Midterms are right around the corner, and if you’re looking for a way to get involved, signing up to be a poll worker with Power to the Polls is one of the best ways to support and facilitate the democratic process.

It’s hard to be proud of being an American these days. The headlines are a constant barrage of the Trump regime’s attacks on our neighbors, on our allies, on our public lands. Our food is being recalled at a relentless pace, and we’ve slipped below the 95% vaccination rate that we need to maintain to prevent outbreaks. We’re once again mired in an endless war in the Middle East, and everything is more expensive, more violent, and harder to get. Meanwhile Trump, a routine mail-in ballot voter, wants to make mail-in voting nearly impossible.

And yet, as we head towards midterms, in communities across the country, election administrators are getting ready to facilitate the thing that we can be most proud of - our free and fair elections, run by city and state authorities, accountable to us, and one of the most important ways we have to fight for our future.

The whole thing about democracy is that it takes all of us to work. It takes all of us showing up, making our voices heard, talking to friends and family and neighbors, volunteering and voting to keep our democracy running. So much of this Trump regime has been about separating us from each other, dismantling the public services that we use to care for each other, trying to turn us against immigrants and trans people and even just people we disagree with. And so many of the places we’ve found joy and hope and solace in each other under this regime have been times and places when our community bonds have been strongest. Those first few weeks of the World Cup, when people from all over the world were connecting with each other here, finding things to love about other cultures, about new communities, about each other. The sidewalk parties and parades and sheer unadulterated joy of the Knicks win. Bad Bunny’s half time show during the Super Bowl. Moon joy, reminding us that our home is shared.

We don’t build roads and bridges alone. We don’t collect garbage alone, and we don’t recycle alone. We don’t feed or protect or heal ourselves alone. We don’t solve crises alone.

We can’t run a democracy alone either. We need candidates and volunteers and voters, and we need election administrators and postal workers and vote counters. We need secretaries of state and lawyers and the people who run debates and print and deliver lawn signs and count signatures.

And we desperately need poll workers.

Poll workers are the backbone of Election Day, the people who ensure that everyone has an efficient and accessible voting experience. Our democracy can’t run without them. In every city and local jurisdiction, election administrators need poll workers to keep polling places open, help their neighbors vote, and ensure every voter has access to the ballot box. Poll workers are critical to help maintain accessible in-person voting for communities without reliable access to mail service, voters with disabilities, voters who need language assistance, or for voters who want to cast their ballot in person.

Poll workers are the face of our elections, the first smile you see when you get to your polling place, the last one you see as you get your sticker, and the help you get at every step in between.

Almost half of election administrators in 2024 reported that it was difficult or very difficult to recruit poll workers, and that was during a presidential election when all eyes in the country were on the voting process. Midterms are often harder to recruit for, and the need for poll workers is high as we head into these critical elections. And while serving as a poll worker is a completely nonpartisan activity, it’s also a vital way to support the pro-democracy coalition.

Elections and voting belong to us. Democracy belongs to us. Our future belongs to us. Now let’s go make it happen.

For more information, and to sign up, head to powerthepolls.org! When you sign up, Power the Polls will connect you to your local poll worker application, where you can apply to be a poll worker in your community to help your neighbors vote.

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I’ve been reading ’s This Is the Plan for book club over the past few weeks, and I think it’s been the kick in the ass I needed.

I do genuinely believe the things I write in this newsletter - that the conversations we have, the organizing we do, the connections we make as we try to influence our elected officials or choose new ones matter, even when we don’t win. But in 2024 I attended packed canvassing shift after packed canvassing shift, made phone calls and wrote letters and told everyone that it didn’t matter if you only connected with one person during a shift, because across all the shifts that still meant we were connecting with hundreds of people. And then we lost. And it’s not like I forgot that what we did mattered, or changed my mind. But I didn’t feel it. I felt devastated, and scared, and annoyed that there were three other groups canvassing the same turf as me the weekend before election day. I assume there were other doors we could have been knocking on.

Trying is always worth it, because the only guaranteed way to fail is not to try at all. But I think since the 2024 election I’ve been reckoning with the feeling of failure. I’ve been wondering what we’re supposed to do if all of the things we’ve been doing no longer work. But in This Is the Plan, Wikler reminded me that this isn’t exactly the case.

In the second to last chapter, Wikler points out a very little discussed fact about the 2026 election.

“Systematically, Harris had done better across all the battleground states than she’d done in the country as a whole. “In non-battleground states where neither candidate focused their campaign, where ad buys were few, and where voters hadn’t been bombarded with door knocks, calls, and texts, the electorate had shifted towards Trump by 6.7 percent. But in the seven battleground states where both candidates had spent the most time, the shift towards Trump was only half as big.”

He also points out that in Wisconsin, where the shift towards Trump was even smaller, the margin of effort was enough to keep Senator Baldwin in her seat, and flip fourteen state legislative seats blue. It wasn’t enough to overcome the vicious anti-incubment feelings pervading the nation, powered by an affordability crisis and a backlash against the #MeToo movement, anti-racist uprising, and the COVID lockdown woke 1 speed run. But it did make a difference. It had a tangible impact. And it left us something to build on.

Throughout This Is the Plan, Wikler walks readers through our political system, from local politics up through the office of the president, highlighting not just how these aspects of our system work but also how we can reform them and how our participation in the political process at any level can facilitate those reforms. It’s an important reminder that all of our work is important, and that there is home in organizing for all of our particular passions and skills. Whether like me, you’ve been feeling a little lost or uncertain, or you’re ready to take your first step in organizing and you’re not sure what it is, or even if you’re already highly engaged and you want some solidarity and some excellent jokes, I highly recommend this book. It’s my favorite kind of political writing - motivational, practical, and honest. Ben Wikler doesn’t shy away from the darkness, but he doesn’t leave you there either. This book will make you laugh, take your hand, and help you up.

In that spirit, I’m going to leave you with my favorite part of the book, and some steps you can take this week to fight for a future where we, and our democracy, can all thrive.

“My argument, my offering to you, is that when you engage with people, when you listen to them, when you search earnestly for common ground and find a basis for common action, you’re doing something more than finding one more voter to add to a list. You’re engaging in the fundamental act of politics—of building a polity. A society. A community.

Organizing builds connections between people. In an era where the world’s biggest corporations and the most powerful politicians profit and dominate by pulling us apart, connecting with one another is an act of defiance. Building community-building solidarity-can seem unimportant and insignificant. But it’s a force that topples dictators.”

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Here’s a few things you can do this week:

Join our Q&A with Ben Wikler on Wednesday, August 19.

I’ve been reading this book with the Vote Save America book club - some of my favorite nerds in the whole world. There is no more generous, practical, and smart group of political organizers out there. And we’re lucky enough to have Ben Wikler join us to talk about the book and the plan to save democracy. Sign up here.

Phone Bank with States Win (formerly Sister District)

The last chapter of This Is the Plan literally outlines a year by year plan to save democracy. I would be remiss if my newsletter, How to Save Democracy, didn’t at least consider it. The 2026 part of the plan says that “For democracy to survive, the single most important priority is likely to be found in state governments,” so fighting for state legislative races in battleground states is critical to taking back our country.

I am nothing if not a good foot soldier in the fight for democracy, so I signed up for a volunteer shift with my favorite phone banking org, States Win, formerly known as Sister District. I’m phone banking with them on September 2nd at 6pm. Join me here.

Call Congress

Congress is going to have a lot to do if Democrats can take back the House and Senate in this year’s midterms. Without veto-proof majorities, it will be nearly impossible to pass meaningful legislation, but Democratic majorities do come with subpoena and investigative power, and the power to shut down the government as leverage in legislative battles. So as the Trump regime continues their assault on immigrant communities and people of color across the country, including the introduction of electrocution gloves to ICE’s toolbox, a Democratic majority in the House and Senate can keep more funding from going to ICE, and can investigate their abuses of power. Democrats can also investigate and expose Trump and his cronies for their corruption.

And then if we do get a Democratic trifecta in 2028, we need Democrats in Congress to be aware of our priorities: eliminating the filibuster, Supreme Court reform and voting rights. Perhaps this Congress, and even the next one won’t be able to pass that legislation or make those rule changes, but I think it’s worth starting early to make our feelings known.

So this week I’m going to call my Senators and my Representative in the House to say that I know we have a lot going on right now, but I want to ensure that they are prepared to use their full investigative powers and budget leverage to investigate and curtail the Trump regime’s corruption and abuses of power, particularly their violent immigration policy. And the next week I’ll call and say I hope they are keeping Supreme Court reform, voting rights, and ending the filibuster in the forefront of their planning for the next Democratic trifecta.

It takes just five minutes to make myself heard by the elected officials who work for me. And while I don’t expect immediate results, I do expect Democrats to make progress on these issues. Fighting for that starts now. If you’d like to join me, here’s a step-by-step guide.

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While I’m gone, I hope you’ll consider signing up for the Vote Save America book club starting this Wednesday! We’re reading This Is the Plan by superstar organizer and former chair of the Wisconsin Democratic Party, Ben Wikler, and he’s going to join us for session 3 for a little Q&A. If you need some inspiration, check out this paragraph from the introduction:

It might sound exhausting at first blush. But if enough of us get involved and add what little we can - if, say, millions of people take action, even just for a few hours a month 0 it’s enough to move mountains.

And here’s the thing: Taking action feels good.

Becoming part of something greater than yourself - living in service to your highest ideals - doesn’t just make you a hero. It also generates exuberance. Collective action fosters collective joy. Doing your part to defend democracy requires rebuilding community, connecting with people whom you would never have otherwise met, finding common cause with people whose paths you’d never have otherwise crossed. '

Let that settle into your soul, let it inspire you to pick up the book, to take action, to fight for your community and for democracy, in these midterms and every day. And come hang out at book club! We’ve really nailed the collective action fostering collective joy at VSA, and we’d love to have you.

In the meantime, I’ll see you back here soon.

That’s 99 days to elect a Democratic majority in the House and Senate who can investigate ICE for the murders they’ve committed, including, most recently, Lorenzo Salgado Araujo in Houston, Texas, and Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero in Biddeford, Maine. 99 days to kick Senator Susan Collins of Maine out of the Senate - Susan Collins who was the deciding vote to send billions of dollars to the ICE agents who murdered one of her constituents, who was a deciding vote to confirm both Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court. Gorsuch and Kavanaugh have since voted to overturn abortion rights, give Trump immunity for his many crimes, gut the Voting Rights Act, and make it harder to fight climate change.

If Republicans keep control of the Senate, there’s a very good chance that some of the conservative Supreme Court justices will retire, letting Trump replace them with 25 year old manosphere podcasters if he’d like - making it so much harder for us to change the balance of the court and potentially locking us out of power for a generation. If we want to fight climate change, if we want to protect our rights and our bodies, if we want a democracy that works, we need to take back the Senate and keep Trump from nominating any more Supreme Court Justices.

If we want to investigate Trump’s corruption, to make it clear that it has been facilitated and enabled by Republicans in Congress ahead of our next presidential election, we need to take back Congress this year. If we want to keep Trump from spending billions more of our tax dollars to bomb Iran (or Mali or whatever other country he decides we should fail at regime change in next) we need to take back Congress this year. If we want Congress to investigate DOGE, and the many, many ways Trump and Republicans let Elon Musk steal our data, gut the programs we voted to fund, and let unqualified assholes run rampant through the halls of our government, we need to take back Congress this year.

We have 99 days to elect the governors and state legislators across the country who will be in place during the 2028 election, who will be in charge of running elections, protecting voting machines, and certifying our elections. The members of Congress we elect this year will be in place if Trump tries to overturn our free and fair elections, either by deceit or by force.

We have no option but to be ruthlessly political and ruthlessly committed to electing Democrats across the country. Whatever disagreements we have, whatever significant and serious disagreements we have about policy, there is no version of our future that is better with Republicans in power, no version of our government that gets better with Republicans in power. People’s lives depend on us. Our lives depend on us.

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Here’s how you can help:

1. Sign up for Vote Save America to get critical insight on innovative ways to make a difference in this election. There’s no kinder, smarter, more generous group of nerds in the business, and you have the added benefit of hanging out with me! In fact, if you’d like to hang out with me, attend a Q&A with Ben Wikler, the incredible organizer who led the Wisconsin Democratic Party, and read his excellent book This is the Plan, come to VSA book club! In spite of the serious stakes of this election, VSA book club is always, always, always a delight.

2. Follow Troy Jackson, the Democratic nominee for Senate in Maine, on all his platforms. Donate to his campaign, share his content, sign up to volunteer. You can also check out Kiernan Majerus-Collins, running for State Legislature, and Matt Dunlap, running for Congress in Maine’s second district.

3. Follow Sherrod Brown who is running for the Senate in Ohio, on all his platforms. Brown was a fantastic Senator when we had him, and we’d be very lucky to get him back in the Senate. You can also check out these Run for Something endorsed candidates for city and state office in Ohio, as well as Greg Landsman and Brian Poindexter, who are running for the House in the first and seventh Congressional districts respectively.

4. Share this post! Forward it as an email to friends and family and say something like “can you believe we’re only 99 days out?? I’m going to start volunteering for [CANDIDATE’S NAME] - want to join me?” or “only 100 days until midterms! Check your voter registration here. Also I’m really excited about [CANDIDATE’S NAME]...if I send you some stuff can you share it on your socials?” And then you know, actually send them some stuff.

We’ve done this before friends. In 2018 we dealt the first Trump regime a crippling blow by taking back the House. In 2020 we got control of the Senate. We have a chance to do the same thing this year. The stakes are high, yes, but there’s nothing like our passion and commitment to making this country better, to the sometimes slow but always powerful work of moving democracy forward, and using all the levers at our disposal to fight for our future. This year is no different. Let’s get to work.

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More and more, I believe that the main divide in politics in the modern era is not right vs left or liberal vs DSA or fighting vs appeasement or any of the other dichotomies we’ve come up with since Trump first came down that gaudy golden elevator. The true divide, it seems to me, is between people who want to do the work of democracy and governing - persuasion, connection, trying new things, listening to people, working together - and people who just want to yell.

This dynamic is everywhere. It’s in Republicans who spend more time saying inflammatory things on twitter and douche bro podcasts than taking constituent calls, more time coming up with horrifying, attention grabbing bills that will never pass than solving actual problems. It’s also a key feature in the so-called Democratic civil war where moderate Democrats would rather yell at the DSA folks winning primaries than put forth their own vision for our future, and in some of the DSA candidates’ own inflammatory statements seem deliberately designed to alienate rather than persuade.

This is not to say that I am compelled by calls to “bring down the temperature” or civility discourse - this is not a call for a more polite form of politics. In fact, the candidates that I have found most compelling over the years (AOC, Pete Buttigieg, Elizabeth Warren, Zohran Mamdani) are masters of the well-placed smackdown, subtle but incisive shade, and calling out their opponents for everything from their bigotry to their politicking. But those moments feel purposeful, part of a broader message, and even at times tactical - communicating their values, but also advancing their political and policy goals.

Of course, Republicans are notorious for their flame throwing. They are in fact, currently led by the flame-thrower-in-chief. Trump has no intention of “getting things done” or “working together” or even persuading. Everything he does is designed to elicit and hold onto our attention, our outrage, and the devotion of his followers. He wants us fighting or fawning. And he has given rise to an entire party trading on attention instead of governance. They just want to yell - so much so, they’ll make up things to yell about. This is why it is so disappointing, for example, to see so many Democrats follow them down the “trans girls in sports” rabbit hole instead of saying something like “what the fuck are you people talking about, why are bullying people about games we made up instead of governing?”

So when I say that where I find this governing vs. yelling dynamic more interesting is in Democratic intraparty conflict, believe me when I say this is not because I don’t think Republicans have this problem, or are the primary drivers of the problem. Instead, it’s because it’s an actual dichotomy in the Democratic party, among politicians and commentators and posters and voters; as opposed to a one-sided phenomenon in a Republican party that has systematically eliminated from its ranks anyone whose primary interest in politics is governance.

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Take the Graham Platner controversy in the Maine Democratic primary and then Senate race. I’ll be honest I have avoided thinking and writing about this one because my number one emotion around the whole thing is relief that I’m not a Maine voter and don’t have to figure out what to do with it. Sometimes, especially because I am a real person with a real full time job outside of politics, I let myself be a voter instead of a newsletter-writer, and I stick closer to home. But as I’ve been watching the fallout from Platner’s implosion, I can’t help calling this out.

I’ve seen a lot of people who were skeptical of Platner from the get-go saying “I told you so,” and I’ve seen a lot of them pointing fingers at people who either liked his message, or had the temerity to describe the phenomenon happening in Maine wherein other people seemed to like his message. I’ve also seen a lot of yelling from Platner-skeptics condemning others for insufficient groveling post Platner implosion.

Here’s what I haven’t seen: anyone prior to the end of Platner’s campaign making a positive case for Janet Mills, his opponent in the primary who dropped out because she couldn’t raise enough money. I never saw anyone posting phone banking shifts for Janet Mills, or canvassing shifts for Janet Mills. I never saw them posting speeches where she’d done particularly well, or interviews where she’d given a good answer. I never even saw someone attack Platner’s actual positions or rhetoric. In short, the entire duration of Platner’s rise and fall, I only ever saw people yelling about how much they hated Platner and people who were interested in his campaign. I never once saw an attempt to persuade people that there was a better option.

But as the title of this piece says, this is not about Graham Platner. Or at least, it’s not just about Graham Platner. It’s also about Michigan, where the Senate primary is getting more and more vicious, and where most of the commentary I see is not a case for one candidate, or even an attack on the other, but a sort of second order vitriolic description of the race, one that seems designed to make you forget that we’re all going to be working on the same campaign when the primary is over no matter who wins.

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It comes from both sides, just as it did in the New York congressional primaries that set this whole thing off. It comes from candidates themselves, who would rather attack electability than policy differences, or who hold firm to positions and posts without empathy or explanation. In spite of my own socialist ideological tendencies, I have often felt alienated from a super-left that seems like it would rather exclude than expand the coalition, that seems to demand a lifetime of ruthless ideological perfection rather than learning and growing. But I am similarly in a state of constant irritation at the way the more moderate faction of the party seems to whine to some imagined referee every time they lose an election or an argument, imagining that said ref might finally determine that they are right, those aren’t real Democrats, the loss doesn’t count, the goal is forfeit.

In our democracy, the only people who determine who a real Democrat is are the voters who vote in primaries. If you can win a Democratic primary, congratulations, you’re a Democrat. And if you didn’t win the primary, it is because you failed to convince enough people to vote for you.

There are plenty of politicians who want to do the work, who want to govern, who want to persuade. There is a lot being made of this interview with Zohran Mamdani where he refuses to identify the cutoff for who counts as working class. In response, Run for Something founder Amanda Litman tweeted “Why would a politician explicitly make the group of people they’re fighting for smaller?” And I think this gets at the entire Mamdani campaign, and his mayoralty. It’s neither useful nor interesting to default to exclusion rather than expansion in your movement. Whether or not a lawyer counts as working class (because they work to pay their bills, is the argument) matters so much less than whether or not that lawyer wants to join a movement that ensures that we can all pay our bills and afford the occasional theater ticket or NWSL ticket or enjoy a nice night out.

Why on earth would a person who wants to make the world a better place spend their limited time, their limited words, their limited attention on making that lawyer feel excluded, when their experience, resources, time, and energy will help the cause? We all live in this world together - we are all connected. There is always a conversation to be had about the distribution of resources, the fairness of it, but how much more likely are we to share with people who make us feel included? How much more likely are we to fight for people who we feel are fighting for us?

Mamdani and Governor of New York Kathy Hochul are at different ends of the ideological spectrum, but because they are both willing to listen, because they respect each other’s values, because even when they disagree they see themselves as part of the same broader movement for a better world, we have a productive governor/mayor relationship for the first time since I moved to New York. There is a way to disagree with people about something that still respects them, and a way to make your opponent’s supporters feel welcome rather than apocalyptic when you win. But it starts with how we talk to and about each other - not nice, not civil, but respectful, with the goal to persuade and connect, and by remembering always that it’s infinitely harder to persuade people who think you hate them. And eventually, if you want to win, you’re going to need to persuade them.

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On September 24, 1962, the same year that Rachel Carson’s seminal Silent Spring was published and less than a month before the start of the Cuban Missile Crisis, the electric utility company Con-Ed announced a new hydroelectric plant at the base of Storm King mountain, on the west bank of the Hudson river in New York - kicking off what historian Douglas Brinkley called “the fiercest environmentalist confrontation of the 1960s.”

Window air conditioning units became much more common in the 1950s. So, too, did dishwashers and refrigerators and washers and dryers. New York City was using a lot more electricity, and Con-Ed wanted to build a plant that would take water from the Hudson River Valley up into a reservoir up in the mountain and then drop it through turbines back into the river to generate more electricity when NYC was on the verge of a blackout and extra power was needed. But the ecological destruction, and the marring of a beloved scenic landscape prompted an opposition movement that united the unlikely allies of Pete Seeger, Sports Illustrated, and several environmentalist organizations like the Sierra Club and the Nature Conservancy. Over the course of 17 years activists would not only see the cancellation of the plant, but inspire the creation of the National Resources Defense Council and Scenic Hudson (organizations which still exist today), as well as the passage of the Clean Water Act of 1972 and the Endangered Species Acts of 1966, 1969, and 1973.

What started as a defense of the historical, aesthetic, and recreational contributions of Storm King evolved into an ecological movement about thermal pollution and the impact of the plant on local wildlife. The legal machinations of the movement to save Storm King gave people standing to sue on behalf of the environment, and established the preservation of ecology as a legitimate consideration in legal proceedings. As activists around the country responded to the increasing industrialization of a rapidly growing economy, Storm King helped establish the legal and political precedents that would propel the movement. And as Carson’s Silent Spring awakened a nation to the ecological and public health harms caused by pesticides and nuclear runoff, as our industry and economy lurched forward at terrifying speeds, and extraction and energy rose to meet it, communities across the country stepped up to protect not just the environment but our harmony with it.

As I’ve been reading more about this I keep seeing echoes in the fight against data centers. A local zoning fight with national implications. A bipartisan issue with roots in property values and taxes, energy consumption and environmentalism. An industry and a technology growing faster than our understanding of how it will shape our lives and our futures. And an opposition movement that has broader implications for whose spaces are protected, and whose needs are met.

According to the organization Data Center Watch 142 activist groups across 24 states have blocked $18 billion in data centers and delayed another $46 billion. Companies like Amazon, Google, Meta, and Microsoft face bipartisan opposition from groups protesting data centers because of taxes and property values, environmental concerns and water usage, noise and diminishing green space. These companies, just like Con-Ed in the 1960s, are responding to massive increased capacity needs from a technological revolution - namely AI.

So much of the conversation around Artificial Intelligence, and the Large Language Models that make up so much of the internet these days has focused on their inevitability. This new technology sweeping the world is unstoppable. We must adopt it, speak its language, cave to its intrusion in every facet of our lives, or be swept away by it. We must step aside as it takes our jobs, writes our books, creates our art, organizes our spreadsheets, writes our sales pitches, codes our apps, and builds our websites. There’s nothing we can do about it. It’s AI’s world now, and we’re just living in it.

Now, I’m certainly not making the case that there are no ethical use cases for AI. I’ve heard some very cool stories about its diagnostic capabilities in the medical field, and how it has been used to accelerate the creation of new drugs and other disease treatments. I’m not even completely adverse to its use as an extremely powerful search engine. I like being able to ask Google long complicated questions, and actually get an answer with sources, instead of putting in various and increasingly unhinged combinations of search terms and then scrolling through three pages of SEO slop to find an answer. But so much of the creation of AI and the marketing around it has been entrenched in a fundamental disrespect of the arts and humanities and ultimately, our dehumanization.

The people who write books and poems and articles don’t matter - AI can do that. The people who make movies don’t matter - AI can do that. It doesn’t matter that a bunch of people used to work at this company, that they brought their unique experiences and expertise, that they collaborated on projects and procrastinated in the lunch room, and took those salaries home to turn into vacations and school lunches and pet food and craft supplies. AI can do that job, and AI doesn’t need a salary, and AI doesn’t have a unique experience that might be different from yours, or a thought or a feeling that might force you outside your comfort zone. AI doesn’t have a different idea. It just fills out the spreadsheet, and it might find a few new efficiencies for you in there too.

The Storm King protests weren’t really about electricity, or even the industrialization of modern conveniences. The activists didn’t want to do away with window air conditioning units, dishwashers, washing machines and dryers. But they did want some measure of control over the manner in which we received those conveniences. They didn’t want to bow to the inevitability of extraction, of big companies deciding for everyone what was worth preserving and what was worth sacrificing.

Journalist Charlie Warzel wrote a piece in the Atlantic at the end of May arguing that part of the AI disruption is a crisis of agency, that as AI takes on more and more tasks, as it becomes the underlying architecture of so much of our culture and technology, humans are becoming passive observers, objects rather than subjects of our language. As Warzel writes, “this system automates, and even negates, the human need to be consulted. Now we consult the chatbots and they provide canonical answers. Generative AI’s much-touted efficiencies also often erase the necessity of collaboration. They do the problem-solving, the heavy lifting.”

But he goes on to say that it’s no wonder that the backlash to AI is manifesting in the data centers protests: “in the form of protests and public comments at town and city-council meetings across the country. People are taking up their agency in one of the few places they can: the physical world.”

When activists came together to try to stop a huge company from building a power plant, I’m not sure they imagined that they would remake the environmentalist movement by establishing the tools and precedents that we would use to fight for clean air and clean water and the boundless glory of ecological balance. They didn’t even know they would be able to stop the power plant from defacing the mountain and hurting the river. But they fought anyway.

We don’t know where the fights of today will lead. We don’t know how many data centers we can block, or what AI regulation we can elicit. Maybe the tech giants really will create a “permanent underclass.” But none of this is inevitable. We do have the opportunity to shape the world we want to live in, to elect leaders who want to see us all thrive, to protect our water and our air, our parks and our mountains from extraction and destruction, to fight diseases and keep each other safe. We hold onto our agency by using it, by fighting back in whatever way we can. It might take a while, 17 years perhaps, or even longer, but at the end of it we may very well get to keep our mountain, and a little more besides.

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Stuff I Referred to While Writing This

Silent Spring Revolution: John F. Kennedy, Rachel Carson, Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, and the Great Environmental Awakening by Douglas Brinkley (Book)

Living on Earth: Storm King, produced by Jim Metzner (10/12/2012)

“AI Is Causing a Crisis of Agency” by Charlie Warzel, in the Atlantic (5/30/2026)

“How a Hudson Highlands Mountain Shaped Tussles Over Energy and the Environment” by Andrew C. Revkin in the New York Times (4/14/2015)

Data Center Watch, Report

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It’s too hot to think, and so I don’t.

I don’t think about the polling that has our candidates down in all of the states we need to win if we want to take back the Senate. If it were easy we would have done it already, in the last election, or the one before that. If it were easy to convince my fellow countrymen that elected Republicans only govern by greed or cowardice, that by picking apart our faith in our country and our faith in each other they’ve successfully also picked our pockets, then I’d be a lot less anxious at the start of my canvassing and phone banking shifts.

For all of Trump’s corruption and bigotry, for all of his obvious hatred for the things that truly make this country great, and his easy disdain for his own voters, every election we’ve had since he made his way down that gaudy gold escalator in 2015 has been way, way too close. This was always going to be hard. We were always going to have to fight, again and again, over and over and over. No use in agonizing about it - we don’t have the time. I don’t think about the polling, it’s too hot. I just get back to work.

I don’t think about the planet, melting around us. Did you know we’re still in an ice age, because there are still ice sheets at the poles? I learned that at Chicago’s Field Museum last week. I don’t want to think about this ice age ending, about rising seas and the islands we’re losing in the Pacific. I don’t want to think about a future pinballing violently between extremes, losing the crisp and clarifying cold of winter or the sultry and languid heat of summer to a life lived mostly indoors. I don’t want to think about the sweat dripping from the backs of my knees or the press of too many bodies on the subway. It’s too hot to think and so I don’t - I just imagine the ocean rolling towards me and then back again, about the gentle pressure of the sun on a perfectly warm day, about ice cream and the perfect sandwich and a fizzy drink. I imagine reading in the shade.

Even though it was too hot to be doing much of anything, I visited the Obama Presidential Center last week while I was in Chicago. Even though my friend and I couldn’t get tickets to the museum, there were plenty of other things for us to see, including the beautiful grounds, a vegetable garden, the art in the lobby of the museum, and even a branch of the Chicago Public Library. So much of it is set up not to venerate and memorialize President Obama, but to remind us what we are capable of when we work together, and what it means to celebrate community and honor the humanity in all of us.

It’s in vogue these days in some progressive circles to caveat your nostalgia for the Obama era, to say “yes, but…” and to follow that up with drones or deportations or the Supreme Court. And these are, of course, valid critiques of the Obama presidency. Presidents have immense power over people’s lives, and their decisions are life or death. There is no perfect president, and those imperfections will have significant consequences. But for eight years we had a president who took that seriously, who cared not just about the wellbeing of those who voted for him, but of everyone in this country and people all over the world. We had a president who wanted to make life more affordable, healthier and brighter and full of potential; a president who made an effort to listen to people, to respect where they came from and their place in our vast national tapestry.

It’s been too hot to think about what American means right now, about how to make sense of our contradictions, our violence and our heroes, the good we have done and the good there is still left to do, the bloody bigotry of our beginnings and the way it perseveres, insidiously wound through our future too. It’s too hot to think about how Trump and his cronies think this is the best of us, more worthy of celebration than the fight to take the promises our founders made for a few and keep it for the many.

I still believe in this country, in our capacity for change and our willingness to fight for it. I believe in Americans - in our generosity and exuberance, in our diversity of experiences and in our curiosity. I believe in persuasion and potential. But that belief is jagged now, rough around the edges, broken and glued back together, and sometimes a very tired and flickering light.

Perhaps it’s the relentlessness of the Trump era. Perhaps it’s just getting older. I’ll revisit it when the heat breaks.

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When polls close tomorrow in New York, Maryland, South Carolina, and Utah, approximately 75% of states across the country will have chosen their Democratic and Republican candidates for the upcoming midterms. And with the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence less than two weeks away - what better way to celebrate than by picking some Democratic candidates to get behind in the fight for our future.

Now, you may be saying to yourself, “I thought a birthday party for an ancient, decaying wannabe king featuring racist transphobia and a giant UFC fight on the White House lawn was the best way to celebrate the birthday of the United States of America.” Understandable, as that’s how our current regime chose to celebrate. But our democracy was founded on the idea that we all have a say in our future, and that the future is better and brighter when we work together to achieve it. When something isn’t working for us, when we are led by a president who actively chooses to make our lives worse, we have the right and the responsibility to check his power and do something differently.

This means we need to take back Congress in the upcoming midterms - both the House, and the Senate. But it also means that we need Democratic controlled state legislatures that can push back on Republican political and racial gerrymandering. It means we need to identify local races where we can elect smart, progressive young people to keep building a deep Democratic bench that will filter up through future elections.

To that end, I’m going to take a few posts over the summer to identify some critical states and races that I hope you’ll pay attention to and get involved in (if, of course, you haven’t picked your races already). If you find this useful, please pass it along to friends and family who might also, and let me know where you get involved and how!

This week, we’ll start with two states that are key for taking back the Senate, but that also have critical state legislature races. Remember, you can help whether you live in these states or not. I’ll try to specify how best to help for in-state and out of state folks, but I also trust y’all to sort through it yourself.

(In the past I’ve created extensive google docs to help people figure out how to get involved in upcoming elections. If you've used one of them before, or you think that version would be more helpful, let me know that too.)

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Texas

Texas is Lucy with the football for Democrats. We want it, we feel like we should be able to win it, and every election it feels more and more possible. And yet, in every election it doesn’t happen. But because of the changing demographics of the country and the way the Senate and the Electoral College distribute power, there’s no future for Democrats that doesn’t involve us figuring out how to win in Texas (and Iowa and Florida and Alaska and, and, and, but that’s a future post).

Democratic state legislators in Texas have also had to literally flee the state five times in the last 25 years to try and prevent the passage of restrictive voting rights and redistricting legislation. If we can get more Democrats into the state legislature there, we can prevent Republicans in Texas from attacking voting rights and possibly even work on passing actual pro-voting rights legislation. So here’s how you can help:

1. For everyone: follow Democratic Senate candidate James Talarico on the preferred social media platform of your choice - Facebook, Twitter, Tiktok, Instagram, YouTube. Go ahead and repost something right now, and then commit to reposting something at least once a week. Or in the case of YouTube, go like and subscribe and comment on videos to boost the algorithm.

2. If you live in Texas, figure out which of these state legislative candidates are closest to you. You can figure out your state districts here. Then follow them on socials, share a post, and commit to sharing one post a week. Set a reminder in your phone if you need to!
   
   Of note here, I pulled candidates with Run for Something and DLCC crossover. Run for Something and DLCC both have more candidates listed, so if none of these fit the bill, you can pick one from their bigger lists. Run for Something in particular has also endorsed local and judicial candidates.

   1. Tyler Smith - House District 138

   2. Allison Mitchell - House District 108

   3. Brittany Black - House District 61

   4. Julio Salinas - House District 41

   5. Kristian Carranza - House District 118

   6. Taylor Rehmet - Senate District 9

3. Set up a recurring donation! I used to have one to the Texas Democrats specifically because I appreciate that they are willing to flee the state to deny quorum for anti-voting rights bills. But even just $5 a month to any of the above candidates will make a huge difference, if you can do it. It helps candidates plan ahead, and use money strategically instead of on huge ad dumps at the end of the campaign.

4. Sign up for a Texas Together phone bank and help campaign for Texas candidates up and down the ballot.

   ---

North Carolina

North Carolina also has a critical Senate race for taking back the U.S. Senate - an opportunity to prevent Trump from appointing any more Supreme Court Justices, to force Republicans to negotiate with Democrats when it comes to appropriations bills and other legislation, and to check Trump’s use of power by issuing subpoenas, investigating corruption, and controlling hearings.

But North Carolina is also one of the most gerrymandered states in the country. Even though Democrats are routinely elected to statewide office, Republicans hold a super majority in the State Senate and are close to achieving one in the State House. But by electing just one more Democrat in the Senate and protecting the seats they hold in the House, Democrats can push back against Republican majorities and build power for the future. Here’s how:

1. For everyone: follow Roy Cooper on Instagram (or your preferred social media platform of choice: Tiktok, Facebook, Twitter, or one of the others listed at the bottom of his website), and share one post right now. Then commit to sharing one post a week at least. Set a reminder in your phone if you need one.

2. If you live in North Carolina, figure out which of these state legislative candidates are closest to you. You can figure out your district here. Then follow them on socials, share a post, and commit to sharing one post a week. Set a reminder in your phone if you need to.
   
   Of note, I picked a few state legislative candidates based on candidates endorsed by Run for Something, States Win (formerly Sister District), and the DLCC. And where possible I linked to their States Winn page which has lots of information about how to support the candidates. If none of these thrill, I recommend taking a look at the organizations themselves to see their full range of candidates in North Carolina and elsewhere.

   1. Evonne Hopkins - District 35

   2. Dante Pittman - District 24

   3. Winn Decker - District 37

   4. Woodson Bradley - District 42

   5. Lindsay Prather - District 115

3. Set up a recurring donation to any one of the candidates listed above. Even $5 a month helps if you can. Candidates need money now to engage in creative organizing, rather than in October, when it mostly goes towards ads. The more candidates can plan for earlier, the more deeply they can engage with the community they are asking to vote for them.

4. Sign up for a Carolina Federation phone bank (they start in July) or find a phone banking or canvassing opportunity near you.

   Thanks for reading How to Save Democracy, and other stories ! This post is public so feel free to share it.

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The Men’s World Cup

Last week, the men’s World Cup started! Teams from all over the world, 48 of them in fact, descended on host countries U.S., Mexico, and Canada to kick off five and a half weeks of soccer.

Well, sort of.

The Iranian soccer team finally got their visas just ten days before the start of the tournament, but many of their support staff were excluded from the U.S., where the team will have to enter and leave the country on the same day of all their matches, while they wait for news on whether the president of one of the host countries will bomb their homeland to oblivions.

Omar Artan, who would have made history as the first Somali referee at the World Cup, was denied entry at the border despite having all of his paperwork. Aymen Hussein, an Iraqi striker, was detained at the airport for over seven hours before he was finally allowed into the country. And fans from several countries faced the prospect of bonds for up to $15,000 to enter the U.S. for their games. And while some host committees claim that the Trump regime will not be sending ICE to the games, the regime itself has made no such claims.

Meanwhile (and apologies to those of you who have heard this from me already this week), the average ticket price for this year’s World Cup final is $13,000. That’s right - the average ticket price. This World Cup has the most expensive tickets of any World Cup yet, and got rid of the tier of cheap tickets for host country citizens.

But at the same time, there's Japanese poetry about endless chips and salsa, and the English are discovering ribs. The Scottish have taken over the Boston Cop slide. Brazilians are dancing in Times Square. In Kansas, the Algerian team’s training center is bringing endless joy to the town it’s in.Two of the U.S. goals in our marvelous win over the weekend were scored by Folarin Balogun, a Nigerian American, raised in London, American by virtue of the very birthright citizenship Trump wants to overturn. As much as this cup has U.S. fascism at its center, so too does it showcase the best of us - our generosity and spirit of adventure, the dream at the center of a nation built on ideas, where everyone can make a home as long as they too subscribe to the idea that we are all equal, that we rise and fall together, and that nothing matters more than than our willingness to commit to this project. We haven’t realized that dream yet, but what a wonderful reminder of what we could be if we did.

I love men’s World Cup soccer. I love the drama of it, and the team dynamics. I love watching players from opposing teams help each other up. I love their homoerotic goal celebrations, and their temper tantrums. I love how silly they look when they are diving. It’s not women’s soccer, which I’m not going to lie, I find more skillful and with better teamwork. But so much of what I wrote about the Olympics early this year is true for the men’s World Cup, and the women’s World Cup as well, that this is the kind of world I want to live in. The one where we have time and space to play, where we come together to do something hard and fun just for the sake of it, where the whole world watches something together.

But, I wrote this about the Olympics too, and the World Cup a few years ago. We can’t separate politics from our sports. We can’t separate sports from the context in which they are played, from what athletes use their platforms to promote, from the culture of fame and accountability and the lack thereof. We cannot separate this World Cup from widening wealth inequality, from draconian immigration policies, from war or strife. We can only try to use this moment to remember that we are all connected, that we can do hard things, and that the world we believe in is worth fighting for, not least because we’ll get to watch more soccer.

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The West Wing

Last week, Trump posted a clip from the tv show The West Wing to justify his planned airstrikes on Iran. In the clip, President Bartlet rails against the idea of a proportional military response a fundamentalist group shooting down an air force transport carrying his doctor as well as many others. Trump appeared to use the clip in justification for his own disproportional response to Iran shooting down a U.S. helicopter.

There are a lot of reasons why this is absurd. First, the whole point of the episode is that the president wants to use the U.S. military to avenge a personal grief, and he is eventually convinced to spare civilians in his much more measured counter attack. The whole point of the episode is that just because we have the power to do something doesn’t mean that we should. Second, President Barlet would hate Trump. Third, Martin Sheen and most of the cast are voracious campaigners for Democrats.

But more than anything else, Trump’s use of this clip is absurd because The West Wing is the antithesis of everything Trump stands for. At its heart, it’s a show about people who want to make the country, and the world a better place. They are flawed, at times arrogant, at times uncertain; at times humbled by the magnitude of their responsibility, rising to it and failing, but all the while focused on what it means to serve the people by working in government.

The West Wing has gotten a lot of flak in the years since it ended. Some of it is deserved - it was very much of its time when it came to its interpretation of the U.S.’s relationship with the Middle East, including some casual racism, and a commitment to the rather shallow, self congratulatory clash of civilizations trope. But much of the criticism also amounts to deriding it as a cringey, naive representation of politics - where the bad guys are bad, and people you disagree with are still trying to do their best to make the world better, where politics is a game of persuasion rather than wealth and influence. And to that I’d say The West Wing might be a bit cringey, and it might be a bit naive, but more than that, it is aspirational.

I want to live in a world where my preeminent disagreement with Republicans is over how we make the country and the world better for all of us, rather than whether or not we should. I want to live in a world where persuasion is powerful, where we have hard conversations, and where our compromises still meet our needs. I want leaders who wrestle with tough questions, who feel the weight of their responsibility, and who believe in getting up every day and trying again, no matter what.

On the day after Trump was elected in 2016, I went home and immediately put on The West Wing. I watched the show live as a child, and I’ve been rewatching it on syndication, DVD, and streaming platforms ever since. And I knew that if I didn’t pick it back up immediately, it would become harder and harder to turn to as Trump overshadowed our politics. And now, as he continues to plunder our country to enrich himself, as he sells hate and division as our national story, as he demands the tribute and fealty of a king, as he throws incoherent temper tantrums on social media and in front of the press, I will keep going back to The West Wing as I always do. Not because it’s perfect, or because it’s accurate, but because it reminds me that the stories we tell about ourselves, and our politics are important.

Well, and because I find its political fantasy and iambic pentameter soothing. I can admit that too.

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The World’s First Trillionaire

Last week, Elon Musk took his company SpaceX public, and in the process became the world’s first trillionaire. He is now worth 7 orders of magnitude more than I make in a year - actually more than 7 orders of magnitude because I rounded my salary up to make the math easier. And I’m fairly well off.

As Elon Musk enjoys his new net worth, however, I would like to bring us back to the first few weeks of Trump’s second term as president, and the Department of Government Efficiency, an Elon Musk brain child that Trump launched via executive order on Inauguration Day, January 20th 2025. DOGE was responsible for a lot of the chaos and corruption of the early part of Trump’s term, but it’s the shuttering of USAID that should be our focus now. Internally lauded as one of our most efficient government agencies, responsible for saving 92 million lives over the course of its history, USAID was also a brick in our national security and public health, providing early warning systems for diseases that could become pandemic and building relationships in countries across the world.

On February 3, 2025 Elon Musk tweeted that he spent the weekend “feeding USAID to the woodchipper,” which meant that across the world people started showing up to clinics and food banks and shelters expecting life saving aid, and were instead turned away to decide which of their children to feed, what to do with sick and pregnant relatives, and where to safely spend the night.

Conservative estimates one year after the closure of USAID suggest that the world’s first trillionaire is responsible for the deaths of over 750,000 people.

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Action Needed

Project 2025 is at it again. New rules proposed by the OMB now threaten the very integrity of the infrastructure of scientific study in the United States. Across the whole of government, the Trump regime defunds scientific inquiry, studies in health care and disease prevention, the search for cures. They are dismantling the ocean monitoring system critical to studying climate change.

We have a chance to put a stop to new OMB rules, and to push Congress to take action to protect science. You can learn more and take action here.

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In And the Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic, Randy Shilts writes about the first months after the inauguration of President Ronald Reagan, “Are you for the president or against him? Every Republican on Capitol Hill seemed to be echoing the line in the early days of February. The country seemed downright giddy over its new president…Battered by the loss of the Senate and the defeat of an incumbent president, the Democrats collectively seemed as insecure as a teenager who was stood up on the night of the senior prom. In the first months of 1981, they didn’t appear to have the gumption for much fight.”

When I started my personal curriculum project about protest movements in the United States, I specifically chose ones I felt resonated with our current moment. Still, the resonance of that quote was perhaps more on the nose than I expected.

And yet the more I read, the inescapable parallels emerge. Reagan swept onto the scene with the religious right and ultra-conservatives stampeding next to him, with a much stronger popular vote mandate than Trump earned in 2024. Reagan’s first budget cut the CDC budget in half, and his government would withhold billions from the WHO as the AIDS epidemic raged. In fact, the $2 billion recommended budget for flatting the HIV curve would not be fulfilled until President George W. Bush’s PEPFAR program, a program the Trump regime has dramatically scaled back. And in spite of the social and electoral victories of the gay rights movement in urban centers like San Francisco and New York City, they were still isolated and stigmatized, defiant and insular, and understandably distrustful of warnings from a government and health infrastructure that at best dismissed and at worst despised them.

Now, as we stare down the barrel of an Ebola outbreak made much worse by the Trump regime’s dismantling of USAID, cuts to the CDC, and removal of the U.S. from the World Health Organization; as the Trump regime further vilifies and isolates trans people; as violence ricochets through the Middle East, and our warmongering precipitates a global economic meltdown - I am consumed by the echoes of the past and the devastation that comes with pretending there’s such a thing as other people.

So often when writing this newsletter, I feel like I’m repeating myself too much. How many different ways can I write that people will die because of the Trump regime’s actions or point to their willingness to strip this country and sell it for parts? How often can I say that the point of their social politics is isolation and fear, to keep us small and scared and separated from each other? I’m frequently reminded of the quote from playwright Eugene O’Neill: “There is no present or future, only the past happening over and over again... now.” Perhaps the reason I repeat myself so often is because history keeps repeating itself too.

There’s a lot to learn from the rise of the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s, and the protest movements that emerged around it. And I’m sure I’ll have more to say after I finish all my “assigned” reading. But it is the implications of the politics of othering that right now I can’t stop thinking about.

There were a lot of factors in the slow response to AIDS as it emerged as a public health crisis in the early 1980 - budget cuts and bureaucratic labyrinths and personal egos. But the disease also emerged as a force among two communities ostracized and dehumanized by society - drug users and gay men. In fact, even drawing parallels between those two groups in the initial efforts to identify AIDS as an infectious disease Stilts describes as “simply too farfetched for a scientific community that, when it thought about gay cancer and gay pneumonia at all, was quite happy to keep the problems just that: gay.” (Stilts)

It’s easier to ignore a disease that mostly impacts people you don’t like, people you think deserve it, people whose lifestyles and choices don’t align with yours. If gay men would just stop having sex with each other, they wouldn’t get sick. If drug users simply stopped using drugs, they wouldn’t get sick or spread the disease either. If women stopped having sex unless they wanted to get pregnant, they wouldn’t need abortions. If kids stop reading about queer people, they’ll stop becoming queer.

The concept of othering is foundational to the politics of the Trump regime. They want us to believe that trans people aren’t like us, that immigrants aren’t like us, that Iranians and Cubans and Venezuelans and Palestinians aren’t like us. Those are other people. They are different people, and they are taking your stuff - your time, your money, your kids, your gas, your house, your job. It’s okay to bomb them, to starve them, to isolate them and vilify them because they aren’t like us. They are other people.

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As AIDS emerged in the early 1980s, warnings from those in the scientific community who were working diligently to identify the disease and stop its spread were often ignored, attributed to anti-gay bias in the press and puritanical hectoring by the scientific establishment. All of the stigmatization, the isolation, the bigotry, meant that when help was most needed, it couldn’t be trusted.

And so the disease spread.

Because as it turns out, the things we do to other people don’t stay there. The violence we perpetuate on other people gets returned to us. The wars we start in other countries gut our economy, wreak havoc on our wallets, make it harder to buy food and to get to work. The aid programs and health care we cut means that diseases travel further, faster, and are harder to treat. The climate we destroy may swallow Pacific islands first, but the rising oceans and the super storms and the food shortages are knocking at our doors. No current projections show Ebola reaching us in any meaningful way, but COVID showed us the precarity we face in the onslaught of a pandemic, and our mechanisms for response have only gotten worse, gutted by budget cuts and a government we cannot trust. We are all connected through our public health, public safety, and public economy, and whatever consequences we feel insulated from now, we will not be for long.

These are the arguments we make when we’re trying to bring back to our side the people we’ve lost, the people we’ll need to win elections. In pursuit of the other, look what they are doing to you. If it is not enough to care about those other people, we can at least care about the impact on us.

But here’s the thing appealing to public health, to public safety, to the public economy might help us win elections, but it won’t help us solve our big, social problems. For that we need public trust. And public trust will not come from appealing to the material consequences for us when we attack them. For public trust, we have to dismantle the concept of us and them. We have to remember our common humanity - with people all over the world, people whose islands are sinking, whose governments start wars, who use drugs, who steal food, who have sex with people of the same gender, people who have sex for money, who vote against their own self interest and ours, people who look different and worship different gods and sing in different languages, people whose lives are wholly different than ours, who farm different land, who live in different cities, people who have no home and who live in their car, people who have done horrible things and people who have had horrible things happen to them.

Of course I don’t mean to say that people should not face consequences for the actions they take that harm others, or that there is no place for anger or fear. But what I do mean to say is that we have to find a way to talk about the things that matter to us, talk about the sheer enormity of the existential crises we face, the hurt that has been done to us and the hurt that we have done to others without dehumanizing each other. The very best things and the very worst things have all been done by people.

Public health suffers when people do not feel safe coming forward, when they do not feel welcomed by the institutions meant to protect us. If people suspect that public health and safety recommendations come from judgment rather than love, they will not abide by them. It is not enough to remind people that their own health is at stake, we have to love and care for each other for it to work. We have to be able to talk about personal responsibility and personal choices in a way that does not diminish the humanity of the people making those choices, whatever they are. We have to be able to say here are the consequences of your choices without saying you are a bad and undeserving person for making them. And we have to commit to helping each other as a society, to create programs and policies and structures that are in service of each other

So, what does that mean in practice? We have to overturn this regime which is so hellbent on turning us against each other (see the end of this post for ways to get involved in the midterms). We have to look for leaders who embrace our common humanity, and who are able to communicate this as well as act on it, and we have to lift them up. We have to think about this in our own communications and relationships, and in how we talk to and about voters and potential voters. And we have to find ways to support each other where we can, to relieve the burden on those who, whether for emotional or physical safety, can’t.

And finally, we have to remember, always, that there’s no such thing as other people.

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If you’re ready to get started helping out with midterms, here’s a couple of options:

1. Look at this map (you do have to scroll a little bit)! Do you know anyone who lives in any of these states? Reach out to them! See if they have started thinking about their upcoming elections, if they know their deadlines for registration and their primary date if it hasn’t happened already. Ask if they’ve thought about volunteering. I know a critical mass of people in North Carolina so I plan to email them to ask how I can help now that their primaries are over and they have a key Senate race and several key House races. (Spoiler alert for some of you reading this)

If you just need something to do right this second, sign up for a phone banking shift with Texas Together and help elect James Talerico and flip some House districts. You can sign up here.

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In spite of its somewhat macabre name, the term autopsy in this case refers to the post-election review that political parties often do after they lose an election. For example, after they lost the 2012 election, Republicans did a now infamous autopsy that called for the GOP to become a more inclusive working class party that embraced comprehensive immigration reform. Obviously these reports are not gospel, and do not compel the changes they recommend. But they do provide important insights into how decisions were made inside a campaign, and study the impact of various tactics, policy positions, and challenges. If Republicans had listened to their own 2012 autopsy, who knows where we’d be right now.

In 2016 the DNC did not complete a formal autopsy, a decision that generated extensive controversy, and as a result, the many, many questions around the 2016 election have gone unanswered. And while an autopsy probably would not have put to bed all of the overarching questions that emerged from that election (incrementalism vs. revolution; economic anxiety vs. enthusiastic christian nationalism; would Bernie have won), we’d at least be arguing from the same playbook. And we’d have insight into other really important tactical questions around how money was spent, how decisions were made, what tactics proved effective, and which innovations were worth iterating. Instead, we’ve all somehow been trapped in November 2016 for going on ten years now.

So when Ken Martin ran for DNC chair after the 2024 election, he promised he’d commission a comprehensive autopsy and release it to the public. What followed instead was a farce more suited to a satirical workplace comedy than the governing body of the only serious political party left in this country.

And to be honest, though facetious, this tweet is a pretty accurate assessment of what happened. Ken Martin promised to commission and release an autopsy of the 2024 election. He put his friend Paul Riviera in charge of the autopsy, and Riviera produced an incomplete, facile, and poorly sourced product. Instead of firing his friend and starting over, Ken Martin lied about the autopsy, asked Pod Save America to have him on so he could lie about it some more, and then released it under duress after someone leaked parts of it to CNN.

On its face, this feels like one of those insider-y, elite political fights that doesn’t really matter in the grand scheme of things. We’re still at war in Iran, no one can afford gas or groceries, the President of the United States is stealing from us left and right, the Supreme Court said racism in elections is good actually, and our planet is trying to boil us alive. Why are we still thinking about the 2024 election at all, let alone a report that at its best would be hundreds of pages hardly anyone would read?

And yet, I think it does matter, in several important ways.

First, the information itself matters. Kyle Tharp, author of the Chaotic Era newsletter, compiled a list of all the various investigations into the 2024 election that other groups have done in the intervening months, and it’s a fantastic collection. There’s a report on organizing tactics and methods that I read thoroughly. The group Catalist regularly does a deep dive into the voter file to give a comprehensive review of demographic voting patterns in each election. There’s a centrist review of the 2024 election, a progressive review of the 2024 election, and a few others. But they all review 2024 with their particular lens, as outsiders. None of them are able to give us a comprehensive view of how decisions were made, how each part of the campaign interacted with the others, and how all of these varying perspectives might be synthesized into actionable conclusions. You could read the thousands of pages of available material. I’ve made a bit of a dent in it this weekend. But that’s not the same thing as a review by the people who were actually making the decisions.

A lot has changed in the past 10-15 years of politics. The media landscape, technology, how we get information - we are three to five revolutions in at this point. Social media is vastly different now than it was even just a couple of years ago. Part of what an autopsy would help us evaluate is not just the changing landscape but how our party officials, the people who manage Democratic primaries and campaigns, navigate that change. The report on organizing tactics talks about the failure of the Biden and then later the Harris campaign to manage the diminishing returns of traditional organizing tactics like stranger-to-stranger canvassing and phone banking and presents some potential pilot programs to address some of the challenges they saw in the 2024 campaign’s program. But without a DNC autopsy we have no idea how the people who will run our 2028 presidential primary and campaign view those insights and ideas, what they learned from their own failures, or if they are even prepared to make substantial changes in the lead up to our next presidential election.

This information matters, and while most people in the country wouldn’t read the DNC autopsy or even know it exists, it would certainly have implications for how the Democratic party reaches them and therefore how they feel about the party. Whoever becomes our candidate in 2028 will have a lot of power in determining how decisions are made in the last 4-6 months of the election, but what they have to work with will be determined by the DNC sometime between now and then.

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But this whole fiasco is consequential even beyond the actual contents of the report. As both Dan Pfeiffer and Amanda Litman have pointed out, this process hasn’t exactly imbued the DNC with a surfeit of trust, and trust is an absolutely vital part of the DNC mandate. The DNC is already the avatar of boundless conspiracies about the Democratic party. People believe that the DNC has a lot more power than it does to determine the direction of our politics and even the results of our elections. People already have trouble trusting it as an institution. And the manner in which Ken Martin has handled the 2024 autopsy only makes that worse. The DNC will run a contentious primary in the lead up to the 2028 presidential election. They will determine who gets on the debate stage and which states vote in which order. If people can’t trust the process, then they can’t trust the candidate, and if they can’t trust the candidate and that person wins anyway, they won’t have the trust they need to lead the country, to make tough decisions and tougher compromises.

But ultimately my biggest concern is that this episode is a microcosm of the crisis facing the Democratic party. The problems we face right now are existential - climate change, the corruption of our democracy, technology that even its own creators have called apocalyptic. And yet rather than face those challenges, too many of our leaders are consumed by their own reputations, intent on playing the same political games of the past that helped get us here. These leaders don’t trust voters and activists enough to have hard conversations with us, to tell the truth about our possibilities or our failures so that we can learn from them and make things better. I’ve written about this before, specifically around Biden’s 2024 debate performance and whether or not he should step down from his presidential campaign but too often we are so afraid that even having starting conversation will undermine our ability to win that we miss the opportunity to learn from each other and change for the better.

A few weeks ago, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez responded to a question about her potential presidential ambitions by saying this:

“What’s funny about that is that they assume my ambition is positional; they assume my ambition is a title or a seat. And my ambition is way bigger than that. My ambition is to change this country. Presidents come and go. Senate, House seats, elected officials come and go, but single-payer healthcare is forever. A living wage is forever. Workers’ rights are forever. Women’s rights, all of that.”

And while it may be dismissed as a cute way to avoid answering the question of whether or not she’ll run for president, to me it actually gets at the heart of what we need from our leaders, and the antidote to the DNC fiasco. The Democratic party lacks credibility, in part because people believe our leaders are more likely to fight for themselves, to cave to lobbyists, to pursue their own wealth, bolster their own reputations, and stay in office for as long as they can at our expense. Ken Martin certainly seems like he is willing and even eager to do so. But what we need, as a party, and as a country, are leaders whose ambitions are not personal; leaders who want to do what they can to help, whether that’s run when it’s time to run, or step down when it’s time to step down; leaders who, most importantly, we can believe.

So what do we do with this? Is it just another episode we have to learn to live with? In some ways, yes. We’re not going to get a better autopsy. What trust people have lost in the DNC as a result of this is the DNC’s to get back. But the answer to this is also to remember that the DNC is not the Democratic party. We are the Democratic party. Voters are the Democratic party. And in lieu of repeating myself even more on this subject, I’m going to quote another prescient piece Amanda Litman wrote on the DNC a few weeks ago:

“But that also means the question isn’t really “what will the Democratic Party do?”

It’s: What are you going to do?

Run for something. Volunteer for a campaign you believe in. Show up to your local party meeting even when it’s uncomfortable — especially when it’s uncomfortable. Give money to candidates. Have a dinner party and actually talk about this stuff. Pick up the phone.

The DNC doesn’t run the party. The party doesn’t really run the party. You run the party — or you could, if you wanted to.

That is a lot of responsibility to put on you. Sorry!

It’s also an invitation. We don’t have to revert to the status quo. We don’t have to go back to normal, we don’t have to defer to the people who have always been in charge just because they’re used to being in charge. We get to decide what the Democratic Party is and becomes if we want to.”

If we want better, we have to demand better. We have to have the conversation. It starts today. It starts by showing up.

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Well, folks, unfortunately the redistricting news keeps getting worse.

In case you haven’t been following this super closely, here’s a quick recap. In early 2025, Trump demanded that Republican state legislatures around the country attempt some mid-cycle redistricting. Typically, redistricting happens around the census as the number of House seats are reapportioned based on the results. Trump wanted Republicans around the country to buck that trend and redraw their House districts to favor more Republican House seats. Most states went for it, except in Indiana where Republicans voted against the redistricting plan much to Trump’s chagrin, and later their own when the primary came around and Trump-endorsed candidates beat 5 of the 7 Republicans who voted against redistricting. Democrats, in response, kicked off their own redistricting plan in California and Virginia to pick up more blue House seats.

This is where it gets messy. For a while it looked like we were able to nullify Republican redistricting efforts with successful efforts of our own. California remains solid, but last week the Virginia Supreme Court overturned the will of the voters and rescinded Virginia’s new maps. Then Florida launched their own redistricting effort. And to top it all off the Supreme Court handed down a decision that essentially repealed a 1982 amendment to the Voting Rights Act that required some states to draw districts in such a way that produced a minimum number of majority-minority districts, to ensure that people of color have representation in Congress - states where race overwhelmingly collates with party identity (aka states where white people are overwhelming Republican and people of color are overwhelmingly Democrats). This Vox article gets into the details if you want more information, but essentially the Supreme Court said that it is more important that Republicans politicians get to pick their voters than it is for all of us to have fair representation in Congress. So Republicans in states like Tennessee and Alabama plan to carve up their last safely Democratic districts and dilute the political power of their Black citizens.

So what does this mean for us?

First, in the short term, it means that Republicans are once again winning the midterms redistricting wars. Democrats have been increasingly favored to take back the House this November, with our chances getting better and better the more Trump tries to bomb his way out of the Epstein news cycle and into a lasting legacy. The last week of redistricting news makes this much harder (though not impossible). As said in the Message Box: “prior to all of these shenanigans, Democrats only needed to pick up three seats to flip the House. In [the current best case scenario for Republicans], we would need to pick up 15.” We might not end up in that best case Republican scenario, but we certainly have to pick up more seats than we were originally planning on. Taking back the House this November is our best chance for stopping significant portions of the Trump agenda, and to start investigations into the worst of this regime’s corruption and malfeasance.

In the long term, we’re in for even more redistricting fights. States that couldn’t redraw districts to divide up majority Black and Latino districts in time for these midterms will be able to do so for 2028. Blue states will hopefully do what they can to combat any Republican gains, but this still opens us up to dismantling majority-minority districts all over the country, and to an endless redistricting war that only further calcifies and polarizes our politics. Democrats will need to do what they can to maintain the balance of power and not lock us out of political representation, but it’s going to be really painful. And as we look even further into the future, the 2030 census is likely to make all of this worse as populations grow in red states, but not enough for those states to actually start to turn purple or even blue.

It’s not great, guys.

But, it’s also not impossible. And even though our jobs got a lot harder, the fundamentals remain the same. The powers that be want to cut us out of the political process and we are absolutely not going to fucking let them.

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So here’s what we do:

1. First things first, we’re not going to panic. We’re going to take a deep breath and remind ourselves that the odds were stacked against the passage of the Voting Rights Act the first time around, and that’s putting it lightly. But millions of people worked very hard, even though many of them didn’t live to see the culmination of that hard work. They did it anyway. And they won. We have a lot of work ahead of us, but a better country and a better world is possible. We get what we fight for. And we will fight for this.

2. Check your voter registration, remind your friends and family to check theirs, and make sure you and everyone you know are ready to vote in any upcoming primaries, as well as this fall. Share this video to make sure your friends and family do the same.

3. Get ready to fight hard in these midterms as well as in the next few years. We need to take back the House, yes. But we also need to win over state legislatures, state attorneys general and secretaries of state, state supreme courts, and anywhere else where the decisions about voting rights, district maps, and elections are made. Make sure you know who represents you at the state level, and their positions on redistricting at the state level. And then check out States Win (formerly Sister District), an organization committed to winning state legislatures, and their plan for dealing with this redistricting fight.

4. You can also check out Swing Left - they have a list of House districts we need to flip or protect this fall. Figure out if you have one near you, or in the same place where friends and family live. Follow the candidates, repost their wins, sign up to volunteer with their campaigns, and set up a recurring donation if you can.

5. Support organizations fighting back against racist Republican gerrymandering. Fair Fight, Black Voters Matter, the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, and the ACLU (Tennessee, Alabama) are all on the case. If you can donate to their efforts, please do. But also follow these organizations and share their efforts. Make sure the people in your life know about it. A lot of what we need to do in the next few months is make sure people know the stakes of these upcoming elections, and are aware of opportunities to take action to protect fair elections and representation.

6. Take another deep breath. This is going to be a long fight. It’s a marathon, not a sprint. But you can’t win a marathon without taking the first step. So after you take your deep breath, take one step.

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For a man who so perfectly exemplifies what it means to be born with a silver spoon in his mouth, it should come as no surprise that Trump’s political career was also born just a few feet from home base. He may claim full credit for his home run, but in truth it was a concerted effort by conservatives over several decades that endowed Trump with the power he currently wields. The chaos, corruption, and violence that Trump has wreaked since his first day in office in 2017 is the result of a deliberate, strategic accumulation of power by Republican operatives.

Republicans believed that the media was so structurally oriented against them that they built their own media apparatus - one that so thoroughly undermined mainstream media that it often feels like our best options for vetted journalism are at best still accountable to a conservative perspective and at worst are fully responsive to it. Republicans were able to unite disparate groups with varying and sometimes even contradictory goals in an effort to pack the Supreme Court with conservative Justices to overturn Roe v. Wade, and not only were they able to overturn the right to an abortion, those same Justices have systematically dismantled the social, economic, and democratic protections we’ve relied on to check and rebalance power in the favor of a more free and fair society.

Most recently, the conservative majority on the Supreme Court has all but completely dismantled the Voting Rights Act, one of the most effective pieces of legislation in history for assuring our democracy actually provides equal representation under the law, in spite of our nation’s dark history of enslavement, subjugation, and discrimination. The Supreme Court’s most recent ruling, however, is not just a singular attack on the integrity of our democracy, nor is it just the culmination of decades of work from Chief Justice John Roberts and his Reaganite cohorts, but a crucial step in an ongoing effort to shore up power that has no end in sight. The redistricting efforts that many southern states have already launched as a result of this ruling will only further disenfranchise voters of color and entrench power in the hands of the wealthy. Or to put another way, it is not only the result of the pursuit of power, but a pursuit of power in and of itself.

Trump’s election empowered conservatives across the Republican machine to dismantle the democratic and economic curtailment of their power and wealth from the past decade - Roe v. Wade, which gave women physical autonomy and economic freedom; the Voting Rights Act which enfranchised Black voters after centuries of exclusion from democracy; USAID which provided aid to marginalized populations all over the world; Medicare and Medicaid which made health care more accessible; the Paris Climate Accord and the fight against the climate crisis, which would have moved us towards cheaper, unlimited, renewable sources of energy and away from energy sources that enrich the powerful at our expense; and so on, and so forth. And yet while he enables this systematic gutting of the social order, Trump pursues a goal somehow even more myopic and self-centered.

Trump just wants all this power to make him richer and more famous. He wants his name in lights next to Napoleon and Alexander the Great. He wants mon

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uments and a ballroom and the decimation of his enemies. He wants fealty and he wants to be rich. Centuries of power struggles about the meaning of democracy and here we are, at the whims of the boy who would be king, smashing his toys together and throwing rocks at the other kids on the playground while the people around him make all of us the world over poorer, sicker, and less safe.

And to be honest, for those of us who love and fight for democracy, it seems pretty depressing. But it’s not. It’s a road map.

It took Republicans almost half a century to dismantle the social and political advances of the mid-century. And abortion rights, the EPA, Medicare and Medicaid, USAID, nutrition assistance, the Voting Rights Act - these massive accomplishments of the 1960s and 1970s were also the results of decades of strategic organizing. And while it’d be great to get to a place where we aren’t living in fear of the pendulum swings of power moving away from us, while we work toward that goal, there are important lessons to be learned today.

What does power mean to us on the left? What does amassing it look like? What will we use it for? Those of us who believe in democracy, who fight for it, are in a peculiar position. The democratic institutions we believe in put us on an even keel with those we oppose. For example, our ultimate goal is to outlaw gerrymandering, but as the Supreme Court paves the way for more and more of it, are we willing to use every tool available to us, including gerrymandering, to amass enough power to do so? Is our allegiance to the institutions of democracy, or the free, fair, and equitable society we can create when they are functioning effectively? And if it is, as I hope, the second one, we have to be willing to use every tool available to us.

With the destruction of the Trump regime, and elections bearing down on us, it is absolutely vital that we on the left start developing a theory of power - not just how we’re going to use it, but how we’re going to get it, and how we’re going to hold onto it. And we have the harder job - we have to do this by bolstering our democracy, which means we have to build democratic institutions and structures that will outlive us, and which our opponents might one day use to attack what we have built.

The country faces an affordability crisis. Climate change presents a massive, existential threat. To hold the Trump regime accountable we need investigations and Congressional hearings. Across the world, violence and war produces chaos and death. We have to address these crises, but we also have to figure out how to address them in a way that builds power rather than siphoning it away. What will help us build up goodwill amongst the electorate so that we can take on the challenges that are harder to communicate? I don’t envy the politicians who need to make these decisions, who need to persuade their colleagues and us, their voters, of their strategy; who need to find a way to show an increasingly entrenched and distracted electorate facing growing economic precarity that their strategy will actually improve our lives.

But the rest of us have important choices to make too. We need to figure out what our focus is going to be, now as we head into midterms and ultimately the primary for the 2028 Democratic presidential primary, but also what we plan to focus on regardless of who is in office, how we want to deploy our own long term strategic efforts towards a better future. Much like Chief Justice John Roberts has been working on dismantling the Voting Rights Act since he was a young lawyer just out of law school, what will be our long term political project? And what will the world look like when we achieve it?

And it’s not just our commitment we have to figure out - whether it’s Supreme Court reform, statehood for D.C. and Puerto Rico (if they want it), getting money out of politics, fighting climate change, electing young progressives to state and local government, or any number of other issues. It’s also our strategy. We have to figure out where we’re willing to compromise, and who we’re willing to compromise with. We have to figure out what we’ll do to get power and who we want to wield it. And we have to figure out how to keep fighting when we face setbacks, how to keep moving forward even when our momentum stalls, and how to differentiate between what feels good and what’s effective.

It feels early to be thinking about this. We haven’t taken the House back yet, and with a new wave of redistricting barreling towards us, that future is even less certain than it was just a week ago. The presidential primary is two whole years away. Who knows what’s in store for us between now and then? But if we don’t start thinking about it now, we may find ourselves in the same place we were during the Biden years - in crisis mode, fractured and demoralized and unwilling to talk about the long term implications of our politics.

I don’t want to take 50 years to fix what’s broken now, but even more than that I don’t want to spend the next four or eight or even twelve years scrambling. I don’t want to jump from crisis to crisis, playing whack-a-mole with Republican policies designed to increase economic precarity, infringe on our rights, and enrich the wealthy at our expense. We deserve better, and we must demand better, from ourselves, from each other, and from our politics. And to get it, we’re going to have to work together, to trust each other, to find allies in unexpected places, and to find a way to see beyond the current crisis to a future where we can all thrive, a future we build together.

A future where power serves us, and the world we dream about, and not the other way around.

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Discipline. To finish the pile of unfinished books sitting next to my dresser. To do yoga three days a week. To go to a museum when I need to look at things and to text friends when I want to connect with people and to walk outside when I know the number one thing I need is the sun on my face.

Free food and free books for everyone. I want to reward curiosity. I want everyone to feel the delicious immersion of a good book, the utter delight of a day with nothing to do but disappear into a story with the perfect snack just within reach. I want everyone to get a few hours a week to read outside, to learn something new, to eat something delicious, and to share it with friends.

For violence to be much more difficult for all of us to reach for. Every once in a while I watch my crime shows, and think to myself “what kind of insane storytelling sets up murder as a solution to this problem?” But is it really that much different than how we live in the real world? Police violence and gun violence and war - it happens every day, and it only begets more death, more destruction, more distrust. I refuse to make any blanket statements about when violence is appropriate, what merits self-defense, or how people should respond to oppression that threatens their lives. But I want to live in a world where we all take it as seriously as it merits. If we’re going to bomb another country, I want us to feel the magnitude of every single death.

An end to the death penalty.

Fetuccini alfredo.

To try more stuff. To try more food and more books and more places and more movies. For trying stuff to be rewarded. For failure to be rewarded. This week Anne Helen Petersen wrote about the closing of Hampshire College in Massachusetts, and a lament for the end of the era of experimentation in education. Education feels so high stakes these days, in a job market fraught with AI, where no one makes enough money except for the people who make way too much, too fragile and uncertain. You only get the chance to give kids the education that will secure their future once, and if the education they get is different than the one other kids get, the risks are even higher.

So maybe what I really want is to live in a world with less precarity, where our education can be less geared towards a cutthroat job market, and instead we can focus on helping kids touch as much of the world we all share as we can. Maybe they won’t use physics or astronomy, maybe history won’t help them write better emails or design better cars. But what if we all had the chance to learn as much about being human as possible, as much about how the world works and what humans have tried and built and ripped apart and scavenged and explored as we can? What if it was okay to struggle with science, but not okay to give it up entirely? What if everyone learned to play an instrument and about poetry and how to calculate the rate of acceleration, not for a job or for a grade or for college acceptance, but because we are humans and humans make music and write poems and math makes a great metaphor?

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A personal stylist and $5000 for a new wardrobe.

Like three days at a beach by myself.

High speed rail between me and all the cities where my friends live, with affordable ticket prices and decent snacks.

Eight hours of uninterrupted sleep.

Women’s sports playing consistently on one of the many channels and streaming platforms that I’m already paying for.

For influencers who post about voting to tell you who they are going to vote for and why. Every election cycle I get immensely frustrated with influencers and actors and hosts and other public figures who make generic posts telling people to get out and vote without talking about what their values are and who they are voting for. Voting is really important. It’s the baseline way we can all help choose our collective future. But too often I feel like famous people want the credit for civic engagement without the risk of truly engaging in the political process. More and more I feel like talking to each other about what is happening, what it means, and what we want to do about it is a critical part of the democratic process, and one we are most in danger of losing. And of course public figures posting about how they are thinking about elections and what they are looking for in candidates and yes, who they are voting for to Instagram isn’t the same as having a conversation, it’s certainly closer to one than an abstract, generic call to turn in your ballot.

For Tucker Carlson’s “apology” to come with a call to vote for Democrats. I do believe in the capacity of people to learn and grow and change their minds. And I think it’s important to welcome people who genuinely change their minds and are willing to join us in undoing the mess the MAGA movement has made of our politics. I just don’t think that’s what Tucker Carlson is doing. His swerve away from Trump and the MAGA movement as a result of the Iran war is politically useful if it turns literally anyone else away from Trump in the lead up to the midterms, but I do not think it is worthy of our time and attention unless it comes with a call to action, particularly as it’s less a change in values and more of a redirection. The way to defeat Trump is to win elections against Republicans. And the way to win elections against Republicans in a two party system is to elect Democrats - something people at both ends of the political spectrum could learn.

A new laptop. A new phone. An unlimited supply of plane tickets.

AI regulation. A robot that will fold my laundry and return my packages and tidy my room so that I can write books, instead of an AI that will write books while I fold my laundry. A society that values human creation and human stories and human art. A way to get kids to go through the messy process of learning to write. When I was a senior in high school, my English teacher told us he wasn’t going to count the grades we got on our essays towards our final grades. He wanted to give us honest feedback that wouldn’t ruin our futures by tanking our GPAs. When I got my first essay back with a letter grade I’d quite literally never seen on a piece of writing before, I was devastated. But I learned more about writing in that class than I had ever before, and more than I would learn in any class until I got to grad school and was learning to teach writing for myself. And when I got my first perfect score on an essay from that teacher, I was so proud that my parents put it up on their refrigerator and it stayed there until they moved out of that house eight years later.

One more room in my apartment.

And peace on earth I guess.

We can build the lives and the future we hope for, but only if we actually imagine it. So now it’s your turn - what do you want? For dinner, for yourself, for this country? For the future?

Leave a comment

It was a weird week.

It started on Sunday, when the President, the man a majority of voters in the 2024 election chose to lead our country, made genocidal threats against Iran in a post on the social media platform he created when he got kicked off of all the other social media platforms for fomenting a riot in an attempt to overturn the free and fair election he lost. Trump posted on Truth Social that “a whole civilization will die tonight” and followed it up with a deranged series of posts in which he threatened Iran’s civilian infrastructure, in particular its bridges and power plants, which also means he threatened every baby in a NICU, every person on a ventilator, people who rely on hospitals and clean water and electricity to live, which is to say millions of civilians who have even less say over their government than we do.

In the end, Trump backed off of these threats, as he has backed off of so many (and yet not nearly enough) of his threats in the past year. And I am incredibly, unbelievably relieved that he did, and that there was a ceasefire however limited and flimsy and short it was. But to live in a world where it was remotely possible that Trump could act on these threats, where we have a president who even makes these kinds of threats, where we are at war in Iran at all, sometimes feels like more than I can stand.

And while all of this was happening, while I was calling Senator Schumer and begging him to do literally anything to find a way to stop this, while we waited with baited breath for a breaking news alert announcing a reprieve, while millions of Iranians prepared for unspeakable violence and we prepared to be a party to that violence, astronauts were flying through space on a record breaking trip around the moon and an absolutely stunning testament to the human spirit.

While the astronauts were in space, we were treated to overwhelming expressions of “moon joy,” an effusion that defied adjectives. We got to listen while the astronauts on Artemis II spoke to their friends on the International Space Station, including the reconnecting of the first women to do a joint all women space walk. We received new images of the moon, decked out in brilliant color, and new images of the Earth - the magnitude of the Pacific Ocean, the bright crown of light around the edge of Earth as seen from space, the swirl of the astronauts hair as they gazed out at their home planet from the tiny windows of their spaceship.

The astronauts were beset by regular human struggles. The toilet didn’t work, leading astronaut Christina Koch to anoint herself a space plumber. Outlook, the Microsoft email platform, stopped working, leading to the truly iconic (at least for those of us plagued daily by Outlook) quote from astronaut Reid Wiseman: “I also see that I have two Microsoft Outlooks, and neither one of those are working,” Folks have enjoyed meme-ing that quote next to Neil Armstrong’s “One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind,” to poke fun at the pervasive mundanity of office culture in the 21st century. But the astronauts of Artemis II also gave us such gems as “moon joy” and “trust us, you look amazing, you look beautiful” and “”Maybe the distance we are from you makes you think what we’re doing is special, but we’re the same distance from you. And I’m trying to tell you, just trust me, you are special.”

And of course, my personal favorite, and the title of this newsletter: “We will always choose Earth. We will always choose each other.”

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There’s actually a name for this phenomenon, where astronauts see Earth from space and are struck by our oneness, by our common humanity. It’s called the overview effect, and there’s a lot of people I wish we could test it out on.

There’s just something immensely overwhelming, I think, in experiencing some of the worst humanity has to offer and some of its best in the same week. Unfortunately, casual violence and unbelievable ineptitude notwithstanding, in the debate about our country’s worst offenses, even just limiting it to 20th century history, it’s not guaranteed that Trump’s war in Iran and the many horrendous threats he’s made against its civilian population would top the list. But his callousness, his self and demeaning rage, and the sycophantic deference he receives from elected Republicans makes it particularly difficult to contend with.

It has been clear throughout the Trump presidency that his main concerns are his own wealth and his own grievances. The Iran war is not about democracy or protecting American lives or ensuring a safer world. It is a project of Trump’s legacy making, an externalization of the Islamaphobia, racism, and fearmongering that has characterized his whole political life, and of course, a misbegotten focus on oil and his family’s own wealth. Trump sees the United States as an extension of himself, a vehicle for his own glorification. And he’ll visit as much death and destruction in service of this as he likes.

Is that the truth of us then, this venal violence and casual dehumanization? Or is it the ingenuity, the drive for exploration, the sense of oneness of Artemis II?

The answer, I’m afraid, is both. I watched the Artemis II journey with wonder. It’s the same feeling I got while waiting for my very first COVID vaccine, when I watch veterans rush towards natural disasters, or José Andrés and World Central Kitchen head into war zones - that when humans come together, when we remember each other with love, when we share each other’s grief, when we work together to help each other, to save each other, there is nothing we can’t do. We are forever reaching our arms towards each other and out towards the universe, calling and calling and answering back.

But we don’t all get the chance to experience the overview effect - the vast majority of us are stuck here on Earth. As much as we are brave and fierce and loving, we are also shortsighted and greedy and obsessed with proving our own superiority. And I think one of the hardest parts is to remember to love humanity, to believe in our indomitable spirit and endless capacity for love, even in the face of our own worst selves. The world is not Trump, and it is not war. These things are a part of us, and we need to take ownership of them, but we must not let them overwhelm us. Everyone here is worth fighting for. This planet is worth fighting for. We are worth fighting for. No matter what, we keep choosing earth. We keep choosing each other

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This week, call your Representative and your Senators and ask them to do everything they can to stop Trump’s “excursion” in Iran, because believe it or not, declaring and funding war are still the province of Congress. Watch the CNN Parts Unknown episode about Iran. Share beautiful pictures of the moon, and tell people in your life what they mean to you. Find a food bank near you and donate or sign up for a volunteer shift. Contact your local library system or school district and ask if there are any STEM programs for girls you can help support.

Go outside, look up at the sky, and take a deep breath. I promise, I will too.

When I finally got so fed up with Twitter in October 2024 that I closed the app and haven’t opened it since, it wasn’t the trolls and the hate speech that got me. Instead, it was two tweets I saw within minutes of each other - the first one absolutely certain that Harris was going to win the election in November, and the second absolutely certain that Harris was going to lose, both filled to the brim with disdain for anyone who thought differently, and both from chronically online accounts with massive followings that they appeared to have for no other reason than tweeting a lot.

That this was the last straw was due at least in part to my own emotional reaction to it, a kind of gut wrenching fury, wanting that certainty for myself, wanting desperately to believe that there was a way to know for sure, a war between resenting their certainty and seething at the irresponsibility of giving over to it one way or the other. I have long said that the illusion of certainty about elections is an attempt to let ourselves off the hook. If we know what’s going to happen, we don’t have to do the work to ensure it. If we know for sure we are going to win an election, we don’t have to show up for our canvassing shift. If we know for sure we are going to lose, that canvassing shift won’t make a difference. But the truth is that we actually don’t know what’s going to happen, in elections or in life, and our actions or lack thereof do matter in shaping our future. But I think there’s also something even more insidious at work here.

Algorithmic social media creates a sense of certainty because it feeds us certainty, cloaked in the illusion of variety and diverse perspectives. It gives us the sense that this is what is really happening out there in the world - this is what people are talking about, what they care about. This is what matters. But not only is social media limited in what it can show us by the number of active users it has, but the algorithm is also geared to show us a version of the world that reinforces our own experience. It’s driven by what it knows will make us mad, make us sad, that we’ll like, that we’ll respond to. There is no incentive to challenge us or introduce new ideas, ways of being or experiences. Instead, our algorithms stay within our own frames of reference, reinforcing the idea that what we care about is what everyone cares about, what we see is what everyone sees, what makes us mad is what makes everyone mad. And if it makes everyone mad and everyone uncomfortable, then there must be something morally wrong with it.

And so the world gets narrower and narrower. Our sense of moral superiority gets stronger and stronger. The things that make us mad are evil, the things that make us happy are good. Our world view tightens to the length of a tweet, a reel, a tiktok. Everything is happening now, and it is the only thing happening, and it’s obviously happening to everyone or it wouldn’t be on the internet. Everything flattens to the same level of importance - the war in Iran; the woman whose ritual of coffee in the garden with her husband pissed off everyone who doesn’t have a husband or a garden or coffee; who candidates invite to a rally; ICE raids; people who cut in line at the airport; the people who agree with you about which characters should get together on the tv show and who are making a really great point when they say that the people who care about different characters are evil.

Okay, Sara, you’re saying to yourself, you already logged off though, so why does this matter? Why are you still thinking about it?

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First, because while I’m no longer on any microblogging platforms, I’ve seen enough to know this has only gotten worse. And second, because the things that happen on the internet rarely stay there. This sense of absolute certainty infects our politics, our art, our ability to connect with each other. Because in truth, nothing is really certain. And the sense of absolutism we get from social media, or from an AI that wants you to keep using it and so never challenges your view or asks you to reconsider your interpretation, keeps us from empathizing with each other, from trying to understand each other’s perspective. It keeps us from acknowledging the complexity of other people’s experiences, and their agency. It limits the beauty of what we can imagine, the fullness of life we get to experience. It makes people take down their art, stop sharing about their lives, and hedge their opinions, and that only reinforces what the algorithm has already determined - our own moral superiority.

My therapist has to remind me every few months that I’ll feel less crazy if I get out in the world. Complexity is challenging. Our relationships with other people, our experiences in the world can sometimes make us uncomfortable or upset. So rarely do they resemble the carefully curated relationships and experiences we see on social media, the contained and illustrative relationships and experiences we see in fiction. But the fear of that complexity is so much worse than the experience of it. Getting out in the world, saying yes to invitations and showing up even when you’re nervous or scared or obsessing about logistics is a much needed reminder that when we allow the world to be complex, when we let other people be complex, it frees us too. Because it’s not just about interacting with people who disagree with us, it’s about remembering that there are people in the world whose experiences and perspectives are so different from ours that they go beyond the reach of agreeing or disagreeing. And that those experiences and perspectives are just as real and impactful as ours.

Absolute certainty is the province of facism. It does not allow questions, it doesn’t allow disagreement. It demands continued shame and ostracization of those who slip, those who don’t fit the norm, over and over again until the norm is just one guy who gets to make decisions for everyone else. I don’t think any of us should be surprised that the rise of facism and authoritarianism around the world coincides with the rise of algorithmic social media and the kind of AI that is willing to be your editor, your therapist, your romantic partner, your doctor, your nutritionist, and your best friend all at once. And I think we’ll all be better off if we remember that fascism doesn’t just descend from the top - it’s a panopticon that we all feed every time we demand the world conform to our own comfort at the cost of everyone else’s.

So I’ve been getting out in the world more. Instead of engaging in increasingly myopic discourse about Heated Rivalry, I went to the first PWHL game played at Madison Square Garden over the weekend and screamed my face off with my friends, both at the goals scored and at the myriad of queer couples making out on the Kiss Cam. Instead of getting mad at “both parties are the same” online communists, I marched with them at the most recent No Kings protest (though I gotta say I grumbled a lot). Instead of talking about politics on twitter, I’ve spent the past year and half talking about politics in the Vote Save America slack community, and instead of confining myself to 280 character rants, I’ve allowed for the expansive complexity of this newsletter. And I have to say, I feel a lot better.

Go outside this week. Talk to someone in person. Put your phone in one room and go into a different one. I promise, I’ll do the same.

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You’re thirty-seven years old. You’re doing fine.

You’re newly twenty-seven and you’re moving to New York City, sleeping in your sister’s room, your friend’s apartment, trying not to take up too much space while you look for an apartment you can afford, that won’t make you crawl out of your skin, that isn’t too far from your new job. Everyone’s first apartment in New York is actually a flop house in New Jersey, but yours is a new build, is clean and empty and if your commute is a long walk to a crowded train, if your roommate is paranoid and neurotic, that’s okay. There’s a farmers market nearby, with outdoor yoga, and your sister and friends who are basically family live close enough to walk to.

You’ve just turned twenty-eight and you’re marching in the streets, slipping past barriers along the avenues where the buildings loom tall and crowded, because your country just elected a racist, misogynistic wannabe fascist who doesn’t care about your future, only his own wealth, his own ego, his own revenge schemes; who was handed the world on a silver platter and responded with violent resentment to the growing awareness that he did nothing to deserve it, and nothing of consequence with it. You should have seen it coming. You were told it was coming. And you did nothing. The foundations cracked, shook, splintered. But you aren’t going to get caught slipping again. Around you the city mourns, the city yells, the city braces.

You’re twenty-nine and you’re taking the bus to Staten Island. You’d take the ferry, you’ve done it before, but there’s a nor’easter coming in and the timing works better this way. You’re knocking doors in NYC’s one swing district, trying to flip the House and bring back some semblance of accountability to the federal government. You’ve never believed you were any good at talking to strangers, but it turns out you can be, if you practice. It turns out you can knock on strangers’ doors every weekend, that even while Republicans are stealing a Supreme Court seat and putting children in cages to separate them from their parents, even while it feels like the world as you know it is crumbling around your ears, even through weddings and tragedies and storms, you can ring doorbells and slip into apartment buildings and ask questions and talk to strangers and make a difference. But it will never feel this doable and uncomplicated again.

You turn thirty and see a therapist for the first time, someone to talk to whose feelings you don’t have to worry about, whose only interest in the stories you’re telling is you. You talk about the things you’ve been carrying, about the stories you’ve been telling about yourself and where they’ve led. You join a gym. Work deeply sucks, like HR is involved sucks, and you’re thinking about taking a chance on a new direction, giving up the stability of a steady paycheck for a chance to make a difference. You’re not sure yet, but you’re thinking about it. You’re still marching in the streets, trying to get anyone to stand up to the megalomaniacal dipshit running your country. The next presidential election looms and it feels like a chance for something new, something different. But the past looms too. You’re not sure about New York, not sure this labyrinth is for you, if you’ll find what you’re looking for here.

You’re looking for yourself - have you found her yet?

You’re thirty-one, and you did get an offer to change your life, a new career, a new direction, a new place to live, but you turned it down. The world rewards your risk aversion by completely shutting down. You come back from a trip to visit friends, stop by your office, and fill your backpack with everything you can carry. You don’t know that you won’t be back for over a year, but you know you won’t be back for a while. You tell your therapist you feel trapped, and she responds, well that makes sense - you are. Sirens wail. Helicopters hover. The city rages. The presidential election marches closer and closer, and you’re not allowed to knock on doors but you get very good at phone calls. You’re not going to get something new, but you’re fighting for something better than you’ve got and that’s always worth it. For a week in November you wait for the news alert to tell you that you’ve won, but it’s the honking in the street that tells you first.

The whole city feels like a party.

You’re thirty-two and crying in the Javits’ Center because you’re getting the Covid-19 vaccine, a public health marvel, evidence of what we can do when we come together, when we demand better, when we fight for each other. You could have gone to the Natural History Museum, a college in Brooklyn, a racetrack. Instead, you wait your turn beneath the glass ceiling that Hilary Clinton was supposed to break. It’s bittersweet. Around the city, restaurants spill into the streets, and you eat beneath the trees.

You’re thirty-three and the world is opening up again, and so are you. You go to Pride for the first time. You start this newsletter. You leave the country for the first time in years. The Supreme Court decides it has more say over what happens in your uterus than you do, but you’re back in the streets, marching with friends. You can’t fix it, but at least you can scream yourself hoarse. You’re not trapped in your house, your voice is not trapped in your body. The sun shines on your rage.

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You’re thirty-four and you’re finally starting to get the hang of this. You’re not sure if you’ve found what you’ve been looking for, but the shape of what you’ve found is getting clearer. It’s the first of several years without an asterisk, and maybe this is your life now - season tickets to see soccer with friends, a 360 degree view of fireworks from your roof on the Fourth of July (little ones on the street corners and the show on the East River), a neighborhood that blooms around you in the summer, tacos for lunch, weddings to attend and officiate, trips to the beach, and new babies, and there are so many things that hurt, but there’s so much love there too. The sky turns yellow for a few days in June, sinister and opaque, but nothing can hide the skyline forever.

You’re thirty-five and we’re doing it again. You have to leave the city to knock doors this time, travel to Pennsylvania, to the more spacious Hudson valley. You can’t believe we’re doing this again, but at least this time you see it coming. And still there is the beach, a trip to Disney World, a beautiful wedding in Vermont, more soccer, a park with a perfect view of the skyline. You’ll photograph it a thousand times. This new neighborhood blooms all summer too. You get bangs for the first time since you were a little kid. The day after the world ends, again, after you spent half an hour on the bathroom floor at 3am waiting for the election to be decided while you google the nuclear blast radius for a bomb hitting Manhattan1, you head to the ocean with your family. Love endures, and so does the sea.

You’re thirty-six and you spend the whole year leaving. There are lots of people you love in New York, but there are so many people you love elsewhere too, and some of them you haven’t seen in too many years. You decide to say yes, and your bank account is empty but your heart is full. You love New York City, but there’s a whole world out there too.

You’re thirty-seven. And twenty years ago you came to this city with your high school band. You sang the national anthem in a church whose windows should have blown out when the Towers collapsed, but instead the stained glass remained. You wandered the city with people you had crushes on, people you thought would be friends forever, people who you would learn terribly hard lessons from. When you were heading to college, you wanted to leave home more than you wanted to come here, and in the end you didn’t get to do either, not for a while. But this city was waiting for you, to be home when you needed it, to be new and scary and huge when you needed that too. New York will give you a million ways to know yourself, to change yourself, to find yourself, but she’s never going to make you do it. She puts all the chips on the table, and then goes back to what she was doing.

New York is unaffordable and scary and anonymous. It can be mean, it doesn’t help you up when you trip. But also, she sings. She makes you dinner, your favorites and new dishes you’ve never heard of, from places you may never go. She’s a doorway, to the world, to yourself. She can’t make you, but she’ll give you the tools you need to make yourself, a million mirrors and windows, a million choices, a million crossroads. And when you’re ready to leave, she’ll let you go.

But you’re not ready yet. You’re thirty-seven, and you moved to New York City ten years ago, and you’re okay.

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So often, it feels like the reality of this regime is inescapable, that it crowds everything else out. There’s too much pain out there, too much violence, and too much suffering. But every day is a chance to make a difference, to take action, to convince people to join us, to push back this administration and to fight for a better world.

Sometimes it’s a phone call or a post, sometimes it’s a protest or a town hall, and sometimes it’s an election and a chance to finally take back some power.

The stakes are incredibly high. Trump and his family are getting richer and richer off our backs while our lives get more and more unaffordable. Masked federal agents rampage through our communities, kidnapping our neighbors, detaining people in inhuman and deadly conditions, and murdering people in cold blood. With our tax dollars, our government killed hundreds of school children. The dismantling of USAID will lead to the deaths of millions. The misinformation, scientifically dubious and false claims, and impacts of cuts to research into vaccines, cancer treatment, Alzheimer’s, and god knows what else will be felt for generations. The Trump Regime Part 2 is as bad if not worse than so much of what we imagined heading into election night in November 2024.

But we’ve already seen what we can do when we come together, in the 2025 elections, in special elections across the country, in court cases, and with the pressure of our protests and our community engagement. And so the question we’ve got to ask ourselves every day is what are we going to do next?

I try to provide some answers to this question pretty regularly in this newsletter. But with primaries in full swing around the country and the escalating global violence from the Trump regime, this week seemed like a good moment to stop, take a deep breath, and zero in on some key actions and critical opportunities, so that’s what we’re going to do this week.

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The Next No Kings March

The next No Kings march is on March 28! If you haven’t been to one before, this is a huge nationwide collection of peaceful rallies and marches, all with the express purpose of showing the strength of our opposition. Millions of people across the country join forces to show that “America does not belong to strongmen, greedy billionaires, or those who rule through fear. It belongs to us, the people.”

Find your closest march or rally and make sure to put this in your calendar!

Connect with Voters

Write Letters with Vote Forward: Vote Forward has already launched two test campaigns so you can get started right now. The first campaign involves sending first time voter guides to new voters in Pennsylvania, based on the idea that while voting can be confusing and challenging, providing new voters with the information they need and a clear plan will help them follow through on making their voices heard.

In the second campaign you can write Community Support letters to voters in Virginia that connect people with voting resources and real world support, including a phone number for a hotline where trained Vote Forward volunteers can direct callers and texters with the information and resources they need most.

Plus, these are test campaigns, so you’re helping the strategists at Vote Forward figure out the best way to reach people so that we can all have a voice in choosing our future.

Midterms

We have midterm elections this year, which means that all of the seats in the House of Representatives, a third of the seats in the Senate, as well as several governorships, state legislatures, and city governments are up for election. If Democrats take back one chamber of Congress, we’ll have investigative powers over the administration, and we’ll be able to halt the worst of the legislative impulses of the Trump cronies in Congress. If we win both the House and the Senate, our capacity to thwart this administration will be even greater.

Every Democrat who has actual power is a Democrat who is beholden to us for votes, for donations, for support. Every Democrat who has actual power is another opportunity to use that power to build something better. And every election is an opportunity to choose a better path for our future.

Here’s how you can help:

Sign up for Vote Save America: VSA, as many of you know, is where I spend most of my volunteer hours. Their mission is to cut through all of the noise to help you spend your time, energy, and money in the most strategic way possible. They recently launched Project 218, their campaign to take back the House. If you sign up you’ll get regular emails about the best way to volunteer, donate, share information, and talk to your friends and family about upcoming elections. Plus, we have an awesome online slack community, full of smart, generous nerds inspiring each other and having fun while we try to save democracy. Come hang out with us!

Prepare for Your State’s Primary Elections: Primaries are how we choose the direction of the Democratic Party. If you’re frustrated with leadership in Congress or in your state, now is the time to get involved in choosing the Democratic candidate for your general election in November. Some primaries have already passed, including a major contest in Texas, and in North Carolina, a critical state for taking back the Senate. Figure out who is running in your primary elections, and make sure your friends and family know when the election is. Here’s some sample text you can use in a text or email:

Hey [NAME]! Just wanted to make sure you’re all set for our primary election coming up on [PRIMARY DATE]. I’ve been digging into the candidates a bit, so let me know if you want to talk anything through - I think I know who I’m supporting, but I’d love to hear your thoughts! If you want to come with, I’ll be heading to vote on [DATE]. Maybe we could get coffee or something after?

So that’s it - a few easy actions to take now that will help us all get ready to elect people this November who will actually have the power to push back against the Trump regime, and who will help us fight for a brighter future. Because if everyone here signs up for 5 Vote Forward letters, reaches out to 5 friends about their primary, brings 5 friends to a No Kings march at the end of the month, and signs up for Vote Save America, together we’ll have reached thousands of people. And that’s just the start.

We can, and will, make this country a better place, if only we act like we can. So let’s get to work. I’ll see you out there.

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With the ongoing bombardment of Iran, the United States is once again at war in the Middle East. After decades mired in Iraq and Afghanistan, resulting in the death of millions of people, worldwide destabilization, and untold damage to our own democracy, the Trump regime has dropped us right back in it, only this time with the curtain peeled all the way back. Unlike his predecessors, Trump did not make his case to Congress, the United Nations, or the American people; nations across the world urged restraint and deescalation instead of offering unwavering support; and a majority of Americans do not support the war. This is American imperialism laid bare, the last vestiges of purported legitimacy stripped away. And what is left? Men, with too many guns.

There’s a lot to be concerned with in this new war. The Trump regime has offered at best incoherent, conflicting reasons for attacking Iran, and an incoherent and conflicting picture of what victory might look like or when we’ll have achieved it. There is also, of course, the question that lies at the heart of every war - how could adding more death, more violence, more destruction ever really improve anything? The former, concerns that civilized heads of state must address in this world we’ve built; the latter, a question every one of us must ask if we’re ever going to build something better. That the Trump regime has neither answered nor answered these concerns is merely a prelude to what I find most disconcerting, however. And that is their sheer delight in the violence they unleashed.

summed it up well in ’s Open Tabs newsletter last week:

“What’s striking here isn’t just the focus on deadliness, or as Hegseth and company so often call it, “lethality,” but how much fun they think this is. By afternoon, the White House had released a hype video mixing actual strike footage from Iran with animations from Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3. At the podium, Hegseth gleefully read a roll call of American aircraft involved in the strikes—“B-2s, B-52s, B-1s, Predator drones, fighters controlling the skies”—many of which are decades-old platforms that generally sit around at Midwestern bases with nothing to do. It’s a good old-fashioned hootenanny, and everybody’s getting in on the action.”

The Trump regime’s delight in their own warmongering is remarkably unsurprising. What else could one expect from the regime that put out a “deportation ASMR” video, that lined the lawn of the White House with mugshot-style posters of the immigrants they arrested, that posed for photoshoots in front of people locked away in immigration detention, or gleefully sold merch for Alligator Alcatraz. And now, as our bombs kill school children and civilians, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth showcases an America unleashed, freed from the constraints of such petty concerns as respect for human lives and honoring human dignity and self-determination. As he reminded us in a briefing on Monday, March 2, this war will be “All on our terms with maximum authorities. No stupid rules of engagement, no nation-building quagmire, no democracy building exercise, no politically correct wars. We fight to win, and we don’t waste time or lives.”

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In other words, we have no concern for civilians or children, we have no concern for the future of the nations we’re destroying. We don’t care about democracy or self-determination or human rights. We care about our own power, and we will not rest until we are secure in our dominion. It’s toxic masculinity armed with torpedoes, the first fired in combat since WWII.

I don’t want to reduce this entire conflict to a singular social, cultural force. Racism, colonialization, and the pursuit of wealth are significant driving forces in the war on Iran. We also can’t ignore the domestic political forces at work (a regime up against the ropes as low approval ratings, bad economic news, and the Epstein files collide with the midterms) or the machinations of history. But I don’t think we can ignore that an administration that so readily turns to violence is also overrun with men who are primarily concerned with their own power, who relish their own cruelty, and who feel such gleeful vindication against the forces of social justice, progress towards equality, and the push to honor innate human dignity.

Plus, Trump desperately wants to cement his place in history, not by shepherding legislation that improves lives, nor by scientific innovation and exploration, but as a conquering emperor, remaking the world. And we can’t ignore that either.

The Iran war is toxic masculinity’s endstage, a summit reached through the accumulation of power and enough might to make right. It is a capstone project for men who feel insecure about their place in the world, and who feel that with enough force and brash confidence in their own superiority, they can push everyone else out of it. But toxic masculinity does not begin there.

It begins on the playground, when pulling pigtails and pushing other kids is excused - “oh it’s because he likes you.” It starts in school when bad behavior is buried beneath sports prowess or fraternity membership. It happens every time we say the words “boys will be boys.” It leads to school shootings, when the conversation circles and then dismisses how the shooters treated the women in their lives, or every time there’s an op-ed that suggests that to solve the male loneliness epidemic, women should lower their standards. It happens every time an assault victim is asked what they were wearing. It happens when we tell men and boys to stop crying, to man up, to take a joke. And it happens in locker rooms when the president calls, makes fun of the US women’s hockey team, and all the men in the room laugh.

There was a lot of talk, after that moment, about whether or not it mattered, about whether or not it was fair to hold athletes accountable for the politics and behavior of their government, whether it was fair to ask them to turn down the state of the union, whether it was just a dumb joke. And of course, in the grand scheme of things, it was just a dumb joke. And while I do think that there is no level of sports prowess that absolves you of knowing what’s going on in your country and using that knowledge to make decisions you can stand by, I’m not focusing on the fact that the US men’s hockey team went to the state of the union. If they want to watch a deranged, violent lunatic give a boring speech for two hours, I am certainly going to think less of them, but it was not the moment that enraged me. That belongs to the delight in that locker room when the president called, the raucous laughter at a joke belittling the accomplishments of their teammates, the way not one single person in that room had the wherewithal or the experience to push back. That shows me what kind of locker rooms those guys are usually in, and it’s not a room I’d ever feel good in.

Toxic masculinity delights in violence, and it delights in bullying and punching down. It enjoys making people feel small, encourages you to laugh, asks why you can’t just take a joke. It amasses power this way, making rooms unsafe for different opinions or perspectives or ways of being by belittling those who share them, letting laughter and jokes mask the true feelings that prop them up. Toxic masculinity is so convinced of its own superiority that it does not want to hear other opinions or other ideas. It just wants to watch others cower before it. And it starts on the playground, and in locker rooms, but it doesn’t end there. Because when we all keep just laughing at the joke, just cheering at the rally, when we’re too tired or put down to call it out, when we’re drowned out, what starts on the playground and in the locker room ends up on private islands and at the White House.

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Take Action This Week

Believe it or not, Congress is actually supposed to have the power to make war, not the White House. Congress is supposed to authorize the use of military force, and Congress is supposed to authorize the funding. Our Congress, led by Republicans, has abdicated this responsibility, and we should give them hell for it. Plus, there are opportunities to deny this administration supplemental funding for their illegal war that has absolutely no foundation in self-defense. Indivisible has a script and action you can take here.

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It’s exhausting, isn’t it? A swirling mass of inexplicable cartoon evil and disastrous ineptitude, like living in a relentless hurricane. Every day I think to myself that we live in the stupidest timeline. And as cartoonish and idiotic as so much of it is, between the USAID cuts and the vaccine disinformation, the ICE raids and the political persecution, the nukes and the joyful exacerbation of the climate crisis, the Trump regime will leave behind millions dead, imprisoned, separated from their families, poorer, sicker, and less safe. Just this week the Trump regime is planning to bomb Iran, is fighting tooth and nail to keep in place the tariffs that make everything more expensive, and is pushing the Senate to pass the SAVE Act, a piece of legislation that will make it nearly impossible for millions of people to vote.

Of course, none of this is unprecedented in history. We have, in our illustrious past, left diseases to flourish because of bad science and malicious neglect. Families have been separated and imprisoned, aid denied. We’ve had nuclear scares and environmental catastrophes and voter disenfranchisement. None of this is unprecedented around the world either, which is awash in self-aggrandizing dictators who lie with particularly stupid voracity, whose actions cause death and destruction while they build ballrooms. Most of them don’t have the power to create their own fake United Nations, nor are they all supported by legislative bodies that let them steal $10 billion from their own people to fund the fake United Nations. We are somewhat uniquely positioned to cause maximum damage to ourselves and to others at the moment. We simply have too much money and too much power. But we are not unique in being led by a murderous buffoon.

So much of the mythology of the United States is founded in a sense of unique superiority. We are, as declared by every president whose voice I’ve heard, the greatest country in the world. Presidents have been able to point to our power, our military might, have lauded our democratic freedoms, have proudly called us a nation of immigrants, have pointed to our Declaration of Independence, our Constitution, our democratic economy - a nation where one’s future is not determined by one’s birth but by one’s ingenuity and willingness to work. At any given point in our history, some of these have been more true than others, some wholly false. Some presidents made flawed but valiant, credible attempts to govern by these tenets. Some undermined them completely. Most hung out somewhere in the middle.

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It would be easy, I think, to be dissuaded by this, to embrace cynicism and inaction. We have been here before, we will be here again. I find myself pulled that way sometimes, doubtful I can make a difference, doubtful that any difference I will make will last. Certainly, it often feels like the last decade has borne this out. We try, we fail. We try, we succeed. We try, we fail again. When so many people in our country seem to choose the worst version of our story over and over again, bitterness and nihilism certainly feel like a logical choice. At my worst moments, I want to wash my hands of this. I did my best, but you wouldn’t listen. If you don’t want to live in a democracy, I certainly can’t make you.

But in remembering that our times are not unprecedented, our story not wholly unique, I actually find comfort. Other people have been here before, and they can show us the way out. All worthwhile projects encounter failures. Everyone who strives, stumbles. If we are not the greatest country in the world, we can’t be the worst country in the world either. Our present is not static, our future not fixed. This is a catastrophe, but it is a comprehensible one, and so too are the solutions. Though we have specific sins to atone for, specific tools at our disposal, we are like all countries: a collection of people, a community. And our greatest responsibility is not to a national narrative of superiority, nor is it to national self-flagellation. Our greatest responsibility is to each other.

At its best, our democracy honors that by giving all of us a voice in our shared future. We lean into the nation of ideas, the belief that the most important part of our story is commitment to a shared project, to making ourselves heard and creating space for the voices of our neighbors, and to innate human dignity - that none of us are born better or more deserving than others. At our best we believe in each other, in people, and in what we can do to help each other and to build a world where we can all thrive.

At its worst, our democracy feeds our basest impulses, allowing the many to turn on the few buoyed by the mandate of the popular vote.

We are not at our best right now. We are led by a president who sees the government as an engine for his own enrichment, for his revenge fantasies and dick measuring contests with likeminded heads of state. His advisors range from the brutally stupid to the brutally cruel, with many a potent cocktail of both. And we are seeing the consequences of this daily, from the high prices we’re paying just to live in the world to the violence immigrants and people of color face daily from an out of control ICE agency. And I do think it is important to acknowledge that our current government’s violence and corruption are egregious, and that because of the power and influence our nation wields, the consequences of this are immense. There are people and families who will never be made whole after this. The impact on public health, climate change, and global instability will be immense. We have a lot of work to do.

But across the globe, and throughout history, dictators have been toppled. Evil policies have been reversed. People who have harmed others have faced consequences. The future we imagine is possible, and it is worth pursuing for however long we have it, because every moment of joy is precious, every full stomach a victory, every healthy baby a chance for a healthy child and a healthy adult. If we are not uniquely bad, then we are absolved of being uniquely perfect too. This current crisis does not exceed our capacity, and neither does the future we imagine. That future won’t be perfect. But it can and will be good.

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Here’s How You Can Help This Week:

Call your Senators and tell them to oppose the SAVE Act. This is a piece of legislation that would require Americans to show proof of citizenship to vote. That means you need either a passport or your birth certificate with your legal name. That means millions of citizens who don’t already have passports or have access to their paper birth certificates would face immense hurdles when it comes to voting, including women who changed their names when they got married.

This is a law that helps no one, and solves no problems. In the United States, we have a much bigger problem getting people who are eligible to vote than we do with people who vote when they are not eligible. This is largely a very misguided attempt by the Trump regime to rig elections in their favor, and a massive unfunded burden on the states and cities that actually run elections. You can get more information on this here, and you can get a script to call your Senators from Indivisible here.

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