There has been a wave of backlash over the people who attended or praised Ye’s recent Los Angeles concerts, and Pepsi’s decision to pull its sponsorship from Wireless Festival in the United Kingdom after his booking as a headliner was the right one. Ye has disgraced himself and others thr…

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Reality Checking the Bulwark - Episode 3 will be out tonight where we discuss Mona Charen and David French’s February 16th conversation on The Mona Charen Show.

Episode 4 will be recorded live on Saturday at …

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Author’s Note: Readers may notice I’m posting a little bit later in the day now. That is due to scheduling adjustments on my end. I hope you still find value in this content and can find time to take it all in when it’s best for you. Much love and thanks for all of the support!

As we approach the first State of the Union of the Trump presidential sequel, I noticed an Atlantic piece by Jonathan Lemire portraying Trump’s second term as rocky. Lemire points to growing disapproval on the economy, ICE tactics that have killed two White Americans and therefore attracted national attention, and the sabre-rattling that now defines the administration’s foreign policy. In that telling, Trump’s presidency is on the rocks hemmed in by backlash, scrutiny, and falling numbers.

That may be true for some Americans. But my fear is that it is not the whole picture.

A large and influential portion of the country has been primed for years to believe immigration is “open borders” and that “wokeness” has made White Americans overly self-conscious about class, hierarchy, and history. For those voters, the point is not whether Trump’s actions are elegant or humane. The point is that power is acting loudly, visibly, and often brutally. That is the darker reality of Trumpism: it has learned to market domination as “order,” and cruelty as “strength.”

This is where scoreboard democracy fails yet again

A politics narrated primarily through polling, approval ticks, crosstabs, and stale turnout models treats public opinion as a final verdict rather than a partial instrument. Polls can measure preference under socially acceptable conditions. They are far less equipped to measure the appeal of threat, spectacle, and punitive governance especially when the underlying motives are things people hesitate to name out loud, or have been trained to rationalize as “common sense.”

I’ve written before about scoreboard democracy or the class of professional political prognosticators who treat American politics like a game of numbers rather than a contest over lived reality. One party keeps chasing a shrinking band of “reasonable” swing voters; the other mobilizes by activating older reflexes like fear of the other, nostalgia for hierarchy, and the promise that someone will finally “make American great again.” In that environment, it’s possible to disapprove of Trump on paper while still drifting toward him when a campaign turns the enemy into a nightly episode.

The problem is that this kind of historical realism is not the preferred posture of mainstream political storytelling. Publications built around a residual American exceptionalism as well as an assumption that the system is basically healthy and merely needs better management will default to scoreboard narratives because they feel safer. They reassure “middle America” and anxious centrists that the country is still normal, that the institutions are still steering, that the electorate is still mostly persuadable.

But Trumpism is not simply a persuasion project. It is an identity project sharpened in the years after Obama, when the symbolic fact of a credible Black president destabilized long-held assumptions about who is entitled to rule. In that context, polls alone won’t capture the gravitational force of backlash politics: the way voters can express discomfort with Trump’s methods while still finding his posture emotionally satisfying when the “other” is made into the story.

So whatever commentary floods in after tonight’s State of the Union, that’s what I’ll be watching for: not just the numbers, not just the spin, but whether the analysis can admit what the spectacle is doing and who it is for.

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In the free section, I wrote about scoreboard democracy and how politics gets reduced to polls, turnout models, and breathless momentum talk, as if the only thing that matters is who’s up by two in Wisconsin and whether the vibes are “shifting.” But what I’m trying to name is bigger than polling error. It’s a kind of cultural denial or an analytic system designed in an old American paradigm, one that can measure disapproval while refusing to interrogate the darkness undergirding American power politics especially when that darkness is popular.

That’s why I’ve been feeling exhausted by the times we encompass.

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Living in an age when there is such a disconnect between the metrics Washington pays attention to as measures of success in a political party’s rule or governing agenda, and the way people experience governing through vibes, self-preservation, and identity signals, is quite a world to inhabit. It is a split-screen republic. In one frame: court rulings against tariffs, Republican dissent, outrage over the Epstein files rollout, and occasional Supreme Court constraints. In the other: grievance, demographic anxiety, cultural reassurance, and the feeling that someone is finally willing to wield power without apology.

Those are not the same metrics. And they are not moving in the same direction.

Yes, there is genuine resistance within Trump’s political party from figures like Representative Thomas Massie to angry members of the public disenchanted by economic realities or the handling of Epstein-related revelations. Yes, institutions sometimes push back. But this fixation on policy battles and emotion-driven news cycles still underestimates the deeper engine driving American politics: a White supremacist backlash reshaped for a digital age of demographic transformation and infinite screens.

That backlash does not require policy consistency. It requires identity cohesion and narrative repetition.

In a country undergoing visible demographic change, partisan ecosystems and algorithmic incentives amplify the fear of displacement. The learned fear of the “other,” subliminal or conscious, becomes political glue. Political institutions spent decades weaving narratives of urban decay, border invasion, welfare dependency, and cultural disorder. Spatial segregation ensured that many Americans could consume those narratives without encountering the communities being caricatured. That is enough to sustain a political engine marked by governance failures and contradictory positions. Because the offering is not a competent administration.

It is cultural protection. Cultural protection can survive a tariff loss. It can survive economic discomfort. It can survive hypocrisy.

The proliferation of screens in the American diet has multiplied this dynamic. We are more inundated, less patient, and more prone to informational reinforcement loops that reward outrage over coherence. The miracle of the information age has curdled into a paradox: people receive both good and bad information simultaneously and lack the shared frameworks to distinguish between them. Algorithms elevate emotional salience, not factual accuracy. In that vacuum of shared truth, disinformation is not an anomaly. It is a structure undergirding a digitization of an ongoing American tradition.

This is why policy-oriented victories in Maryland suburbs do not necessarily translate into national stability. Two different metric systems are operating. Washington measures court decisions, legislative friction, and elite dissent. The electorate often measures whether its inherited power principles like who belongs, who rules, and who threatens its ability to affirm its sense of self.

The mistake analysts continue to make is assuming that policy setbacks weaken a political project whose primary fuel is identity reassurance.

That is American inertia.

The belief is that institutional turbulence equals democratic correction. It is the comfort of assuming that because there is resistance, the system is self-healing. But a movement grounded in backlash does not need smooth governance to succeed. It needs repetition and spectacle. It also needs enough people to believe that power wielded on their behalf is protection, not coercion.

And when real state power is used more openly in immigration enforcement, in regulatory retaliation, in the normalization of executive aggression, it will shock commentators who were busy counting procedural guardrails. It will be declared “un-American,” as if the American story has not always contained racial hierarchy, resource extraction, spatial indifference, and selective rule of law beneath its democratic aspirations.

That shock is not innocence.

It is selective memory.

Winter in America winds down, and a new campaign cycle rises with heat and opportunity. Alongside it are fresh chances to set authoritarian precedents under the cover of cultural reassurance. The question is not whether courts occasionally rule against excess. The question is whether the electorate has been conditioned to accept those excesses as necessary.

Democracy does not unravel only when institutions fail. It unravels when voters normalize coercion as correction and mistake the performance of power for the preservation of order.

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Excavating The Bulwark

Against Reflexive Reactionary Centrism

I have been working on a Substack live and video series with that analyzes The Bulwark as a faction within the larger pro-democracy coalition. The question is not whether it has done good work, because it has. The question is whether its instincts formed in a different Republican era help or hinder the building of a future coalition that does not caricature young people and minority politics or live inside debunked right-wing communication frames.

Courage in departure deserves respect. Leaving one’s professional peer group because of moral dissonance in the face of Donald Trump’s hostile takeover takes psychological, professional, and emotional strength. That unraveling within them is real, and it should not be minimized.

But courage in departure does not automatically translate into clarity in reconstruction.

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Today, I’m writing less about scholarship and more about a feeling or the sense that we are living inside a loop. Not history repeating itself in some mystical way, but a pattern replaying because its root causes were never addressed.

It feels like 2017–2021 all over again. Only this time it’s louder, more consolidated, and less restrained. We are still avoiding the structural question of why this administration can break so many rules and get away with it.

Why does a particular identity cult find such fertile ground here? Why does power centralize so easily while outrage dissipates into pundit fog?

We are still told that the problem lies in tone. In the way that activists are being too loud. In the way academics are being too theoretical. In the way people of color name structural realities that supposedly frighten a mythical median voter. The lesson, we are told, is that democracy would function smoothly if only the margins would quiet down.

But that diagnosis treats symptoms as causes.

If Trumpism were merely a backlash to excess rhetoric, it would not return stronger each time. The ground is fertile because the soil was always prepared. Refusing to examine the structural conditions that make Trumpism inevitable, given the real story of American development, ensures that something like it will rise again, perhaps more efficiently.

The deeper tension is that democracy in a genuinely multicultural society requires a baseline of shared social protection and mutual recognition. But the American Dream was built alongside racialized hierarchy, territorial conquest, and economic stratification so extreme that solidarity itself becomes fragile. For many Americans, democracy has historically meant status preservation more than shared governance.

That is not a glitch.

It is a design inheritance.

We avoid this because we prefer the myth. We were raised in one of the most successful national marketing campaigns in human history, which told a story that fused Enlightenment rhetoric with empire, and industrial might with moral exceptionalism. We learned to see the United States not as a nation among nations, shaped by power and hierarchy, but as a providential experiment immune to the darker currents of history.

But we are not immune. We are a nation built through conquest, exploitation, aspiration, and contradiction, like many others before us.

You see it in the geographic segmentation of American life: manicured suburban cul-de-sacs insulated from structural decay; urban cores burdened with concentrated disadvantage; rural communities folded into grievance narratives. These are policy outcomes and not natural divides. They are spatial manifestations of hierarchy.

And when those hierarchies are challenged, when demographic and cultural shifts unsettle long-standing status arrangements, the cycle restarts. Fear is mobilized as solidarity fractures and institutions bend.

The question is not whether America has an original sin in some theological sense. It is whether the nation was structured around apartheid logics, formal and informal systems designed to distribute power unequally, and whether those logics were ever fully dismantled.

If they were not, then repetition is not destiny.

It is inertia.

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Insurrectionists Punished in Korea

Anytime I read an article about another country punishing elected leaders for being connected to an insurrection, I get a dark feeling.

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For three decades, the American-led order functioned under the assumption that the Cold War’s end signified the end of ideological competition. Liberal democracy would spread, markets would integrate everyone into good behavior, and wars would be quaint anachronisms like smoking in public places.

This assumption wasn’t just false. It was a convenient lie. It allowed policymakers of all stripes, both neoliberals and neoconservatives, to assume American power as the background music of world politics. Something that was always playing, never discussed, and paid for by someone else’s short attention span.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s recent message to Europe illustrates this nicely. The fantasy of the “end of history” was an oversight. The world has changed. Liberal democracy isn’t the inevitable endpoint of human history. Power politics never went away.

So far, so true.

But then there’s the part where the “reassurance” reveals its true face. According to Nathalie Tocci’s argument, Rubio’s softer tone isn’t a return to the old liberal internationalism of the previous administration. It’s just the same suit, tailored better. J.D. Vance may have given the circus act, loud, crude, and intended to shock. Rubio’s presentation is softer, more familiar, and more statesmanlike. The similarity between the two? They both shift the meaning of “the West” from a political ideal to a civilization.

This distinction matters for American soft power.

Soft power, however, has not disappeared. Soft power has mutated.

The old American pitch, at least the one we sold, even when we betrayed it, was universal. The West was selling constitutionalism, rights, institutions, pluralism, and the notion that legitimacy was derived by consent, not bloodline. This was always an imperfect story, often hypocritical, sometimes violently contradictory.

But it was still a story that could recruit allies, build coalitions. It was still a story that allowed Washington to say, “Join us, because we’re for all, everywhere.”

The new pitch is different. It’s no longer, “We represent universal rules.”

It’s, “We represent civilization.”

Heritage. Tradition. Religion. Cultural lineage. Kinship.

This is still soft power, just not liberal soft power. This is still attraction, identification, just not with the rest of the world. This is the kind of soft power that does not expand by attracting new adherents. This is the kind of soft power that consolidates by disciplining its own.

In this world, values are about cultural boundaries and not about rights. The goal isn’t to recruit new members to the rules-based order. The goal is to mobilize our side against the other, to mobilize our side against internal enemies, while keeping the machinery of power firmly in American hands.

The old world was “Rules, plus Leadership.”

The new world is increasingly “Identity, plus Hierarchy.”

Why Europe hears reassurance, and Tocci hears empire.

Many Europeans heard Rubio as a soothing antidote to the administration’s harder edge: a familiar tone of voice after months of purely transactional diplomacy. But the danger is precisely what Tocci warns of: a tone that reduces the alarm level, while the content continues to signal a degradation of European autonomy.

NATO and partnership can continue, but in a much less equal relationship. Not “We have a shared project,” but “We have a shared bloc, and that bloc has a boss.”

Let me illustrate what I mean with some examples:

Security guarantees become conditional, not shared, not based on shared principles or shared rules, but on services rendered in return for compliance. Europe is urged not to rearm to become strategically independent, but to become strategically useful within a strategy defined by America.

European internal politics is on the bargaining table. If “the West” is a cultural club, then who are the “true Europeans,” or the real defenders of civilization, is now a political weapon.

This is where the “civilization” talk ceases to be mere rhetoric and becomes a means of coercion. It is a means of saying, “We are family, therefore we have a claim to loyalty,” and, “If you don’t agree with me, then you are not merely mistaken, you are a traitor to our family story.”

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The unresolved history behind it.

And that is why, I think, this moment feels like a reckoning with unresolved history in both America and Europe. Global liberalism did not die because it was not moral enough; it died because it was moralistic in rhetoric, coercive in reality, and because America and Europe have not, in fact, come to terms with their own histories, with their own unresolved contradictions.

In the United States, those contradictions include the obvious: race, citizenship, violence, inequality, ideals vs. reality. And when those are only half-addressed, they become fuel rather than dissipate. Fuel for a revanchist politics that doesn’t see liberal universalism as an ideal, but as a con. The pitch now is: The “rules-based order” has been a lie we’ve told to weaken ourselves, flood our societies, erase our heritage, and become soft.

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With the news that Gallup is adjusting how it calculates presidential approval ratings, it is worth pausing to reflect on the deeper obsession that defines modern political storytelling: the fixation on marginal polling movements as if they were the pulse of the Republic itself.

To be clear, Gallup isadapting and not surrendering. Response rates for traditional phone surveys have cratered over the last two decades, and what once produced robust participation now struggles to reach even a small fraction of Americans. Trust in institutions is down, and media ecosystems are fragmented. So the old model, which calls for a random sample and measuring the national mood, no longer maps neatly onto a society that no longer consumes information in a shared civic space.

But this is also an American-branded mirror, not just a technical adjustment.

Trumpism weaponized polarization rather than creating it as some obsessed with a more noble before times would like us to believe. This wave of politics exposed how deeply negative partisanship structures American political life. Presidential approval has become less about persuasion and more about identity. For most voters, party affiliation predicts approval almost perfectly. With sticky floors and firm ceilings, the real political temperature of the country is not measured in five-point swings but in hardened camps.

In that environment, the concept of a collapsing approval rating as a sign of imminent political consequence feels outdated. A politician who channels grievance, performs combativeness, and activates cultural anxieties can maintain a loyal base regardless of scandal or institutional stress. The appeal is to tribal clarity, not to policy coherence.

This is not new in world history. But it is newly obvious in American civic life.

The old polling assumptions emerged from a different era when politics operated more like a debate over governing competence within a broadly shared national framework. Today, politics operates as identity affirmation in a nation undergoing demographic, cultural, and hierarchical transition. That transition challenges racial and social assumptions once taken for granted. When those assumptions are destabilized, politics becomes zero-sum in the minds of those who feel displaced.

Pollsters must adjust methodology because the bigger change is sociological. Politics has become less rational in the classical sense and more expressive in a way that is rooted in social belonging, antipathy, resentment, and fear. The numbers still matter, but their meaning has changed.

And that is where the gamesmanship analysis begins to feel hollow.

The breathless parsing of marginal approval shifts (up three, down two) presumes a fluid electorate ready to be nudged by clever messaging. That presumption no longer holds. Approval ratings now largely reflect partisan entrenchment. The volatility that once signaled success or failure in governance has been replaced by structural rigidity.

Life is not a game. And the life of the nation certainly is not.

If masked federal agents can detain citizens on camera and approval remains largely sorted by party, then we are not in a moment of ordinary political fluctuation. We are in a moment that demands structural analysis, not scoreboard watching.

Our society insists that we understand this era plainly as a time where institutions are under strain, media ecosystems are siloed, and trust is fractured. The Republic cannot be reduced to weekly approval oscillations.

The old tools are insufficient, not necessarily wrong.

We are living in a political order defined less by persuasion and more by identity consolidation. That reality does not mean public opinion is irrelevant. It means we must measure it and interpret it with sobriety rather than nostalgia.

The moment requires clarity without fantasy, realism without cynicism, and analysis that recognizes that polarization is not a mood swing but a structural condition.

Whether we like it or not, that is the American chapter we are writing.

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Enshittification and the Privilege of Looking at American Politics as a Game

Treating American politics like a game is a privilege. One reserved for people whose lives don’t change much when the score does. It’s the privilege of watching elections the way you watch sports: obsessed with momentum, addicted to marginal shifts, comforted by the idea that everything is ultimately a matter of strategy and messaging. But for millions of Americans, politics is not a pastime. It is exposure, risk, and whether your rights survive the season.

We are living through mass enshittification. Not just of platforms or products, but of public life itself, our institutions, our civic trust, our shared reality. And if you step back for a moment and look plainly at what happened at the end of 2024, it’s hard to avoid the simplest reading: America showed it is willing to sacrifice national competence for a misogynistic, homophobic, white supremacist rebel yell. That choice wasn’t random.

It wasn’t just “economic anxiety.”

It was a cultural signal flare.

America has long wanted to believe the Civil War was a historical blunder rather than a moral rupture. It has wanted reconciliation without reconstruction and closure without accountability. And it has spent generations trying to erase the meaning of Black bodies being freed and made citizens, as if that transformation was an inconvenient footnote rather than the central unfinished business of the Republic.

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As we’ve watched Minnesotans push back against Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) operations, I’ve found myself turning to an older question like what happens when a region becomes a testing ground for the meaning of citizenship? The Midwest was one such laboratory after the Civil War, when Radical Republicans and their allies tried to convert wartime moral energy into Black male suffrage. Those efforts met backlash often ugly and reactionary, but they also reveal something structurally important: in places like Iowa, the political system still had enough pluralism to let democratic reform pass through the pipes. That stands in sharp contrast to the Southern tradition V.O. Key anatomizes, where state politics was routinely engineered to suppress pluralism and small-d democracy rather than channel it.

Robert R. Dykstra and Harlan Hahn’s article, “Northern Voters and Negro Suffrage: The Case of Iowa, 1868,” is valuable because it doesn’t treat Northern states as innocent bystanders to America’s racial order. Instead, it uses Iowa’s referendum politics to show how prejudice, party organization, and perceived economic threat shaped whether equal rights could survive contact with the ballot box.

Just as important, the mechanics of reform mattered as much as the morality. Dykstra and Hahn show how the 1868 push succeeded not by staging a grand national sermon on equality, but by moving through the fine print of state governance. The campaign advanced a constitutional change and, crucially, removed the word “white” from the suffrage language, thus turning what had been an explicitly racial definition of the electorate into a formally universal one. That’s not just a procedural footnote, as it is a miniature version of the American pattern, which progress often arrives through edits and evasions, even through what gets changed on paper, and even when the country still can’t bring itself to say the word out loud.

Drawing on voting returns and the political context around them, Dykstra and Hahn argue that resistance to Black suffrage was not simply “a regional attitude.” It was also tied to status anxiety, especially among voters who felt economically vulnerable and were more susceptible to arguments that Black political rights threatened their own prospects. In other words traveled along material insecurity and partisan incentives. It wasn’t floating in the air.

What makes 1868 stand out is not that Iowa was uniquely virtuous, but that the campaign succeeded in turning rights into law through ordinary democratic mechanisms, such as coalition building, political messaging, and constitutional revision. The outcome matters all the more because Iowa’s Black population was small. That fact strips away one convenient excuse that this wasn’t simply a referendum driven by a large Black electorate. It was, in significant part, a test of whether a predominantly White electorate could be persuaded, however imperfectly, however instrumentally, to expand the circle of citizenship.

This is where the Midwest becomes a useful mirror for the present. A successful rights campaign creates precedent: legal codes, civic expectations, procedural muscle memory. Even when equality is thin on the ground in practice, the existence of an institutional foothold changes what future generations can build on.

Now flip the picture.

In many Southern states, the immediate postwar struggle against political violence and intimidation became a grinding, exhausting war of attrition. Even as mutual aid and survival networks in Black communities strengthened, the broader atmosphere of hostility hardened into an insurgent governance and thus fertile ground for the disfranchising architecture that would later mature into Jim Crow.

We are drifting into an America where federal standards matter less than they used to, or, at a minimum, where enforcement and norms vary sharply once you cross a state line. That makes Reconstruction Midwest history more than an academic detour. It becomes a way to make credible inferences about the present, like if a new federal operation is announced, then what does a state’s institutional memory do with it?

Does it spark mobilization through civic infrastructure and pluralistic habits, or does it slide, smoothly and quietly, into compliance?

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It’s notable that the New York Times and even Republicans in Congress had no problem calling out the racist meme that Trump’s official Truth Social account pushed on Thursday night. Plenty of people said the obvious thing out loud (that it was racist) while still wrapping it in the polite alibi that maybe it was a mistake.

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The next several essays will live at the fault line where “the nation” ends and “the states” begin because that seam is where American democracy both breathes and bleeds.

As ICE has expanded into a truly nationwide footprint, the question isn’t only what federal power can do. It’s what kind of civic terrain it lands on. In one state, a raid meets a thick web of journalists, clergy, mutual aid networks, lawyers, city officials, county attorneys, and neighbors who know exactly which phone tree to light up. In another, the same action hits a thinner civil society, friendlier local authority, and a citizenry trained by history and habit to treat the state like an electrified fence: touch it, and you learn pain.

Which brings me to V.O. Key because Key’s work is basically the field guide to how “states’ rights” becomes a machine. In Alexander Lamis and Nathan Goldman’s essay on Key’s collaboration with Alexander Heard and the research orbit around Southern Politics, you can feel the system humming: officials performing racial demagoguery as daily governance, public incompetence treated as a feature, not a bug, and an entrenched business/planter elite harvesting power from fractured labor solidarity and enforced social codes. The South that V.O. Key documents didn’t merely represent conservatism, but a one-party order. A political ecology designed to centralize real authority upward to local oligarchs while exporting the costs downward to everyone else.

And that’s the through-line into 2026. Thankfully, we now have the public vocabulary to name what Key was mapping with the tools of racialized rule, institutional capture, civic intimidation, and the way local control can be a velvet glove over a closed fist. But the late 1940s aren’t ancient history. They’re still vanishingly close to living memory’s penumbra, and the habits of governance Key described had migrated, rebranded, and sometimes been digitized.

The deeper question I’m chasing in this series is, does the backlash we’ve seen in places like the Upper Midwest and the West Coast travel well? Or does it collapse when it enters jurisdictions where local power is more ICE-friendly, where discrimination is kept out of plain sight (clean paperwork, quiet cooperation), and where fear of reprisal is a civic norm rather than a scandal?

In other words, if federal power is the storm, state civic infrastructure is the architecture. Some places have lightning rods and reinforced glass. Some places have dry timber and locked exits.

So I’m going back to the sources to trace why some states can improvise democracy under pressure, while others default to deference, silence, or collaboration. (And as Theda Skocpol has argued in a different register, American civic vitality has never been purely local, but shaped by institutions and political opportunity structures that either invite participation or grind it down.)

That’s the journey. Not nostalgia. Not vibes. A map that is drawn from the last time the republic tried to explain itself while it was cracking, so we can recognize what’s happening now, in real time, before the cracks become a border.

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It feels like we’re taking a dreadful walk toward a cliff we keep pretending is a hill.

This election cycle isn’t a presidential one, but it can decide the civic fates of so many statewide governing agendas, and of course, the national legislature. And as we encounter news of Steve Bannon reportedly saying that ICE will surround polls this fall, we really have to wonder if we are still lacking the imagination for how far down the rabbit hole we already are, and how the same old political storytellers are still missing the point when diving into polls and focus groups.

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What Happened?

Ilhan Omar was the victim of a spray attack at a town hall meeting last night due to the racial demagougery she has been forced to endure at the hands of Donald Trump, who has not apologized for the negativity and lies that he has spread about Ilhan Omar. This has been a systematic attempt at weaponizing xenophobia, American racism, and misogyny against the strong woman who has come out of the outbreak of a Somalian civil war that can arguably be connected to some of the most excessive aspects of U.S. and Soviet foreign policy during the Cold War years.

Last night, meaning January 27, 2026: multiple sources reported that a man attacked Ilhan Omar near the end of a town hall meeting in Minneapolis and sprayed her with an unknown substance from a syringe. The police reported that the man was arrested on suspicion of third-degree assault. Initial reports gave different names for the suspect, but the main reports identified him as Anthony Kazmierczak, a 55-year-old man.

She was doing her service at a town hall meeting, or one might say “practicing politics the right way,” and thus she was attacked for being a Somali refugee, a Black woman in America, and is obviously more equipped and worldly than her bigoted opponents and opposition. It is the classic American tale.

And because America is nothing if not consistent in how it polices who is allowed to be “American,” Omar has been marinated in years of insinuation, less “criticism” than a rolling fog of suspicion: the recurring foreign loyalty subtext, the insinuation that she doesn’t belong, and the insistence that her very presence is an offense.

This was the inevitable response to the way Trump, who continues to say demeaning and awfully racist and sexist things towards her, and his Republican allies continue to raise political capital at her behest and manipulating the cultural, racial, and intellectual insulation faced by a large plurality of Americans designed to be myopic and self-destructively angry at minorities in order to get siphoned by wealthier Americans.

That demagoguery has a paper trail. In 2019, after Trump attacked Omar and other congresswomen, his rally crowd famously chanted “Send her back!” a neat little summary of nativist politics, delivered with stadium energy. And after the January 27, 2026, assault, reporting says Trump downplayed the incident and suggested, without evidence, that it was staged.

The Libel Ecosystem

The libel ecosystem around her has also been repetitive in its themes, focusing less on specific claims than on manufacturing distrust. The most durable smear is the “married her brother” rumor, periodically revived, loudly amplified, and repeatedly found by major fact-checking outlets to lack credible evidence. Another evergreen tactic has been quote-snipping to suggest she downplayed 9/11, a frame that outlets have repeatedly contextualized as a distortion of a larger point about civil-liberties backlash after 9/11.

We should all be ashamed of what we’re witnessing, which is the unfinished legacy of learned bigotry becoming the harbinger of a global superpower committing seppuku on the world stage. As a result of the fact that too many moderates and centrists have treated racism, xenophobia, and sexism as a sideshow or a fringe element of our politics despite their centrality to our culture and our politics, we’re not prepared to address the white nationalist uprising that’s tied to the nation’s browning population.

It’s the way it’s always been. You don’t have to convince everybody of a particular lie. You simply have to make a target feel permanently controversial, permanently explicable, and permanently suspect, so that when something happens to them, a portion of the public shrugs, laughs, or worst of all, views violence as a punchline.

Too many centrist, donor-driven political storytellers refuse to acknowledge this reality and end up having the wrong conversation.

References:

• Bargfeld, Laura, and Hannah Schoenbaum. “Man Arrested After Spraying Unknown Substance on Rep. Ilhan Omar at Minneapolis Town Hall.” Associated Press News, January 28, 2026. https://apnews.com/article/ilhan-omar-town-hall-sprayed-7f6ad0b9ece2ae8804b2efe5badd2991.

• Farley, Robert. “Rep. Ilhan Omar’s 9/11 Comments in Context.” FactCheck.org, April 16, 2019. https://www.factcheck.org/2019/04/rep-ilhan-omars-9-11-comments-in-context/.

• Farley, Robert, and Lori Robertson. “Trump’s False Claims About Rep. Ilhan Omar.” FactCheck.org, July 16, 2019. https://www.factcheck.org/2019/07/trumps-false-claims-about-rep-ilhan-omar/.

• Jacobson, Louis. “Did Ilhan Omar Marry Her Brother? Her Hometown Newspaper Investigated and Told Us What They Found.” PolitiFact, July 18, 2019. https://www.politifact.com/article/2019/jul/18/did-ilhan-omar-marry-her-brother-her-hometown-news/.

• McCarthy, Tom. “Trump Rally Crowd Chants ‘Send Her Back’ After President Attacks Ilhan Omar.” The Guardian, July 17, 2019. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/jul/17/trump-rally-send-her-back-ilhan-omar.

• Parker, Ashley, and Colby Itkowitz. “At Rally, Crowd Responds to Trump’s Criticism of Somali-Born Congresswoman Ilhan Omar with Chants of ‘Send Her Back!’” The Washington Post, July 17, 2019. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-says-hes-enjoying-fight-with-democrats-over-his-racist-tweets/2019/07/17/3c315510-a8ad-11e9-86dd-d7f0e60391e9_story.html.

• Reuters. “Fact Check: Ilhan Omar Was Not Arrested 23 Times, and Other Inaccuracies in Meme Targeting Congresswoman.” Reuters, February 19, 2021. https://www.reuters.com/article/world/fact-check-ilhan-omar-was-not-arrested-23-times-and-other-inaccuracies-in-meme-idUSKBN2AJ2BG/.

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The “Polarization” Story Is Too Small

Barbara A. Biesecker argues that what we lazily call “political polarization” often functions as a rhetorical stopgap, a fog machine to conceal what is newly dangerous about our time: the struggle for the national common sense, pursued through competing origin stories, enforced through institutions.

Two Americas, Two Myths, One Fight Over Reality

In “Reinventing World War II: Popular Memory in the Rise of the Ethnonationalist State,” Barbara S. Biesecker writes about the concept of polarization. In her work, she discusses different stories about what America is and how Americans see America.

Is America a gigantic commercial empire built on racial capitalism?

Or is America a place of idealistic democracy, a beacon of democracy to the world, a symbol of the triumph of democracy in the history of the world?

The latter has become more and more impossible to prove, making centrist liberals and conservatives look more like the descendants of Cold War propaganda and Disney history than actual scholars. That might be giving the latter too much credit, since there is significant scholarly weight to America’s attempts to live up to the ideals and goals set forth in the country's founding. However, there is also the election of Donald Trump, and the inability of American pundits and political strategists to deal with the reality of the role of race in creating irrational politics, which suggests that the former is more accurate in the current state of the world.

Narrative War, Not Just “Different Opinions”

But Biesecker’s approach to honing that question is stark and effective: she argues that the conflict is not only over “facts,” but over world-building—two incompatible narratives locked in a struggle to be the “new national common sense,” with no happy medium waiting in the wings. Indeed, in Biesecker’s formulation, the conflict between The 1619 Project and The 1776 Report is a conflict of “imaginary syntheses,” and she argues that the stakes are existential: “No synthesis. No mediation. (Race) War.”

But what makes Biesecker’s argument cut so deeply is that she recognizes these narratives as civic pedagogies (i.e., as instruction manuals for citizenship) rather than as dispassionate scholarship.

Ilhan Omar and the Price of the “White-Centric” National Story

The attack on Ilhan Omar is another example of the way the power of anger and bigotry can unleash the worst aspects of the human condition and become a feeding frenzy for opportunists and politicians, and put our very lives at risk, no matter what our color. The story of America is one of a land for the White and the advancement of the White race and the White-centric approach to democracy, civilization, and the American people.

This is the way to look at America as a great land while ignoring the tools of empire it has used to get there. This is completely unexceptional to the tools of empire that past societies have used.

How the Ethnonationalist Story Gets Institutional Muscle

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Author’s Note: This newsletter is being released much later than people have become accustomed to. I will work to have another one ready in the AM or early PM. Thank you for your continued support as life throws curveballs.

Machine

The bravery on display in Minneapolis and across Minnesota has been a sight to behold.

Not in the abstract “civic virtue” way we talk about in textbooks, but in the practical, sweaty, and dangerous way that includes people showing up, filming, organizing, and refusing to look away. If you oppose the current administration’s immigration enforcement posture, it offers something rarer than optimism.

It offers evidence. Evidence that the public will still insist that you don’t get to do violence in our name and then call it procedure.

And yet, I can’t shake the question that always arrives right when the crowd starts exhaling. What kind of victory is this? And what does it buy the people who don’t support the policy?

Because power can lose a news cycle and still win the decade.

A real crack in the wall: the courts

There is a meaningful reason for hope, and it’s not a vibe. It’s the law, specifically, judges acting like the law applies to the people with badges and budgets.

A federal judge in Minnesota has ordered Acting ICE Director Todd Lyons to appear in court in person and warned that contempt is on the table for alleged failures to comply with court orders, especially regarding due process and bond-hearing timelines.

That’s not a routine scolding. That’s a branch of government trying to reassert a basic premise: the state cannot “surge” its way out of constitutional constraints.

There have also been court efforts to limit the use of force against demonstrators and observers. Againm it’s modest, procedural, and unglamorous, which is exactly why it matters. The most durable resistance to state overreach often looks like paperwork, hearings, deadlines, and judges refusing to be ignored.

That doesn’t mean courts save opponents of the current regime. Courts are slow, appellate courts can narrow remedies, and agencies can comply on paper while undermining in practice.

But it does mean something crucial to consider. Which is that constraints are possible. And if they’re possible, they can be defended.

The face changes, but the machine keeps its funding

A lot of the optimistic coverage right now is gathering around personnel shifts, most notably Gregory Bovino no longer serving as the loudest federal avatar on the ground in Minneapolis and other American cities. There are also reports of partial drawdowns.

If you’ve been living through this administration and its prequel, you know how tempting it is to treat that as a turning point. A de-escalation and a retreat can feel like proof that public pressure works.

And to be fair, sometimes it does.

But here’s the thing power loves most: a story of resolution that costs it nothing structural.

A face change can be meaningful politically even when it’s meaningless institutionally. It lowers the temperature, giving wavering allies a narrative exit ramp. It invites the country to move on, especially if the next headline is shinier.

This is where my wariness kicks in. Because Bovino’s departure can be read as discipline or, in a darker sense, as brand management.

A bomb-thrower is useful in the opening act. He draws attention, provokes conflict, generates footage, and sets the tone. But then predictable blowback arrives, with public anger, legal scrutiny, and political risk among coerced allies, and thus the bomb-thrower becomes a liability.

So you swap the punctuation and replace the exclamation point with a semicolon.

The more dangerous version of power is not always the loud one. It’s the quiet, competent one or the silent operator who doesn’t posture for cameras, doesn’t hand critics an easy villain, and still keeps the gears moving with detentions processed, transfers executed, hearings delayed, and communities exhausted.

That’s how a system matures.

Not by becoming kinder, but by becoming less legible.

Bovino as template, not exception

Here’s a speculative point I think is worth flirting with.

Even if Bovino is no longer in the spotlight, he may already have served a function beyond his role: setting a cultural template. Similar to George Washington and the presidency.

He modeled a certain posture with aggression as branding, enforcement as performance, and public antagonism as a recruitment poster. Once that mold exists, it doesn’t require the same personality to keep reproducing it. A system can absorb the aesthetic and distribute it through new people who are smoother, quieter, and harder to pin down.

That’s why personnel change is not the same thing as policy change, and why policy change is not always the same thing as structural change.

ICE still has funding and institutional muscle. The executive branch still has the capacity to turn procedural complexity into a fog machine.

The machine doesn’t need to win the argument.

It just needs to outlast your attention span.

Narrative control: the other enforcement arm

There’s another front here that deserves more attention: the fight over what counts as “neutral.” Recent media moves, such as high-profile hires and newsroom “repositioning” projects, are being sold as attempts to restore trust by countering “perceived bias.” CBS comes to mind.

That language should set off your brain.

Because “neutrality” is not a location. It’s a strategy that can mean honest fairness but also signal enforced symmetry: treating claims and counterclaims as equally plausible even when one side has the state’s power with funding, detention facilities, armed personnel, and attorneys. But the other side has phone video and a stressed public defender.

When institutions perform balance like a ritual, they can end up laundering power. You get a tidy debate format, a nice, calm anchor tone, and a public trained to think: “Well, both sides have a point.”

Meanwhile, the administrative machine keeps humming.

And it’s often the most important stories with court compliance, bond timelines, transfer practices, and quiet rule shifts that get pushed into citizen-journalist spaces, local reporting, and legal filings. Not because they’re untrue, but because they’re not cinematic.

Power loves boring, and boring is how it survives.

The uncomfortable possibility: support is deeper than the corridor admits

Now for the part that makes polite circles clear their throats.

It’s possible that more Americans support the administration’s racialized enforcement posture than polling, elite commentary, and the cosmopolitan professional corridor are willing to contend with.

Not necessarily as open enthusiasm. Often it looks like tolerance:

• “I don’t like the mess, but I like the message.”

• “I don’t want innocent people hurt, but I want them scared.”

• “I’ll vote on prices, not rights.”

• “That’s terrible… anyway.”

A lot of political support is not passionate agreement. It’s more like permission to proceed and permission to do it “over there,” or to people the supporter doesn’t identify with, in places the supporter will never visit.

And permission is hard to measure, because it’s not always something people confess out loud, especially when it’s socially costly. That’s not a conspiracy theory; it’s basic human behavior. Social desirability bias is real. So is selective attention. So is the very American habit of calling cruelty “toughness” when it’s happening to someone else.

If that permission structure exists (and I think it does), then the administration doesn’t need universal approval. It needs a public that will tire, normalize, and move on.

Hope, with conditions

I’m not writing this to dim the courage Minneapolis has shown. I’m writing it because courage deserves an honest map of the terrain.

The court’s willingness to compel senior ICE leadership and insist on due process is a real crack worth defending. The civic response is a real force worth sustaining.

But the bigger risk remains: a federal enforcement apparatus with funding, institutional heft, and narrative agility can swap faces, soften language, and keep doing the work, especially if the public is exhausted and the media is chasing the next shiny object.

So here’s the question I’m holding onto:

Will relief become leverage or a lullaby?

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That Haunting Realization That More People Want This Than We Want to Believe

The corridor problem: polling isn’t the whole country

I want to zero in on something I hinted at above, which is that elite spaces can become myopic. Not because the people in them are uniquely foolish, but because the social world around them narrows what feels “plausible.”

Polling matters, sure, but it can miss the more important question: not who supports this loudly, but who will permit it quietly.

And that permission structure is where a lot of political behavior comes from, especially the kind people struggle to explain. It’s where the political courage (or calculation) comes from when Democrats vote to fund enforcement agencies they privately criticize. It’s where the hesitance comes from when party leaders refuse to challenge right-wing framings built on stereotypes and demographic panic.

In other words, it’s not always that people love what’s happening. It’s that enough people will tolerate it, prioritize other issues over it, or accept it as “necessary.”

That’s the difference between opposition that trends and opposition that governs.

Listening outside the bubble

This is why the conversations between and (as well as , , , and ) have been so valuable to me.

They don’t treat “polarization” like weather. They talk about how insulated communities are built and maintained through social relations, economic organization, and media systems that reward belonging over truth.

They also return, again and again, to an idea that feels impolite but is clarifying: people don’t just end up in echo chambers. They often live in structures that reinforce them through who they work with, who they worship with, what they watch, what they’re punished for saying out loud, and what they’re rewarded for repeating.

Whenever these folks have a live discussion, I really suggest folks take a listen.

A historical truth: division wasn’t an accident

Here’s the dark truth I keep coming back to.

America didn’t become divided by race and ethnicity by accident. Over long stretches of history, division has been useful, especially to those who benefit from cheap labor, weakened solidarity, and a population trained to punch sideways instead of upward.

You can see early versions of this logic in colonial Virginia, when crises of labor and social order hardened lines between groups and racial hierarchy became a tool of stability and control, not just an attitude.

That pattern repeats: when cross-class cooperation becomes possible, power finds ways to fracture it in social, legal, and cultural ways.

Not because “everyone is evil,” but because the incentives are consistent.

America as story infrastructure

In that context, we have to face another uncomfortable truth: “America” is also a marketing miracle.

Not marketing as in a slogan. Marketing, as in story infrastructure a repeated narrative that becomes a person’s sense of destiny and worth.

Across generations, many Americans have been told (explicitly or implicitly) that status and belonging are tied to skin color. When a story is told enough times, it stops feeling like a story and becomes the natural order of things.

That’s how a nation becomes gripped by existential panic over demographic change. Like it’s something that should be morally meaningless but becomes politically explosive when attached to identity and power.

This is where good marketing meets the irrational behaviors of humanity, our fear of loss, our appetite for status, our addiction to “us versus them,” and creates the ability to spin narratives and sell an otherwise unexceptional or even disastrous product.

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If we actually think about this for a second, then perhaps America performing an act of self-disembowelment upon itself in front of an audience or at least showing its uncommitment to democracy, which was understood by most marginalized populations, isn’t entirely unexpected if we flick our finger and let go of our American Exceptionalism enchantment.

With its legacy as a global power in an era characterized by lethal, global totality in mechanized warfare, America still had not come to terms with its own contradictions regarding its stances on liberty and had left itself prey to a narrative fiction in which its sacrifices in the Civil War era constituted but a half-reckoning. The emancipation of chattel slavery served as an excuse for its long afterlife as a means of coercion, Black codes, debt peons, convict leasing, and sharecropping. All of these instincts made freedom contractual and local.

Thus, it can be argued that this nation was more of a “trust fund baby” that lived through history’s lottery, as the colonial aspirations of the Global North and two World Wars ravaged the economies surrounding it. However, this “trust fund baby” named America never really understood how it got its riches, which makes it all too likely to squander it, especially after it begins to think that its bank balance equates to virtue.

Of course, there have always been fears about American power, at least as seen from outside the country, at least as long as the country itself has existed, and not merely the “well, the Europeans are jealous” variety that Americans like to think to get a good night’s sleep. Britain’s own George Canning, writing in the 1820s, essentially brags that he “called the New World into existence to redress the balance of the Old.” That is, he admits that the New World already figured into the politics of the Old, and that the idea of a New World at all was already a factor in the rivalry between the old powers.

Alexis de Tocqueville, writing in the 1830s, makes the more disquieting observation: the Americans and the Russians, he says, are the two emerging giants, and the American approach to conquest passes through “freedom,” while the Russian approach passes through “servitude.” Don’t be fooled by the rhetoric of freedom and think that freedom implies the absence of control. Control can be the technology.

And then, of course, you have the European whiplash of the 1860s. So, during the Civil War, or during the period of the “republic” as it’s trying not to die, France decides to move into Mexico, sets up Maximilian, and tests how distracted it can make the United States. And after the Civil War, it’s clear, particularly through Secretary of State William Seward’s diplomatic efforts, that the United States will not view the attempt at a European-sponsored monarchy as an “aw, ain’t it sweet” kind of thing, but as an actual threat to what it considers to be its prerogative. Or, as it turns out, the empire has had its nervous breakdown, but it’s still an empire.

The end of the 19th century finds Britain no longer viewing the US as a loud relative at a family reunion, but rather as an industrial monster building a base of resources, railroads, finance, and population. It’s essentially a flywheel for geopolitics.

And at the start of the next century, the old worries are back, but this time not so much a matter of “Will America be strong?” but rather “What are the implications for the world order when a superpower acts like a provincial teenager with a credit card?”

America may be young, like the 25-year-old hedge fund manager, the kind of young that, while not quite the equivalent of the hormone-addled teenager, still thinks it can use the logic it developed at the University of Vermont to control the nuclear arsenal. Oscar Wilde may not have said it, but the notion that America skips directly from barbarism to decadence without ever passing through civilization has the kind of staying power that makes it seem like it was said by Oscar himself.

G.K. Chesterton, visiting in the early 1920s, describes how “young nation” was wielded like a magic wand, making everything clear and excusable. “Oklahoma was proud of having no history—A great future—and nothing else!” And then he basically says that this country’s got a sleeping giant that’s just waiting to be awakened, where politics can be used to squelch dissent through sheer unanimity. The thing about that isn’t that American people are inherently awful. It’s that American society was still trying to develop a civic religion while possessing continental-scale leverage.

André Siegfried (writing for The Atlantic in 1928, after repeat visits) captures the European mood perfectly: immense capacity plus juvenile spirit. He describes the impression of America as “eccentric, erratic… already colossally rich,” and contrasts the older, memory-heavy parts of the U.S. (his example is Richmond, where people carry lineage and inherited culture) with a newer America centered on production, efficiency, and self-satisfaction. An America that can imagine the outer world disappearing and still think it would “continue to prosper.” That’s the adolescent empire in one sentence: a civilization whose confidence is so total it starts mistaking insulation for wisdom.

Then, because, as is often pointed out, history loves a callback, you get Charles de Gaulle in the 1960s, looking at an American-led alliance and saying: we get that you’re helping us, but we’re not going to live inside your machinery. The letter clearly addresses issues of sovereignty and command structure, as well as scale. The US role in global affairs is massive, to the point that its own allies treat it as something that needs to be worked around.

But, I ask you, does having a long history make societies humble? Sometimes. Usually, it simply makes them more sophisticated in their hypocrisy. Old empires know how to live with contradiction: they establish archives, procedures, nomenclature, and cadres of professionals fluent in speaking of extraction as stability, of repression as order, and of privilege as tradition. If you seek to have your society be humble, you do not merely need it to be old. You also need it to be accountable, to have lost, and to have a politics that actually retains a memory. Which is why the view of America as a young nation making old mistakes is a line that hits. Because the US was given the inheritance of world-historical power and yet was unable to work through the fundamental contradictions of its own history of racial domination, conquest of native people, exploitation of workers, etc. When your narrative of self is “we are freedom,” you can see every criticism of you as treason and every restriction of you as oppression. That’s the fragility of a superpower, not because it doesn’t have power, but because it can’t face reality.

And, of course, if you’d like the present tense punchline: well, the reason is, it’s not that America’s changed, exactly. It’s that an increasing number of Americans, at home and abroad, don’t feel obligated to feign surprise when the mask slips, so to speak. Various indices of democracy and various civic freedom monitors have been tracking this phenomenon for some time now, and the past couple of years have simply amplified it to the point where we can speak of ‘theater’ rather than ‘erosion’. We’re seeing courtroom battles over executive authority, we’re seeing civic space constricting, we’re seeing mass demonstrations that don’t so much feel like “policy disagreement” as “legitimacy crisis”.

Thus, yes, the Brits and French have a lot to say. Not because they are saints (lol), but because older empires have a tendency to see one of their own in a rising empire that speaks in idealistic terms but acts like a very particular machine. The only question, of course, is whether we’ll learn from that example before we have to pay the usual tuition of humiliation, decline, and rebuilding a civil culture that doesn’t need mythology to work.

References:

• Canning, George. Speech in the House of Commons, December 12, 1826 (quoted in Hansard Parliamentary Debates).

• Chesterton, G. K. What I Saw in America. New York: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1922.

• Siegfried, André. “The Gulf Between.” The Atlantic Monthly, March 1928.

• Tocqueville, Alexis de. Democracy in America. Translated by Henry Reeve. New York: J. & H.G. Langley, 1841.

• United States Department of State. Papers Relating to Foreign Affairs, Part III (1865 materials). Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1866. (Includes William H. Seward letter to John Bigelow.)

• United States Department of State. Foreign Relations of the United States, 1964–1968, Volume XIII: Western Europe Region. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1995. (Includes Charles de Gaulle letter to Lyndon B. Johnson, March 7, 1966.)

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On ICE and Standing Armies

There is a lot going on with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), and a great deal of attention should be focused on the issue. In Minnesota, a federal appeals court intervened and lifted the restraints a federal district judge had put in place to try to curb the actions of ICE to prevent violence and retaliatory actions against protesters. In plain terms, the government can just keep on keeping on with what they are currently doing, which includes pepper-spraying protesters in Minneapolis.

Meanwhile, the Associated Press reported that ICE has said it can enter a home under an administrative warrant, which is essentially a piece of paper issued by the executive branch without a judge’s signature. That’s not a minor distinction. It’s the difference between a state that is limited by an independent court and a state that validates itself. It doesn’t make a home a space that replaces permission with procedure.

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Author’s Note: Once again, I had a lot to say this morning. Bear with me.

Yesterday, I recorded a video about my thoughts and my own evolution regarding the “Vote Blue No Matter Who” stance I found myself in from Trump’s first term until 2024.

The feedback was… enlightening. Some folks accused me of being on the Trump payroll. Others said they’d vote blue no matter who. Others suggested I should declare myself independent (I have since I was voting age). On the face of it, this was just typical internet craziness. But what it showed was something much more significant: emotions are now attached to the concept of democracy itself in a country that seems to be going backwards.

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For years, I observed the Democratic Party expand its tent to center-right defectors in response to Trump’s hostile takeover of the Republican Party. It made sense. Coalitions change, history is messy, and emergencies make strange bedfellows.

However, over time, what had been a necessary strategy began to appear like a problem in that triangulating between the far right and the center right is not simply “winning elections” but distorts the party’s imagination, shrinking the possible while pushing away those who live with the consequences of austerity, racialized policing, and the erosion of bodily autonomy. This moment would come to be characterized by a dubious debate over whether Trump was “true conservatism” while the party pursued a delusional constituency more invested in rearticulating right-wing discourses than in imagining a future that feels possible.

And I’ve altered my perception of the stakes. I no longer look at the Democratic unraveling as just another installment in the long history of dysfunctional political machinery. I see it as an existential risk to people’s safety and well-being, because the country is now operating under the influence of nationalistic and identitarian forces that do not believe in plural democracy.

But here’s the tough part: a party that is unwilling to specify the failures of the old center-right consensus that led this country into the 21st century can’t seriously claim it’s “saving democracy.” A party that is unwilling to engage America’s history of racialized power, industrial aristocracy, and managed inequality becomes an obstacle to justice, even if it brands itself as “anti-Trump.” And yes, this is how it markets itself. But that’s branding, and it can be far from the truth.

Let me give you an example.

Gavin Newsom has been criticized for pandering to right-wing thinking through “reach across the aisle” media appearances, such as his with Ben Shapiro, in which he disavowed his own administration’s use of ICE and agreed with Shapiro that ICE agents are “not terrorists,” sparking outrage on the left. Whether or not the particular statement is true is almost irrelevant; the political impact is to legitimize right-wing assumptions and to police Democratic discourse in the direction of “reasonable” respect.

Elissa Slotkin used Ronald Reagan in her televised Democratic response to Trump’s speech. Reuters called it reaching for the political center. Again, I’m not saying that using Reagan is illegal. I’m saying, why is a party that is under threat of authoritarianism still using Reagan as a non-partisan way to talk about legitimacy? What does that say to the people who lived through that period about the abandonment of the rights revolution’s gains?

Ruben Gallego is under progressive fire for sponsoring or cosponsoring enforcement-oriented immigration bills (such as the Laken Riley Act) for what some argue is the Democrats’ continued absorption of the right’s border narratives rather than challenging the racialized and ahistorical impulses behind them. This is not theoretical. This comes as ICE practices are sparking scandals that border on the lawless: in Minnesota, a U.S. citizen alleges ICE agents yanked him from his home almost naked in subfreezing temperatures during an operation, while a family with six children, including a six-month-old, was caught in tear gas during an ICE protest response.

And then there’s Chuck Schumer, whose leadership tends to devolve into strongly worded concern as the base watches rights, material conditions, and democratic legitimacy get treated like bargaining chips. (I’ll resist the urge to be snarky here: letters aren’t leverage.)

Behind all of this is the intellectual and media environment that conditions Democrats to always be moving to the right while lecturing the left. The progressive critique of the “pod bro” and centrist commentary world isn’t personal, but structural. It contends that the right is treated as a views marketplace rather than a political project funded and amplified by capital, using fear of the other to wield cultural power over unpopular policy. A sign of this struggle is the reaction to Ezra Klein’s “Charlie Kirk Practiced Politics the Right Way” take, which abstracted the persuasion strategy from the project it was meant to serve.

You see this same thinking in institutional memos and “pragmatist” strategy briefs. In response to ICE violence and escalating tactics, centrist groups like Third Way and Searchlight Institute called on Democrats to move past “Abolish ICE” talk and into “reform and retrain” speak. I am not saying that slogans are policy. I am saying that this impulse to police optics, to temper criticism, and to safeguard the center is taking place while people are living through the consequences.

This is why I don’t buy the demand for silence dressed up as unity. Black women who’ve long been overrepresented in public-sector and stability-seeking jobs because private-sector “meritocracy” has never been neutral are now getting squeezed out when the economy tightens and when institutions decide inclusion was a trend, not a commitment. Meanwhile, Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) gets rolled back, disclosure gets scrubbed, and whole sectors quietly re-Whiten without anyone needing to announce a policy. So when people respond to critique with “stop helping Trump” or “vote blue no matter who,” what they’re really asking is that the people absorbing the losses stop speaking long enough for the brand to survive.

I write all of this with grace towards the figures I’ve mentioned. These are tough jobs in a large, argumentative country. But grace is not silence, and unity is not obedience. We need a Democratic Party that is prepared to lead and imagine beyond the frameworks it has inherited, beyond the talking point complex that punches left while treating right-wing narratives as the default reality.

This is why I created the video about the skepticism of “Vote Blue No Matter Who.” Votes must be earned, particularly from communities of color who have been watching this offensive circus roll back the gains of the past fifty years while Democrats offer procedural maneuvers and restoration daydreams. If the only pitch is “we’re not Trump,” and the only strategy is “discipline the left,” then it’s not a coalition.

It’s a brand maintenance plan.

And I’m not interested in being managed. I’m interested in freedom and accountability.

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References:

• Hall, Orion. “Sen. Gallego’s Laken Riley Act Sponsorship Exemplifies the Dems’ Strategy Failures.” Common Dreams, February 15, 2025. https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/gallego-laken-riley

• Borter, Gabriella. “Democratic Senator Slotkin Reaches for the Political Center in Rebuttal to Trump.” Reuters, March 5, 2025. https://www.reuters.com/world/us/democratic-senator-slotkin-reaches-political-center-rebuttal-trump-2025-03-05/

• ModerateProgressive1. “After Newsoms Interview With Ben Shapiro Is It Fair to Say That the Majority of the Credit He’s Received for Being a ‘Fighter’ Belongs to His Twitter Staffers and Not Himself?” Reddit, r/AskALiberal. https://www.reddit.com/r/AskALiberal/comments/1qif93f/after_newsoms_interview_with_ben_shapiro_is_it/.

• Associated Press. “US Citizen Says ICE Forced Him From His Home Without Clothes in Subfreezing Weather.” The Guardian, January 20, 2026. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jan/20/citizen-ice-minnesota-thao

• Klein, Ezra. “Charlie Kirk Assassination Fear Politics.” The New York Times, September 11, 2025. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/11/opinion/charlie-kirk-assassination-fear-politics.html

• Coates, Ta-Nehisi. “Charlie Kirk, Redeemed: A Political Class Finds Its Lost Cause.” Vanity Fair, September 16, 2025. https://www.vanityfair.com/news/story/charlie-kirk-ezra-klein-tanehisi-coates

• The Conference Board. “Report: Big US Companies Are Disclosing Less of Their Work in DEI… But That Doesn’t Mean They’re Abandoning DEI.” Press release, August 4, 2025. https://www.conference-board.org/press/corporate-diversity-disclosure-2025

• Holloway, Kali. “Trump’s Slash-and-Burn Economy Is Devastating Black Women.” The Nation, January 14, 2026. Republished in Ripple by The Washington Post. https://www.washingtonpost.com/ripple/2026/01/13/trump-economy-black-women/

• Wilson, Valerie. “What’s Behind Rising Unemployment for Black Workers?” Working Economics Blog (Economic Policy Institute), September 19, 2025. https://www.epi.org/blog/whats-behind-rising-unemployment-for-black-workers/

• Corbett, Holly. “Women Made Up Nearly All the Job Losses Last Month. Here’s Why.” Forbes, January 14, 2026. https://www.forbes.com/sites/hollycorbett/2026/01/14/women-made-up-nearly-all-the-job-losses-last-month-heres-why/

I would like to use this paid section to answer a question that has been in my head for a while: Is it a problem that the Democrats have deferred to strategists who constructed the right-wing machine that has completely discredited their brand in the entirety of my lifetime (I am 31 years old) in the 2024 election?

Can that have been the reason why the Democrats lost a winnable election, rather than “wokeness”?

And was the strategist’s logic that led to a Kamala Harris and Liz Cheney “Avengers Assemble” moment actually a misreading of the room, more interested in restoration than imagination?

I ask this question because I have a deep respect for what Liz Cheney and many of the Never Trump Republicans did over the years. I don’t dismiss the bravery that it took to go against a party that had become overtly hostile to pluralism and democratic restraint. But at the same time, I feel like the reckoning for how they practiced politics has yet to be fully realized. It leads us to believe in a conservatism that wouldn’t have spawned Trump, even though the gender, racial, religious, and sexual hatred was always the underlying message on the campaign trail, with legal claims of originalism rooted in a time that enslaved people, and the relevant hum beneath the rallying cries of “states’ rights” and “small government.”

This is a framing that has always been used to empower those who lived through a time of actual institutional effort to address the history of anti-Black destruction, gendered hierarchy, and economic displacement. It is easy to think that ideas are good when those institutions were largely homogeneous and lacked the lived experience that those claims of “welfare queens” and “states’ rights” actually hurt. It is easy to sanitize cruelty with “fiscal responsibility” when the constituent that is harmed by it is silenced at the voting booth, lives in a state that finds new ways to update discrimination and segregation, and is told to view the injury as either a personal failing or an unfortunate but necessary cost of order.

In this regard, I concur with most Never Trump intellectuals who point to Stuart Stevens’s It Was All a Lie as their main text. This is because, even if it wasn’t all a lie, many who subscribed to pluralism and the esoteric architecture of conservative identity in America were being lied to by others with a profoundly human, but primal, need to reify hierarchy in the traditional American setting.

So when the Democrats constructed a restoration coalition in 2024 and when they set “normal” as the destination and “bipartisanship” as the proof of virtue, they were not merely running a campaign. They were running a theology. And the thing about theology is that it doesn’t translate well to a population living through material insecurity, institutional breakdown, and a political right that has ceased pretending it’s playing the same game.

This is what I mean when I say that the 2024 campaign was driven by a desire to restore rather than reimagine.

It appeared in particular locations, not just atmospheres. The campaign was all about respectability politics and “moderation signals” regarding energy policy, the border, “public safety,” and what forms of solidarity were to be expressed on stage. It did the classic triangulation dance move: take the right’s territory seriously, signal to the “center,” and then act surprised when you’re still labeled as radical by folks who believe any democracy that includes “others” is radical.

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Author’s Note: This newsletter is later than usual. I offer my apologies. I had a lot to say today. Because of that, I’m making Stew’d Over free.

It carries a message, but it’s also a culmination of a thread I’ve been building toward: a left-leaning critique of the reactionary centrist industry, which is the ecosystem of pundits and commentators who insi…

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The terror being unleashed in Iran is unfolding alongside a quieter, but still unsettling, sense of terror here in the United States.

I feel my childhood self creeping back into the room. A loved one recently told me thatas a person of color, they “liked America when they were in third grade,” as if it were a childhood phase like Silly Bandz. It was said in response to a video I made about a more ideal world, and about an America that might actually live up to its stated values by reckoning honestly with its racialized and gendered class dynamics. An America that could be a real beacon for Iranians seeking freedom and self-expression. But maybe that version of America has always been closer to fantasy than memory.

The instability here is not comparable to what people are facing in the streets of Tehran or Qom. Still, we are living in the aftermath of an ICE agent shooting Renee Nicole Good, a legal observer, amid community fear over armed and masked immigration agents racially profiling neighbors. After receiving mixed signals from officers, Good attempted to leave the scene and was shot multiple times as she turned her car away. In the aftermath, she has been publicly denigrated for being a lesbian and for being framed by the person occupying America’s highest office as an agitator.

Months ago, I wrote about the aftermath of Tanzania’s elections, where an internet blackout followed widespread allegations of fraud.

At the time, human rights groups and regional observers warned that excessive violence and mass detentions were occurring beyond the reach of verification. What was murky then has since grown clearer. A recent investigative report confirmed that during the blackout, security forces in Mwanza used lethal force against civilians, removed bodies from the streets, and left families without answers. Months later, there is still no official death toll, hundreds remain unaccounted for, and the state continues to deny responsibility.

Which raises an uncomfortable question: who could really know what happened (or what is still happening) outside of the people doing the slow, dangerous work of documentation? In Tanzania, it took leaked police files, survivor testimony, forensic analysis, and investigative journalism to reconstruct what the blackout was designed to erase. Those same civil society actors are often dismissed by political leaders as part of an “NGO-industrial complex” for findings that are inconvenient.

That question takes me back to the reactions to my video about Iran. It is possible to hold real anger toward elected officials while still pushing for an idealism that once drove American progress. It is possible to hope (even now) that the symbolic meaning of self-government still matters to people watching from places where dissent is met with prison or death.

But as a person of color living in the long aftermath of White fragility destabilizing a superpower over the existence of a Black president, and amid backlash against a more honest, pluralistic vision of the American melting pot, it’s hard not to see American ideals as something treated like a childhood fad, which eventually becomes something outgrown and something discarded. Especially once you come to terms with the nation not only as a democracy, but as an empire built on labor exploitation, brilliant marketing, and racial manipulation that concentrates power and wealth at the top.

References

• Al Jazeera. “Iran Protests Live: Tehran Says Trump Encouraging Political Destabilisation.” Al Jazeera, January 14, 2026.
  https://www.aljazeera.com/news/liveblog/2026/1/14/iran-protests-live-tehran-says-trump-encouraging-political-destabilisation.

• CNN Staff. “Iran Protests Live Updates: Trump Comments, Crackdown Continues.” CNN, January 14, 2026.
  https://www.cnn.com/world/live-news/iran-protests-trump-01-14-26.

  (Chicago allows “Staff” when no individual author is listed.)

• Deutsche Welle. “DW Exclusive: Post-Election Violence in Tanzania’s Mwanza.” DW, January 2026.
  https://www.dw.com/en/dw-exclusive-post-election-violence-in-tanzanias-mwanza/a-75473767.

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So the president recently flipped off a detractor after delivering remarks to the Detroit Economic Club, following a tour of a Ford plant. He reportedly told someone, “F**k you.”

This is the President of the United States.

I want to be generous here. Most people do not follow politics as a discipline. They aren’t reading speeches, tracing communications strategies, consulting primary sources, or situating events within historical patterns. They encounter politics the way one encounters weather through fragments, headlines, and the cult-of-personality broadcast hour that filters everything into entertainment. That isn’t a moral failure by itself. It’s how politics has been redesigned for consumption.

But we are now approaching a decade of something deeper than tone or decorum. A decade of unapologetic racism, skeevy sexism, fixation on women’s bodies, open contempt for governance as a serious responsibility, and the substitution of reality-television spectacle for democratic leadership. At some point, the repetition becomes the story.

I agree with those who argue that Trump is a reckoning for a leadership class that hollowed out American civic life long before he arrived: insider trading masquerading as expertise, the wreckage of Reaganomics, irresponsible campaign and pundit gamesmanship, and an elite culture that laundered its own insecurities into dominance contests over who sounded smartest while dismissing unpolished perspectives as unserious. That was the Washington Consensus of the neoliberal and neoconservative age.

But voters are not exempt. Watching people in other countries bleed for their rights while a significant portion of the electorate here votes out of identitarian spite (or treats cruelty as a form of authenticity) is not just hypocrisy. It is a case study in how decadent empires behave when hierarchy feels more emotionally satisfying than democracy. No one is born into that posture.

It is learned, rewarded, and normalized.

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Today’s post will be a little different.

It’s already been a tumultuous thirteen days to start the new year of 2026, so rather than diving into the latest current events and historical currents, I want to share something more personal, a journal entry drawn directly from my own life.

One of the peculiarities of growing up in Baltimore, but within the relatively stable outer-borough life of Ashburton, was how insulated it felt. Ashburton existed as a small hamlet outside the rest of the city, yet was shaped by its deeper histories. The neighborhood once enforced a racial covenant in its housing codes, explicitly barring Americans of color from purchasing homes.

Ashburton was primarily occupied by Jewish American immigrants, people deeply familiar with exile, displacement, and discrimination. Many were strident allies in the struggle to uplift Black Americans, recognizing parallels in diasporic histories marked by exclusion and survival. When Jewish families sold homes to Black families like mine in the 1960s, they helped create a modest but meaningful pocket of Black middle-class life in Baltimore. My grandparents, my parents, my sister, and I grew up inside that inheritance.

My parents worked across both the private and public sectors, themselves the children of Black educators. My paternal grandfather held a Master’s degree from Johns Hopkins University and was part of the effort to desegregate the teaching staff at Baltimore Polytechnic Institute, one of Baltimore’s premier magnet high schools.

I’ve been thinking about legacy more than I used to, especially since the Trump sequel began. For a long time, I overlooked it. Comfort has a way of dulling historical awareness. Private Catholic schooling, friends whose lives ranged from solidly middle class to unmistakably opulent, and a culture of consumer abundance and immediate gratification that made it tempting to believe race no longer mattered in this “new” America.

Martin Luther King Jr. was heavily marketed to my generation as a sanitized national icon, not the disruptive figure he was widely understood to be when my father was coming of age. It was easy to believe the country had already settled its moral accounts.

Life moved on.

I attended Mount Saint Joseph High School in Baltimore and later the University of Maryland at College Park after a competitive admissions process, choosing in-state tuition as college costs skyrocketed. I spent years as a wandering Terp, disillusioned by my own lack of direction and by the journalism path I had set for myself since middle school.

I overindulged in substances to dull the discomfort of emotional confusion. What saved me was love. My parents, my siblings, close friends, and history professors who believed in my curiosity about humanity’s story and recognized real inquiry beneath the haze. Switching my major from journalism to history changed my trajectory. and I formed one of the most important friendships of my life, one that allowed me to see the world not only as an American minority but as part of a global one. In many ways, I was saved from myself by the care surrounding me.

After college, my body forced a reckoning. I was diagnosed with avascular necrosis in both hips. From 2017 to 2020, I walked with a cane before eventually undergoing bilateral hip replacements. The pain was real, and so was the temptation to disappear into an opioid fog.

I didn’t. My mother’s resolve wouldn’t allow it. She pushed me into physical therapy and insisted that this wasn’t the end of my story but the beginning of a harder, truer chapter. During that period, I was accepted into a Master’s program in Political Communications at American University. I found myself increasingly on Twitter, waking up at 5 a.m. each morning to respond to the next unhinged Trump tweet and debating whether he was an aberration or the natural culmination of American conservatism.

In those daily exchanges, I encountered curious, serious writers who treated disagreement as inquiry rather than sport, like , , , , , , , , , , , and . Many of whom were also building their own Substacks and theories. Those conversations sharpened my thinking and reminded me that intellectual life can still be generous, even in unforgiving digital spaces.

My time at Media Matters for America coincided with the pandemic, my parents’ divorce, earning a grad degree, and recovery from my second hip replacement. Watching the far-right disinformation pipeline flow seamlessly into mainstream media, while the country unraveled under racialized lies, became suffocating. The despair wasn’t abstract; it was personal, national, and relentless.

Eventually, the pandemic ended. So did that chapter of my life. What followed were experiences that widened my perspective and restored my sense of movement: working with brilliant minds at the Bank Information Center, traveling to Togo and Benin, teaching middle schoolers at Parkville Middle School, and collaborating with remarkable people at the Congressional Award. Each role added texture, humility, and renewed belief in collective effort.

That brings me to today.

I started this newsletter in 2022 as a way to process my post–January 6 disillusionment and anger, especially watching Fox News and Alex Jones mock Black Americans daily with little pushback from institutions that claimed responsibility and restraint.

What began as a personal outlet has become something sturdier. This space has grown into a place to challenge priors, publish deeply personal essays like this one among trusted readers, and examine how history and current events braid together. It has also convinced me that the communications world desperately needs more historical analysis and less reflexive sloganeering about American exceptionalism.

If you’ve made it this far, thank you. If you were looking for straight news analysis, I point you to my essays yesterday on the investigation into Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell and the instability in Iran.

Your support has made a real difference in my life.

After spending much of the 2020s in a spiral of self-doubt, the effort to build this publication and a daily, engaged readership has grounded me in ways I still struggle to articulate.

All the best,
Steward

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The Bigotry Many Learned to Live With

Growing up, we were taught to look at the 1960s as an almost otherworldly time, when Black Americans were sent to the back of the bus, spat upon, and could fear for their lives simply for looking the wrong way. To many of my White counterparts, those fears sounded exaggerated, even irrational, because they believed people simply couldn’t be that racist. The assumption was that such cruelty belonged to a bygone era.

I don’t think that belief was always rooted in malice. Often, it came from distance, from never having lived with that kind of fear, or from wanting to believe that moral progress, once achieved, maintains itself. There was comfort in imagining that the country had already settled its most painful moral questions, that the civil rights era represented a decisive turning point rather than an ongoing obligation.

What I’ve come to understand more clearly with time is that this optimism, however sincere, depended on overlooking something uncomfortable: not everyone accepted the conclusions of the civil rights project. Some resisted openly, but many more simply withdrew. They reorganized their lives quietly, into homogenous neighborhoods, private institutions, coded political language, and social arrangements that allowed old hierarchies to persist without open confrontation.

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Presidents fighting with the Federal Reserve is nothing new. Presidents using the machinery of the Justice Department while doing it is.

The Federal Reserve’s power over interest rates has always made it a political target. Cheap money looks like growth. Growth looks like competence. And competence buys time with voters. That incentive structure hasn’t changed much in a century.

What has people uneasy this week is the news that Donald Trump’s supposedly independent Department of Justice has opened an investigation into Jerome Powell over his congressional testimony about renovations to the Federal Reserve building. Supporters call it oversight while critics see institutional pressure applied sideways.

To understand why this feels familiar (and why it also feels different), it helps to rewind to a moment when Americans believed they could have everything at once.

In the 1960s, the country genuinely thought it could afford both guns and butter. That belief shaped the presidency of Lyndon B. Johnson, who expanded social spending at home while financing an increasingly disastrous war in Vietnam. The gamble wasn’t just moral or political. It was an economic one, assuming that voters wouldn’t be forced to confront the bill.

That assumption shaped policymakers' thinking about the Federal Reserve.

Economists like Alvin Hansen reflected the era’s confidence that Washington could coordinate growth, employment, and stability if its institutions worked together. Hansen worried less about technical models than about fragmentation. An overly independent Fed, he feared, could force painful tradeoffs into public view before elected officials were prepared to own them.

In other words, inflation wasn’t just an economic problem.

It was a political one.

That tension became personal in Johnson’s relationship with Fed Chair William McChesney Martin. As later reporting, most memorably captured in a Marketplace article, made clear, Johnson leaned on Martin relentlessly to keep interest rates low. Higher rates would have made the Vietnam War's costs unmistakable, raising borrowing costs and puncturing the illusion that ambitious domestic programs could proceed without consequence.

Martin resisted. He believed inflation would eventually force a reckoning and that the Fed’s job was to ensure it happened sooner rather than later.

Johnson heard obstruction, not prudence.

The conflict culminated in Johnson summoning Martin to his Texas ranch, where the president reportedly berated and physically intimidated the Fed chair. The episode mattered less for its theatrics than for what it revealed, which was that Johnson wasn’t asking for analysis but for political cover.

Under pressure, Martin delayed some of the tightening he believed was necessary. But once Johnson removed himself from the political equation by announcing in March 1968 that he would not seek reelection, the Fed sharply raised interest rates within weeks.

The timing told the story.

In hindsight, even Hansen’s call for coordination looks fragile. Confidence in economic stewardship slid toward coercion once political costs mounted. Johnson’s behavior wasn’t a meeting of minds; it was an attempt to delay accountability for a war he privately knew was both morally and economically destabilizing.

Whether the inflation of the late 1960s unfairly discredited Keynesian economics and cleared the path for Milton Friedman’s corrective is a debate best left unresolved.

What matters is this: presidents clashing with Federal Reserve chairs is not new. What is new is the routing that clashes through the Department of Justice, an institution built for legal accountability, not economic disagreement.

The fight has always been about who pays the political price for governing.

What’s changed is how aggressively presidents now try to make sure it isn’t them.

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References

• Hansen, Alvin H. “INFLATION and The New Economics.” Challenge 15, no. 2 (1966): 5–41. http://www.jstor.org/stable/40720897.

• Marshall-Genzer, Nancy. “A President and His Fed Chair Clash. Sound Familiar?” Marketplace, October 27, 2020. https://www.marketplace.org/story/2020/10/27/a-president-and-his-fed-chair-clash-sound-familiar.

If the free section traced a familiar conflict between presidents and the Federal Reserve, the present moment marks a shift in how that conflict is being waged.

What stands out is not presidential frustration with institutions (that is old), but the growing comfort with using institutional power directly to pursue political ends. We have seen versions of this logic applied to prosecutors, law enforcement officials, and statistical agencies. Each episode can be defended in isolation, but together, they form a pattern that is harder to dismiss.

What feels different is the lack of pretense. Previous administrations quietly strained norms, often denying they were doing so at all. Today, institutional pressure is exercised openly, framed as accountability rather than interference. Politics becomes less a contest over policy than a struggle over legitimacy.

In that environment, the president appears to operate with a sense of mandate that sits uneasily alongside older constitutional expectations.

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Yesterday, a woman was killed by a federal immigration officer after being given mixed and contradictory signals about what she was expected to do while expressing her right to assemble and speak out in her neighborhood. Immigration and Customs Enforcement claims the officer acted in self-defense. However, the video of the incident tells a different story: the woman attempting to back her car up and leave the area, the officer positioned beside the vehicle, not in its path, and a gun drawn and fired while she remained seated in the driver’s seat.

This cascading failure should never have happened. It began with a decision that should not have been made at all, deploying armed federal agents into a residential neighborhood to enforce a draconian immigration agenda built on racial demagoguery and widespread public misunderstanding of how immigration actually works. When enforcement is designed as spectacle rather than narrowly tailored public safety, confusion is not an accident. It is the foreseeable outcome.

What happened yesterday is not simply the result of one reckless action. It is the downstream consequence of an American public that allowed racial grievance politics to carry someone to the Oval Office for a second time. That kind of politics not only harms the people it is intended to target, but also harms the people who are not. It erodes restraint, degrades judgment, and reshapes institutions in ways that put everyone at risk. When fear becomes policy, accountability is the first casualty.

The woman killed was Renee Good, a mother of three. She was likely trying to live an ordinary day while responding to something deeply wrong unfolding around her. Now her children are growing up without their mother. This is the cost of refusing to name what has animated the modern GOP for decades, racism and sexism, and of pursuing failed political strategies that attempted to accommodate those forces rather than confront them during the pivotal election of 2024.

The result is a partisan, militarized federal force operating in civilian spaces, exactly the condition that alarmed the framers of the Constitution, whose political imagination was shaped by standing armies and the Quartering Acts. Their fear was not theoretical. It was rooted in lived experience with armed power unaccountable to the communities it occupied.

The most unsettling reality is that even a future transfer of power may not be enough to undo this system. A federal bureaucracy fueled by xenophobia, racial grievance, and personal loyalty will not be dismantled easily or cleanly. Reversing it risks further division. Leaving it intact risks normalization.

For now, we hold Renee Good in our thoughts and prayers. But grief alone is not enough. The conditions that produced this killing did not begin yesterday, and they will not end with one investigation or one election. In the next section, I trace how we arrived here, and why dismantling this system will be far harder than stopping the man who built it.

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This Was Not An Accident. This Was A Pattern.

One of the ways we arrived at this moment is through the media’s long mishandling of the immigration debate, specifically its refusal to challenge the obvious racial asymmetry at the heart of it. The panic was never about immigration as a global phenomenon. It was about people from the Global South seeking asylum. Yet much of the legacy press treated that distinction as impolite to name, laundering racial grievance through vague language about “law and order” and “border security.”

That failure created fertile ground for political manipulation. A candidate was able to rise by exploiting those blind spots and stoking fear among revanchist populations, as well as appealing to people unfamiliar with the immigration system or convinced they had “done it the right way,” thus presenting racialized exclusion as neutral enforcement. Parts of the media ecosystem amplified this framing until it became normalized. Others accommodated it in the name of balance. Eventually, some were absorbed by it outright. The result was not just electoral success, but political capital built on fear.

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