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ICE’s purchase of gloves capable of incapacitating suspects with an electric shock is a desperate attempt to repair the agency’s dismal public image.

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Third Way, a prominent Democratic lobby group in Washington, has a new multi-million dollar effort to “combat extremism” on the “far-left,” an internal staff email leaked to me reveals.

“[E]xtreme far-left voices gaining purchase over the past year … represent a sharp break from a traditional left wing in American politics,” the July 23 email says. This break, the email continues, has led to the rise of a faction that is both “radical” and “illiberal” — figures like Zohran Mamdani — pursuing a government like authoritarian Cuba.

“When some folks hear ‘socialism’ they think of Scandinavia, but what the activists behind the DSA are advocating for is closer to Cuba,” the email says, referring to the Democratic Socialists of America.

Cuba!

Leaked email

4.45KB ∙ PDF file

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The irony is that Third Way, sharply critical of the Trump administration, is echoing it perfectly. In fact, the email was sent just days before the release of a State Department report alleging Cuban influence on the American left, mentioning such frightening subversives as Ben Cohen (founder of Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream) and Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass, as I reported at the time.

Also, earlier that month, Secretary of State Marco Rubio led an international summit on “political terrorism” also targeting the left, even introducing a new term: “Far-Left Terrorism.”

It’s not a war against Trump or MAGA or the Republicans in 2028. It’s not against disinformation or foreign influence; that was yesterday’s panic. It’s not against anti-semitism, or the impact of social media, or guns. It’s not even against violence in general.

It’s a war against other Democrats (socialists specifically), and what Third Way labels far-left “extremism.” That sure sounds more like the FBI and homeland security than a “center left … organization that champions moderate policy and political ideas,” as it describes itself

This isn’t just someone running their mouth in an email, either. The author, senior vice president of Third Way, Lanae Erickson, is announcing an organized and sustained effort to defeat the supposed new extremist threat.

As the email says, “we are launching a strategy to drive awareness of these threats to the party, including adding to our team by hiring a Director of Anti-Extremism to help us make the case against these noxious ideas and recruit many others to do the same.”

The goal, the email continues, is to “create a counterweight to the forces pushing more Democrats to embrace extreme and illiberal ideas.”

Third Way’s president, Jonathan Cowan, alluded to the plan last week.

“We are preparing for the next war that is coming,” Cowan told the New York Times, describing a $15 million effort to discredit democratic socialism between now and 2028. This week, Third Way posted a job announcement for a director to head its “Anti-Extremism” project, corroborating the email.

Beyond the Washington rhetoric, Third Way is saying that if your political views aren’t vanilla, you’re an “extremist.” That’s national security’s polite word for terrorist, once a reference to Muslim Americans and would-be revolutionaries but now applied to any American citizen who dares to venture away from Party talking points.

What is worse, it used to be the case that when the government or the administration, whether Obama or Bush, used the word “extremist” they were always careful to include a qualifier: “violent extremism.” That meant that physical violence (actual or intended) was necessary to get one labeled a terrorist.

Back during the Obama years, there was “countering violent extremism.” Then from Trump’s first term to Biden, there was “domestic violent extremism.” The FBI’s threat categories carried it too — “racially or ethnically motivated violent extremism,” “anti-government or anti-authority violent extremism.” They are all imperfect and ugly labels, but the “violent” qualifier at least maintained a pretense that there was a threat of physical harm. And pretended that the threat label wasn’t questioning free speech or association.

Now it’s just “extremism” — one word. Third Way is joining the Trump administration in dropping the violence qualifier. It’s enough to just have the wrong beliefs; wrong, that is, in the eyes of the Party apparatus in Washington.

When I asked Third Way this week how it defines this “extremism,” spokesperson Kate DeGruyter said that the effort “is aimed at the DSA itself, not at liberal Democrats” — though it wasn’t clear how they define “liberal Democrats.” Asked who gave Third Way the $15 million for this project, DeGruyter’s only response was: “This a new effort and we are in the process of fundraising.”

Before Dr. Abdul El-Sayed won the Michigan primary to run for Senate as a Democrat, Cowan, the Third Way president, issued an open letter and op-ed directly targeting him as a member of DSA despite his never having been a member of the organization and explicitly describing himself as a “capitalist.” (Third Way tells me it now supports El-Sayed, presumably because he’s since won.)

Three members of Congress are DSA members or describe themselves as democratic socialists — Senator Bernie Sanders and Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Rashida Tlaib — along with the mayor of the country's largest city, Zohran Mamdani. You may have heard of them.

The Times reported that Third Way’s new campaign would go after both self-described democratic socialists and candidates like El-Sayed, whom Cowan at the time accused of running a DSA-style campaign without the membership card. So because DSA is too narrow, Third Way has done exactly as the FBI would do: it has expanded the definition of the threat category. The war is against members of DSA and people who espouse DSA positions or use DSA tactics, or just socialists, or just “far-left extreme voices and forces,” as Third Way says, or even more broadly people with “politically toxic ideas and offensive rhetoric.”

Politically toxic ideas and offensive rhetoric? That sounds like me and half the people I know. I call top bunk at the Third Way reeducation camp!

Third Way is all but an arm of the Democratic Party. It’s run by former administration officials — Cowan was chief of staff at the Department of Housing and Urban Development under Bill Clinton — and exists to supply the party’s leadership with the language that leads to the talking points that become the way elected Democrats describe the country and their own voters.

As for what this all looks like in practice, Third Way offered a preview this week in its remarks on Francesca Hong's campaign for the Democratic nomination for governor of Wisconsin.

“She’s not a real person,” Yemisi Egbewole, a Senior Fellow at Third Way and former Biden White House official, told Mark Halperin. She added an implication of mental illness, saying Hong is “deeply unsettled, and she should really work through in therapy some of her own beliefs.”

The goal with the “extremist” label is to make anyone who doesn’t conform with the vanilla politics of Washington seem not just idiotic but insane. It’s a real-life One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and if your beliefs aren’t something you’d see on cable news, the nurse would like to see you.

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— Edited by William M. Arkin

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Wisconsin votes today. If Francesca Hong loses the Democratic gubernatorial primary, mainstream media will file the story they’ve been dying to do all year: that the anti-establishment fever is breaking and the grown-ups are back.

Don’t fall for it. The insurgency already won months ago, before anyone in Washington even knew who Hong was. It’s lame duck hunting season, an electoral massacre of do-nothing political incumbents and the old ways of politics in general. Think DOGE, but for politicians. I’ll call it DOPE (Department of Politician Efficiency).

There’s the famous examples like Zohran Mamdani and Abdul El-Sayed, but also many others. Melat Kiros, a 29-year-old barista, took out 15-term Colorado congresswoman Diana DeGette, age 69. Darializa Avila Chevalier, a 32-year-old grad student, did the same to congressman Adriano Espaillat (71), who has held elected office in upper Manhattan since 1997. Donavan McKinney, a 34-year-old union organizer, ousted 71-year-old congressman Shri Thanedar in Michigan.

And contrary to the media’s lazy comparisons to the Tea Party — primaries of which saw defeats of just four House members in 2010 — the current cycle has already seen primary defeats of ten House members. That’s the most in a non-redistricting year since 1970, with more primaries yet to come.

But there’s more carnage still. A much larger number of politicians ran the “you can’t fire me, I quit” play, rather than face the humiliation of an election defeat. As a result, sixty-two House members are not seeking reelection. That’s the second-highest number not to seek reelection in American history.

Also unlike the Tea Party, DOPE is not confined to one political party. Thirty-five of those House members not seeking reelection are Republicans. Meanwhile, Marjorie Taylor Greene, who herself chose not to seek reelection, plans to launch a third-party bid for the presidency, along with recently-ousted Kentucky congressman Thomas Massie and conservative commentator Tucker Carlson.

Then there’s the survivors who are not long for this world, politically and often literally given their health issues: people like Senators Mitch McConnell and Chuck Schumer, members of the crypt caucus.

Being in the middle of all this, I don’t think we fully appreciate how monumental this political realignment is. And DOPE’s influence is only growing.

When Mamdani won the New York mayoral primary, the response from Democratic “leadership” was awkward silence. Chuck Schumer never endorsed him. Hakeem Jeffries spent months studying his shoes before finally endorsing, only after Mamdani had promised to retain police commissioner Jessica Tisch, the national security schoolmarm who would keep the bucking bronco in line.

Last week though, Democratic officialdom couldn’t get in line fast enough after El-Sayed won the Senate primary in Michigan. Haley Stevens, the leadership-backed candidate he’d just beaten in a bruising primary, endorsed him immediately and without any apparent bitterness. Gavin Newsom endorsed him within minutes of the race being called, then flew to Michigan to campaign with him. Kamala Harris endorsed him Friday. Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand put out a joint statement.

These are not backbenchers. Newsom and Harris, both contenders for the next Democratic Party presidential nomination, evidently concluded that something so big was transpiring that they were willing to stand next to the guy their donors just spent millions of dollars trying to bury. None of them asked El-Sayed to walk anything back, or mentioned his supposed negatives they’d spent months insisting would prompt the sky to fall.

The party bigwigs clearly see the writing on the wall. It’s even changing how they talk. The most striking example is Biden’s former Transportation Secretary, Pete Buttigieg, who now says his experience in the administration “radicalized” him — presumably a move to build up populist cred for a presidential run.

Compare that to his 2020 presidential campaign, when Buttigieg couldn’t seem to find an Iowa fairgoer he could resist telling he was a Rhodes Scholar, speaks six languages (or eight depending on the day), and how much he loves the James Joyce novel, Ulysses. The former McKinsey consultant was the walking embodiment of why the Democrat Party sucks: over-educated, out of touch and fixated on wonky, small-bore bullshit lacking any bold vision.

Now he turns up on popular podcasts like Diary of a CEO, where he does some stupid things — like pandering to conspiracy heads by implying that Jeffrey Epstein compelled Trump to bomb Iran. But he also says things that suggest people’s rage is breaking through.

“ Democrats have a responsibility to present something that is better, not just better than now, but it’s gotta be better than before,” he told Diary.

On Democrats fundraising off Trump’s collapse: sure, it raises money and it gets votes, but the trap is that it leaves the party “relieved of having to generate ideas,” Buttigieg told Politico recently. In the same interview, he also slammed the party’s habit of acting like we just need to return to some idyllic pre-Trump era, saying:

“There’s a kind of unspoken Democratic assumption that we're trying to take us back to, I don't know what. Is it 2012? Is it 1992? Is it 2021? Whatever it is, we can't go there. We shouldn't try. We shouldn't want to.”

These criticisms of the party are present in virtually all of his recent interviews, which come off like a repudiation of his own political career.

Sounds to me like DOPE found its way up Mayor Pete’s nose. Jokes aside, that’s a good thing. Sincere or not — and I suspect it's mostly sincere — it means the most calibrated politician in the party has read the room and concluded the old lines don't work anymore.

In other words, pissed off voters won.

A political realignment doesn't get certified on election night. You find out it happened when you notice the establishment has quietly adopted the insurgents' vocabulary and ideas — like Mamdani’s “affordability” focus — and delivers them back to you as conventional wisdom.

This is already happening; the media just hasn’t noticed. As with the Francesca Hong phenomenon, they’re too busy fixating on “electability.” There’s a word I’d be glad to never hear again.

Correction: An earlier version of this story identified three House incumbent primary defeats in 2010, but there were four. Article has also been updated to reflect new incumbent defeats after publication.

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— Edited by William M. Arkin

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Imagine if Donald Trump went all-in endorsing a candidate for the Senate, campaigned for them and helped raise eleven times as much money as their opponent — who then lost.

There would be wall-to-wall media coverage declaring the end of Trump’s influence and of the Republican Party as we know it. “Trump’s Bitter Defeat,” The New York Times would say; “The End of an Era ,” The Washington Post would echo.

This actually just happened in Michigan’s Senate primary — with one detail glaringly absent.

Basically the entire Democratic Party leadership supported Haley Stevens, who outspent El-Sayed eleven to one amid a relentless campaign of warnings about how bad news bears he would be for state, party, country — but lost. And the media’s response? ‘He didn’t win by that much,’ ‘Now comes the hard part, the general election,’ and so on.

Bullshit.

This is a massive defeat for the Democratic Party old guard and an affirmation that the new crop of outsider, renegade candidates are the people’s choice.

Chuck Schumer, Nancy Pelosi, Gov. Gretchen Whitmer — basically the entire Democratic establishment endorsed Haley Stevens, a textbook party stooge. For her to still lose is a repudiation and humiliation of not just Stevens but the entire political death star behind her.

The party elders threw everything at El-Sayed but their dentures. The attack ads were ugly even by the standards of politics.

“Abdul El-Sayed HAS A PATTERN OF DISRESPECTING WOMEN,” reads one AIPAC-funded mailer (they dumped $30 million in defeating El-Sayed). The evidence for this? He said that Gov. Whitmer was “bought and sold” and that Michelle Obama was “ineffectual.”

Sitting Democratic congresswoman Hillary Scholten of Michigan told CNN that El-Sayed had a “uniquely sexist bent to the things that he has said about women.” The evidence? His calling Stevens “a suit with a large AIPAC bank account,” and, again, his calling Whitmer “bought and sold.” The latter remark, Scholten claimed, was “essentially comparing her to property with no ideas of her own” (lol).

But the real story here is bigger than El-Sayed. It’s that voters were not swayed by an avalanche of big money and big people. Instead, they hoisting a bigger finger than we’ve seen since Barack Obama’s own primary upset in 2008, when he defeated party leader-approved Hillary Clinton. Any media outlet that doesn’t acknowledge that is on the side of the big money and big people.

For example, beltway outlet Politico, which declared in a headline this morning: “Progressives didn’t get the big election night they wanted.” Politico pointed to the “razor-thin margin” (1 percent) of El-Sayed’s victory.

El-Sayed’s insufficiently “big” win is in fact the highest-level Democratic upset since Barack Obama. The irony here is that Obama actually won the 2008 presidential primary by less than El-Sayed — just half a percent of the popular vote.

Imagine the headline, “Obama supporters didn’t get the big election night they wanted.” Would anyone be able to read that without laughing?

As with Obama, young people in Michigan voted for El-Sayed at rates that Washington types consider implausible or even impossible. Young people don’t vote, the conventional wisdom goes.

As I’ve written about before, from Zohran Mamdani to El-Sayed, the impossible keeps happening — because it’s only impossible if you follow the Washington obsessed and dominated news media. They rely on the very army of strategists, consultants, and pollsters for their spin, the same people who keep calling these races wrong and don’t seem to know a single American outside of the Acela Corridor.

What is “possible” or “practical” is a scam propagated by a political class that profits from your despair and resignation.

Something deeper is going on here in the United States. From coast to coast, and now in the heartland, people are defying the gatekeepers and voting for change. The Democratic Party is a ghost ship, its captain hiding in some isolated old folk’s home in Washington. They keep pushing “empty suits” (no sexism intended) of various colors but all with the same diehard commitment to the status quo.

Americans always deserved better. Now they know it.

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— Edited by William M. Arkin

As we move closer to the midterm elections, two candidates stand out for their independence from the institutional Democratic Party.

The first is straight-talking chef Francesca Hong, whom I’ve interviewed and is the clear frontrunner to be governor of my home state of Wisconsin. The second is doctor Abdul El-Sayed, who enters Tuesday’s Senate primary in Michigan with a double-digit lead in polls.

Yet the Democratic Party and the mainstream media are not accepting the clear will of voters. Instead, they’re busy manufacturing the sense that if the two candidates are nominated, losses in the general election would be inevitable because they are too “extreme” for ordinary voters.

The evidence for this is largely just vibes. In fact, a leaked memo shows Hong is privately seen by Republicans as the most formidable candidate, as I’ll detail in a moment. But first, take a look at the orgy of fear-mongering by the Party about these candidates.

“The Dem race for governor in WI feels like a slow-rolling car headed for a cliff,” said David Axelrod, Obama’s chief strategist in his 2008 campaign.

Democratic Party elder James Carville went further, declaring “the two-party system is just under tremendous stress” due to the rise of figures like left-wing commentator Hasan Piker, whom Hong has campaigned with. (When asked if she’d condemn Piker, Hong’s characteristically blunt response was simply “No,” as shown in the video below.)

Party leaders have thumbed the scales in both primary races — Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers in his state, Chuck Schumer in Michigan — each backing the party establishment favorite. The Democratic establishment keeps advancing candidates who aren’t gaining any traction; but instead of asking why they are so out of touch with what the people want, they are resorting to tearing down the popular choices. The Party doesn’t like anyone who it hasn’t anointed and who hasn’t risen through its ranks.

The Democratic Party sits at its lowest level of popularity in at least 30 years. It has been fighting the people’s choices since Zohran Mamdani emerged as mayoral frontrunner in New York last year. When he beat the Party’s candidate last year, the smug reaction from election knowers was that his victory was only possible in a deep blue state like New York.

Turns out that was bullshit. Neither Michigan nor Wisconsin is New York. Nor are they lefty outliers. Trump carried both in 2024!

Now the Party hacks and their elite media buddies are trying to put the fear of god in voters that if they choose the candidate most of them want, it is playing into the hands of the Republican Party, Donald Trump, and so on. Though disguised as a warning, it is actually a threat.

It bears mentioning that this is not the view of congressman Tom Tiffany, the Republican who will actually have to run against Hong.

“We Need To Take Francesca Hong Seriously,” reads the subject line of a memo prepared for Tiffany’s gubernatorial campaign by Republican consultants. Leaked to and reported on by Jessie Opoien of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, the April memo correctly anticipated Hong’s dominance in the primary. It also described her as “uniquely dangerous in the general election” and that “general election strengths are formidable.”

Per the memo, as reported by Opoien:

• Hong’s “combination of grassroots momentum, unapologetically progressive ideology, and a platform centered on high turnout makes her uniquely dangerous in the general election.”

• Hong’s platform is “broadly popular and difficult to counter.”

• Her agenda “is built around kitchen-table issues that poll strongly with independents, working families, and even some rural voters.”

• “more moderate and establishment Democratic alternatives would likely produce lower base motivation and depressed turnout.”

Now compare that with the doomsaying national media coverage. It’s almost surreal how different it is.

The “electability” argument is always a claim about what your neighbors will tolerate, made by someone who has never met them, delivered with the confidence of arithmetic. As a campaign staffer once told me, the horse race’s main function is propaganda to induce voters to feel like voting a certain way is prudent or responsible.

This is all about telling people who they can or cannot vote for. Sometimes it’s barely even concealed. Third Way, the centrist think tank, said in a strategy memo this year that Democrats “cannot run candidates who are far outside the mainstream of their district.”

It’s the very definition of mainstream that is at stake here.

If there’s one thing that ties together Mamdani, Hong and El-Sayed, it is that they have distinct personalities and they talk without the prevarications and doublespeak of what we’ve come to know as “moderates.” Things like democratic socialism are, in my view, a small element of their popularity. That they are willing to directly buck the establishment is their appeal. And when they talk about affordability, it comes from experience and living among normal people rather than the lanyard class that dominates Washington.

As the Republican consultant memo about Hong warns, her “working-class biography and populist economics [could] blunt ‘radical socialist’ framing.”

I have no idea what will happen in the election. Neither does anyone else. But I do know what’s happening in America. People are tired of the establishment, tired of the blow-dried, overproduced version of everything that seeks to manage rather than move.

“I think they’re underestimating voters,” Hong said back in May of the commentariat and their negative predictions. “That has always been a problem for the Democratic Party — that we are not listening to how they are feeling.”

She seems to hear it loud and clear.

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From almost the beginning of the Iran war, the experts have complained that the Pentagon is running out of missiles, a supposed problem that says more about the nature of the national security debate than the state of the US military.

Washington officials are stuck on this half-propaganda, half-operational conundrum. They both want more money for the military and they want to make clear that no weapons shortages are constraining the US from fighting Iran.

This desire to have it both ways reached comic levels this week when U.N. Ambassador Mike Waltz said to Meet the Press that Biden was to blame for the missile shortage, before immediately insisting there was no shortage and that whoever is leaking that there is should be prosecuted.

Waltz's first instinct was to embrace the missile shortage, which is the instinct almost everyone has, and it reflects a broader unwillingness to entertain the possibility that the military has enough — not because that's wrong, but because it's inconvenient. Say it and you're defending the Trump administration, or waving off the danger to our beloved troops. So no one says it.

Under these circumstances, all sides win: proponents, opponents, and of course the Pentagon, which gets more money to close the supposed missile gap. Meanwhile, we are left in a trap that prevents us from answering the very sensible question of how the hell our $1 trillion military keeps getting hit by Iran’s missiles.

First, some facts. The missiles we are talking about are air defense missiles, those that are used to shoot down Iran’s missiles. According to the Center for Strategic and International Studies, the US pre-war inventory of the most modern missiles of these types (Patriot, THAAD, and Navy Aegis-related) was some 2,750 to 2,950. In the ways of the Pentagon, those missiles are split up between various geographic commands, some in Asia, some in Europe, some in the Middle East, etc. Israel has its own missiles, and the Gulf states own a substantial number of their own inventories, almost all purchased from the U.S. (it’s big business).

Given that Iran itself was estimated to have a pre-war inventory of just over 2,000 missiles and thousands of attack drones, clearly the stockpile of these defensive weapons was grossly inadequate if one factors in that they are supposed to be sufficient to deal with not just Iran, but also North Korea, China and Russia.

Before you jump up and say aha, he’s also arguing that we need more, read on.

The U.S. buys all sorts of weapons but clearly the ones that might be most important to fight a modern war (that is, to counter enemy missiles and drones) are not the priority, or even a priority. That’s because the military is all about offense, and particularly about bombing and attacking and maneuvering forces, even in the current environment whether it be the Middle East, Ukraine, Taiwan, or South Korea where the most effective weapons of the enemy are missiles and not tanks.

Partly this is western military culture. The pilots with their silk scarves and the tankers with their binoculars and the soldiers with mud on their faces — they get all the glory. Does anyone care about the dweebs far behind the front lines pressing buttons to shoot defensive missiles? Nope. “No guts, no glory,” as the saying goes.

Which just leaves a giant stockpile of questions: Did no one anticipate this? Iran has been an enemy for 40-plus years and, after 9/11 in particular, has specialized in creating an indigenous missile and drone force, selling them to Russia to fight the Ukraine war.

And if you say that the inventory of missiles is instead intended for war with Russia or China, then the situation is even worse, for those two countries have even larger inventories of missiles and drones. One might think that a priority for the Pentagon would be to have larger inventories of defense missiles to counter Russian and Chinese missiles. One might think. But these are not the sexy weapons.

From Star Wars to Iron Dome and now the Golden Dome, there’s been quite the effort to make defense look sexy. But that rubs up against the longstanding American way of war, which is to send out offensive missiles and attacking airplanes to destroy enemy missiles on the ground, followed by destroying the missile-supporting infrastructure. That’s certainly been the practice in the current Iran war.

So clearly the offense needs to be balanced with a defensive portfolio to shoot down those enemy weapons that thwart or circumvent the offense. But nope. There is no balance. Not for contingencies in dealing with Iran, and certainly not for China. Which should raise even bigger questions about how decisions are made in the Pentagon and how money is spent and why.

The argument during the nuclear era has been dominated by those who said that “ballistic missile defense” was bad because it might upset the balance of terror and undermine nuclear deterrence. The argument by this camp since Reagan’s Star Wars speech in 1983 is twofold. First, that missile defense makes nuclear war more likely because the Russians might perceive that they can’t ensure destroying the world so they would destroy the world to prove that their ability to destroy the world is preserved. And second — this is another important legacy that reverberates today — the argument that missile defense would never work, which is to say, when it comes to nuclear weapons, they wouldn’t work 100 percent, so it’s all or nothing.

Nothing has prevailed as the conclusion, and that has influenced the view of missile defense on the battlefield and regional level, creating a little bit of a prejudice against Patriot and its brethren.

As you’ve seen in my arguments above, every faction is responsible for not having enough missiles. But that’s because the debate is so ill-informed and the arguments are so narrow and everyone wins something by continuing to argue (or not argue) as they’ve been doing.

So, does the United States have enough missiles? The answer is as complicated as the missile gap of the 1950s. Except for one difference: how many missiles Iran has (or China or Russia) is known a lot better than eight decades ago. But clearly the models and the projections are no better, and many of the same biases exist. After all, the “missile gap” with the Soviet Union was used to justify building more nuclear weapons, that is, more offense.

That’s about what it boils down to today.

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— Edited by William M. Arkin

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There was a Democratic primary governor debate last night in Wisconsin and all the news media can seem to say is “socialist.”

It’s national security code, blinking red, deployed against 37-year-old chef and state legislator Francesca Hong, to suggest that she is a walking threat. Not because she is, but because she is polling with more support than all other candidates combined.

The debate was the best illustration yet of how the Democratic Party establishment is facing an extinction-like event, as I’ve written about and will explain in a moment. But the media obviously isn’t going to talk about that, so instead the commentary focuses on whether Hong is “qualified,” has enough “experience,” and other coded ways of nudging voters away from outsider candidates.

In fairness, I guess that’s an improvement over earlier coverage, which focused on her old social media posts, penchant for cursing, and credit card debt.

Hong is a more complex candidate than this type of coverage suggests. During the debate, she said she does not support the Democratic Socialists of America’s (DSA) charter, and is “not here to govern by slogan.” But the media’s singular focus on the socialist label avoids any of that complicated stuff of defining what a candidate actually stands for, particularly when they are not a Party hack who can be controlled.

As for the political extinction event, anyone watching the debate got to see it happen in real time.

The governor-endorsed, establishment candidate Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley, stepped in front of the asteroid just minutes into the debate.

The candidates were asked a simple question about how much they would tax different income levels. Hong answered with specifics that she would increase the millionaire tax rate to 8.85 percent. No waffling, no vagueness.

Crowley, the Party candidate? He launched into a spiel that ran over a minute long and never got to an actual answer on what his tax rate would be.

“Well, let’s be very clear. It’s just not the … the income, uh, tax, but it’s also the property taxes that are also extremely high in the state of Wisconsin,” Crowley said.

He went on:

“Well, when we talk about income taxes, what we really need to be focusing on is how do we actually fix this system moving forward? What we need to do is take a holistic view of our tax, our taxes here in the state of Wisconsin.”

And then:

“I don’t think that we should be just focusing on how we can increase taxes just particular for, for, for certain income own … earners, when we haven’t looked at the entire system. When it comes down to those who are making hand over fist, we absolutely need to, to tax the ultra wealthy, but we need to be smart about how we’re doing things long term.”

Finally the moderator interjected, repeating the question: “And do you know how high you’d like to tax them?”

Crowley’s reply was the funniest of the night.

“Uh, no. I think that we have to look at the, the entire system, holistically,” Crowley said.

Dinosaur meet asteroid.

This is precisely what people are done with: the bullshit. Pickup-artist-level psychological tricks like saying “Let me be clear” to distract from the obvious and utter lack of clarity that inevitably follows.

If I wanted to explain to someone this national political moment in which outsider candidates keep winning, I would show them this debate. People are done with the focus-grouped, controlled, party-managed approach of the dinosaurs that dominate our politics.

People might not agree with Hong, a member of the state legislature’s socialist caucus who outspokenly defends democratic socialism while not wanting to be tarred with another Party’s doctrine (in this case, the DSA’s charter). During the debate, Hong defended her own version of democratic socialism, defining it as “a form of government that puts working class people first, that puts work first.”

There’s no question where she stands on stuff — as I saw myself in her answers to my questions on national security policy. I didn’t agree with all of it but I came away thinking this person clearly has a vision.

The national media in the coming days are going to try to make this about socialism, claiming she’s a naive “Bernie bro,” maybe even brand her a communist (recall the State Department’s recent scaremongering report on communism’s supposed penetration of the American left).

But what the election will really come down to is that people want to elect someone — anyone — willing to challenge a broken system and think big, bold, even brash, and are willing to say so. No one gives a shit about what’s “practical” anymore because, well, look where that got us. It’s not about whether you agree with all the specifics. It’s about the big picture vision — and the demand that there be one.

This is one extinction event that I’m rooting for.

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— Edited by William M. Arkin

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The Federal Emergency Management Agency, often criticized for its inadequate response to natural disasters like wildfires, floods, hurricanes, and tornadoes, has been assigned a new mission: “domestic terrorism.”

Now FEMA is shelling out grant money to state and local authorities to build up capacity to carry out pre-crime operations against “organized political violence,” as one FEMA information bulletin I obtained says.

The bulletin, dated July 9, instructs local authorities to prioritize “domestic terrorism” in their grant applications. Titled “Implementation of National Security Presidential Memorandum-7…,” the document echoes President Trump’s emphasis on rooting out suspected domestic terrorists before an attack takes place.

To head off these attacks, the bulletin tells states what to buy: training to spot “social media-based indicators,” analysts to monitor “online behaviors and digital footprints,” and teams for “managing persons of concern whose behavior indicates a potential trajectory toward domestic terrorism.”

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Some form of the word indicator — indicators, indicative, indicates — appears ten times in the eight-page FEMA bulletin. It is a favorite euphemism of law enforcement because it obscures what’s really happening: pre-crime. Indicators are something a person said or did that an officer has been trained to read as a sign of a crime that hasn't happened and may never happen.

Under this approach, the old requirement that evidence of a crime come first before any investigation is replaced by a forecast. It’s vibes-based law enforcement, divination but with the imprimatur of national security respectability. And while it’s mostly only been used against real, organized foreign terrorist organizations like Al Qaeda and ISIS, it’s now being deployed against Americans.

To give you a sense of just how central pre-crime is to this approach, consider the following grant proposals the FEMA bulletin calls for:

• Learn “the latest tactics and trends used by domestic terrorism actors in order to recognize indicators prior to an attack.”

• “Prepare and train communities to identify and report threatening or concerning behaviors that may be indicative of larger threat plotting and/or activity.”

• Conduct “Surveillance and counter-surveillance training to detect pre-operational casing and hostile surveillance of domestic targets.”

As for why any state or local government would entangle itself in such fraught activities, a second document I obtained — from FEMA’s parent agency, the Department of Homeland Security — explains why. It contains a not-so-subtle warning to authorities that don’t adhere to the new domestic terrorism priority, saying:

“Failure to meet NPA [National Priority Areas] spending requirements will result in a hold on affected funds until compliance issues are resolved.”

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That second document, a Department of Homeland Security grant program notice, is a $1 billion shopping list of available federal money. But there’s a catch: thirty-five percent, it says, must go to terrorism prevention. Another thirty percent is allocated for five designated Department of Homeland Security priorities:

1. “Supporting Border Crisis Response,”

2. “Enhancing Election Security”

3. “Supporting Homeland Security Task Forces and Fusion Centers”

4. “Enhancing the Protection of Soft Targets/Crowded Places”

5. “Enhancing Cybersecurity”

The priorities track the president's own preoccupations. Just this month, Trump gave a primetime address claiming China had compromised the 2020 election. The “border crisis response” priority, meanwhile, points states straight at ICE's 287(g) program — which, as I've reported, turns local law enforcement into bounty hunters by paying them to do immigration enforcement, including bonuses tied to how many people they find. The “Homeland Security Task Forces” priority refers the new federal-local strike forces Trump created by executive order on his first day back in office to hunt cartels and enforce immigration laws.

And the “crowded places” priority has its own ghost: the assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk, shot in front of a crowd at a university event last September.

That murder is what precipitated all of this. Three days after signing an executive order declaring “Antifa” a domestic terrorist organization, Trump issued NSPM-7 on September 25, 2025 — a national security order that opens with a reference to Kirk’s murder and builds a counterterrorism program meant to prevent the next one.

NSPM-7 asserts that political violence in America “does not emerge organically” but is the product of “sophisticated, organized campaigns.” It identifies its own “indicators” of domestic terrorism to investigate, including: “anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity; support for the overthrow of the United States Government; extremism on migration, race, and gender; and hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family, religion, and morality.”

Until now, NSPM-7 has largely pointed at federal machinery, like the FBI and IRS. But a brief section toward the bottom of NSPM-7 reaches down to your county sheriff. It orders the homeland security secretary to develop grant programs to pay local law enforcement to go after domestic terrorism.

Washington knew this would happen, long before Trump entered the White House.

FEMA was created in 1979 as an independent agency. But after the 9/11 attacks, in 2003 it was folded into the new counterterrorism-focused Department of Homeland Security. FEMA’s preparedness functions and grant programs were pulled out and scattered across the department.

That September, the undersecretary for emergency preparedness and response sent Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge a seven-page memo warning that the reorganization would cripple America's ability to respond to disasters. He was overruled. Two years later came Katrina.

By October 2012, a bipartisan congressional investigation reported that the Department of Homeland Security could not say how much it had spent on fusion centers (the state and regional intelligence hubs, built after 9/11, where local police, federal agents and analysts pool information). DHS’s own estimates ranged from $289 million to $1.4 billion. The intelligence coming out of them was “of uneven quality,” the Senate concluded, finding it “oftentimes shoddy, rarely timely, sometimes endangering citizens' civil liberties."

Reviewing thirteen months of fusion center reporting, investigators found nothing that uncovered a terrorist threat and no contribution to disrupting an active plot. Of 610 reports, 188 were never published, many because they lacked useful information or risked violating civil liberties protections. Among the reports flagged: a Muslim community group's book recommendations, parenting advice, and a motorcycle club's pamphlet advising members to be polite to police during traffic stops.

Fourteen years later, the machine is being handed a mandate to watch digital footprints for indicators of anti-American sentiment.

FEMA, meanwhile, has absorbed roughly a 14 percent workforce reduction since January 2025 while managing more than 300,000 projects across more than 600 open disaster declarations.

Even in my little corner of the world, in Wisconsin, I can see how desperately the country needs a functioning disaster response agency. Yesterday afternoon a tornado came through the Fox Valley, about a hundred miles northeast of where I live. The National Weather Service issued a Particularly Dangerous Situation warning, a designation it saves for the worst of them. Video of what it left behind is heartbreaking and all over social media today: homes torn open, everything inside gone.

I’m sure the people who lost their homes will be relieved to know that they’re safe from domestic terrorism.

What is needed now is the thing FEMA was actually created to do, done by a civil agency neither militarized nor given over to an anti-political terrorism agenda. Instead we see a climate-change denying, domestic terrorism-obsessed administration creating its own disaster, with a do-nothing Congress standing idly by.

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Francesca Hong’s insurgent campaign for governor of Wisconsin (where I live) echoes Zohran Mamdani’s rise, but with a striking difference.

She has something to say about national security.

Hong, 37, is a state legislator and chef based in Madison, where she was born and raised. The Democratic Socialists of America member entered the race for governor last September and has consistently led in the polls since March.

Whereas the New York mayor, for all his boldness in other areas, has largely avoided the issue of national security, Hong is facing it head on. I sent her a detailed questionnaire about her thinking on the Iran war, the president’s national security directive NSPM-7, and Wisconsin’s role in the war machine, and she came back with lengthy answers.

On an issue that many assume their governor has no role to play, Hong has proven otherwise. Most striking is her vow of a showdown with President Trump over the Wisconsin National Guard. As Hong told me:

“The focus of this campaign is on improving the lives of working people and families. That said, we do not live in a vacuum. As governor, I will tirelessly defend the people of this state against egregious federal encroachment and infringement upon our constitutional rights. I oppose any additional further deployments of the National Guard under federal status.”

This isn't hypothetical. Wisconsin Army National Guard troops have deployed in support of the war on Iran. Gen. Dan Caine, the Joint Chiefs chairman, volunteered it from the podium at a March 2 Pentagon briefing, singling out "the Wisconsin Army National Guard operating in Kuwait and Iraq." Governor Tony Evers confirmed it the next day.

Governors used to be able to say no. When a few of them refused to send Guard troops to Central America in the 1980s — Wisconsin's Tony Earl considered joining the lawsuit — Congress stripped them of that power under the Montgomery Amendment, a law upheld by the Supreme Court.

So I asked Hong: does a governor have any role left?

Hong replied:

“It will be my sworn duty as governor to defend the Constitution and to speak truth to power. I fully condemn Trump’s use of Wisconsin’s committed servants to execute his illegal war in Iran. I will refuse to comply with any request from this administration that perpetuates war and genocide around the world to the extent I can — and I will work with the state attorney general to file a lawsuit protecting Wisconsinites where executive authority cannot.”

And on the amendment itself:

“The Montgomery Amendment was an abandonment of checks and balances, and the Supreme Court offered a blank check to the president to federalize a state’s National Guard troops.”

Hong’s answers suggest a willingness to stand up to the federal government even when the odds look slim. That stands out at a time when so many see the Democratic Party as pre-folded lawn chairs allergic to conflict. The sense I get from talking to her supporters is that this willingness to throw a punch is a big part of her appeal.

“Trump’s test of our country’s limits will end with me”

The second section of the questionnaire dealt with NSPM-7, the September 2025 presidential order that instructs the federal national security system to treat “anti-Americanism,” “anti-capitalism,” “anti-Christianity,” and “extremism on migration, race, and gender” as supposed indicators of domestic terrorism.

It’s already produced results: eight defendants sentenced in the Prairieland case in Texas to a near-half millennium in federal prison; and 15 anti-ICE protesters indicted in Minnesota, where the U.S. Attorney cited NSPM-7 by name, to mention just a couple examples.

While NSPM-7 is a federal order, it’s carried out at the state level through FBI-led Joint Terrorism Task Forces in which local law enforcement participate. JTTFs were created in response to 9/11 and exist in every state but which no governor has ever terminated or even curbed.

Hong may be the first to do so, telling me:

“Because of the seriousness of the Trump threat, I would use my authority over state police forces to cease any cooperation with a federal joint operation task force that is designed to target American citizens exercising their civil liberties.”

On the existing memoranda of understanding that bind local departments to federal operations — the paperwork nobody covers and everybody signs — Hong said:

“These MOUs are a loophole to essentially federalize local police forces. I do not wish to see Wisconsin become a patchwork of communities where people are unsure if they are safe depending on which side of the county line they may find themselves.”

As with the Guard deployments, agree or disagree, there’s no question where Hong stands. She even called for the “immediate abolition” of ICE and vowed a showdown with President Trump, should he invoke the Insurrection Act.

Here’s how she put it:

“I am calling for the immediate abolition of the fascist brigade known as ICE, the banning of masked agents in our communities, and the protection of essential public spaces for all individuals. Furthermore, I will never concede to Trump’s demands to invoke the Insurrection Act. Our National Guard troops and, frankly, the National Guard troops of other states will not be engaging in police activities in Wisconsin. Trump’s test of our country’s limits will end with me.”

Going nuclear

I also asked Hong about her position on Wisconsin’s manufacturing role in the overall war machine of the country.

More than 300 suppliers across the state feed the Navy’s Columbia-class ballistic missile submarine program — the future sea leg of the nuclear weapons arsenal. One of the boats is even named the USS Wisconsin. In addition, Marinette builds warships. Oshkosh has built tens of thousands of armored trucks for the Army, and Sen. Tammy Baldwin is currently fighting to claw a military truck contract back from an out-of-state competitor.

This is the question that separates anti-war rhetoric from anti-war politics, because the answer costs union jobs in a state where union jobs are the whole ballgame. Hong took the swing, saying:

“I oppose militarism, and nuclear proliferation. I believe in President Eisenhower’s dream that we use ‘atoms for peace’ and orient all our magnificent scientific achievements towards aims that benefit all people. Republican talking points like to suggest that our desire for peace comes with the price of job loss. We are ready and prepared to expose that lie.”

She proposes conversion rather than shutdown, saying:

“Just as the nation rallied and pivoted to war production in 1941, I ask why we couldn’t generate the same urgency and enthusiasm towards producing energy and environmentally efficient vehicles, homes, and businesses.”

Her economic case is that public spending yields more jobs than military spending:

“Engaging in the same old corporate welfare for arms manufacturers neither makes the world a safer place nor develops the Wisconsin economy... military spending creates five jobs per million dollars spent, compared to 13 in education.”

And the tell that she knows exactly how dangerous this terrain is:

“We will not arbitrarily nor deliberately cost workers their jobs... We needn’t ask whether Wisconsin can transition to a peace economy, but who writes the transition plan.”

Whether or not you buy it, notice what it is: an actual position, in a state with a defense industrial base, from a candidate who could be governor in five months.

Everyone else

I asked the other two leading candidates to answer the same questions, and former Lt. Gov. Mandela Barnes answered, more cautious, but still recognizing that a governor has to have a position on something that many think is too remote or unchanging.

“As Governor, Mandela Barnes would oppose further Wisconsin National Guard deployments to Iran,” Lauren Hitt, a spokesperson for the Barnes campaign, told me. “Mandela understands the obstacles presented by the Montgomery Amendment, but he would seriously consider a legal challenge, given that Trump continues to recklessly put our service members in harm’s way.”

If true, this represents a challenge to federal power the likes of which we haven’t seen from a Governor in decades. Barnes’ language is far more conservative than Hong’s, but it’s also not nothing.

There’s also a hint of skepticism of the MOUs between state and federal law enforcement:

“As Governor, Mandela will carefully review MOUs to ensure that any federal-state law enforcement cooperation is aimed squarely at keeping Wisconsinites safe, not supporting Trump’s dangerous, unconstitutional attacks on Americans whose only crime is disagreeing with him.”

A promise to “carefully review MOUs” is, of course, not a promise to change them. But it’s more than I got from Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley, who did not respond to my questions.

It’s hard to overstate how strange this primary has been.

74-year old Evers announced last summer he wouldn’t seek a third term, opening Wisconsin’s first genuinely competitive governor’s race in roughly a generation. Around a half-dozen Democrats piled in. Barnes, who came within about 27,000 votes of unseating Senator Ron Johnson in 2022, was the presumptive favorite from day one. Hong was the wildcard — a state rep from Madison’s bluest district with no statewide profile, polling around 14 percent in March.

Then the field started coming apart.

In early July, former Wisconsin Economic Development Corp. CEO Missy Hughes and Crowley both quit and endorsed Lt. Gov. Sara Rodriguez, who had just won the straw poll at the state party convention. For about a week, Rodriguez looked like the consolidation candidate — the establishment’s answer to Hong.

Then the $1 million TV ad blitz Rodriguez’s campaign had announced on July 7 never aired.

Rodriguez said she had hundreds of thousands of dollars less on hand than she’d been told. She fired her campaign manager, citing “serious mismanagement,” held a Monday press conference calling it a bump in the road — but by Friday was out of the race.

“I am deeply hurt and betrayed by what happened,” Rodriguez then said. Campaign finance reports filed that week showed her with less cash than every rival in the race, including Hong.

Roughly 24 hours later, Crowley un-quit. He relaunched his campaign Saturday in Milwaukee, telling supporters, “We cannot allow the GOP to choose the Democratic nominee for governor of the great state of Wisconsin, period” — a slight clearly directed at Hong.

Governor Evers quickly endorsed Crowley, prompting backlash over suspicions that the party establishment was putting its thumb on the scale to defeat Hong.

For his part, when Crowley was asked about people’s concerns that he’s the establishment’s pick, he replied: “"When you think about the establishment candidate, I don't think you see a black kid from the city of Milwaukee."

The primary is August 11. The winner faces congressman Tom Tiffany, one of the most conservative members of the House and Trump’s endorsee.

Something’s up

Francesca Hong was born in Madison in 1988 to Korean immigrant parents, graduated from Madison West, enrolled at UW–Madison to study Spanish and journalism, and dropped out to become a cook. She started in 2009 washing dishes and taking every part-time kitchen job she could get, worked her way up to executive chef at 43 North, and in 2016 opened Morris Ramen downtown with her then-husband. One of the restaurant’s first events was a Planned Parenthood fundraiser. Morris Ramen closed in 2024, killed by rent and costs.

Hong ran for the Assembly in 2020 because of the pandemic, won a seven-way primary with 28 percent, and became the first Asian American elected to the Wisconsin Legislature. She takes no corporate PAC money. She is one of four socialist caucus members in the Assembly, and a single mother known — per the Wisconsin Examiner — for prodigious cussing and karaoke fundraisers. (“I curse because I care,” she’s said.)

The state GOP chair’s summary of the electability case against her: “We’re in Brooklyn, Wisconsin, not Brooklyn, New York.”

Maybe, but I don’t buy it. Wisconsin also elected socialist mayors in Milwaukee for most of the first half of the twentieth century, and Hong is explicit about claiming that lineage rather than the New York one.

Here’s what I actually want to flag, apart from who wins on August 11.

For a decade, the Democratic Party’s answer on national security has been to have no answer — to treat war, surveillance, and the security state as federal weather, something that happens to a state rather than something a state participates in. Governors sign the MOUs. Governors sign off on the Guard. Governors hand out the tax credits to the defense contractors. And then governors say national security is above their pay grade.

Hong’s questionnaire answers are obviously not, on their own, proof that she’d follow through.

But as candidate for governor, she clearly read the statute, named the precedent, and says what she’d do inside the constraints and what she’d sue over outside of it. Her opponent Barnes, though hedging, puts himself on record against further Iran deployments and floats a legal challenge — a position he almost certainly would not have volunteered two years ago.

Something is shifting here. National security is coming home.

Previous insurgent candidates like Mamdani spent 2025 proving that a candidate in America can win on affordability issues like rent and groceries. Hong is testing something harder: whether a state-level candidate can also challenge the national security establishment.

They aren't separate questions. The Pentagon is seeking $1.5 trillion a year — which over four years would be more than the United States spent on all of World War II (yes, adjusted for inflation). With crushing expenses like that, it’s hard to imagine much money being left over for an affordability agenda.

That’s the Hong innovation. Not simply that a democratic socialist is leading a poll in a swing state — that’s the horse race. It’s that someone running for an office with real, if limited, power over matters of national security is finally treating that as part of the overall job.

I’ve enclosed copies of Hong’s and Barnes’ answers to my questions in full below. Please chip in to help support this coverage by becoming a paid subscriber or with a contribution to my GoFundMe here.

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Pete Hegseth in his wisdom has identified “the greatest threat that our nation faces,” as he told Congress on Tuesday.

It’s not nuclear weapons. Nor is it China. It’s not Iran, Russia, or North Korea. It’s not Cuba or any other country rising or falling. It’s not drugs. It’s not terrorism. It’s not Islam. It’s not “Antifa” or the political left or immigration or migration or anything relating to people. It’s not cybersecurity or the smart phone, artificial intelligence, killer robots, or weapons. It’s not anything related to health or, in Hegseth’s arsenal, laziness or appearance. It’s not an asteroid or some other extinction event. It’s not overpopulation, a pandemic, nor biotechnology in nature. It’s not climate change (of course). And it’s not war itself.

In his eternal quest to remind everyone there’s a dumber official than Sebastian Gorka (somehow), the Secretary of War testified under oath that the greatest threat to America is not giving the Pentagon more money.

“Not funding this department at $1.5 trillion, I believe, is the greatest threat that our nation faces,” he told the Senate. The one-and-a-half trillion dollar figure refers to the record budget sought by the military.

You read that right: the Pentagon is seeking a whopping 40% increase over last year’s budget that already tops $1 TRILLION dollars(!)

War is hell — a hell of a good business, that is.

All of World War II, all of it from 1941 to 1945, cost the United States an estimated $4.5 trillion in today’s inflation-adjusted dollars. Hegseth wants to spend even more than that over the next four years. Not to fight World War III, mind you. (That would require a supplemental budget.)

Handsy Hegseth now has his hand in America’s pocket, trying to fish our wallet out. And by all appearances Congress, with its power of the purse, is going along.

Democrat Congressman Adam Smith, the ranking member on the committee overseeing the Pentagon, condemned any calls to defund the Department of War this week.

“ The Democratic Socialists of America, in their platform, is ‘defund the Department of Defense,’” Smith complained during a nearly hour-long interview with Krystal Ball of Breaking Points.

Smith continued: “ I believe that we do need to have a Department of Defense. We need to support our troops.  We have national security threats that we have to be prepared to deal with, all right?”

And what will all of this bonanza buy? A military 40 percent larger? Forty percent more planes, ships, tanks, etc.? The answer is even more obscene than you can imagine, for Hegeth’s vision isn’t even a major increase in the size. The most powerful military in the world, with every dazzling weapon and innovation you could imagine, just wants more. It wants more weapons — the business end (bombs, missiles, drones, and on and on) — to be able to bomb Iran, or Cuba, or China, forever and never run out.

Todd Harrison, a defense budget expert at the American Enterprise Institute, calls a spade a spade.

“This is not at all a strategy-driven budget. This is a budget-driven budget,” Harrison says in one of his interviews excoriating the $1.5 trillion budget request.

The budget buys newer nuclear weapons and a next generation of bombers, submarines, and ground based ICBMs. The budget buys sixth-generation airplanes; and the next generation of one-way attack drones. The budget pays the troops more, pays the consultants more, pays for more research, pays for more budget specialists (and even auditors); but in the end, it does not anticipate all any of this resulting in MORE of anything. Not more than any prudently planned investment might. Not more nuclear weapons. Not more bombers, fighters, or ships. Not more soldiers even. Each individual item perpetually gets so expensive that fewer are purchased. So the Army and Marine Corps won’t get bigger, nor will the Air Force or the Navy. The nuclear arsenal will stay the same size.

In other words, this 40 percent higher military budget would not result in a 40 percent larger military.

The one thing that will be new will be drones. A next generation of “one-way” loitering autonomous weapon will be purchased: drones, mini-missiles, and robots. The budget request asks for a mind-boggling $54 billion into a single line item for the Defense Autonomous Warfare Group (DAWG) — but even there, how you get to $1.5 trillion overall is an otherworldly arithmetic formula.

You can see why the Pentagon has never once passed an audit.

I agree that the Pentagon budget represents the greatest threat to America — but not in the sense that Hegseth means.

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A new State Department report on Cuba’s “campaign of subversion against the United States” is a virtual government blacklist against left-wing Americans and groups. Linked to last week’s Rubio-led summit on “political terrorism,” the report is unusually candid about the government’s targets.

“Many of the most significant upheavals in recent American political history — from the George Floyd riots to the rise of Antifa to the explosion of pro-terrorist activism on American college campuses — can be linked, in some way, shape, or form, to Cuban influence,” the report says.

As for who these supposed agents of Cuban influence are, the report is remarkably explicit. It names people like Ben Cohen (of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream fame), Mayors Zohran Mamdani and Karen Bass, media figures like Amy Goodman and Hasan Piker, and organizations like the Democratic Socialists of America and the Amazon Labor Union.

The implication is clear: Secretary of State Marco Rubio thinks there should be a modern-day blacklist of the political left in America. In fact, the report explicitly mentions the “blacklists, McCarthy-era investigations and prosecutions” of the 1950s and their effectiveness at dismembering the Communist Party USA.

The 100-page report, titled “Cuba: The Capital of 21st Century Communism,” was released this morning.

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An entire section of the report — numbering over three pages long — is dedicated to the Democratic Socialists of America.

“The Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) serves as a particularly potent illustration of the ideological victory of Cuba’s effort to position itself as the spiritual capital of Third Worldist Radicalism,” the report says. “This represents a significant advance for the Cuban influence operation: Havana no longer needs to rely solely on intelligence penetration or asset cultivation to exert influence over the United States.”

Though the report concedes that “DSA was not shaped by the direct and tangible influence of the Cuban government” and that it has “organic ideological commitments,” it insists that “None of that is to say that the group has no ties to the Cuban regime and its influence network.”

Instead, the report points to the group’s delegations to Cuba as evidence of Cuban influence.

“For more than six decades, the Cuban regime has been the leading sponsor of radical leftism and Third Worldism in the United States,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio said in a post on X/Twitter linking to the report.

Whatever you think of DSA, it is hardly fringe. It claims as members prominent politicians like New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani and has helped to nominate dozens of politicians like him to office in recent years. Senator Bernie Sanders identifies as a Democratic Socialist — having himself popularized the term — as do Reps. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez and Rashida Tlaib, who are card carrying members (as well as Mamdani).

The Cuba report follows last week’s Rubio-led international summit on “political terrorism.” That summit, as I reported, introduced the new term “Far-Left Terrorism” (abbreviated “FLT”), a term it never really defined.

A White House press release summarizing the event said that “far-left extremism will be treated with the same seriousness and ferocity the world has long reserved for jihadist terrorism.”

Speaking at the summit, Rubio vowed that further new terrorist designations for left-wing groups would be coming “soon.”

Jeremy Lewin, the Under Secretary of State for Foreign Assistance, linked last week’s political terrorism summit to today’s Cuba report, saying on X: “For seven decades, the Cuban regime has been behind both the ideological underpinnings of third worldism and subversive organizing structures of the new radical left political terrorists that @SecRubio called out with clarity last week.”

But virtually all the summit could do to substantiate the supposed scourge of political terrorism was to focus on groups that are almost comically dated — like the 70’s era Symbionese Liberation Army or the Weather Underground. The summit was vague about what are the equivalent groups today.

Today’s Cuba report, however, “names names,” in an obvious attempt to stigmatize American citizens who are very much politically active today.

In some cases these are even sitting politicians, from congresswoman Maxine Waters to Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass.

I read the 100-page report and counted references to at least 43 contemporary American groups and individuals, which the report identifies as follows:

• Adely, Suzanne: The president of the National Lawyers Guild who participated in the Nuestra América Convoy and who, the report notes, praised Venezuela’s 2024 elections.

• Amazon Labor Union: A labor union founded by Christian Smalls that participated in the 2026 Nuestra América Convoy to Cuba.

• Antifa: A decentralized group of self-described “Anti-fascist” political activists

• Assata’s Daughters: A Chicago-based Black Lives Matter abolitionist offshoot that trains young activists in the radical spirit of Assata Shakur.

• Association for Investment in Popular Action Committees (AIPAC): A California-based umbrella nonprofit that funds left-wing media and delegations to Cuba and Venezuela.

• Bass, Karen: The current Mayor of Los Angeles and former Congresswoman who was a Venceremos Brigade organizer in the 1970s.

• Benjamin, Medea (Susan Benjamin): A co-founder of Code Pink and Global Exchange who organizes Cuba solidarity efforts.

• Black Alliance for Peace: An activist group that maps U.S. military bases and police training facilities as targets for radical agitation.

• Black Lives Matter (BLM) (including Global Network Foundation, Grassroots, and at School): A sprawling racial justice network whose leaders and offshoots, the report says, have expressed solidarity with Cuban regime and radical figures like Assata Shakur.

• Boudin, Chesa: The former District Attorney of San Francisco and son of Weather Underground member Kathy Boudin.

• changingFrequencies: A Black Queer Feminist-led abolitionist project aiming to disrupt waht it calls the “Medical Industrial Complex”.

• Claudia Jones School: A Washington, D.C.-based organizing collective that conducts popular education and, the report says, pro-Cuba lobbying.

• Code Pink: Women for Peace: A left-wing protest group that describes itself as anti-war and organizes solidarity delegations to Cuba.

• Cohen, Ben: The co-founder of Ben & Jerry’s who attended the wedding of Neville Roy Singham and Jodie Evans.

• de la Cruz, Claudia: The co-founder of the People’s Forum, IFCO executive director, and 2024 presidential candidate for the Party for Socialism and Liberation.

• De Los Santos, Manolo: The co-founder and head of the People’s Forum who the report says maintains deep relationships with Cuban regime elites.

• Democratic Socialists of America (DSA): A major socialist political organization that has organized official delegations to Cuba.

• Ensler, Eve (V): A prominent playwright who attended the wedding of Neville Roy Singham and Jodie Evans.

• Equality for Flatbush: A Brooklyn-based Black Lives Matter abolitionist group fighting gentrification, police, and ICE.

• Evans, Jodie: The co-founder of Code Pink who married Neville Roy Singham.

• Floyd, George: A Minneapolis man whose 2020 death sparked nationwide uprisings that the report notes were praised by Cuba.

• Garza, Alicia: The co-founder of Black Lives Matter who credited Assata Shakur as a key influence in her organizing work.

• Goodman, Amy: The host of Democracy Now! who the report notes attended the wedding of Neville Roy Singham and Jodie Evans.

• Haitian Women for Haitian Refugees: An activist group led by Black women that organizes to defend Black migrants and block deportations.

• Hirsi, Isra: A campus activist and daughter of Ilhan Omar who was suspended from Barnard College for organizing anti-Israel encampments before traveling to Cuba.

• IFCO / Pastors for Peace: An ecumenical foundation that organizes aid caravans to leftist regimes and serves as a fiscal sponsor for numerous radical U.S. groups.

• Larudee, Paul: A U.S. citizen based in San Francisco who serves as the North American coordinator for the pro-Iranian “Resistance Axis” coalition Al-Tajammu.

• Mamdani, Zohran: Mayor of New York

• National Lawyers Guild (NLG): An association of radical lawyers that provides legal defense and “legal observers” for various left-wing groups

• National Network on Cuba (NNOC): A coalition of over 60 American groups dedicated to lobbying for Cuba and coordinating nationwide direct actions.

• Omar, Ilhan: A Democratic Congresswoman and mother of campus activist Isra Hirsi.

• Party for Socialism and Liberation: A leftist political party that fielded a 2024 presidential candidate and conducts protests.

• People’s Forum, The: An activist hub for anti-ICE and pro-Cuban agitation.

• Piker, Hasan: A streamer and left-wing political commentator who, the report notes, traveled to Cuba to film a documentary and participated in the Nuestra América Convoy.

• Pressley, Ayanna: A Democratic Congresswoman who, the report notes, publicly praised convicted murderer Assata Shakur upon her death.

• Singham, Neville Roy: A Shanghai-based American technology magnate who funds various left-wing activist groups.

• Smalls, Christian: The founder of the Amazon Labor Union who participated in the 2026 Nuestra América Convoy to Cuba.

• Thousand Currents: A progressive nonprofit that served as the fiscal sponsor for the Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation.

• Villaraigosa, Antonio: A former Mayor of Los Angeles and Speaker of the California Assembly who was a Venceremos Brigade alumnus.

• Viva Palestina US: The American branch of an international network that, the report says, previously provided convoys and funds to Hamas.

• Waters, Maxine: A Democratic Congresswoman who, the report notes, once wrote a letter urging Fidel Castro not to extradite fugitive Assata Shakur.

• Wilson, Diane: A co-founder of Code Pink.

• Witness for Peace Solidarity Collective: An organization that runs recurring solidarity delegations to Cuba.

Guilt by association at its finest. But what exactly are they guilty of?

What the report shows isn’t that any of these people are knowingly taking directions from a foreign power — only that they disagree with the U.S. government on Cuba policy (or at most, agree with Cuba).

Their views can be wrong — aggressively, offensively wrong even — but it’s their goddamn right as Americans to express them.

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— Edited by William M. Arkin

Tomorrow, Marco Rubio will open a summit unveiling a new designation branding his political opponents as terrorists, documents leaked to me reveal.

The unveil will happen on the opening day of the over 60-nation summit — which I reported on here — called the Ministerial on the Resurgence of Political Terrorism.

That this summit is happening at a time when the Iran war is literally exploding, and while so much else in the world seems to be on fire, is a baffling way for the Secretary of State (and National Security Advisor!) to spend his precious time.

Welcome to the War on FLT, short for “Far-Left Terrorism,” a new acronym appearing in State Department documents about the summit and which I obtained.

A three-letter acronym for an imaginary threat that could be radioactive to a politician’s presidential ambitions. Sound familiar? It’s this generation’s WMD. And it’s going to haunt him.

Rubio, who fancies himself a deep thinker and is already being anointed as the experienced middle-of-the-road alternative to JD Vance, is revealing his true stripes: Trump flunkey, oblivious, and lost in the sauce of the bureaucracy’s ideological hotbox.

Far-left is hard enough to define (who decides what’s “far”?) but to add terrorism takes it to another level of crazy. Not that Rubio cares. The summit will introduce a new visa policy under which State targets “far-left terrorist and other aligned groups” not just for violence against actual people but also “economic sabotage including against public and private property” — a phrase broad enough to cover a broken window or a boycott.

Rubio has spent a decade cultivating the image of the responsible statesman — fourteen years on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, the grown-up steadying a chaotic administration. The FLT designation is a good place to watch that image dissolve. The State Department is being turned into another clown car, and Rubio seems happy to be the driver.

State’s talking points drop any pretense that this is a politically neutral endeavor. Officials are instructed to rely on the following talking points (per the leaked documents):

• “We go where the threat is. Political terrorism is resurgent, and far-left terrorism specifically poses a unique and distinctive threat today. Addressing and defeating that is the focus of the Ministerial.”

• “The United States has observed a concerning convergence between violent far-left and anarchist networks and other violent extremist actors, including violent pro-Iranian and antisemitic networks, as well as militant anti-tech and eco-terrorist movements. This is a trend we are monitoring closely and engaging partners to address.”

• “The Ministerial will focus world attention on the resurgence of political terrorism and bring together the United States and foreign partners to address the terrorist actors, particularly far-left terrorist networks, operating across Europe, Asia, the Western Hemisphere, and beyond. It focuses on improving coordination, information sharing, and practical law enforcement cooperation to counter political terrorism, including violent far-left attacks on law enforcement, critical infrastructure, political figures, and state institutions.”

• “Political terrorism is resurgent, particularly among far-left terrorist networks that have grown more sophisticated. They leverage decentralized cell structures, encrypted communications, and transnational coordination to carry out attacks on rail, energy, and telecommunications infrastructure, as well as targeted violence against political figures and their families. In 2024 alone, there were 21 far-left and anarchist terrorist attacks in the EU — nearly matching the number of jihadist attacks that year.”

• “These are not isolated incidents, but are part of a sustained, transnational campaign of political terrorism that is growing in sophistication and lethality, aimed at dismantling the foundations of self-governing societies.”

• “The Department of State is committed to confronting organized political violence, including from far-left terrorist and other aligned groups that engage in or support terrorist or criminal activities, economic sabotage, or support far-left terrorist-led violent actions.”

• “In support of this effort, the Department of State is announcing a new visa restriction policy that targets members of far-left terrorist and other aligned groups who have supported or incited acts of terrorism; supported violent criminal activity; participated in economic sabotage including against public and private property; financed, recruited, or provided logistical support for violent or criminal actions committed by far-left terrorist and other aligned groups; and/or facilitated the convergence of far left terrorist and other aligned networks for the purposes of economic sabotage.”

• “…this policy will protect U.S. citizens and safeguard the American homeland by restricting entry of foreign nationals who finance, recruit, incite, or otherwise enable terrorist, violent, and criminal far-left terrorist networks — closing the visa pathways that far-left terrorists and other aligned groups could exploit to threaten American lives, undermine economic stability, and coordinate violent actions on U.S. soil.”

Consider who Rubio is comfortable putting in charge of the summit, names I gleaned from an internal State Department roster detailing the event.

Tera Dahl, a senior advisor in State’s Bureau of Counterterrorism, is a Michael Flynn colleague from the first Trump administration who was pushed out of the National Security Council by H.R. McMaster. Before that, she wrote for Steve Bannon’s Breitbart, co-founded the now-defunct Council on Global Security — a think tank devoted to warning about the dangers of Islam. There, she worked with Katharine Gorka, wife of current Trump terrorism czar Sebastian Gorka, authoring a string of pieces praising Egypt’s strongman Abdel Fattah el-Sisi for “leading Egypt towards democracy” as he jailed his critics.

Dahl got her start as a staffer for then-Representative Michele Bachmann — which is its own kind of full circle. In 2012, Bachmann and four House colleagues sent letters to federal inspectors general alleging that the Muslim Brotherhood had infiltrated the U.S. government, singling out longtime Clinton aide Huma Abedin. The claim was baseless enough that John McCain went to the Senate floor to rebuke a member of his own party.

Then there’s Monica Jacobsen, another senior official at State’s Counterrorism Bureau, a holy warrior who emphasizes the defense of global Christians. She testified to Congress this year that her agency would “hold governments’ feet to the fire when they fail to address terrorist threats that undermine religious freedom.”

Then there’s Brent Munyon, Senior Adviser to the Deputy Secretary of Management and Resources. A few years ago, he was a partisan dirt digger for the Republican National Committee. Finally, there’s Oscar Buynevich, Special Advisor for the Office of the Under Secretary for Public Diplomacy, another partisan commentator whose career amounted to shoveling culture war slop at right-wing campus watchdogs like Campus Reform and The College Fix.

It’s a rogues’ gallery befitting the imaginary Iraqi WMD fiasco, the main contributor to the mess we are still in more than 20 years later. Think Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle.

Welcome to Rubio 2028.

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— Edited by William M. Arkin

Secretary of State Marco Rubio will be hosting a big diplomatic summit in Washington on Thursday — not about the Iran war, but about “political terrorism.”

Sterile as that may sound, it’s a resurrection of an obscure Nixon-era term pointed squarely at the political left and recruiting foreign governments to assist its war on domestic political opponents. As a U.S. diplomatic cable leaked to me puts it, all of this is about combatting “far-left terrorism.”

To the extent that media have noticed the summit at all, they’ve focused on the confusion and wariness among some of the over 60 countries invited; but the significance of the term has been completely overlooked. Put simply, it’s a more powerful attack on protest, free speech and the Democratic Party than Trump’s designation of “Antifa” as a domestic terrorist group or NSPM-7.

The summit is called the “Ministerial on the Resurgence of Political Terrorism.” Unlike familiar organized terrorist groups like Al Qaeda or ISIS, “political terrorism” refers to domestic opposition, here and abroad.

If you’ve never heard the term, it’s because the Trump administration has up to now never used it. In fact, this is the first time it’s been used by the federal government in decades.

“This summit is a vital first step in countering rising political violence worldwide, including far-left terrorism, through international collaboration,” a U.S. diplomatic cable dated July 13 says.

“Political terrorism” is a term first adopted by the Nixon administration for its war on “subversives,” carried out in the darkest days of the Vietnam war and a period of intense public protest. Sometimes referred to as “COINTELPRO” (an acronym for Counterintelligence Program), it was a series of covert and illegal actions by the FBI from 1956 through the early seventies that aimed to surveil, infiltrate, entrap and undermine leftist political organizations, everything from civil rights and anti-war groups to the Black Panthers.

State Department spokesman Tommy Piggot hinted at the historical significance last week.

“The resurgence of violent far-left political terrorism is not a new phenomenon — it is an old threat re-emerging with strong transnational links and new convergences,” Piggot said in a statement on the summit.

The administration’s obsession with left-wing terrorism was precipitated by the murder of conservative commentator Charlie Kirk — a personal friend of Trump’s and many in the administration. In my reporting at the time, based on interviews with friends of the alleged gunman, Tyler Robinson, I warned that there wasn’t any evidence that the murder was a partisan act, nor that he was a leftist or even political in general.

That reporting, criticized at the time in an environment where seemingly everything was polarized into Team Red White and Blue, has now been vindicated to an extent that I did not anticipate.

Just last week, Robinson’s lover, Lance Twiggs, who is cooperating with federal prosecutors, testified that Robinson barely ever discussed politics and had never once mentioned Kirk before the shooting.

It’s an extraordinary revelation, made under the clearest penalty of perjury one can imagine, given the Trump administration’s investment in framing the killing as an act of “political terrorism.” After the shooting, FBI Director Kash Patel even testified before Congress that the Bureau was investigating every other member of Robinsons’ discord chats and even the possibility of a foreign nexus. This was based on his suspicion that the killing was carried out by some kind of organized cell, a theory that promptly fell apart.

The killing was, by all appearances, just a young man with a gun, pissed off about what Charlie Kirk said about the LGBT community.

To the Trump camp, Kirk’s killing solidified their thinking that a vast conspiracy existed amongst the left to destroy the nation. Their counter to this imagined national security threat has been to link Trump’s NSPM-7 national security directive, the nihilist violent extremism label, and the executive order designating “Antifa” as a terrorist organization into a larger umbrella: “political terrorism.”

Or as I call, POLTERGEIST, because the “political-terrorism” term is an attempt by the Trump administration to summon a ghost from the Nixon years.

Perhaps the only official definition of political terrorism appears in a declassified 1970 CIA intelligence report.

“Political terrorism is symbolic action, by those out of power, designed to achieve political ends through the systematic use of violence,” the report says.

It goes on to differentiate political terrorism from other forms of violence, saying:

“It is distinguished from intimidation (which emphasizes threats), mob violence (normally unplanned and uncontrolled), mass insurrection (larger in scale, later in time), and governmental terrorism (presented as law-enforcement). It may be practiced by anarchists, by nihilists, by their successors the modern totalitarians, by nationalists, and by a variety of social groups with genuine or fancied grievances.”

In 1972, responding to the Black September terrorist attack at the Munich Olympic Games, Nixon issued a formal presidential memorandum that officially institutionalized counter-political terrorism by creating a Cabinet Committee. Nixon’s 1972 mandate explicitly ordered the heads of the State Department, DOJ, CIA, FBI, Treasury and other agencies to coordinate government-wide actions to “prevent terrorism here and abroad.”

Again, not terrorism as we normally think of it, but political opposition.

In response to the memo, the State Department appointed its first-ever Special Assistant to the Secretary of State and Coordinator for Combating Terrorism. Within days, the new Special Assistant was peppering the term “political terrorism” in internal memos.

Unlike the Kirk assassination, the Munich Olympics massacre really was carried out by a terrorist group. Black September was a highly structured, centrally-commanded paramilitary with the explicit political goal of compelling the release of Palestinian political prisoners and forcing global visibility onto the Palestinian nationalist cause. It counted among its leaders the intelligence chief of the Palestinian Authority, Amin al-Hindi.

Now compare that with Tyler Robinson, an angsty 23-year-old from a Mormon family who was dating Lance (known to him as “Luna”) Twiggs and was upset enough about Charlie Kirk’s rhetoric on LBGT people to take action, allegedly.

In Trump’s National Security Presidential Memorandum 7, or NPSM-7, the president directs the Departments of State Treasury, Justice and various other federal agencies to prioritize investigating and preempting left-wing violence. Sound familiar?

In a section examining the effectiveness of terrorism in different political environments, the CIA report from 1970 says:

“Terrorism can pose a serious challenge to free societies in which great social injustices or severe economic problems exist (e.g. Guatemala), but terrorism does not do well in free societies in which serious grievances are not widespread [redacted].”

Good thing Americans perceive no “great social injustices” today!

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— Edited by William M. Arkin

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I’LL BE BACK, Mitch McConnell finally announced yesterday. Well, sort of.

“As much as it frustrates me, this process takes time,” the 84-year-old senator wrote.

The 600-word statement, expressing his intent to return to Congress at some undisclosed point, was his first since his (also undisclosed) hospitalization a month ago. It was accompanied by a photo of him on a hospital bed, clutching a copy of Sunday’s Washington Post — the kind of picture that kidnappers use to establish proof-of-life.

McConnell statement

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Which I guess makes McConnell the hostage-taker? It must feel that way to the over 4 million Kentuckians who have been without half their Senate representation for the past month.

McConnell’s statement is a masterclass in political manipulation. But it’s also proof that the public demands for transparency are starting to work.

Recall what actually prompted the public outrage. The emergency dispatch audio published last month by independent journalist Deseree Townsend made three specific factual assertions: “cardiac arrest,” an “unconscious” patient, and “CPR in progress.”

Now, despite the audio, McConnell says “I didn’t have a heart attack or a stroke.” But nowhere in the letter does he address the cardiac arrest.

Swapping out “cardiac arrest” for “heart attack” is a clever move because most people use the two terms interchangeably. They are not. A heart attack is a plumbing problem — a blocked artery starving the heart of blood, with the patient usually awake and in pain. Cardiac arrest is a much more dangerous electrical problem — the heart stops pumping, the patient collapses, and death follows in minutes without CPR.

So you can truthfully deny a heart attack while having had the more lethal thing.

The letter goes on to deny a litany of ailments that nobody really alleged: no broken bones, no concussion, no tumors, no hemorrhages. All of this gives the impression of disclosure while revealing nothing.

He admits that he was “briefly unconscious,” was hospitalized, and developed “a mild case of pneumonia.” The cause, per the attached note from the Office of the Attending Physician, was a fall attributed to his post-polio condition — one of several this year.

We’ve seen this movie before. When Susan Collins was finally forced to address her visible tremor in May, she reached for the term “benign essential tremor” — the “benign” being a bit of vestigial branding that neurologists have largely dropped, precisely because patients say it minimizes the often debilitating reality of the condition.

The gerontocracy’s play, when pressed on their obvious decrepitude, is minimal transparency. It is a Washington battle plan that the conventional news media always parrot. They did so in Collins’ case, with major outlets incorrectly using the word “benign” in their headlines.

It’s easy to feel cynical about McConnell’s response. But it’s important to note how genuinely extraordinary this is: the mothball mafia Don himself, who ran the Republican Senate with an iron fist for eighteen years, was forced to say something and release that humiliating photo due to public pressure. And I guarantee you that a famously arrogant prick like McConnell did not want to do that even.

“My impression of men of that age is that they’re a little private when it comes to their health,” former McConnell aide Scott Jennings told CNN last week.

McConnell says as much in his statement, swerving into self-pity about how his generation “hesitate[s] to share the vulnerability that comes with growing older.”

“Even in the public eye, I feel that same instinct — I can’t help it,” the Senator adds.

Yeah, well I can’t help clowning on you mummies. And from the looks of social media, countless other Americans feel the same way. For the first time that I can remember, the whole respect-your-elders routine Congress always falls back on isn’t working anymore.

Don’t let all the cynicism fool you: from McConnell to Collins, congressional leaders hate having to even briefly perform accountability to the public, which they regard as pesky vermin.

McConnell’s bow to public pressure here was a quick one. But it’s the first from him I’ve ever seen. Now let’s make him bend the knee.

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— Edited by William M. Arkin

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Senator Lindsey Graham died last night at age 71, ending a three-decade career as a member of Congress that started in 1995.

Washington is shocked. But 71 is roughly the life expectancy for a man in South Carolina, the state he represented.

Graham becomes the sixth “senior” member of Congress to die in office this term alone (assuming Mitch McConnell isn’t already dead), the other five listed below. But fear not: 78-year-old 13-term congressman Joe Wilson is reportedly interested in running for Graham’s seat.

• Rep. David Scott (D‑GA) died at age 80 on April 22, 2026;

• Rep. Raúl M. Grijalva (D‑AZ) died at age 77 on March 13, 2025;

• Rep. Gerry Connolly (D‑VA), age 75 on May 21, 2025;

• Rep. Sylvester Turner (D‑TX) died at age 70 on March 4, 2025;

• Rep. Doug LaMalfa (R‑CA), died at age 65 on January 6, 2026

One might think this would prompt a debate about gerontocracy, but the FBI wants you instead to worry about national security.

“The FBI is assisting local authorities and has made every necessary resource available,” Director Kash Patel said in a statement after Graham’s death. Patel’s strange intervention has prompted the conspiracy-minded to go wild.

Laura Loomer, a prominent conservative activist and confidant of President Trump’s, cited Patel’s statement as evidence of foul play in Graham’s death. (There’s zero evidence for this.)

“It’s more likely that Russia or Iran poisoned Senator Graham, which is probably why the FBI is now investigating his sudden death upon returning from Ukraine,” Loomer said in a post on X/Twitter, where she has 2 million followers.

It’s a theme Loomer is hammering on, demanding that “the FBI should provide security to those who the Iranian regime is now promising to assassinate.” Loomer, an outspoken critic of Iran, thinks that she herself is a target of the regime as well.

Given her popularity among conservatives online, you can expect to hear a lot of similar talk soon.

Her fears echo messaging by the FBI that America faces a domestic threat from Iran — a line the media has amplified with its breathless coverage of every supposed Iran-backed assassination attempt on U.S. officials, no matter how harebrained or implausible they are.

As a senior Pentagon official once told me, the “intelligence” on any alleged Iran-backed assassination plans to kill Donald Trump amounts to far less than many imagine.

But Loomer and many others seem to genuinely believe this stuff, which is directly tied to the FBI’s constant invoking of threats to “national security.” Not only are we forbidden from knowing the factual basis for such claims, the rules of normal anything go out the window when it comes to national security. From UFOs to Graham’s death, the result is predictable conspiracy-mongering and panic.

And lest you think this is just some obsession of Loomer’s, Fox News also referenced Kash Patel’s statement in a TV news segment. “The FBI are at Senator Graham’s residence,” the segment said, adding that “FBI Director Kash Patel said that the FBI would assist local authorities and make every resource available.”

The FBI under Kash Patel seems to take its orders directly from the White House, which wants to turn everything — from Graham’s death to public protest to journalism — into some kind of sprawling threat to the country.

This week, the Justice Department subpoenaed several New York Times reporters for revealing that the Qatari jet Trump wants to use as Air Force One lacks certain protective features. This was already pretty well known. But the Justice Department says the story spilled secrets that imperil national security. That’s how a straightforward corruption story gets transmuted into a state security story.

National security might not be good at forecasting events or winning wars or making us safer, but it is very good at manufacturing threats that confuse and disempower people and, perhaps worst of all, forego discussion of more important issues.

Like, say, gerontocracy.

In fairness to Graham, I feel compelled to credit him for being a Senator more willing than almost any other to take phone calls from reporters of all stripes (including outsiders like me). In our age of media-shy members of Congress, I have to respect that. And though he'll be remembered as a Trump loyalist, he was willing to break with the president when he believed it mattered — on Ukraine, for example — while so many of his colleagues just went along.

Oh, and unlike so many of his male colleagues, no woman has ever accused Graham of sexual misconduct. Wonder why!

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— Edited by William M. Arkin

As 84-year-old Senator Mitch McConnell’s witness-protection-grade hospitalization nears its fourth week, a key deadline looms: August 3.

Under Kentucky law, if McConnell is declared unfit for office before that date, there's a special election to fill out his term. After that date, the seat sits empty until whoever wins November's already-scheduled race is sworn in on January 3.

In a political system run by the sage leaders that people like McConnell imagine themselves to be, he would have stepped down so voters could have an orderly election and decide for themselves. Instead, we have a mad dash for partisan power.

A longtime Capitol Hill source tells me congressional Republicans don't want to risk a special election, fearing GOP voters might nominate a MAGA candidate over someone friendlier to their party establishment. Kentucky's Democratic governor, Andy Beshear, has now entered the fray, sending McConnell's office a letter today requesting a health update — a first step, potentially, toward appointing an interim senator and flipping the seat blue. (This would require a constitutional challenge to the law described earlier.)

In either case, Republican or Democratic power grab, the voters of Kentucky are deprived of a meaningful say in who represents them.

Congress, meanwhile, only cares about itself. Lawmakers stayed almost completely silent about McConnell’s unexplained absence for more than two weeks. During that stretch he missed more than 20 votes, including a knife-edge resolution to curb Trump’s war powers over Iran. The reason is simple: nobody wants to invite scrutiny of health and fitness in a gerontocracy, especially when members on both sides of the aisle have something to hide.

Independent journalist Desiree Townsend forced officialdom’s hand when she published dispatch audio of the emergency response at McConnell’s home — audio in which a dispatcher reports a “cardiac arrest.” Facing pressure this week for answers, Senate Republican leaders John Thune and John Barrasso offered vague reassurances. They said they’d spoken with McConnell by phone and that everything was fine.

Recent accounts of conversations with McConnell are suspiciously uniform — nearly everyone claims to have talked to him for about 20 minutes about a range of complex policy issues. Kentucky Congressman Thomas Massie couldn’t resist mocking the pattern. He posted his own parody version on X:

“I spoke to McConnell for about 20 minutes this morning. He said we should end the war with Iran, quit giving aid to Israel, stop spying on Americans without a warrant, and he’s really sorry about how my primary turned out.”

The image of McConnell hashing out policy with colleagues clashes with medical reality. Fewer than 5 percent of patients McConnell's age survive an out-of-hospital cardiac arrest, and most survivors suffer lasting brain damage.

Whatever the truth of his condition, McConnell — or his aides — have decided the public doesn't deserve to know what's going on. Yet by their own account, a handful of officials do deserve to know, as well as one insider who worked for McConnell.

Scott Jennings, a former McConnell staffer turned political commentator and one of the few non-government figures who claims to have spoken with him, was asked about the silence on CNN and said: “Ultimately, these officeholders — you know, they’re in charge of their own operations.”

They’re in charge. Not the four million Kentuckians who have no idea if half their Senate representation is even conscious. Not the 300 million Americans who have to live under the decisions he and his colleagues make. They’re. In. Charge.

Jennings made the remark after a comical exchange with another panelist, Sabrina Singh, the former deputy Pentagon press secretary under Biden. Singh pressed Jennings on why, when his party, the Republicans, made so much hay of the undisclosed hospitalization of then-70-year-old Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, they weren’t willing to come clean about McConnell’s absence. A back-and-forth results in which they’re both right about each other but completely unwilling to accept responsibility for their own party’s actions (which are identical here!)

The bigger question, of course, is why aren’t any of you people able to tell the truth about these things?

Al Cross, a longtime Kentucky political journalist and journalism professor emeritus who has spent decades covering McConnell and says he’s been in touch with him in recent weeks, attributed the silence to pride.

“I suspect his reluctance to say very much about his condition stems partly from his pride,” Cross said on the CNN panel with Jennings. “He’s a person who has a lot of pride, justifiably so.”

Pride — a polite way of saying he thinks he’s better than you. These people don't think they answer to or owe an explanation to the public. They hate us.

After all this, who thinks McConnell’s pride is “justifiably so”?

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The allegations published yesterday that Senate nominee Graham Platner sexually assaulted a woman are different from the previous scandals.

For one, they’re credible, based on Facebook messages from well before Platner entered politics. They’re also the first time Platner has been publicly accused of sexual assault. That crosses a line that tattoos, sexting and Reddit posts just do not.

Last month I said of the Platner campaign that “People are done with the clean-cut types who’ve harbored ambitions for political office since they were on high school student council” — I stand by what I said completely. Evidently Maine voters agreed, going on to vote for Platner by a huge margin. But that doesn’t mean they’re willing to look past sexual assault, which again, crosses a line.

That line is getting blurred by the legions of media commentators trying to make it sound like defending Platner against previous attacks is the same as defending him now.

To give you a sense of how nasty this is getting, here’s a fairly representative example from legal commentator Ken White, who said of me: “Anyway just waiting to hear what new hilarious insult [Ken Klippenstein] comes up with next to sneer at people who don’t like rape.”

Never having sneered “at people who don’t like rape,” I have no idea what he’s talking about. But I get the maneuver here. He and other commentators are trying to bully anyone who defended Platner against the earlier scandals into issuing self-abasing public apologies, by implying that anyone who doesn’t is pro-rape.

The campaign to get people to self-flagellate over things they never said is working, with virtually every high-profile figure who defended Platner in the past issuing weepy apologies about how sorry they are. Here are just a few examples:

All of these people took the present accusations against Platner seriously and promptly addressed them (and good on them for that). But it’s unclear to me what exactly they’re apologizing for other than not being clairvoyants able to foresee this week’s accusation before it happened.

As for me, my apology is as follows:

I stand by my previous defense of Platner. Offensive tattoos and sexting-out-of-wedlock struck me as the most Marine shit ever. I literally know Marines who’ve done both but later grew up and became decent guys. (Hi if you’re reading this!) I still believe in my bones that people like that deserve to have a shot at public office and that our country would be better for it. But the Marines I’m describing were never accused of more serious things like sexual assault.

People were right to give him a chance before; and they’re right to drop him now.

“But there were so many red flags,” the argument goes, pointing to the sexting, tattoo, and Reddit posts. Think about that argument for a moment: it means that people should be disqualified from public office for things there isn’t evidence they actually did, just “red flags” from which they can supposedly be divined. Ruling out anyone with Reddit post-level flaws bars millions of otherwise decent people from politics. The only people left are the exact kind of squeaky-clean, McKinsey consultant politicians that was the entire point of my Platner article in the first place.

As I wrote, people are done with the fake, plasticy candidates who’ve dominated politics in the past. I’m certain that’s still the case, regardless of how hard the media commentators try to gaslight you into thinking willingness to look past lesser flaws is the same as defending rape, misogyny, and so on.

Giving people a chance means that sometimes they won’t live up to it. No one should apologize for that.

I’m not.

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“Elder abuse” — that’s what Charles Booker, the outsider Democratic candidate to replace Senator Mitch McConnell, calls the effort to keep the bedridden 84-year-old in office.

By saying what everyone is thinking but Washington refuses to acknowledge, he embodies the new generation of Democrats rejecting the time-honored tradition of saying nothing in favor of saying something.

From Zohran Mamdani to Melat Kiros, the old guard extinction event is here. These new Democrats are unapologetic about their views. That stands in glaring contrast to their predecessors’ neurotic obsession with focus-grouped sound bites that might poll well but radiate insincerity. You might not agree with the new Democrats, but you don’t need a decoder ring to decipher their positions.

If the polls are to be trusted, these new Democrats could make up nearly 10 percent of the Congress after the midterms. Wondering what’s driving this upheaval? Look no further than the old guard’s refusal to address the obvious reality that McConnell is circling the drain.

“I don’t want to speculate on anyone’s health,” Kentucky’s Democratic Gov. Andy Beshear said last week when asked during a press briefing about McConnell’s hospitalization.

I, on the other hand, have no problem “speculating,” like about the fact that only a tiny fraction (fewer than five percent) of octogenarians survive an out-of-hospital cardiac arrest like the one McConnell suffered.

I’ll speculate further: even if he’s part of that lucky few, he’ll have brain damage, as the vast majority of survivors do.

Speculation is necessary here because McConnell’s office has refused to say why he’s been in the hospital for the past three weeks, what his current status is, or when he’ll be out. This has led to a lot of confusion, as seen in the following post from an X/Twitter account that provides daily updates on whether McConnell has passed.

All of this “speculation” is common sense to just about any ER nurse or medical expert, who are all over TikTok expressing their bafflement that the media is entertaining the possibility that McConnell will soon be wheeled down the Senate chamber like Hannibal Lecter.

This Weekend at Bernie’s routine explains the success of all the current insurgent candidates: they’re willing to say and do the thing that’s obvious and necessary, rejecting the ways of those with political “experience” (read: expedience) whose slogan might as well be: The buck stops somewhere else. The old guard believes in procedures over results and hide behind things like decorum and civility as an excuse for doing and saying nothing.

Let’s talk about decorum and civility.

McConnell, who has held his Senate seat since 1985, embodies the old ways perfectly. In his final years he became one of the only Republicans willing to break with Trump — voting against his most controversial nominees, including Pete Hegseth and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — and took to the Senate floor to call Trump “practically and morally responsible” for January 6 (while voting against his impeachment). He lamented that his party had grown too populist, too isolationist, too Trump. The decorous man was, by the end, a man without a party.

It’s hard to imagine now, but McConnell was once a moderate — a Rockefeller Republican, pro-choice and pro-labor, who in his first run for local office courted unions so aggressively that he won the AFL-CIO’s endorsement by promising to back collective bargaining for public employees. (Once elected, he reneged.) His biographer Alec MacGillis titled his book, bluntly, The Cynic, tracing McConnell’s shift “from a moderate Republican … to the embodiment of partisan obstructionism” — driven less by any change of conviction than by a bottomless appetite for power.

His first wife, Sherrill Redmon, a Democrat, divorced him in 1980 as he calcified into that operator; she became a feminist scholar at Smith, where she ran the Sophia Smith Collection and worked with Gloria Steinem on an oral history of the women’s movement. In 1993 McConnell married Elaine Chao, who would serve as labor secretary under George W. Bush and transportation secretary under Trump I — and whose family’s China-based shipping fortune, and the millions it delivered to the couple, has trailed him for decades.

As transportation secretary she drew a criminal referral from the department's inspector general for using her staff and office to benefit her family; the Justice Department declined to pursue it. Chao resigned in the days after January 6, one of the “decorous” exits that changed nothing.

McConnell — a lifelong Washington operator who started as a legislative aide to Kentucky Senator Marlow Cook before becoming a deputy assistant attorney general under Ford — hated public speaking and courting voters, preferring a data-driven war room to the stump. This is exactly the politics voters are rejecting. They want to be in the room where it happens, as participants rather than spectators

Which brings us to the insurgent leading the Democratic primary for Michigan's open Senate seat: Abdul El-Sayed. He's a rejection of everything McConnell stands for, distilled into a single slogan: "Money out of politics, money in your pocket, and Medicare for All." Agree or disagree, you know where he stands.

An MD and epidemiologist, El-Sayed comes not from politics but from medicine — a world whose failures he's clearly passionate about fixing. He ran Detroit's health department after the city's bankruptcy gutted it, then led Wayne County's, serving 1.8 million people. This is not the usual lawyer-to-Washington pipeline of most career politicians like McConnell.

The dinosaur establishment, meanwhile, is spending real money to stop him, which tells you everything.

And McConnell? This weekend it was reported that just three days after his resuscitation and hospitalization, Chao traveled to Beijing to meet the Vice President of China, Han Zheng — for talks Chinese state media described as strengthening U.S.–China ties. Business ties, that is.

Contrary to the movies, CPR is brutal: it breaks ribs, cracks the sternum. McConnell, in what are very likely his final days, has been in excruciating pain — alone, at least from his wife.

How’s that for civility?

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— Edited by William M. Arkin

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Mitch McConnell, the 84-year-old Kentucky senator whose term expires on January 3, 2027, may expire before that.

His status and whereabouts have become as big of a state secret as anything in the CIA’s vaults. Two weeks ago, on the morning of June 14, he was found unconscious at his D.C. home and rushed to the hospital, after an EMS call reporting a cardiac arrest at his address and that he’d been given CPR.

We only learned of the incident this week, after the emergency dispatch audio was published by Desiree Townsend, an independent journalist. Previously, all McConnell’s office had said was that he was in the hospital and “receiving excellent care.”

So has he gone to the big turtle terrarium in the sky? Your guess is as good as mine.

In other words, the senior senator responsible for representing a state of over four million people went MIA and you’re not allowed to know why, or well, anything. And it’s not the only case this month or even this week of secrecy surrounding the whereabouts of those in Congress.

There’s 83-year-old Rep. Frederica Wilson of Florida, who disappeared on April 17, and went radio silent for nearly a month without any public explanation. When she finally emerged on May 13, her office released a statement and local TV interviews attributing her 40‑plus missed votes to major left‑eye surgery and doctor’s orders not to fly. True? Who knows.

And then there’s Rep. Tom Kean of New Jersey, who emerged on Tuesday from a nearly four-month disappearance — missing 140 votes — that he never explained until his return. He now says he was suffering from clinical depression. (I would be too if I was in Congress.)

Medical issues happen, of course. I’m not saying they’re disqualifying of elected officials; but the lack of any serious attempt to keep people informed about where public servants even are reveals their contempt for the people they’re supposed to represent. Or a completely broken system.

Ask yourself: In what other line of work do people get to ghost their employers for weeks or even months without explanation and keep their jobs?

It only seems normal in the case of Congress because we’re so used to it.

As a reporter it is literally easier for me to find out classified Pentagon war plans than what’s going on in Congress.

This isn’t going to be fixed with any policy or paperwork mandating transparency, which Congress would probably find some way to get around. As with the gerontocracy in general, the problem is symptomatic of the fact that Congress doesn’t respect us. The solution, therefore, is to make them.

Frederica Wilson, the congresswoman who disappeared for her “eye surgery,” came clean about her disappearance only after a huge public backlash. And to her credit, she announced her retirement thereafter as well.

With July 4 around the corner, I’m thinking about Independence Day and what we have yet to gain independence from. Two things come to mind: the ingrained secrecy of officialdom, as seen in these congressional disappearances, and the tyranny of political parties. The latter is related because the stranglehold that the Republican and Democratic parties have over our civic life is so powerful.

Not only do elected officials stay on too long or hide from the public to keep power, but they clearly feel they are powerful enough to get away with it.

Political parties are obviously necessary, but we can and should do a lot more to make them fear us. George Washington in his farewell address said as much, urging “the effort ought to be by force of public opinion, to mitigate and assuage” the power of political parties.

On a lighter note, enjoy your holiday weekend. I suspect we have a funny Trump tweet saying sayonara to McConnell to look forward to.

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— Edited by William M. Arkin

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The old guard extinction event is here.

We are witnessing a generational shift in the Democratic Party — gerontocrats dying electorally or literally, public approval at an all-time low, party-approved candidates getting mowed down like a brontosaurus napping in the Yucatán circa 66 million years ago

Last night, 29-year-old democratic socialist Melat Kiros defeated 68-year-old congresswoman Diana DeGette in Colorado, a Denver seat DeGette occupied for 30 years. Last night was the first time I’d ever heard of Kiros. When I jokingly asked who she was on X/Twitter, DeGette promptly blocked me.

Kiros in her victory speech captured the vibe of an electorate that’s done with the suffocating mainstream politics of the “possible” — a scam pushed by Washington types who want to disempower you and manage your expectations down. Kiros said:

“They said you can’t win without corporate PAC money. They said you can’t beat a 30-year incumbent. That the establishment and the oligarchy is just too big and too powerful to overcome.”

Turns out that money in politics can be overcome by electing someone who actually believes in something. And whatever your politics are, it’s impossible to deny that Kiros believes in something.

Her entry into politics came after Sidley Austin, the white-shoe firm where she worked, fired her in 2023 for refusing to take down a letter she'd posted defending students protesting the war in Gaza. Kiros moved back to Denver — where her family had settled after immigrating from Ethiopia. She became a barista.

Corporate lawyer to coffee bean roaster. That is not the type of person you usually find in Congress, a haven for A-student types and rules humpers whose greatest fear is upsetting the teacher (i.e. party leadership) or embarrassment of any kind.

Kiros recounted her story in her victory speech:

“When I wrote a letter defending students’ rights to protest the genocide in Gaza ... my law firm told me, ‘Take it down or you’re fired.’

I didn’t flinch. I didn’t flinch because I stood by every word, and I always will. But I know, I know that will not be the only moment where those in power will tell me to change my tune, to not rock the boat. That seems to happen a lot in Congress.”

Someone willing to lose their job in a posh law firm. That type of person has been in precious short supply in Congress under the tyranny of party rule. Even some previous insurgents like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez are cautious about not criticizing party leadership — in hopes of being “relevant” or advancing to the Senate or whatever.

But the age of play-it-safe is coming to an end.

DeGette’s campaign pitch was that she was “Running to expand,” according to her X bio, “opportunity in our community.”

This is the exact type of unfalsifiably vague, timid politics that is going extinct. Voters don’t want promises of opportunity when there are none. They don’t want to return to the “good old days” once Trump is gone. People want politicians who think big and respond to this political ice age — where nothing changes, everything is frozen in place, and life for the normal citizen never gets better.

If politics was the art of the possible, it isn’t anymore. We’ve seen experts for years say who can or can’t win, what policies can or can’t happen. Meanwhile, Mamdani just got his rent freeze — the campaign promise that seemingly every corporate media op-ed and pundit said was impossible. The Washington experts are full of shit and people can smell it from across the country.

As I’ve reported, a vibe I’ve noticed at virtually all of the major protests this past couple of years is that people are done waiting for change.

The political asteroid — from Mamdani to Melat Kiros — has not yet wiped out all of the dinosaur do-nothings in Congress. But the clouds it kicked up will. We’re just playing out the endgame now.

The only question is: what new species of warm blooded politicians will replace them?

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— Edited by William M. Arkin