This week marks the 100th birthday of el-Hajj Malik el-Shabazz — known to the world as Malcolm X. As we commemorate his legacy, we must delve beyond the caricature of the angry black revolutionary often portrayed in mainstream narratives. The real Malcolm was a visionary whose radical transformation both shocked and inspired the world.

His journey from the Nation of Islam and black separatism to a global revolutionary committed to anti-imperialism and solidarity with oppressed peoples everywhere offers profound lessons for us today. Malcolm’s evolution wasn’t just political — it was spiritual and intellectual. Initially, he was shaped by the Nation of Islam’s emphasis on self-reliance and racial separation.

In popular accounts, by 1964, having broken with the Nation, Malcolm underwent a profound transformation. His pilgrimage to Mecca, where he prayed with Muslims of all races, led him to embrace a more inclusive vision of solidarity.

However, in reality, Malcolm X’s commitment to global solidarity began long before his pilgrimage. Raised in a Garveyite household, he absorbed Pan-African ideals from his parents, who were active in the Universal Negro Improvement Association. That early grounding shaped his 1959 travels across Africa and the Middle East, where he deepened his understanding of anti-imperialist struggles. The 1961 assassination of Patrice Lumumba further sharpened his critique of US foreign policy. That same year, Malcolm founded Muhammad Speaks, a newspaper rooted in internationalist politics and black liberation, as part of a global fight against colonialism and empire.

In September 1964, Malcolm X visited Gaza, then under Egyptian administration. During his visit, he met Palestinian poet Harun Hashim Rashid, who recounted narrowly escaping the 1956 Khan Yunis massacre, where Israeli forces killed 275 Palestinians. Rashid’s poem “We Must Return,” which Malcolm transcribed into his diary, powerfully conveyed the enduring spirit of Palestinian resistance and the universal struggle against colonial oppression.

Throughout his travels in Africa and the Middle East, Malcolm met revolutionaries fighting colonialism and US-backed authoritarian governments. These encounters confirmed what he already suspected: America was not a democracy — it was an empire.

“You can’t have capitalism without racism,” Malcolm told an audience at the Militant Labor Forum in 1964.

He observed that the exploitation of black people in the United States was not an exception, but part of a larger global pattern — one that connected Harlem to the Congo, Mississippi to Palestine, and the American ghetto to every colonized nation resisting imperial domination. “The same rebellion, the same impatience, the same anger that exists in the hearts of the dark people in Africa and Asia,” he said, “is existing in the hearts and minds of 20 million black people in this country.”

Malcolm named US foreign policy for what it was: violent, racist, and imperialist. He opposed the US government not only for how it treated black Americans, but for how it destabilized and dominated other nations. He denounced the CIA’s involvement in assassinations and coups in Africa and Latin America. He exposed US support for apartheid South Africa. And he called out the hypocrisy of a nation that claimed to defend freedom abroad while denying it at home.

Today his critique remains devastatingly accurate.

Malcolm’s warnings echoed America’s ongoing support for Israeli bombardments of Gaza — where entire families are buried under rubble with US weapons. The dehumanization of Palestinians, portrayed as terrorists rather than a people under siege, mirrors the same propaganda Malcolm denounced when black Americans were criminalized for resisting systemic violence. Just as Malcolm exposed the double standards of US policy — human rights for some, occupation for others — today’s mass atrocities in Gaza underscore the same imperial logic he spent his life fighting against.

We see it in the military occupation and destabilization of Haiti, where US-backed governments have left the country in chaos. And we see it in the nearly $1 trillion defense budget that fuels drone wars, coups, and hundreds of military bases around the world, even as poor communities in the United States are starved of basic services and a significant portion of Americans live paycheck to paycheck.

Domestically, Malcolm X’s analysis of systemic racism has never been more relevant. He described the police in black communities as an occupying army — language still echoed by activists in the wake of police killings from Ferguson to Minneapolis. Malcolm also understood mass incarceration before it had a name, warning that systems of punishment were designed to control and contain black people, not rehabilitate or protect. “This is what they mean when they say ‘law and order,’” he declared. “They mean they want to keep you and me under control.”

The moment Malcolm returned to the states after he completed his Hajj pilgrimage to Mecca, and met with leaders and intellectuals during his travels through the Middle East and Africa, he held a press conference at JFK airport. There he spoke about the transformation in his thinking and introduced the idea of approaching the African American struggle as a human rights issue, declaring he would work to bring charges against the United States for its treatment of black people.

Two weeks later, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover sent a telegram to the FBI’s New York office directing them to “do something about Malcolm X.”

Malcolm’s shift toward international human rights advocacy, and his increasing ability to build coalitions across ideologies and races, made him a unique and growing concern to the FBI as the bureau’s illegal COINTELPRO program raged on, targeting black leaders and groups across the country.

Malcolm X’s internationalism was dangerous precisely because it told the truth. It revealed that the United States was not an isolated example of failed democracy but the hub of a global system of racial capitalism. In this sense, Malcolm’s views were more radical — and more accurate — than most of his contemporaries. But he wasn’t alone.

In his final years, Dr Martin Luther King Jr began sounding more like Malcolm — condemning the Vietnam War, the military-industrial complex, and American capitalism. In King’s 1967 “Beyond Vietnam” speech, he declared Washington “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.” Dr King, like Malcolm, was assassinated soon after articulating this deeper critique of empire.

Malcolm X was killed in 1965, just as his politics were expanding toward a global vision of solidarity and revolutionary struggle. Six decades later, his analysis remains chillingly relevant.

His warnings about US power — its foundation in racial capitalism, its dependence on violence, and its global reach — are confirmed in every drone strike, every police killing, every billion-dollar arms deal, and every neglected neighborhood at home. So, too, is his call for global solidarity: not to reform the machinery of oppression, but to dismantle it altogether.

“You don’t have a revolution in which you are begging the system of exploitation to integrate you into it,” he declared in 1964. “Revolutions overturn systems.”

Malcolm refused to choose silence when the truth was inconvenient. He stood with the oppressed — from Harlem to the Congo, from Mississippi to Palestine — not for applause, but because justice demanded it.

“I’m for truth, no matter who tells it. I’m for justice, no matter who it is for or against,” he declared. “I’m a human being, first and foremost, and as such I’m for whoever and whatever benefits humanity as a whole.”

His legacy lives not only in speeches and photos, but in movements: in the global outrage over Israel’s assault on Gaza, in the rejection of US intervention in Haiti, and in the ongoing fight for abolition and dignity from Rikers to Rafah. To honor Malcolm while ignoring these struggles is to betray the very politics that made him dangerous to the Western power structure. He taught us that solidarity must extend beyond borders, beyond comfort, beyond propaganda — that to side with the oppressed is not optional, it is essential.

Tim Miller joins MSNBC’s The 11th Hour to discuss the Trump DOJ’s politically motivated investigations targeting Democratic officials. He explains how this isn’t a distraction tactic, it’s pure intimidation, driven by conspiracy, bad faith, and a desperate attempt to criminalize dissent.

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THE DEPARTMENT OF HOMELAND SECURITY might make a reality-TV show. According to the Wall Street Journal, the department is interested in a proposal it was pitched for a program, The American, in which participants would fight, compete, and complete challenges for the right to become a U.S. citizen.

“This isn’t The Hunger Games for immigrants,” the show’s producer insisted.

These denials came at roughly the same time as a spokesman for DHS was insisting that ICE agents are absolutely nothing like the Gestapo.

When you have to tell people that you’re not trying to pit immigrants against one another in a dystopian gameshow and that you’re not the Gestapo, it might be time to think about your life choices. Then again: maybe not. Because the most interesting question about The American is whether the Trump administration wants people to think of it as the Hunger Games.

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Rob Worsoff is the Canadian producer behind A&E’s Duck Dynasty and Bravo’s Millionaire Matchmaker, and he’s also the frontman for The American. He says the show will celebrate what it means to be American, from traveling on a boat to Ellis Island to “cultural” contests like logrolling in Wisconsin and assembling a Ford Model T in Detroit, before the finale: a naturalization ceremony for the winner at the U.S. Capitol.

“It’s not some meanspirited thing that’s trying to deport people, it’s exactly the opposite of that,” he said. “We’re going to put a face to all these people who are on this journey and want nothing more than to be a part of this country, and we’re going to humanize them, and we’re going to celebrate them,” he told NewsNation.

Let’s give Worsoff the benefit of the doubt and assume that he doesn’t view the idea as “meanspirited.” Is it possible that his humanizing, immigrant-celebrating vision for the show is one the Trump administration would share?

That seems unlikely.

Donald Trump is leading a mass-deportation effort that is purposefully cruel. At every turn, this administration has chosen to forgo normal bureaucratic methods of operation in favor of maximal confrontation and the use of as much physical force as the law will countenance. Homeland Security could have informed Rümeysa Öztürk that her visa had been revoked by mail and instructed her to leave the country within ten days. Instead, they pulled her visa in secret and then sent masked undercover agents to snatch her off the street. As the saying goes: The cruelty is the whole point.

Then there’s the way members of the administration talk about immigrants. Last year, Trump pitched that “nasty” and “mean” migrants should have their own UFC fighting league. ICE Director Todd Lyons said in April that he would like to run deportations like “Amazon Prime for human beings.” The White House released inhumane videos of men sent to Guantánamo Bay and to an El Salvador black site (many of whom, we would later learn, did not have criminal records); soaring drone shots gave a sense of military-operational scale before closeups offered the sight of a gay hairdresser crying for his mother as he was roughly shaved by Salvadoran agents. The administration posted an “ASMR” video of men in shackles to an official White House account.

It’s hard to imagine the same administration responsible for all of the above would want to contribute to a “celebration” of immigrants. And even if they do agree to give access to the production, the gulf between the gilded, made-for-TV version of a contemporary immigrant’s personal story and the violence that person is facing in American neighborhoods makes it very difficult to accept the idea that such a project could yield anything true or worthwhile.

Yet at least one congressional Democrat didn’t rule out the possibility that the show could make it to air. Sen. Alex Padilla (D-Cal.) told me this “offensive proposal” is “yet another outrageous idea from an unserious administration.”

”This administration has no serious vision or plan to modernize our immigration system, so they resort to publicity stunts and photo ops that waste taxpayer dollars.”

Cristina Constantini, an Emmy-award-winning director, told me there are “a million shows” pitched that never get made. She went on to suggest that the goal of the pitch for The American was never to actually bring a show to air, but to create “a press circus.”

Mission accomplished. But what if there’s more to it than that, even?

Before she was a filmmaker, Constantini was a reporter who covered immigration and abuse in detention centers. “For anyone who really understands the stakes for immigrant citizenship, anyone who has met a refugee or has met an immigrant, it would change their lives,” she said. “So this idea completely lacks the seriousness with which a government should treat this great blessing that is American citizenship.”

So why would the Trump administration do it? Jim Acosta notes videos of men shaved bald and standing in their underwear at the CECOT prison in El Salvador evoke something out of Germany in the 1930s or 1940s. “Turning desperate migrants into contestants in a grotesque dystopian reality show only magnifies the Trump administration’s cruel impulses,” he told me. “There is only one word for this idea. It is evil.”

The Daily Mail, which broke the story about the pitch, confirmed in its initial reporting that a DHS spokesperson and Noem herself loved the idea of The American, and Noem had put her support behind the pitch. In a Senate hearing yesterday, though, Noem claimed that “we have no knowledge of a reality show” and that she personally “did not know anything about this reality show until the reporter reached out.”

LAST MONTH TOM HOMAN, Trump’s border czar, said that sending immigrants to Guantánamo was the “most exciting day of my life.” What if that’s really true? Could it be that the Trump administration floated Migrant Hunger Games not just as a distraction, but because it thinks people will love the idea the way they do?

Colin Rogero is a Democratic ad maker who worked for both the Kamala Harris 2024 campaign and Ruben Gallego’s Senate campaign. He also comes from a working-class background in South Florida, where a football scholarship allowed him to go to college and become a filmmaker and producer before venturing into politics. In my experience as a reporter, he’s a straight shooter (filmmaking pun intended)—and I’ve never heard him as mad on a phone call as when I asked him about The American and the people who work for Trump.

“They believe in lies, racism, and the pursuit of ratings,” Rogero told me. (For what it’s worth, he thought the show sounded more like The Running Man than Hunger Games.)

“They’re systematically trying to dehumanize an entire ethnic group of people in this country and it’s beyond disgusting—it’s also dangerous,” Rogero said. He cited a spike in hate crimes during Trump’s first term, which included the awful El Paso Walmart shooting in which a white gunman drove ten hours to kill Mexicans and Latinos, fearing a “Hispanic invasion.”

And yet Rogero is optimistic.

“The American people are overworked, stressed out, looking for ways to improve their economic realities, but they’re not stupid,” Rogero told me. “You can run a reality show when you’re making promises before the election, you can even run a reality-show government with made-for-TV appointees, but when you’re running the government into the ground and looking for scapegoats, the American people know it.”

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A major development in immigration news Monday night as Alina Habba, U.S. attorney for the District of New Jersey, announced charges against Rep. LaMonica McIver (D-N.J.), claiming she “assaulted, impeded, and interfered” with law enforcement at Delaney Hall, an ICE detention center in the state. McIver responded by saying lawmakers were there lawfully to conduct oversight, calling the charges “purely political” and meant to “criminalize and deter legislative oversight.”

As Democrats said after the incident, video appears to show that McIver is the one who was assaulted. If this strikes you as a chilling instance of the Trump administration trying to stamp out dissent, well, many of us agree. Sam Stein and I broke it down in a Monday-night video before Democratic leadership announced they would respond strongly, with some calling the charges a step over a red line.

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Former Rep. Billy Long (R-MO), President Donald Trump’s pick to head the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), was invited to attend Trump’s inauguration as the guest of a financial services CEO who said Long promised him benefits for his company, according to a recording obtained by the Lever.

The executive also stated that Long planned to give a top government job to a campaign donor at an embattled financial firm. Companies peddling tax schemes “don’t have to worry” about regulatory crackdowns under Long’s oversight, added the executive.

In a corporate Zoom recording provided to the Lever by Sen. Ron Wyden’s (D-OR) office, Terry Kennedy, CEO of financial services company Appreciation Financial, noted he helped Long attend Trump’s inauguration.

“I call up one of my friends and I said, ‘Hey, the IRS Commissioner Billy Long, the new one coming in that we’re all excited about. . . Is Billy coming to the inauguration?’” Kennedy said. “And. . . my friend says, ‘Well, he doesn’t have a ticket. He’s not because he’s not confirmed yet.’ I said, ‘Well, make him my guest.’”

Kennedy went on to note that he and Long “had dinner one night” during the inauguration and that he “spent a few nights with [Long].”

During that same call, Kennedy addressed Employee Retention Tax Credits (ERC), a pandemic-era program that the IRS says has been the target of the agency’s “civil and criminal investigations of potential fraud and abuse.” Kennedy asserted that companies would no longer have to worry about such IRS scrutiny because Long sold such products himself.

“He actually pushed ERC; is that not a blessing?” said Kennedy. “We could be worried about promoter audits now. We could be worried about anything with the old administration. But Billy actually is now taking over, and we don’t have to worry about that stuff.”

Promoter audits are IRS investigations looking into potential “abusive tax promotions” and other matters. The IRS has been specifically targeting companies promoting ERC tax schemes.

Kennedy did not respond to a request for comment ahead of publication.

The April 15 Zoom recording is from a monthly “Huddle Up” meeting hosted by Linqqs, an employee benefits management company that donated $50,000 to Trump’s inaugural committee. Kennedy is listed as the manager of Linqqs on the Nevada state government’s website.

According to Kennedy, Long promised to give him a “private letter ruling” — a special IRS determination that helps taxpayers with complex IRS issues avoid potential tax violations, according to the tax agency.

“Billy, please take your sales hat off and put your new IRS commissioner hat on,” Kennedy recounted asking Long in a conversation, seeking advice about his business’s financial arrangement.

Kennedy also highlighted that Long intends to hire Mark Czuchry, an attorney and managing partner at financial advising firm Lifetime Advisors, as legal counsel at the IRS. Czuchry donated $2,900 to Long’s failed Senate campaign efforts after Trump selected him to head the IRS, and other Lifetime Advisors employees donated an additional $7,800 to Long’s coffers.

Lifetime Advisors is among a number of firms named in an April 14 letter from Senate Finance Committee Democrats calling for a criminal investigation into a “scheme to sell investors a fraudulent tax shelter.” Long worked with Lifetime Advisors in 2023 after leaving Congress, where he sold various tax products, including some of the same tax credits that Treasury officials told Senate Democrats “do not exist.”

The Lever previously reported that employees of Lifetime Advisors and others helped Long pay off $130,000 in personal debt via campaign donations after Trump selected him to head the tax agency in December. Following the Lever’s reporting, three senators launched an investigation into the matter on May 15.

During Long’s confirmation hearing on Tuesday, Democratic senators pressed Long about his industry donors, plans to weaponize the IRS against his nonprofit enemies, and his pandemic tax schemes.

In his interrogation, Wyden suggested that his staff investigators had found a recording of a tax promoter recounting that Long had promised him a private letter ruling in his new position at the IRS.

Long denied the allegation, “I was in my room for about fifty hours with food poisoning during the inauguration, so I didn’t talk to many people.”

“These taped conversations are so troubling to me,” said Wyden. “What’s at issue is peddling fake tax credits, scamming small businesses, this questionable array of campaign contributions. . . the extent to which you tried to avoid answering these questions suggests to me someone who’s been up to their eyeballs in this sort of questionable behavior.”

Some tough news this morning: Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-Va.) has died at the age of 75. Shortly after his re-election last November, Connolly revealed he had been diagnosed with esophageal cancer; last month, he announced he would not seek re-election next term. Our thoughts are with his family this morning. Happy Wednesday.

by Sarah Longwell

For those of us who love sifting through actual data when trying to make sense of seismic events—like, say, Donald Trump’s re-election—this week was invaluable. Democratic data firm Catalist came out with its report on the 2024 election, giving us the best set of numbers yet to understand what the hell really happened. Many of the big takeaways are in line with what we already knew: Kamala Harris lost because she struggled with younger and more diverse voters, while Trump overperformed with these groups. But in the troves of files, there was still a lot of interesting demographic data to parse.

Yes, Harris backslid the worst with male voters. Compared to Joe Biden’s performance in 2020, she lost six points with men overall. She lost 12 points with Latino men, seven points with black men, and six points with Asian men.

But she also lost ground with some women voters—down seven points with Latina women, four points with Asian women, and one point with women overall compared to Biden in 2020.

Where Harris did well was among so-called “super voters”: people who have voted in all of the last four major national elections. She won 50 percent of them, a better showing than either Biden in 2020 or Hillary Clinton in 2016.

By contrast, she underperformed with infrequent voters compared to Trump. This group skewed much more young and diverse.

Here’s how Amy Walter and Carrie Dann wrote it up in the Cook Political Report, which got the exclusive on the data: “Harris wanted an electorate heavily populated with frequent voters, while the Trump team wanted an electorate filled with voters who have not participated as much in major elections.” Trump got the electorate he wanted.

What should one make of all this? For Democrats looking for silver linings, there is this: Republicans were not able to boost their margins in the swing states in 2024 as much as they did nationally—meaning that in the states that actually matter, where all the ad spending and stumping happens, Democrats are in a stronger position than they are in the rest of the country. That’s something.

But of course, Trump still won those swing states. And he did so by scrambling the electoral landscape for both parties.

It used to be an article of faith that Dems reliably won young people and minority groups by extreme margins, while Republicans cleaned up with more established and white voters. The 2024 election was the starkest demonstration we’ve had yet that that’s not necessarily the case anymore.

As we’ve already begun to see in recent election cycles, including the special elections so far in 2025, Dems are more likely to thrive in off-year, low-turnout contests—previously favorable turf for Republicans. And it means the GOP could have a much stronger popular vote showing during presidential election years (though without Trump directly on the ballot this is TBD).

Ten years of Trump have, to some extent, reset our electoral coalitions—not to mention those coalitions’ policy preferences (Republicans favoring tariffs, price controls, and Russia—Reagan weeps!).

Having conducted hundreds of focus groups since 2018, I’ve become well-acquainted with the complex varietals of the American voter. Our rapidly shifting information landscape and cultural incohesion makes them harder to categorize for tidy political-science purposes.

I personally find terms like “far-left” and “far-right” or even the word “conservative” to be increasingly meaningless. And there are a fair number of things that used to be axiomatic about politics that no longer are. But one axiom of politics remains true: In the end, it comes down to how people feel about their futures and well-being.

Biden won in 2020 because COVID was destroying the economy (and the rest of our lives). Trump won in 2024 because voters were upset about the persistent inflation resulting from COVID and were nostalgic for Trump’s pre-COVID economy and suckered by his “businessman” mythology. Trump was further helped by Biden being too compromised by age to be an effective communicator for his own policies.

Which leaves both Democrats and Republicans in a tenuous position when it comes to winning future majorities in general elections. Democrats must understand that their destiny will be determined by economics, not demographics. Having a clear economic message that voters believe will improve their lives is at the core of the work they need to do to return from the political wilderness.

Republicans have a bigger problem. Since Trump hijacked their political party, they’ve been shedding reliable college-educated suburban voters—along with most traditional Republican values and policies. And while Trump is able to offset this loss with Saddam Hussein–level margins among working-class voters, especially in rural areas, there’s no evidence a Republican who isn’t Trump can conjure similar appeal with voters otherwise uninterested in politics.

There’s a reason Republicans shrug helplessly at the notion that Trump could run for a third term. It’s because they no longer have any better ideas.

• The GOP’s Big Medicaid Idea Was Tried Before—And Failed Badly… Arkansas and Georgia tried work requirements, and the results were not pretty, writes JONATHAN COHN in The Breakdown.

• Democrats Need to Stand for Things… On Just Between Us, WILL SALETAN joins MONA CHAREN to talk about Biden’s health, Trump’s trip, and how to argue about immigration, democracy, and the rule of law.

• Schizo-in-Chief… On the flagship pod, DAVID FRENCH joins TIM MILLER to talk about Trump’s vacillations between sounding like Bernie Sanders one day and Paul Ryan the next.

• Death of a Cybertruck Salesman… How Trump Killed Tesla, or: Schadenfreude is a bargain at $5.60 per mile, writes JVL in The Triad.

• Kristi Noem Embarrasses Herself Again… ANDREW EGGER joins SAM STEIN on Bulwark+ Takes to chat about Kristi Noem’s disastrous Senate testimony, where she completely botched the definition of habeas corpus.

THE RICH GET RICHER: Republicans are inching toward “yes” on the “big, beautiful bill”, per Politico:

Republican leaders are increasingly confident they will be able to notch a final deal with key GOP megabill holdouts and move toward a final vote in the coming days after several whirlwind hours of closely held negotiations.

The upbeat turn in the frequently tumultuous talks was described by six senior Republicans who are participating in them. It came after President Donald Trump visited Capitol Hill Tuesday morning to personally urge the warring factions to drop their demands and come to an agreement on the sprawling domestic-policy bill centered on a multi-trillion-dollar suite of tax cuts.

The 30,000-foot overview here remains remarkable. Some Republican congressmen have been dragging their heels over the fact that the bill that tightens healthcare eligibility for poor Americans doesn’t tighten healthcare eligibility for poor Americans enough. Other Republican congressmen have objected that the bill’s regressive tax cuts aren’t regressive enough. Trump’s ultimate priority is just to get them on the same page. And while Politico suggests that’s still likely, there remain a few bumps in the road ahead. Maybe more than a few.

ET TU, JD?: If the GOP budget bill passes, it’ll be a win for Republicans and for a particular theory of Republican politics: that for all the talk of a political realignment and the GOP adopting pro-working-class rhetoric, the party’s chief policy aim remains cutting taxes for the rich and cutting benefits for the poor. Over at the New Republic, Greg Sargent pins one of the party’s most celebrated supposed working-class whisperers, JD Vance, to the wall:

Back in 2017, when House Republicans were feverishly trying to repeal the Affordable Care Act during Trump’s first term, Vance repeatedly criticized the effort’s Medicaid cuts, castigating them as a serious betrayal of Trump voters—and, importantly, of the supposed working-class populism underlying Trump’s support. Trump voters, Vance said then, backed him because unlike other Republicans, he “wasn’t saying I’m going to take away . . . your Medicaid.” . . .

The House GOP is currently hashing out the “big, beautiful bill” embodying Trump’s agenda, and it would impose work requirements and other bureaucratic hurdles on Medicaid recipients. That would result in at least seven million fewer people on the program, many from the ranks of the working poor, and many in red states

These are precisely the types of voters who would have been hurt by the 2017 House GOP effort to repeal the ACA. That bill would have phased out the ACA’s Medicaid expansion and transitioned to block grants to states, booting millions off the program, many of them in Trump country, if the bill hadn’t failed in the Senate.

Read the whole thing.

KISS YOUR BOOSTERS GOODBYE: Under 65 and healthy? Looks like no more COVID boosters for you, says the FDA. Here’s the AP:

Annual COVID-19 shots for healthy younger adults and children will no longer be routinely approved under a major new policy shift unveiled Tuesday by the Trump administration.

Top officials for the Food and Drug Administration laid out new requirements for yearly updates to COVID shots, saying they’d continue to use a streamlined approach that would make vaccines available to adults 65 and older as well as children and younger adults with at least one health problem that puts them at higher risk. But the FDA framework urges companies conduct large, lengthy studies before tweaked vaccines can be approved for healthier people.

Heterodox orneriness or sheer antivax crankery? As with much of the stuff coming out of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s Department of Health and Human Services today, it’s difficult to say for sure. FDA Commissioner Marty Makary and Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research Director Vinay Prasad, who coauthored an article in the New England Journal of Medicine announcing the new policy, argued the change simply brings the U.S. COVID-vaccine regulatory regime in line with “all other high-income nations.” And in an odd rhetorical bankshot, they argued that widespread authorization of COVID boosters may have had a “ripple effect” that hurt public confidence in vaccines overall, even “vital immunization programs” like the MMR vaccine, “which has been clearly established as safe and highly effective.”

But the fingerprints of RFK Jr. and his more weapons-grade vaccine lunacy are discernible here too. The call for large new, placebo-controlled trials of COVID vaccines is in keeping with Kennedy’s long-stated and entirely erroneous belief that vaccines currently in circulation have not been sufficiently tested. And it calls into question whether other previously approved vaccines may find their authorizations on the chopping block too.

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A short video taken inside an Illinois school captured troubling behavior: A teacher gripping a 6-year-old boy with autism by the ankle and dragging him down the hallway on his back.

The early-April incident would’ve been upsetting in any school, but it happened at the Garrison School, part of a special education district where at one time students were arrested at the highest rate of any district in the country. The teacher was charged with battery weeks later after pressure from the student’s parents.

It’s been about eight months since the U.S. Department of Education directed Garrison to change the way it responded to the behavior of students with disabilities. The department said it would monitor the Four Rivers Special Education District, which operates Garrison, following a ProPublica and Chicago Tribune investigation in 2022 that found the school frequently involved police and used controversial disciplinary methods.

But the department’s Office for Civil Rights regional office in Chicago, which was responsible for Illinois and five other states, was one of seven abolished by President Donald Trump’s administration in March; the offices were closed and their entire staff was fired.

The future of oversight at Four Rivers, in west-central Illinois, is now uncertain. There’s no record of any communication from the Education Department to the district since Trump took office, and his administration has terminated an antidiscrimination agreement with at least one school district, in South Dakota.

In the April incident, Xander Reed, who has autism and does not speak, did not stop playing with blocks and go to P.E. when he was told to, according to a police report. Xander then “became agitated and fell to the ground,” the report said. When he refused to get up, a substitute teacher, Rhea Drake, dragged him to the gym.

Another staff member took a photo and alerted school leadership. Principal Amy Haarmann told police that Drake’s actions “were not an acceptable practice at the school,” the police report said.

Xander’s family asked to press charges. Drake, who had been working in Xander’s classroom for more than a month, was charged about three weeks later with misdemeanor battery, records show. She has pleaded not guilty. Her attorney told ProPublica that he and Drake did not want to comment for this story.

Tracey Fair, the district’s director, said school officials made sure students were safe following the incident and that Drake won’t be returning to the district. She declined to comment further about the incident, but said school officials take their “obligation to keep students and staff safe very seriously.”

Doug Thompson, chief of police in Jacksonville, where the school is located, said he could not discuss the case.

Xander’s mother, Amanda, said her son is fearful about going to Garrison, where she said he also has been punished by being put in a school “crisis room,” a small space where students are taken when staff feel they misbehave or need time alone. “He has not wanted to go to school,” she said. “We want him to get an education. We want him to be with other kids.”

Four Rivers serves an eight-county area, and students at Garrison range from kindergartners through high schoolers. About 70 students were enrolled at the start of the school year. Districts who feel they aren’t able to educate a student in neighborhood schools send them to Four Rivers; Xander travels 40 minutes each way to attend Garrison.

The federal scrutiny of Garrison began after ProPublica and the Tribune revealed that during a five-year period, school employees called police to report student misbehavior every other school day, on average. Police made more than 100 arrests of students as young as 9 during that period. They were handcuffed and taken to the police station for being disruptive or disobedient; if they’d physically lashed out at staff, they often were charged with felony aggravated battery.

The news organizations also found that Garrison employees frequently removed students from their classrooms and sent them to crisis rooms when the students were upset, disobedient or aggressive.

The Office for Civil Rights’ findings echoed those of the news investigation. It determined that Garrison routinely sent students to police for noncriminal conduct that could have been related to their disabilities — something prohibited by federal law.

The district was to report its progress in making changes to the OCR by last December, which it appears to have done, according to documents ProPublica obtained through a public records request.

But the records show the OCR has not communicated with the district since then and it’s not clear what will come of the work at Four Rivers. The OCR has terminated at least one agreement it entered into last year — a deal with a South Dakota school district that had agreed to take steps to end discrimination against its Native American students. Spokespeople for the Education Department did not respond to questions from ProPublica.

Scott Reed, 6-year-old Xander Reed’s father, said he and Xander’s mother were aware of the frequent use of police as disciplinarians at Four Rivers and of OCR’s involvement. But they reluctantly enrolled him this school year because they were told there were no other options.

“You can say you’ve made all these changes, but you haven’t,” Scott Reed said. For example, he said, even after confirming that Drake had dragged the 50-pound boy down the hall, school leadership sent her home. “They did not call police until I arrived at school and demanded it” hours later, he said.

“If that was a student” that acted that way, “they would have been in handcuffs.”

New ProPublica reporting has found that since school began in August, police have been called to the school at least 30 times in response to student behavior.

Thompson, the police chief, told ProPublica that, in one instance, officers were summoned because a student was saying “inappropriate things.” They also were called last month after a report that a student punched and bit staff members. The officers “helped to calm the student,” according to the local newspaper’s police blotter.

And police have continued to arrest Garrison students. There have been six arrests of students for property damage or aggravated battery this school year, police data shows. A 15-year-old girl was arrested for spitting in a staff member’s face, and a 10-year-old boy was arrested after being accused of hitting an employee. There were at least nine student arrests last school year, according to police data.

Thompson said four students between the ages of 10 and 16 have been arrested this school year on the more serious aggravated battery charge; one of the students was arrested three times. He said he thinks police calls to Garrison are inevitable, but that school staff are now handling more student behavioral concerns without reaching out to police.

“I feel like now the calls for service are more geared toward they have done what they can and they now need help,” Thompson said. “They have attempted to de-escalate themselves and the student is not cooperating still or it is out of their control and they need more assistance.”

Police were called to the school last week to deal with “a disturbance involving a student,” according to the police blotter in Jacksonville’s local newspaper. It didn’t end in an arrest this time; a parent arrived and “made the student obey staff members.”

Anti-LGBTQ+ hate group Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) has targeted the human rights of queer people in public and in private, in the U.S. and abroad. Now, it’s setting its sights on corporate initiatives for the environment and sustainability, along with diversity and equity.

The ADF’s Viewpoint Diversity Score (VDS) program, which it uses to malign these corporate programs (generally referred to as environmental, social and governance, or ESG, and diversity, equity and inclusion, or DEI), reveals a lot about the rigid Christian theocracy underpinning these attacks. Multiple advisers listed on the group’s website have connections to Christian Reconstructionism, which holds that all aspects of society should be primarily governed by Old Testament biblical law, and an accompanying ideology known as dominionism that holds only a narrowly defined group of Christians have a right to rule the Earth.

The work of one ADF adviser, Jerry Bowyer, sheds light on contemporary hard-right Christian supremacists’ focus on corporate activism. Bowyer leads a proxy investing advisory firm that simultaneously claims its shareholder voting guides are not “designed to impose conservative politics on companies” but are dedicated to opposing environmental and diversity policies and supporting an ADF conspiracy theory called “debanking,” which claims government regulators and banks collude to intentionally discriminate against conservatives and Christians.

Since the early 1990s, Bowyer has been a fixture in the Christian Reconstructionist movement, having once led an organization dedicated to what he called “Christocracy, the rule of Christ over the nation.” Along with advising ADF, Bowyer is a fellow with the creationist Discovery Institute and the dominionist Center for Cultural Leadership (CCL), a group led by P. Andrew Sandlin, an anti-abortion extremist who also believes in a Reconstructionist vision of a “world-conquering” Christian theocracy.

Proxy research

In 1999, The Washington Post described Bowyer’s work with the National Reform Association, a Calvinist branch of the Reformed Presbyterian Church, as “crusading for creation of a ‘theocracy’ in America.”

Bowyer is a senior fellow at Sandlin’s CCL. In addition to his anti-abortion extremism, Sandlin is the former executive vice president of the anti-LGBTQ+ hate group Chalcedon Foundation. CCL’s goal, according to Sandlin, is that “all areas of life and thought, in the end, will be Christian.”

Bowyer also runs a proxy investing advisory firm called Bowyer Research, which advises investors on shareholder elections that determine corporate governance.

“Our approach,” Bowyer’s firm notes, “is deeply skeptical regarding ESG [frameworks] and therefore goes beyond simply not supporting it and onto actively countering it when we believe it conflicts with rigorous definitions of pecuniary return to shareholders, which we think it quite commonly does.”

His business appears to be growing. In March 2024, Bowyer and several ADF advisers successfully pressured Institutional Shareholder Services, a major shareholder advisory firm, to offer a new set of materials for pension managers through Bowyer’s company. Bowyer told Reuters at the time, “This is an effort at de-politicization. This isn’t an effort to get companies to be more conservative, this is an effort to get companies out of the political process.”

With few overt references to dominionism on its website, the firm appears to stake out a neutral middle ground between conservative and liberal political activism. From a purely fiduciary perspective, Bowyer argues that using ESG frameworks is not consistent with the financial duty of proxy investors because they produce political risk that jeopardizes corporate profits.

Whereas ESG principles are too political, Bowyer argues, anti-ESG principles are not. The strategy is consistent with the long history of “stealth” activism deployed by Christian supremacists throughout much of the 1990s to 2000s, which sought to both disguise outreach to ultra-conservative religious voters during electoral campaigns and soften their theocratic rhetoric with more innocuous-sounding language.

According to Bowyer’s firm, ESG is too risky in part because it has become “politicized,” especially attracting opposition from the fossil fuel industry and other Christian Reconstructionists.

“The definition of what constitutes a fiduciary approach to proxy voting has become a highly contested space, with some arguing for ESG as an effective way to manage risk and others arguing that ESG is in origin, or at least has become, politicized,” according to the firm. The firm does not appear to disclose Bowyer’s advisory role with ADF on its website or how ADF is working to politicize ESG frameworks through its VDS program.

An illusion of neutrality

According to Bowyer, the so-called politicization of ESG and accompanying ginned-up risks to corporate profits means that corporate support for almost any idea Reconstructionists and political conservatives oppose places companies outside of a fiduciary responsibility to be neutral on political issues.

For example, Bowyer’s firm provides voting guidance on a diverse set of issues, from opposing policies that diminish the use of fossil fuels to “proposals pressuring companies to adopt numerical diversity targets, or pressure companies to defund conservative organizations which are not directly related to the pecuniary benefit of shareholders.” On the other hand, Bowyer’s guidance advocates a “vote for resolutions that discourage companies from publicly engaging on divisive social issues such as abortion policies, voter-ID laws and gender-identity controversies.” The firm also advises against corporate policies that could result in surveillance of gun owners.

As this diverse list of priorities suggests, applying the principles of dominionist theology to investing is not always as direct as advocating against investing in companies that promote “sin.” Instead, dominionist economic principles seem to allow Reconstructionists to embrace companies that would otherwise be deemed sinful, as long as their investment produces a lucrative return that can be used to encourage the development of a Christian theocracy.

“At the most basic level, Biblically Responsible Investing, A.K.A Christian Investing, means investing to get a return,” Bowyer wrote in a January 2020 blog post. “Truly Biblical investment strategies will start with that positive purpose of investment, as opposed to [finding] a Christian investment fund whose purpose focuses mainly on imposing a set of restrictions on which sin industries to block.”

In this context, it does not appear contradictory when Bowyer and his staff insist his firm doesn’t push conservative ideology onto companies and clients. The approach his firm advises is “non-political,” they say, and “focused narrowly on pecuniary benefit to investors. This is not an attempt to move companies to the right, but rather an attempt to move them to neutral.” In short, ESG skepticism is synonymous with neutrality while neutrality means profit that can be invested in building a godly society.

Bowyer Research notes it is not a coincidence that the policies it advocates intersect with conservative political aims. “The guidelines do tend to support proposals from conservative groups,” the firm writes, “but only when those proposals themselves are focused on getting companies away from politics.”

The sentiment belies an understanding among Reconstructionists, however, that true Christianity is politically conservative and “isn’t reconcilable” with either liberalism or the Democratic Party. Writing in 2018, CCL’s Sandlin claimed that “All biblical Christians (that is, true Christians) must be politically conservative (as we use that term today), and all true conservatives must be Christian.”

Changing strategies from private to public companies

Because the political goal of dominionism is a Christian theocracy, Bowyer’s investment strategies reflect the range of economic tools Reconstructionists use to achieve their goal. It also shows an expansion of their tactics to control both privately held companies and publicly traded corporations.

Some Christian-right investment firms, like Sovereign’s Capital and Inspire Investing — which are represented among ADF’s Viewpoint Diversity Score advisers — for years have directly invested money into select private companies based on Christian “screening” metrics that avoid sinful industries, according to the firms’ websites. Only recently have the firms expanded into public equity funds to advance ownership and policy change in publicly traded companies.

According to Bowyer, the lack of “engagement” between Christian investment firms and large corporations means the investment firms forfeit their ability to influence the companies.

“For the most part, those funds [Christian advisory firms] do not focus on voting their values but instead on excluding companies from the portfolio that do not share those values. The issue of screening is debatable, but what isn’t debatable is that every time a fund bans a company like Disney from the portfolio, it loses its authority to vote on Disney’s proxies,” Bowyer wrote in 2023.

On the other hand, investment firms that do not follow conservative principles result in Christians’ money being managed by firms that support “controversial issues,” Bowyer wrote, like “decarbonization, divestment from pro-life states and politicians, and resolutions pertaining to funding Planned Parenthood and similar groups.” For Bowyer, the answer seems to be direct shareholder engagement.

Bowyer has been crucial to modeling this kind of direct corporate advocacy in conjunction with ADF adviser David Bahnsen. In March 2025, ADF praised JPMorgan Chase for “adopt[ing] language that will protect against future instances of political and religious debanking in its Code of Conduct.” The policy change came after the two ADF advisers, Bowyer and Bahnsen, filed shareholder resolutions with the company targeting its commitments to ESG principles.

In a 2023 article about his partnership with Bahnsen and the direct impact on company policy his shareholder activism produces, Bowyer wrote, “Investors whose stake is large enough have the right to propose a resolution. In my experience, such proposals have always led to serious engagement about the issue with the company’s managers. For example, I’ve worked with David Bahnsen … He has formally proposed several resolutions, including ones already confirmed to appear on the Exxon and McDonald’s ballots this season. Every one of his proposals has led to extensive engagement with company management. It’s a powerful tool that only works when the investor has control. Resolutions help us move from the status quo in which we respond to their agenda and make them react to ours.”

As Hatewatch previously reported, Bahnsen withdrew his proposed resolution to JPMorgan Chase shareholders in May 2024. In a report on the resolution, Reuters quoted Bowyer, whom they characterized as a “fund consultant who represents David Bahnsen.” According to Reuters, Bowyer said the resolution was withdrawn because JPMorgan Chase changed policies related to its online payment processing service WePay.

Reuters wrote: “One factor, Bowyer said, was the bank’s decision to drop a requirement that merchants using its WePay service not accept payments tied to risks like allegations of racism or sexual harassment. He also cited a note that JPMorgan included in a recent climate report, stating it serves customers ‘regardless of political, social or religious viewpoints.’” Reuters also quoted ADF’s Jeremy Tedesco, who said, “These policies give people a foothold to demand banks cancel services. So eliminating that is not a small thing.”