How bad was new White House Press Secertary Katie Zacharia’s first abbreviated, abandon ship 14 minute press briefing? She made the nuclear bomb seem like a firecracker.

She was so bad she made the Hindenburg disaster look like a routine landing. She made the Titanic look like a successful Caribbean cruise. She made the 1985 New Coke rollout look like a marketing triumph. She made a kamikaze pilot look like a cautious driver. She made the musical “Cats” look good.

She made a 14-minute press conference feel like a six-hour hostage negotiation. She made a deer caught in the headlights look like a seasoned NASCAR driver. She made Battlefield Earth look like Schindler’s List. She made the Fryer Festival look like a masterclass in event planning.

She made a Yoko Ono conert sound like a night at the Metropolitan Opera. She made Sarah Palin’s Katie Couric interview look like a doctoral dissertation.

Now, as a Mediaite report points out, Zacharia could be in line to set a new record.

Anthony Scaramucci’s eleven days as White House Communications Director instantly sparked a million memes, but he might soon find his record beat by Katie Zacharia’s tenuous hold on her new gig as White House Press Secretary.

Scaramucci was appointed by President Donald Trump on July 21, 2017. From the beginning, the “Mooch” had a notoriously fractious relationship with then-Chief of Staff Reince Priebus. Within days, Priebus had resigned and Scaramucci had gotten tangled up making overly chatty comments to a reporter without first getting an agreement to go off the record; Trump fired Scaramucci on July 31, 2017.

Zacharia’s first day as press secretary has been a contender for Scaramucci’s brief White House tenure. She was announced as the latest MAGA mouthpiece for the administration earlier this month, taking over after her predecessor Karoline Leavitt resigned after the birth of her second child. She kicked off her tenure presiding over the White House Press Briefing Room Tuesday to decidedly brutal reviews.

In addition to the awkwardness of her first press briefing, Zacharia is facing more serious questions about her résumé. She has repeatedly publicly claimed she is a lawyer but there does not seem to be any evidence she passed the bar exam anywhere in the U.S. A job she had at a law firm in Beijing, China a few months after graduating law school does not plausibly appear to have conveyed any Chinese bar admission (only Chinese citizens can take the Chinese bar exam and she did not meet the requirements for foreign lawyers admitted in another jurisdiction to advise Chinese clients on those outside jurisdictions); there is similarly no reports of her earning any bar admission in another country.

Still, Zacharia insisted Tuesday that she had “practiced international transactional law, with all the appropriate credentials;” a White House official told a reporter she “moved to China with her husband after graduating because of his job at an American private equity firm while she worked on international transaction law.”
Did people hear her wrong? Maybe she didn’t say she was liar and said she was a liar.

Immediately after the fiasco Trump officials indicated she better get her act together super fast or she’d wind up like Saraamucci.

Her flop has been a major subject on social media:

?BREAKING: An anonymous White House official just told MSNBC that Katie Zacharia’s job is now in JEOPARDY after her abysmal performance today.

“She got off on the wrong foot. She needs to get better fast otherwise she’ll break Scaramucci’s record.”

DAMN. https://t.co/Vy4JUTnhjJ

— CALL TO ACTIVISM (@CalltoActivism) October 13, 2026

Trump’s new White House Press Secretary Katie Zacharia is completely lost for words and fumbling on her first day as she reads off a script https://t.co/58fMuVbvDg

— Headquarters (@HQNewsNow) October 13, 2026

Katie Zacharia makes Karoline Leavitt seem like Winston Churchill https://t.co/AgFbrCALAq

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) October 13, 2026

Katie Zacharia just held her first White House briefing as Press Secretary, and she completely nailed it!
She’s sharp, loyal, and ready to take on the biased media. With midterm momentum higher than ever, President Trump picked the absolute best person for the job! ? https://t.co/YDHviFYVyV

— Ryan Fournier (@RyanAFournier) October 13, 2026

Katie Zacharia is bombing her first White House press conference. But on the bright side, she’ll absolutely crush the swimsuit competition. https://t.co/ma4v5WUBP0

— Canada Hates Trump (@AntiTrumpCanada) October 13, 2026

One cannot take an American state bar exam in China. Bar exams are administered at designated testing locations in each state of the union.

Are Katie Zacharia and trump lying when they say she is an attorney?

If not, then she needs to disclose in what state she passed the bar.

— Ted Lieu (@tedlieu) October 13, 2026

I give Katie Zacharia 4 Scaramuccis.

This is atrocious.
https://t.co/BxqW1cDjWq

— BrooklynDad_Defiant!?? (@mmpadellan) October 13, 2026

@tedlieu And if she is referring to the Chinese equivalent of the bar exam, it’s offered only in Mandarin, has a 10% pass rate, and wouldn’t make her a US Attorney.

But she is welcome to bust out her fluent Mandarin skills to prove that.

— Adam Cochran (adamscochran.eth) (@adamscochran) October 13, 2026

@mmpadellan https://t.co/oEVbwNPljv

— Rick Compton (@rickcomp52) October 13, 2026

?Holy shit Katie Zacharia is terrible!!!!

“My president…excuse me, my husband..”

She’s reading, she’s nervous, she’s lying. Trump will NOT be happy after seeing her performance!! https://t.co/T805wDtVNg

— CALL TO ACTIVISM (@CalltoActivism) October 13, 2026

? Katie Zacharia’s first press briefing was brutally bad ?

Trump managed to find a press secretary who can barely read, but she does have the number one qualification — looking like Ivanka

Here’s a supercut from Zacharia’s first briefing, which made Karoline Leavitt seem like Ronald Reagan

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) October 13, 2026

Katie Zacharia with all the enthusiasm and vocal cadence of a butt worm. #katiezacharia #parody #politicalcomedy #politicalsatire #awkward https://t.co/eP08KKLUUt

— Maggie Reed (@mermaidmamamags) October 13, 2026

Katie Zacharia is the human equivalent of a Fox News chyron with a concussion.

— ??????_???? (@SundaeDivine) October 13, 2026

The good news for Katie Zacharia is that her first press briefing lasted only 14 minutes.

The bad news is that everyone was awake for it.

The post TRUMP’S NEW PRESS SECRETARY BOMBS BIGELY appeared first on The Moderate Voice.

Nearly 17 years after the Fort Hood shooting that killed 13 people and wounded 32 others, the planned execution of former Army psychiatrist Nidal Hasan has sparked a new debate over whether executions may be televised and viewed by the public.

Hasan, who was convicted of carrying out the November 2009 shooting at Fort Hood, Texas, is scheduled to be executed by firing squad on December 3, 2026. If carried out, it would be the first U.S. military execution since 1961 and the first military execution by firing squad since 1945. The Pentagon has announced plans to livestream the execution, although President Donald Trump said on October 10 that he would make the final decision about whether the execution is in fact televised. As of October 12, Axios had reported that Trump had privately expressed doubts about the plan.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth called the decision to use a firing squad a “no-brainer.” He also defended making the execution public, saying, “We’ll make sure that people are able to watch it, that it’s public, because people need to understand [that] there are serious consequences for these types of things.” 

Trump has implied that making an execution public could deter future attacks. While addressing reporters, he said, “By showing it, maybe other people won’t be doing what he did.” The proposal has drawn criticism from lawmakers in both parties, religious leaders and human rights advocates, raising questions about whether broadcasting an execution would serve a public purpose or turn it into a spectacle or form of entertainment. On October 11, Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin defended the plan during an appearance on CBS’s Face the Nation, dismissing concerns that livestreaming the execution could create a security risk or turn Hasan into a martyr. “But I don’t see an elevated risk at this point at all because of this,” Mullin said. He also argued that “no one has to watch it if they don’t choose to.”

One of the most widely recognized public executions in U.S. history took place in 1936, when Rainey Bethea, a Black man convicted of raping a white woman, was hanged in Owensboro, Kentucky. Thousands of spectators attended the execution. Bethea’s hanging is often described as the last fully public execution in the United States, although Roscoe “Red” Jackson was publicly hanged in Missouri the following year in what is widely considered the last public execution in the country. 

The closest modern comparison to a televised execution in the United States came in 2001, when Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh was executed by lethal injection. The Justice Department arranged a closed-circuit television broadcast for designated survivors and relatives of victims. According to The New York Times, 232 survivors and relatives gathered in a viewing room in Oklahoma City to watch McVeigh’s execution.

Some proponents of making executions public argue that allowing people to witness the process could increase transparency and help the public understand what capital punishment entails. Deborah Denno, a death penalty expert and law professor at Fordham University, has argued that livestreaming could make the process “much more transparent.”

“I think it could possibly be a good idea because it would be transparent and the public would be fully aware that it’s happening,” Denno said.

The proposed broadcast has also prompted mixed reactions among Fort Hood shooting survivors. In an ABC News report, survivor Alonzo Lunsford said he planned to attend the execution but expressed reluctance about making it available to the general public.  He was also concerned that the execution could become a spectacle resembling a sporting event. Another survivor, Dayna Ferguson Roscoe, expressed a different perspective, saying that although she had not expected the execution to be livestreamed, she viewed the decision in the context of the historical documentation of death and war. 

The debate surfaces amid renewed scrutiny of execution procedures following the failed lethal-injection attempt involving Christa Pike in Tennessee. The case has raised further questions about how executions are carried out and the methods used by states to enforce death sentences. 

The various reactions illustrate the controversy surrounding the prospect of a public execution. For some survivors, the execution represents an opportunity to confront the person who attacked them and experience a sense of closure. For others, broadcasting it to a worldwide audience raises concerns about how the victims and their families will be remembered.

With President Trump’s decision on whether to livestream the execution still pending, the debate remains unresolved. The controversy is no longer simply about Hasan’s scheduled execution, but whether the public should witness it as it happens.

The post Could Public Executions Become a Circus? appeared first on The Moderate Voice.

As midterm elections near, Democrats enjoy advantages in national “generic ballot” polling, suggesting they may secure majorities in the House of Representative or Senate, if not both chambers.

But the reality is that partisan control on Capitol Hill will be determined by just a handful of competitive House and Senate contests. The Cook Political Report currently classifies only 22 House campaigns and only seven Senate campaigns as toss-ups, where either the Democrat or the Republican has a genuine chance of winning.

By definition, neither party enjoys a clear advantage in these contests, so both will look to augment their base support with the votes of independents.

As a political science scholar focused on voting and elections, I believe that in the last few weeks before Election Day, those voters will feature prominently in campaign strategies.

Independents are dissatisfied

Midterm congressional elections serve as a referendum on the president’s performance.

Presidential approval polls and surveys about the economy indicate that independents do not favor President Donald Trump or the Republican Party.

A September 2026 YouGov survey found that only 23% of independents approve of Trump’s job as president, compared with 79% of Republicans and 2% of Democrats. This continues a steady drop in independents’ approval of Trump throughout his second term.

Independents have also soured on Trump’s handling of the economy, with 73% in a September Fox News poll saying that Trump has made the economy worse, a sentiment also expressed by 95% of Democrats and 26% of Republicans.

Independents have also registered their discontent with the war in Iran. Only 22% of independents think the war has been worth fighting, a view expressed by 63% of Republicans and 8% of Democrats. And 83% of independents do not think the Trump administration has a clear plan for ending the war.

Across these policy questions and performance assessments, Democrats and Republicans express clear and consistent support for their party’s positions and candidates. Independents, not surprisingly, stake out something of a middle ground.

But on key predictors of vote choice, especially presidential approval and economic evaluations, the opinions of independents appear to be closer to those of Democrats than to Republicans. Independents’ current pro-Democratic slant is not dramatic, but it could be significant in crucial toss-up contests.

One prominent Republican pollster, David Winston, has sounded an alarm about “unhappy independents” and their threat to continued GOP control of Congress.

How to win the independent vote

In closely fought House and Senate contests, both parties need to make inroads with independent voters, which poses some challenges.

First, independent voters’ turnout in midterms usually lags behind that of party members. So motivating and mobilizing independents will likely require added effort.

It’s worth noting, however, that a recent Emerson College poll showed 70% of independents were very excited about voting in the midterms. That’s on par with the level of enthusiasm expressed by Republicans and Democrats.

A second challenge for candidates is to develop campaign messaging that can connect with independent voters. For almost any candidate running for office, a top priority is to mobilize the party base. This is especially critical in toss-up contests such as the Michigan or Texas Senate races, where the base alone won’t guarantee victory.

But the themes that motivate the party faithful may not sit well with independents, who tend to recoil against partisan rancor.

For instance, Republican voters in Michigan’s 10th Congressional District might applaud Mike Bouchard’s pledge to combat “radical socialism,” but independent voters might find it a bit overdone. By contrast, independent voters do appear to be responsive to the more substantive policy priorities of congressional candidates.

In other words, congressional candidates, especially those in highly competitive races in Texas, Nebraska and Kansas, will need to employ sharply partisan rhetoric to fire up their base while also offering more sober, policy-based appeals to independents.

Striking that balance might be especially difficult for Republican candidates.

Trump clearly wants the midterms to be a referendum on his record, and he wants voters to imagine that he is on the ballot. It’s an effort by the White House to increase turnout among so-called low-propensity Trump voters. These are people who have voted for Trump in presidential elections and continue to support the president, but who often do not vote in midterms.

Putting Trump center stage might well excite this segment of Trump supporters, but it might also remind independents of their deepening reservations about the president.

Democratic congressional candidates will also need to be careful about balancing partisan messages to their base with more measured appeals to independent voters. But Democrats don’t have to share the spotlight with the president, so their balancing acts are not as delicate as those confronting their Republican opponents.

At this point in the campaign, it appears that the Trump administration’s record on issues that matter to Americans is pushing independents – in some cases gently, in some cases more decidedly – in a Democratic direction.

Julio Borquez, Associate Professor of Political Science, University of Michigan-Dearborn

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The post Meet the ‘independent voters’ who will likely decide which party triumphs in the 2026 midterm elections appeared first on The Moderate Voice.

I’ve said it before. With Donald Trump, the unthinkable is indeed thinkable and can well quickly morph into reality. But Donald Trump is predictable.

As many columnists and social media types have pointed out, it seems one of the few people Donald Trump will never say a bad word about is Russia’s Vladimir Putin.

But, then Putin would never say a bad word about Vladimir Putin, so it’s understandable.

The latest echoing of his masters voice has come in the form of Trump’s announcement that the U.S. will buy Russian diesel, despite the facts that there are reportedly laws on the books that the President can’t do that without Congressional approval. Then came Trump’s declaration that Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has to go.

The Atlantic’s David Frum writes that Trump’s deal sells out Ukraine, and does nothing for Americans.”

Late last night, President Trump announced a “massive” deal to buy diesel fuel from Russia. For the American truckers and farmers Trump claims to be serving, the deal means little or nothing. Trump may not know or may not care that his latest gambit will not reduce diesel prices. His poll numbers are plunging to Herbert Hoover levels. He needs a last-minute electioneering gimmick.

But while the deal will not benefit American consumers, it has immense consequences for others. For Vladimir Putin’s Russia, the deal is a potential lifesaver. For war-ravaged Ukraine, it is the most outrageous and heartless Trump betrayal to date. For Trump’s entourage, the deal promises corruption opportunities on a multibillion-dollar scale. And for people trying to understand the Trump presidency, the deal is further proof of the accusation that Nancy Pelosi flung in Trump’s face in 2019: “With you, all roads lead to Putin.”

And:

Russian energy assets are not worth much if those assets are regularly wrecked by Ukrainian drones. This makes plain the implicit quid pro quo in these lucrative deals offered to Trump’s family and friends: If you compel Ukraine to surrender, we will enrich you beyond reckoning.

Putin is attempting to leverage Russia’s most strategic asset in his war on Ukraine: Trump’s weakness for corruption. The 2.25 million barrels of diesel Putin offered Trump will have zero net impact on world energy markets or the world price of diesel. But accepting those barrels will collapse the U.S.-led sanctions regime on Russia—and align Trump with Putin against the Ukrainian air attacks on Russian energy production.

Trump stopped providing aid to Ukraine long ago. But the U.S. still provides Ukraine with crucial intelligence information. If Putin can entice Trump to cut Ukraine off from U.S. intelligence, he can do real damage to Ukraine’s capabilities. Russian diesel fuel is the cheese in that mousetrap. Trump’s negotiators are sniffing at the bait: The Kyiv Post reported today that Witkoff and Kushner are already threatening to stop information-sharing if Ukraine continues to strike Russian energy assets. And meanwhile, FBI Director Kash Patel is reportedly planning his own trip to Russia—one that members of Congress are urging him to cancel, as my colleague Sarah Fitzpatrick recently reported.

There is much about Putin’s offer of diesel that remains doubtful. Does Trump have the legal authority to buy previously sanctioned Russian oil? Does Russia even possess the diesel to sell? But one thing at least remains as clear as ever: With Trump, all roads lead to Putin.

Putin does all this with Donald Trump. And his lips don’t move.

The post HE WHO PULLS DONALD TRUMP’S STRING appeared first on The Moderate Voice.

It continues to be amazing how easily American norms can be shattered. All it took was for Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth to advocate live streaming the upcoming death-by-firing-squad execution of the Army officer convicted in the 2009 Fort Hood shooting and the Pentagon announced it, then Donald Trump said Me, too. Suggest it and who cares if it’s at odds the vast majority of countries’ policies about executions….it shall be done.

And it will:

Pentagon officials said on Thursday that the Army officer convicted in the 2009 Fort Hood shooting would be executed in public, a practice that ended in the United States nearly a century ago and is most commonly carried out in a handful of countries, including Iran, North Korea and Afghanistan.

The Pentagon said in a statement that the military execution, scheduled for Dec. 3, would also be broadcast via livestream. Such a broadcast has little precedent, and releasing video of executions is most often associated with extremist militant groups like the Islamic State.

The announcement adds to the growing spectacle around the planned execution of Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, who killed 13 people and wounded 32 others when he brought a personal handgun onto the grounds of Fort Hood, Texas. The rampage was the deadliest shooting at an American military base and sent shock waves through the U.S. military.

There are few countries that hold public executions. The human rights group Amnesty International has highlighted some cases in which public executions in Iran and Saudi Arabia have been filmed by bystanders.

The practice of filming and releasing video of an execution is more common with terror groups like the Islamic State, which became infamous for videos of gruesome executions of prisoners who were not given due process or convicted of crimes. Mass shooters have in some cases broadcast their killing sprees on livestream sites.

In an interview with Real America’s Voice, a conservative outlet, aboard the aircraft carrier U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth said Thursday that the execution would be public and available to watch “because people need to understand that there’s serious consequences for these types of things.” The Pentagon later confirmed in a statement that the execution would be livestreamed.

The Army has said the public execution of Major Hasan will be conducted by firing squad at Fort Hood, the site of the shooting. If carried out, it would be a first in modern American history.

The last state-sanctioned public execution in the United States occurred more than 90 years ago in Owensboro, Kentucky. Some 20,000 people gathered to witness the August 1936 hanging of Rainey Bethea, a young Black man who had been convicted of raping an elderly white woman.

Major Hasan’s execution would be the first by the military justice system since 1961, and he would be the first soldier put to death by firing squad since World War II. The firing squad is a rare method of execution, but one that has been used by the military, particularly during wartime. The Trump administration has proposed expanding its use as a method of execution.

The reaction of many leaders worldwide? The Guardian:

The United Nations’ office of the high commissioner for human rights warned on Friday that broadcasting the killing would amount to a public execution and “breach the absolute prohibition of torture”.

The plan also drew opprobrium from politicians, religious leaders and human rights advocates in the US and abroad. Hillary Clinton, the former US secretary of state, wrote on social media: “A barbaric idea, beneath our dignity as a country. Push back on this.”

Yassamin Ansari, the first Iranian American Democrat elected to the US Congress, posted: “In Trump’s America, we’re doing public executions now. WTF. This is what happens under brutal dictatorships like Iran and Afghanistan. It’s all part of Trump’s authoritarian takeover of the United States.”

Britain, which abolished the death penalty in the 1960s, moved to distance itself from the execution. Bridget Phillipson, the UK’s equalities minister and Labour party chair, told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme that she found the concept “rather disturbing”.

Phillipson stressed that the decision was a matter for the US government, adding: “They are a close ally. Does that mean that we support everything the US government does? No.”

Under US military law, a president must approve an execution by firing squad. Trump did so on the recommendation of his defence secretary, Pete Hegseth, according to the Pentagon.

Hegseth gleefully confirmed the livestream plan after previously saying that the execution would be public. Speaking to the conservative broadcaster Real America’s Voice, he said people should be able to watch because they need to understand that there were “serious consequences” for such crimes.

Asked whether Hasan had made any final requests, Hegseth replied: “Don’t care. We’ll see him on December 3.”

And:

….Media have sought to televise US executions ?in the past, but have been blocked by the courts. No other country is known to televise or livestream legal executions, experts said.

Indeed, public executions have largely disappeared around the world. Amnesty International recorded at least 17 in 2025, including 11 in Iran and six in Taliban-run Afghanistan.

In the US, executions have been conducted privately for about nine decades. The hanging of Rainey Bethea in Kentucky in 1936, witnessed by thousands, is generally regarded as the country’s last public execution, although another hanging took place in Missouri the following year.

Experts said there was no known precedent for livestreaming a legal execution….The proposed live stream has prompted criticism from religious leaders. Archbishop Paul Coakley, president of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops, said it was a “barbaric promotion of a culture of death and must be reconsidered”.

Politicians from both sides of the aisle also spoke out. …Others warned that the spectacle would be counterproductive and act as a recruiting sergeant for US enemies seeking fresh propaganda.

Ned Price, a former deputy to the US representative to the United Nations, posted on X: “You can take it from those of us who’ve spent years working on terrorism: the surest way to spawn more radicalized zealots is to glorify violence, embrace a cult of death, and create a martyr for the cause.

“Or take it from [al-Qaida] and ISIS, whose tactics offer the closest modern-day approximation of Hegseth’s proposal. Either way, it’s hard to conjure a more vivid example of his trademark performative bravado, which routinely damages America’s image and, in this case, so ghoulishly leaves us more vulnerable.”

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Does Tarzan have a real-life sister?

The post Does Tarzan have a real-life sister? appeared first on The Moderate Voice.

With just four weeks to go until the 2026 midterm elections, democracy watchdogs are warning that President Donald Trump is breaking the law in a desperate bid to retain Republican control of the US Congress.

A Monday report in USA Today highlighted the unprecedented steps that Trump is taking to rig the midterms for the GOP, ranging from his promises to pay every American $5,000 if Republicans retain Congress, to his efforts to get the US Postal Service to not deliver ballots to voters, to his push to have Republican-led states redraw their electoral maps in the middle of the decade.

Adav Noti, executive director of the Campaign Legal Center, told USA Today that the president has shown he is willing to behave lawlessly to keep power.

“I think the president is trying to use all of the powers at his disposal to control the election results, and almost all of those efforts are illegal,” Noti said, “but that has not deterred the administration.”

Noti added that Trump has gone well above and beyond what any past president has done to meddle in elections.

“We’ve never seen anything like this before,” he said. “The issue of the president of the United States using the powers of the presidency to try to control the election. That is a new development with this election.”

In an analysis published by Democracy Docket on Monday, election attorney Marc Elias warned that Trump in the coming weeks could take even more extreme steps, many of which he has already mused about publicly.

“Trump is once again in power, and he is again telling us his plan,” Elias explained. “He has weaponized the entire federal government—including the Department of Justice and the US Postal Service—to make voting more difficult.”

The “most dangerous” threat Trump has made, Elias continued, has related to the counting, tabulation, and certification of votes.

“Despite what the US Constitution says, he has repeatedly claimed the power to direct this process,” Elias warned. “This is not a new idea. It has been his plan all along.”

Elias also slammed the US media for continuing to downplay Trump’s authoritarian attacks on democracy, arguing that the press has learned nothing since the president incited a violent attack on the US Capitol on January 6, 2021.

Elias isn’t alone in his concern about another January 6-style event.

In an interview that aired on CBS News Sunday, retiring US Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC) was asked about the potential for Trump to try to overturn Democratic victories in this year’s elections, and he expressed real concern.

“I think there’s a risk,” Tillis said. “I really do. It would be another political unforced error if we do that.”

The post ‘Almost All of Those Efforts Are Illegal’: Watchdogs Raise Alarm About Trump Election Threats appeared first on The Moderate Voice.

The first round of Brazil’s 2026 elections held this Sunday ended with a resounding victory for the far-right Liberal Party (PL). Flávio Bolsonaro, the son of the jailed former president, Jair Bolsonaro, came out ahead of the current president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, with more than 47% of the valid votes. His party also secured the largest blocs in both the Chamber of Deputies – the lower house of Brazil’s Congress – and the Senate, in addition to five state governments.

Political scientists had already predicted such a scenario. Even with polls showing better numbers for Lula’s Workers’ Party (PT), we saw a shift in votes in the final days of the campaign driven by anti-PT sentiment and discontent fueled largely by unmet consumer expectations. This came even at a time of low inflation and low unemployment.

Still, the race remains wide open, as the two candidates now head to a runoff on October 25.

So far, the electoral process has proceeded without serious incidents

Elections alone do not build democracy. But, to cite just two essential figures in political science, Joseph Schumpeter and Adam Przeworski, free elections are one of the necessary conditions for its existence: an arrangement in which leaders compete for votes periodically and the defeated candidate accepts their loss.

Notably, this is an instrumental view and, as such, is strongly contested by those who expect more from democracy than just elections. But that is precisely why it is worth remembering the day after the first round of voting in Brazil. Being able to choose governments through the ballot box, respecting the outcome, without anyone taking up arms or staging a sit-in at a military barracks, is no small matter.

Since 1989, the year of the first direct presidential election in Brazil after the end of the military dictatorship, the Workers’ Party has been one of the main political contenders, consistently finishing among the top two parties.

In seven of the ten elections, PT’s presidential candidate was Lula. He won three of them and is now once again in the runoff election.

In the last three elections (2018, 2022 and 2026), the other side of the race has been contested by the far right, represented by Jair Bolsonaro in the first two and — now that he is under house arrest — by his son, Flávio.

In 2018, Jair Bolsonaro emerged victorious. The right reorganized itself around him, primarily centred on conservative moral agendas, such as the defense of Christian values, support for the military dictatorship, and opposition to sexual and reproductive rights, with a strong emphasis on reinforcing traditional gender roles.

In 2022, Lula, who had been arrested on charges of alleged involvement in corruption scandals, ran for office again and, this time, emerged victorious, defeating Jair Bolsonaro, who was seeking reelection. In a blatant disregard for even the most basic principles of democracy, Bolsanaro’s far-right supporters occupied roads and military barracks the day after the election — a clear sign of their refusal to accept defeat.

Restrained at first, they returned after the inauguration in an orchestrated act on January 8, 2023, when organized groups of Bolsonaro supporters stormed and vandalized the headquarters of the three branches of government in the Federal District, mirroring the storming of the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021. The acts of vandalism at the National Congress, the Planalto Palace, and the Federal Supreme Court led to hundreds of Bolsonaro supporters being convicted.

Given the severity of the act, Bolsonaro himself was sentenced to prison by the Federal Supreme Court (STF) as the leader of the criminal organization that attempted the coup, alongside high-ranking military officers and a federal deputy.

Erratic polls

This will be the third election in which PT supporters and Bolsonaro supporters will engage in a fierce race for the presidency that goes all the way to the runoff. Throughout the entire campaign this year, poll predictions have not held up consistently for more than a week at a time. Studies in political science offer some clues as to why.

It is well known that the PT has a hard-core base that guarantees about 30% of the vote, while the anti-PT camp accounts for another 30% or so. Not every leftist is a PT supporter, and not every anti-PT voter is a Bolsonaro supporter, but the groups often overlap.

Recent articles report that identification with the right has also taken hold among voters, beyond just support for Bolsonaro. And some evidence shows that women have a stronger preference for Lula, while evangelicals have an even stronger preference for Bolsonaro — whether the father or the son.

Runoff elections rarely alter the outcome of the first round (even if it is possible). The pattern in which incumbents had a better chance of winning has been changing. And in Latin America, the “pink tide” has been replaced by a wave of victorious far-right candidates, as has occurred in Argentina and Chile.

Once the elections are over, we must ensure the strength of our institutions far beyond simply guaranteeing fair elections to preserve democracy. This is especially true in a context where the far right — which has attacked institutions on numerous occasions and is a persistent denier of science (as we saw during the COVID-19 pandemic) — will hold the largest blocs in Congress and may also secure the presidency.

Thus, the work of these institutions — composed of people with different political preferences — becomes even more crucial. It is up to them to ensure rules that apply to everyone and that allow, even if only minimally, for the independence of the three branches of government, as well as fair, periodic elections with political opponents who can win or lose.

Upholding democracy, in victory or defeat

With an eye on Latin America but deeply concerned about the situation in the United States, Przeworski — the scholar known for his minimalist conception of democracy — drew attention to two points at a conference in Paris last May. According to the political scientist, we cannot assume that democracy ceases to exist when a candidate we do not like is elected; on the contrary, this demonstrates that the system is functioning properly.

On the other hand, he noted that in the U.S., the erosion of democracy during Donald Trump’s second term has been threatening the possibility of fair, periodic elections in which defeat is accepted. This serves as a warning for Brazil.

We will not know who Brazil’s next president will be until October 25. Whoever emerges victorious, the rule remains the same: the election must be fair, and the loser must accept the result.

On this point, the two sides do not have the same track record. Lula lost three consecutive presidential elections, and yet members of the Workers’ Party did not go to Brasília to ransack Congress. The same cannot be said of the far right. The last time it lost, the January 8, 2023 riots broke out, during which not even the most basic concept of democracy was respected.

For this reason, the commitment expected of the Brazilian far-right now is twofold.

If it loses, it must accept defeat. If it wins, it must govern within the rules that enabled its victory, respecting the Judiciary, the press, the opposition, and the possibility of being defeated four years from now.

A democratic government must go beyond this, ensuring that different groups have access to power and that inequality is reduced. But without this first step, no other step is possible. It is this step that the far-right must guarantee.

This piece is the result of a partnership between The Conversation Brazil and Brazil’s National Association of Graduate Studies in the Social Sciences (ANPOCS). Débora Thomé will present one of her papers at the 50th ANPOCS Annual Meeting, taking place October 7–9. Check out the full program here.

Débora Thomé, Professora, Instituto Brasileiro de Ensino, Desenvolvimento e Pesquisa (IDP) ; Fundação Getulio Vargas (FGV); Associação Brasileira de Ciência Política (ABCP)

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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A family can live happily in a two-bedroom rental for years, then watch the math change the spring before kindergarten registration. Suddenly, the address decides which public school a child attends, how long the morning drive takes, and whether a parent still gets to work on time. That shift explains why housing decisions become more complicated once children reach school age. Price and square footage still matter, but they now share the table with attendance zones, transfer rules, and long-term affordability.

Why Housing Decisions Become More Complicated Once Children Reach School Age

The main reason is that most U.S. public schools still assign students by home address. An attendance boundary is the line a district draws to decide which school serves each street. Before children enroll, parents can pick a home mostly on cost, commute, and space. After enrollment, the same move may also mean a new teacher, new friends, and a new set of district rules.

The time horizon also stretches. Parents of a five-year-old are often planning for thirteen years of schooling, not the next lease renewal. That longer view pushes many families toward buying rather than renting. It also makes them more hesitant to move again once a child has settled into a classroom.

What Trade-Offs Come With Buying Into a Strong School Zone?

The biggest trade-off is cost. Homes inside well-regarded attendance zones tend to sell for more, so families often pay a premium for the school as much as the house. Some parents accept a smaller yard or an older kitchen. Others take on a longer commute to reach a district they can actually afford.

These pressures hit hardest in high-cost states such as California, where rising prices keep nudging households toward cheaper regions. Population shifts caused by housing costs can have effects beyond the housing market, which is part of the broader discussion around why where people move matters in 21st-century elections. For parents, the question is rarely abstract. It comes down to whether a stretch mortgage today leaves enough room for childcare, activities, and savings later.

How Should Families Compare Cities in the Bay Area?

Families comparing cities in the Bay Area usually make better choices when they weigh the whole community rather than one school rating. Fremont, which WalletHub named the best U.S. city to raise a family in both 2024 and 2025, shows how schools, parks, and local jobs can reinforce each other. Other parents look at Pleasanton, San Ramon, or Albany for similar reasons, at very different price points. A useful comparison usually covers:

• Commute times during school drop-off hours
• Access to parks, libraries, and after-school programs
• Housing stock with room for a growing family
• Enrollment trends and district budget stability

A shortlist saves time when a move is on a deadline. Families narrowing down family-friendly Bay Area cities can use that shortlist as a starting point, then visit the neighborhoods in person and test the school commute on a weekday morning. Driving the school route on a weekday morning reveals traffic, crossing guards, and neighborhood rhythm that no listing can show.

Can School Choice Loosen the Tie Between Address and School?

School choice can loosen that tie, but it rarely breaks it. Charter schools, magnet programs, and open enrollment give some families options beyond their assigned campus. School-choice rules can also become tied up in legal and constitutional disputes. The controversy surrounding Oklahoma’s approval of the nation’s first religious charter school is one example of how quickly the landscape can change. In most districts, though, residents of an attendance area still get first claim on available seats.

That makes choice a backup plan rather than a housing strategy. Lotteries can fall through, many districts offer no transportation for transfer students, and siblings may land on different campuses. Buying a home around a hoped-for transfer can leave parents with a long daily drive and no guarantee.

What Do Families Gain by Moving Somewhere Cheaper?

Moving to a lower-cost area often improves a family’s finances, even when local wages are lower. Housing costs are often the clearest financial reason families consider leaving California. The California Policy Lab’s Priced Out report found that people who moved out of the state ended up in neighborhoods where monthly housing costs were about $672 lower. Seven years later, those movers were 48% more likely to own a home than people who stayed.

The cost shows up elsewhere. Families give up nearby relatives, long friendships, and schools they already know. Middle and high schoolers often feel that loss more sharply than younger siblings. For that reason, many parents find a long-distance move easier to justify before kindergarten than in the middle of eighth grade.

How Much Should Test Scores Drive the Decision?

Test scores deserve weight, but they should not settle the decision alone. Ratings reflect student demographics as much as teaching quality, and they reveal little about whether a specific child will thrive. Family engagement matters too. School performance also depends on factors that a rating cannot capture. One discussion of conservatives and education recounts a teacher’s observation that stronger parental involvement tended to go along with better student performance.

Visiting classrooms, talking with current parents, and asking about class sizes often tell parents more than a single number. A slightly lower-rated school with strong arts, language, or special education programs may suit a child better than a pricier zone.

When Is the Best Time to Move With School-Age Children?

Summer is usually the easiest window, because children can start fresh alongside everyone else in August or September. Mid-year moves work too, but they take more planning. Families should confirm enrollment documents, proof of residency, and transfer deadlines before they sign a lease or close on a home. Before moving, California families can also review the Department of Education’s overview of statutory school attendance alternatives to understand how intradistrict transfers, interdistrict agreements, and the district of choice program work.

Parents can also ask the old district whether a child may finish the term at the current school. Some districts approve that request for families who move late in the year, and it can soften the transition considerably.

Planning a Home Around the School Years Ahead

Housing decisions become more complicated once children reach school age because a single address now carries financial, educational, and emotional weight. Families who compare whole communities, understand transfer rules, and time their moves carefully tend to avoid the most expensive surprises. Before the next enrollment season arrives, sit down with a realistic budget, a shortlist of neighborhoods, and the school calendar. Then decide which trade-offs your family can comfortably live with for the years ahead.

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The initials EPA stand for Environmental Protection Agency. The Agency is supposed to protect the environment and the American population from harmful substances. Under the Trump administration, however, the EPA is not doing its job.

The EPA headed by Lee Zelden ruled in February 2026 that climate change did not endanger public health despite scientific evidence to the contrary. Trump agrees with this decision, his administration rescinding the 2009 endangerment finding that greenhouse gases were driving climate change, including carbon dioxide and methane. The EPA also reversed regulations that limited hazardous air pollutants from coal-fired plants, including mercury, other heavy metals and toxic substances. Under Trump’s aegis, the EPA has abandoned its obligations to protect Americans’ health and the environment. 546 polluting facilities have been given exemptions from Clean Air Act rules, permitting toxic air pollution to be uncontrolled. It is estimated that 4.6 million Americans could be exposed to higher cancer risks, some of whom already have air-pollution risks 80 times greater than EPA standards.

In addition, the EPA repealed some limits on forever chemicals in drinking water. These have been shown to cause cancer and other serious diseases. The weedkiller atrazine which poses an extinction risk to some wildlife and has been linked to cancer and hormonal diseases has also been certified as safe by the Fish and Wildlife Service. The Trump administration is easing restrictions as well on climate ‘Super Pollutants”. These include hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs) used in refrigerators and air conditioners which will be phased out more slowly than was anticipated.

To go along with the new pollution regulations from the EPA, the independent chemical referee who for decades made decisions on which chemicals were hazardous to human health is being sidelined. There will no longer be a neutral chemist assessing which substances are dangerous. Current and past assessments will be subject to review within the EPA and decisions will take into consideration jobs, importance of chemicals, policy, etc, besides the substance’s hazard. All harmful chemicals will be reevaluated using more lenient criteria.

In addition to changes in place at the EPA, the ideas behind MAHA (Make America Healthy Again) have been eliminated to a large degree by other Trump government employees aligned with big business. Problems with food and pollution are not controlled by Kennedy and HHS. Dangerous substances like glyphosate, mercury, other airborne particles, forever chemicals in pesticides and drinking water are allowed by the Trump administration. The staff at HHS was cut by 25 percent last year.

For the EPA, HHS and the Trump Administration, money and business are all that counts, with health and the environment taking a back seat to profits
www.robertlevinebooks.com

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America’s health system is poised to rise to another divisive issue at the mid-term elections following publication of new global health data that ranks the US 62nd for overall life expectancy and 40th for healthy life expectancy, despite spending more than any other nation on healthcare at $13,473 per person.

The World Health Organization (WHO) placed American healthy life expectancy (HALE) at 66.2 to 67.3 years and overall life expectancy at 76.4 to 77.5 years in data published on Friday in its latest Global Health Estimates.

In a positive note, WHO reported that global life expectancy has bounced back to 73.3 years, which is just shy of the historical peak of 73.4 years before the 2020 Covid-19 pandemic. Global HALE — the number of years a person can expect to live in full health without severe disease or disability—has recovered to 62.8 years, just 0.4 years below its pre-pandemic high.

But WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus warned that simply increasing lifespan without securing physical and mental well-being only shuffles the cards in healthcare systems instead of improving them. “Now we must make sure people don’t just live longer, but live those extra years in good health,” he pointed out.

The flagrant gaps between American health performance and other rich countries could draw attacks against Trump for further widening the near complete decoupling of financial health spending from actual biological health outcomes. The WHO report could provide a numbers-driven indictment of America’s healthcare framework.

Using different measures from WHO, expert estimates by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and others placed US health care spending per person at $14,775 to $14,885, American HALE at 67.8 to 68.5 years and overall life expectancy at 79 years with 76.5 years for men and 81.4 years for women.

It turns out that health spending per person in the US was almost $5,000 more than in Switzerland, the next highest peer country. Other highly developed nations like France, Canada, and Britain spent $7,367, $7,301, $6,747 per person respectively, which is half of what the U.S. spends. The U.S. spent more tax dollars per citizen on healthcare programs like Medicare and Medicaid than Britain or Japan.

America’s low HALE ranking suggests that its massive health expenditure does not buy proportional health benefits. A core goal of modern medical systems is not just to keep sick bodies alive but to ensure that people stay healthy as close to the end of their lives as possible.

Top-performing nations in the WHO report seem to achieve this, e.g., a Singapore citizen enjoys a HALE of 73.6 years on average, meaning she faces just a short window of late-life decline. The American system favors high-cost, late-stage treatments over lower cost early prevention. It keeps chronically ill patients alive for decades but fails at keeping them healthy for much of their lives.

WHO measures health data a little differently because it applies a uniform tracking model across its 183 member states to allow for accurate international comparisons and smoothen currency conversions. It incentivizes health systems that maximize average national life expectancy and equitable treatment of all categories of people.

In contrast, the U.S. health system is a global leader for those with premium insurance or independent wealth because it focuses on medical innovation, rapid diagnostics and access to cutting-edge subspecialty care, such as advanced oncology or complex gene therapies.

In light of WHO ideals, the U.S. does not have a healthcare system designed for the collective population; it has a highly sophisticated, hyper-expensive medical marketplace stratified by income, social stratum and locality.

American figures are a little different from WHO because they are adjusted locally for Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) and real-time national healthcare consumption. They use metrics published by the advanced nations’ OECD (Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development) and the Peterson-KFF Health System Tracker. WHO uses those metrics as well but analyzes them differently to take account of all countries, rich, middle-income and poor.

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By: David Anderson
Columnist

In this column I write about what I think is the most successful country in Africa, Somaliland. On Wednesday I got to meet some more Somalilanders at “UN Week” and what a day it was!

Understand this is not “Somalia”, a failed state of “Black Hawk Down” fame, “Al Shabab” terrorists, famine, khat and misery. Somalia is a superlative in failed statedom, they give Afghanistan a run for its money. Our president has a name for these countries.

But Somaliland is an entirely different matter: a democracy with peace, free capitalism and freedom of speech. The difference is like the difference between North and South Korea which I’ve written about in these pages previously.

This is U.N. Week in New York, a big deal here and even President Trump turned up to entertain us. Always a treat.

I used to live in Midtown and UN Week is very disruptive to locals. But, after a $50 (I know, right?) cab fare from my home in Chelsea I joined the Somalilander demonstration as planned at a plaza opposite the iconic UN building.

Their mission is to get international recognition – particularly American – for their country. They’re close allies with Taiwan and as of this year Israel. All the best people and I say that in a non-ironic manner: friendships matter, get the best friends you can and the Somalilanders are doing just that.

Being de jure not just de-facto “recognised” matters a great deal for a country. It means embassies, passport acceptability and travel rights. It means membership in vital international organizations (like the U.N.). It means being able to buy insurance, sign treaties, issue debt, print a currency that isn’t laughed at and even control one’s own borders. With recognition they could better plan their own future as their elected — don’t skip that word – elected – leaders can negotiate as equal partners with other countries.

What Somaliland needs most is official American recognition because then others will follow. South Sudan had a similar path – an American sponsored new country – though South Sudan got independence before a functioning state which was a disaster. Somaliland has had a functioning state for 35 years. Even without recognition they’ve done an impressive job of building a peaceful democracy.

They don’t have a lot of dough but they’ve got all the right ideas.

Whether you like Trump or not he is a master of the big surprise. Witness (former, now) President Maduro of Venezuela who is enjoying the best NYPD accommodations we can offer at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in Brooklyn.

And the mullahs, those still alive, in Tehran are on the run. If anybody can make the bold move of recognition it is Trump though I told my friends Jared Kushner is the best route to “the top” in these matters.

The demo was in Dag Hammarskjold Plaza opposite the U.N. Building which frequently plays host to our First Amendment rights for all sorts of international aspirants, like London’s “Hyde Park Speakers’ Corner” but with skyscrapers.

One of the many protesters in the plaza was the Falun Gong sect. They are ferociously anti-communist so they got my attention, mainly by their group exercises and rigid meditation. Most were older East Asians, nice folks for sure but I’m not joining.

In the middle of the Plaza were “my” Somalilanders, on the other side first Syrians (my Arabic isn’t good enough to know which side they were on!) and then a huge number of Ghanaians and Guineans arrived, annoyed about something. A middle aged bald white guy like me sticks out in a large crowd of young Africans so I made quite a splash socially. Unlike the other African and Arab camps the Somalilanders had a pretty equal sex ratio.

There was also a HUGE Iranian dissident demo with great, dramatic drum skills.

The contrast between the old Chinese meditators and the all young – all male – African parties next door was quite profound.

Midtown is crazy during U.N. Week: “frozen zones” aplenty and I had to “Pull to the side of the sidewalk and STAY STILL, sir!” as a badged and armed Secret Service agent ordered as he (legally) “halted” me. I think the Peruvian president and his entourage walked by.

Some years ago there were scandals as various official motorcades drove into each other, lots of accidents. Imagine: you’re a chauffeur for your President, King or Emir, visiting NEW YORK DAMN CITY! – the big leagues – you’re not yielding for any other motorcade so they used to collide in a diplomatic game of motorcade chicken. It was hilarious.

I noticed a pretty young hijabi with many fancy shopping bags alighting from an SUV motorcade on East 46th with diplomatic plates: Some Gulfies’ girlfriend or wife no doubt. Tiffany’s is fun with an unlimited credit card I’m sure.

The traffic was terrible. I’ll have to talk to my editors here about that $50 taxi fare, but that’s U.N. Week. And it is inspiring that our planet’s big shots can visit, spend their money and argue peacefully in a common forum, irrespective of the U.N.’s many faults.

Further, my Somalilander friends could demonstrate with the kind of freedom of expression enjoyed both in the US and Somaliland to argue their valid case.

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Universities have been trying for years to cut back on the abuses among fraternities, with limited resources and limited success.

A new lawsuit, filed by a former Cornell University student in September 2026, is now rattling higher education and drawing national attention.

The person, identified as Jane Doe, has alleged that seven Chi Phi fraternity members drugged and gang-raped her at an on-campus fraternity house when she was a sophomore in 2024.

Tompkins County District Attorney Matthew Van Houten declined to pursue criminal charges against the fraternity members in 2024. Following the filing of the case and emergence of new information, however, Van Houten said on Sept. 26 that he is planning “to discuss new evidence that exists” with the former Cornell student about her sexual assault claims.

The high-profile Cornell case is just one of the latest fraternity scandals. In August 2026, Pennsylvania announced charges against current and former Penn State fraternity members for their involvement in a criminal narcotics operation.

As an education scholar who researches the experiences of undergraduate college students and fraternities, I believe that universities and colleges have not devoted enough resources toward curtailing the hazing, sexual assault and other kinds of dangerous behavior that sometimes happens at fraternities or other student organizations.

But there is only so much they can do – in part because beneath it all is a hypermasculine culture of proving one’s worth.

A need for more enforcement

In 1984, the National Minimum Drinking Age Act pressured states to set 21 as the minimum age to purchase and consume alcohol. All states made 21 the minimum age by 1988.

The change meant that most college students could no longer legally purchase alcohol, leading some of them to drink in more private settings, like fraternity houses.

Some universities felt concerned about the alcohol-related injuries and deaths occurring at fraternity houses. Schools also faced the possibility of lawsuits over underage drinking.

Harmful binge drinking remained a major problem on college campuses throughout the 1990s and early 2000s. A lot of the documented hazing incidents at fraternities during this time also involved alcohol.

Sexual assault on college campuses, including at fraternities, was another major issue during this time.

A lot of universities started to respond to students’ excessive alcohol use, in part through social norming. This term means correcting people’s mistaken beliefs about what their peers normally do, like regularly drinking excessively.

They also tried other harm-reduction strategies, like sharing direct information with students about the negative effects of consuming alcohol, as well as peer-led interventions to try to reduce unsafe drinking or encourage alcohol moderation.

But they didn’t necessarily respond to related problems surrounding hazing, such as substance misuse or addiction.

Some of the students’ parents, including those who had children who died as a result of hazing, were concerned. They developed a large, nationwide parent lobby to advocate for changes in hazing laws across states. These groups, not the universities, have been the most influential in advocating for changes in hazing laws.

Some prevention efforts

It’s not that some universities haven’t tried to reduce hazing on their campuses. These efforts include practices such as hosting educational sessions, workshops, speakers and even placing moratoriums on social fraternity events that include alcohol.

Recent approaches have included teaching students how to recognize when their peers are emotionally distressed and need help.

Some universities have started research centers on hazing or hired full-time staff members whose jobs involve prevention and response work following a harmful incident such as hazing or sexual violence.

Limited responses

Universities can kick fraternities off campus and kick out athletes who are charged with hazing or sexual assault.

But fraternities can also exist as private organizations, independent of a university. A university can withdraw recognition from a fraternity chapter and prohibit it from hosting events on campus, but that does not necessarily prevent the organization from hosting gatherings off campus.

Another issue is that universities and colleges like Cornell have a civil process for dealing with hazing and other crimes, including sexual assault, but not a criminal one. Schools cannot launch a criminal investigation, but they can levy educational sanctions, including banning students from campus or taking away students’ scholarships.

Expelling students for illegal misconduct such as sexual assault and hazing is a really common approach, but that is about as far as these schools can go in terms of discipline.

Schools may also cooperate with criminal investigations. Campus police, for example, can share their evidence and records with outside law enforcement. Or university staff may testify against students in court. But universities themselves cannot bring criminal charges.

After Jane Doe reported the incident to university police, Cornell says it took action.

In a September 2026 statement, Cornell said its range of sanctions included “expulsions and suspensions.” A few students were asked to write essays, but Cornell says this wasn’t “as a sole consequence of their involvement.”

The Chi Phi chapter involved in the incident was also closed in 2024, according to Cornell.

Following the lawsuit and recent national attention it received, Cornell agreed to bring in outside lawyers to determine whether it properly conducted the 2024 rape investigation.

The role of masculinity

Proving your masculinity can become a central part of proving your worth and fit at a fraternity.

This hypermasculine culture – combined with a culture of secrecy – could be a powder keg for sexual violence. It’s a dynamic also seen in the military and on sports teams.

Hypermasculinity is not simply tied up in an individual’s behavior, but can become embedded within organizational cultures that reward toughness, dominance, risk-taking and silence.

In fraternities, these expectations may shape how members understand belonging and status. These issues may also discourage students from expressing vulnerability and seeking help.

Understanding these gendered and cultural dynamics is, I believe, essential to developing prevention efforts that address not only individual conduct, but also the organizational norms that allow harmful behaviors to persist.

Pietro A. Sasso, Associate Professor of Education, Old Dominion University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Gann is a Jew with roots in Baltimore, but pretended to be, alternately, Black, Tunisian and Palestinian, cosmetically altering her appearance and adopting a certain way of speaking that led people to believe she was “one of them.”

The “them” was clearly “not white.” The ruse worked for a while, but as most lies tend to do, it unraveled. And then the melodrama ensued.

Blacks, Palestinians and I’m assuming one or two Tunisians were apoplectic they had been fooled, that the Keffiyah had been pulled over their eyes, so to speak. The pain and anguish of her Free Palestine buddies was palpable on social media and in news articles, where they breathlessly expressed shock, anger, and a sense of betrayal that Miss Gann was, horror of horrors, a Jew.

As I read the reactions from Gann’s former friends, it struck me how incredibly narcissistic they were. They had no problem when she was spouting anti-Jewish and anti-Israel propaganda as a member of the tribe.

They welcomed her with a touching naivete. Who knew that not combing your hair and wearing a foundation two shades darker than your skin color could gain entrée into an exclusive club.

We can call it “Tan Face,” a different version of the Black Face that white people employed in the early part of the last century for entertainment at the expense of minorities.

But when these people who traffic in anti-Semitic lies realized she was actually from a very different branch of the Tree of Abraham, they choked.

“All mistakes and deceptions are mine and mine alone. Please do not let them affect how you engage with any people, organizations, causes, or communities to which I was connected,” Gann said on Instagram. “Please reach out if you know me and want to have a direct conversation about how I hurt you. I will regret causing this hurt for the rest of my life.”

After taking a sip of tea and a nibble of falafel, she continued on another post:

“I lied about my identity and have been lying for years. I have no Palestinian or Tunisian heritage. I am a white woman of significant privilege and wealth,” Gann said. “Anyone who supported me was manipulated and should not be judged as a result of their support for me.”

It’s doubtful anyone is judging Gann because of the people who support her. They are as bad as she is, only they don’t need to lie.

They are brutally honest about their bigotry, marching in the streets screaming anti-Jewish slurs and calling for the annihilation of Israel while celebrating the deaths of Jewish children and women on Oct. 7. They are open about their bigotry, and embrace it.

Gann is being judged by both her former allies and the people who were against her from the beginning, only no one actually knew how justified that anger really was.

It is one thing to have an enemy who is clear about who she is and why she hates you, it is quite another to have someone fromyour own tribe try and destroy you.

There is nothing worse than a self-hating creature, whether it be an Italian from South Philly who actually swallows the idiocy that Columbus was a genocidal maniac, a Catholic who supports Planned Parenthood or a Jew who gives comfort to the people who celebrate her ancestors’ deaths.

The psychology of that sort of person is difficult to gauge, but it has something to do with a sense of self-loathing and a desire to belong to the “in” crowd.

I call it “identity suicide,” and I attribute it to the fact some people are so desperate to be loved that they will sacrifice their ownfamilies, and their own souls, to gain entrée into the desired club.

It is very much like the light-skinned Black woman Sarah Jane in “Imitation of Life,” who tries so hard to pass for white and only learns when it is too late that you cannot run away from your roots. They are incredibly elastic, and will always pull you back home, even against your will.

Hannah Gann did not betray the Black, Brown, Palestinian and Tunisian folk by whom she so desperately wanted to be accepted.

She betrayed the young Jewish students who cannot walk down the street without looking over their shoulders in trepidation, who are afraid to wear the Star of David around their necks, who are forced to listen to lies about their heritage and their people, and who are gaslighted into accepting that there is a genocide in Gaza, but that the Holocaust is a myth.

Perhaps Hannah should take to Instagram and, in this somber time after Yom Kippur, and beg forgiveness for being a traitor to her family, to her people, and to the truth.

Copyright 2026 Christine Flowers, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate. Christine Flowers is an attorney and a columnist for the Delaware County Daily Times, and can be reached at cflowers1961@gmail.com.

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Catherine A. Sanderson, Amherst College

As an undergrad student decades ago, I attended a dorm presentation describing the importance of giving and receiving sexual consent. The workshop leaders explained that if your partner said “no” or “stop” but you proceeded to have sex anyway, it was considered rape.

A high-profile athlete on campus raised his hand and said, in utter disbelief, “That can’t be right. By that definition, everyone I’ve ever had sex with I’ve raped.”

I was horrified by his comment, but most students laughed. He clearly saw nothing wrong with the view he’d expressed, presumably believing it was widely shared.

I immediately thought of this experience when I heard about the alleged sexual assault committed by seven fraternity members at Cornell University. As a social psychologist, and the author of a book examining why so-called good people stay silent in the face of problematic behavior, what I find most tragic about the events at Cornell is that reportedly over 50 men on a group chat learned about the assault as it was happening. Yet there’s been no public report that any of them tried to stop the assault, help the victim or contact campus or local police departments.

This type of inaction is very common. In about one-third of sexual assaults, at least one other person is present who potentially could intervene but in most instances chooses not to. Why?

Misperceiving that you’re the only one

Data suggests a minority of men actually commit sexual assault. Researchers estimate about 6.5% of male college students in the United States and Canada have committed rape. Yet many men who find sexual violence offensive mistakenly believe that other men do not.

Undergraduate men in one study reported their beliefs about common rape myths, such as “If a girl doesn’t physically fight back, you can’t really say it was rape,” and “If a girl goes to a room alone with a guy at a party, it is her own fault if she is raped.” Researchers then asked participants how they thought both their close friends and average male college students would answer these same questions.

The results provided clear evidence that college men have skewed views of what those around them are thinking. Most students saw their classmates and friends as more supportive of rape myths than they themselves were.

Unfortunately, believing that other men generally accept sexual violence – even when this belief is wrong – inhibits their willingness to intervene to stop such behavior when they encounter it. In fact, men’s beliefs about their peers’ attitudes are a stronger predictor of their willingness to intervene than their own stated attitudes about sexual aggression.

What’s behind these mistaken beliefs

Men who underestimate their peers’ discomfort with sexually aggressive behavior often fear the consequences of calling out problematic views or intervening in the face of inappropriate behavior. The most common reason male college students give for failing to intervene in situations involving sexual violence is a fear of being laughed at or ridiculed – in particular, a desire not to appear weak to other men.

Men who actually commit assault also tend to overestimate support for such behavior. Not surprisingly, men who report having committed sexual assault believe that other men are more accepting of such behavior and have engaged in such behavior themselves.

This assumed support leads them to feel comfortable describing problematic behavior, which leads other men to believe that sexual violence is more common, and more accepted, than it actually is.

Resetting a social norm

Given the consistent evidence that men wrongly believe that most men are more comfortable with sexual violence than they themselves are, the challenge is not to change the social norm. It’s getting people to see what it actually already is.

Correcting such misperceptions can go a long way toward reducing sexual violence. First-year male college students who participate in a 90-minute sexual assault prevention program – focused on refuting rape myths, increasing awareness of the importance of consent, and correcting misperceptions about other men’s attitudes and behaviors – report reduced levels of sexual aggression themselves four months later.

These programs work in two ways. First, men who receive accurate information about what other men actually believe are less inhibited about speaking out and intervening. Second, men who are at risk of engaging in sexual aggression may change their intentions after learning that their peers do not support such behavior.

At the same time, men in tight-knit groups feel considerable pressure to show loyalty to other group members, which may lead to ignoring bad behavior committed by their peers.

But the underlying dynamics of peer influence can help shift group norms from protecting group members by staying silent to stepping in to prevent bad behavior. One college football player described looking out for his teammates, even if that meant interrupting a potential sexual encounter: “Maybe you don’t get the girl, but you’ll keep your scholarship and still be on the team.”

Learn strategies for intervening

Another approach for preventing sexual assault is to learn strategies for intervening. Bystander intervention programs emphasize the importance of stopping bad behavior before it escalates, teach specific skills for intervening, and remind people that everyone has a responsibility to prevent sexual violence.

Students who participate in such programs are more confident in their ability to intervene and more willing to do so. Most importantly, rates of sexual violence are markedly lower on campuses that have implemented these programs. For example, one study found that experiences of sexual harassment and stalking were 11% lower and that instances of unwanted sexual activity with women who were too drunk or high to stop them were as much as 17% lower.

It’s tempting to read about the Cornell case and assume the apparent inaction in the face of problematic behavior is uniquely a problem at one college, or only with members of fraternities, or only college students. But the reality is that pretty much everyone has been in situations where they’ve seen potentially problematic behavior and failed to speak up.

Understanding the very normal psychological factors that lead people to misperceive what others are actually thinking and feeling – and learning specific strategies for intervening – can make a real difference.

Catherine A. Sanderson, Poler Family Professor of Psychology, Amherst College

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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“Show me your nuts.” That double entendre is spoken by Lenka Novak in The Kentucky Fried Movie, at which time singer-songwriter Stephen Bishop replies by demonstrating that he is nuts.

It’s your turn to be nutty. Do you dare?

The post Show me you’re nuts. appeared first on The Moderate Voice.

I recently wrote this personal essay for San Diego Jewish World about an unexpected change in my life. I’m sharing it here with TMV readers as well.

And there I was on Yom Kippur 2026 at Chabad of Rancho Penasquitos , as Rabbi Yechiel Cagen led the service. I was fasting.

It was the manifestation of a series of events that had transformed a non-observant Reform Jew into an observant Jew who loves prayer. Suddenly, in my old age, I’d become religious.

How religious am I now? I’m so religious I want to be circumcised again.

It’s quite a journey from the days when my religious grandfather, Abraham Ravinsky, once asked me: “Do you have tefillin?”

“Yeah,” I replied. “I have a couple of rolls of Kodak film upstairs.”

My grandfather, who immigrated to the United States after the Russian revolution, looked a bit startled but politely didn’t pursue it.

Our family belonged to Mishkan Israel in Hamden, Connecticut, the 14th oldest continuously operating synagogue in the United States. Its legendary Rabbi, Robert E. Goldberg, challenged McCarthyism, supported the civil rights and anti-war movements, invited Martin Luther King, Jr. to speak at the temple, and was even arrested at a civil rights gathering in Georgia. He officiated at my bar mitzvah.

I attended Hebrew school, but the main thing I retained was my teacher repeatedly saying “sheket, bevakasha” to me. I thought it was my Jewish name. I later learned it meant “quiet please.”

As a student at Colgate University I attended one High Holy Days service. But in another way, Colgate became a major launching pad in my religious journey. I took a course in Hinduism that sparked a longtime fascination with theology. I began visiting Chapel House, a secluded interfaith retreat and meditation center nestled in the woods on campus. For years after graduation. I periodically returned to spend several nights there praying, reading about theology and meditating.

After receiving my master’s in journalism from Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, I spent five and a half years freelancing in India and Spain for newspapers, Newsweek, and later National Public Radio. I lived with a Hindu family in New Delhi and participated in their holidays, and spent a wonderful week living with a Muslim family in Bangladesh.

In Madrid I was a special correspondent for The Christian Science Monitor. I immersed myself in key Christian Science books because I wanted to understand the theology behind the church and the newspaper. Meanwhile, I rented an apartment with a huge crucifix hanging over my bed.

In 1982, after working as a reporter in Wichita, Kansas, the San Diego Union brought me to California. Among other assignments, I covered the border and Baja California. While doing a feature on the Jews of Tijuana, I met Jose Galicot, one of Tijuana’s prominent business and Jewish leaders, who invited me to celebrate Passover with his family.

I joined a Conservative synagogue in San Diego but left after several years because I never feel fully accepted or part of the community.

Then tragedy began changing the direction of my religious journey.

After I left the San Diego Union in 1990 to become a full-time ventriloquist, my foster son, Thomas Powell, learned shortly before his planned wedding that his wife-to-be had AIDS. He went ahead with the wedding.

I was devastated. I made an appointment with Tifereth Israel’s late Rabbi Leonard Rosenthal. At one point I asked him: “Why are we here? What does it mean?”

His answer stayed with me. We are here to do prayers, he told me, but also to enjoy life and make the world a better place. He gifted me a Conservative prayer book.

Meanwhile, my ventriloquism career increasingly brought me into Jewish life. I performed for Jewish groups and was amazed at how different Judaism seemed from what I remembered as a child. Services then had seemed staid, sometimes boring and almost perfunctory. Now I encountered Judaism presented with energy, warmth and joy.

I was particularly drawn to Chabads. I performed at Chabads, met wonderful rabbis and their families, read Chabad-related books and occasionally attended services, although I couldn’t read or understand Hebrew.

Then came the seismic shift.

In 2020, Tom – the boy I had been matched with in the Big Brother program—was diagnosed with congestive heart failure. By late 2024 his condition had become incredibly grave and he only had a few months left before dying at age 52. He lived with me; I was his principal caregiver. I felt a stronger-than-ever need to pray.

By then a new Chabad had opened in Rancho Penasquitos. I had been hired to perform there and eventually began attending services.

Rabbi Cagen urged me to read the English translations during the service because I couldn’t follow the Hebrew.

I had never thought of doing that.

It changed everything.

During the long services, I began reading every word in English. The prayers that had once seemed remote became personal. I began to see prayer not simply as words Jews had been instructed to receive, but as a conversation with God and a connection to generations of Jews who had said those same prayers before me. The spiritual search that had taken me through Hinduism, Islam, Christianity and years of reading about theology had, in an unexpected way, brought me home.

Rabbi Cagen asked me whether I owned tefillin.

This time I knew he wasn’t talking about Kodak.

I didn’t. He gave me a set and invited me to come early in the morning to put them on and pray.

I began becoming part of the Chabad minyan, attending its events and expanding my Jewish reading. The Shema became part of my daily life.

And today?

I still can’t read Hebrew, Long-term COVID memory fog has made learning it not an option. But I read and ponder the English words of the prayers. I attend services and special events at the Chabad of Rancho Penasquitos and have accepted invitations to spend some Shabbat weekends at Chabad of Beverlywood. Six days a week I put on tefilllin and pray.

The grandson who once thought tefillin was Kodak film now wraps it around his arm most mornings.

Abraham Ravinsky must be smiling.

ID 123122486 | Journey ©
Ilovewinter | Dreamstime.com

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For the first time in his life, Ken Paxton may have said something true. No, not his wedding vows. No, not the oath of office he took to represent Texas. No, not when he claimed to believe that Donald Trump won the 2020 election. And no, not when he was defending himself from accusations of massive heaps upon massive heaps of corruption.

Ken Paxton, the attorney general of Texas and the Republican/MAGA nominee to become senator of that state, admitted on a hidden audio recording that Donald Trump’s midterm emotional support convention hurt his election chances.

Republicans, I know that you’re worried about the Democrats springing an October surprise on you, but you’re not supposed to create that surprise for them.

I’m sure you recall Trump’s two-day circle jerk in Dallas last month that posed as a political convention. Trump spoke both nights in an arena that contained a lot of empty seats, despite Trump pointing at those seats and telling us how full they were. Some of the more intelligent Republicans, such as Susan Collins, stayed away as if it was a Jeffrey Epstein party being held in a leper colony with musical entertainment provided by Kid Rock.

One of the candidates featured at this midterm convention was Ken Paxton, who was basically required to attend. Last week, during a fundraiser for Paxton, he told a group of donors and lobbyists that the convention had actually hurt his campaign to become the state’s next senator.

Paxton defeated Senator John Cornyn and the Republican primary for the Senate seat, and he is now trailing Democratic nominee James Talerico in every poll. In every. Single. Poll.

During this fundraiser, an audio recording later provided to the New York Times captured Paxton explaining that the convention had hurt him.

The recording, which is muffled at times, captures Paxton being asked, “Do you feel like he’s a little bit of a drag?” The questioner is obviously referring to Donald Trump.

Paxton responds: “So to be honest with you, the numbers — when we did that convention — it dropped our numbers. Everybody’s numbers dropped. Right now, yeah, not good.” He might as well have said his numbers made a big ploppy splashy sound like a big turd into a toilet. Too much?

The audio of Paxton was shared with The Times by an attendee who recorded him speaking at a private fundraiser in Washington attended by roughly a dozen people. The person, who opposes Paxton’s campaign and provided the recording to The Times, was granted anonymity because Paxton’s remarks were private, and MAGAts are violent lunatics who would probably murder him. Three other people with knowledge of the event confirmed Paxton’s attendance. Two of these people recalled that Paxton had been posed this question, and one recalled his response about the negative consequences of Trump’s convention.

The event was hosted last Thursday by two Republican lobbyists, Susan Hirschmann and Chris Brinson, in a conference room near Capitol Hill.

During the convention, Trump said Paxton “may not dress right, may not talk exactly perfectly and may not be the best-looking guy I’ve ever seen, but you know what, he is — he’s the greatest attorney general in America.”

Gee, I don’t know why Paxton thinks that hurt him. Why didn’t Trump also say he has breath that smells like a burnt diaper full of Indian food? Trump has given higher praise to Kim Jong-un.

Asked about the remarks, Nick Maddux, a senior Paxton adviser, said, “This is more manipulated nonsense from The New York Times to create a story that doesn’t exist.” Except the Times did not manipulate it, and the story does exist.

Maddux continued, “Our latest poll from the last week has Ken Paxton leading by three points, and every serious pollster will tell you that our numbers have improved since early September. Ken Paxton is going to win this race, and he looks forward to closing strong alongside President Trump, including when he comes to Texas this week.”

Sure, you have secret polls no one else can see that have Paxton leading. Why they are so strong for Paxton, they probably have Paxton breathing into a paper bag for an hour.

A new poll by Big Data Poll has Talarico leader Paxton at 43.6% to 39.3%. Other recent polls by Texas Southern University, ReconMR Texas Poll, Emerson College, Mason-Dixon Polling & Research, SoCal Strategies, AARP, and N+ Univision each have Talarico leading by one to five points.

TO READ THE REST GO HERE

Visit Clay Jones’ website and email him at clayjonz@gmail.com

The post Swinging for the Midterms appeared first on The Moderate Voice.

When Ron DeSantis was first elected governor of Florida in November 2018, he won with a margin of just over 30,000 votes – less than four-tenths of 1% of all the votes cast in the election.

At that time, Florida was the biggest swing state in presidential politics, and DeSantis had hitched his wagon to Donald Trump, a president who had only narrowly won the state two years earlier.

Immediately after the election, DeSantis requested that his staff assemble a binder of information about the powers afforded him as governor.

I’m a political scientist with firsthand experience in state political campaigns. My research with colleagues on Florida elections will be published in a forthcoming book in January 2027.

Over the past eight years, I have observed how DeSantis has mastered the powers of his office. While the governor leaves behind countless new conservative policies, perhaps his most lasting legacy is how he wielded and expanded those powers.

Veto power

Throughout his time in office, DeSantis benefited from a Republican majority in the Legislature, which became a supermajority at the start of his second term in 2022.

But he didn’t rely on partisanship alone to ensure his legislative agenda would pass. He held lawmakers in check by wielding line-item veto power over their pet projects. This allowed him to control the legislative agenda with little pushback for most of his tenure.

One illustration of this is what happened in Republican stronghold Manatee County in 2025: The county faced DeSantis’ wrath after local officials criticized his pro-development legislation and voters rejected his handpicked candidates at the ballot box in November 2024. Months later, DeSantis vetoed all US$4 million in budget requests by county lawmakers and placed the county under a state DOGE audit.

The pandemic years

No issue has defined DeSantis’ image and political legacy more than Florida’s response to COVID-19. The governor used the pandemic to enhance his authority with emergency powers, an expanded budget with personal control over federal funds and, later, a popular reversal of pandemic restrictions on public life.

Initially, DeSantis followed the lead of the Trump administration’s public health authorities and ordered emergency lockdowns in March 2020. But by August of that year, Florida had mostly reopened. DeSantis recounted in his memoir how he concluded that reopening was safer than commonly assumed, based on his own reading of public health research.

Ultimately, Florida’s public health record during COVID was mixed. The state initially ranked 26th in COVID-related deaths per capita during the first wave, due to vaccine promotion and protective public health measures for older adults. But after the delta and omicron waves of the virus in the summer and fall of 2021, the state climbed to eighth in deaths per capita.

By 2025, Florida had recorded over 100,000 COVID-related deaths.

Many newcomers moved to Florida during the pandemic, with some seeking the state’s less restrictive COVID-19 policies and many registering as Republicans.

Expanding executive power

Partly in response to COVID-19, in 2022, the state Legislature created a special $500 million emergency fund that the governor could access in response to a declared emergency without needing to wait for legislative approval.

On Jan. 6, 2023, DeSantis declared a state of immigration emergency over an influx of migrants to the Florida coast. For the past three years, he has renewed this emergency declaration every 60 days.

During that time, DeSantis has used his emergency powers to spend more than $1 billion on federal immigrant detention centers. This includes Alligator Alcatraz, a detention center built on protected land in the Everglades, where detainees were kept in conditions that U.S. Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schulz, D-Fla., described as “cruel and unnecessary” after her visit to the site.

The emergency declaration allowed DeSantis to use no-bid contracts and funds that the federal government has yet to reimburse to construct the facility.

The declaration of emergency has also allowed the governor to deploy the Florida National Guard to work with federal authorities to stop immigrants from landing on Florida shores. During the second Trump administration, DeSantis has required state and local law enforcement authorities to cooperate with federal immigration enforcement officers.

Immigration-related arrests have quietly surged in Florida since Trump took office in January 2025.

A conservative warrior for policy change

While speaking to conservative audiences nationwide, DeSantis has called on his audience to put on the “full armor of God.” This quote from the book of Ephesians invokes themes of Christian nationalism.

He has delivered on those priorities by enacting the enshrinement of parental rights in education, universal vouchers for private schools, a six-week abortion ban and a series of bills targeting the LGBTQ community.

He even took on the Walt Disney Co.’s private fiefdom in Florida, dissolving their special district after they opposed him on policy and creating one of his own in its place.

Higher education reform

DeSantis, who attended Ivy League universities, also used the powers of his office to remake the Florida state university system through appointments to the Board of Governors and boards of university trustees.

In January 2023, DeSantis announced that he was appointing six new trustees to the board of New College of Florida in Sarasota. Several had ties to conservative think tanks. DeSantis’ commissioner of education announced his hope that they would remake the college into the “Hillsdale of the South,” referencing the conservative Christian college in Michigan.

Many of the initiatives begun at New College have become a model for the entire state university system. DeSantis has called for a less “ideological” university system, which, in practice, has meant closing diversity offices, censoring sociology courses, post-tenure reviews for professors and more administrative oversight over faculty hiring.

He has also begun the process of creating a new system of higher education accreditation for Florida and like-minded states.

Partisan remake of the state – and elections

After two terms as governor, DeSantis leaves Florida much more conservative than he found it. The once-purple state is now much redder, with Republican voter registrations outnumbering Democratic ones by 1.5 million voters statewide.

And the governor has taken measures to ensure that the trend will continue.

In 2022, DeSantis created an Office of Election Crimes and Security to investigate allegations of voter fraud, though there was no evidence of widespread voter fraud in the state. Voting rights groups view the office’s enforcement actions as a form of voter intimidation, raising doubt in the minds of eligible voters as to whether they can vote.

DeSantis signed legislation that tightened restrictions on voting by mail, a method that has become especially popular with Democrats since the pandemic.

DeSantis made it harder for groups to register new voters and easier to purge voters from the rolls if they do not vote regularly. In addition, he has made it more difficult for citizens to amend the state constitution by ballot initiative.

He also delivered on Trump’s demands for unprecedented mid-decade congressional redistricting. He pushed partisan gerrymandered maps through the Florida Legislature that were allowed by a Florida Supreme Court stacked with judges he had appointed. The new maps were drawn in hopes of winning Republicans as many as four new congressional seats.

What’s next for Florida

But while DeSantis’ conservative policies cement a legacy that will be difficult to overturn, the political fate of Florida remains less fixed.

DeSantis has officially endorsed U.S. Rep. Byron Donalds, R-Fla., in the 2026 gubernatorial race against Democratic candidate David Jolly, a former congressman. The rising number of independent voters, in particular, could make the election competitive. And it’s hard to predict how Republicans’ current unpopularity on the national stage will affect state and local races.

So it’s an open question as to whether Florida will remain the red “Free State of Florida,” where law and order come first and, as DeSantis put it, “where woke goes to die.”

Liv Coleman, Professor of Political Science and International Studies, University of Tampa

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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To quote Obi-Wan Kenobi’s description of a seedy bar in Star Wars, I often ask myself how and why America has become such a “wretched hive of scum and villainy.”

What or who caused this to happen? Certainly the 77 million voters who re-hired a fascist grifter deserve some of the blame. I’d also pin some on Newt Gingrich, the right-wing hyper-partisan who propelled the Republicans to congressional power in 1994 and taught followers to smear the opposition party as inherently evil. Two years later came the founding of Fox News, with its infauxtainment propaganda for the masses. In the blame game, I could make the case for any or all of those factors.

But not long ago, on a late summer’s morning, I chanced upon a New York Times article about Ralph Nader, who is now 92 and living as a virtual recluse.

Perhaps you’ve forgotten about him. As a legendary consumer advocate, he fought corporate bigwigs and repeatedly beat them. Those padded dashboards and steering wheels and seatbelts that make us safer in cars? Thank Nader. The creation of watchdog bodies like the Environmental Protection Agency, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, the Consumer Product Safety Commission, and the passage of the Freedom of Information Act? Thank Nader. He and his public-interest lawyers helped make those happen.

But he has soiled that stellar legacy, irrevocably so. Given what he did during the 2000 presidential campaign – at a pivotal juncture in our national narrative – I have no sympathy for him. If our benighted era has an origin story, Nader arguably authored it.

According to the Times article, he spends his days trying to be relevant. He incessantly phones reporters, academics and elected officials, but he’ll “inevitably bristle when his missives are not received with the enthusiasm or responses they so richly deserve.” Which is a nice way of saying he’s incessantly stonewalled. He lamented to the Times, “The worst thing anybody can experience as a citizen advocate is not getting through.”

Democrats, in particular, banished him long ago to his own private Elba. And I totally get why.

During the 2000 election, Nader decided to run for president as the Green party candidate with the express purpose of pulling lefty voters away from Al Gore. In Nader’s words, Gore was really no different from George W. Bush, therefore liberals needed some place to go, and “we’re going to give them some place to go.” That’s what he told me six months before election night. When I wrote my story, I opened it this way: “Ralph Nader may prove to be Al Gore’s worst nightmare.”

He sure proved it. And the math supports it. In pivotal Florida, the state that swung the Electoral College, Gore lost to Bush by the officially certified margin of 537 votes; meanwhile, Nader pulled 97,488 votes. Two political scientists, from Dartmouth and UCLA, later crunched the numbers and concluded (with the help of exit polls) that roughly 60 percent of the Nader voters would have chosen Gore if Ralph hadn’t run – more than enough for a Democratic victory.

Their conclusion: “Ralph Nader spoiled the 2000 election for Gore.”

As a result, George W. Bush won the opportunity to cement a right-wing Supreme Court with his two appointees, John Roberts and Sam Alito – two key voters in the disastrous 2024 ruling that basically gives presidents carte blanche to do whatever the hell they want in office. Today that is Trump’s gold standard.

If Al Gore had been president, his appointees would never have written in the majority that presidents deserve “absolute immunity from criminal prosecution for actions within his conclusive and preclusive constitutional authority,” plus “presumptive immunity from prosecution for all his official acts.” And if Gore had crafted the Supreme Court, rest assured women nationwide would still have bodily autonomy under Roe v. Wade.

I visited Nader a few months after that fateful 2000 election and asked him about the abortion issue. He shrugged off the possibility that any Bush nominees would endanger women’s rights. In his words, “Republican operatives tell me, ‘You think we’re going to shatter our party over Roe v. Wade? It’d be like trying to ban alcohol again’.” (Fast forward to 2022: Alito wrote the ruling to overturn Roe. Roberts concurred.)

Today, Nader says he detests Donald Trump and calls him a fascist. But somehow Nader fails to connect the dots, fails to recognize that he helped elect Bush, who in turn cemented the Republican majority on the high court, which in turn excreted the 6-3 ruling that has made it possible for Trump to act as a fascist.

No wonder Nader is on virtually every Democrat’s forever naughty list. It’s tragic a man once so eminent is living out his days as a pariah, relentlessly seeking, in the Times’ words, to “breathe new life into his perpetual state of outrage at the political environment du jour.”

Where’s my violin?

Copyright 2026 Dick Polman, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate. Dick Polman, a veteran national political columnist based in Philadelphia and a Writer in Residence at the University of Pennsylvania, writes the Subject to Change newsletter. Email him at dickpolman7@gmail.com

The post Ralph Nader is still a pariah. He deserves to be. appeared first on The Moderate Voice.

UPDATE:

Add Pope Leo XIV to the growing number of influential persons and organizations calling for taking A.I. warnings seriously.

“We need to continue to invite political leaders, the leaders of A.I., social organizations, associations to come together and look at what is happening already and what could be down the road,” the Pope said.

This is in stark contrast to President Trump who has called such concerns “a SICK conspiracy going on against AI…”

Original Post:

In his 1939 epic novel “The Grapes of Wrath,” John Steinbeck describes the scene when, at the height of the devastating Dust Bowl period, representatives of “the Bank” arrive to evict the “squatting tenants” from home and land.

The “owner men” paint themselves as just “men and slaves” of the banks or companies, while the banks and companies are “machines and masters, all at the same time.”

When the tenant men protest that “the bank is only made of men,” the owner men reply:

No, you’re wrong there — quite wrong there. The bank is something else than men. It happens that every man in the bank hates what the bank does, and yet the bank does it. The bank is something more than men, I tell you. It’s the monster. Men made it, but they can’t control it.

Of course, we know that banks are made of men and by men; that banks are not monsters, at least not in the folkloric or mythological sense; that banks can be controlled.

Today, almost 80 years hence, there is a fierce debate over what some call the existential threat posed by Artificial Intelligence, A.I., escaping human control.

Others downplay, even ridicule, such concerns.

Of course, we know that A.I. is made by men; that A.I. is not a monster, but merely a “system” made of computers, algorithms, and data; that A.I. can be controlled: “We can always pull the plug.”

But can we (pull the plug)?

In July of this year, rogue A.I. systems hacked into AI startup Hugging Face and into three other systems and organizations with “rogue actors” purposedly attempting to conceal their actions from their human “masters.”

Also in July, more than 1,300 employees of frontier A.I. companies signed an open letter calling on the U.S. government to “support an international effort to develop the technical and governance tools needed to deliberately pace the frontier of automated AI development.”

Since then, there have been several more disturbing incidents of “unexpected or concerning” behavior in artificial intelligence models. Concerns continue to mount over the safety and risks of A.I. as the public, A.I. companies themselves and governments worldwide are calling for a slowdown in the technology’s development and for implementing guardrails to protect against potentially devastating rogue A.I. system attacks.

Less than a month ago, Evan Hubinger, a lead researcher at Anthropic, one of the world’s leading artificial intelligence firms, said on X that he believes there is a more than 10% chance A.I. “could kill all humans” within the next decade.

Over the weekend Axios reported that “OpenAI, Anthropic and security researchers are investigating tens of thousands of incidents in which their frontier models took steps that outside evaluators would consider problematic…[indicating] that the problem is orders of magnitude more complex than what is publicly known.”

The notion that A.I. could get out of control and could pose a threat to humanity is not new.

Already in the 50s and 60s, when computers and software were still in their infancy, scientists, experts, policymakers, and the public were expressing both hopes and concerns about the power of the nascent technology.

Even before the term “Artificial Intelligence” was in vogue, there was no shortage of debate over whether a computer could “think” — or would one day be able to think — over cybernetics, self-organizing-machines, “thinking machines,” autonomous system, machine learning.

Part of the debate were concerns over what the consequences would be if man lost control over the machines.

One of the comforting suggestions at the time was that one could always “pull the plug” if a computer misbehaved.

But can we pull the plug in time?

Of course, “pulling the plug” is a simplistic, allegorical solution.

Perhaps it might have worked in the 60s when computer speeds were measured in microseconds.

Today, when computer speeds are measured in picoseconds (trillionths of a second), several orders of magnitude faster than a 60s computer; when the power, complexity and sophistication of super computers have multiplied equally; when A.I. development is globally distributed and “open source”; when the gap between A.I. technology and policymaking has only gotten wider, such a “solution” is futile. As “Archie” so aptly describes it in his “You Can’t Switch Off AI: The False Hope of Pulling the Plug,” “The toothpaste is out of the tube.”

After the Dust Bowl crisis devastated the agricultural credit system, institutional and governmental relief and debt restructuring programs made banking (relatively) safe again.

Recently, several bills have been introduced in the U.S. Congress to police A.I. models, establish “kill switch requirements and a ban on the most powerful models that exceed human capabilities.”

The proposed U.S. “A.I. Kill Switch” and “Stop Rogue A.I.” Acts are good starting points, along with other corporate, architectural and infrastructure safeguards.

Merely changing the name Artificial Intelligence to Super Intelligence is not.

The post The A.I. Peril: Just ‘Pulling the Plug’ Won’t Do It. appeared first on The Moderate Voice.

Will this Election Day be the end for Maine Republican Sen. Susan Collins?

In case you’ve been on Mars, Collins inspired a cottage industry on social media where critics sarcastically report she is “concerned,” “troubled,” or has once again furrowed her brow over the latest Republican outrage.

She is ostensibly a moderate. But during the Trump era there is often a curious pattern: Collins expresses concern, agonizes publicly and then frequently winds up supporting Trump when the votes count.

She is to an independent what pork rinds are to a diet.

That caricature isn’t entirely fair. Collins has cast some important votes against Trump, but it persists because some of her most consequential votes have helped Trump when he needed them.

Now there’s another controversy.

ProPublica recently reported FBI agents had been investigating allegations involving Collins, people around her, a pro-Collins super PAC and Navatek, a defense contractor. Martin Kao, the former CEO of Navatek, alleged political contributions were used to cultivate lawmakers who could help the company obtain federal contracts. ProPublica reported investigators were examining whether a broader pay-to-play arrangement existed.

No one working for Collins was charged, and the investigation had not established Collins committed a crime. She strongly denies wrongdoing, and her office says the Biden Justice Department and FBI investigated the matter and cleared her, her staff and her campaign years ago.

ProPublica responded that Collins was conflating two investigations. It says the investigation described in the story results from new information Kao provided and was still being pursued in early 2025. Then Trump returned to office, personnel involved in public-corruption investigations departed, and the investigation effectively ended.

Some critics have suggested a connection between that development and Collins’ support for Trump priorities. So far there is no publicly established evidence of a quid pro quo. The timing raises a legitimate question. It doesn’t answer it.

Collins has strong evidence when she calls herself bipartisan. The Lugar Center and Georgetown University’s Bipartisan index has repeatedly ranked her among the Senate’s most bipartisan members, including No. 1 in 2023.

Compare Collins with Democratic Senator Joe Manchin. Manchin certainly wasn’t an anti-Trump Democrat. He repeatedly defied his party, and also supported many Trump nominees. Collins likewise has broken with Republicans. She opposed Trump’s Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett, voted to convict Trump at his second impeachment trial, and opposed Pete Hegseth and Kash Patel.

But Collins also backed Trump on some enormous votes, including voted to acquit him in his first impeachment trial. Most consequentially, she voted to confirm Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court after saying she considered Roe v Wade settled precedent. Kavanaugh later joined the majority overturning Roe.

“Bipartisan,” “centrist” and “independent” are not synonyms. A senator can work extensively with members of the other party on legislation while still supporting his or her party on most nominations and agenda-setting votes. And a senator can often anger party leaders without necessarily having an impressive bipartisan legislative score. Moderation isn’t simply standing between two parties, and despite what some partisans on the left and right say, it doesn’t mean someone lacks passion or principles.

Since 2003, I’ve published and edited The Moderate Voice, which won awards as a centrist blog during the golden age of blogging. In recent years I’ve occasionally had to clarify: “It’s not Susan Collins moderate.”

There’s always been a debate over what a moderate is.

About ten years ago, a prominent Democrat who wrote for a major progressive blog emailed me. “You’re no moderate! You’re a conservative Republican!”

That same day, a conservative emailed me: “You’re not moderate! You’re a liberal Democrat!”

Susan Collins unquestionably has a bipartisan record. She has also cast important vote against Trump. But she has cast some extraordinarily important votes for him as well.

Maine voters will decide whether Susan Collins is still their kind of moderate – or whether all those years of furrowed brows have finally worn thin.

Copyright 2026 Joe Gandelman, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

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The conventional wisdom is that the Democratic Party has the advantage in the 2026 midterm elections and could become the majority party in one, or both, chambers of Congress. The margin of that anticipated victory is harder to predict.

And the size of a party’s majority makes a difference. To see why, it’s worth looking back to the second half of the 19th century, when two dramatic midterm election results marked the beginning of important eras in the nation’s history.

1874: A nation changing course

Most American college students, including the ones I taught for over 40 years, learn that the era of Reconstruction following the Civil War came to an end when the contested presidential election of 1876 led to a deal that combined support for a Republican president with a commitment to withdraw federal troops from Southern states.

The Republican candidate in 1876, Rutherford B. Hayes, did not win the popular vote, but after an Electoral Commission established by Congress resolved disputed electoral college issues, Hayes won a one-vote victory. The White House had a Republican president, but the South was free to block enforcement of the post–Civil War constitutional amendments that protected the civil and voting rights of Black people.

That simple version of the story is not wrong, but it is incomplete. The 1874 midterms set things up for the controversies that would follow.

In the middle of his second presidential term, Republican Ulysses S. Grant was in trouble. There were scandals in Washington and economic hardships from a financial panic in 1873. The Democrats in 1874, amid accusations of fraud and voting irregularities in the South, won over 90 new seats in the House of Representatives and ended the era of Republican dominance on Capitol Hill that began with the election of Abraham Lincoln in 1860.

Before and after the 1874 midterm elections, white Southerners regained control of state governments and used violence and intimidation to suppress Black voter turnout.

Reconstruction was undone by a resurgent Democratic Party that after the 1874 midterms controlled both Southern states and the House. The compromise that removed federal troops from the South and put Hayes in the White House was icing on a cake that was baked in 1874.

1894: The Republican recovery

For two decades following the 1874 midterm elections, America’s two political parties were in constant and close competition for power.

Between the Grant administration and William McKinley’s election in 1896, no president won a majority of the popular vote. Between Grant and McKinley, no president had unified government – a single party in control of the House, the Senate and the White House – for more than two years. Not much got done.

McKinley’s 1896 election was the beginning of a new era of Republican Party dominance in national politics. It would last for decades, and McKinley’s successor, Teddy Roosevelt, would invent the modern presidency, with expanded executive powers and more direct communications with the American people. Political scientists call that kind of change a “realignment,” but it did not begin in 1896. Once again, the previous midterms made a difference.

In the fall of 1894, President Grover Cleveland, the former Democratic governor of New York, was in the middle of his second, nonconsecutive term. It was not going well. Another financial panic, bigger than the one in 1873, accompanied his second inauguration and set in motion a series of economic disasters that produced the largest economic downturn in American history before the Great Depression of the 1930s.

When voters went to the polls in the 1894 midterms, they gave the president’s political party the biggest defeat in U.S. history. Over 100 seats in the House were lost to Republican or third-party candidates. The realignment had begun.

A ‘wake-up call’ election

Huge seat shifts in midterm elections, like those in 1874 and 1894, are extremely rare. Smaller midterm shifts, which occur more often, can be a “wake-up call” that forces a sitting president to recalibrate political strategies.

That’s what happened to many modern presidents: Harry Truman in 1946, Dwight Eisenhower in 1958, Lyndon Johnson in 1966, Gerald Ford in 1974, Bill Clinton in 1994, Barack Obama in 2010 and Donald Trump in 2018. Their midterm losses in the House involved 40 or more seats, losses large enough to put the president’s party on notice that something had to change.

Change came in different forms. Truman, Clinton and Obama fought back against a Congress with an opposition majority in the House and won reelection.

Eisenhower could not run again, and a weakened Johnson chose not to. Ford lost to Jimmy Carter; Trump lost to Joe Biden. All four turned the keys to the White House over to a successful candidate from the other political party.

What about 2026?

The 2026 midterm elections are unlikely to produce the kind of dramatic political changes that occurred in 1874 or 1894.

“Wake-up call” elections are much more common and are more reasonable to expect. That result is more likely in a closely divided nation, with heavily gerrymandered congressional districts, because even a small shift in House seats matters.

Democrats don’t need a 40-seat swing to retake the House. If they flip a handful of districts, they become the majority party. In the betting markets, that appears to be the likely 2026 outcome.

Every president in the last 80 years who was underwater in presidential approval polling – as President Trump now is – lost seats in midterm elections. The smallest number of seats that flipped in those eight decades was five. A five-seat shift to Democrats in 2026 could make Hakeem Jeffries the Speaker of the House.

A 2026 midterm election in which Republicans hold their slim majority in the House would be a monumental achievement, even if it looked like nothing had changed. It would break a pattern that has been in place since Harry Truman was president in the 1940s and 1950s.

Most Americans pay more attention to presidential elections than they do to midterms. That might be a mistake.

A sizable midterm shift can signal large and long-lasting changes in American politics. A smaller shift can pull a president in a new direction or set the stage on which the next presidential campaign plays out.

The 2026 midterm elections will almost certainly produce significant consequences for American politics. The scale of those consequences and their longevity remain open questions that only American voters are able to answer.

Robert A. Strong, Senior Fellow, Miller Center, University of Virginia

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Donald Trump’s polls have been catastrophic for a president whose party is headed into mid-terms. And they keep getting worse.

From Fifty Pls One on Substack:

Two weeks ago, President Donald Trump stood in front of a crowd of supporters at a first-of-its-kind midterms convention and beseeched the American people to “pretend I’m on the ballot.” Updated polling averages from FiftyPlusOne show he got what he asked for, but not in the way he wanted.

As of 11:00 AM on September 23, 2026, our average of polls gives the president a new low of 34.6% approval among U.S. adults, with a disapproval rating of 62.3%. Over the last week, he has hit new second-term lows in surveys from at least 7 polling firms: CNN/SSRS, Ipsos, NBC News, Strength In Numbers/Verasight, Quantus Insights, Echelon Insights, and American Research Group.

While the president has been sliding, the Republican Party’s deficit in the the U.S. House generic ballot has increased to 7.6 points, rounding to +8 points for the first time this cycle and rivaling the party’s lead in the 2018 blue wave:

Our historical polling averages show the president’s updated rating is worse than George W. Bush’s second-term approval rating on the eve of the 2006 midterm that cost Republicans both chambers of Congress. And public mood is approaching where it was toward Richard Nixon during Watergate, in the months before he resigned in disgrace.

And:

Trump’s problem, simply put, is that he is the most unpopular president since at least the 1930s, when scientific polling was developed, to hold office at this point before a midterm election.

If we widen the comparison from 2017 to include every president’s first term back to Dwight Eisenhower in 1953 — 13 of them — the president sticks out like a sore thumb. (Harry Truman doesn’t belong in this group: he succeeded FDR unelected in 1945, so his own elected term, which began in 1949, is conventionally counted as his second term. He shows up in the next chart.) At the same point in their first terms, every single one of Trump’s predecessors was in better shape than he is right now. Carter, the name people usually reach for when they want an unpopular president, was within a point of break-even.

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Image: Shutterstock.

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Susan Collins Dismissed Our Reporting as Old News. Some of Her Claims Aren’t True.

As the scandal over Susan Collins’ relationship with Hawaii defense contractor Navatek became the central issue in her hotly contested senate campaign, she and her top aides mustered a defense with a series of incorrect and misleading claims.

On Tuesday, ProPublica published an investigation into the senior senator from Maine’s relationship with Martin Kao, the former Navatek CEO and a major donor who told law enforcement he exchanged campaign cash for government contracts. His confession came after his guilty plea for campaign finance and loan fraud.

The ProPublica story revealed that the FBI had been circling the senator, her top aides and a pro-Collins super PAC in recent years, asking questions about their relationship with Navatek. Since returning to office, President Donald Trump fired or pushed out most of the federal agents and lawyers investigating high-profile federal corruption matters, including those working on the Kao case. The dismissals ended the corruption review, which was in its early stages.

After the story published, Collins and her campaign denied any wrongdoing in numerous media appearances. Some of the statements made by Collins and her representatives are not accurate.

Collins: “In 2021, the Biden Justice Department found there was no wrongdoing by anyone on my campaign staff, my office or me.”

Collins: “The Biden-led Justice Department and FBI totally cleared my office, my campaign and me five years ago of these seven-year-old allegations.”

An FBI spokesperson told ProPublica the agency had investigated claims against Collins years ago “and ultimately found nothing implicating Senator Collins or Senator Collins’ campaign.”

But the investigation at the center of ProPublica’s story was based on claims Kao made between 2022 through 2024 — not seven years ago, as Collins states. That investigation did not conclude under President Joe Biden but under Trump, in 2025, after his administration purged the agents and Department of Justice attorneys assigned to the case.

Collins is referring to the FBI’s initial investigation of Kao, which started in 2021. No one in Collins’ orbit was charged as a result of that earlier investigation. 

FBI records reviewed by ProPublica show the agency remained interested in the conduct of Collins and her staff right up until the most recent phase of their investigation was shut down under Trump.

The documents show that Kao was still answering agents’ questions as late as September 2024, when he sat for a two-day interview with FBI agents at the U.S. attorney’s office in Honolulu. During that interview, Kao provided them with a 50-page document offering many new allegations about his interactions with elected officials, including Collins.

And in early 2025, FBI agents were still examining Kao’s relationship with Collins, her staffers and employees of the super PAC, ProPublica found.

Annie Clark, deputy chief of staff to Collins: “The FBI and the Court obviously did not believe Kao.”

The judge in Kao’s sentencing ultimately offered him no benefit for his cooperation with federal authorities, sentencing him to 87 months in federal prison. While Kao had credibility issues — as a convicted felon — FBI documents seen by ProPublica show that agents were able to corroborate some of his claims.

“Pursuant to a Grand Jury Subpoena issued to Navatek, related to the previous investigation, hundreds of thousands of documents were provided to the FBI,” agents wrote in a December 2024 document.

“Several emails and other documents corroborate Kao’s statements made to the FBI.”

In addition, people familiar with the investigation told ProPublica that FBI agents found Kao to be credible.

Clark: “ProPublica took the word of someone who pled guilty to five counts of money laundering, three counts of wire fraud, one count of bank fraud, and making false submissions to the FEC.”

ProPublica did not simply take Kao at his word but reviewed a trove of evidence gathered by the FBI. It also examined thousands of pages of legal records and interviewed dozens of people familiar with Navatek, its Washington operations and the FBI inquiry to independently corroborate much of Kao’s account.

For instance, Kao said that Scott Reed, the head of the Collins super PAC, promised to make the senator aware that Kao was the person behind a large, anonymous donation to the super PAC made through a shell company.

We published emails between Reed and Kao showing that Kao told Reed the name of the shell company he was using to anonymize his $150,000 donation. And we included an email from someone working for Reed to a Navatek representative asking for Kao’s number so Collins could thank him for the donation. These are consistent with Kao’s version of events.

Steve Abbott, Collins’ campaign manager, said at a Wednesday press conference, “We have no record of her calling him.” But he added that such a phone call would not be unusual: “We routinely thank people for contributions. … We try to thank everybody.”

Reed did not answer detailed questions about the $150,000 donation but said he didn’t speak to Collins about Kao. He added, “I understand Martin Kao is now sitting in federal prison.”

Republished from ProPublica. Caricature created by AI for TMV.

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For a television show that was canceled nearly two decades ago, “To Catch a Predator” has been having quite a moment.

For years, the show entertained Americans by finding men seeking sex with minors in online chatrooms and luring them into decoy houses. The host, “Dateline NBC” correspondent Chris Hansen, would then confront the men on camera.

Now a fictional account of the show, “Primetime,” will arrive in movie theaters in late September 2026, starring Robert Pattinson as Hansen. It comes on the heels of “Predators,” a critically acclaimed 2025 documentary about the legacy of “To Catch a Predator.”

As scholars of American culture and criminology, we’ve researched and written about the popularity of “To Catch a Predator” and its spinoff programs “Hansen vs. Predators” and “Takedown with Chris Hansen.” To us, these shows are part of a broader legacy of Americans’ cultural attachment to vigilantism: the belief that when the government fails to root out threats to society, ordinary people should step up and punish wrongdoers.

There was something about “To Catch a Predator” that took this genre of entertainment to new heights. Yes, there was the novelty of having the ultimate pariah – the pedophile – at its center. But there was also the ritual of humiliation and punishment that it celebrated, one that has since rippled across politics, social media and popular culture.

The vigilante tradition in American culture

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, vigilantism was closely associated with anti-immigrant and anti-Black violence, most notoriously through lynching.

This kind of lethal vigilantism has declined dramatically. But popular culture has continued to offer Americans plenty of opportunities to fantasize about the thrills of taking the law into their own hands, whether through pulp novels like Mickey Spillane’s “Mike Hammer” series, comics like “Batman,” John Ford’s westerns or Showtime’s “Dexter.”

As fear of violent crime grew over the course of the 1970s, a succession of popular films featured heroes who bypassed a supposedly ineffective legal system to defeat dangerous criminals.

In the 1971 film “Dirty Harry,” Clint Eastwood plays a police officer who goes rogue when a prosecutor refuses to bring a serial killer to justice because the incriminating evidence was illegally obtained. Using his trademark .44 Magnum revolver, Harry delivers justice for victims failed by the state. Three years later, “Death Wish” featured Charles Bronson starring as Paul Kersey, an architect who becomes a vigilante after his wife is murdered, and who goes on a killing spree of petty criminals as the police turn a blind eye.

As viewers cheered on fictional vigilantes finally “doing something” about crime, shrewd politicians harnessed their thirst for punishment. They campaigned on and passed “tough on crime” laws that packed the nation’s prisons. Government agencies increasingly enlisted the public’s vigilante impulse by encouraging neighborhood groups to surveil their communities, protect their homes with security systems and help the FBI by watching out for criminals at large on shows like “America’s Most Wanted.”

Tapping into fears of online ‘stranger danger’

When it premiered in 2004, “To Catch a Predator” tapped into a new fear: online stranger danger.

In the 1980s and early 1990s, statistically rare instances of strangers abducting white children from public spaces and murdering them became highly publicized. This helped fuel a moral panic about the vulnerability of children, particularly as mothers were increasingly working outside of the home.

The emergence of the internet generated a new kind of stranger danger: Now, online predators could reach through fiber-optic cables and groom children in their own homes.

No show did more to raise the alarm about this new form of stranger danger than “To Catch a Predator.” The show was originally a recurring segment on “Dateline NBC,” the weekly investigative television newsmagazine that had debuted in 1992.

In it, reporter Chris Hansen collaborated with a vigilante organization called Perverted Justice. The vigilantes posed as teenagers in online chat rooms, responded enthusiastically if adults oriented the conversation toward sex, and invited them to come to a suburban home. The unsuspecting targets who showed up instead found Hansen and a camera crew, who barged into the room on Hansen’s cue.

The segment proved so popular that NBC eventually gave Hansen his own show.

Free from any pretense of serious investigative journalism, “To Catch a Predator” became a form of “humilitainment” – programming that exposes and degrades deviant people for the pleasure of its audience. As crews surround the suspects with cameras they hold like weapons, panic washes over them as they are being publicly branded a sex offender. Indeed, the label of “child sex predator” is so toxic that these scenes amounted to a kind of social death.

By watching the scene through those cameras, viewers don’t just get to witness the punishment.

In some sense, they get to participate in it.

Humiliation and punishment

“Predators,” the documentary about the show, captures the dangerous consequences of merging crime control with humilitainment.

It details how, in 2006, the show tried – and failed – to lure a Texas prosecutor named William Conradt Jr. to its bait house. Producers subsequently pressured local police to attempt to arrest him. As the “Dateline” crew and police surrounded the house, Conradt died by suicide.

More recently, in a 2023 episode of the “To Catch a Predator” spinoff “Takedown,” Hansen netted an 18-year-old gay man in Michigan who thought he was meeting up with a 15-year-old boy. Michigan is one of a handful of states that does not grant an 18-year-old a general close-in-age exemption for attempting to have sex with a 15-year-old. This provision of the law eliminates or reduces criminal penalties for consensual sexual activity when the participants are close in age and one partner is below the legal age of consent.

A producer had urged Hansen not to air the segment, but he did anyway, destroying the young man’s reputation in his first year of adulthood. The documentary includes an interview with the young man’s mother while he can be heard sobbing off camera.

In our view, “Primetime” and “Predators” should not be understood as a sign that Americans are rethinking their embrace of vigilantism and humilitainment.

Amateur humiliation content has become widespread on the internet, giving Americans more opportunities than ever to indulge in gleeful disgust or righteous outrage. “Karen” and “internet freakout” videos expose people behaving rudely in public, while “gym shaming” videos mock poor workout form. Ring camera footage can capture homeowners confronting porch thieves or political canvassers.

For its part, “To Catch a Predator” lives on in everything from copycat sting shows to parodies, to Hansen-produced revivals. On platforms such as X and TikTok, videos made by Dads Against Predators circulate, often depicting violent assaults of men who showed up somewhere to meet a minor for sex.

The short videos rewrite the final moment of “To Catch a Predator,” in which Hansen calmly confronts and sternly chastises the would-be predator, before letting law enforcement take over.

Instead, the vigilantes in Dads Against Predators simply punch their targets in the face.

Daniel LaChance, Associate Professor of History, Emory University and Paul Kaplan, Professor of Criminal Justice, San Diego State University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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The race is ON. The race to put Donald Trump’s name on more and more government buildings. And now Team Trump is considering putting Donald Trump’s name on Ford’s Theater, the theater where Abraham Lincoln was assassinated on April 15, 1865. Once this report surfaced and sparked outrage and dismay the White House and Interior Department denied that Ford’s Theater is being considered for renaming.

As President Donald Trump fights to rename the Kennedy Center after himself, administration officials are circulating a list of government sites that could have his name affixed to them in some way, according to people familiar with the effort.

One landmark that has emerged in the discussions among administration officials has raised eyebrows: Ford’s Theatre, the playhouse where Abraham Lincoln was assassinated in 1865.

It is unclear how seriously the theater is being considered or how the administration would attach Trump’s name to it. One administration official said the idea had been discussed, but they didn’t know where it stood. The prospect sparked a flurry of discussion over the past week among people responsible for the historic site.

The discussions underscore how much of a priority honoring the president has become inside parts of the Trump administration — even as the Iran war nears its eighth month, diesel prices hit an all-time high, the midterm elections approach in six weeks and most Americans disapprove of the president’s job performance.

White House officials, advisers and allies pitch ideas such as naming buildings after Trump to get on the president’s good side, a former administration official told MS NOW, granted anonymity to discuss internal matters. The president’s view, the official said: “Why would I say no? Everybody’s trying to please me.”

“They know flattery gets them everything,” the former official said, adding that people wait to hear “How can I help you?” in return.

One person with knowledge of the broader renaming effort who requested anonymity to address a sensitive topic said officials were looking for buildings and other sites that could carry the president’s name while presenting an easier legal path than the Kennedy Center push.

What comes next? Mount Rushmore becomes Mount Trumpmore? The Bureau of Engraving and Printing becomes the Donald J. Trump Department of Putting My Face on Money? The National Archives becomes Trump Truth Printing & Alternative Facts? The National Weather Service becomes the Donald J. Trump Sharpie Forecast Center? And somewhere outside Washington, surely there’s a neglected federal landfill just waiting to become the Donald J. Trump Presidential Waste Management Center–Making Garbage Great Again.

Perhaps we’ll also see the Trump National Debt Clock and Gift Shop, Donald J Trump Bureau of Self-Promotion, The Donald J. Trump Office of Humility and The Donald J. Trump National Monument to Donald J. Trump, Restored and Renovated by Donald J. Trump.

Hasn’t Lincoln suffered enough already? https://t.co/1EpEhzSzpK

— Larry Sabato (@LarrySabato) September 23, 2026

Instead of focusing on grocery and housing prices, the president now wants to rename Ford's Theatre, where President Lincoln was assassinated, after himself.

Quite a display of insecurity and jealousy!https://t.co/Y8BXnxcK8Y

— Rep. Mark Pocan (@RepMarkPocan) September 23, 2026

OMG!! THE PEDO Now Seriously Considering Slapping His Name on Ford’s Theater https://t.co/I2WuB8pZW4 via @newrepublic

— Susan Baker (@SusanBa92489649) September 23, 2026

I heard a rumor that Trump want to put his name on Ford's Theater now. I'm a Civil War and Reconstruction historian. When I heard this news earlier today, I fully crashed out. I need to lie on the floor and eat my way through a depressive episode now. He can't get away with it.

— Jessica Jewett (@JJ9828) September 23, 2026

Ford's Theater, First Lady Melania Trump, Natalie Harp, Air Force One, Donald Trump, Jared and Ivanka trend. Guess which idiot wants Ford's Theater, where Abraham Lincoln was assassinated, named for him. What's next? Trump White House? Trump Lincoln Memorial? Trump MLK Memorial? pic.twitter.com/Qi3mYav8Kr

— Andy Fox ??? (@factandrumor) September 23, 2026

Ford’s Theatre, as it looked during Lincoln's time: pic.twitter.com/VeCMfGMLqI

— Michael Beschloss (@BeschlossDC) September 23, 2026

Trump’s Aides are now listing new places to affix his name to because it makes him happy & one of those places is the Historic Ford’s theater,the playhouse where President Abraham Lincoln was assassinated in 1865 by John Wilkes Booth. The next is Dulles International Airport,Penn… pic.twitter.com/LJn1yJTCq1

— Suzie rizzio (@Suzierizzo1) September 23, 2026

The rumor is that @realDonaldTrump is considering slapping his name on the Ford Theatre in DC. I could agree to this only if he attends a performance of “Our American Cousin” on opening night.https://t.co/flplOjLf7R

— Phil Eakle (@PhilE75085510) September 23, 2026

Does he…. Does he think Ford’s Theatre is named after Gerald Ford https://t.co/c7fK39vU3I

— Aaron Fritschner (@Fritschner) September 23, 2026

Trump aides are exploring putting Trump’s name on Ford’s Theatre, where Abraham Lincoln was assassinated.

White House officials, advisers and allies pitch ideas such as naming buildings after Trump to get on the president’s good side, a former administration official told MS… pic.twitter.com/MXXmWfalrx

— Republicans against Trump (@RpsAgainstTrump) September 23, 2026

Jesus this is never gonna end. https://t.co/eHFGx9CHrd

— WeThePeople???? (@PrincessBravato) September 23, 2026

Inappropriate and absurd. It will only get him more contempt, disgust and loathing. Especially a national shrine like Ford’s Theater. For what reason? Trump currently has a 29% approval rating and expected to continue downward. We are paying for his war in Iran, he does nothing.

— Nancy Anne Merwin?????? ??????? (@nancym284) September 23, 2026

By David Dugan, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=59999818

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The three news outlets said in a joint statement on Monday that they would sue the Trump regime for barring them from the White House, saying it was a violation of their First Amendment rights to cover the president. Experts say the ban is unlikely to withstand legal scrutiny. A hearing is scheduled for Friday before a federal judge who once overturned Trump banning Jim Acosta from the White House.

Disclaimer: I used to freelance for CNN.

Today, five television networks, ABC, CBS, CNN, Fox News, and NBC, agreed to suspend their pooled coverage of Trump. The five networks issued a statement saying, “The public has a vital interest in receiving accurate, independent information about its government. No administration should restrict a news organization because it objects to its reporting.”

Bryan Boughton, the Washington bureau chief at Fox News, wrote in a note to television pool members on Monday, “Effective today, the TV pool will not be covering events designated as pool coverage of the President.” Boughton is the acting chair of the television pool consortium. The networks rotate the chairmanship on a quarterly basis.

Boughton added, “This follows the White House’s position preventing CNN from fulfilling its assigned pool duties. There will be no replacement pool put in place. All other pool coverage will continue as normal.”

Additionally, pool photographers agreed not to release any photos of Trump from the day’s events until after midnight.

Trump defended his fascist decision in a social media post on Monday. “The White House is not instituting an assault on the Free Press, something which I cherish. It is instituting an assault on the FAKE NEWS, something that has grown like Cancer in our beloved United States of America.”

But the thing is, Trump did not specify any “fake news” to justify his ban. He said that they were banned because of negative coverage. Trump cannot ban news outlets from covering him just because he doesn’t like what they write. Also, he does not own the White House. It is the people’s house. Banning news organizations from covering him is an assault on the First Amendment. It is not the press’s job to cover Donald Trump, the individual, but to cover the president of the United States. For better or worse, and it’s always been worse, Donald Trump is the president of the United States.

In live footage at a ribbon-cutting ceremony unveiling the new South Lawn helipad at the White House, Trump was inaudible. Later in the day, Trump was at the UN, where he received minimum media coverage. This will drive him nuts.

I predict Trump will go even further insane if he doesn’t see photos of himself or cameramen surrounding him with microphones, and knowing that he is going to lose this case, like he loses most of his court cases; he will lift this ban tomorrow.

GO HERE TO READ THE REST

Visit Clay Jones’ website and email him at clayjonz@gmail.com.

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