For several decades now, girls have been outperforming boys academically. 

They earn higher grades, are less likely to drop out, and are significantly more likely to attend college. Women now earn the majority of professional degrees, according to the Hechinger Report, including 60 percent of master’s and doctorates. 

The growing gender gap in achievement isn’t just bad for young men, it’s bad for women too. Wages for less-educated men are declining, with enormous implications for our nation’s economic and political stability. 

One factor that could account for these disparities in academic performance is the dearth of men in teaching, says Curtis Valentine, president of the just-launched Male Educator Network (MEN) and Policy Institute, an initiative of the American Institute for Boys and Men. According to the institute’s research, just 23 percent of teachers are men, and only 6 percent are men of color. 

Research shows that having a male educator can lead to better outcomes for boys in school, Valentine says. For instance, studies find that the gender gap in middle school English performance would decrease by about a third if half of English teachers were men. Another study finds that the gender gap in school math performance halved in 9th grade classes that were taught by a man. 

But few men are choosing to become teachers, and many of those who do don’t last. Valentine’s mission is to understand why and to offer solutions for building a pipeline for men in teaching. 

In addition to his work at MEN, Valentine is director of the Future Learning Network at the Progressive Policy Institute and an adjunct professor at the University of Maryland. He’s also the founder of Real Men Teach, a community of educators working to recruit and retain male educators of color. A former teacher, Valentine recently served as an at-large member of the Board of Education for Prince George’s County Public Schools in Maryland.

This transcript has been edited for length and clarity. The full interview is available at Spotify, YouTube, and iTunes. 

***

Anne Kim: You and I were colleagues at the Progressive Policy Institute where you led the organization’s work on K-12 education, but you’re also a former teacher. I would love to hear about your experiences as a teacher. Whom did you teach? Where did you teach? And importantly, how many of your colleagues were men?

Curtis Valentine: A lot of the work I’m doing now speaks to my experience in the classroom and what worked and what didn’t. In many ways, what I’m trying to create is a response to that experience. My first foray into education was as a Peace Corps volunteer. I was able to go to South Africa and work in a very rural community, with no electricity or running water. 

It was an opportunity to understand how a country like South Africa uses education as a weapon. But the magic that happens when a student and a teacher come together and learn something new attracted me to profession. I returned after two and a half years and became a teacher at the Oxon Hill Middle School, where I was a language arts teacher. 

At the time, I was the only male educator in my group, and while there was a male who was the administrator, I didn’t work really closely with him. So I struggled. I struggled to show up for my students. I struggled to be myself and to connect with my coworkers. I was being challenged by students both intellectually but also in some cases physically. And so before the year was out, I left. 

I eventually came back to education as a school board member in my local district, and one of the first things I did was think about how can we recruit more men teachers into our school district. That’s where I started the first educator group, which eventually transitioned into the “real men teaching” movement. 

Anne Kim: How do you think your experience as a teacher would have been different had you had male colleagues around you? Would you have stayed in teaching?

Curtis Valentine: I wish I’d had a community of men—a man I could talk to and say, “Hey, I’m going through this experience, are you too? Is it my fault or is it something that’s quite normal?” I wish I’d had an older male mentor who could show me what the trajectory could look like, meaning, “All right, Curtis, I know you’re in a classroom now, but here’s a pipeline out of the classroom into administration, into leadership, into policy change.”

I believe I would have stuck around much longer if I’d had colleagues who were at my level, but also a mentor who could help me navigate the profession.

Anne Kim: One of the reports that your institute has put out has some pretty remarkable statistics on the lack of gender diversity among teachers—for instance, that just 23 percent of teachers in K-12 are men and only 6 percent of teachers are men of color, which is pretty shocking. I’m wondering if you could speak to how that lack of gender diversity affects the experience of the students, especially boys and especially boys of color when they don’t have somebody in the classroom in front of them who looks like them.

Curtis Valentine: I think it’s intuitive to most people that having someone in front of you who looks like you helps you to connect with what they’re teaching. When Black students have a Black educator, [the likelihood of student disciplinary action] goes down, the likelihood they go into college goes up, and the likelihood of graduating from college goes up. 

Just having two educators of color can change a Black student’s entire trajectory throughout life. When it comes to young boys, discipline issues go down, but also just the sense of what they can be, the sense of possibility is stronger. Male educators are all college graduates, so young boys are more likely to go to college if they have a male educator.

Anne Kim: Just to add some additional context, there has been a lot of concern about the academic achievement of boys in the classroom relative to girls. Girls now make up the majority of college students. They now make up the majority of graduate students. When you look at test scores, girls are pulling ahead in achievement relative to boys. You already alluded to this, but it does seem like there’s a pretty strong connection between academic achievement among boys and having more men in teaching.

Curtis Valentine: For generations, women were held back. Women in STEM were told that women are incapable of doing STEM or performing at a high level. We changed that with groups like the Society of Women Engineers, which did great good job of building community but also building research and policies and breaking down all the systematic issues that kept women from getting into these spaces. Now you see women kicking butt, as they should. 

But now the question is where do men stand when it comes to leveling up to what young women have? I have an 18-year-old son and a 16-year-old daughter and I see it in real time.

She’s interested in STEM. She wants to be a medical doctor. But she grew up in a household like mine that promoted that and said you could be anything. I’m pushing my son to level up as well but to understand that there are obstacles that shape how he moves throughout the world. He has to understand that in order to be successful in school, he has to change how he shows up, particularly as a young Black man—how he speaks and how people can perceive him as aggressive and how he’s likely to be over-disciplined. 

When you have men around him, they’re less likely to over-discipline and also to understand that there’s something that they could do that people not from his community can’t. 

Anne Kim: Just to push back a little bit, wouldn’t there be female teachers who say, “I can do this too.” What is so unique about having a male teacher that a female teacher can’t do? 

Curtis Valentine: So my wife was having a medical procedure, and she was very clear about wanting to find a woman doctor, particularly a woman of color. And you’ll see the research that when you have a medical professional who shares your background, the chance of you having a better medical outcome increases. That doesn’t mean a man couldn’t have done pretty well. 

There are women who have been kicking butt in K-12 education, and they’re the majority. If you’re a man who finished high school and is going to college, the odds are there’s a woman who actually helped you out, because it’s the law of numbers.

I think about Miss Trope, Miss Balltuck, Miss Nelson, Miss Davis. I had a handful of male educators help me out, but the majority of the ones who believed in me were women. That being said, what we’re seeing with men both through the research, but also just anecdotally, is people responding back to us on a regular basis about what life has been like because of a male educator. They talk about the silent support that they get, which is a man just showing up. 

I remember being an eighth grade teacher, and I would be standing there at cafeteria duty, just standing there, and I would have young men just stand next to me. They didn’t ask for anything. It wasn’t much of a conversation, but it was just sort of a presence. I don’t know if they were smelling my cologne or looking at my clothes, but for a lot of them, it was the first time they were that close to a man where they felt safe, and they didn’t have to defend themselves. I wasn’t a guy who was trying to talk to their mother or someone in authority or a police officer.

People would come up and tell [the kids], “You gotta sit down.” I always said, “No, he’s fine. He’s fine. I’m not bothered. He’s not bothered.” He’s just trying to show up and connect with someone. 

We have a generation of young boys who are really operating independently of mentors and men. Our work is part of a larger conversation around men in our communities through the work of [the American Institute for Boys and Men]. But the number of young men who are looking for mentors is going up tremendously. At groups like Big Brothers, Big Sisters, the wait list for a Big Brother is three times longer than it is for a Big Sister. We have parents raising their hands and saying, “My son needs someone, whether it be in the classroom or outside of the classroom, to help shape how he is and shows up in the world.”

 At the same time, we have a male loneliness crisis. Men in my generation and maybe a generation before are isolating themselves. They’re not going outside. know, Scott Galloway says 20-something-year-old men spend less time outside than prison inmates. Men aren’t going outside even for an hour. They’re not dating. They’re not exercising. They’re not joining softball leagues or bowling clubs. We’ve been talking about this for a whole generation. 

But the work of the Male Educator Network and Policy Institute is to create policies and advocate to state and local and federal agencies around the systems that have got us to this point. 

And we’re not just for classroom teachers. I’m always very mindful of that. People say, “I’m not a classroom teacher, I can’t be part of the Male Educator Network.” I say, “Are you a coach? Are you a mentor? Are you someone on Saturdays who has a leadership program for young men? Are you in front of young men and young girls on a regular basis trying to teach them how to show up in the world?” Then we want you. We want to create an army of men who are taking our communities back and saying, “I know things aren’t the way they’re supposed to be, but I can step up and I have something to contribute because they need it and I need it too.”

Anne Kim: Let’s switch to policy. Your experience shed a little bit of light on why men aren’t staying in teaching, but why aren’t men going into teaching in the first place? And I preface this by saying it’s not that men are absent from education altogether, because you do see men who are principals and superintendents. You see a lot of men who are professors, but why are men missing from K-12?

Curtis Valentine: Young men are not exposed or not introduced to teaching very early. They’re not invited into teaching. In talks with a lot of men, they’ll say the first time someone even asked them to become a school teacher was after they finished college. If you look at women, particularly white women, they’re often approached about teaching very early—third grade or fourth grade—and they see that in their future. So young men aren’t even seeing education as a profession at the time when they’re preparing for high school and college. 

Similarly, only one in three parents supports their child becoming a school teacher. That’s all. I imagine when it comes to young boys, it’s probably less. We have to deal with the structures that say “teaching is for women” or “teaching in general is not something you want to do.” 

Finally, men aren’t going to teaching because you have to have a college degree. Men are going to college less and less. So at places like Howard University, a great HBCU here in Washington D.C., only 18 percent of the students there are Black men. If you’re dealing with a pool that shallow, you don’t have the men to get into the pipeline. 

But say you have a man who wants to be a teacher and has gone through college. The first two or three years is when you see the biggest drop-off of people who come in but then leave because they don’t feel supported. 

So for us from a policy perspective, how are we creating policies and systems that introduce young men to teaching sooner? There are high schools that have a workforce pathway to introduce men into teaching as early as ninth grade, where they’re going to graduate with an associate’s degree in early childhood and at least have something to start off with to move into high school. 

We have a national service idea where if you go to college and become a teacher, we’ll pay for it. You have to give us five years in return. How are we transitioning folks who are mid-career? Did you do the Peace Corps like me? Did you do City Year or AmeriCorps? Are you a veteran? Were you a former [Division 1] athlete? 

We’re all hands on deck when it comes to this because we understand that there are attributes that athletes, veterans, and people in the national service could bring to teaching that our students need. 

Anne Kim: You recently released a framework for action that includes a lot of these ideas. If you had to pick a couple of priorities that you haven’t mentioned so far that are realistic in the policy environment that we’re in right now, in the political environment that we’re in right now, what would those top two or so recommendations be?

Curtis Valentine: Well, I’ll say to the political piece that I believe this is probably the most bipartisan issue out there. The majority of the people who support our work are actually women. 

But we need moms who say, “My son is a teacher, and I’m so proud of him.” So we’re going to have bumper stickers on people’s cars that say that. We need to change the narrative 100 percent. 

I also think teacher apprenticeship programs have a lot of promise because it’s allowing men who may have not gone through the formal education process, but also men who are saying, “I’d love to do this, but I still need to make money,” a way for them to get everything they need to get certified but also do so while they’re being compensated. 

I also see an emphasis on “grow your own,” meaning, are there men already in the school building who aren’t necessarily in the classroom on their own? Are there paraprofessionals? Are there substitute teachers? Are there bus drivers? Are there men who are sports coaches who come after school? There’s some low-hanging fruit with men who’ve already signaled that they support education and connect with students but need the formal training. 

And then there’s the work of programs like Call Me Mister—these cohort programs where you’re bringing in a group of maybe five to 10 or 15 men into a college system, [helping to pay for their education], and then tracking them when they leave. This is a way to incentivize young men to go into teaching without much cost, but also to do it as a group. When you have that small community and that esprit de corps, that fraternity holds each other accountable. 

Anne Kim: How do you plan to tackle the prestige problem? I hate to say it, but teaching is a predominantly female profession, and occupational segregation is a very real thing. And pretty much every profession that is dominated by women also tends to be low prestige. So you have this chicken and egg situation where because there’s not enough men, it’s a low prestige profession. It’s a low prestige profession, therefore men don’t go into it. How do you elevate the prestige of teaching without also undermining the contributions of women?

Curtis Valentine: Great question. So Real Men Teach is a group I started years ago to address this narrative shift around pride and of being a teacher, but also to dispel myths about teaching. For instance, in a place like Maryland where I live, the starting salary is $60,000. That’s in year one. 

And if you do afterschool programs and extracurricular activities, and you’re getting your step increases, you’re at $75,000 probably within the first five years. Now if you marry someone who’s also a teacher, that’s $150,000. Now we’re talking real money. 

So I think prestige is about understanding the reality, but it’s also around narrative shifting, particularly what parents believe about children being educators. Again, we want moms and dads saying, “My son’s a teacher, and I’m proud of it.”

I have big plans on how to really show up in popular culture, but also in social media, around what it means to be a male educator, and being an educator in general. 

You know there was prestige [in being a teacher]. If you go back to the 1950s and 60s, when teaching was mostly male, men showed up in a suit and tie with their vest on. When it came to the civil rights movement, it was teachers, preachers, doctors, and lawyers. They were the middle class. 

Individuals shape prestige, and I’m a proud male educator. I get stopped every time I wear my [“Real Men Teach”] t-shirt, and I get congratulated. I get asked questions, and I get head nods. And I get, “Wow, you’re proud to be a teacher?” Like, hell yeah, I’m proud to be a teacher. And so we’re going to put that pride back into it and that prestige. That prestige will allow us to demand more supports and more resources for educators, both in their pocketbooks, but also in the classroom.

Anne Kim:  You’re a one-man banner for narrative change on this. But you’re pushing against the tide a little bit right now because you’ve got this administration that’s got a much narrower view of masculinity, right? And this is not just the administration, but it’s kind of in the zeitgeist right now of people not going to four year colleges because we need more electricians and plumbers and more people in the military.  Do you feel like you’re swimming a little bit upstream by broadening the lens of what masculinity means to include teaching when the popular culture seems to have a very narrow lens on what “real men” do—despite your t-shirt?

Curtis Valentine: I don’t feel that. I think we get approached by both sides of the aisle about the need for men in our community to teach. Now what they want those men to say once they’re in front of students could differ, but this is one thing where I think we’re getting a lot more support. Our young boys are addicted to their phones, addicted to social media, addicted to pornography, sports betting, and all the things that are shaping how they see the world and how they operate. 

We have to be very clear about the realities affecting men in this country, but we don’t see it as zero-sum, where our gain is at the expense of women. The best quote I heard was from Governor Wes Moore, who says we can’t have thriving women with struggling men. 

Most women will tell you, “I want my daughter to be as successful as she can be. But if she doesn’t have the right partner, and the partner she’s with is broken, and she’s trying to put him together while she’s also trying to work her way through medical school because he didn’t have a male influence, didn’t have structure, didn’t have ways to communicate, didn’t have community, and so he does things that aren’t really healthy for him, then that will be something I’ll regret.”

 This is something I’ll be working on for the rest of my life as a dedication to my father and to the men in my life who were supportive of me. I wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for men in my life who spoke to me. And I don’t believe the next generation will either unless I do something about it.

The post Real Men Teach—But We Need More of Them appeared first on Washington Monthly.

The Department of Justice, under acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, has clearly laid an egg. “When Justice is Politicized, the Courts are Resisting,” proclaims the front-page print headline in The New York Times. And Senate Republicans are, at long last, showing small signs of joining in the resistance.  

Blanche is salivating to remove the word “acting” from his job description, so he does the bidding of his master, for whom he worked as a defense lawyer. In so doing, he is losing the respect of judges and lawyers, and making first-term attorneys general Bill Barr and Jeff Sessions look like Elliot Richardson, the attorney general and a Watergate hero, by comparison. Blanche has hired inexperienced loyalists to fill senior roles even as hundreds of career prosecutors have departed, either of their own accord or after being forced out for working on cases targeting the president. It is a grim scene, not only for those who venerate the law, but also for Republican senators losing faith as the president uses “Main Justice” to reward friends and savage opponents.  

Blanche may end up Trump’s pick for AG, but his confirmation chances are dimming if Trump pushes ahead with his plans for a settlement fund, financed by settling his $10 billion lawsuit against the IRS for leaking his tax returns. For now, the administration has said it will abide by a court order pausing the fund’s establishment, and news reports suggest it might scuttle the fund entirely. We’ll see. But what it hasn’t done is publicly declare that it will kill the fund or any scheme to dole out tax dollars to January 6 perpetrators. “Saying you’re going to follow a court order doesn’t tell me anything,” Senator John Kennedy, the Louisiana Republican, told reporters on Monday. “You have to follow the court order.”   

But when it comes to following court orders and abiding by legal norms, Trump’s DOJ doesn’t, so it’s worth looking at its handling of grand juries in the context of the settlement deal. It’s a reminder of how Trump and his DOJ can go too far and be rebuffed by courts—and now Republican senators. 

“Any good prosecutor can get a grand jury to indict a ham sandwich,” famously said New York Court of Appeals Chief Judge Sol Wachtler. But the grand jury, inherited from England and long since abolished there, can refuse to indict citizens if the evidence is not there. Grand juries are said to breathe “the spirit of a community into the enforcement of law,” a guard rail against governmental excess. 

Since Trump took office for the second time last year, the Justice Department has met serious difficulties presenting cases to grand juries. And federal judges have repeatedly admonished Trump prosecutors for misconduct.  

The latest setback came in Chicago, where a judge cited a remarkable list of grand jury errors in dismissing an indictment against four Democratic activists about to stand trial for impeding the police during an autumn protest at an immigration detention facility. 

The blunders angered the Joe Biden-nominated judge, April M. Perry, who bristled at prosecutors improperly speaking to grand jurors outside the grand jury room and their claim that the evidence was strong. 

The Trump prosecutors also removed some grand jurors who had voted against them when considering an earlier version of the charges. Even worse, they tried to hide these maneuvers by redacting the grand jury transcripts—that is, until Judge Perry demanded full copies. 

The government’s missteps necessitated dropping the case days before trial. 

“Your sole goal is to do justice. Your client is justice itself,” Judge Perry told Andrew S. Boutros, the Trump-appointed U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Illinois, who appeared in court to apologize. “I do believe deeply in the presumption of regularity and that most government attorneys are doing the best they can to do the right thing,” she said. “That trust has been broken.” 

Natalie Baldassare, speaking for the Justice Department, tried to sugarcoat the cases in which prosecutors have been scolded for their grand jury presentations. 

“These few cases are not representative of DOJ’s overall achievements to date,” she said, “and we will not be deterred in our efforts to hold criminals accountable and keep the American people safe.” 

Oh, please.  

In Wyoming recently, a three-judge panel threw out nine indictments—some charging murder—after grand jury proceedings revealed misconduct by Darin Smith, the Trump-appointed U.S. attorney. 

The judges ruled that Smith, a rookie prosecutor serving as a state senator and a Christian Broadcasting Network executive, told grand jurors that they would hear evidence concerning “bad guys” and “murderers” who “did what you are going to hear about.” He larded the pan with the comment that the last grand jury returned an indictment in only three minutes. When the West was won, they used to say, “We’re gonna give you a fair trial, followed by a first-class hanging.”  

Finally, a new grand jury—one that Smith had never spoken to—indicted. The Senate confirmed Smith’s nomination just three days after the judges dismissed the cases, exposing his improprieties. 

The jejune behavior of the prosecutors in Chicago and Wyoming channels what unfolded last September with former FBI director James Comey. Trump put Lindsey Halligan, a onetime insurance lawyer, in charge of the U.S. attorney’s office in the Eastern District of Virginia, after her seasoned predecessor was fired for refusing to file charges against Mr. Comey. 

On her fourth day on the job, Halligan, who had never presented a case to a grand jury, appeared before the panel. Comey’s lawyers moved to inspect the grand jury transcripts. The Magistrate Judge William E. Fitzpatrick reviewed the transcripts and found that Halligan misrepresented basic aspects of the law. 

A few days later, Ms. Halligan was hauled into court to explain her grand jury presentation. Questioned by a different judge, she acknowledged a rookie mistake: She never showed the full grand jury the final version of the indictment. 

And Blanche’s new indictment of Comey—for allegedly threatening Trump’s life with a social media posting of seashells spelling out “86 47”—probably won’t make it to a jury.  

Trump prosecutors have failed to get indictments in blue cities like Los Angeles and Washington, D.C., where grand jurors rebuffed indicting protestors of the administration’s immigration crackdowns.  

Other high-profile cases against Mr. Trump’s political and personal foes have included New York’s Attorney General Letitia James. In November, a judge tossed the James indictment for alleged mortgage fraud. When the DOJ tried to re-indict James, two separate grand juries didn’t buy the government’s proposed charges.  

Then, there are the six Democratic lawmakers who posted a video reminding military and intelligence personnel of their obligation to disobey illegal orders. Those charges were also dismissed.  

And the perjury investigation of writer E. Jean Carroll over her testimony against Trump in her civil suit alleging defamation of character scarcely bears mention. Blanche, who represented Trump in the matter, reportedly recused himself from the case, although his underlings at DOJ have been involved in the inquiry. 

And that’s not all. A judge quashed D.C. U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro’s subpoena to the Federal Reserve, and DOJ eventually dropped its absurd effort to indict former Fed Chair Jerome Powell for the invisible crime of holding the line on interest rates. 

A trial jury acquitted a man of misdemeanor charges that he had hurled a sandwich (not ham) at a Customs and Border Patrol officer, and grand juries refused to indict protesters for even more innocuous behavior.  

Federal District Court Judge Waverly Crenshaw in Tennessee threw out the indictment of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the poster child for Trump’s immigration overreach. He was improperly deported to El Salvador, triggering a major flap. The Supreme Court mandated that the government “facilitate” Garcia’s return to the United States to enable him to contest his removal proceedings properly. The Trump administration noodled about the meaning of facilitate and eventually exfiltrated him in manacles under indictment.  

The criminal case against Garcia was pretextual. As legal commentator Elie Honig wrote in June 2025, “because the administration got caught in a screwup, and then chose to flip off the Supreme Court rather than to comply with its directive, they created a political mess. The indictment became the easy way to mop it up.” Judge Crenshaw agreed that the indictment was a hit job: “The objective evidence here shows that, absent Abrego’s successful lawsuit challenging his removal to El Salvador, the Government would not have brought this prosecution … The evidence before this Court sadly reflects an abuse of prosecuting power.” 

The Poodle Awakens 

So where is Congress? The poodle awakens. If pushed, Congress can exercise the constitutional checks and balances. As King Charles III recently reminded, we inherited checks and balances on the executive from the Magna Carta. Congressional Republicans have raised their greying eyebrows about the purported settlement Trump made with himself, setting up a $1.8 billion fund to pay off pardoned January 6 criminals, as Blanche mused obtusely to CNN’s Paula Reid, “Just to be clear, people who hurt police get money all the time, okay?”  

Even Senate Majority Leader John Thune hinted at dissent, noting that he was “not a big fan” of the fund and that “our members have very legitimate questions” about it. One of those members, Senator Thom Tillis, hung the bell on the cat: “I think it’s stupid on stilts.”  

Meeting with Blanche, dozens of Republican senators exploded over the slush fund. With the power of the purse, they asked the tough questions about the “settlement’s” legal basis, whether it required congressional approval, and who would be the beneficiaries of the largesse. Forget about the gratuitous general release Blanche gave Trump, worth $600 million, to him and his family. Senators wanted no part of the plan, the product of a deal struck between Trump and himself, since the IRS is part of the executive branch. Senator Ted Cruz said that Republican lawmakers were “screaming” at Blanche and that the giveaway could provoke “a full-on revolt in the Senate.” 

On Monday, June 1, the White House was reportedly considering backing off on the settlement in the wake of growing GOP opposition. Still, given Trump’s wild gyrations on everything from war in Iran to tariffs, there’s no telling whether the plan is dead, moribund, or about to be eclipsed by some new scheme.

Republican senators hold a razor-thin 53-47 edge, but four are on record against the settlement fund. Blanche faces a Hobson’s choice: reject the giveaway, and Trump will never give him the top job, or fire him. He could go the way of Jeff Sessions, Bill Barr, or Pam Bondi in the dustbin of history. Support the steal, and he won’t be confirmed. As preached in the Sermon on the Mount, “No man can serve two masters.” Roy Cohn would have had no problem, but where is he today?

The post Todd Blanche’s Hobson’s Choice appeared first on Washington Monthly.

“To be clear, it’s the voters of Maine who thus far have chosen Graham Platner,” said Kate Bedingfield, a former Joe Biden administration aide, on CNN yesterday.  

But to be clear, Maine voters haven’t chosen anybody yet. Not a single vote has been counted for Platner in his entire life. While early voting has already begun, the Maine primary is on June 9.  

Over the weekend, Maine voters were given plenty of new reasons to deny Platner the Democratic nomination for U.S. Senate.  

Platner may be the only person on the Democratic ballot for U.S. Senate running a well-financed campaign. But there are two other candidates on the ballot, each more accomplished, each who has been on a ballot before, each without Platner’s still-growing row of bright red flags. And because Maine has ranked-choice voting, voters can rank both of them.  

No Maine voter should enter a voting booth thinking the race is over, and Platner has already won just because that’s what Platner’s loyalists and many Republicans want you to think. 

On Saturday, the latest Platner scandal blew up. On Sunday, Platner made it worse. 

As you may know, on Saturday, The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times reported that in August, Platner’s wife, Amy Gertner, just days after his U.S. Senate campaign officially began, shared sexts he sent to several women mere months earlier. The Journal further reported that “Platner also has an active account on Kik, a popular, private messaging app. Platner’s profile shows a mirror selfie of him shirtless with a towel wrapped around his waist.” (He is identifiable by his body tattoos, though his face is cropped out, and his arm appears strategically placed where his controversial Totenkopf tattoo once was.) The conservative site, The Maine Wire, quickly published a piece emphasizing Kik’s unsavory reputation as a site frequented by teenagers and, as explained in a 2016 New York Times investigation, a hotbed for “inappropriate sexual content and behavior.” (Platner’s Kik profile is, as of Monday morning, still active and accessible online.)  

Saturday evening, the Platner campaign posted a video from Platner’s wife in which she assures, “Our marriage today is stronger than ever before” and saves her ire for the former campaign staffer, Genevieve McDonald, who was a source for the news stories: “I confided deeply personal details about my marriage to someone I considered a friend … and I am deeply hurt by her betrayal and the invasion of our privacy.”  

On Sunday, Platner spoke to reporters with Gertner by his side. He admitted nothing and offered no apology. Asked if “the stories are true, right, about the texts,” Platner responded, “No. No. This is the amazing part. The Wall Street Journal & The New York Times ran stories without any evidence besides the gossip from a former staffer. I’m sorry that’s frankly journalistic malpractice.” In fact, while McDonald, a former statehouse representative, told the Times that Platner “had been exchanging sexual messages with as many as a dozen women,” the outlet also cited “a current Platner campaign official” who “said Mr. Platner had been communicating with up to six women.” When Platner was asked on Sunday, “So are you confirming that the messages did not exist?” Platner replied with a dodge: “I’m confirming that what Genevieve McDonald said in The New York Times is not true.” 

Platner’s choice to dissemble makes the situation much worse.  

Morris Katz, a Platner consultant, declared on X, “It’s no one’s fucking business what happened in Graham & Amy’s marriage before he was ever a candidate for office.” That past marital indiscretions have no relevance to the job of U.S. Senator is not a wholly unreasonable argument, though we have many examples of infidelity by public officials sliding quickly into illegal behavior, be it sexual harassment or financial crimes committed to cover up their tracks.  

We also have examples of philanderers getting elected and re-elected, so, as other Platner defenders argue, we need not assume this latest controversy means Platner can’t win. Fair enough, we can’t know the latest revelations mean Platner can’t win. But we also don’t know what else controversial may be lurking in Platner’s past. 

Platner himself has lost the credibility to reassure. In January, asked by CNN if he had “other skeletons from your past,” Platner said, “No.” Asked by The New York Times two weeks ago, “Is there something new you want to get ahead of?” Platner said, “No.” On Sunday, he couldn’t even talk straight to reporters about sexts his campaign already admitted he sent. Trust is broken.  

The damage of a Platner nomination could go beyond Maine. Already, we are seeing Republicans nationwide gleefully use Platner to charge Democrats with hypocrisy. Painting the Republican U.S. Senate nominee Ken Paxton—the Texas Attorney General who was impeached over bribery allegations connected to the employer of his mistress—as ethically compromised becomes harder if Democrats are also downplaying Platner’s controversies. Charging Donald Trump’s Republican Party with taking us down the road of fascism is harder when Democrats must argue that Platner, self-styled military history buff, didn’t know about the Nazi origins of his Totenkopf. 

There’s no such thing as a zero-risk candidate, but Platner’s campaign has been a series of red flags warning he is a high-risk candidate, each one redder than the last. Why would Maine Democratic primary voters take such a risk? Yes, he ran the best campaign in the winter and spring. Yes, he raised the most money. Yes, his poll numbers have been good to date. But if more shoes drop, all that will be meaningless.  

And yes, Governor Janet Mills suspended her lackluster campaign. (I argued last week that Mills should unsuspend her campaign, but even if she doesn’t, she remains on the ballot.) David Costello, a career government aide, is currently running a lackluster campaign for the Democratic nomination, too. Yes, it is unlikely that either will best Platner on June 9. But they definitely won’t if voters who would rather not vote for Platner do so out of resignation.  

If you are a Maine Democratic primary voter (both Democrats and unenrolled voters can participate in the June 9 primary) who believes either Mills or Costello would be more likely to beat Senator Susan Collins than the guy who spewed racist and misogynist rhetoric online, blamed women for getting raped, mocked a Purple Heart recipient for getting shot on the battlefield, has a profile on a notorious messaging app and was using it to sext behind his wife’s back last year, then there’s no harm in ranking them number one and number two, in whatever order, on your ranked choice ballot.

Of course, if you believe Platner is the better candidate on the merits, then double down! Matt Stoller, the populist commentator, argued on X, “I like that he’s messy. The rule following perfect resume ladder climbing Harvard law grads are the actually [sic] lizard people creeps.” That strikes me as a wee bit of a broad brush to paint Platner’s opponents. Neither Mills nor Costello even went to Harvard anyway (unlike Stoller, albeit as an undergrad). But regardless, voters who trust Platner can and will win should stand by their man. Others, however, need not feel pressured to vote for a candidate they don’t trust. 

The post Maine Voters, It’s Not Too Late to Save Democrats from Graham Platner  appeared first on Washington Monthly.

Since the start of President Donald Trump’s second term, the White House and Congress have worked aggressively to overhaul federal student financial aid. On July 1, many of those efforts will come to fruition. 

Student borrowers will begin to see different options for loan repayments and forgiveness, while current students will face new limits on how much they can borrow in the first place. Low-income people will have more funding available to pursue career and technical training.  

These moves have cheerleaders, critics, and skeptics. The Hechinger Report checked in with experts around the country to find out what they’re wondering and watching for as it all unfolds.  

Workforce Pell  

Change in higher education rarely moves so quickly that it’s hard to keep up. But one new federal policy that takes effect July 1 has states and providers scrambling. At stake are hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars and a continued supply of workers in essential jobs. 

After years of unsuccessful bipartisan support, federal Pell Grants will be available for the first time to help lower-income students pay not just for associate and bachelor’s degrees, but for short-term training that leads to certificates or certifications for in-demand roles, including nursing assistants, phlebotomists, EMTs, and child care providers, and in many trades—truck driving, welding, car repair, and HVAC. 

This new option, nicknamed short-term or Workforce Pell, has many rules. It applies to programs as short as eight weeks but requires providers to show that at least 70 percent of their students successfully finish and get jobs within six months that pay enough to justify the cost. 

Enforcing these conditions is largely left to states, which have had less than a year to prepare. Some are further along than others. Meanwhile, a survey shows that fewer than half of people who could most benefit from these non-degree programs are aware of them, let alone that they may now qualify for government grants to cover the cost. 

Even once they do know, there are nearly 1.9 million such programs to choose from, according to the Counting Credentials project. They’re offered by 134,491 different providers, from public community colleges to private, for-profit schools. Of those, anywhere from only several hundred to a few thousand will meet the eligibility criteria for short-term Pell Grants, according to the most specific available projection from the U.S. Department of Education. 

Whether the programs pay off is critical for determining loan eligibility. One study finds that only about 12 percent of more than 23,000 non-degree credentials left their students earning at least 10 percent more than they made before enrolling. Another shows that graduates from non-degree programs at community colleges in Texas saw wage gains of about 4 percent; those in fields like transportation and engineering technologies benefited the most, while their counterparts in business and marketing, and in information sciences, saw zero increase in earnings. 

Most states still have a long way to go in establishing eligibility rules that protect prospective students from wasting their time—and federal money—on poor programs.  

Scrapping the SAVE loan program  

What happens when more than 7 million people who owe money on their federal student loans are forced to find new repayment plans in the span of a few months? We’re about to find out. 

The federal Saving on a Valuable Education (SAVE) program is being phased out by the Trump administration, leaving its 7.5 million participants to transfer their student debt to one of at least three other plans starting July 1. Most SAVE borrowers will need to switch by September. Those who miss the deadline will automatically be enrolled in a standard federal repayment plan that could cost significantly more. 

“The key thing is making sure people understand that they really do need to take action,” said Scott Buchanan, executive director of the Student Loan Servicing Alliance, a trade group representing loan servicers. “There’s nothing stopping people from acting now.” 

The SAVE program, enacted by the Biden administration in 2023, limited federal loan repayment to 5 percent of an undergraduate borrower’s disposable income and made it easier to seek forgiveness for loans. The Trump administration ended the program to settle lawsuits by Republican officials in 18 states, who argued that SAVE’s provisions went beyond what Congress had intended in authorizing income-driven repayment plans.  

While the Department of Education will offer a new income-driven plan, its terms will be less forgiving than those of the SAVE program. The lowest-income borrowers will no longer be able to skip some payments, and debt will be allowed to be canceled only after a minimum of 30 years, in contrast with the SAVE plan’s 10-year minimum. 

Going forward, as many as eight plans will be options, but not all will be available to every borrower, and some will expire in 2028. Depending on which new plan a SAVE borrower chooses, monthly payments could rise by hundreds of dollars, said Natalia Abrams, president and founder of the Student Debt Crisis Center, an advocacy group for student borrowers. 

“I would say this is by far the most confusing time for the student borrower landscape,” she said, noting that more than 700 people attended her organization’s most recent workshop about the coming changes. “I don’t think we’ve gotten clear guidance on it.” 

Confusion and worry have been common among SAVE borrowers who reached out to Lane Thompson, Oregon’s student loan ombudsperson. Many wondered about the timeline for the changes, she said, and many feel stressed about the effects on their living expenses amid inflationary pressures. The latest rules also follow years of loan pauses, lawsuits, and other measures that have affected federal student loan rules. 

“I’m definitely seeing people who are very confused,” Thompson said. “People are kind of exhausted by all the change.” 

SAVE borrowers will start receiving letters from the Department of Education around July 1, although some might arrive later as the department staggers implementation. The letters will open a 90-day window for borrowers to find a new repayment plan. The government’s loan simulator can help borrowers make decisions. 

Borrowers will need to choose a plan that fits their repayment goals, said Sarah Sattelmeyer, project director for education, opportunity, and mobility at the left-leaning think tank New America. Some people will want the lowest possible monthly payments, while others might want to pay off their loans as quickly as possible, Sattelmeyer said. 

It’s important to research and speak to loan servicers to find the best option, she said. 

“Borrowers are having to take in a very large amount of information and decide what’s the best move for them,” Sattelmeyer said. “Different plans meet different borrowers’ goals, and it’s based on personal circumstances.”  

Public Service Loan Forgiveness 

The federal Public Service Loan Forgiveness program has had a relatively clear message to student borrowers since 2007: Work in a government or nonprofit job for enough time, and your debt will eventually be canceled. 

But a new caveat from the Trump administration has created chaos for hundreds of thousands of borrowers whose public service jobs may no longer qualify. Starting July 1, employers with what the administration deems a “substantial illegal purpose”—such as helping immigrants or providing transgender care—could be excluded from the program. 

The administration has not specified which employers would meet that definition, only saying it expects fewer than 10 employers per year to be affected. Advocacy groups worry that the Trump administration might target state governments such as California, Illinois, or New York, institutions such as Harvard University, or other groups it disagrees with. 

“I’m trying to minimize the panic here,” said Betsy Mayotte, president and founder of the Institute of Student Loan Advisors, who has spoken with borrowers who have already quit the public service jobs the program was meant to encourage them to take. “But I would be worried if I worked for an employer that has already been singled out by this administration.” 

The Public Service Loan Forgiveness program allows borrowers to request their remaining debt be canceled if they have made 10 years of payments while working for a qualifying employer. Those employers include public schools and government agencies as well as nonprofit organizations such as hospitals, universities, and food banks. 

Several lawsuits could affect the program’s future. One, filed in Massachusetts by 14 parties including the cities of Boston, Chicago, and San Francisco, labor unions, and nonprofits, argues that the administration has no right to alter a congressionally approved program. That complaint has a hearing scheduled for June 3. A second lawsuit has been brought by a coalition of 23 state attorneys general. 

Borrowers should wait to see how the legal challenges proceed before making major decisions, said Winston Berkman-Breen, legal director of Protect Borrowers, which represents some of the 14 plaintiffs. 

“No one should change their life plans or give up their dream job for this,” he said. “We think it would be premature for someone to make such an important decision on their job or where they live based on this rule.” 

Regardless of the lawsuits’ outcomes, it’s not yet clear whether any changes could be enforced or how many people would be affected, Mayotte said. 

“If an employer does fall under scrutiny, the employer will have the opportunity to defend themselves,” she said. “I think the number of borrowers affected, if this makes it through the courts, will not be broad at all.”  

Graduate student loan limits  

Grad PLUS loans, officially named Direct PLUS loans, allowed graduate students to borrow up to the full cost of attendance. They are being phased out. Instead, students enrolled in 11 fields categorized as professional, such as doctors and lawyers, are limited to $50,000 per year and a lifetime total of $200,000. All other graduate programs, such as nursing, teaching, and social work, will have a lower cap of $20,500 per year and $100,000 in total. Two dozen states filed a lawsuit in May challenging the definition of “professional” that created these lower loan limits. Student borrowers already enrolled in a program won’t be affected by the changes.  

Education Department officials say the restrictions will help protect incoming students from ballooning debt that they can’t repay and will pressure institutions to lower costs. Opponents worry that the caps will make a degree less accessible to low-income students, restricting economic mobility for those who would benefit most.  

About 28 percent of graduate students would surpass the borrowing caps if they were in place today, according to an analysis by the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia.  

Some fields of study could be deeply affected. Today, close to 80 percent of dentistry students, 21 percent of registered nursing students, and 58 percent of medical students borrow more than the new limits, according to a recent report by the PEER Center at American University.   

Policymakers across the political spectrum expect growth in private student loans, which have fewer protections than federal ones. Critics note that low-income students, whose families disproportionately have lower credit scores, could face higher interest rates in the private market. More than a third of students who borrow over the new limit have credit scores that will make it difficult to get approved for a private loan.  

“Knowing how many people are going to struggle to access private loans on their own, I think it is safe to assume there will be a notable impact on enrollment,” said Clare McCann, one of the coauthors of the PEER report. “Some of these people will choose not to go, and unfortunately, that’s even going to be true in a lot of the fields where the return on investment is very strong.”  

Supporters of the caps say student debt and unrepaid loans, which cost the federal government billions of dollars, will decrease.  

“Before, you could have a really overpriced graduate program that students would just take out these ridiculous student loans for and not be able to repay them,” said Andrew Gillen, research fellow at the Cato Institute’s Center for Educational Freedom. “These overpriced programs are not going to be able to convince a private financial institution to give loans to their students.” 

Gillen and others hope that nonprofits and colleges will step in to cosign loans for students with low credit scores who can’t get private loans on their own. 

Still, some policymakers who believe in loan limits say it’s unclear whether private companies will risk lending to people with poor credit, even if they attend a high-quality school. They were frustrated with the final law and had advocated pegging the limits to a graduate’s ability to repay the loan.  

Parent loan limits 

Parent PLUS loans, which previously allowed parents to borrow up to the cost of a child’s attendance, will be capped at $20,000 per year and a lifetime total of $65,000 per dependent student. These borrowers will also no longer have access to the limited income-driven repayment plans that previously existed. 

Originally aimed at affluent families who needed a quick cash infusion, Parent PLUS loans have increasingly been used by middle- and low-income families to bridge the financial gap as federal financial aid no longer covered the cost of attending college. About 56 percent of Parent PLUS borrowers qualify for Pell Grants, which are intended for low-income students.  

There has been agreement across the political spectrum for years that Parent PLUS loans landed families in unmanageable debt. After 10 years, the average borrower has barely paid off half of what they owe, and at a 9 percent interest rate, the amount owed can climb to thousands of dollars beyond the amount borrowed. 

Congress created the new caps to keep families from spiraling into debt and steer them toward more affordable options. The motivation was not to stop government waste—the program has traditionally made a profit for the government with a 16 percent return most recently, according to a study by the Brookings Institution. 

The impact of the caps will vary by income level. About 18 percent of borrowers from families making less than $50,000 now borrow above the new annual cap, and 9 percent borrow more than the lifetime limit, according to an analysis by the Urban Institute. For borrowers from families who make more than $200,000, those numbers are 57 percent and 46 percent, respectively.  

Critics of Parent PLUS loans note that low- and middle-income families who struggle to repay their loans tend to borrow well below the limit, making the caps less effective for them.  

“For families with strong financial profiles and good credit, this shift may yield access to lower-cost options than Parent PLUS loans,” wrote the authors of the Brookings report. “However, for families with weaker credit or limited collateral, private market underwriting may result in reduced access to loan funds and substantially higher borrowing costs, potentially exacerbating existing inequalities in college financing.” 

Instead of across-the-board loan limits, critics argue that Parent PLUS loan approval should take into account the ability to pay, include an income-based repayment option, and hold colleges accountable for high default rates.  

This story about student loans was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter. 

The post Five Big Changes Coming to Higher Education This Summer appeared first on Washington Monthly.

Fire Point CEO Iryna Terekh remembers the moment in February when long-range cruise missiles manufactured by her defense technology company struck a Russian arms factory in Votkinsk, nearly 900 miles from Ukraine. The Votkinsk plant manufactures the Kinzhal and Iskander ballistic missiles that Moscow regularly rains down on Kyiv and other cities. Three of Fire Point’s powerful Flamingo missiles hit the plant’s electroplating and stamping facility, and a Russian video captured a giant fireball burning on the horizon.  

“We’re finally hitting the archer,” Terekh, a small, slender engineer with dark hair and aviator glasses, tells me with a smile. “That’s much more effective than stopping the arrows. Votkinsk was my first sense that something was really changing.”  

The Votkinsk strike was just the beginning. Ukraine has been pounding Russia with long-range weapons—missiles and drones—all spring. After one startling mid-May assault on Moscow, the Russian Ministry of Defense reported intercepting 628 drones over 14 regions, destroying 120 above Moscow. Ukrainian strikes damaged critical infrastructure across Russia, including the Moscow Oil Refinery and a major semiconductor plant, killing three, injuring 18, and causing severe delays at the capital’s main international airport.  

Particularly stunning and effective are the now almost daily Ukrainian drone and missile strikes on Russian oil facilities. Kyiv has doubled the tempo of attacks in recent months, boosting the effect with repeated hits on the same refinery—sometimes several in a single week. In late May, Reuters reported the attacks had stopped or scaled back operations at all major fuel refineries in central Russia, cutting 30 percent of Russia’s gasoline output and 25 percent of its diesel fuel production. What Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky wryly calls “long-range sanctions” also target Russian pipelines and storage facilities. The campaign has forced the Kremlin to halt gasoline exports and dented the tax revenues Moscow relies on to finance its war machine. 

Fire Point’s Iyrna Terekh isn’t the only one who feels this moment may be a turning point. The war is far from over. Russia slammed Kyiv last week—one of the largest aerial assaults since the fighting began—with 600 drones and 90 missiles, including a rarely used Oreshnik hypersonic ballistic missile, killing at least four people and injuring more than 90. Russia still has more of everything—missiles, drones, soldiers, and financial resources—than Ukraine. Vladimir Putin shows no signs of giving up. A desperate Putin will surely be a more dangerous Putin. 

Yet many Ukrainians feel they have what strategists call “the initiative”—forward momentum that forces Moscow to respond to Kyiv’s terms of engagement. It’s not just about long-range strikes. Elon Musk’s February decision to halt Russian troops’ illegal use of Starlink terminals, and Ukrainian middle-range drone bombardment—up to 155 miles behind enemy front lines—also play a significant part, pushing back Moscow’s command centers, complicating its logistics, and slowing its battlefield advances. 

Kyiv has all but halted Russian gains along the 1,000-mile front line, and the Ukrainian defense industry continues to roll out new weaponry—still longer-range missiles, more sophisticated drones, better electronic warfare jammers, and interceptors to shoot down incoming missiles. 

Yet long-range strikes—also called long-range fires and deep-precision strikes—are in a class of their own, critical not just for Ukraine but also for European defense and deterrence.  

The short-range Ukrainian drones that captured the world’s attention rely on very simple technology—easy modifications to devices widely used for agriculture and photography. Longer-range fires, especially deep-strike missiles, are something else entirely.  

It was no accident that Hitler called them Wunderwaffen, or miracle weapons. The Nazis made two varieties—V-1 cruise missiles and V-2 ballistic missiles. They didn’t win the war for Germany, as Hitler hoped, but they terrorized Britain for two years, causing widespread destruction and thousands of civilian deaths. Today, both Ukraine and America’s NATO allies see long-range fires as essential weapons against Moscow. But neither Kyiv nor Europe have enough of the weaponry they need.  

President Donald Trump’s recent decision to withdraw troops from Germany was largely symbolic; far more consequential was the cancellation of a deployment, promised in 2024 by President Joe Biden, that would have stationed a battalion equipped with Tomahawk cruise missiles on German soil. Without U.S.-produced Tomahawks, which can flatten a building or destroy an airfield as far as 1,000 miles away, European NATO states have no conventional deep-strike capabilities to deter or punish a Russian assault.  

Long-range cruise and ballistic missiles launched from Russian soil can hit Berlin and Warsaw; those launched from Russia’s Baltic enclave, Kaliningrad, can hit London and Paris. Yet Europe has nothing comparable with which to hit back. Its only long-range weapons carry nuclear warheads, and no one in Europe wants to initiate a nuclear conflict. That’s why defense officials from London to Warsaw believe Putin has a veritable invitation to attack during the a five-year window before Europe can develop its own conventional deep-strike missiles. 

Fire Point produces a spectrum of long-range fires—drones, cruise missiles, and ballistic missiles. Founded in 2022 with just 18 workers, it now employs over 6,000 technicians at 70 locations across Ukraine. Among Ukraine’s best-known and best-connected arms manufacturers, the firm is at once much admired and much criticized. Recent reports implicate it in the corruption scandal that forced Zelensky’s number two to resign last year. Fire Point denies any wrongdoing and is widely seen as too successful to fail, too integral to the Ukrainian war effort, and too tied to European hopes for timely long-range missile production.  

I spoke to Terekh in her spare office in a nondescript building that blends into a modest residential neighborhood—a location chosen for security reasons. A building not far away serves as one of Fire Point’s dispersed production hubs, filled with buzzing 3D printers and technicians huddled over workbenches, while others pack components for the front line. Terekh and cofounder Denys Shtilerman, a big, solidly built man with close-cropped hair, are determined to produce as much as possible in-house, including rocket engines, solid rocket fuel, and navigational components for the Fire Point’s growing product line.  

“I never liked the idea of a Wunderwaffe,” Terekh reflects. “Most situations require a combination of missiles and drones.” Missiles are faster and more powerful; drones are cheaper. A Fire Point FP-5 Flamingo missile can carry a 2,500-pound explosive payload deep into Russia. The company’s FP-1 deep-strike drones carry just a fraction of that but cost only €50,000—a sliver of the missile price and less than one-third of what a similar device would cost in Europe. 

“Our soldiers are squeezing the maximum out of very cheap systems,” Shtilerman explains. “Also, an oil refinery is a huge area, and even a high-explosive FP-5 cannot demolish the whole facility. But if you aim 20 FP-1s in just the right way, you can shut down the refinery.” 

This spring’s hits relied on several Fire Point systems. Its FP-2 middle-strike drones helped take out Russian air defenses just over the border. Then, a combination of long-range FP-1s and Flamingo cruise missiles headed for the target, whether an oil refinery or other critical infrastructure. Fire Point is only one of many Ukrainian companies developing deep-strike missiles. It’s estimated to have produced roughly one-third of the drones used in recent long-range attacks.  

The firm’s focus now is on a critical next step for Ukrainian long-range strike power: perfecting ballistic missiles, which fly in a parabolic arc rather than along the horizon, making them much harder to intercept. 

Fire Point’s approach incorporates many of the lessons learned by Ukraine over four-plus years of battling Russia—the shortcuts, improvisations, and innovations that make the country’s way of war so different from traditional tactics and strategy. In addition to asymmetry—using a cheap drone to take down an expensive enemy system—and a relentless focus on cost, Fire Point never loses sight of what Terekh calls the “user experience.”  

“Unlike most weapons systems,” she explains, “which were designed by arms experts and military men, most new Ukrainian weapons are being developed by people like me who have never built a weapon before—people more likely to think about ease of use and user safety.” That’s why the Flamingo is ground-launched rather than air- or sea-launched like most other deep-strike missiles. This makes the FP-5 easier to hide and safer to use—no pilots need fly risky sorties over enemy territory—making up for what it loses in power from a stationary launch. 

At the same time, Terekh says the company is relying on Ukrainian pilots to innovate on the go, perfecting their technique and sending feedback to the company to improve the weapon’s performance. “In 2022,” Terekh tells me, “we needed four expensive, U.S.-made Patriot interceptors to down one incoming Russian ballistic missile. Now the ratio is one-to-one. We’re counting on the same effect to improve Flamingo accuracy. It’s all about the soldier’s tactics and capabilities—the know-how they develop as they use the weapon in combat.” 

Third and most important to Terekh, Fire Point leadership is determined to advance  Ukrainian independence—the nation’s capacity to defend itself without relying on fickle allies. “Again and again, over the past four years,” she says, “we’ve had to beg our partners for help—for tanks, for planes, for long-range missiles. But the response was always too little, too late—we kept missing the moment to turn the war around, and Ukrainian soldiers paid in blood.” Now, when a Ukrainian fighter needs a weapon, “he doesn’t have to wait.” 

Terekh and Shtilerman say that many European countries are eager to buy weapons or co-produce them, either inside or outside Ukraine. Like most Ukrainian companies, Fire Point puts domestic needs first. The firm has benefited from European subsidies that help Kyiv buy drones for the Ukrainian army; it has also entered into a joint venture to produce solid rocket fuel in Denmark that will be shipped to Ukraine for use against Russia. But the company does not envision selling missiles to Europe until all Ukraine’s needs have been met—at least a year or two down the road. 

That rules out Ukraine as a quick solution for NATO’s long-range missile gap. Still, Terekh predicts, Ukrainian deep-strike weapons will become available long before any country in Europe develops its own.  

Looking to the future, the company’s leadership is eager to collaborate with European partners to develop what Shtilerman calls a continental “anti-ballistic missile shield”—a system to replace U.S.-made Patriot systems, currently the only weapon capable of downing Russian ballistic missiles, with an alternative that doesn’t rely on Washington. 

As Shtilerman imagines it, some half-dozen European countries would produce components—ground-based radars, homing warheads, a tactical data link, and a control unit. Fire Point would produce missiles—a variant of the FP-7 ballistic missile now being tested and improved in the field in Ukraine. He and Terekh say that several European capitals have expressed interest in collaborating, and Fire Point is determined that its product will come without strings attached.  

“There will be no kill switch and no conditions,” Terekh maintains. “As Ukraine learned the hard way”—when the Trump Pentagon turned off software updates for American missiles in use on the eastern front—“that’s a recipe for disaster. We shouldn’t be able to influence the destiny of a weapon once it’s out in the world.” 

Independence is Fire Point’s watchword. Ukraine must be independent; it wants its European partners to be able to fight independently, and it wants to revolutionize the way weapons are made and sold to reduce dependence on foreign manufacturers subject to shifting political winds.  

Terekh tells a story about wandering among manufacturers’ booths at a defense tech exposition and hearing a common refrain. “All the Western companies’ slogans and advertising emphasized safety,” she recalls. “The product they were selling was safety, and it got me thinking—what really is our final product?” Then it dawned on her, she says: “Our product—what we provide for our partners and the Ukrainian soldiers we equip—is safety plus independence.”  

It’s a radical message for Ukraine and for Europe, long reliant on American weaponry and global leadership: no country’s security should rest on the uncertain goodwill of its patrons or suppliers.

The post Could the Tide Be Turning in Ukraine? appeared first on Washington Monthly.

Tom Steyer wants Californians to know he is the only billionaire on the ballot for governor—but not, he is quick to add, the only billionaire spending on the race. The quip captures the odd position the climate activist and Democratic megadonor occupies in California’s gubernatorial primary. Running against the party establishment and corporate donors, the hedge-fund veteran is courting the Democratic Socialists of America. He’s a former single-payer skeptic who is now campaigning on Medicare for All. And he’s taken to wearing a pale cap emblazoned with the words “class traitor.” His self-funded campaign hinges on whether voters find these paradoxes convincing.

Steyer hardly resembles the archetypal populist insurgent, but he is his own kind of political figure. At 68, Steyer is a practicing Christian. Every day he draws on his wrist a Jerusalem Cross—a simple cross with smaller crosses in each of its four quadrants—as a reminder “to tell the truth.”. He met his wife on the running track at Stanford in the 1980s. The couple joined The Giving Pledge—committing to donating their wealth in their lifetimes—and now have four grown children.

If only one Democrat advances out of California’s “jungle primary” tomorrow, in which the top two vote-getters advance, regardless of party, that candidate will be heavily favored to win in November. If two Democrats advance, the general election will become a far more bruising intra-party fight. In most polls, Steyer trails Xavier Becerra, the former congressman, California attorney general and Biden health secretary, who inherited much of the party establishment’s support after sexual assault allegations forced Eric Swalwell from the race in April. Becerra is all but guaranteed to reach the general election, leaving Steyer and Steve Hilton, the former television host and Trump-endorsed Republican, as favorites for the second spot. Matt Mahan, the pragmatic, centrist San Jose mayor buoyed by Silicon Valley money, and Katie Porter, the fiery former congresswoman whose campaign was hobbled by a video of her berating a staffer, are also challenging the status quo, but both have languished below double digits in the polls.

Steyer’s campaign is built around, you guessed it, affordability. His campaign consultant, Fight Agency, was central to Zohran Mamdani’s mayoral campaign, as well as Graham Platner’s U.S. Senate bid in Maine. Like those Democratic insurgents, Steyer is apparently unworried about overpromising. He wants to cut electricity rates by 25 percent by taking on the utility monopolies. He wants to build a million homes by closing what he calls the “Trump Tax Loophole,” a commercial property tax break he says would raise $20 billion a year if eliminated. He wants single-payer healthcare, financed by a tax increase, which, he argues, households already pay in premiums. 

When I met Steyer at his San Francisco campaign office, he was much as I had expected: tall but unimposing and prone to long, nerdy digressions. An unprompted detour into the 2015 Paris climate conference, which he attended, ate several minutes of our conversation. Passion for climate is a brand he leaned into heavily in his presidential run, though Steyer now says winning was never his goal six years ago. He entered that race, he told me, to push climate issues further into the Democratic conversation.

Now, Steyer says, he’s “running to win.” He has clearly absorbed the lesson that climate language alienates voters skeptical of the Democratic Party’s priorities, and he has translated accordingly. “When I talk about introducing competition to the electric monopolies, I don’t use the word climate,” he told me. “I use the word cost.” 

He has cast his bid as a fight against business interests, who he says have made California unaffordable. When we talked, Steyer wanted to reassure me that his concern for working people is not a new consultant-led creation. His activist efforts predate his electoral ambitions by decades, he said “I’ve been working on this for over 20 years, if you include the political stuff I was doing while still working in the private sector.” (Steyer founded a community bank focused on lending in redlined neighborhoods over a decade ago—“now [worth] several billion dollars and delivering loans to the places where normal commercial banks won’t go”—and spent two decades advocating for the climate by bankrolling ballot initiatives and nonprofits.) 

“The idea that suddenly I’m this progressive, that’s ridiculous,” he said. “Twenty years ago, I was doing this so I could fake something in 2026? Really? That’s silly.”

Still, for some voters, Steyer’s capitalist biography makes it difficult to buy into his populist candidacy. The Yale-educated mogul made his billions running Farallon Capital, a hedge fund that once held major stakes in private prison operators tied to ICE contracts. Steyer has since apologized for these former investments and now holds the strongest anti-ICE stance in the gubernatorial field—including a pledge to arrest Stephen Miller, Supremacy Clause be damned. 

The left of the party, for its part, seems to have accepted this apology. Steyer secured endorsements from Bernie Sanders’s Our Revolution in late April and a recommendation from the California DSA in early May. Bernie, he told me, has “had more impact on democratic thinking than anybody else in the United States in the last 20 years.” But despite his overtures to the progressive left, Steyer’s backers extend beyond progressive groups: they include YIMBY Action, the influential free-market housing group, and the moderate California political kingmaker Willie Brown. 

That’s because Steyer also sells himself as a pragmatic fixer: A devoted YIMBY who will reduce bureaucracy and cut red tape. Less than an hour after I left Steyer’s office, he took to Reddit’s r/YIMBY subreddit for an “Ask Me Anything.” Many users were receptive. “Just the fact that you are willing to interact with this subreddit … already shows you are worthy of at least my support, as nothing can get worse than the current Democrat establishment,” one scrutinous Redditor said. 

Others were less impressed. “I’m growing increasingly wary of this guy,” one participant wrote.

Corporate interests, for their part, see Steyer as a threat. Big oil and developers have poured over $50 million into knocking him down and boosting Becerra. PG&E has spent more than $12 million against him, Uber almost $1 million, Meta almost $1 million, and Chevron half a million.

Thanks in part to this barrage, Steyer may fall short of Becerra, who leads the polls. It also helps that California primaries are usually won by candidates who project party familiarity. Becerra does that automatically and has amassed endorsements from Planned Parenthood and Equality California, the prominent LGBT group. Finally, Becerra would be the first Latino governor since the 19th century, and he has made strong inroads with the Latino voters, who comprise 40 percent of the state’s population. 

Becerra’s deep connection to the Democratic establishment may be the most important factor in his favor. Establishment-backed candidates usually trounce their progressive challengers in the state’s primaries. Adam Schiff in the 2024 Senate primary, for instance, warded off several progressives, including Katie Porter. Over a dozen state assemblymen publicly endorsed Becerra in the days after Swalwell dropped out, as did most of Swalwell’s major donors. Politico likened Becerra’s rapid consolidation to Biden’s in 2020.

Thus, it’s hardly surprising that Becerra’s imperative in this race seems to be to make himself legible as the safe candidate. In a CNN interview, Becerra was reluctant to name specific changes he would pursue as governor, settling on housing after being pressed by the interviewer. Becerra just months ago championed single-payer healthcare, only to flip-flop on it amid meetings with the California Medical Association, which staunchly opposes single-payer.

Single-payer is popular in California, and polling also shows that more than half the state supports a billionaire wealth tax, which Steyer alone has endorsed. In this sense, Steyer’s billionaire status obscures a central truth: judged by policy alone, he can claim to be the field’s consensus candidate.

The Becerra campaign has tried to obscure his inconsistency by relying on pre-screened questions and keeping him away from the press after debates. During a recent televised interview, Becerra asked a journalist, “This is a profile piece, not a gotcha piece, right?” When told that hard questions were, in fact, part of the conversation, he scolded the journalist: “A profile is talking about all the things I’ve done, things I want to do, and along with some tough questions. But not only tough questions.”

Becerra has also largely sat out the increasingly important podcast circuit, sticking to safe venues like former Democratic National Committee Chair Jamie Harrison’s At Our Table with Jamie Harrison. Steyer, by contrast, is Mr. Podcast, most notably sitting for a marathon interview with Hasan Piker.

But paid media is key in this most populous of states: Steyer has spent or booked more than $195 million in TV and radio ads, setting a record for a California state election. Steyer has also paid social media influencers to endorse him, some of whom failed to disclose that they were on the campaign payroll. (At least one influencer-turned-Becerra strategist also failed to disclose payments from the Becerra campaign.)

Steyer has been seeking elective office for six years, and now the stars may be lining up to make him the next governor of California. If he loses, his campaign will look, in retrospect, like one more overfunded California experiment. But for now, the experiment is still alive. By tomorrow night, Steyer may look ridiculous. Or he may look like the favorite to become governor.

The post Tom Steyer’s Expensive Populist Bet appeared first on Washington Monthly.

It was inevitable that the growing American passions for bigotry, scapegoating, conspiracy, delusion, and blood libels would revert to their original form: antisemitism. When I interviewed Lonnie Natasir, the then-Midwest Director of the Anti-Defamation League in 2017, he said that “antisemitism is the bellwether of society.”  

“Where there is antisemitism,” he continued, “you can be sure there is going to be racism, homophobia, and all the rest […] We cannot begin to normalize or tolerate any of this behavior. If we do, our society is in trouble.” 

Natasir’s warning was urgent nine years ago when white supremacist crackpots chanted the ancient hatred for Jews at the “Unite the Right” march in Charlottesville, Virginia. Now, it is quaint. The relationship between antisemitism and our society has moved far beyond quiet tolerance, which was insidious enough, to outright celebration. Not far removed from an era of exquisite sensitivity over racial stereotypes, prejudicial tropes, and implicit bias, the most animated elements of mainstream discourse feature full-throated raving about a global conspiracy of sexual trafficking at the hands of “Zionist donors,” “AIPAC-funded politicians,” the “Epstein Class,” and often in its most abbreviated iteration, mere “Zionists.”  

As the obligatory disclaimer goes, criticism of Israel and its government is fair game, including its violent response to the October 7, 2023. Many of the leading critics of the Israeli government are, in fact, Israeli. But we are now way beyond ordinary political debate. Consider for a moment that it has become common in New York for protestors to gather outside of synagogues and Jewish organizations and businesses, chanting that Israel “kills children” at worshipers. It is the equivalent of someone angry with the policies of the African Union staging a demonstration outside a Black church in Chicago.  

 “Zionist” as an epithet, a sneaky smuggle-through-customs trick of saying “Jew” without saying “Jew,” mirrors the neo-Nazi nomenclature of the 1970s and ‘80s. Back then, violent supremacists hosted hate rallies and plotted terrorist attacks to fight “ZOG,” meaning “Zionist Occupied Government.” Now the progressive left is likeliest to utter “Zionist” or “Zionism” as a slur, not only denigrating the vast majority of Jews (90 percent of American Jews, for example, believe Israel has a right to exist), along with their allies, but also delineating a paranoid worldview that spans from the first documented pogrom of 38 CE in Alexandria to the mass shooting of Jews at a Hanukah celebration on Sydney’s Bondi Beach in December. When anti-Zionists harass patrons of Israeli restaurants rather than, say, the Israeli consulate, it tells you what you need to know about today’s version of the Charlottesville crowd. 

David Hirsh, the director and CEO of the London Center for the Study of Antisemitism, wrote in 2021 that “the people who are hostile to Zionism have given the word a meaning that reflects their own hostility.” Defined by its enemies, “Zionism” is the “enemy of all democratic values” and synonymous with “racism.” It is also a totalizing theory that seeks to explain misfortune or injustice. Zionists are responsible for everything from police brutality in the United States to global poverty. The functional definition emanates from hostility and also creates hostility.

The danger, of course, is escalating at home. A recent report indicates that, in 2025, physical assaults against American Jews reached their highest levels since 1979. Hate crimes include murders near the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington, D.C., a Molotov cocktail attack at a rally for Israeli hostages in Colorado, and a stabbing of a Jewish man in New York. In March, an armed man driving a vehicle full of explosives deliberately crashed into Temple Israel, a synagogue in West Bloomfield, Michigan, attempting to murder congregants and others, including the children attending classes in the resident Jewish school.  

In keeping with the dark surrealism, since antisemitism has been growing since October 7, there is a bizarre and pathological pattern in progressive media. More than the human rights violations of ICE, the assault on voting rights and election integrity, Donald Trump’s war on health care access, and state government hostility against transgender citizens, popular leftist commentators speak with the most frequency and excitement about Israel, AIPAC, and the omnipresence of Zionist influence. Jennifer Welch, Medhi Hasan, Drop Site, and The Majority Report with Sam Seder are obvious examples.  

Still, like any purity movement, its adherents learn their dance steps from the most fashionable extremist in the room: Hasan Piker. It is regrettable to devote more words to Piker, the manosphere streamer from a wealthy family, who has said that he would “vote for Hamas over Israel one thousand times,” laughed at voters who showed sympathy for Israeli hostages, claimed that America “deserved 9/11,” and declares allegiance to the Chinese Communist Party while wearing expensive, gaudy jewelry and hawking merch on his website. For good measure, he disciplines his dog with a shock collar.  

In addition to his podcast clout, the Piker effect reverberates throughout the mainstream. The New York Times has made him the subject of a fawning profile, signal-boosted him on its podcasts, and run an embarrassing Ezra Klein apologia for his long rap sheet against decency violations. No clever “six degrees of separation” mapping is required to assert the significance of Piker’s popularity. If you are praising a man who refers to Hamas as a “resistance group” comparable to American slave revolts, you are inches away from excusing Hamas yourself.  

Antisemitism is also moving from the media into Democratic politics. Piker first campaigned with Zohran Mamdani, and he has more recently appeared with the Democratic candidate for the U.S. Senate in Michigan, Abdul El-Sayed. In recent weeks, Mamdani vetoed a bill, over the objection of every Jewish organization in New York City, that would have required the NYPD to develop a plan to ensure the safety of Jewish schools against increasingly aggressive anti-Israel protestors. Despite releasing a brief, written condemnation, he’s also had a blasé response to a wave of antisemitic graffiti vandalism of synagogues and Jewish-owned businesses in Queens.  

Tensions in New York are escalating with Mayor Mamdani’s announcement that he would not participate in the city’s annual Israel Day Parade, making him the first mayor in 60 years who will not attend. During a recent press conference, he explained that while he vows to keep every New Yorker “safe,” he is merely keeping a campaign promise to boycott the parade. “I’ve made my views on the Israeli government clear,” he said. Given that the parade, according to its organizers, is a gathering to show support for the state of Israel, and that Mamdani has accused Israel of “apartheid” and “genocide,” his abstention is understandable. It is jarring, however, that the mayor of the city with the largest population of Jews outside of Israel, who has written rap songs in tribute to financiers of Hamas and refuses to condemn the phrase, “globalize the intifada,” has political beliefs that would make strange and contradictory his attendance at an anodyne event in favor of the world’s only Jewish state. (Jessica Tisch, the New York City police commissioner, who is the grand marshal of today’s parade, said at a press conference standing next to the mayor that she would proudly march in its ranks, adding that the mayor made his decision, and she hers.) It is noteworthy that Mamdani has not issued similar pledges to stay home during events celebrating countries with conflicts over land partitions and accusations of colonialism, such as Ireland and India. Mamdani led the Chinese New Year parade, but failed even to mention the heinous human rights record of the CCP.  

Meanwhile, El-Sayed has claimed that Israel and Hamas are “equally evil,” while accepting donations from Al-Awda/PRRC. This group promotes absurd anti-Israel conspiracy theories and organizes rallies in favor of Hamas. Another disturbing story out of Michigan is the election to the University of Michigan Board of Regents of Amir Makled, an attorney who has promoted a Candace Owens statement referring to Jews as “demons,” and applauded both the Iranian regime and Hezbollah.  

Applause for terrorist organizations that murder Jews is becoming oddly familiar. Recent revelations from his internet history indicate that the putative Democratic nominee for U.S. Senate, Graham Platner, previously said that he was impressed by the military tactics of Hamas on October 7. “I dig it,” he wrote on Reddit at the time. Just as a matter of military history, the 10/7 pogrom, aimed primarily at civilians, did little to diminish the Israel Defense Forces but brought about the decimation of Hamas’s military abilities. Platner, of course, went through most of his adult life with a Nazi Totenkopf tattooed on his chest. Despite claiming he did not know the symbol’s history, which a former campaign staffer disputes, he has since sat for a lengthy interview with a neo-Nazi podcaster. Doing his best impersonation of Hulk Hogan in the 1980s, with a permanent scowl and a gravelly voice, Platner has a penchant for dropping references to the “Epstein Class,” “AIPAC,” the “powers that be” that “control everything.”  

Moving to the opposite coast, California Secretary of State Shirley Weber recently had to apologize after including the antisemitic statements of a gubernatorial candidate in the official voter guide her office sent to residents. Among those statements is a warning that Israel intends to “suitcase nuke” the United States.  

These examples join with others, from the mayor of Chicago, Brandon Johnson, giving Piker a tour of the city, to Representative Ro Khanna advancing the deranged notion that Jeffrey Epstein was a Mossad agent, which adds up to a major problem for the Democratic Party. The effects of the same hallucinogenic drug appear at work in the hysteria over the allegedly almighty AIPAC. As a lobby, it does not even rank in the top 15 in any leading category of spending or influence. Yet, unlike the Chamber of Commerce, General Motors, and other lobbyist organizations that far outspend AIPAC and go unmentioned in mainstream discourse, it is the only PAC that Democratic candidates for office, including leading California gubernatorial candidates, will discuss. (We’ll get to the Republicans in a moment.)  

For instructional case studies in the consequences of permitting paranoia and prejudice to insinuate itself into a left-of-center party’s ranks, Democrats can consider the United Kingdom and recall Jeremy Corbyn’s management of Labor’s defeat in 2019, largely because of widespread accusations of antisemitism, the worst in the party’s history since 1935. They can also look more closely at their political rival.  

It is a dangerous mistake to romanticize the pre-Trump Republican Party. From Richard Nixon’s “Southern Strategy” to Ronald Reagan’s “welfare queens,” the modern GOP has been willing to use racism as a political recruitment tool. The devolution from presidential nominees John McCain and Mitt Romney to Donald Trump is horrific all the same. It was, in part, due to party insiders deluding themselves into believing that they could pander to bigots and control an amoral megalomaniac like Trump.  

The mob’s mania does not compromise, nor does concession placate it. Rahm Emanuel, Gavin Newsom, and other presidential contenders, who have recently attempted to throw bones to the growing “anti-Zionist” constituency, will regret it if Platner and El-Sayed become prominent members of the Senate Democratic Caucus this time next year, and Piker continues his rise. There is an intelligent debate to have over military aid to Israel and the Netanyahu regime. But as the history of antisemitism—or any hatred—suggests, policy change does not satiate the haters.  

It is easy to imagine a 2028 Democratic presidential primary in which the leading candidates vie for the nomination by courting the Israel-obsessed activist base. Voters worried about the cost of living, affordable health care, and civil rights might find it bizarre that national politicians fixate on a small country thousands of miles away.  

Beyond the electoral consequences of obsessing about Israel, there is the moral hazard and literal danger of creating onramps for antisemitism. Demonstrating the horseshoe theory in action, the right wing is a font of antisemitism, as Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens articulate insanities with brazen honesty. Owens blames Jews for the transatlantic slave trade while Carlson hosts fraudulent historians to discuss how Winston Churchill, not Adolf Hitler, was the villain of the Second World War.  

Of course, all the antisemitic fervor is spreading under the modern-day folk tale that Israel committed “genocide” in Gaza after the October 7 attack. Many Free Palestine movement protestors first leveled the accusation on October 8, before Israel had responded. Mamdani patiently waited until … October 13. Again, there are ample reasons to condemn the Netanyahu government, including its violent prosecution of the war in Gaza, its encouragement of war in Iran, and its shameful refusal to police the racist, violent settlers in the West Bank.  

“Genocide,” however, is a real word with a real meaning, mainly the deliberate attempt to remove a racial, ethnic, religious, or national group from the face of the planet. It would not apply to a war with a relatively low civilian-to-combatant kill ratio, even under the circumstances of Hamas deeply insinuating itself into the civilian infrastructure. If Israel were intent on murdering every Palestinian, it certainly would not have administered over 1.1 million polio vaccines to Gazan children in 2024 and ’25. If Israel imposed genocidal policies on Gaza even before the war, as many anti-Israel critics claim, the population of the Gaza Strip would not have grown 450 percent since 1967. I don’t believe everyone who uses the genocide label against Israel is an antisemite; far from it, especially given the moonscape scenes from Gaza, but I believe they are wrong and start from wrong premises; still worse assumptions multiply, especially considering how easily they dovetail into the old-fashioned conspiracy theory of Jewish control of international events for malevolent purposes. 

According to multiple polls, over 70 percent of Democrats believe the “genocide” myth. From that foundational lie, absurdities grow, most recently the allegation that Israelis train dogs to rape Palestinian prisoners. This calumny is unfair to the Palestinians who have suffered real abuse in Israeli prisons and detention centers and they surely have. It recalls Jean-Paul Sartre’s instruction to “Never believe that antisemites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words.” 

I recently spoke to David Hirsh to ask him what warning he could offer Americans after watching antisemitism soar in the UK. He said, “They need to develop a lot of clarity about what antisemitism is […] and the main goal is to prevent those assumptions that one finds in extremist politics from gaining a foothold in the mainstream politics of democracy.” 

If antisemitism is the “bellwether of society,” then we’re fast approaching disaster. Years ago, much of the Republican Party collapsed into a pile of bigotry and ignorance. It is not too late for Democrats to avoid the same fate.  

The post Antisemitism—Left, Right, and Growing appeared first on Washington Monthly.

New lows are getting old in Donald Trump’s second term. The latest frontier of cruelty is Trump’s Justice Department reportedly opening a perjury investigation into the 82-year-old E. Jean Carroll, the woman he sexually abused. 

Note that I don’t have to say “allegedly” sexually abused, because a jury has already found Trump liable for the sexual abuse, which involved forced vaginal penetration with his fingers. The presiding judge decreed that while the abuse did not meet the technical definition of rape under New York State’s legal definition, “Mr. Trump in fact did ‘rape’ Ms. Carroll as that term commonly is used and understood in contexts outside of New York Penal Law.” 

The abuse finding is not a lone verdict that can be waved away. There are two cases. The 2023 jury that found Trump liable for sexual abuse also found him liable for defamation and awarded Carroll $5 million. A second jury, in January 2024, awarded her an additional $83.3 million for Trump’s continued defamation—$18.3 million in compensatory damages and $65 million in punitive damages. In September 2025, a three-judge panel of the Second Circuit upheld that judgment, describing the “degree of reprehensibility of Trump’s conduct as remarkably high and perhaps unprecedented,” and noting that he kept attacking Carroll throughout the trial itself. Two juries and a federal appeals court have all reached the same conclusion. Siccing the Justice Department on Carroll is a continuation of Trump’s attacks in defiance of multiple judicial admonitions and punishments. 

Trump is unfit for office, and deserves impeachment and conviction, on the basis of these facts alone. 

We know that many members of the House of Representatives believe that not only proven sexual misconduct by a fellow member should be grounds for expulsion, but also credible allegations. Republicans Lauren Boebert, Anna Paulina Luna, and Nancy Mace have promoted themselves as determined fighters against sexual misconduct who played a leading role, by threatening expulsion, in pressuring the twin resignations of Democrat Eric Swalwell and Republican Tony Gonzales. Luna told Newsweek, “No one is above the law, and I will be voting to expel them.” Boebert, blasting colleagues who voted to keep misconduct records sealed, called it “absolutely disgusting for anyone to vote against this.” This month, the head of the Republican Women’s Caucus, Kat Cammack, joined her Democratic counterpart on a bipartisan effort to improve Congress’s workplace culture and reporting mechanisms; she said on CNN their aim is to “make sure the accountability doesn’t begin and end with expulsion.” 

“This is not a party issue. It never was,” Mace said in April. “Republican or Democrat, if you are abusing the public trust or covering up your misconduct on the taxpayer’s dime, you should be brought into the light and held accountable. No exceptions.”  

Yet these House Republicans have not applied the zero-tolerance standard to Trump. A New York Times profile of Boebert, Luna, and Mace reported: “they said that they saw nothing wrong with the behavior of the president—who was found liable of sexual abuse in 2023 and was caught on tape boasting about pushing himself on women—and dismissed the accusations of sexual misconduct against him. ‘I’ve only ever gotten grandfather vibes,’ Ms. Boebert said of Mr. Trump.” 

“Vibes” is not a satisfactory reason to ignore Trump’s proven—not just alleged—transgression. The only plausible excuse is political; Republicans are afraid they would never hold elective office again if they hold Trump to a zero-tolerance standard. And they’re probably right. Trump has shown he retains the ability to exhort primary voters and punish wayward Republicans. But to look away from Trump’s sexual misconduct is to make a mockery of any claim to putting the protection of women ahead of political concerns. 

Looking away was easier when the E. Jean Carroll verdict from 2023 could be shrugged off as old news. If voters in 2024 didn’t care, why should we care now? 

Because now we see the ramifications of letting Trump skate. Unafraid of political or legal repercussions, according to multiple media outlets, Trump is brazenly using Justice Department investigators in Chicago to harass the person he victimized. (The top prosecutor in the Chicago office, Andrew Boutros, released a statement denying that a criminal investigation into Carroll has been opened, but CNN, the outlet which originally broke the story, reported “After Boutros’ statement was issued, sources reaffirmed the investigation to CNN.”) That not only re-victimizes Carroll, it also sends a message to all rape survivors—past, present, and future—that if you press charges against someone with political power, you risk retaliation.  

As CNN notes, the perjury accusation stems not from Carroll’s (proven) claims of abuse, but her statement in a deposition that she wasn’t getting outside financial help to cover legal fees. Before the trial began, her lawyers later told the judge that they did get outside financial help, and then Trump’s lawyers got to question Carroll again in another deposition. “When the trial began two weeks later Judge Lewis Kaplan said he saw no issue with Carroll’s credibility,” reported CNN. In other words, this was a matter resolved ahead of the trial. No perjury investigation is justified.  

Trump’s decision to shine the spotlight back on Carroll is reason for the rest of us to remind ourselves that Trump is a proven sex abuser. And if sex abusers should not sit in Congress, then neither should they sit in the Oval Office. If we don’t apply that rule consistently, Washington’s work environment will not sufficiently change. Instead, it is Trump’s hot mic rule that will continue to carry the day: “When you’re a star, they let you do it.” 

The post If You Called for Eric Swalwell and Tony Gonzales to be Expelled, Then You Should Impeach Donald Trump appeared first on Washington Monthly.

College graduates’ dread about the job market is so acute that commencement speakers who dare mention artificial intelligence keep getting booed. The jeers are not hard to understand. Those building AI have been candid, if not always consistent, about their ambition to automate large categories of white-collar work, including much of what a college degree has historically unlocked. A year ago, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei warned that “half of all entry-level white-collar jobs” could disappear within one to five years and that unemployment could spike to “10 or 20 percent.” Lately, he and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman have sounded less apocalyptic, conceding that the wipeout may not arrive after all. The whiplash is hardly reassuring. Anyone who has recently applied for a job has felt the process becoming more automated and less human. The grim mood is supported by data: Entry-level job postings are down in some fields, and unemployment among recent college graduates is creeping up. The share of the long-term unemployed with bachelor’s degrees was one in five a decade ago. Now, it’s closer to one in three.

The case for doom flatters nearly everyone who repeats it. For journalists on deadline, it has the value of being easy to illustrate. There is always a recent graduate, somewhere, willing to be photographed with a sullen face in a sunlit childhood bedroom beside a laptop full of rejected applications. AI companies need the world to believe their progeny is powerful enough to wipe out categories of work. The AI panic helps sustain hype-driven stock valuations that have defied gravity. And when apocalypse talk becomes inconvenient—for example, as OpenAI and Anthropic reportedly prepare for blockbuster IPOs—the same executives can soften their Cassandra tone into a homily about history’s long record of technological adaptation, just as they are doing now.

The way to understand the AI moment is not that it makes college worthless or that white-collar work will collapse. The entry-level slowdown predates ChatGPT, but AI appears to be accelerating what Laura Ullrich, the lead economist at Indeed, the job service, calls “experience creep”: employers demanding more experience for jobs once available to candidates still acquiring it. The labor market still wants college graduates. It increasingly wants them with the experience and critical-thinking skills that entry-level jobs used to develop.

Since ChatGPT arrived in 2022, America’s economy has added about 3 million white-collar jobs, while blue-collar employment has remained flat. The occupations often cited as AI’s roadkill have instead expanded: there are 7 percent more software developers than in 2022, 10 percent more radiologists, and 21 percent more paralegals. Real wages in professional and business services are up 5 percent; among office and administrative workers, 9 percent. Controlling for the usual variables, white-collar workers now earn roughly a third more than blue-collar ones—almost triple the premium of the early 1980s.

It may be too early for the damage to show up in the data. Perhaps. But there are reasons to doubt a looming doomsday. Companies need people to train the models, adapt them to specific businesses, determine when they are wrong, and prevent them from doing stupid or dangerous things at scale. The era of autonomous agents is already producing a small army of humans to attend to AI and make sure it behaves.

White-collar work has rarely been as automatable as those selling automation insist it is. The British advertising executive and behavioral economist Rory Sutherland calls this the “doorman fallacy”: the mistake of assuming that because a doorman opens the door, opening the door is the job. But a doorman also recognizes residents, screens strangers, receives packages, hails taxis, notices when something is awry, and maintains the quiet order of a building. A junior analyst, likewise, does more than assemble spreadsheets. Jobs are more than tasks; they are bundles of skills, habits, relationships, judgments, and institutional knowledge. New technologies tend to eat the bundle unevenly.

But if machines eat the bundle unevenly, the consequences will not be evenly distributed, and recent graduates are not wrong to worry. The labor market for white-collar work, even entry-level white-collar work, can be healthy, even as the first step becomes a harder climb. Much of the easily automatable work of the junior job is being absorbed into the AI models. This leads employers to want entry-level applicants to have more experience than in the past, and the savvy to complete more difficult work.

This dynamic is perfectly represented in a new report about entry-level hiring. The Strada Institute for the Future of Work (which has been a supporter of the Washington Monthly) asked nearly 1,500 executives and senior talent leaders what AI is doing to their junior ranks. Among employers that have begun using the technology, 46 percent said it had increased their entry-level hiring over the past year. Only 13 percent said the opposite. The junior worker, in other words, is not disappearing.

What is disappearing is the easy work of the junior worker: 42 percent of executives said AI has expanded the analytical and judgment-based work asked of entry-level employees, while 41 percent said it has stripped away routine and administrative tasks. The tasks a new graduate used to cut their teeth on—the photocopying, the first-pass research, the formatting and summarizing—are what AI does best. What remains is the harder part.

“What used to be the entry level—these kinds of transitional roles, where you do a bunch of grunt work, prove yourself, and then learn on the job to prepare for the next level—that’s going away,” Andrew Hanson, Strada’s research director and the report’s lead author, told me. “Entry-level roles are becoming more like mid-level roles.”

When the executives were asked to rank the skills they sought, their list read like a brochure for a small liberal arts college. Critical thinking came first, followed by communication, collaboration, workplace readiness, and self-management. But when employers were shown profiles of recent graduates and asked whom they would hire, the candidate with a 4.0 grade-point average, academic honors, and no work experience came in last. Coming in first were the candidates with internships or other industry experience. Employers still want the qualities colleges say they teach. They’re less willing to accept the transcript alone as proof.

Data from Indeed reflects this shift: From mid-2022 to mid-2025, the share of tech job postings open to workers with two to four years of experience fell from 46 percent to 40 percent, while the share seeking at least five years of experience rose from 37 percent to 42 percent.

“The whole idea that you need work experience for an entry-level job seems really counterintuitive,” Hanson said. He thinks part of what’s happening is that academic achievement has become a weaker signal. “With grade inflation, academics are not the differentiators they used to be,” he told me. Employers have gone looking for a new one, and “that tends to be the work experience,” especially internships and other work-based learning.

That does not mean college has stopped paying off. The data say otherwise. But AI is accelerating a shift that leaves the four-year degree valuable and insufficient at the same time. Unless all colleges start reliably giving students real work experience before they finish, many graduates will find that getting their first job now requires proof that they have already had one. For the class of 2026, that is something no commencement speaker can explain away. Until it changes, the students will keep booing.

The post How AI Broke the Entry-Level Job appeared first on Washington Monthly.

Donald Trump’s administration is turning Title IX—the 1972 law Congress passed to protect women—into a weapon against women and higher education. On May 4, the U.S. Department of Education announced an investigation into Smith College—one of the nation’s leading women’s colleges, where I teach—putting both its federal funding and students’ federal loans at risk. In a press release, the DOE suggests the Massachusetts-based school violates Title IX because it admits transgender women and grants them “access to women-only spaces,” including dormitories, bathrooms, and locker rooms.  While the administration frames its investigation of Smith College (which describes itself as “educating women of promise for lives of distinction and purpose”) as “defending women,” its probe is part of a broader reinterpretation of civil rights laws to erode women’s rights, undermining the very purpose of these statutes.  

The DOE investigation is based on a fundamental misreading of Title IX: the law exempts private college admissions. Title IX does apply to private colleges outside of admissions, but it does not require sex-segregated dorms, bathrooms, locker rooms, or sports teams. Title IX allows colleges to have separate living facilities for men and women, but does not require it. Similarly, the implementing regulations allow separate bathrooms and locker rooms, but do not require them. In other words, Title IX prohibits discrimination; it does not require discrimination. 

The DOE’s investigation did not stem from a complaint from a Smith student but from a conservative advocacy group. Notably, the DOE does not cite a single Smith student who has been unable to participate in campus life because of the college’s dorms, bathrooms, or locker room policies.

That’s hardly surprising. Smith College, which opened in 1871, has single-stall bathrooms across campus. In dorms, bathroom stalls have doors, while showers and changing areas have curtains. The gym also provides private showering and changing areas. Despite this, if any student—including trans students—expressed privacy concerns, the college would undoubtedly accommodate them.  

The administration claims to be “defending women,” but I can assure you that Smithies don’t need Donald Trump’s protection. Over a decade ago, cisgender women students demanded that Smith admit transgender women. Today, cisgender women here still support Smith’s trans-inclusive policy, as evidenced by students’ Trans Smithies Belong campaign and a petition to the Board of Trustees with nearly 3,600 signatures demanding that Smith fight back. 

The DOE investigation of Smith College not only erodes a private women’s college’s right to operate free from ideological coercion, but it is part of a broader war on Title IX. The claim to be “defending women” rings hollow after the Trump administration rolled back protections for student survivors of sexual harassment and assault instituted under President Joe Biden. Instead, the Trump administration reinstituted lenient 2020 Title IX standards that granted unprecedented procedural protections to students facing discipline for sexual misconduct, including the right to cross-examine their accusers—protections generally unavailable to students facing other kinds of misconduct charges. The Trump regulations narrowed the definition of sexual harassment, stripped many students experiencing off-campus and online abuse of Title IX protections, and raised the hurdles schools must clear to discipline students accused of sexual assault. Under these regulations, schools can more easily discipline a student for plagiarism than for sexual assault.  

Rather than defending women, the Trump administration is threatening them. For example, the administration recently redefined nursing, social work, and education—all majority-female fields—as “non-professional,” capping federal loans for graduate study in these fields at $100,000. Meanwhile, students pursuing graduate education in fields where men are more represented, such as business, law, and medicine, enjoy a $200,000 cap. It also eliminated Biden-era loan forgiveness programs, a move that disproportionately harms women, who hold two-thirds of the nation’s student debt. [See “The GOP War on Nurses,” in the Washington Monthly.] 

For years, conservative Republicans have made false claims about protecting women athletes under Title IX. During the 2024 presidential campaign, Trump supporters staged a cross-country bus tour. “Save Our Sports,” wrapping their attack on trans students in the language of Title IX. The irony is that conservative Republicans have spent years blocking the expansion of women’s access to athletic opportunities. Banning a handful of trans women from women’s sports will not change that. The “Save Our Sports” campaign was organized by the conservative Independent Women’s Forum—a group formed in 1991 to support Clarence Thomas’s Supreme Court nomination. 

Having done nothing to advance women’s rights, conservatives now claim to be saving women’s sports and protecting women’s colleges? The claim is risible.  The Heritage Foundation’s latest report, Saving America by Saving the Family, actually recommends young women skip college altogether in favor of marriage and motherhood. And most recently, the administration revoked guidance that would have required schools to share Name, Image, and Likeness (NIL) revenue proportionally with women athletes. 

The Trump administration’s actions undermine Title IX. In 1972, Congress passed this guarantee of women’s equal rights in education. For over 50 years, women’s rights advocates have fought to uphold that promise and have made tremendous progress, despite formidable Republican opposition. Today, women are 58 percent of enrolled undergraduate students, 56 percent of law students, and 55 percent of medical students.  

But equality remains elusive in many areas. Women hold only 42 percent of full-time MBA seats and account for just 44 percent of NCAA student-athletes. Female athletes receive only 18 percent of athletic funding, despite being 58 percent of the student body. Women experience shockingly high rates of sexual harassment, assault, and dating violence on campus. Strong Title IX protections hold perpetrators accountable.  

Conservatives have spent decades blocking efforts to strengthen Title IX—and now they feign to be its defenders. The strength of Title IX protections has always depended on which party controls the White House. While courts have interpreted Title IX to protect students from sexual harassment and assault, the contours of that right have vacillated wildly depending on who is president—Democrats expanding protections for women, Republicans eroding them. No administration has gutted them more than the Trump administration.  

As a scholar who follows the partisan Title IX divide, I find it galling to hear those who repeatedly sought to weaken Title IX protections now claim to be champions of women’s education. The Trump administration has decimated the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights, which enforces Title IX. It’s using what’s left to attack a leading women’s educational institution.  

This Title IX weaponization is part of a broader plan, laid out in Project 2025, to force colleges and universities to conform to conservative ideology. In a 2021 speech titled Universities are the Enemy, J.D. Vance said, “We must aggressively attack the universities in this country” and suggested it was “time to seize the endowments, penalize them for being on the wrong side of some of these culture war issues.” Trans rights are at the center of the Trump administration’s investigation of Smith, but so are women’s rights and higher education. As one Smith alumna—Victoria Hugo-Vidal—has said, “conservatives don’t like women, they don’t like education, and they especially can’t stand educated women.” 

The post Inside the Trump Administration’s Attack on Smith College and Title IX appeared first on Washington Monthly.