The incessant tide of outrages from team Trump makes it easy to forget how damaging each has been. So, between now and the midterms, I’m going to revisit issues, trends and news events we need to remember.

Recently, I reread Trump v United States because, honestly, everyone should still be furious about it. It is a ruling that exempts the president from our laws. Chief Justice John Roberts mocked the dissenters, but their dire predictions have already come true. Here’s that piece in case you missed it.

Subscribe now

This week, I’m reminded that Donald Trump, his administration, and the party he controls are determined to replace the light of human freedom with some Trump-branded see-in-the-dark glasses.

Case in point: Freedom.gov

Nearly a century ago, Europe lost its freedom and plunged the world into war, in part because Benito Mussolini, Adolf Hitler, and Francisco Franco knew how to weaponize hate using the new medium of radio. Those who survived the unspeakable horrors of World War II vowed never again to fall prey to organized hate. Today, across much of that continent, hate speech is largely banned from the political arena.

Ignoring the continent’s history, J.D. Vance castigated Europeans and vowed to force them to hear the currently illegal hate speech emanating from right-wing political parties across the continent.

To make that happen, the Trump administration announced in February that Undersecretary for Public Diplomacy Sarah Rogers, would launch a new portal, Freedom.gov, at the Munich Security Conference.

For context, the United States once had a public diplomacy program that celebrated freedom and helped people living under severe oppression access the internet. Voice of America, Fulbright scholarships, and the Internet Freedom Program helped make us a beacon of hope to people everywhere.

Give to Lincoln Square

The latter, the Internet Freedom Program, provided decentralized, privacy-preserving tools to activists and journalists in countries like Iran, Venezuela, and Myanmar, so they could access the internet without fear. The Trump administration killed that program. In its place, they developed a centralized system that routes users through its own system, one experts describe as “opaque.” That system is called Freedom.gov. It’s tag line reads: “Freedom is coming. Information is power. Reclaim your human right to free expression. Get ready.”

It has nothing to do with freedom. Its purpose is to evade European rules against hate speech, pornography, and other illegal material. It is part of an effort J.D. Vance championed to combat what he calls censorship by the politically correct. (The government stands by J.D. Vance’s comments but somehow denies that its portal is related.)

By now, everyone knows that Trump favors coercive speech rather than free speech. In the Oval Office, he calls reporters who ask questions “pigs”. His administration is in court defending the software companies that create nude images of little girls, insisting that protecting those girls somehow violates the companies’ speech rights. He is, of course, still illegally withholding (a form of censorship) the Epstein files. Meanwhile, across the country, his party is banning books from schools and public libraries.

In Trump’s hands, American public diplomacy has rapidly turned its back on freedom in favor of supporting autocratic political parties. Tools developed over time to win people around the world over to the ideals we cherish are now put to darker use. Voice of America and Fulbright scholarship are defunded. Taxpayer money instead built a portal so that neo-fascists in Europe can listen to would-be Hitlers in the AfD.

Share

For the last year, these efforts have been led by Sarah Rogers, who is serves as Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy. In her former life, she was a distinguished lawyer. Distinguished for her defense of Philip Morris, the NRA, and various actors claimed to have been “debanked.”

But there is reason for hope. Freedom.gov has yet to launch. I’d like to think the pushback from Europeans is responsible for the delay, but incompetence can never be ruled out.

As Americans rally for our own freedom during the upcoming midterm elections, it’s worth remembering that our efforts are part of a cause far greater than our own.

Hey patriots! Max Burns here.

If you’ve followed any of my work as host of It’s the End … of the Week! here on Lincoln Square, you know I love analyzing a good poll. Maybe that’s because I’m a nerd with nothing better to do, but let my social deficiency be your profit as we spend Wednesday’s episode of Electionmaxxing with Max Burns mining some of the latest polls for hidden gems of insight about how the midterm election cycle is shifting.

There’s a lot of good news out there, but make no mistake: Democrats have their work cut out for them, especially when their opponent is one of the most corrupt political operations in American history.

Subscribe now

Poll Position Wednesdays

Every Wednesday on Electionmaxxing, I’ll take the bulk of the show to cut through the noise of the political polling industry to bring you the data that really matters, whether that’s good news for Democrats or not. I’ll put the numbers in context to show you how voter sentiment is shaping key races across the country, and how smart campaigns are listening to the polls to shape their messaging.

You might have been enjoying a cookout over the long Labor Day weekend, but the polling industry was hard at work pushing out a bunch of new surveys that have Republicans quaking in their boots. That’s because the big issue mobilizing voters this week was … Donald Trump’s insane tariffs against Canadian goods. From maple syrup to furniture to toilet paper, everything is about to get even more expensive as our neighbors to the north slap back at Trump with trade restrictions of their own.

I also take a look at a few key races including Rob Sand’s surging gubernatorial campaign in Iowa and the GOP’s growing headaches in New York to better understand how Canadian tariffs are shaking things up from the Midwest to Niagara Falls. It turns out that once Americans start to view buying toilet paper as a luxury purchase, even Republicans start deserting their candidates in favor of whoever promises to make things affordable again. Who would’ve thought? Oh yeah — Democrats.

Share

Watch the Full Show

Today’s episode of Electionmaxxing is a love note to Republican incompetence, and we’ve pulled together some of the best examples of GOP officials trying to defend Trump’s indefensible tariff policies. Most Americans may have no idea how trade works, but they tend to get pretty unhappy when toilet paper becomes something only the rich can afford.

That’s … probably not great for Republicans’ reelection hopes.

You won’t want to miss it, so check out the full episode of Electionmaxxing with Max Burns! And as always, leave your feedback in the comments to let me know what we should be covering next.

Stay safe out there!

Give to Lincoln Square

ICYMI on Lincoln Square:

Subscribe now

Florida Democratic Chair Nikki Fried joins the Two Joes to let them know what's really happening on the ground in the Sunshine State.

Give to Lincoln Square

DON’T MISS OUR SPECIAL FRIDAY ON THE 25TH ANNIVERSARY OF 9/11, HOSTED BY RETIRED NAVY COMMANDER BOBBY JONES.

Subscribe now

Dean Obeidallah, SiriusXM Progress host and author of The Dean’s Report on Substack, reflects on this history with Frank Figliuzzi. Dean also points to the ways Muslim Americans became more engaged in politics following 9/11 and have winning elections across the country.

Give to Lincoln Square

Subscribe now

Susan J. Demas talked with historian Thomas Zimmer, who joins us again from Hamburg, about what those election results mean. His primary focus is on rising authoritarianism in America, so we also checked in with him about where our country is at, almost two years into Trump’s second term. Thomas also has written on MAHA as a eugenics movement and he argues that Democrats like AOC who are trying to find common ground with them … shouldn’t.

Give to Lincoln Square

Subscribe now

Jill talks to Susan J. Demas about her latest pieces on Dolly Parton and Gloria Steinem, as well as the latest in the midterm elections.

Give to Lincoln Square

You can read her latest for Lincoln Square here:

Another friend and colleague involved in the aftermath of the 9/11 terror attacks died recently. He passed on July 4, 2026, while our nation marked its 250^th year of freedom.

My friend is free now, too. Free from the specific ailments that qualified him for monitoring and treatment in the World Trade Center Health Program because of his protracted and painstaking evidence recovery work. He’s not the first colleague of mine to perish from their patriotism on 9/11, and likely won’t be the last. Twenty-five years after nearly 3,000 people were killed across the three crash sites in New York, Pennsylvania, and Washington, D.C., the death toll climbs. More people have now died of 9/11 illnesses than were lost on the day of the attacks.

On September 11, 2001, over 400 first responders, including police, firefighters, paramedics and EMTs, ran into the twin towers of the WTC to rescue others, but didn’t save themselves.

In the 25 years since, almost ten times that number have died from 9/11-related illnesses including rare cancers and respiratory ailments linked to the toxic mix of jet fuel, metals and debris that poisoned not only those working the WTC site, but law enforcement investigators assigned to evidence analysis locations where debris was transported. The same holds true for first responders at each of the other crash sites.

I’ve written about this phenomenon on past 9/11 anniversaries, and I’m sharing it again because an entire generation born after the attacks needs to know that the sacrifice of patriots continues well beyond that Tuesday morning a quarter-century ago.

The most common cancer found in responders and civilians exposed to Ground Zero toxins is non-Melanoma skin cancer with 18,380 cases. Then comes prostate (13,170 cases), female breast (4,830), melanoma (3,860 cases) and lymphoma (2,560), according to Centers for Disease Control data released this summer. The cancer numbers are far from average — the rates have surged among the group compared to the general population, according to the World Trade Center Health Program.

Read more

Subscribe now

Jordan is being bombed by the Iranians, after continuous escalation from Trump, Scott Bessent, and the rest of the administration. Meanwhile, Israel and Hezbollah have accepted that this a return to a hot war. In fact, the region is on fire, and we lit the match.

Give to Lincoln Square

Share

Fred Wellman, a veteran, Lincoln Project alum, and the Democratic nominee for Missouri's 2nd Congressional District, joins Joe Trippi on a special edition of Strategy Session to make heads and tails of what's happening in Missouri and what it means for the midterms.

Read more

Hey patriots! Max Burns here.

I’m thrilled to be kicking off this newsletter on an exciting day for me, for America, and maybe — just maybe — the world. Today, Lincoln Square kicked off our new program, Electionmaxxing with Max Burns, where I have the pleasure of guiding you through the craziest and most important midterm election cycle in American history.

Here’s a little roundup of our inaugural show, along with some of the big stories burning up your world.

Subscribe now

Trump’s War Chest

Donald Trump’s MAGA Inc. and his allied Super PACs are sitting on over $400 million in campaign cash, yet the Donald hasn’t spent a dime to boost his party’s endangered House and Senate candidates. Instead, Trump has authorized just $1 million in spending for a TV ad about … how strong he is. And no, I’m not kidding: the latest ad from the group Securing American Greatness is called Toughest Guy, and it doesn’t mention a single Republican except for Trump.

While Trump hoards his gold like Smaug, Republicans are sweating that his unwillingness to part with his war chest could spell sweeping defeats for GOP candidates across the country — including Texas, where all-time creeper Ken Paxton is trailing Democrat James Talarico in a barnburner of a race. We broke down Paxton’s breakdown on today’s episode of Electionmaxxing, complete with Republican strategist Karl Rove’s freakout on Fox News about how Trump’s greed is dooming Paxton’s dud of a campaign.

And if you guessed that Trump might be guarding that money so he can spend it on lavish parties for himself after the 2026 midterm cycle wraps up, congratulations! You’re a better political strategist than any of the Republicans who let America’s most famous grifter control the RNC bank account.

Share

Watch the Full Show

We’ve got plenty of surprises and new segments in the works as Electionmaxxing rolls out in its full glory, so be sure to check out the full episode. And subscribe to Lincoln Square on YouTube and Substack for a bunch of other great articles and videos from voices you trust. I don’t want to give away too much, but Vice President JD Vance definitely makes a surprise appearance on the show to receive a very special award.

You won’t want to miss it. And as always, leave your feedback in the comments to let me know what we should be covering next.

Stay safe out there!

Give to Lincoln Square

ICYMI on Lincoln Square:

Subscribe now

Meanwhile, Elon Musk has been busy helping the far-right AfD party gain a foothold in Germany. And he’s planning to spend millions aiding Republicans in the November elections.

Share

What can we do? Tune in to this conversation with Susan Demas and Edwin Eisendrath. And let us know what we should talk about next in the comments.

Become a Democracy Defender

Subscribe now

He joins Sam Osterhout to talk about the local impacts of climate and what we need to do next.

And don’t miss the last in Sam’s three-part report on climate change.

Share

Give to Lincoln Square

Last week, the U.N. admitted that global temperatures will climb at least 1.8º C above pre-industrial temperatures, even in the best-case scenario. Under the 2015 Paris Agreement, the target had been set at 1.5º. The Nairobi-based UN Environment Programme that issued the report said, “There are no good outcomes above 1.5C.”

I began this three-part climate series a few weeks ago, teeing off on the massive El Niño taking shape in the Pacific. Since the first piece, this El Niño has grown even more powerful.

Last week, when I was planning on writing about the increased likelihood of isolated but supersized climate-fueled catastrophes, an enormous glacier failed, causing a catastrophic avalanche and flash flood, as well as some of the most devastating videos and images of the year.

Share

I’d planned this week to talk about the bigger picture, how we’re walking through a gateway into a world no one has ever seen, and what that might mean for our politics, our societies, our civilizations. The U.N.’s report is yet another headline that slots right in.

I didn’t anticipate this series being able to draw from breaking news. That’s kinda the thing about climate change: no one really knows what to expect. But that’s a much bigger deal than just shrugging our shoulders and saying … I guess we’ll have to wait and see.

Because knowing what to expect is the foundation of our civilization and all civilizations that have existed on Earth. It is how we plan our cities. Knowing what to expect is where architecture came from, and engineering, and science, and agriculture, and cities, and so on.

We don’t know what to expect is a fine thing to say if you’re going to a movie or trying a new restaurant. But if you’re trying to build a stable and productive society, that sentence is game over.

Let’s take a journey, and I’ll show you what I mean.

Read more

If you know me, you know I do not like Laura Loomer, Pam Bondi, Kristi Noem, or any of the other women orbiting Donald Trump like malfunctioning satellites waiting for him to glance upward and validate their existence. Half the time, I cannot tell them apart—not because they look or sound alike, but because each has spent years developing her own proprietary strain of awfulness until the strains merged into one toxic MAGA smoothie nobody should drink without first calling Poison Control. There is the puppy killer, the bimbo, the overt racist, and whichever one is currently on television auditioning to become Trump’s next discarded woman. Keeping track requires flash cards.

This week belongs to the overt racist: Laura Loomer, a woman who has somehow turned being banned, humiliated, rejected, and publicly disposable into a full-time profession. Most people eat dog food once and reconsider their life choices. Loomer ate it on camera and apparently thought, You know what this career needs? More racism.

Share

Loomer spent the better part of a weekend calling Florida state Rep. Angie Nixon—the Democratic Senate nominee who just knocked off Alex Vindman despite being outspent by roughly sixteen to one—a “ghetto black communist bitch.” Not once, because even Loomer knows one racist post will not keep the attention-economy feeding dish full all weekend. Across at least five posts on X, she recycled variations of the same slur, complained that Black women in Congress had “gotten away with way too much,” said Nixon “speaks Ebonics,” and threatened to “bark at you and tug your leash” before Nixon would understand her. She also dragged Ayanna Pressley, Ilhan Omar, Cori Bush, and Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson into the tantrum, turning what began as an attack on one accomplished Black woman into a racist group project for which nobody had asked. Loomer was spraying slurs across the internet like a woman whose smoke detector had been chirping for six months and who had finally decided the battery was not the problem.

Nixon handled her exactly as she deserved to be handled: without fear, confusion, or a single ounce of deference. This is a woman who had just defeated a nationally known opponent with sixteen times her money, so an unemployed racist internet goblin with a ring light was not about to ruin her weekend. Nixon reminded Loomer that it is “Representative Angie Nixon,” reminded everyone that Loomer once ate dog food on camera, and then reached for Queen Latifah: “Who you calling a bitch?” It was disciplined, funny, and devastating—the rhetorical equivalent of swatting a mosquito without interrupting the conversation. Nixon looked like a United States Senate nominee. Loomer looked like someone furiously refreshing her notifications because racial abuse is the only product she has ever successfully brought to market.

Loomer’s defense, to the extent that the word defense applies to a racist digging faster, was that she does not call every Black woman a slur—only the “ghetto” ones who supposedly earn it. What a relief. Apparently Loomer operates a rigorous racial-insult review board consisting of Laura Loomer, Laura Loomer’s phone, and whatever demon has been assigned to keep her trending. This is where Candace Owens enters the story to explain exactly how much Loomer’s distinction is worth. In April, Loomer called Owens—Republican royalty and a woman who built an entire career assuring white conservatives that she was one of the acceptable ones—a “nappy-headed Black bitch” and a “resentful ghetto Black bitch,” all while insisting she was not racist. Owens spent years trying to purchase immunity from this kind of attack and discovered that the MAGA warranty does not cover Blackness.

Trust me, I am no fan of Candace Owens, and I am not particularly impressed that she finally started backing away from MAGA after spending years helping build the machinery that eventually turned on her. But my opinion of Owens has nothing to do with whether I defend her against a racist attack. Black women do not have to be politically agreeable, personally likable, or ideologically redeemed before racism against them counts as racism. And Loomer does not get to divide Black women into the respectable ones she will tolerate and the “ghetto” ones she believes she has permission to degrade.

Read more

About 30 years ago, I saw Gloria Steinem speak to a standing-only crowd at the University of Iowa. Afterward, she stayed to talk with a long line of students.

I told her — with the total sincerity of someone who hadn’t lived very much at that point — that she’d been a huge inspiration to my life. She smiled and said something to the effect that this is how we make change in the world: by passing lessons to the next generation, who carry them forward as they keep fighting to make things better. Then she signed my copy of Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions. I still have it in my bedroom.

I’ve been thinking about that evening a lot since Steinem died last week at 92, and about where we actually stand on basic rights for women in this country. Steinem founded Ms. Magazine and the National Women’s Political Caucus. She spent decades in political organizing that resulted in important wins for women — about what we were legally and culturally allowed to be. She liked to say “trees grow from the bottom,” meaning real change comes from communities, not from waiting on leaders to hand it down. That’s exactly what she was doing on my campus that day, whether she thought of it that way or not: watering a tree.

Share

But Steinem lived long enough to see a furious backlash to everything she helped build. Gen Z women like my daughter now have fewer constitutional rights than I had at their age, thanks to the Supreme Court’s 2022 decision overturning Roe v. Wade. And we’ve watched a violent strain of misogyny seep from the internet’s fringes into the mainstream.

Nothing about that backlash should diminish what second-wave feminists won. Women today still have far more rights than we did before the 1960s. But the misogyny surging right now is genuinely different from what came before it. The old arguments against women’s suffrage in the 19th and 20th centuries were steeped in the idea that women were too pure and delicate to be sullied by politics. Women were put on a pedestal.

The online-incubated misogyny gaining ground today argues the opposite: women are inferior and that’s why they’re not fully entitled to the rights men have. Some influencers, like white nationalist podcaster Nick Fuentes, have declared that women aren’t even entitled to consent over what happens to our own bodies. After Kamala Harris lost the 2024 election to Donald Trump, Fuentes posted on X: “Your body, my choice. Forever.” That post alone netted more than 35 million views.

Researchers at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue documented this shift in real time after the 2024 election, when mentions of “your body, my choice” and “get back in the kitchen” spiked more than 4,600% on X within 24 hours of Harris’ loss. Posts calling to repeal the 19th Amendment jumped 663% in a week.

Read more

On Wajahat Ali’s The Left Hook podcast, Rula Jebreal spent several minutes building toward Hakeem Jeffries’ name. “Hakeem” is Arabic for “healer,” she explained, before announcing, “He’s not a healer, he’s a divider.” Then came the real indictment: “He is a bought-and-paid-by-AIPAC monkey,” followed by the prophylactic phrase people deploy when they know the next words require an attorney: “With all due respect—and I don’t mean it in a racist way.”

Unfortunately, “with all due respect” is not linguistic Clorox. It cannot bleach the racism out of what follows. Ali sat beside her nodding, never interrupting or performing the most basic duty of a host whose guest had just called the Black leader of the House Democratic caucus both a monkey and an errand boy. Within hours, the Congressional Black Caucus dispensed with the euphemisms: “To be clear, there isn’t a non-racist way to call Leader Jeffries—a Black man—a ‘monkey’ or ‘errand boy.’” Rep. Ritchie Torres was more concise: “Calling a Black man a ‘monkey’ is racist. Full stop.”

To her credit, Jebreal later apologized “with her full chest,” appearing on Joy Reid’s show to accept “full responsibility for a big mistake” and concede that there was “no excuse or justification” for using the word “monkey.” I believe that apology was sincere. It was also incomplete. She apologized for “monkey,” but unless I missed an entirely different mea culpa, she never apologized for calling Jeffries an “errand boy.”

Share

That omission matters because the second insult was not merely debris scattered by the first. It carried its own racial meaning. Jebreal described growing up in occupied East Jerusalem with portraits of American civil-rights leaders displayed throughout her community, invoking the genuine historical solidarity between Afro-Palestinian and African American struggles. That history matters, but solidarity does not confer cultural omniscience. Proximity to the Black American experience is not the same as inhabiting it, and shared struggle does not erase the distinct vocabulary through which Black Americans—particularly Black men exercising authority—have been infantilized, subordinated, and denied agency. That is why this should be treated as a teachable moment, not merely another ritual of outrage, apology, and internet amnesia.

Calling a Black man a monkey is a racial slur regardless of the speaker’s race, ethnicity, nationality, or politics. Identity does not function as a semantic permission slip. But “errand boy” bothered me even more precisely because it is less spectacular. “Monkey” announces its racism with a marching band; “errand boy” slips through the side entrance wearing business casual. It reduces a Black man who leads one chamber’s entire Democratic caucus to a servant carrying instructions for more powerful people. That is racialized infantilization: the denial that a Black leader possesses independent judgment, political agency, or authority earned in his own right. Jeffries did not become House minority leader because AIPAC sent him out to pick up the dry cleaning. Criticize his donors, his votes, his strategy, or his leadership—every one of those subjects is fair game. But calling him an “errand boy” resurrects an old American hierarchy in which Black men may occupy impressive offices while still being described as somebody else’s help. Jebreal apologized for the word everyone immediately recognized as racist. She still owes an apology for the one too many people were willing to pretend was merely political criticism.

None of this happened in a vacuum. It had already been a revolting week for anti-Black political rhetoric before Jebreal opened her mouth, beginning with Laura Loomer’s attacks on Black women and the familiar Republican chorus suddenly developing a nationwide hearing problem. My disagreements with Hakeem Jeffries are no secret, but they are irrelevant to whether he should be discussed as a human being. He is a grown man and a powerful politician; he can withstand criticism of his record, donors, strategy, and leadership. He is also a Binghamton graduate with honors, holds a master’s degree in public policy from Georgetown, graduated magna cum laude from NYU Law, served on its Law Review, clerked for a federal judge, practiced law, served six years in the New York State Assembly, and was unanimously elected to lead House Democrats. Educational credentials do not place anyone beyond criticism, but that résumé does make “errand boy” an especially ridiculous description. Jeffries did not leave NYU Law, wander into AIPAC headquarters looking for the mailroom, and accidentally emerge as the first Black congressional party leader in American history.

What should not be normalized is the use of political disagreement as a permission slip for racial degradation. Too many socialists have treated their hostility toward Jeffries as moral licensing—the social-psychological process through which allegiance to a supposedly righteous cause becomes an excuse to stop scrutinizing one’s own conduct. Once that exemption is granted, language that would be condemned instantly coming from MAGA gets laundered as “criticism” when it comes from the left. Racism, apparently, is supposed to stop being racism once it acquires universal health care and a tote bag.

Read more

Share

But that's not all that's going on this week. Sam and Andra also give an update on the progress of Project 2025, and look ahead at the midterms.

Read more

We’ll never need to wonder whether the Declaration of Independence – or Project 2025, for that matter – had impact. But what about Occupy Wall Street, the Free Staters, Anonymous, and countless other movements with names we no longer remember?

What makes a manifesto take root, and stick around? If you wrote your own, what would it say? Is there a specific recipe for success? And must violence be part of that recipe?

These are questions at the heart of Dan Taberski’s Manifesto, a six-part Audible podcast released this summer. It sounds like a vague concept, but in fact it’s quite specific. It also sounds esoteric – but once you realize what we’re really talking about here, it’s as grounded and relevant as … well… the Declaration of Independence.

“Many creators have attempted, with mixed results, to make a podcast series for our troubled times. Taberski has delivered a masterclass,” reviewer Chloe Walker wrote. “Manifesto” might be Audible’s “best original podcast so far, she said.¹

Subscribe now

The T-word – Trump – is never mentioned, and the mood is often light, even laugh-out-loud funny, thanks to Taberski’s interviewing skills and sense of humor. But the subtext is unavoidable, especially when he judges absurdist manifestos by tech billionaires like Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, and Mark Andreesen as “bullshit,” and makes the connection to On Bullshit – a 1986 essay by the late Princeton philosophy professor Harry G. Frankfurt, published in 2005 as a 4x6-inch, 67-page hardback.

Bullshit, Frankfurt contends, is worse than and different from lying – closer to bluffing than telling a lie, which involves sharp focus and an inescapable concern about truth and values. “A person who undertakes to bullshit his way through has much more freedom. His focus is panoramic rather than particular,” Frankfurt writes. A bullshitter “is neither on the side of the truth nor the side of the false. His eye is not on the facts at all … he just picks them out or makes them up to suit his purpose.”

In a C-SPAN clip included in “Manifesto,” we hear Frankfurt discussing what he calls the endgame of the bullshitter: “He’s not engaged in the enterprise of conveying information or in deceiving people. He’s engaged in the enterprise of manipulating opinions, manipulating attitudes and feelings. And he will say whatever he thinks will be effective in that respect, regardless of whether it’s true or false.” He called bullshit “a more insidious threat to our culture, to our civilization, than lying is. Because bullshit encourages … indifference to the truth.”

Exactly. We’ve now reached heights of B.S. and indifference that Frankfurt never could have imagined 40 years ago, or even 20. Here’s a model of understatement straight from his book: “Bullshit is unavoidable whenever circumstances require someone to talk without knowing what he is talking about … This discrepancy is common in public life.”²

Free Staters and Unoccupied Wall Street

Most manifestos represent lost opportunities, and sometimes that’s all to the good. In one of the more amusing episodes, Taberski traces the libertarian “Free State” movement from its early 21^st century origins in scattered states to its success in getting thousands of people to move to the state they decide they’ll take over and turn into a libertarian paradise: New Hampshire.

Now, it’s true that New Hampshire license plates say “Live Free or Die,” and that it has no state sales or income tax. But it’s not exactly Ayn Rand on the Merrimack. It has favored Democrats for president since 2004, it has elected two Democratic senators, its state House of Representatives is the largest in America (400 members, twice as large as second-place Pennsylvania), and each member represents a mere 3,300 people. That’s a lot of government.

Beyond that, as Taberski covers with admirable good humor, the Free Staters were trying to take over a place where people already lived. That includes emigres from Massachusetts, the liberal bastion to the south.

New Hampshire has a law stipulating that it holds the first primary in presidential years, which is ridiculous and unenforceable. But it did mean that as a presidential campaign reporter, I spent an inordinate amount of time studying the state’s habits and habitat. I found it hard to resist its quirks and beauty, and some of the thousands of free-state transplants from Texas and elsewhere had similar reactions.

Taberski captures that dynamic, as well as the libertarian presence in the state legislature. The Free Staters have representation and influence, but they have also triggered protests and opposition, and fallen short (so far) of the takeover they envisioned. For instance, they were smacked down 323-13 in a 2022 state House vote to secede from the United States.

Give to Lincoln Square

Occupy Wall Street is another movement examined in “Manifesto.” Taberski looks at how and why it sputtered out – despite seeming destined to take off. Because who doesn’t hate Wall Street? There’s a whole genre of films and books dedicated to villainizing it.

That was especially true when Occupy Wall Street emerged in 2011 in lower Manhattan. The nation was still recovering from the Wall Street collapse and the Great Recession, with its evictions and foreclosures and, for the financial firms that precipitated the mortgage crisis, federal bailouts. And the Tea Party on the right provided a model of grassroots energy to emulate.

So what happened? The key is in an enduring yet futile precept the Occupy originators laid out at launch: Tell us your ideas and what you want to achieve. As Taberski makes clear, this question was still being asked years after the movement began. There was no leadership or direction, no specific demand or goal, and no willingness to work within the system with anyone who is part of it.

The scattershot nature of the movement and its potential for brand dilution, as I put it in a 2011 piece for The Atlantic, was obvious at the outset. Even so, when Taberski asks one of the founders about her ultimate ambition, her response hit me as a real WTF moment. Without giving too much away, let’s just say it was more flower child than wolf-of-Wall-Street tamer.

Share

‘Mad as Hell’ and ‘Queers Read This’

We hear about manifestos associated with violence – Luigi Mangione’s screed against greedy health-care system “parasites,” and the virulently anti-technology Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski. There also are sales-pitch manifestos like Think Different, Apple’s 1997 “here’s to the crazy ones” ad campaign for computers that showed no computers, just a procession of world-changing geniuses.

We hear the classic “I’m as mad as hell and I’m not going to take this anymore” rant from about-to-be-fired anchorman Howard Beale (Peter Finch) in Network. The Anonymous collective that takes on the Church of Scientology (a prank-centric group that devolves into nuttiness and then tragedy). A punk-inspired Riot Grrrl manifesto to lift and protect women. An AIDS manifesto that Taberski describes as “full of fear and fury and exasperation,” blaring “Queers read this!” with an urgent warning that their lives were in danger.

And, of course, there’s that potentially treasonous 1776 declaration, illuminated in Manifesto by Taberski and his interview with Bill Barker, a Thomas Jefferson impersonator who has played the same role for nearly 50 years. “What we had written could be our death warrant,” Barker – in character as Jefferson at Monticello – told Taberski.

Subscribe now

That document remains one of the most successful manifestos of all time. It was also terrifying, for the authors and for the colonists bitterly divided over whether, in fact, splitting from Britain was a good idea.

Centuries later, it is the reason we are here as a once and future role model, to struggle, celebrate, and all the rest. Despite our many troubles of the moment, that declaration is still a guiding force — right down to anticipating practically every complaint against today’s regime in its list of grievances against King George III.

As Taberski tours manifesto-ville, to use reviewer Lauren Passell’s coinage, full-blown success stories are rare. For anyone losing sleep over the new national platform from the Democratic Socialists of America — the one with planks like phasing out borders, abolishing the Senate, and replacing the president and Supreme Court with “an executive and judiciary chosen by and subordinate to Congress” — it’s probably safe to relax.

And for anyone planning their own manifesto, Taberski’s 11 bullet points – including get angry, take the leap, and write like you’re an army – are an excellent starting place. The rest is up to you. And us.

¹ Full disclosure, this podcast came to my attention because my son, Greg Martin, composed and produced the music for it.

² Yes, I digress, but what are the chances that my next-door neighbor would own a copy of On Bullshit? It came up in a casual backyard discussion and he immediately went inside, found it, and walked it over. (There is an ebook, as well, of course.)

Throughout history, physicians have played a lesser-known but unique role in confronting authoritarianism. Our profession asks us to observe carefully, follow evidence, protect vulnerable people, and speak the truth even when doing so is uncomfortable or unpopular. Those responsibilities do not disappear when political power threatens the health of our patients. In fact, they become more important.

Today, American physicians are facing one of those moments.

President Donald Trump’s executive order seeking to reshape federal childhood vaccine policy — including limiting the vaccines recommended for children and directing the separation of the measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine into individual doses — represents a direct intrusion of political ideology into medical decision-making. The response from physicians has been striking.

Subscribe now

The president of the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), Andrew Racine, emphasized that pediatricians recommend vaccines at specific ages based on when children’s immune systems respond best and when they are most vulnerable to disease. He urged parents to make vaccination decisions in consultation with their child’s pediatrician. Likewise, the American Public Health Association (APHA) responded with “grave concerns” that the very action Trump demands in his EO “ leaves the American public, especially our children, more vulnerable to preventable illness and death.”

Racine and the AAP, the APHA, and countless physicians speaking out today are following a long tradition. Throughout history, physicians have recognized that their obligation to patients sometimes requires them to confront political power.

Consider Rudolf Virchow, often called the father of modern pathology. In 1848, after investigating a devastating typhus epidemic in Upper Silesia, Virchow concluded that poverty, social exclusion, and political failures — not simply biology — were responsible for the crisis. He returned to Berlin convinced that medicine could not be separated from the political conditions affecting people’s health. During the revolutionary upheaval that followed, he became politically active. His philosophy was captured in his famous observation that “medicine is social science and politics nothing but medicine on a grand scale.”

Virchow understood something that remains true today: health does not exist in a political vacuum. And when political power threatens health, physicians cannot always remain apolitical.

That lesson has been repeated under some of history’s darkest regimes.

German neurologist and psychoanalyst John Rittmeister became part of the resistance to the Nazi regime. In 1942, he distributed anti-Nazi notices condemning the regime’s propaganda and its war, knowing the extraordinary risks involved. He was arrested and executed later that year.

In Chile under the military dictator Augusto Pinochet, physicians treated people who had been subjected to torture and other abuses by the regime. In the early 1980s, American physician Jonathan Fine traveled to Chile with a delegation seeking the release of physicians who had been “disappeared” by the dictatorship. Fine and others would go on to help establish Physicians for Human Rights, an organization founded on the principle that physicians have a responsibility to defend human rights.

And this tradition continues today. In Russia, more than 1,000 physicians signed an open letter demanding the release of Dr. Nadezhda Buyanova, who was sentenced to prison after allegedly making comments critical of Russia’s war against Ukraine. They risked their own freedom and safety to defend a fellow physician and the principle that medicine should not be subordinated to political repression.

These examples aren’t perfectly analogous to what is happening in the United States today. We aren’t living under Nazi Germany, Pinochet’s dictatorship, or Vladimir Putin’s Russia. But that’s precisely why we should pay attention to the warning signs before authoritarianism becomes entrenched, and why we should speak out.

Physicians have already been entering this sphere of advocacy in the Trump era. During COVID, when bodies were stacking up in the ICU, and refrigerator trucks were brought in for morgue overflow, we pulled back the curtain, so to speak, sharing our experiences with the public. When Trump suggested people inject bleach… we rejected such absurd, dangerous suggestions. When he used his influence to undermine trust in the vaccine that helped finally protect health care workers who’d been putting our lives on the line, and helped reduce the numbers of sick in our hospitals, we made our voices heard.

But in Trump’s second term, we’re witnessing not just profound ineptitude and disinformation, but an increasingly aggressive concentration of executive power. And now political power is reaching directly into the exam room.

For generations, physicians have been told to leave politics at the exam-room door. But what happens when politics walks through that door first? What happens when a president with no medical training attempts to dictate vaccination policy contrary to the recommendations of pediatricians and the evidence on which those recommendations are based?

At that point, telling our patients the truth is not partisan politics. It is our professional responsibility.

Share

We do this every day. Physicians rely on evidence and expertise to make decisions on behalf of our patients. We push back when pharmaceutical companies put profits ahead of patients. We challenge insurance companies when their policies interfere with appropriate care. We fight hospital administrators when financial considerations threaten patient safety. We accept that responsibility because our patients trust us to put their health before someone else’s interests.

We must bring that same courage to this moment.

History shows us that authoritarianism does not always arrive all at once. It can advance through the gradual erosion of institutions, expertise, norms, and the willingness of professionals to speak when those things are threatened. Physicians have repeatedly been among those willing to stand up because our profession gives us both a unique vantage point and a unique obligation to do so.

We will listen to our patients. We will follow the evidence. We will protect children. And when political power threatens any of those responsibilities, we will speak up.

Dr. Rob Davidson is a Michigan-based ER physician, the executive director of the Committee to Protect Health Care, and co-host of the Paging America podcast.

Share

Watch out for the next few months, folks. And a new game! Which polls are Joe buying — or selling? And why? This one wasn’t a disaster!

Read more