Michael Lewis is the most engaging writer about government alive, and he has written a new book about DOGE, Blockers. Elon Musk used the term “blockers” to describe government employees who tried to slow down the changes DOGE was imposing, and directed DOGE foot soldiers to fire them.

The book is important and timely for a few reasons. It comes just as a wave of DOGE revisionism is occurring. DOGErs are written op-eds saying that their approach needs to become the model for government. They are getting rich off the connections they made while undermining the American government. Elon Musk has been invited back into government, to tell the DOD which weapons it should buy (his).

Lewis also helps to provide the raw materials for an answer to a question that I don’t think enough people who want change in government are grappling honestly with: why did DOGE fail?

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As in his earlier book, The Fifth Risk, Lewis reminds us that the federal government is full of heroic public servants. He also reminds us that, at a time when there is broad agreement that government has to operate more quickly, sometimes blocking is a good thing. Even when Lewis is simply giving us the inside perspective on what we already knew, that perspective is invaluable, because it asks us to identify with some awful ordeals and dilemmas federal employees went through while trying to protect the public and uphold their oath to the Constitution.

In an excerpt from the book in The Guardian, Lewis described one such blocker, Kathleen Walters at the IRS, and the impossible choices she was faced with. Despite having the letter of the law on her side, Walters left the agency because she refused to participate in illegal sharing of IRS immigrant data led by DOGEr Gavin Kliger. I haven’t read the full book, but this example, which I will excerpt generously, is terrific.

DOGErs Were a Specific Type of Guy

Gavin Kliger turned up at IRS on February 13 demanding agency credentials and access to data. Kliger was at the forefront of DOGE’s crippling of multiple agencies.

• He wrote the email telling USAID employees to stop coming into work.

• The 25 year old was told his private stock portfolios limited him from working at CFPB, the consumer watchdog, and he needed to divest. He refused but led an attempt to fire 90% of staff. One member of the CFPB Reduction in Force team swore that: “He kept the team up for 36 hours straight to ensure that the notices would go out yesterday…Gavin was screaming at people he did not believe were working fast enough…calling them incompetent.”

• He oversaw the cutting of climate grants by USDA.

• He was assigned to American General Media, the parent company of Voice of America, shortly before almost all employees on leave.

Kliger was a Berkeley grad whose online posts veered toward anti-immigrant white nationalism. He reposted self-proclaimed Nazi Nick Fuentes, and misogynist Andrew Tate. According to Forbes, he called for military executions of criminal immigrants, and the pardon of Derek Chauvin, the police officer who killed George Floyd. Despite benefiting from an education at perhaps the best public university in the United States, he called for cutting all public funding to universities. He also criticized foreign aid, saying, “Wonder what the kickbacks on this latest grift look like.” Keep that last one in mind.

We can simplify DOGE into basically a) Musk and his inner circle, and b) the foot soldiers. Musk and his inner circle represent the owner class of Silicon Valley and its hangers-on, already enmeshed into a network the foot soldiers desperately wanted to get into. When he joined DOGE, Kliger was on the outer edges of that network, an employee at an AI start-up funded by Andreessen-Horowitz.

Lewis claims that the DOGE foot soldiers like Kliger had a certain type: white, male, middle class, desperate to have Elon’s attention. Many had been rejected from elite institutions and had a chip on their shoulder. They enjoyed their sense of power over experienced government employees who knew much more than they did.

Some combination of those personality traits, ideologies and desire for Elon’s approval led them to do illegal and morally reprehensible things. The Washington Post reports that Kliger and Luke Farritor overrode orders to keep USAID’s life-saving aid flowing. They literally flipped the switches in a kill chain.

Several times, USAID managers prepared packages of these payments and got the agency’s interim leaders to sign off on them with support from the White House. But each time, using their new gatekeeping powers and clearly acting on orders from Musk or one of his lieutenants, Farritor and Kliger would veto the payments — a process that required them to manually check boxes in the payment system one at a time, the same tedious way you probably pay your bills online.

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DOGErs Vs. Experienced Civil Servants

IRS officials had some sense of Kliger when he arrived. He was dismissive of and rude to IRS staff, insisting he did not need to go through basic mandated training before accessing data. When he finally relented, you can imagine how uncomfortable it was for the Black IRS staffer who briefed him on privacy issues. Kliger refused to shake her hand, or pay attention during the presentation. From Lewis:

Phyllis, who loved working for Kathleen and saw falling on hand grenades as part of her job, never told her how this one had felt. She knew Gavin had expressed enthusiasm for white nationalists, and he likely knew that she knew. She tried to break the ice by walking in with her hand extended; Gavin stared at it and declined to shake it, though he had shaken the hands of the white men who had offered them. “He was kind of cool towards me,” said Phyllis. Before she could even start the briefing, he said, You know, I’ve heard these rules before at other agencies. Yes, she said, but these rules are different, because no other agency is governed by this privacy law, and this law can get you thrown in jail very quickly. As she walked him through the basics – how you can’t use your personal phone for business, how if you happen to so much as glimpse a form 1040 with someone’s name on it you must avert your eyes – Gavin played on his phone. “He’s multitasking right in front of me, typing and texting,” said Phyllis. “It was, here’s a routine that I must endure.”

One point here is that Black women have gone to federal work in disproportionate numbers, with a primary explanation being that they are selecting into a workforce where hiring and ongoing personnel processes offer strong protection against discrimination. While they represented about 12% of the federal workforce, they represented about one-third of federal employment losses according to one analysis. (I’d like to see more data, but the Trump administration has stopped collected federal employee data on race). Some of this may reflect the focus on eliminating DEI initiatives, but the backdrop of these cuts being driven by a group of predominantly white men, some of who held racist views, is inescapable.

Using Federal Employees to Do their Dirty Work

DOGE made false claims about employee performance in order to fire them, but did not want to put their names to these emails. So they would coerce civil servants into doing so. If the civil servants refused, they were fired. A judge would later find these mass firings of probationary employees were likely unlawful, but did not give them their jobs back.

To get rid of IRS’s 6,700 probationary employees, DOGE told the acting Commissioner, Doug O’Donnell, to fire them via email for unspecified performance reasons. He refused, and was removed from office, to be replaced by Melanie Krause, a career civil servant considered to be more pliable. Kliger then asked the head of IRS human resources, Traci DiMartini, to do the firing.

The Doge people played this trick often. They’d use or try to use civil servants as a kind of ventriloquist dummy so that they, the Doge workers, could keep their names off official documents. But Traci took one look at the email, saw it was plainly a lie, and refused to have anything to do with it. The price of that single act of resistance was her job. Gavin didn’t have the authority to fire Traci, but his new acting commissioner did. “He asked Melanie to fire Traci, and Melanie did it,” said Kathleen.

The DOGE officials knew enough to know that they lacked the power to make these firings, or at least that they did not want to be dragged into lawsuits. And so they put a gun to the head of other public servants to do their dirty work for them. There were no performance reviews, no staffing plans. Just purges at the behest of people who did not understand or care about the damage they were doing.

Again, this was not a one off. As I wrote last year:

HR officials at the National Nuclear Security Administration resigned after they became frustrated at being forced to tell employees, falsely, that they were being fired for performance reasons. The absurdity of the situation was underlined when a Small Business Administration hire was told they were fired for poor performance, despite not yet having worked a single day in the agency. Other employees were fired despite receiving only excellent performance evaluations. It is one thing to lie to the public about what bureaucrats do—and Musk has been doing plenty of that—but there is something deeply amoral about lying directly to individual human beings about their performance.

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DOGErs Knew They Broke the Law, but Pushed Ahead

One of the first things you learn about federal government data is that the IRS data is a) highly valuable, and b) impossible to access without an act of Congress. Whether that is a good thing or not is up for debate, but the law is clear.

DOGErs were told about this law, but did not care. Kliger called a staff meeting to tell IRS veterans: “Every agency has a superpower. The IRS’s superpower is data.”

Everyone in the agency knew that its data was valuable. That was the reason for the strict laws that prevented it from being exploited for profit or political gain. “He said this in a way that he expected everyone to clap when he was done,” said Kathleen. “No one said a word.” The people around the table – a group that included a woman who had worked at the IRS for 54 years, or 53 years and 50 weeks longer than Gavin Kliger – looked down, or away. Kathleen felt embarrassed for Gavin Kliger. But now it was clear what the meeting was about. Gavin wanted, in his words, “to explore how we can share our data with other agencies”. Interestingly, he never once mentioned Ice or DHS. Instead, that week, he sought to share data with himself, by trying to access files detailing IRS contracts with outside consultants that also contained taxpayer information. Kathleen denied him access.

This might be a good time to tell you that after Kliger finished with DOGE he was made the Chief Data Officer at the Department of Defense. The Chief Data Officer.

Kliger was not alone in the thirst for data. Whistleblowers have said that DOGErs exposed Social Security data by uploading it to the cloud, and downloading it on a thumb drive to bring to their new job.

DOGErs and Government Lawyers Lied to Courts

Judges generally assume that when a government lawyer comes in front of them, they will receive honest and good faith answers. This basic trust, called the presumption of regularity, makes court oversight of the government operate more smoothly.

IRS lawyers had told judges that the agency had not shared data with DHS. Then the Washington Post revealed that such data sharing was happening. IRS lawyers went back to the judge and acknowledged they had lied to the court. The judge determined that their sharing of taxpayer data violated the law about 43,000 times.

DOGErs Undermined Agency Missions

DOGE was led by a white nationalist immigrant who hates (non-white) immigrants and many of his foot soldiers feel the same way. Under that worldview, you don’t really think about the second order effects of constructing a police state.

But let’s think this through a little bit. The IRS has data about undocumented immigrants because it allows undocumented immigrants to pay taxes. This matters, a lot, because the numbers are non-trivial. Undocumented immigrants pay about $66 billion a year in federal taxes. They subsidize government services that they often cannot claim, like Medicaid, Medicare, SNAP and Social Security.

If DOGE was interested in cutting the deficit, as it claimed, it would not have engaged in illegal data sharing of immigrants’ identities because doing so has the entirely predictable effect of discouraging immigrants from paying taxes. If DOGE was a white nationalist organization, it would not care about those lost revenues. It did not care about those lost revenues.

Now the Trump administration wants to add a citizenship question to tax returns (and to the Census) to drive those immigrants underground and say goodbye to billions.

If DOGE was interested in cutting the deficit, as it claimed, it would not have cut 1 in 4 IRS employees, and 1 in 3 of its revenue agents and tax examiners. If DOGE was an organization dedicated to protecting wealthy tax evaders, it would not care about those lost revenues. It did not care about those lost revenues.

We are already seeing billions in lost revenues from tax evaders, a figure which is expected to balloon out to hundreds of billions in the future.

DOGErs Destroyed Agency Leadership

For a short period of time the richest man in the world had more power over every government agency than anyone except the President. During that time, he employed a strategy of firing civil servants who told him what he was doing was illegal.

Eventually this equilibrium broke. Musk became unpopular, Cabinet officials were confirmed and some started to resent not being able to run their agencies. But during that window, career civil servants had no one who might be willing to push back except themselves. And the result was that many left government because they could not cope with the impossible choices they were asked to make, and they no longer felt able to resist.

When those people left, a lot of institutional knowledge and ethics left the building with them. IRS became a hollow shell of itself. In April of last year, I wrote about the leadership crisis at IRS:

So: the IRS is on its fifth Commissioner in three months. And no Chief Human Capital Officer. The Acting Chief Counsel was replaced with someone more DOGE-friendly after he resisted DOGE requests for data. Oh, and a few other people resigned after the privacy violations occurred. The Chief of Staff. The Chief Financial Officer. The Chief Risk Officer. The Chief Privacy Officer. The Chief Information Officer and his two deputies.

The situation is not much better now. The IRS is trying to rebuild after DOGE gutted its leadership.

Lewis explains what it was like from the inside. Krause, the acting IRS leader, deputized lower-level leaders to manage the data sharing. But everyone could see this for what it was, and no-one wanted to be left holding the back for DOGE’s illegal actions. The breaking point was a phone call where ICE asked for the addresses of seven million immigrants without going through the standard legal processes for data sharing.

After the call, Julie, the IRS privacy lawyer, came straight to her office. Julie was usually ice-calm – someone who kept her wits about her. She hadn’t a trace of drama in her. But now Julie was not calm. Kathleen, after that call I’m not working on this thing, she said. I’m not coming in tomorrow. I might not come in Monday. I might not come in ever again.

“I don’t usually deal with life or death stuff,” said Kathleen. “But this was life or death stuff. At that moment I knew I had to quit. Either that or I’m going to get fired, because I can’t facilitate something that will break the law and is going to hurt people. We all have boundaries. That was my boundary.”

That weekend, Kathleen sent Melanie a note saying she’d be resigning. “I didn’t need to tell her why,” said Kathleen. “She knew why.” She’d be leaving just weeks before her 20th anniversary with the agency. If she’d waited until mid-May, she would have been able to retire and receive benefits for the rest of her life. But she didn’t want to retire. Federal law made it hard for a retired civil servant to return, and if the day ever came when the IRS was rebuilt, she wanted to be able to return.

DOGErs Are Cashing in

So where is Kliger now? He is one of many DOGE foot soldiers who have used their experience to move themselves closer to the heart of the VC world of Silicon Valley that set up DOGE. Immediately after leaving DOD, he and other DOGErs started fundraising for a security start-up that sees the DOD as a future customer, with funding from Andreessen-Horowitz and Sequoia Capital.¹ From the Washington Post, which detailed a wave of DOGE-based start-ups:

The start-ups include a host of firms focused on cybersecurity and defense technology, as well as ventures dedicated to helping businesses across America deploy artificial intelligence tools. Among the largest is Cathedral, an AI-enabled cybersecurity firm, founded by Gavin Kliger and Luke Farritor. Valued by investors at $1.4 billion, Cathedral aims to sell to both corporate America and government agencies, including the Pentagon, according to a person familiar with the business, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the firm has not made its operations public.

Maybe Kliger’s old boss, Musk, will put in a good word to the Pentagon in his new role advising them on what to buy. As Kliger might say: “Wonder what the kickbacks on this latest grift look like.”

Despite the massive destruction wrought by DOGE, a lot of the commentariat about government still reflexively values the disruptors and denigrates the blockers. Lewis does us a service by providing a stark example of why we need more Walters and fewer Kligers.

The federal government needs employees who believe in the rule of law, and will defend it, even when it costs them their career. But lets face it, the blockers have gotten little support. They have been stripped of the civil service protections provided precisely to help them to defend the constitution. The courts have repeatedly failed to uphold their ability to protect us.

Here is a tangible short-run action to hold DOGE accountable. Lets assume Democrats gain control of Congress in November. There is an existing DOGE subcommittee in the House. Reconfigure it with staff and members able to make it do the job it has failed to do thus far: provide real oversight of DOGE. Run hearings that puts former DOGE members under oath. Call whistleblowers the DOJ has ignored. Call the “blockers” Lewis wrote about and other witnesses to abuse. Create public salience and a record that will lay the groundwork for criminal investigations in 2029. Establish credible signals that they won’t get away with it.

Barack Obama gave Democrats the kind of campaign week that makes Republican strategists consider updating their résumés. He rallied in Cleveland and Detroit, endorsed Angie Nixon and David Jolly in Florida, and demonstrated something Republicans seem to have forgotten: political parties are supposed to win elections. Obama is even throwing his weight behind progressive candidates like Abdul El-Sayed, despite their past disagreements with him. His involvement in Georgia’s Senate and gubernatorial races further underscores how seriously he’s taking these midterms. The former president has been putting in the work.

So what did Republicans do with their week? Well, I kept a list. It got so long I started wondering whether these idiots were competing for some kind of frequent-failure rewards program.

Let’s begin with what might be the stupidest manufactured controversy of the entire election cycle, which is an impressive accomplishment considering the competition. During his Cleveland rally, Obama took a shot at Trump’s obsession with turning the White House into something resembling the presidential suite at a Las Vegas casino where the owner has never heard the phrase less is more. Referring to Trump’s gold-plated decorating preferences, Obama said he had the White House “looking like Saddam Hussein opened a Cheesecake Factory.”

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Barack Obama compared Donald Trump to Saddam Hussein, one of the most notorious dictators of the twentieth century. Saddam was a murderous tyrant who filled Iraq with palaces, monuments to himself, and enough gold-colored decoration to make Liberace consider downsizing. Obama essentially suggested that Trump was decorating the people’s house like an Iraqi dictator with unlimited access to a Home Depot credit card.

And somehow, Republicans decided the offensive part was the Cheesecake Factory.

I am not making this up. These people heard their president compared to Saddam Hussein, apparently held an emergency meeting of the Republican National Committee’s Department of Selective Outrage, and concluded, “Well, he’s probably got a point about Saddam. But who the hell does Barack Obama think he is insulting the Cheesecake Factory?”

Imagine being so committed to defending Donald Trump that somebody compares him to one of history’s most infamous dictators and your response is to demand an apology on behalf of a restaurant that serves 250 different dishes and has a dessert menu requiring its own congressional appropriations bill. Nobody rushed to explain why Trump shouldn’t be compared to Saddam Hussein. Nobody defended the architectural dignity of the White House. They went straight to protecting the honor of Chicken Madeira and the Original Cheesecake.

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The party of Trump might lose power in the midterm elections next week, not necessarily because of its corruption, inaction, or befuddled president, but because of the price of gas and related cost of goods and services.

President Trump claims it’s an “inexpensive price to pay” for the Iran war and negating an imminent nuclear threat from that nation. While Trump may have duped some of his MAGA base into believing those inflated prices are for a worthy cause, it’s his claims about Iran that are looking pumped up. If you scratch the surface of Trump’s Iran story, you may learn that we’re paying higher prices in hard-earned dollars for nothing, while American soldiers and Iranian citizens are paying with their lives.

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Prominent lawmakers and former intelligence officials have publicly condemned the Trump administration’s make-believe justification for launching military operations against Iran. Those House and Senate members who are most in the know because they serve on the Armed Services or Intelligence Committees and are privy to classified briefings, have consistently stated there was no intelligence indicating an imminent threat of Iran acquiring or using a nuclear weapon.

I know, because some of them directly told me, when I separately interviewed them on The Frank Figliuzzi Show for Lincoln Square. Those same experts have made similar revelations in numerous other public appearances.

The specific statements made by these key figures—some made during their appearances with me on Substack and YouTube include:

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On the same night former President Barack Obama was headlining a Detroit rally for the Michigan Democratic ticket featuring U.S. Senate nominee Abdul El-Sayed and gubernatorial nominee Jocelyn Benson, the line was out the door for another election event at Walled Lake Northern High School about an hour away.

More than 800 people — including buses of vote…

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Elon Musk must be feeling the heat. Last week, the man who spent $44 billion purchasing Twitter because his favorite bigots kept getting thrown off the platform decided to use his overpriced digital dumpster to threaten Democrats who intend to investigate him if they win control of Congress on Nov. 3.

“Live by the sword, die by the sword,” he wrote, responding to a Politico report detailing the investigations Democrats are preparing. Then, because subtlety has never been one of his intellectual strengths, he warned that he would “find out who is really pulling the strings and come for them, not just their puppets.” Well, goddamn. Lex Luthor has discovered congressional oversight, and somebody needs to explain to him that the United States Constitution does not have a customer-service department where billionaires can demand to speak to the manager.

Elon Musk has proven himself, time and time again, to be a piece-of-shit human being. He is an extraordinarily wealthy man with the emotional maturity of a thirteen-year-old boy who just got suspended from Xbox Live for calling somebody a racial slur. He does not understand how American government works, and he has demonstrated absolutely no curiosity about learning. Congress is not a corporate board he can stack with ass-kissers, intimidate with stock options, or fire because somebody hurt his feelings. Congressional subpoenas do not give a flying fuck how many satellites he owns, how many rockets he launches, or how many zeros appear on his bank statements. The legislative branch was conducting investigations long before Elon Musk was born, and it will continue doing so long after his latest midlife crisis has been converted into another embarrassing social media post.

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What Musk understands is money. It is the only language he speaks fluently, the foundation of his entire personality, and the yardstick by which he measures his own importance: how much wealth he can accumulate, how many companies he can purchase, how many politicians he can bankroll, and how many women he can bed and impregnate along the way. The man approaches reproduction like he is personally responsible for solving an imaginary population shortage. Somewhere in America, a family court clerk probably sees his name on the docket and starts calculating overtime. For all his talk about advancing civilization, Musk seems convinced that humanity’s greatest technological achievement would be producing enough little Elons to populate a medium-sized congressional district.

And for a man who worships money, he has demonstrated a truly spectacular inability to spend it intelligently. Consider his $44 billion purchase of Twitter, which deserves its own chapter in the history of billionaires doing dumb shit because nobody in their immediate orbit has the courage to tell them to sit their stupid asses down. Musk became increasingly irritated that Twitter was suspending accounts belonging to his favorite collection of racists, conspiracy theorists, and professional grievance merchants. Evidently, the possibility that people might face consequences for behaving like assholes on a privately owned platform was an intolerable assault on Western civilization. So, rather than find another website where his bigoted buddies could gather and exchange their latest theories about why minorities are responsible for everything, this fool decided to buy the entire goddamn company.

And here is the part that makes me laugh. There was a reason Jack Dorsey wanted out of the Twitter business.

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The U.S. is leaving GRECO, the Council of Europe’s anti-corruption watchdog, after the State Department said membership offered too little benefit. GRECO had urged Washington to tighten rules on presidential conflicts of interest, lobbying and FBI integrity, and its public record shows no completed U.S. compliance review before the withdrawal was announced.

The Trump administration is ending the United States’ 26-year membership in the Council of Europe’s principal anti-corruption monitoring body, withdrawing from a system in which participating governments examine one another’s safeguards against abuses of public power.

The administration notified the Council of Europe in late September that the United States would leave the Group of States against Corruption, known as GRECO. American membership, which began in 2000, is scheduled to end Dec. 31.

Only Russia and Belarus had previously left the organization.

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The State Department said participation required an annual contribution while providing no “tangible benefits to U.S. national security,” and said it preferred what it called higher-impact tools, including sanctions, visa restrictions and targeted assistance for foreign corruption investigations.

GRECO operates differently. It does not prosecute cases or compel changes to American law. Member governments examine one another’s anti-corruption safeguards, issue recommendations and later assess whether those recommendations were carried out.

Its most recent review of the United States, adopted in 2023, examined what GRECO calls “top executive functions” and the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The organization credited the United States with a substantial integrity framework, including ethics laws, inspectors general and the Office of Government Ethics. But it also identified gaps at the highest levels of government, noting that the president and vice president are exempt from many statutory and regulatory conflict-of-interest and integrity rules that apply to other executive officials.

GRECO issued 15 recommendations. It urged the United States to require presidents and vice presidents to relinquish outside positions and divest assets that could create conflicts of interest, or place them in qualified trusts. It also called for more durable ethics restrictions, greater disclosure of contacts between senior officials and lobbyists, tighter rules governing officials who move between government and private employment, and stronger safeguards for FBI whistleblowers.

GRECO directed Washington to report by June 30, 2025, on the measures it had taken. But GRECO’s published Fifth Round registry lists no subsequent compliance assessment for the United States. The organization’s published materials reviewed for this article also do not disclose whether Washington submitted the underlying report.

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We can have democracy, or we can have Elon Musk, but we can’t have both. His wealth and his impact on our social fabric, on our democracy, are obscene to the point of total abstraction.

When I was a kid, my family went through a rough patch. It’s not an unusual story. It happens. I was able to get an off-the-books job at a bottling plant when I was 12. I made $4 an hour putting labels on bottles of engine oil additive at the end of the line, and got my checks made to cash. Sometimes, the man who owned the operation would accidentally forget to sign my checks.

At 20 hours a week, the checks I couldn’t cash were for $80.

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As of this writing, Elon Musk’s net worth is around $1,000,000,000,000, give or take a few billion or a few tens of billions of dollars. So far, he’s reportedly given around $366,000,000 to federal committees supporting Republican candidates for national office. Most of it — about $275,000,000 — landed between July and September of this year.

$366,000,000 is the floor of his giving. It’s possible, maybe even likely, that he’s giving to groups that don’t disclose donors.

We can look at these numbers and shake our heads and say something like One guy shouldn’t have that much power. But it’s important to sit with it a second. We have to at least try to wrap our heads around what this kind of wealth means for us, personally. It’s almost impossible.

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Dear Lincoln Loyal,

We are 12 days away from the most critical midterm election of our lives. Right now, pro-democracy, independent media is being systematically drowned out and suppressed at the exact moment Americans need facts most.

While Lincoln Square fights tirelessly for the truth, we are up against millions in dark money and MAGA-enabling tech oli…

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Over the last twelve months, Republicans have given this country an embarrassing, deadly, and unpopular war, a president whose approval ratings are scraping the bottom of the political toilet, and a midterm slate featuring some of the most pathetic MAGA candidates ever to file paperwork.

Ken Paxton is among them, which tells you something about the competition. And somehow, with that much concentrated stupidity fighting for our attention, Ohio GOP gubernatorial nominee Vivek Ramaswamy has found a way to distinguish himself. When your party has turned public embarrassment into an Olympic sport and you are still finding innovative ways to take home the gold, that is a special kind of talent. Vivek has managed to offend people on both the left and the right, which is just a regular Tuesday for him, but this time he might have tanked his own campaign.

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In an extraordinary display of political desperation, a one-minute video surfaced Monday night featuring Donna Arthur, the mother of Democratic gubernatorial nominee Amy Acton, telling Ohioans not to vote for her daughter. The video initially circulated on Twitter without identifying its sponsor, raising questions about Ohio’s political advertising disclosure requirements. Ramaswamy’s campaign didn’t run from it. His spokesperson called Acton a “serial fabulist” and insisted the public needed to be warned about her. Then, according to Axios, the campaign committed $4 million to putting this garbage on the air. Four million dollars! Somewhere, a political consultant is collecting a handsome paycheck for convincing a gubernatorial candidate that publicly humiliating a survivor of childhood sexual abuse was a brilliant use of campaign resources. I would love to sit in on that strategy meeting just to find out whether anyone in the room possessed a functioning conscience.

The problem with this ad is that Acton is estranged from her mother for reasons that should make any decent human being recoil. Acton was removed from her mother’s home at age twelve after her stepfather was indicted on a charge of raping her. Her mother went to court to support the man her daughter had accused, then left town with him. As Acton’s brother, Philip Stearns, explained, their mother “stayed married to Amy’s rapist until he died.” Think about the magnitude of that betrayal. A child reports sexual abuse, her mother sides with the accused, and decades later a multimillionaire politician decides the mother would make an excellent character witness against the daughter.

What Vivek doesn’t seem to understand is how many people can identify with some version of Acton’s experience. Ask anybody who grew up with an asshole stepfather and a mother who consistently took the man’s side, even when her own child was suffering. Family therapists have studied these dynamics for decades, particularly the emotional damage that occurs when a parent prioritizes a romantic relationship over a child’s safety and well-being. Acton’s experience involves an especially horrific allegation, but the underlying betrayal is painfully recognizable. There are adults walking around today who haven’t spoken to a parent in twenty years for precisely that reason. And Vivek, displaying all the emotional intelligence of a parking meter, thinks Ohioans are going to watch this woman attack her estranged daughter and automatically conclude the daughter must be the problem. His spokesperson even presented Arthur as one of the people who knows Acton best. Somebody needs to explain to these idiots that being biologically related to someone doesn’t automatically make you a credible witness to their character.

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Millions of Americans took to the streets Saturday for No Kings Day, a pro-democracy mobilization against the concern that a single, unitary authority seeks to control our freedoms.

Just as the rallies reached their peak, Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta reached in and proved their point. The movement’s most vital communication channel suddenly vanished. Meta temporarily shut down the official No Kings Instagram account, along with the pages of several key organizers and leaders. For hours, during the most critical window of the mobilization, the digital heartbeat of the protest went dark, leaving organizers locked out and fueling immediate fears of political censorship.

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The fallout was swift, and the explanation from Silicon Valley was frustratingly familiar. Tech giants like Meta operate with the power of sovereign royalty, yet when their systems disrupt core constitutional activities, they retreat behind the shield of technical glitches. This incident exposes a dangerous vulnerability in our public square: the automated suppression of legitimate political speech during a highly volatile election year.

Meta’s initial response was a brief, hollow apology about algorithms. Company spokesperson Andy Stone stated on X (not even a Meta platform) that an automated trigger designed to catch accounts posting, sharing, or commenting at unusually high frequencies, had been pulled “in error.”

It took a full 24 hours for Meta to offer a more granular, detailed explanation. On Sunday, Stone clarified that engineering teams found the restriction was triggered not by outgoing posts, but by the account’s intense “reading” behavior, which network security systems mistakenly flagged as an automated Claude AI tool that might be scraping data. Humans blaming an automated system they created, for wrongly perceiving the presence of an AI tool created by humans, which ultimately suppressed the freedom of humans.

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Those who continuously defend and fight for our democracy deserve to lead it.

Dear Friend,

Take a breath for a moment and really look around at where we are—because after everything we’ve weathered, we are standing on the very edge of something historic.

We are fingertip-close to turning back authoritarianism and breathing vibrant life into the true Promis…

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I have heard of October surprises. Every political junkie has. An October surprise is that deliciously inconvenient political bombshell that drops in the final weeks before a November election, sending campaign managers into cardiac arrest, communications directors scrambling for explanations, and candidates suddenly discovering the importance of spending more time with their families. The phrase took hold during the 1980 presidential election, and ever since, October surprises have become something of an American political tradition.

George W. Bush had his old drunk-driving arrest surface days before the 2000 election. Donald Trump had the Access Hollywood tape in 2016, when America learned that the Republican nominee thought sexual assault sounded like a perfectly reasonable perk of celebrity. Usually, campaigns spend October worrying about what devastating information their opponents might uncover. They have researchers digging through decades of records, consultants preparing emergency talking points, and lawyers standing by in case somebody discovers their candidate once committed a felony, fathered a secret family, or spent an afternoon with Jeffrey Epstein. It’s the political equivalent of waiting for someone to throw a grenade through your living room window.

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But Donald Trump, a man who has never encountered a perfectly functioning disaster he couldn’t make considerably worse, decided to revolutionize the entire concept. Why spend October nervously waiting for Democrats to uncover some embarrassing scandal when you can manufacture one yourself? Why let the opposition research department do all the heavy lifting when you have the authority to appoint your very own catastrophe? Trump looked at the Republican Party’s already miserable political situation, surveyed the approaching midterms, and concluded that what his administration desperately needed was another public relations emergency.

And because this man has never believed in doing anything halfway, he personally hired one, gave her access to the White House briefing room, and allowed the entire country to watch the experiment collapse in real time. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Katie Zacharia, the first October surprise to come with a federal job title and an introductory press briefing.

Zacharia joins an increasingly distinguished collection of MAGA employees whose White House careers have had roughly the same life expectancy as a mosquito at a backyard barbecue. Sean Spicer, Trump’s first press secretary, spent six miserable months defending presidential nonsense with the frantic desperation of a man trying to convince his wife that the lipstick on his collar came from a particularly affectionate cashier at CVS. Anthony Scaramucci, affectionately known as the Mooch, lasted 11 days as communications director before giving The New Yorker a profanity-filled interview that made him sound like a cocaine-fueled character from Goodfellas who had accidentally wandered into the West Wing.

Michael Flynn made it 24 days as national security adviser before his conversations with the Russian ambassador helped send him packing. Reince Priebus got thrown out as chief of staff during the same week Scaramucci was busy turning the administration into an HBO crime drama. Tom Price resigned from Health and Human Services after discovering that taxpayers were less enthusiastic about financing his private-jet lifestyle than he was. Stephanie Grisham somehow managed nine months as White House press secretary without holding a single press briefing, which is the professional equivalent of being hired as a lifeguard and refusing to acknowledge the existence of water.

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Let’s fire up the not-so-way-back machine and return to November 4, 2025, when Democrats and their supporters were preparing for the off-year elections with all the emotional stability of Titanic passengers who had just spotted the iceberg. Donald Trump was barely ten months into his second, nonconsecutive occupation of the Oval Office, having already engineered an administration so unpopular that his approval ratings were circling the drain. By the end of November, Gallup would have him at a miserable 36 percent. Trump had practically done everything short of personally driving Democrats to the polls, handing them ballots, and reminding them to bring identification. Yet Democrats were approaching Election Day like they were entering a hostage negotiation.

Naturally, the Democratic Party responded to this gift with the composure of a Victorian aristocrat discovering a mouse in the parlor.

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I vividly remember the discourse that autumn, mostly because it required an industrial-strength sedative to endure. Pundits and consultants were hyperventilating on cable news, convinced that Mikie Sherrill might self-destruct in New Jersey, Abigail Spanberger was facing political catastrophe in Virginia, and Zohran Mamdani might hand New York City over to Andrew Cuomo—a political Lazarus running on an independent vanity line while Republicans performed interpretive dance routines begging voters to support him. Trump eventually joined the spectacle, urging New Yorkers to vote for Cuomo, proving that MAGA’s ideological principles have roughly the same shelf life as a gas-station hot dog.

My cousin in Jersey, who lives in a predominantly Black, middle-class neighborhood, phoned in a cold sweat, complaining that she hadn’t seen a single Sherrill yard sign but had endured enough Jack Ciattarelli commercials to induce photosensitive epilepsy. She was practically convinced her neighbors were secretly preparing to vote Republican. The way she was talking, you would have thought every Black household on her block had a Ciattarelli sign hidden in the garage, waiting until nightfall to sneak it onto the front lawn before the neighbors could catch them committing political treason. She had seen the commercials, absorbed the atmosphere, and diagnosed an electoral catastrophe before anybody counted a single vote.

What actually transpired was an electoral bludgeoning.

Sherrill defeated Ciattarelli by approximately 13.5 percentage points. Spanberger demolished Winsome Earle-Sears by more than 15 points. Mamdani dispatched Cuomo by nearly nine points, becoming mayor of America’s largest city while conservatives continued waiting for the municipal apocalypse they had promised everybody. New York City remained standing, much to the disappointment of people who seemed genuinely convinced that affordable housing proposals would cause Manhattan to collapse into the Hudson River.

And do not even get me started on down-ballot contests in regions so deeply ruby-red they make a cardinal look malnourished. Democrats broke the Republican supermajority in Mississippi’s state Senate. In Iowa, a state Trump carried by roughly 13 points, they flipped Republican-held legislative seats in districts that had supported him by substantial margins. Oklahoma produced additional Democratic gains, while Georgia voters unseated two incumbent Republicans on the Public Service Commission, delivering the party’s first statewide victories for state-level offices since 2006.

Democrats were outperforming Kamala Harris’s 2024 numbers by double digits in special elections. They were winning contests that national consultants had practically classified as acts of divine intervention. To call this an overperformance is a linguistic crime against understatement. Democrats absolutely kicked proverbial ass.

Yet a remarkable amount of the political establishment continued behaving as though losing was the natural order of things. Every competitive race prompted another lecture about historical voting patterns. Every promising Democrat received a detailed explanation of why their campaign was probably doomed. The institutional anxiety had become so ingrained that some people seemed more comfortable predicting defeat than entertaining the possibility of victory.

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I want to talk with you about three things: No Kings, what we need to do between now and Nov. 3, and what we need to do in the days after the election.

Today is another No Kings Day. Autocrats want to convince you that resistance is futile. They coopt powerful forces and hope that makes the rest of us feel powerless. When the big law firm, Paul Weiss, caved without a fight, that sent a signal. When Vanderbilt University caved, it sent a signal. When big media companies like CBS caved, it sent a signal. When nearly all Big Tech companies jumped to the president’s side, it sent a signal. Everything seemed to broadcast the same thing: cooperate and get benefits or stand alone and risk losing everything. Trump accomplished the decapitation of an independent business sector, an independent legal community, an independent university system, and an independent media with enormous speed.

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So the first No Kings rally last June was our chance to say, Not so fast. We are not helpless, and we are not alone. The big guys may be collaborators, but we are patriots. Those early rallies were a communion. We learned that we are not alone. We learned that we are not powerless. We learned that our common bonds are stronger than the politics of division. At the first No Kings, I stood next to former Republicans and near a small group calling itself the American Communist Party. These folks do not share ideas about the direction of government. But they shared a commitment to determining that direction through democratic and peaceful means.

Communion. Common bonds. And what Lincoln called mystic chords of memory. Together we bore witness to the outrages of our would-be monarch and his corrupt courtiers. We also bore witness to the pain of our fellow Americans — whether they are struggling with high food and energy prices, or struggling with appalling conditions aboard an aircraft carrier in the Persian Gulf, or struggling to walk freely on American streets where ICE is patrolling. We bore witness. Alex Pretti and Renee Good paid the ultimate price for their witness. Yet our numbers grew.

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Still, we face an unprecedented and global attack on freedom and democracy. Russian armies want to erase those ideas in Ukraine. Russian agents and propagandists want to undermine them in Europe. And Putin, in league with Donald Trump, wants to wipe them out in their modern birthplace, here, in the United States.

Today’s No Kings gathering is unlike the previous ones. As I said, by communion and witness, those earlier rallies helped us birth a new force in the land. Today we put that force to work. This is the moment we have planned for. This is the moment of truth.

Today is all about voting. Making sure everyone is registered. Curing registrations that have been improperly purged. And turning those registrations into votes. Millions and millions of votes. Votes cast as early as possible.

Whether or not you attended a rally in person today, you can be part of its purpose. If you have already voted, reach out to others to be sure they vote. If you have not voted, check your registration. You can do that at vote.gov. Make a plan to go vote. And go vote.

Between now and Nov. 3, the number of lies that will be told will have no precedent, and, try as you might, you will not be able to avoid them. Already Trump is claiming elections are rigged. He is in court to stop the count of mailed ballots in California. A candidate for Senate in Minnesota tells MAGA audiences she is proudly pro-life while she posts an ad calling herself a pro-choice Republican. Elon Musk has a website that pretends to help people check their voter registration but instead collects data probably to sell to GOP operatives. A Senate candidate in Texas caught the flu. His opponent says he was sent to an asylum. Meanwhile, a new White House press secretary cosplayed an attorney even though she never passed the bar. Please, don’t let the deluge of lies turn you from your own lived experience. You know what a failure Trump and his MAGA party have been, on every conceivable measure.

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Finally, prepare for the fight to come. Not every race will be decided on Election Day. It takes time to count votes that come in by mail or were cast early. Some states do not allow those votes to be counted before Election Day. Remember, the time between the election and the certification of the winners is when Donald Trump is at his most dangerous. Remember Jan. 6.

Expect him to call for the impoundment of ballot boxes. Expect him to seek emergency relief from the Supreme Court. Expect him to do everything except allow the votes to be fully and fairly counted.

And prepare to support legal efforts to stop him. Where there are recounts, volunteer to observe. When you hear conspiracy theories and lies, call them out.

And remember every day, although up against great odds and great power, we have come together, we have borne true witness, we have grown our ranks, we have stood firm. And we will not back down.

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We say it every time, and it is always true: this is the most consequential election of our lifetimes. All things being equal, it should be a pretty significant blue wave. But all things are not equal. The next three or so months will determine if we are able to keep our democracy or not. It really is that simple.

Trump’s presidency has been a catastrophe. I’m not writing now to enumerate the ways this is true. You already know. Everyone does. It’s getting harder and harder for those of us in the media to come up with more ways of saying Trump’s polling is cratering. Even the people who love him hate him.

But that polling puts us in a very precarious, very dangerous position, because while Donald J. Trump doesn’t care about the actual direction of the country; he doesn’t care about the well-being of Americans; he doesn’t care about our standing in the world or our economy or the safety of our children or women or people who are not white; he does care about winning.

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What’s more, the people who have snaked their way into his orbit care very deeply about maintaining a grip on their power.

For months he’s been talking about how the midterms are going to be unfair. He’s talked about how he might declare an emergency, or confiscate ballots in blue states, or how if he loses it will be because of cheating. And so on. You’ve heard it all.

We’re all waiting to see what he does to muck up the election and, therefore, our democracy. In the interest of clarity, let’s go through the list of things that could happen between the moment you’re reading this and, say, January 3, 2027.

Clear eyes.

So. What could happen?

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Donald Trump is facing a crushing reckoning at the polls. He is desperate. Vladimir Putin does not have voters, but even Russians, as expe…

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Ukraine just handed us an October surprise right in time for the midterms.

Friend,

Right now, as you read this, Russian propaganda networks and their Yandex internet targeting American voters have completely collapsed.

Over the weekend, Ukrainian forces struck Yandex’s data centers—the hub of Russia’s digital infrastructure and the primary engine driving a…

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U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced last week his plans to livestream the firing squad execution of former Army Major Nidal Hasan on December 3.

In 2009, the ex-military psychiatrist fired 200 rounds, killing 13 people and wounding 32 others as he shouted, “Allahu Akbar!” at Fort Hood in Texas. He was shot in the chest by an Army police officer and is paralyzed. Hasan was sentenced to death after a court-martial established Hasan carefully planned the attack and researched jihad. Now, Hegseth’s macabre machismo prompts him to stream Hasan’s execution on the Internet thereby promoting Hasan’s martyrdom and likely inspiring other violent jihadists.

The killings took place at Fort Hood’s Soldier Readiness Processing Center, where troops were getting medical checkups before deploying to Afghanistan.

Hasan, an American-born Muslim, was also scheduled to deploy to Afghanistan. His death sentence was handed down in a unanimous decision by a panel of 13 senior military officers. Hasan acted as his own attorney, called no witnesses and offered no testimony. In an opening statement, he said he had decided to “switch sides” in what he believed was a U.S. war against Islam.

The Pentagon’s plan unleashed intense bipartisan backlash and ethical debates. Hasan’s looming death by a military firing squad marks an unprecedented modern event. Hegseth justified his decision by stating that making the execution public ensures that “people need to understand that there’s serious consequences for these types of things.”

Death by firing squad is certainly a powerful and permanent consequence. But live streaming it like a viral TikTok teenage dance routine, may have the opposite impact Hegseth seeks.

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You can be forgiven for thinking the only big election in Michigan this year is the open seat in the U.S. Senate.

That race has sucked up most of the oxygen both in traditional media and social media, where Bernie Sanders-backed progressive Abdul El-Sayed is a bonafide star. In the bruising August primary, the charismatic former health official squeaked …

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On the third anniversary of October 7, Mayor Zohran Mamdani performed an act of basic political triage that should not require a peer-reviewed defense.

He issued a statement acknowledging the Hamas attack for what it unambiguously was: a series of horrific war crimes that claimed over 1,100 Israeli lives and saw 251 hostages taken into Gaza. He expressed grief alongside New Yorkers who carry that trauma. Simultaneously, he characterized the Israeli government’s military campaign in Gaza as an ongoing genocide—a position he has held consistently for years. Then, demonstrating a rare willingness to face his own constituency in the flesh, he walked down to Union Square, lit a candle next to Comptroller Brad Lander, and stood in silence.

Predictably, the right-wing apparatus executed its pre-programmed routine. Israel’s U.N. Ambassador, Danny Danon, accused Mamdani of “hijacking” the anniversary, while AIPAC and its orbiters immediately launched their standard press release offensive. For anyone who has monitored political rhetoric over the last decade, this was entirely baseline behavior: hold Benjamin Netanyahu accountable for the destruction of Gaza, and an automated PR campaign with your name on it arrives on a predictable schedule.

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What was far more remarkable—and far more absurd—was the flank attack from the left. Roughly 200 pro-Palestinian protesters materialized to surround a solemn vigil attended by perhaps 50 people. Rather than engaging in strategic activism, they proceeded to drown out the speakers, chant, “Long Live Hamas!” and denounce the mayor as a sellout.

As captured on video by City & State journalist Peter Sterne, the crowd broke into chants of “Traitor, traitor, come on out! You sold all your people out!” alongside a display of staggering tactical illiteracy: “Zohran, what do you say? How many kids did you kill today?” One protester even proudly announced to the crowd that he was a former Mamdani intern—a flex that says far more about the hyper-concentrated nature of local activist networks than it does about political principle. The mayor stood stone-faced, absorbed the noise, and left.

What makes this performance truly embarrassing from a social movements perspective is that the vigil they disrupted was not a right-wing rally or a pro-war rally. It was organized by Israelis for Peace, a group that explicitly read accounts of Israeli victims of October 7 alongside testimonies from Palestinians living under bombardment in Gaza. The protesters effectively screamed over a memorial designed specifically around joint grieving and dual-narrative humanization.

The institutional mechanics behind the protest were equally baffling. Promotional materials listed the NYC Young Democratic Socialists of America (YDSA) and chapters from City College, Hunter, Lehman, and the New School alongside Within Our Lifetime. Their promotional flyers framed October 7 as the moment “resistance against imperialism changed the fate of our world forever,” while their rap sheet against the mayor included his municipal strategies to combat antisemitism and security funding for synagogues. In a move of peak bureaucratic self-preservation, Mamdani’s own press office was forced to clarify the ideological lineage: “It’s not NYC DSA, it’s young DSA, a separate org.”

Left-wing purity politics isn’t new.

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