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This story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. The war launched by the United States and Israel on Iran has caused an unprecedented disruption in global energy markets, bottlenecking 20 percent of the world’s supply of oil and liquefied natural gas. We don’t yet know exactly what this means for […]

The following is a lightly edited transcript of the April 28 episode of the Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.After a heavily armed man tried to breach security at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, apparently to kill Donald Trump or others in his orbit, Trump and Republicans immediately started blaming Democratic rhetoric about Trump for the incident. Unsurprisingly, Karoline Leavitt was more disgusting on this score than just about anyone else. Some media figures did fall for some of this, but really, this moment should drive home some fundamental truths for the media. Each side does use incendiary rhetoric about the other, but only one of the two parties is correct in describing the other as extreme and profoundly dangerous. Only one of the two parties is fundamentally hostile to liberal democracy and fundamentally hostile to the mission of the free press itself. Democrats should make this plain. We’re talking about all this with Matt Gertz, senior fellow at Media Matters, who has long been an observer of the media’s inability to cover that basic reality fairly. Matt, good to have you on.Matt Gertz: Good to be back.Sargent: So as of this recording, Cole Tomas Allen of California has been charged with a plot to assassinate Trump. This came at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner on Saturday night. Matt, can you explain the bigger context here—how this dinner is a gathering of the elite of the elites, with media figures perhaps being too willing to be cozy with Trump, given his attacks on liberal democracy and the press itself?Gertz: Typically, the president of the United States is invited. He and members of his administration show up, and the president himself typically speaks. It’s generally a combination of lighthearted jokes and at some point, the president tends to talk about the importance of the freedom of the press, the importance of the First Amendment in our country. When Donald Trump is president, this really takes on a new level, because of course Donald Trump doesn’t believe in the freedom of the press. He cannot convincingly give a paean to the First Amendment. He cannot recite the pleasant clichés that you would expect in a situation like that. The idea of inviting him to an event like this should be anathema, but sadly hasn’t been.Sargent: It certainly hasn’t. Well, let’s quickly go through what Republicans are saying. They’re fanning out to claim that Democrats are to blame for this alleged assassination attempt. Let’s listen to Karoline Leavitt.Karoline Leavitt (voiceover): Nobody in recent years has faced more bullets and more violence than President Trump. This political violence stems from a systemic demonization of him and his supporters by commentators, yes, by elected members of the Democrat Party and even some in the media. This hateful and constant and violent rhetoric directed at President Trump day after day after day for 11 years has helped to legitimize this violence and bring us to this dark moment.Sargent: Note that Leavitt appeals for calm and then immediately throws it all away by insisting that the primary cause of political violence in this country comes only from Democrats. Matt, you want to respond to that?Gertz: This is the cynical, pathetic, cry-bully nonsense that we’ve come to expect from people like Leavitt. If the White House is really concerned that the rhetoric has gotten out of control, then they could do something about how the president of the United States has referred to Democrats as traitors seven times in one week. It was last week. This is the rhetoric that we’ve come to expect from the president of the United States. The idea here appears to be that the president can say whatever he wants and that all of his critics can say whatever he wants as well.Sargent: There’s another imbalance that we should home in on for a second, and the media is uncomfortable with saying this. It’s this: Trump and Republicans just don’t condemn political violence when it comes from their side with anything close to the vehemence that Democrats do when it comes from their side. Trump and Republicans have a history of excusing political violence against Democrats and even at times joking about it. We all remember January 6—Trump pardoned hundreds and hundreds of people, many of whom committed serious political violence against the United States. Matt, can you talk about that history of Trump and Republicans essentially hand-waving away political violence when it’s directed at Democrats and liberals?Gertz: I can give a couple of quick examples. You’ll recall back in October of 2022, a deranged person broke into the home of Nancy Pelosi, then the speaker of the House. She wasn’t there, but her husband was. The man beat him brutally—he was hospitalized in critical condition. The response from Republicans and conservatives was twofold. You had, on the one hand, people claiming that this was some sort of gay tryst that went badly for Paul Pelosi, a really deranged conspiracy theory on that level that was ported across Fox News and other outlets. Then you had people joking about the whole thing. Donald Trump on the stump repeatedly would make jokes about Paul Pelosi’s brutal beating.Then you had the tragic situation where two Minnesota legislators were shot, one killed alongside her husband. Again, the response from the right-wing media, from senators, was to joke about the whole thing and suggest that this was all some sort of conspiracy overseen by Democratic Governor Walz. So the thing that Republicans tend to do when there is political violence committed against Democrats isn’t to call for the temperature to be turned down. It’s to pretend it’s not happening or suggest that if it has happened, it’s really funny. That is the sort of split that we see in situations like that, because Democratic officeholders respond to political violence that targets the right by criticizing it, by saying that it’s not acceptable, by pointing out that it is the sort of thing that will spread and continue to spread. This is just a case where there isn’t symmetry. The press, unfortunately, sometimes is unable to point that out.Sargent: It really is unable to point that out. And here’s another way that that asymmetry manifests itself. I want to just ask you this question pretty straightforwardly, Matt. Is there an organized movement of political violence on the left? And is there an organized movement of political violence on the right?Gertz: I think there is obviously no organized movement of political violence on the left. On the right, you do have a series of sort of street gangs that have, if not the full approval of Donald Trump and others in the Republican Party, then at least a wink and a nod—you’ll recall him talking about the Proud Boys needing to stand back and stand by during a presidential debate. Those are the types of people that certainly take that quite seriously.If we’re talking about linking rhetoric to killings, how about describing a vast swath of the left as vermin, as the president has done? Sargent: And great replacement theory! That inspired multiple acts of major political violence, and Trump and the Republican Party—at least much of the Republican Party and much of the MAGA movement—are full devotees of great replacement theory. That is clearly something that has inspired violence and they react very badly when you point that out.Let’s listen to a little bit more of Karoline Leavitt. Check this out.Karoline Leavitt (voiceover): People listen. And when you have mentally disturbed individuals across the country who are listening to this crazed rhetoric about the president day after day after day, it inspires them to do crazy things. And unfortunately, it’s not just the media. The entire Democrat Party has made their pitch to voters across the country that Donald Trump poses an existential threat to democracy, that he is a fascist and that they compare him to Hitler. These are despicable statements that the American people have been consuming for years and so many mentally perturbed individuals are led to believe these words are truth and then are inspired to act on it.Sargent: Matt, what’s so troubling about this is that when Democrats and/or liberals call Trump a fascist or an authoritarian, it’s based on an actual assessment of what he’s doing to the country. You don’t have to agree that those labels apply—I think they absolutely do—but even if you don’t agree, you can’t deny that there’s an actual intellectual case behind the use of them. Democrats and liberals have debated for years whether these terms apply and gotten into intense back-and-forths. You’ve seen them all, over how far to go in describing what Trump is doing as authoritarian or fascist. An actual intellectual case exists for doing it. Whereas when Republicans and Trump call Democrats antifa or communists or enemies of the people, which they apply to Democrats as well, there’s zero connection to any policy reality of any kind. I think there you have another difference that the media can’t get its head around.Gertz: I think that’s right. Just to add to it, it’s not just liberals and Democrats who use language like that to talk about Donald Trump. John Kelly, who was White House chief of staff during Trump’s first term—a retired general—says that Donald Trump is a fascist who wants to rule like a dictator. Jim Mattis has agreed with that statement. Mark Esper, another former defense secretary from Trump’s first term, has also said that it’s hard to argue against the idea that Donald Trump is a fascist. Mark Milley, who was chairman of the Joint Chiefs, called him “fascist to the core.” These are people who served at the highest levels of Donald Trump’s administration, many of them former military. They’re the ones who are using language like this to talk about the man who’s sitting in the White House right now. If you can’t echo Donald Trump’s former chief of staff on the descriptors for the president, what exactly are you supposed to do?I’ll agree that it does seem like very harsh language to use. At the same time, we do have to reckon with the reality that this is not a president like any other. It is one who is willing to use state power in ways that no other modern president has done. Because of that, he does get tagged with unusual descriptors for an American president.Sargent: Not only that, but he has used those powers in that fascistic and/or authoritarian way on members of the media themselves. Trump regularly describes the media as the enemy of the people. He’s corruptly used all these baseless lawsuits to extort media companies into doing his bidding and even turning over large piles of cash to his favored causes. He’s openly urged the Federal Communications Commission chair, his lackey, to wield government power against media outlets that displease him. Trump’s White House has also tried to punish outlets for not following his decree that they use terms like “Gulf of America.” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth tried to strong-arm news organizations into signing away their independence. He’s opened the Pentagon’s press room to rank MAGA propagandists. It’s not just that the media is failing to recognize that one party is fundamentally fascist or authoritarian and the other isn’t. It’s that they won’t even point this out when they themselves are the targets of it, Matt.Gertz: Boy, Greg, when you put it that way, it really sounds like he’s not the best person to invite to your celebration for the First Amendment. That is my main takeaway.The Trump war on the press has been one of the major through lines of his political rise, of his terms in office. He was sort of clumsy about some of these efforts during his first term, but approached the second with a real dedicated plan to try to use the levers of state power to cudgel the press into line. Again, this is a case where he thinks that he can say what he wants and everyone else should also say what he wants. He does not appreciate criticism of any type and is willing to use the power of the state to try to force media outlets to only put on the type of hagiographic coverage that he gets from Fox News.Sargent: Matt, there’s another dark element to this that we should address as well, which is that when Donald Trump and Republicans call Democrats things like antifa or communists, and when they attack Democrats for using harsh rhetoric about the president, they’re not just making a rhetorical case—they’re laying the groundwork for more use of state power against Democrats and liberals. As we speak, Stephen Miller and others inside the administration are really scouring the bureaucracy and the law for whatever they can come up with to prosecute liberal groups. The stated justification for this is that Democrats and liberals are in some sense allied with a movement that favors political violence towards Trump and Republicans. So it’s not just an innocent, if wrongheaded, argument that they’re making. It’s actually a pretext for more authoritarian and fascist behavior. Can you get into that a bit?Gertz: I think the repression is already underway. As we speak, Joe diGenova, who is a crackpot Republican lawyer, one who’s often appearing in right-wing media to run with various conspiracy theories, has been appointed by the Justice Department to oversee what they’re calling a grand conspiracy case down in Florida. The idea here is that all of the federal law enforcement actions that have targeted Donald Trump in recent years—the Russia probe, the Mar-a-Lago raid, the January 6 investigations—they’re all part of the same dark conspiratorial effort to get Trump and stop him from getting elected. That Barack Obama was behind the whole thing. It’s totally bonkers; it’s crackpot stuff. But the full power of the Justice Department is now behind attempting to make a federal case out of what basically looks like 10 years of Sean Hannity monologue stuck in a blender. It’s the sort of thing that would be very funny except for how dangerous it really is—and of course the waste of resources that that sort of thing entails.This is just par for the course for an administration that, as we’ve seen, does not believe that any efforts to push back on it are legitimate and is willing to use law enforcement to go after it. We saw that with Mark Kelly and the other Democratic members of Congress who warned members of the military and intelligence services not to obey [illegal] orders. We’ve seen it with Jerome Powell, who was investigated because Donald Trump thought that he was doing a bad job at the Fed—they trumped up an investigation to get him—and a whole host of other cases that this Justice Department is trying to spool out.Sargent: Just to wrap this up then, there’s a split-screen thing going on here, because in many ways the press has actually risen to the occasion magnificently with some of the reporting on Donald Trump and his fascist designs and machinations and policies and all the rest of it. There’s been terrific reporting, and while you can point to occasional examples of the press caving in the face of Trump’s pressure, the bigger story is that they aren’t getting cowed by Trump’s pressure. So that’s good. But on the other hand, you still can’t get the press to level with the American people about what we’re talking about here, which is that one party does not function as an actor in a liberal democracy, and the other fundamentally does. So where do we go from here, Matt?Gertz: My big worry around a lot of this is that, as you say, what’s really been essential over the course of this administration is how journalists have been able to dig up information that the administration doesn’t want out there and publish it. And yes, the narratives that get woven by the political journalism elite often do not fully take that information into account. But the information still gets out. What I worry about with things like the CBS takeover by David Ellison, the possibility that CNN will come under his thumb again—this billionaire who’s a major Trump supporter—is that you’ll see a bit of a tone shift from the on-air, chattering-class stuff. But the real loss will be that that investigative reporting will stop happening, that many of those journalists who are doing the good work will lose their jobs, and that there will be more and more stories that just aren’t told about this administration as time goes forward. If Democrats want to stop that, they’ll have to think very hard about what levers they might have to try to protect the press from coming under Donald Trump’s domination.Sargent: Democrats, if they take back one or both houses of Congress, are going to have to have a defend-the-media agenda, in essence. But let me tell you something, Matt—even if Trump’s authoritarianism does constrain the press in some major way, hey, at least we’ll still have those White House Correspondents’ Dinners. Gertz: We’ll never be rid of them, apparently.Sargent: Apparently not. Matt Gertz, awesome to talk to you as always. Thanks so much for coming on.Gertz: Always a pleasure.

Donald and Melania are trying to get Jimmy Kimmel fired, again, for mocking Trump's age and health. Plus: Republicans meddle in Democratic primaries, and Californians will vote on a billionaire tax.

A combination of catchy memes, holiday excursions, and earnest seminars don’t add up to a broad détente.

In The Prince, Niccolò Machiavelli states it is ideal to be both loved and feared, but because they rarely coexist, it is safer to be feared than loved. He argues that fear is more reliable than love, which is fickle, but crucially advises that a leader must avoid being hated. Donald Trump wants to be an autocrat who follows this advice but fails at it miserably on the international stage, and the world is in greater danger because of this.Donald Trump has had success with this model inside the United States, to be sure. He is loved by a few, hated by many, and feared by all. Institutions routinely cave to his demands, including individuals, corporations, law firms, hospitals, and universities, even when those demands violate state or federal law. The Republican Party has become the Party of Trump, where the organizational platform is whatever Trump says it is today. Indeed, Republicans are so afraid of Trump that they have all united around unrealities, like January 6 being a peaceful protest. To paraphrase George Orwell, “The president told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was his final, most essential command.” To do otherwise means losing your office at best, and being indicted by the Trump Department of Justice at worst.Trump, however, does not have such leverage over people living in other countries, or their leaders. He is widely despised in educated, democratic countries, which even a year ago had no confidence in his leadership. Today, most people of the world express significantly higher approval of China’s despotic, genocidal regime than they do of U.S. leadership.Behind Trump’s back, world leaders reportedly consider him a “laughing fool” and a buffoon. They even were caught sniggering at him in 2018. Reports indicate that many foreign leaders and diplomats view him as vain, susceptible to flattery, and easy to manipulate. This perception has led to a strategic, often performative, approach by world leaders to manage his transactional style of diplomacy, sometimes referred to as “kissing the ring” or “Trump Management 101.”Now, even countries that had regarded him as a useful idiot, like Russia, are increasingly seeing diminishing value in courting him as an asset as the 2026 midterms approach. They sense that it’s going to be a drubbing, and Trump’s ability to throw his weight around will be constrained by a democratically held House, and perhaps Senate. Now, in places where Trump used to be popular (like Hungary), even Trump and JD Vance’s ham-handed attempts to influence elections fell flat. Conversely, countries are seeing increasing value in defying Trump. Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney brought the Liberal Party of Canada to a shocking win in 2025 by repudiating Trump and promising to stand firm against him. Fifty-five percent of Canadians regard the United States as the greatest threat to Canadian national security, and yet they’re still more than willing to tell the U.S. to get stuffed when pressured to accede to maximalist demands. NATO has lost patience with him as a whole, basically telling him he’s on his own with the war he started. No matter how Trump has threatened, bullied, or cajoled European leaders, none (other than Volodymyr Zelenskiy and Ukraine) has offered to assist in reopening the Strait of Hormuz.This situation of being neither loved nor feared, but nearly universally hated and mocked, has direct implications for the war with Iran. Currently, Trump seems content to extend the ceasefire indefinitely, relying on the assumption that the blockade will eventually force Iran’s hand. This seems unlikely: Iran is not a democracy, and public opinion counts for very little. The IRGC has already proven it can kill its way out of civil unrest. What is evolving is a test between it and the United States to see who can absorb the most economic pain, and Iran’s government seems more likely to survive it than Republicans on Capitol Hill in November 2026.Trump has tried to bluster and threaten his way through negotiations: promising to destroy every Iranian power plant and infamously threatening on Truth Social that “a whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.” Iran’s leadership, though fractured, still collectively looked at these threats and yawned a “whatever.” There are no indications that Iran will be back to the negotiating table, leaving Vance and Steven Witkoff, Trump’s special envoy to the Middle East, perpetually in a state of getting ready to leave for Islamabad for further talks.Over time, the effects of the blockade will pile up on Trump, and he will be forced to either make peace on terms unfavorable to the U.S. (and to his own image as a master dealmaker) or resume bombing. So far, the bombing campaign seems to have accomplished little other than to put younger hard-liners in power and destroy a lot of antique military equipment that Iran didn’t need to close the Strait of Hormuz and terrorize its Gulf State neighbors. It did, however, put a serious dent in U.S. missile inventories and get 13 U.S. troops killed and a bunch of exquisitely expensive and nearly irreplaceable military equipment destroyed.Even if Trump does resume bombing, he’s effectively trying to dig his way out of a hole he’s already standing in. His stated goal of bringing down the Iranian government by targeting power plants has never worked before. It didn’t work in Vietnam with Operation Linebacker II (North Vietnam got concessions that led to the fall of South Vietnam). It hasn’t worked in Ukraine, where Russia’s systematic destruction of Ukraine’s power grid has failed to bring the Zelenskiy government down or force it to sue for a dishonorable peace.It is difficult to predict how Trump would react to this further likely failure of bombing: whether to simply give up and take an even worse deal from Iran, or escalate by destroying Iranian water infrastructure, particularly dams, reservoirs, pumping stations, and desalination plants. The latter could very plausibly end Iranian civilization as we know it under the worst-case scenarios for people dying of thirst or fleeing as refugees. No one outside the U.S. seems to be afraid of Trump anymore, and he is hated rather than loved. These key factors will drive the ongoing Iranian crises, and are the driving force leaving Trump with the options of accepting Iranian terms and trying to spin it as a win, or getting pushed far enough into a corner that he decides to do something monstrous enough to make himself truly feared.

In December 2025, the Prairie Band of Potawatomi withdrew from a $30 million Immigration and Customs Enforcement contract and fired the executives who brokered it, after criticism from tribal members. In January, the Oneida Nation of Wisconsin terminated over $6 million in ICE contracts and replaced its business group head. You’re probably noticing a pattern: In both of these cases, public pressure from tribal organizations forced the divestiture in President Donald Trump’s mass-deportation machine. But the trend hasn’t held everywhere. One notable instance is in Alaska, where Native corporations—a birthright to their shareholders—have continued pursuing ICE contracts despite the fact that the same kinds of forces are demanding that the Bering Straits Native Corporation, or BSNC, divest itself from contracts involving the controversial immigration agency.It’s a surprising result given the obvious fault lines. “Native people know oppression,” wrote Levi Rickert, a Prairie Band of Potawatomi tribal citizen. “We were forcibly removed from our homelands, locked in Indian boarding schools, confined to reservations. We cannot—we should not—profit from the oppression of others.”Why could tribal members force action at Prairie Band of Potawatomi and Oneida, while BSNC shareholders cannot?The key difference lies in the legal structure of the targeted firms. Prairie Band of Potawatomi and Oneida are tribal governments, and their leaders answer to enrolled members, who can vote them out or demand accountability at council meetings. But Alaska Native Corporations, such as BSNC, are not tribal governments. They are for-profit corporations created by the 1971 Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act, and their boards answer to fiduciary duty, not community values. Shareholders can sign petitions, but the board has no obligation to respond. That structure is on full display at BSNC. Its subsidiary, Paragon Professional Services, holds $88 million in federal contracts with ICE, including for work at the East Montana Detention Center in El Paso and transportation of detained immigrants across Newark, New York, Baltimore, and Boston. More than 470 signees—including BSNC shareholders, descendants and non-BSNC community members (including white allies)—have signed a petition demanding the corporation divest from ICE work.* The board has not formally responded.“With tribal governments in the Lower 48, there’s a lot of attention to what economic development projects the Tribes are engaged in,” said Ann Tweedy, federal Indian law professor at the University of Mississippi. “There’s less division between the tribal government and any economic development that’s going on. That creates a direct accountability.… I think with Alaska, it created a system where the corporate governance is a bit more removed from shareholders than the direct line you see in tribal governments.“The Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act had this assimilationist goal of turning Tribes more into corporate bodies,” said Tweedy. “The idea that they shouldn’t be acting like Tribes is kind of inherent in ANCSA.”That philosophy has proven to be the dividing line for those who are hoping that BSNC will succumb to public pressure. In the case of most public corporations, the main obligation is to generate value for shareholders. But tribal corporations are typically built different: They carry an added responsibility of upholding Native cultural values. Reciprocity is a foundational value for the 577 federally recognized tribes and unrecognized tribes. It prescribes mutual, respectful relations between people, communities, and the natural world. “No one is illegal on stolen land” is a political slogan often heard in the Land Back movement. It’s this ethos that informs the 470 signatures decrying BSNC’s support of ICE’s border control operations. But it’s not an ethos that BSNC shares.The impact of ICE on tribes isn’t distant and contractual. “Last October, I hired a company to do some work at my house,” said Jessica Senigaq Ullrich, a tribal citizen of the Nome Eskimo Community and a BSNC shareholder. “As they were arriving, ICE agents swooped in and detained one of the workers. I caught it on video.” Days later, at BSNC’s annual meeting, she learned that the corporation in which she had just inherited shares was itself contracting with ICE. Ullrich, along with Ayyu Qassataq (Iñupiaq/Yupi’k), vice president of the Native Conservancy, and Charlene Aqpik Apok (Iñupiaq), executive director of Data for Indigenous Justice, quickly coordinated the petition demanding BSNC quit collaborating with ICE. The petition, collaboratively drafted in a Google Doc and circulated through personal networks, quickly accrued hundreds of signatures. With this in hand, they approached BSNC’s board. “We gathered hundreds of shareholders to speak clearly about our values, and the response we got was essentially: ‘We’ve received it, and we’ll do what we think is best.’ That’s not accountability,” said Qassataq.The goal of the petition was to reinforce two facts: There was significant tribal opposition to BSNC’s ICE contracts, and the company owed a share of accountability to its shareholders. ICE contracts expose what happens when those expectations collide.When the three women followed up with the board to ascertain precisely what they “think is best,” they were met with administrative acknowledgment, followed by silence. “Business decisions are being made in our name, but without transparency or response, there’s no way to understand how they’re aligned with our values, or what they are at all,” said Qassataq. “It feels like we’re speaking into a void: like the structure exists, but the accountability doesn’t.”But some of BSNC’s leadership has unclear ties to its shareholders. From 2009 to 2023, Gail Schubert, an Iñupiaq community member, was the firm’s CEO and president. After her departure in May 2023, Dan Graham, who is white, was appointed the interim CEO. “I was talking with different board members, and they kept saying, ‘Yeah, we’re gonna have a hiring process. We’re gonna put it out there,’” said Qassataq. “Then an announcement toward the end of the year said Cindy [Aġnaqhiq Towarak Massie,] is now the president; they’ve bifurcated the president and CEO roles. Completely nontransparent process, and there was no opportunity to my knowledge for shareholders to submit résumés or express interest in being part of it.”Massie is, at least a well-regarded community leader. Still, Graham remains the CEO and earns $1.4 million per year. Krystal Nelson, who is also white, joined BSNC’s staff in 2014 as the executive vice president and earns $1.26 million annually. In 2025, BSNC declared $8.4 million in shareholder dividends. With 8,200 shareholders, each shareholder earned $1,024 in 2025.*The way that BSNC has managed to dodge accountability stands in stark contrast to the ways tribal members have forced other tribal organizations seeking to contract with ICE to reverse course. After the Prairie Band of Potawatomi secured its $30 million federal contract from the DHS to help design ICE’s potential detention centers, tribes criticized the deal and the 4,500-member Prairie Band of Potawatomi fired the business leaders who brokered the deal.The Oneida Nation’s subsidiary OE-Santec JV LLC also came under fire from its members and other Native Nations for two ICE contracts: $3.8 million for construction services and $2.6 million for facility services. Tribal leaders became aware of the contracts in late December 2025 and moved in January 2026 to terminate the more than $6 million in contracts.In 2026, the Poarch Creek Tribe’s co-owned firm PCI Guidehouse JV LLC completed a $1.8 million ICE contract providing ICE administrative services. Their tribal chairwoman has not replied to a request for comment on the completed contract or any plans to renew contracts. As Poarch Creek Tribe’s external communications director, Kristin Hellmich, told The New Republic, “Like other tribes who earn federal contracts, Poarch Creek Indians Federal entities have provided professional and technical services across governmental agencies throughout multiple presidential administrations. By delivering valuable and efficient services to U.S. taxpayers year after year since 2008, PCI Federal creates more than one thousand jobs for Tribal Citizens and non-members alike.“As elected officials of a sovereign nation, the Tribal Council continually takes into account feedback from its Citizens to inform decisions that advance the Tribe’s interests,” she added.Still, in this instance Poarch Creek leadership at least had to respond—BSNC shareholders are still waiting for an explanation. Contacted by The New Republic, BSNC declined to comment on its ICE contracts, citing federal disclosure restrictions, and directed inquiries to the Department of Homeland Security. The corporation did not respond to questions about the shareholder petition or executive compensation. Krystal Nelson and Dan Graham did not respond to requests for comment. The DHS also did not respond to requests for comment.“These corporations are a birthright of Indigenous people. It represents a connection that is an inherent right of us to our homelands and also to our responsibility to those lands. It’s not just a money picture,” said Qassataq. “When it’s reduced to a capitalistic money picture—our bottom line is to provide money to shareholders—it takes something really vital away from us as Native people.”Ullrich and Qassataq passionately echoed each other, frustrated by the contrast between unknown white executives at BSNC and Alaska Natives’ lived experiences, coping with disenfranchisement and growing climate change devastation. “We still have communities where people are literally shitting into buckets. There’s no running water,” said Qassataq. “I want to know how much these contracts actually equate to in dividends because if you’re going to say this is where we need to be, tell me how a $500 million contract translates to a specific individual check.”The petition remains unanswered. The contracts remain active. * This article originally excluded some of the petition responders. It also misidentified Nelson’s position.

It only took a brief aside between a right-wing pundit and a sitting governor to reveal the newest, weirdest front in America’s long simmering “war on alcohol.” The comment generated scant coverage from mainstream media outlets and went largely unremarked upon by the nation’s pundits. But when, on a podcast last March, the late Charlie Kirk told California’s Gavin Newsom that he no longer drank, you could almost hear the record scratch.“You don’t [drink]?” said the governor, who co-owns multiple wineries. Kirk responded that he used to.“That’s interesting. What happened? A couple years ago, you stopped?” asked the governor.“I just wanted to be more successful,” replied the Republican operative.“I love that,” Newsom said.For decades, executives of America’s “beverage-alcohol industry”—as the centi-billion-dollar agglomeration of brewers, winemakers, distillers, and distributors prefers to be known—have worked themselves into a lather over a “neo-Prohibition” simmering within the World Health Organization and the national health agencies it advises. A legion of killjoy scientists, nanny-state bureaucrats, and do-gooder religious zealots, they have warned, are conspiring in the public health ether to once again ignobly foist the noble experiment upon the American drinking public. There are kernels of truth in the industry’s campfire tales, as there usually are, but not when it comes to laws or regulations. Since the Trump administration retook control over the federal public health establishment, it has cleared the road of serious regulatory threats to the industry from liberal institutions. Paradoxically, this victory has coincided with a curious cultural loss for Big Booze. Like never before, the upper echelons of America’s contemporary right wing—traditional allies in the fight against odious concepts like “science” and “society”—not just are abstaining from but are speaking out against alcohol. And it’s not a problem lobbying can fix.In August 2025, Gallup released the results of its annual “Consumption Habits” survey, finding that just 54 percent of Americans said they drank alcohol. It was the lowest proportion in the nearly 90-year history of the poll, and it caused a fresh wave of consternation in Big Booze boardrooms already distraught over reports of “sober-curious” Zoomers and the power of GLP-1 drugs like Ozempic to curb cravings for alcohol. From the survey’s cross-tabs came an even more shocking result: Gallup recorded “a sharp drop in reported drinking among Republicans (falling 19 points, to 46%) but not Democrats (holding fairly steady at 61%).” The news had the makings of a bizarre reversal for an industry that has woven brands like Jack Daniel’s and Coors Light so tightly into the fabric of white, pastoral Americana favored by the GOP. As the Financial Times declared in a headline at the time: “Republicans: America’s Teetotalers.” Could it really be?Many of the right’s most revered figures are dry. Donald Trump is the most prominent teetotaler in the Republican universe. Tucker Carlson is a recovering alcoholic who’s been off the sauce since 2002 and favors the mind-expanding buzz of Zyn nicotine pouches. Joe Rogan, the Pied Piper of protein-addled Cybertruck owners, quit drinking in 2025. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a former heroin addict, is known to abstain; conservative propagandist Dennis Prager has spoken at length about his son’s sobriety; Elon Musk reportedly favors ketamine to cocktails.Yet none of these MAGA-lebrities have leveraged their sway over the red-hatted base to build momentum for a neo-Prohibition. Trump himself has marketed vodka in the past, and his son Eric owns a winery in Virginia. A political movement against booze, this ain’t—not yet, at least. Critiques from more outspoken opponents like YouTube Svengali Jordan Peterson and fitness/misogyny enthusiast Andrew Tate suggest that downstream of individual health choices, rejecting alcohol currently serves more of a symbolic function—a performance of in-group values more than an abstinence call to arms. These broadsides against booze draw from some common principles. Alcohol is unhealthy, decadent, unproductive, and, above all, not masculine. The strains of logic—and some of it is strained—have reinforced one another over time. Alcohol culture is “woke,” alt-right influencer Mike Cernovich tweeted in 2023. “Boozing means participating in cultural rot.” Two years later, and even more succinctly, Clavicular, the rising right-adjacent influencer, declared alcohol a “looksmin,” antithetical to the goal of some Gen Z males to “looksmax” or be as conventionally attractive as possible.This factional dogma is not always coherent with itself, let alone with American history. “It’s a strange view of masculinity,” said Lisa Jacobson, a professor of history at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and the author of the 2024 book Intoxicating Pleasures: The Reinvention of Wine, Beer, and Whiskey after Prohibition. “Traditionally, the measure or the test of masculinity was, ‘Can you hold your liquor?’” In the run-up to Prohibition proper, she said, the Drys took aim at this (literally toxic) masculinity by framing alcohol as a destructive vice that was wrecking homes and robbing the economy of productive labor.The history of the repeal of Prohibition offers a clue to the origins of this modern tension, albeit a grim one. “Anti-Prohibitionists were very much about connecting alcohol to pluralism, to a kind of cosmopolitan secularism, to [...] a new vision of sociability in which men and women drank together,” Jacobson said. During World War II, alcohol was promoted by both the industry and the federal government by tightly linking it to “the values we are fighting to defend [...] that separate us from the fascist enemy,” she continued, intoning a hypothetical newsreel line. “We are fighting for a vision of the world that’s a little bit more inclusive.” In this paradigm, twenty-first-century right-wing antipathy toward alcohol looks less like an amalgam of legitimate health concerns, optimization hokum, and anti-corporate populism, and more like a rejection of small-l liberal society as such.In his 2022 dissertation, the researcher Ben Elley studied how users of 4chan’s infamous /pol/ message board (“pol” is short for “politically incorrect”) “took the iron pill”—that is, radicalized themselves into a fitness-oriented fascism reminiscent of Benito Mussolini’s “New Man.”“Following in the footsteps of the original fascists, the far-right on 4chan use politics to motivate self-improvement, and in so doing transform that self-improvement into a form of political action,” Elley wrote in a 2021 paper. In this heavily ironized, fully anonymized context, anodyne advice about workouts, nutrition, and self-discipline was traded freely as both ends unto themselves, and a means to save the nation—by force—from liberals’ depraved self-indulgence.“I don’t think it’s a coincidence that we were seeing the ‘iron pill’ in the far right early on, and now we’re seeing something sort of similar coming out of right-wing influencers,” he said. “Which [group] is actually leading the other? It’s a little bit hard to say, but I think they’re probably influencing each other.”Still, that is all mostly happening on the margins—the larger story is more complicated than that buzzy Gallup poll suggests. Data-literate industry insiders have groused about Gallup’s methodology on this survey, noting that the sample size is small (around 1,000 people) and includes respondents 18 years old and up. “We know from other data sources that underage drinking has plunged, so some portion of this may be continued declines in 18-20 drinking,” Bart Watson, the former chief economist and current president of the Brewers Association, the country’s largest craft-brewing trade group, noted at the time. Crucially, Gallup’s poll is based on how much respondents say they drink, rather than how much they actually do. If you’ve ever lied to your physician about how many beers you typically have per week, you can see how that might pose load-bearing issues for surveys about national drinking habits.Moreover, the jaw-dropping swing in Republican swigging came from the cross-tabs of Gallup’s poll, further whittling away the number of respondents into the hundreds. “It’s just a minuscule amount of people to make any insights about anything other than top-line public health concerns,” said Bourcard Nesin, senior beverage analyst at the Dutch agribusiness lender Rabobank, in a recent phone interview. No comprehensive behavioral study on drinking rates as related to party affiliation has been conducted in over a decade, but a cursory review of available sales and voter-demographic data that Nesin performed for The New Republic indicates no Republican tilt toward temperance. The opposite, in fact: “States that voted Republican are actually seeing better beer consumption than not,” he said. On balance, he added, conservatives “may be drinking less, but they’re not drinking less than Democrats are drinking less.”There’s no evidence that rank-and-file Republican voters are heeding the call of mass abstinence, and many mainline GOP figures back booze as a matter of personal preference and political expedience. “If they want us to drink two beers a week, frankly they can kiss my ass,” Senator Ted Cruz of Texas declared in 2023, gripping a longneck of Shiner Bock and trying to stoke outrage about unsubstantiated rumors that the Biden administration was preparing to reduce the recommended intake for American adults. But as Kirk’s teetotaling testimony demonstrated, the call is certainly being made by leaders on the right, some more prescriptively than others.It’s easy, and perhaps tempting, then to view anti-alcohol activism with MAGA characteristics as coincidence, crankery, or both. It certainly has had no measurable effect on federal policymaking around alcohol. In fact, a year into the Trump administration, policy is heading in the other direction.The booze industry may have had some sense that the fix was in when Dr. Mehmet Oz, the Oprah acolyte-turned-administrator of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, stepped up to the dais on January 7 to announce the federal government’s new guidelines on drinking. In June 2025, Reuters had reported that RFK Jr.’s Department of Health and Human Services was planning to eliminate Uncle Sam’s recommended limits on drinks-per-day for men and women in the 2025 Dietary Guidelines for Americans, or DGAs; a few months later, Vox broke the news that HHS had effectively spiked a study strengthening the known linkage between alcohol and some forms of cancer. But Oz—who is a real doctor, despite playing one on TV—delivered a bigger gift to the business than even beverage-alcohol insiders had expected. “Alcohol is a social lubricant that brings people together,” he said, delivering a well-worn trade talking point. “In the best-case scenario, I don’t think you should drink alcohol, but it does allow people an excuse to bond and socialize, and there’s probably nothing healthier than having a good time with friends in a safe way.”For the first time in the 46-year history of the DGAs, the document includes no per-day recommendation whatsoever. It was a huge victory for the industry, Nesin said, just the latest of many. “We’ve seen consistent reduction in tax burden for the industry in terms of ready-to-drink cocktails, and there is a very strong lobby for the alcohol industry in government,” he said. “Regardless of whether or not people in government are individually drinking ... that has in no way influenced the policy.”Elley, well-versed in deciphering the mixed messaging of the right from his 4chan forays, offers a synthesis. “I wouldn’t expect [prominent right-wing teetotalers] to be that serious about the idea of actually wanting to enforce Prohibition, because alcohol serves all their purposes just by being there and being something they can say they don’t drink,” said Elley.Call it sobriety as a signifier: an expedient way to broadcast self-discipline, business acumen, masculinity, and transgression to fellow travelers in MAGA-land. It’s a form of power-projection over louche libs that requires no ideological updates, intraparty knife fights, or tedious bureaucratic administration. Best of all?No hangovers.