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Oil prices rise above $100 again over Strait of Hormuz attacks
Saudi Arabia is diverting tankers to its southern Red Sea coast, while Oman’s key export terminal was evacuated over safety concerns.
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Transcript: Trump’s War Takes Unnerving Turn as Damning New Leaks Hit
The following is a lightly edited transcript of the March 4 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.For Donald Trump, the news is getting worse on his war against Iran. A preliminary military report finds that the U.S. was behind the bombing of an Iranian nursery school, killing scores of children. New reporting confirms that the Trump team badly miscalculated Iran’s response to their invasion, leading to a developing energy fiasco, with some officials growing pessimistic about the lack of a strategy to finish the war—and they’re afraid to tell that to the president.Trump is publicly acknowledging none of this. He just urged oil companies to use the Strait of Hormuz regardless of danger, and he’s refusing to comment on how he’ll know when it’s time to end the war. So how do we get out of this situation if Trump’s unwilling to acknowledge the situation we’re in? We’re posing this question to Elizabeth Saunders, a political scientist at Columbia who focuses on foreign policy and has a new piece on the huge mess we’re in. Elizabeth, good to have you on.Elizabeth Saunders: Thanks. Good to be here.Sargent: So let’s start with the Strait of Hormuz, which abuts Iran and connects the Persian Gulf to the wider world. Can you define the importance of the Strait of Hormuz in global terms? And how bad is the energy situation right now?Saunders: So basically this mess is like turning off the spigot that controls 20 percent of the world’s oil flow. It’s like you have running water and then it’s 20 percent less—and it’s all because of this choke point in the Strait of Hormuz. The supply is going down and that sends the price of oil up. And it’s not like a normal oil shock where the Saudis or OPEC can get together and restart production, because these tankers are stuck inside the Persian Gulf. And the Gulf states have already filled up their storage tanks, so they have to shut down the oil fields, which are not easy to restart. This is one of those shocks that is going to be very hard to get back to any sort of status quo before the war. There’s also no end in sight. This is not like when the container ship got stuck in the Suez Canal—remember istheboatstuck.com? Once the boat is unstuck, the canal reopens. This is not going to be like that, because the Iranians have so much weaponry and power and they’re not going anywhere, because that’s where they live. You now basically have 20 percent of the world’s oil flow held hostage, essentially, by Iran.This has always been a threat. And one of the big reasons why presidents for 20 years who’ve considered striking Iran have been deterred from doing so is because this is such a dramatic shock to the world economy. The oil market is global. And so it’s not as though we can just pump more oil out of the ground in the U.S. to make up for it. It’s a global energy market. And that’s going to drive the price of oil up. I’m no oil expert, no energy market expert, but if you make something 20 percent more scarce, it’s clearly going to have an effect. And that doesn’t even account for the problem of getting things back online, which will not necessarily be smooth.Sargent: Can you just define the importance of the Strait of Hormuz in global terms? And now bad is the energy situation right now?Saunders: It’s pretty bad, because 20 percent of the world’s oil flows through the Strait of Hormuz, which is a choke point 24 miles wide—but really much less than that, because it’s so shallow and the Iranians can target it from the shore. So tankers have been stuck and they can’t get through. And so this is backing up the world’s oil supply and driving up the price of oil, because when things get more scarce, the price goes up.Since the war began, oil prices have gone up around 20 percent. It’s been very volatile, but on average, I think that’s the latest estimate. And eventually that will mean prices will go up at the gas pump for Americans. It’s only likely to get worse. We can talk about why that is, but I don’t see this ending cleanly anytime soon.Sargent: Well, let’s listen to Trump on this for a second. Here he’s asked whether oil companies should use the Strait of Hormuz. Listen.Reporter (voiceover): Are you talking to CEOs of various oil companies, encouraging them to use the Strait of Hormuz right now?Donald Trump (voiceover): Yeah, I think they should. I think they should. I think they should use it, if you want my opinion. Look, we took out just about all of their mine ships in one night. We’re up to boat number 60; I didn’t realize they had that big a navy.Sargent: So, Elizabeth, he doesn’t know how big Iran’s navy is, which you’d think he should know as commander in chief. But that aside, what’s the story with what you’re hearing there? How do you make sense of it? What do you think is going to happen with the Strait? Trump is trying to secure it, he’s trying to get oil companies to use it even though it puts them in danger? It’s a little hard to parse. What do you make of it?Saunders: To be honest, I think he just has no grasp of what the situation really is. I think he wants brave captains to run the Strait of Hormuz like in Star Wars—you know, the Kessel Run or whatever it is. I don’t mean to make light of it—it’s a dangerous state [of affairs]. He wants these ships to be taking on very dangerous journeys through this very narrow, very shallow strait that may now have mines. In that clip, he said they’ve destroyed all their mining ships. That’s absolutely not true. They may have distributed some of the mines around Iran so that they couldn’t be targeted directly in one go. They may have already put some mines in. We don’t fully know, but that is not something we can just take on Trump’s say-so.This is not something the world, and in particular the financial world that insures these ships, and the companies that run these ships, and the pilots and captains, the people who crew these ships, can unsee. Iran struck these tankers—at least three that I saw today, and I may already be out of date. And if you look at these images of tankers on fire, what captain, what company in their right mind would send a tanker laden with fuel through the Strait of Hormuz? It’s really dangerous.There’s been talk of a naval escort by the U.S., and the Navy is simply not equipped to do that. Even if it were, it really does not want to, because it makes the U.S. naval ships a target as well. These ballistic missiles that Iran has could hit these ships—they can attack them from the shore and they can also mine the Strait. And this is a problem that U.S. military planners and analysts, national security analysts, and presidential administrations have been thinking about for 20 years. And every president until Trump has been deterred from doing it, precisely because this is such a mess.Sargent: Well, it’s a good thing we have the Art of the Deal guy here to figure this out for us. I mean, the Times reports that Trump’s team badly misjudged how Iran would respond to the invasion to begin with, creating this mess. I want to read a sentence from the Times piece because it’s amazing:“Inside the administration, some officials are growing pessimistic about the lack of a clear strategy to finish the war, but they have been careful not to express that directly to the president, who has repeatedly declared that the military operation is a complete success.”Elizabeth, let’s take this in two parts. First, how crazy is it that Trump officials are not allowed—or are afraid—to talk to him about the situation we’re in?Saunders: I mean, it’s classic personalist dictatorship yes-man behavior. It is crazy. I have written before about how the constraints on Trump, especially in the national security and military force area, are basically gone.But what is interesting is they may not want to tell it to Trump’s face, but they’re all falling over themselves to leak to the press that it wasn’t their idea, they thought it was terrible, we gave him the warnings. And not just the ones from the Pentagon before the war, but now. And that is quite interesting, because victory has a thousand fathers, but failure is an orphan. They’re trying to put the failure at Trump’s door. That’s one of the problems with being a personalist leader, is things do fall at your door.It’s pretty clear that nobody looked down the proverbial game tree at the next move that Iran would make. And closing the Strait of Hormuz as a war move has got to be, if not number one, very, very high on the list of things Iran would do—it’s its biggest point of leverage. But clearly this was not integrated into the decision-making. It’s just the latest incredibly painful and costly and deadly reminder of what it means to purge government and decision-making of all the experts.Sargent: I want to pull on the thread that you just laid out there—how this really suggests that people are starting to leak already that it wasn’t their idea to get into this mess. And they’re constrained from telling the despot—the ailing, angry, delusional despot—that we’re in a real fix. It’s just an odd situation. Can you talk a little bit more about how personalist dictatorship rulers tend to create situations like this, inherently or structurally? That’s what’s happening, right?Saunders: The combination of the trends in presidential power long before Trump—really since 9/11, where Congress is delegating all its power to the president—plus Trump’s intimidation tactics and total control through fear of the Republican Party has essentially meant that the last gasp of constraint that you could have on a President Trump is his inner circle. In the second term, he’s entirely surrounded by yes-men and yes-women. Structurally, it’s not so much that they’re pushing him toward war—it’s that there’s nothing to restrain his impulses anymore.Sargent: And that leads to the other piece of the Times reporting, which is that Trump officials got caught off guard by Iran’s ability to create a global energy crisis, and also that they lack a clear strategy to end the war. Those things are kind of connected. The crisis is putting the U.S. in a bad spot, but we can’t extricate ourselves. Why not? In other words, can we extricate ourselves or not?Saunders: The lack of a plan to extricate ourselves—this is a recurrent theme in history. We are the big power with the best military equipment; no one disputes that. But it is very hard to use that to change a regime, to make good on what for the other party is existential—to get them to surrender something that they consider completely central to their existence. That’s why North Korea was never going to give up its nukes. Iran was never going to give up its ballistic missiles. Maybe they would have compromised on the nuclear, but apparently the diplomats weren’t smart enough—Witkoff and Kushner weren’t smart enough to understand what they were getting as an offer from the Iranians on the nuclear front.But Vietnam, Afghanistan—you could make a list of all the countries that have failed to use their superior military power against a determined, militarily inferior enemy who just has to last. This is also George Washington’s strategy against the British in the Revolutionary War—we didn’t invent it, but the U.S. knows both sides of this. And if nobody told him that, that’s malpractice. If they did and he went ahead anyway—he doesn’t have any grasp of history. He just thinks he can make it so.So then we get to the question of: Can we extricate ourselves? With the tariffs, he could say, “20 percent tariff today,” and then back off, leaving aside the illegality of doing that. He clearly thinks that is what will happen here—that he can just choose the moment where he wants to undo this and go back to the way it was. Leaving aside all the other reasons why that’s probably not possible—such as trust in the U.S., the Israelis might not be ready to stop—just assume all those problems are solvable. What you have now is the Strait of Hormuz has become militarized in a way that it wasn’t before. It’s not clear that Iran will stop shooting if they feel it’s necessary for them to keep the war going, for international reasons, for domestic reasons. And the world cannot unsee that. Global markets can’t unsee that. Ship captains can’t unsee that. So it’s not clear to me that he can make the shooting stop by magic. It’s not clear to me that if the shooting stops, you would immediately see traffic through the Strait of Hormuz go back to normal. I think you’re going to have a Trump premium on the oil coming through the Strait of Hormuz for a long time.Sargent: Can you see a scenario by which this war ends? Is there some way that he—in the next week, or the next two weeks, or the next few days maybe—says, OK, they’ve unconditionally surrendered? They haven’t said that, but they’ve unconditionally surrendered in the sense that we have debilitated their forces enough that they can’t do anything to us anymore—so we’re going to pull out—is there a scenario like that?Saunders: Trump thinks that there is. He thinks he can stop shooting and then everybody will take their toys and go home. One could argue that that’s impossible for all the reasons we’ve already discussed—that Iran may have its own reasons to want to punish the Gulf states that hosted all these American bombers and so forth, and really show the world it still is around and means business.You can’t unsee what’s happened in the Strait of Hormuz. But there’s another, less obvious reason why I really do not think such a scenario is possible. We have lost, at Trump and Marco Rubio’s hand, a huge amount of our diplomatic capacity. We do not have the expertise in the region. We don’t have the ambassadors in post in the region. We don’t have competent people at the level at the State Department that you need to go in and try to marshal allies and deal with some of these attacks on neighbors—Gulf partners that didn’t expect to be attacked and need reassurance.There’s fallout from this terrible strike on the school that looks to be an error. I do believe it wasn’t intentional, although the way Trump has handled it has been pretty horrifying. But that will also have raised some concerns and sensitivities in the region—not just in Iran. It’s horrific. When stuff like that happens, you have to get your diplomats engaged. It’s a form of power; it’s not a weakness. Diplomacy is not the opposite of war—it’s part of how you fight a war and how you end a war. So I don’t think that there’s a scenario where Trump can unilaterally declare that the war is over.Sargent: Well, Elizabeth, you mentioned the school. The Times also reports that an ongoing military investigation has concluded that the U.S. is responsible for blowing up the Iranian school—it had scores of children in it. Confirm this is the worst U.S. atrocity directed at civilians in decades. Is it not? Trump was asked about this conclusion and he said he didn’t know about it, which is odd, because you’d think he’d want to know about it. Elizabeth, how do you think about this part of it in the larger context? And to wrap up—how do we get out of this?Saunders: If I knew that I would be trading oil futures right now. The answer to that is: I do not know.On the school—it’s a horrendous tragedy, and not to minimize it in the slightest—I do think mistakes happen in war, and this is a particularly brutal and tragic mistake because it involves young, innocent schoolchildren. It makes me shudder every time I even think about it. But as with any situation like this, it’s how you handle it afterwards that really is also very important. Not only is he not trying to mitigate the fallout—he’s pouring fuel on the fire by implying somehow it was Iran that got Tomahawks. But where would they have gotten the Tomahawks from? It makes no sense. It’s—I don’t even want to say a lie, because it’s more like he’s just making it up.He did finally say, at the end of one of the press conferences—maybe yesterday—that if they do an investigation, he’ll accept that. I don’t think he’ll have any choice but to implicitly accept that. But again, he’s making a terrible, terrible situation worse, and his inability to conduct any sort of diplomacy at any level is harming his own ability to prosecute the war. He will have a harder time declaring victory and going home because he’s not using American diplomatic resources and in fact has dismantled them.Sargent: Well, Elizabeth Saunders, your piece at the Good Authority website is all about that, and folks should check it out if you enjoyed this conversation. Elizabeth, thank you so much for coming on. It was a great pleasure to talk to you.Saunders: Thank you.
How Democrats Can Outplay the GOP on Tax Cuts
A popular Washington game is to oversell tax cuts to lower-income people. Republicans have excelled at this for half a century. Now Democrats want to play too.In the most familiar version of the game, a Republican president promises to slash income taxes but ends up mainly doing so for rich people. Ordinary people may get a cut, but it’s very small. Thus President George W. Bush’s tax cuts in 2001 and 2003 boosted incomes for the top 1 percent by 6.7 percent but boosted incomes for the middle 20 percent only 2.8 percent, and for the bottom 20 percent a pathetic 1 percent. President Donald Trump’s 2025 tax bill actually lowered incomes for the bottom 20 percent when you factor in accompanying Medicaid and food stamp cuts, while incomes for the middle 20 percent rose only 1 percent or less. The wealthy made out like bandits; everybody else got table scraps at best.Another Republican trick, perfected during the 2024 presidential campaign, is to eliminate taxes on stuff that scarcely gets taxed as it is. That’s what Trump did last year by eliminating taxes on tips. Only 4 percent of workers receive tips, and at least 37 percent of these people pay no income tax in the first place—and that’s before you figure in tax credits like the Earned Income Tax Credit. Also, let’s get serious, when the tip is in cash who’s going to report it as income?A related Republican trick is to claim you eliminated taxes on something when actually you reduced them by not very much. That’s the gist of Trump’s supposed elimination last year of taxes on Social Security, about which he boasted in last month’s State of the Union Address. What Trump actually did was introduce a deduction of up to $6,000 for individual filers that’s phased out starting at incomes of $75,000. Given that people earning less than $75,000 pay little income tax in the first place, and that 15 to 50 percent of their Social Security benefits goes untaxed already, the impact was negligible.Democratic Senators Chris Van Hollen and Cory Booker now propose tax cuts of their own. Von Hollen’s proposal would eliminate taxes on incomes up to $46,000 for individuals and up to $92,000 for married couples. Booker’s plan would double the standard deduction to $37,500 for individuals and $75,000 for married couples, and would also expand the child tax credit. These senators’ proposals deliver more benefit to lower-income people than those from their Republican counterparts, and Van Hollen and Booker sweeten the deal by also increasing taxes on higher incomes. No one would call these plans a stalking horse for trickle-down economics. Still, it seems to me that they miss the point.Booker helpfully presents a tax calculator with his proposal. I entered an income of $65,000, the maximum household earnings for the bottom 40 percent in the income distribution. For a single filer with no kids, Booker’s plan would boost after-tax income by 4 percent. That’s not nothing, but it is well under the 6.7 percent that Dubya’s tax cuts delivered to the top 1 percent. As for Van Hollen’s plan, people earning less than $50,000 seldom pay income tax as it is.Remember Mitt Romney’s famous complaint in 2012 that 47 percent of the population paid no income tax at all? (The real percentage was 46 percent, which since then has dropped to 40 percent). Some of Mitt’s 47 (now 40) percenters are rich jerks who dodge tax liability, but most of them are low earners. Romney’s complaint drew on a tendentious conservative literature (about which I’ve written many times) that complains too many Americans are insulated from the cost of government. The trouble with this argument is that, when you factor in all taxes at the federal, state, and local level, pretty much everybody pays them. Indeed, at the time Romney made his 47 percent crack, the middle 20 percent paid nearly as much effective tax (25 percent) as the top 1 percent (29 percent), while the bottom 20 percent paid a not-inconsiderable 17 percent. That goes a long way toward explaining why Romney lost the election.State taxes are more regressive than the federal income tax, but the chief reason Romney’s “untaxed” pay quite a bit in tax is the federal payroll tax, or FICA (for 1935’s Federal Insurance Contributions Act). About 70 percent of Americans pay more FICA tax than federal income tax because the federal income tax is reasonably progressive at the low end (more so, anyway, than at the high end) while the FICA tax, which funds Social Security and Medicare, is not progressive at all. The Social Security tax is regressive in two ways: It’s a flat tax (12.4 percent, split by employers and workers), plus it doesn’t apply to any income above $184,500. The other FICA component, Medicare tax, is a smaller 2.9 percent split by employers and workers, which is also regressive, but the Medicare tax has no income cap, and attached to it is a surtax, the Net Investment Income Tax, that makes Medicare funding more progressive.It’s hard for anybody, Republican or Democrat, to give the working class much of an income tax cut because the working class doesn’t pay much income tax to begin with. These earners are under the impression that they pay a lot of income tax because they pay a lot of FICA tax, which gets deducted from their paychecks along with their deductions for income tax. But it’s workers’ FICA tax that really pinches, and it’s their FICA tax that we should cut.Last year, the Tax Foundation created a tax calculator to show how Trump’s Big, Beautiful Bill would affect John Q. Taxpayer. What it mostly showed was that John Q. Taxpayer pays so much in FICA taxes that any income tax cut will scarcely register unless he’s rich. For example, a hypothetical person named Amber with no kids earns $75,000. Amber now pays—since Trump’s Big, Beautiful Bill did pass—$4,960 in income tax. But Amber pays more than twice that amount—$11,475—in FICA tax. Sophie and Chad, a hypothetical couple with two kids, earn $165,000. They pay $8,000 in income tax. But they pay more than three times that amount—$25,245—in payroll tax. I’m going to repeat this point because it’s important: About 70 percent of Americans pay more in FICA tax than they do in federal income tax.Democrats hesitate to talk about cutting payroll taxes because the Medicare and Social Security trust funds are both projected to go bust in the next decade. Given the disproportionate clout wielded by older voters, only a fool would put these programs at further risk. But we don’t have to put them at further risk! It’s entirely possible to cut payroll taxes for lower-income people and offset any losses by increasing payroll taxes on higher-income people. We could, for instance, eliminate the regressive income cap on the Social Security tax. Or we could substitute for the flat 12.4 percent and 2.9 percent Social Security and Medicare taxes progressive brackets that mimic (or, better yet, improve on) those in the income tax. We might even do both. Also, Trump gets it exactly backward about taxing Social Security benefits. Instead of pretending not to tax these, we should tax 100 percent of them, instead of the 50 percent to 85 percent that we tax today. Or, if “meddling with Social Security” feels just too politically forbidding, Congress could create a refundable income tax credit averaging, say, $3,000, designed specifically to offset FICA payments, as my friend the former Oregon Secretary of State Phil Keisling proposed last year in The Washington Monthly. Phil’s income tax credit could be offset with higher income taxes on the rich. What Democrats shouldn’t do is oversell the prospect of small income tax cuts for working people when the real source of the trouble is FICA. This is an eminently fixable policy problem. Indeed, we’ll have to change funding for Social Security and Medicare before 2033 or so just to keep them going. While the hood is up, why not fix the regressivity problem too? Audentes fortuna iuvat. Fortune favors the bold.
The Looming Crisis in Home Health Care
The health care industry has offered a rare bright spot for a struggling labor market, growing at dramatic rates even as employment flags in other sectors. It’s not only hospitals and medical facilities that are hiring more: Demand for home health care workers has spiked over the past decade, and as the American population ages, the need for these professionals will only increase. But cuts to Medicaid and shifts in immigration policy could threaten the future of these vital working-class positions.The workers in this sector include home health aides, who assist elderly and disabled individuals with care such as checking vital signs and helping administer medications, as well as with activities of daily living like bathing, eating, and going to the bathroom. There are also personal care aides, who provide assistance with the activities of daily living and with tasks such as running errands, preparing meals, and cleaning. In short, they are crucial to the quality of life for any individual who is otherwise unable to meet their own daily needs.Despite the importance of home health care for older and disabled Americans, these workers typically earn lower wages, a trend exacerbating difficulties in hiring for these positions. In 2024, the median pay for home health and personal care aides was only $16.78 per hour. While the labor is both physically and emotionally taxing, there is a perception that the occupation is lower-skilled than other health professions because it may require less training.“The workforce has just historically been under-recognized and underappreciated,” said Madeline Sterling, associate professor of medicine at Weill Cornell Medicine and the director of the Initiative on Home Care Work at Cornell University. Home aides are a part of the “direct care” labor force, which includes workers who operate in both home and nursing facility settings. Eighty-seven percent of direct care workers are women, 65 percent are considered low-wage, and 28 percent are Black, according to data by the health news and research organization KFF. With 41 percent of workers aged 50 or older, the industry is also disproportionately older, in part because a proportion are family members who are being reimbursed for their care of loved ones.Nursing assistants, home health aides, and personal care aides are collectively paid the least of all direct care workers, earning a median of around $35,000 per year, and are more likely to be uninsured. Those working in home and community-based settings—such as senior centers or adult day cares—are also more likely to be noncitizens and work part-time compared to registered nurses and licensed nurse practitioners. The combination of low wages, minimal worker protections, and high stress contributes to a significant strain on mental and physical health.“Compared to similar workers not working in the home, we see that this workforce has higher rates of stress, depressive symptoms, and loneliness,” said Sterling, who co-authored a 2021 report that found nearly 21 percent of home health workers struggle with poor mental health.The job is marked by high turnover and vacancies, particularly in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic—a time when many direct care workers left the workforce. “For how much you’re getting paid—$16, $17 an hour—it’s often easier to go to a local retail store and get paid that much for work that is a little bit less emotionally and physically demanding,” said Priya Chidambaram, senior policy manager with the program on Medicaid and the uninsured at KFF.Meanwhile, the continued aging of baby boomers will ensure a demand for home care. Pew Research Center polling has found that the majority of older Americans would like to “age in place”—that is, in their own homes with a caregiver. One 2021 report found that more than half of all adults older than 65 will develop a serious disability and use some form of paid long-term services and supports.“As people need more and more of that care over the course of the day, it may not be possible for their kids or for a neighbor, or … for someone in their community to help them out more informally,” said Chidambaram. “As someone’s need increases, the likelihood that they are going to need professional care is going to increase.”It is not unheard of for the demand for home health care to exceed the supply. One 2023 study found that the number of home care workers per 100 participants in the Medicaid home and community-based services program declined by 11.6 percent between 2013 and 2019. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, there will be an increase of nearly 740,000 home health and personal care aide jobs between 2025 and 2034, a 17 percent growth rate—by comparison, the average growth rate for all jobs is 3 percent. However, that growth may be insufficient. According to the health policy organization PHI, the home care workforce will add 772,000 new direct jobs over the next decade, the majority of which will be for the home care workforce; however, there will also be 9.7 million job openings in direct care as a whole from 2024 through 2034. Those struggles to meet demand may be exacerbated by recent federal policy changes, including dramatic cuts to Medicaid approved by Congress last year. Despite confusion among many adults over how long-term care is financed, Medicare—the public health program for elderly Americans—does not cover long-term stays in nursing facilities, nor does it pay for the majority of home-health services. Instead, Medicaid, which provides health care for low-income individuals and is jointly funded by federal and state governments, covers the bulk of long-term care costs in the country. This can also help explain lower wages for home health care aides, as Medicaid reimbursement tends to be less than that of Medicare or other insurance.Although states are required to provide nursing facility care through Medicaid, they can choose whether to provide home care services such as personal care, as well as household activities such as cooking meals. Slashing federal Medicaid spending could thus lead to a reduction in state coverage of home care. The last time there was a major reduction in federal Medicaid spending, in 2011, it also resulted in dramatic cuts to state spending on home care.States have a few options for reducing Medicaid spending, said Damon Terzaghi, vice president for Medicaid advocacy and programs at the National Alliance for Care at Home: reducing eligibility, reducing the number of services—either by eliminating certain services or providing fewer covered services—or reducing the amount paid for services.“We are seeing combinations of all three of those types of proposals in the home care space directly,” said Terzaghi. He highlighted states like Idaho, where lawmakers are drafting legislation that would cut funds for home care services through Medicaid, and Colorado, where state Medicaid officials paused a controversial plan to cap the number of hours a family caregiver could bill for providing medical care.Immigration policy will also affect the home care labor force, as immigrants comprise one in three workers in the home care setting. Historical data has shown that previous crackdowns on immigration have led to a reduction in home health care workers. Conversely, another recent working paper found that increasing immigration has a positive effect on American longevity. For example, large populations of Haitians work in elder care; as their Temporary Protected Status is under doubt, it could have dramatic ripple effects for the industry and the health of older Americans.Then there is the impact on labor force participation for family members of those who require long-term care. Katherine Miller, an associate professor at the Bloomberg School of Public Health at Johns Hopkins University, noted the relationship between paid home care workers and the support systems that may need to be relied upon in the event of a significant shortage in the former. It is often family members who step in when a loved one becomes ill and who may be affected by a shortage in home aides.“I often think of the direct care workforce as one side of the coin and the other side of the coin being families and friends who provide unpaid help, and the impact that all these policies can have on them, as well,” said Miller. Indeed, there is a clear connection with paid and unpaid home care aides, as caring for a family member can be a pathway to seeking that work elsewhere. Recent KFF focus groups found that most home care workers joined that workforce because they were able to help people, often beginning with someone they knew.“These individuals have started delivering care on an informal basis, and it’s become a paid job. Sometimes, when the paid job for their family member or loved one or whomever ends, they transition to another client because the work is so rewarding, and they really value that engagement with the individuals,” said Terzaghi. These are the kinds of workers who might be affected by a state’s decision to limit pay for home caregivers as a potential method for cutting Medicaid costs.Despite the high turnover rate, those who do remain in the workforce may experience high job satisfaction. In interviewing these workers for qualitative studies, Sterling said that home health aides see their positions as a “calling,” despite the struggles that accompany it.“‘If I’m not doing that, who will?’ We hear that all the time,” Sterling said.
The Enduring Vigilante Credo of Bernie Goetz
One Saturday afternoon in December 1984, a man got onto the number 2 train going downtown at West 14th Street in Greenwich Village. Blond, glasses-wearing, and scrawny, he did not fit anyone’s stereotype of a dangerous man. But he was carrying, under his waistband, an illegal weapon: a .38 Smith & Wesson in a quick-draw holster.The man got on the train, boarding in the same car as four Black teenagers. The four kids were hanging out, chatting loudly, dangling on the handrails, joking. They were on their way to a downtown arcade, they later said, where they intended to jimmy open video game machines to steal the quarters, a low-grade crime in a city that still ran on change rather than plastic. To do that, though, they needed a few bucks to play. Most of the passengers in the car were at the other end of the train.What happened next? Everyone agrees that one of the young men, Troy Canty, leaned over to ask the slight man for five dollars, a gesture that virtually no one interprets as friendly. But did the teenagers surround the man with the intention of intimidating him, even mugging him, as the man would later claim? Was there a plan to commit a robbery? Or were they sprawled throughout that end of the car, as they insist and eyewitnesses agreed, the farther two not even sure what their friend was saying to the strange man?Regardless, the man’s response was immediate: He got into a crouch, took out his gun, and started shooting. First, he shot Canty. Then he blasted away at the next closest, Barry Allen, and then James Ramseur. Panic spread among the passengers; one rider thought his intent might be to kill all Black passengers, and a young couple riding with their infant was desperate to protect the baby. When he got to Darrell Cabey, the fourth young man, who by that time was cowering, terrified, in a subway seat, he said: “You don’t look too bad—here’s another,” before shooting and severing his spinal cord. Cabey would never walk again. Then he disappeared into the tunnel, vanishing into the winter afternoon.The louche metropolis of New York City in the 1970s is a site of intense nostalgia. In popular accounts, the graffiti-stained, arson-plagued city resembles Florence in the Renaissance, a musical genius at every block party and dive bar. New York in the 1980s—not so much. Hyped up on “Bolivian marching powder,” defined alternately by tragedy and crass commerce, with AIDS, the stock market, and homelessness all on the rise, New York in the 1980s is grim, and it doesn’t get nastier than the story of Bernhard Goetz, the “subway vigilante.” Forty-two years later, the raw facts of the case remain shocking: that this act of violence happened at all, in the middle of the afternoon, in a New York City subway car; that the shooter was on the run for nine days until he turned himself in in New Hampshire; and most of all, that a man who could unleash such chaos would become known as a hero in the city, celebrated (at least briefly) for his willingness to stand up for something called public order.Two new books—journalist Elliot Williams’s Five Bullets: The Story of Bernie Goetz, New York’s Explosive ’80s, and the Subway Vigilante Trial That Divided the Nation, and historian Heather Ann Thompson’s Fear and Fury: The Reagan Eighties, the Bernie Goetz Shootings, and the Rebirth of White Rage—explore the Goetz shooting and the ferocious responses to it in the city, with an eye toward what these tell us about racism, crime, and gun violence in the United States. Each book stays close to the events of December 22, 1984, the reaction in the city, and the trials that followed, and yet they come to very different conclusions about its meaning for the city. Williams provides a streamlined, careful narrative of the shooting and its aftermath. It is more conventional, in that Goetz (whom Williams interviewed) is the focus—his psychology, the question of whether there is any way that his actions could be justified, and the way he became a cause célèbre for gun rights organizations including the National Rifle Association. Thompson has a different project. She shows, in depth and detail, the damage done by Goetz’s bullets to the bodies and psyches of the four young men and their families. Relying heavily on the papers of Ron Kuby, the lawyer who represented the Cabey family in civil court, her narrative is suffused with anger and indignation, and at times it can feel as though Thompson is mounting her own brief against Goetz and the machine that promoted his side of the story.The public response to the shooting demonstrated that there was a reservoir of support for revanchist violence if it were justified under the guise of fighting crime. The aggrieved paranoia of white New Yorkers in the early 1980s, Thompson suggests, taught the right a new political language—one that would be adopted and honed by figures including Rudy Giuliani and, ultimately, Donald Trump.Thompson begins her story with Darrell Cabey. We learn that his nickname was Bean, that he spent his early years in Rockaway, Queens, with his parents, four brothers, and a dog named Flocko. The defining event of his childhood came in 1973, when his father, a truck driver, was killed when someone was trying to steal his truck (which was his livelihood). Cabey’s mother, Shirley, tried to keep things together afterward. She managed to move the family to public housing in the South Bronx, where she kept a neat apartment while working in food service at a state psychiatric hospital. Social Security from her husband’s death helped to keep the family from falling apart economically.But Cabey suffered. By 1984, he was 19, an unemployed high school dropout—although one who by all accounts remained very close to his family. On the day he got shot, he had been staying at his grandmother’s apartment, helping to care for her while she had the flu; before he decided to go for a ride downtown, he had been heading home to help care for his younger siblings.Cabey was not especially good friends with the other young men he was hanging out with on December 22: Ramseur, Allen, and Canty. None of them had a regular job. Allen (who was a teenage parent) was selling crack cocaine and using it himself, although after his son was born he tried to get into a drug rehab program only to be deterred by long waiting lists. Canty was also using cocaine; Ramseur, who was known as a jokester, had just gotten a 60-day sentence for smoking marijuana. Even though they didn’t know Cabey well, they agreed to let him join them for the adventures of the day: riding a bus to the subway and heading down to the arcade to break open video game machines.The man they ran into on the subway had his own troubled past. Goetz was born in Queens to two German immigrants who had met in New York in the 1930s. (His mother was Jewish but had converted to Lutheranism.) His father, a small businessman, made enough money to move the family out of the city to Rhinebeck, New York. From the outside, all looked well. Within the family, however, Goetz’s father was a low-grade tyrant who could not tolerate disagreement, disobedience, or independence in his children. As time went by, it became clear that there were more serious problems still. When Goetz was a young teenager, his father was convicted of sexually molesting two 15-year-old boys. (He appealed and managed to avoid serving any time—several counts were dismissed, and he wound up with a suspended sentence on a single charge of disorderly conduct.) But he forced his children to attend every day of the trial as a show of support, and afterward, Goetz was sent to boarding school in Switzerland.When he came back to the United States, Goetz was aimless. He dodged the draft for Vietnam by feigning mental illness. His life was unstable—he dropped out of college once before going back to finish, got married and divorced, fought with his father. In the late 1970s, he moved to Greenwich Village, where he worked from home, running his own company testing and repairing electrical equipment. Living on 14th Street, he became distraught by the street noise and homelessness that were becoming increasingly evident in the neighborhood. He joined the tenants’ association for his building. “Let’s face it; the problem with 14th Street is the Sp-- and the N-- and until we deal with that problem we can’t deal with any others,” he railed at one meeting, after which he was removed from the leadership of the group. Goetz bought his first gun in 1970. He filed for a permit in New York that was denied, but he brought his gun to the city anyway. By 1984, he owned four of them, including the .38 he brought on the subway that day.Much of this basic information is in Williams’s book as well as Thompson’s, but Williams leaves open the question of whether the four young men might have been interacting with Goetz in a way that was intended to intimidate or threaten him. In the story told by Thompson, Goetz is moving through the car, essentially hunting the teenagers down even though two of them are “ten feet away.” He shoots one in the back while he is fleeing, another as he is turning away. Then he turns to Darrell Cabey, by that time sitting in a subway seat hoping that the shooter would move on. In this version of the story, Goetz would not have any reasonable grounds for self-defense at all—certainly not after the first bullets were fired, and probably not even then. There is no cell phone video to consult, but the eyewitness reports seem to corroborate this: No one saw the four young men take out a weapon or use physical threats to force Goetz to hand over money. (The newspapers would later erroneously report that the screwdrivers they carried were “sharpened,” which had an ominous sound—they weren’t, but Goetz never saw the tools or knew they had them.)Goetz’s own original confession in New Hampshire also repeated this story. There, he described shooting the teenagers deliberately, one by one, even checking on the first two to make sure they were out of commission before shooting the second pair. “My intent was to kill,” he said in that first confession. Unstable and embattled, enraged at a city that seemed out of control, Goetz was, in Thompson’s account, primed to hate the authority figures and prissy bureaucrats who seemed scarcely able or simply unwilling to protect the innocent, and all too ready to take matters into his own hands.The public frenzy that followed set a pattern for the rest of the decade and beyond. Goetz’s spectacular violence was treated by many of New York’s politicians and pundits as that of an avenging angel. He was the victim, fragile and scrawny; anyone would do it if they were pushed too far. The language of enraged victimhood would become familiar on the right. Goetz’s sense that his own safety was endangered gave him—and people like him—the right to enact violence with impunity.The Daily News and the New York Post led the way, reporting the story as a “fantasy come true” in which “prey turns predator,” a rare example of the erstwhile crime victim fighting back. Meanwhile, the victims of the shooting would become the targets of the kind of harassment campaign that now is waged on the internet. Even as Cabey slipped into a coma as a result of his injuries (he would emerge with brain damage), the families of the young men received hate mail in the form of Christmas cards, such as one addressed to Cabey’s mother: “I hope your son is crippled for life to remind you that it was your responsibility to raise your child to be a decent human being and not an animal.”The hysteria only increased after Goetz turned himself in. Despite Goetz’s initial statement to police, his lawyers would later make the argument that the teenagers were standing up, surrounding him, acting in a concerted fashion to intimidate him, and that he shot them in a blind panic, a spray of bullets, without any time to consider what he was doing. A ballistics expert buttressed this argument, observing that Cabey could not have sustained his injury if he were shot while sitting down. This distinction was crucial, because to admit that Goetz could have stopped with shooting Canty meant acknowledging that there was no justification for maiming Cabey. Goetz’s lawyers said that his original confession should be discounted, given that Goetz was under stress and had been on the run for nine days. Curtis Sliwa and the Guardian Angels protested his incarceration on Rikers Island, asking why he was imprisoned while the teenagers were free. The Guardian Angels fundraised for his legal defense on the subway, calling him a hero. The chairman of the New York State Republican Party donated $5,000 to his cause, while the comedian Joan Rivers offered to pay his bail and signed her note to him “love and kisses.” The district attorney’s office got vast amounts of mail about the case, three to one in support of the shooter.Goetz was not seen as a mass shooter who had terrorized a subway car full of people and then fled, but as a hero who had stood up against the crime in the city and defended himself and perhaps his fellow passengers. The National Rifle Association, which was becoming more aggressive in its gun rights advocacy, saw an opportunity in the Goetz case to challenge laws in New York that made it harder to carry a concealed weapon or get a permit. The NRA tapped Roy Innis, the head of Brooklyn’s chapter of the Congress of Racial Equality, or CORE, to speak at its press conference in New York; Innis was vociferous in Goetz’s defense, calling him “the avenger for all of us.” The lesson of the Goetz case was that if only more people owned guns, and were allowed to carry them, criminals would think twice before menacing strangers on a train. The NRA took out advertisements: “Self-Protection Is Your Right,” a “basic right held sacred by all law-abiding citizens.”Seeing the swell of public support for Goetz, New York’s elected officials sought to capitalize. Initially, Mayor Ed Koch decried the shooting as reckless and a sign of social breakdown. But as days went by, he began to express his sympathy for Goetz, saying he knew that the public was “fed up” with crime. When a grand jury declined to indict Goetz for anything other than criminal possession of a weapon, the New York Post celebrated the decision as “a victory for common sense and self-defense,” and Koch said he thought the jury was right. (Koch’s police commissioner, Benjamin Ward, the first Black commissioner in city history, disagreed: “You don’t shoot two people running away from you and say it’s self-defense.”)This was not the end of the legal saga. A second grand jury (called with new evidence) did indict Goetz for attempted murder, assault, and reckless endangerment. The criminal trial unfolded over several years and contained many bizarre twists and turns—among them, the decision of the trial judge to allow Goetz’s legal defense team to stage a “re-creation” of the crime within the courtroom, bringing in four Black Guardian Angels (who were buffer and burlier than the actual teenagers) to play the shooting victims while a white defense lawyer played Goetz. The defense was then allowed to take the jurors out of the courtroom to a “field trip” to the subway, where they could imagine the crime unfolding. Perhaps because these tactics helped to sway their minds, the jury found Goetz innocent of everything other than illegal possession of a weapon. Eventually, Cabey’s mother brought a civil suit against Goetz; here, a jury awarded her a judgment of more than $40 million, but it was a Pyrrhic victory, because Goetz claimed he had no money to pay.Goetz went on to become a pop culture reference point, a lone hero whose violence was an inevitable reaction to a city out of control: There was an infamous Subway Vigilante board game modeled on Monopoly in which players race to see who can survive a trip from the Bronx to Brooklyn. (“Punk shot, but still moving. USE TWO BULLETS.”) Even people who might have identified with the young men, not with Goetz, referred to the shootings as part of the fabric of the gritty city. The Beastie Boys and the Wu-Tang Clan allude to it in songs (“Pickpocket gangsters, paying their debts/I caught a bullet in the lung from Bernie Goetz”). And Billy Joel wove it into his montage of the insanity of life in ’80s America: “Foreign debts, homeless vets/AIDS, crack, Bernie Goetz!” All of these, in their way, rendered the horror of the shooting just another part of the daily experience of New York, and by extension of urban America in the 1980s.For Williams, the Goetz story is part of the city’s past, a relic of an uglier New York. For Thompson, the story does not end with the 1980s.For Williams, the Goetz story is part of the city’s past, a relic of an uglier New York. But for Thompson, the story does not end with the 1980s. She suggests that Goetz’s violence and the public response to it came to form a playbook and a strategy for the right. One of Trump’s early interventions in political debate, for example, came when he took out full-page advertisements in the city’s major newspapers in 1989, following the sexual assault and beating of a young white woman jogging in Central Park. “I want to hate these muggers and murderers,” Trump wrote, calling for the five young men suspected in the case to receive the death penalty. “They should be forced to suffer and, when they kill, they should be executed for their crimes.” (At that time, capital punishment was outlawed in New York state.)It is not just the act of violence itself, but the way that it is justified and praised that matters. Heavily armed men can lay claim to extreme vulnerability when their authority seems questioned, even momentarily. Violence in the name of self-defense would become a leitmotif for the right down to the present day. This was the defense cited by George Zimmerman when he shot Trayvon Martin and by Kyle Rittenhouse when he killed two protesters and injured one more at a Black Lives Matter march in the summer of 2020. And one can hear the same theme echoed by the Trump administration as it tries to explain why heavily armed ICE officers were justified in killing Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis.Both Thompson and Williams see the 2023 strangulation of Jordan Neely, a mentally ill homeless subway performer, by former Marine Daniel Penny on the F train as a modern-day Goetz affair. There are certainly differences: Neely was unstable, visibly angry and in pain, rather than threatening violence to get money. But many of the arguments used to defend Penny were identical: Was he right to see Neely as an imminent threat? Was he protecting the vulnerable on the subway, or was he using force to subdue and ultimately kill someone who was vulnerable himself? Whose quality of life matters, whose subway and whose city is it? Like Goetz’s, Penny’s case unfolded at a moment when media was covering a crime wave, in this case a spike in crime on the subway at the height of the pandemic (since reversed). And when Penny stood trial in December 2024, he was acquitted on all charges, walking cleaner than Goetz, who was found guilty of possessing a firearm.One major difference lies perhaps in their lives after acquittal. Penny was championed by the right. He attended the Army-Navy football game as the special guest of JD Vance and Trump (then vice president-elect and president-elect), and, though he had no background in finance, the prominent venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz hired him, commending his “courage in a tough situation.” Goetz’s fate has been quieter. Today, he still lives in New York. He is known as “Squirrel Man” for his penchant for rescuing squirrels in Union Square. Occasionally, Fox News asks him to comment on a story, but he is far from a right-wing star. He has never expressed remorse for shooting the teenagers, and in his interview with Williams, he reiterates that the real problem in the 1980s was people coming down “from Harlem,” and that anyone who didn’t like what he had done on December 22, 1984, could “go fuck themselves.”Meanwhile, the young men Goetz wounded carried their injuries with them. Troy Canty did the best: He got into rehab, learned auto mechanics, and got married. Barry Allen was in and out of prison and rehab; he died in 2021. James Ramseur served time in prison for sexual assault and committed suicide on the twenty-seventh anniversary of the shootings. Darrell Cabey’s mother moved him out of the city, to a care facility in upstate New York. He never recovered from the brain damage he suffered in the coma that followed the shooting, and his sister says he still misses their mother, who died a few years ago.Fear and Fury and Five Bullets join other recent works that revisit the history of New York in the 1980s from the perspective of those who were vilified at the time: Tell Her Story, historian LaShawn Harris’s remarkable elegy for Eleanor Bumpurs, the 66-year-old grandmother who was killed by police in her own home in 1984; journalist Jonathan Mahler’s chronicle of the city in the late 1980s, The Gods of New York, which opens with the funeral of Yusuf Hawkins, the Black teenager killed in Bensonhurst in 1989; and two documentaries about the wrongful convictions of the “Central Park Five,” Ava DuVernay’s When They See Us and Ken Burns’s The Central Park Five. The journalist Leon Neyfakh also devoted a season of his podcast series Fiasco to Goetz, some of which makes it into Thompson’s book. If at the time, the media trashed the victims of these crimes and miscarriages of justice, recent works aim to indict a culture that gleefully cast Black victims as perpetrators.These are important correctives, yet the depiction of New York in the 1980s in most of these accounts remains one-dimensional: The focus remains on the tabloid headlines, even if the victims and the perpetrators have changed places. What is more, the relentless emphasis on violence in the 1980s—the number of homicides had swelled from 390 in 1960 to 1,787 in 1980, the year the NYPD declared the worst for crime in the city’s history—has the effect of underwriting Goetz’s defense.From the vantage point of the present, when the number of homicides has declined to closer to 300, the exceptional level of violence in the 1980s city does stand out. But to understand the embrace of the figure of the vigilante, we need to look away from crime and violence to the larger dynamics of the city in these years. Private security forces were rife in the city in the 1980s: Businesses hired rent-a cops, neighborhoods set up foot patrols, the Guardian Angels stalked the trains in their red berets and combat boots. They patrolled a city where rich and poor were ever more separate. More people in New York in these years were homeless, sleeping outside on the streets and begging on the subways. Healthy young men were suddenly dying of rare and obscure illnesses, filling the wards at St. Vincent’s Hospital. Wall Street wealth flooded the city, transforming the East Village and downtown Brooklyn. And the Murdochs and the conservative radio talk show hosts, the Manhattan Institute think tank elite and the CompStat crime-fighting technocrats, all were poised to take disorientation and turn it into fear.New York has long been celebrated as the center of the left and radical politics for the United States. But over these years of widening inequality, the city was primed to act as an incubator for a politics that glorifies violence enacted in the name of self-protection and communal defense—bringing us, eventually, to where we are today: a country governed by comfortable people who invoke looming menace and imminent danger to justify their own acts of inhumanity.
The Gen Z Organizers Plotting to Take Down Trumpism
When I was 16, I was interviewed by The Mercury News at my first-ever protest. I was standing outside of San Jose City Hall with other high school students in 2018, calling on Congress to protect immigrants brought to the United States as children. The story ran with my name. For the first time, I saw someone like me, a young Latina, quoted in print about immigrant rights. I didn’t know it then, but many years prior, another California teen at that same age, Stephen Miller, was also interviewed and given his first big media opportunities. Miller had advantages in the form of mentors in conservative media who helped him turn his local exposure into national TV appearances and a job in Congress by the time he was 23, the age I am now. As a teen, I had only my protest sign, my voice, and my neighbors. The difference between us wasn’t passion or intelligence; it was access. Miller’s early platform helped him shape a movement built on exclusion. He is now the deputy chief of staff and homeland security adviser for the Trump administration, where he is helping direct anti-immigrant operations that are kidnapping our neighbors and killing innocent people. My generation is determined to build something very different: a world where everyone has a voice; where everyone feels wanted, safe, and welcomed. We are building this world with few resources or connections. While Miller and other MAGA figures rose through cable hits and congressional internships, Gen Z is using its smartphones and organizing in the streets. Recently, The Atlantic’s Adam Serwer described the burgeoning civic ethic that’s rallied residents of the Twin Cities as they have responded to the predations of Miller as “neighborism”—the idea that people should protect and care for one another when institutions fail. For Latinas like me, this is nothing new. It’s how our communities have survived for generations: We watch out for each other’s families, we share information, we organize rides, we deliver groceries. We were building networks of protection long before anyone gave it a name. What some commentators are just discovering, we’ve been perfecting.This past summer, as fear spread through my neighborhood with ICE sightings rising across the Bay Area, I joined a community defense project, the Santa Clara County Rapid Response Network, responding to text message alerts and observing ICE activity to make sure people’s rights were respected. I attended numerous Know Your Rights workshops to educate myself and others. I distributed over 1,000 red cards in cities like San Jose, San Francisco, Santa Ana, and Anaheim. I created a Linktree resource page called Protect Our People, which has received over 100,000 clicks. It provides Know Your Rights cards, immigration updates, and community resources; many other young people are creating similar online resources. We’ve been studying how the demagogues attacking our communities operate. We’ve observed them monopolize audiovisual media, from talk radio to YouTube, by channeling their rage and bigotry. Meanwhile, the political conversation on the left is dominated by institutional liberals and pundits who struggle to convey urgency. They’re insulated from the worst impacts of the policies they debate, and the lack of authenticity is painfully evident. When they speak about mass deportations and disappearances, it doesn’t resonate with most Americans because it doesn’t feel real. In traditional newsrooms, the people shaping narratives are overwhelmingly white, highly educated, and comfortable enough that the stakes remain theoretical. But for people like me, this crisis isn’t something I can blithely sleepwalk through. I see what’s at stake every day. That’s why voices like mine matter right now—because we’re not observing this moment from a distance. We’re living it.My generation is determined to flip a playbook that has served us—and the country—poorly. We’re going on TikTok to fill the vacuum of content with work that is factual and authentic. Last summer, I created a TikTok video explaining how the “big, beautiful bill” would continue to enable mass deportations, allocating $75 billion to ICE, an already overfunded agency. I explained, with genuine urgency, how millions of people would lose access to health insurance and EBT benefits, resources that low-income families rely on to survive. That video reached 500,000 views and received 100,000 likes. Ahead of the 2025 elections, I made another video encouraging people to vote “yes” on Prop 50, which would redraw congressional districts to safeguard democracy, and to drop off their ballots early. It reached 23,000 views and 3,200 likes. Ultimately, Californians passed the ballot initiative. Earlier this year, a federal court denied efforts by the California Republican Party and the Department of Justice to sue California to stop the implementation of Prop 50, which they claim unfairly favors Latinos. Of course, giving Latino voters an equal shot is “unfair.” Republicans have turned grievance into a brand, claiming persecution at every turn, even as their leaders have enjoyed every institutional privilege imaginable. The rest of us don’t have the luxury of grievance politics; we are too busy doing the work, without the powerful mentors, the platforms, or the media pundits on speed dial. After months of mass deportations under this administration, the fear and anxiety in mixed-status communities are constant. We have former Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem threatening us in commercials. “Leave now. If you don’t, we will find you and we will deport you.… You will never return,” she says in one ad. These horrible ads are aired across Latino-dominant platforms like Univision. As a 23-year-old Latina watching these ads, my heart drops thinking of all the heroes who risked everything to create a better future for their children, who are doing everything they can to prop up this country, only to be treated like animals. But my generation will not be silenced. We’re creating a resistance movement from scratch. As institutions ignore us, we are learning to rely on each other, turning neighborhood networks, group chats, and protests into our command centers. My generation takes the tools designed by tech billionaires to capture our attention and flips them into engines of our collective power. I recently graduated from UC Merced with a degree in political science, and plan to pursue a law degree. I plan to use my education to protect people from harm, not to persecute them.For years, I’ve been studying these MAGA provocateurs, not because they inspired me but because they shaped the battlefield my community is forced to navigate. Charlie Kirk is another figure who built an empire by portraying himself as an outsider, all while enjoying the full backing of billionaire donors, right-wing think tanks, and a media ecosystem eager to elevate him. For a long time, I daydreamed about debating him someday. His assassination last year was a disturbing reminder of how violent our political landscape has become. But it also clarified something for me: The fight was never about him or Miller or any provocateur. It’s about the systems that made them powerful, that are injecting hatred into the national bloodstream. And it’s about the infrastructure my generation is building to spread love and neighborliness.This journey has led me to spaces I never imagined, including “Our Unsilencing,” a new initiative at USC Annenberg for increasing the diversity of public intellectuals, and it has changed me. I once believed my voice was my weakness; now I know it is my greatest strength. I plan to take the commentary skills I’ve learned and pour them back into my community.We do have an advantage over the provocateurs: years of building without anyone’s permission, without protection, without a safety net. We learned to navigate systems designed to exclude us. My story is only one thread in something much larger: a generation that refuses to surrender its future, and that has grown strong fighting a rigged system. And we are just getting started.
Zohran Mamdani and the Rise of the Renter Politicians
In 2019, Aparna Raj was living with five friends in a group house in Washington, D.C., that had no shortage of problems. Half the house lost electricity for a time. Worse, there were rats running around. She said her landlord refused to do anything about it. “He couldn’t fix anything,” she said, “but he could send people around to collect rent from us.”In March of that year, she and her roommates learned that even though they’d been paying their rent, the landlord hadn’t been paying the mortgage. The house was foreclosed on and then snatched up by someone who worked in real estate. The tenants tried to lobby their new landlord to fix the problems, but he was only interested in converting the house into condos and flipping it for a profit. A few months later, everyone had to scramble to move—including Raj’s downstairs neighbors, who hadn’t even been notified when the house went into foreclosure.“It just opened my eyes, in that moment; I didn’t know what to do and I didn’t know who to turn to,” she said. “In D.C., we do have really strong tenant protections, but even so, we didn’t have any sort of say in what happened to us.”After that, Raj began volunteering to organize tenants and helping them fight abusive and neglectful landlords. Through that work she realized something else too. “Right now, there are only two renters on the [D.C.] Council, and so few of them understand the experiences that renters face and the instability that renters face, and the fact that we’re just at the whim of our landlords,” she said. “And so going into these meetings with council members, so many of them did not care.”Now Raj, 32, is running to represent Ward 1 on the council, in part to give renters more voice in local politics. Around the country, other renters are doing the same, running for city, state, and federal offices, many of them supported by organizations like Run for Something. Like Raj, many of the renter candidates I spoke to have been shaped by their experiences as tenants. And their policy ideas are intertwined with how they believe the country should resolve the class divides that housing costs are exacerbating.Almost all candidates and elected officials around the country have been homeowners, at least until recently. A 2022 study from Boston University and the University of Georgia found that 93 percent of officeholders at federal, state, and local levels (in 190 of the country’s largest cities) were homeowners, many of them in single-family homes worth more than the median home value in their zip codes. Only 2 percent to 7 percent of officeholders at various levels were renters, while almost half of the people in the cities surveyed were renters.That underrepresentation shapes policy at all levels, and influences the ways that politicians speak about housing—like focusing on homebuying and mortgages. Less attention has been given to the full-blown crisis facing renters. A new report out Thursday from the Harvard University Joint Center for Housing Studies shows exactly how bad it’s gotten. Almost half of all renters were burdened by high costs in 2024, meaning they spent more than a third of their incomes on rent, a sign of financial distress. Just over a quarter are severely cost-burdened, meaning they spent more than half their incomes on rent. And that’s nationwide. The percentage of renters who are cost-burdened has risen in 44 states in the past five years. What’s more surprising is that over the past few years, the number of rent-stressed households in middle- and even high-middle incomes has grown too. While the lowest-income households are the most burdened, 49 percent of renters making between $45,000 to $74,999 are also burdened, a share that has increased almost 10 points since the pandemic.These shifts may have helped to propel candidates last year who promised to address renters’ issues. The most high-profile among them were Zohran Mamdani in New York City and Katie Wilson in Seattle, both renters, who became mayors of their respective cities by defeating establishment Democrats who were homeowners. “More and more people are rent-burdened, and in terms of [that burden] climbing the income scale, I think it just speaks to how unaffordable a lot of places are becoming,” said Whitney Airgood-Obrycki, the lead author of the Harvard report.Spending more on rent makes it harder for renters to save money for a potential down payment on a home, which also reduces homeownership opportunities and keeps the rental market crowded. While the lowest-income families face the most problems—Airgood-Obrycki cited another study showing they only have $210 on average left to spend each month after housing and utility costs are met—the high cost of housing reduces spending for more comfortable families too. It all has a greater impact on the cities they live in and on the country as a whole. Because the middle class tends to be more politically engaged—and politicians are more responsive to them—we’re likely to see the needs of renters becoming a more prominent electoral issue. “I think there is this growing call for solutions and for people to do something about it, and that’s gaining slightly more momentum,” she said. “And the other place we’re really seeing it is in statewide zoning reforms.”Many reforms around the country have been pushed by renters, or people with organized renters in their coalition. Claire Valdez, who rents in Ridgewood, Queens, and was elected to the New York State Assembly in 2024, is now running to replace U.S. Representative Nydia Velázquez, who is retiring. Valdez faces a crowded field, but if she wins she will join Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who represents a nearby district, as a member of the Democratic Socialists of America and a renter in Congress who is fighting a new class politics from the left. “I think so often we’re treated as … people who are not engaged in neighborhoods, who are transient, and sometimes that is true, because rents go up [and] we’re forced to move around because we’re seeking affordability in our housing,” she said. “We deserve the same stability as homeowners, and the same representation, as well.”New York City may become the center of reform. Mamdani reopened the city’s Office to Protect Tenants when his term began earlier this year. Its new head, Cea Weaver, another DSA member, has come under fire for a resurfaced 2019 social media post in which she denounced homeownership as a “weapon of white supremacy.” She said in January that this is not “how I would say things today,” and seizing private property is undoubtedly a fringe position on the renter left. No one I spoke to said anything of the sort. Instead, candidates tout ideas for increasing access to homeownership, such as nonprofit development and social housing, as well as opportunities for tenants to buy their apartment buildings to run as cooperatives.For renter candidates, the issue isn’t just that housing is unaffordable. It’s that current laws meant to protect tenants are sporadically enforced or require tenants to organize and sue, and that politicians reflexively take the side of homeowners and landlords. “They put a lot of money into these races, and they prop up a lot of these mainstream politicians,” Conrad Blackburn, who’s running to represent Harlem in the New York State Assembly, said of landlords. “Some of them are beholden to the interest of real estate and not the interest of the tenants and normal people. The landlord lobby is huge.”Some tenant protections, like rent stabilization, don’t exist in many cities, either. “It breaks my heart as a state representative now when I get these calls asking me, ‘Is it legal for my landlord to increase my rent $400 to $500 at once?’” said David Morales, a state representative in Rhode Island and renter who is running for mayor of Providence. “And when I tell them that it is certainly legal, then they have to start trying to figure out what their next plan is, whether that is trying to … couch-surf until they figure out where they’re eventually going to move, or if it just means that they pick up, leave Providence, and go to a neighboring city or town—which, more often than not, is usually what ends up happening,” he said.That’s exactly what these candidates don’t want people to have to do. Henry Mantel, who is running for Los Angeles City Council and is also a renter and a tenant rights attorney, said these second-order effects of the housing crisis—young people moving away to start families, and people having less money to spend in their community—matter to everyone, whether they rent or own. “The housing crisis really does relate back to every issue,” he said. With older voters, he tells them if they want to have grandkids living nearby, they need to support the construction of more affordable housing. And if California wants to maintain its number of Electoral College votes, and therefore its political power, it needs to stop the flood of people leaving the state for affordability reasons, he said.“A big part of my campaign is making it clear L.A. can’t improve unless we can solve this crisis,” he said. “This is not a recent problem. It’s definitely not just this City Council’s fault, but they really are not treating this crisis with the kind of urgency it deserves.”
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