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The Unusual Working-Class Message That Turned a Deep-Red District Blue
• Feb 4, 2026

The Unusual Working-Class Message That Turned a Deep-Red District Blue

The issues that have worked for Democrats around the country this election season—affordability and working-class stability chief among them—also worked for Taylor Rehmet, a union president and machinist who beat his Trump-backed opponent for a deep-red state Senate seat in the Fort Worth area of Texas last weekend. But his platform included something more unusual and a little retro: a promise to return vocational education to public high schools.Rehmet, 33, is the son of blue-collar Republicans: His father was an airplane mechanic, and his mother was a hairdresser. He has said he plans to expand vocational education as part of an effort at “rebuilding the pipeline between schools and good-paying jobs,” and made it part of his pro–working class pitch. “No matter what party you’re in, if you work hard and focus on the issues—such as lowering costs, health care, and really focusing on working people—that’s how you’ll get people to show up and vote,” he said on ABC News Live after his victory.The focus comes at a time when Republicans are paying lip service to American workers while dismantling public education, the economy, and pro-worker laws. At the same time, more and more American families are anxious about their economic future and how to maintain stable careers that will survive the next technological revolution. Talking about vocational training—now commonly referred to as career and technical education, or CTE—may hit the sweet spot for many voters. It’s a message other Democrats could pick up.“CTE enrollment is up almost 10 percent over the last three years, which is a big jump in a short period of time,” said Taylor White, director of postsecondary pathways for youth at New America, a nonpartisan think tank in Washington, D.C. “[Rehmet] is tapping into something that is for real happening, not just in his backyard.”The U.S. education system for at least a generation has focused on sending high school students to college, owing to the decline in manufacturing in the last half of the twentieth century and the expansion of service-sector and knowledge-worker careers that required college educations. That has meant a lot of changes in practice, one of them being an under-investment in the kinds of agricultural, woodworking, shop, home economics, and other career-focused classes that had been common in high schools until then.There were some good reasons for the shift. It seemed that college educations held the key to the best-paying jobs, and it’s still true that college graduates earn a wage premium. And in the past, some of the vocational education pathways amounted to tracking some students into classes that closed off college opportunities and weren’t always academically rigorous enough to truly prepare them for jobs. That made parents skeptical of CTE in general.“It was absolutely terrible for many years,” said Mary Alice McCarthy, director of New America’s Center on Education and Labor. “Researchers in the ’70s and ’80s and ’90s found that it was a space where students of color, Black students in particular, were tracked into these programs. They were dead-end programs. They were very low quality. And, you know, they just had a terrible reputation, and vocational education had a lot of stigma associated with it.”The reforms since then have been significant, she said. “We don’t usually have really good stories of reform to tell in the education space, but career and technical education is one of those stories,” she said. So much so that the College Board is extending its Advanced Placement program, which is college-level courses offered in high schools that can allow students to earn college credit, into some CTE classes. Students who take CTE can still go to college as well, so it no longer diverts students away from earning bachelor’s degrees if they want them.All of this speaks to the appeal of these classes to students and their parents, who are seeking AI-proof career paths and rethinking the sizable investment it takes to go to college. But federal funding for CTE is still lacking; it received almost $1.5 billion in 2025, just 14 percent more than in 2008—not enough to keep pace with inflation. And President Donald Trump is slowly dismantling the Department of Education, impacting some of these programs.“They are trying to move parts of the Department of Education which are really necessary for career and technical education, vocational programs and others, to different agencies,” said Veronica Goodman, senior director of workforce development policy at the Center for American Progress. “And as we’ve seen, that’s already led to a lot of disarray for programs and workers and the institutions that rely on these funds. And so I think that’s definitely going to have an impact, a negative impact, on the preparation that students and workers are getting.”That will mean even fewer students could have access to those programs than do today. At the same time, Trump’s dismantling of many of the programs in the Inflation Reduction Act and other manufacturing policies passed by President Joe Biden means that the apprenticeships and entry-level jobs that could provide an alternative pathway into those careers could disappear too.While expanding CTE might make sense on its own, Rehmet also framed his support as a way to bolster his support for public education in general. He says he wants to increase teacher pay and repeal the state’s voucher system, which diverts government money to private schools. This message apparently resonated in a district where his opponent, Republican Leigh Wambsganss, had helped fuel an anti–diversity, equity, and inclusion push at local libraries and on the school board—which had already inspired a backlash. CTE education is part of Rehmet’s broader message about reinvesting in public schools and helping the working class find stable jobs in an economy where they can afford houses, groceries, and more stable lives. It’s part of an overarching message about rebuilding unions and the working class.His message could also resonate in working-class communities beyond Texas. “This is an area that should rise up in the priorities of progressives and Democrats,” McCarthy said. “We’ve been so focused on a college mentality, but students and families are voting with their feet, and they are picking CTE.”

Trump’s New “Prison Camp” Threat Unleashes Fury Even in MAGA Country
• Feb 4, 2026

Trump’s New “Prison Camp” Threat Unleashes Fury Even in MAGA Country

When Stephen Miller offered his first big rollout of Donald Trump’s immigration agenda during the 2024 campaign, he demonstrated great enthusiasm for the idea of giant migrant camps. He gushed about creating “vast holding facilities” built on “open land,” which would enable Trump to escalate the volume and speed of deportations to unprecedented heights. Trembling with excitement, Miller vowed: “President Trump will do whatever it takes.”But a funny thing has happened with Miller’s authoritarian fever dreams. As plans for these new detention facilities have become public, they’re encountering opposition in some very unlikely places. Notably, that includes regions that backed Trump in 2024. Which in turn captures something essential about this moment: The public backlash unleashed by Trump’s immigration agenda runs far deeper than revulsion at imagery of ICE violence. It’s now seemingly coalescing against the goal of mass removals as a broader ideological project.We’re now learning that this year, Immigration and Customs Enforcement plans to retrofit around two dozen vast new facilities. In keeping with Trump-Miller’s visions, ICE vows to detain an additional 80,000 people in them. Some will reportedly hold up to 10,000 detainees apiece. In other words, the Trump-Miller threat to create a system of new detention camps is just getting underway in earnest.To put a ghoulish twist on the oft-discussed ideal of bureaucratic “capacity,” this will allow Trump and Miller to imprison and then deport vastly more people a whole lot faster. Right now, more than 70,000 migrants are languishing in detention—a record—but the administration is running out of space. Add another 80,000 beds, and it would supercharge expulsion capacity.Yet these detention dreams are hitting stiff opposition. ICE wants to buy a warehouse in Virginia’s Hanover County, which went for Trump by 26 points in 2024 and combines rural territory with Richmond’s northern suburbs. Residents recently turned out in force and angrily condemned the proposed sale, with local reports suggesting only a “handful” backed it. The GOP-heavy Board of Supervisors opposed the transaction. The warehouse owner canceled the sale.Meanwhile, in New Jersey, the Republican-dominated Roxbury Township Council, in slightly-Trump-leaning Morris County, recently voted unanimously to oppose ICE’s plans to buy a warehouse there, with some locals sharply protesting the scheme for humanitarian reasons. The Republican mayor of Oklahoma City came out against a proposed ICE warehouse, with the owner also nixing the sale. Officials in places like Kansas City, Missouri, and Salt Lake City, Utah, are also dead set against plans for ICE camps in their locales.Guess what: The opposition is only getting started. As MS NOW’s Rachel Maddow noted in a useful overview of the opposition Monday night, we’re already seeing mass protests outside existing facilities. Those are smaller than some of the gargantuan new camps ICE hopes to create, yet migrant deaths are already soaring in the current facilities, and the bigger ones will be even worse. “If they build them, they will fill them,” Maddow said, labeling them “prison camps.” She added: “How do you think those facilities are going to be run?”The pushback has come together surprisingly quickly. What explains this? A bizarrely overlooked finding in a recent Pew Research poll sheds some light: It finds that a huge majority of Americans oppose mass immigrant detention. The wording is critical here:Do you favor or oppose keeping large numbers of immigrants in detention centers while their cases are decided?Favor: 35 percentOppose: 64 percentNote that huge majorities are against keeping immigrants in detention while their cases are being decided. This is a decisive repudiation of a key pillar of MAGA ideology. Trump and Miller have long treated the release of immigrants awaiting court dates as something akin to profound national humiliation, even a harbinger of cultural decay and civilizational decline. But the broad American mainstream—including 59 percent of white voters in the Pew poll—appears to oppose detaining them. With majorities also opposing deporting noncriminal undocumented immigrants and longtime residents, that MAGA understanding is just not widely shared. For Trumpworld, mass detention isn’t merely about facilitating deportations. It’s also supposed to correct the grievous national wound that previous presidents inflicted by releasing migrants into the interior. Is it really possible that majorities are actually OK with such a horror? Apparently it is.That wasn’t supposed to happen. After Trump’s 2024 victory, some analysts suggested that his win reflected a decisive cultural shift in the direction of his restrictionist views on immigration, one that Democrats must accommodate themselves to going forward. Call it the “MAGA moment” thesis.But it’s hard to square that idea with what we’re seeing now. As political scientist Julia Azari argues, notions of such a shift are bound up with the deeper idea that the culture is undergoing a meaningful conservative reorientation on race and nationalism. Yet that now looks baseless, Azari notes, because “the public seems to be turning against some of the hardcore principles of MAGA in that regard, especially on immigration.”To wit: Trump’s overall approval on the issue is in the toilet, and ICE has become a pariah agency. Majorities oppose deporting longtime residents with jobs and no criminal record and view immigration as a positive good for the country. In that Pew poll, 60 percent of Americans oppose pausing visa applications for the 75 countries Trump has singled out, apparently in keeping with his hatred for “shithole countries,” and two-thirds oppose ending asylum applications for people fleeing horrors abroad. So, at the most fundamental level, large majorities are rejecting both the Trump-Miller ethnonationalist reengineering of the country and their effort to choke off all humanitarian pathways for settling here. Such public sentiments seem very much at odds with diagnoses of a durable Trumpist-nationalist moment.Relatedly, Substacker Brian Beutler recently argued that social signaling is generating opposition to Trump’s worst policies, as more and more ordinary people see them as shameful and heinous in the most basic moral and human terms. Something like that is helping drive opposition to detention centers: See this remarkable column in the Kansas City Star that seeks to shame warehouse owners into refraining from selling to ICE, arguing that doing so risks social ostracism. Similar efforts probably helped persuade owners to nix selling in Oklahoma and deep-red parts of Virginia. The growing opposition to ICE prison camps suggests much, much more of this to come.In short: If there ever was a big “MAGA moment” cultural shift on immigration, well, it’s already long gone.

Trump and Musk Knew Exactly Who Jeffrey Epstein Was
• Feb 4, 2026

Trump and Musk Knew Exactly Who Jeffrey Epstein Was

Elon Musk is very insistent that he never visited Jeffrey Epstein’s private island in the Caribbean. That may very well be true. There is nothing in the millions of Epstein’s emails to suggest that Musk did—or, for that matter, that he ever flew on the “Lolita Express,” the alleged sex trafficker’s infamous jet.“I had very little correspondence with Epstein and declined repeated invitations to go to his island or fly on his ‘Lolita Express,’” Musk wrote on his X platform on Friday, not long after emails between him and Epstein were released by the federal government, “but was well aware that some email correspondence with him could be misinterpreted and used by detractors to smear my name.” There’s always a “but.” While there’s very little direct correspondence between Musk and Epstein—at least that we know of today, with millions of files still unreleased—it’s easy to see why Musk felt the need to explain himself. In 2012 and 2013, he wrote to Epstein on several occasions asking about visiting his island. In one email, Musk inquired which night would feature the “wildest party.” In another, he initially begged off attending a party Epstein was throwing during the United Nations General Assembly because he thought it meant it would be full of diplomats. Epstein, who pleaded guilty in 2008 to soliciting prostitution from someone under 18, responded that “there is no one over 25 and all very cute.”The email chain ends there, and there’s no evidence Musk attended the party or any other event Epstein hosted. For Musk, that’s enough. He has continued his grandstanding about Epstein, demanding the federal government do more to prosecute people in the files—but not him, of course. “When there is at least one arrest, some justice will be done. If not, this is all performative,” he wrote. “Nothing but a distraction.” The distraction he is referring to, it seems, is his relationship with Epstein. But the emails between Musk and Epstein are far from exculpatory. It’s obvious from Musk’s limited correspondence with Epstein that he was fully aware of Epstein’s reputation. Epstein was a guy who reliably threw parties full of “girls.” When, at one point, Epstein informed Musk that the “ratio” on his island may make Talulah Riley, Musk’s wife at the time, uncomfortable, the tech billionaire was blunt: “Ratio is not a problem for Talulah.” Musk, it seems, had few concerns about corresponding or—whether or not they ever actually hung out—associating with Epstein given his reputation. To the contrary, it seems to have been the point of associating with Epstein. Of course, the millions of emails released last week make it clear that a lot of other powerful people, most of them men, felt the exact same way. There is a sense of admiration, sometimes even envy, in their correspondence with Epstein. Mostly, though, they thought he was a good hang—not in spite of his reputation but because of it. Musk’s defense is notable because it mirrors the one offered by Donald Trump of his yearslong friendship with Epstein, which began in the late 1980s and ended in the mid-2000s. But Trump’s relationship with Epstein was not limited to correspondence. Indeed, given Trump’s relative paucity of grown-up friendships, one could credibly make the case that his relationship with Epstein was one of the deepest of his adult life. (Epstein told the journalist Michael Wolff—whose disturbingly close relationship with his “source” is detailed throughout the files—that Trump was once his “closest friend.”) “I’ve known Jeff [Epstein] for 15 years. Terrific guy,” Trump told New York magazine in 2002. “He’s a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side.” Around the same time, he sent Epstein a birthday card featuring a hand-drawn silhouette. “A pal is a wonderful thing,” Trump wrote. “Happy Birthday—and may every day be another wonderful secret.” Trump has since suggested that his relationship with Epstein deteriorated when he learned that his friend was a creep—specifically when Epstein attempted to “steal” a young masseuse (possibly Virginia Giuffre, who recently published a memoir detailing Epstein’s abuse and who died by suicide last year) who worked at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club. Trump’s allies have repeated that claim ad nauseam, also claiming that Epstein was “banned” from the club at the same time. There’s no evidence that’s true. (Epstein, it seems, was never a dues-paying member of Mar-a-Lago but was treated as one, given his close relationship with Trump.) Instead, the best contemporaneous evidence of their falling out suggests that it was over real estate, not Epstein’s treatment of women: The two engaged in a bitter battle to buy a historic Palm Beach property in 2004 that ultimately destroyed their friendship.That real estate, not misogyny or criminal sexual activity, destroyed Trump and Epstein’s relationship makes sense because it’s clear from public comments and private correspondence that Trump was aware that Epstein was a creep—he just thought it was cool. Every day with him, after all, was a “wonderful secret.” The fact that Epstein liked women on the “younger side” was something to toast. The extent to which Trump participated in Epstein’s criminal activity is not clear. But what is obvious is that he was well aware of who his friend was, and that it was worth celebrating. He liked Epstein because he liked young girls and was frequently surrounded by them. Which is also why, years after Epstein and Trump’s falling out, Musk wrote to him to ask when he would be throwing the “wildest” party.If you are looking for people to prosecute, as Musk claims he is, the millions of documents released by the Department of Justice have many leads but few obvious open and shut cases. What they show instead is something different—but similarly repugnant. Again and again, powerful men—Musk and Wolff, certainly, but also Bill Gates, Steve Bannon, Peter Thiel, Prince Andrew, New York Giants owner Steve Tisch, former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, and recently named CBS contributor Peter Attia among them—seek out Epstein. There is no indication in their emails that they are unaware of Epstein’s reputation or status as a convicted sex offender. In some cases—Prince Andrew being perhaps the most notable—the friendship appears to be built around that fact. But in others, it’s clear that Epstein’s correspondents simply don’t care. Instead, Epstein is a confidant, someone to talk with about business, the state of the world, and, in many cases, girls. He’s not a pariah but a valued member of a social circle that wields enormous power in the world.The handful of examples of people turning down Epstein only make that clearer. (When The Daily Beast founder Tina Brown was asked to attend a dinner with Epstein, Woody Allen, and Prince Andrew in 2010, she replied, “What the fuck is this … ? The paedophile’s ball?”) The general public may not have known who Epstein was, but elites did. They knew he was a criminal sex offender and that he was a creep—and that’s precisely why so many of them kept hanging out with him.Musk is pushing for “prosecutions” for cynical reasons: Doing so downplays his own relationship with Epstein by drawing attention to people who engaged in real criminal conduct. He’s right on this much: It is absurd that no one has been prosecuted as a result of the millions of documents that federal law enforcement officers have acquired in the Epstein investigation. Still, Musk’s demand is somewhat beside the point. The millions of emails released by the Department of Justice mostly don’t show glaring criminal conduct or detail the inner workings of what Musk alleges: a sinister and sophisticated cabal of pedophiles.Indeed, most of the emails are quite banal. But what they do show is nevertheless extremely bleak: They depict a global, but primarily American, elite–one that Musk and Trump belong to—that openly embraced and celebrated a man who preyed on underage girls. The people corresponding with him quite literally ran the country’s government and economy, or are doing so today. When they wanted to hang out with girls or attend a wild party, they got in touch with their pal Jeff. And they didn’t stop until he got thrown in prison—a second time.

The Religious Left Is a Leader in the ICE Resistance
• Feb 4, 2026

The Religious Left Is a Leader in the ICE Resistance

You can watch this episode of Right Now With Perry Bacon above or by following this show on YouTube or Substack. You can read the transcript here. The “religious right” has long been a key part of Republican politics. But the role of the faithful in the GOP is shifting, says David Buckley, a political science professor at the University of Louisville and expert on the role of religion in politics. With Roe v. Wade overturned, conservative Catholics and Protestants aren’t as focused on the issue of abortion. And in some ways, they aren’t pushing the party at all. Instead, Trump has united religious conservatives and nonreligious conservatives on issues like opposing transgender rights and diversity and inclusion initiatives. On the Democratic side, even as a growing number of Democratic voters are nonreligious, Buckley says progressive Christians, Jews, and Muslims play an important role in the party and other left-wing causes. Catholic groups and leaders, he argues, are playing an important role in the mobilizations against the administration in Minneapolis and more broadly in defending immigrants across the country.

A Guy Who Never Dies feat. David J. Roth | Chapo Trap House
1:31:47
• Feb 4, 2026

A Guy Who Never Dies feat. David J. Roth | Chapo Trap House

Trump Spirals Into Crazed Fury After Harvard Humiliates Him Very Badly
• Feb 4, 2026

Trump Spirals Into Crazed Fury After Harvard Humiliates Him Very Badly

After The New York Times reported that President Trump has backtracked on a major demand he’d made on Harvard University, he spiraled out of control in three wild tirades. He angrily insisted on a correction from the Times and levied unhinged new threats against Harvard, demanding a new billion-dollar extortion payment while calling for the university’s criminal prosecution. Harvard officials clearly leaked word of Trump’s backtracking to humiliate him at a moment of political weakness. It worked: Trump appeared panicked and weak as he fired off half-cocked threats. Which raises a question: Why don’t more institutions grasp that standing firm against Trump is the only way? We talked to Ryan Enos, a Harvard political scientist who has long argued for a strong stand. He explains the internal politics at Harvard leading to its current posture, why this fight’s outcome has broader significance amid our slide into authoritarianism, and what the prospects are for Harvard holding firm. Listen to this episode here. A transcript is here.

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