The number of journalists killed by Israel is remarkably high even when compared to the number of journalists killed in other conflict zones.
On Wednesday morning, Homeland Security agents entered a Columbia University dormitory and detained student Elaina Aghayeva. ICE claimed that the reason for the detention was Aghayeva’s failure to attend some classes 10 years ago—an already outrageous notion—but what really captured public attention was the manner in which her arrest was conducted.In a public statement, Columbia acting president Claire Shipman claimed that “federal agents made misrepresentations to gain entry to the building to search for a ‘missing person.’” Word quickly spread that agents had allegedly represented themselves as NYPD officers to Columbia staff in order to gain access to Aghayeva’s dorm without a warrant signed by a judge, along with the more far-fetched rumor that they had used spoofed NYPD badges.That Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents undertook this fakery seemed to have been confirmed by Manhattan Borough President Brad Hoylman-Sigal, who tweeted that agents had “impersonated NYPD with fake badges” before backtracking with an update that called this “unconfirmed.” In a separate press release, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries also referenced ICE agents “impersonating NYPD officers.”The whole story reminded me of an investigation I published almost eight years ago on ICE’s use of so-called ruses and misrepresentations to make arrests, a tactic that not only was long-standing but had been explicitly included in the agency’s Fugitive Operations Handbook. Yet even then, the question of how legal these tactics were was far from clear. As NYU Law professor Nancy Morawetz told me at the time, “There is a pretty strong argument, I think, that it is impersonating a police officer,” when a federal agent implies that they are NYPD.Still, even the cases I looked at then weren’t quite as clear-cut as the allegations here. There’s little doubt that federal personnel are allowed to represent themselves generally as “police” or “law enforcement,” and have been doing so for many years. What could set this incident apart are two factors: First, if the agents described themselves as NYPD in particular, that moves from vague insinuation to direct impersonation, and second, if the agents used that impersonation to gain access to private property and a private residence without a judicial warrant, they’ve now used that impersonation to violate due process rights pretty clearly.In the ruses I covered years ago, agents were mostly trying to get people to leave their homes or meet them places where they could then make an arrest in at least a semi-public area. A misrepresentation like the one alleged in the Columbia case, which is used to evade what would otherwise be a requirement to present a warrant, could well be a Fourth Amendment violation—even if they did not claim to be local police. Think about it like this: If the FBI wanted to search your home but did not have a warrant to do so, they couldn’t just pretend to be the electric company to gain access. A judge would bat that down in an instant.The potential constitutional violation is something that would be up to Aghayeva to pursue, but the impersonation aspect is easy fodder for at least an inquiry by the NYPD and local prosecutors, likely in Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s office. If it remains unconfirmed whether this happened, it would seem like a clear priority for investigators to find out conclusively. I have a hard time imagining almost any other circumstance in which a credible allegation of people falsely claiming to be members of the NYPD would not be exhaustively investigated.That Aghayeva has been released (apparently at least in part as a result of Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s personal entreaty to Trump, whom he’d been visiting earlier in the day) does not make this a moot point. If agents claimed to be NYPD in order to arrest someone in a private building, they fulfilled both requirements under New York Penal Law § 190.26 for a class E felony, regardless of what happened next. This is not as visceral a crime as the daylight fatal shootings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis, but it remains a serious crime that is quite corrosive to local governance.The other two citywide elected officials seem at least tentatively on board. Standing outside Columbia’s gates on Broadway, Public Advocate Jumaane Williams told me that the question of whether ICE agents impersonated NYPD officers “needs to be investigated.” Comptroller Mark Levine emphasized that he had not received any confirmation of whether the impersonation had indeed happened, but “if it did, I would find that to be outrageous and probably illegal.”Levine also brought up that agents entering private property under false pretenses for immigration enforcement could violate other local statutes, and “if, in fact, as it appears to be the case, they violated city law, there absolutely must be a full investigation and accountability” that could, in theory, include arrests. Mamdani himself has yet to say anything definitive on the matter, and Bragg’s office did not return a request for comment about whether it would be opening an inquiry into it. Still, this would seem like an obvious opportunity for the city to draw a line in the sand and defend the integrity of its own law enforcement and sanctuary provisions.The overarching story of the second Trump term has been a kind of relentless tire-kicking to see just how far it can get away with running roughshod over everything from separation of powers to constitutional constraints. Columbia itself paid a $221 million settlement and implemented changes to its admissions and programs in what was widely understood to be a shakedown by the Trump administration, yet here it is being deceived and having one of its students detained by the very same government to which it had already kowtowed.Mamdani may enjoy a bizarrely warm relationship with Trump—whose Achilles’ heel seems to be charismatic men—but it’s the viziers like Stephen Miller and Tom Homan who are running the enforcement policy on the ground. If they get the message that NYC won’t do anything about agents impersonating the NYPD, they’ll just keep looking to find out what else they can get away with.
You can watch this episode of Right Now With Perry Bacon above or by following this show on YouTube or Substack. You can read a transcript here. In Texas next week, Representative Jasmine Crockett and Texas state Representative James Talarico are facing off in a U.S. Senate primary that has drawn national attention. Polls show a very tight race. On the Republican side, incumbent Senator John Cornyn is struggling to hold off Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton. And in a U.S. House primary, longtime Representative Al Green could be knocked off by a Democratic challenger. Justin Miller, political editor for the Texas Observer, breaks down those races in the latest edition of Right Now. Miller argues that Talarico is benefiting from the perception that he has a better chance in a general election than Crockett. On the GOP side, Paxton is considered more of a MAGA Republican than Cornyn, a key advantage in a GOP primary, says Miller.
Len Phillips had just finished posting a yellow sign underneath the camera when an elderly man pulled up, exited his pickup truck, and shuffled over to take a look. “A.I. camera,” the sign read. “Your movements have just been logged into a private searchable database.” The man gazed up at the camera overhead, then back down. He paused. Then he went back to his truck and pulled out a chainsaw.“I was like, ‘No, no, no!’” Phillips told me recently regarding the January interaction. “He’s like, ‘Why?’ I was like, ‘That’s just gonna make it worse. They’ll put four over here if you do that!’ And he put it down. He’s like, ‘We have to get rid of these things!’”Phillips is the head of DeFlock Atlanta, one of many local groups around the country mounting campaigns against Flock Safety. The nation’s leading provider of automated license plate readers, or ALPRs, Flock has drawn ire over the past year amid revelations that Immigration and Customs Enforcement is tapping into its data as part of President Trump’s mass deportation regime.None of the people I interviewed for this story advocated for the outright destruction of Flock equipment, but it’s not uncommon. Last October, vandals chopped down three Flock cameras in Eugene, Oregon. “Hahaha get wrecked ya surveilling fucks,” said a sticker affixed to one of the metal stumps. The same month, 41-year-old Jeffrey Sovern was arrested after allegedly disassembling 13 Flock license plate readers around Suffolk, Virginia. “MY ABSOLUTE HERO!” a woman commented on Facebook, under a link to his mug shot. “I don’t know anything else about him, but I would support a GiveSendGo for his legal fees just because he destroyed a dozen unconstitutional Flock cameras!”Sure enough, two days after the arrest, a “Jeff Sovern Legal Defense Fund” was launched on GoFundMe by one “Jeff S.” “I appreciate everyone’s right to privacy, enshrined in the Fourth Amendment,” the description reads. “If this fund grows in excess of what it costs to fight this fight, I will forward any to … efforts to rollback intrusive surveillance.” To date, the page has raised more than $4,200. (The New Republic contacted “Jeff S.” through GoFundMe, but he declined to comment or provide information confirming he was Sovern, citing privacy concerns.) The ALPRs that Sovern allegedly destroyed are simple cameras. They photograph license plates of passing vehicles and upload the pictures onto a cloud server, along with time stamps and other identifying information about the vehicle, such as its make and color. Users are encouraged to share Flock data with each other, creating AI-powered law enforcement databases where a search for something like “red Audi with broken taillight” will yield data on all cars deemed to match the description. The largest of these databases is Flock’s national search tool, which allows local police departments to query billions of snapshots and track vehicles far outside their jurisdictions.All told, Flock represents a staggeringly powerful—and profitable—mass surveillance system. Its ALPRs are used by over 1,000 businesses and roughly one-third of 18,000 law enforcement agencies in the United States, according to Holly Beilin, Flock’s senior director of communications. While Beilin wouldn’t provide the number of active Flock cameras in the U.S., the ACLU estimates there to be 90,000. Flock used ALPRs, along with other products like drones and gunshot detectors, to generate $285 million in revenue in 2024. Venture capital titans Andreessen Horowitz recently valued the company at $7.5 billion.But growing in concert with Flock is an organized resistance movement which has notched more than a few wins. Its nexus is DeFlock.me, which hosts a crowdsourced map of ALPRs and warns readers that the cameras are “a serious risk to your privacy and civil liberties.” The website lists 15 local anti-Flock groups around the country, though its creator, Will Freeman, estimates there to be 30 in total. While many of these groups use “DeFlock” in their name, Freeman stressed that all operate independently of his site.Flock CEO Garrett Langley is not a fan. In an interview last year, he called DeFlock a “terroristic organization.” Freeman was unsurprised to hear it. “They don’t like my site,” he said. “Anything that provides real transparency they don’t like.”Langley has a habit of hyperbole. Last fall, he offered the modest prediction that Flock will eliminate almost all crime in the U.S. within a decade. The technology is indeed praised by police for making it easier to catch certain criminals. But independent studies on its effectiveness are hard to come by. Flock has also been criticized for publishing exaggerated statistics to promote its products. In 2022, the company bragged that cameras in San Marino, California, had caused burglaries to drop 80 percent over five months; Forbes later reported that burglaries had actually increased in the years after Flock installed its cameras.Even if Flock’s cameras and tracking network do help solve some crimes, critics say it’s not worth the cost to our privacy—not to mention people’s Fourth Amendment rights. Police have been caught illegally using Flock data to locate a woman seeking abortion services, stalk and harass people, monitor protests, and aid ICE. “At minimum, this dragnet surveillance means warrantless tracking of everyone on the road,” the ACLU warned last year. “At worst, it means a digital police state wherein law enforcement officials … can track protesters, political opponents, immigrants, patients, and others not suspected of any crime and use the information to hurt them.” (Dan Haley, chief legal officer at Flock, responded that “Flock is used … millions of times a year, and the incidences of abuse are few and far between.” He added that all evidence of misuse is recorded in Flock’s software.)Flock was founded in Atlanta in 2017, so it’s somewhat surprising that the city’s first resistance group was only formed this January. Phillips, the group’s founder, doesn’t consider himself an activist—“I’ve never gone to a protest or anything,” he said—but has been concerned about government surveillance for years. “I was the tin hat person,” he said.DeFlock Atlanta has logged hundreds of cameras on DeFlock.me, and is erecting large yellow signs underneath them, warning residents they’re being watched. Phillips is planning an in-person protest soon, and has (unsuccessfully) petitioned private businesses to relinquish their cameras. All the while, Flock’s influence in the city is growing. Last year, DeKalb County entered a 10-year, $18 million contract with the company for cameras and drones. Fulton County public schools are also contracting with Flock, while Atlanta police were recently revealed to be using the cameras to track noncitizens.Some in DeFlock Atlanta have proposed more aggressive resistance. “When they had the rush of people starting to pay attention, everybody went, ‘Let’s just get Sawzalls and cut them down,’” Phillips said. But he advocates for a lighter touch. “If people realize how much they’re being watched, we won’t have to cut anything down,” he said, suggesting public pressure will force officials to remove the cameras themselves.Some communities have already proved this point. Austin, Texas, paused its Flock program after local pushback last June; Evanston, Illinois, terminated theirs in August. According to NPR, at least 30 localities “have either deactivated their Flock cameras or canceled their contracts since the beginning of 2025.” Ithaca, New York’s anti-Flock group is close to doing the same. Flock Off was founded last summer after the city installed 22 ALPRs in 2024. There are now more than 50 in the whole of Tompkins County. The cameras were funded by a state grant for combating gun violence, which allocated $69,300 to the city and $160,650 to the county for Flock cameras. But researchers question whether the equipment has actually reduced violent crime. “There’s no basis in the argument that the cameras have contributed to any sort of decline in gun violence in the area,” said Eric Simmons, a student studying at Cornell Law School’s Civil Rights and Civil Liberties Clinic. News outlets such as the Ithaca Journal and 607 News Now report that police have used the cameras to find car thieves and a lost elderly man, but do not mention violent crime. Ithaca Police Chief Thomas Kelly did not respond to a request for comment. Through petitions, public comments, and the press, Flock Off has somewhat stymied its namesake. In October, the county sheriff’s office stopped sharing Flock data with counties that partner with ICE. That didn’t placate Flock Off, which held a protest outside Ithaca’s City Hall on February 4. A resident named Dirk Trachy donned a sinister-looking camera costume that stretched nine feet tall, while a local musician released an anti-Flock song: “These birds ain’t like the others / they steal your data and your family’s too,” the lyrics read.After the protest, local police reduced the number of departments with which they shared data. “In a lot of ways, this is showing that at the local level, democracy can still work,” organizer Aaron Fernando said. Flock Off’s next goal is to end the city contract altogether. Organizers are confident; two council members were spotted participating in their recent protest. “We have a good shot,” Fernando said.Like Ithaca, Tucson is a college town, and students at the University of Arizona were quick to form a resistance group last August after the college quietly installed 62 Flock ALPRs around campus. The group has since expanded to combat surveillance across the whole of Pima County, said an organizer who was granted anonymity because she has participated in civil disobedience.DeFlock Tucson has petitioned the county to remove its Flock cameras for months, attending council meetings and even filing a cease and desist letter with the Department of Education. A separate Tucson group, which the organizer declined to name, has gone a step further by wheat-pasting posters and stickers to camera poles. “Mass surveillance ≠ safety—get the Flock out of Tuscon,” one sticker reads. “Obey the system,” reads another. “They’ve been wondering how far wasp spray can spray,” the organizer added. “I don’t know, maybe it will spray far enough up high to spray onto the camera.” DW Nance describes himself as the “de facto” leader of DeFlock Birmingham in Alabama—he and a friend are the only official members. Nonetheless, Nance has created a sleek website for his cause and garnered 400 local signatures on a petition demanding an “immediate moratorium” on cameras and “mandatory deletion” of existing Flock data. Over 600 ALPRs have been logged in Birmingham, and Nance is planning on creating digital billboard advertisements informing residents of Flock’s misdeeds. He has received online backlash to his campaign, particularly among Trump supporters. “There’s a lot of people that are real awful,” he said. A comment on one of his Facebook posts reads: “Aww, you almost had my support. Then you mentioned ICE as a villain. Now you sound like a domestic terrorist.” But Flock’s critics don’t fall neatly in one political camp. While anti-Flock groups generally sprout from liberal enclaves, some Republican-led states have also taken steps to restrict ALPR surveillance. Libertarians in particular object to Flock: Reason has published multiple articles criticizing the company, which the magazine has accused of running an “Orwellian mass surveillance program.”Organizers, while alarmed at the relentless growth of the surveillance state, are also encouraged by the growing resistance to it. Small victories continue to pile up: Dunwoody, an Atlanta suburb and early adoptee of Flock, paused their contract on February 25. Eight days earlier, DeFlock Tucson celebrated after South Tucson canceled theirs. “We don’t have to hide or shield ourselves from the world,” said Arian Chavez, an organizer at the University of Arizona. “We shouldn’t be afraid to still go out, even though we know we’re wrongfully being watched every single second. There’s more of us than there are of them.” The reaction to the recent Super Bowl commercial from Amazon-owned Ring suggests that momentum is on the resistance groups’ side. The ad showed an online network of Ring’s AI-powered doorbell cameras being used to locate a lost dog. A heartwarming story—until you consider the privacy implications of a network of cameras that can identify anything that walks past every Ring-enabled home. The backlash was swift, with many people comparing Ring’s surveillance dragnet to Flock’s. “As soon as that commercial came on, I just sat there with the biggest smile on my face,” said Phillips. “My girlfriend was like, ‘What are you smiling about?’ I’m like, ‘You don’t understand how bad they just messed up.’” Four days later, Ring scrapped a planned partnership with Flock that would have allowed Ring users to share footage with Flock’s police databases. “Even for a creepy surveillance company that’s Amazon-owned,” Fernando said, “Flock is too toxic.”
Hypocrisy, famously, is the tribute that vice pays to virtue. Put differently, hypocrites acknowledge that virtue exists and must be paid its due, at least for appearances’ sake.For decades, Israeli policy in the West Bank has served as an example. After Israel’s unplanned conquest of the territory in 1967, it annexed East Jerusalem in a quick fait accompli. But the rest of the West Bank has officially remained under temporary military occupation. Outright annexation is illegal under international law and would risk greater international isolation than Israel has faced up to now. Domestically, annexation without extending full rights to Palestinian residents would shred Israelis’ own sense that they live in a liberal democracy. Moreover, under the Oslo II Accord of 1995, much of the West Bank is under the civil rule of the autonomous Palestinian Authority, an interim status meant to last until a permanent peace accord. Instead of officially extending sovereignty, successive governments have pursued a gradualist policy, a ploy both psychological and political, a matter of “Let’s do it, but tell ourselves we’re not.” The state has encouraged Israelis to build settlements in the West Bank. In incremental, often unnoticed steps, it has applied much of Israeli civil law to those settlers—paradoxically, using military decrees, a tool of a temporary occupier. The result is that in occupied territory, settlers enjoy the rights and live under virtually the same legal system as residents of sovereign, pre-1967 Israel. Palestinians do not. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s current government, however, is done with paying tribute to virtue. Among the measures approved in recent days by the Cabinet and the powerful ministerial committee for national security: Israeli authorities in the West Bank will gain enforcement powers over environmental and other issues in Areas A and B of the West Bank, which are under Palestinian Authority civil rule. That’s an extension of Israeli control in direct violation of the Oslo Accords. Meanwhile, Israel will launch a new effort to survey land ownership in much of the West Bank. As the Peace Now movement’s Settlement Watch team notes, large areas will likely be registered as state-owned, available for settlement. Particularly brazen are the changes in Hebron, the one place in the West Bank where settlers have established footholds inside a Palestinian city. Planning and building authority for the settlers will be divested from the Hebron municipality—a Palestinian body—and put under direct Israeli control. So will planning power at the holy site known to Jews as the Tomb of the Patriarchs and to Muslims as the Ibrahimi Mosque. These moves violate the Hebron Accord between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization, signed in 1997 under Netanyahu as prime minister. Anyone who has ever visited Hebron knows that tension between settlers and Palestinians there is as sharp in the air as recently fired tear gas. Hebron’s holy place—site of a ghastly massacre of 29 Muslim worshippers by an armed settler in 1994—is second only to Jerusalem’s Temple Mount, a.k.a. Haram Al Sharif, in its potential to detonate violent confrontations between Palestinians and Israelis. These moves aren’t outright annexation, but they are great leaps toward it. They advance the goal of Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, leader of the far-right Religious Zionism Party, who proposed last summer that Israel annex over 80 percent of the West Bank. So why the move from subtle to flagrant, and why now? Why risk both foreign condemnation and igniting a new uprising in occupied territory?The short answer is that Netanyahu’s foreign policy is entirely domestic, and his domestic policy is focused on his personal survival and power. And his survival depends in part on a political ally, Smotrich, who is certain he knows God’s plan for the world, an approach that renders immediate dangers inconsequential.Netanyahu’s overt diplomatic agenda has mostly contracted to managing ties with Donald Trump. On February 10, for instance, he flew to Washington for what was billed as an urgent meeting the next day with the president about Iran. Talking to reporters afterward, Trump launched into a Trumpian tirade at Israeli President Isaac Herzog for not granting a pardon to Netanyahu, who is on trial for bribery and fraud. Back in November, Trump had called on Herzog to issue a mid-trial pardon—unprecedented in Israel—and Netanyahu filed a formal request for the move. And here, over two months later, Herzog hadn’t paid sufficient attention to this matter! “You have a president that refused to give him a pardon,” Trump said, adding that Herzog “should be ashamed of himself.”It’s not hard to figure out who suggested that Trump raise the subject. But let’s assume that in their meeting, Trump and Netanyahu also talked about Iran, not just pesky prosecutions. Whatever one thinks the United States or Israel should do regarding Iran, the decision will affect the life and safety of every Israeli. In the midst of discussing the matter, Netanyahu asked for a favor and created a personal debt to a foreign autocrat who keeps close track of favors and slights. The prime minister showed his top priority: himself and his own future.All the more so in his political behavior within Israel: As he came under police investigation, then under indictment, then actually faced trial, Netanyahu’s assault on democratic norms escalated. The central project of his current term in office has been an autocratic revolution, aimed at weakening the courts and bringing them under control of the ruling party. He has tried to fire the attorney general, an independent civil servant who heads the state prosecution. Public protests and court rulings have slowed this self-coup but not stopped it. Defendant Netanyahu’s personal stake in these changes is obvious. A docile Supreme Court could acquit him on appeal if he’s convicted—that is, if a pliant prosecutor doesn’t stop the trial first. This is context for the latest moves in occupied territory: Aligned with Trump abroad, bulldozing constitutional limits at home, Netanyahu has no reason to pretend he’s maintaining a facade of liberal democracy.Still, the structure of the parliamentary system remains. To stay in power, Netanyahu has sought to squeeze every possible day out of his current term, which means holding his coalition together until the legal deadline for new elections in October this year. This is a key reason that the war in Gaza lasted so long, even as the death count kept climbing. Smotrich’s party and the equally extreme Jewish Power Party pressed to keep fighting in order to conquer the entire Gaza Strip. In March of last year, Netanyahu ended a ceasefire to keep them from bolting the government. Making down payments on Smotrich’s annexationist program fits the same pattern.The upcoming election is a greater hurdle: Unreliable as polls may be, they consistently show Netanyahu’s coalition losing to a disparate bloc of opposition parties. Many right-wing voters, it appears, see Netanyahu as corrupt, or as evading responsibility for the catastrophic Hamas attack of October 7, 2023, or both. In a multiparty system, their options include right-wing parties opposed to Netanyahu personally. Steps deepening Israel’s hold on the West Bank are aimed at showing that only Netanyahu can be trusted to carry out the right’s agenda.They’re also designed to boost Smotrich’s support on the far right. Polls show that his party could fall just short of 3.25 percent of the national vote, the threshold for making it into Parliament. The pro-Netanyahu bloc as a whole would lose seats, potentially deciding a close election. In the current term, 68 out of 120 members of parliament are aligned with the government. Smotrich stands for a hard-line version of a theology that regards Israel’s conquests in 1967 as part of God’s plan for final redemption, and holding the land as an overriding religious obligation. In the summer of 2024, in the midst of the Gaza war, another Cabinet minister from the party caused a storm by describing the current time as “a period of miracles” because the government was accelerating construction in settlements. Smotrich has publicly asserted that in the long term, Israel should “be run according to the laws of Torah,” as in the days of King David. In that conception, democracy isn’t a concern. Nor is the potential for a violent uprising in the West Bank. It might be part of God’s plan. Smotrich’s party represents only a small number of Israelis. But Netanyahu’s desperation gives it outsize influence. The critical questions now are how much more damage Netanyahu’s government will do before October and whether the election will finally end his reign. In the meantime, what’s left of the prime minister’s hypocrisy is paying lip service to Israeli security, while worrying mainly about his own.
This is a lightly edited transcript of the February 26 edition of Right Now With Perry Bacon. You can watch the video here or by following this show on YouTube or Substack. Perry Bacon: So let’s start with the Democratic race, which is probably of more interest to our audience. Jasmine Crockett, congresswoman, very famous. James Talarico, state representative, who has become somebody who a lot of my friends have seen videos of. He’s become sort of a popular figure as well. So I guess my first question is: you told me in September or October, Jasmine Crockett is going to run against somebody. I would have said, oh, she’s going to have a big advantage because she’s like a famous person and so well known, and nobody knows who a state representative is. So how did he get to the point where this race is either tied or very close, or maybe he’s even leading? How did he do this?Justin Miller: Yeah. I’ve been seeing Talarico as a bit of a rising star in the State House. He’s been on the front lines of fighting back against extremist Republican policy in the legislature. And I think people have been seeing him, over the past couple of years, as a likely candidate for higher office — whether it was Senate or I think a lot of people were thinking originally, governor. For a time, the only other declared candidate was Colin Allred. And then there was the disorganized Democratic Party, any chances of an organized slate, and obviously Crockett got in very late into the race. And I think that overlaid a lot of the dynamics of the race.Bacon: She entered in November or December?Miller: Right before the filing deadline — I think it was very early December. She had been saying throughout November, and maybe even back into October, that she was seriously considering running for U.S. Senate. There were some public polls showing that she had obviously the highest name recognition of any candidate, including against Beto O’Rourke. That, combined with the redistricting, which reoriented a lot of the political lines up in Dallas County, she said gave the basis for her considering to run for U.S. Senate. So yeah, it was definitely a very late entry.Bacon: So he had a three- or four-month head start — that’s part of what he did, right? He was running before she started running. That’s a big part of the story here, right?Miller: Yeah, he had at least a couple of months’ head start, and of course he was starting with much lower name recognition. And honestly, I think his own campaign got off to a slower start than I would have thought and struggled to gain traction right out of the gate. And then, when Crockett entered, he reconsidered his strategy and everything, and I think he was caught on his back foot. But now you see in the past several weeks, I think his campaign has hit its stride. It’s been aided a lot by a ton of national media attention, going on talk shows and everything. So yeah, it’s been a definitely abnormal primary, but also a very hotly contested one that we haven’t seen in quite a while.Bacon: So as a person following this nationally, what I’ve seen is: he seems to be, one, very articulate, and two, he’s talked about being religious and that drawing on and having a moral politics. He’s not the only religious Democrat — Raphael Warnock, and there are plenty of Black Democrats who are very religious, particularly. But Joe Biden was religious, Nancy Pelosi as well. But I think the national story is there’s this charismatic young guy who’s very religious. That’s unusual. Is that the story in Texas? What’s drawing people to him among the actual voters who might vote for him?Miller: Yes, that’s definitely become like the core part of his identity. Going back to the legislature, a lot of his most viral moments on the Texas House floor have come from him using his command of and beliefs in Christianity and his studies as a seminarian to turn scripture back against Republicans as they’re trying to push Christian nationalist-type policies in schools and in state government and all of that. I think, yes, it’s framed as this unique thing — a Democrat who’s a Christian is somehow this completely unique thing, which obviously, as you said, it isn’t. I think his use of his religion, and quoting scripture and everything, to advance a progressive platform intrigues a lot of Democratic voters. Especially, maybe, non-Christian voters who see in this something they imagine will be convincing to knowable voters in the middle, and even staunch Republicans. That’s obviously a pretty big proposition and one that hasn’t been tested yet so far.Bacon: So I’ll be blunt: I’m often leery of electability arguments in a primary, because I think that often plays against women and people of color. And Jasmine’s a Black woman. So I want to talk about this in a subtle way. One, is he benefiting from the perception that he’s more “electable” than she is? And two, is that grounded in things beyond race and gender? Because I think it could be here. Talk about that.Miller: Yeah, I think he absolutely is benefiting from this inherent assumption that a white guy who speaks well and has viral moments and talks about religion in an eloquent and compelling way is automatically going to lend itself to electability in a general election in Texas. And I think there is absolutely a lot of that dynamic playing into this. People are self-hedging. They might support Jasmine Crockett and say they would love to vote for her. But in the end, they really think Talarico is more electable. Again, this is Texas. Democrats don’t know what’s electable. We’ve time and time again thought we’ve had various answers, and everything has come up short. And I think Talarico so far — he’s a progressive from Austin, which, there are plenty of things that Republicans will go after him for in a general election.Bacon: But we should note Crockett is not Kamala Harris. Compare — Kamala Harris is bland in a certain way, and Crockett has leaned into being resistance and strong, with viral moments and calling Republicans racist and things like that. She’s not the average politician, Black or woman.Miller: Definitely not a wallflower. She’s not going to back off her convictions to try to appeal to some conception of a moderate middle, or walk on eggshells for the sake of some notion of electability. And I think that is what people see as the most compelling thing about her among Democratic voters. And she’s made this point in the home stretch: Talarico is trying to make faith a central component of the race. Crockett very much says this is a moment where Democrats want fighters. They don’t want somebody who’s trying to play to some Trump crossover voters or something like that.Bacon: Do they have any real public policy differences? This is not really a left-versus-center race, right? Not the same way as Bernie versus Biden. This doesn’t play into that. Or Ossoff versus Warnock either. This is not that race, right?Miller: Yeah, no. The ideological attachments have gotten all jumbled. I think there are ways that Talarico is trying to frame himself as more of a moderate, and some people are casting Crockett as too left-wing. When in reality I think Talarico is very progressive and has a progressive track record. Crockett in some ways is a bit more moderate — she also has a staunch liberal voting record. But yeah, there really isn’t any core policy differences fueling this race in any significant way, as far as I can tell. Some votes have been raised, but of course Talarico hasn’t been in Congress and hasn’t had to take any votes on that. But really, yeah, this is definitely more of a race about style and the character of these candidates and how they can appeal to the electorate — not necessarily anything about policy at this point.Bacon: Let’s jump to the Republican race, where Attorney General Ken Paxton is running in a primary against the incumbent Senator John Cornyn. I guess my obvious question would be: I covered Washington a long time, and John Cornyn seemed pretty conservative to me. Why is there a primary? He’s pro-Trump. From a conservative perspective, what’s the problem with John Cornyn?Miller: Big bad John. Yeah, he’s been around for 20 years. Twenty-plus years. He was first elected back in 2002. And I think part of it is that long-time incumbency, but also part of it is the base — the hardcore right base of the Republican Party has been angry with Cornyn over some of his votes, particularly over a very modest, bipartisan gun control reform bill that he helped pass a couple of years ago in the wake of the Uvalde shooting. And he got booed on stage at the state Republican Convention in the wake of that. And they see him, despite him being very staunchly in line with the Trump agenda, as not a true believer. Part of the big-business wing, the Mitch McConnell wing.Bacon: I was going to say that he comes off in persona as a Mitch McConnell Republican — is that the subtext, that big business thing?Miller: Yes. And he’s also somebody who has bear-hugged Trump as a matter of political necessity. And I think in a lot of ways he is firmly committed to a lot of Trump’s agenda. But going back a couple of years, I think he was saying Trump should retire to Mar-a-Lago and not run for president. And I think that has stuck with him. He’s just seen as not a classic MAGA-er.Bacon: Paxton has had all these scandals. He was impeached at some point. He got charged with securities fraud. Why has none of it stuck? He seems to be corrupt, is what it looks like to me. He seems Trump-like in that way. Maybe that explains it. But he seems corrupt. How has none of this stuff stuck to him? He’s getting divorced, there are some marriage issues — why does nothing stick to him?Miller: It’s a very good question. Partly I think there is a Trump effect to it all. At a certain point, all of the scandals in their cumulative effect have just been dismissed as part of a conspiracy to take him out for being too much of a MAGA warrior. He’s being taken out by a conspiracy of RINOs and liberal Democrats in Texas. But yeah, I think the impeachment trial — where he was on trial for allegations of corruption, bribery, and abuse of office — that was a huge moment in Texas politics. And I think a lot of people really did believe at the time that there were a lot of Republicans in the Texas House who voted to impeach him, and then it went to the much more conservative Texas Senate where he was ultimately acquitted. There was an immense amount of political pressure from grassroots conservatives in Texas on senators to vote to acquit across the board. So it was much more of a political trial than any sort of legal trial. And obviously he’s benefited from the Trump administration taking over and closing the DOJ investigations that had been ongoing for years into his affairs. And then yeah, there are obviously the affairs that he’s had, and he’s now getting divorced wife Angela Paxton, who’s also a state senator. I don’t have the answer to exactly why he’s been able to survive. But he is very much seen as a rock-solid MAGA warrior who takes the hundred-percent approach.Bacon: Okay, so the primary is on Tuesday. You have to get 50 percent, right? Otherwise there’s a runoff. When would the runoff be?Miller: End of May. So it creates this painfully long interim period from early March to end of May where there are runoff campaigns. And basically the conventional wisdom in Texas is that if you’re an incumbent and you’re forced into a runoff, your chances of survival are next to nothing. There are exceptions to that rule, including Ken Paxton himself, who back in 2022 was primaried by several Republican challengers when he was in the midst of all his scandals, and got forced into a runoff against George P. Bush — and ended up prevailing in that race. But I think Cornyn getting forced into a runoff is the most likely result heading into Tuesday. I don’t, given it’s a three-way race, foresee any way it doesn’t go to a runoff.Bacon: I think that one is pretty clearly going to a runoff between Cornyn and Paxton. There’s a third candidate running below the two of them. But you think neither one of them gets to 50 percent? We have a runoff there in which Paxton is probably the favorite. Is that what you’re getting at?Miller: I think so, yeah. I think that’s the most likely scenario, and that’s when it’s going to get real. The gloves are going to come off far more than they already have.Bacon: And the president, I don’t think, has endorsed anybody. But the fact that he’s not endorsed the incumbent is a hint. Do we think he’ll endorse Paxton if he endorses anyone? Is that what you think? I’m just curious.Miller: It’s hard to read. I think both Paxton and Cornyn have lobbied him very hard throughout the course of the campaign and before, to try to secure his endorsement, and he’s withheld it. I think that probably does more harm to Cornyn, just by virtue of his association with Trump. And Trump is going to be in Texas tomorrow. I don’t think he’s going to make any sort of surprise endorsement, but yeah, it’s definitely been an interesting factor. Trump doesn’t necessarily stay on the sidelines very frequently in high-profile races like this.Bacon: And who knows what he’ll say on stage, even if he doesn’t endorse someone in the most formal sense. In the other primary, it’s really two candidates. So me reading the polls — and I used to work at FiveThirtyEight, so I study this stuff somewhat carefully — I get the sense my guess would be Talarico wins on Tuesday. That’s what it looks like, but it’s close, so you would just say too close to call, basically. But that’s what I’m expecting. What’s your sense of it?Miller: Yeah, there have been polls that have shown Crockett —Bacon: Both candidates leading in different polls, right?Miller: Yeah. A recent one from the University of Texas had Crockett up by 12 points. I think — I would be very surprised if it’s not a blowout probably —Bacon: He’s not going to win a blowout probably.Miller: Yeah, I think it’s going to be very close. I think Talarico has the wind at his back right now. And Crockett — I think she started the race banking on her high name ID and all of that, and now is in the home stretch really trying to push across the finish line. But yeah, I think it’s going to be very close. I don’t want to make any prediction.Bacon: That’s fine. Yeah, I understand that. I always want to get a sense of things from you because you’re there. And so moving to the — I think the reason a lot of our audience, which is left of center obviously, is going to be interested in this, is the thought that Paxton wins, Talarico wins, and looking farther ahead, maybe Democrats could get the white whale and win Texas. I will believe it when I see it and not a moment before then. Where do you stand? I understand that you might have the best possible Democrat and the worst possible Republican, but still. Do you think we should be covering the Texas Senate race in terms of electability — in the sense of who’s going to win? Do you think this race would be worth covering if it’s Talarico versus Paxton? Because I still think Texas is a steal.Miller: I think the instinct of “I’ll believe it when I see it” is the right one. I think that’s not going to prevent there from being, as always in Texas, a huge bunch of hype around: is this the time that Texas turns blue? I do think Paxton is the most beatable of the Republican candidates, but even with the most ideal circumstances and the weakest possible opponent, it’s still such an outside chance in Texas. I think even with a big blue wave and all of that, it’s still a firmly Republican state.Bacon: Yeah. 2018 was this huge Democratic wave year, like this one. And Beto did really well, hustled everywhere, and I think lost by 4 percent to Ted Cruz, who is not an overly great politician. So I think that’s maybe a high-water mark in a certain sense.Miller: Yeah. I think it was about two and a half or 3 percent.Bacon: Okay, closer than I thought. And that was with Beto.Miller: Historic turnout among the Democratic base. I think it’s fair to say that as of now, that still remains the high-water mark.Bacon: There are a bunch of primaries going on in Texas for the House and other races, and the redistricting has changed a lot — so I’m not going to get into that too much. The one thing I do want to ask about is: I covered Congress a long time, so I just know Al Green, and I have liked the fact that he stood up and was for impeachment in the early moments, before the party got there. So it looks like he might lose on Tuesday. Can you talk about that primary and why?Miller: Yeah. So that is one of the casualties of the gerrymandering war in Texas, where they redrew his district in Houston to be a much more conservative, exurban seat. And then reoriented the 18th Congressional District, which was vacant for nearly a year after Congressman Sylvester Turner died just a couple of months into his term. Christian Menefee — he was the Harris County attorney — just won the special election runoff to hold that seat under its current boundaries. And now we’re pivoting to the primary where Al Green decided to run in this seat, which is now the historically Black congressional district in Houston. And so he decided to run in the 18th against Menefee. And yeah, I think Menefee is the front-runner at this point. There are a lot of factors. I think Al Green is still very well liked and popular, but there’s also an undeniable age factor.Bacon: He is old. How old is he? He’s facing this age thing — is he in his eighties?Miller: In his late seventies. I should know this. And then Menefee is in his thirties. And the 18th Congressional was held by Sheila Jackson Lee for so long, and then she passed away while in office and was replaced by Sylvester Turner, also in his seventies. I think there’s anxiety about the generational dynamics.Bacon: So I looked it up. Al Green is 79 and turning 80 on April 12th. So he’s really in that club of people the party wants to move on from. He’s unusual in that I think a lot of people feel like the older members are not fighters enough. And he’s definitely a fighting old person — no other way to say that.Miller: Yeah, he is not wallpaper, like some of the older members who are representing their districts and nowhere to be found. He is definitely at the forefront. So I think that could definitely benefit him.Bacon: All right, good. Justin Miller, this was a great conversation. Thanks for joining us. Tuesday is going to be very interesting and I hope you come back to talk to us about it.Miller: Will do. Appreciate it.Bacon: Good to see you. Bye-bye.
As Trump moves to undo decades of work—begun by Republican President Richard Nixon—to protect people and nature from toxic chemicals, two recent pro-polluter policies are especially likely to harm his own voters.Last week, Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency—when will they rename it?—rolled back Biden-era limits on the amount of mercury pollution that coal plants can emit. Mercury can cause serious neurological damage to kids, especially babies (including unborn babies, another group this president has at times professed to care about). Other health problems associated with exposure to even small amounts of mercury include kidney and nervous system damage. For all these reasons, the World Health Organization recommends not using coal at all. The majority of babies endangered by the rollback on mercury live in red states. The states with the largest number of coal plants—Texas, Indiana, Kentucky, and West Virginia, according to January 2026 data from Global Energy Monitor—voted overwhelmingly for Trump in both 2016 and 2024. Indeed, Trump’s supporters could be pardoned for thinking the president has it out for them, as the coal rollback wasn’t the president’s only act of chilling disregard for their well-being. The same day as the EPA loosened mercury restrictions, Trump signed an executive order prioritizing the production of glyphosate, a toxic herbicide, nonsensically calling it essential to national security, and offering its manufacturer a degree of “immunity” from liability. Numerous legal findings and a large body of research attest to glyphosate’s links to a range of health problems, including lung and kidney disease, gut disease, and hormonal disruption. The World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer has for a decade considered the herbicide a “probable carcinogen,” with a specific link to lymphoma. Last year, Bayer, the company that makes glyphosate, warned it would stop U.S. production unless the government made changes to shield it from lawsuits. Trump’s administration, never having met a toxic chemical it wanted to regulate, has apparently been happy to oblige. The administration has also filed a brief on behalf of Bayer in a liability case scheduled to be argued before the Supreme Court in April.Like coal pollution, any damage from glyphosate will hit rural areas hardest. The chemical’s heaviest use is in agriculture, and a 2022 study of its geographical concentration by NBC News found that the U.S. county with the highest glyphosate usage rate was Nueces County, Texas, which voted overwhelmingly for the current president, as well as for Senator Ted Cruz and other Republicans. The second-, third-, and fourth-most glyphosate-drenched counties—San Patricio County and Lynn County in Texas, and Mississippi County in Arkansas—also vote solidly Republican. There’s a particular nihilism to this. Trump and his supporters have never seemed to care about poor people of color, an indifference easily explained by the combination of racism and traditional conservative callousness that has long animated many in the Republican Party. But this second administration is advancing a more broadly anti-human ethos. Trump and those around him seem to be so deeply opposed to all forms of solidarity that they cannot even be bothered to protect their own. These moves to literally poison Trump’s own base suggest a transition from the exuberant collective (OK, a bit fascistic) vibe of Trump campaign rallies, toward something even darker and weirder, closer to what writer Max Read recently dubbed the Suicide Right. In this view, Trump and his actions seem spitefully misanthropic, like those of a mass shooter or the 2004 “Killdozer,” a Colorado man named Marvin Heemeyer who, fed up over a zoning dispute, used a modified bulldozer to demolish 13 buildings and most of his town’s business district before shooting himself. Granted, the terrifying, all-too-easy to visualize image of Killdozer on the rampage hits most of us quite differently than Trump’s quiet and invisible assent to mass poisoning does. But Heemeyer, like our president an online icon to many alienated men, is still a sound metaphor for our current right-wing, school-shooter politics. If the comparison seems like a stretch—and by the way, Killdozer didn’t actually kill anyone, though witnesses believe he intended to—it only shows how much trouble we have conceptualizing ecological and public health crime, a persistent barrier to holding thugs like Trump and EPA head Lee Zeldin accountable.Assuming most people don’t think deregulating poison is “based,” these moves could have political blowback for Republicans. As we’ve seen from the grassroots popularity of both the traditionally liberal environmental movement and, more recently, the right-coded Make America Healthy Again movement, people across the political spectrum want to protect their kids and themselves from toxins. Indeed, in December several leaders and influencers in the MAHA movement asked President Trump to fire Zeldin, citing his moves to loosen restrictions on harmful pesticides and other chemicals. A petition circulating by some MAHA activists on social media and signed by more than 15,000 people said Zeldin “has prioritized the interests of chemical corporations over the well-being of American families and children.” A note appended last month adds some conciliatory language about a “collaborative relationship to advance the MAHA agenda at EPA,” but the petition calling for Zeldin’s removal is still online. The problem is bigger than Lee Zeldin, though. It’s Trump and his whole administration, whose profound lack of care even for the health of its most fervent supporters is reason enough to fire them all. Perhaps in the coming elections, some red-state voters will think so, too. That would be a step in the right direction. Who wants to be saturated in glyphosate and mercury? But electoral loss hardly seems like sufficient accountability for knowingly poisoning people. For the Suicide Right, I imagine part of what’s iconic about Killdozer is that he escaped punishment. There, too, Trump and his minions seem to be on the same path. That evasion of justice may threaten our civilization even more than coal mining and herbicides.
Cold War II is transforming the global system, with two competing visions: The US seeks to revive colonialism and imperialist spheres of influence. China wants a multipolar order based on peace, sovereign equality, and win-win cooperation. Compare speeches by their top officials.
Hill Republicans have said they’re willing to play ball on Trump’s idea if it means getting separate bipartisan housing legislation over the finish line.