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A gloomy financial prognosis for Social Security by the program’s trustees could spell a reduction in benefits for millions of Americans in just six years. The cuts to Social Security benefits would come amid changes that already make it more difficult for low-income adults to access key federal nutrition and health programs. A June report estimated that, barring congressional action, the Social Security Old Age and Survivors Insurance trust fund, or OASI—which includes both retiree and survivor benefits—is expected to be depleted by the end of 2032. Incoming revenue for the program will only be able to pay out 78 percent of full benefits, a cut of 22 percent applicable to current and future beneficiaries.Around 70 million Americans receive Social Security benefits, the majority of which is paid through the OASI trust fund. If combined with a separate, far smaller trust fund that pays out benefits for disabled workers and their families, the OASI fund could remain solvent for an additional two years—but this would also require action from Congress. The earlier timeline is due in part to the Republican tax and spending law that was approved by Congress and signed by President Donald Trump last year, which reduced revenue going into the Social Security trust fund. Lower expected rates of immigration and births will also contribute to the fund’s depletion.Social Security is not an anti-poverty program, and the pending bankruptcy of its primary trust fund would affect millions across wealth brackets. But low-income beneficiaries will likely be the hardest hit.“There are a significant number of Americans who only have Social Security, and so any type of reduction in benefits would have a much more dramatic effect on those who have no other source of income,” said Joel Eskovitz, senior director of Social Security and savings at the AARP Public Policy Institute.The Republican law foisted onto states a share of benefit costs for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, and Medicaid. It also tightened work requirements and narrowed eligibility for both programs. For SNAP, this includes the expansion of work requirements for able-bodied adults without children, applying to adults up to age 65, where previously people over age 54 were exempt. The new work requirement also removes exemptions for homeless people and veterans.According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, approximately 1.4 million adults between the ages of 55 and 64 receive SNAP benefits. Another report by the Urban Institute found that the Republican law would result in 480,000 families with a member between the ages of 55 and 64 losing their SNAP benefits entirely, while 312,000 would see lower benefits.The new work requirements for Medicaid are applicable to adults living in states that  expanded the program under the Affordable Care Act. There is not total overlap between the exemptions for SNAP and Medicaid work requirements, further complicating the process of applying for and maintaining both benefits.For the first time, millions of enrollees between the ages of 55 and 64 will need to prove either that they are working or that they qualify for an exemption, a significant burden that could result in people losing their benefits. According to the AARP, nearly 80 percent of the 4.6 million adults between the ages of 55 and 64 who receive both SNAP and Medicaid benefits reported being either retired or unemployed. For those roughly 20 percent that do work, more than half did not meet the minimum 80-hour-per-month requirement.Tracey Gronniger, the managing director for economic policy for the advocacy group Justice in Aging, said that the work requirements do not accurately “reflect the disabilities and the challenges that older adults may be facing in terms of age discrimination, or being able to maintain work, or other kinds of health issues.” Meanwhile, given the higher burden of expenses on states, legislatures may choose to cut SNAP benefits or narrow eligibility for the program, as well as slash Medicaid payments to health care providers, both of which would result in people being booted from the program.Even when they are no longer subject to work requirements, these older adults who have struggled to maintain their benefits may be faced with further economic hardship. Imagine a childless 59-year-old SNAP and Medicaid recipient who must now work 80 hours per month to obtain their benefits. Assuming that this person is able to find a job and maintain employment for the next six years, they decide to retire at age 65 in 2032. That person may no longer be subject to work requirements, but if Congress has not taken action to raise revenue for the Social Security fund, the individual is now receiving payments that have been cut by 22 percent.For those older Americans who rely entirely on Social Security payments as their only source of income, these cuts would feel like salt in a wound already gouged by stringent program requirements for their other benefits. “We’re going to see older adults who should be economically secure, who should have these benefits that are helping them to maintain their economic security, instead finding that it’s harder and harder to keep up with costs of health care and shelter and all the other expenses that people continue to have,” said Gronniger.Once a person reaches age 65, their difficulties in obtaining benefits will not necessarily come to an end. Jessica Johnston, senior strategist for economic wellbeing at the National Council on Aging, noted that SNAP already has low participation rates among eligible adults. In 2023, only 38 percent of eligible adults over age 65 received SNAP benefits. This low number is due in part to significant administrative hurdles and personal reluctance to accept assistance from the government. SNAP participants already need to regularly recertify their benefits, and requiring states to screen for the new requirements and exceptions could further complicate that process. “We already have an enrollment problem, and so when you add on the number of older adults who might fall off the rolls due to not meeting a work requirement or not understanding new recertification requirements, the likelihood that they will unexpectedly lose the benefit becomes much higher as well,” said Johnston.There is also a complicated intersection of eligibility for nutrition and health care assistance. In 2022, nearly nine million adults ages 65 and over who were eligible for SNAP were not eligible for the Medicare Savings Program, which covers premiums for qualifying low-income elderly individuals. (Separately, the hospital trust fund for Medicare is expected to be depleted by 2033, with money enough to pay 89 percent of full benefits.)Johnston said that the assistance offered by SNAP to cover food purchases would not offset rising health care costs—and that these struggles could in turn be compounded by cuts to Social Security.“A cut to their Social Security benefit is likely going to mean that they have to make even more difficult decisions about whether to pay for housing or for food or for medications,” said Johnston. “We hear from our community-based partners regularly that older adults will come in and talk about cutting pills in half or not being able to afford food that helps them manage chronic conditions, and so a cut to Social Security is only going to exacerbate those types of situations.”States are already responding to the new limits on SNAP and Medicaid, but there is some time to address the pending bankruptcy of the Social Security fund. There are a few strategies that Congress could employ to keep Social Security solvent, such as eliminating the limit on taxable income. The trust fund largely receives revenue through payroll taxes, but there is a taxable maximum of $184,500. This means that most people earning less than that amount will pay taxes on 100 percent of their income, whereas a person with a far higher salary will only pay taxes up to that $184,500 limit. Rising income inequality has exacerbated the issue, with the fund unable to benefit from higher earners’ pay.Lifting the cap on the payroll tax has bipartisan support and polls well among Americans, although making any change to Social Security is easier said than done. Other strategies, such as raising the tax rate, increasing the retirement age, or slimming down benefits, would likely be less popular with Americans. But Eskovitz said that lawmakers could not afford to kick the can down the road.“The quicker Congress acts, the less dramatic the changes will need to be,” Eskovitz said.

The Supreme Court struck down a Hawaii law on Thursday that forbade concealed-carry permit holders from bringing their guns onto private property without the owner’s express permission. “This regime hobbles what the Second Amendment protects: the right of Americans to carry arms for self-defense as they go about their daily lives,” Justice Samuel Alito wrote for the court. “We hold that the law is unconstitutional.”The 6–3 decision in Wolford v. Lopez, which fell along the usual ideological lines, is the court’s latest effort to apply its relatively new history-and-tradition test to state gun-control laws. Along the way, the court raised new questions about what kinds of “historical analogues” can be used to defend gun restrictions—and whether the bigotries of past generations should be a factor.In 2022, the Supreme Court adopted a new Second Amendment test for lower courts in New York State Rifle and Pistol Association v. Bruen. At issue in Bruen was New York’s restrictive law for granting concealed-carry licenses. In a 6–3 ruling, the court’s conservative majority held that the law violated the Second Amendment because it fell outside the historical bounds of gun rights in America. Bruen’s history-and-tradition test, as articulated by the court, has two steps. “When the Second Amendment’s plain text covers an individual’s conduct, the Constitution presumptively protects that conduct,” Justice Clarence Thomas explained in his majority opinion. “The government must then justify its regulation by demonstrating that it is consistent with the Nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation. Only then may a court conclude that the individual’s conduct falls outside the Second Amendment’s unqualified command.”At first, lower courts found themselves applying Bruen to a wide range of long-standing gun restrictions. Different courts also reached wildly different conclusions on when and how to use historical evidence to decide whether a law fit within “the nation’s historical tradition.” Two years years later, in United States v. Rahimi, the conservatives clarified the Bruen test: The government need only identify a “historical analogue” to survive judicial scrutiny, not a perfect match or a “dead ringer.”After Bruen, states that historically favored greater restrictions on guns rewrote their laws to accommodate the Supreme Court’s ruling. Among those states was Hawaii. One of its changes was to the state’s “default rule” for trespassing. Before Bruen, it was lawful to bring a concealed weapon onto private property that is generally open to the public—restaurants, stores, gas stations, and so on—unless the owner specifically prohibited it. (For brevity’s sake, I’ll just refer to this as “private property” from now on, even though I am not literally referring to all private property in the state.)Hawaii reversed that presumption: Now it would be illegal to bring a gun onto private property unless the owner had explicitly allowed it. With only a handful of exceptions, the law requires private property owners to provide “clear and conspicuous signage” that grants permission or “unambiguous written or verbal authorization.” As Alito noted in his opinion, Hawaii also bans concealed carry altogether in a variety of other locations, like public buildings, parks, banks, schools, hospitals, beaches, playgrounds, and so on.A group of Hawaii gun owners sued to challenge the law in federal court, arguing that it violated their Second Amendment rights by depriving them of the ability to feasibly carry their concealed weapons anywhere in public. The state defended the law by arguing that the individual right to bear arms does not supersede an owner’s right to exclude people from their property. The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals sided with the state last year.Since the Bruen decision was announced, lower courts and litigants have sharply disagreed on what counts as evidence of a “historical tradition” in Second Amendment cases. Hawaii, which had a unique path to entry into the Union, cited legal texts from the Kingdom of Hawaii in the early nineteenth century that strictly limited when and how weapons could be carried in public. This tradition, the state argued, supported Hawaii’s passage of a new default-rule law. Not so, said Alito.“The Second Amendment has the same meaning in all parts of the United States,” the justice wrote in his majority opinion. “It cannot give way to ‘the spirit of Aloha’ in Hawaii, any more than it can yield to the spirit of the Big Apple (Bruen) or the Windy City (McDonald [v. Chicago]). It applies in the same way to our 50th State (where about 8 percent of adults possess guns) and our 49th State (where the figure is roughly 59 percent).”In other words, the Second Amendment’s interpretation must flow from British common-law sources and those found in the colonial and early founding era, the court held. (There is an ongoing dispute over how Reconstruction-era sources apply, but I’ll come back to that later.) Hawaii cited those laws as well, pointing to eighteenth-century statutes in Maryland, New Jersey, New York, and Pennsylvania that restricted gun owners from carrying their weapons in private fields at certain times of the year.Unsurprisingly, Alito dismissed their value as historical evidence, as well. The laws that Hawaii cited, he wrote, “consist almost entirely of laws that prohibited unauthorized hunting of deer or small game on someone else’s private property,” and did not implicate stores, restaurants, and the like. “They had little if any impact on the Second Amendment’s central objective: protecting the fundamental right to self-defense,” Alito claimed. “And their obvious aim was to prevent the distinctive harms and risks associated with unauthorized hunting.”The three liberals justices disagreed in their dissents. Justice Elena Kagan, writing only for herself, noted that Bruen envisioned that historical analogues might be enacted for different purposes. Both the Hawaii law and the colonial-era laws cited by the state meant to address, in her view, the problems that would come with unauthorized gun possession on private property.“The ‘how’ is identical: The new law, just like the old ones, sets a default rule against gun carry that a private landowner may reverse,” Kagan explained. “The ‘why’ is sufficiently close. Both sets of laws respond to the dangers and harms that someone with a gun can cause on another person’s property. That the old laws had a special (though by no means exclusive) concern with poaching does not matter.”Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, in a separate dissent joined by Justice Sonia Sotomayor, took the same view of Hawaii’s historical analogues. She additionally argued that the case should be primarily viewed as a property law case, where the state is owed more deference than a Second Amendment case. Alito countered that Bruen clearly applied, since it commanded judges to apply it in any case involving gun restrictions.Perhaps the most controversial citation made by Hawaii was to an 1865 law in Louisiana that made it illegal to bear arms “on the premises or plantations of any citizen, without the consent of the owner or proprietor, other than in lawful discharge of a civil or military order.” Alito dismissed the statute because it was an isolated example and not “widespread, well-known, or widely accepted.”The conservative justices have left open a debate over whether Reconstruction-era gun laws have any weight in the Bruen test. Under the court’s precedents, the Second Amendment applies to the states through the Fourteenth Amendment’s due process clause. Therefore, the “original public meaning” that the court claims to seek might naturally take it to the 1860s when the Fourteenth Amendment was ratified, and not just the 1790s, when the Second Amendment was adopted, or earlier.But there’s a complicating factor here: Louisiana did not adopt the 1865 law in a vacuum. Instead, it enacted the restriction as part of what became known as the Black Codes—laws specifically designed to deprive formerly enslaved Black Americans of the fundamental rights that they would otherwise enjoy. In other cases, states have cited founding-era gun restrictions drafted to disarm Native Americans and enslaved people. To what extent does that reflect the “original public meaning” of the Second and Fourteenth Amendments?In Alito’s eyes, such laws hold no weight. He concluded that the Radical Republicans who drafted and ratified the Fourteenth Amendment intended to protect Black civil rights, including an individual right to bear arms, and that this intent supersedes that of Southern state legislatures. “Unless we put history entirely out of our minds, Hawaii’s claim that this tainted artifact illuminates the original understanding of the right to keep and bear arms cannot be taken seriously,” he wrote.Alito was not the only conservative member of the court to criticize Hawaii for its choice of historical analogue. Justice Amy Coney Barrett wrote a separate concurring opinion where she specifically castigated Hawaii for invoking the Black Codes, which she described as “vile laws,” in a twenty-first-century case.“The State seems to think Bruen is a matching game: Southern states enacted broad default rules, Hawaii reasons, so it can do the same today,” Barrett wrote. “But even if Hawaii is right that the how is analogous, it also must identify an analogous why.” She noted that the Black Codes were enacted to “subordinate newly freed slaves” and that since Hawaii did not have the same intent, the laws did not count as a historical analogue.It is always a welcome sight to see the Supreme Court condemn the bigotry and discrimination of the past. The majority’s words would also carry slightly more weight, however, if they were more consistent about it in the present. Their condemnation, for example, would have more moral weight if Barrett and her conservative colleagues had not gone out of their way to sanitize Trump’s racist bile toward Haitians as merely a strong, constitutionally permissible critique of immigration, in Mullen v. Doe—a case decided on the same day as Wolford.Alito’s appeal to the intent of the Reconstruction Amendment’s drafters is also laudable. At one point, he cites the Republican Party’s platforms in 1856 and 1860 to illustrate how the Fourteenth Amendment’s drafters meant its protections to operate for certain rights. One can only hope that he and his colleagues show the same deference to the Reconstruction Amendments’ purpose when they decide the imminent case on birthright citizenship next month. It is lamentable that Reconstruction’s lessons have already been forgotten or disregarded by Alito and his allies in cases on voting rights, racial gerrymandering, and insurrectionist disqualifications.Jackson agreed with her colleagues in the majority that the Black Codes were “ugly” and “racist.” She also argued that the court “cannot have it both ways” by selectively drawing from relevant statutes. Though Jackson was not on the court when it decided Bruen, she criticized its approach to constitutional law in follow-up cases and described it on Thursday as “a grave mistake.”“Either history does matter, and if so, all potentially relevant historical experiences must be thoroughly examined to determine whether they reflect our Nation’s history and tradition of firearm regulation,” Jackson argued. “Or, it does not, and the Court should just admit that the test it has created is boundless, allowing it to accept or excise any historical analogue it chooses for any reason it prefers.”That is problematic, Jackson explained, because the court’s original rationale for the Bruen test was to rein in lower courts that were upholding too many gun restrictions. “Of course, the real irony is that the Court’s effort to rein in judicial discretion has resulted in an arbitrary rule that unleashes judges to thwart gun regulation at every turn,” she explained. It is hard to disagree with that assessment, just as it is hard to believe that future Second Amendment cases will not be similarly arbitrary.

So Democratic Congressman Tom Suozzi of Long Island has come out swinging against the socialists. “We are capitalist, not socialist,” reads a letter that The New York Times reports he and 14 other legislators signed and began circulating last week. This made news on Thursday, two days after three self-described democratic socialists backed by New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani won Democratic congressional primaries in the city, but the original language was drafted on June 2 during WelcomeFest.*The letter, which is on the short and vague side, states two broad principles to which the signatories adhere. The first is “growth, competition, and broad prosperity.” “Growth” and “prosperity” are time-honored centrist buzzwords, as they’re hoisted into use to send the message that these Democrats value economic dynamism more than “fairness,” which is a word that moderates fear signals endorsement of excessive statism, although interestingly, the concept is tucked into the first sentence (“We believe in a growing, fair, and competitive economy”). The second is “safety, security, and human dignity,” under which the letter lists four components: fiscal discipline, a government that works, free speech, and patriotism.There’s nothing wrong with these things as far as they go. But they don’t go far enough. In particular, there’s one big missing word. I’ll circle back to that, but first, let’s talk about why these democratic socialists are winning in some places. The first reason is that people are really pissed off at a system they see as totally rigged. Suozzi is roughly my age. He and I grew up in a United States in the 1960s and ’70s that, Lord knows, had many problems but was at least trying to build a robust middle class and was taxing excessive wealth appropriately.The Gini coefficient is a number that measures economic inequality. Like golf, lower scores are better, and the lowest Gini scores, invariably logged by the Scandinavian countries, are in the mid-20s. The highest is always South Africa, in the low 60s.When Suozzi and I were toddlers, the U.S. number was fairly high—around 37. Then came the Great Society—the civil rights, fair housing, and other antidiscrimination laws that first brought large numbers of Black families into the middle class, and other anti-poverty programs. The right has sold middle America on the idea that the Great Society—which I’d hope most Democrats today are proud of, but much of which was, as the word is used today, “socialism”—was a failure. But by the 1980s, right before Ronald Reagan took office, the U.S. Gini number reached its lowest point in modern history, 34.7.Then came Reagan and supply-side economics and the war on the War on Poverty. By the time Bill Clinton took office, the number was north of 40. Today it’s 42 and climbing. We’re worse than Russia and Iraq and about on par with Argentina and Mexico.People aren’t stupid. They may not know what the Gini coefficient is or who Gini was (an Italian economist), but they know what’s been happening to the country and their money in their bones. And they know how they’re being ripped off by corporate actors, as these hidden junk fees become more and more just a fact of life, especially for working-class people paying rent to private-equity landlords or trying to take their kids to a ball game. So it’s small wonder that more people are voting for the candidates who are saying most emphatically that they’re going to try to do something about all that—specifically, fight back against the people who’ve been cheating the middle and lower classes for years. The second reason socialists are winning elections is that the Democratic base has moved well to the left of where it was even just 10 years ago. Early this year, The New Republic commissioned a poll of 2,400 rank-and-file Democrats. We asked respondents to identify themselves ideologically, giving them five choices: conservative, moderate, moderate-to-liberal, liberal, and progressive. There were little descriptions of each, so it should have been clear to all that “progressive” was the left-most choice.I thought “progressive” was going to finish third. It finished first (within the margin of error): Progressive got 32 percent, liberal 31, and moderate-to-liberal 21. Moderate was way back, at 12 percent. Back in the Obama days, moderates were around 35 percent of the party. Indeed, liberal overtook moderate as the top Democratic category only around 2012, according to Pew. So that’s a huge change. Now it’s true that other polls, which unlike TNR’s didn’t offer five categories, show a higher moderate share, but the overall move leftward by Democratic base voters is undeniable. They haven’t done so because they want the government to take over the means of production. They’re enraged at the way they’re getting nickel-and-dimed by these billionaires who have more and more power, and they want their party to take on that fight, and the democratic socialist candidates are, in most cases, the ones who are being clearest that they would take up that challenge.Moderates can choose to recoil at that word socialist if they want. The branding carries some amount of risk: We have a diverse population, and many people who reside here now remember when totalitarian regimes that called themselves socialist ravaged their lives—a far cry from the way socialism is practiced in Canada and the Nordic states (all of which are, of course, capitalist countries at their core). Still, it’s not even clear it’s such a dirty word, at least to Democrats. In our poll, we asked people if they thought the word was a plus or a minus or didn’t matter. Results: plus 31, minus 24, didn’t matter 43.I’d rather see moderate Democrats try to make common cause with this resurgent left to the extent possible. As recounted in the 2024 book The Truce, this is a feat that President Joe Biden managed for much of his presidency, so it can be done. I should note that I think the left bears some responsibility for this, as well. As I wrote in a long piece back in our March issue, both sides are just too emotionally invested in regarding the other side with suspicion. As political psychologist Drew Westen explained to me in that piece, Democrats tend to discuss politics and policy in a way that emphasizes their differences and not their points of commonality.Members of Congress form a lot of caucuses and coalitions. It’s telling that to my knowledge, there isn’t one, not one, that tries to bridge the differences between the two sides and highlight some things they agree on. It would be nice if a prominent left leader and a prominent moderate leader formed some kind of coalition that said to America, hey, we agree on these x number of things. For starters:That the rich should pay higher taxes, with a top marginal rate somewhere above 40 percent.That Social Security must be made solvent forever, probably by reimposing the Social Security tax above a certain income level (the so-called “donut hole” approach, which by the way polls through the roof).That the minimum wage should be raised to $18 an hour (there’s been a lot of inflation since the Fight for 15) and that Congress should index it to inflation so that it never has to worry about passing increases again.That the expanded child tax credit enacted in the wake of the pandemic—which, as The New Republic’s Grace Segers reported, was a historically successful anti-poverty program—should be made permanent.That they will pass laws cracking down on monopoly power.Doing this would send the almost unprecedented signal to voters and the media that Democrats are less interested in fighting each other than in uniting to pass an agenda that actually improves people’s daily lives. These five positions would signal such a commitment. They should all be completely uncontroversial.Ah, but that last one … and here we return to the Suozzi letter. It sings the praises of competition. Great. I’m all for it. But what force today in the United States is crushing competition? It’s not the Democratic Socialists of America. It’s not the government. It’s not Zohran Mamdani.It’s the billionaire class, or “the Epstein class,” if you prefer Jon Ossoff’s acerbic locution. You call yourself a capitalist, Tom Suozzi? Well, monopoly is the most grotesque perversion of capitalism that exists. There’s a reason Adam Smith hated monopolies. Centrist Democrats should familiarize themselves with that history, if they don’t know it.And this is a telling point on which Suozzi’s letter comes up short. That missing word I alluded to above is monopoly. You can’t praise competition without criticizing monopoly. Monopoly kills competition—period, end of story.But to criticize monopoly is to be willing to make powerful enemies. The democratic socialists—and by the way, in proper historical terms, they’re really social democrats; go google “difference between social democrat and democratic socialist”—are willing to do this. The centrists are not. And until they are, their happy talk about competition won’t mean much. Rank-and-file Democrats want their party to fight. That doesn’t mean just fighting Donald Trump. It means fighting the powerful interests that are screwing them deeper into the ground every day.Fareed Zakaria, who I’m pretty sure is not a card-carrying DSA member, made the point forcefully in his Washington Post column over the weekend. Discussing a new book on liberalism by Adrian Wooldridge, Zakaria wrote that liberalism “was once the most radical force in politics. It attacked inherited privilege, monopoly power, censorship, aristocracy, clerical authority, and closed guilds. It was not the ideology of the establishment. It was the battering ram against the establishment.”That’s what this country needs. I don’t care that much whether it’s called liberalism or socialism. I prefer that it be called liberalism, but if others want to call it socialism, I won’t go into hysterics. The point is that the Democratic Party better do it, or it will lose again in 2028, and it, and our democracy, will die. * This article originally misidentified the date of the letter.

For more than a decade, right-wing Christian groups have taken issue with the Southern Poverty Law Center, the nonprofit organization founded more than 50 years ago that researches and challenges those it characterizes as hate and extremist groups. The right-wing groups’ grievances have varied, but they tend to boil down to the claim that it’s the SPLC that’s hateful and extreme for labeling other groups that way. Recently it appears that, after an FBI investigation and a subsequent criminal indictment, the Department of Justice has taken the complaints of these Christian-right groups seriously. In an April press release, FBI Director Kash Patel accused SPLC of having “lied to their donors, vowing to dismantle violent extremist groups, and actually turned around and paid the leaders of these very extremist groups—even utilizing the funds to have these groups facilitate the commission of state and federal crimes.” The government has yet to prove any of these accusations, but it is eager to keep the narrative going. When announcing the charges, acting Attorney General Todd Blanche summed up the case: “The SPLC is manufacturing racism to justify its existence.” It appears that the government has sided with the organizations that long populated SPLC’s hate-group lists.Federal prosecutors have specifically alleged that SPLC defrauded its donors by using their funds to pay members of hate and extremist groups for tips on their activities. These practices are not a secret, least of all to the FBI, with which the SPLC had shared tips. Months before the indictment was made public, Kash Patel suspended any relationship between the FBI and SPLC; after the indictment, Todd Blanche claimed on Fox that SPLC had never shared information obtained from its confidential informants with federal law enforcement. “The Department of Justice is well aware that the SPLC provided helpful information, through the use of its confidential informants, to law enforcement,” said the SPLC in one court filing. “The Department of Justice also knows that these confidential informants helped law enforcement put violent extremists in jail.”Blanche’s claims to the media are indicative of how the government’s narrative about the case has taken prominence over the legal process. In June, for instance, the Department of Justice sent a superseding indictment to the media before it was filed in federal court. SPLC’s lawyer Abbe Lowell told CBS News that sharing the indictment first with the press was “another example of the government’s troubling and unusual handling of this case.” In a later filing, the government said that “media members erroneously received the draft document.” It all only underscored the fact that what the government said in public showed its intentions more clearly than anything written in the court filings.Groups that the SPLC placed on its Hate Map greeted the indictment eagerly, as an opportunity to turn public scrutiny back on a group that has long monitored them. Some are going further. At a hearing before the House Judiciary Committee earlier this month, a senior staffer at the Alliance Defending Freedom, a Southern Poverty Law Center–designated hate group, testified that his group, contrary to the SPLC’s characterization, is actually “mainstream.” Ryan Bangert, senior vice president for strategic initiatives as well as an adviser to the president of Alliance Defending Freedom, did not dispute that his organization had done what had warranted the SPLC’s designation: roll back the rights of LGBTQ+ people by way of social stigma and the law. It is an agenda evident in ADF’s interventions at the Supreme Court, such as its 2003 brief arguing in favor of laws criminalizing sodomy and in the words of its founder, who in 2012 described the group’s mission as a “battle” against “the homosexual legal agenda.”The Alliance Defending Freedom’s legal agenda is hardly mainstream. It wasn’t mainstream in 2003, either, when 74 percent of adults surveyed at the time supported overturning sodomy laws, including 70 percent of those adults who described their political views as “conservative.” But ADF has worked overtime in the years since to remake the courts and the country to serve its Christian nationalist enterprise. (Sometimes, as it did in arguing to overturn the landmark abortion rights case Roe v. Wade, it succeeded.) But in this moment, when the Trump administration has marshaled the Justice Department to serve as the president’s enforcers, ADF may get to have it both ways: casting itself as an innocent victim of hatred for Christian conservatives and recasting the whole idea of “hate groups” as a variety of fraud. It also appears, based on a new filing last week in the federal case against the Southern Poverty Law Center, that Alliance Defending Freedom may have played a more direct role in the FBI’s recent investigation into the SPLC than was previously known.The Christian right’s grievances against SPLC go beyond the Hate Map. When ADF’s Bangert testified before the house committee in June, he not only positioned his group as a purported victim of SPLC, but he also called on Congress to “reach beyond the indictment,” to take “critical steps toward dismantling” SPLC’s work, which he called a “shadow censorship regime” that had “tarred mainstream conservative organization as ‘hate groups.’” The examples of SPLC’s “censorship regime” were thin and beside the point. Bangert was jumping onto the government’s attempt to unmake SPLC. Bangert himself has worked for state attorneys general who supported ADF’s mission, such as former Missouri Attorney General Josh Hawley (whose wife, Erin Hawley, works for ADF, arguing its failed attempt to ban medication abortion via telehealth in 2024). He also worked for Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton (whom Bangert later testified against in his 2023 impeachment trial). He knew what he was doing when he repeated the indictment’s allegation that SPLC had been “funding the racist groups they claimed to fight,” mischaracterizing payments made to informants inside those groups for tips that informed SPLC’s research and publications, and which they also shared with law enforcement. But Bangert quickly pivoted to what he called the “broader story” behind those “shocking allegations.” That’s the story, he said, of “how the SPLC tarred mainstream conservative organizations as hate groups.”For ADF, it’s not just about refuting the “hate group” label but about casting doubt on the idea that opposition to LGBTQ+ rights could constitute hate. “We’ve been on the SPLC’s hate map since 2016, which is odd given that we reject racism,” Bangert also testified. Given that ADF has been listed for more than a decade, one might think he was familiar with the actual reasons why. “The SPLC lists ADF as a hate group because it has supported the idea that being LGBTQ+ should be a crime in the U.S. and abroad and believes that it is OK to put LGBTQ+ people in prison for engaging in consensual sex,” a 2020 story on the SPLC website begins. “ADF has played a role in the passage of religious exemption laws that lead to discrimination against LGBTQ+ people,” it goes on. “ADF is not only attempting to erase transgender people through its litigation and policy work but by deliberately misgendering them in media and on its website.”For ADF to acknowledge the reason SPLC designated the group as it did, however, would require ADF to acknowledge that queer and trans people have civil rights, which ADF is dedicated to eroding. It is extremely disingenuous for ADF to pretend that SPLC only labels racist groups as hate groups, but the pretending is strategic: ADF appears to allow the claim that there are “real” hate groups, if only to state that it is not one.Now Alliance Defending Freedom has appeared in the SPLC case by name—in documents the government had to hand over. A new filing from the Southern Poverty Law Center made these part of the court record. They point out that a prior investigation into SPLC, opened under Trump’s first administration, continued into the Biden administration and then was dropped. “The investigation sat closed for approximately four years,” the filing states. “It was suddenly reopened during the Trump Administration at least as early as September 2025. The question before the Court is why.” A letter to Stephen Miller, produced by the government in discovery, could provide an answer.That letter, which appears to have been sent in August 2025, complains that SPLC, a “biased” and “politicized” organization “unmoored from its original mission,” has “begun placing traditional value and faith-based organizations” on its Hate Map, such as “Alliance Defending Freedom” and “Moms for Liberty.” It goes on to claim that “the SPLC places many groups on its ‘Hate Map’ as a smear tactic solely because they disagree with its radical leftwing ideology.” (They may as well have called it a “homosexual agenda.”)The Miller letter was signed by the head of Alliance Defending Freedom, Kristen Waggoner, as well as Tina Descovich of Moms for Liberty, Turning Point USA’s Charlie Kirk, Christian pseudohistorian David Barton, reactionary conspiracy theorist James Lindsay, and the founder of Gays Against Groomers, an anti-trans group that has operated in the vein of Libs of TikTok. Parts of the groups’ letter to Miller appear lightly paraphrased in another document the government turned over: a redacted FBI incident report dated October 24, 2025, not long after the killing of Charlie Kirk and Trump’s directives to investigate the left over alleged “political violence.” As SPLC put it, the FBI incident report reads like a “rehashing” of the letter sent to Stephen Miller by these groups, some of which appear on the Hate List and were the main ones to complain about it. If groups like ADF protesting their appearance on the Hate Map is what prompted the FBI to reopen an investigation, SPLC contends, then the case wasn’t really about the financial crimes the government alleges. Rather, what provoked the investigation, it appears, was speech that these groups find objectionable.If that is true, then the case against the Southern Poverty Law Center was at bottom motivated by Christian nationalist groups that want to punish SPLC for accurately describing their agendas. Also, notably, it was SPLC that exposed, based on scores of leaked emails, Stephen Miller’s links with white nationalists, pushing a shared anti-immigrant agenda that dates back to Trump’s first administration. A Department of Justice spokesperson told HuffPo that Miller “had nothing to do with FBI-Mobile’s investigation of the SPLC.” However, the spokesperson also said that the Miller letter “was provided by one of the signatory groups in the initial stages of an investigation of potential criminal law violations committed by the SPLC.” They did not say which group.We may be hearing more about how this case came about soon, thanks to a whistleblower. The whistleblower’s allegations have not yet been made public, but they were described in an April 30 letter that Representatives Jamie Raskin and Mary Gay Scanlon sent to Aakash Singh, associate deputy attorney general. The congressmembers received reports that Singh “ordered the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Middle District of Alabama to rush through the indictment of the SPLC despite serious concerns about the strength of the case,” their letter states. Singh had also previously instructed the leaders of each U.S. Attorney’s Office that the president is their “chief client.”It was perhaps with a bit of authority, then, that at the June House Judiciary hearing where ADF’s Ryan Bangert testified, Representative Raskin called the prosecution of SPLC “a tissue of lies, that will join the pantheon of debunked, fraudulent prosecutions that DOJ has been excoriated for by dozens of judges across the land.” He added, “I predict it will not be long before another federal judge casts this obscene prosecution to the winds.”If an investigation into the case itself results, we may hear more from Stephen Miller and from the groups on the Hate Map. But we may never learn whether an anti-LGBTQ group—whose founder said of its mission that it aimed to stop “the homosexual agenda,” and which argues major cases before the Supreme Court, sometimes with a sitting senator’s wife making the arguments—also has the influence to wield the Department of Justice against its political opponents. Perhaps ADF is simply fortunate enough to share some enemies with the “chief client” of the Justice Department: the president.

Two versions of history began when, one fall night in 1957, a two-stage rocket lifted off from the Baikonur Cosmodrome and deposited a Soviet satellite called Sputnik into orbit around Earth. The first version is the one that is well-known: the grand romance of a terrestrial species bounding out of its cradle, the sharpening of America’s own hunger for this scientific adventure, the astonishing realms of knowledge bequeathed to us by the Space Age. The alternate history casts the space race, first and foremost, as a surly, selfish contest for military and ideological supremacy.The prospect of being snooped upon from space by the Soviets got the Americans worked up enough to accelerate the development not only of Explorer 1—the first U.S. scientific satellite, launched in January 1958—but also of the Corona program of spy satellites. Just as worrying for the Eisenhower administration was the rocket on which Sputnik rode: an R-7 Semyorka, the world’s first intercontinental ballistic missile. (Edward Teller, who helped build the hydrogen bomb for the United States, described the news of Sputnik as “a technological Pearl Harbor.”) If you could put a satellite on the R-7 and send it into orbit, you could also put a nuke on it and send it to Chicago. The Russians had set a precedent, Eisenhower’s advisers insisted in a closed-door conference; the United States, too, could and should lob missiles into outer space. Moscow was surreptitious and scheming in its own way. To dupe the Americans, the spaceport referred to as the Baikonur Cosmodrome was, in fact, nearly 200 miles southwest of the mining town of Baikonur. These cold warriors had not so much thoughts as afterthoughts of science.All narrators of the Space Age as a sordid geopolitical competition will invite several accusations. That they’re narrow- and mean-minded, so intent on sweating the politics that they’re unable to cherish the scientific advances—not to mention the glorious vistas of our universe—that our spacefaring has brought to us. That they’re Luddites. That they’re too idealistic, too eager to believe that we would have reached the moon when we did even without the pants-on-fire urgency of Cold War militarism. Or that they’re not idealistic enough, because they aren’t able to imagine the egalitarian space bound future that will rescue us from our ramshackle present.These charges hold varying levels of merit. You’d certainly have to be staggeringly cussed, for instance, to dismiss the images of Saturn’s rings captured by the Voyager and Cassini probes, or the truths that space telescopes, picking up cosmic microwave background radiation, revealed about the age and shape of our universe, or just the daily conveniences of GPS, memory foam mattresses, and runners’ Mylar blankets that have spun out of space missions. The clear-eyed will see, on the other hand, the utter hokum that is the space utopia now hawked to us by a handful of libertarian billionaires. They will also spot the bright, continuous line that connects the space race of the twentieth century to that of the twenty-first. Just as scientific universalism was once used, at least in part, as a cover for the power struggles of the Cold War, today’s techno-libertarian drive outward into space cloaks a steroidal American urge to impose its will upon the world. The signs can be read through the history of space exploration, right up into Artemis—the recent lunar mission hastened along by Donald Trump’s vanity, his desire to “never be second,” and the plot to “establish U.S. dominance on the moon.” It’s futile to deny that we got the Space Age we got because one country grew drunk on capitalism and is still zealous about defending its mythic exceptionalism beyond the literal ends of the earth.For David Ariosto, the author of Open Space, that defense must be led by U.S. companies, with an aim to grab their share of space before China does. Ariosto describes himself as the founder of a “strategic communications and intelligence firm redefining how organizations navigate the space frontier,” and while his book is scattered and incoherent, it is revealing in one way. In being thoroughly and constantly obsessed with what China is up to, Ariosto reveals the id of America: its paranoid lust for military and industrial preeminence, its self-regard, its delusion that the future belongs to no other nation. During his first spasm of panic about China, which comes as early as the second page of the prologue, Ariosto writes that “we” ought to “acknowledge that it is wiser to have trusted stewards at the table than to surrender control to those who may do us harm.” It’s uncertain whom he means by “we,” but he leaves no doubts that the stewards should be Americans—or American corporations.This clumsily posed binary choice has a rich heritage. In the “battle that is now going on around the world between freedom and tyranny,” John F. Kennedy told a joint session of Congress in 1961, the time had come “for this nation to take a clearly leading role in space achievement, which in many ways may hold the key to our future on Earth.” It was almost existentially important for humanity to see that the American system—or the Soviet system, as the case may have been—was the best to grasp the universe, and also to weaponize it en route. Again and again, the space programs of the two Cold War antagonists were waylaid or warped by the priorities of their militaries. When, in the late 1940s, the Soviet engineer Sergei Korolev wanted to propose building a satellite, his superiors, wary of subversive talk, warned him to back off. Practically as soon as satellites confirmed the existence of the Van Allen belt, a zone of charged particles high above the atmosphere, the United States began detonating nuclear bombs within it, trying to generate enough radiation to disrupt the mechanisms of Soviet warheads. Both Yuri Gagarin and John Glenn rode to space on ICBMs; so useful was NASA to the Pentagon, the political scientist Daniel Deudney writes in Dark Skies, that “Lyndon Johnson claimed the space program had saved ten times as much as it cost by reducing arms expenditures.”The Pentagon wanted the space shuttle to be designed so that it could fly over Soviet latitudes, release a spy satellite or capture one, and then return to its launchpad after a single orbit. As a result, the wings had to be shaped differently, the cargo bay had to be enlarged to hold the bigger reconnaissance satellites that were in the offing, and the spacecraft itself grew heavier. When the shuttle lagged behind schedule and ran over budget, Jimmy Carter kept funding it in the hope that it could be used to check up on the Soviets, to see if they were sticking to the terms of arms-limitation treaties.In the Reagan era, NASA’s scientific funding shrank, even as the Strategic Defense Initiative, which relied so heavily on space-based missiles that it was nicknamed “Star Wars,” received more and more money. In 1986, when NASA’s entire budget clocked in at $7.4 billion, Reagan asked Congress for $5.4 billion for Star Wars alone. And then, when the Cold War petered out—when the United States felt it had won, when history ended—America’s space adventurism deflated. To be sure, there was serious and excellent research conducted aboard the International Space Station and by observatories on the ground and in the sky. But the once-frantic ambition to push ever upward seemed to fall in America’s priorities when there was no burning strategic or military objective to tether the space program. Net-net, Deudney writes with provocative boldness, “the consequences of what has actually happened in space are much less positive than space enthusiasts and many others believe.”It can’t be total coincidence that the U.S. space sector revived around the dawn of another rivalry of great powers and their clashing ideologies. Beijing didn’t offer tactful euphemisms for its aspirations. Ye Peijian, the head of the Chinese lunar exploration program, said of the moon in 2019: “If we don’t go there now even though we’re capable of doing so, then we will be blamed by our descendants. If others go there, then they will take over, and you won’t be able to go even if you want to. This is reason enough.” This kind of directness has been the rhetorical equivalent of the R-7 rocket: a license to freely frame the new space race as a tussle for control and wealth.If Ariosto is any measure of the U.S. space industry today, everyone has an anxious eye turned eastward. When he suggests that space has become a “gatekeeper to humanity’s AI-driven future, offering solar energy, abundant resources, and natural cooling”—a thorough deromanticization of the universe if there ever was one—he frets in the very next sentence that China has surged ahead in batteries, solar cells, rare earths, robotics, and quantum technologies. An Iranian-born space entrepreneur working in the United States tells Ariosto that he wants to “ensure the Chinese never surpass us in space technology.” If the high seas might be read as an analogue to deep space, Ariosto writes elsewhere in the book, China signed the U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea but then showed its willingness to ignore the treaty whenever it saw fit. (He neglects the fact that the United States has refused to sign up to UNCLOS, just as it has rejected treaties that ban nuclear testing, act against climate change, and recognize the International Criminal Court.) In detailing how satellites might help build “digital twins”—real-time models—of practically anything on Earth’s surface, he points out that the notion raises “major questions of privacy.” He means, of course, not the capacity of governments to intrude into the lives of their citizens, but the possibility that China could obtain critical insights into Western infrastructure.Ariosto devotes two whole chapters to China’s construction in Argentina of a ground station to support its space missions; he is allowed to visit the facility, he watches scientists and engineers at work in their labs—and then he seems to hint that the station is likely to have been set up to intercept U.S. electromagnetic signals. (Las Lajas, the town in the Andean foothills where the Chinese built this complex of buildings, is thousands of miles from the continental United States—much too far to eavesdrop on the president’s cell phone calls.) It’s never wise to be too credulous of the subterranean motivations of great powers, as the United States itself has taught us again and again. But Ariosto’s manner implies that, for Americans, space wouldn’t be worth a second look if they weren’t mightily alarmed about China’s interest in it. When he describes Apophis, an asteroid that will pass uncomfortably close to Earth in 2029, I half-expected him to urge America to load it with explosives before the Chinese can make a move.For that is really what Ariosto thinks it will mean for the United States to excel in space: weaponize better, extract more, and colonize faster than anyone else. In this, he resembles most of the Americans he speaks to and writes about—even Barack Obama, who in 2015 made it legal for U.S. companies to own minerals and other resources found in space. The act may well violate the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, which banned governments from claiming sovereignty over any celestial body. But the flag bearers of the modern space race must view the 1967 treaty as part of a brief and regrettable infection of idealism in the American establishment. They certainly regard that establishment as not being aggressive and cutthroat enough in its extraterrestrial pursuits. (One of Ariosto’s sources, deciding that words really hold no intrinsic meaning, ascribes the laggardness of the United States in the 1960s to the “socialist paradigm” of the time.)Today’s space titans—including those in China—plan to avoid those old-timey, rookie mistakes. The only reason, really, to send probes to asteroids is to figure out how best to strip-mine them. (“Will we actually land on an asteroid and get these beautiful samples? Probably fucking not,” says the CEO of AstroForge, an American space mining startup, sounding as if he were assessing his chances of rushing a frat. “But do we hope to … show people the price point we’re doing this at is doable? I hope.”) A senior Chinese official envisaged a “special economic zone” between the moon and Earth that might, by 2050, yield $10 trillion in yearly revenue. The Adam Smith Institute published a report arguing that we should privatize the moon altogether, sweetly pretending that the objective is to “turbocharge scientific discovery.” The abject lack of any enforceable space law is a feature, not a bug; SpaceX’s general counsel has said that his company would “move to impose our own legal regime” on Mars. The laissez-faire code of outer space will, it is implicitly believed, engender better civilian technology—which will, in turn, prove useful in preparations for war. For the Americans in Ariosto’s book, this future cannot arrive fast enough. What better way, after all, to champion the free market, the military-industrial complex, the internalized hallucinations of Manifest Destiny, and all the other pillars of the American way of life than to put them to use, nakedly and in concert, in the conquest of space?Open Space likes to valorize the entrepreneurs it portrays. These aren’t the very grandest names in the business; Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, who coined their wealth in other fields and then spent it on SpaceX and Blue Origin, only transit briefly through the book. They aren’t even the founders of companies in the next tier: the New Zealand-born Peter Beck, for instance, whose Rocket Lab has ferried more than 200 satellites into space, or the trio behind Planet Labs, whose Dove satellites, like manic shutterbugs, photograph Earth from orbit thousands of times a day. Rather, Ariosto takes us to startups striving to cash in on the space race. One company, Lonestar Data Holdings, wants to repurpose the moon “as a kind of off-world backup for Earth’s data.” Ariosto suggests that the eventual result of a lunar mission launched by another company, Intuitive Machines, will be the mining of the moon for iron and titanium. A third, D-Orbit, wishes to take apart old satellites and recycle their parts for profit.The men—usually men—who lead these companies wear the heroic sheen not of philosophers at the frontiers of knowledge but of accountants toiling over their P&L statements. As a habit, in describing these endeavors, Ariosto will say: “Yet, admittedly, the path forward will not be easy” or “Turns out, it wouldn’t be easy” or “Of course, it wouldn’t be easy.” (Once, to change things up, he writes: “Failure was a very real possibility.”) Perhaps he intends to signal that he is a realist, a cool and clinical analyst of the state of play. But he offers no satisfying insights into what it means for the space sector to have intersected so neatly with Silicon Valley, and why that even came to be.One factor behind this unholy marriage is the confluence of economic trends, as Ashlee Vance explains in When the Heavens Went on Sale, a closely observed account of the people and companies propelling the modern space business. Some things got cheaper—consumer electronics that could survive in space, materials for rockets, software—and some people got epic rich. It became possible to build a satellite for $100,000, rather than $1 billion, just when tech magnates like Musk and Bezos grew wealthy to the point that $100,000 was a meaningless sum of money—and also when they believed that they ruled their industry and wished for more worlds to master. They could have improved health care or paid off student debt, but these wouldn’t have been very American things to do. Just like the tech sector circa 2000, space exploration today holds the same promise of titanic and impersonal engineering challenges (“Of course, it wouldn’t be easy”), untold riches for first movers, and an unregulated playground. Aspiring to exploit the cosmos for personal gain is one exponential leap from aspiring to build an online store that crushes every other online store or to build a thinking machine that replaces humans. The hubris of it all, which Vance captures so well, and also the harm-be-damned approach of it all—that is very American. It may be corporations that are running this race, but they’re still direct and rather obvious proxies for national power.It helps, too, that the tech moguls had, like their predecessors in the space sector, learned to garb their real motivations in do-gooding platitudes. Just as Neil Armstrong claimed to be arriving on the moon for all mankind but was really there for the United States alone, so, too, the pitch decks of Silicon Valley routinely talk about making the world a better place while pledging their loyalty in blood to shareholders. These new pioneers of space expansionism guarantee nothing less than utopia at the other end of the journey. In Open Space, Ariosto points to previous such projects that he deems to have succeeded: The expansion of Western empires, he writes, was driven by fine things like “new financial incentives and stock options [that] spurred entrepreneurial growth.” And the settlement of Mars, he says, might resemble the settlement of Jamestown: with some “tensions” between the early colonists, distant investors, and the English crown. He has left out the racist subjugation and extractive greed of imperialism, and the “tensions” with Native Americans that resulted in their large-scale slaughter. To forestall the possibility of industries ravaging outer space, Ariosto ponders some vague “earthly legal overseer,” but he isn’t very interested in details. It’s too important to dupe the world into thinking that this space mania—into which billions of dollars have been invested—will truly bring about colonies wonderfully low on violence, servitude, and greed, pies in the literal sky.The tragedy of this space race is that it has left us unable to imagine or craft an alternative one. Because of course it’s essential for humans to know this universe that holds us, not only for what we will learn about the nature of matter, space, and time, but also for the genuine potential of this enterprise to unite us. Nothing about our recent record suggests that we’re even able to come together to combat threats that imperil us right this minute, let alone capable of forming world governments and moon cities that are just and free. If the future of humankind in space is to look any different from the state of humankind on Earth, it can’t be left, by default or out of despair, to the tech firms of Silicon Valley. We need other space programs, other agencies, other men and women to obsess over our role out among the stars. This won’t be easy, as Ariosto would no doubt say—but the moon shot will be worth it.

Unfortunately, we’re only on Day 6 of the 16-day celebration—and we have about five days of more bullshit before the official America 250 celebration commences on Saturday. 

Drawing congressional maps to favor Republicans often disenfranchises Black voters.

One-third of US adults say they are “extremely proud” to be an American, according to Gallup.

The liberal counterweight to conservatives’ Project 2025 is rolling out a series of policies to set the stage for an already crowded field of 2028 presidential hopefuls.