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The president was booed in New York after making the NBA Finals about him, and flesh-eating screwworms spread in the U.S. after Trump’s DOGE cuts.

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The following is a lightly edited transcript of the June 9 episode of the Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.Over the weekend, Donald Trump erupted in crazed fury at NBC’s Kristen Welker on Meet the Press. What enraged him is that she dared to ask him for evidence to back up his many lies, in this case about elections in California allegedly being rigged against the GOP candidates. But we think this episode deserves a deeper deconstruction. A big reason Trump is so angry, we think, is that the MAGA online disinformation universe has been unable to entirely reinvent reality and use propaganda to inflate the GOP candidate’s strength into something it isn’t. In a sense, then, this saga is really about the failures of MAGA propaganda.So we’re talking about all of it with Gil Duran, a tech writer who’s based in California and tracks all this stuff. Good to have you on, Gil.Gil Duran: Thanks for having me.Sargent: So in two big races in California, the GOP candidates are struggling as the votes get counted. In the Los Angeles mayoral race, Democratic incumbent Karen Bass leads, and progressive candidate Nithya Raman has pulled ahead of Republican reality TV star Spencer Pratt for second place and a chance to go to the general election. In the California governor’s race, Republican Steve Hilton is vying with Tom Steyer for second place. Gil, can you just tell us a little bit about Spencer Pratt and Steve Hilton and why the online right is so heavily invested in them?Duran: Sure. Steve Hilton and Spencer Pratt are right-wing D-list celebrities who are desperate enough for attention to run for office in California, where they have virtually no chance of winning. Both of them have backgrounds mostly as entertainers. Spencer Pratt was a reality TV star, a sort of villainous character on a show called The Hills for many years. And Steve Hilton has a political background in the U.K. where he was an advisor to David Cameron, but most recently since coming to the United States has been a Fox News host. And he went from being a guy who was sort of what we would have considered a moderate Republican to being a complete right-wing lunatic during his time at Fox News. I know this because I actually met with Steve Hilton when he moved to the U.S. in 2014 and he was a totally different guy than he was a few years later on Fox News.And so both of them are trying to parlay their status as sort of right-wing low-level celebrities into political office in California, but that’s not very easy to do.Sargent: Just to be clear, what this means for Spencer Pratt is that if he gets edged out of second place by the progressive, Nithya Raman, then he doesn’t get to go to the general, correct? And so what’s really at stake here is, as the votes get counted, it’s really possible Spencer Pratt gets knocked out of contention. Is that what the situation is?Duran: Yeah, and it looks like it’s pretty certain that he’s now knocked out of contention. In the LA mayor’s race and in the California gubernatorial race, the top two vote-getters get to go to the general election. And in the gubernatorial race, it looks pretty clear that Steve Hilton will probably be in the general election. He’s edging out billionaire Tom Steyer for votes. Looks like Steyer is going to come in third place. So it’ll be Hilton versus Becerra. You’ll have a Republican and a Democrat in the gubernatorial race.But the LA race is nonpartisan. And LA is heavily Democratic by voter registration—LA is 52 percent Democratic voters compared to 19 percent Republicans. So with Spencer Pratt running with the MAGA endorsements as the right-wing reality TV guy, it’s not a big surprise that he wouldn’t make the top two. In fact, the polls showed him in third. What happened though is that in California, the early votes tend to be the more conservative ones. And so there was this idea that maybe he would make it, and that turns out to be a false prediction or false assumption. And most people familiar with the process knew that was a likely outcome.Sargent: So that’s the context for Trump’s blowup with NBC’s Kristen Welker. Here’s what happened. Trump first lied his ass off about the 2020 election being rigged. She challenged that. Then he brought up the California races and said those are also rigged. Kristen Welker challenged that as well. She said, look, your candidates—meaning the two Republicans we’re discussing here—look, they’re doing well. And then Trump said, well, no, they’re not. They’re dropping fast. And Trump meant by this that they’re dropping fast as the votes are getting counted. Listen to how it went south from there.Donald Trump (voiceover): They’re dropping fast because it’s a rigged election. Let me tell you, it’s four days and they aren’t even close to coming up with— Kristen Welker (voiceover): But that’s how they count the votes in California.Trump (voiceover): You know why they’re doing that? Because they’re cheating on the election. Welker (voiceover): What, do you have evidence to support—Trump (voiceover): All I have to do is look. All I have to do is look. And I listen. And I listen to people. And let’s see what happens.Welker (voiceover): But sir, that’s not evidence. That’s how they count the votes in California.Trump (voiceover): Do you think it’s appropriate—Do you think it’s appropriate that they have an election and five days later, they’re nowhere close to picking—Welker (voiceover): State and local officials acknowledge they are slow. They’re urging the votes to be counted quickly.Trump (voiceover): No, they’re crooked. Just like you’re crooked. Your press is crooked and Meet the Press is crooked.Welker (voiceover): To be fair, I’m not crooked, but—Trump (voiceover): Really? Well you play right into their hands. You’re either crooked or you’re stupid.Sargent: So according to Trump, Welker is crooked because she won’t simply accept Trump’s word that the elections are rigged. Note how Welker said, what evidence is there of rigging in the California races? And Trump said, all you have to do is look. In other words, he gets to dictate what reality is. He doesn’t have to show any facts or evidence. Your reaction to all that?Duran: Well, this is typical Trump. He’s been doing this for years and years. He tries to create his own version of reality and insist that other people agree with it. The main enemy, the main challenge that Republicans have in California is called simple math. There was a very low likelihood that Spencer Pratt was going to make it out of the LA mayor’s race to the general, out of the primary. And Steve Hilton has a better chance of making it to the general in the gubernatorial race, but he has zero chance of winning the election, because the Republican Party is only 25 percent of California voters, whereas Democrats have like 45 percent. So you don’t really have a math that adds up to a Republican victory.But this is important to Trump because Trump’s brand is about winning. He can’t accept that his party and his politics are so unpopular in California. So in order to maintain his winning image, he creates this counter-reality in which it’s all because of fraud on the part of the Democrats and that he would have actually won. He said actually in 2020 that he would have won the race if Jesus had been allowed to count the votes, whatever that means. But he’s long been on this idea that the only reason California is a Democratic state is because of cheating. And there’s zero evidence of that, but they are continuing to push this mythology because the reality is too painful to face—which is that, as Arnold Schwarzenegger said in 2007, the California Republican Party is dying at the box office.Sargent: Right. I think that Trump is clearly much more angry about the Spencer Pratt situation here. I believe he’s separately already said that the election is rigged against Spencer Pratt. And as you say, it looks like Spencer Pratt is less likely to get into the final round, whereas Steve Hilton really could. And so what Trump is really raging over here is that as the votes are getting counted, the candidate that Trump endorsed is not getting into the final round.Duran: The earliest returns are always the most conservative because conservatives vote on election day because they’ve been taught that vote by mail is evil. And so in the early returns, you always see a more conservative trend. But as the votes are counted—which in democracy you have to count the votes—those Republican margins slim down and the Republicans often fall into a much lower place.And so what Trump is doing is exploiting this simple, very well-known mechanism. We all knew that the Republican numbers go down. [He’s exploiting it] to create a false narrative for the MAGA audience, to continue this kind of complaint of fraud and thievery that he’s so fond of. That’s all it is. It’s a very simple mechanism. You take the early returns, you claim that any deviation from those early returns is evidence of a crime of some kind. And that’s pretty much it. He doesn’t believe it. I don’t think most Republicans believe it. This was also being pushed by Ron DeSantis and other Republicans. But they know that people in their audience will believe it. And that’s how they keep this flame of aggrieved Republican anger going—that everywhere they look, there’s fraud, even California’s being stolen from them. And it’s just completely bunk.Sargent: Well, let’s listen to a little bit more of Trump and Kristen Welker. It really goes off the rails after that exchange we heard earlier. Listen to this.Trump (voiceover): Your elections in this country, we’re like a third-world country. Your elections are crooked and you’re crooked and Meet the Press is crooked. And so is ABC and CBS and CNN. You’re one-sided, crooked networks. Let’s call it quits because I’ve had enough. Thank you, darling. Have a good time.Sargent: Gil, I’ll tell you, fascists really hate it when you challenge their absolute right to dictate reality, don’t they?Duran: Definitely. That’s one of the 10 main points of fascism. It’s called unreality. You create a complete opposite reality for your followers so they don’t know who or what to believe. As Hannah Arendt said, the ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction no longer exists.And so that’s what they’re doing here. They’re creating a situation where their followers are in a constant state of panic that everything is being stolen from them. And Trump really can’t handle the reality. And by storming out, he assured that those false claims got a lot more attention than they would have otherwise. He creates this drama around it.Now, they had been arguing before that about the weaponization of government. He was just angry that he wasn’t getting his way. But they clearly sought to create the idea on social media that the celebrity of Spencer Pratt—where he was being pushed by right-wing accounts with AI videos and tech billionaires like Sergey Brin and Joe Lonsdale, right-wing tech billionaires funding his campaign—that he really had a chance of victory, that he was going to win. And they often do this. He’s going to win no matter what, even though it doesn’t really make sense to people familiar with LA politics. And so when that expectation they’ve built up gets upset by reality, they have to attack with a fake narrative. They can’t accept that they were dumb or that they made a false promise. It has to be someone else’s fault that they lost.Sargent: You mentioned that Spencer Pratt is an enormous online presence and that he’s pumped really aggressively by the online right. Let’s talk a little bit about that. Renée DiResta, who’s a researcher on disinformation, laid out some of this on her Substack. The basic story here is that he’s just everywhere on X, Elon Musk’s X anyway, and on TikTok. He’s a fixture. He’s got over a million followers on X. And there are all these AI videos going around casting him as Batman and Karen Bass, the Democratic incumbent, as the Joker, according to DiResta, that got more than five million views.And so this is really a creation of the extremely online fascist MAGA right, isn’t it? He is a creation of these influencers.Duran: Definitely. No one was really paying too much attention to Spencer Pratt before this election, but actually he popped his head up because his home burned up in the fires. And there he started gaining an online following for being this sort of angry right-winger condemning the Democratic government, because there was a big fire that burned everybody’s homes.Well, California has a lot of natural disasters. So do Republican states. You generally don’t see everybody blaming Republicans when there’s a disaster there, but in California, it always gets politicized. So he kind of made himself a political figure by dramatizing his own experience losing his home in the fire. And that was just enough to give him sort of enough of a profile to step into the void of being the right-wing sacrificial lamb in the LA mayor’s race.Because generally what you have in California is Republicans run for governor or for mayor of LA knowing they won’t win. So you end up getting an attention hound whose job is just to put on a show and create some spectacle of a fight and try to cause as much damage as possible and bring in Republican and right-wing money to really just screw with Democrats—because they’re not going to win. They’re really just screwing with Democrats. So they hope, I guess, that it’s a Hail Mary pass—maybe people will be angry enough or enthused enough about a Republican candidate who’s popular online to win.What they find, however, is that being viral online is not necessarily the same thing as being popular in the real world. Twitter especially, and TikTok to some degree, create these alternate realities where you think these things are really big and everybody’s talking about them, but most people have very different concerns about their city. They’re not on TikTok or Twitter all day. They don’t know what Spencer Pratt just tweeted or what Elon Musk tweeted about him. And so when that reality hits, they’re very upset because they gin themselves up into believing that this candidate’s going to win.And what they’re all going for really is the model that Trump set when he won. He sort of became the biggest character in American politics using Twitter, also came from a reality TV background like Spencer Pratt, and was able to become president. But just because you can do something once doesn’t mean you can always do it. And even before Trump, we had Arnold Schwarzenegger, who was the last Republican governor of California, who only became governor because he was a world-famous actor. And so he was able to do it. But then that was the last Republican we ever had. Arnold left with like a 27 percent, maybe less, approval rating. So even if you do win, it can be bad news.So they tried to make fetch happen. They try to create what DiResta calls the “red mirage”—this idea that a Republican’s about to win California. Everybody knows it because it’s happening on X and TikTok. But when the votes get counted, it turns out that virality is not the same thing as votes, and they lose. And so then they immediately pivot to calling it fraud because they are sore losers and big man-babies in reality.Sargent: And Donald Trump essentially imbibed what’s going on in the right-wing bubble on this. He internalized this picture of Spencer Pratt as this very powerful figure within the context of Los Angeles politics. And so you can kind of see his eruption of fury at Kristen Welker as his bubble bursting. He looks at the situation, he says, well, this can’t be happening. He can’t be falling behind in real life because the online universe told me that he was going to win.So that’s what’s really going on here with this whole Kristen Welker confrontation, I think. It’s Trump’s bubble bursting and him wrestling with the reality that his candidate is not actually going to become the mayor of Los Angeles.Duran: And this is very personal for Trump because the idea that he won the 2020 election—the lie that he won the 2020 election—is a central part of his mythology now. There was no way he could lose. He was supposed to be the winner. Yet he lost. And that’s this unresolved issue that we’re all going to have to deal with at some point, because Trump seems to believe that he’s owed for that, maybe owed an extra term.And if you remember 2020, I seem to recall Trump was arguing that the vote should stop counting at a certain time, like the day of the election, while he’s ahead. So he has a very childlike, corrupt view of what politics is. He should always win, is basically his fascist argument. And there are people who agree with him—a very small number of people in the country—but that’s the audience he has to keep behind him because other people are starting to peel off as it becomes more and more unpopular.Sargent: Spencer Pratt is also the candidate of at least some tech people. Can you talk a little bit about that?Duran: Definitely. We’ve seen this rightward shift in Silicon Valley—overt rightward shift. I would argue there’s always been some right-wing politics there. But whenever you get a spectacle like this of a right-wing type of person running for office, you can now count on the billionaires of Silicon Valley to throw in money and try to make it a real thing. So Spencer Pratt had money from Sergey Brin of Google, who’s now pretty much a right-winger. Joe Lonsdale of Palantir, who’s completely off the charts, far right—recently called for public executions in the United States. And so you can always count on having them throw in some money.On the state level, a lot of the right-wing tech guys got behind the candidacy of Matt Mahan, the mayor of San Jose, who was trying to run as a moderate. People weren’t buying that. So we can expect the right-wing tech money now to go behind Steve Hilton if he makes the general. Again, they’re not betting on victory, they’re betting on disruption and chaos and providing a beachhead where Trump can continue to make his claims about the obsolescence of the democratic process.Sargent: So how does this all unspool from here? Basically, the most likely scenario is that Spencer Pratt gets bumped out of contention for LA mayor and Steve Hilton goes on to the general for governor and most likely loses at the end of the day to Xavier Becerra, right?Duran: Definitely. Steve Hilton is almost guaranteed to lose to Becerra, who’s not a particularly strong Democrat, but California is so Democratic that even if Becerra were dead, he would still beat Steve Hilton in a general election. I mean, there’s just no path really for Hilton to win.Pratt—it seems mathematically impossible for him now to regain the second slot. So he probably won’t be in the race. He has said that if he lost, he would move out of Los Angeles, which is a pretty loser thing to say. You don’t really hear people who want to be the mayor or want to be the governor say, I’m going to move out of the state. You’re supposed to act like, I’m going to stay here no matter what and continue to work to help my community, and then run again in four years when your challenger is unpopular if they win.Again, they’re going to fold up their tents and go on to the next thing after this. Steve Hilton is probably just trying to get on another show on Fox. His was canceled because no one was watching it. So this is for him an audience-building exercise more than anything. Although there was a piece in the Financial Times over the weekend where these three Brits said, it’s amazing that he’s the front-runner and he’s had this major political turnaround. These are people with no idea of California politics. He’s just simply the guy who’s desperate enough for attention that he’s willing to lose the governor’s race to get it. And that’s exactly what’s going to happen.Sargent: Well, I sure hope so. Gil Duran—folks, if you enjoyed this, make sure to check out Gil’s new book. It’s coming out in mid-August. It’s called The Nerd Right: Silicon Valley, Fascism, and the War on Democracy. Gil, always great to talk to you. Thanks for coming on.Duran: Thanks for having me.

As Western economies scramble to defend themselves against the second China shock, their corporate and national interests are again radically at odds.

The post An Indian Billionaire Was Targeted by Trump. Then He Poured Money Into a Startup Secretly Backed by Donald Trump Jr. appeared first on ProPublica.

It’s a quiet Tuesday morning in Sacramento. On any given weekday this past year, the City of Trees is normally bustling with state workers heading to their offices, construction workers hammering away at the new Capitol Annex, or City Parking Enforcement Officer Grant Nakamura breaking his previous record of having handed out 22,000 parking tickets in 2025. But, with last week’s primary results still being counted, the state is now reeling from one of the most unpredictable primary elections in recent history. For the past six months, Californians have witnessed a parade of gubernatorial candidates who have vied to replace Gavin Newsom as the state’s next governor. In what many have called a turbulent election, the primary has seen everything from the cataclysmic downfall of Representative Eric Swalwell to the close race between three candidates from across the political spectrum—Xavier Becerra, who experienced a historic rise from among the last to being the front-runner; Steve Hilton, a wannabe Trump in California with the blessing of the Trump himself; and Tom Steyer, a billionaire and political outsider who courted progressive voters with his vision of environmentalism. Several other candidates, including Elizabeth Warren acolyte Katie Porter and former Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, fell short. This was the most expensive election in California history, with $316 million spent. Two hundred million of that came from Steyer tapping his personal war chest, along with a myriad of corporate donations for Becerra and Hilton. In any case, Californians will have to wait a few more days for the primary dust to settle, and then it’s on to November to decide on who will replace the presumably presidential primary–bound Gavin Newsom and sort out the myriad challenges he’ll leave behind: skyrocketing costs of living, a lack of housing, an increasing number of climate change–driven wildfires, and the constant animosity of the Trump administration. With Becerra already called as one of the candidates, and Hilton leading by several percentage points over Steyer, it looks as if the final showdown will be between Becerra and Hilton. If so, Becerra, the sole Democrat in the race, will likely take the state. Why that matters nationwide is that Becerra, like many veteran Democrats, is a poster child for much of the Democratic leadership—experienced but moderate. While I would like to give Becerra a chance to prove himself, as he stands, he will be much like—well, Gavin Newsom.  Becerra has a deep résumé. He is the former secretary of health and human services under the Biden administration, a former state attorney general, and former member of Congress who represented the heart of Central and East Los Angeles. As state attorney general, he defended DACA and the Affordable Care Act during Trump’s first term and sued the administration over fracking. The son of Mexican immigrants, who grew up in Sacramento, he was the first in his family to attend college when he enrolled at Stanford University. On paper, his portfolio would make him an ideal Democratic candidate—experience in both Sacramento and Washington, from a working-class background, the son of immigrants. After Swalwell, the first mainstream Democratic contender, fell from grace, Becerra positioned himself as a steady choice for many Democrats. And it paid off: By late May, polls showed Becerra leading beyond the other contenders by a safe margin, beating back earlier fears of a Republican shutout from earlier in the election. Becerra’s rise can also be understood in the context of the state’s racial politics. Back in March, Becerra protested the exclusion of himself and other candidates of color from the ABC7-USC debate. As he said in an open letter to USC’s President Beong-Soo Kim: “My father used to tell me of the days when he would encounter signs posted outside establishments that read ‘No Dogs, Negroes or Mexicans Allowed.’ USC’s actions may not seem so transparent. But, you have deliberately chosen to selectively filter the voters’ view of the field of gubernatorial candidates in what all observers characterize as a wide-open race.” The move helped cement his connection to Latino politics in the Golden State, where 41 percent of California’s population is Latino. Communities are not monoliths—as the 2024 election demonstrated, the Trump campaign received a significant number of Latino votes. But Becerra, who is the first in his family to attend university, who fought against ICE in his time as attorney general during the first Trump administration, and would be the first Latino governor and governor of color in California history since Romualdo Pacheco in 1875, does appeal as someone who understands the immigrant experience at a time when immigrants are under attack.At the same time, Becerra’s emergence as the front-runner brought a wave of corporate backers. If money talks, then Becerra can be expected to give lip service to Chevron, Meta, Uber, and PG&E. It’s no wonder Becerra has received the most scrutiny for his anticipated catering to groups that inflame issues important to many California Democrats: climate change, the rise of AI, and affordability. Becerra described this as pragmatism—as he said in one debate statement: “You need Chevron. I need Chevron. My people of the state of California need Chevron … Chevron wants to give me a check, that’s—that’s their prerogative.” While he cited his lawsuits against oil companies and his support for green energy, he said in the end that Chevron remains an important employer to the state. But it is worth noting that Chevron’s contribution to a Becerra PAC was the first time it had donated to a California gubernatorial election in a decade.  David Dayen of The American Prospect has noted how the final days of the primary were defined by Becerra’s corporate backers. In his article on Becerra’s inaction on pharmacy benefit managers, or PBMs, Dayen pointed out that as attorney general Becerra sought to rein in PBMs. He rolled back his stance once appointed to the Biden administration (in parallel with his change of heart on the single payer option). Becerra’s rise, to Dayen, has been a credit less to his talent as a policymaker than to a lack of accountability from the California Democratic Party. While Becerra proposed seizing patents for medication made with government research as a means of cutting down on pharmaceutical price gouging during his time as state attorney general, he later backtracked on the plan when he became health and human services secretary. “Governing matters less than internal power positioning,” said Dayen.  This accounts for the potent challenge mounted by Tom Steyer, the billionaire former head of investment group Farallon Capital who used his personal fortune to combat climate change and take on the oil industry. As Joe Hagan outlined, in his profile of Steyer for Men’s Journal back in 2017, Steyer seemed nothing like a billionaire in his lifestyle or interests. That may be why he has enjoyed some success in an era when billionaire is a dirty word. Steyer has enjoyed endorsements from some key progressives, including former U.S. Secretary of Labor Robert Reich and Representative Ro Khanna. A Becerra-Steyer matchup may offer a more interesting election than a race between Becerra and right-wing blowhard Steve Hilton. But, based on the current AP results, we are likely facing a November election between Becerra and Hilton.California was doomed to have a chaotic election. In 2009, Republican state Senator Abel Maldonado authored what would become Proposition 14, a measure that would amend the state constitution to create the current open primary system. Then-Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger championed the measure as a staple of his legacy and in 2010 promoted Maldonado to be lieutenant governor.At the time, some pundits viewed the measure as a means of preventing extreme candidates from winning an election. Others saw it as a system that limited the power of third parties to compete in the jungle primary. But what stands out most of all is the fact that, in California at least, it was a solution in search of a problem: Before 2010, most elections—save the explosive recall election of Governor Gray Davis—were relatively tame. As The New Republic’s own Timothy Noah previously noted, California’s electoral problems are down to the stagnation of the state Democratic Party, which has changed very little since the Clinton years. As Republicans have moved increasingly rightward as part of capitulating to Donald Trump, their importance in state politics has dwindled to a few conspiracy theorists and as foil to Gavin Newsom. Whoever the next Democratic governor is, they would do the party a favor by eliminating the open primary.  California Democratic politics have been increasingly defined by the party’s centrism, which has become more deeply rooted even as the state’s biggest problems—affordability, environmental devastation, the seemingly intractable housing crisis—have become equally entrenched. There are no outside forces strong enough to shake this status quo. Few have challenged the main Democratic establishment at the statewide level. Since 2006, no Republican has been elected to statewide office. The Democratic Party in California has maintained a steady grip on statewide policy to the point that many within the party seem mostly concerned about maintaining its monopoly. And moderate Republicans fleeing MAGA’s corruption in tenuous alliance with the Democratic Party’s center have only more deeply instilled the party’s corporate bent, seen most vividly in the way state Democrats tend to cater to major business interests like Silicon Valley. As Dayen put it to me: “I think the party has generally evolved a mild antipathy to governing, which is poisonous in the current environment where voters are disappointed at the lack of follow-through on campaign promises. Wanting to be liked more than wanting to get things done creates a slow, painful toxicity that emerges in approval ratings of the Democratic Party.”Outside the governor’s race, some challenges to the established order have bubbled up. The Los Angeles mayoral race has received the most attention for the fact that former reality-television fixture Spencer Pratt channeled anger over the L.A. wildfires and slung AI campaign videos left and right to become the first major Republican mayoral challenger in decades.But it is not only challenges from the right that are rocking city politics. Nithya Raman, a onetime ally of incumbent Mayor Karen Bass, entered the race against her, blasting her former colleague for her handling of programs supporting the city’s significant unhoused population.  Yet it will be Bass and Raman facing each other in the fall election, ending Pratt’s mayoral ambitions. This election has demonstrated that Bass’s leadership does not sit well with many Angelenos angered about the fires and hoping for more than just the status quo. But it nevertheless demonstrates that many L.A. Democrats still lean toward moderates. For the next few months, Bass will have to defend her reputation and prove that she is serious about caring for Angelenos.Elsewhere, anti-establishment figures are doing more than merely rattling some cages. In San Francisco, State Senator Scott Weiner will face off against City Supervisor Connie Chan to replace Democratic legend Nancy Pelosi. Although Chan received endorsements from both Pelosi and former San Franciso Mayor Willie Brown, she finished second in the primary. Weiner, a Democratic state senator with a long track record of authoring legislation on issues ranging from LGBTQ+ rights to housing, has received praise as the brains behind the No Secret Police Act, which required federal agents to demask, and one of the earliest bills to regulate artificial intelligence (it was vetoed by Newsom). Since then, Weiner has authored several AI regulation bills that have been signed by the governor, and some speculate his state legislation being a template for federal oversight on AI. East of the Bay Area in Sacramento, Representative Doris Matsui of California’s 7th congressional district has faced a significant challenge from Sacramento City Council member Mai Vang. Matsui and Vang will face off in the November election, in what will be a standoff between different generations of the Democratic Party—in some ways a microcosm for party politics writ large. Matsui is part of a family political dynasty that began when Robert Matsui was elected to California’s 3rd district in 1979. Until his death in 2005, he worked on legislation that included blocking the privatization of Social Security to shepherding the Civil Liberties Act of 1988, which offered redress to Japanese Americans formerly incarcerated in camps during World War II. That same year, Doris, his wife, ran successfully for his seat in a 2005 special election. Since then, Doris Matsui has been a longtime advocate for women’s and LGBTQ+ rights.But while in previous years Matsui’s reelections have been relatively calm and certain, this year the race has been contentious. Vang and Matsui have attacked each other on a personal level, often pointing to their generational differences. Matsui has been criticized for her age (she is 82) and her slow response to ICE’s predations. Vang, who was elected to the City Council in 2020, has been criticized for lacking the experience needed to serve in Congress. As with the governor’s race, money played a crucial role in this election. Matsui raised $1 million to Vang’s $600,000, and Matsui later took out a $1.4 million loan to finance her campaign (Matsui’s second husband is billionaire Roger Sant).  The Sacramento Bee ultimately endorsed Vang after Matsui declined to speak with the paper’s editorial board. In the board’s words: “Mai Vang embodies today’s Sacramento. Doris Matsui does not. The Bee endorses Vang for a much-needed and historic changing of the guard for Sacramento in Washington.” The Bee’s Robin Epley also accused Matsui of platforming Zachariah Wooden, a college student running as the Republican, in order to pull votes away from Vang. When I asked Dayen what he saw in this primary, he described it as an important moment where a lack of strong leadership left many voters uncertain about their future—a sentiment with which The New Republic’s Perry Bacon concurred. “I think there is a strain of restlessness in California,” Dayen said. “The governor’s race didn’t have a locked and loaded establishment figure for the first time in 20 years. The late redistricting unsettled the House races to a degree, and there’s a real questioning of what it takes to win in swing-district territory.” However, as demonstrated by the wealth of support for Becerra from companies like Chevron and Meta, Dayen says the influence of corporations still influences state politics: “The money thrown around continues to frustrate public desires.”For decades, Californians have seemed to want calm and easygoing elections, preferring familiar faces to firebrands. And they’ve largely gotten their wish, even at the top of the ballot in this current cycle. As longtime Los Angeles Times columnist George Skelton put it, Becerra offered something that has, with some exception, dominated California politics: “Nothing flashy, just plain but comfortable.” But what remains are the underlying problems—environmental disasters like wildfires, rising housing costs, and anxiety over the AI industry, to name a few—that have plagued California residents and have made life anything but calm and easygoing. And while challenges to the status quo have been more a trickle than a flood, it’s a warning sign to those who’ve clung to power in the established order that they must start delivering solutions. At some point, something’s got to give—or else MAGA’s next Golden State savant might successfully convince voters to give them the reins. Democratic leadership should pay attention to the rumblings out west; California will be a bellwether for what could happen to the party across the nation.* This article has been updated.

A famous figure who lives a very long life risks outliving his fame. That was the case for Robert Coles, the celebrated child psychiatrist and social critic, who died earlier this week at age 97. From the 1960s through the 1990s, Coles was revered by succeeding generations of young people (including mine) for his empathic writings about everyday experience in an America divided by race and class. Many of these writings first appeared in The New Republic, where Coles was for many years a contributing editor. I encountered Coles in the spring of 1979, when, as a Harvard junior, I took his wildly popular lecture course, Soc. Sci. 33: Moral and Social Inquiry. Coles was a campus celebrity, profiled the year before on the cover of The New York Times Magazine and not especially admired by his academic colleagues because he lacked “rigor.” (Coles returned the disdain by heaping scorn on the social sciences for being too abstracted from the meat and gristle of everyday life.) Drawing on an eclectic and compelling reading list—George Orwell’s The Road to Wigan Pier, Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men by James Agee and Walker Evans, essays by Simone Weil, short stories by Flannery O’Connor—Coles urged his votaries to lead lives that made moral sense. He didn’t tell us exactly how to go about it, but he made clear we would find no spiritual refreshment on Wall Street. Coles also warned his compatriots on the political left against ideological complacency. A veteran of social movements regarding civil rights, Appalachian poverty, and migrant farmers, Coles told the Harvard Crimson in 1968 that “I’m very worried about the dangers of a kind of political activity that ignores the ironies and ambiguities of life, including political life.” For example:The [predominantly Black low-income] people in Roxbury—regardless of what the leaders of SDS or I have to think about it—want to get into the system rather than leave it. The families I work with want to be able to get better service at the Boston City Hospital, they want garbage collection more frequently, they want better heating, they want welfare workers who will help them out. They are not going to take to the streets in order to storm the Winter Palace—there is no Winter Palace to storm.In his excellent Coles obituary in The Boston Globe, David Shribman writes about Coles’s devotion to what he called “in medias res,” a literary term that describes a narrative that begins in the middle of the story. (The phrase is Latin for “into the middle of things.”) Coles was drawn to studying life “in the midst of trouble.” His first experience doing so was in 1960, when he witnessed a tiny Black girl named Ruby Bridges enter an all-white elementary school in 1960 on the authority of a federal judge’s desegregation order.“I happened to see this little child going into a school in New Orleans,” Coles later recalled, “at the age of six, in the first grade, and I thought to myself: I’d like to know that child. I’d like to know what’s happening to her.” Coles spent months meeting with Ruby regularly, “rather puzzled at how normal and stoic and strong she was, going through this kind of living hell. Two hundred people waiting at 8:30 in the morning to tell her they were going to kill her.… Twenty-five federal marshals taking her into that building.” Ruby’s father lost his job, and her grandparents, who lived in a small Mississippi town, feared that they would be lynched. Coles figured it was only a matter of time before Ruby would “start developing symptoms and get in trouble.” But she didn’t. One day Ruby’s teacher told Coles she’d seen Ruby, as she walked past yet another fist-shaking crowd of angry white segregationists, pause to say something. When Coles asked Ruby what she’d said, she explained she’d recited a prayer: “Please, dear God, forgive them, because they don’t know what they’re doing.” The result of that conversation was Coles’s five-volume series, Children of Crisis. “Ruby had a will,” Coles wrote later, “and used it to make an ethical choice: she demonstrated moral stamina; she possessed honor, courage.” Religious faith was hugely important to Coles, a practicing Catholic. He wrote about faith often, and these passages were usually the first to get cut out by editors. I know this because Coles told me so himself while I was editing an op-ed I’d assigned him for The New York Times. It was his response to my cutting, in fact, a passage about faith. In that instance, it was for space (I swear!), but he didn’t believe me, and maybe he was correct not to. Coles later tried to help make Dorothy Day a saint by telling the Vatican that his wife, Jane, had prayed to her and was healed in some way. At the moment, though, Day is designated only a “servant of God.”But I digress.After Ruby Bridges, Coles’s next in medias res experience was one that’s gone largely unmentioned in his obituaries, which is a shame because I find it his most interesting. “He was [the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee’s] resident shrink,” an Atlanta-based reporter named Pat Walters said in that long-ago Times Magazine profile. “When people got to the cracking point, he was there for them.” Coles worked in Mississippi for SNCC during 1964’s Freedom Summer, probably the most dangerous campaign of the entire Civil Rights Movement, led by the fearless and brilliant Robert Parris Moses. Northern college students, most of them white and middle or upper-middle class, were recruited to travel south to register voters, teach African American children math, reading, and Black history, and organize an integrated alternative slate of delegates for the 1964 Democratic convention. Almost immediately, three civil rights workers—Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, both white and from New York, and James Chaney, Black and from Mississippi—were killed. The murder went unpunished for half a century, when one of the surviving killers was finally convicted, though only of manslaughter. Coles’s role in Freedom Summer is documented in Thomas E. Ricks’s superb 2022 book, Waging a Good War, which examines the Civil Rights Movement from the perspective of military strategy. In many ways, the movement’s logic was just as brutal. When Goodman, Cheney, and Schwerner were killed, Ricks reports, Coles, who had known them well, was stunned to realize that although Moses and the other leaders grieved their deaths, they also saw it as a moral victory. “They were realizing that they’d succeeded,” Coles would recall. “Because this became cover stories in the newsmagazines. And the president of the United States was having something to say. So they had won.” Black people had been dying for a long time in Mississippi, Coles realized, and “no one noticed or cared.” Now people would care.Ricks is right; this nonviolent movement was, in fact, waging war. Coles would later diagnose students with “battle fatigue,” with signs of “exhaustion, weariness, despair, frustration and rage.” To Coles, these young civil rights protesters were “in a war and exposed to the stresses of warfare.”As Coles recalled in a 1983 oral history, he didn’t feel he had much to teach the (almost entirely Black) veterans of the Civil Rights Movement about how to cope, “because they knew a hell of a lot more about that than I did.” Instead, he was steered mostly to minister to the middle- and upper-middle-class white kids, because “having gone to Harvard, and being a product of what I am,” he knew better what they might need. Some of these kids, he said, “were arrogant, protected by their ignorance and arrogance, to be blunt about it. And some of them were protected in the best sense of the word … by a kind of earnest good will. Some of them were a bit show-offy, some of them were naïve and presumptuous, but so are we all, Black and white.” Such novelistic complexity is characteristic of Coles’s observations; in his writings, nobody is ever reduced to a “case study.”One of the young idealists Coles encountered in Mississippi turned out to be notably sinister: Dennis Sweeney, who two decades later would assassinate his mentor, the civil rights activist and future congressman Allard Lowenstein (also in Mississippi that summer). Coles examined Sweeney after a dynamite blast to figure out whether he needed to see a doctor. “I heard him say some things and made an immediate diagnosis. I said to my wife on the phone … ‘I think he is schizophrenic.’” Coles hoped that Sweeney’s strange behavior had been brought out by stress, and that it would recede. “But then I noticed that it didn’t, totally.” In another disturbing incident related by Coles, “some students went to see a doctor because they had been injured by one of these incidents with Klan elements or whatever. And the doctor called the Klan in, and they got hurt more.”The parents of these white college kids, Coles recalled, “were frightened out of their minds.” Coles was told to talk to one female student whose father was a psychoanalyst in Chicago. “She didn’t seem too depressed to me. She said that the only problem I have is that my parents are calling me all the time.” Coles volunteered to phone them, and when he did the father told him she’d had a depressive episode when she was 12. “I said, oh, now she is 20.… I just talked to her and she seemed fine.” Then the man’s wife came on the phone and said she thought it was her husband who was depressed. “He is very worried,” she said. “Worry is not depression,” Coles answered. “And you have every reason to worry. I can’t tell you not to worry. You should worry. So should we all.” It is perhaps an unusual psychiatric practice to advise your patients to worry, but then Freedom Summer was an unusual event that occurred in the real world, not in anybody’s imagination. When you’re in medias res it doesn’t make sense not to worry. Ruby Bridges was perhaps spared by being too young to worry. But Coles perhaps sells short his own bravery. In that 1978 Times profile, the late civil rights leader Julian Bond recalls:He was a model for grace under the pressure of those days. We had one fellow demonstrating against us who’d been accused and acquitted of bombing a synagogue; a real hater, this guy. Coles [whose father was Jewish] just patiently drew him out and the guy burst out in tears one day and sobbed to Bob that his mother always hated him and somehow he was getting back at her. I know it sounds theatrical, but he had this special way with people.One of Coles’s favorite poems, I remember from his class, was Stephen Spender’s “The Truly Great.” Coles would have hotly disputed that he was a great man, but I feel comfortable stating he was one of those who, as Spender writes,fought for life,Who wore at their hearts the fire’s centre.Born of the sun, they travelled a short while toward the sunAnd left the vivid air signed with their honour.Requiescat in pace, Dr. Coles, and safe travels.