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The oysterman-turned-Senate candidate is plotting a political revolution against oligarchs and leaders of both parties.

Representative Frederica Wilson is, actually, tapping out of her midterm race.The 83-year-old Democrat announced Friday that her time representing Florida’s 24th congressional district will come to an end after her current term. In a sit-down interview with the Miami Herald, Wilson explained that while she’s decided not to run for reelection, she’s also not ready to retire.“I think it’s time,” Wilson told the south Florida paper, explaining that she stayed in her position as long as she did in order to assist the 5000 Role Models program, a mentorship program she created for Black and brown boys in 1993.Wilson disappeared for four weeks without explanation last month, missing 40 House votes in the process while sparking concerns among her constituents about the state of Wilson’s health. Earlier this month, the cowboy hat–wearing lawmaker revealed to WPLG Local 10 that eye surgery was the reason behind her spontaneous absence and that she required several weeks for the stitches to heal.But Wilson had been privately musing about the possibility of ending her campaign, anyway. Multiple sources told Axios that Wilson made several calls on Saturday to people in her district about her plans to quit the race.“She’s not running anymore—she’s going to retire,” one source told Axios.Wilson adamantly denied the report, telling Axios in turn that her supposed exit was just a “crazy rumor.”“A crazy, crazy rumor. I’m almost distraught. It’s not true. I am still planning on running,” Wilson said.But the unidentified source doubled down, insisting to Axios that Wilson “called and made it known” that she is planning to retire and that she has already made the decision known to several legislators in her district.Wilson confirmed to the Miami Herald that she had made her decision to exit the race a while ago—but needed to be “politically strategic” about sharing the news, in light of Florida’s recent redistricting. “I figured if I announced that I was retiring, what would the Legislature and the governor do? What would they say? Would District 24 be an easy target because Frederica is no longer there? I’m a strong candidate,” Wilson said. “With me not here, would that weaken the survival of District 24?Wilson’s district, which she has represented since 2013, encompasses the Miami-Dade area and Broward County. The area has a solid Democratic advantage, according to an analysis by the Cook Political Report. Christine Sanon-Jules Olivo, a small-business owner with ties to the NAACP, is already lined up to replace Wilson in the district’s Democratic primary. But the race could soon be crowded: State Senator Shevrin Jones has also announced his interest in running for Wilson’s seat. The primary is scheduled for August 18.For her part, Wilson said that she’s not quite ready to endorse her replacement.“All of this rests on my shoulders. So I carried a lot, and it’s time to find someone who I can trust,” Wilson told the Herald. “I’m going to vet all these candidates to see who I can trust to carry this mission forward.”

We would be in an entirely different economy if practically anyone other than America’s worst human was president.

CBS News chief Bari Weiss has hacked up 60 Minutes to the point that even show staffers have lost faith in the famed magazine show.Weiss’s recent shakeup at 60 Minutes has involved the exit of several of the show’s major personalities, including correspondent Sharyn Alfonsi (who criticized Weiss’s decision to delay her report on a notoriously brutal CECOT mega-prison in El Salvador), correspondent Cecilia Vega, executive producer Tanya Simon, and executive editor Draggan Mihailovich. Correspondent Anderson Cooper left voluntarily. To replace the top leadership, Weiss has installed former Vanity Fair writer Nick Bilton, who, like her, has next to no formal experience in broadcast journalism.But 60 Minutes staffers don’t see Weiss’s aggressive restructuring as an optimistic new era for the program—instead, there’s a near-unanimous prediction that “it’s over.”Status reported on the maelstrom behind the scenes, citing “more than half a dozen” staffers.“They’re gutting us,” one 60 Minutes employee told Status. “It’s over. I don’t see how ‘60’ will be able to function after this.”“Goodnight and good luck, motherfuckers,” they added.Another senior staffer told Status that “everyone—100 percent thought Tanya and Draggan did exemplary jobs.”“It hurts. We feel violated,” the senior staffer said.Weiss’s tenure has so far lasted seven months, but her business decisions atop the news giant have unequivocally and single-handedly divorced CBS News from its decades-long place within America’s prestige news media circuit. What was once crowned the “gold standard” of broadcasting, and was the home of some of journalism’s most venerable names, such as Walter Cronkite and Edward R. Murrow, has since devolved into a graveyard for journalism ethics. In a statement shared with The New York Times, Vega said she “very much [fears] what comes next for and the future of the legendary broadcast.”“In recent months, my producing teams and I have experienced efforts to insert political bias into our stories,” Vega wrote. “Reporting teams have held back on submitting story pitches about important news topics out of fear of the internal repercussions.“Let’s call this what it is: censorship, both imposed and self-driven. It is dangerous for the show and dangerous for democracy,” the George Polk Award–winning journalist noted.But CBS’s parent company, Paramount, was ready and willing to sacrifice 60 Minutes long before that. The media conglomerate undermined itself by settling multimillion-dollar lawsuits with Donald Trump over the show’s 2024 Kamala Harris interview, in an apparent bid to butter up the administration ahead of a multibillion-dollar merger with SkyDance. That resulted in the loss of two storied showrunners, including 60 Minutes producer Bill Owens and CBS News chief Wendy McMahon, who rejected Paramount’s approach to handling Trump’s groundless lawsuit.Owens, who has largely remained out of the spotlight since leaving the show, shared his opinion on Weiss’s recent restructuring with Status. “They’re killing 60 Minutes,” he said.

It hasn’t even been two days since Freedom 250, the Trump-tied group organizing a bunch of celebrations ostensibly in honor of America’s 250th birthday, announced the lineup for its Great American State Fair concert series. But the series already appears dead on arrival, with more than half of the scheduled performers fleeing. The latest? Bret […]

Katie Miller, who is married to Stephen Miller, lashed out at a young Democratic operative on Thursday, after the Democratic Party’s official account called Miller’s husband an “ugly f–k.” The aggrieved wife of the top White House adviser posted the operative’s picture on X and ridiculed her personal life, declaring, “She’s 30, unmarried with no kids,” and adding: “This is what a sad, unhappy, female Liberal looks like.”That liberal is Paulina Mangubat, 30, who writes many of the Democratic National Committee’s tweets as its deputy chief mobilization officer. After Katie Miller named her and posted her picture, the MAGA fury started rolling in. I spoke with Mangubat Friday morning. The MAGA backlash has been swift, with people circulating images of her engagement photo shoot and insulting her and her fiancé’s appearance. People are posting decade-old pictures of her while commenting on her appearance, weight, and even her happiness in life.But in our interview, Mangubat stressed emphatically that this dustup should refocus everyone on the real victims of the moment.“Ultimately, this is not really about me,” Mangubat told me. “It’s about the people who are really being attacked by the Trump administration.”This saga all started after MAGA extremist Ken Paxton won the Texas GOP Senate primary, after which the DNC posted a fairly conventional tweet that included a picture of the Democratic nominee, James Talarico, adding: “It’s time to take back Texas.”That prompted Stephen Miller to tweet: “Democrats made history in Texas by nominating their first transgender senate candidate.” It’s a strange claim—Talarico is not transgender, though he’s spoken up for trans rights—but it’s obviously in keeping with the GOP strategy, which is to portray Talarico as woke and effeminate. Regardless, that’s the tweet that the DNC feed—Mangubat—responded to with “Shut up you ugly f–k.”Mangubat’s tweet was approved by the DNC. She says that the effort to make the Democratic Party’s social media presence more nimble and responsive is the much more important story here, especially given how well Trump and the GOP prosecuted the information wars in 2024. The DNC says its program has grown, pointing to an additional 6.3 million followers across all its social media platforms. It claims the programs have produced over nine billion impressions since Trump took office.Mangubat says that when Democrats did research into how to reach more people, “overwhelmingly what we heard is people want us to be more direct, speak more like real people, and be faster.”Speaking like real people also means letting them react in real time with real feeling—which is what happened here with Stephen Miller, Mangubat says.“All we did was say what everyone else is thinking, which is, ‘Shut up—that’s not what people care about right now,’” Mangubat says. She added that there’s no reason to regret using the “ugly” moniker to describe Miller.“What he’s doing is ugly—siccing federal agents on civilians, applauding when families are separated. It is ugly behavior,” Mangubat said. “The reason this happened is because Stephen Miller, who is one of the most powerful men in the country, decided that it would be a good use of his time to go on Twitter and hurl an untrue and transphobic attack against James Talarico.”It’s worth stressing that the roots of this saga lie in the depiction of Talarico as transgender—and that this was intended as a vicious insult. Indeed, Stephen Miller went on a tear after this exchange, going on Fox News and ripping Talarico as soft and effeminate in every way he could. Miller derided Talarico as “transitioning to female,” mocking his testosterone count and claiming Talarico’s blood is made of “soy milk.”It’s also worth dwelling on the vision of masculinity that Paxton presents. His wife divorced him on biblical grounds, he’s been impeached and indicted while in office, and he has subjected LGBTQ people to relentless abuse.But this is very much the MAGA vision of masculinity in action, according to Stephen Miller. During that Fox News hit, Miller described Paxton as a “real conservative” and “patriotic” and “God-fearing,” while claiming that Talarico will be roundly rejected by red-blooded Texans, given their manly “pioneer heritage” and “frontier history.” The roots of this saga, then, really lie in the MAGA-approved view that Talarico doesn’t count as a Real Man, while Paxton somehow does.Mangubat, the daughter of two Filipino immigrants, tells me she was born in Louisiana and raised in Arizona. She said Katie Miller’s claims about her being an unhappy liberal are false. “I feel very blessed in my life,” Mangubat said. “I love this country. It has given me every single blessing and opportunity in my life.”The darker story underneath all this is that these days, going viral is the coin of the realm in our politics, and succeeding at this often requires what’s known as “dunking.” The question that many Democratic operatives are trying to crack right now is how to achieve virality. Does it really require dunks like calling Stephen Miller “ugly”?One answer to that question can be found in this fact: That tweet about Miller now has more than 40 million views.