In recent months, two ideas that were once on the fringes of Democratic policy thinking — cutting off financial support and stopping arms transfers to Israel — have gone mainstream.

Nearly half of House Democrats voted to end aid to Israel last month, while roughly 40 percent of the caucus has called for blocking the sale of offensive weapons to the Israeli government until it persuades Congress that it will not use American bombs to perpetrate war crimes. 

Many of the party’s 2028 hopefuls have also embraced these general concepts. Rahm Emanuel, the former Chicago mayor and consummate centrist, recently suggested that America should end aid to Israel and condition arms sales on its compliance with US law. Progressive Sen. Chris Van Hollen of Maryland has gone several steps further, saying that Israel should be barred from accessing US-made offensive weapons until it “agrees to a time-bound plan to end the occupation and enact a two-state solution.”

If recent elections are any indication, these ideas will only grow more prominent in the coming years. Over the past two months, a slew of Democratic candidates — often with establishment backing and largely progressive voting records — lost to left-wing rivals who promised to take a more adversarial posture toward Israel. Rep. Haley Stevens’s apparent defeat at the hands of the staunchly pro-Palestinian Abdul El-Sayed in this week’s Democratic Senate primary is the latest and perhaps most consequential example of this trend.

The Democratic Party’s burgeoning support for restricting aid and arms transfers to Israel is well-founded. In prosecuting its war with Hamas, the Israeli government has subjected Gaza’s civilian population to grotesque and illegal forms of collective punishment (if not genocide). Meanwhile, in the occupied West Bank, Israel is expanding illegal settlements and allowing Jewish settlers to violently dispossess Palestinian residents. In this context, supplying Israel with money and weapons is contrary to both America’s moral obligations and security interests. It is wrong to subsidize or provision any foreign military’s assaults on human rights. And doing so undermines global respect for both the United States and the concept of international law.

For many Democrats, however, the purpose of cutting off aid and weapons to Israel is not merely to end America’s complicity in its crimes. Rather, the objective is to effect a radical change in Israeli policy — and ultimately, a peaceful resolution of the Israel-Palestine conflict.

Such Democrats believe that the Israeli government will not seriously pursue a two-state solution (much less, a binational democratic state) unless it is forced to do so. Fortunately, in this view, Israel’s reliance on American aid and military technology provides the US with potent leverage over its internal policies: If America ceases to provide the Israeli military with cash and offensive weapons, then Tel Aviv will eventually have little choice but to start upholding its end of the two-state bargain.

But this is probably too optimistic. Ending aid and conditioning arms sales may be preconditions for realigning Israeli policy. But coercing its government into an acceptance of Palestinian statehood would likely require measures far more sweeping — and controversial — than those that congressional Democrats are presently entertaining.

Israel doesn’t need our money 

Of all the Democratic Party’s proposals for disciplining Israel, ending US aid may be the most politically palatable — yet least effective.

The notion that the United States should stop giving Israel $3.8 billion each year has some appeal on the left, right, and center. Which is not surprising: One doesn’t need to be passionately pro-Palestinian to be skeptical of America giving billions in aid to a rich, foreign country. In his Senate race, El-Sayed tried to tap into this isolationist sentiment, describing his plans for slashing aid to Israel — and increasing benefits for US citizens — as an “America First” agenda.

Unfortunately, ending aid would have little impact on Israeli policy. And for the very reason that such assistance is hard to justify, even to those who care little about the Palestinians: Israel is a wealthy nation that can fund its own military.

In 2025, Israel spent about 7.9 percent of its GDP on the military, not counting its use of American aid. To sustain its 2025 level of defense funding — without American aid — Israel would need to dedicate 8.5 percent of GDP to its military. This increase might be slightly inconvenient for Israeli taxpayers. But it’s clearly doable. 

And Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu wants to do it. 

Or so he told 60 Minutes in May, saying that he would like to “draw down to zero the American financial support, the financial component of the military cooperation that we have.” In the view of some Israeli analysts, forgoing US aid would give Israel a freer hand to pursue its security objectives as it sees fit without worrying about a backlash from politicians thousands of miles away. The American Enterprise Institute’s Daniel J. Samet and former Israeli Defense Forces Maj. Raphael BenLevi spelled out the logic of this position back in 2023, writing, “As long as aid continues, the temptation to dictate Israel’s policies will be too strong for Washington to resist, while Israeli officials will be inclined to seek approval for every action they take.”

This doesn’t mean that the US should continue funding Israel’s military; revoking such aid could improve America’s global image while saving taxpayers a little money. By itself, however, canceling all military grants to Israel would not force its government to make any real changes in its security strategies, much less to accept Palestinian statehood.

Blocking bombs would have a bigger impact 

Although Israel does not need America’s dollars, it does currently require our weaponry. Between 2021 and 2025, the United States supplied 68 percent of Israel’s imported major arms.

Israel can domestically manufacture many of these weapons — including drones, missiles, air-defense systems, armored vehicles, and aerial, artillery, and tank munitions. But its arms industry is not capable of churning all of these out at the rate required by its intensive, multifront wars since October 7, 2023. 

Meanwhile, Israel is wholly reliant on America for its combat aircraft fleet. They don’t make F-15s, F-16s, or F-35s in Haifa. Critically, this doesn’t just leave Israel dependent on the US for new fighter jets but also for the maintenance of its existing ones. 

“The F-35 is a system that is deeply reliant on just-in-time delivery of spare parts,” Josh Paul, a former Biden State Department official who resigned in protest of American arms transfers to Israel, told me. “And were the US to say we’re not going to provide you those spare parts, it wouldn’t be more than one or two months before Israel’s F-35s would not fly, certainly at the current operational paces.”

Thus, conditionally freezing sales of US military equipment to Israel would place real constraints on its martial capabilities. Although, the scale of those constraints depends a lot on the details of US policy. 

The most prominent proposal for an arms embargo in Congress, the Block the Bombs Act, would freeze the transfer of select classes of weaponry, including bunker-busting bombs and precision missiles. This policy might force Israel to scale back or delay certain aerial campaigns. In the long run, however, Israel has domestic substitutes for these weapons. 

By contrast, were the US to choke off military supplies more broadly — leaving the Israeli air force bereft of fighter jets and component parts — the implications for Israeli security strategy would be far more profound.

In either scenario, however, it seems unlikely that the Israeli government would respond to an embargo by agreeing to cede territory or autonomy to the Palestinians, in service of a two-state solution. 

The reasons for this are twofold. First, although an embargo would substantially diminish Israel’s military capabilities, those capacities would remain formidable. As already noted, Israel domestically produces a great deal of military hardware — so much, it actually exported more arms than all but six countries between 2021 and 2025. 

What’s more, the Israeli government has already launched an effort to achieve “munitions independence.” This entails a $110 billion investment into its arms industry, including initiatives to increase Israeli production of aerial munitions, heavy bombs, and artillery shells.

At the same time, Israel is also developing a plan for expanding its domestic raw materials industry, so that it enjoys sovereignty over the inputs necessary for arms production.

Given all this, even without access to American weapons, Israel would still be able to militarily dominate the West Bank and Gaza. 

“Israel’s dependence on US weapons is more about its position in the region; its capacity to deter Iran and so forth, not in the Palestinian context,” Paul said. “Cut off Israel’s access to US weapons, and it would still have overwhelming military superiority over any Palestinian resistance group.”

Further, in the face of a US arms embargo, Israel would not only remain capable of sustaining its subjugation of the Palestinians; it would also likely retain the will to do so. 

Israeli opinion on politics in general — and the Palestinian issue in particular — has been drifting rightward for decades. In a 2025 Gallup poll, 27 percent of Israelis supported a two-state solution while 63 percent opposed one. And opposition to Palestinian statehood is even more pronounced among Jewish Israelis, who dominate the nation’s politics. In a Pew survey from last year, only 16 percent of Israeli Jews agreed that peaceful coexistence with a Palestinian state was possible — down from 46 percent in 2013. Support for a binational, democratic state of Israel-Palestine — the “one-state solution” favored by many on the American left — is all-but non-existent among Israeli Jews, with only 1 percent backing the policy in a 2025 poll.

Israeli political leaders share its electorate’s opposition to Palestinian statehood. Netanyahu’s leading rival in Israel’s upcoming election, former IDF chief Gadi Eisenkot, recently told an interviewer, “I have never said two states for two peoples, because I understand the depth of this religious-national-social conflict, and anyone who talks about ‘peace now’ and two states doesn’t understand the conflict.”

Israeli attitudes toward Palestinian sovereignty do shift with events; after the horrors of Hamas’s October 7, 2023, attacks, skepticism of a two-state solution among Jewish Israelis spiked. It is therefore conceivable that Israelis might become more open to Palestinian statehood, were the people of Gaza and the West Bank to unify behind conciliatory political leaders, who were prepared to accept the existence of a Jewish state within Israel’s legal borders. But that is an unlikely prospect in the near or medium term — and one that Israel’s criminality makes evermore remote. 

Absent such a development, a US arms embargo is unlikely to realign Israeli politics fundamentally. Historically, when great powers have tried to force weaker states to shift their policies through coercion, the latter often resist, even at a high cost. Iran’s refusal to submit to US demands on its regional policies and weapons programs, amid years of devastating sanctions and months of bombardment, may be today’s most salient example. 

The Iranian regime’s recalcitrance may partly reflect its authoritarian character. But democratic states have also routinely bucked the strong-arming of foreign powers. For example, in the 1980s, New Zealand barred the United States from docking nuclear-powered or armed ships at its ports. The US tried to coerce the Kiwis into reversing this policy by suspending America’s commitment to defend New Zealand from military attack in 1986. But New Zealanders remained undaunted; indeed, support for the anti-nuclear policy grew over the ensuing years.

What getting tough on Israel would really look like

This is not to say that no amount of sustained American coercion could shift Israel’s political calculus on its conflict with the Palestinians. But the scale and duration of US pressure would likely need to be much greater than what congressional Democrats are presently contemplating. 

Specifically, such a campaign would likely require an arms embargo more far-reaching than the one proposed by the Block the Bombs Act, along with sweeping economic sanctions, and the withdrawal of American diplomatic protection at the United Nations. 

The Biden administration created the architecture for such a sanctions policy when it froze the US-held assets and visas of Israeli settlers who’d perpetrated acts of violence in the West Bank, along with those who had materially assisted them. These sanctions could be expanded to cover all involved in settlement expansion, including construction companies, banks, financial institutions and government agencies that facilitate the colonization of Palestinian territory. Should this prove insufficient to change Israeli policy, America could apply sanctions to those populating and serving already-existing Israeli settlements.

For reasons previously noted, Israel’s first response to all of this is liable to be resistance. To the extent that these measures were politically controversial within the US — and opposed by the Republican Party — Israel would probably seek to undermine and wait out a Democratic government that implemented them, rather than making substantial concessions to Palestinian autonomy. 

America’s pressure campaign may therefore need to be sustained for a prolonged period — and enjoy a measure of bipartisan support — before having any transformative impact on Israeli policy. 

This could be challenging. As El-Sayed’s “America First” message indicates, many Americans favor cutting off aid to Israel because they want to disengage from Middle Eastern conflicts and focus attention on domestic problems. But the case for blocking arms sales, sanctioning large financial institutions — and, more broadly, expending political capital and energy on a protracted fight over a foreign country’s internal policies — cannot rest on mere isolationism.  

An effective pressure campaign would also require long-term resolve across multiple administrations, who may be tempted to reengage with Israel if the US runs into new challenges abroad in which Israeli intelligence, military assets, diplomatic ties, or technology might be useful. When Joe Biden took office, he initially sought to treat Saudi Arabia as a “pariah” over the regime’s appalling record on human rights, only to come calling to its leaders in person, in order to secure its cooperation with regional issues and the global energy supply. Since then, President Trump has drawn the two nations even closer.  

In any case, for now, the idea of not merely cutting off aid and select “offensive” weapons to Israel — but rather, forbidding the sale of all military goods to its government, sanctioning all involved in settling the occupied West Bank, and withdrawing US diplomatic support at the UN — remains too radical an agenda for most congressional progressives, much less their Republican colleagues.

Even if Democrats can’t change Israeli policy, they can reduce American complicity

None of this means that ending US aid to Israel — or restricting the sale of offensive weapons to its military — aren’t worthy objectives. Such measures could constrain Israel’s capacity to bomb civilian infrastructure and launch wars of choice. They just might not be sufficient to singlehandedly overwhelm Israeli resistance to Palestinian sovereignty.

Regardless, the congressional left’s Israel agenda would improve America’s moral health and global image. And this should arguably be US lawmakers’ priority. 

“The United States played an enormous role in creating Israel’s conventional military advantage as a player in the Middle East,” Daryl Kimball, executive director of the nonprofit Arms Control Association, told me. “And in the face of the devastation that the Israeli government has wrought in Gaza and now on the West Bank — which involves, by any objective measure, serious war crimes — the United States needs to exert its leverage, so as not to be complicit in such behavior. Whether that changes Israeli policy regarding a two-state solution, or its ongoing treatment of Palestinians in occupied territories, is ultimately a separate question.”

Of all the extinction-level threats vying for our attention, AI, climate change, and nuclear war tend to get most of the airplay. But Annie Jacobsen thinks biological war should be near the top of our mental list of doomsday scenarios, too.

She should know — Jacobsen has carved out a unique niche as America’s foremost reporter on the ways we could end the world. Her bestselling 2024 book Nuclear War: A Scenario terrified readers and experts alike, and has been optioned by Hollywood. 

It was while conducting dozens of interviews with high-level government sources for Nuclear War that Jacobsen was told repeatedly that biowarfare should be her next focus.

She took their advice. Her gripping new book Biological War: A Scenario follows a similar ticking-clock format that shows, step by step, just how a humanity-threatening man-made biological catastrophe could play out. (Spoiler alert: not great.)

The result feels like dystopian science fiction, albeit the kind that comes heavily footnoted with government studies that come to similarly grim conclusions. The fact that tech CEOs are also sounding the alarm that advanced AI could make creating killer germs even easier only adds to the growing sense of anxiety. And this book has also been optioned by Hollywood for a TV adaptation. 

Jacobsen sat down with Today, Explained host Noel King to talk through the plot of her nightmare scenario, why we’re still developing biological weapons despite the clear risks, and what needs to happen to avoid disaster. Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.

How does your book start?

The inciting incident in the book is an accident at a Biosafety Level 4 lab, shorthand BSL-4, in Siberia called Vector. And it’s an actual BSL-4 lab, the highest classification. … And there was an actual accident, an explosion there in 2019. 

In that real-life incident, a deadly pathogen was not released that we know of. But of course, in Biological War: A Scenario, a deadly pathogen is released. And it’s a form of pneumonic plague, which is a nightmare pathogen and sits at the top of the Tier 1 select agent list of the CDC. And so in the first act of the book, I show the scrambling of the intelligence community and the Defense Department, trying desperately to determine if something got out and what it is. … The release of the pathogen widens, and so once you have escape. You do not have mitigation, which has to happen in the first 24, 48 hours. Now you have a situation which is unstoppable.

You say this is now an unstoppable scenario. What is it?

A plague itself, of course, conjures up images and ideas of the bubonic plague of the 14th century, the Black Death. That killed between one half and one third of Europe. The bacteria is called Yersinia pestis. And pneumonic plague is the airborne version of plague. The problem with an airborne pathogen is that because the delivery system is the human lungs, it can move very quickly from a scientist in that lab who now has Yersinia pestis in his lungs out to the general public. And that is precisely what happens in the scenario.

How does it spread from there? The city where this BSL-4 lab sits isn’t Moscow. What happens once the pathogen is in the lungs of the people who work in that lab, or the janitor who was cleaning it that night?

That’s right. Well, suddenly it’s in everyone’s lungs, and those people go out into their community. And even though Koltsovo, the science town where Vector is located, is a small town, it is just 12 miles from Novosibirsk, which is the third-largest city in Russia. And, also, there happens to be in this scenario a group of international hunters on a hunting trip in that area who come across a dying scientist in the snow. One of them gives him CPR, being the Good Samaritan that he is. And lo and behold, those travelers suddenly are now getting on an airplane in Novosibirsk, flying home to where they reside in five or six of the continents.

What makes this form of plague so novel, so dangerous?

I pull this information from actual facts of the Soviet Cold War-era biological weapons program that we know about from Soviet defectors. And I want you to keep in mind: This is 40 years ago when gene editing was in its infancy. But there are two things specifically that the Soviet bioweapons engineers did to plague. 

Their idea was to create a super plague weapon. And one of them has never been revealed before. They were working to insert the gene for euphoria into the plague pathogen. … When you get a disease, a pneumonic-type disease, pneumonia, tubercular, you want to go home and get under the covers because you feel terrible. And when you do that, you’re infecting a lot less people than you would if a gene for euphoria had been inserted into the pathogen, which would make you feel terrific, which would make you want to go out and socialize with people, perhaps even go to a crowded disco. 

And the other thing that the Soviet scientists were working on was a way to defeat medical countermeasures, but with an added component of psychological distress. They inserted a gene into the pathogen that would be triggered by the taking of antibiotics. And that second pathogen would give you encephalitis, which is a swelling of the brain. The psychological part of it, according to the Soviet scientists, was that they wanted the last thought of the person dying of what they thought was pneumonic plague, but would in fact be encephalitist to be, “My government and Western medicine has failed me.”

Those of us who try to remain optimistic think there’s a way to stop it. In the movies, there’s an outbreak, then the government gets it under control, and okay, maybe a lot of people die, but we’re all right. That is not where your book is headed. How does your scenario end?

So in the book, I take readers from outbreak to anarchy in six days. Anarchy is what will happen according to Pentagon war gaming and pandemic planning. And this is because fear of infection becomes a secondary weapon, if you will. People begin to behave like they are about to die, which is most certainly underpinning everyone’s mind. And so after those first six days, the Principals Committee, the President’s Biodefense Committee, must make a decision. The president has to declare the Insurrection Act, which allows the military to step in as a law enforcement agency. 

“Imagine the president — with a few Secret Service outside the door, the military aide with the nuclear football — sitting alone in a room wearing a gas mask.”

What happens to the president really blew my mind as a reporter. He goes somewhere in the United States very far away from everyone. Because the idea, the goal, is to make sure that the president doesn’t get the airborne pathogen in his lungs. So maybe I’ll leave you with an image. Imagine the president — with a few Secret Service outside the door, the military aide with the nuclear football — sitting alone in a room wearing a gas mask.

In the book, the people who survive are the ones who have gas masks. Everyone else is gone.

And look, we hope we never get to that, by all means. But yes, the Pentagon has issued 1.7 million gas masks to its military personnel. And that is a spooky thought in and of itself, coupled with the idea that the military is predominantly male. There’s something like 17 percent women in the military. And so, unlike the Nuclear War scenario in which I had science-based nuclear winter theory to work from, in Biological War, nothing has been written on the science record about what it might be after. And so the one imaginative part of the book is the very end where I write about biological twilight. … And it is a very, very ugly world.

Let’s back up. We did outlaw biological weapons at some point, right?

That’s right. Very mysteriously in 1969, President Nixon just unilaterally declared that the arsenal was going to be destroyed. At the same time that all of the nations of the world were working to sign this treaty called the Biological Weapons Convention Treaty, which would outlaw bioweapons. Soviet Russia at the time signed it but immediately began work on an illegal biological weapons program that was colossal. And this went without notice, without any idea really by the CIA and the Pentagon all the way until 1989, when one of the Soviet scientists named Vladimir Pasechnik had a crisis of conscience and he defected and he told British intelligence all about the program.

Where have we seen biological weapons used?

Maybe the most important example of a biological attack in the past, certainly here in the United States, are the anthrax attacks, which occurred right after 9/11. Weaponized anthrax was sent through the mail to US senators and a number of media outlets. So five people ended up dying; 22 got sick in four states. But that really kicked off what can be considered the biological military-industrial complex, if you will, which led to this buildup in BSL-4 labs around the world today. There are 110 BSL-4 labs around the world. There are more than 3,500 BSL-3 labs.

Your book has a map of where those labs are, which I found weirdly comforting, mainly because I don’t live too near any of them. If one of these things is going to be released, either accidentally or deliberately, where is the threat coming from? A rogue nation? Terrorists?

Certainly, bad actors getting a hold of a biological weapon was the great concern of the post-anthrax situation. And that is why so much emphasis was put on bioterrorism. Now I avoided that specifically in the book. … And I didn’t even have an attack. Rather, I had an incident. I had a lab leak because I have learned in the decades since that really is the greatest concern. So many of these BSL-3 and 4 labs are in places without a lot of security, including in countries where there are wars going on.

Could somebody be making a biological weapon in a basement somewhere, off books?

Absolutely. And another disturbing document I came across, unclassified in the Pentagon, was a threat spectrum that showed weapons of mass destruction in terms of destructiveness. And of course, nuclear weapons sit at the far end of the spectrum. They are the most destructive. But very close behind were biological weapons. And even more startling was the notion that biological weapons present the greatest overall threat. 

Nuclear weapons have an extremely high barrier for entry. You have to have fissile material. … You have to have a weapons delivery system like an ICBM or a submarine. … That creates a situation where most nuclear weapons, all nuclear weapons, if you will, are in the hands of a command-and-control system within a nation. 

Biological weapons have no such barriers. In fact, the barriers for entry are getting lower literally by the day. You now can have a situation where someone with very limited knowledge of biology can create a biological weapon in their basement with the use of computational systems like an AI system, for example.

Your book reads like a thriller. How much have you exaggerated? How much have you novelized in order to hold our attention?

Everything in the book is based in science fact, meaning all of the facts, all of the figures. I write a hundred or so pages of notes in the back of the book for readers to be able to answer the question that you are asking me. … In the notes, you can find that answer.

Did any of those people give you good recommendations for how to avoid a disaster scenario, or at least how to avoid these things proliferating?

Well, you know, the ticking clock scenario that I write has an even more urgent ticking clock, which is the public’s pressure on lawmakers to absolutely do something about this nightmare scenario before it happens. Look, we have a world right now where you have the CEOs of the largest AI companies in the world admitting publicly that the lane of bio mixed with AI is of their top concern. You don’t hear that about nuclear. You hear that about bio.

How do you sleep through the night?

Anyone who knows me personally can vouch for the fact that I am an optimist at heart. I really believe that information is king. Once you know things, it gives you a lot of power. Perhaps that’s whistling by the graveyard, but that’s what works for me.

Do you have a biohazard suit?

I do not. I do not. But I do have a few gas masks. I must tell the truth.

On August 5, 2025, the US Department of Health and Human Services canceled 22 mRNA vaccine projects worth roughly $500 million and told the country it would stop investing in the technology that had brought us life-saving Covid vaccines. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a longtime vaccine skeptic, claimed that the data showed these vaccines fail to protect against upper respiratory infections like Covid and flu. That his claims weren’t true — Moderna had already published Phase 3 trial results showing the opposite — didn’t seem to matter.

On August 5, 2026 — one year to the day later — the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved mFLUSIVA, the first mRNA influenza vaccine ever licensed in the United States.

That symmetry, while highly useful to writers like myself who are always looking to identify the rhymes of history, wasn’t planned. The approval landed on the one-year anniversary simply because of the deadline the agency had set for itself in February of this year, after it refused to review Moderna’s application and then, 15 days later, reversed itself. 

The decision didn’t earn a huge amount of press, in part because seasonal flu is a disease Americans have rarely taken seriously — fewer than 50 percent of US adults got their flu shot this past fall and winter. But flu is no joke: The 2024–’25 season produced 51 million illnesses, 710,000 hospitalizations, and 45,000 deaths. That’s more than the number of Americans who died in car crashes last year. And the damage from a flu virus doesn’t stop when the fever does. In the week after a confirmed infection, the risk of a heart attack runs roughly six times higher than normal. 

So a better flu vaccine matters. But the more interesting thing is what the approval says about the year that produced it. The nine experts who voted unanimously that this vaccine’s benefits outweigh its risks were appointed under the very same secretary who was against mRNA technology. Asked to look at the evidence, those experts couldn’t produce a single vote against it. 

That’s not quite a change of heart, but at a dark time for public health, it’s something to hang our hopes on — because flu could just be the start for this technology.

The egg came first

If you’ve ever taken a flu shot, thank a chicken.

Every flu vaccine Americans have received since the 1940s has been grown inside fertilized chicken eggs. It’s a laborious process, closer to agriculture than it is high technology. Each batch incubates for nine to 12 days; the World Health Organization then spends months making the reagents manufacturers need to calibrate doses. The whole sequence runs about six months.

That means that the flu strains in your vaccine in November were selected back in February. Which is a problem, because flu viruses don’t like to stand still. Between February and November, the virus drifts, and the current dominant H3N2 flu drifts especially fast. 

The eggs are a problem, too. Growing flu virus in a chicken egg forces it to adapt to egg cells, and those adaptations alter the very surface protein the vaccine is meant to teach your immune system to recognize. Between the 2011 and 2020 flu seasons, egg-adaptive mutations caused more mismatches than the virus’s own drift did. And more mismatches mean a less effective vaccine — while the flu shot prevented an estimated 12,000 deaths in the 2024–’25 flu season, it is the weakest vaccine in routine American use, landing anywhere between 20 and 60 percent effective depending on how well February’s guess matched November’s virus.

mRNA skips the egg. The shot carries instructions, a strip of genetic code that tells your own cells to build the flu’s surface protein, which your immune system then learns to attack. And swapping in a new strain means retyping that code, not growing a new virus.

As a result, Moderna told the FDA’s advisory panel it can go from strain selection to finished vaccine in two to three months instead of six. That means strain picks could move later, closer to the season they cover, and a novel flu virus surfacing in September could still be blocked by a reformulated vaccine in the same season. Eggs are great, but they can’t do that.

Building off the platform

Back in January I wrote here about the universal flu vaccine — one shot covering every strain for years. It’s a public health dream. mFLUSIVA isn’t that, but some of the best hopes for a universal flu vaccine run through the mRNA platform, and platforms only improve when somebody uses them.

That word — platform — is where last August’s decision went wrong. Kennedy made a claim about one application, mRNA respiratory vaccines, and cut funding for the technology underneath all of them. But over the 12 months that followed, the science on mRNA kept flowing.

In June, five-year melanoma results showed an individualized mRNA therapy given after surgery alongside pembrolizumab cut the risk of recurrence or death by 49 percent. In April, a Memorial Sloan Kettering team reported that among pancreatic cancer patients whose immune systems responded to a personalized mRNA vaccine, nearly 90 percent were alive six years later; the five-year survival rate in that disease sits near 13 percent. And KJ Muldoon, the first person treated with a gene-editing therapy built for his mutation alone, is walking and talking, though half the infants born with his disorder never see a first birthday. The editor that rewrote his DNA was delivered to his liver as messenger RNA — mRNA as the delivery truck rather than the vaccine.

None of those is a flu shot. All of them are the same chemistry — a strip of genetic code wrapped in a lipid nanoparticle — and none of them were what Kennedy was talking about when he defunded it.

Partially as a result, Americans are falling behind. Moderna’s combined Covid-and-flu shot is already licensed in Europe while patients here wait for a resubmission. The Phase 3 trial of its H5 bird flu vaccine — the one meant to be ready if bird flu ever learns to spread between people — runs on money from the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations, and the British government, after the administration killed a $760 million BARDA contract. “The United States invented this platform,” Johns Hopkins RNA biologist Jeff Coller wrote on Thursday, “and is the only country walking away from it.”

Of course, you need to actually get the vaccine

mFLUSIVA beat a standard-dose flu shot by 26.6 percent in a 40,700-person trial. (Against flu bad enough to send someone to a doctor, the figure was 33.7 percent — an exploratory finding the trial wasn’t built to prove, but that points in the same direction.) This is a better flu shot, but it hasn’t solved flu.

There are issues with side effects: Two-thirds of recipients reported injection-site pain, against 30 percent for the comparison. Most cleared in a day or two, but in a country where a quarter of the people who skip the flu shot cite side effects, that’s not a minor problem.

And approval, unfortunately, isn’t access. The CDC’s vaccine advisory committee has been frozen by a federal court since March, so there is no clinical recommendation, which means insurers aren’t required to cover mFLUSIVA at no cost. The $500 million in canceled contracts hasn’t been restored. As Michael Osterholm, who runs the University of Minnesota’s infectious disease center, put it after the government reversed its mRNA decision in February: “We don’t have any idea why they reversed course. That’s part of the problem.”

The most optimistic reading is that nine independent experts appointed by this government looked at the evidence on mRNA and could not produce a single vote against it. The more pessimistic one is that it took a refusal-to-file letter, a public outcry and two senior departures to get there.

But here’s what we do know: Some morning this fall a 58-year-old will roll up a sleeve at a CVS for a vaccine designed off a sequence rather than grown in an egg, and will think about none of this. That’s more progress than I would have expected a year ago.

A version of this story originally appeared in the Good News newsletter. Sign up here!

With the 2026 midterm elections quickly approaching, President Donald Trump’s war with Iran is ongoing and gas prices remain high. 

Americans are taking note: On this week’s episode of America, Actually, host Astead Herndon visits Allentown, Pennsylvania in the state’s bellwether Seventh District, to hear how persistently high gas prices — almost $4.20 per gallon in Pennsylvania — are showing up in residents’ lives. Many said the economy and prices were at the top of their list of issues, and laid the blame at Trump’s feet.

Still, gas is just one expense of many, for voters who are likely also feeling the pinch with the cost of groceries, housing, electricity, and more. So how much power do gas prices really have to shape the outcome of an election — and, potentially, a presidency? And after decades of renewable energy growth, technological disruption, and new existential worries, why are gas prices still so core to the American political conversation?

To learn more, Herndon spoke with Julian Zelizer, a professor of history and public affairs at Princeton University. They discussed the history of gas prices as a salient political issue, why Americans feel high prices so acutely, even compared to other commodities, and whether voters are ever willing to overlook gas prices when they go to the polls.

Below is an excerpt of the conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full show, so listen to America, Actually wherever you get your podcasts or watch it on Vox’s YouTube channel.

When did the price of gas become such a political weapon in America? Does this date all the way back to the Model T?

It really dates to the 1970s. That’s when the United States will have two energy crises, in 1973 and 1979, and the price of gas becomes a huge political issue for Americans. It affects presidents, it affects Congress, and it becomes a manifestation in that decade of the problems facing the country.

I think that’s when we start to realize we don’t have unlimited resources and it’s gonna be a political problem.

Can you go in more detail about that? What happened in the ’70s to make it so clear to Americans that this party might not last forever?

Production of oil here peaks in the late 1960s, early 1970s, and then in 1973, OPEC, which is the cartel of oil-producing countries in the Middle East, imposes an embargo on the US because the United States had supported Israel during the Yom Kippur War. And as a result of the embargo, prices go up and supplies go down, and that’s when Americans start to face gas lines.

Then, in 1979, we have another round of this after the Iranian Revolution, and that leads to even bigger gas lines and more stringent rations and government mandates in ’79, and many people think it really helped bring down Jimmy Carter’s presidency.

Carter in 1979 is really reeling from what Americans experience. And it’s not simply gas prices, it’s waiting in line for gas. It’s hearing that you could only buy gas on certain days. It’s reading stories about people stealing gas and violent clashes occurring over getting this commodity. 

There’s a lot of things that go into the mix with Carter — the hostages in Iran — but certainly his difficulty dealing with this fundamental is a big part of what happens in 1980 when Reagan wins the presidency.

Of course, presidents have little control over the global price of oil, yet they are blamed for it seemingly every time. How have politicians and particularly presidents dealt with that reality, considering the price at the pump is so important to their political futures while not always in their control?

In the ’70s they tried with legislation. Carter pushes legislation that deals with energy, but it’s limited in its success. Americans want a lot of oil and it was hard to get them to conserve.

He put solar panels on the White House. There’s really not much that presidents can do. We have the strategic reserves. And other than that, I think presidents just wait it out and hope the timing works in their favor and the gas prices go down again.

Is there an example of a president who beat the gas prices trap? Do we have any example of someone successfully convincing the country, “Hey, look away from the price of the pump”?

I think we have presidents who say, “Just look away for a little while,” and when reelection comes around again, they’re doing better. Even President George W. Bush struggled with some of this after 9/11 and after the war started. But in the end, he doesn’t make an announcement about it so much as focus on other issues such as national security.

And now we see how prices fluctuate, so you just wait for those moments.

Why is it always gasoline rather than other commodities when we think about the priorities for the electorate?

There’s a few things. One is that, historically, the automobile really symbolizes American freedom and American consumption. And so when something impinges on our ability to drive a lot…

Second, it’s a price you just see. It’s just very visible when it goes up or down, more than groceries even.

I think that kind of recurring image for people becomes very politically potent if that number gets too high. So it’s a real struggle, but it’s also symbolically right in front of us. And these days, I think even more so now than in the ’70s or ’80s, it’s become something that the reporters and the media track.

I want to talk specifically about this summer. We’ve crossed $4/gallon again this summer, the highest since 2022, and this time it’s pretty clearly tied with the ongoing war in Iran.

Donald Trump has tried to make the argument that some short-term pain at the pump is worth a long-term national security focus. But his energy secretary said pretty clearly that gas won’t be back to $3 until 2027. Obviously, that puts us after the midterm elections. It sounds like he’s running the exact playbook you just told me has never worked, which is to get people to just pretend this is not happening.

What have you thought about how the president has handled the spike in gas prices?

In part it strikes me as a president who doesn’t really care about the fate of his party. I think it’s a big issue. I think most Republicans understand that. And it’s tied to a war that really doesn’t have public support.

It’s a war without the kind of clarity that many people felt after 9/11 with Afghanistan, and Iraq for a while. It’s the worst of all worlds. And so I think he’s really fumbled on this issue, and there was part of him that hoped people either wouldn’t care even if they noticed, or somehow the prices would diminish. It’s certainly not looking that way.

Democratic socialists keep winning primary elections, and Democratic voters are trending in the same direction: Recent polling suggests that a third of Democrats and Democratic-leaning adults now identify as democratic socialists. Most recently, Abdul El-Sayed, who does not identify as a democratic socialist but was endorsed by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) and supports policies like Medicare-for-all, won a fiercely fought Democratic Senate primary in Michigan. 

As democratic socialists gain ground in Democratic politics, President Donald Trump and Republicans have attempted to conflate democratic socialism with communism (though allegations of “communism” are hardly new territory for Trump). At the same time, recent reporting has pointed out that, in fact, there are some members within the Democratic Socialists of America who openly identify as communists.

To help us understand what communism actually is and its history in the United States, Today Explained co-host Noel King spoke with Maurice Isserman, a history professor at Hamilton College. Isserman has written extensively about the history of communism in the United States, including in his latest book is Reds: The Tragedy of American Communism.

Below is an excerpt of the conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify. 

Define communism for me. 

Communism began as a split off from the socialist movement. It was inspired by the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia in 1917. And it is in favor of a total transformation of capitalist society with the government — the state — owning and operating what communists would call the means of production: factories, transportation, and so forth. It also believes in one-party rule. So for 75 years or so, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union allowed no competing parties to exist within that country.

There have been communists in the United States of America before. What is their history in this country? 

The American Communist Party was founded in 1919, right after the First World War.

And it was, again, inspired by the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia. It seemed to point to a way out. The Bolsheviks came to power, remained in power. And so communists or would-be communists in the United States, in Europe, elsewhere said, “Well, if they can do it, we can do it too.” So an American Communist Party was founded in 1919 — small, isolated, mostly immigrants, but it gained strength in the course of the 1930s during the Great Depression.

Why did they gain strength during the Great Depression? 

Because capitalism seemed to be failing and communism seemed to be the wave of the future. The other factor leading to the increase in communist influence was that fascism was rising in Italy, in the 1920s, in Germany, in the early 1930s. And it seemed as if there was a stark choice facing the world: either fascism or communism. And many people in the 1930s said, “Well, let’s support the communists to beat back the threat of fascism.”

Did elected communists get anything done in the United States?

Well, there were very few elected communists. In the 1940s, there were two communist members of the New York City Council, but that was about it in terms of open communists being elected to office. Their influence was seen more behind the scenes in the labor movement, in organizing the big new industrial unions of the 1930s, and organizing so-called front groups, anti-fascist groups, anti-racist groups, and so forth. And the party was never huge. At its height at the end of the 30s, it had perhaps 75,000 members in a country then with a population of 130 million. Its influence extended beyond its own membership, but it was still very much a minor party — growing, but minor.

Why did communism fail in the United States of America? 

One reason was that it was repressed by the government pretty much throughout its existence — in the first Red Scare immediately after the First World War, and then again in the second Red Scare, which we commonly refer to as the McCarthy era in the late ’40s and through the 1950s. Communists were sent to jail for advocacy, for simply saying that they favored communism.  

But it also failed because of its rather slavish obedience to the dictates of Soviet leaders. When the Soviet foreign policy changed from anti-fascism and anti-Hitlerism in the mid- to late ’30s to a kind of de facto alliance with Hitler from 1939 to 1941, the American Communist Party obediently followed that line. Then Hitler invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, and the Soviet Union swung back to anti-fascism. Well, [the American Communist Party] made that turn too. But all of those turns gave the communists a reputation as an organization that did not really exist to serve American interests, but rather to serve Soviet interests.

We know from reporting that’s been done that there are people within the DSA who identify as communists. Can you help us understand who these folks are within the organization and what they actually believe?

There are a number of left-wing factions. There’s a group called Red Star. There’s another one called the Marxist Unity Group. There are three or four of them that work in coalition. They’re rivals, but they also work in coalition to control, by a narrow margin, the national leadership. One of the members of Red Star is a co-chair of the organization. 

These people make no bones about their belief. They’re not secret communists infiltrating. They describe themselves as being inspired by the Bolshevik Revolution or being inspired by Maoist China, or they call themselves Marxist-Leninist. So they’re quite open about it, and that comes out of a different political tradition, an antithetical tradition to democratic socialism. 

They have a different ultimate strategy in mind, which is not to work within the Democratic Party as AOC is committed to do, as Zohran Mandami is committed to do, but rather they want to split and start an independent revolutionary socialist party, which will run against both Democrats and Republicans, which is a strategy that has been tried an infinite number of times in the past by various groups of leftists.

Is this a Red Scare, or is there something to be scared about here?

It’s definitely a Red Scare. Trump and his allies don’t have a lot going for them in this election cycle. They’ve got an unwinnable war going on. They’ve got gasoline prices skyrocketing. Trump is even underwater on immigration, his signature issue. So what do you do in that situation? You create a boogeyman, or try to. And the difference is that most Americans under the age of 45 have no memory whatsoever of the existence of the Soviet Union as a threat to the United States. 

When you launch a Red Scare in 1919, well, there’s communist Russia. When you launch a Red Scare in the 1940s and ’’50s, well, there’s the Soviet Union. There’s a real threat. I mean, they have missiles and so forth. 

Who’s supposed to be the foreign threat today controlling the actions of these American communists? Cuba? Cuba can’t even keep the lights on for its own people. It doesn’t have missiles. It’s not going to invade the United States or its allies. So I think this is an attempt to launch a Red Scare using DSA as kind of a boogeyman. But DSA, again, is not one thing. It has the ‘left wing of the possible’ Democratic socialists, who I would say include such figures as Zohran Mamdani and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. And then it has, unfortunately, some would-be Bolsheviks, so it’s really a question of which DSA is going to prevail in the long run. 

Which one do you think will prevail in the long run?

I’m a historian. I’m very good at predicting the past, and I’m terrible at predicting the future.

This story appeared in The Logoff, a daily newsletter that helps you stay informed about the Trump administration without letting political news take over your life. Subscribe here.

Welcome to The Logoff: As the Iran war drags on, the US may be running perilously low on key munitions.

What’s happening? According to reporting by Reuters this week, the US has used “virtually all” of its stockpiles of two kinds of precision long-range missiles since the start of the US-Iran war in late February. Its defensive capabilities may be slipping, too. CNN reported on Tuesday that the US has also depleted “nearly 80%” of its supply of THAAD interceptor missiles and around half of its Patriot interceptors.

What do these shortages mean for the Iran conflict? 1) They could limit the US’s military options against Iran. Reporting suggests that this is already happening. According to the New York Times, President Donald Trump decided against a “major escalation” of the US-Iran war late last month after three US troops were killed, at least partially because of concerns about munitions shortages. 

2) The shortage of interceptors increases the danger for US troops and allies in the region. According to the Atlantic, US forces are now at the point where they have to make snap decisions about whether to use an interceptor or ride out an attack. They’re also at a mathematical disadvantage; the US has relatively few interceptors, which cost millions to produce. Iran, meanwhile, can hurl mass-produced drones at the US for about $35,000 each.

How is Trump responding? Not well. The shortages are reportedly causing friction between Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, and the president has lashed out on social media. 

“The U.S. has massive amounts of ‘munitions,’ especially of certain types,” Trump posted on Friday. “The ‘leakers’ of these treasonous statements are being hunted down. Long term jail sentences will be sought!”

What’s next? One effect of the shortage could be to encourage an end to the fighting. A new agreement over the Strait of Hormuz between Iran and Oman is reportedly in the works, which could be a step toward ending the war — if the US is willing to make some concessions.

And with that, it’s time to log off…

Hi readers, this newsletter will be off tomorrow. We’d like to preemptively encourage you to log off and enjoy the summer weekend. We’ll see you back here on Monday. 

Now, before we go: Did you know there are World Dog Surfing Championships? I did not, so I was especially delighted to encounter this photo gallery from the Atlantic, collecting competitors from several recent years. You can find them all here with a gift link — enjoy!

Francesca Hong is the frontrunner to win the Democratic nomination for governor of Wisconsin next week. If she goes on to win the general election, she’ll become the first democratic socialist governor in American history. 

But, when Bernie Sanders, the most famous democratic socialist in the country, was asked Wednesday if he’d endorse her, he said: “I don’t think so.” He said he’d met her a few years ago, and that she “seems very very nice” — but said he wasn’t familiar with her race.

Indeed, while leftists and socialists who’ve long been eager to overthrow the Democratic establishment are excited about Hong’s campaign, some are increasingly sounding a bit wary of her chances — and wondering whether she’s the best representative the movement has to offer given the electoral stakes in this swing state. 

For instance, when Hong was asked this week about an old deleted tweet in which she called to cancel Thanksgiving due to its celebration of colonialism, she didn’t exactly disavow it. Instead, she told CNN’s Kaitlan Collins that “views can evolve” while also stressing the holiday was “incredibly painful for many people in our communities.”

Moderate Democrats cringed, of course. But what was more notable was how many fellow leftists joined in — even to some of her biggest fans, the answer seemed like political malpractice. It also brought to the surface simmering tensions within the left over how to navigate social issues more broadly, a divide that’s becoming more relevant now that their candidates are on the cusp of wielding actual power. 

Left-wing streamer Hasan Piker, fresh off campaigning with Hong, posted on X: “love fran, this was an opportunity to turn this back on how thanksgiving is about to be unaffordable due to trumps wars.” (Two days later, Hong tried a do-over on the answer, claiming Thanksgiving was actually her favorite holiday.)

Another source of concern, for some, is Hong’s tendency of giving elliptical answers when asked about her old support for abolishing police and prisons — saying she won’t do it as governor, but remaining reluctant to disavow the idea as a long-term goal. 

Sanders has been a longtime critic of “defund the police” rhetoric. And in the same interview where Sanders said he likely wouldn’t endorse Hong, he said, in response to a separate question: “No serious person that I know who is running for office believes in quote-unquote defunding the police.”

Hong’s rhetoric is reminiscent of how many people in progressive spaces talked about culture, identity, policing, and prisons back during the “Great Awokening” era, peaking in the “racial reckoning” of 2020. But some on the left increasingly believe that those positions alienate voters — particularly the working-class voters they’re trying to mobilize. 

This new left conventional wisdom, said to be embodied in Zohran Mamdani’s New York City mayoral campaign, is that socialist candidates for office should quietly downplay or even explicitly renounce those old causes — as Mamdani did for police defunding — in favor of a laser focus on issues like affordability, stopping data centers, and opposition to Israel, where public opinion is on their side. 

It’s a sort of left-wing version of “popularism” — the center-left credo that Democrats should campaign on popular ideas that poll well, and abandon unpopular progressive stances. In other words: Don’t scare the normies.

But not everyone on the left is so eager to jettison these stances for purportedly optimal campaign messaging: After all, a major organizing principle for many on the left is their willingness to stand up for what they believe in even when it isn’t popular. 

For instance, Darializa Avila Chevalier, the Mamdani ally who successfully challenged a House Democratic incumbent this year, stood by her old calls to abolish policing and borders — though, unlike Hong, she’s running in extremely blue terrain. 

“Five years ago, the left was collectively making the case for abolition &/or defund, & gaining public opinion wins,” leftist podcaster Briahna Joy Gray wrote. “Today, they’re making the case for why elected progressives are justified in abandoning this agenda.”

All this is symptomatic of a deeper divide on the left, not just about today’s political strategy, but about race, class, and gender more broadly, and how 2020-era cultural issues fit into their movement today. 

Many class-focused leftists view the period they now jokingly call “woke 1.0” or “woke 1” as a cringey mistake, and seek to blame Democratic elites for it. But others on the left still think and talk about race, identity, and social justice causes just like they did in 2020 — indeed, to them, these issues might be why they joined the left in the first place.

Some on the left now want to move on from “woke 1.0”

In 2021, Chi Ossé, campaigning for New York City Council, tweeted: “A cis white man should not be the next speaker of the Council.”

When a critic of his on X unearthed that old post earlier this year, Ossé — now a council member — gave a pithy response: “Woke 1 was crazyyyy”.

The citation of “woke 1.0” or “woke 1” is a now-common shorthand among parts of the online left to describe — and distance themselves from — what they now view as the more dated or inconvenient aspects of the impassioned social justice activism they participated in during the late 2010s and early 2020s.

Typically, this doesn’t necessarily mean rejecting causes like racial justice altogether. Rather, it is often intended to acknowledge that the tactics used a few years back didn’t work, and that a new approach is necessary to try and achieve those goals. (Indeed, “woke 1.0” implies that “woke 2.0” is either coming or already here.)

Among those who use the term, there isn’t a consensus about what’s an outdated relic worth abandoning, and what’s a worthy cause worth preserving. However, there’s probably the most consensus that the sweeping, totalizing identity-related rhetoric and assertions that were common at the time haven’t aged well. Not only did they repel winnable voters, but they fueled constant arguments inside progressive organizations, to the point that some activists likened the discord to undercover federal plots to disrupt left-wing groups in the 1960s. 

Take it from Chevalier. The victorious congressional primary challenger has stood by her old tweets about police and borders being fundamentally wrong. But when the New York Editorial Board asked her about “woke 1,” she said it was “indeed crazy” — because there was too much “divisive rhetoric” that hurt the left’s effort to build solidarity.

“At the core of what it means to organize is to bring people together behind a vision,” Chevalier said. “And you can’t do that when you are spending time trying to show who’s more progressive or who’s more woke. That actually causes more division, and it makes folks feel that there is no space for them in our movements.”

To others, the true core of “woke 1.0” is unpopular, fringe-sounding cultural causes — like, say, calling Thanksgiving problematic. In response to the Thanksgiving clip, independent journalist Ken Klippenstein posted: “Hong has a lot of strengths but this woke 1 stuff is a major weakness.”

“Socialists must practice effective communication,” Nathan J. Robinson, editor-in-chief of the socialist publication Current Affairs, wrote. “Reply to a Thanksgiving question: The only thing threatening to cancel Thanksgiving is the rising cost of groceries.”

The deeper disagreement inside the left on economics and identity issues

Underneath some leftists’ attempt to turn the page from “woke 1.0,” there’s a deeper and more longstanding divide on the left between those who want to prioritize economic issues — and those who care deeply about identity-related causes too.

To broadly generalize, we can think of the left as having three main strains, focused on economic justice (class politics), social justice (causes related to identity and culture), and foreign policy (war, empire, and — especially nowadays — Israel). But not everyone prioritizes them in the same way, or joined the movement because of the same issue.

Amid the rise of social media-powered identity related activism, some on the economics-focused left have expressed concern that progressives’ language, approach, and tactics were hampering what should be the left’s top priority: mobilizing the working class. The Marxist scholar Adolph Reed, for instance, has criticized “left identitarians” as “fundamentally antagonistic to working-class politics.”

Some on the class-focused left go further, characterizing “wokeness” as essentially an op by their political enemies. 

According to this potted history, it was Hillary Clinton who first opened the Pandora’s box of weaponized identity politics, and she did this to defeat a Bernie Sanders campaign that was overwhelmingly focused on economic justice. Clinton characterized Sanders as insufficiently attentive to gender and racial issues, famously questioning whether breaking up the big banks would solve racism and sexism. His record of more moderate positions on hot-button issues like guns and immigration, which had helped maintain support with culturally conservative independents back in Vermont, also came under attack. 

But by 2018, the rising left — embodied by Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, and Ayanna Pressley, all first elected that year — had fulsomely embraced identity-related causes alongside economic ones, believing them to be compatible and interconnected.

All this built up to the 2020 racial reckoning, in which the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police Officer Derek Chauvin spurred massive nationwide protests and impassioned demands from the left for societal change. And some activists insisted this change had to include not just defunding but outright abolishing the police.

Yet the racial reckoning ended in disappointment, an “anti-woke” backlash soon followed, and rising crime seemed to discredit the idea of doing away with police. And though the platform of the Democratic Socialists of America still calls for taking “steps towards fully abolishing the police and prison system,” there’s an increasingly open debate on the left about whether it should.

“The idea that police/prison abolitionism flow from ‘core socialist principles’ is pretty odd,” Ben Burgis, a columnist for Jacobin magazine, posted recently.

“We need to create a permission structure on the left that allows socialists to have normal socialist beliefs about police & prisons (fairer, fewer, and more humane) instead of “abolish” which is flatly anarchist, and incompatible with any form of state socialism,” the socialist Cassie Pritchard wrote.

Sociologist Alex Vitale, author of The End of Policing, fired back: “In what fantasy land are police not the natural enemies of workers and their movements? There is no ‘reforming away’ that core truth.”

How these tensions play out in Francesca Hong’s campaign

With Hong holding a large lead in recent polls, some Democrats — fearing what lies ahead for her in the general election — have essentially been trying to coach her into giving what they view as better answers on these “woke 1.0” questions.

When Jon Favreau interviewed Hong on Pod Save America this week, he asked about her old tweets — saying he was only focusing on this because Republicans would be sure to spend millions attacking her, and “I just want to make sure you have the best possible answers to what’s coming.”

Asked about how her views on policing have evolved, Hong said: “My views have only become stronger in that I’m serious about public safety and I will not abolish the police.”

Favreau then asked if she still believed police exist to uphold white supremacy (as she tweeted in 2021), and Hong said, “No.”

But when Favreau asked specifically why she changed her mind on that, her answer was difficult to parse.

“When you talk to people who are most justice-impacted — a mother who lost a child to police violence, people who have contended with injustices in historically marginalized communities — justice also looks like making sure that we are implementing solutions and helping to change the material conditions of people’s lives,” she said.

Then, when asked how her long-term vision of a world without prisons would work, Hong said: “What I know is attainable and the policies that actually meet the urgency of the moment and understanding the realities of it, means that we have to ensure that we’re funding our local governments, that we’re bringing justice to victims.”

She added, more succinctly: “What may have been aspirational is not primary.”

In 2014, Narendra Modi pioneered the use of social media and digital campaigning in India to become prime minister. Known as one of the first global politicians to harness the power of the internet, he has the most social media followers of any world leader currently in office. 

Today, over a decade since Modi’s digital-first political campaign, an internet-fueled youth movement called the Cockroach Janta Party (or the Cockroach People’s Party) is using the same social media platforms to organize protests, successfully forcing the resignation of one of Prime Minister Modi’s top advisers. The Indian government has responded with a crackdown, arresting protesters and increasingly censoring X, Meta, and other social meda sites. The legacy of the Cockroach Janta Party will be complex: On one hand, it brought to the forefront important conversations around Gen Z unemployment and meritocracy; on the other, it may have pushed the Indian government to create stricter new censorship laws to silence future dissent.

The internet that helped propel Modi to power is becoming a tool that a new generation uses against him. How much further will Modi’s government go to censor its people and restrict free speech? 

Read more about censorship in India and the Cockroach Janta Party:

• Censorship tracker on MediaNama, a live list of censorship following the Jantar Mantar protests in New Delhi
• “Social Media Modi-Fication: Narendra Modi’s use of Social Media in Indian Elections 2014”
• “India CJP protests: Young women face harassment and abuse”
• “Activists decry AI surveillance at CJP protests”
• “India’s young are more educated than ever. Why are so many jobless?”

If you enjoy our reporting and want to hear more from Vox journalists, sign up for our Patreon at patreon.com/vox. Each month, our members get access to exclusive videos, livestreams, and chats with our newsroom.

Support Vox’s reporting on important issues like this. Become a Vox Member today.

In the teensy Midwestern town of Braham, homemade pie capital of Minnesota, something unusual in the municipality’s computer systems knocked the city’s entire water supply offline last week.

Within a few hours, dozens of other Minnesota cities discovered that their water and wastewater utilities, too, had been compromised, most likely as part of a massive Iranian cyberattack, the kind that US officials have been warning about since the war began. 

At least a dozen states have been affected by the attack, which briefly led to a flurry of small-town service disruptions, boil-water notices, and local flooding. Water wells, dams, sewers, and pipelines are some of America’s oldest and creakiest pieces of infrastructure, built long before the internet existed, and certainly long before AI made hacking much easier. While you may assume most hackers are in it for the money or for data, some have targeted critical infrastructure like water systems or energy grids in ploys for control or disruption — or worse still, as acts of war. 

And, as last week’s attacks show, the nation’s water system is woefully unprepared. But how worried should you be that the very infrastructure that keeps our water taps running is, apparently, hackable? 

Quite worried, indeed. 

When we say the water supply got hacked, what we really mean is that someone, somewhere has broken into the computer that controls a local water treatment plant or reservoir, and is now pulling the levers, like the one that decides how much of a corrosive chemical can safely go into cleaning the water that comes out of your tap. 

These levers were once manual buttons and knobs operated in-person by real live humans, meaning that — barring a natural disaster, bomb, or break-in — protecting them was about as simple as building a fence and hiring guards. Increasingly, however, these levers have gone digital, meaning that they are now remotely operable from anywhere in the world. 

Those upgrades have been convenient, allowing technicians to monitor and troubleshoot problems in real time. But, in the process, they have exposed at times centuries-old infrastructure to distinctly modern vulnerabilities. Most local water systems are operated by local authorities, don’t have a dedicated IT team, and lack the money or resources to thoroughly protect themselves without some extra help. Hackers know this, which is why they’ve increasingly targeted local agencies in such attacks. 

“With great connectivity comes great responsibility,” said Joshua Corman, founder of I Am The Cavalry, a nonprofit focused on helping critical infrastructure withstand hackers. And yet, even when it comes to critical services like water, “our dependence on connected technology is growing faster than our ability to secure it.” 

About 97 percent of water systems are small, run by local agencies that often barely lock the proverbial front door. America’s water system is like an expensive heirloom bicycle that’s been left on a busy street, protected by only the flimsiest of padlocks. And that very vulnerability has made tiny towns like Braham prime targets for faraway adversaries. Accessing the computers that operate most water systems — known as programmable logic controllers or PLCs — is often as simple as entering a username and password on a public-facing webpage. Sometimes, there is no real password at all, because PLCs were initially intended to be accessed only within locked, secure facilities, not on the open internet. If the US wants to avoid a far more severe version of what happened last week, then it will need to start taking the security of tiny water systems like Braham’s seriously.

“Any sociopath from anywhere in the world can see these things on the internet,” said Corman. And in the case of last week’s attacks, “these were devices with no password, no firewall or VPN shielding them — they just had to log in” as whoever the intended operator was, and just like that, they were inside a local water plant. 

How did this happen at all? 

When municipalities began hooking up their old water and wastewater systems to the internet — a trend that accelerated during the pandemic as water operators, like everyone else, adapted to remote work — cybersecurity was rarely front of mind, neither for individual utilities nor for regulators as a whole. 

“We have more cybersecurity regulations for your credit card than we have for the nation’s water supply,” said Corman. Only recently have some municipalities begun to take steps to decrease the exposure of their water plants to hacks. In March, New York state, for example, launched a set of grants and basic cybersecurity regulations mandating security training for all water operators. 

Basic cybersecurity hygiene isn’t always enough. More than half of all credit card holders have been hacked, even with the help of mandatory firewalls and data encryption. You can imagine how vulnerable our water must be without the assistance of such guardrails. In a worst-case scenario, a malicious actor could quite literally open the floodgates, as Russian hackers did to a Norwegian dam last year. They could poison the tap water, as a still unidentified hacker almost did in Florida in 2021, dialing up the levels of sodium hydroxide used at a water treatment plant by over 100 times its normal levels. In a severe scenario, they could indefinitely cut off access to all water entirely.

The good news is, none of this happened last week. Nobody died, nobody lost water for more than a few hours, no fire hydrants ran dry, and no hospitals were forced to cut off their dialysis machines (which can use more than a hundred gallons of water per treatment session). There’s no need to panic, and your drinking water is almost certainly still safe to drink, assuming it was safe before. Even the city of Braham, within a few hours, was able to bring its water tower back online, pumping groundwater back to its 1,800 residents. 

How do we avoid cyber-armageddon?

If you’ve watched the Julia Roberts and Mahershala Ali-starring thriller Leave the World Behind, in which a cyberattack apocalyptically spoils a family vacation, then you might have some idea of where this story could go. 

Cyberattacks on critical infrastructure can be extraordinarily dangerous, but thankfully, none have directly cost lives or severely disrupted services in this country so far. If the US wants to keep it that way, that will mean doing more to help small cities like Braham adapt and better monitor for potential threats. As it stands, of the roughly 151,000 water facilities in the US, only about 420 participate in voluntary information sharing on their own cybersecurity practices, says Corman, who has been leading his own project that recruits volunteers to give free cybersecurity support to water utilities in the nation’s roughly 6,000 hospital towns, where a disruption could be particularly deadly. 

Cybersecurity experts like Corman believe that hackers from other nations like China have already quietly established cyber intrusions in countless local US utilities, water systems, and power grids, lying in wait to attack or act as leverage if a conflict arises. 

Unfortunately, the Trump administration has hardly treated last week’s attacks as symptoms of a system in need of much broader strengthening, at least in its public statements. “I think Minnesota is behind it. You know who’s behind it? Minnesota,” the president baselessly claimed during a Cabinet meeting last Friday. “I think the governor is behind it. I don’t think there was an Iranian cyber attack.” 

Just a few months ago, he proposed $707 million in cuts to the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), the agency responsible for protecting the nation’s infrastructure from cyberattacks. He did so, at least in part, out of anger over the agency’s role in confirming the validity of the 2020 election results. If Iran is, indeed, responsible, for the recent water system intrusions, all of this means that Trump has effectively made us more vulnerable to the consequences of a conflict he initiated.

At the end of the day,“nation-state hackers do not respect the jurisdictional lines separating federal, state, and local responsibility,” Jen Easterly, who led CISA under the Biden administration, wrote in the New York Times this week. “They search for the most vulnerable way to disrupt American life, and too often they find it in small communities that lack the resources to defend themselves.” Easterly’s role has remained vacant for the past 18 months.

Kurt Gaudette, a senior vice president at the cybersecurity firm Dragos, told me that water systems have got to get into the habit of monitoring their networks for suspicious activity. Most power utilities have begun doing so in recent years, with some bipartisan backing from Congress. 

In some cases, however, the most cost-effective and safest way to avoid a repeat of last week’s mess might be to unplug the most vital controls — like the one that decides the chemical levels in a water treatment plant — from the web entirely. 

As Corman puts it, “if you can’t protect it, disconnect it.”

The acrimonious Democratic primary contest in Michigan is over: Dr. Abdul El-Sayed will move on to face the Republican former Rep. Mike Rogers this November for a must-win seat in controlling the US Senate.

Al-Sayed’s victory, as the first Muslim major-party Senate nominee, is historic for Muslim Americans. But the race also pitted various constituencies of the Democratic base against each other, and set the Democratic establishment and heavy AIPAC spending against El-Sayed, a progressive political newcomer.

To get a better sense of the significance of this moment, and to get an on-the-ground perspective of the repairing of bonds that Democrats must now do to prepare for the general election, I turned to another trailblazer: Abdullah Hammoud, the mayor of Dearborn, Michigan.

In 2023, Dearborn became the first majority-Arab American city, and a large percentage of its residents are Muslim. Hammoud was the first of both communities to be elected mayor. He has long been on the front lines of how these communities engage with, or feel left out of, the Democratic Party. He was a prominent voice of the Uncommitted movement back in 2024 which urged people to vote “uncommitted” in Democratic primaries in 2024 in protest of President Joe Biden’s handling of the Gaza war. That issue pushed many residents out of the party. Later that year, Dearborn, along with Michigan, shifted right, with Donald Trump winning a plurality of the city’s vote and contributing to former Vice President Kamala Harris’s eventual loss.

Two years later, things are very different, he told me. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

You endorsed and campaigned for Abdul El-Sayed. How are you feeling today, and how is your community feeling?

Many of us are feeling exhausted because we haven’t slept. But what I can tell you, honestly, is that many people are feeling hopeful. In addition to, obviously, the outcome of the elections yesterday up and down the ballot, what was hopeful this morning is just seeing the whole party come together.

So kudos to Congresswoman [Haley] Stevens, to state Sen. Mallory McMorrow, to Curtis Hertel, the chair of the Michigan Democratic Party, for announcing right away that we know what we’re facing down in November, we have a lot more that we agree about than we disagree about; it’s time to come together and continue marching forward and to build this momentum and this movement.

But I think overall, people are just feeling inspired. I’m out and about today, and a lot of people are just approaching, talking about how hopeful they are.

How much of that hopefulness is about the possibility of El-Sayed making history as a Muslim American in the Senate?

Listen, most certainly I’m not going to take away the significance of a potential first. And as a fellow Abdul — I mean, Abdul is just short for all of our full names — it’s beautiful to see a son of Michigan who’s authentically himself, welcomed and uplifted by the people of Michigan. What is more American than that? That you’re willing to support a candidate regardless of the direction in which they pray, because of the direction in which they lead? And that is the American story.

I’m wondering, are you worried at all about the spotlight that this has all brought, or fearful about more ugliness? Already the GOP is trafficking in Islamophobia: Mike Rogers tweeted out that he’s going to save Michigan from El-Sayed, just as when he went after terrorists.

The ugliness and the Islamophobia and the bigotry is not going to be anything new. Keep in mind, what did they do to our first Black president, whose middle name happened to be Hussein? How much Islamophobia was thrown out there at the idea that he may have been Muslim? 

And when we’ve had women run for office, whether it was Secretary Clinton or Vice President Harris, you saw the sexism come out. Time and time again, regardless of who you have at bat, this type of hateful rhetoric always seems to emerge. And unfortunately, the algorithms seem to promote it. 

That’s honestly what’s most problematic: a lot of the rhetoric you do hear online, it’s fake accounts, it’s bots, and it’s because these social media owners and operators, these conglomerates and these monoliths, are so afraid of the president that they’re unwilling to have a check on hate speech. Rather than focus on the hate, again, people feel hopeful because you have candidates who are authentically themselves, who are not only welcomed and accepted, but uplifted and supported. And it’s because they spoke to a set of values that people of all faiths, of all backgrounds, of all ethnicities, of multi-generational, multi-ethnic coalitions that were constructed, all share. And they’re a set of values that we want to apply globally and they’re not exclusionary.

A lot of money was spent on painting an educated, kind man as misogynistic, who is married to a far smarter physician, who is the father of two young daughters. And I’m a girl dad myself, married to a far smarter physician. But stereotypes, they get acted on for the purposes of immediate political satisfaction…there will be some carryover as a result, with Republicans now utilizing those stereotypes, trying to cast fear because of Abdul’s name, Abdulrahman. They tweeted out his full name. He’s Abdulrahman Mohamed El-Sayed, I’m Abdullah Hussein Hammoud, so unfortunately that will happen. But again, I choose to believe that people are bigger than the naysayers and people are bigger than all the negativity.

Was there anything about El-Sayed’s contest that reminded you of your own run for mayor?

Obviously my race was far smaller. And I’m in the city of Dearborn, where people expect somebody with a name like mine to come to office, although we were the first at the time. I’ll tell you, even then in that race, in a city like Dearborn, there was a lot of rhetoric that said Hammoud could be the mayor for some, but not the mayor for all.

And you hear that underlying nature with the Mike Rogers attack ads, with the Republican Senate campaign coming out and saying, look at his full name. 

What is wrong with that full name? It’s a beautifully American name. And so yes, there are similarities in that sense, similarities in other candidates who were the first who rose to power. 

What surprised you about this primary? 

On the ground, we felt like there was a lot of momentum. And obviously I’m talking about the city of Dearborn, and obviously El-Sayed took nearly 80 percent of the vote here.

I would say that this election was also a stark reminder that people are hungry for a politics that answers to working families, not to corporate PACs and special interests. And the influence of big money has too often drowned out the voices of everyday people. And so, it’s beautiful to see that there’s an opportunity to restore a government that works for those it was meant to serve. And I think that is an underlying story that is foundational to the campaigns we’re seeing not only in Michigan, not only in the US Senate race, but in campaigns all across this country. It’s the mini versus the money, as Abdul would say.

How have things changed since 2024? Trump made major inroads with Muslim and Arab American communities back then — how does it feel now?

What’s changed are candidates who are trying to build authentic connections with people on the ground on a set of values and ideals that we can all corral around, versus in 2024, just being told that, well, the other candidate is worse.

Everybody knows what Abdul’s platform is. And remember, people in Dearborn didn’t vote for Abdul because he’s Muslim. They voted for Abdul because he showed up, he knocked on the doors, he went to places of worship. He canvassed and rallied. He had an agenda that wanted to tackle the main issues that so many working families are facing, economic issues. 

And obviously in ’24, slightly different, but I would say that people did not feel heard in 2024. And yes, Trump came to the City of Dearborn. I rejected meeting with Trump. I spoke to the threat that Donald Trump presented, to unravel the very fabric of America, and we see that happening each and every single day. But unfortunately at that time, the [Democratic] party was not willing to move. And I think there were lessons happening in that election, and I think we’re kind of seeing that play out right now.

You were a pretty vocal leader of the Uncommitted movement back then. My colleague Astead Herndon recently made the case that El-Sayed’s campaign has its roots in this movement, and in some way his victory came about because of those 2024 efforts. I’m wondering if you agree, or how you think about that legacy.

For me, getting 100,000 votes for Uncommitted, I don’t categorize it personally as victories. For me, it was, can you demonstrate that children being blown up in their homes or in their schools, or in hospitals being bulldozed, that these are things that universally we as human beings should all be opposed to? And you saw a multi-generational, multi-ethnic, multi-faith coalition be constructed around that.

It wasn’t an Arab, a Muslim issue. And in this election, what I see is that that coalition grew.

We’re still seeing atrocities unfold, but what is beautiful is people are bold enough, daring enough to come forward now and say, “Hey, why send our tax dollars for death and destruction when we need to build and uplift and support working families here?” Blind to who is being killed or murdered. And I think that’s ultimately what we were trying to achieve. 

The Uncommitted movement was an anti-war coalition, a pro-justice movement. And I think that’s what you’re seeing manifest in these candidates on the ground. And so I don’t like to consider anything a mere victory. It’s one election. We’re in another election right now. And ultimately victory is when working families feel seen, feel heard, and when policies change to change their lives for the better.

That is victory and that has yet to happen.

You mention this multi-ethnic, multi-faith coalition. I’m wondering if there have been any constructive interfaith conversations you’ve heard, or had, in this primary.

We worked a lot with organizers on the ground when they asked us, how do you mobilize and canvass in cities like Dearborn? And we told them, it’s not the traditional sense where you send out a text message or do phone banking. You got to show up. You got to be seen in community with them. 

We believe in authentic relationships. And I think that the same is true about many communities where they don’t want you to show up just during election time. And so I think the coalition-building and the community-building has been happening for quite some time between myself and my residents, obviously.

We educated them; when we did do canvassing, I gave them the tips about the cultural norms, the greetings. Don’t jump right into politics. Ask somebody: What do they care about? Find the issue that matters to them and try to uplift that somehow and speak to that. Show up multiple times. “Oh, I appreciate you passing by a place of worship once.” It’s not enough. You should be there every single week, if you authentically mean and stand by the idea that you want this community to support you. What are you doing today? Today’s the day after the election — are you coming back?

It was a pretty bitter race at times, particularly on the Israel and Palestine question. Lots of attempts were made by Republicans and Democrats to drive a wedge between Muslim and Jewish voters both in Michigan and in other races around the country. What’s it going to take to rebuild trust, to repair relationships? 

Prior to the genocide in Gaza, there’s been strong relationships between the Jewish community, the Muslim community and the Arab communities. The City of Dearborn is a city that uplifted its Jewish uncle Bernie Sanders twice in the presidential election. I personally endorsed Andy Levin when he first ran for Congress against Congresswoman Haley Stevens. We’re in contact. 

I’ve worked with Jewish Voice for Peace (the pro-Palestinian national Jewish activist organization) for several years now. We just put up the Wall of Tears mural in the City of Dearborn, which highlights the nearly 20,000 children in Gaza that have been killed. They brought the idea forward to work with us. 

Sometimes the media likes to speak to a relationship that is fraught with many issues. The reality is we know that antisemitism and Islamophobia and anti-Arab sentiment are one and the same. When you see a rise in one, you see a rise in the other, and we have to counteract all this together. And we have to distinguish between criticism of a government and criticism of a people.

This story appeared in Today, Explained, a daily newsletter that helps you understand the most compelling news and stories of the day. Subscribe here.

The progressive populist Abdul El-Sayed won Tuesday’s Democratic Senate primary in Michigan — though the vote was so close that most outlets didn’t call the race until this morning.

It’s not exactly the resounding triumph progressives expected. In the lead-up to Election Day, El-Sayed’s campaign boasted of a “massive” polling lead over centrist Rep. Haley Stevens that they said definitively proved the mainstream appeal of his style of politics.

In reality, the takeaways from one of the midterms’ bitterest and most consequential races are probably more mixed. El-Sayed, an epidemiologist and former public health official who has championed policies like Medicare-for-all and an end to military aid for Israel, appeared to struggle in some of Michigan’s lower-income and less-educated districts. 

That said, his win is still a big deal, especially given the forces arrayed against him. Democratic heavyweights and big-money donors both threw their considerable weight behind Stevens. 

The left’s big swing-state test

The Democratic primary in Michigan centered on a lot of interesting issues: money in politics, a whole bunch of -isms, and the role of “the establishment,” to name just a few. But the upcoming general election will test one question above all: Can a left-wing populist win over swing-state voters the way right-wing populists have been doing for years now? 

We have some left-wing populists in office already, of course — Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and US Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez D-NY), who both campaigned for El-Sayed this cycle. Progressives represent a number of cities and urban congressional districts. And over the past few months, the left wing of the Democratic Party has notched some notable primary wins.

But all of these candidates have run to represent solidly Democratic communities, where winning the primary effectively meant winning the seat. An out-and-proud, Sanders-style, left-wing populist arguably has yet to prove that this platform can win a statewide general election in a state that isn’t deep-blue already. 

That makes Michigan a high-stakes test. The state went for Trump in two of the past three presidential elections. Winning Michigan as a Democrat means cobbling together a coalition from a broad and varied range of constituencies, including Black Detroiters, swing suburbanites, college-town progressives, blue-collar union workers, and both Jewish and Muslim Americans. 

“Michigan is like a microcosm of America,” one Detroit reporter told my colleague Astead Herndon. If a left-wing populist can win there, in other words, the Democratic Party will really have to pay attention. 

One link for later

➨ Have that second cup of coffee; there’s a strong case to be made for its health benefits. In contrast to other, highly publicized food studies of this arena — many of which are sponsored by industry groups — a number of large, rigorous, peer-reviewed studies have found that coffee reduces your risk of developing dementia, cirrhosis, and liver cancer.

Before you go…

• Did you know…that for most people, physical fitness peaks around age 33? I wish I didn’t know that, but now that I do: Misery loves company! 
• Today’s trivia: What was the name of the Nickelodeon game show hosted by Marc Summers? (You can find this and other brain puzzles in Vox’s daily crossword. Look for the answer in tomorrow’s edition.)
• Yesterday’s trivia: Yesterday, we asked you how many states have legalized marijuana. That would be 41, if you count medical use, and 24 if you do not.

Abdul El-Sayed has defeated Haley Stevens in Michigan’s Democratic Senate primary — albeit by a significantly smaller margin than preelection polling suggested. He’s beaten back $30 million in AIPAC spending and endorsements from top Democrats, including Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, who backed Stevens. Now he’s moving on to face the GOP nominee, former Rep. Mike Rogers, in a contest crucial to determining Senate control.

So the next question is: Can El-Sayed beat a Republican?

That will be a cinch, some in his camp claim. “For progressives, getting out of the primary is a far more difficult battle than winning in the general,” left-wing streamer Hasan Piker told CNN last week.

But the reality is that we’ve had very few true tests of how candidates associated with the left flank of the party — and specifically with the Bernie Sanders-backed revolt against the establishment — would fare in competitive swing-state general elections. 

Which means that this would be one of the first such tests, and that its outcome will have enormous stakes for the party’s future.

El-Sayed’s views on Israel and his prospective history-making turn as the first-ever Muslim senator have gotten much coverage. But El-Sayed is also a dyed-in-the-wool member of the Sanders faction, having been closely aligned with Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez since his first political campaign in 2018. Both have campaigned for him this cycle.

If El-Sayed defeats Rogers convincingly (he’s personally predicting a 7-point victory as his baseline), he’ll become a megastar and even possibly a presidential contender. He’ll arguably be the first to prove that the Sanders formula — attacking billionaires, corporate influence, and the party establishment, while backing sweeping social welfare spending like Medicare-for-all — can win over voters who once backed President Donald Trump.

“If Abdul El-Sayed beats Stevens I actually think he’s very likely to be the next president,” Nathan J. Robinson, editor-in-chief of the socialist publication Current Affairs, posted on X last month. “If he wins the general, it’s over for centrist Dems.”

Conversely, if El-Sayed — who has trailed Rogers in recent polls — loses, skeptics may conclude that the left can’t appeal to the country’s true swing voters, and that nominating a leftist for president in 2028, or in downballot races, is too big of a risk. 

The core disagreement: Will the left’s approach succeed in the general election?

Over the past decade, it has become an article of faith across much of the left that their particular populist approach to economics and foreign policy would be potent in a general election.

They argue that typical Democrats have a more compromised platform and timid style, lacking the populist fire that can win over disaffected Americans. “Bernie would’ve won” in 2016, the saying goes, by using his outsider credibility and ambitious plans to appeal to the working-class voters and independents that went for Trump. Kamala Harris’s defeat, amid intense criticism on the left over her and Joe Biden’s support for Israel, further bolstered their sense that the party establishment just can’t get it done. 

Now, left factionalists are pointing to their several high-profile primary victories this year and arguing that energy and enthusiasm are on their side — and would translate to the general election too.

Many mainstream Democrats see this as naive. They believe that while talk of “socialism” and other far-left positions might work fine in deep blue cities and districts, it could well prove toxic in swing states that have voted for Trump. While public opinion on certain issues has moved in the left’s direction, especially Israel, candidates could have a tougher time on issues like crime, where El-Sayed has offered nuanced explanations of his “defund the police” rhetoric from 2020.

“Winning a Democratic primary means close to nothing when it comes to the general election, because these are functionally different voter pools,” Lakshya Jain of the center-left publication The Argument recently wrote.

Some analysts pointed to the primary results as a potential harbinger of general election struggles, with El-Sayed performing poorly against Stevens in the kinds of rural areas that have swung toward Republicans in the Trump era.

Are there past examples of Bernie-aligned candidates making it to tough general elections?

But even though the “Bernie vs. the establishment” battle has been raging on and off for the past decade, there have been very few clean tests about how Bernie-backed candidates would do in swing states.

Sanders never won the presidential nomination, and candidates aligned with him have generally preferred to run in strongly Democratic areas where, if they win the primary, the general election is a fait accompli. The now-expanding “squad” of left-wing House members that began with Reps. Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, and Ayanna Pressley all fit this model.

There have, however, been a few past examples where Sanders-aligned candidates have made it to the general election in tough territory.

One is Andrew Gillum, whose 2018 bid for governor of Florida was backed by Sanders and other progressive groups, including billionaire Tom Steyer’s network. He won the nomination over establishment favorite Gwen Graham — but then went on to lose the general election to Ron DeSantis by a mere four-tenths of a percentage point, ushering in what became the era of Deep Red Florida.

In nominating Gillum, did the left blow a winnable race amid a national Democratic wave? Maybe — but one counterargument is that longtime Sen. Bill Nelson, a thoroughly mainstream Democrat, lost his seat by a similarly tight margin in that same election. Florida may have just been trending redder generally. Gillum’s post-election personal struggles also color views of his candidacy today.

That same cycle, in Nebraska, Kara Eastman upset the establishment favorite to win the nomination for a swing House district. (Sanders hadn’t endorsed her in the primary, but she ran on a platform of Medicare-for-all and free college.) She lost in 2018 — and again in 2020, even though Joe Biden won her district — and has been viewed inside the party as a cautionary tale about blowing a winnable race ever since.

The outcome was happier for Keith Ellison, a close Sanders ally who won his race to be Minnesota’s attorney general in 2018. Yet his margin of victory — about 4 percentage points — wasn’t particularly impressive in a lean blue state in a strongly Democratic year when Tim Walz won the governor’s race by 11. Later, when Ellison ran for reelection in 2022, he eked out a win by less than 1 point while Walz won by 8.

John Fetterman was generally understood to be a “Bernie faction” candidate when he ran for an open US Senate seat in Pennsylvania in 2022. (Sanders stayed neutral in the primary that year, but had backed Fetterman’s earlier lieutenant governor campaign and championed him in the general election.) But he wasn’t exactly running on a bold left platform — he backed off his past Medicare-for-all support and was pro-fracking.

Fetterman ended up winning by 5 points even though it was a favorable cycle for Republicans — but simultaneously, the more centrist Josh Shapiro won the governor’s race by 15. However, Shapiro’s opponent was believed to be weaker and more extreme, and the stroke Fetterman suffered that year complicates efforts to read too much into his performance. 

Separate from his electoral performance, Fetterman’s association with the Sanders left ended years ago as his politics moved to the right; lately, there has been talk he might switch parties. This has also fueled arguments from moderates that populist outsider candidates are less reliable than more conventional ones even if they do manage to win.

El-Sayed is running on a bold left platform in a true swing state

Taking this grab bag of outcomes together, one can see why mainstream Democrats might be skeptical that the left has the secret sauce to win swing voters. But each race has had its own unique circumstances and complications.

Furthermore, in this cycle, the electorate could be in a different place — more disenchanted by the establishment and more willing to take a chance on further-left candidates.

Graham Platner was set to be the great hope for the Sanders faction until his Senate campaign was derailed by scandal and he was replaced on the ballot by Troy Jackson — another Sanders-aligned candidate, albeit one with his own long history in state politics. But though Jackson is facing a formidable Republican incumbent, Maine is a blue state that hasn’t backed a GOP presidential candidate since 1988.

Michigan is tougher turf, having voted for Trump in two of the past three presidential elections. The conventional wisdom for how a Democrat can win a race there is to run a cautious campaign, being careful not to alienate potentially winnable Republican and independent voters. A good example is Gary Peters, the departing two-term senator El-Sayed is running to replace, who’s a traditional pro-union Democrat known for keeping a low profile in general.

El-Sayed is not doing that. He supports Medicare-for-all, a billionaire wealth tax, abolishing ICE, and a full arms embargo on Israel. While El-Sayed is not a democratic socialist, he’s very closely tied to Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez — the trio held hands and raised their arms together at a recent rally, in an image Michigan voters may well see in GOP-funded attack ads. 

And back in 2020, El-Sayed expressed sympathy with activists calling to “defund the police” and said most major cities spend far too much on police departments, though he’s tried to downplay those views this cycle.

“I’m worried that he’s more passionate about attacking other Dems than Republicans and may not be ready for what’s coming,” Adam Jentleson, president of the center-left Searchlight Institute, posted on X recently.

Now that he’s won the primary, El-Sayed will get the chance to try and show he’s ready — and to test whether his bold left platform will be his greatest asset, or a millstone.

This story appeared in The Logoff, a daily newsletter that helps you stay informed about the Trump administration without letting political news take over your life. Subscribe here.

Welcome to The Logoff: President Donald Trump’s renovation mania is reaching new heights. 

What’s happening? Not satisfied with a paved Rose Garden, lavish amounts of gold, and a granite walkway paid for with national parks money, Trump is currently adding a helipad to the White House lawn. Construction, begun in June, has been running 24/7, with the goal of finishing the project before a visit from Chinese President Xi Jinping in late September. 

But all is not well: As the Washington Post reported on Tuesday, contractors are now undoing their work as Trump demands a perfectly level helipad (on a South Lawn that is anything but).

It’s the latest evidence of something that New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman recently described in a podcast with Ezra Klein: By her estimate, around 70 percent of Trump’s “mind share” is tied up not with the Iran war, affordability, or the upcoming midterms, but “on his renovations,” which she describes as a “legacy thing.”

What else does Trump have in the works? In addition to the helipad, Trump is currently working on renovating Lafayette Square, across the street from the White House; on Monday, he mused about his “big decision” on whether to change the park’s pavers from red brick to granite.

He’s also re-gilding four statues near the Lincoln Memorial in vivid 23.75-karat gold; repairing the re-drained Reflecting Pool, which was the victim of a rush job the first time around; and moving ahead with his plan for a 250-foot arch, which could be approved by early next month and which the National Park Service recently concluded would have “adverse effects” on more than three dozen historic sites in the DC area.

What’s the big picture? Trump’s construction fervor has only accelerated since he returned to office last year, especially as other agenda items have eluded him. A midterms loss will further curtail his options for the final two years of his presidency, so don’t expect it to stop here.

And with that, it’s time to log off…

Here’s a stat I did not know, courtesy of my colleague Bryan Walsh: Traffic injuries are “the leading cause of death for everyone between the ages of 5 and 29 — ahead of malaria, ahead of war and homicide, ahead of every disease we spend more time worrying about.” 

That’s pretty grim, and not very Logoff-y. But there’s good news, too: As Bryan reports, between 2011 and 2025, global road deaths have fallen by 21 percent, even as more vehicles take to the roads — thanks in large part to a change in how we think about traffic accidents. You can read Bryan’s full story about what changed — and what we still have to work on — here with a gift link.

Have a great evening, and we’ll see you right back here tomorrow!

Welcome to The Midterms, Actually. Every week I’ll be writing about two things: one big idea or trend I see forming across the 2026 primaries, and one thing I’m hearing from a voice on the ground. Let’s get into it.

One big idea: The Uncommitted movement has already won

During the 2024 presidential election, on the third night of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, we recorded an episode of my election podcast The Run-Up that I still think about all the time. The premise was simple: I wanted to know whether Democrats were making a material change at the top of the ticket or just a cosmetic one. So we asked convention-goers a plain question — how would Kamala Harris’s Democratic Party be any different from Joe Biden’s?

The tone of the piece reflected the optimism of the room. The activists, down to a person, thought Harris was showing a newfound openness to the administration’s critics. But underneath the hopium was a specific policy desire: that Harris would break from Biden’s unconditional support of Israel’s violent campaign in Gaza. That afternoon, I spent time with members of the Uncommitted movement, born in Michigan, who were trying to pressure the DNC into putting a single Palestinian speaker on the stage. They held press conferences with grieving families, and warned the party that the Democrats’ Muslim and Arab base in particular would not forget being sidelined. 

United Auto Workers president Shawn Fain made clear the confidence surrounding Harris at the time was tied to the belief her posture around Gaza would be different from Biden’s: “She’s made, obviously, a couple different comments on Gaza,” he said. “We called for a ceasefire in UAW back in November. And obviously, she understands the humanity issue of this. And I mean, my conversations I’ve had with Kamala Harris have been very good, very fruitful.” 

They didn’t get one. Not the speaker, not the policy shift, not the break from Biden. Harris famously refused to distance herself from her boss, whether it was Israel or anything else — and likely lost because of it. 

And while many of the most prominent voices of the Uncommitted movement (including current Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed) ended up publicly backing Harris in the end, some of Harris’s most ardent supporters have repeatedly blamed left-wing activists for undermining her campaign. Haley Stevens, the Michigan representative who’s running for the Senate as the party’s establishment choice, has sought to make El-Sayed’s support for Uncommitted an issue in that race, suggesting that the movement planted seeds of discontent ahead of a must-win presidential election. 

I want to argue the opposite. Two years after the Uncommitted movement shook up the Democratic Party, its impact has never been more clear. Public opinion of Israel has plummeted across the American electorate, to the point where the movement’s position is now a majority opinion. Per Quinnipiac, 77 percent of Democrats say they believe Israel is committing a genocide — an unthinkable number just two years ago. The Uncommitted movement also led to the growth and maturation of the Democrats’ Muslim left, which has already molded prominent elected officials like New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani and Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed. 

Even more, I think Uncommitted challenged the blame-the-voters framework that allows the establishment to avoid self-reflection. The movement was never only about a DNC speaking slot, but about the idea that every vote must be earned, not owed. It was a retort to “vote blue no matter who” — an argument that conditional support for the party is not only valid, but of moral importance. 

In 2024, that posture got you branded a spoiler. Today it’s just how Democrats talk. When I sat down with Hasan Piker — the most popular voice on the Democratic left — he told me he voted for Kamala Harris but pointedly refused to endorse her, and named exactly why:

“The only reason for my refusal to openly endorse was because of…a continuation of the genocide in Gaza.”

“I understand the harm reduction arguments…but it’s not a practical approach to winning elections, and demonstrably it’s been a failure with Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris.”

Piker put the mechanism plainly. October 7, 2023, and its aftermath, he told me, were “a seismic shift that gave a lot of confidence to the left, that as long as they stood by their positions…people would actually see the truth.” The movement didn’t move Biden. It moved the electorate Biden’s successors now have to answer to.

And you can trace that shifted ground straight into this year’s wins. In New York, Zohran Mamdani rode exactly this coalition into City Hall — a victory Piker described as the proof of concept he’d been waiting for: “that’s why I was so grateful for Zohran’s victory…I can just point to him.” In Congress, progressives like Darializa Avila Chevalier in New York City and Melat Kiros in Colorado add to the growing evidence that acknowledging Israel’s actions in Gaza as a genocide is now a litmus test for Democratic voters gauging the trust and credibility of their candidates.

Which brings us to Michigan, where the whole thing started. It’s easy to forget now, but the Uncommitted movement was born in the Michigan primary — and the general-election bill came due there, too. Kamala Harris got 36 percent of the vote in Dearborn, a city Joe Biden had carried with nearly 69 percent in 2020. She lost the state by about 80,000 votes. The voters the party told to fall in line didn’t, and Michigan is where that refusal was most legible.

Now look at who’s competitive in this week’s Senate primary. Abdul El-Sayed is running on the precise argument Uncommitted was making in the streets of Chicago — except now it’s a statewide campaign with real money behind it, against a candidate backed by tens of millions in pro-Israel spending. He turns the foreign-policy question into a pocketbook one and refuses to soften the language. As he said on America, Actually:

“There is an electoral cost to backstopping genocide and apartheid.”

“If you can’t call a genocide perpetrated by our tax dollars the moral abomination that it is, then at some point it’s hard for me to believe that you’re gonna fight for anything,” he told me.

Whether or not El-Sayed wins today, the fact that a candidate running explicitly against AIPAC and unconditional aid is fighting for a Senate seat in a swing state is the clearest possible measure of how far the ground has moved since that convention floor.

In the coming months, it may be that the Democrats’ moderate wing — think tanks like Third Way, party leadership, and those offended by the electorate’s rising leftist tide — will adopt some of the same tactics they criticized. Already, Rep. Hillary Scholten, who is supporting Stevens in Michigan, has signaled she may refuse to support El-Sayed in a general election, due to his association with Piker. 

It seems “vote blue no matter who” has its limits. For progressives. For centrists. For everyone. 

What I’m hearing

With Michigan’s primary set to conclude today, that leaves the Wisconsin governor’s race as the next big election on the Democratic calendar. This week, I reached out to Dan Shafer, a reporter in Milwaukee who has been covering the race for months. Schafer writes for the Recombobulation Area, where he’s political editor and writes a weekly opinion column. 

It looks like Francesca Hong, the DSA-aligned state assemblywoman, has a commanding lead in the Wisconsin governor’s primary. This would’ve been a shock a year ago. How did this happen?

The short answer is that Francesca Hong has simply run the best campaign. She has run circles around the consultant-brained conventional approaches of her opponents, and has found success by doing things decidedly differently.

From the very beginning, I characterized her as the “wild card” in the race. And while I certainly did not envision her having a commanding lead in the polls in the final stretch in the primary, I knew that, given her background in the restaurant and hospitality industry, she wouldn’t let anyone out-work or out-hustle her on the campaign trail. Her relentless ground game and digital organizing energy essentially issued a challenge to every other campaign to step up. The rest of the field failed that test. 

She’s also absolutely dominating this primary with younger voters. In the Marquette University Law School Poll from last week, the data showed her with the support of 66% of likely primary voters in the 18-29 age group, and 51% in the 30-44 age group. No other candidate was even in double digits. I write a breakdown of every new Marquette poll, and these are just preposterous numbers. For Gen Z and millennials, she is the candidate.

Hong has made data centers and AI backlash a centerpiece of this race. How important is this issue specifically in this race?

I think it’s been the No. 1 issue [since] she’s taken off in this primary. 

She backed a data center moratorium in January, and began running on this issue early. It’s been a very animating issue in Wisconsin, first for all the reasons the anti-data center backlash is coming to so many Great Lakes states, but also because of the failed Foxconn project in Racine County that happened during the first Trump administration under then-Gov. Scott Walker. It came with the promise of thousands and thousands of jobs, Trump called it the “eighth wonder of the world,” and it’s just been a miserable failure on so many levels. Hong just filmed her most recent ad at the Foxconn site — a project the Republican nominee Tom Tiffany voted for while in the state Senate at the time.

Politically, though, what really helped Hong on this issue is that no other candidate running backed a data center moratorium. One of the most significant moments of the primary happened in a June 3 candidate forum focused on working-class issues, where moderator JT Cestkowski asked a yes-or-no question on whether the candidates back a data center moratorium. Only Hong said yes. If any other candidate had said yes, that would have given the anti-data center voter options in the primary. Instead, they all went to Hong.

There is an assertion that Hong is a weak general election candidate. Is there evidence for this? 

This is Wisconsin. Anyone pretending a statewide election in this of all states should be considered anything other than a toss-up is kidding themselves. Many have argued that her likely Republican opponent, Tom Tiffany, is a uniquely weak general election candidate in his own right. But it can’t be denied that there would be a whole lot of risk involved with her as a general election candidate: The “socialism” of it all will undoubtedly be a challenge. But Francesca Hong continues to be a wild card, and she might have what it takes to play a winning hand.

Editor’s note, Aug. 5, 6:20 am ET: Kansas voters rejected a proposed amendment to change how state supreme court justices are selected. This piece below was originally published on August 4.

Four years after the Dobbs decision, abortion battles have largely taken a backseat in national news to other policy fights this cycle. Leaders in the anti-abortion movement say they’re disillusioned with President Donald Trump’s unwillingness to push for further restrictions. The federal battle over access to abortion medication seems to be settled — for now. Public awareness of that fight is limited, and even at the state level, a couple years have passed since the high-pitched but successful state-level efforts to protect abortion access in red states.

Yet a little-known battle has been playing out in Kansas, where a ballot measure to change the way state supreme court justices are selected serves as a reminder that these fights over abortion are still active, even if they take the form of creative procedural and administrative efforts. 

If it succeeds, opponents say, it would open the floodgates for similar efforts in other states to politicize the remaining independent state courts (13 other states use a method similar to Kansas) and provide a road map to undoing abortion protections in other states that have safeguarded them.

On Tuesday, Kansans are deciding whether to change the way judges on the state’s highest court are selected. Up until now, judges were selected through a nonpartisan merit-based system: When a spot opens on the bench, a nine-member commission submits a list to the governor, who then selects a replacement.

The referendum would replace this system with direct, partisan elections of judges, like any other politician. Proponents say it’s a democratic move, a way to better express the will of voters over “unelected” bureaucrats. Yet critics say it’s first and foremost about restricting abortion rights — which both the court and voters have rejected.

How Kansas became an abortion rights flashpoint

In 2019, the state supreme court recognized the right to abortion in the state constitution; three years later, after Dobbs, voters rejected a Republican-championed proposal to overturn that ruling, choosing to preserve abortion rights by a 59-41 margin in a deeply red state.

It was after that failed vote in 2022 that then-state attorney general Republican candidate Kris Kobach outlined a new strategy for undoing these protections: changing the way the supreme court is selected, electing anti-abortion candidates, and “slowly and quietly” overturning the 2019 decision and 2022 vote.

“If you look at the various proposals, one of the proposals that is crystal clear is allowing people to popularly elect justices to the supreme court, which is the most common system among all of the states in the country,” Kobach said in 2022.

He’s a bit more careful talking about this in 2026: “There is a real desire to bring back some accountability to the judiciary,” he told the New York Times this week. “It’s not just about abortion.”

Tuesday’s results would have huge ramifications, critics said, given that nonelected state courts have been a final bulwark against Republican supermajorities and governors in red states. Kansas has been an island for abortion access for women in the South and central US since the Dobbs decision.

The victory in 2022 also inspired abortion rights advocates to try to use ballot measures to enshrine these protections in about a dozen other states, which successfully overturned abortion bans in Missouri and Ohio. State courts in Utah and Wyoming, meanwhile, blocked bans.

The next frontier in the abortion wars

These independent checks on power have been under attack for years, Michael Milov-Cordoba, a court expert and counsel in the Brennan Center for Justice’s judiciary program, told me. 

“State legislators across the country are increasingly trying to undermine those courts. … That retaliation takes a few different forms, but changing how judges are selected is top of the list,” Milov-Cordoba said. “And what we’ve seen is that in many states where courts stand up for abortion rights and strike down abortion restrictions, efforts to change state judiciaries have followed.”

He noted the complete reworking of the Utah supreme court in the last year, including by expanding and packing it. Similar retooling of the state supreme court happened in Iowa in 2022. Montana is likely the next battleground, where Republican legislators are exploring various avenues to strip or limit the state supreme court’s powers. That in turn has led the ACLU to get involved to boost a constitutional amendment this year that would preserve the nonpartisan status of judicial elections.

And in recent years, state supreme court elections have been inundated with spending and attention from both in- and out-of-state backers. Last year’s Wisconsin judicial election, for example, became the most expensive race of its kind in US history, with more than $100 million spent — just two years after a contest for a different seat on the state supreme court had set its own record at more than $50 million spent.

“If these courts become partisan, then they will be just like any other election fight — subject to being bought and sold by billionaire political funders,” Deirdre Schifeling, the chief political and advocacy officer at the ACLU, told me. “They become a race to the bottom … and [Republicans] are finding backdoor ways to seize power to push their ideological agenda.”

Already, Kansas has seen heavy spending: More than $12 million have been spent from both sides, including about $5 million from the ACLU, Schifeling told me.

”Everyone’s focused on the Michigan Senate race, other kind of big-ticket, sexy elections,” Schifeling said. “Well, this is just as important and much more under the radar. Without a balanced court, we are going to lose rights and liberties across the board in a state like Kansas.”

This story appeared in The Logoff, a daily newsletter that helps you stay informed about the Trump administration without letting political news take over your life. Subscribe here.

Welcome to The Logoff: It’s clearer than ever that President Donald Trump has no way out on Iran. 

What’s happening? Over the weekend, Trump posted to social media that he had agreed to “hold off any attack” on Iran because “the perimeters of a deal has been agreed to.” The deal, he said, would include the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz and a nebulous “end to Iran’s nuclear threat.” 

That should all sound fairly familiar, since it’s essentially what the US and Iran agreed to — and subsequently abandoned — in June. As of Monday morning, though, Trump had already pivoted, accusing Iran of being “unbelievably duplicitous” in negotiating.

“This is a last chance for them to sign a good document,” he told reporters in the Oval Office Monday afternoon, threatening “decapitation” — essentially the same warning he issued in April. 

What’s the context? Since the collapse of the June “memorandum of understanding” between the US and Iran, which ended the immediate conflict and set out a path for negotiations on Iran’s nuclear program, the two countries have resumed hostilities, if not full-scale war. In July, three more US servicemembers were killed in Iranian attacks.

The strait also remains largely closed, with only a handful of vessels per day passing through.

Why does this matter? The Logoff has tried to steer clear of blow-by-blow coverage of the Iran war, because this kind of reversal happens a lot: Trump is constantly blustering, promising a deal, threatening massive retaliation, backing down, and doing it all over again. 

This latest episode, more than five months into the war and tidily compressed into just a few days, is little different. We’re writing about it anyway because it’s a good reminder of what has emerged as the essential fact of the war: Trump may have started the conflict, but he doesn’t seem to have any real plan in place to end it — and the longer things drag on, the greater the risk to the US troops fighting it.

And with that, it’s time to log off…

Vox’s Unexplainable podcast is tackling the “holy grail of sensory biology” — magnetoreception, which lets birds navigate using Earth’s magnetic field — this week with some help from author and journalist Ed Yong. You can listen here, and I also recommend Yong’s newsletter, which regularly features some spectacular bird photos.

Thanks for reading, have a great evening, and we’ll see you back here tomorrow! 

For a brief moment late last week, it looked like acting Attorney General Todd Blanche’s bid to get the word “acting” removed from his job title was in serious trouble. But that moment appears to have passed, as two key Republican senators just signaled that they will vote to move his nomination forward.

Sens. John Cornyn (R-TX) and Thom Tillis (R-NC) halted Blanche’s nomination because of concerns about a $1.8 billion slush fund that Blanche helped create as the Justice Department’s acting leader, as well as some objections to a collusive deal between President Donald Trump and the IRS that could have shut down tax investigations into Trump, his family, and his businesses. Both senators announced on Monday that they will no longer block the nomination.

Though these two senators, both of whom are retiring in January, did extract some minor concessions from the Department of Justice in return for their votes, they objected to only a small fraction of Blanche’s efforts to transform the DOJ’s lawyers into Trump’s personal advocates and enforcers. The fact that Blanche is likely to be confirmed, despite his sycophancy toward Trump, suggests that any meaningful guardrails on a weaponized Justice Department have ceased to exist.

Cornyn and Tillis both currently serve on the Senate Judiciary Committee. That committee, where Republicans currently have a two-vote majority, was originally scheduled to vote on Blanche’s nomination Thursday — but that vote would have failed if Cornyn and Tillis rejected the nominee. And, now, it’s likely to go ahead.

Cornyn and Tillis’s objections to Blanche were quite narrow in scope. They demanded a written order from Blanche “terminating the anti-weaponization fund,” a reference to the $1.8 billion slush fund that could be paid out to Trump’s allies, including participants in the January 6 attack on the US Capitol. Blanche originally established this fund in a May 18 order. On Sunday night, he tweeted out a new document terminating his May 18 order. 

Cornyn also objected to the breadth of settlement between Trump and the IRS — which could be read to permanently cut off that agency’s power to audit Trump, his companies, or many members of his family — but only sought to narrow this settlement’s scope.

For the most part, however, the two senators did not object to Blanche’s broader efforts to weaponize the Justice Department against people who’ve displeased Trump, including the use of law enforcement to cow Trump’s critics. As both deputy attorney general and as acting attorney general, Blanche oversaw several highly dubious prosecutions brought against Trump’s perceived enemies and prominent Democrats.  

A video introduced in federal court, for example, indicated that Blanche personally instructed law enforcement officers to arrest Newark’s Democratic Mayor Ras Baraka — an arrest that led a federal magistrate judge to scold the DOJ for “using the immense power of the government to pursue weak cases or to make examples without sufficient cause.” Under Blanche’s oversight, the DOJ’s also brought flimsy charges against individuals like former FBI Director James Comey and New York state Attorney General Letitia James, who investigated Trump for potential wrongdoing. (One minor exception: Tillis did previously pressure Blanche to drop an investigation into former Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell.)

So, while Cornyn and Tillis successfully pushed Blanche to make some small concessions in order to secure their votes in the Judiciary Committee, neither senator appeared interested in a confrontation over Trump and Blanche’s broader efforts to transform the DOJ into a revenge-seeking agency. And now, it appears likely that Blanche will be confirmed — and that those efforts will continue. 

What did Blanche actually agree to do in order to get Cornyn and Tillis’s votes?

Earlier this year, Trump, the Trump Organization, and Trump’s two oldest sons sued the IRS, claiming that it failed to prevent a contractor from leaking some of Trump’s tax documents. The president originally demanded a $10 billion payout from the federal government, and the lawsuit triggered widespread concerns about a conflict of interest, because Trump was both the plaintiff and the chief executive of the government he sued.

On May 18, a little over a month after Blanche became the federal government’s top lawyer, Trump (and the other plaintiffs) entered into a “settlement agreement” that did not include a $10 billion payday for Trump but that did include several provisions favorable to Trump, his family, and his companies. 

Among other things, the settlement announced the creation of the “anti-weaponization fund,” which would distribute money to an unknown group of people who claim they were unfairly targeted by previous administrations based on decisions by five individuals appointed by Blanche. It also included a provision claiming that the IRS (and potentially other federal agencies) is “FOREVER BARRED” from pursuing any claims that “have been or could have been asserted by Plaintiffs” — open-ended language which sparked fears that a wide range of potential investigations into Trump, his family, or his companies could be shut down forever.

In response to Cornyn and Tillis’s objections to this settlement, Blanche tweeted out a brief order on Monday, stating that his own May 18 order establishing the anti-weaponization fund “is rescinded and shall have no force or effect.” According to Tillis, the DOJ also “acknowledged in a binding written order that the audit settlement is limited to the plaintiffs and the scope does not extend beyond the defendants in the lawsuit.”

So, Blanche walked back the specific order that he signed to establish the $1.8 billion slush fund, but he did not repudiate the part of the settlement that immunizes Trump, his two oldest sons, and the Trump Organization from many tax investigations. According to Tillis, the DOJ merely said that this part of the settlement does not apply to parties (including federal agencies) that were not parties to Trump’s original lawsuit.

Though this deal appeared to have been enough to secure Cornyn and Tillis’s votes, and most likely to ensure Blanche’s confirmation in a Republican Senate, it is unlikely to placate Democrats. As Sen. Adam Schiff (D-CA) tweeted Tuesday morning, Blanche’s new order “doesn’t prevent payouts to violent insurrectionists in the future,” and it “leaves in place a tax-immunity deal that could help Trump skip taxes on the $2.3 billion he made last year.”

And the question of whether the DOJ may bring politically motivated charges against figures like Baraka, Comey, or James appeared to not even be part of the deal struck between Blanche, Cornyn, and Tillis.

One reason why the two senators exacted such meager concessions may be because they didn’t have a very strong hand to play against Trump. Because Blanche is currently the Senate-confirmed deputy attorney general, he can remain head of the Justice Department, in an acting role, for as long as Trump is president. Indeed, when negotiations between Blanche and the two senators appeared to hit an impasse late last week, Trump threatened to “keep Todd as Acting A.G., and push hard to get the Anti-Weaponization Bill” if Cornyn and Tillis wouldn’t support Blanche.

But that doesn’t change the fact that Blanche’s concessions are thin gruel. His statement on the slush fund merely confirms that “there is no Fund” right now. And, under the terms of the apparent deal reached with Cornyn and Tillis, Trump, his sons, and his primary business still gain broad immunity from a wide range of tax investigations. 

So, while Cornyn and Tillis may have given Trump and Blanche a brief scare, they never put up much real resistance to Trump’s nominee.

This story appeared in Today, Explained, a daily newsletter that helps you understand the most compelling news and stories of the day. Subscribe here.

We always like a bit of good democracy news — such news being in overall short supply — and acting Attorney General Todd Blanche appeared to deliver some last night. 

Blanche is currently jockeying for the permanent AG gig, which would put him in charge of the Justice Department. But his confirmation process stalled over bipartisan objections to President Donald Trump’s “anti-weaponization fund,” a $1.8 billion reparation program for people who claimed the government had wronged them. 

On Sunday, in acknowledgement of those objections, Blanche confirmed in writing that the Justice Department had rescinded the fund and had no plans to revive it. It’s a rare reminder that the Senate’s confirmation power can still constrain the White House, even if many Republican lawmakers would rather not rock the boat. And the presidential boat was very much rocked by the dustup over Blanche’s confirmation. 

In a post on Saturday, Trump insisted that he’d get some version of the fund even over senators’ objections. And on Monday, he told reporters that he didn’t sign off on the rescission. Notably, the two Republicans who forced that surrender — North Carolina’s Thom Tillis and Texas’s John Cornyn — will both depart the Senate in early 2027.

All the president’s slush funds

The anti-weaponization fund is just the latest of Trump’s attempts to siphon federal money into an account that he or his allies control. In fact, the quest to secure such a slush fund is a defining feature of his presidency — and several of his previous, less egregious attempts have been more successful. Those include: 

1. Venezuelan oil accounts: Since the US toppled Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro earlier this year, proceeds from the sale of Venezuelan oil have gotten routed into special US Treasury accounts, which are labeled as Venezuela’s sovereign property — but only released at the direction of the secretary of state.   
2. The Board of Peace: Trump’s controversial coalition for rebuilding Gaza was conceived as a pay-to-play operation: Member countries get seats for a mere three years unless they pony up $1 billion to the Trump-controlled organization. While more than 20 countries have signed on, Reuters reported in April that only two had actually made contributions.  
3. US sovereign wealth fund: Trump first floated this idea of a government-owned wealth fund, which would allow him to direct federal investment in private companies, during his first term. While it never got off the ground as such, the administration has since acquired equity stakes in at least a dozen firms.

“The long-term risk is not just that Trump might be doing something illegal,” Tad DeHaven, a policy analyst with the Cato Institute, wrote for Vox earlier this year. “The long-term risk is that his presidency is normalizing treating the receipt and disbursement of money as instruments of personal power.”

One link for later

➨ Happiness is overrated. In a new book, the author Ian Bogost argues we should instead pursue sensory gratification: the simple and immediate pleasure found in physical experiences, whether changing gears in a stick-shift car or holding a warm mug in your hands. 

Before you go…

• Did you know…that dolphins have been known to beat and kill other animals for fun? I spent much of my weekend watching a baby animal documentary with my sick child, and am actually devastated to learn that many adorable animals “are also murderous monsters.” 
• Today’s trivia: What Pennsylvania-born singer/songwriter is sometimes called “the godmother of punk”? (You can find this and other brain puzzles in Vox’s daily crossword. Look for the answer in tomorrow’s edition.)
• Yesterday’s trivia: Last Friday we asked you for the Vietnamese word for festival. That would be “tết,” as in the 1968 Tet Offensive — a brutal military campaign that began during Vietnamese Lunar New Year celebrations. 

New Yorkers will soon enjoy a 30 percent discount on their meat, seafood, milk, and bread — so long as they shop at a city-owned store.

Mayor Zohran Mamdani touted such bargains this week at a press conference detailing his plans to launch five public grocery stores, in a bid to lower New Yorkers’ food costs. Under the proposal, the city would own each supermarket and dictate its pricing and labor practices, while private grocery companies would handle the day-to-day operations.

Mamdani’s proposal has been getting people worked up from the moment he unveiled it on the campaign trail for his 2025 mayoral run. For many progressives, state-owned supermarkets embody one of their movement’s highest ideals — the prioritization of public needs over private profits. For conservatives, meanwhile, “Mamdani Marts” represent an attack on free enterprise (if not, the first step on the road to Soviet breadlines).

While stimulating, these grand philosophical arguments have often overshadowed more banal but pressing questions: Would public grocery stores do more to advance Mamdani’s stated goals than other things the city could do with the same money? Has New York’s mayor discovered a way to sell groceries more efficiently than Costco does — or an approach to nutritional relief more effective than simply giving poor people more cash and food?

The answer to both of these questions appears to be “no.” And that should concern more than just New Yorkers. Mamdani’s vision is already inspiring imitators, with San Francisco and Boston both exploring their own public grocery store proposals. And in national discourse, the mayor’s policy is widely understood as an experiment — one testing a bold new theory of how governments can make food more affordable.

Unfortunately, although public grocers have merit in some circumstances, the theory underlying Mamdani’s specific plan is not merely unproven but incoherent.

Grocery socialism makes more sense for small-town Republicans

Public grocery stores have historically aimed to solve a problem that New York City does not have — a total absence of private supermarkets.

In 2018, the small town of Baldwin, Florida lost its only grocer. With only 1,600 residents — and a median income of $44,271 — the community no longer generated enough business to be worth the local IGA’s while. And no other national chain rushed in to fill the gap. 

So, the municipality opened its own grocery store, the Baldwin Market.

This attracted national media attention. And not without reason. A deeply conservative small-town trying its hand at socialism was a fun story. And it turned out that Baldwin wasn’t an aberration: Other aging rural communities in red America had turned to government grocers once private supermarkets had left them in the lurch.

Progressive policy thinkers took inspiration from these examples. In the ensuing years, proposals for using public grocery stores to combat urban food deserts — impoverished neighborhoods without convenient and affordable supermarkets — began to circulate. The merits of such plans can be debated. But their logic was straightforward: Where the market fails to provide residents with healthy food options, the government should step in. 

When post-COVID inflation sowed outrage over food prices, however, some on the left reconceived the purpose of public supermarkets: In their telling, such stores weren’t merely a means of eliminating food deserts, but also a way to make groceries more affordable.

Mamdani’s plan is principally animated by the latter goal. With more than 1,100 grocery stores and 10,000 bodegas, most of New York City is well-provisioned by private food vendors. And although parts of the municipality are under-served, the mayor is not actually concentrating his stores in such areas; his planned East Harlem location lies just blocks from an Aldi, Costco, and many other grocers. 

In a report detailing its policy, the mayor’s office makes clear that its primary aim is to drive down New Yorkers’ food bills. Yet there’s little reason to think that public grocery stores are a cost-effective way to do that.

New York City probably won’t provide groceries more efficiently than Costco

Without question, a government store can make groceries more affordable for its own customers: All it has to do is charge below-market prices.

And yet, if that store manages this feat by operating at a loss, then its shoppers’ savings will come at the broader city’s expense.

That might not be too troubling, if one pictures rich taxpayers footing the bill. But for a city like New York — which faces a structural budget deficit — revenue is a scarce resource. A tax dollar spent on public grocery stores is one that can’t be spent on nutritional assistance for low-income people. And all else equal, the latter will do more to enhance affordability: If you have a limited pool of food subsidies — and want to minimize the number of New Yorkers who can’t afford groceries — then you should spend your funds on the poor, not on whoever happens to show up at your city-owned store. 

Thus, for Mamdani’s supermarkets to be cost-effective, they can’t just subsidize low prices with taxpayer money. Rather, they need to deliver groceries more efficiently than private retailers do.

Public ownership can unlock efficiencies in certain contexts. For example, America’s private health insurance system generates massive administrative redundancies. By one estimate, if the US replaced its sprawling insurance industry with a single government payer, it could cut our health system’s annual administrative costs by $500 billion. In other words, a Medicare For All program could theoretically provide more healthcare-per-dollar than the current system does, by eliminating excess bureaucracy.

But there are no comparable inefficiencies in the grocery sector. True, a government retailer could generate some savings by declining to take a profit. But margins in the industry are slim; the average profit rate among food retailers was just 2.1 percent in 2025. Therefore, Mamdani’s stores can’t finance 30 percent discounts merely by dispensing with shareholder returns. 

Meanwhile, the city actually wants its stores to be less cost-efficient than private grocers in some respects. According to its policy brief, the government grocers will pay their workers higher wages than most retailers and may also favor “local and regional suppliers,” rather than automatically contracting with whichever food producers offer the best rate. 

The city suggests that its stores will have some cost advantages: Unlike private competitors, they will pay no rent or property taxes on their facilities. But these are merely additional subsidies, not actual efficiencies: By providing free real estate to its grocers, the city is forgoing revenue that it could otherwise collect and spend on nutritional assistance or other public goods. 

It is not yet clear how much money the city is prepared to lose each year on these stores. If Mamdani’s celebrity — and heavily advertised bargains — lure large masses of people to his markets, their steeply discounted goods will quickly sell out. In that circumstance, to avoid long stretches with empty shelves, or some complex rationing system, the city would need to rapidly restock money-losing items, compounding the stores’ operating losses.  

In theory, there is one way that government stores could benefit consumers throughout a city without being especially efficient enterprises in themselves: They could force other retailers to cut prices by accepting lower profits or discovering new efficiencies. But with grocery margins already thin, squeezing private markets further could lead to closures, thereby reducing shoppers’ options. Further, Mamdani himself insists that his stores will go out of their way to avoid harming private competitors (which, in New York, consist primarily of the sorts of small businesses that Mamdani has promised to help). 

In any case, five stores won’t substantially impact pricing citywide. And so long as each government grocer operates at a loss, scaling up the program will only deepen its costs — and thus, the tradeoff between funding public supermarkets and anti-hunger programs.

Aldi for all

At present, Mamdani’s grocery store experiment looks fairly cheap. The city estimates the stores will require $70 million in capital costs. As already noted, it’s unclear precisely how large each store’s annual operating budget will be. But even if each supermarket loses many millions each year, it still won’t make that big a difference, in the context of the city’s $125 billion budget.

Still, the opportunity costs of Mamdani’s policy are real. New York City currently plans to spend $3.1 million next year on a program called Get The Good Stuff (GTGS), which essentially gives SNAP recipients up to $10 off each time they purchase fruits and vegetables from 25 participating grocery stores. With the money slated for its public supermarkets, New York could dramatically expand the program, while also investing more money into its food banks. Alternatively, the city could modestly increase cash transfers to its lowest-income residents. 

To be sure, none of that would offer much benefit to middle-class shoppers. And the mayor is quite reasonably concerned with increasing grocery affordability for the typical New Yorker. But the city can advance that aim — while actually increasing its revenue — by easing zoning and permitting rules that currently make it difficult for large, low-cost retailers like Costco and Walmart to operate in many parts of the city. Happily, to Mamdani’s great credit, his administration’s paper on public grocery stores does briefly mention the need for permitting reforms.

Maybe public grocery stores are an end in themselves

All this said, there may still be a reasonable case for Mamdani’s stores or others like them. For example, a city’s residents might come to see such retailers as a kind of attraction, public amenity, or community space, akin to a park or library.

Further, public grocers could theoretically increase the public’s faith in the government. While the grocers are unlikely to be efficient in reality, they may appear to be. After all, their low prices will be far more visible to consumers than their operating costs. If Americans come to associate the public sector with cheap, ostensibly well-run supermarkets — rather than dreary DMV lines — that could aid the left’s broader efforts to expand the government’s remit. (Although, if the public grocers end up being characterized by overcrowding and empty shelves, the policy could further erode Americans’ confidence in the public sector.)

As a means of maximizing affordability, however, Mamdani’s program makes little sense. It will mostly just transfer income from the city’s broad population to the small subset of New Yorkers who happen to live near — or work at — one of its five stores.

Where private markets fail to provide any grocery options, public stores may be the best way for municipalities to meet their residents’ nutritional needs. But in other contexts, governments can make a bigger difference by simply putting more money in poor people’s pockets.

Both Washington and Silicon Valley are in the midst of a collective freak-out over China’s recent advancements in artificial intelligence.

The latest round of consternation was triggered this month when a little-known Chinese AI startup called Moonshot released a new large language model called Kimi K3. The conventional wisdom had been that the leading AI models developed by companies like OpenAI and Anthropic were between six to 12 months ahead of their Chinese competitors. Kimi dashed those assumptions: now, analysts say American companies may be as little as two to three months behind. 

Dean Ball, a former Trump administration official now with OpenAI, warned in a bleak post on X that models like Kimi K3 could lead to a world of “full AI communism” and a “dystopian hellscape” of AI under full government control. 

Policymakers have worried for years now about China gaining an edge over the US in the AI race. Both the Donald Trump and Joe Biden administrations took steps to slow China’s AI progress, including blocking the export of the most advanced US semiconductors.  

The White House is already reportedly considering taking steps to ban “open-weight” models — models that are easier to adapt for a user’s own purposes — like Kimi K3 in the United States. The Trump administration has also accused Moonshot of using the unauthorized “distillation” of one of Anthropic’s models — basically using another model’s outputs to train itself rather than raw data — as well as gaining access to blacklisted Nvidia chips in Thailand.

But often lost in the debates about what to do about China’s accelerating AI capabilities is the question of why the US cares about this at all. Obviously, the American companies developing the latest frontier models care about maintaining their edge, but why should it matter to Americans if the chatbot in their pocket was developed in Silicon Valley or Shanghai? And perhaps even more so, why should it matter what chatbots people in Nairobi or Brussels are using? 

The concerns in the US about Chinese AI generally fall into three broad buckets: cybersecurity concerns; military and national security concerns; and human rights or democracy concerns.

For the moment, concerns about who is winning the AI race can feel a bit abstract, but as AI becomes more embedded into governments, militaries, and ordinary people’s lives, the difference will start to be felt in a much more material way at both a national and personal level. In general, there is a growing sense that it matters which of the world’s vastly different superpowers builds the technology that could transform everything. 

“People’s relationship with AI is becoming foundational to how they live their lives, so the choices people make about whose model they use and where they are physically hosted, as they share some of their most intimate secrets and ask for life advice and business guidance, and run an increasing share of their life — those are incredibly important,” said Ryan Fedasiuk, a former State Department technology adviser now at the American Enterprise Institute. “It’s a contest between the United States and China to define the operating systems through which people live and work.”

Here’s what else America loses if it loses that contest.

Chinese AI could be more vulnerable to cyberattacks 

The concerns about using Chinese AI are in some ways a repeat of the concerns over Huawei, the Chinese telecoms firm that built much of the world’s 5G internet infrastructure, but which the US government banned from operating in the United States during the first Trump administration over concerns that the Chinese government could intercept information transmitted over these networks. 

Today, the concern is that many firms are increasingly integrating Chinese AI models into their systems, both because they are often cheaper and because they are “open-weight.” (“Weights” refer to the setting an AI model uses to process a user’s inputs. “Open-weight” models make these publicly available for users to tinker with, rather than charging for access.) 

There are some indications that Americans using Chinese AI models are already vulnerable. A Booz Allen study from earlier this year tested four Chinese models commonly used by US developers and found that three of them generated software with far more “hidden vulnerabilities” that could be exploited by hackers than their US counterparts. There’s no proof that the models were doing this intentionally, but the study did find that the models were “changing their behavior depending on who the user seemed to be or what country the request referenced.”

AI can also be used to carry out cyberattacks. Although nearly all the leading models have safety protocols meant to prevent this, they’re not bulletproof. Even Anthropic’s Claude, generally considered one of the most secure models, was adapted by Chinese hackers last year to engage in cyber espionage. The open weights of the leading Chinese models could make it even easier to strip out the safety protocols. 

AI could give China a military edge

The simplest and most obvious argument for why AI matters for American national security is that it’s all too conceivable that the US and China could be at war in the years to come, and AI could be a major factor in determining who wins. 

The conflicts in Ukraine, Gaza, and Iran have shown that modern militaries are already extensively using AI for intelligence collection and targeting. Semi- or fully-autonomous drone swarms are a major component of US plans for repelling a Chinese invasion of Taiwan. Then there’s the risk of AI being used to generate new bioweapons or other dangerous threats. 

US experts believe China has pursued a “military-civil fusion” strategy, encouraging the People’s Liberation Army and Chinese defense contractors to collaborate closely with civilian technology companies and research institutions in order to gain an edge in military AI applications like intelligence analysis and drone swarms. It’s difficult to know exactly which of these capabilities China is focusing on, but procurement data suggests leading Chinese technology firms like Deepseek and Alibaba are involved in work with potential military applications. Analysts also accuse China of using outputs from US models like ChatGPT and Claude to train AI systems that could help develop China’s defense capabilities. 

And that’s just conventional weapons. The US government has alleged that Chinese labs have “continued to engage in biological activities with potential [bioweapon] applications” amid concerns that artificial intelligence could help make such weapons more sophisticated and deadly. 

China could export digital authoritarianism

Last year, it was reported that Miiloo, a fuzzy children’s plush toy with a built-in AI chatbot, would, if prompted, happily tell users Chinese Communist Party talking points like “Taiwan is an inalienable part of China.” The hubbub over Miiloo reached the US Senate floor. While it’s hard to imagine that many users were really asking Miiloo to help clear up East Asian territorial disputes, the affair illustrated much larger concerns about the dangers of letting AI models built by an authoritarian government with one of the world’s strictest censorship regimes become the global standard. 

Chinese generative AI tools are legally required to uphold the country’s “core socialist values,” according to a document published by its national cybersecurity standards committee. So it’s little surprise that DeepSeek, the Chinese chatbot that sent shockwaves through the US tech industry in 2025, politely declines to answer when you ask it what happened on June 4, 1989, in Tiananmen Square. 

It’s not just that Chinese AI could help shape the political narratives absorbed by billions around the world, at a time when US soft power is ebbing and surveys show people in many countries already now have a more positive view of China than the United States.

 The Chinese government is also increasingly integrating AI into its own censorship and surveillance apparatus, and is exporting tools like facial recognition technology to other authoritarian countries. 

The fact that under Xi Jinping, China’s government was centralizing power and becoming more, not less, authoritarian in the years leading up to the recent advances in AI are a major factor driving the mistrust in its technology. 

“I think many of the sincere arguments about the risks of these models and what China would do with them stems from the coercive authoritarian approach of China’s current leader,” said Mieke Eoyang, former US  deputy assistant secretary of defense for cyber policy. “I don’t think we would be having this conversation in the same way with someone like [China’s previous leaders] Jiang Zemin or Hu Jintao.”

It is a serious concern if models built to conform to the values and political priorities of China’s current government become the global standard. But some are skeptical of the idea that human rights and democracy should be the goal of AI competition, worrying that the damage has already been done. The premise of that idea has gotten “shakier in recent years,” says Steven Feldstein, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment and author of the book The Rise of Digital Repression. Under this administration, the US has cut support for democracy and human rights programs overseas, and often allied itself with authoritarian governments. Then there’s the fact that at least one leading chatbot often seems to mimic the racist and antisemitic views of the world’s richest man who is also an ally of the current president. 

While it’s still true that Chinese AI reflects the authoritarian values and priorities of China’s leaders, Feldstein notes, “this idea that the US is standing at the forefront of protecting and advancing democracy, human rights, that we’re not sort of there to manipulate information or to push a narrative agenda that reflects the ideological preferences of its leaders, has started to fray.” 

The race to AGI 

There’s also a set of concerns around the topic of “artificial general intelligence,” the hypothetical point at which AI exceeds human capabilities and is able to improve itself. The concern, expressed by both US government commissions and senior officials in both administrations, is that China is “racing” toward AGI and that whichever country achieves it first will have a massive geopolitical advantage. This is the type of thinking behind invocations of the nuclear-era Manhattan Project to justify massive government investments in AI development. 

Chinese leaders do not appear to view AI competition this way. “The US conversation around this is much more ‘AGI-pilled’,” says Jeffrey Ding, a professor at George Washington University and expert on US-China technology competition. “The concern here is that we are very much on the brink of this explosion of more and more powerful AI that leads to it dominating everything.” Chinese leaders, on the other hand, “generally see AI as a productivity tool.”

If Chinese AI is a problem, what should we be doing about it? 

This is not just a Beltway or Silicon Valley concern. A recent Pew survey found that 43 percent Americans believe it is very important for the US to remain the leader in AI development, versus 22 percent who said it was not that important. Interestingly, the survey also found that most Americans believe China is already ahead on AI, though the expert consensus is that it’s still slightly behind. 

“We’ve gotten so used to the fact that the US has been the leading player in technological revolutions from like mobile internet to the internet era, so it’s worrying to feel we may no longer have that dominant strength,” said Selina Xu, China and AI policy lead in the office of former Google CEO Eric Schmidt. 

Even if there’s some consensus that AI competition is a priority, there’s less agreement on how to go about it. The challenge, Xu says, is “How do you manage the very concrete national security risks that come from competing with China on AI, but not turn technological competition into blanket protectionism?”

Often, the policy responses to this challenge have been contradictory. 

The Trump administration, in its first term, pioneered the policy of restricting the export of the most advanced semiconductor chips to China, but Trump undermined that policy last year by permitting Nvidia to sell its advanced H200 chips there. The move flummoxed China hawks in Washington and went against the preferences of AI developers like Anthropic, but probably had a lot to do with lobbying by chip maker Nvidia’s Jensen Huang, CEO of the world’s most valuable company. 

In some cases, the US may be inadvertently making China’s models more appealing. In June, the Trump administration placed export controls on Anthropic’s advanced Fable model. This move prompted the company to take the model down for all users and led to the first time that AI capabilities meant for the global public took a step backward.In response, French President Emmanuel Macron warned, “We will not buy any model made by [US AI] companies if from one day to the next you can just turn off the switch.” Chinese models are hardly immune from concerns about kill switches or back doors, but if both governments involved in the AI race are seen as meddling, customers may just opt for whichever one is cheaper. 

The latest flashpoint in the debate concerns the reports that the administration is considering banning open-weight models.  This prompted an open letter from dozens of leading tech companies including Nvidia and OpenAI defending access to these models as necessary for helping the US maintain AI leadership. Advocates note that open-weight models can help respond to vulnerabilities as well as create them: When a rogue OpenAI model recently hacked into the startup Hugging Face’s systems, Hugging Face’s engineers used an open-weight model developed by China’s Z.ai to analyze the attack. 

Despite the frequent comparisons, AI is not a national security competition like the early days of nuclear weapons or the space race. It’s a technology with potentially grave national security implications, that’s also used by millions of people around the world to plan their Tuesday night dinner or help with their homework. The log-in for Claude is not carried by a military officer at the president’s side. And much of the important work on developing these new technologies is being done by private tech companies, not government labs or defense contractors. 

It may be that AI capability will help determine which country has the edge in the 21st century. It may also be that the benefits of these capabilities will be shared: Chinese companies might be no less capable than their American counterparts when it comes to developing new medications or clean energy technology. 

The challenge of crafting technology to prevent a “dystopian hellscape” is to not accidentally make the existing world worse.