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via The Wall Street Journal

Daniel Moraff is a political operative who works in the shadows of campaigns. For the past decade, he has hopscotched the country, casting progressive working-class political candidates to run for competitive seats. He himself had rarely made headlines—until one of his candidates blew up national politics. Moraff and his fiancée Leanne Fan are credited with plucking an oyster farmer in Maine named Graham Platner out of obscurity and urging him to run for United States Senate against incumbent Republican Susan Collins. Despite zero political experience, Moraff was convinced Platner was the new golden boy, writing in an email to friends in August 2025 reviewed by The Handbasket, “I think he’s going to be president one day.” 

But once Politico reported on July 6th that a former partner of Platner’s named Jenny Racicot alleged he sexually assaulted her in 2021, the campaign was doomed. The allegations—that Platner “entered her rural Maine home uninvited one night in late 2021, deeply intoxicated, and forced himself on her while she repeatedly told him to stop”—were too disturbing for even the most stringent Platner apologist to ignore. On July 10th, Platner officially withdrew from the race. And in the wake of these credible allegations, Moraff’s role in Platner’s story has become an object of fascination.

Now The Handbasket can exclusively report that much like his candidate, Moraff has a credible sexual assault allegation against him, too, adding fuel to the conversation already prompted by Platner about how progressive spaces continue to harbor regressive men. When reached for comment, Moraff’s spokesperson denied any allegations of sexual assault. “Any suggestion that he committed a criminal offence is false and without foundation,” they said.

Before he was known as Platner's guy, Moraff served as the Massachusetts Field Director for Bernie Sanders’ 2020 presidential campaign and helped run labor leader Dan Obsorn’s 2024 senate campaign in Nebraska. (Moraff was also working on Osborn’s current campaign for senate until he reportedly stepped away in June.) And prior to those experiences, Moraff spent a number of years in Pittsburgh working on local campaigns and building his reputation—for better and for worse.

Moraff, 34, recently became a more widely-recognized name when a video interview he and Fan did with the Wall Street Journal in June just after Platner won the Democratic primary went viral. In the interview, Moraff admitted that they skimped on the vetting process for Platner as a candidate. “Did the vetting process turn up the tattoo that became so controversial?” journalist Aaron Zitner asked Moraff about Platner’s Totenkopf tattoo. After a pause and a head shake, he replied, “No.” Then Zitner asked if the Reddit posts came up in the vetting. “It had some of the posts,” he said, “but it didn’t have all of them,” his voice going up an octave at the end, conveying uncertainty. Moraff told Zitner that he felt nothing he learned about Platner in the light background check “should prevent him from becoming a US Senator.” He said voters didn’t want people “grown in vats.”

Moraff himself came from a particular mold, though. He grew up in a suburb of Boston and graduated from Commonwealth, an elite private high school where annual tuition costs around $60k. He then attended Brown University in Providence for undergrad. One former classmate said he was known “to have faux-left wrecker politics” and to “behave bizarrely,” while another said he was “one of those aggressively sociable guys who always has to be the funniest person in the room.” 

He had his first viral on-camera moment back in 2012 while standing near Fox Point Hurricane Barrier as Hurricane Sandy hit Providence. “I don’t really believe there is a hurricane,” Moraff, then a student and writer for a Brown satire magazine, told the local NBC News reporter who had engaged him in conversation. After she interjected, “Well, there is.” Moraff continued, “I know the government wants us to think that. I mean think about it: The Earth rotates very quickly.” He then pretended to partly concede by saying, “It’s definitely windy.” (You can watch the clip here.)

Moraff has come a long way from a college kid making a dumb joke to being partly responsible for one of the fastest rises and falls in recent political history. He had a brief stint in New York City after graduating from Brown where he worked on the failed state senate campaign of democratic socialist Debbie Medina. While the Medina campaign showed some promise, it was ultimately derailed by testimony she gave at sentencing for her son’s 2010 trial in which he was found guilty of murdering his then-girlfriend’s three-year-old son. Medina admitted to beating her son repeatedly when he was a child, context that she thought might help him avoid the death penalty. Her son is currently serving life in prison.

In 2017, he moved to Pittsburgh. Upon arriving, Moraff helped found the local Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) chapter and quickly got to work recruiting candidates to run for office. In 2018, he recruited Turahn Jenkins for his ill-fated Allegheny County District Attorney campaign, which came under fire when it was revealed that Jenkins belonged to a socially conservative church with anti-LGBTQ and anti-abortion views.

“Moraff came to him representing DSA and assured him he would have an easy endorsement,” a person who was an early DSA Pittsburgh member along with Moraff told me. “But Turahn's politics were quite conservative socially when it came to sexuality, so that was a big problem for the chapter because we had, and do have, a lot of queer representation. So Jenkins lost the endorsement.”

(This fellow DSA member also said a former partner of his who had also previously dated Moraff told him that he once locked her in a room while they were dating.)

Moraff also had a major success in Pittsburgh, helping recruit a local community organizer named Summer Lee to run for the Pennsylvania House of Representatives and beating an entrenched incumbent. This victory set the stage for Lee to run for Congress four years later.

It was in Pittsburgh where Natalie briefly dated Moraff during the winter of 2019. According to Natalie—a pseudonym used by The Handbasket to protect her privacy—the two met on a dating app and hung out a handful of times over two months. Natalie had joined local progressive politics as a way to reconnect with the community after moving back to her hometown. Moraff’s deep ties in the progressive community—most notably with the local chapter of the DSA—intrigued her, and she was impressed when he said he was a headline writer for the humor site Clickhole. (The Handbasket reached out to Clickhole to confirm Moraff’s past employment but did not receive a response.)

But her first in-person impression of him didn’t match her expectations. “It just seemed like the way that he was speaking was very erratic,” Natalie told The Handbasket, the first time she’s spoken to the press about her experience with Moraff. “The way that he moves is very quick. It's hard to keep him focused. And so that was a little jarring.”

“I'd heard from people that he was not liked by a lot of people in Pittsburgh politics,” Natalie said. “I don't know if they were just trying to protect me. None of them really divulged a lot until we had already broken up. Nothing I knew at the time we were dating was enough of a red flag for me to cut things off.”

Their relationship was casually moving along when, one evening at her apartment, Natalie said Moraff locked her in her bedroom for 10 or so minutes by holding the door shut from the outside. When he finally let her out, Natalie said Moraff was laughing and claimed he did it as a joke; but to Natalie, it was anything but funny. Though Natalie said no sexual violence occurred that evening, it left her shaken and made her regard Moraff with caution moving forward. (Natalie confirmed she was the partner the Pittsburgh DSA member had anonymously referenced about being locked in a room. I connected with this person and with Natalie independently of one another. ) 

Despite the disturbing incident on their previous date, Natalie agreed to see Moraff again. This time, they were at his apartment, and as things got intimate, she grew increasingly uncomfortable. They’d had sex before, she said, but in previous encounters she had “started feeling concerned that the things he was becoming interested in were escalating to things that I wasn't comfortable doing. And I wasn't sure when or if I was going to be able to stop that.” Despite her telling him no multiple times, Moraff proceeded to have sex with her without her consent.

“It was the most disconnected from my body I had ever felt,” Natalie recalled. Her fears had become reality. 

A few weeks later, she confided in a close friend. “I remember the exact city block and neighborhood where she shared with me that she'd been assaulted by Dan,” the friend told me.

He recalled her being upset and telling him that when she started dating Moraff, she’d heard warnings about him. Even though the warnings were vague and did not include assault allegations, she wished she’d stopped seeing him sooner. “I remember being like, no, it's not your fault,” he recalled.

The friend said he didn’t realize Moraff’s position within the Platner campaign until a friend sent him a screenshot from the WSJ video interview Moraff and Fan had done in June. He thought: “Why is a campaign manager who is lacking in self-awareness doing a feature-length interview?” But, he said, given Moraff’s behavior over the past decade, “it lined up.”

Natalie told others what had happened. She showed me Facebook messages from 2021 in which she, a friend, and another person who had questions about Moraff’s past were talking about him. In the messages, Natalie’s friend refers to Moraff engaging in "non-consensual sexual actions” with Natalie.

The Pittsburgh DSA member who dated Natalie after Moraff confirmed she had told him about being locked in a room by Moraff—and about the nonconsensual sex. “I could tell it was clearly traumatic for her,” he recalled.

In his/their statement to The Handbasket, Moraff’s spokesperson did not address the specifics of Natalie’s claims, just that “Daniel categorically denies each and every claim set out in your email.” 

Multiple people I spoke to who were in or around Pittsburgh DSA between 2017 and 2020 described hearing about “plans” for what to do if Moraff showed up at one of his past partners’ homes. Natalie confirmed she was one former partner, though her friends never filled her in on the exact details of the plans. 

A report earlier this month alleged that Moraff was “barred” from Congresswoman Lee’s 2022 primary campaign after her team learned of at least three allegations of “sexual misconduct.” A subsequent story in Semafor then claimed a person close to Lee’s campaign said he was barred “over concerns he was disrespectful to others, rather than allegations of sexual harassment or misconduct.” (A Moraff spokesman denied the sexual assault allegations to Semafor.)

But according to Annie Weinberg, Lee’s campaign manager at the time, the allegations of sexual misconduct were the reason Moraff was told to stay away.

In late January 2022, Weinberg tells The Handbasket, a member of the community came forward to relay six allegations of sexual misconduct by Moraff that had happened prior to the campaign—three more than previously reported. Weinberg confirmed that at least one of the allegations she was told about was sexual assault. “These alarming allegations involved six different people who did not want to be named directly, and none of whom were on our staff team, to the best of our knowledge. This community members’ concerns were then backed up by another one,” Weinberg said. 

Though none of these incidents were alleged to have happened during Lee’s 2022 campaign, Weinberg understood it was important to take them seriously and evaluate how this history would impact their current staffers and volunteers. “Campaigns, I think, have a responsibility to build cultures that keep everybody as safe as possible,” Weinberg said.

Despite being Lee’s campaign manager for her 2018 State House run, Moraff had no role in her 2022 campaign. As far as Weinberg and others knew, he was a full-time Yale Law student no longer living in Pittsburgh. Still, that didn’t stop him from having a presence, she said. 

“He still wanted to try to involve himself in lots of decisions, even though he had no formal role in the campaign,” Weinberg said. “He wasn't involved in the day-to-day of understanding what the campaign plans were. For a while I would listen when he would aggressively call and text me or other senior folks on the team to offer input.” 

Soon after she was made aware of the sexual misconduct allegations, however, she banned Moraff from attending or participating in any campaign events or actions. 

But according to Weinberg, Moraff flouted the ban. Sometime after his dismissal, he reportedly sent out an unauthorized mass email, per Weinberg, that was meant to look like it was an official campaign message for recruiting volunteers. She said it sparked confusion among people who believed he was persona non grata. According to another person familiar with the campaign, when Lee won her May 2022 primary, Moraff showed up at her victory party only to be kicked out. Weinberg confirmed this series of events. Lee’s current team did not respond to a request for comment.

When I reached out to Moraff with allegations that he was barred from Lee’s campaign after six allegations of sexual assault and/or misconduct and flouted it by sending an unauthorized email and showing up at the primary victory party (and was then told to leave), his spokesperson replied:

"With respect to the matters concerning Summer Lee's campaign, when those issues first surfaced, Daniel unequivocally asserted his innocence and called for a full investigation. No investigation was ever conducted."

I followed up with Weinberg to see if this characterization was accurate. She had this to say: “Daniel had been a valued part of Pittsburgh politics; he was also an out-of-state volunteer [at the time] who had already repeatedly engaged in toxic, bullying, line-stepping behavior. I’m not surprised he was upset about the boundary we set — he pushed back on it and attempted to get around it. But we did not owe Daniel any more follow-up information about our decisions or process, and he would have no knowledge of any steps we took.”

After not hearing much about him for a few years, Weinberg started seeing Moraff’s name floating around again this year. “I have seen him pop up, and I find it kind of haunting and frustrating,” she said. “It is a worthwhile vision to try to circumvent gatekeepers and encourage non-traditional emerging leaders to run for office and then build the sort of engaged people-powered operation that it will take to actually elect them. And it does not have to be a packaged deal with harmful behaviors and misogyny. It just does not have to be like that.”

Not everyone I spoke to for this story had negative experiences with Moraff. A Pittsburgh political operative told me she worked with Moraff on a local magistrate campaign in 2020. “Daniel was just incredible,” she said. “Highly skilled in the technical things I needed to be able to use, super sharp, and infinitely generous with his time. I really couldn’t have done it without him.”

She added, “He taught me to think more about campaign workers, for instance, and what motivates them. People like to feel useful.” 

A woman who met Moraff in Pittsburgh in 2017 told me she worked on various campaigns with him, briefly dated him and still considers him a friend. She described being “inspired” by Moraff to continue doing political work. “He was the one that helped me really believe that politics can make a difference, and now I'm doing that work every day. And he's inspired a ton of people, and without him, Pittsburgh would not be in the place that it was. Without him, we wouldn't be having conversations about working-class candidates.”

When I shared with her that there was a credible allegation of sexual assault against him, she seemed stunned. “I could never see Daniel doing something like that,” she said. “And I say that as someone that has now been friends with him for 10 years and someone that has been with him through his highs and his lows in his life.” 

Though she was defensive of Moraff, she seemed conflicted. So I asked her if that was the case. “Well, yeah, I mean, because I'm a woman and so I want to believe women,” she said. “And I also have a friend here, so it's kind of difficult.”

Hi there! Just dropping a quick note to let you know about The Handbasket’s very first live NYC event happening on Wednesday, July 29th at 6:30pm! 

I’ll be at Crystal Lake in Brooklyn with Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo discussing independent journalism and the absolute chaos that has been the second Trump administration. You’ll get to hang and chat with us after. 

Tickets are required, so make sure to grab one ASAP. If you love The Handbasket, get yours today!

Live events are something I’ve wanted to do for a while now, and I’m so grateful to my pals at TPM for putting this one together and forcing me to leave the house and interact with humans IRL.

If you want me to do more of these in the future, it would be awesome if you could come out and support this one!

And to my readers who aren’t in the NYC area, you will be sorely missed. I hope to one day take this show on the road. Stay tuned!

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Platner during a June TV appearance

When the story detailing allegations of rape against Graham Platner dropped Monday afternoon, I was about to head out the door to Gloria Steinem’s house, of all places. The timing felt both cruel and kismet: While my fury was eclipsing my excitement to be in conversation with a living legend, I realized who better to understand patriarchy run amok than a foremother of feminism herself?

Since we learned last fall about the Maine Democratic senate candidate’s Nazi insignia tattoo, the personal revelations about the Marine veteran and oyster farmer have only gone downhill from there. But an initial instinct told me not to weigh in. Let the people of Maine decide for themselves, I thought. I watched from New York as the public learned about shitty stuff he’d posted online, his previous work for the private military contractor Blackwater, and the sexually explicit texts he sent to other women while married to his current wife (which were flagged by her to his campaign as a concern.) And when the New York Times published a story just a few days before the June primary detailing “unsettling” behavior alleged by three women Platner had dated in the past, while I weighed in on social media, I shied away from opportunities to explicitly spell out how dangerous I believed him to be. He went on to win the primary.

It turns out the instinct that kept me from vocalizing my opinion on Platner was the same as the one that prevented Jenny Racicot from coming forward with allegations of a 2021 rape—that is, until this week. “One of the reasons I didn’t come forward sooner was the huge moral conflict that I had between supporting his politics, but not supporting him as a person,” Racicot, who had dated Platner a few years back, told Politico. My position is in no way analogous with Racicot’s, but I, too, had a latent feeling that turning on Platner was in some way turning on an opportunity to kick Republican Susan Collins out of the senate, and possibly regain control of the entire chamber.

While Racicot was one of the women in the NYT story, the stomach-churning details of her sexual assault were for whatever reason not reported then. But on Monday, she said it all: “I remember him grabbing my pelvis and being really forceful of me. I remember the specific moment where I thought to myself, like, ‘This is no longer my choice.’” She describes Platner letting himself into her home while “almost blackout drunk” and having sex with her against her will. Now that we have a fuller picture of Platner’s malfeasance, there is finally consensus around what has long been clear to many of us: he’s a dangerous man. If only the earlier evidence was enough.

When the NYT story dropped on June 4th describing “unsettling” behavior alleged by three women Platner had dated in the past, people who I considered political heroes insisted continuing their support. Senators Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders stuck by Platner, even when there was already more than enough evidence that he was not fit to be the Democratic candidate. Both Warren and Sanders finally pulled their support this week after the rape allegations were published, but it shouldn’t take a woman sharing details about a grotesque intimate experience to knock a man off his pedestal.

Meanwhile, men (and some women) who I nominally considered allies not only defended Platner at the time, but disparaged anyone concerned by the allegations. 

Ryan Grim, a progressive journalist and co-founder of Drop Site News, tried to undermine the allegations because one of the women from the story, Lyndsey Fifield, is a Republican. He then went on the progressive podcast Breaking Points and said the Platner situation was good because it was forcing Democrats to confront bigotry against white men. “The current cultural divorce between progressives and white men is so, like, stark that it is—it's just culturally, morally, ethically wrong,” Grim said. “But also just pragmatically, from a political perspective, you can't build a national party if you assume every white guy or every white guy with a deep voice who is a combat vet or whatever is, like, out to get you.”

Jon Favreau of Pod Save America defended Platner at every turn and mega-streamer Hasan Piker vocally stood by him. The Substack journalist Ken Klippenstein wrote that continuing to defend Platner showed that “People are done with the clean-cut types who’ve harbored ambitions for political office since they were on high school student council and have lived every waking moment accordingly. I call them smoothgroins: real-life barbie dolls with smooth plastic where a sexual organ should be.”

While Favreau and Piker were both suddenly singing a different tune after the sexual assault allegations against Platner came out, Klippenstein dug in Tuesday with a post to his Substack mocking the apologies made by people like NYT Opinion Columnist Michelle Goldberg and the great author and thinker Naomi Klein, who wrote “I truly fucked up not doing my due diligence on Platner before offering high praise for his communication skills.”

Though Klippenstein admitted sexual assault, “crosses a line that tattoos, sexting and Reddit posts just do not,” he said he refused to apologize for defending Platner until now, writing that commentators “are trying to bully anyone who defended Platner against the earlier scandals into issuing self-abasing public apologies, by implying that anyone who doesn’t is pro-rape.”

Klippenstein implies anyone apologizing for their previous support is too soft to stick to their guns. The past is immaterial to him; there is only the information we have right now. To interrogate the past based on new information makes you pathetic. It doesn’t occur to him that for people who are genuine, an apology is not a performance. And now that there’s a credible claim of rape, it’s smart and good to stop supporting Platner. But if you judge him on anything short of rape, you’re a progressive traitor, or what similarly edgy political commentator Matt Stoller last month disparagingly called “Dem HR lady politics.” 

Sure, I suppose it is feminine-coded to not want a senate candidate who allegedly twisted an ex-girlfriend’s arm and shoved her into a bedroom and “held the door closed from the other side so she couldn’t get out, telling her to remain there until she was ‘calm.’” I guess it’s pretty girly to hear another ex describe him showing up at her house engaging in behavior she described as “reckless” and “unsettling” and imagining that there’s much more where that came from. Women sure are silly that way.

I could do a line by line analysis of all the ways Klippenstein’s non-apology is unhinged —reducing the allegations made it the June NYT story to “sexting” when it went far beyond that, admitting he’s friends with numerous former Marines with offensive tattoos, claiming his tolerance for Platner was merely an example of “giving people a chance”—but I won’t. His mindset is merely an ugly symptom of a broad set of conditions that allowed Platner’s ascendance. 

As writer Jamelle Bouie put it on Tuesday: “There is a cohort of men who resent the responsibilities and obligations of adulthood — of the fact that you owe things to other people. It is a fundamentally childish impulse that they have reconfigured as the height of masculinity, and i think it informs the parasocial attraction to platner.”

Platner’s implosion is the natural culmination of a campaign motivated by a warped sense of masculinity, one that told voters to give their trust to a candidate who had done nothing to earn it. It has revealed that, for some progressives, the important markers of a candidate who displays “positive masculinity” are primarily aesthetic, with little concern for whether or not the man in question actually lives the values he presents. Platner and his team had so thoroughly convinced journalists, commentators and voters that they had outsmarted the trappings of traditional masculinity, only to come crashing down as a result of it.

Critics and enemies of progressives will use this debacle as a data point showing the left flank can’t be trusted any more than the right. They’ll argue for moderation as the solution when I’d argue moderation, or perhaps adherence to traditional politics as usual, is what got us here. Though Platner’s policy stances have fallen squarely in the progressive camp, the excuses made for his personal shortcomings and failures signaled an old fashioned approach to politics where looking the part and sounding the part are enough to ignore all manner of sin. No, this latest tornado of violent misogyny won’t drive me from the left; if anything it’s made me recommit myself to the goals of progressivism and to continue fighting for liberation for all. And with Platner remaining in the race as of this publishing, there’s much work to be done.

This isn’t an apology as much as it is a statement of regret. I regret not being more vocal about Platner’s many red flags and the way they reflected on progressive values. I regret not saying more about the June allegations when they painted a vivid portrait of a dangerous man. I regret not doing what I always do—talking through my perspective on issues of national importance in an attempt to help others better understand their own feelings. But most of all I regret listening to the inconsequential male voices in my head instead of my own, which was overcome with anger and sadness at being asked to excuse another humiliation for women.

When someone shows you their Nazi tattoo, believe them.

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The early days of the second Trump administration were so chaotic that it was impossible to keep track of all the unceremonious firings, disrespect for public service, and disregard for settled law (though god knows I tried.) Paul Osadebe, formerly a civil rights lawyer at the US Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), witnessed the blatant disregard up close—and chose to share with the world what he saw.

In a new book out Tuesday called “On Courage: How to Be a Dissident in an Age of Fear,” authors Julia Angwin and Ami Fields-Meyer endeavor to show how courage in this political moment—both domestically and globally—can take many forms. The Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist and the senior fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Allen Lab for Democracy Renovation, respectively, interviewed more than 100 dissidents and activists about the ways they’ve tried to protect their communities from the forces of autocracy that threaten to upend them. Some they spoke with purposely set out to make change, while others (like Osadebe) were put in extraordinary circumstances during the course of normal life that required a level of bravery they didn’t know they had.

Just as I did with USAID whistleblower Nicholas Enrich’s explosive book back in April, The Handbasket is excited to share another exclusive excerpt. This one comes from a chapter of “On Courage” called “A Moral Collision: A Small Feeling and a Big Choice,” that details Osadebe’s observation in February 2025 that the Fair Housing Act—the landmark Civil Rights-era law making it illegal to deny Americans housing based on race—was not being enforced by Trump’s HUD cronies. So he decided to blow the whistle, ultimately being terminated last October. “No one is watching, he told a ProPublica journalist at the time. “No one will hold them accountable.”

While the wheels of accountability move slowly, we’re finally starting to see them turn. Osadebe and other former colleagues are now suing the Trump administration for the dismantling of their office, and they continue to campaign and lobby Congress to enforce the protections against housing discrimination enshrined in the law.

Though Osadebe has trouble personally using the word courage to describe his actions, as the book describes, we can certainly say it for him. Read on for his story and purchase the book here.

On a crisp, bright day in February 2025, a mild-mannered civil rights lawyer named Paul Osadebe came to the terrible realization that a cornerstone of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s legacy was not likely to survive.

The Fair Housing Act had passed the U.S. House of Representatives in 1968, just seven days after an assassin’s bullet ended King’s life. The law barred landlords from advertising or renting to “Whites only” and made housing discrimination illegal for the first time in U.S. history.

President Lyndon Baines Johnson had already signed the Civil Rights Act into law, guaranteeing equal treatment for Black Americans seeking a job, a meal, or a hotel room. Housing was the next frontier, a bid to redeem the “promissory note” of equal rights that King had invoked. Its passage, Johnson declared at the signing ceremony, finally meant that no one in America in search of shelter would “suffer the humiliation of being turned away because of their race.”

But Osadebe believed all that was at risk. He had worked since 2021 in the federal office tasked with enforcing fair housing rules. It was his job to help fulfill Johnson’s promise by prosecuting violations of the landmark law. If a landlord told an immigrant family that no units were open so that they could lease to an English-speaking couple instead, or if they denied a disabled tenant’s request for a service animal, Osadebe’s office could step in to sue the landlord.

But since January 2025, when new management moved into the Washington, D.C., headquarters of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, Osadebe had noticed that his new bosses seemed uninterested in en-forcing civil rights law. It was an indifference that verged on hostility.

The trouble began with a “gag order” blocking him and his colleagues from communicating with anyone outside the agency about civil rights complaints. A few weeks later, HUD officials abandoned a case against a predominantly White homeowners association north of Dallas that had tried to push low-income Black residents out of their neighborhood. Then, on February 14, the new administration carried out a mass firing across the government—a “Valentine’s Day Massacre,” the media called it. Twenty percent of the fair housing office was terminated in a single day.

After the firings, Osadebe realized that enforcement of the Fair Housing Act was in peril. The law would still exist on paper, but not in practice.

They’re not going to let us do our jobs, he thought.

But the crisis was not understood beyond the walls of the HUD offices, much less breaking through to the outside world. Poor tenants across the country didn’t yet know that their housing rights had shrunk considerably. Even members of Congress, tasked by the U.S. Constitution with oversight of the executive branch, appeared to be unaware that the new administration was bulldozing these basic protections. There was information, however, that could alert all of them to the emergency unfolding beneath their feet, and Osadebe could be the one to deliver it.

Still, he recoiled at the thought of sticking his neck out. Though he was a union steward at the federal agency, he didn’t consider himself an activist type, preferring to spend his free hours playing video games and going to concerts. His parents—working-class Nigerian immigrants—had always counseled their son to work hard, go to church, and keep his head down. When he told his younger sister about what was going on at the office, she urged him to stay quiet: “We are not people with a safety net to fall back on,” she warned.

His family’s voices battled his own conscience. Blowing the whistle would almost certainly mean facing retaliation. The end of his employment. The end of a stable income. Given the political climate, he wondered if it might even trigger a more acute threat—people finding his parents’ address, tracking them down, and harassing them.

But Osadebe was a civil rights attorney. He had committed his career to protecting vulnerable people against discrimination and exploitation. “I was able to go to a law school that used to be segregated. I am living in an apartment that would have been segregated in the past. I have been able to live the life that I’ve had because the civil rights movement made real gains,” he says. “I just don’t want to live in a country that doesn’t have civil rights.”

He cleared out his office so that there wouldn’t be much to carry if he was eventually frog-marched out of the building. And then he began to talk. He spoke to a local television sta-tion one day after the mass firing. The next day he gave his first live television interview to MSNBC.

Wearing an olive green sweater and holding his head still, the attorney told a national TV audience what he had seen at work. “We’re losing the ability to protect people in their day-to-day lives,” he warned. “Unless people take action and respond, we’re going to be seeing a lot of pain.”

Excerpted from the book ON COURAGE, provided courtesy of Mariner Books, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers. Copyright © 2026. Reprinted by permission.

This is a guest post by Kim Kelly, a freelance journalist and author based in Philadelphia.

Clipping from Harpers Weekly, January 2, 1887

When Savanna Batten, Zachary Evetts, Autumn Hill, Meagan Morris, Maricela Rueda, Benjamin “Champagne” Song and Elizabeth Soto participated in a July 4, 2025, noise demonstration outside the Prairieland ICE Detention Center in Alvarado, Texas, it’s possible they thought they’d make history that day. And in the end, they did—by having the great misfortune of joining a long line of radicals who dared to push back against an oppressive system and were severely punished for it.

The Trump administration notched a critical victory in its self-styled war on “antifa” this week when seven demonstrators and one alleged accomplice were hit with a litany of terrorism charges by a Texas judge who told them quite clearly that “the state wants to send a message to anyone who shares a similar ideology.” He then handed down what amounted to a death sentence to each of them: a combined 450 years in prison. The eighth defendant— Daniel Rolando Sanchez Estrada—wasn’t even present at the protest, but still received 30 years for “conspiracy to conceal documents” after moving a box of zines to a friend’s house. Another 15 still face a dizzying array of state and federal charges that include accusations of rioting, conspiracy to use an explosive, providing material support for terrorism, and attempted murder of a federal employee.

The severity is incomprehensible: By declaring “antifa” a terrorist organization and pillorying the Prairieland defendants, the Trump administration has made it very clear that there is no acceptable form of protest left—and that this is just the beginning. But it’s also worth exploring the dark historical parallels, which show this isn’t the first time the US government has abused its powers to quash dissent.

The defendants were arrested after the July 4th noise demo at Prairieland in which the dozen or so participants shouted messages of support to detainees through a loudspeaker and set off fireworks. Nearby, a smaller group spray painted a few ICE vehicles. At one point a local police officer, Lt. Thomas Gross, was allegedly shot in the shoulder by one of the protestors, who stated that he’d seen the officer draw his weapon and feared that Gross was preparing to shoot one of the other people assembled there. Following the protest, the FBI and state law enforcement launched a series of raids on local activists’ homes and arrested 22 people they claimed were involved in the “antifa” plot. 

Antifa is short for antifascism, a broad, leaderless political movement with deep historical roots around the globe. To be antifascist is to oppose white supremacy, authoritarianism, and far-right bigotry in whatever way possible and by any means necessary, whether that be a peaceful protest, a letter-writing campaign, or a militant street action.

During the first Trump regime, a wide variety of people who wouldn’t dream of donning all black or burning a flag—from normie Democrat “wine moms” to World War II veterans—could be seen proudly claiming the mantle of antifascism for themselves as a sign of resistance. In practice, it’s far more about direct action and mutual aid than social media posting, but given the circumstances, it was hard for even the most curmudgeonly comrades to find fault with everyday people loudly publicizing their own opposition to fascism. If there are no atheists in a foxhole, there was certainly no time for purity tests when the Nazis came marching in. “We are all antifa now,” as the media and artists said. And for a little while, we could be. 

The Prairieland defendants were motivated by an opposition to ICE and the terrors they have and continue to unleash on communities; a position that, per a February 2026 poll, is held by a majority of Americans. How many people in your life feel the same way? And how about you—have you ever gone to an anti-ICE protest, complained about capitalism, or joined a neighborhood Signal chat? Congratulations. Definitionally, you’re an “antifa member”—and in the eyes of the US government, that makes you a terrorist.

To truly understand the gravity of this case and the vengeful precedent upon which it was built, let’s travel back to Chicago in 1886. Eight activists alleged to have been a part of “the Haymarket riot” stood accused of conspiracy to use explosives, left to the mercy of a hostile jury that found their political views repugnant and their identities suspect. All eight men were anarchists; many were also labor organizers, orators, and writers who had thrown themselves into the fight for the eight-hour workday. Some were immigrants of German extraction, while one was a former Confederate soldier from Alabama turned leftist wordsmith. 

The activists had been hunted down and arrested after a rally of striking workers turned to chaos. Someone had thrown a bomb into the crowd, and the police started shooting. A number of workers were injured or killed in the resulting melee, as well as several policemen. Most of the accused had not been present when it happened, but were hauled to jail just the same; later, it was generally acknowledged that none of them had thrown the bomb, either. 

Their friends and comrades tried desperately to win them their freedom by appeal, by pardon, by sheer force of will. Lucy Parsons, the iconic Black anarchist activist whose husband Albert was among the accused, criss-crossed the country drumming up support. But even her fierce dedication could not swing the odds in their favor. 

Merely being associated with anarchism was enough to make a man seem guilty then, and ultimately, four of the eight men hung for it. Albert Parsons, August Spies, Adolph Fisher, and George Engel were executed on November 11, 1887. As the darkness closed in, Spies spoke the promise of his final words: “The day will come when our silence will be more powerful than the voices you strangle today!” Another, Louis Lingg, took his own life before the state got the chance. Three other defendants—Samuel Fielden, Oscar Neebe, and Michael Schwab—eventually had their sentences commuted after years of torment.

I thought about Spies and the other Haymarket martyrs as I read Benjamin “Champagne” Song’s closing statement from Prairieland. It, too, was a warning: “Whatever is taken from me is taken from you,” they said. “It may be these 22 strangers now, but it will be you tomorrow.” One can imagine the Haymarket martyrs stirring in their graves at the ugly familiarity of it all. Once again, the voices of dissent are being strangled. Once again, the silence of a living tomb—an endless prison sentence—threatens a movement. Another eight lives hang in terrible limbo, their families terrified of a rapidly darkening future. 

Marching from Lowell, AZ, Deportation of Industrial Workers of the World, July 12, 1917

We unfortunately have a wealth of other historical parallels to choose from in our remembrances. We can look back to 1917, when the FBI raided the Industrial Workers of the World offices and hundreds of labor activists (including Eugene V. Debs and prominent Black organizer Ben Fletcher) were carted off to prison on bogus charges of treason; or the Bisbee Deportations, when 1,300 striking Mexican American coal miners were kidnapped and dumped in the New Mexico desert. We can also look to the First Red Scare, that nasty period between 1919 and 1920 when government suppression of left-wing organizations, trade unions, and anti-war activists hit a fever pitch and hundreds of socialists, anarchists, and communists (including the iconic Emma Goldman) were rounded up and deported.

Then there’s always the sad, infuriating tale of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, Italian anarchists who were wrongfully arrested for murder, publicly castigated for their politics, then railroaded by a xenophobic jury who sent them to the gallows in 1927. Fifty years later, Massachusetts governor Michael Dukakis stuck a more penitent tone, noting the injustice of the trial and asking people "to reflect upon these tragic events, and draw from their historic lessons the resolve to prevent the forces of intolerance, fear, and hatred from ever again uniting to overcome the rationality, wisdom, and fairness to which our legal system aspires."

Recent history, too, has been filled with dissenters who’ve been knocked sideways by the long arm of the law for their trouble—particularly during the Trump era. In January 2017, following a mass protest during Trump’s first inauguration, 214 antifascist activists were arrested under the DC Riot Act and threatened with decades in prison; they were dragged through torturous and costly legal proceedings, only to see their charges dropped for lack of evidence. In 2020, during the nationwide Black Lives Matter protests, over 13,000 people were arrested, while multiple states enacted harsher laws aimed at suppressing protests and demonstrations. The ICE agents who gunned down Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis earlier this year are still walking free and have faced no consequences for committing cold-blooded murder. 

The trouble with being vocally in opposition to fascism under a fascist regime is that it automatically makes you a target. In September 2025, after years of urging from the bad actors, whiny fascists, and literal Nazis that populate the far-right mediasphere, the Trump administration made good on its threats to formally designate “antifa” a terrorist organization. Three days later, it released a memo titled Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence (known as NSPM-7) that further criminalized dissent as “domestic terrorism” and has poured government resources into identifying, investigating, and ultimately prosecuting groups and individuals who are caught within its web “before they result in violent political acts.” The fact that no such organization exists does not seem to matter.

The story of American dissent does not have to end here, though. Nearly 140 years since the noose tightened around the Chicago anarchists’ necks, we have an opportunity to reject their fate, to stand up for these 21st century dissidents and throw our backs into their defense. The case may well “disintegrate” once it breaks state containment, but we know that this will not be the last “antifa” trial of the Trump era. The regime is out for blood, and it’s far easier to trumpet its crackdown on “domestic terrorists” than to confront its own staggering failures. 

As of this writing, fifteen people in Minnesota have been indicted on trumped-up federal charges of “conspiring to impede immigration agents” and are facing down the same anti-“antifa” playbook. We are all antifa now. 

“I don’t fear for myself; I fear for all of you,” Song said in their statement this week. “What will you do in this time of great failures and great injustices? What will you do? How will you help each other? How will you help yourselves?” 

Kim Kelly is a freelance journalist and author based in Philadelphia. Her writing can be found in The Nation, In These Times, Teen Vogue, The Baffler, Playboy, Rolling Stone, and many others. Her first book, FIGHT LIKE HELL: The Untold History of American Labor, was published in 2022, followed by a young readers edition in 2025. Find out more at kim-kelly.com.

This piece was edited by Marisa Kabas.

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Brad Lander after his victory speech at Threes Brewing in Park Slope, 6/23/2026. Photo by Greg Pak / gregpak.photo / Bluesky @gregpak.net / IG @gregpaknet

Tuesday was a good day for New York City progressives as their candidates won primaries nearly across the board. Suddenly progressives were fighting on the front foot, with old Democratic party attitudes, especially on Israel, looking more and more like fossils. Depending on your perspective, the city’s political landscape had just shifted in a dramatically positive direction, or in a terrifyingly bleak direction. But one thing was universally understood; something seismic had just happened. 

I didn’t expect to feel so deeply about the primary results. While I live in a district that held a highly-visible and contentious primary, my enthusiasm for elections has waned during the second Trump administration as authoritarianism surges and normalcy evades us. Even if we elect more progressives and Democrats take control of both houses of Congress, I’ve frequently wondered, what then? For the next two years, Trump would just kill anything good and hopeful, right? What I didn’t realize until Tuesday’s results came in was that while I obliquely believed a better country was possible, I had severely tempered my expectations to avoid more heartbreak. 

But as I learned, a jolt of hope will kick you in the head when you least expect it.

New York City has been on a winning streak, despite the country’s macro sense of loss. On January 1st we inaugurated a young Democratic Socialist named Zohran Mamdani as Mayor who immediately got to work deftly clearing sidewalks after snowstorms and fixing potholes with the same joy and ease displayed during his campaign; On June 13th, the Knicks won the championship for the first time in 53 years, creating a moment of collective ecstasy and making the case for why living in the city rules; and on the 23rd, a slate of progressives beat out more centrist incumbents or challengers to send a message that the status quo wasn’t good enough. But one dark cloud has persisted in this town: The politics around Israel and Palestine, and how our local, state and federal leaders engage with the issue.

As it turns out, my congressional district has the highest Jewish population of any in the country. NY-10 spans lower Manhattan and a large swath of Brooklyn, going as far North as the Meatpacking District, as far South as Borough Park, with neighborhoods like the Financial District, Lower East Side, Brooklyn Heights, Park Slope and Sunset Park in between. Nearly a quarter of the people who live here are Jewish. If there was anywhere the debate over US support for Israel would reach a tipping point one way or another, it would be here. And so it did when former city comptroller and councilman Brad Lander challenged incumbent Dan Goldman in the 2026 congressional primary. Both men are Jewish; but only one has called Israel’s destruction of Gaza a genocide. And voters took note.

Lander rose to national prominence after launching a revolutionary bromance with Mamdani to co-promote their candidacies in the 2025 ranked choice primary that Mamdani eventually won. Lander then spent all summer hyping him up for the general, his good sportsmanship and team playing abilities setting the stage for his ascendance. Goldman, known for his work on the first Trump impeachment, was only in his second term and didn’t have the same deep roots in that community that longtime Park Slope resident and politician Lander did. 

It would be unfair to say this race turned solely on Israel, but with October 7th happening within his first year in office, Goldman’s nearly unconditional support for Israel became a focal point of his service—and left a gaping hole for Lander to fill as someone who calls the situation in Gaza apartheid and supports ending US aid to Israel. And in the background of the race stood a Jewish community torn apart by these issues, especially since Mamdani’s election. 

Pro-Israel New York Jews see Mamdani’s rejection of a single Jewish ethnostate and his support of an Israel with rights for all people as a repudiation of Judaism itself. That’s because for so many years the ideas of Zionism and Judaism were like two fingers of the same Kit Kat, with all but a small minority questioning this intrinsic tie. But what October 7th and the fallout thereafter has revealed is that there is very much a Judaism that exists independent of Zionism, and American supporters of Israel feel threatened by the spectre of divorce. And Lander’s trouncing of Goldman in Tuesday’s primary became an extension of this threat. It doesn’t matter that Lander has broad Jewish support; he has support from the “wrong” type of Jews, in their estimation. Jews like me.

Mayor Zohran Mamdani, NY-10 candidate Brad Lander, and New York Senate District 27 candidate Yuh-Line Niou in front of a polling station at Grand Street Settlement on Election Day, 6/23/2026. Photo by Greg Pak / gregpak.photo / Bluesky @gregpak.net / IG @gregpaknet

I looked over at the social platform Threads late Tuesday night, which had been flooded with anti-Lander and anti-Mamdani sentiment in the preceding days. Mamdani had recently referred to AIPAC—the powerful conservative pro-Israel lobby—as “monsters,” as the conflation of antizionism and antisemitism was on full display. Because Threads operates on an algorithm, it’s impossible to say if my experience on there Tuesday into Wednesday was the same as others; but the mood I witnessed was equal parts funereal and angry. 

“Sad day for NYC, esp The Tribe,” one post read. “We are totally fucked.” Zionist activist Lizzy Savetsky took to the platform with a video captioned “Hey NYC— this is war. Diplomacy is dead. It’s time to play dirty.” And in her video, she addressed Lander directly. “I have a message for you Brad: The self-hating Jews were also gassed at Auschwitz."

Over the last few years when the issue of Israel has come to a head amongst American Jews, it’s left me feeling alienated and alone. Despite the valiant work of Jewish organizations like If Not Now, Jews for Racial and Economic Justice and Jewish Voice for Peace, I couldn’t conceive of a reality where progressive Jews had real electoral power. Though powerful anti-genocide voices like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib and Delia Ramirez exist in Congress, I couldn’t imagine a point where opposing Benjamin Netanyahu’s government was a candidate’s selling point. But that changed on Tuesday.

I posted to Threads myself Tuesday night, writing that I was proud of the message the Jewish voters of NY-10 had sent by choosing Lander over Goldman. I reference ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt’s recent bogus claim that 85% of Jews support Israel, and how it was disproven by the primary results. And I made clear that Lander supporters are not “self-hating Jews” or antisemitic; we display our profound love of Judaism by holding firm to the idea that we will not perpetuate violence in our name.

via Threads

Unsurprisingly, my comments drew mostly ire.

“Being the last one on the train will be an exciting moment for you,” one reply read. Another said: “They’ll come for you the same as they’re coming for all of us. You’re deluded. Kapo.” I was called “a fool,” “painfully naive,” and “a useful idiot.” One reply read: “The irony is that you are no different than the German Jews who initially supported the Nazis.” 

That last one would be a stinging accusation if I hadn’t heard the same thing five years ago from a member of my own family.

At that time, though I was far behind many of my Jewish peers in understanding the scope of Israel’s injustice against Palestinians, I was going out on a bit of a limb compared to the general population by publishing a piece for Rolling Stone detailing the anguish of realizing that tacit support for the Israeli government’s violence was tantamount to active support. I shared a plea to change the narrative in order to save lives. It was met with some intense derision (see above), but also a ton of support from people who felt the same but were too afraid to say so. In 2021, those voices were whispers. Today, they roar. And the knowledge that anti-Zionist Jews are legion strengthens my resolve, and diminishes the power of voices against peace.

“To my beautiful Jewish friends in America. We love you. You are not alone,” fail-daughter Meghan McCain wrote on X Tuesday night. “We are just as freaked out as you are and see with clear eyes exactly what is happening.”

“Welcome to the United Socialist Republic of New York City,” former advertising exec and full-time yapper Donny Deutsch said in a video on Threads Wednesday. “It’s reprehensible. The candidates that won last night are socialists. There is a major thread of anti-Israel underneath these candidates, even though one of them is Jewish,” referring to Lander.

These sentiments are representative of a political reality that has become deeply unpopular. As Israel continues to prevent the US making peace with Iran by relentlessly attacking Southern Lebanon and killing more than 4,100 people, as the price tag for our country’s military and monetary support for Netanyahu’s vengeance continues to increase, and as the ties that bind the improbable alliance between far-right Jews and white nationalist evangelical Christians continue to weaken, progressive American Jews are done being told that our safety can only be ensured by a politics of fear. 

The accusations of us being self-hating Jews will no doubt persist, but it was easier to wake up this morning and not believe them.

Hi, Basketeers. Just dropping a line to let you know about a cool virtual event I’m a part of this Thursday at 2pm ET!

I’ll be in conversation with Adam Marshall of Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, one of the lawyers in my winning lawsuit against the DC Metropolitan Police Department for body camera footage from the 2025 DOGE raid on the US Institute of Peace. 

Adam and I will be chatting about how we connected in the first place, the many delays and challenges in obtaining these public records, what the videos [finally] released to us showed, and the essential work the Reporters Committee does to protect freedom of the press.

In addition to our gabbing, the event will include some clips from the body camera footage, as well as time for participant questions. I know we find this stuff absolutely fascinating, and I hope you will, too!

(And people in the New York area: I have an exciting announcement about an in-person event in late July coming soon!)

xx, Marisa

Support independent journalism by subscribing to The Handbasket. Upgrade to premium to help keep my work going or leave a tip.

As soon as I saw the New York Times report drop Thursday afternoon about ICE looking to sell seven of the 11 warehouses they’d purchased to convert into immigrant concentration camps, I knew I had to talk to Michael Wriston. Wriston is a 20-year veteran military analyst and one of the founders and masterminds behind Project Salt Box, a data and editorial project that has tracked the many developments in the Trump administration’s quest for warehouses to cage humans. He’s been aware of every sale, every failure, every contract awarded, and as a result, he has a unique insight into what this news functionally means (insofar as anyone can really divine anything from Trump news.)

My initial read, having written an in-depth piece about the obscure contracting mechanism behind purchasing the warehouses and from following along since then, was that this was overall positive news. Obviously it didn’t mean an end to Trump’s project of mass incarceration and deportation, but it signaled to me that the widespread pushback among communities blue and red, coupled with numerous legal challenges, meant that sand had successfully been thrown in the gears. Still, I figured it was best to consult an authority.

Times reporter Hamed Aleaziz subsequently reported that the following facilities are the ones planned for offloading: Romulus, Michigan; Social Circle, Georgia; Flowery Branch, Georgia; Hamburg, Pennsylvania; Tremont, Pennsylvania; Salt Lake City, Utah; and Roxbury, New Jersey. So what did that mean for the remaining warehouses?

I hopped on the phone with Wriston to get the warehouse whisperer’s reaction to this new development, to ask if he thought it was indeed a major turning point, and to discuss the potential alternative danger it could signal. Our conversation is below, edited for clarity and length (though not much because most parts, in my opinion, were too interesting to leave out.)

Image of warehouse purchased by ICE (Tremont, PA)

MARISA KABAS, THE HANDBASKET: So the last time we spoke, the situation with the warehouses was a bit different.

MICHAEL WRISTON, PROJECT SALT BOX: A little bit, yeah.

KABAS: The New York Times just reported that DHS plans to offload seven of the 11 warehouses that that you tracked as purchased over the last few months. After watching this whole thing unfold, what do you think accounts for this seemingly pretty major change in approach?

WRISTON: I think a couple things. I think that the first and foremost factor that's leading to this decision would have to be just the total infeasibility of the project. And I think that's something that people within ICE have known for a while—that converting warehouses into detention centers or concentration camps is logistically just not feasible. 

I think the other thing, too, is cost. Per warehouse they were looking at something like $600 million just for conversion. And so that's essentially doubling the $1.07 billion dollar figure that they spent buying these warehouses outright.

Then there are some legal aspects of it that are starting to play out in the courts that I think demonstrate that ICE has a losing hand with the warehouses. That became clear in April when Judge [Brendan] Hurson in Maryland granted a preliminary injunction against ICE to the state because ICE failed to do its due diligence in terms of environmental impact assessments that would fall under the National Environmental Policy Act; failed to follow some provisions of the Procedural Act in how they did or did not work through the General Services Administration; and failed to do all of the things you're supposed to do before you buy an 800,000 square foot facility and then say you're going to turn it into a detention center. And so that has now replicated itself six times, with active federal lawsuits against ICE in the states of Maryland, Arizona, Michigan and New Jersey and the cities of Social Circle, Georgia and Salt Lake City.

So I think what ICE is kind of contending with here is this notion that all of this is coming back to bite them, and it's probably not gonna go the way they want. 

KABAS: It sounds like a lot of this could have been foreseen. So do you think they just expected they would be able to ram this through? How were they so ill-prepared for what has come at them?

WRISTON: Yeah, I think that it was a “let's throw money at the situation and that will fix everything.” That was the thought process back in December and January when they were rushing through buying all of these. Sources that I've spoken to have all said that because they had $38 billion to spend on detention, they were going to use every last penny of it and they wanted to do it as quickly as possible. And that meant just buying these facilities and essentially pencil whipping the paperwork because they didn't think anyone would pay attention. They thought no one's paying attention to warehouse sales: Maybe people are distracted by the data center purchases, which are equally important to pay attention to. And that wasn't the case. 

I think when The Washington Post reported in December that they were looking at the warehouses, it really resonated with the public and people latched onto it. And from there people paid attention. And when people pay attention, it's hard to sneak in a 10,000-bed detention facility in the middle of rural Social Circle, Georgia or in the middle of a major city like Salt Lake. And now there's been this massive pause. It's been three months since the last warehouse sold, and there have been no new contracts awarded since then. It's been a complete hiatus despite ICE's statements that they're going to push full steam ahead with this scheme. 

But I do think it presents an opportunity to pay attention to what they're going to do next, which I think is a harder fight for the public, and is the one that gives me pause as I think about it. I think this is a great victory, and we need to celebrate it—and begin looking forward to what's coming down the line.

KABAS: I really want to get to what you think comes next. But first I want to talk about how this development really speaks to the power of the media in fighting fascism, as you touched on.

WRISTON: Transparency is historically the tool of defeating fascism and defeating authoritarianism. You shine a light and really dig in and be relentless in the questions that you're asking. And the attention that you pay to it, the amount of people that you have on your side asking those questions and showing up, whether it's at a protest outside a detention facility, whether it's at a county council meeting or just flooding inboxes and phone lines and asking the questions that are informed by journalism. 

There are a lot of well-earned parallels between what's happening in America today with Nazi Germany in the 30s and 40s. But what happened in Nazi Germany in the 30s and 40s can't fully happen in America today because we still have that First Amendment and people are still exercising it. And if anything, it's a call to action for people to continue to exercise it. The second we abdicate that and the second we stop paying attention and stop asking questions is when we fully allow for authoritarianism to take root and take hold.

KABAS: And I think there's also just an awareness thanks to different kinds of media that like, Social Circle, Georgia doesn’t want to be the next Dachau. They don't want their city associated forever with this kind of depravity. I wonder if you have seen that awareness play into people pushing back on the warehouses.

WRISTON: Absolutely, yeah. I mean, that's the one thing, from Williamsport, Maryland to Social Circle, Georgia, all the way over to the sites on the west coast—every last one of these groups has said the same thing: “We don't want the next Auschwitz in our backyard. We don't want the next Dachau in our backyard.” A big press machine putting out this document of potential sites that ICE was looking at gave average, ordinary citizens—in concert with local press who know their region very well—to ask questions and go to trusted sources and start doing public records requests and paying attention to it.

I think all that happened in Germany happened in great secrecy and with a lot of public lies and not a lot of mechanisms to challenge those lies. And certainly not the resources that we have today for rapid response organizing or for instantaneous social media updates. Social media, for good or ill, still continues to be a prevailing force in fighting fascism so long as it remains independent and out of the clutches of fascist enablers. The choice of [which] social media [you use] is important.

KABAS: What role do you feel resistance by regular people played in changing the conversation around the warehouses?

WRITSTON: Massive. When we talk about the political side of things, there was an assumption that the typical liberal left was going to be upset about the warehouses, and that was going to be that. And of course they're upset. But because it was a very bipartisan backlash and there were Republican senators and Republican representatives and Republican townships that were fighting against these in Republican districts alongside your broad spectrum of political affiliations, it really sent a message that this is a group of people that are united in their dislike. That sends a pretty clear message on down-ballot issues in upcoming elections, especially the midterms, and I think they realize that this is a losing issue.

KABAS: I mean when Marsha Blackburn and Elizabeth fucking Warren are on the same side of an issue, you know you kind of have a political loser, right?

WRISTON: Yeah, you've really struck the hornet's nest with that one.

KABAS: There was some chatter online that this is all just like, a big real estate laundering scheme by Trump and his allies. Do you see any merit to that?

WRISTON: I do. I think that there are aspects of that that are absolutely 100% true. I wouldn't say that it necessarily factors into all of them, but there are some very suspicious ties. The facility that sold in Salt Lake City was sold by an LLC that was a subsidiary of DWS, a company in which Deutsche Bank has a majority stakeholder ownership. Goldman Sachs was a primary financier for the warehouse in Maryland. There was a Russian oligarch that sold the Social Circle warehouse and claimed that he had signed an NDA with ICE and so he wouldn't answer any questions about it.

I would say probably the most damning ones are the ones that you can pull their SEC filings and you can see that in the years leading up to the sales, the primary owners were claiming them as major losses. So the company that owned the Hagerstown warehouse for like the last four or five years in their SEC filings had named it as a contributor to their poor financial performance. The one that sold in Tremont, Pennsylvania and the one that was being targeted in Durant, Oklahoma, were both former Big Lots facilities that are now both owned by Blue Owl Capital. So ICE was essentially just looking at what, based on the list that we've looked at and based on the records that we've pulled, looking at warehouses that were in deep financial trouble. 

And sources that we've spoken to within ICE have all said, yeah, this was a push from high up in the administration to ICE to purchase these for the sake of people that wanted to get rid of failing properties. Is there any concrete evidence of that? Not that we've been able to find, but I think there's merit to that conjecture.

KABAS: The administration spent $700 million on the seven warehouses that they're trying to offload. Do you think there will be any accounting for that money?

WRISTON: A couple weeks ago, NBC News had published a piece that said ICE was eyeballing offloading some of the warehouses, and so we at Project Saltbox had this conversation in-house and we said, well, that's, that's amazing. But logistically what does that look like? 

There are some barriers to a federal agency outright selling. It's not like you or I putting our house up on the market, or Colliers or JLL putting a warehouse out on the market. There's accounting that they have to do. They have to go through the General Services Administration. There has to be a review that's done by the Department of Housing and Urban Development to determine if any offloaded federal properties would be better suited for homeless advocacy purposes or homeless housing purposes. And so there are these lengthy periods that they have to go through before they even go on the market or transfer them laterally to other administrations or other departments. 

And if they do decide to sell them on the market, a hardship I think that they're going to face is offloading them for the same cost that they bought them for. So it's a double-edged sword, right? They purchased them at great sums of money, and in many of those cases—I'm going to use the term bailed out, but essentially paid off the debts associated with many of these warehouses for the private seller. That was to the private seller's great benefit. The other edge of that now is if ICE is seriously looking at selling these and they purchased them at 20,30, 40% markups, is there a commensurate private seller out there that's going to buy them at those same markups? Or is there a loss that ICE is going to be willing to take them at? 

KABAS: Regarding the purchase price markups, was there ever any accounting for those discrepancies? Did they explain why they paid so much more than they seemed to be worth?

WRISTON: No, and those FOIA requests remain unanswered. So yeah, that's something that we partnered with the ACLU on earlier this year. I was writing kind of an omnibus FOIA request that included their evaluation strategy. How did they arrive at those particular figures for these warehouses? What guidelines did they use? It's still pending, as all things FOIA go with this administration. And whenever we ask ICE for, you know, what led you to spend $102.4 million for a warehouse in western Maryland, we get the classic mugshots of “the worst of the worst,” and that's about it.

KABAS: From all your tracking, was there a point in the last couple of months where you thought it appeared the tide might be turning against the warehouses?

WRISTON: I will say that the moment that I thought the tide was actually beginning to turn was when the preliminary injunction was granted [in Maryland] in April. And the reason I think that that was the turning point was because the judge in that case basically said ICE failed to do its due diligence under NEPA. Because if you look at the records that ICE submitted as part of discovery, they essentially showed that they did the quote unquote due diligence, the environmental assessment, in a single afternoon within the span of about 30 minutes within days of purchasing the warehouse. It's this incredibly condensed timeline. One environmental report was done hours after the suit was filed, and you could just tell there was this desperation there to just push these things along and say no, no, no, we're covering all our bases. 

That gave us great optimism because it demonstrated that at the federal level, even within the courts, there was great skepticism about the diligence ICE was doing (or the lack thereof.) And once that happened, you could feel this sort of deflation from ICE. Their legal filings became more antagonistic and more par for the course for the Trump administration, whereas before they seemed a little more neutral. And you could just tell that they were throwing whatever they could at the wall hoping that they could sway these judges to let them off the hook. And the more this happened, the more people started getting involved and started showing up and started calling and saying, well, hey, you didn't do due diligence in our communities. And they started calling on their attorneys general to take action. 

And so one by one, more cases started filing, more protesters started showing up demanding more action from their elected officials. Two weeks prior to that preliminary injunction is when Kristi Noem was ousted. This was right during the pause that Markwayne Mullin announced where they were going to be taking a good hard look at the warehouse purchases. And then not long after, the Office of the Inspector General announced that they were investigating ICE's plan to purchase warehouses. So there is now an internal investigation happening into ICE and how they bought these. So there's just tremendous political, financial, and Republican and Democratic pressure against this whole harebrained idea that they have.

KABAS: Speaking of DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin, he told the Times today that the agency is pivoting to “utilize existing detention space with our state and county partners.” What does that tell you and does that worry you?

WRISTON: Yeah, that's the one that's the downside to this, right? There's a lot to celebrate here, there's a lot to worry about what comes next. 

So in our investigation of documents, what we've been finding is ICE is beginning to rely very heavily on sole source procurement for [private prison companies] CoreCivic and GEO Group-owned facilities, which is nothing new. That's been happening for years now. What worries me are statements that were made by both the GEO Group and the Core Civic CEOs during recent investor calls at the close of the quarter, and both of them mentioned that ICE had been looking at “turnkey detention facilities” within the GEO Group and the Core Civic portfolio to either purchase and run as federal facilities or to invest heavily in to turn them into much larger detention facilities than they currently are. We talked to some folks that we knew within ICE and we were able to get a list of eight of those facilities. [Note: Those facilities are Northwest ICE Processing Center in Tacoma, Wash.; California City Detention Center in California City, Calif.; Otay Mesa Detention Center in San Diego; Mesa Verde ICE Processing Center in Bakersfield, Calif.; Montgomery Processing Center in Conroe, Texas; Central; Louisiana Processing Center in Jena, La.; the Aurora ICE Processing Center in Aurora, Colo.; the Winn Processing Center in Winnfield, La.]

So those are the ones we know that they're looking at buying. What that would do and why this is so problematic is where the warehouse fight really fell apart for ICE was that they were purchasing non-detention facilities for the purposes of detention and didn't do any of that environmental consideration and so they were very easy to fight on those grounds. These [existing facilities] are already operating as detention facilities. They're already being used by ICE for the purpose of detention. It would be much more difficult for the public to fight if ICE were to decide to buy these and turn them into federal facilities. And that would come with a lot of headaches for localities.

KABAS: So why didn't ICE just do it this way in the first place? Seems a lot easier.

WRISTON: Yeah that's the $1.07 billion dollar question. And, and in the course of talking to, talking to people, folks at ICE were very quick to say that was always what they wanted to do. That was as far back as when the one big beautiful Bill Act was passed last summer. A lot of those internal conversations were, let's start procuring existing detention space. That was what they envisioned with that $38 billion. It was external elements of pressure, allegedly within the White House and allegedly very close to the president, pushing to say, no, we want to go this warehouse route. And that's where I think a lot of that very damning evidence points to there being some level of corruption in terms of buying off these failing warehouses. 

One of the things they don't mention in this [Times] article that I think people should be paying very close attention to is the possibility of what they're calling “greenfield construction” projects, which is essentially using undeveloped land and building brand new detention centers from the ground up. We have seen indications of that coming in Gilroy, California, which is in Santa Clara County right outside of San Jose. There are a number of contracts swirling to develop a parcel of land that the General Services Administration owned and then sort of gave control to some Texas-based corporation, Edgewood Capital Group, that is building detention facilities for ICE in other states. And so this would be government-owned land operated by a contractor, developed by money procured by ICE to build brand new purpose built detention facilities that would make it very difficult for advocacy groups to fight. Not impossible, but difficult. There'd have to be a change in strategy. 

A source that we spoke to specifically said they're looking at Texas as a place to build brand new detention facilities due to the abundance of federal land and private land that they could buy unopposed, proximity to the border, and deportation hubs.

KABAS: My initial read was that this development was an overall positive sign.

WRISTON: That is the correct read. This is absolutely a victory. It's a victory for rule of law. Obviously there are federal laws in place for a reason, and I think the courts and the direction that ICE is going with their settlements and their negotiations with the states demonstrate that they didn't follow the law. And it was bound to be proven in court that they didn't follow the law, and that would have been damaging for the warehouse scheme altogether. It would have meant going completely back to the drawing board on all 11 of them to do a year's worth of due diligence each to make sure that the water system was adequate, that they weren't going to be leaching forever chemicals into local communities, that local communities had the opportunity to step up and make their voices heard, and all of the things that should have gone into this. 

It's a win for the First Amendment and for all of the protesters and demonstrators and activists and everyday people that just showed up, made their voices heard. Every last one of those people contributed to a decision to offload these and just reducing that detention headcount. It is a win because we have to think about what that represents downstream. If we're talking seven warehouses, that could represent up to 30, 40, 50,000 people that aren't going to be held in just the worst conceivable conditions that we can think of in the modern age. Warehouses that aren't properly ventilated, facilities that don't have adequate toilets, running water or HVAC in very hot locations. And even though there are fights ahead, that is just a victory that people need to be proud of.

This is a guest post by Lee Hurley, a freelance writer from Belfast who covers trans issues and politics in the UK. As a racist pogrom unfolded last week on the streets of Belfast—and internationally on our social media feeds—I took note of Hurley’s posts and asked if he would write a piece for The Handbasket describing the situation on the ground and explaining misconceptions outside Northern Ireland. Read on for his thoughtful dispatch.

Rally/counter rally outside Belfast City Hall, August 2024. (Lee Hurley)

On Monday, 8 June 2026, a horrific attempted murder in Northern Ireland was filmed and posted to social media, lighting the petrol-soaked touchpaper that always lies scattered around Belfast. The attack, perpetrated by a man later identified as a Sudanese immigrant, resulted in the victim losing an eye and suffering multiple other stab wounds. By the afternoon of the following day, businesses had closed and events were cancelled as calls on social media appeared from Loyalist-linked racist anti-immigrant groups to protest the city’s immigrant population because of the actions of one man. The city emptied as people rushed to bunker down behind the locked doors of their homes.

Residents knew what was coming, none more so than those in the tightly packed terrace houses of Loyalist areas marked out by their red, white and blue painted curb stones. This place has plenty of experience with violence, after all, and it is in the most economically deprived Loyalist areas that we often see the worst of it. The police largely looked on as these rioters (that the media have dubbed ‘protestors’) demanded justice for a man whose attacker had already been arrested. What started as roadblocks escalated to burning buses before the sun had even set, which never bodes well because Belfast locals know that it always gets worse after dark.

And it did.

Masked men marched the streets, burning the homes and cars of non-white people, terrorising people on the streets of their own areas in east and north Belfast. People across the city were left living in fear, many too afraid to leave their homes even for food.

But despite the international focus on Elon Musk’s role in whipping up this racist pogrom, few in Northern Ireland would say the same. There’s no denying that X has played a role, amplifying the far right and allowing them to hook into a willing and eager audience that has been primed to enact what the fash want to see on the streets of Britain. But they didn’t do this because of Musk.

The Loyalists on the ground are the ones understood by locals to be largely responsible for what was yet another horrific racist pogrom, even though they deny involvement. And despite this understanding, the police have made a pathetically low number of arrests so far. There is a widespread feeling across all communities—based on history—that nothing will be done about any of it, and the possibility of it happening again this summer looms large. 

There is a violence at the heart of Loyalism that no politician in power has ever had the will to address, and it has left communities, particularly their own, living in fear. Punishment for challenging their authority, reporting their illegal activity to the police, or otherwise standing up to them can be severe. Many have been forced from their homes in attacks that rarely get reported. Others have been beaten and killed. They now behave more like criminal gangs, running much of the illegal drug trade in the country, using intimidation to operate as standard. But they still command significant respect from people willing to take up arms for their cause and the roots of what the world witnessed last week drive deep into the history of this place. Musk is nothing more than this summer’s rotten flower.

For his part, Musk has appeared unbothered, deflecting blame for any role he might have played in promoting violence and championing the right-wing group Restore Britain. He seems quite happy to let people believe he has the power to order masked men onto the streets of Belfast to terrorise people of colour, but he alone does not have that power. Nothing like this can happen in these communities without the explicit approval of a known set of groups. What his platform and others have done is allow these groups to better coordinate, and for others to stir an already boiling pot. Elsewhere on social media, active Facebook groups post openly about their plans. 

Despite so much of this organizing being out in the open, authorities have made few tangible efforts to stop it. 

In the UK, you will be arrested for holding a sign supporting Palestine Action, a non-violent direct-action group. More than 3,000 people have already been arrested in under a year, with over 100 arrested just this week. Yet in Northern Ireland, you can paint murals on private or public property celebrating right wing terrorist organisations without hassle and threaten, with impunity, anyone who tries to stop you.

After the racist pogrom in 2024, enacted by Loyalists in a manner similar to what we have seen this month as a response to a stabbing in England that saw three children killed in Southport, politicians could have legislated against hate crimes. But they didn’t. It seems like from their view that if a few riots happen now and then, well, at least the Protestants and Catholics aren’t fighting each other, and the money keeps flowing in from the European Union.

From June 1 every year, Loyalist flags are hung from lampposts across the country in preparation for their July festival celebrating the arrival of the Protestant foreign invader, King William of Orange, who defeated the catholic King James II during the Williamite-Jacobian War in 1690. The flags remain there, untouched, until they are required to be taken down towards the end of September. In some Loyalist areas, they fly all year round.

It is an old joke that the calendar in Northern Ireland goes “January, February, March, March, March” and the flags signal the peak of Northern Ireland’s marching season is approaching. Tens of thousands of people flee the country for a fortnight in July to escape the trouble that often follows, particularly on the 11th night. Bonfires, many illegal, are lit across the country. It’s typically the busiest night of the year for the Northern Ireland Fire Service. Previously, some Loyalists burned catholic effigies on their fires. But now that we have so-called “peace” in Northern Ireland, effigies of migrants have replaced those in recent years. On 12th July, the entire country closes down to allow sectarian marching bands to take over the streets.

The Good Friday Agreement of 1998 that brought peace and hope to Northern Ireland didn’t magic away the hate overnight and little has ever been done to address that. Reconciliation has never been a priority and segregation (Protestant/Catholic) in education is still the standard. Communities have been left to fester and now some have chosen immigrants as a more socially acceptable target. Just this week, Michelle O’Neill, Northern Ireland First Minister, called for a probe into reports that the police advised non-white nurses to comply and show their NHS ID to Loyalists at their blockades to be allowed to pass.

The official numbers say 27 people, including children, were made homeless last Tuesday night—but from what I know on the ground, that number is almost certainly much higher. One activist group saw a call go out to find beds for another 30 people who had been intimidated from their homes or were too afraid to return. Within an hour, they all had a bed in a stranger’s home.

The amazing response from the community has been in stark contrast to that of the police and politicians. While they stood back, the Belfast community mobilised immediately. WhatsApp groups full of strangers helped coordinate a response. They offered spare rooms and sofas as shelter for those displaced. They picked up children and drove them to school and hospital appointments. 

This past weekend, hundreds of people too afraid to leave their homes received deliveries of food and essentials, all collected and distributed by volunteers with no official help or funding. I was able to raise almost £6,000 in the space of three days, with a large helping hand from the people of Minnesota who identified with what was happening in Belfast after their own recent experiences with ICE. At the same time, tens of thousands of people turned up at Belfast City Hall on Saturday afternoon for what has been called the city's 'largest ever' anti-racism rally.

So no, the people in Northern Ireland aren’t blaming Elon Musk. In some ways it would be easier to deal with if he was solely responsible; then we’d have a unified place to direct our ire. But to hold those actually responsible would require the mass arrests of thousands of people, the complete overhaul of the political system here, a completely new education system, and politicians who wanted to do the hard work of reconciliation.

Things are quiet now in Belfast. People have started to emerge from their homes and children are back on the streets playing again. But it is unlikely to last. More trouble is expected in a country where The Troubles were meant to have ended 28 years ago. Sadly, for many an end to Loyalism and far right terrorism feels further away today than it did back then.

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It may have been the strangest Friday night in history.

Tens of thousands of people across the country sat glued to our screens watching a livestream that began early afternoon on the east coast and stretched deep into the night. We sat patiently as construction workers in fluorescent vests slowly erected an elaborate set of scaffolding: We stood by as a last ditch court filing threatened the completion of the project: We waited through rain and thunder: The longer it went on, the more we dug in. We needed to see the letters fall.

Starting on December 19, 2025, the building at 2700 F. Street NW in Washington, DC, bore the name Donald J. Trump in addition to its real namesake, former President John F. Kennedy. In the pantheon of heinous developments during Trump’s second administration, it paled in comparison to him allowing Elon Musk to gut USAID which led to the hundreds of thousands of deaths overseas, or the opening of an immigrant concentration camp in Florida where he hoped alligators would consume them. No, this was more symbolic; a nod to dictators past who plastered their names on places and achievements to which they played no role to expand their omnipresence. But in the wee hours of Saturday morning under the cover of a massive tarp, construction workers removed the letters spelling his name. For a moment his power retracted. 

On May 29th, US District Judge Christopher Cooper ordered the removal of Trump’s name from the building within 14 days. Cooper also halted the Trump-appointed board’s two-year shutdown and renovation plan. In the maelstrom of Trump’s crushing cruelty, it was a rare reminder that not every bit of the people’s power had been torched. As the administration came up against the deadline of midnight on Friday, the Kennedy Center board filed an emergency motion to stay the decision, threatening their own funding should Trump’s name be removed. But the judge wasn’t buying it and denied the motion. After more weather delays, work resumed around 8pm.

someone can be heard on the livestream yelling "take the T down first!" 😂

— Marisa Kabas (@marisakabas.bsky.social)
12:34 AM • Jun 13, 2026

The excruciating process to remove the letters was on brand, considering Trump never cedes an inch without a knock-down, drag-out fight. His quest for power is quashed only by his petulance, with no amount of pride getting in the way of what he feels is entitled to him. But the letters at the Kennedy Center—as well as the United States Institute of Peace installed just days earlier—have served as a reminder that as much as things have become profoundly dangerous in this country, they’ve also become profoundly stupid.

In the hours after DOGE (with the help of DC Metropolitan Police) took over the Institute of Peace building in March 2025, an image was shared with me from someone inside of giant metal letters scattered on the lobby floor. Trump’s administration hoped that by immediately removing the rightful name from the lobby wall that people would forget. The discarded letters would rust in the scrap yard while Trump continued to amass power. Anything he grabbed was his. Or so he thought.

Discarded letters at the USIP in March 2025

What made the rapt online and in-person audience on Friday night that much more remarkable was the fact that the country isn’t hurting for communal events right now. The World Cup kicked off right here at home on Thursday, and the New York Knicks are in the middle of a historic championship run. For the first time in years, people are being brought together by something other than a global pandemic or their loathing for Trump. But for some the power of sports was no match for the pleasure of reveling in Trump’s displeasure.

The act of taking down the letters became a communal event in and of itself, with people (like me) live-posting on social media throughout the many hours of build up. We watched carefully as each rod was set in place, speculating why the workers were on a break (government interference? Pizza time?), whether they were intentionally drawing out the process in case of another last minute Trump interference, or whether the scaffolding would eventually hold a tarp that would deny us the joy of watching each letter pried off the wall. For the most part, however, we were just watching a fairly static image of a wall. That’s how we’d chosen to spend our Friday night.

NEW IMAGE: Worker removes a letter from Donald Trump’s name on the Kennedy Center. There is a tarp covering the building at this time. His name had to come down last night after a court order.

— MS NOW (@ms.now)
12:38 PM • Jun 13, 2026

At a time when culture has become so diffuse, with millions following online streamers who millions of others have never heard of, the removal of the letters felt as close to a monoculture moment as we’ve had in a long time. It was a celebration that was geographically agnostic, attracting people throughout the country and the world and demonstrating just how starved we are to witness an ounce of accountability. That, and our insatiable thirst for his humiliation. And of the millions who tuned in to watch at least part of the livestream—MS Now’s stream had more than five million viewers by its end—the president himself was surely one of them. Before he had the nuclear codes and the ability to destroy civilizations, he was the master of spectacle. But at the Kennedy Center on Friday night, Trump wasn’t the ringmaster; he was the bear in a tutu. 

I have to confess that I wasn’t able to stay awake for the actual letter removal. No, the first letter didn’t come down until around 4am ET and my body refused to make it past 1:30. I awoke later in the morning to find that the deed had finally been done. Indeed a giant white tarp had been draped from the top of the scaffolding to obscure the view of onlookers in person and at home, and presumably to protect Trump’s ego. But the letters came down all the same, notching one victory in what will be a generational war to rebuild. 

Just a mile down the road at the White House, a UFC fight will be held for Trump’s birthday and his white nationalist Freedom 250 campaign in honor of the country’s big upcoming birthday. On the hallowed White House grounds he’s had a massive fighting ring built, which again can’t compare in impact to the decisions he’s made as president that have ruined and ended lives, but serves as a symbol of his unabated depravity. Whether he can attract the kind of audience that tuned into the Kennedy Center livestream remains to be seen. 

While corporate media continues to act as though they’re all in for Trump, I hope they’ll take note of how many people willingly spent hours watching scaffolding get built just to see him fail. There may be big bucks in stroking his ego, but what’s emerged is an existing market ready to see it destroyed. If media executives can’t see the moral imperative for stopping Trump, perhaps the potential payoff will speak to them. 

On a separate note, I just wanted to apologize for the dearth of stories this week. Sometimes as a journalist you’re chasing down a bunch of leads and they don’t come to fruition as quickly as you’d like. That said, I have a number of stories in the hopper and look forward to sharing them with you when they’re good and ready. Thanks for your patience and ongoing support. - M

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Me, left, and Bari Weiss, right, in 2017.

Back in 2017 I was part of a panel moderated by a New York Times Opinion Editor named Bari Weiss. I’d never heard of her before; she’d joined the Times recently at that time, coming from The Wall Street Journal. The subject of the panel was “Zionism and Feminism” and whether it was possible for those ideologies to co-exist in the wake of the Women’s March and the mass protests against Trump. Even though I was quite progressive on most issues at the time, I [wrongly] believed coexistence was possible. But in the intervening years, my perspective has shifted considerably—as has my career trajectory. And so has Bari’s.

You could look at us as two roads diverged: Both millennial, white, Jewish women who grew up in affluent neighborhoods with large Jewish populations, and who came up in the New York media scene of the late aughts/early 2010s. While Bari had a string of steady gigs, I bounced around more, giving me an early awareness of the precarity of working in modern media. Regardless, our understanding of this business was shaped by the same world, where no one could figure out how to make money off online news and social media was not yet a potential source of revenue for journalists. 

We got along well enough during the panel, though I distinctly remember catching an edge in response to something I said. I even pitched her a few times after the fact to no avail. She wasn’t picking up what I was putting down. Bari soon became a known quantity in media circles, publishing a string of Times op-eds that revealed a proudly right-leaning worldview. She made quick work of denigrating the organizers of the Women’s March, celebrating cultural appropriation, running cover for Ben Shapiro and making her belief clear well before October 7th that any criticism of Israel was cloaked antisemitism. 

At the same time, I was figuring out my next move. After being laid off from my last staff writer job one week post-Trump’s first election, I was trying to make it as a freelance journalist and seeing how I could set myself apart among an ever-growing cohort. 

The reason I’d ended up on the panel with Bari was because I’d published a much-derided opinion piece with Harper’s Bazaar a few months earlier that remains the greatest shame of my career. (I won’t link it here, but Google if you must.) It made me wonder whether I was cut out for a public-facing career where I had to answer for the opinions I shared. And unlike Bari’s unabashed insistence that she was right, I buckled under online scrutiny. It wouldn’t be until years later that I realized it was because some of my opinions back then were uninformed: I had trouble standing by them because they were not deeply-held. So I retreated for a while, working for a couple of years outside the industry and then dealing with a series of serious health issues and major surgeries. I had trouble picturing any future for myself in journalism. 

Despite her palpable loathing for progressive ideals, Bari still insisted for a period that she believed in liberal values, democracy and especially free speech. That last one would grow to define her, in 2021 leading her to found a Substack called The Free Press, and the unaccredited University of Austin with the motto “Dare to Think.” One of her co-founders in her academic venture was a protege of Peter Thiel, the conservative billionaire media destroyer. Any delusions about a remaining liberal core were dead, and suddenly Bari was on top of the industry she’d shit all over in her self-aggrandizing resignation letter from the Times. She had emerged as an avatar for a conservative who has everything but still wants more. And she had realized her dream of being the boss. 

I started a Substack of my own a year after Bari. It was a little side project called The Handbasket that I wasn’t really sure what to do with. (I detailed that journey in a speech I gave at Grinnell College this past fall.) But I kept writing and publishing, and writing and publishing some more, and moved off Substack to another hosting platform, and continued creating a publication that I was proud of and that I hoped meant something to at least a few people.

Like Bari, I made no effort to hide my point of view. And also like Bari, I built something from nothing. But unlike Bari, my only goal was to make enough money to earn a living, not to scale up in hopes of an eventual sale. Even as The Handbasket experienced a period of remarkable growth and success in early 2025 while critically covering the second Trump administration, there was never any part of me that craved market domination or frankly, to be anyone’s boss. Perhaps that reveals a lack of ambition that will hurt me in the end. 

Now in 2026 Bari Weiss has become the household name she always believed she deserved to be, serving at the pleasure of President Trump and sundry billionaires who love her unapologetic thirst for power. The Free Press was acquired by CBS News in October for $150 million and Bari was named Editor-in-Chief by billionaire owner David Ellison. She had proven herself a loyal soldier in the fight against “woke” (whatever it happened to mean to conservatives that day) and Ellison understood she would be the perfect steward for taking a respected and historic news brand and running it into the ground. No morals would obstruct her on the slide down. 

But the last several months have seen one crash after another at CBS News under Bari’s leadership, with her swiftly laying off journalists of color, putting an incompetent anchor at the helm of the flagship evening news, pulling a 60 Minutes segment about El Salvador’s brutal CECOT prison where the US had illegally sent people, and shuttering the storied radio division. Despite declaring “Let’s do the fucking news” in her first meeting with staff last fall, it’s become clear that her actual mandate was to do the dirty work; to treat the near hundred-year-old news organization with no more respect than a TikTok account. 

That all came to a head in a 60 Minutes staff meeting Monday morning in the wake of the firings of executive producer Tanya Simon, and correspondents Sharon Alfonsi and Cecilia Vega. (Alfonsi was the lead correspondent on the CECOT segment.) Hosted by Bari’s new EP Nick Bilton, things quickly went sideways when longtime correspondent Scott Pelley accused Bari of “murdering '60 Minutes.'" He went on to say: "She does not love this place. She was brought in to kill it—and she's doing exactly that." Pelley had gone from traveling to Vietnam in March for a story exploring the world’s largest cave to sparring with a guy who had no broadcast journalism experience. By Tuesday night, Pelley was fired.

Bari Weiss attended a fundraiser last night in NYC, attendee tells me. There was an auction item for dinner with her and wife Nellie Bowles. Several people cheered in approval, many others said after how gross it was. Bari shouted out “And you can make out with Nellie!” It ultimately sold for $55k.

— Marisa Kabas (@marisakabas.bsky.social)
6:04 PM • Feb 1, 2026

Perhaps more astonishing than the actual firing was what Pelley revealed on the way out. In a statement that started by celebrating the accomplishments of the long-running news magazine program, he turned to the new leadership’s silencing and firing of people who were part of the show’s “DNA.” 

“For my part, new management has instructed me to inject falsehoods and bias into a politically sensitive story,” Pelley wrote. “I’ve been told to include assertions that are unverified. To date, in every case, I have managed to ignore these instructions or refuse them.” And it was ultimately that refusal to comply that would lead to his dismissal. 

Bari handled Pelley’s firing with her characteristic lack of grace, reportedly telling staff in a Wednesday morning call: "I hope I speak for everyone here when I say I'm only interested in working in a newsroom that is built on trust and mutual respect. We cannot do our work without it. That foundation was broken on Monday,” in reference to Pelley’s spot-on characterization of how she was destroying the show. Nothing builds trust and respect like firing a well-known and revered journalist.

The problem Bari seems to be coming up against is that she’s so used to being surrounded by Yes Men—and saying Yes to powerful men—that she finds dissent intolerable. Whereas she could ostensibly bend the team at the Free Press to her will and tell the fat cats what they wanted to hear to get what she wanted, a newsroom of seasoned journalists won’t go so quietly. And so they’re being crushed. 

There exists a tension between covering the news and covering news about the people who make the news. Journalists are taught from day one to never become the story, but the creep of fascism in the US has unfortunately put this business front and center as those nefariously seeking even greater power look to diminish our avenues of communication. (One need look no further than the abhorrent treatment of press outside Delaney Hall.) And so it’s periodically necessary to step back and examine the bigger picture.

Yes, billionaires have accelerated the rightward shift of corporate media, but it would never have been possible without ordinary people like Bari who are willing to drain their souls to fill their own bank accounts. This isn’t unique to the media business, but when newsmakers are your victims, it tends to attract more headlines. Us journalists have watched countless corporate smash-and-grabs completed in broad daylight, bankrupting our friends and colleagues, killing their dreams, and denying the world exposure to their talents. With people like Bari in charge, mediocrity isn’t a dealbreaker; only dissent is. 

Bari will probably never see this. While she’s in a boardroom, I’m in my bedroom typing this out to an audience that's a tiny fraction of hers. She’s Fox Books; I’m Kathleen Kelly. But aside from money and status, what I think most sets us apart is our divergent understandings of what we owe this world.

I don’t believe independent media is the full answer to corporate media’s failures, but the rise in flourishing independent outlets is instructive, showing us that many crave values-driven journalism instead of shareholder-pleasing slop. And while slinging that slop may lead to personal success, it ultimately diminishes the product you create and the legacy you leave behind. But I guess that’s more important to some than others.

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Protesters and ICE agents outside Delaney Hall Wednesday evening. (Marisa Kabas)

Doremus Avenue is a two and half mile stretch in Newark, New Jersey that parallels the Passaic River and Newark Bay. It’s somewhere you’re unlikely to venture unless you have a specific reason, making it an ideal spot to illegally detain and torture immigrants. Standing outside Delaney Hall you’d never know you were just a stone’s throw from New York City, a place in perpetual motion and proudly populated by millions of immigrants.

On Wednesday protesters stood for hours in a line that had been pushed into moving traffic on Doremus while facing ICE agents similarly lined up on the sidewalk. They shouted protest chants and cheered when giant trucks rolled by and honked in support. One driver even yelled out his window “FUCK ICE!” They’d heard about what had happened in Broadview, Dilley, Minneapolis and other towns, and it had finally landed in their own backyard. 

Inside Delaney hall, some 300 people began a hunger and labor strike one week ago in protest of unpaid labor, putrid food, lack of medical care and unjust detention. Supporters have held strong outside ever since, attempting to block vehicles from leaving with detainees and handing out snacks, water and personal protective equipment to shield them from chemical irritants used by ICE. Some are there simply bearing witness.

Shadows of bodies in darkened windows and phone calls are the only signs of life inside, with visitation shut down last weekend. The supporters have been a combination of family of loved ones participating in the strike—like Gabriela Soto, wife of detainee Martin Soto—community organizers, elected officials and regular local folks who’ve seen this story play out in other towns and are committed to stopping it here. 

Now we’ve learned that ICE agents within Delaney have begun physically retaliating against the hunger strikers: Outside in clear view of cameras, they’ve taken to physically attacking protesters and journalists, pushing one into the wheel of a moving truck and smashing a camera. What’s emerged in Newark is a new front in the battle against Donald Trump’s vicious and deadly immigration policy, and a strong sign that the campaign to abolish and prosecute ICE is alive and well.

Congressman Jerry Nadler, activists, and press. (Marisa Kabas)

I went to observe the resistance myself for several hours on Wednesday. When I first arrived, New York Democratic Congressmen Jerry Nadler and Dan Goldman were finishing up speaking with a gaggle of reporters after a visit inside Delaney where they reported awful conditions. Other elected officials have visited in the past week, most notably Senator Andy Kim (D-NJ) who himself was pepper sprayed by agents. Democratic electeds from New Jersey like Senator Cory Booker and Congressmen Robert Menendez Jr. and Frank Pallone got a look inside. According to a video from Rep. Pallone posted Thursday, a detainee suffered a miscarriage inside Delaney and was transferred out. When NJ Governor Mikie Sherrill attempted to enter earlier in the week, she was denied. She hasn’t tried again since.

I just spoke with Sister Sharon of the Sisters of St. Joseph in Philly. She drove straight from the ICE prison there where she was doing a weekly prayer session to Delaney Hall to support the hunger strikers. This is what she had to say:

— Marisa Kabas (@marisakabas.bsky.social)
9:25 PM • May 27, 2026

While there were a few minor tussles over the hours I was there, the activity I witnessed was relatively tame. A man in a giraffe costume who’s become a mainstay at protests at anti-ICE protests across the country sang crude parody songs, and at one point someone blasted Let It Go from Frozen through a portable speaker directly in front of the agents. Someone who I was told was a right wing streamer stood directly in front of the agents with his back towards them and filmed the crowd, hoping to get a rise out of them. 

But shortly after I left, a livestream showed agents shooting pepper balls and getting physical with protesters. Just after midnight, an ICE agent was seen pushing a protester wearing all black into a slow-moving 18-wheeler going by.

Instagram post

In the stream you could see his leg was run over. While it appeared that agents pinned him down and whisked him away moments later, photographer Will Allen-DuPraw who has been on the scene all week on assignment for independent media outlet Status Coup News and who I met while I was out there witnessed the incident and said he believed it was actually another protester similarly dressed in all black who was pinned down and removed. He did confirm to me that an ICE agent made a “running start” and “kicked them,” which “directly pushed [the protester] into the moving truck behind them.”

While The Handbasket has been unable to independently verify any information about the protester’s condition or whereabouts, Allen-DuPraw told me he received a Instagram message from a person purporting to be a friend of the person whose leg was run over, saying: “By some fucking miracle, they were fine. Just bruised up. Their foot did go under the wheel, but nothing was broken.” ICE has not replied to an email I sent asking about the incident. 

An ICE agent guards Delaney Hall. (Marisa Kabas)

Thursday night the violence picked up again, with independent journalist Amanda Moore reporting on Bluesky at 11:09pm: “ICE is targeting journalists at Delaney Hall. They’re hitting photographers, breaking fingers and smashing off lenses.”

A news personality who goes by King Trivv on Instagram was there documenting the violence and posted a video of himself appearing bruised and saying “I'm going to the hospital, but I was strangled. I was hit in the face. I was thrown to the ground. I was OC sprayed. I was dragged.”

Photojournalist Mostafa Bassim posted to his Instagram story Thursday night that an ICE agent “hit my camera with his baton using full force,” despite him being clearly identified as press. 

Allen-Dupraw said he saw the destruction of Bassim’s camera as ICE agents deliberately trying to “break the tools we’re using as journalists to show what’s happening here.”

Underneath all the violence outside of Delaney is the intense violence inside being perpetrated against those being forced to work for little to no money, served spoiled food, and kept incarcerated despite a vast majority never committing a crime. 

As a reminder, these are the strikers’ demands, via a press release by Eyes on ICE New Jersey:

NJ.com reporter Daysi Calavia-Robertson was able to meet with hunger striker Martin Soto this week after he was secretly transferred out of Delaney Monday night. He’s now being held in solitary at Elizabeth Detention Center, a regular state jail 20 minutes south. Calavia-Robertson reports that Martin has purple and yellow bruises on his right arm, swelling on his wrist and scrapes on his ankles. “My chest is hurting, too,” he told her in Spanish. “It’s probably from the heavy chain they wrapped around my body, from its weight, or maybe from all the movements, from them shoving me into that car to bring me here.”

The wife of another detainee reported Thursday that she got a call from her husband “screaming,” with other detainees in the background screaming, too, “because they were getting hit” for trying to stop the guards from taking away the one detainee who had been translating from Spanish to English for them. He called back later to say the guards were cleaning up the blood on the floor, “because they know they messed up.”

Instagram post

Despite these very real and urgent testimonials, in a brief press conference in another part of the state Friday afternoon, Governor Sherrill didn’t seem to have any concrete plans for how she plans to address the strikers’ demands. Instead, she announced a number of measures being implemented to control and contain protesters’ movements, like establishing a "peaceful protected protest zone” located “very close” to Delaney Hall. 

Sherrill and other statewide officials at the press conference confirmed a "roadway diversion" has been set up, limiting traffic on the road where the facility is located "to protect those assembled." Sherrill specifically referenced the protester whose leg was run over on Wednesday by oncoming traffic as a reason for limiting traffic, but didn’t acknowledge how that person ended up under the truck’s wheel.

As independent reporter Talia Ben-Ora pointed out, “the ‘protest’ is a direct blockade of the ICE entrance. Establishing a separate ‘zone’ negates the protest, helping clear the path for ICE. Sherrill is assisting ICE operations.”

DHS secretary Markwayne Mullin went on Fox News Thursday morning and clarified that Delaney Hall “isn’t a Holiday Inn.” His glib comment was bad enough, especially in light of the prisoners’ abusive conditions and malnutrition. But the most chilling part of his remarks was this: “We’re meeting the calorie standard.” You know who else used calorie restrictions as a weapon against prisoners? The Nazis.

I reached out to DHS to ask if they have a documented calorie standard, and if maggots—which have reportedly been found inside food at Delaney—count towards the daily total. I have not yet received a response.

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Photo by Anson Tong

MARISA KABAS, THE HANDBASKET: How did it feel waking up this morning?

KAT ABUGHAZALEH: I had to get up at like 5am to go on Morning Joe, but I woke up and I was like, oh yeah, I don't have to go to trial this week—which is not a statement I thought I'd have to say ever in my life.

KABAS: Walk us through what you thought the next week or so was supposed to be like before yesterday’s hearing.

ABUGHAZALEH: I was supposed to have not just trial prep with my lawyers, but having to get my clothes dry cleaned. Going to get a manicure because my nails always always look awful. I spent way too long at a Nordstrom Rack picking out shoes that I thought looked fashionable but also modest and wouldn't make jurors think I was a bitch. On Tuesday we were supposed to have jury selection. On Wednesday we were supposed to have opening arguments, which is a shame that we don't get to hear our lawyers spit absolute fire. But yeah, it's nice not to do it in the first place.

KABAS: Absolutely. So what do you think you're gonna do instead?

ABUGHAZALEH: I have a 12-hour live stream tomorrow to raise money for our legal funds because, despite not having to go to trial, we're still picking up the pieces of our lives both emotionally and financially. Every single one of us as co-defendants, we have very real fears of bankruptcy and being in debt for the rest of our lives because of this. And then, I don't know, sleep a bunch. Get my passport renewed, something that I couldn't do for the last seven months. I couldn’t even go to Alaska.

KABAS: Are you serious? Could you go to Hawaii?

ABUGHAZALEH: No, just the lower 48. Couldn't even go to Puerto Rico.

KABAS: So this has really restricted your movement as a human being for the last seven months.

ABUGHAZALEH: Yeah, and it's something that's really scary, especially as the government gets more and more aggressive, just being like, oh, you're stuck here no matter what happens.

“Kat” Abughazaleh speaking after today’s crazy developments in the “Broadview 6” case

— Jason Meisner (@jmetr22b.bsky.social)
6:47 PM • May 21, 2026

KABAS: So when did you get a sense that things might be changing this week?

ABUGHAZALEH: So we've been requesting to see the grand jury transcripts or just have the judge look at them for months. And ahead of trial Chris Parente—Brian Straw's lawyer—just asked the judge, “Can you just look at the unredacted version?” And her understanding was that the redactions were referring to some IT issues, and the prosecution had never corrected her. So she looked at the unredacted transcript and then called a hearing the next morning. And it was sealed. Now the transcript is public. 

She was saying “I'm not sure that the charge will get dismissed without prejudice because there's not a lot of precedent for that, especially for a misdemeanor.” And then we broke for an hour for the government to talk it over, and then they came in. I remember one of my lawyers looking at me as one of the government’s lawyers [Andrew Boutros] started talking, and she just turns to me and says, “Congratulations.” And I went, “What?” And then Boutros said, “dismissed with prejudice.” [Meaning the case was permanently closed.]  And it was just surreal. Absolutely surreal.

KABAS: Did you have a sense of where things were heading or were you totally shocked by the outcome?

ABUGHAZALEH: I truly did not think it would get dismissed yesterday. I did not want to get my hopes up. I thought that we were going to trial for sure, just because it's very unusual to try a federal misdemeanor. I knew we would win in that case, but I was completely shocked.

KABAS: How do you think this will change or impact anti-ICE protests and prosecutions in the future?

ABUGHAZALEH: I hope that it does have impact. It was meant to intimidate us into silence, and none of us took a deal. None of us sold each other out (not that there was anything to sell each other out on.) But, you know, we were charged with conspiracy. We were facing like 10 years in prison. 

KABAS: How's Ben feeling about all this? [Ben Collins, CEO of The Onion, is Abughazaleh’s partner and has been with her through this whole experience. He’s also a friend of The Handbasket.]

ABUGHAZALEH: He's feeling good! The hearing was so sudden. He was out of town and he's been at everything—every single hearing—and I was like, you don't have to fly in early because it's not gonna get dismissed. And then it just happened, and he changed his flight to make sure he could be here to celebrate with me. 

It's been really stressful for both of us. It's been really scary. I mean, I'm sure you get this, harassment from weird right wing weirdos. It's always easier when it's happening to you, as opposed to when it's happening to someone you love. And Ben's had to be doing that double time. Not just with the case, but also the campaign. For the first time in over a year, I got to wake up and not worry about jail or a national campaign—and neither did Ben.

KABAS: Yea, Ben posted something on Bluesky about how hard this has been on both of you and your families and just your whole circle. Were there any specific threats or situations that particularly worried you?

ABUGHAZALEH: When I got thrown really hard by that ICE agent, which was like the 3rd time it had happened, it went super viral; I think because of the noise that it made when my body hit the pavement. DHS was posting about me after. That was really scary. It was scary for my parents, it was scary for me. We were all considering staying in hotels. There's been weird shit in our inboxes, in our physical mail. The right has a bloodlust to imprison dissenters. Once you're a target of the right, as you know, you never really stop.

KABAS: So you were running a national campaign at the same time that you were fearing possibly being convicted and going to prison. What was that experience like?

ABUGHAZALEH: It was awful because we're also trying to balance going to court. There were some big campaign things that I couldn't go to because I had to be in a courtroom or I had to be booked by the FBI. And there was also the financial question of—you know, we raised a lot of money through the campaign for our legal fees, but it ended up not being enough. And it was so stressful and my staff was unbelievably kind and flexible and good at their jobs. When we launched our campaign, a lot of people didn't think we could even break 5% and I believe we beat five elected officials, got closer to first place than second, and it took an indictment, AIPAC money, weird backroom fuckery, and a dark money influencer scheme to beat us. And there's a sense of satisfaction in that.

KABAS: You mentioned that you raised money but it wasn't enough. How much did the legal fees end up costing overall?

ABUGHAZALEH: We're looking at about at max of $250,000—that is with both Andre's and my legal teams working at a reduced rate. That also includes personal debt accrued from financial decisions, like I am not paying off this debt so that way I can pay legal fees. Then if there's anything left over, because now the calculus is different with no trial, we will be donating it to the National Lawyers Guild.

KABAS: How much money do you have to raise to break even?

ABUGHAZALEH: Another $90k. But I'm just grateful for all the support we've gotten. I'm absolutely blown away. [Editor’s note: Abughazaleh said on Sunday that between the fundaising livestream and GoFundMe donations, they were only about $30k away from goal.]

FUCK ICE NOW AND FOREVER

— Kat Abughazaleh (@katmabu.bsky.social)
7:08 PM • May 21, 2026

KABAS: So where does one go from here?

ABUGHAZALEH: That's a really great question. Andre and I have, along with two other of our campaign staffers, started this organization Kapow, where we're helping integrate mutual aid and direct action into politics. And it's been kind of a bummer because we’ve wanted to be all in but haven't been able to because we had to fundraise instead for our legal fees and focus on trial prep. So we're really excited to get into that, but really, this case isn't over. We still have so much to learn about misconduct from the prosecutors. We still have so much to learn about what happened behind closed doors. We are going to pursue any avenue we have to recuperate legal costs, but that's a very long, difficult, and definitely not guaranteed process.

In the meantime, I'm gonna take some time to like, be a person again. And by some time I mean like 3 days because I still have to work to live and pay off debt. Every single one of us co-defendants have had different and similar traumas when it comes to this case. And we have to pick up the pieces of our lives that the government broke.

KABAS: Would you ever run for office again?

ABUGHAZALEH: I have no idea. I used to just be like, no, but then it was a huge bummer for a bunch of people, and I don't know. The reason I ran was because I felt like our leaders were failing. Maybe something will change and they'll stop failing us. That would be really cool. So for now I just say I don't know. Also it's fun when you wanna make people scared of you running for office again.

KABAS: Say more about that.

ABUGHAZALEH: There's a rumor right now that I'm gonna run for mayor of Chicago, and I think it's the funniest thing in the world. I've never told anyone that in my life. And I'm like, why would I do that? But it's like something that I've heard from people who really hate me and they're terrified about it.

KABAS: At this point your existence is a threat.

ABUGHAZALEH: Right, and so might as well just leave the door open. Maybe I mean it, maybe I don't. But if it makes them sweat, sure. Maybe.

[Ex-Google CEO Eric Schmidt while being booed]

Jonah Peretti is very lucky. Buzzfeed—the viral media company he founded 20 years ago and was once valued at $1.6 billion—was running out of cash when billionaire Byron Allen agreed to buy 52% of its shares. At the same time this new partnership was revealed, Peretti announced he’d be stepping down as CEO of Buzzfeed to serve in a new role as President of Buzzfeed AI. So Allen will continue to bankroll the former media titan’s obsession, as he promises (without evidence) that AI will right the ship. Lucky, to be sure, but also part of the mass delusion that AI is not just worth our money, but owed our respect. 

Lately I’ve felt myself rapidly radicalizing into what I can only call an anti-AI evangelist. I’ve never been quiet about my feelings on the subject—I even wrote a screed about it last month—but as more and more examples show how easily it can be used unethically, I’m not just skeptical. I'm against it. 

I wouldn’t call this a particularly bold stance, given the front page of today’s Wall Street Journal declares an “AI Rebellion,” noting that public opinion on the subject is souring “at breakneck speed.” What is novel, I think, is recognizing that people who loathe AI and the way it’s being foisted upon society are an actual constituency to be taken seriously. I figure that if billionaires and brands are going to try to beat us into AI submission, it’s only fair we get to take a few swings. We’re told that if we don’t use AI then we’ll get left behind, but what if we’d like to leave the AI boosters behind instead? It’s time to give a voice to those who don’t view AI as an inevitability but a liability. 

Now is our time. 

The soundtrack of the past week or so has been the boos of graduating college students as out-of-touch adults try to tell them that they need to embrace AI or else. Perhaps most prominent were the boos of University of Arizona graduates as ex-Google CEO Eric Schmidt told them, “The question is not whether AI will shape the world. It will. The question is whether you will help shape artificial intelligence.” 

These grads, according to Schmidt, have no agency, which was confirmed by this comment a few minutes later: “When someone offers you a seat on the rocket ship, you do not ask which seat. You just get on, Graduates, the rocket ship is here.” What Schmidt doesn’t get is that these young people have already been forced onto the ship and there aren’t enough seats.

A few days before Schmidt, record company CEO Scott Borchetta took the stage at Middle Tennessee State University’s commencement to extoll the virtues of AI. When the students, whose job prospects have shrunken significantly because of the AI bubble, booed Borchetta, he shot back: “Deal with it. Like I said, it’s a tool.”

Sage words from a man reportedly worth $450 million.

AI is the lynchpin of the whole political project. It’s the container for the parallel governance they have promised each other. I truly think that they are surprised that people don’t like it…and that they can’t yet wholesale punish everyone for not liking them.

— Tressie McMillan Cottom (@tressiemcphd.bsky.social)
9:11 PM • May 19, 2026

It may seem callous for a commencement speaker to respond to graduates’ existential dread with “deal with it,” but billionaires and tech companies have been feeding us this message for a while now. You may not like AI, they preach, but because of choices we are making for you, life will be increasingly unlivable without it. Yet while they try to force-feed us this bleakly inevitable future, actually existing AI keeps making the humans who use it look like idiots.

On Tuesday, the New York Times reported on a new book called “The Future of Truth: How AI Reshapes Reality,” by media executive Steven Rosenbaum. He readily copped to having “used AI tools ChatGPT and Claude during the research, writing and editing process.” But he didn’t disclose—likely because he didn’t realize it!— that his book contained misattributed or completely fabricated quotes created by those very tools. Only when reporters began to question the quotes did Rosenbaum promise to “investigate” how they’d been included. 

But Rosenbaum was unrepentant. He told the Times that if this debacle “serves as a warning about the risks of AI-assisted research and verification, that is why I wrote the book.” And he went on to say: “These AI errors do not, in fact, diminish the larger questions that the book raises about truth, trust and AI and its impact on society, democracy and editorial.”

Ronsebaum’s big whoopsie is certainly a warning, but not in the way he thinks. He himself is the warning; a cautionary tale about relying so heavily on a flawed technology that it completely undermines your legitimacy. The errors may not diminish some of the book’s larger questions, but they diminish the value of the book itself. If you can’t make the effort to verify the contents of your book, then why should anyone make an effort to read it?

Two other literary AI-crises unfolded Tuesday. Coincidence? Perhaps. But also potentially a sign that AI use has reached the critical mass billionaires hoped for. Only, instead of making things better, it’s just made them stupider. 

One of the crises involved the Commonwealth Short Story Prize, a prestigious annual fiction award, and the winning stories. When this year’s winners were published online by UK-based literary magazine Granta, one immediately aroused suspicion that it was partly AI-generated. Some, perhaps to sardonically prove a point, ran it through AI that claims to detect the presence of AI. Later, Granta’s publisher admitted to doing the same thing. “We showed Claude.ai the story and asked whether it was AI-generated,” the statement reads. “The response was long, concluding that it was ‘almost certainly not produced unaided by a human’.”

But the use of AI on AI only caused more confusion. “It may be that the judges have now awarded a prize to an instance of AI plagiarism – we don’t yet know, and perhaps we never will know,” the publisher wrote. For a well-respected publisher to simply throw up its hands and say “perhaps we never will know,” deeply rankled some human writers, to say the least. 

my gf works corporate and is on a training about AI and there's a word cloud for "what do you use AI for." the largest word by far is "Nothing" and the trainer is PISSED

— jesse, dramatically changing display name (@killgoldfish.bsky.social)
4:54 PM • May 19, 2026

The other scandal surrounded Nobel laureate Olga Tokarczuk’s admission that she used AI in her writing process, clarifying that she uses “artificial intelligence on the same principles as most people in the world – I treat it as a tool that allows faster documenting and checking of facts.” The casualness with which she mentioned it during an earlier interview indicated she wasn’t particularly tortured about using it. 

“Often I just ask the machine, ‘darling, how could we develop this beautifully?’” Tokarczuk reportedly said, per a translation from Polish. “Even though I know about hallucinations and many factual errors in the algorithms in terms of economics and hard data, I have to add that in literary fiction this technology is an advantage of unbelievable proportion.” 

This brings up the idea I’ve seen pushed by other writers who openly used AI and say this technology is merely like a sourdough starter, creating the conditions for something to be made where there was once nothing. The problem arises when you don’t know where the starter ends and the creative process begins. And can anything truly novel be created by a technology that feeds on what already exists?

[Image from a 2025 Nature magazine study that was retracted in part because of this “AI-generated figure containing nonsense to demonstrate the framework.”]

To understand the crusade for, and increasingly against, AI, one must regrettably log into LinkedIn. Originally known as a social media platform for job searching and professional networking, it’s morphed primarily into a place where tech evangelists assert supremacy by loudly and frequently listing out the ways they harness technology to achieve peak performance. None of the posts read like something an actual human would say, and I would guess the people posting this shit don’t talk like that in real life. But it’s not real life. It’s LinkedIn. A haven for sycophants to gain validation for their originality all while saying the same things as everyone else. Typically I scroll through for amusement, and sometimes post to promote my 100% human-made work.

While LinkedIn may seem like an impenetrable space for AI skeptics and outright haters like me, my passive scrolling has somewhat confirmed what the WSJ labeled a “rebellion.” One trend I noticed a month or two back is that marketing professionals, TED talkers and communications gurus alike have started calling out what they see as easy tells for AI-generated writing. 

At first, I took it as a hopeful sign that AI use wasn’t going completely unchecked. After all, according to a Pew study from September, “U.S. adults are generally pessimistic about AI’s effect on people’s ability to think creatively and form meaningful relationships,” with 53% saying AI will make it worse, and 16% saying it will both of those things better. But after reading enough of these posts, I came to realize people on LinkedIn weren’t mad others were using AI; they were mad people were being so sloppy about it, not even bothering to massage the machine’s language to conceal their process.

And of course with most trends, there’s a backlash to people calling out AI. One defender called the popular groundswell against AI slop “the new McCarthyism.” Some of these posts about AI policing are imbued with a sense of outright betrayal. How dare you draw attention to an unethical shortcut that we all use, even if some of us are better at using it than others. How dare you let people see your writing is actually just two LLMs in a trench coat. Again they’re not mad that people use it: they’re mad that people are catching on.

But while I took mental notes on what I was observing, I also felt a lack of representation for true, profound, and guttural loathing of AI. The people like me who have only the vaguest idea of what defines AI, but extremely specific examples of why it sucks. I’m not a hater based on vibes. I’m a hater based on facts. And those facts deserve as much respect as the billionaires who continue to dump money into losing enterprises.

Just ask Pizza Hut. 

[My new and improved LinkedIn header]

A not-insignificant part of my frustration with the AI ethos saturating LinkedIn is that it increasingly serves only one, narrow vision of success. It’s the success that comes only to the organized, the efficient and the hyper-optimized. And above all, to the deeply certain.

But as someone who’s built a business myself, the one thing I can be certain about is that there is absolutely another way. You don’t have to be part of the grindset or be a girlboss or a sociopath or use shortcuts to be successful. You don’t have to outsource thinking to a machine to demonstrate you understand the future. You will only be and do those things if what you’re actually seeking is power. 

“People hate AI,” the CEO of an AI-infrastructure consulting firm said on a podcast, per the Wall Street Journal. “AI is less popular than ICE. AI is less popular than politicians.” And much like ICE, AI has sunk its claws into communities that don’t want it. 

Despite the braying of the tech elite, we still have agency. We still have a choice.  Players with many billions at stake have a vested interest in removing your agency, and reclaiming it hurts their bottom line. There’s no way to say for certain who will be right about AI in the end, but the current evidence points towards disaster. And it’s safe to acknowledge it.

This story was edited by Jesse Hicks.

This is a guest post written and reported by Solomon Crenshaw Jr.

Crossing the Edmund Pettus Bridge, May 16, 2026. (Photo by Solomon Crenshaw Jr.)

Drive from Birmingham to Selma on Alabama’s Highway 22 and you’ll certainly pass Selma Roots, a family-owned “purchase with a purpose” mission thrift store on Citizens Parkway. A subtle curve puts you on Broad Street and brings you to the Edmund Pettus Bridge, site of the Bloody Sunday event that put Selma on the map for civil rights.

Over the years many have sojourned to Selma, traveling that road to commemorate the activists pursuing their right to vote who were brutally beaten by Alabama law enforcement. Visitors new and old were on that road Saturday to connect to the roots of the Civil Rights Movement as they rallied in protest of the state government’s attempt to eliminate at least one of the two majority-Black congressional districts. The “All Roads Lead To the South National Day Of Action For Voting Rights” spanned several hours and two Alabama cities, a throwback to the rallies and marches of the 1960s that preceded the hard-fought US Supreme Court rulings that resulted in increased civil rights. And it comes in the aftermath of a modern high court decision that seeks to take some of them away.

The theme of the day—from a moving hour of prayer at Selma’s Tabernacle Baptist Church, to a march from the church to cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge, to the four-hour rally in front of the State Capitol in Montgomery—was clear: We’ve been down this road before. And for some, quite literally.

Samuel Coleman was 14 years old on Bloody Sunday, March 7, 1965. He was in the back of the line to cross the bridge, unaware of the savage brutality that was being inflicted on civil rights activists just ahead, including John Lewis and Hosea Williams.

“I was not in the front of the line, but my mother, my two sisters and myself, we were in line,” recalled Coleman, now a 77-year-old deacon at Selma’s Tabernacle Baptist which was part of the Saturday’s events. “We didn't have any cell phones or anything, so we didn't know what was happening across the bridge. We found out what was going on [when] we saw people running.”

Saturday, Coleman doled out bottles of water for those outside the church. He said this renewed fight for justice is like a frightening physical diagnosis.

“It's almost, I would say, like cancer reoccurring, where you have to go back all over again with the hope that the cancer would go away a second time,” he said.

The cool conditions outside Saturday morning in Selma stood in contrast to the emotional temperature that was rising inside Tabernacle Baptist. This was not the heat of anger or hatred; This was the emotional fervor that rose as the Rev. Leodis Strong, pastor of Brown Chapel AME Church, ignited the hearts of the activists who filled the pews at Tabernacle.

“Now Lord, we face a moment in this fight where some would rather destroy democracy itself than share democracy with us by allowing us to participate,” Strong prayed. “In faith, we turn our hearts to the truth, to the one who carried us through nights like this before.”

“We are not defeated, we are not hopeless because your mercy, your mercies are new every day,” he continued. “Pour out your compassion on Selma, on Montgomery, on America, as we walk towards the bridge over the Alabama River. Continue to be our bridge over all troubled waters.”

Annie Pearl Avery, an attendee in Selma. (Photo by Solomon Crenshaw Jr.)

After the Supreme Court ruled on April 29th by a 6–3 vote that Louisiana had relied too heavily on race in creating a second Black-majority congressional district, Alabama officials moved quickly to try to undo Alabama’s own court-ordered second Black-opportunity district.

Republican Governor Kay Ivey, who is white, called a special legislative session so lawmakers could revisit congressional district lines. The Republican-controlled Alabama Legislature then passed bills preparing for possible special elections and new congressional maps.

At the same time, Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall and Secretary of State Wes Allen—both Republicans—filed emergency motions asking courts to lift previous rulings that had forced Alabama to use a map with two districts where Black voters could elect their preferred candidates. They argued that the Supreme Court’s Louisiana ruling changed the legal standard for Voting Rights Act cases and meant Alabama should be allowed to revert to its previous map with only one majority-Black district. The Supreme Court later agreed to halt the lower court order decision that had required Alabama to keep using the two-district map through 2030. That opened the door for Alabama to redraw its congressional districts again before the 2026 midterm elections.

Supporters of the move said Alabama lawmakers were reclaiming authority over redistricting and complying with the Court’s newer interpretation of the Constitution. Critics, including voting-rights groups and Democratic leaders at Saturday’s Alabama events, said the actions weakened Black voting power and undermined protections in the Voting Rights Act.

The scene in Selma on Saturday was not unlike an old-time revival. And white people—not unlike the Movement of old—were visibly present. The cool of the morning gave way to warmer conditions as activists made their way out of the church. Beads of sweat formed on the heads of many, with Coleman’s bottled water helping fend off the effects of the heat. Two masses at least 100 deep walked about 12 blocks from the church to the bridge.

Annie Pearl Avery, 82, sat in a wheelchair at the bottom of the church steps in Selma on Saturday. The former activist said “we dropped the ball” when it came to protecting the rights for which she and others fought.

“We stopped doing certain things that we needed to do to secure what we have,” she said. “You've got to watch this stuff. You've got to protect it, just like you're protecting a baby. You've got to watch everything, because it'll get away from you real quick.”

As the events shifted about an hour’s drive east to Montgomery, the tenor of the day shifted as well. The tone went from that of an indoor revival to part tent meeting and part pep rally. As in Selma, the masses were the picture of diversity. There were Black people, certainly, but so many white people made it clear where they stood along these battle lines.

The crowd in Montgomery. (Photo by Solomon Crenshaw Jr.)

The crowd grew to thousands and displayed their sentiments with the signs they carried: “No Jim Crow Maps”; “The Ballot Is The New Underground Railroad”; “Honor King, End Racism.” Human rights activist groups like the NAACP, Black Lives Matter, Fair Fight Action, ACLU of Alabama, No Kings, Indivisible, 50501, Children's Defense Fund, Utopia Vision, Working Families Party, Urban League of Alabama, Black Women's Round Table and others showed up to support the cause.

Scores of government and civil leaders paraded to the stage in front of the state capitol building to make statements about the gravity of this moment. The roster of speakers included Senators Cory Booker and Raphael Warnock; Representatives Terri Sewell, Shomari Figures and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez; leader and advocate Bernice A. King, the granddaughter of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.; Montgomery Mayor Steven L. Reed, and more.

“There is no liberation without obligation,” Sen. Booker (D-New Jersey) told the crowd, as the May sun beat down. "If we in our generation do not now do our duty, we will lose the gains and the rights and the liberties that our ancestors afforded us.”

Sen. Warnock (D-Georgia) also a pastor in Atlanta, said his nine and seven-year-old children now have less voter protection than he did growing up at their age. “That makes me angry enough to show up again and again and again and again,” he said. “I know that this is a tough moment. But I dropped by Alabama to tell you that the light shines in the darkness. It's dark, but the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness overcometh not.”

Virginia K. Solomon, president and CEO of Common Cause, disputed the notion that gerrymandering is just politics. “It's not,” she said from the stage. “Bleaching congressional districts and maps in an attempt to silence Black and brown voters is court-sanctioned white supremacy. Let's call it what it is.”

Imara Jones, an American political journalist and transgender activist who created TransLash Media, cited several instances in which Blacks wondered why they were in their circumstances. Then Jones turned the light on today. “We don't quite know why we have to be here again,” Jones said. “But we do know that America wasn't America, and wouldn't be America without us.”

Marion Fintel, a white woman from the Birmingham suburb of Mountain Brook, made her statement in her attire. Standing with her husband Dick Echols, she wore a t-shirt that read, “American Is An Idea.”

“It's our Constitution. It is our Declaration of Independence. It's our form of government. It's freedom,” the 71-year-old told me. “What it's not is people who are all alike. We're all different but what holds us together is our ideals.” Fintel said she believes all people deserve respect—regardless of immigration status—and all have a right to influence our government.

“We’re going backwards,” Fintel said.

Her husband chimed in: “Man, if I had black skin, I would be a lot less happy about things than I am, and I'm not thrilled now.”

The charge given to the thousands who stood in front of the State Capitol was for everyone to go to the polls for primaries—including the one in Alabama tomorrow, Tuesday, May 19th. 

“We will not give up on you,” said Rep. Shomari Figures, whose congressional seat was placed in jeopardy with the recent state action and whose father, a former state senator, went to jail to get the Confederate flag removed from the state capitol. “Thank you guys for not giving up on us. Thank you guys for not giving up on democracy.”

Coleman, the deacon from Selma, said that despite the many battles of the past, he couldn’t miss being part of the latest struggle. Especially as he thinks about the continued struggle that will be faced by his children and grandchildren and even his great-grandchildren.

“I think a lot of what happened was that somewhere generations failed each other,” Coleman said. “They were not able to tell the other generation what happened back during that time, what we struggled for. Our younger generation just reaps the benefits of what happened years ago. They didn't watch their back.”

While the national focus on Alabama may seem sudden, those who live here know the ingrained history of the Civil Rights Movement has never stopped animating the ongoing fight for justice. For better or worse, Alabama is where it’s expected to be: There has always been a set of folks threatening to reduce the rights of people that are generally of a darker hue, and there has always been a set of folks who stepped up to battle against those threats. There is perhaps nowhere else more equipped for this fight. 

This Friday a three-judge panel will convene in Alabama federal court to decide whether or not to block the new map and preserve the court-ordered map to remain in place until 2030. If the panel chooses not to block it, there will be energy for this fight. That’s the Alabama way.

Solomon Crenshaw Jr. is a Birmingham, Alabama native who is a veteran of 48 years in journalism. The son of a Baptist pastor, he worked 37 years for The Birmingham News and AL.com and now operates under the banner of his business, SCJr. Content Providers, writing stories, snapping photos and shooting videos for various clients. His work spans the gamut of government, sports, features, entertainment and more.

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Image via GLAAD

Ann was at dinner for her adult child’s birthday on Monday when a text alert came through letting her know she had a message in the NYU Langone patient portal. Though her kid was no longer a minor, they still allowed mom to maintain access to their messages from the Transgender Youth Health program to make sure they didn’t miss anything important. Electing to ignore the text, Ann waited til she was back home later that evening to read it. Then she handed her phone to her kid, who was home in New York City on a brief visit from college, so they could read it, too. “I could just watch their face fall,” Ann told me.

When Ann’s kid came out as nonbinary at 14 and expressed a desire to seek gender-affirming care, she was immediately supportive. She spoke to the pediatrician who then referred her to NYU Lagone’s program, and had a call with a doctor and then a social worker to get the process started. “It was surprisingly seamless,” she told The Handbasket. Ann knows she lives in a bubble, and that’s by design to keep her family safe; but that bubble was pierced this week when the hospital sent out a message letting patients who’d received care with the trans youth health program know that a federal court in Texas had issued a criminal subpoena for their private health records. Discouragingly, they didn’t say anything about fighting the subpoena, leaving patients and families terrified and looking to outside officials and organizations for help.

“On May 7, 2026, NYU Langone Hospitals (‘NYULHLH’) was one of several institutions that received a grand jury subpoena from the U.S. Attorney’s Office in the Northern District of Texas,” the message to NYULH patients, which was also posted on their website, reads. “Among other requests, the subpoena directs NYULH to provide information pertaining to patients under the age of 18 who received gender affirming care at NYULH between 2020-2026, as well as the names of NYULH providers and others who were involved in offering such care at NYULH in that timeframe.” The notice said, pursuant to New York’s Shield Law, they were required to notify patients 30 days before complying.

I was first alerted to NYULH’s announcement by Bernadette, whose child received care during the time period specified in the subpoena but is now over 18, and who told me she was “furious” about the notice. “I was in disbelief,” she said. “I was scared for my child's well-being. I was scared for the medical professionals who will support my child's well-being.” When we spoke earlier this week, I asked what she feared most if NYULH were to comply with the subpoena: “That my child's information would become public and it would be a danger to them because there are a lot of intolerant people in the world right now,” she said.

Ann (a pseudonym to protect her family’s privacy) sent an email to NYULH the following morning asking what they planned to do, whether they could quash the subpoena, and how on Earth the Northern District of Texas could have jurisdiction. She received a brief reply that she shared with The Handbasket and that provided her family little comfort. It stated in part, “We understand that news of this subpoena is unsettling to our patients. Please be assured that we take the privacy of your protected health information very seriously. We are evaluating our response to the subpoena with our legal advisors and reviewing all available avenues to protect our patients' information while ensuring that we comply with applicable law.”

As soon as Trump’s second term began last year, he issued an executive order threatening to withhold federal funding from health care providers who provided this type of care. While NYULH didn’t make any immediate changes to its offerings, like access to hormone blockers and hormone therapy, patients and families started noticing a decline in services. The parents of two NYULH patients shared with the New York Times that in the immediate aftermath of Trump’s EO, they had their appointments canceled, with one doctor reportedly citing “the new administration” as the reason.

Bernadette (also a pseudonym) tried to schedule surgery for her child a few weeks prior in early January 2025, and at first someone at NYULH said yes to moving forward with scheduling. But after Trump’s inauguration it was radio silence, leaving Bernadette to call relentlessly with no idea if the surgery could move forward. 

“Then finally, after me hounding them over and over, I finally got someone on the phone who said they're no longer doing the surgery,” she said. 

Bernadette told The Handbasket that her child wanted gender-affirming surgery before heading off to college “so they would have a clean slate.” She explained that surgeons book up months and months in advance, “so them delaying getting back to me by a few months was also delaying our chance of scheduling a surgery and having our child have time to heal before college.”

Fortunately Bernadette was able to get her child an appointment with a private surgeon elsewhere and the surgery was completed before college started. But not before creating unnecessary stress and denying her kid care that just a few months earlier they’d been guaranteed.

NYULH eventually announced in February this year that they’d be ceasing all gender-affirming care for minors. (Now when you visit the page for Gender & Sexuality, the only offerings are mental health-related.) A few days later, an official in New York Attorney General Letitia James’ office sent a letter to NYULH demanding they resume their trans youth care, giving them 10 days to comply. But there was never any compliance before the criminal subpoena was issued to NYULH on May 7th. 

“The sudden discontinuation of medically necessary transgender healthcare can have severe, negative health outcomes,” the letter stated “Accordingly, the Attorney General is extremely concerned by your institution’s decision to cease the provision of care to this vulnerable, minority population…New York state laws prohibit discrimination based on a patient’s membership in a protected class, including sex, gender identity, and disability, and remain in full effect.”

But when I reached James’ spokesperson earlier this week, her office took a noticeably more cautious tone: “New York has strong protections in place to protect the privacy of patient records. Every health care institution in New York should seek to protect both patients and providers.”

The same day NYULH announced they’d be ending trans youth care, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s administration released its preliminary $127 billion budget for fiscal year 2027. While running for office last year, Mamdani pledged to invest $65 million “in public providers to provide gender-affirming care to New Yorkers who seek it and will hold private entities abetting Trump’s attacks to account.” This pledge is not specifically reflected in the proposed budget, though experts told Prism in March that it doesn’t necessarily mean the funding won’t come through in the final budget. On April 30th, a coalition of LGBTQ+ groups gathered at City Hall to put pressure on Mamdani to keep his campaign promise. 

“Community led partners…have always been central to responding to the longstanding disparities and exigent crises facing LGBTQIA+ people," Taylor Brown, head of Mamdani’s new LGBTQIA+ Affairs Office and the first trans person to lead a city agency, said in a statement to Them in response to the rally. "They understand the issues, they have and continue to provide solutions, and the Office of LGBTQIA+ Affairs proudly stands with them in this ask to the City Council, to ensure that their work protecting some of the most vulnerable populations in NYC continues."

But in the days since news of the NYULH subpoena broke, Mamdani’s office has remained mum. Multiple requests for comment from The Handbasket to multiple members of his administration went unanswered. 

Manhattan Borough President Brad Hoylman-Siegel attended a rally outside City Hall Wednesday morning where protesters urged NYULH not to comply. “I urge every provider to fight these subpoenas,” he said, according to The Advocate. “Every hospital in New York regards patient privacy as sacrosanct. Otherwise, no patient could feel comfortable walking through their doors.”

Though NYULH isn’t the first hospital to be subpoenaed, it’s the first to get a criminal subpoena—meaning potential criminal charges for practitioners involved. Last year, Boston Children’s Hospital received a civil subpoena to provide the Department of Justice with information about minor patients who received gender-affirming care; in September, a judge blocked it. Rhode Island Hospital received a similar subpoena last July “seeking over half a decade of sensitive medical information of every minor patient that had received gender affirming care at that hospital”; that, too, was blocked by a judge this week. 

In her opinion, Trump appointee Mary McElroy excoriated the DOJ’s attempts to access Rhode Islanders’ private health care information, addressed DOJ’s decision to do so from a more favorable venue in Texas—the same one that issued the NYULH subpoena—and called the quashing of the subpoena warranted for reasons of “bad” faith and 14th amendment privacy violations.

“Ultimately, the Court’s decision is based solely on its application of the law to the administrative subpoena at issue here,” McElroy wrote. “But the discrepancy between the honorable conduct expected of federal prosecutors and DOJ’s tactics in this case is unsettling. The Court cannot help but share the sentiment that ‘[t]he presumption of regularity that has previously been extended to [DOJ] that it could be taken at its word—with little doubt about its intentions and stated purposes—no longer holds,’” she wrote, quoting United States v. Oregon.

How NYULH will respond to its subpoena remains to be seen. When reached for comment, General Counsel Annette Johnson directed me to their website.

Bernadette has been in touch with PFLAG NYC (Parents, Families & Friends of LGBTQ+ People) as well as David Siffert, a nonbinary candidate running for state assembly, about efforts to protect kids from the subpoena. She was also told Chase Strangio of the ACLU was handling the organization’s effort to push back against it. For the moment though, the families are forced to wait with anxiety as the 30-day window to potential compliance ticks by.

The news of this subpoena comes amidst a major exodus of trans people across the country fleeing oppressive policies in conservative states that are fundamentally hostile to their human rights. A study released in January by The Movement Advancement Project (MAP) with NORC at the University of Chicago found that an estimated 400,000 trans people in America relocated between November 2024 and June 2025 because of these policies. As I wrote about back in February, one such example is the Kansas law that invalidated the drivers license of anyone who had ever changed their gender marker with the DMV. That law is just one of too many.

Much like Ann, Bernadette also said she felt like she and her family lived in a protective bubble—until now. “There is this feeling that if this bubble bursts, there's nowhere else to go. We would have to leave the country.”

Ann feels her child is mostly safe, partly because they’re no longer a minor. “But what about the other kids?” she asked. “What about the other families? What about the people who can't find a way to make their child safe?”

Depending on your interests, you either know Sean Duffy as one of the housemates on Real World: Boston, or as a Republican politician who was previously a Wisconsin congressman and now serves as Trump’s secretary of transportation. Last week we learned those two claims to fame have converged in a project called The Great American Road Trip, a Youtube reality series filmed over seven months that follows Duffy, his wife and Fox News personality Rachel Campos-Duffy, and their nine children as they traverse the country by car—all while American taxpayers paid his salary.

The show (which documents published by Politico is referred to internally by the entity producing it as GART) comes in time for the celebration of America’s 250th birthday, something for which the Trump administration has been planning garish celebrations and inartful branding. Per the trailer released by the US Department of Transportation, GART has everything: a Benjamin Franklin impersonator; Kid Rock; an original theme song; a pregnancy gender reveal; cliches about car travel; a kid getting a CAT scan. We’ve also learned the endeavor was sponsored by United Airlines, Toyota Motor Corporation, Boeing, Royal Caribbean, and Enterprise, and now watchdogs are calling for an ethics investigation. Good old fashioned fun.

While this news is just another notch on the administration’s wildly unethical belt, with gas prices continuing to rise and increased air travel accidents, it still managed to raise eyebrows. So when historian Kevin Kruse suggested an artist “mock up the National Lampoon's Vacation poster, but it's Sean Duffy instead of Chevy Chase and it's nothing but airport crashes and lines for $8 gas in the background,” I loved the idea and put out a call to commission someone to do it. Thankfully, artist Christian Dawson (ZeroAnd09) answered.

Behold Dawson’s “Fascist Vacation”:

Check out “Fascist Vacation” on Instagram here and share it! (You can also view the inspiration here.)

I hope you enjoyed The Handbasket’s first foray into editorial cartoons! Hopefully more to come.

Jane’s parking spot before part of it was painted over

Jane Khan knows what it’s like to have her identity erased in the most literal sense. As part of a years-long tradition for graduating seniors at Half Hollow Hills High School West in Dix Hills, NY, Jane received a designated parking spot in her school’s parking lot. Per the tradition, she personalized the space, painting a watermelon with a keffiyeh, symbols of Palestinian solidarity. But in September 2024, mere weeks into the new school year and without warning, school administrators painted over her design. The move came just days after a photo of the parking space was posted by an angry parent in a pro-Israel group with nearly 60k members. 

After obtaining legal advice and support, Jane and her family filed a lawsuit in March 2025, just two months into the violently chaotic early days of the second Trump administration. This was yet another period of increased fear among the Muslim-American community, when international students were being threatened with deportation simply for voicing support for Palestinians. Still, Jane—a pseudonym used in the lawsuit because she was then a minor—and her lawyers pushed forward. Now they have confirmed to The Handbasket the receipt of a $125,000 settlement check from the school district’s insurer, putting this specific situation to bed. But while Jane and her family can now move forward, the precedent of this settlement, her lawyers predict, could be just the beginning.

“Her friend had texted her like, ‘they're painting over your spot,’ and she sent a picture of it,” Jane’s mother Nighat Malik told The Handbasket. (Coincidentally or not, the incident happened on 9/11 that year.)  “She came in really upset crying, and she just wasn't even able to talk too much. She was shaking. So I immediately called the school.”

Jane’s design included the phrase “peace be upon you,” her name in Arabic, and her nickname. She’d spent two weeks before school began decorating the spot with help from others, including a close Jewish friend and the friend’s mother. 

It also included the watermelon with the keffiyeh print, which the lawsuit notes “has long been a symbol of Palestinian solidarity and pride. Because it contains the same colors as the Palestinian flag, it arose as a symbol to replace display of the flag itself, which was banned by Israel in 1967.” Only the keffiyeh-print watermelon was painted over. 

Malik, Jane’s mother, says the principal even commented that he thought the art was great when he first saw it. But she says when she spoke to him the day it was painted over, the principal told her it was beyond his control. He attributed the decision to then-Superintendent Dr. Patrick Harrigan. (Harrigan resigned from his job two weeks later after 20 years in the district to take a less powerful job in a smaller district for significantly less money. He was recently named the incoming Superintendent of Patchogue-Medford School District.) 

A school board meeting the following Monday drew a large audience, with members of the local Muslim community speaking in support of Jane’s artwork. There were also multiple voices in support of the school’s decision. 

Among the crowd was Christina John, a lawyer from the Council on American-Islamic Relations, New York (CAIR-NY) who called the district’s move “a blatant First Amendment violation.” Malik had reached out to the organization and the CAIR-NY team enlisted Brooklyn-based civil rights attorney Andrew Stoll to help represent Jane and her mother. By early 2025, a robust and motivated legal team had assembled to seek justice for Jane.

“Our client and her family were really brave and courageous to say, ‘we believe in this and we have to go forward. And we understand potential risks,’” John told The Handbasket earlier this week. 

In a June hearing with Senior District Judge Kiyo A. Matsumoto of the Eastern District of New York, the defense signaled an early effort to dismiss while Jane’s team made it clear they were ready to go to trial. Judge Matsumoto made it clear during a June hearing that it was her strong recommendation for both parties to reach a settlement.

“At that point [the defense] understood we were gonna get into discovery, and we were gonna get every email and every message and every communication among board members, between board members and the Zionist community, all the lunatic rantings from people across the country reaching out to the school board because they saw something on Facebook,” Stoll told The Handbasket this week.  

With a potentially embarrassing discovery process looming, the district seemed much more willing to settle the case.

So much of the negotiations came down to one word: intended. The then-Superintendent said at the September 16th board meeting that he did not believe Jane intended any offense or hate with her art. But email communications reviewed by The Handbasket show the defense insisted “intended” be included in an official apology, which Jane’s lawyers felt was a result of them wanting to leave the door open for possible action against students in the future. 

“We wanted an unambiguous statement that this is not hateful,” Stoll said. “We needed them to concede that it was not reasonable to ban the watermelon or the keffiyeh.”

In the end, this one word led to the apology being scrapped altogether—and to the defendants asking the plaintiffs to sign a non-disclosure agreement (NDA) related to the entire matter. Ultimately the parties agreed to a final number of $125,000, with no NDA, no apology, and no liability for the defense. 

How the parties came to this agreement and what it says about the First Amendment as applied to speech about Palestine is another story in and of itself. 

Jane’s spot after her work was painted over

Jane was hardly the first student in the district’s two high schools to use her stretch of pavement for a political message. In the past, a student painted a Black Lives Matter fist. Another painted a Pride flag. There were also spots with the American Flag, Italian Flag, and the “Betsy Ross Flag,” which the lawsuit complaint notes is “an early version of the American flag that has been largely adopted as a symbol by extremist, racist movements in the United States.” None of those designs were altered. So why was Jane’s different?

The difference, it seems, was outside attention.

At 10pm on Friday, September 6, 2024, a Facebook user named Leslie Richard posted a photo of Jane’s parking spot to a private group called “Never Forget Jewish Lives Matter.” Along with the image, Richard wrote, to the group’s then 58k members: “This is a painted student parking space in the student lot at the local hs. An individual student painted her spot. Suggestions on how to demand it be removed? For all of my neighbors in this group. Call the superintendent.” 

Malik confirmed that the original post was made by another Half Hollow Hills West parent—one who she’d known peripherally since both of their kids were young.

Debate in the comments quickly ensued, with perspectives pretty evenly split on whether or not Jane’s art constituted a problem.

One commenter wrote: “The watermelon is offensive and does not belong on a mural painted on a parking spot for a graduation [sic] senior. It is a political statement, no different than painting a confederate flag. We all know the implications behind that, this should be treated the same way.”

Another member argued: “This is a personal parking spot and are you going to complain about a Star of David or a Cross? One of the hallmarks that makes this country great is that the first amendment protects our freedom of speech as well as our freedom of expression. This child has the right to express themselves the same way our children do. EVEN if it makes us uncomfortable.”

First thing Monday morning, Jane was called into the principal’s office.

“Without so much as a call to Ms. Khan’s parents, the Principal and another administrator interrogated her in a closed office about the meaning of her artwork and threatened that ‘some action would have to be taken,’” the lawsuit complaint states. “Through tears at her interrogation, Ms. Khan explained her artwork was related to her identity as a Muslim and a person of Pakistani descent; she explained her people’s connection to Palestine, and the cultural significance of the keffiyeh design, and her interest in advocating for Palestine.”

Indeed, Jane’s connections to Palestine were and remain potent. According to her mother, Jane had a Palestinian friend who ended up moving back there. They have a relative whose spouse is Palestinian. And a family friend is a Palestinian refugee living in the US, who’s had 135 family members killed in Israel’s genocide in Gaza. For Malik’s daughter, Palestinian safety and freedom was not a remote, abstract cause, but one very near to her heart. 

“We've seen and experienced firsthand people who are affected,” Malik told me.

Yet the district claimed Jane’s designs was tantamount to hate speech. “Regardless of plaintiff’s intentions, the message imprinted on school property contained an image that either was, or was reasonably interpreted as, an expression of anti-Semitism and support for a terrorist organization,” the school district’s lawyer, Steven C. Stern, wrote. 

Stern continued: “Any student, teacher, or member of the public could have driven into the parking lot and reasonably understood the school was endorsing a political message—or worse, anti-Semitic hate speech—by allowing it. The District must be allowed to regulate a painting like this on its own parking lot.”

To support this reading, the district offered an NPR article titled, “What is a keffiyeh, who wears it, and how did it become a symbol for Palestinians?” Yet far from bolstering their case, the article seemed to undercut it. As Jane’s lawyer’s responded, the gist of the article “is that people wearing the keffiyeh as a symbol of identity or solidarity are unreasonably targeted by violent racists.”  The article describes the shooting of three Palestinian-American men in Vermont who were wearing keffiyehs, and a Brooklyn father being accosted in a park—in front of his 18-month-old child—for wearing one.  

“Defendants’ identification with the article’s murderous bigots driven mad by a keffiyeh is their prerogative,” the response continued. “But where they cave to similar bigotry to suppress Plaintiff’s speech, the First Amendment would like a word.”

All of it put together—the apparent lack of school policy about parking lot designs, the erroneous claim of hate speech—seemed to persuade the judge that Jane had a strong First Amendment case. Settling, she suggested, would be in the best interest of both parties.

“I think that what we have here is a decision by the superintendent and the principal to paint over this parking spot after the superintendent has acknowledged that this was not hate speech,” Judge Matsumoto said during the June hearing, per a court transcript.

“My concern is that the school district has not been neutral, although they claim neutrality,” the judge said at another point. “They have not been neutral on issues that they posted on their website and decisions that they've made. And I think that the viewpoint discrimination is fairly clearly alleged.”

While the defense counsel tried to argue that Jane’s art created “potential disruption” to the school environment, Judge Matsumoto was having none of it. 

“Well, when you permitted parking spaces to be painted with a Pride flag, did you request that opposing viewpoints against gay rights also be displayed? Or when you had a parking spot that said ‘Black Lives Matter,’ did you also have an opposing viewpoint for that?” the judge asked. “I don't think that the school board, frankly, or the school can have it both ways in terms of the viewpoint discrimination that is alleged here adequately, in my view.”

In October of last year, settlement talks began in earnest, with both parties agreeing that it would include both a public, written apology to Jane from the district as well as a monetary sum. After a few months of going back and forth on the language, in late January of this year the two parties agreed on a final version of a public statement that satisfactorily recognized Jane’s art did not constitute any form of hate, along with $100,000. 

But in early March, suddenly the district’s tune changed, email communications reveal. They communicated to Stoll and his team that the statement would not be approved in its current form, jeopardizing the entire settlement altogether. They also asked for the plaintiffs to sign NDAs. Jane and her lawyers wouldn’t agree, finally countering with a greater monetary ask in lieu of the apology and with no NDA. The extra $25,000, it seemed, was worth it to the district to avoid the apology. Both parties also agreed that the district would admit no wrongdoing or violation of law. 

I asked Stoll what message he believes is being sent by the large settlement number.  “I don't think there's any question that demonstrates that they knew they were going to lose this case, that it indicates that they knew that they absolutely violated this young woman's First Amendment rights and that one way or another, they were going to have to pay.”

Stern, the lawyer for the school district, has not yet responded to The Handbasket’s request for comment. 

With Jane now in college and the settlement concluded, Malik is happy to move forward, but understands the potential legacy and precedent set by her and her daughter’s legal battle.

“As much as I would want to protect my child going forward and just move on from it and let this be a learning experience for the school as well as her, our family, and our community,” Malik said, “I hope that it would really encourage any minority and the Muslim community and the Palestinian community to not be silenced and not be censored, and to know that they have the right and their voice matters.”

Story edited by Jesse Hicks

Strega Nona

If you’re receiving this message, I’m already [hopefully] wheels down in Italy. I’ll be speaking on a panel at the International Journalism Festival in Perugia and then heading off on a two-week journey to see beautiful flowers and architecture, eating my weight in various meats and cheeses, and drinking all of the wine. 

Since I’ll be in Europe, I’m going to do as the Europeans do: close up shop and not work for the entire time. As a one-woman operation, that means there will be no new issues of The Handbasket from now through May 2nd. I understand that might be disappointing as a subscriber, but I hope you’ll understand that your incredible support (since 2022, and especially in the past year) have made it possible for me to feel comfortable taking a break. So thank you for this much-needed break.

As a little out of office treat, I’m offering 25% off an annual subscription to The Handbasket now through 5/2. If you’re not a paid subscriber already, now’s the time!

See you in May with more of the 100% independent, farm-to-table reporting that you love. 

And here are links to some of my favorite Handbaskets past to keep you company:

One of the first acts by the second Trump administration was the complete gutting of the US Agency for International Development, a workforce of more than 10,000 people that had administered humanitarian aid and public health support to nations around the world since 1961. Thousands of jobs were immediately slashed by Elon Musk’s para-governmental Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) and political appointees took over posts previously held by career civil servants. An agency once charged with fighting poverty, curbing the spread of infectious diseases, and promoting education and democracy abroad had been effectively thrown in the woodchipper.

It was during those critical early days that Nicholas Enrich, then-USAID’s acting assistant administrator for global health (GH), witnessed firsthand the carelessness and callousness with which the Trump administration destroyed the agency, ultimately leading to him becoming a government whistleblower. As a result, he was placed on administrative leave for sharing Trump officials’ decision to deny the continuation of life-saving aid, and the lies they told to justify it. 

Enrich’s new book “Into the Wood Chipper: A Whistleblower's Account of How the Trump Administration Shredded USAID” will be published on Tuesday, and The Handbasket is proud to share an exclusive excerpt. It shows the scary lack of public health expertise among the Trump team—which included Ken Jackson, who was part of the US Institute of Peace raid—their fundamental ignorance to USAID’s mission—”I assumed it was just, you know, abortions”—and the life or death decisions they forced people like Enrich to make in the name of supposed efficiency. This excerpt details a meeting that took place on February 5, 2025, during which Enrich and his colleagues Nida Parks and Ramona Godbole met with newly-installed Trump officials at the former USAID headquarters to explain their bureau’s critical functions. 

You can purchase the book here. Excerpt below:

On Wednesday, Nida, Ramona, and I went to the Reagan Building to finally meet with Joel Borkert and the USAID leadership team. We made our way through the eerily empty headquarters building and entered the administrator’s suite, where we were ushered into the executive conference room. I had last been there years earlier, during the first Trump administration, to brief Administrator Mark Green on our proposed restructuring of our tuberculosis strategy. I remembered nervously trying to answer pointed questions from Green and several of his top deputies, who had relentlessly pushed us to identify opportunities to make our programs more efficient, to maximize local ownership, and to propel host governments toward self- reliance, reducing the need for foreign assistance from the United States.

Today, the room felt emptier, devoid of the expertise and experience that had so often directed policy from within its walls. Besides the three of us from GH, the group consisted of Joel Borkert (USAID’s chief of staff), Adam Korzeniewski (White House liaison), Meghan Hanson (director of policy), Paul Seong (senior advisor to the administrator), and Ken Jackson (with Pete Marocco’s new designation as deputy administrator, Ken’s title was revised to acting deputy administrator for management and resources). Jason Gray (briefly the acting administrator, now back to chief information officer) joined as well. The group looked tired and bored, and I got the sense that we were not the first bureau to brief this group on our “mission- critical functions” that afternoon.

Without introductions, Joel, who was eating a frozen Indian dinner, jumped right in. “In full transparency, we’re drawing down USAID,” he said. “We’d like you to walk us through your mission-critical functions so that we can close things out smoothly. What are the key priorities that we need to keep working on in GH, and the staff needs to carry them out?”

Draw down. Close out. The words he dropped so casually rang in my head. Our global health programs didn’t concern him, he was only interested in the quickest way to shutter the agency. I knew this was my only chance to make him see why our work mattered.

“Thanks, Joel,” I began. “With the current pause on foreign aid, we’re primarily focused right now on the waiver to restart our lifesaving activities. But emergency response is only a tiny fraction of our work. So much of what we do is to strengthen sustainable health systems around the world for long-term health improvements. Let me tell you about that work as well as some of the more urgent needs.”

Joel, who had been checking his watch, shrugged and took another bite of his microwaved paneer. Just as I was about to go on, Paul Seong spoke up. “I’d say just stick to the lifesaving stuff,” he said. Aside from Jason Gray, Paul was the only career official representing the front office in this meeting. My only prior engagement with Paul was the Ebola briefing on Monday after which he had asked for the names of the meeting’s participants, who had been the only staff spared from administrative leave that day. Paul had been a relatively junior foreign service officer until recently, when he had somehow ingratiated himself with our new political leaders. Now the political appointees seemed to look to him for strategic advice on how to tear down the agency, and he appeared to relish his newfound influence, which was affirmed by his seat at the center of the conference table. Joel and the others nodded their agreement.

Disappointed, though not surprised, I began to describe various life- saving components of USAID’s global health portfolio, highlighting how we prepare for and respond to emerging pandemic threats; support the diagnosis and treatment of tuberculosis, malaria, and HIV; and immunize millions of children from the deadliest childhood diseases. I spoke for about five minutes, focusing primarily on our infectious diseases work and hoping to keep the attention of people who seemed to have no experience—or interest—in global health.

When I finished, the room was silent, the political appointees looking at one another in what appeared to be disbelief. The silence was broken by Ken Jackson, who chuckled softly and shook his head. “Wow, there really is so much that USAID does that we never knew,” he said. “This is the story that needs to get out there.”

Joel, also smiling, chimed in next, echoing Jackson’s amazement. “I had no idea you did all this,” he said. “As a Republican, when I think of what USAID does in global health, I assumed it was just, you know, abortions.”

I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. My first thought was to explain that no global health programming supports abortions. Providing or promoting abortions with foreign assistance funds is illegal, and we had robust systems in place to ensure that no U.S. funds were used to support abortions. But obviously, arguing with Joel would get me nowhere. Mostly, I was shocked to hear how unapologetically ignorant our new leaders were about USAID’s work. Just the night before, they had triumphantly announced that nearly the entire agency was being placed on administrative leave, clearly without having a clue as to what we did. I willed myself to avoid eye contact with Nida or Ramona, knowing that seeing their expressions would lay waste to my twitching attempt at a straight face.

The first question came from Adam Korzeniewski, a veteran of the first Trump administration where he served short stints with the departments of Treasury and Commerce. Adam, the White House liaison to USAID, wanted to know more about the risks associated with interruptions to TB clinical trials, which I had mentioned in my overview. He was the only participant in this meeting who appeared genuinely happy to be there, and he was wearing a USAID lapel pin on his suit jacket, in what I could only explain as an apparently ironic nod to the agency he was charged with destroying. I found it odd and vaguely offensive, like a vindictive landlord throwing a farewell party for a tenant he was in the process of evicting.

“Some of the studies are testing new treatment regimens for drug- resistant tuberculosis,” I explained, hoping I could convey the very real danger in terms that would register with this audience. “Thousands of enrolled patients are at risk now that their lifesaving treatment is stopped. But that’s not the only danger. We only have limited options to treat drug- resistant TB. We’re using our antibiotics of last resort in these trials. Interrupting treatment midstream risks the development of new, even more drug-resistant strains that could be untreatable. For an airborne infectious disease, that is a serious national security risk.”

Adam thought for a moment and then responded, noting that the political appointees at USAID were “not health people.” It would be hard, he surmised, for nonexperts to understand this issue. And so he suggested that we draft a simple, “Barney-style” set of slides to help the political leadership grasp the dangers, referring to the purple dinosaur of children’s television. He recommended that we use the term “Super TB” instead of “drug- resistant TB” to describe the mutations that can develop when treatment is interrupted, because it might be more likely to “catch their attention.”

Adam then made clear that he did not count himself among those po- litical appointees who were not health experts. Though he had no relevant training or experience, he reassured me that he understood the severity of infectious diseases, noting that he had recently read a book about smallpox. Apparently he had watched movies as well.

“One thing I thought of while you were talking,” he added, gesticulating wildly with his hands to conjure the image in his mind. “If you can make one of those maps like they have in Outbreak, where it shows the red growing over time as the disease spreads? You know, like the zombie apocalypse? That would be great, very effective.”

The thought that Adam might have the most health expertise of anyone in the agency’s leadership made me shudder.

Meghan Hanson, who had been appointed days ago as USAID’s new director of policy, focused on my warnings related to the interruption of activities needed to prevent the spread of malaria, one of the world’s leading killers of children. I had noted that the rainy season was fast approaching in many of the African countries with the highest burden of malaria, and that the annual preparations to combat the disease—indoor residual spraying, distribution of bed nets, delivery of commodities for testing and treatment—had all been stopped.

Hanson seemed to grasp the urgency. “We need to get those activities turned back on right away,” she said. “Write up the details, including the number of lives at risk, how quickly the interventions are needed, and where, and get that to us tonight!”

I told her that we would prioritize this action. But, I reminded her, all the malaria division staff—the entirety of USAID’s malaria expertise—had been shut off from USAID’s network, making it extremely difficult to pull together accurate information quickly.

At this, Joel’s exasperation with DOGE’s meddling boiled over, and he shouted at the room: “See, this is why, just because it might work at Twitter does not mean you can do it here!”

I shifted uncomfortably in my chair. If the political appointees in this room—tearing down USAID without any comprehension of the consequences—felt that DOGE’s tactics were reckless and destructive, we were in deeper trouble than I had realized.

Following another long silence, Joel summarized what we needed to do next. My description of our lifesaving work had been helpful, and we would need to develop “a very simple way to describe it to the secretary,” he told us. “To be clear, we’re not looking for a laundry list of everything you want to do, you’re going to have to cut things, it’s going to have to be draconian. You’re only going to get things that are priority number one, that is all we’re going to be able to do, so don’t even send up the things that are priorities number two, three, or four.”

At that point, Nida jumped in. Out of the corner of my eye, I had noticed her picking nervously at her hands for most of the meeting, and I knew it was just a matter of time before my oft-impatient colleague spoke up.

“Can I just clarify one thing?” she asked, not waiting for a response. “This group seems very focused on what GH does to respond to infectious diseases, but we haven’t spoken much about our other lifesaving work. Just as one example, we support lifesaving care to mothers for emergency inter- ventions like postpartum hemorrhaging and eclampsia, two of the leading causes of pregnancy-related deaths. You would also consider that kind of work to fit into our ‘priority number one,’ right?”

Another brief silence followed as Joel watched the clock, and it was Paul Seong who broke it. “I’d say that’s more of a number two,” he said dismissively, looking to Joel and Ken for affirmation.

“That sounds right,” Joel agreed, and the others nodded. Nida, shaking visibly, scribbled furiously in her notebook. And just like that, it was decided. Without even a cursory nod to data or expertise, USAID’s leadership had determined purely on a whim that lifesaving maternal health services were not a priority for this administration.

Finally, Joel told us where things now stood. “As I said, the decision has been made to draw down USAID,” he said. “My job is to make sure it goes smoothly, and I need your help with that. I need you to tell me which individuals you need to do those few core remaining activities. It’s gotta be lean, but if you need us to bring a few people back to life—turn them back on—we can do that. Everyone else is going to stay off.” He glanced at Jason Gray, who apparently was in charge of turning people on and off. Jason nodded, almost imperceptibly, without looking up.

As the meeting ended, I reminded Joel that we were still waiting on his approval of our approach to implement the waiver for lifesaving activities, and that we had also sent him several requests to initiate our increasingly delayed response to the Ebola outbreak in Uganda. Then we were ushered out to the elevator.

Ramona, Nida, and I sat in the food court in the basement of the Reagan Building, trying to process the meeting we had just left. It was simply shocking that the group currently sitting in the administrator’s suite was the team that was making decisions about USAID’s future. They were not real policymakers, but impostors, sitting in big chairs and pretending to grapple with complex issues that required teams of experts, who they had just off-loaded. Clearly, they hadn’t considered how their plans to dismantle USAID might affect lives around the world or the health and safety of Americans. Now, having heard my warnings, they were not actually interested in—or capable of—finding a solution to prevent people from dying.

Their job was to tear down the agency as quickly and quietly as possible, receive their pat on the back from Pete Marocco, and move on to whatever was next.

Ramona, Nida, and I had been dismissed from the meeting with an impossible assignment: to provide a “draconian” short list of global health activities to maintain during the “drawdown” and a rank-ordered list of the staff needed to accomplish them. We did not know where to start. Were we really supposed to just abandon all of USAID’s programs to strengthen health systems, even though they were the key to our sustainable development goals? Had they really just deprioritized our maternal and child health programs in front of our eyes? And how could we even begin to rank our staff?

Ramona summed things up: “They’re asking us to dig our own grave.”

Excerpted from Nicholas Enrich's Into the Wood Chipper: A Whistleblower's Account of How the Trump Administration Shredded USAID, to be published on April 14th by Summit Books, an imprint of Simon & Schuster.