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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.

If you want to support my 100% independent journalism, subscribe to The Handbasket for free. You can also become a premium subscriber or leave a tip! (Also, The Handbasket is now on Instagram. Follow here for news updates.)

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.

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When I woke up Tuesday morning I believed there was a very real possibility that the United States might drop a nuclear bomb on Iran. And as I was going to bed Wednesday night, that possibility returned. Thursday, an eerie calm settled as we waited to see if the alleged cease fire would hold, knowing it could change at any moment. It felt like we were dangling off a cliff, hanging on with one sweaty palm.

Sometimes journalism is relaying new information; other times it’s capturing what you already know so that you don’t forget how it made you feel. I wrote this so you and I don't forget. 

Those who were sentient during the first administration will remember how it felt like we were just existing from one Trump tweet to the next. Often indecipherable posts punctuated every day like an exclamation point with a foghorn attached, cortisol constantly pulsing, mind never knowing who or what he’d go after next. While a great deal of those posts were bluster, his words had real impacts: trans people in the military, as an example, found out via tweet that Trump was claiming they were no longer allowed to serve. The space between the tweets where we lived our lives felt that much more precarious. In this second administration we’ve gone from precarity to mortal peril. 

Donald Trump started his day Tuesday by logging onto Truth Social and posting this:

I read the post while still in bed, a product of terrible sleep hygiene wherein there’s no separation between slumber and the terrors of the day. My half-warmed up brain snapped to attention as I scanned the words, each one landing with a thud. 

“Holy shit,” I muttered. My husband, no stranger to my random outbursts about the horrors on my phone, passively asked what was happening as he got ready for work. “I think Trump might nuke Iran?” I replied, eyes still glued on the post. 

There’s been no shortage of what-the-fuck-are-we-supposed-to-do-with-this-information moments since Trump retook office in January 2025, but instead of speeding up time in anxious anticipation, this instance made the merry-go-round pause. It was the first time in my lifetime that the idea of the United States dropping another nuclear bomb felt within the realm of possibility. And that possibility slowed time to a crawl.

The shocking post didn’t come entirely out of nowhere: On Sunday Trump posted what we thought at the time would be the worst he had this week. “Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran,” he wrote. “There will be nothing like it!!! Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell - JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah. President DONALD J. TRUMP.” In a subsequent post he added “Tuesday, 8:00 P.M. Eastern Time!” as the deadline for opening the straight. It was then that the countdown really began, but it wasn’t until Tuesday morning that the countdown turned nuclear.

A whole civilization will die tonight.

After the shock of the first read, the questions flooded: Which civilization would allegedly die Tuesday night? Iran? Ours? All of human civilization? How would it die? “WHO KNOWS?” What could he have planned that would warrant the hyperbole of calling it one of the most important moments in world history? Would April 7th become one of those seismic dates to which people knowingly refer without context? Why is he blessing the people of Iran when he wants them dead? Was this a real threat or did he just want attention? Did that distinction really matter when a country of 92 million people thought they might be vaporized overnight? 

Shortly after Trump’s post lit the world on fire, Iranian officials called on young people to form human chains around power plants and across bridges that were potential targets of an American strike. Our president’s actions gave permission to other reckless leaders abroad to put their own people in the very direct line of fire. While the Iranians who showed up at these various sites were linked to one another, it was difficult not to feel as though we were linked to them, too. Because while Trump may have been pointing a weapon at them, Americans were undoubtedly in the crossfire.

I put away dishes from the dishwasher that had been sitting there for two days, carefully placing each fragile item in its designated space, and gathered a few things to toss in my backpack before heading out to see my parents on Long Island and return their car I’d borrowed. At the wheel I shouted along with Celine Dion until my vocal cords ached, the Power of Love helping carry me just a little closer to 8pm when we’d learn the fate of a civilization. I stopped for a salad, wondering why I was eating a stupid salad when the world could be about to irrevocably change, and brought some stuff I ordered online to the UPS Store to send back. Would the refund for these jeans mean much tomorrow? Impossible to say. 

By mid-afternoon, more than 50 congressional Democrats had called for Trump to be impeached, in an effort that felt like much too little, much too late. Republicans practiced their patented silence in the face of anarchy.

“So, Trump might nuke Iran tonight?” I said to my dad when I walked in the house, after telling him about the bit of traffic I hit on the way. 

As 6:30pm Eastern Time rolled around, I sat in the kitchen of my childhood home, the clock on the wall sounding louder with each tick towards the future. In that moment there was nothing to be done but sit and listen. To hope that cooler heads, if any such heads existed here, would prevail in deescalating a situation in which we should have never been in the first place. With the certainty of tomorrow gone, the fullness of the present felt suddenly rife with meaning. 

A few moments later, Trump announced—again via social media post—that a tentative cease fire agreement had been reached with Iran via mediation by Pakistan. 

“Subject to the Islamic Republic of Iran agreeing to the COMPLETE, IMMEDIATE, and SAFE OPENING of the Strait of Hormuz, I agree to suspend the bombing and attack of Iran for a period of two weeks,” he wrote at 6:32pm. Shortly after, Iran confirmed that the terms had been agreed upon by both countries. For the people of Iran, I felt immediate relief. But for those of us who’ve lived at Trump’s whims in one way or another for the past decade, we knew the relief would be temporary. No bombs would be dropped by the US on Iran Tuesday night, but we still had all been shattered. 

And we learned Wednesday that Israel did not believe they were subject to the cease fire, continuing to ceaselessly attack Lebanon as a proxy for Iran. More than 100 targets were hit with 1,000-pound bombs in less than 10 minutes, killing mostly civilians while they were going about their days—just as I was in New York. 

“First responders in Barbour worked to find people trapped under the rubble,” The Guardian reported on Thursday. “Firefighters sprayed water on the smouldering remains of the building while forklifts lifted crumpled cars to clear the road for ambulances. An emergency worker on the scene said they had not yet found any survivors, only pieces of people.”

Only pieces of people. 

By late afternoon Wednesday, Israeli’s murderous carnage in Lebanon threatened the US-Iran cease fire, a term that felt and continues to feel ridiculous when the fire is far from ceased. There were reports Iran was charging ships to pass through the Strait of Hormuz, meaning we were now paying for something that just days earlier had been free. 

As I settled into bed Wednesday night I couldn’t help but check Trump’s Truth Social feed, my hypervigilant mind ever-convinced that the sooner I knew something, the less it would hurt. Sure enough, Trump had just posted again:

Trump’s all caps assurance that nuclear weapons wouldn’t be used in Iran only made the threat feel more real, and again he only prompted more questions. We were back in limbo, but had we ever really left? Where was the next conquest? And from where was America back? We’d have to tune into tomorrow’s episode to find out. 

At 5:08 on Thursday, Trump posted: “There are reports that Iran is charging fees to tankers going through the Hormuz Strait — They better not be and, if they are, they better stop now!”  Then at 6:29pm he wrote: “Iran is doing a very poor job, dishonorable some would say, of allowing Oil to go through the Strait of Hormuz. That is not the agreement we have!” The outlook for Friday didn’t look good.

While a civilization did not yet die this week, we most certainly experienced a very real loss; the loss of that last shred of hope that no matter how unhinged Trump becomes, no matter what he says in a rambling speech or an incoherent press conference, that he wouldn’t do that. That is now a menu item, even if its threat is just a means to an end. 

(Image by Rama)

In a November conversation at the Urban Consulate in Detroit, the great writer and thinker Tressie McMillan Cottom was asked by host Orlando P. Bailey, “Do you have a daring idea for us to ponder and sit with for our collective future?” McMillan Cottom replied with this: “When people try to sell you on the idea that the future is already settled, it’s because it is deeply unsettled. I think that this promise of an artificial intelligent future is really just a collective anxiety that very wealthy, powerful people have about how well they’re gonna be able to control us in the future. If they can get us to accept that the future is already settled—AI is already here, the end is already here—then we will create that for them. My most daring idea is to refuse.” 

Today, I refuse.

As a rule, I’ve tried not to concern myself with AI. As the companies behind these products continue promising us that AI has something for everyone, I still haven’t seen a practical application that makes sense for me. But I’ve been hesitant to weigh in on the use of AI in the past as it typically concerned areas beyond my expertise and in which I do not work. But now that multiple stories from major outlets in recent days have proclaimed not just the inevitability of AI in journalism, but have trumpeted how working journalists are actively including AI-produced work in their finished product, it’s become my problem. It’s exposed a gulf between those who want to have their words remembered and those who just want people to remember that they wrote. We must stem the idea being pushed by tech companies and their billionaire funders who’ve sunk too much into their products to admit defeat that the infiltration of AI into journalism is inevitable; because from my perch as an independent journalist, it simply is not.

The Wall Street Journal recently sat down with Nick Lichtenberg, a reporter at Fortune, whose website is a shell of the once-renowned magazine founded nearly a century ago. AI-assisted stories accounted for nearly 20% of Fortune’s web traffic in the latter half of 2025, an astonishing fact shared in the story. Lichtenberg proudly attached his name to most of them with the full backing of his bosses, and the story notes he’s published more than 600 stories since rejoining the publication in July.

“A story by Lichtenberg sometimes starts with a prompt entered into Perplexity or Google’s NotebookLM, asking it to write something based on a headline he comes up with,” the WSJ story explains, referring to two different AI software programs. “He moves the AI tools’ initial drafts into a content-management system and edits the stories before publishing them for Fortune’s readers.”

Even more alarming than this admission of process is the admission of how his use of AI isn’t always disclosed. “Initially, Lichtenberg would share bylines with Fortune Intelligence,” the story says. “Now, he typically takes sole bylines because he feels the work is mostly his own. [Editor in Chief and Chief Content Officer Alyson] Shontell said of Lichtenberg’s stories, ‘more than 50% is Nick.’ His stories sometimes include a disclosure explaining that generative AI was used as a research tool.”

It’s a value drilled into the brains of young journalists since time immemorial that 100% of stories published under your name should be a product of your own work. If other people worked on the story, a co-byline. Sometimes a story will note “additional reporting” or “research by” at the bottom as a necessary and deserved nod to the material support. Some outlets include the editor’s name, a practice that ought to be more widely practiced. The point is that all of the humans who helped move a concept to a finished product (and who may not all be writers!) deserve acknowledgement because they are sentient beings whose unique perspectives helped shape what the story became—not tools.

“I’ve always hated the zero-to-one process of writing a story,” independent tech journalist Alex Heath told Wired for a story called Meet the Tech Reporters Using AI to Help Write and Edit Their Stories, which was published this week. “Now, it’s actually kind of fun.” 

The “fun” part is that Heath openly admits to using AI to get his stories off the ground, going so far as to use it to create first drafts. “Going out on my own, I realized I need AI to help with the volume.” 

As a fellow independent journalist, but one who has never used AI to write a story and emphasizes quality over quantity, I take umbrage with the idea that because we have fewer resources we’re forced to plagiarize and that more is always more. It undermines the respect for which so many of us have fought for—and continue to fight for— in this industry, and creates a permission structure for cheating. And Heath admits as much: “I feel like I’m cheating in a way that feels amazing,” he said. “I never did this because I liked being a writer. I like reporting, learning new things, having an edge, and telling people things that will make them feel smart six months from now.”

It seems like Heath is saying he likes the way that good writing makes people feel, but he doesn’t like doing the toughest part of eliciting those emotions: Actually writing the thing. 

Another problem with relying on AI is that there’s no way of knowing where the program you’re using has “learned” this knowledge, nor can you know what is paraphrased versus straight-up lifted from another writer’s work. That became painfully clear this week when the New York Times had to issue this mortifying correction to a book review by freelancer Alex Preston:

Preston was promptly dropped by the Times as a freelancer and issued a statement of apology to The Guardian. “I made a serious mistake in using an AI tool on a draft review I had written, and I failed to identify and remove overlapping language from another review that the AI dropped in,” Preston wrote. “I am hugely embarrassed by what happened and truly sorry.”

It was the second time in a few days that the Times was called out for potential AI plagiarism, despite strong internal policies intended to safeguard against it. 

Some AI-loving journalists appear to believe that if they’re clear enough with the AI program they’re using, it will truly understand what they’re seeking and not just do what it’s made to do: steal shit. Jasmine Sun, a contributor at The Atlantic, also spoke to Wired about her prolific AI usage, describing how she’s attempted to train Claude, the program she uses:

Telling a machine that can’t perceive that it can’t perceive won’t make it perceive that it can’t perceive. It can’t make you be the best version of yourself because it doesn’t know what that means, nor does it know what it means to aspire. Just because some are given a human name and users are taught to address it collegially doesn’t make it real. You cannot force a machine to become human. You’re stuck, for better or worse, with your fellow humans for perceiving your aspirations. Perhaps the problem is that you don’t like how humans perceive you. 

Like Sun, the Washington Post’s Megan McArdle openly admitted to relying heavily on AI for her work. In a series of recent posts on X, McArdle admitted to using AI “to do research (i.e., find things to read, explain parts of academic papers I find ambiguous or confusing), transcribe interviews, generate pushback on my column thesis, suggest trims when I'm over my word count, sharpen podcast interview questions, and perform a final fact check on columns and editorials.” 

Becca Rothfeld, a literary critic at The New Yorker who worked at the Post until recently, pointed out how McArdle’s posts are tantamount to confessions of violating her own publication’s policies on AI.

“The policy states, ‘We are transparent about how and when we use AI,’ but McArdle has not appended notes to her columns explaining how she has used it in each, although she is apparently quite heavily reliant on it!” Rothfeld wrote on Substack. “The policy states, ‘Attribution of material from other media must be total. Plagiarism is not permitted…. Readers should be able to distinguish between what the reporter saw and what the reporter obtained from other sources such as wire services, pool reporters, email, websites, etc.’ McArdle admits here that she often asks AI to generate ideas for stories for her, yet she has not attributed anything to it in any of the resultant columns, at least that I’ve seen.”

McArdle goes on to say that journalists should think of an AI chatbot “as a combination of an intern, a first-past editor, and a fact-checker. Its job is to do grunt work and help you turn in cleaner copy, not to ‘inspire’ you.” 

For starters, a chatbot can be none of those things because it’s not a person. For another, calling those duties “grunt work” belies a fundamental misunderstanding—and frankly, disrespect—for the many steps of the writing process. Those steps are also often the work of younger, less-experienced journalists trying to forge a career in an ever-dwindling industry. If those jobs are considered “grunt work” better delegated to machines, how do you suppose they get started?

Rusty Foster, writer and publisher of Today in Tabs, talked this week about AI infiltration of journalism in terms of who will “go AI” and who will not. And he’s right to characterize it in this way; there does seem to be a predisposition for certain journalists to accept AI into their hearts, depending on their goals. For those whom volume and access to power are paramount, shortcuts and plagiarism aren’t detrimental to their final product. But for those who value foremost being seen as journalists of quality, originality, and integrity, the machines serve none of those goals. 

If your goal is simply to create content, great news: That’s an existing, different job. It might even be more lucrative, and less governed by the respectability politics of uppity journalists who believe your work should be exclusively shaped by the processing power of your own mind. This is not a knock on content creators, many of whom produce essential work and hold themselves to high ethical and moral standards, but simply to note that a less governed space may be more ideal for those looking to eschew standards. 

If you want to work with machines, get a job that requires it. There are a whole lot more of those than there are writing jobs, so free up space for people who actually want to do the work. You’re not doing the world a favor by gifting it your human/AI hybrid. Journalism will not miss you if you leave. No one is making you be a journalist; it’s not one of those jobs parents force you to choose, like a doctor or a lawyer. Journalism, while romanticized in popular culture, is generally unglamorous and poorly paid, with progressively worse job opportunities (no thanks to AI.) I’m careful not to refer to it as a calling because that seems to excuse sacrificing mental health in service of craft, but I do believe that it’s a job that can’t be forced. It’s obvious to readers when your heart isn’t in it. 

I look back on these past four years as an independent journalist and it’s possible to track how I built this space brick by brick. Every conversation I had with family, friends, and trusted comrades, every story I brought to life—even the duds—led me to this moment. There was no formula, and there’s no way I could have possibly programmed it. It was the result of a series of deeply human decisions. 

I don’t write because it’s fun (though sometimes it is.) I write because it feeds my spirit. It helps me unspool my thoughts and feelings in the hopes of helping others do the same. The process is the purpose. You don’t have to always like or enjoy the process, but if you don’t respect it enough to do it yourself, there is no purpose. 

Writing is not always fun and anyone who says it’s fun all the time is lying. It can be grueling and frustrating—perhaps at times verging on something you loathe—but feeling those things ultimately means you understand your words are a representation of who you are in the world. You understand that they reflect on you, and it’s your responsibility to make them as good as they can be. If you really, truly hate writing, if the only way you can do it is by using a plagiarism machine, maybe it’s just not for you. 

Sometimes a thought you love pops into your head and you scramble to open a blank email or your notes app or even grab a piece of paper to jot it down before it flies away. These moments of inspiration aren’t just a result of fishing in your pool of existing knowledge; they include a little bit of magic. A sprinkle of the unidentifiable zest that makes your writing something that only you—not the ‘you’ processed and interpreted by a machine—could create. Your words are a product of a specific moment in time, and that’s what makes them distinct. (I originally used the word “special” and then I changed it to “unique,” ultimately landing on “distinct” because it felt right. That’s the process.)

Nowhere was the power of the process more evident than with a story I published in early February about the Worldwide Expeditionary Multiple Award Contract, Territorial Integrity of the United States (WEXMAC TITUS), an obscure government contracting program that has been co-opted by the Trump administration to fast-track the construction of ICE concentration camps around the country. The story was born out of conversations with Michael Wriston who I reached to after I was alerted to his exceptional work on Project Salt Box, which collects and organizes public data about ICE’s land purchases and other contracts. Wriston told me about the program and once I grasped the enormity, I set out to write an all-encompassing piece that would help make a seemingly wonky issue easily understood by a wide swath of people. Once I hit publish, that initial goal felt like it had been fulfilled.

Then on March 22nd, Senators Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH) sent a letter to Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth about WEXMAC TITUS, linking to my story in the very first sentence. A few days later, Senator Warren along with Congressman Jamie Raskin (D-MD) announced that they, along with 45 other lawmakers, would be investigating six of the contractors and real estate firms involved with the questionable contracting program. Though it’s far from exhaustive—as Wriston noted, the “inquiry focuses on a small cross-section of the contractors ... [and] the sellers who profited from the acquisitions, the brokers who facilitated them, and the officials whose financial disclosures overlap with both remain yet unchallenged”—seeing direct impact as the result of a story birthed from human interaction was a humbling reminder of its power.

AI may help you construct content, but it will not create memories. It will, at best, rehash ones you already made, and at worst, create false ones. It does not experience, it does not struggle, it does not feel: all essential parts of turning a pile of information into a story. 

During her November talk at the Urban Consulate in Detroit, Tressie McMillan Cottom said, “The proposal for a post-human future is one where there will be human beings, they’ll just be treated inhumanely.” To avoid that future—to refuse it—is to keep relying on other human beings, even if they sometimes disappoint you. What’s more human than that?

This story was edited by Jesse Hicks.

Quick cool thing: I’m excited to share that The Handbasket has launched an indie media bundle with journalists Katelyn Burns of Burns Notice and Kat Tenbarge of Spitfire News. Now you can get a 30-day paid trial of all three publications in your inbox for one [heavily discounted] price! Already a paid subscriber to one of us? Trustfnd, the platform we’re using for this deal, will automatically adjust the price to exclude your existing subscriptions. We really hope this is one of many paths forward for indie journalism. Check it out!

The State Department will begin moving some of its offices into the United States Institute of Peace building as early as next week, despite the fact that the building’s ownership remains under pending litigation. Staff in those offices have been told verbally and in writing to pack up their belongings in preparation for the move, which The Handbasket is first to report based on conversations with two employees whose identities are being kept anonymous to protect their jobs, and review of internal communications about the move. Adding insult to injury, the office supporting Kristi Noem’s new gig has been confirmed to be part of those making the move.

The fight over the USIP building has been a major focus of my reporting for the past year, most recently in light of the lawsuit I won against the DC Metropolitan Police Department, compelling them to release all body camera footage from their response to last year’s raid. While the former staffers continue to wait on a decision from the DC Circuit Court of Appeals in United States Institute of Peace vs. Jackson to determine who will ultimately retain control of the building, the Trump administration has kept the keys since a June 2025 stay. And now the State Department plans to take up residence in the disputed property.

This past December, the State Department announced that the building at 2301 Constitution Ave. NW in Washington, DC—which the Trump administration’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) seized in a March 2025 raid—had been renamed the Donald J. Trump Institute of Peace. They slapped his name in large metal letters above the USIP sign on the exterior of the building, claiming the new name was meant “to reflect the greatest dealmaker in our nation's history.” A day later, Trump used the building to hold a peace deal signing between Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo. It remains unclear what, if any, impact the deal had on peace in the region.  

"A federal judge has already ruled that the government's armed takeover was illegal,” George Foote, counsel for former USIP leadership and staff, told NPR in December after the renaming. “That judgment is stayed while the government appeals, which is the only reason the government continues to control the building.” 

As Wired reported in January, a letter was sent to the Justice Department by representatives on behalf of the USIP’s fired board and president which references a 10-year memorandum of understanding (MOU) “under which hundreds of State Department employees will move into USIP’s building.”

Per Wired: 

The Handbasket has obtained a copy of what appears to be the MOU; State Department employees I spoke to reviewed the document and said it appeared authentic, but they were not able to vouch for its authenticity. The 15-page document is signed by Darren Beattie, a State Department official who was at some point the Acting President of the new USIP and was fired from his job during the first Trump administration for attending a white supremacist gathering. It contains the same details shared in the former USIP staffers’ letter to the Justice Department, and more. 

“DOS's use of the Premises shall be for the support of DOS's mission in a manner that will not be inconsistent with SIP's legal authorities and mission,” the purported MOU reads. But that’s already debatable, as The Handbasket has learned that one of the offices moving into the building is Shield of the Americas, Trump’s anti-drug cartel coalition helmed by former Secretary of DHS Kristi Noem. Noem is now a State Department employee, with a confirmed email address and phone number, and is listed on an organizational chart I reviewed. She reports to Deputy Secretary ⁠of State Christopher Landau in her new role. Both State staffers said it has been verbally confirmed to them that Noem’s new team will be housed in the USIP building. 

“It’s frustrating that some staff are being asked, with less than a week’s notice, to pack up and move into a building where there aren’t clear arrangements, there’s no US government IT infrastructure, and seating charts haven’t been established,” one of the staffers said.

Internal department communications reviewed by The Handbasket show the building referred to as “DJTIP,” and a staffer confirmed that the building appears on the drop-down of department buildings in the visitor access request form. In a February notice from a department official that I reviewed, it was declared that the Institute of Peace building “is now available to host Department of State and White House representational events” and is not available to any other departments.

“They're acting under the stay as though they have a license to use the building, to use money, to treat the building any way they want,” George Foote told Wired in January. “A stay is not permission for the loser of a case to hijack the property of the winning party.”

Meanwhile, former USIP staffers wait anxiously for the court’s decision as to whether they’ll have control of their privately-owned building returned to them, or if Trump is granted the power to continue grabbing anything he wants. 

The State Department did not respond to The Handbasket’s request for comment on the move.

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ICE agents at the Atlanta airport

The prevailing feeling on Monday was that at least the ICE agents at airports around the country weren’t shooting people.

At least that’s what I heard from travelers who reached out to me throughout the day to share photos and stories of what they were seeing on the ground the day after Trump’s Border Czar Tom Homan announced federal agents would be fanning out while TSA remains severely-understaffed during the partial DHS shutdown. What would these agents be doing? Homan was asked. Hard to say. And after a day of witnessing them in action, the answer is no more clear.

The first dispatch I received was early Monday morning from a traveler flying out of Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport. She’d arrived around 5:50am Eastern for a 10:10 flight after hearing ICE would be there, on top of reports of many hours-long security lines. “I saw 4 ICE agents within 5 minutes just walking around,” she told me. “One had a ‘federal agent’ patch, one had an ‘ICE’ patch, and the other two were not clearly marked.”

She explained that she entered the security line at 6am outside of the building. “Saw my next set of agents at 7am once I got inside. They’re in the mezzanine just watching us. Not doing anything that I can tell besides just having a presence.” She also said she saw around 20 local police officers deployed to help with line management. 

After three hours and 20 minutes, she made it through security. “I didn’t see ICE agents help with anything the entire time! They just stood around chatting it up with each other,” she said.”

ICE agents at Newark airport

I also received a couple of dispatches from George Bush Intercontinental Airport in Houston, where one traveler reported ICE agents were “standing in a circle in the middle of terminal A with some folk filming them and occasionally an agent is walking up and down the long lines of people. No evidence they are doing any of the work of a TSA agent at all.”

In a Sunday TV appearance, Homan made it clear ICE agents wouldn’t be tasked with actual TSA duties. “I don’t see an ICE agent looking at an X-ray machine because [they’re] not trained in that,” he told CNN. “There are certain parts of security that TSA is doing, that we can move them off those jobs and put them in the specialized jobs, help move those lines.”

The Houston traveler said he spotted about 12 agents, including a few walking around baggage claim where the line for security was snaking. “Only seen them pacing and cracking jokes with each other which at least is not assault!” He said the agents he witnessed were mostly patrolling in a security capacity or just hanging out.

In a particularly cringeworthy moment shared with me via video, another Houston passenger recorded fellow travelers on the hours-long security line while Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless the USA” blared through the airport speakers. Proud to be an American, indeed.

Instagram post

New Orleans was the airport that generated the most messages on Monday. “I’m at the bag drop area, before security,” one traveler told me. “They’re literally just walking around in groups of three and four, seemingly without any true purpose.”

ICE agents in NOLA

She noted they were wearing vests identifying them as either ICE or a federal agent, layered over casual clothes. “They are carrying sidearms,” she said. “But they’re just casually walking around carrying bottles of water and Gatorade.”

One NOLA traveler sent over photos of agents leaning on the glass railing of a mezzanine area that overlooked the security area below, seemingly bored, and another shared a photo of a group of them lined up at a line nearby behind the area where you pick up trays for your stuff to pass through security. 

ICE agents in NOLA

“I'm a white, anti-Zionist naturalized citizen traveling with my Black wife,” she explained. “We both live with an undercurrent of dread, which will spike based on external circumstances.” 

She and her wife even discussed beforehand what they would do if confronted by ICE. “Had we been sent through the security line of ICE agents, we would have followed the protocols we gamed out earlier: head down, no commentary, attempt to de-escalate politely if necessary. Then we would have gone to the nearest bathroom and puked our guts out.”

ICE agent takes a big sip at Laguardia

I also received messages from travelers in Phoenix, Las Vegas, Boston, Chicago O’hare, and all three New York City-area airports. From these disparate locales, the commentary remained pretty much the same: The presence of ICE was certainly not helping anyone, it wasn’t speeding up security lines, and at worst it was making people uncomfortable.

Late Sunday night an Air Canada flight arriving at New York’s Laguardia Airport collided with a fire truck responding to an incident on another plane. The flight’s two pilots were killed and dozens of passengers were injured. There’s speculation it may have been a result of understaffed Air Traffic Control, a problem that predated this partial shutdown. With ICE arriving a few hours later, it certainly added to the feeling that everything is on fire.

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Proposed gold coin design (US Mint)

Julius Caesar started off 44 BCE feeling pretty good: In January, as the story goes, the Roman Senate renewed his appointment as dictator, and the following month, they decreed he’d serve as dictator “for life.” They also announced that Caesar’s portrait would appear on coins—the first time any living Roman had appeared on currency. By March, he was murdered. So what does this have to do with Donald Trump?

In the ultimate culmination of Trump’s interests, the US Mint may soon produce a 24-karat gold commemorative coin bearing his image. It’s part of the celebration of America’s 250th anniversary—otherwise known as the semiquincentennial—and, if produced, would be in addition to a proposed one dollar coin with Trump’s image that was previously announced. Now The Handbasket is first to report that, per multiple members of a government coin committee, video of their recent meeting during which they voiced strong objections to the Trump coins’ production—because “no nation on Earth has issued coins with the image of a democratically-elected leader during the time of their service”—has disappeared from the US Mint’s Youtube page. While this particular instance of federal censorship is about coins, the larger message is loud and clear: Dissent will not be tolerated.

The Citizens Coinage Advisory Committee (CCAC), an impartial group that advises the Treasury Department on issues of design, held their most recent meeting on February 24th. Prior to that, the Mint added an agenda item to the official meeting notice reading: “review and discussion of a Semiquincentennial Gold Coin.” However, acting CCAC chair Donald Scarinci announced at the outset of the meeting that he was using his discretion to remove the agenda item, in addition to any talk of the one dollar coin, because “Only those nations ruled by kings or dictators display the image of their sitting ruler on the coins of the realm."

The following day, Dan Barry at the New York Times published a story about the meeting. Three hours later, Scarinci told The Handbasket, the recording was gone.

In an email to Mint leadership sent on February 25th—the text of which was reviewed by The Handbasket—Scarinci asked that the video of the meeting be restored online. Mint officials replied that they would restore it and that the transcript would be published to CCAC’s website (which is controlled by the Mint), but neither of those things have happened. If the video isn’t restored before the next meeting on April 18th, Scarinci plans to ask the Mint for an explanation as to why the video was removed, and if necessary, take a vote among committee members to bring it back.

Requests for comment from multiple representatives at the Mint about the removal of the video and the status of the Trump coins received no reply as of this publishing. A copy of the video has been uploaded by one of the CCAC members, which you can view here.

I first learned about the gold coin not because of the Times story, but because someone flagged the agenda for this week’s meeting of the US Commission of Fine Arts. It states that the Mint will be presenting “2026 Semiquincentennial Coin Program (24-Karat Commemorative Coin - President Donald J. Trump). Designs for obverse and reverse. Final.” The agenda links to a PDF of a design that shows a menacing-looking Trump with balled fists resting on a desk, the word “LIBERTY” in all caps above his head like a halo, the years 1776 and 2026, and “IN GOD WE TRUST” on the bottom. It is a replica of the photo of Trump that now hangs in the National Portrait Gallery. The flip side is an equally-menacing bald eagle atop a perch.

The Commission of Fine Arts (CFA) is an independent federal agency that, per the Federal Register, is “charged with giving expert advice to the President, Congress and the heads of departments and agencies of the Federal and District of Columbia governments on matters of design and aesthetics, as they affect the Federal interest and preserve the dignity of the nation's capital.” They’re tasked with providing advice to the Mint on the design of coins and medals, which is why they’re involved with the Semiquincentennial Coins & Medals—AKA SemiQ—project. 

The US Mint presented three different designs for the front of the one dollar coin at the CFA meeting in January. In a subsequent letter to US Mint Director Paul Hollis, CFA Secretary Thomas Luebke wrote: “The Commission members recommended obverse #3 and reverse #5—comprising a side profile of President Donald J. Trump and the heraldic eagle from the Great Seal of the United States—as a classic pairing reminiscent of early twentieth-century coins. For the obverse, they praised this alternative for its statesman-like and accurate depiction of the President.”

Proposed one dollar coin design (US Mint)

This response was despite Public Law 116-330 which states, “No head and shoulders portrait or bust of any person, living or dead, and no portrait of a living person may be included in the design on the reverse of any coin.” Megan Sullivan, acting chief of the Mint’s Office of Design Management, told the CFA at their January meeting that “the legal research has been done … and they have determined that this does not violate any laws, that this, is perfectly, legal … under the Circulating Collectible Coin Redesign Act.” It’s unclear what exactly that research entailed.

This laudatory review of the one dollar coin design is no coincidence: Trump dismissed all the members of the CFA back in October reportedly to “appoint a new slate of members to the commission that are more aligned with President Trump's America First Policies." In January, he appointed Rodney Mims Cook, Jr. as Chairman, plus six other members of the commission. Those new members include two with no discernible arts expertise: Chamberlain Harris, the current Deputy Director of Oval Office Operations at the White House who graduated college in 2019; and Pamela Hughes Patenaude, a Deputy Secretary of HUD during the first Trump administration. The commission rubber stamped Trump’s White House ballroom project after being presented with revised plans in February. 

“President Trump has an incredible eye and appreciation for the arts, and only selects the most talented people possible,” a White House spokesperson told Politico of the new commission members after the ballroom approval. Now those same “talented” eyes will gaze upon the proposed gold coin design for approval.

In a phone conversation on Tuesday, Scarinci explained how the February 24th meeting was immediately contentious, and the subsequent sharp questioning of Mint legal counsel Greg Weinman by CCAC board member Kellen Hoard added to the seriousness. 

“Over the last several months, the committee has been faced with a number of challenges unprecedented in its history,” Hoard began. “These challenges have resulted in a lack of legal, procedural, and operational clarity, which directly impacted the ability of the committee and its members to fulfill their responsibilities in the years to come.”

Hoard read aloud an email he sent to Mint officials in December letting them know he believed the selections of the American 250 quarter designs—ones that do not feature Trump’s name or face, but images of American themes—were made “in violation of the law” because they were never okayed by his committee. Hoard never received a reply to his email, and despite his salient objections, the Mint has since gone ahead with producing the quarters anyway.

The ultimate design discretion for the Trump gold coin lies with Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. As opposed to commemorative coins with actual denominations that require Congressional approval, the gold coin is discretionary, meaning the secretary can authorize it on his own without CCAC review. Still though, there was something unique about this discretionary coin: Mint representatives said the idea for the gold coin came from “outside the agency.” That “has never happened before in my 20 years there,” Scarinci told me.

Commemorative gold coins are not unheard of. Right now you can purchase one with an image of Wonder Woman, part of the Mint’s Comic Art Coin & Medal Collection. The Wonder Woman coin retails for $4,110. It’s unclear if it’s produced how much the Trump gold coin will be sold for, but Scarinci explained the price will include a premium over the price of gold, which right now is $5,000 an ounce. 

As a member of the CCAC since 2005, Scarinci has been appointed by seven different Treasury Secretaries to continue his service. A lawyer based in New Jersey, he’s the owner of the largest private collection of art medals in the country, and even published a book in 2015 called Coin of the Year. (Naturally, he was the one who flagged the Caesar anecdote for me.) And it’s because of his devotion to the art form that he was so perturbed by President Trump’s desire to flout tradition and, it appears, the law, to see his own face on a coin.

“We're celebrating the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, which was the document that enabled a revolution against kings,” Scarinci said. “And to celebrate our declaration of independence against rule by a king with a coin that has an image of a living, serving, president of our country, that is a slap in the face to the founders, to George Washington, and a statement to the world that [Trump] is a king.”

The CFA and Treasury Department did not reply to requests for comment on the production of the Trump coins. CCAC will continue to object to being left out of this process, Scarinci said, and hopes Congress will step in to prevent production. Aside from that, the committee has little recourse.

“You know what’s particularly scary about this?” Scarinci asked. “This conversation is about a coin. They have reached into coins.” I replied that this administration can’t withstand any criticism, even about a coin. “This is valid criticism based on history, and they don’t even want to hear that,” Scarinci said. “They wanna do what they wanna do, and they don’t really care what anyone else has to say about it. That’s the message.”

This isn’t the first time in recent weeks that a video shining a bad light on the Trump administration has been taken down. Clips from depositions of former DOGE staffers Justin Fox and Nate Cavanaugh went viral last week, thanks to footage made available by a lawsuit brought by the Modern Language Association, American Council of Learned Societies, and American Historical Association. The brief clips, shared by 404 Media, show Elon Musk’s former lackeys’ complete inability to coherently explain the concept of DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion), what experience they had with approving or denying federal grants, among other moments of staggering ineptitude. 

On Friday, 404 reported that a judge ordered the full deposition videos be taken down from Youtube after the government asked the plaintiffs to do so because of “concerns that the publication of the videos could subject the witnesses and their family members to undue harassment and reputational harm.” But of course, nothing on the internet can ever truly be gone. 

The coin caper is not a particularly surprising development in the Trump canon. But sinking the country into a bloody and pointless war while his approval rating continues to crater make such an obvious symbol of monarchical aspirations and gaudy garbage as politics look all the more ridiculous. 

If there is one silver lining, Scarinci pointed out, it’s this: If the Trump coins are produced, the “No Kings” movement will have a powerful new symbol. 

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Photo by Greg Pak, gregpak.fyi

The US House of Representatives voted late last week on whether or not to pass a war powers resolution that would require President Trump to seek congressional approval for further foreign intervention after taking it upon himself to, along with Israel, bomb Iran. Passing the resolution would have provided a sorely needed check on his power at a time when his lawlessness has reached a fever pitch, and would have hopefully helped avoid killing more Iranians and US servicemembers. The vote failed, allowing him to further entrench us in war and augmenting the idea that it’s inevitable.

In light of the events of the past week or so, I’d like to share a pretty simple belief: We don’t have to be at war. We’re taught growing up about the myriad battles of the past that, in a perfect world, should serve as painful lessons to avoid—not inspiration for the future. Yet time and again, this country chooses violence, and what persists is an attitude that if past generations made it through war, then we will, too. I’m here to tell you that we don’t have to. War is a choice.

War bookends everyone’s life in one way or another. As a 38-year-old, I’ve scarcely known adult life without it. My second week of high school was 9/11. Immediately, President George W. Bush entrenched us in war in Afghanistan, and soon after, Iraq, leading to unfathomable death and destruction. According to a Brown University study, more than 940,000 people “were killed by direct post-9/11 war violence in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen, and Pakistan between 2001-2023.”

We don’t need to do this again. Today’s teens don’t need to grow up in a world marred by war, where their classmates and siblings are forced to fight un-winnable fights with the fear that if things carry on, they’ll be forced to serve, too. Donald Trump does not care about regime change in Iran. Donald Trump does not care about the stability of the Middle East. Donald Trump couldn’t tell you one single fact about Iran that doesn’t line his pockets. Donald Trump cares about Donald Trump, and he’s opened up his own country and many others to yet another generational war. You do not have to fall for it.

But there’s good news: Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson says we’re not at war. 

"We are four days into a very specific, clear mission, an operation," Johnson told reporters last week. This “operation,” as it were, supposedly has two objectives: to destroy Iran's ballistic missiles and to "take their Navy down." The second part there sure sounds brand-new and made-up, but came on the heels of the US torpedoing an Iranian naval ship off Sri Lanka, killing 87 people. 

Aside from literal acts of war, there are many signs pointing to the fact that we’re at war. Politico reported Wednesday that “U.S. Central Command, meanwhile, is asking the Pentagon to send more military intelligence officers to its headquarters in Tampa, Florida, to support operations against Iran for at least 100 days but likely through September.” Members of Congress said they’re hearing a price tag of two billion dollars per day to carry on in Iran. The rain in Tehran is black after the bombing of oil depots. And the violence had spread beyond Iran’s borders: Israel, our partners in this offensive, has reportedly killed nearly 300 people in Lebanon in the past week. If this isn’t a war, then why is it shaped like one?

It’s not just Republicans who are open to supporting continued US violence abroad. A handful of Congressional Democrats have signaled a willingness to hear Trump out. “I need to know the goals and the plan. … I don’t rule anything out,” US Senator Elissa Slotkin of Michigan told Politico. “I mean, we’re in it.” 

Democratic Senators Jack Reed of Rhode Island, Gary Peters of Michigan, and Tim Kaine of Virginia have also said they’re open to sending the Pentagon more money. 

During the war powers resolution vote on Thursday, four Democrats sided with the Republicans to block it, in a vote that failed by two. Rep. Greg Landsman of Ohio, one of the four Democrats, told C-SPAN on Thursday: “I think it’s important to say, look, this is not good policy. What’s better policy is to allow the military and our allies to finish this particular operation, which is targeted, just the missiles and the launchers and the ships. That’s it. And then be done.”

The problem is that by relinquishing control from the very start, we’ll never get to say when it’s over. What kind of message does this send to constituents—or prospective future leaders—that once you’re in a war you must fund and fight it, no matter how you got there in the first place? Or that Trump can do whatever he wants and we’ll always clean up the mess? Secretary of Defense/War Pete Hegseth has decried the “stupid of rules of engagement” in overseas fighting, but that doesn’t mean Congress should throw out any of their pre-existing rules to accommodate anarchy.

Hegseth doesn’t want media reporting on the deaths already caused by this war because he thinks it makes the president look bad. Perhaps he should have thought about that before he killed people. Numbers make things real. Numbers aren’t opinions. They just are. Being dead is not a matter of conjecture. But that’s what this administration wants; for doubt to creep in. For Americans to say “Well, the Ayatollah was really bad, and there are people celebrating his death, so maybe the illegal ends justify the means?” 

A bad man killing a bad man does not make the first man good. 

And now we’ve learned he’ll be replaced by his son Mojtaba Khamenei, who worked hand-in-hand with his late father, and is now fueled by vengeance against the country that just killed his parents, his wife and one of his sons.  

We can distance ourselves by calling it “Trump’s War,” but the fact remains that, as the president of this country, his actions cast a filthy pall on all of us whether we support war or not. We can say it’s his “war of choice” or even refuse to use the word war at all, but do you think the little girls killed in the Iranian school bombing on Saturday cared about phrasing? When American missiles are raining down on your country, all you know is where the bombs came from. We all become complicit. 

Much like it’s taken some journalists years to admit that Donald Trump is indeed a fascist, so will others wait until we’re weeks, months or years into a war with Iran—or whichever countries he decides to target next—to say this needs to end. What would happen if, instead of waiting to see how this all plays out, we just say no, here and now. No waiting for the administration to get their story straight, no entertaining a million different justifications for why it’s actually worth all this death and destruction and money (Jesus Christ, the money!) What if those of us with a conscience and a modicum of influence just said no to war, regardless of oil prices, and before there are boots on the ground?

If you draw a moral line mere days into this war, you won’t have to do years of soul-searching to figure out what was obvious from the start. You won’t have to conduct a years-long mea culpa campaign explaining how, as a “policy wonk,” you were so sure war was the right choice at the time, but you were indeed wrong. As nice as it is to see someone like Bill Kristol pivot late in life to policies more progressive than most of Congress and vocally opposing war in Iran, he can’t takesies backsies cheerleading a war that destroyed untold lives. Hindsight is not required for 20/20 vision; we need only pay attention to history.

Many of the people in government and media who lulled the public into a compliant stupor in the early aughts remain in power today. While I was too young at the time to say I knew better, that’s no longer the case. And if you’re someone who’s old enough to remember how we ended up in Iraq, or even Vietnam, you have a duty to take what you’ve learned and apply it to the present; to recognize that you don’t have to be a military expert or a political science PhD to just say no to war. 

There is no way this war is going to end well for the United States. It’s already cost hundreds of lives in Iran, and the lives of seven American service members. The day after the initial bombing, anti-American protesters in Karachi, Pakistan breached the perimeter of the US Consulate there in an attempt to storm the building while American staffers were inside. Security personnel—which included, as Reuters has confirmed, US Marines—opened fire, killing 10 of the protesters. Non-essential consulate staff and their families have been instructed to evacuate because of the “risk of terrorist violence.” 

But perhaps as an American, the most compelling reason not to go to war abroad is that we’re already fighting one here at home. The Trump administration has unleashed the full force of the federal government on immigrants, people of color, LGBTQ+ people, poor people, non-Christians, and any combination thereof, making them afraid to go to work, to school, to celebrations, to houses of worship or to merely go put their trash bin on the curb. We’ve already been enlisted in a war we never asked for, having to put our bodies on the line to protect our neighbors—sometimes with deadly results. 

Americans don’t need to be deployed to Iran or elsewhere to experience the horrors of war because one has been domestically grown for us. Abolishing ICE (and DHS at large); preventing the opening of concentration camps; protecting our families, friends and neighbors; providing mutual aid for our communities; those should be the wartime efforts at hand.

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On Monday, the DC Metropolitan Police released the nearly six hours of body camera footage taken by their officers on March 17, 2025 when DOGE raided the United States Institute of Peace (USIP). This was as a direct result of my Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit against the department, in which I was represented by Allyson Veile and Adam Marshall of Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press. 

In a DC court hearing last month, Judge Darlene Soltys ruled on the spot that the department had to make available all the footage from that day, despite their months of objecting to do so. The defense argued there were privacy concerns for the individuals featured in the video, but when Judge Soltys asked for a specific example to illustrate this concern, they couldn’t produce any. “I'm not going to just accept a generic representation that gives them a blanket disclosure for every word that they uttered,” Judge Soltys said. She also said “the withholding of this much of the footage is unjustified when the statute prohibits redacting the officers' likenesses, and the District has yet to identify any specific dangers,” per the court transcript we requested and obtained. 

I’ve spent the last few days carefully reviewing all of the footage and taking copious notes on moments big and small, but my main takeaway is this: The people representing the Trump administration knew they were entering a privately-owned building, and the DC MPD allowed them to enter despite that fact. 

From the footage it’s clear that the team sent to take over USIP consisted of Kenneth Jackson, the Trump-installed new President; Laken Rapier, who identified herself as a USAID staffer who would be serving as Jackson’s Chief-of-Staff; DOGE workers Nate Cavanaugh and Justin Fox; and DOGE lawyer Justin Aimonetti. (“They’re pretty young,” one officer could be heard saying of DOGE at one point.) They were let in a side entrance by MPD, who had been called there by both the USIP staffers who believed Trump’s people were trespassing, and by Trump’s people who believed the USIP staffers were remaining in the building unlawfully.

Led by Jason Bagshaw, MPD’s commander of the Special Operations Division, the footage shows local police officers were brought into a situation of which they were given very little background, and for which they were ill-equipped to handle. 

After the DOGE group showed up but before MPD arrived, the USIP building had been placed in lockdown mode, meaning all interior doors were locked and elevators were no longer operable. So when DOGE presented MPD with an order supposedly showing Jackson now controlled the building, it was up to MPD officers to get him and his team up to the 5th floor where USIP President George Moose remained in his office. Colin O’Brien, then USIP’s Chief of Security, certainly wasn’t going to help them, despite their many requests for him to do so. At one point MPD officers openly muse about pulling the fire alarm to open all of the doors, but decide against it. That’s why a great deal of the footage shows officers attempting to break the locks on a variety of doors, from interior glass doors to heavy duty fire doors in stairwells. 

You can hear an officer ask for “the kid who picks locks” and at one point we can see an officer go to his patrol car to retrieve a set of tools. One such tool was a long and skinny white device that could snake under a door if there was any room, and successfully helped them pop open a few. Later on, officers could be seen taking tools from an extensive locksmith set and using them to work on the doors. Those tools included knives, and at at least one point in the footage, there were two knives on one lock simultaneously, creating what appeared to be a dangerous situation. Fortunately no one was hurt. (Watch a clip of them using the tools here.)

While this manual work was being done by some officers throughout the large building, then-current USIP staffers and members of the DOGE team were coming face to face in hallways and the main lobby of the building while other officers observed. An officer can be heard during one of these moments as saying to O’Brien, “I’m stuck in the middle. You keep staring at me like I did something.” Nate Cavanaugh, the 28-year-old DOGE worker tells the officer a few moments later, “Two FBI agents are gonna be here in about 10 minutes.” 

Aside from O’Brien and Moose, the USIP employees on site that day were George Foote, USIP outside counsel since 1987; Anna Dean, USIP Chief of Staff; Sophia Lin, outside counsel; Gonzalo Gallegos, USIP Director of Communications; plus two others who can be seen, and janitorial/maintenance staff who are referenced but never appear on camera.

The most tense confrontation comes when Jackson, Foote, their respective teams and the MPD all converge in one of the ground floor hallways (you can view the clip here.) Foote and Lin try to better understand how the DOGE team got into the building in the first place but are shut down by Jackson. “I’m asking the questions, not you,” Jackson tells Foote. In the same clip, Foote and Lin try to advance down the hall but an officer and Jackson physically block their way. “You’ve got guns. I don’t,” Foote says. He and Lin are told they’re not allowed to collect their personal property until the newly appointed board meets. 

In another clip (which can be viewed here), Aimonetti, the DOGE lawyer, tells Commander Bagshaw that they plan to call the private security contractor, Inter-Con, that USIP had terminated the day before to re-hire them and help them get through the building. When another officer asks if the building is owned by GSA (the General Services Administration which typically deals with the federal government’s real estate), Aimonetti and Jackson confirm it is not. “It’s a private building, and that’s why we need MPD,” Jackson says. The other officer confirms the building is “private property” to which Aimonetti responds, “That’s the oddball link in the chain for us.”

And in another clip (view here) when Rapier is asked by an MPD officer if the USIP building is a federal building, she also confirms it is not. “No, it’s privately-owned by USIP.” 

Eventually the footage shows MPD officers managed to break their way through enough doors to reach the 5th floor and escort then-President Moose out of the building (view here.) “We thought you guys were our friends,” Moose says to Bagshaw and the other officers.

The litigation over who has lawful control of the USIP building plays on, with the Trump administration remaining control of the building for now. But this footage sheds important light on their intentions when they entered the building nearly one year ago and the role MPD played in helping them achieve their goal.

You can view all of the uploaded footage here. 

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Gabriel’s mother called him crying on Thursday with some news: A new Kansas law invalidating the driver’s licenses of trans and gender nonconforming people who had previously changed the gender marker on their driver’s license was immediately in effect. “She asked if I was okay,” Gabriel, a trans man in Wichita, told The Handbasket, “and [asked] had I checked if my driver’s license was invalid yet.” At first, he admitted, he didn’t understand the gravity of the situation.

Earlier this week people began receiving unsigned letters from the Kansas Department of Revenue (KDOR) letting them know their licenses would be invalid as of February 26, 2025. The letter was first reported on Wednesday by independent journalist Erin Reed, and local and some national media raced to figure out the implications. After reviewing the law—which also restricts trans Kansan’s bathroom use in government buildings—and speaking with eight trans people in Kansas, in addition to exclusively obtaining two internal emails sent to state Department of Motor Vehicles employees about implementing the policy, a chaotic picture has emerged. By Friday not everyone who changed their marker in the past had received a letter, and it was unclear what the penalty would be for driving with an invalid license. What is clear is that Kansas Republicans have weaponized the government to target a tiny subset of an already small portion of the population to score political points and institutionalize cruelty.

Copy of the letter (via Erin Reed)

Being trans in Kansas was never simple, but the last few years have been particularly tumultuous as the rise in anti-trans legislation nationally became particularly pronounced locally. Kansans have been allowed to change the gender marker on their driver’s license since at least 2007, according to the Kansas Reflector. The nonprofit news outlet reported last year that from 2011 to 2022, 380 drivers in Kansas changed their gender marker.

In 2023 Kris Kobach, the state’s attorney general, used a newly-passed law to argue that KDOR should no longer allow the practice, putting the ability to change one’s marker on pause for the next two years while it wound through the courts. Finally in 2025 the state Supreme Court denied Kobach’s appeal, and in early October people were allowed to update their licenses. But that victory would prove short-lived.

“Before it was changed, I had problems buying alcohol, entering bars (important community spaces for queer people), awkward I-9 conversations for employment,” Alex, an app-based delivery driver in Kansas, told me. “Once a doctor’s office accused me of stealing my mother's driver’s license to check in because I didn't look female.”

But changing their gender marker in 2022 made all the difference. “Not having to worry about that anymore was amazing,” they said. “I felt safe and free. It felt like I could go anywhere and be a normal citizen.”

Fast forward to the beginning of the Kansas legislative session in January of this year, and trans people and their rights were once again in Republicans’ crosshairs. A bill, SB 244, was introduced in the state house that would make the terms “gender” and “sex” equivalent in state law, barring people from amending their license or birth certificate to reflect their own personal gender identity. The proposed bill’s hearing was announced just 24 hours in advance, giving opponents virtually no time to formulate a strategy. Republicans then added language that would make it illegal for someone to use a bathroom in a government building that doesn’t align with their sex assigned at birth. Despite a veto by Democratic Governor Laura Kelly, the Republican supermajority overrode the veto a few weeks back, making it state law.

Trans Kansans knew this was coming at some point, but they never expected it would happen so suddenly and be put into effect so swiftly.

Alex said their first reaction was anger. “We all deserve to have IDs and it's unjust for the state to invalidate them like this for a vulnerable group,” they said. “Then, worry and fear. What are the consequences if we don't comply? What group is next? Should I move?”

A group of trans activists pose for pictures on Feb. 6, 2026, at the Kansas Statehouse. (Photo by Sherman Smith/Kansas Reflector)

Jae Moyer, an LGBTQ+ Activist who sits on the Johnson County Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Coalition, said they were at work on Wednesday when they saw a social media post from Representative Abi Boatman, the only trans member of the Kansas Legislature, sharing a copy of the KDOR letter. (Boatman delivered this remarkable speech on the bill in late January.) As someone who uses they/them pronouns, Moyer was not directly impacted—the only gender options for a Kansas driver’s license are male or female, unlike other states where X is a possible marker for trans/gender nonconforming people—but Moyer, who spoke on their own behalf and not for the coalition, immediately feared for their community. 

“What makes me very concerned is like, let's imagine a hypothetical for a second where I am a trans person in Kansas who just had their license invalidated,” Moyer told me. “And let's say I live in a rural area without a ton of resources. And I have to drive quite a ways to get to the closest DMV on my invalidated driver's license, and for whatever reason, on the way I get pulled over. Then it's not just, ‘oh, I don't have a valid license.’ It's, ‘oh, I'm driving on an invalid license and I can be charged with something for that.’”

That was a valid and widespread concern in the period of shock immediately following the implementation of the law, which was not initially made any clearer by guidance sent out to the DMV employees who would be processing the mandated license changes.

In an email sent on Wednesday and obtained exclusively by The Handbasket on Thursday, Kent Selk, Driver Services Manager for the Kansas Department of Revenue, doled out instructions for how to comply with SB244 and shared a copy of the letter sent to “individuals who need to return to our office and have their credential updated with their gender at birth.” Selk wrote that a flag will show on the record of anyone who has supposedly been sent a letter. Then he added insult to injury: “The individuals will be charged as normal for their reissuance.”

But perhaps most concerning of all was Selks instruction that DMV employees must email the government helpdesk after issuing the updated credentials with an individual’s license number, indicating the person was now in compliance with SB 244. It also indicated that a list is being compiled.

“I'm definitely not a fan of being marked as a trans person in a state database,” Zoey told me. “I worry that the presidential administration could start going after us with that information like they have for immigrants.” 

After receiving the letter, Zoey rushed to the DMV first thing on Thursday to update her license out of fear of what it would mean to have an invalid license. While there, she saw another trans woman doing the same thing, letter in hand. Zoey changed her name and gender marker to female in 2022, but when she had to renew in 2023, Kobach’s lawsuit was in full swing and she was forced to change back to male. Then in October, once changes were allowed again, she happily switched it back thinking she’d have six years until this came up again. “Thankfully I didn't cry this morning,” she said on Thursday. “I’m too numb to all this at this point.”

Jackie, on the other hand, hasn’t received a letter yet despite changing her gender marker in the past. She plans to sit tight until she does. “I am very worried about getting a random traffic stop and getting hit with a suspended license fine and not even knowing it,” she told me. “Or even worse, being prevented from voting when they run it at a polling station.”

She added that even if she does eventually get the letter, she worries about “having to participate in their little humiliation ritual” in order to comply with the law. “It’s an even bigger risk to go to jail I suppose,” Jackie said. “I guess I just don’t have the right barometer to deal with this kind of capricious hate.”

Midday Friday, I obtained a copy of another email sent out to DMV employees earlier in the day providing more guidance. 

“Currently, KDOR has not ‘invalidated’ any records for people who were sent letters due to the passing of SB244 which requires the ‘sex at birth’ to be listed on Kansas credentials,” Kent Selk of the KDOR wrote. “If this is completed, we will let you know.”

He indicated the letter had been sent to “about 300” license holders, putting into sharp perspective how much time, energy and money Kansas Republicans have spent this year in service of hurting such a tiny percentage of their population of nearly three million people. Tellingly, Selk wrote that the applicants don’t need documentation to make the update other than their current license and proof of address.

Photo by Sherman Smith/Kansas Reflector

Michaela from Topeka accidentally ended up in compliance before the law took effect when she needed to update the address on her driver’s license in September in order to complete the purchase of a firearm. Though her ID at the time had a female marker, the DMV changed it back to male without asking. 

“Before I knew it, they clipped the corner of my ID off, invalidating it, and issued me a new temporary one with the M on it,” she told me. “Didn’t warn me, didn’t ask if I wanted to continue. They just took it.” When she asked about a recent court ruling, she was met with a confused look. Her birth certificate, however, still holds the female marker.

“Of course all this happened shortly after the Charlie Kirk killing when the national zeitgeist seemed to be in a frenzy to take firearms from trans people,” Michaela said. “I’m a student of history and that kind of talk sent a chill down my spine. I saw the writing on the wall.”

(In other echoes of history, many have commented that the new Kansas law is reminiscent of when the Nazis invalidated the passports of all German Jews in 1938.) 

Leaving the state has crossed the minds of most of the people I spoke to, though it’s not feasible for many. Between professional licenses tied to the state, lack of funds to move elsewhere, or the simple fact that they can’t—and shouldn’t have to—leave their families, picking up and leaving feels like a distant option. 

The Trans Continental Pipeline, a nonprofit mutual aid organization based in Colorado, is helping relieve the burden for trans people and their families who feel they must leave the state where they live. They work nationally to help people relocate from states with oppressive anti-trans laws to ones with better rights for them. 

A recent survey by The Movement Advancement Project (MAP) with NORC at the University of Chicago looked to understand the negative impacts adults in the LGBTQ+ community were experiencing under the second Trump administration. It found that nearly one in 10 trans adults had moved to a different state from November 2024 to June 2025 because of LGBTQ-related laws or politics. That’s an estimated 400,000 people.

The American Civil Liberties Union of Kansas announced Friday they would we representing two trans Kansans challenging SB 244 in court. 

“SB 244 is a cruel and craven threat to public safety all in the name of fostering fear, division, and paranoia,” Harper Seldin, a Senior Staff Attorney for the ACLU’s LGBTQ & HIV Rights Project, was quoted as saying in a news release. “The invalidation of state-issued IDs threatens to out transgender people against their will every time they apply for a job, rent an apartment, or interact with police. Taken as a whole, SB 244 is a transparent attempt to deny transgender people autonomy over their own identities and push them out of public life altogether.”

A personal note related to this story: 

The only journalism award I’ve ever received is one from the Kansas Press Association. As a born and raised New Yorker, the state of Kansas is close to my heart and has been [however improbably] a large part of my more recent journalism career. From interviewing a 50-year abortion rights activist based there about the state’s effort to add an amendment to the state constitution banning abortion (it ultimately failed), to my scoop about why the Marion County Record newspaper was raided by police which ultimately led to me visiting a year later, I’ve developed meaningful and important friendships and relationships with people who call Kansas home. 

This is all to say: If you come for my trans friends in Kansas, you come for me. Trans rights are human rights. Full stop.

Image from small amount of footage already shared

I’m not used to writing you with good news, but here goes: 

This morning I went to the District of Columbia Superior Court along with my lawyers Allyson Veile and Adam Marshall of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press for a hearing about my lawsuit seeking all body camera footage from the DOGE raid on the US Institute of Peace (USIP) last March. Now, 11 months after I filed my original Freedom of Information (FOIA) request to the DC Metropolitan Police Department (MPD), we finally have a resolution: We won. 

Associate Judge Darlene Soltys has ordered MPD to produce all un-redacted body camera footage from the officers who responded to calls from both USIP employees and representatives of the Trump administration at the USIP building on March 17, 2025. The order was made live during the course of the hearing, and must be fulfilled within 14 calendar days. 

Phones and recording devices weren’t allowed inside the courtroom, so I’m relying on notes taken by my lawyers and me to give you a sense of what transpired at the hearing. Nothing below is an exact quote. While the judge won’t be issuing a written order, we’re requesting the transcript so that I can share her reasoning in her own words—but that will take a week or so.

MPD’s case relied, in part, on the claim that releasing all of the body camera footage would constitute an invasion of privacy for the DOGE employees present that day. (Prior to Wednesday, they had shared approximately 32 minutes of footage out of five hours and 50 minutes total—some with significant visual or audio redactions.) At the start of the hearing, the judge asked the defense if they could provide any specific examples of exchanges or words uttered in the footage that would support that claim. Lead counsel replied that she could not. The judge then asked if there was any current criminal investigation into what happened at the USIP building, and the answer was no. 

For the most part, Judge Soltys read her ruling from the bench, explaining that MPD had not provided substantial evidence to support their claims. She said that in ordering the USIP employees to vacate the building, MPD had chosen a side in what was a federal dispute. Judge Soltys also underlined the fact that when you are a government employee whose salary is paid for by the taxpayers, there is less expectation of privacy.

As I shared in November, our team was able to get six sworn affidavits from USIP staff who were present the day of the raid. Numerous times throughout her ruling, Judge Soltys referenced the affidavit of Colin O’Brien, the former chief security officer at USIP. MPD had argued that releasing the body cam footage would present a security risk to the current occupants of the building, but O’Brien said that the footage was taken in public spaces, including the lobby where there are often large events with no photo restrictions. 

“We’re proud to have represented Marisa in this case,” RCFP lawyer Allyson Veile said in a statement. “This is an important win not just for The Handbasket but for the promise of transparency in the District of Columbia. The court’s ruling vindicates the public’s right of access to body camera footage, and ensures that the public will get a full and accurate accounting of the episode of the U.S. Institute of Peace last year.”

This outcome is an important reminder that no matter how strong the forces against us may seem, it’s always worth putting up a fight. I look forward to seeing all of the body camera footage, including the “high-fives and fist bumps” O’Brien said were exchanged between MPD officers. I will share clips and insights with you as soon as I can.

Allow me to close by saying: Hell yea.

If you believe in the First Amendment and the value of journalism, consider supporting the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press so they can continue their essential work.