Progressive Political News Archives | Page 6 of 21

Children May Face the Steepest Risks as Trump’s EPA Reverses Course on Pollution

President Donald Trump and his administration have called it the “Great American Comeback.” But environmental advocates say the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s reversing course on enforcing air and water pollution laws is more of a throwback — one that will exacerbate health risks for children who live and study in the shadows of petrochemical facilities.…

Trump Officials Are Keeping Ties to His Social Media Company

Mother Jones illustration Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters. For Donald Trump, TruthSocial, his unsuccessful and money-losing Twitter competitor, has mainly been a place to retreat to when banned from the former, and a megaphone to trumpet his many opinions on his enemies, golf,…

The Great Pretender

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Rep. Andy Ogles has achieved a difficult feat: In a GOP House caucus known for sycophancy, the second-term Tennessee Republican has become President Donald Trump’s most cloying lackey. Since January, Ogles has introduced a bill to “Make Greenland Great Again,” moved to amend the Constitution so Trump (but not Barack Obama) can run for a third term, and filed articles of impeachment against two federal judges who have ruled against the president. On social media, he defends Trump loudly, if poorly. The congressman told Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy after his contentious White House visit to head his “little a$$ back to Europe!!!”

From the perspective of Ogles’ dignity, the most charitable explanation for his behavior is that he is legislating with a gun to his head. During the 2022 run that brought him to Washington, Ogles reported making a $320,000 loan to his campaign, which he later admitted did not exist—a potential felony. Last summer, FBI agents seized Ogles’ cellphone from him at his home. The possibility of an indictment loomed. But a week after Ogles introduced his bill to let Trump seek reelection, the Trump Justice Department pulled prosecutors and put the case on ice.

Still, Ogles performs his loyalty with an enthusiasm indicating ambitions beyond legal protection. In interviews and on social media, he appears desperate to capture the fame of MAGA celebrities like Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.) and former Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.).

In fact, it may be former Rep. George Santos (R-N.Y.) who provides the clearest counterpoint. Both men are serial fabulists who have been investigated by the FBI. Yet, despite his best efforts to become a household name on the right, Ogles thus far has proven to be too boring, even for infamy. Over-the-top claims and obsequiousness from Trump foot soldiers used to surprise. But it’s a crowded marketplace now, and Ogles’ comparative anonymity shows how hard it is to stand out from the shitposter pack.

Rep. Andy Ogles (R-Tenn.) speaks to reporters before attending a Republican caucus meeting in 2023.Chip Somodevilla/Getty

The day after the 2024 election, Ogles told a local radio show that he’d just called Trump, planning to leave a congratulatory voicemail. But Ogles added a gleeful twist: Trump, despite how tired he must have been, answered.

One week later, Ogles told the story again, this time on his own podcast, a low-budget affair whose video introduction features images of Jesus Christ, the Archangel Michael, and Michelangelo’s David. In the following week’s episode, titled “JUST CALLED TRUMP!,” the still-starstruck congressman retold the Trump-picked-up story a third time—and boasted of a second call with the president-elect.

Ogles didn’t say whether they discussed his federal case. But shortly after Inauguration Day, two lead prosecutors from the Justice Department left the case pursuing the congressman. Trump’s DOJ has not formally withdrawn its request to access Ogles’ communications, leaving the door open that he could still be indicted.

So it’s no surprise that Ogles continues to aggressively puff up Trump. In February, he went on Fox’s LiveNOW streaming channel to discuss his support for Trump’s efforts to turn Gaza into an American protectorate by offering a legislative counterpart, Ogles’ “Make Gaza Great Again Act.” Soon after, the congressman launched a futile effort to strip dozens of Democrats, including Rep. Al Green (D-Texas), of committee assignments for pushing back against Trump. (Green was removed from Trump’s joint address to Congress for interrupting the president.) House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries hit back. “Andy Ogles is a fraud, a complete and total fraud,” he declared in a video. “Don’t make me expose you to folks who don’t know you.”

The deceptions that Jeffries was hinting at are not hard to find. Two decades before arriving in Congress, Ogles, then entering his 30s, owned a restaurant and doughnut place in Franklin, Tennessee. When a local reporter showed up to write about his shop, Daylight Donuts, in 2001, Ogles was described as a student of German, Russian, and Japanese with international business ambitions who ended up selling doughnuts by chance. It would later emerge that Ogles only took an introductory college Japanese class, earning a B; there is no record of him studying or speaking German or Russian. While Ogles has asserted as a congressman, including during a meeting of the House Financial Services Committee, that he is an economist, the same transcript shows he took just one community college economics course, earning a C.

By 2004, following his first unsuccessful congressional run, the Tennessee Department of Revenue had filed a lien against Daylight Donuts and Ogles for failing to pay the business’s taxes. Later, on a 2009 résumé that Ogles submitted for a job—and that was later obtained by investigative reporter Phil Williams of Nashville’s NewsChannel 5—the future congressman omitted any mention of the shop. But that résumé did claim he’d been a vice president at Franklin Investment & Holding from 1995 to 2002, where he boasted of achieving Ponzi-like “continued growth of 18% to 25% annually” despite the concurrent burst of the dot-com bubble. The résumé also stated that he went on to become executive vice president at E.Net Media & Consulting. But according to the Washington Post, Franklin Investment & Holding existed for only one year, and there are no records to prove that E.Net ever did. The only other job listed was Ogles’ failed 2002 run for Congress.

The community work Ogles listed did not hold up, either. He claimed to be on the board of directors for the city of Franklin and the local branch of the YMCA. The city has no board of directors, and, according to the Post, he never served on the YMCA board.

In 2006, Ogles lost a state Senate primary, winning just 2 percent of the vote and finishing sixth of six. What he did next is unclear—he declined to comment for this story—but by 2013, he was the director of Tennessee’s chapter of Americans for Prosperity, a Koch-backed group. In 2018, after dropping out of a US Senate race, Ogles, the sole Republican on the ballot, became mayor of Maury County.

During his successful run for Congress four years later, any discrepancies in his biography went unnoticed. When Ogles described himself at a debate as a “former member of law enforcement,” voters had no reason to suspect that he’d just been a volunteer reserve sheriff’s deputy—who was kicked out for failing to show up.

Reporting questioning the Tennessee congressman’s claims about himself came out not long after the revelations about Santos. But compared to the gay son of Brazilian immigrants who seemed made for reality TV, Ogles largely got a pass in the court of public opinion for lies that in another era might have ended a career.

Federal prosecutors and congressional investigators took more interest. The trouble started after the congressman’s own financial disclosures strongly suggested he wasn’t wealthy enough to have loaned his campaign so much. In May 2024, Ogles bowed to the pressure by admitting in amended Federal Election Commission filings that the loan did not exist and that his campaign had never received the $320,000 from him or anyone else.

Why would he make up a loan to his own campaign? Ogles’ campaign treasurer, Thomas Datwyler, later explained to Office of Congressional Ethics investigators that a fake loan could still inflate the campaign’s war chest to “scare away the competition and buy the primary.” (Datwyler was also listed on FEC filings as the treasurer for Santos, who pleaded guilty in 2024 to submitting fake loan information to the FEC to inflate his campaign’s financial position.) Datwyler noted that Ogles had repeatedly refused to provide him bank records during the 2022 campaign. “I work with two dozen congressmen, five senators; he’s the only one that I don’t have access,” he said.

Questions about the fake loan and biographical fabrications did not stop Ogles from defeating a well-funded Republican primary opponent last summer. When FBI agents in Tennessee seized the congressman’s phone days after the primary, Ogles insisted that any investigation would yield only “reporting discrepancies” and “honest mistakes.”

In September, after Ogles petitioned a court to get his phone back from the FBI, DOJ attorneys submitted a 25-page brief arguing to keep it. While congressional ethics investigators released a report in early January that found Ogles had “omitted or misrepresented required information” in filings and “may have violated federal law,” the brief was the last public step government prosecutors made in the case before Trump took office.

Whether or not Ogles fears Trump might restart an investigation, he’s since proven willing to act as the president’s loudest defender. Take late February, when Ogles released a video about his bills to impeach judges who have ruled against Trump. In it, the congressman lectures in front of a poster board featuring seven judges marked “WANTED.” At least this once, Ogles broke through: Elon Musk saw it and shared it with his more than 219 million followers on X.

RFK Jr.’s Old Environmental Group Is Extremely Unhappy With Trump’s EPA

Once a byword for environmental degradation, the Hudson River is now recovering, in part due to the work of Riverkeeper, a non-profit environmental organization that established a model of legal activism for water protection.John B Senter III/UCG/Universal Images Group/Getty Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that…

France Cracked Down on Far-Right Corruption—And Team Trump Is Triggered

Far-right French politician Marine Le Pen has not proven to be as lucky as Donald Trump was in skirting consequences of breaking the law.Alexis Sciard/IP3/ZUMA Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters. After a French court found far-right leader and former presidential frontrunner Marine Le…

A Cowardly Attack on Disabled Students

When Republicans like the squatter currently occupying the White House try to cut popular public support and civil rights programs, they do so in cowardly fashion, like a bully who shoots you a quick elbow to the ribs when he thinks nobody’s watching.

Take, for example, all that’s been going on lately with Donald Trump’s attacks on the U.S. Department of Education. The department is currently responsible for enforcing the federal Individuals With Disabilities Education Act of 1975 (IDEA), which establishes the right of every child with a disability in the United States to a “free and appropriate” public education.

Before IDEA was enacted, disabled students were routinely rejected by our school districts. The public schools that my non-disabled neighbors attended weren’t wheelchair accessible. There was no law obligating school districts to do anything to accommodate disabled children at that time, so they often did nothing, and we had no legal recourse. I was instead bussed miles away to one of Chicago’s few accessible public schools.

IDEA gives the parents and guardians of disabled kids a means of fighting back against their school district if they feel that the disabled child is being shortchanged on their education due to lack of accommodation. They can file a complaint with the Education Department’s Office of Civil Rights (OCR), which assigns an investigator to look into and help resolve the dispute.

But shortly after the squatter took office on January 20, a freeze was placed on OCR investigations of disability complaints. That freeze was lifted on February 20, but the Associated Press reports that OCR investigators have been told to shift their priorities to better reflect the political agenda of the squatter, which includes such matters as keeping transgender people from participating in school athletics, stopping pro-Palestinian student protests, and eradicating diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs.

Earlier this month, the squatter’s regime closed seven of the twelve regional OCR offices, including the one here in Chicago and in other major cities such as New York and Philadelphia. This was done via a mass email to about 1,300 of the DoE’s 4,000 employees sharing the “difficult news” that their jobs were being eliminated. The OCR division was among the most heavily affected.

This is how political cowards go about doing their dirty work. They profess their undying love for and eternal devotion to laws like IDEA. But they know that a quick and easy way to make a law ineffective is to deprive those who enforce civil rights laws and administer public programs of the resources they need to properly do their jobs.

The squatter never would have dared to promise on the campaign trail that, if elected, he would gut the right of disabled kids to receive a free and appropriate public education. But he has spoken often about his simple-minded quest to abolish the Education Department, which, he says, has become infested with “radicals, zealots, and Marxists.”

That’s just another cowardly way of doing things.

The Plight of the Working Homeless

In May 2018, the house in Atlanta, Georgia, where Celeste lived with her three children burned down. It was an act of arson committed by a man with mental illness she had briefly dated.

Celeste began the search for a new place to live, in the meantime staying in hotels and friends’ apartments, in exchange for cleaning and cooking, her personal passion, as she worked full-time warehouse jobs and juggled her children’s child care needs. Then came the bad news that she had ovarian and breast cancer, for which she needed treatment. She sought help from a social service agency charged with helping the homeless, only to be told that her family was not homeless enough—they had to be living in a shelter or someplace unsuited for human habitation. When she asked about getting into a shelter, she was told it would mean splitting up her family, since her son was fifteen and the local family shelters disallowed boys older than thirteen.

“I wish I had more to offer,” the caseworker told her. “I’m sorry.”

There are many such stories in Brian Goldstone’s There Is No Place for Us: Working and Homeless in America, a deeply reported and even more deeply infuriating look into the lives of five Black families in Atlanta as they struggle to meet the most basic of needs: finding a place to live. All are headed by parents who work hard, sometimes at more than one job, but are priced out due to gentrification, corporate landlords, opportunistic investors, and byzantine rules that seem designed to keep people from getting the help—or, more precisely, the housing—they need.

There Is No Place for Us: Working and Homeless in America

By Brian Goldstone

Crown, 448 pages

Publication date: March 25, 2025

Atlanta is the nation’s third fastest-growing metropolitan area and, like many other places, has more people than places to house them. That may sound like an overly simplistic way to frame the nation’s housing crisis, but it is one that is maddeningly overlooked. Goldstone cites a 1986 poll by The New York Times and CBS News in which randomly polled people were asked to name the root causes of homelessness. About a third said alcohol, drugs, or mental health problems; 20 percent cited an unwillingness to work; 19 percent named bad luck. Nobody mentioned housing.

The families Goldstone profiles are subject to all manner of trials and exploitation. They spend hours per day, week after week, searching for available units, plagued by past evictions or low credit scores caused by their lack of money. Housing providers routinely demand nonrefundable “application fees” of $50 or more. Government agencies order them to take classes on such topics as “financial literacy”—which in the case of one profiled working mother would mean quitting her job. “What kind of ‘financial literacy’ would make it easier to afford $380-a-week rent on a $12-an-hour wage?” Goldstone asks.

Lacking any other place to stay, these families sleep in cars, terrified they may awake to a police officer’s tap on the window, the beam of a flashlight falling on children who are about to be taken away. In recent years, Goldstone reports, about 20 percent of child removals in Georgia were due to “inadequate housing.”

There Is No Place for Us does not offer much reason for hope. At one point, protests erupt at a housing complex that evicted families using private security forces armed with handguns and assault rifles. “NO MORE GUNS POINTED AT CHILDREN” read one of the signs. But this effort fizzled out without any real gains.

Goldstone does suggest some policy changes that could be embraced: “banning extortionate application fees, capping security deposits, outlawing biased tenant screening practices, prohibiting discrimination against voucher holders,” and more. But there is simply not enough affordable housing to go around, nor is there the political will to do something about it.

Celeste ended up moving to her home state of Florida. It was, Goldstone notes, an admission of defeat, going back to a place that represented “heartache and abuse, frustration and futility.” She had wanted to build a life in Atlanta. She had dreams of someday opening a restaurant, and she would have been good at it. But Atlanta made no place for her. It was the city’s loss, and a nation’s shame.

Editor’s Note: About the Children

You may be wondering why—as federal jobs, institutions, and grants are cut to the bone, as diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) offices and initiatives evaporate across both the private and public sectors, as nonviolent citizens are forcibly dragged from town hall meetings by security personnel in plainclothes, as the newspaper of the nation’s capital city is remade to the liking of the world’s second richest man—is The Progressive turning our focus in this April/May issue to the state of children in the United States? To that question I return another: Have you seen who’s running the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE)?

A crew of six young men, barely out of college, recruited by Elon Musk as DOGE operatives, have been “sweeping into agency headquarters with black backpacks and ambitious marching orders”—plunging the federal workforce into chaos for the broken promise of $2 trillion in federal cuts. As I write this, in an apparent effort to make it look all better now, President Donald Trump has announced that Musk will not be empowered to make decisions over Cabinet leaders—despite clearly stating continued support for the efforts of DOGE. That the youngest of these DOGE aides, nineteen-year-old Edward Coristine, became a “ubiquitous presence” in online platforms that trafficked in bigotry and cybercrime as a high schooler reflects a sobering national reality. In a story for this issue that echoes Coristine’s own, Melissa Ryan takes us inside the online communities of young extremists that have resulted in school shootings across the country—including one in The Progressive’s hometown of Madison, Wisconsin.

The well-being of children in the United States is not a niche nor a women’s issue, as it is often presented, but one that directly measures the health of our economy and our democracy. In these pages, you’ll find a range of stories about what happens when we abandon our social responsibilities on a generational level, and what is possible when we embrace the political power of young people. Bryce Covert covers the child care crash, in which providers are closing doors after losing the federal funds that have been keeping them afloat since the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic. Navin Kariyawasam and Eric Zhao dive deep into how the United States v. Skrmetti case before the U.S. Supreme Court—which will decide the constitutionality of a ban on gender-affirming care for trans youth in Tennessee and is set for a ruling by summer 2025—will harm all youth nationwide. Longtime Chicago Public Schools teacher Xian Franzinger Barrett shares the heartbreak of being unable, in this political climate, to ensure a safe classroom for their students. Psychotherapist Nahid Fattahi discusses her work with patients “whose anxiety, depression, and post-traumatic stress stem from childhood experiences of immigration enforcement,” and how mass deportations and family separation continue to perpetuate this harm. Author Brea Baker reflects on her own family’s history with the U.S. land policy that prevents Black descendants from inheriting their relatives’ property.

Opening this issue with a hefty dose of optimism, seventeen-year-old Emma Weber the of Sunrise Movement tells us how she and other students in Boulder, Colorado, won a Green New Deal for Schools resolution in their school district, and are now organizing at the state level. Also speaking out are Iowa student Kayde Martin and a teacher at his high school, Kat Power, who share Martin’s experience giving testimony on his eighteenth birthday before Iowa lawmakers against the proposed removal of protections for transgender people in the state’s Civil Rights Act.

Youth bear the brunt of a society on the verge of collapse. This much is clear when even U.S. Representative Brittany Pettersen, Democrat of Colorado—blocked from voting remotely—had to cut short her maternity leave at the end of February to fly to Washington, D.C., and vote no on a series of disastrously anti-family budget cuts with her four-week-old baby in her arms. “All of our major movements in American history have failed,” child advocate and author of Spare the Kids Stacey Patton told me via email as we prepared this issue of the magazine, “because we haven’t centered and radically transformed our treatment of the young.”

What happens when a democracy crumbles? We begin at the beginning.

In solidarity,

Alexandra Tempus

This Progressive Judge Is Democrats’ Best Hope to Take Down Elon Musk

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“I need to talk for just a minute or two about my opponent,” Wisconsin Supreme Court candidate Susan Crawford tells a crowd of supporters in Kenosha. “Elon Musk.”

It’s become her signature line. And it was particularly apt for her to deliver on Friday, March 28, the same day Musk announced that he would hold a rally in Wisconsin to hand deliver two million dollar checks to people who had voted in the April 1 election, which he abruptly backtracked on after legal experts pointed out that his pledge violated the state constitution.

“This is the guy,” Crawford says in Kenosha, “who has spent over $25 million trying to keep me off the Wisconsin Supreme Court.”

[embedded content]

The spring election will decide the ideological majority on the court. When she entered the race, Crawford, a circuit court judge in Madison’s Dane County, expected to discuss the hot button issues that the court often decides, such as abortion, gerrymandering, voting rights, crime, and public safety. And indeed, the court could soon decide the fate of the state’s 1849 abortion ban, a law restricting collective bargaining for public sector unions, and the legality of Wisconsin’s congressional maps.

But Musk’s involvement—he has spent more money in Wisconsin than any donor to a judicial election in US history—and the controversial, possibly illegal, tactics he’s employed, has dramatically raised the stakes, giving the election huge national significance. “Musk has made this a referendum on the idea of an American oligarchy,” Wisconsin Democratic Party Chair Ben Wikler tells me in Kenosha, a lakefront city forty miles south of Milwaukee.

“It’s probably something of a test case for him to see if this works,” Crawford says when we speak after her event, in a former bank built in 1928, with an ornate ceiling and towering chandelier. “And if it works here, I think that we can look forward to seeing Elon Musk trying to buy not just judges, but other elected officials in other states with the same tactics.” She calls Musk’s scheme to pay voters for signing his pac’s petition against “activist judges” and giving million dollar checks to those who’ve voted, “very concerning to me. Because it certainly seems like an effort to buy votes in this election.”

“Elon Musk would really like to buy himself a seat on the Wisconsin Supreme Court,” Crawford adds. “He wants to put somebody there that he thinks he can have some influence over and access to. And I think in part, that’s because he’s got business interests here,” she says, referencing a lawsuit Tesla has filed against Wisconsin.

Wisconsin Attorney General Josh Kaul challenged Musk’s scheme in court on Friday, but the Wisconsin Supreme Court declined to block it before Musk’s rally. Musk spoke for two hours in Green Bay on Sunday, walking out in a cheesehead and giving million dollar checks to two people who signed his PAC’s petition, Nicholas Jacobs, the chair of the state college Republicans and Ekaterina Diestler, a graphic designer. Hundreds of protesters gathered outside the event, holding signs that read, “My Vote is Not for Sale.”

Crawford, 60, a former prosecutor and circuit court judge since 2018, is an unlikely candidate to go toe-to-toe with Musk. She’s petite and mild-mannered, with a reserved, lawyerly demeaner. She likes baking sourdough bread and painting in her spare time. “She did not expect to be running against the richest man in the world,” Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice Rebecca Dallet said when she campaigned with Crawford in the Milwaukee suburbs the next day.

But she’s now the best hope of Democrats and progressives to strike the first blow against the Trump-Musk alliance and provide a blueprint for how Democrats can defeat oligarchy in other battleground states. On the other hand, if the Trump and Musk-backed candidate Brad Schimel, a former state attorney and judge in suburban Milwaukee, wins, it will embolden Musk to spend many more millions extending his plan for oligarchy to the states at the same time he dismantles the federal government with little resistance, steamrolling whatever checks and balances stand in his way.

“If Musk is able to buy the Wisconsin State Supreme Court,” Wikler says, “he’s going to send a signal to any other potential elected judge in the country or other candidate for public office that if they swear fealty to Trump and agree to be a rubber stamp for Trump agenda and do whatever it is that Musk wants them to do, he will pour enough money in to guarantee their victory.”

The fate of democracy is not an abstract issue in Wisconsin. The state supreme court came one vote short of overturning the election in 2020, when Trump tried to throw out 221,000 votes only in the Democratic strongholds of Milwaukee and Dane Counties.

Crawford, who lives in Madison, took that personally. “My ballot was one of the ones they were trying to throw out,” she says. “So I was very disturbed by that.”

She worries that Schimel, who has said that the Wisconsin Supreme Court “screwed [Trump] over” in 2020, will “absolutely” try to overturn future elections if he sits on the court.

“He has said that he thinks the Supreme Court did the wrong thing in failing to overturn the election results,” she says. “He’s had a history of being supportive of voter suppression in Wisconsin, so it’s very concerning to see somebody like him with such a hard right, partisan agenda, to see what he might do on the court.”

Schimel has aggressively tied himself to Trump’s MAGA platform. He attended Trump’s inauguration, claimed the January 6 rioters did not receive fair trials, and said he wanted to be part of a “support network” to fight the lawsuits against the Trump administration. He’s amplified Trump’s election denialism, telling a conservative radio host that he needs to “make this too big to rig so we don’t have to worry that at 11:30 in Milwaukee, they’re going to find bags of ballots that they forgot to put into the machines.”

Trump endorsed Schimel on March 21. Campaign material distributed by Musk’s America PAC says Schimel is on “Team Trump.” Schimel stumped in Milwaukee in the final days of the campaign wearing a Make America Great Again Hat.

“I know that if another voting rights case comes in front of our court, I would not want Brad Schimel to be one of those people deciding whether to throw out lawfully cast ballots,” Justice Dallet said in suburban Milwaukee.

Republicans say the onslaught of spending against Crawford, led by Musk, has tightened the race, while Democrats believe Musk’s money will motivate their voters to turn out. Early voting shows high turnout in both blue and red strongholds, with double the number of early votes compared to the last Supreme Court race in 2023, when progressives won the majority on the court. In a good sign for Democrats, the city of Milwaukee set a record for early voting on Saturday, with turnout up roughly 200 percent compared to the April 2023 race; more than three-fourths of the statewide early vote on Saturday came from Milwaukee and Madison.

Democrats believe they have an eight-point lead among the roughly 500,000 voters who have voted early, but it’s hard to predict how many Republican voters will turn out on Election Day. The airwaves have been blanketed with ads from both sides. The race is expected to top $100 million, by far a record for any state judicial contest, with a quarter of overall spending coming from Musk-backed groups.

Musk’s attempt to buy the Wisconsin Supreme Court is especially notable because Wisconsin used to be known for its history of good governance. Teddy Roosevelt once called it “a laboratory for wise experimental legislation aiming to secure the social and political betterment of the people as a whole.” But after Republicans took control of the state following the 2010 elections, they dismantled its tough campaign finance system, abandoned judicial ethics rules, and otherwise politicized previously well-regarded institutions, making the state a laboratory for undermining democracy.

“They gerrymander to rig the system, and when they can’t gerrymander, then they try to take away people’s votes,” State Rep. Robyn Vining, who flipped a Republican-held district in suburban Milwaukee in 2018, tells me. “Then when they can’t rig the votes, the richest man in the world comes in and decides he wants to try and buy it.”

Wisconsin Democrats repeatedly said they believed Musk’s scheme would backfire because state voters wouldn’t like the idea of a billionaire swooping in to buy an election. “It’s everything that Wisconsin is not,” Vining says. “The Wisconsin work ethic is a big deal. You work hard for what you have, and to have the richest man in the world come in and just to buy a seat for his own advantage, it’s not who we are. As a Wisconsinite, that’s infuriating.”

Now, Wisconsin is the laboratory that will tell us whether not just the state, but the entire country, is swinging toward an insurmountable oligarchy or whether democracy still has a fighting change.

As she knocked on doors in Schimel’s home county, trying to turn out the pockets of blue in a red stronghold that is trending more puple, Vining handed out campaign literature showing Crawford on the front, saying she would “protect abortion rights” and “strengthen voting rights.” On the back was Schimel next to Musk, showing how much money Musk has poured into the race, “because Musk knows Brad Schimel is for sale.”

“We’re going to be the first to test of whether or not the richest man in the world can come in and buy our election,” Vining says. “I hope that we show them that we will be the last. It would be really great if Wisconsin could shut this down.”

Bodies of Massacred First Responders Found Buried in Rafah

At Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis, Taghreed al-Attar sits next to her husband’s body, which was discovered last Friday in Rafah. Her husband, Anwar al-Attar, left with fellow first responders to Rafah the previous week, but no one returned. His wife says that when they lost contact with him, people told her he had been…