And while the details of his misconduct and justice for his survivors are paramount, this story is also a case study in who women trust with their stories, and the sources we trust to tell their stories to us.

From a DM to a Newsroom

Five months before the San Francisco Chronicle published its investigation into Eric Swalwell, education influencer Arielle Fodor, known to more than a million followers as Mrs. Frazzled, posted something unremarkable. A former kindergarten teacher turned TikTok personality and political voice, she shared a positive reaction to Swalwell’s announcement that he was running for governor of California. “You know how I love to tell you when I meet a politician who acts like a normal human and not a robot,” she wrote. “Eric is that.”

The response she got was not what she expected. Three people messaged her privately with warnings. One told her not to give him her personal number. Another said he had slept with an intern. The third sent up a vague flare: “uh oh.”

Fodor started asking around Washington. She found that the broad contours of Swalwell’s alleged behavior were not news to people who worked in and around politics, especially those who had spent time on Capitol Hill. There was a whisper network. It had existed for years. It just hadn’t traveled outside a tight circle of political insiders, where the prevailing attitude was, as one person put it, “This is just how men are.”

Around the same time, Cheyenne Hunt, a lawyer, former Capitol Hill staffer, and executive director of the youth political engagement group Gen-Z for Change, got a call from a friend, Democratic political strategist Annika Albrecht. Albrecht had her own story. She told Hunt she had met Swalwell on a college field trip to Washington, that he had offered to stay in touch and give her career advice, and that he had added her on Snapchat, where the tone of the conversation shifted from professional to sexual. He eventually invited her to a hotel and kept pressuring her to go. She stopped responding. She said later, “I keep thinking about how lucky I am that I didn’t go to that hotel.”

Hunt had her own reason to take this seriously. She had been warned about Swalwell herself when she worked on the Hill. She knew the whisper network. She decided to make a video.

Fodor and Hunt connected, and the two began working together, building a process to consolidate women and get their stories told the right way. Hunt described it plainly: “It was really three girls in a group chat figuring out how we were going to bring this story forward.” As they posted publicly, dozens of women sent them private messages with their own accounts. More than thirty women would ultimately reach out to Hunt alone with some form of allegation against Swalwell.

What Fodor and Hunt had wasn’t a newsroom. They had community. A consistent presence, a track record of showing up for the issues their audiences cared about, and the trust that comes from that kind of relationship over time. That was enough for women to speak.

What the Women Said

When the San Francisco Chronicle and CNN published their investigations on April 10, what they reported was serious and specific.

A former staffer who began interning for Swalwell in 2019, when she was 20 years old, said he sexually assaulted her on two separate occasions when she was too intoxicated to consent. “I was pushing him off of me, saying no,” she told CNN. “He didn’t stop.” Another woman, Lonna Drewes, alleged Swalwell drugged her before raping her in a California hotel room.

Two additional women described a pattern of online contact initiated by Swalwell, often via Snapchat, the platform that automatically deletes messages. Both said the conversations became sexual quickly after he made contact, and that he sent unsolicited explicit photos and messages. The approach was consistent: he would find women on social media who had engaged with his political content, follow them, send his number, and begin texting late at night. When he learned he would be traveling to their city, he would ask to meet, suggest a hotel, and press for dinner and drinks.

Ally Sammarco, one of the named accusers, said she first connected with Swalwell in 2021 when she was 24 and working in an entry-level role on a political campaign. She described feeling both flattered and unsettled by his attention. “He gave off this perception that he was a family man. That he was a fighter. That he was a defender of women,” she said. “And that couldn’t be further from the truth.”

The Manhattan District Attorney opened a criminal investigation into the New York allegation the following day.

Swalwell had denied the most serious allegations while acknowledging what he called “mistakes in judgment.” His campaign had initially called the entire story a MAGA conspiracy coordinated by rival candidate Katie Porter’s allies. His attorney sent cease-and-desist letters to some of the women. None of it held.

By Sunday, April 12, he had suspended his gubernatorial campaign. By Monday, April 13, he had announced his resignation from Congress, citing awareness that colleagues were preparing an immediate expulsion vote against him. The House Ethics Committee had already announced an investigation into whether he had engaged in sexual misconduct toward an employee under his supervision.

Trusted Journalism Matters

Traditional journalism didn’t start this story, but it helped finish it. And that distinction matters.

Fodor and Hunt made a deliberate strategic decision early in the process: specific allegations needed to be broken by a news organization. While reporters at the Chronicle and CNN conducted their independent investigations, the two influencers maintained a public drumbeat, signaling that a story was coming without detailing the allegations themselves. It was an unusual and controversial approach. Critics accused them of irresponsibility, of lobbing accusations without evidence. But the public pressure dried up Swalwell’s fundraising, unnerved his supporters, and prompted at least four senior campaign staffers to resign before the Chronicle’s story even published.

When journalism stepped in, it did what influencers alone could not: it independently verified the accounts of multiple women who did not know each other, corroborated their stories through messages, records and third-party interviews, and published under the institutional credibility and editorial accountability of major news organizations. That process transformed the story from a social media warning into the kind of documented public record that compels institutional consequences.

Within days of publication, Swalwell had lost two dozen congressional endorsements, the support of the California Teachers Association, and his campaign chairman. Then he lost his seat.

Hours after Swalwell announced his resignation, Republican Congressman Tony Gonzales of San Antonio announced his as well. Gonzales had admitted in March to an affair with a staffer who later died by suicide, with text messages showing he had pressured her for nude photos. He had declined to resign at the time. It was the Swalwell moment, and the bipartisan momentum toward expulsion votes, that finally closed the door. Two congressmen, one from each party, out the same day.

Who Do We Trust, and Why?

All of this raises a question that extends well beyond Eric Swalwell. In a media landscape where influencers and news organizations both shape how information reaches us, and where neither operates without bias or self-interest, how do we develop the judgment to know who to trust?

Influencers build trust through community and consistency. The relationship between a creator, their platform, and their audience is inseparable. Cheyenne Hunt and Arielle Fodor were believed, in significant part, because they had shown up for the people who followed them, over time, on issues those people cared about. That’s real. That’s earned. But influencers are also advocates first, and their standards of verification vary widely.

News organizations bring editorial process, institutional resources, and professional accountability. But they also carry ownership interests, ideological tendencies, and varying commitments to accuracy that are not always visible to the reader. The same story looks different depending on where you read it. A resignation that one outlet treats as long overdue accountability is framed by another as a politically motivated takedown.

The answer isn’t to trust one kind of source and dismiss the other. It’s to build the habit of evaluating sources critically, consistently, and with eyes open. It means knowing who owns what you’re reading, understanding where a publication sits on the spectrum between factual reporting and advocacy, and seeking out multiple angles on any story that matters to you.

Women trusted two influencers with stories they had been sitting on for years. Real journalism is fundamental to a free society and ultimately helped to bring this story to its tipping point.

The rest is on each of us.

If you made it here, you must care about getting the whole story. I encourage you to check out Ground News [groundnews.com/dad] to help you evaluate media critically. I use them every day and advocate for them on a regular basis. [Note: I partner with Ground News in my video, but they are not a sponsor for this article.]

Democracies, at their best, borrow ideas that expand who gets a seat at the table. Authoritarians borrow ideas that shrink the guest list while convincing the people left out that they weren’t invited for their own good.

For anyone paying attention to American politics over the last several years, Hungary under Viktor Orbán has been something of a case study, and not a cautionary one to everyone. To some, it was a model.

Orbán took power in 2010 and spent the next 16 years methodically dismantling the architecture of Hungarian democracy. He used his supermajority to consolidate power, weaken the independence of the country’s courts, change the election system, and restrict the rights of minorities. By the time it was done, approximately 80 percent of Hungary’s media was controlled by his Fidesz party. He called this project “illiberal democracy,” a term he embraced rather than rejected, and he marketed it to the world as a viable alternative to the messy, slow, contentious work of self-governance.

The American right was paying attention. Orbán’s Danube Institute was a partner with The Heritage Foundation in drafting Project 2025, and analysts noted that the Trump administration’s opening moves closely mirrored what Orbán had done when he came to power in 2010.

The playbook is not complicated. You stack the courts. You rewrite the rules. You control the narrative. You get everyone else fighting each other over culture and identity while the people at the top consolidate wealth and power. You call it freedom.

Then, on April 12, 2026, the Hungarian people showed up to the polls in numbers nobody had seen in decades.

With 97 percent of precincts counted, Péter Magyar’s center-right Tisza party secured 138 seats in the 199-seat parliament on 53.6 percent of the vote, while Orbán’s Fidesz took just 55 seats with 37.8 percent. Election officials estimated turnout at a record 79 percent or more, in an election that many Hungarians saw as a watershed moment for their country.

Magyar, a conservative who was previously part of Orbán’s party before splitting off in 2024, had pledged to implement anti-corruption reforms if elected. He ran a broad coalition campaign, going out to every single village in person to persuade Orbán’s base that Orbán was not acting in their interests, building a big tent where people who voted for him probably agreed on very little else except that Orbán had to go and that democratic institutions had to be rebuilt.

It worked.

In his victory speech to tens of thousands of supporters gathered along the Danube River in Budapest, Magyar said: “Tonight, truth prevailed over lies. Today, we won because Hungarians didn’t ask what their homeland could do for them; they asked what they could do for their homeland.”

The lesson isn’t that democracy is self-correcting. It isn’t. For the past sixteen years, Orbán had systematically eroded democracy by stacking courts with loyalists, erasing key political rights, and limiting the power of the legislature. The lesson is that democracy responds when people work for it, organize for it, and show up for it in numbers too large to ignore.

Democracy endures when the people make a stand, which they always seem to do once they remember that self-governance isn’t a spectator sport.

As for me, I used to go to Starbucks for these Bacon Gruyère Egg Bites. But I’m married to a Brazilian, so it’s not good for my health to have anyone else drawing hearts on my coffee cup.

The good news is that this recipe is simple. Starbucks uses a sous vide method to produce that delicate, custardy texture, but you can replicate it at home with a little cornstarch and a hot water bath in the oven. The result is rich, savory, and deeply satisfying.

Kind of like watching authoritarians lose an election they spent years rigging in their favor.

And hoping the lesson is not lost.

Share

Bacon Gruyère Egg Bites

Makes 12 egg bites (6 servings)

Ingredients

• 4 slices cooked bacon

• 8 eggs, whisked

• 1 cup cottage cheese

• 3/4 cup Gruyère cheese, shredded

• 1/4 cup cheddar cheese, shredded

• 1 tbsp cornstarch

• 1/4 cup chives, chopped (optional)

• 1/4 tsp salt

Instructions

Preheat oven to 300°F.

Chop the bacon into crumbles and set aside.

Into a blender, add the cottage cheese, Gruyère, cheddar, cornstarch, and salt, and blend on high until smooth and creamy. Add the eggs and blend on low until just combined.

Lightly grease the cups of a standard muffin tin with cooking spray (or butter or neutral oil) and set it on top of a 9x13 baking sheet. Pour the egg mixture to fill each cup about halfway. Sprinkle chives and bacon crumbles in your desired amounts into each cup.

Carefully place the baking sheet and muffin tin in the oven, then pour hot water into the baking sheet until it reaches the bottom of the muffin cups. This water bath helps the egg bites achieve their silky texture.

Bake for 30 minutes, until the bites are just set. Remove the muffin tin first, then carefully lift out the baking sheet with the water. Let the egg bites cool before removing them from the tin.

Notes

Serving size is 2 egg bites.

Store leftovers in the fridge for up to 5 days, or freeze for up to 2 months.

Reheat in the microwave for 30 seconds to 1 minute.

Try different mix-ins like cooked spinach, feta cheese, or diced veggies.

In April 2026, with a Democratic congressman facing rape allegations while a Republican president’s name appears 38,000+ times in the publicly released Epstein files, the evidence is overwhelming that neither party has clean hands. The pattern is structural, bipartisan, and devastating to survivors. Understanding it requires looking at specific cases honestly — starting with the men our own side wants to protect.

Anatomy of a Reckoning: Eric Swalwell

For years, the Eric Swalwell story was primarily about a Chinese spy. Axios broke the story on December 8, 2020, revealing that a suspected Chinese intelligence operative named Christine Fang cultivated a relationship with Swalwell beginning around 2011, when he was a Dublin, California city council member. Fang bundled fundraising for his 2014 reelection and placed at least one intern in his office. The FBI gave Swalwell a defensive briefing in 2015; he severed ties immediately and cooperated with investigators. No evidence surfaced that he shared classified information, and the House Ethics Committee investigated and closed the matter in May 2023 without finding any wrongdoing.

Whether Swalwell had a sexual relationship with Fang remains publicly unconfirmed. Snopes found “no evidence to date” establishing one. Classified intelligence documents reportedly contain more intimate details, but nothing has been declassified. What is confirmed is that Republicans weaponized the story relentlessly — particularly because Swalwell had been one of Congress’s most vocal accusers of Trump over Russian collusion. Speaker Pelosi kept him on the Intelligence Committee and named him an impeachment manager weeks after the story broke. Kevin McCarthy removed him in January 2023.

Then came April 10, 2026, and the story became something entirely different.

CNN published an extensive investigation featuring four women alleging sexual misconduct. The San Francisco Chronicle published a parallel account. The most serious accuser, a former staffer who began as an intern at age 20, alleged Swalwell raped her twice — once in September 2019 and again in April 2024 — both times when she was too intoxicated to consent. She told NBC News she woke up naked in his hotel bed after the first incident and “could feel the effect of vaginal intercourse.” After the second, she said she was “pushing him off of me, saying no. He didn’t stop,” leaving her “bruised and bleeding.” CNN reviewed text messages she sent to a friend three days later: “I was sexually assaulted on Thursday. By Eric.” Two family members, a friend, and her then-boyfriend corroborated her contemporaneous disclosures. She provided medical records showing STD and pregnancy testing afterward.

A second woman told CNN that Swalwell kissed her without consent and that she ended up in his hotel room with no memory of how she got there. A third woman, Democratic influencer Ally Sammarco, went on the record alleging Swalwell sent her unsolicited photos of his genitals. A fourth alleged unsolicited explicit videos. The women described a consistent pattern: Swalwell, married with three children, cultivated young women in their twenties who were “finding their footing professionally,” made them feel special and starstruck, then escalated to increasingly sexual behavior.

Swalwell’s response was a study in contradiction. On April 7, at a Sacramento town hall, he flatly denied any misconduct and stated: “There’s never been an allegation and there’s never been a settlement.” He specifically claimed no staffer had “ever been asked to sign an NDA. Ever.” The same day the allegations broke, a document surfaced showing a former employee had signed an agreement with confidentiality and non-disparagement clauses over a workplace discrimination dispute — directly contradicting his blanket denial. In a video posted April 10, he said: “These allegations of sexual assault are flat false.” But he added: “I do not suggest to you in any way that I am perfect or that I’m a saint. I have certainly made mistakes in judgment in my past.”

What happened next was instructive. House Democratic leaders Jeffries, Clark, and Aguilar called the accusations “incredibly disturbing” and demanded Swalwell immediately end his campaign for California governor. Nancy Pelosi said accountability required transparency “outside of a gubernatorial campaign.” Adam Schiff withdrew his endorsement. Ruben Gallego withdrew his endorsement, saying he “regret[s] having come to his defense on social media.” Swalwell’s own senior staff released a statement saying they were “horrified” and stood with the accusers. The Manhattan DA opened an investigation. Major labor endorsements were rescinded. His campaign collapsed.

This is what accountability looks like when a party decides to act. But the question is whether the same standard applies to everyone.

That Dog that Hasn’t Barked: Trump and the Epstein Files

Donald Trump’s relationship with Jeffrey Epstein is the most extensively documented friendship between a sitting president and a convicted sex trafficker in American history. The facts are not in dispute. Trump told New York Magazine in 2002 that he had known Epstein for fifteen years, calling him a “terrific guy” and adding: “It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side. No doubt about it — Jeffrey enjoys his social life.” Flight logs presented at Ghislaine Maxwell’s trial confirm Trump flew on Epstein’s private jet at least seven to eight times between 1993 and 1997 — a fact Trump flatly denied in 2024, saying “I was never on Epstein’s Plane.” Trump’s phone number appeared in Epstein’s address book. NBC archival footage from 1992 shows Trump and Epstein chatting and pointing at women at a Mar-a-Lago party. Epstein attended Trump’s 1993 wedding to Marla Maples. Virginia Giuffre, Epstein’s most prominent survivor, was recruited by Ghislaine Maxwell while working as a teenage spa attendant at Mar-a-Lago.

The question of whether Trump participated in Epstein’s abuse is more complex. Giuffre herself, in a 2016 sworn deposition, withdrew earlier claims that Trump flirted with her, testified she could not recall seeing Trump at Epstein’s homes, and said Trump never behaved inappropriately toward her. In her posthumous memoir published October 2025 — Giuffre died by suicide in April 2025 — she wrote warmly about meeting Trump and made no allegations against him.

But other evidence creates a more troubling picture. A 2011 email from Epstein to Maxwell, released in the document dumps, reads: “I want you to realize that that dog that hasn’t barked is trump.. [VICTIM] spent hours at my house with him.. he has never once been mentioned.” Maxwell replied: “I have been thinking about that.” A 2019 email from Epstein stated that Trump “of course he knew about the girls, as he asked Ghislaine to stop.” The White House called these “selectively leaked emails” creating a “fake narrative.” Stacey Williams, a former Sports Illustrated model, alleged in October 2024 that Trump groped her in front of Epstein at Trump Tower in 1993, describing it as a “twisted game” between the two men.

The most serious allegation came from a woman using the pseudonym “Katie Johnson,” who filed a federal lawsuit in 2016 alleging Trump and Epstein forcibly raped her when she was 13 years old at Epstein’s Manhattan residence in 1994. The lawsuit included a declaration from a witness claiming to have seen multiple sexual encounters. The case was withdrawn days before the 2016 election after the plaintiff’s press conference was canceled due to reported threats. Snopes found the case was promoted by Norm Lubow, a former Jerry Springer Show producer, though the investigating attorney later insisted the woman “told the truth.” FBI documents released in 2026 detailed this same complaint. Additional FBI files contained allegations from other women, including one claiming Trump forced a 13-year-old to perform oral sex roughly 35 years earlier. The DOJ stated these claims were “unfounded and false.” No criminal charges have ever been filed against Trump in connection with Epstein.

What is not in dispute is how aggressively the Trump administration worked to control the Epstein narrative. On the campaign trail in 2024, Trump promised to release the files. Once in office, he resisted. In February 2025, AG Pam Bondi staged a theatrical event handing binders of already-public material to right-wing influencers at the White House. In July 2025, the DOJ released a memo concluding no “client list” existed and no further disclosures were warranted. Trump personally lobbied Republicans against the Epstein Files Transparency Act. Elon Musk, during his departure from his White House adviser role, posted and then deleted that the files weren’t released because “Trump’s name was in them.” The law passed only after a discharge petition forced the issue — 427 to 1 in the House.

When the files came out, the pattern of selective withholding was striking. NPR’s February 2026 investigation found the DOJ had removed or withheld dozens of pages from the public database, including FBI interview records with women who accused Trump of sexual abuse as minors. One accuser had been interviewed by the FBI four times — a level of investigative seriousness that distinguished her claims from routine tips — yet only one transcript was initially released, and it did not address the Trump allegations. When DOJ eventually released 16 additional pages in March 2026, it blamed the omission on files “incorrectly coded as duplicative” — but could not explain why only the three interview summaries naming Trump were affected. AG Bondi was fired by Trump on April 2, 2026, reportedly in part over her handling of the files. Both Democratic and Republican members of Congress opened investigations into the missing files.

Trump has never been criminally charged. He says the files “totally exonerated” him. But the documented pattern — the long friendship, the flights, the quote about young women, the emails between Epstein and Maxwell, the DOJ’s selective withholding of accuser interviews — demands the same scrutiny that any reasonable person would apply if the president were a Democrat.

The Partisanship Corruption of Moral Judgment

Academic research confirms what these cases illustrate. A Princeton and University of Arizona study published in the American Journal of Political Science found that partisans are significantly more likely to view out-party members as guilty of sexual misconduct and in-party members as less guilty. The Society for Personality and Social Psychology summarized the broader finding: “The more strongly one identifies with their political party, the more likely they are to believe in myths surrounding sexual assault and downplay the severity of sexual assault as a problem.”

The Ford-Reade comparison is the clearest illustration. When Christine Blasey Ford accused Brett Kavanaugh, Democrats demanded an FBI investigation, held televised hearings, and rallied behind her testimony. When Tara Reade accused Joe Biden of sexual assault with arguably stronger contemporaneous evidence — CNN’s Jake Tapper noted that “Blasey-Ford didn’t have the same contemporary records Tara Reade has” — the response was dramatically different. The New York Times initially buried the story. Senator Dianne Feinstein, who championed Ford’s case, dismissed Reade’s claims as “absolutely ridiculous.” Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, who led calls for Al Franken’s resignation and championed Ford, supported Biden. Biden himself gave Christine Blasey Ford “the benefit of the doubt” but never applied that standard to Reade.

Republicans applied identical selective morality in reverse. Trump won the presidency in 2016 despite the Access Hollywood tape and over a dozen accusers. He won again in 2024 after a jury found him liable for sexually abusing E. Jean Carroll and awarded $83.3 million in defamation damages — a verdict upheld by the Second Circuit in September 2025. Pete Hegseth was confirmed as Defense Secretary despite a 2017 sexual assault allegation and a $50,000 settlement, with his former sister-in-law submitting a sworn affidavit that his second wife “feared for her safety.” Only two Republican senators voted against him. The House Ethics Committee found “substantial evidence” Matt Gaetz had sex with a 17-year-old and made over $90,000 in payments to women likely connected to sexual activity; Trump nominated him for Attorney General.

The spring of 2026 produced a perfect controlled experiment. Swalwell (D) faces sexual assault allegations from four women. Rep. Tony Gonzales (R-TX) admitted an affair with a former staffer who died by suicide in September 2025 after he pressured her for sex via explicit texts. A second staffer also accused Gonzales of sending explicit messages. Republicans moved to expel Swalwell. Democrats responded by moving to expel Gonzales. Neither party primarily motivated by concern for the women involved. Both treating misconduct allegations as partisan ammunition.

The Machinery of Impunity

Andrew Cuomo’s political resurrection is perhaps the most revealing case study. He resigned as governor in August 2021 after the state attorney general’s investigation found he had harassed thirteen women. In 2026, he is the frontrunner for New York City mayor, polling at 32%. He told the New York Times: “If I had to do it again, I wouldn’t have resigned.” His accuser Charlotte Bennett dropped her federal lawsuit — not because she lost, but because of what The 19th News described as “an astonishing number of invasive discovery requests and outrageous statements” designed to “embarrass and humiliate her.” Bennett said she believed she’d “be better off dead than endure more of his litigation abuse.”

This is the machinery of impunity. NDAs silence survivors — a Stanford and Lift Our Voices study found they “mainly protect employers, not individuals.” Litigation abuse exhausts accusers into submission. Partisan media ecosystems ensure that supporters of the accused never encounter the full weight of evidence against him. And the ultimate message to every woman considering coming forward is delivered by the outcomes: Trump is president. Cuomo may be mayor. Gaetz was nominated for the nation’s top law enforcement job. The women who spoke are poorer, more traumatized, and largely forgotten.

The Epstein case makes this architecture visible at an industrial scale. Investigative reporter Julie K. Brown put it plainly: this case is still an example of how there are two systems of justice in this country — one for people who have money and power, and one for people who don’t. The National Women’s Defense League found 400 allegations of sexual harassment against 145 sitting state lawmakers between 2013 and 2024. Their researcher Emma Davidson Tribbs noted: “There are very short memories. And that’s not just frustrating for the movement, but it’s so harmful for survivors, and reinforces this idea that even if you come forward, the system is not going to change.”

A study in Frontiers in Political Science connected this directly to democratic legitimacy: “Hostile sexism lessens the ability of candidates accused of sexual misconduct to be held accountable. The ability to maintain accountability is central to democratic legitimacy.” When voters excuse misconduct because the accused shares their party, they are not protecting their values — they are abandoning them.

What To Do When the Accused Is on Your Side

The only distinction that matters is believing credible women regardless of who the accused is. The Swalwell case tests Democrats. The Epstein files test Republicans. The Cuomo comeback tests New Yorkers. The Hegseth confirmation tested the Senate. Every single one of these is a test of the same principle.

The women who accused Swalwell had contemporaneous text messages, corroborating witnesses, medical records, and a consistent pattern across multiple independent accusers. The women in the Epstein files had FBI interview records serious enough to warrant repeated follow-up investigations. E. Jean Carroll had a jury verdict. Charlotte Bennett had an attorney general’s investigation. Tara Reade had contemporaneous records. Christine Blasey Ford had a polygraph and Senate testimony. In every case, the question was never really whether the evidence was credible. The question was whether the accused was on our team.

The phrase “the ends justify the means” has become a governing philosophy in an era where holding power is treated as an existential imperative. But the means are not incidental to who we are — they are definitional. A movement that protects predators because they vote the right way is not a movement worth belonging to. A party that believes women only when the accused wears the other jersey is not defending women. It is using them.

The evidence points to a single conclusion. Believing credible women is a test of character. And both sides are failing it.

The only question left is whether we care enough to demand better from the people who claim to represent us.

Starting with our own.

The Dad Briefs covers the civic, political, and quietly human stories that shape family life in America. Food, Fun and Fatherly Wisdom.

On “Rent-free”

The concept is sound: don’t let people who don’t matter consume your mental and emotional energy. Don’t obsess over an ex. Don’t fixate on someone who wronged you at a job you left five years ago. Protect your peace.

That’s good advice.

But it makes no sense when applied to the President of the United States.

The person who controls the largest military in human history, who appoints the judges who interpret your rights, whose executive orders shape the economy your children will inherit, whose foreign policy decisions determine whether your country is at war — that person’s words and actions have a significant impact on us.

Paying attention to power a responsibility of citizenship. Conflating that with an obsession is either a mistake or a strategy.

This is too expensive

Institutions built over generations — imperfect, worth improving, but load-bearing — are being dismantled not to make them better but to settle scores and consolidate power. Programs that feed children, support veterans, fund medical research, protect workers: cut, gutted, or eliminated, often by the same people who campaigned on protecting them.

We have watched the Justice Department turn toward political enemies. We have watched agencies staffed with loyalists instead of experts, at the precise moment those agencies needed expertise. We have watched the deliberate erosion of the independent press, the courts, the civil service — not because these things were broken beyond repair, but because they were functional enough to say no.

History has a name for this pattern. It doesn’t require a crown to qualify.

Populist authoritarianism is an ill fit

Populism mixed with moral authority is excellent at generating a feeling.

The feeling of finally being seen. Of the right enemies finally being punished. Of a leader who says out loud what you’ve been thinking and doesn’t apologize for it.

This is not a new story. Timothy Snyder has written about it. Heather Cox Richardson has charted its American roots. Hannah Arendt described its mechanics with terrifying precision decades ago. The details change. The architecture doesn’t.

And some of the people who felt that feeling — who showed up to the rallies, who wore the red hats, who told people like me to calm down — are peeling away. Not because they were always wrong about what made them angry. Some of what made them angry was real. But because they are beginning to see that the thing they signed up for is not delivering what it promised, and it is costing them things they didn’t agree to pay.

That matters. It is worth acknowledging without gloating.

Now or later

History informs us that someday, everyone will claim to have been against this. Even our buddy, E.O.

It happened in Germany. It happened in Hungary. It happened in every country where a democratic backslide moved slowly enough that the people living through it could tell themselves it wasn’t happening, until suddenly the telling stopped being comfortable.

The people who said they didn’t know. The people who said they were just doing their jobs. The people who said they disagreed privately. The people who said it wasn’t their place to speak up.

They were everywhere. They were the majority. And history did not record their silence as neutrality.

If this hasn’t touched you yet, it will. Tariffs touch everyone eventually. Economic instability touches everyone eventually. The erosion of institutional checks on power touches everyone eventually.

The question is whether we address it while we still can or explain ourselves afterward.

Who owns whom?

E.O. said Trump owns me.

I’d point out that I don’t make a habit of going to Trump’s Truth Social posts to leave comments. E.O., however, is often in my comments section, arguing not the merits of my content but insulting my personal character.

All I’d ask is that he own his own behavior.

I want E.O. to be okay. I want his family to be okay.

I want the people who voted for this — out of frustration, out of genuine grievance, out of a belief that the other option was worse — to come through the next few years without having paid a price they didn’t agree to.

I am not their enemy. I am the person saying: this is what I see, this is what history says, this is what the data shows. You are free to disagree. But I am not going to stop saying it because it makes you uncomfortable.

Civic attention is a minimum requirement. It’s the rent I owe to a country that gave me the right to pay it.

So if I’m in E.O.’s head, he can send me a bill for the rent.

I like to earn my keep.

The Dad Briefs covers the civic, political, and quietly human stories that shape family life in America. Food, Fun and Fatherly Wisdom.

Almost no one is watching, which is by design.

The Trump administration has made no secret of its contempt for American universities. But the most sweeping changes it’s pursuing aren’t happening through dramatic executive orders or headline-grabbing funding freezes. They’re happening through a bureaucratic process called negotiated rulemaking — a wonky, technical-sounding mechanism that is almost perfectly engineered to avoid public scrutiny.

Understanding what’s at stake requires investigating something most Americans have never had reason to think about: college accreditation. And once you understand it, the picture that emerges is one of the most significant threats to educational access and academic freedom in a generation.

What is Accreditation?

Accreditation is the quality assurance system that determines whether a college or university is eligible for federal financial aid: Pell Grants, federal student loans, and research funding. Private nonprofit agencies called accreditors review institutions against standards covering academic quality, student support, financial stability, and governance. If your institution passes muster, your students can access the more than $100 billion in federal aid distributed every year. Fail or lose your accreditation, and your students can’t.

This system has its roots in the GI Bill. After World War II, returning veterans flooded the higher education market with federal tuition money, and predatory fly-by-night schools flooded right back. Congress responded in 1952 by requiring that GI Bill money could only be spent at accredited institutions. The Higher Education Act of 1965 extended that principle to the entire federal student aid system. Since then, accreditation has been the financial foundation on which virtually every American college operates.

Accreditors are independent. That independence is key to the legitimacy of accreditation. Quality assurance only means something if the entity doing the assuring isn’t taking its cues from whoever happens to be in political power.

That independence is what’s under attack.

A Year of Breaking Down Independence

The Trump administration’s assault on accreditation has unfolded in methodical steps over the past year — each one quietly expanding its leverage before most people noticed what was happening.

April 2025: President Trump signed Executive Order 14279, Reforming Accreditation to Strengthen Higher Education. The order directed Education Secretary Linda McMahon to strip federal recognition from accreditors that maintain DEI standards — which the order characterizes as “unlawful discrimination.” It also called for making it easier for colleges to switch accreditors, recognizing new accrediting agencies, and requiring accreditors to prioritize what the order calls “intellectual diversity” among faculty.

May 2025: The Department revoked Biden-era guidance that required careful review before institutions could switch accreditors. It also lifted a moratorium on applications from new accrediting agencies — opening the door for new entrants whose standards might be more politically aligned with the administration’s priorities. A Dear Colleague Letter established a streamlined 30-day approval process for schools seeking to change accreditors.

Summer 2025: The administration escalated from rule-changing to direct institutional pressure. It notified the accreditors of both Harvard and Columbia that those schools may no longer meet accreditation standards — based not on the accreditors’ independent assessments, but on the administration’s own civil rights claims. Harvard’s accreditor received a notification citing “strong evidence” that Harvard’s accreditation should be revoked. Columbia received a formal non-compliance warning, resulting in a Submission of Monitoring Report to their accreditor and a campus follow-up visit in January 2026. (Columbia released a statement on March 19, 2026 confirming its accreditor affirmed the University’s compliance and accreditation status.)

Legal experts called these moves unprecedented. “It’s really an inappropriate overreach by the administration,” said Jon Fansmith of the American Council on Education. A Cornell law professor put it more bluntly: “The Trump administration has failed to follow any of the required procedures.”

June 2025: Six Southern public university systems — Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Texas — announced the formation of a new accreditor called the Commission for Public Higher Education. The administration awarded $1 million in federal grants to support its launch, part of nearly $15 million allocated to support new accreditors and institutional transitions. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, announcing the new agency, explicitly echoed the administration’s criticisms of existing accreditors’ diversity standards.

October 2025: The WASC Senior College and University Commission (WSCUC) is the accreditor overseeing roughly 170 colleges in California and Hawaii, and it officially adopted updated standards removing DEI language, replacing its previous requirement of an “explicit commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion” with broader phrasing about “success for all students.” Shortly thereafter, the New England Commission of Higher Education (NECHE), the accreditor that oversees Harvard, Columbia, and other New England institutions, separately proposed removing DEI from its own standards.

The chilling effect was working. Accreditors were self-censoring before any new rules even came into effect.

December 2025: The Department issued a Request for Information seeking public comment on rewriting the Accreditation Handbook — the operational guide governing how accreditors are reviewed and recognized.

January 2026: The Department announced the Accreditation, Innovation, and Modernization (AIM) negotiated rulemaking committee. This is the formal regulatory process that will produce binding rules implementing everything outlined above. The first public session begins on April 13th.

“Negotiated Rulemaking” and Our Window of Opportunity

Negotiated rulemaking is a specific legal process under the Higher Education Act. Before the Department can publish new regulations governing Title IV programs (the ones tied to federal financial aid) it must convene a committee of stakeholders to try to reach consensus on the proposed rules. Sessions are public. They are required by statute.

The administration has manipulated the AIM committee’s composition: it consolidated the seats representing public two-year and four-year institutions into a single negotiating spot, which is a break from longstanding precedent that advocates say reduces the representation of community colleges and regional universities at the table.

If the committee reaches consensus, the Department publishes a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking with a public comment period. If it doesn’t reach consensus, the Department can draft its own proposed rule. The earliest any final regulation could take effect is July 1, 2027. This window of time exists specifically to allow for advocacy, public comment, and legal challenges.

The window (from April 13 to 17) is our opportunity. But it requires everyone to pay attention.

A “Plain Worthy” Legal Argument

Buried in the advocacy briefings circulating among higher education lawyers is a pointed legal argument that hasn’t gotten enough public attention: the proposed regulations may blatantly violate the statutory limitations on the Secretary of Education’s authority under the Higher Education Act. Congress gave accreditors their own independent statutory authority. The administration cannot simply override that by executive order or regulatory fiat.

The Supreme Court’s 2023 decision in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard (the affirmative action ruling) is also relevant here. The Court held that race-conscious admissions were unconstitutional, but it also affirmed that universities’ diversity-related mission interests are “commendable” and “plainly worthy” and may be achieved through lawful means. The administration’s characterization of all DEI standards as “unlawful discrimination” goes well beyond what the Court actually held.

The administration already lost once in court when it tried to withhold funding from universities that wouldn’t comply with its demands. This rulemaking effort is, in part, a procedural workaround, attempting to embed political compliance requirements into the regulatory infrastructure itself, where they’re harder to challenge and less visible to the public.

Understanding the Risks

The administration frames these changes as promoting competition and student outcomes. It’s worth taking that framing seriously for a moment, because some criticism of the accreditation system is legitimate. Accreditors have been slow to act on low-performing programs. Quality assurance should be rigorous. These are real issues.

But the cumulative effect of what’s being proposed goes well beyond fixing a slow bureaucracy.

Consider that when accreditors drop DEI standards (as WSCUC and NECHE are already doing under political pressure), the programs most affected are the tutoring, mentorship, and support services that help first-generation students, students of color, veterans, and adult learners stay enrolled and graduate. These aren’t abstract ideological commitments. They are practical interventions that move graduation rates.

When it becomes easier to shop for more lenient accreditors — or to create new ones aligned with administration priorities — the rigor that makes accreditation meaningful erodes. Predatory schools, which have a long history of targeting low-income students and veterans with federal aid dollars, become harder to hold accountable. The biggest losers are the students who trusted that an accredited school meant something.

When the government can use accreditation as leverage against specific institutions (as it has against Harvard and Columbia) it gains an unprecedented tool for political coercion. The mechanism being constructed doesn’t require actually revoking anyone’s accreditation. The threat alone is often sufficient.

And when the federal government can pressure accreditors to enforce its own interpretation of civil rights law — rather than courts or Congress — it effectively becomes the final word on what universities can teach, who they can hire, and how they can serve their students.

Anyone who wants to see nurses at bedsides, teachers in classrooms, and engineers contributing to our cities and communities should care about whether the institutions that trained them are protected or narrowed.

What You Can Do Before April 13

The first of five scheduled AIM committee sessions begins on April 13. The sessions are livestreamed and open to the public. This is one of those moments where showing up — even just digitally — creates pressure that bureaucratic processes respond to.

Sessions will be held from 9:00 a.m. to 12:00 p.m. and 1:00 p.m. to 4:00 p.m. ET

Watch the sessions. You can register to watch the livestream on the Department of Education website. Make no mistake, if this goes into effect, everyone (not just current or prospective students seeking financial aid) will see the impact and ripple effects. Even 30 minutes of engagement shows committee members and the administration that we, the public, are invested and paying attention.

Talk about it. The most powerful thing content creators, writers, and citizen voices can do right now is make this legible for people who have no idea it’s happening. Accreditation is designed to be invisible. Make it visible.

Prepare to comment. Once the committee publishes draft regulations, there will be a formal public comment period. Public comments have real impact — especially when they’re grounded in specific lived experience. Whether you attended college or not, if you believe accreditation should be a measure of quality, not compliance with ideology, submit a comment and let your voice be heard. Start thinking now about what you’d like to say.

The regulatory process has a clock. Our window for advocacy is here. But it requires people to pay attention to a room that was designed not to be noticed.

Pay attention.

Share

The Dad Briefs covers the civic and political stories that shape family life in America. If this piece was useful, share it with someone who should know about this.

Sources & Further Reading:

1. U.S. Department of Education — AIM Rulemaking Announcement (January 2026) https://www.ed.gov/about/news/press-release/us-department-of-education-announces-negotiated-rulemaking-reform-and-strengthen-americas-higher-education-accreditation-system

2. The White House — Fact Sheet: Executive Order 14279 (April 2025) https://www.whitehouse.gov/fact-sheets/2025/04/fact-sheet-president-donald-j-trump-reforms-accreditation-to-strengthen-higher-education/

3. CNN — Trump targets college accreditation process in new executive order (April 2025) https://www.cnn.com/2025/04/23/politics/trump-college-accreditation-process-executive-order/index.html

4. NPR — All the ways the Trump administration is going after colleges and universities (June 2025) https://www.npr.org/2025/06/10/nx-s1-5424450/ways-trump-administration-is-going-after-colleges

5. Boston Globe — Trump targets Columbia’s accreditation and Harvard’s international students (June 2025) https://www.bostonglobe.com/2025/06/04/metro/columbia-accreditation-harvard-trump/

6. WBUR — Trump administration threatens Harvard’s accreditation (July 2025) https://www.wbur.org/news/2025/07/09/harvard-trump-administration-accreditation-status

7. TIME — Trump administration warns Harvard risks losing accreditation (July 2025) https://time.com/7301306/harvard-trump-administration-accreditation/

8. Harvard Magazine — Trump administration threatens Harvard’s accreditation, subpoenas student records (August 2025) https://www.harvardmagazine.com/2025/07/trump-harvard-accreditation

9. WBUR — More than money: What a Harvard deal with Trump could mean for academia (August 2025) https://www.wbur.org/news/2025/08/07/ivy-league-schools-trump-settlements-harvard

10. Inside Higher Ed — Accreditors offer flexibility on DEI standards (February 2025) https://www.insidehighered.com/news/governance/accreditation/2025/02/28/accreditors-offer-flexibility-dei-standards

11. Inside Higher Ed — Northeast accreditor proposes removing DEI standards (August 2025) https://www.insidehighered.com/news/quick-takes/2025/08/05/northeast-accreditor-proposes-removing-dei-standards

12. Higher Ed Dive — Trump executive order on accreditation sparks concerns over government intrusion (April 2025) https://www.highereddive.com/news/trump-executive-order-accreditation-dei-intellectual-diversity/746331/

13. Council for Higher Education Accreditation (CHEA) — February 2026 Update https://www.chea.org/february-2026

14. NAICU — Negotiated rulemaking to tackle accreditation reform (January 2026) https://www.naicu.edu/news-events/washington-update/2026/january-30/negotiated-rulemaking-to-tackle-accreditation-reform/

15. Ithaka S+R — Regional Accreditation Standards research brief (2026) https://sr.ithaka.org/publications/regional-accreditation-standards/

His aide described it plainly: “He didn’t have relationships with his peers or teachers, for that matter. He was very alone. And he acted very alone.”

Reid noticed, and he decided to do something about it.

He started learning a few signs. Then his classmates joined in. Then the whole class decided to learn sign language together. Then teachers in other grades started taking sign language classes — and here’s the part that gets me — they started signing even when Ben wasn’t in the room.

They were practicing it as a way of life.

Ben’s adoptive mothers, Etta and Marlaina O’Reilly, found out what was happening and could barely process it. “I could barely breathe,” Etta told CBS News. “Like it was just so overwhelming.”

His aide watched the transformation up close: “You could just watch his world open up with communication. It was amazing.”

I think about this story in the context of everything we’re navigating right now as a country — the arguments about who belongs where, who gets access to what, which kids are worth accommodating and which ones are an inconvenience to be managed.

And then I think about a seven-year-old in rural New Hampshire whose classmates decided, with no mandate and no policy and no political argument, that they wanted to be able to talk to their friend.

They didn’t debate whether it was fair that Ben required extra effort. They didn’t ask whether including him would give him an unfair advantage over kids who could already hear. They just learned the language. Because he was their friend, and that’s what you do.

Inclusion isn’t complicated when you see it from a child’s eye level.

The rest of us should see it the same.

The full story was reported by Steve Hartman for CBS News’ On the Road segment. If you haven’t seen it, go find it. It’s two and a half minutes and it will do something good to your day.

The Dad Briefs covers the civic and political stories — and the quietly human ones — that shape family life in America. If this piece resonated, share it with someone who needs it today.

Two things at once. Without contradiction.

I think about that every time someone informs me, with great confidence, that actually, America is a republic, not a democracy.

And they’re not wrong. They’re just not finished.

We are a federal republic. We are also a representative democracy. These are not competing claims. They are complementary truths. Our founders built a system that was specifically designed to be both a nation governed by law and constitutional structure and one where the people hold sovereign power through their elected representatives.

You can be two things at once. Beans figured it out. Let’s do the same.

Which brings me to hummus.

The secret to a great hummus isn’t any one ingredient. It’s the balance between them. The tahini, the lemon juice, the garlic — each one has a distinct role. Each one has its own assertive personality. And the whole thing falls apart the moment any single one of them decides it’s more important than the others.

Sound familiar?

Our founders were thinking similarly when they designed three coequal branches of government. The legislature makes the laws. The judiciary interprets them. The executive enforces them. None of them is supposed to overpower the others. That balance isn’t bureaucratic inefficiency — it’s the point. It’s the flavor.

They knew, with historical clarity, that an executive branch that consumed the other two would be an existential threat to the whole recipe.

Here’s a kitchen tip that sounds like it shouldn’t work but absolutely does: after you’ve blended your hummus, add a few ice cubes and keep blending.

It sounds like the kind of thing you’d do by accident. But the result is the smoothest, creamiest hummus you’ve ever made. The cold water from the ice helps emulsify the mixture of protein and oil (fat), and the texture goes from gritty to silky in about sixty seconds.

Even the rockiest process, with consistent effort and the right tools, can smooth out into something better than you started with.

America’s road has been rocky. Achieving smoothness doesn’t mean pretending the grit wasn’t there; it means working through it until the texture changes. It means keeping your character intact while the blender runs.

Taste it before you serve it. Adjust. And don’t forget the salt.

The Constitution didn’t get everything right on the first draft either. That’s why they gave us amendments.

Be kind. And make the hummus.

Share

🫘 Basic Hummus

A recipe for the kitchen — and a metaphor for the republic.

Serves: 4–6 Time: 10 minutes

Ingredients

• 1 can (15.5 oz) chickpeas, drained

• 1 tbsp tahini

• 2 tbsp extra-virgin olive oil

• 1½ tbsp fresh lemon juice, more to taste

• 1–3 garlic cloves (start with one — you can always add more; unlike executive power, garlic is easier to walk back)

• Salt to taste

• 2–3 ice cubes

Directions

1. Add all ingredients except the ice to a food processor.

2. Blend for 1 minute.

3. Add the ice cubes and blend for another 1–2 minutes until smooth and creamy.

4. Taste. Adjust salt and lemon. Serve immediately or refrigerate.

Enjoy with pita, vegetables, or your feelings about the current news cycle.

Kitchen Counter Civics is a series where I cook something simple and discuss something more complicated. If this resonated, share it with someone who could use a recipe and a reminder today.

It’s a lifestyle.

The air fryer fry is not all of that, but it can make nearly perfect fries — and I’ve come to believe that near-perfection is actually the more honest American aspiration, anyway.

A “more perfect union” was always the language — not a finished product, but a direction. A heading. Lots of ups, plenty of downs, and a long road that demands we stay on it even when the destination feels impossibly far. Being an American isn’t arriving somewhere. It’s deciding, again and again, to keep going.

Blues Traveler had a line that’s been stuck in my head: time is the beauty of the road being long. I think about that a lot right now. When any administration pursues its own gratification at the expense of our shared humanity, it doesn’t reflect our enduring spirit — it challenges it. And the response to that challenge is showing up. Turning the tide. Fighting the long fight with the emotional intelligence to know the difference between a setback and an ending.

Also: making fries.

These come together in about 20 minutes of air-fry time, and they’re legitimately delicious. They pair well with whatever you’re watching on the news — whether that’s cause for celebration or cause for rallying your neighbors.

Stay safe out there.

Nearly Perfect French Fries

Servings: 2

Ingredients

2 medium (or 1 ½ large) Russet potatoes

1 ½ tbsp olive oil

1 tsp garlic powder

1 tsp onion powder

1 tsp paprika

1 tsp salt

1 tsp dried parsley flakes

½ tsp black pepper

Instructions:

Slice the potatoes into lengths about ½ inch wide. Skins on or off — that’s your call, and both are correct.

Rinse the cut fries under cold water, repeating 2-3 times until the water runs clear. This pulls out excess starch and helps make air fryer fries crispy.

Toss the fries directly into the air fryer basket while still wet. Set to 385°F and cook for 10 minutes.

While the fries cook, combine all dry seasonings and stir together.

Carefully dump the fries into a large bowl. Drizzle with olive oil and add the seasoning blend. Toss until every fry is well coated.

Return the seasoned fries to the air fryer for another 10 minutes at 385°F, or until golden and crisp. (Note: some air fryers may take 5-10 minutes longer.)

Let them sit for 1–2 minutes before serving. Nearly perfect! Serve alongside whatever conversation needs to happen at your kitchen table.

Notes

Don’t overcrowd the air fryer basket, or your fries won’t achieve ideal crispiness — work in two or more rounds if you’re increasing the batch.

The egg whites puff into soft, golden clouds. The yolks sit nestled on top like little suns. And when you take a bite, they just ... melt. It’s the kind of food that makes you stop mid-chew and think: why don’t I make this every weekend?

A 17th Century French Invention (Sort Of)

Cloud eggs, or something very close to them, have been around since 17th century France, where they were called oeufs à la neige, which translates literally to “eggs in snow.”

Now, if you order oeufs à la neige in France today, you’ll get a sweet dessert involving poached meringue floating in crème anglaise—beautiful, but a different animal entirely. The name migrated to something else, and the savory cloud egg kind of drifted into culinary history until the internet rediscovered it.

Cloud Eggs Preparation

You need eggs and a little patience. That’s basically it.

Separate your yolks first. Set them aside carefully. You’ll want them intact for the second bake.

Whip the egg whites. For three egg whites, use a quarter teaspoon of cream of tartar (or a small squeeze of lemon juice). The acid is the secret: it stabilizes the proteins and gives you a smoother, more consistent fluff. Whip until you get stiff peaks. The whites should hold their shape when you lift the beater.

Dollop the whites onto a parchment-lined baking sheet in little cloud shapes. This is the fun part. Make them as dramatic or as modest as you want. Then use a small spoon to press a shallow nest into the center of each cloud (that’s where the yolk will live).

Bake at 350° for 4 minutes. Just enough to set the whites and get a little color.

Carefully nestle the yolks into the nests and bake for another 4 minutes. You want the whites golden and the yolk just barely set and still jammy in the center.

Season however you like. Salt and pepper is perfect. A little flaky sea salt, some fresh herbs, a crack of black pepper. Go wherever the mood takes you.

Have you tried cloud eggs before? Drop a comment — I want to know your favorite way to season them.

I’m proud to have earned your trust as an independent creator.

In this video, I discuss a pivotal 2025 moment that forced my hand. Turned out, it was just the push I needed

Be kind and wash your behind.

Not for what you might consider to be controversial, or a political take, or a spicy hot-button opinion. He posted a workout video — functional movements, stuff anyone could do from home during COVID — and the comments came anyway. This isn’t a real workout. You don’t even look good. Why would I take advice from you?

That’s where we started our conversation, and it set the tone for everything that followed: a quiet, clear-eyed look at why we’ve been taught to police each other’s bodies, who benefits from that, and what it actually costs us to keep doing it.

Sander grew up in South Florida—a stone’s throw from my house, in fact. You might know him as Jazz Jennings’ older brother. Jazz, the transgender activist and I Am Jazz star, just graduated from Harvard and has been one of the most publicly visible trans voices in America since she was six years old. But Sander is very much his own person, and this conversation proved it. He’s built a following of over 1.5 million on the foundation of a simple, radical idea: love yourself, love others, and do both out loud if you can.

It sounds easy. It isn’t.

How Fitness Became Activism

Sander didn’t set out to be an activist. During the pandemic, he had a backyard, some time, and a desire to help people move. So he started posting workouts anyone could do from home — no equipment, no gym membership required.

The trolls arrived soon afterward.

What struck me about his response was how it sidestepped defensiveness and went straight into curiosity. He started asking why we’re so invested in telling each other that our movement doesn’t count, that our bodies aren’t right, that our effort isn’t enough. And the answer is simple and unsettling: someone profits from you feeling that way.

The fitness industry, the diet industry, the supplement industry — they’re all built on the premise that you are a problem to be solved. And once you see that mechanism clearly, Sander told me, you start seeing it everywhere.

“Society tells us we have to look or act a certain way in order to fit the mold,” he said. “And the moment you stop buying that story, a lot of other stories start falling apart too.”

The Jazz Connection — And Why It Goes Deeper Than You Think

To know Sander is to know his advocacy for body image and trans rights. The idea that trans individuals deserve autonomy over their own bodies is absolutely part of the body positivity conversation. But Sander took me somewhere more specific.

Jazz, his sister, has struggled with binge eating disorder. Separate from her identity as a trans woman, this was a health crisis for someone he loves. And Sander told me that watching himself try to help her — and realizing he was unintentionally imposing his own ideas about what “healthy” should look like — was one of the most formative experiences of his life.

That’s not a small thing to admit. That’s someone doing the actual internal work — catching himself mid-pattern and choosing differently. The body positivity he now advocates isn’t abstract. It was forged in real relationship, real love, real friction.

The Math of Being an Ally

One of the things I find most useful about Sander’s perspective is that he approaches allyship strategically, not just emotionally.

Here’s the math he laid out: roughly 5-7% of the population identifies as LGBTQ+. Which means 90-95% of us can be allies. And that’s not a small number. That’s a movement waiting to happen, if people decide to show up.

“I realized I could use my voice to start being a voice for change,” he said. “Not just the proud big brother amplifying his sister’s message — but a voice for every LGBTQ+ person who needed someone in their corner.”

This is where I think Sander’s work is genuinely underappreciated. It’s easy to celebrate the person who is openly trans, who is out and visible and bearing the cost of that visibility every day. It’s harder — and maybe more strategically important — to be the person standing next to them saying I’m here, and I’m not going anywhere.

Allies normalize. Allies expand the circle. Allies make it possible for the 5-7% to breathe a little easier.

On Staying Sane While the World Burns

I asked Sander how he keeps his mental health intact while doing this work.

He stays active — movement every day, even if it’s just a walk. He goes to therapy. And he specifically called out the cultural script that tells men therapy is weakness: “I think it’s exactly the opposite.”

I’ll admit something here too. He asked me what helps me stay calm, and I told him the truth: I feel the cumulative weight of all of it — the empathy I extend to people under attack, the worry that extends beyond my own kids to anyone I see being targeted publicly. And when I stop moving, when I stop getting outside, when I neglect the very things I know help me, I feel it. I get ornery. I get small.

So we sat there at my kitchen table, two guys who are supposed to have it together, admitting we’re both doing our best and some days that’s enough and some days it isn’t. It felt like exactly the kind of conversation everyone should be having more of.

What His Parents Got Right

Sander mentioned that his parents are routinely called the worst parents in the world for unconditionally loving their child.

For supporting Jazz through her transition. For consulting with medical professionals. For saying we know the statistics of not allowing our child to be her most authentic self, and we choose love.

The worst parents in the world. For loving their kid.

Sander didn’t say this with bitterness. He said it with something closer to clarity. That’s great parents, right there. Full stop.

I think about the parents watching this who are scared, or confused, or who have been told by someone — a pastor, a pundit, a politician — that supporting their child’s identity is somehow dangerous. I want those parents to hear this: the research is clear, the human cost of rejection is devastating, and the thing your child needs most is exactly what Sander’s parents gave Jazz. You.

The Takeaway (And the Bidet)

I asked Sander what he wanted people to walk away with:

“Leading with empathy is not weakness. It’s not our place to tell people how they should live their life — whether that’s their identity, their body, their choices. It’s up to people to make their own decisions, and it’s up to you to accept and love those decisions, or zip your mouth and stay quiet.”

I’ll take that. That’s the whole thing. You don’t have to understand everything. You don’t have to agree with everything. But you do have to decide whether you’re going to lead with love or lead with judgment — and that choice, made millions of times a day by millions of ordinary people.

That’s how the world actually changes.

You can follow Sander across Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube at @sander_jennings. He runs a good ship over there. Kind community. Real talk.

Be kind, and wash your behind.

— Slade

Good parents agonize over this from time to time. There are good days when communication is high, and you feel in sync. There are difficult days when you feel miles apart, sitting in the same room.

I have ADHD, so I’ve struggled with making strong bonds. Yet I’m happy with the tight circle of friends I have, and I love my sons more than life itself. I also love the young men they are becoming.

My wife is Brazilian and has three wonderful sons of her own. She is very close to her sons and remarkably consistent in her communication—she’s taught me a lot about how to make a relationship work. We’ve labeled our blended family “rice and beans,” an ode to household harmony despite our cultural and melanin disparities.

Leave a comment

My firstborn is a senior at a high school located on the other side of our county. When I pick him up, we share a 40-minute drive back home. We have an understanding on this drive. He is exhausted from the day and wants to chill, and I want to hear how his day went. So he obliges me with a few highlights before we both fall silent.

Sometimes I feel like this silence is wasted time. Surely there is so much to say. So my mind races with clever questions to ask and profound ideas to share. On a recent trip home, I decided to break the silence and draw him into a deep conversation.

As I turned to look at him, I saw he was sleeping with his mouth open, and I realized it’s not always about filling up our shared space with words.

As long as we parents keep showing up, we’ll have all the closeness we need.

At the first two No Kings rallies, I stood among my fellow Americans and felt a strong love for country, for the Constitution, and for each other.

It’s a love that requires our witness and our action.

On this Saturday, March 28th, we show up again. Bigger. Louder. And Together.

No Thrones. No Crowns. No Kings.

Be kind … and we’ll see you there.

That’s it. That’s what school is.

For over four decades, the law agreed with that instinct. But now, a coordinated legal and legislative campaign is working to change it. And every parent in America — regardless of where they stand on immigration — needs to understand what’s at stake.

The Case You Need to Know: Plyler v. Doe (1982)

In 1975, Texas passed a law that let school districts do two things: charge tuition to undocumented children, or simply refuse to enroll them at all. For two years, children were turned away from schoolhouse doors — not because of anything they did, but because of the paperwork (or lack of it) their parents carried.

A group of families sued. The case made it to the Supreme Court, and in 1982, in a 5-4 decision, the Court struck down the Texas law. Justice William Brennan, writing for the majority, grounded the ruling in the 14th Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause — specifically, its use of the word person, not citizen. No state, the Amendment reads, shall deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

That word choice was not an accident. It was a constitutional commitment.

Brennan wrote that denying undocumented children an education would impose “a lifetime hardship on a discrete class of children not accountable for their disabling status,” and that “the deprivation of education takes an inestimable toll on the social, economic, intellectual, and psychological well-being of the individual.”

The Court also made a broader social argument: creating a permanent underclass of uneducated people locked out of civic participation was not just cruel — it was contrary to America’s foundational commitments. The ruling is why public schools today do not request or collect immigration status information during enrollment.

Plyler has held for 44 years. Until now, no serious effort had come close to overturning it.

The Playbook: Heritage Foundation’s Deliberate Strategy

The Heritage Foundation — the conservative think tank behind the Project 2025 policy playbook shaping much of President Trump’s agenda — published a policy document on February 17, 2026, calling on states to intentionally enact laws or rules restricting free public education for undocumented students, with the explicit long-term goal of getting the Supreme Court to overturn Plyler.

This is not a subtly-worded policy paper. The brief states openly that such a move “would draw a lawsuit from the Left, which would likely lead the Supreme Court to reconsider its ill-considered Plyler v. Doe decision.” They want a legal challenge. They want this case back in front of a Court they believe will rule differently. The strategy is transparent: manufacture a conflict, litigate it upward, and use the current Supreme Court’s composition to undo four decades of settled law.

On December 17, 2025, Heritage published model legislation titled the “Charging K–12 Public School Tuition for Illegal Alien Students Act,” which was revised and updated in February 2026. The document is essentially a legislative kit — ready for any state that wants to be the test case.

The States Already Moving

This isn’t theoretical anymore. In 2025, at least five states considered legislation that would make it harder for undocumented students to attend K-12 school. Here’s where things stand:

Tennessee is the furthest along. The Tennessee Senate passed a bill in 2025 that would allow school districts to ban undocumented students. As of early 2026, advocates are watching it closely.

Oklahoma moved fast — and then retreated. In January 2025, the Oklahoma Board of Education passed a resolution requiring parents to show their child’s citizenship status before enrolling. Oklahoma’s House of Representatives blocked it four months later.

Idaho is currently in play. Republican legislators introduced a bill in February 2026 that would require public K-12 schools to check students’ immigration status. The state’s House Education Committee is currently considering it.

New Jersey, Indiana, Ohio, and Texas all saw legislative proposals in 2025 — none passed, but advocates say the efforts are likely to continue. Texas Governor Greg Abbott has been vocal about wanting to revisit Plyler as far back as 2022.

Illinois went the other direction entirely. Democratic Governor JB Pritzker signed House Bill 3247 into law in August 2025, codifying the right of undocumented students to receive a free public education and requiring school districts to adopt clear policies protecting students from immigration enforcement on school grounds.

The Federal Layer

The legislative pressure on Plyler doesn’t exist in isolation. The Trump administration has systematically dismantled the informal protections that surrounded it. The administration cut (later reinstated after states sued) funding for migrant students, and barred students without legal status from Head Start, adult education, and career and technical education programs. It also rescinded policies that had long designated schools as enforcement-free zones — meaning immigration agents can now operate near or at school buildings.

The chilling effect is real. Educators across the country are reporting that families are hesitant to enroll their children at all. Schools serving immigrant students are grappling with heightened enforcement activity that educators say disrupts learning and harms students’ emotional well-being. When children live in fear, that fear doesn’t stay outside the classroom door. It affects focus, behavior, relationships — and it affects every child in the room, not just the ones whose families are undocumented.

Why Every Parent Should Care

There are an estimated 600,000 to 850,000 undocumented students enrolled in K-12 schools across the country. These are children. They did not choose their circumstances. They cannot control their parents’ immigration status any more than any of us chose the family we were born into.

Justice Brennan understood this. The 14th Amendment understood this. The question now is whether we still do.

Public school was the one institution in American life where we drew a bright line and said: we are not sorting children here. Not by wealth, not by race, not by paperwork. Every child who walks through those doors belongs.

That idea is now under a direct, organized, and well-funded attack. The Heritage Foundation has published the model legislation. Multiple states are running it. And the Supreme Court has been explicitly named as the intended destination.

Plyler v. Doe is still the law of the land — but it has never been more vulnerable. And the parents who most need to know that are the ones who assume it could never happen here.

It’s happening here.

Sources

Primary Legal Source

1. Plyler v. Doe, 457 U.S. 202 (1982). Justia U.S. Supreme Court Center. https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/457/202/

Conservative / Pro-Challenge Perspectives

2. Ries, Lora. “Every State Should Challenge Plyler v. Doe: Time to End Free Education for Illegal Alien K–12 Students.” The Heritage Foundation, December 17, 2025 (revised February 17, 2026). https://www.heritage.org/border-security/report/every-state-should-challenge-plyler-v-doe-time-end-free-education-illegal-0

3. Heritage Foundation. “Undocumented Children a Drain on U.S. Schools.” The Heritage Foundation. https://www.heritage.org/education/commentary/undocumented-children-drain-us-schools

News Reporting

4. Belsha, Kalyn. “Heritage Foundation Urges States to Make Undocumented Kids Pay for School.” Chalkbeat, April 9, 2024. https://www.chalkbeat.org/2024/04/09/plyler-protects-undocumented-students-heritage-foundation-seeks-challenge/

5. Najarro, Ileana. “Which States Are Challenging Undocumented Students’ Right to Free Education?” Education Week, March 17, 2025. https://www.edweek.org/policy-politics/which-states-are-challenging-undocumented-students-right-to-free-education/2025/03

6. Najarro, Ileana. “Undocumented Students Still Have a Right to Education. Will That Change in 2026?” Education Week, January 7, 2026. https://www.edweek.org/policy-politics/undocumented-students-still-have-a-right-to-education-will-that-change-in-2026/2025/12

7. Langreo, Lauraine. “Heritage Foundation Targets Undocumented Students’ Access to Free Education.” Education Week, February 2026. https://www.edweek.org/policy-politics/project-2025-group-targets-undocumented-students-access-to-free-education/2026/02

8. Kohli, Sonali. “Students Without Legal Status Have the Right to Attend Public School. Will Trump Change That?” LAIST, 2025. https://laist.com/brief/news/education/students-without-legal-status-have-the-right-to-attend-public-school-will-trump-change-that

9. “Immigrant Kids Can Attend School Regardless of Citizenship — Some States Are Challenging This Standard.” The Conversation, March 2026. https://theconversation.com/immigrant-kids-can-attend-school-regardless-of-citizenship-some-states-are-challenging-this-standard-278766

Policy Analysis & Advocacy

10. “Defending Plyler v. Doe‘s Legacy in 2025.” Niskanen Center, February 3, 2025. https://www.niskanencenter.org/defending-plyler-v-does-legacy-in-2025/

11. “The Price of Denial: State Lawmakers’ Efforts to Undermine Plyler v. Doe and the Fiscal Fallacy of Exclusion.” Niskanen Center, June 18, 2025. https://www.niskanencenter.org/the-price-of-denial-state-lawmakers-efforts-to-undermine-plyler-v-doe-and-the-fiscal-fallacy-of-exclusion/

12. National Immigration Law Center. “Understanding Plyler v. Doe: SCOTUS Case Protecting Access to Public Education.” March 20, 2025. https://www.nilc.org/resources/plyler-v-doe-case-explainer/

13. National Immigration Law Center. “Education for All Campaign.” January 15, 2025. https://www.nilc.org/resources/education-for-all-campaign/

14. American Immigration Council. “Public Education for Immigrant Students: Understanding Plyler v. Doe.” October 2016 (updated January 2025). https://www.americanimmigrationcouncil.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/public_education_for_immigrant_students_understanding_plyer_v_doe.pdf

15. Resseger, Jan. “Heritage Foundation Wants to Deny the Right to Public Schooling for Undocumented Immigrant Children.” Network for Public Education, June 3, 2024. https://networkforpubliceducation.org/blog-content/jan-resseger-heritage-foundation-wants-to-deny-the-right-to-public-schooling-for-undocumented-immigrant-children/

Academic & Legal Scholarship

16. Williams, Jamie. “Children Versus Texas: The Legacy of Plyler v. Doe.” UC Berkeley School of Law. https://www.law.berkeley.edu/files/Children_v._Texas_Williams.pdf

17. Moran, Rachel F. “Personhood, Property, and Public Education: The Case of Plyler v. Doe.” Texas A&M Law Scholarship / Columbia Law Review. https://scholarship.law.tamu.edu/context/facscholar/article/2875/viewcontent/

18. “Plyler v. Doe and the Rights of Undocumented Immigrants to Public Education.” Washington University Law Review. https://openscholarship.wustl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1375&context=law_lawreview

19. “Plyler v. Doe.” Wikipedia (for quick reference and case background). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plyler_v._Doe

So why are Republican senators keeping it alive — opening floor debate this week, letting it run for days, turning it into a drawn-out public spectacle?

Here are four things you need to know.

1. They’ve Found a Message They Think Will Win the Midterms — and It’s Built on a Lie.

Here’s the strategy: Republicans keep calling this a voter ID bill. And voter ID is genuinely popular. Gallup shows 84% of Americans support photo ID to vote — including 67% of Democrats. So Republicans are using that number as a shield, forcing every Democrat in the Senate to vote against a bill they can then call an “anti-voter ID vote” in campaign ads all the way to November.

The problem is the bill isn’t a voter ID bill. It’s a voter registration bill — requiring a passport or birth certificate just to get on the rolls in the first place. That is a fundamentally different ask, and the distinction is deliberate. Polling consistently shows that broad support for “voter ID” crumbles the moment you explain what this bill actually requires.

Here’s the tell: every Democrat in Congress actually voted for a nationwide photo ID requirement as part of the Freedom to Vote Act. Not a single Republican joined them. The party that claims to want voter ID refused to vote for voter ID when Democrats offered it — because this was never actually about voter ID.

What this is actually about, Trump told us himself. At a Georgia rally, talking about the SAVE Act, he said — and I quote — “If this becomes law, we’ll never lose a race. For 50 years, we won’t lose a race.” He said it again this month: “It’ll guarantee the midterms.”

That is not election integrity. That is election control. And it is the only honest thing anyone on that side has said about this bill.

Share

2. They Don’t Even Need It to Pass. They Just Need Red States to Follow Florida’s Lead.

I live in Florida. So I can tell you exactly what this playbook looks like when it’s already been run — and what it looks like when it gets a second act.

The first act: SB 7050, 2023.

In May 2023, Governor DeSantis signed Senate Bill 7050 — a law that imposed crippling new restrictions on the community organizations that register voters. Groups like the League of Women Voters, the NAACP, and Hispanic Federation, which had registered voters in Florida for decades, suddenly faced $50,000 fines per infraction, shortened deadlines, felony criminal penalties for volunteers who made paperwork errors, and a requirement to re-register with the state before every election cycle.

The result was immediate and measurable. In 2020, third-party voter registration organizations registered roughly 60,000 Floridians in the first quarter of the election year. In the same period of 2024 — after SB 7050 — that number was 3,860. A 94% collapse. The Florida NAACP, after more than 30 years of running voter registration drives, stopped entirely. The League of Women Voters said their registrations dropped by at least 30%.

The law also triggered aggressive voter roll purges. In Miami-Dade County, more than 85,000 voters were moved to inactive status — over 90% of them Democrats or independents. In Broward, nearly 191,000 moved to inactive, with 84% being Democrats or independents. In Palm Beach, over 156,000 removed, with nearly 83% being Democrats or independents. Those numbers are not a coincidence. They are a result.

Courts struck down pieces of SB 7050 — but the chilling effect was already baked in. Florida now ranks 47th out of all 50 states in the percentage of eligible citizens who are registered to vote.

The second act: HB 991, 2026 — passed last week.

On March 12th — just days ago — the Florida Legislature passed House Bill 991 on a party-line vote: 77 to 28 in the House, 27 to 12 in the Senate. Governor DeSantis has said he is “enthusiastically ready” to sign it. The bill’s sponsor openly described it as Florida’s own version of the SAVE America Act.

HB 991 requires citizenship verification for every registered voter in the state, cross-checked against the DMV database. Starting in 2027, every new or renewed Florida driver’s license will include a citizenship marker. Any voter who updates their registration — moves, changes their name, changes their party — will be required to provide proof of citizenship at that time.

And then there’s the ID provision, which tells you everything you need to know about who this law is actually designed to target. Under HB 991, Florida voters can use a driver’s license, a state ID card, a military ID, or — and this is real — a concealed carry weapons permit to identify themselves at the polls. What they can no longer use: a college student ID or a retirement community ID. Both of which have been accepted forms of voter identification in Florida for decades.

Read that again. A concealed carry permit: valid. A state university student ID: banned. DeSantis called the use of student IDs a “loophole” he had long wanted to close. A loophole for whom, exactly? Democrats argued — accurately — that many college students don’t have driver’s licenses, and many seniors in retirement communities have stopped renewing theirs because they no longer drive. Those two groups are not a random cross-section of the electorate.

State Rep. Ashley Viola Gantt, a Democrat from Miami-Dade, put a human face on what these citizenship verification requirements actually mean in practice. Her aunt, she told her colleagues, was born during segregation in the 1940s and was never issued a birth certificate because she wasn’t born in a hospital. She is a federal employee. She cannot get a REAL ID-compliant driver’s license. They have spent a year trying to get her South Carolina birth certificate. They still don’t have it. “This is what a lot of Black folks who were born during Jim Crow have to contend with,” Rep. Gantt said on the floor. “They do not have issued birth certificates. It’s not conjecture. This is real life.”

Critically, the effective date for HB 991’s key provisions was pushed to January 1, 2027 — after this November’s midterm elections. The original House version would have taken effect in July, weeks before the August primaries. After election administrators and voting advocates warned of chaos, the timeline was moved. Conveniently, the law will be fully in force for the next cycle — the one where Republicans need to hold Congress — but not for the one coming up where they’re most vulnerable.

Democratic elections attorney Marc Elias was direct: “If this is enacted, Florida will be sued.”

This is what Republicans in Washington want to nationalize. The Senate debate this week is as much a signal to red-state legislatures as it is a legislative effort: do this at home, and we’ll try to do it everywhere.

3. The Real Danger in This Bill Isn’t the Registration Requirement. It’s What It Does With Your Data.

Buried in the SAVE America Act is a provision requiring all 50 states to hand over their complete, unredacted voter rolls — names, addresses, Social Security data, the full file — to the Department of Homeland Security. Every single American voter. No restrictions on what DHS can do with it. No safeguards against using it to order purges. No requirement that the data stay within the government.

We already have a preview of how this goes. When Texas voluntarily handed its rolls to DHS for screening, the department flagged hundreds of citizens for removal — with naturalized citizens particularly at risk of being falsely identified as noncitizens. In Missouri, more than half the voters flagged as noncitizens by this system were actually citizens. In Texas, one in five records couldn’t even be processed. And we now know that DOGE team members within the Social Security Administration agreed to transfer state voter rolls to an outside advocacy group specifically seeking to, in their own words, “find evidence of voter fraud and overturn election results in certain states.”

The Campaign Legal Center, a nonpartisan election law organization, reviewed the DHS provision and found that the bill “places no restrictions on what the federal government can do with the sensitive data once DHS receives it and no safeguards against using the data to force voter purges.” Meanwhile, the DOJ has already filed 30 lawsuits against states — Republican and Democratic — that have refused to hand over their voter rolls. This bill would remove the choice.

Think about what this architecture actually enables. If you have the voter rolls of every swing district in the country, a government agency with zero legal restrictions on how it uses that data, and the explicit stated goal of “guaranteeing” midterm elections — you have something this country has never seen before. Not voter suppression by accident or indifference. Voter suppression by algorithm, targeted with surgical precision at the precincts and counties that decide close elections.

This will be challenged in the courts. But the challenge itself takes time — and time, in a midterm election year with primaries already underway, is exactly what they’re counting on.

4. Twenty-One Million Americans Could Be Blocked from Voting.

The Brennan Center for Justice — the legal research arm of NYU School of Law, which works directly with election officials across the country — estimates that more than 21 million Americans lack the documents this bill would require to register. That number is not a partisan talking point. It is a research finding based on census data, passport ownership statistics, and the specific documentary requirements written into the bill’s text.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer is calling this “Jim Crow 2.0.” That framing is contested by Republicans, who cite the broad popularity of voter ID as evidence that the comparison is unfair. But the comparison isn’t to the concept of voter ID — it’s to the strategic use of documentation requirements to construct barriers that fall disproportionately on specific communities. The Brennan Center’s research confirms that the bill’s impact would fall hardest on younger voters, voters of color, and the tens of millions of married women whose current legal name doesn’t appear on their birth certificate.

The SAVE America Act will almost certainly fail this week. But the intent behind it is not going away. Republicans are explicitly, on the record, saying they want to lock in electoral advantages before the 2026 midterms. Trump said so himself, repeatedly, in public. That means this fight — over who gets to vote and who doesn’t — is far from over.

The bill may die in the Senate.

The strategy it represents is just getting started.

Share The Dad Briefs

Sources: NPR, The New Republic, Florida Bulldog, South Florida Sun Sentinel, Florida Phoenix, Democracy Docket, Orlando Sentinel, Campaign Legal Center, Brennan Center for Justice, Center for American Progress, Senator Alex Padilla press release, PBS NewsHour, WHYY, CNBC, NBC News, Harvard CAPS/Harris Poll, Gallup, ACLU.

“Broadcasters that are running hoaxes and news distortions — also known as the fake news — have a chance now to correct course before their license renewals come up. The law is clear. Broadcasters must operate in the public interest, and they will lose their licenses if they do not.”

The trigger was a dispute over war reporting. The Wall Street Journal had reported that five U.S. Air Force refueling planes were struck during an Iranian missile strike on the Prince Sultan Air Base in Saudi Arabia. The president called the coverage “intentionally misleading” and accused the Times, the Journal, and other outlets of “terrible reporting.” Carr, at the same resort as the president that day, echoed the complaint with a threat.

The president then endorsed Carr’s warning on Truth Social, calling media organizations “Corrupt and Highly Unpatriotic.” And then Trump went further — suggesting on social media that some journalists should be tried for treason over their coverage of a war.

Let’s be precise about what just happened: the United States government threatened to strip broadcasters of their licenses if their war coverage didn’t align with the president’s account of events. And it did so while the war was still ongoing.

That is not a threat to “fake news.” That is the definition of state-controlled media.

Why is the Press called the “Fourth Estate”

To understand why this moment is so consequential, it helps to understand where the concept of a free press actually comes from — and what it was designed to do.

The term “Fourth Estate” was popularized by the historian Thomas Carlyle, who attributed it to the Irish statesman Edmund Burke. In his book On Heroes and Hero Worship (1840), Carlyle wrote: “Burke said there were Three Estates in Parliament; but, in the Reporters’ Gallery yonder, there sat a Fourth Estate more important far than they all.” The three estates Burke referred to were the Lords Spiritual, the Lords Temporal, and the Commons — essentially the church, the aristocracy, and the people. Burke’s argument, as Carlyle framed it, was radical: the reporters watching from the gallery were more powerful than any of the three official branches of government combined. Not because they held authority, but because they held accountability.

Carlyle connected the press directly to the survival of self-governance: “Printing, which comes necessarily out of Writing, I say often, is equivalent to Democracy: invent Writing, Democracy is inevitable.” He saw the press as instrumental to the birth of democracy — spreading facts, sparking debate, and making revolution against tyranny possible.

This wasn’t romanticism. It was a structural argument about how free societies function. Democracy requires that citizens be informed enough to make consequential decisions — about who governs them, how wars are fought in their name, what their tax dollars are doing, what their government is hiding. No governing body can be expected to operate accountably without knowledge of what it is doing being available to those it governs.

Walter Cronkite put it with characteristic directness: “A democracy ceases to be a democracy if its citizens do not participate in its governance. To participate intelligently, they must know what their government has done, is doing and plans to do in their name… This is the meaning of freedom of press. It is not just important to democracy — it is democracy.”

The First Amendment doesn’t protect the press because journalists are special. It protects the press because you are special. You are the sovereign in this democracy, and the press is the mechanism by which you exercise that sovereignty with informed consent rather than manufactured ignorance.

What Brendan Carr Is Actually Doing — and Why His Limited Legal Power Isn’t the Point

Legal experts and First Amendment advocates were quick to point out that Carr’s specific threat has significant practical limitations. The FCC does not license national networks. It licenses local stations that carry network programming. Cable networks like CNN fall entirely outside the FCC’s authority. The New York Times and Wall Street Journal — the outlets Trump specifically attacked — own no broadcast licenses whatsoever and are entirely beyond the FCC’s reach.

But there is a deeper reason Carr’s threat is largely hollow — and it comes from the one and only time in American history that the FCC actually revoked a television station’s license over content. It is a story most people have never heard. And it is the exact opposite of what Brendan Carr is implying.

The One Precedent — and What It Actually Means

The station was WLBT, Channel 3 in Jackson, Mississippi. It had been on the air for just eighteen years when the FCC did something it had never done to any other station in the country — and has never done since.

WLBT was an NBC affiliate in a city whose population was forty percent Black. Its transgressions were not subtle. In 1955, when Thurgood Marshall — NAACP lawyer and future Supreme Court Justice — appeared on an NBC national broadcast to discuss the implications of Brown v. Board of Education, WLBT cut the network feed and put up a card that read: “Sorry, cable trouble.” The station manager later admitted he had pulled the interview deliberately. His explanation: television networks had become instruments of, in his words, “Negro propaganda.”

That was not an isolated incident. It was policy. The station sold anti-integration literature in the lobby of its downtown studios. It editorialized in favor of segregation. It blacked out network civil rights coverage as a matter of routine. When James Meredith was admitted to the University of Mississippi in 1962, the station manager wrote a deriding editorial that prompted formal complaints to the FCC. The station gave airtime to segregationist politicians while systematically excluding the Black community from any meaningful representation — in a city where nearly half the population was Black.

In 1963, civil rights leader Medgar Evers was finally granted air time after formally requesting the opportunity to respond to Jackson’s mayor. He spoke calmly and eloquently: “Whether Jackson and the state choose change or not, the years of change are upon us. In the racial picture things will never be as they once were. History has reached a turning point.” Three weeks later, he was assassinated in his driveway.

In 1964, the Reverend Everett Parker of the United Church of Christ — joined by NAACP state president Aaron Henry and Rev. R.L.T. Smith — filed a formal petition with the FCC to deny WLBT’s license renewal. They documented the pattern of discrimination, the blacked-out coverage, the editorial hostility, and the systematic exclusion of the Black community from a public airwave they had every right to access.

The FCC’s initial response was as revealing as WLBT’s conduct. The commission ruled that the petitioners had no standing to challenge the license — because they had no economic interest in the station and were not subject to electronic interference from its signal. In other words: ordinary citizens, including the very community the station was supposed to serve, had no legal right to participate in FCC proceedings. The public, as far as the FCC was concerned, did not exist in this process.

The United Church of Christ appealed to the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia. In 1966, the court — in an opinion written by Warren Burger, before he became Chief Justice of the United States — ruled that the public absolutely had the right to participate in FCC hearings. This was a landmark decision that permanently changed communications law. Citizens could now challenge broadcast licenses. The airwaves, Burger wrote, belonged to the public.

It didn’t end there. The FCC, undeterred, renewed WLBT’s license anyway. Twice. The challengers appealed again. Burger wrote a second decision. This time the court took the extraordinary step of ordering the license stripped entirely — the first and only time a federal court has ever done so based on a station’s content and conduct.

In 1969, WLBT became the first television station in American history to lose its broadcast license over what it put on the air. In 1971, control passed to a biracial nonprofit. The new management appointed the first Black general manager of a television station in the American South. The station was rebuilt from the ground up as what its new operators called “a beacon of tolerance.”

A Mississippi Freedom Trail marker now stands outside the building.

Now consider what that precedent actually establishes. The one and only time the FCC’s content authority was invoked to strip a license, it was used to punish a station for suppressing minority voices, distorting coverage of a civil rights movement, and providing a platform for a political establishment’s preferred propaganda — while excluding the community it was supposed to serve.

The power was wielded against state-aligned media. Not for it.

When Brendan Carr invokes the FCC’s “public interest” authority to threaten stations that report facts about a war the president finds inconvenient, he is not following precedent. He is inverting it. He is pointing a legal instrument designed to protect the public from government-friendly distortion and aiming it in the opposite direction entirely.

As one First Amendment scholar noted, the Telecommunications Act of 1996 further restricted the criteria for revoking a license to the point where he described it as “essentially impossible before then” and “totally impossible now” on content grounds.

That’s the legal reality. But Carr’s strategy was never about legality. It was about fear.

Media advocacy groups have been clear about what this approach is actually designed to achieve: not license revocation, but self-censorship. The implicit threat, as public interest communications attorney Andrew Jay Schwartzman described it, is that broadcasters who displease the administration may find the regulatory relief they want — merger approvals, license transfers, spectrum allocations — suddenly much harder to obtain. It is regulatory leverage wielded as a weapon, and it works without a single license ever being revoked.

We have already watched it work. When Carr suggested ABC affiliate owners might face license scrutiny over a Jimmy Kimmel joke, two of the largest broadcast groups in the country pulled the show from their programming within hours. Paramount, seeking merger approval, told the FCC it would install an editorial ombudsman at CBS and eliminate diversity and inclusion practices as conditions of the deal. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth stood at a Pentagon press briefing and said of CNN — explicitly — that “the sooner David Ellison takes over that network, the better,” referring to the Paramount executive seeking regulatory approval to acquire CNN’s parent company.

The Radio Television Digital News Association’s CEO, Tara Puckey, called it precisely what it is: “What Chair Carr is describing is government control of the press.”

The Broader Pattern: Fourteen Months of Documented Attacks

This week’s threat did not emerge from nowhere. It is the latest escalation in a systematic, documented campaign against independent journalism that began on the first day of Trump’s second term — in fact, before it officially started.

By the numbers, compiled by Poynter’s Press Freedom Watch: 215 anti-media social media posts from Trump in 2025 alone. Seventy-six documented federal actions against journalists. Thirteen lawsuits filed by journalists and media organizations against the administration over press freedom violations.

The scope of what those numbers represent:

Access and accreditation: The Associated Press was banned from the White House press pool in February 2025 after refusing to use the administration’s preferred name for the Gulf of Mexico. In October 2025, the Pentagon introduced new press guidelines requiring reporters to submit material for vetting as a condition of access — conditions that nearly the entire mainstream press corps, including AP, Reuters, NPR, and all major newspapers and broadcasters, refused to accept. They surrendered their Pentagon credentials rather than comply. Their places were filled by pro-Trump outlets and political influencers. Critical journalism was not formally banned. It was rendered structurally unworkable.

Physical threats: There were 170 reports of assaults on journalists in the United States in 2025, 160 of them at the hands of law enforcement, most occurring during immigration enforcement coverage.

Legal intimidation: The FBI raided the home of Washington Post reporter Hannah Natanson on January 14, 2026. Legal observers described it as a rare and deliberately intimidating move, designed to send a message to reporters covering government sources. Jameel Jaffer of Columbia University’s Knight First Amendment Institute called it “intensely concerning” for its chilling effect on legitimate journalistic activity. Trump separately sued the New York Times for fifteen billion dollars. A federal judge threw the case out.

Public broadcasting: FCC Chairman Carr launched investigations into NPR and PBS, explicitly linking them to Congressional efforts to defund both organizations. He reopened complaints against ABC, CBS, and NBC over their 2024 election coverage. He conspicuously declined to reopen the equivalent complaint against Fox News.

International press freedom: Voice of America, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Radio Free Asia, and other U.S.-funded international outlets — which collectively reached 427 million people every week in countries where independent journalism doesn’t otherwise exist — have been gutted by funding freezes and mass layoffs, going dark in some cases entirely. Nine hours into Trump’s second term, before the congratulatory calls from foreign leaders had finished coming in, he suspended hundreds of millions of dollars in foreign aid earmarked for press freedom support overseas.

Reporters Without Borders has recorded a marked decline for the United States on its World Press Freedom Index, citing political pressure, legal intimidation, and the politicization of regulatory agencies. RSF has explicitly compared the approach to Vladimir Putin’s. Amnesty International has gone further, arguing that this is no longer a media dispute — it is a full-blown human rights crisis.

Why Wartime Press Suppression Is the Most Dangerous Category of All

Everything described above is serious. But the FCC’s threat over war coverage deserves its own category of alarm, for one simple and irreducible reason: governments lie during wars. They have always lied during wars. And a press that is free to challenge those lies is not a nuisance — it is the only mechanism a democracy has to hold its military and its leadership accountable when the stakes are highest.

Consider the historical record. The Pentagon Papers revealed that the government had systematically deceived the public about the scope and trajectory of the Vietnam War. The Abu Ghraib photographs showed what was happening in American detention facilities in Iraq when official briefings said nothing of the kind. The claim that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction — repeated with certainty by the most senior officials in government — was wrong, and it took independent journalism years to fully document how wrong it was. The My Lai massacre was covered up by the military. It was a reporter who exposed it.

In every case, the government called that journalism irresponsible, dangerous, or treasonous. In every case, history vindicated the reporters.

Senator Brian Schatz of Hawaii grasped the stakes of this moment immediately: “This is a clear directive to provide positive war coverage or else licenses may not be renewed. This is worse than the comedian stuff, and by a lot. The stakes here are much higher. He’s not talking about late night shows, he’s talking about how a war is covered.”

The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression was unambiguous: “The First Amendment doesn’t allow the government to censor information about the war it’s waging.”

When Brendan Carr says broadcasters must report the war in a way that meets the government’s definition of the “public interest,” he is describing state-run media. There is no softer way to say it. State-run media is what countries have when they don’t have a free press. It is what Russia has. It is what North Korea has. It is what the United States has never had — and what the First Amendment was written specifically to prevent.

This Is Not About the Media. It’s About You.

I want to be careful here, because I know that trust in the press is genuinely low — and some of that distrust is earned. Journalism has real failures. Sensationalism. Institutional bias. The collapse of local news. The corrosive incentives of engagement-driven media. These are legitimate criticisms, and they deserve serious engagement.

But there is a categorical difference — a difference in kind, not degree — between criticizing journalism and weaponizing federal regulatory power to silence reporting a president finds inconvenient. One is the sign of a healthy, skeptical democracy. The other is how democracies end.

The ACLU’s Brian Hauss made the historical point directly: “Restrictions on press freedom are the canary in the coal mine for democratic backsliding. As the White House thumbs its nose at the First Amendment, it’s instructive to look to countries like Hungary and Russia, where the descent into autocracy began with crackdowns on journalists.”

He is not being hyperbolic. This is documented pattern, observed across multiple countries over multiple decades. The sequence is consistent: first the press is delegitimized (”fake news,” “enemy of the people”); then it is pressured through regulatory and legal threat; then compliant outlets are rewarded and critical ones are punished; then the public, already primed to distrust what it reads, accepts the narrowing of the information it receives. Not because anyone issued a formal censorship order — but because the incentives and the fear did the work quietly, over time.

You don’t have to love the media to understand what losing it means. An informed citizenry cannot exist without independent journalism. Corruption cannot be exposed without reporters who are free to expose it. Wars cannot be questioned without journalists who are free to question them. Elections cannot be meaningful if the information environment surrounding them is controlled by the government holding them.

Joseph Pulitzer believed a newspaper “should always fight for progress and reform; never tolerate injustice or corruption; always fight demagogues of all parties… always oppose privileged classes and public plunderers; never lack sympathy with the poor; always remain devoted to the public welfare.” That is not a left-wing agenda. That is a democratic one. And it is one that requires a press free enough to actually do it.

When a government tells you the only trustworthy information comes from the government, that is the moment — precisely that moment — when you should trust the government least.

What You Can Do Right Now

Support independent journalism financially. Subscribe to a local newspaper. Support investigative outlets. Contribute to public broadcasters. They cannot do this work without resources, and the industry is under severe financial pressure independent of any political threat.

Use media literacy tools. Ground News, AllSides, and similar platforms help you understand the media landscape — identifying bias, factuality ratings, and ownership structures so you can evaluate what you’re reading rather than outsourcing that judgment to an algorithm or a politician.

Contact your representatives. The FCC chairman is a presidential appointee, but Congress has oversight authority over the FCC and can hold hearings, pass legislation, and make clear that using a federal regulatory body to coerce news coverage is unacceptable.

Share credible war reporting. When you see coverage of the Iran conflict that is sourced, fact-checked, and corrected when wrong — share it. The label “fake news” derives its power from repetition, not evidence. Counter it with specificity.

Remember the precedent. The one time the FCC revoked a TV license over content, it did so to protect a community whose voices were being suppressed by a broadcaster serving a segregationist political establishment. The power was designed to hold media accountable to the public — not to hold the public accountable to the government’s preferred narrative. Brendan Carr knows that. He’s counting on you not to.

The reporters in the gallery didn’t become the Fourth Estate because someone handed them that title. They earned it by showing up, asking uncomfortable questions, publishing inconvenient facts, and refusing to look away — even when the government told them to.

That work has never been more important, or more endangered, than it is right now.

Be kind, and you know.

Sources: Washington Post, NPR, CNN, CBS News, NBC News, Al Jazeera, The Hill, Axios, Poynter Institute, WAN-IFRA, Columbia Journalism Review, Committee to Protect Journalists, Reporters Without Borders, American Civil Liberties Union, Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, Brennan Center for Justice, National Archives, Mississippi Encyclopedia, Yale Journal on Regulation, Democracy Now!, Lapham’s Quarterly, FactCheck.org, The 19th News, Votebeat.

Long before soda bread existed — we’re talking the seventh century — Ireland had a law. An actual, enforceable, you-will-be-fined law. It was called oigidecht, and it said: if a stranger comes to your door, you feed them. You give them a bed. You don’t ask questions. Refuse, and you could be sanctioned and shamed in front of your entire community.

The ancient Irish didn’t just tolerate strangers. They legislated for them.

They even had a phrase for it: Céad Míle Fáilte — a hundred thousand welcomes. Not ten. Not a polite nod at the door. A hundred thousand. That’s a lot of welcomes. The kind of number that tells you this wasn’t casual. It was a whole identity.

So when Irish soda bread showed up in 1836 — four ingredients, iron pot, open fire — it wasn’t baked in isolation. It was made to be shared. With family. With neighbors. With whoever came through the door that night. During the Great Famine, when families had almost nothing, the tradition held: you shared what you had, because someday it might be your child on a stranger’s doorstep.

The bread and the welcome were always the same thing.

Now. The traditionalists — and the Society for the Preservation of Irish Soda Bread is very much a real organization — will tell you that proper soda bread has exactly four ingredients: flour, salt, baking soda, and buttermilk. They are correct. Add raisins and you’ve made a Spotted Dog. Add caraway seeds and it’s a Tea Cake. These are named things, and they are delicious, but they are technically not soda bread.

I respect this position completely.

And then I say: Céad Míle Fáilte. A hundred thousand welcomes. You want raisins? Better in here than in a potato salad. Caraway seeds? Pull up a chair, you’re family. A little honey on top? Come in, sit down, eat something.

The people who codified hospitality into ancient law are not going to draw the line at dried fruit.

Irish Soda Bread

Four ingredients. Forty minutes. Serves 6–8.

• 500g (4 cups) all-purpose flour (avoid bread flours)

• 1.5 tsp baking soda

• 1 tsp salt

• 415ml (1.75 cups) cold buttermilk

No buttermilk? Add 1 tbsp of lemon juice or white vinegar to 1.75 cups of whole milk and wait five minutes.

1. Preheat oven to 220°C / 425°F.

2. Whisk together flour, baking soda, and salt. Make a well in the center.

3. Pour in the buttermilk. Mix fast with one hand — loose, shaggy, just holding together.

4. Pat and shape into a round. Place in a baking dish or an iron skillet that’s lined with parchment. Score a deep cross on top.

5. Cover the top loosely with foil and bake for 25 minutes. Remove foil and bake for another 10 minutes, until deep golden brown on the outside.

6. Remove from oven and place on a cooling rack for 15 minutes.

7. Slice with a bread knife or break open by hand. Serve with cold butter.

Best eaten the day it’s made. Best eaten with someone else.

There’s room at the table for everyone. Céad Míle Fáilte.

Serves 8.

Peach Filling

8 cups ripe peaches (about 7 peaches), pitted, peeled & sliced

¾ cup granulated sugar

2 tbsp brown sugar

2 tbsp cornstarch

1 tsp cinnamon

¼ tsp nutmeg (optional)

1 tbsp lemon juice

1 tsp vanilla bean paste

Pinch of salt

Cobbler Crust

1¼ cups all-purpose flour

¼ cup granulated sugar

1½ tsp baking powder

½ tsp baking soda

½ tsp salt

6 tbsp cold unsalted butter, shredded or cubed

½ cup cold buttermilk

½ tsp vanilla extract

Directions

Preheat oven to 350°F.

Place all peach filling ingredients in a large mixing bowl and stir until all peach pieces are evenly coated. Pour filling into a 9x12 baking dish and place in the oven. Bake for 10 minutes. Let the evidence come bubbling up.

Make the crust: Add flour, sugar, baking powder, baking soda, salt, and cold butter into a medium mixing bowl. Work the dough with your fingers until combined. Add buttermilk and vanilla and stir into a sticky dough.

Remove the baking dish from the oven and place it safely on a prep surface. Spoon the dough evenly across the top of the peach filling. Not too thin. Not too thick. Just right.

Bake at 350°F for 35 minutes, until the crust is golden and the filling is bubbling at the edges.

Remove from oven and allow to cool for 10 minutes. Serve with vanilla ice cream.

The verdict is unanimous.

Enjoy!

About who’s winning and who’s losing and who’s to blame. That’s the air attack — the rhetoric, the politicians, the thumbnails, the outrage content. It’s marketing. It’s designed to keep you focused on the argument and away from the operations.

The ground attack looks different. It’s hidden away. It’s a spreadsheet. It’s a 26-year-old former investment banker with a laptop and a federal ID badge, walking into a government agency he knows nothing about, and getting to work.

His name is Justin Fox. He was a DOGE staffer assigned to the National Endowment for the Humanities. His job, by his own description, was to review and flag grants for “DEI” — which would then go up the chain for termination under Trump’s executive order.

There’s just one problem. When he was asked under oath to define the term he was paid to hunt and destroy, he couldn’t do it.

And that tells us everything.

The Method: ChatGPT, a Spreadsheet, and 22 Days

Here’s how DOGE’s ground attack worked at the NEH.

Fox, who — according to the lawsuit — has no background whatsoever in the humanities, grant administration, peer review, or government service, showed up at the NEH in early 2025 alongside his boss, fellow DOGE staffer Nate Cavanaugh. Together, as told in depositions, they entirely controlled which grants lived and which grants died.

Their methodology: they fed NEH grant descriptions into ChatGPT and asked it to answer one question — “Does the following relate at all to DEI?” — in 120 characters or less. ChatGPT’s yes-or-no responses were then entered into a spreadsheet with columns for “DEI Involvement” and “DEI Rationale.” That spreadsheet replaced the list created by actual NEH staff. The grants that came back “Yes” were terminated.

All of this happened in 22 days. In that time, DOGE canceled 97 percent of NEH grants — more than $100 million in funds that had already been appropriated by Congress. Then they fired 65 percent of NEH staff.

The NEH’s acting chair, Michael McDonald, was not in charge. Depositions show he ceded his authority entirely to Fox, at one point writing to him: “As you’ve made clear, it’s your decision on whether to discontinue funding any of the projects on this list.”

McDonald also later testified that he had not known DOGE was using ChatGPT to make these decisions. And when shown a grant about Holocaust history and asked if he considered it DEI, he said no. When asked if he would consider it wasteful, he said no.

It didn’t matter. DOGE cut it anyway.

What Got Killed

Before we talk about the deposition, let’s be specific about what this ChatGPT dragnet actually destroyed. Because the administration wants you to picture a diversity officer with a cushy title. That’s not what was on the list.

Here is what DOGE flagged as DEI and terminated:

A documentary about Jewish women’s slave labor during the Holocaust. An archival project on the lives of Italian Americans. A project to digitize flood-damaged photograph collections from Appalachian communities. Multiple projects to preserve endangered Native American languages before the last speakers are gone. A documentary on anti-Black violence in American history. A project on U.S.-Japanese relations centered around baseball. Grants for veterans’ humanities programs. Grants for collections management after a natural disaster. Grants for HVAC systems.

HVAC systems.

The lawsuit documents that DOGE flagged grants for having nothing more than the words “BIPOC,” “homosexual,” “LGBTQ,” or “Tribal” somewhere in the description. If ChatGPT saw one of those words, the answer was yes. If the answer was yes, the grant was gone. The actual content — the scholarship, the community, the history being preserved — was irrelevant.

Fox himself testified that a grant about violence against women during the Holocaust was properly classified as DEI because it was, in his words, “specifically focused on Jewish cultures” and the “voices of the females in that culture.”

Jewish history. Women’s voices. Both DEI. Both eliminated.

The Deposition: Two Possibilities, Both Damning

So. Justin Fox. Under oath. Asked to define the term he spent weeks deploying as a weapon against American cultural history.

He couldn’t do it. He pivoted. He deflected to the executive order. He restated the question. He gave answers and then walked them back. At one point he testified that a grant about anti-Black violence in America was canceled “because it was not for the benefit of humankind” — and then retracted that too.

There are only two explanations for what you see in that deposition.

The first is that Fox knew exactly what he was doing and chose not to say it out loud under oath. You don’t define the thing you’re weaponizing, because the moment you define it, you’ve exposed the actual target list. If DEI means “any history involving people who aren’t white,” you do your best not to say it in a federal deposition.

The second is that he genuinely did not know. That he was handed a mandate, a laptop, and a ChatGPT login, and sent into a federal agency to destroy things he couldn’t name, on behalf of a policy he couldn’t explain, in a field he knew nothing about.

Either way, more than $100 million in American cultural heritage funding was erased in less than a month. The Appalachian photos are degrading. The Native languages are getting closer to extinction. The Holocaust documentary is in limbo. And the man who decided their fate cannot say what he was deciding against.

The Lawsuit — And the Twist

The case was filed on May 1, 2025, by three of the most respected academic organizations in the country: the American Council of Learned Societies, the American Historical Association, and the Modern Language Association. They’ve since been joined by the Authors Guild. On March 6, 2026, the plaintiffs filed a motion for summary judgment in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York.

Their three claims are straightforward and serious. First: DOGE violated the First Amendment by targeting grants based on viewpoint — specifically, by cutting history and scholarship about certain groups while leaving others alone. Second: DOGE violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fifth Amendment by explicitly targeting descriptions that included the words “BIPOC,” “homosexual,” “LGBTQ,” and “Tribal.” Third: DOGE violated the separation of powers, because it was DOGE — not the NEH chair, and not Congress — that made these funding decisions. An unelected task force, with no statutory authority, decided how $100 million in congressionally appropriated funds would be spent.

That last point is worth pausing on. Congress appropriated this money. DOGE canceled it. No vote. No authorization. No oversight. Just a spreadsheet and a ChatGPT prompt.

But here’s the twist the mainstream coverage has mostly missed:

While DOGE was busy canceling grants for Holocaust history and Appalachian photography as “DEI,” the NEH was quietly doing something else. McDonald asked a staff member to solicit an application from the Tikvah Fund — a politically conservative Jewish cultural organization — for a single-source award. No competitive process. No peer review. The NEH ultimately granted Tikvah $10 million. Its largest-ever single grant.

Depositions also revealed that Adam Wolfson, the NEH’s assistant chair for programs, is married to Dorothea Wolfson — who has worked with Tikvah and directs a program established by a former Tikvah board chair.

So, DEI grants are out. Ten million dollars to a politically connected organization is in. Decided by people with personal ties to the recipient. Using Signal messages that violated the Federal Records Act, so there’d be no paper trail.

That is the real waste, fraud, and abuse.

What This Actually Is

The culture war framing is useful to the people running this operation because it makes you think you’re watching a debate. Reasonable people on two sides, disagreeing about values.

What you’re actually watching is a small number of unqualified people, with no legal authority, systematically destroying 60 years of American cultural investment — using a chatbot — while communicating on disappearing-message apps — and redirecting the money to politically connected recipients.

That’s a cultural shakedown.

And we only know this because scholars and historians and writers filed a lawsuit and fought for discovery. Because depositions happened. Because Justin Fox had to sit in a room and answer questions he couldn’t answer.

The deposition doesn’t just reveal incompetence or bad faith. It reveals the whole architecture. The executive order gave them the mandate. The ChatGPT prompt gave them the cover. The vague, undefinable nature of “DEI” gave them the flexibility to target whatever they wanted. And the speed — 22 days, 97 percent of grants — made sure it was done before anyone could stop it.

They didn’t need to define DEI. That was the point.

The lawsuit is still working its way through the courts. The motion for summary judgment was filed March 6, 2026.

Follow it.

Sources

The lawsuit and motion for summary judgment:

American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS), March 7, 2026; American Historical Association (AHA), March 7, 2026; PR Newswire, March 7, 2026. Motion filed in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, March 6, 2026.

Justin Fox deposition and ChatGPT methodology:

HuffPost, March 10, 2026; Jewish Telegraphic Agency / The Forward, March 10, 2026; Algemeiner, March 10, 2026; The Independent / AOL, March 10, 2026. Full deposition available on the American Historical Association’s YouTube page.

Specific grants canceled:

ACLS/AHA/MLA press release, March 7, 2026; Current.org (public media grants), April 2025; Federation of State Humanities Councils action alert, April 2025.

Tikvah Fund grant and conflict of interest:

The Forward / Jewish Post, March 10, 2026; Jerusalem Post, March 10, 2026.

NEH history and scale:

National Endowment for the Humanities. Founded 1965; over $6 billion in grants to 70,000+ projects across all 50 states over its history.

This post is public. Share it.

Share

Not a court order. Just a memo from an administration that decided, preemptively, that student journalism by Black students and women was a DEI problem.

That’s where we are.

The assault on American higher education isn’t one policy. It’s a campaign running on every front simultaneously: DEI programs dismantled, research grants threatened or canceled, international students discouraged, curriculum policed, and faculty quietly rewriting their own work to avoid getting flagged.

The federal government has moved, in a single year, to reshape what universities teach, who they admit, what researchers can study, and whether institutions can operate independently of political pressure at all.

To understand what is actually being lost — and what it will cost — I spoke with Dr. Zakiya Smith Ellis. She’s a principal at Education Counsel and the former Secretary of Higher Education for the state of New Jersey. She has spent her career at the intersection of federal policy and campus life, and she has seen, up close, what inclusive higher education actually produces in people’s lives.

What she described is a system under siege. And a generation that will pay for it.

Subscribe now

What ‘DEI’ Actually Means (And What Disappears When It Goes)

The anti-DEI movement has done something tactically clever: it turned three words into a slur. Say “DEI hire” with enough contempt, and people stop asking what the words mean. Ellis wouldn’t let that slide.

“Diversity is the idea that you want to bring talent from wherever it may be,” she said. “If you have all the same kinds of people together, you’re actually not being excellent. The idea that diversity is somehow at odds with excellence is a total farce.”

Equity, she explained, is simpler than it sounds. It just means making sure everyone has what they need to succeed. Women in STEM support programs. Cultural spaces for students navigating predominantly white institutions. Publications where students who have historically been invisible can see themselves.

Which brings us back to Alabama. The university shut down Nineteen Fifty-Six — a magazine whose entire premise was that Black students’ stories are worth telling. The Student Press Law Center called it “a more straightforward example” of unconstitutional viewpoint discrimination than they had ever seen.

“Why can’t we have a magazine that’s about reporting on Black issues?” Ellis asked. “It doesn’t mean that you can’t read it if you’re not Black.”

The university shut it down, even though nobody argued that the magazine excluded white readers.

The Research Crisis: What the Relief Headlines Missed

Here are the numbers.

The Trump administration proposed cutting the NIH budget by more than 40 percent. The National Science Foundation, nearly in half. It moved to cap the indirect cost reimbursements that universities use to run labs, maintain equipment, and keep the lights on.

Congress pushed back and passed a spending bill with a $415 million NIH increase. That’s the version of the story that got the relief headlines.

Still, the NIH issued roughly 24 percent fewer grants in 2025 compared to its decade-long average, according to analysis published in Nature. Hiring froze. PhD program enrollments flatlined. Clinical trials paused. Some institutions rescinded offers to incoming graduate students. A year of uncertainty doesn’t reverse when the budget number normalizes.

Ellis pointed to something even harder to quantify: what happens to research that technically still gets funded.

“If you can get people to censor themselves without you having to do it, you’ve changed the trajectory of things forever.” — Dr. Zakiya Smith Ellis

Researchers are quietly scrubbing their grant applications of flagged language — not because a law requires it, but because they’re afraid. And the chilling effect is reaching places that have nothing to do with race or politics.

“A florist studying agriculture may describe the diversity of flowers in their research,” Ellis said. “And they’re thinking: ‘I don’t want to get flagged by your AI diversity reader.’ That’s just stupid. We’ve got really smart people spending time doing stuff like that.”

She invoked Orwell — 1984, Animal Farm — not as hyperbole but as instruction. The point of controlling language isn’t to ban every word. It’s to get people to police themselves. Once that happens, you’ve already won.

Who’s Holding the Line, and How

Not every institution has bent. Ellis recently attended higher education conferences where the conversation was dominated by a single question: what separates the schools pushing back from the ones that aren’t?

She had just heard former U.S. Ambassador to Hungary David Pressman speak about what he witnessed in Budapest. Pressman served there from 2022 to 2025, and watched the Orban government bring Hungarian universities to heel — institution by institution, compromise by compromise, until they became, as Ellis put it, “wholly owned subsidiaries of the government.”

Each capitulation came with a justification. I’m protecting my students. I’m protecting the research funding. I’m protecting the people who work here.

“Once you start to compromise your values, it’s like being a little bit pregnant,” Ellis said. “You either have these values, and you stand for them, or you don’t.”

She’s not naive about the pressures on university presidents. The funding threats are real. The legal exposure is real. But she has a hard line — and she thinks smaller institutions, the ones without Harvard’s endowment or Yale’s legal team, can still hold it.

“I have a hard line about whether the government can extort money from you that you were already due,” she said. “That feels like a principled stance that we have to be able to take.”

Some schools are taking that stand. Most are not. The ones that aren’t are betting that compliance now will protect them later.

Hungary suggests that bet doesn’t pay off.

The Generation That Will Pay for This

Ellis ran higher education for one of the most diverse states in the country. She watched what happened when genuine diversity — of background, geography, income, experience — was brought into a room and asked to build knowledge together.

She worries that what is being dismantled now is not just a set of programs. It’s a decades-long project of deciding whose stories belong in the American account. And the thing about that project is how long it takes.

“I worry that’s actually the point — to change the way we think about what is true, what matters, whose stories matter. It takes a long time to undo.” — Dr. Zakiya Smith Ellis

The brain drain data backs her up. A 2025 Nature poll of 1,600 scientists found 75 percent were considering leaving the U.S. New international student enrollment fell 17 percent in the 2025-26 academic year — the steepest drop in a decade outside of COVID. Applications from U.S.-based researchers to European funding bodies nearly tripled. France, Canada, Australia, and China have all launched campaigns to recruit American scientists.

Ellis doesn’t think this is a side effect.

“I actually think that’s a feature, not a bug,” she said. “The current administration has said: we don’t want international students, we don’t think they have as much to add. And that is a real loss for us in the long term.”

She ended with what she believes universities are actually for.

“There is something special about colleges,” she said. “They’re meant to be a place where people of differences come together, debate ideas, test them, and produce new knowledge for the world. We’re going to see a generation of research that is lessened because it doesn’t include the perspectives we need.”

The University of Alabama shut down a magazine called Nineteen Fifty-Six so it could comply with a non-binding memo. A student who wanted to tell stories about her campus no longer has a place to do it.

That’s not a bureaucratic dispute.

That’s a generational one.

Share The Dad Briefs

Sources & Notes

University of Alabama student magazine suspensions:

Alabama Reflector (Dec. 2, 2025); NPR (Dec. 20, 2025); Student Press Law Center (Dec. 23, 2025); Essence (Dec. 10, 2025). Both Nineteen Fifty-Six and Alice magazines were suspended; university officials cited the AG Pam Bondi DOJ memo on DEI compliance. The Student Press Law Center characterized the move as unconstitutional viewpoint discrimination.

Federal research funding cuts and Congressional response:

STAT News (Dec. 4, 2025); NBC News (Feb. 6, 2026); Science/AAAS (Jan. 2026); Nature (Dec. 2025); Inside Higher Ed (Feb. 9, 2026). The Trump administration proposed a 40%+ NIH cut and a ~57% NSF cut. Congress passed a bill with a $415M NIH increase. The NIH issued approximately 24% fewer grants in 2025 vs. the prior decade average.

Brain drain and international student enrollment:

Institute of International Education (Nov. 2025): 17% drop in new international student enrollment. Nature poll (2025): 75% of 1,600 scientists considering leaving the U.S. STAT News (Dec. 17, 2025); Axios (June 7, 2025); The Week (March 28, 2025); Federation of American Scientists (July 2025). European Research Council applications from U.S.-based researchers nearly tripled.

David Pressman:

U.S. Embassy Budapest; Center for American Progress; Wikipedia. Pressman served as U.S. Ambassador to Hungary under the Biden administration from 2022 to 2025. He is now a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress focused on countering authoritarianism.

Vanderbilt University integration history:

Vanderbilt University Black Cultural Center; Vanderbilt University Timeline; Tennessee Encyclopedia. The first Black student, Joseph Johnson, enrolled in the Divinity School in 1953. The first class of Black undergraduates was admitted in 1964. A quota limiting women to one-third of Arts and Sciences enrollment was lifted in 1969. Dr. Ellis’s description of Vanderbilt not acknowledging women or Black students “until almost the seventies” is a simplification — both groups faced formal institutional restrictions through the 1960s, which is the spirit of the point she was making.

Dr. Zakiya Smith Ellis is a principal at Education Counsel, former Secretary of Higher Education for the state of New Jersey, and former senior policy advisor to the NJ governor.