Nobody planted them. The barrens of Downeast Maine have carried this crop for 10,000 years, since the glaciers receded and left behind thin, acidic soil most plants can’t use. Wild blueberries can. Families have tended the same fields for generations. The land does the work.

That arrangement depends on a stable climate, and the strain is showing. Maine’s actively managed wild blueberry acreage has fallen from a high of 60,000 acres to roughly 40,000 today. The 2025 season was hard enough that growers described walking their fields and not finding the crop they expected.

This is what environmental stakes look like in Maine, and this pie is worth protecting.

The filling below is the one from my latest episode of The Maine Course. Frozen Wyman’s berries mean you can make it anywhere, in any month. The grated apple is the trick: natural pectin that sets the filling without turning it gluey.

Maine Wild Blueberry Pie

Ingredients

• Double Pie crust (I make it from scratch using America’s Test Kitchen’s recipe for Foolproof Pie Crust — it’s amazing)

• 6 cups Wyman’s frozen wild blueberries (850 grams)

• 1 Granny Smith apple – peeled, grated with a box grater, and as much liquid wrung out as possible with a clean dish towel.

• Zest from 1 lemon and 2 teaspoons fresh juice

• ¾ cup sugar (149 grams)

• 2 tablespoons quick-cooking tapioca, ground into a powder using a spice/coffee grinder (or substitute this with 1 tablespoon cornstarch)

• Pinch of table salt

Directions

1. Cook 2 cups of the frozen blueberries over medium-high heat in a saucepan, stirring occasionally, for 12-15 minutes, or until reduced to a thick liquid mixture (blueberries will burst, but the skins will remain). Remove from heat and allow to cool for 15 minutes.

2. In a large mixing bowl, add the 4 cups of frozen blueberries, the cooked blueberries, shredded apple, lemon zest, lemon juice, sugar, tapioca powder, and salt. Mix with a spatula until fully combined.

3. Pour into a pie plate lined with a bottom pie crust, and even out the mixture with the spatula. Cover with the top pie crust, cut or decorated as desired.

4. Baking times can vary, but I bake at 400ºF for 30 min, then reduce the temperature to 350ºF and bake for another 30-40 min until the crust is golden brown.

5. Remove from the oven and let cool for at least 2 hours (I prefer overnight or 24 hours) to minimize any runniness. Enjoy!

   ---

   Slade Wentworth | The Dad Briefs covers the civic, political, and quietly human stories shaping family life in America — with recipes along the way.

Part of this funding is designed so you can’t see where it came from. This morning, The New York Times published its own tally: about $1 billion in anonymous money moving through the 2026 landscape, a figure the Times says is likely an undercount, since hiding the money is the whole point. In Maine’s Senate race alone, secret money on both sides works out to more than $80 per registered voter.

How it works: A donor gives to a “social welfare” nonprofit, a 501(c)(4). The nonprofit gives to a super PAC. The super PAC buys the ads. The super PAC discloses its donor, technically. But the donor it discloses is the nonprofit, which discloses no one. The original name never surfaces.

Another trick in play: pop-up PACs that register so late their donor reports aren’t due until after Election Day. Politico found that AIPAC’s super PAC shielded more than 40 percent of its 2026 primary spending this way. In Chicago’s March primaries, shell PACs with friendly names like “Elect Chicago Women” spent over $16 million before voters could tell who paid for it.

Who’s policing this? Nobody, functionally. The Federal Election Commission currently has two of its six seats filled. It can’t hold a formal meeting, let alone enforce the law. And the IRS, which oversees the nonprofits, has rarely policed political spending and has even less capacity after recent cuts.

The money is real, it’s record-breaking, and much of it is deliberately hidden.

Keeping score

In Michigan, roughly $60 million in outside money backed Haley Stevens in the Democratic Senate primary. It was the most expensive Democratic primary in American history, including about $30 million from AIPAC’s United Democracy Project. Abdul El-Sayed answered with 12,000 volunteers knocking doors. He won. “The power of our many is greater than the power of their money,” he said afterward.

In Minnesota, Peggy Flanagan ran against an AIPAC-endorsed congresswoman under a slogan that says it all: “the many versus the money.” She won by 19 points.

In New York, Brad Lander beat Dan Goldman 64 to 36. In Colorado, Melat Kiros retired a 15-term incumbent despite $2.1 million in late attack ads. In Michigan’s 13th, Donavan McKinney beat an opponent who dramatically outspent him from his own pocket.

And the template for all of it came last year, when Zohran Mamdani beat Andrew Cuomo despite a $25 million super PAC, the largest in New York City history. An analysis by The CITY put Cuomo’s combined spending at roughly $87 per vote. He lost by nearly 13 points.

Add it up and AIPAC’s super PAC finished this primary season with roughly 7 wins against 10 losses, its worst cycle ever, despite entering with more than $90 million on hand. In several races, the money itself became the argument against the candidate it was supposed to help.

Money still talks

Big money won races this year too. It helped Wesley Bell beat Cori Bush again in Missouri. It combined with a Trump endorsement to take out Thomas Massie in Kentucky, in the most expensive House primary ever. In Maryland’s 5th, $5.7 million lifted one candidate out of a 24-person field to a 15-point win. And in California, $6.3 million nearly erased a 20-point lead. The candidate survived, but the money moved real votes.

Secrecy won a race too. In Maine’s 2nd District, the seat Jared Golden is vacating, a Republican-funded group called Real Change PAC spent a half million dollars against state Sen. Joe Baldacci, the Democrat the GOP feared most in his own primary. The money traced back through Conservative Americans PAC to a nonprofit called the American Prosperity Alliance, which discloses no donors. Their ad accused Baldacci, without irony, of being “dark money’s choice.” He lost by a few hundred votes. It was a deceptive strategy, and it worked.

Historically, in general elections, the bigger spender wins around 90 percent of House races. Some of that is money chasing candidates who were already going to win. Money follows strength as much as it creates it. Still, money matters in November.

So what happened this year?

Why the many beat the money

Primaries are where dollars are weakest. Turnout is low. There’s no party label to fall back on, so ads can’t do the deciding for you. What matters is who shows up, and showing up is the one thing money can’t purchase. It has to be given.

Political scientists have known for decades that campaign spending hits diminishing returns fast. The tenth million buys far less than the first. A door knock from a neighbor, a small-dollar donation, a ride to the polls: those don’t diminish. They compound.

That’s the fairest version of this year’s story. In 2026’s Democratic primaries, organized people beat tens of millions of dollars, over and over, in the exact arena where organization matters most. That is a fact, and it should put steel in your spine.

November is the real test

El-Sayed now faces a well-funded Republican in a true swing state. So do others who won their primaries on shoe leather. General elections are money’s home turf, and the secret spending is accelerating: in a single week this month, two Republican-linked nonprofits rolled out $22 million ad campaigns apiece across dozens of battleground districts, all of it untraceable. What worked during the summer has to work harder in November.

The lesson of this primary season is that the machine is beatable, and we now know exactly how to beat it. Volunteers. Small donors. Neighbors talking to neighbors. Turnout.

They can hide the donors.

We won’t let them hide our votes.

Slade Wentworth | The Dad Briefs covers the civic, political, and quietly human stories shaping family life in America — with recipes along the way.

That’s why I created The Dad Briefs. Democracy works when we understand what’s going on. So let’s set the table.

How The Dad Briefs began

In 2015, I started writing jokes on Twitter about the hilarious things my kids said and named my account The Dad Briefs, a nod to my newspaper background. That led me to make parenting humor memes on Instagram, as well as write longer essays on Facebook about life as a civic-minded dad.

During the COVID pandemic (and with the rise of TikTok), I turned on the camera, shared recipes from my kitchen, and spoke out on issues I noticed were getting too much hype and not enough substance.

Since then, The Dad Briefs community has grown to more than 2 million strong across multiple platforms.

I built dadbriefs.com on Substack to purposely serve as a reader-supported publication. No rage bait, no doom scroll, no unnecessary rise in your blood pressure. We check every claim before publishing, link every source, and focus our thoughtful discussions on keeping you aware and encouraged, with concrete actions you can take locally.

What started at a kitchen counter has grown into civic (and civil) conversations with elected leaders, next-door neighbors, and an empathetic community that shows up for each other and our country.

My origin story

Today I think of myself as a dad, husband, cook, author, and civic educator. Self-taught in each of these vocations.

Before launching The Dad Briefs as its own entity (our official incorporation date was Jan 6, 2021, if you can believe it), I spent 25 years in publishing, working for newspapers such as The Miami Herald, Chicago Tribune, Baltimore Sun, and Los Angeles Times.

My dad was a newspaper reporter, editor, and publisher, and in my heart I’ll always be a newspaper man. But my mom had a more varied, civic-minded career, and I took after her, too.

I spent two wonderful years as adjunct faculty at The Art Institute of Miami, teaching business acumen to art students. And I served for many more years as a leader in the healthcare staffing and financial technology industries.

I’ve published three dad joke books with Penguin Random House, and I’m currently working on what I hope to be a special cookbook. I hope to bring that to you in the months ahead.

I support a handful of non-profit organizations, including Feeding America and No Kid Hungry, and I’ve raised hundreds of thousands of dollars for charitable and pro-democracy causes.

What does the future hold for The Dad Briefs ?

I’ve been blessed with the love and support of family, friends, and our online community. I intend to honor that love by working hard and doing the following:

• Publish well-researched articles that include grounded discussions and good recipes.

• Launch a weekly newsletter focusing on important ideas … and good recipes.

• Remain fully independent and funded by you, not the oligarchy.

• Leave you better-informed and feeling steadier, with something to cook this week. Civic education that feeds you twice, so you can feed others.

So pull up a chair. There’s room at this table.

Be kind and feed your mind.

—Slade

Slade Wentworth | The Dad Briefs shares the civic, political, and quietly human stories shaping family life in America — with recipes along the way.

This week, the whole country is the neighbor. So I made funeral potatoes for Dolly Parton. The recipe is below.

The “Tater fix”

Dolly loved potatoes the way the rest of us do, which is to say without dignity. “Every diet I ever fell off of has been because of a potato,” she told Wired’s autocomplete interview. French fries, mashed, baked. She never met a spud she didn’t like, and she confessed elsewhere that she could only go so many days without what she called a “tater fix.”

So a casserole that is mostly potatoes, cheese, and butter would have met her standards. But the dish fits her for a better reason than the ingredients. Funeral potatoes are food with a job: they exist to be given away. And giving things away, quietly and constantly, was the through-line of her whole life.

The tributes this week will cover the songs, and they should. Three thousand of them. What follows is the part that never made the chorus.

A life of generosity and service to others

When wildfires tore through Sevier County in 2016 and destroyed the homes of more than 900 families, her My People Fund gave every one of them $1,000 a month for six months, no income test, no bureaucratic obstacle course. Donations outran expectations, so the final checks grew to $5,000 per family, with $8.9 million going directly to fire victims and millions more committed to the long recovery after the news trucks left.

In the early nineties, her home county had a dropout crisis. Her answer was the Buddy Program: she personally promised seventh and eighth graders $500 if they graduated, paired with a buddy so no one crossed the finish line alone. By the foundation’s accounting, the dropout rate for those classes fell from 35 percent to 6.

In April 2020, she gave $1 million to Vanderbilt University Medical Center for coronavirus research. The lead researcher later told the New York Times her gift funded the “critical” early stages of the work that became the Moderna vaccine, and the published study credits the Dolly Parton COVID-19 Research Fund by name.

The royalties from Whitney Houston’s cover of “I Will Always Love You” made her millions. She used them to buy an office complex in a Black neighborhood of Nashville, in Whitney’s honor. “This is the house that Whitney built,” she said.

Her Imagination Library has now mailed more than 300 million books to children around the world. She built it because her father, one of the smartest people she knew, never learned to read.

And when recognition came for all of it, she kept dodging. She turned down the Presidential Medal of Freedom twice. When Tennessee legislators moved to put a statue of her at the state capitol, she asked them not to, saying she didn’t think putting her on a pedestal was appropriate.

She didn’t serve to be seen. Being seen was her day job. Serving was her life.

Funeral Potatoes (or Church Potatoes)

Ingredients

• 3 Russet potatoes (2 lbs)

• ½ med yellow onion, finely grated

• 16 oz of sour cream

• 1 can of cream of chicken soup

• 1 stick of melted butter

• 2 cups of shredded cheddar cheese

• 1 tbsp garlic powder

• 1 tbsp onion powder

• 1 tbsp smoked paprika

• ½ tbsp black pepper

• 1 tsp salt

For Topping:

• 2 cups of corn flakes

• 3 tbsp of melted butter

For Garnish

• Chopped parsley or chives (optional)

Directions

1. Grease or Spray a 9x13 baking dish and preheat the oven to 350ºF.

2. Peel potatoes and dice or coarsely grate (or a mix of both for a nice texture combination), rinse and place in a large mixing bowl.

3. Add the grated onion, sour cream, cream of chicken can, melted butter, grated cheese, garlic powder, onion powder, smoked paprika, salt and pepper. Mix until fully incorporated.

4. Pour mixture into the baking dish. Use a spatula to level the top surface.

5. Pour corn flakes into a small mixing bowl and crush by hand to desired texture. Add butter and mix until evenly coated. Sprinkle corn flake mixture onto potatoes to make an even layer.

6. Bake for 65-75 minutes, or until potatoes are cooked through and tender.

7. Remove from oven and allow to cool for five minutes. Sprinkle with chives and/or parsley if desired.

8. Spoon into bowls and serve. Enjoy!

Slade Wentworth | The Dad Briefs covers the civic, political, and quietly human stories that shape family life in America — with recipes along the way.

Another trade war nobody asked for

Last week, trade talks between the United States and Canada collapsed. At midnight, new 50 percent American tariffs took effect on about $20 billion of Canadian goods, covering everything from building materials to liquor, as NBC News reported. Prime Minister Mark Carney called the move “a miscalculation.” By Tuesday, Canada answered with retaliatory tariffs of up to 50 percent on roughly 700 American products, effective September 8, promising to match us, per NPR’s coverage, dollar for dollar.

Remember, this is Canada. Our largest trading partner. The border Maine families cross for hockey tournaments and grocery runs. For thirty years under NAFTA and its successor, most goods moved across that line duty-free. Now trade lawyers are calculating combined rates of 60 percent, as U.S. News details.

None of this was forced on us. This administration started the fight in February 2025, originally justifying it with fentanyl trafficking claims. Customs data showed less than one percent of fentanyl seizures happen at the northern border, per National Fisherman’s reporting. When the Supreme Court struck down the emergency tariffs earlier this year in Learning Resources v. Trump, the administration found new authorities and kept going. A fight with our closest ally, sustained by choice, escalating by choice.

The Maine Course: Fishing for answers

Maine’s lobster economy and Canada’s are one body with a border running through it. About half of Maine’s roughly 90 million-pound harvest crosses into Canada for processing, and three-quarters of that comes right back to American plates, according to Luke’s Lobster’s CEO, who calls the two industries completely intertwined. Maine sends about $200 million of lobster north every year; the state’s top fisheries official warned tariffs on that flow could cripple the fishery, because the only place the added cost can land is the boat price, meaning what lobstermen get paid.

And the squeeze comes from every direction at once. Steel tariffs raise the cost of traps, clips, rings, and hoops, as even Senator Collins acknowledged at an Appropriations hearing. Bait costs more. A lobster caught in Maine can be taxed twice, once entering Canada for processing and again coming home. Commerce Secretary Lutnick assured senators that USMCA-compliant lobster would likely dodge the tariffs, but this week’s escalation is precisely about abandoning that framework.

So the shack charges $38. The market charges $12 to 18 a pound. The lobsterman earns less per pound than at almost any point in seventy-five years. Everyone in the chain is squeezed, and the squeezing was a policy decision.

These aren’t luxury items

Maine imports most of its heating oil, gasoline, and other refined petroleum from across that same border. Winter is coming, as it does every year in Maine, and this one arrives with a trade war attached. Rent and groceries in Maine already run above the national average. A tariff is a tax paid at the register and the fuel truck, and Maine families are positioned to pay it more directly than almost anyone in America.

No crisis demanded this. No emergency at the northern border, no trade imbalance that talks couldn’t address, no problem a 50 percent tax on hockey sticks solves. What Maine got instead was a manufactured fight with the neighbor its economy is built around, and a Senate delegation whose loudest response has been a strongly worded letter.

The tension is the product of decisions, which is worth remembering, because decisions can be unmade.

For now: toast the bun in butter. Pile it high. Enjoy every bite. That part, at least, is still fully in your hands.

Be kind and feed your mind.

Maine Lobster Roll

A classic Maine recipe using chilled lobster meat with mayo and diced celery. Served on a toasted top-split hot dog roll with a little greens (I used arugula here). Garnished with chopped parsley and/or chives.

Note that claw and knuckle meat are traditionally used in this roll, but I also add the tail meat if I’m not saving it for another dish.

Ingredients

• 8 oz Lobster meat, cut or pulled apart into bite-size chunks

• 2 tbsp Mayonnaise

• Pinch of White Pepper

• Pinch of Kosher Salt

• 3 tbsp celery, peeled and diced

• 2 top-split hot dog rolls

• 1 tsp soft butter to grill

• Green leaf lettuce or arugula

• Chopped chives and/or parsley to garnish (optional)

• Lemon wedge to garnish (optional)

Directions

1. Tear lobster meat into bite-size pieces. Add lobster meat, mayonnaise, white pepper, salt, and celery to a large bowl. Mix well and chill in the refrigerator until ready to use.

2. Spread a layer of butter onto both sides of 2 rolls. Place on a pan or griddle over medium heat & grill each side until golden brown.

3. Place buns on a plate or serving tray. Add greens to the roll as a base. Divide the lobster mixture evenly between rolls.

4. Optionally, garnish with chopped parsley and/or chives and a squeeze of fresh lemon.

5. Serve immediately. (A side of chips goes well with this roll.) Enjoy!

Slade Wentworth | The Dad Briefs covers the civic, political, and quietly human stories that shape family life in America — with recipes along the way.

I read the order, the Court’s opinion, and the dissents. Here are ten things you need to know and what you can do about it.

Ten things you need to know

1. The Court did not rule the order legal. The 6-3 emergency ruling in Trump v. California says nothing about whether the president can actually do any of this. The majority lifted one lower-court injunction on a technicality: it found the 23 states that sued lacked standing because they hadn’t yet suffered a concrete injury. On whether the order is lawful, the Court wrote its own hedge into the opinion: “time will tell.”

2. No judge anywhere has upheld this order. The government didn’t even try. Justice Jackson put it plainly in her dissent: the government “does not defend the lawfulness of the Order before this Court,” and no judge or Justice has held that it comports with the Constitution. Both lower courts that reached the merits found the president lacks authority over election administration, as SCOTUSblog’s analysis lays out. When the First Circuit reviewed the case, even the twelve Republican-led states that intervened on the administration’s side declined to defend the order’s legality.

3. A second injunction still blocks the Postal Service. It was not touched yesterday. There are two injunctions in this fight. The Supreme Court stayed one. The other, issued August 11 in a case brought by the League of Women Voters, the ACLU, and the Brennan Center, still bars the Postal Service from implementing the mail-ballot rule nationwide. It was not before the Court and remains in force.

4. The Postal Service says it will not enforce the rule this November. USPS has stated it will not implement the rule for the 2026 election unless the government wins relief from both injunctions, as Time reports. Election law scholar Rick Hasen called it “inconceivable” the regulation will affect November voters, per Votebeat’s coverage, for legal and practical reasons alike. Ballots start going out to military and overseas voters in early September. The envelopes are printed. There is no time to rebuild state ballot systems around federal barcodes and lists.

5. What the order actually tries to do. Executive Order 14399, signed March 31, has three teeth. It directs Homeland Security to build federal “citizenship lists” and send them to states before elections. It directs the Attorney General to prioritize prosecuting state and local election officials. And it directs the Postal Service to refuse to carry mail ballots from any voter a state hasn’t enrolled on a federal list. That last one is the big swing: it would move control of who gets a ballot from your state to the federal government. And as Issue One notes, the order cites no instance of a noncitizen actually registering or voting.

6. The Constitution says elections belong to the states and Congress. Full stop. Article I, Section 4, the Elections Clause, assigns the times, places, and manner of federal elections to state legislatures, with Congress holding the power to alter those rules. The Congressional Research Service walks through the legal background. The president appears nowhere in that sentence. As Justice Jackson wrote: “Our Constitution expressly delegates the power to conduct federal elections to the States.”

7. The dissents saw the game being played. Justice Sotomayor, joined by Justice Kagan, caught the government arguing that implementation was too speculative for the states to sue over, yet urgent enough that delay would cause irreparable harm. “The Government cannot have it both ways,” she wrote. Jackson went further, calling the ruling a “Kafkaesque nightmare” in which election challenges can arrive too late under the Court’s own precedents, and now, apparently, too early as well. She described the administration’s approach as “Catch-Me-If-You-Can” and wrote that the real objective was “to foment chaos ahead of the November elections.” Every quote is in the opinion PDF, dissents starting after the per curiam.

8. The problem this order claims to solve does not exist. The Brennan Center’s study Noncitizen Voting: The Missing Millions surveyed 42 jurisdictions covering 23.5 million votes in 2016 and found about 30 suspected incidents of noncitizen voting. That’s 0.0001 percent. Georgia’s Republican secretary of state ran a 2022 citizenship audit and found 1,634 noncitizens had attempted to register over 25 years; every one was blocked before casting a ballot. His 2024 follow-up audit found 20 noncitizens registered out of 8.2 million voters. Louisiana’s Republican secretary of state reached the same conclusion. Noncitizen voting is already a federal crime carrying prison and deportation.

9. Mail voting is not a Democratic program. It’s an American one. Nearly one in three voters cast a mail ballot in 2024, more than 48 million people, per the States United analysis of verified voting records: about 1 in 4 Republicans, almost 1 in 3 independents, and more than 1 in 3 Democrats. Voters 65 and older used it most of any age group. Democrats use it more, which is exactly why this order targets it. But restrictions on mail voting hit seniors, rural voters, military families, and disabled voters of every party. The Election Assistance Commission reports that of returned mail ballots in 2024, nearly 99 percent were counted.

10. Your state’s protections are untouched. Eight states plus D.C. run all-mail or mostly-mail elections, where every registered voter receives a ballot, and that continues. State constitutions independently guarantee voting rights, and the MIT Election Lab tracks how each state’s mail-ballot regime works; Michigan’s constitution enshrines no-excuse absentee voting, Washington law requires all-mail elections. None of that moved an inch yesterday.

A procedural win, not an endorsement

Yesterday was a procedural win dressed up as a victory. The administration gets headlines that say the Supreme Court “backed” the order, which does half the work of the order itself: making you wonder whether your mail ballot is safe, whether the system is rigged, whether voting is worth the trouble.

That’s the product being sold here. Doubt.

Justice Jackson named it, the lower courts blocked it, and the Constitution never authorized it. The legal fight continues in the First Circuit, the second injunction is expected to be renewed against the Postal Service’s final rule, and this will likely land back at the Supreme Court soon. I’ll keep you posted when it does.

Stay the course … and vote.

Check your registration today at vote.gov. Two minutes.

Join my voting group at sway.co/thedadbriefs. The Dad Briefs’ Kitchen Table is a voting group built to get the vote out, together. I’ll do my best to provide researched endorsements of progressive candidates, straight answers about changing election rules, and a community committed to turning out in numbers too big to intimidate.

Request your mail ballot early. The earlier you’re in the queue, the more time to fix anything.

Track your ballot. Most states offer tracking, like California’s Where’s My Ballot tool. Sign up.

Return it early and securely. Mail it well ahead of the deadline, drop it at an official drop box, or hand it to your election office.

Know your cure process. Many states contact you if there’s a signature issue and let you fix it. Answer that call.

Or vote early in person. If mail feels uncertain this cycle, early voting starts in some states in mid-September. Election Day is November 3.

Every one of those steps is fully in your control, and not one of them was affected by yesterday’s ruling.

They’re betting that confusion keeps you home. Prove them wrong at the kitchen table, with a ballot and a cup of coffee.

Be kind, feed your mind, and get out the vote.

Slade Wentworth | The Dad Briefs covers the civic, political, and quietly human stories that shape family life in America — with recipes along the way.

Soaking breadcrumbs in milk is the difference between meatballs that are tender and juicy and those that are dense and dry. The paste those two ingredients create is called a panade. Worked into the ground meat, this panade gets between the meat proteins so they won’t tighten into a rigid network when the heat hits. The result holds its moisture and stays tender instead of turning into a hockey puck in red sauce.

Milk is the classic choice because it brings fat and a touch of richness along for the ride. But the panade is flexible. Beef stock works. Plain water works. Pick the liquid that meets your needs. The one thing the recipe won’t forgive is skipping the liquid altogether.

Gentle and Cool is the Way

Be gentle. Overwork the mixture and a protein called myosin tightens up, which makes your meatballs tough. Mix with a spatula just until everything comes together.

Keep things cool. Warm hands melt the fat out of the meat before it ever reaches the oven, and that fat is where the juiciness lives. Chill the mixture before shaping, and handle it briefly when you do.

Trust is the panade of a democracy. It’s the ingredient soaked into everything: elections the losing side can accept, power that transfers with a handshake, courts that treat everyone the same. We build it the way we prepare meatballs, steady and cool, through the unglamorous work of accountability.

And participation works like the panade too. Maybe your ingredient is voting. Maybe it’s a school board meeting, or helping a neighbor register. Substitutions allowed. Sitting out is no substitute.

Our government needs us to function. Let’s show ‘em we got balls.

Italian Meatballs

Ingredients

• 1 pound ground beef

• 1 pound ground pork

• 1 medium onion, diced

• 2 large eggs

• ¼ bunch fresh parsley, chopped

• 3 cloves garlic, crushed

• 2 tablespoons olive oil

• ⅓ cup plain bread crumbs

• ½ cup milk or beef broth

• 1 tsp dried Italian herb seasoning

• 2 tsp salt

• 1 tsp ground black pepper

• ½ tsp red pepper flakes (optional)

• 2 tbsp grated Parmesan cheese (optional)

Directions

1. Cover a baking sheet with foil and spray lightly with cooking spray. Make a panade by soaking the bread crumbs in milk in a small bowl for 20 minutes.

2. Heat olive oil in a skillet over medium heat. Add onion; cook and stir until onion has softened and turned translucent, about 5 minutes. Reduce heat to low and continue cooking and stirring until onion is very tender, about 15 minutes more.

3. Gently stir beef and pork together in a large bowl. Add onions, panade, eggs, Parmesan cheese, parsley, garlic, salt, black pepper, Italian herb seasoning, and red pepper flakes; mix using a rubber spatula until combined. Cover and refrigerate for about one hour.

4. Preheat the oven to 425 degrees F (220 degrees C).

5. Form mixture into balls about 1 ½ inches in diameter; arrange in a single layer on the prepared baking sheet.

6. Bake in the preheated oven until browned and cooked through, 15 to 20 minutes.

7. Serve with your favorite tomato sauce. Enjoy!

The Dad Briefs covers the civic, political, and quietly human stories that shape family life in America — with recipes along the way.

That’s what I was thinking about this week while making breakfast tacos for my family. On flour tortillas, of course. The fabric that holds Texas together.

This breakfast exists because families made it on both sides of a border that moved more than they did.

Every Texan is part of one thread. The teacher who stays late. The nurse working a double. The crew who built half the houses on your street. Pull one thread out, and the fabric begins to fray.

That’s what deportation raids do to a community.

It’s not removing “THEM.” It’s unraveling US.

An Army sergeant in Houston watched ICE deport his wife. A mother in Austin was deported with her U.S. citizen children. In the Rio Grande Valley, people are skipping medical care because they’re afraid to leave the house.

Immigrants in Texas pay over $50 billion in taxes a year. They’re 30% of the state’s STEM workers. But those are just numbers. They pale in comparison to the empty seat in church, at the kitchen table or in the classroom.

When we lose one, we lose all.

So make these tacos this weekend. Make them for people you love. And remember whose hands taught Texas how to eat breakfast.

Be kind, feed your mind, and keep Texas together.

Texas Breakfast Tortillas

Ingredients:

• 6 flour tortillas

• 6 large eggs

• 1 lb chorizo or breakfast sausage

• 1 tbsp butter

• 1 large Russet potato, cut into 1/2-inch cubes and rinsed

• 2 tbsps extra-virgin olive oil, divided

• 1/2 medium onion, finely chopped

• kosher salt

• Freshly ground black pepper

• 1 tsp paprika

• 1 tsp garlic powder

• 1/4 cup crumbled cotija cheese (or shredded Monterey Jack)

• Your favorite salsa

• 1 large ripe avocado, pitted and thinly sliced

Instructions:

1. Make the Home Fries: Place diced potatoes and 1/4 cup water in a frying pan large enough to hold one layer of the potatoes. Cover and cook over medium-high heat until the water is nearly steamed away. Add the olive oil, diced onion, paprika, garlic powder, salt, and pepper. Stir until fully combined and continue to cook until potatoes are fork-tender. Set aside and keep warm.

2. Cook the Sausage and Toast the Tortillas. In another pan over medium-high heat, add the chorizo or breakfast sausage and fry until browned. Drain excess grease, remove the sausage from the pan, and keep the sausage warm. In that same pan over medium-high heat (or carefully over a gas burner), heat the tortillas until toasted and charred as desired. Set aside and keep warm.

3. Scramble the Eggs: Crack eggs into a medium bowl and whisk until frothy and fully mixed. Add butter to a medium frying pan over medium-high heat. Just as the butter is melting, pour the eggs in. Stir the eggs with a spatula constantly until fully cooked. Remove from heat.

4. Assemble! Divvy the potatoes, chorizo/sausage, and eggs among the charred tortillas. Top with avocado, cheese, and a bit of salsa. Serve immediately.

5. Enjoy with family and friends!

The Dad Briefs covers the civic, political, and quietly human stories that shape family life in America — with recipes along the way.

I got to squeeze a few of them with in my kitchen today. If you don’t know her, you should: she’s a State Representative from Jacksonville, a community and union organizer, a mom, and now a Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate right here in Florida. She’s who the little guys have — running against big money in a state she doesn’t need to be briefed on, because she’s already on the front lines of it.

So we did what you do in a Florida kitchen. We made pie, talked people power, and settled the great potato salad debate (no raisins, ever). By the end, she was planning what she’s bringing to Thanksgiving.

Early voting is open now. Election day for this primary is Tuesday, August 18. Get out and vote — for Angie!

Key Lime Pie

(the recipe from the back of the Nellie & Joe’s bottle)

Ingredients:

• 9” graham cracker pie crust

• 14 oz can sweetened condensed milk

• 3 egg yolks (whites not used)

• ½ cup Key Lime Juice

Directions:

1. Combine the condensed milk, egg yolks, and lime juice, and blend until smooth.

2. Pour the filling into the crust and bake at 350° for 15 minutes.

3. Let stand 10 minutes, then refrigerate.

4. Just before serving, top with freshly whipped cream — and remember: if you can see the pie, you haven’t put enough on.

The Dad Briefs covers the civic, political, and quietly human stories that shape family life in America — with recipes along the way.

This recipe article isn’t sponsored. I’m sharing it because I use the ShopKind tool every week, and the eggs in this frittata came from it.

Hope you enjoy this one. It’s incredibly delicious!

Mediterranean Vegetable Frittata

Ingredients

• 1 red bell pepper, cored and chopped

• 1 zucchini, diced

• 1 green onion, chopped

• 4 ounces broccoli, cut into small florets

• Kosher salt and black pepper

• 3 tbsp Extra virgin olive oil

• 7 large eggs

• ¼ teaspoon baking powder

• ¼ cup whole milk

• 1/3 cup feta cheese, crumbled

• 1/3 cup finely chopped fresh parsley

• 1 teaspoon fresh thyme

Instructions

1. Preheat the oven to 450°F.

2. In a mixing bowl, add the bell peppers, zucchini, green onion and broccoli. Sprinkle on a pinch of salt and pepper if desired. Add 2 tbsp of olive oil and toss until all the veggies are coated.

3. Spread the veggies onto a sheet pan and place in the oven—roast for 15 minutes or until the veggies are soft and slightly charred. Remove from the oven and set aside.

4. Turn the oven heat down to 400°F.

5. In your mixing bowl, whisk together the eggs, baking powder, milk, thyme, half of the parsley, and a pinch of salt and black pepper. Fold in the roasted vegetables.

6. Coat the bottom and sides of a 10-inch cast iron or oven-safe pan with 1 tbsp of oil. Pour the egg and veggie mixture into the pan. Sprinkle the feta cheese crumbles evenly across the mixture.

7. Transfer the pan to the heated oven and cook for 10-12 minutes or until the center of the frittata is cooked through.

8. Remove from the oven, carefully cut into wedges, and serve with a garnish of fresh parsley.

9. Enjoy!

The Dad Briefs covers the civic, political, and quietly human stories that shape family life in America — with recipes along the way.

That’s it. Four ingredients.

So if someone offers a different recipe and calls it THE recipe, they’re not being truthful with you. They might not be lying, exactly. They might just be repeating something that felt true. But felt-true and is-true are different things, and knowing the difference is most of the work of being a citizen right now.

Ted’s incorrect quote, and the one Walt Whitman got right

In the show, Ted drops a line he attributes to Walt Whitman: “Be curious, not judgmental.” It’s great advice. It’s also not Whitman. Scholars at the Walt Whitman Archive have confirmed he never said it or wrote it. The earliest known appearance of the phrase is a 1986 newspaper advice column. Somewhere along the way, somebody stapled Whitman’s name to it, painted it on a wall, and a fake quote became famous because it felt true and nobody checked.

Nothing travels faster than words you want to believe.

Whitman did offer the following, however, in Song of Myself:

“Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself, (I am large, I contain multitudes.)”

I can’t think of a better description of this country. America has always contradicted itself. We preached liberty while practicing slavery. We spend more on lottery tickets than we do on books. And it shows.

The test of a democracy isn’t whether we agree. Three hundred and forty million people were never going to agree. The test is whether we’re large enough, in our actions, to contain our multitudes and our contradictions.

Notice the difference between the two quotes. The fake one gives us a vibe. The real one asks us to do the work. That’s usually how you can tell.

Or, as puts it, “We have to know things to do things.”

Why the biscuits mattered

It’s curious that Ted would be a biscuit maker, however I believe those buscuits mattered most because he showed up with them every single morning. In a little pink box, handed over in person, to a boss who was actively working against him. He wanted her to know she mattered and deserved care, regardless of status, regardless of what she achieved, regardless of whether she’d earned it yet.

Wins and losses come and go. Who we are remains.

That’s what I want my boys to take from this show, and it’s what I’d offer you. Belief isn’t a speech. It’s a box you hand somebody, daily. And a country works the same way. Democracy is not a feeling you have in November. It’s a practice. So vote, organize, mobilize, and give yourself to your causes. Believe in yourself.

America’s multitudes need you.

Now let’s bake.

Ted Lasso’s Biscuits (official recipe)

Yield: One square pan, about 16 biscuits. Time: 15 minutes of work, 30 minutes of patience, 45 to 60 minutes in the oven.

Ingredients

• 2 cups all-purpose flour

• 1/4 teaspoon coarse salt

• 1 cup (2 sticks) unsalted butter, room temperature

• 3/4 cup confectioners’ sugar

• Optional: a splash of vanilla, if you’re feeling fancy

Preparation

1. Preheat oven to 300 F.

2. Sift flour and salt, mix into bowl and set aside.

3. Mix butter on high speed until fluffy (3 to 5 minutes).

4. Gradually add sugar slowly, continuing to mix until pale and fluffy.

5. Add flour all at once and mix until combined.

6. Butter a square pan.

7. Pat and roll shortbread into pan no more than 1/2-inch thick.

8. Refrigerate for at least 30 minutes.

9. Cut into squares.

10. Bake until golden and make sure the middle is firm; approximate bake time 45 to 60 minutes.

11. Cool completely. Re-slice them, if necessary, and serve.

The most important step

Put them in a box. Give them to somebody.

A coworker, a neighbor, the kid at the bus stop, someone you disagreed with last week. It doesn’t have to be pink, but it doesn’t hurt. The biscuits were never the point. The showing up was.

If you make them, tell me in the comments who got the box.

Be kind, feed your mind, and... barbecue sauce.

The Dad Briefs covers the civic, political, and quietly human stories that shape family life in America — with recipes along the way.

In Michigan, the Democratic establishment spent over $60 million to stop Abdul El-Sayed. AIPAC alone put nearly $30 million behind his opponent, the most it has ever spent on a single race. He was outspent nine to one on the airwaves.

He won anyway.

In Detroit, a crypto super PAC funded by Coinbase and Ripple spent over $2 million to protect a millionaire incumbent. Donavan McKinney, who grew up in the district’s poorest neighborhoods, won anyway.

And in Dearborn, Abbas Alawieh, an organizer of the Uncommitted movement, won his primary. If he wins in November, he’ll be the first Arab American ever to serve in Michigan’s state Senate.

Then there are the ballot measures.

Missouri Republicans asked voters to gut the citizen amendment process, the same tool Missourians used to pass Medicaid expansion, legalize marijuana, and guarantee abortion rights. Their plan would have let the reddest districts veto the will of the whole state, the highest bar of any state in the country. Voters rejected it FOUR to ONE.

Kansas Republicans asked voters to turn their Supreme Court into an elected, politicized body. They told the public it was about the “will of the voters.” They told anti-abortion groups it was about overturning the court’s abortion rights ruling. Kansas voters said no. And in that same state, Rev. Adam Hamilton, pastor of the largest Methodist congregation in America, won the Democratic Senate primary. Kansas hasn’t sent a Democrat to the Senate in nearly a century. Watch that race anyway.

Anti-establishment Dems didn’t win them all. In St. Louis, Cori Bush lost her primary rematch to Wesley Bell, the AIPAC-backed Democrat who unseated her in 2024. And Trump-endorsed candidates won their primaries because his grip on Republican primary voters remains.

But when the question went to everyone, not just the loudest, voters rejected the schemes. When the money told Democrats who to pick, they picked for themselves. Eighty percent of Missouri voters is not a partisan number. That’s neighbors, across every line we’re told divides us, refusing to be managed.

Last night goes a long way to prove that you cannot buy a primary or angle in a ballot measure from people who are paying attention.

Keep voting like it’s your government.

Because it is.

The Dad Briefs covers the civic, political, and quietly human stories that shape family life in America — with recipes along the way.

These cookies use dark rye flour, which creates a complex, nutty, and gentle sweetness to complement the dark chocolate chips. The brown sugars add richness and allow the interior of the cookies to be chewy while the exterior gets crisp.

Dark Rye Flour Chocolate Chip Cookies

Ingredients:

• ½ cup unsalted butter (1 stick), softened

• ½ cup packed dark brown sugar

• ½ cup packed light brown sugar

• ½ cup white granulated sugar

• 1 large egg

• 1 tsp vanilla extract

• 1 ½ cups dark rye flour

• 1 tsp baking powder

• ½ tsp kosher salt

• 6 ounces chopped dark chocolate (or about 1 cup chips)

• Flaky sea salt (optional, for sprinkling on top)

Instructions:

Preheat oven to 375 degrees. Line a large baking sheet with parchment paper or coat the sheet’s cooking surface lightly with nonstick spray.

In a large bowl, mix the sugars and butter. Stir in the egg and vanilla extract until whipped smooth. Add the flour, baking powder, and salt, and mix until fully incorporated.

Add in the chocolate chunks/chips and mix just enough to distribute them evenly.

Scoop 1/4-cup amounts of the cookie dough and roll into balls. Place the dough balls onto the prepared baking sheets and press gently into a disk about 1-inch thick.

Sprinkle the cookies with some sea salt (optional) and bake until the cookies have spread and are browned on the bottom, about 12 minutes.

Let cool for a couple of minutes on the baking sheet before transferring cookies to a wire rack to cool completely.

Enjoy!

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

Be kind, feed your mind, and … you know.

Mayor Zohran Mamdani met his wife on Hinge. I met mine on Bumble, and she messaged me first, which is how Bumble works. The Mayor clocked that immediately.

“Well, she took the first step, right?”

She did. I’m the lucky one.

As we stood beneath the Manhattan Bridge in Lower Manhattan last week, I joked that we should launch an initiative to make dating more affordable because I don’t envy what young people are going through. He playfully agreed. Even our jokes bend toward the cost of living.

The radical idea

I put it to him this way: the summer midterms have revealed that “government should actually work for everybody, not just the wealthy and the well-connected” is what passes for a radical idea in this country.

“Yes. Right?” he said. “Nowadays.”

Millions of people, parents among them, are watching this city and experiencing an awakening. They wonder what more they should demand of their own city hall. What is his advice?

He started by validating the feeling.

“What they are feeling, that is right,” he told me. “Politics is not something that should happen to them. It’s something that they should also do.”

For most of our lives we have been treated as subjects of politics. Our one choice was how much attention to pay. The Mayor argues that this framing was always a con. You can shape the politics. You always could.

You can have the same thing

“If you like what you’re seeing in New York City and you live somewhere else, you can have the same thing,” Mamdani said. “As much as I believe that New York is exceptional, which it is, and I think we’re the greatest city in the world, a lot of what we’re talking about, these are the struggles of Americans no matter where they live.”

He named the list without notes: the climate crisis, the cost of housing, childcare, public transit, groceries. “Americans feel that no matter what party they belong to and no matter what part of the country they live in.”

A government that treats affordability as its job is available to any city where people demand it. Start with the one you have.

Working people win when politics is about working people

The Mayor’s theory of change fits in one sentence: “What we’ve seen time and again is when working people become the focus of our politics, those same working people start to win.”

He has receipts. The New Deal under FDR. Fiorello La Guardia in New York. This happened before, within our grandparents’ memory, because people fought for it.

“We can have that again, but we have to fight for it,” he said. “Because without it, instead of a New Deal, we’re gonna be having to explain why we have to accept a raw deal. And those days have to come to an end.”

Pick your issue. Give it everything.

My follow-up came from experience. There is a real paralysis in seeing so many things worth fighting for and having to pick one. Press freedom, healthcare access, public education, housing, transit, climate. Where do you start?

He answered by invoking Mariame Kaba.

“Mariame Kaba is an organizer here in New York City, and she has shared a number of reflections on what it means to organize,” he said. “One of them that really stuck with me was, pick an issue and give all of yourself to it. Don’t try and be everything to everyone. If you can find that focus, then you can also find that fulfillment.”

Kaba is a New York City native who spent two decades organizing in Chicago before coming home in 2016. She founded Project NIA, a grassroots group working to end youth incarceration, and wrote a New York Times bestseller, We Do This ‘Til We Free Us, on what organizing asks of the people who do it. Her advice carries the weight of someone who picked her issue three decades ago and held on.

You do not have to fit yourself into housing or public transit because those are the issues on cable news. If flood prevention is what you care about, flood prevention is your issue. The Mayor said as much.

So here’s your homework, from him and from me.

Find ways to stay in the fight. Pick the one thing your city is getting wrong for working families, the one that keeps you up at night, and give yourself to it. Show up to the council meeting. Learn the budget line. Bring two neighbors with you.

Politics is not something that happens to you. It’s something you do.

And if a dating app can find you the love of your life, your city hall can find you an issue worth fighting for.

Share

The Dad Briefs covers the civic, political, and quietly human stories that shape family life in America — with recipes along the way.

On Wednesday, an 85-year-old retired public servant sat before the Senate Homeland Security Committee and gave the same one-sentence answer, word for word, more than a hundred times.

"On the advice of counsel, I respectfully decline to answer based upon my rights under the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution."

Chairman Rand Paul had Capitol Police remove the man’s lawyer from the room for trying to speak. Senator Josh Hawley cracked that nothing says honesty like taking the Fifth. Paul closed by asking whether the witness had caused “the largest man-made plague in history,” then threatened a contempt vote.

That’s a serious charge to level at anyone. So let’s pull the receipts, weigh the whole record, and arrive at the measure of Anthony Fauci as best we can.

First, I’ll cut to the chase: Fauci made real mistakes during the pandemic, and I’m going to name them. But the ledger of his career runs so far into the black that treating him as a villain requires ignoring most of his life. And the hearing you watched clips of this week had nothing to do with finding the truth. It was a campaign event with a subpoena attached.

Come with me.

Start the clock before 2020

Here’s the trap almost every Fauci conversation falls into: it starts in March 2020, as if the man materialized on your television at age 79.

He didn’t. He spent 38 years running the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, advising seven presidents of both parties, from Reagan to Biden. Before that, he was a working clinical researcher, and this is the part almost nobody in the comment sections knows.

In the 1970s, two diseases called Wegener’s granulomatosis and polyarteritis nodosa were death sentences. Fauci’s research on vasculitis showed they could be driven into remission with cyclophosphamide and corticosteroids. Rheumatologists still point to that work as the foundation of modern treatment. People are alive today, decades later, because of papers he published before most of his current critics were born.

Then came AIDS.

In the late 1980s, Fauci was the enemy. Larry Kramer, the founder of ACT UP, published an open letter calling him a murderer and an “incompetent idiot.” Activists burned him in effigy. And Fauci’s response is the single most revealing fact of his career: he invited them in. He brought AIDS activists into NIH deliberations they’d been shut out of, and he helped rewrite how the FDA ran clinical trials so dying people could access experimental drugs. Kramer, the man who called him a murderer, became his friend. When Kramer died in 2020, Fauci wrote his tribute.

Think about that for a moment. When confronted by his angriest critics, the man’s instinct was to listen, admit the system was failing them, and change it. That is the opposite of the arrogant caricature being drawn today.

Then came the biggest line item on the ledger. In 2002, George W. Bush sent Fauci to Africa to design an AIDS relief program. Fauci came back thinking in hundreds of millions. Bush told him to think bigger. The result was PEPFAR, a $15 billion program that Fauci personally architected and that the State Department credits with saving more than 25 million lives.

Twenty-five million. A Republican president’s signature humanitarian achievement, built by the guy your uncle’s Facebook page says belongs in prison.

Add the anthrax response, Ebola, Zika, and this: the NIAID vaccine lab’s years of coronavirus spike-protein research is why Moderna could move from viral sequence to human trials in roughly two months in 2020. The COVID vaccines that Operation Warp Speed delivered under President Trump, the ones Trump still occasionally takes credit for, stand on Fauci’s institute’s science.

What he got wrong

The mask reversal. In early March 2020, Fauci said on 60 Minutes that there was no reason for healthy people to walk around in masks. Weeks later, he reversed. His explanation, that he feared depleting supplies needed by health care workers, has truth in it, but emails released later show he was giving the same advice privately. The kindest reading is that he, like the CDC and the WHO, was slow to accept how much this virus spread through the air from people without symptoms. Either way, the whiplash cost public trust at the worst possible moment.

The herd immunity numbers. In December 2020, Fauci told the New York Times he had been adjusting his public estimates of the vaccination threshold partly based on what he thought the public was ready to hear. His words: “I can nudge this up a bit.” That was a mistake, full stop. The public can handle uncertainty. What it can’t handle is learning that the numbers were massaged, because then it starts doubting any numbers that are provided.

The six-foot rule. In closed-door testimony to the House in January 2024, Fauci admitted the six-foot distancing guidance “sort of just appeared” and that he wasn’t aware of studies supporting the specific distance. The rule came from the CDC, and Fauci wasn’t its author, but he defended it publicly, and it shaped school reopenings and business closures with real costs attached. That deserved more scientific rigor than it got.

“I represent science.” In November 2021, responding to attacks, Fauci said his critics were “really criticizing science, because I represent science.” I understand the point he was reaching for. It was still a terrible sentence, and it handed his opponents a gift they’re still unwrapping five years later.

So no, he’s not a saint. He was a man making real-time calls under conditions of radical uncertainty, and some of those calls were wrong, and at least one of those wrongs (the nudged numbers) was a choice rather than an honest miss.

The allegations that don’t hold up to scrutiny

“He lied to Congress about gain-of-function research.” This is Rand Paul’s five-year obsession, and it rests almost entirely on a definitional dispute. NIH funded the EcoHealth Alliance, which subcontracted bat coronavirus work to the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Fauci testified that NIH did not fund “gain-of-function research” there. He was using the government’s regulatory definition, which covers enhancement of pathogens already known to infect humans. Paul uses a broader, colloquial definition. FactCheck.org reviewed the fight and concluded the answer depends on whose definition you use. That’s a genuine scientific policy debate worth having. It is a very long way from perjury, which is why, five years and multiple investigations later, no charge has ever been brought.

And here’s the detail that should end the darkest version of this argument: both the Republican and Democratic tracks of the House COVID subcommittee agreed the specific viruses studied under that grant were too genetically distant from SARS-CoV-2 to have caused the pandemic. The research Paul waves around could not have created COVID. His own committee’s work says so.

“He orchestrated a cover-up of the lab leak.” The claim is that Fauci prompted scientists to publish the February 2020 “Proximal Origin” paper to bury the lab-leak theory. The House Democrats’ staff report, built on more than 10,000 pages of documents, found no cover-up and no suppression of the lab-leak theory by Fauci. The paper’s lead author, Kristian Andersen, called the collusion allegations “absurd and false” under oath, where lying is a felony.

Where do the origins actually stand? Genuinely unresolved. The FBI and CIA lean toward a lab incident (the CIA at low confidence). The WHO’s advisory group and most virologists still favor natural spillover. Fauci’s stated position all along, that he keeps an open mind but finds natural origin most likely, sits comfortably inside the mainstream scientific view. Holding a mainstream scientific opinion is different from running a conspiracy.

“His office evaded FOIA.” Partly true, and worth being precise about. Fauci’s longtime adviser David Morens wrote genuinely damning emails about making messages “disappear” and was indicted this April. That conduct is indefensible, and I won’t defend it. But the record, after aggressive investigation by a hostile Congress, shows it was Morens’s conduct. Nobody has established that Fauci directed it or participated in it. In this community we don’t convict people of other people’s crimes. We especially don’t do it while claiming to be the side that cares about due process.

Taking the Fifth

Which brings us back to last Wednesday, and the question half my comment sections are asking: if he’s innocent, why take the Fifth?

Because in January 2025, President Biden issued Fauci a preemptive pardon covering conduct from 2014 through the date of the pardon. Whatever you think of that decision (and reasonable people differ; I have my own reservations about preemptive pardons as a category), it has one crucial feature: it covers the past. It does not cover anything Fauci says today. Which means every new answer to a hostile committee is fresh legal exposure. Paul has publicly and repeatedly said he wants Fauci “behind bars.”

Fauci’s lawyers watched House Republicans try to build a false-statements referral out of Jack Smith’s recent testimony, and they drew the obvious conclusion: this hearing existed to manufacture a perjury charge, because the pardon closed off every other route. Fauci said as much in his opening statement.

Any competent attorney on this planet gives the same advice: don’t answer. Even Donald Trump, asked why Fauci pleaded the Fifth, waved it off: “His lawyer told him to.”

Paul’s counter-argument is that the pardon eliminates the risk of self-incrimination, so Fauci no longer has a Fifth Amendment right to invoke. Notice what Paul himself admits: that theory is untested, “a question for the courts.” He held the hearing anyway.

Regarding the Fifth itself — invoking it is a constitutional right, in a Senate hearing room as much as a courtroom, and the Supreme Court has been clear that silence is not evidence of guilt. But if you’re someone who believes taking the Fifth proves you did it, I need you to apply that standard consistently.

In August 2022, Donald Trump sat for a deposition in the New York Attorney General’s investigation of his business, an actual legal proceeding with actual legal stakes, and invoked the Fifth more than 440 times, per NBC News. By his attorney’s account, the only question he answered was his name. This is the same man who told an Iowa crowd in 2016: “The mob takes the Fifth. If you’re innocent, why are you taking the Fifth Amendment?”

So pick one. Either the Fifth is a shield for the innocent facing a hostile process, in which case it protects Fauci at least as much as it protected Trump, or it’s proof of guilt, in which case you have 440 problems bigger than Anthony Fauci. What you don’t get to do is issue Trump a pass and Fauci a verdict for the same constitutional act. That’s how you know you’re reasoning from team, and I hold this community to a higher standard than that.

Why this hearing, why now

Ask yourself what this week’s hearing was for. Fauci retired in December 2022. He has testified before Congress, voluntarily, publicly, for hours, multiple times since, including 14 hours of transcribed interviews with the House in 2024. The gain-of-function question has been investigated for five years. The Republican House subcommittee already published its 520-page report in December 2024. There is no pending legislation his testimony would inform. There is no new document he alone could explain.

There is, however, a midterm election in three months, a base that needs feeding, and a governing record that’s hard to run on. So the show got booked. Ranking Member Gary Peters called it what it was: an investigation “designed to validate predetermined conclusions.” Senator Maggie Hassan said it to Fauci’s face: “we are here in an attempt to entrap you.”

An Annenberg Public Policy Center survey last August found 57 percent of Americans trust Fauci on public health information. The sitting Secretary of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., came in at 39. The man in the witness chair is 18 points more trusted on health than the man running the department. You don’t haul a private citizen out of retirement to berate him on camera because he’s irrelevant. You do it because he’s a symbol your base still wants punished, and punishing symbols is easier than delivering results.

The verdict

Weigh it all. On one side: a cure protocol for fatal diseases, the transformation of the federal AIDS response, 25 million lives through PEPFAR, decades of pandemic preparedness, and the scientific groundwork under the fastest vaccine development in human history. On the other: a mask reversal, massaged herd-immunity numbers, a distancing rule with thin evidence, one arrogant sentence, and a subordinate who disgraced himself.

Every one of those debits is real. And if the measure of a public servant is perfection under conditions no one had ever faced, then no one who served in 2020 survives the audit, including every elected official now sitting in judgment.

But that’s never been the measure. The measure is the whole ledger, honestly kept. By that measure, Anthony Fauci is one of the most consequential public health figures this country has ever produced, a man who saved more lives than almost anyone you can name, made real errors under impossible pressure, and answered for them, on the record, for years, until the only questions left were the ones designed to jail him for answering.

He’s not perfect. He didn’t deserve that.

And a party with a record to run on — and minimal ethics — wouldn’t have done it to him.

The Dad Briefs covers the civic, political, and quietly human stories that shape family life in America — with recipes along the way. Food, Fun and Fatherly Wisdom. Recipes for Resistance.

I mean that literally. One YMCA mentoring program in Maryland reports more than 800 youth on its waiting list, and says plainly that its greatest need is men.

That’s one program, in one state.

I’ve spent this week thinking about the men who showed up for me. I looked hard for mentors in every endeavor I’ve tried, from cooking to corporate leadership to teaching to fatherhood. I found them some of the time. They weren’t always within reach.

Dr. Zanvoort was. As a teacher, he gave me a love of visual arts I’ll hold forever, especially the impressionists and the art scene in Paris at the turn of the 20th century. He literally filled my life with color.

Boys today have fewer Dr. Zanvoorts. Men are down to about 23 percent of public school teachers, from roughly a third when I was a kid. Fewer men on volunteer rosters. Fewer men in the everyday lives of kids who could use their wisdom.

This absence doesn’t stay empty. Boys looking to understand what a good man is will find an answer somewhere — too often from a screen, from toxic voices that profit from keeping young men angry, isolated, and buying.

The fix is not complicated. It’s presence. If you’ve ever thought “somebody should do something about this,” I’d like to introduce you … to you.

If you can give an hour a week

Big Brothers Big Sisters is the biggest door in. The commitment is about an hour a week, being yourself with one kid, with professional staff supporting the match the whole way. Boys wait longest for matches because male volunteers are scarcest. If you’re a man reading this, you are the shortage.

The Mentoring Connector, run by MENTOR, is the national database of vetted mentoring programs. Enter your zip code, the ages you’d like to work with, and the kind of program you want, and it shows you who needs you nearby. Parents can use the same tool to find a program for their own kid.

100 Black Men of America has run mentoring, education, and economic empowerment programming through local chapters for over sixty years, built on men showing up for boys in their own communities.

Boys & Girls Clubs and your local YMCA both run mentoring and youth programs in nearly every community in America, and both chronically need male volunteers. Search your city’s club or Y directly; the front desk will know exactly where to put you.

If you’ve ever thought about teaching

Maybe you’re mid-career, and the thought keeps returning. Here’s what most people don’t know: you don’t need to start over with an education degree.

TEACH.org explains alternative certification state by state and offers free career coaching to talk through your specific situation. If you hold a bachelor’s degree in anything, there’s a pathway.

Teacher residency programs let you earn a paycheck while you train, teaching under a mentor teacher for a year while completing certification. Many big districts run their own, like the Chicago Public Schools residency for career-changers. Search your district’s name plus “teacher residency.”

Your state’s alternative route. Every state maintains its own programs for career-changers, often 12 to 24 months, often while you’re already earning a teacher’s salary under a provisional license. This guide breaks down how the routes work.

The classrooms with the biggest shortages — math, science, special education, trades — are the ones where a man with real-world experience walks in with instant credibility.

If you want to serve

AmeriCorps places members in schools, youth programs, conservation, and disaster response, with a living allowance and an education award. Many Boys & Girls Clubs run AmeriCorps programs directly. Men are only about 28 percent of AmeriCorps volunteers. That number is an invitation.

Operation Bigs, a Big Brothers Big Sisters program, matches mentors with children from military families. Veterans especially: a kid with a deployed parent could use someone who understands the life.

If none of that fits your life right now

Presence doesn’t require a program.

Coach the rec league team nobody wants to coach. Show up to your nephew’s game. Teach a kid to cook something, fix something, build something. Ask the boy who mows your lawn what he’s planning after graduation, and then actually listen to the answer. Mentorship existed for a few thousand years before anyone built a nonprofit around it.

New legislation supporting this

Senator Mark Kelly of Arizona has introduced two bills aimed at this problem: the Educators for America Act, which supports earn-while-you-learn teacher residencies and recruits men into them, and the Building Community in America Act, which funds service programs that actively recruit male volunteers. You can read the press release here. Good policy can widen the doors.

But nobody’s waiting on Congress to walk through them.

The doors are open now.

There’s a line of boys out there, waiting to learn what being a good man is about. They’re going to learn it from someone.

It should be you.

The Dad Briefs covers the civic, political, and quietly human stories that shape family life in America — with recipes along the way. Food, Fun and Fatherly Wisdom. Recipes for Resistance.

It takes fifteen minutes. A small act of love first thing in the morning, and I never take for granted that I get to do it.

For millions of American families, the school cafeteria is the plan. Nearly 30 million kids count on free or reduced-price meals at school. Breakfast, lunch, sometimes an after-school snack. For a lot of children, the most reliable meals of their week happen inside a school building.

Then the last bell rings in June.

When school lets out, so does the safety net

Summer is supposed to be the easy season. Pool days, popsicles, staying up too late. For families living close to the edge, summer is the hardest stretch of the year.

When school meals stop, a family with two kids suddenly has to cover roughly twenty additional meals a week from a grocery budget that was already stretched thin. Food banks across the country report their steepest demand in June, July, and August. Researchers call it the summer hunger gap, and it shows up in the data year after year: only about one in six kids who eats a school-year meal is reached by a summer meal program.

Summertime should be a break. It shouldn’t bring kids to the breaking point.

Policy choices made this summer harder

This gap is a policy failure, and recent federal choices have widened it.

The budget law signed last July made the largest cut to food assistance in American history, reducing SNAP by roughly $186 billion over the next decade, expanding work requirements, and pushing costs onto state budgets that can’t absorb them.

Here’s the part that doesn’t make headlines: SNAP and school meals are connected. Kids in households receiving SNAP are automatically certified for free school meals. When a family loses SNAP, their children can lose their school meals too. Cut one thread and the whole net sags.

Feeding kids is one of the cheapest, highest-return investments a government can make. Kids who eat well learn better, get sick less, and carry fewer of hunger’s long shadows into adulthood. A budget that walks away from that is telling you what it values.

These programs help right now

Here’s the good news, and I want you to share this part widely, because a program only works if families know it exists.

Free summer meal sites. Schools, libraries, parks, and community centers across the country serve free meals to kids and teens 18 and under all summer, no registration and no ID required. Find a site through the USDA site finder, or call 211.

SUN Bucks (Summer EBT). Eligible families receive $120 per child in grocery benefits for the summer. In participating states, many families are enrolled automatically. Check your state’s status and apply through the SUN Bucks program page.

Your local food bank. Organizations like Feeding America and No Kid Hungry run summer programs and can connect families to help fast.

If your family doesn’t need these programs, you can still be the reason another family finds them. Share the site finder. Ask your library or community center if they host a meal site. Give to the food bank in your county, in dollars if you can, because they stretch a dollar further than a can.

This is our fight

The Dad Briefs supports organizations working on food security, economic security, and public education. That’s the mission, and it’s personal. Feeding people and defending public schools are the same fight: both rest on the belief that every kid deserves a fair start, no matter what their parents earn.

So this summer, while I’m packing vacation bags instead of lunch boxes, I’m reminding myself that the note I tucked under the napkin only means something because the meal is there.

Every kid deserves the meal.

Be kind, feed your mind, and … our kids.

Sources

• USDA Food and Nutrition Service, National School Lunch Program participation data — https://www.fns.usda.gov/nslp

• Food Research & Action Center, Summer Nutrition Status Report — https://frac.org

• Congressional Budget Office / USDA analysis of SNAP provisions in the 2025 reconciliation law (~$186 billion reduction through 2034)

• USDA SUN Bucks (Summer EBT) program — https://www.fns.usda.gov/sunbucks

• USDA Summer Meal Site Finder — https://www.fns.usda.gov/summer/sitefinder

• Feeding America summer hunger research — https://www.feedingamerica.org

• No Kid Hungry summer meals resources — https://www.nokidhungry.org

Six days before this, an ICE officer in Houston’s Magnolia Park shot and killed Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, a 52-year-old father of three, while he drove his construction crew to a job site. ICE says he tried to ram an officer. The men in his van dispute that account through their attorney. The Harris County medical examiner ruled it a homicide and the county DA has opened an investigation. Those officers wore no body cameras either. The Associated Press called it at least the eighth death in this administration’s immigration enforcement campaign. Biddeford makes at least nine, by Al Jazeera’s count. NBC News, counting the injured alongside the dead, documented 14 people shot by immigration agents between September 2025 and February 2026 alone.

And that is only the streets. Inside detention, Human Rights Watch and Physicians for Human Rights documented 52 deaths in ICE custody in the administration’s first 500 days. Their June report, “Dying in Detention,” found the mortality rate has more than doubled, a roughly 140 percent year-over-year increase, the highest level in over a decade even after accounting for the surge in the detained population. Seven people died by apparent suicide in the first year. In 2024, there was one.

Not one agent has been criminally charged in any of these deaths. Capital & Main, which identified several of the shooters through public records, confirmed in March that none had faced charges.

Consider Marimar Martinez, a Chicago schoolteacher and US citizen. A Border Patrol agent shot her five times in October 2025 after DHS claimed she rammed his vehicle. Federal prosecutors charged her, then dropped the case in November. When a judge ordered the evidence released in February, bodycam footage showed the agent swerving into her car after another agent said “it’s time to get aggressive.” The government had called her a domestic terrorist. The video defines her as a person driving away. In Minneapolis this January, agents shot and killed two US citizens, Renee Good and Alex Pretti, in separate incidents days apart. In the Marquette Law School poll taken immediately after, 62 percent of Americans said the Good shooting was not justified.

Congress built this

The July 2025 reconciliation law handed ICE roughly $75 billion in new funding, which NPR notes made it the highest-funded federal law enforcement agency in the country and doubled its ranks within months. That was part of $170 billion overall for immigration and border enforcement, including $45 billion for detention, a 265 percent annual increase. Then, this June, Congress used reconciliation a second time to add about $70 billion more for ICE and Border Patrol, with no new accountability measures attached, bypassing the appropriations process where oversight strings normally get tied.

The money bought exactly what you would expect. Border czar Tom Homan went on Fox News the day of the Houston shooting and boasted that ICE had arrested over 10,000 people in five days, a record. “We turned the heat up after we got the reconciliation bill,” he said.

And we must dismantle the “worst of the worst” talking point. Leaked ICE data analyzed by the libertarian Cato Institute shows 73 percent of people booked into ICE custody this fiscal year had no criminal conviction at all. Only 5 percent had a violent conviction. The American Immigration Council found that during the winter enforcement peak, two out of three street arrests were of people with no criminal record. Their data. Their arrests.

Let me take the strongest counterargument seriously, because you will hear it. A majority of Americans still support deporting people convicted of serious crimes, and the Marquette poll found 56 percent favor deporting people here illegally in the abstract. That position is legitimate and deserves a straight answer. The answer is that this is not that. When the same poll asks about people with jobs, years of residence, and no criminal record, support collapses to 44 percent. When Marist asked in late January whether ICE’s actions have gone too far, 65 percent said yes, up from 54 percent last June, and 59 percent called the protests against ICE legitimate. Americans watched Renee Good die and did the math themselves.

The agency doing this is 23 years old. ICE was created in 2003. The country functioned before it existed, with immigration enforcement housed in a civil framework under the INS. Abolition is not lawlessness. It is the position that a young, uniquely unaccountable agency should be dismantled and its legitimate functions rebuilt under real judicial oversight, without mass detention. Warren, Booker, and Gillibrand said versions of this in 2018. Today, 42 percent of Americans support abolishing ICE per Civiqs tracking, up from 24 percent a year ago. Still a minority. A minority that grew 18 points in one year of watching this agency work.

But you did not open this to read a policy history. You opened this because you want to do something. Here is the full menu, every item lawful, every organization vetted.

Protect yourself and your family

Know your rights, physically, on paper. The Immigrant Legal Resource Center prints red cards in over a dozen languages stating your constitutional rights. Order them. Keep them in your wallet, your car, your kid’s backpack. The core rights: you do not have to open your door unless agents have a judicial warrant signed by a judge. An ICE administrative warrant (Form I-200 or I-205) does not authorize entry. You have the right to remain silent. You have the right to refuse to sign anything. You have the right to a lawyer.

Save this number: 1-844-363-1423. That is United We Dream’s MigraWatch hotline for reporting and verifying ICE activity.

Make a family preparedness plan. Emergency contacts, caregiver authorization for children, copies of documents with a trusted person. The ILRC publishes a family preparedness plan template, and the ACLU’s immigrants’ rights resources cover what to do during an encounter.

Protect your neighbors

Join or start a rapid response network. These are trained volunteer networks that verify reported ICE activity before publicizing it, document operations on video, and connect families to lawyers. Verification is the discipline that separates these networks from panic machines. Rumors hurt the community; confirmed documentation builds cases. Find your local network through United We Dream or your state immigrant coalition.

Record, from a distance. You have a First Amendment right to film officers in public. You do not have a right to physically interfere, block vehicles, or ignore lawful dispersal orders, and doing so can get you arrested and can get the person being detained hurt. Stand back, film steadily, capture badge numbers if visible, note the time and location, and get the footage to a legal organization rather than posting it raw. Remember what footage did in the Martinez case. Remember that the agents in Biddeford and Houston wore no cameras. Yours may be the only record.

Fund freedom directly. Bond funds get people out of detention while their cases proceed. The National Bail Fund Network coordinates immigration bond funds nationally. RAICES provides legal services and bond assistance. Accompaniment programs send volunteers to court hearings and ICE check-ins so no one walks in alone.

Pressure the system

Go after the contracts. ICE’s reach depends on local cooperation: 287(g) agreements that deputize local officers, and county detention bed contracts. In most states, these can be ended by county boards and sheriffs who answer to voters. Detention Watch Network tracks the contracts.

A word to my Florida readers, because I am one of you. Our state mandates 287(g) participation and bans sanctuary policies outright. The county commission route is closed here. But look at what pressure and litigation just accomplished: the Everglades detention camp is done. The ACLU, ACLU of Florida, and Americans for Immigrant Justice sued over access to counsel and won a preliminary injunction, and DeSantis has now announced the facility’s closure, with the environmental case by Friends of the Everglades, the Center for Biological Diversity, and the Miccosukee Tribe still moving through the courts. Constraint is real here. Helplessness is a choice. Plug into the Florida Immigrant Coalition, WeCount!, and Americans for Immigrant Justice, and remember which legislators built this machine when you vote.

Call Congress with a specific ask. Not “do something.” Ask your representative to oppose ICE enforcement and detention line items in the next DHS funding fight, to demand oversight hearings on the 52 deaths in custody documented by Human Rights Watch, and to co-sponsor legislation restructuring interior enforcement. Congress just funded these agencies through 2029 with almost no strings. The clawback fight starts now, and it starts with constituents. Specific, local, tied to a vote. That is what moves offices.

Support the litigation. The ACLU’s Immigrants’ Rights Project, the National Immigration Project, Al Otro Lado, and the National Immigrant Justice Center are challenging courthouse arrests, denial of counsel, racial profiling in stops, and detention conditions right now. Donations fund discovery. Witnesses win cases. If you documented an operation, these organizations want to hear from you.

Show up. Lawful protest works and it is protected. More than a hundred people marched in Houston on Saturday. Biddeford filled its streets within hours yesterday. Learn your local rules, keep your distance from operations, and bring your phone charged.

A note on keeping this real and verifiable

Do not amplify unverified raid videos. Confirm the date, location, and source before you share anything. Old footage recirculated as new hands the government its easiest rebuttal. Never post identifying information about vulnerable people. And do not doxx agents. Beyond the legal risk, it hands them the victim narrative and it has never freed a single person from detention.

The precise truth is damning enough. At least nine dead in enforcement operations, fourteen shot in five months. Fifty-two dead in custody. Zero charges. Seventy-three percent of detainees with no criminal conviction, by the government’s own leaked data.

Print the red card. Save the hotline. Pick one organization from this piece and give it money or hours this week. Then send this to one person who keeps saying they wish they could do something.

They can. So can you.

Sources

Here they are with active links throughout:

Organizations and resources

• Immigrant Legal Resource Center, Red Cards / Tarjetas Rojas. https://www.ilrc.org/red-cards

• Immigrant Legal Resource Center, Family Preparedness Plan. https://www.ilrc.org/family-preparedness-plan

• United We Dream, MigraWatch hotline (1-844-363-1423). https://unitedwedream.org/migrawatch

• ACLU, Know Your Rights: Immigrants’ Rights. https://www.aclu.org/know-your-rights/immigrants-rights

• ACLU, Immigrants’ Rights Project. https://www.aclu.org/issues/immigrants-rights

• National Bail Fund Network, Community Justice Exchange. https://www.communityjusticeexchange.org/en/nbfn-directory

• RAICES. https://www.raicestexas.org

• Detention Watch Network. https://www.detentionwatchnetwork.org

• National Immigration Project (NIPNLG). https://nipnlg.org

• Al Otro Lado. https://alotrolado.org

• National Immigrant Justice Center. https://immigrantjustice.org

• Florida Immigrant Coalition. https://floridaimmigrant.org

• WeCount! https://www.we-count.org

• Americans for Immigrant Justice. https://aijustice.org

News reporting and primary documents

• News Center Maine, “Man shot and killed by ICE was not the suspect agents were looking for, Sen. King’s office says” (July 13, 2026). https://www.newscentermaine.com/article/news/local/public-safety/ice-shooting-biddeford-maine-fatal-police-comment-investigation/97-681babc8-1462-4ee8-9bed-18eb9c8fdfe4

• Portland Press Herald, live coverage of the Biddeford shooting and protests (July 13, 2026). https://www.pressherald.com/2026/07/13/shooting-reported-in-biddeford-2/

• CBC News, “Victim of ICE shooting in Maine was legally in U.S., activists say” (July 14, 2026). https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/ice-shooting-killed-maine-speaker-9.7268524

• AP via PBS NewsHour, “What to know about the fatal shooting of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo by ICE” (July 2026). https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/what-to-know-about-the-fatal-shooting-of-lorenzo-salgado-araujo-by-ice

• Houston Public Media, “Salgado Araujo’s passengers dispute ICE’s account” (July 10, 2026). https://www.houstonpublicmedia.org/articles/news/politics/immigration/2026/07/10/556770/ice-shooting-houston-lorenzo-salgado-araujo-passengers-dispute-dhs-account/

• KPRC Click2Houston, “Harris County DA vows full investigation; medical examiner rules death a homicide” (July 13, 2026). https://www.click2houston.com/news/local/2026/07/13/harris-county-da-vows-full-investigation-into-fatal-ice-shooting-of-lorenzo-salgado-araujo/

• CNN, “After his fatal shooting in Houston, ICE faces a familiar test of credibility” (July 13, 2026). https://www.cnn.com/2026/07/13/us/salgado-araujo-ice-shooting-investigation

• Al Jazeera, “ICE kills 26-year-old in Maine: What happened, and who else has ICE killed?” (July 14, 2026). https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/7/14/ice-kills-26-year-old-in-maine-what-happened-and-who-else-has-ice-killed

• NBC News, “Trump’s DHS immigration enforcement officers shot 14 people from September 2025 to February 2026” (April 2026). https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/ice-shootings-list-border-patrol-trump-immigration-operations-rcna254202

• Human Rights Watch / Physicians for Human Rights, “Dying in Detention: Rising Deaths in an Expanding US Immigration Detention System” (June 25, 2026). https://www.hrw.org/report/2026/06/25/dying-in-detention/rising-deaths-in-an-expanding-us-immigration-detention-system

• HRW press release, “US: Deaths in ICE Custody Surge Under Trump” (June 25, 2026). https://www.hrw.org/news/2026/06/25/us-deaths-in-ice-custody-surge-under-trump

• Block Club Chicago, “Feds Drop Charges Against Woman Shot By Border Patrol In Brighton Park” (Nov. 20, 2025). https://blockclubchicago.org/2025/11/20/feds-drop-charges-against-woman-shot-by-border-patrol-in-brighton-park/

• CNN, “Video and text messages from Border Patrol agent’s shooting of a Chicago woman are released” (Feb. 11, 2026). https://www.cnn.com/2026/02/11/us/chicago-border-patrol-shooting-video-evidence

• Capital & Main, “Agents In ICE Shootings Made Racist or Sexist Remarks, Records Show” (March 2026; confirms no agents criminally charged). https://capitalandmain.com/agents-in-ice-shootings-made-racist-or-sexist-remarks-records-show

• NPR, “Trump signs immigration bill with billions for ICE” (June 9, 2026; $75B figure, highest-funded agency). https://www.npr.org/2026/06/09/nx-s1-5851664/house-reconciliation-vote-immigration-enforcement-ice-border-patrol

• American Immigration Council, “What’s in the Big Beautiful Bill? Immigration & Border Security Unpacked.” https://www.americanimmigrationcouncil.org/fact-sheet/big-beautiful-bill-immigration-border-security/

• ACLU, statement on Senate vote to add $70 billion to ICE and Border Patrol (June 2026). https://www.aclu.org/press-releases/aclu-statement-on-senate-vote-to-add-70-billion-to-ice-and-border-patrols-bloated-budget

• KPRC Click2Houston, Homan “turned the heat up” remarks and 10,000 arrests in five days (July 8, 2026). https://www.click2houston.com/news/local/2026/07/08/border-czar-tom-homan-says-ice-turned-the-heat-up-on-arrests-after-funding-boost-as-houston-seeks-answers-in-fatal-a/

• Cato Institute, “5% of People Detained By ICE Have Violent Convictions, 73% No Convictions” (leaked ICE data). https://www.cato.org/blog/5-ice-detainees-have-violent-convictions-73-no-convictions

• American Immigration Council, “New ICE Arrest Statistics Shed Light on Who the Agency is Targeting” (April 2026). https://www.americanimmigrationcouncil.org/blog/ice-arrest-statistics-americans-noncriminals/

• NPR/PBS News/Marist Poll, “The Actions of ICE” (fieldwork Jan. 27–30, 2026). https://maristpoll.marist.edu/polls/the-actions-of-ice-february-2026/

• Marquette Law School Poll, national survey on ICE and deportation (fieldwork Jan. 21–28, 2026). https://today.marquette.edu/2026/02/new-marquette-law-school-national-survey-finds-60-disapprove-of-the-work-of-ice-with-democrats-and-independents-opposed-to-ice-and-republicans-in-favor/

• Truthout, Civiqs tracking on abolishing ICE (Jan. 2026). https://truthout.org/articles/more-americans-support-abolishing-ice-than-ever-before-polling-data-shows/

• ACLU, “Federal Court Orders ICE to Provide People Detained at ‘Alligator Alcatraz’ Access to Legal Counsel” and closure statement. https://www.aclu.org/press-releases/federal-court-orders-ice-to-provide-people-detained-access-to-legal-counsel-at-alligator-alcatraz-detention-facility

• Friends of the Everglades, “Stop Alligator Alcatraz” case timeline. https://www.everglades.org/stop-alligator-alcatraz/

Senator Lindsey Graham has died, unexpectedly. With all politically attuned eyes on Mitch McConnell’s health, his death felt like some kind of mortal bait-and-switch. And within hours, my feeds filled with creators I respect reacting in ways that ranged from somber restraint to open glee. Some of the same people who had jokes ready for McConnell went quiet. Some found new jokes fast.

Which raises a question: should we celebrate the death of our perceived enemies?

I have three thoughts, and they don’t fully agree with each other. I’d love to know what you think.

Not a good look

Dancing on graves in public never ages well. When we do it, we believe it’s about the person who’s gone. In reality it functions as a reveal of our own character.

That’s my instinct, anyway. But I typed that and immediately thought about the champagne. Nobody looks at an exile family toasting the end of the man who took their country and thinks, what a character flaw. So the rule I just stated can’t be the whole rule.

The self-censor

I have the mind of a comedian. I see the funny in everything, including things I have no business finding funny, and some days it takes strength to rein it in.

So I recognize what a lot of social media posts actually are. People aren’t issuing moral verdicts on a life. They’re sharing the thing that popped into their head that they thought was funny or clever, without much consideration of anything else. I know because I had three of those thoughts before I finished reading the headline. I just didn’t post them.

I’m not sure the difference between them and me is virtue. It might just be brand discipline. That’s an uncomfortable admission, and I’m leaving it in.

A language of the unheard

Dr. King, arguing for nonviolence in “The Other America”, said that a riot is the language of the unheard. I want to be careful here, because that line gets stretched to cover everything, and a snarky post is obviously nothing like a riot. I’m borrowing only the logic.

When people erupt in ways that look counterproductive from the outside, the eruption usually has a history. Some of what looks like verbal violence, or mocking an otherwise somber occasion, is an emotional release with a load of pain behind it. I don’t know what a stranger is releasing when they post the joke I would have judged. Graham’s record touched real lives in ways I can’t inventory from my kitchen counter. So even when I think a reaction is in poor taste, I don’t stand between a person and their catharsis.

What I’ll do

My first instinct says restraint reveals character. My third says withholding judgment reveals character too. Both can’t govern every case, and I think the champagne is what separates them.

The champagne was never about mocking a dead man. It was about the living, about a community marking the end of something that had been done to them. Mockery points at the deceased and asks the room to laugh. Release points at a wound and lets it finally close. From the outside, the two can look identical. From the inside they are not.

I may yet post a joke or two, and I certainly won’t be scolding anyone who does the same. But every time I feel that flash of glee or grief at someone’s passing, 'I’ll ask what the feeling is actually about. If the answer is a wound, I’ll honor it. If the answer is an audience, I’ll sit still.

I’m curious to know your thoughts.

Politico interviewed her three times over two weeks. Reporters also spoke with a man she confided in during the years after the alleged assault, and reviewed emails between Racicot and her therapist, along with messages in which she warned an acquaintance about Platner years before he ever ran for office.

Platner denies the allegation. He calls it “categorically untrue,” and his campaign says the encounter was consensual. His campaign also says the story was coordinated by out-of-state operatives, and points to its timing, one week before Maine’s ballot deadline. You should read the reporting yourself. The account, the corroboration, and the denial.

Racicot spoke to The New York Times last month. She described Platner’s behavior then as reckless and unsettling, and said nothing about an assault. According to the Politico reporting, she came forward with the full account only after watching the conversation around that Times story collapse into a debate about another accuser’s Republican ties instead of what the accuser actually said. She watched a survivor get turned into a talking point. Then she stepped forward anyway.

Graham Platner should suspend his campaign.

Platner won his primary in June with more than 70 percent of the vote. He beat a sitting governor. A lot of good people in Maine put their hope in him because he talked like someone who understood their lives. That hope was real, but it’s no longer the question.

If Platner withdraws by 5:00pm on July 13th, the Maine Democratic Party can replace him on the ballot. Mainers would still have a nominee. They would still have a race. What they would no longer have is a choice between their values and their vote.

You have read here my Susan Collins accountability series for months. I have written about her healthcare votes, her ICE funding votes, her procedural cover for a bill that hurt Maine families. I want that seat flipped as much as anyone writing about politics right now. And the standard still cannot be “better than Susan Collins.” The question is simpler and harder: can this person be trusted with power?

Because here is what authoritarianism actually is — it is domination. It is control, silence, coercion. It is power protecting itself, without conscience. And we cannot build an anti-authoritarian movement by asking women, survivors, and marginalized people to absorb harm in the name of winning.

Our values are foundational. They do not crumble when struck by power. Either accountability applies when it is politically inconvenient, or it was never a value. It was a weapon we pointed at our enemies.

Survivors are not collateral damage in anyone’s fight for political power. Bodily autonomy means freedom from interpersonal violence and freedom from political violence, and those are the same fight. Harm cannot be excused because the polling looks good. Voters deserve a candidate they can organize for without compromising their morals. No exceptions. We cannot ask people to knock doors for bodily autonomy, gender justice, and freedom from state violence while telling survivors that accountability is optional if the accused is on our side.

And to the argument that saying this out loud “helps the right”: ignoring harm helps the right. It proves their favorite claim, that everyone’s values are disposable when power is on the line. The most powerful thing Maine Democrats can do this week is prove that claim wrong.

There is still time for Mainers to choose a leader who can stand against violence in public policy and in personal conduct. There is still time to hold the line and hold the seat. Those were never in conflict.

Pretending they are is a choice.

The Dad Briefs covers the civic, political, and quietly human stories that shape family life in America — with recipes along the way. Food, Fun and Fatherly Wisdom. Recipes for Resistance.