Our right to vote came from the courage of many who came before us.

But today we have cowards in power, men of no real conviction for democracy, and they are so afraid of our vote — of the collective power guaranteed to us by the Constitution — that they have spewed disinformation from every institution they run to confuse us, threaten us, and discourage us from voting. It’s their top priority, and it’s caused more waste, fraud, and abuse than ever in modern history.

Today is No Kings Nationwide Day of Action for Early Voting. And you can go to NoKings.org

and find an event year you, but most importantly, just use today to make a plan to vote. The earlier, the better.

Your county has resources to help you vote that you might not know about. You can go directly to them if you know where to find them, or try a site I found useful: Iwillvote.com.

And here’s what you can do with it:

1. Check the status of your voter registration

2. Register to vote if it’s not too late.

3. You can request a mail ballot from your county

   1. On that same page of your county website, you should also be able to view and download a sample ballot you can take your time to read, fill out, print, and use as a reference when you fill out your real ballot. Very handy.

4. Check the status of your ballot if you’ve already voted

5. Find your voting location and nearby ballot drop-off locations.

6. Get guidance for voting while living abroad

7. Learn more about voting and get your state’s voter hotline number.

It’s a great place to start. Highly recommended. I’m not getting paid to say this.

Go to Iwillvote.com for voting resources. And visit nokings.org for events and more resources.

Be kind, feed your mind, and vote with courage and confidence.

Congress passed it in 1972, and President Nixon signed it into law that June. Not a word has changed since.

My oldest son is a college freshman this fall. He moved into a dorm governed by those same 37 words. He moved into a rulebook that Washington has rewritten so often that a student can enroll under one version and graduate under another.

This piece is about the gap between the words and the rulebook, and the actions, or inactions, this gap has allowed.

What the law intended

Title IX was written to open doors. Rep. Patsy Mink of Hawaii, the first woman of color elected to Congress, had been turned away by medical schools because she was a woman. She, Rep. Edith Green, and Sen. Birch Bayh pushed the law through to stop schools that took federal money from shutting women out. In 2002, Congress renamed it the Patsy T. Mink Equal Opportunity in Education Act.

It worked. Women now earn most bachelor’s degrees in this country. Girls’ sports grew from an afterthought into the part of Title IX most Americans know.

The law itself never mentions sports or sexual assault. Both came later, as people asked what “subjected to discrimination” means in practice.

How sexual violence became a Title IX issue

In 1977, a group of Yale students sued their university. They argued that sexual harassment by professors was sex discrimination, because it kept women from getting the same education as men (Alexander v. Yale). The courts never ruled for them on the merits. The argument held anyway, and it became the foundation of the campus protections students rely on today.

In 1998 and 1999, the Supreme Court decided two cases about when a student can sue a school for money. In Gebser v. Lago Vista, it said the school must have had actual knowledge of the harassment and responded with deliberate indifference. In Davis v. Monroe County, it said peer harassment must be “severe, pervasive, and objectively offensive.”

That’s a high bar, and the Court set it high on purpose. It was deciding when a school should pay damages, which is a different question from when a school should step in to help a student.

Five swings in one childhood

For years, federal guidance kept those two questions apart. The bar for suing stayed high. The bar for a school’s duty to respond stayed lower. Then the swings began.

• 2011. The Obama administration told schools to use the “more likely than not” standard of proof in sexual misconduct cases.

• 2017. The Trump administration rescinded that guidance and let schools use the tougher “clear and convincing” standard.

• 2020. The DeVos rule took effect, the first binding regulation on campus sexual misconduct.

• 2024. The Biden administration replaced it. Courts blocked the new rule in many states almost immediately.

• 2025. In January, a federal court struck down the 2024 rule nationwide, and schools went back to the 2020 version.

On September 28, Education Secretary Linda McMahon formally reinstated the 2020 rule. It took effect immediately, with no public comment period (Chalkbeat explained).

So the latest move didn’t change what’s happening on campuses this semester. It locked it in. The 2020 rules were in force when Cornell investigated and held hearings in Jane Doe’s case, the one everyone has been reading about for the past three weeks.

Today, here’s what that looks like for a student:

• The harassment has to be severe, pervasive, and objectively offensive. Sexual assault still counts. The months of harassment before or after may not.

• A college’s duty to act starts when an official with authority knows. Telling a professor or a coach may not be enough.

• A formal complaint starts the formal process. A student has to file one.

• Colleges must hold live hearings, where each side’s adviser cross-examines the other.

• Schools choose their standard of proof, “more likely than not” or the stricter “clear and convincing.”

• Some places aren’t covered. Incidents in study-abroad programs fall outside it, and off-campus conduct counts only where the school has control.

• There are no explicit protections for LGBTQ students. The 2024 rule covered gender identity and sexual orientation. This one drops that language.

Lambda Legal said the rule “lets schools look away until harm becomes severe and pervasive, and forces survivors through re-traumatizing courtroom-style cross-examination just to be heard” (Lambda Legal’s statement).

What enforcement looks like now

A rule is only as strict as the office that enforces it.

In 2025, the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights closed seven of its 12 regional offices (The 19th reported). Of the 7,072 complaints it resolved between March and September 2025, it dismissed 6,353, about 90% (GAO findings, via The Arc). A Senate HELP Committee report found it reached zero sexual-violence resolution agreements with schools in 2025, with 334 cases pending.

In January, the same office opened 18 new investigations involving transgender athletes (Fisher Phillips summarized).

When she announced the September rule, McMahon promised to “hold accountable any school or college that violates the rights, privacy, or athletic opportunities of our women and girls.”

Shiwali Patel of the National Women’s Law Center responded: “While the administration is unlawfully eroding protections for trans students under the guise of ‘protecting women and girls,’ they are systematically weakening the very laws that keep students safe and schools accountable” (NWLC’s statement).

Safety comes before belonging

The most recent national survey of 33 universities found that 25.9% of undergraduate women experienced nonconsensual sexual contact by force or incapacitation during college. Among transgender, genderqueer, and nonbinary undergraduates, the figure was 23.1% (AAU Campus Climate Survey).

Then there’s the trust gap. Sixty-six percent of all students believe their school would take a report seriously. Among students who have been victimized, that drops to 45% (RAINN’s campus statistics). The students who know the system best trust it least.

That gap costs people their education. Research links sexual assault to lower grades, withdrawing from classes, and leaving school (University of Kentucky research). In one study, 14.3% of women raped during their first semester finished it with a GPA below 2.5.

Patsy Mink wanted a fair shot to access education. A student who doesn’t feel safe in their dorm is still technically enrolled, but may not stay long.

A floor that doesn’t swing

If the federal rulebook flips every few years, students can’t count on it. Colleges can.

Federal rules set a floor. Schools can write stronger protections into their own codes of conduct, and states can require them. California already requires trauma-informed policies that cover off-campus conduct, whatever Washington decides. New York requires campus climate surveys every two years.

Cornell has now partnered with New York State Police on assault investigations and added a case manager for survivors (AP via OPB). Those steps came after a lawsuit and three weeks of national headlines. They belong in every college’s handbook before the next lawsuit, with no headlines needed.

Tarana Burke wrote in her Time essay that the administration’s decision “only adds to the helplessness so many survivors feel.” A university that sets its own higher floor is telling its students they don’t have to wait for the next election to feel safe.

What I told my son

When the Cornell story broke, my son and I talked about it. He said talk of it was all over campus, and that it all seemed unfathomable to his circle of friends. We discussed what consent means, and that someone too drunk or high can’t give it.

I reminded him that we are the helpers. Anyone who sends a message like that in a group chat is one person, but everyone who reads it and stays quiet shapes the culture too. If he sees something wrong, he should say something and do something, even when it costs him.

He’ll spend four years on a campus governed by 37 words and whatever rulebook Washington hands his school next. I’d like his school’s promise to every student to last longer than that.

Education for all requires safety for all.

If this helped you understand what changed, share it with a parent who has a kid on campus.

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

Absolutely delicious. They balance the sweetness of the cookie cake and the filling and have an amazing texture. You can refrigerate them in an airtight container for up to three days, so they’ll last for days of enjoyment.

I hope you make these and love them as much as I did.

And above all else, get out and vote!

Whoopie Pies

Ingredients

For the cookie cakes:

• 2 cups (10 ounces/283 grams) all-purpose flour

• ½ cup (1½ ounces/43 grams) Dutch-processed cocoa powder

• 1 teaspoon baking soda

• ½ teaspoon table salt

• 1 cup packed (7 ounces/198 grams) light brown sugar

• 8 tablespoons unsalted butter (1 stick), softened but still cool

• 1 large egg, room temperature

• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract

• 1 cup buttermilk

For the filling:

• 12 tablespoons unsalted butter (1½ sticks), softened but still cool

• 1 ¼ cups (5 ounces/142 grams) confectioners’ sugar

• 1 ½ teaspoons vanilla extract

• ⅛ teaspoon table salt

• 2 ½ cups Marshmallow Fluff

Instructions

For the cookie cakes:

1. Adjust oven racks to the upper-middle and lower-middle positions and preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Line 2 baking half sheets with parchment paper or Silpat.

2. Whisk flour, cocoa powder, baking soda, and salt in a medium bowl.

3. Beat sugar and butter in a large bowl with an electric mixer on medium speed until fluffy, about 4 minutes. Beat in the egg until incorporated, scraping down the sides of the bowl as needed, then beat in the vanilla.

4. Reduce speed to low and beat in one-third of the flour mixture, then half of the buttermilk. Repeat with half of the remaining flour mixture, then the remaining buttermilk, and finally the remaining flour mixture. Using a rubber spatula, give the batter a final stir.

5. Using a 1/3-cup measure, scoop 6 mounds of batter onto each baking sheet, spacing mounds about 3 inches apart. Bake 15 to 18 minutes, until cakes spring back when pressed, switching and rotating pans halfway through baking. Cool completely on the baking sheets for at least 1 hour.

For the filling:

1. Beat butter and sugar together with an electric mixer on medium speed until fluffy, about 2 minutes. Beat in vanilla and salt. Beat in Fluff until incorporated, about 2 minutes.

2. Refrigerate filling until slightly firm, about 30 minutes. (Wrap the bowl and refrigerate for up to 2 days.)

3. Dollop 1/3 cup filling in the center of the flat side of 6 cakes. Top with the flat side of the remaining 6 cakes and gently press until the filling spreads to the edge.

4. Serve and enjoy!

(You can refrigerate whoopie pies in an airtight container for up to 3 days.)

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

Hasan killed 13 people and wounded 32 at Fort Hood in 2009. A military jury sentenced him to death in 2013. President Trump approved the execution, as military law requires.

It is set for Thursday, Dec. 3, at 1 p.m., at Fort Hood, by firing squad. Hegseth chose the day, the hour, and the place to match the shooting. When asked whether Hasan had any final requests, he said, “Don’t care.”

It might not happen on schedule

If it happens, it would be the first U.S. military execution since 1961 and the first military firing squad since 1945. Military law experts told the AP a civilian court challenge could delay it for years.

The last public execution in America happened in Owensboro, Kentucky, in 1936. About 20,000 people came to watch Rainey Bethea hang (NPR, via The Advocate).

Ninety years later, nobody has to drive to the courthouse lawn. The crowd will be on its phones. So will our kids.

President Trump has criticized Iran for its public executions. He was right then.

Hegseth feeds a fetish with public death

We can believe Hasan earned the sentence a jury gave him. A courtroom settled that question with evidence and appeals.

A livestream asks a different question. It muses what the government wants us to feel, and how loudly. The justice was in the verdict. The stream is a show, and every show needs an audience. The MAGA manosphere is known for fetishizing military and death tropes. This cuts squarely along those lines.

Clips will spread within minutes. Algorithms will serve them to 12-year-olds between dance videos and homework. No parental control pulls a video back once it’s everywhere.

I don’t want my government in the business of putting death on my kids’ screens. Not for this man. Not for anyone.

The Bookshelf

Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption by Bryan Stevenson

Stevenson founded the Equal Justice Initiative and has spent his career representing people on death row in Alabama. Just Mercy follows one case, Walter McMillian’s, and the system that nearly killed an innocent man.

You don’t have to share his view of capital punishment to get something from this book. It asks what a justice system owes the people it judges, and what it does to the rest of us who watch.

It reads like a novel, and it’s the right book for a week when the government wants us watching.

Also for parents to consider: Sister Helen Prejean’s Dead Man Walking is the account of what it means to sit with a man on the last day of his life. A hard, humane read for older teens.

The Recipe: Funeral Potatoes

Some weeks call for comfort food, and this one feels heavy. I recently made these to commemorate Dolly Parton’s passing in a video article.

Funeral potatoes got their name from the church basements and family tables where neighbors bring a warm dish to people who are grieving. That’s the spirit I offer this week: show up, bring something, sit down together.

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, dice or coarsely grate (or use a mix of both for a nice texture), 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 the desired texture. Add butter and mix until evenly coated. Sprinkle the corn flake mixture evenly over the potatoes.

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

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

8. Spoon into bowls and serve. Enjoy!

Dad Joke for the Road

I didn’t think orthopedic shoes would help, but I stand corrected.

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

Sources

1. Reuters via WHTC: US to livestream Army execution of Fort Hood shooter (livestream, Dec. 3 at 1 p.m., presidential approval, 1945 and 1961 firsts, 2013 sentence)

2. AP via PBS NewsHour: Pentagon says firing squad execution will be livestreamed (Hegseth quotes, habeas delay, Trump on Iran)

3. Scripps News: Pentagon says execution will be livestreamed (Oct. 7 and 8 timeline)

4. The Advocate: Hegseth announces public execution (citing NPR on the 1936 Rainey Bethea hanging)

I’m sharing these checklists (PDF links below) from Rebuild, the National Disaster Survivors Association, to reach as many people as possible. People who have lived through disasters and the long recovery wrote these. Download them, print them, send them to anyone in the path of this storm.

Evacuation Tipsheet
What to pack, how to plan your route, what to do on the road, and when it’s safe to return home.

Hurricane Preparedness Checklist
How to film your house for an insurance claim, and how to prepare for flooding, wind and power outages.

Safeguarding Important Documents
A full checklist of the papers you’ll need for insurance and disaster aid, and how to protect them.

If you only have a few minutes:

If an evacuation order covers you and you’re able to leave, go now. Waiting means more traffic and more danger.

Pack two weeks of medications, chargers, cash, water and supplies for your pets.

Put your IDs, insurance policies, lease or deed and medical records in a plastic sleeve. Photograph them and text them to someone you trust.

Walk through your house with your phone recording. Open closets and drawers, and say out loud what you’re filming. Get the roof and trees outside. That video is your proof for an insurance claim.

Leave a note saying when you left and where you’re going.

Never drive or walk through floodwater. Turn around, don’t drown.

Numbers to write down now

Your phone may run out of battery. Put these on paper:

• FEMA Helpline: 1-800-621-3362 (TTY: 1-800-462-7585)

• Apply for disaster assistance: DisasterAssistance.gov

• Disaster Distress Helpline: 1-800-985-5990 (call or text)

• SBA Disaster Loans: disasterloanassistance.sba.gov

• Disaster Legal Aid: disasterlegalaid.org

• Disaster Fraud Hotline: 1-866-720-5721

• Find open shelters through your local Red Cross

For updates from the ground, and find more guides at Rebuild’s full resource library.

Please share this post. Someone in Pensacola, Panama City, or other areas needs it before tomorrow night.

And the crowd laughed and cheered.

All day long I’ve read and listened to the Trump translators and apologists, including White House Communications Director Steven Cheung. Cheung called the reaction a “media freakout” that was “not rooted in reality,” while the White House’s rapid response account called reporters “buffoons.” I’ve watched them twist and turn and blame the rest of us for not being able to speak Trump’s language.

There’s a name for that: DARVO, which stands for Deny, Attack, and Reverse Victim and Offender. Psychologist Jennifer Freyd identified the pattern decades ago, and she has written about how institutions use it too. That’s exactly what this White House did. In fact, it’s this administration’s signature move.

Even CNN’s analysis, which called the remark more incoherent than malicious, said the ugliest part of the whole episode was that people cheered.

So let’s just agree on this: 13 million Americans live in those two counties. They are not a small price, and their deaths are not something a crowd should cheer.

But make no mistake, Trump is doing what he’s always done. Historians already rank him dead last among American presidents, and he keeps working to earn it.

The outrage directed at him is just and necessary, because what he said was dangerous, stupid, and a betrayal of his oath. His careless and callous choices have already cost American lives:

• service members killed in a war with Iran that Congress never declared;

• citizens like Renee Good and Alex Pretti, shot dead in Minneapolis by masked federal agents;

• Americans who died of measles during the worst outbreak since 1991, on the watch of a health secretary who has spent his career undermining vaccines.

Abroad, researchers writing in The Lancet project that his foreign aid cuts could cause millions of deaths by 2030. And now he has told every hostile actor on Earth that the president considers two American cities expendable.

So much for “promote the general Welfare.”

But let’s talk about the future.

Presidents generally serve as political counterbalances to one another, in succession. Political scientists call it the thermostat: when policy runs too hot in one direction, the public turns the dial the other way.

Trump has altered that cycle in significant ways. He’s not just the idiotic inverse of Obama’s dignity and restraint, and he’s not just a pair of boorish bookends around Biden’s business as usual.

He’s a blunt culture unto himself. That means the counterbalance to the Trump era will need to come from all of us.

And I predict it will be a doozy: a period of renewed decency, radical empathy, and a recognition that dignity for all is what saves us.

Researchers have found again and again that a community, a city, achieves harmony when its people have what they need — not just enough to eke out survival, but enough to live with dignity. We’re talking about jobs, affordable rent, groceries, healthcare, public services, the works. When people have those things, trust goes up and violence goes down. People also live longer. When states expanded Medicaid, death rates among low-income older adults fell.

The world Trump keeps selling us is one in which those who have the most are aggrieved, and those who have the least are the grievance — the cause of all our problems. They don’t belong. They’re taking our jobs. Their hard circumstances are a moral failure of their own making. So let’s take away their healthcare, their food, their freedom, and their dignity, and give more to those who “know what to do with it.”

That’s enough to keep us fighting among ourselves. Meanwhile, the oligarchs use their influence over technology, media, and patronage to get around the inconveniences of democracy. Those inconveniences are the very constraints Trump and Project 2025 have constantly tested and aim to destroy.

In June, the Heritage Foundation itself said Project 2025 is 53% complete. But there’s no end game for the people behind it. It’s a constant attack on our republic until we stop it.

That’s what’s at stake in this midterm election. That’s why Trump is flailing, squirming, and dangling $5,000 checks he has no plan to pay for, and only if Republicans win. (Anyone spend their DOGE check? Didn’t think so.) It’s also why Republican money is retreating from races it once called winnable, abandoning North Carolina to defend Kansas.

Eras of civic renewal have come before. After the Gilded Age came the Progressive Era, and after Watergate came real ethics reform. Ours begins with these midterms, which will tell us whether the MAGA coalition is ready to break. I think it is.

I don’t believe that crowd in Nebraska wants Los Angeles wiped off the map. I think they’ve been told for ten years that people in cities like LA aren’t really their neighbors, that those people are “the radical left,” that they’re the problem. And when you hear that long enough, you laugh at jokes about them disappearing.

The counterbalance to that isn’t coming from a savior politician or from inside Washington. It’s coming from us: people who have always believed that lives in San Diego matter as much as lives in Nebraska, and who believe in dignity for all.

November 3 is four weeks away, and in many states early voting is already open or opens soon. Make your plan this week. Then make a second plan: bring one person with you who sat the last one out.

That’s how this particular pendulum swings. Not by itself.

By all of us, pushing.

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 later worked in fraud prevention, and I learned exactly what someone can do with your name, your address, and your date of birth.

Then I began making videos as a creator, and I became a target. My identity was stolen. I’ve received threats on my life because some folks didn’t like what I was saying.

And I’ve learned that most people don’t know that data brokers can legally collect your personal information and sell it to anyone online with a credit card.

I’ve been using DeleteMe, and when they asked me to partner with them on this sponsored video, I said yes because I’ve seen the results. The very first report they provided to me showed 83 instances of my data exposed, which they have removed, and they keep scanning and removing all year, because these sites find a way to put your information right back up. When I’ve had questions, I’ve called DeleteMe and talked to real people.

DeleteMe has been doing this for over 15 years. Removing your data from these sites helps protect you from the risks of identity theft, stalking, and harassment.

Be kind, feed your mind, and protect yourself with DeleteMe.

Some men laughed. Some nodded. Some were disgusted. But far too many said nothing.

This week, I’d like to talk to all men.

What happened at Cornell

In October 2024, a 20-year-old Cornell student, identified in court papers only as Jane Doe, went to visit a friend at the Chi Phi fraternity house. What follows comes from her lawsuit, her sworn statements and records obtained by CBS News. Much of it is alleged, some of it is disputed, and no one has been charged with a crime.

• That night: Doe, already intoxicated, alleges two fraternity members pressured her into taking what they said was ketamine, then sexually assaulted her.

• 1:42 a.m.: A member posts to the chapter’s Snapchat group, a chat with dozens of brothers in it, suggesting in crude language that a woman upstairs was available for sex. Later, someone asks: “Shop still open?” The answer comes back: “Yea.” (CBS News)

• Through the night: Doe alleges more men came into the room and the assaults went on until 5:45 a.m.

• At some point: In her 2024 sworn statement, Doe described two people walking into the room and saying they were “shutting it down.” The group of men scattered.

• Two days later: One of the accused texted her an apology. He wrote that he and another man felt bad for being too intoxicated to “shut it down and kick people out before it got way out of hand.”

• About three weeks later: Doe went to Cornell police. “I can say with 100% confidence I was raped,” she told them, according to a transcript CBS obtained.

• November 2024: The Tompkins County district attorney declined to file charges. He says her sworn statement described the conduct as consensual. Her lawyer says she was traumatized, and that no one from the DA’s office ever interviewed her.

• 2025: Cornell’s Title IX panel expelled two of the men and suspended two for at least two semesters. One graduated before he could be sanctioned. Two were found not responsible. The chapter was closed.

• September 2026: Doe sued Cornell, the fraternity and the seven men. The suit alleges some were allowed to mitigate their conduct by writing essays. Cornell denies that essays were anyone’s sole consequence.

• Since then: The DA reopened the case. Cornell agreed to an outside review. And on Oct. 1, Gov. Kathy Hochul named Attorney General Letitia James special prosecutor.

Two people walked in

Here’s the detail almost nobody is talking about. Sometime that night, two people walked into that room and said, in effect, "We’re shutting this down." And the room emptied.

We don’t know who they were. We don’t know exactly when it happened. And it didn’t end the night: Doe’s statement describes more after they left, and the lawsuit says it went on until dawn.

But it tells us something that matters. One sentence broke up the crowd, according to Doe.

And the man who texted her two days later? He knew exactly what should have happened. He used the words himself: shut it down. He just knew it too late.

It’s on us

Every time a story like this breaks, someone says, "Imagine if it were your daughter." Your sister. Your wife.

I understand the instinct. But I’m done with it. A woman shouldn’t need to be personally connected to you to deserve not being raped. If our decency only switches on when we picture someone we’d defend, our view is too narrow, and likely so is our action.

So this isn’t a talk for parents to give their daughters about watching their drinks. It’s a talk for men, from men. Fathers to sons. Coaches to players. Friends to friends.

Here’s what we’re up against:

• 45.1% of American women have experienced contact sexual violence in their lifetime, and 21% have experienced a completed or attempted rape (CDC, December 2025).

• The person who does it is usually someone the survivor knows (CDC).

• About 1 in 4 undergraduate women reported nonconsensual sexual contact by force or while unable to consent (AAU campus survey, 2019).

• Fewer than 1 in 4 rapes and sexual assaults were reported to police in 2024 (Bureau of Justice Statistics).

• Of every 1,000 sexual assaults, RAINN estimates 25 perpetrators go to prison.

• At Cornell, 1,216 reports of sexual misconduct from 2018 to 2024 produced 7 expulsions or dismissals (USA TODAY analysis of New York state data).

• Nationally, students found responsible for sexual assault are expelled in, at most, 30% of cases (HuffPost analysis, 2014).

Those numbers aren’t made by strangers in alleys. They’re made by guys we know, in rooms full of guys we know, after conversations we were part of.

Now the good news. Research going back years shows men consistently overestimate how comfortable other men are with sexist talk (Kilmartin et al., 2008). Most of the guys in that chat are more uncomfortable than they think everybody else is. When you speak up, you’re usually not the lone voice. You’re just the first one.

And it works. In a five-year study of 26 Kentucky high schools, the Green Dot bystander program cut sexual violence perpetration by 17% to 21%. Coaching Boys Into Men, where coaches talk to their athletes for a few minutes each week, made players more likely to step in. When men talk to boys, boys listen.

What we tell our sons

1. Be the first to reply. “No, stop this.” Three words in a group chat. Make it easy for the second guy to say it, because you went first.

2. Shut down the joke, and you never have to shut down the room. The talk is the earliest exit. Take it.

3. Finish the interruption. Breaking up the crowd is a start, not the job. Get her out. Get her to people she trusts. Call for help. Stay on task.

4. Stay sober enough to be useful. The man in that text knew what to do. He was too far gone to do it.

5. Loyalty to the guy who did it betrays everyone else. Don’t cover. Report it.

6. Dads, model it. Your son learns more from what you laugh at during the cookout than from any talk you give him.

It’s never just locker room talk. Culture gets built one conversation at a time: the joke we let slide, the chat we don’t leave or correct midstream, the “Yea.” We don’t need to stop talking. We just need to have better conversations.

The Bookshelf

The Macho Paradox: Why Some Men Hurt Women and How All Men Can Help

by Jackson Katz

Katz has spent decades working with athletes, coaches, fraternity men and the military. He co-founded Mentors in Violence Prevention, one of the first programs to train men as active bystanders.

His core argument is the one I made above, expanded into a whole book. Violence against women isn’t a “women’s issue” that men occasionally help with. It’s a men’s issue, and the guys who would never do it have the most power to stop the ones who would.

It’s direct and practical, and it doesn’t let any of us off the hook.

Also for dads: Peggy Orenstein’s Boys & Sex is a frank look at what young men are actually learning about sex and consent, and from whom. Spoiler: mostly not from us.

The Recipe

Adobo Chicken Noodle Soup

Warm, delicious comfort for the start of soup season, with just a hint of spicy heat. I had an idea that adobo seasoning would be a fun addition to chicken soup, so I wrangled up the ingredients and chose both chicken breast and thighs for the meat. Since this recipe doesn’t use skin or bones to add depth of flavor, I recommend using the highest quality chicken broth or stock you can find (or make!).

I shot the video for this recipe today. Will post it soon!

Ingredients

• 2 tablespoons olive oil

• 1 medium onion, diced or slivered

• 1 large carrot, diced

• 2 stalks celery, diced

• 1 leek, halved, rinsed, and sliced

• 5 garlic cloves. chopped

• 2 boneless, skinless chicken breasts

• 2 boneless, skinless chicken thighs

• 2 tablespoons Adobo spice mix

• 3 liters chicken stock or broth

• 1 13-oz package of pasta noodles

• 3 sprigs thyme

• 2 bay leaves

• 4 tablespoons chopped Parsley

• Salt and pepper to taste

Directions

1. Coat all chicken pieces in the Adobo spice mix.

2. In a large frying/sauté pan over medium-high heat, add 1 tbsp olive oil. When the oil shimmers, lay down all chicken pieces and sear for 2 minutes per side.

3. Turn off heat and transfer chicken to a large stock pot. Fill the pot with chicken stock and bring to a boil over medium-high heat. After boiling for 5 minutes, turn off the heat.

4. Place the pan you used to sear the chicken over medium heat and add 1 tbsp olive oil. Add all onion, carrot, leek, and celery pieces to the ban sweat down the vegetables for 3-4 minutes, gently scraping up the chicken & spice flavor from the bottom of the pan.

5. Add the garlic and continue to sweat for another 2-3 minutes. Remove from heat and set aside.

6. From the stock pot, take out all chicken pieces and cut/tear them into bite-size pieces. Return all pieces to the stock pot.

7. Carefully transfer vegetables to the stock pot. Add pasta noodles, thyme, bay leaves, and salt and pepper to taste.

8. Simmer on low for one hour, or until pasta is tender.

9. Taste and adjust seasoning as desired. Finish with parsley. Enjoy!

One for the Road

My son was determined to climb the stairs, so I wrote him a step-by-step guide.

Sources

• CBS News: Details emerge in case of former Cornell student alleging gang rape by fraternity members (timeline, sworn statement, Snapchat messages, texts, sanctions, special prosecutor)

• Cornell University FAQ on the 2024 Chi Phi allegations

• CDC NISVS 2023/2024 Sexual Violence Data Brief

• CDC: About Sexual Violence

• Bureau of Justice Statistics: Criminal Victimization, 2024

• RAINN Policy Center

• AAU Campus Climate Survey, 2019

• USA TODAY via Yahoo: Cornell rarely expels students in sex assault cases

• HuffPost: Fewer than one-third of campus sexual assault cases result in expulsion (2014)

• University of Kentucky: Green Dot results

• PubMed: Coaching Boys Into Men randomized trial

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’m familiar with the area, having lived along the adjacent lake for several years early in my newspaper career. The town has a slogan: “Ithaca is Gorges!” It’s a hilly landscape; walking Cornell’s campus is a decent cardio workout.

I had a FaceTime call with my older son last night. He’s a freshman in college on a very flat landscape in Florida. He’s adjusting well; he loves it. Says the classes are easy so far, even the ones in his chosen field of study, engineering.

Like everyone with a social media feed this week, he knew about the news coming out of Cornell. I asked whether his college had released any statements about it for the sake of their own campus; he said they hadn’t.

I knew I didn’t need to tell him what not to do. If there’s one thing I’ve done well as a dad, it’s teaching our kids about respect for others, especially the vulnerable. From the social contract Montessori school embedded in their minds as toddlers to me constantly throwing scenarios at them and arriving at the right answer together. Carla has also done superb with her boys, who are the strongest, kindest young men I know.

But it’s not enough to tell our kids what NOT to do. Respect is one thing. Stopping harm is a different discipline. It requires character and courage.

I reminded my son that we are the kind of people who would step in and stop the harm to that girl. I was proud of his response. “Fuck yeah,” he said, scoffing.

The red pill manosphere and the Epstein class in this country have a very fucked up idea about what relationships and power are all about.

But it’s not enough to know they’re there and label their brand of insecure cowardice as extremely dangerous.

We must stop the danger.

I’m proud of all the creators who have spoken up in outrage and created the pressure that reopened the sexual assault investigations into these dangerous men.

But we need more good men to stop bad men in their heinous actions.

And to do that, we need to raise more good men.

Please give us feedback on what you’d like to see here. We are a work in progress, for progress!

Carla and I celebrated four years together this weekend. She found me when I didn’t feel I deserved much, and she gave me everything. Put together, we have five sons, and our blended home is like a Brazilian-American Brady Bunch. Never underestimate what having genuine love and support can do for you. And always remember that you are worthy of it. Be well. –Slade

The Briefs

Court clears a voter-screening database

In a 6-3 decision, the Supreme Court sided with the Trump administration in its push to use a controversial database to review state voter rolls for potential noncitizens. SAVE was built to check eligibility for public benefits. The administration expanded it to include the records of natural-born citizens, pull Social Security records, and run bulk searches. The federal judge who blocked it in June found the government had knowingly trampled citizens’ privacy in a way that threatens the right to vote. Justice Jackson, joined by Kagan and Sotomayor, dissented, warning that legitimate voter registrations could be mistakenly revoked.

The Upshot:

This should NOT affect the midterms, so proceed as usual, but remain vigilant. States may use the database, but adoption remains uncertain, and most states have resisted federal efforts to take over voter registration. That makes your state’s secretary of state and county election supervisor the people to call this month. Then check your registration, and help a neighbor check theirs.

Social Security is in danger

New Congressional Budget Office projections released this week show Social Security’s retirement trust fund running dry by mid-2032, the same year the program’s trustees expect. If Congress does nothing, retirees face an automatic 26 percent benefit cut, growing to 40 percent by the end of the century. The date keeps moving closer. Last year’s trustees projected 2033, and the agency moved it to 2032, citing the One Big Beautiful Bill Act’s effect on the taxation of benefits. Social Security keeps more Americans out of poverty than any other program in the country.

The Upshot:

We need to vote for the right people. Senators elected this November will serve through the insolvency date, so they’ll either vote on a fix or watch the cut happen. Both parties have mostly promised never to touch the program, and that promise quietly accepts the across-the-board cut that comes when the fund runs out. Ask candidates for their plan, and don’t settle for a pledge.

DoorDash pays up in New York

More than 260,000 New York City delivery workers will receive compensation under a $131.5 million settlement announced by Mayor Zohran Mamdani and the city’s Department of Consumer and Worker Protection. The city found thousands of workers went unpaid for work they had already done, while thousands more were paid late. DoorDash’s own statement was blunt: “Simply put, we screwed up.” The deal also forces DoorDash to hand the city detailed data for three years and gives workers tools to share their trip and earnings information directly with regulators.

The Upshot:

This is good for New Yorkers, and should be a wake-up call for cities everywhere. Outside of New York, wage laws only matter when a city funds the office that enforces them. Ask your local officials whether anyone in your town is checking.

Xi comes to Washington, tariffs remain

Trump hosted Chinese President Xi Jinping for a White House state visit this week. Instead of a durable agreement, the two sides extended their trade truce by two months, pushing tariffs, Chinese purchases, rare-earth supplies, and technology restrictions into the next round of talks. Treasury Secretary Bessent said China is meeting its soybean commitment but lagging on its pledge to buy $17 billion in other farm goods. Even Iowa Republican Chuck Grassley was unimpressed, calling the event a “show job” if the truce extension was all it produced.

The Upshot:

Tariffs on Chinese goods are still paid at the register by American families, and farm income still hangs on promises. The truce now runs into January, which puts the next deadline after the midterms. Another reason your vote matters.

An AI agent broke into a government health portal

Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese revealed that an OpenAI agent gained unauthorized access to a government Medicare statistics portal in June. The agent was researching public medical spending and got around blocks that should have stopped it. OpenAI said the files involved aggregate health statistics and internal file names, and officials confirmed no personal medical records were accessed. OpenAI waited 84 days to notify the Australian government.

The Upshot:

No one’s records leaked this time. The bigger question is how fast a company has to tell the public when its product breaks into a system holding our data. Congress is writing the rules for this technology right now, so put that question to your representatives.

The Bookshelf

One Person, No Vote by Carol Anderson

If the past is prologue, this book is required reading. Anderson traces how voter suppression survived the Voting Rights Act by changing costumes: purged rolls, strict ID laws, closed polling places, and database matching programs that flagged eligible voters as suspect.

Read this alongside this week’s SAVE ruling, and it reads less like history and more like a field guide. It’s clear, fast, and furious in the useful way, the kind of book that sends you to check your registration before you finish chapter two.

The Recipe

Tzatziki Chickpea Salad

Cool, creamy, and quietly defiant. A recipe for something bright and herby that comes together fast and travels well — for potlucks, protests, or just a Tuesday.

Servings: 6-8

Ingredients

• 1 cup Greek yogurt

• 1 or 2 garlic cloves, grated

• 2 tablespoons olive oil, plus more for serving

• 1 teaspoon honey

• 1 lemon, halved

• 1 pound Persian cucumbers, halved lengthwise and cut into ½-inch pieces

• 2 15-oz cans chickpeas, with aquafaba drained and reserved

• 1/3 cup kalamata olives, chopped

• 1/2 cup fresh dill, roughly chopped (big handful)

• 1/3 cup fresh mint leaves, roughly chopped (big handful)

• 2 scallions, thinly sliced

• Salt and pepper, to taste

Steps

1. Make the tzatziki dressing: In a large bowl, whisk together Greek yogurt, grated garlic clove, olive oil, honey, and the juice of half a lemon (or more to taste). If it seems too thick, loosen with a splash of aquafaba or a little more lemon juice. Season with a pinch salt and pepper, to taste.

2. Toss the salad: Add cucumbers, olives, chickpeas, dill, mint, and scallions to the bowl and toss everything to coat. Ajust tasted with added salt, pepper, lemon juice or olive oil as desired.

3. Serve: Transfer to a serving bowl or plate and finish with extra sprigs of dill and/or drizzle of additional olive oil.

One for the Road

Q: What kind of tea is the hardest to swallow?

A: Reality.

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

This spring, a Facebook post told Indiana voters to check their registration. Stambaugh looked hers up and found her registration had been canceled. She registered again and got a letter from the Johnson County Clerk’s Office requiring her to prove her citizenship to keep her right to vote.

Indiana’s check ran on old motor-vehicle records. On Friday, the Supreme Court cleared the way for a much bigger version, built on Homeland Security files and Social Security data covering nearly every American.

The ruling

In an unsigned 6-3 order, the Court let the Trump administration restart the modified SAVE system. States can upload their entire voter rolls and have DHS flag anyone it thinks isn’t a citizen.

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote the dissent, joined by Justices Sotomayor and Kagan. She argued that burdening even a few lawful voters outweighs a harm to the government that doesn’t exist.

In June, a federal judge found that agencies had haphazardly combined private data on millions of Americans, including citizenship data they knew was unreliable. That system is back on.

Voluntary on paper

No law requires your state to use SAVE, and the ruling doesn’t either. The Court said Washington must answer when a state asks it to check a voter’s citizenship. Each state decides whether to ask.

Maine’s secretary of state, Shenna Bellows, refuses to use it. She said after the ruling that it “does not force states to change the way we run our elections.”

The executive branch is pressuring states

In July, the Department of Homeland Security attached new grant conditions to more than $1 billion in homeland security funding. A state that takes the money must run every registered voter through SAVE within 120 days. Until it does, FEMA holds back 20 percent of the award. DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin said states that want a grant need their voter lists “scrubbed.” Congress never wrote that requirement.

The Justice Department is pushing too. It has sued 30 states and D.C. for full voter files, including driver’s license and Social Security numbers. According to the Brennan Center’s DOJ tracker, the department has said it will run whatever it collects through SAVE. A March executive order also tells DHS to build state-by-state citizenship lists from federal data, a project NPR reports the ruling helps clear.

Rightfully, the courts keep saying no. On September 22, a federal judge in Seattle tossed DOJ’s Washington lawsuit, the department’s 25th straight loss. No judge has ruled in its favor, and a federal appeals court has also rejected its Michigan case. DOJ has appealed many of the other losses.

The losses cross party lines. In Colorado, a George W. Bush appointee dismissed the case with prejudice, meaning it can’t be refiled. He found DOJ gave no valid reason for needing the rolls and that federal law doesn’t entitle the department to unredacted voter files. In California, a federal judge called the demand for data on 23 million voters “unprecedented and illegal.”

What DOJ can’t win in court, some states hand over anyway. At least 16 Republican-led states have given or promised their full voter lists. A state can turn down SAVE and still have every voter screened once its file sits in Washington.

A temporary order with a long reach

The order is a stay. It lasts while a federal appeals court in D.C. hears the case, and through any trip back to the Supreme Court.

Federal law bars systematic purges in the 90 days before a federal election, and that window opened August 5. On paper, that shields the midterms. Given how this administration treats the law, I wouldn’t bet my ballot on paper.

After November, that protection ends. The administration can restart bulk SAVE screening of state voter rolls, and purges can begin, with a runway straight to 2028. Until then, election officials can use the system to check individual voters.

The Court is also set to decide RNC v. Mi Familia Vota, which asks whether states can remove suspected noncitizens inside that 90-day window. If the RNC wins, states could purge anyone SAVE flags right up to Election Day.

A lawsuit led by Florida

Some states didn’t need a push. In 2025, Florida led Ohio, Indiana and Iowa in a lawsuit against DHS. It ended in a 20-year settlement guaranteeing the four states bulk uploads and Social Security number searches. Florida’s secretary of state said the deal would improve SAVE “for decades”.

When the D.C. judge blocked SAVE in June, a federal judge in Florida ordered access restored for those four states anyway. For most of the summer, two federal courts disagreed about whether the system could run at all. Four states kept using it.

The errors and the fraud

Texas ran all 18 million of its voters through SAVE, and the system flagged 2,724 as potential noncitizens. County officials gave each of them 30 days to prove citizenship and removed anyone who didn’t respond in time. About 20 percent of those flagged were later found to be citizens and reinstated. The state referred 117 cases for investigation. That’s 117 names out of 18 million.

In one Missouri county, half of the voters initially flagged as noncitizens have been confirmed as citizens. Utah spent more than a year and a quarter-million dollars reviewing its entire voter roll and found 27 confirmed noncitizens among 2 million voters.

Iowa shows the gap between a flag and a finding. Before the 2024 election, the state flagged more than 2,100 registered voters as possible noncitizens using transportation records. After checking SAVE, it confirmed 277 were noncitizens, and 35 had cast ballots that were counted. Louisiana identified about 400 potential noncitizens among nearly 3 million voters and found 83 who had voted in at least one election since the 1980s.

The errors start in the data. Social Security didn’t record citizenship systematically until 1978. The agency relies mostly on people reporting their own naturalization in person, so its records lag for naturalized citizens. About half of Americans don’t have a passport, which is the backup record that clears many flags.

Know your state’s deadline

When a state flags you, state law sets the clock. Federal law doesn’t set a deadline for citizenship challenges, so the rules range from a month to no warning at all. Here’s what the states with specific rules or active programs require.

Note: Mississippi’s 2026 law says a voter can’t be removed “solely based on a SAVE match,” and cancellation can happen only after a failure to respond or confirmation of ineligibility, never within 90 days of a federal election. A Republican legislature passed that line, and every state could adopt it.

If your state isn’t listed, it handles citizenship questions through its general challenge and removal process. Your county or state election office can tell you the timeline.

What you can do

1. Check your registration every week until November, then every month after that. Vote.org’s registration lookup also lists your state’s deadlines. The biggest purge risk comes after the election.

2. Help your parents, naturalized relatives and neighbors do the same. Look up their registrations with them.

3. Open every letter from your election office. In Virginia you get 14 days. In Georgia, three days’ notice of a hearing. In Ohio and South Carolina, you might get no warning at all.

4. If you’ve been removed, call the Election Protection hotline at 866-OUR-VOTE for help getting it corrected, and ask for a provisional ballot. If your state offers same-day registration, use it.

5. Call your county election office, whether a supervisor of elections, a county clerk, a recorder or a registrar runs it. In most states, that office makes the final decision on removing a voter. Ask for three promises: nobody gets removed on a SAVE flag alone, a human checks every flag against state and naturalization records, and the office publishes how many flagged voters turned out to be citizens.

6. Call your secretary of state and tell them to stay out of SAVE, including the grant conditions that require it.

7. Ask your state legislators to adopt the same rule upheld in Mississippi: no removal based solely on a SAVE match.

8. Show up in public. Speak during public comment at county commission meetings. File a public records request for your county’s SAVE flag results. Texas published its numbers, which is how we know how many of the voters it flagged were citizens.

Charrie Stambaugh found out because a stranger posted a reminder on Facebook. Be that reminder for someone.

Be kind, feed your mind, and protect our votes.

Sources

Court rulings and federal actions

• Supreme Court of the United States, DHS v. League of Women Voters, No. 26A308, order and dissent (Sept. 25, 2026)

• U.S. Department of Homeland Security, “DHS Requires States to Adopt Common-Sense Election Security Measures Before Receiving Federal Funds” (July 10, 2026)

• Florida Department of State, “Secretary of State Cord Byrd announces landmark agreement with DHS” (2025)

• Texas Secretary of State, “Texas Secretary of State Refers 117 Cases for Investigation of Noncitizen Voting” (Sept. 15, 2026)

• SCOTUSblog, Republican National Committee v. Mi Familia Vota (No. 25-1017)

Reporting

• Indiana Capital Chronicle, “Longtime citizen flagged, voter registration revoked in proof-of-citizenship ordeal” (July 2, 2026)

• Votebeat, “Judge blocks Trump administration’s overhaul of SAVE database” (June 22, 2026)

• Votebeat, “Supreme Court rules in favor of Trump’s SAVE system, but impact on 2026 election will be limited” (Sept. 25, 2026)

• Votebeat, “Court rules against Trump Department of Justice in voter roll fight with Michigan” (June 2026)

• NPR/OPB, “The Supreme Court revives a controversial data system for citizenship checks” (Sept. 25, 2026)

• NPR, “The Supreme Court revives the controversial SAVE data system” (Sept. 25, 2026)

• PBS NewsHour/AP, “Supreme Court lets Trump administration use revamped federal voter eligibility database for now” (Sept. 25, 2026)

• Washington State Standard, “Trump administration’s WA voter roll lawsuit dismissed” (Sept. 22, 2026)

• Democracy Docket, “Trump DOJ now 0 for 20 after judge dismisses Colorado voter roll lawsuit ‘with prejudice’” (Aug. 4, 2026)

• Democracy Docket, “Trump admin will make states purge rolls or lose election security funding, DHS says”

• Democracy Docket, “Voting rights groups sue to block Ohio law that purges voters without warning” (Feb. 13, 2026)

• CBS News, “Judge tosses Justice Department lawsuit seeking Oregon voter rolls” (Jan. 27, 2026)

• Ballotpedia News, “Federal district judges issue conflicting rulings on states’ use of expanded SAVE system” (July 18, 2026)

• ProPublica/Texas Tribune, “A federal tool to check voter citizenship keeps making mistakes” (Feb. 2026)

• Texas Tribune/Votebeat, “Ruling that blocks use of SAVE system won’t help flagged voters” (June 29, 2026)

• KSL NewsRadio, “New audit finds ‘small handful’ of noncitizens on Utah voter rolls”

• When In Your State, “Iowa moves to purge non-citizens from voter rolls using federal records” (March 17, 2026)

• PolitiFact, “Is a DHS tool kicking naturalized citizens off voter rolls?” (Feb. 20, 2026)

• Ohio Capital Journal, “Voting rights groups sue Ohio over law cancelling registrations without notice” (Feb. 17, 2026)

• Magnolia Tribune, “New Mississippi laws aimed at curbing illegal immigration could face challenges from ACLU” (April 15, 2026)

Research and analysis

• Brennan Center for Justice, “Tracker of Justice Department Requests for Voter Information”

• Brennan Center for Justice, “States Already Enacting Harmful SAVE Act Policies, Requiring Proof of Citizenship to Vote” (June 3, 2026)

• Center for American Progress, “The SAVE Act May Be Stalled in Congress, But State Versions Are Being Advanced All Across the Country” (June 30, 2026)

State laws

• Arizona: A.R.S. § 16-165

• Texas: Tex. Elec. Code § 16.0332

• Indiana: Ind. Code § 3-7-38.2-7.3

• Mississippi: SB 2588 (SHIELD Act, 2026)

• Florida: Fla. Stat. § 98.075

• Virginia: Va. Code § 24.2-427

• Georgia: O.C.G.A. § 21-2-228

• Kansas: 2026 Session Laws, Chapter 141 (HB 2437)

Voter resources

• Vote.org registration lookup

• Election Protection hotline, 866-OUR-VOTE

Here’s one example:

This November, North Carolina voters will flip past two such measures. One would let the state legislature cap how much local governments can raise through property taxes. The other would lower the ceiling on the state income-tax rate from 7 percent to 3.5 percent, written into the state constitution where no future legislature can touch it without another amendment.

Read the titles, and you see tax relief. Know the assignment, and you’ll see something else.

Neither amendment mentions education. But property taxes provide over a third of local government funding in North Carolina, and local governments are who pay for school facilities, teacher salary supplements, waste management, and public safety. State income taxes fill the other side of the ledger. Cap both and you have shrunk the pot that pays for classrooms, libraries, parks, and fire departments, all without writing the word “school” once.

Here’s the part that would have gotten circled in red on my homework. North Carolina’s income-tax rate is already 3.99 percent, and state law already schedules it to fall to 3.49 percent next year. The amendment lowers nobody’s taxes today. What it does is lock the door behind the cuts, so that when the next recession or hurricane or school funding crisis arrives, the state constitution forbids the money from coming back. Public Ed Works points out that every North Carolina child has a constitutional right to a sound basic education, and nearly 1.5 million children depend on the schools these amendments would squeeze. WSOC TVPublic Ed Works

The property-tax amendment has its own trick question buried in it. It doesn’t set a limit or a formula. It hands that decision to the legislature to fill in later, which means voters are being asked to sign the test before the questions are written. League of Women Voters

At The Dad Briefs, we want everyone to be informed without losing heart or our humanity. If you find our content useful, please subscribe at a level sustainable to you and help us sustain our mission.

A public budget works like a recipe. Cap the ingredients coming in, and something comes off the plate. Fewer teachers. Oversized classes. A library that closes at midday. The recipe card never says which dish disappears. It just gets quietly scratched from the menu, and by then the vote is two years behind you.

You don’t have to live in North Carolina for this to matter. Every state puts measures on the ballot with titles that sound like relief and consequences that land in a classroom. The pattern is the same everywhere: the savings are immediate and visible, the costs are diffuse and delayed. That asymmetry is the whole business model of misdirection, and the only defense is reading comprehension.

Here are actions you can take

Pull up your actual ballot. Vote411.org and Ballotpedia’s sample ballot tool show you every measure you’ll face, weeks before you’re standing in the booth pretending to skim.

Read past the title. For each measure, ask one question: where does this money come from, and what stops getting funded without it? If the measure caps revenue, find out whose budget that revenue feeds.

Check who filled in the blanks. If a measure delegates the details to lawmakers later, like North Carolina’s property-tax amendment does, you’re not voting on a policy. You’re voting on a blank check.

Confirm you’re registered. Two minutes at vote.org. Do it before you forget you read this.

Study with a group. The Dad Briefs’ Kitchen Table exists for exactly this: a free space to work through what’s on our ballots together before November. Homework goes faster with friends.

The measures that shape your kid’s education almost never have the word schools in the title. That’s the lesson.

Be kind, feed your mind, and study your ballot.

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

So he filed a complaint with his city.

On Tuesday, Tacam stood at City Hall as Mayor Zohran Mamdani announced the settlement. DoorDash will pay $131.5 million to resolve the city’s investigation. More than $115 million of it goes to over 260,000 delivery workers who were underpaid, paid late, or never paid at all between April 2022 and June 2026. The city calls it the largest worker settlement in its history.

It started with a law

In 2021, the City Council passed a law guaranteeing app-based delivery workers a minimum pay rate. Workers Justice Project and Los Deliveristas Unidos organized for it. Former Comptroller Brad Lander, who helped pass it, said everyone knew it would take “diligent, creative, aggressive enforcement.”

The apps fought back. The city’s Department of Consumer and Worker Protection issued the pay rule in June 2023 and began enforcing it that December, after lawsuits. Minimum pay now stands at $22.13 an hour before tips.

Then workers used it

The complaints came early. In August 2023, THE CITY reported that 13 DoorDash workers had filed claims over roughly $22,000 in unpaid wages. That same year, Workers Justice Project brought the city evidence that 200 DoorDash workers had wages stolen going back to 2022. In November 2024, deliveristas filed 95 more cases.

By spring 2025, DCWP had logged more than 300 complaints against DoorDash, and a DCWP spokesperson told Documented the agency was still investigating the company for widespread violations.

That was under Mayor Eric Adams, whose consumer protection agency kept this case alive.

Giving enforcement some oomph

Mamdani took office in January, and his DCWP commissioner, Sam Levine, inherited the case. Levine said on Tuesday that the investigation began under the previous administration, and that new enforcement resources let the agency accelerate it.

DCWP launched a Research and Analytics Division built to dig through corporate data. Investigators pulled terabytes of DoorDash’s own records and worked through 152 million payments and 110 million hours of work. The agency found that DoorDash had left whole categories of work time out of its minimum pay math, including canceled trips and time workers spent waiting between deliveries. The city hasn’t said when the investigation expanded to cover those violations.

Workers who were never paid will get three times what they were owed. Workers paid late get double. Nobody has to file a claim. The city already knows who’s owed and will start emailing workers in late October.

DoorDash: We screwed up

DoorDash’s statement on the settlement opens with “Simply put, we screwed up.” The company admits about $12.3 million in missing and late payments and blames software bugs and complicated deliveries.

It disputes the rest. More than $83 million of the settlement comes from a disagreement over how to pay workers for on-call time between deliveries. DoorDash maintains its method was legal, and it agreed to use the city’s method going forward to avoid years of litigation. No judge ruled on the question. The case ended in a consent order, with DoorDash agreeing to settle without a hearing.

Payouts will vary widely. DoorDash puts the median payment at about $48. Levine says some workers are owed more than $10,000.

Built to last

The most important part of this settlement may be what happens after the checks go out. For three years, DoorDash must send DCWP detailed pay data every month. It has to change its software so no New York delivery can be offered unless the worker’s time is being counted. An internal compliance monitor has to certify each year, under oath, that the company is following the law.

Workers get their own tool, too. Workers Justice Project and Princeton’s Workers’ Algorithm Observatory are building software that lets deliveristas share their trip and pay data directly with the city. The people doing the work become the watchdogs.

That’s the job!

Look at the chain. Workers organized for a law. The Council passed it. The city defended it in court. Workers filed complaints. Investigators opened a case under one mayor, and the next mayor funded them to finish it.

That’s what government is for. One delivery worker can’t take on a company that brings in $13.7 billion a year. A city can. Staff it, fund it, point it at the people doing the cheating, and the little guy wins.

Rosendo Tacam filed his complaint in 2023.

Three years later, 260,000 people are getting paid.

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 get the sentiment: a retort to a tyrannical president and a fascist administration that don’t abide by the law. It sounds like something someone planning a revolution (against a regime with nuclear weapons) would say.

Or worse, it sounds like someone who has given up.

And that’s exactly how this administration wants you to feel: that voting won’t matter, or has become too confusing. Might as well sit this one out.

Make no mistake: our way out of the current destruction of our democratic republic is through collective action by we, the people. And voting is our most effective collective action.

And though a single election is unlikely to cure all of our problems, this year’s midterms are a generational opportunity to thwart this existential attack on our democracy, even if the results aren’t the “blue tsunami” many of us are hoping for.

No political party will save us. History teaches that we must save ourselves through collective action. We are being tested in our time to uphold that history for future generations.

Keep that in mind. Then check your registration status at vote.org HERE.

And VOTE early.

The recent progress of Collective Action

In March, the President signed an executive order on elections directing the Postal Service to take control of how mail ballots move. The order required states to hand USPS lists of every voter eligible to vote by mail sixty days before Election Day, and instructed the Postal Service not to deliver any ballot that fell outside its requirements, which would effectively cancel that vote. The administration said the rule was about standardizing election mail and stopping illegal voting by noncitizens, a problem dozens of studies and audits have shown DOES NOT EXIST IN ANY MEANINGFUL WAY.

Then people went to work.

State officials sued. Voting rights organizations sued. In early September, a Postal Service whistleblower came forward and described the new system as secretive, rushed, chaotic, and fundamentally flawed, warning the agency had never properly tested it and that it could block millions of Americans. A federal judge in Boston issued the first injunction, finding that implementing the rule less than seventy days out threatened to disenfranchise millions and that the record held no evidence of fraudulent mail voting to justify the rush.

A three-judge First Circuit panel kept the block in place, and then Judge Carl Nichols, a Trump nominee, ruled that USPS has no authority to refuse delivery of ballots in states that don’t meet its new requirements.

On September 14, the Supreme Court refused to let the restrictions take effect, saying the administration was unlikely to succeed on the merits. Justice Kavanaugh wrote separately that even if the rule might fall inside the Postal Service’s authority, applying it this year would violate the Administrative Procedure Act, because state and local officials do not have enough time to implement it before the election.

The result: No ballots canceled. Not one state forced into an impossible deadline.

North Carolina and parts of Wisconsin started mailing absentee ballots the first week of September, and those ballots are moving right now because a whistleblower talked, lawyers filed, judges ruled, and the pressure held.

On Friday, the President announced on Truth Social that he was banning MS NOW, CNN and Politico from the White House effective immediately, accused them of publishing fake news, and said other outlets will likely face the same. Saturday morning, Secret Service turned away an MS NOW reporter and photojournalist and confiscated their press passes at a gate outside the West Wing.

These outlets will keep reporting the truth, and they are not standing alone. The White House Correspondents’ Association, led by a Fox News reporter, called the ban a First Amendment violation and demanded the access be restored, warning that a standard used to exclude one outlet over its coverage can be applied to any outlet later. The Associated Press and The Washington Post said they stand with the targeted newsrooms. Competitors defending competitors, because a threat to the First Amendment anywhere is a threat everywhere.

Friday evening in Washington, thousands of people filled the streets of Foggy Bottom for “Hands Around the Kennedy Center,” a human chain around the building in response to his threat to close and demolish it. A man from the local arts community set up a chalkboard with the President’s name written on it hundreds of times, and people lined up to erase the names and draw hearts in their place.

That’s collective action in its most beautiful form.

The way out is through, together. The ballot is one critical step.

The Bookshelf

Democracy Awakening, Heather Cox Richardson

Richardson is a historian, and she built this book in three parts: how a small faction spent decades undermining American democracy, how authoritarians take hold, and how ordinary people have reclaimed the country before. The middle section reads like this year’s headlines with older dates on them.

The last section speaks to where we are now. She ends where this week ended, on the idea that the American story has always been rewritten by people who refused to accept the version they were handed.

The Recipe

The Best Chili You Ever Had

What’s the secret to great chili? Some say you should add cocoa powder or cinnamon or coffee or even beer. But if you get back to basics, great chili comes down to ingredients that match the phenomenal flavor profile of beef + tomatoes + chili peppers.

This chili recipe has a simple sequence, is easy to make, and tastes outstanding. Try it as written first, then add your own signature touches in the future. Enjoy!

Ingredients:

• 1 tablespoon olive oil

• 1 medium yellow onion, diced

• 1 1/2 pounds 80-90% lean ground beef

• 2 tablespoons tomato paste

• 1 1/2 cups beef broth

• 1 (15 oz) can petite diced tomatoes

• 1 (16 oz) can red kidney beans, drained

• 1 (8 oz) can tomato sauce

Spice mix:

• 3 tablespoons chili powder

• 1.5 tablespoons ground cumin

• 2 tablespoons granulated sugar

• 1 tablespoon garlic powder

• 1 teaspoon salt

• 1 teaspoon ground black pepper

• 1/4 teaspoon ground cayenne pepper (optional)

Directions:

1. Over medium-high heat, add the olive oil to a large pot and heat for two minutes. Add the diced onion and sauté for 4-5 minutes or until softened and translucent, stirring occasionally.

2. Add the ground beef and brown it (approx. 7-8 minutes), breaking it up with a spatula (or a whisk) into small pieces as it cooks.

3. Add the spice mix and tomato paste. Stir until well combined.

4. Add the broth, diced tomatoes, drained beans, and tomato sauce. Stir well and cook until it starts to boil.

5. Reduce the heat to low and simmer the chili for an hour, uncovered, stirring occasionally.

6. Remove the pot from the heat. Let the chili rest for 5-10 minutes before serving.

7. Enjoy!

One for the Road

Q: Why do melons always get married in a church?

A: Because they cantaloupe.

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

QUICK ACTION: Visit the accreditation NPRM’s Federal Register page and click the green “Submit a Public Comment” button on the left side of the page.

Detailed guidance below. Make your voice heard!

There’s a “Grade A” stamp on the egg carton in my refrigerator. I’ve seen it so many times I’ve stopped seeing it.

Like you, I’ve bought countless cartons of eggs, and I’ve never once checked the grader’s credentials. I don’t have to. The egg company doesn’t grade its own eggs. It can’t pick a grader who promises good news, and it can’t fire the grader for handing out a B. Or an F. One standard, applied to everyone, so a dad in a hurry can grab the carton and go.

Colleges have a stamp too. It’s called accreditation. Last month the Department of Education proposed rewriting the rules behind it, and the public comment window closes Monday, September 21.

Your voice is needed. Below I’ll show you how to speak up!

Accreditation carries real weight

Most families never think about accreditation when they’re choosing a college, and that’s how it should be. It works like the grade on the carton. A qualified, independent reviewer checks whether a school meets real standards for educational quality, then stands behind the result so students and parents don’t have to investigate every campus themselves.

The stamp carries serious weight. Only accredited schools can receive federal student aid. In fiscal year 2024, that meant $120.8 billion delivered to 9.9 million students. Pell Grants, federal loans, the money that puts college within reach for most American families, all of it flows through schools that hold the stamp.

So the stamp's quality matters.

This proposal would rewrite the rules

On August 20, the Department issues its Notice of Proposed Rulemaking [NPRM], carrying out an executive order President Trump signed in 2025 after calling accreditation his “secret weapon” for reshaping higher education. The administration says the rule promotes innovation and accountability. Read the fine print and three changes deserve your attention.

First, it becomes far easier for a college to drop its accreditor and pick a new one. Under the proposal, a switch is presumed legitimate unless the government can show the school is dodging enforcement. Policy experts call this accreditation shopping. Remember, accreditors are funded by dues from the very colleges they review. When a college can walk away at any time, the business incentive tilts toward leniency. Imagine the egg company shopping for a grader who guarantees an A.

Second, the rule scraps the requirement that a new accreditor operate for two years before seeking federal recognition. Brand-new graders, no track record, overseeing the gateway to billions in aid. The Department admits in its own proposal that it lacks the data to predict how these changes will reshape the market.

Third, the rule would require accreditors to enforce the administration’s interpretations of “academic freedom,” “intellectual diversity,” and civil-rights law. Reviewers who answer to educational standards would now police political ones. Antoinette Flores of New America, who once oversaw accreditation at the Department, calls the overhaul “a political power grab”. The Council for Higher Education Accreditation, hardly a radical outfit, warned the proposal goes “beyond modernization” into undue federal control.

A weakened accreditation hurts all of us

If you want to know what happens when this system fails, ask the students of Corinthian Colleges.

Corinthian ran more than a hundred campuses under names like Everest, Heald, and WyoTech. Its recruiters targeted single parents, veterans, and first-generation students. The company advertised job placement rates it could not back up, and in 2015 federal regulators fined it $30 million for misrepresenting those numbers. It collapsed within months. ITT Tech, another giant with the same playbook, collapsed the following year. Roughly 768,000 borrowers between the two chains were left holding debt for credentials the job market wouldn’t honor. Taxpayers eventually absorbed $5.8 billion in discharged loans for Corinthian students and $3.9 billion more for ITT.

Both chains were fully accredited on the day they declared bankruptcy. Their accreditor, ACICS, kept stamping the carton through every warning sign, until the federal government finally stripped its recognition. Senator Dick Durbin called ACICS a “deadbeat accreditor” that failed as a gatekeeper of taxpayer dollars.

That is what a weak stamp costs. Students’ years, families’ savings, and about $9.7 billion in public money. The proposal on the table right now makes the conditions that produced ACICS easier to recreate, with more accreditors, lower bars to entry, and colleges free to shop among them.

The process needs improvement, but this isn’t it

The current system has flaws. Accreditors rarely pull the stamp from schools with poor student outcomes. Transferring credits between accredited colleges can be maddening. Those problems deserve fixing.

And the Department didn’t write this rule in a back room. A negotiating committee of higher education representatives reached consensus on the text in May. Two things about that process are worth knowing. The Department’s Under Secretary told the committee the administration’s goal was to “upend higher education.” The negotiators representing students and veterans also abstained from the final vote. The two groups the stamp exists to protect declined to put their names on it.

If accreditation needs reform, and it does, the reform should give the watchdog sharper teeth on behalf of students.

This proposal files the teeth down and hands the leash to politics.

Add your voice before Monday!

Federal agencies must read and consider substantive public comments before finalizing a rule, and courts hold them to it. One specific, personal comment carries more weight than a thousand copied form letters.

So here’s your move. It takes ten minutes.

1. Visit the accreditation NPRM’s Federal Register page and click the green “Submit a Public Comment” button on the left side of the page.

2. Enter your comment directly into the text box (which allows up to 5,000 characters) or upload a file containing your comment. Uploaded files are not subject to the character limit, and the site accepts common file formats, including PDF and DOCX.

3. When you are finished, click “Submit Comment” and save the tracking number for your records.

Submit before 11:59 p.m. Eastern on Monday, September 21.

How to structure your public comment

Please make your letter personal! To help you get started, EdTrust and the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law provide the recommendations below on how you can structure your letter.

1. Introduce yourself or your organization. Example: “This letter is submitted on behalf of EdTrust, a national nonprofit organization dedicated to advancing policies and practices that dismantle racial and economic barriers in the American education system, in response to the U.S. Department of Education (ED)’s proposed revisions to the regulations that govern accreditation.”

2. Clearly state your position, the specific provisions of the rule that concern you, and how these provisions would impact you, your institution, or the students you serve. Example: “I oppose the provisions in § 602.17(g) and § 602.23(j) as currently written in the NPRM. Together, these provisions would shield state lawmakers who encroach on academic freedom and institutional governance from accreditor scrutiny. This means that if a partisan state legislature decides to micromanage a university’s curriculum, dismantle tenure, or stack a university board with political operatives — actions that are currently happening and often undermine lawful programs and initiatives designed to uplift under-represented students — the accreditor may be required to look the other way.”

3. Close with what you want ED to do. Example: “We urge ED to (withdraw XYZ provisions and) not finalize this rule as currently written.”

Quick Cheat Sheet: Review the topics below and choose those that resonate most with you or your organization. Specific provision numbers are listed further below and should be cited in your comment letter!

Where the NPRM Goes Wrong

Guiding Questions

The NPRM Would Weaken Accreditors’ Consumer Protection and Educational Quality Assurance Role

Have you enrolled in an accredited program or institution that provided a poor quality education and/or left you with poor outcomes (e.g., low earnings and high debt)? If so, you can use your experiences to justify the need for strong consumer protections and why ED should withdraw these new provisions.

The NPRM Would Undermine Accreditors’ Role as a Safeguard for Academic Freedom

Has your institution self-censored lawful speech, curricula, or student supports out of fear of this current administration? Have you experienced other instances of federal government overreach that concern you or impact your learning? If so, explain how that experience informs your concerns about partisan interference in higher education and shows why ED should withdraw these new provisions.

The NPRM Would Shield State Partisan Interference From Accreditor Scrutiny

Have state politicians targeted lawful speech, curricula, and student supports at your institution? Have you had other experiences that raise concerns about state partisan overreach into your education? If so, you can cite these experiences to justify your request for ED to withdraw these new provisions.

The NPRM Would Further Codify the Administration’s Anti-Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Campaign

Has your institution experienced the loss of lawful programs or student supports in response to the federal administration’s campaign against programs that advance diversity, equity, and inclusion? Do you have other concerns about the administration’s continued onslaught against DEI programs and supports? If so, explain how those changes affected you or your campus community and use those experiences to justify why ED should withdraw these new provisions

The NPRM Would Weaken Accreditors’ Consumer Protection and Educational Quality Assurance Role

What’s at stake: Accreditors are charged with ensuring academic quality, evaluating American colleges and universities on factors like student achievement, faculty, and curriculum — the core elements that shape students’ educational experiences. Department-recognized accreditors also determine whether institutions and programs have access to the federal financial aid system, worth more than $100 billion in federal grants, work-study funds, and student loans each year. Taken together, the NPRM’s provisions would weaken accreditors’ role as independent watchdogs that hold institutions accountable and protect students from low-quality programs.

Sanctioned Institutions Could Shop for a New Accreditor

• Under the proposed rule, requests to change or have multiple accreditors would be automatically approved unless ED actively intervenes – § 600.11(a)(1)(ii) & § 600.11(b)(1)(ii)

• At the same time, ED would eliminate existing safeguards that prohibit institutions from changing or obtaining multiple accreditors if, within the prior two years, their accreditation was withdrawn, revoked, or terminated, or if they were subject to a probation, show-cause, or suspension order – rescissions of language in § 600.11(a) & § 600.11(b)

Untested Accreditors Could Win Federal Recognition

• Under the proposed rule, newly created accreditors could apply for federal recognition as soon as they establish accreditation standards and operating procedures and receive an application from at least one institution – § 602.12(a)

• While an agency would still need to accredit at least one institution before gaining recognition, the proposal would remove the longstanding requirement that new accreditors have at least two years of experience making accreditation decisions before seeking recognition – rescissions of language in § 602.12(a)

The Department Could Second-Guess Accreditor Enforcement Decisions

• The proposed rule would allow ED to maintain an institution’s Title IV eligibility while an adverse accreditation action is under appeal, arbitration, or judicial review – § 602.26(h). However, because the NPRM does not specify when ED would exercise this authority, it would introduce federal discretion and uncertainty into the accreditation process regarding when institutions would face the consequences of adverse actions.

The NPRM Would Undermine Accreditors’ Role as a Safeguard for Academic Freedom

What’s at stake: Accreditors exist as independent entities, separate from federal and state governments, for a reason: to protect higher education from partisan interference. Their role is to ensure that teaching, learning, and research are evaluated by academic experts rather than by changing political priorities or ideological preferences. The NPRM would undermine that independence by effectively turning accreditors into enforcers of the administration’s interpretations of academic freedom, viewpoint neutrality, and the First Amendment.

While these requirements may seem protective on paper, in practice, they give the administration discretion to target whatever it considers ideologically objectionable — a tactic it has already used to take aim at diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs. Codifying requirements related to “academic freedom” and making them a condition of accreditor recognition would effectively position the federal government as the arbiter of the term.

The ambiguity of these requirements and the threat of severe penalties for noncompliance would also pressure accreditors and institutions to preemptively self-censor lawful speech, curricula, and student supports.

Accreditors & Institutions Would Effectively Need to Comply With the Trump Administration’s Interpretation of Academic Freedom

• Accreditors would have to evaluate whether institutions maintain academic freedom protections among their faculty – § 602.17(a)(2)(iii), § 602.17(a)(2)(vii)(A), and § 602.17(a)(2)(vii)(B)

• Accreditors would have to evaluate whether institutions maintain policies “regarding the integrity of scholarly activity” – § 602.17(a)(2)(vi)

Accreditors & Institutions Would Effectively Need to Comply With the Trump Administration’s Interpretation of Viewpoint, Ideology, and Intellectual Neutrality

• Accreditors would have to evaluate whether institutions have policies “designed to support, promote, and appropriately prioritize intellectual diversity” among faculty, including measures of “student and faculty perceptions on the range of viewpoints and perspectives” (emphasis added) – § 602.17(a)(2)(viii)

• Accreditors would have to ensure their decisions are “neutral with respect to viewpoint and ideology that are unrelated to its accrediting policies or standards” – § 602.18(b)(4)

Accreditors & Institutions Would Effectively Need to Comply With the Trump Administration’s Interpretation of the First Amendment

• Accreditors could not maintain “standards, policies, and enforcement practices” that impede public institutions from fulfilling their First Amendment obligations – § 602.15(f)

• Accreditors would have to evaluate whether public institutions maintain policies that protect First Amendment rights – § 602.17(a)(2)(v)

Accreditors Would Effectively Need to Mirror Enforcement Actions by the Trump Administration

• In the preamble of the NPRM, ED notes that its intent “is not to prescribe specific institutional policies or override institutional autonomy.” Yet this provision would conflict with ED’s stated intention by requiring accreditors to “promptly review [their] accreditation or preaccreditation of [an] institution or program” if that institution or program has been subject to an adverse action “by a State agency or Federal agency” (emphasis added) – § 602.28(d)

The NPRM Would Shield State Partisan Interference From Accreditor Scrutiny

What’s at stake: The NPRM would also shield state lawmakers who encroach on academic freedom and institutional governance from accreditor scrutiny. This means that an accreditor would be legally required to overlook partisan efforts to micromanage a university’s curriculum, dismantle tenure, or stack a university board with political operatives — actions that are currently happening and often undermine lawful programs and initiatives designed to uplift under-represented students. Meanwhile, ideologically motivated adverse actions by state agencies against particular institutions or programs would trigger an accreditor review of those institutions or programs.

State Politicians Could Interfere With Accrediting Standards

• Accreditors could not maintain standards that “encourage, direct, or otherwise require institutions or programs to violate Federal or State law ....” – § 602.17(g)

State Politicians Could Interfere With Institutional Governance

• Accreditors could not review “aspects of institutional governance of public institutions that are established by State law, including the appointment of institutional directors or officers by elected or appointed State officials.” – § 602.23(j)

Accreditors Would Effectively Need to Mirror Enforcement Actions by State Governments

• Accreditors would have to “promptly review [their] accreditation or preaccreditation of [an] institution or program” if that institution or program has been subject to an adverse action “by a State agency or Federal agency” (emphasis added) – § 602.28(d)

The NPRM Would Further Codify the Administration’s Anti-DEI Campaign

What’s at stake: The NPRM would give the administration another means to advance its broader anti-diversity, equity, and inclusion agenda; although these requirements are proclaimed as protective, in practice they are poised to exert significant pressure on both accreditors and institutions to interpret and enforce the administration’s legally flawed interpretation of civil rights law — one that has repeatedly treated DEI and race-conscious initiatives as presumptively unlawful, even though many such programs remain lawful and serve important educational purposes.

Accreditors & Institutions Would Effectively Need to Comply With the Trump Administration’s Anti-DEI Interpretation of Civil Rights Law

• Accreditors would have to evaluate whether institutions maintain policies that “protect civil rights” among faculty – § 602.17(a)(2)(vii)

• Accrediting standards could not “encourage, direct, or otherwise require institutions or programs to violate Federal or State law, including by having policies that provide any preferences on the basis of race” (emphasis added) – § 602.17(g)

• Accreditors could not have policies that “require institutions or programs to violate any Federal or State law,” including Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 – § 602.23(h)

• Accreditors would have to conduct a “cost/benefit analysis” of institutions’ student support services to justify their costs – § 602.17(a)(3)(i)

You don’t need a policy degree. You need a stake in whether the stamp means something, and if you’re a parent, a student, or a taxpayer, you have one.

Tell them students deserve a stamp that means something. I would never let the egg company grade its own eggs. I’m not going to watch it happen to my kids’ colleges quietly, either.

Be kind, feed your mind, and use your voice.

Status as of September 17, 2026: this is a proposed rule, open for public comment through September 21. A final rule is expected around November 1, 2026, and would take effect July 1, 2027. I’ll update this piece as it moves.

Sources: Federal Register, “Accreditation, Innovation, and Modernization” (91 FR 53940, Aug. 20, 2026); Federal Student Aid FY2024 Annual Report; U.S. Department of Education press releases; Inside Higher Ed; Higher Ed Dive; New America; Council for Higher Education Accreditation; NPR; Office of Sen. Dick Durbin.

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

Nine days later, he was gone.

On Monday, Rolling Stone reported that Sheeran’s promoter, Messina Touring Group, had pulled Macklemore from the remaining U.S. dates. The promoter’s explanation: the venues would not allow a show with Macklemore on the lineup, and keeping him meant canceling the tour.

Macklemore filled in the rest. In his statement, he said Ed told him that Patriots owner Robert Kraft rallied other stadium owners and delivered an ultimatum: drop Macklemore or lose the venues. Kraft confirmed he personally barred Macklemore from Gillette Stadium, calling his rhetoric antisemitic.

Antisemitic.

James Stadium in Tampa is on the list of venues that objected to Macklemore. In June, that stadium hosted Kanye West. Twice. This is a man who sold a swastika t-shirt through a Super Bowl ad. A man who released a song called “Heil Hitler.” And no, the title is not ironic. The track ends with a sample of Hitler delivering his 1935 Krupp Factory speech, asking the crowd to stand up for him as he stood up for them. Ye posted the quote on his own account, approvingly. The American Jewish Committee called the song “blatant antisemitism.”

AT&T Stadium in Arlington is also on the list. Kanye is scheduled to perform there this November. The date is on the calendar right now.

So an artist who praised Hitler clears the antisemitism bar. An artist who criticized a government committing genocide does not. That is the finding of the UN’s Commission of Inquiry, of Amnesty International, and of the International Association of Genocide Scholars, whose voting members declared last year that Israel’s actions in Gaza meet the legal definition. Macklemore stood on a stage and agreed.

Let me be clear about what I believe. Artists should have wide freedom to create, and art has always been political. Woody Guthrie wrote “This Machine Kills Fascists” on his guitar. Marvin Gaye asked what was going on. Political speech is a feature of art, one as old as art itself.

I also understand that speech at private venues carries consequences. A stadium can decline a performer. Businesses make those calls every day.

But confusing anti-Zionism with antisemitism to justify the call is a cop-out. Anti-Zionism opposes a political project and criticizes a state. Antisemitism is hatred of Jewish people. More than 400 scholars of antisemitism, the Holocaust, and Jewish history signed the Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism, making that exact distinction, and stating plainly that criticism of Israel is not inherently antisemitic. The people who own these stadiums understand the difference. Their own booking calendars prove it. If antisemitism were the standard, Kanye West would not have a microphone in Tampa or Arlington.

Some will point out that Ye apologized last November. Fine. Then the standard these venues enforce is this: Nazi glorification, followed by an apology, gets you two stadium nights and a fall booking. Anti-genocide speech, with nothing to apologize for, gets you an ultimatum. Grace extended in exactly one direction.

Which brings us to what this decision actually was. Business. Macklemore is the opener. Openers are replaceable, and replaceable people are cheap to sacrifice. If Macklemore carried Ed Sheeran’s ticket sales, this boycott evaporates overnight. Nobody hands an ultimatum to the name on the marquee. These owners stand on principle only when principle costs them nothing.

As for Ed Sheeran and his team, they might think they landed on the anti-antisemitism team.

But they never made the A team; they just made the A team laugh.

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

Every Sunday, I’ll bring you a story worth your attention, a book worth your time, a recipe worth your kitchen, and a dad joke worth your full-groan reaction. Ten minutes. Let’s get into it.

The Brief: A Wrongful Prosecution

This administration keeps indicting its opponents and propping up improper prosecutors, and their cases keep collapsing.

• James Comey: dismissed, unlawfully appointed prosecutor.

• Letitia James: dismissed, same defect.

• Newark Mayor Ras Baraka: dropped within two weeks.

• Alina Habba, the president’s former personal lawyer turned federal prosecutor: disqualified for serving without Senate confirmation.

• The six lawmakers who told troops they can refuse illegal orders, including Sens. Mark Kelly and Elissa Slotkin: a grand jury refused even to indict.

But one case remains ongoing. Rep. LaMonica McIver of Newark, a 39-year-old freshman congresswoman who is expecting her second child within weeks, faces up to 17 years in federal prison. Her crime: an oversight visit.

On May 9, 2025, McIver inspected Delaney Hall, a 1,000-bed ICE detention center in her own district, run by the private prison company GEO Group under a contract worth more than a billion taxpayer dollars. Congress has a legal right to inspect facilities like this one, unannounced. Three men held there have died in nine months. Detainees have described inhumane conditions: crowded cells, contaminated water, and medication that never comes. This spring they smuggled out an open letter. An SOS, in their words.

The visit turned chaotic when armed, masked agents arrested Mayor Baraka. Prosecutors say McIver’s forearms made contact with officers in the scrum. After the chaos, ICE gave her the tour. Officers walked the woman they would later accuse of assaulting them through the facility she came to inspect. She was never arrested. Eleven days later, Habba announced the charges on social media, after the court clerk’s office had closed. McIver learned about it from a tweet.

From the start, this case is a test. House ethics rules bar members of Congress from accepting free legal help, so McIver must drain her own accounts and campaign funds to fight the Justice Department’s unlimited budget. Her legal costs have passed a million dollars. Win or lose at trial, the government has already shown every member of Congress what an oversight visit can cost. If the tactic works on her, it works on anyone who looks too closely. And she has refused to stop looking: she has returned to Delaney Hall again and again, reporting conditions “any of us would recognize as torture.”

The tactic depends on two things: our attention fading and her money running out.

So here’s your part. Stay aware. Follow the case, share it, and notice out loud when the trial calendar collides with the birth of her child. And if you can, chip in to her defense. Small-dollar donations are the only way the public can fund it.

The Bookshelf

You’re More Powerful Than You Think — Eric Liu

If the story above leaves you angry and feeling powerless, this is the book. Liu treats civic power like a skill you can practice, with plain instructions for turning frustration into leverage. It’s the anti-doomscroll: less “can you believe this,” more “here’s what we do about it.”

Reading it? Tell us about it in the comments.

The Dad Joke

Some people prefer elevators, some prefer escalators. It depends on how they were raised.

The Recipe

Our first edition calls for slow-Sunday energy. Bacon jam is what happens when bacon, onions, brown sugar, and patience meet in one pan, and soft scrambled eggs prove that low heat is a love language.

Bacon Jam and Soft Scrambled Eggs

This is the most straightforwardly delicious breakfast I know how to make.

I serve mine over toasted 5-grain bread, often with smashed avocado (one avocado, a teaspoon of lime juice, salt, and pepper) topped with chopped chives, and cherry tomatoes or strawberries on the side. Make it your way.

Bacon Jam

Ingredients

• 1 lb bacon, cut into ½-inch pieces

• 1 medium yellow onion, finely chopped

• 3 cloves garlic, minced

• ⅓ cup apple cider vinegar

• ½ cup dark brown sugar, packed

• ⅓ cup maple syrup

• ¼ tsp cayenne pepper (or more to taste)

• 1 tsp black pepper

Instructions

Add the bacon to a 10-inch skillet over medium heat. Cook until crispy, about 20 minutes. Using a slotted spoon, transfer the cooked bacon to a paper towel-lined plate to drain. Drain the remaining bacon fat from the pan, then add back 1 tablespoon into the pan.

Reduce the heat to medium-low, and add the onion to the pan. Sauté for about 4 minutes, then add the garlic and cook for a couple of minutes more, until fragrant.

Add the apple cider vinegar and cook, stirring frequently, until the liquid is reduced by half. Add the brown sugar, maple syrup, and cayenne pepper, stirring to incorporate. Return the cooked bacon to the pan. Continue stirring until a jam-like consistency is reached, another 5 minutes.

Turn off the heat and take note that the jam is very hot and sticky. Allow to cool for a couple of minutes, and be careful if serving immediately. Enjoy!

Store in an airtight container in the refrigerator for up to 2 weeks. Warm before serving.

Soft Scrambled Eggs

Ingredients

• 3 eggs, whisked

• 2 tablespoons heavy cream

• Salt and pepper to taste

Instructions

Over medium-low heat, pour the cream into a medium nonstick frying pan. Allow the cream to bubble up and just start to caramelize (about 2 minutes).

Pour eggs into the pan. Using a silicon spatula, stir the eggs constantly in a tight circular motion to keep the eggs creamy and prevent large curds from forming. When the eggs are almost cooked to your desired consistency, remove them from the heat and continue stirring until they are fully cooked.

Add salt and pepper to taste, if desired.

Serve immediately. Enjoy!

That’s the first Sunday Brief. If it earned its fifteen minutes, forward it to somebody who needs a recipe and a reason to keep going. And if somebody forwarded this to you, welcome. Subscribe, and I’ll see you next Sunday.

Same table next week,

Slade

Recipes for Black Beans & Rice and Mango Avocado Salsa are below!

You can stretch beans. Add water and rice, and a pound of dried black beans can feed a family for days at roughly $1.50 a serving. Generations of families have run this math at their own kitchen counters.

But it’s hard to stretch a mango. Fresh fruit and vegetables cost what they cost, spoil when they spoil, and when a grocery budget gets tight, they are the first things families cut. That single fact explains almost everything else in this article.

Cold, hard math at the cash register

Groceries were already expensive, and they keep climbing. Federal economists at USDA project food prices rose another 3.2 percent between April 2025 and April 2026, with fresh produce climbing faster still. Those increases came on top of years of elevated inflation, and prices rarely fall back once a crisis eases.

Right now, roughly one in eight Americans buys groceries with help from SNAP, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. In fiscal year 2025, that meant about 22.6 million households every month. Working families, seniors on fixed incomes, veterans, children, and people whose paychecks stopped keeping up with the register.

The average benefit works out to about $6.17 per day per person, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. Six dollars a day supplements a grocery budget. It does not carry one. And on six dollars a day, the mango loses to the beans every time.

Programs help to get fresh food back

Nutrition incentive programs exist in nearly every state, and they target exactly the food that gets cut first.

The model is simple — spend SNAP dollars on fruits and vegetables, and the program matches them, often dollar for dollar. Families take home more fresh food. Local farmers sell more of what they grow. Neighborhood grocers and farmers markets see more business. The Nutrition Incentive Hub’s latest national evaluation found these programs generated more than $62 million in fruit and vegetable purchases between 2024 and 2025, reaching 225,000 families per month.

The best-known is Double Up Food Bucks, started run by the Fair Food Network. It was piloted in 2009 at five farmers’ markets in Detroit. One city, one simple idea: when healthy food is affordable, everyone benefits. Today Double Up operates in nearly 30 states, and it helped shape the federal grant program (the Gus Schumacher Nutrition Incentive Program, if you want the formal name) that now funds similar efforts across the country.

In my home state of Florida, and yours, too

Florida runs its own version. Fresh Access Bucks, a program of Feeding Florida, matches SNAP purchases dollar for dollar for fresh, Florida-grown fruits and vegetables. It works at more than 80 farmers markets, farm stands, CSAs, mobile markets, and community grocery stores statewide. No sign-up, no application. If you shop with a SNAP/EBT card at a participating location, the match is automatic.

Spend $10 in SNAP at a participating market, walk away with $10 more for Florida-grown produce. That is the mango problem, solved at the point of sale.

Ordinarily, you could go to freshaccessbucks.com and find a location near you. But because of a gap in state funding, this program has paused operations this month. These programs need our voices to keep their support going.

If you live elsewhere, the Nutrition Incentive Hub can point you to programs in your state.

A structural stretch

SNAP’s structure just changed in a way that puts these gains at risk.

For the program’s entire history, the federal government paid 100 percent of SNAP benefits. The budget reconciliation law signed in July 2025 changed that. Beginning in fiscal year 2028, states with payment error rates above 6 percent must pay a share of benefit costs, between 5 and 15 percent depending on the rate. States also take on a much larger share of administrative costs starting in late 2026.

Error rates sound bad, but the SNAP application requires surprisingly complex paperwork. Simple mistakes, even if states correct them, now put states on the hook for large sums. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities estimates 27 states face a projected cost shift of more than $100 million per year — per state. State legislatures are deciding right now how to absorb those costs, and options include tightening eligibility, cutting benefits, and making enrollment harder.

Translation: the future of the program that feeds one in eight Americans is being decided in state capitols, this year and next. Wherever you live, that budget fight is worth your attention.

What YOU can do

Move a purchase or two. If you can, shift part of your grocery list to a farmers market or an independent grocer rooted in your community. Food dollars spent locally keep farms in business, support local jobs, and keep money circulating close to home. Summer is peak growing season across most of the country, and here in South Florida, August means avocados and mangoes at their best.

Spread the word. Most eligible families have never heard of nutrition incentive programs. If you know someone shopping with SNAP, tell them about the match. In Florida, we hope Fresh Access Bucks will be available again soon.

Anywhere else, start with Double Up America or the Nutrition Incentive Hub to find a program near you.

Watch your statehouse. The SNAP cost shift lands in state budgets over the next two years. Legislators will hear from plenty of people about it. Make sure some of those people can name what six dollars a day buys.

And make the beans. The recipe from this week’s video, black beans and rice with Florida avocado and mango salsa, feeds four for about two dollars a serving with the fresh stuff included. The cheap part fills you up. The fresh part makes it a more complete meal.

Every family deserves both.

Black Beans and Rice

My wife Carla is Brazilian, and she has made rice and beans her whole life. In this recipe, I take pieces of her process (sautéing onion and garlic and toasting the rice first) and add my own spin (cooking it in broth with cumin and adding the beans directly to the rice instead of serving them separately). She immediately asked me for the recipe because she said it was so good.

That’s the best endorsement I’ll ever know. Please try these. You won’t be disappointed!

Ingredients

• 1 tablespoon olive oil

• 1/2 cup onion, finely diced

• 2 teaspoons minced garlic

• 1 1/2 cups long grain white rice (uncooked)

• 3 cups chicken broth

• 2 15-ounce cans black beans, drained

• 2 tablespoons lime juice

• 1/3 cup cilantro leaves, chopped

• 1 teaspoon ground cumin

• Pinch of salt and pepper

• Cilantro sprigs and lime wedges for garnish

Instructions

1. Heat the oil in a large pot over medium heat. Add the onion and cook for 2-3 minutes or until tender. Add the garlic and continue to cook until fragrant.

2. Add the rice and stir to toast it for 1-2 minutes.

3. Add chicken broth, cumin, and salt and pepper if desired. Bring the pot to a boil.

4. Cover the pot and turn the heat down to low. Simmer for 15 minutes or until rice is tender.

5. Stir the beans into the rice. Cover the pot and let sit off the heat for 3-5 minutes or until beans are warmed through.

6. Stir in the lime juice and cilantro. Taste and add more salt and pepper if desired.

7. Serve and garnish with cilantro sprigs and lime wedges. Enjoy!

Mango Avocado Salsa

This is the simplest and best mango avocado salsa you will find. In the video above, I used the tropical avocados you find here in South Florida, which are much bigger than Hass avocados, but the ingredient quantities below are for the more popular Hass variety. Nonetheless, if you can find the sweeter tropical avocados, I recommend giving them a try.

Ingredients

• 2 ripe mangoes, peeled, pitted, and cut into1/2-inch cubes

• 2 avocados, peeled, pitted, and cubed

• ½ cup red onion, diced

• ¼ cup cilantro, finely chopped

• 1 clove garlic, grated

• 1 jalapeño, seeded and minced

• Juice of ½ lime

• Pinch of salt (optional)

Instructions

1. In a large mixing bowl, add the mango, avocado, red onion, cilantro, jalapeño, and lime juice.

2. Toss the ingredients together until they’re fully combined. Taste, add salt if desired, and toss again.

3. Serve with chips and/or alongside my rice and beans (and any protein). Store leftovers in an airtight container in the fridge. Enjoy!

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.

My essay, posted yesterday as a guest contributor to The Preamble — Sharon McMahon’s Substack publication, shared again here.

Ted Lasso begins as a fish-out-of-water story: a Midwest college football coach is hired to manage a Premier League soccer club in Richmond, England. While Ted is set up to fail (on many fronts, it turns out), he navigates unfamiliar terrain using his novel brand of leadership and his ability to see people’s struggles as the path to their strengths.

His leadership style includes a number of key values — curiosity over judgment, a short memory to push past one’s failures, radical empathy, and more — that have resonated widely. In fact, Ted’s insights have become part of the curriculum at business schools. That’s heady stuff for a sports comedy series, now in the midst of its long-awaited fourth season. (This essay contains spoilers for seasons 1-3.)

But it isn’t just executives who can learn from Ted Lasso. In the show, the soccer club’s locker room is diverse, filled with players from around the world — each with different backgrounds, skills, and temperaments —serving different roles on the team. Ted and his coaching staff guide them through successes and setbacks alike by building a culture of belief: in themselves, in the team, and in the fundamental idea that every person matters.

Democracy shares this fundamental idea, and I believe America works best when we take a page from Ted’s playbook.

Let’s look at why … one “Lasso lesson” at a time.

“Be curious, not judgmental”

The most quoted scene of the show’s first season takes place at a pub, where Rupert — the owner of a rival soccer club — bets against Ted in a game of darts. As Ted lands three impressive darts for the win, he offers Rupert some advice: “Be curious, not judgmental.” Rupert had belittled and underestimated Ted while never showing an ounce of curiosity about him (such as whether he played a lot of darts).

But with that simple, powerful phrase, Ted reminded him that being judgmental is the easy path; it spares us the work of getting to know people or investing in our own self-discovery. Curiosity opens the mind to the possible. Communities can be built with either curiosity or judgment, but only one can readily survive disagreement or welcome strangers. Only one treats everyone as equals.

“Just because we own these teams doesn’t mean they belong to us”

Rebecca, the team’s owner, hires Ted, hoping he will fail. She aims to destroy the club her ex-husband loves. Her leadership is corrupted; she bullies her staff and exploits the public trust of her team to settle a personal score. But she comes to respect Ted and to want what’s best for the team.

So when a group of billionaire team owners hatches a plot for a breakaway super league that threatens their traditional fan base, Rebecca demands they reconsider: “Just because we own these teams doesn’t mean they belong to us.”

Leadership in our democracy is, by constitutional design, limited stewardship. The president, for instance, is a tenant of the White House, not the landlord. But this idea alone isn’t a perfect safeguard from rampant abuses of power, corruption, retribution, and self-enrichment.

Elected leaders must demonstrate they know the difference between their office and themselves. A steward’s test is what they do with their temporary authority: will they leave it in better shape than they received it, or strip it for parts on the way out?

“Belief doesn’t just happen because you hang something up on a wall”

The show’s icon is a handmade sign that reads “BELIEVE” in blue letters on yellow paper. It hangs above Ted’s office door. In season 3, Ted tears the sign down in front of the team, points to his chest, and reminds them that the power of belief resides inside each of us. We exercise it every day through the work we put in together.

Symbols of our belief in America are everywhere. Flags and laminated declarations remind us of our history and the sacrifices made to preserve our way of life. But our belief only works when it’s a practice, and our Constitution restrains the powerful only to the extent that we, the people, behave as though it does.

For elected officials, that means honoring an oath. Certifying an election victory for the other party. Checking a president’s power, even when it might cost them something. For the rest of us, it means the unglamorous work of organizing and showing up to vote, helping others to register and vote, and having hard conversations with people we love.

“You only ripped it up once …”

Nate Shelley begins as the kit man (equipment manager) nobody noticed. Ted raises him through the coaching ranks, where he becomes consumed with his own fame, then wounded when the attention fades. Nate’s insecurity curdles into grievance. He tears the BELIEVE sign in two, leaks information about Ted’s private mental health struggles to the press, and defects to manage the rival soccer club after being flattered by Rupert, that club’s billionaire owner.

Nate’s resentment of his circumstances at Richmond makes him vulnerable to radicalization. He is lured into a darker space and coaching philosophy, buoyed by a wealthy patron who made him feel powerful. But once he starts with the new club, everything falls apart.

The management there had created a transactional environment that undervalued relationships and trust, and overvalued winning at any cost. Nate soon leaves, and after some time away from the game, he regains his emotional footing and returns to Richmond, hoping for redemption.

There, he apologizes to Ted for everything — tearing down the sign, and revealing his private business to the world. Ted welcomes him back and accepts the apology, even admitting that he’d torn the sign down himself at least twice before.

Nate’s arc and Ted’s reaction embody both a major risk and an essential obligation of a functioning democracy.

Resentment is a renewable resource, and demagogues love to recruit the people who feel invisible, convincing them that their circumstance is a conspiracy. Rupert didn’t create Nate’s wound; he exploited it.

But that wasn’t the end of the story. Though Nate strayed from the right path, Ted kept the door open for him. A republic that offers no way home from grievance guarantees itself permanent enemies from within. We have millions of Nates in America, people flattered by a billionaire patron who is actually exploiting them because of the transactional, winners-and-losers way he views the world. What happens to them determines what happens to us.

Redemption should come at a cost — Nate had to earn his way back onto the Richmond coaching staff and steadily rebuild trust —but it must come nonetheless.

“Doing the right thing is never the wrong thing”

Sam, Richmond’s young Nigerian defender, learns that a team sponsor is owned by an oil company that has poisoned the water and the politics of his home country. He seeks advice from Ted, who tells him, “Doing the right thing is never the wrong thing.”

Sam takes Ted’s words to heart, and before a nationally televised match, he tapes over the sponsor’s logo on his jersey. It’s a risk: he is young and foreign, taking a stand against a company paying the club’s bills. But his teammates rally behind him, taping their jerseys as well in solidarity, and the club owner, Rebecca, refuses to cut Sam from the team at the sponsor’s behest.

In a separate plotline, Ted gets his own test. After Nate leaks the story that Ted had a panic attack in the middle of coaching a game, Ted has every incentive to keep lying about what happened. Instead, he sits in a press conference and tells the truth about his mental health. His transparency starves the scandal before it could devour his reputation.

In self-governance, we’re often told that decency and confrontation are opposites, that our country can be kind or it can be tough. This show demonstrates otherwise. Sam’s protest is confrontational, costly, and morally correct. Rebecca’s refusal to cut him puts real money on the line. Both actions come from the same trust and belief in a culture that also produces “Biscuits with the Boss” one-on-ones and impromptu “Diamond Dogs” bull sessions.

Doing the right thing doesn’t always come with an immediate reward. It can cost a sponsorship, a friendship, a job, a primary election. But if enough people tape over a logo or talk about the hard truths, that creates a space and a culture where the next person can afford to do the right thing, too.

Courage is contagious, and so is its absence.

For America’s sake, be the one who goes first.

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

More than 95,000 people signed a petition asking to keep him away.

Zohran Mamdani is the first Muslim mayor of New York, a city that holds the largest and most diverse Muslim population in the United States. Those two facts are America’s most powerful living rebuttal to the attacks of 25 years ago. Who better? Who better than a New York City mayor who is Muslim to demonstrate that Islam is not al-Qaeda or the Taliban, any more than Christianity is the KKK or white nationalism?

It’s a uniquely American circumstance. It might just represent what America is all about.

The numbers

On the morning of September 11, 2001, al-Qaeda’s core numbered fewer than one hundred members, by the Council on Foreign Relations’ count. There are two billion Muslims on Earth. For every man in that terror cell, twenty million Muslims woke up that day, prayed or didn’t, dropped kids at school, went to work, and had nothing to do with any of it.

Run the same math on my faith. Christianity claims 2.3 billion people worldwide. The Ku Klux Klan, which burned crosses in Christ’s name for a century, counts roughly 3,000 members today. Nobody asks a Christian mayor to skip a memorial because the Klan exists. Nobody should.

The country has moved in the wrong direction on this arithmetic. In March 2002, six months after the attacks, 25 percent of Americans said Islam was more likely than other religions to encourage violence. Today, per a new Pew study, it’s 51 percent. A quarter century of knowing our Muslim neighbors, and the suspicion doubled. That number is a choice we keep making.

The record

The attacks killed nearly 3,000 innocent people. About 60 of them were Muslim.

One was Mohammad Salman Hamdani, a 23-year-old from Queens. Pakistani-born, Star Wars fan, NYPD cadet, certified EMT. When the towers were hit, he drove toward them to help. For months his mother, Talat, searched hospitals and casualty lists, hoping he was among the injured who had lost their memory. Five months later, his remains were found near the North Tower, beside his medical bag. It was four months after the New York Post had cast him as a possible terrorist on the run, under the headline “Missing — or Hiding? Mystery of NYPD Cadet from Pakistan.”

The city buried him with full police honors. Congress wrote his name into law as an example of Muslim-American valor. His mother has spent years fighting to have him listed on the memorial among the first responders. “That’s where he belongs,” she said. “That’s why he went down there.”

One in nine New Yorkers is Muslim, more than 750,000 people. Roughly a thousand of them wear an NYPD badge. On September 11, they grieved as New Yorkers. By September 12, they grieved as suspects. A leader of the Council on American-Islamic Relations said it plainly that fall: the hijackers took one thing from American Muslims. “The only thing they took from us was the name of our faith. They stole it from us.”

America has run this experiment before, with other faiths and other names.

In 1928, New York Governor Al Smith became the first Catholic nominated for president. Millions of handbills warned he would take orders from the Pope. He lost in a landslide. Thirty-two years later, John F. Kennedy stood before Protestant ministers in Houston, declared himself the candidate “who happens also to be a Catholic,” and won.

After Pearl Harbor, we forced 120,000 Japanese Americans into camps. Some of their sons volunteered from behind the barbed wire and formed the 442nd Regimental Combat Team, one of the most decorated units in U.S. Army history. One of them, Daniel Inouye, lost his arm in Italy, earned the Medal of Honor, and rose to President pro tempore of the Senate, third in line to lead the country that once labeled him an enemy. His father’s words as he shipped out: “America has been good to us. Whatever you do, do not dishonor your country.”

On September 11, 2001, there were zero Muslims in Congress. In 2007, Keith Ellison took his oath on Thomas Jefferson’s personal Quran, a book the founder bought in 1765 and Congress has kept ever since. Today there are four. And this year, the city al-Qaeda wounded most deeply swore in a Muslim mayor.

It’s a repeating pattern: America scapegoats, then repents, then elevates. Slowly, imperfectly, at brutal cost to the scapegoated. But the arc is real, and it runs straight through New York.

The fabric

Six days after the attacks, President George W Bush walked into the Islamic Center of Washington and said, “The face of terror is not the true faith of Islam. Islam is peace.” Anti-Muslim hate crimes had spiked seventeen-fold that September. The following year, they fell by nearly two-thirds. Researchers credit W’s speech. Words from leaders matter.

So do hands.

A 30-foot American flag hung over Ground Zero during the site recovery; it was tattered and in pieces. Seven years later, volunteers carried the shredded flag to Greensburg, Kansas, a town a tornado had nearly wiped off the map. Survivors there began stitching it back together with fabric from their own storm-damaged flags. Over three years, the flag traveled to all 50 states, and 30,000 hands added stitches: wounded soldiers, Katrina survivors, Fort Hood families, students from Columbine, Pearl Harbor veterans aboard the USS Missouri. Restorers wove in blue wool from the flag that draped Lincoln’s box at Ford’s Theatre and thread from the original Star-Spangled Banner.

The man who led the project said a flag destroyed in New York, brought back to life by tornado survivors in a small Kansas town, is “what America’s all about.”

There’s a quilt, too. The United in Memory 9/11 Memorial Quilt, sewn by 3,600 volunteers from 18 countries. One block for every victim, 2,977 in all. Laid end to end, it would stretch five football fields. Nobody checked the religion of the hands holding the needles. A quilt is many fabrics refusing to come apart. That has always been the whole idea of this country. E pluribus unum is a sewing instruction.

The grief behind that petition is real, and it deserves to be named. Giovanni Galante lost his wife, Grace, in the towers. The Port Authority Police Department lost 37 officers that morning, the largest single-day loss in the history of American policing. Those families guard the plaza fiercely because they earned the right. And listen to what the petition’s organizer said about the mayor: “Not because he is Muslim. Because of who he supports.” Take him at his word. Americans can oppose a politician’s positions with everything they’ve got; that’s the country working. The ceremony settles the rest. No one gets a microphone. A mayor’s role on that plaza is to stand with the families of his city, head bowed, silent. Presence is not a speech. For the chief executive of New York, presence is the job.

On the question of who belongs, New York answered centuries ago. In 1657, about 30 settlers in Flushing, in what is now Queens, refused a colonial order to turn away Quakers. None of the signers were Quakers themselves. They wrote that they were “bounde by the law of God and man to doe good unto all men.” Historians call the Flushing Remonstrance a root of the First Amendment. It was written in the borough Zohran Mamdani represented before the city elected him mayor.

A young republic made the same promise in 1790, when George Washington wrote to the Jews of Newport, Rhode Island, a congregation unsure the new nation had room for them. The government of the United States, he told them, “gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance.” Every citizen shall sit in safety under his own vine and fig tree, “and there shall be none to make him afraid.”

On Friday, the names will be read. Salman Hamdani’s is among them, right where he belongs. Sixty Muslim names woven through 2,977, one fabric, torn on the same morning by the same evil. Standing with the families will be a Muslim New Yorker the city chose to lead it.

Twenty-five years ago, thousands of strangers picked up needles and repaired a flag.

For America’s sake, let’s keep stitching.

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