Thank you for watching! In the face of unrelenting disinformation and authoritarian actions, clear truth-telling and independent media are a necessity. If you value pro-democracy journalism, consider becoming a paid subscriber to my newsletter. Paid subscribers empower this work and gain access to exclusive benefits. Your support makes a difference.

Subscribe now

A researcher who worked at both OpenAI and Anthropic resigned this week with a warning: neither company is acting responsibly. Then Anthropic’s alignment science lead, who still works there, publicly agreed that the odds of AI killing all of humanity are greater than 10% within the next decade. This sent shockwaves through Washington, as lawmakers, mostly Democrats, called for robust AI regulation.

Whether you believe the worst-case AI predictions or not, we're way beyond the threshold worthy of robust regulation.

Common Power Executive Director Charles Douglas, who organizes doorknockers nationwide, and I broke down what happened and how Democrats should respond.

For me, the alarm went off earlier this summer with the Hugging Face hack. Around 1,200 AI agents were run through cybersecurity tests by OpenAI, some of them designed to be impossible. So the agents cheated, hacking Hugging Face, getting answer keys to their tests, and attempting to cover their tracks. They called themselves the collective. Only six ever considered telling a human.

I compared it to the Kobayashi Maru, the Star Trek test Captain Kirk beat by rewriting it. Charles is convinced I booked the whole episode just to make that reference (he’s half right). I asked what these agents would do when the goal is bigger than a test. Charles’s answer was chilling: anything willing to sacrifice itself to win won’t hesitate to sacrifice us.

Now lawmakers are scrambling. Senator Bernie Sanders wants a ban on superintelligence. Senator Ted Cruz called for guardrails, then pivoted to saying he’d rather have American killer robots than Chinese ones. Republicans announced an investigation into the hack. I asked where all of this was before an insider predicted our extinction.

Anthropic’s own misuse report says Houthi rebels used Claude to help guide missiles. Lawmakers have all the information they need. Charles brought up Rep. Jim Clyburn admitting to Astead Herndon that he’d only recently learned about ChatGPT. I called that inexcusable. Charles made the case that we can’t even have a real debate until the people writing the regulations understand the technology.

What happens next depends on what we do, and I argued that robust regulation is the only way forward. I give the companies disclosing these incidents some credit, though I don’t see them as benevolent actors. I suspect Elon Musk’s AI has had thousands of incidents like this that he isn’t reporting.

On data centers, Charles laid out the range, from AOC’s call for a moratorium to Rob Sand’s push for closed-loop water systems and tax-sharing deals with local communities. If Democrats want Congress back, he argued, they need that nuance. As Charles put it, anything is better than nothing. Right now, we’re at nothing at the federal level.

This brings me to the opportunity cost of Trump’s presidency. Government corruption and incompetence are a tax on the American people. Both in actual dollar amounts and in the cost of what we won’t achieve during this foolish admin. There have been measurable setbacks to human progress.

A self-organizing AI swarm launched a cyberattack. Unregulated profit-driven AI companies are racing toward superintelligence. Rather than handle the existential tech challenge of our time, Trump has us bogged down in foolishness. We need serious people in charge again. The next admin must boldly rebuild and push forward.

Needless to say, the 2028 Democratic candidate will have to come up with a robust plan to address this. It’s one of the greatest challenges of our time.

I appreciate those of you who tuned in live and contributed so much to the conversation. This is truly the best community on Substack. If you’re just catching it now, feel free to leave your thoughts in the comments and smash that like button.

You can watch our full conversation above. And, as always, thank you for supporting independent media.

If you want to knock doors alongside Charles and Common Power heading into the midterms, go to commonpower.org.

Thank you for watching! In the face of unrelenting disinformation and authoritarian actions, clear truth-telling and independent media are a necessity. If you value pro-democracy journalism, consider becoming a paid subscriber to my newsletter. Paid subscribers empower this work and gain access to exclusive benefits. Your support makes a difference.

Subscribe now

Every narrative heading into this election cycle told us the Senate map would be too difficult for Democrats. That narrative has collapsed, all due to President Trump’s weakness.

Common Power Executive Director Charles Douglas and I talked through some takeaways from the Democratic primaries, which Senate races organizers should be paying attention to, and so much more.

Charles is sending door knockers to Alaska, where Mary Peltola lost by roughly 7,000 votes in 2024. And Nebraska, where the path runs through an independent. Iowa, Maine, Texas, and North Carolina. We are no longer arguing about whether a flip is possible. We are arguing about which is the best path to get there.

The primaries told us why. The winning message has been working-class economics, and it travels across age, income, and region.

I appreciate those of you who tuned in live and contributed so much to the conversation. This is truly the best community on Substack. If you’re just catching it now, feel free to leave your thoughts in the comments and smash that like button.

You can watch our full conversation above. And, as always, thank you for supporting independent media.

If you want to knock doors alongside Charles and Common Power heading into the midterms, go to commonpower.org.

Thank you for watching! In the face of unrelenting disinformation and authoritarian actions, clear truth-telling and independent media are a necessity. If you value pro-democracy journalism, consider becoming a paid subscriber to my newsletter. Paid subscribers empower this work and gain access to exclusive benefits. Your support makes a difference.

Subscribe now

I was happy to sit down once again with of , and we had a genuinely great conversation. We could’ve talked for another few hours, and we probably will in the coming weeks on more lives. Thank you to everyone who watched live and persevered through a few attempts as Substack glitched! If you’re catching the recording now, welcome.

Alex opened with cautious progressive optimism and immediately backed it up. Turnout numbers, surprise primary wins, Angie Nixon winning the Senate nomination in Florida, and Abdul El-Sayed pulling off what he’s pulling off in Michigan. Alex made the point that the candidates refusing corporate money are the ones performing, and that this is a verdict on grassroots people power over money.

I said the same dynamic is showing up across ideological lines. Democrats across the spectrum are doing the same thing: speaking directly to what people are actually living through.

We spent real time on the affordability argument, because it’s the whole ballgame. Alex pointed out that the issue polling hasn’t moved since 2024. Groceries, rent, health care. Trump ran on fixing what people felt under Biden, and two years in, nothing has changed. In fact, he’s made it worse.

Meanwhile, Trump has said out loud that he doesn’t think about Americans’ financial problems while conducting his war. He’s made billions of dollars, a chunk of it from crypto, and he’s spending his attention on ballrooms and golf course expansions. Alex flagged the East Potomac Park plan, where a public national park with the cherry blossoms is getting bulldozed for a bigger course while public bike paths disappear. I keep calling him the personification of the K-shaped economy. Reagan sold trickle-down. This is trickle-up, straight into Donald’s pockets, and everybody can see it.

Alex made the sharpest structural point of the live, and I want to sit with it. Treating Trump as a spontaneous event is a mistake. He’s the product of decades of American politics that leaned on white supremacy, on unregulated capitalism at working people’s expense, and on the complicity in leaving all of it unaddressed.

I agreed and traced the line: Backlash to the Civil Rights era, then the Southern Strategy with Nixon’s dog whistles and Reagan’s welfare queens, then Trump ripping the mask off entirely. That’s why I want the next Democrat to be a builder. Prosecute the people who broke the law. Pass sweeping anti-corruption legislation. Codify the norms Trump shredded. Rebuild the agencies he dismantled, bring back USAID, go hard on affordability and health care. FDR fixed the banking crisis in a week. Stop pretending the tools don’t exist.

On the risks, Alex raised Texas: more than a million voters purged from the rolls and many polling places closed, plus the USPS mail-in ballot mess. We both think it backfires. When people feel their rights are being targeted, they plan accordingly.

Alex’s bigger worry is what comes after November: another round of stolen election lawsuits, and she’s right to name it. My answer is to get vigilant now. Read Democracy Docket, use Marc Elias’s resources, and sign up to be a poll worker, which Alex noted is a paid job. I’m bullish on Texas with Talarico, and on North Carolina, Alaska, and Josh Turek in Iowa. Alex thinks the Senate is genuinely in play.

Don’t let Republicans demoralize you. They’re the ones losing.

Thank you for watching! In the face of unrelenting disinformation and authoritarian actions, clear truth-telling and independent media are a necessity. If you value pro-democracy journalism, consider becoming a paid subscriber to my newsletter. Paid subscribers empower this work and gain access to exclusive benefits. Your support makes a difference.

Subscribe now

It’s been a few weeks since Don Lemon and I ran a Substack Live. We reassembled today to break down an important development.

Meta has agreed to a multi-billion-dollar settlement and major changes to how children interact with its platforms. I brought my tech background to this conversation, and Don Lemon brought his skeptical, pro-First Amendment journalist lens. What resulted was an excellent, nuanced discussion about what this settlement means.

I came with a big-picture take on Meta's settlement. My take was that if your platforms are so toxic that they're detrimental to the health of kids, then you need a top-down re-engineering of your algorithm and incentive structures. I called for federal regulation, transparency, and algorithm changes.

Don was justifiably more skeptical of Meta’s changes to how we interact with its platforms. He also broached “Big Brother” concerns over federal regulation, and wondered whether the responsibility should be more on parents.

We landed somewhere in the middle.

We both agreed, though, that federal regulation of social media companies under the Trump Administration would pose some pretty significant risks. I called for the future Democratic majority post-2028 to handle this, but to bring in real technologists that understand how these algorithms work.

This ended up being a surprisingly nuanced conversation about the social media landscape. I think you’ll enjoy it!

You can watch our full conversation above or check it out on YouTube below. Make sure to subscribe to Don's and my channel while you’re there. I’ve just started creating long-form video content there. Appreciate you all!

You’ll find the full video above and on my YouTube channel.

Below is an edited written version of the video piece.

Appreciate all of you, as always!

In 2016, the late Lindsey Graham sent this famous tweet, proclaiming that “If we nominate Trump, we will get destroyed.......and we will deserve it.”

He was right.

I’ve been reporting on Trump’s backfiring overreach since the start of his second term, and each time I do, I get flooded with comments about why his unpopularity doesn’t matter. But it very much matters. And in one very important way: he is leading the Republican Party into further political ruin.

We have to be clear about how much of a failure the Trump presidency has been. Trump and his Project 2025 allies entered office with a singular mission to crush the left and seek authoritarian power. Instead, they’ve revitalized a left-wing opposition and weakened the Republican Party.

Senator Graham’s words were as prophetic as they were revelatory of how the party as a whole would soon abandon their principles to back Trump. Or, which is more likely the case, they proved they never had any principles to begin with. Trump ripped the mask off the GOP, and the face that was revealed was an ugly one willing to push the country to the brink of authoritarianism as long as they had a seat at the table.

But that corrupt bargain is leading to their fall, just as Graham predicted.

The very same sycophantic Republican loyalty that helped manufacture Donald Trump’s rise will help facilitate his and the Republican Party’s demise.

No matter how much Trump pretends it doesn’t, political gravity still exists.

Let’s break down how the Republican Party’s alliance with Donald Trump has backfired and get into some of the numbers that prove Trump’s all-time-low approval rating is damaging the Republican Party down-ballot.

One of Trump’s most profound impacts on our politics is that he made indecent people think they no longer had to pretend to be decent in order to be accepted in society. Not only could shameless grifters be accepted, they could become rich and powerful.

When Republican lawmakers saw a corrupt bigot say whatever came to his mind and not only avoid consequences but go on to win the presidency, some felt they were granted a license to take off their decency masks, too.

But those who embraced depravity didn’t suddenly become that. They just stopped hiding their true nature. Because, of course, Trump didn’t create this problem. He is the inevitable culmination of the Republican Party’s Southern Strategy, where they subtly scapegoated people of color and immigrants for the economic woes of the white working class while legislating for the rich. Trump just moved from whispering dog whistles to yelling the quiet part out loud as he descended down his golden escalator in 2015.

That is the story of the modern Republican Party.

They entered into a political alliance with someone they knew was a depraved, reckless egomaniac. From Lindsey Graham to JD Vance to Mitch McConnell, countless Republicans have been clear-eyed about who Trump is, and embraced him anyway.

Trump has been well aware of this, and often referenced it in unintentionally self-aware ways, like in his recitation of the snake poem at his campaign rallies in 2016.

Republicans knew he was a snake when he walked in. They knowingly tied their political fate to him anyway, and now they refuse to break free.

There’s been a lot of attention on what’s happening in the Democratic Party, but the internal debates playing out in those primaries are healthy. What’s actually remarkable is how little dissent is tolerated within the MAGA establishment, and how that’s led to a fracturing coalition as Trump betrays his own base.

When Republicans do choose to speak out, like Marjorie Taylor Greene or Thomas Massie, they’re exiled from the party. Those who remain have chosen to be cogs in Trump’s machine.

Republicans have abdicated their oversight responsibility, effectively rendering the legislative branch a limp arm of the Trump Administration. They’ve done nothing as Trump and his team of loyalists moved with reckless abandon to gut the federal bureaucracy, eliminate pockets of independence in the executive branch, unilaterally dismantle agencies, reshape the global order by undermining economic and diplomatic alliances, target civil liberties, and attempt to consolidate power in the presidency.

As Trump unleashed tariffs that have unilaterally raised prices on Americans, Republicans have refused to exercise their constitutional duty to check the president. As Trump pushed forward the Big Beautiful Bill, which amounted to the largest legislative wealth transfer from the poor to the rich in American history, they passed it. As Trump’s ICE killed American citizens and immigrants alike, the Republican Party responded by rubber-stamping billions in new funding for DHS. As Trump wages a fruitless war in Iran that has further destabilized the Middle East, they’ve done nothing to rein him in.

The GOP owns the consequences of the Trump presidency, whether they like it or not.

Republicans have fully embraced the monster they helped create, even as this lame-duck, politically weak president becomes an undeniable liability.

Now, as Trump’s political project fails, he seems hell-bent on taking the party down with him.

Now, let’s get into the numbers.

Donald Trump is a historically unpopular president whose second term has been defined by corruption, authoritarian overreach, and incompetence.

I’m an independent journalist who has been covering Trump and American politics for over a decade now, and I’ve never seen his polling this bad. In my previous reporting, we’ve established just how weak President Trump is politically. And it’s only gotten worse with each passing week.

Multiple polls over the last few weeks have found Trump’s approval rating at an all-time low and his support among Republicans at an all-time low as well.

Last week, a new Reuters/Ipsos poll has Trump’s approval at an all-time low of 33%, after multiple polls over the last few weeks have put his approval rating at similar lows.

He is underwater on all key issues as Americans reject his abuses of power, betrayals of his campaign promises, his Iran War, and his raising of prices while he enriches himself.

When a president is this weak, usually, you’ll find members of their same party seeking to distance themselves from some of his more unpopular policies. But Trump won’t let Republicans do that.

I talked about this in my most recent appearance on MS NOW last week:

As I pointed out, Trump’s approval rating with Republicans is also seeing all-time lows. We’re also seeing those who strongly support the president seeing new lows as well.

It’s not just the polls showcasing this weakness. In elections over the past year and a half, Democrats have either won or significantly over-performed. The most notable example of this was the November 2025 off-year elections, which showcased massive Democratic wins and stunning Republican underperformances.

Democrats notched decisive wins in Virginia, New York, New Jersey, Maine, Georgia, and California, to name a few. Democrats saw double-digit wins in the Virginia and New Jersey governor races, and counties with heavy Latino populations saw double-digit swings to Democrats. We saw similar swings in special elections this year.

We’ve also seen evidence of Trump’s coalition fracturing in light of Trump’s weakness. Key MAGA media figures have diverged from the president on his cover-up of the Epstein Files and his reckless Iran War. There’s also evidence that the MAGA media ecosystem is fracturing and plummeting in viewership, which I covered in a previous video.

An NBC News poll at the end of last year showcased the splintering of MAGA, with traditional Republicans and MAGA-identifying Republicans now standing at 50/50. Since then, the all-time-low support among Republicans and declining strong support are also indicators.

In spite of the terrible polling, election losses, and splintering base, the Republican Party is still standing by Trump. This refusal to distance itself from Trump’s unpopular moves on the economy, immigration, and the Iran War has led to self-inflicted wounds to their midterm prospects.

One of the key indicators of how poorly Republicans are expected to do in the midterms can be found in the generic ballot. Democrats lead in the generic ballot by an average of about 6-7 points, with some polls, like a recent Emerson poll, showing that lead as high as 11 points.

That is above the 3.1% national popular vote advantage New York Times Chief Political Analyst Nate Cohn has said Democrats need to win the House to overcome this new GOP gerrymandered environment.

Nate Silver has also moved the chances Democrats take the Senate to nearly 60%.

Ahead of this expected loss, Trump is already throwing Republicans under the bus and blaming them for his unpopularity. In an interview with Punchbowl News earlier this month, Trump said that voters are angry at Republicans, not him.

“The question is, will they vote? Because a lot of them [voters] are very angry at Republicans, to be honest with you… They're not angry at me, but they are angry at Republicans.”

Prepare to hear a lot more of that after the midterms. Trump will blame his party for his own failures. That’s fine by me. It surely won’t help Republicans in 2028.

Ultimately, I think Trump’s attempts to interfere in the midterms will fail, as I’ve reported before in previous pieces. Then, Trump will be bogged down in congressional oversight for the first time this term. He’ll continue to act out in desperate ways, but those moves will be exactly that: desperate. Not from a place of power, but from a place of weakness, as his presidency falters and his legacy is defined as the worst president of all time.

The clock is ticking as the Republican congressional majority’s days are numbered.

Republicans own this, and there’s nothing they can do to convince Americans otherwise.

History is littered with political establishments thinking they can control a raging authoritarian. By the time they realize they can’t, it’s too late. Fortunately for us, it’s not too late for democracy.

Americans have repeatedly shown they will not stand for this. And they will so once again, in unmistakable numbers this November.

So, while the title of this video is how Trump is destroying the Republican Party, the truth is, they’ve destroyed themselves. And they deserve it.

If you enjoyed this video, smash that like button and subscribe. I’m going to dedicate a lot more time to longer-form videos like this. I’m a firm believer that curiosity is a more powerful algorithmic driver than outrage-bait, and I’ll continue to test that theory with these videos. If you’ve made it this far in the video, you’ve validated that optimistic belief, and I hope you consider supporting my work.

I’m an independent journalist who has been covering Trump for over a decade now. I’ve made appearances on MS NOW and CNN, and my work has been cited in The New York Times and The Washington Post. I documented every day of Trump’s first term and was among the first to cover Project 2025 back in 2023. Now, I run a best-selling Substack publication called Ahmed Baba News, where you can read more of my work and become a paid subscriber if you’re interested.

With right-wing consolidation of mainstream media accelerating, independent media is more important than ever.

Thank you for watching, and see you around!

Thank you for watching! In the face of unrelenting disinformation and authoritarian actions, clear truth-telling and independent media are a necessity. If you value pro-democracy journalism, consider becoming a paid subscriber to my newsletter. Paid subscribers empower this work and gain access to exclusive benefits. Your support makes a difference.

Subscribe now

I joined Money, Power Politics on MS NOW once again for the full hour. The brilliant Antonia Hylton was filling in for Stephanie Ruhle, and we had a powerhouse panel with MS NOW Senior Editor Anthony Fisher, Democratic strategist Basil Smikle, and CNBC Fast Money Contributor Dan Nathan.

We covered a lot of ground, but three things kept connecting back to each other. Trump’s numbers are cratering. ICE keeps moving without accountability while seeking more power. And Trump keeps enriching himself while raising our prices and spending our taxpayer dollars on vanity projects.

You can watch key moments from the appearance above, read key takeaways below, and check out the first two full segments of the appearance linked at the bottom of this piece from YouTube.

I also just wanted to thank you all for your support! It’s because all of you who like, share, and subscribe to this work that I get these opportunities to speak truth on bigger stages. Just wanted to share a note of gratitude.

Ok, now let’s dive in.

Trump Is Leading The GOP Into Political Ruin

The polling this month has been brutal for Trump, and the number that matters most is not his topline approval. It is what is happening to him inside his own party.

• Multiple polls have found Trump’s overall approval rating and support among Republicans at an all-time low. The American people are rejecting his abuses of power, betrayals of his campaign promises, fruitless war, and price hikes.

• I pointed out that Trump will never do what Pelosi did in 2018, when she told Democrats to run against her personally if that is what it took to win their districts. Trump is going to demand that every Republican candidate defend all of his unpopular policies.

• That is a losing position heading into the midterms. He is leading the GOP into political ruin.

I did a standalone video on Trump’s declining approval ratings if you’d like to dive deeper:

ICE Doesn’t Need Shock Gloves. They Need Accountability.

Antonia asked what happens when you put a tool like an electric shock glove into the hands of a force with an excessive force problem. My answer was that it escalates, and that we already have four cases proving nobody will answer for it.

• The killers of Renee Good, Alex Pretti, Joan Sebastian Guerrero, and Lorenzo Salgado Araujo are still walking free. There have been no criminal charges.

• Instead, DHS has lied to try to protect them. In one case, they claimed a man used his vehicle as a weapon, a claim his own coworkers directly disputed.

• I said that if these were police officers, we would have seen faster accountability than this even before George Floyd. The proposed shock gloves would give officers a quieter way to hurt people, where you might not even know it is happening. It must be shut down.

Trickle-Up Economics Into Donald’s Pockets

Politico found that 65% of Americans are dissatisfied or upset about Trump’s construction projects. It’s not complicated as to why. These projects are a visual representation of his desecration of the office and self-interested grifts.

• Trump is grifting billions while raising prices on Americans and spending nearly $900M of our taxpayer dollars on his vanity projects.

• Our affordability crisis is the culmination of the lie of trickle-down economics. Now we have trickle-up economics into Donald’s pockets.

• I argued that if Democrats are smart, they will tie these projects directly to his profiteering off the presidency. It is a visual representation of his desecration of the office.

I did a standalone video on Trump’s grifts if you’d like to dive deeper:

The Bottom Line

Trump is at his weakest point politically, and yet he is still grifting, spending our taxpayer dollars on his vanity projects, and refusing to hold anyone accountable for people killed by ICE. Those are not separate stories. They are what happens when a president believes there is no cost to anything he does.

The midterms will be that cost.

If this analysis mattered to you, I hope you consider becoming a paid subscriber to Ahmed Baba News. Independent media runs on the people who back it. You’ll help empower my work as I get to bring my pro-democracy journalism to increasingly bigger stages. I couldn’t be more appreciative. We’re making an impact!

Subscribe now

Thank you for watching! In the face of unrelenting disinformation and authoritarian actions, clear truth-telling and independent media are a necessity. If you value pro-democracy journalism, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber to my newsletter. Paid subscribers empower this work and gain access to exclusive benefits. Your support makes a difference.

Subscribe now

New reporting from The New York Times has revealed the MAGA media ecosystem is seeing its audiences collapse as Trump’s unpopular presidency fractures his coalition.

Let me explain.

I’m an independent journalist who has been covering Trump and American politics for over a decade. I documented every day of Trump’s first term and was among the first to cover Project 2025 back in 2023.

The threat of Trump’s authoritarianism has been the focal point of my journalism. So I'm not spreading false hope when I report that Trump is weakening and his MAGA coalition is fracturing. The data backs it up.

Now, we have new evidence that the MAGA media ecosystem is fracturing as well.

A new report from Stuart Thompson at The New York Times is headlined “The MAGA Media Machine Is Fracturing.”

The report provides new quantitative analysis that found some of the biggest MAGA media figures are seeing their audiences plummet.

Cumulative views on algorithmic platforms are down significantly since Trump’s inauguration. Weekly YouTube views are down by 50 million, Twitter views are down by nearly 700 million, and Rumble views are down by nearly 30 million. Only podcast views have remained relatively stable.

In order to assess this, The New York Times analyzed years’ worth of data across podcasting platforms, YouTube, X, and Rumble. They focused on 12 of the biggest right-wing content creators: Tucker Carlson, Benny Johnson, Megyn Kelly, Steve Bannon, Dan Bongino, Ben Shapiro, Candace Owens, Steven Crowder, Matt Walsh, Nick Fuentes, Tim Pool, and Charlie Kirk, whose accounts are still being run by his team after his death.

You can see here that analysis of the weekly YouTube views of the individual creators shows an overall drop in average views, with some down over 20 million views from their highs.

This reduction in viewership comes after major rifts opened up in the MAGA coalition as Trump betrayed his promises on releasing the Epstein files and no new wars. Division over the Iran War, outrage over the Trump Admin’s cover-up of the Epstein files, and very real anger over Trump’s worsening of the affordability crisis have caused many Republican voters to turn on President Trump. Trump has registered a record low approval among Republicans in multiple polls, showing it in the 70s.

I covered this in a previous video:

It’s harder to sell people culture wars and grievances when your president’s policies are directly hurting their bottom line.

This has opened up an opportunity for right-wing, anti-Trump content.

Content creators who have spoken out against Trump, like Candace Owens and Tucker Carlson and Megyn Kelly, have managed to garner momentary spikes in viewership as others have collapsed.

It’s good to see more MAGA figures speaking out against Trump, but, as I’ve often said, this is not a moral awakening. They see Trump weakening, and know there’s an anti-Trump “America First” lane opening up, so they’re pivoting to a new market they can monetize as Trump’s fall accelerates.

As soon as Marjorie Taylor Greene began speaking out against Trump, I called this out. This was me in October of last year on MS NOW:

This matters. Leading MAGA figures speaking out against Trump provides a permission structure for others to do the same. It’s why we’ve seen comedian podcasts and the manosphere also turning on Trump.

For a decade, Donald Trump and his right-wing allies have weaponized disinformation to sell the public on their false version of reality. Now, the same information ecosystem that facilitated his rise is documenting his fall.

If you enjoyed this video, smash that like button, follow me on all the socials, and share.

And I hope you consider becoming a free or paid subscriber to Ahmed Baba News. With right-wing consolidation of mainstream media accelerating, independent media is more important than ever.

Thank you for watching!

Thank you for watching! In the face of unrelenting disinformation and authoritarian actions, clear truth-telling and independent media are a necessity. If you value pro-democracy journalism, consider becoming a paid subscriber to my newsletter. Paid subscribers empower this work and gain access to exclusive benefits. Your support makes a difference.

Subscribe now

Common Power Executive Director Charles Douglas hopped on this live fresh off knocking doors for Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan and Justin Pearson in Tennessee. Both won. El-Sayed won after roughly $70 million was spent against him, and Charles was blunt about what closed that gap. It was people. Volunteers, advocates, and neighbors in rooms and on porches, in rural counties and metro precincts, with the oldest voters and the youngest ones.

What made this conversation useful was that we did not stop at the celebration. I talked to Charles about the demographic breakdowns, the ones showing progressive candidates underperforming with Black voters and with lower-income voters while overperforming with highly educated white voters. He gave me his perspective.

We also got into the Amir Hassan story out of Michigan’s 8th, which is one of the most clarifying things to happen in a Republican primary this year. Charles heard about it in real time on the show.

From there we talked about trust. Charles told a story about a Black couple who pulled up to a polling place not knowing there was a Senate race at all, and what changed their afternoon was the fact that Charles looked like them. That anecdote powered the second half of the show, into his thesis about young Muslims and young Jews building the coalition that heals this party, and into Justin Pearson winning a district that Tennessee Republicans redrew to hurt him.

It was a high-energy hour with a lot of laughing in it. We got into high-level analysis, and somewhere in there we agreed that a well-executed Obama impression remains an underrated campaign asset.

I appreciate those of you who tuned in live and contributed so much to the conversation. This is truly the best community on Substack. If you’re just catching it now, feel free to leave your thoughts in the comments and smash that like button.

You can watch our full conversation above and read key takeaways below. And, as always, thank you for supporting independent media.

Beating Money With People

Charles framed Abdul El-Sayed’s win as proof of concept for the model his organization has been betting on, and I framed it as a survival skill for a general election that is about to get a lot more expensive.

• A spending gap offset by volunteers. Charles kept returning to the number, roughly $70 million spent against one of the biggest Senate candidates on the left. His answer for what beat it was people power, and his conclusion was that any Democrat hoping to win in November needs a candidate who can marshal regular people in neighborhoods rather than just buy airtime.

• The coalition was wider than the caricature. Charles pointed out that El-Sayed did not just run up numbers in the usual progressive strongholds. He won some rural counties, pulled from the middle class, and performed with both the oldest and the youngest voters, while Stevens took the metros.

• This is the skill set the money era demands. I made the case that beating that kind of spending is the exact credential a general election candidate needs right now, given the recent Supreme Court ruling loosening how corporate PAC money can coordinate with campaigns and Elon Musk announcing another $100 million. A candidate who can garner grassroots support is the one thing that money has not figured out how to buy.

The Unity Came Fast, And It Should Come Faster Everywhere Else

The part that surprised both of us was the speed of the reconciliation. Charles admitted he had been worried about Michigan for weeks, because the race had slid from a policy fight into character attacks. Then the losing side folded it up and got behind the winner within hours.

• Haley Stevens did not make anyone wait. Her statement said she was proud to offer her support, and she hugged El-Sayed on stage at their unity breakfast the next morning. Charles said the images gave him hope precisely because he had watched the primary devolve into personal attacks, which he warned last week is the kind of fight that leaves lasting damage on our side.

• Schumer’s PAC had the ad locked and loaded. Senate Majority PAC dropped a Don’t Stop Believing ad for El-Sayed right after helping spend tens of millions against him. Charles read the timing as evidence they were always prepared to put it back together, and we both agreed it is one of the best Democratic ads either of us has seen this cycle.

• I want this to be the standard, not the exception. I said what Haley Stevens did is what Jasmine Crockett needs to do. I am still waiting on a more full-throated embrace of James Talarico from her. The Michigan race was far more vitriolic than the Texas primary, where James Talarico ran on sunshine and rainbows and never said anything negative about his opponent, which makes the delay harder to justify.

A Different Way To Look At The Demographic Splits In Dem Primaries

This was the analytical core of the show. I brought the data, and Charles gave an answer that reframed the whole question.

• I asked the question people did not want me asking. Progressive candidates keep underperforming with Black voters in primaries, and in Michigan, lower-income and working-class voters broke toward Stevens while highly educated white voters broke toward El-Sayed. My honest confusion was about the second part. If the entire message is built around the working class, something is getting lost between the message and the people it is written for.

• The Black electorate that shows up is not the whole Black community. Charles made the point that primary data captures older voters disproportionately, and that younger Black voters do not vote like older ones. He added that when someone tells him at the door that their vote does not count, it is almost always a young Black man, and that suppression shapes the sample before anyone runs a crosstab.

• The Voting Rights Act theory. Charles presented a theory: Voters old enough to remember having no rights in 1964 and rights in 1965 believe government can deliver transformative change overnight, so the silent generation often reads more like Gen Z than like boomers. The youngest boomers came of age entirely after that shift, learned politics as incremental tinkering, and became the don’t rock the boat voters.

• He heard the same thing in rural Tennessee. Gen X and boomer voters told Charles at the door that they loved Justin Pearson but thought he was too loud, and that being that loud was going to get everybody in trouble. Charles said the identical instinct shows up in Detroit.

• Where you get your news predicts how you vote in a primary. Charles argued that voters with less formal education still get most of their news from television and still trust those outlets, and that this group lines up closely with establishment primary voters. On the flip side, he thinks that independent media audiences are self-selecting into information seeking, which is why they lean toward bolder candidates.

Amir Hassan Found Out What Selling Out Buys You

I got to break this story to Charles live, which was worth the setup. It is the most revealing thing to happen in a Republican primary this cycle, and it took about ninety seconds to explain.

• The setup sounds like a joke and is not. Amir Hassan, a Black ex-Muslim who went full MAGA, ran in Michigan’s 8th and was endorsed by Donald Trump and by Mike Johnson. He was embraced by the MAGA establishment at the highest level available to a first-time House candidate.

• The base rejected him anyway. MAGA came after him with Islamophobic attacks, insisted he was still a Muslim, and spread lies about him despite Trump’s endorsement. A Trump endorsement did not override what the movement’s own voters decided about his name.

• He lost to a man who had already quit. Tom Smith dropped out of the race, did not fundraise, and had essentially no online presence, and he beat Hassan by nearly 20 points. Hassan posted a visibly shaken video afterward, and my read is that he genuinely expected to walk into Congress on the strength of that endorsement.

• The lesson for every sellout watching. You are not protected from the bigotry at the center of Trump’s movement by embracing their far-right ideology. They do not like you. I said on the show that Vivek Ramaswamy is going to run into some version of the same wall.

Representation Cultivates Trust, And It Matters

Charles spent election day doing poll greeting and watching at a Michigan polling place, and what he learned there impacted how both of us think about persuasion.

• The couple who did not know there was a Senate race. A Black couple pulled up, asked him what was going on, and did not recognize either El-Sayed or Haley Stevens. He gave them the pitch on money out of politics and Medicare for All, and the man looked at him and said, “You’re one of me, huh?” Charles, who is Black and Filipino, said yes, and they went in and voted.

• He traced that moment back to policy, not vibes. Charles connected it to segregation, redlining, and Jim Crow keeping communities physically apart, and said those cultural effects still reverberate through generations. He also framed it as trust rather than tribalism, meaning trust that the person talking to you understands what your life actually looks like.

• Everyone in political media assumes too much knowledge. I made the point that most people are living their lives, too stressed or too busy to track any of this, which is why the Iran war broke through when other stories did not. The gas tank was the headline. Every appearance I do, I try to present the story as if the audience is hearing it for the first time, the way Charles did on that corner. And the fact that people listen most to people who look like them shows why we need more representation everywhere. That is also why we need more Black voices in independent media, because the trust problem does not stop at the door.

• My post about names went semi-viral for a reason. I wrote that between Abdul El-Sayed and Zohran Mamdani, this is the biggest year for names that scare Fox News since Barack Hussein Obama pulled off the W. The replies filled up with Arab and Muslim people saying some version of “we out here,” because when you walk into spaces dominated by people nothing like you, the name arrives before you do. People can relate to other people who have experienced this. It’s why I feel connected to Abdul El-Sayed in spite of us living totally different lives. Representation matters.

The Coalition That Could Heal This

Charles has now been in the room for two of the most talked-about wins on the left, and he noticed the same crowd both times. His thesis about what that crowd becomes was the most forward-looking thing either of us said.

• The rooms in Detroit and Astoria looked alike. He said El-Sayed’s watch party was full of young Muslim and Arab people, and that when he was in Astoria for Zohran Mamdani he saw those same faces plus a lot of young Jewish people.

• Young Muslims and young Jews are the repair. Charles argued this is the thing that heals the Democratic Party, because these communities agree on far more than the people insisting they are permanent enemies want to admit. He pointed to what happens when Jon Ossoff becomes more prominent, and people hear him and Mamdani in conversation rather than in opposition.

• The platform has to carry all of it. I laid out what ties the coalition together: an economic populist message, an anti-corruption message, and a clear pro-human-rights position, built into one cohesive narrative. A candidate who can hold those three at once is the candidate who can hold the coalition.

Justin Pearson In Tennessee Shows How To Fight Gerrymandering

The Tennessee result got less national attention and deserves more, because it is a case study in what happens when a party draws a district to weaken someone and accidentally hands him a bigger platform.

• They ran the election on a Thursday. Charles said Tennessee moved the vote off Tuesday because the state does not want Black people voting and does not want poor white people voting either. Making it hard is the design, not a side effect.

• Memphis got cracked into three districts. Rather than packing Black voters into one seat, the map splits them, and Pearson’s district now runs along 13 counties from Memphis nearly to Nashville. Charles said it took his teams about four hours to drive across it to knock on doors.

• The redder map may have helped him. He won with more than 60 percent against a candidate backed by Cohen, the white incumbent who held that seat for 30 years. Charles credits the margin to Pearson talking with voters who had never cast a ballot for a Democrat in a federal race, including rural white voters who are middle class rather than poor.

• Pearson is not a moderate, and it did not matter. He has fought for the environment in Tennessee for years, opposes data centers, and supports Medicare for All. He is running as a further left candidate in territory the map was drawn to deny him.

• Common Power falls in love in the primary and then gets to work. Charles said their thesis is that moving the country away from MAGA requires pulling the general further left, and that the new middle will end up looking like where we were a decade ago. After the primary, they knock for whoever is not insane, which currently includes independents like Dan Osborn and moderate Democrats like Roy Cooper.

Bottom Line

This was a winning week, and the reason it was a winning week is the same in every race we covered. The progressive movement beat roughly $70 million in Michigan. Justin Pearson won a district Tennessee Republicans redrew to weaken him by talking to people who had never voted for a Democrat.

The Democratic establishment in Michigan also deserves credit for closing ranks within hours, and I want that speed to become the standard for every candidate who loses a primary from here forward.

The primary season is almost over. After that, the Democratic Party must unite behind the most important goal: defeating the Republican congressional majority.

If you want to knock doors alongside Charles and Common Power heading into the midterms, go to commonpower.org.

Thank you for watching! In the face of unrelenting disinformation and authoritarian actions, clear truth-telling and independent media are a necessity. If you value pro-democracy journalism, consider becoming a paid subscriber to my newsletter. Paid subscribers empower this work and gain access to exclusive benefits. Your support makes a difference.

Subscribe now

This week, James Matthewson and I spent the bulk of our episode on the Michigan Senate primary results, and the surprising view of its candidates from the UK.

We closed on Andrew and Tristan Tate, who are fighting UK extradition for their human trafficking crimes. We also got into why men like Tate, and members of Congress like Max Miller, have felt so comfortable operating without consequence.

I appreciate those of you who tuned in live and contributed so much to the conversation. This is truly the best community on Substack. If you’re just catching it now, feel free to leave your thoughts in the comments.

You can watch our full conversation above and read key takeaways below. And, as always, thank you for supporting independent media.

Michigan’s Israel Litmus Test And What It Exposed

James opened the show admitting he had gotten the Michigan Senate primary almost completely backward. Several of his contacts in the UK assumed Haley Stevens, the establishment-backed Democrat, was actually the Republican in the race, based entirely on how she talked about Israel. There aren’t primary elections in the UK, so that was the source of the confusion. The race further clarified how toxic Israel and AIPAC have become to the Democratic Base.

• Israel Became The Line Nobody Could See Past. James said that when he looked into Stevens after seeing her speak, he assumed she was Republican, and when he checked with friends back home they told him the same thing, all based on her rhetoric around Israel and AIPAC backing, which he estimated at tens of millions of dollars. I said that money has become a liability inside the current Democratic base rather than an asset, and that Stevens speaking like a traditional Democrat about Israel from a few years ago shows how fast the ground has shifted under this issue.

• British Media Found Their Own Way In. James said UK outlets largely covered the race through the lens of Hasan Piker’s involvement, since Piker’s ban from Britain over his comments on Hamas and Hezbollah gave British press a domestic hook to justify covering an American primary they would otherwise have treated as background noise.

Tate’s Reckoning And The Shame Trump Erased

We closed on Andrew Tate’s extradition case, which James has been tracking closely from the UK side. It turned into a conversation about a culture where shame stopped functioning as a check on bad behavior, and what it looks like when institutions finally start clawing that back.

• Three UK Counties Are Building The Case. James walked through how three different English police forces are prosecuting the Tate brothers while they remain in the US awaiting extradition. He said UK authorities have already seized several million dollars tied to the brothers and, unusually, are paying it out immediately to fund anti-misogyny programs in schools rather than letting it sit in a general fund.

• Max Miller Said The Quiet Part Out Loud. James referenced a Jake Tapper interview where Congressman Max Miller, facing multiple domestic abuse allegations, refused to step aside and pointed directly to Trump’s own political survival despite dozens of accusations as his justification for staying in his seat.

• Trump Built The Permission Structure. I argued Trump is the reason figures like Tate and Miller feel safe operating the way they do, because he proved shamelessness gets rewarded rather than punished. I said the fix has to include actually bringing shame back as a tool, and that classroom conversations like the ones the UK is now funding, where boys hear directly why this behavior is disgusting, and girls feel empowered to say so out loud, are a real part of rebuilding that.

Bottom Line

That's where we left it this week. Michigan's primary is a preview of arguments Democrats are going to keep having all the way to 2028, and the Tate brothers are finally facing consequences that took far too long to arrive. Glad we got into both.

Support independent media and analysis that fearlessly tells the truth. If you have not yet become a paid subscriber to Ahmed Baba News, you can do that below. It truly means a lot.

Subscribe now

Thank you for watching! In the face of unrelenting disinformation and authoritarian actions, clear truth-telling and independent media are a necessity. If you value pro-democracy journalism, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber to my newsletter. Paid subscribers empower this work and gain access to exclusive benefits. Your support makes a difference.

Subscribe now

We are witnessing self-dealing, grift, and foreign influence peddling at a scale never before seen in this country. Trump is the most corrupt president in American history, and it’s not even close.

Let’s jump into how Trump exploits the White House as an asset on the Trump family balance sheet, how he profits from industries he oversees, and how his decisions are tainted by conflicts of interest.

Trump’s self-dealing in his second term makes his first term grifts look like child’s play.

According to Bloomberg’s Tim O’Brien, Trump has earned more money in the first year and a half of his second term than in the previous 60 years of his life.

Pubic financial disclosure forms and analysis from The New York Times show Trump’s 2025 income at a staggering $2.24 billion. This includes $1.44 billion from Trump family crypto projects, which is an industry Trump has pushed friendly policies for.

Trump’s family crypto firm World Liberty Financial has netted Trump $799 million, as the firm has taken on big deals, including an Abu Dhabi-backed entity that used $2 billion in World Liberty Financial's "USD1" stablecoin to fund an investment in Binance. There’s also the $TRUMP memecoin, which Trump has earned $636 million and sold dinner access to him in exchange for purchases. And of course, there’s $125 million in foreign golf and real estate earnings.

Analysis from New Yorker investigative reporter David Kirkpatrick found his total profiteering from the presidency in both terms to be a total of $4 billion. That analysis was published in January of this year. It’s likely ballooned since then.

There is more grift to come, with new $10 billion Trump real estate projects set to launch in Saudi Arabia. In the United Arab Emirates, the Trump family has a new $1 billion Trump International Hotel & Tower being developed in Dubai. The UAE tower is being built by the same Saudi-backed development firm, Dar Global. Not to mention the Qatari plane gifted to Trump.

These transactions are important because all decisions have to be analyzed through the lens of conflicts of interest.

Trump’s ventures have created an unprecedented opportunity for foreign-influence peddling and pay-to-play access to the presidency. Trump is indicating to the world that US policy is up for sale to the highest bidder.

Trump has given pardons to people who have financially benefited his family businesses, like the Binance founder who boosted his family stablecoin. Trump has pushed friendly regulations to industries he’s invested in. And he’s also made foreign policy decisions that benefit companies he’s directly invested in and demonstrated a pattern of making fake Iran Deal announcements that enable what appears to be large-scale insider trading. I talked about this on MS NOW:

Trump’s stock portfolio includes defense contractors like Northrop Grumman and Lockheed Martin while waging a war that requires the US to purchase more from defense contractors. He owns NVIDIA while greenlighting NVIDIA chip sales to China. He’s made Truth Social posts after suspiciously timed oil trades.

Now, Trump is selling early access to his market-moving Truth Social posts, which to me looks like direct pay-to-play insider trading.

This is all a stunning level of corruption that deserves scrutiny and accountability.

What happens when the president monetizes every facet of his office? What does the presidency become when a con man uses it as a vehicle for his self-enrichment? All while unilaterally raising prices on Americans. It becomes a kleptocracy.

Trump is the personification of the K-shaped economy.

If Democrats win, we will surely see countless investigations into these grifts. The American people have an opportunity in these midterms to do what the Republican Party has refused to do: hold him accountable.

If you enjoyed this video, smash that like button, follow me on all the socials, and share.

And I hope you consider becoming a paid subscriber to Ahmed Baba News. With right-wing consolidation of mainstream media accelerating, independent media is more important than ever.

Thank you for watching!

Ahmed Baba News

Independent pro-democracy journalism, analysis, and commentary. Delivered to your inbox 2 to 4 times a week. Become a free or paid subscriber.

Thank you for watching! In the face of unrelenting disinformation and authoritarian actions, clear truth-telling and independent media are a necessity. If you value pro-democracy journalism, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber to my newsletter. Paid subscribers empower this work and gain access to exclusive benefits. Your support makes a difference.

Subscribe now

Donald Trump is reaching new levels of unpopularity and weakness. An avalanche of polls out this week found his overall approval rating hitting all-time lows and his support among Republicans hitting an all-time low as he faces strong majority disapproval on the key issues that matter most to Americans. His overreach, incompetence, and failures are catching up to him.

Before we dive into the data, some context. I’m an independent journalist who has been covering Trump for over a decade now. I’ve made appearances on MS NOW and CNN, and my work has been cited in The New York Times and The Washington Post. I documented every day of Trump’s first term and was among the first to cover Project 2025 back in 2023. Now, I run a best-selling Substack publication called Ahmed Baba News.

This has to be the absolute worst week of polls that I have ever seen for Donald Trump. 4 polls this week found Trump’s approval rating either reaching new lows or matching all-time lows.

The lowest low comes from a Quinnipiac University poll out on Wednesday that found Trump’s approval at a dismal 32% - an all-time low for that poll.

An AP-NORC poll out on Thursday found Trump’s approval at 33%, down from 37% the previous month. This is the lowest rating on record for this poll since the start of Trump’s second term. The sharpest decline in support was found among Republicans, with a 10-point drop. More on his declining GOP support in a bit.

An Economist/YouGov poll released on Tuesday found Trump with 34% approval, marking Trump’s lowest approval YouGov has found in Trump’s second term, and matching his all-time low. They also found a record disapproval of 62% and a net approval of -28 points.

A CNN/SSRS poll released on Wednesday also found Trump’s approval rating at just 34%, which matches Trump’s all-time low in the aftermath of January 6. Yes, Trump is just as unpopular as he was in the aftermath of inciting an insurrection.

Now, this CNN poll is where things get uniquely dire for Trump. Because this poll also found that just 78 percent of Republicans approve of Trump, a new all-time low in this poll. It also found that just 19% of Republicans say they’re enthusiastic about the rest of his second term, down from 38% last spring.

The Quinnipiac University poll we talked about earlier had similar findings, with Trump’s approval among Republicans at only 76%, which is a 9-point drop from the previous month.

You might be thinking, approval in the 70s among Republicans is still high. What matters here is the contrast, because he has typically maintained support levels among Republicans in the high 80s and 90s. So this is evidence of Trump’s base cracking.

And we know why. CNN’s poll found that 65% of Americans say Trump’s policies have “worsened the economic conditions in the country,” 67% say Trump’s military decisions in Iran have hurt the US, and 73% of Americans say that Trump hasn’t paid enough attention to the country’s most important problems.

A breakdown of polling on Trump’s handling of key issues gives even more detail. Quinnipiac found that Trump’s disapproval on immigration is at 57%, on trade it’s 58%, on the economy it’s 62%, on foreign policy it’s 62%, and on Iran it’s 66%. These are stark swings, especially on immigration and the economy, issues Trump used to be strong on.

All of this comes as Democrats lead in the generic ballot by an average of about 6-7 points, with some polls, like the latest Emerson poll, showing that lead as high as 11 points.

I always say you can never rely too much on one poll, but you have to trust the trends. Well, the trends here are pretty clear.

The story of this presidency isn’t just about a wannabe authoritarian abusing his power, betraying his campaign promises, waging fruitless wars, and raising prices on Americans while he enriches himself. It’s also about the backlash and the American people standing up to reject him.

I charted the full descent of Trump’s second term in a longer video last month. You can check that out here.

If you enjoyed this video, smash that like button and share.

And I hope you consider becoming a free or paid subscriber to Ahmed Baba News. With right-wing consolidation of mainstream media accelerating, independent media is more important than ever. Thank you for watching. See you around.

Subscribe now

Thank you for watching! In the face of unrelenting disinformation and authoritarian actions, clear truth-telling and independent media are a necessity. If you value pro-democracy journalism, consider becoming a paid subscriber to my newsletter. Paid subscribers empower this work and gain access to exclusive benefits. Your support makes a difference.

Subscribe now

Over 300,000 people have been displaced across France and Spain, the largest peacetime evacuations either country has ever had to carry out, due to the largest fires either country has seen in modern history. Villages decimated. Hundreds of thousands of acres scorched. Temperatures over 104 degrees Fahrenheit. And already, in June alone, at least 10,000 heat-related deaths across Europe, a number that will likely climb once the full data comes in.

James Matthewson, my Across the Pond co-host, isn’t in France or Spain, but he’s been grappling with fires nonetheless. Arthur’s Seat, the dormant volcano that overlooks Edinburgh, caught fire. He told me barbecue embers set off the blaze, and normally that would be a small local story. But this year the heather shrubs across the Scottish Highlands are so dried out from the heat wave that the same thing happened in the Cairngorms, at a scale big enough to be the largest wildfire in Scottish history.

That image ended up anchoring the whole conversation. We didn’t treat the fires as an isolated weather story. We connected them to the global climate crisis and the far-right authoritarians who seem hell-bent on worsening it. We talked about what the Trump administration and the global far right, including Reform UK, are actively doing to resist climate progress. We also dove into China’s dominance in renewables, the market forces already pointing toward a clean energy future, and the fight over where data centers get built and who gets a say.

We also got into a genuinely nuanced back-and-forth on AI, regulation, and where the ethical lines should sit, one that pulled in the Pope’s encyclical. We closed on Lindsey Graham’s funeral, which turned into an honest conversation about what it actually means to live a life worth remembering.

These are the kinds of big conversations I wish were centered more in our political discourse. How do we empower a renewable energy future to tackle climate change, and how should we navigate advances in AI ethically should be among the dominant debates in our politics. Instead, we’re absorbed by senseless wars and foolish debates litigating far-right delusions and the president’s corruption.

It’s frustrating living in this moment knowing what we could be. All these scientific and technological breakthroughs that could elevate humanity, and we’re busy murdering each other and debating nonsense. The world's progress is being held hostage by the giant, fragile egos of small, depraved men.

I appreciate those of you who tuned in live and contributed so much to the conversation. This is truly the best community on Substack. If you’re just catching it now, feel free to leave your thoughts in the comments.

You can watch our full conversation above and read key takeaways below. And, as always, thank you for supporting independent media.

The Climate Crisis & Wildfires Know No Borders

We started here because this issue is too important. James is living through a heat wave in Edinburgh with a fan running around the clock, and I opened with the numbers out of France and Spain: over 300,000 displaced, the largest fires in either country’s modern history, the largest peacetime evacuations either has seen. I mentioned that French President Macron called these fires France’s worst crisis since World War II.

• Arthur’s Seat and the Cairngorms made it personal for James. He described watching a dormant volcano in the middle of his own city catch fire from barbecue embers, then described the far larger blaze in the Cairngorms that forced an entire evacuation to Aviemore.

• I brought the Canada smoke into the conversation. Just a couple of weeks before we recorded, wildfire smoke from Canada made the air hazardous across much of the East Coast and Midwest, New York and New Jersey included. I said plainly that this isn’t normal.

• James connected the fires to something bigger than any one country’s disaster. He talked about friends who can no longer travel to Italy or Greece in July and August because the heat has become genuinely dangerous, not just uncomfortable. Places that used to be lovely holiday destinations are becoming inaccessible for parts of the year, and he said that shift is happening within a single generation.

• England’s drought turned into its own story mid-conversation. James read out breaking news that the Environment Agency had declared half of England in a state of drought, with hosepipe bans in effect because reservoirs haven’t been built in twenty or thirty years. He tied that directly to Thames Water, the privatized utility that’s billions of pounds in debt while still paying executives bonuses and dumping sewage into English rivers, and contrasted it with Scotland, where water stayed public, and Edinburgh is putting up free public water fountains ahead of the Fringe.

The Trump Admin Leads A Global Far Right Assault On Climate Change Progress

This is where the conversation moved from extreme weather to policy, and where I wanted to make the point that Trump isn’t operating alone. The same instinct to deny climate change and dismantle progress is showing up in the UK too.

• I laid out what’s actually been rolled back in the US. The EPA revoked the “endangerment finding” that forms the legal basis for greenhouse gas regulation. DOGE ended a wildfire monitoring program before this season’s fires even started. And court documents show the administration canceled billions in clean energy funding, admitting outright that the decision was based solely on the political identity of the recipient states, all sixteen of which voted for Kamala Harris. The Trump administration is also actively spending billions of dollars to get companies to abandon wind farm projects.

• I connected that to Project 2025, which mentions the EPA dozens of times and reads like an oil lobbyist’s wish list. My point was that none of this is incidental. It’s part of a coordinated plan.

• Reform UK gave me the international part of the argument. Seven of the nine councils Reform now controls have scrapped their climate targets since taking office.

• James offered a theory on why the far right benefits from fires even when they don’t talk about them. He said Farage’s messaging has stayed almost entirely on migration and cultural change rather than climate, but argued that a world visibly on fire still reinforces the far right’s larger narrative that everything is collapsing and drastic measures are needed. He connected this to a kind of political isolationism, the idea that a country can wall itself off and be safe from what’s coming, and raised the elephant in the room: mass displacement from the global south as sea levels rise, and where those people will actually be able to go.

• I pushed the migration point further using the French and Spanish evacuees themselves. These are largely white Europeans displaced in their own countries, but I argued the far right will still find a way to spin scarcity and resource strain into their zero-sum framing regardless of who’s displaced.

The Market Is Already Choosing Renewable Energy

I wanted to make the case that this isn’t even a fight between renewable energy and capitalism anymore. The practical choice and the renewable choice are the same choice, and only one side is pretending otherwise. The market is moving toward increasingly cheap, scalable, clean energy, and the far right is actively resisting it.

• China’s dominance became my central example. China produces roughly 80 percent of the world’s solar panels, somewhere around 60 percent of its wind turbines, 75 percent of its lithium-ion batteries, and 70 percent of its electric vehicles. I said outright that if Trump were actually a smart, greedy operator, he’d be investing in this instead of fighting it, because China clearly understands where the future is headed.

• James reframed the whole debate as ironically anti-capitalist. He walked through the free-market argument. Many companies are pivoting toward clean energy because that’s what markets do when the writing is on the wall. His point was that the administration’s posture is just plain obstruction of progress.

• James also pushed back on a version of climate advocacy he sees as too rigid. Drawing on his own background in the northeast of England, he talked about the 1984 coal strikes and how Thatcher’s closures devastated working communities, not for environmental reasons but to break the unions. His argument was that any real transition, in places like Aberdeen’s oil industry or nuclear-dependent communities, has to bring those workers into good, union green jobs rather than discarding them, what he called a Green Industrial Revolution.

• I raised the Strait of Hormuz as a concrete stake in this fight. Roughly 20 percent of the world’s oil moves through a single strait controlled by an authoritarian regime, and I argued that’s exactly the kind of vulnerability a serious renewable buildout would eliminate.

Our Nuanced Take On Data Centers

James opened this section responding to a question from Jools in the chat, and I liked that we started from the environmental cost rather than the tech hype, because that’s the actual entry point for how these fights are playing out on the ground in Scotland and in the US.

• James described active court battles over data centers proposed for protected land. Companies are trying to build in some of the cleanest environments in Scotland. James said the local benefit is essentially nonexistent beyond a handful of temporary construction jobs, since the specialized maintenance jobs get imported.

• He also flagged the speed problem, not just the location problem. James pointed out that real infrastructure, bridges and roads, takes years to get through UK planning, while private data center investment can buy land and bulldoze through approval almost immediately, often without meaningfully consulting the local community. He cited his own work with space tech companies as an example of how engagement should actually start, with the community first.

• I connected this to the imbalance in US regulation. I said plainly that there’s more red tape on new housing in America than there is on data centers, which is backward given the scale of environmental impact, and argued these projects should require the kind of full public input that housing already does.

• I laid out where I land rather than just criticizing the industry. A full ban isn’t realistic if AI infrastructure is going to keep growing, so I proposed the more useful fight is over whether these centers can be mandated to run on genuinely renewable power rather than the current practice of buying carbon offset credits elsewhere while still pulling from the grid. I also raised the idea of siting new centers on already barren or abandoned land instead of pristine areas as a middle path between a moratorium and unchecked buildout. At the very least, since a moratorium is likely not politically feasible, we need regulation to guarantee new AI data centers are both ethically powered and ethically located.

AI’s Ethical Fork In The Road

This became the most philosophically interesting stretch of the episode, and I made a point of saying I don’t think AI is categorically good or bad, because I think that framing requires more nuance.

• I argued against treating AI as an all-or-nothing issue. I brought up how much it’s already doing in genome sequencing and medicine as evidence that a blanket “AI is useless and dangerous” position doesn’t hold up, even as I agree the consumer-facing use cases are often wasteful and genuinely harmful.

• James drew a sharp line between frivolous use and infrastructure use. He said he’d have far less of a problem with these data centers if the demand behind them were medical research rather than novelty images, and joked pointedly about a certain president generating AI content for hours at a stretch. His actual policy position was that the moratorium conversation should focus on pace and access rather than existence.

• I pointed to the Pope’s encyclical as the most compelling ethical framework I’ve read on this. I described it as a genuinely pro-human document that calls for reining in AI companies without rejecting the technology outright, and said it’s helped shape how I think about where the guardrails should sit.

• I raised concentration of power as the issue I care about most. I said AI cannot become a technology that only enriches a handful of people, name-checking Sam Altman and Musk specifically, and said Anthropic is about as ethical an operator as exists in the space even though it isn’t perfect. I flagged the circular financing between chip makers and AI companies, and the number of billion-dollar-valuation companies with no real revenue, as an AI bubble topic that probably needs its own episode.

• James used the UK’s approach as the contrast. He described a £2 billion government fund distributed as open solicitations, essentially: any company, including a smaller outfit, can bid on a project like exploring how AI could improve healthcare, with grants running up to seven million pounds. I said directly that this is exactly the kind of centralized investment the US should be doing instead of leaving it entirely to private companies.

• I closed this section with the bigger philosophical stakes. I talked about wanting AI in medicine and science to move us toward eliminating scarcity the way Star Trek imagined it, not through chatbots, but through the kind of foundational technology that could remove the need for people to fight over resources at all. I said that’s the real prize, even if it’s a long way off.

Reflecting On Lindsey Graham’s Life

We closed on Lindsey Graham’s funeral, and this section ended up being less about politics than about what Trump’s eulogy revealed by accident.

• James described the eulogy as performative in a way that was hard to watch.

• I zeroed in on the specific line that stuck with me. Trump told the crowd Graham “never saw a war he didn’t like,” which is a strange thing to celebrate at a funeral, and Hannity followed by noting that many people called Graham a warmonger.

• I brought in reporting from my own past coverage of Graham. I referenced a New York Times interview I found years ago, not widely picked up elsewhere, where Graham said plainly that his entire political arc, from John McCain’s closest friend to Trump loyalist, was driven by a desire to stay relevant. I said that quote reframes his whole career as a study in political self-preservation and clout-chasing rather than conviction. This was actually the topic of one of my very first articles for The Independent in 2019, which started my 5-year columnist tenure there. I described Graham as the personification of the Republican Party’s descent into Trumpism. And I think that framing still holds up.

• We both landed on the teleprompter moment as the most telling detail of the day. Trump was reading a line claiming virtually everyone liked Graham, caught himself, and ad-libbed live that Graham was actually “a tough cookie” who wasn’t universally loved, seemingly correcting the script in real time because even he didn’t believe it. James’s reaction was simply, “May that love never find me.”

• James closed with the broader point that stuck with me most. He said the real tragedy wasn’t the funeral itself but what it revealed: a life spent chasing relevance ends with the person who eulogizes you mocking you, while the people who actually build lives full of love and friendship never end up in that position. I added that one of Graham’s final calls was reportedly with Trump, a man Graham once called a bigot who’d destroy the Republican Party, whom he then backed anyway.

The Bottom Line

The climate crisis is here. The political response to that reality, on both sides of the Atlantic, is the same manufactured denial, whether it’s the gutting of the EPA or Reform UK councils quietly scrapping climate targets. But nothing in this episode suggested the fixes are actually complicated. The market has already picked renewables, and the resistance to it is both dangerous and nonsensical.

When it comes to AI, the path to an ethical approach to the technology is not rocket science. It will just take good faith debate and decent, smart people with the political will to get it done.

Let’s hope in this year’s elections and in 2028, we can elect leaders who are serious enough about protecting our futures that they take these issues head-on.

Support independent media and analysis that fearlessly tells the truth. If you have not yet become a paid subscriber to Ahmed Baba News, you can do that below. It truly means a lot.

Ahmed Baba News

Independent pro-democracy journalism, analysis, and commentary. Delivered to your inbox 2 to 4 times a week. Become a free or paid subscriber.

Thank you for watching! In the face of unrelenting disinformation and authoritarian actions, clear truth-telling and independent media are a necessity. If you value pro-democracy journalism, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber to my newsletter. Paid subscribers empower this work and gain access to exclusive benefits. Your support makes a difference.

Subscribe now

On Friday, I was happy to return from a short hiatus for my first cable news appearance since my son was born. I couldn’t have come back to a better show.

I made my debut on Stephanie Ruhle’s new morning show, Money, Power, Politics on MS NOW. As many of you know, I was a regular on her show The 11th Hour, so it was cool to check out her new setup. Her team has updated the format to span two hours of programming in a new time of day. It’s a truly great show. And as usual, she booked a panel with brilliant people.

I was in studio with MS NOW Business Analyst (and at this point, buddy of mine) and Puck News Journalist Abby Livingston. Semafor Politics Reporter Dave Weigel and Former Ambassador Michael McFaul joined remotely. It was a fast-paced, high-energy panel. I could not have been more grateful to be included. It never gets old.

We covered a lot of ground, so I cut together a clip above with some of the key moments where I contributed.

I talked about what this war is actually costing American households. I called out the grift defining the Trump presidency, and how he is the personification of the K-shaped economy. I broke down why Iran hasn’t been forced to yield despite months of bombing, and why the Strait of Hormuz and the Houthis’ new Red Sea front are proof this war made things worse, not better. And I closed on a moment from a Senate hearing that tied the whole thing together: Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who has been lying to the American people since day one of this war, and Senator Jon Ossoff, who wouldn’t let him get away with it. Ossoff was my MVP of the week, and for good reason.

You can watch key moments from the appearance above, read key takeaways below, and check out the first two full segments of the appearance linked at the bottom of this piece from YouTube.

I also just wanted to thank you all for your support! It feels great to be fully back in action. It’s because all of you who like, share, and subscribe to this work that helps get me these opportunities to speak truth on bigger stages. Just wanted to share a note of gratitude.

Ok, now let’s dive in.

The Throughline Is Simple. Americans Are Paying For This War In Multiple Ways.

Americans don’t need a briefing to understand what’s happening to their wallets. They’re connecting the dots themselves, and the numbers back up what they’re feeling.

• The money being wasted on Trump’s Iran War. I laid out that there’s a direct line between the $37.5 billion, and by some upper estimates $100 billion, this war has cost U.S. taxpayers, and the fact that Republicans somehow never found the money to renew the Affordable Care Act’s enhanced subsidies. Americans can see the money being wasted in Iran and not being spent to improve their affordability crises.

• You don’t need to read the headlines to see it. You just need to look at the gas pump. I made the point that Americans don’t even have to check the news to know when there’s been a move in the Iran War. Gas prices climbing above four dollars tell the story. Every spike is a signal of a development in the war.

• The household math is brutal. Moody’s Analytics puts the cost at $1,100 more spent per household since this war began. I paired that with the Fed’s finding that 37 percent of Americans don’t have $400 in emergency savings. That’s the gap between what this war costs and what people actually have the financial bandwidth to absorb.

• Trump is the personification of the K-shaped economy he’s worsening. When the conversation turned to Republican ad spending ahead of the midterms, I made the case that no amount of money buys back a message that doesn’t match how people are living. Trump is grifting billions personally while raising prices on everyone else, and now he’s stacking new tariffs on top of war costs. I said if you asked ChatGPT or Claude to design a policy meant to raise prices, it wouldn’t look much different than what he’s actually doing. Republicans can spend whatever they want, but they can’t gaslight Americans out of their own lived experience. Right now organic Democratic messaging is reaching people more than any paid ad could.

This War Is Like The Movie Groundhog Day, Except The Plot Is War Crimes

Stephanie Ruhle asked me directly what Americans should be bracing for, and my answer was straightforward.

• We’re living in the volatility of Trump’s mind. I told her Americans should brace for a continued volatile president, someone whose mind changes direction constantly and drags the country’s foreign policy along with it. This isn’t background noise for the people affected by it. Every reversal, every strike, every cover-up becomes something the country has to absorb in real time, with no indication of when, or whether, the cycle actually breaks.

• My Groundhog Day analogy: We’re stuck in the same deadly cycle. Failed ceasefires, strikes, casualty cover-ups, Strait of Hormuz closures, war profiteering, repeat. I told the panel that this is like the movie Groundhog Day, except the plot is war crimes. We’ve been living the same news cycles over and over again.

• The cycle doesn’t reset. It compounds. Each ceasefire that fails leaves the region worse positioned than the one before it. Each closure of the Strait tightens the same chokepoint that’s already driving prices at the pump. Nothing about this loop is neutral. It gets more dangerous every time it repeats.

The Hydra: Why It’s So Hard To Get Iran To Yield

This is where I got into the strategic military miscalculation underneath everything else we discussed, because the economic costs don’t exist in a vacuum. They’re downstream of a war that was ill-advised, ill-conceived, and downright foolish.

• Iran’s leadership isn’t built like a target you can decapitate. I explained that a more extreme Iran is the result of this war. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) operates with a decentralized, mosaic leadership structure. Different generals hold different realms of responsibility. There’s no single head to remove and no guarantee that removing one changes the structure underneath it. It only further entrenches an extremist regime.

• Trump thought this would look like Venezuela. It didn’t. He believed he could take out Khamenei and get a clean regime-change outcome. Instead, he cut off one head of a Hydra. What’s left is a more extreme Iran, not a defeated one.

• The chokepoints multiplied instead of disappearing. Iran now holds the Strait of Hormuz as leverage, and the Houthis have opened a second front in the Red Sea. Neither of those was utilized as pressure points in this way before the war started.

• The American people are the ones absorbing the fallout. This is where the throughline closes the loop. A war meant to project strength instead handed adversaries more leverage, and the cost of that miscalculation lands back on the same households already paying more at the pump after losing their ACA subsidies.

My MVP: Ossoff Made Hegseth’s Lie Impossible To Defend

My MVP of the week was Senator Jon Ossoff, and not just for how he handled Secretary Pete Hegseth in a Senate hearing. But also because he got the worst nickname Trump has ever given.

• Fourteen days into the war, Hegseth made a claim that hasn’t aged well. He said Iran’s military capability had been so thoroughly destroyed and degraded that it was rendered combat ineffective for years and decades to come. Ossoff went after that claim directly, and it fell apart under questioning.

• Stephanie added context. She noted this wasn’t an isolated lie. The administration said Iran’s nuclear capabilities were essentially wiped out over a year ago, and separately claimed Iran was two weeks from a usable nuclear weapon before this year’s strikes even began. They can’t keep their lies straight.

• I said it plainly: nearly every word out of their mouths has been a lie. Not just on the nuclear front. On military capability, on missile stockpiles, the administration has consistently claimed more damage than the facts support.

• David Rohde’s reporting backs up exactly what I said. His reporting showed Iran retained 70 percent of its missile launchers before the ceasefire and held access to 30 of the 33 missile sites along the Strait of Hormuz.

• And then there’s the nickname. Ossoff earned the worst nickname Trump has ever produced, and Trump didn’t even land it. He called him “Pinky Herman.” We all laughed about it on the panel. He meant Pee-wee, but let’s be real. Nobody looking at Ossoff thinks Pee-wee. This will never land.

Bottom Line

This war has cost the country a lot. It cost us economically, in taxpayer dollars, in affordability programs that aren’t being funded, and in household budgets that are $1,100 thinner than they were before the first strike. And it cost us strategically, because the administration sold a clean outcome and delivered a more dangerous one, an Iranian Hydra with more chokepoints than before, defended by a Pentagon that has been lying about the results since day one.

Senator Jon Ossoff helped expose the gap between the Trump Administration’s claims and reality of this war. That gap is the story right now, and Republicans can't spend their way out of it. The midterms are coming, and voters are going to make themselves heard loud and clear.

A short highlight reel of all my major contributions to the conversation is at the top of this post. If you want to dive deeper, here are the first two full segment blocks. MS NOW posted them on YouTube, including one with a title that used my Groundhog Day analogy. Check them out:

If this analysis mattered to you, I hope you consider becoming a free or paid subscriber to Ahmed Baba News. And if you’re already a paid subscriber, thank you! It truly means a lot. Independent media runs on the people who back it. You’ve helped empower my work as I get to bring my journalism to increasingly bigger stages. I couldn’t be more appreciative. We’re making an impact!

Ahmed Baba News

Independent pro-democracy journalism, analysis, and commentary. Delivered to your inbox 2 to 4 times a week. Become a free or paid subscriber.

Thank you for watching! In the face of unrelenting disinformation and authoritarian actions, clear truth-telling and independent media are a necessity. If you value pro-democracy journalism, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber to my newsletter. Paid subscribers empower this work and gain access to exclusive benefits. Your support makes a difference.

Subscribe now

This was yet another jam-packed conversation with James Matthewson that got into some raw, honest areas I didn’t expect.

We opened on Iran, where the Pentagon is actively covering up both the financial and human cost of a war now on its eleventh consecutive night of strikes after the ceasefire failed. We moved to Andy Burnham’s first week as UK Prime Minister, where he announced one of the more ambitious policies I’ve heard from any Western leader lately, ending homelessness in Britain within six months, even as parts of his own coalition tried to paint him as something he isn’t. And we closed with something bigger picture: a real conversation about the need for everyone to develop better radars for egomaniacal grifters.

I appreciate those of you who tuned in live and contributed so much to the conversation. This is truly the best community on Substack. If you’re just catching it now, feel free to leave your thoughts in the comments.

You can watch our full conversation above and read key takeaways below. And, as always, thank you for supporting independent media.

Iran’s War Grinds On And The Costs Are Being Covered Up

James and I opened with Trump threatening to strike Iranian civilian infrastructure again, and from there the conversation became less about the war itself and more about what the Pentagon isn’t telling us about it.

• We’re on the eleventh consecutive night of strikes, and I called it what it is: the same headlines on a loop. Oil is climbing back toward $100, the Iran-backed Houthis are now threatening the Red Sea, a second crucial waterway, after the ceasefire collapsed exactly the way everyone expected it to.

• I laid out the financial cover-up in detail. Defense Secretary Hegseth testified to Congress this week that the war has cost $37.5 billion, but I cited more credible estimates putting the real number closer to $80 to $100 billion, money I noted could otherwise cover things like the enhanced Affordable Care Act subsidies several times over, while households are already eating roughly $1,100 in estimated added energy costs tied to the conflict.

• Then there’s the human cost, which is being hidden even more directly. Three US service members were killed this week alone. The New York Times revealed three additional strikes the Pentagon never disclosed, injuring close to 100 service members and damaging helicopters and infrastructure, information that only came out because reporters forced it, not because the Pentagon volunteered it.

• A Sky News documentary explored the US strike that killed 156 people at a school in Iran, 120 of them students, most of them girls, along with an unborn child. Sky expanded on The New York Times’ earlier reporting, which found the US strike was responsible. Sky’s own conclusion was that it was a mistake, the result of bad intelligence and a lack of interest in confirming what the site was actually being used for before hitting it.

• James connected the dots on why almost none of this is getting real scrutiny: the press pool itself has been hollowed out. He pointed out that Bush and Cheney still had to stand up and call civilian deaths “collateral damage.” This administration doesn’t even have to do that anymore, because the Pentagon press pool has been narrowed down mostly to friendly right-wing outlets.

This War Has Gotten Us Nothing

Once we got past the cover-up itself, the conversation turned to what this war has actually accomplished, and the honest answer, from both of us, was very little.

• I connected the Saudi angle directly to the Kushner family’s financial ties. The US struck a deal letting Saudi Arabia enrich uranium without a robust inspection regime, which I called a major step backward, especially arming an unreliable rival to Iran with nuclear capability. I noted the deal lines up suspiciously well with Jared Kushner’s investment fund, which draws money from the Saudi sovereign wealth fund.

• I connected this to a bigger shift in global power dynamics. With the previous, comparatively more moderate Khamenei gone and an emboldened IRGC now calling more of the shots, and with Iran demonstrating real leverage over the Strait of Hormuz, I argued Trump has effectively created a new “might is right” world order, one where any country with leverage over a chokepoint, Russia and China included, has been shown exactly how little consequence there is for using it.

• James brought receipts from an actual defense industry insider. He’d spoken with a defense editor at Europe’s largest defense procurement event, who told him Germany now openly regards the US as weak on defense.

• He kept the list going, and it built into a genuinely damning picture. The US can’t reopen the Strait of Hormuz. It can’t neutralize the Houthis, a rebel group with none of the terrain advantages the Taliban had, everyone knows exactly where they are. And now the administration is ramping up rhetoric on Cuba while ignoring that the suffering there traces back to Washington’s own decades-long blockade.

• I drew the parallel to Russia’s humiliation in Ukraine, and it led somewhere unexpected. Just as Russia’s military reputation collapsed once a smaller, more determined Ukraine exposed it, I argued the US is running through its own missile stockpile while Iran retains a striking share of its launch capability despite US claims of having degraded it. Iran is still able to hit Gulf bases, damage US military equipment, kill and injure American service members, and hold the Strait hostage. That’s not what “victory” is supposed to look like.

Burnham’s Ambitious First Week

I wanted James’s read on Andy Burnham’s early moves as prime minister, and the conversation ended up covering both a genuinely bold policy and the ugly politics already surrounding it.

• James described Burnham’s opening act as more ambitious than either of us expected. After the formal ceremony of being invited by the King to form a government, Burnham’s first announced policy wasn’t a safe, symbolic gesture, it was a pledge to end homelessness entirely within six months, which he called a disgrace to society.

• I asked directly whether that meant real housing or just clearing encampments, and James’s answer traced back through decades of British housing policy. Burnham’s plan centers on rebuilding council housing, the state-supported housing system that flourished after World War II, which James’s own grandparents benefited from as working-class newlyweds. Margaret Thatcher’s 1980s Right to Buy scheme let residents purchase those homes cheaply. James cited a friend’s grandparents who bought their council house for £16,000, now worth roughly £495,000, which built real wealth for that generation and shifted many of them toward voting Conservative. What never got rebuilt was the housing stock itself, which is why young families today can’t get access to it at all.

• I pointed out the policy does double duty. Housing the unhoused population is one benefit, but adding housing supply broadly also brings costs down for everyone else, directly undercutting the scapegoat narrative that blames immigrants for housing shortages. Scarcity is what breeds scapegoating in the first place, and solving the actual shortage takes real wind out of Nigel Farage’s sails.

• I connected it back home, noting Congress recently passed a housing bill Trump refused to sign but that became law anyway, calling it a solid first step that the US still needs to build much further on.

The “Zionist” Smear Aimed At Burnham

James brought up how parts of the UK left are already smearing Burnham as a “Zionist” within days of taking office, and it’s worth hearing directly what he found when he actually pushed back on it.

• James said the label doesn’t survive five minutes of scrutiny. When he pushed friends on why they call Burnham a Zionist, the answers kept circling back to “he still believes in Israel.”

• He pointed out Burnham’s real positions are more progressive than the caricature, not less. Burnham backs a two-state solution, further than the current US administration or Israel’s government will go, and considers West Bank settlements illegal. James said he’s withholding full judgment on foreign policy specifics until seeing where the new Foreign Secretary lands.

• James brought his own credibility into it too. He claims he’s currently banned from traveling to Israel, and still finds himself getting labeled unfairly over language rather than substance, which he said says more about how loosely the term gets thrown around than about anything he or Burnham has actually done.

• My one addition was a simple filter for cutting through this kind of debate: any country that currently exists has a right to keep existing, because it exists. That doesn’t extend to unlimited military budgets or a pass on how Gaza and the West Bank are being oppressed, but it’s a useful starting point before the conversation gets more complicated.

We Must Demand More From Our Own Side

We closed, as we have before, with a hard look inward at the media ecosystem James and I are both part of, and this time it went further than usual, into a specific and troubling example.

• James made the case that grift isn’t a right-wing exclusive. He pointed to unnamed left-leaning streamers who whip up their audiences the same way, building an echo chamber instead of an argument. His point was that grifters specifically avoid holding nuance because it doesn’t generate the same outrage or income.

• I connected the incentive structure directly to Trump’s own playbook. Stripping out nuance is what creates the outrage that generates the dollars, the exact same binary, everyone’s-out-to-get-you formula Trump uses to keep his own base locked in. I mentioned a tweet I’d written recently about needing better radars for egomaniacal grifters, and named Graham Platner again specifically as someone I was skeptical of from the start and who turned out to be exactly what I suspected.

• A viewer asked me to name the grifters directly, and I declined on air, for now. I said naming names outright would “start some wars,” but that I’m considering doing a more thorough, evidence-based investigation into this at some point, rather than calling people out without receipts.

• I tied it back to something I’ve been sitting with during this stretch of paternity leave: independent media needs to do better. I said plainly that I’d rather keep building slower, on curiosity instead of outrage, than take the faster path some creators are taking.

Bottom Line

The Pentagon is hiding what this war actually costs, in dollars and in lives. Parts of the UK left are smearing a prime minister days into office over a label that doesn’t hold up to five minutes of scrutiny. And plenty of media on both sides of the aisle, ours included, has a real incentive to keep things simple, loud, and profitable instead of nuanced.

James and I don’t have a clean fix for any of it. What we do have is a standing commitment to say the complicated version of the truth out loud anyway, even when it’s the harder sell.

Support independent media and analysis that fearlessly tells the truth. Subscribe to my brilliant co-host, James Matthewson. If you have not yet become a paid subscriber to Ahmed Baba News, you can do that below. And if you’re already a paid subscriber, thank you! It truly means a lot.

Subscribe now

I’ve been thinking a lot about the ongoing right-wing takeover of mainstream media and the media we actually deserve. I wrote a Substack note with my thoughts in more detail if you’re interested in reading more:

Thank you for watching! In the face of unrelenting disinformation and authoritarian actions, clear truth-telling and independent media are a necessity. If you value pro-democracy journalism, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber to my newsletter. Paid subscribers empower this work and gain access to exclusive benefits. Your support makes a difference.

Subscribe now

Charles Douglas and I had a lot to get into on this week’s live, because what Trump said Thursday night and everything he’s actually been doing for months before he said it add up to the clearest picture yet of how he plans to attack the midterm elections.

The throughline of this conversation is that Trump’s case for interfering in November rests on claims that fall apart under the slightest bit of scrutiny as he builds a pretext to interfere in the midterms.

Charles and I walked through why the China voter data claim doesn’t hold up, what Trump has actually done procedurally to the Election Assistance Commission, the Justice Department, and federal cybersecurity infrastructure, and why none of it changes the fact that he has less power and credibility than he did in 2020.

Then we got into how House and Senate Democrats are quietly preparing to counter over a hundred Trump midterm interference scenarios, and how you can help to counter Trump’s election interference at your local election precinct. We also talked about how Charles’s organization, Common Power, is treating this fall as the most important door-knocking season of its existence.

We closed on the kind of coalition message Democrats actually need heading into November and beyond, and on why Charles believes the whole fight ultimately gets decided by regular people at doors, not by anyone in Washington.

I appreciate those of you who tuned in live and contributed so much to the conversation. This is truly the best community on Substack. If you’re just catching it now, feel free to leave your thoughts in the comments.

You can watch our full conversation above and read key takeaways below. And, as always, thank you for supporting independent media.

Debunking Trump’s Primetime Election Interference Claims

Trump spent the first five minutes of Thursday night’s address trying to convince the country that everything is going great, before pivoting into the actual point of the speech: a claim that China illegally acquired 220 million American voter files and interfered in the 2020 election. I watched it and immediately clocked the opening minutes as a tell.

When a president spends prime time insisting the economy is fantastic and crime is down, that’s not confidence. That’s someone who knows his approval numbers are underwater heading into a midterm he’s set up to lose.

• The China claim collapses under its own weight. I pointed out that voter file data of the kind Trump described is largely public information, purchasable by anyone through entirely legal channels. Charles made the same point from firsthand experience, explaining that when Common Power’s volunteers go knock doors, the exact same data- names, addresses, voting history- loads onto their phones from a standard campaign data tool. If that’s a national security breach, it’s one both parties have been committing for years.

• The intelligence Trump cited says the opposite of what he claimed. I laid out that the actual intelligence community assessment found no mass Chinese interference or exploitation in the 2020 election. What the assessment did find was that China considered a more aggressive meddling operation, similar to what Russia ran in 2016, and decided against it. The declassified documents Trump released to make his case actually confirm that Russia ran an influence operation in 2020 that benefited him. He surfaced evidence of the opposite scandal while trying to sell a different one.

• The non-citizen voting numbers are still nothing. I noted that credible counts put total non-citizen voting incidents somewhere around 77 instances over multiple decades nationally, a number small enough that it’s statistically comparable to dead people occasionally appearing on voter rolls, which Charles pointed out is exactly the kind of clerical noise every large voter file naturally contains.

• The “urgent action” line is the whole point of the speech. I flagged the key phrase in Trump’s address, where he said the intelligence “underscores why we must take urgent action to ensure that our system can never, ever be hacked or compromised like it was in the past.” Nothing was hacked. No election system was compromised. That sentence is the setup for whatever he does next.

• He’s undermining the very security he claims to be defending. Charles brought in a point from a veteran Republican election attorney who appeared on CNN discussing how Trump and Musk’s DOGE effort defunded CISA, the federal agency responsible for election cybersecurity. Charles called it an own goal: if the country is more vulnerable now, it’s in part because this administration cut the very defenses meant to prevent it, then used that manufactured vulnerability as the emotional hook for the speech.

• Why Trump’s lies are falling flat. Charles’s read on the reaction was that it wasn’t just the usual voices calling the speech nonsense. He said the pushback came from across the political spectrum, including people who don’t normally agree on anything, and he argued the core problem for Trump is that he’s simply not a trusted messenger anymore, for anyone. I extended that by pointing to Trump’s own logic trap: if the 2020 election was as compromised as he claims, that happened on his watch as president, and by his own timeline, the system somehow became secure enough for him to win again by 2024. Either the vulnerability was real, and his administration failed to catch it, or it wasn’t real, and this is a pretext. Charles’s response was blunt: apparently elections are only free and fair when Democrats are the ones in charge.

The Real Playbook: What Trump Has Actually Done To Interfere In The Midterms

The speech was never really about China. It was about laying rhetorical groundwork for a set of actions Trump has already been taking for months.

• He gutted the Election Assistance Commission. I walked through how Trump fired three commissioners from the EAC last week, an agency that oversees election funding to states, alarming state election officials nationwide who depend on that funding and guidance.

• His citizenship executive order already lost in court. I noted that Trump previously tried to sign an executive order seeking to force the EAC to withhold funds from localities that didn’t verify voters’ citizenship status, and it was struck down in federal court.

• The Justice Department is demanding voter rolls. I flagged that the DOJ sent letters demanding states hand over voter roll data, using the same overblown non-citizen voting narrative as justification.

• Mark Elias and his firm keep beating him. Charles noted that Elias’s firm represents Common Power directly, which gave the conversation a personal edge. I added that Elias has been intervening successfully across DOJ’s voter data lawsuits nationally, which is a big part of why none of Trump’s moves so far have stuck.

• A live example of the strategy broke during our own show. While we were talking, DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin escalated Trump’s rhetoric further, threatening states that refuse to partner with his department and promising to use “maximum pressure” to root out what he called illegally cast votes. I pointed out this is the exact same overblown non-citizen narrative, deployed in real time, to intimidate localities into compliance ahead of whatever comes in November.

• The goal is a veneer of legitimacy he doesn’t actually have. I made the case that all of this, the speech, the EAC firings, the DOJ letters, the DHS threats, is designed to sow enough distrust that whatever Trump tries in November looks justified. But I don’t think it will work because this isn’t 2020. Even then, when more people were inclined to believe him, it wasn’t enough. Today, almost nobody of importance is buying it.

Inside The Secret Meeting To Defend The Midterms: How Democrats Are War-Gaming the Response

This is the part of the conversation Charles genuinely hadn’t heard about yet, and it’s some of the most encouraging reporting either of us has come across in a while.

• Rep. Joseph Morelle is leading a war-gaming effort in the House. I explained that MS NOW exclusively reported this week that more than two dozen House Democrats gathered for a closed-door strategy session organized by Morelle, a New York Democrat, to game out how they’d respond if Trump or his administration tried to interfere in the midterms.

• They’re preparing for more than a hundred scenarios. I noted that Morelle’s team has been walking through upwards of a hundred potential situations where Trump or his allies could try to intervene, and according to the reporting, they’ve been doing this work for over a year already, not just reacting to this week’s speech.

• The hypotheticals get specific. I described two of the scenarios MS NOW was allowed to watch. One involved Trump trying to implement a proof-of-citizenship requirement through executive action, with Democrats coordinating in real time with local officials to reject the order while courts process legal challenges. The other involved Trump attempting to shut down a polling place outright, with a plan to mobilize local officials and legal resources immediately in response.

• Their core strategy is education and legal readiness, not just messaging. I laid out that Morelle described the overall approach as making sure voters and local officials understand the actual law, so nobody gets bullied or intimidated by someone falsely claiming authority they don’t have, while also having attorneys lined up nationally ready to file suit for nearly any scenario.

• The Senate ran its own version of this. I mentioned that Politico reported last month that Chuck Schumer and nine other Democratic senators held a separate war-gaming session preparing for the same kind of potential intrusions, with Senate Democrats also training staffers to serve as election observers on the ground come November.

• Charles’s reaction was cautious relief. Charles said it was genuinely comforting to learn Democrats didn’t just start this work reactively, and that they’d been building toward it for over a year. But he was quick to add a caveat that shaped the rest of the conversation: a plan built in Washington only works if it’s actually implementable by individual people at the state and county level.

How You Can Fight Back Against Trump’s Election Meddling

Charles’s biggest point of the entire conversation was that this fight gets decided at the precinct, not in Washington. A national war-gaming session is only as good as the sheriff, county clerk, or precinct volunteer who actually has to act on it in the moment.

• State power structures will determine what actually happens. Charles argued that whether a given state protects its voters comes down to who controls the state legislature and the governorship there. He said nobody should assume Alabama or Tennessee will act to protect voters, but he pointed to Georgia as a state that has already shown up once and could again, along with movement happening in North Carolina and South Carolina, where even some Republicans have treated Trump’s asks as a bridge too far.

• The real leverage is with everyday poll workers, not officials. Charles made the case that the people who physically manage ballot boxes, run polling locations, and process mail-in ballots are regular volunteers, not partisans with something to prove, and they’re being moved by the exact same economic pressures as everyone else: gas prices, the cost of living, the wars draining resources overseas. He argued that changing minds at the precinct level, one conversation at a time, is just as important as changing minds among voters.

• Trump’s plan requires mass compliance that he isn’t going to get. I made the case that for any of this to actually work practically, Trump needs thousands of people across hundreds of localities to go along with it, and that’s the same reason the effort to overturn 2020 failed. So many local officials in both parties refused to play along that it collapsed under its own weight. Even in a worst-case scenario where some officials did comply, there’s no legitimate path to competing slates of certified results.

• He has less power now than he did in 2020, not more. I argued that Trump doesn’t have another term coming, his approval is lower, and he’s already burned through trust with his own base over the Epstein files and the economy. I acknowledged the counterargument that he has more executive authority now because of favorable Supreme Court rulings, but noted the Court has historically been reluctant to intervene directly in election disputes.

• Go be a poll worker. I pointed to Thomas Hicks, a recently fired EAC commissioner, who said in a Rachel Maddow interview that the single most useful thing a citizen can do right now is volunteer to work the polls. I made the case that the same energy that turned out for the “No Kings” protests, hundreds of people in nearly every locality, could be redirected toward poll working, building a real-time alert system so people can flag ICE presence or suspicious activity the moment they see it.

• Early voting matters more than ever. I pointed out that early and mail-in voting are harder to interfere with once ballots are already cast and counted, which is exactly why Republicans have spent so much energy trying to restrict both.

• Speed matters when something does go wrong. I made the point that the faster people on the ground flag interference, whether that’s an ICE agent at a polling site or someone meddling with voting equipment, the faster Marc Elias’s legal team and the rest of the legal apparatus can move to stop it.

The Coalition-Building Messaging Democrats Actually Need

Before we got to Common Power’s own fall plans, Charles and I spent real time on Jon Ossoff, both as a messenger and as a test case for how Democrats should be talking about this fight.

• Texas and Georgia both show what sustained organizing looks like. Charles walked through how Texas Senate candidate James Talarico is building one of the largest organizing operations the state has seen, built directly on the volunteer infrastructure Beto O’Rourke assembled after his own Senate loss. He drew the same line to Georgia, where Stacey Abrams’s earlier organizing work laid the foundation for Ossoff’s rise. Common Power is sending teams to Texas four separate times this fall, starting in September.

• Ossoff is running a corruption message that travels. I made the case that Ossoff’s corruption framing is the message that carries not just through this midterm but potentially into 2028, and that he’s smart about how he distributes it, feeding well-produced clips to supporters who circulate them widely. Charles added that “corruption” functions as language that lands in red states too, pointing to Rob Sand in Iowa and Dan Osborne in Nebraska using similar oligarch-focused framing to reach voters who’d tune out more traditional progressive language.

• I tied the corruption message directly to affordability. I argued there’s a bigger, largely untold story here about the failure of trickle-down economics playing out in real time, one Ossoff doesn’t have to name explicitly by ideology to make land with voters who are feeling the costs directly.

• Ossoff is naming the racial targeting explicitly and pairing it with economic messaging. I pointed out that Ossoff has been direct in calling Trump’s election interference an attempt to delegitimize the Black vote specifically, which tracks with the actual 2020 record: the localities Trump’s team challenged most aggressively were places like Detroit and Atlanta. I said what makes Ossoff effective is that he pairs that explicit framing with a genuine working-class economic message instead of choosing one or the other, something I’ve heard some in the broader progressive coalition get criticized for not doing enough.

• He’s also a uniquely positioned messenger on Israel. I noted that Ossoff is Jewish and voted against additional aid to Israel, and that his ability to criticize Netanyahu’s government without tipping into antisemitic framing matters given how often that line gets crossed elsewhere in the conversation. I said that criticism carries more power coming from within the progressive Jewish community itself.

• Ossoff’s biggest asset might be that he hasn’t been defined yet. I described what Charles later called the Democratic Rorschach test effect: moderates see Ossoff as moderate, liberals see him as liberal, progressives see him as progressive, because he hasn’t been pinned down the way frontrunners usually get pinned down. Charles picked up that framing directly and ran with it, calling him a Rorschach test for the party.

• The party needs an economic message that unifies rather than divides. Charles introduced a data point here that reframed the whole conversation: using the ALICE measure- Asset-Limited, Income-Constrained, Employed- roughly 40 percent of the country was already struggling financially as of 2024 data, even among people with jobs above the poverty line. He argued that number is likely higher now, and that an over-focus on identity-specific messaging risks obscuring the scale of a shared economic crisis that cuts across every demographic, including voters Democrats have lost.

• I pushed back gently on how that point gets applied. I clarified that I’m simply arguing that we cannot ignore attacks on Black political and economic power, and that the more effective version of that conversation runs identity through an economic lens rather than a purely rhetorical one, pointing to how Trump’s federal workforce cuts directly raised Black unemployment as an example of that approach. I said one of my most-shared media appearances made exactly that case without ever calling out Trump’s racist words, but focusing entirely on the material racist impact instead.

Strengthening Democratic Infrastructure & Building Margins Too Big To Rig

We closed the show on the ground game itself, and Charles had real numbers to share.

• Common Power just kicked off its fall program in the middle of summer. Charles said the organization held its fall kickoff call the night before our live, with roughly 400 people registering on Zoom to plan logistics, learn how to use Common Power’s volunteer app (which I built, full disclosure) and start booking trips. Charles described people as genuinely ready to act now that primaries are wrapping up and attention is shifting fully to the midterms.

• The Michigan numbers back up the enthusiasm. Charles reported that a team of about a dozen and a half volunteers knocked on 6,000 doors in roughly four days while canvassing in Michigan, with a conversion rate higher than any other group working in that district. He credited part of that success to building a real community among volunteers, including a shared trip to a local African American museum to learn the history of the neighborhoods they were canvassing.

• I disclosed my own role in the infrastructure. I mentioned that I personally built the app Common Power’s volunteers use to organize their canvassing, including new features like a search function the team just launched, as a way of contributing my tech skills directly to this fight.

• Persuasion is happening in real time, including with Trump voters. Charles said flipping Republican voters happens more often than people assume, recalling volunteers knocking on doors with Trump flags visible in 2024 and having voters tell them they’d never actually spoken to a Democrat in person before. He argued that today’s Trump voters, after watching what this administration has and hasn’t delivered for them, are even more open to those conversations than they were then.

• Charles will be filing updates straight from the doors. Charles agreed to serve as a live correspondent throughout the fall canvassing season, reporting back what he’s hearing directly from voters in the states Common Power is targeting.

• The whole thing comes back to margins. I closed the conversation by connecting it to what happened in Hungary, where Viktor Orbán’s opposition won by margins so large that he had no real path to contest the results. I made the case that building those kinds of margins, precinct by precinct, door by door, is the actual answer to everything Trump is trying to set up. You can’t lie your way past a result that’s too big to rig.

Bottom Line

Trump’s speech Thursday night wasn’t really about China, and it wasn’t really about election security. It was a pretext dressed up as an intelligence report, delivered by a president whose own declassified evidence undercuts his own argument. What matters more than anything he said is what he’s already done, gutting the EAC, demanding voter rolls, defunding cyber defenses, and what House Democrats and organizations like Common Power are already doing in response.

This fight isn’t hypothetical anymore, and it isn’t just happening in Washington. It’s happening in county clerk offices, at polling stations, and on doorsteps in Michigan, Georgia, Texas, and more. That’s where this all actually gets decided.

If this conversation mattered to you, I hope you consider becoming a free or paid subscriber to Ahmed Baba News. If you’re already a paid subscriber, thank you! Independent pro-democracy journalism only works if people back it. And if you’d like to get involved and knock doors this election year, I also highly recommend checking out Common Power.

Ahmed Baba News

Independent pro-democracy journalism, analysis, and commentary. Delivered to your inbox 2 to 4 times a week. Become a free or paid subscriber.

Thank you for watching! In the face of unrelenting disinformation and authoritarian actions, clear truth-telling and independent media are a necessity. If you value pro-democracy journalism, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber to my newsletter. Paid subscribers empower this work and gain access to exclusive benefits. Your support makes a difference.

Subscribe now

There’s a detail in the Nolan Wells case that I can’t shake. His mother had to use Life360 to track down her own son’s phone. Not investigators. Not the sheriff’s department. A grieving mother was doing the work that a real investigation should have done in the first 24 hours. That single fact tells you almost everything you need to know about how this case has been handled, and it’s exactly what Don Lemon and I spent time covering in our latest Substack Live.

We got into the coverage gap first because it’s impossible to talk about Nolan Wells without talking about who has been covering it and who hasn’t. Fox News has been largely silent, at least in comparison to its missing persons coverage of white people. Other mainstream outlets took days to catch up. Don has been on this story since day one and has been steeped in the details of this case in a way almost nobody else in the media has. I noted that when Black people aren’t in the room, it’s difficult to get Black stories covered with the depth they deserve.

From there, we walked through the actual holes in the investigation. A drowning characterization was publicly speculated before a full investigation had been completed. Nolan’s phone, which the family tracked down themselves, had deleted messages. And Nolan’s mother, Christine, says she hadn’t heard from investigators in a week, despite the public outcry.

We also got into something harder to quantify but just as real, which is the anxiety this story triggers in Black families specifically. I talked about seeing that photo of Nolan with his friends and feeling something familiar, something that goes back to Trayvon Martin for me personally. Don talked about his own experience going to an integrated high school in the 80s and what’s shifted since. And I brought up something I haven’t fully sat with on air before, which is that I’m now a father to a one-month-old son, and stories like this hit different when you’re raising a Black boy in this world.

We closed on Colin Kaepernick funding an independent autopsy, Ben Crump’s role in exposing how badly this investigation has been mismanaged, and what happens once Monday’s funeral passes and the cameras start looking elsewhere.

I appreciate those of you who tuned in live and contributed so much to the conversation. This is truly the best community on Substack. If you’re just catching it now, feel free to leave your thoughts in the comments.

You can watch our full conversation above and read key takeaways below. And, as always, thank you for supporting independent media.

The Diversity Gap That Decides Which Stories Get Told

Before we got into the specifics of the case, I wanted to name the coverage discrepancy directly, because it shapes everything else about how this story has unfolded.

• I laid out the double standard plainly. I said if the situation were reversed, if a white teenager had vanished under similar circumstances with three Black kids on the boat, Fox News would be on day twelve of wall-to-wall coverage. Instead, we got near silence from Fox and a slow, reluctant catch-up from the rest of the mainstream media.

• Don explained this was the exact fight he had at CNN. He said this kind of story was something he pushed for consistently while there, and that these stories always rated well once the network actually ran them. He connected that directly to a lack of diversity among the people deciding what gets covered.

• Don pointed out who’s missing from the room. He said he’s rarely, if ever, seen another Black journalist like Roland Martin or Joy Reid at these press conferences, and that there just aren’t that many of them present covering this case in real time.

• I raised the fact that there’s an actual business case being ignored. I made the point that outlets have a ratings and engagement incentive to cover this story and are still choosing not to, which only makes sense if you understand that newsrooms without lived experience in these communities don’t recognize the urgency.

A Botched Investigation

This is where the conversation had the most weight for me, because every new detail we discussed pointed toward the same pattern of an investigation that never treated this case with immediate, urgent seriousness.

• I walked through the phone timeline, and it doesn’t add up. I said the phone was never voluntarily handed over. Nolan’s mother, Christine, had to use Life360 tracking to locate it herself, and it turned out to be sitting in a house rather than on the boat, meaning someone removed it and never called the family.

• I pushed back hard on how fast the sheriff moved to a conclusion. I said investigators tried to characterize this as a drowning far too early, which is not how a serious investigation is supposed to work.

• New audio surfaced this week that raises more questions than it answers. I referenced the NBC News audio describing the boat taking on water at one point and asked why that detail wasn’t part of the public record earlier.

• Don revealed the family had gone over a week without contact from investigators. He said Nolan’s mother told reporters at a press conference that she hadn’t heard from investigators since the previous Tuesday, more than a week prior, and that she’d initiated that last contact herself by text. Don illustrated what basic decency would look like by acting out the kind of short, simple check-in call a sheriff’s office should be making, a hypothetical rather than anything actually said, to underline just how low a bar was being missed.

Misinformation Fills The Vacuum

Where there’s an information gap this large, something rushes in to fill it, and in this case it’s been outright fabrication.

• I flagged the AI-generated videos targeting Nolan’s mother. I referenced Mississippi Free Press reporting on fake AI content attempting to put words in her mouth, which is its own kind of cruelty layered on top of an already devastating situation.

• I connected the silence to an unwillingness to protect the family. I said the department’s failure to properly communicate shows they know they’ve mishandled this case, and that failing to work to rebuild trust only deepens the family’s justified distrust.

The Anxiety Every Black Family Recognizes

We spent real time on why this story resonates so deeply beyond the specific facts of the case, and that meant getting personal.

• I described the specific kind of anxiety this story triggers. I said there’s a difference between being comfortable around white people generally and being around white people who aren’t your allies, and that this case taps into a collective trauma that Black people carry regardless of how integrated our own lives are.

• Don reflected on his own experience with integration and how the era has shifted. He talked about attending an all-Black Catholic school before switching to an integrated high school in the 80s, and how his sense of who his white classmates were has changed as he has watched the MAGA era unfold. He also pushed back on the idea that Nolan was isolated among white friends, noting there’s plenty of footage of him with his Black friends, several of whom have been the ones speaking out.

• I drew a direct line to Trayvon Martin. I said I was Trayvon’s exact age when that happened, and that this case is triggering something similar in me even though the circumstances aren’t identical.

• I brought in where I am now as a new father. I said I’m one month into fatherhood and that this story hits differently, seeing it through the lens of a son I’m now responsible for protecting in this world.

Kaepernick, Crump, & The Fight for Answers

The role of outside support in this case, both financial and legal, came up as a turning point in how much pressure has actually been applied to investigators.

• I gave credit to Colin Kaepernick for funding the independent autopsy. I said Kaepernick helped pay to get the body transported for a second opinion because the family didn’t trust the original investigators, and that this kind of sustained commitment to the fight, years after he was blackballed from the NFL, deserves real recognition.

• Don drew the connection to how Kaepernick himself was treated. He said what happened to Kaepernick for taking a knee, one of the most respectful gestures there is, reflects the same distorted perceptions around race and Black men running through this entire case.

• I extended that point further. I said Kaepernick was never virtue signaling, that he’s paid for his stance financially and is still actively in the fight today, which is part of what makes his involvement in funding this autopsy significant rather than performative.

• Don credited Ben Crump with exposing how badly this has been mishandled. He said Crump’s involvement is what surfaced and spread many of the details we covered in this conversation.

What Happens After Monday

We ended on the practical question of what happens once public attention naturally shifts, which is the part of this story that worries both of us most.

• Don raised concern about what happens once the funeral passes. He said the funeral is scheduled for Monday, and that historically once a funeral happens, network attention and roundtable coverage tend to fade even though the investigation itself doesn’t actually conclude.

• I said I’m already watching that shift happen. I said this week’s coverage has rightfully shifted toward the ICE killings, which are their own atrocities deserving attention, but that I’m not seeing the same sustained diligence applied to Nolan’s case that Don has brought to his own coverage.

• I pointed to the newly surfaced audio as evidence that this story isn’t finished. I said that between CBS and NBC News uncovering new audio this week, the hunt for real answers is continuing even as most mainstream attention wanes, and that I expect more information to come out that will keep this case alive.

Bottom Line

Strip away everything else, and what’s left is a mother who had to do investigators’ jobs for them, a sheriff’s department that announced an assumed cause of death before it had the facts, and a week of total silence toward a grieving family that deserved basic communication.

Layer on top of that a media landscape that took days to even notice, and you start to understand why this case has become about more than just Nolan Wells. It’s become a test of whether institutions, both law enforcement and media, actually show up for Black families with the same urgency they show up for everyone else. Right now, they’re failing that test.

Support independent media and analysis that fearlessly tells the truth. Subscribe to Don Lemon. If you have not yet become a paid subscriber to Ahmed Baba News, you can do that below. And if you’re already a paid subscriber, thank you! It truly means a lot.

Ahmed Baba News

Independent pro-democracy journalism, analysis, and commentary. Delivered to your inbox 2 to 4 times a week. Become a free or paid subscriber.

The Don Lemon Show

Don Lemon's Substack is a direct, unfiltered platform where Don breaks down politics, media, and culture with sharp analysis, personal perspective and unapologetic clarity. No network. No corporate sponsors. Just you and me.

Thank you for watching! In the face of unrelenting disinformation and authoritarian actions, clear truth-telling and independent media are a necessity. If you value pro-democracy journalism, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber to my newsletter. Paid subscribers empower this work and gain access to exclusive benefits. Your support makes a difference.

Subscribe now

James warned me before we even got into it today that this one would be heavy, and he was right. We opened on two ICE killings that happened within days of each other, kept finding the same pattern of zero accountability everywhere we looked, and ended up in one of the most honest conversations James and I have had on this show, about the industry we both work in and why people deserve better, both from mainstream and independent media.

We led with the two ICE killings that happened within days of each other this month. 26-year-old Joan Sebastian Guerrero was killed in Maine. He had legal work permits and a three-year-old daughter. Lorenzo Salgado Araujo was killed in Houston days earlier. He was 52 and had spent decades trying to get right with the immigration system. Both men were fathers. Neither man was even the target of the operation that killed him. We also got into the Memphis killings that got far less attention, two National Guard soldiers and a DEA agent involved in separate fatal shootings within days of each other this same month.

From there, we got into why this isn’t getting the same coverage in Britain that the Minneapolis killings got earlier this year, and why even here at home, coverage and public outrage shift depending on who the victim is. That led into the economics underneath all of it and the decades of manufactured immigrant scapegoating that Republicans use to avoid solving the actual problems facing working Americans. From there, we got into what it would actually take to fix and/or abolish an agency like ICE.

And then, as we do in most weeks, the conversation turned personal. James and I talked honestly about trying to navigate an industry built to reward outrage over understanding, why we’ve both been thinking about building something bigger than either of us has built before, and what it actually takes to do this work honestly instead of creating performative nonsense. It’s one of the most candid conversations we’ve had on this show, and it’s worth watching in full.

I appreciate those of you who tuned in live and contributed so much to the conversation. This is truly the best community on Substack. If you’re just catching it now, feel free to leave your thoughts in the comments.

You can watch our full conversation above and read key takeaways below. And if you value this thoughtful style of content and you’re not already a paid subscriber, this is exactly the kind of independent media we’re trying to keep building. And if you’re already a paid subscriber, thank you! It truly means a lot.

Unaccountable: Two More ICE Killings

I opened with the details of this month’s ICE killings, and neither James nor I could find any version of events that makes what happened defensible.

• Joan Sebastian Guerrero was 26, and he had done everything right. He had legal work permits and was here working to provide for his family. He had a three-year-old daughter. He was shot and killed by ICE in Maine this week, and I’ll admit it’s hard for me to cover this one without getting emotional, because there’s no veneer of legitimacy to any of it. They left blood on the streets and called it a day.

• Lorenzo Salgado Araujo was 52, and he was killed in Houston just days before Guerrero. He had spent decades trying to achieve legal status and was working, not committing any crime, when ICE killed him. He was also not the target of the operation. Both men were fathers. Both were in their cars, on their way to work. Both were killed for no reason, as immigration enforcement quotas climb toward roughly 2,000 arrests a day.

• This wasn’t only ICE, and it wasn’t only immigrants. Early this month, two National Guard soldiers fatally shot a 20-year-old in Memphis. Four days later, a DEA agent serving a drug warrant fatally shot a man in a Memphis hotel room. This is federal agents broadly, National Guard included, unleashing violence on American civilians.

• The pattern of lies keeps repeating, and it keeps getting less careful. In Salgado Araujo’s case, DHS claimed he tried to use his vehicle as a weapon, a claim his own coworkers in the truck directly disputed. In Guerrero’s case, they didn’t even bother making that claim. They just called him a threat to public safety without saying why. That’s an agency essentially admitting there was no real justification and daring anyone to do something about it.

• There is still zero accountability anywhere in this chain. Renee Good and Alex Pretti’s killers are still walking free, and the federal government is actively obstructing Minnesota’s investigation instead of cooperating with it. Trump has offered no words of remorse for any of these families. And this week, a brief pause on ICE traffic stops was announced, and then Trump overruled it in real time, just as we were going live. ICE will keep targeting Latino communities regardless of legal status, and most of the thousands arrested daily still don’t have criminal records.

• The most coverage this story is getting right now, at least out of Britain, is Petro’s comparison to Nuremberg. James went looking and found that the dominant UK angle on this whole story is the Colombian president calling it a state-sponsored killing and invoking the Nazis. He was careful to note Petro isn’t a leader without his own authoritarian streak, but said flatly he couldn’t disagree with the substance of what Petro said. I agree. Regardless of Petro’s own legitimacy, I think what’s happening here is state-sanctioned and state-sponsored murder, full stop.

The Coverage Gap, In The US And Across The Pond

James went looking for UK coverage of these killings and came up almost empty. When we compared notes on the US coverage too, a clear pattern emerged about whose deaths get treated as a crisis and whose don’t.

• James searched everywhere and found almost nothing. He uses Ground News and checks multiple outlets regularly, and the only UK coverage he could find at the time was from The Independent, which, he pointed out, runs a lot of cross-Atlantic content. The BBC has covered it since, but there was nothing in the immediate aftermath. His own algorithm had gone quiet on ICE content since the peak right after Alex Pretti’s killing, and it’s only spiking again now.

• A third death came up in the same conversation. James flagged that a man in Florida was struck and killed by a tractor-trailer while fleeing ICE and said he genuinely can’t fathom what it must feel like on the ground there right now, watching footage of agents in masks that he described as dystopian.

• The domestic discrepancy comes down to race, and James said so directly. He pointed out that the outrage gap between how Renee Good's and Alex Pretti’s killings were covered versus these ones isn’t really about legal status, since Guerrero had perfectly legal work authorization. It comes down to Hispanic origin, and to Blackness, patterns Black American communities already know well. After he looked into the story, his own algorithm served him a run of pro-ICE content, including a video of a woman at an airport praying over and hugging ICE agents while referencing something called an ICE coin. He compared the whole vibe to The Handmaid’s Tale.

• I connected it to a story from last week: Nolan Wells. Nolan, a Black man, went missing for about 24 hours after being with a group of white friends, and there was no coverage in the initial days until independent media, myself included, along with Danielle Moodie and Don Lemon, started covering it, and mainstream outlets caught up. It’s the same discrepancy playing out again.

The Economic Scapegoating Of Migrants That Provides The Basis For These Abuses

Once we got past the coverage gap, the conversation moved to the deeper why: the decades of manufactured economic grievance that make killings like these politically viable in Trump’s base.

• I laid out the throughline: this is the culmination of decades of villainizing immigrants. Trump’s first line coming down the escalator in 2015 was calling Mexicans rapists. That’s the same energy driving all of this now. You cannot claim you want to reward people for following the rules and then kill and deport the people who are literally following the rules. Guerrero had legal work permits. Salgado Araujo spent decades trying to get legal status. If you’re a Trump supporter and you still back this, I think you need to sit with why you’re able to dehumanize people doing exactly what your own ancestors did when they came here.

• James drew the UK parallel to Farage and Rupert Lowe. He said they’re trying to sell the idea that asylum is some newfangled, woke invention that isn’t working anymore, when it’s actually one of the oldest principles in statecraft. His bigger complaint was that the right offers no actual solutions, just complaints.

• A viewer raised the take-care-of-our-own-first argument, and I wanted to push back on it directly. Undocumented immigrants pay more than $100 billion in taxes annually without receiving matching benefits back, which is the reverse of what that argument assumes. I traced this zero-sum framing back to the Reagan era specifically and pointed out that white Americans are actually the largest plurality of people receiving welfare benefits in this country, which undercuts the entire premise that immigrants are the drain.

• James added the false binary underneath this framing. He said the right specifically invokes veterans, not the wider category of struggling Americans, because it stokes nationalistic pride more effectively. His larger point was that a country either accepts the basic responsibilities of statecraft, including some form of asylum and immigration policy, or it isn’t really a country. He said plainly that people like Trump and Farage don’t actually care about society because division benefits them while they stay personally insulated from its costs.

Root Causes, From The K-Shaped Economy To The Impact Of Foreign Interventionism

The conversation kept going down a level, from the manufactured grievance itself to what’s actually driving it, and eventually to what should replace ICE as it currently exists.

• I tied it back to Reagan-era trickle-down economics that never actually trickled down. Tax cuts fuel stock buybacks and CEO pay, not wages, and that’s the root of the K-shaped economy. Rather than fix income inequality or the tax code’s tilt toward the wealthy, the response has been to scapegoat immigrant communities instead, which is a distraction from the actual problem, not a solution to it.

• James asked me directly whether ICE can be reformed or whether it needs to be abolished. He referenced Michigan candidate Abdul El-Sayed’s abolition stance. My answer: the US ran an immigration system before ICE existed; it isn’t a foundational American institution, so yes, it could be abolished. My actual preference is dismantling it and rebuilding it under a new name, with real training and real accountability, focused on humane processing and citizenship pathways instead of terror and deportation quotas. I’d rather see that done legislatively than by executive order, even though Trump has already proven agencies can be dismantled unilaterally if a future administration wants to go that route.

• James had a number that stopped the conversation for a second. ICE’s current funding exceeds Denmark’s entire military budget. He said that fact genuinely blew his mind, and it’s a clean illustration of my point that a budget is a statement of priorities, and right now this one reflects a lie about where the actual threat to this country is coming from.

• I connected the funding fight to foreign policy, specifically the gutting of USAID. When the US pulls back on foreign aid and enables further regional destabilization, Israel’s actions in Lebanon being one example, it directly creates the refugee crises this same administration then punishes people for fleeing. People aren’t showing up at the border for a prolonged vacation. They’re fleeing violence. If you actually want to solve the asylum problem, restoring foreign aid and addressing root causes abroad does more than any amount of enforcement at home ever will.

The Kind Of Thoughtful Media We Want To Contribute To The Information Landscape

The last stretch of the show turned inward, into a genuinely candid conversation about the industry James and I both work in, and why so much of it is built to make people angry instead of informed.

• I’ve been developing a theory that curiosity can drive an algorithm as effectively as outrage can. I’ve seen it work in some of my own videos already, and coming out of this hiatus, I want to lean into it more directly. The goal is to give people the why behind hard stories, not just to tell them the sky is falling.

• James told a story about an invitation that stuck with him. He’d been invited to a Meta-hosted creator summer barbecue next week, and one of the scheduled talks is on how to turn news trends into fast, engagement-driving content. His reaction, in his own words, was that it’s not entertainment; it’s the news. He described outrage content as functioning like a cortisol spike, adrenaline without nourishment, what we’ve both called fast food politics before, and said real processing requires talking through something rather than just pointing at it.

• I reflected on my own younger self doing exactly what James was describing. At 22 or 23, early in Trump’s first term, I sometimes fell into that same outrage trap myself before I matured out of it. My sharper critique is aimed at some independent media figures who wear the journalist persona without the rigor to back it up. I think our own space needs more internal accountability instead of pointing every criticism outward at mainstream media.

• James shared something more vulnerable: a specific moment that morning after leaving BBC Studios. He’d been up since 5:30 am, was out the door by 7, and sat in his car scrolling past a creator whose entire format is seven-second rage clips, lines like calling a politician’s death overdue with no substance behind them. She’d just crossed a million followers. He admitted feeling envy in that moment before catching himself. In recent months, he’s reshaped the book he’s currently writing, which now centers on the shift in politics from news and storytelling toward entertainment and rage.

• I ended up sharing my own bigger picture reflection. I miss running an actual media organization the way I did with Rantt Media. With CNN likely heading toward the Ellisons and the same path CBS News is now on, I’ve been thinking about what it would take to eventually build a new, editorially independent network with both a digital and broadcast presence. James and I didn’t land on a plan, but we landed on the same belief: honest, unhurried conversation, exactly like the one we’d just had, is the actual antidote to a media ecosystem built to keep people angry instead of informed.

Bottom Line

Two more innocent people are dead, killed by federal agents who won’t be named, defended by a department that keeps changing its story, and covered unevenly depending on who died. None of that happens in a vacuum. It’s propped up by decades of manufactured economic grievance, amplified by a media system that rewards outrage over understanding, and normalized because there’s still no real accountability anywhere in the chain.

James and I didn’t come out of this conversation with easy answers. We came out of it more convinced than ever that the way through is the same as it’s always been: talk it through honestly instead of just pointing at it.

Support independent media and analysis that fearlessly tells the truth. Subscribe to my brilliant co-host, James Matthewson. If you have not yet become a paid subscriber to Ahmed Baba News, you can do that below. And if you’re already a paid subscriber, thank you! It truly means a lot.

Subscribe now

I’ve been thinking a lot about the ongoing right-wing takeover of mainstream media and the media we actually deserve. I wrote a Substack note with my thoughts in more detail if you’re interested in reading more:

Thank you for watching! In the face of unrelenting disinformation and authoritarian actions, clear truth-telling and independent media are a necessity. If you value pro-democracy journalism, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber to my newsletter. Paid subscribers empower this work and gain access to exclusive benefits. Your support makes a difference.

Subscribe now

Every so often, a conversation ends up revealing the throughline connecting a week’s worth of unrelated headlines, and that’s exactly what happened today in my latest episode of Across the Pond with James Matthewson.

We started somewhere we’ve been before, an Iran ceasefire falling apart in real time, moved into a NATO summit that spent more energy managing one unpredictable American president than deterring anyone else, and closed on a story so absurd it barely needed analysis: Nigel Farage resigning his own seat to dodge a corruption probe, only to end up facing off against a man dressed as a trash can.

If there’s a single idea running underneath all three stories, it’s that unpredictability and stunts work as strategies right up until the people around you stop playing along.

James joined from an unusually hot Edinburgh, hay fever and all, which didn’t get in the way of some of the sharpest analysis we’ve done together on this show. I’m easing back into a full schedule myself. My son is almost a month old now, and later this month I’m heading back to MS NOW on Stephanie Ruhle’s new 9 - 11 am show, Money, Power, Politics, with another CNN return likely not far behind. It felt good to be back in the chair with James for a full hour, with a solid night’s sleep.

We opened with the collapse, again, of the ceasefire between the US and Iran, which I’ve taken to calling the memorandum of misunderstanding rather than understanding, given how many times this exact headline has repeated itself. Trump used the sidelines of the NATO summit in Turkey to declare the agreement over and threaten a return to a naval blockade after the two countries traded strikes overnight.

I then framed the whole summit around the question that carried through the rest of the show: what is NATO actually accomplishing when the room’s real agenda item is managing one man’s unpredictability?

From there, we got into the mixed signals coming out of Ankara, Trump touting Ukraine’s Patriot missile defense plans out of one side of his mouth while threatening to pull tens of thousands of troops out of Europe and reviving his push on Greenland out of the other. James walked through how that’s landing in Britain, from energy and medical supply shortages tied to the Strait of Hormuz to Trump’s feud with Giorgia Meloni over a photo dispute, all the way to his phone call to FIFA to get an American player’s World Cup red card overturned.

We also spent real time on something more hopeful: the actual relationships being built between ordinary people at that tournament, which no amount of top-down chaos seems able to touch.

And then we got to Nigel Farage, who resigned his seat this week to trigger a by-election he thought would let him dodge a corruption investigation and rebrand himself as a man of the people. It backfired almost immediately, and by the end of the show, James and I were fully in stitches over just how badly. After all major parties decided not to contest his seat, Nigel Farage’s main opposition is now Count Binface, a comedian dressed as a trash can.

Stick around for that section, because the back half of this one got genuinely hilarious, and if you’ve got a slogan for the Binface campaign that’s currently humiliating Farage, drop it in the comments. We’re reading the best ones at the top of next week’s show.

I appreciate those of you who tuned in live and contributed so much to the conversation. This is truly the best community on Substack. If you’re just catching it now, feel free to leave your thoughts in the comments.

You can watch our full conversation above and read key takeaways below. And, as always, thank you for supporting independent media.

The Iran Ceasefire Is “Over” … Again

The Trump Administration and Iran are back to a familiar place, a ceasefire collapsing. James and I broke down what triggered this latest fallout.

• I opened by reading through the latest reporting. Trump said, from the NATO summit, that the US would probably strike Iran again and could reimpose the naval blockade after the two countries traded strikes overnight. My framing of it as the memorandum of misunderstanding rather than understanding captured how routine this exact cycle has become.

• A caretaker Starmer showed up looser than usual. James noted that Keir Starmer, with roughly two weeks left as prime minister, seemed more relaxed and more willing to speak plainly at this summit than he had been in office, since he no longer carries the same political incentive to hold his tongue.

• James flagged that Trump barely bothers to hear from other leaders, and I turned it into the framing that carried the segment. He pointed out that Trump skips out on hearing other countries’ remarks at these summits, Zelensky’s included, treating the room like background noise. I called him totally incurious and compared this NATO summit to inviting Putin back into the G7, a room full of people who’d rather be strategizing about how to handle one specific attendee than doing anything else, except that attendee is sitting right there.

• I tied it to a pattern I’ve flagged in past episodes. This is a rogue, unsettled figure who forces the rest of the world to build its strategy around anticipating his next move instead of solving the actual problems on the table, and this summit was no exception, right down to allies spending more energy managing him than addressing Iran or Russia.

Trump, The Unpredictability Factor: Greenland, Troops, And World Cup Interference

The Ankara summit was supposed to be about defense spending. Instead, James and I spent most of this segment cataloging how many contradictory signals came out of the same set of meetings.

• James broke down the three things actually leading British coverage. He said UK papers have mostly stopped discussing Iran and are instead covering its downstream effects, especially energy prices and helium shortages hitting the medical sector because of what he called a revolving door at the Strait of Hormuz, open one hour and closed the next.

• Greenland threats are back, and James reads them as a distraction technique. He said the renewed push to take over Greenland landed in Britain as a deliberate grenade thrown into the summit conversation, something politicians there have stopped taking seriously after hearing it repeated for so long, even as it still grabs headlines every time it comes up.

• I named the pattern outright: carrots and threats in the same breath. I argued Trump is running something like an abusive relationship with the alliance, sounding upbeat about NATO investment and a plan to help Ukraine build its own Patriot missile defense system out of one side of his mouth, while threatening Greenland and floating pulling a meaningful share of the roughly seventy-five thousand US troops stationed in Europe out of the other.

• Italy got dragged in over a photo dispute, and then came the World Cup. James explained that Trump turned on longtime ally Giorgia Meloni after she publicly disputed his account of a photo request, landing Italy on his list of allies not pulling their weight for reasons that had nothing to do with actual defense spending. And of course, we have the incident where Trump phoned the FIFA president directly to get a suspension overturned for an American player, and the US lost to Belgium anyway.

• I tied it back to a thesis about who’s missing from the room. I called it the unmitigated id of Trump. The difference between a first term with people like Gary Cohn and John Kelly around him holding back his worst instincts and a second term with nobody left to do that, and argued this is exactly why allies now need a standing contingency plan for whichever Republican shows up next, not just this one.

The Culture Trump’s Chaos Can’t Touch

Not everything in this segment was about the noise at the top. James and I spent real time on what’s actually happening between people on the ground, and how little the chaos above them seems to change it.

• James pointed to the World Cup as proof number one. He described Scottish fans traveling to the tournament for the first time in years and coming back with stories of warm, welcoming relationships with Americans they met. This is a sharp contrast to the white nationalist tone coming from the far-right.

• I pointed to viral clips as proof point number two. I referenced videos of international visitors experiencing American culture up close, dancing, celebrating, connecting across race and background. This is multiculturalism at its finest and is precisely the version of the country the current administration is trying to destroy.

• A twelfth-century chapel outside Edinburgh complicated the history books. James mentioned a recent trip to Rosslyn Chapel, where newly identified carvings of maize and corn appear to predate Columbus’s arrival in the Americas, and argued that discoveries like that undercut the narrative that global contact and exchange began with European colonization.

• I closed the segment on who actually owns American culture. I argued American culture was never one thing to begin with, that it has always been a blend of the cultures that built it. The right’s obsession with “hellhole” narratives about American cities falls apart the moment you spend an afternoon somewhere like a Brooklyn food market and see it for what it actually is.

Farage Vs. Count Binface

This is the part of the show that turned into pure comedy. James walked through exactly how Nigel Farage’s attempt to dodge a corruption probe with a resignation stunt turned into one of the worst self-inflicted political humiliations in recent British memory.

• The setup: a corruption probe Farage wanted paused. James explained that Farage, the Reform UK leader and MP for Clacton, has been under mounting scrutiny over undisclosed financial gifts, including a five-million-pound donation from a tech billionaire he never declared. Rather than let the investigation play out, Farage announced his resignation to trigger a by-election he plans to contest himself, a move that automatically pauses the probe.

• The speech did him no favors. James described watching the announcement live and called it a rambling, Trump-like performance built around bragging about how much money he made in the eighties and how many job offers he’s turned down. This style of self-promotion, he said, simply doesn’t land with British audiences the way it might in the US.

• Every other party refused to play along, and it backfired spectacularly. James reported that the major parties all agreed not to field candidates against Farage, leaving the field open only to Count Binface, a longtime satirical candidate who normally pulls around a hundred votes, meaning every vote that would have gone to real opposition is now consolidating behind a man in a bin costume. People in the Substack Live chat were coming up with hilarious slogans for Count Binface, which we shouted out in the episode. Feel free to throw yours into the comments, and we’ll read the best ones at the top of next week’s episode.

Leave a comment

• I connected it to a broader pattern with the far right. I argued this fits something I’ve tracked before. Far right figures are consistently better at campaigning than governing, and Farage clearly wanted to be back in campaign mode rather than facing his own investigation, only to end up campaigning against a trash can.

• Even Farage’s rivals on the right wouldn’t touch it. James noted that Rupert Lowe, the former Reform MP who now leads Restore Britain, publicly accused Farage of weaponizing the by-election to distract from his own bad decisions and confirmed his party won’t stand either. James said this tells you everything about how far Farage has fallen, even among people who agree with his politics.

• James and I landed on the same closing point: mockery is doing real work here. James argued that a society’s ability to laugh at its own leaders is a genuine test of how free that society actually is. I added that Trump ran for office in part because he couldn’t stand being laughed at, and that mocking figures like Farage is exactly the right instinct against people who cannot tolerate not being taken seriously.

Bottom Line

Three different stories, one thread. A ceasefire collapsed because unpredictability has become an actual governing strategy for Trump, the NATO summit spent more time managing his chaos than on anything productive, and Nigel Farage tried to use a stunt to dodge accountability for his own finances. Only one of the three backfired immediately and hilariously, but the lesson from all three is the same: instability only works as a strategy until the people around you stop playing along, and in Farage’s case, until a man in a bin costume ends up doing more damage to him than anyone anticipated.

And don’t forget, drop your best Count Binface campaign slogans in the comments below. We’re reading the top ones at the start of next week’s show.

Support independent media and analysis that fearlessly tells the truth. Subscribe to my brilliant co-host, James Matthewson. If you have not yet become a paid subscriber to Ahmed Baba News, you can do that below. And if you’re already a paid subscriber, thank you! It truly means a lot.

Subscribe now

I’ve been thinking a lot about the ongoing right-wing takeover of mainstream media and the media we actually deserve. I wrote a Substack note with my thoughts in more detail if you’re interested in reading more:

Ahmed Baba News

Independent pro-democracy journalism, analysis, and commentary. Delivered to your inbox 2 to 4 times a week. Become a free or paid subscriber.

Thank you for watching! In the face of unrelenting disinformation and authoritarian actions, clear truth-telling and independent media are a necessity. If you value pro-democracy journalism, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber to my newsletter. Paid subscribers empower this work and gain access to exclusive benefits. Your support makes a difference.

Subscribe now

$2.2 billion in personal income for Trump last year. Over 3,700 stock trades in a single quarter. A $620 million defense contract that landed in the hands of a company with ties to Donald Trump Jr., right as Trump’s Iran War started generating profits. These are the kinds of numbers Danielle Moodie and I found ourselves rattling off to each other in today’s Substack Live, and by the time we reached the end of the hour, the throughline connecting all of it, from a Senate campaign collapsing under its own weight to a Black teenager who died under circumstances that still don’t add up, was impossible to look away from.

We opened with breaking news. Senator Bernie Sanders had just told Graham Platner directly to drop out of the Maine Senate race, hours after a new and credible sexual assault allegation from a former partner sent his campaign into freefall. Danielle and I found ourselves in total alignment here. Neither of us had ever been on board with him, for reasons that predated this allegation by months, and we walked through why the vetting failure around his campaign says something bigger about how Democrats are learning the difference between moving beyond cancel culture and ignoring red flags.

From there, we went to the story I think about more than almost any other right now, the sheer scale of the Trump family grift. I came in with numbers. Danielle came in with more numbers, plus the receipts for where the money is actually landing. Together we tried to trace the throughline from a president personally profiting off crypto and foreign governments to the price you’re paying at the pump, and from there into the bigger structural question underneath all of it: an economy that has been quietly redesigned over decades to serve the richest among us rather than the people actually doing the work.

We closed on something heavier. We talked about the death of Nolan Xavier Wells, an 18-year-old who went missing over the Fourth of July weekend in Mississippi while on a boat trip with an all-white friend group, and whose body has now been found. We walked through what doesn’t add up about the timeline, what the reporting has surfaced, and why this story sits inside a pattern that Black families know intimately. I’ll be honest, this one hit different for me as a brand-new father, and Danielle helped me think through some of that in real time.

I appreciate those of you who tuned in live and contributed so much to the conversation. This is truly the best community on Substack. If you’re just catching it now, feel free to leave your thoughts in the comments.

You can watch our full conversation above and read key takeaways below. And, as always, thank you for supporting independent media.

The Platner Reckoning

Bernie Sanders’ call for Graham Platner to withdraw broke just before we went live, and neither Danielle nor I needed convincing that it was the right call. We were both skeptical from day one and used this opportunity to discuss the deeper lesson for Democrats moving forward.

• Danielle was never sold on him to begin with. She made clear she wasn’t one of the people reflexively defending Platner as allegations piled up over the course of his campaign, describing him as a flawed candidate carrying far too much baggage even before this latest and most serious allegation surfaced. She pushed back hard on anyone using Donald Trump’s own conduct as a reason to excuse Platner’s, calling that logic wild on its face, and landed on a phrase that stuck with me all show: that he’d become a candidate of distraction rather than one of direction.

• My skepticism traces back to a single Reddit answer. Long before this scandal, I pointed to Platner’s early media appearance with Tommy Vietor, where he apologized for a string of old Reddit posts but conspicuously stood by his “Black people don’t tip” line. I read that as a tell, a candidate making a political calculation about whose voters he could afford to offend, and I’ve carried that distrust since day one.

• The vetting process itself is the bigger scandal. Danielle walked through how quickly his support evaporated once the story broke, with Senators, the Working Families Party, and Bernie himself pulling back within a day, and asked pointedly what kind of background check produces a candidate who needed that much walking back. She was clear that she understands the Democratic establishment has treated progressive candidates unfairly before, but said Platner was not the hill she’d have chosen to defend given everything already in his record.

• The “regular guy” defense doesn’t survive contact with the facts. I pushed back on the idea that Platner’s rough edges were simply evidence of authenticity, noting that I don’t personally know many regular working people with a Nazi tattoo. I contrasted Platner with other candidates who came from working class or non-traditional backgrounds without anything close to this kind of baggage, arguing that authenticity was never actually the issue.

• The timing of the allegation only adds to its credibility. Both of us noted that accuser Jenny Racicot had reportedly wrestled with the political consequences of coming forward as a Democrat who wants to see Susan Collins defeated, and came forward anyway. I pointed out that Platner’s own response, disputing the accuracy of the reporting without directly addressing the substance of the allegation, read as an admission in itself.

• What comes next matters more than what just happened. With Maine’s July 13 withdrawal deadline approaching and a July 27 deadline to name a replacement, I flagged that state senator Troy Jackson has emerged as a possible alternative and was already polling ahead of Collins in at least one survey. Danielle’s closing point was simple, that Maine deserves a candidate the state doesn’t have to make excuses for, someone who clears a bar that should never have been this low.

The Grift Playing In Our Faces

This is the section where the conversation really opened up. I came in ready to lay out the scale of what’s happening, and Danielle matched it with detail after detail, until the two of us were essentially building a single, damning case together in real time.

• The topline numbers are staggering on their own. I laid out that Trump reported more than $2.2 billion in personal income last year, with $1.4 billion of that coming from crypto alone, alongside more than 3,700 stock trades in a single quarter. I connected this directly to conflicts of interest, noting Trump holds investments in defense contractors while waging a war that benefits them, and holds Nvidia stock while simultaneously greenlighting chip sales to China.

• The Pentagon contract is a crystal-clear example of self-dealing. I pointed to a $620 million Pentagon contract awarded to a company with ties to Trump Jr. and no real defense industry background, awarded in the middle of a war that stands to benefit that same company. I outlined this alongside the reported $2 billion in Abu Dhabi-linked funds that flowed into the Trump family’s World Liberty Financial stablecoin venture as evidence of a president actively converting foreign and domestic policy into personal income.

• Danielle came in with the receipts on where else the money is moving. She referenced a list she had laid out for her own show the day before, cataloging government contracts and business deals benefiting companies tied to Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump, and noted the irony of Hunter Biden becoming an unlikely and effective messenger on the subject after years of Republican investigations into his own finances turned up comparatively little. She also flagged reported trading activity tied to oil markets around the Iran strikes, describing a pattern of enormous trades landing right before major announcements, over and over again.

• Treasury Secretary Bessent’s denial only made it worse. Danielle didn’t hold back on Bessent’s public claim that there’s no appearance of any impropriety, calling that response willful blindness. She tied it to the broader posture of an administration that isn’t even bothering to hide what it’s doing, pointing to a $14 million no-bid contract tied to the National Mall reflecting pool as a small but telling example of money being spent carelessly while paint peels and basic maintenance goes undone.

• Danielle’s warning was about where this leads if nothing changes. She described an administration that is playing in the public’s face and said plainly that by the time this is over, the country risks looking more dilapidated than the authoritarian regimes it likes to compare itself favorably against. That line landed as the center of this whole section.

• I connected the grift directly to people’s pocketbooks. I argued the real story isn’t just that Trump is enriching himself; it’s that he’s doing so while personally driving up costs for everyone else, through tariffs he chose to impose and a war with Iran he entered without congressional approval. I noted that the closing of the Strait of Hormuz, through which roughly a fifth of the world’s oil and a significant share of fertilizer supply travels, has already added real costs to American households, and called Trump the personification of a K-shaped economy where the wealthy pull further ahead while everyone else falls behind.

The Economy We Deserve

This was the section that ran the longest, and for good reason. What started as outrage over the grift turned into a genuinely substantive conversation about how we got here, who benefits from keeping working people divided, and what an actual alternative could look like.

• I traced a direct line from the Southern Strategy to today. I walked through how the coded racial messaging of the Nixon and Reagan eras, built around phrases like welfare queens despite white Americans making up the largest group of welfare recipients, evolved into blaming immigrants and eventually into Trump discarding the code words altogether. I argued that trickle-down economics never delivered on its promise, with corporate tax cuts flowing into stock buybacks and executive pay rather than wages, and predicted Trump’s approval could sink into the high twenties by the midterms as the consequences become impossible to ignore.

• Danielle’s response was that real change requires real pain first. She said she does see pockets of growing awareness, but believes many white Americans still haven’t reckoned with what she called a generational trade: access to whiteness and its privileges in exchange for economic security that has quietly eroded for decades. She also turned the question back on the Democratic establishment, asking what real alternative they’ve actually offered when the same corporate donors, big tech, and big oil fund both parties.

• Danielle’s servant-class framing reframed the entire debate. She argued that the real dividing line in this country isn’t between working class and middle class; it’s between the ultra-wealthy and everyone else who has to work for a living, whether that’s a middle manager or someone picking produce. When a commenter in the chat pushed back using a $200,000 salary as a counterexample, she responded directly, walking through what childcare, rent, and basic cost of living actually look like in most major American cities to make the point that even a six-figure salary doesn’t buy escape from that structure.

• I extended that framework into a concrete policy vision. I proposed a tax system built around a simple test: if you have to work for your money, you deserve real relief, floating meaningful tax cuts for people making under roughly half a million to a million dollars a year. I also floated a specific idea, taxing the net profits of AI companies to fund a small business loan system modeled on federal student loans, paired with what I described as a New Deal-style economic framework that doesn’t repeat the original New Deal’s exclusion of Black Americans.

• Danielle grounded all of it in her own family’s story. She described her grandparents immigrating from Jamaica in 1970 and, without college degrees, being able to buy a home and help put their kids through school by working as a domestic worker and a factory worker. She pointed out that she, with multiple advanced degrees, could not afford to buy that same house today, and connected it to a broader story of retail and service workers in the 1990s who could once afford homes and vacations on wages that now leave people needing public assistance just to get by.

• She called the current system exactly what it is, a Ponzi scheme. Danielle argued the economy has been deliberately structured to funnel wealth upward while keeping everyone else fighting over scraps, using racism and misogyny as the tools that keep people from recognizing their shared interests. I picked up that thread and tied it back to the K-shaped economy discussion, arguing that grievance politics exists specifically to redirect anger away from that structure and onto immigrants and communities of color instead.

• Danielle closed this section with something close to hope. She said she views Trump’s brazenness as, in a strange way, a gift, because it makes the truth about this country impossible to keep denying to ourselves. She acknowledged a commenter calling the conversation soul-crushing, but argued that robbing people of hope is the entire point of the exercise, and that the outcome from here comes down to one of two paths, either unchecked authoritarian power or a collective American awakening.

What Happened To Nolan Wells

This is the story Danielle wanted to make sure we got to, and it’s the one that stayed with me the longest after we went off air. Eighteen-year-old Nolan Xavier Wells went missing over the Fourth of July weekend on a boat trip in Mississippi with a group of white friends, and his body has since been found. What follows is what doesn’t add up and why this story sits inside a much larger and painfully familiar pattern.

• The basic facts already raise serious questions. Danielle said that Wells was the only Black person on a boat trip to a remote island, described as little more than a strip of sand with nowhere to hide or go, and that the group returned home with his phone but without him. She noted that in the time between his disappearance and his body being found, several of the friends’ social media accounts went private, and that there has been a conspicuous absence of the kind of public grief posts you’d expect from close friends after a tragedy like this.

• This fits a pattern Danielle says Black families know all too well. She referenced a previous case involving a young Black woman who went missing and was later found murdered after a trip with an all-white friend group, a story that only gained mainstream media attention after sustained pressure on social media. She also raised her own skepticism toward past cases officially ruled suicides by hanging in public, arguing that framing runs contrary to patterns she’s observed within the Black community.

• New details are surfacing through social media rather than official channels. Danielle referenced footage shared by attorney Ben Crump showing a fight breaking out on the water near a cluster of boats gathered for the holiday weekend, along with a bystander account placing Wells on the boat around 4:30 p.m. and gone by roughly 7:30 p.m. She also pointed out that a Snapchat video from the area confirmed cell service was working that day, undercutting any suggestion that the group couldn’t have called for help.

• I focused on the group’s behavior after Wells went missing. I said leaving the island with a missing friend’s phone rather than staying to search or immediately alerting authorities reads as deeply suspicious on its own, regardless of what ultimately happened. I was careful to say I don’t know whether the friends are guilty of anything, but argued plainly that if the races here were reversed, three Black teenagers in this exact situation would already be under active suspicion, and this story would be dominating Fox News around the clock.

• The conversation turned personal for me in a way I didn’t expect. I connected this moment to being roughly Trayvon Martin’s age when Martin was killed, and to watching colleagues at the time defend George Zimmerman in real time, describing that recurring pattern of young Black men targeted, killed, or convicted after defending themselves as something I now have to think about differently as a brand new father to a son who will be both Black and Jewish.

• Danielle closed by naming exactly why this work matters to her. She said conversations like this one are the reason she does what she does, describing the Black community’s hypervigilance not as excessive caution but as a survival skill earned the hard way. Her message to parents and caregivers listening was direct: pay close attention to whether the spaces your children move through, and the ones you move through yourself, are actually safe.

Bottom Line

Everything we covered this week traces back to the same basic question, who does this country actually protect, and who is left to absorb the cost.

Graham Platner got to run for months on charisma and grievance politics before the truth caught up to him. Donald Trump gets to convert the presidency itself into a personal income stream while working families choose between groceries and gas. An entire economic system has been built, deliberately, to keep people fighting each other over scraps instead of asking why the scraps exist in the first place. And a family in Mississippi is left demanding answers that the system isn’t in any hurry to provide. None of these stories are separate. They’re the same story, told from different angles, about who gets accountability and who gets excuses.

Thank you to for another conversation that pushed me to think deeper, and for the work she does every single day. Go subscribe to her at if you haven’t already. Her voice is one of the sharpest and most honest in independent media.

And if you want to keep supporting work like this, becoming a paid subscriber to Ahmed Baba News is one of the most direct ways to do it. You can do that below. And if you’re already a paid subscriber, thank you! It truly means a lot.

Ahmed Baba News

Independent pro-democracy journalism, analysis, and commentary. Delivered to your inbox 2 to 4 times a week. Become a free or paid subscriber.

Thank you for watching! In the face of unrelenting disinformation and authoritarian actions, clear truth-telling and independent media are a necessity. If you value pro-democracy journalism, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber to my newsletter. Paid subscribers empower this work and gain access to exclusive benefits. Your support makes a difference.

Subscribe now

This was my first live with Charles Douglas since my son was born last month, and if my voice was a little quieter than usual, that is why. The baby was asleep in the next room.

We came back to an important discussion. While I was taking a break from most of my Substack Lives and a hiatus from cable news appearances, the Democratic Party primaries produced a wave of results that sent people into a spiral.

Zohran Mamdani’s political operation delivered primary wins for Darializa Avila Chevalier in New York’s 13th, Claire Valdez in New York’s 7th, and Brad Lander in New York’s 10th. Melat Kiros, a 29-year-old democratic socialist, beat a 29-term incumbent in Denver. Phil Weiser beat Michael Bennet in Colorado’s gubernatorial primary. And the panels on cable news reacted as if the Democratic Party had gone full revolutionary, even though the DSA wins were only a small part of the broader story here.

Charles Douglas runs Common Power, an organization that has been doing real electoral groundwork across the country, from Tennessee to Michigan to Alaska. His read on all of this is grounded in something the cable news panels mostly missed: what these candidates actually have in common is not a label. It is a prioritization of the working class that voters appear to believe the Democratic establishment has failed to deliver.

My own view going into this conversation, and coming out of it, is that this is being framed wrong. Calling this a democratic socialist takeover and generalizing the entire party based on a few candidates is doing the Republicans’ work for them. Brad Lander left the DSA. James Talarico is a Presbyterian seminarian quoting Scripture in Texas. Phil Weiser is not a democratic socialist. What they all share is a posture, a willingness to say that working people have been deprioritized and that is going to change. That is the story.

We also talked honestly about the candidates who make that argument harder to make. And we talked about what comes next, including Charles’s prediction about a potential political realignment and what the 2028 platform needs to look like.

I appreciate those of you who tuned in live and contributed so much to the conversation. This is truly the best community on Substack. If you’re just catching it now, feel free to leave your thoughts in the comments.

You can watch our full conversation above and read key takeaways below. And, as always, thank you for supporting independent media.

The “Socialist Takeover” Narrative Is Overblown

My belief is that the coverage is not accurately describing the full scope of the recent primary results. Watching pundits respond to a handful of primary wins in deeply blue districts as evidence that the entire Democratic Party holds every single view of one or two candidates is both false and politically useful for exactly the wrong people.

• We are talking about three House primaries in districts Kamala Harris won by massive margins. I made this point directly: these are deeply blue districts, the hub of DSA organizing, and it should not surprise anyone that democratic socialist candidates won there. Extrapolating that onto the entire Democratic Party and calling it a socialist takeover is the same anecdote-extrapolation tactic the Republican Party uses constantly. When we are handed three primary wins and respond by debating whether the whole party has lost its mind, we are doing their work for them.

• The double standard here is glaring. When Trump wins on white nationalist rhetoric, every pundit rushes to understand the economic anxiety beneath the surface. When a handful of democratic socialists win primaries in Brooklyn and Denver, running on healthcare and economic populism, suddenly we need to excommunicate them? Charles put this plainly: the reason the far left gets villainized immediately is not because of their policy record. It is because what they are saying is that rich people should not have as much money as they have, and that is enough to get the most powerful people in the country to turn on them.

• There are real critiques to make, and making them is healthy. I said on the live that I have genuine concerns about how some of these candidates communicate, particularly on issues where imprecise language gives opponents easy ammunition. That is a legitimate internal conversation. But legitimate critique is not the same as generalization, and right now, the generalization is winning the airtime.

The Socialist Branding Problem And the Mamdani Standard

The DSA label creates barriers to entry that the underlying ideas do not require. Zohran Mamdani proved that you can overcome those barriers. He is a unique case and political talent, though, and it is worth being honest about why not every candidate running under a similar banner has managed to clear the same bar.

• Mamdani is the Michael Jordan of this political moment. Charles said it directly, and I agree. What Mamdani demonstrated is that you can hold democratic socialist policy commitments while being so disciplined on messaging, so relentlessly focused on affordability and working people, that the label never becomes the story. You throw something at him, and he comes back with rent freeze, grocery stores, fare-free buses. The policy is the answer. Charles noted that Mamdani did not run with DSA flags behind him. I noted that Mamdani also strategically declined to back a challenger to Hakeem Jeffries, understanding the limits of what the moment required.

• Not every candidate in this wave has that discipline, and it shows in the margins. I was honest about Darializa Avila Chevalier: I have real questions about some of her past statements and some of her current policy positions. Charles made the counterargument that in the age of the internet, any candidate who was a regular person online before running for office will have something in their history that looks bad in a screenshot. But my point was not about the past posts. It was about current communications discipline and whether it makes life harder for Democrats in swing districts who now have to answer for it.

• The DSA label, specifically, regardless of the underlying policy, gives Republicans a free layup. I am not arguing these candidates should hide what they believe. I am arguing that “democratic socialism” as a brand carries decades of fear-mongering baggage that the actual ideas do not need. James Talarico does not call himself a democratic socialist and is running competitively for a Senate seat in Texas. Abdul El-Sayed is a progressive running for Michigan Senate and does not identify as a democratic socialist. There is a lesson in that.

The DSA As Left Flank, Not The Whole Tent

Charles made the argument that I found pretty compelling, and it helped reframe how I think about this wave. The DSA’s value to the broader coalition is not that every district should elect a democratic socialist. It is that having a real, organized left flank changes where the center of the conversation sits.

• When you negotiate from the middle, the middle keeps moving toward whoever is starting further right. Charles laid this out precisely: for years, Democratic deals were made by splitting the difference with a Republican Party that was starting way out on the right. The result is that compromise often landed in center-right territory and was called progress. Now that there is a credible left flank with wins, the negotiating floor moves. Candidates like Roy Cooper or James Talarico or Abdul El-Sayed get to be the “moderate” option in a conversation that has shifted.

• Bernie Sanders spent decades saying things that seemed impossible, and that is exactly why they are now possible. Charles made this comparison to Avila Chevalier’s further-left policy positions. The role of the left flank is not just to win elections. It is to expand the range of what the political conversation treats as legitimate. Someone has to hold the far end of the continuum so the middle can move, Charles argued.

• A coalition is not a coalition if everyone agrees. Charles closed the section with this, and I thought it was the right note. The instinct to excommunicate candidates whose views make us uncomfortable is the same instinct that kept the Democratic Party in a shrinking tent. Welcome people in. Disagree where you disagree. Then point the collective energy at the actual opponents, who are the Republicans running the country right now.

Why The Establishment Lost Many Of Its Own Voters

The opening that allowed this wave to happen was not created by the DSA. It was left open by an establishment that voters believe stopped fighting and stopped prioritizing the people it claimed to represent.

• Chuck Schumer’s sternly worded letters and 12th press conferences are not a governing vision. Charles put it bluntly: the establishment spent the years since 2020 waiting for a vision to emerge, and it never came. Regular people across the country looked at that vacuum and decided to fill it themselves. The candidates winning these primaries are not part of a hostile takeover. They are what happens when the people who were supposed to fight for you didn’t show up as forcefully as voters wanted.

• The Tea Party comparison does not hold. I made this point, and I want to put it in the write-up because it keeps coming up. The Tea Party was manufactured. It was funded by the Koch brothers. It was an engineered capture of the Republican Party by wealthy interests, and it culminated in Trump. What is happening on the Democratic left right now is grassroots. The money is running against these candidates, not behind them. That is a fundamental difference, and the comparison should stop.

What Comes Next: The Party Realignment Prediction

Charles closed with an interesting forecast.

• Wealthy Democrats will eventually leave the party if the working class takes it over, Charles said. Charles predicted that as working-class priorities come to dominate the Democratic platform, we will see an exodus of wealthy Democratic donors and voters who will eventually migrate back to a post-MAGA Republican Party. He pointed to Third Way, fully funded by ultra-millionaires, as the first signal of that toe out of the water.

• The 2028 platform needs to look like FDR. My read is that the end state of all this is a Democratic Party that runs on New Deal-scale economic ambition: rebuild the federal agencies hollowed out by this administration, roll back the Big Beautiful Bill, build out housing, and invest in the working class at a scale people can feel. That is not radical. FDR did it without calling himself a socialist. The ideas travel. The label does not have to.

• The races to watch: Michigan, Wisconsin, Seattle. Charles flagged Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan, currently leading in the primary polls, as the next big test. Francesca Hong is polling in second in the Wisconsin governor’s race, which would be significant precisely because Wisconsin is not a deep-blue state. And Charles will be on the ground in Tennessee with Justin Pearson and in Michigan with the El-Sayed campaign in the coming weeks. Keep watching those races. They will tell us a lot about where this goes.

The Bottom Line

The debate consuming Democratic politics right now is real, but it is being badly framed. The candidates winning these primaries are not evidence of a socialist takeover. They are evidence that working people want someone who will actually fight for them. The label matters less than the posture. The posture that is winning is: I am on your side, the powerful are not, and I will not back down.

Charles’s point about the left flank widening the Overton window is an important structural argument to understand here. A Democratic Party with a real left flank negotiates differently. It governs differently. And eventually, the candidates who find the Mamdani-level discipline to hold those commitments while keeping their coalition broad are going to be the ones who define what the party becomes.

If this conversation mattered to you, I hope you consider becoming a paid subscriber to Ahmed Baba News. If you’re already a paid subscriber, thank you! Independent pro-democracy journalism only works if people back it. And if you’d like to get involved and knock doors this election year, I also highly recommend checking out Common Power.

Ahmed Baba News

Independent pro-democracy journalism, analysis, and commentary. Delivered to your inbox 2 to 4 times a week. Become a free or paid subscriber.