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On Friday, I was happy to return from a short hiatus for my first cable news appearance since my son was born, and 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!

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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The Don Lemon Show

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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:

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$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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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James Matthewson and I had our first guest on Across the Pond this week, and she was fantastic.

Andra Watkins is a New York Times bestselling author and one of the earliest voices to document Project 2025 as a Christian nationalist manifesto. Her Substack, For Such a Time as This, is dedicated to decoding the language, funding, and infrastructure of white Christian nationalism. She joined our weekly Substack Live as the inaugural guest of Across the Pond to help us better understand the interconnected Christian nationalist global network driving the far right. What followed was one of the most analytically rich conversations we have had on this show.

The thesis we built together over the course of the conversation is this: Christian nationalism is a globally coordinated authoritarian project, backed by identifiable money, carried by recognizable institutional networks, and exported with deliberate intent to countries where the religious infrastructure looks completely different. The far right has cultivated a shared global ideology.

What makes Andra’s perspective uniquely valuable is that she is not analyzing this movement from the outside. She grew up inside Christian nationalism. She was indoctrinated early into what she described as a mini-dictatorship structure, where you trust the authority figure, you do not question the leader, and deviation is punished. That training, she made clear, is exactly why this ideological vehicle is so useful to authoritarians. The congregation is pre-built for it.

James brought the UK angle with the kind of on-the-ground fluency that makes Across the Pond worth watching. He tracked Farage’s evolution from someone who could not have cared less about religion into a figure now explicitly invoking “Judeo-Christian” heritage. He named the class dimensions of British far-right politics, the way Farage looks down on Tommy Robinson as low-brow while still absorbing his energy. And he flagged something important: in a society as secular as Britain, the Christian nationalist playbook lands differently. The religious hook does not grab the same way. What travels instead is the racial subtext underneath it.

We covered a lot of ground. The three factions funding the movement. The international conferences where these networks compare notes. Project 2025’s stumbling implementation and the structural reasons for it. Whether the global far right is actually declining, and what the honest answer to that question looks like. And the role real Christians can play in dismantling a movement that has hijacked their faith.

This is the kind of media I like to create. The better we understand the global dynamics of authoritarianism, the more effectively we can combat it.

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.

Religion Has Always Been the Authoritarian’s Best Tool

Authoritarians do not reach for Christianity because they believe in it. They reach for it because it works. Andra opened the conversation by placing this moment inside a much longer history.

• The Nazis did it. Mussolini did it. This is not new. Andra was direct about this from the start: the merging of authoritarian political power with religion is a recurring pattern across history, not an American invention. What is distinctive about the current moment is how explicitly coordinated and well-funded the effort has become. She pointed out that other active theocracies around the world use different faiths the same way, making the point that the tool is religion itself, not any specific tradition.

• The church structure is pre-built for authoritarian indoctrination. Andra described what she experienced growing up: pastors and priests as mini-dictators, congregations trained to accept what the leader says as truth, punishment for questioning. Fifty years of Americans sitting in those pews, she said, have produced a deeply radicalized base that is already primed to accept a political strongman. The infrastructure of submission was built long before Trump arrived to exploit it.

• The charlatans are the most dangerous operators. I made the point that the most revealing thing about this wave is watching people like Donald Trump, perhaps the most ungodly figure in modern public life, and Nigel Farage, who James noted has likely never spent meaningful time in a church, deploy Christian language as a political cudgel. The exploitation is the point. They are not believers. They are abusers of believers.

The Money Behind Christian Nationalism

This was the section of the conversation that I think most people have never heard laid out this clearly. Andra broke down the organizational architecture of white Christian nationalism in the United States and explained how that architecture is being exported.

• The Protestant wing, the Opus Dei Catholics, and the New Apostolic Reformation all hate each other and work together anyway. Andra identified three loose but powerful factions: the Baptist and conservative Presbyterian tradition she grew up in; the Opus Dei and related Catholic networks, which she described as a captive of the Heritage Foundation; and the charismatic, Pentecostal New Apostolic Reformation, represented by figures like Paula White-Cain. She was emphatic that these groups genuinely despise each other theologically. They all believe the others are going to hell. But the billionaire money behind them does not care about the theology. So they have been funded into an uneasy, effective coalition.

• The Heritage Foundation is going international, and Alliance Defending Freedom is doing the legal groundwork in Europe. Andra explained that organizations like Alliance Defending Freedom and Heritage Foundation affiliates are opening offices abroad, taking the temperature of local populations, and running the same judicial strategy they ran in the United States, manufacturing religious liberty cases and using local courts to pull countries rightward through legal precedent. This is an organized infrastructure.

• Peter Thiel believes in Peter Thiel. The religious affiliation is a management tool. Andra was unsparing on this point. She said directly that Peter Thiel, affiliated with Opus Dei, believes none of it. What he understands is that millions of Americans do believe it, and that a billionaire vouching for those beliefs amplifies them. His association with the movement is not based on faith. It is leverage. As James put it, it does the legwork for you. You hitch your wagon to a framework that already exists and use it to move people.

• The AfD’s rural youth radicalization strategy was studied and imported. Andra made a point I found genuinely eye-opening: the German far-right party AfD spent years and significant money targeting rural youth in Germany, radicalizing young people in areas outside major cities. Her view is that the American far right watched that, learned from it, and brought adapted versions of it home in the form of the manosphere and the trad wife movement. These are not organic cultural phenomena. They are downstream of a deliberate international strategy.

Farage And The British Replication Of Christian Nationalism

James brought serious analytical depth to the UK dimension of this conversation, tracking how Christian nationalist rhetoric has been grafted onto a fundamentally secular political culture.

• Farage was never religious. He adopted this because it works. James was precise about this: Farage was a Catholic Thatcherite, a banker, a free-market guy. His background had nothing to do with the evangelical tradition that powers American Christian nationalism. What changed was the rise of figures like Tommy Robinson, whose appeal he originally looked down on as low-brow, and the dawning realization that the energy behind that appeal was something he wanted. So he fused with it.

• Britain is secular in a way America is not, so what crosses the Atlantic is the racial subtext, not the theology. James made a distinction worth holding onto. In the UK, creationism is rare. Active religious practice is in long decline. The church-as-political-organizing-tool simply does not have the same infrastructure to attach to. What does translate is the ethnonationalist dimension. When Farage says Judeo-Christian values and British heritage, James was clear about what that signals: it means white. It is not a statement about Abrahamic monotheism. It is a racial identifier dressed in religious language.

• Rupert Lowe is now out-Christian-nationalizing Farage, and that tells you everything about the race to the bottom. James noted that since Lowe split from Reform to form his own party, Restore, Farage has actually been outflanked on the Christian nationalist right. There is now a competition within the British far right for who can own that lane most aggressively. The secular barrier in the UK may slow the movement, but it is not stopping it.

Project 2025: Stumbling Fascism

I pushed on the question of whether Project 2025’s implementation has backfired, and Andra agreed with the general assessment while adding important texture about what is actually driving the stumble.

• The problem is an unpredictable leader that no one can fully control. Andra’s read was that Trump was never going to execute the playbook the way its architects designed it. The plan assumed a figure who could be directed. What they got was someone who follows his own impulses, and those impulses do not always align with the project’s goals.

• Stephen Miller and Russell Vought are the real operators, but they cannot do it alone. Andra named these two as the most ruthlessly effective implementers in the administration. But they have had to rely on people like Kristi Noem to fill out the implementation layer, and that is where things have broken down. I added that Elon Musk’s public role directly undercut Vought’s quiet bureaucratic gutting of the federal government. The richest man on earth with a chainsaw was not part of the plan. I also added that Trump’s overall approach and botched implementation of Project 2025 have backfired on him politically in ways that are still playing out.

• They have not given up on the midterms. That is where the next assault is coming. Andra was clear that the stumbling does not mean retreat. Her read is that the coordinated attack on the midterms is already underway because they understand they are behind schedule and need to lock in political control before the implementation window closes. Getting worse, she said, does not necessarily mean they are winning. But it does mean the pressure will increase before it decreases.

Is The Global Far Right Actually Declining?

I asked both Andra and James whether Viktor Orbán’s fall, Trump’s collapsing approval numbers, and the fractures inside MAGA were evidence of the global far right declining. Their answers were more sober than my framing.

• Andra sees global gains, not decline. She ran through the landscape: Colombia went badly in recent elections, Peru chose a dictator, Chile returned a Pinochet acolyte, Argentina lurched further right, Bolivia is experiencing violence, Paraguay has rejected democracy, and Brazil is the next major frontier the techno-fascists are targeting for its resources. The AfD has made strides in Germany. Spain’s Sanchez government is, in her words, a Frankenstein coalition one election away from collapse into a center-right and Vox alignment. Hungary was won after years of patient groundwork. The takeaway, she said, is that democracy is a daily job, and the far right has understood that far longer than the left has.

• James sees cracks, but credits them to the movement’s own internal flaws, not external pressure. His read on the UK is that the fractures appearing in Reform are self-inflicted. Farage is in hiding because of questions about a five-million-pound donation from a Thai tech billionaire and an overnight conversion to crypto deregulation that followed it. In Britain, unlike America, conspicuous wealth does not inspire admiration. It triggers suspicion. The Scottish Reform leader bragged about six houses and three boats in a debate and immediately tanked. The movement is fragile precisely because it is built around deeply flawed individuals who cannot stop revealing themselves.

• My view is that their arrogance and incompetence are genuine assets for the opposition, and the polling shows it. I responded by injecting some optimism. Trump entered this term cracking over 50% approval, which was historically unusual, because voters gave him a genuine window assuming he might restore the pre-COVID economy they remembered. Instead, he squandered every bit of that goodwill within weeks. His disapproval has climbed steadily. The Republican Party’s generic ballot numbers are declining alongside his. The Democrats, for all their current internal chaos, are still ahead in the generic ballot by as many as ten points in some polling. I did a whole video tracking how Trump is destroying the Republican Party here:

  And the No Kings protests, millions of people in the streets, tell you something real about where the public’s head is.

The Fight For Christianity’s Soul

The conversation closed where it needed to: not just on what the far right is doing, but on what people of faith, and people outside of religious institutions, can actually do about it.

• Pope Leo is now one of the most powerful voices speaking out against Christian nationalism, and that matters. I quoted his line directly: “Woe to those who manipulate religion in the very name of God for their own military, economic, or political gain, dragging that which is sacred into darkness and filth.” That is the most powerful religious leader in the world calling out this movement by its function. Andra affirmed that it is professing Christians who need to be the loudest voices in this fight, and named Pope Leo alongside figures like James Talarico, John Pavlovitz, and John Fugelsang as people doing that work credibly.

• Andra’s NYT study on media coverage reveals how protected Christianity has been from scrutiny. Andra shared research she conducted: since the mid-1800s, The New York Times has used terms like radical Islamist, radicalized Islam, and jihad nearly 4,000 times. The equivalent language applied to radicalized Christianity appears fewer than 100 times, according to Andra. Christians are not persecuted, she said. They are among the most coddled groups in American media history. Calling out Christian nationalism is not persecution. It is accountability. And people should not let the inevitable accusations of religious persecution deter them from doing it.

• James sees the UK’s relative ignorance of the term as an opportunity, not a disadvantage. His point was reframing: if so many Americans still do not know what Christian nationalism is, the UK is even earlier in that curve. Which means there is time to get ahead of it. He committed to directing UK audiences to Andra’s work, noting that even as someone who has fought the Catholic Church on multiple fronts, he recognizes that the path to preventing Christian nationalism from taking hold in Britain runs through respectful conversation with people of faith, not around them.

• The deprogramming happens in trusted spheres of influence, community by community. I closed on this note because I believe it. The work Andra is doing, coming from inside the movement, being able to say this is what I saw and this is how I got out of it, is a model for how radicalization gets reversed. Not through top-down messaging. Through trusted relationships, local communities, and hard conversations in rooms where the people already trust each other. That is how the far right built this. And it is how it gets dismantled.

The Bottom Line

The conversation we had with Andra made several things clear. This is a well-coordinated global far right enterprise. The funding networks are real. The international infrastructure is documented. The legal groundwork is already being laid in European courts. What looks like a cultural wave is actually the output of decades of patient, coordinated organizing across factions that despise each other but share enough common interest in authoritarian control to stay aligned.

What gives me genuine optimism is that they needed everything to go right, and it has not. They needed a controllable front man, and they got Donald Trump. They needed quiet implementation, and they got Elon Musk with a chainsaw. They are running out of runway, the polling is moving against them, and the coalition is fracturing in ways they cannot paper over.

But Andra’s warning deserves to sit with you. The far right has operated on a time horizon that the left has rarely matched. The answer is not one leader, one election, one ruling. The answer is all of us deciding that democracy is a daily job.

Andra Watkins writes at For Such a Time as This on Substack, where she decodes Christian nationalism for readers across the political and faith spectrum. Subscribe to her work. Also, subscribe to my brilliant co-host, James Matthewson.

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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.

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My son is eleven days old. After a week off, I came back to this week’s episode of Across the Pond sleep-deprived, fresh off a diaper change, and somehow more energized than I have been in weeks. Becoming a dad has made me the happiest I’ve been in my life, as I wrote in a Father’s Day post on Sunday. This community has been so patient and supportive, so I couldn’t wait to come back and chat with James and you all. And it was right on time. Because the week I was gone, UK politics did not pause for anyone.

UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer has announced his resignation. Andy Burnham won his by-election for parliament by more than nine thousand votes, making him eligible to become the next Prime Minister. And just like that, the political landscape of one of America’s closest allies shifted in a matter of 48 hours. BBC News and Sky News Contributor James Matthewson was on the ground for all of it, and he brought the full picture.

We talked about what Starmer’s resignation actually means, how it happened, and why it matters that people made genuinely self-sacrificing decisions to defend democracy against far-right authoritarianism. We got into who Andy Burnham is for those in the US who are less familiar, what he has to do now that the opportunity is in front of him, and what the Farage-Trump network is already plotting to undermine him. We also had some real talk about the economic challenges Burnham inherits and what a genuinely progressive policy platform could look like from day one.

It was a shorter episode than usual. A newborn will do that to you. But James and I got all our key analysis in.

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.

Keir Starmer Did The Right Thing

What happened in the UK over the past week was a series of decisions by people who put the pro-democracy coalition ahead of their own positions. The result is a genuine opening for the Labour Party heading into the next general election.

• Andy Burnham won his by-election by over nine thousand votes, and that number changed everything. James had predicted a majority of around one thousand. The actual result was nine times that, with Reform and Restore, the two far-right parties, not even close to beating him when their votes were combined. James made the point plainly: after that result, there was no doubt in anyone’s mind that Burnham could defeat Reform without copying their stances on immigration. That is the whole argument in one data point. He did not move right. He won anyway. Decisively.

• The day Burnham was sworn in as an MP, Starmer stood outside Downing Street and resigned. James described the scene vividly: two helicopters following Burnham’s train into London, journalists on the platform when he stepped off, two hundred Labour MPs behind him for a selfie, the “king of the north” coming south. That same day, Starmer made an emotional speech, teared up talking about being a father and a husband, hugged his wife, and said the party and the country wanted something different. James’s read is that Starmer spent Father’s Day weekend at the Prime Minister’s country estate, and something clicked. The power was not worth what it was costing the movement.

• For US audiences, the closest analogy is if Biden bowed out after the 2022 midterms if Democrats did badly. That is the frame I offered on the live: what if, after a shellacking at the ballot box, a sitting president had the self-awareness to step aside and hand the mantle to someone with more energy and a fresher mandate? That is essentially what happened here. Starmer lost badly at the local elections, recognized the threat Farage represented, watched Burnham show up with a show of force that made the message undeniable, and made the call. James compared it to the frustration Democrats felt about Biden, the good and honorable guy you want to shake because his decency sometimes reads as passivity. Starmer was that. And then he did the right thing. In Biden’s case, Democrats did better than expected in the midterms, so Biden didn’t face pressure at the time. But one wonders how that moment would’ve been different if Democrats saw massive losses in 2022.

• Multiple people made self-sacrificing decisions to make this moment possible. Burnham’s friend and MP Josh Simons vacated his own seat early to trigger the by-election and give Burnham a path back into Parliament. Burnham ran a local campaign talking about streetlights and closed shops when he knew the stakes were national. Starmer stepped aside without triggering a divisive leadership contest, giving Burnham two to three weeks to put his ducks in a row before the deadline for Labour leadership nominations. I said on the live that this is what it looks like when people do the right thing for democracy, and it is worth naming that clearly because we do not see it often enough.

Andy Burnham: The “King In The North” Comes South

For those in the US who are less familiar with Burnham, James gave the full picture. The short version is that he is exactly the kind of candidate this moment demands, an anti-establishment figure with real governing experience, a track record of standing up to the right, and the communication skills to make the progressive economic case without alienating the people who need to hear it.

• Burnham built his reputation in Manchester by standing up to Boris Johnson during COVID. James laid out the history: Burnham has been Mayor of Greater Manchester for years, the center of the north, revolutionizing public services and becoming a genuinely popular figure. During the pandemic, he took on Johnson’s government over lockdown policy and its impact on Manchester’s hospitality sector. He stopped wearing suits, started showing up in black t-shirts with a suit jacket, and earned a nickname: the King in the North, taken from Game of Thrones. It reflects something real about how the north of England perceives him as someone who actually fights for them.

• The transatlantic anti-establishment wave is real, and Burnham is the UK’s version of it. This is the frame I kept coming back to on the live: what we are seeing with Mamdani in New York, with working-class first candidates winning primaries across the US, has a direct parallel in what Burnham represents in the UK. The anti-establishment energy is not specifically left or right. It is the energy of people who want someone who is actually fighting to improve their material conditions. Burnham has that energy, and he has been building it for years. The question is whether he can carry it from the mayor’s office to the Prime Minister’s office without losing what made it work.

• James is thrilled and nervous, and both feelings are justified. James was on a panel with a spokesperson from Restore, someone he described plainly as a neo-Nazi, when Burnham’s result came in. The far-right panelists went stone-faced and immediately reached for the Trump playbook, claiming an establishment stitch-up. Watching that was satisfying. What makes James nervous is the temptation Burnham will face: not being radical enough with his policy platform, appointing the same establishment figures around him, and staying within fiscal constraints that need to be challenged. The coalition that backed Burnham, Green Party voters, Liberal Democrats, people who do not normally vote Labour, came together because they believed he was different. They will not give him unlimited patience if the rhetoric does not match the substance.

• The lesson from Mamdani and Obama applies directly to how Burnham should move. I made both points on the live. From Mamdani: get in and show momentum immediately, big and small, day by day, so people feel that something is actually changing. From Obama: the lesson is less for Burnham than for his coalition. Obama was doing genuinely progressive things under enormous structural constraints, and people were frustrated because the pace felt too measured. Burnham’s supporters need to be patient with a man who has inherited decades of Brexit damage, an economy that is not growing the way it was promised to, and a bond market that he will need to manage carefully. You do not fix that overnight. What you can do is signal direction clearly and move fast on the things within your immediate power.

Farage, Trump, And What Burnham Has To Navigate

The good news is that Farage is on the rocks. The bad news is that he will not stay there if Burnham does not deliver. And Trump is already intervening in UK politics in ways that signal exactly how the MAGA-Reform network intends to create trouble for a Burnham government.

• Trump threatened UK semiconductor access, and it is not an isolated move. James explained the context: the UK government has invested heavily in chip and semiconductor production, which Trump sees as competition to his promise to deliver a US monopoly on that industry for his tech billionaire allies. Trump is starting to throw his weight around on this. James made the point that it is better for everyone globally if chips are produced in multiple places rather than concentrated in one country, but that is not the calculation Trump is making. How Burnham handles Trump is already the second biggest question people in the UK are asking, right after domestic economic policy. James’s read is that Burnham is calm and rarely gets fiery, but he will not take nonsense, and that is going to be a fascinating dynamic to watch.

• The MAGA and Farage networks are actively coordinating to undermine a Burnham government before it even starts. James was direct about this: the people around Trump have every incentive to help Farage by driving a wedge between Burnham and the British public. Trump already set the groundwork by claiming Starmer had to go because of immigration policy and too many windmills. That framing was not an assessment of what actually happened in the UK. It was pre-loading a narrative that Burnham’s government is out of touch on immigration, so that Farage has something to run on. The international far-right collaborative network is real. James and I have covered it extensively on this show, and we are watching it operate in real time again.

• Farage is rattled right now, and it is worth watching. James pointed to a compilation put together by the UK charity Hope Not Hate: every media interview Farage did in the past twenty-four hours had someone asking him about a five-million-pound gift he received from a tech crypto billionaire. James said his skin is as thin as Trump’s when that question comes up. He deflects, dismisses, says nobody cares. The UK media is not tolerating it and is pressing him to explain himself. That is a real vulnerability. The caveat is that all of that evaporates if Burnham underdelivers, because Farage’s entire pitch is that the establishment cannot be trusted, and a Burnham government that fails to improve material conditions hands him exactly the evidence he needs.

• James’s specific policy ask: legalize cannabis and put the revenue toward children’s mental health. This was one of the most concrete moments of the conversation. James said he wants to see left-wing red meat from Burnham early, something that signals genuine direction without requiring massive borrowing. His specific proposal: legalize cannabis, ring-fence the tax revenue from regulating it, and use it to guarantee every child under sixteen access to a therapist before they turn sixteen. I backed the cannabis point immediately: the industry in the US has generated real tax revenue and kept young people, disproportionately young Black men, out of prison for something that never should have been a criminal offense. James’s broader point is that Burnham can talk to the bond markets and still do genuinely transformative things, but he needs to show people early that he means it. The rhetoric without the substance will not hold the coalition together.

Bottom Line

Keir Starmer made the right call. Andy Burnham has a genuine opportunity to make meaningful change and stave off a Reform Party challenge in the next general election. The coalition that put him here is broad, motivated, and watching closely. What he does in the first weeks will set the tone for everything that follows. Farage is weakened but not finished, and the Trump-Reform network is already working to make Burnham’s job harder. The UK is at an inflection point, and this show will be covering every turn of it.

People keep asking if there’s anything they can do to help my wife and I with our newborn son. The best help would be to become a paid subscriber to this newsletter. If you’re already one, thank you so much! You’re backing independent journalism and analysis that aims to help you better understand the world, not just outrage bait you. Thanks as always for reading!

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 reading! 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 Saturday, June 13, 2026, my wife and I welcomed our adorable, healthy baby boy just hours before the sounds of fireworks and street celebrations for the New York Knicks reverberated through the hospital walls. A post I sent as my wife began early labor led to millions on social media cheering on his birth. His birthday was a vibrant eruption of joy and life. And what followed has been the best days of my life.

I’m writing this at 6 am after a late-night shift of baby duty on day 6 after the birth of James Brooklyn Baba. My wife Sophia and I make a great team. A few hours ago it was my turn to change, swaddle, feed, and burp my son back to sleep after he had an unusually fussy night. He’s been mostly calm. This time, he slept for 3 hours uninterrupted. A miracle!

Lying here, with my wife sleeping next to me, my son’s bassinet in eyeshot, and my dog Otis sleeping quietly in his bed, I can’t help but swell up with gratitude. I’m sleep-deprived, and I’m pretty sure if I go another day without shaving, my usually Mr. Clean bald hair style will look more like Danny DeVito. It’s been a whirlwind few days with a lot to process, but what I know for sure is this: I am the happiest I have ever been.

When you hear people talk about parenthood and how it is the greatest joy achievable, sure, you can try and imagine it for yourself. But nothing could prepare me for the pure, unmitigated bliss I’ve felt over these past few days. It’s all true. Heaven on Earth.

I don’t know how to explain it, but something has clicked into place within me. A calm and peace I’ve always sought through meditation, that is now my foundational center. There’s a new equanimity that I’ve always aspired to. It’s not that my life was missing anything, but I feel whole in a way I’ve never felt before.

My wife and I have both always wanted to be parents. It’s something we bonded over on our first date. We’re now living our dream.

Before I say anything about my son, my wife carried this pregnancy and is entering postpartum with a grace and strength that is taking my already expansive love, admiration, and respect for her to new heights. She is bouncing back from birth with beauty and power. And seeing her already be an incredible mom to James has been so moving, while not surprising. This is who she is. I could not be more proud of her.

My son James is a work of art. Not only is he the cutest newborn I’ve ever seen (only slightly biased here), but his temperament is calm and gentle. I can already see the kind and decent boy and man he will become. He looks like me when I was a baby, down to my ears, but he has his mom’s big beautiful eyes. He is a special soul, and already showing signs of advanced newborn behavior according to my wife. One of her Master’s degrees is in child development, so her expertise is a godsend right now.

At some point soon I’m sure I’ll once again feel the weight and responsibility of raising a man in this world. Thoughts of how I should show him a positive form of masculinity consumed me during the pregnancy stage. I felt the gravity of having a son and the need to teach him about virtue, character, and that real strength isn’t cruelty. But right now, all I feel is joy and weightlessness. Like I’m Superman playing Quidditch on Coruscant.

There’s also something eerie about how much your kid looks like you. It’s almost as if I’m holding my inner child in my arms, and the compassion I show in those quiet 2 am moments when he’s crying during a diaper change is somehow healing my own trauma. But that’s a thought I’ll expand on with my therapist, not here. Too deep.

Another thing I’m feeling is a resounding sense of groundedness. As someone with an insatiable ambition to change the world for the better who grapples with perfectionism and pushing myself too hard, when I look down into my son’s face, I realize that I’ll never accomplish anything more perfect than this. I still plan to do everything I’m working toward, but I know for sure that nothing will ever match this feeling, or supersede the love that I have for my wife and my son. My family is my everything.

Overall, we feel blessed with a smooth birth, a healthy boy, and a wonderful family support system and friends (chosen family) that will be by our side, showering James with love. We could not be more grateful.

And all of this coming amid a beautiful moment of celebration in the greatest city in the world, our home. New York, the pinnacle of multicultural democracy, is in a moment of pure euphoria, and we got to experience it firsthand. Our son is now part of New York Knicks history, with his birth coming the day of the NBA Finals win.

I sent a post about how my wife was going into labor, and by the evening, millions of people had viewed it, and thousands were cheering him on and wondering if we would name him Knickolas or Jalen Brunson OG Baba. Some people were hilariously calling him the Knicks messiah. Here are the posts I sent in case you missed them:

I’ve really tried to like and engage with as many congratulations as I can. But there are literally thousands of replies, comments, and messages we’ve received. If I haven’t directly responded to you and you’re reading this, thank you! The outpouring of love on Substack, Twitter, BlueSky, Threads, and Instagram has meant the world to my wife and I. What a warm welcome.

I can’t wait to tell James about his birthday. How New York City saw the fact he was about to arrive as a good omen that the Knicks would win in five. How millions of people welcomed him to the world. And how his presence fulfilled his mom and dad in ways that have fundamentally enlarged our hearts and enriched our souls.

Have a Happy Father’s Day! I know I am.

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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.

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Charles Douglas and I came into this Friday show with a lot to discuss. We had news of the day to get through, primaries to dissect, a Platner update to deliver, and somewhere in the middle we landed on a thesis: economic populism is resilient to scandal. By the end, we were debating summer music playlists, which tells you everything you need to know about this community.

We started with Trump’s latest fake Iran War deal moment. We got into the Horace Cooper CNN clip and the broader Black conservative grift machine. We updated the California picture, which has genuinely improved since the initial results came in. We talked about Bernie Sanders as a progressive barometer, with honest critiques attached. And we spent real time on Graham Platner, not to relitigate our conversation from last week, but to land somewhere more useful: what the fact that he won tells us about where the Democratic Party’s energy actually is right now.

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.

The Iran “Deal” Is A Pump & Dump Scheme

We have been here before. Thirty-eight times before, according to CNN’s count. Trump announced another imminent Iran deal, the details were immediately contradicted by Iran, and by morning Trump was on Truth Social calling Tehran “dishonorable.”

• Trump has claimed an imminent Iran deal at least 38 times, and the pattern is not random. Every time one of these announcements drops, someone has already shorted the market by hundreds of millions of dollars, roughly twenty minutes prior. I said this directly, and I will keep saying it until someone with a subpoena takes it seriously: this is insider trading at a scale that is pretty much indisputable at this point. Mainstream financial media has largely accepted that this is happening. What we are waiting for is accountability, and under this administration we are not holding our breath.

• The victims of this scheme are not abstract. Charles made this point with real force: the people getting burned are not day traders. They are regular people with 401ks and pension funds watching their retirement accounts get used as a casino while the people running the scheme build bunkers and buy islands. The wealth being extracted is not coming from nowhere. It is coming from us.

• Trump owns defense contractors. His sons own drone manufacturers. The Pentagon gave them a $600 million loan. I laid this out plainly: this is not a gray area. The president of the United States is waging a war in which he personally profits from the continuation of hostilities. That is the definition of a conflict of interest at a scale that should be dominating every news cycle.

• Even if a deal happens, there is no returning to the previous status quo. I made this argument, and I want it on the record: supply chain shocks are already locked in. Gulf nations have ramped down oil production, and it will take a long time to get that back up to speed. Iran now knows the full extent of its leverage over the global economy with the Strait of Hormuz. A deal does not erase any of that. The damage is done. And we are still paying $450 more per household on energy while people in a Signal chat somewhere get rich off the announcements.

The Black Conservative Grift & Why Demographic Representation Is No Longer Enough

Horace Cooper went on CNN and said, with a straight face, that Trump’s policies are specifically helping Black Americans. He was so convinced of it, he wrote a book about it. Abby Phillip immediately fact-checked him with the Black unemployment data. I quote-tweeted the exchange with a fact-check of my own. Charles and I spent some real time here because the broader issue is worth taking seriously.

• The Black conservative grift machine is well-funded, and it will find you. I disclosed something I do not talk about often: I get far more sponsorship requests from right-wing products than left-leaning ones. The money is on the right. The second a Black creator gets any platform, the machine approaches. Candace Owens ran an anti-Trump blog in 2016 before getting swept up. Charlie Kirk’s team approached me in 2022 to fly to Arizona and appear on his show. I declined. I declined because I know what that orbit does to people and I know what my values are. But the financial incentive to go the other way is real, and people should understand that when they see a Horace Cooper on their screen.

• Trump’s decade has forced a necessary evolution in how voters think about representation. Charles made this observation clearly: before Trump, representation mattered in a way that stood on its own. Getting someone elected who looked like you and came from a disadvantaged community was a win in itself. That is no longer sufficient. What the Trump era has done, and Charles acknowledged this is a painful clarification, is force voters to interrogate the policies behind the face. Winsome Sears running against Abigail Spanberger in Virginia is the proof of concept. Voters did not back Sears because she was a Black woman. They looked at what she was going to do and chose accordingly. Deb Haaland, on the verge of becoming the first Native American governor, is the counterexample: representation plus substance, which is what the moment demands.

• There is no excuse for backing this agenda today, and Charles was direct about that. Ten or twenty years ago, when the debate was tax policy, and it was a different world, maybe you could make a principled argument. Not now. The lines are too clear. You are siding with white nationalist authoritarianism when the evidence is this obvious, and no amount of book deals or cable news appearances changes what that means for the communities you claim to represent.

California Update: Nithya Raman’s Real Shot & The End Of The Career Politician

The initial California results looked one way. The final count looks considerably more interesting. Charles had a lot to say about what actually happened and what it means.

• Two-thirds of LA voters did not vote for Karen Bass. Charles made this the headline, and he is right to. Nithya Raman is now in the top two. The MAGA candidate, Spencer Pratt, is eliminated. What looked like an establishment hold is now a genuinely competitive race between an incumbent whose tenure voters have judged harshly on homelessness and the fires, and a candidate aligned with Mamdani, AOC, and Bernie who is talking about reinventing Los Angeles from the ground up. Charles said he was judging LA before this, and he takes it back. I think Raman can win some of the Pratt anti-incumbency vote too, because what those voters wanted was disruption and she is the more credible version of it.

• The career politician model is broken, and voters can smell it. I said this on the live, and I will stand by it: there is a specific mold of Democrat that people are exhausted by. It is the person for whom this is their next career step. The person who is just moving up the ladder because it is their turn. That is not a calling. That is a job. What Mamdani has, what Raman has, what the candidates winning these primaries have, is the unmistakable energy of someone who is about the cause before they are about the title. Voters know the difference right now. They are starving for it.

• The people who should run are usually the people who need to be talked into it. Charles made the AOC point that landed with me: she said her opponents mistake her for someone seeking a seat, when she is fighting for a cause and will do whatever serves that cause. I made the Obama point: Harry Reid had to walk a newly elected senator into his office and tell him to consider running for president. Obama was reluctant. Michelle did not want him to run. He was pulled to it by the moment and by the people. That is the model. Charles put it simply: the people who do not want power are the ones we want in power, because they will get the job done for the people, not themselves.

The Progressive Bernie Barometer, And An Honest Critique

Charles came into this live wearing a Bernie Sanders shirt, which prompted some teasing, but his underlying point is worth taking seriously. Bernie is batting a thousand on endorsements this cycle, and that is not a coincidence.

• Charles claims that Bernie Sanders is the best barometer in American politics for where working-class voters are headed, even if you would not vote for him yourself. Charles made this case plainly: the Montana smoke jumper candidate, Justin Pearson running against a beloved 30-year incumbent in Memphis, Mamdani, all of them controversial picks at the time, all of them winning. Common Power’s own candidate selections have aligned almost exactly with Bernie’s endorsements. You do not have to agree with everything he says. You do not have to think he is the messenger for every issue. But if you want to understand where the energy is, watch where he points, Charles said.

• I agree with Bernie being early on the working class message, but my critiques of him are real. I said this on the live, and I mean it: Bernie took too long to respond to the Supreme Court Callais ruling. His broader pattern on systemic racism has frustrated people who are close to him, not just his critics. And his handling of the 2016 rigged-primary narrative, even if I understand what he was getting at, let something loose that I have not forgiven easily. But the critiques of Bernie on race are real, and they come from people inside progressive politics, not just from establishment Democrats trying to discredit him.

• The New Deal problem. In my conversation with Jamaal Bowman earlier this week, Bowman was the one to point out that the New Deal left out a lot of Black people in its implementation. That is the history we are working with. What I am seeing now, and Charles agreed, is a genuine convergence where the working class economic message and the racial justice message are blending in ways that are undeniable. You cannot deny that the Trump administration is targeting Black political and economic power simultaneously. That fusion is where the real power of this coalition lives.

Platner Won. The Takeaway: Economic Populism Is Resilient To Scandal

We spent real time here, partly because we spent real time on it last week and people deserve a follow-up, and partly because Charles landed a frame by the end of this conversation that I think is the most important political observation made this episode.

• Harm reduction voting is not a compromise. It is a political tradition with deep roots. Charles said this with real weight: Black voters in deep red areas have been making harm reduction decisions for generations. Voting for the least harmful Republican in Indiana or the least hostile candidate in a race they cannot win is not cynicism. It is political survival. Eyes on the prize is a slogan that comes from exactly this tradition. Common Power does not have the privilege to look at the Maine map and say they do not need that seat. Charles challenged anyone sitting in a blue state to go to Maine and tell the people who voted for Platner that they were wrong. That is not politics. That is condescension, according to Charles.

• My lane is journalism, and I am committed to staying in it. I was honest about this: you will not find me shilling for Platner on panels. You will not find me going blue MAGA and discrediting the women. But you also will not find me playing false equivalencies. Republicans backing Trump, who has been found liable for sexually abusing E. Jean Carroll, who covered up the Epstein files, who has never apologized for anything in his life, do not get to enter this conversation as moral arbiters. Multiple things can be true at once. The Democratic Party is grappling publicly with a flawed candidate because we have standards. That is not hypocrisy. That is conscience.

• The one distinction I will make for Platner is the one that matters most: he apologizes. I said this clearly: the key difference between Platner and Trump is not only the severity of the allegations, but how they reckon with them. Trump has never acknowledged a failing in his life. Platner has apologized, says he has grown, and is owning most of the conduct. That does not make the conduct acceptable. It does not mean I am not still frustrated that he ran knowing what was in his background. But it is a real distinction, and I will not pretend it is not.

• The big takeaway: economic populism is resilient to scandal. This is Charles’s frame, and it is the one I want people to leave with. This guy was about as flawed a candidate as you can have on the Democratic side, and he still won because people believe he is fighting for them. That is how powerful the working-class economic message is right now. Charles said it directly: if real economic populist messaging could survive all of this, it has real standing as the predominant platform for the party heading into the general. And then the obligation is to follow through. You say you will improve material conditions. You get in office. You do it. Because if you do not, they will swing back and vote for someone else, and they will be right to.

• People are desperate because they are not thriving. Charles closed with this: Things are bad and getting worse. Wealth is concentrating at a pace that has no precedent. Elon Musk just became a trillionaire while people cannot pay their utility bills. That desperation is why voters will ride for whoever they believe has their backs. The candidates who can credibly answer that desperation with a real economic vision will win. That is the whole game.

Bottom Line

The Iran War is a grift, and someone needs to investigate it. The Black conservative machine is well-funded, and we need to call it what it is. California has more life in it than the initial results suggested. Platner won; the people of Maine made their choice, and the lesson is not about him. The lesson is that when people believe you are fighting for their material conditions, they will ride for you through almost anything. Working class politics is the message. Run on it.

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.

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 weak and leading the Republican Party into political ruin. He wants us to think he’s more powerful than he is, but his failures have never been more evident.

Let me explain.

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.

It’s been a while since I did a dedicated video on Trump’s political weakness. And let’s just say, things have gotten worse for him and the Republican Party.

Annualized inflation just hit 4.2% for the first time in over 3 years. It was about 3% when Trump took office. And now, President Trump is bogged down in a costly, unpopular war that has resulted in a more extreme Iran that has realized the full extent of the leverage it has over the global economy. With the Strait of Hormuz still closed, energy prices remain high, as everything from fuel to fertilizer causes direct hits to the pocketbooks of Americans.

Meanwhile, Trump’s authoritarian overreach has also backfired. His ICE raids have resulted in the separation of countless migrant families and the deaths of Renee Good and Alex Pretti. Trump’s grifts have taken center stage as he uses the White House as just another asset on the Trump family balance sheet. Whether it’s Trump himself making 3,700 stock trades in Q1 of this year, including in companies that benefit from his moves, or insiders using the Iran War as a pump and dump scheme, Americans see through it. This is why Trump is a historically unpopular president.

When you look at Trump’s approval ratings over time, you see the story of a president burning through his political capital at a rapid pace.

Take a look at his polling averages in The New York Times. You can literally see the story of his descent. As the early months went on, the story of Trump’s second term quickly shifted from a wannabe authoritarian consolidating power into a lame duck president whose toxicity led to a politically ruined Republican Party and a revitalized opposition.

Trump started off his term with a surprising amount of support, with Americans seemingly believing his campaign promises. It becomes clear, pretty quickly though, that he was lying about reducing costs, lying about his ties to Project 2025, lying about wanting to release the Epstein files, and lying about no new wars.

Trump immediately hired multiple authors and contributors to Project 2025, including one of its main architects, Russell Vought. Trump then unleashed the richest man in the world, Elon Musk, to gut the federal government.

As someone with a deep knowledge of Project 2025, I saw in real-time how he was botching its implementation by moving with a ferocious incompetence and triggering a cascade of court losses. My article at the 10-day mark of Trump’s second term was literally titled: “Trump’s Incompetent Overreach Is Already Backfiring.”

It was clear to me from the start where all this was headed.

You can see during the months of February and March, Trump’s political fortunes change pretty quickly as Americans watch Trump and his cronies enrich themselves as he unleashes tariffs that unilaterally raise prices on the American people.

Then comes the Big Beautiful Bill, which is the largest legislative wealth transfer from the poor to the rich in American history. Trump’s refusal to release the Epstein files resulted in real fractures in his base, which worsened into the fall as right-wing figures like Marjorie Taylor Greene defected from the President and the House forced a vote to release the files. Then, we have the ultimate betrayal of Trump’s “no new wars” promise as we entered 2026, and the bottom really fell out, with multiple polls having Trump’s approval in the mid-30s.

Underneath Trump’s terrible approval numbers, you see what’s driving it. Trump is underwater on all key issues.

Harry Enten at CNN this week found Trump’s net approval rating on inflation is negative 50 points in at least 8 polls this year. Trump also has an 80% disapproval rating on gas prices.

Now I know what the pushback to this often is. That Trump remains popular with MAGA Republicans. But that is an increasingly shrinking subset of people. I’ve been laying out this case forcefully.

In an appearance on MS NOW’s The Weekend Primetime last month, I pointed out that Trump keeps touting 100% support among MAGA Republicans but that same NBC poll previously found that the number of Republicans who identify as MAGA is dropping. It fell seven points to 50% of Republicans. So, Trump has consolidated total control of a base that is actively contracting. Congratulations, Donald. You have 100% of a shrinking pie.

Trump’s unpopularity has resulted in seismic shifts not only in the November 2025 elections, but in special elections across the country. Now, as we head to the midterms, Democrats lead Republicans in the generic ballot, with the House likely to flip and the Senate realistically in play.

So, we’ve established that Trump is incredibly unpopular, and it’s weighing down Republicans. You might be thinking, why does this matter?

It matters because anyone with an understanding of history knows that authoritarians cannot consolidate power with this level of unpopularity. This is something historians like and have often talked about. When you overreach before you’ve taken over all the institutions necessary to maintain control, you will lose the people, and lose power. Look at Viktor Orban in Hungary.

And as I’ve reported, when it comes to Trump’s clear attempts to lay the groundwork to interfere in the midterm elections, those efforts have no basis in law or fact. They will be struck down just like they were in 2020. Also, when it comes to redistricting, Republicans can redraw districts all they want, but if all demographics are increasingly opposing you, you’re just reconfiguring your demise.

These gerrymandering efforts will only give them a handful of seats this year, and will not save Republicans in the midterms. In 2028, it will have a larger impact, but again, Trump and Republicans are so unpopular, and have lost so much ground with the Latino voters many of these redrawn maps rely on, they could end up diluting more of their districts than they anticipate. While this is a historic assault on Black political power, as I’ve reported before, many of their efforts could backfire.

How this all plays out moving forward is up to how the pro-democracy coalition organizes. But overall, I remain hopeful that the vast majority of American people have woken up to the most self-serving, corrupt president in American history. Trump is not invincible. He never was. The numbers prove it.

If you liked this video, smash that like button, follow me, 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.

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 are weeks on Across the Pond where James and I get to debate ideas and explore the nuances of transatlantic politics with some distance from the immediate moment. This was not one of those weeks. James and I came into this live angry about the violence targeting immigrants in Ireland.

What happened in Belfast over the last 48 hours is not a protest. It is organized mob violence targeting immigrant communities because of the actions of one Sudanese man who attacked someone in the street. The victim survived. The attacker was arrested. And then masked men coordinated to identify the addresses of residents they thought were immigrants, kick in their front doors while their families were inside, and set fire to their homes.

Watching the footage, I thought of American history. The Jim Crow South. The Tulsa massacre. The logic of collective punishment where the crime of one person becomes the justification for violence against everyone who looks like them. James, who grew up learning about the civil rights movement in a high school in Northern England, said something that stopped me: he never understood how a community could organize a lynching until he watched Belfast last night. That is the weight of what we are dealing with.

The throughline from Nigel Farage’s “rage” rhetoric after Henry Nowak’s murder to Elon Musk amplifying calls for millions to leave to masked men kicking in immigrant families’ front doors is not a coincidence. It is a far-right network. And James and I spent this live mapping it with as much clarity as we could manage while both of us were genuinely furious.

You can watch our full conversation above and read key takeaways below.

What’s Happening In Belfast: Lynch Mob Violence In 2026

The facts of what happened in Belfast need to be stated clearly before anything else. Because the people inciting this violence are counting on the outrage being louder than the facts, and the facts tell the real story.

• A Sudanese man attacked Steven Ogilvy in Northern Ireland. Ogilvy survived. Community members intervened. James was clear about this from the start: the attacker was stopped, the victim did not die, and the response of the community in the moment was to protect the victim. We do not yet know the attacker’s motive, whether it was mental health related or otherwise. What we do know is that justice is being done. The attacker was arrested. There is no miscarriage of justice here. There is nothing to protest. And yet.

• What followed was organized, targeted mob violence that James called the most terrifying thing he has ever seen in Britain. Community groups were monitoring Facebook in real time as the violence was being coordinated. According to James, the posts were explicit: wear a mask, leave your phone at home, we are going to target every Black and brown person on this street, we will kick in the front doors and set fire to their homes. James noted that a journalist reporting from Belfast was threatened with being kneecapped and had to leave. These were not people venting anger. This was a coordinated pogrom.

• James’s Vietnamese friend’s father, a man in his 70s who fled Vietnam after the war and built his life in Northern Ireland, was told by his children not to leave the house. His family settled in Northern Ireland in the late 1970s and early 1980s as part of a resettlement program after the Americans left Vietnam. They have already lived through the complexities of the Troubles. And now, because a Sudanese man they have never met attacked someone in the street, this elderly man cannot safely walk outside. That is the human cost of what the far right’s rhetoric produces.

• Rows of houses that survived the Troubles were burnt to the ground overnight. James made this point with real force: the IRA at the height of its violence did not burn these houses. These were communities that lived through one of the most sustained periods of political violence in modern British history and kept their physical homes intact. Last night, masked men with Facebook coordination did what decades of the Troubles did not. James described it plainly: it is Tulsa. It is Kristallnacht. These are not hyperbolic comparisons. They are the accurate historical frame for what organized racist mob violence looks like.

• The victim’s own family called for peace and was completely ignored. Steven Ogilvy’s family, the actual victims of the actual attack, publicly said they did not want this violence and encouraged calm. Henry Nowak’s father did the same thing after his son’s murder. Both families were ignored entirely. Because this was never about the victims. It was never about justice. The families of the people whose tragedies are being exploited are begging the people exploiting those tragedies to stop, and nobody is listening.

The Global Far-Right Network: Musk, Farage, Vance & The Architecture Of Incitement

What happened in Belfast did not emerge from nowhere. It was built, brick by brick, over weeks of deliberate rhetoric from people with platforms and power. James and I have covered this network on this show before. We are watching it produce its intended results in real time.

• Elon Musk was able to influence a riot in Belfast, Northern Ireland, in real time. Musk has been amplifying Rupert Lowe, founder of the Restore Party, which sits further right than Reform UK, calling for millions to leave Britain. He reposted White Lives Matter imagery. He reposted content framing the attack as evidence of an invasion. I checked his feed live during the conversation, and he was still posting about it positively that morning. One tech billionaire on the other side of the world, with no democratic accountability in Britain, helped organize violence in a British city. The idea that social media is just speech and words do not have real consequences is a foolish notion.

• Nigel Farage’s “pure cold rage” rhetoric after Henry Nowak’s murder was the match that lit the flame. We covered this on this show in detail. Farage called on white people to respond with “pure cold rage.” That baseline of organized far-right anger was already in place when the Belfast stabbing happened. It did not take much to redirect it. I made this point directly: if Farage had not spent the weeks since Nowak’s murder ginning up that anger, there might not have been the groundwork for this to pop off from. Words from leaders produce consequences. That is not a figure of speech.

• JD Vance directly tied Henry Nowak’s killing to immigrants in his post about the case, laying the political groundwork from Washington. Vance was not reacting to Belfast specifically. He was doing something more insidious: pre-loading the narrative that immigrants are responsible for violence against white people in the UK, so that when the next incident happened, the connection was already in the public mind.

• The far-right tapped into Northern Ireland’s existing paramilitary infrastructure with devastating efficiency. James explained the specific danger of Belfast: Northern Ireland has a decades-long tradition of community groups organizing quickly for collective action, including violent collective action. The loyalist and unionist networks that once mobilized against the IRA still exist, even if the IRA itself no longer functions in the same way. Many of those organizations have now transitioned into crime entities. The far right found them and redirected their organizing capacity toward immigrants. James said it is a tradition of putting on a balaclava and going out to defend your community, and the far right has been able to redefine what the community means and who the enemy is.

• The global far-right collaborative network is not a theory. It is producing burning homes. We have talked on this show about the connection between Farage, Musk, the American far right, the great replacement theory, the white genocide narrative, and the anti-DEI push. Belfast is where the abstract becomes concrete. One network. One set of narratives. Deployed simultaneously across multiple countries by people with massive platforms and zero accountability. The architecture of incitement is now visible to anyone willing to look at it honestly.

Collective Punishment, Avoided Accountability, & What Governments Must Do

The conversation did not end in despair. It ended in demands. James and I both made arguments about what accountability should look like and what governments have the power to do if they choose to exercise it.

• The logic of these riots, followed to its conclusion, exposes how indefensible it is. I made this argument directly: statistically, mass shootings in the United States are predominantly carried out by young white men. By the logic being applied in Belfast, the correct response to every school shooting would be for hundreds of people to run into the streets and target homes where young white boys live. Nobody would accept that. Nobody would call it an understandable reaction. The logic is identical. The difference is who is being targeted. Collective punishment of an entire demographic for the actions of one individual is not justice. It is not grief. It is racism. It is a lynch mob, and the only honest thing to call it is what it is.

• These men were not out there protesting the hundreds of other stabbings that happened in Britain this week. James made this point with clarity: stabbings happen every single day in Britain, just as shootings happen every day in America. The far right is not outside every hospital where a stabbing victim is being treated. They are not in the streets every time someone is killed with a knife. They showed up in Belfast because someone told them to show up, because this particular stabbing had been loaded with racial and political meaning by people with agendas.

• There is a two-tier accountability system running in plain sight. I made this case directly: if any CEO of a major company retweeted a fraction of what Elon Musk retweets, they would be removed from their board by the end of the day. If any politician said a fraction of what Donald Trump has said and done, they would not be able to run a local ice cream shop, let alone the country. The rules that govern ordinary people’s professional and civic lives do not apply to wealthy right-wing men. And it is what produces Elon Musk waking up every morning and amplifying calls for racist violence with no consequence.

• Adjust the incentives, and you change the outcomes. My own argument built on Charlie Munger’s observation: “show me the incentive, and I will show you the outcome.” The current incentive structure rewards Musk for exactly what he is doing. His platform grows, his influence grows, his government contracts continue. What changes behavior is changing incentives. Government contracts should come with conduct requirements. Platforms that organize violence should face regulatory consequences. These companies need government contracts. That is leverage. Use it.

• James’s closing socialist argument: this was always the endgame of the unregulated free market. Reagan and Thatcher told us the market would regulate itself. It did not. What an unregulated free market produces, given enough time and enough power concentrated in enough hands, is Elon Musk. It is Donald Trump. It is men who have won the capitalist game entirely and then spent their winnings on making the world worse because nothing can fill the emptiness. James said it simply: he bought a social media platform and turned it into a porn site of violence and racism. That is what he chose to do with everything. Governments exist precisely to prevent this outcome. It is long past time they acted like it.

Bottom Line

What happened in Belfast is not complicated to describe. Masked men coordinated on Facebook to burn immigrant families out of their homes because a Sudanese man attacked someone in the street. The victim survived. The attacker was arrested. There was no miscarriage of justice to protest. There was only a far-right network that needed an excuse and found one, backed by the richest man on earth, amplified by American politicians, and built on weeks of deliberate incitement by people who knew exactly what they were doing. The families of the actual victims begged for peace. Nobody listened. That is the world Farage and Musk and Vance are building. We have to call it what it is.

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Uneducated by James Matthewson

Before he was a broadcaster and writer, James Matthewson was a high-school drop out who accidentally became a political adviser. Naming this substack after being criticised for being 'uneducated', James gives his weekly updates on the world of Politics.

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Jamaal Bowman and I first met on MS NOW, and I knew immediately I needed to get him on for a longer conversation. He is someone whose ideas deserve more time than short cable news segments allow for. So today, he joined me for a Substack Live conversation. He was in Dublin, Ireland, where he had just delivered a keynote at a workers' rights and human rights festival. What followed was one of my favorite Substack Lives I’ve ever hosted.

Jamaal Bowman came to this conversation with a substantive perspective. Bowman represented New York’s 16th congressional district from 2021 to 2025. An educator at heart, he was a former Bronx middle school principal and founder of the Cornerstone Academy for Social Action. Now, he’s been helping progressive candidates across the country and is the author of an upcoming memoir called Unpolished, out this November.

We covered an enormous amount of ground. We talked about where the Democratic Party is heading and why Bowman believes the progressive wing is on its way to becoming the mainstream wing. We got into the fact that Bowman was primaried in one of the most expensive congressional races in history for holding positions that are now being openly argued in the pages of The New York Times by a mainstream Democratic senator.

We discussed Trump’s Iran War, the Tupac quote Bowman delivered in Dublin that perfectly encapsulates this moment, and the economic case for investing in working people rather than endless military spending. We went deep on education in a way I almost never get to on this show, and it was probably my favorite part of this conversation.

From there, we talked about who has what it takes to win in 2028, why stances on Gaza could be a litmus test, and what is actually happening inside the Republican Party right now. And we ended with Bowman’s upcoming memoir Unpolished, his remarkable life story, and what it means to be a Black man in America trying to set a good example for generations of Black boys to come.

I appreciate those of you who tuned in live, made Jamaal feel welcome by showing love, and who 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.

This conversation was top-notch. I promise it will leave you feeling smarter and more empowered to keep fighting for a prosperous and inclusive democracy. You can watch our full conversation above and read key takeaways below. Like, share, and, as always, thank you for supporting independent media.

The Progressive Wing Is Becoming The Mainstream Wing

Bowman came out of the gate with a clear argument: the progressive wing of the Democratic Party is not a fringe. The American people are ahead of party leadership on issue after issue, and leadership needs to catch up.

• The working-class-first orientation is becoming the dominant force in Democratic politics. Bowman made this case with conviction: from the very beginning, the progressive wing has been centering politics in the needs of working people, making sure affordability is at the top of the agenda, that housing is treated as a human right, that healthcare is a human right, that public schools are fully funded with real post-secondary opportunities behind them. He has been saying this since before it was popular, and the results in primary after primary this cycle are proving the point. The energy is with the candidates who lead with working-class economics first.

• Bowman’s specific policy vision aims to push the Democratic Party further toward the people. His agenda includes a federal jobs guarantee, ending mass incarceration, ending poverty in America, and a foreign policy rooted in diplomacy and cooperation that pushes back against genocide, apartheid, and occupation. These are not positions the whole party has embraced, though they increasingly are. But the broader working-class economic orientation, the affordability message, the anti-war instinct, is gaining ground rapidly in ways that would have seemed unlikely just a few years ago.

• The American people are aligned with the progressive wing. Party leadership is not. Bowman made this distinction explicitly: poll after poll shows the majority of the American people want to get big money out of politics, want healthcare accessible to everyone, want an end to policies that make affordability impossible. It is not the voters who are out of step. It is the people who lead the party, in Bowman’s view. And if leadership does not get on board, Bowman warned, the party is going to continue to struggle in the biggest elections, including the presidential in 2028. The grassroots will stay home if Palestine and affordability are not front and center, Bowman says.

Bowman Was Primaried For What Is Now Mainstream Dem Politics

One of the most telling moments of this conversation was watching Bowman describe what it feels like to watch the Democratic Party shift toward positions he was primaried for holding. The shift is real. It is documented. Bowman was calling out the Netanyahu government when it was genuinely costly to do so politically. Now, it seems to be the mainstream Democratic position.

• Senator Chris Van Hollen argued for policies in The New York Times that were similar to what got Bowman primaried. In an op-ed published two weeks ago, Senator Chris Van Hollen (D-MD) wrote, “The Democratic Party has provided reflexive and unconditional support to Israeli governments, even as their actions have increasingly undermined American interests and values.” He went on to call out the “brutality” of Netanyahu’s government, the violent settlers in the West Bank, and the humanitarian crisis in Gaza. He also called for conditioning aid to Israel, which was seen as controversial not too long ago. That ran in The New York Times. Van Hollen is not a far-left firebrand. He is a mainstream Democratic senator. The Overton window has moved, and it moved in the direction Bowman was pointing out years ago.

• Bowman’s response was grounded in policy and moral clarity, not grievance. He did not spend the moment gloating. He looked forward. He said what we need is for Israel, as an ally, to end the occupation in the West Bank, address what the United Nations and Human Rights Watch have called apartheid, and have a genuine conversation about a two-state solution.

• Criticizing the Israeli government is not antisemitism, and Bowman has always been clear about that. He said it directly: we fight antisemitism exactly the same way we fight anti-Black racism, sexism, homophobia, and all other forms of hate. Criticism of a government is not criticism of a people. I added from my own experience that as someone married into a progressive Jewish family and has Jewish friends, plenty of Jews, from progressive to moderate, have acknowledged that Netanyahu has gone too far. Bowman gave a shout-out to IfNotNow and Jewish Voices for Peace, organizations that have been saying the same thing for years and whose work makes the fight against antisemitism stronger, not weaker.

Money For Wars, Can’t Feed The Poor: The Need For Rising Tide Economics

Bowman delivered a keynote in Dublin where he quoted Tupac’s “Keep Ya Head Up,” saying “we got money for wars but can’t feed the poor.” That line has been increasingly relevant since Trump’s Iran War began, and it opened one of the sharpest economic exchanges of this live.

• Trump’s Iran War costs are a concrete illustration of Democratic economic priorities. I laid this out directly: what has already been spent on the Iran war could fund the Enhanced Affordable Care Act premium subsidies multiple times over. It could fund a year of subsidized college. When people ask where the pay-fors are for working class policies, this is the answer. The money exists. The political will has been lacking.

• Build Back Better proved the policy and the pay-fors already exist. Bowman made a point that does not get made enough: Build Back Better was not written by the Squad. It was President Biden’s bill. Chairman Richard Neal of the Ways and Means Committee, not a progressive, ensured it was paid for and supported it. It was killed in the Senate by Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema. The infrastructure for transformative working-class policy has already been built. Anyone running in 2028 needs to run on it.

• Rising tide economics versus trickle down. I called it plainly: we are still in the Reagan era. Trickle down does not work. You cut taxes for corporations, and you get stock buybacks, not wages. You cut taxes for billionaires, and you get Elon Musk. Bowman said that what we need is rising tide economics where everyone contributes their fair share and the investment comes back through the community. I made the Keynesian economics point: you invest in the economy through the people, and they invest back. It is FDR. It is what built America into the global power it became and then got systematically dismantled through decades of Reaganite mythology.

• Bowman’s moral and economic case for investing in communities is the same argument. He made this with real force: when you pour love and resources into neglected communities, those communities thrive. Education, healthcare, innovation. GDP goes up. Costs for mass incarceration and militarism go down. He cited the robber baron parallel and pointed out that this concentration of wealth at the top, the rest of us working class, is America from the beginning. The difference now is that the people heading toward trillionaire status are doing it while data centers make the climate worse and they pay nothing for any of it.

The Revolutionary Education System We Need

This was my favorite section of the entire conversation and one of the best discussions I have had on this platform. Bowman isn’t just a former Congressman with opinions about education. He is a doctor of education leadership who founded a public middle school in the Bronx, took it to number one combined growth scores in New York City in 2016, and has done the primary research on what actually works. Everything he said here was backed by evidence.

• The Lost Einsteins study is one of the most important pieces of research in American policy, and almost nobody talks about it. Bowman brought this up, and I want everyone to look it up. The study examined third and fourth-grade academic achievement across the board and found that gifted kids from poor Black and brown communities are just as gifted as kids from wealthy suburbs at that age. The suburban kids go on to file patents, become inventors, build companies. The kids from underinvested communities do not get those opportunities. The study’s conclusion: if those kids had equal access, American GDP would increase by 33 percent. That is not just a social justice argument. That is an economic argument. And it is hiding in plain sight.

• Universal childcare is the single most important education policy we could pass. Bowman said this plainly and backed it with his own doctoral research: from birth to age three, the brain develops 90 percent of its growth. When a child experiences trauma during that window, the development of the prefrontal cortex, the reasoning and decision-making center, is stagnated. That child enters kindergarten already behind. Without intervention, they are more likely to be placed in special education, more likely to enter the school-to-prison pipeline, more likely to be suspended. Universal childcare is not a nice-to-have. It is the foundational fix that every other education reform depends on.

• No Child Left Behind was an educational catastrophe, and the effects are still with us. Bowman laid out the mechanism: by tying everything to English and math test scores from grades three through eight, the policy caused school districts nationwide to eliminate gym teachers, arts teachers, and music teachers. There are kids who struggle in English and math because of dyslexia or learning differences but who are maestros on an instrument. That was taken away from them. A holistic education that includes sports, music, drama, and the arts is not a luxury. It develops transferable skills and keeps America healthy, innovative, and competitive.

• Socratic seminar is AI-proof. Bowman trained his teachers in it. Cornerstone Academy became number one in New York City using it. The method: students read a high-level text, annotate it with their questions and connections, and then the teacher facilitates a real discussion about what they read. That is it. When Bowman describes this method to teachers in certain schools, they say that is just how you teach. But the majority of schools do not do this. I made the point that everything I know about politics I learned by forcing myself to write about it and explain it in articles. When you are required to debate and argue something with a pen in your hand, you actually have to understand it. That cannot be outsourced to AI. Bowman held up his journal as evidence. Write by hand. It still matters.

• The Green New Deal for public schools is a comprehensive vision. Bowman introduced this legislation while in Congress: rebuild the physical infrastructure of public schools in alignment with the climate emergency, bring interdisciplinary project-based STEM and STEAM into classrooms, restore the humanities and Socratic practice, ensure every child who wants to has access to a sport, an instrument, and the arts. He made the point that this is bipartisan in practice. When Trump and Musk tried to cut the Department of Education, rural Republican communities in Arkansas who voted for Trump spoke out, because Title I funding is what keeps their schools running. The issue is bigger than party.

Will Gaza Be The 2028 Litmus Test? And The State Of MAGA

With ideas for the 2028 primary field beginning to take shape, Bowman had clear opinions about who is positioned well, who is not, and why Gaza is going to be a defining issue whether candidates want it to be or not. He also had a sharp read on where the Republican Party actually is right now.

• Gaza could be the moral litmus test of the 2028 primary. Bowman said this directly and without hedging: if you are not on the right side of that issue, you are going to struggle. The grassroots will not show up for candidates who continue to enable or ignore what is happening. He was clear that he does not even require the word genocide. Just acknowledge the reality. Just say we should not be supporting this. Just come with a policy that reflects what the American people, particularly people under 45, actually believe. Candidates who are AIPAC-supported and unwilling to risk that relationship are going to find themselves on the wrong side of history and on the wrong side of the primary electorate, Bowman said.

• Rep. Ro Khanna and Senator Chris Van Hollen are two names Bowman mentioned as positioned well. Khanna has had an extraordinary year, leading on the Epstein files and being consistently right on Gaza, and Bowman said his name comes up everywhere when he travels the country. Van Hollen has already put his position in The New York Times. AOC, if she runs, has a real chance, Bowman feels. Ossoff has the riz and the swag, Bowman’s words, but needs to make his stance clear on Gaza. Wes Moore has not said enough, Bowman says. And the candidate who runs on the policies that were contained in Build Back Better, affordability, and a free Palestine, according to Bowman, wins in a landslide if they have the charisma and communication skills to go with it.

• MAGA is weakening as Trump weakens, and the Republican Party does not have a new playbook. Bowman made this case clearly: MAGA and America First were one and the same for a while, and that gave Trump enormous power. Now they are diverging. Marjorie Taylor Greene is pulling away and doing her own thing. The convergence Bowman finds interesting is between America First and progressive positions, because affordability, anti-war, and childcare are all America First policies if you actually mean putting American people first. His prediction: JD Vance will run, Marco Rubio will run, they will rebrand and claim they told Trump not to do this, and a lot of Republican voters will fall for it. He would not be surprised if MTG is being considered as a vice presidential candidate for Vance right now.

• The political establishment is underwater on both sides. Bowman made this point with data: the last congressional approval rating he saw was under 30 percent, Republicans and Democrats combined. When the whole establishment is that unpopular, what voters want is new voices and fresh ideas. He does not see that coming from the Republican side. He does see it on the Democratic side, and the primary results this cycle are beginning to reflect it.

Unpolished: Jamaal Bowman’s Remarkable Life Story & An Example For Black Boys

Bowman started writing his memoir in early December 2025, four weeks after the Mamdani win, after a run of keynotes in Philadelphia and Chicago that left him in a reflective place. He sat down and just started writing. Four weeks later, he had 83,000 words.

• The story goes from the crack epidemic to the classroom to Congress. Bowman describes it as the story of a Black boy raised by a single mom in New York, no private schools, no HBCU, no Divine Nine, no trust fund. A kid who barely survived shootouts on the streets of New York in the early 90s, got a chance to move out of the city to finish high school, became the first in his family to go to college, started teaching, opened his own school at 33, took it to number one in New York City, won a historic congressional race against a 16-term incumbent, served in Congress with the Squad, lost a historic primary, and is still here doing the work.

• Every chapter is named after a hip hop song, because hip hop has been the soundtrack of his life. The first chapter is Run’s House. The second is Windows. The third is Know the Ledge. Each track is a thematic lens on the chapter it opens. Bowman said hip hop is almost a religion for him, and the way he structured the book reflects that. I told him it reminded me of what Tupac did as a storyteller, bringing the world inside the community to people who had never seen it from the inside.

• The central framework of the book is the hunger versus the healing. Bowman named the evils that continue to plague us - racism, sexism, classism, homophobia, antisemitism, colonialism - and gave them a collective name: the hunger. The book argues that the only thing that defeats the hunger is the healing. That framework runs through every chapter and connects his personal story to the broader political argument he has been making his whole career.

• Survivor’s responsibility over survivor’s guilt. Bowman made this distinction, and it landed hard. He said he feels a responsibility to go as far as he can go so that young kids can see him and think they could do that. I told him about one of my best childhood friends who was shot and killed at 23, tattooed on my chest. Bowman said what I described is something uniquely particular to Black men in America: you can meet any random Black man from certain communities anywhere in this country and go down a list of five to ten people he grew up with who were killed. That is not okay. It is a trauma that should not be normalized. And it is exactly what Unpolished is trying to make visible.

• Unpolished means decolonize. It means uniqueness. It means consistent growth. Bowman explained the title directly: it means not needing to fit into any box, not needing to perform a version of yourself that someone else designed for you. It means recognizing that we are not finished products. We will learn and grow for the rest of our lives. Therefore, we will be unpolished for the rest of our lives. He said he takes a lot of pride in being a regular dude, not Obama-level exceptional, not Harvard and Columbia, but someone who came from the same place a lot of these kids come from and made it to Congress anyway. That is a model that he wants Black boys to see.

Bottom Line

My conversation with former Rep. Jamaal Bowman was one of the most substantive I’ve had on this platform. We covered a lot. The progressive wing is becoming the mainstream wing. The Van Hollen op-ed is proof that the party is catching up to positions Bowman paid a real price for holding. The economic argument, invest in people and they invest back, is not radical. It is Keynesian. It is FDR. And the education conversation we had was a reminder that the answers to America’s biggest problems are hiding in plain sight in underinvested communities across this country.

Unpolished drops in November. Follow/subscribe to here on Substack.

Support independent journalism and analysis that fearlessly tells the truth. If you have not yet become a free or 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. Independent media runs on the people who back it.

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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.

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Charles Douglas just got back from Tennessee and California, leading teams of door-knockers. We had a lot of ground to cover. Six states held primaries Tuesday, and the results give us some insights into where the Democratic Party is heading, where it is still stuck, and what the midterm map actually looks like heading into November. We covered all of it.

The California results were messy, but we had some interesting takeaways. The Iowa results confirmed something else: Trump’s grip on his own party is not as iron-clad as the press keeps treating it. And New Jersey is quietly setting up one of the most important House flips on the board.

Then we got into Graham Platner. The live chat wanted to hear our takes. What followed was one of the most honest conversations I have had on this show about the impossible moral mathematics of electoral politics in an existential moment. Charles spoke from a place I cannot fully speak from: he is an organizer who has to make real decisions about where to deploy real people, sometimes in spite of his personal feelings. I spoke from my own perspective: someone who believes in redemption, but has my own hard moral lines, and my own frustrations with a candidate who I believe knew what was in his background and ran anyway. If you are looking for a nuanced discussion on the Graham Platner situation, you will find it here.

You can watch our full conversation above and read key takeaways below.

Primary Night Takeaways: California, Iowa & New Jersey

Six states voted Tuesday. Here are our takeaways:

• California races were hit or miss. The catastrophic scenario of two Republicans in the top two did not happen. Becerra holds the second slot behind Hilton as votes are being counted. But the way it happened tells the real story: Swalwell dropping out and a Democratic Party that could not consolidate around one or two alternatives. When it comes to the LA Mayor race, the votes are still being counted, but how well Spencer Pratt is doing is more a referendum on Karen Bass’s leadership than a broad rebuke of the Democratic Party. The Randy Villegas result in Bakersfield is the bright spot nobody is talking about enough. He is outperforming the DCCC-backed candidate with AOC behind him, growing up in the city he is running in, and talking a Trump voter around at the door in 90-degree heat. That is the model California’s governor race was missing entirely.

• Iowa was the real story of the night, and Trump lost it. Randy Feenstra, Trump’s endorsed pick for Iowa governor, lost to businessman Zach Lahn, making him the first statewide Trump endorsee to lose a primary in 2026. On the Democratic side, Josh Turek, a Paralympian with a remarkable biographical story, won the Senate primary and moved the race from likely Republican to leaning Republican. Rob Sand on the governor side gives Democrats two strong candidates in a state they had written off. Charles made the point that Chuck Schumer’s strategic read on red states is correct: moderate enough in Iowa, working class first everywhere, and let the further left energy live in the blue cities where it can pull the Overton window and give battleground candidates room to run as the reasonable alternative.

• New Jersey’s Tom Kean Jr. is a ghost, and Democrats are taking that seat. He has missed over 100 votes, ran unopposed, and barely won last time in a state that is moving left. The Democratic candidate coming up is another populist challenger, a regular person giving voters something to vote for in addition to something to vote against. In a narrow House majority, this is one of the most important races on the board, and it is not getting the attention it deserves.

Graham Platner: Putting Dems In A Terrible Situation

The chat wanted us to talk about this. And we gave it the time it deserved: an honest conversation between two people who care about democracy and came at this from genuinely different places.

What we know about the controversies: The New York Times interviewed women who had been romantically involved with Platner, some of whom spoke highly of him. Others called his behavior “unsettling” and described their time with him as “toxic” or volatile. One woman, Lyndsey Fifield, a right-wing operative who worked at the Heritage Foundation, said Platner got rough with her physically. You can read the full New York Times piece for yourself in a gift link here.

This follows earlier controversies, including deleted Reddit posts and a tattoo on his chest that has a Nazi association. The most recent controversy stems from reports that he exchanged sexually explicit messages with multiple women during his marriage, an issue that campaign aides were reportedly aware of as his Senate bid was taking shape.

• Charles has a hard line on violence, and he stated it clearly. Charles said violence is a philosophical non-starter for him. He believes people should be talked to and reasoned with. That is where he stands. He said it without hedging.

• The operational reality is what it is, and Charles had to say that out loud too. Charles runs an organization that is charged with participating in this electoral moment and getting others to do the same. The math on the Senate is the math. There are a handful of viable seats that can flip the chamber, and Maine is one of them. Janet Mills halted her campaign in April, and much of the party establishment has consolidated behind Platner. You do not get to choose based purely on your feelings when the alternative is someone who will vote with an authoritarian administration most of the time. Charles said that plainly: it is a shitty reality, it is so messed up, but the people of Maine get to make their decision and then you push the better person over the line.

• My personal reaction was different, and I want to be honest about where it comes from. I have talked on this show about struggling with alcoholism in high school and being sober for over a decade. I believe in redemption. I believe people can change. I have made arguments on this very show about giving people a pathway back after they have done terrible things. But the accumulation of what keeps coming out about Platner makes me wonder what else is still coming. And my personal take, separate from any political calculation, is that it was incredibly selfish of him to have run when he knew this stuff was in his background. I had to say it.

• Republicans do not get to have this conversation, and I will not let them. This is a point I want to make clearly because I am going to be on national TV panels again soon, and this will come up. Democrats are struggling publicly with the moral side of a flawed candidate because we have moral standards and we are trying to reconcile them with existential political stakes. That is not hypocrisy. That is what people of conscience do. Republicans, on the other hand, do not deserve to be part of this conversation. They have no room to talk. They enthusiastically backed Trump after he was found liable for sexually abusing E. Jean Carroll among his mountain of depraved activity. They backed Roy Moore, a credibly accused child abuser. They back Ken Paxton, a man impeached by his own party. None of them apologized. None of them grappled with their conduct. This is an internal debate for the Democratic Party to have about who they are, what they will tolerate, and what winning actually costs.

• The community found its own nuanced conclusion. The chat throughout this conversation was measured, thoughtful, and genuinely engaged. People came in with strong feelings and stayed with the complexity. That is what this show is for. The primary is Tuesday in Maine. The voters there will decide. Whatever they decide, that decision will come with real costs either way, and the people of Maine are the ones who get to make it.

Thank you all for sticking around for a nuanced conversation like this. It means a lot that you show up for each conversation with an open mind and assuming good faith from the guests I have on this platform. Thank you all and have a great weekend!

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.

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.

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Scott Pelley walked into an all-hands meeting with Bari Weiss’s hand-picked 60 Minutes executive producer, Nick Bilton, and spoke truth to power. He was fired for speaking that truth. That is the only way to describe what happened at CBS.

I couldn’t think of a better person to talk about this with than Don Lemon. When I sat down for our latest Substack Live conversation, what emerged was more than media commentary. It was a firsthand account from someone who has been in similar rooms, heard similar lies, and lived through a similar playbook, now being run at CBS News, when Chris Licht took over CNN, and led to Don’s ousting.

Don called Pelley a hero. And rightfully so. Pelley has effectively acted as a whistleblower. In that now-famous all-hands meeting, Pelley reportedly said that Bari Weiss is “murdering 60 Minutes. She does not love this place. She was brought in to kill it, and she’s been doing exactly that.”

After he was fired, he released a statement, accusing CBS’s new management, the Trump-allied Ellisons and their chosen Editor-in-Chief Bari Weiss, of asking him to “inject falsehoods and bias into a politically sensitive story.” He said politicians were being “invited to choose their own correspondents for interviews.” He said the Ellisons were trying to curry favor with the Trump Administration.

This is CBS News. The network of Walter Cronkite. And Don’s response when he watched it unfold was not surprise. It was recognition of a familiar playbook.

This isn’t just a story about executives making bad business decisions. This is about the erosion of America’s democratic infrastructure, our information ecosystem. The media is called the Fourth Estate for a reason.

Journalism is supposed to function as democracy’s immune system. And what is happening at CBS, what happened at CNN under Chris Licht and could happen again if the Ellisons complete their takeover of the network, and what is happening across the American media landscape as corporate owners seek favor with the White House, is an autoimmune disease. The body is attacking itself in order to seek favor with a regime hell-bent on eroding the foundations of democracy that uphold the Fourth Estate.

Don and I spent ten sharp minutes on exactly that.

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

Scott Pelley Is A Hero & The Attack On The Truth That Led To His Ousting Should Be A Five Alarm Fire

Don did not mince words. Neither did I. What Pelley did was an act of courage that should be a wake-up call for everyone in this industry and everyone who depends on it.

• Don called it immediately: this should be a five-alarm fire, a break-the-glass moment, and he does not see that response from enough people. He said watching what these companies are doing to appease the Trump administration should be frightening to everyone in the business. The media world is small. People know each other. And when a CBS News anchor says he was instructed to inject falsehoods into a story, the correct response should be industry-wide alarm.

• Don knew the script before it played out because he lived it. As Pelley was sharing his account of those management meetings, Don said he was reading it thinking: I know they are going to lie about the last meeting. I know they are going to say he was not cooperative. I know how this goes because I have been in those rooms. That is not analysis. That is testimony. And it matters because it confirms that what happened to Pelley is not an isolated incident at one broken company. It is a pattern.

• Nicole Wallace told Don it was triggering for her too. When he appeared on MS NOW yesterday, she confided that watching what is happening at CBS is deeply unsettling for anyone who believes in journalism. Don noted she is not just a television host. She is a former White House communications director under a Republican president. When that person is alarmed by what is happening to the press, that is a signal worth paying attention to.

• In a world of Bari Weisses, be a Scott Pelley. Don said it plainly, and it deserves to be repeated. Pelley did not just defend himself. He defended his colleagues. He defended 60 Minutes. He defended the principle that a news organization exists to inform the public, not to curry regulatory favor for a corporate owner trying to close a merger. That is what a journalist does. That is what the fourth estate is for.

• This is not a story about executives making bad decisions. I made this point directly, and I want to be clear about it: what is happening at CBS is not a management story. It is not a business story. It is a story about the erosion of America’s democratic information infrastructure. Journalism is called the fourth estate for a reason. It is not just another for-profit pursuit. It exists to uphold public trust and to hold power accountable. When the owners of CBS decide that White House approval matters more than that function, they are not making a bad business decision. They are making a choice about what kind of country we live in.

The Access Game & What News Organizations Should Actually Do

Don pulled back the curtain on something the public rarely sees: the quiet negotiations over access that have been eroding editorial independence at news organizations long before the Ellisons arrived at CBS.

• Politicians demanding to choose their interviewers is not new, and news organizations enabling it is the real problem. Don was clear that what Pelley described, politicians being invited to select their own correspondents, has been happening at other organizations for years, including CNN. Politicians learn they can make these demands because they have been accommodated before. The correct response, Don said, is to expose it publicly. Tell the audience: we offered this person an interview, they wanted to pick the correspondent, we do not do that here, so they are not coming on. That transparency would end the behavior immediately because no politician wants that story told about them.

• The people getting the most access are usually the ones softballing the interviews. Don did not hedge on this. Some news organizations pull their punches because they want access, and the way you keep access is by not making powerful people uncomfortable. The result is that the journalists with the most face time with power are often the ones doing the least to hold it accountable. That is a transaction. And it is why independent journalists and those willing to lose access by doing their jobs are more valuable to the public than ever.

• Short-term access always destroys long-term credibility. I made this case directly: every time a news organization accommodates a demand from a politician or an administration to protect its access, it is making a trade it cannot win. The audience notices. Trust erodes. And then when you need that trust, when a real story breaks, and you need people to believe you, it is gone. What Scott Pelley did by going public is the opposite of that trade. He chose credibility over access, permanently. That should be the model for good journalism.

Advice To Journalists & What Is At Stake Amid Right-Wing Media Consolidation

Don’s advice to journalists watching this was direct, specific, and grounded in what he has personally lived through. And the picture he painted of where the Ellisons are taking CBS makes the stakes undeniable.

• If someone gives you an illegal order, you do not have to carry it out. Don drew an explicit parallel to what Democratic leaders told military personnel: if you are given an order that requires you to compromise your journalistic integrity, do not comply, and document it. Go to HR. Put it in writing that you refused and explain why, that what was being asked of you violates company policy, journalistic standards, and potentially the law. Don said as long as you stand on that ground, you will be fine. But you have to start standing up to the corporations. You have to.

• Courage is contagious, and Pelley may have just changed the temperature. Don echoed what Jim Acosta said on MS NOW with him: courage is contagious. Don said he hopes what Pelley did inspires other journalists to be more courageous, the same way what he did after CNN, and what Acosta did, encouraged others. Nicole Wallace told him she often finds herself following the editorial lead of independent journalists now rather than the other way around. This signals that the center of gravity in journalism may be shifting toward those willing to take more risks.

• CBS Evening News is cratering, and 60 Minutes was the one thing that was growing. Don made the business case as clearly as the democratic one: CBS Evening News is suffering under the new regime. The Morning Show is suffering. The one program that was not suffering, that was actually growing its audience both in linear television and in digital, was 60 Minutes. The Ellisons took the one thing that was working and decided to break it. That is not a business decision. That is an ideological one. And it tells you everything you need to know about what they are actually trying to accomplish.

• If the Ellisons get CNN, we will already know what happens because we are watching it happen at CBS. I raised this directly, and Don’s answer was unambiguous: look at CBS. That is your preview. The international reporting, the institutional credibility, the journalists who have spent careers building trust with sources around the world, all of it becomes a negotiating chip for corporate owners who need something from the White House. Journalism as a public service does not survive that transaction. And right now, the Ellisons are showing us exactly what they do when they own a newsroom.

Bottom Line

Scott Pelley stood up in the middle of an all-hands meeting and told the truth about what was being done to his newsroom. Don Lemon recognized every beat because he lived through the same script. The pattern is clear. Corporate owners seek right-wing audiences or need regulatory favors. The White House has demands. Journalists get told to inject falsehoods, accommodate right-wing pressure, and pull their punches. The ones who refuse get fired. The ones who go public become heroes. As Don said, in a world of Bari Weisses, be a Scott Pelley.

This is why Independent media is so important. If this conversation mattered to you, I hope you consider becoming a paid subscriber to Ahmed Baba News and also consider supporting Don Lemon. And if you’re already a paid subscriber, thank you! It truly means a lot. Independent media runs on the people who back it.

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This episode of Across the Pond sparked the kind of discussion this moment demands.

James Matthewson and I sat down to talk through the most charged and emotionally loaded story in the UK right now: the murder of 18-year-old Henry Nowak. What emerged was one of the most nuanced, intellectually honest conversations I think we have had on this show. The chat agreed. Some in the chat came in angry at the top and left with nuance and clarity. That arc is the whole point of what we are building here.

Let me give you the facts of the Henry Nowak case upfront because they matter and because Nigel Farage is deliberately exploiting them. Henry Nowak was an 18-year-old student who was stabbed and killed by Vikram Digwa, a 23-year-old Sikh. When police arrived, Digwa and his brother had already called 999 and lied, claiming they were the victims of a racist attack by a drunk white man. The police arrived and, responding to that false account, handcuffed Henry Nowak as he lay dying.

The body cam footage, released as part of the sentencing process, is genuinely horrific to watch. Digwa has since been sentenced to life in prison. This is a disgusting, individualized tragedy. A depraved man murdered an 18-year-old kid and then tried to exploit the justice system to cover it up. Henry Nowak deserved better. His family deserves justice. Full stop.

What James and I spent this conversation doing is separating that legitimate grief and anger from what Nigel Farage is doing with it, which is something else entirely. Farage is exploiting a family’s worst nightmare to push an “anti-white prejudice” narrative, incite anger, and take a wrecking ball to the UK’s anti-racism policing commitments. We called it out directly, and we did not flinch from the nuance.

Yes, there are legitimate questions about how these officers were trained to respond to the scene. No, that does not validate the two-tier policing narrative. Yes, what happened to Henry Nowak was horrific. No, it does not make Vikram Digwa representative of the Sikh community, any more than a school shooter represents all young white men.

We ended somewhere I want to carry forward: a conversation about the kind of media we actually want to build. Not outrage bait. Not viral dunks. Not simplistic packaging of complex issues for the algorithm. Thoughtful, nuanced, persuasion-driven journalism that makes people smarter rather than angrier. James put it perfectly near the end. He wants to hear people believe what they are saying. He wants more time and more space to actually develop ideas. That is what this show is for.

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

Henry Nowak: What Actually Happened & Why It Matters

Before the politics, the exploitation, and the riots, there is a murdered 18-year-old kid and a family in mourning. The facts of this case deserve to be stated clearly and without distortion.

• Vikram Digwa is a murderer who lied to cover it up. James made this point directly, and it is the right starting point. From all accounts that emerged in the trial, Digwa had been showing off his knife, threatening people with it, and using it as a prop for intimidation before the night he killed Henry Nowak. He then called police and lied, claiming he was the victim of a racist attack, to cover his tracks. He is a thug and a sociopath. He has been rightly sentenced to life in prison.

• The body cam footage is genuinely horrific and the police mishandled the scene. James watched the footage and described it carefully: Henry Nowak is on the ground saying he has been stabbed. The officer does not believe him. Digwa and his brother had already called 999 claiming they were victims of a racist attack, that the white man was drunk, that there were no weapons. The police arrived responding to that false account and handcuffed a dying young man. I watched it too and was viscerally angry. It was disgusting. I would have been just as angry watching it happen to a Black person or any other person. The mishandling is real and deserves a full inquiry.

• We do not have evidence that the attack was racially motivated against Henry Nowak because he was white. James made this point plainly, and it needs to be repeated: nothing in the evidence gathered in the trial indicates Digwa attacked Henry Nowak because he was white. The claim that this was a racially motivated hate crime against a white person is not supported by the facts of the case. That matters enormously when Farage is building an entire political argument on the premise that it was.

• Nigel Farage has not been in touch with Henry Nowak’s family. James said this, and it says everything. Farage gave an address to the nation about a murdered boy to further his own political agenda. He has not been down to see the family. He has not said, let us remember Henry and look into his life. He took a family’s worst nightmare and used it as a prop. That is the context in which everything that follows has to be understood.

Nigel Farage’s Playbook: Anecdote Extrapolation & The White Genocide Narrative

The far right has a playbook. It runs on both sides of the Atlantic. Take a single incident, extrapolate it as if it represents the dominant behavior of an entire group, use it to push a pre-existing narrative, and farm the outrage before the facts are fully understood. James and I have seen this before. We are seeing it again.

• Farage is echoing Enoch Powell and pushing a white genocide narrative. James laid this out with precision: Farage has said in a national address that white people now have fewer rights than minorities in Britain. That is echoing the language of Enoch Powell, the historic conservative figure whose Rivers of Blood speech warned that one day the black man would hold the whip hand over the white man. Farage is now transplanting that framing onto the Henry Nowak case. James noted that the more Farage strays into that language, the more he loses credibility with the mainstream of politics and mainstream media, because even the most aggrieved white people in Britain know deep down they are not at risk of racist attack in any way comparable to what people of color experience.

• “Pure cold rage” is incitement dressed in plausible deniability. James called it out directly: Farage told white people in Britain to respond to this case with pure cold rage. That sounds like incitement to violence. What followed was far-right riots in which over 100 police officers and two police dogs were injured. Farage is giving himself just enough room to say he meant rage at the ballot box, the same way Donald Trump told people to march on the Capitol and later said he meant march down there and protest. James made that comparison explicitly. Keir Starmer condemned the violence in the House of Commons and called for Farage to do the same. He will not.

• Farage is trying to make this the UK’s George Floyd moment for white people. I made this argument live: Farage has specifically invoked George Floyd in framing the Henry Nowak case because Henry Nowak says “I can’t breathe” in the body cam footage as he is dying. Farage is using that parallel deliberately. But the comparison collapses immediately under scrutiny. George Floyd was killed by a police officer. There is systemic racism in American policing with decades of documented evidence. What happened to Henry Nowak was a murderer lying to police. Completely different structural realities. The anger in the moment may feel similar, but the causes are categorically different. Farage knows this. He does not care.

• This is a globally coordinated far-right narrative and Elon Musk is amplifying it. I connected the dots on the live: the Henry Nowak story is being amplified by Elon Musk on Twitter, and it connects directly to the great replacement theory, the white genocide narrative, the anti-DEI push in the US, and even Samuel Alito’s language in the Callais decision claiming it is racist to draw majority-Black districts. These are not separate stories. The global far right is collaborative, and they are all using the same playbook. It’s all trying to build a narrative that white people are being systemically oppressed. James added that he would not be surprised if Farage is being actively advised on how to farm the outrage and utilize these opportunities, because we see Trump and the people around him doing the exact same thing every single time a tragedy occurs.

• The Sikh community is speaking out in repulsion, and that matters. I raised this on the live: I am seeing Sikhs going on television, speaking out against Digwa in the strongest possible terms. The Sikh community did not do this. Vikram Digwa did this. James said it plainly: Sikhs especially, as much as anyone in Britain, are out feeding the homeless, hosting events at their temples, contributing to communities everywhere. The fabricated tension between Sikh communities and white communities does not reflect the reality of how people actually live together in Britain.

The Two-Tier Policing Argument: What Is Real & What Is Not

Farage’s argument shifted when the white lives matter framing started losing traction. He moved to the House of Commons and started claiming there is a “two-tier policing” system that favors minorities over white people. James and I took this apart piece by piece, including the parts where legitimate critique is possible.

• The actual anti-racism policing commitment says nothing like what Farage claims. I read the relevant section on the live: the commitment is to producing equality of policing outcomes for people from different ethnic groups by responding to individuals and communities according to their specific needs, circumstances, and experiences. That is not discriminating against white people. That is trying to ensure policing outcomes are fair regardless of race. Farage is taking one line of a genuine anti-racism commitment and telling people it means white people are being treated worse. It is the same flip-the-script tactic he and Trump use on DEI, claiming something designed to make things more accessible for everyone is actually discriminating against white people.

• Two-tier policing is a catchy phrase built on cherry-picked incidents. James explained this carefully: the phrase catches on because there is genuine historical context people can point to, the grooming gang cover-ups in Rochdale and Rotherham, where predominantly Pakistani perpetrators went uninvestigated for years and police were reportedly worried about being accused of racism. James gave the full picture, though: Pakistani communities did not trust police understandably, because in the 1960s and 70s those same police forces included neo-fascist groups throwing firebombs at their businesses. The mistrust is rooted in real history. The grooming gang failures came from a complete breakdown of community trust, not from police being soft on minorities. Farage ignores all of that context and presents the outcome as evidence of systematic anti-white bias.

• There is a legitimate critique of these specific officers, and it deserves a full inquiry. James and I both agreed on this, and it is important. The officers who arrived at the scene did not do their jobs properly. They took the 999 call at face value, failed to assess the scene independently, and handcuffed a dying young man. James said the failure is on those officers as individuals and he does not see the systematic markers that would indicate a force-wide issue. I said there are legitimate questions about how officers are trained to respond to calls alleging racist attacks, whether they are being trained to do independent fact-finding rather than taking the account of the caller at face value. That is a real conversation worth having. Throwing out the entire anti-racism commitment because of those officers is not.

• The Jussie Smollett parallel tells us exactly how this playbook works. I made this comparison live: Smollett faked a hate crime in 2019, and the right immediately used it to claim all hate crimes are fake, even as real hate crimes were rising across the US during Trump's first term. Vikram Digwa lied about a racist attack to cover his murder, and now the right is seeking to claim that there is broadly anti-white bias in policing. Both cases involve a bad actor exploiting systems that exist to protect marginalized people. James’s point: that should prove that awful people, regardless of skin color, will always use whatever is current and topical to their advantage. It does not invalidate the systems. It validates the need for careful independent investigation. But Farage does not want careful independent investigation. He just wants to exploit this moment for political gain.

Don’t Let The Right Bait You Into Defending Stupid Stuff

This is the section I most want people to read. Farage’s strategy is not just about the Henry Nowak case. It is about setting a trap. And the progressive side has fallen into it before.

• Farage is trying to entrench liberals into defending the indefensible. I said this directly on the live: Farage is trying to get people on the liberal and pro-democracy side so angry and so reactive that they end up defending positions they should not be defending just to oppose him. When you are in that mode, when you are just reacting to the outrage, you stop thinking clearly. And then he gets to say, look at them, they are defending this. The antidote is exactly what we tried to do in this conversation: separate the legitimate anger at a genuine tragedy from the political exploitation of it, and be willing to say yes, the police mishandled this, and no, Farage is still wrong.

• Defund the police is what happens when progressives get baited into bad messaging. I raised this, and it sparked real conversation in the chat. In 2020, there was enormous moral and political energy behind the Black Lives Matter movement. The right framing would have been reform the police. What became the dominant slogan was defund the police, which handed the right a gift and became an anchor on the Democratic Party for years. Shannon in the chat made the important point that it was not mainstream Democrats saying defund, it was a handful of voices who got amplified. But the point stands: when you are angry and reactive, and you let the moment dictate your messaging, you end up fighting on the wrong terrain. Farage is trying to do the same thing here: bait the progressive side into positions that sound defensive or extreme.

• Always keep the third person in the room in mind. James made this point, and I want to highlight it because it is the core of persuasion-driven media. When you are in a debate or a conversation, you are not just talking to the person in front of you. You are talking to the person watching who has not yet made up their mind. James said he watches me do this on MS NOW, always thinking about that third person, always calibrating not to score points but to inform. That is what we try to do on this show. That is what wins over time.

• These tests are designed to be on progressive home turf. James made this point with clarity: the reason cases like this are so challenging is precisely because they implicate things progressives care deeply about: anti-racism commitments, police reform, community trust. Farage picks these moments deliberately because he knows that when progressives feel their values are being attacked they can get reactionary, loud, and imprecise. The right counts on that. The answer is not to stop caring about those values. It is to be disciplined, precise, and calm in how you defend them.

The Kind Of Media We Want To Build

We did not plan to end with a declaration of the kind of media ecosystem we want to build, but you can always count on James and I to end the pod with big picture thoughts. It emerged naturally from the conversation and from the community in the chat. James and I have been doing this long enough now that the why of what we are doing is clear to both of us.

• We are not here for outrage bait, and we are not here for clout. I said this directly near the end: I do not do this work to chase a segment or a viral moment. I am here to inform and persuade people so they can make good decisions about their democracy. That means being willing to say things that are complicated. It means being willing to disagree with the easy take. It means building a space where people can come in angry at the top of a live and leave with nuance because the conversation actually moved somewhere. That is a harder path than dunking on the next headline. I have been on it since 2016 when I was 23, documenting Trump’s first term. It is the only path worth being on.

• Nuance is not weakness. It is the work. I have been thinking a lot about the kind of content I want to contribute to the media landscape. When you can demonstrate flexibility, intellectual curiosity, and the willingness to say yes to a point you did not expect to agree with, you open people’s Overton windows. You give people a permission structure to change their minds. You show that there are thoughtful people on the progressive side. James pointed to this in how he describes our conversations: when people see us genuinely working through something rather than just presenting talking points, it models something they can do themselves. That is the whole project.

• The far right’s outrage machine wants you burnt out and reactive. James and I both named this at the end. The greatest victory Farage and Trump can win is not a policy win. It is getting you to give yourself over to constant outrage, to feel like every development is the end of the world, to lose the ability to think clearly because you are running on fear and anger. James said it simply: we want you to come away from these conversations feeling good. Not naive. Not uninformed. But equipped. Capable. Nourished rather than depleted. That is the intention behind every episode of this show.

• James’s Dead Poets Society close. He ended on this, and it is worth preserving: engineering, politics, law, all noble pursuits. But art, music, human connection, these are what we live for. Come from that place. If you put that at the center of everything, you will not burn yourself out. You will not give yourself over to them. You will have something left at the end of the week that is yours, and that is worth protecting. We do this work from that place. And we will keep doing it.

Bottom Line

Henry Nowak was an 18-year-old kid who was murdered by a sociopath, mishandled by officers who failed to properly assess a scene, and then had his death weaponized by a politician who never even contacted his family. The legitimate anger at what happened to Henry deserves a full inquiry into the officers’ training and conduct.

But it does not validate the white genocide narrative, the two-tier policing claim, or the incitement to outrage Farage dressed up as an address to the nation. The playbook is the same on both sides of the Atlantic: take a single tragedy, extrapolate it onto an entire group, farm the outrage, and watch the far-right movement grow. The answer is not to stop being angry. It is to be precise about how to channel your outrage productively, and never let your critical thinking skills fall to the wayside. Stay sane, everyone.

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

Some conversations leave you smarter. Some leave you inspired. This one did both. I was joined by two of the most brilliant and passionate historians working today, and I left the live feeling exactly what I always hope our audience feels when they tune in: that understanding history does not make the current moment more hopeless. It makes progress seem more possible.

I re-immerse myself in this history whenever I need to be reminded that we have overcome seismic challenges before. Every time I talk to Dr. Scott and Dr. Williams, I leave revitalized. I hope this conversation does the same for you.

Dr. Terry Anne Scott is an award-winning historian, author, and speaker, the Director of the Institute for Common Power, and former Professor and Chair of the Department of History at Hood College. Dr. Yohuru Williams is Distinguished University Chair and Professor of History and founding director of the Racial Justice Initiative at the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota. They are both going to be live on the ground in Selma and Montgomery, Alabama, this Sunday, June 7th at noon Eastern Time for a national Zoom teach-in with Mr. Charles Mauldin, who was sixth in line on the Edmund Pettus Bridge on Bloody Sunday. Ahead of that, I was happy to have this conversation to glean their insights and get a glimpse of what they’ll be covering in the teach-in.

We covered an enormous amount of ground. We started with the Callais ruling and what gutting Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act actually means in practical terms. We traced the through line from the Confederacy to MAGA, the progress-backlash cycle that has defined American history, and the coded language that has been used across generations to erode Black political power.

We dug into the legal architecture behind what Dr. Williams called a new “Roberts Crow” era and what the Supreme Court has been doing quietly for decades. We talked about what previous generations of civil rights activists understood about power that the modern movement sometimes forgets. And we ended with concrete tools, from a story about Diane Nash, a new way to view “WOKE,” the Ella Baker model of leadership, and why cynicism is the one thing that will absolutely guarantee failure.

This was genuinely one of my favorite Substack Lives. It’s exactly the kind of content I want to contribute to the media landscape. Informative, deep, and contextualized in a way that leaves you feeling empowered.

You can watch our full conversation above and read key takeaways below.

The Callais Ruling At America’s 250th: What Just Happened And Why It Matters

Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 has now been gutted by the Supreme Court. On the eve of America’s 250th birthday, the conversation about what this country actually stands for has never been more urgent.

• Section 2 ensured fair and non-discriminatory political representation, and it is now gone. Dr. Scott explained it plainly: Section 2 made sure political representation was proportional and non-discriminatory. The Callais case came out of Louisiana, where 30% of the population is African American, and their representation was 30%. With Callais, that representation now threatens to be zero. That is a direct reversion to a political landscape this country fought and bled to move beyond.

• In Montgomery, the first Black representative since 1871 could now be the last. Dr. Scott pointed to Shomari Figures, who represents Montgomery through Mobile and is the first Black representative in Montgomery since 1871, 150 years. With the Callais ruling, he could be the last for however many more years. That is the concrete human consequence of what the Supreme Court just did, and it lands with full weight when you situate it against America approaching its 250th anniversary.

• The ruling sits on a continuum of cementing white supremacy, and that context is the source of optimism, not despair. Dr. Scott offered two paths for how to receive this history: deep distress because it is so pernicious, or optimism because we know people fought against it and won. She chose optimism. People like Mr. Charles Mauldin, who will be with them in Selma this weekend, are the reason. We owe it to them to continue the fight because a just and inclusive democracy is winnable.

• Dr. Williams grounded this moment in the Lewis doctrine. Dr. Williams wrote about this concept in 2021 following John Lewis’s death. Lewis said that together we can redeem the soul of America by getting into good trouble, necessary trouble. Everyone quotes that line, Dr. Williams noted, but they miss the part where Lewis talked about the need to study history honestly and engage it in a way that creates meaningful change. Lewis also talked about the right to vote as an instrument of empowerment in communities of color specifically. That framework is what the teach-in this Sunday is designed to activate.

The Backlash Cycle: From Reconstruction To MAGA

American history is defined by cycles of progress and backlash. Understanding that cycle is not a reason to despair. It is the map. And the map also shows that every backlash has been followed by more progress, because of what people chose to do next.

• Every period of Black progress in American history has been met with a systematic backlash designed to roll it back. The Civil War was a backlash to the expansion of non-slave states and the growing threat to the slave economy. After Reconstruction produced nearly 2,000 Black elected officials, there was a violent backlash that gave us Jim Crow, the KKK, and the systematic erasure of Black political power. After the civil rights movement of the 1960s, there was a backlash: assassinations, the war on drugs, the Southern strategy. After Barack Obama became president and it became undeniable how fundamentally Black culture is American culture, there was a backlash, and that backlash is MAGA. We are still in that cycle. The erosion of voting rights is not a new story. It is the same story, repackaged.

• The erosion of voting rights is not just part of the backlash. It is the hallmark of it. Dr. Scott made this distinction precisely. During Reconstruction, nearly 2,000 Black elected officials served, from sheriffs to aldermen to representatives, so many that white Southerners called it an era of Negro domination or Negro rule in deeply pejorative terms. When Reconstruction ended and federal troops protecting Black voting rights were removed, the first thing they chanted was no more Negro domination. What followed was literacy tests, poll taxes, lynching, and people being murdered on the courthouse lawn for attempting to register. Undermining Black political power was the hallmark of restoring a white power structure. We are seeing that again.

• Tennessee right now is a direct historical parallel to Southern Redemption. Dr. Scott drew this line explicitly: the Tennessee legislature recently removed all African American and Democratic lawmakers from any position of power within the legislature. That is precisely what happened in the moments of Southern Redemption following the Civil War, when Black people were stripped of representation systematically and violently. In Georgia alone, 25% of Black elected officials were killed after Reconstruction. The parallel is chilling.

• Dr. Williams on the South losing the war but winning the peace. Dr. Williams cited David Blight’s Race and Reunion: even going into the 1960s and beyond, there was fertile ground where someone like Donald Trump could create a narrative about a mythical America, making America great again, hearkening back to a “Lost Cause” period that gave rise to Jim Crow segregation and was completely hostile to women’s rights, immigration, and racial minorities of all stripes. The Confederate monuments went up between 1890 and 1910, Dr. Williams noted, when those same sentiments were being institutionalized. They came down in 2017, 2018, 2019, and 2020, and that removal became the opportunity to operationalize a playbook that had been in existence for decades. John Roberts and others had been working toward this quietly. Trump simply became their vocal champion, willing to say the quiet parts out loud.

Coded Language & The Southern Strategy: How The Con Works

The language changes across generations. The con does not. Understanding the coded language that has been used to pit working-class white Americans against Black and brown Americans is essential to dismantling it.

• The Southern strategy is the Republican Party’s operating manual for decades. I laid this out directly: LBJ pushed the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the party switch happened, Southern Democrats disaffected to the Republicans, and Richard Nixon accelerated it. Lee Atwater and Reagan deployed welfare queens and other code words, language designed to appeal to the economic anxiety of Southern whites while governing for the rich. The message was: Black people are to blame for your problems. Not the people giving tax cuts to the rich and robbing you blind. The brown people. That has been the Republican Party’s model for decades.

• Trump ripped the mask off. What was new about Trump was not the ideology. It was the willingness to dispense with the coded language entirely. He came down the escalator and said Mexicans are rapists. He called for a Muslim ban. He stopped pretending to be a business party in a suit and just played directly to bigotries without the euphemisms. Dr. Scott made the point that “Make America Great Again” was also Reagan’s slogan. This is nothing but a continuation of the same ideological effort to ensure white supremacy governs and to suppress progress among Black and BIPOC people, she argued.

• The opportunity now is to show white working-class voters they have been lied to the entire time. I made this argument directly: Trump is the perfect embodiment of the con becoming visible. He is literally enriching himself while actively raising prices on the people who voted for him. The through line of history, the Southern strategy, the coded language, the Lost Cause, it all points to the same conclusion. The modern Republican Party has never been legislating for white working-class voters. It has been using their racial grievances as a distraction while governing for the top. Now that Trump has stripped the mask off entirely, the teaching of this history can wake people up to that truth in a way that coded language made much harder.

“Roberts Crow” & The Legal Architecture Of Suppression

The Supreme Court has been the instrument of voting rights suppression for over 150 years. Dr. Williams and Dr. Scott gave the legal and historical receipts that everybody should have ready.

• A hostile Supreme Court was the original instrument of undermining Reconstruction. Dr. Williams laid this out with precision: the Supreme Court rendered most civil rights legislation from the Reconstruction era nugatory, eviscerating key sections of the Enforcement Act of 1870 and the Civil Rights Act of 1875. In one case, U.S. v. Reese, the justices literally employed the language of magic words, ruling that because an election examiner did not use the explicit language of race, there was no way to determine if discrimination had occurred. That reasoning is the ancestor of the intent requirement Alito used in the Callais decision. The genealogy is unbroken.

• “Roberts Crow” is not a metaphor. It is a documented project. Dr. Williams explained that in 2013, after Shelby County v. Holder, he and other historians wrote a piece naming what they called “Roberts Crow.” John Roberts’s history is known. His path to gutting the Voting Rights Act was a career-long project. Callais is its fruition. The face of the laws do not say Black people cannot vote, Dr. Williams noted, but the outcomes will be racist by design. That is “Roberts Crow.”

• Facially neutral laws are still discriminatory laws. Dr. Scott gave the receipts. In Georgia, it is now criminalized to give water or food to people standing in line to vote. The law does not mention race. But in the 2020 election, when Georgia went blue, it was Black people standing in the long lines in Black districts. If you criminalize giving people food and water, you are trying to cause people to go home. That is facially neutral and functionally discriminatory. Dr. Scott said they are going to walk through a slew of these laws at the teach-in this weekend.

• The Alito intent requirement guts the 1982 amendment Congress specifically passed to fix this. I made this point directly: the 1982 amendment to the Voting Rights Act of 1965 was passed explicitly to shift the standard from intent to outcomes, because Congress recognized that proving intent was nearly impossible by design. Alito’s ruling reverses that. Effectively, to prove racism now, you would need a Signal chat of people saying “I am being racist so right now,” even though we know precisely what the targeted outcomes are. Dr. Williams connected this to the same pattern going back to Reconstruction, and called for people to memorize the 14th and 15th Amendments and to be able to cite the case law, not to become junior attorneys, but to recognize the signs and fight back effectively.

What Previous Generations Understood About Power That We Sometimes Forget

The civil rights movement was not just a moral movement. It was a strategic one. The lessons about power, economic leverage, organizing versus mobilizing, and the Ella Baker model of leadership are as applicable today as they were in 1965. I asked Dr. Scott and Dr. Williams what we can learn from the movements of the past.

• Economic boycotts are one of the most powerful tools in the arsenal. Dr. Scott made this point with historical precision: the Montgomery bus boycott, the Nashville sit-ins, and the 1953 Baton Rouge bus boycott were all economic boycotts. Black people withheld their money to put pressure on a white power business structure to create change. That same power exists today. When Black people say we are not going to Target because of how they dropped their DEI commitments, when people support Costco and other organizations that held the line, that is the same mechanism. Voices raised in unison work too. Alex Haley’s Roots being removed from a banned book list after vocal outrage. The $1.776 billion slush fund being blocked because of public and court pressure. Never underestimate the power you have as an individual.

• Ella Baker taught us that the best leaders empower others to lead. Dr. Scott brought up Ella Baker as the model she tries to adopt. Baker was a youth organizer in the NAACP, a key figure in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and the person who organized voter registration across Atlanta. When the students from the sit-ins were ready to organize, she helped them create the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. What Baker understood is that leadership is not about demanding deference. It is about making sure others around you understand their own power as leaders. That is the Ella Baker model, and it is the model the Institute for Common Power runs on.

• Stokely Carmichael had a moment of doubt too. Dr. Williams told this story with care: when Carmichael first encountered young people sitting in, he thought they were just trying to get on television. Then he went and witnessed the courage in person, and it transformed him. He went on to become one of the fiercest voices of the movement. Dr. Williams’s point is that it is okay to feel disconnected or doubtful in this moment. What matters is that the people we lionize always found a way to respond. Find your Stokely Carmichael moment. Walk in, witness the courage, and let it change you.

• The difference between mass mobilizing and mass organizing matters enormously. Dr. Williams raised this distinction, and I built on it. Mobilizing is powerful, getting 3,000 people in a square is meaningful, and the No Kings protests function as a funnel to get people into activism. But the real work is organizing, figuring out the levers of power and targeting them with precision. The Selma tactic was about imagery and moral force. The economic boycotts targeted financial pressure points. Minneapolis and what happened with George Floyd was about sustained attention forcing federal involvement. You need to understand which tool applies to which moment.

• Cynicism will get you absolutely nowhere. I said this directly, and I mean it. A solid portion of the far left operates from a place of nihilism, a belief that nothing can change, that all paths are closed. That is not what John Lewis modeled. It is not what Charles Mauldin modeled. The “I Have a Dream” speech was not a “There Is No Point” speech. It was an audacious act of optimism delivered in the middle of a moment where what King was describing seemed genuinely unimaginable. He was painting the future into existence. People with far less power, far fewer rights, and far fewer tools than we have today made changes many could not have foreseen. If they could do it, we can absolutely do this.

Education To Action: How We Fight From Here

Dr. Scott’s phrase is education to action. Learning without acting is a privilege. The teach-in this Sunday is built around exactly that principle, and this section is for everyone reading this who wants to know what to do next.

• Diane Nash showed up alone, and from that came an entire movement. Dr. Scott told this story, and it is the one I want everyone to carry with them. Diane Nash was a young student from Chicago who came to Fisk University in Nashville and started attending James Lawson’s nonviolent resistance workshops. Do you know how many people showed up with her? Zero. It was her and James Lawson, sitting in the basement of a church. She kept coming back. She brought more people. More people came. From that small beginning came John Lewis, Bernard Lafayette, and the entire Nashville movement that shaped the modern civil rights era. What if she had not kept showing up? Never let anyone tell you that you do not have the power to create a movement.

• Dr. Williams’s WOKE acronym is an interesting framework. Dr. Williams reclaimed the word deliberately, clarifying that he does not mean what Pete Hegseth loses sleep over. He means it as a concrete framework. W is the Willingness to confront difficult truths about ourselves, our institutions, and our history. O is Ownership of our role in creating and sustaining the conditions that shape outcomes. K is Keep, maintenance, what do you grow, what do you protect, how do you cover crop so that when headlines fade and the work becomes difficult, the fire stays lit. E is Extension, figuring out how to extend the work, extend the season, extend the streak, winning hearts and minds in spaces where metrics do not capture what is actually happening. Stay woke. That is the whole program.

• Dr. Scott’s historical empowerment framework is history as a self-help book. She named it precisely: historical empowerment. History is not just context. It is fuel. Every time you feel discouraged, you think about Diane Nash, Ella Baker, John Lewis, Charles Mauldin, and Joanne Bland, who was eleven years old and still walked the Edmund Pettus Bridge. If they could do that, if Charles Mauldin could get beaten on that bridge and get back up, surely we can do this from the relative comfort of our phones and computers. People in the chat during the live were saying their grandfathers and fathers faced much worse. Let that be guidance, not guilt.

• They cannot gerrymander the maps fast enough to win the midterms. I said this, and I believe it. The Supreme Court ruling is a serious setback. But if all demographics are increasingly rejecting Trump, you can move districts around all you want, you can’t save the GOP majority. Trump is approaching 30% approval. The work has worked. The American people are mobilizing. There have been real damages, the federal workforce erosion, the attack on Black unemployment, the ongoing assault on civil rights. But there is a backlash growing that is bigger than any map can contain. Donald Trump is not stronger than the American people. He never has been. And he is not going to be the thing that ends the American experiment. We should be embarrassed if he were.

• This Sunday, the teach-in goes live from Selma and Montgomery. Dr. Scott closed with the line that stayed with me: evil will always falter under the weight of good and righteousness. The teach-in this Sunday, June 7th at noon Eastern Time, will be live from Selma and Montgomery with Dr. Scott, Dr. Williams, and Mr. Charles Mauldin, the man who was sixth in line on the Edmund Pettus Bridge on Bloody Sunday. Four hours of learning, inspiration, and determination from the sacred sites that drove the most important piece of small-d democratic legislation in American history. Sign up here.

Bottom Line

The Voting Rights Act is under assault, the backlash cycle is real, and Roberts Crow is the Supreme Court’s long game finally realized. But every generation that faced something comparable found a way forward because they understood power, used economic leverage, organized rather than just mobilized, and refused to let cynicism win. Diane Nash showed up alone. Charles Mauldin stood sixth in line on a bridge knowing what was coming. Ella Baker built a movement by empowering others to lead. History is not just context. It is the map out of this.

Join the teach-in this Sunday, June 7th, at noon Eastern Time, live from Selma and Montgomery.

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Charles Douglas and I did something a little different this week. Instead of our usual Friday setup, we checked in live while Charles was on the ground in California on election day. And I mean literally on the ground.

As we were getting started, Saikat Chakrabarti, the candidate running to replace Nancy Pelosi in San Francisco, walked right past the camera with his team and Common Power staffers. That is the kind of view you only get when your co-host is out on these streets doing the work.

Charles had spent the day before in Bakersfield knocking 120 doors in 90 degree heat with Randy Villegas, and was now in San Francisco with Saikat’s operation, where hundreds of volunteers were up since 5 am putting sticky notes on 20,000 doors across the city. Jessica, a Common Power staffer and Bay Area native, joined us from the field to give her read on the ground. It was one of those lives where the movement of election day became the content.

The conversation also went big picture. California’s primaries are not just local races. They are a live test of the central argument Charles and I have been making all year: that what Democratic voters want is not a more moderate party, but a bolder one. The establishment versus anti-establishment battle playing out in San Francisco, Bakersfield, and the governor’s race is a preview of the fight that will define the party heading into 2026 and beyond.

You can watch our full conversation above and read key takeaways below.

In California’s Primaries, A Battle To Define The Democratic Party’s Identity

Three races, one through line: establishment Democrats are facing an insurgent wave. Charles was on the ground to see how it plays out in real time.

• Saikat Chakrabarti’s ground game in San Francisco is one of the strongest Charles has ever seen. Five hundred volunteers were up at 5 am putting sticky notes on 20,000 doors across the city before round two of door-knocking even started. Jessica reported from the field that a significant portion of the volunteers they interviewed were first-timers, people who had never volunteered before but felt this race was different. Her read: San Francisco feels they’ve never had a real progressive in this seat, and people feel this is their shot. Saikat is a Silicon Valley coder who is talking about a Star Trek future, cutting the military budget, and policies to offset AI-driven job loss. That is a different kind of candidate.

• The governor’s race is a cautionary tale of what happens when establishment Dems fail to coalesce. Charles called it a slow-moving train wreck and placed the blame squarely on establishment Democrats not getting their act together behind a single candidate. The result was a near disaster where California, a deep blue state, almost ended up with no Democrat in the top two of its own governor’s race. Charles’s minimum acceptable outcome was at least one Democrat making the general. Jessica’s take from the ground: she landed on Tom Steyer in the last three weeks because he is genuinely progressive, focused on climate and single-payer healthcare.

Prosperity Politics & The Overton Window

The lesson some Democrats took from 2024 was that voters wanted something more conservative. Charles and I both think that is exactly wrong. What voters wanted was bold action. The candidates winning right now are the ones offering it.

• Our Overton window argument is the most strategically important point of the conversation. If Democrats want to move the country further toward working class policies, they cannot negotiate from the middle. You start at a point further out than where you want to end up, the same way you negotiate a car price. Blue cities in blue states, San Francisco, Seattle, Chicago, New York, Colorado, are the places where electing further left candidates pulls the Overton window in that direction. When people see these progressive policies can work (example: Mamdani), they’ll yearn for those policies at the national level.

• People do not want to just get by. They want to prosper. I have been thinking about this a lot and said it directly on the live: the framing of kitchen table politics as survival, people just want to put food on the table, pay their bills, get by, undersells what people actually want. People want to thrive. They want their kids to do better than them. They want prosperity. Charles connected it immediately to FDR, whose language was about prosperity and economic transformation, not survival. The candidates winning right now are speaking that language. I added the FDR detail: he solved the banking crisis in his first week by declaring a bank holiday, issuing a fireside chat, passing legislation, and reinstilling public confidence in banks. That is the kind of bold action people are hungry for, and it is catching on because we are in a slow-moving economic crisis that demands it.

• Randy Villegas talked a Trump voter into supporting him at the door in Bakersfield. Charles reported this directly from the ground. They knocked on a door, a Republican answered and said he had voted for Trump, and the message was: our candidates are not just for one party. They are for anyone who believes the system is not working for them. Charles called Randy over to finish the conversation, and the voter came around. That is the persuasion model working in real time. Charles noted that Randy’s flyer leads with both parties failing people, which wipes the slate clean and stops the party line reflex. Right now it is Republicans and independents looking for a new home, and talking about affordability and staying in your home and having a job is what moves them. I added that the contrast writes itself when Trump is out here saying he does not care about Americans’ financial situation while enriching himself.

• How you read tonight’s results matters as much as who wins. Charles closed with this, and it is the right frame: do not just look at which candidate advances. Look at what Republican and independent voters did with their vote. Look at young voter turnout and how they broke. That data tells you something about what is actually working in blue cities and blue states and how to replicate it for the fall. The system has to be changed, not iterated upon. Having policies that actually improve the lives of young people and disenfranchised communities is how you do it.

Bottom Line

California’s primaries are a live test of the central argument of this entire midterm cycle: bold beats cautious, prosperity beats survival, and the candidates with the ground games and the big ideas are the ones generating the energy. Charles was on the streets in 90-degree heat in Bakersfield and up at 5 a.m. in San Francisco because that is where the work happens. Watch the turnout numbers tonight as closely as you watch the results.

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.

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