“As an adjudicated insurrectionist, Trump is an illegitimate president according to Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, and therefore every official act as president will be illegitimate.”
–Mike Zonta, co-editor of OccupySF.net
The 14th Amendment states: “No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any state, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any state legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any state, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may, by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.”
Call your Congressperson and your U.S. Senators at (202) 224-3121
The wealthy and powerful few have dominated the masses throughout most of human history. This is starkly visible now more than ever—today, the gulf between oligarchs and the average citizen is larger than any gap that existed during European serfdom or the slave society of Imperial Rome. We have arrived at the most blatant version of oligarchy that most modern states have endured, with politicians bought and paid for across the political spectrum.
The strange thing we aren’t in open revolt against this system. In fact, we keep voting to prop it up. Why?
In The Blind Spot, political scientist Jeffrey A. Winters delivers an urgent, incisive account of how we reached this era of in-your-face oligarchy, exposing how modern democracy was developed to protect the interests of the ultra-rich. By tracing the evolution of oligarchy across the globe and through modern history, he demonstrates how the rule of the wealthy isn’t just a flaw in our democracy, it has been built into its very foundations. Now, in an extraordinary paradox, we exist in a state of “participatory inequality”: a world in which 99.99% of us participate openly and freely—democratically, even—in our own ongoing exclusion and disenfranchisement.
But powerful change can begin when we have a clear understanding of where we are, and where we deserve to be. As well as shining a light just how bad our political reality has become, The Blind Spot introduces bold ideas for how we might shift the balance of power. While the rich and powerful do not cede power quietly, this period of shocking inequality is, Winters shows, an opportunity for transformation.
Jeffrey Alan Winters is an American political scientist at Northwestern University, specialising in the study of oligarchy. He has written extensively on Indonesia and on oligarchy in the United States. His 2011 book Oligarchy was the 2012 winner of the American Political Science Association’s Luebbert Award for the Best Book in Comparative politics.
In the mythology of history, 1776 belongs to Philadelphia: declarations, rebellion and the birth of the United States. Yet on the far edge of a continent the revolutionaries hadn’t fully imagined, another founding was quietly unfolding that same year.
While Thomas Jefferson drafted ideals of liberty and self-government in the East, Spanish conquistadors and Franciscan missionaries were establishing a tiny outpost beside one of the world’s greatest natural harbors. That settlement would become San Francisco.
The coincidence is more than historical trivia. It is a revealing dual narrative about the American experiment itself: one founding devoted to principles, the other to possibility.
The United States was born from an argument about freedom. San Francisco was born from geography, ambition and grit. Together, they tell the story of a nation forever oscillating between ideals and reinvention.
In 1776, the future San Francisco — located on the ancestral homeland of the Ramaytush Ohlone people — was mainly known for windblown dunes and rolling hills.
Then, Spain — worried about Russian and British encroachment on the Pacific coast — moved to secure Alta California. That summer, colonists established the Presidio of San Francisco and Mision San Francisco de Asis, today better known as Mission Dolores.
Mere days before the Continental Congress signed the Declaration of Independence, Juan Bautista de Anza planted a cross in the ground establishing the Presidio on the bluffs above the Pacific. The contrast between the two foundings could not have been sharper.
The American Revolution announced itself with soaring language about equality and liberty. San Francisco’s founding emerged from empire. One was loudly ideological; the other deeply pragmatic — but over the centuries, San Francisco would evolve into perhaps the most vivid expression of the very ideals articulated in Philadelphia.
For most of its early life, San Francisco remained obscure. No one could have predicted that this remote village would one day become one of the most influential cities on Earth. Then came 1848.
The discovery of gold transformed San Francisco almost overnight from a sleepy port into a global magnet for ambition, becoming — in a matter of years — the most cosmopolitan place west of New York.
The California Gold Rush did more than enrich prospectors. It created a civic culture built around reinvention. In older societies, identity often depended on class, ancestry or inherited status. In San Francisco, identity became fluid. Here, a laborer could become a merchant, a refugee could become a restaurateur, and an immigrant could become a titan of industry.
The City rewarded audacity more than pedigree. That ethos still defines San Francisco today.
The rest of America often imagines San Francisco as a place of contradictions: radical and wealthy, bohemian and corporate, idealistic and relentlessly ambitious. But beneath these polarities lies a coherent civic philosophy.
San Francisco has long believed that talent matters more than origins and that the future belongs to those willing to invent it. That is the deeper connection between the two foundings of 1776.
The founders of the United States envisioned a society in which individuals were not permanently trapped by aristocracy or inherited hierarchy. Their vision was incomplete and deeply flawed in practice, especially in a nation still burdened by slavery and exclusion.
But the democratic aspiration was revolutionary: Ordinary people could shape their own destinies. San Francisco became one of the ultimate realizations of that aspiration.
The City’s history is a procession of outsiders arriving with little and building something transformative. Chinese railroad workers and merchants helped define its commercial and cultural identity despite fierce discrimination. LGBTQ communities found refuge and political power in San Francisco decades before much of America accepted them. Artists, activists and entrepreneurs repeatedly turned our home into a laboratory for social and technological change.
And then came Silicon Valley.
Though the region geographically exists outside the city limits, the Bay Area spawned a technological revolution over the 20th century that cemented San Francisco’s place in the global imagination as the cradle of innovation. The personal computer, the internet economy, social media, artificial intelligence and venture capital culture all carry the unmistakable imprint of San Francisco’s frontier mentality.
This place has always attracted people who believe the world can be remade.
The Storefront Opportunity Grant Program is infusing commercial corridors with commerce and assisting proprietors with up to $100,000 in funding
From prospectors searching riverbeds for precious metal to engineers in laboratories searching for semiconductor breakthroughs to today’s founders exploring frontiers in AI, biotech, climate technology and space exploration, the tools have changed but the underlying impulse remains strikingly similar: Come west; start over; build the future.
That is why San Francisco occupies such a singular place in popular imagination.
To many around the world, New York represents power, Los Angeles represents fame and Washington, D.C., represents authority. San Francisco represents possibility. Its steep hills and Victorian houses are only part of the iconography. Our home symbolizes a belief that new ideas can overturn old systems.
But today, San Francisco represents something more urgent than possibility. It represents defiance.
The ideals that animated 1776 — that all people are created equal, that liberty is not a privilege of the powerful, that government exists to serve its citizens rather than to subjugate them — these are not abstract principles safely preserved behind museum glass. They are living commitments, and they are under pressure.
Across the country and in the halls of national power, forces have emerged that would concentrate wealth and authority in fewer hands, that would use the machinery of government to punish dissent, that would cast immigrants as threats and vulnerable communities as burdens, and that would replace the expansive promise of American democracy with a narrower, harder vision of who belongs and who matters.
San Francisco has answered that pressure not with resignation, but with resolve.
When federal policies have targeted immigrant communities, San Francisco has reaffirmed its commitment to being a sanctuary city, insisting that human dignity does not depend on documentation.
When LGBTQ rights have faced legal assault, San Francisco has stood as a place where queer people do not merely survive but lead, govern and thrive.
When the social safety net has been frayed by ideology and indifference, San Francisco has continued to invest in housing, mental health, public health and the radical proposition that a city’s worth is measured by how it treats its most vulnerable residents, not its most powerful.
These commitments are not without struggle. San Francisco is not a finished city or a perfect one. It wrestles daily with inequality, with the displacement of longtime residents, with the unresolved tension between its progressive ideals and the enormous private wealth generated within its borders.
But its willingness to wrestle openly with those tensions is itself a democratic act.
What is emerging now is something the City’s founders could not have anticipated but might have recognized: San Francisco stepping into a role not merely as an American city, but as a global symbol of what humane, democratic governance can look like when it refuses to surrender its values.
Cities around the world watch San Francisco not just for its technology or its culture, but for its example. They watch to see whether a major city can protect the marginalized while remaining open to the world, whether it can hold fast to civil liberties while confronting deep inequality, whether it can say to immigrants and refugees, to artists and dissidents, to people who have been turned away elsewhere: You are welcome here, and your presence makes us stronger.
In this moment, that message is not merely civic pride. It is a moral stance.
The United States was founded on the audacious proposition that human beings could govern themselves, that no person was born to rule and no person was born to be ruled. Throughout American history, every generation has been asked to decide whether that proposition holds.
San Francisco has consistently answered that question with a stubborn, imperfect and living yes.
Two foundings, one nation — and one city fighting for the soul of both.
In Philadelphia, America declared its ideals. On the shores of San Francisco Bay, a city grew that has never stopped insisting those ideals must be honored in practice, not just in principle — that freedom is not merely a word to be celebrated, but a standard to be met, a promise to be kept and, when necessary, a flame to be carried forward against the wind.
A young visitor shields themself from the sun at the Great American State Fair during Fourth of July celebrations on the National Mall on July 4, 2026 in Washington, DC.
(Photo by Finn Gomez/Getty Images)
“How we confront the climate crisis will determine a lot about the next 250 years of American history, including if we make it that long,” one climate advocate said. “The revolution we need today is the clean energy revolution.”
The US reliance on and promotion of fossil fuels is interfering with its ability to celebrate its 250th birthday, as several July 4 events were canceled due to a dangerous, record-breaking heatwave in the Central and Eastern US that scientists say would have been “virtually impossible” without the climate emergency.
As millions of people sweltered under heat alerts, extreme heat and humidity led to the cancellation of both Washington, DC and Philadelphia’s Independence Day parades. Nearly 30 other events in states including Alabama, Delaware, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Virginia were modified, postponed, or canceled, according to USA Today.
“The US having to cancel major 4th of July celebrations because of extreme heat is almost too spot on as a metaphor for the country’s failure to combat global warming,” Fossil Free Media director Jamie Henn told Common Dreams. “How we confront the climate crisis will determine a lot about the next 250 years of American history, including if we make it that long. The revolution we need today is the clean energy revolution so we can finally declare our independence from fossil fuels.”
Temperature records were tied or broken in 22 locations on Thursday and 17 on Friday, according to CNN, with DC breaking a 120-year record on both days with temperatures above 102°F.
The heat forced the temporary closure Friday afternoon of the Great American State Fair on the National Mall, and seven attendees required “advanced life support,” probably due to heat exposure, according to CNN.
Matt Rein, the Democratic National Committee’s influencer and creative partnerships director, reported from the state fair on Saturday that local emergency workers said guests were “dropping like flies” due to the heat.
Meanwhile, one group who tried to draw attention to the climate emergency at a July 4 event was evicted for its efforts by the US Coast Guard, as the Times Union reported. The nonprofit Hudson River Sloop Clearwater had attempted to join Saturday’s Sail4th 250 parade of tall ships to New York Harbor when its sailboat was removed by the guard. The Coast Guard later said it was due to banners the boat was displaying reading, “Save the Clean Water Act” and “Indigenous rights, racial justice, climate solutions,” despite the fact that the group had the event organizer’s permission to participate.
A sailboat, the Hudson River Sloop Clearwater, was removed from the Sail4th 250 Parade of Ships for displaying banners about climate justice and clean water.
The heat dome that has settled over the Central and Eastern US over the July 4 weekend is so dangerous in part because it includes high humidity along with high heat, with heat indexes of 105-115°F expected in some places. This corresponds with a Wet Bulb Global Temperature (WBGT)—a measurement that accounts for heat, humidity, and air flow—of 28-30°C, at which point it is dangerous for even healthy people to be physically active outdoors. According to World Weather Attribution, the current heatwave broke regional records for WBGT.
“It is still a relatively rare event even in today’s climate, that has warmed by 1.4°C due to the burning of fossil fuels. In a 1.4°C cooler climate, WBGTs as high as those forecast in early July 2026 would have been so extreme as to be virtually impossible,” the group wrote on Friday.
Friederike Otto, a professor of climate science at Imperial College London, told CNN, “When a historic 4th of July celebration is disrupted, and World Cup matches are played in conditions that are unsafe for players and fans, it shouldn’t take another scientific study to wake people up.”
Otto continued, “Climate change is here, it’s already impacting the things we enjoy in our everyday lives, and it will continue to get worse the longer we drag out the inevitable transition to net zero emissions.”
Climate scientist and communicator Katharine Hayhoe encouraged people to use this opportunity to talk about the climate emergency to their friends and family:
Heatwaves aren’t new. But I’m a climate scientist, and I can tell you heatwaves like this are virtually impossible without fossil fuel pollution. Not only that, but when extreme weather hits, research shows that connecting it to climate change helps people understand why it matters. And you know who the most trusted people to do that are? Not scientists. You! Yes, people we know are the most effective messengers to have these conversations. So if you’re worried about what’s happening and how extreme heat puts us at risk—talk about it!
“Trump’s promotion of coal burning and cancellation of wind turbines make him the Benedict Arnold of America’s current struggle, not its George Washington.”
Just two days before the nation’s birthday, Energy Secretary and fracking CEO Chris Wright bragged on social media that the Trump administration would end subsidies for new wind and solar on July 4.
Climate scientist Rebekah Jones shot back: “During a record heatwave, no less. Fossil fuel industries have received $549 BILLION in direct subsidies, and $7 TRILLION in tax benefits. They average $30 billion per year in upfront taxpayer money. All of renewable energy recieved $400 million per year from 1994-2009.”
Tennessee state Sen. Heidi Campbell (D-20) also called out the move: “Talk about ‘slugs for salt’—it’s 119 degree heat index in the Eastern US this week—these guys are all in on the rapture.”
In a July 4 post, scholar Juan Cole argued that President Donald Trump’s climate policies were tantamount to treason.
“Since 2018, some 13,000 Americans have died from heat,” he said. “Trump’s promotion of coal burning and cancellation of wind turbines make him the Benedict Arnold of America’s current struggle, not its George Washington.”
Cole pointed out that the current heatwave was part of a pattern of hotter summers in the nation’s capital due to the climate emergency, noting that the last decade was its hottest on record.
He continued:
The bad news is that this is only the beginning. Summers in the capital are going to be more dangerous every decade unless we halt dangerous carbon emissions.
The average summer temperature in DC could be 97°F in the 2080s if we go on farting out CO2 at our current rate. Humidity will also increase, as the Atlantic heats up and puts more water vapor in the atmosphere. The ability of the atmosphere to hold water vapor increases 7% with every 1°C increase in temperature.
That combined with more frequent storms and sea-level rise opens up the possiblity that DC “will be unlivable in the summers within the lifetime of my younger readers,” he wrote.
“Trump is helping climate change accomplish what British military might could not, putting in question the future of America in places like Washington, DC and Baltimore, at least in the summers,” Cole said.
Our work is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Feel free to republish and share widely.
A commuter sits as members of the group Patriot Front ride the metro on the 250th anniversary of U.S. independence on the Fourth of July in Washington, D.C., U.S., July 4, 2026. REUTERS/Cheney Orr TPX IMAGES OF THE DAY (REUTERS)
U.S. President Donald Trump sits at his desk, behind a hat that reads “America is back” at the White House in Washington, D.C., on February 3, 2026. Evelyn Hockstein/Reuters
Eighteen states have turned their complete voter files over to the Trump Justice Department, including the driver’s license numbers and Social Security numbers of every registered voter in them. That count comes from Protect Democracy, which names all eighteen; Texas, Florida, and Ohio are among them. Together those eighteen states have 148 US House seats, 36 US Senate seats, and 184 electoral college votes, roughly two thirds of what it takes to control the House, the Senate, and the presidency. The question in the headline has an answer, and it is fewer than eighteen.
Since early 2025, the Trump administration has been trying to take control of voter rolls, mail ballots, and registration rules away from the states and hand it to the federal executive branch.
A March 2025 executive order demanded changes to state voting procedures and ordered federal election money withheld from states that refused. Courts blocked parts of it, and on June 24, 2026, a federal judge permanently barred key provisions. The Justice Department demanded voter registration data from all 50 states and the District of Columbia, including driver’s license numbers and Social Security numbers. The Department of Homeland Security rebuilt a database called SAVE so states could submit their voter rolls to it for citizenship checks.
A second executive order, issued March 31, 2026, ordered federal agencies to build lists of United States citizens and send them to the states before every election, ordered the Postal Service to create a list of approved mail voters, and told the Postal Service to refuse to deliver ballots from anyone not on that list.
DHS has also written new grant conditions, obtained by CNN and expected to go out to the states, that would make states change their election procedures and run their full voter rolls through SAVE to receive homeland security grants from a program worth more than one billion dollars this fiscal year. States that refuse would lose 20 percent of the money. As of this writing DHS has not formally announced the conditions. Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows said that cutting the funds of refusing states “endangers American lives and democracy itself.”
Most states said no. The Justice Department answered with 31 federal lawsuits against 30 states plus Washington DC to force the data handover, and so far no court, trial or appellate, has ruled in the department’s favor. On June 22, a federal judge ruled that the rebuilt SAVE system broke three federal laws: the Privacy Act, the Social Security Act, and the Administrative Procedure Act. That judge, Sparkle Sooknanan, wrote that the federal government had “knowingly trampled on the privacy rights of American citizens.” Two days later, the Sixth Circuit became the first appeals court to rule on the data lawsuits, upholding the dismissal of the case against Michigan. And on June 25, a federal judge in Boston blocked the core of the mail voting order for the November 2026 election in a lawsuit brought by 23 Democratic-led states and DC. The judge, Indira Talwani, wrote that “The Constitution does not grant the President any specific powers over elections.”
News stories about these rulings count the states that refused and the rulings the administration lost. Every one of those stories is accurate. They still measure the wrong thing, because a count of refusing states only means something if each state’s choice stays inside that state’s borders. It does not, for two reasons.
The first reason: once voter data leaves a state, the federal government keeps it, and every new state adds to the same federal database. That database works as soon as one state hands over its records, no matter how many others refuse.
Twelve of the eighteen had handed over complete files, driver’s license and Social Security numbers included, by early April; the other six complied partly or later. Texas alone accounts for a large share of the affected voters: it signed an agreement with DHS in March 2025 and ran its more than 18 million registered voters through SAVE. Separately, the DHS agency that handles citizenship began building a registry that combines its own records with data from the Social Security Administration and the State Department.
The Justice Department also asked states to sign a confidential agreement along with the data handover. Under its reported terms, a state that signs agrees to remove any voter the department flags as ineligible within 45 days. Two states signed: Alaska and Texas. Mississippi, South Dakota, and Tennessee handed over their rolls but refused to sign. A state that signs has given the federal executive branch ongoing control of its voter roll.
A court ruling issued after a transfer does not bring the data back. On May 12, 2026, the Office of Legal Counsel issued a written opinion saying federal law lets the Attorney General force states to produce their voter lists and share them with DHS. Losing individual court cases does not erase that opinion.
The second reason is geography. Control of the House and Senate will be decided in a small number of competitive districts and states, and several cooperating states hold those races, including Texas, Ohio, Florida, Iowa, and North Carolina. At least 25 states have run their rolls through SAVE since April 2025, 60 million registrations in a year, plus another 7.4 million from North Carolina, where Republicans control the state election board.
The court wins protect mostly the governments that sued. The June 25 injunction covers the 23 suing states and DC, and the administration told the courts this week that it is moving ahead with the system in the remaining states. Postmaster General David Steiner told the Senate on June 24 that under the proposed rule the Postal Service would refuse to deliver mail ballots in states that do not send their voter lists to the federal government. A voter in Houston or Columbus gets nothing from the injunction, because that voter’s state government joined the federal programs instead of fighting them. One ruling reaches further: in a separate case brought by the NAACP, U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan found the plan to deliver ballots only to preapproved voters broke a 2021 agreement with the Postal Service, and his ruling applies nationwide. That ruling protects ballot delivery. It does not touch the data collection, the purge agreements, or the state purge laws. So the court protection concentrates in states whose governments already refused to cooperate. In the cooperating states that hold the races deciding control of Congress, only the ballot delivery ruling applies.
The 60 million registration checks flagged about 24,000 possible noncitizens, and officials also flagged several hundred thousand registrations of people who may have died. Those totals only show how many people the government has flagged so far. It can flag as many as it chooses, and no one has to prove a flagged voter is ineligible before the registration is canceled; the voter has to prove they are eligible. That arrangement is a devastatingly powerful voter disenfranchisement tool.
In Texas, flagged voters got a letter, and if the county heard nothing within 30 days, the registration was canceled; some who did answer turned out to be citizens. A new Ohio law makes local election boards promptly cancel the registrations of people the secretary of state flags as noncitizens in checks he must run at least monthly. That secretary, Frank LaRose, defends the law on the ground that flagged voters can “immediately restore their registration status” by showing proof of citizenship.
The system also discourages people from registering at all, separate from the cancellations. A federal official confirmed that people flagged by SAVE are referred to DHS for possible criminal investigation, and the judge who reviewed the system wrote that a centralized federal database like this would discourage registration because citizens could fear misuse of their personal information. In races decided by hundreds or a few thousand votes, losing voters from only one side, and mostly from one party, can change the result even when the national numbers stay small.
The administration has also arranged its litigation so that losing in court still produces something useful. After losing the voter data cases in California, Michigan, and Oregon, the Justice Department filed emergency appeals warning that the security and sanctity of elections in those states would be questioned without quick rulings, and its filings say that without a final court decision there is “no other process to ensure a fair election in 2026.”
Stated plainly, months before the election, the department put into official court documents the claim that results in refusing states should be treated as doubtful. If a state cooperates, the government gets its data and a purge process. If a state refuses, the government gets a written reason to challenge that state’s results in November. Either way, the administration gains something it can use. David Becker, executive director of the Center for Election Innovation and Research and a former Justice Department voting section attorney, said of the department’s conduct, “There’s so much lawyering from the DOJ here that is raising ethical questions.”
The same approach is underway with the mail voting order. Within a week of the June 25 injunction, the administration appealed to the First Circuit, asked the district judge to lift her order by July 6, and warned in its filings that the injunction will make it impossible for the Postal Service to build the new ballot delivery system before November even if the administration wins the appeal. Those filings put in writing, ahead of time, a federal reason to call November mail ballots compromised.
Collecting the names of individual election workers and threatening officials with prosecution discourages people from doing that work whether or not charges are ever filed.
President Trump is also pressing Congress to pass the SAVE America Act, which would make people show citizenship papers to register, limit mail voting to reasons such as illness, disability, military deployment, and travel, and make states submit their voter rolls to DHS and remove anyone the system flags. In March he said of the bill, “It will guarantee the midterms.”
Between June 22 and June 29, federal courts ruled the SAVE overhaul unlawful, permanently barred parts of the 2025 executive order, upheld the dismissal of the Michigan data case on appeal, blocked the mail voting order for 23 states and DC, and upheld Mississippi’s ballot deadline law at the Supreme Court. Those rulings stop specific legal mechanisms.
They do not bring back data already handed over, automatically restore wrongly canceled registrations, reassure naturalized citizens who now connect registering with a federal investigation, protect election workers whose names have been demanded, erase the department’s written claims that elections in refusing states cannot be presumed fair, or stop the grant conditions waiting to go out.
So, how many states is enough? To steal an election, the infrastructure needs only three things: enough voter data, cooperation from states that hold the competitive races, and an official reason to dispute the results everywhere else. Texas alone supplied the first two: 18 million records handed over, a signature on the 45 day removal agreement, citizens with canceled registrations, and competitive House seats inside its borders. The Justice Department’s own court filings supplied the third. The answer is one, and it has already happened.
Want to do something about it? Well it’s our job at the Existentialist Republic to address exactly the issue this article outlines and then hand people tools to make change because when the federal government and a large fraction of states have abandoned fairness, freedom, and democracy, we need a plan.
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Free Speech Now Requires Trump’s Permission, From Your Facebook Page to AI Research
Just In: Environmental research posted to Facebook can carry the same felony exposure as a phoned-in bomb threat.
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Mimmo Rotella (1918-2006) pioneered décollage—creating art by tearing away layers of advertising posters from city walls. Instead of adding paint, he removed paper, exposing fragments hidden beneath.
“Once a government is committed to the principle of silencing the voice of opposition, it has only one way to go, and that is down the path of increasingly repressive measures, until it becomes a source of terror to all its citizens and creates a country where everyone lives in fear.” — President Harry S. Truman, message to Congress, August 8, 1950
Jennifer Combs spent a night in jail for a Facebook post and now presses a federal lawsuit against Trinidad, Texas. Combs ran a community page in the Henderson County town. Residents had posted on the police department’s own page about illness from the city’s brown tap water. Combs relayed their reports of bacteria hospitalizations and asked neighbors to document discolored water.
Police arrested her at home on May 8 under a felony statute written for bomb threats, carrying up to two years. The city issued a boil-water notice two weeks later, the state opened an investigation, and a grand jury refused to indict her. Her lawsuit calls the arrest political retaliation.
A small-town police chief jailed a woman for warning neighbors about their own water, and that confidence to target free speech did not form in a vacuum. Under Trump, the United States fell to 64th of 180 countries for press freedom, its lowest ranking ever; the index’s authors call his press hostility “a systematic policy”. Combs gathered information published, and asked for documentation, the working method of every investigative reporter. That exposure now covers every journalist, Substack writer, and citizen who posts what officials deny.
The exposure reaches me. I publish investigative journalism under this byline every day, and statutes like the one that jailed Combs exist across the states. Every fact below carries a numbered source because the sources are the difference between an article and an arrest. The same permission system now governs every channel: the newspaper, the broadcast, the comedian, and the AI on your phone.
Trump’s permission system reached the AI this week: Anthropic restored its two most advanced models on July 1 after accepting safeguards Commerce’s own testers approved on Claude Fable 5, and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick reserves the right to shut them down again. Commerce had ordered Anthropic on June 12 to block foreign nationals from the models within 90 minutes; Anthropic pulled both offline worldwide for eighteen days.
The blackout capped months of pressure: Trump ordered federal agencies off Anthropic products, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth branded the company a supply chain risk, and a federal judge blocked those measures as “Orwellian.” The judge chose the right adjective; Orwell defined liberty as the right to tell people what they do not want to hear, and Combs exercised that right about drinking water. The administration targeted CEO Dario Amodei over his safety advocacy and 2024 Harris endorsement, so co-founder Tom Brown negotiated and received Lutnick’s approval letter.
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A federal judge ruled the February 2025 Associated Press ban unlawful; the White House restricted access anyway. Paramount paid Trump $16 million and installed a CBS bias monitor to win merger approval. The Corporation for Public Broadcasting survived Nixon, Reagan, and both Bushes; Trump ended the 58-year institution in August 2025.
In January 2026, Carr’s FCC revoked the decades-old talk show exemption; by February, CBS lawyers pulled a Senate candidate’s interview from Colbert’s broadcast and barred any on-air mention of the removal. The suppressed interview drew 8 million YouTube views. In April, the FCC ordered ABC stations to file license renewals years early over a comedian’s jokes.
Every action used one instrument, business consequences until editorial submission, and Combs faced the cruder version, handcuffs until silence. This week the government took approval power over the newest channel in American life.
Only one country ran that system first: China’s Cyberspace Administration approves every generative AI model before public release and requires each model to uphold “Core Socialist Values.” The United States stood as the counterexample until Trump erased the distinction in eighteen days.
Who decides what you may read, watch, and ask? Donald Trump decides. In Trinidad, Texas, the answer reached one woman’s front door.
Combs faced up to two years for warning that her town’s water was contaminated, and the city’s boil-water notice confirmed the danger. Every American who posts about a public hazard shares her exposure; the notice below states the rights that protect you.
Protected-Speech Notice, copy onto your own posts and emails:
I publish this statement as political speech criticizing a government official’s public conduct, protected at the core of the First Amendment. This publication conveys criticism, opinion, and rhetorical hyperbole alone and neither threatens nor encourages unlawful conduct. Watts v. United States distinguishes protected political hyperbole from a true threat, while Counterman v. Colorado requires proof that a speaker consciously disregarded a substantial risk that the statement would be understood as threatening. No such intent or conscious disregard exists. I invoke my rights under the First, Fourth, and Fifth Amendments.
The work continues.
Wendy
A serous word on risk. The Trump administration has moved speech restriction from the edges of journalism to its center, and independent journalists stand in the path. What officials cannot capture is a readership. Paid subscribers reach my inbox by email or DM and keep independent journalism standing, at 16¢ per day with the annual coupon; if you can join, you have my sincere gratitude. Glass Empires also needs founding members at a dollar a day to expand this work.
FOX 4 Dallas-Fort Worth, “Woman files lawsuit after arrest for Facebook post concerning Trinidad water supply issues,” May 21, 2026. https://www.fox4news.com/news/woman-arrested-facebook-post-concerning-trinidad-water-poisoning
CBS News, “Anthropic says Trump administration lifted restrictions on some of its most powerful Claude AI models,” July 2026. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/anthropic-trump-administration-lifted-claude-restrictions/
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When public needs were great, he wrote, its claim on the ‘superfluous’ property of the rich was strong and just.When we consider which of the nation’s Founding Fathers still provides wise counsel to us today, 250 years after they wrote and signed the Declaration of Independence, may I submit for your consideration one Benjamin Franklin, who argued that wealth taxes were both proper and necessary. Indeed, Franklin’s ideas about private property suggest he’d be writing and speaking in favor of the one-time wealth tax on California’s billionaires were he with us today. In December of 1783, shortly after he’d negotiated and signed the peace treaty with Britain in which Britain relinquished its claim to the 13 united states, Franklin wrote a letter to his fellow Founding Father Robert Morris in which he assessed the rival claims of taxpayers to their property and the government’s power to tax or even expropriate it:
All Property, indeed, except the Savage’s temporary Cabin, his Bow, his Matchcoat, and other little Acquisitions, absolutely necessary for his Subsistence, seems to me to be the Creature of public Convention. Hence the Public has the Right of Regulating Descents, and all other Conveyances of Property, and even of limiting the Quantity and the Uses of it. All the Property that is necessary to a Man, for the Conservation of the Individual and the Propagation of the Species, is his natural Right, which none can justly deprive him of: But all Property superfluous to such purposes is the Property of the Publick, who, by their Laws, have created it, and who may therefore by other Laws dispose of it, whenever the Welfare of the Publick shall demand such Disposition. He that does not like civil Society on these Terms, let him retire and live among Savages. He can have no right to the benefits of Society, who will not pay his Club towards the Support of it.
With multiple California hospitals reducing services and laying off staff due to the cuts in President Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill, the “Welfare of the Publick” certainly appears to require a tax on “Property superfluous to such purposes” as “the Conservation of the Individual and the Propagation of the Species.” Whether the flight of billionaire Sergey Brin, the leading funder of the anti–wealth tax campaign, from California to Nevada constitutes “retir[ing] and liv[ing] among savages” I leave to keener minds than mine.
Franklin’s argument (which, please note, specifically favors inheritance taxes as well as wealth taxes) is of a piece with his broader radicalism: supporting the abolition of slavery; writing Pennsylvania’s 1776 state constitution, which, at a time when other states required substantial property ownership in order to have the right to vote, extended the franchise to all taxpaying men and their adult male children (whether those children were taxpayers or not). That constitution also established a unicameral legislature with one-year terms, and in lieu of creating the post of governor, established a 12-person executive council answerable to the legislature.
So as our 250th rolls around at a time when the rule of the rich threatens not only democracy but our egalitarian premises and promises, here’s to Benjamin Franklin, foe of oligarchy and champion of popular sovereignty.
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Harold Meyerson
