“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 Revolving Door Project, a Prospect partner, scrutinizes the executive branch and presidential power. Follow them at therevolvingdoorproject.org.
According to Zack Rosen, founder of California YIMBY and the Abundance Network, the problem with politics is Americans being too involved. Bemoaning the rise of small-dollar political donations in fundraising documents leaked to the Prospect, Rosen is blunt: “Small dollar internet fundraising makes politics dumber.” Rosen misses what he considers to be a bygone era of elite dominance. Lamenting the current state of democratized influence, Rosen says “the old gatekeepers were political professionals who could count cards; small dollar donors today are amateurs yanking the handles of ActBlue slot machines.”
This sentiment is laid out in substantial detail, filling 31 pages across two separate documents obtained by the Prospect. In an email exchange, Rosen confirmed the documents’ legitimacy.
Rosen and his allies have no need for small-dollar donations or mass-membership politics: They come to do political battle with $260 million annually (yes, each year!) from billionaire benefactors, one document asserts. This “Abundance Capital Stack” is being deployed to organize in all 50 states and consists of a $120 million annual commitment from ex-hedge fund manager and current Meta board member John Arnold, $40 million from Facebook/Meta co-founder Dustin Moskovitz, and $100 million from Steve Ballmer, the L.A. Clippers owner and former Microsoft executive. Ballmer, who is currently embroiled in a scandal surrounding alleged off-book pay for NBA star Kawhi Leonard, was not previously known as a funder of the abundance movement.
Rosen told me that “the committed capital number was an estimate, and doesn’t reflect active funding today,” and that the total amount of actual grants “is probably closer to $40M.” In particular, he said that Arnold’s financial commitment to abundance organizing was incorrect. Rosen did not respond to questions about whether Ballmer and Moskovitz’s funding figures were incorrect as well, or what a more accurate number for Arnold would be. There was no explanation offered for the discrepancy between the estimate in the fundraising pitch and his smaller estimate, although the memo discusses capital commitments, whereas Rosen’s lower figure is specifically active grants.
It is worth noting that there are two publicly announced $120 million abundance grant funds, the Abundance and Growth Fund from Coefficient Giving (née Open Philanthropy) and Jennifer Pahlka’s Recoding America Fund. The former is operating over the course of three years, the latter six. Those alone would equal $64 million a year.
In addition, the network has received significant donations from Michael Bloomberg, the billionaire former Republican mayor of New York City, and Chris Larsen, co-founder of cryptocurrency firm Ripple. Larsen has been a major donor to Democrats in the past, but his company donated nearly $5 million to Donald Trump’s inauguration and received significant regulatory relief from the Trump-controlled SEC just months later. Ripple has also donated millions to Trump’s ballroom project and has benefited from the president promising to include the company’s XRP coin in his promised “crypto reserve.”
The first document, a funding pitch for abundance organizing in California for prospective high-net-worth donors, was obtained by Bay Area political watchdog The Phoenix Project and provided to the Prospect. The second document, obtained from a link embedded in the first, is Rosen and his co-founder Misha Chellam’s attempt to lay out the Abundance Network’s view of modern American political history. The memos are undated, but The Phoenix Project obtained one of them in February and Rosen told me they were both from 2025. Both are available to read below, although Mr. Rosen’s phone number and email address have been redacted for his privacy.
Abundance adherents often bristle at the suggestion that the project is orchestrated by Silicon Valley elites. But as the leaked documents demonstrate, Rosen and his colleagues clearly view it as such, and even frequently use the word “elite” by choice.
In a statement, Phoenix Project executive director Jeremy Mack said that the fundraising document demonstrates that “Abundance to-date is being backed by hundreds of millions of dollars from Silicon Valley’s wealthiest tech elites, and they are investing heavily into a movement that will support their interests.”
ROSEN OPERATES AT THE NEXUS of tech titans’ “hostile takeover” of San Francisco politics through a “grey money” network, documented in reporting from The Guardian and Mission Local. The Phoenix Project has dubbed this overlapping set of organizations and campaigns the “Astroturf Network” and detailed its operations in a set of reports and a pair of influencemaps.
According to the fundraising document, Abundance Network itself (as opposed to the broader abundance movement of which it is a small but influential part) is receiving several million annually from tech donors. The organization has an annual budget of $8 million, split roughly evenly between the core network and five local chapters located in San Francisco, Santa Monica, Oakland, Seattle, and Burlington, Vermont. The organization also spends an additional $5 million per campaign cycle. As of the memo’s writing, it had 120 “donor members” who are asked to contribute between $500 and $5,000 annually through membership dues.
While there is little detail on where the remaining Abundance Network funding comes from, the description of the organization’s sister outfit, CA YIMBY, offers one possibility: Silicon Valley titans. CA YIMBY’s funding largely originates from “tech founders: Mark Zuckerberg, Dustin Moskowitz, Patrick Collison, Ken Duda are 80%+ of the funding,” the document states.
Rosen and his allies have no need for small-dollar donations: They come to do political battle with $260 million annually from billionaire benefactors.
Public information tells a similar story with Abundance Network, which has received funding from Chris Larsen, who tops the list of donors to its campaign arm, Families for a Vibrant San Francisco, as well as former Twitch.tv executive Emmett Shear, former Ripple CTO and tech founder Jed McCaleb, and the two co-founders of the messaging software firm Twilio, Jeff Lawson and John Wolthuis. Originally called Abundant SF, the organization was launched by “a network of tech families,” according to The San Francisco Standard.
All this money, unsurprisingly, has generated some success. The documents credit abundance organizations with having “Flipped San Francisco Democratic Party, Flipped San Francisco Board of Supervisors … [and] Flipped Santa Monica City Council.” The ousting of former district attorney Chesa Boudin in 2022 is celebrated in Rosen’s pitch as “a major accomplishment.”
However, many of its preferred ballot propositions have been defeated, and efforts to oust supervisor Connie Chan failed. Chan will likely be in the network’s crosshairs again as she faces off with abundance darling state Sen. Scott Wiener for Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi’s seat in the House of Representatives this fall. Rosen explicitly notes, “We built our San Francisco operation with Scott Weiner’s policy and political team,” referring to him on a first-name basis throughout the document. Five of the six key staff listed are Wiener-world alumni.
The document also highlights that two of the staff have close ties to former mayor London Breed, who recently came under FBI scrutiny after two former staffers, including her onetime chief of staff, alleged that she appointed an ally of Michael Bloomberg to a position on the city’s Board of Supervisors in the hopes of obtaining a well-compensated job at the billionaire’s philanthropy after leaving office. Bloomberg had been a major donor to Breed’s re-election efforts, and is one of the largest funders of the Abundance Network.
The fundraising pitch appears intent on impugning progressives, arguing that voters have been presented a choice between “(A) MAGA states that are delivering progressive outcomes or (B) Blue states that are claiming progressive values but probably increasing inequality and poverty.” The facts sometimes get in the way of this claim.
Rosen notes that California has the highest poverty rate, based on the U.S. Census Bureau’s state-by-state supplemental poverty measure. But the claim that MAGA states are delivering better outcomes is undercut if you look at the next three highest states on that measure: Louisiana, Mississippi, and Florida. The two lowest supplemental poverty rates were in Maine and Minnesota, both of which had been under Democratic trifectas until 2025.
Rosen also claims that Mississippi “went from worst-in the nation education performance to best-in the nation,” which is not remotely true. While the media has become infatuated with the so-called Mississippi miracle, Rosen heavily overstates the state’s turnaround. According to Rosen’s own source, the state improved from 49th to 21st in fourth-grade reading, a worthwhile accomplishment, but substantially different from the claim being made.
Rosen also claims that “Blue States collectively are increasingly failing at governing our public education systems,” seemingly based on an article from the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal, which does not even assert that education systems in Democratic states are actually worse, only that red states are improving faster. U.S. News’s state education ranking puts New Jersey atop the list, with three of the top five states in K-12 education being governed by Democratic trifectas. World Population Review’s data is even better for blue states, with eight out of the top ten spots going to states with Democratic trifectas. The other two are Virginia and Pennsylvania, which have been under divided government.
“ONE WAY TO THINK ABOUT ABUNDANCE NETWORK,” Rosen writes, “is [as] the liberal answer to the tech elite joining the MAGA faction.” Himself a tech founder of software company Pantheon, Rosen writes about how the movement’s goal is to empower tech founders to usher in “an era of true abundance” defined by “the innovation born in Silicon Valley demonstrably improv[ing] the lives of every American.” The message is undoubtedly appealing to tech billionaires with a savior complex, who are upset that the public has grown increasingly skeptical of their promises.
Rosen, who sees the movement’s aims as to “retool the American system of government for the modern era,” extols a decidedly anti-democratic style of governance. He breaks political spending into three categories: “gambling,” meaning donations to individual candidates; “card counting,” meaning turning funding over to experts; and “the house,” meaning creating a political edge and sustaining it over time. Rosen gives the example of overturning Roe v. Wade, which although massively unpopular was able to be accomplished by creating and maintaining a political advantage in the courts. Abundance, as Rosen explains it, wants to be “the house,” because “the big stuff has to be done this way.”
To that end, the Abundance Network is set to build a political infrastructure that can secure a toehold in government and pacify those who might rebel. Ultimately, it is the Great Man Theory of history applied to politics, with an important proviso: Great men must be protected to allow them to orchestrate social progress.
In response to a question about whether he viewed abundance organizing as a counterweight to grassroots fundraising, Rosen said: “Having worked on the Howard Dean campaign, I saw that trying to raise large amounts of campaign money online, in small increments, required a simplification of political messaging that not only flattened complex issues, but turned the internet into a tool for intense and even dangerous political polarization. It was an unintended consequence of trying to counteract ‘big money’ in politics. These incentives helped turn the political internet into a cesspool, and I think it’s important to try to find ways to address it.”
Rosen, who sees the movement’s aims as to “retool the American system of government for the modern era,” extols a decidedly anti-democratic style of governance.
This framing is reinforced in the supporting document, in which Rosen and his co-founder Misha Chellam outline their read of political history. “Maszlow’s monsters,” they write, “are now here: Urban conflagrations, floods, deteriorating norms, and the rebellion against elites” (emphasis added). Popular revolt against oligarchs being considered a problem comparable to cities on fire speaks volumes about the group’s priorities. In Rosen and Chellam’s view, the crucial problem in left-of-center politics is that business elites are not active enough, resulting in “elite abdication.”
The pair’s analysis “came out of a joint 5+ year, 100-book quest for a ‘root disease’ diagnosis for what is crippling left politics and rotting our American democracy.” They spent half a decade, alongside “a community of intellectuals like Ezra Klein, Jerusalem Desmas, Jen Pahlka, Steve Teles, Derek Thompson” working on “piecing that analysis together via an emerging political ideology called Abundance” (emphasis in original). The goal now is “operationalizing it into a powerful political faction that drives public outcomes at scale.”
Rosen declined to answer whether those thought leaders were notified they were being referenced in supplemental fundraising materials or whether they had actively worked on fundraising for Abundance Network, saying, “We have been programming with them and other high-profile supporters of the Abundance Movement since the beginning, including book events, conferences, and other gatherings and events. This is fairly typical of how non-profits operate and build their organizations.”
Demsas and Thompson did not respond to questions about whether they were aware their names were used in supplementary fundraising materials. (Pahlka, a board member of the Abundance Network, was not asked.) Teles said that he was not involved with the document or fundraising though was “honored” to have his name used, despite being unaware of it. He added that he was “thrilled to see the growth of AN over time and Misha Chellam and I have been helping each other think through our various projects in this space for some time, and I think he and Zack are amazing and are doing great work.”
In response to questions about the nature of Klein’s relationship with the Abundance Network, a spokesperson for The New York Times, where he works as an opinion journalist, stressed that he has “no official or paid relationship with the Abundance Network or any similar group.” Klein has spoken at Abundance Network events without compensation, the spokesperson said. They declined to respond to questions about the Times’ policy for opinion journalists engaging in political work and whether they or Klein were aware of his name being used in materials distributed along with a fundraising pitch.
Klein’s involvement as an abundance-flavored power broker in Democratic politics has previously “raised internal concerns at the Times,” according to reporting from Axios.
DESPITE BLAMING THE LEFT AND RIGHT for their “hobbling” of government, the pair seem more forgiving of the right. Unlike in the book Abundance, which does not discuss corporate power (something co-author Ezra Klein has stated retrospectively should have been included), Chellam and Rosen do invoke it, insisting that corporate power has not been exercised robustly enough in our political and civic institutions. “For the right, and corporate power, [the attack on Government] was a dereliction,” as business leaders withdrew from civic leadership. “Elite responsibility,” the document adds later, “is a key element of abundance. Those who modernized our economic institutions for the 21st century must be key contributors to modernizing our public institutions.”
The historical analysis is centered on the claim that industrialists were in fact truly responsible for progressive victories of the mid-20th century. “The progressive movement scaled power only when industrialists brought their financial and social capital to bear on the institutional problems blocking progress.” It cites the Progressive Era as a model, but makes no mention of the labor movement. It lauds Nathan Straus, the founder of Macy’s, for improving food safety by pushing through laws requiring milk pasteurization, but there is no mention of the more expansive Pure Food and Drug Act or the muckraking journalism (like The Jungle by Upton Sinclair) that created a popular political base for reform. It contains no mention of monopolies except a single passing reference to “trustbusters” as one element of the progressive movement.
In short, their view of the Progressive Era, which was in large part a reaction against the concentrated power of wealthy industrialists, cuts out most of the progressive parts and nearly all of the work done by ordinary people organizing grassroots movements.
Given the document’s purpose—soliciting donations from Silicon Valley’s modern robber barons who deeply feared and resented Joe Biden’s trust-busting—these conspicuous absences may have been an attempt to soothe the egos of prospective donors. It may have also been excluded to reconcile this history with the ideological assumptions that elites are a fundamentally positive force in society. Because if that supposition were untrue, well, why would we all get out of their way?
At a time when resistance to AI data centers and economic populism are powering politics, Abundance Network is telling its donors that they can rebuild the Democratic Party in a more billionaire-positive vision. Despite calling the movement “democratic” and repeatedly talking about the need for “bottom-up” organizing, what Rosen and company clearly want is a political infrastructure that reorients politics away from anger at economic elites. Despite reassurances otherwise, abundance certainly appears to be an attempt to steer Democrats away from class war and toward renewing the party’s vows in its increasingly unhappymarriage between the party and the tech sector.
Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) attends a Senate hearing on May 14, 2026.
(Bill Clark/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images)
“While Susan Collins’ campaign is backed by billionaire donors, our campaign is built on a movement funded by the people, with an average donation of $26,” said Graham Platner’s campaign manager.
A new analysis of campaign finance data shows that nearly 100 billionaires and their spouses have contributed to Republican Sen. Susan Collins’ reelection bid so far, funneling nearly $10 million to the incumbent’s campaign committee and PACs supporting her effort to fend off progressive challenger Graham Platner.
The Maine Monitor on Thursday published a list of billionaires who have donated to Collins and Platner, who has called his Republican opponent a “corrupt” protector and beneficiary of an oligarchic political system. The outlet noted that Collins’ billionaire donation total “stands in stark contrast with the fundraising of her opponent… whose campaign has mostly attracted smaller amounts of funds but from many more people.”
The $9.8 million that Collins’ fundraising network received from billionaires and their spouses between January 2025 and late May 2026 represents “a third of what groups supporting Collins raised from all donors,” according to The Maine Monitor’s analysis.
Platner’s reelection bid has received donations from billionaires George Soros, Pat Stryker, Jon Stryker, Christy Walton, and Jennifer Pritzker. Those contributions represent “a fraction of 1% of his total haul,” The Maine Monitor noted. The Democratic candidate’s campaign said Thursday that “grassroots donors chipping in $200 or less have given Graham Platner $9.6 million.”
“While Susan Collins’ campaign is backed by billionaire donors, our campaign is built on a movement funded by the people, with an average donation of $26,” Ben Chin, Platner’s campaign manager, said in a statement. “The establishment can bring it on—they cannot defeat the will of working Mainers, 15,000+ volunteers, and a campaign powered by small-dollar donors from nearly every zip code in Maine.”
Collins’ largest billionaire donor to date came from Ken Griffin, a hedge fund manager who pumped $2.5 million into Pine Tree Results, a Super PAC supporting the five-term Republican incumbent. Collins’ network has also received at least $1 million from Blackstone CEO Stephen Schwarzman, New Balance chair James Davis, and hedge fund manager Paul Singer.
The Maine Monitor observed that “the majority of the billionaire donations to Collins this cycle are from billionaires who made their money in alternative investments, including hedge funds and private equity.”
In 2017, Collins voted for legislation that delivered massive tax breaks to large corporations and American billionaires, whose collective wealth surged to $8.1 trillion last year. ProPublica reported that private equity became Collins’ “most reliable source of donations” after she withdrew an amendment to the 2017 legislation that would have targeted one of the industry’s beloved tax breaks.
On top of billionaire funding, Collins’ campaign has benefited from massive ad spending by dark-money groups such as One Nation. The group, which is aligned with Sen. Mitch McConnell, has spent more than $19 million on advertising for Collins so far.
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The government of Greenland sure has a big portfolio of state-owned companies. It owns the fishing company Royal Greenland, which is also the country’s largest single employer; the shipping company Royal Arctic Line; the housing company INI; the ferry company Arctic Umiaq Line; the logistics and retail company KNI; the national airline Air Greenland; the telecom company Tusass; the clothing company Great Greenland; the construction and renewable-energy company NunaGreen; the investment company Nalik Ventures; the real estate company Illuut; the utility company Nukissiorfiit; and the tourism company Visit Greenland.
It is hard to get precise statistics on these companies, as the government counts them as part of the relevant industrial sectors rather than the government itself. But according to a recent report, in 2023 they collectively employed 5,117 people, close to 10 percent of the total population. That year, they were responsible for 2.6 billion kroner in wages and profits (or about $410 million), which gives a rough sense of their contribution to GDP—11 percent in 2023. In 2022, that figure was 13 percent; the decline is thanks to post-pandemic inflation and some big investment spending turning their combined net profits negative. Add the 11,633 Greenland residents who worked for the government directly in 2023, and the 9.6 billion kroner directly spent by the government, and about 66 percent of employed Greenlanders work for the state or its companies, and the public sector writ large is responsible for something like 57 percent of GDP (or 59 percent in 2022).
Why would the government be so heavily involved in industry and commerce? Isn’t that the dread socialism? I traveled to Greenland to answer this question. Watch the video below to find out!
Ryan Cooper is a senior editor at The American Prospect, and author of How Are You Going to Pay for That?: Smart Answers to the Dumbest Question in Politics. He was previously a national correspondent for The Week. His work has also appeared in The Nation, The New Republic, and Current Affairs. More by Ryan Cooper
An Ordinary Insanity Film Jun 4, 2026 In this 29-minute documentary, renowned whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg provides a powerful wakeup call about the global threat posed by nuclear weapons and advocates how we can dramatically reduce the real and present danger of nuclear annihilation. Before he released the top secret Pentagon Papers during the Vietnam War, Ellsberg was a nuclear war planner with access to classified information on U.S. nuclear strategy. Filmed one year before his death at age 92, Ellsberg speaks with clarity and urgency about the dangers we face, noting, ”I’ve long said that to my last breath I will be doing what I can to postpone and avert the risk of nuclear war.” With ongoing conflicts heightening global nuclear tensions and with the recent end of the New START treaty potentially triggering a renewed arms race, AN ORDINARY INSANITY is a timely film to help mobilize broad public concern and action for arms control and nuclear disarmament. PLEASE SHARE ONLINE & SCREEN AT PUBLIC EVENTS. Visit the film website for more information – https://www.anordinaryinsanity.com
President Donald Trump shakes hands with Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (R-La.) during a reception for Republican lawmakers in the White House on July 22, 2025 in Washington, DC.
(Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
“The money that Trump wants to burn on war should instead be spent on the needs of the American people, including restoring funding for healthcare, food, housing, and climate action,” said one critic.
Republicans in both houses of Congress voted Thursday to advance President Donald Trump’s request for record-high US military funding for 2027, prompting rebuke from Democrats and consumer advocates who decried the GOP’s deep cuts to social safety net programs amid an ongoing affordability crisis.
The Senate Armed Services Committee voted 18-9 to advance the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) for fiscal year 2027. Meanwhile, the House Appropriations Defense Subcommittee advanced the Fiscal Year 2027 Defense Appropriations Bill during a closed-door markup. The House bill provides $1.072 trillion for the Pentagon and other military-related activities, a $234 billion increase from this year’s enacted level.
The Trump administration’s broader national security proposal requests nearly $1.5 trillion in total defense-related spending for 2027, which includes $350 billion in supplemental funding for munitions production, shipbuilding, missile defense, drones, artificial intelligence, and other long-term military programs. Trump wants Congress to use the budget reconciliation process to secure the additional funding. However, GOP lawmakers are wary to do so for a third time; just this week, Republicans used reconciliation to pass $70 billion in new funding for US Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection.
“This year, the majority has written a Defense Appropriations Act that provides the department with over a trillion dollars—an unprecedented sum. But this level of defense spending comes at the cost of cuts to domestic investments like education and workforce training, as well as international diplomacy,” Defense Appropriations Subcommittee Ranking Member Betty McCollum (D-Minn.) said in a statement.
“President Trump said, ‘Jump,’ and Republicans in Congress said, ‘How high?’ Meanwhile, Republicans are proposing nearly $13 billion in cuts to domestic programs that provide relief for working families struggling to stay afloat as costs keep rising,” the congresswoman added. “The American people are begging for relief from high prices, but the Trump administration and Republicans in Congress are deaf to their pleas.”
In addition to increasing the national debt by an estimated $6.9 trillion over the next decade, Trump is seeking over $70 billion in proposed domestic cuts, including the elimination of the Low-Income Home Energy Assistance Program, sharp cuts in student aid, ending the Job Corps, slashing medical research and public health programs and Federal Emergency Management Agency assistance, reducing mental health and substance abuse programs, and halving Environmental Protection Agency funding.
These and other proposed reductions follow the enactment of the biggest cuts to Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program in the programs’ histories under the so-called One Big Beautiful Bill Act signed by Trump last July. The OBBBA cuts were made to help fund trillions of dollars in tax reductions that disproportionately benefit the wealthiest Americans.
Robert Weisman, co-president of the consumer advocacy watchdog Public Citizen, noted significant opposition to Trump’s proposed $234 billion increase in Pentagon spending for 2027.
“There is a rising tide of Democratic and Republican opposition to Trump’s illegal Iran war and massive proposed increases to the Pentagon budget,” Weissman said Thursday, pointing to the “dozens” of lawmakers who voted against the additional spending during committee sessions, and the “bipartisan majority of the House” that “voted in support of the war powers resolution that directs Trump to end his war on Iran.”
“Trump has repeatedly stated that he doesn’t care about childcare, inflation, or addressing the needs of the American people,” Weissman continued. “Instead, he is seeking an overall $600 billion annual increase in Pentagon spending that would raise the total Pentagon budget to over $1.5 trillion.”
“The American people are demanding Congress block Trump’s attempts to increase the Pentagon budget,” he said. “This means voting against his National Defense Authorization Act, rejecting any Iran war supplemental funding bill, and blocking his proposed third reconciliation bill.”
“The money that Trump wants to burn on war should instead be spent on the needs of the American people, including restoring funding for healthcare, food, housing, and climate action,” Weissman added.
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US President Donald Trump speaks during a roundtable to “save college sports” in the East Room of the White House in Washington, DC, on March 6, 2026.
(Photo by Brendan Smialowski / AFP via Getty Images)
The fundraiser comes as a recent study from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York showed food insecurity in the US has reached its highest levels since the Covid-19 pandemic.
A super political action committee created to support Donald Trump is preparing to hold a big-money fundraiser at the president’s Virginia golf course that will charge attendees $1 million each.
As reported by NBC News, MAGA, Inc. will host the $1 million-per-plate event at the Trump National Golf Club Washington DC on the day before the president is set to host Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) events at the White House as part of his 80th birthday celebration.
“The fundraiser is at least the sixth such $1 million-per-person event held by Trump-aligned groups for the midterm elections,” reported NBC News. “Republicans at nearly all levels hold a significant midterm cash advantage over Democrats, who expect to be outpaced financially in many key House and Senate races.”
Lisa Gilbert, co-president of Public Citizen, linked the ritzy fundraiser to Trump’s economic policies that have primarily benefited the wealthiest Americans at the expense of the working class.
“The comingling of 250th anniversary events, Trump’s UFC fight, and a $1 million per-plate fundraiser on Trump’s own birthday,” Gilbert said, “gives corporate interests and wealthy donors not just an ultimate fight—but the ultimate opportunity to pay tribute to the president. Rather than celebrate our nation’s anniversary in the bipartisan manner directed by Congress, the Trump administration has directed public money and public property to politicized events.”
“Major corporations, such as Chevron, Exxon, MasterCard, and many more,” Gilbert added, “should be ashamed to be associated with this corrupt spectacle.”
The fundraiser comes as a recent study from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York showed food insecurity in the US has reached its highest levels since the Covid-19pandemic.
The New York Fed researchers said their study found “a remarkable increase in food insecurity, particularly among lower-educated and lower-income households and households with young children,” as well as “a contemporaneous increase in pessimism among the same groups, along with a sharp decline in job-finding expectations.”
The researchers noted that “while many households are doing fine and economic activity overall has been expanding at a solid pace,” there are large numbers of people “facing high levels of economic insecurity and financial strain,” which has resulted in plunging overall consumer sentiment.
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A poster attacking Elon Musk’s wealth in a world of large-scale hunger is displayed on a bus shelter on June 11, 2026 in Tottenham, England.
(Photo by Leon Neal/Getty Images)
“The level of wealth that Mr. Musk has reached requires human exploitation, wage theft, wage suppression, anti-competitive markets, monopolistic control, price collusion, inadequate tax systems, and corruption.”
Elon Musk’s net worth surged past $1 trillion on Friday as SpaceX—the rocket company he founded and controls—made its debut on the public market, prompting global revulsion and calls for an aggressive wealth tax to rein in out-of-control inequality.
“Musk became the world’s first trillionaire because our tax system shields the wealth of the ultra-wealthy from taxation while requiring working to people pay taxes on every paycheck,” said Igor Volsky, director of the Tax the Greedy Billionaires Campaign. “Today’s milestone should serve as a wake-up call to us all.”
“Unless we plan to cede control and agency over our future to a handful of ultra-wealthy individuals, lawmakers must pursue bold tax policies that actually meet this moment—not just slowing the accumulation of extreme wealth, but reversing it,” Volsky added. “That means passing taxes on billionaire wealth ambitious enough to make the ultra-wealthy less wealthy, reduce the stranglehold they have over our economy and democracy, and restore the ideal that no one in America gets to buy their way to unchecked power.”
Reuters reported Friday that “most of Musk’s wealth now rests with SpaceX, where he holds a stake worth roughly $866 billion.”
“Along with Tesla and the rest of his properties, his net worth will exceed $1.1 trillion when the stock begins trading Friday,” Reuters noted. “The tally includes stock components that would vest over time.”
While Musk’s on-paper fortune could drop below the trillion-dollar mark if SpaceX’s stock price drops below $135 per share—which is highly possible, as experts argue the company’s valuation is absurd—campaigners said Friday that the milestone is an appalling product of a society that has allowed the mega-rich to dictate policy, funneling immense wealth to the very top while millions worldwide face hunger, violent displacement, and preventable disease. Oxfam has estimated that just a 10% tax on Musk’s fortune could lift 800 million people above the extreme poverty line.
“Eighty-six of Americans are worried about the price of food. Elon Musk is a trillionaire. These two things are deeply, inherently connected,” said Erica Payne, founder and president of the advocacy group Patriotic Millionaires. “The level of wealth that Mr. Musk has reached requires human exploitation, wage theft, wage suppression, anti-competitive markets, monopolistic control, price collusion, inadequate tax systems, and corruption. Mostly inadequate tax systems and corruption.”
Musk’s companies, including SpaceX, have relied heavily on and benefited massively from government contracts, subsidies, and research, while paying minimal taxes.
The New York Timesreported last year that SpaceX “has most likely paid little to no federal income taxes since its founding in 2002 and has privately told investors that it may never have to pay any, according to internal company documents.” As for Tesla, the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy found earlier this year that the company “avoided almost all federal income tax on over $12 billion of US income over the past three years.”
Musk, whose immense wealth is largely stock appreciation that is not taxed in the US unless shares are sold, paid nothing in federal income taxes in 2018, according to ProPublica. “Between 2014 and 2018, he had a true tax rate of 3.27%,” the investigative outlet noted.
Writer Elizabeth Spiers argued Friday that “trillionaires shouldn’t exist,” noting in a column for The Nation that “as Musk’s wealth multiplies, he continues to prosper on the public dime.”
“Musk’s cosmic-scale wealth-hoarding is particularly abhorrent when you place it against the backdrop of how much damage he’s done,” wrote Spiers. “It’s hard to quantify the scale of destruction and deprivation that he will never personally be held accountable for. How do you value the lives of the hundreds of thousands of people who have died since Musk, in his words, gleefully ‘fed [USAID] into the woodchipper’? How do you value the lives of people who will die because DOGEcut major biomedical research funding?”
“Musk has enriched himself via a rigged investment economy ensuring that those with the most contribute the least—or in many cases, nothing at all,” Spiers added.
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Identifying vehicles ICE may be using to snatch students or their parents off the streets isn’t in the normal job description of the superintendent of a school district. However, as Brenda Lewis found out, these are not normal times.
This is the second article in a four-part series investigating the impact of Operation Metro Surge on Minnesota schools and students. You can find the first here and the next installment tomorrow.
Superintendent Brenda Lewis of Fridley Public Schools near Minneapolis never expected to find herself a leader in the resistance against ICE. But after Renee Good, a local mom, was killed by an immigration enforcement agent in January, and one of Lewis’s teachers was pulled over and held at gunpoint just hours later, the superintendent was spurred into action.
That teacher, who is an American citizen, was first tailgated and later followed for several miles. When Lewis found out what happened, something shifted in her mind.
“I was trying to understand the motivation around it, but then you are also in this mode of ‘Hey, we have to keep our children, our students, our family safe, our staff safe,’” she told WhoWhatWhy.
One of the reasons she felt the need to do something is that Fridley, an inner-ring suburb of Minneapolis, has a large population of Somali immigrants — one of the groups the Trump administration vowed to especially target as part of its “Operation Metro Surge.” This resulted in many students missing classes, which culminated in more than a third of students being absent from their classrooms in the week after Good’s deadly shooting.
Starting in mid-January, Lewis gave Fridley students the option to participate in their classes remotely for the winter quarter. More than 400 out of 2,800 students chose to take advantage of the opportunity. To protect those who still came to school, the superintendent arranged for district-wide patrol duty which took place during arrival and dismissal times until the end of February.
Lewis found herself spending most of her waking hours managing the crisis. In the mornings, she went on patrol, during which she shared information about suspicious vehicles that could be ICE, did walkabouts at each school, and addressed situations involving students or faculty members.
In what would ordinarily be her lunch break, Lewis contacted food delivery pantries working in the schools, and she checked in with students who were learning virtually to find out if they were absent due to ICE interference, whether direct or indirect. Some students chose to remain at home in order to stay safe, and some had been detained or deported by federal agents.
At the end of each school day, Lewis would go back on patrol duty to ensure that everyone — students and faculty alike — got home safely. Later in the evening, she would speak at press conferences and testify on behalf of the Minneapolis school community, revealing the shocking stories that detailed why ICE needed to stay out of schools. Finally, the superintendent would end her evening by updating her board members, staff, and families on the events of the day and communicating messages of reassurance.
At the peak of ICE’s engagement in Minneapolis, she went to the Minnesota State Capitol in St. Paul to speak on behalf of her schools at Gov. Tim Walz’s (D) press conference on February 3.
“Their presence is harming children, it is disrupting learning and it’s eroding trust. I will continue to be transparent, I will continue to speak up. And I am asking urgently for action,” Lewis said at the event. “Get ICE out of schools, out of our parking lots and out of our bus stops. Our children deserve to feel safe when they come to school. This is not political, this is all of our responsibility.”
The following morning, Lewis was reminded of how serious the situation had become. A mother was followed by two ICE vehicles as she tried to bring her child to school; she sat in the parking lot until she felt safe to drive again. Her child saw the whole thing. Another mother was followed by ICE as she took her three-year-old child to daycare. At yet another school, six ICE vehicles circled the roundabout during morning drop-off, and agents heckled the principal and staff. Crossing guards were scared because they didn’t know what to do, and children were blocked from crossing the street as ICE recorded the entire encounter. Lewis later calculated that all these events took place in the same 15-minute time span.
“It’s not my job to interfere with ICE operations,” Lewis told WhoWhatWhy in March. “However, it is my job to ensure that ICE does not interfere with school district operations.”
And interfere they did.
According to Lewis, at the beginning of the 2025–2026 academic year, Fridley Public Schools had been on track to continue its trajectory of growth in literacy and math. This was a big deal considering how Fridley schools are so heavily populated with children of immigrants. However, due to the upheaval caused by ICE, a significant number of these students missed attending school during the winter months.
“We still will continue, we’ve just taken some backsliding,” Lewis said.
The Two Types of Trauma Children Carried Through Metro Surge
According to Katie Lingras, an associate professor with the University of Minnesota’s Department of Psychiatry & Behavioral Sciences, there are two types of kids who were impacted by ICE: those who were directly affected, and those who were indirectly affected.
The children who were directly affected were the ones who feared being deported themselves, had family members detained, or who were separated from their families because they were deported by ICE.
The kids from families most at risk of ICE encounters generally stayed away from school and hid in their homes. These kids are the most impacted by this experience, but they can also be the most resilient.
“There’s lots of skills and characteristics that families can build that can get kids through hard times,” said Lingras, who specializes in early childhood mental health and trauma.
She noted that kids in the Minneapolis–St. Paul area specifically have witnessed a series of stressful events over the past seven years, ranging from the pandemic and the protests in the wake of George Floyd’s murder to the Annunciation Catholic School shooting, which took place a few months before ICE was deployed to the city.
“Each and every one of those can trigger all of those same types of feelings of fear and grief,” Lingras said. “And then you take that foundation and add on this, this kind of lawless show of power among federal law enforcement officers, and this intentional cruelty, this intentional fear-inducing behavior. And it’s a lot for all of these kids to manage.”
She also said that many kids were indirectly affected by ICE, such as the elementary classes that didn’t have playground recess throughout the winter due to fear for the students’ safety, or the children who saw armed and masked ICE agents around town everywhere they went.
There was no safe place in Minneapolis that was “ICE free.”
“The most challenging thing was that there was not really an area you could avoid — you know, ‘I wanna keep my kids sheltered and safe from this, so we’re not gonna go to x place,’” Lingras said.
The Fallout Continued Long After the Surge Ended
The staff at Fridley Public Schools did their best to track if students moved out of state, self-deported, or were forcibly deported or detained by ICE. But Lewis noted that she only knows for sure that a student’s residency status has changed when a member of their family communicates with her or school staff. Although the virtual learning program Lewis helped maintain kept the school district stabilized during the height of the surge, the superintendent believes it’s going to take another five years for the district as a whole to get their missed learning time back.
A laminated flyer stapled to a utility pole in South Minneapolis, MN, which reads “ICE Kidnapped Our Neighbor Here” on January 26, 2026. Photo credit: Chad Davis / Flickr (CC BY 4.0)
While in the midst of the mass ICE raids, Lewis missed the simplicities of an abundantly filled school, such as classrooms with children sitting at every desk or table, crowded hallways during passing periods, and loud lunchrooms with students engaged in conversation.
“I will never again complain about overcrowding in a hallway,” she said. “I felt what that’s like when 400 of our kids are remote learning and 122 of our kids aren’t with us that were with us in December.”
When WhoWhatWhy spoke with Lewis, she said it had been a long time since she’s sent a message about an issue other than ICE.
In the early spring, however, some of her district’s students started coming back to school. The superintendent believes the experience of losing and then seeing friends of her own kids return has been “renewing.” She was always relieved when her children told her excitedly, “So-and-so’s back, Mom!”
In the next article, you’ll learn about two middle school teachers in Columbia Heights who organized meal deliveries for community members in hiding and worked to minimize the trauma experienced by their young students.
This story was written by a member of our Mentor Apprentice Program (MAP). It gives aspiring journalists an opportunity to hone their craft while covering national and international news under the tutelage of seasoned reporters and editors. You can learn more about the MAP and how you can support our efforts to safeguard the future of journalism here.
LA mayoral candidate Nithya Raman at her primary election night party at Boomtown Brewery on June 2, 2026, in Los Angeles. Photo: Gina Ferrazi/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images
The surprising and divisive mayoral campaign of right-wing reality TV star Spencer Pratt came to an end on Monday, when Los Angeles City Councilmember Nithya Raman, a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, claimed her spot on the general election ballot against incumbent Mayor Karen Bass.
The second-place finish for Raman means that in the coming months, Bass will have to grapple with a challenger from her left. The incumbent mayor’s establishment bonafides at once lend her a strong political apparatus and make her the object of voter frustration. Raman, meanwhile, will face an uphill battle against the entrenched Democratic machine, which helped Bass easily secure a first-place finish. The embrace of mail-in voting by Angelenos slowly turned the tide for Raman, who initially trailed Pratt when polls closed last Tuesday.
Under California’s nonpartisan, open primary system, all viable candidates stood for the same June election — putting Pratt, a Republican, in the same primary as the heavily Democratic field. The top two advance to a runoff in November, meaning Los Angeles voters will choose between two Democrats in the general election ballot.
The emergence of Pratt, who rode a wave of outside conservative funding, prompted an intense debate among the city’s left on how to vote in the open primary. Rae Huang entered the race early on a progressive platform of strident police accountability measures, free and fast buses, and public housing. Raman, a city councilmember, decided to run at the last moment, with polls quickly showing she had a clearer path to a November runoff to fend off Pratt. Huang and her supporters insisted that she had the bolder leftist vision for the city, while Raman’s backers accused the Huang campaign of splitting the left amid a real threat from Pratt. The left is now faced with the task of repairing its fractures ahead of the November runoff.
Following Zohran Mamdani’s successful run for mayor in New York City, pundits were quick to ponder whether Los Angeles might be having its own Mamdani moment. But closer watchers of LA politics have been asking whether a different New York import could improve elections in the nation’s second biggest city: ranked-choice voting.
A ranked-choice voting system allows voters to rank candidates in order of preference. The system often leads to opponents with similar platforms and voter bases to cross-endorse, as was the case with Mamdani and his fellow progressive opponent Brad Lander, which helped stave off the more conservative-leaning former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo. In the LA race, ranked choice would have allowed Raman and Huang to forge a similar alliance without compromising their positions and cooling the fierce debates among their supporters.
“We’ve heard lots of voters that they are voting strategically, they try and follow the polls instead of supporting their real favorite — that’s the narrative that I think ranked-choice voting would solve,” said Rachel Hutchinson, deputy director of research and policy at FairVote, a nonprofit that is pushing for ranked-choice voting across the U.S., including in Los Angeles, where City Council has until June 26 to decide whether to place a measure on the November ballot that would implement the system in future elections.
“Not only do people not have to drop out, but they can actually act civilly toward each other, especially if they share an ideology or they represent a similar community,” Hutchinson continued. “Voters under this system would feel more empowered to vote their conscience because they can still support their candidate.”
Raman joined the LA City Council as part of a wing of left-leaning victories that shifted the city’s political calculus, and has cast herself as a pragmatic leader with an eye for policy. But she faced challenges garnering support from the left amid accusations of flip-flopping and cozying up to entrenched local power. Despite running on defunding the police in 2020 as the first member of the Democratic Socialists of America elected to the council, Raman repeatedly voted to expand the Los Angeles Police Department budget, although she has pushed back on plans to expand the force. In 2024, Raman accepted an endorsement from Zionist group Democrats for Israel–Los Angeles, which opposed a ceasefire in Gaza, for which she was widely rebuked and even censured by DSA–LA.
Even though Raman and Huang are both DSA members, the local chapter declined to reopen the endorsement process for them. Raman’s three DSA colleagues on the City Council opted to endorse Bass.
Bass focused much of her fire on attacking Raman, despite arguably having the biggest ideological disagreements with Pratt. Bass and Raman were once allies: Bass campaigned for Raman in 2024, and Raman supported Bass in her previous mayoral race. But once Raman launched her last-minute campaign, Bass criticized her for claiming to be an outsider with no control over the current issues plaguing the city, despite Raman having spent years in City Hall.
On Monday, the local publication LA Material released a text message Bass sent Raman shortly after the latter filed to run; it contained only a tweet announcing Raman’s filing and a woman shrugging emoji.
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Bass’s tenure as mayor has been rife with controversy, particularly over her handling of the deadly 2025 Pacific Palisades fire. The mayor was in Ghana attending an embassy party when the fire broke out, and she returned home the following day, with her city and reputation in tatters. Bass’s office has also been criticized for watering down an after-action report on the Palisades fire, including allegations that she scrubbed the most damning findings about the city’s shortcomings in responding to the blaze.
Her supporters are quick to point out that the Santa Ana winds, and not Bass, fueled the intense fire. And in fact, President Donald Trump, who endorsed Pratt, also shares blame for the slow recovery effort. The president and Republicans in Congress have declined to release the $34 billion in Federal Emergency Management Agency aid requested by California Gov. Gavin Newsom for assisting fire survivors.
The controversy over the fires largely fueled the campaign of third-place finisher Pratt, a former television star on “The Hills” who has never worked in politics and is best known for getting into public spats with his female co-stars. He centered his pitch on his anger at Bass’s handling of the Palisades fire — which consumed his home as well as thousands of others — as well as his disdain for the city’s homeless population, whom he called “bums” and “zombies” and argued should be arrested en masse.
Housing experts told The Intercept that Pratt’s assertions were completely divorced from reality. But they pointed out that the lack of significant progress on the issue of homelessness in Los Angeles under Bass has emboldened figures like Pratt to swoop in and spread misinformation and dangerous propaganda.
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