Political News

White House deputy press secretary Anna Kelly has stepped in to be the face of the lying machine while press secretary Karoline Leavitt is away on maternity leave. During an appearance on Fox News Friday, Kelly displayed the dead-eyed shamelessness required to deliver the kind of misinformation that President Donald Trump’s billionaire-backed orbit demands. “The president has been clear…

Source

Nobody wants to see Kid Rock perform. But guess what, America? You get to help Mr. Rock fix this problem! Wait, what? Kid Rock is pulling out all of the stops to boost his pathetic ticket sales for his Freedom 250 tour—including leveraging his ties with the Trump administration. His latest move is to surround himself with members of the military to boast that he’s going to give 250…

Source

President Donald Trump made it clear Friday that, 60 days into his war in Iran, he still has no plan. “No other country has ever done it,” Trump said, delivering his signature rant when asked whether he would seek congressional approval for his war. “Most people consider it totally unconstitutional.” “We had a ceasefire, so that gives you additional time,” Trump added.

Source

After being criticized by President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance for following the Bible and speaking out against an unjust war and in favor of helping the oppressed, Pope Leo XIV announced on Friday that a former undocumented immigrant and critic of Trump’s anti-immigrant policies would be appointed Bishop for West Virginia. Rev. Evelio Menjivar-Ayala, who currently serves as the…

Source

A cartoon by Pedro Molina. Related | Melania renews call to censor Jimmy Kimmel—for doing his job…

Source

After last month’s No Kings protest, Indivisible, the group that describes itself as a pro-democracy, anti-authoritarian people-powered movement, joined May Day Strong’s actions to take a page out of Minnesota’s one-day strike playbook from this past January.

On its surface, Indivisible’s participation appears to be a slight pivot, engaging in more disruptive labor-directed actions. But for Ezra Levin, the co-founder and co-executive director of Indivisible, May Day Strong is part of their movement—one that can’t succeed without growing its broad coalition. “Society cannot function without workers, and our political system won’t function unless more non-billionaires and non-mega corporations get involved in how politics works,” Levin told me when we spoke by phone on Thursday.

Politics feel brutal for most workers these days. It’s equally hard to measure the impact of protest groups like Indivisible. That’s especially true in a week where the Supreme Court dismantled voting rights and the Trump administration doubled down on its war in Iran despite rising costs and thousands of people killed. But Levin was, at times, evasive about looking too far in the future. For him, it’s impossible to measure the success of a pro-democracy movement on whether authoritarians are doing damage. It’s more useful to measure impact by how much a movement grows and tries new tactics.

This strategic alignment with May Day is an example. Levin was focused on building a coalition now—including opening the door for people who are not advocates or organizers. He also seemed clear-eyed about his group’s role: “Indivisible isn’t the right movement organization to organize the entire country. We are a piece of it.”

This interview has been lightly condensed and edited for clarity.

Where do you think Indivisible’s work stands within the larger US ecosystem of organizing? 

I don’t think there’s a pathway to getting a real democracy that reflects the world of people that doesn’t depend on coalition. There’s not going to be any one organization or any one individual movement that succeeds in significantly changing our political system and bends it to the will of the people—you need to build across coalition. 

For us, that’s core to just about everything Indivisible does. That shows up in the Hands Off coalition that came out a year ago. The Good Trouble Lives On [protests] on the John Lewis Day of Remembrance, and the No Kings coalition itself, which is made up of hundreds members. 

May Day is not by Indivisible and it’s not led by the No Kings coalition. It’s being led by the May Day strong coalition with an emphasis on union participation. You’re not going to build a pro-democracy movement that’s successful without having heavy involvement from union leaders. You can’t succeed in what we’re trying to do without welcoming new members to your coalition and without showing up for them when they’re leading a day of action like tomorrow.

How are you measuring the impact of your work with No Kings, considering we’re in a week where the Supreme Court has fully gutted voting rights?

How you judge the success of a pro-democracy movement is with a couple of criteria: One, are you bigger than you were before? Two is, are you more aligned than you were before? Three is, is the authoritarian regime less popular than it was before? And four is, are your tactics proliferating? Are you trying new things? Are you developing new muscles?

We had three million people at the 1300 Hands Off protests last April. Then for the first No Kings, we had five million people at 2100 protests at the second No Kings. We had 7 million people at 2700, protests at the third No Kings. We had 3300 protests and more than 8 million people, which is to say three of the largest protests in all of American history are in ascending order.

The growth is pretty evident, and I don’t think it’s just us saying that. Some of the experts like Erica Chenoweth who are looking quantitatively at the scale of protests over the course of 2025 and into 2026. It dwarfs what we saw in 2017. The scale of mass mobilization and organizing is historic.

What are the challenges of growing No Kings?

The challenges in growing No Kings are the president repeatedly systematically using the powers of the presidency to go after his opponents. There are challenges of convincing people to care about politics. A lot of people believe that politics is bullshit, that both sides are corrupt, and that the whole system is broken and it’s not worth their time to get involved. That cynicism and nihilism and fatalism about the state of the country and our politics is the primary enemy that we have and the one that we have to slay. Indivisible isn’t the right movement organization to organize the entire country.

We are a piece of it. And if we’re doing our work to build a truly representative and powerful movement, we’ve got to be helping and showing up for other organizations, other movements, went into their time to lead, and I would be May Day tomorrow as an example that, like I said, it’s not an Indivisible action. This is being led by May Day Strong.

What do you think of larger disruption actions formed by coalitions over longer periods of time like the general strikes in India, Panama, and Italy? Do you think that is possible in the US?

In 2025, the regime was targeting the organization of America, which is straight out of [the playbook of] Hungary. One of the lessons of Orbán’s downfall is that the best way to remove an authoritarian is electorally, so it depends on building a mass movement.

When it comes to disruption, you don’t have to look abroad. You can look at the Twin Cities. The Day of Truth and Freedom was a mass disruption event and intended to bring society to a halt. And I think it was very successful. The federal government had to retreat because of the PR disaster as a direct result of the incredible organizing on the ground. If Trump tries to sabotage the midterm elections, you’re going to need something that looks like the Twin Cities but at the scale of something that looks like No Kings. 

Going off what you brought up about disruption actions in the US, what do you think about tactics that try to get around restrictive US labor laws such as the proposed UAW strike in 2028?

I’m one battle at a time right now. There are a lot of questions about what happens in the Democratic primary, how we position ourselves in that race, and what happens if Trump runs again. These are all interesting questions that I look forward to digging into after we crush the regime in the midterms and elect some Democrats who are interested in using the powers of the Senate and the House to prevent the regime from doing more damage and bringing accountability to people who violated the Constitution. That is the single best thing we can do to set up democracy for a successful 2028.

Georgia’s gubernatorial election is not getting the kind of national attention that other statewide races are drawing as the 2026 midterms approach. But the outcome of that race may be one of the most important for the future of democracy—for multiple reasons. First, after the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act on Wednesday, Georgia could eliminate more than a dozen Black- and…

Source

Matt Multari has been driving for Amazon—and organizing with the Teamsters—for about a year and a half. His days are mostly spent delivering packages. But he thinks of his role as a worker-organizer as something much more historically significant than just maximizing delivery efficiency. 

“After the Assyrians lost their state, they survived in their homeland of Iraq for thousands of years. After facing a genocide that forced them to flee that homeland, they went to Russia, and then to Iran, and then some of them went to New York. Now I’m here,” he said. “And I’d like to tell Amazon: fuck you!”

Early on the morning of May 1, Multari took the megaphone in front of a hundred or so sign-toting Amazon warehouse workers, delivery drivers, and software engineers, who had traveled in from Queens and Staten Island to march on an Amazon office building for International Workers’ Day. 

“Each of us here has a story of generational struggle,” Multari, 25, said. But to him, working for Amazon means the obliteration of identity. “Amazon is trying to erase that.” Every day, as he puts on his blue vest and delivers packages from Amazon’s DBK-1 warehouse in Queens, the company surveills him: “You have an app that tells you the exact stop order you’re supposed to go in. You’re under a time quota, basically.” 

If you take too long, or take too many stops, Multari said, the app tells you to go faster. “You get a scorecard every week that says how you’re performing.” Five months ago, Multari and his DBK-1 coworkers unionized with the Teamsters, joining thousands of unionized Amazon workers nationwide. They’ve been able to extract some concessions from the e-commerce giant, though Amazon has refused to bargain with their unionized workers. Nonetheless, during this year’s record-breaking winter storms, they were paid for days they weren’t able to work; and when they needed new hand-trucks, Amazon paid up. 

Amazon holds millions of dollars in ICE contracts.Sophie Hurwitz

Nonetheless, Multari and his coworkers are aware that they’ll have to do much more to win real job security in an age of automation. “Amazon, at its core, is a tech company,” Multari said. “Our main asset to them is our data from our routes, so that it can train its algorithm, so it can make us more and more replaceable.” 

Amazon’s Web Services cloud-computing platform is more profitable than all the company’s retail operations combined. And AWS sells cloud-computing services to clients throughout the American government, including Immigration and Customs Enforcement: According to Forbes reporting, ICE spent at least $25 million on AWS during the second Trump administration. Amazon Web Services also holds contracts with Palantir, the surveillance-tech company behind much of ICE’s deportation operation. (And Amazon has served as an inspiration for ICE, too: acting ICE director Todd Lyons has said he wants deportations in the US to run “like Amazon Prime for human beings.”) 

That’s part of why, at Monday’s rally, non-union tech workers stood alongside unionized warehouse workers. 

Zelda Montes, a former software engineer at Google who was fired in 2024 for holding a sit-in with their coworkers, said they’ve spent much of the past two years trying to help organize tech workers at places like Amazon. With the group No Tech for Apartheid, Montes works to build power within tech companies against the contracts that Amazon and Google hold with the Israeli government. “For a lot of tech workers, the work that they’re doing is helping to create these systems of surveillance that affect warehouse workers, that affect delivery workers, that create more difficult working conditions for them,” Montes said. “So it’s really important for us to be able to unite with them on the labor front.” 

Thousands of Amazon workers are unionized with the Teamsters. The company has spent years refusing to bargain with them.Sophie Hurwitz

At some Amazon warehouses, more than half of workers are immigrants. But Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos has shown no interest in walking back the company’s contracts with agencies targeting those immigrants. “Amazon’s abuse of workers bankrolls their ability to do this,” said Sultana Hossain, an organizer with Amazon Labor Union. So, workers in New York told Mother Jones, they’re going to keep fighting. 

“We will demand the one thing that’s worth fighting for in this life: respect,” Multari said. 

It’s probably for the best that the Trump family doesn’t bother to hide its corruption. At least we get advance word of their next grift rather than having to guess. This time around, it’s drones, because of course. President Donald Trump’s Large Adult Sons are getting into the war business. Pretty convenient when your daddy can start a war and you can profit, right?

Source

Department of Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin appeared on Fox News Friday to whine about how the GOP-driven partial government shutdown has made things difficult for him, claiming “almost a third of the workforce is no longer with us.” “It takes about four months to onboard people,” he told host Dana Perino. “People say, ‘Well, but they’re getting paid.’ We had [the] State…

Source

A cartoon by Clay Bennett. Related | Transportation chief wants AI to manage your air travel safety…

Source

Right-wing conspiracy theorist Alex Jones’ website, Infowars.com, went offline Thursday night, marking a possible end to decades of misinformation, lies, and deception. Currently, upon visiting the website, a single page appears with the message, “Off Air.” Infowars launched in 1999 and has steadily spewed out nonsense nearly every day of its ensuing 27 years of operation.

Source

On Friday, Nebraska became the first state to enact Medicaid work requirements, mandatory for states with Medicaid expansion due to Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act. Notably, the state did it seven months before the deadline.

Now, around 70,000 adults below the age of 65 in Nebraska who have Medicaid through its expansion could risk having their health insurance ripped away from them.

Medicaid work requirements do not increase employment. Instead, the administrative burden of work requirements only serves to kick people off this governmental health insurance. Additionally, a majority of people on Medicaid, who are not on Supplemental Security Income, work full or part-time jobs. This underlines how rhetoric around work requirements is just false.

The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities also highlighted that there is not enough time to implement what could be considered less cruel systems for Medicaid work requirements. The center called for work requirements to be pulled, “but short of that, states need more time to ensure their policies, systems, and staffing plans are in place to minimize the number of eligible people whose health care is taken away.” This also highlights the cruelty of Nebraska’s implementation of work requirements before the January 1, 2027 deadline.

Especially because an interim rule from the Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is not even due until June 1. I previously raised concerns about what an interim rule could look like from Kennedy:

A person with debilitating chronic pain, or a serious autoimmune illness, may appear “able-bodied” by the standards RFK Jr. appears poised to implement—even as they face hurdles in qualifying for Social Security disability due to not being considered disabled enough. HHS declined to answer a series of questions for this article, instead offering a general statement that the agency “remains committed to protecting and strengthening Medicaid for those who rely on it…while eliminating waste, fraud, and abuse.”

There are some exemptions to Medicaid work requirements, including for people with chronic illnesses and pregnant people. According to Nebraska’s Department of Health and Human Services’ website, the state will be considering work requirement exemptions during checks every six months. There is a list of conditions for people on Medicaid that qualify for people with exemptions, but understandably, not every serious health issue is on there. Notably absent is Long Covid, a post-infectious disease caused by a Covid infection that can very much impact someone’s ability to work.

“I don’t see how any state could protect people with disabilities from these kinds of cuts,” Georgetown University professor Edwin Park told me last year before Republicans voted to enact Medicaid work requirements and nearly $1 trillion worth of Medicaid cuts.

Now, it’s a waiting game to see how draconian Medicaid work requirements roll out throughout the country.

President Donald Trump’s boondoggle of a war in Iran officially hit the 60-day mark on Friday, thus requiring him—by law—to get congressional approval to continue his hostilities. But Trump and his administration came up with a bullshit excuse for why the War Powers Resolution of 1973 doesn’t apply to them in this situation. “We are in a ceasefire right now, which our understanding means…

Source

Fresh on the heels of a lackluster Mar-a-Lago “luncheon” party for his struggling $TRUMP meme coin, President Donald Trump appears ready to launch his next crypto-coin-for-exclusive-access project: Trump Coin Club.

In the wake of the Mar-a-Lago bash, the official $TRUMP coin website was updated with a new offer. The details are sparse but apparently meant to be enticing. “MEMBERS ONLY · LIMITED ACCESS,” the site promises. “The Trump Coin Club — invitation-only luxury suites at the biggest sporting events in the world, private dinners, and the most elite and extraordinary experiences.”

There is no information as to what specific “biggest sporting events” that might include. I sent an email to the $TRUMP coin website and the Trump Organization, but no one replied.

The website has a sign-up prompt and what appears to be a mockup of a “leaderboard”—apparently similar to the ranking system used to doll out slots to the top 297 $TRUMP coin holders who were invited to last weekend’s Mar-a-Lago luncheon. Independent crypto researcher Molly White first reported the new Trumpian offer Wednesday evening. While it seems anyone can join can join the Trump Coin Club for free, White writes that the leaderboard “appears designed to rank members by both the amount of the token they hold and the duration they’ve held it.” And the prospect of invitations to “elite” events could be intended to incentivize crypto enthusiasts to hold onto their $TRUMP coins for the long term.

$TRUMP is a meme coin, which means it doesn’t have any inherent use or value—it simply exists as a digital endorsement of Trump, as a concept. If it becomes popular, it can also become useful for financial speculation. But other than a huge spike in price in the hours immediately before and after Trump officially announced the coin’s creation, the price’s trajectory has been almost exclusively downward.

Depending on the crypto exchange you use, the price of the coin was once as high as $74, giving it a $15 billion market cap. But since February, each coin has been worth less than $4. After last weekend’s event at Mar-a-Lago, which Trump attended, the price slipped even further. As of this writing, it is currently hovering below $2.40.

But even with the plunging price, $TRUMP is a great deal for its namesake. The president created the coin out of nothing, so any price is a win for him.

The Trump administration did some genuine stormtrooper garbage earlier this week when it arrested David Morens, a 78-year-old research scientist who served as an aide to Anthony Fauci at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases until 2022. Morens is accused of pretty much the most nonviolent crime ever: concealing federal records, which—even if true—does not really warrant…

Source

The Current Work List The Fix List Thank you all for your help with researching the “Server Error” on the polls and the grayed out POST button that some users were seeing on Safari. It turns out that both of these issues were caused by privacy settings. Server Error When Voting On Polls This is apparently a known issue with this polling plug-in — it’s been a problem…

Source

70% of collateral arrests are for immigration-related crimes or violations only. By Tim Henderson for Stateline A quarter of immigration arrests since August were labeled by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement as “collateral,” a type of arrest and detention that’s been challenged in court as an end run around civil rights. Public outrage and lawsuits over the arrests may…

Source

A cartoon by Clay Jones. Related | GOP uses shooting to shill for Trump’s gaudy ballroom…

Source

Affordability is the new buzzword. It’s yapped by politicians and pundits across the spectrum. It’s as popular as a new TikTok dance. And it’s genuinely an important and mobilizing concept.

But the truth is, it doesn’t really capture what’s ailing us.

What makes this moment unique is insecurity. Struggling with bills isn’t new to most Americans; what is different today, across lines of social class lines, is the degree of unpredictability that comes with ordinary ways of making a living: ICE grabbing people at workplaces and schools, at bodegas and hospitals, and taking them to American concentration camps; hundreds of thousands of formerly secure, essential federal workers being laid off, part of a Trump administration program of destroying any institution or program that led people to associate government with stability and security, like Medicaid-backed home care and FEMA. And then there’s the threat of AI ending our jobs as we know them.

In this era, instead of walking on solid ground, terra firma, we dwell on shaking, shifting terra infirma. While affordability is a handy reframe of pervasive income inequality—talking about prices and the cost of living, rather than structural forces that stymie mobility, makes people feel less blamed and less-than—it doesn’t cover the gamut of social instability that the last few years have wrought. Call them “economic-plus” factors.

Of course, much of this insecurity has been manufactured by merchants of doubt, the henchmen of an “insecurity-industrial complex.”

That complex is the brainchild, in part, of what former Trump advisor Steve Bannon has dubbed “muzzle velocity,” a rapid political communications strategy that presents a constant stream of wild news events and outrages, shocks designed to both overwhelm the media and put the populace on edge.

It entails the steady downpour of confounding right-wing populist dreck. Bannon described it to Frontline as “three things a day—they’ll bite on one.” When it lands on media platforms, viewers’ fears are then exploited in predatory fashion, for monetary or political gain.

The new insecurity also follows on more than a decade of gleeful “disruption” by Silicon Valley, whose titans have gutted or taken over so many familiar institutions in the last decade that experiences like shopping feel fundamentally less secure, with constant developments like the idea of dynamic pricing in stores, so that budgeting for coffee or eggs feels like playing a slot machine.

On a wider level, it also extends to predictive gambling mega-sites, which monetize the increasingly unpredictable news generated by the White House, benefiting inside traders in government and enabling corporate forces to cash in at scale on our feelings of instability.

Prediction market Kalshi’s co-founders Luana Lopes Lara and Tarek Mansour are now billionaires, according to Forbes; New York University anthropologist Natasha Schull characterizes their platform as “making everything into a set of binary choices” and bettable outcomes, both offering a kind of false reassurance.

The insecurity-industrial complex also includes the nationalist politicians who incite volcanic policy shifts and mass layoffs.

Take Tara Fannon, for years a research director at a consulting agency serving the federal government, responsible for communication outreach across agencies and direct work with veterans. In 2025, her government contracting job was DOGEd into oblivion. Fannon now makes a fraction of her former salary, and her unemployment has run out. At 50, she’s looking for a full-time job and “struggling”—Fannon says “the job market is the worst in my life: an absolute hellscape.” Her health care premiums are colossal.

“For me, ‘insecurity’ is a good word to describe all the ways I feel precarious right now,” Fannon says from her apartment in Brooklyn. “I can’t afford great medical care, and that’s going to affect my health, which causes me to worry and feel more anxious. I can’t afford to go to the gym or eat the kind of food that makes me feel healthy, and that affects me in other ways.”

She didn’t want to take all that turbulence lying down. Fannon started an oral history site interviewing government workers who had been laid off equally unceremoniously. Most, like her, she says, are still unemployed, “patching things together.”

And the war against our security entails crushing reliable government, including funds allotted to the caregivers of our most vulnerable citizens. United Domestic Workers deputy director Johanna Hester is on the front line of that battle. GOP-led cuts to Medicaid, she tells me, have been brutal for her members, who struggle with reduced paid hours as well as the fear of ICE raids at their workplaces. Many make less than $20 an hour and need food assistance from the union; some have been driven to live in their cars, struggling to afford gas.

Terra infirma is also a place where people fear speaking freely. The bravest are those who continue to, like Amisha Patel, a Chicago activist and mother of two who passed away this week at age 50, a month and a half after we spoke. Opposing the second Trump administration while struggling with metastatic cancer, Patel epitomized to me degree of courage that some Americans are showing today, standing up even while they teeter on the personal and political edge.

Before she passed, Patel underwent treatments, hoping to find something that would give her extra time. But by March, she was told she had just a few months to live. Still, when we spoke, she was trying to “show up,” as she put it, for her wife and neighbors in Chicago’s Rogers Park neighborhood amid an escalation of ICE raids.

What kept her together in the last months of her life, in a time of massive turmoil, was the opportunity “to fight fascism.” “It’s easy to be frozen and not to act,” Patel said. I knew what she meant: public defiance was harder in a time of street kidnappings, campus crackdowns, and organized attacks on free speech (of, say, anyone who called Charlie Kirk…well, a Charlie Kirk). “But my disease has shown me that we are not going to have certainty,” she continued—only “possibilities.”

Fannon, Hester, Patel, and so many of us are standing in a frightscape and yearning for security from the political developments that snap at us like carnivorous plants.

I am not the only one who sees our main vibe as uncertainty, anxiety, and nervousness, our mood rings always turning to a muted gray or black. The Urban Institute’s “True Cost of Economic Security” metric, which factors in costs like health insurance, childcare, and retirement, defines 52 percent of US families as financially insecure, many more than define themselves (or are defined by other standards) as poor.

In the age of gig work, volatile income is another source of systemic insecurity around our labor. It makes planning for the future or even giving consistent time to family and other obligations, far more difficult. (No wonder Gen Z, has come up with corecore, a TikTok aesthetic that specializes in confusing, overwhelming juxtapositions.)

So does indebtedness: consumer debt is among the reasons that Americans’ available income has dropped by more than a quarter in recent years, according to political scientist Jacob Hacker’s Economic Security Index. Businesses look to the Economic Policy Uncertainty Index, a financial instrument that tracks the effects of economic instability in the US and twenty other countries, going back to 1900.

Political uncertainty is approaching an all-time high here, says EPUI director Scott Baker, a professor of finance at the University of Wisconsin. Baker believes that insecurity about the future has made “firms and households less comfortable” spending and more likely to reduce consumption, while business have become less productive as a result, leery to make investments or increase hiring.

As Baker puts it, “sudden shifts in policy across a wide range of fields [have] made it hard for businesses and financial markets to know what is coming next.” According to a recent Associated Press-NORC poll, 47 percent of American adults  are “not very” or “not at all confident” they could find a job they would want. That figure was 37 percent in late 2023. 

Of course, the insecurity-industrial complex wasn’t born yesterday: exploiters have been making us nervous for generations. In her 1989 book Fear of Falling, Barbara Ehrenreich wrote about the anxieties of an American middle class barely holding on to its social position by one high-thread-count pillow-set. In the 2009 collection The Insecure American: How We Got Here and What We Should Do About It, nineteen ethnographers parsed how our leaders produce social insecurity, from the war on terror to the war on welfare.

But now that insecurity is everywhere, all the time. As economist Pranab Bardhan argues in his 2022 book A World of Insecurity: Democratic Disenchantment in Rich and Poor Countries, insecurity, rather than poverty or inequality, is our new constant, bringing with it the forces that have caused an erosion of liberal democracy in rich and poor countries alike. As societal uncertainty, both real and manufactured, has risen in countries like the US, India, and Turkey, populists have taken over and tilted the political tables toward despotism, exploiting citizens’ economic and cultural instabilities to get their votes.

What would really restore our sense of certainty? On a governmental level, bolstering the hardy social programs we have, like Social Security, Medicare and unemployment insurance. Paid leave, which I depended on over the last year to care for two family members.

Rebecca Vallas, CEO of the National Academy for Social Insurance, tells me that this is the “moment to return to the moral and even spiritual foundation of the New Deal—the idea that we are in this together—and to carry that further into the next chapter of public policy. The question isn’t whether uncertainty will exist, it’s whether we will meet it with solidarity or fragmentation.”

When I attended a conference Vallas recently organized in Washington on the future of American social programs, attendees struck similar notes, harkening back to that great moment of the birth of Social Security, the New Deal; of Frances Perkins and FDR. But we can also push new policies that have a grandeur of spirit;  some of the threats to our security are too deeply contemporary to do otherwise.

Will we strategize and develop policies akin to universal basic income, updated to account for the six-fingered monster that is AI? An experimental “AI dividend” piloted by the nonprofit AI Commons Project and What We Will proposes to compensate 50 workers who have lost paid jobs or opportunities due to AI to the tune of $1,000 a month for a year, no strings attached. If it works, it will be a new model for basic income set to help the hundreds of thousands who may ultimately lose work due to AI.

And then there’s the personal piece of this: standing up to the insecurity complex, starting to naturalize the term “insecurity” when we talk about citizens’ state of mind, their needs and what informs their political will. I believe that part of surviving uncertainty is framing it, living with it—and acting despite it. Therapists I have spoken to speak of treating patients’ sense of “overwhelming and overweening threat,” in the words of psychologist Harriet Fraad, including fear of the encroachments of AI, while increasingly “unable to afford heat or gas for their car” as a consequence of Trump’s war in Iran.

Fraad tries to make her clients recognize the real culprit: “that their fears aren’t just because of their mother or something” but rather the nature of America today. She tries to ensure that they aren’t blaming themselves for their nerves, personalizing the effects of the insecurity-industrial complex into a singular failure on their part. To these patients, Fraad recommends “not being alone” and embracing “activism, love and solidarity.” 

Similarly, it can’t hurt for us to recognize when we are participating in habits that reflect and exacerbate terra infirma—we can reject predictive betting markets and their janky fake sense of relief, for example, or use tools that strip our feeds of AI slop wherever they find it, demanding a more human internet.

I am trying to acknowledge the political and economic uncertainty and nihilism around me, to live with it and name it. Otherwise, there is always the danger of repression, which leads, according to psychologists, to our splitting into metaphorical parts. The version of myself that tries on tinted sunscreen, makes sure to Docusign contracts, and  watches regional UK TV procedurals late into the night co-exists with the version of myself that is hyper-vigilant to the extreme events that keep unfolding.

In my quest to gain a greater sense of equilibrium, I also look for mirrors of our current precarity. Perhaps weirdly, I find reassurance in poetry reflecting extreme events, like poems composed shadows of the gulag, or one of Jorie Graham’s latest. As she writes, “I/will let go/of the world/as it was/once. It was probably/ never that way.”

This article was produced in collaboration with the Economic Hardship Reporting Project, which supports independent journalists as they forward fresh narratives about inequality. Subscribe to follow EHRP.