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Food Recalls Are Good, Actually
Over the last few months, Trader Joe’s has pulled thousands of cases of focaccia bread and frozen fried rice from its shelves for potentially having fragments of metal or glass, respectively. If that makes you a little nervous about stocking up on other TJ favorites like cookie butter and Everything But the Bagel crackers, you’re not alone. (Trader Joe’s website notes that the company takes “these matters seriously—personally, even.”)
Monti Carlo, a chef who breaks down food recalls on her Substack, told me in November that at one point during the fall, it felt like there were too many recalls for her to keep track of. There was a listeria outbreak in prepared pasta meals, an infant botulism outbreak in ByHeart whole nutrition infant formula, and a recall of certain corn dogs and sausage-on-a-stick products for potential pieces of wood in the batter. “You have to ask yourself, ‘What is going on?’” Carlo said.
According to experts, the answer is complicated. For the past year especially, food safety has been in turmoil.
Last fall, the 43-day government shutdown led to the furlough of over 30,000 employees at the Department of Health and Human Services, stalling public health communications from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and delaying inspections of food facilities. Then there was the Trump administration’s layoff of 3,859 FDA and 2,499 CDC employees by the end of 2025, as part of Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s restructuring of the Department of Health and Human Services in accordance with the DOGE effort to cut costs.
Firing all the epidemiologists wouldn’t get rid of foodborne illnesses, it would just stop us from knowing about them.
While it isn’t totally clear yet how the shutdown and layoffs will affect the food safety system, when a system on the brink loses thousands of workers, it creates fractures in an already delicate food system. In a March 2025 Consumer Reports article, food safety experts in and outside the agency agreed “that the food program’s budget was already inadequate to carry out the amount of oversight required even before the new administration took over.”
For animal products like meat and poultry, food safety regulations are created and maintained by the USDA Food Safety and Inspection Service, while the safety of all other food products is overseen by the Food and Drug Administration. Many USDA facilities are under continuous inspection, but the FDA may visit each facility only once a year, leaving much of the daily oversight to food manufacturers. State and local health agencies may be the first to identify cases of illness and determine the cause to be foodborne. Sometimes the FDA will delegate food manufacturer inspections to these agencies, but its main purview is typically the inspection of the retail food industry. When illness cases in different states are linked, the CDC will often get involved to coordinate an investigation and contact the appropriate agencies once an issue is identified.
It’s a fragile system that becomes even more tenuous in situations like last year’s multistate listeria outbreak in prepared pasta meals. Donald Schaffner, an extension specialist in food science and professor at Rutgers University, recalled how that outbreak was an eye opener because it happened at a company making fresh pasta for meals, which made it an FDA-regulated company, but because the pasta might have been used to make a fresh or refrigerated entree that has meat in it, that became a USDA issue. They were still able to unravel the threads, but it showcased just how intertwined, and occasionally arduous, the system oversight can be.
The ultimate hope is that with these overlapping systems in place, all food will be safe, but it’s not perfect. It’s unnerving to have to worry about whether the food you’re eating is safe, and most foodborne illnesses are identified first by the consumer—once they’re already sick.
“We have recalls as a last recourse. Everything else that we need to do in order to produce a safe food product must be done,” said Angela Anandappa, founding executive director of the industry nonprofit Alliance for Advanced Sanitation. “And the worst-case scenario is for someone to get sick and die.”
Despite how unnerving a recall might be, experts argue that it might be a good thing that we’re still seeing them, because that means there are still people within the government doing the work to keep our food safe.
Schaffner noted that firing all the epidemiologists wouldn’t get rid of foodborne illnesses, it would just stop us from knowing about them.
“If you undermine those resources, things could get worse, and probably will get worse, and you might not even know it, because the people who are keeping track of whether it’s getting better or worse no longer work for the federal government,” he added.
When you see a new food recall, don’t take it lightly, but also remember that it means there are still food safety specialists working hard to make sure your food is as safe as it can be.
In first electoral run since his recall, Chris Krohn aims to stop the ‘selling off’ of Santa Cruz to developers as mayor
Chris Krohn says he wasn’t really considering running for Santa Cruz mayor even six months ago, but when he kept hearing concerns that there might be only one candidate — longtime politico Ryan Coonerty — he decided to go for it. He sees a lack of candidates as a problem, adding that, while he likes District 3 County Supervisor Justin Cummings personally, him running unopposed for reelection to that seat is “bad for democracy.”
“I’ll never attack Ryan on his character, integrity or anything like that, because I think he loves Santa Cruz and just has a different vision of Santa Cruz than I have,” Krohn said of Coonerty. “I think the folks who are running now all have different, particular interests that we want to put forward, and they’re not the same, but it’s much more wide-ranging and promotes a debate and discussion.”
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Krohn said the Santa Cruz County Democratic Central Committee’s failure to reach a consensus on endorsements for the Santa Cruz city races shows that the organization has also opened up to more perspectives.
“It was a resounding victory for the reason all of us ran,” he said. “We all felt like, ‘Wow, this is amazing. We’re getting a conversation here.’”
Krohn has lived mostly in Santa Cruz since 1983, with stints in Washington, D.C., working on political asylum applications for Salvadorans and Guatemalans, and in Nicaragua, where he helped run and teach at a language school. He was drawn to Santa Cruz when he heard about the late Mike Rotkin, one of the few mayors in the country who called himself a socialist. Krohn attended UC Santa Cruz and connected with Rotkin, who co-founded the university’s Community Studies program.
Krohn has served two separate terms on the Santa Cruz City Council, the first from 1998 to 2002, serving as mayor in 2002. His second term was to run from 2016 to 2020, but he did not finish it, as he and fellow councilmember Drew Glover were recalled in March 2020. Now, he’s returning to electoral politics to push back against what he sees as “selling off Santa Cruz to outsiders.”
Five of a legion of former Santa Cruz mayors (from left): Chris Krohn, Tim Fitzmaurice, Jane Weed-Pomerantz, Katherine Beiers and John Laird. Credit: Via Laurie Brooks“Are these people producing housing for folks who live here? My contention is they are not,” he said, arguing that much of the new housing mostly caters to second-home buyers or people in the tech industry. “I’m afraid they want to bring in a different class of people.”
Krohn also takes issue with the potential housing development planned for the site of The Catalyst. “I think the city could do something to save that venue, or at least designate another venue before they’re out of business,” he said. “Because you know that music venue is not going back there. Nobody’s gonna want to live above a nightclub.”
Krohn said one of his first priorities is advocating for a town hall meeting for residents to discuss development in the city. He said he’d want to include people from various perspectives, including Yes In My Backyard (YIMBY) advocates, homeowners associations and more, including people from jurisdictions such as Santa Monica and Los Angeles involved in lawsuits against the state.
“The folks on the council want this development, and they’re using ‘my hands are tied’ as a way of saying the state is doing this,” he said. “We could slow it down a lot.”
Krohn said his vision of successful development is two- to four-story projects that better fit the scale of Santa Cruz. He said he also would push for city staff to work with affordable housing providers rather than luxury housing developers; he believes the city has too much high-end housing in the pipeline. He pointed to Paris, which he said has high-rises in only a specific part of the city, despite a much larger population than Santa Cruz. He said he’s glad that Measure C, a real estate transfer and parcel tax, passed in November, but thinks it could have gone even further and taxed the most expensive properties more aggressively.
Krohn said he thinks the dwindling of homeless services, such as the closure of Housing Matters’ day services, is serious, and that social services are “paramount to the progressive era.” He said that while he understands Housing Matters’ decision, he thinks the nonprofit can’t just take the services away with no alternative.
“[Housing Matters] has a vulnerable population moving into those new places and they’re going to have to go through that gauntlet of human misery, so I get that,” he said, adding that it reminds him of when the city moved to close the encampment between Highway 1 and the Gateway Plaza. “It wasn’t like, ‘Where are we going to locate folks? This might not be the appropriate place,’ they just wanted to get those people out of there.”
Krohn said he’d look to expand a county program that pairs a nurse and social worker together to respond to nonviolent and mental health crises. He said he himself used the program to check on his brother dealing with mental health issues, and the responding social worker got his brother proper medication and treatment at a Capitola nursing facility.
“Let the police do what they do best if they’re going after criminals,” he said. “A social worker nurse program is expensive, but so are police officers.”
Krohn said pulling out of the Flock Safety contract was the “most progressive thing I’ve seen the city council do.” He said he wouldn’t support automated license-plate readers of any kind, and expressed concern with Coonerty’s willingness to explore the technology.
Should he win the mayorship, Krohn said other top priorities would be working to fill vacant storefronts, improve the city’s bicycle and pedestrian infrastructure and prepare for federal immigration enforcement, particularly by barring the feds from using city-owned property and training city employees on how to deal with agents, should they come to the city.
Krohn was recalled after he was accused of mistreating city staff and fellow councilmembers. He argues, however, that the impetus for the recall went well beyond personal or political disagreements. He said he and a short-lived progressive majority were “focused on the most vulnerable people in our community” as well as social justice issues and affordable housing, which the current council has strayed from.
“It has much to do with capital, has to do with money, and we didn’t represent those interests,” he said. “Santa Cruz is a very valuable place, and this city council is not protecting that value. It is denigrating the value, and it’s giving the value away to these outside developers. I’m running for city council to bring about balance in that relationship.”
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Nearly half of UK businesses pwned last year as phishing keeps doing the job like it's 2005
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The Roberts Court Shows Its True Partisan Colors
The Supreme Court’s Republican-appointed majority would have you think that its latest gerrymandering decision is a mere tweak to the legal rules governing political map-drawing. No doubt hoping for mild headlines, the court’s 6-3 opinion framed its holding as hewing to “the plain text” of the Voting Rights Act and “consistent with” the Fifteenth Amendment’s prohibition against racial discrimination in voting. In compliance with these two guideposts, Justice Samuel Alito’s majority opinion styles itself as a humble “update.”
Don’t be fooled. This is a counter-revolution. Section 2 of the 1965 Voting Rights Act requires that people of color have an equal opportunity to elect representatives of their choice. Wednesday’s decision effectively strikes down Section 2—at least what this Supreme Court had left of it—and takes the country back to the dark days when Black and brown voters in many states cast meaningless ballots, having been diluted and gerrymandered into powerlessness. In the decades since the Voting Rights Act, southern states have sent Black representatives to Congress, state legislatures, and local political bodies because this seminal civil rights law demanded that minority voters have an equal voice in the political process. Congress has repeatedly defended and continued these protections. On Wednesday, a court majority watered them right down to nothing.
The Republican appointees elevated partisan concerns over the rights of minority voters.
In her dissent, Justice Elena Kagan laid out the stakes of what the court had just done, and repeatedly chided the majority for downplaying the gravity of its holding. Wednesday’s decision in Louisiana v. Callais “could destroy most of the majority minority districts that in the past 40 years the Voting Rights Act created,” Kagan wrote, joined by Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson. The decision has “thus laid the groundwork for the largest reduction in minority representation since the era following Reconstruction. Under cover of ‘updat[ing]’ and ‘realign[ing]’ this greatest of statutes, the majority makes a nullity of Section 2 and threatens a half-century’s worth of gains in voting equality.”
This case is not the first that the Roberts Court has taken to dismantle the Voting Rights Act, but it may be the last. It is likely the final nail in its coffin, and the lid is now so firmly in place that it is improbable that any plaintiff will be able to pry it open and avail themselves of the law’s protections. This court, under Chief Justice John Roberts, began its assassination of the law in 2013, striking down the requirement that jurisdictions with a history of discrimination get pre-clearance for new maps and changes in voting rules. The court went on to make it harder to win cases against discriminatory voting laws that block minority voters from casting their ballots. And in a related line of cases, the justices green lit partisan gerrymandering and made it increasingly difficult to prove racially discriminatory map-drawing had occurred. The Callais decision marries these two lines of cases, destroying the Voting Rights Act while elevating permission to conductpartisan gerrymandering above minority voting rights.
The dissent opens with a hypothetical that illustrates the import of the majority’s decision: Imagine a state with a history of virulent racial discrimination, in which Black and white voters prefer different political parties. The population is 90 percent white, save a single county, shaped like a circle, which is 90 percent Black. The Black voters elect a representative of their choice because they belong to one congressional district. Then “the state legislature decides to eliminate the circle district, slicing it into six pie pieces and allocating one each to six new, still solidly White congressional districts,” Kagan writes. “The State’s Black voters are now widely dispersed, and (unlike the State’s White voters) lack any ability to elect a representative of their choice. Election after election, Black citizens’ votes are, by every practical measure, wasted.”
Congress, under the Voting Rights Act, forbid this kind of racial vote dilution. Under Callais, the Roberts Court brings it back. Indeed, if the white majority in the dissent’s hypothetical seeks to hand all their state’s congressional districts to Republicans, then the Black population cannot have a meaningful vote because they would choose a Democrat. “The majority straight-facedly holds that the Voting Rights Act must be brought low to make the world safe for partisan gerrymanders,” Kagan writes. “For how else, the majority reasons, can we preserve the authority of States to engage in this practice than by stripping minority citizens of their rights to an equal political process? And with that, the majority as much as invites States to embark on a new round of partisan gerrymanders.” Notably, the majority does not dispute this. Alito does not counter that this hypothetical district—the paradigmatic Section 2 district—would survive Wednesday’s opinion. It’s a damning silence that tacitly admits just how sweeping his decision is.
Partisan gerrymandering, the court’s preferred tool for dismantling Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, is not a constitutionally protected practice. In fact, it’s long been viewed as a big problem. As recently as 2017, the Supreme Court appeared poised to limit extreme partisan gerrymandering and its obviously corrosive impact on democracy and individual rights. But two years later, after Justice Anthony Kennedy was replaced by Justice Brett Kavanaugh, the court swung in the other direction. In Rucho v. Common Cause, Chief Justice John Roberts ruled that federal courts could not adjudicate partisan gerrymandering claims because they were ill-equipped for the task. Rucho “did not pretend that partisan gerrymanders were something in need of safeguarding,” Kagan recalled in her Callais dissent. “To the contrary, the Court conceded that they were ‘incompatible with democratic principles’ and ‘lead to results that reasonably seem unjust.’” But, seven years later, the majority has transformed partisan gerrymandering into a weapon with which to extinguish the political voice of minority voters.
Partisan gerrymandering—indeed any partisan concern that a legislature might raise—can now perform the same function that Jim Crow tactics did prior to the Voting Rights Act. There’s no need to resurrect poll taxes or literacy tests when legislatures can simply draw maps to exclude minority’s preferred candidate from winning. Against any accusations of discrimination against minority voters, legislators can simply invoke a political motive and prevail. The Voting Rights Act was “born of the literal blood of Union soldiers and civil rights marchers,” Kagan wrote. Callais not only tramples the Voting Rights Act, it creates the scaffolding upon which to build a new discriminatory political system.
Defenders of the Roberts Court chafe at the accusation by liberal critics that it is guided by partisan concerns rather than faithful application of the law. But on Wednesday, the Republican appointees literally elevated partisan concerns above the individual and collective rights of minority voters. They ruled that helping your preferred political party trumps the rights of Black and brown citizens. It’s hard to imagine a less justifiable decision—or a more precise representation of this court’s agenda.
RFK Jr. Has Met His Match in This California Congressional Hopeful
Richard Pan is no stranger to blood. As a pediatrician, he was trained for its inevitability. But unlike your average medical professional—and despite his approachable and buoyant demeanor—he’s had menstrual blood launched at him in protest. He’s been assaulted on the street by a person livestreaming the attack on Facebook. He’s been the subject of racist memes comparing him to Asian despots. He’s encountered demonstrators clad in t-shirts depicting his face smeared with blood. He’s gotten plenty of death threats, too.
Oh, and by the way, he’s running for Congress.
What’s with the hate? Most of it stems from the fact that during his tenure as a California state senator, Pan authored some of the nation’s strongest vaccine laws. In 2015, he introduced legislation that nixed the ability of parents to use “personal beliefs” to exempt their children from the routine immunizations required for public school enrollment. Four years later, he wrote a bill cracking down on fraudulent medical exemptions for vaccines, which passed despite protesters’ clamorous attempts to shut down the Legislature. “They brought the militia to the capital,” Pan recalls.
“I like to say I met RFK Jr. twice. I debated him twice. I beat him both times.”
“When we came out of the hearing room, I was shaken by the level of vitriol, and I was almost in tears—but Dr. Pan was so calm,” says Leah Russin, a parent who, concerned about high rates of vaccine exemptions in California schools, began working with Pan to generate support for the 2015 bill.
Opponents had been bussed in from around the state—mostly mothers who described their children as “vaccine-injured”—to address lawmakers in Sacramento. As anti-vax firebrands yelled into the microphone and religious leaders promised imprecatory prayers, Pan stood and listened calmly. “It was like the ocean lapping against a wall without eroding it at all,” Russin remembers.
This scene repeated in 2019, but escalated to include the blood throwing and even a bodily assault. “It was the roots of what we now call the MAHA movement,” Russin says, and Pan endured their “crucible.”
Pan, now 60, his dark hair peppered with gray, ditched his usual coat and tie for our interview, opting for a crisp blue Oxford shirt. He has never been too rattled by the vitriol, he tells me: “When you resort to violence, then I think you’ve already admitted you’ve lost the argument.”
After four years in the California Assembly and 12 in the state Senate, Pan termed out and took a hiatus from politics—returning to his teaching post at UC Davis School of Medicine. But the rise of the vehemently anti-vaccine Make America Healthy (MAHA) movement and its erratic figurehead, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., has compelled him to jump into the national ring, where his résumé, unflappability, and knowledge of vaccine science and its deniers make him uniquely qualified to push back.
Pan in 2024, during a Sacramento Bee-KVIE mayoral forum.Hector Amezcua/The Sacramento Bee/ZUMAHaving tousled with the anti-vax movement for decades, Pan has watched it shift from a hodgepodge of religious fundamentalists and lefty hippie types toward a more violent, right-leaning contingent obsessed with personal freedoms and urged along by peddlers of bogus cures. “As a physician,” he says, “I learned a lot about both the diseases and the vaccinations themselves, but I had to learn more about this anti-vaccine—not just ideology, but all their myths.”
Suddenly, “the concept of a health system broadly not meeting someone’s needs clicked in his mind—you could see the world open up to him.”
This knowledge, he believes, is his best weapon against vaccine dissenters, including RFK Jr., who butted heads personally with Pan after showing up in Sacramento to argue against his public health bills. “I like to say I met him twice. I debated him twice. I beat him both times,” Pan says. The first time was a true debate; the second not so much. During a hearing on his 2019 bill, other anti-vax witnesses didn’t leave enough time for Kennedy to speak. Sitting next to the pediatrician, he grumbled something, whereupon Pan said, “It’s not my fault. You know that your guys didn’t figure this out.”
A 15-minute slot on the floor of the California Senate is one thing, but Kennedy has since gained a powerful national platform—watching him spew misinformation during a raucous four-hour Senate hearing last September served as the final straw for Pan’s return to politics. Soon after, Pan announced he would run for the House of Representatives, challenging Republican incumbent Rep. Kevin Kiley in California’s Third congressional district.
The Third District contained a sliver of left-leaning Sacramento, where Pan lives, along with a large tract of the more conservative Eastern Sierras. But he’d flipped a Republican seat during his first bid for elected office. Maybe he could do it again? Plus, Gov. Gavin Newsom was mounting a campaign to redraw California’s electoral map in response to an aggressive gerrymandering effort by Texas Republicans. The political landscape Pan was launching himself into was about to be overhauled.
The child of Taiwanese immigrants, Pan was born in Yonkers, New York, and raised in Pittsburgh. He knew he wanted to be a doctor since the third grade, he remembers, after he read a book from the school library about (of all things) blood. It took another few decades for him to find his penchant for politics, but he began straying from the conventional med-school track while studying biophysics at Johns Hopkins in the late-1980s.
He had taken up a genetics research project between semesters, but another lab published findings that made it moot. “Oh, great, now I have to find a new project for the summer,” Pan recalls thinking.
That’s how he began working with Gerard Anderson, a professor of health policy who needed help collecting data for a book on how Medicare can fail to meet the needs of people with multiple chronic diseases. “I would have never anticipated him going into politics,” Anderson told me.
The trauma of ICE’s abuses isn’t limited to “the person it happened to,” Pan says. “It’s the person who’s witnessed it. It’s the person who hears about it.”
Pan had people skills, his former mentor recalls, but was overly focused on the details. “In biophysics, you’re dealing with very minute, specific topics,” Anderson explains. But as Pan delved deeper into the work, “all of a sudden the concept of a health system broadly not meeting someone’s needs clicked in his mind—you could see the world open up to him.”
Pan likes to say that he traded a micro view of health for a macro one: “We need people to discover the next great cure. We also need people to work on being sure people can get access to those great cures.”
To that end, he spent his summers during medical school on rotation with the Commissioned Corps of US Public Health Service, which places medical professionals in regions of the country that are experiencing public health crises. His first assignment was in a Pennsylvania trucking town, where the locals weren’t too concerned with infectious disease; they wanted officials to address an epidemic of domestic violence. The next year, the Commissioned Corps dropped him into a Philadelphia-area clinic at the center of a measles outbreak fueled by fundamentalist churches whose congregations refused to vaccinate their children. These experiences, Pan says, “really made me think about social determinants of health before that name was popular.”
This public-health lens informed his work on a range of policies, even ones with seemingly no medical connection. His core issues as a state legislator, including affordability, housing, and violence prevention, are also prominent features of his House campaign—as is countering President Donald Trump. But Pan says he doesn’t view his opposition to the administration’s agenda as separate from his medical obligations.
Part of his work as a pediatrician—he continues to treat low-income children at the Sacramento County Health Center—is to determine whether his young patients have experienced trauma. Because unaddressed, trauma is itself a risk factor for the kinds of chronic diseases RFK Jr. and Trump promised to tackle. (In fact, the administration has slashed research grants to scientists who study them.) And now, on Trump’s watch, we have “armed, masked agents going around breaking into people’s houses without warrants, breaking into people’s cars, children worried that their parents may not be home when they come home from school,” Pan says. “Think about the chronic impact of that trauma.”
“It’s not just to the person it happened to,” he adds. “It’s the person who’s witnessed it. It’s the person who hears about it—that our own federal government is in defiance of our Constitution.”
There’s no shortage of ways to portray the second Trump administration as a threat to people’s wellbeing, but its detrimental actions on vaccines and health coverage, in Pan’s view, are only a part of why medical professionals should feel obliged speak out. Because policies that make people fear for their rights and freedoms constitute their own public health crisis.
The anti-vaxxer stalking Pan wore a t-shirt depicting Pan’s face splotched with blood, and the word “LIAR” sprayed across his glasses.
Congress has its share of physician members, but the majority of the 20 currently serving are Republicans. And most have supported Trump despite his detrimental public health policies and appointees. The Senate’s four MDs all voted to confirm RFK Jr., for example. But the rise of MAHA and the Republican gutting of Medicaid have prompted other doctors to launch Democratic congressional bids—counting Pan, at least three are running in California.
After voters approved Newsom’s redistricting plan, the district Pan had planned to run in, the Third, suddenly tilted liberal. A game of musical chairs ensued. Democratic Rep. Ami Bera, the incumbent in the adjoining Sixth District, announced a run in the Third. So Pan pounced on the Sixth.
His prospects look decent: 70 percent of voters in the newly drawn Sixth already know Pan pretty well—they’re his former constituents. And as the dust settled, Pan secured several key endorsements, including from the Sacramento Bee. Still, the race is anything but decided, especially now that Pan may get his match-up with a conservative incumbent.
Last month, Kiley announced he, too, would run in the Sixth—not as a Republican, but as an independent. His incumbency in the Third has given him a big money advantage. As of late March, per the most recent disclosure report, he’d raised nearly five times as much as Pan or Thien Ho, the Sacramento County district attorney who is also running as a Democrat and is slightly ahead of Pan in fundraising. But Kiley’s rebrand may not be enough to get him elected in the freshly left-leaning Sixth. He was endorsed by Trump in 2022, and has consistently voted with his conservative colleagues in the House.
In some ways, the challenges Pan will face in Congress if elected are not that different from what he confronted as a state legislator. He drafted the 2015 vaccine bill in response to a nonfatal measles outbreak in Disneyland, then the largest since 2000, when the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention declared the virus eliminated in the US. But that outbreak was only about 3 percent as big as the ongoing wave, which has resulted in 4,080 confirmed cases, 344 hospitalizations, and three deaths since the beginning of 2025. Roughly 93 percent of those afflicted were unvaccinated.
A few months into Trump’s first term, Pan and Russin got on a plane to attend the first March for Science in DC. They weren’t the only envoys from California’s vaccine wars. As they ambled down the National Mall with the rest of the procession, two familiar faces caught up. One was Joshua Coleman, a prominent anti-vaxxer from the Sacramento suburbs, and the other was Pan’s: Coleman’s sign and t-shirt bore a depiction of Pan’s face splotched with blood, and the word “LIAR” spray painted across his glasses.
Coleman has been a “perennial person,” Russin told me. Even after getting into legal trouble, he kept popping up, sometimes donning Star Wars themed costumes that obscured his identity. He followed Pan throughout the march, shouting accusations and documenting his actions for a 30-minute highlight reel he later published on YouTube. At the end of the video, Coleman stands on a DC sidewalk in the rain, beaming: “I ruined his day!”
Well, maybe. Much of the rest of the video consists of Pan strolling down the mall in his white coat, chatting with other science supporters and taking pictures with fellow physicians, despite Coleman hovering just a few feet behind. Beyond the occasional moment when Pan gestures towards the camera with a shrug, Coleman might as well be invisible—at least to Pan. Other science-minded demonstrators circle by with uneasy looks. A few bold ones block Coleman’s camera and ask him to leave.
All of this happened before anti-vax influencers helped convince nearly a third of Americans surveyed that childhood vaccines do more harm than good, before some of those right-wing skeptics were placed in key public health posts, and before Pan’s opponents began resorting to violence.
Yet though the political power dynamics have shifted immensely in a relatively brief period, Pan doesn’t plan to change how he responds. “To a certain degree,” he says, “some of the threats that I get are no longer about me. It’s about scaring other people, because they know I won’t give in.”
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Five candidates, five questions, one big decision: Meet the voices vying to lead Santa Cruz – and get ready for the June 2 primary
Five candidates are competing to become the city of Santa Cruz’s next mayor: Ami Chen Mills, Ryan Coonerty, Gillian Greensite, Chris Krohn and Joy Schendledecker. Coonerty and Krohn have held the office before, while Chen Mills, Greensite and Schendledecker are well-known activists, none of whom have ever held political office. Lookout has covered the race here.
Lookout asked each candidate five simple questions we think will give readers a sense of who they are, what they stand for, and how they could shape the future of the city. We include their responses here in alphabetical order.
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The first vote happens in the June 2 primary. Santa Cruz uses California’s “top-two” system, meaning all candidates run in the same race, regardless of party. If one candidate gets more than 50% of the vote, that candidate wins outright. If not, the top two finishers move on to a run-off in November.
Whether you’re already following the race or just getting up to speed, here’s a look at each candidate – in their own words – before you cast your vote.
You can also see the candidates live at Lookout’s May 7 candidates forum at Hotel Paradox featuring these mayoral contenders, along with District 4 candidates Scott Newsome and Hector Marin, and District 6 candidates Renee Golder and Gabriella Noack. Get more information and RSVP for free here.
Ami Chen Mills Ryan Coonerty Gillian Greensite Chris Krohn Joy SchendledeckerHave something to say? Lookout welcomes letters to the editor, within our policies, from readers. Guidelines here.
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Supreme Court ruling on voting won’t change California districts, but could hurt Democrats
This story was originally published by CalMatters. Sign up for its newsletters.
Wednesday’s Supreme Court ruling narrowing the Voting Rights Act undermines legal protections that have helped Latinos gain representation in politics California Democrats and activists say.
The case centered on the boundaries of a Louisiana congressional district. The court found by a 6-3 majority that Louisiana had relied too heavily on race to decide the borders.
“One may lament partisan gerrymandering, but … partisan gerrymandering claims are not justiciable in federal court,” wrote Justice Samuel Alito for the majority. “And in a racial gerrymandering case like the one before us, race and politics must be disentangled.”
The ruling scales back Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which prohibits voting practices that discriminate against people based on their race.
The ruling will not change California’s congressional districts, which were redrawn to favor Democrats after voters approved Proposition 50 last November. Partisan gerrymanders are permitted under the Constitution, the Supreme Court has previously ruled.
The decision also nullifies the California Republican Party’s “Hail Mary” attempts to invalidate the state’s new maps, which the GOP argued were a racial gerrymander to favor Latinos.
But when it comes to House majority math in the U.S. Congress and which party clinches a majority in the November election, the curtailing of Section 2 could make Democrats’ Prop 50 gains moot.
Gov. Gavin Newsom put forward the measure after Texas Republicans redrew congressional boundaries to favor the GOP. Prop 50 was meant to help Democrats pick up five additional California seats.
After the new ruling, several Southern states in particular could redraw their maps to eliminate “majority-minority” districts that were drawn to magnify the power of nonwhite voters. Such a move could oust as many as 12 Democrats, according to a New York Times analysis, and shift the long-term balance of power in the House toward Republicans. The GOP could then control Congress’s lower chamber even if the party loses the popular vote by a wide margin.
Newsom called the new ruling “outrageous.” Attorney General Rob Bonta, also a Democrat, said in a statement that while it’s unclear what impacts the changes will have on California, the ruling overall endangers minority voters in other states.
“While the full impact of this ruling is still uncertain, we know from past experience that decisions striking down, or effectively gutting, provisions of the Voting Rights Act are often followed by new state laws that restrict access to the ballot for voters of color,” Bonta said in a statement.
Kristin Nimmers, policy and campaigns manager of the Black Power Network, said in a statement that the decision rolls back “generations of progress.”
“The ability of voters to challenge discriminatory districts manipulated to drown out people’s voices based on race is a critical safeguard against being silenced,” Nimmers said.
In California, Voting Rights Act violations aren’t only a memento of Civil Rights-era discrimination. As recently as 1990, a federal judge cited Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act in declaring the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors had unconstitutionally gerrymandered their districts to exclude Latino voters.
Section 2 required that redrawn district maps must be “equally open to participation” from protected groups — including racial minorities. The Supreme Court decision on Wednesday left Section 2 intact, but significantly curtailed how it could be applied by raising the bar for violations to “a strong inference that intentional discrimination occurred.”
The high court’s three-justice liberal minority argued that the changes to Section 2 effectively dismantled the Voting Rights Act. The conservative majority on the court has been narrowing the law since 2013.
Conservatives in California celebrated the ruling.
Chris Kieser, senior attorney with the Pacific Legal Foundation, said the ruling was a victory long hoped for by California conservatives who had argued that Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act improperly used race in redistricting.
“The very idea of a majority-minority district and having a candidate of their choice is kind of antithetical to democracy,” Kieser said. “Voting is an individual right, it’s not a group right.”
The Voting Rights Act has been primarily used to help the state’s growing Latino population achieve political representation from the 1960s to the 1990s. Thomas A. Saenz, president and general counsel of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, said the ruling is unlikely to have much immediate impact in California.
The ruling won’t affect California’s recent redistricting effort, he said, nor will it affect the independent state redistricting commission’s decisions.
“I don’t believe there is any challengeable gerrymandering in this state,” Saenz said.
But Rosalind Gold, chief public policy officer of the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials Educational Fund, said the ruling has dire long-term implications for Latino representation in California.
“By eviscerating the Voting Rights Act, this could open the door to counties and localities looking at how they used Section 2 to draw their maps and challenging those maps,” Gold said.
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California’s race for secretary of state shows partisan divide over how to count ballots
This story was originally published by CalMatters. Sign up for its newsletters.
California Secretary of State Shirley Weber, who made history in 2021 as the first Black person to hold the office, is seeking a second four-year term.
As the incumbent and the only Democrat in the field, she will almost certainly cruise to victory in November. She faces only one serious challenger: Orange County Supervisor Don Wagner, a Republican. No Republican has won a statewide race since 2006.
ELECTION 2026: Read more local, state and national coverage here from Lookout and our content partners
During her tenure, Weber has faced criticism for California’s slow ballot-counting process — so slow that projected winners of state legislative races are often sworn in before Weber’s office certifies the results. Under state law, county election officials have 30 days to count ballots and conduct audits. Critics, including Wagner, say the time frame undermines voters’ trust in the state’s election integrity.
In an interview with CalMatters, Weber dismissed the concerns as an issue President Donald Trump drummed up to pick on California. She argued it’s important to count every ballot and that most outcomes are known before she certifies the results anyway.
“I know the value of being fast for some folks,” she said. “For me, accuracy is far more important.”
Wagner criticized Weber for doing little to lobby state lawmakers to speed up the ballot count. He said he would roll back the practice of sending universal mail-in ballots to every voter, which the state made permanent during the COVID-19 pandemic, though that would require legislative approval. He said he’d also support legislation to move up the deadline to certify election results.
“Rather than wait 30 days, let’s make these changes that are right now causing people of all parties and no party to question: ‘Geez, is that really a fair election?’” Wagner said.
Weber, a former San Diego assemblymember, was appointed to the position by Gov. Gavin Newsom in 2021 and later won a full term in 2022. The daughter of Arkansas sharecroppers who fled the Jim Crow South, Weber drew on her family history and campaigned on expanding voter access and boosting voter turnout.
Over the past five years, Weber has overseen the administration of contentious elections that drew the national spotlight, from the recall against Newsom in 2021 to the congressional redistricting fight last November. She said she has focused on expanding voter outreach to rural corners of California and encouraging voter registration on high school and college campuses — something she said she would continue to focus on in her second term if she is reelected.
Weber has been in court several times defending California election laws. She has sued local governments for violating election law while also defending the state’s election administration against legal challenges from both Democrats and Republicans. She most recently fended off a lawsuit by Trump’s Department of Justice seeking voter registration data in California.
Weber said she fought to defend Californians’ voting rights. “If we were giving [voter information] away like candy, who would trust us … to protect their records?”
Weber has also faced criticism from advocates who say the state hasn’t done enough to make voting accessible. Disability advocates sued her in 2024 — albeit unsuccessfully — over state election laws that do not allow voters with disabilities to return their ballots electronically.
Former Assemblymember Don Wagner, a Republican from Irvine, is running for secretary of state. Credit: Rich Pedroncelli / Associated PressWagner, the Republican challenger, wants to present an alternative to Weber, even though he acknowledged that a GOP upset would shock even himself. But if he were elected, Wagner, who also served in the state Assembly, said he’d garner enough national attention to use the office as a “bully pulpit” with the Democratic supermajority in the state Legislature. He said he would require voters to display ID while voting, which also would require a new law. A GOP-backed voter ID ballot initiative on Friday qualified for the November ballot.
Wagner argued that the goal is to restore voters’ trust in state elections.
“I am not one of those Republicans who is going to be out there telling you that unless a Republican wins, the election got stolen,” he told CalMatters. “What I am saying is I believe folks on either side of the political aisle and in the middle question the integrity.”
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Pajaro Valley Unified School District on Wednesday declared an impasse in ongoing negotiations with the teachers union, setting the stage for possible intervention by a state-appointed mediator.
In a letter to district staff, PVUSD Assistant Superintendent of Human Resources Kit Bragg said a previous proposal to give teachers a 7.77% salary increase while capping medical benefits was an attempt to “increase take-home pay while also adjusting benefit structures to strengthen long-term fiscal sustainability.”
“We brought this forward in good faith, hopeful it would serve as a starting point for meaningful dialogue,” Bragg wrote. “Recognizing the parties have substantial differences, PVUSD is requesting the state to appoint a neutral mediator to assist the parties.”
Bragg said the district’s responsibility is “to pursue agreements that are both competitive for employees and financially sustainable for the district.”
“Our goal is to offer competitive salaries, maintain strong, restructured benefits, ensure fiscal responsibility, and continue strengthening our programs to support improved student outcomes,” he wrote.
But the Pajaro Valley Federation of Teachers says the cap is a nonstarter, arguing that the modest salary increase does not cover the increased costs of their insurance plans—roughly $12,000 per year.
PVFT President Brandon Diniz said the union is also seeking smaller class sizes and lower caseloads for special education teachers.
Diniz said a message sent to teachers Wednesday afternoon asking whether they would support a strike showed overwhelming support. The survey runs through May 11.
“We’re going to be gearing up and ready to take all avenues available to us in this process,” he said.
The district’s announcement came about a month after it sent layoff notices to 85 teachers, a number Diniz expects to grow as the May 15 final layoff deadline approaches.
In addition, the district is looking to address its $29.3 million deficit by considering closing schools with low enrollment.
“They’re eliminating teachers through layoffs,” Diniz said. “We’re now looking at closing schools. Our students can’t afford for us to continue with this status quo, business-as-usual approach. So we want to see some movement on class sizes, and we’re not willing to budge on that benefits cap.”
The union plans to hold a rally before the next PVUSD board meeting, scheduled for May 6 in the Watsonville City Council chambers.
“We’re hoping to see our members and the community show up in force,” he said.
If mediation fails—a process that takes roughly a month—the union can request a three-member panel (one union representative, one employer representative and one neutral chair) to review the evidence and issue a nonbinding report with recommendations for settlement.
If no agreement is reached after that, and following a required 10-day quiet period, the district can make its last, best and final offer, Diniz wrote. If that offer is rejected, the union could then consider a strike.
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