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American Cult Story
59:53
I've Had It Podcast • Feb 17, 2026

American Cult Story

Christian Nationalists Are All in on Trump—and Vice Versa
New Republic • Feb 17, 2026

Christian Nationalists Are All in on Trump—and Vice Versa

President Donald Trump is on the fence about whether he will be accepted into heaven. At the National Prayer Breakfast earlier this month, he said that he may not “qualify,” before clarifying that he was joking and he “probably should make it.”Despite this uncertainty about his spiritual future, Trump does understand that white evangelical Christians have always been key to his political success, supporting him by wide margins and helping to guide him to the White House twice. But that dependence is mutual: For a significant number of white evangelical Christians, support for Trump is not only a core part of their faith identity but is inextricably intertwined with their vision of what the country should be—and what steps should be taken to impose that vision.New polling released Tuesday by the Public Religion Research Institute found that 67 percent of white evangelical Christians qualify as Christian nationalist adherents or sympathizers, meaning that they believe the United States is a nation founded on Christian principles and should be governed as such. The new PRRI poll also found that Christian nationalist beliefs are strongly correlated with Republican Party identity and support for Trump.“Christian nationalism, I think, absolutely has to be one of the primary lenses that we understand, really, the turmoil in our politics today,” said Robert Jones, the president and founder of the Public Religion Research Institute. The measure of Christian nationalism was determined by respondents’ answers to five questions: whether they believe that “the U.S. government should declare America a Christian nation,” that “U.S. laws should be based on Christian values,” that “if the U.S. moves away from our Christian foundations, we will not have a country anymore,” that “being Christian is an important part of being truly American,” and that “God has called Christians to exercise dominion over all areas of American society.”Race alone is not predictive of support for Christian nationalism: A majority of Hispanic Protestants also hold Christian nationalist beliefs, and far smaller percentages of white Catholics, white mainline Protestants, and Hispanic Catholics are adherents or sympathizers. Christian nationalist ideology predominates in the South and Midwest. If you look at a map, the states that supported Trump in 2024 are also the states with the highest share of the population that identify as Christian nationalist adherents or sympathizers. States with a higher number of Republican legislators also correlate with higher levels of Christian nationalism.“This relationship between, say, favorable views of Trump and Christian nationalist adherence are fairly linear,” Jones said. The graph showing the relationship between a state’s approval of Trump and its level of Christian nationalist beliefs is a “textbook example of a positive correlation in a scatterplot,” he continued.As compared to “skeptics” or “rejecters” of Christian nationalism, adherents and sympathizers are also more likely to agree that “because things have gotten too far off track, true American patriots may have to resort to violence in order to save our country.” Christian nationalist beliefs were also strongly correlated with support for authoritarianism. Seventy-three percent of adherents, and 68 percent of sympathizers, agreed with the statement that “President Trump is a strong leader who should be given the power he needs to restore America’s greatness.”Americans who hold Christian nationalist beliefs are also more likely to be aligned with Trump’s positions on immigration, with the majority of adherents and sympathizers agreeing with the “great replacement” theory that “immigrants are invading our country and replacing our cultural and ethnic background,” and with the idea that undocumented immigrants should be deported without due process.Trump has embraced Christian nationalism in his second term. Among other moves, he created a Religious Liberty Commission, which includes several conservative Christian faith leaders and commentators. In remarks to the commission in September, at the Museum of the Bible, Trump attacked the separation of church and state, and said, “As president, I will always defend our nation’s glorious heritage, and we will protect the Judeo-Christian principles of our founding.” Meanwhile, at right-wing provocateur Charlie Kirk’s memorial service that same month, Vice President JD Vance encouraged Americans to “put Christ at the center of your life.” The month prior, the official Defense Department social media account posted a recruitment video overlaid with a Bible verse, in keeping with a trend of agency social media echoing white supremacist messaging.“If you were only to look at those feeds and say, ‘What does it mean to be an American?’ you would see this portrayal of being white and being Christian as normative for being truly American,” said Jones.Support for Trump among white evangelical Christians is not necessarily immutable. A recent Pew Research Center survey found that the share of white evangelicals who say they support all or most of Trump’s policies declined from 66 percent in February 2025 to 58 percent in January 2026. Only 40 percent said they are extremely or very confident that Trump acts ethically while in office, as compared to 55 percent who said the same last year.The PRRI poll found that the majority of Americans do not hold Christian nationalist beliefs, with 37 percent qualifying as Christian nationalist skeptics and 27 percent as rejecters. These percentages have largely remained stable since PRRI first began asking questions on Christian nationalism in 2022. But Jones noted that Christian nationalism long predates Trump, stretching back to the foundation of the country. The notion of the United States as a “Christian nation” was used to help justify such policies as Manifest Destiny and westward expansion, as well as slavery and Jim Crow.The debate over Christian nationalism will again be in the spotlight as the nation celebrates the 250th anniversary of the country’s founding. In preparation for it, Trump has launched an “America Prays” initiative to exhort people to pray weekly for the nation. Come July, the anniversary will be characterized by dizzying levels of pomp and circumstance, with Trump aiming to reshape the very foundations of the nation’s capital for the festivities.“The country will be reflecting collectively about our identity.… Who are we as a country? How were we founded? And who do we want to be in the future?” said Jones. “Whether we are a pluralistic democracy or whether we are a white Christian country—it’s going to be one of the key fault lines and debate points around the 250th anniversary.”

What’s Behind the Centrists’ Resistance to the “Resistance Liberals”?
New Republic • Feb 17, 2026

What’s Behind the Centrists’ Resistance to the “Resistance Liberals”?

For over a decade, many centrist pundits have reflexively dismissed resistance liberals. We were considered, if we were considered at all, through ugly dismissive stereotypes. Talked to, when talked to at all, with a self-satisfied condescension. It was core to the centrists’ identity that they were the smart, sophisticated, savvy ones.  However, following a steady drumbeat of events—most recently the federal occupation of Minneapolis—it’s becoming undeniable that America’s Dear Leader is indeed a threat to liberal democracy. And, for that matter, that “fascist” is a reasonable term for him and many in the MAGA movement.The columnists have slowly updated their language. But in doing so, they have, as a Marxist would say, become involved in a contradiction: What they were saying for a decade was wrong, yet they cannot be wrong. Liberals were right, yet we cannot be right.Jonathan Rauch, in a recent Atlantic article, conceded that Trump was a fascist. He nonetheless started with a swipe at the people who he was admitting had been correct about this. They had overused the term “to the point of meaninglessness,” he insisted. Especially guilty were “left-leaning types who call you a fascist if you oppose abortion or affirmative action.” The whole argument was strange. “Trump has revealed himself,” Rauch concluded, implying that the information had only just come to light. Yet the evidence he drew on spanned the era, much of it dating back to 2015–16. Were those who used the same evidence to draw the same conclusion a decade earlier wrong to do so? Rauch doesn’t say, but he seems to think so.For others, it’s simply axiomatic. Economics blogger Noah Smith noted that recounting the horrific actions of ICE sounds like “the kind of thing crazy Resistance Libs would rant about on Bluesky.” Anti-Trump liberals are, it seems, just crazy. Even being utterly and obviously right doesn’t change that.Nate Silver, in a long conversation with Matt Yglesias, talked around the claim that resist libs were right. The whole thing just seemed to annoy him. He ultimately bypassed the question altogether. It was difficult for him to even understand us as he was “taking a more detached and analytical method”; whereas the liberal “approach might feel more emotionally right,” that didn’t make it correct.And there it is. Female-coded resistance liberalism is too emotional—Nate is riffing off a tweet calling us “hysterical pussy hats”—men like him and Matt are rational. I talk about this symbolic sexism a lot, but then it’s hard not to—it really is gender all the way down.What’s an example of our hysterical irrationality? Well, “the Resistance Libs are sometimes spectacularly unfocused,” and there’s often “a mismatch between what stories are ‘objectively’ most important” and those we pay attention to. Nate’s first, and only, example of this is Jeffrey Epstein. Apparently caring that the president was implicated in an international pedophile ring is emotional and unfocused. The point of stressing Epstein isn’t merely the immediate harms to his victims (though these are not trivial). Many who feared the worst about Trump pointed to the fact that he was an abuser because, to them, it showed how he thought about power. This was the correct inference. It is not incidental to Trump’s political project how many of its key figures—including the president himself, Elon Musk, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, and Robert F Kennedy Jr.—have had serious assault allegations made against them. It informs how they behave and how they justify themselves. Of course, in the eyes of “rationalist” commentators, that analysis becomes an emotional and unfocused overreaction. I’m increasingly noticing how little that is written about resistance liberals cites one of us directly. This “libs were right” piece by Anne Lutz Fernandez is infinitely better than anything thus far surveyed, because it was written by a liberal who has held these views all along—it discusses the gendered aspect of how fears were dismissed and links this to the logic of abuse, and the fact that this is an administration staffed by abusers. With some honorable exceptions like Jamelle Bouie, such voices are absent from the most significant national publications. Perhaps those publications should be more interested in them. Or, for that matter, perhaps the press could engage with the ordinary voters they so casually dismiss with unpleasant stereotypes. They were, after all, right. Those who feared the worst from the start are a minority, to be sure, but not a vanishingly small one. As far as I’m aware, this feature by me is the first piece of reporting attempting to profile such voters—Cassandras, as I called them. The resistance to listening to them seems basically pathological. Resistance liberals might have been right about Trump, but they’re wrong about how to combat him, is a common retort. Smith makes this point, as did Nate Silver and Megan McArdle. Yelling about democracy is counterproductive; it’s more effective to focus on regular political issues. Once again, these writers show they have not engaged at all with what resistance liberals are saying. They imagine there are two paths to the same goal (winning an election) and their messaging is a better strategy for getting there. But the argument on our side is that things have deteriorated so much that an election victory is not enough—we must undertake an ambitious program of accountability and reform in order to create liberal democracy in America again. Without ICE abolition, criminal trials for rights violations, court reform, and reform of electoral institutions, the country will remain a competitive authoritarian state and will be vulnerable to descending into full fascism. To do all those things, we will need to sell the Democratic Party and at least half the electorate on this notion. Which, in turn, will require them accepting that things are as bad as we say they are. Hence, we have to talk about it. Another Democratic presidency that attempts to return to normalcy by power of example alone will doom us. In terms of regular policy, in the world of online resistance liberalism, a lot of interesting work is being done. Off the top of my head, I’d recommend Samantha Hancox-Li on the intersection of feminism and housing policy or state-level governance, myself (if I may) on new narratives on immigration or how liberalism thinks of itself, Ned Resnikoff on housing, Alan Elrod on American virtue, and Sam Deutsch on congestion pricing.Compare the media’s interest in work like this to their interest in the latest pseudo intellectual skull measuring to come out of the right. For a long time now, they’ve had severe gender hang-ups about listening to resistance liberals (and, for the same reasons, been fascinated with “real” red-state Americans). Now reality is very, very obviously validating us, and it’s breaking their brains. The hour is getting very late for the loudest megaphones on our side to be in the hands of people so crippled by gender insecurity. Being called a “soy boy” is preferable to dying in a concentration camp, and we resist libs have lost all patience with those who seem to find this a hard choice. Am I, perhaps, being too harsh? I am, after all, talking about people who are coming round to my view somewhat. Should I not welcome them into the movement?I think this sort of argument can conflate two things: welcoming their support and welcoming their leadership. I think we should welcome anyone’s support; I’d never throw a vote back. The question I’m asking is, are these people best placed to lead? To be the most significant voices and define the strategy for the anti-Trump coalition? Centrist columnists want the power of leading the coalition without any responsibility. They assign to liberals and the left responsibility without power. We are blamed for election losses, but we may not set election strategy. We are responsible for liberalism’s image, but we are not given its loudest megaphones. And now, even talking about us seems to send them spiraling into unprocessed feelings of masculine inadequacy. Resistance liberals have stopped accepting this. Our numbers have grown. We are now the majority of votes on our side, and I suspect the majority of those protesting in No Kings, or heroically resisting ICE. Contrary to stereotypes, we are a cross-class coalition from every corner of America, representing tens of millions of people. This is what we mean when we say we “got it right.” It’s not patting ourselves on the back or being mean for the sake of it. Resistance liberalism is asserting that it should be listened to. That our strategy is the correct one. And that we are ready to lead the antifascist coalition. 

Data Centers Are the Enemy We’ve All Been Waiting For
New Republic • Feb 17, 2026

Data Centers Are the Enemy We’ve All Been Waiting For

The Trump White House wants tech companies to publicly commit to ensuring that their data centers won’t raise electricity prices, stress local water supplies, or complicate grid reliability, Politico reported last week. This kind of voluntary compact is mostly useless, of course. It’s exactly the sort of thing you’d expect from the crowd whose official environmental policy is that it doesn’t matter if pollution kills us—a logic that recently led them to officially stop regulating greenhouse gases.And yet: This administration felt a need to interrupt its virtually nonstop death drive to draft this compact, and then to make statements that make it sound more aggressive than it is: “I just want to assure people that we’re on it,” Trump trade adviser Peter Navarro told Fox viewers on Sunday, floating the surprising news that his administration would “force” companies to absorb the cost of data centers. That means the mass revolt against AI data centers is working.All over the country, communities have been fighting data center proposals for a variety of reasons. Some want to protect their grids and water supplies. Others fear data centers will push up energy bills, stress the electrical grid, and use up land that would be better preserved for nature conservation or farming. Then there’s more general rage at the tech oligarchs, as well as terror of the impending dystopia of AI—from job loss to Hollywood visions of malevolent machines that prioritize their own survival over ours. “The infrastructure that they need for this corporate domination isn’t built in the cloud,” says Mahroh Jahangiri, senior policy counsel at Local Progress, which has been supporting local officials with technical and policy expertise on this issue. To get that “physical infrastructure” built, tech companies are “relying on the structural power that they’ve exerted over democratic institutions for a while to be able to do whatever they want to.” But what we’re seeing right now, she says, is that “local communities and their elected leaders really are finding themselves on the front lines of this fight,” and are finding that they do, in fact have some power to say no to Big Tech. In Wisconsin, for example, at least four communities—DeForest, Caledonia, Yorkville, and Greenleaf—have recently defeated data center proposals, either by getting local authorities to reject them or by causing so much trouble that the companies withdrew their plans. Counties and cities in Georgia have passed moratoriums on data centers.Communities have even, using public relations and protest, resisted data centers in places where the town has no authority to regulate, as is the case with a proposed data center opposed by Ypsilanti residents that would be sited on University of Michigan land.In fact, at least 19 Michigan communities—including Bay City and Grand Rapids—are considering banning data centers or have already done so (the latter include Howell, Saginaw, and Pontiac). The Michigan rebellion is particularly significant given that in 2024, the state promised massive tax holidays—no taxes till 2050, if they meet some extremely mild conditions—to companies willing to build data centers. That’s a big incentive for companies to site their data centers in Michigan. But local communities are not welcoming them. As town after town takes up the issue, local officials described packed community meetings and data center backlash unlike anything they’ve ever seen before. “So many people come to this issue because all of a sudden, overnight, there is a data center proposal or a facility going up in their community often with very little notice, without their knowledge, without any meaningful transparency or public decision-making,” Alli Finn, partnership and strategy lead at the AI Now Institute, said. “And the impacts are material and, in many cases, immediate: pollution and traffic from construction, air pollution from operation of diesel generators.” Finn pointed to water use, as well as the “most immediate” effect for many: “raising their electricity bill.” But these are also fights about class power, as is abundantly clear in a beautifully granular Politico article about a data center fight in Northern Virginia, which shows the lengths that those who profit from data centers must go to circumvent local democratic governance. Says Finn, “There’s a bigger context of how decisions are made and by whom, to serve whom. Who this buildout is serving, who’s getting these tax breaks, where these public dollars are being spent. And many people correctly see that it’s not for them, that it doesn’t serve them, that they are being shut out of critical conversations about how the resources in their community are used.” Asking even bigger and even more disturbing questions, Finn says, many are wondering, about the tech oligarchs and corporations, “what this future is that they have chosen for us?” The political class has been slow to address this anger. But there are signs that some are finally catching up. Some gubernatorial candidates are now placing opposition to data centers at the center of their campaigns. In Georgia, Michigan, New York, and Wisconsin, and elsewhere, legislators are proposing statewide moratoriums on their construction.Conventional wisdom seems to hold that the climate movement is in retreat. It can certainly feel that way, with fewer headline-grabbing disruptions or protests in the news these days. It can be hard to focus on long-term issues like climate change when the national political situation is so dire that the president is threatening public officials with hanging and his masked goons are shooting protesters in the street. But the data center rebellion offers an interesting asterisk in that narrative: When it comes to energy and climate issues, people will act when there are immediate local effects. And these hyper-local fights can, in turn, start to shape national narratives. It also shows that many of us rise to the occasion when we are given something to do. One ubiquitous complaint about climate change is that it can be hard to know, as an individual, what to do about such a global, diffuse problem. And similarly, it’s hard to know what an individual can do about the other abstract and distant problems that a data center represents: a destructive tech mogul class unaccountable to the masses, the surveillance state, a possible tech bubble, the affordability crisis, a far-right leadership class that doesn’t get off its phone long enough to even notice the great outdoors it is destroying. Most of us can’t give up our work and family responsibilities to protest every day in Washington, D.C., or Silicon Valley. But an individual data center brings the entire constellation of problems to your town—and many Americans are showing that they know what to do when it shows up.As one of the few national leaders to understand mass public anger, Senator Bernie Sanders has proposed a national moratorium on data centers. That the reactionaries at The Washington Post think this is “Bernie Sanders’ Worst Idea Yet” shows that it’s hit a nerve, and reflects a grassroots momentum that the Bezos class fears. Congressional Democrats, with their usual genius for the zeitgeist, are not getting on board with his measure, probably because far too many are beholden to tech industry donors. Fortunately, not everyone in this party is a fully owned subsidiary of Anthropic or Google; Democratic politicians in New Jersey and Virginia ran against data centers last November and won their elections, as did data center skeptics on the Georgia Public Service Commission.Of course, in many cases, local officials are getting steamrolled by Big Tech operators. Far too many of these data centers are under construction as I write this. But the resistance is growing, and is plainly shaping local and state policy. It’s possible that soon, the big civilizational battle will be less between Democrats and Republicans, and more between Big Tech—and similar industries like Big Oil and Big Pesticide—and its opponents. The future of humanity, the natural environment—and local democracy itself—may depend on the grassroots fights that are underway now.

Tyra Banks, 'I Am Disappointed' in You
Jezebel • Feb 17, 2026

Tyra Banks, 'I Am Disappointed' in You

In the new <em>America's Next Top Model </em>doc, Tyra flat-out refuses to discuss the fallout between herself and her former friend, Jay Manuel, who was more than happy to detail his side of the story.

Transcript: Trump Press Sec Goes Off Rails on Fox amid New ICE Horror
New Republic • Feb 17, 2026

Transcript: Trump Press Sec Goes Off Rails on Fox amid New ICE Horror

The following is a lightly edited transcript of the February 17 episode of the Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent. Now that Donald Trump appears to be largely drawing down his violent occupation of Minneapolis, the administration is resorting to a time-honored tradition: declare victory and go home. In a bizarre interview, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt went full cult and called the operation a resounding success. But she also spun it as targeting criminals, effectively revealing that it’s no longer possible to tell the truth about Trump’s actual mass-deportation agenda. This is a moment of unusual political vulnerability for Trump and the White House on this issue. But are Democrats doing all they can to exploit it? We think they’re not. So we’re talking to Anat Shenker-Osorio, a Democratic message strategist who often argues that Democrats let polls limit their ability to exploit critical political opportunities. Anat, nice to have you on. Anat Shenker-Osorio: Thank you so much. Sargent: So border czar Tom Homan announced this week that the “surge” in Minneapolis will now end because he doesn’t want to see any more bloodshed. Time will tell how real that is, but I can report that some people in the state do think it’s real. Now listen to Karoline Leavitt address the situation on Fox News.Karoline Leavitt (voiceover): Operation Metro Surge in Minnesota has been a resounding success. It has resulted in the detention and deportation of more than 4,000 illegal alien criminals. Let me repeat: 4,000 illegal alien criminals just from Minnesota alone. And while the surge is coming to an end, immigration enforcement in Minnesota absolutely will not.Sargent: So Leavitt calls this a resounding success, even though two Americans were murdered, there were massive outbreaks of violence and civil conflict, there’s been widespread public opposition, and Trump’s numbers on immigration have absolutely cratered. Anat, what did you think of that?Shenker-Osorio: I guess when your entire job is shoveling crap and playing cleanup crew for the Gestapo and fascism, you’ve got to put some pretty nice wrapping paper on that. Obviously, what’s going on here—and it’s pretty plain for almost all of America to see, other than the calcified core of the MAGA base who will never, ever, ever be moved—is that this is a regime of the bullies, by the bribes, for the billionaires, that’s hell-bent on destroying us.As I like to call them, they’re a MAGA murder regime, and they’ve proved it in every conceivable way. Here it is to the naked eye, and it’s horrifying. It’s just really putting into plain relief what, sadly, voters were incapable of truly understanding in 2024, which is that when someone prints, say, a 920-page document of their agenda, perhaps they mean to enforce it.Sargent: Yeah. Well, it seems to me that Leavitt is talking in a way that reflects an awareness on the part of the White House political operation that people really do understand what the Trump agenda is actually about right now, because it’s been kind of bludgeoned into their heads by everything we’ve seen. What do you think of that?Shenker-Osorio: The question is really: What did people internalize and understand the phrase “mass deportation” to be? It’s clearly not what’s going on here.What Leavitt is doing is what MAGA has always done and what all authoritarians require, which is to foment a counterrevolution against a revolution that never was. It is to say to people, “We are going to protect you from those people.” And those people need to be dehumanized and portrayed as not merely “less than,” but an actual threat to us—in order to hide the fact that, actually, the minority in America that’s harming you is the billionaires.Unless and until they can keep ginning up—keeping their base engaged and enraged around this idea that they are the strongmen who are getting rid of “bad people” and making you safe and all the rest of it—then you will ignore the fact that, basically, they’re screwing almost all of us over in every possible way.Sargent: What did you think about her messaging there? And what did you think she was actually trying to do by calling everybody a criminal, when it’s apparent to everybody—through Instagram, TikTok, their phones—that these people are not criminals? Who are they talking to? What are they trying to do?Shenker-Osorio: So, first and foremost, what they need to do is reassure their base because, in the dark corners of the internet where their base resides, they’re seeing people—not just in Minnesota, but outside of it—celebrate this as a temporary reprieve. None of us are silly enough to think this means ICE is done doing damage in lots of places, but this is a win.And so team “liberty and justice for all,” team “neighbor-ism,” is celebrating. And that, of course, pisses off the MAGA base. So, first, Leavitt needs to reassure those people: “No, no, don’t worry. We actually did our job. We actually did the task we promised you we’d do, and we’re going to keep at it.” Because they’re mad. They wanted the Insurrection Act. I mean, they plainly wanted an escalation. They don’t want a drawdown.And then the second thing is that there’s not enough of their base in order to maintain this. And so they need to also continue to create plausible deniability for what they are doing and why they are doing it. And that argument, as you know, has always been that they are in Minnesota and beyond it in order to protect us and get rid of the “bad people.” Because sure enough, Americans are catching on that they are the bad people.Sargent: Yes, I think that’s exactly right. And I just want to point out here that they actually got their bloodshed. Two Americans were murdered, and there were all sorts of other violent outbursts and major civil conflict erupting all over the city, and there was actual terror experienced by the local population. The core point, though, is that the bloodshed they got isn’t enough. They want absolute subjugation—meaning MAGA, right? Shenker-Osorio: Yes, absolutely. They want absolute subjugation, and they want a justification of their worldview—that they are the “good people” who are restoring America, “making America great again,” and bringing us back to an era, an epoch, where the “good people” were in charge, they had total domination, and the “bad people” of all sorts were brought to heel and doing as they were told.What Minnesota keeps showing over and over and over again is the moral clarity of people standing with and for each other across races, across origins, across accents, across faiths. And that is a fundamental sort of wound to the core narrative of MAGA.Sargent: 100 percent agree. In fact, that’s exactly what’s getting people so pissed off. It’s the fact that white Americans are showing a lot of solidarity with immigrants. Now, let’s listen to a bit more of Karoline Leavitt.Karoline Leavitt (voiceover): Mr. Homan was also able to achieve a level of cooperation with local police to arrest left-wing agitators when they are engaged in unlawful behavior, which has led to a calmer situation on the ground. You’re no longer seeing videos of these agitators engaging in unlawful activity to break up ICE’s operations, which, again, are continuing. Nothing will ever stop President Trump and this administration from targeted immigration enforcement focusing on the worst of the worst criminals in American communities, and that includes in Minnesota.Sargent: Two things about this: First, note the eagerness to portray Trump and Homan as cooperating very effectively with local leaders. Now, that runs counter to Trump’s frequent effort to publicly treat Democratic local leaders like shit for sport.And by the way, I just want to point out here—talk about something that’s going to piss off MAGA—this idea that Trump and Homan are actually trying to work with local Democrats? MAGA just wants them to be treated like absolute garbage.Second, note that Leavitt actually calls the operation “targeted at criminals” while also saying that they’re not backing down in the slightest. I mean, this is like North Korea cult propaganda stuff, but I think it shows that they’re in a weak position politically on all this. What did you think of what you heard there?Shenker-Osorio: I completely agree with you that it shows that they’re in an indefensible position, and so they have to basically just invent verbal spaghetti or diarrhea or whatever.I have a slightly different interpretation of when she is saying, “We have gotten cooperation.” What I hear her saying is: We have forced these Democrat elected officials—who have been naughty, naughty, naughty and misbehaving and disobeying and aiding and abetting bad things because they have the temerity to actually believe that all people have rights, God forbid—and now we’ve made them obey. We’ve made them cooperate with us. We’ve basically brought these naughty children to heel. That’s what I hear her saying. Sargent: That is very interesting. I tend to think, though, that at the same time, at least part of the messaging seems to be directed at the middle of the country in the sense that I think that independents and moderates are extremely uncomfortable with the aspect of MAGA that treats half the country as “occupied territory,” as it were. You know what I’m saying?Shenker-Osorio: I do, but actually the interpretation, as I understand it, is congruent with that. Basically, what she is saying to me is: The reason why this thing got out of hand is because these Democrat—as they like to call it, “Democrat”—elected officials weren’t doing what they should. They were getting in the way. They were harming this “law-enforcement operation,” as they would call it.And now that they’ve finally straightened themselves out and did the right thing—purportedly collaborating with ICE, all of which is just invented bullshit—that’s why we can leave. The bloodshed is their fault. And that’s her justification to middle America for why stuff that, as you said, middle America isn’t pleased with occurred.Sargent: Yeah. Their messaging is really tortured because it’s not really possible to make both MAGA and the middle of the country happy. I think that’s the essence of this.Shenker-Osorio: Yeah, I agree.Sargent: So we’re seeing this really awful news coming out of Minneapolis as well, which is that ICE is now admitting that federal agents appear to have lied about a confrontation that led to a shooting.So it looks like what happened is that federal agents initially claimed that two men they encountered assaulted them with a broom and a shovel, and then one of the agents shot one of the two migrants, but that seems to have fallen apart. And prosecutors are saying new evidence contradicts the officers’ story. And it now looks as if ICE is basically admitting that the officers may have lied about the incident. What do you think of this latest turn? Shenker-Osorio: So in order for the MAGA storyline to function—which, just to be clear, I don’t think that it does; I’m saying from their own perspective—they need everything that they’re doing to be framed, whether it’s inside of the Twin Cities or, you know, in another spot, as “evil forces”: immigrants and their misbegotten allies, leftist nutcases who are doing the wrong thing versus well-meaning law enforcement that is keeping us safe.That is the story that they require. And what’s happened—and I would argue there were sparks and kernels of this, for example, with the “inflatable frogs” in Portland and the broader inflatable cast of characters—Minnesota has done it extraordinarily. It’s not the only place that has done it. Basically, to challenge that overarching narrative of who are the “good guys” and who are the “bad guys”: What is actually going on? What is the motivation? What is the outcome?So, just focusing in on Minnesota, what I would argue has happened narratively—and we can see this in public opinion; we can see it in just streams of the discourse that we monitor across social media—they’ve flipped the frame. Now, it is people of good conscience of various backgrounds and colors and accents and so on versus the evil regime. And in that storyline, MAGA is the evil regime. And so this story about protesters purportedly assaulting ICE agents is part of trying to have that first story be true. But of course, it isn’t.Sargent: Yeah, I think one way to think about this also is that a lot of mainstream America now, I think, sees very clearly that what ICE is doing in these cities has nothing in common with actual law enforcement. It’s wanton, destructive violence. It’s fascist violence, basically being carried out at the behest of Trump and Stephen Miller to essentially punish a population for being cosmopolitan, diverse, and pro-democracy.And so they are in a really difficult spot now because ICE is a pariah agency. It’s seen as fundamentally something illegitimate now—to control recklessly violent, crazed killers almost, it seems like in some of these videos. It really has that feeling to it. And so they—they really struggle at this point to make ICE violence look legitimate.In cases like this, the story really falls apart badly for them when the ICE officers are said to have lied about being provoked into their own violence. Shenker-Osorio: Yeah. It’s also the broader point that the currency of modern life and politics, unfortunately, is attention. There’s a Substack called Share a Voice that did a really, really beautiful rendering showing which topics—over the course of all of 2025 and into 2026—have ever been in ascendancy as the top thing that are talked about across social media.Basically, the short version of it is that in 2025, it was Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump. And the only two moments in which some other topic eclipsed something Trump had said or something Trump had done—as kind of the most talked-about across various platforms—was the debate over Alex Pretti’s murder and the Epstein files.And so they know that, like many other drugs, you have to keep taking bigger hits to get high. And so now we’ve got the attention economy onto not just the outlandish—to be kind—horrific, criminal, et cetera, things that Trump is doing constantly. Every day there’s another one, in this kind of, I will command the attention; I will get the discourse to be about me.Now, Minnesota sort of stole the spotlight, if you will, for good and for ill—and by ill, I mean the absolute horrors that have been visited upon those communities. But also they’ve stolen the spotlight by showcasing the heroism. Alex Pretti was murdered in an act of standing up for another person. And same, of course, with Renee Good.And so that’s just, as we’ve been talking about, it’s complicated the narrative. And so trying to introduce this story that, actually, the protesters assaulted ICE—that’s another sort of gambit into the attention economy, to, go look over there, basically.Sargent: Right. Or the migrants assaulted ICE—which just seems to have been the story that these ICE agents told.All right. Let’s get to the rubber meeting the road now, which is Democrats. I think in many ways, Democrats are finding some spine on this stuff. And there are certainly some Democrats who are very good on it. No question about that. They’re condemning the brutality. They’re holding the line in some of these shutdown talks, trying to force reforms to ICE and all that. That’s all good stuff.I still think, though, that there’s a missing piece from the point of view of Democrats. There’s something else Democrats could be doing here, which is elevating the idea that immigrants and immigration are good. Now, this is something you’ve talked about. I have a piece at TNR.com on JB Pritzker and Gavin Newsom—the Illinois and California governors—and how they have tried to crack new ways into figuring out how to fight the information wars on this stuff.And one thing we talk about in the piece is that Gavin Newsom actually tries to elevate and bring more visibility to immigrants doing good things in communities. And you mentioned earlier that Minneapolis is doing this. I think Democrats could be doing more of it. Can you talk about that?Shenker-Osorio: Yeah, thank you for asking the question. Unless and until there is a different prevailing narrative about who immigrants are and what they represent here in our cultures and communities, we’re always going to be on the back foot. And we’re going to be on the back foot morally, and we’re going to be on the back foot electorally.Because Republicans, again, rely upon having this villain front and center in order that you not see that the actual—you know, if you wanted to know who took all your money, here’s a hint: It’s the people with all the money. That’s how you can tell.And so as long as they can say, It’s immigrants that did this, or It’s inner-city crime that did this, or It’s trans folks that did this, or It’s women with the temerity to want reproductive autonomy over their own bodies, then there’s always going to be this made-up “other” that is to blame.And it is vital and critical—it cannot be said enough how vital and critical it is—to rein in ICE and DHS and to understand that there is no reforming an agency whose mission is to actually harm and destroy. You cannot reform that. But that is not enough. That is not going to get the kids out of camps or close them. That’s not going to bring people home.And it’s not going to create the conditions that we require to actually win big in this midterm and beyond it. Immigrants are neither villains, nor are they victims, nor are they “doing jobs nobody wants.” They are a representation of this dream and this courage that we’re supposed to admire.Sargent: Anat Shenker-Osorio, thank you so much for saying all that. I really hope Democrats try and pay a little more attention to what Minneapolis is actually accomplishing. Thanks so much for coming on with us. We really appreciate it.Shenker-Osorio: Thank you for having me.

Jeffrey Epstein’s Sinister Shadow Over West Asia
Scheer Post • Feb 17, 2026

Jeffrey Epstein’s Sinister Shadow Over West Asia

Kit Klarenberg Substack In late January, the US Department of Justice dumped millions of documents detailing the criminal activities of US oligarch and serial paedophile Jeffrey Epstein, including his vast rolodex of paedophilic celebrities, financiers, politicians and public figures. The tranche is so vast, independent journalists and researchers have barely scratched the surface yet. But preliminary […]

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