I didn’t have Peeping Tom drones on my bingo card for 2026.
But then, on July 14, the West Brandywine Police Department let residents of Wallace Township in Chester County know, via Facebook, that for a month or so, they’d been investigating (and had witnessed) a drone flying over homes along several roads in my neighborhood at night, between 8 and 11 p.m.
“It has been reported that this drone may be photographing properties, including inside the homes,” stated the police department’s Facebook page. “Those residents that live in that area are being urged to be mindful of this aircraft, and to be diligent, especially if you have skylights on the roof. These drones can be equipped with high resolution cameras and have extreme zoom capabilities.”
Huh. Creepy.
Since we don’t have young children whose images, captured without our consent, might find their way onto the more sinister reaches of the web, and since our house isn’t full of luxury goods to be cased, I didn’t worry much.
Maybe if the drone operator chanced to peep through our windows, he’d take pity seeing the proliferation of dust bunnies and proactively book us a deep-cleaning service appointment?
But the West Brandywine Police Department’s Aug. 10 update upped the ante: “We have seen the comments that [the drone] may be looking for a ‘pet’ or some other legitimate reason. This is NOT the case.”
Screen capture of the West Brandywine Police Department’s Facebook post on Aug. 10 updating residents of Wallace Township on the continued drone sightings.Screen capture
It is particularly disconcerting because Pennsylvania regulations stipulate that for nighttime flying the drones “need to remain within line-of-sight of the remote pilot on the ground.” Even if you aren’t unnerved at the idea of someone deploying a little electromechanical spy to look into your windows at night (when the lights inside make people and things clearly visible in a way they wouldn’t be during the day), the idea that the person doing so is on your property — or close enough to keep the drone in sight — should be.
I can easily imagine folks who already feel vulnerable — the elderly, women living alone, or people who have experienced domestic partner abuse or who have filed for protection orders — being terrified by that prospect.
The thing is — despite the West Brandywine Police Department’s gratifyingly proactive approach to residents’ privacy concerns — it is the Federal Aviation Administration that’s in charge. The state reports that some 11,000 people have an FAA remote pilot rating, and if this peeping drone is flown by a registered pilot, there may be little anyone can do.
Responses to West Brandywine PD’s Facebook posts about this have been predictably mixed in this libertarian-leaning corner of the county. Outrage and worry about surveillance and invasion of privacy, of course, but also lots of drone-flying enthusiasts who chafe at any talk of curtailing their ability to pilot their unmanned craft wherever and whenever — property owners be damned.
Also, since there are a lot of hunters in this neck of the woods, there are a good number of comments about shooting the drone down if it is sighted. I hasten to add that — as tempting as it might be to shoot the flying snoop right between its blinking red lights — drones are considered aircraft, and it is a federal felony to damage or disable them — punishable with a fine of $250,000 and up to 20 years imprisonment.
If you think none of this should matter to you because, hey, you don’t live in Wallace Township and no drone has been haunting your nights, think again. Aerial surveillance by drones is widespread, and largely unregulated. According to the Electronic Privacy Information Center, there are “no clear rules protecting individual privacy against drone surveillance. Despite the fact that drone surveillance implicates significant First Amendment and Fourth Amendment interests and common law privacy rights, the law around conducting aerial surveillance very much remains in a gray area.”
Regardless of what happens at the federal level, I hope that what has been unfolding in Wallace Township prompts Pennsylvania legislators to reconsider Act 78’s limits on local regulation of unmanned aircraft in order to better protect residents from unwarranted and nuisance drone surveillance.
Meantime, the West Brandywine Police Department wants residents to contact them if they see the drone on their property.
“Each home that this drone enters, are additional counts of offenses and if the pilot is identified sanctions will be levied, including criminal charges, confiscation of drone and revocation of their license, (if licensed),” the police department wrote in its latest Facebook post. “The use of a drone to invade someone’s personal privacy, (especially home space), will not be tolerated and the maximum, allowable penalties will be pursued.”
And maybe, just maybe, the fines accrued cumulatively will be enough to make drone operators think twice before unleashing their propeller-driven ghouls to hang around our windows in the middle of the night.
While the world is focused on the failures of Donald Trump’s warmongering in Iran and “peacemaking” in Gaza, too little attention is being paid to a potential new Mideast flash point sparked by messianic Israeli settlers on the occupied West Bank.
I have witnessed such settler violence during reporting trips over the years, but it is reaching unprecedented heights (or depths) as Bibi courts right-wing votes before Israeli elections in October.
Far-right extremists are even encouraging Jewish-Arab violence atop the Temple Mount, the most sacred site in Judaism and the third holiest in Islam, which could ignite anti-Israel religious violence and terrorism in the region.
The extremists’ goal — as clearly spelled out in a “Decisive Plan” by current Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, who also oversees administration of the West Bank — is to present the Palestinians with three choices: legalized apartheid and repression, massive ethnic cleansing (labeled “voluntary emigration”) from the West Bank, or death if Palestinians resist.
The quibble over language that feeds debate over Israel in the United States — as in whether to call what’s happening in Gaza “genocide” — only distracts from the central problem. When Palestinians are offered nothing — meaning no political future or rights — they have nothing to lose. Unfettered occupation and ethnic cleansing will provoke resistance and terror attacks. It will be untenable in the long run.
What is more likely to happen is a third uprising on the West Bank, followed by massive bloodshed between Palestinians and settlers. It would guarantee a disastrous end to Trump’s Gaza project and to his Abraham Accords, which were meant to advance peace between Israel and Gulf Arab states. Yet, the president is clearly blind to how quickly his Mideast peace efforts are sliding toward disaster.
In desperation, 600 retired Israel Defense Forces generals and colonels, as well as retired intelligence and foreign service officers, recently wrote to Trump urging him to press Bibi to halt the West Bank violence.
I spoke to one of the group’s organizers, Nimrod Novik, a senior adviser to former Prime Minister Shimon Peres, a deeply experienced negotiator and distinguished fellow at the Israel Policy Forum, about his fears for the future if Israel’s policy toward Palestinians doesn’t change.
“What we will see in the West Bank in the next 90 days [before the Israeli election], you haven’t seen ever,” he warned. “The whole ideological right-wing extremist group, helped by the government, fears this is their last opportunity [to advance Smotrich’s goals]. If the Netanyahu government is ousted, the next government would deal harshly with Jewish terrorism.”
President Donald Trump listens as Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu speaks at President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club, Dec. 29, 2025, in Palm Beach, Fla.Alex Brandon
I would add a caveat: It isn’t clear how much a coalition of opposition parties, even if they were able to push Bibi out, would change policy toward Palestinians. The two largest opposition parties are against any future Palestinian state alongside Israel. But a new Israeli prime minister would likely try to reassert Israeli army control over army reserve units that support extremist settlers who regularly attack Palestinian civilians. And he might have less patience with radical groups of settler youths who roam unchallenged and even attack Israeli soldiers who try to block their violence.
Novik had a stark warning about what could happen if the violent settlers were allowed to continue their rampage. In certain security circles, he told me, “They think the settlers want to provoke a security crisis, and the West Bank might be the best opportunity.” He believes Jewish settler terrorism will produce revenge-seeking by Palestinians who are defending their families. Israeli security agencies, he added, are worried about a possible effort to provoke large-scale violence on the Temple Mount.
I still recall how a 1982 plot by Jewish religious terrorists to blow up the third holiest mosque in Islam atop the Temple Mount was discovered only at the last minute. “Even if they don’t bomb the mosque,” Novik pointed out, violence could still explode. Only recently, “one thousand Israelis in one day violated the status quo by praying on the mount.”
The status quo between Israel and Arab states, in place since the 1967 war, prohibits such praying, which is also banned by Israel’s rabbinate for religious reasons. Palestinians fear it indicates an imminent takeover of the holy site by Israeli Jews.
And unless a newly elected leadership permits the rebuilding of the West Bank’s Palestinian Authority, the body which technically governed Palestinians, there is no authority to counter Hamas. Bibi did everything he could to destroy and bankrupt the Palestinian Authority. What would happen with a new government is unclear.
What is clear is that Bibi’s tolerance of Jewish terror is leading to a clash in the West Bank, and is aimed at driving the population of Gaza out into the Sinai Desert by keeping two million Palestinians underfed, without schools or medicine, and living in tents.
Even liberal Israelis are still traumatized by Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, slaughter, and a new government will still tilt rightward. But a recent Israeli survey by the Israeli Democracy Institute shows that the largest share of respondents — among left, center, and even center-right — said authorities treat violence by Jews against Palestinians in the West Bank too leniently, with perpetrators rarely arrested and hardly ever punished.
Whether or not that poll hints at a particular voter response is also unclear.
However, Trump has a chance to stop his being labeled a complete loser in the Mideast by backing the opposition to Bibi, which may still carry weight with many Israeli voters. Yet no one should rely on Trump’s awakening to reality.
It will be up to Israeli voters to decide whether or not they accept Smotrich’s vision — and the consequences that are bound to follow if they do.
Do rich guys have to ruin everything? Apparently so. There came a time about 15 years ago when my soccer obsession got to the point where I felt I needed to pick an English Premier League team to root for, in addition to the U.S. national teams and the Union. Long story, but I went with Liverpool, in a city many consider the Philadelphia of the U.K., and it’s been a good ride, including a couple of trophies. On Monday, it was reported Amazon gazillionaire Jeff Bezos is buying 30% of the team. I’m officially out. Go, Leeds!
When did Trump’s ballroom become a national security fortress? We need answers.
Construction continues on a helipad and the White House ballroom on the South Lawn of the White House on Aug. 5.Tierney L. Cross
Donald Trump’s originally stated 2025 scheme to demolish the East Wing of the White House to make way for an oversized ballroom to hold state dinners and whatnot was bad enough: an unneeded, unwanted, gilded, and presumably tacky callback to Louis XVI, a massive monument to a modern let-them-eat-cake regime.
A year later, the project is better describedasan alleged ballroom — another bait-and-switch scam by America’s first grifter president. The fact that the public really doesn’t know how much this project actually costs — estimates have soared from the initial lowball of $300 million to now at least $600 million, but possibly more — or how much of that will be dumped on U.S. taxpayers is just the beginning of the problem.
Nearly 10 months after the president shocked Washington, D.C., and the rest of America by taking a wrecking ball to the history-packed East Wing, Trump has all but stopped talking about a black-tie party venue and instead rebranded the project as essential to national security.
When the D.C. federal appeals court on Friday ordered the White House, which never got congressional approval for either the demolition or the ballroom addition, to halt aboveground construction, Trump took to Truth Social and described the ruling as akin to treason.
“The Military and Secret Service are viewing this horrendous, politically motivated, and unlawful ruling as a National Security threat to our Nation in that the entire Complex is being built for the protection of our Country and, additionally, all future Presidents,” Trump posted, using language that’s probably never previously in human history been used to describe a “ballroom.”
Trump didn’t say in his post anything about crystal chandeliers, or great acoustics, or things you might expect in a world-class ballroom. Instead, he said the facility will have bomb shelters, a state-of-the-art hospital, top-secret military facilities, protective missile-resistant steel, columns, roofs, and beams, drone-proof ceilings and roofs, military-grade venting, and bullet-, ballistic-, and blast-proof glass.
It sounds like somebody is expecting a last tango in Washington.
Trump’s post was alarming — shocking, really — but in case anyone missed the point, or doesn’t know how to read, he also posted some AI-created renderings, which again did not depict waltzing diplomats, but instead showed a rooftop “DronePort” that was packed to thegills with ominous-looking military drones, manned by troops and also with armored vehicles that somehow drove up there. The vibe was Darth Vader’s Death Star, except with “military-grade venting” this time around.
There are two very different ways to look at all of this, and let’s start with the more benign one. Ever since the beginning of his second crack at the presidency, Trump — when he’s not pursuing his main projects of making billions of dollars, punishing his enemies, and staying out of prison — has been obsessed with placing his personalist stamp on Washington. Maybe that’s for his legacy, or maybe he just wants a Mar-a-Lago-by-the-Potomac to comfort his octogenarian mind.
Trump might not be able to crash weddings as he does at his Palm Beach, Fla., estate, but his ballroom idea would be close enough. Although he’s also sought and received donations for the project from the usual suspects of friendly billionaires and favor-seeking corporations, Trump also wants both additional dollars and — more importantly, in light of the appeals court ruling — a stamp of approval from Congress. That’s been a thwarted agenda item for GOP leaders on Capitol Hill for months.
But if Trump can’t sway Congress, he hopes to win over a U.S. Supreme Court where he has appointed three of the nine members. The White House knows that both Congress and the high court tend to fall in line whenever national security is invoked, while there is no constitutional right to foxtrot. So maybe all the military bluster is just political posturing for Trump’s latest real estate development.
But as the project enters its second year, it seems to have morphed into something a lot more disturbing than that. The pictures, descriptions, and accounts of Trump’s game here are sounding a lot more like the impregnable mountain lair of a Bond villain.
This is a man who fomented an attempted coup the first time he was asked to leave 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, and who saw how South Korea’s corrupt right-wing president was ousted after a massive throng of protesters overwhelmed key government buildings. Wasn’t it Chekhov who said you don’t put drones up on the roof unless you intend to deploy them by the third act? The two most likely scenarios for actually using Trump’s bunker — Civil War II, or World War III — are less than optimal.
This national security bunker isn’t the only thing that’s worrisome as Trump looks to the second half of what’s supposed to be his final term. As noted in this space recently, Trump has also extended the presence of National Guard troops in Washington through Jan. 20, 2029, which coincidentally is the scheduled last day of his term.
Since their arrival last year, the Guard troops — many from units in pro-Trump red states, and costing U.S. taxpayers at least $1.4 billion and possibly more — have often been spotted hanging around, or picking up trash as a kind of busywork. But residents and some advocates like Scott Michelman, legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union of the District of Columbia, are already complaining Trump is “treating [D.C.] like a police state.”
It raises the same questions as the alleged “ballroom.” The president is entitled to state-of-the-art security, and while the public doesn’t need to know all of the operational details, American taxpayers also can’t be expected to fork over hundreds of millions of dollars for these projects without truly knowing what they are for.
Democrats on Capitol Hill need to start demanding answers. On Monday, there was an encouraging report by the New Republic’s Greg Sargent that the opposition party is working to demand communications from the Justice and Interior Departments to explain why several people were wrongly criminally charged with vandalism at the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool when the actual damage was a botched repainting contract.
Congress can, and should, also flex its muscles over this ballroom fiasco — first by denying any public money for the project, and then by launching a similar investigation into the hasty demolition, the political fundraising, and the sketchy purposes for the project. Someone owes America the truth, and it’s not going to come from the current regime without a fight.
Whatever happens, the woman or man who hopefully succeeds Trump and sends those guard troops back to their own private Idaho in January 2029 is also going to have a giant mess in their backyard. But it’s better to have the ruins from a botched, halted construction project than from the Battle of Armageddon.
Yo, do this!
The California journalist Gil Durán has been paying attention to the political craziness coming out of Silicon Valley years before anyone else was, and now comes the big payoff in the form of a book that is not only incredibly timely but has the best title of the year: The Nerd Reich: Silicon Valley Fascism and the War on Democracy. Durán explores the strange beliefs of Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Marc Andreessen, and their friends, their obsession with building their own private “networked cities,” and their unlikely alliance with Donald Trump. I’ve been waiting on this one for a while.
August is always a great month for books. While Durán drills down on the high-tech enemies of liberty, the great writer Dave Zirin has a new tome about one of democracy’s heroes, the late historian Howard Zinn, his former mentor. Public intellectuals are still arguing about the merits of Zinn’s 1980 masterwork, A People’s History of the United States, but nobody disputes his influence on the national conversation. Zinn rejected American exceptionalism, but also spotlighted everyday heroes like labor leaders or civil rights activists who expanded our freedoms over two centuries. I’m looking forward to reading The People’s Historian: The Outsized Life of Howard Zinn.
Ask me anything
Question: Data centers are the flashpoint but the root problem is the unregulated AI that is sweeping up every keystroke and every written document then repackaging it as if original thought. How do we get a federal government mired in 2020 to begin legislating on AI? — Suzi (@wanderponder.bsky.social) via Bluesky
Answer: Great question, Suzi, and I think we all know the main reason why the body politic — and I’m talking about both Democrats and Republicans — have been so painfully slow to respond to voters’ widespread anxiety not only about noisy, polluting, resource-wasting data centers, but also to artificial intelligence itself. The reason is money. Silicon Valley AI developers have raised an unbelievable $220 million to spend on November’s election, and — while there are some disagreements within Big Tech about policy — most of the cash will go to the politicians least likely to regulatean industry badly in need of it. Cognitive computing is not only stealing our intellectual property, as you noted, but also our jobs, as well as our children’s ability to learn.The good news is that public backlash against AI is so strong that even a quarter-billion dollars may not be able to stop the movement. But it’s way past time to get money out of politics.
What you’re saying about …
I should have guessed that newsletter readers don’t have much more of a clue than Donald Trump about what to do about the giant mess in the Persian Gulf. I did get one thoughtful response from an emailer with a “cbluff” handle (Reminder: Please sign your real name to these responses) who said the Trump regime needs to send skilled negotiators — and be realistic. “I believe the U.S. will have to cede the Strait of Hormuz, allow Iran and Oman to collect protection money, remove sanctions and pay them so we can declare victory and leave,” they wrote. It’s hard to disagree. Once again, the United States has lost a war.
📮 This week’s question: Since the Democratic Senate primary win by Michigan’s Abdul El-Sayed last week, the mainstream media has been obsessed with the question of whether this year’s progressive surge, including candidates (although not El-Sayed) tied to the Democratic Socialists of America, is hurting the Democrats. What do you think? Are leftists bringing needed energy to a moribund party, or are they too out there to defeat the GOP in November? Please email me your answer and put the exact phrase “Democrats and the left” in the subject line.
Backstory on the day Trump left his press corps for dead
Catering trucks are parked at Air Force One on the tarmac as the motorcade carrying President Donald Trump arrives to depart following the NATO summit, at Ankara International Airport in Ankara, Turkey, on July 8.Alex Brandon
It was appalling enough back in late July when we watched a room full of some of America’s highest-profile journalists break bread with Donald Trump at the rescheduled White House Correspondents’ Association dinner in Washington, where the president got up and hurled crude insults at several of the media members. Many of us were disgusted that some of the nation’s most respected journalists would platform a man who has repeatedly called a free press “the enemies of the people.” But the White House press corps was in the dark about an even more disturbing plot twist.
Just 16 days earlier, Trump had left some of those journalists for dead — at least potentially — as human decoys who might be blown from the skies in a feared Iranian plot.
The stunning story came out late Monday night as I was writing this newsletter, with a scoop by the Washington Post, matched shortly, with some additional details, by the New York Times. The articles revealed a modern-day Air Force One kind of thriller that essentially involved a shell game with three different aircraft. It was triggered by what officials deemed was a credible Iranian assassination threat against the president when he traveled to a NATO summit in Ankara, Turkey — just over 700 miles from the border with the U.S. enemy.
This launched a series of events, beginning with a plan to abandon Trump’s new, $400 million gift-from-Qatar iteration of Air Force One for an older version that actually has more advanced defensive capacities. Trump was filmed boarding the replacement Air Force One, followed by the White House press corps and some traveling aides for the departure from Ankara to a U.S. air base in Great Britain. What those passengers could not have imagined was that Trump had somehow been spirited out “via a catering container that had been lifted to the opposite side of the plane,” and switched to a C-32A military plane for the flight to the U.K.
Then they kept the unwitting journalists and aides on the ground for a couple of hours before it was revealed POTUS was safely in Britain and the Iranians had been thwarted and … haha, of course that’s not what really happened. No, the press corps took off as human decoys — the latest sitting ducks in an idiotic war that never should have been launched in the first place. Thankfully, no one was hurt … this time. Journalists wondered why they’d been ordered to keep the airplane’s window blinds closed, which inspired this now ironic exchange between Trump and some journalists when they reunited for the flight from Britain back to the U.S.
Trump lied that he didn’t know of any specific plot against Air Force One, and then added: “I’m No. 1on their list, before you. But if I go, you go. Right?”
Apparently not.
Even as I write this in the middle of the night just hours after the Post and Times scoops, the internet is already flooded with memes depicting Trump crammed into one of those airport serving carts, or pigging out on the adjacent airline food. It’s funny to see that your president isn’t Harrison Ford punching out the terrorists, but, in reality, slinking away in a food truck, leaving other Americans in the line of fire, right?
No, it’s not funny at all. This whole episode is a grand metaphor for a careless president who smashes up things before retreating into his money or whatever keeps him going — not thinking twice about the fate of human beings in a squalid ICE detention camp or an Iranian girls’ school. Or bantering with the gaggle of journalists whom he abandoned after drawing a big target on their backs. The first media question at the next Oval Office event ought to be, “Why did you treat me like cannon fodder?” But I wouldn’t bet on that happening.
What I wrote on this date in 2016
It’s almost funny now, in a dark-comedy kind of way, to look back on the fateful summer of 2016 and remember what it felt like to be stubbornly convinced that something, anything, was bound to happen to stop the obvious insanity of a Donald Trump presidency. It seems so incredibly naive now to read what I believed exactly one decade ago, when I actually thought the success of a diverse and incredibly talented U.S. Olympics team in Brazil would expose the Big Lie of Trump’s racism. I wrote, “The exclamation point is the remarkable women’s gymnastics team led by individual gold medalist Simone Biles — so dominant you will easily forget they also celebrate the kind of diversity that is America’s best feature, not the bug that’s described by the bitter and the disaffected back home.”
The fight for America’s future is waged on many fronts, and I’m trying to keep up. Last week, I wrote about a fascinating political development that’s been largely flying under the radar screen: a movement out west to knock off GOP incumbents by creating one-on-one contests with feisty, populist independents. That means long-shot Democrats need to drop out — which has happened in Nebraska, Idaho, and South Dakota, but not in Montana. It’s both a bold plan to end the Republican majority on Capitol Hill and a sad commentary on the failed Democratic Party brand in the American heartland. This weekend, I wrote about the Trump regime’s latest assault on higher education — denying loans for students who major in fields linked to lower-income jobs — and the increasingly bleak future of a liberal arts education. I wondered why Democrats won’t fight harder to end runaway careerism and preserve college campuses as bastions of critical thinking.
This August feels like the calm before the storm in Philadelphia sports. Some of that is the excitement over the Eagles finally beingback in training camp and looking to regain that Super Bowl mojo as 76ers fans try to process, if that’s the right term, a once-in-a-lifetime offseason rebuilding project. But much of it is angst over the Phillies, who are clinging by their fingernails to a playoff spot despite adding the National League’s batting champ to a lineup that already includes home run king Kyle Schwarber, future Hall of Famer Bryce Harper, and one of baseball’s best pitching rotations. None of that matters when the Phillies don’t have a relief pitcher who can carry a lead past the 7th or 8th inning. The Inquirer’s ace sports columnists like David Murphy and Marcus Hayes have all asked the same question: Can this team be saved? The answers are just over the paywall, and you can leap over it just like Saquon Barkley at the first-down marker; all you need to do is subscribe to The Inquirer.
By submitting your written, visual, and/or audio contributions, you agree to The Inquirer’s Terms of Use, including the grant of rights in Section 10.
I oppose its current leadership and its policies in Gaza and the West Bank. But I support its right to exist as a Jewish state. And I reject the idea that Zionism is inherently racist or malevolent.
That’s why it’s important for me to hear from people who see Israel differently than I do. I need them to question, provoke, and challenge me. That’s how I learn.
And that’s also why I’m worried about the settlement Haverford College announced last week, pledging to protect Jewish students from antisemitic speech. In a statement, Haverford president Wendy Raymond declared that the college would not tolerate “discrimination, harassment, and bias” against “students who identify as Jewish” or “those who support Zionism.”
So does that mean you won’t be able to say “Zionism is racism” or “Israel is an apartheid state”? The lawyer representing Jewish students who sued the school — and who said she was “very pleased” with the settlement — seemed to think so.
“It’s a new form of antisemitism, saying, ‘Oh, no, I don’t hate Jews, I just hate Zionists,’” she said. “For a Jew to hear that was incredibly painful.”
I’m sure that it was. I’m Jewish, and anti-Zionist rhetoric is hard for me to hear, as well.
But that’s why I should hear it. Zionism is probably the most contested question on our campuses right now. Unless everyone can address it, freely and openly, we’ll never get a good purchase on it.
Wendy Raymond, president of Haverford College, pledged that the college would not tolerate “discrimination, harassment, and bias” against “those who support Zionism.”Jose Luis Magana
Ditto for Columbia, where I went to college 40 years ago. Back then, you could argue about anything. But now Zionism, too, is effectively off the table.
That’s because the university adopted the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of antisemitism. According to the IHRA, “claiming the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor” and “drawing comparisons of contemporary Israel policy to that of the Nazis” are antisemitic.
But a competing standard, the Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism, argues that “criticizing or opposing Zionism as a form of nationalism” or offering “evidence-based criticism of Israel as a state” are not, on their face, antisemitic. Haverfordʼs settlement seems to lean entirely on the first definition and ignores the second, which has not been adopted by the college or most other institutions, but was endorsed by Bucknell University’s faculty last year.
Under the IHRA definition, would a student or professor who said Israel was committing genocide in Gaza — like the Nazis did in Europe — face punishment at Columbia? I don’t think Israel’s action in Gaza constitutes genocide, but I know other historians do. And again, I need to hear from them.
In their 2024 lawsuit against Haverford, Jewish students complained that a professor called supporters of Israel “racist genocidaires.” I can understand why they felt “pain and harm” about these kinds of comments, as Raymond acknowledged at the time.
But you can censor anything — literally, anything — on those grounds. During the 2016 presidential campaign, students at Emory University said they were harmed by campus chalk messages backing Donald Trump. “Supporting him, repeating his catchphrases [is] an implicit attack on the Muslim, Latinx, Black, and other communities at Emory and across the country,” protesters declared. “This is not political expression; it is hate speech.”
And in 2021, Harvard biology professor Carole Hooven caused an outcry when she told Fox News that gender could take any number of forms, but sex is binary: male or female. After a colleague denounced Hooven’s “transphobic and hateful” comments on Twitter (now X), she became a campus pariah. Her mental health plummeted, and she resigned.
Like Zionism, the biology of sex is a hugely contested and complicated matter. And we won’t be able to learn more about it if we inhibit discussion of it.
How many people celebrating the new restrictions on anti-Zionist speech at Haverford would be OK with prohibiting claims that sex is binary? Likewise, would any of the critics who pushed out Hooven rest easily if critics of Israel were silenced, too?
We all want to have our own say, of course. But when we feel pained or harmed by someone else’s political expression, we call it hate speech. And we try to blot it out.
To be clear, nobody should be subject to threats of physical violence. Whatever you think of Zionists on campus, you can’t say you’re going to assault or murder them. That’s against the law, and our colleges should be vigilant in enforcing it.
But at Haverford, it would now appear, you can’t say anything negative about Zionism. Period. If you don’t think Israel should exist, you’re an antisemite. And you need to keep your big mouth shut.
I know some people on campus have been “deeply hurt” by anti-Israel rhetoric, as Raymond said in her statement last week. But once that becomes the barometer for what the rest of us can say, we won’t be able to speak — or listen — across our differences. Isn’t that why we gather at universities in the first place: to learn from each other?
Either you believe in free expression for everyone, or you don’t believe in it at all. Period.
Jonathan Zimmerman teaches history and education at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of “Schooling Citizens: How Education Can Save Democracy,” which will be published next spring by the American Philosophical Society Press.
This could be a win-win situation for both the students and the Keystone State.
Everyone who knows me recognizes how much I love Howard, which is my alma mater. To call the four years I spent on the campus in Washington, D.C., life-changing would be an understatement. It was the former leader of HU’s journalism department, Lawrence Kaggwa, who set me on my career path, informing me that I was going to work in the newspaper industry.
The first-time college students — some in tears — responded by posting videos on social media about their plight. They were hard to watch. Some went viral and even made the national news.
School officials defended what happened, saying payment notices had been going out since March about deadlines and enrollment requirements. Some students said they didn’t get them, or else received a notification on the same day their bill was due.
Nikiyah Clark told ABC News, “I was so scared because Howard University is my dream school, like, my grandma went there.” She hopped on a bus from Fairport Harbor, Ohio, to D.C. to advocate for herself in person. It paid off, because she has been reinstated into Howard’s first-year class.
But now Clark faces perhaps an even bigger hurdle: paying for tuition. Tuition plus room and board is $66,000, according to Howard’s website.
HU’s interim president, Wayne A.I. Frederick, called for an internal investigation into what went wrong, but it’s going to take a lot more than that to heal the damage to the school’s reputation.
“If another school in the city said that things had to be paid at a certain point, I think people would do that,” he told the Washington Post. “Nobody would make a fuss about the fact that somebody was suggesting a bill be paid on time.”
Howard University interim president Wayne A. I. Frederick sits for an interview July 29.Allison Robbert
And the fact is, HU needs the money. Trump administration officials ended a series of annual payments meant to support the construction of the university’s new hospital. That move resulted in a cut to the historically Black college or university’s (HBCU) annual federal appropriation for the current fiscal year of about $64 million, or more than 20%. The Chronicle of Higher Education reported on Thursday that HU has offered buyouts to 600 employees.
Still, that’s no excuse for how the first-time college students were treated. We expect more of institutions like Howard, which was founded in 1867 to educate newly emancipated Black Americans.
“HBCUs are known for being nurturing and family environments,” said Marybeth Gasman, who runs the Rutgers Center for Minority Serving Institutions. “That’s why this comes off as being kind of shocking to parents and students and some alumni, and some people in the HBCU community and beyond.”
As I pointed out earlier, expediting admissions here could be a real win-win both for the students unenrolled from Howard and Pennsylvania’s state colleges and universities. Incoming freshmen could further their educations, and state institutions — which have struggled with diversifying their student bodies and declining enrollments — can take a step toward changing those narratives.
No matter what President Donald Trump would have you believe, diversity matters.
“In higher education, we do a better job as teachers and as researchers when we work in a diverse environment,” David Oppenheimer, a leading scholar on issues of discrimination and equality, told InsideHigherEd.com earlier this year.
Oppenheimer, who is the author of The Diversity Principle, added: “Students learn more. In a science lab, scientists make more significant discoveries when the scientists working in the lab are diverse. It’s a real thing. It’s not just a psychological argument.”
Following all of the public outcry, Howard has readmitted more than 200 of the freshmen who had been dropped, but it’s unclear what all of the other students will do.
Shapiro should recognize that there’s a real opportunity here — and that Pennsylvania should take advantage of it.
There is one war Donald Trump is actually winning — unfortunately.
Clearly it’s not the ongoing fiasco in the Strait of Hormuz. But Trump and his MAGA culture warriors keep gaining new territory here at home in their all-out assault on knowledge, with America’s college campuses as the prime battleground.
The Trump regime is fighting to destroy liberal arts education in America, and this summer it opened a new front in the campaign to make going to college all about the narrow pathway to a job in a robot-driven economy — and little more.
A little-publicized new rule published last month by Trump’s Department of Education aims to end student loans to young people who major in fields that lead to jobs with below-average incomes. The rule won’t take effect until next year, and there remain real questions about how it might work and which programs would be most affected. But some experts are worried that training for essential jobs like social work or teaching will be harmed.
“I’m happy for an MBA to pay back every penny they borrowed,” Ted Mitchell, president of the American Council on Education and a former college president and education policymaker in the Barack Obama administration, told me last week. “But social workers and teachers shouldn’t be submitted to the same logic.” In other words, some jobs are more valuable to a healthy society than the dollar value we assign them.
Still, education experts who are critical of the Trump regime over many other policies say there could also be some good to come out of student loan reform, since the rule is likely to most heavily impact for-profit institutions, especially those that have abused the system to saddle young people with high debt and poor job prospects.
But Roosevelt Montás, who leads the Chang Chavkin Center for Liberal Education and Civic Life at Bard College, said the positive benefits of going after for-profit college scandals need to be weighed against the broader harm to the idea that a liberal education will give students more than a return-on-investment balance sheet.
Montás called the student loan rule “an example of how the Trump administration has found areas that, in fact, deserve criticism and require reform in higher education, and he has used these as a tool to destroy and weaken the system.”
This month, most of the nearly 20 million university students in the United States are drifting back to campus to begin a new academic year — with broad agreement across the political spectrum that American higher education is in crisis.
Undergraduate enrollment actually peaked in 2010, when that era’s economic crisis was at its nadir, and has declined gradually in most years since. Public trust in higher education — as with other large institutions — has plummeted even more steeply. You could write a book about how college access, the insane cost of tuition, and resentment between educational haves and have-nots drive our deep, bitter political divide.
The Trump regime is not letting this crisis go to waste. Ignoring the real roots of the problem — the steady privatization of getting a college degree since the 1970s — the MAGA government has been following the Project 2025 blueprint for waging an ideological war on campuses it sees as breeding grounds for future liberals.
The student loan rule is just the latest onslaught. In recent weeks, a White House policy paper mapped out a massive shift of as much as $200 billion away from grants for basic science on university campuses and toward work on artificial intelligence, or AI, with private companies competing for those dollars.
Meanwhile, a surprising number of universities — rather than fighting the Trump agenda — are saying they’ll sign onto a so-called reform agenda that merges some broadly popular measures, such as reducing tuition, with right-wing wish-list items like more conservative faculty, ending efforts to boost enrollment numbers for students of color, and cracking down on protests. This builds on the regime’s push to end campus diversity programs.
The campus of Hampshire College in Amherst, Mass., in April. It is scheduled to close at the end of the fall semester.Leah Willingham
This overlap of societal and governmental crises has fallen hardest on small liberal arts colleges — some, like the experimental, born-of-the-1960s Hampshire College, have announced plans toclose altogether — as have some degree programs in the humanities at larger schools, which have seen layoffs or even elimination.
“I think we’re at a real moment of crisis,” Montás said, noting that programs in the humanities and some social sciences were already weakened by downward enrollment trends and by ideological controversies even before the Trump regime targeted them. “These have energized questions about the value and cost of education. This combination of factors is proving deadly.”
But while the headlines tend to focus on campus closings or the latest faculty layoffs, the bigger story is the government’s push to radically reform the role that higher education plays in a healthy democracy.
In what we now clearly see as a golden age of U.S. college from the late 1940s into the ‘70s — when tuition was generally low, and enrollment was skyrocketing — advocates saw more diplomas as a way both to populate a new “knowledge economy” and also mold better citizens who’d be less likely to start World War III. Majors like English literature, philosophy, and sociology soared — as did the inclination to question authority in the fraught era of civil rights and the Vietnam War.
That last part, arguably, is what triggered a 60-years-and-counting conservative backlash that is currently maxing out under Trump. His regime doesn’t want to wreck college altogether — white dude-bros still need their keg parties, after all — as long as the ultimate outcome is creating worker drones, not critical thinkers.
The seeds exist for a backlash that might swing the pendulum back to where it was around 1965, but no one has really planted them. Instead of fighting the destruction of liberal education as a true opposition party, far too many Democrats have instead complied — insisting they support colleges, but only because they create jobs.
“Every student should have access to an education that aligns with industry demands and evolves to meet the demands of tomorrow’s global workforce” is a quote that sounds like it was ripped from Project 2025, but it was posted in 2022 by Joe Biden’s education secretary, Miguel Cardona. Democratic governors like Pennsylvania’s Josh Shapiro spend more time touting trade school than talking about expanding opportunities for four-year bachelor’s degrees.
Increasingly, politicians who last year were raving about the economic development possibilities of AI data centers are furiously backpedaling in the face of a full-on public revolt. While a lot of the backlash is driven by issues such as noise pollution or higher electric bills, the public unrest also reflects a more cosmic concern: Do we really want robots not only taking our jobs and making our art but thinking for us, too?
It’s easy for a politician to be against something, like a data center. But who is going to fight for something, like the humanities? The headline of this column about Democrats making a demand for more English lit majors into a political rallying cry was somewhat facetious — but should it be? Real leadership would mean fighting to give more young people more opportunities to flourish as creators and thinkers, without being terrified the other side will call you an “elitist.”
Mitchell said he’d like to see an expansion of federal loan forgiveness programs for graduates who go into public service careers like social work or teaching — perhaps on the state level — as part of a much broader return of the vanishing idea that higher education can be a public good.
Both Montás and Mitchell also advocated for college programs that would better integrate both career skills training and wider education in the liberal arts and civics. Mitchell touted, for example, a new program at the University of Texas which — working with the online learning company Coursera, where he is a board member — allows students to earn career-readiness certificates on their transcript even as they also pursue a major in the humanities.
Montás said his new center at Bard is part of a burgeoning national movement to grow general education programs within universities that promote classroom discussion through a heavy emphasis on what some call “the great books” of modern civilization. Advocates seek a core curriculum that would promote critical thinking and discourse beyond career-focused majors such as business or engineering. It would be, Montás said, “a return to approaches and conceptions of liberal education that are traditional — an emphasis on great books, an emphasis on character, an emphasis on civic education.”
The 2026 campaigns for Congress are well underway, and while you’ll hear a lot about vital issues like expanding access to healthcare or lowering gas prices, hardly anyone is running on bringing books back into the classroom or saving the humanities major. That feels like a big mistake. When there is a war against the very notion of higher education, somebody needs to be fighting back.
No one should have to spend even a single day behind bars for a crime they did not commit. But in his zeal to right legal wrongs, District Attorney Larry Krasner lost the plot.
Since first getting elected in November 2017, Krasner, a former defense and civil rights attorney, has pushed for scores of exonerations for people convicted mainly of murder. But, it turns out, most are not exonerations in which the convict’s innocence is proven through incontrovertible evidence, such as DNA.
Instead, the DA’s office often sides with defense attorneys who claim some sort of procedural error, such as withheld evidence or inadequate defense counsel. In most of thesecases, there isn’ta court hearing in which the new findings get presented, and witnesses testify under oath. Instead, the prosecutors offer what is known as a concession, which often results in dropping the charges and letting the person go free.
But state and federal courts are starting to challenge Krasner’s tactics.
In June, the state Supreme Court rebuked the DA’s handling of a case in which it was seeking to vacate a 2004 murder conviction of Laver Brown, who was convicted of second-degree murder and robbery following the shooting death of Michael Richardson, a Rite Aid worker at a North Philadelphia store.
In July, former Assistant District Attorney Jaclyn Mason testified in federal court that Krasner’s office did not investigate the appeal of another convicted murderer and instead relied on the claims of his defense attorneys — and then encouraged her to lie about the lack of independent verification. Instead of going along with the scheme, Masonsaid, she quit.
That hearing before U.S. District Judge Paul S. Diamond was continued to Aug. 27, where more damning testimony may come.
The state Supreme Court has already seen enough. The court ordered the state attorney general to be allowed to review future cases in which Krasner’s office is seeking to overturn a conviction.
“What we have seen in this case and too many others is the opposite of justice,” Justice Kevin Dougherty wrote in the scathing 109-page opinion.
The high court found Krasner’s office misled the courts and submitted false statements when asking a lower-court judge to vacate Brown’s life sentence.
In June, the state Supreme Court ordered Pennsylvania’s attorney general to be allowed to review future cases in which Krasner’s office is seeking to overturn a conviction.Tom Gralish / Staff Photographer
After his conviction, Brown’s attorneys said some earlier witness statements were not provided to his trial lawyer, which violated his right to a fair trial. Krasner’s office agreed and argued thatthe case file revealed a “pattern of prosecutorial misconduct” and requested Brown receive a new trial.
But lawyers for the families of Richardson and a second man Brown was convicted of killing in a separate incident asked the state Supreme Court to intervene.
Lawyers for the victims’ families argued that Krasner had a conflict of interest because two of his former law partners had been involved in Brown’s case.
The high court ordered a hearing that shed a harsh light on the conduct of Krasner’s prosecutors.
“We find the [district attorney’s office] … violated its duty of candor to the [Post Conviction Relief Act] court, withheld material evidence from the court, opposed efforts by [the victims’ families] to gain access to this evidence, submitted a false stipulation of fact, misstated facts in its pleadings, failed to conduct a reasonable investigation, and opposed a required evidentiary hearing,” Dougherty wrote.
Whoa. What the heck is going on?
The Supreme Court also found the prosecutors filed a joint document with Brown’s attorneys that “was false in multiple respects.”
The court rejected claims by the DA’s office that it conducted a thorough review of the record in the case. Instead, the court said prosecutors “cut corners” and failed to interview a single witness or any of the original investigators involved in the case.
The DA’s handling of Brown’s case is troubling enough. But it turns out this was not a one-off blunder. The Supreme Court found the case fit a disturbing pattern.
“There have been numerous instances of untrustworthy concessions, lack of candor, misrepresentations of fact, lack of adequate investigation, and avoidance of hearings,” the opinion said.
The Supreme Court went on to highlight problems with the DA’s handling of 10 additional cases, and said there may be many more.
One case involved efforts by Krasner’s office to overturn the death sentence of Robert Wharton, who was convicted in the 1984 strangulation and drowning deaths of a couple in their East Mount Airy home, leaving their then-7-month-old child alone. She survived.
The case eventually ended up before a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit. In a unanimous decision, the panel found that Krasner’s office misled the court and “slant[ed] the facts” surrounding Wharton’s case before a lower federal court in 2019 in an attempt to vacate the death penaltyand instead let Wharton remain in prison for life.
Again, with the lack of candor.
U.S. District Judge Mitchell S. Goldberg denied the request and imposed penalties that required Krasner to write a letter of apology to the family of Wharton’s victims, which the appellate panel found were both “mild and fitting.”
“Courts rely on lawyers’ honesty; lawyers may not mislead them,” Circuit Judge Stefanos Bibas wrote in the panel’s March 2024 opinion. “But the Philadelphia District Attorney’s Office did just that.”
Back to the state Supreme Court.
After highlighting problems with the Brown case and 10 others, the court wrote, “These cases, and the present one, likely represent only a fraction of the [district attorney’s] problematic concessions since January of 2018.”
The court said many of the DA’s concessions did not include hearings in which sworn testimony from both sides is presented, which the court wrote “is generally the best means to expose problems and ensure a reliable and just outcome.”
For his part, Krasner was unrepentant. He issued a video statement following the Supreme Court opinion that leaned on his electoral victories to claim the ruling “undermines the value of a vote in Philadelphia as compared to every other county.”
District Attorney Larry Krasner (left) and G. Lamar Stewart, head of the community engagement and government affairs division, at Independence National Historical Park in February.Tom Gralish / Staff Photographer
Krasner added that social justice efforts like his often face a familiar pattern of resistance: “First they ignore you — we’re past it. Then they laugh at you — we’re past that. Then they fight you — and we have been fighting for 8½ years.”
The district attorney’s website trumpets 59 “exonerations” by the Conviction Integrity Unit created by Krasner. But the National Registry of Exonerations said the total number of exonerations by the DA’s office during Krasner’s tenure is 75 — an extraordinary number given that reversing a conviction faces a high bar and often takes years.
Nearly all of those set free have been Black men, underscoring how the legal system is often stacked against people of color. At the same time, no new charges have been brought in those cases, leaving killers and other wrongdoers walking the streets.
There is no denying systemic racism exists across our legal system, including in Philadelphia. I witnessed abuses and failures of cops, prosecutors, lousy defense attorneys, eyewitness misidentifications, and forced confessions up close as a reporter covering the courts years ago for the Wall Street Journal.
I wrote a story about a Latino man who was convicted of murder in the Bronx, N.Y., despite having a solid alibi: On the night of the murder, he was in prison in the Dominican Republic.
That’s all to say wrongful convictions happen, and sending someone to prison for a crime they didn’t commit — or worse, putting them to death — is the most heinous abuse of the legal system imaginable.
That’s why I welcomed Krasner’s efforts to review cases in which misconduct or errors may have occurred.
But the sloppy work by Krasner’s office has undermined his theory of the case. Sadly, those who have been truly wrongfully convicted will be the ones to suffer because judges will no longer trust the DA’s office.
When judges in state and federal courts and former prosecutors in Krasner’s own office are citing similar patterns of corner-cutting and lying, there is a serious problem.
Krasner built his career on demanding accountability from the system. He owes Philadelphians no less from his own office.
Welcome to Shackamaxon, a weekly politics column focused on what’s happening at City Hall and in Harrisburg. It is named for the place where the Lenape chiefs would meet to conduct the people’s business, which is now known as Penn Treaty Park.
This week’s edition questions a plea deal, looks at Center City’s efforts to bring back daytime foot traffic, and examines the legacy of the Philadelphia wage tax.
SEPTA Transit and Philadelphia Police at the scene of the fatal shooting of SEPTA bus driver Bernard Gribbin in Germantown in October 2023.Alejandro A. Alvarez / Staff Photographer
Deterrence desired
On Oct. 26, 2023, Bernard Gribbin became the first city transit operator to die by gunfire while on the job. Family members called him “the best of the best,” and described the 48-year-old Army veteran as a man who loved Philadelphia, who proudly took out-of-town relatives on tours of the city when they came to visit, and who served the public by working as a bus operator — a demanding, underpaid, and utterly essential job.
Gribbin’s murder sent shock waves through the city’s transit agency. His colleagues were left angry and afraid.
Around that time, reporting from Mensah Dean at the Trace identified a spate of attacks against public employees. During the next contract negotiations, the Transport Workers Union demanded SEPTA install bulletproof glass to protect drivers. Operators report that management, which has long emphasized de-escalation, became even more strict about the kinds of interactions bus drivers and train conductors are permitted to have with unruly passengers. For many, this undermined their sense of stewardship of their vehicles.
The death of Gribbin seemed like a case in which prosecutors could send a message that violence against SEPTA workers will be met with serious consequences. Instead, District Attorney Larry Krasner opted to accept a plea bargain.
Gribbin’s killer, Zhontay Capers, was able to secure a conviction for third-degree murder this week, rather than first, which was her original charge. Pennsylvania law defines first-degree murder as a willful, deliberate, and premeditated killing. Given Capers shot six times and that surveillance video showed her with a firearm shortly before the shooting, there would seem to be a strong case.
Of course, there could be complications I don’t know about. Perhaps another passenger was armed, a witness recanted, or Capers stood a good chance of being declared incompetent to stand trial. Prosecutors often accept plea deals in cases in which going to court presents too much risk.
Yet, Krasner’s office refused to comment on any of these possibilities when asked. Instead, they called it an example of individual justice. Capers now faces up to 40 years in prison, rather than a life sentence. Unlike Gribbin, she may one day again enjoy the unfettered company of friends and family.
Of course, individual justice is important. And if the circumstances of a particular case merit a third-degree charge, then so be it. But Krasner has not provided any additional information or shed any light on his office’s decision-making.
Every killing is a tragedy that deserves justice, but Gribbin’s death had a magnified impact. Capers’ actions also caused public servants to be fearful of coming into work, and resulted in millions of dollars’ worth of unplanned spending in installing the protective glass.
The public deserves a fuller account of why the plea deal happened.
Happy Hour at the Air Grille Garden at Dilworth Park in 202, part of the midweek Center City District Sips after-work events.TOM GRALISH / Staff Photographer
Eventful days
Like most big city downtowns, Center City is a major employment hub. More than 300,000 people work there, representing around 42% of jobs in Philadelphia.
According to Clint Randall, the vice president for economic development at the Center City District, the amount of downtown office space has remained relatively stable for decades. That’s despite the rise of residential conversions and remote and hybrid work arrangements. Still, people are coming to the office less often, and momentum on bringing workers downtown on a more regular basis has stalled.
Thankfully, Randall and his colleagues have a plan to ensure the city’s commercial core remains as essential as it can be by leveraging its status as a regional host, with events seen as both a short- and long-term way to make Center City more vibrant.
Randall cited Center City Sips as a way to bring more people into town on Wednesday evenings during the summer. Philadelphia Open Streets, the FIFA World Cup, festivities around the MLB All-Star Game, and other smaller events have proved a major boon. They’ve brought out not just those who live and work in Center City, but also people from around the region and the world who may not otherwise have had a reason to come.
I asked Randall about the potential for event fatigue among locals. With Center City adding thousands of new residents each year, would this create pressure to draw down on hosting? Randall said that vibrancy is what brings many people to live downtown in the first place. As inconvenient as it can be to live next to major festivals, it is also a major amenity.
My own experience bears this out. I may not have made it to the Eagles’ Super Bowl parades if they hadn’t marched down Broad Street, not far from my South Philly home. Our friends and family also enjoyed the convenience of having a place to sit down and use a nonportable restroom.
A view of the Center City skyline as seen from the Schuylkill Expressway, where it intersects with the Vine Street Expessway, in May.Elizabeth Robertson / Staff Photographer
Tax switch
When Philadelphia became the first American city to institute a wage tax all the way back in 1940, the idea seemed like a no-brainer. After all, where else were people supposed to work? Suburban rail stations were packed to the brim with commuters, the Interstate Highway System did not yet exist, and anyone who wanted access to skilled workers had little choice but to open offices in Center City.
Today, however, the region looks different.
While Center City remains a major regional hub, Philadelphia has lost tens of thousands of jobs to suburban office parks. Most Delaware Valley residents drive themselves to work, and hundreds of thousands of people have moved to the suburbs. This has left us with an important policy question: How much of this shift is simply due to national cultural trends, and how much of it was caused by public policy?
A new study from René Livas and Matthew Jacob at Harvard University, working with the Progress and Poverty Institute, attempts to answer this question. They say there is a clear link.
As the wage tax rate rose between 1940 and 1976, jobs fled to the suburbs. Since City Hall began decreasing the tax in 1995, jobs have started to flow back into Philadelphia. In fact, the city recently overtook Montgomery County as the top host for office jobs in the region.
The researchers’ proposal for replacing the wage tax is based around switching to a land value tax, an idea that is popular among economists. Separate tax rates for land and property are already legal in Pennsylvania, and the city already splits the two in its own property assessments.
The idea, however, may be politically fraught. Homeowners already resent the chaos of the city’s regular assessments. Additionally, determining how much of a property’s value is inherent to its location may be easier said than done. While an 80/20 split between structural and land value is often cited as standard, levying the two individually would require significantly more research from the city’s Office of Property Assessment.
In an email, Livas suggested phasing in the switch, which would help avoid big increases. He also said that the city’s existing programs, like the homestead exemption and Longtime Owner Occupants Program, should help alleviate the burden on homeowners.
The data suggests the city could add around 26,000 jobs if this reform is pursued.
South Dakota is a prairie state that voted more than 63% for Donald Trump in 2024, so it’s not the first place you’d look to find a wave of discontent over GOP rule. But deep under the state’s expansive corn and soybean fields grow the invasive roots of political rage.
There’s the trade war that’s dried up demand for farmers’ crops while driving up the costs of essential items like fertilizer. Disdain for Trump has slashed the flow of Canadian tourists who once flocked to Mount Rushmore. There’s the same high gas and supermarket prices as in the other 49 states. And farmers who had liked the president’s border policies are now scared of losing workers to immigration raids.
Doug Sombke, president of the South Dakota Farmers Union, recently told the Canadian magazine Maclean’s that some Dakotans now “see we got sold a bill of goods … They were told grocery prices were going to come down. Trump keeps leading them on, saying, ‘There’s gonna be some pain.’ I don’t think anybody was ready for this much pain, this soon.”
In this brutal climate, one South Dakotan who probably should be bracing for pain is the mostly pro-Trump GOP Sen. Mike Rounds, a former governor seeking reelection to the Senate in November. And on Tuesday, Democrats hoping to oust Rounds from Capitol Hill got the big news that a lot of them were hoping for.
That’s right. In what may be the most counterintuitive political strategy in U.S. political history, liberal anti-Trump activists in politically red states west of the Mississippi have been pleading for obscure, long-shot Democratic candidates to abandon their races — so that spunky independent candidates can challenge the GOP one-on-one instead.
When ex-state trooper and longtime Democratic activist Julian Beaudion told South Dakotans that, feeling pressure, he’s quitting the race, it cleared the path for independent Brian Bengs to consolidate the anti-incumbent vote in November. Polls suggest that the retired U.S. Air Force lawyer and college professor who was briefly a Democrat is already within striking distance of an upset.
And he’s not alone. Democrats are also not running a Senate candidate in Nebraska — where a well-funded and well-known independent, labor leader Dan Osborn, is running again — or in Idaho, where Todd Achilles, a one-time Democratic lawmaker who left the party, is on the ballot. In Montana, an independent Senate hopeful is also hoping that a Democrat will drop out, but unsuccessfully so far.
Casual political observers probably know that Democrats (and two allied independents) — currently in the Senate minority by a 47-53 count — are hoping Trump’s unpopularity will help their candidates run the table in five to six key contested states from Maine to Texas. But much less attention has been paid to this stealth backup plan — the notion that a few prairie populists can end the GOP majority.
What’s truly remarkable about this scheme is that a growing number of Democratic strategists are making a tacit, not to mention uncomfortable, acknowledgment: In the American heartland, their party’s brand is in the toilet.
That’s why a number of political activists believe the only way in these blood-red states to make the most out of rising voter anger against Republicans over high gas prices and Trump’s badly botched war with Iran is to offer voters an alternative without a “D” next to their name.
Steve Hildebrand, a Sioux Falls-based political consultant who was a high-ranking official in Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign, is one of the Democrats who thinks that — despite voter unrest against the GOP — an independent has the best chance in South Dakota.
“I think our party has gravitated too far away from fighting for hard-working Americans — you know, blue-collar workers, union workers,” Hildebrand told me this week. “You know, we’ve been fairly pathetic about a unified party message, and frankly, we’ve been pathetic about beating back on Donald Trump.”
Still, most of the political agenda of the western independents is larded with a modern brand of prairie populism that feels like a first cousin to the left-wing progressivism of Democrats — like Michigan’s Abdul El-Sayed — who’ve been scoring 2026 victories in blue states. They are strongly against billionaire influence in politics while advocatingfor healthcare reform and progressive ideas about making life more affordable.
“Getting money out of politics to the maximum extent possible would be the single biggest accomplishment I think of my career and of Congress,” Bengs told Independent Voter News. “And I’d also like to get healthcare affordable, so people don’t have to worry about, ‘Don’t call the ambulance, because I can’t afford that.’”
So why not run as a Democrat, when so many of his proposals overlap? Bengs did join the Democratic Party to challenge South Dakota’s other GOP senator, Majority Leader John Thune, in 2022, and after losing by 27 percentage points, he said he’ll never do that again.
He said at county fairs and parades he met voters who liked his ideas, but told him, “I’ll never vote for a Democrat.” “Sometimes there was an expletive in there. The takeaway was that the letter was more important than what I was saying.”
“Democrats are simply not competitive in at least 20 states, maybe more.” Larry Sabato, the University of Virginia political scientist and veteran analyst, told me. He said independent races can be a way to win in these red states, but the candidate needs to break with the Democrats on some issues and show themselves as a true outsider.
Sabato said Republican dominance of prairie and mountain states can end up with “voters getting fed up with the ruling party, and desiring a switch so badly that they’ll hold their nose and defect. I suppose it is easier to vote for an independent.”
Except that clearing the political field to create the desired one-on-one race between a Republican and such an independent upstart is proving to be not so easy.
Experts like Sabato say the strongest independent Senate candidate might be Montana’s Seth Bodnar, a former University of Montana president and Army veteran. But the Democrat who’s on the ballot in Big Sky Country, Alani Bankhead, told Politico last week that she would abandon the race only “if a lightning bolt from God struck me” — an unlikely event even in this summer of wild weather. Polls suggest the Republican, Kurt Alme, would easily win a three-way race against both Bodnar and Bankhead.
The process in South Dakota was just as messy. The Democrat, Beaudion, also had been insistent he would not withdraw before Tuesday’s deadline, when he alleged that he and his family faced “intimidating threats to drop out of the race,” and gave no indication he would support Bengs’ campaign.
The best chance for knocking off a GOP incumbent remains Nebraska. Osborn, who rose to prominence as the union leader of a high-profile strike against the food giant Kellogg’s, got nearly 47% of the vote against Sen. Deb Fischer in 2024 when Trump was on the ballot. In 2026, he’s poised to capitalize on the president’s fading approval as he challenges another incumbent, Sen. Pete Ricketts.
“If you believe that billionaires, like Elon Musk, George Soros, or Pete Ricketts, should not be allowed to buy anything they want, including private islands for sex trafficking, and our elections, and our votes, then send them a message in cash and vote for me,” Osborn told a recent town hall. The most current poll, conducted in May by Tavern Associates, showed Osborn winning by 5 percentage points.
Still, it’s an uphill climb for many of these prairie independents. Incumbents like Rounds, Ricketts, and Idaho’s 83-year-old Sen. James Risch enter their races with an unshakeable base of MAGA Trump supporters, and they’ll have millions of dollars for ad campaigns that will surely portray their opponents as liberal Democratic wolves in sheep’s clothing.
There are also a ton of questions about what will happen if any of them win in November. Would they join the two current independents, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders and Maine Sen. Angus King, in caucusing with the Democrats? (Osborn has explicitly said he will not.) Whom would they support for majority leader, with a likely challenge to the current top Democrat Chuck Schumer? Would they vote mostly with Democrats, or take contrary, libertarian stands on issues like gun control, in line with voters back home?
The biggest question for Democrats, however, might be the long-term one: How will yanking so many candidates in 2026 help the professed goal of rebuilding a Democratic Party that some day will be viable in all 50 states? That will have to wait until the political derecho of disgust with both parties blows past.
“There’s just a lot of different stripes out there right now, and I don’t think that’s a bad thing,” Hildebrand said. “I think the Democratic Party and the Republican Party both have terrible brands. I think you know that it’s their own fault. It’s not the fault of voters.”
Today’s newsletter is all about things I thought I was done writing about: COVID-19, Kamala Harris, and the World Cup. Regarding the latter, FIFA strongman Gianni Infantino walked off the pitch after last month’s final like the hero in Steve Miller’s “Take the Money and Run”: He got the money — an ungodly $15 billion in revenue — thinking he got away. But instead, just like Icarus, Infantino flew too close to the sun. A plan to make even more cash off the world’s greatest sporting event — by selling a share to private investors led by the brother of Donald Trump’s son-in-law — outraged so many folks that the FIFA chief could lose his job. What a shame.
The right can’t shut up about COVID-19 because it needs your outrage against experts
Workers move bodies to a refrigerated truck from the Andrew T. Cleckley Funeral Home in the Brooklyn borough of New York in April 2020.AP
Honestly, I thought — and hoped, frankly — that I’d written about the COVID-19 pandemic for the last time by the end of 2021. The issues it raised — about everything from public health preparedness to conspiracy theories — had seemed important enough, but I was more than ready to move on from empty baseball stadiums and masks in the supermarket.
I thought most folks felt the same way — that we were all eager to put the coronavirus in the rearview mirror. Clearly, I was wrong. The people we call MAGA still can’t stop yelling about it.
Last week brought the acid flashback of the government’s communicable disease czar when the pandemic erupted in 2020,Anthony Fauci,getting dragged before a U.S. Senate committee in a Joe McCarthy fashion, forced to take the Fifth Amendment to avoid any perjury traps that would satisfy the senators’ mouth-breathing constituents’ raw lust to imprison the 85-year-old public health icon.
The realization that they weren’t going to send Fauci — who was pardoned for his past actions in January 2025 by outgoing President Joe Biden to protect the good doctor from GOP wrath — up the river led these Republican statesmen to do the only thing left: scream at him.
“Who the f— do you think you were for doing that?” Ohio Sen. Bernie Moreno yelled at Fauci, even as it’s hard to understand what “that” was, except for working tirelessly to give Americans the best information about a rapidly evolving, deadly pandemic. “It is a total disgrace what you did to this country.”
The baseless attacks on Fauci by right-wingers — who’ve convinced themselves that the real crisis of 2020-2021 wasn’t the invisible virus that caused the early death of more than 1.2 million Americans, but an authoritarian government (led at the time by Donald Trump, but no matter) making them wear those masks and avoid those baseball games — were both infuriating and unconscionable. Still, maybe because of my aversion to reliving the pandemic, I was going to let the subject slide.
But then the current government’s top health official, Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., went on CNN to double down on the Trump regime’s Big Lies about what really happened during the COVID years. And like Moreno, RFK Jr. turned the volume up to 11.
“Anthony Fauci was mismanaging the COVIDpandemic and was doing it under the Biden administration. President Trump wanted to end the lockdowns,” Kennedy loudly told CNN’s Dana Bash, inventing a farcical, backward timeline. An agitated RFK Jr. insisted the government’s priority during COVID-19 should not have been saving lives, but “protecting constitutional rights,” yet to make this fiction sound less ridiculous, the HHS chief also had to lie about the extent of thecrisis.
“There were ICUs that were empty all over the country, including in New York, at the height [of the pandemic],” Kennedy insisted.
This can no longer be ignored. There are two very important points that need to be made here.
First, when a high-ranking government official tells a lie on national television, this must be debunked immediately. The truth here is that the hospital emergency rooms and intensive care units, especially in New York City but other locales as well, were overwhelmed in the spring of 2020. So were many morgues and funeral homes, which struggled to keep up with the dead.
“I worked for New York’s largest medical center at the start of the pandemic,” Lucky Tran, a Columbia University scientist, posted on Bluesky. “There were morgue trucks on the streets. They set up emergency medical tents in Central Park. Healthcare worker colleagues died. It is horrific that RFK Jr is on national TV lying that ICUs were empty.”
Of course, this is just one of a number of lies about the pandemic — that the vaccines released to the public in early 2021 are dangerous (they’re not), that the virus came from a Chinese lab (it almost certainly didn’t) and not animal-to-human contact, and that Fauci led some kind of Watergate-level cover-up (his personal diaries, obtained by the senators, revealed exactly the opposite) — that are matters of faith among the political right.
Which brings us to the second big thing: Why? Why are all of these petty grievances about inconveniences we experienced six years ago still so gosh-darned important to these yelling people in 2026? Why do they want to send an octogenarian Fauci — a grandson of Italian immigrants whose life was the kind of American dream 20th-century Republicans would have celebrated — to prison?
The real virus here is anti-intellectualism — a strain that has always existed in American life, as the historian Richard Hofstadter famously wrote in 1964 — that has metastasized from a small, well-contained syndrome to overtaking the entire Republican Party. So-called rural resentment leads angry voters to think people like college professors or doctors in white coats are looking down on them.
It’s an antisocial worldview that was encouraged from on high by the likes of Big Oil executives who love it when the masses scoff at climate scientists. But the rejection of expertise reached a whole new level in 2020 when doctors like Fauci started telling Americans to wear masks or avoid social gatherings to slow the spread of COVID-19.
Sure, there were tough calls around issues like how long to close schools, but in real time, health experts were erring on the side of caution — the right thing to do — while shell-shocked regular folks stewed about an assault on their liberty.
As the revived Fauci controversy continued online this week, Mike Adams, whose website has been accused of spreading medical disinformation, posted Monday on X that getting a COVID-19 vaccine “reveals a twisted and artificial obedience to the falsified appearance of authority. People like that should never be trusted, because they are not in control of their own minds.”
They believe experts like Fauci don’t want to help you, but control you — welcome to the far right’s Bizarro World.
But still, why? At the end of the day, these extremists might care somewhat about thwarting climate science or not wearing masks, but the real reason they despise educated experts is because facts shatter the ancient, lie-based hierarchies such as white supremacy, the patriarchy, or homophobia that give meaning to their broken world.
I think some of the reason they still care so much about Fauci is that the pandemic spring of 2020 also brought the police murder of George Floyd and the subsequent Black Lives Matter marches that shocked many of the communities where they occurred. In their minds, all of it — masks, diversity training, vaccines, calls to “defund the police” — merged into one giant threat.
Which brings us to: Why now? There’s no question that the lingering resentments of 2020-2021 over both the coronavirus and the Floyd protests were the rage fuel that revived Trump, who looked dead in the water after his failed coup of Jan. 6, 2021. Now, it’s less than 100 days until a new election that could cripple Trump and his MAGA movement. And they are desperately waving the bloody shirt of COVID-19.
We must never forget the truth about 2020, Fauci, or the necessity of public health in a true democracy. Our anti-science government is seeing rising cases of measles and of the bacteria that causes explosive diarrhea (which has now been linked to two deaths), and God only knows what elseis in the pipeline.
Experts like Fauci aren’t here to tell you how to live your life — just how to not die.
Yo, do this!
I remain fascinated with the hidden history of American reactionary movements, which is coming out of the shadows during the Trump era. I’ve been listening to the audiobook of The Biggest Lie: The Prehistory of American Fascism, 1818-1915 by College of Charleston historian Joseph Kelly, which looks at how the defense of slavery in the antebellum South, Jim Crow, and the early 20th century revival of the Ku Klux Klan all bore the defining characteristics of an American strain of fascism, often for the self-preservation of monied interests. In the same mode, I highly recommend a recent New York Times guest essay, “It Wasn’t a Civil War. It Was the Slaveholders’ Rebellion,” by history writer Anthony Conwright, who argues persuasively that the name most of us have always used to describe the 1861-1865 conflict is actually a whitewash pushed by the South. The piece is a real eye-opener.
Did I mention that 2026’s summer of soccer isn’t over? The Philadelphia Union have emerged from the two-month World Cup break with a completely different look from the group that tanked in the first half of the MLS season, with the return of Kai Wagner (from England) and Quinn Sullivan (from injury) and rising young stars Neil Pierre and Cavan Sullivan, Quinn’s brother. They’ll also get a fresh start for a trophy opportunity with the arrival of the Leagues Cup tournament against the best teams of Mexico’s Liga MX. Check out their first match Thursday night at 8 p.m. against traditional powerhouse Cruz Azul, live at Subaru Park in Chester and on Apple TV.
Ask me anything
Question: Do you believe the Dems have a chance to take the Senate in November? — Elise (@bnat4.bsky.social) via Bluesky
Answer: Elise, I’d almost bank on it happening, and here’s why. Since the early months of the Trump 47 presidency, Democrats — who need to gain four seats for a majority — have consistently run double digits ahead of past performance in special elections. That should put seven states in play, with the strongest possible candidates in places like North Carolina (ex-Gov. Roy Cooper), Alaska (ex-Rep. Mary Peltola), and Iowa (Josh Turek). Maine voters will forget the Graham Platner fiasco long before they forget Sen. Susan Collins’ vote to confirm Justice Brett Kavanaugh. Ironically, the battle to hold a Democratic seat in Michigan looks toughest, but likely primary winner Abdul El-Sayed is an excellent campaigner. As Trump’s popularity plummets, there’s even a chance for shockers in places like Florida or with independent candidates in Nebraska or Idaho. For me, the bigger question is whether 51-plus Dems will dump Chuck Schumer as their leader after November. Stay tuned.
What you’re saying about …
Many of you had great ideas for a fall Democratic message that’s about more than just “affordability” — the preferred mantra of the party’s consultant class. Many sought to widen the conversation to issues around corruption and inequality. Here are some pithy ones. Roberta Soules wants to “take power away from the large corporations and oligarchs.” Meg Berlin suggested “More Butter. Fewer Guns.” Dane Madsen prefers “Stop the Trump Crime Family,” while Frank Friedman went with an even simpler, “We will be honest with you.” Stephen R. Rourke wrote simply, “Peace, prosperity, and justice for all.”
📮 This week’s question:CNN is reporting that the Pentagon recently took the highly unconventional step of asking rank-and-file troops for creative new ideas on how “to punish Iran.” But what should be done about this mess? Can the United States simply walk away at this point? Or do big problems like the flow of oil through the Strait of Hormuz or Iran’s nuclear ambitions require a response, and what is that, exactly? Please email me your answer and put the exact phrase “Iran war ideas” in the subject line.
Backstory: Is Kamala Harris ‘the new Nixon’?
Democratic presidential nominee Vice President Kamala Harris delivers a concession speech for the 2024 presidential election, Nov. 6, 2024, on the campus of Howard University in Washington. Jacquelyn Martin
Although it’s true that, as a 5-year-old kindergartner in 1964, I nearly got into a fight with a kid who said he supported Barry Goldwater, the first presidential election I really followed came four years later in 1968. I was probably waiting for the baseball scores when I saw news reports that the GOP front-runner was a “New Nixon,” which made this 9-year-old wonder what was wrong with the old one. Indeed, a Californian who’d lost a presidential election (and a gubernatorial race just two years later) stunned America with the political comeback that made him the 37th president. We’d spend the next six years of Kent State and Watergate learning the kinder, gentler Richard Nixon of 1968 was all a lie.
It would be a Nixon-level comeback if Kamala Harris were to win the Democratic nomination in 2028, let alone the presidency. Like Tricky Dick, Harris is a child of the Golden State and former vice president to the oldest-ever POTUS at that time (Dwight Eisenhower was 70 when he left office, which was unprecedented before Ronald Reagan, Joe Biden, and now Donald Trump), and a failed nominee, although shewas smart enough not to run for governor when she returned home. People forget the brief lightning bolt of excitement when she replaced Biden on top of the 2024 ticket, and so the smart money has been that her moment has passed, as the Democratic base looks for new blood.
But it feels like the earth has shifted a bit, and the reason can be summed up in two words: South Carolina. Last week, the Democratic National Committee unveiled its list of the first six presidential primary states, and the South Carolina primary tops the list. The same South Carolina where, in 2020, the state’s main Democratic voting bloc — older, center-left, Black members of the middle- or working classes — turned the race around for Biden, the man who then tapped Harris as his veep. The same South Carolina whose Democratic power broker, Rep. James Clyburn, is close to Harris. A state that seems tailor-made for a Harris comeback.
But the Palmetto State isn’t the only reason to start taking a Harris return seriously. In politics, your weakness is often also your strength, or vice versa. Harris has long been a political chameleon — from tough 2010s prosecutor to a sharp left turn during Trump’s first term that she backpedaled away from in 2024. Today, Harris is feeling the zeitgeist. She is drifting left again, but perhaps more importantly, she understands the desire by core Democrats to support fighters, not milquetoast cowards.
“They are ruthless,” Harris told the annual gathering of the National Urban League in Nashville on Friday, referring to Republicans. “We need to be ruthless, too” — explaining that Democrats should not be “cruel,” but “uncompromising.” She added: “For example, and I know this is going to be controversial coming from me, in particular, we need to revisit the Electoral College. We need to revisit the point of expanding the court to 13 justices, like we have 13 district courts. We need to revisit, if they so want, statehood for Puerto Rico and D.C.” Harris has also been holding extensive meetings with some of the pro-Palestinian activists who often clashed with her over Israel policy in 2024.
She’s running? It sure sounds like it.
To be clear, while I thought in the fall of 2024 that Harris had thepotential to become a very good president, and I still do, I’m also very much in the “new blood” camp when I think about 2028. I’d love to see what someone from the progressive Bernie Sanders-Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez wing of the movement could do in wiping away the stain of Trumpism. But establishment Democrats, intentionally or not, have thrown Harris a lifeline with their South Carolina gambit. The coming months will reveal whether this former vice president can be “the new Nixon” of the left.
What I wrote on this date in 2013
I was reminded that the 25th anniversary of the 9/11 terror attacks is almost upon us. Expect a lot of what you might call negative nostalgia about that wretched day in 2001, but also the bad times that followed. Do you remember the terror alerts? Many of us thought those would vanish when George W. Bush left the White House, so it was a little jarring when Barack Obama continued the practice, including this major one 13 years ago. I wrote that “the problem with the terror warning of 2013 is not the warning itself but the decade of government baloney that preceded it. Washington needs to acknowledge the reality: If it wants to do a better job of keeping the public safe, it will need to start doing a much, much better job of telling the public the truth.”
The Trump regime’s cruel campaign against our immigrant neighbors is the biggest story of our time. Last week, I traveled to a tiny borough in Central Pennsylvania, Mount Holly Springs, where a budding partnership with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has seized 32 immigrants in just four months, and angrily divided a rural community. Pennsylvania’s small towns are becoming the front line of mass deportation. Over the weekend, the immigrant crackdown was central to my essay about the rising death toll that’s attributable to Trump’s misrule, which includes murdered deportees in Guatemala, a woman left by ICE agents to die at a Pittsburgh bus terminal, the latest civilian bombing victims in Iran, and many, many more. It’s a humanitarian crisis that demands our immediate attention.
No two people define the world-class journalism that we regularly produce here at The Inquirer more than my longtime friends Wendy Ruderman and Barbara Laker, who could have rested on their laurels after winning the Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting in 2010. Instead, both are working harder than ever. Ruderman has applied her talent for digging to Philadelphia’s leading industry, healthcare, with remarkable results. Check out her latest exposé about a Main Line psychiatrist who lost her license after a wildly inappropriate affair with a troubled younger client. Laker remains a linchpin of The Inquirer’s investigative unit, and — joined by her colleagues Ryan W. Briggs, Max Marin, and Ellie Rushing — she has been digging into the dark tale of a Philadelphia pornographer and his family’s mysterious ties to two missing women. Investigative reporting is essential to democracy and forging better communities, but it’s costly, time-consuming, and won’t happen without your support. Subscribe to The Inquirer today.
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