The people working there had in-depth knowledge of the products they sold or the skills they provided. You felt confident that you were going to get exactly what you wanted. Customization and talking through decisions were expected.

“Service with a smile,” as they used to say.

“The customer is always right.”

Those little things helped small businesses and even major corporations succeed and gain loyal customers. It was something we all understood.

More and more, my friends and I find ourselves asking the same question: What the hell happened to service?

We Don’t Get Service Anymore

Maybe this is another lament from a middle-aged man, but it is a common theme among my friends in their 30s, 40s, and 50s. Service is not the same.

Customer-service calls have been exported to call centers. You press one for English and two for Español. Then you hear the familiar recording: “Please listen carefully because our menu options have recently changed.”

You spend the next five minutes trying to determine whether you should press four for sales, five for office hours, or repeatedly smash zero while screaming, “Representative,” into your phone.

Then there is restaurant service. A 20% tip used to represent great service that exceeded expectations. Now, 20% feels like the standard, almost mandatory amount because we have been guilted into accepting that this is simply how workers get paid.

You do not even need to receive actual service anymore. Someone spins a computer screen around and passively says, “The screen is going to ask you a few questions,” as if neither of you knows what the question will be.

Money, please.

The strange part is that this may be one of the only times you will hear me say this with “complete confidence:” I may be getting old.

And I am starting to wonder whether the idea of good service has fundamentally changed.

What If We Are the Ones Who Don’t Understand?

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A local resident had posted a video complaining about a pothole. The video went viral, so Bass responded by showing up with city employees, work trucks, cameras, and an apparent plan to demonstrate that city government was listening.

There was only one problem.

A car was parked directly over the pothole.

The crew could not fix it. Bass showed up, stood around the blocked pothole, and then released the video anyway. The mayor’s official account proudly told the resident, “We got you,” even though the pothole remained exactly where it was.

The video went viral for all the wrong reasons.

Almost anybody watching it could see the incompetence. City government mobilized employees, trucks, communications staff, and a camera crew but failed to check whether the pothole was accessible before everybody arrived.

Then whatever gatekeeping process exists inside the mayor’s office failed, too. Nobody stopped and said, “Maybe we shouldn’t publish a video of ourselves not fixing the pothole.”

It became a perfect little microcosm of government at its worst. It assembled a large group of people, produced a lot of activity, accomplished nothing, and then issued a public-relations video congratulating itself.

The intentions may have been good. The result was still fucking ridiculous.

But there is a reason Karen Bass is suddenly making videos like this.

Zohran Mamdani changed political campaigning.

Mamdani Changed the Campaign Playbook

The rise of Zohran Mamdani has been incredible to watch.

He went from being a relatively unknown state assemblymember to the mayor of New York City, the largest city in the United States and one of the most important cities in the world.

He did not accomplish that purely through short-form videos. His campaign also built an enormous field organization with tens of thousands of volunteers knocking on doors and making calls. His victory came from combining online attention with actual organizing, fundraising, policy, and voter contact.

But his videos introduced him to millions of people and gave the entire campaign its personality.

They were funny, self-aware, relentlessly on message, and directly tailored to the way people consume information online. He used them to explain policies, introduce himself, mobilize volunteers, reach different communities, and occasionally make fun of himself.

They looked good, but they were not just random content. Almost every video returned to the same basic message about affordability and the cost of living.

Mamdani understood the internet because he was already part of its culture. He understood the memes, references, editing styles, humor, music, and language. He was not an older politician asking a 24-year-old staffer to explain TikTok to him.

He was not trying to become online. He was online.

It probably also did not hurt that Mamdani grew up around performance and storytelling. His mother, Mira Nair, is an acclaimed filmmaker who directed movies including Mississippi Masala, Monsoon Wedding, and The Namesake. He grew up in a family that understood film, culture, performance, and how stories reach people.

Most politicians do not have that background.

Mamdani also has something that cannot be manufactured by an editing team. When it is time to say “action,” he can flip a switch and become incredibly charismatic. He can speak to the camera as if he is talking to a friend he has known for 20 years.

Whether you agree with his politics or not, that is a real political talent.

We have seen this kind of transformation before.

Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign did not invent social media, but it was one of the first presidential campaigns to make social networking and digital organizing central to its operation. His campaign used the internet not only for advertising, but also to raise money, recruit volunteers, organize communities, and communicate directly with supporters.

After Obama won, social media stopped being an optional campaign experiment. It became part of the basic toolkit.

People also started copying Obama himself. They copied his cadence, his pauses, his voice, and his style of speaking. Everybody wanted to sound like Barack Obama because the Barack Obama template had worked.

The problem was that most of those people were not Barack Obama.

Now everybody wants to be Zohran Mamdani.

The same problem has returned.

You Cannot Copy and Paste Charisma

More and more mayors, governors, members of Congress, and candidates are trying to campaign in TikTok format.

Karen Bass is doing it. Chuck Schumer has tried it. Abdul El-Sayed has done everything from playful campaign videos to a Blue’s Clues parody. Politicians across the ideological spectrum are producing short clips, scripted jokes, staged confrontations, thirst traps, memes, and supposedly relatable behind-the-scenes content.

They are all trying to capture the lightning that Mamdani put in a bottle.

It is not working for most of them.

The first problem is what we call the performance face.

When the camera turns on, most candidates stop acting like themselves. Their faces change. Their voices change. They suddenly become a carefully rehearsed version of what they think a normal person sounds like.

It feels fake because it is fake.

They look like someone reading a script while desperately trying to pretend they are not reading a script. Their communications team may have studied the latest trend and reproduced all the technical elements correctly, but the person in the video does not understand why the original worked.

Mamdani does not merely repeat internet culture. He lives inside it. When he is not following the culture, he is occasionally helping create it.

Other politicians are being handed memes by staffers five days after the meme was funny.

Some of these politicians are also genuinely unpleasant people, and video makes that obvious. They succeeded through fundraising, party relationships, policy knowledge, or years of working inside political institutions. None of that means they can look into a camera and connect with another human being.

That is not necessarily a character flaw. Some people are simply not performers.

But the attempt to manufacture charisma often produces something worse than boring. It produces cringe.

Abdul El-Sayed’s videos are a useful example, although they also complicate my argument. His Blue’s Clues-style voting video was mocked after resurfacing online, but El-Sayed still won Michigan’s Democratic Senate primary.

So an awkward video does not automatically destroy a candidate. It also does not prove the video helped him win.

That distinction is important. Viral mockery can create attention, but attention is not always persuasion. Sometimes people are just laughing at you.

Internet Points Are Not Votes

Spencer Pratt may be the clearest recent example of the limits of social-media campaigning.

Pratt entered the 2026 Los Angeles mayoral race with a massive online following and decades of experience as a reality television personality. He understood performance. His videos generated millions of views. His TikTok account had approximately 2.5 million followers and more than 92 million cumulative likes by the end of the primary.

He also raised millions of dollars.

Then he finished third.

Pratt received approximately 25.5% of the vote, behind Karen Bass and Nithya Raman, and failed to advance to the general election. An analysis of the race found that Pratt’s enormous online reach did not translate into enough support among the voters who actually decided the primary. TargetSmart’s post-election analysis compared Pratt’s massive digital audience with his third-place finish.

The internet helped him raise money, gain attention, and become a serious candidate. It did not win the election.

Kat Abughazaleh offers another example.

Abughazaleh entered the Democratic primary for Illinois’ 9th Congressional District with a large online following and an established identity as a political influencer. She understood internet culture far better than most of the people running against her. Her campaign raised money, attracted national attention, and turned her into one of the most recognizable candidates in the race.

She still lost to Evanston Mayor Daniel Biss, who received about 29.6% of the vote to her 25.9%. Again, going viral is not the same as winning.

Internet points may translate into small-dollar donations. They may generate media coverage. They may help a candidate who was previously unknown become viable.

But the people liking, sharing, and commenting on a video may not live in the candidate’s district. They may not be registered to vote. They may not know anything else about the campaign. They may not even like the candidate.

Some of them may be watching because the video is a train wreck.

The internet can giveth, and the internet can taketh away.

Karen Bass wanted to show that she was responding to a constituent and fixing a basic city problem. Instead, thousands of creators, commentators, and ordinary users took the video, ripped it apart, and turned it into evidence that she could not manage a pothole repair.

Once a politician posts something, the campaign no longer controls it.

Politics Is Becoming Slopulism

The larger problem is not simply that politicians are bad at making videos.

The problem is what short-form video is doing to campaigns.

Political arguments are increasingly reduced to whatever can fit inside a 30-second or 60-second clip. Complicated policies become slogans. Every issue is flattened into one simple promise designed to survive the algorithm.

Freeze the rent.

Make the buses free.

Fix the pothole.

Lower the prices.

Regardless of the merits of any individual proposal, complicated questions about funding, implementation, legal authority, trade-offs, and unintended consequences rarely make it into the video.

The politician points at a problem, announces a solution, inserts a trending sound, and waits for the views.

Call it slopulism.

It is politics reduced to algorithm-friendly content. It is endless simplistic videos created in the hope that one of them goes viral. It rewards the person who can perform a solution more effectively than the person who can implement one.

That is really fucked up.

Campaigns have always involved performance. Candidates have always delivered rehearsed speeches, staged photo opportunities, kissed babies, visited diners, and pretended to enjoy county-fair food.

But I do not think political campaigning has ever been reduced to this level of simplicity and stupidity.

If this becomes the dominant way campaigns operate, we may end up selecting candidates based on their ability to make short-form videos. People who are serious, thoughtful, nuanced, and maybe a little boring could become less competitive because they cannot perform for the camera.

Some of those boring people might be better leaders.

They might understand government. They might be able to think through complicated problems. They might be willing to admit that a policy has costs, limitations, or trade-offs.

They might be able to fix the pothole without filming themselves standing beside it.

Mamdani’s Actual Lesson

Mamdani’s victory does not prove that every politician needs to imitate Mamdani.

It proves that authenticity, clear messaging, digital communication, and actual organizing can reinforce one another when the right candidate brings them together.

His videos worked because they matched the person, the campaign, the message, and the political moment. They were part of a much larger operation that eventually mobilized an extraordinary number of volunteers and voters.

Copying the editing style without understanding the substance is not campaigning.

It is cosplay.

I do not think most lifelong politicians can suddenly transform themselves into charismatic, video-friendly personalities. They are not theater kids. They did not grow up around performance. They cannot simply turn on a camera and become someone else.

Maybe that is the one upside.

Maybe most of these imitations will fail because voters can still recognize when someone is faking it. Maybe online attention will continue helping candidates raise money and become known without completely replacing the parts of campaigning that require real organization, real voters, and an actual message.

Mamdani changed political campaigning, just as Obama did before him.

But the lesson is not that everybody should talk like Obama or make videos like Mamdani.

The lesson is that when a rare political talent changes the game, copying the surface of what worked is not the same as understanding why it worked.

And if all your video proves is that you brought an entire city crew to a pothole and still could not fix it, maybe do not post the fucking video.

Stay Angry.

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The Democratic Party is seeing this with the Democratic Socialists of America, or the DSA. A lot of people have been in the Democratic Party for many years, even decades, running on certain beliefs, ideas, and policies that have yet to come to fruition.

So what is the Democratic Party to do? What is this talent left to do?

When you look at how businesses acquire talent, how competition emerges, and how new products get formed, maybe what we are seeing here is the emergence of a new Democratic Party being created from within.

We have seen this play out in business over and over again. Once the need for a product/idea/policy begins to emerge, a company has to make a choice. It can allow a new product/idea/policy to develop from within lead by it’s talent. It can let the people behind that product leave and become the competition. Or it can fire the employees, lock the product in the basement, and pretend it never existed.

The Democratic Party is facing that choice with the DSA right now.

Below, I’m playing with an idea about what we can learn from business, how it compares to the modern Democratic Party and the DSA, and what we can expect in the future.

What do you think about the DSA? What do you think about the relationship between the Democratic Party and the DSA?

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• BTW. This is a video podcast. Click above to watch. But below is the write up about what we spoke about.

The first is about money. The Democratic National Committee mortgaged its headquarters to help finance elections and is now entering the final stretch of the midterms with more debt than cash.

The second is about democracy. The DNC’s Rules and Bylaws Committee has proposed putting South Carolina first in the 2028 presidential primary calendar, followed by Nevada, New Hampshire, New Mexico, Michigan, and Virginia.

These may look like separate issues, but both come back to trust.

Democrats need people to believe the party will spend their contributions responsibly. They also need voters to believe that they will be allowed to choose candidates without party leaders deciding the outcome in advance.

The good news is that neither problem is impossible to fix. Democrats still have an enormous coalition, millions of motivated voters, and a genuine opportunity to win the House in 2026. But the party has to start treating trust as something it earns, not something it is automatically owed.

We are the Democratic Party. Our processes should be democratic.

Become a paid subscriber to read the full podcast newsletter. But you can watch for free above.

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Abdul El-Sayed won Michigan’s Democratic Senate primary this morning, 48.5% to 47.5%, with 99% of the vote counted. Mallory McMorrow, who dropped out weeks ago, still pulled 4%. It was close, but El-Sayed beat Haley Stevens, Chuck Schumer’s preferred candidate. Call it El-Sayed’s win if you want, but its implications are bigger than that. It is a real blow to Schumer’s waning power as Senate Minority Leader.

AdImpact clocked $98.2 million in ads and reserved air through the end of July, the third most expensive Senate primary in American history. Most of it was aimed at one man. It was money lost.

Schumer was already the least popular leader his party has. His approval sits at 28% approve to 47% disapprove, the worst net rating of any leader in Congress. Michigan is what that weakness looks like spent out in the open. A leader this unpopular, who loses this expensively with this much of the party’s money, has run out of the one thing leadership requires. He should step down.

Democrats Tried to Control This Outcome

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Rep. Max Miller went live this morning at 10 a.m. to beat the allegations against him, explain away the allegations made by his ex-wife, Emily Moreno, and tell everyone why he should remain in Congress.

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It did not go well.

Actually, that is being generous. It was an absolute political malpractice masterclass. Miller released a video and a treasure trove of documents, recordings, and text messages for his political opposition to spend the next three months cutting apart.

Max MIller Documents

It showed that he has absolutely no common fucking sense and no clue what the hell he is doing.

This is not going to end well for Max Miller.

And it shouldn’t.

Before getting into this, I want to be clear about something: these are allegations. Miller denies abusing his ex-wife or daughter. He has not been convicted of these accusations, and the child-services investigation into his daughter’s broken collarbone was reportedly unsubstantiated, meaning investigators did not find enough evidence to establish neglect or abuse.

Allegations are not proof. Pictures of red skin and bruising are not, by themselves, proof of how those injuries occurred.

But due diligence does not mean ignoring a pattern of accusations spanning nearly two decades. It means looking at what has been alleged, what has been documented, what Miller admits, what he denies, and whether this person is capable of representing Ohio’s 7th Congressional District while his personal life is exploding all over the internet.

These Allegations Are Nothing New

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The accusations surrounding Max Miller did not begin with his divorce.

Politico reported in 2021 that three people said Miller pushed a girl out of his room while in high school after she resisted his attempts to touch her, causing her to fall down a flight of stairs. Miller categorically denied that happened. When Mother Jones contacted the woman years later, she called it “one of the more traumatic nights” of her life.

Former Trump White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham also accused Miller of becoming physically abusive during their relationship. According to reporting at the time, she alleged that Miller pushed her against a wall and slapped her after she confronted him about cheating.

Miller denied Grisham’s accusations and sued her for defamation. The lawsuit was later dropped after the two reached a confidential settlement. Grisham has since filed another lawsuit alleging Miller violated that agreement with his more recent public comments.

Grisham also wrote that she told people around Donald Trump that the relationship had become abusive and that they did not seem to care. As she wrote in The Washington Post, the Trumps knew when the relationship had turned abusive and “didn’t seem to care.”

I reached out to Grisham myself. She told me she could not speak on the record because of the legal restrictions surrounding the case, although she did speak with me privately.

Now we have accusations from Emily Moreno, Miller’s ex-wife and the daughter of Republican Sen. Bernie Moreno.

Emily has accused Miller of throwing hot water at her, shoving her into a wall, putting a loaded gun to her head, using drugs, and engaging in aggressive and demeaning behavior. Their two-year-old daughter later suffered a broken collarbone under circumstances neither parent could explain. Emily reportedly told police that her daughter had said, “Daddy’s house is scary.”

Again, Miller denies the allegations. The cause of the child’s broken collarbone has not been established. Nobody should say Miller broke his daughter’s collarbone as if a court has proven that he did.

But what the actual fuck are we doing here?

We now have multiple women, across different periods of Miller’s life, describing accusations of aggressive or violent behavior. Due diligence does not require us to convict Miller ourselves. It does require us to ask whether this pattern is acceptable in someone serving in Congress.

Miller’s Own Water Recording Makes Him Look Worse

Miller released audio that he apparently believes clears him.

It does not.

In one recording, Emily says Miller poured steaming hot water on her. Miller does not respond by saying nothing involving water ever happened. Instead, he argues about intent, temperature, and whether the incident was playful.

“It was never done to hurt you, and you know that.”

He says the faucet could not produce boiling water and compares it to standing under a hot shower. He says he and his attorneys tested the water temperature because he anticipated that she would raise the allegation.

Gaslighting 101!

Miller’s defense appears to just be that something involving hot water happened, it simply was not intended to hurt her.

That is not the clean denial Miller seems to believe it is.

He calls it a “playful incident.” She says it was not playful.

The question is no longer only whether an incident happened. It is what happened, how hot the water was, why it happened, whether she was injured, and whether Miller is minimizing something serious by calling it playful.

That is not exoneration. That is a fucking evidentiary argument over the temperature of the water.

But She Cooked Me Dinner

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Another part of Miller’s defense is that Emily continued interacting with him after an alleged assault.

Miller says Ring doorbell footage shows Emily leaving his home calmly with their daughter. He says she did not immediately call police or go to the hospital. He says she went to a child’s birthday party, spoke with him about their daughter’s medical procedure, offered to cook him empanadas six days later, invited him and his girlfriend to a playground, and wrote that they were in a “friendlier place.”

Then he asks:

“If I had assaulted her, would she have offered to cook me dinner six days later?”

I do not know, Max. Maybe.

People remain in contact with former partners after alleged abuse all the time, especially when they share custody of a two-year-old child. People act normally because they are scared, confused, trying to de-escalate a situation, trying to co-parent, or trying to keep their lives from completely exploding.

Her making empanadas does not prove an assault happened. It also does not prove that one did not happen.

The fact that Emily cooked dinner six days later is not the Perry Mason moment Max thinks it is.

“What do you mean I assaulted her? She made me empanadas.”

What the fuck does that have to do with anything?

Then There Are the Needles

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Miller also released an audio recording involving allegations of drug use.

In the recording, Emily says she went into his backpack because she believed he had a drug problem. She says it began with weed and that she later found needles near his bed or in a bedroom drawer.

Miller denies that the needles belonged to him. He repeatedly says he has never had needles in his bedroom drawer and offers to be tested for drugs.

That is his denial, and it should be included.

But the recording does not establish whose needles they were, whether the photograph Emily says she took exists, or whether Miller was using injectable drugs. It captures one person making an allegation and Miller denying it.

Once again, releasing it publicly does not resolve anything. It simply gives voters another disturbing argument between a congressman and his former wife to listen to on the internet.

Max apparently looked at this recording and thought, “Yes, this will help.”

Political malpractice.

Bernie Moreno Finally Found His Balls

For years, SENATOR Bernie Moreno remained publicly silent while allegations involving his daughter and former son-in-law continued piling up.

When I was running for Congress in 2024, I wondered whether Bernie would eventually throw Miller under the bus.

He did not.

Why?

Because Bernie Moreno was a complete fucking wuss.

But after watching Miller’s unhinged livestream, Bernie finally found his balls.

Maybe they (his balls) were at the house of whoever created that old Adult Friend Finder profile using his work email. The Associated Press confirmed that somebody with access to Moreno’s account created a profile seeking encounters with men. And by encounters I mean sex. And by with men, I mean Bernie Moreno having sex with men. Moreno’s lawyer said an intern created it as a prank, and the AP could not independently determine who actually made it.

Fine. Maybe it was the intern. Maybe it was Bernie. Maybe it was Batman.

I do not care.

And Bernie, let me extend an olive branch here: Democrats do not care if somebody is gay, straight, bisexual, or anything else. Nobody is going to burn in hell for rubbing another man’s Johnson.

What I care about is that it took you this long to speak publicly while your daughter was making allegations this serious.

After Miller’s livestream, Moreno released a blistering statement saying the past two years had been “pure hell” for his family. He accused Miller of “increasingly erratic and dangerous behavior,” said Miller needs “serious psychological help,” called him a danger to his daughter, and said he holds his breath whenever Miller has custody of his granddaughter.

Moreno concluded:

“If there are any basic standards of character required to hold elected office, Max Miller fails them. He should not serve in the House of Representatives.”

Bernie Moreno is not some liberal activist. He is a Republican senator, a Trump ally, Miller’s former father-in-law, and the grandfather of the child at the center of this nightmare. He is now publicly calling on Miller to leave Congress.

That does not legally prove Emily’s allegations.

But holy shit, it should get everyone’s attention.

Republicans Are Politically Insane if They Keep Him

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If Donald Trump and Republican leaders do not call for Miller’s immediate resignation, then they are either completely abhorrent in what they are willing to tolerate or too politically stupid to understand what is happening.

Maybe both.

A Republican-commissioned poll conducted July 29 and 30 reportedly showed Democratic challenger Brian Poindexter leading Miller 44 percent to 39 percent, with 16 percent unsure. Miller’s favorability was reportedly just 25 percent, while 41 percent viewed him unfavorably.

Yes, that is Republican polling.

A previous Democratic internal poll had Miller leading by only one point, 44 percent to 43 percent. That was already a statistical tie in a district Trump won by double digits in 2024.

Now the Republican poll has Max losing by five.

What a crash and burn.

For comparison, Miller’s favorability in that Republican poll is significantly worse than Trump’s approval in the district. Max Miller has somehow managed to become less popular than Donald Trump in a Republican-leaning district.

That takes work. Real hard work. I said “hard”… calm down Senator Moreno

From a purely partisan Democratic perspective, we should want Max to remain in the race. Keep him right there. Put him on every television station. Let him keep releasing recordings. Let him hold another livestream. Maybe next time he can bring a whiteboard and diagram the exact temperature of his kitchen faucet.

This is a flippable district. Always has been.

But from the standpoint of responsible government, basic ethics, and the dignity of Congress, Miller should have been gone yesterday.

Republicans still have an opportunity to replace him with a normal Republican who could probably retain the seat. If Trump cares about keeping control of the House, this should be a simple political decision.

Call Max and tell him to get the fuck out.

Max Miller Has Barely Represented Us Anyway

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These allegations and the legal battles surrounding them are now an enormous distraction.

Miller is fighting his ex-wife, his former father-in-law, Stephanie Grisham, attorneys, reporters, political opponents, and apparently anyone else who walks within ten feet of an Ohio courthouse.

I do not believe anyone can be fully focused on legislation, constituents, and the geopolitical disaster unfolding around us while doing all of that.

To be perfectly honest, I have been criticizing Miller for barely showing up for constituents long before this.

He has avoided traditional town halls. He has often blamed security concerns and antisemitism, which is absolutely on the rise and should be taken seriously. But he also seems terrified of standing in front of ordinary Republicans, Democrats, and independents and answering for his record.

We see him occasionally at a homecoming festival or community event when reelection comes around. Spotting Max Miller in the district is like Punxsutawney Phil seeing his shadow.

He crawls out of his hole, sees his shadow, shakes a few hands, and announces two more years of elected office.

Then he disappears again.

Now he is even more distracted. Instead of discussing legislation, healthcare, inflation, war, immigration, the economy, or what he has actually accomplished, he is publicly arguing that his faucet does not get hot enough to burn someone.

This is not representation.

Think About the Child

There is also a two-year-old girl trapped in the middle of all of this.

Nobody wants to grow up knowing the entire internet can search for recordings, allegations, photographs, police reports, court documents, and public accusations about their parents.

That shit never disappears.

Miller says he is defending himself. Emily says she is protecting herself and her daughter. Bernie says he is speaking out because he fears for his family.

Whatever the adults believe they are accomplishing, the child will eventually inherit every ugly piece of it.

By making this as public as it has become, there is almost no way for this to be healthy for her later.

That alone should cause everyone involved to step back and ask what the fuck they are doing.

Go Be Rich, Max

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Max Miller needs to resign.

Not because it is the politically best outcome for Democrats. It is not. The politically best outcome for Democrats is for Max to remain on the ballot, keep imploding, and hand Brian Poindexter a Republican district.

He should resign because it is the right thing for Congress, the district, the country, and his daughter.

And as The Rooster says, Just Go be rich, Max.

Seriously.

One current estimate places Miller’s net worth at roughly $12 million. He has trusts, investments, and valuable property. He does not need this job.

Max's Finances

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Go drive around the country. Camp a little. Smoke some weed, assuming it is legal where you are. Have a few drinks, preferably after handing over the car keys. Get on Adult Friend Finder with Bernie and go get wild with the boys. Maybe the two of you can finally reconnect over something.

I do not know.

But politics is not for you.

You make bad choices. You exercise terrible political judgment. Your personal life is completely messed up, and now you are dragging your family, your constituents, and the institution of Congress through it.

Go get help.

Go take care of your family.

Go get your shit together.

And Go be rich, brother.

Stay Angry.

For Max, in the words of Tay Tay. “It’s me. Hi! I’m the problem it’s me.”

Welcome to another week of The Angry Files, where we take the stories and ideas that have been on our minds throughout the week and put them together in one place.

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This feels like the first week when the midterm elections are actually beginning to ramp up. We are now fewer than 100 days from Election Day. I do not think the real crunch begins until the end of August or sometime in September, but the direction of these races is starting to become clearer.

Here is what has been on my mind this week.

Amy Acton and a Primary Process That Failed Ohio Democrats

Erin In The Morning

Dem. Ohio Gov Candidate Amy Acton Scheduled a Meeting With LGBTQ+ Advocates, Didn't Show Up, And Kicked Out Trans People Who Did

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21 days ago · 564 likes · 66 comments · Erin Reed

The first story is Amy Acton and the growing conflict between her campaign and Ohio’s LGBTQIA+ community. What interests me most about this controversy is what it reveals about our broken political process.

I have been ranting about this for a long time: Democrats do not seem to like democracy nearly as much as they claim.

Amy Acton became the Democratic nominee for governor without having to survive a real primary. Other people considered running. Potential candidates were pushed aside. Party leaders, donors, elected officials, and political organizations put their thumbs on the scale because they decided Acton should be the nominee.

That meant Democratic voters never got a meaningful campaign in which candidates were forced to explain their ideas, defend their records, show their character, and tell Ohioans what they would actually do as governor.

Now, fewer than 100 days before the general election, we are still learning basic things about both candidates.

Vivek Ramaswamy flying around in a private jet, spending substantial time outside Ohio, saying crazy things, and blaming ordinary people for their failures while he lives as a multi-billionaire is ridiculous. But Ramaswamy being ridiculous does not take responsibility from Amy Acton.

Acton’s short, pithy plans and lack of detailed policy have already frustrated some voters and members of the media. Her recent comments about transgender athletes have now created a much deeper problem.

Acton endorsed restrictions on transgender participation in sports and referred to transgender girls as “boys.” Members of Ohio’s LGBTQIA+ community wanted an apology, a clarification, or some indication that she understood why they were angry. Her campaign scheduled what was presented as a listening session with LGBTQIA+ advocates.

Acton did not attend.

According to reporting by Erin Reed, the situation became worse from there. Arienne Childrey, vice chair of the Ohio Democratic Party Pride Caucus, a transgender candidate for the Ohio House, and Ohio’s first openly transgender city council member, was reportedly barred from entering the Zoom meeting. Advocate Ciara Keeton was removed after asking why Childrey had been excluded. Kim McCarthy, chair of the Progressive Caucus, was reportedly left in the waiting room for the entire session.

Childrey said she was eventually able to speak only because Pride Caucus Chair Kyle Herman called her personal phone and put her on speakerphone inside the meeting.

The meeting opened with Equality Ohio rescinding Acton’s “A” rating on its LGBTQIA+ candidate scorecard. When participants pressed campaign manager Philip Stein about why certain advocates had been excluded, he reportedly said the event was “mostly a space we want to listen to the folks that we picked here.” At the end, the campaign offered no retraction, no specific next step, and no commitment that Acton would meet directly with the people who had been excluded.

Here is the point: this may simply be what Amy Acton believes.

People are demanding that she make amends or say something different, but she may genuinely believe transgender athletes should not compete in sports associated with their gender identity. I am not making a value judgment on that position in this article. I am saying Democratic voters should have learned about it during a competitive primary, when Acton could have been questioned, challenged, and compared with other candidates.

Instead, party leaders avoided that debate. Now the ideological disagreement is exploding fewer than 100 days before an election that Democrats describe as an existential fight for democracy.

Ideas should have been fleshed out. Candidates should have debated. Democratic voters should have been allowed to decide whether Amy Acton represented them before the party effectively handed her the nomination.

This should never have gotten this far.

“Daddy’s House Is Scary” and the Allegations Against Max Miller

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The second story is the continuing implosion of Rep. Max Miller’s personal life.

I want to be precise about this: these are allegations. Allegations are not proof, and repeating an accusation does not make it true.

As of Friday, July 31, the allegations involving Miller and his ex-wife, Emily Moreno Miller, had not been proven in court. Photographs reportedly showing red skin on her stomach do not, by themselves, prove her allegation that Miller threw boiling water on her. The involvement of child-services agencies or other authorities also does not establish that abuse occurred.

We should not pretend otherwise.

But we also should not ignore the pattern of accusations surrounding Miller. His ex-wife has alleged that he threw boiling water at her, assaulted and bruised her, held a gun to her head, pushed her against a wall, and slapped her. Their daughter reportedly suffered a broken collarbone and allegedly told her mother, “Daddy’s house is scary.” Miller has denied allegations of abuse.

These are not the first accusations involving his behavior. Former White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham wrote that Miller slapped her during their relationship. A former college classmate accused him of assaulting her during what she described as one of the most traumatic nights of her life. Other allegations about aggressive behavior have followed him since he was young.

Again, none of that means every allegation is true. But when accusations involving similar behavior emerge from multiple people across more than a decade, voters are allowed to take the pattern seriously.

Maybe the correct response is for Max Miller to step away, deal with his personal life, and get his shit together while somebody else represents Ohio’s 7th District in Congress.

The district’s Republican lean does not require voters to give Miller a safe seat. Character still counts. Voters show their own character through the behavior they are willing to accept from the people they elect.

If the accusations are false and Miller is ultimately exonerated, he can make that case publicly and run again. But while allegations this serious remain unresolved, Ohioans are not obligated to act as if nothing happened.

America Is Losing Its Greatest Minds

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Another thing on my mind this week was a video from Neil deGrasse Tyson’s StarTalk about America losing some of its greatest minds.

The argument itself is not new. The United States has weakened the incentives for young people to enter science, technology, engineering, mathematics, and research. We have reduced funding, attacked the credibility of scientists, and forgotten how discoveries in one field can transform industries that appear completely unrelated.

Cuts to scientific and medical research do not remain isolated inside a university or government agency. Work supported through the National Institutes of Health, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, NASA, and other institutions feeds into medicine, manufacturing, national security, technology, communications, and the broader economy.

We often seem willing to invest in science only when the government wants to flex American power. We fund a race to the Moon, a military objective, or some high-profile national goal. What we have failed to maintain is the larger ecosystem that allows researchers to pursue ideas before anyone knows exactly where those ideas will lead.

This is becoming more than a research problem. It is a cultural problem.

The United States increasingly imports instead of creates. We manufacture abroad and import the goods. We weaken our own scientific pipeline and then rely on researchers and scientists trained in other countries to fill the gaps here.

Bringing talented people to the United States is not the problem. America has always benefited from attracting smart, ambitious people from around the world. The problem is that we are failing to cultivate enough of that talent ourselves.

If we keep moving in this direction, the only thing Americans will be expected to do is scroll, consume, and purchase while other countries innovate, research, create, and manufacture.

That is not an economy capable of leading the world.

The DNC Is Mortgaging Its Future

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Laura Rodriguez-Carbone wrote this week about the Democratic National Committee mortgaging its headquarters while trying to pay for elections. Her article examines the growing financial gap between the DNC, the Republican National Committee, and Donald Trump’s MAGA Inc. super PAC as we approach the midterms.

The Whisper Campaign

DNC Mortgages Building to Pay for Races

A few months ago, I wrote about widespread concerns within the DNC about fundraising and we are now getting a clearer look at how bad the party’s financial picture actually is…

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22 days ago · 2 likes · Laura Rodriguez-Carbone

Democratic leaders continue to tell us this election is all or nothing. If Democrats lose, they warn, American democracy itself may not survive.

If that is true, it seems strange that the Democratic Party is entering the fight millions of dollars in debt.

But this is not new. Democratic organizations have repeatedly operated in the hole and managed their money poorly. We see versions of the same problem in county parties, state parties, and the DNC.

Read Laura’s full article for the details. But the basic question is simple: if party leaders genuinely believe democracy is on the line, why have they managed the institution responsible for defending it so badly?

Chris Ronayne, Courtney Scheff, and an Obvious Conflict

Moving closer to home, a conflict has emerged in the Cuyahoga County Council District 5 race between Democrat Courtney Scheff and Republican incumbent Michael Gallagher.

County Executive Chris Ronayne’s campaign committee contributed $5,000 to Scheff’s campaign. Ronayne is also hosting a fundraiser for her that could bring in thousands more.

None of this appears to be illegal. Elected officials routinely use campaign funds to support other candidates. But legality is not the only standard we should apply to political conduct.

I have written about this race multiple times and said many positive things about Courtney. She is intelligent, accomplished, and has an impressive background. I have spoken with her several times. I have also said positive things about Gallagher’s role as a check on the county executive.

The Angry Ohioans

Cuyahoga County Council District 5: Courtney Scheff vs. Michael Gallagher

Edit: Mike Gallagher made a website a couple weeks after this article came out. You can find his and Courtney’s websites linked by their names below…

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a month ago · The Angry Democrat, Matt Diemer, and Laura Rodriguez-Carbone

That check is exactly what concerns me.

The county executive is helping finance the campaign of someone who, if elected, will sit on the council responsible for overseeing his administration. Ronayne may call it coalition building. I see an executive helping elect a potential rubber stamp.

If Ronayne’s money and political network help Scheff win, how much meaningful pushback will she be willing to give him once she is on council? That does not mean she will vote with him on everything. It means voters have a legitimate reason to question the relationship.

I think Scheff is favored to win. Strongsville remains Gallagher’s strongest Republican base, while Democratic turnout across the rest of the district could carry her comfortably.

But I am bothered by the conflict, and I am more bothered that so few people appear willing to acknowledge it. A county council member should provide oversight of the executive branch, not owe her election to it.

East Cleveland Will Not Tell the Public How Many Police Officers It Has

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The final political story on my mind is East Cleveland.

Online reports claimed the city was down to four active patrol officers and one detective. East Cleveland officials denied those numbers, but then refused to tell the public how many officers the department actually employs.

Mayor Sandra Morgan and Law Director Ken Myers said the city could not disclose “specific tactical staffing numbers” for security reasons. But according to the Ohio Attorney General’s 2026 Sunshine Laws Manual, public offices are required to maintain a public database or list containing the names of their officials and employees.

Officials cannot dismiss public reporting as false while refusing to provide the number they claim is correct.

Ideastream reported that News 5 Cleveland had identified six active-duty patrol officers, which would amount to roughly two officers per shift. Ideastream said one of its own sources had heard the same number. The Cuyahoga County Sheriff’s Department is providing limited weekend support, but the county says its deputies are not the primary agency responding to 911 calls and do not replace East Cleveland’s patrol function.

The mayor later reportedly said the department had 16 officers. Even if that number is accurate, two were reportedly on sick leave and another was involved in a legal matter, leaving approximately 13 available. That is still an alarmingly small force for a city that requires coverage 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

The administration’s response has been deflection followed by non-transparency. First, officials said the online numbers were wrong. Then they refused to release the actual number. Then a larger number was offered without acknowledging that even this staffing level appears dangerously inadequate.

You can find the discussion in the below podcast by Cleveland dot com. Around the 31 minute mark.

This comes after years of scandal inside the department. More than a dozen East Cleveland officers have been convicted of crimes including bribery, assault, and robbery during the past five years. Former Police Chief Kenneth Lundy is facing 31 criminal charges. The city’s finances are under state control through receivership, and the state auditor previously cited East Cleveland’s failure to produce records needed to complete audits.

This is not one isolated staffing shortage inherited by a new administration. It is a systemic collapse in governance, accountability, public safety, and trust.

When officials refuse to provide basic information, people will speculate. That is not the public’s fault. It is the predictable result of a government that demands trust while refusing transparency.

Shame on you, Mayor Morgan. Shame on you.

What I Watched This Week

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As you know, I love movies. I try to watch two or three each week, although I usually watch them the way most people watch television. I stop after an hour, go to bed, and finish them over the next day or two.

The first movie this week was Mortal Kombat II.

As someone who grew up in the 1980s and 1990s, Mortal Kombat is legendary. The video game is a classic, but we have still never received a truly great movie adaptation. The previous movie was decent and finally put some of our favorite characters on screen. The sequel gives us even more of that.

It is hokey. It is bad. But if you want to see the characters you remember from the games, it does a decent job.

I give it a 5 out of 10…. uuuhhhhgggg maybe 4.5/10.

I also watched Masters of the Universe, another piece of 1980s nostalgia.

Again, it was horrible. The dialogue was bad. The action was bad. The jokes and the entire script was a script and formula we has seen 100 times already.

But it had the nostalgia. It included the characters, and from what I remember of the cartoon, many of them looked pretty good. I wish they had included Man-E-Faces, the character whose face rotates among different identities. He always reminded of the Face Dancers from Dune.

Jared Leto was also fun as Skeletor. He played him as a quirky, narcissistic egomaniac, which worked better than most of the movie around him.

Still, I give it a 5 out of 10. Maybe less.

Both movies sucked, but I powered through them. Took me about 2 days each.

Those are the stories and ideas that were on my mind this week. Leave your thoughts below and tell us what you believed was the most important story of the week.

Stay Angry.

I just got back from seeing Christopher Nolan’s adaptation of The Odyssey, and I have a lot to say about it.

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This review contains spoilers. If you have not seen the movie, close this article, go watch it, and come back. I do not want to hear anybody complaining that I spoiled it for them.

I would also recommend learning the basic story of The Odyssey before watching the movie. You do not need to read Homer’s entire epic, but a quick overview will make the characters, mythology, and structure much easier to follow.

I am going to do three things here:

First, explain the basic story.

Second, talk about the political backlash surrounding the movie.

Finally, explain why I think Nolan’s The Odyssey is a 9 out of 10 epic about war, masculinity, addiction, leadership, and what happens when the norms holding a society together begin to collapse.

What Is The Odyssey?

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The Odyssey is Homer’s ancient Greek epic about Odysseus, king of Ithaca, and his attempt to return home after the Trojan War.

Odysseus is married to Penelope, and they have a son named Telemachus. He leaves Ithaca to fight at Troy when Telemachus is still an infant. The war lasts ten years, and Odysseus’s journey home takes another ten. By the time he returns, he has been gone for twenty years.

Odysseus is not the biggest or strongest warrior in Greek mythology. His strength is his mind. He is a strategist, a manipulator, a liar when necessary, and the man traditionally credited with devising the Trojan Horse.

Christopher Nolan’s movie expands beyond the events of Homer’s Odyssey to show the end of the Trojan War. Greek soldiers hide inside the horse while Sinon, played by Elliot Page, helps deceive the Trojans into believing it is an offering. The Trojans bring it through the city’s walls, allowing the Greeks to attack Troy from inside.

But winning the war is only the beginning of Odysseus’s real story.

Back in Ithaca, Penelope has spent twenty years protecting her family and holding together what remains of Odysseus’s household. Telemachus has grown into a young man without his father. Suitors have flooded into their home, consuming their food, abusing their hospitality, corrupting people around them, and pressuring Penelope to choose a new husband.

The suitors are not merely obnoxious guests. They are exploiting xenia, the sacred Greek law of hospitality associated with Zeus. People were expected to welcome strangers and treat guests properly because they never knew when a god might arrive in disguise.

The suitors take that sacred obligation and weaponize it. They use a custom meant to create trust as permission to consume Odysseus’s household from within.

Meanwhile, Odysseus is trying to return home through gods, monsters, temptations, grief, bad decisions, and the consequences of war. His journey is not only physical. It is mental, emotional, spiritual, and strategic. He is not simply trying to reach Ithaca. He is trying to figure out whether the man who left Ithaca twenty years earlier still exists.

The Movie Was Declared Woke Before Anyone Saw It

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The political backlash started months before the movie was released.

People attacked Elliot Page’s casting, often while falsely claiming he was playing Achilles or some massive Spartan warrior. Page actually plays Sinon, a smaller and more vulnerable figure whose importance comes from deception and sacrifice, not physical dominance.

Lupita Nyong’o’s casting as Helen of Troy created even more outrage. She is Black, rather than the blonde, white version of Helen that many people have come to expect from Western paintings and previous movies.

Suddenly, half the internet became experts on Bronze Age Greece. People were debating armor, ships, ethnicity, masculinity, historical accuracy, Greek mythology, and the supposed destruction of Western civilization.

The backlash reached the point where people were saying Nolan had lost the plot. They claimed he had sold out to woke Hollywood, intentionally disrespected Western culture, and made casting decisions to appease some imaginary DEI committee at the Academy Awards.

Matt Walsh joined the pile-on before the movie was released and continued afterward. He called the casting “atrocious” and described Odysseus as an “anachronistic whiney, solemn shell of a man” plagued by trauma and guilt. According to Walsh, Nolan had taken one of history’s great warriors and transformed him into a modern victim.

Honestly, some of it almost got to me.

I watched the videos. I read the arguments. I listened to people confidently explain why this movie was going to be a disaster. I went into the theater wondering whether Christopher Nolan had finally made a massive mistake.

He did not.

Christopher Nolan Understood the Assignment

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This movie is absolutely epic.

Is the cast diverse? Yes.

Does that damage the story? No. Actually, it might be more accurate.

The ancient Mediterranean was not an isolated neighborhood where nobody ever encountered people from somewhere else. It was a center of trade, migration, conquest, slavery, commerce, and travel. More importantly, this is a mythological adaptation involving gods, monsters, prophecies, and divine intervention.

Casting still has to make sense within a story. I do not believe every actor automatically fits every role. Physicality matters when the story requires physicality.

But that is precisely why Page’s casting works. Sinon is not presented as an unstoppable warrior beating men twice his size. He is smaller, vulnerable, expendable, and essential to Odysseus’s plan. The character demonstrates that wars are not won only through strength. They are also won through deception, sacrifice, strategy, and the willingness to use human beings as pieces on a board.

The scenes inside the Trojan Horse are brutal. The men are packed together, drowning as the tide rises, pissing and shitting on one another, waiting for the slightest opportunity to escape and open the gates.

There is nothing glamorous about it. Nolan does not present war as a beautiful procession of muscular men marching heroically into battle. He shows what victory costs and what leaders sometimes ask other people to endure in order to achieve it.

Nyong’o’s Helen does not destroy the story either. Her casting changes nothing about the deception, betrayal, heartbreak, or consequences surrounding Troy. Her relatively limited role also becomes important to Odysseus because her experience helps him think through how he might return to Ithaca without immediately revealing himself.

This Is a Story About Masculinity

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I do not understand the argument that showing Odysseus wrestling with trauma somehow demasculates him.

If anything, that is what makes his masculinity believable.

This is not an Arnold Schwarzenegger movie where the hero kills everyone, delivers a one-liner, and walks away untouched. Odysseus spends ten years at war and another ten trying to return home. He watches men die. He sends some of them to their deaths. He makes impossible choices, loses people he loves, and carries the responsibility of leadership long after the glory of victory disappears.

That changes him.

Strength is not the absence of grief, guilt, doubt, or fear. Strength is carrying those things without allowing them to completely destroy you. It is finding a reason to continue when the mission that once defined you is over and the person you were before the war no longer exists.

That is the deeper question behind Odysseus’s journey. Winning the war does not mean he knows how to come home. Victory gives him glory, but it does not give him peace. He still has to decide whether he wants to remain a warrior forever or return to being a husband, father, and king.

That is not a weak man. That is a man being forced to confront the full consequences of what he has done and what has been done to him.

Leadership Does Not Mean Control

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The movie also understands something important about leadership: being responsible for people does not mean you can control them.

Odysseus can warn his men. He can plan for them. He can try to protect them. He can understand the consequences better than they do. But he cannot make every decision for them.

His men slaughter the sacred cattle of Helios after being explicitly warned not to touch them. Odysseus does not choose that outcome, but he still has to live with the consequences.

That is one of the hardest parts of leadership. You can know the danger. You can explain it clearly. You can see exactly where a decision will lead, and people can still make it anyway.

Foreknowledge is not control.

Odysseus also has to decide who will be placed in danger and who may have to die. Leaders can pretend every person will come home, but that is not true. Sometimes every available choice is terrible. Sometimes there is no heroic answer that leaves everyone alive and morally clean.

The scenes involving the Underworld and the people Odysseus lost are powerful because they force him to confront the human cost behind his own choices. History may remember the victory. He remembers the faces.

Glory is temporary. The burden is not.

Addiction, Comfort, and the Temptation to Stop Moving

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The movie also made me think about addiction.

The lotus and Calypso are separate parts of Odysseus’s journey, but both represent different versions of the temptation to stop moving forward. The lotus offers forgetfulness. Calypso offers comfort, pleasure, and escape.

After everything Odysseus has endured, that temptation makes complete sense.

It made me think about soldiers who return from war and drink too much, use drugs, or find some other way to numb themselves. Not because they are weak, but because forgetting can feel easier than living with the people they lost and the choices they made.

Addiction can become its own island. You are no longer trapped by a monster or a god. You are trapped by the comfort of not having to remember.

Odysseus cannot return home until he is willing to leave that comfort and face his past. He has to remember his family, accept what happened to his crew, and resume the journey knowing that returning home will not erase what came before.

He cannot become the person he was before the war. He can only decide what kind of person he will be after it.

We Are Being Fed Our Opinions

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The response to this movie made me think about something larger than The Odyssey.

We are being given our opinions before we are given the facts.

We see a clip, headline, screenshot, meme, AI-generated image, or reaction video. Someone packages an argument into a sound bite, and people repeat it to prove they are informed and on the correct team.

I see it constantly on Substack and Facebook. People respond to something I wrote with an argument that has almost nothing to do with what I said because they are not responding to me. They are responding with a prepackaged set of talking points somebody else gave them.

It almost worked on me with this movie.

The outrage was repeated so confidently and so often that I entered the theater wondering whether the movie might be an intentional attack on Western culture. Millions of people reached conclusions about the film before they had watched it or even knew which characters the actors were playing.

Sometimes I think that we are living in a simulation and that some massive artificial intelligence took control of the algorithms around the COVID era. I do not know if there is one person or force controlling it. But I do know what the incentives are producing.

The algorithms reward anger, certainty, humiliation, tribalism, and the quickest possible reaction. They do not reward thoughtfulness, restraint, curiosity, or admitting that you do not have enough information yet.

We are living in a post-truth society where the person who tells the most emotionally satisfying story often beats the person who has the facts.

The reaction to The Odyssey allowed me to watch that process unfold on a compressed timeline. A narrative was created. People repeated it. The movie came out. The narrative was contradicted, and many people simply refused to reconsider it.

Admitting you were wrong is apparently no longer an option. Shit even Ben Shapiro liked it!

When Norms Collapse, Darkness Gets In

The most political part of The Odyssey may not be its casting. It may be what the story says about the collapse of norms.

Odysseus is gone for twenty years, ten years fighting at Troy and ten years trying to return. The darkness that spreads during that absence is not caused only by war, monsters, tragedy, and the anger of the gods.

It is also caused by people abandoning the laws and customs that hold society together.

The suitors understand the rules of hospitality. They exploit those rules while violating their purpose. They technically arrive as guests, but then consume the household, threaten Telemachus, pressure Penelope, corrupt the servants, and turn hospitality into occupation.

That is what makes their behavior so corrosive. They are not attacking the system from outside. They are hollowing it out from within.

A functioning society cannot survive through written law alone. There must also be shared standards about honesty, dignity, restraint, loyalty, hospitality, and acceptable behavior. There will always be things people can legally do that still destroy trust and weaken the culture around them.

In Homer’s world, those standards are connected to Zeus and the gods. In another culture, they might be described as religious or biblical principles. But you do not have to believe in Zeus or belong to any religion to understand why they are necessary.

Over the past decade, we have watched social media push our culture toward the lowest possible denominator. The most dishonest, cruel, humiliating, degenerate, and attention-seeking behavior gets rewarded. The person willing to break the norm gets the attention, and everyone else begins lowering their own standards because they do not want to compete at a disadvantage.

Then comes the whataboutism.

Why should we tell the truth when the other side lies? Why should we follow the rules when they break them? Why should we maintain standards when they have already stooped lower?

Eventually, nobody is defending the norm. Everyone is only explaining why the other side forced them to abandon it.

That is how a culture collapses. Not necessarily through one dramatic event, but through millions of smaller choices where people decide that truth is optional and rules only matter when they can be used against someone else.

The consequences eventually reach everyone. That is the warning running beneath The Odyssey. When shared rules disappear, brute strength, deception, revenge, and violence rush in to replace them.

My Review

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I give Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey a 9 out of 10.

It is not perfect. Every movie has flaws if you look hard enough. People will debate the historical inaccuracies, changes to Homer, characters Nolan added, elements he removed, the costumes, ships, accents, casting, and everything else.

Fine.

But I walked out thinking, this is exactly why I still pay to see a movie in a theater.

It is visually stunning, thoughtful, violent, emotional, and much deeper than the culture-war argument surrounding it. It does not demasculate Odysseus. It gives masculinity weight. It shows that being a man is not about being untouched by war, grief, or failure. Crying because you miss you family. Praying for your fellow soldiers. Struck by fear to make a wrong choice. It is about how you carry those things and whether you can still find your way home.

It is a story about leadership without complete control, victory without peace, addiction as escape, family as purpose, and the terrible cost of decisions that cannot be undone.

It is also a warning about what happens when the shared laws, customs, and expectations holding a society together become nothing more than loopholes for selfish people to exploit.

Christopher Nolan understood the assignment.

Go see it.

Stay Angry.

p.s. Read my review of Andor as well.

We’re trying a new article format inspired by a few Substacks we follow, including The Rooster and its Mailbag series. We’re calling ours The Angry Files.

These are stories, ideas, and updates that we want to put in front of you but may not need an individual email. Instead, we’ll collect them into one larger post covering several things we’ve been watching and thinking about over the past week.

Once we get rolling, we plan to publish The Angry Files a couple of times each month.

I hope you enjoy it.

Stay Angry.

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wrote an article arguing that the Democratic Party & new effort to win back men is mostly vibes. Even the candidate said so.

There has been plenty of pushback online. People called her bitter and tried to turn the whole thing into a personal grievance. But what Laura wrote was also something we saw firsthand during the primary.

Laura was 100% right to write that article.

We are not going to keep rehashing the same arguments or replying to every person online, so you will not get every back-and-forth in your inbox. But if you want to know what I think about the Democratic Party’s inauthentic push to win back white men, or men generally, read this.

The Whisper Campaign

The Democratic Party’s Bro Pivot Is Just More Identity Politics

The other day, The Atlantic published an article about Brian Poindexter, the Democratic candidate for Congress in Ohio’s 7th District. The title was “The Return of the Democratic Manly Man,” and the subtitle announced that the party has a new campaign strategy: masculinity…

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a month ago · The Angry Democrat and Matt Diemer

Election Fraud?

Donald Trump said there was election fraud and outside interference in the 2020 election. He recently released declassified intelligence documents from agencies including the CIA, NSA, and ODNI that he says support those claims. I uploaded the documents from the White House so anyone can read them and come to their own conclusions.

Some of the broad themes that appear throughout the documents include:

• Intelligence reporting discusses foreign influence efforts by countries including China, Russia, and Iran aimed at shaping U.S. politics and public opinion.

• Several documents reference concerns over foreign access to voter registration data and other sensitive election-related information.

• Internal emails show disagreements among intelligence officials over how foreign election-related activity should be analyzed and described in official assessments.

• The released material includes intelligence assessments, internal emails, and heavily redacted reports, but much of the underlying evidence remains redacted or unavailable for independent verification.

With extraordinary claims comes extraordinary evidence.

Download White House Files

I’m not going to dismiss this because it’s Donald Trump. I’m also not going to embrace it because it is Donald Trump.

Words on a page are not enough. Redacted intelligence reports are not enough.

I want digital fingerprints. Digital evidence. I want independent cybersecurity experts and third-party investigators, working separately, arriving at the same conclusions.

Until then, I’m staying agnostic. Open-minded. Cautious. Paying attention. Head on a swivel. But I’m not jumping to either side without evidence.

What are your thoughts?

When Debate Dies

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This next piece comes from

One thing Dani and I have talked about at length is the nonstop whataboutism coming from every side of every political argument. Instead of substance, constructive thought, or even a real understanding of the issue, we get people screaming about what the other side did first or did worse.

That does not move anything forward. It just keeps us stuck blaming the other team while lowering our own ethical, moral, and behavioral standards because they stooped to a new low.

At some point, we have to ask: What do we actually believe? What are we willing to defend? And what would incremental improvement even look like?

What are your thoughts on Dani’s article?

The Rooster

is one of my daily go-tos when I want to see what is happening in other parts of Ohio. He occasionally covers Northeast Ohio too, which I always appreciate.

Check out his Mailbag, where he puts several different thoughts and updates into one post.

I especially wanted to point out his coverage of races around the state, where he highlights the candidates, the race, and the Democrat on the ticket.

Always worth a read.

The Rooster

The Rooster's July Mailbag

WARREN COUNTY — I saw The Odyssey last night. I had never considered that Odysseus might have felt bad for tricking the Trojans like that…

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a month ago · 14 likes · 5 comments · D.J. Byrnes

This next piece comes from Andrey J. Martinichin, a write-in congressional candidate in Ohio’s 7th District.

Andrey takes a hard look at private equity’s growing role in nursing education, including how for-profit schools can load aspiring nurses with massive debt while offering programs that may leave them with limited options afterward. It is a sharp piece on what happens when Wall Street sees people trying to better their lives as a business opportunity.

The Angry Ohioans

Private Equity Is Breaking Nursing Before Nurses Ever Reach the Bedside

U.S. healthcare is a sprawling mess, and there’s no clean place to point and say “this is where it broke.” So I picked a starting point that made sense to me: the classroom, where most healthcare careers begin. My background is in nursing, so that’s the lens I’ll use — and what I found is a system where private equity is quietly reshaping, and warping, …

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a month ago · The Angry Democrat and Andrey J. Martinichin

Flock No?

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This week, Cleveland City Council voted 9-6 to keep the city’s Flock license-plate reader cameras for another six months.

The problem is not that Cleveland wants to reduce crime. Cleveland has real crime problems, and residents deserve safety. The problem is handing over more of our privacy to a private surveillance company that collects and stores data about where people drive and when.

Council did add restrictions, including cutting off the Northeast Ohio Regional Fusion Center’s access to Cleveland’s Flock data. But this still deserves serious scrutiny. We should not casually accept a future where private companies build searchable databases of our movements and call it public safety.

Read the Cleveland.com story: Cleveland to Keep Flock Cameras After City Council Vote.

Voted yes to extend Flock

• Joseph T. Jones, Ward 1: 216-664-4944

• Kevin L. Bishop, Ward 2: 216-664-4945

• Deborah Gray, Ward 3: 216-664-4941

• Richard A. Starr, Ward 5: 216-664-2309

• Blaine A. Griffin, Ward 6: 216-664-4234

• Kevin Conwell, Ward 9: 216-664-4252

• Michael D. Polensek, Ward 10: 216-664-4236

• Brian Kazy, Ward 13: 216-664-2942

• Charles J. Slife, Ward 15: 216-664-4239

Voted no on the extension

• Kris Harsh, Ward 4: 216-664-2943

• Austin N. Davis, Ward 7: 216-664-2691

• Stephanie D. Howse-Jones, Ward 8: 216-664-2908

• Nikki Hudson, Ward 11: 216-664-4235

• Tanmay Shah, Ward 12: 216-664-4233

• Jasmin Santana, Ward 14: 216-664-4238

Contact the council members. Tell them what you think about how they voted. Holding them accountable matters.

What I’m Watching

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I used to write a lot more about movies, television, and media. I may start doing that again, especially because so much of it eventually connects back to politics, culture, and how we think through the world.

There are two shows and one movie on my mind right now.

First, watch The Orville.

It is not officially a Star Trek spinoff, but let’s be honest, it is a full-on love letter to what made Star Trek great. Episodic stories. Characters you get to know. Ethical dilemmas where there is no clean answer and both choices can be awful in their own way. The trolly problem!

That was the brilliance of the original series, The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, and Voyager. The best episodes did not lecture you. They gave you a problem, showed you multiple perspectives, and let you walk away thinking about it. Ten people could watch the same episode and have ten different opinions afterward.

That is what The Orville does well. Season one starts out more comedic, but by season three it becomes a serious, thoughtful science-fiction show. If you love old-school Star Trek, you should watch it. In my opinion, it is modern Star Trek, more than modern Star Trek.

The second is For All Mankind. It asks a simple question: What if the space race never really ended? What if we kept pushing human exploration, science, and technological advancement through all the political conflict, mistakes, costs, and human drama?

The show can drift into more drama than I personally want at times, but the bigger idea is worth it. It gives you hope and wonder about what humanity might be capable of if we actually decided to put our minds and resources toward exploration. It does not feel like some impossible warp-speed fantasy. Much of it feels close enough to reality that it makes you ask why we stopped dreaming that big.

And finally, Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey comes out this week.

There has already been plenty of online chatter trying to tear it down over casting and everything else people can find to fight about. But Christopher Nolan is one of the best directors of our generation, and, in my opinion, one of the best ever. His movies are not perfect. No movie is if you look hard enough. But the early reactions have me hopeful that this is going to be the epic people have been waiting for.

We (Laura and I) are seeing it this weekend. We will report back.

What Laura’s Listening To

I’m an audiophile, play multiple instruments (guitar, piano, drums), and am surprised I am not in a band at this point. But here’s what’s spinning on my record player:

The Guest List — on heavy rotation

A young Manchester five-piece who came up through TikTok and turned out to be the real thing. Their EP When The Lights Are Out is out now, with a debut album, Something Real, due this year. Frontman Cai Alty writes straight at the modern world — climate dread, mental health, male suicide, the low hum of everyone’s rage — over guitars that earn the Arctic Monkeys and Sam Fender comparisons without hiding behind them. Rolling Stone UK called the title track “reminiscent of Humbug-era Arctic Monkeys.” If you like a band that still believes a song can mean something, start here. If you were an Oasis fan or like the Smiths or Morrissey, this music is melodic and relatable.

Start with: “Something Real,” “Weatherman,” “Ruine” Listen: Spotify

The Airborne Toxic Event — my new-old discovery

How I slept on this LA band for this long, I can’t tell you. “Sometime Around Midnight” is the gateway — a slow-building, string-laced crescendo gut-punch about seeing an ex across a bar that goes exactly where you’re afraid it will. Behind it is a whole catalog, from 2008’s self-titled debut through 2024’s Glory, with literate, big-hearted rock led by Mikel Jollett (also worth knowing as the author of the memoir Hollywood Park). Come for the one song everyone knows; stay for the four you’ll wish you’d found sooner.

Start with: “Sometime Around Midnight,” “All I Ever Wanted,” “Faithless,” “Wishing Well” Listen: Spotify — “Sometime Around Midnight”

Brandon Flowers — Thrasher — listening with one eyebrow raised

Full disclosure: I’m not a country fan. I am a Killers diehard who’ll argue they’re the best rock band of the last twenty-five years. So this one’s a test of faith. Flowers’ first solo record in eleven years (out August 21) is a full country-western turn — cut at Nashville’s historic RCA Studio A with pedal steel, harmonica, and the ghosts of Johnny Cash and Waylon Jennings, songs about family, loss, and small-town Utah. The lead single “Plans” is out now. I’m going in skeptical and hopeful in equal measure. Report to follow.

Start with: “Plans” (before you judge) Listen: Spotify — “Plans”

I hope you enjoyed this format instead of getting blasted with a separate email for every story.

Take your time, bookmark the pieces that interest you, and read through them when you can. We would love your feedback. Email us at admin@theangrydem.com, or email me directly at matt@theangrydem.com.

And, of course, please support our work. We spend hours every week, and honestly most of my day, looking into stories, talking to people, and figuring out how to cover more Northeast Ohio politics.

Thank you for supporting us and for being an Angry Democrat.

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Stay Angry.

The following is an op-ed from Dani Pajak, who has written for The Angry Ohioans before.

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I wanted to highlight this piece because what Dani says below reflects something I have felt for a long time. Honestly, it is one of the main reasons I started The Angry Democrats, why I reached out to Laura, and why people like Dani and others have found this platform as a place to voice their dissatisfaction with the Democratic Party.

We all want to make this nation better. We deeply love the United States. We believe the Democratic Party is still the last real avenue of political power that can hopefully protect democracy and create change for the betterment of everyone in this country.

But some of the party’s shortcomings have become so glaringly anti-democratic, anti-transparency, and opposed to the very principles we should hold dear that we cannot simply stand by and let them happen.

Otherwise, what are we doing?

That is not democracy.

To have a strong democracy, we have to practice democracy. That means debate, speech, open conversation, finding our voices, and finding others who are willing to speak with us.

Dani’s opinions below echo how I felt after 2024.

I remember getting on the phone with a close colleague and saying Joe Biden had to drop out of the race. I was told to shut up and accept what the Democratic Party gave me.

I later put out a statement calling for Biden to step aside, in lockstep with Sherrod Brown when he made the same request.

Then Kamala Harris was anointed without a primary. I protested that too. I said this was not what we should be standing for, and I was shut down again.

After Kamala was chosen, I never supported her publicly. I did not put up a yard sign. I did not talk about her on the campaign trail.

To me, the Democratic Party had done one of the most undemocratic things imaginable. It simply picked someone, told us to shut up, fall in line, and vote for her.

So I am glad to see that Dani and others agree with me on something fundamental.

To uphold democracy, we have to practice democracy. We have to model it. We have to defend open speech and debate inside our own party.

Thank you, Dani, for being brave enough to speak out.

- Matt

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Guest Writer: Dani Pajak is a local Angry Ohioan and guest contributor. In this piece, Dani argues that the Democratic Party has replaced open debate with candidate anointment, trigger words, and “what-about-isms,” leaving independent-minded voters feeling dismissed, unheard, and taken for granted.

American politics used to be a contest of ideas, with debate at the center of the process.

Today, especially within the Democratic Party, debate feels like from another era.

What has replaced it is a defensive reflex built on trigger words, accusations, and a kind of rhetorical sleight of hand I call “what‑about‑isms.”

Instead of addressing criticism, the response is often to point at the opposing party and say, “Well, what about them?” It’s a tactic meant to shut down conversation rather than open it. I’ve watched this shift happen over years, but the last presidential election made it impossible to ignore.

I wasn’t on board with Kamala Harris, and I felt my voice was taken away when the primary offered no real choice. I was open‑minded to independent candidates like Bobby Kennedy Jr., Jill Stein, and others.

But the moment I told someone I didn’t support Harris, the assumption was immediate: I must be MAGA. I must be a Trump lover. The nuance of being an independent voter, someone who evaluates candidates individually, was erased.

When I asked people why I should vote for Harris, the answer was always the same: “Because she’s not Trump.” That was the entire pitch. Not her policies, not her leadership, not her vision. Just her opposition to one man. And nothing seemed to anger staunch Democrats more than hearing that I was open to someone other than Trump and Kamala. The only thing both parties seemed to hate more was me considering the Green Party or Libertarians.

This wasn’t new for me. Back when I campaigned for Bernie Sanders, I watched him get boxed out for Hillary Clinton. I was infuriated. And when Bernie jumped on the bandwagon afterward, I felt betrayed. I lost respect for him because it felt like he abandoned the movement he inspired. And because of all that, of course Trump won.

To call Hillary Clinton a liberal is laughable. When she labeled anyone who didn’t support her as sexist, racist, or a “basket of deplorables,” she alienated millions of voters who weren’t any of those things.

Some were, most weren’t. But her campaign acted like disagreement itself was bigotry.

Kamala Harris followed the same pattern. She offered nothing meaningful, and when she lost, Democrats seemed shocked that celebrity endorsements weren’t enough.

When Joe Biden went on The Breakfast Club and said, “If you don’t vote for me, you’re not Black,” it was another example of how disconnected Democratic leadership had become from real people. I’ve watched debates where the Democratic candidate’s entire platform was anti‑Trump. That’s not a platform.

The “what‑about‑isms” don’t work. And somehow the Democratic Party doesn’t seem to understand that.

The Meaning of Debate: What We Lost

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A debate is not supposed to be a performance. It’s not a collection of sound bites crafted by consultants. A debate is a public test of ideas. It’s a moment where a politician must stand alone, without the shield of their party, and defend their beliefs with clarity, logic, and conviction. A real debate is a form of respect, respect for the audience, respect for the opponent, and respect for the democratic process.

Once upon a time, debates were meaningful. Watching John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon was like watching two visions of America collide. They disagreed deeply, but they shared a fundamental belief, that the American people deserved to hear their reasoning. They spoke in full thoughts, not fragments. They explained, they justified, they persuaded. They didn’t rely on trigger words or accusations. They didn’t assume that calling the other side names would be enough to win.

Debate used to be a way for voters to understand how politicians thought, not just what they thought. It revealed character. It revealed priorities. It revealed whether someone could handle pressure, complexity, and scrutiny.

Today, debates feel more like staged media events where candidates recite pre‑approved lines designed to avoid risk. The art of thinking out loud, the courage to engage honestly, has been replaced by fear of saying anything that might offend the party’s base.

When debate dies, democracy weakens.

Because democracy depends on disagreement. It depends on the clash of ideas. It depends on leaders who can articulate more than insults.

The Party of Anointment

The Democratic Party has developed a habit of anointing candidates instead of letting voters choose them. Kamala Harris was hoisted up the same way Hillary Clinton was. The same way others have been. The voice of the people gets replaced by the voice of party insiders who decide who the nominee “should” be. And then they expect everyone to fall in line.

This isn’t just a federal problem. It happens right here in Euclid, where I live.

Local politics mirror national politics, candidates are selected behind closed doors, and the public is expected to accept it.

Debate is minimized. Dissent is treated as disloyalty.

And anyone who questions the chosen candidate is labeled with whatever trigger word is convenient.

The result is predictable, people feel unheard. People feel dismissed. People feel like their vote is being taken for granted. And when voters feel ignored long enough, they stop supporting the party that ignores them.

The Cost of Losing Debate

When a party stops debating, it stops evolving. It stops listening. It stops learning. It becomes defensive instead of visionary. It becomes reactive instead of proactive. It becomes a party defined by what it hates rather than what it hopes for.

Trigger words like “fascist,” “racist,” “sexist,” and “Nazi” are used so casually now that they’ve lost meaning.

They’re used as shields, not arguments. They’re used to silence, not persuade.

And when every criticism is met with a “what‑about‑ism,” nothing gets solved. Accountability disappears.

Debate forces clarity. Debate forces honesty. Debate forces growth.

Without it, politics becomes a performance instead of a conversation.

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A Final Thought

I use the word “coup” because that’s what it felt like, a takeover of the Democratic Party by people who no longer trust voters to choose.

I didn’t vote for Kamala Harris. I didn’t support her. And I won’t pretend that being told “vote for her because she’s not Trump” was enough.

Debate matters. Ideas matter. Choice matters.

And until the Democratic Party remembers that, they will continue to lose the voters who once believed in them.

Guest Writer: This article was contributed by a local Angry Patriot.

The Angry Democrat welcomes submissions from local writers and community members who want to contribute thoughtful commentary on the Democratic Party, our democracy, public policy, and issues affecting Northeast Ohio and beyond.

Interested in writing for us? Contact us at admin@theangrydem.com.

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Our argument was straightforward. Khanna is trying to rebrand himself as an anti-billionaire, anti-oligarch, working-class progressive while positioning himself for a possible presidential campaign. He travels around the country endorsing union workers, democratic socialists, and anti-establishment candidates, collecting the exact political relationships and photographs that help build that image.

Meanwhile, his household continues reporting thousands of stock trades worth tens of millions of dollars while he supports legislation that would prohibit members of Congress, their spouses, and dependent children from trading individual stocks.

That was the article.

responded with a 2,500-word Substack post claiming that our “real grievance” was his criticism of Israel and his trip to the West Bank.

There is one big fucking problem.

Our article did not mention Israel.

Not one word.

Ro Khanna's Substack

Two Decades of a Clear and Progressive Record

Matt Diemer published an attack on my record the day I arrived home from the West Bank. He has said for years that America must cherish its relationship with Israel. That is his real grievance. So here is my record…

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a month ago · 351 likes · 74 comments · Ro Khanna

Israel Was a Deflection

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Khanna pulled a quote from my 2022 congressional campaign. I told the Cleveland Jewish News that the United States should “uphold and cherish” its relationship with Israel.

Yes, I said that.

Supporting a relationship between two countries does not mean supporting every decision made by either government. More importantly, it had absolutely nothing to do with what Laura and I wrote.

We wrote about stock trading. We wrote about Khanna’s family wealth. We wrote about his national endorsement strategy. We wrote about a politician supporting a congressional stock-trading ban while thousands of trades continue appearing in his household’s financial disclosures.

Khanna came home from the West Bank with a story that was politically useful for his brand. He then attached our article to it and manufactured a fight about Israel that we never started.

That is the grift.

Khanna did not defend his actions. He changed the subject to something he is currently trying to establish himself as a national champion for. He turned our reporting into an attack on his West Bank trip because that was easier than answering questions about his portfolio.

Then he gave us his résumé.

Iraq. Yemen. Bernie Sanders. The CHIPS Act. The Epstein files. Medicare for All. A $25 minimum wage. His books.

None of it answers the question.

It is easy to introduce legislation, support proposals, and talk about what you believe, especially when you know a bill has little chance of becoming law. The real test is whether you are willing to live under the standard you are selling to everyone else.

Just Stop Trading

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Khanna says he does not personally buy or sell stocks. He says neither he nor his wife directs the trades. According to him, the investments are held in trusts established by his in-laws and managed by an independent third-party trustee.

The precise description is that Khanna’s congressional disclosures reported thousands of transactions involving his household’s trusts. Common Cause attributed 3,923 trades totaling approximately $55.7 million to Khanna in its 2025.

Ro Khanna's Money

We are not alleging insider trading. We do not need to prove insider trading to make the ethical argument.

The trades should not be happening at all.

Khanna supports the TRUST in Congress Act, which would prohibit members of Congress, their spouses, and dependent children from trading individual stocks.

Then stop trading.

I do not care whether Khanna personally clicks the button, his wife chooses the stocks, or an independent trustee manages the account. His household reported thousands of individual stock trades while he was a sitting member of Congress.

There is no version of that I find ethically acceptable.

Members of Congress receive classified briefings. They regulate industries, approve federal contracts, investigate corporations, and make decisions that can move entire markets. Their households should not be actively trading individual companies while they hold that power.

We should not need hundreds of pages of financial disclosures, trust attorneys, forensic accountants, or explanations about which family member technically owns which asset.

Khanna says the trust underperformed the S&P 500. I do not give a shit. Losing to the market does not make thousands of trades ethical. A conflict or the appearance of a conflict does not disappear because the investment performed poorly.

Khanna does not need to wait for Congress to pass his bill. Sell the individual stocks. Move the money into diversified index funds, Treasury securities, or something that does not require thousands of individual trades while he serves in Congress.

Stand on business.

Live under the standard you are selling to everyone else.

Apparently Losing Only Counts When We Do It

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Instead of answering that argument, Khanna looked up our election histories.

Laura ran against Brian Poindexter in the May 5 Democratic primary for Ohio’s 7th Congressional District and lost. I ran for the same congressional seat in 2022 and 2024 and lost.

Those are facts.

What Khanna left out is that Ohio’s 7th District was deliberately drawn to favor Republicans. It is difficult to run there as a Democrat, but somebody still has to stand up and do it. Candidates in difficult districts build local organizations, engage voters, recruit volunteers, raise money, and make sure Democrats have somebody on the ballot.

Khanna should understand that.

He lost his first two congressional campaigns. In his response, he presented his failed 2004 primary campaign as proof that he had the courage to challenge an entrenched incumbent.

Apparently, losing demonstrated courage when Ro Khanna did it. When Laura and I did it, our losses became opposition research.

Laura also brought more to her campaign than the one sentence Khanna gave her. She served for more than two decades across multiple federal agencies, working on healthcare, civil rights, emergency response, and public service. She ran for Congress using approximately $12,000 of her savings and rejected corporate PAC money.

Brian Poindexter benefited from at least $570,204 in outside spending from Jobs and Democracy PAC, according to FEC-based tracking. That super PAC operates within a political network heavily funded by interests connected to the artificial intelligence industry.

Khanna did not call Laura before endorsing. He did not examine her record or ask why outside money was pouring into an eight-person Democratic primary.

Khanna can endorse whoever he wants. But he cannot spend years criticizing the Democratic establishment for putting its thumb on the scale, enter an Ohio primary and add his thumb to the pile, and then dismiss Laura as a sore loser when she questions his hypocrisy.

Do Not Use Brian Poindexter as a Shield

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Our original article was not an attack on Brian Poindexter.

It was about what Khanna receives from endorsing candidates like him.

Brian gives Khanna a union ironworker in working-class Ohio. Other endorsements give him democratic socialists, rural candidates, Midwestern relationships, and access to local political networks far outside Silicon Valley.

Khanna receives photographs, relationships, fundraising opportunities, labor credibility, email lists, and a national story about how a wealthy congressman from Silicon Valley understands working people across America.

That is extremely useful for somebody thinking about running for president.

Instead of addressing that strategy, Khanna placed Brian between himself and our criticism. He turned questions about his own political ambition into an alleged attack on a union worker.

Do not borrow a worker’s credibility and then hide behind him when somebody asks what you are getting from the relationship.

And do not use Brian’s biography to protect Ro Khanna’s portfolio.

Why Did He Choose Us?

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Khanna has faced questions about his household’s trading from researchers, national publications, political opponents, and people with audiences numbering in the millions.

But he chose to write 2,500 words about two former congressional candidates publishing a small newsletter in Ohio.

Maybe we looked like the easiest targets.

Khanna could point to our election losses and dismiss us as bitter. He could use my four-year-old quote about Israel to invent a secret motive. He could make himself look like a fighter without directly engaging the people filing complaints or publishing detailed financial analyses.

He could not make the financial disclosures disappear.

But maybe he thought he could discredit us.

So, genuinely, thank you for the attention, Congressman Khanna. Thank you for tagging The Angry Democrats and putting our criticism in front of your audience.

But next time, respond to the article we actually wrote.

A Warning to Candidates

Candidates receiving Khanna’s attention should understand that the relationship is not one-sided.

Maybe Khanna sincerely believes in you. We hope he does.

But he is also using your campaign to build his political image. Your background gives him credibility. Your supporters become part of his network. Your campaign becomes evidence that a wealthy Silicon Valley congressman understands labor, rural America, democratic socialism, or whatever political lane he is trying to enter that week.

Do not confuse national attention with friendship.

Do not allow your biography, campaign, or working-class credibility to become somebody else’s political costume.

And pay attention to what Khanna did when his own record was questioned. He placed Brian Poindexter between himself and criticism that had nothing to do with Brian.

Ro Khanna knows how to use people.

Make sure you are not next.

Stay Angry.

Every dollar funds coverage you can read and the worked needed to curate the stories, strategy, and analysis to bring you the information you need to know.

Give once. Then hold us to it.

So our next race is the 2026 Ohio governor’s race between Amy Acton and Vivek Ramaswamy. Acton is the Democratic nominee, Ramaswamy is the Republican nominee, and this is one of the clearest contrasts Ohio voters are going to see on the ballot.

This is part of the larger work of The Angry Ohioans: comparing races around Ohio, looking at who is running, what they have done, what they say they will do, and who is funding them. The goal is not to give candidates a free pass because of the letter next to their name. The goal is to look clearly at who wants power, what they say they will do with it, and whether voters have a real way to hold them accountable after Election Day.

Please support The Angry Democrats. We are trying to build something to bring accountability to our party.

Please Support

Please Support

Amy Acton

Amy Acton is a 60-year-old Youngstown-born physician and public health leader who served as Director of the Ohio Department of Health under Governor Mike DeWine. She grew up through poverty and instability, worked her way through college and medical school, trained in pediatrics and preventive medicine, earned a master’s in public health, and built much of her career around children’s health, maternal health, public health, and community wellness.

Before running for governor, Acton worked in public health, taught at Ohio State, served with the Columbus Foundation, led health-focused community initiatives, and became one of Ohio’s most visible public officials during the COVID pandemic. She currently lives in Bexley, Ohio, with her husband, Eric, a teacher and coach, and they have a blended family of six children.

Vivek Ramaswamy

Vivek Ramaswamy is a 40-year-old Cincinnati-born entrepreneur, author, and Republican political figure who made his money in biotech, finance, and anti-woke media politics. He founded Roivant Sciences, a biotech company built around developing and commercializing drugs, later co-founded Strive Asset Management, went to Harvard and Yale, and became nationally known during his 2024 Republican presidential campaign.

Vivek is not a traditional Ohio politician who worked his way up through local government. His background is business, venture capital, biotech, national media, and Republican movement politics. He now lives in the greater Columbus area with his wife, Dr. Apoorva Ramaswamy, a throat surgeon at Ohio State, and their three children.

Campaign Finance Through the 2026 Post-Primary Reports

Both Amy Acton and Vivek Ramaswamy are raising real money, but they are not raising it the same way.

Amy Acton Reports

Where Amy Acton’s Money Comes From

Amy Acton raised another $5.38 million in her 2026 post-primary report. Combined with her earlier reports, Acton has now raised approximately $15.93 million since entering the race, including $10.58 million in 2026.

The biggest thing that stands out is that Acton’s campaign remains heavily rooted in Ohio. About $3.67 million, or 68.3% of the money in her latest report, came from Ohio addresses. Ohio donors also accounted for roughly 51.6% of the individual contribution entries in the report.

Acton’s campaign is also still built around a massive number of small donations. Of the 88,029 contribution entries in the new report, more than 65,000 were $25 or less. Those small contributions added up to roughly $774,000. Another 18,898 contributions fell between $26 and $100, bringing in approximately $1.17 million.

But this is not purely a grassroots campaign. The single largest identifiable block in the new file came from the Ohio Democratic Party, whose Columbus address was attached to four contributions totaling $370,000. That included contributions of $200,000, $100,000, $50,000, and $20,000. So while Acton has a broad small-dollar base, the state party is also putting serious institutional money behind her.

Other large-dollar contributions were heavily concentrated among attorneys, executives, investors, consultants, and business owners, with numerous donors reaching or approaching Ohio’s contribution limit of roughly $16,615. David Pepper, Acton’s running mate, is also listed through his employer information with $12,000 in contributions during the post-primary period.

Ramaswamy Reports

Where Vivek Ramaswamy’s Money Comes From

Vivek Ramaswamy raised another $4.

75 million in his post-primary report. His contribution records now total approximately $30.31 million, including $10.30 million in 2026.

That number still does not tell the full story because Ramaswamy previously loaned his campaign at least $25 million of his own money. When his donor contributions and personal financing are combined, his campaign has had access to roughly $55 million, subject to any repayments or additional loans not reflected in these contribution exports.

Ramaswamy’s campaign remains far more national than Acton’s. Ohio addresses produced approximately $2.93 million, or 61.7% of the dollars in his newest report, but Ohioans represented only 16.5% of the contribution entries. That means he is receiving an enormous number of smaller contributions from outside Ohio, even though large Ohio donors still account for much of the money.

His report contained 68,034 contribution entries. Nearly 47,000 were $25 or less, but those donations produced only about $453,000. By contrast, just 453 contributions above $1,000 generated approximately $2.83 million. That is the clearest picture of his fundraising operation: huge national donor volume at the bottom, backed by a relatively small number of very large donors at the top.

The largest identifiable professional groups in the new report included executives and owners connected to Twins Buick, Quasar Energy Group, Brennan Manna & Diamond, Process Technology, AndHealth, Edwards Companies, Oberer Homes, Cardinal Health, Standard Wellness, Ohio CAT, and World Liberty Financial. Numerous donors gave approximately $16,615, effectively maxing out to the campaign.

The Elon Musk and V-PAC Money

The biggest development is not inside Ramaswamy’s campaign account. It is the outside money being spent on his behalf.

Elon Musk gave $5 million to V-PAC, the super PAC supporting Ramaswamy, according to a filing released July 15. That money did not go directly into Ramaswamy’s campaign account. V-PAC is legally separate and can raise and spend unlimited money independently to help elect him.

And V-PAC is not planning to sit on the money. The group announced a $25 million summer advertising campaign supporting Ramaswamy and attacking Acton. That is outside spending on top of Ramaswamy’s roughly $55 million campaign operation.

So this is no longer simply Amy Acton versus Vivek Ramaswamy. Financially, it is Amy Acton and the Ohio Democratic Party against Ramaswamy’s donor operation, his personal fortune, and a super PAC with a $25 million advertising plan that now includes $5 million from Elon Musk.

Spending

The previous reports showed Ramaswamy spending $21.2 million, compared with Acton’s $5.5 million. Public reporting also found that Ramaswamy’s campaign had placed more than $500,000 on campaign credit cards, including nearly $281,000 on an American Express card over a relatively short period, without the filings fully disclosing the underlying purchases.

On the Issues

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Policy count from their websites: Acton 10, Ramaswamy 4.

Amy Acton: Issues From Her Website

Reducing Costs for Ohio Families: Acton says she would lower everyday costs by targeting housing, health care, energy bills, child care, drug prices, property taxes, medical debt, and food costs. Her plan includes free school lunch, an expanded child tax credit, expanding the homestead tax exemption, cracking down on price gouging, fighting wage theft, reducing prescription drug costs, pushing hospital and insurance transparency, stopping surprise medical bills, and creating partnerships to erase medical debt.

Matt’s Take: This reads like a grocery list of things people want to hear, with every cost issue added in to reach some demographic, but not enough of a real actionable plan behind it. I get the strategy, because acknowledging these problems matters and getting lost in policy minutia may not win elections, but anyone paying attention should want to know how she plans to lower all these costs with a Republican supermajority, a conservative-leaning Supreme Court, and without gouging Ohioans in taxes.

Laura’s Take: Acton frames this as help for “775,000 working families,” but the credit she’s building on has a ceiling most working families blow past long before six figures. The federal EITC, and Ohio’s version rides on top of it, phases out completely at $68,675 for a married couple with three or more kids, and far lower than that for smaller families or single filers (IRS). A family earning $75,000, $85,000, or anywhere close to $100,000 gets nothing from it today. Acton’s plan implies she wants to expand it. Fine. How? Does she raise Ohio’s state match percentage, push to change who qualifies at the state level, or does this require Washington to move the federal thresholds first, in which case it’s a promise she can’t keep alone?

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That is the version Ro Khanna is selling now. I do not buy it. This does not look like conviction. It looks like a wealthy Silicon Valley politician trying on working-class rage because he figured out that is the uniform for 2028.

Khanna did not come out of nowhere as some working-class revolt against Silicon Valley power. He came up as a Silicon Valley Democrat, backed by the tech world, representing one of the richest and most powerful districts in America. Business Insider described his 2016 victory as a win for the tech industry and said he had been a favorite of the tech industry since his 2014 run against Mike Honda.

Now he wants to sound like the man who will save the Democratic Party from billionaires. That is the part Democrats should examine before they start treating him like the answer for 2028 and before we welcome him into our state and congressional races.

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Who Is Ro Khanna

Ro Khanna, full name Rohit Khanna, was born on September 13, 1976, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He is 49 years old. His parents immigrated to the United States from Punjab, India, in 1968. His father was a chemical engineer, and his mother was a former schoolteacher. Khanna grew up in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, before going on to the University of Chicago, where he earned a degree in economics, and Yale Law School, where he earned his law degree.

Before Congress, Khanna worked as an attorney, taught at Stanford, Santa Clara University School of Law, and San Francisco State University, and served in the Obama administration as deputy assistant secretary at the U.S. Department of Commerce from 2009 to 2011. After leaving the Commerce Department, he joined Wilson Sonsini, a Silicon Valley law firm, and later worked as vice president of strategic initiatives at Smart Utility Systems.

Politically, Khanna first ran for Congress in 2004 and lost. He later challenged Democratic incumbent Mike Honda in California’s 17th Congressional District in 2014 and lost again, though his campaign was heavily backed by major names in the tech industry. In 2016, he ran again, defeated Honda, and has represented California’s 17th District since January 2017. The district includes a major part of Silicon Valley, which is central to understanding both his rise and the criticism of his current populist rebrand

Khanna now describes himself as a “progressive capitalist.” He endorsed Bernie Sanders in 2016, co-chaired Sanders’ 2020 presidential campaign, sits in the Congressional Progressive Caucus, and has built a national profile around antitrust, technology, manufacturing, foreign policy restraint, campaign finance reform, and economic populism. He is married to Ritu Ahuja Khanna, and they have two children.

Before the Populist Rebrand

Khanna’s political origin was not anti-tech populism. He was Silicon Valley all day. The tech bros of bros!

He represented the tech district. He raised from the tech ecosystem. He built the profile of the polished, pro-innovation, Silicon Valley Democrat who could speak the language of startups, global competition, and the new economy.

But now the language has changed.

Now Khanna talks about economic patriotism, steel towns, manufacturing, workers left behind, and the failure of both parties to build an economy that reaches beyond the coasts. His own “New Economic Patriotism” pitch opens with steelworkers in Chicago, shuttered mills, lower-paying warehouse jobs, and the decline of opportunity for working-class communities. He relaunched the whole vision in an April 2026 National Press Club speech that pivots from "the Epstein class" of untouchable elites straight to "we need a billionaire tax."

That is a real issue. The problem is not that Ro Khanna is talking about it. The problem is that every version of Ro Khanna seems to arrive exactly when that version becomes useful. The grifter that knows the right time to change the grift and use people to shape his brand and perception.

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Ro Khanna Is Borrowing Other People’s Working-Class Credibility

Khanna’s endorsements are not random. They are a map. He is attaching himself to the exact kinds of candidates who signal where the Democratic base is moving: democratic socialists, labor candidates, anti-establishment candidates, and working-class messengers outside his Silicon Valley lane. ABC News reported that Khanna has backed more than 30 candidates this cycle, with national attention on his endorsement strategy as he is widely viewed as a possible 2028 contender.

The old Ro Khanna was the Silicon Valley Democrat. The new Ro Khanna wants to be seen standing next to socialists, union workers, and populists. So who is he endorsing?

• Zohran Mamdani, New York City mayor
  Mamdani gives Khanna the DSA lane. NYC-DSA endorsed Mamdani, and his campaign became a national symbol of movement from the left before he won City Hall. For Khanna, standing with Mamdani is a way to look aligned with the socialist energy inside the Democratic base without having to actually be from that world.

• Omar Fateh, Minneapolis mayoral candidate
  Fateh gives Khanna another democratic socialist signal, this time in Minneapolis. The Progressive described Fateh’s rise as part of a “Mamdani Moment” in Minneapolis, with democratic socialist candidates making gains against Democratic establishment resistance. Fateh, a Minnesota state senator, won the DFL endorsement but lost the November 2025 race to incumbent Jacob Frey. Winning was never the point for Khanna. That is exactly the kind of fight Khanna wants to be photographed near now.

• Brian Poindexter, Ohio’s 7th Congressional District
  Poindexter gives Khanna the labor lane. Poindexter is a union ironworker, organizer, Brook Park city councilman, and Democrat running against Max Miller in Ohio’s 7th. Working Families Party endorsed him as a working-class candidate, and America’s Work Force Union Podcast described him as an Ironworkers Local 17 member campaigning on wages, health care, and retirement security. Khanna endorsing him is not just about Ohio. It lets Khanna borrow the credibility from labor in a working-class district far from Silicon Valley.

  

• Abdul El-Sayed, Michigan U.S. Senate
  El-Sayed gives Khanna the Bernie-left, anti-corporate Senate lane. El-Sayed is running on taxing billionaires, Medicare for All, and breaking up corporate power, and he oversaw an effort to erase hundreds of millions in medical debt as Wayne County's health director (Time, July 8, 2026). That fits perfectly with Khanna’s new anti-billionaire language. Maybe he is just jealous he isn’t a billionaire yet. More on that later. Believe that.

• Graham Platner, Maine U.S. Senate
  Platner gave Khanna the rural anti-establishment lane before the campaign blew up. ABC listed Platner among Khanna’s Senate endorsements. After a serious sexual-assault allegation surfaced, Khanna rescinded his endorsement and publicly called on Platner to drop out (Fox News, July 6, 2026). That does not erase the original political calculation: Platner was part of the tough guy working man image.

  

• Josh Turek, Iowa U.S. Senate
  Turek gives Khanna a Midwestern Senate lane. He fits the broader pattern of Khanna trying to build relationships outside California in states that matter for Senate control and presidential politics. ABC listed Turek among Khanna’s Senate endorsements.

• Roy Cooper, North Carolina U.S. Senate
  Cooper gives Khanna a more establishment-friendly lane. This is important because Khanna cannot be seen as not only endorsing DSA and Labor. He is also covering himself with electability and swing-state credibility.

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His New Script

Khanna is now teaming with Bernie Sanders on a billionaire wealth tax. Their bill, the Make Billionaires Pay Their Fair Share Act, would place a 5% annual tax on the roughly 938 billionaires in America and use the revenue for $3,000 direct payments to working- and middle-income households and other working-family priorities.

But then let’s stop pretending the obvious question is off the table. If Ro Khanna believes concentrated wealth is such a moral and political emergency, why is his own family wealth structured like the exact thing he is supposedly running against?

A Free Beacon review of his financial disclosures estimated family assets ranging from $103 million to more than $340 million across Khanna, his wife, and his children. His children reportedly hold tens of millions of dollars in irrevocable trusts. His wife and children’s trusts are tied to thousands of stock trades. His children’s trusts reportedly hold interests in private golf clubs in Ohio that generate millions of dollars.

So…umm… wtaf?

Wealth is a problem when billionaires have it, but when it is Ro Khanna’s family, it is just estate planning? Stock trading is a problem when members of Congress do it, but when the trades run through spouse and child trusts, suddenly we are all supposed to be ok with nearly $56 million in trades? Hoarded wealth is bad, but golf course interests tucked into children’s trusts are just normal family business? Good?

Khanna is full of shit.

If Khanna believes this much wealth should be redirected toward working families, why is he waiting for Congress to force him into that position? Why not move first?

Why not put a serious chunk of that family wealth into housing, medical debt relief, labor organizing, local journalism, rural hospitals, or worker-owned businesses? Why not build the kind of public-serving foundation he says the ultra-rich should be forced to fund?

Instead, voters are looking at trusts, private investments, real estate, stock activity, and golf club interests.

That is not working-class politics. That is a rich-guy pandering.

The issue is not whether Ro Khanna has technically violated the law. The issue is that he wants to campaign as the guy fighting concentrated wealth while his own household looks like a fucking case study in how concentrated wealth protects itself.

So How Much Does Ro Have?

Common Cause reported that members of Congress made 13,324 trades totaling $635.57 million over the trailing year. In that same report, Khanna was listed third by volume, with 3,923 trades and $55.7 million in volume.

Khanna’s defense is also part of the record. He says he does not personally own or trade stocks. He says the household investments are in a trust his in-laws set up before marriage, managed independently by a third-party trustee. He says neither he nor his wife directs the trades. He also points out that he supports the TRUST in Congress Act, which would bar members of Congress, their spouses, and their dependent children from trading individual stocks while in office.

Here’s the obvious question. If spouses and dependent children belong inside the ban, why are voters supposed to pretend spousal and child trusts are irrelevant right now?

That’s the contradiction. Not that there’s proven insider trading. There is no public evidence proving that. The contradiction is that Khanna wants credit for supporting a ban that recognizes the household as part of the ethical problem, while asking voters to treat his own household as some separate universe.

That IS the Democratic hypocrisy.

It is all searchable at: https://www.rokhanna.money/

Give Him the Credit He Earned

Khanna does have a real anti-PAC record.

He launched the NO PAC Caucus in 2017, aimed at limiting PAC influence and prohibiting PAC contributions to members of Congress. He also joined Summer Lee, Pramila Jayapal, Rashida Tlaib, and others on the Abolish Super PACs Act in 2025.

This is not an argument that Ro Khanna has never done anything right. This is an argument that Democrats should stop confusing a well-timed rebrand with conviction.

Matt’s Take:

Ro Khanna is somebody I have been following for many years. I have seen him many times on Breaking Points and other podcasts. In the beginning, Ro Khanna was honestly refreshing. He seemed authentic. He seemed like a congressman who had his positions pretty much locked down and was advocating for them.

Then something changed.

He changed. Politics changed. And he saw opportunity.

Then he started pandering.

The problem is that his pandering feels inauthentic and hypocritical compared to the life he lives and the politician he used to be. If he is a rich tech bro, be a rich tech bro. But you cant be Mamdani in politics with a rich tech bro life. It doesn’t make sense.

Ro is hanging out with union workers like he is friends with them, Like he even knows any laboror, that isn’t cleaning his house, in real life. It is like when Mark Zuckerburg was BBQ’ing and told everyone he loves Sweet Baby Ray’s BBQ sauce. Like he was trying to convince us he was a real person that does real things. Like Mark, you are not fooling anyone. Go sit down and just be rich.

It is obvious that he is trying to build some sort of robust coalition that is outside of who he actually is. He is trying to speak the language, and he is convincing a lot of people. But to be perfectly honest… I do not buy it.

The hypocrisy around his accounts and trading is what really bothers me too.

It’s okay if you have money. It’s okay if you are doing well for yourself and your family. I have no problem with that.

But actively trading while in Congress, whether it is in a trust or not, and doing very, very well for yourself while in office does not sit right with me. Especially when he is preaching there should be not stock trading in congress and is the author of the TRUST in Congress Act.

To me, it sounds like virtue signaling. It gets people to stop looking at him while he stock trades, makes a lot of money, panders, and makes inroads for some sort of power grab with inauthentic positioning. Another Thiel Trojan Horse?

Laura’s Take

Ro Khanna is an opportunist. He takes whichever position is selling that year and leaves his money exactly where it is.

In 2016 he ran as Silicon Valley’s candidate, funded by the tech industry that had backed him since his first run at Mike Honda in 2014. In 2026 he is co-writing a billionaire wealth tax with Bernie Sanders. He is still the third-heaviest stock trader in Congress, $55.7 million across nearly 4,000 trades, while carrying his own bill to ban members of Congress from trading stocks. I believe Khanna does things like this because he knows the value of performative politics and understands it will never pass. Again, he is buying good will without doing any actual work. Ro Khanna is no better than Donald Trump in this category. Trump continues to use public office to grow his own fortune, and Khanna, no doubt, relies on insider-trading of some sort to do the same.

He has no working-class record, so he buys proximity to one. He endorsed Brian Poindexter, an ironworker in Ohio, Zohran Mamdani, a democratic socialist in New York, and Senate candidates in Maine, Michigan, Iowa, and North Carolina, none of them his home state. Not one of those endorsements changed a line in his own financial disclosures. They changed his photographs and his personal brand marketing.

Khanna represents Silicon Valley, by many measures the wealthiest congressional district in the country. The ironworkers, steel towns, and warehouse workers he now stands beside are not his constituents, but they now serve as his backdrop. The real Ro Khanna is “wet-fingered” (see the show Veep and its definition of the politics of Qataris) and if it became trendy to jump off bridges tomorrow, he’d be the first one to go. Who is Ro Khanna? Nobody has any actual idea.

Stay Angry.

Sources:

• https://bioguide.congress.gov/search/bio/K000389

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ro_Khanna

• https://www.businessinsider.com/silicon-valley-backed-ro-khanna-wins-house-of-representatives-space-2016-11

• https://khanna.house.gov/about/about-rep-khanna

• https://khanna.house.gov/media/press-releases/beyond-epstein-class-new-economic-patriotism

• https://www.sanders.senate.gov/press-releases/news-sanders-and-khanna-introduce-legislation-to-tax-billionaire-wealth-and-invest-in-working-families/

• https://www.commoncause.org/articles/congress-made-over-635-million-in-stock-trades-while-americans-struggled-see-who-traded-the-most/

• https://readsludge.com/2022/02/16/months-after-claiming-to-divest-ro-khannas-spouse-keeps-trading-fossil-fuel-and-defense-stocks/

• https://freebeacon.com/democrats/ro-me-the-money-how-progressive-class-warrior-ro-khanna-lives-like-the-oligarchs-he-fights-with-in-home-elevator-190k-range-rover-and-family-owned-golf-clubs/

• https://khanna.house.gov/media/press-releases/release-house-members-start-no-pac-money-caucus

• https://summerlee.house.gov/newsroom/press-releases/reps-lee-khanna-colleagues-unveil-bill-to-abolish-super-pacs

• https://abcnews.com/Politics/democratic-rep-khanna-biden-made-mistake-running/story?id=121913712

• https://abcnews.com/Politics/aoc-ro-khannas-midterm-endorsements-influence-democratic-party/story?id=134046393

• https://socialists.nyc/zohran-mayor-nyc-dsa/

• https://socialists.nyc/zohran/

• https://progressive.org/latest/how-omar-fateh-brought-his-own-mamdani-moment-to-minneapolis-jakel-20250909/

• https://workingfamilies.org/2026/04/wfp-endorses-brian-poindexter-for-oh-07/

• https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/oct/30/omar-fateh-minneapolis-mayor-race

• https://www.tomsteyer.com/press/representative-ro-khanna-endorses-tom-steyer-for-governor

• https://www.tomsteyer.com/endorsements/ro-khanna

• https://newjerseyglobe.com/local/mussab-gets-backing-of-prominent-national-political-leaders/

• https://junaidforus.com/congressman-ro-khanna-endorses-junaid-ahmed-for-congress-in-illinois-8th-district/

• https://newjerseyglobe.com/congress/ro-khanna-endorses-analilia-mejia-in-nj-11/

• https://www.insidernj.com/press-release/rep-ro-khanna-endorses-megan-orourke-in-new-jerseys-seventh-congressional-district/

• https://michiganadvance.com/briefs/william-lawrence-nets-support-from-u-s-rep-ro-khanna-in-michigan-7-primary/

• https://turek4iowa.com/endorsements

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The Angry Democrat and The Angry Ohioan are now becoming The Angry Democrats and The Angry Ohioans.

That might seem small. It is just an S. But it is bigger than it looks.

Adding the S opens this up. It makes clear that this is not just me. This is not just Matt Diemer sitting here putting out his opinions. This is not one person yelling into the void and hoping somebody hears it.

This is for all Angry Democrats and Angry Ohioans who see what is happening and know something has to change.

It is for people who understand that corruption is not limited to one party. It is for people who are sick of behind-the-scenes deals, hypocrisy, gatekeeping, insider politics, and people in power acting like they are owed our votes, our donations, and our silence.

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and I have teamed up, and we are opening the door for more people to join us. We are welcoming anyone who wants to be an Angry Democrat or an Angry Ohioan.

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We will be told not to criticize our own party. We will be told this is not the time.

But when is the time?

When the party rallies behind horrible candidates with no policies and no vision?

When the average person keeps getting screwed?

When Ohioans are taxed more while their healthcare gets worse, their benefits get whittled away, and their communities get ignored?

When our tax dollars are used for corruption, bribery scandals, billionaire corporations, and sports teams, while infrastructure crumbles and whole neighborhoods are left behind?

When jobs leave, services fail, and the same small group of people keeps making decisions on behalf of everyone else?

And then, after all of that, they still want our donations. They still want our votes. They still want our loyalty.

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That is exactly why the S matters.

The S means this is bigger than one person.

The S means people are allowed to be angry.

The S means Democrats can demand better from Democrats.

The S means Ohioans can demand better from Ohio.

And yes, like the S on Superman’s chest, it stands for hope.

Not the kind of hope they sell you every election cycle and then forget about when the votes are counted.

Real hope.

The kind that comes from people finally saying enough, stepping forward, and refusing to let the same broken systems keep speaking for them.

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For months, we’ve been telling Angry Democrat readers who Graham Platner actually is. Not the working-class oyster farmer on the yard signs. A candidate two Democratic Socialist organizers found at his home in Sullivan, packaged by the strategist who built Zohran Mamdani’s campaign, and sold to a national donor base as an everyman (Washington Examiner). I did not report that to help Susan Collins. I reported it because voters deserve to know who is asking for their trust before November, not after.

On July 6, another woman accused Platner of sexual assault, and the campaign has told supporters he needed time to “reflect on the best path forward” (CNN; NBC News). He denies the allegation. He calls it “troubling, serious, and false,” and that denial belongs next to every sentence that follows. Nobody who has watched this campaign should be surprised. The party built this candidate, and the party endorsed him already knowing what the issues were.

Its Always Another Story

In June, The New York Times published three women from past relationships who described his behavior as unsettling, demeaning, and in one case physically threatening (Washington Post timeline). The Wall Street Journal reported he traded sexually explicit messages with multiple women near the start of his marriage, and his own campaign confirmed it. In 2013, on Reddit, he told people worried about sexual assault to “take some responsibility for themselves and not get so fucked up they wind up having sex with someone they don’t mean to” (The Maine Monitor). Those are his words, not an accuser’s.

Platner also has a Totenkopf tattoo, the death’s head the SS wore guarding Hitler’s camps, inked on his chest. He says he never knew what it meant. The record cuts against him. In Reddit threads from 2019 and 2020 he discussed the Totenkopf and SS lightning bolts by name, and his own political director said a man who prides himself on military history could not plausibly have stayed ignorant for eighteen years (CNN KFile). Now, Jenny Racicot says he forced her to have sex with him in 2021, an account a later boyfriend says she shared at the time and that her emails with her therapist corroborate (NPR). He denies that too.

I am not the jury on the 2021 allegation. I will not call a denied accusation a conviction, and I will not wave off a corroborated one because the target is inconvenient. The argument does not need a verdict. It’s hard to believe that three women in the Times, and his own campaign’s confirmations, and his own posts, all add up to nothing.

They Knew

The party’s problem is not that this surfaced. The party’s problem is when.

Read more

When I was a kid, the Fourth of July was simple. Hot dogs. Burgers. Cookouts. Fireworks. Sparklers. And, if you got a little older and a little more wild, trying to get your hands on an M-80.

That was America to me then. Family. Summer. Noise. Food. Light in the sky.

Then, in my 20s and 30s, the Fourth became more about community. It was about getting together with other Americans and celebrating our Americanism, whatever that meant to each of us at the time.

I lived abroad for a long time, and every Fourth of July, us Americans would search out each other. Because, on that day, I/we wanted to feel culturally connected to home.

Now I am back in the United States. I am 46 years old. And America has taken many different shapes in my mind.

I remember living abroad and hearing people say that America was changing. Then I came home and realized something strange. In many ways, my politics had stayed fairly consistent, like I was in a bubble outside of the USA and the conversation, but the country had shifted without me experiencing it. The political landscape, the culture, the values, the fights, the language, all of it was different. I was a time capsule.

So my 40s have become a period of personal discovery, but also political discovery. I have been trying to piece together my understanding of America from the past to the present. Where we were. Where we are. Where we need to go.

This country began with a bunch of scrappy 20 year olds trying to escape monarchy, choose their own leaders, create their own government, worship how they wanted, speak freely, and reject being ruled from across an ocean.

And now, 250 years later, we are 50 states. We are the world’s largest economy. We are a country built through struggle, conflict, discourse, celebration, victory, defeat, contradiction, and change.

America has never been one fixed thing.

A country is a living entity, shaped by millions of people, millions of arguments, millions of hopes, and millions of competing ideas about what it should become.

That is why the conversation matters. That is why we cannot back out. That is why we cannot bury our heads in the sand and hope everything works out.

We have to stay in it.

We have to keep doing the work. Showing up. And lending our voice.

Refuse to let the loudest people define the country for everyone else. Be part of the conversation.

So on America’s 250th birthday, I want to reflect on where we were, where we are, and where we need to go.

This has never been a straight path. It has never been a journey of perfection.

But as Vince Lombardi famously said, “Perfection is not attainable, but if we chase perfection we can catch excellence.”

That is what I still believe America is supposed to be.

Not perfect, but chasing perfection.

Catching excellence when we can.

And I believe most Americans, in our own way, are still trying to do that.

Happy 250th, America.

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Chris Cillizza laid this out in his YouTube video, “How Donald Trump Is Using the Presidency to Get EVEN Richer.” Trump’s latest financial disclosure shows that his income exploded once he returned to the presidency. Trump made $622 million in 2024, before returning to office. In 2025, his first year back in office, he made $2.2 billion.

On June 23 in the Senate, Senator Chris Murphy laid out what he called "500 Days of Corruption." Month by month, he walked through pardons sold to donors, no-bid contracts steered to friends, and a president who constantly uses the presidency to manipulate the stock market. Trump’s 2026 financial disclosures dropped this week. The methods Trump is using to amass this money are something that would get a Democratic President impeached. This, coupled with Chris Murphy’s speech, explain how Trump runs this country. Here are the 8 things you need to know about Trump’s wealth racket.

1. Trump’s Income Has Exploded

Of the $2.2 billion Trump reported in income for 2025, roughly $1.4 billion came from crypto. His 2025 financial disclosure, released June 30, confirms it: crypto is now his single largest source of personal income. Reuters traced most of it to World Liberty Financial and his branded meme coins, income streams the next section breaks down in full. That is a jump of roughly $1.6 billion from 2024, his last year as a private citizen, to 2025, his first full year back in the White House.

Trump has made an argument before that the Presidency costs him money. During his first term, he claimed it was cost him up to $5 billion. “This thing is costing me a fortune being president,” he told a Pennsylvania rally in August 2019. There was no evidence for that then, and Forbes’ own numbers undercut it further: his net worth fell from about $4 billion to about $2.5 billion over that stretch, a real decline, and roughly a third of what he claimed.

Forbes has put his current net worth at $6.5 billion, up $1.4 billion from a year ago, after peaking even higher at $7.3 billion in September 2025. As Forbes put it in its own accounting, Trump has been “leveraging the presidency for profit.”

So spare the idea that Trump sacrifices anything to hold this office. His first term cost him an estimated $1.5 billion, spread across four years. His second term has already made him $1.6 billion.

2. He is Running a Crypto Machine

Crypto used to be a punchline in Trump's orbit. Now, it is the largest line item on his personal balance sheet, ahead of his golf courses, Mar-a-Lago, and the real estate empire he built over five decades. Most of it traces to two sources.

World Liberty Financial, the crypto venture Trump and his sons co-founded in 2024, generated nearly $800 million for Trump personally last year. That breaks down to more than $520 million from token sales and more than $250 million from selling off pieces of the business itself, according to Reuters’ review of the filing. A year earlier, in Trump’s first disclosure after retaking office, that same venture had produced $57.35 million from token sales. His income from World Liberty tokens alone jumped roughly ninefold in twelve months.

The $TRUMP meme coin, licensed through an entity called Celebration Coins, brought in another $635 million. Trump launched the coin three days before his second inauguration. Combined with smaller crypto holdings, the total tops $1.4 billion out of $2.2 billion in reported income. Crypto is not a side interest for this president. It’s most of the business.

And, it is a business his own administration writes the rules for. In his first week back in office, Trump signed an executive order on digital assets. In March 2025, he created a Strategic Bitcoin Reserve. On July 18, 2025, he signed the GENIUS Act, the first federal framework for the exact stablecoin product his family’s company sells.

The president of the United States should not be in a position where people, companies, foreign interests, political allies, insiders, and suckers in the market can pour money into products tied to his personal brand while his administration shapes the rules of the industry.

That is corrupt as hell.

3. Trump is Running an Enrichment Racket

Senator Chris Murphy’s speech shows the crypto numbers are not an isolated data point. They sit inside a pattern his office has been documenting in public, on the record, for a year and a half. Some of what Murphy laid out connects directly to Trump’s financial disclosure. For example, on April 7, 2025, Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche ordered the Justice Department to drop several crypto-related investigations and shut down the DOJ’s crypto fraud enforcement unit entirely. At the time, Blanche himself held up to $500,000 in crypto investments.

On September 18, 2025, Murphy told the Senate that disclosures showed Trump had made $57 million selling crypto tokens to entities tied to the governments of North Korea, Iran, and Russia. By law, nobody has to disclose who buys meme coin. That, Murphy argued, is exactly the danger: a direct financial channel for hostile foreign governments to funnel money into a sitting president's pocket. Invisible by design and with no accountability to Congress or to the American people.

Three weeks later, on October 7, 2025, Trump pardoned Changpeng Zhao, the Binance founder who went to prison for running a platform that let terrorists and drug traffickers move money undetected. Zhao had helped Trump’s family launch its own crypto venture.

By the way, none of this is limited only to crypto. Murphy’s office found that more than half of the publicly identified donors to Trump’s new White House ballroom have, since donating, won new or expanded federal contracts. Combined, those contracts total more than $50 billion of your tax dollars. Trump is using every avenue he can to manipulate the stock market, write the rules to benefit him, and make it so the same regulatory rules that apply to you don’t apply to him.

4. The Blind Trust Excuse Is Bullshit

Past presidents have generally tried to separate themselves from their businesses while in office. Trump did not do that in any meaningful way.

Trump has said repeatedly this term that his assets sit in a trust his children manage, so he is walled off from the money. But, that was already a stretch. The Donald J. Trump Revocable Trust names Donald Trump Jr. as trustee. According to SEC filings, he “holds sole voting and investment power over all securities owned by the Trust.” Eric Trump, his son, also sits on the board of World Liberty Financial. And Reuters reported, in its review of the new disclosure, that Trump remains “the beneficiary of the assets in the trust that ultimately receives the income.” A trust that pays its namesake is cannot be a blind trust. A blind trust means the officeholder does not know what is happening with the assets, cannot direct the investments, and cannot use public power to benefit private holdings.

In May 2026, it came out that Trump has been personally signing off on individual stock trades throughout his presidency, something no previous president has ever done. Murphy’s office cited one example: Trump bought roughly $1 million of Dell stock, then publicly praised the company, and months later his administration handed Dell a $10 billion defense contract.

5. Hunter Biden’s Got Nothing on Trump

Hunter Biden traded on his father’s name for consulting fees and art sales worth, at most, a few million dollars. That was real, and it was gross, and Democrats should be allowed to say that. Even Hunter Biden has said he shouldn’t have done it.

But that was also nowhere close to the same scale or structure as what is happening now. Hunter Biden never regulated the industries paying him. His father was not personally directing the trades. Nobody at the Justice Department had to write a memo protecting his business partners from prosecution.

Trump’s family runs a company that sells a financial product his own agencies write the rules for, sold in part to entities tied to hostile foreign governments, sitting inside a trust that pays him directly, while he personally picks stocks ahead of the contracts his administration hands out. That is blatant self-dealing and corruption by a sitting President meant for personal enrichment. It’s wrong and its wildly illegal.

6. The Media Refuses to Cover Trump’s Corruption Honestly

The main stream media has been dishonest in the way it has covered Trump’s presidency. A financial disclosure showing $2.2 billion in presidential income, most of it from an industry the president regulates, would, in normal times (when the media wasn’t scared of the President) be grounds for a huge, presidency-ending scandal. The words they choose to showcase this now, “conflicts of interest,” “ethics questions,” “concerns,” do a disservice to the public by deliberately not reporting how serious this is.

If a Democratic president had co-founded a crypto company with his children, spent a year in office setting crypto policy from the Oval Office, and then reported more than a billion dollars in crypto income in a single year, it would not be a one-day financial disclosure story. It would be the story, on every network, for weeks, with every Republican in Congress asked to answer for it.

That is not what’s happening here, and the media is aiding Trump in continuing to abuse the law, misappropriate public funds, and lie to the American people.

7. Trump Isn’t Hiding It

The corruption here is not hidden. It sits in the disclosure itself, in Murphy’s speech, in the reporting already cited in this piece, all public record. What is missing is not information. What is missing is anyone treating it like what it is. The government of the United States doesn't exist to make Donald Trump rich. It works for you, and its time our Congress acted like it.

Stay Angry.

This happens in the part of American government almost nobody watches: the statehouse. It is not a glitch; it is the designed output of a machine most people have never had explained to them. And it is not one party doing it to the other, the votes that get erased are often cast in red states, by the very people who send Republicans to the capitol. So here is the question the machine is built to make irrelevant: what, exactly, is your vote worth?

The first two parts of “The Rigged Map” series followed that machine through the maps that decide Congress. This one follows it somewhere more intimate: your state legislative districts, the maps that decide whether your wages rise, whether you can stay home sick, whether you can see a doctor. They are often rigged far more ruthlessly than the lines that decide Washington.

Here is how it works.

A gerrymander draws districts so lopsided that one party is all but guaranteed to win them. Once a seat is that safe, the November election stops deciding anything; the only contest that can unseat the incumbent is that party’s primary, a low-turnout affair dominated by the most committed voters and the wealthy donors who fund the campaigns.

Win the primary and the general is a formality.

So a representative’s real boss is never the broad public; it is the narrow slice that votes in the primary, and the big money behind it. That is all a “safe seat” means, a place where the people who live there have already lost the only election that counts. Build a statehouse out of such seats, and it can defy its own voters and pay nothing for it.

This is why the familiar instincts fail. Voting a straight party line, or studying the issues and voting your conscience, in a safe seat, both happen in November.

November is the formality. The election that chose your representative was the primary, and for most people it was over before they knew it had begun. You can be the most informed voter in your district and still be voting in the wrong election. And when the people lose it, the bill comes due in dollars, and in lives. You don’t need a theory to see it, only to watch what one state’s legislature did to its own voters.

Missouri Said yes. The Legislature Said No.

In November 2024, Missourians did something their legislature had refused to do for years. By ballot initiative, the citizen end-run that lets voters write law directly when their representatives won’t, they passed Proposition A. It raised the state minimum wage to $15 an hour by 2026, indexed it to inflation after that, and guaranteed workers paid sick leave.

It passed with 57.6 percent of the vote, nearly 1.7 million yes votes, almost as many as Donald Trump drew in the same state on the same night, which he carried by eighteen points. Vast numbers of Missourians, in other words, voted for Trump and for the measure both. This was not a partisan wish list. It was a supermajority of Missourians, Republicans plainly among them, telling their government what they wanted.

The business lobby went to court first. A coalition including the Missouri Chamber of Commerce, the Restaurant Association, and the National Federation of Independent Business sued, arguing the measure violated the constitution’s single-subject rule. On April 29, 2025, the Missouri Supreme Court upheld Proposition A: the summary was not misleading, there was no irregularity, the voters’ law was clean. It stood.

So the legislature simply repealed it. House Bill 567 struck the paid-sick-leave guarantee in full and deleted the inflation indexing, freezing the wage after 2026. The House passed it 97 to 49: the yes votes all Republican, the no votes all Democrats but one, a lone Republican who sided with the voters. The Senate passed it 22 to 11, its leadership invoking a maneuver the chamber rarely uses, the “previous question,” to shut down a Democratic filibuster. Governor Mike Kehoe signed the repeal on July 10, 2025.

The timing is the part to sit with. The sick leave took effect May 1 and was extinguished August 28, accrued for a single summer, then taken back. Not by the voters who granted it, but by a legislature overruling them six months after the election, and barely two weeks after the state’s highest court had confirmed the law was valid.

Ask who actually wanted it gone, and the gerrymandering story and the corporate-money story turn out to be one story.

The repeal was driven by the business groups that had lost at the ballot box, who called the mandate a job killer; the Senate minority leader charged on the floor that the supermajority had acted at the direction of “corporate overlords.” That last is a partisan’s accusation, not a finding of fact, but the structure underneath it is not in dispute.

A legislature drawn to be safe does not have to fear a statewide majority; its members answer to the primary, and the primary answers to money. Fifty-eight percent of Missouri can vote yes and it changes nothing, because the maps mean the people who voted yes were never the people their representatives feared.

The Override Beneath the Override

It is worth asking why those maps look the way they do, because Missouri’s voters tried to fix that too, and were overruled there first.

Previously in 2018, the same electorate passed Proposition A. It won with 62 percent of the vote, carrying 80 of the state’s 114 counties. It handed legislative mapmaking to a nonpartisan demographer and required districts drawn for fairness and competitiveness, an attempt to outlaw the gerrymander and force the legislature into seats it could actually lose. An Associated Press analysis found the formula likely would have let Democrats cut into the Republican supermajority as soon as 2022. To the people holding those safe seats, it was an existential threat, and they treated it as one.

So before the new system drew a single map, the legislature moved to kill it. It put Amendment 3 on the 2020 ballot to repeal the reform voters had just enacted, demoting fairness and competitiveness to the bottom of the criteria. The way it was sold is the part a court ruled on: the ballot summary led with a token tightening of lobbyist gift limits while barely disclosing that it gutted the redistricting reform underneath.

A judge called that summary “misleading, unfair and insufficient,” and wrote that the legislature “seeks to override the recent, clearly expressed will of Missouri voters.” Bankrolled almost entirely by the Missouri Republican State Committee, it passed with 51 percent, and many voters, a Brennan Center analyst noted, likely did not understand they were repealing what they had passed two years before.

It was not a clean repeal, Amendment 3 kept the popular ethics reforms, and there is a fair argument that engineering competitiveness carries distortions of its own. But the heart of it is not in dispute. The voters tried to make their legislature reachable. The legislature reached back and took the tool away before it could be used.

Utah: even the failure failed by accident

It is tempting to think the system has a backstop, that somewhere, a check kicks in. Utah is the cautionary version of that hope.

In November 2018, Utah voters passed Proposition 3, a full Medicaid expansion covering an estimated 150,000 people, with 53 percent of the vote. Weeks into the next legislative session, the Republican supermajority passed SB96, replacing it with a narrower plan that covered roughly 48,000 fewer people and added a work requirement. Governor Gary Herbert signed it before the voter-approved version ever took effect.

It should have stuck, except the legislature had tried to have it both ways, covering fewer people while still drawing the enhanced federal funding the Affordable Care Act reserves for full expansion.

Washington refused; a fallback buried in SB96 then triggered full expansion anyway in 2020, and the voters got, eventually, what they had voted for. But the rule that saved them was written to discipline cost-cutting states, not to protect ballot initiatives, and even then it was close, the federal administration overruled its own Medicaid agency, which had been ready to let the override stand. The maps let Utah’s legislature defy 53 percent of the state freely. What defied the legislature back was a financing technicality the voters had no hand in. Even the failure failed by accident.

The Bill In Lives

The Missouri ledger is measured in dollars: a frozen wage, sick days revoked. The Medicaid ledger is measured in lives, and the arithmetic is grim. Researchers studying the states that refused expansion estimated that roughly 15,600 people died who would have lived had those states expanded Medicaid as the law intended, deaths concentrated among older, low-income adults, from precisely the conditions that medical care prevents.

That is the cost of the divergence, and the ballot initiative is what proves it is a divergence, not a preference. In seven Republican-led states, Maine, Idaho, Nebraska, Utah, Oklahoma, Missouri, and South Dakota, voters used the initiative to expand Medicaid over legislatures that had refused for years.

When an electorate votes directly for coverage while sending representatives who block it to the statehouse, you can no longer say the legislature reflects the will of its constituents. The constituents are on record, in the same election, wanting the opposite. That gap is not a matter of interpretation. It is the rigged map, rendered in mortality tables.

What 90 percent can’t buy

Almost nothing pulls nine in ten Americans to the same side. Universal background checks for gun buyers do, support runs near ninety percent, across nearly every line that supposedly divides the country. And it changes nothing. In a system that answered to the public, that near-unanimity would be law; in a system of safe seats, it isn’t. The ninety percent lives in the general electorate, and safe-seat legislators don’t answer to the general electorate. They answer to the primary, where that consensus thins out, so they can defy nine in ten Americans and never pay for it.

The only safe place left

Step back and it reads as a single argument. Missouri’s voters raised their own wages and were overruled; they tried to fix the maps that made the overruling possible, and were overruled there too. Across the country, voters bought themselves health coverage their legislatures had denied, and watched those legislatures move to shrink it. This is not one party against another. The measures pass in red states, carried by Republican voters; the overrides answer less to ideology than to the wealthy donors the safe-seat primary rewards. It is the moneyed few against an electorate that keeps voting the other way and keeps getting reversed.

Missouri’s organizers drew the obvious conclusion. They have filed a new constitutional amendment for the November 2026 ballot, this time to write the minimum wage and paid sick leave directly into the state constitution, where the legislature cannot reach them.

Their organizing director put the stakes in a sentence: “No right is safe if it is not in your constitution.” It is a remarkable thing to have to say about laws the people already passed, that the only way to make a vote count is to put it where the legislature is forbidden to touch it. The people can win, and win decisively, and still have to wonder whether it will be allowed to stand.

If there is a way out of this, it does not begin in November. It begins in the primary, the election that actually decides who represents you, and the one almost engineered to be ignored.

The information you would need is not secret: when your primary is, who is running, what they have done with their power, and who pays for their campaigns. It is simply scattered, a state office here, a disclosure database there, a record filed somewhere most people never think to look, kept far enough apart that almost no one ever assembles the whole picture.

That is not an accident either. A public that cannot easily see who represents it, or who funds them, is a public that is easier to overrule. Gathering those scattered pieces into one place, where any voter could find them before the election that actually counts, is the work all of this makes necessary, and the work this project means to take up next.

Stay Angry

Sources

Missouri Proposition A and its repeal (HB 567)

• Proposition A passage (57.6%, ~1.7 million yes votes), provisions: KCUR, “Missouri legislature repeals sick leave law that voters approved just months before”; Ballotpedia, “Missouri Proposition A, Minimum Wage and Earned Paid Sick Time Initiative (2024)”; Missouri Law Review, “Pre-Empting the People.”

• Missouri Supreme Court upholding Proposition A (April 29, 2025): Ballotpedia (Proposition A page); Polsinelli, “Missouri’s Repeal of Paid Sick Leave.”

• HB 567 roll calls (House 97–49; Senate 22–11): LegiScan, “MO HB567, 2025 Regular Session.”

• “Previous question” motion to end the filibuster: KCUR, “Missouri legislature repeals sick leave law”; KOMU, “Senate Republicans vote to repeal paid sick leave in Missouri.”

• Gov. Mike Kehoe’s signature (July 10, 2025); sick leave effective May 1 / repealed Aug. 28: Ballotpedia News, “Missouri governor signs law repealing provisions of 2024 paid sick leave and minimum wage ballot initiative”; Ogletree Deakins; SHRM.

• Sen. Doug Beck “corporate overlords” remark: KCUR.

2024 Missouri presidential result (Trump 58.5%, 18.4-point margin)

• Missouri Secretary of State, official 2024 General Election returns; Wikipedia, “2024 United States presidential election in Missouri.”

Clean Missouri (2018) and Amendment 3 (2020)

• Clean Missouri passage (62%, 80 of 114 counties); nonpartisan demographer and fairness/competitiveness criteria: Missouri Independent, “Voters repeal Clean Missouri redistricting plan they enacted in 2018.”

• AP analysis (reform would have let Democrats cut into the supermajority by 2022); Brennan Center assessment (Yurij Rudensky): PBS NewsHour, “Missouri voters reverse redistricting reforms before they could be used.”

• Amendment 3 repeal (51%), funded almost entirely by the Missouri Republican State Committee: Missouri Independent; The Intercept, “On the Ballot in Missouri: A GOP Effort to Undo Redistricting Reform.”

• Ballot summary ruled “misleading, unfair and insufficient” (Cole County Judge Patricia Joyce): St. Louis Public Radio, “Appeals Court Changes Ballot Summary for Clean Missouri Repeal.”

• Ethics provisions retained; competitiveness-method critique: Ballotpedia, “Missouri Amendment 3 (2020)”; PBS NewsHour.

Utah Proposition 3 and SB96

• Proposition 3 passage (2018, 53%, ~150,000 people); SB96 repeal-and-replace (~48,000 fewer covered, work requirement and enrollment cap); Gov. Gary Herbert’s signature: Ballotpedia, “Utah Proposition 3, Medicaid Expansion Initiative (2018)”; Ballotpedia News; Families USA; Deseret News.

• ACA enhanced match available only for full expansion (2012 CMS guidance after NFIB v. Sebelius): KFF, “’Partial Medicaid Expansion’ with ACA Enhanced Matching Funds”; Congressional Research Service, “Overview of the ACA Medicaid Expansion.”

• Rejection of partial-expansion-at-enhanced-match requests (Arkansas, Massachusetts) and the White House overruling CMS on Utah: Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, “Partial Medicaid Expansions Fall Short of Full Medicaid Expansion.”

• Waiver denied; SB96 fallback triggering full expansion in 2020: Salt Lake Tribune, “Trump administration to reject full Medicaid expansion funding for Utah”; Families USA.

Medicaid expansion and mortality

• Estimated ~15,600 deaths in non-expansion states (Miller and Altekruse study): Medicare Rights Center; UC Davis Center for Poverty and Inequality Research.

• Ballot-initiative Medicaid expansions in seven states; margins (Oklahoma 50.5%, Missouri 53%, South Dakota 56%): healthinsurance.org; NPR; NBC News.

Gun background-check polling

• Universal background checks supported by roughly nine in ten Americans: Giffords Law Center, “Americans Want Stronger Gun Laws”; Pew Research Center, “Key facts about Americans and guns”; PolitiFact, “Polls consistently show high support for gun background checks.”

Missouri’s 2026 constitutional initiative

• New ballot effort to place the minimum wage and paid sick leave in the state constitution; Richard von Glahn (”No right is safe if it is not in your constitution”): Ballotpedia News; MultiState.

The Democratic Party needs to say something about the growing antisemitic rhetoric showing up on the left, especially when it is being disguised as anti-Zionism.

I want to be very clear before people start twisting this.

I am anti-war. I am horrified by what has happened to Palestinian civilians. I do not support the destruction, displacement, death, and suffering happening in Gaza. I think our government has serious responsibility here. I think the Israeli government has serious responsibility here. I think Prime Minister Netanyahu and his coalition should be criticized. I think American elected officials who fund, defend, enable, or excuse this war should be criticized.

But that is not the same thing as blaming Jewish people.

That is not the same thing as using “Zionist” as a catchall for every conspiracy, every foreign policy frustration, every political grievance, and every ugly thing people used to say openly about Jews before they learned to code the language better.

And that is where I think this is going.

Anti-Zionism Cannot Become a Mask

Originally, I thought some people used the word “Zionist” because they were trying to be more precise. They were trying to criticize a political project, a government, a nationalist ideology, or support for specific Israeli policies without saying “the Jews,” because obviously the Jewish people as a whole are not responsible for every action of the Israeli government.

That distinction is important.

But lately, I am hearing the word “Zionist” used in ways that do not feel precise at all. It is becoming a substitute word. A shield. A way for people to say things that sound very close to antisemitism while insisting they are only talking about politics.

This past weekend, I heard someone on a YouTube channel talk about AIPAC and “the Zionists,” and then clarify by saying, “you know, the people with the little hats.”

That is not subtle.

That is not coded.

That is not criticism of Israeli policy.

That is an attack on Jewish people.

And I think Democrats need to stop pretending we do not hear it.

We Have to Be Able to Hold Two Thoughts at Once

This should not be hard.

We should be able to condemn the Israeli government’s actions in Gaza and also condemn antisemitism.

We should be able to criticize AIPAC’s, and all PACs influence in American politics, and also reject language that paints Jewish Americans as collectively responsible for Israel’s decisions.

We should be able to oppose war, oppose civilian suffering, oppose occupation, oppose extremism, and oppose Netanyahu without letting people slide into old antisemitic patterns with newer vocabulary.

This is not complicated.

Jewish Americans are Americans. They are our neighbors, friends, coworkers, classmates, community members, and constituents. Many of them have no control over what the Israeli government does. Many of them disagree with what the Israeli government does. Many of them are also watching antisemitism rise and wondering why people who claim to care about bigotry suddenly get quiet when the bigotry is aimed at them.

That should bother us.

And if it does not, then we need to ask ourselves what kind of big tent we are actually building.

The Candidate Problem

This also matters because we now have candidates running as Democrats, and in some cases being promoted or endorsed by Democratic institutions, who have either used language, shared symbolism, or associated with rhetoric that Jewish voters have every right to find alarming.

I am not going to fully litigate Graham Platner here. The situation around his totenkompf tattoo and the broader questions around his campaign have been covered elsewhere, and The Angry Democrat did a deeper dive on that separately.

Even in local races, there are serious questions about candidates with antisemitic social media posts and comments still earning Democratic endorsements.

If you are asking to represent a district with a large Jewish population, then you have a responsibility to understand what your words mean to that community.

And the Democratic Party has a responsibility too.

The Party Should Not Look Away

My bigger problem is not only with candidates.

My bigger problem is the Democratic Party endorsing, promoting, or protecting candidates while ignoring the legitimate concerns of Jewish voters.

That is what feels like a slap in the face.

At a time when Jewish Americans are seeing more threats, more hostility, more conspiracy language, and more open antisemitism, the party should be extra aware. Not silent. Not cowardly. Not afraid to criticize Israel. But careful, clear, and morally consistent.

Instead, too often, it feels like the party is looking the other way because the politics around Israel and Gaza are difficult. Because young voters are angry. Because the left is angry. Because people do not want to offend certain activist spaces. Because party leaders are afraid of losing a political lane.

That is cowardice dressed up as a coalition.

We cannot say we are the party of inclusion and then tell Jewish voters to swallow their concerns for the sake of political expediency.

Call It Out Clearly

We need to be able to say this plainly.

Criticizing Israel is not antisemitic.

Criticizing Netanyahu is not antisemitic.

Criticizing AIPAC is not antisemitic.

Opposing war is not antisemitic.

Defending Palestinian civilians is not antisemitic.

But blaming “the Zionists” while pointing at Jewish religious symbols is antisemitic. Treating Jewish Americans as responsible for the Israeli government is antisemitic. Using anti-Zionism as a mask for old conspiracy language is antisemitic. Ignoring Jewish voters when they say they feel targeted is unacceptable.

The Democratic Party should be able to hold that line.

In fact, the Democratic Party must be able to hold that line.

Because if we cannot separate criticism of a government or geo-political issues from hostility toward a people, then we are not being morally serious. We are just letting anger turn into bigotry and calling it politics.

I do not want that in this party.

I do not want Jewish Democrats wondering whether there is still room for them in the coalition.

I do not want candidates rewarded for ignorance that harms the communities they are asking to represent.

And I do not want Democrats to become so afraid of internal conflict that we stop calling out antisemitism when it is happening right in front of us.

We can oppose war and oppose antisemitism.

We can criticize Israel’s government and protect Jewish communities.

Those things should coexist easily inside the Democratic Party.

If they cannot, then the party has a much bigger problem than it wants to admit.

Stay Angry.

Opinion Disclaimer: This essay reflects the personal views of its author. Opinions published by The Angry Democrat are intended to encourage debate and discussion, and do not necessarily represent the views of the publication, its editors, contributors, or affiliated projects.

A recent Atlantic article has been making the rounds. In it, Susan Crawford Shaw, founder of Grassroots Resistance, GRR, a Cleveland activist group, and its members said what a lot of Democratic voters already feel: they are sick of platitudes. They want more than slogans.

So do we.

Laura and I criticize the Democratic Party a lot. But if we are going to demand better, we should also be willing to say what better looks like.

So we both decided to take a swing at it.

These are the policies, priorities, and fights we think Democrats should be willing to run on right now. Some of our points overlap. Some go in different directions. But the point is the same: stop hiding behind vague language and start saying what you actually believe.

We are going back and forth here because this is not just one person’s list. It is a conversation. It is Matt’s take. It is Laura’s take. And hopefully, it is the beginning of a much bigger conversation about what Democrats should actually stand for.

Matt’s Take

Healthcare for All

I would not be surprised if Laura says the same thing. I have no clue what she is going to write, but for me, this is the starting point.

If you are not running on healthcare for all, I do not care about the excuses. I do not care about all the talking points about what it is going to cost.

Work out the numbers.

There are many countries that do it with better healthcare results and less money per capita. So stop the BS. Crunch the numbers and put it in your policy.

Talk about how much families will save. Talk about how much companies will save. Talk about how life expectancy and health outcomes will improve.

Then make a way to afford it.

Running on “lowering costs” or making it “more affordable” is weak tired and shows you have no balls.

Laura’s Take

At this point, I am a yes for all of Matt’s policies. But, I wouldn’t be the policy wonk or outspoken Democrat I am if I didn’t go a little deeper and maybe state the obvious in a few places. The bottom line is people right now want a fighter. These policy recommendations will make Democratic candidates seem more like one. They are also the right thing to do.

I spent 23 years inside the federal government across seven agencies. I know what government does when it works and is doing what has been mandated by Congress. I know what breaks when you gut it. So my list starts where Matt’s transparency point leaves off. With accountability that has teeth.

Impeach, Remove, Convict

Democrats need to stop being afraid of these words.

When an official breaks the law, you hold a hearing. You build a record and collect evidence. You go to trial. Democrats keep treating accountability like a gift they hand out only when it polls well. It is not a gift. It’s your job. Either we have a Constitution or we don’t.

When a president defies a court order, or ignores the Constitution or the law, that is impeachable. When a cabinet secretary ignores a law Congress passed and a president signed, that is removable. The Constitution handed us the tool for exactly this. Use it. When the evidence supports a crime, prosecute it.

The daily corruption, graft, open-theft, abuses, state-sanctioned murders, and denial of basic human and Constitutional rights is wrong. We just went to an war in Iran Congress didn’t ever approve - that is a power entirely reserved for them. As Democrats, how can we keep watching this and do nothing?

If you or I aren’t above the law, then no President or politician is either. Say it like you mean it. Nothing else will be possible until Trump and his ilk are gone. Sorry, not sorry.

Matt’s Take

Reduce Deficit Spending and Balance the Budget

We are nearly $40 trillion in debt, and about $1 trillion every year is going just to pay the interest on that debt.

That is insane.

Not only that, we spend close to $1 trillion on the military. Social Security is again under threat of becoming insolvent. We need to balance the budget, stop paying a trillion dollars in interest, and use that money to fund things people actually need, like healthcare.

But that does not mean the debt is fake.

Stop wasting the money. Balance the budget. Reduce the debt. Use the savings to help people.

Laura’s Take

It’s Time for a Living Wage. End Legalized Political Bribery

Wages should be high enough to support a family.

Right now that lands around $30 to $35 an hour. MIT’s Living Wage Calculator shows a no-frills budget for a family of four runs $20 to $30 an hour per working parent, and well past $40 on a single income. The federal minimum has sat at $7.25 since 2009.

People know it is broken. Polling by Data for Progress found 74 percent of voters back a $20 federal minimum, 60 percent of Republicans included. Three quarters back $17. This is not a fringe position. It is a landslide Washington keeps ignoring. Unfortunately, you will never pry a living wage out of a Congress that answers to the donors fighting against one.

So, fix the machine. Pass a constitutional amendment (or similar legislation) to overturn Citizens United. Ban corporate money in campaigns. Ban the Super PACs. Publicly finance federal elections and run them to one national standard, so your ballot counts the same in Ohio as it does anywhere else.

Pay people enough to live. Then make sure the people they elect work for them, not the highest bidder.

Matt’s Take

Raise the Cap on Social Security

It is absolutely ridiculous that there is a cap on Social Security. Once you make over a certain amount, you max out on what you pay into the system.

Social Security, like it or not, has become the default retirement plan for a lot of people. We are saving it away for them. So raise the cap, fund Social Security, and make sure everybody has a way to live in dignity.

With that said, the fact that we tax Social Security is absolutely absurd.

Do not tax Social Security.

At the same time, Social Security should not sit in a bank account losing money to depreciation and inflation. It should be in Treasuries or another safe structure that at least keeps up with inflation.

If we are not investing Social Security in a way that beats or at least keeps up with inflation, then we are failing.

The government is failing.

Just admit it and do better.

Laura’s Take

Rebuild the Civil Service. It Keeps You Alive

They answer the phone at Social Security. They Inspect your food. They show up after it floods. I got dialysis patients to their appointments across 19 states during the pandemic. Government keeps people alive in ways you never see until it stops. It is also what you pay for.

About 317,000 federal workers were purged in 2025, reported by Bloomberg from Office of Personnel Management data. On June 3 an executive order made about 8,000 career experts “at-will,” with an accompanying agency rule that will likely lead to an additionally 50,000 more civil servants being purged. Every single firing is illegal.

HHS announced cuts of 20,000, a quarter of the agency, per Government Executive. This is not waste, fraud, or abuse. Federally funded research is behind every new drug the FDA approved from 2010 to 2016, STAT reported (FDA, NIH, HHS, and even DoD supplements budgets for drug research and trials). Anyone who thinks we built American science without the civil service is delusional.

The goal of this administration is to get rid of every civil servant, privitize every public service, help themselves to your tax money, and govern on high from a board room. Don’t let it happen. Reinstate every program, rehire every worker, honor every contract, and expand the civil service.

Matt’s Take

Universal Basic Income

I was part of the Yang Gang.

Andrew Yang was the only person talking about the future and trying to future-proof America. Everybody else was focused on the now or looking backwards, trying to fix problems that had already gotten out of control.

Yang was the one saying, hey, there is this thing called AI and robotics, and it is going to take a lot of jobs. It is coming. Can we please start talking about it?

Everybody laughed at him.

But somehow, as an unknown candidate, he made it through to become one of the last people standing in the Democratic primary.

Why?

Because he had an actual fucking policy.

With the rise of AI, automation, robotics, Tesla’s Optimus, Waymo, self-driving cars, Tesla’s self-driving fleet, and AI replacing real work, now is the time to start introducing universal basic income.

No, that does not mean everyone is to be on the government dole.

It means we need policies in place so companies are not just lowering their costs, replacing workers, and eating all the profits for shareholders while workers get displaced.

There has to be a policy where some of those profits are shared or dividends payed with the country they are doing business in, the workers who are displaced, and the communities where jobs are lost.

Laura’s Take

End Our Current Immigration System; Hold Officials Accountable for Deaths and Abuse

Renée Nicole Good, a mother of three and a legal observer watching out for her neighbors, was shot through her windshield by an ICE officer in Minneapolis this January. Two weeks later and less than two miles away, Alex Pretti, an intensive care nurse at the Minneapolis VA, was shot by Border Patrol agents while trying to help a woman they were accosting. Months later, the federal investigations into both deaths remain stalled, with the administration fighting to withhold the evidence.

That sits on top of 31 people who died in ICE detention in 2025, the deadliest year in two decades, while the office meant to investigate those deaths lost hundreds of staff and went dark during the shutdown. I shouldn’t have to even mention that we are also imprisoning young children and infants, allowing sexual abuse of young girls at detention centers, engaging in starvation, beatings, and murders of those detained.

These victims aren’t fodder. They are why this has to end.

We need to end ICE as we know it and rebuild immigration enforcement from the ground up. One that solves the backlog instead of terrorizing human beings. We need to fund real processing capacity, real asylum courts, and iron clad oversight. Then we need to seek justice, and prosecute the officials who gave orders for, or let people die in the street and in custody. Not reassign them. Not let them retire. Prosecute them.

Matt’s Take

Transparency

Everything in government is so obscure.

Yes, there are records requests, but they get delayed. Police departments drag their feet. Governors drag their feet. Departments drag their feet. Everyone has an excuse.

You are not allowed to do this. You need to file that. You need to wait. You need to appeal.

No.

This is a government of the people.

Unless something is classified, top secret, related to clandestine operations, protecting assets, or some real national security concern, everything should be auditable and transparent to the American people.

Build trust in government.

Let us audit how much the pencil costs.

Is this like Independence Day, where a toilet seat costs $35,000 and a hammer costs $2,500?

The people should know.

They should be able to go to a website, type into a search bar, and get the receipts for what we are paying for.

And PS: if the Pentagon fails another audit, people should get fired. If there is fraud or misconduct, there should be prosecution.

Laura’s Take

Democrats Need to Clean Their Own House

Voters do not separate the parties on corruption anymore. Ninety-two percent of them call corruption a big problem in politics, rating Congress corruption at 85 percent, and not just the president. Democrats should know a battleground poll found voters in frontline districts see Democrats as more corrupt than Republicans, even while Trump’s own scandals dominate the headlines.

After this presidency, voters will be starving for a real anti-corruption party, not just one that points at Trump’s. There is movement already. AOC, Jason Crow, and Mike Levin just launched an End Corruption Caucus inside the House Democratic caucus. Good. Now point it inward too.

Democrats have to turn informer on their own party. Investigate our own dark money. Audit our own endorsement deals. Name our own insiders trading access for loyalty. The party willing to police itself first is the only one voters will ever trust to police Washington after this.

Matt’s Take

Campaign Finance Reform and Ending Stock Trading in Congress

This is simple.

You cannot have trust in government if government officials are front-running the books.

You cannot have trust in government if they are in bed with big business.

You cannot have trust in government if members of Congress are trading stocks while writing laws that affect those companies.

And you cannot have trust in democracy if, at any minute, Elon or any other billionaire can put a tiny fraction of their net worth into elections and change the whole field.

Campaign finance reform must happen.

End congressional stock trading.

Limit the power of billionaires and corporations to buy influence.

Make elected officials work for the people again.

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