Happy Tuesday! Here’s your Tuesday Tech Drop, the past week’s top stories from the intersection of technology and politics.

Dems want damning surveillance report

A pair of Democratic senators are accusing President Donald Trump’s administration of hiding a report that “details serious abuses of Americans’ rights under Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.” Sens. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., and Adam Schiff, D-Calif., are trying to pry loose a report they say the administration is legally required to make public after a FISA court opinion detailed abuses of the program in March.

Since retaking office, Trump has expanded the federal government’s arsenal of creepy surveillance tools en route to building what appears to be an unprecedented spy machine that can track Americans. It’s in that context that Democrats — with some GOP help — tanked a vote in June that would have extended the controversial FISA powers that give the government broad latitude to sweep up data, including information belonging to Americans.

In a letter to Director of National Intelligence Jay Clayton and Attorney General Todd Blanche, the two Senate Democrats said the damning FISA report from on alleged surveillance abuses should have been released already — and demanded that it be released now so lawmakers can consider whether to extend FISA powers next year.

They wrote:

The administration has now had over seven months to declassify and release this opinion. It is time to stop violating the law and finally release this opinion. And if this administration won’t follow this simple statutory directive, it is unclear why Congress or the American people should trust this administration to follow any of the other legal limits to Section 702.

Read more at Gizmodo.

AI bots’ banking break-ins

Artificial intelligence bots are increasingly gaining unauthorized access to people’s bank accounts, according to new reporting from Axios. The report homes in on concerns among bank officials about security in the age of AI.

Read more at Axios.

Massive Meta judgment

A judge ordered Meta to pay $25 billion after the company lost a lawsuit alleging that the company broke New Mexico’s consumer protection laws and jeopardized its users after the Cambridge Analytica scandal nearly a decade ago. Meta has vowed to appeal the ruling.

Read more at MS NOW.

Republican outcry over Colom ad

After Mississippi’s Republican attorney general issued legal threats last week, the state’s Democratic Senate nominee, Scott Colom, deleted an ad using AI tools to mock his Republican opponent, Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith. I wrote about how it seems like Republicans are fretting over this race in a deep-red state.

Read more at MS NOW.

Pro-ICE activist reportedly faces deportation

Samuel Sey, a popular right-wing influencer known for supporting Trump’s racist anti-immigrant crackdown, reportedly has been detained by immigration officials and is now facing deportation after allegedly overstaying a temporary visa.

Read more at The Roys Report.

What AI guidelines?

The good news is the Pentagon apparently has some guidelines around the development of AI tools to avoid the risk of escalating wars or harming civilians and troops. The bad news? Defense officials aren’t always adhering to these rules, according to a congressional report.

Read more at NPR.

Anthropic bots get alarming access

Anthropic says its AI tool accessed Georgia voting data typically only available to people who pay for it. The company and Georgia’s secretary of state said no individual voter records were accessed, but the intrusion marks yet another disturbing security breach involving AI. A new report explains why “the company’s statements about what its bot accessed raise more questions.”

Read more at The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

Alpha School shortcomings

An investigation from The New York Times suggests that Alpha School, the network of AI-fueled private schools that have been backed by the Trump administration and vow to offer a superior learning experience, is failing to live up to its promises.

Read more at The New York Times.

MAGA influencer meddling fails

Several MAGA influencers have recently been in Brazil and Serbia, hoping to sway elections in both countries — but the pro-authoritarian candidates they supported flamed out over the weekend. Now, especially when it comes to Brazil, Trump and a bunch of extremely online conservatives are pushing lies about the election being rigged, as my colleague Brandy Zydrozny explained.

Read more at MS NOW.

The post Senate Democrats warn that the Trump administration is hiding a damning surveillance report appeared first on MS NOW.

"The long-term goal is to achieve statehood and autonomy," says Kymone Freeman, the Green Party candidate for Washington, D.C.'s nonvoting delegate seat in the U.S. House of Representatives. "The short-term leverage to achieve that is tax resistance."

Like many D.C. locals, Freeman believes it's unfair that residents of the nation's capital pay federal income taxes without a voting representative in Congress. Freeman has made it a key plank in his policy platform that D.C. residents should be exempt from paying federal income tax until the district is granted statehood. "We're celebrating the 250th anniversary of America's resistance to taxation without representation, so I think it's time," says Freeman. The nation's capital is a federal district, not a U.S. territory like Guam, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands, so D.C. residents are still subject to federal income tax requirements. 

Federal district or not, imposing income taxes on D.C. residents without representation would likely offend America's Founders, who met in New York in October 1765 and proclaimed that it is "inseparably essential to the freedom of a people…that no taxes be imposed on them, but with their own consent, given personally, or by their representatives." Taxation is a form of theft. Compounding the issue, D.C. residents have little recourse to challenge their tax burden.

The U.S. is the only democratically governed nation to withhold voting representation from citizens living in its capital. Worse, local officials—such as the city's mayor and the D.C. Council—must solicit congressional approval for the district's budget and laws with little more than a figurehead serving as their lone representative in the federal legislature. Reason's analysis of the Internal Revenue Service's latest available adjusted gross income data shows that D.C. tax filers paid more federal income tax per return than residents in any other state, about $26,900, compared to a national average of roughly $14,300.  

While that's partly because the city has many high-income earners, data show that excluding those in the city earning over $1 million, D.C. residents still paid more in income tax per return than filers in any state, about $16,500 compared to $8,900 nationally.

"We don't have a system where public policy is determined by public input because of the status quo," says Freeman. But challenging that status quo has proven difficult, as Congress resists attempts to make D.C. the 51st state. In 2021, the House of Representatives passed a party-line bill sponsored by Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton (D–D.C.) to establish D.C. as the 51st state. It later died in the (barely) Democratically controlled Senate.

Democrats once opposed D.C. becoming the 51st state; however, they've since warmed to the idea, unlike Republican lawmakers at the federal level, who have been reluctant to support statehood for D.C., viewing it as a move that would give Democrats an electoral stronghold. That argument has some truth: No elected Republicans serve on the D.C. Council. The city hasn't had a Republican mayor since its local government was established, and the district has reliably voted for a Democrat in every presidential election since 1964.

Even though Republicans at the national level do not support statehood for D.C., the District's local GOP does support ending taxation without representation. Denise Rosado—the Republican candidate for D.C.'s delegate seat—thinks statehood for the district is "unlikely" and "undesirable." That hasn't stopped her from campaigning for an end to federal income taxes in D.C., an outcome she claims can be "accomplished quickly."

That's doubtful given Congress' pace. Still, there's no logic in making statehood a prerequisite to abolishing the federal income tax requirement for district residents.

The post In D.C.'s Delegate Race, 2 Candidates Agree: No Federal Income Tax for District Residents appeared first on Reason Magazine.

Ahead of Election Day, our politics crew takes a closer look at what to watch in the 2026 elections and take your questions around election security and voting rights.

When House Republicans made a surprise announcement in mid-September, sending members home early and abandoning plans for a busy September, there was uncertainty about why, exactly, GOP leaders wanted to do even less work. It wasn’t long before Capitol Hill observers settled on an answer.

Republican Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky was poised to force a vote on Sept. 17 on impeaching Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth — and by all accounts, the measure was likely to generate a fair number of bipartisan votes, which would have been deeply embarrassing to the beleaguered Pentagon chief, the White House and the party itself with seven weeks remaining in the election cycle.

And so House Speaker Mike Johnson let members know their last pre-election workday would be Sept. 16.

The move successfully kicked the can down the road, although with Election Day just a week away, Congress has very nearly caught up to that can. Roll Call reported:

The author of a draft House resolution to impeach the Defense secretary said Monday he plans to force a vote on the measure the week of Nov. 9.

The Pete Hegseth impeachment resolution is a “week one” issue for the House lame-duck session, Rep. Thomas Massie, R-Ky., said in a phone interview.

For a long while, as the political world turned its focus to the midterm elections, the lame-duck session appeared to be on some faraway horizon. That’s no longer the case: Members will return to Capitol Hill in two weeks — the week after Election Day — and they will find the Hegseth impeachment resolution waiting for them as they get back to work.

“I give it better than a 50% chance of passing,” Massie, who was defeated in a GOP primary in May, told Roll Call. “Will all the Democrats vote for it? I think the answer to that is yes. And then the second question is, do I get a handful of Republicans? And I think they’re probably more inclined in the lame-duck session to vote for it than they were before their campaigns were over.”

We’ll learn soon enough how that vote turns out, but in the meantime, it’s worth keeping in mind that in the next Congress, if there’s a Democratic majority, Hegseth should prepare himself for fierce pushback. As recently as Saturday, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, the likely next House speaker should Democrats fare well next week, told MS NOW, “Pete Hegseth needs to be pushed aside by the president, or we’re going to have to deal with that situation if he is not.”

A day earlier, The Wall Street Journal reported, “House Democrats are setting their political sights on Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, pushing for his impeachment as the first spoils from anticipated wins in the midterm election.”

The day after Jeffries’ comments, Democratic Rep. Jason Crow of Colorado, a member of the Armed Services Committee and a decorated military veteran, appeared on CBS News’s “Face the Nation” and said, “Pete Hegseth remains incompetent and is not doing what’s necessary to protect our service members, which is why he’s my priority No. 1 if we retake the majority, to make sure we oust him from the Pentagon, because our service members actually deserve competent, serious, real leadership that will protect them and do the right thing.”

For most of American history, only one Cabinet secretary has ever been impeached: In 1876, the House impeached Secretary of War William Belknap — after he left office — over alleged bribes. (He was later acquitted by senators.)

Nearly three years ago, Belknap got a little company: House Republicans impeached then-Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas despite having uncovered no evidence the DHS secretary had done anything to merit impeachment. (The Senate dismissed the effort and didn’t bother with a trial.)

Will Hegseth join this tiny club? Watch this space.

The post Vote on Pete Hegseth’s impeachment is on the way — and it probably won’t be the last appeared first on MS NOW.

Last week, Israeli soldiers detained me for harvesting olives in a grove near Bethlehem. I was one of about 70 people — rabbis, American and Israeli Jews, and Palestinians — helping Palestinian farmers harvest trees their family has owned for generations.

My detention made headlines. But it’s not the story. The story is the ethnic cleansing of the West Bank.

The olive grove we were harvesting as part of the Protect the Harvest effort belongs to families from Nahalin, a Palestinian village south of Bethlehem in the West Bank. The villagers have not been able to harvest their olives for three years, because of attacks by Israeli settlers.

In recent weeks across the West Bank, settlers have attacked Palestinian farmers, volunteers, European diplomats and a Washington Post journalist. In our case, though, when security guards from the adjacent settlement of Beitar Illit spotted us, they didn’t confront us themselves. Instead, they called the Israeli army, and soldiers detained us for harvesting olives on private Palestinian land at the invitation of its owners. In other words, we were doing nothing illegal nor anything that required coordination with the Israeli government.

Of the 70 folks I was detained alongside, the IDF soldiers held a Palestinian woman from the family who owns the land longest of all. Their message was clear: don’t try to harvest that land again.

What I saw in Nahalin is part of a broader pattern I have seen across the West Bank: settler violence and state power working hand in hand to dispossess Palestinians of their land and expel them from their homes.

In Mughayir, the sister village of my Brooklyn synagogue, families once farmed olives and dates and grazed flocks on land stretching down into the Jordan Valley. Today, the village has been stripped of nearly all of it — by a government order that uprooted its olive trees, by a permanently locked gate cutting it off from the main road and by attacks from nearby settler outposts. One older man was assaulted and pepper sprayed earlier this month by settlers, just for walking into one of his few remaining fields.

In Taibe, a shepherd showed me a video of settlers and soldiers raiding his compound at night, beating his family and taking 40 of his sheep on a newly arrived settler’s claim that they were his.

These are not isolated incidents. A recent report from Peace Now and Kerem Navot found that settler violence, combined with Israeli government policy, has made more than 1 million dunams — roughly 18% of the West Bank — inaccessible to Palestinians, and has displaced over 100 communities.

In Al-Walaja, in eastern Jerusalem, villagers have sought approval of a zoning plan for more than a decade. The Israeli authorities have refused to grant it without explanation — a recurring dynamic in Palestinian communities — only to then cite the missing zoning plan as an excuse to demolish their homes. Half the village is under demolition orders. Residents pay taxes to the Jerusalem municipality. But the main government service they receive is the bulldozer.

In the Jordan Valley near Jericho, I saw the ruins of what were, until recently, the Bedouin communities of Mu’arrajat and Ras Ein al-Auja, where hundreds of families lived. After the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks on Israel, settlers began a campaign of harassment that escalated to an attack on the village elementary school. Residents pleaded to soldiers for protection, and they were told it would be provided — but only during the day. So one night, settlers — no, let’s call them terrorists — came and burned the homes, one by one. When the pogrom was over, every house was destroyed, and every family gone.

The term for that is ethnic cleansing.

A young Bedouin woman named Aliya, who lived through it, told me the story. She now lives with her family in a refugee compound without running water. Despite it all, she’s studying remotely for her master’s degree. It should not take the arrest of a U.S. congressional candidate or a group of rabbis to bring attention to her story. But American media provides little opportunity for Palestinians’ voices to be heard.

None of the Palestinians I met in the West Bank can vote in this week’s Israeli elections, even though the resulting government controls their lives. I devoutly hope Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s party loses, and that a new government will take steps to rein in settler terrorism like this. But neither prospective coalition is promising to stop settlement construction, end ongoing occupation and apartheid or protect the human rights of Palestinians — much less recognize a Palestinian state.

Here in the United States, though, the midterm elections do offer an opportunity to demand change. We are not bystanders to ethnic cleansing in Israel and Palestine: our tax dollars help underwrite it.

In Congress, I will work to end U.S. military aid to Israel while it violates international law and Palestinian human rights. I will support the Stop the Settlements bill to ban trade and impose sanctions on companies who build and bankroll the settlements — something U.K. Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband recently announced. I will support recognition of a Palestinian state as U.S. policy. I will work with a broad coalition of American Jewish and Muslim groups that don’t always agree with one another, but who are committed to ending the occupation.

Before I left the West Bank, I spoke with a group of Palestinian high school students at the Talitha Kumi school in Beit Jala. Most speak Arabic, Hebrew, German and excellent English. They experience injustice on a daily basis. Their families can’t vote, but still they told me about their Model UN. They were glad to learn I’m Jewish, and they thanked me for being there. They want a free Palestine, but they also believe in democracy and want to live peacefully alongside Israelis.

There are, to be sure, many complex issues in resolving the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians.

But don’t let anyone tell you these young people are raised on hatred. That they deserve freedom and opportunity any less than your kids or mine. That it is in any way “democratic” that their families can’t vote. That stealing their land is consistent with Jewish values. That it’s a good use of our tax dollars to fund their subordination. Or that we can’t find partners for peace.

The post Israeli soldiers detained me for harvesting olives — but that’s not the real outrage appeared first on MS NOW.

Former Sen. Joe Manchin (I-W.Va.) said the midterms are trending toward being a “complete tsunami” ahead of the November elections where the GOP is projected to lose the majority in the House.  “Well, the atmosphere is definitely right, I believe, for a complete tsunami,” the former senator said, responding to a question from Blake Burman…

Benjamin Netanyahu is in the fight of his political life. Voters in Israel are heading to the polls on Tuesday to decide an election that could determine whether Netanyahu will remain the country's prime minister (and affect the outcome of the corruption charges against him). But the Israeli election also arrives at a time when voters around the world seem to be rejecting authoritarianism. A student-run movement stunned the world on Sunday when its candidates routed Serbia's long-serving leader, Aleksandar Vučić. That same day, Brazilians beat back a campaign by Flávio Bolsonaro – the son of Jair Bolsonaro, the disgraced former president – in a historic upset. Carter Sherman speaks to Julian Borger, the Guardian’s senior international correspondent, about how these four elections could reshape the political world order in just 10 days, and why the upcoming US midterm elections are the biggest test for global democracy.

• Julian Borger on 10 days that could shake the world

Continue reading...

© Photograph: Grid

© Photograph: Grid

© Photograph: Grid

At a Trump rally in Michigan on Sunday, David Beamer, the father of a passenger who died on the hijacked United Flight 93 on 9/11, made a remarkable criticism of Democratic senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed.

“Mike Rogers is an American,” Beamer said of El-Sayed’s Republican opponent, as President Donald Trump looked on. “Abdul has a birth certificate. The birth certificate says he’s a citizen of America. You know what? A birth certificate doesn’t make you an American.”

Dismissing a birth certificate as legitimate evidence of nationality underscores the egregious bigotry of the GOP’s racist playbook against El-Sayed. And it illuminates an evolution in the right’s tactics toward a postbirtherism white nationalism.

During Barack Obama’s presidency, Trump played a key role in popularizing racist “birtherism” conspiracy theories that sought to undermine Obama’s legitimacy as president by claiming he was not born in the U.S. One right-wing activist titled a book promoting those theories “Where’s The Birth Certificate?” Those narratives prompted Obama to release a long-form birth certificate to the public in 2011 — after having released a standard one in 2008 in response to earlier sets of rumors.

The right wants to become an arbiter of who gets to be an American, using its own political and racial metrics.

That wasn’t enough for Trump. In 2012 he tweeted, “An ‘extremely credible source’ has called my office and told me that @BarackObama’s birth certificate is a fraud.” He and many on the right questioned the authenticity of the certificate several other times. Years later, however, he claimed he was the one who had “finished” the manufactured controversy.

Trump’s questioning of Obama’s Americanness was, undoubtedly, animated by rank bigotry. But ostensibly that disinformation campaign had a solution — an authentic certificate. Implicitly, it acknowledged the constitutional rights conferred by being born in the U.S.

Now things have gotten far worse: Having a birth certificate is not enough. Being a citizen is not enough. Having the backing of the Constitution is not enough. Instead, the right wants to become an arbiter of who gets to be an American, using its own political and racial metrics.

“[El-Sayed] demonstrates with his view of what our world should look like that he’s not an American, he’s anti-American,” Beamer said at the rally. How did he determine this? Beamer claimed, falsely, that El-Sayed’s beliefs “align” with the Islamist organization the Muslim Brotherhood. This is a fabricated claim. It takes El-Sayed’s Arab ancestry as a pretext for claiming he has covert extremist beliefs. For right-wingers, the “proof” is El-Sayed’s background.

“He has blood that’s red,” Beamer said. “However, he has chosen to remove any strain of the white and blue part in his blood. We cannot allow this man to invade and occupy our country.”

Given that white in the U.S. flag symbolizes, according to the U.S. government, “purity and innocence” and blue symbolizes “vigilance, perseverance, and justice,” it’s not hard to see how Beamer’s remarks code as a comment on El-Sayed being innately too swarthy and too dangerous for Michigan. Thus, his potential election becomes an “invasion.” In an echo of the fascistic language of the 20th century, the right’s case against the people they want to Other is rendered in terms of protection of the body.

Beamer’s virulent rhetoric is in keeping with that of the party. At the same rally, Trump smeared El-Sayed as a “jihadist” — a lie he has repeatedly uttered. Rogers’ first attack ad against El-Sayed attempted to portray left-wing politicians of color as violent anarchists.

The shameful comments of Trump, Rogers, Beamer and others are not an outlier limited to one Senate race, but a summary of the right’s trajectory. This is all of a piece with the Trump administration’s efforts to roll back birthright citizenship and effectively permit immigration based on race. Vice President JD Vance has promoted the idea that ethnic heritage, not shared values, make one an American. This project, under the guise of protecting America from a so-called invasion, is a bid to create nothing less than a white ethnostate.

The post The right has zoomed past ‘birtherism’ to something far darker appeared first on MS NOW.

PEARL RIVER, N.Y. — Reps. Mike Lawler and Brian Fitzpatrick are the only two Republicans running for re-election this year in districts where Vice President Kamala Harris prevailed in 2024. And while Democrats are confident that a blue wave will finally wash away these two GOP lawmakers, both think they can once again rise above the political tide — by deploying similar but distinctly different strategies.

“When I agree with the president, I say it. When I disagree with him, I say it,” Lawler, referring to Donald Trump, told MS NOW in an interview on the sidelines of the Pearl River Day street fair. “I have a pretty clear record of pushing back on things that matter to my district and my constituents.”

Fitzpatrick has embraced a similar approach. The Pennsylvania Republican told MS NOW during an interview in Bensalem, Pennsylvania, that voters “feel the way they’re going to feel about the president.”

“My job is to represent a district, and that means opposing him when doing so is in the interest of our district,” he said. “That means supporting policies, no matter who introduces them, when doing so is in the interest of our district.”

For both Republicans, the “disagree when I disagree” approach carries some risks. They could alienate some GOP voters and draw the ire of a temperamental president. But the strategy may also be overstated: Fitzpatrick has voted with Trump roughly 77% of the time, according to The Philadelphia Inquirer. And a 2025 analysis from Congressional Quarterly found that Lawler voted with Trump 94% of the time.

But thus far, the strategy appears to be working. Recent polling shows Lawler neck and neck with Democrat Cait Conley and Fitzpatrick in a close race with Democrat Bob Harvie. Notably, both parties together have dumped more than $80 million into advertisements in the two races, according to AdImpact.

Harris did win a third district that’s currently represented by a Republican. But that GOP lawmaker, Rep. Don Bacon of Nebraska, isn’t running for re-election, and Democrats think they will pick up that seat.

The situation is much less clear in the cases of Lawler and Fitzpatrick.

In 2024, Lawler won re-election in his Hudson Valley district by 6.3%, sailing to his second term in Congress. That same year, Harris won the district by 0.6%.

The margins were even more pronounced for Fitzpatrick, who marched to a fifth term representing his Bucks County district in 2024 by 12.8%. Harris, meanwhile, carried his district by 0.4%.

Same goal, different playbook

While Lawler and Fitzpatrick share a goal — embrace the president when it helps and distance themselves when it hurts — their playbooks are slightly different.

For every step Lawler has moved away from Trump, he has also taken a step toward him. The New York Republican has criticized the president on a number of policies, including his decision to end Temporary Protected Status for Haitian immigrants, parts of his memorandum of understanding with Iran and, most recently, the rollback of sanctions on Russia.

But Lawler also appeared with Trump at a rally the president held in Rockland County in May, and he spoke at the Republican convention in September — an event that many battleground Republicans skipped.

For Lawler, the calculus is simple.

“He’s the president of the United States, and whether it was Joe Biden or Donald Trump, you show up when the president comes to your district,” Lawler said, noting that he attended Biden’s event in his district in 2023.

“In order to be effective, you got to be able to deal with the president, and I’ve done that,” he said.

Fitzpatrick, meanwhile, has kept Trump at a greater distance. The Pennsylvania Republican did not attend the GOP convention, has never appeared with Trump at a campaign rally and isn’t even endorsed by the president.

Fitzpatrick was also one of just two Republicans to vote against the GOP’s reconciliation package last year, and he was one of the first Republicans to vote to curb Trump’s authority in Iran.

“If he conducts himself in a manner that’s unbecoming — which he has, very, very often — I will say so,” Fitzpatrick said.

But, he added, there is a balance.

“That doesn’t mean you just make a living out of just poking people in the eye all day, every day,” he said.

The slightly different strategies for Lawler and Fitzpatrick are coming into focus one week before Election Day. Democrats need to flip just four seats to take control of the House — and both Lawler and Fitzpatrick are prime targets.

However, as Republicans begin spending in districts where Trump won by double digits, Lawler and Fitzpatrick have stubbornly made both of their races no sure thing.

Still, even as public polls show the races in dead heats, Democrats are projecting confidence.

“This is the year that Brian Fitzpatrick and Mike Lawler lose their seats,” a Democratic strategist working on House races told MS NOW.

The operative, who requested anonymity to candidly discuss the elections, cited Harvie’s roots in Bucks County and Conley’s status as a decorated combat veteran.

“It’s why Republicans spent millions to meddle in the Democratic primary,” the strategist said. “They are scared to death of losing to her next week.”

The voters

For voters, the question of whether Lawler and Fitzpatrick are genuinely independent is far from settled.

Roger DeBonis, a financial adviser from Tappan, New York, told MS NOW he is a Trump supporter voting for Lawler, citing the congressman’s independent streak.

“He doesn’t just tow the line for the Republican Party,” DeBonis said. “I happen to be a very big fan of our president, but he’s not right all the time.”

Bernadette Murray, a 65-year-old accountant from Pearl River, told MS NOW she’s voting for Conley. Asked about Lawler’s moderate streak, Murray said she didn’t really think it made a difference.

“Republicans are never going to go anywhere,” she said. “I think he’s just in a party that is just failing, hurting people left and right.”

Plenty of voters — perhaps a decisive number — remain persuadable.

Jeanine Salvato, a 62-year-old retiree from Pomona, told MS NOW she voted for Harris in 2024 and was planning on supporting Conley. But after meeting Lawler at the street fair, she’s reconsidering.

“When I spoke to him, he kind of reiterated that and said he’s more in the middle,” Salvato said, adding that Lawler “pushes back when he can, and I think that’s important.”

Voters in Pennsylvania’s 1st District are similarly divided. Some see Fitzpatrick’s middle-of-the-road approach as genuine. Others say it’s an act.

Linda Crawe, an assistant deli manager from Bucks County, told MS NOW she is voting for Fitzpatrick and supports his independent streak.

“I do support Trump, but sometimes there are things that can go either way,” Crawe said.

In contrast, Michelle Tobia, an 81-year-old retired nurse from Philadelphia, said she is voting for Harvie because Fitzpatrick is “a chameleon.”

Carol Mikulsky, a 72-year-old retiree, also plans to vote for Harvie, though she’s not sure this will be the year Democrats oust Fitzpatrick.

“We’re in a purple district,” she said. “I think the turnout is good, we have a chance. But I still think it’s going to be difficult.”

The path to victory

Despite the challenges, both Republicans believe the political makeup of their districts gives them a path to victory.

For Lawler, it’s a numbers game. He points to the shrinking Democratic advantage in his district: In 2020, Joe Biden won New York’s 17th District by 10.1 percentage points, compared with Harris’ 0.6-point victory in 2024.

Lawler also noted that polling suggests voters’ opinions of Trump have remained remarkably consistent. In more than a dozen surveys of his district he has conducted over the past four years, he said, Trump’s disapproval rating has hovered around 49%.

The statistics lead Lawler to believe that voter feelings about Trump are largely baked in — and that winning requires appealing to both his supporters and his critics.

“People are frustrated across the board,” Lawler said. “But I can tell you, this district is notorious for being ticket-splitters — for being pragmatic, for being commonsense.”

For Fitzpatrick, the argument is less about data and more about demographics. While the Democratic margin of victory on the presidential level decreased from 2020 to 2024 — 4.6% to 0.4% — the Pennsylvania Republican cited the broad coalition of support he has built.

“I have a ton of Democrat supporters, independent supporters and Republican supporters,” Fitzpatrick said. “I also have detractors in both parties, because many in the parties want me to be ideologically pure on one side or the other.”

With Election Day approaching, Lawler and Fitzpatrick are confident they can win. But they are also confident in their brand of politics — a style that, they say, is the only kind they can perform.

“This is the only kind of district I could represent,” Fitzpatrick said. “I could never represent a lopsided district, and I’ve thought about that a lot. When people say it’s a tough district, it’s not tough for me. Any other district would be tough for me.”

Lawler, in true New York fashion, was even blunter: “To me, I am who I am, and I don’t care the political consequence of standing up for what I believe in.”

“And if it pissed them off,” he said, “so be it.”

The post The only two Republicans defending blue districts have very different playbooks appeared first on MS NOW.

The top Democrats on the House Oversight and Judiciary committees are demanding answers from Meta chief Mark Zuckerberg after the main “No Kings” Instagram account was temporarily suspended earlier this month — just as Americans participated in thousands of local rallies across the country.

The account was down for more than an hour on Oct. 17, but organizers claim they were then locked out of accessing the account for several additional hours.

In a joint letter to Zuckerberg obtained first by MS NOW, Reps. Robert Garcia of California and Jamie Raskin of Maryland — the ranking members of the House Oversight and Judiciary committees, respectively — wrote that the “apparent” act of “corporate censorship of political speech raise[s] serious concerns about Meta’s dedication to ensuring free and fair elections.”

They are demanding a briefing from Meta about its “election security efforts” and the No Kings incident no later than Nov. 9.

After the incident, Meta spokesperson Andy Stone apologized for the issues with the Instagram account, explaining that the suspension was “incorrect” and the result of an “automated” enforcement action.

Stone wrote that “when accounts post, share or comment at very high frequencies it can trigger automated systems. That’s what happened with the No Kings IG account in the lead up to today’s day of action.

“Unfortunately, that automated action was clearly taken in error,” Stone said.

But in their letter, the Democrats dismissed that explanation as straining “public credulity” — with the two committee leaders suggesting that the No Kings incident is part of a larger pattern of the social media company playing politics.

“Technical glitches occur,” Garcia and Raskin wrote, “but at Meta they are happening frequently and, curiously, seem to disproportionately impact the political opponents of President Trump and his authoritarian political alliances.”

The duo in particular raised concerns about other recent occurrences involving Meta’s platforms — including accusations that the company “choked off” content favoring Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in Brazil’s presidential election while allowing “pro-right-wing ads and deepfakes” favoring Trump’s preferred candidate, Flávio Bolsonaro, to continue to spread. Lula’s campaign took Meta to court, accusing the company of using biased algorithms. Meta denied that it was acting with political bias and published a blog post in an effort to explain what happened.

Garcia and Raskin also cite recent reports that Instagram accounts used by Albanian activists and journalists were disabled amid protests there against a hotel project linked to Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner.

(Democrats already have their sights on that hotel venture. In August, MS NOW reported that Raskin and House Judiciary Democrats were expanding their ongoing investigation of Kushner’s business habits to include the project.)

In the letter, Garcia and Raskin also suggest that Zuckerberg and Meta have a financial incentive to appease the White House and the Trump team.

Invoking Zuckerberg and Meta’s various ties to the Trump White House — from the company’s multimillion-dollar donation to the East Wing ballroom project to the CEO’s attendance at the UFC fight on the White House lawn — they write that Meta stands to make “billions of dollars in government contracts and data center incentives from working with the Trump Administration.”

“And you personally stand to benefit greatly from taking actions that win you additional support from President Trump and his Administration,” Garcia and Raskin added.

Contacted about the Democrats’ letter, a Meta spokesperson referred MS NOW to the company’s previous explanation about the No Kings incident.

A cursory search of the Meta spokesperson’s social media feed does indicate that the company’s technical “errors” have not solely affected those on the political left. In the past few years, Sen. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., and the firearm manufacturer Smith & Wesson, among others, have also experienced issues.

The first No Kings protests were held in June 2025, aimed at denouncing Trump’s actions since he returned to the White House. Additional protest days have been organized in the year-and-a-half since.

The earlier demonstrations, which occurred in cities and communities across the country, are considered some of the largest single-day protests in U.S. history, with millions attending the rallies nationwide.

The most recent event on Oct. 17, which occurred less than three weeks before Election Day, focused on encouraging people to vote early.

This story has been updated to include comment from Meta.

The post Instagram shut down a ‘No Kings’ account. Now Democrats want answers from Mark Zuckerberg. appeared first on MS NOW.

Texas might finally turn blue, and the man poised to do it is a mask-wearing, trans rights–supporting, Gnostic Gospel–quoting liberal from Austin. In an already tough year for Republicans, voter dissatisfaction at the state's data center boom is giving the Democrat an edge.

A few weeks out from the 2026 midterm elections, the polls have been giving state Rep. James Talarico (D–Austin) a small, steady edge over Republican Attorney General Ken Paxton in the race to fill the Senate seat currently occupied by Republican Sen. John Cornyn.

Texas has not elected a Democrat to statewide office since 1994. The chattering class's constantly misfiring prediction that the latest liberal challenger will beat the favored Republican has made "Texas turning blue" a mockable meme—the political equivalent of Charlie Brown winding up to kick the football.

But this year may be different. The national environment is very bad for Republicans. President Donald Trump's unpopular tariffs and unpopular war have made him, well, unpopular and given GOP candidates little to run on. Texas Republicans are also saddled with Paxton, who won a hotly contested primary despite having little natural charisma and a lot of scandals (both personal and political) to explain away.

Republicans' political headwinds have made Talarico, a 37-year-old legislator with a history that puts him solidly to the left of the median Texas voter, a surprisingly competitive candidate. Some of Talarico's edge can no doubt be chalked up to the candidate's own political skill and fundraising advantage. But he is also benefiting from a late-breaking development that few saw coming: the Lone Star's data center revolt.

For as long as Republicans have run Texas, they've been able to claim credit for the state's decades-long economic growth streak. But the grassroots groundswell of opposition to Texas' data center boom has helped to neutralize that traditional GOP advantage. In solidly red rural areas, large majorities are telling pollsters that they are opposed to the hundreds of data centers proposed in their backyard.

When Republicans thus talk about their economic stewardship today, it conjures up not positive feelings of persistent prosperity but dissatisfaction at all the ways the party has allowed an unpopular data center to be built next door. In a tight race, that might just be enough to give Talarico the last little push he needs to finally turn Texas blue.

Lab-Grown Liberals vs. the GOP Growth Machine

All the Texas Senate races of the past couple of decades have taken place within a growth machine. From 1998 through 2024, the Lone Star state posted the fourth-highest GDP growth rate, a period that roughly matches the GOP's unbroken record of statewide election wins. Not a day goes by, it seems, without a major corporation announcing a Texas megaproject or a billionaire relocating to booming Austin.

The state's frenetic growth rate has given the Texas GOP a good story to tell voters about why they should continue Republican rule: Under their low-tax, low-regulation regime, Texas has prospered. The jobs and businesses flooding into the state tend to be coming from states ruled by the Democrats trying to unseat them.

Those Texas Democrats whose bids for statewide office have managed to electrify liberals, meanwhile, have been ill-suited to convince voters that they'll keep the "Texas Miracle" going. There's an old joke that "Republicans fall in line, Democrats fall in love." In Texas, this hopeless romanticism has led to repeated heartbreak. In 2014, Wendy Davis inspired a national media buzz with her pro-abortion messaging while running for governor against Greg Abbott. Beto O'Rourke's style-over-substance challenge to Ted Cruz in 2018 produced a similar mania. Both lost. 

You might expect Talarico to meet a similar fate. The fresh-faced lawmaker seems almost grown in a lab to leave liberals giddy while making swing voters stick with the GOP. A former teacher, he first won elected office in 2018, when he flipped an open Texas House seat in the Austin suburbs from red to blue. At 29 years old, he was then the youngest member of the Texas Legislature.

Analyses of lawmakers' voting record put Talarico squarely in the ideological middle of his fellow Democrats, and well to the left of the state's political center. His national star began to rise among Democrats when he used religious arguments to challenge Texas Republicans' culture-war battles over education.

In 2021, Texas Republicans proposed a bill requiring K-12 athletes to play on girls' or boys' sports teams according to the sex listed on their birth certificates. Two years later, they introduced a measure that would require the Ten Commandments to be displayed in public school classrooms. Talarico, a Presbyterian seminarian, cited his liberal brand of Protestantism to oppose both bills. "Trans children are God's children, made in God's own image. There's nothing wrong with them. Nothing at all. They are perfect. They are beautiful, and they are sacred," he said in a floor speech opposing the sports bill. In a debate on the Ten Commandments bill, he declared the legislation "deeply un-Christian," citing Christ's instructions in the Gospel of Matthew to pray privately. (The sports bill eventually passed. The 2023 Ten Commandments bill failed, but a near-identical bill would pass in 2025.)

Conservative Christians would quibble with Talarico's progressive readings of the Bible. For national Democrats and liberal-leaning magazine writers, however, his penchant for reframing the Annunciation as a pro-abortion parable and his citations of the noncanonical Gospel of Thomas to support trans rights all served as proof that this "deeply religious" Democrat could effectively speak to Christian swing voters in their own terms.

Talarico has also taken many secular positions that might be hard sells in Texas. In May 2020, a couple of months into the COVID-19 pandemic and weeks before George Floyd was killed by Minneapolis police, Talarico declared that racism was the real virus. At a 2022 animal welfare fundraiser, a mask-wearing Talarico said he was running a vegan campaign. The same year, he said in a public hearing, again wearing a mask, that "fossil fuels are destroying the planet."

In a state where oil, gas, and beef are champion industries, swing voters to not swoon ordinarily for race-critical, carbon-neutral veganism. Talarico himself seems to have conceded that point. He's dispelled rumors of his veganism by eating barbecue on camera and waved away his past wokisms as "cringey" and "miss[ing] the mark." Even so, Talarico's campaign platform remains stridently progressive. He wants to tax billionaires and raise the minimum wage. If it were up to him, he'd open up Medicare to everyone, regardless of age, and would codify abortion protections into law. He's pro–marijuana legalization and fanatically anti–school choice.

So why are polls showing Talarico maintaining a consistent two- to six-point edge over Paxton?

In one sense, his continued leftward lean is an electoral boon. In a race with a clear enthusiasm gap, some 91 percent of Democrats say they'll be supporting Talarico in the general election. Only 79 percent of Republicans say the same about their candidate. Talarico has also been blessed with a national environment that's shaping up to be a bloodbath for Republicans, who have to answer for the rising prices driven by Trump's tariffs and the Iran war.

But there is one final factor putting Talarico over the edge: a statewide data center revolt that's souring Texas voters on their state's growth machine and neutralizing the pro-growth message that has carried the GOP through so many other tough election cycles. 

It's the Data Centers, Stupid

In November 2025, on the heels of Google's decision to invest $40 billion in data center development in the state, Gov. Greg Abbott proudly declared, "Texas is the epicenter of AI development, where companies can pair innovation with expanding energy." Just a few months later, the governor was vowing to impose new regulations on data centers to "protect" Texans from the consequences of their rampant development.

The U.S. has experienced a rapid revolt against data centers this year, and in few places has that backlash been more sudden or more pronounced than in Texas. According to a 2025 poll by the University of Texas at Austin, nearly 60 percent of Texans were either supportive or neutral about a data center being built in their neighborhood. In August 2026, 57 percent said they would oppose a local data center project.

This backlash against data centers couldn't have come at a worse time for Texas Republicans, or, consequently, at a better time for Talarico. The policies the Texas GOP have long touted as the key to the state's economic success—loose land use and environmental regulations, no state income tax, and the cheap commercial energy prices created by its deregulated energy sector—are the same policies attracting data centers. When the most visible recent consequence of those pro-growth policies is a data center boom most Texans hate, the state's Republicans are having to run away from what were once their prime selling points.

The sudden negative turn in public opinion on data centers has "proven a catalyst for people raising questions about governance and the economy in the state," says James Henson, director of the Texas Politics Project at the University of Texas at Austin. Making matters worse, says Henson, is the geography of the data center backlash. Opposition to these projects is concentrated in rural areas that have long been Republican strongholds and in suburban areas where the party needs to stay competitive to win statewide elections.

As Abbott's pivot demonstrates, Texas Republicans feel acutely vulnerable on this issue and are scrambling to adopt policies that ensure these developments do not lead to higher electricity prices for residential consumers. Paxton himself has called for a raft of new regulations on these facilities' water and power use and for ending a sales tax exemption on data centers, as well as some more off-the-wall conservative-coded policies, such as holding data centers criminally liable for facilitating AI chatbots that "endanger" children.

Talarico's data center proposal isn't all that different. He too would require data centers to pay for the full costs of their power and would end the sales tax exemption they can currently claim on equipment purchases. He'd also give local communities veto power over data center projects. That makes him more moderate on data centers than fellow Democrat Gina Hinojosa, who is running for governor against Abbott. She's called for a moratorium on data center construction until the state Legislature can convene to discuss "protections" for Texans.

Talarico's moderation could be partly explained by the fact that data centers are more popular, relatively speaking, in heavily Democratic urban areas. He also represents a slice of Austin, which has become a booming tech town. Why risk upsetting one's base when long-ruling Republicans already have to own the data center boom they were so recently bragging about?

'Talafreako'

The 2026 midterm environment seems almost tailor-made to neutralize Republicans' long-time advantages in Texas. Nationally, they have to own higher prices. Locally, they have to own an unpopular data center boom. Waning voter concerns about illegal immigration have caused their favored red-meat issue to turn a dull brown.

The Texas GOP's only weapon left is personal attacks on the man they call "Talafreako"—some weirdo liberal who calls trans kids "perfect" and thinks racism is the real virus. Talarico's persistent lead in the polls and on the prediction markets (which, in late  October, put the chances of him winning at nearly 70 percent) suggest that these attacks are not working.

One could sense Republicans' desperation when right-wing influencers spun up a rumor that Talarico was absent from the campaign trail in early October because he was in a mental health facility in Ohio. (The hospital publicly denied ever treating Talarico. The candidate himself said he'd been recovering from the flu and said he'd never even visited Ohio.)

When Republicans call Talarico a freak, they mean to cast him as abnormal and off-putting: a "freak of nature." But freak has multiple usages. The word can also mean an unpredicted or unusual event: a "freak occurrence." Talarico succeeding in ending Republicans' three-decade run of statewide victories in Texas would fit the latter definition.

Rather than run from the Talafreako barb, Talarico's campaign has emblazoned merch with the intended insult. They at least seem to appreciate the irony of it all.

If Talarico is a freak, that will make his likely victory all the more freaky.

The post Will a Data Center Backlash Help James Talarico Turn Texas Blue? appeared first on Reason Magazine.