Category: Uncategorized

How a phrase coined during the Depression became a national creed, a global brand, and a vessel for disillusionment.

From The New Yorker 

From The Hill

A grand state fair highlighting American culture is set to kick off on the National Mall this week ahead of the country’s 250th anniversary, but several states have publicly said they will not attend the event. At least seven states led by Democratic governors have opted not to send official representatives to the “Great American…

From The Hill

President Trump’s relationship with key Senate Republicans, including Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.), is crumbling after repeated clashes over strategy on array of issues. The two sides are splitting further apart as the midterm election nears and GOP lawmakers fear the potential loss of both chambers of Congress. GOP senators say there has been…

A crucial component of the Trump administration’s war on immigrants is targeting nonimmigrants who stand up for their neighbors. Federal immigration agents shot dead Renee Good and Alex Pretti in January as they were doing just that.  And last week, the Department of Justice indicted 15 Minnesotans involved in resistance to Immigration and Customs Enforcement during this winter’s awful Operation Metro Surge.

We’re still learning about the details of the individuals named in these arrests and the charges against them. They’re members of a group called Direct Action Minnesota, and the government’s indictment says they’re being charged with “conspiring to impede or injure federal officers.”

Many of us in Minneapolis are hopeful that the charges will ultimately be dropped, that is, that this eventually ends the way the “Broadview Six” case ended.

At least one of the 15 is a member of the local educators union. Educators in Minneapolis were among those most affected by Metro Surge, as students who were immigrants or children of immigrants sometimes watched their parents be abducted by ICE, or had to hide in their homes from immigration agents. Educators sometimes taught online to reduce students’ and parents’ vulnerability to ICE enforcement.

Many of us in Minneapolis are hopeful that the charges will ultimately be dropped; that is, that this eventually ends the way the “Broadview Six” case ended. Charges were dropped against a group of six protesters and observers who were arrested outside the ICE processing center in suburban Chicago in late May because of “significant errors” in the grand jury process.

But as publicist Lisa Braun Dubbels wrote after the Minnesota indictments were announced last week, “A charge does its work the instant it is announced. It affixes a name and a face to a crime in the minds of millions, most of whom will never learn how the case ended.”

The federal government has consistently lied about its interactions with people in Minnesota during Operation Metro Surge; therefore, what the government says cannot be trusted. Kristi Noem, then-head of the Department of Homeland Security, immediately made unverified claims about Good and Pretti when they were killed, accusing them of domestic terrorism. In both incidents, the government said immigration agents had killed people acting aggressively toward them, contrary to video evidence.

On June 8, the Justice Department dropped charges against a St. Paul man ICE agents shot at in December. The government had alleged that the man rammed agents with his car, but the Minnesota Reformer reports that “agents’ stories contained contradictions.”

In February, the government dropped charges against two men it accused of assaulting immigration agents, one of whom agents shot. An agent had claimed he was attacked with a snow shovel and broom, but The New York Times reported in April that video from the scene of the shooting “contradicts the agent’s claim that three assailants had beaten him with a shovel and broom for roughly 3 minutes before he opened fire. Instead, the confrontation depicted in the video lasts about 12 seconds and shows two men struggling with the agent. It shows no sustained attack with a shovel.”

As the government raids “antifa groups” in Minneapolis with the SAME charges levied against myself and the rest of the Broadview Six, we need to be asking how they got this indictment.And as charges (hopefully) get dropped, we must remember the process is the punishment.

— Kat Abughazaleh (@katmabu.bsky.social) 2026-06-16T16:06:11.283Z

President Donald Trump has weaponized the legal system to demonize not only people of color, but also people of every color who resist his brutal agenda. And the resistance was particularly profound here in the Twin Cities.

Indeed, the world responded so positively to our resistance because our movement was rooted in compassion, joy, love and inclusivity. In contrast to masked agents pushing and shoving children at a Minneapolis high school, South Minneapolis residents joined singing resistance groups. Parents and grandparents organized as observers at school bus stops and daycare centers. Christian, Jewish and Muslim clerics prayed together in the streets, while Somalis who have made Minnesota home handed out free sambusas at events memorializing Good and Pretti.

Brass Solidarity, a community band founded after George Floyd’s murder in May 2020, blasted out tunes on icy streets, while senior citizens were among those who bundled up to carry signs during a mass strike and protest march on one of the coldest days of the year.

The Trump administration quickly recognized Minneapolis residents as a threat to their immigration narrative, and in the earliest days of the resistance, neighborhood organizers warned that online groups were being infiltrated and surveilled.

The federal government says some among the indicted 15 called for violence against ICE in online resistance groups, though notably, one of the people the government says was pressing for more confrontational tactics allegedly complained about “a ton of pushback from libs”; that is, he was reportedly frustrated by the unwillingness of the vast majority of the people in the movement to abandon nonviolent methods.

Whatever their rhetoric, none of those arrested appears to have committed actual violence against ICE. One woman, Natasha Rakotz, 45, is accused of tracking the license plate numbers of ICE agents and sharing them with others in a Signal chat. The government says that in May, Rakotz “side-swiped” an agent’s car and caused a collision.

I can’t just sit there and not do anything, but I definitely would never do anything illegal.”

NATASHA RAKOTZ

“I think all of this is absolutely ridiculous. I am not a violent person,” Rakotz, an in-home health aide, said outside the Warren E. Burger Federal Building in St. Paul on Wednesday. “I’ve never been violent. I’ve never had trouble with the law. The only thing I did was care about my community, and my neighbors … I can’t just sit there and not do anything, but I definitely would never do anything illegal.”

I hope people outside the Twin Cities look beyond the headlines and find out more about these 15 people, my neighbors. I hope people remember that while 15 have been charged, many thousands more of us stood together in solidarity with our immigrant neighbors. Millions more people across America are doing the same thing, not out of a desire for violence or chaos, but truly out of love.

They can’t arrest us all.

The post The Trump administration is now attacking Minneapolis with indictments appeared first on MS NOW.

From MS Now.

Day after day, President Donald Trump crowed about his success, saying he had achieved something his predecessors could not. Then, the illusion snapped. The project fell apart. Things were not better; if anything, they were worse off than before. The cut corners and headlong rush yielded a temporary thrill for the president and a waste of money for taxpayers.

I’m referring to Trump’s very expensive and rapidly unraveling attempts to overhaul the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool on the National Mall, though the description could apply to many issues from the Trump presidency. My colleague Ja’han Jones described the once again algae-coated site as “a physical swamp that serves as a potent metaphor for [the Trump] administration’s corruption and incompetence.” The hastily done renovation and its swift demise are simply the most recent example of a pattern in which Trump and his allies’ bold declarations collapse under the pressures of time, scrutiny and common sense.

The cut corners and headlong rush yielded a temporary thrill for the president and a waste of money for taxpayers.

For weeks, Trump has hyped the Reflecting Pool project alongside his other beautification side hustles. He’s blamed his predecessors, particularly Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden, for not fully fixing the pool’s many issues. Over the course of several weeks, the pool was drained and repainted, with a layer of sealant applied to prevent the leaks that have plagued the pool for years. The Trump administration gave a $14 million no-bid contract to a firm that worked on pools at one of Trump’s golf clubs. (The firm is also reportedly owned by a Trump donor and, according to a government analysis, got the contract at an “inflated” profit margin.)

The intention was to have the Washington landmark looking better than ever (or at least more Trumpian) in time for events surrounding America’s 250th birthday. Instead, the pool’s shallow surface is coated in more algae than has been seen there in years, The Washington Post reports. Videos taken Friday showed the “American Flag Blue” paint that Trump bragged about already peeling away. The speedy devolution of the vaunted project could have been predicted from the start, or it may have been helped along by the hydrogen peroxide used last week to help kill the algae clusters that had already formed.

The Trump administration blamed the algae’s return on residual amounts remaining in the pipes while the renovation was underway. When the blooms continued and the coating began to peel, the president accused “Radical Left Wing Lunatics” of using chemicals in the Reflecting Pool “to try to destroy and demean our beautiful work.” As ever, the real fault must have lain with anyone but Trump. But there’s no such excuse for the many other examples of administration hubris that have ended in the same fashion.

Last year, Trump’s pal Elon Musk — who recently became the world’s first trillionaire — led an effort to slash billions of dollars in federal spending. Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency project was empowered in large part by Russell Vought, director of the Office of Management and Budget, who has long sought to shrink the federal workforce. Both men framed their slash-and-burn efforts as ridding the government of unnecessary bloat, which nobody had had the courage to do before.

Instead, within months, the mass layoffs proved to have deeply affected vital work. For example, the Internal Revenue Service was forced to rehire staffers only weeks after forcing them out of their roles. The result wasn’t enough to prevent a drop in revenue reported last year as the IRS lost a good chunk of its enforcement capabilities.

Trump has repeatedly taken a sledgehammer to a load-bearing wall and expected thanks for creating a cool, refreshing breeze.

In a similar (but grosser) vein, the administration saw fit to slash funding last year for monitoring and preventing screwworm flies, flesh-eating parasites that can lay their eggs in the open wounds of livestock. A 2020 article in The Atlantic noted that the program “costs $15 million a year, a small fraction of the estimated $796 million a year that it saves American farmers.” (That estimate was from 1996, so farmers’ savings were closer to $1.7 billion annually, adjusted for inflation.) Since that funding was cut, screwworm flies have become a problem in Southwestern America for the first time in decades, prompting an emergency $1 billion response from the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

Again, this was meant to be a cost-saving measure.

The most obvious point of comparison must be Trump’s needless war against Iran. When the U.S. launched operations in late February, the administration touted a showcase of American strength toward Tehran unlike anything previous presidents had been willing to do. In 2018, Trump had torn up an Obama-era nuclear agreement to stymie Iran’s capabilities and has steadfastly insisted that he would be able to get a much better deal. The administration’s shifting rationale for war inevitably drifted back to the claim that America would be much better off in the long run.

Now that a “memorandum of understanding” ending the conflict has been released, it’s clear how far from true that is. The biggest achievement for the U.S. and its multibillion-dollar bombing campaign was more or less restoring the prewar status quo. Any hope of pulling an actual victory from the jaws of declared victory rests on negotiating in the coming two months an agreement the likes of which had previously been hammered out over the course of years — before Trump threw that deal in the trash.

There’s one more thing that unites all these cases: Trump’s inability to admit that he messed up. As my colleague Steve Benen noted, things weren’t perfect before the president’s unnecessary interventions, but if he had kept his hands to himself, they would be imperfect in a stable, predictable manner. Instead, chaos agent that he is, Trump has repeatedly taken a sledgehammer to a load-bearing wall and expected thanks for creating a cool, refreshing breeze.

The post The failed Reflecting Pool renovation is the perfect metaphor appeared first on MS NOW.

From MS Now.

Heading to Ibiza? Discover a quieter part of the island by booking one of the best Airbnbs in Ibiza, replete with traditional details.

Source: Vogue

From The Hill

Republicans are embracing allegations that data center opposition in the U.S. is being fueled by foreign actors, raising questions over how influence operators are contributing to one of the fiercest debates in the tech policy space. Reports, including from OpenAI, recently emerged suggesting China and other countries are carrying out influence campaigns to fan…

EXCLUSIVE: Channel 4 has given a second season order to A Woman of Substance, its most-streamed drama since It’s a Sin. The renewal comes more than 40 years after the iconic original, an adaptation of the 1979 Barbara Taylor Bradford novel, which remains Channel 4’s most-watched show of all time. The late Taylor Bradford’s book […]

Source: Deadline.

In 2017, US Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) offered what remains one of the most insightful explanations of Donald Trump’s rise from any elected official. Massie, a Tea Party libertarian in the Rand and Ron Paul mode, was wondering why so many of his supporters could back an un-libertarian candidate like Trump. His conclusion was grim.

“They weren’t voting for libertarian ideas — they were voting for the craziest son of a bitch in the race,” Massie said. “And Donald Trump won best in class, as we had up until he came along.”

Last month, the “craziest son of a bitch” took Massie down. Trump — miffed by Massie’s stance on the Epstein files and the Iran war — endorsed his challenger in Kentucky, and the popular libertarian was pushed out of a seat he’d held for nearly 14 years.

Massie conceded. But at no point, during the race or afterward, has the logical next step: reflecting on how his own actions caused the problem. Massie’s years of vocal support for Trump, and his boundary-pushing Tea Party politics, had helped turn the GOP into the political chaos agent he once bemoaned.

Massie is the poster child for a particular kind of conservative now emerging in Trump’s second term: influential Trump allies who have sounded the alarm about the right’s direction, but who steadfastly refuse to acknowledge that their own actions in the Trump era may have had something to do with it.

The examples are mounting. Joe Rogan, who regularly sells his audience on conspiratorial mistrust of official narratives, is now denouncing conspiracy theories about the assassination attempts on Trump. The pundit Ben Shapiro has gone to war against right-wing podcaster Candace Owens, who he now calls an antisemitic crank — while barely acknowledging that he himself played an instrumental role in Owens’s rise. You can even see this happening with Trump himself, who has spent his presidency battling rumors about an elite pedophile network run by Jeffrey Epstein that he helped stoke earlier, and which arose from a MAGA movement he trained to see conspiracy at every turn.

It’s a real-life version of the famous sketch on Tim Robinson’s show I Think You Should Leave, where a hot-dog-shaped car crashes into a storefront and a man in a hot dog suit says, “We’re all trying to find the guy who did this.”

The “hot dog men” — and yes, they’re almost all men — are easy to mock. But their growing ranks point to something serious: that right-wing political machine is spinning out of control in ways that even some of its most aggressive and radical voices recognize as dangerous. And as the right searches for new leadership before Trump himself fades into history, nobody on their side has shown any proven ability to contain or redirect its worst impulses.

In the absence of post-Trump leaders both willing and able to address the real problems, the future of the right — and, thus, in some sense, America — is dangerously unclear.

The growing ranks of the “hot dog men”

Admitting error is tough; admitting culpability for something bad happening is even harder. We’ve all been “hot dog men” at some point in our lives — and in politics, all movements have had moments of desperately trying to blame anyone else for their mistakes.

But there are, at present, a disproportionate number of hot dog men in the right’s top ranks. This is not a coincidence. It’s a reflection of the right hitting a moment where its continuing radicalization has begun to elude the control of even the people who thought they were steering the ship.

Take Ben Shapiro as an example. His feud with Candace Owens began when she worked at his outlet, the Daily Wire, arising out of her criticism of Israel during the war with Gaza. After Owens’s critiques verged into openly antisemitic territory in 2024 — liking an X post accusing a rabbi of being “drunk on Christian blood” — the Daily Wire fired her. Since then, Shapiro has not only attacked Owens, but has worked to actively purge her from the conservative movement. The Ben Shapiro Show regularly features monologues attacking Owens; one recent episode was simply titled “Candace Owens is evil.”

Yet these broadsides rarely acknowledge Shapiro’s crucial role in her rise to fame. 

When Owens was making a name for herself as a right-wing commentator, between roughly 2017 and 2020, she was already prone to conspiracies and extremism. Owens had, for example, claimed that Bill Gates was conducting secret medical experiments on African children and suggested Hitler’s main mistake was invading other countries. Despite this, or perhaps because of it, the Daily Wire hired her to host a talk show titled Candace — which would become the vehicle for her current online stardom.

In public, at least, Shapiro shows no interest in reflecting on his mistake. In a recent video, titled “All the haters can kiss my ass,” he blames her recent prominence on the liberal media, who he describes as collaborating with Owens and her allies (like Tucker Carlson) to take down “normie” conservatives like Shapiro. “They’re always happy to run this grift because they love a right that is crazy,” he says.

Yet it was Shapiro who was benefitting financially from the spread of “crazy” — right up until he felt it had escaped his control.

Chris Rufo, arguably the right’s leading activist on cultural issues, is another example. Rufo, like Shapiro, is very concerned about the rise of antisemitic extremism on the right. When Joe Kent resigned from his top counterterrorism post in the Trump administration over Iran, issuing a public letter filled with antisemitic tropes, Rufo chided him for turning his “resignation into another podcast-brained conspiracy.”

Yet in the same post, Rufo recalls that he “campaigned for [Kent] when he was running for Congress in my home state” — at a time when it was already clear who Kent was. During his first congressional run (in the 2022 cycle), Kent called white nationalist podcaster Nick Fuentes for messaging advice, did an interview with a neo-Nazi, and hired a Proud Boy as a campaign consultant. His extremism was a chief reason he lost a conservative Washington district to Democrat Marie Gluesenkamp Perez (twice).

But Rufo describes Kent as only now “treading into [nutty] territory,” as if his long record of conspiracist extremism didn’t exist. To do otherwise would require Rufo to ask whether he was wrong to try and put this man in Congress — a question he has no interest in raising.

Rogan, for his part, recently has started fretting over conspiracy theories about the Trump assassination attempt in Butler, Pennsylvania. “Anybody that thinks that’s that staged is out of their fucking mind,” he said in the May 13 episode of his podcast.

Yet in the same video, in roughly the same minute, he considers a counter-conspiracy: that the Butler shooter and more recent White House Correspondent’s Dinner assailants were “MK Ultra” types brainwashed by the deep state to go after Trump. This is par for the course for Rogan, who has played an outsized role in both mainstreaming conspiracy theories and bringing voters who believe said theories into the Trump orbit.

Instead of reflecting on this, Rogan instead reaches for scapegoats — blaming social media for the spread of speculation that lack the Rogan seal of approval. “This is TikTok — it’s fucking ruining people’s brains. It’s fucking rotting their brains out from inside their heads,” he says.

Shapiro, Rufo, and Rogan are three of the most important figures of the modern right. That they’ve all started sounding like comedy “hot dog men” of late suggests the right has a genuine problem on its hands.

Indeed, there are plenty of other examples. 

Mark Levin, the Fox News and talk radio provocateur with Trump’s ear, unironically complains about “podcasters” who are “not about informing or educating,” but rather profiting off being “crazier” than their competitors. Rod Dreher, a right-wing writer who has long promoted a famously racist anti-immigration novel, has been expressing deep concern about rising bigotry on the young right. And even Dinesh D’Souza — a commentator who has spent literally decades spreading increasingly toxic, racially tinged conspiracies — is now warning that right-wing racism may prompt “mass desertions of blacks, Latinos and other minorities from the GOP.”

All of these men openly helped build the right-wing political culture that got us here. Now they’re all trying, desperately, to find the guy who did this. 

The hot dog men and the right’s escalation ladder

I have a lot of sympathy for many of the substantive concerns these conservatives are raising. Conspiracist antisemitism really is bad; its rise on the right is genuinely dangerous. It is better for America to have Chris Rufo and Mark Levin warning about these things hypocritically than staying silent. Ben Shapiro has been particularly bold: He’s made a point of trying to critique the conspiratorial tendency in politics more broadly even as the Daily Wire’s traffic and YouTube views are in free fall. 

But the fact that these men are all simultaneously donning hot dog suits points to something important: They appear to be losing influence over a right-wing machine they thought they could control. What happened? 

Even before Trump, the right has been defined by its oppositional culture: specifically, a desire for its public figures to smash what they see as the “woke” or “PC” rules restricting right-wing expression. The base’s hunger for transgression creates an ever-growing desire for more and more radical stances from their leaders. The thrill comes from seeing boundaries broken, from hearing liberal shrieks of bigotry and ignoring them.

“It’s like drugs,” says Charlie Sykes, a conservative talk radio host turned Never Trumper. “Pot used to be enough, but now I need the purest meth I can find out there on the street.”

Being on the cutting edge, and building a growing young audience, requires pushing this process further and further.

If your critique of LGBT activism centers on its alleged threat to Christians’ religious freedom, you’ll soon get outflanked by someone claiming trans identity is a mental illness. If your commentary on race and sex discrimination ends at critiquing affirmative action, your audience will move to someone saying Blacks have low IQs and women are ruining the workplace. And eventually, when even these provocations start to feel tired for right-wing audiences, someone will go even further — suggesting one’s political opponents are pedophiles, communing with literal demons, or puppets of a Jewish conspiracy.

The hot dog men are right-wingers who saw this ratchet as tolerable or even helpful to a point, but are appalled at those willing to push it further — targeting groups they are members of or sympathetic toward, or abandoning ideas like formal colorblindness they’ve long defended. 

There may be no brakes on the car

One question is: Can they do anything to stop it?

Probably not, says Pedro Gonzalez, a prominent MAGA commentator who abandoned Trump after the 2024 lies about Haitians eating pets.

“When your movement revolves around taboo-breaking and boundary-stepping, but then you decide there are some boundaries that are worth respecting, it’s a joke. It’s going to fail,” he says. “It’s going to collapse under its own weight.”

Gonzalez and Sykes represent the alternative to the hot dog men. They are conservatives who not only recognized that something has gone wrong, but took responsibility for their own role in fueling the dynamics that brought the right to its current nadir. 

By saying this openly, they have alienated themselves from the movement they once called home. They look at the hot dog men, and see ghosts of themselves before that fateful choice.

They all described themselves as casualties of the right’s transgressive spirit. They thought there were lines that couldn’t be crossed, only for Trump and his friends to leap over them.

“I wasn’t the most self-aware guy in the world,” says Stuart Stevens, the lead strategist for Mitt Romney’s 2012 campaign. “Some of us were like the guys working for Bernie Madoff who thought they were actually beating the market.”

When speaking with these apostates, I heard a strikingly similar kind of story. Be they old-guard politicos like Stevens or younger internet natives like Gonzalez, they all described themselves as casualties of the right’s transgressive spirit. They thought there were lines that couldn’t be crossed, only for Trump and his friends to leap over them. 

Whether the break happened during Trump’s original rise in 2016, or in response to some later outrage, they all realized that the moral boundaries they set for themselves did not and could not hold for the movement at large. The hot dog men, in their view, are flailing impotently against forces far larger than themselves.

“Shapiro I think has been more outspoken than most,” says Richard Hanania, a former extreme-right poster turned harsh GOP critic. “But…I think that there’s little he can do. This is an audience problem.”

This throws the future of the GOP into doubt

The rise of the hot dog men is not just a media story. It’s actually a portent about the future of the entire Republican Party — and thus the entire country.

Right now, the fractious conservative movement is being held together by one figure: Donald Trump. The president’s charismatic hold on the MAGA faithful allows him to define what the right stands for. His ousting of Massie and other enemies in recent primaries is the most recent evidence of his powers. 

Yet even Trump has his limits. He has been unable to put the genie back in the bottle when it comes to Epstein conspiracy theories, which have been dogging his administration for over a year. His condemnation of Tucker Carlson during their post-Iran split has not ended the podcaster’s career. And, most recently, his handpicked candidate in Iowa’s gubernatorial race lost to a no-name MAHA insurgent.

It seems, in short, like the time of a Trump-enforced consensus inside the Republican Party is coming to an end. And a lot of what’s happening now, including the efforts by the hot dog men to cast out their extremist enemies, reflects a recognition of the party’s uncertain future.

“They’re trying to jockey for position in a post-Trump political world — or at least, a world where Trump is no longer a font of their own legitimacy,” says David Austin Walsh, a historian at the University of Virginia who studies the right.

So what does that world look like? The honest answer is that no one knows — and the hot dog men show us why.

Had they been able to successfully put the brakes on the GOP’s radicalization process, you could imagine a fairly predictable post-Trump transition: one in which the right’s policy and politics basically reflect their own priorities. But their efforts to purge radical voices are, as the apostates note, failing.

In some cases, the hot dog men’s efforts are even backfiring: The Daily Wire’s numbers have gotten bad enough that it has recently been forced to do mass layoffs. 

In the absence of a kind of MAGA elite in waiting, a group of influential figures who can manage an orderly internal transition to a leader who reflects their values, it’s nearly impossible to say what comes next with any certainty.

“If you want to look at the future of the party, it’s not about the elected officials or the leaders — it’s about what’s going on in the media ecosystem that will shape the base,” Sykes says. “It won’t go back to normal until it’s no longer held hostage by the loudest, craziest, most extreme voices in the party.” 

Others I spoke with floated a very different scenario: one in which the divisions between the various forces trying to seize the mantle create an opportunity for the old GOP establishment.

The premise here is that the GOP’s elected officials are, in large part, frustrated old-guard conservatives grudgingly going along with MAGA in order to stay relevant. While the podcaster cadres war with each other, this old guard might have an opening: field a candidate who captures the party’s less-online voters while still wearing a convincing-enough populist skinsuit. Marco Rubio’s recent 2028 polling surge makes this return-to-quasi-normalcy sound a little bit less outlandish than it might seem.

“I was surprised how much excitement there was when we started talking about Rubio and how much people came out of the woodwork to attack Vance,” Hanania says. “There’s an old GOP out there that is waiting for the opportunity.”

A third possibility is chaos: no charismatic individual, dominant ideology, nor singularly powerful faction emerges to take Trump’s place as the right’s unifying force. Neither JD Vance’s far-right nationalism, nor Rubio’s more old-school Reaganism, nor Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s Make America Health Again movement, nor any of dozens of flavors of influencers and would-be leaders achieve a level of influence that allows them to corral the rest.

In this scenario, Republican Party politics becomes seemingly endless factional warfare. No single election, not even a White House victory, ends the conflict — one waged in primary elections, small magazine essays, and angry podcast monologues. This has basically been the Democratic Party since the Obama presidency; Hillary Clinton’s defeat created an ideological vacuum no one left-of-center vision has been able to completely fill. The right’s future could look similar.

“Even within the Republican Party, [MAGA]’s power is not what it once was — even a year ago,” Walsh says. “At the same time, I don’t know what else there is on the right right now.”

I can’t rank which of these possibilities is most likely. In fact, I’m confident this isn’t an exhaustive list. The right is so chaotic at present, its most influential non-Trump voices so unable to dictate terms, that it’s hard to predict with any certainty where it will go in 2028 — let alone in the years to come.

But one thing is for sure: Whatever ends up happening, there will be a significant number of people dissatisfied with what their movement becomes. And you will find hot dog men in their ranks.

Source: Vox.

New Theater Hollywood’s ‘California Gothic: A Bus Tour’ periodically invites riders to meet ghostly street performers and ponder the death of the California dream.

Fifteen people died in one weekend, prompting calls for better regulation in a booming area of tourism.

This post was originally published on NBC News.

Scenic vacation selfies.

From The New Yorker