2026-04-22 08:22:10
The mystery of the missing scientists began with a Silver Alert. In late February, a retired Air Force major general named Neil McCasland left his house in New Mexico for a walk and never returned. Rumors spread on social media that the elderly former astronautical engineer had been abducted or killed. Forget Nancy Guthrie, they said. Here was a guy who used to run a “UFO-linked” lab. Here was a guy with knowledge of “America’s deepest, darkest secrets.” So where was this guy?
McCasland’s wife did her best with a post on Facebook to address what she called the “misinformation circulating about Neil and his disappearance,” but wild notions only multiplied. Dots were added, then connected: Another scientist—an advanced-materials researcher at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) named Monica Reza—had disappeared while hiking near Los Angeles in June 2025. A physicist at MIT had been murdered in December. “What is going on seems to be an enemy action,” Walter Kirn, the novelist and podcast contrarian, said last month.
Things got even dottier from there: Another eight names were added to a growing list of scientists who have recently either died or gone missing. House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer expressed concern about the 11 missing scientists and said that “something sinister could be happening.” Another member of that committee proposed that China, Russia, or Iran might be involved. And last week, on the White House lawn, President Trump told a reporter from Fox News that he’d just been in a meeting to discuss the matter. (Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt confirmed that the administration will address the “legitimate questions about these troubling cases” and said that “no stone will be unturned.”)
[Read: Walter Kirn and the empty politics of defiance]
Which is all to say that another piece of flagrant nonsense has ascended to the highest levels of U.S. politics and media. To call it a conspiracy theory would be far too kind, because no comprehensive theory has been floated to explain the pattern of events. But then, even the phrase pattern of events is imprecise, because there is no pattern here at all. Given all the people who could have been roped into this narrative but weren’t, any hope of finding meaning falls away. Barring any dramatic new disclosures, the mystery of the missing scientists has the dubious honor of being a sham in every way at once.
The conspiracy theorists can’t even put their finger on the field of U.S. research that has fallen under threat. Our leading scientists are being targeted by foreign powers—but which ones, exactly? Well, it’s the people who study space technologies, or maybe the people who study asteroids and comets, or maybe the people who work on plasma physics? The Fox News reporter Peter Doocy tried to sum it up like this: The scientists who have died or gone missing are the ones “with access to classified stuff—nuclear material, aerospace.” Kirn’s attempt was somehow even less coherent: The missing experts, he said, work “in the most advanced realms of space-rocket propulsion and, you know, Air Force–NASA–type endeavors.”
If these attempts at explanations sound stupid, it’s because the people on the list of missing scientists have no common area of expertise. Sure, many happen to be physicists or engineers; some are or were affiliated with government labs. But what about Jason Thomas? His tragic death over the winter made the list even though he was a chemical biologist working for Novartis on ways to improve the process of drug discovery.
And what about Melissa Casias, a Los Alamos National Laboratory employee who went missing last year? She was not a scientist at all, but rather an administrative assistant. (Perhaps she had access to some “classified stuff”; who knows?) Another person on the list is Amy Eskridge, who was a “scientist” only in the way that a subway preacher is a “theologian.” Whatever fame she had derived from her claiming that her father, a former NASA propulsion engineer, had discovered the secret of antigravity and that she would soon go public with this world-changing scientific breakthrough. She also made frequent reference to a friend of hers, a “katana-wielding, time-traveling soldier” named Dan.
Maybe Casias chanced to open some ultrasensitive file in the course of doing her job, and had to be abducted. Maybe Eskridge really was onto some new technology. The bigger problem with the story is this: Their deaths and disappearances aren’t really unexplained. Reza went missing while hiking, a fate that probably befalls hundreds if not thousands of people every year. Two more people on the list, a pair of JPL-affiliated astrophysicists, each about 60 years old, may have died of natural causes, as happens to roughly 35,000 other Americans of their age each year. The MIT physicist was murdered by a former classmate who also shot and killed two undergraduates at Brown University. Several people on the list appeared to be suffering from personal distress: Thomas, the chemical biologist, was distraught over the recent loss of both of his parents; Casias had very significant personal problems, according to her daughter, and may have tried to run away from them; McCasland was tormented by brain fog and physical deterioration, according to his wife, and he’d told her more than once that “he didn’t want to live like that.”
And then there’s Eskridge, the antigravity theorist with the time-traveling-soldier friend. In what seems to be her final media appearance, from 2020, she is (by her own account) drunk and high, and appears to be in the grips of a paranoid delusion. Over the course of the interview, she claims that someone sneaked into her home while she was out and closed her bedroom window and that, in another incident, someone broke in and unplugged the charger for her boyfriend’s wireless headphones. Eskridge also said that she’d been followed by a car with a license plate that kept changing, that she’d been roofied multiple times, and that strangers at her local bar had been taunting her by using “buzzwords” relevant to her life. “I’m scared,” she said near the end of the interview. “I’m tired. I’m real tired.” Eskridge died in June 2022.
Read: An act of cosmic sabotage
Note the date: June 2022. Any good conspiracy theory starts with a notable coincidence. (The bacteria that cause Lyme disease were first discovered on an island that happens to be just 10 miles away from the former site of a military research lab …) But again, this is not a good conspiracy theory. When on the White House lawn Doocy asked for comment on the missing scientists, he described them as having “all gone missing or turned up dead in the last couple of months.” If that were true, we might indeed be looking at a “cluster” of events. In fact, the cited instances of dead or missing people extend across a span of nearly four years, from Eskridge’s death by suicide to McCasland’s disappearance two months ago.
Add in the diversity of individuals and circumstances—recall that we’re talking about a group of people who were either scientists or nonscientists, and who died of natural causes or got murdered or went missing—and it’s crystal clear that no coincidence actually exists. The loss of life is real, and families are mourning, but nothing sinister is going on. The “mystery” is just a p-hacked panic and a waste of everybody’s time.
[Read: Every scientific empire comes to an end]
Ironically, America doesn’t seem to need much help when it comes to disappearing scientists. About 1,000 employees have been laid off from NASA’s JPL in the past few years. One senior scientist who is still there told my colleague Ross Andersen last October that he’d never seen the place so empty and lifeless. In the meantime, the Trump administration has repeatedly proposed cutting NASA’s science research funding in half, a plan that would surely lead to further loss of staff at JPL, not to mention the abandonment of probes that have been sent into our solar system.
And while the FBI looks into potential foreign involvement in professors’ deaths at MIT and Caltech, the Trump administration says that it intends to halve the budget of the National Science Foundation, which in recent years has furnished those two schools with hundreds of millions of dollars in research grants. Already, more than 40 percent of the NSF’s scientific staff have left or been fired.
This is just a subset of the harms that have been done to the U.S. research enterprise since the start of 2025. In response, some top scientists have been getting up and walking out the door. Their absence can’t be blamed on China, Russia, or Iran. Maybe the White House should look into it.
2026-04-21 23:36:00
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When Lori Chavez-DeRemer was nominated, she had a chance to be a pathbreaking secretary of labor, supposedly tasked with shepherding the Republican Party in a more worker-friendly direction. Instead, she turned out to be a typical Trump Cabinet member: disempowered and disgraced. Now she has added dismissed to that list.
Chavez-DeRemer’s departure was announced yesterday evening in an X post from White House Communications Director Steven Cheung, who said she would “take a position in the private sector.” He said that Keith Sonderling, the deputy secretary, will be acting secretary.
“It has been an honor and a privilege to serve in this historic Administration and work for the greatest President of my lifetime,” Chavez-DeRemer wrote on X.
Chavez-DeRemer is unlikely to be missed at the Labor Department, in part because it seems she was hardly ever there. Employees said that she was an absentee secretary, and Sonderling has reportedly already been effectively running the department for some time. When Chavez-DeRemer was present, she brought scandals with her. Shortly after her confirmation last spring, she threw what looked a lot like a birthday party for herself at department headquarters—on her birthday, with her picture on television screens and staffers singing “Happy Birthday.” To justify spending government funds on the bash, the department called it a swearing-in ceremony. Chavez-DeRemer told a House committee, “I did not have a birthday party,” but The New York Times obtained a picture of the secretary blowing out candles on a cake.
This episode set the pattern for Chavez-DeRemer’s tenure as secretary. In January, a complaint was filed with the department’s inspector general, an internal watchdog, and Chavez-DeRemer’s chief of staff and deputy chief of staff were placed on leave and later forced out. Among the allegations against the secretary were claims that she was having the department pay for personal trips, drinking on the job, taking staffers to strip clubs, and in a romantic relationship with a bodyguard, who was also placed on leave this past winter. In February, the Times reported that Chavez-DeRemer’s husband had been barred from Labor Department headquarters after at least two staffers alleged he had sexually assaulted them. (He has “categorically” denied the allegations.)
This spring, the Times also reported that three more employees had filed civil-rights complaints against Chavez-DeRemer, adding claims that she retaliated against staffers for cooperating with an investigation and asked some to run errands for her husband. According to the Times, investigations uncovered evidence that Chavez-DeRemer allegedly dispatched aides to bring wine to her hotel room on trips, including during the workday. Her father and husband were both said to have texted young female department employees, who were instructed by Chavez-DeRemer and an aide to “pay attention” to the two men. Chavez-DeRemer has not specifically responded to the allegations in the January complaint, but issued a “general denial” through a lawyer; she and her husband did not immediately respond to a request for comment from the Times about the new allegations.
Chavez-DeRemer’s departure, as the probes into her and press scrutiny both escalated, is thus no surprise. But it’s the latest evidence that President Trump’s “no scalps” policy, in which he refused to push out aides for fear of giving wins to Democrats or the press, is defunct. What’s notable in the new era is who gets fired. Trump has pushed out Attorney General Pam Bondi, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem (who was also accused of having an affair with a staffer and abuse of public resources, which she denied), and now Chavez-DeRemer—all women.
Meanwhile, top male aides have so far escaped consequence for allegations similarly serious to the ones that got Noem and Chavez-DeRemer pushed out. As my colleague Sarah Fitzpatrick reported Friday, officials have been concerned about FBI Director Kash Patel repeatedly drinking to excess (Patel has denied this, and is suing The Atlantic); Patel has also used FBI aircraft to travel to several destinations, including to visit his girlfriend in Nashville, where FBI SWAT team members have provided security to her. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who faced numerous allegations of excessive drinking at the time of his confirmation, has also reportedly mingled family and work, bringing his wife into high-level discussions. (Hegseth has denied all allegations of wrongdoing.) The only public fallout from the “Signalgate” scandal, in which Atlantic editor in chief Jeffrey Goldberg was added to a chat where highly sensitive matters were being discussed, was that National Security Adviser Mike Waltz was reassigned to a cushy post as ambassador to the United Nations.
Chavez-DeRemer has been so plagued with scandals that it’s easy to forget that her tenure began with a very different sort of controversy. Her nomination, urged by the president of the Teamsters, was seen as evidence of the Republican Party under Trump prioritizing workers’ interests. As a U.S. representative from Oregon, Chavez-DeRemer had a history of voting with Democrats. She was one of three House Republicans to co-sponsor the PRO Act, an organized-labor-backed bill to make unionizing easier. Even as many Trump picks were easily confirmed, Chavez-DeRemer faced a grilling from fellow Republicans over her stances on labor, though she ultimately won all but a handful of their votes.
But she leaves behind little legacy on policy. Maybe that’s because Chavez-DeRemer allegedly spent much of her tenure partying and then playing defense on investigations, but it’s also because Trump likes to centralize policy decisions in the White House, rather than empowering Cabinet members. And Trump himself appears to have lost interest in a worker-friendly agenda, if he ever had it in the first place. At the start of his second administration, the president fired a pro-union member of the National Labor Relations Board (though the dismissal is still being challenged in court) and slashed union protections for roughly a million federal workers.
Since then, the president’s attention has shifted from domestic politics to foreign interventions, especially the war in Iran, and GOP figures with more labor-friendly rhetoric, including Vice President Vance and Senator Josh Hawley, have put little focus on workers’ issues. Support for labor unions among Republican voters has dropped sharply, and union leaders who hoped to cultivate an alliance with Trump have mostly lost hope in him. Trump’s approval in the working class has also been dented by inflation, which has only worsened as a result of the Iran war.
With Chavez-DeRemer gone, the Labor Department will surely be a more functional and less scandal-ridden workplace. Sonderling is said to be a more traditional pro-business figure, but regardless of whom Trump nominates as a permanent leader, the department is unlikely to matter much for the rest of his presidency. The real acting secretary of labor will always be Trump himself.
2026-04-21 23:00:00
Here is the promise of a house manager. Hire one, and soon someone else could be doing your laundry, washing your dishes, prepping your meals, and completing those Amazon returns you’ve been meaning to make. They could reorganize the utensil drawer, notice if your kid is outgrowing their shoes and order more, take your car to the repair shop, and be at home to meet the plumber. If your child needs food for a class party, a house manager could make the dish and drop it off; if that child also has a pet lizard, a house manager could buy the crickets to feed it.
House managers are not a nanny or a house cleaner. They’re a “chief of staff for the home,” a “personal assistant for Mom,” and “a clone of myself,” according to the more than a dozen people I spoke with who have either hired one or work as one. They are, in effect, what might have once been called a housekeeper—a person who helps oversee a household’s basic functioning. Middle- and upper-class families used to more commonly employ this kind of position (the title “house manager” dates back to at least the 1830s), but it has become rare enough that a couple of people I spoke with thought they may have come up with the term.
Whatever you call the job, the ultra-wealthy have maintained some version of this role in their homes for years, but more and more companies are cropping up to serve Americans with salaries in the lower six figures—a cohort that is nowhere near having a private jet but might already use a house cleaner or have a regular handyman.
Some will argue that shouldering the burden of household work is a necessary part of adulthood. But for many on the high side of the country’s wealth divide, time is at enough of a premium that buying it back feels worth the money. Kelly Hubbell, who in 2023 founded Sage Haus, a company that helps people find house managers, told me that many of her clients are dual-income households where tasks pile up beyond what two adults can handle; a house manager steps in as a third. Several women described their house manager to me as “my wife.” One company offering the service is even called “Rent A Wife—Oregon.” (Its founder, Brianna Ruelas Zuniga, knows what the name sounds like; she still likes it, she told me.)
Many house-managing businesses started around the country at about the same time. In 2022, Amy Root was running a home-organization business in central Connecticut—clearing out people’s garages and adding shelving to their closets—but she realized that even if she got the right home systems in place, “the laundry still needed to get done,” she told me. People needed “help with their regular to-dos but also the aspiration checklist,” such as finally hanging that one painting they bought a year ago, she said. In 2023, she pivoted to running a house-managing business, Personal Assistant for Mom, and now leads a team of five (soon to be seven) part-time house managers.
The crew includes retirees and empty nesters, as well as a woman training to be a doula and an artist who needed an extra gig. Rates for house managers generally are $25 to $50 an hour; some agencies take a cut. (Sage Haus charges clients a finder’s fee; house managers are paid directly.) Today’s version of the job is very much part of the gig economy, and like many gig workers, the managers are usually responsible for their own health insurance. Some of the house managers I spoke with work full-time for one family, but many are cobbling together part-time gigs with multiple families while also working as a nanny or cleaner.
When Root tells people what a house manager does, most of the time, their response is “Someone will do that for me?” A time-saving purchase like that just doesn’t occur to a lot of people, Ashley Whillans, a Harvard Business School professor who studies such spending, told me. About a decade ago, she and her colleagues asked people what they would do with an extra $40, and most of them said they’d use it for bills or a nice experience; only 2 percent said they’d use the money for a service that would save them time. Back then, Whillans said, Taskrabbit was really the only chore-outsourcing platform, but as these services have become more common, more people with the money to spend seem to see it as a way to escape the worst parts of their day. “I’m buying back joy and time where I can right now,” Barbara Mighdoll, a mother of two and a business owner who now has a house manager for 15 hours a week, told me. Each time her house manager does a chore, she said, “that is a tab that is now closed in my brain.” When she’s with her family, she no longer has ticker tape running through her head about the laundry she needs to put away. The house manager already took care of it.
A purchase like that really can buy happiness, according to Whillans’s research. She and her colleagues have found that when people outsource bothersome chores and reinvest that time in something they actually care about, they report being more satisfied with their life. (Anyone who hates doing the dishes will not be surprised by this.) In one study, she and her co-authors found that couples who take that freed-up time and spend it on each other say that it improved their relationship. So far, Whillans has yet to see a point at which couples who off-load their to-dos stop getting happier. Some tentative evidence, she said, suggests that when given money for time-saving purchases, lower-income people report more benefits than their wealthier counterparts. But where someone in the so-called upper-middle class might consider $30 an hour a bargain, being able to buy back time is still a luxury.
If they can afford it, though, “people are now turning to the market for social support,” Whillans said. The gig economy has only made this easier: A person can now order soup on DoorDash when they’re sick rather than asking a loved one to make it, or take an Uber from the airport instead of getting a ride from a friend. Almost everyone I spoke with who has a house manager lives far from their family; several said that they lacked a “village.” Kara Smith Brown, a mother of two and a founder of a PR consultancy, told me that without “grandparents, or aunts and uncles to kick in at all” and be the village, “you kind of have to build your own and pay for it.”
It’s not ideal, but people who’ve hired house managers feel that paying is an improvement on their status quo. Eliza Jackson, the mother of an eighteen-month-old and the chief operating officer of a direct-to-consumer meat-delivery company called ButcherBox, would wake up early before her son so that she could get chores done, cook breakfast, get him ready, drive the hour and a half in traffic to the office, work all day, commute home, cook dinner on the nights her husband didn’t, then do more household administration until bedtime. “I don’t think the day that I’m describing is unusual,” she told me. “I just thought you suffered through it.”
In January, she and her husband hired Katie Eastlack, a 23-year-old recent college grad, through Sage Haus. Eastlack had been living with her parents in Virginia and struggling to find education jobs after graduation, but she realized that she was already doing something she enjoyed: helping someone, in this case her mom, run a home. She hoped to move to Boston and scoured Indeed for personal-assistant and house-managing jobs there, until she came upon Sage Haus’s listing to work at Jackson’s home. Finding the right family was important, Eastlack told me, because she is in their lives full-time. She has a family credit card for household expenses and is trusted to, say, choose the right repairman for Jackson’s car. (She didn’t say this, but working for the wrong family, in a gig job with no HR, could easily turn into a nightmare.) Eastlack likes that her job helps Jackson and her husband, who both have demanding careers, spend more time with their kid. And it has meant that she got to move to Boston and now has her own apartment.
She’s still getting used to the feeling of coming home at night and realizing that she has her own house chores to do. Kristen Milburn, who house-manages part-time for a dual-physician home in Oklahoma City, told me something similar: The role “requires a lot of physical energy,” which she’s not sure she can maintain forever. And as much as she loves her job, doing someone else’s housework all day “does make it a little harder to want to come home and do laundry and dishes,” she said. “But it gets done.” Running one household is a lot of work—let alone two.
2026-04-21 22:44:00
If Elon Musk gets his way, space will soon look very different. Through his ownership of SpaceX, the world’s richest man already operates most of the roughly 14,000 active satellites that are orbiting Earth. Now his rocket company is asking the government for permission to launch up to 1 million more. It’s part of Musk’s plan to build data centers in space that can harness the power of the sun for AI. “You’re power-constrained on Earth,” Musk said last month. “Space has the advantage that it’s always sunny.”
Musk has a lot riding on these orbital data centers. To help finance them, he is set to take SpaceX public as early as June, at a reported valuation of $2 trillion. Musk has claimed that data centers in space can “enable self-growing bases on the moon, an entire civilization on Mars, and ultimately expansion to the universe.” It’s all classic Musk, who has a habit of making big promises that he can’t always keep. Data centers in space are an untested technology, and it’s not clear if they’d actually work. (Neither Musk nor SpaceX responded to a request for comment.)
Even if Musk falls short of his lofty space dreams, his venture may still pay him considerable dividends. That’s because it could help him secure regulatory approval to accelerate a land grab in space. There are only so many satellites that can circle Earth’s low orbit before the risk of collision becomes unacceptably high. By flooding space with his own satellites, Musk can make it impossible for other companies to gain entry while dramatically expanding one of the most important and valuable parts of his empire: Starlink.
The world’s largest satellite-internet provider, Starlink already boasts more than 10 million active customers in at least 150 countries. Subscribers set up a flat antenna that looks a bit like a pizza box to connect their devices to the internet anywhere they are in the world. (Even if you aren’t someone who pays for Starlink, you might have used the service without knowing it. The company’s satellites now power in-plane Wi-Fi for several airlines, including United Airlines and Qatar Airways.)
Musk’s control over Starlink has vested him with a degree of power traditionally reserved for a head of state. He has restricted access for both Ukrainian and Russian forces at various points during the ongoing conflict between the two countries, potentially altering the course of the war. In other cases, he has made Starlink service free—such as in Venezuela after the U.S. raid and capture of Nicolás Maduro, in January.
[Read: Elon Musk moves against the Russians in Ukraine]
The new frontier for Starlink is delivering satellite connectivity directly to people’s smartphones without specialized hardware. In other words, no more pizza boxes. Musk already provides this service through partnerships with more than a dozen mobile carriers to serve “dead zones” beyond the range of cell towers, but the bandwidth is limited. T-Mobile’s Starlink partnership, T-Satellite, allows customers to use Musk’s satellite internet for messaging, location sharing, and low-speed data for a handful of apps.
Musk wants to go bigger, possibly even operating Starlink as its own stand-alone mobile carrier. “You should be able to have a Starlink—like you have an AT&T or a T-Mobile or a Verizon or whatever,” he said last September. Unlike traditional mobile carriers, Starlink could operate on any cellphone anywhere in the world, due to the reach of its satellites. Imagine a future in which Musk owns not only a major social network, but a large chunk of the infrastructure through which the world’s information flows. To pull that off, he will need more satellites. Musk has already said that the ones that he’s looking to send to space for data centers are essentially souped-up versions of Starlink’s next-generation satellite, set to launch later this year, which promise to increase mobile speeds by more than 3,000 percent.
Starlink isn’t the only company trying to ramp up satellite-to-smartphone service. The prospect of offering high-speed connectivity anywhere in the world is tantalizing enough to justify major capital investment. Last week, Amazon bought the satellite company GlobalStar for more than $11 billion in one of its largest-ever acquisitions. As part of the announcement of the deal, Amazon also struck an agreement with Apple to operate the satellite internet on iPhones and Apple Watches. These moves position Amazon as Starlink’s leading competitor—and make it all the more urgent for Musk to launch as many satellites as possible, locking up the sky before anyone else can gain a foothold.
If Musk makes good on his vision to create his own Starlink mobile carrier, he will accrue more power than ever before. Not only would Musk have the capacity to cut or enable service as desired, he would also have a greater ability to push people onto more of his own products and platforms. A relatively obscure technique called “zero-rating” allows telecom providers to let users visit certain websites without having it count toward their data caps. Free Basics, for instance, is a program initiated more than a decade ago by Facebook in which the company partners with local mobile carriers in developing countries to provide free access to Meta’s family of apps. This allows poorer users to still surf the web, but at the cost of locking them into Meta’s walled garden.
Starlink has already experimented with this approach. The select collection of apps that can be used through T-Satellite include both X and Grok, but not competitors such as Instagram and ChatGPT. Musk could go further by letting Starlink subscribers use X and Grok for free. Particularly in low-income countries, this subsidy would be a major inducement to using those services. And considering the breadth of Musk’s empire, there are endless opportunities for cross-promotion. He could make Starlink’s mobile service a free perk for Tesla drivers, X Premium members, and xAI customers. For now, all of this is a hypothetical—but it is not far-fetched. Although 1 million satellites is the headline-grabbing number, these pursuits can happen below that ceiling. As so often is the case, Musk promises Mars but satisfies investors with low Earth orbit.
Starlink could also be the logical next step in Musk’s campaign against what he calls the “woke mind virus.” Take his treatment of Twitter. Since purchasing the social-media site in 2022 and renaming it X, Musk has turned it into a megaphone for his political viewpoints. He has restored hundreds of banned far-right accounts, eliminated virtually all content-moderation rules, and tweaked the algorithm to promote accounts that align with his politics. Musk attempts to further reinforce his worldview through Grok, the proudly politically incorrect chatbot, and now Grokipedia, his competitor to Wikipedia.
[Read: What Elon Musk’s version of Wikipedia thinks about Hitler, Putin, and apartheid]
While Musk has never had any problem winning investor confidence, he has sometimes stumbled at winning broad-based popularity. A common reflex is to blame the messengers: As he told CNBC last spring, “What I’ve learned is that legacy-media propaganda is very effective at making you believe things that aren’t true.” Launching even more satellites into space presents the opportunity to close the loop and cut out the “legacy media” altogether. The logic of Musk’s empire is total. X shapes the discourse. Grok automates it. Grokipedia rewrites the historical record. Starlink can deliver it all, everywhere, to everyone. Each layer reinforces the others. It’s not about winning arguments in the public sphere. It’s about building a replacement. If Musk gets his way, the echo chamber of tomorrow will reach to space and back.
2026-04-21 22:00:00
Earlier this month, a staff writer for The Free Press, Olivia Reingold, asked the Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed from Michigan a question: “Does Israel have a right to exist as a Jewish state?”
El-Sayed replied with his own question: “What do you mean by a ‘Jewish state’?” When Reingold went silent, before beginning to stutter out a response, El-Sayed continued, “If you can’t define the question, I’m not going to answer your question.”
A lot of labels and terms get thrown around in arguments over the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, words such as Zionist or anti-Zionist and one state or two states. These terms are not always well defined, and they mean different things to different factions—so it’s important, when discussing such matters, to know what people actually mean.
There are more or less illiberal versions of a “Jewish state.” The term could refer to a state that exists alongside a Palestinian state, where residents of both retain equal rights and democratic self-determination. Or a single state with a Jewish identity—one that prioritizes Jewish holidays and the Hebrew language, perhaps, but protects equal rights regardless of religion or ethnic background. It could mean the status quo: an Israel that maintains its occupation of the West Bank indefinitely, without extending equal rights or suffrage to the Palestinians who live there, which critics have called a form of apartheid. But maybe it means annexation of the West Bank and Gaza, without extending equal rights to the non-Jews. It could simply mean a Jewish demographic majority—which, given that roughly half the population between the river and the sea is Palestinian, raises the question of whether such a state would have the right to permanently disenfranchise or expel its non-Jewish population in order to maintain a majority Jewish polity or population in perpetuity.
[David Wolpe: I believe California has a right to exist]
In 2018, Israel passed a basic law defining itself as “the nation state of the Jewish people.” The Israel Democracy Institute, a liberal Israeli think tank, argues that this declaration “excludes minorities, omits equality, ignores democracy.” The Jewish left in Israel has long supported a two-state solution, comprising a Jewish state roughly within the 1967 borders alongside a Palestinian state, but a recent survey found that support for a two-state solution has fallen to 21 percent among Israeli Jews, while 42 percent support “annexation of the West Bank without equal rights for Palestinians.” According to the same survey, 40 percent of Palestinians support a two-state solution, and the number rises to 72 percent among Israeli Arabs.
One might argue that many other states in the region also define themselves in ethnic terms, as Arab states, and refer to Islam as their official religion. But the existence of one illiberal state does not justify the existence of another, nor does the hypocrisy of certain critics of Israel somehow render Israel’s inequalities just. Certainly, as an American, I do not want to live in a state that considers itself “white” or “Christian,” nor do I think equal rights are possible under such a regime.
Yet it’s possible to object to the actions of the current Israeli government while still thinking the existence of a Jewish state is necessary, given the historic persecution of the Jewish people. It’s also possible to accept that a Jewish state exists without embracing the idea of a Jewish state.
This is why El-Sayed’s question is so important. It is entirely fair to ask what kind of outcome one is endorsing before endorsing it: for example, the hypothetical two-state version, or the current “one-state reality,” where, as four professors write in Foreign Affairs, “the land and the people are subject to radically different legal regimes, and Palestinians are permanently treated as a lower caste.” Those who support ensuring that the character of the state remains “Jewish” by any means necessary should have to say so publicly, even if that means admitting that they would endorse the use of brutality and violence.
[Yair Rosenberg: Netanyahu’s ]very useful war
The purpose of Reingold’s original question was to put El-Sayed in an uncomfortable position. If he were to say that Israel does not have the right to exist as a Jewish state, he might be accused of employing an anti-Semitic double standard. If he were to affirm that it does, he could be taken to endorse second-class citizenship or worse for those living under Israeli authority who are not Jewish.
In a subsequent post on X, Reingold left little doubt that this was her intent, emphasizing El-Sayed’s background, as though it were somehow discrediting. “Abdul El-Sayed, who is Muslim, walks a fine line on the Jewish state,” she wrote, adding that he had “rebuffed my question.”
He wasn’t the only one. In the rather large block of text she offered in her retelling of the incident, she didn’t answer his question, either.
2026-04-21 21:56:21
Jason Boeshore, a grain-elevator manager on the eastern plains of Montana, fired off a rocket this month to the private Signal chat he shares with the 23 other members of the state Democratic Party executive board. He demanded that leaders make clear in newspapers across the state that the Democratic Party would support only Democratic candidates in the fall elections. The response was swift and not to his liking. Shannon O’Brien, the chair of the party, wrote that her staff, not the board, would set the messaging strategy. Then she addressed the unspoken concerns at the heart of Boeshore’s request. “Listen if ANY of you EVER find yourselves questioning my intentions, please call me,” O’Brien wrote. “I will continue to move forward to get Democrats elected. There’s no hidden agenda.”
The problem for O’Brien is the belief among Boeshore and many other party stalwarts in Montana that exactly such a hidden agenda exists, pitting national, big-money Democrats—and maybe even some state party leaders—against the state Democratic apparatus. This internecine feud, full of rumors, speculation, and skepticism over the role of outsiders in state races, threatens to spoil one of the last best places for Democrats to pull a Senate majority from a difficult midterm map.
At issue is Seth Bodnar, a former University of Montana president who is running as an independent for the Senate seat being vacated by Republican Steve Daines. Bodnar, 47, is young, moderate, a veteran, a Rhodes Scholar, and all in all the sort of person Montanans might elect in a year when Republicans are facing the prospect of steep losses amid President Trump’s declining popularity. Democratic mega-donors such as one of LinkedIn co-founders, Reid Hoffman; the cryptocurrency investor Michael Novogratz; and the Microsoft heir Rory Gates are all supporting Bodnar’s campaign, hoping he can yank the seat away from the GOP. Because Bodnar is running as an independent, it means part of his campaign in Montana is based on criticizing Democrats whose voters he needs to support him.
Even the candidates running for the Democratic nomination have been drawn into the drama. They, too, are criticizing their own party leaders just weeks before the June 2 primary and seeking to make sure that party bigwigs don’t try to clear a path for Bodnar to face the GOP nominee in November.
“There is clearly manipulation trying to happen there,” Alani Bankhead, a former Air Force intelligence officer and Senate hopeful who lives in Helena, told me. Reilly Neill, the front-runner for the nomination, told me that the state party needs to commit to not changing its bylaws that require it to back Democratic candidates, “because the chatter is that they are going to because the money is too good to pass up.” Both have sworn to run hard against Bodnar if they win the nomination.
Bodnar’s Democratic backers say he stands the best chance of winning in November, so even without a party label, he is worth supporting on the wink-and-nod assumption that he will help Democrats seal a majority, like Angus King of Maine and Bernie Sanders of Vermont, both independents who caucus with Democrats. In other words, the handwringers in the Montana Democratic Party need to get real. “For Democrats, Seth is the only viable alternative,” Matt McKenna, a Bozeman-based Democratic strategist who has worked for the Clinton family and four Democrats who have won statewide in Montana, told me in a statement. “Seth wins with a large majority of Democrats, a majority of Independents, and the Republicans who actually do show up and are sick of the partisan shitshow.”
That works only if rank-and-file Democrats swallow their pride and throw their support Bodnar’s way—a tough ask of a gossipy party in a frontier state where some current and former Democratic operatives call their regular Zoom meetings the “Giddy Up Club.” Former Governor Brian Schweitzer, a Giddy Up founder, told me that he’d had three phone calls with Bodnar before Bodnar announced, imploring him to run inside the party. When Bodnar declined, Schweitzer went on the attack. No independent can win in Montana, the former governor insists, given the significant share of Democrats who are going to vote the party line. The danger is that Bodnar splits the Democratic vote and the Republican sails through. Republicans have circulated an April internal poll, before much campaigning, that shows Neill pulling ahead of Bodnar in a hypothetical four-way general election.
“Seth Bodnar is a pretty good guy, and I understand that he is a Rhodes Scholar,” Schweitzer told me. “But he ain’t been on a lot of dirt roads in Montana, and that’s what it takes to get elected.”
Montana is a big state with a tiny population and big personalities—fewer people vote across its 147,000 square miles than live in Louisville or El Paso. But an anti-corporate, libertarian streak has long given the state an outsize role in federal elections, sometimes attracting hundreds of millions of dollars in out-of-state funding. Daines’s sudden retirement got Democrats salivating about the possibility of a win. There was also the party crack-up, which became public in January after former Democratic Senator Jon Tester sent around his own prickly text message suggesting his support for Bodnar if he ran as an independent. Tester was a loyal Democrat during his three terms. But the seven-fingered former dirt farmer with a flat-top haircut cast his party affiliation as a liability.
“You can send this around because I don’t care,” he wrote in the message, which was reported by the Montana press. “During my last two races the democratic Party was poison in my attempts to get re-elected.”
Days later, Bodnar stepped down as president of the University of Montana. Weeks later, he announced his campaign; Tester’s former pollster, his former political director, and the state party’s former spokesperson all signed on. Bodnar joined Act Blue, the Democratic grassroots tech platform, to raise money, hauling in $1.4 million in about a month. “I’m running as an independent because that’s who I am,” Bodnar told NBC Montana. His campaign, so far, has largely focused on the damage that Trump’s economic policies are doing to the state, with some jabs at the political status quo: “We don’t believe that here in Montana we have to settle for a broken political system.”
The Democratic whisper network went into overdrive. Some former Tester and Schweitzer aides speculated about secret plans to persuade whomever wins the Democratic nomination to then drop out of the race to consolidate support behind Bodnar. One story making the rounds involves a purported plot to have a state party convention in the summer, after the primary, to find a way to avoid an endorsement of the nominee or to leave the Democrats’ ballot line empty if the nominee were to be persuaded to step aside. “It’s becoming clear the chair of the Montana Democratic Party isn’t acting in conjunction with her board and answers to dark-money special interests,” Erik Nylund, a former regional director for Tester, told me.
[From the March issue: The Democrats aren’t built for this]
Other members of the state party executive board denied any such intrigue and told me that the party has clearly communicated its commitment to the Democratic nominee. “Somebody has a fever dream that that is going to happen,” state Senate Minority Leader Pat Flowers told me. “I think there is a lot of hand-wringing and there is not any reality there.”
O’Brien, the party chair, sees the drama as self-defeating when Democrats should be united in seizing the chance to regain power. The party also has a shot at the congressional district covering western Montana this year following the retirement of Republican Representative Ryan Zinke. O’Brien pointed to the huge turnout for “No Kings” rallies in the state. A recent annual fundraising dinner for the state party was oversubscribed. “As chair, I will support the Democratic nominee,” O’Brien told me. “To my knowledge there is no intention to change the rules to allow for support of anyone else.”
Bodnar has the never-failed résumé of a future senator: first in his class at West Point; former Army Ranger–qualified Green Beret with deployments in Iraq; and onetime corporate executive at General Electric. As president of the University of Montana, he reversed a six-year enrollment decline. His wife, also a Rhodes Scholar, befriended the former first daughter Chelsea Clinton at Oxford, and the Bodnars attended her 2010 wedding. They sat next to then–First Lady Michelle Obama at a 2012 presidential debate. Last year, before a University of Montana basketball game, Bodnar showed off his Ranger skills by rappelling to the court from the rafters.
He supports abortion rights, rails against tariffs, and says that Trump needs to seek congressional authorization for the use of force in Iran. His critiques of the Democrats echo those from inside the party itself: The culture wars are a distraction; transgender athletes should not have unfair advantages in competitive sports; and “Defund the police” is a dumb slogan and worse policy. Bodnar has called for a strong border. And, as a hunter, he opposes an assault-weapons ban, but he backs new red-flag laws to take weapons away from people who threaten their communities. “Seth saw his share of dirt roads in Iraq, putting his life on the line for our country,” his spokesperson, Roy Loewenstein, a former state party spokesperson, told me when I read Schweitzer’s zinger about Bodnar’s lack of familiarity with the byways of Montana. (Loewenstein declined to make Bodnar available for an interview.)
[Listen: Will 2026 be a fair fight?]
Bodnar’s advisers point to support from former Governor Marc Racicot and the strategist Reed Galen, who both left the GOP over their opposition to Trump, as a sign of the candidate’s bipartisan credibility. But the candidate demurs when asked about the most important decision he would likely make if he wins. The Senate operates as a two-party body; the party with the most votes appoints a majority leader who sets committee assignments and oversees legislative action. “I think we need new leadership in the U.S. Senate,” Bodnar said in a recent podcast appearance, a reference to both Republican and Democratic leaders. But he will not say which party’s new leaders he would support if elected. His advisers told me that Bodnar would go to Washington, negotiate the best deal for Montana, and not join either the Democratic or Republican caucuses. “I reject the notion that we have to accept a political system where you have to submit to a leader of a Party, vote the way you’re told, and engage in endless political warfare with the other side,” Bodnar told me in a written statement.
Republicans in Washington have attacked Bodnar, and Senate Democratic leaders have stayed silent. Bodnar’s Democratic supporters act as if he is a certain vote for their side. As soon as Bodnar entered the race, a Republican group cut an ad attacking him for running the university when a transgender track athlete competed in meets with other women, in accordance with NCAA rules at the time. Alex Latcham, who runs the super PAC aligned with Republican Majority Leader John Thune, described Bodnar as a registered Democrat—an affiliation that dates to when he was living in Connecticut in 2012. (There is no party registration in Montana, and Bodnar did not claim a party in 2014 when he lived in Florida.) “It is laughable to suggest Seth Bodnar would not vote for Chuck Schumer to be majority leader,” Latcham told me. Loewenstein, Bodnar’s spokesperson, responded: “Laughing at Montanans who are fighting the broken politics of Washington is exactly what we’d expect.”
One bright spot for Bodnar and the Democratic Party is that Republicans in the state are in their own mess. Daines surprised everyone by announcing that he would not stand for reelection minutes before the filing deadline and hours after Bodnar filed as an independent. Daines’s handpicked successor, the former U.S. Attorney Kurt Alme, who has never before run for office, was the only candidate who had time to enter the race, confirming to many Montanans the stereotype of national party grandees being dismissive of local democracy.
“That stunt threw everything on both sides of the equation,” Nancy Keenan, the former executive director of the state Democratic Party, told me. “Not only are Democrats in a snit, but Republicans are also in a snit.”
In a state more libertarian than partisan—abortion, recreational marijuana, permitless concealed carry are all legal—Democrats have had success here before. They claimed at least one, and often both, of Montana’s U.S. Senate seats from 1912 to 2024, and pulled off a 16-year run in the governor’s mansion from 2005 to 2021. In 2008, Obama came within 11,000 votes of winning. Then came the disruptions of Trump. Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris got about 38 percent of the vote in 2024, dooming Tester, who ran seven points ahead of her and seven points behind his Republican opponent.
Tester’s defeat led some strategists in the state to de-emphasize party affiliation. Some Democrats backed failed ballot measures in 2024 that would have shifted to an Alaska-style ranked-choice voting program. Others explored adopting a model where lawmakers organize around issues rather than parties. A Democratic consulting firm, Fireweed Campaigns, founded by a former state Democratic Party official, recently began working to elect moderate Republican lawmakers in the hopes of building a post-partisan governing majority in the state legislature, earning rebukes from the state GOP.
In the summer of 2025, Fireweed convened Democratic leaders in Anaconda, Montana, for a pitch on why an independent would have a better chance of winning the state’s western U.S. House district in 2026 than a Democrat. That plan, according to two people familiar with the presentation who asked to remain anonymous, was contingent on finding a way to persuade the Democratic nominee to back out once an independent entered the race—a similar scenario to the one that some Democrats suspect is now at play in the Senate race. Tully Olson, a former Tester campaign staffer who now works for Bodnar, was employed by Fireweed at the time and was on the list of those invited to the meeting, according to a document I reviewed. Bodnar’s campaign said that Olson did not ultimately attend the meeting. (Lauren Caldwell, the founder of Fireweed, did not respond to a request for comment.)
In mid-April, Democratic activists began circulating a resolution among the state party’s executive board that would require the party to appoint a replacement within 72 hours for a Democratic candidate who drops out—one way to ensure that the party doesn’t just switch to backing an independent. Current rules are unclear on how quickly the appointment must be made, but it is also not clear that the state party could logistically arrange a nominating convention on such a short timeline. Some of the party faithful fear that national democratic strategists and donors are throwing their money behind Bodnar to attract more money into the state, rather than help the party rebuild and take advantage of Republicans’ vulnerability.
“The tradition in Montana is that the top-of-the-ticket Senate races really do have coattails, and it matters for the overall organization of the party in the state. Seth Bodnar just completely screwed that up,” Ken Toole, a former Democratic lawmaker and state party officer, told me. “It’s a lot like burning down the barn to get rid of a few mice. The damage to the party is going to take a while to get over.”
[Read: Trump voters are over it]
Boeshore and others have pledged to keep raising the alarm. His frustration is such that he asked me to tell Montana voters to reach out to him directly so he can tell everyone in the state that the Democratic Party does not support independent candidates. “My email is on the website,” he told me. For him, the Bodnar independent experiment was being driven by “the revenants” of the old Democratic party. But there was a new party, “a new energy,” in the grassroots, waiting to emerge. So the fight would go on. And the fate of the Senate could hang on the result.
