Last week, Megyn Kelly, a former Fox News anchor and Donald Trump supporter this year, wanted to give Montana Republican Senate candidate Tim Sheehy a chance to explain himself. For the past year, in a pivotal campaign to flip the US Senate, Sheehy had been embroiled in a scandal involving potentially stolen valor.

Sheehy says he was shot in Afghanistan; there is a good deal of evidence that is a lie. As the Washington Post revealed in April, Sheehy told a park ranger in 2015 that the bullet in his arm came from accidentally shooting himself in Glacier National Park.

“So, just to be clear,” Kelly asked, “did you shoot yourself in the arm?”

Sheehy told Kelly his opponent’s campaign was based on “character assassination.” But mostly, he obfuscated. Kelly kept pressing on whether he was shot in Afghanistan or the park: “Which is it?”

Sheehy insisted that he hadn’t actually shot himself, despite having paid a $525 fine for illegally firing a gun in a national park and pleading for leniency in a handwritten note.

“Are there medical records where the ER can say, ‘We did not treat a gunshot wound?” Kelly followed up. Sheehy said there weren’t, even though he’d previously suggested there were.

“So confusing,” Kelly said, clearly perplexed.

In the end, it didn’t matter; Montana voters wanted a Republican. They chose Sheehy over Democratic Sen. Jon Tester, the famously seven-fingered farmer who has represented Montana since 2007. Tester’s defeat signals the end of an era: Come January, there will be no Democratic senators representing red states in the West.

Sheehy’s botched response helped explain why his campaign went to extreme lengths to hide him from reporters this year. Despite initially seeming like a dream Republican recruit—young, rich, former Navy SEAL—Sheehy proved to be about as compelling as a cardboard cutout.

Sheehy’s ideology more broadly is not clear, either. “I don’t really know what he believes and from what I can tell,” one Republican operative told Vanity Fair, “he doesn’t know either.” Sheehy, who is originally from Minnesota and moved to Montana a decade ago, had never run for office before being anointed by state and national Republicans to run against Tester. Nor did he write or say much about his politics for years.

That left the scandal as one of the few things to talk about. In his book and on the campaign trail, he said a bullet in his right arm was from being shot in combat in Afghanistan. But as the Washington Post revealed in April, Sheehy told a park ranger in 2015 that the bullet in his arm came from accidentally shooting himself in Glacier National Park.

In responding to Kelly, Sheehy claimed that his campaign had discussed the incident “at length, repeatedly, with every media outlet for the last year.” That wasn’t true either. I know because I went to great lengths to give Sheehy’s campaign the chance to substantiate his story. As I reported in September:

I reached out to Sheehy’s campaign on September 3 asking if they would be able to provide any more records to support the candidate’s account, or if they would make someone available to defend Sheehy’s story on or off-the-record. The campaign did not respond to the email or a follow-up sent [weeks later].

On Wednesday, I emailed [Daniel] Watkins, who, according to his official bio, is a “nationally ranked trial lawyer and reputation counselor specializing in high-stakes crisis and defamation cases.” Watkins confirmed that he is representing Sheehy, and asked to review the request I sent to the campaign. He did not respond after receiving it.

Since that story came out, Kim Peach, the park ranger who Sheehy told in 2015 that he shot himself, has spoken on the record to the Post and the New York Times. “I am 100 percent sure he shot himself that day,” Peach told the Times. He met Sheehy at the hospital that day and remembers the candidate showing him the weapon. It was fully loaded aside from the one bullet that is most likely in Sheehy’s arm today. A Navy SEAL who served closely with Sheehy also told the Times that he believes Sheehy is lying and that Sheehy never brought up being shot in the arm in Afghanistan.

Not surprisingly, there are other issues with the biography of a candidate who appears to be willing to lie about being wounded in combat. The wildlife firefighting business he founded has been hemorrhaging money, and its finances leave many reasons to doubt his claims about his business acumen. His Little Belt ranch looks a lot like one of the lifestyle plays that so many longtime native Montanans resent for helping to drive up prices in the state.

The good news for Sheehy is that he won’t have to go before Montana voters for another six years. Maybe it will be enough time to find those medical records.

Last week, Megyn Kelly, a former Fox News anchor and Donald Trump supporter this year, wanted to give Montana Republican Senate candidate Tim Sheehy a chance to explain himself. For the past year, in a pivotal campaign to flip the US Senate, Sheehy had been embroiled in a scandal involving potentially stolen valor.

Sheehy says he was shot in Afghanistan; there is a good deal of evidence that is a lie. As the Washington Post revealed in April, Sheehy told a park ranger in 2015 that the bullet in his arm came from accidentally shooting himself in Glacier National Park.

“So, just to be clear,” Kelly asked, “did you shoot yourself in the arm?”

Sheehy told Kelly his opponent’s campaign was based on “character assassination.” But mostly, he obfuscated. Kelly kept pressing on whether he was shot in Afghanistan or the park: “Which is it?”

Sheehy insisted that he hadn’t actually shot himself, despite having paid a $525 fine for illegally firing a gun in a national park and pleading for leniency in a handwritten note.

“Are there medical records where the ER can say, ‘We did not treat a gunshot wound?” Kelly followed up. Sheehy said there weren’t, even though he’d previously suggested there were.

“So confusing,” Kelly said, clearly perplexed.

In the end, it didn’t matter; Montana voters wanted a Republican. They chose Sheehy over Democratic Sen. Jon Tester, the famously seven-fingered farmer who has represented Montana since 2007. Tester’s defeat signals the end of an era: Come January, there will be no Democratic senators representing red states in the West.

Sheehy’s botched response helped explain why his campaign went to extreme lengths to hide him from reporters this year. Despite initially seeming like a dream Republican recruit—young, rich, former Navy SEAL—Sheehy proved to be about as compelling as a cardboard cutout.

Sheehy’s ideology more broadly is not clear, either. “I don’t really know what he believes and from what I can tell,” one Republican operative told Vanity Fair, “he doesn’t know either.” Sheehy, who is originally from Minnesota and moved to Montana a decade ago, had never run for office before being anointed by state and national Republicans to run against Tester. Nor did he write or say much about his politics for years.

That left the scandal as one of the few things to talk about. In his book and on the campaign trail, he said a bullet in his right arm was from being shot in combat in Afghanistan. But as the Washington Post revealed in April, Sheehy told a park ranger in 2015 that the bullet in his arm came from accidentally shooting himself in Glacier National Park.

In responding to Kelly, Sheehy claimed that his campaign had discussed the incident “at length, repeatedly, with every media outlet for the last year.” That wasn’t true either. I know because I went to great lengths to give Sheehy’s campaign the chance to substantiate his story. As I reported in September:

I reached out to Sheehy’s campaign on September 3 asking if they would be able to provide any more records to support the candidate’s account, or if they would make someone available to defend Sheehy’s story on or off-the-record. The campaign did not respond to the email or a follow-up sent [weeks later].

On Wednesday, I emailed [Daniel] Watkins, who, according to his official bio, is a “nationally ranked trial lawyer and reputation counselor specializing in high-stakes crisis and defamation cases.” Watkins confirmed that he is representing Sheehy, and asked to review the request I sent to the campaign. He did not respond after receiving it.

Since that story came out, Kim Peach, the park ranger who Sheehy told in 2015 that he shot himself, has spoken on the record to the Post and the New York Times. “I am 100 percent sure he shot himself that day,” Peach told the Times. He met Sheehy at the hospital that day and remembers the candidate showing him the weapon. It was fully loaded aside from the one bullet that is most likely in Sheehy’s arm today. A Navy SEAL who served closely with Sheehy also told the Times that he believes Sheehy is lying and that Sheehy never brought up being shot in the arm in Afghanistan.

Not surprisingly, there are other issues with the biography of a candidate who appears to be willing to lie about being wounded in combat. The wildlife firefighting business he founded has been hemorrhaging money, and its finances leave many reasons to doubt his claims about his business acumen. His Little Belt ranch looks a lot like one of the lifestyle plays that so many longtime native Montanans resent for helping to drive up prices in the state.

The good news for Sheehy is that he won’t have to go before Montana voters for another six years. Maybe it will be enough time to find those medical records.

Keyes, California, is not the typical town in which a Republican spends the precious final days of a close campaign. It is a working-class community of fewer than 6,000 between Merced and Modesto where about two-thirds of people are Latino and 6 percent of residents have a bachelor’s degree.

Yet six days before the election, John Duarte, the incumbent Republican member of Congress, was going door to door there to make his case to voters of both parties. Duarte was hoping to capitalize on what polls have shown is a startling decrease in support for Democrats among California Latinos. The largely positive reception he got at the doors suggested he was right to try.

In 2020, pre-election surveys and exit polls showed Biden winning Latino voters in the state, the large majority of whom are of Mexican ancestry, by about 50 points. Three recent polls in a row from the Institute of Governmental Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, including one released on Friday, show Harris up by less than 25 points among Latinos.

“This year is different,” Mark DiCamillo, the IGS poll director, explained about California. “It used to be that Latinos were reliably Democratic in just about all elections with 70 percent or more [support].”

As a result of Democrats underperforming in the state in 2020 and 2022, there are five toss-up seats in the House held by Republicans; Latinos account for a significant share of the population in all five districts. In two, the 13th and the Central Valley seat immediately to its south represented by Rep. David Valadao, they constitute between about 50 to 60 percent of eligible voters. Winning back some of these seats will likely be essential for Democrats to take back control of Congress.

In 2022, Duarte—a farmer of Portuguese and Swiss ancestry whose family runs one of the largest plant nurseries in the country—won by just over 500 votes. He now has a rematch against Adam Gray, the former state Assembly member he defeated two years ago.

Covering large swatches of the San Joaquin Valley, the heart of the United States’ fruit and nut industries, the district voted for Joe Biden by 11 points in 2020. This year’s face-off should normally be an easy Democratic pickup in which higher presidential election turnout carries Gray to victory.

But everyone I talked to considered the Gray-Duarte race essentially a coin flip.

For Latino voters in California, “We are seeing voting trends and registration move in a rightward direction that I have not seen in 30 years,” Mike Madrid, a co-founder of the never-Trump Lincoln Project and a former political director of the California Republican Party, told me.

Polls continue to show a clear majority of Latino voters backing Democrats statewide, and Madrid cautioned that polling during the failed 2021 effort to recall Gov. Gavin Newsom showed a drop off in Latino support that proved to be a “mirage.” But something does seem to be changing. “As somebody who watches this like a hawk,” Madrid emphasized, “I’ve never seen it before. But that doesn’t mean that it won’t snap back.”

One person who appeared less concerned was Gray, Duarte’s opponent. When we met at his Merced campaign office this week, I asked him what he makes of the signs Democrats in the state are losing significant support among Latino voters. Gray brushed off the question. “I think it’s a Washington conversation,” he told me of the concerns.

None of the Latino elected officials and political consultants in California I interviewed responded similarly. They said they have seen firsthand that many fellow Latinos, particularly men, appear more willing to vote for Republican candidates this year. The most recent IGS poll showed Harris winning Hispanic men by only about 10 points, compared to 36 points among women. (It also showed a major drop in Democratic support among Asian American voters since 2020.)

Pedro Ramirez, a Democratic political consultant and community leader in Fresno, warned that the first question heard from younger Latino Democrats contacted by local campaigns was often: Who is the candidate supporting for president? They were hoping to hear Trump’s name. It happened so often that Ramirez started to think there was an issue with their data and they might not actually be talking to Democrats.

“We look and, no, they’re not. The data is fine,” Ramirez added. “It’s that some of these folks have moved more to Trump.”

As he knocked on doors, Duarte’s pitch to voters was fairly simple: I’m your congressman. I’m a farmer. I want to make gas and groceries cheaper. He was hitting the right message, even if Donald Trump’s promised tariffs and mass deportations would likely exacerbate the cost-of-living crisis. Across party lines in the Central Valley, the increased prices of gas, food, and housing were by far the most important issues mentioned by the voters and Latino political experts I interviewed.

“People are frustrated, rightfully so,” Assemblywoman Esmeralda Soria, a Democrat who represents much of the area Duarte does, told me. “People are struggling. Everything’s much more expensive. Wages haven’t kept up. I think that that’s what’s going on. People don’t feel that either party is doing it for them.”

The basic act of Durate showing up clearly resonated as well. “So, you’re just going around?” a surprised woman in her twenties asked Duarte. “That’s really cool. I like that.”

Soria said the congressman has worked hard to win support in small communities in the district. “People have not knocked on their doors. They haven’t been reached out to,” she explained. “The congressman made a very intentional decision to engage some of these small city mayors early on and he got them earmarks.” The result is local leaders who are endorsing Duarte over Gray, while also backing Soria, their Democratic state representative.

At another door, an older woman told him that she used to work for Duarte’s plant nursery. She added to me in Spanish, which Duarte largely doesn’t speak, that she had traditionally voted Democrat but backed Duarte during his first run for Congress in 2022 and that she was planning on doing so again because she wanted to support her old patrón, her boss.

“There are five votes in that house,” Duarte told me as we walked away. “They’re voting for me because she worked for me.” It didn’t surprise him. It happened pretty often, he said.

The exchange reflected something that Gustavo Arellano, the Los Angeles Times writer well known for his old OC Weekly “¡Ask a Mexican!” column, had told me about the neighboring 22nd District, the other tossup race in the valley in a majority Latino area. The incumbent Republican is Valadao, another farmer whose ancestors are from the Azores. His challenger, Rudy Salas, is the son of a farmworker and a former Assembly member.

“It’s like, yeah, [Valadao is] Portuguese. But he’s a farmer, which means he’s a person who ostensibly knows how to run a farm, at least in the minds of voters,” Arellano explained. Salas comes from a farmworker family. “So, implicitly, it’s like, ‘He’s just a worker. Well, we don’t need workers. Having a worker is not going to better our lives. We need someone who has experience.’ It’s kind of fucked up but we’ll see [what happens].”

Mayor Victor Martinez is one of the Democratic elected officials who have endorsed Duarte. Mendota, the city of about 12,000 he represents, is in the more isolated western end of the valley. Like many in town, he is a Salvadoran immigrant who initially did farm labor with his parents after arriving in the country as a child.

“I think that people are tired and finally figuring out how government affects their day to day,” Martinez said about the shift he sees away from Democrats in his community. “It’s not a lie that gas prices are way up. It’s not a lie that a lot of these business policies in place to protect the environment are choking small businesses.” He owns a small trucking business and fears what will happen if California forces people like him to buy expensive electric trucks. “Who can afford to do that?” he asked. “Huge companies. Corporations. Not us.”

“Our people are very hard-working people, but I think they’re getting tired of what’s going on,” he continued. “So, I’m a Democrat. But I decided right now I’m not going to be a sheep anymore.” He saw Democrats as too often treating Latinos as victims instead of empowering them.

Martinez credited Duarte with securing $5 million to repave the roads in his city. At the same time, he is splitting his ticket by supporting Soria in her reelection bid. “I’m going to support those that have common sense policies that will support our people,” the mayor explained. “And not just make people happy by just bringing them a food bank, and then more food banks. Killing jobs. And then more food banks.” He preferred not to discuss who he was voting for in the presidential race.

Jesús, a Mexican immigrant from Jalisco who works in construction, answered one of the last doors Duarte knocked. He told the congressman that he used to be a Democrat but was now a committed Republican. After Duarte and I parted ways, I went back to talk with him some more.

He told me that he’d crossed the border illegally in 1986 on the day he turned 18, then later gained legal status—and eventually citizenship—from the amnesty Ronald Reagan signed into law that year. He recalled that his father-in-law and others he knew voted Democrat: “So I said, ‘Yeah, okay, I’m gonna give them my vote.’” But, in 2020, he voted for Trump. He liked his economic record and concluded that Republicans’ values aligned more closely with the ones he holds as a devout Christian.

His 25-year-old son, Zadrac, was at the house that night. He has an MBA, works as an accountant, and finds himself unsure about how to vote. “A couple of years ago, I was like, ‘I’m never going to vote for the Republicans,’” Zadrac explained. “But I know this upcoming election, I’m more on the fence about it.”

Like his dad, he felt that Democrats often did not share his Christian principles. Still, he was concerned by some of the supporters Trump attracted. “The people that are going for him, they seem kind of racist,” he explained. “They may be opposed to people like me. So it makes me wary. Why would you vote for someone if the people that are supporting him don’t seem to care about you?”

Zadrac’s attitude was common. Many of the Latino voters I spoke with who are considering voting Republican were aware of the nativism—and sometimes overt racism—of MAGA. Even if they are Mexican American, they don’t like seeing Puerto Ricans being called “garbage.” But for many, other issues seem more important this year.

Duarte has gone out of his way to differentiate himself from Trump to allow Latinos to move to him. His rhetoric is nothing like the former president’s, and he supports a path to citizenship for Dreamers and other undocumented immigrants. I told Duarte I was skeptical that right-wing Republicans, who have tanked multiple bipartisan immigration reform bills in recent decades, would ever allow such a path. “I can’t convince them,” Duarte said of his colleagues. “Donald Trump can.”

“I think as he turns a lot of Hispanic votes this time, he’s going to say, ‘This is a durable majority if I address their needs,’” the congressman said.

Ramirez, the Fresno-based political consultant and community leader, said messaging about Trump’s promises about mass deportations and other immigration crackdowns often does not resonate with the Latino voters in the area. Many believe Trump is talking about other people, or thinks that he won’t actually follow through on his campaign promises.

He tries to explain that Trump’s immigration agenda was often blocked by Congress or the courts, and that a second term would be different. “Nah, I think he’s saying it just to get elected,” Ramirez, who is himself undocumented, said about what he hears in response. “You’ll see, once he gets elected, he’ll be fine.” Many of these voters want progressive immigration reforms but they’ve lost faith that Democrats will ever get them done.

More surprisingly, Ramirez said some of the Latino voters he talks to even respect Trump on immigration despite not liking what he did. “They might not agree with what he did in terms of the deportations and enforcement mechanisms. [But] people will say at least he actually acted on what he said he was going to do,” Ramirez explained. “Whereas again, the Democrats have yet to deliver on immigration.”

In 2022, Duarte and Valadao’s districts had some of the lowest turnout in the country. Only about 100,000 people voted in the Valadao race, compared with more than 350,000 in the nation’s highest-turnout congressional races. (Members of Congress each represent nearly 800,000 people, although the number of eligible voters varies by district.) And of the 25 races with the lowest turnout, Duarte and Valadao were the only Republicans who won two years ago.

In an effort to boost turnout, Grita Canta Vota, a nonpartisan campaign, organized a free concert in Visalia on Thursday. It was part of a well-funded and highly produced national tour called Vota Palooza that has been coming to Latino communities where there are close races. Los Tucanes de Tijuana, a veteran norteño act with a major following, was the headliner. Thousands attended.

Outside the venue, organizers had set up a little plaza featuring mariachis, food, and lowriders. Most of the people I talked to, particularly women and those who were older, supported Harris and fellow Democrats. The disgust with Trump I heard from one of them, a Latino man originally from Oakland, was visceral.

But Sara, a 38-year-old life insurance agent originally from Mexicali, was at the other end of the spectrum. Her husband couldn’t understand why but she was voting for Trump. She said the economy was by far the most important issue for her and she thought Trump would handle it better.

Inside the venue, the crowd filled in as Lupita Infante and Grupo Control opened for Los Tucanes. In between the sets, speakers tried to make sure they planned to vote. One of these exhortations came via a video message from Dolores Huerta, the legendary labor leader who helped to organize the era-defining 1965 grape strike with Cesar Chavez in nearby Delano. “If we vote, we can prevent that horrifying future,” Huerta, now 94, stressed in Spanish wearing a flat-brim hat. “Because we’re the winners: Latino people, people of color, all the young people fighting for a better future.”

Most of the people in attendance had not been born when Huerta and Chavez became icons. In many cases, neither were their parents. The movement Huerta emerged from is increasingly distant.

I ran into Ramirez, the political consultant, later that night. When we’d spoken earlier in the week, he’d stressed the potential electoral consequences of Latino voters in the area struggling to get by. “That’s really what most voters are looking at right now is that: their actual bank account,” he said.

He has a master’s degree in public policy and runs a nonprofit when he isn’t being paid to elect Democrats. But the issues aren’t abstractions for him. “Honestly,” he explained about his own life. “I’m trying to buy a house, and it’s like, I can’t even afford it.”

Rebecca Cooke has spent many nights this year waiting tables during her race for Congress in a Wisconsin swing district. She is a 36-year-old service industry worker and nonprofit leader with a chance to secure an upset in a tight House race.

It’s not the typical profile for a future member of Congress. She has no personal fortune to self-fund her campaign or elected experience. But Cooke—running in a district that covers much of rural southwestern Wisconsin and includes the cities of Eau Claire and La Crosse—hopes a moderate version of Democratic populism can win back Trump voters.

“A big part of our identity and why I wanted to run for Congress is because I feel like there’s a lot of corporate monopolies that have really robbed us of our farming traditions, and that have really crippled a lot of our rural economy,” Cooke told me. She stressed the need for robust antitrust enforcement and supporting organized labor. “I like to tell people often that I’m progressive where it counts,” she said.

“After I endorsed Becca, he shoulder-checked me on the floor,” Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez said of Rep. Derrick Van Orden.

Cooke’s district leans Republican—but not by much. Trump carried the area by about 5 points. In 2022, Derrick Van Orden, a right-wing Republican and former Navy SEAL, won the seat after Ron Kind, the longtime moderate Democrat incumbent, announced his retirement. Cooke is now running to unseat Van Orden, who has quickly established a reputation for being one of Congress’ worst-behaved members.

Cooke is affiliated with the moderate Blue Dog wing of the party and has (literally) placed herself in the middle: In one ad, she stands in the center of a dirt road on her family’s farm and criticizes those who are “too far left” and “too far right.”

When I spoke to Cooke last month one of the first things she brought up about herself was that her parents had been forced to sell their cows when she was a kid because they couldn’t compete with big companies. It was a gutting development given that her family has farmed in the district for more than 150 years.

Cooke winning could play a major role in allowing Democrats to take back the House, where they need to flip four seats to regain a majority. It would also further establish that running young political outsiders like Cooke is a way for Democrats to win in Republican-leaning districts that have sometimes been considered out of reach.

Anthony Chergosky, a political science professor at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse, says Trump is expected to carry the district again. “I think it is very likely that Cooke will need a decent amount of ticket splitting to go in her favor in order to win the election,” he explained.

Cooke is not alone in adopting her combination of moderation and populism. Since 2022, the Blue Dogs have been taken over by a new generation led by Reps. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez (D-Wash.), Jared Golden (D-Maine), and Mary Peltola (D-Alaska). The new Blue Dogs still take positions that anger some on the left like voting against a student debt relief bill because it didn’t do enough for blue collar workers. But they lean less towards the Chamber of Commerce and more towards emphasizing support for people in the trades.

Gluesenkamp Perez and Cooke are the same age and are also running against far-right Republicans who were once members of US special forces. Gluesenkamp Perez has a rematch against Joe Kent, the retired Green Beret she defeated in 2022 in what was perhaps the biggest upset of the last cycle.

The two millennial women have become friends and talk frequently. Cooke described Gluesenkamp Perez as an “incredible mentor.” The congresswoman has picked Cooke up at the airport when she’s come to DC and given her clothes. “Our districts are sort of similar,” Gluesenkamp Perez said. “Rural. Family farms. People that care about American manufacturing. People in the trades. And, you know, she drives a shit box [car]. She’s great.”

Gluesenkamp Perez has little patience for parsing exactly how she and fellow Blue Dogs should be categorized ideologically. “The political spectrum is not real,” she told me. “It does not exist in nature. What does exist is our farms getting consolidated, seeing young farmers get priced out of land by Chinese investors, having big corporations tell us we can’t fix our own stuff, not being able to buy a pair of work boots that last more than six months.”

Gluesenkamp Perez said she and Cooke “are trying to build a body that is more representative of the normal experience of being an American today.” As she put it: “America is not made up of just lawyers, and the congressional body shouldn’t be.”

Kent and Van Orden, who was at the January 6 rally in Washington, DC, are similarly extreme but Van Orden is maybe the less likable of the two. “She’s running against a really weird dude. This insurrectionist Derrick Van Orden,” Gluesenkamp Perez said about her colleague in the House. “After I endorsed Becca, he shoulder-checked me on the floor.”

In March, Van Orden made news for yelling “lies” during President Joe Biden’s State of the Union. As I’ve written, it was only the latest in a string of embarrassing outbursts. Last year, Van Orden was criticized for yelling at a group of teenage Congressional pages for lying on the floor of the rotunda. Among the things he reportedly told them were:

“Wake the fuck up you little shits.”

“What the fuck are you all doing?”

“Get the fuck out of here. You are defiling the space.”

“Who the fuck are you?”

“I don’t give a fuck who you are, get out.”

In 2021, while running for Congress, Van Orden yelled at another teenage page. In that case, the incident took place at the Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin, library. Van Orden objected to a Pride Month-themed display—directing particular ire at the inclusion of A Day in the Life of Marlon Bundo, a satirical children’s book that imagines a world in which Mike Pence’s pet rabbit Marlon Bundo was gay. (Van Orden is the author of Book of Man: A Navy Seal’s Guide to the Lost Art of Manhood.)

When we spoke, Cooke said residents of the district are ready for a member of Congress who is “going to go out there and get shit done and not embarrass us.” But she mostly stuck to a more typically Wisconsin style of shading her opponent. “He lives on a hobby farm in the district,” Cooke noted, “and I think there’s some differences in the way in which we grew up.”

Cooke spent more time emphasizing her own priorities of defending women’s right to choose, keeping hospitals in the district open, lowering prescription drug prices, protecting family farms, and taking on powerful corporations.

“People are struggling to be able to pay their rent, to get gas at the gas pump, and go to the grocery store and have a little bit of money left over,” Cooke said. “I credit a lot of that to corporations that are price gouging consumers off the backs of their workforce. When you see record profits, that really means stolen wages.”

Rebecca Cooke has spent many nights this year waiting tables during her race for Congress in a Wisconsin swing district. She is a 36-year-old service industry worker and nonprofit leader with a chance to secure an upset in a tight House race.

It’s not the typical profile for a future member of Congress. She has no personal fortune to self-fund her campaign or elected experience. But Cooke—running in a district that covers much of rural southwestern Wisconsin and includes the cities of Eau Claire and La Crosse—hopes a moderate version of Democratic populism can win back Trump voters.

“A big part of our identity and why I wanted to run for Congress is because I feel like there’s a lot of corporate monopolies that have really robbed us of our farming traditions, and that have really crippled a lot of our rural economy,” Cooke told me. She stressed the need for robust antitrust enforcement and supporting organized labor. “I like to tell people often that I’m progressive where it counts,” she said.

“After I endorsed Becca, he shoulder-checked me on the floor,” Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez said of Rep. Derrick Van Orden.

Cooke’s district leans Republican—but not by much. Trump carried the area by about 5 points. In 2022, Derrick Van Orden, a right-wing Republican and former Navy SEAL, won the seat after Ron Kind, the longtime moderate Democrat incumbent, announced his retirement. Cooke is now running to unseat Van Orden, who has quickly established a reputation for being one of Congress’ worst-behaved members.

Cooke is affiliated with the moderate Blue Dog wing of the party and has (literally) placed herself in the middle: In one ad, she stands in the center of a dirt road on her family’s farm and criticizes those who are “too far left” and “too far right.”

When I spoke to Cooke last month one of the first things she brought up about herself was that her parents had been forced to sell their cows when she was a kid because they couldn’t compete with big companies. It was a gutting development given that her family has farmed in the district for more than 150 years.

Cooke winning could play a major role in allowing Democrats to take back the House, where they need to flip four seats to regain a majority. It would also further establish that running young political outsiders like Cooke is a way for Democrats to win in Republican-leaning districts that have sometimes been considered out of reach.

Anthony Chergosky, a political science professor at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse, says Trump is expected to carry the district again. “I think it is very likely that Cooke will need a decent amount of ticket splitting to go in her favor in order to win the election,” he explained.

Cooke is not alone in adopting her combination of moderation and populism. Since 2022, the Blue Dogs have been taken over by a new generation led by Reps. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez (D-Wash.), Jared Golden (D-Maine), and Mary Peltola (D-Alaska). The new Blue Dogs still take positions that anger some on the left like voting against a student debt relief bill because it didn’t do enough for blue collar workers. But they lean less towards the Chamber of Commerce and more towards emphasizing support for people in the trades.

Gluesenkamp Perez and Cooke are the same age and are also running against far-right Republicans who were once members of US special forces. Gluesenkamp Perez has a rematch against Joe Kent, the retired Green Beret she defeated in 2022 in what was perhaps the biggest upset of the last cycle.

The two millennial women have become friends and talk frequently. Cooke described Gluesenkamp Perez as an “incredible mentor.” The congresswoman has picked Cooke up at the airport when she’s come to DC and given her clothes. “Our districts are sort of similar,” Gluesenkamp Perez said. “Rural. Family farms. People that care about American manufacturing. People in the trades. And, you know, she drives a shit box [car]. She’s great.”

Gluesenkamp Perez has little patience for parsing exactly how she and fellow Blue Dogs should be categorized ideologically. “The political spectrum is not real,” she told me. “It does not exist in nature. What does exist is our farms getting consolidated, seeing young farmers get priced out of land by Chinese investors, having big corporations tell us we can’t fix our own stuff, not being able to buy a pair of work boots that last more than six months.”

Gluesenkamp Perez said she and Cooke “are trying to build a body that is more representative of the normal experience of being an American today.” As she put it: “America is not made up of just lawyers, and the congressional body shouldn’t be.”

Kent and Van Orden, who was at the January 6 rally in Washington, DC, are similarly extreme but Van Orden is maybe the less likable of the two. “She’s running against a really weird dude. This insurrectionist Derrick Van Orden,” Gluesenkamp Perez said about her colleague in the House. “After I endorsed Becca, he shoulder-checked me on the floor.”

In March, Van Orden made news for yelling “lies” during President Joe Biden’s State of the Union. As I’ve written, it was only the latest in a string of embarrassing outbursts. Last year, Van Orden was criticized for yelling at a group of teenage Congressional pages for lying on the floor of the rotunda. Among the things he reportedly told them were:

“Wake the fuck up you little shits.”

“What the fuck are you all doing?”

“Get the fuck out of here. You are defiling the space.”

“Who the fuck are you?”

“I don’t give a fuck who you are, get out.”

In 2021, while running for Congress, Van Orden yelled at another teenage page. In that case, the incident took place at the Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin, library. Van Orden objected to a Pride Month-themed display—directing particular ire at the inclusion of A Day in the Life of Marlon Bundo, a satirical children’s book that imagines a world in which Mike Pence’s pet rabbit Marlon Bundo was gay. (Van Orden is the author of Book of Man: A Navy Seal’s Guide to the Lost Art of Manhood.)

When we spoke, Cooke said residents of the district are ready for a member of Congress who is “going to go out there and get shit done and not embarrass us.” But she mostly stuck to a more typically Wisconsin style of shading her opponent. “He lives on a hobby farm in the district,” Cooke noted, “and I think there’s some differences in the way in which we grew up.”

Cooke spent more time emphasizing her own priorities of defending women’s right to choose, keeping hospitals in the district open, lowering prescription drug prices, protecting family farms, and taking on powerful corporations.

“People are struggling to be able to pay their rent, to get gas at the gas pump, and go to the grocery store and have a little bit of money left over,” Cooke said. “I credit a lot of that to corporations that are price gouging consumers off the backs of their workforce. When you see record profits, that really means stolen wages.”

In 2015, Clay Higgins started his climb to Congress with a series of videos promising to hunt down lawbreakers. As a spokesman for the St. Landry Parish Sheriff’s Office in Louisiana, Higgins generated national attention by making Crime Stoppers public service announcements as straight-to-camera monologues. His menacing promises got him billed as the “Cajun John Wayne” in coverage by CBS News and the Washington Post.

In reality, public information officer Higgins was neither Cajun nor much of a street cop. It did not matter. In 2016, he ran for Congress as a Republican and rode his law-and-order image to Washington. As a congressman, Higgins has kept up the act: He recently made news and drew threats of congressional censure after posting a transparently racist rant about how Haitian immigrants are “thugs.”

Higgins’ carefully cultivated brand centers almost exclusively on law enforcement. His campaign logo features him in his police uniform. He has served as a reserve officer with the Louisiana Department of Justice while in Congress and is known for communicating in cryptic military jargon typical of right-wing militias. Expected to win easily in November, Higgins is believed to harbor ambitions of running for Senate in 2026. If he does, he will almost certainly continue to make his work as a cop central to his message to voters.

But a Mother Jones investigation has revealed a major problem with his pitch: Some of the former Louisiana cops Higgins has associated with have been accused by law enforcement officials of severe wrongdoing—including allegedly participating in a sex trafficking ring in one case and of committing incest in another.

One of the most troubling of these connections, which has not been previously reported, is with an old friend from the St. Landry Parish Sheriff’s Office: Leon Boudreaux. Higgins has been a member of the motorcycle group dubbed the Kindred Vets that Boudreaux founded, and the two are seemingly close. They appear together in numerous photos posted to one of Higgins’ Facebook pages, and they are also pictured together in photos posted by the Kindred Vets in 2022 and 2023.

In 2021, a year prior to Higgins posting a photo with his hand clasped with Boudreaux’s, a New Mexico jury convicted Boudreaux of incest after a teenage relative accused him of sexually assaulting her between the ages of 14 and 18.

Boudreaux confirmed to Mother Jones by phone on Thursday that he is a longtime friend of Higgins and that he rides motorcycles with him. Boudreaux said that Higgins was aware of the charges that had been brought against him. “Back when all that happened, he did call me,” Boudreaux explained. “He called to check on me. But we don’t really talk about that kind of stuff.”

Asked whether he was surprised that the incest case had not impacted their friendship, Boudreaux replied, “Not at all.” He continued, “Clay knows me. Knows I didn’t break any laws. It’s just the way it went.” Boudreaux ended the interview after saying that he did not want to be a part of an article that would “discredit” the congressman. (Higgins’ office did not respond to a detailed request for comment.)

Higgins’ willingness to appear with Boudreaux after the conviction is notable considering his public policy positions. He has repeatedly spread fears of the dangers of sex traffickers and sexual predators coming across the US-Mexico border. In a congressional resolution introduced in May, he warned about how a Haitian migrant had been arrested for the “sexual assault of a 15-year-old girl” in Massachusetts. Higgins has also said it should be illegal for women to have an abortion—including in cases of rape and incest.

Before working with Boudreaux in St. Landry Parish, Higgins served in the nearby Opelousas Police Department. He ended up there in his 40s after trading what he has described as a lucrative job managing car dealerships for a law enforcement position that paid $8 an hour.

His time included discord. In 2007, Higgins and fellow Opelousas officer John Chautin assaulted an unarmed Black man while on duty, according to an internal police investigation and reporting from the Louisiana outlet Bayou Brief. Higgins was caught lying to a police investigator and resigned rather than face discipline. Chautin, who was disciplined for his conduct, has since followed Higgins into politics: He is now the congressman’s district director. (In a 2015 email, Higgins described Chautin, who did not respond to the request for comment sent to Higgins’ congressional office, as his “best friend, work out partner and assistant Sensei.”)

Jerod Prunty is another former cop in Higgins’ orbit who caught the attention of law enforcement. In 2019, Louisiana police arrested Prunty and nine others following a 17-month investigation while he was working in Higgins’ district office as a field representative. Police alleged that Prunty was part of a sex-trafficking ring involving Chinese women who were reportedly forced to live and perform sex acts at local massage parlors. “We are shocked and saddened to learn of allegations against Jerod,” a spokesperson for Higgins said in a statement before Prunty resigned. (Prosecutors did not pursue charges against Prunty, who did not respond to a request for comment sent by email.)

Aimee Robinson, a local activist involved with the state and parish Democratic parties, said Higgins is well liked in the district, despite these controversies. “It’s like Trump, he would have to shoot somebody in the middle of the street, and even then, we’re not sure that it would matter,” she explained. (Robinson’s willingness to criticize Higgins on the record was unusual among the people Mother Jones contacted for this story, many of whom feared retribution; she said she’d recently told a friend concerned for her safety for speaking out that she has “three big dogs and a revolver” and that her address is “123 I Wish A Motherfucker Would.”)

Higgins has also courted his own share of controversies beyond the use of excessive force in Opelousas. In 1991, the first of his four wives accused him in court of holding a gun to her head, according to court records reviewed by Mother Jones. (Higgins denies the accusation made by his ex-wife, who later died.)

In the lead-up to his 2016 election, his second wife released recordings in which the two discussed the more than $100,000 in child support Higgins reportedly owed. It is unclear whether Higgins has settled that debt and, unusually for a representative, his congressional financial disclosure form lists no assets.

After leaving the Opelousas department in 2007, Higgins got a job with the Port Barre Police Department, where the bike group leader Leon Boudreaux’s identical twin brother, Deon, was the chief of police. After about three years, Higgins went to St. Landry Parish, where he worked with Leon.

Higgins was working as a night patrolman—not a particularly distinguished position for a more than 50-year-old cop—when he became the department’s public information officer. Higgins used his new role to turn himself into something of a local celebrity in viral Crime Stoppers videos. He often addressed alleged criminals in degrading language. “I can just imagine his very limited brain cells,” Higgins said in one 2015 video as a Black man appeared to rob a gas station convenience store. In another, he wondered whether Black suspects had used “even one” of their “combined eight or ten brain cells.” (In 2022, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez chastised Higgins after he referred to a Black woman testifying before them in Congress as “boo.”)

Before being pushed out of the department by Sheriff Bobby Guidroz in 2016, Higgins tried to capitalize on the notoriety generated by the St. Landry Parish videos by pitching a reality show called American Justice, starring himself, that was never produced. Episodes of his crime-hunting show were to be based around themes such as “sex crimes” and “crimes affecting children,” Higgins explained at the time. In 2015, he sent a potential list of “Regular interaction characters” for the show. The first name was Leon Boudreaux and another was that of his “close friend” Deon Boudreaux.

Four years later, police officers in Raton, New Mexico, arrested Leon Boudreaux after he had sex with a teenage relative in a local hotel room. According to a statement of probable cause obtained by Mother Jones via a public records request, the then-18-year-old victim stated she had been sexually abused by Boudreaux for the past four years.

“I gave him consent because I’m scared,” she said about what had just happened. “I’m so scared right now.” She told the officer that she had been raped by Boudreaux in the past but eventually “just started giving in.” She was afraid that Boudreaux, a short but physically imposing bodybuilding aficionado, would kill her if she said no to his advances—telling a police officer that he had a firearm with him at the time, according to the statement of probable cause. (Police found a .357 Magnum loaded with hollow point bullets and a roughly six-inch knife in his backpack.)

According to an arrest report obtained via a public records request, Boudreaux claimed in a police interview that he had fallen asleep wearing his underwear only to wake up and realize that his relative had begun having sexual intercourse with him. He added that he ejaculated against his own will before he could push her off him. Boudreaux told police that he had been taken advantage of by his teenage relative, but that he did not want to press charges.

Boudreaux said that the victim had previously accused him of rape in Port Barre. He explained that he learned of the accusation from his twin brother, the Port Barre police chief. Leon Boudreaux then got his teenage relative to recant in a conversation that he recorded, according to the police report and the Lafayette Daily Advertiser. (Deon Boudreaux did not respond to a voicemail seeking comment regarding his handling of the accusation.)

The relative then fled the state for Colorado. Leon Boudreaux tracked her down there, according to a person familiar with the case. He committed incest as they made their way back to Louisiana. (Boudreaux told New Mexico police that the victim called and asked him to pick her up in Colorado.)

Boudreaux also told the officer that a second young relative had previously accused him of wanting to have sex with her. He added that an unspecified investigation had deemed the claim unfounded. That conflicted with what the victim told New Mexico police about how Boudreaux had sexually abused both her and another relative.

Along with incest, Boudreaux was later charged with two counts of criminal sexual penetration. (A New Mexico judge prevented the latter charges from being brought to trial.) During the trial for incest, Boudreaux’s relative took the stand against Boudreaux, who did not testify, according to the prosecutor who tried the case. The judge deemed the years-long period during which Boudreaux allegedly raped his then-minor relative in Louisiana to be inadmissible. Nevertheless, in February 2021, a New Mexico jury found Boudreaux guilty on the incest charge, a felony offense.

In October 2021, he received a suspended sentence and three years of probation. The prosecutor, who requested anonymity, said the district attorney’s office had sought jail time. The prosecutor shared a victim statement that they said was read during the sentencing. In it, Boudreaux’s relative stated:

At 14, he began sexually abusing me. Although I cannot go into further detail on the events that happened prior to this case, I’d like to state that for 4 years, I suffered. For 4 years, he satisfied himself with a child. Manipulating me that because of his authority and public image, that just like my [relative] who had reported him of the same thing previously, that it would not go far and nobody would believe me.

After the arrest, a handful of Louisiana outlets reported on the case. Leon Boudreaux objected to the Advertiser’s coverage of his then-upcoming trial. “My character has been tarnished,” he complained. His twin brother, the Port Barre police chief, said that the story was an attempt to “jump on the anti-police rhetoric bandwagon for ratings.”

The year after Boudreaux’s conviction, Higgins wrote a Facebook screed with a familiar mix of righteous indignation and pretension of speaking for real Americans. Addressed to “You elitists, you woke arrogant hypocrites of both parties,” the congressman explained that “you keep poking us in the chest and eventually you’re going to get a response.” Higgins signed the post: “Respectfully, We the People.” 

In the accompanying photo, Higgins wears his Kindred Vets motorcycle gear. A thin blue line patch is clearly visible on his leather jacket. His right hand rests on Leon Boudreaux’s shoulder.

On Wednesday, during a routine operation in Gaza, Israeli soldiers reportedly killed Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar—seemingly stumbling into realizing a major military objective. Despite over a year’s worth of efforts, Israeli soldiers appear to have found Sinwar by accident. After killing three people during a normal operation, they apparently realized that one of the men resembled the Hamas leader. The Israeli military confirmed Sinwar’s death on Thursday.

“I think Netanyahu has zero interest in ending this war and I don’t think he’s motivated to help Biden before the elections.”

Israel and the United States have been trying to find and kill Sinwar since last October. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has cast his death as one of the main reasons for Israel’s unceasing bombardment of Gaza, saying a main war objective is “eliminating” Hamas leadership. 

With this objective met, Sinwar’s death could present a chance to end what has become a regional war. Vice President Kamala Harris said after the killing that Sinwar’s death gave “us an opportunity to finally end the war in Gaza.” But it seems unlikely that Israeli and American leaders will fully press in this moment.

A former Biden administration official said they do believe that Sinwar’s death will be viewed by the administration as “somewhat of an opportunity to secure an end to the conflict,” particularly ahead of the elections as they try to win back votes that they “certainly have lost.” The problem, the former official explained, is that “I think Netanyahu has zero interest in ending this war and I don’t think he’s motivated to help Biden before the elections.”

The next move from Israel’s government, at the moment, is unclear. On Thursday, Netanyahu stated that “the mission ahead of us has not been completed.” In an initial statement Benny Gantz, a centrist member of Netanyahu’s war cabinet, said that while Sinwar’s death is a vital goal it would not mean the end of the war in Gaza.

Sinwar was killed just over a year after he orchestrated the October 7 attack in which Hamas killed nearly 1,200 Israelis. In response, the Israeli military has leveled Gaza, killing at least 42,000 Palestinians, according to the local health ministry. (The full death toll is feared to be more than double that number, according to some public health experts.) 

Sinwar’s death comes at a time when ceasefire talks to end the war in Gaza have effectively fallen apart and the conflict has expanded throughout the region.

Israel recently launched a major invasion of Lebanon, where more than 2,000 people have now been killed. And Israel is on the verge of striking Iran in response to the ballistic missiles it launched against Israel on October 1. Iran’s decision to strike Israel came after a series of increasingly aggressive Israeli escalations in Lebanon—including extensive bombardment of residential areas in Beirut—that seemed all but guaranteed to provoke an Iranian retaliation. Hezbollah officials supported multiple ceasefire offers in early October, none of which Netanyahu accepted. (The US is not currently pushing publicly for a ceasefire between Hezbollah and Israel.)

The Biden administration could use Sinwar’s death as leverage to push for an end to what is now a regional war. This would build on a letter the United States recently sent to Israel that gave Israel 30 days to allow in more humanitarian aid to Gaza, or face potential restrictions on US weapons exports to Israel. “I don’t think [the Israeli government] will be responsive to the letter,” the former Biden official said. “I don’t think they take our threat seriously. I don’t think the US government would withhold weapons. I think this is a signal that won’t be followed through on.” (Human rights groups, according to a report in Politico, voiced similar concerns that “rules don’t apply” to Israel.)

Israel has now killed the top leaders of both Hamas and Hezbollah: Hezbollah secretary-general Hassan Nasrallah was killed in an Israeli airstrike on September 27, and in July, Israeli is widely understood to have assassinated Hamas’ political chief Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran. (Haniyeh, who was Hamas’ key ceasefire negotiator, was considered to be more moderate than Sinwar.) 

Israel has reduced much of Gaza to rubble following one of the most intense aerial bombardment campaigns in modern history. The IDF has dropped at least 75,000 tons of bombs on the territory, killed at least one out of every 55 people in Gaza, and has cut off nearly all humanitarian aid. Its actions in Gaza have reportedly violated international human rights law and—along with Hamas’ actions on October 7—constitute potential war crimes in the view of the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court. A case in the International Court of Justice asserting Israel is actively committing a genocide is proceeding as well.

Both Iran and Hezbollah, which is closely aligned with Iran, have signaled they would like to avoid a full-scale war with Israel that could potentially further involve the United States. The question remains whether the Biden administration is willing to use its extensive leverage as Israel’s primary weapons supplier to force an end to the conflict. 

Update, October 17: This post has been updated to reflect a new statement from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and a new statement from Vice President Kamala Harris.

Last November, I asked Rashid Khalidi, the Edward Said professor of modern Arab studies at Columbia University and the most renowned Palestinian American historian today, about the lack of statements from President Joe Biden expressing sympathy for Palestinians. At the time, I was writing an article outlining Biden’s long-standing and unusual unwillingness to challenge Israel.

“I don’t really think he sees the Palestinians at all,” Khalidi replied. “He sees the Israelis as they are very carefully presented by their government and their massive information apparatus, which is being sucked at by every element of the mainstream media.”

The professional bluntness was typical of Khalidi. Throughout his decadeslong career as an academic and public intellectual, he has not shied away from lacerating fellow elites as he uproots deep assumptions about Israel and Palestine. In doing so, he has made himself a fitting successor to Said, the late Palestinian American literary critic his professorship was named after.

Khalidi’s 1997 book, Palestinian Identity: The Construction of Modern National Consciousness, was called a “pathbreaking work of major importance” by Said. In the early days of the ongoing war, Khalidi’s most recent book, The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine, became a New York Times bestseller. He is currently working on a study of how Ireland was a laboratory for British colonial practices that were later employed in Palestine. At the end of June, he retired and became a professor emeritus.

We spoke last Wednesday—one day after Iran launched ballistic missiles at Israel following a series of Israeli escalations—to assess the one-year mark of the current war.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

A year ago, more than 1,100 people were killed in Israel in Hamas’ October 7 attack. At least 41,000 people have been killed in Gaza in response. Now, Israel has invaded Lebanon and provoked a war with Iran, which launched ballistic missiles at Israel yesterday. A year ago, was this a nightmare scenario?

It is a nightmare scenario, but we may be at the beginning of the nightmare. This is potentially a multiyear war now. By the time this is published, we will have entered its second year. But the risks in terms of a regional confrontation are much, much greater than most people would have assessed back in October 2023. This is potentially going to be a world war, a major regional war, a multifront war. In fact, in some respects, it already is.

An article in the New York Times this morning stated that “Democrats cannot afford to be accused of restraining Israel after Tuesday’s missile attack.” The US has also said it will work with Israel to impose “severe consequences” on Iran. Are you surprised that there’s been essentially no willingness by the US to use its leverage over Israel?

I have to say I’m a little surprised. Firstly, because every earlier war, with the exception of 1948, was eventually stopped by the United States, or by the international community with the involvement of the United States, much more quickly than this one. You’ve had wars that went on for a couple of months. But eventually, after backing Israel fully, the United States stopped Israel. There’s absolutely no sign of the United States doing anything but encouraging Israel and arming and protecting them diplomatically. In historical perspective, this is unique to my knowledge.

Secondly, it is a little surprising in domestic electoral terms. I don’t think Biden and [Vice President Kamala] Harris have a whole lot to worry about on their right. People who are going to vote on this issue in one way are going to vote for [former President Donald] Trump anyway. Whereas on his left, I think one of the terrible ironies of this—we will only find this out after the election—might be that Harris loses the election because she loses Michigan. Because she lost young people and Arabs and Muslims.

To the left, there’s a huge void where some people are going to hold their noses and vote for Harris. But some people will not vote for her under any circumstances. And if that tips the margin in favor of Trump, it will be one of the most colossal failures of the Democratic Party leadership in modern history to not understand that there’s lots of space to their left and there’s no space to their right. They have hewed right, right, right on this—at least publicly. Personally, I don’t understand that electoral calculation. 

I also go back to the first thing I said: I don’t understand how the United States doesn’t see that the expansion of this war is extremely harmful to any possible definition of American national interests. 

What do you think the Biden administration and its supporters fail to understand in terms of the cost to the United States of enabling this war?

The administration and the entire American elite is in another place from Americans, who reject the Biden policy, want a ceasefire, and are opposed to continuing to arm Israel. That’s the problem. You have this cork in the bottle. The bottle has changed. The cork hasn’t. 

The media elites, the university and foundation elites, the corporate elites, the donor class, the leaderships of the political parties, and the foreign policy establishment are way out in right field and are completely supportive of whatever Israel does. They back Israel to the hilt—whatever it does. And you are getting the same kind of mindless drivel in the foreign policy world about an opportunity for “remaking the Middle East” that we got before the 2003 Iraq fiasco. 

Israel killed the guy they were negotiating with in Tehran—[Ismail] Haniyeh. They don’t say anything. You want a ceasefire? Haniyeh allegedly wanted a ceasefire. Israel goes and kills the guy in Tehran. The US doesn’t say anything. Not a peep. This is a high-level provocation. 

[Harris] and the Democratic Party establishment have obviously made a decision that they can spit at young people who feel strongly about this.

You’re trying to bring about a ceasefire on the Lebanese border? The Israelis kill the person they’re negotiating with. Not a peep. The US says: He was a bad guy. He killed Americans. Good thing. 

I find it mind-boggling the degree to which the elite is blind to the damage that this is clearly doing to the United States in the world and in the Middle East—and the dangers that entails. I hear not a peep out of that elite about the potential danger of Israel leading them by the nose into an American, Israeli, Iranian, Yemeni, Palestinian, Lebanese war, which has no visible end. I mean, where does this stop? 

Harris has declined to break with Biden on Israel in her public rhetoric. If she’s elected, do you expect a significant shift in her approach to Israel and Palestine?

No, I do not. She had multiple opportunities to do a Hubert Humphrey—to disassociate herself from the president who just decided not to run again. To allow a Palestinian speaker at the [Democratic National] Convention, to meet with certain people, to modulate her virulent, pro-Israel rhetoric, she hasn’t taken those opportunities. I don’t expect that she will.

She and the Democratic Party establishment have obviously made a decision that they can spit at young people who feel strongly about this. They can ignore Arabs and Muslims, and then they can win the election anyway. That seems to have been their decision. That might change if their internal polling at the end of October shows she’s losing Michigan. But it would be a little bit late.

Humphrey’s speech was on September 30. So we’re already past that.

And it was too late for Humphrey.

The main success that Biden administration officials pointed to again and again was preventing a regional war. That has now completely fallen apart. You were in Lebanon during the 1982 Israeli invasion with your kids and your wife, Mona, who was pregnant at the time. How does your personal experience of that invasion influence how you see what is happening in Lebanon today?

It’s not deja vu for me. I actually feel it’s much, much, much worse. I’m following along with all my relatives in Beirut, as I have been following along with relatives in Palestine over the past year, as they report on what’s happening to them and around them. It’s similar, but it’s a lot worse. I think my kids are going through the same thing, especially my daughters, who were little children during the ’82 war.

And all of us are sitting in safety outside the Middle East. I’m thinking of the family that we have who are still in Beirut. They’ve been through war and misery and the collapse of Lebanon and various phases of this war in the past. I know they are resilient. But it’s really hard to experience it again and again and again. They went through it in 2006 and now they’re going through it again.

It’s horrifying that nobody seems to read history or understand that no good can come from this. Leave aside good for the Lebanese—obviously, nobody in the Western elite cares about the Lebanese or the Palestinians. There’s a degree of insensitivity, which is shocking, but we’re used to it. But nobody even cares about the Israelis. They are putting their head into a buzz saw in both Gaza and Lebanon: a tunnel without end.

What do the Americans think they are doing, pushing, allowing, arming Israel to do this vis-à-vis Iran, vis-à-vis Yemen, vis-à-vis Lebanon, vis-à-vis the Palestinians? Where does this end for Israel? They are getting themselves into a minefield out of which they will not be able to extract themselves without enormous, terrible results for them—and obviously infinitely more devastating results for Lebanon and the Palestinians. 

I don’t understand the blindness of the United States in basically encouraging Israel to commit harakiri. This cannot end well for them. It’s not going to end well for anyone else. I’m not minimizing the horror. It’s going to end worse, obviously, for Palestinians and Lebanese. But what can they possibly be thinking in Washington? Or, for that matter, in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem?

Perhaps the most horrifying result of the 1982 invasion was Sabra and Shatila, when Israeli soldiers assisted Lebanese Christian militants as they slaughtered thousands of Palestinian and Lebanese Muslims inside the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps. You and your family were staying in a faculty apartment that Malcolm Kerr had found for you after American and international troops pulled out of Beirut. Could you talk about what you saw from the balcony of that apartment?

What we witnessed was the Israeli military firing illumination shells over Sabra and Shatila after they had introduced militias that they paid and armed to kill people on the basis of an agreement between [Israeli Defense Minster Ariel] Sharon and the Lebanese forces. We were a little shocked because the fighting had stopped a couple of days before. The Israelis had occupied West Beirut. There were no Palestinian military forces at all in Beirut. No fighters, no units, nothing. The camps were defenseless, and the Americans had promised the PLO that they would protect the civilian populations left behind when the PLO evacuated its forces. 

So, we were quite perplexed. What is going with these illumination shells being fired when it seemed completely quiet? We went to bed not knowing the massacre had started. When we woke up, we found out from Jon Randall and Loren Jenkins, who were working for the Washington Post, what they had just seen.

When we spoke in November, you held up your phone so that I could hear pro-Palestine demonstrations passing by you in Morningside Heights. Edward Said had the opposite experience decades before.

He said he was radicalized by being in New York during the 1967 Arab-Israeli War and talked about hearing someone in Morningside Heights ask, How are we doing? It drove home that Arabs and Palestinians effectively did not exist. What do you make of the significance of that shift?

I was in New York in June 1967, and I remember people collecting money for Israel in bedsheets outside Grand Central station. The same fervor that Edward witnessed, I witnessed in ’67. There’s been an enormous shift in American public opinion. The polling numbers are unequivocally opposed to this war, opposed to Biden’s policy, opposed to continuing to arm Israel.

We’ve seen it on campus. The campus has been shut down in response to last year’s protests. We call it Fortress Columbia. You can’t get a journalist onto the campus without two days’ notice, and even then, it doesn’t work. Columbia has sealed the campus and installed checkpoints to prevent the people of the neighborhood from walking across the campus on what should be a public thoroughfare on 116th Street. 

The protest movement has been shut down by repression, but the sentiment is I’m sure still there. Most young people have an entirely different view of this war—and of Palestine and Israel—than their grandparents have. The difference is enormous and striking, and I think it may be growing. The invasion of Lebanon will do nothing to change the way people see things. I think it will just reinforce it.

I’ve seen a sea change in the past couple of decades that I was at Columbia. I arrived there in 2003, and sentiment was not favorable to Palestine overall. I still had the sense that I had when I was an undergraduate many decades ago that I was swimming against the tide of opinion among students and faculty. That’s not the case anymore. Two-thirds of the arts and sciences faculty voted no confidence in the president because of her position on the protests. I couldn’t have imagined something like that happening 25 years ago.

Do you ever fear that the shift is arriving too late? That by the time America potentially decides to hold Israel accountable, there might not be a Palestine left to save because the West Bank has been annexed and Gaza has been leveled?

Gaza has been leveled, and the West Bank has long since been annexed. It’s been incorporated into Israel in practice for decades. Israeli law operates in the West Bank for Israelis only. Palestinians are being squeezed into smaller and smaller Bantustans, and Israel is encouraging them to leave. But that doesn’t mean that Palestine is gone. You still have as many Palestinians as Israelis within the frontiers of Palestine. That’s not going to change. 

They still have a problem. How do you establish an entity involving Jewish supremacy in a country where at least half of the population are not Jews? I don’t see how they get out of that conundrum just because they’ve devastated Gaza or just because they’ve annexed the West Bank. 

They’ve created that conundrum and there’s no way out for them. They either entirely annihilate the Palestinian population or drive it out, which I don’t think is possible in the 21st century, at least I hope not, or they come to terms with it. They’re not willing to do that right now. They’re even less willing to do that after October 7. Public opinion has hardened in Israel for reasons that are perfectly understandable.

But do I see that this is too late? No. I worry that no matter how consequential the shift in public opinion is, the elite will hold on stubbornly. And that it will take even longer than it took for public opinion opposing the Iraq war or public opinion opposing the Vietnam War to force elites that were dedicated and committed to mindless, aggressive wars abroad to finally change their course. It took years and years on Vietnam, and it took years and years on Iraq.

That’s what I’m afraid of—that the anti-democratic intent of the elite, and of the party leaderships, of the foreign policy establishment, and of the donor class will prevent a shift for many more years than should be the case. If we had a really democratic system, if we had a system where public opinion had as much of an effect as money—which it doesn’t, unfortunately—then you would have seen a change already. There’s no indication that there will be a change for quite a while, regardless of who is elected in November.

A consequence of timing this interview to coincide with the one-year mark of the war is that it can obscure what came before. How should the reality of daily life in Gaza in the decades leading up to October 7 shape how we understand what has happened in the past year?

The people who have been fighting Israel in Gaza, for the most part, are people who grew up as children under this prison camp regime imposed on them by the Israelis and on the southern border by the Egyptians. Most of them have never been allowed to leave Gaza. Most of them have had all kinds of restrictions on everything they can do and buy and say for their entire lives. And they’ve lived under an authoritarian Hamas regime, which was quite unpopular in Gaza before October 7. 

The people who have been fighting the Israelis are the people who Israel’s prison camp has created. And what Israel has done in the last year is far, far worse than anything it did in the preceding 17 years of the blockade. They killed over 2,300 people in 2014. They’ve killed probably well over 50,000 in the past year, if we count those buried under the rubble. The number is 41,600 as of today. The numbers are hard to process.

The kids growing up now are going to be the successors to today’s fighters, given that nobody’s offering them a future, given that they’re going to live in misery for a decade if not longer, given that Israel will dominate their lives in even more intense ways than it had before. The people who grow up in that situation—some of them are going to turn into even more ferocious fighters resisting Israel.

The same thing is happening in South Lebanon. People grew up in South Lebanon being bombarded by Israel, and they became the fighters in the ’82 war. There’s a picture of [former Hezbollah leader Hassan] Nasrallah fighting in ’82 as a young man. That experience of constant Israeli attacks and the occupations of South Lebanon in ’78 and ’82 created Hezbollah. Even Ehud Barak admitted as much. 

I’ve seen not one mention of the fact that the United States helped Israel kill 19,000 people in Lebanon in 1982. And that might have been a factor as important as what Israel was doing in creating Hezbollah and in it turning against the United States. They considered the United States responsible for Sabra and Shatila because it had promised to protect the civilians—that no harm would come to the civilians the PLO left behind. 

I fear that the United States’ full-throated support for what Israel is doing may have the same effect in the 2020s and 2030s, unfortunately. I’m not happy about any of this. I consider all of these things disastrous. But I’m looking at them coldly. The things that I’m talking about have produced what has passed, and what we’re seeing now will produce, heaven forbid, possibly even more horrible things in the future. Those who don’t read history and don’t understand history are condemned to repeat it, but in a much worse way, I’m afraid. 

There appears to be a bullet lodged in Tim Sheehy’s right forearm. That is not in dispute. But how and when it got there has become the subject of an ongoing mystery that has dogged the campaign of the former Navy SEAL challenging Sen. Jon Tester (D-Mont.) in one of this election cycle’s most high-stakes races.

The question of how Sheehy was shot first came up last spring in a Washington Post exposé by Liz Goodwin who reported that Sheehy had said on the campaign trail he has a “bullet stuck” in his right arm from his time serving in Afghanistan. The problem was that Sheehy had told a National Park Service ranger in 2015 that the bullet wound in his right arm came from him accidentally shooting himself with a Colt .45 revolver while in Glacier National Park.

When confronted with these incompatible stories, Sheehy told the Post that his original story was a lie designed to protect former platoon-mates who may have shot him in a friendly fire incident in Afghanistan in 2012. Sheehy said that, in reality, he’d ended up in the emergency room in 2015 after falling on a hike. A park ranger, in this version of the story, was summoned to the hospital because Sheehy told the staff there that he had a bullet in his arm.

Sheey’s account should be easy to substantiate. Medical records would presumably show whether he arrived at the hospital with a fresh bullet wound or an injury sustained from a fall. The medical professionals who treated him could potentially recall what happened. A family member who was with him that day could back up his story. But Sheehy has not released records or made available any witnesses of the 2015 incident who could backup his version of events.

Sheehy, 38, is a first-time candidate who, until recently, ran a wildfire firefighting company that is struggling financially. He has been endorsed by Donald Trump and was seen as a top recruit by Senate Republicans. His background as a millennial former SEAL, Purple Heart recipient, and wealthy businessman who was largely free of MAGA baggage was seen as perfect for taking on Tester, who was first elected in 2006. Polls now show him leading Tester in a race that is crucial for determining which party controls the Senate.

In terms of medical records, the Sheehy campaign only shared an X-ray with the Post that it provided on the condition that the image not be published. Doctors who reviewed it for the paper concluded that it does not provide strong support for Sheehy’s story that a “friendly ricochet bullet” hit him in Afghanistan:

The image probably depicts a bullet, but it is not possible to tell what type of weapon it came from nor the age of the wound, said Joseph V. Sakran, a trauma surgeon at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, who reviewed the X-ray at the request of The Post. Thomas J. Esposito, a professor at the University of Illinois College of Medicine in Peoria who has spent 30 years as a trauma surgeon, said that the X-ray looks like an injury from a low-velocity firearm, such as a handgun, and that he found it “doubtful” the bullet was the result of ricochet from an assault weapon because of the smoothness of its edges.

Sheehy’s campaign told the Post back in April that he had requested medical records from the hospital visit but had not yet been able to obtain them. Later that month, the campaign declined to comment about the status of that request and referred the paper to Sheehy’s lawyer, Daniel Watkins of Meier Watkins Phillips Pusch. The statement Watkins provided claimed that the “released reports corroborate the information we have provided, and they confirm Mr. Sheehy’s recollection of what took place.” The information provided—that is, the X-ray—does not confirm Sheehy’s account.

One piece of evidence in favor of Sheehy’s current story is that a weapons expert interviewed by the Post said it was “very unlikely” that the gun would have misfired after being dropped. The emergency room that Sheehy went to was about two hours away from where he initially said he shot himself. That, along with the fact that Sheehy appears to have been discharged from the hospital relatively quickly, could also support the claim that he did not arrive at the hospital with a fresh gunshot wound.

I reached out to Sheehy’s campaign on September 3 asking if they would be able to provide any more records to support the candidate’s account, or if they would make someone available to to defend Sheehy’s story on or off-the-record. The campaign did not respond to the email or a follow-up sent last week.

On Wednesday, I emailed Watkins, who, according to his official bio, is a “nationally ranked trial lawyer and reputation counselor specializing in high-stakes crisis and defamation cases.” Watkins confirmed that he is representing Sheehy, and asked to review the request I sent to the campaign. He did not respond after receiving it.

Another problem for Sheehy is the length he went to substantiate his original story in 2015. As the Post reported in its April follow-up, Sheehy hand wrote and signed a detailed statement that explains how he shot himself. “Upon finishing our hike at Logan’s Pass while reloading our vehicle, an improperly placed firearm kept in the vehicle for bear protection fell out and discharged into my right forearm,” he wrote. “We fully cooperated with Ranger [name redacted in document] after he called the ER and agreed to pay the $500.00 fine before leaving the hospital.” Sheehy (who was fined for discharging a firearm in a national park) went on to “request leniency with any charges related to this unfortunate accident” due to his “security clearance and involvement with national defense related contracts.”

Sheehy’s 2015 account fits with a statement of probable cause that the park ranger signed under penalty of perjury shortly after the incident. According to that statement, the ranger was already on the way to Logan Pass in response to the report of a gunshot when he learned that Sheehy was in the Kalispell hospital emergency room. That timeline is supported by a second statement from the park ranger that explained that he initially responded to the incident after a “park visitor called park dispatch” to report that a gun had been accidentally fired.

When interviewed by the Post on the condition of anonymity, the ranger, a Marine Corps veteran, said he was surprised to hear that Sheehy is now claiming to have lied to him in 2015. He recalled Sheehy showing him the weapon at the time and him seeing that it was fully loaded aside from one bullet. “I don’t in any way impugn the law enforcement officer,” Sheehy told the Post about the ranger’s written account. “Everything he says is true to the extent of his knowledge.”

As the Post noted, lying to a park ranger is a crime, although the statute of limitations has now expired. According to his current story, Sheehy lied out of a selfless desire to protect former platoon-mates from an investigation that experts say was highly unlikely to have been triggered by him saying he had been hit by friendly fire years before.

This doesn’t have to be this complicated. Sheehy just needs to release the medical records. He won’t. Which begs the question: Why not?

There appears to be a bullet lodged in Tim Sheehy’s right forearm. That is not in dispute. But how and when it got there has become the subject of an ongoing mystery that has dogged the campaign of the former Navy SEAL challenging Sen. Jon Tester (D-Mont.) in one of this election cycle’s most high-stakes races.

The question of how Sheehy was shot first came up last spring in a Washington Post exposé by Liz Goodwin who reported that Sheehy had said on the campaign trail he has a “bullet stuck” in his right arm from his time serving in Afghanistan. The problem was that Sheehy had told a National Park Service ranger in 2015 that the bullet wound in his right arm came from him accidentally shooting himself with a Colt .45 revolver while in Glacier National Park.

When confronted with these incompatible stories, Sheehy told the Post that his original story was a lie designed to protect former platoon-mates who may have shot him in a friendly fire incident in Afghanistan in 2012. Sheehy said that, in reality, he’d ended up in the emergency room in 2015 after falling on a hike. A park ranger, in this version of the story, was summoned to the hospital because Sheehy told the staff there that he had a bullet in his arm.

Sheey’s account should be easy to substantiate. Medical records would presumably show whether he arrived at the hospital with a fresh bullet wound or an injury sustained from a fall. The medical professionals who treated him could potentially recall what happened. A family member who was with him that day could back up his story. But Sheehy has not released records or made available any witnesses of the 2015 incident who could backup his version of events.

Sheehy, 38, is a first-time candidate who, until recently, ran a wildfire firefighting company that is struggling financially. He has been endorsed by Donald Trump and was seen as a top recruit by Senate Republicans. His background as a millennial former SEAL, Purple Heart recipient, and wealthy businessman who was largely free of MAGA baggage was seen as perfect for taking on Tester, who was first elected in 2006. Polls now show him leading Tester in a race that is crucial for determining which party controls the Senate.

In terms of medical records, the Sheehy campaign only shared an X-ray with the Post that it provided on the condition that the image not be published. Doctors who reviewed it for the paper concluded that it does not provide strong support for Sheehy’s story that a “friendly ricochet bullet” hit him in Afghanistan:

The image probably depicts a bullet, but it is not possible to tell what type of weapon it came from nor the age of the wound, said Joseph V. Sakran, a trauma surgeon at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, who reviewed the X-ray at the request of The Post. Thomas J. Esposito, a professor at the University of Illinois College of Medicine in Peoria who has spent 30 years as a trauma surgeon, said that the X-ray looks like an injury from a low-velocity firearm, such as a handgun, and that he found it “doubtful” the bullet was the result of ricochet from an assault weapon because of the smoothness of its edges.

Sheehy’s campaign told the Post back in April that he had requested medical records from the hospital visit but had not yet been able to obtain them. Later that month, the campaign declined to comment about the status of that request and referred the paper to Sheehy’s lawyer, Daniel Watkins of Meier Watkins Phillips Pusch. The statement Watkins provided claimed that the “released reports corroborate the information we have provided, and they confirm Mr. Sheehy’s recollection of what took place.” The information provided—that is, the X-ray—does not confirm Sheehy’s account.

One piece of evidence in favor of Sheehy’s current story is that a weapons expert interviewed by the Post said it was “very unlikely” that the gun would have misfired after being dropped. The emergency room that Sheehy went to was about two hours away from where he initially said he shot himself. That, along with the fact that Sheehy appears to have been discharged from the hospital relatively quickly, could also support the claim that he did not arrive at the hospital with a fresh gunshot wound.

I reached out to Sheehy’s campaign on September 3 asking if they would be able to provide any more records to support the candidate’s account, or if they would make someone available to to defend Sheehy’s story on or off-the-record. The campaign did not respond to the email or a follow-up sent last week.

On Wednesday, I emailed Watkins, who, according to his official bio, is a “nationally ranked trial lawyer and reputation counselor specializing in high-stakes crisis and defamation cases.” Watkins confirmed that he is representing Sheehy, and asked to review the request I sent to the campaign. He did not respond after receiving it.

Another problem for Sheehy is the length he went to substantiate his original story in 2015. As the Post reported in its April follow-up, Sheehy hand wrote and signed a detailed statement that explains how he shot himself. “Upon finishing our hike at Logan’s Pass while reloading our vehicle, an improperly placed firearm kept in the vehicle for bear protection fell out and discharged into my right forearm,” he wrote. “We fully cooperated with Ranger [name redacted in document] after he called the ER and agreed to pay the $500.00 fine before leaving the hospital.” Sheehy (who was fined for discharging a firearm in a national park) went on to “request leniency with any charges related to this unfortunate accident” due to his “security clearance and involvement with national defense related contracts.”

Sheehy’s 2015 account fits with a statement of probable cause that the park ranger signed under penalty of perjury shortly after the incident. According to that statement, the ranger was already on the way to Logan Pass in response to the report of a gunshot when he learned that Sheehy was in the Kalispell hospital emergency room. That timeline is supported by a second statement from the park ranger that explained that he initially responded to the incident after a “park visitor called park dispatch” to report that a gun had been accidentally fired.

When interviewed by the Post on the condition of anonymity, the ranger, a Marine Corps veteran, said he was surprised to hear that Sheehy is now claiming to have lied to him in 2015. He recalled Sheehy showing him the weapon at the time and him seeing that it was fully loaded aside from one bullet. “I don’t in any way impugn the law enforcement officer,” Sheehy told the Post about the ranger’s written account. “Everything he says is true to the extent of his knowledge.”

As the Post noted, lying to a park ranger is a crime, although the statute of limitations has now expired. According to his current story, Sheehy lied out of a selfless desire to protect former platoon-mates from an investigation that experts say was highly unlikely to have been triggered by him saying he had been hit by friendly fire years before.

This doesn’t have to be this complicated. Sheehy just needs to release the medical records. He won’t. Which begs the question: Why not?

On Wednesday afternoon, Rep. Clay Higgins (R-La.) posted a mocking, racist tweet about “wild” Haitians practicing “vudu” and flooding into the US from the “nastiest country in the western hemisphere.” Such rhetoric would be surprising for most members of Congress. In the case of Higgins, it serves as an excellent introduction.

Rep. Clay Higgins (R-La.) “put a gun to my head,” wrote an ex-wife. (A charge that Higgins denies.)

The post from Higgins, which he soon deleted, focused on the legal Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio, who Republicans continue to slander for sport and potential electoral gain.

The tweet is racist. There’s not much more to say about it. There is, however, a lot more to say about Higgins, a member of Congress whose disturbing personal history has not gotten much attention.

One of Higgins’ first appearances in the public record came in a 1992 newspaper article dug up by Bayou Brief, a Louisiana publication that has investigated the congressman. Higgins, then 30, was commenting on Pat Buchanan’s run for president, which came one year after the former Ku Klux Klan grand wizard and neo-Nazi David Duke was nearly elected governor of Louisiana.

“Duke won’t get the vote. Pat will. Pat represents much of the same positions,” Higgins explained to a reporter while attending a Buchanan rally—correctly sussing out Buchanan’s white nationalism. “Regardless of the fact that David’s a homeboy and all that, the boy’s a Nazi, and that’s a real problem.”

Still, Higgins admitted that he’d recently voted for David Duke for governor of Louisiana (a man who once decorated his college dorm room with a Nazi flag and picture of Adolf Hitler).

Higgins’ missteps have allegedly not been limited to rhetoric. The first of his three ex-wives wrote while seeking a protective order against him in 1991 that Higgins “put a gun to my head” during an argument. She explained that he “threatened that if I ever came near the house he would shoot me.” (Higgins denied ever being violent with her.)

In 2007, Higgins resigned from the Opelousas Police Department in Louisiana after reportedly assaulting an unarmed Black man and then lying about it. The victim stated that Higgins and another officer, John Chautin, attacked him after he did not consent to a search of his car, according to an internal investigation. “[The victim] stated while on the ground, Officer Higgins grabbed him by the hair and twisted his head and told him to go get his lawyer and called him a pussy,” the report explains. “[He] stated that he was then kicked while still on the ground but could not see who kicked him.” The report also says that Higgins “grabbed [the victim] by the neck and slammed him against his car” and “struck him in the jaw.”

Higgins went on to lie about the incident, falsely claiming that he was the one who was assaulted. Later, the now congressman called back the police investigator to admit he was not telling the truth. He claimed his decision for new honesty stemmed from confessing his sins to a counselor from Las Vegas. The report concluded something else: Higgins learned that a third officer, who was on the scene during the incident, had failed to cover for him and Chautin.

Higgins resigned rather than face disciplinary action. And he went on to hire Chautin in his congressional office.

Perhaps there are other incidents which we do not know about. As Higgins himself admits, he has skeletons.

“Not only did I do things wrong. You better start early, pack a lunch, and bring batteries for your flashlight if you intend to go back through my history and find everything I’ve done wrong,” he warned in a 2015 interview. “Bring a shovel. You might need an excavator.”

If you have information about Rep. Clay Higgins (R-La.), please contact Noah Lanard at nlanard@motherjones.com.

On Wednesday afternoon, Rep. Clay Higgins (R-La.) posted a mocking, racist tweet about “wild” Haitians practicing “vudu” and flooding into the US from the “nastiest country in the western hemisphere.” Such rhetoric would be surprising for most members of Congress. In the case of Higgins, it serves as an excellent introduction.

Rep. Clay Higgins (R-La.) “put a gun to my head,” wrote an ex-wife. (A charge that Higgins denies.)

The post from Higgins, which he soon deleted, focused on the legal Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio, who Republicans continue to slander for sport and potential electoral gain.

The tweet is racist. There’s not much more to say about it. There is, however, a lot more to say about Higgins, a member of Congress whose disturbing personal history has not gotten much attention.

One of Higgins’ first appearances in the public record came in a 1992 newspaper article dug up by Bayou Brief, a Louisiana publication that has investigated the congressman. Higgins, then 30, was commenting on Pat Buchanan’s run for president, which came one year after the former Ku Klux Klan grand wizard and neo-Nazi David Duke was nearly elected governor of Louisiana.

“Duke won’t get the vote. Pat will. Pat represents much of the same positions,” Higgins explained to a reporter while attending a Buchanan rally—correctly sussing out Buchanan’s white nationalism. “Regardless of the fact that David’s a homeboy and all that, the boy’s a Nazi, and that’s a real problem.”

Still, Higgins admitted that he’d recently voted for David Duke for governor of Louisiana (a man who once decorated his college dorm room with a Nazi flag and picture of Adolf Hitler).

Higgins’ missteps have allegedly not been limited to rhetoric. The first of his three ex-wives wrote while seeking a protective order against him in 1991 that Higgins “put a gun to my head” during an argument. She explained that he “threatened that if I ever came near the house he would shoot me.” (Higgins denied ever being violent with her.)

In 2007, Higgins resigned from the Opelousas Police Department in Louisiana after reportedly assaulting an unarmed Black man and then lying about it. The victim stated that Higgins and another officer, John Chautin, attacked him after he did not consent to a search of his car, according to an internal investigation. “[The victim] stated while on the ground, Officer Higgins grabbed him by the hair and twisted his head and told him to go get his lawyer and called him a pussy,” the report explains. “[He] stated that he was then kicked while still on the ground but could not see who kicked him.” The report also says that Higgins “grabbed [the victim] by the neck and slammed him against his car” and “struck him in the jaw.”

Higgins went on to lie about the incident, falsely claiming that he was the one who was assaulted. Later, the now congressman called back the police investigator to admit he was not telling the truth. He claimed his decision for new honesty stemmed from confessing his sins to a counselor from Las Vegas. The report concluded something else: Higgins learned that a third officer, who was on the scene during the incident, had failed to cover for him and Chautin.

Higgins resigned rather than face disciplinary action. And he went on to hire Chautin in his congressional office.

Perhaps there are other incidents which we do not know about. As Higgins himself admits, he has skeletons.

“Not only did I do things wrong. You better start early, pack a lunch, and bring batteries for your flashlight if you intend to go back through my history and find everything I’ve done wrong,” he warned in a 2015 interview. “Bring a shovel. You might need an excavator.”

If you have information about Rep. Clay Higgins (R-La.), please contact Noah Lanard at nlanard@motherjones.com.

When President Joe Biden first joined the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 1975, it was taken as a sign that the 32-year-old legislator was “ticketed for a bright future.” The assumption proved correct. Although it took decades, Biden did ascend the ladder of American power—rising to chair of that committee to vice president and, finally, to the presidency. As Biden climbed, he was not shy about selling himself as a master statesman and an expert on foreign policy. While running for president in 2007, he made that experience central to his case for why Democrats should back him over Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.

In theory, the speech that Biden gave on Tuesday morning to the United Nations General Assembly—the last of his career before the body—was the end of this triumphant arc. An American president opining, at the end of his reign, on his record within a favored policy arena.

Instead, the timing of the UN speech highlighted one of the central failures of his presidency: Biden’s inability to restore even a semblance of calm between Israel and its neighbors in the wake of the October 7 attack by Hamas. As if to rub it in, Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu posted a video on social media during the speech in which he vowed to continue the bombing in Lebanon that Biden tried in vain to prevent.

Since October 7, the Biden administration’s overarching diplomatic priority in the Middle East has been to prevent a broader regional war. The president sent top level envoys and military officials to the region countless times in service of that goal. He dispatched carrier strike groups to signal to Iran and its proxies that the United States was prepared to defend Israel. He agreed to almost all of Israel’s requests for weapons and diplomatic cover—partly out of a misguided belief that doing so would give the administration the ability to shape Israel’s actions.

While it has been clear for most of the past year that his approach has failed in Gaza—where more than 41,000 people have been killed and nearly 100,000 people have been injured—the Biden administration has clung, as ceasefire talks fell apart, to the victory of Israel not starting a massive regional conflict. Now, even that tiny glimmer of a win has faded.

In the past week, Biden’s efforts in Lebanon have fallen apart. The signs that Israel was headed toward war began in earnest last week when it made a central goal of its military campaign to return residents that had evacuated out of the north to their homes. One day later, it began detonating thousands of pagers sent to members of Hezbollah in what even centrist American officials like former Defense Secretary Leon Panetta have called an act of terrorism. On Friday, it launched an airstrike in Beirut targeting senior Hezbollah commanders that killed at least 50 people.

Despite this, during the speech, Biden reiterated his longstanding position that it is “not in anyone’s interest” for there to be a full-scale war in the region. “Even as the situation has escalated, a diplomatic solution is still possible,” he continued. “In fact, it remains the only path to lasting security…That’s what we’re working tirelessly to achieve.”

Israel clearly disagrees. Monday was the deadliest day in Lebanon since at least 1990. Israeli airstrikes throughout the country killed more than 550 people—including at least 144 women and children—and injured more than 1,800, according to the Lebanese health ministry. (By population, this is equivalent to the United States suffering roughly 150,000 casualties in a single day; there were less than half as many US casualties during the entirety of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.) 

Israel’s assault shows no sign of letting up. In his Tuesday post, Netanyahu pledged to continue the bombing and said “anybody who has a missile in their living room will not have a home.” Hezbollah has responded by launching rockets into Israel.

Another US goal of the Biden administration has been a ceasefire between Hamas and Israel, which has also fallen apart. In private, even Biden’s own officials now say that is unlikely to happen during his presidency. Netanyahu seems to have no interest in a ceasefire partly because it would cost him the support of the far-right Jewish supremacists in his cabinet and potentially bring down his governing coalition.

Biden detailed the horrors of Hamas’ October 7 attack on Tuesday before making clear that the families of Israeli hostages he has met with are “going through hell.” He added that “innocent civilians in Gaza are also going through hell” as evidenced by the “thousands and thousands” of people who have been killed. “Now is the time” for Israel and Hamas to agree to a ceasefire that ends the war,” Biden said.

But his administration has proven to be almost completely unwilling to use the United States’ substantial leverage to push Israel to change course. As a result, Biden has been repeatedly and publicly humiliated by Netanyahu, an ostensible ally who is believed to want Donald Trump to beat Biden’s Vice President Kamala Harris in November.

Throughout the speech, Biden made a point of defending the UN Charter and his efforts to uphold it. “The Security Council, like the UN itself, needs to go back to the job of making peace—of brokering deals to end wars and suffering,” the president argued. It is a noble goal but it almost surely rang hollow to the diplomats and heads of state in attendance. 

Over the past year, Biden’s UN Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield has consistently vetoed Security Council resolutions designed to hold Israel accountable and end the war. In April, the United States was the only Security Council member to veto a resolution that recommended that Palestine be admitted as a member of the UN. In December, it was one of 10 out of 186 nations to oppose a ceasefire resolution. No other major powers joined it in doing so. (On Tuesday, ProPublica reported that Secretary of State Antony Blinken, a longtime Biden aide, rejected US government reports that found that Israel deliberately blocked humanitarian aid to Gaza—a conclusion that could have forced the United States to cut off military aid.)

The United States is not the only nation to use its Security Council position to run interference for violent and illiberal actions. China and Russia do the same. The difference is that Biden wanted to be seen as a champion of a “rules-based” order that respected international law and prioritized humanitarian concerns. His actions in relation to Israel and Palestine do not fit with such a goal. If Biden is aware of the tension, he did not mention it on Tuesday. 

When President Joe Biden first joined the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 1975, it was taken as a sign that the 32-year-old legislator was “ticketed for a bright future.” The assumption proved correct. Although it took decades, Biden did ascend the ladder of American power—rising to chair of that committee to vice president and, finally, to the presidency. As Biden climbed, he was not shy about selling himself as a master statesman and an expert on foreign policy. While running for president in 2007, he made that experience central to his case for why Democrats should back him over Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.

In theory, the speech that Biden gave on Tuesday morning to the United Nations General Assembly—the last of his career before the body—was the end of this triumphant arc. An American president opining, at the end of his reign, on his record within a favored policy arena.

Instead, the timing of the UN speech highlighted one of the central failures of his presidency: Biden’s inability to restore even a semblance of calm between Israel and its neighbors in the wake of the October 7 attack by Hamas. As if to rub it in, Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu posted a video on social media during the speech in which he vowed to continue the bombing in Lebanon that Biden tried in vain to prevent.

Since October 7, the Biden administration’s overarching diplomatic priority in the Middle East has been to prevent a broader regional war. The president sent top level envoys and military officials to the region countless times in service of that goal. He dispatched carrier strike groups to signal to Iran and its proxies that the United States was prepared to defend Israel. He agreed to almost all of Israel’s requests for weapons and diplomatic cover—partly out of a misguided belief that doing so would give the administration the ability to shape Israel’s actions.

While it has been clear for most of the past year that his approach has failed in Gaza—where more than 41,000 people have been killed and nearly 100,000 people have been injured—the Biden administration has clung, as ceasefire talks fell apart, to the victory of Israel not starting a massive regional conflict. Now, even that tiny glimmer of a win has faded.

In the past week, Biden’s efforts in Lebanon have fallen apart. The signs that Israel was headed toward war began in earnest last week when it made a central goal of its military campaign to return residents that had evacuated out of the north to their homes. One day later, it began detonating thousands of pagers sent to members of Hezbollah in what even centrist American officials like former Defense Secretary Leon Panetta have called an act of terrorism. On Friday, it launched an airstrike in Beirut targeting senior Hezbollah commanders that killed at least 50 people.

Despite this, during the speech, Biden reiterated his longstanding position that it is “not in anyone’s interest” for there to be a full-scale war in the region. “Even as the situation has escalated, a diplomatic solution is still possible,” he continued. “In fact, it remains the only path to lasting security…That’s what we’re working tirelessly to achieve.”

Israel clearly disagrees. Monday was the deadliest day in Lebanon since at least 1990. Israeli airstrikes throughout the country killed more than 550 people—including at least 144 women and children—and injured more than 1,800, according to the Lebanese health ministry. (By population, this is equivalent to the United States suffering roughly 150,000 casualties in a single day; there were less than half as many US casualties during the entirety of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.) 

Israel’s assault shows no sign of letting up. In his Tuesday post, Netanyahu pledged to continue the bombing and said “anybody who has a missile in their living room will not have a home.” Hezbollah has responded by launching rockets into Israel.

Another US goal of the Biden administration has been a ceasefire between Hamas and Israel, which has also fallen apart. In private, even Biden’s own officials now say that is unlikely to happen during his presidency. Netanyahu seems to have no interest in a ceasefire partly because it would cost him the support of the far-right Jewish supremacists in his cabinet and potentially bring down his governing coalition.

Biden detailed the horrors of Hamas’ October 7 attack on Tuesday before making clear that the families of Israeli hostages he has met with are “going through hell.” He added that “innocent civilians in Gaza are also going through hell” as evidenced by the “thousands and thousands” of people who have been killed. “Now is the time” for Israel and Hamas to agree to a ceasefire that ends the war,” Biden said.

But his administration has proven to be almost completely unwilling to use the United States’ substantial leverage to push Israel to change course. As a result, Biden has been repeatedly and publicly humiliated by Netanyahu, an ostensible ally who is believed to want Donald Trump to beat Biden’s Vice President Kamala Harris in November.

Throughout the speech, Biden made a point of defending the UN Charter and his efforts to uphold it. “The Security Council, like the UN itself, needs to go back to the job of making peace—of brokering deals to end wars and suffering,” the president argued. It is a noble goal but it almost surely rang hollow to the diplomats and heads of state in attendance. 

Over the past year, Biden’s UN Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield has consistently vetoed Security Council resolutions designed to hold Israel accountable and end the war. In April, the United States was the only Security Council member to veto a resolution that recommended that Palestine be admitted as a member of the UN. In December, it was one of 10 out of 186 nations to oppose a ceasefire resolution. No other major powers joined it in doing so. (On Tuesday, ProPublica reported that Secretary of State Antony Blinken, a longtime Biden aide, rejected US government reports that found that Israel deliberately blocked humanitarian aid to Gaza—a conclusion that could have forced the United States to cut off military aid.)

The United States is not the only nation to use its Security Council position to run interference for violent and illiberal actions. China and Russia do the same. The difference is that Biden wanted to be seen as a champion of a “rules-based” order that respected international law and prioritized humanitarian concerns. His actions in relation to Israel and Palestine do not fit with such a goal. If Biden is aware of the tension, he did not mention it on Tuesday. 

This February, President Joe Biden was eating an ice cream cone with Late Night host Seth Meyers in Manhattan when a reporter asked about the chances of a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas. “Well,” Biden replied, prompting breaking news posts, “I hope, by the end of the weekend.” The president then assured the public: “We’re close.”

Nearly seven months later, no ceasefire is in sight. On Thursday, the Wall Street Journal reported that multiple US officials told the paper that there is little chance of a ceasefire.

The report continued a horrific week for Biden’s foreign policy record in the Middle East. Each of the past five days has brought its own grim news about the vanishing chances of peace in the region:

Monday: Israel formally expanded its war aims to include the return of residents evacuated out of the north. Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said the “possibility for an agreement is running out” with Hezbollah. Gallant explained, “Therefore, the only way left to ensure the return of Israel’s northern communities to their homes will be via military action.” It suggested a much heightened potential for a wider war between Lebanon and Israel.

Tuesday: Israel began detonating explosive-rigged pagers and walkie-talkies in an attack that targeted members of Hezbollah, the Iran-backed political and militant group. Axios reported that US officials were not warned of the operation. The indiscriminate approach killed dozens—including at least two children—and injured thousands. In doing so, Israel greatly increased the odds of a regional war (that the United States does not want to be dragged into).

Wednesday: Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman said that his kingdom will not normalize relations with Israel without the “establishment of a Palestinian state.” The announcement appeared to kill off any chance of success for a years-long (and widely criticized) effort by the Biden administration to normalize relations between Saudi Arabia and Israel, while largely sidestepping the concerns of Palestinians. That effort had begun under the Trump administration in the much touted Abraham Accords that the former president’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, had helped broker.

Thursday: A Wall Street Journal story headlined “US Officials Concede Gaza Cease-Fire Out of Reach for Biden,” cited senior US officials who have concluded that a ceasefire deal is unlikely during Biden’s presidency. “No deal is imminent,” one said. “I’m not sure it ever gets done.”

Friday: Israel killed at least 12 people in an airstrike in Beirut targeting senior Hezbollah commanders. As Gallant made clear earlier in the week in reference to Lebanon, “we are at the start of a new phase in the war” and the “center of gravity is moving north.”

Initially, one of the few bright spots of Biden’s approach was that no regional war had broken out. The recent Israeli assaults in Lebanon, along with Gallant’s comments about a “new phase” of the war, suggest that may soon change. For Netanyahu, who is widely believed to favor a second Donald Trump presidency, a new phase of conflict that makes a Biden-Harris administration look ineffectual just as some Americans begin voting may carry additional rewards.

This string of havoc was all, sadly, predictable. In response to the brutal Hamas attack on October 7, Biden embraced what was labeled a “bear hug” approach to his relationship with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. In keeping with a decades-old personal approach for managing relations with Israel, he made sure there was “no daylight” between him and the Israeli Prime Minister in public. Biden thought it would allow him to shape the direction of the war in private.

Without US weapons, Israeli military experts have made clear that the country would not be able to carry on fighting at such scale.

Biden’s faith in a no daylight approach had been repeatedly disproven prior to October 7 but he stuck with it anyway. That decision reflected an effectively limitless commitment to supporting Israel. As I reported in December on the roots of Biden’s flawed response to the war, his Israel record was unusual:

Biden has long gone further than many of his fellow Democrats in defense of Israel. As a senator, he backed moving the American embassy to Jerusalem decades before Donald Trump made that a reality, boasted about attending more fundraisers for the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) than any other senator, and savaged an effort by George H.W. Bush to push Israel toward negotiating with Palestinians. As vice president, he undercut Barack Obama’s efforts to push Israel toward peace. As president prior to October 7, he continued policies implemented by Trump that sidelined Palestinians.

The death toll in Gaza stood at around 20,000 when that story came out. It is now double that, and the full death toll may prove far higher. Nearly 100,000 people have been injured. Israeli hostages remain in captivity in large part due to Netanyahu’s repeated efforts to derail ceasefire negotiations.

What has not changed is Biden’s almost complete unwillingness to use the United States’ extensive leverage over Israel. Aside from some 2,000-pound bombs, his administration has ensured that arms keep flowing. That decision has been made despite substantial evidence that doing so violates US laws that prevent weapons from being sent to foreign units implicated in major human rights violations. Without US weapons, Israeli military experts have made clear that the country would not be able to carry on fighting at such scale.

This February, President Joe Biden was eating an ice cream cone with Late Night host Seth Meyers in Manhattan when a reporter asked about the chances of a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas. “Well,” Biden replied, prompting breaking news posts, “I hope, by the end of the weekend.” The president then assured the public: “We’re close.”

Nearly seven months later, no ceasefire is in sight. On Thursday, the Wall Street Journal reported that multiple US officials told the paper that there is little chance of a ceasefire.

The report continued a horrific week for Biden’s foreign policy record in the Middle East. Each of the past five days has brought its own grim news about the vanishing chances of peace in the region:

Monday: Israel formally expanded its war aims to include the return of residents evacuated out of the north. Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said the “possibility for an agreement is running out” with Hezbollah. Gallant explained, “Therefore, the only way left to ensure the return of Israel’s northern communities to their homes will be via military action.” It suggested a much heightened potential for a wider war between Lebanon and Israel.

Tuesday: Israel began detonating explosive-rigged pagers and walkie-talkies in an attack that targeted members of Hezbollah, the Iran-backed political and militant group. Axios reported that US officials were not warned of the operation. The indiscriminate approach killed dozens—including at least two children—and injured thousands. In doing so, Israel greatly increased the odds of a regional war (that the United States does not want to be dragged into).

Wednesday: Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman said that his kingdom will not normalize relations with Israel without the “establishment of a Palestinian state.” The announcement appeared to kill off any chance of success for a years-long (and widely criticized) effort by the Biden administration to normalize relations between Saudi Arabia and Israel, while largely sidestepping the concerns of Palestinians. That effort had begun under the Trump administration in the much touted Abraham Accords that the former president’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, had helped broker.

Thursday: A Wall Street Journal story headlined “US Officials Concede Gaza Cease-Fire Out of Reach for Biden,” cited senior US officials who have concluded that a ceasefire deal is unlikely during Biden’s presidency. “No deal is imminent,” one said. “I’m not sure it ever gets done.”

Friday: Israel killed at least 12 people in an airstrike in Beirut targeting senior Hezbollah commanders. As Gallant made clear earlier in the week in reference to Lebanon, “we are at the start of a new phase in the war” and the “center of gravity is moving north.”

Initially, one of the few bright spots of Biden’s approach was that no regional war had broken out. The recent Israeli assaults in Lebanon, along with Gallant’s comments about a “new phase” of the war, suggest that may soon change. For Netanyahu, who is widely believed to favor a second Donald Trump presidency, a new phase of conflict that makes a Biden-Harris administration look ineffectual just as some Americans begin voting may carry additional rewards.

This string of havoc was all, sadly, predictable. In response to the brutal Hamas attack on October 7, Biden embraced what was labeled a “bear hug” approach to his relationship with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. In keeping with a decades-old personal approach for managing relations with Israel, he made sure there was “no daylight” between him and the Israeli Prime Minister in public. Biden thought it would allow him to shape the direction of the war in private.

Without US weapons, Israeli military experts have made clear that the country would not be able to carry on fighting at such scale.

Biden’s faith in a no daylight approach had been repeatedly disproven prior to October 7 but he stuck with it anyway. That decision reflected an effectively limitless commitment to supporting Israel. As I reported in December on the roots of Biden’s flawed response to the war, his Israel record was unusual:

Biden has long gone further than many of his fellow Democrats in defense of Israel. As a senator, he backed moving the American embassy to Jerusalem decades before Donald Trump made that a reality, boasted about attending more fundraisers for the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) than any other senator, and savaged an effort by George H.W. Bush to push Israel toward negotiating with Palestinians. As vice president, he undercut Barack Obama’s efforts to push Israel toward peace. As president prior to October 7, he continued policies implemented by Trump that sidelined Palestinians.

The death toll in Gaza stood at around 20,000 when that story came out. It is now double that, and the full death toll may prove far higher. Nearly 100,000 people have been injured. Israeli hostages remain in captivity in large part due to Netanyahu’s repeated efforts to derail ceasefire negotiations.

What has not changed is Biden’s almost complete unwillingness to use the United States’ extensive leverage over Israel. Aside from some 2,000-pound bombs, his administration has ensured that arms keep flowing. That decision has been made despite substantial evidence that doing so violates US laws that prevent weapons from being sent to foreign units implicated in major human rights violations. Without US weapons, Israeli military experts have made clear that the country would not be able to carry on fighting at such scale.

The Uncommitted movement announced on Thursday that it will not be endorsing Vice President Kamala Harris. The decision comes in response to Harris declining to break with the Biden administration over its response to the war in Israel and Palestine and after a tumultuous Democratic National Convention in which Palestinian voices were largely shut out from speaking about the horrors happening in Gaza.

The group, which represents the hundreds of thousands of Democrats who voted “uncommitted” during the primaries in protest of Biden’s Gaza policy, said in a statement released Thursday that “Vice President Harris’s unwillingness to shift on unconditional weapons policy or to even make a clear campaign statement in support of upholding existing US and international human rights law has made it impossible for us to endorse her.”

At the same time, the movement’s leaders stressed that they oppose Donald Trump and are not recommending that supporters vote for a third-party candidate because doing so could help elect Trump.

“I told VP Harris through the tears that Michigan voters want to vote for her, but we need a policy change that is going to save lives.”

“We must block Donald Trump, which is why we urge Uncommitted voters to vote against him and avoid third-party candidates that could inadvertently boost his chances, as Trump openly boasts that third parties will help his candidacy,” the group said in a statement released on Thursday. “We urge Uncommitted voters to register anti-Trump votes and vote up and down the ballot.”

Uncommitted leaders, throughout the past months, have been eager to endorse Harris and organize on her behalf if she were willing to move more aggressively towards ending the war. In early August, when organizer Layla Elabed briefly met the vice president, she told her as much. “I told VP Harris through the tears that Michigan voters want to vote for her,” Elabed said at the time, “but we need a policy change that is going to save lives.” Elabed stressed that “pro-war forces like AIPAC may want to drive us out of the Democratic Party, but we’re here to stay.”

Uncommitted had asked Vice President Harris to respond by September 15 to a request to meet with Palestinian Americans in Michigan whose family members have been killed during the war. That meeting has not happened and the Harris campaign has not committed to making it happen.

“The Vice President is committed to work to earn every vote, unite our country, and to be a President for all Americans,” the Harris campaign said in a statement. “She will continue working to bring the war in Gaza to an end in a way where Israel is secure, the hostages are released, the suffering in Gaza ends, and the Palestinian people can realize their right to dignity, security, freedom and self-determination.”

The latest announcement from Uncommitted comes one month after the group made news with a sit-in at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. Uncommitted made two main policy asks at the convention: an immediate ceasefire and a US arms embargo on Israel to help bring one about. But Uncommitted delegates also made much smaller demands in the lead up to and during the convention.

Most notably, they asked that an American doctor who has volunteered in Gaza, or a Palestinian American, be given a brief speaking slot from the convention’s main stage. After convention organizers rejected Tanya Haj-Hassan, a pediatric intensive care doctor, the group eventually began pushing for a speaking slot for Georgia state Rep. Ruwa Romman, a Palestinian American Democrat.

Lexis Zeidan, an organizer with the Uncommitted national movement, said that in their refusal to allow even one Palestinian American speaker, “the DNC and the vice president’s campaign fumbled even a small gesture.”

“Now, the vice president’s team is courting people like Dick Cheney, while sidelining these incredibly important anti-war voices,” she said. Some leaders within Uncommitted are voting for Harris—and others will not be voting at the top of the ticket at all. Zeidan, who is Palestinian American, said that on a personal level, she “simply cannot go to the ballot box and cast a vote for a candidate that is not hearing the demands of her people.” Her fellow organizer, Abbas Alawieh, will be voting for Harris, a choice he describes as a “chess move” against Donald Trump.

“If you’re willing to get some satisfaction out of feeling like you punished Harris, and that’ll help you sleep at night, I can respect that,” Alawieh said. But, he added, “In order for me to try and start sleeping at night, I need to know that I’m blocking Donald Trump because his plans are very clearly to enable Netanyahu to do more murdering.”

Mother Jones reported during the convention that Romman, who was not an Uncommitted delegate, planned to explicitly endorse Harris from the main stage. Nevertheless, national Democrats denied her and any other Palestinian American Democrat a speaking slot without asking to see their remarks. Uncommitted had made clear that any speech would be vetted and pre-approved by convention planners. As we reported:

By denying someone of Palestinian descent the chance to speak, the Harris campaign missed an easy opportunity to create distance between itself and President Biden’s failing and highly unpopular response to the war. A June poll by CBS News and YouGov found that 77 percent of Democrats and 62 percent of independents believe that the United States should not send weapons and supplies to Israel, despite the Biden administration’s support for continuing to do so. Only 23 percent of Democrats, compared with 76 percent of Republicans, told Gallup in June that they support Israel’s military actions in Gaza. 

More than 41,000 Palestinians have been killed and nearly 100,000 have been injured in Gaza, according to the local health ministry. Public health experts fear that the full death toll may be far higher. Nearly a year into the war, the chances for a ceasefire in the near future still appear low.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu appears committed to prolonging the war—even if it means the death of more hostages—to appease far-right cabinet members and remain in power. President Biden has largely refused to use the United States’ extensive leverage to push Netanyahu toward a ceasefire.

In last week’s debate, Harris reiterated her support for Israel and once again called for the US to have the “most lethal fighting force in the world.” 

“Our organizing around the presidential election was never about endorsing a specific candidate,” Alawieh, the Uncommitted cofounder, made clear on Thursday. “It has always been about building a movement that saves lives.”

Update, September 19: This post has been updated with a statement from the campaign of Vice President Kamala Harris.

At the center of the two biggest controversies of JD Vance’s short political career have been cats. The first came from his attacks against the “childless cat ladies” on the left. More recently, the Republican vice presidential candidate has been spreading lies about Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, eating pets.

One possible conclusion to draw from these missives is that he is an angry man who spends too much time on the internet. Another is that he is a liar. But there is much more to what Vance is doing than mere trolling. 

Vance’s cat rhetoric is a purposeful attempt to simplify Great Replacement hysteria—hoping to convince voters that their fears of a migrant invasion and childless women are an existential threat. The controversies derive from two fixations: the number of children American women are having and the rate at which foreigners are coming to the United States. Vance wants a United States where the birth rate is high and the immigration rate is low.

In championing low immigration, mass deportation, and an increase in fertility, Vance is aligning himself with white nationalists who were once shunned by the Republican establishment. These days, he is spending less time openly espousing his ideas than he used to on podcasts. Instead, Vance—as he has explained is part of his project—is finding uncomplicated ways to get his points across (whether they are factual or not). “I do think that political rhetoric is fundamentally [about] dealing with people at their particular level,” he said earlier this year. “I think you get too deep into the theory, you actually miss a lot of the truth.” On Sunday, he went further, telling CNN’s Dana Bash during an exchange about Springfield, “If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do.”

Lying about Haitian immigrants eating cats and attacking childless cat ladies is a perfect example of this plan. Vance thinks he can sell what critics have called “blood and soil nationalism”—invoking the Nazi slogan—with dumb memes.

Vance has not hidden his influences for this theory of change. “I read this book when I was maybe 15 years old, called the Death of the West by Patrick Buchanan,” Vance said during a 2021 podcast appearance. “And that was a really influential book for me.” Buchanan, a former speechwriter for Richard Nixon and Republican presidential candidate, was not subtle about his white nationalism in the Death of the West. When it came to immigration, he accused Mexican Americans of waging a “reconquista” of land they’d lost to the United States. He spoke of declining birth rates in extreme terms—claiming that “Western women” were committing an “autogenocide for peoples of European ancestry” by having too many abortions.

It is not hard to trace the line between Buchanan’s fears and Vance’s anxieties about “childless cat ladies.” The subtitle of Buchanan’s book cuts to the heart of Vance’s current preoccupations: How Dying Populations and Immigrant Invasions Imperil Our Country and Civilization.

Buchanan’s worldview was rooted in a paleoconservatism that rejected the view that America is an idea and instead saw America as a people. In doing so, he embraced a framework that justified exclusion and a permanent white majority. 

Vance has been emphasizing the claim that Americans are a “people” for much of this year. During a speech to the hard-right group American Moment earlier this year, Vance made a point of bringing up “this thing that increasingly bothers me, which is the concept that American is an idea.” Vance made the same point about Americans as a people in July at the National Conservatism Conference in which he railed about the influx of Haitian migrants in Springfield. But the clearest explanation of this obsession, as my colleague Isabela Dias wrote, came during the Republican National Convention: 

America is not just an idea. It is a group of people with a shared history and a common future. It is, in short, a nation.

Now, it is part of that tradition, of course, that we welcome newcomers. But when we allow newcomers into our American family, we allow them on our terms.

Vance went on to talk about the cemetery plot in Kentucky that he hopes that he; his wife, Usha, the child of Indian immigrants; and, eventually, their kids will be buried in. (Her family came on “our terms” in this formulation.)

“There will be seven generations just in that small mountain cemetery plot in eastern Kentucky,” Vance said. “Seven generations of people who have fought for this country. Who have built this country. Who have made things in this country. And who would fight and die to protect this country if they were asked to.”

Vance was born in Ohio. It was his grandparents who came to the state in search of economic opportunity in the 1940s. His kids would likely be buried in the family plot in Kentucky sometime around 2100—roughly 160 years after any of their paternal ancestors lived there. But for Vance, it doesn’t seem to matter. He believes his blood is connected to that soil. That is what it means for him for America to be a people.

Behind the silly memes of Donald Trump running with cats is a much darker story. Vance sees a rapid demographic shift that is being forced upon the American “people” through immigration and childless women. Vance is determined to stop it. If he has to talk about cats along the way, he will. 

At the center of the two biggest controversies of JD Vance’s short political career have been cats. The first came from his attacks against the “childless cat ladies” on the left. More recently, the Republican vice presidential candidate has been spreading lies about Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, eating pets.

One possible conclusion to draw from these missives is that he is an angry man who spends too much time on the internet. Another is that he is a liar. But there is much more to what Vance is doing than mere trolling. 

Vance’s cat rhetoric is a purposeful attempt to simplify Great Replacement hysteria—hoping to convince voters that their fears of a migrant invasion and childless women are an existential threat. The controversies derive from two fixations: the number of children American women are having and the rate at which foreigners are coming to the United States. Vance wants a United States where the birth rate is high and the immigration rate is low.

In championing low immigration, mass deportation, and an increase in fertility, Vance is aligning himself with white nationalists who were once shunned by the Republican establishment. These days, he is spending less time openly espousing his ideas than he used to on podcasts. Instead, Vance—as he has explained is part of his project—is finding uncomplicated ways to get his points across (whether they are factual or not). “I do think that political rhetoric is fundamentally [about] dealing with people at their particular level,” he said earlier this year. “I think you get too deep into the theory, you actually miss a lot of the truth.” On Sunday, he went further, telling CNN’s Dana Bash during an exchange about Springfield, “If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do.”

Lying about Haitian immigrants eating cats and attacking childless cat ladies is a perfect example of this plan. Vance thinks he can sell what critics have called “blood and soil nationalism”—invoking the Nazi slogan—with dumb memes.

Vance has not hidden his influences for this theory of change. “I read this book when I was maybe 15 years old, called the Death of the West by Patrick Buchanan,” Vance said during a 2021 podcast appearance. “And that was a really influential book for me.” Buchanan, a former speechwriter for Richard Nixon and Republican presidential candidate, was not subtle about his white nationalism in the Death of the West. When it came to immigration, he accused Mexican Americans of waging a “reconquista” of land they’d lost to the United States. He spoke of declining birth rates in extreme terms—claiming that “Western women” were committing an “autogenocide for peoples of European ancestry” by having too many abortions.

It is not hard to trace the line between Buchanan’s fears and Vance’s anxieties about “childless cat ladies.” The subtitle of Buchanan’s book cuts to the heart of Vance’s current preoccupations: How Dying Populations and Immigrant Invasions Imperil Our Country and Civilization.

Buchanan’s worldview was rooted in a paleoconservatism that rejected the view that America is an idea and instead saw America as a people. In doing so, he embraced a framework that justified exclusion and a permanent white majority. 

Vance has been emphasizing the claim that Americans are a “people” for much of this year. During a speech to the hard-right group American Moment earlier this year, Vance made a point of bringing up “this thing that increasingly bothers me, which is the concept that American is an idea.” Vance made the same point about Americans as a people in July at the National Conservatism Conference in which he railed about the influx of Haitian migrants in Springfield. But the clearest explanation of this obsession, as my colleague Isabela Dias wrote, came during the Republican National Convention: 

America is not just an idea. It is a group of people with a shared history and a common future. It is, in short, a nation.

Now, it is part of that tradition, of course, that we welcome newcomers. But when we allow newcomers into our American family, we allow them on our terms.

Vance went on to talk about the cemetery plot in Kentucky that he hopes that he; his wife, Usha, the child of Indian immigrants; and, eventually, their kids will be buried in. (Her family came on “our terms” in this formulation.)

“There will be seven generations just in that small mountain cemetery plot in eastern Kentucky,” Vance said. “Seven generations of people who have fought for this country. Who have built this country. Who have made things in this country. And who would fight and die to protect this country if they were asked to.”

Vance was born in Ohio. It was his grandparents who came to the state in search of economic opportunity in the 1940s. His kids would likely be buried in the family plot in Kentucky sometime around 2100—roughly 160 years after any of their paternal ancestors lived there. But for Vance, it doesn’t seem to matter. He believes his blood is connected to that soil. That is what it means for him for America to be a people.

Behind the silly memes of Donald Trump running with cats is a much darker story. Vance sees a rapid demographic shift that is being forced upon the American “people” through immigration and childless women. Vance is determined to stop it. If he has to talk about cats along the way, he will.