‘I Promised People I Would Do Something’

Broadcast Journalist Antonio Sanchez (Facebook)

When Antonio Sánchez lost his job—and Oregon lost its only Spanish news station—he started his own daily YouTube broadcast. The show now reaches tens of thousands.

BY GRACE BENNINGHOFF

Last June, Kenia Jackeline Merlos, her four children, and her sister were at a park in Washington State when they were arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers. The children and Merlos’s sister spent two weeks in custody, but Merlos was detained for months. At a loss for how to help, her sister contacted an independent journalist, Antonio Sánchez, a reporter who for nearly a decade had been the lead anchor for Univision Portland—the area’s only Spanish-language news outlet—before starting his own broadcast on YouTube. He broke the story of Merlos’s detention and continued to cover her case until she was released.

The story was later picked up by national outlets. “I trusted Antonio to share my story because of his professionalism, his reputation in the community, and the respect he has shown for others in similar situations,” Merlos told me. “He took the time to understand the details, and he kept sharing until I got released. He followed my story until the end.”

Sánchez, who is forty-five, grew up in Calexico, California, near the border with Mexico, where he spoke Spanish at home. His newscast, tailored to the Spanish-speaking community in the Portland area—“Están cayendo como moscas muertas” (They’re dropping like flies), he reported of turnover in President Trump’s cabinet—reaches about fifty thousand people per week and has nearly ten thousand subscribers. His reports cover everything from local politics to crime to weather, broadcast from a basement in Southeast Portland. Acoustic foam is checkered across the ceiling, turquoise carpet covers the vinyl flooring, and a television screen behind the desk bears the name of his show: Noticias Noroeste.

Going solo hadn’t been part of his career plans. But in September of 2024, he was laid off from Univision Portland, and the station, KUNP-TV, announced it was severing ties with Univision and transitioning to English-language news and sports coverage. “I started getting all these messages asking what’s going to happen,” he said.

A few weeks later, Trump won the presidential election. The messages kept coming. “They were asking, ‘What’s going to happen to us? A new government is about to take over.’ I felt like maybe I could create something while I look for a job,” Sánchez said.

He ordered a teleprompter, a microphone, and lights on Amazon; soundproofed the basement; and asked a friend to create a logo. Startup costs ran about fifteen hundred bucks. He produced his first broadcast on Inauguration Day. “Even if it looked bad, it was always going to air,” he said, “because I promised people that I would do something.”

Since then, he has dedicated twelve or more hours each day to reporting, producing, and editing. “I want to preserve that tradition of doing everything they watched on television,” he said. Sánchez wears a suit and sits at a desk as he runs through the top stories. But he has made changes, too. “I talk in sayings—that’s very typical in Spanish, and that’s something you don’t do in English news,” he told me. His style also differs from most Spanish-language news in the United States, where Univision and Telemundo operate under the umbrella of an English-language parent company and tend to align with American broadcast standards. “The media in general has a problem with finding real connection with the audience,” Ismael Nafría, an independent journalist and former board vice president of Sembra Media, a nonprofit that supports Spanish-language media, told me. “The language issue is so important if you want to build something authentic and something real.”

Sánchez built trust quickly. Last fall, reporting on ICE arrests around Portland, he drew a record eighty thousand viewers. He also found himself pushing back against misinformation from local social media influencers who had told audiences they’d witnessed ICE raids—which Sánchez’s reporting revealed were actually local drug raids. “I’m almost like their 211,” he said of his relationship with viewers. “The language barrier makes it harder for them to pick up a phone and call a helpline. But they can message me, and I’ll respond quickly.”

Sánchez initially envisioned Noticias Noroeste as temporary—something to fill the gap left by Univision until a larger station resumed local Spanish-language coverage. But then he thought, “I had to keep doing it.” A new channel, Telemundo Portland, started up about six months ago, but its broadcast is anchored out of Kansas City and includes only a two-minute local segment.

Sánchez said he supports his broadcast through advertising. He brings in at least three thousand dollars per month through ads, sometimes more, and funds are paid to him directly. His ads come from Multnomah County, the Tualatin Valley Water District, and the City of Portland, among others; most are PSAs. “I can’t be worried about, ‘Oh my God, my views went down, my views went up.’ I don’t care. I’m not an influencer, I’m a journalist,” he said. Once revenue allows, he hopes to hire interns. Eventually, he said, he’d like to move into a bigger space.

In January, Merlos was invited to celebrate Noticias Noroeste’s first anniversary party. She said she was nervous—she expected a roomful of “fancy people”—but was surprised to find Sánchez had invited other Portlanders who had been detained by ICE. It was a chance to connect with others who understood firsthand what she and her family had been through. “It’s important to get connected,” she told me. “No one else is going to understand your situation.”

Private Matters

Catherine Herridge

Catherine Herridge, a former Fox News reporter, is being compelled to pay $800 a day until she reveals confidential sources.

BY RIDDHY SETTY

In 2003, Toni Locy, a former reporter for USA Today, published a series of articles about the FBI’s investigation into the 2001 anthrax attacks that left five people dead and seventeen infected. Along the way, she reported on Steven Hatfill, a former Army scientist who was the initial focus of the FBI’s probe. In 2003, Hatfill filed a civil lawsuit under the Privacy Act, a federal law that restricts government agencies from sharing private information about individuals without their consent. As part of his legal efforts, in 2004 he pressed Locy and other journalists to testify and reveal their sources.

In February of 2008, a federal judge held Locy in contempt of court for refusing to do so. Notably, Hatfill had sued not Locy but the federal government, arguing that his reputation had been ruined due to law enforcement officials leaking to the media and linking him to the attacks. By then, Locy was working as a journalism professor at West Virginia University. She was subject to a fine of five hundred dollars for seven days, one thousand dollars for the next seven, and five thousand dollars for the seven days after that. The judge also barred anyone from helping her pay this fine—her students couldn’t even hold a bake sale to fundraise for her.

Cases like Locy’s—those brought by individuals against the government, resulting in journalists being subpoenaed and held in contempt—are unusual. But they haven’t gone away.

In 2017, Catherine Herridge, then a reporter for Fox News, published a story about Yanping Chen, a Chinese American scientist who was the subject of an FBI counterintelligence investigation. In 2018, Chen, who was never charged, filed a civil lawsuit against the government under the Privacy Act and subpoenaed Herridge to reveal her sources. In 2024, a Washington, DC, district court ordered Herridge, by then an independent journalist, to pay a fine of eight hundred dollars for each day she did not reveal her sources.

As with Locy’s case, Herridge is not a named party in the lawsuit. Her reporting is not in dispute, and she does not currently face the threat of jail time. But the DC court is asking her to reveal her sources in litigation brought against the government for violating the Privacy Act. “In these Privacy Act cases, the plaintiff needs to establish that the government leaker or alleged leaker acted willfully, and so that’s why you can see plaintiffs in these cases, which are ordinary civil cases, going after journalists,” Gabe Rottman, the vice president of policy at the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, said. Complicating Herridge’s case is the fact that documents about the FBI’s investigation of Chen were filed under seal, and all of the appellate arguments about those documents were held in closed court. The Freedom of the Press Foundation has filed a motion to unseal the documents and hearing transcript.

Core to the litigation is the question of whether Herridge should be protected from being compelled to testify through reporter’s privilege. While most states, as well as the District of Columbia, have enacted shield laws protecting a reporter’s right not to reveal their confidential sources, recent attempts to create a federal version have failed. Much of the current case law dates back to Zerilli v. Smith, a 1981 case concerning an investigation into organized crime where the government, without a warrant, had planted a listening device. The resulting logs were sealed, but some of their contents were reported on by the Detroit News. In that case, a DC district court judge and court of appeals found that the reporter did not have to reveal their sources. The DC Circuit Court of Appeals judge also ruled that a plaintiff must prove that the information they are requesting goes to “the heart of the matter” and that they have exhausted all other reasonable means to get it before a court can compel a reporter to reveal a source—a test that became crucial in subsequent decisions.

Rottman pointed out that if a court considers only these two factors, a judge can almost always find reason to rule against a reporter’s right to protect their sources in privacy cases. “There’s other things that the court could conceivably do to strengthen the privilege,” he told me. “They can test whether the person’s claim would even survive without the information. So, in other words, if there was an independent source for the potential harm to the plaintiff, the court could rightly look at that and say, ‘Well, you’re going to likely lose anyways, and so we’re not going to pierce the privilege.’”

In Herridge’s case, the DC district court judge held that Chen had cleared the bar put forth in the Zerilli test—getting to the heart of the matter and exhausting all other reasonable means to get the information—and ordered Herridge to reveal her sources, holding her in contempt when she refused to do so. In his 2024 decision, Christopher R. Cooper, a judge in the US District Court for the District of Columbia, stayed the fine until an appeals court ruled on her case; in September of 2025 the appeals court ruled against Herridge.

In June of 2026, after the appeals court declined to rehear the case, it refused to stay the fine Herridge has been ordered to pay while she prepares her next appeal—this time to the Supreme Court. On July 2, the Supreme Court denied her emergency request to stay the fines (while it considered the request, the fines were stayed); notably, Justice Brett Kavanaugh supported granting the application for a stay. “We’re pleased with the Supreme Court’s decision and hope that it will help bring a close to this matter. It follows complete vindication for Dr. Chen in the district and circuit courts,” Andrew C. Phillips, an attorney for Chen, told CJR in an emailed statement.

In Locy’s case, a three-judge panel of the US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit—which included Kavanaugh—stayed the fines pending a decision by the court. But the appeals court never wound up making a decision, because Hatfill’s case was settled. This rendered Locy’s contempt issue irrelevant, effectively canceling her fine. Locy had hoped to push the appeals court to make a decision. “They didn’t think there was a need to decide anything,” Locy, who is now a professor of journalism and mass communications at Washington and Lee University, told me. “I wish they had. Because I think I wasn’t going to win on everything, but I think I was going to win on some stuff,” she said. “And it might have helped Catherine.”

Locy told me that, in Privacy Act cases that seek to force journalists to reveal their sources, plaintiffs’ lawyers often appear to be using them as a shortcut: “They want the journalists to do their work for them, and federal judges are allowing these plaintiffs’ attorneys to go after journalists, and in Privacy Act civil lawsuits, which is a cheap, dangerous way for civil litigators who are looking for a payday.”

Though the reporters subpoenaed in Privacy Act cases are not the ones being sued, news organizations have participated in settling these lawsuits alongside the government. In former nuclear weapons scientist Wen Ho Lee’s lawsuit against the government, five journalists from publications including the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, and ABC were subpoenaed and refused to reveal their sources. These organizations agreed to pay Lee seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars as part of a settlement that the government also participated in to end the contempt-of-court proceedings against their reporters.

While independent reporters are particularly vulnerable in these cases, Seth Stern, the chief of advocacy at the Freedom of the Press Foundation, said this is a fight that corporate media organizations may not want to take on either. “When you look at corporate media, you’ve got to wonder if they value the First Amendment at all, given how they’ve capitulated to attacks on the First Amendment lately,” he said. “Certainly, you know corporate outlets can afford to pay eight hundred dollars a day. That’s not a question, but they could also afford to litigate with Donald Trump, and they chose not to.”

Cases like Herridge’s may be relatively rare, Rottman said, “but when they do occur, they’re really consequential for press freedom.”

READ ORIGINAL STORY HERE

KNOCK, KNOCK

By issuing subpoenas to five Times journalists, the Trump administration reveals its first response to unwanted national security coverage: go after reporters.

BY JEM BARTHOLOMEW

On Friday evening, federal agents showed up at the homes of multiple New York Times reporters to deliver subpoenas to testify before a federal grand jury. Those who received—or may soon receive—subpoenas include Julian E. Barnes, Adam Goldman, Eric Lipton, Tyler Pager, and Eric Schmitt, according to an email that Joe Kahn, the paper’s executive editor, sent Times staff over the weekend. The journalists had been part of a team investigating security concerns related to Donald Trump’s new Air Force One—a gift from Qatar last year that was quickly refurbished and decorated in the gaudy cream-and-gold that is typical of Trumpist style. The Times decided to immediately go public about the subpoenas, which seek to compel the reporters to testify in Manhattan on Wednesday. “The appearance of federal law enforcement agents on the doorstep of news reporters should shock the conscience of any American who believes in the Constitution and the press freedom it protects,” David McCraw, the Times newsroom lawyer, said in a statement on Friday. “This brazen act should be seen as nothing more than an attempt to prevent the public from knowing what is happening in their country by intimidating journalists from doing their jobs.”

Since returning to office, Trump has complained about the look of presidential planes. Other countries had newer planes that appeared “bigger and sleeker and sharper” than Air Force One, Trump told Fox News last year, “and it doesn’t look right.” In May of 2025, the US accepted Qatar’s gift of a Boeing 747-8 jetliner. It was reportedly worth about two hundred million dollars, and was intended to be the president’s official plane until two Boeing aircraft, commissioned in 2018 but repeatedly delayed, were ready. The Qatari plane was retrofitted to become “a flying White House at a level of luxury that nobody’s ever seen before,” Trump said when he unveiled it in a hangar in Maryland last month. “Now when we land at airports in London and Germany and different places, nobody tops this one.”

But last Wednesday, Barnes, Lipton, Pager, and Schmitt heard from sources that, as a security precaution, Trump had been forced to switch back to the old Air Force One when leaving a NATO summit in Türkiye. They wrote about concerns that the Qatari plane may not have been outfitted with security improvements, such as a missile defense system, that officials felt were necessary because of renewed threats from Iran. It was a classic public interest story: millions in taxpayer dollars had been spent to refit the plane that carries the commander in chief and a large entourage of officials, staff, and journalists, but was it even equipped with the necessary defensive features? According to the Times’ Michael Grynbaum, a senior official at the FBI requested that the Times hold the article—calling it a matter of national security—and asked to know the sources of the information. (The piece cited “people briefed on the new plane’s capabilities, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive security issues.”) The Times refused both requests and hit publish. The article was followed, on Thursday, by another piece that delved more deeply into the specific defensive countermeasures that may have been skipped when refitting the Qatari plane. The reporting made the Times’ front page on Friday and Saturday. Trump was “fuming,” “embarrassed and angry,” according to CNN.

The episode fused two phenomena that have long infuriated Trump: being embarrassed on the international stage, and the use of anonymous sources in reporting that does not flatter him or his administration. He instructed Kash Patel, the FBI director, to oversee a leak investigation, the Times reported (quoting more people who spoke “on the condition of anonymity to describe sensitive internal discussions”). Patel was on his way to Chicago but canceled the trip, instead spending eight hours at the White House on Friday. The subpoenas were issued soon after, from the Southern District of New York. They are strikingly uncommon in leak investigations—let alone as the first step in such a probe. A spokeswoman for the Justice Department insisted on Saturday that “reporters are not the targets; those leaking classified information are.”

But the subpoenas must be seen as part of a wider push by the Trump administration to criminalize routine newsgathering practices, especially on topics related to national security. Last month, the Justice Department issued grand jury subpoenas to journalists at the Washington Post, reportedly for a story relating to Venezuela, and the Wall Street Journal, for a story on military action against Iran, but later backed down and withdrew them after the news organizations pushed back. (The filings in those cases are sealed.) In January, the FBI raided the home of Hannah Natanson, a Post reporter, seizing her devices and referring to her reporting materials as “contraband” in a case “virtually without comparison,” as Maddy Crowell wrote for CJR at the time. And Trump has personally sued multiple news organizations for coverage he didn’t like. Jodie Ginsberg, the chief executive of the Committee to Protect Journalists, described the Times subpoenas as an “extraordinary escalation” in efforts to “threaten and intimidate independent news organizations.”

The latest case is particularly revealing because it tells us that the Trump administration’s first impulse is now to pursue reporters, even before conducting a thorough internal leak investigation. This seems to treat journalists as criminals for legally receiving information, and looks like a cynical excuse to try to comb through their notebooks and ransack their contact lists. If the five Times journalists are forced to appear before a grand jury, they could be asked to reveal their sources—and, as Perry Stein writes in the Post, they could face charges of contempt of court or obstruction of justice if they refuse to comply. “This is not something that should be normal,” Jon Schleuss, the president of the NewsGuild-CWA, of which the subpoenaed reporters are members, told me on Sunday. “But when the president attacks journalists every single day, that becomes an unfortunate normalization—and if we ignore it, then we’re doomed.” The “really scary thing,” Schleuss added, is that Trump’s tactics against the press “are filtering down at the state and the county and the city level. You have county sheriffs who will see this and say, ‘This is how we actually prevent reporting about the no-good contracts that we’ve got.’”

The Times has signaled its intention to aggressively fight the subpoenas. “This is a naked attempt to intimidate individual reporters and to prevent the Times and other independent news media from doing important reporting protected by the First Amendment,” Kahn wrote to staff on Saturday. The paper has a very good chance of winning. As I wrote for CJR in April, the Trump administration’s efforts to crack down on critical journalism have not gone down well in many courtrooms. Kahn, in his email, pointed out that the “impulsive” subpoenas “used vague pretenses of a threat to national security,” and said that “we expect to prevail.” But he also issued a warning about the impending strain of the subpoenas on the lives and families of the five targeted journalists, who, for however long this takes, will be tangled up in Trump’s sprawling web of litigation.

Other Notable Stories...

By Jem Bartholomew

On Wednesday night, Graham Platner, a Senate candidate from Maine, announced on X that he was suspending his campaign, after Politico published a story in which Jenny Racicot, a woman who dated him, said Platner sexually assaulted her. (He denied the allegations.) Betsy Morais, the editor in chief of CJR, wrote about the extraordinarily difficult, sensitive task of reporting on sexual violence. “A story like this asks you to hold two things at once: real sensitivity toward a source who is describing a traumatic experience and real rigor in testing the account,” Jessica Piper, one of the authors of the Politico story, told Morais.In May, Riddhi Setty and I wrote for CJR about how the Trump administration was helping a white, male editor, Bryant Rousseau, sue the New York Times for discrimination; Rousseau is alleging that he was subjected to “unlawful employment practices” when he was not put forward for the role of deputy real estate editor at the paper. Last Friday, the Times said in a court filing that the administration had violated the First and Fifth Amendments with the suit—and called it an act of retaliation for its journalism. The Times asked for the suit to be dismissed. (Rousseau resigned from the company in June, the Times’ Erik Wemple reported.)On Friday, a federal court in Los Angeles ordered the Department of Homeland Security to stop using force to prevent journalists, legal observers, and members of the public from documenting immigration enforcement operations in the Central District of California. The case, filed in June of last year by plaintiffs including the LA Press Club, the NewsGuild-CWA, and three individual journalists, came after DHS agents used militarized crowd-control weapons against people documenting immigration raids. “No federal agency has the authority to use force to prevent the public from documenting and holding the government accountable for its actions,” Jonathan Markovitz, a senior staff attorney at the ACLU Foundation of Southern California, said in a statement.In the UK, Associated Newspapers, the publisher of the Daily Mail, won a major case at the High Court in London on Tuesday against a lineup of claimants including Prince Harry, Elton John, and Doreen Lawrence, who became an advocate for police reform after the racially motivated murder of her son Stephen in 1993, and is now a member of the House of Lords. The plaintiffs alleged a pattern of unlawful information gathering by the news organization—following revelations of phone-hacking in the British tabloid press during the aughts—but Justice Matthew Nicklin said they had failed to prove that the Mail engaged in unlawful activity. At a hearing later this month, the claimants could be ordered to pay tens of millions of dollars in legal bills. (They are reportedly deciding whether to appeal.)In the occupied West Bank on Sunday, Israeli settlers attacked several journalists, including some from CNN, who were reporting on the one-year anniversary of the killing of Saif Musallet, a Palestinian American who was beaten to death by settlers near the village of Sinjil, north of Ramallah. Soon after the journalists arrived, four people showed up wielding “wooden and metal rods and stones,” according to a CNN write-up. (Israeli police said four suspects were arrested.) Jeremy Diamond, CNN’s Jerusalem correspondent, who was present, said that a full report on the attack would air on Monday night. In related news, the Committee to Protect Journalists on Wednesday urged Israeli authorities to investigate two recent attacks that targeted the entrances of the Tel Aviv offices of two news organizations—Haaretz, a newspaper, and Channel 12, a broadcaster—with concrete blocks or stones. The vandalism, according to CPJ, seemed like attempts “to intimidate journalists and media workers.” And several Iranian journalists said they were denied US visas to cover the World Cup, according to an article in Nieman Reports, which described the refusals as “unprecedented.” The Trump administration’s travel restrictions on several countries represented in the tournament—Iran, Haiti, Senegal, and the Ivory Coast—included an exemption for athletes, staff, and immediate family members, but it did not extend to fans or media workers. For more on the World Cup—now narrowed to four semifinalists: France, Spain, England, and Argentina—see Amos Barshad’s piece for CJR on news outlets bringing politics into their coverage of the tournament, which concludes next Sunday.

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When A Congressman Beat A Senator Unconscious, America Confronted The Limits Of Free Speech

In John Magee’s print, Preston Brooks wields a cane against Charles Sumner, who is clutching a pen and a rolled-up speech. John L. Magee, The New York Public Library

BY PAUL QUIGLEY

PROFESSOR OF HISTORY,

VIRGINIA TECH

On May 22, 1856, Preston Brooks strode into the United States Senate chamber and beat Sen. Charles Sumner unconscious with a cane. Brooks, a South Carolina congressman, was retaliating for a speech Sumner had given condemning slavery and personally insulting a relative of Brooks.

Though lasting only a minute, the beating had far-reaching consequences. It pushed Americans one step closer to civil war.

And, as I discovered while researching my book “The Man Behind the Cane: Preston Brooks, Political Violence, and the Road to the Civil War,” it sparked a nationwide debate over free speech, political violence and the relationship between the two.
Speak without reprisal

Northerners denounced the caning as an attack on Sumner’s right to free expression. Even if they thought Sumner’s abolitionism too radical – as most white Northerners did in 1856 – they believed a U.S. senator had the right to say what he wanted without violent reprisal.

Visual images of the caning reflected the Northern take on free speech. In John Magee’s political caricature, “Southern Chivalry – Argument Versus Club’s,” Brooks wields a sturdy stick against a defenseless Sumner, who is clutching a pen in one hand and a rolled-up speech in the other. Winslow Homer’s print “Arguments of the Chivalry” depicts Sumner writing at his desk as Brooks prepares to strike.

Homer’s headline captured the message of both depictions: “The Symbol of the North is the Pen; the Symbol of the South is the Bludgeon,” which is a quote from a speech by antislavery activist Henry Ward Beecher.

Defenders of Brooks insisted any abolitionist speech was too incendiary to deserve protected status. Brooks’ hometown newspaper in Edgefield, South Carolina, berated Sumner for “licentiously prostituting the principle of freedom of speech,” reflecting the widespread conviction among white Southerners that free speech had limits.
Collapsing the distinction between words and violence

The argument between supporters of Brooks and Sumner was not isolated to the caning incident. Societies throughout history have punished language deemed blasphemous, seditious, inciting or slanderous. In most times and places, authorities have hewed more to slaveholders’ conception of free speech as a limited privilege than to abolitionists’ assertion of an absolute right. In the United States, the idea of free speech as virtually inviolable became mainstream only in the 20th century.

To pro-slavery Americans, abolitionist words warranted violent responses because such words were themselves tantamount to violence.

Alexander Stephens, future Confederate vice president, justified the caning by saying, “I have no objection to the liberty of Speech, when the liberty of the cudgel is left free to combat it.”

Another Southern politician wrote to Brooks, “Address your arguments to the Skin, to the physical sensibilities.” And one of the many replacement canes given to Brooks bore the revealing inscription “Use Knock-Down Arguments.”

Slaveholders were collapsing the distinction between words and physical violence. Language could constitute violence, and an act of violence could be a counterargument.

This logic has resurfaced in our own time, but instead of slaveholders using it to maintain white supremacy, today it is more often deployed to designate certain types of expression, such as burning crosses or displaying Nazi symbols, as hate speech against marginalized communities. It has also appeared in the increasing moves by the Trump administration to label dissent as terrorism.
Suppressing antislavery language

While most Northerners in the 1850s continued to value freedom of speech over violence, the caning convinced some that they must respond in kind.

One Minnesota newspaper editor hoped that “every Northern member will fully arm himself, and if necessary plant a cannon by the side of his desk to be used as the most effectual argument in favor of Free Speech.”

It was increasingly difficult to keep rhetorical and physical violence separate as the slavery conflict heated up.

This was a new phase in the history of free speech. While abolitionists and increasing numbers of Northerners fought for an expansive idea of free expression, publishing pamphlets and newspapers and submitting petitions to Congress, slaveholders tried to suppress antislavery language.

Terrified that abolitionist words might lead to rebellions by the enslaved, slaveholders feared for their survival. As prominent abolitionist Frederick Douglass recognized, “Slavery cannot tolerate free speech.”

Political reformer Lydia Maria Child described a growing threat: “A slaveholding community necessarily lives in the midst of gunpowder and, in this age, sparks of free thought are flying in every direction.”

Responding to those sparks of abolitionist free thought with violent repression, including acts such as the Sumner caning, slaveholders’ violence fueled the rise of the new Republican Party. The Republicans articulated their opposition to slavery with their slogan of “free soil, free speech, free labor, free men.”

Brooks and his kind ultimately brought about their own demise by provoking Northern outrage – outrage that ultimately led to war once the slaveholding South seceded.

Who gets to say what to whom? Are there any words that can justify violence? These questions polarized the country after the caning. In new forms, they continue to confound American politics 170 years on.

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THE INTERVIEW: ‘All I Have Is The Power To Talk And Be Heard’

Tucker Carlson - Wikipedia

Tucker Carlson on pitying Donald Trump, never listening to podcasts, and planning a new political party—while selling you nicotine pouches.

BY AMOS BARSHAD

On a recent afternoon, I drove down a wooded Maine road, past serene ponds with no people in sight, until I reached a big white barn. I parked, in patchy grass, near a Ford F-350 with a crane bolted onto the back, an American flag, and an idling black SUV. A guy in the driver’s seat of the SUV, whose tattoos peeked out beneath the sleeves of a white dress shirt, sent me thirty feet down the road to another guy, in a large white SUV, who politely told me to wait. Tucker Carlson was still recording.

I wouldn’t have been surprised to see anyone—a United States senator? A prison guard claiming to have evidence that Jeffrey Epstein was murdered? Donald Trump?—walk out of that barn. Carlson, who is fifty-seven, occupies a singular space in American media: after decades in corporate television, most famously at Fox News, he now hosts The Tucker Carlson Show, a video podcast, where he can and does follow his every whim, taking his hordes of fans along with him. A recent episode, “The Secret History of Biblical Giants,” has 1.5 million views on YouTube.

Eventually, Carlson—boyish, tanned, wearing an outdoorsman vest and New Balances—welcomed me into the barn. As I entered, I passed that day’s interviewee: Nick Maynard, an English surgeon who has worked extensively treating Gazan victims of Israeli air strikes.

On his show, Carlson advocates long-held hard-line conservative views, which include total opposition to immigration, abortion, and trans rights. He also takes a strong stand against war: Carlson has vociferously denounced the American and Israeli attacks on Iran—during which over thirteen thousand targets have been bombed and more than three thousand people killed—as well as Israel’s post–October 7 assault on Gaza. Carlson has personally lobbied Trump, whom he’s known at least since both were NBC television personalities, not to attack Iran. He’s an imperfect vessel for the anti-war argument, but his reach and influence may make him America’s most prominent crusader for the cause.

Because of his reputation among American conservatives, Carlson can book guests such as Ted Cruz, the Republican senator from Texas, and grill them on their warmongering. In a 2025 interview that went viral, Carlson asked Cruz to tell him the population of Iran; Cruz couldn’t do it. “You’re a senator who’s calling for the overthrow of the government,” Carlson shouted in response, “and you don’t know anything about the country!” It was a rare thing: a complete pantsing of a powerful public figure. “I am always struck by the ignorance of policymakers,” Carlson told me. “I wanted him to feel shame. And he felt no shame.”

Carlson’s relevance is rooted in the fact that he can both book Cruz and embarrass him. It’s also connected to his symbiosis with a subset of Republicans. According to a recent New York Times/Siena poll of self-identified Republicans and Trump voters, nearly 60 percent of those with a “very favorable” view of Carlson say “they want the next Republican presidential nominee to take the party in a new direction.”

What may be most significant about Carlson now is that his campaign against the Iran war and Israel’s influence on the American political system has placed him in strange cultural territory: suddenly, he has fans on the left. Cenk Uygur, the creator of the progressive news show The Young Turks, has cheered Carlson for criticizing Trump’s attacks on Muslims. When Olivia Reingold, a writer for the Free Press, compiled a dossier against Rama Duwaji, the First Lady of New York City, one of Reingold’s ostensibly damning reveals was that Duwaji had liked a Carlson post criticizing AIPAC.

Peter Beinart—the editor-at-large at Jewish Currents and a prominent Israel critic—has pushed back on the left’s support for Carlson, arguing in a recent Substack video that any progressive who is going on Carlson’s show “should not leave your principles at the door. If you’re against bigotry” and “the argument that somehow white Christians are superior to Black and brown immigrants,” then don’t “ignore all of that because you think you’re working with him to try to turn US policy against Israel.” Carlson recently spoke to Lulu Garcia-Navarro, a journalist for the New York Times, who pressed him about his interview with Nick Fuentes, the white-nationalist influencer.

Carlson often starts his podcast episodes with lengthy, showy monologues. He doesn’t write them down, he told me, instead sketching them out in his head during daily sauna sessions. The monologues encapsulate both his appeal and the fear he strikes in people. Whatever the topic—biblical giants, Christian nationalism, Gaza—he is a preternaturally compelling speaker. At one point in our conversation, he fell into a reverie describing all the cigarettes he smoked in Dubai while sitting down with an aide to Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister. “I love smoking so much,” Carlson said. These days, though, he mostly gets his fix via his own nicotine-pouch brand, ALP, which stands for American Lip Pillow.

Carlson’s barn, in the town of Woodstock—his family has owned the barn for years, and their summer home is nearby—feels like a GOP-themed chain restaurant. Nearly every spare inch is covered with taxidermy or Republican memorabilia. Carlson took a seat under a big stuffed bear head and torso, near a Nixon/Agnew sign and a Bush ’88 ashtray. He spit out an ALP, popped in a new one—with twelve milligrams of nicotine, he made sure to point out, making it one of the most potent pouches on the market—and we began talking. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

AB: Fox fired you in 2023. Did you anticipate any of what would come next?

TC: No! I don’t anticipate where I’m going to be after dinner tonight. I’m not a planner. I never have been. A lot of our producers got fired with me. We immediately pivoted from television to the internet. It was actually a lot easier than I thought. We had the Fox studio in the other part of the barn: they came and took all their cameras and the lighting rig and the soundproofing.

I certainly did not anticipate talking about Israel. I had been on TV for thirty years. I don’t think I had ever really talked about Israel. From my perspective, I got pushed into it.

How so?

I felt I had no choice. Early in 2025, Netanyahu showed up at the White House right after Trump’s inauguration, and I thought, “This is a little early to be siphoning off the energy from this campaign and this election for the benefit of another country.” And I resented it. I very quickly began to understand the point of these visits was a regime-change effort in Iran. And that’s something that I talked to Trump about many times over ten years. Fifty times! More! In public, but mostly in private.

The breaking point and the huge change in my life came in June of 2025, with the Twelve-Day War—which was not about Iran’s nuclear program. It was the first salvo in a regime-change effort led by Israel. And that’s just antithetical to everything Trump ran on.

I’ve been to Israel several times, both for work and as a visitor. I love Jerusalem—amazing city—but I’m not interested in Israel. I don’t think it’s significant as a country from an American perspective. It’s not in our hemisphere. It’s got no resources. So I just don’t care. But once you start taking over my political system and destroying my country, then I have a right to care. So now I do care.

When you’re trying to dissuade Trump from going to war, what do you see as your role? Are you speaking as a concerned American or as a journalist?

What category do I occupy? I haven’t the faintest idea. I’m not interested at all in defining it. I’m not a politician, that’s for sure. I’m not a rival to Trump for power. I have no power. I’m someone who knows Trump, and I know him well, and I’ve known him for a long time. I can call him. He often calls me.

Do you still speak to Trump?

I haven’t spoken to him since the regime-change war began. I’m not interested in talking to him. I feel sorry for him. He’s not a man in charge of his own life at this point. I feel sorry for anybody who’s enslaved, including him. I mean, I visited him three times at the White House in the month before the Twelve-Day War, and I told him the same thing all three times: “You’re not gonna see the rise of a democratic, pro-Western government in Tehran. The best you’re gonna see there is just this suppurating wound.” And he said, “I know.”

What is it really about, in Trump’s mind? Why did he destroy himself? His administration? His legacy? The Republican Party and America? I don’t know, but maybe someone at CJR should get on this and find out.

Okay, so, three years after leaving Fox, you’re suddenly one of the most prominent anti-war voices in America—

It’s not hard, because no one else is against it! Where is everybody?

Are you surprised to find yourself in this position?

Well, no. I’ve been against war since December of 2003, when I was in Iraq and I was highly distressed by it. So I’ve had the same views for twenty-three years now, more or less. But I just stayed away from Israel because—and I would say this to people who worked for me at Fox—it’s not worth it. It’s too personal. The unwritten rule is that criticism of Israel is criticism of all Jews, and because I am not against Jews, it’s not worth it.

I’ve been to Israel a lot, so I’m fully aware of the apartheid situation in Israel. I’ve been offended by it going back twenty years. But I would always say to myself, “Okay, I’ve been in a lot of places with injustice.” I’ve seen Nigerians treat Liberians like animals, firsthand, in West Africa, and I was offended by it. But I didn’t organize my life around defending oppressed Liberians.

Occasionally, something would happen and my staff at Fox would bring me a story about Israel. I’d be like, “Nope, I don’t want to do it.” Now, that was probably cowardice on my part, but also the truth was I had mixed feelings about it. I’m not defending this. I’m just telling you the way I thought. I would sublimate it. “Is it really worth it? I don’t want to think about it, and I’ve got all these children, and I want America to be a decent place.” But the Iran war, that was too far.

There’s been speculation that hawks like Marc Thiessen, the Washington Post columnist, have played a part in convincing Trump to continue the Iran war. Do we, meaning the public, have a good understanding of how people in the media influence Trump?

I don’t know if people have a good understanding of it. I don’t know if I always have a good understanding of it. But I don’t believe that Trump is substantially influenced by Marc Thiessen. I doubt Marc Thiessen influences his wife, assuming he has one. I think that Marc Thiessen and others like that are just a sideshow designed to divert your attention away from the people who are influencing the president. And those would include his donors. Those would include John Paulson and Miriam Adelson and Rupert Murdoch, who’s had a huge effect on Trump. Rupert Murdoch would call Trump three or four times a day to encourage him to attack Iran. And I know that because I’ve talked to Trump about it many times.

You and Pete Hegseth, the secretary of war, were both on Fox. Do you have any thoughts about his fitness for the job?

I feel sad about the whole thing. I think it’s disgusting to brag about killing people. It’s totally unchristian and immoral. We should treat death with reverence, period. You can certainly make the case that some people should be killed, but I don’t think anyone should ever celebrate the death of another human being. And by the way, you’re gonna be punished for that.

What do you make of Trump’s lurching attempts to end the war in Iran with the memorandum of understanding?

It’s a humiliating defeat for the United States, but it’s still an improvement over what would happen if we kept going, so I’m grateful for it. Israel is the victim in this. Israel got so far over its skis. Imagine it from Israel’s perspective: you think you’re gonna be the regional hegemon, and then, three months later, Iran becomes a global power. It’s a freaking nightmare!

But there’s no meaningful diplomatic effort; Israel doesn’t even have the capacity for diplomacy. “We’re just gonna explode your pagers.” You can talk yourself into thinking you’re far more powerful than you are, and when you do that, you get hurt. I learned that at twenty-five in a bar fight. And I never punched anyone again, because last time I did, I got the snot knocked out of me, and I had to go on TV with a black eye. I was married. With kids. I was actually thirty-two, now that I’m thinking about it. And my wife was not impressed at all, and my kids were confused. Everything about it was bad. But I realized I’m better at talking my way out of problems than fighting my way out of problems.

I don’t think I’m making complicated points, and I don’t think I’m saying anything radical. Like in that interview with the New York Times. Midway through it she gets kind of emotional and treats me like I’m a dangerous figure. I don’t see myself that way at all. I see myself as thoroughly moderate, and more so as I get older, and I don’t think I have any weird sacred cows that I’m not admitting in public.

The Times reporter, Garcia-Navarro, asked repeatedly about your interview with Nick Fuentes, which seemed to surprise you.

I’m happy to answer questions about Nick Fuentes, but if you’re asking me your eleventh question on Nick Fuentes, I’m gonna have to call it out for what it is, which is a diversion tactic.

I feel like the thing that people are really mad about is the fact that they can’t get jobs that are well-paying enough to build an independent life. Young people are threatened by the promise of AI, which is taking away their futures. And she wants to talk about Nick Fuentes? It is so perfectly representative of the way a certain class of people in America thinks, which is small and narrow. We’re supposed to be running the world! Not with people like you, man.

You did express regret in that Times interview about interviewing Fuentes, at least on the basis that it created too much blowback for you. If you are going to continue to be a prominent anti-war voice and Israel critic, are you thinking about calibrating your approach in any way?

No. I’m not an anti-Semite; if I was an anti-Semite, I would just say so: “I’m against the Jews, here’s why.” I don’t have an employer. I don’t have investors. I don’t even have any creditors, so I can say whatever I think is true, and I plan to.

I find it so interesting that people are unwilling to accept my word. I always say, “Well, why wouldn’t I just say it? What am I going to get? Canceled? I’ve already been fired.” I had the highest-rated show in the history of Fox, and they fired me anyway. So it’s like, what are you going to take from me now?

Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan recently reported that JD Vance pitched having you interview Ghislaine Maxwell in prison as part of the Trump administration’s pushback to negative coverage around the Epstein files. Were you involved in this idea?

I was one of the very first, maybe the first person to attack the administration in public last summer for hiding the Epstein materials. Not only was I not involved in a cover-up, I was publicly attacking them. I’ll be happy to interview Ghislaine Maxwell or anybody else. That’s my job. But no, I was not involved in a plot to cover it up.

In an interview recently, Sebastian Gorka, the White House counterterrorism “czar,” name-checked you after being asked about right-wing terror threats.

Sebastian Gorka—he’s not even American. My family’s been here for like four hundred years. And I’m the terror threat because I would like democracy and free speech. I texted him immediately and said, “Let’s have a conversation.” He never responded. He used to invite me over for dinner to his house, and I got such a creepy vibe. I just knew, I’m gonna get over there and he’s going to have me put on a costume.

Sorry, a costume? What kind of a costume?

I don’t know. I’m just guessing. If there’s anybody that has a costume room, it’s Gorka.

Speaking of free speech crackdowns—one of the most famous recent examples when it comes to Israel/Palestine is Mahmoud Khalil, the Columbia student-protest leader detained by ICE.

Even then, I didn’t say anything. So determined was I to stay out of this that I made the—in retrospect, probably foolish and maybe even cowardly—decision to not say anything when they started revoking people’s visas for their political views.

Now, I’m for less immigration. In fact, I’m for ending all immigration today. I don’t know how you can justify immigration when half of all white-collar jobs are going away because of AI. What are people going to do for a living? There’s no economic justification for any immigration in the United States because we can’t even figure out what we’re going to do with all these unemployed people. So it’s crazy. Social-services spending, healthcare, education—who’s going to pay for that? So I’m opposed. And in the case of Sebastian Gorka—like, I would deport him immediately.

Legacy media is in constant flux. Do you see the old-school press being able to navigate this era? Or is it slowly just withering away?

Do I see NBC News making a comeback? No! I don’t know David Ellison, but he’s not a genius, I’ll tell you that. He’s buying CBS. Are you gonna buy RCA Records next? I wouldn’t take CBS News for free. I wouldn’t take CNN for free—maybe CNN International. But, like, Paramount Pictures? This is not the future. It’s not even the recent past. It’s the distant past.

I’m not exactly sure where young people are getting their information, but wherever they’re getting it is the right place, because they are so well-informed. For years, I thought that weed and porn and SSRIs and benzodiazepines have totally disabled young people. But I don’t think that anymore. I employ a lot of them, and they’re the sharpest, hardest-working people. They give me a lot of hope. And boy, they don’t believe anything. And they’re very well-informed. So much better-informed than I was when I was twenty-seven. I thought the CIA was a force for good! I literally thought that!

I think Trump is the last Fox News viewer. I’m so grateful every single day that I got fired. I probably wouldn’t have left, knowing me. I’d just be increasingly unhappy.

And here, you feel like you’ve found your—

I feel totally happy. I mean, I think my influence is overstated. I don’t seem to have influence at all. I couldn’t stop Trump from attacking Iran. And my wife, who is hilarious, literally laughed at me after the war started: “So I guess you weren’t very good at that, Mr. Powerful Influential Guy!” What matters is the ability to affect outcomes. And I have no demonstrated ability to do that. None.

Some have referred to the current divide on the right as being a split between Fox News Republicans and YouTube Republicans. Are you strategically positioning yourself as counterprogramming?

I’m not strategic in any way. I make almost all decisions on the basis of smell and instinct. I have no real idea who watches our show. I’m sure there are people who work here who have, or claim to have, a better sense of who the audience is. I really don’t. I make all decisions about what we air myself, usually without consulting anybody. I have a short attention span. That’s been a huge advantage for me over the years.

One thing I always loved about Rachel Maddow, and I often told her this, is that she just existed in her own universe. She’s off in the Berkshires alone, thinking. She was disconnected from the herd. I’ve always wanted to be that. I haven’t always succeeded. It’s shameful the number of times I’ve covered something because everyone else was talking about it. But I really try not to be that way. And increasingly, especially as I age, I am cut off.

I’ve never posted in my life. I don’t have my password on social media. I don’t read anything. I get almost all my information by text message or phone call. That’s it. It could be every bit as wrong. But I just don’t trust anybody at all, and I don’t want it in my head. I’ve never listened to a podcast. I have some form of intense dyslexia, and something about podcasts and movies and television puts me to sleep almost immediately. I still read books every day.

Are you interested in aligning yourself with other anti-war voices?

I do know what really matters is war and finance. Where does the money come from? Where does it go? And who gets killed? And on those questions, the parties are in lockstep solidarity with each other. That’s not a democracy. That’s a one-party state posing as a democracy, and it needs to be broken, and there’s going to be a third party, and I’m going to do everything I can to bring that about.

And that’s the lesson of the last two and a half months, to me. If you vote for Trump and you still wind up in a regime-change war—if Chuck Schumer is strongly behind Trump’s foreign policy, which he is—then we need options, or else let’s just give up and be ruled by the most unscrupulous people. And I’m just too young to accept that. We need a third party.

And when you say do everything you can—

I’m going to help build a third party. There should be a good-faith effort to figure out what benefits the country. I mean, if you make sixty thousand dollars a year, you’re degraded. Your life expectancy has gone down, and the promise of your children’s lives is likely gone. No one seems to care. It’s not even a factor. “What about Hamas?” I officially don’t care about Hamas. The US government should have, as its first priority, the welfare of its own people.

Would you be a candidate for this third party?

I don’t want to be a candidate. Before I did the Times interview, someone said to me, “They’re going to ask you if you’re running for president.” I was very tempted to say “I am running—on the pro-patriarchy ticket.” Just to make sure I gain no new fans.

What’s your goal in speaking to outlets like CJR or the Times—people who are presumably outside of your direct audience?

It’s the only power I have. I don’t have any tricky plan to win Times readers to my campaign for some office. I don’t have any institutional power. I don’t control a military. So all I have is the power to talk and be heard. And though it’s borne no fruit so far, I remain hopeful.

The headline of that Times interview was “What Does Tucker Carlson Really Believe?” The Atlantic used an almost identical headline for a 2019 profile.

So weird. Like I’m using some kind of verbal magic trick to hide something. From my perspective, I am the least mysterious person who’s ever lived. I don’t think I’ve ever said anything in public that’s complicated or hard to understand. I have a commitment to not doing that. I believe if you can’t explain something clearly, either you don’t understand it, or you’re trying to hide something.

What do I really believe? What do you think I’m hiding? I could talk for twenty-four hours! I’ll tell you everything I believe! I can’t stop talking!

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‘America Knows Less About Itself At The Very Moment It Needs To Know The Truth’

John Duprey / 1963 Birmingham photograph from NY Daily News Archive via Getty Images

BY SUSIE BANIKARIM

In 1967, President Lyndon B. Johnson established the Kerner Commission in response to widespread demonstrations over the treatment of Black Americans. The following year, the panel released a report, outlining systemic white racism across society—and sharply criticizing the press’s failure to cover the subject of race. “Along with the country as a whole, the press has too long basked in a white world looking out of it, if at all, with white men’s eyes and white perspective,” the report concluded, calling on newsrooms to hire and promote more Black journalists. A decade later, the American Society of News Editors (ASNE) started a recurring survey to track the news industry’s progress toward inclusion, setting an ambitious goal: that the demographics of newsrooms would mirror those of the broader US population by the year 2000. The survey, which for years served as one of the industry’s primary benchmarks for tracking newsroom representation, was last conducted in 2019. ASNE, later known as the News Leaders Association (NLA), disbanded in 2024.

It’s hard to imagine a more apt metaphor for the state of Black representation in media today. At a time when the Trump administration is aggressively dismantling diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives and targeting communities of color, many newsrooms have all but abandoned promises they made during the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020 to increase racial diversity in coverage and staffing. As CJR reported last month, 76 percent of journalists identified as white in a 2022 Pew Research Center survey, compared with roughly 58 percent of Americans who identified as white in the most recent census. “You saw the industry making all these promises, but we are in a moment where we’ve got this backlash that is really exposing which of those promises were values and which ones were window dressing or branding,” Errin Haines, the president of the National Association of Black Journalists and editor at large of The 19th, told me.

In the past year, NBC News has shut down all of its verticals dedicated to reporting on Black, Latino, queer, and other underrepresented groups. CBS eliminated its Race and Culture team. Bloomberg and Politico wound down their newsletters about race, according to Nieman Lab. In February, the Washington Post laid off 45 percent of unionized Black staffers amid widespread reductions, but journalists at the Post told my colleague Riddhi Setty that leadership had given up on diverse coverage long before that.

These are a few suggestive examples—but what we know about the bigger picture of representation in journalism is largely anecdotal. There is no comprehensive or current data on reductions of race coverage or diverse staffing across the industry. In 2025, the American Press Institute (API) announced that it had “acquired the survey” from the NLA so that it could relaunch and expand that research. Robyn Tomlin, the executive director of API, told me in an email that they “are working to identify potential funding to support it in the future.” For now, only historical survey data is available on the institute’s website.

“We’re absolutely in a moment now where Black journalists are being disproportionately affected by choices around whose beats get cut and what kind of teams get dismantled,” Haines said. “And frankly, whose expertise is valued versus whose expertise is considered expendable and whose communities and what kind of audiences are just optional.”

It is particularly troubling to see newsrooms cowed by the administration’s cynical efforts to reframe DEI as discrimination, because these are the institutions on which we rely to tell that story. “The press, tasked with protecting American democracy, is best secured by reflecting the American people,” Jelani Cobb, the dean of Columbia Journalism School and this magazine’s publisher, wrote for CJR in 2018. Six years later, many news organizations are still failing to tell the full American story. “You can’t say democracy is under threat and then just eliminate the journalists that are best positioned to explain how that threat is landing in Black communities,” Haines said. “If we get pushed out, America literally knows less about itself at the very moment that it needs to know the truth about itself.”

In The Souls of Black Folk, W.E.B. Du Bois introduced the concept of “second sight” and the ability it gives Black Americans to see the country as it truly is rather than the ideal it is often claimed to be. In A Second Sight: How the Wonder and Vision of Black Mediamakers Push America Toward Freedom, Sarah J. Jackson, an associate professor at the Annenberg School for Communication, explores how that double consciousness is both a burden and a privilege for Black storytellers, giving them “a profound insight: the ability to see through the veil, to understand the contradictions of American life with a clarity often unavailable to those at the center of power. Second sight is a vision, a tool, a gift.”

The book, out this week, is an alternative history of media in America, an insightful and invaluable examination of how Black journalists, photographers, filmmakers, radio hosts, and podcasters have shaped the nation, even while their contributions have too often been excluded from the official record. Jackson combines deep historical analysis with interviews of contemporary Black media-makers conducted over four years to trace the stories of those “who have used the tools of their time—pen, press, lens, mic—to critique the nation and imagine it otherwise.”

By structuring the book around the founding principles of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, Jackson shows how figures such as Du Bois, Frederick Douglass, Ida B. Wells, and Mary McLeod Bethune fundamentally reframed our understanding of these concepts. She draws a direct line between their work and journalists of today who continue to interrogate the idea of the American project—including Cobb and Haines, as well as Ta-Nehisi Coates, Nikole Hannah-Jones, Gene Demby, Gabriella Angotti-Jones, and Chenjerai Kumanyika. These journalists, Jackson writes, continue to give us “a more nuanced, evocative, and honest story about our nation. Their belief that the public can hold—and act on—this story is itself an extraordinary act of faith.”

In the book’s coda, Jackson reminds us that, as the country prepares to mark the 250th anniversary of the adoption of the Declaration of Independence, “one measure of the integrity” of the flood of expected media coverage will be how it treats the stories of Americans on the margins. “Are the stories and contributions to democracy of countless unnamed Americans—whose lives and futures are tied to these histories—considered worthy of remembrance and celebration?” Jackson asks. “Whose freedom is celebrated? Whose life and liberty? Whose happiness protected? What futures imagined?”

One morning in the fall of 2022, Juliana Pache was solving the New York Times’ “Mini” crossword, as she did every day, when she came across something that stumped her. “I don’t remember the clues from that day, but there was something about one of the clues in particular from that Mini that I was like, ‘This feels like a white person would know this and I probably wouldn’t,’” Pache recalled.

The experience prompted Pache, a first-generation Afro-Caribbean American, to look for puzzles centered on Black history and culture. When she couldn’t find what she was looking for, she decided to make it herself. “That day, I bought a bunch of domain names, because I wasn’t sure what to name it yet. And I had never made a crossword puzzle before. I was like, ‘How hard could it be?’” She laughed. “It turns out it’s way harder than it looks.”

Pache taught herself how to construct puzzles by watching YouTube videos and found support on a Discord channel. Three months later, she debuted Black Crossword with her first mini. She has published a new puzzle every day since. The site’s tagline: “If you know, you know.” Clues this week included “‘There’s Always This ___: On Basketball and Ascension’ (2024 book by Hanif Abdurraqib),” “Radical Puerto Rican civil rights organization, The Young ___,” and “Dancer and choreographer ___ Ninja.” (The answers: Year, Lords, Willi.)

For Pache, it’s important that Black Crossword not present Black culture as a monolith. “A really big part of my goal is to connect people across the diaspora culturally,” she told me. “Language is such a huge part of how black folks across the diaspora communicate with each other. We have these kinds of shared languages.”

She has also published two puzzle books: Black Crossword: 100 Mini Puzzles Celebrating the African Diaspora in 2024 and Black Crossword: 100 Midi Puzzles Connecting the African Diaspora last year. She is currently brainstorming for her third book, which will include a wider variety of puzzles, including word searches and logic games. “There are so many ways to challenge hatred and systemic erasure,” she told me. With Black Crossword, she has found a way to do that by centering Black culture. “My primary feeling,” she said, “was this would be a joy to have.”

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Texas Tech’s New Limits On How Faculty Teach Gender Identity And Sexual Orientation Challenge More Than Free Speech

Texas Tech University’s main campus is in Lubbock, Texas. David Kozlowski/Moment Mobile via Getty Images

BY HENRY F. FRADELLA

PROFESSOR OF CRIMINOLOGY 

AND CRIMINAL JUSTICE,

ARIZONA STATE UNIVERSITY 

Texas Tech University, a public university in Lubbock, announced in April 2026 that its five schools would phase out all academic credentials centered on sexual orientation or gender identity. The new policy, detailed in a six-page memo on April 9, also requires instructors to use “alternate materials” when courses address these topics.

Texas Tech, led by former Texas Republican state legislator Brandon Creighton, is not the first university to try to restrict instruction on gender, sexual orientation and other topics in recent years.

In 2023, for example, Florida passed legislation that banned students at public universities from majoring in critical race theory, gender studies, queer theory and intersectionality.

Texas Tech, however, goes further with this new memo. It also bars graduate students from writing “degree-culminating” theses or dissertations on sexual orientation or gender identity, something no other major public university system appears to have done.

As a scholar who studies the intersection of law, science and public policy, I doubt the policy would survive a possible constitutional challenge in court, given First Amendment freedom of speech protections. Even if courts ultimately strike the policy down, though, it may still leave a lasting mark, by signaling that some universities are willing to prioritize politics over independent academic inquiry.

Texas Tech’s policy shift

Texas Tech’s policy, which will begin taking effect in June 2026, requires faculty to teach in compliance with a 2025 Texas law that declares there are “only two human sexes.”

The law echoes the language of an executive order the Trump administration issued in January 2025 that said “It is the policy of the United States to recognize two sexes, male and female.”

Despite that air of certainty, there is substantial scientific literature that shows people’s biological variation does not fit a strict binary model.

Texas Tech faculty will soon be largely prohibited from teaching about gender fluidity or gender as a spectrum. There are narrow exceptions to this rule, such as discussions about intersex traits, so long as instructors do not “advocate for or validate sociological frameworks.”

Although current faculty may continue researching “topics of their choosing,” new faculty will be hired “in alignment” with the memo.

Students, meanwhile, can continue to conduct “general independent student research,” and write standard term papers, for example, on one of these subjects. But students cannot write graduate theses or dissertations on sexual orientation and gender identity.

By legal standards, these new policies are not neutral, curricular decisions. This is because the state of Texas favors one viewpoint – that there are only two biological sexes – that this public university system now reflects.

For nearly 60 years, the U.S. Supreme Court has repeatedly rejected the idea of viewpoint discrimination at universities. This discrimination occurs when the government or another authority allows speech favoring one opinion, while restricting speech expressing an opposing opinion.

The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, which oversees the region where Texas Tech is located, has also long recognized that “classroom discussion is protected activity.”

In a statement to the Associated Press in April, Creighton said that the school is “focused on ensuring our academic programs are rigorous, relevant, and produce degrees of value.”

He added that this focus “is matched by our unwavering support for the First Amendment and the open exchange of ideas that define a public university. Texas Tech will continue to be a national leader on both fronts.”

Part of a broader story

The Texas Tech policy is the latest example of a broader political effort to reshape what public universities may teach and research.

Several other public universities have also recently limited programs or coursework involving gender and identity studies.

In 2022, Florida’s “Stop WOKE” Act, restricted instruction perceived as endorsing certain race-related concepts in classrooms and workplace training sessions. Some faculty members left Florida public universities, citing concerns about censorship and political interference in higher education.

In 2022, federal judge Mark Walker called that Florida law “positively dystopian” and barred its enforcement, holding that the state cannot grant academic freedom only to viewpoints it favors. The restrictions remain blocked, pending appeal.

Texas A&M English professor Melissa McCoul sued that university after she was fired in September 2025, following a classroom discussion she led about gender identity.

Texas A&M later eliminated its women’s and gender studies degree program in January 2026.

The University of Texas at Austin consolidated four ethnic studies departments and the Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Department into a single Department of Social and Cultural Analysis in February 2026. The university is also reviewing which majors, minors and courses within that new department students may pursue and enroll in.

These changes reflect a broader political climate in which some politicians and university leaders increasingly frame gender identity and other academic subjects as ideological positions, rather than scholarly areas of research. That trend has intensified alongside the Trump administration’s executive orders, actions and rhetoric surrounding gender identity and diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives.

Limiting academic research

Texas Tech was established in 1923 to prepare students for technical and agricultural professions, and “elevate the ideals, enrich the lives, and increase the capacity of the people for democratic self-government.”

That mission reflects the American Association of University Professors’ 1940 Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure. The statement describes universities as dedicated to “the common good” through the “free search for truth.”

Universities are therefore expected to pursue scholarly inquiry according to disciplinary standards and academic expertise, not partisan priorities. That commitment is reflected in the thesis and dissertation process, through which faculty evaluate students’ ability to conduct independent research and contribute to disciplinary knowledge.

Although disfavored on some Texas and Florida campuses, topics such as HIV disparities in LGBTQ+ populations continue to be studied elsewhere as public-health subjects. The same is true for suicide risk and family rejection among LGBTQ+ adolescents and services for transgender youth.

With such lines of inquiry curtailed, some Texas Tech students now question whether the university can still provide an “honest education.” Some Texas Tech faculty members are openly discussing looking for other jobs.

Restricting academic independence

A September 2025 survey by the American Association of University Professors documented the toll of political interference on university faculty across the country, including in Texas.

One-quarter of the 1,100 Texas professors and researchers surveyed said they are seeking jobs outside the state. More than 60% said they would not encourage graduate students or colleagues to work at a university in Texas.

When the state decides which questions may and may not be researched, it is doing more than shaping curriculum. It is regulating the boundaries of knowledge itself by determining what future scholars may study and what universities are permitted to discover.

That – more than any single line in a memo – is what I believe should concern anyone who cares about the integrity of higher education. And it is precisely the danger longstanding First Amendment protections for academic freedom were designed to prevent.

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Overwhelm The Public With Muzzle-Velocity Headlines: A Strategy Rooted In Racism And Authoritarianism

The seemingly unending barrage of stressful news is a strategy with ties to the past. zimmytws/iStock via Getty Images

BY ANGIE CHUANG

ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF JOURNALISM,

UNIVERSITY OF COLORADO BOULDER

The headlines documenting President Donald Trump’s plan to send federal troops to San Francisco followed a familiar arc. “Trump claims ‘unquestioned power’ in vow to send troops to San Francisco,” The Guardian reported on Oct. 20, 2025. The next day, the San Francisco Chronicle blared: “S.F. threatens to sue if Trump brings in National Guard.” Then, on Oct. 23, “Trump reverses his decision to send troops to San Francisco,” as ABC News put it, after Trump posted that conversations with the city’s mayor and tech moguls had swayed him.

It was another example of how Trump’s shifting policy positions, racially inflammatory statements and threats frequently fuel a flurry of headlines, reflecting what some psychologists are calling “media saturation overload” or “Trump stress disorder.”

This barrage of information may seem like overcommunication from a hyperactive administration. But it is much more than that.

Scholars have found that the constant, often conflicting and at times false information coming out of the White House and shared via social media posts and the conventional news media causes members of the public to see truth and fact as relative and makes them more likely to dismiss those who disagree with them as untruthful. This leaves doubt about what’s real and what isn’t.

This citizen paralysis creates what philosopher Hannah Arendt described in “The Origins of Totalitarianism” as a general public “for whom the distinction between fact and fiction … no longer exist.” When lies are truth and truth is derided as lies, Arendt wrote, ordinary people lose their bearings and can be manipulated for totalitarian objectives.

Meanwhile, many journalists have openly acknowledged fatigue with the pace and nature of the Trump administrations’ news cycles, amid frequent newsroom layoffs, mergers and closures.

I am a longtime journalist and now scholar of journalism and race, trained to see the methods and aims behind political leaders’ press operations. And as I show in my forthcoming book, the Trump administration’s rhetorical strategies echo the playbooks of authoritarian and white supremacist organizations such as the Third Reich and some factions of the modern alt-right movement. They are intended to narrow the scope of who belongs as an American.

Headlines at ‘muzzle velocity’

The Trump administration’s rhetorical strategies include claiming victim status while often laying blame on immigrants or other scapegoats in ways that I believe betray racist intent. At the same time it has overwhelmed journalists and the public with breaking news.

This strategy was laid out by Steve Bannon, an influential Trump supporter and strategist in his first administration, during a 2019 PBS “Frontline” interview, when he described the media as “the opposition party.”

“They’re dumb and they’re lazy, they can only focus on one thing at a time,” he said. “All we have to do is flood the zone. … Bang, bang, bang. These guys will never – will never be able to recover. But we’ve got to start with muzzle velocity.”

Bannon has long been associated with the alt-right, a movement known for rhetorical tactics that minimize and obfuscate its true aims.

A strategy forged in Trump’s first term

As I detail in my book, “American Otherness in Journalism: News Media Representations of Identity and Belonging,” Trump and his key advisers have been developing, refining and ramping up their news media manipulation for a long time.

An early example of this is the way the administration used these tactics through Trump’s public responses to the fatal violence at the August 2017 Unite the Right protest in Charlottesville, Virginia.

The two-day rally was organized by a white nationalist blogger and attended by members of neo-Nazi, white supremacist and far-right militias protesting the removal of a statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee from a Charlottesville park. They marched with tiki torches, flew Confederate and Nazi flags and chanted antisemitic and racist slogans.

Amid violent clashes with counterprotesters on the second day, a neo-Nazi sympathizer drove into a crowd, killing a 32-year-old woman and injuring many others.

My study of television news coverage of Unite the Right found that the majority of news reports focused on the contradictory and inflammatory statements that Trump made about the antisemitic and racist protesters. Trump’s Aug. 15, 2017, press conference remark about blame on both sides after what happened garnered the most news media attention: “I think there is blame on both sides,” he said. “You had some very bad people in that group. You also had some very fine people on both sides.”

Exploiting chaos

The uncertainty surrounding what he meant created a cycle of news stories implying and denying that he sympathizes with white supremacists.

This is-he-or-isn’t-he intrigue spurred a surge of what fits the description of Bannon’s “muzzle-velocity” news headlines: “Trump declares ‘racism is evil’ amid pressure over Charlottesville” followed closely by “Trump defends White-nationalist protesters” and “Why Trump can’t get his story straight on Charlottesville.”

With the focus on Trump’s comments and what he might have really meant, the news media ultimately missed covering at the time the long-term threat posed by these white supremacist and other extremist groups.

Echoing a playbook from the past

Scholars have identified the fascist roots of these “post-truth” strategies: strongmen leaders uninterested in establishing leadership through honesty and transparency.

A recent scholarly analysis of Trump’s leadership concludes that the second-term president is overwhelming the public into “organized despair” by pitting races against each other while targeting minority groups as scapegoats, a tactic that hearkens back to 1930s Germany.

A 2019 analysis of Trump’s narrative style describes how he presents himself as a “strongman” fighting invisible forces of censorship and suppression. It also points out that this was part of the appeal of fascist leaders such as Mussolini and Hitler.

Researchers of Nazi propaganda identified key tactics in the German press such as name-calling and lumping together groups seen as opposition – communists, liberals and Jews – until public understanding of those groups blur into phrases like “enemies of Germany.” The messaging was constant and immersive, carried in local and national newspapers, radio, film and posters.

A key part of Trump’s rhetorical strategy is using race without directly referring to it. For example, Trump has described cities with large nonwhite populations such as Washington, D.C., and Chicago as “out of control” or “dirty,” contrary to actual crime statistics. He’s also questioned Kamala Harris’ racial identity, suggesting she “happened to turn Black.” And referring to Black football players who had been protesting systemic racism by kneeling during the national anthem, Trump said, “Get that son of a bitch off the field right now,” which many observers interpreted as racist because he was insulting people of color for the act of protesting racism.

This racial coding has been used by white supremacist groups to mask their true intent. They also use less overt labels such as “alt-right” or “pro-white” as a “rhetorical bridge” to the mainstream public.

In the case of the NFL protesters, the plausible deniability became an actual denial. Trump perfected this move when, during a 2020 debate with Joe Biden, he said, “Proud Boys – stand back and stand by,” referencing another group accused of thinly veiled racism.

Drowning in headlines

I believe that the endgame for this strategy is authoritarian power that greatly narrows the scope of who truly belongs and has rights in this country as an American.

This media saturation – drowning the public with a thousand Trump-generated headlines – allows his administration to keep dominating and controlling national attention.

But the media-consuming public can use the tools they have to encourage news outlets to better inform the public by identifying the media saturation strategy and reporting on why leaders are using it.

Otherwise, if news consumers let the headline overload do what it’s intended to do, and become overwhelmed and paralyzed, they become pawns in what I consider a ploy to make America less egalitarian and less democratic.

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