This article reflects on an interview and discussion with the volunteer, fundraiser, and true Neskorena, Anastasiya Paraskevova, known publicly as “UkrainianAna”. The conversation explored drone warfare, civilian survival, Ukrainian adaptation, and the psychological reality of living beneath Russia’s invasion. During the interview, air-raid sirens went off; Ana calmly checked her app, judged that the threat was not immediate for her, and later noted that the drone had been shot down. Her account is both a testimony to Ukrainian resilience and a warning that Ukraine is living through the emerging future of war. This warning should be heeded by us all. ^[1]

This week, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has once again appealed for more Patriot air-defence support, with Russian ballistic missiles remaining one of the gravest threats to Ukrainian cities. It is an important reminder that, for all of Ukraine’s ingenuity and battlefield adaptation, the country still needs Western help to defend its skies. Drones may now define much of the visible evolution of the war, but ballistic missiles remain a strategic threat Ukraine cannot simply improvise its way out of. ^[2]

Yet the sky above Ukraine is no longer defined only by missiles. Increasingly, it is filled with drones: reconnaissance drones, attack drones, interceptor drones, and the constant fear of machines heard before they are seen. Ukraine’s war in the air now has several layers. There are ballistic missiles, which require systems like Patriot. There are Shaheds and other long-range drones, which terrorise cities. There are small FPV drones that can hunt soldiers and civilians close to the front. This sickening act of hunting civilians, so frequently inflicted by Russian drone pilots, is known as a human safari. However, there are now anti-drone drones, turning the sky itself into a battlefield of war machines. ^[3][4]

This article builds on the previous interview with Dylan Burns. With Ana, the same subject appeared from another angle. If the Dylan Burns interview showed the brutality of drone warfare from a front-line reporting perspective, Ana’s testimony showed how that brutality enters ordinary civilian life. ^[5]

She was not speaking abstractly about military technology. She was describing a world in which sounds trigger reflexes, apps become part of daily threat assessment, and the sky itself has become a contested space. In the middle of the interview, this stopped being theoretical. Air-raid sirens went off. Ana calmly checked her app, explained that the drone was not an immediate threat to her part of the city, and then, a few minutes later, noted that it had been shot down.

This was an apt display of Ukrainian resilience. A refusal to let Russia dictate the terms of ordinary life, and, in Ana’s own spirit, a symbolic middle finger to the aggressor.

That moment captured something difficult to grasp for those of us outside Ukraine: the strange mixture of danger, adaptation, humour, technical competence, and emotional exhaustion that defines life under Russia’s invasion.

How drones became part of everyday war

One of the most striking parts of Ana’s account was the chronology. Drones did not appear all at once as the central feature of the war. Their role morphed over time.

“In 2022 it wasn’t really a thing,” she said. “It wasn’t particularly a thing in 2023,” except that people were buying DJI Mavic drones for soldiers, mostly for scouting. At that stage, drones were still largely a tool of reconnaissance: infantry teams using them to see, scout, and survive.

Then, she said, came the shift. “2024, I think, was the year when it really kicked off,” Ana explained. That was when drones became “proper weaponry,” when they were used constantly, and when the experience of them became “sort of like a daily thing.”

That line matters because it describes the transition from drones as useful equipment to drones as a central architecture of the war. The drone is no longer just an object used by soldiers. It becomes part of the civilian soundscape, part of the city, part of the route to work, part of the calculation of whether a street, a road, or a region is safe.

Ana described drone warfare as an arms race that moves in steps. “People should look at drone warfare in general,” she said, “not just from the civilian, but from the military [side], as a constant sort of step by step. They make a step, they invent something, and the next step of ours is to figure out how to deal with that.”

This is one of the core insights of the interview. Drone warfare is not a single technological revolution that happens once. It is an adaptive struggle. Russia develops a drone, a guidance method, a camera system, or a way to avoid interception. Ukraine studies it, responds, builds a countermeasure, and then Russia adapts again.

There are clear echoes of the development of aviation in the early part of the 20th century. During the First World War, the first planes were used for scouting, followed by bombers, then fighter aircraft. Whilst a similar pattern is emerging in Ukraine, the rate of development appears much faster. Continuing with the comparison, the dawn of AI combined with drone technology is the drone’s jet age. ^[6]

Ana also placed drones within the broader chronology of attacks on Kharkiv. “Back in ’22,” she said, “we were mostly hit by artillery in Kharkiv.” Russian forces were close enough to hit the city constantly, and she described them “flattening” Pivnichna Saltivka, a large residential area where many people in Kharkiv had lived. Once Russian forces were pushed farther back, that kind of artillery fire became less possible. But the war did not become safe. The tools of destruction changed.

“Artillery became sort of, not obsolete by any means,” she said, “but every year it becomes more of a drone, drone, drone, drone, drone.”

That repetition is worth taking seriously. It captures the way the war has shifted from older images of artillery and trenches toward a constant aerial presence. The drone does not replace every other weapon, but it increasingly shapes the battlefield and the psychology of civilians living near it.

Ana gave the example of drone nets near the front. These are not features of ordinary city life in western or central Ukraine, but closer to the front they have become part of the environment. Roads and areas are covered to make drone attacks harder. The image is almost surreal: civilians and soldiers moving beneath nets, carrying on with life underneath a defensive layer built against machines repeatedly, indiscriminately attempting to take those very lives away.

She also described older methods of defence: ground fire groups, people in vehicles with machine guns trying to shoot drones down. “They still do that,” she said. “We have people in Kharkiv right now who do that. I even know them.”

But the most modern layer is now drone-on-drone warfare. “We’re basically in the process of fully transitioning,” she said, “into drone-on-drone violence, as we say. So it’s just interceptor drones against the attacking drone. So it’s like a Star Wars battle, basically, in the sky, robots against robots.”

That image, robots against robots in the sky, would sound almost fantastical if it were not being described by someone living beneath it.

Ukrainian adaptation, pride, and countermeasures

One danger in writing about Ukraine is portraying Ukrainians only as victims. Ana’s account resists that. Her testimony is full of danger, grief, and fear, but also of competence, humour, and pride.

Ukraine has had to become expert in the practical management of threat. One example is the use of air-raid and tracking apps. During the interview, when sirens went off, Ana checked her app and explained what was happening in real time.

“Our app is absolutely bomb-dot-com, they’re basically right in 99% of cases,” she said, describing it as highly accurate. It told her what kind of object was in the air, where it was flying, and where it was likely going.

“It’s pretty good in terms of just managing your day,” she explained.

From that, she could tell that she was not in immediate danger. “I know that I’m not in an immediate threat,” she said, “but other people who are, obviously can also tell.”

That sentence is quietly devastating. The app gives a degree of control, but not safety. It tells you whether the threat is coming for you or for someone else. It makes the danger legible, but no less unreal.

Ana described this as a practical improvement in daily life. Since the apps became accurate, life “feels a little bit controlled.” That phrase is important. Not controlled. Not safe. Only a little bit more in control.

The same spirit runs through Ukrainian volunteer culture. The app developers are supported because people know they help. Radar groups, volunteers, drone fundraisers, soldiers, civilians: Ana described a society in which the line between military and civilian effort is blurred by necessity.

“They help us, so we support them,” she said. “That’s kind of how the volunteer process works in Ukraine as well.” Later, speaking about soldiers and civilians, she put it more simply: “They defend us, we defend them.”

That may be one of the strongest lines in the interview. It is not sentimental. It is practical and reciprocal, a symbiosis. The soldiers defend civilians physically; civilians support soldiers materially, socially, and emotionally. It is a form of national resilience built not out of slogans, but out of repeated small acts.

The counter-drone story also shows a form of adaptation, though one seeking to maximise non-cooperation.

When Russian drones presented new problems, Ukrainians adapted. Ana described drones that were initially difficult to detect because their altitude signal was misleading. “Our guys had major trouble trying to understand where the hell it is,” she said. Then they figured it out. Now, she said, those drones are taken down much more effectively.

She also described new Russian adaptations. One newer drone type, she said, had been called “Oko Saurona”, the Eye of Sauron, because of a camera positioned at the rear of the drone, giving it this appearance. This created new problems for Ukrainian interceptor drones, because the attacking drone could see interceptors coming from behind.

This matters because it shows drone warfare as a living technological system. A method works until the enemy adapts. Then the countermeasure must also adapt. Ana’s testimony repeatedly returned to this cyclic pattern: invention, response, reinvention, response.

The pride here is not naïve. Ana did not pretend Ukraine has solved the problem. She described new Russian systems, new cameras, new manoeuvres, and new difficulties. But there is a clear sense that Ukrainians are learning faster than outsiders often understand.

This matters because Western debates often ignorantly frame Ukraine primarily in terms of what it lacks. In the now infamous words of Donald Trump, Ukraine doesn’t have the cards.

Ukraine certainly does lack crucial systems, especially for ballistic missile defence. But on the drone front, Ukraine is a pioneer. It is not merely receiving the future of war. It is helping invent the countermeasures to survive it. This year, Ukraine has also begun signing drone-related defence cooperation and export agreements with Gulf states, including Saudi Arabia. ^[7]

The heartbreaking texture of life under drones

The most disturbing parts of Ana’s testimony were not always the most dramatic. Sometimes they were the small details.

Ana described how ordinary sounds become threat-signals. She recalled hearing someone mowing grass in the morning and briefly reacting as if it might be something else. It is not only mopeds, she explained. Any strange mechanical sound can trigger the body. Any moment’s peace in Ukraine has become so immensely fragile.

“You can look at this as like an animal,” she said. “People are a little bit like animals, not in a derogatory sense, but you have that sort of reaction. You hear weird sounds… and then you calm down because you figure out what that is.”

This was one of the most psychologically telling moments in the interview. She was not presenting herself as prone or traumatised in a simplistic way. She was describing a nervous system adapted, hardwired to danger.

When asked whether she was shocked by sounds that turn out not to be drones or missiles, she resisted the word “shocked.” “I wouldn’t say shocked is a strong word,” she said. “It’s like a reaction. It’s like a reflex more than anything. You don’t really think about it.”

Then, when this was posed as experiencing trauma, she again resisted the framing. “Trauma? No, no, no. I wouldn’t say so. It’s just a reflexive sort of thing. It’s just an adaptation, if anything.”

That answer is revealing. From the outside, one might describe everything as trauma. From inside the situation, Ana’s language was more practical. If a sound might mean danger, the body should react. In that context, alertness is not pathology. It is fundamental to survival.

But survival has a cost. “Fireworks are absolutely unbearable,” she said. “Nobody can deal with that.”

She also described the impact of explosions on animals. One friend’s parrot, she said, died after a strike hit across the street. The sound and vibration were enough. The bird had been a pet for decades and might have lived much longer.

“The parrot just died,” she said. “Birds are suffering pretty horribly… we actually had birds straight up, like in a horror movie, dropping dead from the sky.”

That image is difficult to forget. War is often described in terms of territory, weapons, casualties, and strategy. Ana’s account reminds us that war also enters the nervous systems of animals, the behaviour of pets, the routes of birds, and the physical atmosphere of a city. The scars of war reach beyond the obvious.

The emotional centre of the interview came when air-raid sirens went off while we were talking. Ana paused and checked. “Let me check what’s happening,” she said. “You can talk, obviously. I’m sorry that I interrupted you.”

I could hear the sirens through the call. She explained that they were not very close to her. “It’s not really close to my place,” she said. “So it’s not super loud, but you can hear it.”

Then she checked the app and explained the situation: a drone was flying near Kharkiv, but not toward her immediate location. “I know that I’m not in an immediate threat,” she said, “but other people who are, obviously can also tell.”

Impressively, the app can even tell the type of drone. Ana went on to explain, “Right now, my app says that there is a BpLA, which is a drone, an unmanned vehicle. It says what type it is, the place where it’s flying now currently, and where it’s going.”

A few minutes later, she looked again. “People took down that guy who was flying,” she said with a sense of satisfaction.

There is something almost unbearable about the calmness of this exchange. To hear the sound of sirens during wartime is nothing short of haunting. Yet Ana was stoic, practical, and almost apologetic. At one point, after checking the threat, she said: “Can you finish what you were talking about? Because I interrupted you rudely with my air raids.”

That line says more about life under Russia’s invasion than any abstract description could. An air raid becomes an interruption. A drone becomes just another routine thing to deal with. Survival becomes a matter of checking an app, judging distance, and continuing the conversation.

Ana also described the ordinary presence of grief. “Everyone has that experience by now, pretty much, in the east especially of Ukraine,” she said. “If you speak with people, they at the very least know someone who died.”

What changes is not that people stop caring. It is that grief becomes something they are forced to process quickly. “If you see something like that now, it’s not that you don’t feel anything,” she said, “but it’s just very numb.” Then she added: “You process it very fast and you move on.”

Perhaps the most devastating practical detail came when she described the way people prepare for death. “People just have to think about things in terms of practicality,” she said. “Here’s my code, here’s the password to my account… if I die, they can access it. And everyone does that.” This act, common among those who are terminally ill or elderly, is now conducted by millions of Ukrainians.

That is just part of what invasion does to ordinary life.

Where drone warfare is going and what it means for civilians

Ana’s warning was not only about Ukraine. It was about the future of war.

“You don’t know much, it seems, about how modern war works,” she said, speaking of people in the West who still imagine war through older, obsolete categories. “If Iran, China, Russia, whoever attacks, they’re not gonna do it with anything but drones.”

Her point was not that missiles, artillery, or conventional weapons have disappeared. Rather, drones are becoming the most flexible, scalable, and psychologically intrusive tools of modern war. They can scout, strike, harass, hunt, observe, and force entire populations to live under constant low-level threat.

Ana described Ukraine as the place where this new era is being developed. “This is a training field,” she said. “This new era of war is developed, and we are sort of the frontier, but we’re also the testing ground.”

That is a chilling formulation. Ukraine is not only defending itself against Russia’s invasion. It is also being forced to live through the experimental phase of twenty-first-century warfare.

For civilians, this means that the front line is no longer only a line on a map. That line blurs, smudges across the country. The sky far from the point of contact becomes part of the front. A lawnmower, a moped, or thunder can briefly enter the nervous system as a possible threat.

The phrase “human safari,” discussed in the interview with Dylan Burns, captures the apex of cruelty: Russian drone operators hunting civilians. Ana’s testimony shows what lies around that horror: not only the moment of attack, but the entire world of anticipation, adaptation, and aftermath.

“You can hunt people with those,” Ana said of drones. “Which they do.”

She also described what this means in evacuation zones. “In the kill zone,” she explained, if people do not have equipment that can show where the drones are, if their car is not protected, and if they do not have electronic-warfare protection, “you just die.” But with the right equipment, she said, “you have a chance to protect people and get them out of the zones they’re stuck in.”

This is where the humanitarian and military realities merge. Evacuating civilians is no longer simply a question of courage or logistics. It is a drone-warfare problem. Rescue itself needs detection, protection, electronic warfare, and rapid adaptation. Even that is often not enough.

But Ana’s account was not only one of fear. It was also one of Ukrainian response. Apps are built. Volunteers donate. Soldiers adapt. Interceptor drones rise to meet attack drones. Civilians support soldiers, and soldiers defend civilians. A drone appears on the app; minutes later, someone has taken it down.

This is a hopeful lesson not just for Ukraine, but more broadly for future countries facing such heinous acts: people and systems are far more capable of adaptation than appears on the surface.

Nevertheless, adaptation has its limits. Ukraine requires Patriots and air defence that are the responsibility of its western partners. Ukraine has shown extraordinary ingenuity against drones, but it still needs systems capable of stopping ballistic missiles. At the same time, its experience with drones should be taken seriously by every country that wants to understand where war is going. Ukraine’s allies should see the soldier-civilian symbiosis as a blueprint for relations between allies.

Ana was blunt about the future of warfare. “It’s gonna develop,” she said. “It’s gonna get more dystopian, more weird, but it’s gonna be this.”

That warning matters far beyond Ukraine. The war being fought there is not a distant exception. It is a preview.

Toward the end of the conversation, Ana rejected complacency. Fear, she suggested, is not irrational. It is rational if it leads people to act. “War is absolutely atrocious,” she said. “Nothing can be worse.” Then she added: “Not being afraid is horrible. It is healthy. You should be afraid. But here’s the thing: be afraid, but you’re not afraid enough.”

That is not a call for panic. It is a call for seriousness. Western societies do not need to imagine Ukraine’s experience as charity, or as someone else’s tragedy. They can understand support for Ukraine as self-interest: a way to help stop this form of war before it travels further.

Ana put that argument directly. “Westerners live now in a very, very good position to invest in us so they never have to deal with this shit ever.”

That may be the hard truth beneath the entire interview. Ukraine is not only asking to be saved. Ukraine is also warning everyone else what our future can look like. We never expect it to be us.

See the full video of the interview here (Ana enters the conversation approximately 10 minutes in to the video).

Important elections in Alaska and
Trump's electoral influence campaign

This June, Digital Ground Game is using our monthly Midterms Report to explore the state of elections in Alaska as they enter their tourism season and provide updates on the impact of Trump’s endorsement of primary candidates as midterms approach. We also want to remind readers to keep an eye out for updates on the Watson v. RNC case currently being decided in the Supreme Court, which is likely to be released sometime this month. The Trump administration is arguing that mail-in ballots cannot be accepted after election day, regardless of postmarking. Our team will provide reminders in our future reports once the ruling comes out but depending on the results, those planning to use mail-in ballots this fall may need to mail their ballots up to two or three weeks before election day to ensure their vote doesn’t arrive late.

State Highlight: Alaska

Increasingly cited as one of Chuck Schumer’s sole successful recruited candidate, the high expectations for Mary Peltola have turned the Alaska Senate race into a key pillar of the Democratic Party’s Senate strategy. Polling shows a warming view of Peltola among Alaskans who reflect a consistent, if small, democratic advantage in the race ^[1]. Primaries for the state don’t take place until August 18th, but our team wanted to shine a light on the races ahead of time. Given Alaska’s unique election rules, using a top four jungle primary into a rank-choice vote, let’s give a quick rundown of how their system works before we get into the candidates.

Voting

A jungle primary or nonpartisan primary is a system where all candidates, regardless of party, participate in a unified primary election resulting in the top two candidates moving on to the general election. In this system, occasionally one party will over crowd the primary and dilute the party’s vote leading to both general candidates coming from a minority party. We’re currently seeing a risk of this in California’s race for governor. Alaska’s answer to this issue is its use of ranked choice voting allowing the top four candidates all to move on to the general election. Ranked choice voting is a system that allows voters to rank the candidates by order of preference. If one candidate does not receive at least 50% of the votes, then the election will have multiple rounds. For each round, the candidate with the fewest votes is removed. As a voter, if your first ranked pick gets removed then your vote counts for whoever you ranked second. This continues until a candidate holds over half of the votes ^[2]. Currently, Alaska is the only state that uses both jungle primaries and ranked choice voting in its federal office elections.

Senate

The incumbent Senator running for reelection, Dan Sullivan, is framed by the RNC as someone who “fights for Alaskans every day” ^[3] but polling as recent as March 2026 shows his job approval at only 36% ^[4]. While the race will undoubtedly be close,the pile of promising data only seems to grow as we approach the elections for this important race. While Alaska’s jungle primary system sends the top four candidates to the general for a rank-choice election, we will only go into detail on Dan Sullivan and Mary Peltola, as all other candidates currently poll at less than 5%.

Dan Sullivan - R

Current incumbent Senator, Dan Sullivan, has a diverse resume both inside Alaska and out. After earning his law degree from Georgetown University Law Center in 1993, Sullivan joined the U.S. Marine Corps, where he served until transitioning to the reserves in 1997. Once out of active duty, he began a roughly 16 year legal career holding various appointed roles in public service including, Alaska’s attorney general and later its commissioner of natural resources ^[5]. Following a narrow victory in 2014, Sullivan began his 12 years as Senator during which he served on a number of committees, including veterans’ affairs, public works, and commerce. Those reading Dan’s campaign website would be forgiven for being confused about his policy stances, much like the Ohio Senate candidates, Sullivan failed to include an issues tab on his site. Largely reading like a resume, the “Meet Dan” tab seems to push the image of a more moderate republican by highlighting his work on the Save Our Seas Act to fund an ocean cleanup effort and his pro-bono services helping victims of sexual assault. Entertainingly, these policies are framed as beyond the scope of republican issues which seems to imply that republicans don’t want to help assault victims. During my reading of Dan’s site, the aspect I found most emblematic of his desire for a moderate image is the absence of President Trump’s July 2025 endorsement on his “endorsements” tab ^[6]. I suspect his efforts will be insufficient for voters looking for a more independently spirited candidate which has a real possibility of being a roadblock to his campaign, considering that the majority of Alaska voters are nonpartisan or undeclared ^[7].

Mary Peltola - D

A candidate with more believable moderate bona fides is former representative Mary Peltola. Not only did she assist Senator Merkowski’s 2010 write-in campaign and receive her support during Peltola’s 2022 House race, but in the 2024 elections, she was the only democrat to be endorsed by the National Rifle Association ^[8]. While these elements of her political history would almost certainly kill a campaign in a blue state, many political commentators, including Tim Miller of the Bulwark, have cited taking heterodox positions as an under-appreciated strategy for Democrats to pick up seats in redder areas ^[9]. The Mary Peltola campaign website is generally quite well designed and easy to navigate. Her “priorities” tab is split into one section on affordability and one on “fixing the rigged system” which mostly deals with ethics reform and regulations. In my view, the affordability section is a tad under cooked, while she has some interesting ideas on shipping and energy policy, most of the section is non-specific. The section on reform came off as much more detailed and focused; she proposes term limits and a new Senate Ethics Office, among other policies that increase congressional accountability ^[10]. Mary Peltola seems to be quite skilled at taking more traditionally right-wing policies for herself and coming off as natural. It will be interesting to see how voters respond to her in November.

Strategy

Mary Peltola seems to be doing a good job so far of advocating for her policies but I think she would benefit from including the contrasting element of Dan Sullivan. Given Alaska’s red nature, it likely wouldn't be good to bring up Trump directly. Calling Sullivan a rubber stamp for the regime would serve the dual purpose of communicating that Dan isn't interested in Alaskans and highlights that he isn't the moderate he seems to want to present himself as. Laying out in detail all the service cuts and job losses hurting Alaskans because of the one big beautiful bill act that Sullivan signed could serve as a cutting opposition ad campaign.

Governor

The sitting governor of Alaska, Mike Dunleavy is term limited, meaning the normal incumbent advantage can’t easily be assumed in this race. Following his statements last summer, it’s not clear Dunleavy even intends to use his swing to influence the race, only noting that he hopes whoever replaces him will continue his projects and work with the Trump administration ^[11]. The lack of rallying around a Republican candidate and the crowded field is leading to a somewhat misleading polling environment where Democratic candidate Tom Begich appears to have a significant lead; however, when consolidated by party, the polls show a virtually even split between Republicans, Democrats, and undecided voters ^[12]. Because of the lack of a clear polling leader among the republican candidates, we’ll briefly cover the top three. The outcome of this race still depends on a cacophony of factors but the possibility of Alaska having its first Democratic Governor in 24 years is by no means off the table.

Tom Begich - D

The clear standout of the few Democratic candidates is former Alaska State Senator and singer/songwriter Tom Begich. During his time in office, 16 of the 25 bills Begich sponsored passed and he served as the chair of the Alaska Juvenile Justice Advisory Committee ^[13]. In 2022 he worked closely with the sitting governor to pass the Alaska Reads Act to improve reading levels in early education across the state. In addition to Tom’s own record, the Begich family as a whole is something of an Alaskan political dynasty. Since 1970, five members of the Begich family have held elected office ^[14]. The website for Begich’s campaign is comprehensive to a fault; it offers a lot of information for those willing to go through it but may pose a real risk of turning away voters intimidated by the amount of reading required. Tom’s “issues” tab is formatted quite nicely, splitting policy into education, economics, energy, and a miscellaneous section labeled “Tom’s vision”. The energy section was particularly interesting. Begich appears to be using the term “new energy” to distance himself from the stigma that green energy has given the state’s economic reliance on fossil fuel production. An underlying theme throughout his policy platform is an interest in increasing government transparency, as reflected in his legislative history in the state Senate ^[15].

Bernadette Wilson - R

Wildly shifting in favorability across the polls, Bernadette Wilson’s online presence is spotty at best. She doesn't have a Wikipedia page at all and her Ballotpedia biography section is empty so researching her outside of her campaign site had to come primarily from articles and interviews. Wilson is the owner of Denali Disposal, a private trash collection service in Anchorage and claims the visage of a political outsider despite her long record of legislative advocacy and her time as interim executive director of conservative think tank, Alaska Policy Forum ^[16]. Bernadette Wilson is one of only a handful of Alaskan politicians who isn't attempting to run to the center in one way or another, and her campaign site seems to display that proudly. Her brief bio name drops multiple partisan favorites, including opposing the COVID-19 lockdowns and wanting to repeal Alaska’s ranked choice voting system, a policy that passed with a two-thirds majority in 2020 and overcame the 2024 repeal attempt already ^[17]. Wilson’s issues tab is limited to some unspecific education policy and a pledge to cut government jobs to restore the permanent fund dividend, a sort of sovereign wealth fund based on Alaskan oil revenues ^[18].

Click Bishop - R

Former Labor Commissioner and state senator, Click Bishop, won his 2012 state Senate race as the only candidate who didn’t sign the pledge not to join the bipartisan coalition of moderates leading the state congress at the time. His time in the Alaska Senate is marked by both imaginative legislating and repeated attacks from the state’s Republican Party establishment for his image as a swing vote ^[19]. Of all the candidates portraying themselves as bipartisan, Click’s bona fides appear to be the most deserved, even choosing a registered nonpartisan as his running mate. His campaign website is somewhat lackluster with some brief policy goals, but charitably speaking, his legislative history supports the idea that he can back up his goals with follow through ^[20].

Dave Bronson - R

Former Anchorage Mayor and U.S. Air Force veteran Dave Bronson currently leads by a hair according to the above poll he sponsored. Bronson has the air of a more traditional conservative candidate with his running mate’s and his military history, but those willing to read deeper will find their more extremist bent. The policy page of his campaign website is impressively detailed, linking to multiple page documents on each policy. While detailed policy planning is generally good, the volume buries more extreme policies like school vouchers, voter ID laws, and mail-in vote restrictions ^[21]. Over half of Alaska votes by mail so his proposals for not accepting mail ballots after election day have the potential to kill a massive number of otherwise eligible ballots.

Strategy

Alaska has a fairly unique political climate, which makes it hard to say what tactics would have a strong effect. From my reading, Click Bishop appears to be the most electable Republican to the degree that he will likely receive some portion of Democratic voters. For this reason, it may be prudent to push him out of the top four for generals if you are confident people will be turned off by a more extreme candidate. Running ads about Bishop being censured by the Alaska Republican Party in 2022 for voting against the party platform or highlighting his running mate being a nonpartisan might be enough to turn off more conservative voters. After the primaries, running ads highlighting Bronson and Wilson’s policies on election reform that would make voting harder would probably help shore up support among more rural voters, who would be the people most affected by such a policy. This last one is a serious long shot but assuming bishop is in the final four, forming a first/second rank choice alliance with him might be possible and bring more conservative voters on board. Such an alliance could include a promised position in the winner’s administration. This could be appealing to Bishop considering he was reported to have commented that addressing the budget issues of Alaska would require a bigger role than Congress can offer, shortly before ending his final term in 2024 ^[19].

Trump's pressure influencing primaries

Coming into this year’s midterm season, whether or not Trump’s endorsement would still hold the power to swing primaries was an open question. A number of races this month have illuminated a fealty to Trump still thriving in Republican voters. We wanted to give a quick rundown of those elections before we wrap up this month’s report.

Indiana State Senators

After Trump’s call for redistricting last fall, Indiana's Congress drafted redistricting bill 31-19, which was blocked on December 11th in the State Senate. Seven of the Republican Senators who voted against the bill were heavily targeted for replacement by more loyal candidates. Early last month, five of the seven were defeated in their primaries ^[22].

• District 1: Dan Dernulc was replaced by Trevor De Vries
• District 11: Linda Rogers was replaced by Brian Schmutzler
• District 19: Travis Holdman was replaced by Blake Fiechter
• District 21: James Buck was replaced by Tracey Powell
• District 41: Greg Walker was replaced by Michelle Davis

Senator Cassidy

Senator Cassidy is someone Trump has held a grudge against since he voted in favor of conviction during the impeachment hearings over the January 6th insurrection. This is widely believed to have led to Trump’s endorsement of his opponent, Julia Letlow. On May 16th, Cassidy was unsuccessful in his primary reelection bid ^[23].

Representative Massie

Kentucky Representative Thomas Massie has been a thorn in Trump’s side for a while now, but the fervor to oust him escalated significantly following Massie’s efforts to release the Epstein files last fall. Trump’s decision to endorse a virtual no-name candidate, Ed Gallrein, was initially somewhat baffling but ultimately paid off with Massie’s defeat on May 19th ^[24]. While Gallrein landed the nomination, the amount of help he needed to get him there makes this race the most expensive House of Representatives seat in history ^[25].

Senator Cornyn

The strangest target of Trump’s ire here has to be Senator John Cornyn. Speculation seems to land on a combination of some of Cornyn’s past statements dismissing Trump and Paxton’s enthusiasm for the SAVE America Act, leading to Paxton receiving the coveted endorsement on May 19th ^[26].  It seems unlikely that Trump's endorsement alone could be responsible for the final margin of the race, but Cornyn was defeated in the May 26th primary runoff.

Closer

One last reminder to readers to keep an eye out for the ruling on the Watson v. RNC case in the Supreme Court. This case will have a significant impact on federal voting rules, so we will include an update in our next report on it. If you want more immediate, real time updates on Digital Ground Game, be sure to keep an eye on our website or join our Discord, where you can talk to our staff directly about news and upcoming projects.

Pick any week from the last year. A SpaceX rocket lifts off from Texas while NASA’s Artemis program quietly reshapes its mission under new budget pressures^[1]. Somewhere in Brussels, the European Union Artificial Intelligence (EU AI) Act entered into force^[2] while Silicon Valley moves faster than any regulator can follow. BRICS nations meet to discuss a new financial architecture that doesn’t require the dollar. The oil market, already rattled by a supply disruption economists are calling the largest in history^[3], adds another variable to a world that has too many already. None of these are isolated events. And none of them are waiting for us to figure out what they mean.

We are living through a convergence. The rules-based international order hammered into place after 1945^[4] — imperfect, paternalistic, often hypocritical, but structurally committed to preventing the worst — is visibly fragmenting. Artificial intelligence, the most transformative technology since the printing press, is being deployed at scale without agreed-upon guardrails, democratic deliberation, or a shared vocabulary for what we even want it to do. And space, which for sixty years was the province of national governments and their implicit social contracts, has opened its borders to private capital. We are no longer dreaming about these things. We are signing the contracts, launching the rockets, and passing laws that will govern the next century.

The question isn't whether the world is changing. The question is which world we're building.

You already know the meme. Trek versus Wars, optimism versus fatalism, the Federation versus the Empire. It's been a shorthand for decades, a way of sorting people at parties and on the internet. But I can't stop noticing that it stopped being a meme somewhere along the way. The same divide I grew up debating in fiction is showing up in the actual news, every single week, in decisions that will outlast all of us. Not as nostalgia. As a diagnostic.

Two philosophies, not two franchises

The standard take on this divide is aesthetic: one has laser swords and family drama, the other has diplomacy and jumpsuits. But the real disagreement runs much deeper. It's a fundamental split on three questions that happen to be the exact questions we're facing right now.

The nature of conflict

The first is the nature of conflict. In Star Wars, conflict is metaphysical; a spiritual force baked into the fabric of existence expressed as the eternal struggle between light and dark. There will always be an Empire. There will always be a Rebellion. History is a wheel.

In Star Trek, conflict is a problem to be solved. War happens because of misunderstanding or resource scarcity. The implicit promise of the Federation is that both of those things are curable. The difference isn't just philosophical. It determines whether you build institutions or strongmen, whether you invest in diplomacy or deterrence, whether you design AI systems that serve broad human needs or narrow ones.

Technology’s role in society

The second disagreement is about technology's role in society. In Star Wars, technology is background. A hyperdrive is like a car engine: it breaks, it's greasy, it's owned by individuals or corporations, and it doesn't change what people are. Technology in that universe is a tool, neutral and inert, in the hands of whoever can afford it. In Star Trek, technology is the protagonist. The replicator and the warp drive didn't just make life easier. They deleted the reasons for human greed. You cannot hoard what everyone can replicate. You cannot conquer for resources that you can synthesize. Technology, in that vision, is the ladder we use to climb out of our own animal instincts.

Individual vs. institution

The third is the tension between the individual and the institution. Star Wars is a story about exceptional people making moral choices that change history. Luke Skywalker doesn't reform the Senate. He redeems his father. Change is personal, spiritual, intimate. Star Trek insists, sometimes to the point of drama, that no one person is bigger than the mission or the Prime Directive. The institution is the hero. The system is the point.

Star Wars is the past projected into the future. Star Trek is the future as an escape from the past.

Star Wars asks: how do we survive the world? Star Trek asks: what kind of world is worth surviving for?

Those aren't equivalent questions. And which one you're answering right now, in the choices being made about technology and governance and international order, will define the world your children inherit.

The human loop

Of everything converging at this moment, artificial intelligence is where the fork in the road is sharpest, and where most people don't realize they're already walking down one path.

The surface concern about AI is familiar: job displacement, misinformation, bias. These are real. But the deeper concern is something I'd call the loss of the human loop. We are moving, faster than most people appreciate, from AI as a tool you consult to AI as an agent that acts. These are systems that make decisions at speeds no human can follow, optimizing for efficiency across domains too complex for any individual to monitor. The problem isn't that they will go rogue in some cinematic sense. The problem is subtler: a society can function perfectly on paper, optimized and frictionless and measurable, and feel hollow or oppressive to actually live in. Efficiency is not the same as dignity. Optimization is not the same as flourishing.

There is also a quieter loss that doesn't get enough attention. The middle layer of thinking – the synthesis, the judgment calls, the messy interpretive work between data and decision – is exactly what we are outsourcing. And when we do, we don’t just change outcomes: we change ourselves. Cognition, like muscle, atrophies when it isn't used. A generation that grows up delegating its reasoning to systems it can't inspect or understand is not just dependent. It is, in some meaningful sense, diminished. This is not an argument against AI. It is an argument for keeping humans in the loop, not as a bottleneck, but as the point.

The Star Trek version of AI is a force multiplier for human curiosity. Scientific leaps, not just steps. Hyper-personalized learning and empowerment. Collaborative creativity between human and machine. The replicator didn't make humans obsolete. It freed them. That future is still available. But it requires building AI systems that are legible, accountable, and designed around human agency rather than around the convenience of the people who own the servers.

The Star Wars version is already here, if you know where to look: inscrutable systems wielded by a priesthood of founders and investors, moving faster than democratic deliberation can follow, optimizing for metrics that were never put to a vote. The Force is strong with those who can afford the compute.

Two visions in orbit

The same divide is playing out in geopolitics with an almost embarrassing literalness. We are, right now, in a genuine competition over what the rules of space will be, and the contestants represent two different civilizational philosophies.

The Artemis Accords, signed by 67 nations^[5], attempt to establish a cooperative framework for lunar exploration: shared principles, transparent operations, the avoidance of harmful interference. They are imperfect and unevenly adopted, but they are structurally Trek, an attempt to write the rules before the scramble begins. China's competing Lunar Research Station program, backed by Russia and a growing coalition, represents a different model: parallel infrastructure, separate standards, a multipolar space in which competing blocs do not coordinate so much as coexist warily.

Neither vision is simply good or evil. But, they are genuinely different answers to the question of whether technology will be governed by shared institutions or by whoever gets there first. The same question is being asked about AI regulation, with the EU AI Act on one side and the race for global AI dominance on the other. It echoes, too, in the global financial architecture, as BRICS nations build alternatives to the dollar-denominated system the post-war order created.

In each of these arenas, the choice isn't between cooperation and conflict. Instead, it's between building the systems that make cooperation possible and defaulting to a world where only the strong define the terms. One of those paths leads to a Federation. The other leads to an Empire that may be perfectly convinced of its own righteousness.

The door that closes

This is the thing about crossroads that makes them different from crises: you don't always know you're at one. Crises announce themselves. Crossroads are quieter. They look, from the inside, like a normal sequence of decisions. A regulatory choice here, a funding priority there, a treaty signed or declined, a technology deployed before the questions about it are answered. The door doesn't slam. It drifts closed.

Gene Roddenberry wasn't predicting the future when he created Star Trek. He was prescribing it. He was saying something specific: here is a version of humanity that made a choice. Collectively, and with effort, it decided to be better than its worst instincts. Not because the instincts went away, but because the institutions and the technology and the shared commitments made it possible to override them most of the time. That future was never inevitable. It was built.

We are at the moment when building it, or failing to, is an active choice. Not a metaphor. Not a thought experiment. The convergence of forces happening right now, in AI labs and treaty negotiations and energy markets and orbit, is the raw material of whichever future gets made. The contracts are being signed. The standards are being set. The precedents are being established that will be almost impossible to reverse.

So: which universe are we building?

The answer is not written yet. But it is being written right now, by people who are mostly not thinking about Star Trek at all. Maybe that's the problem. Maybe the people who grew up believing that humanity could earn its technology, that civilization could mature into its power rather than simply accumulate it, need to say so more loudly, in more rooms, while there is still time to matter.

The Final Frontier is still out there. But so is a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away.

The choice, for now, is ours.

Local elections are decided by dozens of votes. Meet the canvasser who's been proving it every weekend in Maine, and learn how easy it is to do the same.

Hey Everyone!

Digital Ground Game is excited to announce that the latest winner of the monthly DGG Political Action Award is: UltraFridge!

The DGG Political Action Award is a community-led award intended to highlight members who have done significant real-life political work. Winners receive a Discord shoutout, a pinned Reddit post, an article in the Pragmatic Papers, and a special role on the Digital Ground Game Discord server!

If you’d like to nominate yourself or others for this award, fill out the form here: Nomination Form

The award committee selected UltraFridge for his tireless weekend canvassing work in Maine, his direct contributions to multiple razor-thin local election victories, and his commitment to making canvassing more approachable and accessible for younger members of the community.

Who Is UltraFridge?

There's a certain kind of person who, when things get bad enough, stops doom-scrolling and starts doing. UltraFridge is that kind of person.

A longtime member of the DGG community, going back to the JonTron era, UltraFridge spent years like a lot of us: politically aware, increasingly alarmed, but unsure what "getting involved" actually looked like in practice. 

His political awakening, as he calls it, came on January 6th. What he watched unfold that day, and the months of reckoning that followed, left him with a slow-burning conviction that he needed to be one of the people who actually showed up. Not metaphorically. Physically.

By January 2026, that conviction had him enrolled in political science courses. Then everything happened at once. ICE raided Minnesota's Somali communities and simultaneously hit Lewiston and Portland, Maine — both cities he calls home. Alex Pretti and René Goode were shot. U.S. forces invaded Venezuela. It was, in his words, "whiplash." 

Sitting in an accelerated poli sci course while all of that was happening outside felt like a waste. He joined the Digital Ground Game server, and almost immediately found himself being asked by Cody: Do you live in Maine?

He's been canvassing every weekend since.

We recognized UltraFridge with the DGG Political Action Award — though he almost didn't accept it. "I'm a behind-the-scenes kind of guy," he told us. 

He saw it as an opportunity to make canvassing feel more approachable for others who might be on the fence. We sat down with him to talk about what the work actually looks like, what it's accomplished, and what he'd say to someone who wants to do something but hasn't yet.

A Conversation With UltraFridge

Sixpaths: Early 2026 was a lot — the ICE raids, the murders of René Goode and Alex Pretti, the invasion of Venezuela. You mentioned these events hit close to home for you. Can you walk us through what that felt like and why it pushed you to act?

UltraFridge: "Lewiston has a pretty heavy Somali population, and Portland does too. They invaded both at the same time — both cities that are basically my home.

And I'm sitting there with my nose buried in a textbook, just kind of pretending it wasn't happening. It was really, really distracting. I felt like I have the talent, I have the skills to pitch in and do something, and I was just kind of letting them go to waste."

Sixpaths: Maine isn't the first state that comes to mind when people think about competitive politics. What's it actually like on the ground there?

UltraFridge: "Maine is really not as blue as people tend to think. Most of Maine is very, very red — all of the blue areas are Portland and a few other towns. What isn't red is very purple.

By design, a lot of the canvassing I've done has been pretty friendly. When you go canvassing, unless you're doing persuasion doors, you're going to pull up, you're going to have an established route of doors — people that are at worst undecided, but mostly pretty consistent Dem voters.

That said, even then, the guy I've been canvassing for most recently is in a very, very red district. The blue people that I do talk to are probably feeling very alone where they are, and they'll just have so much to get off their chest, because someone's finally listening to them."

Sixpaths: You mentioned that people in red districts sometimes just want to vent to a friendly Democrat voice. What kinds of things are coming up when you're actually at someone's door — what's on people's minds?

UltraFridge: "It kind of depends. You can tell the people that are pretty engaged with local politics versus the people that are tunnel-visioned on federal politics — which was me for a very, very long time.

A lot of people have a lot to vent about Donald Trump, the war in Iran, the price of gas, the ICE raids. There was a bill that passed in the state Congress to severely hamper our law enforcement's coordination and cooperation with ICE. It was on Janet Mills' desk, and she just didn't sign it. 

By her not signing it, it went into effect at a later date — after ICE had already come and gone. Whereas if she'd signed it, it would have gone into effect before they'd gotten here.

People bitch about that quite a lot, rightfully. And I'm not even joking — I don't think I've met more than a couple people that like her. It's crazy."

Sixpaths: You mentioned you got into this because Cody happened to reach out in the Discord. For someone who isn't already in that server, how do they find their way to canvassing?

UltraFridge: "I would recommend reaching out to the HDCC for your state — the House Democratic Campaign Committee, or the Senate campaign committee. These are the people running the campaigns. 

You could be working directly with a campaign manager, and they'll point you at a local race and say, 'Hey, we're falling behind in this area, it would be awesome if you could go knock on doors.' They'll meet you there, probably go knocking with you. You download an app, plug in a route, and you just follow it — 30 doors in two, three hours.

And if you go canvassing one time, you're already like one of the best in their eyes. If you go a second time, you are a superstar. The bar is that low, unfortunately. So they will bend over backwards to keep you and make it as easy as possible. 

If you're in the server, I would strongly recommend going to your regional channel and just saying, 'Hey, who's in my state, who's nearby, who wants to go canvassing with me?' Having someone your age and similarly-minded alongside you makes an astronomical difference. It turns it from a boring thing to slog through on your weekend to something you actually look forward to."

Sixpaths: You've described yourself as a behind-the-scenes person. How does someone like that end up good at knocking on strangers' doors every weekend?

UltraFridge: "I think it's more just something that I have a knack for, mostly due to my professional and volunteer experience. I've worked in intake for subsidized housing — all the worst calls you could imagine. I've worked in training, community service, a lot of client-facing roles where I preferred to be more behind the scenes, but by nature of that experience I've just gotten good at talking to random people.

I could never picture myself running for office — I'm not wired for that kind of thing. But canvassing is just the easiest step. I want to get involved, I want to help out, we need people knocking on doors.

One of the guys I canvassed for, Scott Harriman — he's a political nerd, not a put-on-a-face-for-the-cameras guy. And I was next to him when they announced he won, and I shook his hand and was like, 'You ready to do this again in a few months?' And it looked like the blood just drained from his face. I felt that. 

I wouldn’t do it myself, ever. But what I do — I enjoy doing something impactful, I enjoy being involved and feeling like I'm doing something that is actually meaningfully important."

Sixpaths: You mentioned before that one of the races you canvassed for was won by around 50 votes, which is an incredibly thin margin. When you see numbers like that, how do you think about the direct impact that you and the other canvassers had on the outcome?

UltraFridge: "So I've mainly been canvassing for two people. The guy who flipped a red district in 2024 won by about 50 votes. The special election in February — Scott Harriman — was somewhere between 40 and 90 votes, a razor thin margin. In the previous election for that same district the person won by like 16 points, and this one won by five. So it was a heavy swing red.

When you see how thin the margins are for local state representative elections, it is very, very easy to do the math in your head. I can knock on 30 doors and maybe reach 50 people in three hours — most of my routes have been on average 30 doors, about two and a half hours. Do that a few weekends in a row, and you have had an actual serious impact on that election.

And given the minuscule number of people that are even canvassing at all, it is huge just to do anything. Most of the time, the only people canvassing are going to be the candidate and the campaign manager. For the Lewiston special election, Ken Martin — the DNC chair — came down personally, and he drew a lot of people. On a day like that, when you have ten or twelve people knocking on doors and you win by 50 or 60 votes — yeah, it is critically important."

Sixpaths: What's the biggest misconception people have about what canvassing actually requires?

UltraFridge: "I would guess people generally have the impression that you're going to need to argue with people, or be super persuasive. That is a different type of canvassing — persuasion doors — where you're going to independent doors, households that kind of vote Democrat one year and Republican the next.

But generally speaking, when you're canvassing, you are just knocking on friendly doors. People will sometimes be unfriendly because they don't want to be bothered or they just don't like politicians. But by and large, the overwhelming majority of people you'll speak to will be friendly.

And more than trying to convince them of something, you're more so just putting something on their radar — usually something that will already be important to them, and they will appreciate you notifying them of it. It is much, much less combative than people would think. It's a pretty good time."

Sixpaths: What does a good script look like for someone just starting out?

UltraFridge: "Part of it will just come from observing. At the start, I would hope you get put with a buddy who you can go knocking on doors with as a pair — someone with much more experience. You can just observe, smile, be a pretty face for a bit, but pay attention.

Listen to what they're doing, get a feel for the types of questions people ask, what comes off as rigid versus not. It is very, very easy for us — people consuming political media and talking about politics all day — to use poli sci language when you really just want to come across as a normal person knocking on doors for your buddy. Very casual, very down to earth.

You’ll always be rigid for a while, the first day or two, the first few doors. But it’s definitely the kind of thing that just comes with time.

For me, I'll say something like: 'I'm knocking on doors for my buddy — he's the current sitting representative in this district. Are you familiar with him?' If they say no, I rattle off two or three things I think are important. The guy I've been canvassing for most recently is a union leader for electricians — his whole thing is electricity bills and trades. Very easy for people to connect with immediately.

Then I lean into whatever the purpose is that day: get out the vote, raise awareness, or sometimes I'm getting qualified contributions for the Clean Election Fund, where if you give five bucks, it becomes $110 from the state. It depends on the person, the candidate, the area. The more you do it, the more you move away from literally what's written on the pamphlet you're holding."

Sixpaths: What would you say to someone reading this who wants to do something but hasn't yet?

UltraFridge: "Just give it a shot. Go into the server, join if you haven't, and just say, 'Hey, I'm from this state, I would like to get knocking on doors. Is there anybody nearby that can help me out, or that wants to maybe do this with me?' Do it once. Hopefully do it twice. You'll see how easy it is, how meaningful it is, how actually impactful it is.

Because coming off of 2025 and a lot of 2026, it’s very, very easy to spiral. That was me for most of 2025, and to a degree that is still me. The only way I'm not is by just simply not paying as much attention to federal politics — because holy fuck, you want to drink bleach sometimes. 

But it’s so easy to just disconnect, go outside, touch grass, talk to people, and look at the numbers. A handful of hours on your Saturday. Actual real impact. I strongly encourage you guys to just give it a shot."

If you want to get involved in canvassing, join the DGG political action server and head to your regional channel. You can also reach out directly to your state's House Democratic Campaign Committee (HDCC) or Senate Democratic Campaign Committee. 

You don't need experience. You don't need to know everything. You just need to show up.

In 1932, as Europe drifted toward another catastrophe, British Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin warned Parliament that “the bomber will always get through,” giving voice to a growing conviction among interwar strategists that air power had rendered the battlefield transparent and traditional armies increasingly obsolete^[1]. Few thinkers embodied that belief more completely than Giulio Douhet, whose seminal work, The Command of the Air, envisioned fleets of bombers ranging above shattered cities, bypassing trenches and fortifications alike to strike directly at the industrial and psychological foundations of entire societies^[2][3]. Nearly a century later, similar rhetoric now surrounds unmanned aerial systems (UAS), whose ceaseless hum over the trenches of the Russo-Ukrainian War has produced an atmosphere of perpetual exposure in which troop concentrations, armored columns, artillery batteries, and even individual soldiers can be identified and attacked with startling speed^[4].

Viral footage of First Person View (FPV) drones plunging through shattered windows or pursuing vehicles across scarred fields has contributed to a popular perception that drones are inaugurating a wholly new epoch of warfare in which concealment is vanishing and maneuver itself may become suicidal ^[5][6]. Yet the history of air power offers a more sobering lesson. Strategic bombing profoundly altered twentieth and twenty-first century conflict and granted enormous advantages to militaries capable of harnessing aerial dominance ^[7][8]. But aircraft alone rarely proved capable of translating destruction into decisive political victory or territorial control. Air power can pulverize infrastructure, isolate battlefields, and terrorize civilian populations, but as critics of modern drone triumphalism increasingly observe, it still could not occupy a hill, hold a city, or compel surrender absent effective ground forces capable of exploiting those effects. The parallel with contemporary drone warfare is difficult to ignore. UAS have unquestionably transformed modern combat, enhancing capabilities in reconnaissance and targeting, greatly increasing lethality. However, the enduring danger lies in mistaking a dramatic shift in the visibility and tempo of combat for the permanent obsolescence of the broader political and operational realities that have long governed war itself.

The history of warfare is littered with prophets who mistook the arrival of a new machine for the arrival of an entirely new age. But genuine military revolutions rarely emerge from technology in isolation. They materialize instead through slower and more uneven convergences of invention, doctrine, organization, and political adaptation ^[9][10]. A weapon may shatter formations on the battlefield, but unless institutions learn how to integrate it into a coherent operational system, its effects often remain fragmented and temporary. The tank existed before bewegungskrieg/blitzkrieg. Aircraft circled above battlefields before airpower theorists promised that fleets of bombers would render armies obsolete. Precision-guided munitions appeared decades before the United States fused satellites, surveillance networks, and digital command systems into the architecture of post-Cold War information warfare. In nearly every era, the decisive transformation emerged not from the machine itself, but from the military establishment that learned how to wield it with greater coordination and conceptual clarity than its rivals^[11].

For that reason, the very notion of a Revolution in Military Affairs remains slippery and contested among historians and military professionals^[12]. What later generations identify as a paradigm shift often appeared, at the time, as a series of disconnected improvisations stitched together amid uncertainty and bloodshed. The interwar apostles of strategic bombing believed aircraft would bypass trenches, annihilate civilian morale, and make conventional armies redundant, only for the furnaces of World War II to reveal a far more complex reality in which airpower became indispensable without becoming singularly decisive. Today, the drone debate occupies a similar intellectual terrain ^[13][14]. Small quadcopters hover above shattered villages in eastern Ukraine like mechanical vultures, transmitting coordinates within seconds to artillery crews miles away, while commentators across social media proclaim the death of armor and maneuver and even concealment itself. Yet many military analysts remain cautious, arguing that drones may represent less a clean rupture with the past than the latest stage in a longer evolution toward persistent surveillance and increasingly transparent battlefields^[15].

In early antiquity, bronze clad chariots rolling across the plains of the ancient Near East promised aristocratic dominance through speed and shock before disciplined infantry formations and cavalry constrained their utility. Centuries later, the thunder of cannon fire reverberating against the stone ramparts of medieval Europe shattered not only fortress walls but also the political order that had sustained feudal aristocracies for generations. Even gunpowder did not transform warfare in isolation. The true upheaval emerged from the convergence of centralized taxation, standing armies, bureaucratic administration, and logistical systems capable of sustaining campaigns over enormous distances^[16]. Military revolutions, both in theory and in practice, rarely materialized as singular technological epiphanies.

Throughout military history, armed institutions and civilian observers alike have repeatedly displayed a tendency to mistake technological novelty for immediate strategic transcendence, often projecting onto emerging weapons systems a degree of decisiveness that later battlefields failed to substantiate^[15]. In the years preceding the First World War many European strategists regarded the machine gun not merely as an incremental improvement in firepower but as an instrument capable of rendering maneuver obsolete and transforming warfare into an unassailable contest of defensive attrition. When "The Guns of August" finally opened across the fields of France and Belgium, the result was indeed carnage on an industrial scale. However, the battlefield did not freeze permanently into static paralysis as many had anticipated. Instead, armies adapted through a variety of means and tactics i.e., infiltration, creeping barrages, mechanized mobility, and increasingly sophisticated forms of combined arms coordination.

In World War II, tanks alone did not produce the German "war of movement", any more than aircraft alone created strategic bombing. German operational success during the early years of World War II emerged from the integration of armored formations, tactical aviation, radio communications, decentralized command structures, and operational doctrines emphasizing tempo and disruption over linear attrition. Likewise, the rise of carrier warfare in the Pacific transformed naval combat not because aircraft carriers were inherently revolutionary objects, but because they displaced battleships as the centerpiece of an entirely new operational system organized around mobility and long-range strike. The battlefield had changed profoundly, but war itself retained its enduring character as a contest shaped as much by human adaptation and political will as by machinery alone.

A similar pattern now surrounds contemporary discourse on unmanned aerial systems, where grainy first-person-view footage circulating across social media platforms often creates the impression that drones alone have rendered tanks and infantry and operational maneuver, relics of a fading epoch. However beneath the spectacle of exploding armored vehicles and hovering quadcopters lies a more restrained assessment among many professional military analysts, who increasingly argue that drones, while transformative in their effects, remain embedded within older continuities of warfare shaped by logistics, electronic warfare, artillery, engineering, and the enduring contest between detection and survivability^[17][18].

Russia's war in Ukraine has become the most drone saturated battlefield in modern history, a sprawling laboratory of attrition in which the sky itself has been transformed into a dense latticework of sensors^[13]. But the extraordinary lethality of drone warfare in the Russo-Ukrainian War is not simply the consequence of technological innovation alone, but the product of several overlapping operational constraints that have trapped both armies inside an exhausting contest of attrition^[19]. Neither Moscow nor Kyiv has succeeded in establishing enduring air superiority, forcing each side to rely heavily on cheap quadcopters, FPV drones, loitering munitions, and dispersed reconnaissance systems to compensate for the relative absence of uncontested manned aviation over the front^[20].

Simultaneously, acute manpower shortages and mounting casualties have steadily reduced the capacity of both armies to conduct large-scale maneuver operations, while chronic pressures upon artillery shell production and interceptor stockpiles have elevated drones into an economical substitute for scarce precision-guided fires^[21][22]. Under these conditions, even small infantry detachments moving across open terrain can find themselves stalked by persistent aerial surveillance before being struck by artillery directed through drone feeds transmitted in real time to fire-control teams kilometers away. The resulting battlefield environment has produced a form of tactical paralysis in which the accumulation of surveillance, entrenched defenses, and constrained resources has often favored incremental destruction over operational breakthrough.

The spectacle of drone warfare in Ukraine or Mali or Israel, has encouraged a torrent of commentary portraying unmanned aerial systems as wholly unprecedented instruments of combat, though many of the battlefield functions now associated with UAS are in essence, recognizable continuities of older military practices rendered cheaper, faster, and vastly more accessible^[23]. What has changed is not the existence of aerial observation or precision engagement, but the extraordinary compression of the kill chain and the diffusion of these capabilities downward to tactical echelons once dependent upon scarce aircraft or cumbersome command structures^[24][25]. A squad or platoon equipped with commercially modified drones can now perform tasks that once required dedicated tasking at the level of battalion or even brigade, transforming relatively smaller infantry formations into localized surveillance and strike networks capable of identifying, tracking, and attacking targets within minutes.

At the tactical and operational level maneuver warfare, at its core, concerns the movement of forces through space in order to impose dislocation, paralysis, confusion, or collapse upon an adversary rather than merely annihilating him through frontal attrition. However, the drone saturated battlefields of the war in Ukraine have increasingly transformed even modest movement into a hazardous and frequently lethal undertaking. The traditional logic of maneuver rested on the ability of commanders to mass combat power at decisive points while concealing intentions long enough to rupture enemy cohesion through surprise, tempo, and positional advantage^[26]. Despite recurrent declarations that maneuver itself has become obsolete, professionals remain skeptical of such sweeping conclusions, arguing instead that the contemporary battlefield reflects not the death of maneuver but its adaptation under new technological conditions where dispersion, camouflage, electronic warfare, deception, hardened fortifications, and rapid relocation increasingly function as prerequisites for movement rather than substitutes for it^[27][28][29].

Still, the cumulative implications of drone warfare remain difficult to dismiss. Persistent aerial surveillance has narrowed the space between detection and destruction to such a degree that concealment itself has become increasingly fragile^[30]. Vehicles once able to disperse beneath darkness now risk exposure beneath the cold gaze of thermal optics carried by inexpensive commercial drones modified in improvised workshops. Supply convoys navigate roads stalked by loitering munitions whose operators sit far from the front, peering through screens illuminated in dim concrete bunkers. But even as these developments appear transformative, caution shadows many serious assessments. Warfare has repeatedly produced moments in which contemporary observers mistook violent adaptation for irreversible revolution. The challenge facing modern militaries is therefore not merely technological but intellectual. Defense planners must determine whether drones represent a discrete Revolution in Military Affairs or whether they constitute another stage in the centuries long evolution of warfare^[31][32]. The answer may ultimately depend not on any single capability but on whether the aggregation of UAS capabilities matures into an operational framework capable of fundamentally reshaping how armies fight and win.

Introduction

Federal investigators issued subpoenas to Twitch streamer Hasan Piker and CodePink cofounder Medea Benjamin, as part of a larger probe into the March “Nuestra América Convoy”  to Cuba with 40 other U.S. activists.^[1] The Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) is trying to determine whether the trip, which delivered medical aid to Cuba under a banner of solidarity, violated the U.S. embargo on Cuba. 

Checking in to Hotel California 

Around 40 Americans joined dozens of international activists to sail supplies to Cuba and visit hospitals, part of a “Nuestra América Convoy” organized by leftist NGOs. U.S. authorities suspect that convoy participants may have violated the U.S. Cuba embargo by coordinating with Cuban government entities or by staying in state-linked hotels.

Treasury investigators are particularly checking if convoys booked rooms at hotels on the State Department’s 2025 Cuba Restricted List, a blacklist of firms tied to Cuba’s government. U.S. law generally bans unlicensed transactions with Cuban entities, subject to only narrow exceptions such as permitted journalism, humanitarian aid, or educational exchanges. Though one would reasonably conclude Piker’s trip was for humanitarian aid, he could still be found liable for allegedly staying at a hotel on Cuba’s Prohibited Accommodations List.^[2] Section 708 of the OFAC website’s section on Cuban Sanctions leaves an exception to what defines a humanitarian visit, reading - “...exclude from the authorization lodging, paying for lodging, or making any reservation for or on behalf of a third party to lodge, at any property in Cuba on the Cuba Prohibited Accommodations List to the extent prohibited by § 515.210.“

Legal experts who spoke with Fox News, who broke this story, note the process could remain a civil OFAC enforcement case or escalate to a criminal IEEPA (International Emergency Economic Powers Act) prosecution, depending on the information gathered.^[3] Under IEEPA, willful sanctions evasion can result in fines up to $1 million and 20 years in prison per violation.

The Piker case is part of a recent broader crackdown on alleged foreign influence. Fox News and press wires say investigators have identified dozens more Americans who joined Cuba solidarity convoys led by a wealthy pro-communist network. The Treasury, Justice, and State departments are inspecting whether radical nonprofit groups funneled political activism under the guise of aid. The subpoena on Piker and Benjamin is described by officials as “part of a wider dragnet” to curb extremist or foreign-directed campaigns that exploit social media. 

Piker and Benjamin deny any wrongdoing. Both have publicly framed the trip as genuine humanitarian relief. Piker fired back on X/Twitter that the U.S. government would rather “try to criminalize delivering aid to a country we’ve starved” than target elite wrongdoers. He also posted defensively, “we stayed at the right hotel btw – the govt got duped by a f**ing viral Twitter post. I’m losing my mind.”. 

I was unable to find the Twitter post Hasan is referring to, but Fox News and others reported they were staying at Gran Hotel Bristol Habana Vieja.^[4] However, the New York Times reported on March 23rd that the group would be staying at Iberostar Marques de la Torre, later confirmed by Medea Benjamin to PolitiFact.^[5][6] It is important to note that neither of these hotels appears on the Cuba Restricted List.^[7]

Political and Legal Context

Since the Cold War, a rigorous embargo has barred most trade and tourist travel to Cuba from the US, citing human rights and national security concerns. Americans can’t just vacation there, as every trip must fit into a narrow category (education, cultural exchange, humanitarian aid, etc.). OFAC’s Cuban Assets Control Regulations explicitly forbid most financial transactions with the Cuban government or military-linked entities.^[8] Knowingly booking accommodations at a Cuban military-operated hotel can itself be a sanctions violation.

OFAC is looking for evidence of a crime, hence the requests for information. Potential civil penalties under U.S. law for an unlicensed sanctions breach can be up to $250,000 or twice the transaction value. If OFAC finds willful evasion, the matter could be referred for criminal prosecution under the IEEPA. 

In response, Piker immediately ramped up on stream, calling the subpoenas “intimidation tactics” and shifting the blame onto wealthy patron Neville Roy Singham (a businessman married to CodePink’s co-founder).^[9] He argued that federal authorities were selectively targeting activists who challenge U.S. foreign policy, while ignoring larger political and corporate corruption. Piker has also maintained that the convoy complied with applicable regulations and that media reports linking participants to prohibited accommodations are inaccurate.

Conclusion

The question now is whether this will quietly close or escalate. If investigators find paperwork lapses or sanction violations, Piker could face a civil penalty or be dragged into criminal court. A variety of people online have been making the claim that Piker may face larger charges or consequences as a result of Piker’s association with Code Pink and Progressive International, the organizers of the convoy.^[10]

The convoy was organized by Progressive International, working alongside other organizations like Code Pink. The official organizer for the convoy is David R.K. Adler, an American who works as Progressive International’s Co-General Coordinator.^[11] On the list of advisors for Progressive International appears Mariela Castro, daughter of former First Secretary Raul Castro.^[12] Mariela also made a speech, defending the Cuban regime and blasting the embargo.^[13] This, combined with Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s tough stance on the Cuban government, leads the poster to conclude that Hasan’s trip may not be found to be humanitarian at all, but an attempt “coordinated in part by the Cuban government to counteract the US strategic leverage being utilized against it." As phrased by one reddit user.

However, I was unable to find Mariela, or the National Center for Sex Education (CENESEX), the Cuban government entity of which she is director, or Progressive International, or David R.K. Adler on the U.S. Treasury OFAC sanctions lists, the Cuba Restricted List, or the SDN list.^[14][7][15] As far as one can reasonably tell, her interactions were perfectly legal and fell in line with sanctions against the Cuban government. If Rubio has taken notice of Piker in particular and singled him out, it is possible that there will be some way found around this, but there is no evidence to suggest that is the case. Piker was not the only one subpoenaed, but he was likely the most prominent. I’m not convinced that Piker has LARPed too close to the sun, but it is still too early to say. The subpoenas could unearth new information that paints Piker or Code Pink’s actions as criminal. Unfortunately for all of us, his LARP goes on, at least for now.

Another claim seems to be that Hasan admitted on stream that he coordinated with someone in the Cuban government to ensure internet access during his stay in Cuba, and thus admitted to "coordinating with the Cuban government" and violated sanctions or laws. ^[16]

Reading through the OFAC FAQ in regards to the Cuba sanctions, internet access and communications, even transactions, seem to be generally authorized.[17] "The general license ... authorizes ... certain services incident to the exchange of communications over the internet, services to support the exchange of communications..."

Most forms of internet communication are allowed, and the wording is deliberately broad. During the protests around 2021, the Biden-era administration sought to support Cuban communications and thus broadly authorized most social media transactions with the US.^[18]It is hard to imagine that, on this point alone, Hasan has committed a crime, as everything he claims to have done falls within these broad authorizations.

When asked for comment, the author of the linked Reddit post EightEight16 responded to me with the following, 

“The way the sanction laws are written, and the way in which the convoy was organized and executed, I would not begrudge anyone for coming out on one side or another in regards to the legal implications, perhaps as the laws were intended. What I would be willing to wager a great deal on is that the analysts looking in have almost certainly done a great deal more research than Hasan himself did before he struck boldly out to sea like his hero, Luffy. And if I were Hasan, I would be eyeing nervously the stacked volumes of One Piece with a worry that my own legal saga on the horizon might be nearly as long.”

Wait don't angrily comment yet, it's her stance on Section 230. Let me explain..

Whenever you see Taylor Lorenz, you hear her pushing various agendas. The most notable is the laws governing the tech environment, specifically Section 230. These legislative provisions are often ignored by the public, and Lorenz has remarked that neither end of the political spectrum fully comprehends their implications. When bipartisan efforts are undertaken to regulate the technology industry, the resulting legislation may produce unintended consequences. I believe after watching her videos on the subject and doing research, she is likely right. To understand why I have to say Taylor Lorenz is right about Section 230, and why we should sound the alarm about the various ill-advised pieces of legislation being considered by Congress and statehouses across our country, we should begin with the history of Section 230.

Section 230: Origins in the 1990s

The year is 1996, a great year if you were me and if you were an Internet service provider. I was a Junior in high school: I  logged on to the Internet for the first time at my high school, had a summer internship at a community theater company, got my first job, and so much more. Being a teen in the 90’s was something else. The Communications Decency Act (CDA), which was signed into law on February 8, 1996, was a little known section that had been added by two members of Congress, Representatives Chris Cox (R-CA) and Ron Wyden (D-OR) , who were concerned by recent court cases that could stymie the Internet.

The CDA was primarily designed to stop indecent material from being shown to children via the internet. “ Some portions of the CDA directly imposed liability for transmitting obscene or harassing material online,2 including two provisions that the Supreme Court struck down as unconstitutional in 1997 “ ^[1]. The Supreme Court's reasoning was that it infringed on adults' First Amendment rights and was so broad that parents would not have the agency to determine what was appropriate to show their children.^[1] However, Section 230 was upheld and has shaped our experience with the Internet. The section defined the legal responsibilities of Internet Service Providers. A recent case created a troubling precedent: if moderation was added, the ISP would go from being seen as a distributor, like a bookstore or library, to a publisher.

The case that had the congressmen concerned involved Stratton Oakmont Inc. and Prodigy Services Co., and the claim was that since the ISP Prodigy said they moderated the environment, it was more family friendly. With that promise to consumers, Prodigy seemed to open itself up to a defamation lawsuit from Stratton Oakmont, Inc. In 1994, a post on the Money Talks bulletin board stated that the investment firm was involved in fraud. When the case went to trial in 1995, Stratton Oakmont Inc. won. With this case weighing heavily on their minds and the potential to harm free speech rights, the Congressmen wrote Section 230. Let the record note that the unknown user was right, Stratton Oakmont was involved in fraud, and would be successfully prosecuted by the federal government. This story is told in the movie “The Wolf of Wall Street”. ^[2]

The importance of Section 230 was to create an environment that would allow ISP’s and later social media platforms to do some moderation but not be liable for missing some content. Without this section, there wouldn't be any form of moderation allowed. Inspired by Good Samaritan laws, which protect medical professionals who step in to help during a medical emergency, the Congressmen wrote Section 230 to allow ISPs to do moderation without liability. Section 230 is only 26 words long and has shaped the Internet environment since its enactment:

“No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.” ^[3]

Section 230 has protected internet publishers, but it hasn't been without being challenged in court. There have been cases that tested what was meant by 'publisher'. Two of the most notable are Force v Facebook and Lemmon V Snapchat. Force v Facebook alleged that the algorithm had changed Facebook from being a publisher to a content creator. The court disagreed in that case that algorithms had turned Facebook into a creator, but said the algorithms are just tools to help users find third-party content they would be interested in. In Lemon v. Snapchat, the court found Snapchat liable because its speed filter design encouraged reckless speeding. This meant they were not protected by Section 230. ^[4] The clear implication is that the design can be seen as a liability for these companies.

The Rise of Social Media and Algorithms

The early days of social media were simpler, you logged in, and your feed was filled only with the people you had decided to follow. As time went by, it wasn’t just about the ability to connect with people but also their ability to get your data and sell it to other companies to use. This was the rise of Algorithms that have changed what you see on social media. Algorithms are now designed specifically to hit the brain's dopamine centers, keeping you scrolling for hours. The Big Tech companies have purposely created products designed to keep people of all ages on their platforms. In March 2026, a federal court in California found Meta and YouTube were liable for knowingly designing an addictive environment that caused someone to suffer mental health issues. The client had been on social media since the age of 9, and as a result, she had suffered depression, anxiety, and eating disorders.^{[5] [6]} This is the first of many cases that will be brought to trial. It’s been established that Section 230 doesn’t cover the design issues of algorithms. As these cases make their way through the courts, we need to turn to new regulations and laws to address the problems of the internet.  

​The most concerning problems are related to how to keep children safe on the internet. With the anonymity users online have, there have been some disturbing cases involving the exploitation of minors. How can we keep them safe online? The new legislation generally tries to create laws that allow us to identify who is a child and who is an adult. Age verification and age restrictions to keep kids offline and away from unsuitable material. The bill that is going through Congress right now, Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA), is making its way through Congress, and it addresses some of the concerns. It has three key areas it hopes to address. Duty of care, Design Requirements and Reports, and Audits.  (source) The exact language of the final bill hasn’t been cemented. The House changed the language, and many parent advocacy groups say it removes much of the Duty of care language they wanted in the bill. ^{[7] [8]}The requirements listed would require platforms to have some sort of age verification. This is definitely causing privacy advocates to raise the alarm. ^[9][10] Cause while age verification seems like the right course of action, it comes with its own baggage. We don’t have to guess at the results; we just have to see how it worked for other countries.

International Approaches to Online Safety

Both the UK and Australia have implemented laws restricting children's access to social media. The UK’s law requires age verification via ID or facial recognition software. The facial recognition software was shown to be easy to bypass or not work at all. Kids have used many methods to get around age verification, from using random pictures of adults online to, in one case, drawing a mustache to bypass the facial recognition software. ^[11] And ID verification is still troublesome, as bad actors now have a new avenue to obtain people’s private information. Discord hired a 3rd party to handle ID verification, and that 3rd party was hacked, releasing the private information of its UK users ^[12]. VPN usage has soured and predatory “free” VPN in the app store are often scams that lure people in. Many platforms have implemented restrictions that seem restrictive and unnecessary. Some sites have shut down completely because they couldn’t afford to comply with the law, even though they hosted only benign content. ^[13]The reports from kids are that they are finding ways around the restrictions. Which means they are now on social media without the support they had before, because everyone assumes the sites have verified their age. There have been other consequences of the age verification.

The platforms most affected are the smaller ones. ^[14] The Big Tech companies will be able to afford to hire a third party and pay the fines if something goes wrong. Or even defend themselves in court. It's the smaller websites that will be harmed. Forums and chat groups focused on niche interests could find themselves having to move to a big tech platform because the logistics and the risks of operating are too great. Also, the innovation of new sites would be lower because the start-up costs would be too high. Beyond that, access to the internet has helped many LGBTQ and isolated teens find community and support. We do need to censor information for kids, but we need to make sure we don’t hand it over to the most hyperbolic individuals in society. The schoolbook banning movements we’ve seen prove we have to be careful. ^[15]

A critical issue is the fundamental right to privacy. I know many will groan and wonder why that matters. It's more about how these organizations will use the information they gather; the US currently has poor data collection laws to protect citizens online. We have to rely on their word that they’re keeping it to themselves.  Once we are forced to provide our ID, there will be risks associated with storing our official government identification. Companies have a hard time now keeping users' private data safe from internet hackers. It’s a matter of whether these companies can guarantee that our information won’t end up on the dark web. They haven’t done a very good job historically. Reports of data breaches seem to occur regularly.

​Finding a Path Forward: Recommendations

The best course of action? In my opinion, it is most likely a middle-of-the-road approach. The companies need to start being transparent about the algorithms they use and allow users to determine how they want to engage with the platforms. Offering users the ability to remove or adjust algorithms to their tastes. Reducing the gambling dopamine triggers that keep people scrolling. Reminders within a platform that it’s been x amount of time and that the user might need to go touch grass. This would benefit everyone. Kids need to be educated about how to use the internet safely, which means explaining the real risks. Teaching online safety from elementary onward. This will allow our kids to be knowledgeable about how to keep themselves safe as children and as adults. Creating a future generation that knows how to stay safe online. While we’re at it, we can require parents to get some education on how to keep their kids safe, including using parental controls and other methods. Providing materials on ways to talk to children regarding the risks they might encounter online. We also need comprehensive data privacy laws that protect everyone’s data, including kids'.  I’d also say that breaking up some of the larger tech companies would be a good idea. Similar to what we have done in the past with Standard Oil and the Bell systems.

Ultimately, these proposed laws demand that we sacrifice our fundamental right to privacy, handing over even more personal data to corporations that have repeatedly demonstrated their inability to safeguard it. Rather than addressing the real dangers facing children online, such overreaching regulations threaten to stifle innovation, drive out smaller communities, and erode the very freedoms that have defined the open internet. The solution does not lie in blanket surveillance or ill-conceived mandates, but in nuanced, well-informed policy that protects both safety and liberty.

I have to concede that Taylor Lorenz is right, these laws are just “... surveillance laws that would censor the internet, strip us all of our ability to freely access information and actually cause great harm to children…” ^[16]

A key issue plaguing the United States is the opioid epidemic, one of the most devastating public health crises in the nation’s history. In accordance with the principles outlined by the previous article in the series, our first policy initiative can help alleviate the opioid crisis in a swift way that has bipartisan support. The following proposal will first introduce the crisis, discuss an overlooked solution to that crisis, and conclude with the potential impact and political implications of the policy solution.

Introduction

Across the United States, drug overdose deaths continue to rise across the country driven largely by the opioid epidemic. In 2020, the country suffered the largest increase in opioid overdoses with the United States seeing a 37% increase in total fatalities from 51,333 fatalities in 2019 to 70,168 in 2020 ^[1]. The sudden spike in opioid deaths can be attributed to the introduction of new drugs, such as fentanyl. Conditions continued to worsen throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, with opioid deaths reaching their peak in 2022. While opioid overdose rates have slightly decreased since 2023, the number of opioid seizures declined at a much lower rate. This indicates that interventions like methadone have decreased opioid deaths but the underlying rate of opioid use has hardly moved^[2]. 

During the pandemic, social distancing and quarantine mandates forced the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) to relax their restrictions on medications for opioid use disorder (MOUD). During this state of emergency, providers were allowed to prescribe MOUD through telehealth, otherwise known as telemedicine, without an in-person evaluation^[3]. However, telehealth’s efficacy hinges on the assumption that patients have consistent access to the internet. For many vulnerable populations, this is often not the case and a majority of healthcare providers cite unreliable internet access as a major obstacle for patients who wish to receive it^[4]. This disproportionately affects Americans living in rural areas, as broadband infrastructure and internet usage is not as developed as in urban areas.

This growing inequity in internet access is coined as the “digital divide”, the gap between communities that do and do not have reliable access to the internet ^[5]. The first stage of the digital divide is in the physical inequality characterized by a lack of reliable physical access to the internet. This can be seen in internet connectivity speeds, with only 51.6% of rural U.S. residents having internet speeds over 250 megabits per second compared to 94% of urban residents in 2020^[6]. The COVID-19 pandemic further exacerbated the digital divide, prompting the launch of the Emergency Broadband Benefit (EBB) in 2021, a federal program created to maintain broadband connectivity in low-income households. In 2022, the program became the Affordable Connectivity Program (ACP), which was mostly the same but rebranded to establish that it would remain beyond the duration of the pandemic. Enrolled households received a 30$ per month discount on internet service (up to 75$ on tribal lands) and were eligible for a $100 discount on an electronic device such as a laptop or desktop computer^[7].

The ACP was discontinued on June 1^st, 2024 due to a lack of congressional funding^[8]. Since its cancellation, the inequities between rural and urban communities persist with drug overdose rates rising much faster in rural areas with less infrastructure to support OUD treatment ^[9]. Although the digital divide encompasses more than just affordability, the cost of an internet plan is still the primary hurdle for those in need of telehealth. According to an Federal Communication Commission (FCC) survey, 72% of ACP recipients used ACP devices or internet access to schedule or attend appointments physically or virtually ^[10]. Combined with the lack of funding and shutdown of rural clinics across the country ^[11], increasing telehealth access through the ACP could be key to combating the opioid crisis in rural communities. This paper investigates the ACP’s impact on drug overdoses through increasing access to MOUD telehealth prescriptions and discusses its role in a future policy platform.

Data

To examine the effects of the ACP on rural drug overdose deaths, we used annual health measures, program enrollment, and drug overdoses for all rural counties across the United States. ZIP code areas and census tract geographical boundaries were unstable on an annual basis for these measures and aggregating into states would lead to insufficient statistical power. Annual county level observations were chosen since the boundaries for counties remain stable across years, and there are enough observations to potentially observe a moderate treatment effect.

Sources

County level enrollment data for the EBB and ACP was obtained from the FCC’s Enrollment and Claims tracker. Since the enrollment tracker uses monthly data, the monthly estimates for enrollment had to be aggregated into yearly estimates. To find ZIP code level eligibility, estimates were scraped from the RURAL LISC Dashboard ^[12]. Their methodology for estimating the eligible population is listed in the Appendix. These ZIP code eligibility numbers were aggregated into county wide estimates using HUD USPS ZIP Code Crosswalk files. 

Annual opioid use deaths for each county were sourced from the National Center for Health Statistics. Other covariates, such as percentage of rural population, non-Hispanic white population, unemployment rate, children in poverty rate, and uninsured adult rate, were taken from the County Health Rankings and Roadmaps datasets. The original sources for each covariate can be found in the Appendix. All data and code used for this paper is attached below and the original data sources are also all publicly available on their respective websites. 

Measures

County-level panel data was used for three years, 2019, 2022, and 2023 with a total of 10029 observations. 2020 was removed as during this year, lockdowns and quarantines were most intense across jurisdictions in the United States. 2021 was omitted as it was the year when the EBB launched and while the ACP and EBB were similar programs, their eligibility requirements and level of stimulus were quite different^[13]. Additionally, 2024 and 2025 were also removed as those were years after the ACP was discontinued. Years before 2017 and 2018 were not used in the main specification as drug overdose deaths were structurally different by that point (opiates like heroin were less common while opioids like fentanyl were becoming more common). Counties that were first treated in 2021 were also removed in the sample, as they would have experienced a transition between the EBB and ACP which could have potentially caused confusion for that cohort of program recipients. Counties that had less than 10% of their population eligible for the program were omitted from the sample. Only non-core (rural) counties were kept in the sample as defined by the NCHS rural-urban classification scheme. The classification scheme has 6 categorical variables ranking how metropolitan a county is and is designed for assessing health risks.

For privacy reasons, many counties had suppressed drug overdose deaths when their counties had between 1-9 drug overdose deaths in a given year. For our analysis, we implement the Dean & Kimmel imputation scheme for drug overdose deaths ^[14]. If during any year between 2019 and 2023 the county had a year where drug overdose deaths were observed and not suppressed, their suppressed drug overdose deaths were imputed as 9. Otherwise, the county’s drug deaths were imputed as 5. 

Methods

To estimate the effect of ACP enrollment on county-level drug overdose mortality (per 100,000), we use the doubly-robust staggered difference-in-differences estimator from Callaway & Sant’Anna ^[15]. For each treatment cohort g and post-treatment year t, the estimator compares changes in overdose death rates relative to a common pre-treatment base among counties baseline among counties first treated in year g against never-treated counties, after reweighting controls to be comparable on observable characteristics:

\($$ ATT(g,t) = E[Y_t(g) - Y_t (\infty ) | G_i = g] $$\)

 The advantage of the doubly-robust method is if our model is specified correctly for either a propensity score or linear regression model, a causal effect can still be identified even if the specification is wrong for one of these models. For the sake of reproducibility, a consistent seed of 123 in the R programming language is set before running the model and all robustness checks. 

Treated vs. control group. Counties that had at least 40% of their eligible households enrolled to the ACP were considered treated. The subscription rate was defined as the percentage of eligible households in the county that were subscribed to the ACP. The 40% threshold was chosen as the main model specification as it was the most robust. The control group was any county that had never reached this 40% enrollment threshold.

Parallel Trends. Our model assumes parallel trends hold while conditioning on the following covariates: uninsured rate, unemployment rate, child poverty rate, baseline overdose mortality in 2019, and the rural percentage of the county. When pretrends tests were done in these years, there was no statistically significant difference between the treated and untreated cohorts. To further support the parallel trends assumption, a pretrends test was done with additional years 2017 and 2018. Despite 2017 and 2018 being structurally different years, there was no statistically significant difference found between the treated and untreated cohorts even when these additional years were included. A county’s ACP enrollment rate was also not inherently tied to its overdose deaths. Rather, ACP enrollment was based on the program’s local outreach efforts, the broadband infrastructure, and cultural attitudes around internet use in the county. To help determine covariate selection, a standardized differences table was used. Of particular note, there was no imbalance in COVID death rate between treated and untreated populations.

Results

Treated counties that had at least one previous year of ACP treatment had a dynamic average treatment term of -15.0935 drug overdose deaths per 100,000 people. The general average treatment term was -16.0689 per 100,000 people. In this case, the average treatment term is the average effect of the ACP on drug overdose deaths. This suggests that among the cohort that was first treated in 2022, there was a 37.11% reduction in mean drug overdose deaths due to the ACP. Based on this figure, we estimate that between 2022 and 2023, 7169 drug overdose deaths were prevented and that 20058 more overdoses could have been prevented if the untreated counties had more ACP enrollment. 

The lagged benefits of the ACP for drug overdoses highlights that increasing access to telehealth could significantly decrease opioid deaths greater than even our difference-in-difference analysis suggests. The ACP, compared to other federal programs like SNAP or SSA, was not as well known and was greatly overshadowed by the context of the pandemic. A survey conducted near the end of the program's lifespan found that 71% of ACP eligible households either did not know the ACP existed, heard of the program and didn't know much about it, or knew of it and didn't apply ^[16]. This indicates that if the program was not discontinued and reached higher penetration levels, it could have further decreased rates of drug overdoses in rural counties through telehealth flexibilities.

Limitations

These results are not sensitive to a specific imputation assumption but are sensitive to whether suppressed values are imputed or dropped. Due to the significant loss in statistical power from dropping suppressed values, the confidence intervals become too wide to detect even a large treatment effect. Several factors caused the ACP to be adopted nonrandomly. Inequities in broadband infrastructure likely constrained potential demand for the ACP, as there are areas where even if the internet becomes affordable due to the program, the internet is still too slow. Enrollment was also constrained by both physical infrastructure and "network externalities" or a lack of others demonstrating the utility of a technology^[17]. 

Our results remain robust when specifying different thresholds for defining a treated county, from 40% to 70%. Critically, these ATT coefficients also remain stable when using two different imputation schemes - replacing all suppressed values with any integer value 2 to 9, and imputing according to the Dean & Kimmel scheme with different values. The only specification that did not survive robustness checks is the imputation that replaced all suppressed values with 1. This value is implausible as it drastically underestimates the amount of opioid deaths in these counties. Notably, the Dean & Kimmel scheme that replaced observed counties with 2 deaths per 100k and replaced unobserved counties with 1 death per 100k did remain robust. The results also remain robust when specifying estimation methods besides doubly robust methods. Using a propensity score or regression model on its own gives similar results to the doubly robust model used as our main specification. 

Placebo outcome tests were done, replacing drug overdose deaths with alcohol-impaired driving deaths and COVID cases per 100k, and the placebo coefficients were found to be insignificant. To check for structural stability, different covariates were included and excluded. The model was not sensitive to the inclusion of unemployment, children in poverty, uninsured rate, and rurality as covariates. The model was only sensitive to the removal of the 2019 baseline as a control, which was necessary for establishing conditional parallel trends. The model also remained robust when we included counties beyond non-rural counties. 

An important distinction is that while these results are suggestive for opioid related deaths, the response variable contains all drug overdose deaths. Part of the ATT captures the effect of telehealth on treating substance use disorder, not just opioid use disorder. As a result, our results are most likely conservative and underestimate the proportional impact on decreasing opioid overdoses. Further studies should explore differences in telehealth use for patients that use different kinds of substances. 

Policy Implications

Reviving the Affordable Connectivity Program

Literature surrounding telehealth flexibilities primarily focus on interventions for providers, while neglecting pain points the patient faces when getting to their appointment. Although telecommunication policy research addresses the potential benefits of the ACP for telehealth, rural health literature does not discuss the ACP as a public health intervention. In order for policymakers to fully take advantage of telehealth flexibilities, they must design policies that address the obstacles to both providers and patients.

The success of the ACP as an incidental public health intervention must be contextualized by its program implementation. A key factor in the ACP's success hinged on effective outreach investment. While the ACP began during the COVID-19 pandemic which distracted potential participants from the program's launch, the majority of eligible participants were still not aware of the program after the end of the pandemic. From 2021-2022, the ACP mostly utilized the interim outreach strategy from the EBB and delayed development of a comprehensive outreach strategy until 2023. In an official report regarding the ACP, the Government Accountability Office concluded that the FCC’s outreach plan was underdeveloped and did not follow leading practices for consumer outreach ^[18].

Any comprehensive plan to overcome the opioid crisis must include the revival and expansion of the Affordable Connectivity Program. Despite a flawed consumer outreach program and launching in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, the program still succeeded in delivering positive public health outcomes even though it was not designed as a public health intervention. A second iteration of the ACP should immediately continue its outreach grant program but prioritize giving grants to clinics that service populations most afflicted by the opioid crisis. ACP consumer outreach has primarily focused on getting eligible users to enroll, with tertiary consideration for developing internet usage patterns in communities with lower internet use. The FCC should significantly invest in internet literacy training as part of a future ACP outreach strategy. Within these trainings, community members should be encouraged to train their friends and family on internet literacy. 

The political capital needed to reimplement the ACP would be minimal since both iterations of the policy, EBB and ACP, were passed as part of bipartisan policy initiatives (2021 Consolidated Appropriations Act and Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act). The program is estimated to generate at least twice the economic savings than it costs to subsidize the program, due to increasing employment and decreasing healthcare costs^[19]. There is still institutional knowledge for how to run and improve the ACP for its next iteration since the program was only shut down recently. The program was only “shut down” due to a lapse of funding, not a legal termination. Unlike most policy proposals, which create entirely new policies, reviving the ACP only requires a new round of funding from congress in its next session. 

To maximize the impact of the ACP, further investment into broadband infrastructure for rural areas is necessary. As the ACP is a consumer-side intervention, its impact does not address the underlying inequities in broadband availability and quality of internet access between counties. Nearly 23% of Americans in rural counties lack fixed broadband services^[20]. Many of the eligible counties analyzed likely did not reach their peak ACP enrollment rate because low income, rural communities are underserved by broadband infrastructure. Even amongst rural counties, there is heterogeneity in treatment due to different regions having ISPs who offer plans with different internet speeds and device limits. Increasing broadband infrastructure in rural communities is not only vital for economic investment but also can improve the public health outcomes of rural areas. 

For the ACP to succeed as a health intervention, legal barriers to telemedicine providers must be streamlined or removed. The telehealth flexibilities for MOUD currently exist in a state of legal precarity, where they are extended yearly by the DEA ^[21]. Enshrining these flexibilities into permanent legislation would give providers the confidence they need to invest in providing telehealth for their communities. This legislation should also make it easier for providers to obtain telehealth licenses across multiple states ^[22]. Incentives should be provided for states to adopt a universal quality standard for telehealth licensure and standardize reciprocity agreements across states. Minimizing the time between providers applying for licenses and providing telehealth would increase the number of providers across the country– especially in rural counties most afflicted by the opioid crisis and with the lowest proportion of healthcare providers. The extensive regulations around MOUD prescriptions such as the Harrison Act have created a stigma surrounding receiving MOUD treatment ^[23]. By increasing the amount of telehealth providers for MOUD, the stigma surrounding MOUD prescriptions decreases and telehealth utilization will increase, saving lives in the process.

Appendix

ACP ZIP Code Eligible Population Estimation Formula

Total Eligible Households by ZIP Code = $27,180 + $9,440(HS-1)

• HS = average household size in a ZIP code.
• $27,180 = 200% FPL for a 1-person household
• $9,440(HS - 1) = the rate at which the total number of individuals living at 200% FPL changes within a ZIP code for each person added to a household

Source: 

https://www.lisc.org/media/filer_public/13/4d/134d8f53-fe33-4ab9-b54b-5523c0193c80/acp_methodology_faqs_1_20_2023.pdf

Data Sources Table

Sources

Final dataset and code: https://github.com/Nathaniel-AW/Research-on-Internet-Connectivity 

Through a conversation with the Ukraine-based journalist Dylan Burns, this article explores how Track Ukraine places the magnifying glass over American politicians, why its founder believes support for Ukraine must remain politically visible, and how the electorate indirectly shapes the war.

For many Americans, the war in Ukraine can too often feel distant, appearing on occasion in the odd headline, social media argument, or dispute over aid packages. Yet for Ukrainians, those same debates can determine whether ammunition arrives, whether air defences hold, and whether cities remain liveable, with Ukraine living on a knife edge more than four years into Russia’s full-scale invasion.

This distance between political choice and human consequence is precisely the space Track Ukraine attempts to close, leaving less space for ignorance in place of accountability.

What is Track Ukraine?

Track Ukraine is a volunteer-run project founded by journalist Dylan Burns. Its purpose is to track where American politicians and candidates stand on support for Ukraine. It does this through a colour-coded system based on voting records, public statements, political behaviour, ambiguity, and shifts over time.^[1]

The project publishes these assessments through its website (www.TrackUkraine.com) and social media platforms, where the rankings can be shared, challenged, and used by voters and campaigners alike. Burns said the team aims to maintain a regular stream of posts/updates, ideally “two to four posts a day,” constantly grading politicians and keeping the issue visible.^[2]

The project is not simply a database. It is an accountability mechanism critical to the sustaining of a healthy democracy. Its deeper purpose is to make the consequences of voting for a particular politician more explicit and harder to ignore. A voter may not follow the minutiae of every procedural vote, amendment, interview, or foreign policy statement. Track Ukraine attempts to condense that record into something visible and usable.

Burns described the project as rooted in social pressure. “We believe in the power of social taboos and social pressure,” he stated confidently during the interview. Abandoning Ukraine to the destruction of its cities, he argued, should become “a massive social taboo.”^[2]

This is an important distinction. Track Ukraine does not treat information as passive. It treats information as something that can alter incentives and shape decisions. A public ranking can become reputational pressure, a form of political currency.

A politician who knows that their ambiguity will be recognised may behave differently from one who expects voters not to notice. In this sense, Track Ukraine tries to make democratic responsibility more visible: if elected officials shape Ukraine’s ability to defend itself, then voters should know what those officials are doing.

The project’s traffic-light colour categories are especially important because they avoid reducing every politician to a simple pro-Ukraine or anti-Ukraine label. Some politicians support Ukraine clearly. Others oppose support openly. But many occupy murkier territory: hesitation, silence, inconsistency, rhetorical support without material commitment, or procedural behaviour that weakens aid while avoiding explicit opposition.

That middle ground matters. Democracies rarely abandon responsibilities all at once. More often, political support erodes through delay, ambiguity, distraction politics, and the gradual normalisation of indifference, with indifference so often coupled with the utterance, “It’s not our problem.”

Most pertinently, history has taught us the power of apathy to forge a path for extremism.

Why should readers trust Track Ukraine?

Track Ukraine is openly motivated by support for Ukraine. It is not neutral in the sense of pretending indifference between aggressor and victim; rather, its neutrality lies in how it treats evidence. A project can have a moral position and still be careful in its claims — the basis of trustworthiness.

One of the most revealing moments in the interview came when I pushed Burns on whether Russia’s actions in Ukraine should be described as genocide. He did not simply adopt the strongest available term. Instead, he was cautious. He said he would not personally use the term unless he was “100 percent certain” and there was a clear consensus among genocide scholars.^[2]

This was not scepticism about Russian brutality. Burns was explicit about ethnic cleansing, forced displacement, russification, child trafficking, and the attempt to erase Ukrainian national identity through violence and coercion. But he distinguished between describing atrocities forcefully and using legal or academic terminology before he felt the threshold of evidence had been met.

That caution gives credibility to his broader approach. In a media environment often shaped by outrage and exaggeration, exactness matters. Burns’ point was that the reality is already horrifying enough without careless inflation of language. “You don’t need to find the academic terminology to inspire outrage,” he argued. “You can channel just what it is to be human and describe this and know that it is wrong.”^[2]

Track Ukraine’s surprising results

One of the more critical aspects of Track Ukraine is that it does not simply function as a partisan scoreboard. Burns strongly criticised sections of the Republican Party for obstructing aid to Ukraine, but he was also clear that Democrats should not be exempt from scrutiny.

This came up in relation to the project’s intermediate categories, especially the yellow category, which captures ambiguity and problematic behaviour short of outright opposition. Burns cited Congressman Vicente Gonzalez as an example of a Democrat whom he believed deserved criticism after meeting sanctioned Russian MPs visiting the United States.^[2]

That example matters because it complicates the usual party-political narrative. Track Ukraine’s value is not only in identifying open opponents of Ukrainian aid. It is also in identifying hesitation, inconsistency and behaviour that undermines support while avoiding clear anti-Ukraine branding. As mentioned prior, this kind of apathy is a critical component in the erosion of reasonableness in politics.

In this sense, some of the project’s most interesting findings are not necessarily the most extreme politicians, but the ambiguous ones. The politician who loudly opposes Ukraine is easy to classify. The more difficult case is the politician who appears supportive in general terms, but acts in ways that weaken the practical position of Ukraine. Track Ukraine makes that ambiguity visible.

Motivations: Moral

Burns’ motivation is clearly rooted in the human reality of the war. When discussing Ukraine, his focus was not in geopolitical abstractions. He returned repeatedly to civilians, soldiers, displacement, exhaustion, and the specific terror of modern drone warfare: the details of Russian viciousness towards Ukrainian civilians.

Burns described the mood in Ukraine as “steely”: “They don’t want the war to continue, but they accept the reality for what it is.” He goes on to describe the Ukrainians as resilient but tired, “The majority of Ukrainians are still defiant... they are still quite resilient,” stating that “,There can’t be hesitation in surviving because that’s the national goal, survival.” ^[2]

Nevertheless, this resilience should not be romanticised into invulnerability. Burns also described visible exhaustion after years of war and another brutal winter. Ukrainians may be defiant, but defiance is not a substitute for ammunition, air defence, sanctions, or sustained political commitment. Ukrainian resilience has been utterly impressive, but they remain human.

The most vivid section of the interview concerned what has become known as the “human safari”: the deliberate hunting of civilians with FPV (first person view) drones. Burns described civilians hiding under trees as drones came in, cities living under the threat of artillery, and the psychological atmosphere of bombardment. For civilians near the front, Burns described artillery range as a threshold of terror. “Once you’re in that artillery range, that’s when the terror really starts.”^[2] There is, he said, “this constant thunder without the storm.”^[2]

His most striking description was of FPV drones themselves: “It’s like you took an improvised explosive device and gave it wings and eyes and then told it to chase people.”^[2]

This is the moral kernel. Track Ukraine matters because the votes and positions it tracks are connected to these realities. Aid delays are not merely procedural disputes. Political hesitation is not merely rhetoric. The level of support Ukraine receives can affect whether civilians remain protected, whether soldiers have the ammunition they need, and whether Russia concludes that it can simply wait out the West.

The moral argument is therefore not abstract. It is grounded in a question: if democratic voters indirectly shape these outcomes, can they claim complete distance from the consequences?

Motivations: Economic and geopolitical

Although Burns’ motivation appears primarily moral and human, there is also a pragmatic case for supporting Ukraine. For the United States, Ukraine is not merely a distant humanitarian issue. It is tied to the credibility of Western deterrence, the stability of Europe, and the question of whether authoritarian states can redraw borders by force without lasting consequences.

The financial cost of supporting Ukraine is substantial, but it should be compared with the possible cost of a wider European security crisis. By early 2026, Ukraine had received about $188 billion in aid from the United States and $197 billion from the European Union.^[3] That figure is significant, but the strategic alternative may be far more expensive: a weakened Ukraine, a more aggressive Russia, increased pressure on NATO’s eastern flank, and a Europe forced into deeper instability.

NATO itself has reinforced its eastern deterrence posture since Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022, deploying additional ships, aircraft and troops to the eastern part of the Alliance.^[4] This response shows that the war is not isolated from wider European security. If Russia’s aggression succeeds, the burden does not simply disappear. It shifts westward, closer to NATO territory.

From a purely economic standpoint, it is reasonable to ask how much Ukraine’s Western allies might have saved had Ukraine been supplied with stronger deterrent capabilities before Russia’s full-scale invasion, to the point of having deterred Russian aggression. Importantly, a similar question applies today: how much greater will the eventual cost be if Ukraine is left in a state of precariousness now?

This is part of a broader deterrence argument. If Russia can gain territory through invasion and then wait for Western democracies to lose interest, the lesson will not be confined to Ukraine. Other authoritarian powers will be watching whether Western commitments can be exhausted through time, propaganda and domestic political fatigue. Supporting Ukraine is therefore not charity in a vacuum. It is also an investment in deterrence, alliance credibility, and the principle that conquest should not be rewarded.

This does not replace the moral case; it complements it. States often act from mixed motives, and electorates are more likely to sustain support when they understand both the ethical and self-interested reasons for action. Ukraine’s defence is first and foremost a Ukrainian struggle for survival, but it is also part of a larger test of whether democratic alliances can recognise threats before they become more costly.

What can we, as individuals, do for Ukraine?

The interview ended with the practical question of what individuals can do while lawmakers hesitate. Burns’ answer was not glamorous, but it was concrete: contact representatives, make clear where you stand, and create political incentives for continued support.^[2]

This is where Track Ukraine can become useful. It gives voters a tool for identifying where politicians stand, where pressure may be needed, and where rhetoric does not match behaviour. Political accountability requires attention, and attention is easier when information is organised.

Beyond politics, Burns also mentioned grassroots fundraising and Ukrainian voices who continue to raise money and awareness. He referred to Ukrainian Ana, Serhii Sternenko, and Rick Ukrainian as examples of people who fundraise regularly.

For example Ukrainian Ana (Anastasiya Paraskevova), who was featured in the Kyiv Post,^[5] has raised money for frontline essentials including drones, vehicles, generators, and medical equipment. Additionally, she has raised money for the Dusha Kharkiv charity, helping feed refugees, children, elderly people, and victims of Russian attacks.^[6]Such successful fundraisers represent an overtly positive outcome of individuals sidestepping their governments, uniting, and supporting Ukraine.

For individuals, the options are therefore not limited to passive concern. People can vote with Ukraine in mind. They can contact representatives. They can support credible fundraisers. They can refuse to let the war disappear into the background noise of politics. They can share reliable information, something Track Ukraine makes a simpler task.

Ultimately, Track Ukraine matters because it tries to make distant consequences politically visible. It makes it harder for voters to treat foreign policy as something detached from their own democratic choices. Indeed, the onus of responsibility is shared between the electorate and representative when ignorance can no longer be reasonably excused.

If voters choose politicians who weaken support for Ukraine, that choice has consequences. If they reward politicians who take the issue seriously, that has consequences too. In a healthy democracy, those consequences should be visible.

Burns put the point simply: “People should vote as if their vote matters on the issue.”^[2]

If you appreciate what Track Ukraine is doing, share and follow their website and social media accounts. By doing so you are actively supporting Ukraine. Find them on X.

The Trump Administration will be implementing several changes to student loan financing starting this summer. The changes encompass borrowing limits, restrictions on who can borrow, repayment processes, and forgiveness. The bill was passed as part of the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act.

One of the most significant changes affects Grad PLUS loans, which currently allow students to borrow the full cost of attendance with no lifetime limit. Graduate students only make up about 16% of college students but account for 46.6% of loan disbursements. The Trump administration states that allowing graduate students to borrow so much effectively removed any cap for students to borrow and led to tuition skyrocketing. It argues that ending this policy will reduce overborrowing and encourage colleges to lower costs^[1].

This line of thinking follows the Bennett Hypothesis, which argues that student loans increase the demand for a college education, which then increases tuition^[2]. It has mixed empirical support with stronger correlations observed in studies that compare a college’s sticker price and federal aid and much weaker or no relationship found in studies that compare what students actually pay.

Other efforts to reduce amounts borrowed include setting limits on what graduate students can borrow. The administration identified 11 specialties as “Professional” and limited their borrowing to $200,000. All other graduate degrees are limited to $100,000^[1]. Professional degrees are programs that require at least two years of post-baccalaureate education and require professional licensing to begin work, but the requirements have not been applied to career paths that also meet those metrics, like teaching and nursing^[3]. In response, the Trump administration stated that the “Professional” allocation was an internal classifier and not an indicator of if a specific job type was professional in nature^[4]. They also noted that, for nursing in particular, 90% of borrowers do not reach the $100,000 cap and will not be impacted by the new rules.

Although there are lifetime limits set, the new rules set undergraduate and graduate debt on separate buckets. Before, these totals were combined, but now the cap for graduate degrees does not include amounts borrowed during undergraduate study, which is subject to a separate cap. This could allow students to borrow more than they could before the changes.

Repayment options for loans have also been changed substantially by ending Biden-era income-driven repayment plans. The Repayment Assistance Plan (RAP) and new Standard Tiered Repayment Plan will become available later this year. Unlike plans under the Biden-era, all plans require some form of payment with the lowest option set at $10 a month or 1% of the borrower's income. These plans scale up to 10% of the borrower's income which is set by income level. RAP also requires that the first $50 of any payment be applied to principal of the loan and that any unpaid interest be forgiven, so amounts owed don’t balloon due to unpaid interest. This also stretches forgiveness from 20 years out to 30 years^[5].

The Standard Tiered Plan sets repayment time according to the borrower’s principle loan amount with those with less than $25,000 given 10 years, those with $50,000 given 15 years, and so on until students with more than $100,000 to repay are given 25 years. These plans set a standard payment, dependent on the loan amount and timeframe for repayment^[6].

Loan deferment rules have also changed by eliminating options to defer loans for economic hardship or unemployment reasons. In those circumstances, borrowers will be able to quickly switch to a RAP plan. Other deferment options remain, but general forbearance is limited to nine months within any 24-month period^[6].

Institutions also have new requirements placed on them to qualify for federal loans. Colleges whose four-year graduates do not earn more than high school students, or graduate students that do not earn more than people with bachelor's degrees will lose access to federal student loan lending. This is called the “do no harm” rule to hold institutions accountable for their programs and graduates. Any institution whose students fail to meet these benchmarks in two out of three consecutive years will lose access to federal loans for two years.^[7]

My Take

I was in high school during the peak “college will solve all your problems” era and I remember sitting in one of the many presentations by yet another person trying to convince us to go. This particular one had a chart that showed how many years people would have to work at each education level before they could buy a yacht. There was no nuance in this chart. No degree was specified, the imaginary job was unknown, I don’t even think they said how much the yacht was. 

But the message however was clear. The more education you had, the faster you could buy a yacht.

Ten years later, my peers and I learned about that missing context. Our college debt (among other things) has apparently led to millennials culturally killing expensive golf club memberships, pricey engagement rings, casual dining and department stores. I didn’t come out of college with near the debt of some of my cohorts. I certainly felt the pinch.

So it may surprise some readers when I say this:

As much as I dislike Trump, I don’t hate these changes.

The underlying cause of college tuition being increased by student loan access, is probably only slightly correlated. There are years where federal loan amounts were stagnant, but college tuition increased. There are years where college tuition is maintained when the amount available for students to borrow increased. This isn’t to say one has no impact on the other, but it's not “one to one” like the Trump admin claims.

College tuition has actually been stagnant or in many cases has decreased in inflation-adjusted terms in the last several years while borrowing still has increased. That’s because in many cases, students also borrow to cover their living expenses, which has dramatically increased.

I know this cuts against the current narrative, but college is expensive because that degree is usually worth the investment. Some get a better deal, some settle for a lower standard, some just get a free ride, but on the net, a college education usually comes with more success and more returns. That doesn’t just come from the program you studied. Getting through college requires all sorts of soft skills that employers look for: delayed gratification, the ability to work on something boring, problem solving, communicating complicated ideas, time management, adaptability, etc. 

This is not to say people without college degrees don’t have these traits. Hell, plenty of college graduates somehow get all the way through and completely miss these lessons. 

This is to say people who graduate college are likely to have these traits more developed. But rightly or wrongly, a college diploma remains one of society’s most widely accepted signals that a person has developed them. 

For all the doomsday scenarios only about half the college graduates leave with any debt, and of those, the average debt is only about $40,000. Things get pretty crazy when you focus on loans taken for graduate school, which is probably why this plan focuses on capping those loans. If anything, there should probably be more caps so students can only borrow an amount with some proximity to the average salary for that job. 

Probably the best thing about these changes is the interest forgiveness. Runaway interest is one of the most commonly cited issues that hobbles borrowers. People sign up for the income based plans only to find that their monthly payment didn’t cover the interest and their loans ballooned even after years of payment. RAP plans stop that.

There are plenty of qualms to be had over the professional classifier for graduate degrees, but getting mad over not being considered a professional degree is not one. There are limitations and the standard needs to be applied across the board. The nurse anesthetists need more than $100,000 for their degree, but the social worker will be just fine.

At the end of the day, the student loan system should do two things: make college accessible and protect students from financial ruin. For all of the political baggage surrounding this law, many of these changes move in that direction. Capping borrowing for programs with questionable returns, forcing colleges to demonstrate that their graduates actually earn more than they would have otherwise, and ending the absurd practice of charging interest that grows faster than a borrower can pay it are all sensible reforms. The real test will be whether these rules are applied consistently and whether policymakers remain willing to adjust them when they create unintended consequences. College should still be a pathway to opportunity, not a 30-year financial hangover—and if these changes help move the system closer to that goal, they deserve more credit than many of Trump’s policies usually earn. 

After Labour’s heavy local election losses, the question of Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s future has moved from gossip into open crisis with growing disquiet.^[1] Despite various MPs remaining hesitantly supportive of Starmer, Wes Streeting has resigned as Health Secretary and called for Starmer to go. Meanwhile, Andy Burnham is trying to return to Parliament through the Makerfield by-election, likely months away.^[2][3]
The seat has long been Labour territory, but it is not risk-free. Reform UK is expected to treat the contest seriously, while a Green candidate could split the vote on the left, reducing the chances of a Labour victory.^[3] This could lead to an utterly embarrassing gain for Reform.

The timing matters. Burnham cannot stand for Labour leader unless he is an MP. If Starmer falls before Burnham wins a seat, the contest probably favours those already in Westminster. So far, Streeting has held back from initiating the process, though his early resignation is a clear sign of intent (Before triggering a leadership challenge Streeting will ensure he has sufficient support). Additionally, four junior members of the government have resigned alongside Streeting, adding to the pressure on Starmer to resign.

If Burnham wins in Makerfield, the entire race changes. The party would then have a candidate who can present himself as Labour loyalist, with strong support both within the party and among the public, yet differentiated from Starmer’s inner circle.

The sequence of events leading up to a leadership challenge:

1. Starmer comes under pressure after the local elections. Already happened.
2. Government (senior) minsters' resignations increase that pressure. Already happened.
3. Burnham tries to enter Parliament. In process.
4. Labour MPs decide when and whether to force a contest or wait. Yet to be decided, very different contests could result.
5. A formal leadership challenge is triggered, either by Starmer resigning or by a challenger receiving nominations from 20% of Labour MPs. According to Labour’s current parliamentary party, this is reported as 81 MPs. This is the same number of candidates required to go through to the final round.
6. Labour members then vote on the candidates who have made it through that parliamentary stage. In practice, MPs decide who reaches the ballot, but Labour Party members decide the winner.

If there is a leadership election while Labour is still in government, the winner would not automatically become Prime Minister in a legal sense. The monarch appoints the person most likely to command the confidence of the House of Commons. In practice, however, if Labour still has a Commons majority, the new Labour leader would almost certainly become Prime Minister. This has become a familiar process for those observing the British political system.
A leadership challenge at some point looks reasonably probable. The question is when, and who will stand. Here are the known likely contenders, including a rough estimate of their place on the left-right spectrum of the Labour Party.

Andy Burnham

Left-right score: 4/10
Main question: Can he get back into Parliament in time?

Burnham is probably the strongest candidate if he becomes an MP before the contest begins. He has ministerial experience, executive experience as Mayor of Greater Manchester (the UK’s third largest city), and enough distance from the current government to present himself as a reset.

Polling supports this. A recent Survation poll of Labour members found Burnham was the preferred leadership choice of 42% of members, far ahead of Wes Streeting and Angela Rayner, who were both on 11%.^[4] YouGov also found Burnham to be the most popular Labour figure among the public, with 34% viewing him favourably and a net favourability score of +4. He is also the only senior Labour figure polled who is viewed positively by a majority of 2024 Labour voters.^[5]

He served as a minister under Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, then later served as Shadow Home Secretary under Jeremy Corbyn before leaving Westminster.^[6] That does not mean politics is simply repeating old Labour battles. Instead, it shows that Burnham knows government, knows the party, and has spent enough time outside Westminster to avoid looking like another Starmer-era minister. He is therefore seen by many as a potential bridge-builder, capable of bringing some unity to a currently divided party.

A likely Burnham vision is clear: Labour has become too managerial, too cautious and too detached from the people it claims to represent. He can offer a break without sounding like a return to the Corbyn years.

The risk is also simple. He has to win Makerfield first. If the contest begins before he returns to Parliament, he may miss his moment. Makerfield is also not risk-free, with Reform likely to treat the by-election as a major target.^[3]

Overall: Favourite if he gets back into Parliament in time. Given his support among Labour members and across sections of the Parliamentary Labour Party, there is a real chance that enough MPs will wait until he has returned before forcing the issue.

Wes Streeting

Left-right score: 9/10
Main question: Is he the real change that is desired or a sharper version of the same politics?

Streeting is now central to the crisis because he has resigned from government and called for Starmer to go.^[2] That gives him a claim to have acted decisively rather than waiting for the collapse.

Unlike Burnham, Streeting was too young to serve under Blair or Brown. He entered Parliament in 2015, during the Corbyn period, but his real rise came under Starmer. He became one of the most recognizable figures in the Starmer project and later the Health Secretary.^[7]

This background gives him both strength and weakness. His strength is that he is articulate, ambitious and politically sharp. His weakness is that his career is closely tied to the very project now in crisis. Arguably, Streeting is to the right of Starmer, particularly in tone and instinct. His critics also point to his closeness to Peter Mandelson, which reinforces the impression that he represents a harder-edged version of Labour’s right.

Polling shows the difficulty. Survation polling reported by LabourList suggested Starmer would beat Streeting in a head-to-head contest among Labour members, with Starmer on 53% and Streeting on 23%.^[8] Streeting may be respected as a political operator, but that does not mean he is loved by the membership.

Streeting’s case would be that Labour does not need to abandon the centre, but to govern with more clarity, urgency and confidence. His critics would say that this is not a reset, but an even greater lurch to the right, with the intention of merging what remains of the Tory Party with the centre of the Labour Party. This would effectively mean giving up on supporters who have moved to the Greens.

Overall: Serious contender and a very good speaker, but probably not a favourite unless MPs choose discipline over a new trajectory. His clearest path is if Burnham does not stand, or if the PLP (the Parliamentary Labour Party) decides that control matters more than popularity with members.

Angela Rayner

Left-right score: 4/10
Main question: Can she unite the party without looking like compromise for its own sake?

Rayner is the strongest candidate already in Parliament if Burnham cannot stand. She has roots in the trade union movement, a strong personal story, and enough senior experience to look credible.

She entered Parliament in 2015, rose under Corbyn, and then served in senior roles under Starmer. That makes her difficult to dismiss. She has survived different versions of Labour and remained relevant.

Her appeal is that she can offer change without making Labour look reckless. Her weakness is that she may be broadly acceptable without being the overwhelming first choice of enough of the party. In the Survation members’ poll, she was level with Streeting on 11%, well behind Burnham.^[4] In YouGov’s public favourability polling, 22% of Britons viewed her favourably, placing her below Burnham but broadly in the same range as other senior Labour figures.^[5]

Rayner was also damaged by the controversy around her tax affairs. She resigned from government during that scandal, but has now said she has been cleared by HMRC (the tax authorities) of deliberate wrongdoing or carelessness.^[9]That does not erase the political damage entirely, but it does remove one of the most serious obstacles to a leadership bid.

Overall: Most likely winner if Burnham cannot stand. She can appeal to the soft left, parts of the trade union movement, and MPs who want change without a complete rupture.

Al Carns

Left-right score: 6.5/10, though less clearly defined/known
Main question: Is he too inexperienced, or is this his strength?

Al Carns is the wildcard. He was elected as Labour MP for Birmingham Selly Oak in 2024 and is a former Royal Marines officer with a decorated military career. He became Minister for Veterans and People in 2024 and was appointed Minister for the Armed Forces in 2025.^[10]

Carns’s appeal is obvious. He does not look like the usual Labour leadership candidate. At a time when many voters associate politics with managerial language and controlled evasions, Carns offers something more direct: service, discipline, defence, country and action.

That could matter more than people expect. Reform’s rise has created a problem for Labour that is not only economic, but cultural. A candidate with a military background, a state-school story and a strong national-security profile may appeal to MPs who think Labour needs to sound more patriotic and less technocratic.

There are signs that this is being noticed. Carns has recently been discussed as an outsider candidate, and the Guardian listed him among possible contenders if a contest emerges.^[11] The Times also reported that Carns had set out what looked like a mission statement after the local election defeats.^[12]

But the weakness is just as obvious. Carns is very new to Parliament. He has not built the same party network as Rayner, Streeting, Cooper, Miliband or Burnham. He may be admired without being seen as ready to lead the government.

Overall: A real unknown. He is unlikely to win this time, but he could shape the contest. A strong showing would make him a serious figure in the future.

Ed Miliband

Left-right score: 4/10
Main question: Does experience help him, or entrench him in the past?

Miliband has substance, experience and a serious policy profile. He served under Gordon Brown, led Labour from 2010 to 2015, resigned after losing to David Cameron, and later returned to senior politics under Starmer.

His strength is that he can speak with greater depth about climate, inequality, and public purpose than most candidates. His weakness is that he has already led the party and lost before Jeremy Corbyn became leader.

His politics is close to Burnham’s in some respects. Both can be seen as soft-left bridge-builders, generally acceptable to several wings of the party. Miliband also performs reasonably well with the public compared with many other Labour figures. YouGov found 23% of Britons viewed him favourably, the same figure as Starmer and just above Rayner.^[5]

But Miliband’s problem is not only popularity. It is whether Labour wants to reopen a chapter it has already closed. He may be liked, but that does not mean the party wants him back as leader.

Overall: Plausible in a fragmented contest, but unlikely to stand if Burnham enters the race. If Burnham is available, Miliband’s lane becomes much narrower.

Rachel Reeves

Left-right score: 7.5/10
Main question: Can she separate herself from the cautionary economic approach of the Starmer government?

Reeves, the current chancellor (having worked in retail banking and for the Bank of England), would be the candidate of fiscal credibility and institutional reassurance. In another moment, that might be enough. While she does not poll well among the general public, she is generally associated with reassuring business, the Treasury and financial markets.

This matters because the leadership crisis has already destabilised markets. Reuters reported that political turmoil around Burnham’s possible return led to rising UK borrowing costs, a fall in sterling and pressure on bank stocks.^[13] The Guardian also reported warnings from investors about the risk of another “Liz Truss moment” if a leadership contest ignores public finances and market confidence.^[14]

Nevertheless, if Starmer falls, it will probably be because Labour decides that caution itself has become politically damaging. Reeves may be respected, but she would struggle to look like change. She is too closely associated with the economic strategy of the Starmer government.

Overall: Credible, but poorly placed for this specific crisis. Her more likely role may be staying on as Chancellor, signalling continuity to shaken bond/gilt markets under a new leader.

Shabana Mahmood

Left-right score: 8/10
Main question: Is competence enough, or are too many bridges burnt?

Mahmood, the current home secretary, would appeal to MPs who want seriousness, order and control. She could become attractive if the contest becomes chaotic despite sharing the low-energy charisma that hallmarks Starmer's premiership.

Nonetheless, she does not obviously answer the larger political question: how does Labour reconnect with voters who feel ignored or disappointed? Her rhetoric as Home Secretary has alienated parts of the left and liberal centre. She has warned that illegal migration is “tearing our country apart” and has pursued some of the toughest asylum and immigration proposals of the Labour government, including plans to make refugee status temporary, review it every 30 months, and tighten rules around family reunion.^[15]

This is not simply a question of policy. It is also a question of tone. Mahmood has been accused by critics of adopting language too close to that of Reform UK. At a live political event, she told “white liberal” hecklers to “f**k right off” after they accused her of “out-Reforming Reform”.^[16]One of the hecklers later dismissed Mahmood’s description as “laughable”, saying he was himself a migrant and person of colour.^[17]

Her supporters would argue that she is confronting legitimate public concern about immigration. Her critics would argue that she has moved into rhetoric that sounds punitive, divisive and, at times, xenophobic.

That is the Mahmood problem. She may look serious to parts of the PLP, but she has likely lost too much trust on the left of the party and the general public alike. Her route depends on a small field and a desire for order over renewal.

Overall: Competent and serious, but unlikely to gather enough support unless the pool of candidates remains small.

Yvette Cooper

Left-right score: 6/10
Main question: Stabiliser or renewal candidate?

Cooper has long experience and authority. She served as a minister under Tony Blair, entered Cabinet under Gordon Brown, later served in Ed Miliband’s shadow cabinet, chaired the Home Affairs Select Committee, and returned to senior office under Starmer.^[18] She would look safe in a crisis.

Her political positions have also shifted over time, or at least adapted to different moments. She has moved from New Labour ministerial politics, through a more civil-liberties and parliamentary-scrutiny role during the Brexit years, and then back into the harder world of Home Office and foreign policy politics. That breadth is useful, but it also makes her harder to define. She is experienced, but not obviously symbolic of renewal.

Her marriage to Ed Balls is not relevant as a qualification, but it is politically relevant as part of the media and Labour ecosystem around her. Balls is a former Labour shadow chancellor and now a major broadcaster. In 2026, he stopped interviewing Cooper on Good Morning Britain after earlier criticism over impartiality when he interviewed his wife while she was Home Secretary.^[19] If Cooper stood for leader, this would not define her, but it would form part of the wider scrutiny around her public image and political network.

The problem is that a party removing its Prime Minister may not only want safety. It may want someone who symbolises a clearer break. Cooper is serious, experienced and credible, but she may feel more like a stabiliser than an answer.

Overall: Serious, but unlikely unless the party panics and decides that experience matters more than renewal. Seen very much as an establishment figure within the party, she would represent little in the way of forward momentum.

What the Polls Say

The polling picture is clearest around Andy Burnham. A recent Survation poll of Labour members found Burnham was the first-choice successor for 42% of members, far ahead of Wes Streeting and Angela Rayner, who were both on 11%.^[4] YouGov polling points in the same direction among the wider public, finding Burnham to be the most popular senior Labour figure, with 34% viewing him favourably and 30% unfavourably, giving him a rare positive net score of +4.^[20]

The same polling suggests Streeting has a serious membership problem. Survation polling reported by LabourList found that Starmer would beat Streeting in a head-to-head contest among Labour members, while Burnham would beat Starmer heavily.^[21] Rayner appears to be the strongest fallback if Burnham cannot stand, while Miliband remains plausible but burdened by having led before. Cooper, Mahmood, Reeves and Carns currently look like harder routes unless the contest becomes unusually fragmented.

Current Prediction

Assuming the contest takes place: Burnham wins if he gets into Parliament in time. Rayner wins if he does not and by a much tighter margin.
Before considering the successes of the likely candidates, it is worth noting, albeit briefly, how the policy positions of a likely candidate could stifle any leadership challenge. In the 2024 Labour manifesto, strict lines were drawn on what a Labour government would do, including around taxation and remaining outside of the EU single market or customs union.
If any candidate's position is suggestive of a distinct change of path from the manifesto, this may prompt a call for an early general election. Wes Streeting, calling for the UK to rejoin the EU, for example, may worry MPs that an election will be called early, risking their seats. With Labour's massive majority in the Commons, there are many seats to lose. As it stands a general election is likely in 2028/2029.
Hence, MPs may be supportive of particular candidates, assuming a leadership challenge is initiated, but may not themselves begin the process.

Thus, what is the likely outcome assuming a leadership contest is called?

It is also worth mentioning that Kier Starmer is entitled to stand in the contest. Polling suggests he would win against the likes of Streeting, but lose against Burnham. He would, nevertheless, require the 81 MP support like all other candidates.

Burnham has the clearest story. He can argue that Labour needs to reconnect with the country rather than simply replace one Westminster figure with another. Rayner has the clearest internal route if Burnham is not available, and her recent clearance by the tax authorities (finding she had not deliberately or carelessly broken tax rules) removes a major obstacle to any leadership bid.[9] Streeting is dangerous, but likely remains too closely associated with the project Labour would be trying to move beyond.

Carns is the most interesting outsider. Though unlikely to win this contest, his presence would reveal something important. Labour is no longer only asking whether it should move left or right. It is also asking whether it can find someone who sounds serious, patriotic and practical without sounding like another cautious administrator.

The forecast is that Burnham wins if he takes Makerfield before the contest begins. If Burnham cannot stand, Rayner becomes the most likely winner. Streeting remains a serious contender if Labour MPs choose discipline over renewal, while Carns becomes possible if the party wants a wildcard who can speak to security, patriotism and Reform-facing voters, especially if other candidates decide not to stand.
It should also be noted that the Labour hard left (including the Bennite tradition from which Jeremy Corbyn emerged) does not appear to have an obvious candidate capable of challenging Starmer. Figures such as Diane Abbott and Rebecca Long-Bailey remain in Parliament, but the left of the Parliamentary Labour Party is too small to shape the contest alone. This is striking, given that a significant part of Labour’s lost support appears to have moved leftwards, particularly towards the Green Party, now headed by Zack Polanski. Any new leader must be attractive enough to these voters in order for Labour to regain support and re-establish the Labour Party as the dominant part of the left.
Despite much of the lost support moving towards the left, a smaller but meaningful shift has been towards the far-right Reform Party lead by Nigel Farage. So far, attempts by the current administration to claw this support back have failed.

So if Starmer does fall, Labour will not only be choosing a new leader. It will likely be a shift of in the balance between the wings of the party. The question is in which direction, and how will the public and markets alike respond to the new prime minister.
With Streeting having already resigned, his delay in declaring his challenge is likely not one of kindness but one of a lack of assured support among his fellow MPs. It is undoubtedly in his interest to trigger the process before Burnham is able to gain his seat, which is likely in June or July.

If the leadership contest is delayed beyond this date, Burnham is the clear favourite. A rushed process may however yield surprises in both who reaches the 81 MP threshold, and the eventual vote of the Labour party membership.
It remains unclear whether a leadership challenge will be mounted whatsoever; if so, when is as difficult a question as if it will happen.

Candidates themselves may favour a general election if polling for Labour improves, allowing them to truly craft policy in their own vision. Yet, this may be the exact motivation for MPs not to trigger a leadership challenge in the first place.

The insurgent attacks in Mali reveal a deeper crisis of state fragility and institutional erosion shaping future Sahel geopolitics

On the morning of 25 April 2026, the geography of violence in Mali expanded with startling ferocity ^[1]. Columns of smoke rose above garrison towns scattered across the country’s interior while bursts of rifle fire and mortar detonations rippled through military installations that only months earlier had been presented by Bamako as symbols of restored sovereign control ^[2]. Convoys stalled on arterial roads leading toward the capital as rumors spread faster than official communiqués, producing a climate of apprehension in which civilians, soldiers, and administrators struggled to distinguish verified battlefield developments from speculation carried through encrypted messaging channels and local radio ^[3][4]. The killing of Defense Minister Sadio Camara sent a shockwave through Mali’s ruling hierarchy, transforming what authorities initially portrayed as a containable security crisis into a profound rupture at the center of the junta’s command structure ^[5]. His death, reportedly amid the expanding chain of coordinated assaults and sustained exchanges of fire around strategic northern positions, carried the symbolism of a fortified citadel suddenly discovering that the perimeter had already been breached.

The attacks exposed a more profound reality concealed beneath the rhetoric of military restoration. Since seizing power, the government of Assimi Goïta had grounded its legitimacy in the promise of order through force, portraying itself as the last institutional barrier preventing national disintegration. Yet the April offensive by Jama'at Nusrat al Islam wal Muslimeen (JNIM) and the Azawad Liberation Front (FLA) illuminated the fragility of that claim with uncommon clarity. Rather than functioning as a consolidated authority, Mali is fighting to maintain control through a besieged lattice of isolated strongholds, connected by fragile supply corridors and contested roads that cut across the Sahelian expanse. For American readers accustomed to interpreting insurgency through the vocabulary of counterterrorism, Mali presents a more disquieting tableau. The conflict is not only a confrontation between a government and extremist factions. It is a layered struggle involving historical grievances, fractured sovereignty, illicit commerce, ethnic rivalry, foreign intervention, and the slow erosion of public faith in state institutions.

The contemporary crisis in Mali cannot be disentangled from the architecture of French colonial rule, which fused disparate ecological, ethnic, and commercial zones into a territorial construct governed calculated exclusion [6]. Amidst the Scramble for Africa, Paris administered the arid northern reaches of what would become Mali as a distant military frontier, sparsely developed and politically subordinate to the more densely populated regions along the Niger River basin. Colonial administrators concentrated roads, schools, bureaucratic infrastructure, and political patronage in the south while treating the Saharan expanses as a buffer against rebellion and trans-Saharan instability ^[6][7]. When independence arrived in 1960, Bamako inherited not a cohesive national polity but a brittle state draped over old caravan routes, clan territories, and nomadic networks that had never been fully absorbed into a common civic framework. The desert itself became a metaphor for the state’s authority. Vast and intermittently traversed by smugglers and insurgents, the north remained psychologically remote from the political center. Periodic Tuareg uprisings erupted from this estrangement with the rhythm of a recurring storm, each rebellion exposing the same fracture between a centralized government seeking territorial consolidation and peripheral communities that regarded Bamako as a predatory and alien power.

These unresolved tensions calcified over decades into a landscape of chronic distrust that militant organizations later learned to navigate with considerable dexterity. In villages scattered across the scrublands and rocky plains of northern and central Mali, state authority often appeared episodically, arriving in the form of tax collectors or security sweeps, then vanishing again beyond the horizon in clouds of dust and diesel exhaust. Jihadist factions and separatist movements exploited this vacuum not simply through coercion but through immersion in local disputes over grazing land, smuggling routes, and communal protection ^[8]. The result was a conflict involving ethnicity, patronage, commerce, and survival. The attacks of April 25, 2026, revealed how little the underlying geography of alienation had changed. Armed columns moved across immense distances with unsettling fluidity, striking military targets while exposing the inability of the Malian state to transform nominal sovereignty into durable political control.

For much of the early 2000s, Mali occupied a celebrated position within Western diplomatic discourse, frequently depicted as a rare democratic anchor in a region repeatedly convulsed by insurgency and military rule ^[9]. Beneath this exterior however, the state apparatus was steadily hollowing out. Electoral rituals persisted, foreign donors circulated through conference halls in Bamako extolling decentralization and civil society, and international observers praised procedural stability even as corruption seeped through the officer corps, patronage networks metastasized across ministries, and large stretches of the countryside slipped beyond meaningful administrative control ^[10][11]. The collapse came with startling speed after the 2012 Tuareg rebellion and the subsequent jihadist advance toward the south. This exposed the military’s logistical weakness and shattered public confidence in civilian leadership, sentiments that eventually culminated in successive coups and the ascent of Colonel Assimi Goïta. The junta framed itself as the embodiment of national salvation, draping military authority in the language of sovereignty and anti-colonial renewal ^[12].

When French forces withdrew from Mali in 2022, it was amid waves of nationalist fervor and denunciations of neocolonial interference. The ruling junta in Bamako presented the departure as the dawn of a reclaimed sovereignty, a dramatic severing of dependency that would supposedly allow the state to prosecute the war on its own terms. Into that vacuum stepped Russian mercenaries and military advisers affiliated first with the private military contractor Wagner Group, and later with the restructured Africa Corps ^[13]. Yet the strategic terrain remained stubbornly unchanged. Helicopter gunships thundered above scorched villages, armored convoys lurched across the Sahelian belt, and counterinsurgency raids swept through settlements suspected of harboring militants, but these operations often deepened the estrangement between the state and the populations it claimed to defend. Reports of civilian killings, disappearances, and punitive expeditions spread through communities with corrosive speed, feeding the same reservoir of grievance that jihadist groups had long exploited ^[14]. Despite years of Russian assistance and the expulsion of French forces, insurgent formations retained the capacity to maneuver across immense distances and coordinate assaults against strategic targets^[15][16][17].

The endurance of JNIM has less to do with battlefield supremacy than with its capacity to seep into the fractures of Malian society. While Bamako and its foreign partners have often framed the conflict through the sterile vocabulary of counterterrorism, JNIM has cultivated a far more granular understanding of the terrain, not merely the geography of dunes and river towns, but the social cartography of political dislocation and abandoned communities^[18][19]. In villages scattered across central and northern Mali, the movement has embedded itself within preexisting networks of mediation and survival, arbitrating cattle disputes, regulating access to roads and markets, and presenting itself not as a revolutionary vanguard descending from abroad, but as an adaptive force capable of imposing order where state authority has withered into abstraction. Even as Malian forces, backed first by French aircraft and later by Russian mercenaries and military advisers, launched successive offensives across the Sahelian interior, the insurgency retained the ability to dissolve into the human and physical landscape, withdrawing beneath the horizon only to reemerge elsewhere with renewed force.

The apparent convergence between Tuareg separatist formations like the FLA and the al Qaeda linked coalition JNIM reveals the emergence of a harsh wartime compact. Tuareg nationalists continue to frame their struggle through the language of autonomy and resistance to domination from Bamako, while JNIM advances a vision rooted in insurgent Salafist governance and transnational jihadist doctrine. Shared antagonism toward the Malian junta, Russian auxiliaries, and rival militias has generated a tactical alignment sustained by overlapping utility. In many parts of northern Mali, sovereignty no longer resides exclusively within the state apparatus but drifts instead through a fractured mosaic of armed intermediaries who tax commerce, regulate movement, arbitrate disputes, and administer violence with varying degrees of coercion and consent ^[20][21].

Across the trading lanes stretching from Kidal through Gao and into the fractured frontier lands bordering Algeria and Niger, the Malian conflict has evolved into something far more intricate than a binary contest between the state and jihadist insurgents^[22][23][24]. Beneath the rhetoric of counterterrorism lies a dense latticework of clan patronage, contraband economies, and localized protection networks that bind militants, traffickers, tribal intermediaries, and civilians into relationships shaped by survival and transactional necessity ^[25][26]. Fuel convoys creep across the desert under moonlight beside caravans carrying subsidized food, narcotics, cigarettes, migrants, and weapons, while commanders affiliated with JNIM or Tuareg separatist factions frequently function as arbiters of commerce and guarantors of passage in territories where Bamako’s authority dissipates beyond isolated military outposts.

The attacks of 25 April did not merely expose vulnerabilities within Mali’s security architecture. They punctured the central political mythology upon which the Bamako junta has grounded its claim to authority ^[27]. Across an arc stretching from the north toward the approaches of the capital itself, coordinated insurgent attacks struck military positions and imposed a tempo of violence that suggests operational maturity. In Bamako, the reverberations were psychological as much as tactical. The insurgents have demonstrated an ability to synchronize pressure across dispersed fronts despite years of counterinsurgency campaigns.

In the furnace heat of the Sahel, Mali now stands as a fractured political organism whose arteries have been opened by decades of institutional erosion, foreign intervention, insurgent adaptation, and postcolonial disillusionment. This latest attack by insurgent forces did not just expose tactical deficiencies within the junta’s security architecture but illuminated the deeper bankruptcy of a governing model that substituted militarized spectacle and external patronage for durable civic legitimacy ^[28] Russian mercenaries, Malian officers, Tuareg separatists, jihadist emirs, smugglers threading contraband through ancient caravan routes, and frightened civilians navigating roadblocks and extortion checkpoints now move through the same contested landscape. In Bamako, officials proclaim imminent victory while beyond the capital the state recedes into scattered garrisons and negotiated pockets of influence where allegiance shifts according to kinship, survival, commerce, and coercion rather than ideology alone. Mali offers an unsettling portrait in which sovereignty decays gradually instead of collapsing outright, where insurgencies metabolize local grievances faster than governments can address them, and where the retreat of one great power simply invites another to inherit the same unforgiving terrain, the same brittle institutions, and the same unresolved political fractures.

If you’re in this community, you probably know about the fundraiser Digital Ground Game ran on April 10th. If you know that, you know it was an insane success. $270,000 raised by one community, whose passion and moral fiber inspired me to undertake this venture in the first place. I have an extraordinarily high opinion of DGG as a result of participating in the ‘24 house canvassing program, and you all continue to exceed my expectations at every turn. I really do believe that DGG is at the heart of what should be the future of Democratic organizing. I hope that the actions I take live up to the potential we have. 

Ok enough of the sappy stuff, this piece is about organizing. Specifically, what made the fundraising possible, what we raised, and what we’re doing with it. I can’t go into every specific detail, but I want to paint a clear picture of how we got to this point and where we are wanting to go. I’m going to outline roughly what the process looks like, understand that with organizing there’s not usually an outlined, rigid structure for things.

First off, if you’re going to do any level of organizing you need to have a reason. It sounds fairly simple, but it’s going to determine how you approach everything. “I want to fight fascism” is too broad. Mission statements? Too broad. “We want to change organizing by going to where people are…” blah blah blah. You need specific, actionable goals with measurable outcomes. Even something as simple as cleaning up a local park. What park is it? Are you completely restoring it or just picking up trash? How many people do you need? How long will it take them? When is it going to be completed by? You need to have an idea of what a successful project looks like and how much time/effort it is going to take. If your goal is aimless, you are aimless. If you are aimless, everyone is aimless. If everyone is aimless, you waste labor and money. If you waste labor and money, you will fail. You need to have a strong starting point before involving others, even if the final result isn’t what you had in mind. Things will change and it’s important to be adaptable, but you will not hit anywhere close to your goal if you don’t have one in the first place. 

For the sake of this article, let’s say we want to turn this park into this one during a standard American school summer break. Three months, 12 weekends, and a whole lot of supplies required. I’ll note here that the numbers I’m spitting out will likely undercut what it would actually take to do this project by a LOT. We’re going for simplicity.

Now that you have a specific goal, the next step is researching and planning. While this step is crucial, it comes with a word of warning. People pursuing perfection in planning place the project in peril. Your plan doesn’t need to be all encompassing and you can do too much research. Simply put, you need to think about:

1. The bare minimum amount of materials you need to complete the project
2. The rough amount of labor/hours needed to complete the project
3. Any legal obstacles you may have

From there, you start your research. Using the park example, this looks like actually physically going to the park and taking notes/pictures on how big it is and what needs to be removed, then contacting someone with experience in landscaping. Not only do you want to ask them how long it would take to do and what tools are needed, but about potential legal obstacles and, if you build up a good enough rapport, about their capacity to help. Bare minimum, you should walk out of that discussion with enough information to get the ball rolling. If things go well, you have someone with experience helping you through the process. 

With a rough idea of what is needed to complete the job in terms of labor and equipment, your next thing to look into is acquiring these things. Recruitment and fundraising, pillars of organizing. While we’ll save recruiting for another time, I will note that in terms of importance, recruiting is head and shoulders above fundraising. Money is very important for any organizing endeavor because it enables you to do more with the volunteer hours you have. The hours are the indispensable portion of that equation. I’d rather be broke and have 10 dedicated volunteers than be loaded and alone. If you can manage to get dedicated volunteers AND have money, you’re in a way better position than most. 

Let’s not understate the value of money though. If you become an experienced political representative or activist, a lot of your career is going to be pursuing the almighty dollar. If you’re just trying to get the local park restored, you’ll just need to know the basics. For our park example, we’ll run with a $100,000 goal and assume 400 hours of work is going to be needed. That $100,000 breaks down into:

• $40,000 for permits (including insurance)
• $40,000 for equipment rentals 
• $20,000 for recruitment/misc. 

When setting an overall fundraising goal, base it off the high-end cost estimates, not the bare minimum. Having a tangible goal is a fantastic motivator for donors and a way to keep on track. Don’t be shy. Ask for the higher number. People new to making requests for money tend to be shy about the amounts they’re asking for, and it’s a disservice to the causes they lead. The more money a just cause gets, the better off the world is. Understand that a minimum number is also crucial to any organizing effort, but that number should only be disclosed in times of absolute desperation. If someone only asks for the minimum, then the minimum is what they’ll receive. Be better than the minimum. 

With both the cause and the totals in mind, the next question naturally becomes how to raise that money. There’s a million different ways to do it, so specifics here are somewhat useless. There are some important things to keep in mind:

• Community, community, community
• • There are going to be people who are invested in the stuff you do. Involve them! On a local level this might look like a bake sale or a car wash or selling girl scout cookies. Online, it’s doing a stream with a dogwarts segment. Cater to the people who care. 
•  Funds aren’t a requirement
• • Think about the actual materials you need to complete a project when talking to people, not just money. In canvassing this looks like literature, clipboards, lunch, etc. For the park example this would be landscaping equipment, water, sunscreen, etc. What’s a better get, $100 or a dude with a truck and a trailer?
• THE DONOR CLASS
• • They just be handing the stuff out man. Grants require a bit more formality, so you’ll want to look into either fiscal sponsorship or filing as a nonprofit. Speaking from experience, filing as a nonprofit takes a bit of time to process fully. For short term projects, go with a fiscal sponsorship.

Timelines begin to diverge pretty quickly after this point. In one universe 10 community events are run and using the power of small town dreams, the park was rebuilt with minimal cost. In another, a single person raises over a million in grant money and pays a landscaping agency to do it. Either way, a park was restored. There’s a million ways to break an egg, so choose one. 

Digital Ground Game’s next steps

A lot of people have reached out to me and asked what our specific plans with the money are. How are we, as Digital Ground Game, going to crack this egg? In my opinion, the way forward is not only obvious, but simple. Two words is all I need: 

Switch. 

Up. 

I don’t know y'all. Matter of fact, somebody call the cops. Careful y’all, there’s poor people around. 

Ok, jokes over. 270k is no joke, and I take that trust incredibly seriously. I have promised some of the final details to others, but you’ll get them soon enough. What I can say is that we will be running a minimum of 2 canvassing houses and 4 events. 99% chance we’re going to Michigan and Ohio (sorry Alaska fans) for houses. Event wise, nothing is really set in stone as of yet. Ideally there would be one in each of the house states, one in Colorado to assist with the redistricting efforts, and then another wildcard. If you have suggestions I’d love to hear them, and I’m confident that at the very least we’ll do the housing events. Outside of the house canvassing program, we’re also working on getting our own phonebanks up and running, along with direct support for our regional squads. With every new fold we add there becomes an increased need for legal guidance, and that’s more time not doing the things we want to do. This is a marathon however, not a sprint. If we want to have an impact in 2028, doing things right is the only possibility. 

Digital Ground Game is moving in a great direction. I’m not sure what I can disclose, but we’ve had some very productive conversations behind the scenes and people have taken notice. That’s due to the passion of every person in this organization and every person who has supported our work. Whether that's reading the Pragmatic Papers or liking Digital Ground Game posts, every little bit matters. Thank you all for your time, and it’s going to be a fun year.

In A Thousand Splendid Suns, the civilian condition experienced during Afghanistan’s thirty years of war, is rendered through immediate proximity to violence, where bombardment, displacement, and coercion collapse the boundary between front line and domestic space ^[1]. By contrast, the civilian experience within the Russia-Ukraine War is structured less by direct exposure to kinetic destruction than by a mediated negotiation with it. Reporting underscores the asymmetry, while tens of thousands of Russian soldiers have been killed, these losses are often diffused across geography and obscured within official reporting, rendering death both pervasive and socially attenuated rather than collectively visible ^[2]. This disjunction generates a distinct cognitive terrain. Civilians are not compelled to confront war as an immediate physical reality but must instead reconcile state narratives with fragmentary personal knowledge.

Collected accounts further complicate this picture by situating the war within intimate, localized experiences that rarely cohere into overt opposition ^[3]. Families of mobilized men describe a condition of constrained agency in which protest is discouraged and often stigmatized, yet private doubt persists alongside outward compliance. In regions such as Buryatia, a territory just north of Mongolia and within Siberia, where casualty rates are disproportionately high, relatives confront loss in stark terms, with narratives that question purpose even as participation continues ^[3]. These accounts do not illustrate a unified ideological commitment but a pattern of compartmentalization, where individuals sustain parallel understandings of the war as both necessary and inexplicable. Within the larger analytical framework, this tension becomes central to interpreting Russian public attitudes over time. Shifting polling data reflects not a simple erosion of support but an evolving equilibrium between adaptation, fatigue, and the persistent need to reconcile official claims with lived, if unevenly perceived, realities.

The initial phase of the Russia-Ukraine War generated a measurable consolidation of public sentiment consistent with a classic rally dynamic, as reflected in early polling that indicated elevated approval rates and heightened trust in executive authority ^[4]. This convergence, however, appears contingent rather than durable. Longitudinal data point to a gradual attenuation of enthusiasm, marked not by overt opposition but by a transition toward acquiescence and detachment ^[5][6]. The persistence of high approval figures reported by Russian outlets and disseminated through state channels complicates interpretation, as these metrics capture expressed alignment under constrained informational conditions rather than a stable reservoir of conviction ^[7][8].

This divergence between surface stability and underlying ambivalence has led analysts to conceptualize the current equilibrium as a form of reluctant consensus, wherein individuals neither mobilize in support of the war effort nor articulate sustained resistance to it. Evidence drawn from independent and experimental polling methodologies suggests that respondents increasingly calibrate their answers to perceived risk, producing an outward posture of conformity that masks a more fragmented internal landscape. The erosion of the rally effect, therefore, does not manifest as a discrete rupture but as a slow diffusion of certainty in which the war recedes from a focal national cause into a normalized backdrop of governance ^[4]. In this environment, public opinion functions less as an engine of policy legitimization than as a permissive condition shaped by inertia and the absence of a catalyzing shock capable of transforming latent discontent into coordinated dissent.

Within the information environment shaped by war, Russian citizens navigate a fragmented epistemic landscape where official narratives coexist with informal and often contradictory streams of reporting. State-aligned outlets project coherence and eventual success, while alternative channels circulating through encrypted platforms and diaspora media introduce dissonant accounts of battlefield reversals, economic strain, and institutional friction. The result is not a simple contest between belief and disbelief, but a layered process of cognitive compartmentalization. Individuals frequently segregate domains of understanding, accepting official claims in public or procedural contexts while privately entertaining doubt or uncertainty. Survey data indicate that expressed approval often functions as a signal of conformity rather than a reliable indicator of internal conviction, reflecting both social desirability pressures and awareness of surveillance within an increasingly restrictive communicative space ^[9][10].

This dual structure of expression and belief enables the absorption of negative information without precipitating overt rejection of the state’s framing of the conflict. Setbacks are frequently reinterpreted through externally oriented explanations, including escalation by Western actors or the inherent protraction of large-scale war, allowing individuals to reconcile contradictory evidence without abandoning baseline acceptance. Over time, this interpretive elasticity sustains a form of adaptive compliance in which skepticism and assent coexist without resolution. Rather than producing ideological commitment, the system cultivates a pragmatic orientation toward uncertainty, in which maintaining alignment with dominant narratives minimizes personal risk while preserving cognitive flexibility.

The temporal dimension of the war reveals a gradual reconfiguration of public tolerance that is not adequately captured by static measures of approval. Russian survey data across a multitude of polling agencies indicate that a majority of respondents anticipate the cessation of hostilities within a defined medium-term horizon, often converging around 2026, which suggests not optimism but rather a bounded expectation that the conflict must eventually resolve within a socially intelligible timeframe ^[8][11][12]. This expectation coexists with findings from independent efforts, where a significant proportion of respondents report adverse effects on their daily existence, thereby introducing a tension between projected endurance and experienced strain ^{[13] [14] [15][16]}. The result is not a linear decline in support but a layered disposition in which acceptance persists alongside accumulating discontent, producing a form of temporal ambivalence that permits continuation without enthusiasm.

Disaggregation across social and geographic strata further complicates the notion of an “acceptable duration,” as the lived experience of the war diverges sharply between metropolitan centers such as Moscow and Saint Petersburg and peripheral regions more directly exposed to mobilization and casualty flows like Buryatia ^[3]. In urban environments, economic perturbations and informational permeability generate a subdued skepticism that rarely translates into overt opposition, while in outlying regions the war is mediated through material dependence on state structures and localized sacrifice, reinforcing patterns of compliance even as costs intensify. Related analyses indicate that support for negotiations has expanded in parallel with continued endorsement of the war effort, a juxtaposition that underscores the distinction between passive endurance and latent war-weariness ^[10][17]. What emerges is a society that has not yet encountered a decisive threshold of rejection but has instead incorporated the war into the cadence of everyday life, normalizing its duration while quietly adjusting the limits of what can be sustained.

Public conceptions of victory among Russians exhibit a marked elasticity that mirrors the iterative recalibration of official war aims, shifting from expansive and ideologically framed objectives toward more circumscribed formulations centered on territorial retention and strategic endurance. Initial narratives invoking systemic transformation in Ukraine recede into the background. Survey data and qualitative reporting suggest that many Russians now anchor success less in measurable gains than in the avoidance of demonstrable loss, a reframing that permits the coexistence of support for continued operations with growing receptivity to negotiations ^[5][18]. This process of retrospective alignment, wherein public expectations adapt to evolving elite rhetoric rather than constrain it, reflects a broader pattern of goalpost recalibration that stabilizes consent by lowering definitional thresholds for success. In this configuration, victory assumes a procedural character grounded in persistence, regime continuity, and resistance to external pressure, rather than a discrete or verifiable end state, thereby enabling sustained acquiescence even as the material and temporal costs of the conflict accumulate.

The consolidation of information control within Russia has not produced uniform conviction so much as it has engineered a constrained interpretive environment in which ambiguity can persist without resolution. Reporting indicates that the progressive tightening of internet regulation combined with the centralization of broadcast narratives has curtailed the circulation of dissonant accounts while leaving intact a substratum of informal exchange that operates through oblique channels and coded language ^[19][20][21]. This architecture does not eliminate skepticism; rather, it redistributes it into less observable domains, where private doubt coexists with public conformity and where expressed opinion often functions as a performative signal calibrated to perceived risk.

In the aggregate, the trajectory of public sentiment within Russia resists reduction to binary categories of endorsement or dissent, instead revealing a pattern of adaptive compliance shaped by informational constraint and incremental cost absorption. Survey data, when read alongside qualitative reporting, indicates that expressed approval often functions as a performative accommodation to prevailing narratives, reinforced by the institutional weight of the state and the diffuse pressures of conformity. This produces a civic environment in which skepticism can coexist with outward assent, allowing individuals to register dissatisfaction in private while maintaining alignment in public discourse. The result is not a mobilized society animated by ideological fervor, but one conditioned to navigate ambiguity through selective engagement and silence.

At the same time, the persistence of Russia's war in Ukraine appears less contingent on the absence of a catalytic rupture capable of transforming latent fatigue into collective opposition. War weariness accumulates in diffuse forms, visible in economic strain, shifting expectations, and a growing preference for negotiated outcomes, yet these pressures remain fragmented and insufficiently synchronized to generate coordinated resistance. The durability of the conflict rests on a precarious equilibrium in which tolerance endures not because objectives are clearly defined or widely internalized but because they remain sufficiently elastic to accommodate recalibration. In this sense, the war’s continuation reflects not the strength of public commitment but the stability of a social condition in which resignation and managed uncertainty sustain the status quo.

In the current discourse surrounding the crafting and creation of policy to address the swarm of immediate and institutional concerns, there is a common flaw that permeates the ecosystem. The policy space is congested with proposals and thought experiments that are narrow in scope and technocratic in presentation. In effect, policymakers are isolating problems to be solved one at a time, ignoring the interrelated nature of many sets of issues, and failing to execute effective solutions. This makes policy confusing and overwhelming to the public due to sheer volume. This is most egregious when addressing issues of low public interest or with long term return on investments (ROI)— a great example being the discourse around EV charging stations. The policy discourse needs to refocus on the creation of viable policy initiatives. A policy initiative for the purposes of this article is a series of policies, measures, and actions to achieve an overarching series of objectives. Policy initiatives are not an entire national platform; they are the main components executing a national platform. They are multi-layered, broad in scope, and address multiple interrelated issues. Good policy initiatives can be marketed differently to different audiences without damaging legitimacy. Where this is particularly vital is in untangling the quagmire of addressing the immediate needs of the public as well as reforms that are boringly bureaucratic, unpopular, or have long ROI timelines. The current popular methods to address these bifurcated needs are to address each separately. In stark contrast with America's legacy— our most successful and celebrated programs chose to operate under the definition of a policy initiative. Of these, the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) is arguably the best archetype of a successful and deeply transformative policy initiative. 

The Domestic and Popular Front

“Our greatest primary task is to put people to work. This is no unsolvable problem if we face it wisely and courageously. It can be accomplished in part by direct recruiting by the Government itself, treating the task as we would treat the emergency of war, but at the same time, through this employment, accomplishing greatly needed projects to stimulate and reorganize the use of our natural resources.” - Franklin D. Roosevelt  in his 1933 inaugural address ^[1]

It is crucial to highlight the landscape in which the CCC was founded: it was conceived, marketed and operated as an emergency response to the mass unemployment, family destitution, and national resource catastrophes (e.g., deforestation, soil exhaustion, the Dust Bowl) of the Great Depression. These were visible, genuine, and urgent issues that the CCC sought to immediately address, and its material success made the program politically untouchable for almost a decade. By the end of the program's nine years, three million young men had rotated through CCC camps. At its peak in 1935, it enrolled more than 500,000 men simultaneously in 2,650 camps. Each enrollee earned $30 per month, of which $25 was sent directly to a family dependent, effectively making the CCC a compulsory family-remittance program operating at national scale ^[2].

1941 polling data shows that the program was immensely popular— roughly 90% approval for the CCC ^[2]. This popularity and public affection garnered from the immediate relief allowed the program to survive FDR's 1935 attempt to reduce the program by around 40% in an attempt to cut spending going into an election year. Congressional Democrats openly revolted, even engaging in joint action with Republicans to counter the cuts. This backlash forced FDR's retreat, and the program continued as usual. This political resilience to interference by even a politician as apt as FDR is striking and shows how popular the program was to the public ^[4]. This resilience allowed the CCC to continue operating until 1942, closing operations as the U.S entrance into WWII mobilized the nation. The longevity allowed the CCC to not only provide relief, but also to prepare the nation for the demands of wartime mass mobilization. 

The Rearmament and Military Preparedness

The CCC delivered as advertised, but it also played a significant role in preparing the United States Army for war. At the time of the program’s conception, the Isolationist movement in the United States was in full swing. This public sentiment resulted in the US Army's significant degradation by the mid-1930’s. In a mechanizing world, the U.S. Army still mostly moved on foot, deployed obsolete WW1 tank models, and, in June of 1934, had only eighty semiautomatic rifles ^[5]. In a world mobilizing to meet the rapid rise of fascist expansionism, Isolationism prevented American preparatory action. Even FDR was forced to sign the Neutrality Act of 1935 which dramatically reduced America’s ability to engage in preventative actions in the lead-up to WWII ^[5]. This constraint required a creative solution— that solution was the CCC. 

The only organization capable of mobilizing hundreds of thousands in the requisite timescale was the US Army. The US Forest and Park service did not have the manpower, bureaucracy, or experience managing that many people, and building that out would have taken years. In the spring of 1933, the Quartermaster Corps of the US Army mobilized to provide nearly 300,000 men with food, clothing, equipment, and shelter, as well as transport them across the country within the first three months of the CCC's operation. That is almost three times the personnel than the army, itself, had at the time. The rapid construction of thousands of camps, millions of purchases of clothing and equipment, and nationwide distribution pushed the Quartermaster Cops to its limits ^[6]. The logistical experience and infrastructure the Army gained throughout the CCC’s operation served as the foundation for providing for 12 million servicemembers during WWII. The physical infrastructure of the camps were also repurposed; when war broke out, over 1300 closed camps with buildings and equipment were immediately at the disposal of the armed services. These camps became training schools, housing, and POW camps ^[1]. The CCC saved an atrophying logistics apparatus and allowed it to build badly needed skills, institutions, and experience that were vital in the war.  

The effect on Army personnel was profound. The CCC acted as a rescue measure for the Army Reserve officer corps by having them run the bureaucracy of the CCC. The interwar isolationist environment had led to the gutting of training and funding for the Reserve Officer Corps, leaving its infrastructure available to be repurposed for CCC operations. General George C. Marshall, US Army Chief of Staff in WWII, was in command of the CCC’s Vancouver barracks from 1936-1938 which allowed him to experiment with brigade scale command and administration protocols. This hands-on experience was vital for Marshall’s ability to direct the entire Army mobilization of WWII ^[7]. This experience pipeline was not exclusive to the officer and leadership of the Army but also influenced general personnel. 3 million young men passed through the program and they would become the foundation of the mobilization efforts in 1942 ^[2]. The CCC vocational training program trained members in skills like motor and aviation repair, cooking and baking, clerical skills, radio operation, driving, photography and cartography. These were non-combatant skills the Army would need at scale ^[1]. The 1942 final report by the CCC director showed that in fiscal year 1941 alone, 84% of CCC enrollees had moved to the armed services and defense work ^[1]. 

The Integrated Program

The CCC demonstrated that in the face of a national crisis measures could be taken to address immediate popular needs, as well as long term and unpopular institutional needs. While providing job relief, financial aid to families, and land topsoil restoration, the CCC worked against the sentiment of the times, preserved Army institutions, and prepared millions of Army-conditioned men. The CCC’s militarization was inadvertent at the level of formal training and inevitable at the level of structural conditioning. This organic synthesis of public and institutional needs is what allowed the program to succeed. 

“From tree soldiers to real soldiers. ... Although officially not military camps, CCC camps were run much like a military camp. ... The CCC never formally became a war-training facility, but effectively served as one.” ^[2]

We can draw three clear lessons from the CCC about what makes an effective policy initiative.

1. The popular mission must be real and immediate. The CCC’s work relief and conservation work were not an excuse to expand the Army. They were responses to real emergencies that needed to be dealt with quickly. The deliverables shown in Table 1 are not propaganda points to justify a military build up; they were real and celebrated deliverables on promised relief. This material relief created political resilience that allowed the CCC to survive long enough for the Army’s institutions to weather the period of isolationism. A policy initiative where the popular mission only exists as window trappings for an institutional reform will not generate the political resilience necessary for long ROI reforms to be achievable. 
2. The institutional mission must be administratively compatible with delivering on the popular needs. The Army was not shoehorned into the position of CCC administration. It was the only institution that could deliver at the requisite scale the logistical and administrative capacities to roll out the CCC immediately. The interwar remediation was not the primary driver for its integration; it accompanied the organic forces that drove the use of the Army. A policy initiative needs to correctly identify the same kind of administrative compatibility that will allow organic interfacing and integration.
3. The dual purpose must be a structural integration, not a rhetorical pairing. The CCC was not a propaganda camp for Army officers to wax on rhetorically about military reform. Army offices were needed to run the camps, not pontificate. The institutional gains of the Army though the period of the CCC’s operation were the byproduct of the administrative arrangement, not the stated objective of the program. This is what differentiates a policy initiative that becomes a political battlefield and one that works and delivers. A successful policy initiative needs its multiple layers and objectives to BE a single movement, and NOT a syncretic bundle. 

The current policy space needs a course correction as the political capital we gain going into 2029 is finite and at risk of being squandered on political projects that have no staying power. It is vital that policy makers learn the lessons from successful policy initiatives if they want their policies to survive long enough to make the desired effect. To this end, we will be launching a series exploring policy initiatives that could be effective for a 2029 platform, using the lessons learned from the CCC. The next piece in this series  will be a proposal on increasing internet access for rural communities to help reduce the opioid epidemic through telehealth access. 

On January 3, 2026, Venezuela’s political trajectory suddenly shifted. In a surprise operation, Operation Absolute Resolve. , U.S. forces struck key sites in Caracas and captured President Nicolás Maduro. Within hours, Maduro was flown to New York to face federal charges tied to narcotics trafficking and terrorism, pleading not guilty in a U.S. court. ^[1]

Vice President Delcy Rodríguez was sworn in as acting president on January 5, in line with the Venezuelan constitution. ^[2]Despite expectations of regime change, the structures of Chavista governance have endured. The Trump administration signaled it would oversee a transition, promising to “take control” of Venezuela, but so far, the impact has been absent. 

Who’s Next?

Rodríguez’s ascent was swift and calculated. While opposition figures like María Corina Machado are internationally prominent, they are effectively excluded from any realistic path to power inside Venezuela. Machado had been formally barred from holding office by Venezuela’s Supreme Tribunal in 2024.^[3] Allowing Machado and opposition parties to come to power would require a massive reshaping of the current political system, a rather tedious process that may not suit the President’s short attention span. 

By contrast, Delcy Rodríguez represented continuity within the existing system. As vice president at the time of Maduro’s capture, she was the constitutionally designated successor in the event of presidential absence. More importantly, she maintained relationships across the military command, the United Socialist Party of Venezuela, and key economic ministries.

Adapting Repression

At first, the opposition was willing to take what they could get. Machado was not in power, but she celebrated, calling for a democratic transition and recognition of the previous election outcomes. Yet inside the country, momentum quickly stalled.

Rodríguez’s government quickly demonstrated that dissent would remain constrained. Many who publicly celebrated Maduro’s capture were arrested, and protests were limited by both fear and enforcement. ^[4]

Some political prisoners were released under a new amnesty law, but the narrow scope of those releases warrants scrutiny. While the government cited hundreds freed, independent organizations reported far fewer confirmed cases involving genuine political detainees. Many who were released still face charges and are just as afraid to speak out against the government as before. ^[5]The change in leadership has not translated into a change in lived experience for most citizens. The broader system shows little structural reform.

Public health systems struggle to provide basic services. While the interim government has allowed greater access for humanitarian aid, shortages of medicine and equipment remain. Hunger remains one of the most immediate consequences of Venezuela’s prolonged crisis. ^[6]For many households, access to food is about whether they can find any, not if they can afford it. Rising food prices erode purchasing power and place healthy diets out of reach for large segments of the population. Even where markets are stocked, families often resort to coping strategies such as reducing portion sizes or skipping meals. ^[7]The result is chronic undernourishment that continues to shape Venezuela’s long-term public health outlook.

As a result, leaving remains the most viable option for many. With access to food growing increasingly more difficult, and human rights still being trampled, Trump’s control of Venezuela is looking less like a new dawn, and more like Venezuela is “under new management”. 

Growth and Stagnation

Venezuela’s economic trajectory in the post-Maduro period reflects visible macroeconomic stabilization layered over deep structural fragility. Following years of contraction, the economy has registered a tentative rebound, driven almost entirely by hydrocarbons. The partial easing of sanctions and rapid re-engagement of foreign energy firms have unlocked production capacity that had long been dormant. By spring 2026, oil output had risen markedly, with exports reaching their highest levels in several years and regaining access to key markets in the United States, India, and Europe. ^[8]This external reopening has restored a degree of fiscal breathing room for the state, which remains heavily reliant on petroleum revenues.

Official data for 2025 suggests GDP growth of approximately 8.7 percent, extending a multi-quarter recovery from the country’s prolonged economic collapse. Yet this expansion is best understood as narrow and sectorally concentrated. Oil-related activity continues to outpace the rest of the economy, while non-oil sectors remain structurally weakened after a decade of infrastructural decay.

Beneath these aggregate figures, inflation remains the defining constraint on recovery. Price increases continue to erode real wages and distort economic planning. The national currency has not regained credibility as a store of value, and dollarization (adopting the dollar alongside or in place of the current currency), once informal, now functions as the economy’s de facto operating system in many urban and commercial sectors.

Capital-intensive oil-linked industries have begun to recover, benefiting from renewed external engagement. By contrast, domestic consumption markets remain constrained by persistent import bottlenecks and limited access to stable credit. The rebound visible in macroeconomic indicators is only faintly reflected in the daily economic life of the average Venezuelan.

In this sense, Venezuela’s recovery is less a broad-based reconstruction than a recalibration of extractive capacity within an unchanged structural framework. The state has regained access to oil revenues, but has not yet resolved the deeper institutional and monetary distortions that led to its earlier collapse.

Conclusion

Venezuela has not undergone a clean break from its past. Instead, it has adapted its government to appease the US while maintaining a firm grip on its citizens. Power has shifted but not fundamentally restructured. Economic growth in the oil industry is what Trump wants, putting the industry in a perfect position for extraction. Any humanitarian or democratic concerns are tossed in the wind.

Venezuela today is not defined by collapse or recovery alone. It is defined by uncertainty.

This is the first in a series covering the court case of United States of America v. Nicolas Maduro Moros. I am not a lawyer, nor do I work in a profession related to the law or the courts. I am merely a U.S. citizen interested in our legal system, the courts, and the rule of law. I am taking advantage rights provided by the First Amendment which allow the public to attend criminal trials. 

Do Dictators get Sixth Amendment Rights?

Nicolas Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, were back in court on Thursday March 26th for the first time since their arraignment back on January 5th 2026, for a pre-trial hearing. It was originally scheduled for March 17th, but got pushed back by request from the prosecutors for the U.S. Government. The hearing focused on the U.S. Government's refusal to provide exemption to sanctions on the Venezuelan Government, Mr. Maduro, and Ms. Flores to allow them to pay for council in the U.S. Mr. Maduro was represented by Brian Pollack and Ms. Flores was represented by Mark Donnelly. The main purpose of the hearing was to address defense’s argument that the U.S. Government violated their clients’ Sixth Amendment^[1] rights by preventing the Venezuelan Government or their clients directly from paying for legal counsel by refusing to provide the defense counsel with licenses to accept payment from persons or entities who are sanctioned by the U.S. Government.

The defense argued that the U.S. Government violated the Sixth Amendment rights of the defendants by refusing to provide the defense counsel licenses to receive payment from sanctioned persons or entities. A key part of your Sixth Amendment right is not only the right to “the assistance of counsel”, but the qualified right to be represented by the attorney of one’s choosing. Because Mr. Maduro, Ms. Flores, and the Venezuelan Government are all sanctioned by the U.S. Government, the defense counsel must obtain a Specific License from the U.S. Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) to receive payment for legal services^[2]. Mr. Pollack and Mr. Donnelly submitted applications for licenses to the OFAC, which were initially granted, but the OFAC reversed its decision and revoked the licenses only a couple hours later without providing a reason. This effectively prevents Mr. Maduro and Ms. Flores from being able to request and pay for services from the counsel of their choosing, which would ultimately force them to rely on legal services from public defenders. 

After hearing the argument from the defense, the court turned to Assistant U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, Kyle Wirshba, for the rebuttal from the Department of Justice (DOJ). The argument first asserted that this case is unique and cannot directly follow precedent set by previous court cases (e.g., United States v. Stein^[3] or Luis v. United States^[4]) because the funds in question are either outside of the United States or are being held by foreign entities. The rulings in the aforementioned cases were with respect to assets housed in the United States. Since the funds to pay for Mr. Maduro and Ms. Flores’ counsel, whether paid by the Venezuelan Government or not, will come from outside of the U.S., the executive branch has sole discretion on whether to provide licenses to Mr. Pollack and Mr. Donnely. Mr. Wirshba's argument went so far as to say that the U.S. Government’s position is that the court could not even provide a remedy which would compel the OFAC to provide a license to the defense council; although, he did admit that the OFAC would reconsider its decision if the judge indicated he was going to throw out the case.

Update: As of April 24th, 2026, Jay Claton, the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York announced that the Treasury Department issued amended licenses to, Brian Pollack and Mark Donnelly, the attorneys for Mr. Maduro and Ms. Flores, so they can receive pay from the Venezuelan Government^[5]. Both the prosecution and defense have requested a status hearing in 60 days. This means that the next court date will likely be at the end of June or beginning of July.

It’s Cranks, Cranks all the Way Down 

Nothing could have prepared me for the experience of attending this hearing for the Maduro Trial. Even though the hearing was not scheduled to start until 11 AM I got to the courthouse at around 9 AM because I knew there would be a lot of interest in this trial, and I wanted to make sure that I had the opportunity to sit in on it. The walk from the Brooklyn Bridge-City Hall subway station to the courthouse, I walked past many large and stately federal, state, municipal court buildings which loom over you and give weight to the activities that take place here daily. However, this moment of reflection was broken by the chanting of protesters across the street for the release of Maduro. As I stopped to take a picture of them, two older Hispanic ladies dressed in business attire walked past me and started passionately heckling back at the protestors. Adding to the chaos of voices were news reports giving updates about what the hearing would be about and TV film crews getting footage of the protestors for B-roll during news segments about the trial. I had to take a moment to stop, listen, and take in all of it. After about fifteen minutes the protestors switched from their free Maduro chants, to chants against the war in Iran. The omnicause wins again! At this point I decided it was time to head in and get in line for the hearing.

To get into the courthouse I went through airport style security where I had to put my backpack through an x-ray scanner and walk through a metal detector. After going through all of that, the U.S. Marshal directed me to what looked like a coat check counter to drop off my phone and any other electronic devices I had. Now I was finally ready to get in line for the hearing. I was so thankful that I had the foresight to pack a book the night before. The lobby where the the line was forming was filled mostly with journalists, mostly from local outlets, and younger well dressed people, who I imagine were law students. I made my way to the end of the line and I barely made it through one page before the woman in front of me turned around and introduced herself. She very quickly told me that she is from South Florida, runs a daily podcast/radio show, and just so happened to be in New York City the week of the hearing and decided to sit in on it. Immediately alarm bells went off in my head that this woman is crazy. Despite the warning signs, I engaged with her in friendly conversation because we will be in line together for the next hour and a half. We talk about how the War in Iran was very worrying. She had scathing criticism of the Trump administration's handling of the war; however, she was very quick to assure me that she did not have “Trump Derangement Syndrome.” That was not my concern.

As we waited to be let up to the court room, she told me about how she finds it very frustrating that many of the people she knows are checking out of politics and have stopped following the news. The last year has been a constant onslaught of one thing after another, muzzle velocity as Steve Bannon says, and that it's understandable that the average person might think it's too much to handle. When I told her this, she quipped that the reason we’re in this mess now is that not enough of the voters are actually informed on what is currently happening and that this leads to our politicians not solving problems. To drive home this point to me, she pointed to “our inability to solve voter fraud.” If only the Democrats would get out of the way of voter ID, we could have secure elections like Venezuela. I pushed back against her claim saying that if republicans were serious about preventing election fraud by requiring voter ID, they wouldn’t be against a nation ID card and they wouldn’t play games with what types of IDs you can and cannot use when voting. She didn’t seem very satisfied with my response, but before she could continue the argument, the U.S. Marshals came over to start leading people up to the court room.

After the hearing concluded, I stayed behind for a few minutes to collect my thoughts on everything I had experienced both before and during the hearing. Ultimately the conclusion I came to felt pretty bleak. The Maduro Trial is historic because not only have we captured a sitting head of state, but we are having him stand trial. What happens if he is convicted? That could set off an unprecedented international crisis. Despite the seriousness of the trial, the majority of the people who attended were people who had their own crank agenda to push. What is an open and accessible criminal justice system supposed to look like when we’re putting world leaders on trial and the only members of the public who bother to show up are people on the political fringes. This whole experience felt like a microcosm of the current political moment we’re living. We’re surrounded by so much unprecedented and possibly illegal action, but the average American is nowhere to be seen. Then, when there is no one else there the cranks, the weirdos, and the political fringe come crawling out of the shadows to take their place.

A lack of understanding exists around foster care within our society.

It exists at the intersection of child welfare, family reunification, and social services that come together to form the foster care system. Many of these systems rely heavily on media representation and anecdotes from people who do not have firsthand knowledge or experience with foster care, as opposed to factual evidence. This misconception may harm those who will consider becoming a foster parent and/or create an atmosphere of bias against children in care. Additionally, those who work in foster care (i.e., social workers, families, and communities) are often portrayed in a manner that does not reflect the amount of complexity involved in their work.

The purpose of this article is to identify and explain the 5 "myths" regarding foster care as well as to discuss some of the actual realities encountered by children, families, and caregivers in the foster care system.

Myth #1: Foster care is a place for “bad kids.”

The stereotype that children in foster care are “bad” or “troubled” is one of the most pervasive myths surrounding youth in care and serves to inaccurately portray youth in foster care as being difficult, delinquent, or unable to help themselves ^[1].

Fact: The truth is, children enter foster care because of situations beyond their control, most often because there is abuse, neglect, or unsafe living conditions in their homes^[2][3]. Children do not create the circumstances that cause them to be taken into foster care but rather are the victims of those circumstances. Many children have experienced multiple instances of trauma, instability, or loss in their lives, which may have implications for their behavior; however, those experiences do not define who they are. 

Youth in foster care are just as diverse as any other group. In addition to varying personalities and talents and dreams, youth in foster care are sometimes identified by the way they behave and interact with others. Although some youth may be challenging, when placed in a stable and supportive environment, many youth will flourish. The label of “bad” puts an inaccurate label on them and serves only to create obstacles to their healing and growth^[4].

Myth #2: Foster care is always unsafe or poorly managed

Media coverage sometimes highlights extreme cases of neglect or abuse within the foster care system, leading to a perception that the system as a whole is unsafe.

Fact: Although no system is indeed perfect, there are some regulations and requirements for background checks, training, and ongoing monitoring and supervision to ensure children in foster care are safe. Social workers routinely check on the children who are placed with foster parents, and foster parents must meet required levels of care to remain licensed as foster parents^[5].

Nonetheless, there are many things that contribute to these challenges, including caseworker shortages, lack of resources, and other systemic inequities that may affect the quality of care a child receives in certain areas^[6]. While it is important to acknowledge these challenges, it is equally important to recognize that there are a number of dedicated professionals and caregivers working together to ensure the safety and well-being of the children they care for.

Myth #3: Teens in foster care are “too difficult” to foster

Among all ages of foster children, there is probably no group that causes as much fear in potential foster parents as teenagers. Some potential parents believe that teenagers are both more difficult to manage and less likely to develop meaningful relationships.

Fact: Teens in foster care will have many major challenges that are unique to them. They also have an important desire to have permanency and support in their lives. As teenagers enter into young adulthood, they often need support from an adult in their life to help make a difference in their development.

Teens can develop trusting and supportive relationships with their foster parents. They may need patience and understanding from their foster parents due to their experiences with trauma, yet they also bring with them many positive qualities, resilience, and a different point of view. Sadly, teens are many times in the greatest need of temporary homes, but are also the least likely to go into a foster home due to the misconceptions surrounding them^[7].

Myth #4: Foster care is the same everywhere

People often assume that foster care operates uniformly across all regions and communities.

Fact: Foster care systems vary by state, region, and even county. Policies, resources, and practices can differ significantly. Some areas may have robust support systems and training programs, while others face resource constraints^[8].

These differences can affect everything from placement stability to access to services^[9]. Understanding this variability is important for anyone considering involvement in foster care, whether as a foster parent, foster kid, or foster advocate.

Myth #5: Foster care only affects young children

When people think of foster care, they often picture infants or young children.

Fact: Foster care serves children and youth of all ages, from newborns to young adults. Older youth, particularly those aging out of the system, face unique challenges, including finding housing, employment, and educational opportunities^[10].

These young adults may lack the family support systems that many of their peers rely on. Programs aimed at supporting them during this transition are crucial, but they are often underfunded or limited in scope^[11].

The Impact of Misconceptions and the Path Toward Understanding

Misconceptions about the foster care system have an impact on foster care outcomes. Public perceptions of foster care through stereotypes and incomplete information positively or negatively affect children, families, and the caregivers involved in foster care. Negative public perceptions discourage potential foster parents from wanting to become foster parents, resulting in inadequate, unsafe, and unsupportive homes for children. Additionally, children in foster care may be stigmatized by their peers, teachers, and their larger community, affecting their self-esteem, relationships with others, and their ability to thrive long-term. Misunderstandings about a child's biological family may foster judgment, rather than empathy, and make it difficult to support parents in their efforts to reunify with their children in a valuable way. More broadly, foster care misconceptions can influence public policies that support funding, services, and system reforms needed to strengthen the foster care system.
To address these issues, we must first shift to a more understanding place. One of the strongest methods of breaking down myths and replacing them with accurate, compassionate perspectives is through education. When we listen to people directly involved in foster care like the Fosters, biological parents, foster families, and child welfare professionals, we can ground our conversations on personal experiences as opposed to assumptions. Communities play a significant role as well, by supporting foster families, mentoring youth, and advocating for improved resources, they can all help create a better and more compassionate system. A very simple, day-to-day conversations can make a difference as well; when we stop and challenge stereotypes when they arise, it can ultimately impact how foster care is viewed.

We can develop a more compassionate and educated understanding of foster care by acknowledging that misunderstandings about foster care have both created harm and provided opportunity for general awareness of and respect for children in foster care and their families as a result.

Conclusion

The system of foster care has many complexities and is not always easy to understand or interpret properly. At its very essence, foster care was created to help children and families during difficult periods of their lives by providing them with safe, stable, and supportive environments while they navigate through those experiences.

Understanding the differences between fact and myth can help individuals to learn about the specific challenges and opportunities present in the foster care system. By creating an environment that promotes support for individuals involved in foster care rather than stigmatizing those individuals, we can establish greater awareness and empathy and ultimately develop more cohesive communities where all children have the opportunity to reach their full potential.

Trump has begun shedding members of his cabinet, and the pattern has sparked accusations of sexism. But the more revealing story isn’t who has been fired, it’s who hasn’t. The answer says less about bias and more about how Trump is managing a fragile coalition.

Lori Chavez-DeRemer

Donald Trump nominated Lori Chavez-DeRemer for Secretary of Labor with encouragement from Sean O’Brien^[1]. Her pro-union record drew support from several Democratic senators while raising skepticism among Republicans^[2]. She was ultimately confirmed by a 67–32 vote. 

Chavez-DeRemer began her tenure with an “America at Work” listening tour, though it produced little in the way of concrete policy. Early efforts focused on aligning the Department of Labor with the administration’s rollback of DEI-related programs. This included a proposal to eliminate the Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs (OFCCP)^[3] and transfer its enforcement responsibilities to the Veterans’ Employment and Training Service (VETS). While Congress did not adopt the proposal, the department still underwent a significant restructuring that reduced OFCCP staffing to roughly 80 employees ^[4]. 

Her more substantive shift came in workforce development. Chavez-DeRemer emphasized apprenticeships and skills-based training over traditional college pathways. An executive order directed the Departments of Labor, Commerce, and Education to review federal workforce programs within 90 days and develop a plan to better align resources with emerging industry needs ^[5]. It also called for the creation of 1 million new registered apprenticeships, supported by $85 million in grants announced in August 2025 ^[6]. 

Her tenure was also marked by a series of controversies. Reports surfaced alleging misuse of government resources tied to an event described internally as a swearing-in ceremony that coincided with her birthday ^[7]. Critics also questioned the substance of her “America at Work” tour, characterizing it as light on official business. Additional allegations involved inappropriate conduct by her husband, Dr. Shawn DeRemer, who was reportedly barred from a federal building following employee complaints^[8]. No charges were filed, and he denied wrongdoing. Internal reviews have also examined communications between Chavez-DeRemer, her family members, and department staff, along with separate allegations involving workplace misconduct and a possible relationship with a subordinate ^[9]. 

The administration later announced that Chavez-DeRemer would step down to pursue a role in the private sector, praising her tenure. She denied any wrongdoing, dismissed the allegations as politically motivated, and stated it was an honor to serve ^[10]. She is expected to be interviewed as part of an ongoing internal review.

Kash Patel

Kash Patel spent the time between Trump administrations building a following through his podcast, where he regularly criticized the Biden administration and reinforced MAGA-aligned narratives. He described the FBI as corrupt, dismissed investigations into Trump as politically motivated, expressed sympathy for January 6th rioters, and suggested that lawmakers should face prosecution for actions taken against the Trump administration ^[11]. He was confirmed as FBI Director by a narrow 51–49 vote, with Republican Senators Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski joining Democrats in opposition. 

Patel quickly moved to reshape the FBI. He ordered roughly 1,500 agents reassigned to field offices in an effort to decentralize operations ^[12] and cleared out portions of the senior civil service leadership, replacing them with political allies. He also expanded the use of polygraphs in internal leak investigations, including questions about internal criticism of his leadership. These moves contributed to increased attrition among senior agents, particularly those connected to prior Trump-related investigations ^[13]. 

Under Patel, the FBI’s public-facing priorities have shifted. Greater emphasis has been placed on immigration-related investigations^[14] and domestic threats tied to left-leaning protest activity^[15], while counterterrorism and cyber investigations have received comparatively less attention. Thousands of agents are now assigned to work alongside DHS on immigration-linked cases^[16]. 

Patel has also taken an unusually active and public role in ongoing investigations, at times creating confusion and drawing criticism. Following the killing of Charlie Kirk, Patel announced on social media that a suspect was in custody while local authorities still considered the shooter at large^[17]. He later criticized local law enforcement for delaying the release of surveillance footage^[18] and publicly referenced DNA evidence while stating his belief in the suspect’s guilt. Legal experts warned that these actions could complicate prosecution and raise due process concerns for the accused, Tyler Robinson^[19]. 

In a separate incident involving a sniper attack on an ICE facility in Dallas, Patel posted an image of shell casings marked “Anti-ICE” and characterized the attack as politically motivated. The early release of evidence and rapid attribution of motive again drew criticism for departing from standard FBI communication practices^[20]. 

Patel’s tenure has also been marked by allegations of misconduct unrelated to investigations. Reports have raised questions about his use of government resources, including travel for personal events, and the use of FBI personnel for personal security^[21]. Additional claims regarding workplace disruptions tied to his behavior have been reported but remain contested. Patel has denied wrongdoing and is pursuing legal action against at least one outlet for defamation^[22]. 

My Take: 

So far, Trump has fired three cabinet members: Pam Bondi, Kristi Noem, and Lori Chavez-DeRemer. Each fell for different reasons, loyalty without restraint, performance failures, or internal dysfunction, but the pattern has led many to point to sexism as the common thread. 

There’s some truth to that. But it doesn’t explain why Kash Patel is still standing.

Patel checks all the same boxes. He has shown ideological loyalty, invited controversy, and raised serious concerns about competence and judgment. Yet he remains in place—not because he’s different, but because he serves a different function.

Patel has something the others didn’t: a base. 

You can certainly make the argument that Patel has that following because MAGA are more likely to follow men, but Patel still has a base that will back him. Booting him risks not only angering a following but also losing a cheerleader. This doesn’t make Patel bullet proof, but it does mean he needs a graceful exit so Trump doesn’t have a conspiracy peddler peddling conspiracies against him.

The conspiracy fearmongers are already turning on Trump. Candance Owens and Tucker Carlson outwardly expressed their disappointment. Keeping Patel on his side means keeping someone with some “credibility” on board to help counter the contrarians.

This same dynamic likely explains the staying power of figures like Robert F. Kennedy Jr.. Their value isn’t administrative, it’s coalitional. 

Trump has spent the first year of his second term being unusually good about not firing people. He was able to staff his cabinet with people that asked no questions, but now the consequences of that are showing. When you hire for loyalty over skill — surprise, surprise— you don’t get skill. Their incompetence muddies not just Trump, but the Senators that confirmed them as well.

I don’t think Patel is safe, he just had a larger margin for error. At some point, Trump has to decide if he wants loyalty or effectiveness. In his first term, he was often stymied by professionals that not only knew the system, but also wanted to work within it. He thought if he had a loyal cabinet, he could push for more of his agenda, and that has worked to some extent, but it hasn't produced a streamlined smaller government republicans claim they want. What we have right now is a demoralized and understaffed federal government.

Trump has  little more than 2 years to shape the government. If he continues to employ sycophants that only work at his pleasure, the country will not be left with a functioning government, but if he selects for skill, he will have to deal with the grown ups in the room that will tell him no.

A scattershot collection of political news stories 

This May, Digital Ground Game is using our monthly Midterms Report to present a veritable bouquet of stories from elections to finances to future plans for our organization. Part of our goal in this month’s formatting is to float a trial balloon for a more diverse flavor profile in our reporting; in the spirit of said trial balloon, reader feedback is very much appreciated this month, especially. To do so, feel free to join the Discord on our website linked above.

State Highlight: Ohio

Despite its fairly red population, Ohio, like most states, is seeing a notable shift away from the Republican Party in polling ^[1]. These trends, along with their position as a bellwether state ^[2] have lent Ohio’s midterm elections an increased national spotlight. All these factors, along with the imminent May 5th primaries, contributed to our choice of Ohio as this month’s highlighted state.

Governor

Incumbent governor Mike DeWine ends his third term this year, term-limiting him from participating in the upcoming race. While incumbency generally offers an electoral advantage, DeWine’s atrocious job approval ratings make it less clear whether that would have been a factor here ^[3]. If the poor perception of DeWine’s work as governor pushes voters away from the Republican Party, we could see a significant opportunity for the Democratic candidate to win this race. Current polling aggregates are rating the race as a toss-up ^[4] but the movement of polls over the past year shows a promising trend ^[5].

Vivek Ramaswamy - R

The presumed republican nominee is the ever polarizing Vivek Ramaswamy, having received the endorsement of the retiring governor ^[6] in addition to the majority of the national Republican leadership ^[7]. Ramaswamy has held a presence in right-wing politics as a commentator for quite a while but his resume of actual governance is unimpressive to say the least having quit his leadership role at DOGE in the first week of Donald Trump’s second term ^[8]. Despite his party’s endorsement, Vivek’s history of dubious money making strategies ^[9]offer myriad angles of attack on a campaign trail making him a fairly risky candidate to back. Looking at the crosstabs of Emerson College Polling’s Ohio governor survey^[10], while Ramaswamy’s approval among registered Republicans roughly matches Acton’s numbers in the Democratic Party, his unfavourability in his own voter base more than doubles that of his opponent. In addition to his weak bio as a candidate, the policy platform laid out on the Vivek for Ohio campaign site ^[11] is extremely slogan heavy and generally vague. If we want a chance to flip the Ohio Governor’s seat, this race is about as good as we could ask for.

Dr. Amy Acton - D

Unopposed in the democratic primary is Dr. Amy Acton, former director of the Ohio Department of Public Health. Dr. Acton worked multiple jobs to put herself through medical school despite growing up in poverty and even facing homelessness at times. This adversity and direct experience as a member of the working class will allow her to make a compelling case that she actually understands the struggles faced by Ohioans today. In addition to the challenges of her upbringing, she’s also a wife and mother of six children, so she knows firsthand the expenses necessary to raise a family. Having been appointed to the role by the sitting governor DeWine, Amy’s tenure as Director of the Ohio Department of Public Health demonstrated her willingness to put partisanship aside for the sake of the people. While her appointment could be viewed as having bipartisan trust, the events that led to her resignation tell another story; just months after the initiation of the COVID-19 lockdowns, crowds of demonstrators (sometimes armed) protested her every decision from directly outside her home ^[12]. Vivek’s labeling of Dr. Acton as “Ohio’s Anthony Fauci” could turn out to be a compelling argument to voters but to what degree has yet to be seen. The “Priorities” section found on the Acton for governor campaign website ^[13] is decently extensive but largely not very specific with one exception. The last page on the priorities tab labeled “ActOn Lowering Costs: Amy’s Affordability Agenda” ^[14] is impressively comprehensive and lists specific policies that an Acton administration would enact to address a wide range of affordability based issues faced by voters.

Strategy

Ohio’s workforce has a fairly heavy reliance on manufacturing, healthcare, and retail trade, with these three industries accounting for a third of all employment in the state ^[15]. All three of these industries have been damaged by Trump’s various reckless economic policies making them ripe topics to focus on while campaigning. Dr. Acton does a good job addressing this on her ActOn policy page but something like a workers’ union rally could be a strategy that really solidifies her stance optically. While her time running the Ohio Department of Public Health ended in controversy, her work there pre-lockdowns seems to have been quite successful so it could be useful to magnify those accomplishments to counter Ramaswamy’s attacks. 

Senate

The incumbent for the senate seat at issue this fall was appointed as the replacement for JD Vance after he was elected vice president. The rules for such an occurrence require that the newly appointed senator win a special election in order to serve out the remainder of the term. With polling looking more blue as we creep toward elections ^[16] and the disparity of name recognition between Vance’s replacement and presumed Democratic candidate Sherrod Brown ^[5], an increasing number of commentators see Ohio as an important stepping stone on the path back to the Senate. A recent DSCC press release ^[17] included the Ohio Senate special election among the highlighted Senate races that polling aggregators recently adjusted leftward.

Jon Husted - R

The uncontested Republican nominee, Jon Husted, appears very qualified for the role on paper. Husted earned a master’s degree in communication in the early 90s and worked as a football commentator for radio and TV until 1997, when he entered public service. He’s spent close to 30 years slowly working his way through more prestigious elected offices. Husted started as a state representative in 2001, briefly became a state senator in 2009, before he was elected the Ohio Secretary of State in 2011, finally he became the lieutenant governor in 2019, where he was until being appointed to Vice President Vance’s former Senate seat in 2025 ^[18]. Despite such a resume, Jon appears to have neglected his communications degree entirely, seeing as very little of this information would be gleaned just by reading his campaign website. The information on offer from the Jon Husted for Senate page consists of an extremely brief bio about his time in foster care and his adopted family before extensively flaunting his list of endorsements including a dramatic zoom on a Trump Truth Social post and spouting MAGA friendly buzzwords. The last spit in your face element of the website is the fact that it lacks an “issues” tab entirely meaning Jon Husted trusts that people will vote for him without even needing to lay out the policies he wants to accomplish ^[19]. Reading about this candidate left a bad taste in my mouth and I’m confident that the right communications strategy from his opponent can adequately portray that feeling to voters.

Sherrod Brown - D

Speaking of eminently qualified candidates, the Democratic frontrunner, Sherrod Brown intends to return to the Senate where he formerly served for nearly twenty years. During Brown’s time in Congress he chaired multiple committees and subcommittees. His degrees in Russian studies and education give him a broad range of expertise ^[20]. While polling largely shows tossups or a slight lead for Husted, the numbers are tightening and the combination of Brown’s name recognition and his reputation for bipartisan legislation shouldn't be underestimated ^[21]. In the interest of fairness, Sherrod Brown’s campaign site is very bare bones, which was rather disappointing to see. The website doesn't have separate tabs but the large section of text acts as a sort of amalgamation of the candidate bio and issues section. One could argue that given his extensive career in the Senate, voters can expect a continuation of his previous work but it would still be nice to see a more clear vision laid out ^[22]. 

Strategy

Sherrod Brown already has a history working with unions and blue collar workers, playing into this image and connecting it to the ongoing affordability problems functions as a solid messaging core to work around. Since Ohio has one of the largest Ukrainian populations in the country, it might be a strong choice to appeal to them regarding how much the Trump administration is helping Russia by lifting oil sanctions. This message might also be attractive to Ohio’s weapons manufacturing and defense industries if Brown can pitch that weapons produced in-state be included in a military aid package. Secondarily, Vance recounted a story in mid-April about how proud he was to cut off aid to Ukraine, linking this to Vance’s endorsement of Jon Husted, which could prove to be an effective attack. Lastly, depending on the movement of public approval of the Trump administration, prodding Husted on how closely he appears to be linking his political identity to them could be helpful in moderation.

Electoral Issue: Primary Hopping

A problem of growing salience this electoral cycle is a strategy I’ve been referring to as “primary hopping”. Primary hopping is a move that effectively allows a retiring incumbent to anoint an electoral successor by letting them bypass the normal primary process. The strategy involves an incumbent indicating their intention to retain their seat to dissuade candidates from running, only to drop out and allow their preferred candidate to sign up sometimes, only minutes before the deadline ^[23]. While actions have been taken in the past to circumvent primaries, such as the decision to hold a GOP convention for the 2021 Virginia gubernatorial election ^[24] instead of a normal primary, primary hopping appears to be the most blatant working method to date. So far, only two candidates have attempted this in the 2026 cycle likely, because it's still unclear whether the potential for voter backlash makes primary hopping a worthwhile strategy.

Senator Steve Daines and Kurt Alme

The most recent occurrence is that of now retiring incumbent Senator of Montana, Steve Daines. Despite his stated intention to run for his third term a month earlier, Daines withdrew his name from the ballot a mere two minutes before the filing deadline to be replaced by the U.S. Attorney for the District of Montana, Kurt Alme^[25]. While Daines claims he had been wrestling with the decision for months, the last minute maneuver leaves many with their eye on the race skeptical of his explanation ^[23]. Seemingly spurred by these events, former University of Montana President Seth Bodnar announced his intention to run in the general election as an independent, reportedly with the backing of former Democratic U.S. Senator Jon Tester ^[26]. A key part of Bodnar’s campaign seems to rely on the assumption that voters will be put off by the actions of Daines and Alme.

Representative Chuy Garcia and Patty Garcia

Unfortunately, this issue isn't one isolated to the republican party. Democratic Representative Chuy Garcia of Illinois pulled a similar stunt last November with his chief of staff, Patty Garcia (no relation to the congressman). In this instance, Garcia actually withdrew after the filing deadline closed, meaning he was able to ensure that his successor was the only candidate in the primary race. Similar to Senator Daines, Garcia claims that he had been working through the choice for a while, citing personal health issues and family matters as the reason for his late resignation but his organization’s effort to amass signatures for his chief of staff seems to betray his intentions ^[27]. Following these actions, the House voted 236-186 to reprimand Garcia; Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, who initiated the vote to much party outrage, defended her decision, saying that it’s important to call out “election subversion” by lawmakers on both sides of the aisle ^[28].

Potential corruption

While primary hopping is a legal, if scummy strategy, an aspect I didn’t see brought up in much of the reporting on the issue is the opportunity it creates for corruption. The occurrences seen so far appear to be nothing more than a means to pull a trusted ally into an incumbent’s seat or to avoid a primary winner who is less electable in a general election but buying seats seems to be a real risk if this strategy gains prevalence. In theory, the leader of an industry put at risk by ongoing legislation could identify an older congressperson and offer to pay them to install a candidate more amenable to the plights of your industry. I think this issue needs to be addressed legally before we see such a plan attempted.

Closer: Fundraiser Recap and Canvassing Plans

Before laying out our upcoming canvassing projects, we wanted to give a quick update on the April 10th fundraiser stream that we mentioned at the end of our last report. We want to thank everyone who participated for blowing away our expectations. The stream raised over $270,000, hitting every goal we prepared and even had participating streamers putting together stretch goals in real time! For those interested in more detailed reporting of the event, an in-depth article can be found

here. 

Thanks to the success of this event, our leadership is currently deciding which locations to use for our canvassing events. Assuming all goes to plan, we hope to begin operations around mid-June or early July and continue until the elections in November. We will be sure to relay any updates to our canvassing plans at the end of our June report next month. To see updates as they happen, be sure to keep an eye on our website or join our Discord, where discussions of next steps are happening every day.