Born in rural Ohio, Howard Keylor attended a one-room country schoolhouse. He became a member of the National Honor Society when he graduated from Marietta High School.
After enlisting in the U.S. Army, Howard fought in the Pacific Theater in World War Two, during which he participated in the Battle of Okinawa as a Corporal. The 96th U.S. Army Division, which Howard trained with, had casualty rates above 50%. The incompetence and racism of the military command, the destruction of the capital city of Naha and the deliberate killings of tens of thousands of Okinawan civil-ians – a third of the population - made Howard a committed anti-imperialist, anti-militarist and anti-racist for the rest of his life.
Upon returning to the United States, Howard enrolled in the College of the Pacific, but dropped out to support Filipino agricultural workers in the 1948 asparagus strike, working with legendary labor leader Larry Itliong. He became a longshore worker in Stockton in 1953. As a member of the Communist Party, Howard and his wife, Evangeline, were attacked in the HUAC (McCarthy) hearings in San Francisco. Later, Howard transferred to ILWU Local 10. In 1971 he, along with Brothers Herb Mills, Leo Robinson and a ma-jority of Local 10’s members, opposed the proposed 1971 contract which codified the 9.43 steadyman sys-tem. This led to the longshore strike of 1971-1972, which shut down 56 West Coast ports and lasted 130 days. It was the longest strike in the ILWU’s history.
In Local 10 Brother Keylor was a member of the Militant Caucus, a class struggle rank-and-file group which published a regular newsletter, the “Longshore Militant”. He later left the Militant Caucus and pub-lished a separate newsletter on his own, the “Militant Longshoreman.” Howard advocated deliberate defi-ance of the “slave-labor” Taft-Hartley law through illegal secondary boycotts and pickets. Running on an open class-struggle program which called for breaking with the Democratic and Republican Parties, form-ing a worker’s government, expropriating the capitalists without compensation and creating a planned economy, Howard won election to the Executive Board of Local 10 for twelve years.
The Militant Caucus was involved in organizing protests and boycotts of military cargo bound for the military dictatorship in Chile in 1975 and 1978 and again in 1980 to the military dictatorship in El Sal-vador. The Caucus also participated in ILWU Local 6’s strike at KNC Glass in Union City, during which a mass picket line physically defeated police and scabs, winning a contract for a workforce composed pri-marily of Mexican-American immigrants.
In 1984, Brother Keylor made the motion, amended by Brother Leo Robinson, which led to the elev-en-day longshore boycott of South African cargo on the Nedlloyd Kimberley. In 1986, Howard again partici-pated in the Campaign Against Apartheid’s community picket line against the Nedlloyd Kemba. When Nel-son Mandela spoke at the Oakland Coliseum in 1990 after his release from prison, he credited Local 10 with re-igniting the anti-Apartheid movement in the Bay Area.
Other actions Brother Howard initiated, organized or participated in included the 1995-98 struggle of the Liverpool dockworkers; the 1999 coastwide shutdown and march of 25,000 in San Francisco to de-mand freedom for Mumia Abu-Jamal; the 2000 Charleston longshore union campaign; the 2008 May Day anti-imperialist war shutdown of all West Coast ports; the shutdown of Northern California ports in pro-test of the murder of Oscar Grant; the blockades of Israeli ships to protest the war on Gaza in 2010 and 2014; the 2011 ILWU struggle against the grain monopolies in Longview; Occupy Oakland’s march of 40,000 to the Port of Oakland, and countless other militant job actions and protests. Throughout his life, Brother Keylor always extended solidarity where it was needed. He fought racist police murders and fas-cist terror, defended abortion clinics, and fought for survivors of psychiatric abuse. Having grown up in Appalachia, he has always been an environmentalist, and helped shut down a Monsanto facility in Davis in 2012, as well as fighting pesticide use and deforestation in the East Bay.
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The Trump administration is escalating its attack on Cuba, cutting off the island’s access to oil in a deliberate attempt to induce famine and mass suffering. This is collective punishment, plain and simple.
In response, we’re releasing a public Call to Conscience, already signed by influential public figures, elected officials, artists, and organizations—including 22 members of the New York City Council, Kal Penn, Mark Ruffalo, Susan Sarandon, Alice Walker, 50501, Movement for Black Lives, The People’s Forum, IFCO Pastors for Peace, ANSWER Coalition, and many others—demanding an end to this brutal policy.
The letter is open for everyone to sign. Add your name today. Cutting off energy to an island nation is not policy—it is a tactic of starvation.
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VIDEO:
What Cubans Really Think About Trump
By Jeff Seal, May 28, 2026
Mr. Seal is a comedian and a visual journalist.
Petition to Force Amazon to Cut ICE Contracts!
https://actionnetwork.org/letters/tell-amazon-end-contracts-with-ice/?source=group-amazon-labor-union&referrer=group-amazon-labor-
Amazon Labor Union
Over 600,000 messages have already been sent directly to Amazon board members demanding one thing: Amazon must stop fueling deportations by ending its contracts with ICE and DHS.
ICE and DHS rely on the data infrastructure provided by Amazon Web Services. Their campaign against immigrants and those who stand with them depends on the logistical, financial, and political support of companies like Amazon.
But workers and communities have real power when we act collectively. That’s why we must expose Amazon’s role in the deportation machine. Help us reach 1 million messages and force Amazon to act by signing our petition with The Labor Force today:
Tell Amazon: End contracts with ICE!
On Cyber Monday 2025, Amazon workers rallied outside of Amazon’s NYC headquarters to demand that Amazon stop fueling mass deportations through Amazon Web Services’ contracts with ICE and DHS.
ICE cannot operate without corporate backing; its campaign against immigrants and those who stand with them depends on the logistical, financial, and political support of companies like Amazon. Mega-corporations may appear untouchable, but they are not. Anti-authoritarian movements have long understood that repression is sustained by a network of institutional enablers and when those enablers are disrupted, state violence weakens. Workers and communities have real power when they act collectively. That is why we must expose Amazon’s role in the deportation machine.
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) rely on Amazon Web Services (AWS) as its most commonly used cloud platform. DHS and ICE cannot wage their attack on immigrants without the critical data infrastructure that Amazon Web Services provide, allowing the agencies to collect, analyze, and store the massive amounts of data they need to do their dirty work. Without the power of AWS, ICE would not be able to track and target people at its current scale.
ICE and DHS use Amazon Web Services to collect and store massive amounts of purchased data on immigrants and their friends and family–everything from biometric data, DMV data, cellphone records, and more. And through its contracts with Palantir, DHS is able to scour regional, local, state, and federal databases and analyze and store this data on AWS. All of this information is ultimately used to target immigrants and other members of our communities.
No corporation should profit from oppression and abuse. Yet Amazon is raking in tens of millions of dollars to fuel DHS and ICE, while grossly exploiting its own workers. Can you sign our petition today, demanding that Amazon stop fueling deportations by ending its contracts with DHS and ICE, now?
https://actionnetwork.org/letters/tell-amazon-end-contracts-with-ice/?source=group-amazon-labor-union&referrer=group-amazon-labor-
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End Texas Torture of Revolutionary Elder Xinachtli
Organization Support Letter
Letter to demand the immediate medical treatment and release of Chicano political prisoner Xinachtli (Alvaro Hernandez #00255735)
To the Texas Department of Criminal Justice,
We, the undersigned organizations, write to urge immediate action to protect the life, health, and human rights of Xinachtli (legal name Alvaro Hernandez). Xinachtli is 73-year-old Chicano community organizer from Texas who has spent 23 years in solitary confinement and 30 years incarcerated as part of a 50-year sentence. His health is now in a critical and life-threatening state and requires prompt and comprehensive medical intervention.
Since his conviction in 1997, Xinachtli has spent decades in conditions that have caused significant physical and psychological harm. As an elder in worsening health, these conditions have effectively become a de facto death sentence.
Xinachtli’s current medical condition is severe. His physical, mental, and overall well-being have declined rapidly in recent weeks. He now requires both a wheelchair and a walker, has experienced multiple falls, and is suffering from rapid weight loss. He is currently housed in the McConnell Unit infirmary, where he is receiving only palliative measures and is being denied a medical diagnosis, access to his medical records, and adequate diagnostic testing or treatment.
A virtual clinical visit with licensed medical doctor Dr. Dona Kim Murphey underscores the severity of his condition. In her report of the visit, she wrote: "Given the history of recent neck/back trauma and recurrent urinary tract infections with numbness, weakness, and bowel and bladder incontinence, I am concerned about nerve root or spinal cord injury and/or abscesses that can lead to permanent sensorimotor dysfunction."
Despite his age and visible disabilities, he remains in solitary confinement under the Security Threat Group designation as a 73-year-old. During his time in the infirmary, prison staff threw away all of his belongings and “lost” his commissary card, leaving him completely without basic necessities. He is experiencing hunger, and the lack of consistent nutrition is worsening his medical condition. McConnell Unit staff have also consistently given him incorrect forms, including forms for medical records and medical visitation, creating further barriers to care and communication.
A family visit on November 29 confirmed the seriousness of his condition. Xinachtli, who was once able to walk on his own, can no longer stand without assistance. He struggled to breathe, has lost more than 30 pounds, relied heavily on his wheelchair, and was in severe pain throughout the visit.
In light of these conditions, we, the undersigned organizations, demand that TDCJ take immediate action to save Xinachtli’s life and comply with its legal and ethical obligations.
We urge the immediate implementation of the following actions:
Immediate re-instatement of his access to commissary to buy hygiene, food, and other critical items. Immediate transfer to the TDCJ hospital in Galveston for a full medical evaluation and treatment, including complete access to his medical records and full transparency regarding all procedures. Transfer to a geriatric and medical unit that is fully accessible under the Americans with Disabilities Act. Xinachtli requests placement at the Richard P LeBlanc Unit in Beaumont, Texas. Approval of Medical Recommended Intensive Supervision, the release program for individuals with serious medical conditions and disabilities, in recognition of the severity and progression of his current health issues. Failure to act will result in the continued and foreseeable deterioration of Xinachtli’s health, amounting to state-sanctioned death. We urge TDCJ to take swift and decisive action to meet these requests and to fulfill its responsibility to safeguard his life and well-being.
We stand united in calling for immediate and decisive action. Xinachtli’s life depends on it.
Signed, Xinachtli Freedom Campaign and supporting organizations
Endorsing Organizations:
Al-Awda Houston; All African People’s Revolutionary Party; Anakbayan Houston; Anti-Imperialist Solidarity; Artists for Black Lives' Equality; Black Alliance for Peace - Solidarity Network; Columbia University Students for a Democratic Society; Community Liberation Programs; Community Powered ATX; Contra Gentrificación; Diaspora Pa’lante Collective; Down South; DSA Emerge; Entre nos kc; Fighting Racism Workshops; Frontera Water Protectors; GC Harm Reductionists; JERICHO MOVEMENT; Jericho Movement Providence; Montrose Anarchist Collective; NYC Jericho Movement; OC Focus; Palestine Solidarity TX; Partisan Defense Committee; Partido Nacional de la Raza Unida; PDX Anti-Repression; Red Star Texas; Root Cause; San Francisco Solidarity Collective; Shine White Support Team; Sunrise Columbia; UC San Diego Faculty for Justice in Palestine; Viva Palestina, EPTX; Water Justice and Technology Studio; Workshops4Gaza.
Sign the endorsement letter for your organization here:
https://cryptpad.fr/form/#/2/form/view/MiR1f+iLiRBJC7gSTyfhyxJoLIDhThxRafPatxdbMWI/
IMPORTANT LINKS TO MATERIALS FOR XINACHTLI FREEDOM CAMPAIGN:
PHONE BLAST: Your community can sign up for a 15-minute-long call shift here: bit.ly/xphoneblast
FUNDRAISER: Here is the link to Jericho's fundraiser for Xinachtli: http://givebutter.com/jerichomovement
CASE HISTORY: Learn more about Xinachtli and his case through our website: https://freealvaro.net
CONTACT INFO:
Follow us on Instagram: @freexinachtlinow
Email us:
xinachtlifreedomcampaign@protonmail.com
COALITION FOLDER:
https://drive.proton.me/urls/SP3KTC1RK4#KARGiPQVYIvR
In the folder you will find: Two pictures of Xinachtli from 2024; The latest updated graphics for the phone blast; The original TRO emergency motion filing; Maria Salazar's declaration; Dr. Murphy's report from her Dec. 9 medical visit; Letter from Amnesty International declaring Xinachtli's situation a human rights violation; Free Xinachtli zine (which gives background on him and his case); and The most recent press release detailing who Xinachtli is as well as his medical situation.
Write to:
Alvaro Hernandez CID #00255735
TDCJ-W.G. McConnell Unit
PO Box 660400
Dallas, TX 75266-0400
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Self-portrait by Kevin Cooper
Funds for Kevin Cooper
Kevin was transferred out of San Quentin and is now at a healthcare facility in Stockton. He has received some long overdue healthcare. The art program is very different from the one at San Quentin but we are hopeful that Kevin can get back to painting soon.
For 41 years, an innocent man has been on death row in California.
Kevin Cooper was wrongfully convicted of the brutal 1983 murders of the Ryen family and houseguest. The case has a long history of police and prosecutorial misconduct, evidence tampering, and numerous constitutional violations including many incidences of the prosecution withholding evidence of innocence from the defense. You can learn more here .
In December 2018 Gov. Brown ordered limited DNA testing and in February 2019, Gov. Newsom ordered additional DNA testing. Meanwhile, Kevin remains on Death Row at San Quentin Prison.
The funds raised will be used to help Kevin purchase art supplies for his paintings . Additionally, being in prison is expensive, and this money would help Kevin pay for stamps, books, paper, toiletries, supplies, supplementary food, printing materials to educate the public about his case and/or video calls.
Please help ease the daily struggle of an innocent man on death row!
An immediate act of solidarity we can all do right now is to write to Kevin and assure him of our continuing support in his fight for justice. Here’s his address:
Kevin Cooper #C65304
Cell 107, Unit E1C
California Health Care Facility, Stockton (CHCF)
P.O. Box 213040
Stockton, CA 95213
www.freekevincooper.org
Call California Governor Newsom:
1-(916) 445-2841
Press 1 for English or 2 for Spanish,
press 6 to speak with a representative and
wait for someone to answer
(Monday-Friday, 9:00 A.M. to 5:00 P.M. PST—12:00 P.M. to 8:00 P.M. EST)
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Dr. Atler Still Needs Our Help!
Please sign the petition today!
https://www.change.org/p/texas-state-university-give-tom-alter-his-job-back
What you can do to support:
—Donate to help Tom Alter and his family with living and legal expenses: https://gofund.me/27c72f26d
—Sign and share this petition demanding Tom Alter be given his job back: https://www.change.org/p/texas-state-university-give-tom-alter-his-job-back
—Write to and call the President and Provost at Texas State University demanding that Tom Alter be given his job back:
President Kelly Damphousse: president@txstate.edu
President’s Office Phone: 512-245-2121
Provost Pranesh Aswath: xrk25@txstate.edu
Provost Office Phone: 512-245-2205
For more information about the reason for the firing of Dr. Tom Alter, read:
"Fired for Advocating Socialism: Professor Tom Alter Speaks Out"
Ashley Smith Interviews Dr. Tom Alter
—CounterPunch, September 24, 2025
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 Boris Kagarlitsky International Solidarity CampaignAn appeal for financial supportMay 12, 2026 Dear Friends of the Boris Kagarlitsky International Solidarity Campaign, It has been more than two years since Boris Kagarlitsky began serving the five-year sentence meted out to him by a Russian military court as a way of silencing and punishing him for his opposition to Putin’s war on Ukraine. With a multitude of longstanding friends and colleagues throughout the world, Boris is one of the best-known victims of the steadily escalating political repression in Russia. He has borne the gross injustice of his incarceration with characteristic courage, determination and defiance. But there is no denying that Putin’s gulag takes a toll on even the most valiant spirits. The Boris Kagarlitsky Solidarity Campaign has worked continuously these last two years to draw attention to Boris’s plight, and by extension to that of other prisoners unjustly condemned for protesting the ongoing war that has already cost upwards of half a million lives and vastly more maimed, according to estimates. We have sought, through a variety of activities, to bring pressure to bear on the Russian authorities to free Boris. The many people involved in the Campaign are happy to volunteer their time. However, we rely on the generosity of the Campaign’s supporters to cover the periodic expenses we incur. We recently reached out for help to defray costs associated with the participation of Boris’ daughter and tireless advocate for Russian political prisoners, Kseniia Kagarlitskya, in the international antifascist conference in Porto Alegre at the end of March. That trip was a great success. It allowed Kseniia and Mikhail Lobanov, Russian mathematician, political activist, and former associate professor at Moscow State University, to introduce the thousands of conference-goers from Brazil and across the world to the grim realities confronting Russian political dissidents. The Boris Kagarlitsky International Solidarity Committee has many plans in store for the coming months and especially the fall, including a virtual conference devoted to the global manifestations of political repression. We are appealing to you for a little financial help to carry out our projects and support the day-to-day ongoing work of the committee. We would be deeply appreciative of any assistance you can provide. Because the members of the Campaign coordinating committee are scattered across Europe, North America and beyond, it has been a little complicated to set up a campaign bank account, although we are making progress on that front. For the time being we are asking that you send any contributions you can manage directly to our de facto treasurer Suzi Weissman who is located in Los Angeles, California. The details of her account are: Bank: Wells Fargo Swift/Bic: PNBPUS6L Account holder: Susan Claudia Weissman Account number: 0657205076 International wire transfers: WFBIUS6S wise.com personal account: @susanclaudiaw We thank you in anticipation of any contribution you can make to help keep the Campaign running. Yours in solidarity, Dick Nichols Russia Confirms Jailing of Antiwar Leader Boris Kagarlitsky In a secret trial on June 5, 2024, the Russian Supreme Court’s Military Chamber confirmed a sentence of five years in a penal colony for left-wing sociologist and online journalist Boris Kagarlitsky. His crime? “Justifying terrorism” — a sham charge used to silence opponents of Putin’s war on Ukraine. The court disregarded a plea for freedom sent by thirty-seven international luminaries. Kagarlitsky, a leading Marxist thinker in Russia’s post-Soviet period, recently addressed socialists who won’t criticize Putin: “To my Western colleagues, who…call for an understanding of Putin and his regime, I would like to ask a very simple question. [Would] you want to live in a country where there is no free press or independent courts? In a country where the police have the right to break into your house without a warrant? …In a country which…broadcasts appeals on TV to destroy Paris, London, Warsaw, with a nuclear strike?” Thousands of antiwar critics have been forced to flee Russia or are behind bars, swept up in Putin’s vicious crackdown on dissidents. Opposition to the war is consistently highest among the poorest workers. Recently, RusNews journalists Roman Ivanov and Maria Ponomarenko were sentenced to seven, and six years respectively, for reporting the military’s brutal assault on Ukraine. A massive global solidarity campaign that garnered support from thousands was launched at Kagarlitsky’s arrest. Now, it has been revived. This internationalism will bolster the repressed Russian left and Ukrainian resistance to Putin’s imperialism. To sign the online petition at freeboris.info —Freedom Socialist Party, August 2024 https://socialism.com/fs-article/russia-jails-prominent-antiwar-leader-boris-kagarlitsky/#:~:text=In%20a%20secret%20trial%20on,of%20Putin's%20war%20on%20Ukraine. Petition in Support of Boris KagarlitskyWe, the undersigned, were deeply shocked to learn that on February 13 the leading Russian socialist intellectual and antiwar activist Dr. Boris Kagarlitsky (65) was sentenced to five years in prison. Dr. Kagarlitsky was arrested on the absurd charge of 'justifying terrorism' in July last year. After a global campaign reflecting his worldwide reputation as a writer and critic of capitalism and imperialism, his trial ended on December 12 with a guilty verdict and a fine of 609,000 roubles. The prosecution then appealed against the fine as 'unjust due to its excessive leniency' and claimed falsely that Dr. Kagarlitsky was unable to pay the fine and had failed to cooperate with the court. In fact, he had paid the fine in full and provided the court with everything it requested. On February 13 a military court of appeal sent him to prison for five years and banned him from running a website for two years after his release. The reversal of the original court decision is a deliberate insult to the many thousands of activists, academics, and artists around the world who respect Dr. Kagarlitsky and took part in the global campaign for his release. The section of Russian law used against Dr. Kagarlitsky effectively prohibits free expression. The decision to replace the fine with imprisonment was made under a completely trumped-up pretext. Undoubtedly, the court's action represents an attempt to silence criticism in the Russian Federation of the government's war in Ukraine, which is turning the country into a prison. The sham trial of Dr. Kagarlitsky is the latest in a wave of brutal repression against the left-wing movements in Russia. Organizations that have consistently criticized imperialism, Western and otherwise, are now under direct attack, many of them banned. Dozens of activists are already serving long terms simply because they disagree with the policies of the Russian government and have the courage to speak up. Many of them are tortured and subjected to life-threatening conditions in Russian penal colonies, deprived of basic medical care. Left-wing politicians are forced to flee Russia, facing criminal charges. International trade unions such as IndustriALL and the International Transport Federation are banned and any contact with them will result in long prison sentences. There is a clear reason for this crackdown on the Russian left. The heavy toll of the war gives rise to growing discontent among the mass of working people. The poor pay for this massacre with their lives and wellbeing, and opposition to war is consistently highest among the poorest. The left has the message and resolve to expose the connection between imperialist war and human suffering. Dr. Kagarlitsky has responded to the court's outrageous decision with calm and dignity: “We just need to live a little longer and survive this dark period for our country,” he said. Russia is nearing a period of radical change and upheaval, and freedom for Dr. Kagarlitsky and other activists is a condition for these changes to take a progressive course. We demand that Boris Kagarlitsky and all other antiwar prisoners be released immediately and unconditionally. We also call on the auth *..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........* *..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........* |
Mumia Abu-Jamal is Innocent!
FREE HIM NOW!
Write to Mumia at:
Smart Communications/PADOC
Mumia Abu-Jamal #AM-8335
SCI Mahanoy
P.O. Box 33028
St. Petersburg, FL 33733
Join the Fight for Mumia's Life
Since September, Mumia Abu-Jamal's health has been declining at a concerning rate. He has lost weight, is anemic, has high blood pressure and an extreme flair up of his psoriasis, and his hair has fallen out. In April 2021 Mumia underwent open heart surgery. Since then, he has been denied cardiac rehabilitation care including a healthy diet and exercise.
He still needs more complicated treatment from a retinal specialist for his right eye if his eyesight is to be saved:
Donate to Mumia Abu-Jamal's Emergency Legal and Medical
Defense Fund
Mumia has instructed PrisonRadio to set up this fund. Gifts donated here are designated for the Mumia Abu-Jamal Medical and Legal Defense Fund. If you are writing a check or making a donation in another way, note this in the memo line.
Send to:
Mumia Medical and Legal Fund c/o Prison Radio
P.O. Box 411074, San Francisco, CA 94103
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Resources for Resisting Federal Repression
https://www.nlg.org/federalrepressionresources/
Since June of 2020, activists have been subjected to an increasingly aggressive crackdown on protests by federal law enforcement. The federal response to the movement for Black Lives has included federal criminal charges for activists, door knocks by federal law enforcement agents, and increased use of federal troops to violently police protests.
The NLG National Office is releasing this resource page for activists who are resisting federal repression. It includes a link to our emergency hotline numbers, as well as our library of Know-Your-Rights materials, our recent federal repression webinar, and a list of some of our recommended resources for activists. We will continue to update this page.
Please visit the NLG Mass Defense Program page for general protest-related legal support hotlines run by NLG chapters.
Emergency Hotlines
If you are contacted by federal law enforcement, you should exercise all of your rights. It is always advisable to speak to an attorney before responding to federal authorities.
State and Local Hotlines
If you have been contacted by the FBI or other federal law enforcement, in one of the following areas, you may be able to get help or information from one of these local NLG hotlines for:
Portland, Oregon: (833) 680-1312
San Francisco, California: (415) 285-1041 or fbi_hotline@nlgsf.org
Seattle, Washington: (206) 658-7963
National Hotline
If you are located in an area with no hotline, you can call the following number:
National NLG Federal Defense Hotline: (212) 679-2811
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Articles
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1) Latest Indicator of Political Discontent: 43% of Voters Dissatisfied With Both Parties
Persistent frustration over the economy and foreign policy has left many Americans feeling politically homeless, and young voters are particularly frustrated.
By Ruth Igielnik, May 29, 2026
“Forty-three percent of voters are dissatisfied with both major political parties, according to a recent New York Times/Siena poll — the latest sign that the frustration that has built over the last decade will continue to roil American politics for the foreseeable future. …Overall, the Times/Siena survey found that just 26 percent of voters felt satisfied with the Democratic Party and that 33 percent felt satisfied with the Republican Party. …Eighty percent of dissatisfied voters said the economic and political system needed major changes or to be torn down entirely, and 77 percent said the economic system was generally unfair.
Forty-three percent of voters are dissatisfied with both major political parties, according to a recent New York Times/Siena poll — the latest sign that the frustration that has built over the last decade will continue to roil American politics for the foreseeable future.
The survey’s findings highlight the risks for both parties heading into the midterms and the next presidential election, with Democrats deeply discontented with their own party and an increasingly unpopular Republican president continuing to consolidate support among his loyalists.
The results come as Americans’ political disillusionment seems only to be deepening. It has been nearly a quarter-century since a majority of voters thought the country was headed in the right direction. Trust in the government and many other institutions remains near all-time lows, and there have been several recent high-profile incidents of political violence. While ideas like significant overhauls of the parties still face stiff headwinds, the level of dissatisfaction with the status quo has created better conditions for such efforts than has existed in a long time.
Overall, the Times/Siena survey found that just 26 percent of voters felt satisfied with the Democratic Party and that 33 percent felt satisfied with the Republican Party.
Alienation is felt most intensely among younger voters; nearly two-thirds of respondents under the age of 30 expressed dissatisfaction with both parties. Young voters are increasingly likely to identify as politically independent — a recent report from Gallup had the number of independents at a three-decade high — and, so far, they are more likely to remain that way as they age than they were in previous generations.
“Both parties are the same,” said Max Cook, 24, a college student in San Diego. “They both have the same level of corruption. They both take lobbying money. It’s different lobbying, but the same corruption.”
Mr. Cook said he did not vote in 2024 because he did not care for either major party candidate. He added he leaned toward Republicans as the “lesser of two evils” but worried that neither party was putting America first.
He is far from alone. Many dissatisfied voters lament that Washington is focusing too heavily on foreign affairs. Nearly two-thirds of those unhappy with both parties want politicians to “pay less attention to problems overseas and concentrate more on problems here at home,” compared with 47 percent of those who are satisfied with at least one of the political parties.
The idea of putting America first was a central component of the rise of the Tea Party and President Trump’s brand of politics. The dissatisfaction with foreign policy evident in the poll speaks to the magnitude of the risk Mr. Trump is taking with the war in Iran, even as he brushes aside complaints about the war’s effects on the economy, and his steadfast support for Israel.
The question of how much the American government should support Israel has already upended the Democratic Party, contributing to its defeat in 2024. And the poll found that it was one of the issues that most divided Republicans, too: Thirty-eight percent of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents said they wanted the party to move away from Mr. Trump on Israel.
About 80 percent of dissatisfied voters in the poll opposed economic and military aid to Israel, and references to Israel came up time and time again in follow-up conversations.
“Donald Trump said he was going to drain the swamp, and if anything, it’s gotten worse,” said Dakota Janssen, 26, a machinist from Saratoga County, N.Y., who identifies as a libertarian. “And Democrats don’t end up doing what they say they’re going to do.”
“There’s a lot of corporate greed that goes on,” he added. “A lot of foreign donations from Israel.”
With widespread concern about the nation’s economy, candidates as politically disparate as Mr. Trump and Mayor Zohran Mamdani of New York City have been able to engage dissatisfied voters through populist messaging. Eighty percent of dissatisfied voters said the economic and political system needed major changes or to be torn down entirely, and 77 percent said the economic system was generally unfair.
“I don’t care which party I’m voting for as long as they’re representing people instead of corporations,” said Tai Vetrone, 18, of Waltham, Mass.
While voters who are satisfied with at least one party were less likely to want to overhaul the system, the desire for significant change is widespread, showing the opportunity for dissatisfaction to spread further.
Mr. Vetrone, who said he leaned Democratic, likes the message of people like Mr. Mamdani, but feels that some Republicans have also captured the spirit of economic populism.
In the survey, dissatisfaction was felt most acutely among Democrats. Forty-four percent said they were unhappy with the Democratic Party, compared with about a quarter of Republicans who said the same of the Republican Party.
This dissatisfaction with the Democratic Party has resulted in a rejection of several establishment candidates in primary elections over the last year. Progressive candidates like Graham Platner in Maine and Mr. Mamdani in New York were once seen as operating on the fringes of the party, and are now being discussed, however fancifully, as the future of the Democratic Party.
But as American politics becomes more polarized, the parties risk alienating the electorate. A majority of dissatisfied voters want the Democratic Party to move toward the ideological center, while a staggering 90 percent want the Republican Party to move away from Mr. Trump.
“The parties have gone pretty wide on the spectrum of left and right, while most people are more in the middle and agree with points on both sides,” said Patrick Tehonica, 25, a construction worker in upstate New York who said he voted for Mr. Trump in 2024, but felt he had not had good choices. “I don’t really feel like I have a political home.”
Going forward, the question is whether dissatisfied voters will look for other options or opt entirely out of the system.
“I don’t vote for federal elections,” said Elizabeth Arias, of Seattle, who added that she used to vote mostly for Democrats. “I only vote for my local elections.”
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2) The Politics of the Downwardly Mobile Professional Class
The debate over whether Graham Platner is “working class” comes at a time when more and more people are at risk of falling into it.
By Noam Scheiber, May 29, 2026
Noam Scheiber covers labor and workplace issues for The Times.
Photo illustration by Chantal Jahchan
Graham Platner, the Democratic candidate in Maine’s Senate race, says he understands the plight of his state’s working class because he is working class.
Platner, who works as an oyster farmer, talks regularly about getting by on $60,000 a year while living in a modest two-story house in the town where he grew up. He has described suffering from PTSD after three tours with the Marines in Iraq and one with the Army in Afghanistan. When he’s not wearing a rugged flannel shirt on the campaign trail, he often exposes his tattooed arms.
Critics have seized on a different set of biographical details: The biggest customer of Platner’s oyster farm appears to be his mother’s high-end restaurant. He purchased his house with a $200,000 mortgage from his father, an Ivy League-educated lawyer, who recently helped pay for a trip for his son and daughter-in-law to Norway for fertility treatment. Before he served in the Middle East, Platner did a brief tour at an elite Connecticut boarding school.
At the outset of her ultimately doomed primary campaign against Platner, Maine’s Democratic governor, Janet Mills, had a habit of saying she knew almost nothing about her opponent, “other than that his dad was a prominent attorney and his mother a successful business owner,” according to The Portland Press Herald.
Conservatives have gone even further, insinuating that Platner has been cosplaying as a working stiff in order to sneak his woke agenda past voters. The historian and commentator Victor Davis Hanson highlighted past social media posts in which Platner identified as a communist and, separately, said that rural white people “actually are” racist and stupid. (Platner later apologized for many of his posts.)
Such skepticism reflects how much class has become a political fault line in America. As President Trump has built a following among voters without a college degree over the past decade, his success has heightened the political competition over who best represents the working class, and has exacerbated an already bitter debate over who belongs to it.
Often these disputes are based on the assumption that a person is either authentically working-class or not — a kind of binary logic that can disqualify Platner. “This is not a salt-of-the-earth guy coming up from a hardscrabble existence,” Tony Buxton, a former Maine Democratic Party official who backed Ms. Mills, told The New York Times. “If he’s an oysterman, I’m a florist, OK? Because I raise roses and give them to my wife.”
But as the debate over Platner’s authenticity has raged these past few weeks, it’s failed to capture a new reality: The contours of “working class” are increasingly difficult to draw neatly. Much of our understanding of class was forged in the middle of the last century, when more than a quarter of American adults worked in manufacturing, and when affluence and privilege, or their absence, were far more discernible to the naked eye.
Since then, class distinctions in America have become more muddled and porous. The steady rise of knowledge work led to an increase in the population of those who were neither workers nor bosses. In this century, the downward mobility of many in this solidly middle-class group further complicates the picture.
Among the expensively educated, there is no more famous chronicler of class than Karl Marx, who held that there were effectively two, inherently antagonistic, categories — capitalist and worker. Marxist thought essentially waved out of existence the 19th-century middle class of small-time farmers, shopkeepers and doctors. They were petite bourgeoisie — a relic of an earlier age that would fade away under industrial capitalism.
There was one problem for these predictions: the 20th century. Instead of shriveling, the middle class swelled. College professors and architects; therapists and social workers; admen, accountants and middle managers — by the early postwar era, there were millions of people in the United States alone who weren’t business owners, but who weren’t exactly rank-and-file workers, either.
Some Marxists went to elaborate lengths to force these professionals into the square peg of Marxist theory. But by the 1970s, when the educated middle class made up around a quarter of the work force, many on the left were in the mood for a reappraisal. In a pair of essays that would frame the debate for decades, the writers Barbara and John Ehrenreich argued that there was, in fact, a third class: the professional-managerial class, or P.M.C.
The P.M.C., the Ehrenreichs conceded, was something of a contradiction. Its members worked for bosses who preferred to pay them as little as possible, and to spend less money on what the P.M.C. thought was important — like craftsmanship and basic research — so that more would flow to the bottom line. This put the P.M.C. at odds with capital.
But through its work in mass marketing and research and development and government agencies and nonprofits, they observed, the P.M.C. mostly helped to keep the existing class structure in place. “Their actual attitudes often mix hostility toward the capitalist class with elitism toward the working class,” the Ehrenreichs wrote.
The authors argued that membership in the P.M.C. often passed from one generation to the next through a common culture, like shared views on education, child-rearing and gender roles. But they believed the P.M.C. ultimately had more in common with the working class than with the capitalists, and urged the two groups to forge an alliance.
Critics derided their approach. To the left, an alliance was unnecessary. Class was defined by your relationship to the means of production. If you grew up privileged but ended up working on a farm or in a factory, then you were working class.
To the right, an alliance was laughable because class was essentially inherited. The son or daughter of college-educated professionals who decided to work on a farm or in a factory was playacting, or maybe working out some liberal guilt.
In the end, the debate appeared to be settled by the Ehrenreichs’ bad timing. The 1980s and ’90s were boom years for the P.M.C. The returns on a college degree were exploding, and knowledge work was taking over the economy. More than ever before, the professional classes could think of themselves as entitled to affluence and prestige; yuppie was a status people strove for. An alliance with the working class sounded delusional, as the conservative critics had claimed.
Then the P.M.C. hit hard times.
In the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, unemployment among college grads surged to its highest rate in decades. Layoffs swept through the knowledge economy. Foreclosures piled up.
The Ehrenreichs published a new essay, saying that financial precariousness was bringing about what their cheerleading had failed to do. The P.M.C. was poised to join forces with workers.
Some portions of the P.M.C. — like laid-off journalists and adjunct professors — were collapsing into the working class, they pointed out, forced to take retail jobs to pay the bills. Others, like increasingly unfashionable middle managers, could see where the trend lines were headed. Either way, more and more members of the professional class no longer needed to be sold on the idea that they shared interests with workers.
And it was even more obvious to the youngest members of the P.M.C. — Platner’s generation. By 2020, a majority of college grads under 35 approved of socialism, according to Gallup. A report on the Occupy Wall Street movement, which rose to prominence in 2011, found that the activists were disproportionately young and college educated. A large portion had been laid off in the past few years and “were carrying substantial debt.”
In some cases, the merger between the P.M.C. and the more traditional working class was relatively smooth. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, whose mother was a domestic worker and who did stints as a bartender and waitress after graduating from Boston University, rarely saw her bona fides questioned.
The alliance even notched some concrete wins. Over the last few years, a mix of downwardly mobile P.M.C.ers and members of the more traditional working class have formed labor unions at previously nonunion companies like Starbucks, Apple and Trader Joe’s. Around the same time, graduate students and factory workers represented by the United Automobile Workers formed an alliance to elect more militant union leadership, which then led the U.A.W. into a bruising but largely successful strike against the Big Three automakers.
But often there has been friction. In some corners of the left, “P.M.C.” has become an epithet aimed at fellow progressives. “People were using the term as a term of abuse,” said Gabriel Winant, a writer and labor historian at the University of Chicago.
The sniping reached a fever pitch during the 2020 presidential primaries, when the slightly less affluent college grads backing Bernie Sanders derided the slightly more affluent college grads backing Elizabeth Warren as members of the P.M.C. Winant, who analyzed the tensions, noted that some Sanders supporters appeared anxious about whether they were sufficiently working class.
“There is a kind of class composition of the new socialist left that is a source of discomfort for its members,” he said, alluding to the prominence of college graduates in these circles. “It results in a kind of performative disavowal.”
Platner’s story is particular. He has struggled with alcohol, as well as PTSD. He is both a business owner and a worker. Still, he straddles these class tensions on the left. He was not only the son of local elites, but also the grandson of a prominent architect whose archives were stored at Yale University. But in addition to serving in the military, he tended bar while at George Washington University — from which he never graduated — and, like many in his generation, struggled after college. He has said he moved in with his mother after returning to Maine in 2016, depressed and penniless.
As a candidate, Platner doesn’t invoke sociological concepts like “P.M.C.” When asked to justify his claims to a working-class identity, he nods at the Marxism of an earlier era: In a world where oligarchs have seen their financial assets balloon into the hundreds of billions, pretty much anyone who draws a paycheck qualifies as a worker. “I know it’s an expansive definition of ‘working class,’” he told The Times. “But I think you need to have an expansive definition when we have the most expansive margin of wealth inequality in the history of the country.”
The Ehrenreichs would not go this far. They argued that differences between the P.M.C. and the working class could not be wished away. “People are falling into the working class, yet culturally not entirely falling into it,” John Ehrenreich said in an interview. He added that Platner was a good example of a person “not fitting any useful model.” (Barbara passed away in 2022.)
But the Ehrenreichs did think these differences could be bridged. And like Platner, they recognized that the deep inequalities of the post-2008 economy were widening the political appeal of populism.
“In the coming years, we expect to see the remnants of the P.M.C. increasingly making common cause with the remnants of the traditional working class for, at a minimum, representation in the political process,” they wrote after the Great Recession.
John Ehrenreich said he had become more pessimistic since then, noting the rightward drift of many in the working class.
Still, Platner appears as well positioned as any son or daughter of the P.M.C. to navigate the challenges of such a coalition. While he once advertised his sympathies for revolutionaries and freedom fighters, his politics today are less radical chic than lunch-pail Sanders-ism: support for universal health care, universal child care, affordable housing, affordable college. And a general disdain for the ruling class — “the corporate interests, the billionaires, the D.C. elites and the establishment politicians,” as he puts it.
It doesn’t hurt that many of Platner’s friends and neighbors hail from the traditional working class. Or that, from a distance, it is hard to distinguish him from them.
Then again, he is far from the only downwardly mobile member of the P.M.C. living in Maine. And the downward mobility is no less real for those who earn a Ph.D. in art history than it is for those who farm oysters.
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3) Inside the Ebola Epicenter, the Virus Rages With Little to Stop It
A remote gold mining town is under siege, as medical workers struggle to beat back a surge of deaths and infections.
By Declan Walsh, Photographs by Arlette Bashizi, May 30, 2026
Declan Walsh and Arlette Bashizi reported from inside an Ebola ward in Mongbwalu, Democratic Republic of Congo, the epicenter of the outbreak.
A relative and a medical worker caring for Christiane Bahati, an Ebola patient in Mongbwalu, shortly before she fell into a coma and died.
In the cramped, dilapidated Ebola ward, a 5-year-old boy languished on a bare mattress, a tissue stuffed into his nose to stanch the incessant bleeding. His father stood over him, eyes clouded with worry.
A few beds away lay the body of Christiane Bahati, 21, who had died seven hours earlier but had not yet been taken away. Her shoes were still tucked under the bed, her wailing relatives gathered outside the ward doors.
The body, covered by a thin sheet, was highly contagious. Yet hardly anyone in the ward was protected. Relatives came and went, carrying food and water to ailing patients because the hospital had none to give them. A few wore rubber gloves or pulled a scarf across their mouths. Most had nothing at all.
In the next ward lay the hospital’s laboratory technician, also sick. Seven other hospital workers had already died from suspected Ebola. Few of the staff members had ever been trained to fight the disease, and the most rudimentary equipment was in dangerously short supply: tests, protective suits, goggles, masks, even drinking water.
Outside, the sound of hammering broke the hushed silence. Aid workers from Doctors Without Borders were racing to erect isolation tents and disinfection stations.
Dr. Alex Bogole, a Congolese doctor in the hospital’s intensive care ward, was furious.
The virus had been spreading for months, virtually unimpeded, “and this is the best we can do?” he said, the frustration pouring through his protective gear.
This is the epicenter of the Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo, and the front line is completely overwhelmed.
The Congolese Health Ministry declared the outbreak on May 15, and it has already ballooned into the third largest on record. Two weeks later, the international response is being outpaced by the virus, and there is almost nothing to slow it down. Aid groups warn that without urgent intervention, this could be the world’s deadliest Ebola outbreak ever.
Dr. Bogole was never trained for this and was angry at everyone — at the Congolese government for failing to detect the outbreak until perhaps six weeks after it began, and at the world, which has barely mobilized help here in Mongbwalu, a remote gold mining town of about 150,000 where the outbreak is believed to have started.
“They hold meetings and meetings,” he said, struggling to contain his disdain. “What is the purpose of these meetings? People are dying, people are getting infected, people are in danger. It’s very slow.”
I arrived here with Arlette Bashizi, a photographer for The New York Times, after taking a bumpy, three-hour journey from the regional capital, Bunia, on what has become the Ebola highway, a rutted dirt road that began spreading the disease long before anyone detected it.
Giant trucks, curling through lush hills, leave blinding clouds of dust. Edgy-looking Congolese soldiers guard checkpoints that are often little more than string. Gold miners and people fleeing rebel conflict stream in and out of Mongbwalu, providing an excellent vector for the spread of the virus.
Through April and into early May, doctors in Mongbwalu found themselves fighting a mysterious disease that was taking dozens of lives in the town. It turned out to be Bundibugyo, a virus that causes Ebola. There is no approved vaccine or treatment.
As of Thursday, at least 1,077 suspected cases and 246 suspected deaths had been recorded in this outbreak, according to the Africa Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. More than 400 of those cases are in Mongbwalu, a town in the heart of gold country and surrounded by rebel-held territory here in Ituri Province, in northeastern Congo.
Ebola has swamped this hospital’s meager capacities.
Test kits for this species of the disease are very hard to come by, and there is no triage station, so arriving patients who do not have Ebola risk being infected by those who do. In fact, it is hard to know who has Ebola because test results from the regional capital, some 50 miles away, take four days or more to arrive, said the hospital director, Dr. Richard Lokudu.
By then, many patients have already died.
“I’ve been telling people that we need results immediately,” Dr. Lokudu said.
Wailing drifted into his office. Several times a day, news of the death of an Ebola patient sets off explosions of grief, he said. Relatives screamed, gesticulated and rolled around on the grass. Looking into his notebook, Dr. Lokudu produced a tally: At least 30 patients had died at the hospital over the previous 12 days. Many more had died in their homes across the town.
Beyond the hospital gates, residents were gripped by fear and confusion, he said. Mongbwalu had not been touched by the last Ebola outbreak in Ituri, which began in 2018 and did not end until 2020. Now, faced with a sudden surge in deaths, many refused to accept that the virus was real and focused their ire on the hospital, Mongbwalu General, which has 135 beds.
Some said the outbreak was a moneymaking plot concocted by Congolese doctors and foreign aid workers. Others called it a curse. Often, doctors say, the early symptoms of Ebola resemble other ailments, like malaria or typhoid, so by the time patients go to the hospital, many are already very sick and die quickly, heightening suspicion and distrust.
An angry crowd gathered outside the hospital’s front gate, where armed soldiers stood guard. “Killers!” people shouted at us when we arrived, confusing us for foreign aid workers.
Two nights earlier, assailants had burned down an isolation ward in the hospital, shortly after Doctors Without Borders put it up. In the chaos, 18 patients suspected of having Ebola fled their beds and vanished into the town, potentially spreading the virus even more.
A four-wheel drive vehicle with a smashed window was parked outside Dr. Lokudu’s office. A day earlier, angry residents had chased him through the hospital grounds, flinging rocks, he said.
“We really are in a terrible crisis,” he said.
“We’re here to save them,” he added. “They think we want to kill them.”
Other factors help explain why Mongbwalu is the center of the outbreak. Fruit bats, which scientists believe are a natural reservoir for the Bundibugyo virus, roost in huge numbers in trees on the edge of the town, introducing the risk of transmission.
Gold mining and conflict mean that a diverse stream of people is constantly flowing through the town. Miners seeking an income come here from other provinces, or even across borders, then return home. The gold business brings traders, prostitutes and smugglers.
Before the outbreak, the city was a haven in a volatile region where ethnic conflicts have raged for decades. Displaced people flock to Mongbwalu from the surrounding countryside, seeking safety. But they also go back, perhaps now with the virus.
“It’s a perfect storm,” said Dr. Esther Sterk, a tropical medicines adviser with Doctors Without Borders, who arrived in Mongbwalu this week.
Dr. Lokudu, the hospital director, believes he may have treated one of the outbreak’s first victims.
On April 6, he said he operated on a young woman who had suffered a miscarriage during a late stage of her pregnancy. As he performed a C-section, he noticed unusual splotches of blood on her organs. Six hours later, he said, the woman died. In the weeks that followed, the medics who treated her fell sick.
The anesthesiologist died on May 9, Dr. Lokudu said. The surgical assistant died a day later. Dr. Lokudu said he also fell sick around the same time, but survived. He is not sure how, though he noted that he had been vaccinated during the previous outbreak, albeit for a different species of Ebola.
“Perhaps that saved me,” he said.
Now, his focus was on the crowd at the gate. They were followers of Sylvestre Atama, a charismatic Catholic preacher who had died the day before, only hours after tests confirmed he had Ebola. His anguished supporters converged on the hospital, demanding his body to hold his funeral. Dr. Lokudu refused.
Traditional burial practices involve touching the body. Dr. Lokudu feared an unmanaged funeral could turn into a superspreader event, passing the disease to even more people. The crowd attacked Dr. Lokudu, hitting his car with stones. Although soldiers were now positioned at the gate, the threats continued.
“They absolutely want the body,” he said.
That night, as we settled into our hotel, gunshots rang out. A crowd of more than 100 men, some armed with machetes and sticks, attacked the hospital in an effort to spring the preacher’s body. The police and soldiers fired warning shots to repel them, witnesses said.
The battle went on for five hours, the police chief, Djuma Yaweli, told me. In the chaos, yet more Ebola patients left their beds and ran for safety, potentially taking the virus home to their loved ones.
The next morning, after careful negotiations, a line of soldiers accompanied Mr. Atama’s body as it wound through the town for a safe burial beside the Catholic church.
Experts at the W.H.O. say that a vaccine against this species of Ebola could take six or nine months to develop. Until then, “we must make do with what we have,” Dr. Lokudu said. “Otherwise, who will do it?”
The doors of the Ebola ward swung open. A Red Cross worker emerged, wearing the same kind of a protective suit we had put on to enter the hospital wards. Spraying disinfectant in his path, he was followed by volunteers carrying a sealed white bag.
It contained the remains of Ms. Bahati, the 21-year-old whose body had lain there for many hours after she had died.
Mourners grieved as the body bag was placed in a casket, wailing and beating themselves. “Show us her body!” one cried out.
Her husband, Héritier Alezo, watched from a distance. He still had not told their boys, aged 2 and 3, that their mother was gone. “How would they understand?” he said.
He impatiently rejected the conspiracy theories that were circulating in the streets to explain the scourge. He had the ultimate, most painful proof.
“In my opinion,” he said firmly, “Ebola exists.”
The door to the Ebola ward closed again. But there were also glimmers of hope. The ailing 5-year-old boy, Emmanuel Cyrille, fought on.
Only days earlier, he had been at school, until the teachers sent him home when he became feverish. Soon, he began to bleed.
By Friday afternoon, his father sent a message to say that Emmanuel was sitting up, asking for toys. The bleeding had stopped.
Emmanuel hoped to go home soon, he said.
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4) Steyer Campaigns on Affordability. Does His Own Mansion Portfolio Matter?
Tom Steyer wants to address California’s housing crisis if he becomes governor. He is also a billionaire with extensive personal real estate holdings.
By Heather Knight and Laurel Rosenhall, May 30, 2026
Heather Knight reported from San Francisco and Berkeley, Calif. Laurel Rosenhall reported from Sacramento.
Tom Steyer has campaigned as a progressive Democrat who wants to make housing affordable in the state. His own wealth has been a concern for some voters. Rachel Bujalski for The New York Times
As Tom Steyer amassed billions of dollars by leading a wildly successful San Francisco hedge fund, he did what many wealthy Californians do. He scooped up luxury homes.
His collection looks as if it were ripped from the pages of a glossy real estate magazine. He owns side-by-side, cliff-top mansions in San Francisco with sweeping views of the Golden Gate Bridge, and a 1909 classical home two miles away in a gated community dotted with palm trees and security guards’ vehicles.
Mr. Steyer also owns a $2 million condo in a downtown San Francisco high-rise that features views of the City Hall dome. Another home is just steps from the Pacific Ocean in Stinson Beach, north of the city in Marin County.
About an hour’s drive south of San Francisco, in a coastal farming town called Pescadero, he purchased 11 parcels of land, including six single-family homes and two mobile homes, to create an 1,800-acre, grass-fed cattle ranch, which he named TomKat after himself and his wife, Kat Taylor.
His properties aren’t confined to the Golden State. He owns a home on the Nevada shore of Lake Tahoe and an apartment on New York City’s Fifth Avenue, plus a separate unit there that is referred to on the deed as a “maid’s room.” Records show that Mr. Steyer and his entities appear to own more than a dozen homes.
This might be customary for billionaires in California, where San Francisco has an exclusive Billionaires Row neighborhood, and where Palo Alto has compounds owned by Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Page and Laurene Powell Jobs.
But it highlights a central tension of Mr. Steyer’s campaign that liberal voters have been wrestling with for months: Can they separate his personal wealth from his political policies?
Mr. Steyer, a Democrat, enters Tuesday’s primary as one of three leading candidates for governor. He would need to finish in the top two to advance to the general election.
On the campaign stump, he has cut a progressive path, telling voters that he will make California more affordable, reduce inequality and tax billionaires. His message is aimed at working-class Democrats who fear that they and subsequent generations are being priced out of California.
Yet it comes from a former hedge fund manager who in his personal life has combined parcels and owned multiple residences for part-time use. Some on the left, including prominent unions, have ignored his personal wealth. Others have struggled with it.
“If you are a housing advocate, as you say you are, why are you sitting on all these properties?” said Greer Stone, a Palo Alto city councilman who has pushed legislation to restrict billionaire compounds in his city. “I get frustrated by politicians who say one thing and then live very different lifestyles.”
Mr. Stone, a high school teacher who lives with his wife in an apartment, believes that when wealthy people buy multiple properties, it shrinks the housing stock and drives up prices for everybody else. He said that he still had not cast his ballot and did not particularly like any of the candidates for governor, feeling that Mr. Steyer’s real estate portfolio undercut his housing platform.
Mr. Steyer has spent $200 million of his own money on his campaign, a record sum that enabled him to quickly raise his profile in the nation’s most populous state, where it is difficult to reach voters in a fractured media landscape.
He has argued that his personal wealth frees him from being beholden to corporate interests. He has attacked the Democratic front-runner, Xavier Becerra, for relying on donations from Chevron and other companies.
Mr. Steyer has also said that his career managing a hedge fund has prepared him to help solve California’s housing problems. He argues that the state’s system for financing housing is too bureaucratic, and that he will transform it with the mind-set of “a smart investor.”
Mr. Steyer was not made available for an interview on his personal real estate holdings despite several requests this month.
On Wednesday, he went walking in Berkeley as part of his bus tour called “A California You Can Afford.” Accompanied by the city’s mayor, Mr. Steyer passed by small businesses, including a vegan doughnut shop and a co-working space for queer people. He posed for sidewalk selfies. And he fist-bumped a woman who had a “Defund Oligarchs” pin on her shirt.
Afterward, he allotted five minutes for reporters and took just one question about how he reconciles his housing platform with his personal property collection.
“I’m trying to make sure that all those properties are used,” he said. “Our job in all this stuff, including in units and houses, is to try to make sure that more people can live in the state of California, not to sit on property, but to make sure that we’re adding units so people can live here more easily.”
A New York Times reporter then asked about who lives in his side-by-side mansions in San Francisco. At that point, Lauren Hitt, a campaign spokeswoman, pushed her way between the reporter and Mr. Steyer and said the candidate was done taking questions.
The campaign later clarified the picture. Mr. Steyer and Ms. Taylor live in the spread, which is built across three lots and together has 20 rooms, in the Sea Cliff neighborhood. The Steyers have asked the city for permission to demolish one of the mansions to build a luxury home that would have 7,500 square feet of space over three levels. They would also excavate 1,400 cubic yards of earth to construct a large basement and build a cottage out back.
Dan Sider, chief of staff for the San Francisco Planning Department, said the city was waiting for Mr. Steyer to revise his plans before it issued permits for the work to begin.
The expanse overlooks China Beach, a cove used by Chinese fishermen during the Gold Rush, on the city’s northern waterfront. Sea Cliff has long been home to the rich and famous, including, at various points, the singer Linda Ronstadt, the comedian Robin Williams and Marc Benioff, the Salesforce chief executive.
Mr. Steyer uses the Stinson Beach home, worth $6 million, for his family’s personal use, according to his campaign. The same is true of his six-bedroom home in Lake Tahoe, worth $17 million, in the gated Glenbrook community that includes a golf course and tennis club. President Joseph R. Biden Jr. stayed in that lake home in 2023 on a weeklong vacation.
The campaign said that Mr. Steyer’s other properties were occupied, including rehabilitated homes that house as many as 25 people, mostly employees and their families, at TomKat Ranch. Ms. Taylor’s foundation runs the ranch and promotes environmentally sound land management techniques there.
The campaign said that a family friend was renting Mr. Steyer’s apartment in the Four Seasons Private Residences in downtown San Francisco, though his most recent statement of economic interest filed in March shows less than $500 in income from that unit.
In 2023, Mr. Steyer spent $14.3 million to purchase a seven-bedroom home in the Presidio Terrace neighborhood of San Francisco, which is gated and notes on signs out front that the street is private. He bought the home for one of his children, his campaign said, and they have a loan arrangement.
He bought the New York City apartment on Central Park — for $6.5 million in 2014 — for his brother, the campaign said. His brother purchased the $175,000 maid’s room in March and uses it as an office, according to the campaign.
Mr. Steyer has been endorsed by pro-housing groups, including YIMBY Action and the Abundance Network. They support building far more housing for people of all income levels by loosening rules that are used to restrict housing.
The groups have rallied behind Mr. Steyer for his pledge to build one million homes in California in four years and to make housing construction cheaper and faster by reducing permit hurdles and reforming zoning rules.
Laura Foote, executive director of YIMBY Action, said in an interview that wealthy people owning multiple homes was just a small contributor to the state’s housing crisis — and that it was better that they own assets that are out in the open and taxable instead of hiding their wealth. She said restrictive local development rules were far more problematic.
“If we wanted to seize everyone’s second home and redistribute those homes, that would not move the needle,” she said. “You compare that to 40 years of Cupertino actively conspiring to block housing while adding thousands of jobs at Apple headquarters.”
Mr. Steyer has said he knows how to build a million new homes because he and Ms. Taylor co-founded Beneficial State Bank, which has financed 17,000 affordable housing units in two decades.
Mr. Steyer has also said he will make it harder for investment firms to buy houses. Yet Mr. Steyer himself is an investor in corporate-owned housing.
He has holdings in several real estate companies, as well as the Brookfield Asset Management company, which owns 19,000 single-family rental homes, according to the 95-page economic disclosure form he filed as a candidate.
Ms. Hitt said the Brookfield stock was in an account managed by an adviser and without input from Mr. Steyer.
Mr. Steyer’s campaign pointed out that Mr. Becerra, his chief Democratic rival in the race, also owned multiple properties. Mr. Becerra rents out a townhouse and a condominium in Sacramento and two houses in Los Angeles County. Mr. Becerra and his wife, Carolina Reyes, reported collecting $187,460 in rent for the four properties on their 2024 tax returns.
The real estate lobby is spending heavily to support Mr. Becerra and oppose Mr. Steyer in the governor’s race.
A major reason is the candidates’ diverging stance on policies that affect homeownership and housing, the California Association of Realtors said in a statement. The group wants to preserve the state’s landmark property tax law, as well as a policy that limits the types of properties that can be subject to rent control, and it says Mr. Becerra holds similar views.
Mr. Steyer has campaigned on raising commercial property taxes, capping rent increases and preserving local rent control ordinances. His platform, the Realtors group said, “undermines housing affordability and discourages new construction.”
At China Beach on Wednesday, just below Mr. Steyer’s mansions, Dennis Cabral, 73, paused his daily bike ride to discuss his indecision over the governor’s race.
“Steyer seems like an out-of-the-box kind of guy,” Mr. Cabral said, “but billionaires don’t exactly talk my language.”
Mr. Cabral said he taught preschool and kindergarten for 40 years before retiring. He can only stay in San Francisco, he said, because he has lived in the same rent-controlled apartment for many years.
Danny Hakim contributed reporting. Georgia Gee contributed research.
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5) Across the Middle East, Muslims Mark Eid Amid War and Crisis
From Iran to Gaza, Eid al-Adha celebrations were muted as war dragged on and shortages of food and fuel roiled the region.
By Abdi Latif Dahir and Bilal Shbair, May 30, 2026
Abdi Latif Dahir reported from Baysarieh and Beirut, Lebanon, and Bilal Shbair from Gaza.
Palestinians prayed near the ruins of Al-Huda Mosque in Khan Younis, in southern Gaza, on Wednesday, the first day of Eid al-Adha. Israel bombed the mosque early in the war in Gaza. Saher Alghorra for The New York Times
For many Muslims in the Middle East, another Eid arrived this week with little joy, under the shadow of war.
Eid al-Adha, which marks the sacred Hajj pilgrimage to Mecca, began on Wednesday. In a region battered by conflict, the festive holiday — known to some as the “Big Eid,” compared with Eid al-Fitr, which celebrates the end of Ramadan — has been defined less by family celebrations than by mourning, displacement and uncertainty.
Many people have been anxiously following the news, watching for signs of a cease-fire agreement that could end the fighting between Iran and the United States. And reminders of the conflict, or of the war in Gaza that preceded it, seem to be everywhere.
Hundreds of people in their finest clothes gathered Wednesday for morning Eid prayers at Mohammad Al-Amin Mosque in Beirut, the Lebanese capital scarred by Israeli bombardment. Afterward, many moved into nearby Martyrs’ Square, where families and friends embraced, posed for photographs and tried, however briefly, to create a sense of festivity.
“We have to be happy and celebrate, even if it’s only for a short time,” said Ahmed Mohamed, 32, an immigrant from Sudan who works at a cafe.
Many in the crowd, like Mr. Mohamed, were from other countries engulfed by war. Some said they were from southern Lebanon, where they had worked on farms before fleeing the fighting between Israel and Hezbollah, which erupted in March. Israel intensified its attacks across Lebanon this week, and on Thursday, it said it had carried out a strike on the outskirts of Beirut.
Despite the prevailing fear, Mr. Mohamed said, the holiday still has meaning.
“We fled war, and now we are living through another war,” he said, referring to the yearslong civil war in Sudan. “But we have to feel some happiness on this special day.”
In Iran, Eid began just after the government started restoring access to the internet, which it blocked again this year after the United States and Israel attacked the country in late February, starting the war.
“It feels like they are giving the internet back to us, which is our right, as an Eid gift,” Lili, who works in Tehran’s art scene, said of the government. She and other Iranians asked not to be identified by their full names, fearing retribution for speaking to the news media.
Several Iranians said they were indifferent to the holiday, seeing it merely as a day off work or school. One resident of the city of Isfahan said that while people had observed Eid in mosques, celebrations in the streets were limited.
Others took part in state-sanctioned gatherings. At one on Tuesday evening in Tehran, in Tajrish Square, organizers handed out sandwiches and tea, while booth operators offered games and toys for children, said Mahmoud, a resident who attended.
In Yemen, Eid was accompanied by prolonged power cuts, caused by severe fuel and gas shortages. Such outages have become bleakly familiar since the start of Yemen’s civil war more than a decade ago.
This year, the economic effects of the Iran war have made things even worse. Traders and other people said that fuel, transportation and things traditionally bought for Eid, like livestock and new clothes, had gotten more expensive.
In the coastal city of Mukalla on Wednesday morning, many people had endured a sleepless night without power in scorching temperatures. As worshipers were trickling into mosques, the power went out again.
The shortages have led to long lines outside gas stations. Haddad Musead, who lives in the city of Tarim, shared a video with a reporter that showed him on a motorbike in his new Eid clothes, waiting for fuel. He said he spent half an hour in line before reaching the pump.
It was “a scene that marred the spirit of Eid,” Mr. Musead said.
In the West Bank, many Palestinian families have very little and cannot afford to spend on Eid. Most government employees have not received full salaries in years, and many other West Bank residents have been unable to work in Israel since the Hamas attacks of Oct. 7, 2023, which led to the war in Gaza.
“We are barely making by with our salaries,” said Sanaa Khateeb, 39. She said she could not afford to buy her youngest daughter a new dress for Eid, so she altered one that she already had.
In Khan Younis, in southern Gaza, displaced Palestinians gathered on Wednesday to pray beside one of the many scars of war that surround them: the rubble of Al-Huda Mosque, which Israel bombed early in the war.
In the city of Deir al-Balah, in what shoppers bitterly called “the most expensive market in Gaza,” chickens, rabbits and underfed goats were lined up in cramped cages and makeshift pens. It was a painful imitation of a bustling prewar Eid market, which would have been overflowing with fattened livestock for the traditional sacrifice. Just a handful of sheep owners stood beside their animals, amid the clamor of vendors and the smell of dust and diesel.
Families wandering through the market said they were there to remember, not to buy.
For the third straight Eid al-Adha, the rituals that define the holiday — choosing a sheep, gathering around a slaughter, cooking and sharing meat with relatives and neighbors — are impossible for most Gazans.
In a small jewelry shop, Ahmed Shabrawi, 25, sat with his father, polishing gold bracelets and speaking quietly about a festival he said he no longer recognized.
“This was always the biggest holiday for us,” he said. “Families used to take their children to the farms to see the sheep. There was joy, noise, celebration everywhere. Now, a single sheep in Gaza can cost nearly $6,000. Even people who still have money cannot justify it.”
Instead, Mr. Shabrawi said, he sent nearly $600 to relatives in Cairo to buy two sheep there — one on behalf of his parents, the other on behalf of his own family — and arrange for them to be slaughtered. The meat was to be distributed to displaced Palestinians.
“I wish I could’ve done it here,” he said. “I wish the meat could reach exhausted families living in tents in Gaza instead.”
In a crowded market stall stacked with frozen goods, Mohammed Salman, 29, was trying to calm his 6-month-old twins, Abdallah and Misk. Before the war, he said, Eid mornings meant the smell of fresh, grilled meat, large family breakfasts and children running between relatives’ homes.
This year, he was buying imported frozen meat, to retain some connection to those memories.
“It feels absurd that frozen meat has become our substitute for Eid,” he said. “We are trying to convince ourselves life is still normal, somehow.”
Reporting was contributed by Sanam Mahoozi, Shirin Hakim, Rozhin Razavi, Saeed Al-Batati and Fatima AbdulKarim.
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6) The U.S. Boat Strike Campaign Has Now Killed Over 200 People
Residents of coastal communities in Colombia and Ecuador said the airstrike campaign was making many reconsider anything involving the ocean as a livelihood.
By Max Bearak and José María León Cabrera, Reporting from Colombia and Ecuador, May 31, 2026
The remains of a burned boat near Puerto López, Guajira, Colombia in December. Federico Rios for The New York Times
More than 200 people have now been killed in a bombing campaign by the U.S. military against people it has accused of smuggling drugs in the waters off South America, after a string of deadly attacks over the last week.
The military said on Saturday that three men had been killed in the eastern Pacific during a strike ordered by Gen. Francis L. Donovan, the head of the Southern Command, against a boat that was “engaged in narco-trafficking operations.” Their deaths bring the total killed to at least 202, in more than 60 strikes.
The strikes have been shrouded in secrecy. Few bodies of those killed have been recovered, and scant physical evidence exists of debris or the drugs the Trump administration claims the boats were transporting.
A wide range of legal experts say the strikes are illegal because the military is prohibited from deliberately targeting civilians, even if they are believed to have committed a crime, unless they pose an immediate threat. Experts also say there is no evidence that the strikes have had any impact on the amount of cocaine reaching the United States from South America.
The death toll, however, only accounts for one dimension of the consequences of the lethal campaign.
Coastal communities in Colombia and Ecuador, where most of the boats are thought to have begun their journeys, are counting the losses not just in relatives who never returned, but in how the attacks have upended the lives of those who make their living from the ocean and now fear it.
Residents described entire communities abandoning fishing because the small “lanchas,” or speedboats, used by traffickers and fishers are often indistinguishable.
“Fishermen endure the forces of nature: wind, rain and sun. But they also face pirates, and on top of that, now there is this bombing thing,” said one Ecuadorean woman from a fishing family in San Mateo, a seaside town of 5,000. Like many in these coastal Ecuadorean villages, she asked not to have her name published for fear of retribution from the government, which has actively supported the bombing campaign. The Ecuadorean government did not respond to requests for comment.
“We live in fear of these strikes,” she said, “and because of that, many people have stopped going out to fish.”
In Ecuador and Colombia, residents described being caught between forces beyond their control: an emboldened Trump administration that has dismissed accusations of wrongdoing while offering little proof to back up its claims, and drug traffickers who often prey on fishermen, commandeering their boats to use for their own purposes.
The lines between fishermen and traffickers can blur, too, some said. In low seasons, or simply as a way to make more than fishing’s meager income provides, some fishermen take occasional trafficking jobs to get by.
Unlike Ecuador’s right-leaning government, Colombia’s leftist president, Gustavo Petro, has sharply criticized the strikes, calling them “murder” and claiming, in the case of one strike last October, that a Colombian fisherman had been killed. After that strike, Mr. Petro suspended intelligence sharing with the U.S. military for the purposes of the strikes.
On Colombia’s Guajira peninsula, where The New York Times found the first physical evidence of one of the strikes last December, nearly all the men had left the towns of Puerto López and Siapana, each just a few miles from where a bombed boat and two bodies of its crew members washed ashore.
Aristótele Palmar García, a police inspector in Siapana, said the area had become a ghost town.
“Youth who made their living fishing, you know, selling, buying, they’ve gone to the city now, driving motorcycle taxis, that kind of thing,” Mr. García said. “I ask them how it’s going for them and they tell me, ‘To be honest, I’m about to throw in the towel.’”
Colombia’s state-run forensic agency said in an emailed statement that they still had the bodies of the two people that washed ashore in December in their custody, but that they had not been able to “establish the identities.”
The strikes reached their peak last December, with 14 that month. But the pace has recently begun increasing again, and the period between April 11 and May 8 saw a strike nearly every three days.
During that time period, the military increased the number of secret fixed-wing attack aircraft and armed MQ-9 Reaper drones operating from bases in El Salvador and Puerto Rico, allowing the military to accelerate the strikes.
Before the increase in aircraft, a suspected drug boat might have had a 50 percent chance of evading the military, a U.S. military official told The Times in an interview. Now that is down to about 25 percent, the official said.
Neither the military nor the administration has disclosed any information about the strikes except for social media posts that contain grainy videos of the strikes themselves.
In November, The Times examined video of more than 40 strikes and consulted military aviators and weapons experts, and found that the U.S. military used both drones and manned aircraft, contrasting with traditional stop-and-board operations by the U.S. Coast Guard.
Fishermen in Ecuador said they had feared harassment in the past by the U.S. military, as well as from their own, patrolling nearby waters, but that the possibility of being bombed by an unmanned drone was particularly unnerving.
“We don’t want anyone to fish anymore,” said Johnny Valencia, 59, a lifelong fisherman from Jaramijó, a few miles north of San Mateo. Now he picks up plastic bottles that wash up on the beach and sells them to recyclers, earning even less than he did fishing.
“We eat once a day, twice a day,” he said, “or sometimes go to bed without even having a cup of coffee.”
Simón Posadaand Eric Schmitt contributed reporting.
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7) After Voting Decision, a Month of Political Earthquakes Across the South
As Republicans rush to redraw the region’s congressional maps, some voters are confused and concerned, and civil rights activists are gearing up for the fight of a generation.
By Emily Cochrane and Rick Rojas, May 31, 2026
Emily Cochrane and Rick Rojas, who cover the South, reported this article from Montgomery and Selma, Ala.; Baton Rouge, La.; Nashville; and Atlanta.
Earlier this month, people from all over the United States came to Selma, Ala., to march for voters’ rights, beginning at Tabernacle Baptist Church and ending on the far side of the Edmund Pettus Bridge. Wes Frazer for The New York Times
It is a confusing moment to be a voter in the South.
Republican leaders across the region have redrawn congressional maps at breakneck speed in the month since the Supreme Court weakened the Voting Rights Act, leading primaries to be postponed, a veteran House member to abandon his re-election bid and new candidates to charge into races ahead of the November midterms.
The outcome could be the most sweeping reconfiguration of the region’s political landscape in at least a generation, pushing what was already a largely red swath of the country more firmly into the Republican column and jeopardizing the political careers of a number of Black Democrats.
In the meantime, the rush to redistrict is stoking a fierce debate over what representation should look like in the South — as well as more pragmatic questions about district boundaries that are shifting, or may soon shift, under voters’ feet.
“They literally have created chaos,” said Mayor Chaz Molder of Columbia, Tenn., a Democrat whose home was drawn out of the Tennessee district where he had spent months running for Congress when Republican state lawmakers adopted a new map in early May. “It’s the voter that loses in this kind of partisan gamesmanship.”
Recent redistricting efforts have not been limited to the South, nor have Republicans been behind all of them. But President Trump pushed the party to adopt the strategy even before the Supreme Court ruling, recognizing the uphill battle that Republicans faced to maintain their slim House majority in the midterms.
Texas began the current redistricting wars last summer at the behest of Mr. Trump, drawing a new map in an effort to flip five House seats to Republicans. Democrats in California responded in kind, and several other states followed last fall. But it was the Supreme Court ruling late last month that set off the frenzy in the South, where the Voting Rights Act had long protected a handful of districts with a majority of Black voters who have largely elected Black Democrats.
About 60 percent of Black Americans live in the South, a share that has grown in recent years in a reversal of the exodus from the region during the Great Migration, according to an analysis by the Brennan Center for Justice, a public policy institute.
At least a third of the population is Black in Georgia, Louisiana and Mississippi, as are about one in four voters in Alabama. But while Republicans fully control almost every Southern state, the region remains racially polarized, as most of the districts with a majority of Black voters lean Democratic and have elected Black representatives.
They include James E. Clyburn of South Carolina and Bennie Thompson of Mississippi, who have both served more than three decades in Congress. Georgia has four Black members of the House. As recently as 2024, rulings tied to the Voting Rights Act paved the way for the creation of new districts in Alabama and Louisiana that Black Democrats won.
But in its ruling last month, the Supreme Court rejected Louisiana’s congressional map as unconstitutional. The court’s conservative supermajority agreed with plaintiffs in a lawsuit that race had illegally been used as a primary factor in drawing the second majority-Black district, which Representative Cleo Fields won in 2024, flipping it from Republican to Democrat.
The ruling significantly raised the bar for proving discrimination against minority voters under the Voting Rights Act.
Within hours, it set off a redistricting frenzy across the South, with Tennessee, Louisiana and Alabama quickly moving to eliminate districts with large concentrations of Black voters. The Florida Legislature approved a map on the day of the ruling that eliminated four Democratic-held districts, diluting the voting power of Black and Hispanic voters in several regions.
In states like Mississippi, where primaries had already been held, Georgia, where early voting had started, and South Carolina, where lawmakers failed to reach agreement on a new map before early voting began last week, top officials vowed that the coming midterm elections would be the last to use their current maps.
The ruling also surfaced a fraught debate about just how far the South has been able to move beyond the racism of the region’s past, where segregation-era poll taxes, literacy tests and other disenfranchisement tactics were used to deny basic rights to Black voters. “Vast social change has occurred throughout the country and particularly in the South,” Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. wrote for the majority in the ruling.
In interviews around the region, though, many Black voters said the ruling worried them deeply.
“They’re trying to bring us back,” said Janet Tobias, 70, sitting outside a Louisiana State Capitol hearing room where lawmakers were debating new district lines one recent evening. Noting attempts by Mr. Trump and other conservative lawmakers to roll back diversity efforts and the teaching of Black history, she said she feared that “we are not going to have anyone behind those doors speaking up on our behalf.”
To hear some Black lawmakers tell it, some of their most important duties are delivering funds to communities that have been chronically overlooked and underserved, and guaranteeing that the perspective of a Black Southerner is present when consequential decisions are being made in Washington.
“Sometimes people don’t bother to read my résumé or look at my record — they just see a picture and see my skin color, ” Mr. Clyburn, once the No. 3 Democrat who is still viewed as a power broker, said in an interview. He added, “Let the work I do speak for me.”
For some voters and officials, however, the ruling was a validation that race should never have been a factor in determining representation.
“People are talking about race and all this other stuff — I don’t think it was ever built that way,” said Ben Lilley, chairman of the Republican Executive Committee in Iberia Parish, La. “Everyone has an opportunity here, you know? So run it. Run it to win it.”
In some states, as lawmakers debated new maps, absentee ballots had already been distributed and early voting was set to begin. At least one Louisiana congressional office was flooded with calls asking if voting had been canceled altogether. Campaigns have been canceled, started or relaunched under new district lines that did not exist a month ago.
In Alabama, a week after primary elections were held for most races, residents in four congressional districts are waiting for the Supreme Court to weigh in on which map can be used in an August special election: the current one, with two districts held by Black Democrats, or a previous one the legislature wants to revert to, with just one district containing a large number of Black voters.
The Republicans redrawing the maps have swatted away accusations of racism, insisting they were focused on delivering their party even more of a political advantage. The Supreme Court has repeatedly upheld partisan gerrymandering in recent years.
In Tennessee, where the majority-Black city of Memphis was split this month among three new districts that lean Republican, several Republicans downplayed concerns about how the city’s Black — and Democratic — voters would be represented moving forward.
“Just because that you may not have voted for that person doesn’t mean you’re not represented,” said Cameron Sexton, the Tennessee House speaker, in an interview.
Dana Brown, a voter in Irmo, S.C., saw it differently; she opposed South Carolina lawmakers’ redistricting push, saying it would marginalize the voices of racial minorities.
“They’re not wanting to hear Black voters’ voices, and that’s something that we fought for forever,” Ms. Brown, 42, said after voting in the state’s Democratic primary on Wednesday. “You should be able to hear everybody’s side and come to a common ground.”
Some voters said they were, more than anything, put off by the loss of political competition in their states.
Edward Callaway, a Republican in Columbus, Ga., said he agreed with excluding race as a factor in determining district lines. But he also called gerrymandering “one of the biggest threats to democracy we have.”
“We’re a long way from representing communities, which is what we really ought to be about,” Mr. Callaway, 71, said.
Others, including Jeff Holcomb, a Republican in Chapin, S.C., said they were annoyed at lawmakers for trying to pass new maps so close to primary elections.
“I don’t want it to happen this late in the cycle,” Mr. Holcomb, a 66-year-old military veteran, said. “People have already voted.”
With little political power at the state level in the South and on the brink of losing more seats in Congress, Black elected officials, faith leaders and activists are still grappling with how to move forward.
Earlier this month, a number of them organized a pilgrimage to Selma and Montgomery, Ala. — cities regarded as sacred for their civil rights history — to rally for a new fight over representation.
“This is about how we build power in the South and together to change this country,” State Representative Justin J. Pearson, who faces an uphill battle as he runs for Tennessee’s redrawn Ninth Congressional District, said at the Montgomery gathering.
For others, it was a matter of continuing to vote and urging others to do the same — and there were early signs of an energized electorate in several southern states. In South Carolina, the first day of early voting more than doubled the previous record for highest turnout in a single day.
In New Orleans, a recent town hall hosted by Representative Troy Carter, Democrat of New Orleans, was standing room only. And elsewhere, several voters said the ruling had pushed them to become more involved politically.
“You wonder if there’s anything that can be done at this point,” said Nettie Ramsey, 58, after casting her primary vote during her lunch break in Montgomery on Tuesday. “But actually, I don’t ever want to see us stop fighting for our rights.”
“We’ve come a long way,” she added. “We have a ways to go.”
Brendan Farrington contributed reporting from Plains, Ga., Jim Lynn from Columbus, Ga., Bryant K. Oden from Montgomery, Ala., and Tiffany Tan from Irmo and Lexington, S.C. Jeff Adelson, Audra D. S. Burch and Nick Corasaniti also contributed reporting.
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8) The Problem With Martin Luther King Jr.’s Origin Story
By Lerone Martin and Jonathan Eig, May 31, 2026
Dr. Martin and Mr. Eig are biographers of Martin Luther King Jr.
Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images
For years, we’ve been trying, with some frustration, to identify the white boy who introduced Martin Luther King Jr. to racism.
Dr. King told the story himself, first in a college essay, and then again in interviews, until it formed the core of his origin story. It went like this: He was 3 years old and still known as Mike, the name on his birth certificate, when he made friends with a white boy whose family owned a store across the street from the King family’s home in Atlanta. They played together almost every day. In 1935, when they turned 6 and entered school — “separate schools of course,” Dr. King later wrote — the parents of the white boy told their son he was no longer permitted to play with Mike.
Shocked, Mike asked his parents to explain. They sat at the family’s dinner table where “for the first time I was made aware of the existence of a race problem,” he would later write. “I had never been conscious of it before.”
In Dr. King’s account, Alberta Williams King and Martin Luther King Sr. tried to explain to their son the tragedy of American racism. They told him that many people used skin color to define and classify humans, to denigrate them, humiliate them, isolate them, deny them justice and profit from their punishment and penury.
Alberta Williams King reassured her son, “You’re as good as anyone.” Dr. King would say years later his mother’s response to his youthful pain gave him a sense of “somebody-ness.”
The question we are now forced to confront is what happens if we can’t confirm this story. As part of our work as King scholars, we’ve been hunting through archives and public records for seven years in search of Dr. King’s young white friend, and while we have one plausible possibility, we cannot be sure. We experienced disappointment as we hit one dead end after another. We began to wonder if Dr. King’s story could be trusted. We know from history and from human nature that origin stories are often shaped to serve other ends than a literal recounting of events.
Our conclusion is that a core piece of Dr. King’s biography, one that in his own telling propelled him to become his future self, can’t yet be verified. This raises a whole host of problems. What would it mean if he’d confused the details? What would it mean if he’d fabricated the story entirely?
As scholars and biographers of Dr. King, we admit we are prone to obsess about the details of his life. Want to know how many points he had in the Morehouse intramural basketball championship game? “Will Shoot,” the nickname his friends later gave him for his shoot-first-pass-never mentality, scored eight of his team’s 47 points. Want to know what brand of cologne he wore? It was Aramis.
Our search for the identity of the white boy has been driven by more than a fixation over detail. Dr. King told the story to make a larger point about the damage that racism does to all of us. Our history of legal and self-imposed separation continues to sit at the core of some of our nation’s most serious spiritual and political crises. With that in mind, we thought that learning what happened to Mike King’s young friend might provide insight into racism’s long-lasting costs.
There are some things we do know. Dr. King’s older sister, Christine King Farris, told her son she remembered her brother’s story and his playmate, but didn’t remember the name. City directories for 1935 confirm that there was a grocery on Auburn Avenue across from the King home, but city directories and census records indicate that the store’s proprietor, Minnie Smith, was a single woman with no children.
A white family owned the store a few years earlier, and that white family did have a child the same age as young Mike King, named Melvin.
As we investigated, we learned Melvin’s father was a Jewish refugee born in the Russian Empire who arrived in the United States in 1913. Despite having only a seventh-grade education, he assimilated with stunning speed. Within a single generation he had changed his name, presumably to make it sound more American, purchased a home, started a business and sent his children to college. Melvin attended Boys High, a public school where Black students were denied entry. He earned a bachelor’s degree at the University of Georgia, a public college where Black students were also denied entry. He served in the Marine Corps. He married and had two children. He went into the family business, owning and operating a small grocery store in one of Atlanta’s predominantly Black neighborhoods.
In 1968, when Dr. King was assassinated and violence erupted in Black neighborhoods all over the country, a grocery store owned by Melvin went up in flames.
If Melvin was the boy who inadvertently opened Dr. King’s eyes to racism, the fire would represent an extraordinary and bitter irony. But we can’t be sure. The facts don’t entirely line up. Urban renewal and decay have transformed Auburn Avenue, erasing most of its original structures. We contacted one of Melvin’s children, who told us that his father, who died in 2003, never mentioned a childhood connection to Dr. King. With no other way to corroborate the story, we are withholding Melvin’s last name.
A new piece of evidence emerged last year: A photo discovered in a Wisconsin archive shows young Mike King kneeling in front of a grocery store, his brother A.D. behind him. There’s a sign on the outer wall of the shop. It appears to say something like “Harriman Grocery.” Alas, we couldn’t find any stores near the King home with a name that began with the letter H.
Where does this leave us? As historians, we’re fond of primary sources and hard, cold facts. If pressed, we would judge Dr. King’s story as “probably true.”
We’re also aware of this hard, cold fact: History isn’t concrete. It moves and changes with us. It’s not even in the past, as Baldwin, Faulkner and others remind us. We shape it as we speak. Perhaps we’ve been asking the wrong question about Mike King’s white playmate. Perhaps a better question is what the story meant to Dr. King, and what it means to us today.
Origin stories help us make sense of the world. The Greek and Roman columns in Washington and your local county courthouse are vivid reminders of America’s efforts to hitch a new democracy to its ancient antecedents. There are moral lessons we obtain from a hero’s origin story, whether it’s that of George Washington or Luke Skywalker. And those moral lessons can be more important than factual accuracy (in the case of Luke Skywalker, that argument is easy).
In the first recorded instance in which he told the story, Mike King had already changed his name to Martin Luther King Jr., which is also part of his origin story. At 19, he had moved to Pennsylvania to attend Crozer Theological Seminary, living outside the strictures of the Jim Crow South. He told the story of the grocery store owner’s son in a class assignment dedicated to tracing each student’s religious development.
Before he was famous, he used the story to communicate to his teacher and fellow students how he arrived at his faith and then journeyed toward loving his enemies.
His experience with the white grocer’s son was hardly his only exposure to the bruising effects of racism. When he was around 8 years old, he was slapped by a white woman at a department store because she mistakenly believed he had stepped on her foot. He and his father were denied service while shopping for shoes when they declined to sit in the back of the store. And at 15, he suffered the curses and threats of a white bus driver when he momentarily refused to give up his seat for a white passenger.
He didn’t need to be rejected by a white 6-year-old to know that all the schools he attended in Atlanta were segregated by race and inferior to better-funded white schools. Neither did he need that child to understand the menacing intent of the Ku Klux Klansmen who paraded down his street. But he told the story of the grocer’s son over and over, because once he suffered the afflictions of racism, nothing was ever the same.
The structure of Dr. King’s origin story fits into a longer tradition. From Frederick Douglass to Rosa Parks, Black Americans have told similar stories of being evicted from their childhood innocence by early racist encounters — thrown out of the Garden of Eden by no sin except the color of their skin. As the civil rights activist James Farmer once wrote, “Every Black child in the South has an early experience of racism that shafts his soul.”
Dr. King, like his forebears, told his story in the hopes that others might understand his struggle, as well as our struggle as a nation. His parents and Sunday-school teachers told him that his religion compelled him to love the people who enslaved his ancestors and continued to insist on his inferiority. He had to wrestle with a question that struck him forcefully as a child: “How could I love a race of people who hated me and who had been responsible for breaking me up with one of my best childhood friends?”
His mother’s message — “You’re as good as anyone” — set him on a journey to become one of the most inspiring and transformative leaders in American history. His belief in his own “somebody-ness,” and his hope in the potential of American democracy, pushed him to challenge not only segregation laws but all of racism, all of America’s economic and cultural injustice, all its military aggression and all its hate. It was this commitment that led him to take unpopular stances and confront powerful rivals.
Sometimes, myth matters more than fact, and as historians, we have to respect the power of a great story and see it for what it is. In talking about his personal introduction to racism, Dr. King sought to make a point about our collective journey: that our self-imposed division threatened to rot not only individual souls but the soul of our nation. And that’s a story we still need to tell, even if some of the details remain unknowable.
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9) Americans Want to Read. Give Them Books.
By Brian Bannon, May 31, 2026
Mr. Bannon is the chief librarian of the New York Public Library, where he is also the director of branch libraries and education.
Grade Solomon for The New York Times
Walking up Madison Avenue during January’s polar vortex, I turned the corner onto 39th Street and hit a line of puffy coats, tote bags and young people with wired headphones. I had no idea what they were waiting for until I reached Fifth Avenue and saw that the line ended at the New York Public Library’s front door.
We had opened the library for a large-scale reading party for the first time. A data analyst had come from Queens to read poetry. A teacher had made the trip from the Bronx. More than a thousand people filed in. There weren’t enough chairs, and we ended up turning hundreds of people away. I ended up on the floor with a romance novel involving a barista pining over a beefy hockey player.
This was not an anomaly. More New Yorkers are borrowing books from the New York Public Library today than 15 years ago; borrowing is up 27 percent since 2010. And yet America is facing a book-reading crisis.
A 2025 study in iScience, a research journal focused on the sciences, found that pleasure reading fell 40 percent from 2003 to 2023, and a 2023 National Assessment of Educational Progress report showed that the share of 13-year-olds reading for fun almost every day has dropped to 14 percent, the lowest level since the federal government began asking the question in 1984. The diagnoses keep coming. Screens. Shrinking attention spans. A culture losing its appetite for books. And nearly every prescription is addressed to individuals: Read more, put your phone down, try harder.
I’m the chief librarian at the New York Public Library. In nearly 30 years of leading libraries across four U.S. cities, I’ve seen this decline up close. To be sure, one part of the solution is finding more effective ways to teach children to read in the first place. But teaching someone to read and building a world where they can do so are different problems. Throwing our phones in the lake can’t bring about that world, but designing the conditions for reading will.
In the 19th century, America began to build a national network of free public libraries in nearly every community. And then almost overnight, Google could answer any question, and Amazon could deliver any book. Who needed a building full of them?
Instead of disappearing, libraries remained indispensable, just not for reading and books. In community after community, local libraries filled society’s gaps. Computer classes, voter registration, literacy programs, social services, job training. It was important work that came with little new money. The first thing to get squeezed was the books.
Then came a harder truth. Libraries themselves were throwing up barriers to reading. In 2019 the Chicago Public Library found that its overdue fine policy had created a two-tiered system. In the city’s lower-income South District, one-third of cardholders were barred from borrowing because they owed $10 or more in fines and fees. On the more affluent North District, that share dropped to roughly one-sixth. A few dollars could lock an 8-year-old out of the library.
That October, Chicago became the largest city in America to eliminate fines for overdue materials. Three weeks later, returns of overdue books were up 240 percent. Within a year, 111,000 patrons renewed or replaced their library cards. From 2019 to 2021, major library systems across the country — including those of Dallas, Denver, San Francisco and New York City went late-fee-free.
When the Covid pandemic closed library doors, we told ourselves that reading would simply move online. For wealthier communities with home broadband, it did. For communities where people have slower internet service or none at all, it didn’t. Only when libraries reopened, when people could walk in and pull a spine off a shelf, did the numbers start recovering.
When libraries reinvested in books, the gains were larger. The Harris County Public Library in Texas invested early in digital lending when many systems had not. Checkouts grew from one million to seven million in seven years. At the New York Public Library, as part of a special, limited-time program this past January, we turned on unlimited digital access for Rachel Reid’s Game Changers novels, including the best seller “Heated Rivalry.” Normally, readers would have had to wait months for such a popular title to be available for their e-readers. Instead, 40,000 people downloaded the books in three weeks, and thousands of new patrons registered for library cards.
Other countries have gone further. Last year Denmark’s government announced a plan to eliminate the highest book tax in the world, citing its reading crisis as the reason; Argentina exempts books from tax, alongside bread, milk and medicine; Italy introduced a policy in 2016 that gave every 18-year-old a 500-euro cultural voucher, and 70 percent of it was spent on books; France, Germany and Spain followed with vouchers of their own.
America did not build its library system by accident. In Philadelphia, Benjamin Franklin founded the Library Company because he believed a free country required citizens who could think, reason and govern themselves. A century and a half later, Andrew Carnegie (and later his foundation) funded 1,681 libraries across the country, this time as free spaces built on the condition that towns would maintain them. By 2010, there were over 17,000 public library branches and bookmobiles. A democracy needs its people to read, and it is society’s job to make that possible — the same reason we have public schools, water systems and the electric grid.
The reading crisis is real. But we don’t need new inventions to build a reading city. Exempt books from sales taxes the way we exempt prescription medicine. Invest in library collections and reduce wait lists for books. Open nonprofit and hybrid bookstores when the market alone cannot sustain them. Build on the models that already work: reading in laundromats, libraries in transit systems, books in barbershops, classrooms, homes and pediatric offices.
None of this is theoretical. Every time someone designs the conditions for reading, people read. A data analyst from Queens. A teacher from the Bronx. The thousand New Yorkers who showed up on a freezing January night for a library reading party.
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10) N.J. Governor Calls for Calm After Protesters Clash With Police at Delaney Hall
Mayor Ras Baraka of Newark imposed a curfew early Sunday around the immigration detention center after a second consecutive night of unrest over living conditions there.
By Maia Coleman and Mark Bonamo, Published May 30, 2026, Updated May 31, 2026
Demonstrators and police officers outside the Delaney Hall immigration detention center in Newark on Saturday. Vincent Alban for The New York Times
Gov. Mikie Sherrill of New Jersey again urged demonstrators to remain peaceful early Sunday after a second straight night of clashes between protesters and law enforcement outside the Delaney Hall immigration detention center in Newark.
Mayor Ras Baraka of Newark imposed a curfew early Sunday around the facility, where demonstrators threw projectiles, fought over barricades, set fires and scuffled with officers from the New Jersey State Police and the Newark Police Department on Saturday evening and overnight. The detention center has, for the past week, been the site of tense protests over concerns about living conditions at the facility.
“I do not know why these individuals attacked or what they wanted to accomplish, but I refuse to let these dangerous actions detract from New Jersey’s dedication to ensuring public safety, keeping people safe from ICE, and that the people detained inside Delaney Hall are treated with dignity,” Ms. Sherrill said in a statement early Sunday.
Hours earlier, Ms. Sherrill made a similar plea, urging demonstrators to “bring the temperature down” to avoid escalating immigration enforcement operations and endangering the lives of detainees and other immigrants in the state.
Ms. Sherrill criticized the intrusion of “extremist groups” and demonstrators from outside the state, who she said had been interfering in the protests and distracting from the ultimate goal of improving conditions inside the detention center and eventually closing it.
A standoff on Friday night resulted in the arrest of six demonstrators, four of whom had traveled from New York and one from Pennsylvania. The state police had assumed control of the area after negotiating the withdrawal of federal agents in hopes of restoring order.
“To the people coming from out of state to create chaos and dangerous situations, you should not be here,” Ms. Sherrill said. “You are not helping the people detained at Delaney Hall, you are not helping detainee families and you’re certainly not keeping New Jersey safe.”
Despite the calls for calm, clashes continued.
Late Saturday, protesters pressed against police barricades and shields, wielded makeshift shields of their own and at times struggled with officers for control of metal fencing. Police later deployed tear gas and flash-bang grenades as they sought to disperse the crowd.
Officers in riot gear formed shield lines outside the detention center, while mounted troopers and officers on foot worked to push demonstrators back.
Around midnight, dozens of state troopers and Newark police officers sealed off Doremus Avenue at the detention center. Officers set up metal barricades, some wearing combat boots and riot helmets, and carrying sidearms and zip-tie handcuffs.
Just after midnight, Mr. Baraka, the Newark mayor, issued a curfew covering a half-mile area around the detention center. The restrictions remain in effect nightly from 9 p.m. to 6 a.m. until further notice.
A public safety alert announcing the curfew was sent to residents’ cellphones at 12:30 a.m.
The groups have clashed frequently over the past week, with protesters sometimes taunting federal agents. The agents, in turn, have tackled demonstrators, spraying chemical irritants and, in at least one case, beating a protester with a baton across the torso, thighs, knee and calves as he tried to flee.
On Wednesday, some members of a group of demonstrators were arrested, and on Thursday night, a 26-year-old man from Morris County bit two agents who were trying to remove him during a scuffle outside the facility, the authorities said. The man, Brendan John Geier, was charged in New Jersey federal court on Friday with assaulting federal officers and causing bodily injury. He was later released with limitations and barred from returning to Delaney Hall.
A lawyer for Mr. Geier could not immediately be reached on Saturday.
Relatives of detainees and immigrant advocates have said that detainees inside the facility were beaten and doused with pepper spray this week after some inmates began a hunger strike.
The Department of Homeland Security has denied that there was a hunger strike. The agency also said that there had been a fight involving detainees inside the detention center and that jail staff had broken it up. Officials said that detainees who had been affected had been evaluated by medical workers and that no one had been seriously hurt.
Ms. Sherrill said her focus remained on gaining full access to Delaney Hall for the members of her administration, restoring visitation for families and ensuring that detainees received proper medical care.
“We can’t let what’s happening outside Delaney Hall take us away from that mission,” she said.
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