If You Think MAGA Journalism Is Bad Now, Just WaitThe mayhem in Minnesota is partially the fault of one pup “reporter” chasing clicks.
Things are going great in the ICE standards department. In a wild article published yesterday, Slate writer Laura Jedeed revealed how non-existent the background check process is for new ICE agents by accidentally getting offered a job as an agent herself. Then it came out that James Rodden, an ICE prosecutor who was revealed last year to be running a brazenly white-nationalist X account¹, is back on the job. And yesterday, Stephen Miller encouraged ICE not to let little obstacles like city and state officials interfere with their work. ICE officers, he said, have “immunity to perform your duties,” and any official who interferes with those duties “will face justice.” Happy Wednesday.
MAGA’S Young, Dumb Futureby Andrew Egger The wilder the situation grows in Minneapolis—ICE growing openly brutal against protesters and observers, career prosecutors resigning in protest over the slanted investigation of the death of Renee Good, Stephen Miller proclaiming to ICE that “you have immunity to perform your duties” and that “no city official, no state official, no illegal alien, no leftist agitator or domestic insurrectionist” can stand in their way—the more remarkable it is that the whole situation really got going thanks to one smooth-brained 23-year-old YouTuber. Minnesota’s public-services fraud and its connections to Minneapolis’s Somali population had been an ongoing scandal for years, and were already a large and growing story on the right before Nick Shirley headed there with a camera crew late last month. But Shirley’s highly misleading gonzo video confronting employees of Somali-run daycares and health care centers and claiming to have discovered $110 million in fraud went ultra-viral, racking up hundreds of millions of views and turning the scandal into the story of the moment for the MAGA right. Within days, the White House was surging immigration enforcement to Minneapolis; Vice President JD Vance said Shirley had “done far more useful journalism than any of the winners of the 2024 [Pulitzer] prizes.” If this sort of person doing this sort of work can be so richly rewarded on the right right now, it’s safe to say both that Shirley will be a major fixture of the online right for a while, and that many others will try to follow in his footsteps. But if he’s the future of right-wing journalism, the future is very bleak indeed. Gaping holes quickly appeared in Shirley’s viral video, and exposés of the ludicrously propagandistic nature of his earlier work quickly followed. But it wasn’t until Shirley sat for a trainwreck interview with fellow YouTuber Andrew Callaghan this week that the broader picture came into focus: Sorry to say it, but the kid just ain’t that bright. When Callaghan asked him who he thought were America’s “three most benevolent billionaires,” Shirley was stumped: “What do you mean by the word ‘bellevolent’?”² Here’s the thing that gets me, though. It’s not a crime to be young and dumb in America. It’s not even a career-ending offense to be young and dumb in journalism. As ludicrous as Shirley’s current output is, he’s plainly got a certain aptitude for video reporting. In a different world—one set up to restrain his worst and dumbest instincts rather than to reward them—a guy like him could turn out to be a solid reporter. When we talk about the disintegration of the political right, I don’t think we talk enough about the collapse of its institutions. It’s been almost a decade since I started my first journalism job as a kid reporter at the Weekly Standard. The web editor there was one Jonathan V. Last, and I still remember one of the first things he ever told me: Part of his job as an editor of early-career writers was to keep them from popping off with insane hot-take stuff that would ruin their credibility before they’d accumulated any in the first place.³ At the time, he was contrasting the Standard’s approach with that of other right-wing outlets that used young writers as “commentary” cannon fodder for clicks, asking them to churn out three or four barely-edited “takes” a day to keep traffic numbers high. A decade on, though, the situation is far worse even than that. Much of the old press model has collapsed entirely, especially on the right. Guys like Nick Shirley aren’t trying to join a publication, they’re picking up a camera and trying to go viral on their own. They have no safety net, no sounding board, no mentorship, no way to grow beyond what they’re doing this minute. All they have is the zero-sum game of the algorithm: Get noticed or die. Of course they’re going to do what the algorithm demands—which, on today’s right, means snappy, confrontational, fact-agnostic propaganda for the regime. That’s what the ecosystem rewards, so we’re going to get more and more of it. If you think that’s grim today, wait till you see the future. Authoritarianism Is Accelerating. So Is Resistance.by William Kristol Freedom is complicated. Dictatorship is simple. Dictatorial or authoritarian movements tend toward uniformity and homogeneity. They bow to one leader. They look up to authority. They march in lockstep. They seek to impose one culture. Their message is one of simplicity and unity: “Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer.” Liberal and pro-democratic resistance efforts, by contrast, tend toward diversity, toward variety and heterogeneity. The free society they cherish is characterized by diversity. Resistance on behalf of a free society will tend to reflect that diversity. Different parts of the resistance will choose to fight in different ways. They will defend different aspects of a pluralistic society. Their core message is one that allows for a society of variety and diversity: No Kings. Unity of purpose can give an authoritarian movement an advantage in the short term. But the diversity of the resistance coalition gives it a more lasting and deep-seated strength. The diversity of the American resistance has been on full display in recent days, in response to the accelerationist authoritarianism of the Trump administration. On Sunday, the resistance featured a paragon of the establishment, the chairman of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, wearing suit and tie, speaking soberly but forcefully on behalf of sound policy, his institution’s independence, and his own determination and duty to stay and fight. On Monday, the resistance spotlight turned toward career civil servants, as at least five senior attorneys in Washington announced their resignations from the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department because of the refusal of political appointees above them to authorize a normal investigation that would follow a killing by a law enforcement agent of a peaceful protestor. And then on Tuesday, six federal prosecutors in Minnesota quit rather than carry out orders to open a criminal investigation of Becca Good, Renee Good’s widow, as well as over the refusal of their political superiors to authorize an investigation of the shooting in partnership with the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension. Among the attorneys who resigned were Joseph H. Thompson, who was second-in-command at the U.S. attorney’s office, and attorneys Harry Jacobs, Melinda Williams, and Thomas Calhoun-Lopez. After the polite if firm resistance of the Fed chair and career attorneys at Justice, yesterday we saw a different kind of resistance. At a Donald Trump photo op at a Ford plant in Michigan, a 40-year-old line worker at the factory, TJ Sabula, shouted “pedophile protector” at Trump from about sixty feet away, referring of course to his administration’s ongoing obstruction of the Jeffrey Epstein investigation. Trump heard the remark, and our thin-skinned wannabe dictator twice mouthed an expletive at Sabula, followed by a middle finger. The price Sabula paid for his heckling was being suspended from work. But he was not cowed. He told the Washington Post, “As far as calling him out, definitely no regrets whatsoever,” adding, “I don’t feel as though fate looks upon you often, and when it does, you better be ready to seize the opportunity. And today I think I did that.” So Sabula did. He stepped up in his way. As did the attorneys at the Justice Department in theirs. As did the chair of the Fed in his. They should inspire many others to act as well. Those modes of action will also be varied. But that’s fine. Diversity in resistance is a strength. After all, No Kings has defeated ein Führer before. But today’s authoritarians will not give up any more easily than yesteryear’s. It is sobering to realize that success, while certainly possible, remains in doubt. But it is heartening—even inspiring—to see resistance mounting on so many fronts. AROUND THE BULWARK
Quick HitsGIVE KIDS A (THIRD) CHANCE: Over the past year, advocates in the world of pediatric cancer research have been pushing for passage of the Give Kids a Chance Act, a bill that would allow for the Food and Drug Administration to authorize experimental combination therapies for kids suffering from these deadly diseases. Last week, they got some good news. The Department of Health and Human Services said in a January 6 letter to Senate Majority Leader John Thune that it supported the legislation, which was renamed the Mikaela Naylon Give Kids a Chance Act in honor of a 16-year-old cancer victim who advocated for its passage. The letter notes that the bill would “accelerate the development of pediatric cancer treatments” by, among other things, “awarding priority review vouchers to sponsors of certain approved rare pediatric disease product applications.” That’s the Trump administration’s imprimatur: If the bill were to get to the president’s desk, he would sign it. But can it get to his desk? The Mikaela Naylon Give Kids a Chance Act is widely popular in Congress. But twice now it has been at the doorstep of becoming law only to suffer an ignominious defeat. In December 2025, Elon Musk torpedoed a bipartisan-agreed upon government funding bill that included the legislation. In December 2026, Sen. Bernie Sanders stopped it from passing as a standalone bill in the Senate when he objected to a unanimous consent request for its consideration. The fate of the bill remains unclear. In theory, it could be part of the government funding legislation that gets passed (we assume) before the end of January. Or, the Senate could bring it back up for consideration once again by unanimous consent. At which point it would be unequivocally clear that whoever objects (Sanders or any other senator) would be the only lawmaker in Washington D.C. standing in its way. —Sam Stein RESISTANCE ROGAN: Another day, another sign that Joe Rogan is over his fascination with Donald Trump. On his podcast yesterday, Rogan spoke with horror about the shooting of Renee Good and widely circulating clips of ICE–induced chaos in Minneapolis: “It’s very ugly to watch someone shoot a U.S. citizen, especially a woman, in the face,” he said. “It just looked horrific to me. When people say it’s justifiable because the car hit it, it seemed like she was turning the car away.” He went on: “You don’t want militarized people in the streets just roaming around, snatching up people—many of which turn out to be U.S. citizens that just don’t have their papers on them. Are we really gonna be the Gestapo? ‘Where’s your papers’? Is that what we’ve come to?” Young men were instrumental in getting Trump re-elected in 2024, and many of the most prominent young men visible on the political right today are alarmingly fascist. But that doesn’t mean that all the young men who helped Trump return to power are loving his increasingly fascist tactics. Ditto the “manosphere” entertainers they listen to. THE INCREDIBLE VANISHING BILLIONAIRE: California Gov. Gavin Newsom didn’t expect to spend the last year of his term in an all-out fight against state progressive groups over a wealth-tax measure. But that seems to be how his 2026 is shaping up. A powerful California healthcare workers union is behind the effort to pass a one-time 5 percent wealth tax on billionaires living in the state, which they say is necessary to replace Medicaid spending and Affordable Care Act subsidies cut last year by the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. In an attempt to cut Newsom out of the process, they’re pushing the change not as a bill in the California legislature, but as a ballot initiative for voters to consider this November. Still, Newsom is promising to fight the measure relentlessly. “This will be defeated, there’s no question in my mind,” he told the New York Times. “I’ll do what I have to do to protect my state.” It’s not hard to see why Newsom is digging in. Rather than succeed in tapping more of the accumulated wealth of California’s ultra-wealthy, the proposed tax seems likelier to drive many of them from the state altogether, dropping their contributions to California’s state revenue closer to zero. And while the provision’s authors hoped to prevent that by making the tax retroactive to California residents as of January 1 of this year, they seem instead to have simply pushed some billionaires out that much earlier, before it’s even clear the measure will make it to the ballot at all. For instance, the New York Times reported that Google cofounders Larry Page and Sergey Brin spent the closing days of 2025 moving many of their assets and companies out of the state. Cheap Shots
1 As the Texas Observer reported, Rodden’s account “has over 17,000 followers and has routinely posted hateful statements, including that ‘America is a White nation,’ that ‘“Migrants” are all criminals,’ and that ‘All blacks are foreign to my people,’ in addition to posts with apparent praise of Adolf Hitler. 2 At another point, Shirley accused Callaghan of “not saying anything about the death of Charlie Kirk.” When Callaghan pointed out that he had denounced Kirk’s killing, Shirley retreated to a remarkable admission: He’d assumed Callaghan hadn’t denounced the assassination, because he hadn’t watched Callaghan talk about the assassination, because he assumed Callaghan wouldn’t denounce the assassination. Okay! 3 Couldn’t be me! You’re a free subscriber to The Bulwark—the largest pro-democracy news and analysis bundle on Substack. For unfettered access to all our newsletters and to access ad-free and member-only shows, become a paying subscriber.We’re going to send you a lot of content—newsletters and alerts for shows so you can read and watch on your schedule. Don’t care for so much email? You can update your personal email preferences as often as you like. To update the list of newsletter or alerts you received from The Bulwark, click here. Having trouble with something related to your account? Check out our constantly-updated FAQ, which likely has an answer for you.
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