When I interviewed for a Washington Monthly internship in March, I was contemplating abandoning journalism, even though I hadn’t finished journalism school. After completing a final summer newsroom stint at the 56-year-old magazine (assuming I was accepted), I’d find a job that paid the bills. “Anything that doesn’t make the world a worse place,” I told myself. 

I was readying to jump ship because the kind of in-depth writing jobs I wanted were rare and, if you could manage to snag one, too financially unstable for those of us with looming student debt. Besides, I’d been told in J-school that nobody reads long-form pieces anymore. And I thought any article I managed to pen was unlikely to reach those who didn’t already agree with me. 

I hadn’t turned gloomy in a vacuum. My journalism master’s program was heavy on professors’ nostalgia for staff writing positions that no longer existed, and award-winning freelancers spilling the beans on commercial copywriting gigs they settled for to make ends meet. It was peppered with the grim bromides for today’s news industry. “Write like no one will read past the third paragraph, because odds are they won’t,” one professor advised. “We don’t do this for the money,” guest speakers explained. “Long-form writing? Paid? On staff? Forget about it,” our mentors pounded into us. While I was there, my favorite teacher left journalism altogether. 

My Monthly summer as a paid intern—many news outfits don’t pay interns–poked holes in my morose preconceptions, revealing glimpses of the sun. Like every newbie here, I fact-checked and worked on my own stories. My first Monthly piece—on how AmeriCorps acts as an antidote to brain drain, inspired by having returned to my rural hometown through a national service program—got a shoutout in Politico’s “Playbook,” meaning that someone buckled in for a 2,000-word-plus piece. And on my second piece, the editors pushed me to appeal to readers who might disagree. The Monthly still believes in the power of persuasion.  

But we can’t do our work without your help. We need reader contributions to keep this 56-year-old magazine going. Please help us.

Working on the Washington Monthly’s annual College Guide, which celebrates underdog universities that focus on educating non-wealthy students over prestige or profit, the Monthly’s core mission became clearer for me. I knew this magazine offered ideas to benefit working-class Americans. What I learned is that the Monthly staff intelligently and relentlessly breathe life into those ideas. Write, and it may come to pass. History backs my superiors’ faith. After two decades of the Washington Monthly College Guide, some universities stopped participating in the U.S. News & World Report rankings, citing the rankings’ bias toward selectivity over affordability and social mobility. In 2023, U.S. News & World Report also revised its college rankings to align more closely with the Monthly’s methodology. This magazine has a time-honored tradition of subtle, meaningful influence. 

Sure, at times, I’ve struggled during my first semester in the Monthly’s J-school. It’s easy to be intimidated by the cast of thinkers this place cultivates, from former Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan to TIME correspondent Eric Cortellessa to Atlantic CEO Nicholas Thompson to my fellow editors today. Moreover, solutions-based policy journalism is a daunting challenge, as the MAGA movement is taking a wrecking ball to the institutions required to enact change.  

But improving today’s grim governance means offering voters better options, and, despite my doomsday career musings, I’ve landed in a place that does just that. “Not many people get to do this in their lives,” our editor-in-chief, Paul Glastris, said recently. He meant to shape national conversations, arming policymakers and constituents alike with ideas for the greater good. Glastris started as an intern, too. 

The Washington Monthly has convinced me to stay the course. I’ll keep faith that great ideas—tested, challenged, and refined—can shape public debate.  

If you think our brand of independent solutions-based journalism, and the opportunity the Monthly provides for young writers to become lifelong journalists, is essential, there’s something you can do: Make a donation.  

As a nonprofit, the Monthly only survives with your support. If you prefer print to screen reading, give $50 or more, and you’ll receive a free one-year subscription to the print edition of the Washington Monthly. Thank you. 

All the best, 

Gillen Tener Martin 

Associate Editor 

The post The Washington Monthly Restored My Faith in Journalism (Jobs)  appeared first on Washington Monthly.

California’s 1^st congressional district, a vast, rugged expanse in the state’s northeast corner, is definitive Trump country. With nary a town over 100,000, the region abounds with soaring peaks, fire-prone conifer forests, “Don’t Tread on Me” merch, and obscenely large four-door trucks. Its population bases are a network of former Gold Rush boomtowns, complete with excellent saloons. In these parts, timber and farming still reign supreme, locals help locals, and outsiders—especially city folk—face an uphill battle to become anything else. Since 2012, it’s been represented by Republican Doug LaMalfa, a fourth-generation rice farmer and climate change skeptic who voted against certifying the 2020 election. In 2024, California 1st voters supported Donald Trump over Kamala Harris nearly two-to-one.

I hail from the adjacent 2^nd congressional district, which runs along the Pacific Coast from the north end of the Golden Gate Bridge to the Oregon border. Here, back-to-the-landers built geodesic domes as centerpieces to their communes and Earth First! activists chained themselves to old-growth redwoods. Since 2012, our congressman has been Democrat Jared Huffman, who has stood up (and sat in) against gun violence and joined tribes in their decades-long fight to remove the dams choking the Klamath River. In 2024, the 2^nd district’s voters supported Harris over Trump by more than two-to-one. 

When I venture inland, getting up off what high country folks colloquially call “the coast,” it’s usually to backpack. If you try to buy a bottle of whiskey in Callahan, an unincorporated community with around 50 residents in Siskiyou County, you’ll get told, “If you want spirits, you’ll have to go on down to Etna”—the area’s bustling metropolis of about 670. Moving north, Yreka—Siskiyou’s largest town with 7,765 residents—is considered the capital city of the “State of Jefferson,” a long-running dream of rural Southern Oregonian and Northern Californian secessionists to shed the shackles and purported neglect of Sacramento and Salem’s bureaucracies. (Needless to say, they have not as of yet succeeded in seceding.)

Once, when I was seeking medical supplies while bleeding in a Walmart in Shasta County, just south of Siskiyou, a woman asked if she could pray for me. I said yes, and she rested her hands on my shoulders while I tried to avoid dripping blood onto the floor.

Frequenting the California 1^st, I don’t talk politics with the locals. But I’m pretty sure there’s plenty we wouldn’t agree on, and that Representative LaMalfa faithfully represents their views—which is how the political system is supposed to work.  

Thanks to Donald Trump, however, that’s no longer the case for the good people of California’s 1^st congressional district, nor for many others around the country. This past summer, fearful that his party would lose its narrow House majority in the 2026 midterms, Trump ordered Texas Republicans to engage in mid-decade redistricting—gerrymandering—to carve out five more GOP-friendly seats. When Texas Governor Greg Abbott complied and began the process, California Governor Gavin Newsom responded in kind: throwing his considerable political power behind a ballot measure, Proposition 50, that asked Californians to gerrymander more Democratic-friendly districts. On Tuesday, the voters agreed by a wide margin.  

Practically, that means that much of the 1^st district of California, including Shasta, Siskiyou, and Modoc counties, will be absorbed by the 2^nd district, and its Trump-supporting voters will be represented in Washington by Huffman, a progressive, who also represents and lives in the North Bay’s Marin—one of the richest counties in America, where the median annual income tops $142,000. Conversely, the conservative 1^st district picks up enough Democratic voters from Sonoma County to make Representative LaMalfa’s reelection highly unlikely. 

While Texas’s redraw is still tied up in court, with plaintiffs arguing the map intentionally dilutes the power of minority votes, the Golden State’s gerrymandering will ostensibly create five Democratic congressional seats to match Texas’s new Republican five. “The point is to disenfranchise our Republican neighbors in response to the Texas Republicans’ disenfranchisement of their Democratic neighbors, lest the Texas Republicans succeed in disenfranchising us all,” wrote veteran North Coast journalist Hank Sims. “That’s the world we get to live in now!” 

Contrary to Trump’s pre-Proposition 50 claim that “California is gerrymandered,” Tuesday’s vote marked a departure from how the state normally redistricts. Since 2010, California’s maps have been drawn by an independent commission with equal representation of both parties. But because the president had to go and mess with Texas, Californians were forced into a bleak choice between doing their part for America’s democracy by leveling the playing field or holding to long-held principles of fairness and independence within their own state. Now, a slew of other states are also looking to get in on the “gerrymandering arms race.” 

My inland neighbors and Republicans across the county should take Prop 50 as a wake-up call. If voters want their ballots to count under fairly drawn maps, there’s a decades-old fight they can join. Unfortunately, their party has been the villain of that story so far. I would say it’s never too late to do the right thing, but—given the year our democracy has had—I’ll stick with it’s not too late yet. We can still call a ceasefire, name fairness a bipartisan virtue, and let voters pick their politicians. We can still get out of this mess. 

To catch any would-be fighters up: Mid-decade redistricting was widespread in the early days of the Republic, largely dormant throughout the 20th century, and aggressively revived by Republicans beginning around the early 2000s. Following Democratic victories in 2008, the GOP also focused on flipping statehouses in time for regularly scheduled post-2010 census redistricting, ultimately winning 700 state seats and enacting a “sophisticated” redraw campaign nationwide. A decade later, as the 2022 midterms approached, the proportion of competitive districts in America hit a new low.  

Throughout, Democratic lawmakers have decried the redistricting race to the bottom. In both 2019 and 2021, House Democrats introduced a bill, titled the “For the People Act,” that would have required states to establish independent redistricting commissions. Both times, the bill was passed by House Democrats and died at the hands of Senate Republicans. On its first go-around, then-Majority Leader Mitch McConnell blocked a vote, grinningly telling reporters, “I get to decide what we vote on.” On its second, after Democrats unanimously voted for the bill in a 50-50 party-line split, Republicans deployed the almighty filibuster. 

Democrats have made clear that partisan redistricting isn’t their chosen way. But today, blue states are setting their democratic values aside in service of national democracy. If Republican redistricting locks in the right’s control of Congress for the rest of Trump’s term, and Capitol Hill continues to abdicate its constitutional responsibility to check an “authoritarian curious” White House, there’s no telling what America will look like on the other side. “It’s not good enough to just hold hands, have a candlelight vigil, and talk about the way things should be,” Newsom told reporters. “We have got to meet fire with fire.” 

Fire with fire—done. Prop 50 is a go. But we can still be talking about the way things should be and laying the groundwork to get there. For one, mid-decade redistricting could be banned. Representative Kevin Kiley, a California Republican who may lose his seat post-Prop 50, proposed a bill to do just that, which he said House Republican leadership is so far unwilling to bring to the floor. “I think if it did come to the floor, it would have a lot of support,” Representative Kiley told The New York Times.

Legislators could also revisit the For the People Act to establish independent state commissions. Or, they could take the examples of other democracies to remove congressional redistricting from the hands of states altogether. Canada transferred that authority to a national commission in 1964, and has since seen redistricting evolve into an exercise “widely seen as legitimate” and devoid of “public cynicism and disenchantment.” Among contemporary democracies, America’s approach is “uniquely awful,” New America wrote.  

Now, with California’s fight in the rearview, it is a fine time to come clean about what Prop 50 doesn’t do: give power back to the people, as campaign ads claimed. Voiding votes of California Republicans—who were already feeling pretty powerless in a deep blue state—won’t restore fair representation to voters of color in Texas, because the function of congressional representation is not simply to add another “D” or “R” ballot to a party-line vote in Washington. Our members are intended to bring the interests, concerns, and voices of far-away constituencies to the House of Representatives, the federal government’s most locally accountable, place-based arm.  

Of course, institutional design and electoral practice have diverged over the last half-century. American elections today are more about national party politics than they have been or were crafted to be. A “D” or an “R” next to a candidate’s name alone can tank a campaign. This nationalization upends a central premise in our political system: that local interests, inherently diverse across a massive country, matter and warrant responsive representation. If we consider five California Democrats gained to be an equal trade for five Texans lost, we accept a complete shift to party affiliation over individual candidates or the local concerns they speak to.  

That isn’t where Americans want to be. According to a recent New York Times/Siena poll, voters increasingly name “polarization” the most important problem facing the country. And some politicians are reading the room: As the Monthly’s Nate Weisberg pointed out, successful Democratic candidates in swing districts today appeal to localism lost. They employ a “moral vocabulary” around place and talk about “the closing factory and the bridge that finally got fixed” rather than jumping into partisan fights.  

As the redistricting battles rage on, and more Republican communities are silenced, Democrats may be able to recruit soldiers from across the aisle in the broader war for fair maps. For now, Prop 50 means as many as five new Democrats voting to protect programs that aid low-income Americans in every state, which House Republicans have slashed in service of the president’s agenda. “When someone does the bidding of Donald Trump, you’re essentially represented by Donald Trump in Congress,” Doug Greco, Democratic Party chair for Texas’s Travis County, told me. And after the 2030 census, California’s congressional maps will once again be in the hands of its independent commission.  

In the meantime, Huffman says he’s already been reaching out to his new constituents. “When there are community problems … I could care less about what anyone’s party label is,” he said.  

Gerrymandering and political polarization have risen hand-in-hand over the last three decades–each feeding the other, and both undermining voters’ trust in their democracy. Perhaps now, the all-out maps war taking place between red and blue states will push the injustices of partisan redistricting to the breaking point. And if so, perhaps they’ll actually break.  

One can dream. In fact, one should. 

The post ​My Disenfranchised California Republican Neighbors Should Take It Up With Their Party  appeared first on Washington Monthly.

QAnon. Pizzagate. Chemtrails.

Conspiracy theories dominate much of the internet and form the rabid core of MAGA canon: That the January 6 insurrection was a “false flag” operation; that vaccines cause autism; and that the 2020 election was “rigged.” 

In the runup to his second campaign, Trump egged on the believers of QAnon, reposting Q-related content and playing QAnon songs (yes, there is such a thing) in his campaign rallies and videos. (As of 2022, as many as 1 in 5 Americans—and 1 in 4 Republicans—were QAnon believers.) MAGA’s conspiracist roots run so deep that they even ultimately precipitated a crack in Trump’s base. Adherents perceived the administration’s failure to release the “Epstein files” as a betrayal of QAnon’s key tenets: that a Satan-worshipping cabal of pedophilic elites secretly run the world, that Epstein was “proof” of this scheme, and that it was Trump’s destiny to “save the children.” 

While social scientists and politicians have struggled with strategies to beat back the tide of conspiracies, YouTuber and cultural critic Natalie Wynn—known as ContraPoints—is reaching vast audiences with her videos. Wynn, an ex-philosophy PhD student, has built an award-winning commentary channel dedicated to countering the rising tide of right-wing extremism on YouTube. She produces extensively researched, expertly set-designed, and meticulously costumed feature-length video essays for an audience of 1.9 million subscribers. “One of the hallmarks of Wynn’s rhetorical style is her ability to get her viewers to see things from another person’s point of view,” Nancy Jo Sales wrote in a 2021 Guardian profile. 

Her latest video, “CONSPIRACY,” has racked up more than 4 million views with a deep dive into the history and dynamics of conspiracist thinking in America, and how conspiracism undermines democracy. The success of her approach could hold important lessons for how to loosen conspiracists’ grip on American politics. 

This interview has been edited for length and clarity. The full interview is available at YouTube, Spotify and iTunes. 

***

Anne Kim: To set the table for our audience, you host a YouTube channel under your alter ego, ContraPoints, which has nearly two million subscribers. You’ve won awards for your commentary and you’ve been fearless in your dissections of right-wing ideology. You’ve critiqued incel culture, transphobia, and racism, and done video essays that have covered a wide range of topics, ethics, politics, gender, philosophy. I think you were once a PhD student in philosophy. Your latest video, “CONSPIRACY,” is a two hour 40 minute tour de force. There’s really no other way to describe it. It’s about conspiracist thinking in America, and I found every minute to be riveting. We want to talk about your approach in creating this video, but what prompted you to tackle this topic in the first place?

Natalie Wynn: Thank you. My channel has often covered fringe aspects of digital culture. Back in 2017, I did a lot of stuff on what was at the time called the “alt-right,” but which has now increasingly become the Republican Party. So I guess this is kind of my beat in a way. I remember spending a lot of time online as a teenager, during the Bush administration. At that time, conspiracy theories were everywhere online—mostly about 9/11. But there has been a kind of acceleration of it, and a mainstreaming of it, that happened during the first Trump administration. Most fascinating to me was QAnon, because of just how exotic that particular conspiracy theory got. And also the fact that it played a major role in motivating thousands of people to attempt to overturn an election. I actually regretted not doing a video about QAnon back in 2020. But I thought that by the time 2024 came around, it was still relevant.

Gillen Tener Martin: This video has gained four million views, reaching beyond even your subscriber base. Whom are you hoping to reach with this video? 

Natalie Wynn: I thought about this question a lot while I was working on it. Am I going to try to convince people who are deep in the conspiracy world? Am I trying to convince them to stop it? I decided ‘no, I’m not going to do that.’ I don’t think it’s the kind of thing that you can just reason people out of. 

Who I wanted the video to emotionally resonate most with are friends and family of people who have gone down the rabbit hole. I think there is an element of catharsis in hearing someone analyze this thing that has caused a lot of distress in your life. I think millions of Americans and people around the world are in that situation.

Anne Kim: You talk about the patterns that conspiracies have in common. What are the commonalities that you’ve observed in the various conspiracies that have taken hold of our modern politics over the last 20 years?

Natalie Wynn: There are really two types of patterns that I analyze. One is the method of argument, and one is the content of the beliefs. Part of my research for this video was watching a lot of viral conspiracy “documentaries,” I guess you could call them, that have been influential over the last couple of decades. For the 9/11 “truther” movement, there was this video called “Loose Change,” which was viral on YouTube in the late 2000s. I compare it to “Fall of the Cabal,” which was a Facebook-viral documentary that onboarded a lot of people to QAnon beliefs in 2019 and 2020. What I describe as a common style of argument is basically a ‘catalog of “anomalies.”

An anomaly is something that subjectively feels inconsistent or implausible about an official narrative. So for example, a 9/11 “anomaly” would be that a passport of one of the hijackers was found after 9/11 at Ground Zero. How could a passport survive this fire that burned the building down? 

The 9/11 conspiracy theories at least approximate something like amassing evidence for a specific conclusion. Whereas with a lot of the QAnon stuff, it’s hard to even suggest what the logic might be. It’s like, “look at these reptile symbols in the architecture of the Vatican.” You mentioned I used to be a philosophy PhD. I dropped out, but I still got as far as logic class. And in logic, there are premises that lead to a conclusion. I would not say that “Fall of the Cabal” is anything close to that. 

Instead, I think what they’re doing is creating room for doubt that maybe all the world’s institutions are captured by some kind of radical evil. That I think is emotionally powerful because it makes people feel like they have nowhere to go for good information. They can’t trust the press. They can’t trust doctors. Obviously, the government is corrupt. Obviously, you can’t trust any official historian because they’re all in on it. So that’s uncomfortable, right? Because it’s uncomfortable not to know what kind of world you’re living in. It creates this thirst for knowledge, which the conspiracy documentary that you’re watching then fills in with a bunch of stuff that they haven’t demonstrated with anything resembling evidence. But it fills in the gap that you’ve just created by causing them to question everything else. 

For the content, I break it down into three major tendencies that I call dualism, symbolism, and intentionalism. Dualism is black and white moral thinking. People are good or people are evil. And all of the world’s institutions, governments, universities—those have all been captured by radical evil. Whereas, we, the conspiracy researchers and the common people, obviously we’re good. 

Intentionalism would be the idea that things happen because someone consciously wills them to happen. So If there is an economic recession, well, that’s not the product of widely dispersed, reckless decision-making. It’s not the product of ordinary human greed compounding at the level of millions of little decisions. It’s instead like, “Someone decided there’s going to be a recession now and they made that happen.” And every single detail unfolds according to plan. So that’s intentionalism. 

Symbolism I compare to divination, like reading tea leaves or astrology, where you are using associations with symbols that you attempt to interpret. You can look for the symbols basically anywhere. Government buildings are a good place to start. [So take] again, the Vatican: it has reptile symbols, a snake is associated with Satan, so that means the Vatican is probably satanic. A lot of the activity in the QAnon community online was “decoding.” There are these cryptic messages, and then people go around looking for clues. I think this is closer to divination than it is to the kind of thing that a journalist or historian would do, which I think is also fun for people because journalism and history are kind of tedious, right? It requires you to collect information and to proportion your belief to evidence. Whereas divination is kind of fun because you can follow whatever feels emotionally satisfying to you in the moment. It’s almost like free association. 

Gillen Tener Martin: I think it’s common to think about conspiracist thinking as a mainstream phenomenon in the U.S. today, but you trace a big historical arc to the beginnings of the Republic. Can you talk a bit about that long arc of conspiracist thinking?

Natalie Wynn: People talk about this like the internet started it. I do think the internet made it worse, but I don’t think the internet started it. I think the printing press probably was the first thing to make it worse. There was this book by John Robison. He’s a [Scottish] writer on conspiracy theories, and he was the popularizer of the Illuminati conspiracy theory in the 18th century. They thought the Illuminati was a branch of the Freemasons: atheists and anarchists that would cause revolutions and overthrow all the world’s governments and all the world’s religions. 

Someone sent a copy of his book to George Washington, and there’s a correspondence where George Washington acknowledges having read the book and he sort of says, “Well, I’ve heard a lot about this. I don’t think the Freemasons of America are involved, but I’ll keep an eye on it.” It’s funny to me considering how “online” Illuminati conspiracy theories feel—the 2010s was a peak of people looking for triangles and eyes everywhere, like in Katy Perry music videos. “My God, it’s the Illuminati!” It’s kind of funny that George Washington was having this conversation with someone.

Anne Kim: Let’s bring things back to the modern day and to Trump. What is it about Trump and conspiracist thinking that has enabled such a close partnership? You could argue that Trump exploits all the tendencies that you’ve talked about in order to leverage and use that thinking to his benefit. There are aspects of Trump that fit into what you’re talking about. He does see the world in very dualistic terms: black and white, us against them. But how did Donald Trump become the totem for conspiracy theorists and conspiracist thinking, to the extent that he has?

Natalie Wynn: I think Trump has always recognized conspiracy thinking as useful, as this underground strain of American politics that is available at any time to be tapped by someone unscrupulous enough to tap it. In 2015, he went on the Alex Jones show “Infowars,” which I don’t think any other presidential candidate, certainly not one running for one of the main two parties, has ever gone on. Because, you know, it’s crackpot. But Trump saw that there were millions of people listening to that, and no politician saw that as a useful voting demographic. He did. 

I think that he found it useful especially in 2020. The best way to plot a real conspiracy is to theorize a fictional conspiracy, because the existence of a conspiracy justifies a counter-conspiracy. So if you say that the election has been rigged, and if your followers believe that, then it’s justified to conspire to overturn the election, right? It’s not like this is the first election where people have said that it’s rigged or that it’s a conspiracy. People say it basically every time. But traditionally, American politicians who lose the election concede and they tell their followers, “yes, we accept the results of the election.” And that quells this impulse. But Trump did the opposite. He fanned the flames up until the point of January 6th. 

So I think in a very pragmatic way, he finds conspiracy thinking useful. Although things have gotten a little awkward lately as a result of the Epstein situation because the Epstein stuff is a load-bearing pillar of conspiracy thinking in the modern age. I think that a lot of people, and certainly most conspiracy theorists, believe that there is a vast pedophile conspiracy that involves a huge proportion of Hollywood and politicians and so on. I get the sense that Trump has gotten used to the idea that he can just tell his followers, “Yeah, we’re not thinking about that anymore,” and they’ll stop. But this one seems to be a little more difficult. As a big part of QAnon, people are very attached to this, and so it’s a little harder to put a memory hold on this particular thing.

Gillen Tener Martin: It says a lot to me that this has formed one of the most notable cracks in his base so far. And going back to January 6th, I think it can be easy for us now to forget the relationship of conspiracies to that event, but in the video you give a really good overview of how conspiracy both led to and excused an insurrection. Can you talk a bit about the role of QAnon and conspiracism in January 6th?

Natalie Wynn: So QAnon always had this element of apocalyptic thinking. The idea was that there was going to be this event called “the Storm”’ where Donald Trump—who they viewed as a messiah figure—was going to purge the deep state of the cabal (cannibals, pedophiles, whatever evil people that had taken hold of it). And there was a growing frustration that this hadn’t happened. What happened is a morphing of the idea “Trump is going to abolish the deep state” to “we are the digital soldiers, we’ve been here all along, the point of this movement was that it was training us to be ready for this moment, and now it’s up to us to join the president in bringing about the Storm.”

Obviously, there were a lot of different groups at January 6th. There [were] also Proud Boys and other people bringing their own agenda to it. But a lot of those who I guess would be considered “ordinary people”—people who were not previously involved in white nationalist gangs, for example, like accountants and grandmothers—who showed up on January 6th were there because of QAnon conspiracy theorizing.

Anne Kim: Your reference to the accountants and the grandmothers alludes to a point that you make in your video about how almost anyone can be vulnerable to conspiracist thinking. Could you talk a little bit about what makes someone more vulnerable to this kind of thinking in the first place? 

Natalie Wynn: Some of it is pretty universal. Systematic thinking is hard: it’s unintuitive to humans, whereas intentionalist thinking—the idea that things happen as a result of plans manifesting—is more intuitive. But there are things that I think cause specific people to really tend to dive into this. One of the big ones is some sense of humiliation or having this longing to feel important that has been frustrated in other areas of life. This is something I noticed with the most high-profile celebrity conspiracy theorists. 

For example, David Icke is most notorious for the reptilian theorizing that he did beginning in the 1990s. But he used to be a sports broadcaster. He announced on a talk show in the early ‘90s that he was the son of God, and he prophesied a coming era of hurricanes and earthquakes and this sort of revolution. And he was mocked, he was laughed at, and was kind of a pariah in the British media. I mean, we can understand why. But I think from his perspective, that was painful and humiliating. And so there’s this desire to be like, “Who did this to me?” And in his case, the answer to that question was reptilians. But I think that it’s something you also see with more recent conspiracy theorists. 

Candace Owens, who has really been on a conspiracy tear recently, wasn’t always like this. Back in 2017 or so, she was involved in Black Lives Matter activism. But there was this incident where she created a website called Social Autopsy, which was essentially a revenge doxing website for people who had been harassed. She got very negative feedback for this, and I think the sense of being canceled. She’s talked about this in interviews. She felt like “the media is against me,” and then she heard Trump talking about how the media is lying, and that really resonated because she was under attack by the media. So I think that there’s a sense of humiliation in both those cases. 

But it’s also common in the average person who gets into conspiracy theories. A sense of career unfulfillment or estrangement from your kids or just any kind of miscellaneous personal frustration that you have can create a scapegoating impulse. When bad things happen, people want a sort of satanic mastermind that they can blame. And conspiracism offers that. 

Gillen Tener Martin: You make a really strong case throughout the video for how conspiracist thinking is not compatible with democracy. Can you lay out why?

Natalie Wynn: So the idea of how democracy ideally is supposed to function is that there is public deliberation about issues and it’s possible for us to negotiate and to reason about things and to make compromises. Conspiracism throws a wrench in the works of all of that because it’s so irrational. I almost want to say a-rational. It’s not really engaging with reason at all. So when you find that you cannot reason with your neighbors—you can’t even have a coherent conversation because you don’t know how to have a coherent conversation with someone who thinks that the pandemic was caused by the Rothschilds—I think it’s a problem for a political system where people need to reach at least some baseline of consensus about what reality is. 

There’s a wide spectrum of opinion, much of it I would disagree with, but which I would still consider to be within the realm of things that can be argued about. Whereas the idea that the Judeo-Bolshevik-Vatican-Freemasons are controlling the White House through reptilian moon radars or whatever … I don’t know how to talk about that because it’s so not grounded in reality that discourse itself fails. And that scares me.

The post A One-Woman Stand Against Conspiracists appeared first on Washington Monthly.

For over 30 years, a tiny federal program called SNAP-Ed quietly made America healthier. Educators led cooking, fitness, and gardening classes, advised families on tight budgets about shopping and meal prep, and showed parents how to decode nutrition labels. The program helped more than 1.8 million participants in 2022 alone, and millions more over the years, to stretch what they had and eat better. In Conway County, Arkansas, SNAP-Ed created a junior high school garden that produced fresh fruits and veggies. Across Southwestern Colorado, Indigenous youth and elders participated in traditional foods workshops. And in New Orleans, seniors learned to cook “Soul Food with a Twist”—healthier takes on their favorite recipes.  

Founded to increase the likelihood that those on SNAP (formerly food stamps but still run by the U.S. Department of Agriculture) make healthy choices with limited funds, SNAP-Ed has cost the USDA less than $10 billion over its lifetime. Last year, it was allocated around $515 million, versus the over $14 billion the food industry spends annually on advertising (more than 80 percent of which promotes fast food, sugary drinks, candy, and unhealthy snacks). 

And it worked. A 2024 report of SNAP-Ed impacts across 23 states found that the individuals it engaged across all age groups increased their fruit, vegetable, and water intake, exercised more regularly, cut down on sugary drinks, and served more healthy meals at home. Further, while course participants may have numbered in the low multi-millions nationally, the report found that SNAP-Ed reached 10.6 million Americans through policy and systems changes that made healthy eating more widely available—worthy endeavors like getting local produce into school cafeterias—and garnered over 260 million views through social media marketing. A 2023 Illinois impact report estimated the program prevented more than 5,000 cases of obesity and 570 cases of food insecurity statewide in a single year, returning as much as $9.50 for every dollar spent by lowering future healthcare costs.  

Nonetheless, Congressional Republicans defunded SNAP-Ed in their One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA), which President Donald Trump signed with great fanfare on July 4. SNAP, which provides benefits to help low-income Americans purchase food, also faces cuts and new work requirements that critics say will be a nightmare to administer, leading to a big drop-off in recipients. By November 1, the states must begin enforcing the changes, which are expected to reduce or eliminate benefits for around one in 10 SNAP recipients.

SNAP-Ed, titled for its role as SNAP’s petite educational arm, also administered by the USDA, allocated funds to states that tapped local organizations to spend them. And so, on September 30, land-grant universities, Tribal agencies, and nonprofits across the country halted their SNAP-Ed operations, while others are eking out their funding to wind down over the coming months. According to Jean Butel, a community nutrition specialist and former SNAP-Ed director with the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, school garden initiatives supported by their SNAP-Ed program have been paused. In Ohio, Pat Bebo, a SNAP-Ed administrator with Ohio State University Extension (the only SNAP-Ed implementer in the Buckeye State), said that although they plan to stretch their program funds until November 30, they’ve already lost more than half their workforce of around 130.  

“People have found positions…they had to do what they had to do,” she said. All told, around 2,000 nutrition educators nationwide—frequently hired from within the communities they served—are facing unemployment. Also lost will be their decades-long relationships with over 30,000 partner organizations, including schools, nonprofits, and food banks: the network of community touchpoints that made SNAP-Ed a “pillar” of America’s public health infrastructure, in the words of the Journal of Nutrition Education and Behavior.  

Republicans said they eliminated SNAP-Ed because it was ineffective and redundant—claims that proponents, and impact reports, dispute. “Hawaiʻi does not have a nutrition education program with the scale or infrastructure to fill the void SNAP-Ed has left behind,” Butel says.  

After the University of Wisconsin announced it laid off 91 employees who ran FoodWIse, a statewide SNAP-Ed program, due to the cuts, U.S. Senator Tammy Baldwin, Governor Tony Evers, along with U.S. Representatives Gwen Moore and Mark Pocan put out a statement lauding the program: “FoodWIse, and the dedicated staff behind it, have proven to be a good investment that helps tens of thousands of Wisconsinites stay well fed and live a healthy life…we hope Wisconsin’s Congressional Republicans who voted for this are prepared to answer to impacted families.” 

The end of SNAP-Ed exposes the chasm between the White House’s messaging and governance. Even as Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. voices concern about what Americans put in their bodies, the administration has dismantled SNAP-Ed, which helped low-income Americans eat better.  

Last month’s Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) Strategy Report from the White House iced the cake: proposing little regarding food system regulation and calling for “more research” from agencies whose research the Trump administration has gutted. While it vaguely tasks the USDA with “exploring options” to improve its Expanded Food and Nutrition Education Program, a smaller effort with a more limited purview, the department’s largest, broadest nutrition education initiative, SNAP-Ed, is on its way out. 

SNAP-Ed’s demise is ironic, as the administration’s MAHA efforts are mostly about personal responsibility. As Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and his bevy of be-healthy-buy-what-I’m-selling influencers rail against the corporate food ecosystem, Republicans are targeting individuals. “If someone wants to buy junk food on their own dime, that’s up to them,” reads a press release from Representative Josh Brecheen, an Oklahoma Republican, who reintroduced a bill that would ban soft drinks, candy, ice cream, and prepared desserts from eligible SNAP purchases. “What we’re saying is, don’t ask the taxpayer to pay for it and then also expect the taxpayer to pick up the tab for the resulting health consequences.” 

Framing eating healthy solely as personal responsibility or individual choice allows legislators to shirk the responsibility of fixing America’s broken food system, which heavily subsidizes unhealthy products while doing little to put more nutritious food on Americans’ tables. In the U.S., the cheapest, most heavily marketed, most widely available options are often the worst, resulting in a reality in which over 50 percent of the calories Americans consume come from ultra-processed foods. Among children, it’s over 60 percent.  

Moreover, the nation is famously rife with thousands of “food deserts,” low-income census tracts where residents must travel miles to grocery stores and have limited access to healthy foods. Rising alongside the deserts are “food swamps”: neighborhoods awash with unhealthy options like convenience stores and fast-food restaurants. Low-income, rural, non-white, and Tribal communities are more likely to live in a desert or a swamp, and lower-income individuals are at greater risk of heart disease, cancer, diabetes, and obesity than more affluent Americans.  

Even under these conditions, SNAP-Ed helped people make healthier choices. It encouraged individuals to buy frozen or canned fruits and vegetables if fresh ones weren’t available and educated them on practices like rinsing canned products to remove excess sodium.  

In Hawaii, where 90 percent of food comes from off-island, driving prices up and self-sufficiency down, Butel said SNAP-Ed funding supported sessions showing families how to use SNAP benefits to buy seedlings and grow their own produce. “Without SNAP-Ed, those opportunities are disappearing,” she says. “The long-term risk is that we’ll see greater disparities in nutrition and chronic disease outcomes—especially among the communities that have historically had the least access to healthy, affordable food.” 

This year, Ohio SNAP-Ed also debuted its Mobile Education Nutrition Unit (MENU), a teaching vehicle that would meet people where they shop and gather—particularly in rural communities, further from services and transportation—to provide classes, cooking demos, and food tastings. Now, the MENU, considered a “major asset” per federal guidance, will be sold.  

MAHA’s strategy report notes access and affordability challenges between communities and healthy options. It proposes eliminating zoning restrictions that prevent mobile grocery units and fast-tracking permitting for grocery stores in underserved areas. But it isn’t red tape creating food deserts. It’s chains offering cheaper options.  

In Minnesota, Patricia Olsen, the head of the University of Minnesota Extension’s Family, Health & Wellbeing department—which implemented SNAP-Ed—said their educators advertised for mobile food pantry distributions like the mobile grocers the MAHA report champions. “We worked hand-in-hand,” Olsen said, adding that she’s hearing from contacts in these units today that federal cuts to the Emergency Food Assistance Program, another USDA program that buys food from farmers and sends it to food banks, may mean less mobile distributions as banks across the state have less stock available. “Mobile options helped in those swamps or deserts,” she said. 

SNAP-Ed also helped low-income consumers wade through misinformation, misleading advertising, and confusing labeling. “Big Food is adept at contorting nutrition science to promote its products,” Dhruv Khullar wrote in the New Yorker. Vitamin Water is marketed as a health drink, even though it’s essentially sugar water. Yoplait’s “French-style” yogurt can claim “now with more fruit” because its recipe had little to begin with, and General Mills’ “Blueberry Pomegranate” cereal contains no blueberries or pomegranates.  

SNAP-Ed was a vehicle for valuable consumer information: it taught individuals to read nutrition labels, empowering them to cut through deceptive claims, and supported community initiatives that made locally grown, fresh foods more accessible.  

Choices are shaped by what’s available, what we know, and what we can afford—all of which are influenced by policy and profit, and little of which MAHA’s strategy proposes to change. Despite Kennedy’s make-America-healthy rhetoric, more of the onus will be placed on individual choice, and less money will be available to help individuals choose wisely.

The post SNAP-Ed’s Demise Exposes MAHA’s Hypocrisy appeared first on Washington Monthly.

Last year, there were 27 weather and climate disasters that reached the $1 billion in damages mark, outpaced only by the record-setting 28 in 2023.  Presiding over America’s response to this cataclysmic situation, we have a president ignoring the science on climate change, rolling back environmental protections, and denying half of the requests the federal government receives from states for major disaster aid. From weakening the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to laying off hundreds of federal employees critical in forecasting and responding to extreme weather events, this administration has already shown itself to be disastrous for disaster management.

But the unequal consequences of natural catastrophes reveal an added danger that Trump’s wide-ranging rollbacks create. When wildfires ravaged Los Angeles at the beginning of this year, killing at least 30 people, forcing around 200,000 evacuations, and destroying more than 16,000 structures, then-Trump advisor Elon Musk placed the blame squarely on L.A. agencies’ prioritization of diversity, equity, and inclusion.

“DEI means people DIE,” he wrote on X, reposting a tweet from a conspiracist influencer claiming that L.A.’s fire chief and city budget both put DEI before brush clearing and ensuring that fire hydrants were water-stocked. Neither claim was true, and so in response, TIME ran a piece headlined “The L.A. Fires Have Nothing to Do With DEI.” 

Today, however, that isn’t exactly right either. DEI primarily refers to a set of principles designed to ensure representation in companies, institutions, or organizations. But if we accept the Trump administration’s operational definition of the acronym, the L.A. fires—and every other natural disaster—most definitely have something to do with DEI. Since January, the administration has cast DEI to mean any consideration of populations uniquely at risk, turning efforts to identify and address where needs are greatest into “dangerous preferential hierarchy.” In response, government agencies have been limiting the use of language like “at risk,” “historically,” “marginalized,” “underserved,” and hundreds of other terms, according to a New York Times analysis. 

And in so doing, they dodge the fact that the United States government has “marginalized” and “underserved” groups of individuals, many of whom are now disproportionately “at risk” for natural disasters. Indisputably inequitable aspects of American history—like segregation and redlining—have often determined who lives where, pushing communities of color into more hazardous zones. Present inequalities shape community readiness, as less wealthy areas are less likely to have resilient infrastructure and resources to prepare themselves. And individual circumstances determine how each of us experiences natural catastrophes, meaning disasters often hit the poor, the elderly, and people with disabilities hardest. 

Twenty years ago this week, Hurricane Katrina showed the world what it looks like when unequal realities on the ground are not considered in emergency planning, and patterns of inequality can be traced through every natural catastrophe since. Sticking with the L.A. example, a third of the 17 people living killed by the Eaton fire had impairments that could affect mobility and the median age of those killed was 77, according to a Los Angeles Times analysis. And, following the findings of a National Bureau of Economic Research study, on-average-wealthier Pacific Palisades residents were more likely to have solid insurance coverage than on-average-poorer homeowners in Altadena to the east.

“Much like we see social determinants of health, we also see social determinants of disasters,” Jeffrey Schlegelmilch, director of the National Center for Disaster Preparedness at the Columbia Climate School, told me.

Trump has turned strategizing to protect those most at risk—whether it be for maternal mortality, fire, or flood—into a politically perilous and deeply underfunded activity. He’s ended the Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities (BRIC) grant program (established during his first term) and frozen funding for the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law—both of which put federal money (over $18 billion so far) toward upgrading jurisdictions’ infrastructure to withstand climate-driven disasters, and both of which prioritized aid to, or shared more of the cost burden for, “low-income” and “disadvantaged” communities. 

But, as disasters have taught us time and time again, prioritizing aid to those most vulnerable  isn’t “woke” politics gone amok—it’s smart planning that saves taxpayers money.

The morning before Katrina made landfall in New Orleans on August 29, 2005, Mayor Ray Nagin issued the city’s first ever mandatory evacuation order. Around 1 million people from the greater New Orleans area heeded the order, but tens of thousands stayed. At the time, the city estimated that 100,000 residents did not own a car and one in four residents was living below the poverty line. Many were too old, in too poor of health, or simply too poor to evacuate without assistance. 

The responsibility to mobilize transport for those without in the case of emergencies lay with Louisiana’s Department of Transportation, headed at the time by former oil and gas man Johnny Bradberry. That task was “starkly left undone,” former Senator Joseph Lieberman said in a committee hearing on the failed evacuation. Bradberry himself admitted to senate investigators that his office did not support evacuation for “at-risk populations” because they had “put no plans in place” to do so.

The official death toll puts Katrina fatalities at 1,400 (revised from around 1,800 after a 2023 analysis of medical logs). Seventy-one percent of Louisianians who died were over 60, and 47 percent were over 75. Black New Orleanians, less of whom had personal vehicles when the storm struck, also made up a disproportionate share of the victims. 

Images broadcast around the world in the weeks that followed showed mostly Black families waving white flags from rooftops, Black bodies floating in floodwaters, and Black Americans waiting days in over 90 degree heat at the Superdome and outside the convention center for food, water, and medical attention.

“If this had been a much more affluent place, a place that was not as populated by African Americans, I am firmly convinced that it would have been a different kind of response,” Nagin told the BBC years later. Kanye West—not yet a self-identified Nazi at the time—put it more bluntly, famously going off-script on an NBC telethon to say, “George Bush doesn’t care about Black people.”

While Katrina undoubtedly crossed class lines, with fatalities dispersed through poor, middle-income, and wealthy neighborhoods, the years-long fallout exemplified how those struggling the most often get the least from government recovery programs. The formula Louisiana used to calculate payouts to homeowners under the Road Home, its program to help with rebuilding costs, based each grant on home values prior to the storm—meaning that people living in areas with a median income of $15,000 or under received on average $18,000 less than homeowners in areas where the median was over $75,000, according to an analysis by ProPublica as well as New Orleans’s own Advocate and WWL-TV. Needless to say, as poverty runs on racial lines in Louisiana (and the U.S. more broadly), homeowners in predominantly Black neighborhoods got less money to rebuild.

The failure of all levels of government during Katrina sparked an overhaul of the way America plans for and responds to disasters. The Post-Katrina Emergency Reform Act of 2006 increased the attention given to individuals with disabilities or other special needs in disaster preparedness and response, required the inclusion of people with disabilities in planning and preparedness activities, and called for regulations prohibiting discrimination in disaster assistance.

“Emergency planning that does not make provisions for society’s most vulnerable—the aged, the sick, the poor—is not just operationally unacceptable,” Senator Lieberman said in the evacuation hearing, “it is morally unacceptable.”

Emergency management professionals conceptualize their work in stages: preparedness, response, recovery, and mitigation. Trump’s penalization of policies and programs that consider who (or where) is most vulnerable has already cost communities in every stage. In the early months of his second term, the administration removed web tools that tracked climate impacts on low-income communities and showed where transport and water infrastructure is weak. 

Joshua Saks, the Adaptation Program director at the Georgetown Climate Center, described the move as “turning off the indicator lights” on the government’s dashboard in ways that will undoubtedly hit poor communities hardest. “You’re taking away specific tools or policy mechanisms that are designed to make sure that everyone at high risk gets helped,” he said. 

Since Trump reentered office, FEMA has also stopped offering trainings on how to incorporate the needs of vulnerable groups in preparedness; specifically, two titled “Including People With Disabilities in Disaster Operations” and “Integrating Access & Functional Needs into Emergency Planning,” an official in the California Governor’s Office of Emergency Services (CalOES) told me.

FEMA declined to comment on when or why the agency stopped offering the trainings. In response, CalOES has made some of its own training sessions available to emergency managers nationwide at no cost. 

And, in ending the BRIC grant program and freezing Infrastructure Law funds, Trump undercut communities’ abilities to take on large-scale mitigation projects—undoubtedly the most cost-effective interventions. Studies have found that taxpayers save between $6 and $13 per every $1 spent on mitigation, and that return on investment is only expected to grow as storms increase in frequency and severity. Case in point, against Katrina’s $125 billion in damages, rebuilding New Orleans’s levees to withstand similar storms cost a meager $15 billion.

In rescinding Biden-era memos on the Infrastructure Law, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy described the legislation’s prioritization of resources to communities most in-need as injecting “a social justice and environmental agenda into decisions for critical infrastructure projects,” and in its press release announcing the termination of the BRIC program, FEMA called the program “politicized.”

In reality, these programs supported critical projects across jurisdictions both red and blue in the exact ways experts say we need: They funded long-term, large-scale investments like flood control systems, stormwater management upgrades, and resilient coastal infrastructure. Individual preparedness measures—like fortifying homes or ensuring one’s insurance is up to snuff—may be available to the wealthier among us, but when disasters take roads, bridges, schools, or hospitals out of commission, even those who battened down their own hatches will be in dire straits. 

Programs that support whole community preparedness may be harder and more complicated than individual preparedness measures, but they’re also more holistic: They serve entire populations rather than the few who can afford to be ready. And in the end, those investments are, by every estimate, far, far cheaper than recovering from disasters governments fail to mitigate for.

Under Trump, the federal government’s list of no-go language is expansive. “Vulnerable populations”—which, in the context of disasters, can mean older adults, those with physical or intellectual disabilities, people with chronic conditions, people with limited English proficiency, those dependent on public transit, homeless people, rural residents, or children—is another forbidden term, alongside words like “accessible,” “disabilities,” and “discrimination.” 

But eliminating snippets of “liberal” rhetoric doesn’t eliminate the populations they refer to or the needs they have—just the programs and funding intended to meet those needs. Wiping away the concept of “accessibility” won’t decrease the number of people who use wheelchairs and need “accessible” transportation to evacuate. Avoiding the words “discrimination,” “segregation,” or “racism” won’t change the reality that—due in large part to discrimination, segregation, and racism—Black communities are disproportionately at risk for extreme heat, severe flooding, and hurricanes. And nixing “Indigenous communities” from government usage won’t alter the fact that legacies of forced relocation have left many Indigenous communities in fire-prone rural and remote regions, making Native Americans six times more likely to live in an area with “extreme fire potential” than white people. 

The prioritization of disaster management resources need not focus on race—especially as, given the above, directing resources to those communities most at risk would inherently benefit communities of color—but the federal level has a responsibility to ensure that factors of race don’t deprive communities. Because while disasters don’t discriminate, governments in America certainly have. 

When severe storms and flooding led to a failure of Jackson, Mississippi’s water system in August of 2022, leaving over 150,000 people without safe drinking water for months, sources from the New England Journal of Medicine to Human Rights Watch laid blame on decades of disinvestment in a city whose population is more than 80 percent Black. A 2024 Environmental Protection Agency evaluation subsequently found that the Mississippi State Department of Health “did not consistently enforce the Safe Drinking Water Act or provide adequate oversight for the Jackson public water system.”

Historically, from the Emancipation Proclamation to the Civil Rights Act and beyond, the federal government has stepped in to deliver justice for populations experiencing discrimination on state or local levels. In decimating the federal government, Trump has used its power to do the opposite.

It’s true that not all workplace DEI programs have been effective, and the left’s embrace of DEI has been divisive. Yet neither fact erases the need to plan for at-risk populations, the responsibility to ensure discrimination doesn’t rear its head along the way, or the importance of striving for a more equal society overall. We all know someone who is disproportionately vulnerable to disasters, whether they be a rural resident, an elderly parent, a friend with young children, or a colleague with a disability. Banning consideration of vulnerability in emergency management will not unify the country, but it will hamper governments’ abilities to plan for, rise to, and meet the needs of our loved ones. 

California serves groups disproportionately at risk in disasters through the Office of Access and Functional Needs within CalOES. Vance Taylor, the office chief, told me that despite the current political climate, he’s seen jurisdictions red and blue nationwide still striving to consider the needs of their most vulnerable.

“Once devastation hits that community, those lives are real and the suffering is real,” Taylor said. “So they may not call it an ‘integrative, inclusive’ process, but they will say things like ‘Well, we’re a community here. We take care of our own.’” Taylor said that an out-of-state colleague recently reached out to him, saying that while their office may be “de-woke-ifying” rhetorically, they plan to keep to the same principles. “At the end of the day, people want to help people,” he said. 

Since the Clinton era, Louisiana has held firmly red—voting for Trump by over 60 percent in the last election. But over the last 20 years, the state has stepped up to the tenets of whole community preparedness that the Trump administration is now disposing of. 

Saks, the Georgetown climate adaptation director, said that Louisiana has one of the best plans in the country to protect its coastal system and the people who live there. “Katrina hit other states, but Louisiana got the message, really big time,” he told me. The state is tackling proactive mitigation—like building floodwalls and installing pump systems—and its 2023 coastal plan uses analyses of community vulnerability (including demographic data) to determine project selection.

“They are working at the community scale, and they are not leaving people behind,” Saks said. 

If we cannot study and strategize for realities on the ground today, we will not only be a persistently unequal nation, but one increasingly less prepared to confront the disasters to come. In the words of Johnny Bradberry, former Louisiana Secretary of Transportation, “Those who fail to reap lessons learned from history are doomed to repeat its worst chapters.” 

The post Trump’s Definition of DEI Is a Disaster for Disaster Management appeared first on Washington Monthly.

When Oliver Borchers-Williams was wrapping up his undergrad during the pandemic, he had offers on the table that would have taken him to New York, Washington, D.C., or Los Angeles. 

Instead, the North Dakota-born, Minnesota-bred graduate moved to Nebraska for a public service fellowship that put him to work on broadband access across 16 counties, some of which have fewer than 5,000 residents. Over the next two years that he served as an AmeriCorps-funded fellow in the American Connection Corps program, Borchers-Williams aided in turning a $4 million American Rescue Plan Act allocation into an $11 million investment and ultimately brought broadband to thousands of homes. Today, he’s still in Nebraska with the Southeast Nebraska Development District—now, as its director of broadband development. 

For Borchers-Williams, it’s simple: If he hadn’t done AmeriCorps, he would’ve taken his talent elsewhere—likely, to a city already rich with it. “I would’ve been off doing something else … definitely not in Nebraska,” he told me.

Before the Trump administration slashed AmeriCorps in April, terminating more than 1,000 grants, laying off over 30,000 current workers, and placing 85 percent of its federal staff on administrative leave, members worked across communities both urban and rural in all 50 states. These members represented a vital talent pool, especially in rural and post-industrial regions, overlooked towns, and smaller cities—locales that have experienced generations of skilled youth leaving for more “dynamic states” and major metro areas. In notices to terminated programs, the only reason provided was that their awards “no longer effectuated agency priorities.” 

According to the nonprofit America’s Service Commissions (ASC), thousands working rurally were affected. And in non-metropolitan communities, with less deep pockets, shorter philanthropic benches, and fewer places to turn for interim funding—where AmeriCorps is often the only support system—their absence will hit especially hard. “When you look at rural communities, it is not uncommon that if that AmeriCorps member wasn’t there, the service that they are taking on wouldn’t be happening at all,” said Kristen Bennett, chief executive officer with the nonprofit Service Year Alliance. 

AmeriCorps members serve with nonprofit and community-based organizations, public agencies, or schools. Those in rural communities worked as tutors, in food pantries, and in disaster response, to name just a few categories of services lost. In North Carolina, for example, 52 AmeriCorps workers were rebuilding homes damaged by Hurricane Helene. When the cuts hit, they were all recalled. 

In rural places, however, the losses won’t only be felt in terms of funding or social services, but in terms of people: the members themselves, and the possibility they stay. Time and again, Donald Trump has promised to expand apprenticeship and job training as part of his pledge to the “forgotten men and women” of rural America. But his cuts to AmeriCorps have eliminated thousands of positions that provided just that: on-the-job training and career pathways in industries crucial to rural prosperity. (In addition to gutting AmeriCorps—which, as Paul Glastris has shown, acts as a de facto apprenticeship program for nonprofits—Trump and the GOP are also cutting funding for traditional apprenticeships and other vocational programs, as Bill Scher recently reported.)

Haley Desilet, assistant director of the Rural Health Service Corps in upstate New York, told me that if her AmeriCorps members laid off in April can’t secure (limited) work in their rural placement communities, they’re off to cities. “We’re going to lose them,” she said.

By most measures, rural America is struggling. Rural communities are losing bank branches, hospitals, local news outlets, and grocery stores. Children growing up rurally are more likely to experience economic hardship, witness violence, or live with substance abuse or mental illness in the household. Since the beginning of Trump’s first term, the difference in average household income between metro and nonmetro areas has increased by nearly 30 percent. 

But rural communities also have a more insidious challenge, one underlying—and crucial to addressing—all the rest: They’re losing residents. Between 1910 and 2010, the population living rurally in the United States declined from 54 percent to 19 percent, and half of rural counties today have fewer residents than they did in 2000. Rural counties also skew older, with 5 percent more residents 65 and up than cities. 

This isn’t a simple story of youth flocking to metropolitan centers because they strive to join the ranks of coastal elites. In many cases, there just aren’t clear pathways for returning to or staying in smaller communities. “Coming out of college, even with an Ivy League degree, I would’ve struggled to find a job in Marquette,” said Evan Bonsall, who returned to his hometown of Marquette, Michigan with Lead For America—the nonprofit that operates the American Connection Corps today—in 2019. 

Following decades of deregulation that dismantled the policy levers designed to localize business and check the tendency of a select set of cities to dominate, it’s no wonder that opportunity and upward mobility are sparse in rural America. Service programs are by no means an antidote to geographic inequality, outmigration, or brain drain, but they represent a promising start—one that should be expanded.

“AmeriCorps brings people into towns more used to watching them leave,” Shannon Stober, an AmeriCorps alum, wrote on Instagram in the days following the cuts. “Sometimes, they stay.” When Stober first came to Bozeman, Montana with AmeriCorps in 2002, it was not the billionaire playground shown in Kevin Costner’s Yellowstone. Despite the rest of the country pouring in (Bozeman more than doubled in size between 1990 and 2022), she never left Montana, and has worked in and around service programs in the state for over two decades. 

Unlike the moneyed classes that Stober sees as coming to “extract” Montana’s culture or natural resources, she told me service corps members show up to contribute. They lead with questions rather than answers and often live in frontier communities outside the hubs of wealth, where housing is sparse and drives to groceries long. “Montana is a small town with a long road,” Stober said, adding that there’s almost no community along that road that doesn’t have at least one AmeriCorps alum. 

Nationwide, 43 percent of AmeriCorps alumni stay in their communities of service, with 27 percent hired on to the organization they served with. In some programs, the numbers are stronger: A survey of American Connection Corps alums this fall found that over 50 percent stayed put, and 36 percent were currently employed by their host organization, according to Taylor Stuckert, Lead for America’s chief executive officer. 

When members decide to stay rural, they can fill critical gaps. In her 12 years with the Rural Health Service Corps, Desilet said she has seen alums go on to programs that specialize in rural medicine, with some ultimately becoming the only primary care provider in their area. “Not all of them stay [rural], obviously, but hundreds have,” she said. 

Reasons for settling in vary, but several alums I spoke with described the lasting pull of affecting responsibilities. In rural communities, with less funding and limited human capital, service often means shouldering consequential work. For many, seeing the difference they’ve made encourages them to stay put. Arriving back in Marquette, a 22-year-old Bonsall was told, “Evan, you’re a planner,” and went on to rewrite his county’s overdue master plan. Just weeks after his 23rd birthday, he was elected to the city council, becoming the youngest representative in Marquette history.

Meaningful service “amplifies the connection that you feel to places,” said Borchers-Williams. “It gives you a sense of ownership of some of the progress that’s been made. And, at least for me, it really energized me to keep doing that sort of work.”

Members’ successes can also lead to new jobs in communities. Desilet said that host organizations are often able to persuade funders to pay for newly created positions for recent alumni by touting the impact of their service—saying, essentially, “‘Imagine what we could do if they were full-time, if they could stay.’” A 2018 survey of AmeriCorps alumni across five states found that 37 percent of full-time jobs that host sites offered to alums were newly created.

What’s more, those who stay can bring others to their communities. Mark Peiffer, an alum who served in West Virginia, now heads a food security nonprofit there that has hosted six AmeriCorps members since its founding in 2021. (The nonprofit, called Community Markets Inc., was hosting four members when their service was terminated in the administration’s April cuts.)

Meanwhile, as they help to revitalize forgotten corners of America, alums also contribute their own backgrounds and stories. As Tony Pipa, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, pointed out to me, the U.S. today is notably short on institutions that build relationships across geographic difference, especially from metropolitan to rural areas. Pipa, who hosts the podcast Reimagine Rural and sits on the Lead For America’s board, sees “renewing our vows around public service” as a critical step in combating political polarization.

AmeriCorps’s numbers—over 1 million volunteers since 1994—don’t add up to an all-encompassing solution for regions that have experienced generations of outmigration. But service programs are cost-effective investments, which, if expanded, would go a long way toward reversing the trend. By the most conservative estimate, AmeriCorps generates a $17 return on investment for every federal dollar invested. (ASC puts the figure at $34.)

Service opportunities connect people to places, whether familiar to them, or entirely new, building foundations for lasting love of those places to grow. In my case, the place was familiar. In 2019, I returned to my hometown of Arcata, California—tucked away on the state’s far North Coast, known historically for our bustling logging and marijuana industries—as a member of Lead For America’s first cohort of fellows. Stationed in the city manager’s office, I wrote city plans and grants, hosted community events, and was hired at the end of my two-year term. Service was my path back, when I knew home was where I wanted to be but didn’t see a way to get there. These days, the organization that made it happen for me seems to be in the clear funding-wise; They escaped the agency’s April grant terminations. Hundreds of others weren’t so lucky. 

There was no “rhyme or reason” to DOGE’s decimation of AmeriCorps, Rachel Bruns, ASC’s chief engagement officer, told me, but state programs—which more often serve rural areas—were harder-hit than national ones. Some lost every state-run program they had.

The slashings prompted 24 states and the District of Columbia to sue and, on June 5, a judge ruled in their favor, ordering the restoration of funds to the plaintiff states (and only to the plaintiffs). Because the suit ran roughly down partisan lines, with far more blue states signing on than red, some that lost their entire state portfolios—including Wyoming, Alabama, and Kansas—also lost their opportunity to change that fate. In Wyoming’s case, its congressional delegation has largely backed DOGE funding cuts. 

“President Trump campaigned on draining the swamp—and that’s exactly what DOGE is doing,” Wyoming Senator John Barrasso told Cowboy State Daily. Through AmeriCorps cuts alone, DOGE drained roughly $2.4 million in grants and scholarships from his state, according to ServeWyoming, a nonprofit that administers AmeriCorps grants in the state.

Even where funding has been ordered to be restored, programs will have to be restarted, members reinstated, and grants run through a federal agency that’s operating at only 15 percent staff capacity. 

For the Rural Health Service Corps, the funding pause has been “catastrophic,” according to Desilet, who said that some members have already left. Understandably, they couldn’t wait around for months without pay. On June 26, weeks after the decision, plaintiff states received guidance on how to reinstate members. 

It’s the same story we’ve seen over and over in Trump’s second term: It’s quicker and easier to break things than to put them back together. In rural communities, where it’s harder to get service programs up and running, much less sustain them, picking up the pieces will be particularly tough.

If Republicans intend to address generations of flight from rural America by creating “massive numbers of jobs” and “rebuilding” communities, as Trump recently promised to do, they should be fighting for and expanding AmeriCorps, not cutting it. 

The post How AmeriCorps Kept Young Talent in Rural Communities appeared first on Washington Monthly.