Category: Politics

Small local organizations called Active Clubs have spread widely across the U.S. and internationally, using fitness as a cover for a much more alarming mission. These groups are a new and harder-to-detect form of white supremacist organizing that merges extremist ideology with fitness and combat sports culture.

Active Clubs frame themselves as innocuous workout groups on digital platforms and decentralized networks to recruit, radicalize and prepare members for racist violence. The clubs commonly use encrypted messaging apps such as Telegram, Wire and Matrix to coordinate internally.

For broader propaganda and outreach they rely on alternative social media platforms such as Gab, Odysee, VK and sometimes BitChute. They also selectively use mainstream sites such as Instagram, Facebook, X and TikTok, until those sites ban the clubs.

Active Club members have been implicated in orchestrating and distributing neo-Nazi recruitment videos and manifestos. In late 2023, for instance, two Ontario men, Kristoffer Nippak and Matthew Althorpe, were arrested and charged with distributing materials for the neo-Nazi group Atomwaffen Division and the transnational terrorist group Terrorgram.

Following their arrests, Active Club Canada’s public network went dark, Telegram pages were deleted or rebranded, and the club went virtually silent. Nippak was granted bail under strict conditions, while Althorpe remains in custody.

As a sociologist studying extremism and white supremacy since 1993, I have watched the movement shift from formal organizations to small, decentralized cells – a change embodied most clearly by Active Clubs.

White nationalism 3.0

According to private analysts who track far-right extremist activities, the Active Club network has a core membership of 400 to 1,200 white men globally, plus sympathizers, online supporters and passive members. The clubs mainly target young white men in their late teens and twenties.

Since 2020, Active Clubs have expanded rapidly across the United States, Canada and Europe, including the U.K., France, Sweden and Finland. Precise numbers are hard to verify, but the clubs appear to be spreading, according to The Counter Extremism Project, the Anti-Defamation League, the Southern Poverty Law Center and my own research.

The clubs reportedly operate in at least 25 U.S. states, and potentially as many as 34. Active U.S. chapters reportedly increased from 49 in 2023 to 78 in 2025.

The clubs’ rise reflects a broader shift in white supremacist strategy, away from formal organizations and social movements. In 2020, American neo-Nazi Robert Rundo introduced the concept of “White Nationalism 3.0” – a decentralized, branded and fitness-based approach to extremist organizing.

Rundo previously founded the Rise Above Movement, which was a violent, far-right extremist group in the U.S. known for promoting white nationalist ideology, organizing street fights and coordinating through social media. The organization carried out attacks at protests and rallies from 2016 through 2018.

Active Clubs embed their ideology within apolitical activities such as martial arts and weightlifting. This model allows them to blend in with mainstream fitness communities. However, their deeper purpose is to prepare members for racial conflict.

‘You need to learn how to fight’

Active Club messaging glorifies discipline, masculinity and strength – a “warrior identity” designed to attract young men.

“The active club is not so much a structural organization as it is a lifestyle for those willing to work, risk and sweat to embody our ideals for themselves and to promote them to others,” Rundo explained via his Telegram channel.

“They never were like, ‘You need to learn how to fight so you can beat up people of color.’ It was like, ‘You need to learn how to fight because people want to kill you in the future,’” a former Active Club member told Vice News in 2023.

These cells are deliberately small – often under a dozen members – and self-contained, which gives them greater operational security and flexibility. Each club operates semi-autonomously while remaining connected to the broader ideology and digital network.

Expanding globally and deepening ties

Active Clubs maintain strategic and ideological connections with formal white supremacist groups, including Patriot Front, a white nationalist and neofascist group founded in 2017 by Thomas Rousseau after the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia.

Active Clubs share extremist beliefs with these organizations, including racial hierarchy and the “Great Replacement” theory, which claims white populations are being deliberately replaced by nonwhite immigrants. While publicly presenting as fitness groups, they may collaborate with white supremacist groups on recruitment, training, propaganda or public events.

Figures connected to accelerationist groups – organizations that seek to create social chaos and societal collapse that they believe will lead to a race war and the destruction of liberal democracy – played a role in founding the Active Club network. Along with the Rise Above Movement, they include Atomwaffen Division and another neo-Nazi group, The Base – organizations that repackage violent fascism to appeal to disaffected young white men in the U.S.

Brotherhood as a cover

By downplaying explicit hate symbols and emphasizing strength and preparedness, Active Clubs appeal to a new generation of recruits who may not initially identify with overt racism but are drawn to a culture of hypermasculinity and self-improvement.

Anyone can start a local Active Club chapter with minimal oversight. This autonomy makes it hard for law enforcement agencies to monitor the groups and helps the network grow rapidly.

Shared branding and digital propaganda maintain ideological consistency. Through this approach, Active Clubs have built a transnational network of echo chambers, recruitment pipelines and paramilitary-style training in parks and gyms.

Club members engage in activities such as combat sports training, propaganda dissemination and ideological conditioning. Fight sessions are often recorded and shared online as recruitment tools.

Members distribute flyers, stickers and online content to spread white supremacist messages. Active Clubs embed themselves in local communities by hosting events, promoting physical fitness, staging public actions and sharing propaganda.

Potential members first see propaganda on encrypted apps such as Telegram or on social media. The clubs recruit in person at gyms, protests and local events, vetting new members to ensure they share the group’s beliefs and can be trusted to maintain secrecy.

From fringe to functioning network

Based on current information from the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism, there are 187 active chapters within the Active Club Network across 27 countries – a 25% increase from late 2023. The Crowd Counting Consortium documented 27 protest events involving Active Clubs in 2022-2023.

However, precise membership numbers remain difficult to ascertain. Some groups call themselves “youth clubs” but share similar ideas and aesthetics and engage in similar activities.

Active Club members view themselves as defenders of Western civilization and masculine virtue. From their perspective, their activities represent noble resistance rather than hate. Members are encouraged to stay secretive, prepare for societal collapse and build a network of committed, fit men ready to act through infiltration, activism or violence.

Hiding in plain sight

Law enforcement agencies, researchers and civil society now face a new kind of domestic threat that wears workout clothes instead of uniforms.

Active Clubs work across international borders, bound by shared ideas and tactics and a common purpose. This is the new white nationalism: decentralized, modernized, more agile and disguised as self-improvement. What appears to be a harmless workout group may be a gateway to violent extremism, one pushup at a time.

Art Jipson does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

​Politics + Society – The Conversation

The fate of Lisa Cook, who is fighting attempts by President Donald Trump to remove her from the Federal Reserve’s Board of Governors, has huge implications for a keystone of good economic policy: central bank independence.

At the heart of her firing attempt – and other moves to undermine the Fed by the Trump administration – is a power struggle. Central banks, which are public institutions that manage a country’s currency and its monetary policy, have an extraordinary amount of power. By controlling the flow of money and credit in a country, they can affect economic growth, inflation, employment and financial stability.

These are powers that many politicians would like to control or at least manipulate. That’s because monetary policy can provide governments with economic boosts at key times, such as around elections or during periods of falling popularity.

The problem is that short-lived, politically motivated moves may be detrimental to the long-term economic well-being of a nation. They may, in other words, saddle the economy with problems further down the line.

That is why central banks across the globe tend to receive significant leeway to set interest rates independently and free from the electoral wishes of politicians.

In fact, monetary policymaking that is data-driven and technocratic, rather than politically motivated, has since the early 1990s been seen as the gold standard of governance of national finances and has largely achieved its main purpose of keeping inflation relatively low and stable.

But despite independence being seen to work, central banks over the past decade have come under increased pressure from politicians.

Trump is one recent example. In his first term as president, he criticized his own choice to head the U.S. Federal Reserve and demanded lower interest rates.

Attacks on the Fed have accelerated in Trump’s second administration. In April 2025, Trump lashed out at Fed Chair Jerome Powell in an online post accusing him of being “TOO LATE AND WRONG” on interest rate cuts, while suggesting that the central banker’s “termination cannot come fast enough!” Unable to force Powell out, Trump has now brought the power struggle to a head with his firing of Cook, nominally over allegations that the Fed governor falsified records in a mortgage application. Cook has said that the president does not have the grounds or authority to fire her.

As political economists, we are not surprised to see politicians try to exert influence on central banks. For one thing, central banks remain part of the government bureaucracy, and independence granted to them can always be reversed – either by changing laws or backtracking on established practices.

Moreover, the reason politicians may want to interfere in monetary policy is that low interest rates remain a potent, quick method to boost an economy. And while politicians know that there are costs to besieging an independent central bank – financial markets may react negatively or inflation may flare up – short-term control of a powerful policy tool can prove irresistible.

Legislating independence

If monetary policy is such a coveted policy tool, how have central banks held off politicians and stayed independent? And is this independence being eroded?

Broadly, central banks are protected by laws that offer long tenures to their leadership, allow them to focus policy primarily on inflation, and severely limit lending to the rest of the government.

Of course, such legislation cannot anticipate all future contingencies, which may open the door for political interference or for practices that break the law. And sometimes central bankers are unceremoniously fired.

However, laws do keep politicians in line. For example, even in authoritarian countries, laws protecting central banks from political interference have helped reduce inflation and restricted central bank lending to the government.

In our own research, we have detailed the ways that laws have insulated central banks from the rest of the government, but also the recent trend of eroding this legal independence.

Politicizing appointees

Around the world, appointments to central bank leadership are political – elected politicians select candidates based on career credentials, political affiliation and, importantly, their dislike or tolerance of inflation.

But lawmakers in different countries exercise different degrees of political control.

A 2025 study shows that the large majority of central bank leaders – about 70% – are appointed by the head of government alone or with the intervention of other members of the executive branch. This ensures that the preferences of the central bank are closer to the government’s, which can boost the central bank’s legitimacy in democratic countries, but at the risk of permeability to political influence.

Alternatively, appointments can involve the legislative power or even the central bank’s own board. In the U.S., while the president nominates members of the Federal Reserve Board, the Senate can and has rejected unconventional or incompetent candidates.

Moreover, even if appointments are political, many central bankers stay in office long after the people who appointed them have been voted out. By the end of 2023, the most common length of the governors’ appointment is five years, and in 41 countries the legal mandate was six years or longer. Powell is set to stay on as Fed chair until his term expires in 2026. The Fed chair position has traditionally been protected by law, as Powell himself acknowledged in November 2024: “We’re not removable except for cause. We serve very long terms, seemingly endless terms. So we’re protected into law. Congress could change that law, but I don’t think there’s any danger of that.”

In the 2000s, several countries shortened the tenure of their central banks’ governors to four or five years. Sometimes, this was part of broader restrictions in central bank independence, as was the case in Iceland in 2001, Ghana in 2002 and Romania in 2004.

The low inflation objective

As of 2023, all but six central banks globally had low inflation as their main goal. Yet many central banks are required by law to try to achieve additional and sometimes conflicting goals, such as financial stability, full employment or support for the government’s policies.

This is the case for 38 central banks that either have the explicit dual mandate of price stability and employment or more complex goals. In Argentina, for example, the central bank’s mandate is to provide “employment and economic development with social equity.”

Conflicting objectives can open central banks to politicization. In the U.S. the Federal Reserve has a dual mandate of stable prices and maximum sustainable employment. These goals are often complementary, and economists have argued that low inflation is a prerequisite for sustainable high levels of employment.

But in times of overlapping high inflation and high unemployment, such as in the late 1970s or when the COVID-19 crisis was winding down in 2022, the Fed’s dual mandate has become active territory for political wrangling.

Since 2000, at least 23 countries have expanded the focus of their central banks beyond just inflation.

Limits on government lending

The first central banks were created to help secure finance for governments fighting wars. But today, limiting lending to governments is at the core of protecting price stability from unsustainable fiscal spending.

History is dotted with the consequences of not doing so. In the 1960s and 1970s, for example, central banks in Latin America printed money to support their governments’ spending goals. But it resulted in massive inflation while not securing growth or political stability.

Today, limits on lending are strongly associated with lower inflation in the developing world. And central banks with high levels of independence can reject a government’s financing requests or dictate the terms of loans.

Yet over the past two decades, almost 40 countries have made their central banks less able to limit central government funding. In the more extreme examples – such as in Belarus, Ecuador or even New Zealand – they have turned the central bank into a potential financier for the government.

Scapegoating central bankers

In recent years, governments have tried to influence central banks by pushing for lower interest rates, making statements criticizing bank policy or calling for meetings with central bank leadership.

At the same time, politicians have blamed the same central bankers for a number of perceived failings: not anticipating economic shocks such as the 2007-09 financial crisis; exceeding their authority with quantitative easing; or creating massive inequality or instability while trying to save the financial sector.

And since mid-2021, major central banks have struggled to keep inflation low, raising questions from populist and antidemocratic politicians about the merits of an arm’s-length relationship.

But chipping away at central bank independence, as Trump appears to be doing with his open criticism of the Fed chair and his removal of a member of the bank’s Board of Governors, is a historically sure way to high inflation.

This is an updated version of an article that was originally published on June 14, 2024.

The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

​Politics + Society – The Conversation

George Orwell’s dystopian novels “Animal Farm” and “1984” have remained popular in the U.S. ever since their initial publication in the 1940s.

What’s less well known is that in the years before the publication of “Animal Farm” and “1984,” Orwell’s writing often focused primarily on other themes including work, poverty, anti-imperialism and democratic socialism.

In fact, Orwell remained a committed democratic socialist until his death in 1950.

“Animal Farm” tells the tale of a group of farm animals who take ownership of their farm from their human master by means of rebellion, but who eventually end up re-enslaved by the farm’s pigs. “1984” tells the story of one man’s failed attempt to resist totalitarian rule in a hypothetical future dictatorship set in Orwell’s home country of England.

Part of these books’ initial appeal came from their critiques of Soviet communism as the U.S. was entering the Cold War. Part of why the books seem to have remained popular are their anti-totalitarian and pro-freedom messages, which have been praised by people across the U.S. political spectrum.

Orwell, who died of tuberculosis at age 46, is a writer famous for the ideas that preoccupied him in the final years of his life. His journey to those ideas via his thinking about work, poverty and democratic socialism, among other themes, may surprise those familiar with only his dystopian fiction.

Communism and socialism not synonymous

Orwell’s democratic socialism may surprise some Americans for at least two reasons.

First, when many Americans talk about politics, they often treat communism and socialism as interchangeable terms. How could Orwell, the great satirist of Soviet communism, have been a socialist?

The answer is that communism and socialism are not synonymous.

Orwell denied that Soviet communism was a form of socialism. Instead, he saw Soviet communism as totalitarianism merely masquerading as socialism.

Orwell claimed in his 1937 book, “The Road to Wigan Pier,” that “Socialism means justice and common decency” and a commitment to “the overthrow of tyranny.” Elsewhere in the same book, he maligned communism’s anti-democratic behavior as like “sawing off the branch you are sitting on.”

A second reason that Orwell’s commitment to democratic socialism may surprise some is because in the U.S., democratic socialism is often associated with the nation’s most left-leaning political figures, such as Sen. Bernie Sanders, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani. And Orwell is often not viewed in popular imagination as a political progressive.

Yet, by American standards, Orwell was very politically progressive. He argued in “The Lion and the Unicorn” that his home country of England ought to nationalize mines, railways, banks and major industries. He also argued for limits on income inequality. Some of these policies run to the left of even most U.S. democratic socialists.

For Orwell, such left-leaning economic policies were not only compatible with, but required, a strong commitment to the central pillars of democracy, such as intellectual freedom, free speech, a free press and genuine rule by the people.

I think the best way to understand how these aspects of Orwell’s political views came together is to look at the evolution of his writing.

Work and poverty

Two of the most important themes in Orwell’s first decade as a professional writer, the 1930s, are work and poverty.

These are what he focused on most in his first book, the autobiographical “Down and Out in Paris and London,” published in 1933. There he recounts his experiences living among the poor and unemployed in France and England in the late 1920s and early 1930s.

The book is full of pithy insights, such as “poverty frees people from ordinary standards of behavior, just as money frees people from work,” and “the average millionaire is only the average dishwasher dressed in a new suit.”

The latter quote highlights one of the key ethical and political messages of “Down and Out”: It is primarily social and political circumstances, and not moral character, that separates the rich from the poor.

Another key theme in “Down and Out” is that without a certain amount of leisure, people are incapable of doing certain kinds of thinking.

For example, Orwell argued that the reason the kitchen staff in French restaurants had not gone on strike or formed a union was because “they do not think, because they have no leisure for it; their life has made slaves of them.”

Orwell blamed the owners of such establishments for exploiting their workers. As he saw it, at most upscale restaurants “the staff work more and the customers pay more” and “no one benefits except the proprietor.”

In multiple novels and works of nonfiction in the 1930s, Orwell continued to explore the idea that social and political circumstances robbed people of the time they needed to engage in tasks like serious thinking and writing.

Imperialism and democratic socialism

One of Orwell’s earliest and most enduring political commitments was anti-imperialism – opposition to extending national power by means of colonialization or military force.

Orwell was of English and French descent. He was raised in England, but born in India in 1903. His father worked for the British Civil Service, which at the time exercised administrative control over India as a British colony.

Following his father’s footsteps, he spent five years working for the Imperial Police in Burma, now Myanmar. He came away from that experience with a deep hatred of imperialism. He drew upon this in his novel “Burmese Days” and his essays “A Hanging” and “Shooting an Elephant.”

In “The Road to Wigan Pier,” he wrote, “I hated the imperialism I was serving with a bitterness which I probably cannot make clear.”

“Wigan Pier” also displays Orwell’s commitment to democratic socialism. In the book’s first half, he reports on the dismal working and living conditions of the poor and unemployed in northern England. In the second half, he uses that material to make a case for democratic socialism.

In Orwell’s view, in deciding whether to embrace democratic socialism one had “to decide whether things at present are tolerable or not tolerable.” He concluded that present conditions were not tolerable and that democratic socialism was the way to make things better.

Propaganda and totalitarianism

Orwell developed into a sharp critic of Soviet Russia after witnessing how they used propaganda to mislead much of Europe about the Spanish Civil War. He discussed this in his book “Homage to Catalonia,” which recounts his time during the Spanish Civil War as a volunteer soldier fighting with the Spanish left against Gen. Francisco Franco, who would go on to become the country’s longtime dictator.

From Orwell’s perspective, communism highlighted the risks of how socialist revolution could go wrong. He thought that, without care, attempts at socialist revolution could create opportunities for a new form of oppression through totalitarianism.

He saw that totalitarianism was not limited to either the political left or right. Soviet communism represented left-wing totalitarianism, while Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy represented right-wing totalitarianism.

Thus, a major preoccupation in his final years was trying to warn people about the risks of falling into totalitarianism during times of political upheaval. Orwell wanted radical political change, but the change he wanted was in the service of increasing freedom and democracy, not decreasing it.

“Animal Farm” is a story about falling into autocracy. “1984” is a story about just how much autocracy can take from us.

But the things Orwell wanted to preserve, such as freedom of the mind, were also things that he thought were at risk from circumstances like poverty, oppressive working conditions and imperialism.

Research for this article was supported by a faculty fellowship from the Douglas A. Fraser Center for Workplace Issues at Wayne State University.

​Politics + Society – The Conversation

Hurricane Katrina looms large in the history of American emergency management, both for what went wrong as the disaster unfolded and for the policy changes it triggered.

As the nation looks back on the disaster 20 years later, I believe as a crisis and emergency management specialist that it is more important than ever to remember Katrina’s lessons to avoid repeating past mistakes.

When Katrina hit New Orleans on Aug. 29, 2005, its storm surge broke through levees protecting the city. Water quickly poured into low-lying neighborhoods, flooding houses up to their rooftops and inundating an estimated 80% of the city. People who could not evacuate before the storm and were lucky enough to escape to their roofs were stranded for days in some cases.

Once the water had receded and the death toll counted, it became clear that nearly 1,400 people had died as a result of this devastating storm. The hurricane did more than $100 billion in damage, equivalent to about US$170 billion today when adjusted for inflation.

While there were many unsung heroes during Katrina, the tragic missteps and missed opportunities at all levels of government emergency management are what no emergency manager ever wants to repeat. The response failed in many areas, from broken communications among federal, state and local agencies to the reported horrors in the Superdome as 16,000 evacuees faced failed generators, poor security, dwindling supplies and overflowing toilets.

Three lessons from Katrina stand out today as the Trump administration talks about dismantling the Federal Emergency Management Agency and putting more responsibility for disaster management on local and state agencies.

1. Emergency response is only as strong as the weakest links

FEMA took the brunt of the criticism after Hurricane Katrina. However, serious analyses of what went wrong recognize that good disaster response requires effective governance at all levels.

Before FEMA could spend significant money to deploy people and aid, the state of Louisiana had to request a presidential disaster declaration. However, tensions between the state and federal governments reportedly delayed President George W. Bush’s approval, according to a Senate committee report assessing the response. The committee also found that New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin’s decision to first issue a voluntary evacuation and not issue a mandatory order until a day before the storm cost precious time.

Once the storm hit, communication and coordination fell apart.

Vehicles badly needed for the disaster response were damaged by the storm. Problems with communication systems and a breakdown in situation reporting from local law enforcement and rescue services left state and federal government decision-makers flying blind, without up-to-date reports of conditions on the ground. Media reports of a “war zone” in New Orleans exaggerated the extent of public disorder and threats to responders. That further delayed the arrival of federal military and National Guard assistance – and hindered some local efforts – because it required additional precautions for coping with a hostile security environment.

As challenging as the information environment was during Hurricane Katrina, it is more difficult now. Social media, hyper-partisanship and deliberate misinformation attempts complicate emergency response and recovery efforts.

If the federal government now proposes to push more responsibility for disaster relief to the state and local levels, emergency managers at those levels will be taking on highly complex disasters in a potentially toxic information environment with less support.

States, counties and cities vary greatly in their readiness to shoulder this responsibility.

2. Leave no one behind

An enduring image of Hurricane Katrina was the plight of residents who lacked transportation and took shelter at the New Orleans Superdome, where conditions quickly deteriorated.

Another was the harrowing tales of gravely ill patients and exhausted medical staff stranded at Memorial Medical Center for five days without power as temperatures rose and the lower floors flooded.

These extreme predicaments and the deaths of people trapped in flooding homes in the Lower Ninth Ward were powerful reminders of the vulnerability of many low-income, elderly and ill residents who were unable to get out ahead of the disaster.

A few years after Katrina, Obama administration FEMA Administrator Craig Fugate and his team placed a new focus on forging a “whole community” emergency management strategy. It is designed to include marginalized populations in emergency planning and ensure that those who aren’t able to evacuate due to disability or financial limitations are not forgotten during disasters.

Government guidance now states that emergency mass care shelters be in buildings that people who have trouble walking can navigate easily. Emergency information is typically distributed in multiple languages, accessible for people with impaired hearing or vision, and written in ways adapted to the cultures and circumstances of minority groups.

However, many of these advances are in jeopardy today as the Trump administration seeks to eliminate initiatives that might be considered DEI – diversity, equity and inclusion. The misery and death caused by Hurricane Katrina should serve as vivid reminders of why many existing emergency management programs emphasize the needs of socially vulnerable populations.

3. Professional emergency management is essential

The face of the federal government’s shortcomings in responding to Hurricane Katrina was then-FEMA Administrator Michael Brown. Initially, he was publicly praised by President Bush, who declared: “Brownie, you’re doing a heck of a job!”

But Brown was not a professional emergency manager. His prior on-the-job experience in the role did not prove sufficient in this extreme situation. As the problems with the response to Katrina became increasingly evident, Brown proved unable to provide effective leadership in the crisis and was forced out.

Part of the legislative legacy of Katrina is the Post-Katrina Emergency Management Reform Act of 2006. It requires that FEMA chief administrators have extensive knowledge of emergency management and substantial relevant executive leadership experience. All of the subsequent confirmed heads of FEMA were once state emergency management directors or had been in charge of emergency management in major cities.

However, those requirements do not always apply to acting administrators. In his second term, President Donald Trump has had two acting FEMA administrators – Cameron Hamilton and David Richardson. Both lacked prior experience managing major disasters on a statewide or comparable basis. Hamilton was abruptly fired after suggesting to Congress that FEMA should not be eliminated. Richardson’s leadership was quickly tested during the Texas flash flood tragedy on July 4, 2025, that killed more than 135 people.

The shortcomings of the response to Hurricane Katrina also led to wider adoption of the National Incident Management System, which helps all levels of government, nongovernmental organizations and the private sector work together in an emergency.

If more responsibility for emergency management devolves to states in the future, they will need to cultivate the ability to coordinate and collaborate effectively to respond to disasters.

Looking ahead

Leaders and organizations such as FEMA have learned from crises such as Hurricane Katrina.

However, political priorities come and go, staff turns over, and generations pass the torch to their successors. Leaders and organizations can forget critical lessons from the past.

As efforts to reform – and possibly rebalance – the U.S. emergency management system continue during the Trump administration, it is essential to remember and heed the costly lessons of Hurricane Katrina.

Eric Stern has recently received funding from DHS Science and Technology for an extreme weather informatics project and from NOAA for work on extreme heat events. He has lectured at the National Emergency Management Executive Academy and many similar programs around the country and the world.

​Politics + Society – The Conversation

CHICAGO — Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker pushed back Monday on a threat by President Donald Trump to deploy federal troops in Chicago to fight crime, calling it “unconstitutional and unamerican,” and designed more for theater than public safety.

Pritzker, speaking at a news conference along with top Democratic officials from across the state and with the iconic Chicago skyline in the background, said there is no justification for Trump to use soldiers to patrol the city.

“We have crime like other cities do, but let’s be clear, we are actually in better shape than the 30 biggest cities across the United States,” the governor said. “It’s important to understand that the president of the United States is doing this for theatrics.”

Pritzker’s comments came hours after Trump, speaking to reporters at the White House, renewed his threat to make Chicago the next focus of his effort to draw public attention to crime even as violent incidents fall back to pre-pandemic levels throughout the nation.

No request for federal assistance has been made, Pritzker said — nor has any communication come from the Trump administration.

“No one from the White House or the executive branch has reached out to me or to the mayor,” the governor said. “No one has reached out to our staffs. No effort has been made to coordinate or to ask for our assistance in identifying any actions that might be helpful to us.”

While most officials in a state dominated by Democrats agree with Pritzker, the leader of the Chicago Police union, John Catanzara, told POLITICO that the department is short 1,000 officers and could use reinforcements. “More manpower is still needed,” he said.

The governor, who arrived by water taxi to emphasize the city’s vibrancy and beauty, made his remarks days after Trump floated the idea of federal intervention in Chicago.

“If we need to, we’re going to do the same thing in Chicago, which is a disaster,” Trump said at a White House briefing last week, referencing prior National Guard deployments. On Monday, Trump ratcheted up his rhetoric, suggesting the federal government may need to “barge in” on Illinois.

Pritzker, who was joined by Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson, Sens. Tammy Duckworth and Dick Durbin, Illinois Attorney General Kwame Raoul and numerous city and state officials, civic and faith leaders, said Illinois has the authority and the resolve to block any attempt to override local control.

They vowed to fight any National Guard action in the courts, and they urged protests to be peaceful.

Johnson echoed Pritzker in criticizing Trump’s motives. The mayor noted that crime was on the decline in Chicago, down more than 30 percent. “We are being targeted because of who we are as a city,” said Johnson, pointing to Chicago’s progressive roots in labor and immigration.

Chicago Alderwoman Samantha Nugent, who previously worked with the Cook County Department of Homeland Security, said she’s concerned that the National Guard potentially converging in Chicago would only create confusion because there would be a question about “who’s controlling the mission.” The Chicago Police superintendent is in charge of the chain of command, not the Guard, she said.

The high-profile press conference followed Johnson speaking out against Trump over the weekend, telling MSNBC that if the president moves ahead with his threat, it would be a “flagrant violation of our Constitution.”

Over the weekend, former Chicago mayors Rahm Emanuel and Lori Lightfoot also criticized Trump.

“When you look at what he did in D.C., he’s not going to actually deal with crime,” Emanuel said on CNN. “This is an attempt to deal with cities that are welcoming cities, known as sanctuary cities, and deal with immigration.”

Trump also said a group of African American “ladies” are “screaming” for the Trump administration to address violence in Chicago. It was an apparent reference to Chicago Flips Red, whose members have criticized Johnson’s handling of the large influx of migrants who needed housing and other services during the Biden administration.

​Politics

Democrats have been warning for months that President Donald Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” would wreak havoc on state budgets.

But Colorado is the first state to call lawmakers back to the Capitol to grapple with the ramifications of the massive federal tax and spending bill.

In a special session that began Thursday, the Democratic-led state Legislature is considering bills to cover a budget gap of roughly $1 billion by increasing taxes, reallocating funding and tapping the state’s reserves — as well as set the stage for future cuts. The session — which is also attempting to address artificial intelligence policy — is expected to continue at least through Tuesday.

“The only reason we’re even talking about this is because HR1 passed,” Democratic Gov. Jared Polis told POLITICO on Thursday, referring to the GOP megabill. “[It] not only increased the federal deficit by trillions of dollars, but also increased the state deficit by hundreds of millions of dollars.”

Republicans top legislative priority — or HR1, passed in July — extended Trump’s 2017 tax cuts and made major cuts to social safety net programs. The bill’s passage came after most states had already set their budgets for the current fiscal year, and now many have been scrambling to sort out how it impacts their finances this year and down the road.

Colorado’s response will likely serve as a preview of how other states will address the financial ramifications in the coming months.

The financial adjustments being made by Colorado lawmakers in the special session only address the short-term impacts of the bill, and legislators say they are only the first of many changes their state will undergo as a result of the legislation.

Colorado legislators and the governor told POLITICO that the special session was necessary because changes to the federal tax code — which the state’s tax code is tied to — are estimated to reduce the state’s income tax revenue by as much as $1.2 billion. That could create a deficit of about $750 million in the budget passed in April. Add on funds to fill in cuts to school lunch programs and to soften the looming rise of health insurance premiums due to smaller federal subsidies and it’s estimated that Colorado faces a financial gap of more than $1 billion.

To address the shortfall, legislators are proposing a range of solutions: selling tax credits to increase funds for health care, raising taxes on the state’s highest earners, ending some tax incentives and reallocating funds from less critical programs like the reintroduction of gray wolves.

“Can we fix it 100 percent? No,” House Majority Leader Monica Duran said in an interview on Thursday. “But we’re trying to make it less painful for everyone.”

Sarah Mercer of Denver-based lobbying firm Brownstein Hyatt Farber Schreck describes the funding strategy as “a third, a third, a third” — filling equal portions of the budget hole by closing tax exemptions, tapping the state’s reserves and cutting costs.

The budget cuts, however, would come later, through a bill already advancing through the Legislature that would allow Polis to propose mid-year cuts if the state cannot meet its fiscal obligations. The governor would still need to work with the legislature’s Joint Budget Committee to enact those cuts.

“It gives the governor some pretty unusual powers,” Mercer explained. “What is really the full scope of this new power, and when else might it be used in the future?”

Colorado Republicans, meanwhile, are accusing Democrats — who hold a trifecta in the state government — of mishandling the state budget and then trying to pass the blame onto Washington.

“For years, Democrats at the Capitol have spent beyond their means and ignored Republican solutions. Now, they want taxpayers to bail them out,” House Minority Leader Rose Pugliese said in a press release. Colorado House Republicans’ communications team did not respond to an interview request.

Mercer said some of the shortfall may stem from funding that states like Colorado received from Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act — which was used to fund some programs and has since run out.

“I think [lawmakers] did try to think through and craft programs that were limited,” Mercer said. “[But] I think our government and our budget did grow a little bit as well during that time.”

State Rep. Shannon Bird, vice chair of the Joint Budget Committee who is vying for the congressional seat currently held by GOP Rep. Gabe Evans, pushed back on the notion that one-time federal dollars led to this problem.

“To the extent that we understood funds to be one time … Colorado, I believe, did a very fair job of using that money either for infrastructure investment or just to fund one time grants,” Bird said, pointing the finger instead at withheld funding that the state expected to be ongoing, like school grants and Medicaid dollars.

Why Colorado faces this financial dilemma

The Colorado tax code’s direct relationship to the federal tax code led it to this point. The state automatically adopts any changes to federal tax code, and also is one of just a handful of states that uses federal tax rates for state taxes. That means the minute the federal tax code changes, so do Colorado’s taxes — leaving a shortfall where the state expected a surplus.

To make matters more complicated, in 1992 Colorado passed the taxpayer bill of rights. It requires the state to ask permission from the voters for any tax changes via ballot measure. When the state increased taxes on cigarettes and other tobacco products to pay for universal preschool in 2020, for example, voters had to approve the proposal via ballot measure before it became law.

To that end, the Legislature over the weekend approved a bill that would allow leftover revenue from a ballot measure already approved for November — which would increase taxes on residents with taxable incomes over $300,000 — to be used for school meals. If approved by voters, it could provide an additional $95 million annually to the state’s healthy school meals program, Healthy School Meals For All. The legislature on Friday also approved a bill to fund Medicaid reimbursements for Planned Parenthood.

The state is also concerned about a possible increase to health insurance premiums. Because Congress has yet to renew higher federal health care subsidies for Obamacare plans that expire at the end of this year, the costs for consumers are expected to substantially increase. Colorado’s insurance division estimated in July that premiums would rise 28 percent on average in the state and as much as 38 percent in the state’s more rural western slope.

“I’m hopeful that the United States Congress takes action and renews the [health care] tax credits,” Polis said. There has been some talk on Capitol Hill of finding another vehicle for the subsidies, but it’s unclear if Congress will act before the year’s end, and Colorado lawmakers are looking to soften the blow by selling tax credits.

“We’ll do what we can,” Polis added. “It’s not going to negate those huge increases, but it’ll at least reduce them.”

The Legislature is also considering removing some tax incentives, including breaks for companies that employ a certain percentage of Coloradans and deductions that allow retailers to cover the cost of collecting taxes, to increase the state’s revenues.

But there are many more details that Colorado will need to iron out in the months and years to come.

“A lot of these cuts will likely need to be ongoing cuts, not just for the current year,” Polis said, explaining that they couldn’t continue to dip into the reserve indefinitely. “The reserve is there for a recession. And this is not a recession. This is caused by HR1.”

​Politics

Texas Republicans approved a new, aggressively gerrymandered congressional map early Saturday morning, moving forward with a power grab pushed by President Donald Trump.

The GOP-controlled state Senate approved the map on a party-line vote after hours of debate that began Friday morning. Republicans used a procedural move to block a Democratic senator’s plans to filibuster the bill, forcing it to a vote — one final show of force from GOP leadership after weeks of partisan fighting.

The map could ultimately help flip as many as five seats for the GOP starting with next year’s midterms. Republican Gov. Greg Abbott is set to quickly sign the legislation, capping off a turbulent few weeks in Texas over Republicans’ now-successful effort to further skew the maps in the GOP’s favor ahead of the 2030 census.

Under the new map, Republicans in Texas are aiming to earn 30 House seats — up from their current 25 — as they attempt to hold onto control of the chamber in what could be an unfavorable environment for them next year. Republicans currently have just a three-seat majority in the House, so the new Texas map alone will significantly affect their chances.

The unusual offcycle redistricting effort in Texas has set off a contentious national tit-for-tat. California formally launched its preemptive retaliation on Thursday, with lawmakers approving a ballot measure redrawing the state’s map to create five new Democratic seats to offset Texas. That measure — which would temporarily circumvent the state’s independent redistricting commission — now goes to voters on the November ballot, a gerrymander Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom has cast as necessary to preserve democracy.

But Republicans could soon have the advantage as a redistricting battle escalates nationwide: The White House is pressuring other GOP states, like Indiana and Missouri, to take on their own redistricting gambits. Democratic governors in New York and Illinois have vowed to fight back, but have so far taken no concrete steps to do so.

The National Redistricting Foundation, an arm of the Democratic Party’s main redistricting organization, immediately challenged the new map in federal court.

The complaint — a supplement to a long-running lawsuit over the state’s now-outdated, post-2020 census map — lodges a bevy of challenges against the new lines, including that it is an unconstitutional racial gerrymander and that it violated the Voting Rights Act.

“The Texas Legislature subordinated other redistricting criteria — including partisan advantage — to race” in drawing the new maps, the challengers allege.

The case, in particular, homes in on the new map dismantling so-called coalition districts, which are districts where no single racial group makes up a majority, but Black and Latino voters collectively do. Democrats argue that the “intentional targeting” of those districts would be impossible to do without taking race into account.

Republicans, however, contend that they redrew the districts explicitly for partisan purposes and did not account for race or ethnicity.

“I did not take race into consideration when drawing this map,” said state Sen. Phil King, the Texas Republican who wrote the redistricting legislation, at a committee hearing. “I drew it based on what would better perform for Republican candidates.”

The Trump administration’s Department of Justice spurred the redistricting into motion by arguing Texas’ previous map was unconstitutional because it contained several of these types of coalition districts.

At the time, the DOJ cited a 2024 ruling by the 5th Circuit — which controls Texas-based cases — that found that the Voting Rights Act does not allow for distinct minority groups to join together to make a claim, meaning mapmakers were not required to draw these coalition districts. That ruling, however, did not find that coalition districts were unconstitutional as the Justice Department asserted.

Racial gerrymandering claims are one of the last remaining ways to challenge a political map in federal court, since the U.S. Supreme Court in 2019 barred them from policing partisan gerrymandering. The new map — which was drawn using 2024 election data — creates four new majority-Hispanic districts, drawn to reflect Hispanic voters’ shift toward the GOP.

The Voting Right Act has faced significant legal challenges, with the Supreme Court gradually chipping away at the landmark civil rights-era legislation over the last decade and a half. Two significant pieces of federal litigation — including one the Supreme Court will hear in October — could further weaken the VRA, potentially undermining some of the claims in Texas.

The Democrats’ lawsuit also challenges the premise of voluntary mid-decade redistricting — which is legal in many states — by bringing a “malapportionment” claim, which argues that some voters are more powerful than others because the congressional districts are not equal in population when they were drawn this week.

“Texas’s population has grown by nearly five percent since the 2020 census — more than any other state in the country,” the suit read. “Although states generally ‘operate under the legal fiction’ that plans remain constitutionally apportioned for ten years after they are adjusted for a given census, states should not get the benefit of that legal fiction when they choose to engage in unnecessary, mid-decade redistricting.”

Before the maps passed, Democrats asked a federal district court to be prepared to quickly rule on the legality of the new maps. Lawyers are set to conference with the court on Wednesday to discuss that request.

Texas House Democrats protested the maps by leaving the state for two weeks, depriving Republicans of the ability to conduct legislative business. Those lawmakers returned on Monday — clearing the way for Republicans to quickly pass the legislation. Democrats racked up thousands of dollars in fines for ducking their legislative duties, and when they returned, House Speaker Dustin Burrows sought one last punishment: He ordered law enforcement to chaperone the Democrats to ensure they would be present for passage of the map.

One Democrat, state Rep. Nicole Collier, refused to sign a permission slip allowing an officer to monitor her movements, instead staging a three-day sit-in on the House floor.

“When I press that button to vote, I know these maps will harm my constituents — I won’t just go along quietly with their intimidation or their discrimination,” Collier said from the chamber.

The Senate passed its map on Saturday morning after thwarting an attempted filibuster by another Democrat who planned to stage one last protest against the legislation. But Republicans made a procedural move that ended debate and the chamber approved the map along party lines.

​Politics

The redistricting war is officially on.

After weeks of bluster from dueling governors and state lawmakers, California and Texas raced forward with parallel action this week to draw new congressional maps, setting into motion a national redistricting fight that could upend the midterms and determine control of the House.

Texas Republicans on Saturday passed a new map that will help the GOP flip as many as five House seats — a partisan play at the hand of President Donald Trump. On Thursday, California Democratic lawmakers and Gov. Gavin Newsom preemptively agreed to send a retaliatory ballot measure to voters — the first step in potentially offsetting Texas’ maneuver by creating new Democratic-leaning seats.

The nation’s two largest states had fired the opening salvo in what is likely to become an intense and protracted redistricting campaign by both parties to grasp power in Washington. Now other red and blue state governors face pressure to follow their lead and aggressively gerrymander their congressional maps.

Republicans hold a clear advantage in the arms race: The GOP is poised to move forward with redistricting in Florida, Ohio, Missouri and Indiana, which could yield at least half a dozen more seats. Democrats, meanwhile, have struggled to get gerrymandering efforts moving in blue states beyond California, though leaders in New York, Illinois and Maryland say they are weighing options.

“Right now, these other states need to step up,” said Rep. Robert Garcia, a Democrat from Long Beach, Calif. “I know it’s hard, I know it’s complicated … But, if you’re a blue state governor, the time is now to step up and get it done.”

As the map battles continue, at stake is a national shift away from the norm of once-a-decade, Census-aligned redistricting and toward a more polarized landscape in which both parties redraw political maps at will to shift the balance of power. The escalation has major implications for Trump’s post-midterm agenda and the political prospects of several prominent Democrats, including Newsom and his likely presidential run in 2028.

Democrats in the California Legislature framed their vote Thursday in that national context, casting it as a fight to save American democracy from Trump’s “election rigging” — even as they voted nearly unanimously to toss aside lines drawn by the state’s independent commission and put forward a partisan map. The ends, they argued, justified the means.

“We don’t want this fight and we didn’t choose this fight, but with our democracy on the line, we cannot and will not run away from this fight,” said Assemblymember Marc Berman, a Democrat from Silicon Valley.

The vote sets off a Nov. 4 special election for Californians, and both parties are gearing up for an all-out campaign sprint. Democrats estimate they will have to raise up to $100 million to mount an advertising blitz across the state’s large and expensive media markets to convince voters, whom early polling shows are skeptical.

Republicans, who have a thin minority in the California statehouse, unsuccessfully tried to derail the vote with a host of procedural maneuvers. They argued California Democrats betrayed voters’ trust by adopting a map drawn behind closed doors, sidestepping the state’s voter-created redistricting commission. A GOP-backed legal attempt to thwart Democrats’ map was also dismissed by the California Supreme Court on Wednesday.

Assemblymember Carl DeMaio, a Republican from San Diego, called the vote a “political stunt.” When Democrats said he couldn’t use props during his floor speech, he retorted, “Then, why have you become props to Gov. Gavin Newsom’s presidential campaign?”

Texas Democrats, a minority in their state House, have pulled their own stunts. House members prolonged passage of the map by leaving the state for two weeks in protest, denying Republicans the quorum needed to conduct official business. When they returned, Rep. Nicole Collier refused to sign a permission slip ordered by GOP leadership allowing law enforcement to supervise her movements and instead staged a sit-in on the House floor.

Unlike California Democrats’ map, which requires voter approval to take effect, the Republicans in the Texas Legislature were able to approve their map without going to voters or mounting a statewide campaign. Both parties have vowed to fight the maps in court, disputes that could ultimately lead to the U.S. Supreme Court. A lawsuit in Texas was filed just hours after the map was approved by the legislature early Saturday.

“The fight is far from over,” Texas Rep. Gene Wu, chair of the House Democratic Caucus, said on the floor after the map passed the House on Wednesday. “Our best shot is in the courts. This part of the fight is over, but it is merely the first chapter.”

In Texas, Democrats argue the GOP’s map illegally dilutes the voting power of Hispanic and Black voters. In California, where the state’s map preserves minority-opportunity districts, Republicans say the map illegally sidelines the state’s independent redistricting commission.

But in the redistricting wars, voting rights and other legal considerations are taking a backseat to purely partisan interests.

Efforts are underway to carve out more GOP seats in Indiana, Ohio, Missouri and Florida — and Trump’s political operation is pressuring individual state lawmakers to act. On Thursday, Trump declared on X that Republicans in Missouri — where the GOP could pick up one more seat by splitting a district in Kansas City — are “IN!” to call a special session to redistrict.

The legal hurdles for Democrats in other deep-blue states could prove more formidable, hampering their party’s quest to retake the House in the 2026 midterms.

In New York, Gov. Kathy Hochul wants to disband a quasi-independent commission in charge of drawing House map. But the panel, created by a voter-approved constitutional amendment, cannot be erased until 2027 at the earliest.

And while the New York governor has talked tough about redistricting, she acknowledged to reporters her hands are tied by the state’s lengthy constitutional amendment process. Any changes must be approved by two separately elected sessions of the Legislature before going to voters in a referendum.

“Now, everyone says, ‘Why don’t you do what Gavin Newsom does?’ Gavin Newsom has a very different situation, because if I could, I would,” Hochul told reporters this week. “But I have to have the Constitution changed, and also the voters approved that change, before I can do that.”

Albany Democrats are under pressure to act faster anyway.

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, a Brooklyn Democrat, has talked several times in recent weeks with Hochul about their options and this week urged her and other top New York Democrats to expand the state’s voting rights law — which enables legal challenges to local legislative districts — to include congressional seats.

That would open the door to a legal challenge to the existing house lines, a maneuver designed to force a mid-decade redistricting if the map is thrown out. But two New York Democratic officials, granted anonymity to speak frankly, said that would be a long shot given the complexities of the strategy. One of them said there are “no clear options” for what New York can do ahead of the midterms.

That’s leaving Democrats to scour the map for potential redistricting pick-up opportunities outside California.

Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker has spoken boldly about the importance for Democrats to not let Texas go unmatched, and the state hosted many of the Democrats who left the Texas state House. But Illinois has been known for its aggressive Democratic gerrymanders, and it currently has just three Republican seats it can target.

It’s also unclear Illinois Democrats have the political will to take on redrawing the congressional map — most of the redistricting talk this week has been on a whole other set of maps. Former Barack Obama chief of staff Bill Daley, a Chicago Democrat, and Ray LaHood, a Peoria Republican who served as Obama’s transportation secretary, rolled out a “Fair Maps Illinois” proposal this week that would end the process of state lawmakers drawing their own districts.

In Maryland — one of Democrats’ few options to wage a response to the GOP — House Majority Leader David Moon is pushing legislation to open its redistricting process. Gov. Wes Moore has said that “all options are on the table,” but has not laid out any specifics.

“It is not our first choice to fight back against this, and I think it’s everybody’s preference that we stand down and everyone steps back from the brink here,” Moon said in an interview. “But I think the common sentiment you’re seeing from everyone is that we have to be prepared in the event that this thing does explode.”

Shia Kapos and Jeremy B. White contributed to this report.

​Politics

The legacy of Vincent Chin has recently been commemorated in a street sign bearing his name on the corner of Cass Avenue and Peterboro Street in Detroit’s historic Chinatown.

I was glad to see it. Watching the 1987 documentary “Who Killed Vincent Chin?” and learning about his life and Asian American activism changed my life.

I was 18 and taking my first Asian American studies class at the University of California, Santa Barbara. The film made me realize two things: Asian Americans are targets of racial violence, and Asian Americans across the ethnic spectrum could join together to fight for civil rights. This led to my passion for social justice.

I’m proud to now be a professor of Asian American studies and critical race theory who teaches my students about Vincent Chin.

So who was Chin, and why did his death catalyze an Asian American civil rights movement?

A fatal brawl

Chin, an Oak Park resident, was 27 years old on the night of his bachelor party, June 19, 1982. He got into a fight with two white men – Ronald Ebens, a Chrysler car plant supervisor, and Michael Nitz, an unemployed autoworker and Ebens’ stepson.

According to Racine Colwell, a dancer at the Fancy Pants Club in the Detroit area, Ebens shouted, “It’s because of you little motherf–kers that we’re out of work.” Detroit in the early 1980s was in an automotive slump. People blamed Japanese auto imports and the Japanese people, in general, for the economic downturn. The assailants didn’t seem to understand or care that Chin was actually Chinese.

After the fight between Chin and Nitz and Ebens, Chin and his friends ran out of the club. Ebens and Nitz ran after them, with Nitz grabbing a baseball bat from his car. When they found Chin outside a McDonald’s on Woodward Avenue, Nitz held Chin while Ebens beat his body and head with the bat. They were stopped by two off-duty police officers who had been inside the fast-food restaurant.

After the attack, Jimmy Choi, a member of the bachelor party, cradled Chin in his arms. He said that Chin’s last words were “It’s not fair.” Chin died four days later.

Ebens and Nitz were charged with second-degree murder, but their lawyers pleaded the charge down to manslaughter. At the end of the trial, Judge Charles Kaufman fined them US$3,000 each and sentenced each to three years’ probation, explaining: “These weren’t the kind of people you send to prison. … You don’t make the punishment fit the crime. You make the punishment fit the criminal.”

Asian Americans organize for legal justice

The sentencing enraged Chin’s friends, family and the greater Chinese and Asian American community of Detroit.

Activists of various Asian ethnicities and their non-Asian allies created American Citizens for Justice, an organization that pressured the Justice Department to investigate the violation of Chin’s civil rights and to see Ebens and Nitz imprisoned for Chin’s murder. Lily Chin, Vincent’s mother, was a key advocate in the pursuit of justice for her son, showing up to rallies and interviews to remind people of Vincent’s death for nearly a decade.

While there were other moments, such as the anti-eviction fight for the I-Hotel in San Francisco, that brought Asian Americans of all ethnicities together to fight for civil rights, Chin’s murder sparked a broad awareness. Asian Americans realized that what happened to Chin could happen to them.

American Citizens for Justice held press conferences and gained support from local African American activists in Michigan and national Black leaders like Jesse Jackson, whose presence helped bring more attention to the Chin tragedy.

Activists were successful in forcing the FBI to open an investigation. The resulting 1984 federal trial was the first time the Justice Department had argued that the civil rights of an Asian American person had been violated. Nitz was found not guilty on two counts. Ebens was found guilty and sentenced to 25 years in prison. However, a 1986 federal appeals court ruling overturned the conviction, freeing Ebens.

A civil suit filed against Ebens and Nitz on behalf of Lily Chin was settled out of court in 1987. Nitz agreed to pay $50,000 and Ebens $1.5 million – the projected income that Chin would have made had he lived.

Nitz fulfilled his debt, but Ebens made only a few payments. By 1987, Ebens had been unemployed for five years. He stopped making payments after he moved to Nevada. Estimates in 2016 place Ebens’ debt to the Chin estate at over $8 million, including accumulated interest.

Chin’s death had a profound impact on the criminal justice system in Michigan and nationally. Michigan made it harder to plead down murder charges to manslaughter and required prosecutors to be present at sentencings to face victims. Nationally, victim impact statements are now commonplace. Victims and their families now have more of a voice in the justice system.

Chin’s death spurred Pan-Asian American activism across the U.S., leading to the eventual founding of organizations like Asian Americans Advancing Justice in 1991 and Stop Asian American Pacific Islander Hate in 2020. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Stop AAPI Hate recorded violence against Asians happening in the U.S. and educated people about anti-Asian racism.

Today, Asian Americans fight for social justice through organizations like these and 18 Million Rising, a group that advocates for racial justice for Asian Americans and all marginalized people.

This is the lasting legacy of Vincent Chin.

Jennifer Ho does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

​Politics + Society – The Conversation

Has President Donald Trump survived the latest and most serious firestorm of controversy over the Epstein scandal? Or has the Trump administration’s handling of the release of information concerning the prosecution of Jeffrey Epstein, a convicted child sex trafficker and Trump’s former friend, hurt the president?

A number of journalists, pointing to recent public opinion polls, have claimed that the scandal has hurt Trump. Others have argued that the public has largely moved on and the Epstein controversy no longer presents a political liability for Trump.

But both of these conclusions are based on limited polling about the Epstein controversy and thus may be premature.

Our recent University of Massachusetts Amherst national poll includes particularly detailed questions about the Epstein controversy and attitudes toward Trump, and thus provides fresh insights on how the controversy has affected public support for Trump.

We find that Trump’s handling of the Epstein controversy has done significant damage to his standing, particularly among his core supporters.

Trump ‘fumbling the matter’

Americans are paying close attention to the prolonged Epstein controversy. Our polling finds that 3 in 4 respondents have heard, read or seen “a lot” or “some” about Epstein.

Moreover, most believe that Trump is fumbling the matter.

Seven in 10 Americans believe that Trump is handling the matter “not well.” This includes pluralities of Trump’s most loyal supporters, 43% of Republicans, 43% of conservatives, and 47% of those who voted for him in 2024.

When we drill down on the 47% of 2024 Trump voters who disapprove of Trump’s handling of the Epstein controversy, we find significant cracks in the MAGA facade. Among members of this group, 28% now disapprove of Trump as president.

When we take demographics, ideology, partisanship and assessments of the economy into account, disapproval of Trump’s handling of the release of the Epstein files is still associated with an increase in disapproval of Trump.

Voter regret

Even more significantly, we find that among 2024 Trump voters, negative views of Trump’s handling of the Epstein files are associated with an increased desire to make a different choice if the 2024 election could be rerun.

More specifically, among Trump voters who believe that the president has mishandled the release of the Epstein files, more than one quarter – 26% – indicate that they would not vote for Trump if they had the opportunity to vote again in the 2024 election.

While there are no election do-overs, it is clear that the Epstein scandal has hurt Trump among his base of voters.

Much can happen between now and the midterm elections in November 2026, of course.

But if Trump fails to satisfy his political base, perceptions among Trump voters that he has mishandled the controversy could reduce enthusiasm and participation in the elections. Even if the share of Republicans alienated by the Epstein controversy is relatively small, this could hurt Republicans in close contests.

With over a year to go, the facts on the ground will likely change. But as of today, the controversy over the release of the Epstein files remains relevant. Whether the president responds in a manner that satisfies his voters is a question that could have important political consequences.

Jesse Rhodes receives funding from the National Science Foundation, the Spencer Foundation, and Demos. He is a member of the American Civil Liberties Union.

Adam Eichen, Alexander Theodoridis, Raymond La Raja, and Tatishe Nteta do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

​Politics + Society – The Conversation