Lately, it seems that Democrats cannot win, even when they win.
The Supreme Court has struck down the Voting Rights Act, ruling that race cannot be a factor in drawing congressional districts, which has now set off southern red states to redraw all their districts to guarantee that their entire congressional delegation will be lily white.
And Republicans, who hate fair elections anyway, have redrawn their congressional districts mid-decade in Texas, Missouri, North Carolina, and now in Florida, without putting it to a vote by the people, and can gain as many as 14 seats. But in Virginia, where the people did vote on it, four conservative justices have ruled it unconstitutional and thrown out the entire election. (snip-MORE)
Last week, The Wall Street Journal reported about the possibility that Iran could be using “mine-carrying dolphins” to attack U.S. warships. Seriously.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who does not want to acknowledge any strength of the Iranian military, said at one of his He-Man press briefings last week after being asked about kamikaze dolphins, “I cannot confirm or deny whether we have kamikaze dolphins, but I can confirm they don’t.”
We cannot confirm or deny whether Hegseth was joking or if he was serious because Republicans do not have a sense of humor. An example to prove this would be Greg Gutfeld. (snip-MORE)
Donald Trump declassified 162 files and identified flying objects last week. And it landed with a thud.
The files, hosted on a defense department website, include dozens of testimonials from civilians, federal agents, diplomats, and astronauts who reported seeing UFOs. There are also new videos, but they are like the ones that we’ve seen over the past few decades, grainy, squiggly, and usually creating more questions than answers.
It’s almost like it doesn’t matter what they release, as skeptics will see it as proof that there’s nothing out there, while true believers will claim it’s proof that we are being visited, while also claiming that the government is still withholding information.
Personally, I do believe there is life out there, but I don’t believe we are being visited. I also believe that the government is withholding information. For example, they’re withholding information on the Epstein files. And regarding these UFO files, I think the government may be embarrassed by how little it knows. (snip-MORE)
When we last discussed Alabama, we talked about the fact that it took the state about a nanosecond after Callais to run to the Supreme Court for permission to redraw its maps—to get the “benefit” of Callais—ahead of the midterm elections.
Today, the Supreme Court ruled. There had been speculation that they might delay until after the midterm primary, which is scheduled for Tuesday, May 19, one week from tomorrow. But the Court jumped right into the fray, despite its constant protests that it does not interfere in elections or make political decisions.
The Court has sent the case back to the panel that considered it previously for a decision “consistent with Callais.” Essentially, that’s a direction to permit Alabama to abandon the court-ordered map that created a second Black opportunity district and leave the state free to revert to the older map that the Court had previously ruled discriminated against Black voters in violation of the Voting Rights Act. That’s the map we looked at the other night, that sends long spines out of Alabama’s Black Belt into Birmingham, Montgomery, and north of Mobile to pack Black voters into a single district.
Justices Sotomayor, Kagan, and Jackson dissented. I haven’t seen the dissent yet, but it’s noted on the docket. I’d expect it to be pretty vigorous and to focus on the panel’s finding that the Alabama Legislature engaged in intentional discrimination against Black voters. The Court split along pure party lines. Justices Roberts and Kavanaugh, who three years ago ruled in favor of Black voters, abandoned that principled position.
Oh, and the kicker? Despite Alabama’s win, which meant the Court found that the maps the state legislature had drawn illegally discriminated against Black voters, the state went through an additional election cycle using those maps. Alabama had argued that any changes, sought in February ahead of a June primary, came too close to the election and violated the Purcell principle.
Purcell is the recently created Supreme Court doctrine that says federal courts can’t make changes to state election laws or procedures “too close” to an election, whatever too close means. Meanwhile, the Supreme Court just made the mother of all changes in Alabama one week before the primary.
The rationale for the principle is that it prevents voter confusion and avoids logistical chaos for election officials. Since the Court dropped its decision, I’ve spoken with candidates, election officials, and voters in Alabama. To say Alabama is in disarray is not an overstatement.
It’s not even clear whether the primary will be held on schedule next week at this point. Jerome Dees, at the Southern Poverty Law Center, told me that, “HB1 didn’t give a clear cutoff date for when it would be ‘too close’ to the election, which means whether Alabama will hold a primary on schedule next week is up in the air.” There has been some suggestion that Governor Kay Ivey and Secretary of State Wes Allen are canvassing local election officials to see if they can make the turnaround happen within a week, but new districts throw everything from candidate qualifying to physical ballots into question. Alabama could invalidate votes cast next week and hold a special election later this year in the affected districts.
Earlier today, the Court scheduled for conference later this week three cases involving whether individual voters can sue to enforce the Voting Rights Act. One was Milligan.
The other cases involve Native voters in Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians v. Howe and a case out of Mississippi brought by the NAACP.
The Brennan Center explained the significance last year: “For decades, Congress, the courts, the DOJ, and private litigants have agreed that Section 2 of the VRA can be enforced by individual voters and groups. Historically, a majority of Section 2 cases have been brought by private parties, and DOJ attorneys have explained that the department relies on private lawsuits because it does not have the resources to bring all of these types of cases even if it wanted to.”
If the Court rules that private parties cannot sue to enforce the Voting Rights Act, that leaves only the Justice Department—in other words, this Justice Department—which is not inclined to protect historically disenfranchised voters by filing lawsuits. That would truly eviscerate the last shreds of the Voting Rights Act, while DOJ continues to pursue fantastical theories of voter fraud instead of protecting voting rights. It can still get worse.
It is a sad, difficult day for democracy, with the Court as a willing participant.
The Supreme Court’s decision in Callais continues to make clear all the reasons we needed, and continue to need, a Voting Rights Act. And it isn’t about protecting white voters. Congress had an entirely different intent when it passed the Act, an intent that DOJ has forgotten to remove mention of from its website:
Section 2 “prohibits voting practices or procedures that discriminate on the basis of race, color, or membership in one of the [specified] language minority groups,” according to the website, which hasn’t been updated by this administration, at least not yet. “[T]he Supreme Court explained that the ‘essence of a Section 2 claim is that a certain electoral law, practice, or structure interacts with social and historical conditions to cause an inequality in the opportunities enjoyed by black and white voters to elect their preferred representatives.’” Congress clarified that the courts should look to “the history of official voting-related discrimination in the state or political subdivision,” when determining if the law has been violated. In the states hurriedly enacting new maps that eliminate Black voting power, that history involves denying Black people the right to vote. Instead of using Section 2 to fix that, the Court and Southern state legislatures are turning the law on its head and making a mockery of the rights it was meant to protect.
When the Court gutted Section 5 of the act in Shelby County v. Holder, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg accused the majority of shutting the umbrella that was meant to protect voters in the middle of a rainstorm who weren’t getting wet, because the umbrella was working. The case was decided in 2013, but even before the Supreme Court formally gutted Section 5 of the Act, repressive measures were being adopted in states like Alabama, which adopted a stepped-up voter identification requirement that made it more difficult for parts of the population, including Black voters, to exercise their rights, expecting that the Court would do away with Section 5’s preclearance provision.
A study at the Brennan Center explained the impact: “The racial turnout gap — the difference between white and nonwhite turnout rates in elections — has been consistently growing since at least 2008, reaching 18 percentage points in the 2022 midterm elections. If the gap did not exist, nearly 14 million additional ballots would have come from voters of color that year.” The analysis was based on nearly 1 billion vote records and controlled for factors like regional differences, income, and education.
The kind of behavior the Act was meant to prevent is exactly what’s happening, as Black voting power is diluted with new maps that are being adopted. And the Court seems to have abandoned its allegiance to the Purcell principle, which it has used in the past to prevent changes from being made too close to an election. Some of the new measures adopted by the states are being challenged, or will be challenged in court, and we’ll get a chance to see if the rules are different now that the Court is focused on protecting white voters from discrimination, which was the story behind Callais.
For instance, Tennessee’s extraordinary gerrymander was accompanied by a change to state law, so that election officials no longer have to advise voters about changes to their designated polling places as a result of the newly drawn maps. It’s easy to imagine how this plays out: voters with limited time because of family responsibilities go to what they think is the right polling place. They wait in a long line, maybe for hours, before being told they’re in the wrong location. At every step, the process is being redesigned to insert more friction, in hopes that Democratic-leaning voters will be dissuaded from participating. As Marc Elias noted, “Republicans defended the map by claiming that only population and politics were considered when the new map was created, not race.” But of course, the two are inextricably intertwined in Southern elections, despite the pretense the Court adopted.
To put all of this into context, consider the importance of the right to vote. At bottom, it’s the right that unlocks all of the other rights, the essence of democracy. Efforts by the Trump faction to impede that right—whether it’s by making it more difficult to register, more difficult to vote, or more difficult to have your vote count—is an effort to lock up all of our other rights.
The NAACP filed a lawsuit challenging Tennessee’s new gerrymander late last week. The complaint explains that “The timing of drawing Tennessee’s congressional districts is governed by Tennessee law, including Section 2-16-102 of the Tennessee Code, which provides: ‘The general assembly shall establish the composition of districts for the election of members of the house of representatives in congress after each enumeration and apportionment of representation by the congress of the United States. The districts may not be changed between apportionments.’” The NAACP is asking the court to issue a declaratory judgment that the late-decade redistricting violates the law and to enter an injunction that will prevent the new maps from going into effect.
There are reports that South Carolina is getting ready to join in this week, with a proposal that would gerrymander its only Black member of Congress, Jim Clyburn, into a district that, at least in theory, is designed to make it more difficult for the veteran Congressman to win. But it’s not clear that the South Carolina Senate will extend the legislative session to permit action to be taken. Currently, the state has seven seats in the House and only one Black representative, although the state is roughly 25% African American.
Alito’s Mistake in Callais
Late last week, The Guardian reported that Justice Alito relied on flawed data to justify his majority opinion in Callais. That opinion is predicated on the view that it is no longer necessary to apply the Voting Rights Act as a corrective for historic voter suppression because Black voter turnout has caught up. Of course, that doesn’t square up with the Brennan Center data we discussed up above. But Alito wrote that Black voter turnout exceeded white voter turnout in two of the five most recent presidential elections, both nationally and in Louisiana. He relied on data that the Solicitor General of the United States, who was not a party to the case, but who filed an amicus brief, presented to the Court:
The data is flawed because it calculates voter turnout in Louisiana as a proportion of the total population of each racial group, for people over the age of 18. But that isn’t the same as calculating eligible voters, because total population includes non-citizens, people with felony convictions, and others who are ineligible to vote. For instance, Black people are more likely to have felony convictions in South Carolina than white people are, which skews the data.
Perhaps Justice Alito should have paid more attention to Justice Ginsburg’s explanation about closing the umbrella prematurely. She was right.
Oral Argument in the DC Circuit on Trump Executive Orders
On Thursday, the D.C. Circuit will hear oral argument in the cases regarding Trump’s executive orders that were designed to punish law firms. The terms of the executive orders made it more difficult, if not impossible, for law firms that the president viewed as representing clients or causes he disagreed with to do business. The cases brought by the law firms have been consolidated for the appeal. So far, every court to consider one of the orders has found them to be illegal.
We discussed the executive orders here when they were first issued, and again here, when the administration dismissed the appeals it will argue later this week before abruptly changing course and asking to reinstate them.
Four law firms are involved: Perkins Coie, Jenner and Block, WilmerHale, and Susman Godfrey. There is also an executive order against Mark Zaid, a lawyer known for his work representing whistleblowers. He is represented by Abbe Lowell. Lowell has argued in his briefs that the executive orders turn security clearances, necessary for lawyers in this field to do business, into political weapons.
Perkins Coie’s brief to the Court of Appeals opens like this: “One year ago, the President did something no other president had done before: issue an executive order declaring a law firm whose clients and representations he dislikes ‘dishonest and dangerous’ and deploying the levers of federal power to try to put the firm out of business. That was a perilous moment for appellee Perkins, the legal profession, and the rule of law. Nine law firms, cowed by the threat of firm-ending sanctions, ‘settled’ with the President …Four different district judges recognized the President’s executive orders for what they are: shocking abuses of power that trample the constitutional rights of the law firms and their clients. This Court should recognize the same.” Two of the judges on the panel that will hear the case, Chief Judge Sri Srinivasan and Judge Cornelia Pillard, were appointed by President Obama. The third judge, Neomi Rao, is a Trump appointee.
Kash On The Hill
FBI Director Kash Patel will join the administrator of the DEA, the Director of the ATF, and the head of the U.S. Marshal’s Service for budget hearings in the Senate on Tuesday afternoon. It’s typical for the four DOJ law enforcement agencies to do this jointly.
Despite the intricacies of the federal budget, the question on everyone’s mind will likely be whether Patel will be passing out bottles of his special Ka$h Patel, FBI Director, Bourbon.
Atlantic reporter Sarah Fitzpatrick, who wrote the original expose on Patel’s erratic behavior in office, had a new story last week. Fitzpatrick wrote, “it is not unusual for him [Patel] to travel with a supply of personalized branded bourbon. The bottles bear the imprint of the Kentucky distillery Woodford Reserve, and are engraved with the words ‘Kash Patel FBI Director,’ as well as a rendering of an FBI shield. Surrounding the shield is a band of text featuring Patel’s director title and his favored spelling of his first name: Ka$h. An eagle holds the shield in its talons, along with the number 9, presumably a reference to Patel’s place in the history of FBI directors.”
Finally
The administrative stay in the mifepristone case ends on Monday. That means that unless the Supreme Court issues an order regarding whether the injunction should stay in place while the litigation proceeds, the Fifth Circuit’s ban on obtaining the abortion drug via telehealth goes into effect.
Given that the Court virtually disallowed nationwide injunctions last June in Trump v. Casa, it’s difficult to see the legally consistent path to permitting this one to go into effect. And, in the 2023-2024 term mifepristone case, the Court stayed efforts to restrict the availability of the drug from going into effect during the pendency of the lawsuit (before it dismissed it rather than decided the substantive issues, because it found the plaintiffs lacked standing). The smart money would seem to be on similar treatment here, but this is a Court that has been willing to ignore the past to put abortion out of reach for American women, so we will wait and see.
There’s a busy week ahead of us. But Donald Trump is spending the evening on Truth Social, reposting memes about his popularity.
The latest NPR/PBS News/Marist poll shows Trump with just a 37% approval rating; 59% of those polled disapproved of his performance. That’s the worst score this poll has given Trump in either of his terms in office.
The Interior Department added $6.2 million to the no-bid contract for repairs to the Lincoln Memorial pool late last week.
Atlantic Industrial Coatings was hired to repair leaking joints between the pool’s concrete slabs, waterproof the pool’s bottom and paint it a shade called “American flag blue.”Credit…Al Drago for The New York Times
President Trump said that his handpicked contractor would charge only $1.8 million to repair the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool and paint it blue.
The actual cost is now more than seven times that, after the Interior Department nearly doubled the size of the contract late last week, federal records show.
On Friday, the Interior Department added $6.2 million to the contract’s previous cost, saying it now planned to pay $13.1 million to a Virginia firm called Atlantic Industrial Coatings. President Trump said he chose that company to repair the landmark because the firm had worked on the swimming pools at his golf club in Sterling, Va.
The government awarded that firm a no-bid contract last month, bypassing the requirement to seek competing offers by saying that the situation was so urgent that any delay would cause “serious injury” to the government. The government has not publicly said what that injury would have been.
Instead, it has cited Mr. Trump’s desire to get the work done before the country’s 250th birthday on July 4.
Public contracting records do not say why the contract’s cost increased so sharply on Friday. Katie Martin, a spokeswoman for the Interior Department, said that the higher price “reflects the effort necessary to expedite the timeline of completing the leak prevention coating project — more people, more materials, more equipment and longer hours ahead of our 250th.”
Atlantic Industrial Coatings did not respond to questions about the increase.
But government documents obtained by The New York Times show that the contract’s current value matches, down to the dollar, an offer submitted to the government by Atlantic Industrial Coatings in the middle of last month. That offer included a 20 percent profit margin, the documents show.
Competitive bidding laws aim to ensure that the government is getting a fair price from its vendors.
Image
“Every day that the resurfacing continues, the historic character of the Reflecting Pool is being further and fundamentally altered,” a lawsuit filed Monday said.Credit…Al Drago for The New York Times
The contractor was hired to repair leaking joints between the pool’s concrete slabs, waterproof the pool’s bottom, and paint it a shade called “American flag blue.”
The pool has also been troubled for decades by leaks and algae blooms that turn its water green.
On Monday, a nonprofit dedicated to landscape architecture filed a lawsuit in U.S. District Court in Washington seeking to halt the paint job. The Cultural Landscape Foundation said that the Trump administration had ignored a law requiring advance scrutiny of projects that alter historic landmarks.
The foundation, based in Washington, said in its lawsuit that “every day that the resurfacing continues, the historic character of the Reflecting Pool is being further and fundamentally altered.”
David A. Fahrenthold is a Times investigative reporter writing about nonprofit organizations. He has been a reporter for two decades.
This was a private event held and paid for by the group for a set amount of time at the park. It is a normal occurrence at parks like this. If this had been a Christian church doing the event it would have caused no backlash and been accepted. But because it was a Muslim sponcered event with mostly clothing of this sect of the Islamic faith that also encouraged the eating of foods not normally eaten by Christians it caused a backlash of Islamophobia. Hate for people and customs different from the Christian religion practiced by white people is common in the nearly theocratic Texas. Hugs
The park is available for rent at a cost of $5,000 an hour, Dallas News reported.
A private event at a Texas city-owned water park has been canceled following backlash and a direct threat by Gov. Greg Abbott to withhold more than $500,000 in state public safety funding.
A spokesperson for the City of Grand Prairie said Thursday the city canceled the DFW Epic Eid Celebration scheduled for June 1 at the Epic Waters Indoor Waterpark.
“After further review and in the best interest of the City of Grand Prairie, the June 1 Eid event at Epic Waters Indoor Waterpark has been canceled,” the spokesperson said.
The event at the city-owned waterpark was initially promoted with flyers describing it as “Muslims only” and included a modest dress code requiring burkinis for women, halal food, a private prayer room and rules encouraging attendees to maintain personal space and “lower the gaze.”
After backlash on social media, organizers updated promotional materials to state that “all are welcome,” provided attendees follow the modest dress code.
Abbott’s Public Safety Office shared a letter with The Christian Post that had been sent to Grand Prairie Mayor Ron Jensen warning that the “DFW Epic Eid” event “was publicly and openly advertised as discriminating based on religion” and therefore violated agreements between the city and the Public Safety Office.
The letter from Public Safety Office Executive Director Andrew Friedrichs said the event “purports to be public facing and discriminatory at the same time” and compared it to advertising for a “Whites only” event.
“All Muslims — but only Muslims — may attend,” Friedrichs wrote. “An event at a city-owned pool that was publicly and indiscriminately advertised as ‘Whites only’ would surely violate the Constitution.”
Event organizer Dr. Aminah Knight later updated the online flyer to clarify that the DFW Eid Celebration is a “privately organized and privately funded event held through a standard rental of Epic Waters, just like many other private gatherings hosted at the park.”
“At its core, this event is about creating a space where individuals and families, particularly those who value modest dress and a modest environment, can come together and enjoy a recreational setting comfortably,” Knight wrote.
Knight added that anyone “of a different faith who wants to celebrate the Eid holiday with us and adhere to the modest dress code” is welcome to attend.
A screenshot of an online flyer for a 2025 “Muslims only” event at the Epic Indoor Waterpark in Grand Prairie, Texas. | Screenshot/Facebook
A Facebook post shared by Knight in May 2025 promoting last year’s event included a flyer calling it an “exclusive Muslim-only event” and stating that the taxpayer-funded facility was “closed to the public” for “Muslims only.”
It is unclear whether the City of Grand Prairie approved the flyer or its contents. The city did not respond to CP’s request for comment by Thursday afternoon.
While the 2026 event flyer listed Knight as the organizer, a video shared on social media by Muhammad Abdullah, listed as the director of Outreach & Youth at Al-Hedayah Academy in Fort Worth, claimed he organized the event.
In a video posted Tuesday, Abdullah blamed “Islamophobia” for the public response to the now-canceled event and said, “By the way, I’m organizing that with my wife.”
CP reached out to Al-Hedayah Academy, where Abdullah is pictured as a member of the mosque’s “spiritual team,” seeking clarification Thursday on whether the mosque was involved in organizing the event.
According to Knight, more than 600 people attended the event last year, and all “lovers of modest fashion and those who are curious about Eid and what modesty at a waterpark can look like” are welcome to attend.
Owned by the city of Grand Prairie near the Dallas and Tarrant County border, Epic Waters — which has no ties to the planned Muslim-centric development formerly known as “EPIC City” — is an 80,000-square-foot waterpark with a retractable roof and the longest indoor lazy river in North Texas, according to its website.
Epic Waters opened in 2017 after voters approved a 0.25% sales tax, according to city documents. The park is available for rent at a cost of $5,000 an hour, Dallas News reported.
Democratic TN state Rep. Justin Jones burns a Confederate flag in the state Capitol, Thursday, May 8, 2026, video screengrab
Yesterday, the Ku Klux Klan, we mean Tennessee state Legislature, rushed through new maps to eliminate the state’s last remaining Democratic congressional seat in Congress, and racist pigfuck Governor Bill Lee signed them, because that’s what white supremacists do when Donald Trump’s partisan hack Supreme Court says it’s unconstitutional for them not to hurt Black people by gutting the last remaining piece of the Voting Rights Act.
The lawsuits are already being filed, and to be sure, Republicans don’t even understand the war they started yesterday. As we wrote, it’s useful to remember that Republicans always, 100 percent of the time, overplay their hands.
We quoted Tennessee state Rep. Justin Pearson, who until yesterday was running in a primary against long-serving Congressman Steve Cohen to represent what was the Ninth District, in Memphis. We guess how exactly that will end up is undetermined at this exact moment, but Pearson said earlier this week at a rally that “[I]f we keep marching, if we keep pressing, if we keep fighting, the future that our descendants will live into will be a better one than this one. And our message to the Republican Party, our message to that racist, white-supremacist president Donald Trump is that we will fight.”
Pearson, if you remember, is one of the two Black men in the Tennessee Three, back when the grand wizards of the Tennessee Lege first bent over and showed everybody their Klan-hood-shaped buttplugs, expelling the two men from the state House for taking to the House floor to try to defend their constituents against gun violence. Also for being Black men, because they didn’t expel the white woman, Knoxville Rep. Gloria Johnson, for being part of the same protest. (Voters of course sent the two Justinsright the fuck back to the Legislature.)
Both Justins were of course present yesterday to witness what white supremacist Tennessee Republicans really think was the Birth of a Nation. And there were many protests in the Tennessee state Capitol yesterday. Justin Jones of Nashville set a Confederate flag on fire, or at least a paper version of it.
And then he stomped that sad loser little bitch of a flag — a flag the greatest losers who ever lived died defending, and their family legacies are less valuable than dried dogshit because of it — right on out.
And what are people saying about that, and about iconic pictures photographers captured of that? “Hang it in the Louvre.”
Oh, it’s gonna be in museums and history books all right.
Rep. Jones, “Brother Jones” as he refers to himself on Instagram, posted videos and images of the already iconic moment.
The South will not rise again, until it’s paid for all its sins of racism and white supremacy.
Today, I left the Capitol Klan Rally, where my white Republican colleagues took off their white hoods and dismantled Black political power in our state. It’s shameful, it’s immoral, and it will go down in the history books alongside the legacy of George Wallace and Bull Connor.
Tennessee has shamefully become the first state to pass a new, racist congressional map following the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Louisiana v. Callais, which dismantled the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
When I walked into the building it was 2026, and when I walked out it was pre-1965. This racial power grab against Black voters is purely rooted in control and elimination of their voices in our democracy. Today’s Jim Crow laws passed in our legislature spit on the graves of our Civil Rights martyrs who bled and died for the right to political power and representation.
They are dragging us backwards in history but we refuse to be moved.
I burned the Confederate flag, because the neo-Confederate caucus that assembled today will be defeated again. Their vision of the South, rooted in plantation politics and racial division will not win. Instead we must use this moment to ignite our rebellion and movement even more towards real justice and multiracial democracy. We must build towards a South that can RISE ANEW.
We will not go back!
“Burn it, young brother,” said Joy-Ann Reid in response. So say we all.
A week before the US went to war with Iran, Pete Hegseth, the war secretary, invited the head of his church to lead prayers at the Pentagon. From his pulpit in Idaho, Doug Wilson, a 72-year-old ultraconservative pastor, preaches that homosexuality is a sin, women who dress immodestly are “sluts”, and Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution is the “silliest thing in the world”.
Despite Hegseth’s evangelising, Wilson says the Trump administration is far from morally pure. He says the president is “not someone I would call a godly Christian man”, and disagrees with Trump’s appointment of a gay man, Scott Bessent, as his Treasury secretary because homosexuality is not just a sin, it is “a bad one”.
Of all his gripes, however, Wilson is most indignant about the 1960s sexual revolution, a moral catastrophe that he condemns frequently in his blog posts, sermons and books. He thinks women should dress modestly. But what is modest dress? “Not what they’re doing now,” he says. “I could pick on yoga pants.” He continues: “Men know what they think of hookers, which is not very much. When you’re just giving it away to every slob on the bus who wants to look, you’re degrading the currency.”
Does that mean Wilson and his followers sympathise with the dress codes enforced by Shia clerics in Iran? “No, because wrapping them up in a bedsheet is another way of degrading them. It is possible to be modest and attractive — attractive without attracting. Bundling them up the way really conservative Muslims do is a different kind of degradation. Like you’re not a person. But for a woman to dress like a slut is a different kind of degradation. Both kinds of degradation play off of each other.”
Wilson appeared here last month when he called for criminalizing homosexuality and outlawing all LGBTQ events.
In March, Wilson declared that under his Christian nationalist theocracy, all non-Protestant public events – such a Catholic parades that venerate the Virgin Mary – would be banned.
Also in March, a separate pastor at Hegseth’s church prayed for God to kill Senate candidate James Talarico.
Pete Hegseth’s pastor: ‘Women who dress immodestly are sluts’
The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has sued the New York Times for discriminating against a white, male employee who claims to have been denied a promotion based on his demographic attributes. It marks the third lawsuit President Trump or his administration has filed against the Times in less than five years.
The Times also filed its own lawsuit against the Defense Department last year over its restrictions on journalists. A federal judge ruled in the outlet’s favor in March. The EEOC said Tuesday that the lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, alleges the Times violated the Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, as amended.
The federal agency, which sits under the executive branch, pointed to the lack of promotion for a “well-qualified white male employee” along with the Times’ diversity, equity, and inclusion policies and a 2021 “Call to Action” to increase non-white and female representation in its leadership. “Federal law is clear: making hiring or promotion decisions motivated in whole or in part by race or sex violates federal law. There is no diversity exception to this rule,” EEOC chair Andrea Lucas said in a statement.
People at the paper say the claim is absurd. “I’m sorry, there are plenty of white guys at the top of the New York Times. Not really something that’s holding you back,” said the reporter. To name one prominent example, Joe Kahn, the paper’s executive editor, is a white male, as are many members of the masthead.
Rhoades Ha, the Times spokesperson, said, “The allegation centers on a single personnel decision for one of over 100 deputy positions across the newsroom, yet the EEOC’s filing makes sweeping claims that ignore the facts to fit a predetermined narrative.”
The employee originally filed the complaint in July 2025 with the EEOC office in New York. One staffer noted it could now be impossible for the Times to take action against the complainant: “This person now has job security for good after this suit. What a mess.”
Purely by coincidence, yeah, last week the NYT reported on the “deeply demoralized” work culture at the EEOC.
EEOC chief Andrea Lucas last appeared here when a judge ruled that she can have the names of Jewish employees at the University of Pennsylvania.
She appeared here in January 2026 when she ended federal guidelines against anti-LGBTQ workplace harassment.
In December 2025, Lucas appeared here when she posted a video seeking plaintiffs in lawsuits for anti-white male workplace discrimination.
A white male New York Times employee filed a complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission alleging that the paper discriminated against him by not giving him a promotion because he is a white male.
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