TOPEKA — Private school founder, farmer and businessman Zach Lahn is running an insurgent Republican campaign for governor in Iowa.
The former Kansan has labeled this outsider bid as an “Iowa First” campaign. He’s opposed abortion and high taxes, but defended gun rights, school vouchers and religious freedom. He told Iowa voters he admired President Donald Trump’s tenacious fight against the political establishment.
“I told my wife many times, if I ever ran for anything, the only thing I’d ever want to run for was governor,” Lahn said.
Lahn grew up near Sioux City, Iowa, graduated from University of Colorado in Boulder, worked for Montana and Colorado congressmen, served as Montana director of Americans for Prosperity and as an AFP fundraiser, and bought a Belle Plaine, Iowa, farm previously owned by relatives. He launched an unorthodox school in Wichita and voted in Kansas elections in the 2018, 2020 and 2022 cycles.
Lahn’s campaign didn’t respond to a request for comment about why he chose to run for governor in Iowa rather than Kansas or questions raised by the Iowa Democratic Party about his close ties to Kansas and decision in 2024 to transfer his voter registration to Iowa.
Lahn has stood out among Iowa’s GOP gubernatorial candidates by denouncing lobbyists, corporations and organizations with outsized influence on politics. He’s not been shy about criticizing Democrats and Republicans responsible for blocking public policy reform.
“I’m fighting the ‘Uni-party.’ Both sides have been bought off in many ways,” he said.
Lahn is on the Tuesday primary ballot with U.S. Rep. Randy Feenstra, state Rep. Eddie Andrews, former state Rep. Brad Sherman and former Iowa Department of Administrative Services director Adam Steen. The Democratic nominee will be Iowa state Auditor Rob Sand, who is running unopposed.
For the first time since 2006, an incumbent Iowa governor won’t be on the ballot. Republican Gov. Kim Reynolds, with one of the lowest approval ratings in the country, didn’t seek reelection.
Michael Smith, a political science professor at Emporia State University, said old-school political theory dictated gubernatorial candidates had to be rooted in a state’s political infrastructure and local community life to be relevant. That changed as Trump assumed control of GOP politics and showed how firebrand conservatives, including those without prior experience in public office, might find a lane to run, he said.
“It’s all different now,” said Smith, who indicated Lahn could be a beneficiary of that shift. “He’s trying to be his own kind of populist.”
Lahn created momentum for his candidacy by loaning the campaign $2 million and using that cash to fill the airwaves with television advertising.
After working for Americans for Prosperity, an advocacy group associated with founders of Koch Industries, Lahn moved to Wichita to launch the unconventional private school named Wonder. The pre-kindergarten through 12th-grade school opened in 2018 on the campus of Wichita State University. It was financed by Chase Koch, the son of billionaire Charles Koch, and Chase Koch’s wife at the time, Annie Koch.
Annie Koch and Lahn subsequently divorced their spouses and were married. They have seven children in a blended family and the kids have been featured in campaign materials.
Kansas voter registration records show Zach Lahn voted in Kansas with a provisional ballot in November 2018, in-person at a Sedgwick County polling place in November 2020 and with an advance ballot in the August 2022 primary. Zach Lahn registered to vote in Iowa on Oct. 17, 2024. Transferring his registration at that time allowed him to meet the state’s two-year residency requirement for a run for governor in 2026.
Jennifer Konfrst, a professor of journalism and strategic political communication at Drake University in Des Moines, said there was potential for Lahn’s “Iowa First” campaign slogan to come across as disingenuous among voters aware of his lengthy presence in Kansas. Iowa voters appreciate the life history of candidates, she said, but some dig deeper into whether a candidate’s staff came from Iowa or Washington, D.C.
“Being from here matters,” said Konfrst, a Democratic member of the Iowa House not seeking reelection. “It’s not unimportant that somebody who wants to be governor of Iowa isn’t from here.”
In July 2024, according to Sedgwick County’s register of deeds, Annie Lahn purchased a home in Kechi near Wichita and declared on mortgage documents it was her primary residence. One year after acquiring the property, Zach and Annie Lahn sold the home to an LLC for $1.
Business records filed with the Kansas Secretary of State’s Office identified the LLC’s “authorized person” as Wichita resident Mikaela Ledbetter, who made a modest donation in December 2025 to Zach Lahn’s campaign for governor.
Less than two weeks after the transaction in July 2025, Annie Lahn registered to vote in Belle Plaine, Iowa. Zach Lahn and his previous wife, Lauren, had purchased that Belle Plaine homestead in 2014.
The Des Moines Register reported in April that Zach Lahn flew from Iowa to Wichita in his personal airplane 37 times since Oct. 1, 2025. Zach Lahn told the Register the flights allowed him to be with children that he and his wife had from previous marriages.
“I’m trying my best to be present for things,” Zach Lahn told the Register. “I have no worries that we’ll be able to fulfill every duty we need to do on the campaign or as governor.”
Zach Lahn told the newspaper he moved from Kansas to Iowa in 2023 and was an official Iowa voter in the 2024 general election and a 2025 local election.
Iowa Democratic Party spokesperson Terra Hernandez seized upon the Register’s reporting to declare Zach Lahn a “Kansas carpetbagger.”
“Lahn has been trying to fool Iowa voters since the start of his campaign, thinks he can pay his way to the governor’s mansion with his millions in out-of-state money and spends more time in Wichita than Belle Plaine,” Hernandez said.
During the gubernatorial campaign, Zach Lahn has emphasized he was a sixth-generation Iowan with family roots as far back as the Civil War.
His campaign has concentrated on restoration of academic achievement in the state’s education system and removal of classroom educators who insisted on advancing personal ideology.
“We don’t have a spending problem. We have a quality problem,” Zack Lahn said during a GOP forum broadcast by KCCI in Des Moines.
He said he would work to preserve Iowa family farms after 10,000 vanished during the past 20 years. He said one-fourth of Iowa land was now owned by out-of-state investors. He proposed raising property taxes on Iowa land held by nonresidents so property taxes for Iowa residents could be lowered.
He’s questioned economic development strategies in Iowa that did little to stem the brain drain of youth to other states.
Zack Lahn, endorsed by MAHA Action associated with U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert Kennedy Jr., made a campaign issue of rising cancer rates in Iowa. He promised to veto any bill granting agricultural chemical companies immunity from lawsuits tied to alleged failure to accurately warn consumers of health risks.
“I believe big ag and big pharma have treated our farmers and families as numbers, not neighbors,” Zack Lahn said.
To understand this cartoon you have to switch the axis of the point of view. For the rich guy the red line is going up, for the worker on the other axis it is going down. Hugs
As we like reminding you, with Donald Trump trying to kill clean energy, Europe has become the source of much of our clean energy Nice Times lately. Here’s one more example: Spain is among the big sleeper hits on Europe’s energy transition pop chart. In just a decade, Spain has ramped up its use of wind and solar power, resulting in some of the lowest wholesale electricity prices on the continent.
Oxford prof and energy policy analyst Jan Rosenow gets into the details at his “Bright Spots” newsletter, which we’ll recommend for folks who need a dose of climate optimism about now:
In the first four months of 2026, the average wholesale electricity price in Spain was €44 per megawatt-hour. In Italy, it was €127. In Germany, €96. In the UK, €103. Spain is now cheaper than France, well below the central-European bloc, and within striking distance of the Nordic hydro-and-nuclear heavyweights that have always topped the cheap-power league.
The basic reason is pretty simple, Rosenow explains, although he also goes into further detail beyond this. “Spain increasingly pushed gas increasingly out of its electricity supply, and the price of electricity followed.”
Over the last 25 years, Spain has gone from getting a third of its electricity from coal to effectively having zero coal power. Spain replaced most of that capacity with cheaper (and relatively cleaner but still climate-unfriendly) fossil gas, and it’s now replacing gas with renewables. Gas peaked at about 30 percent of Spain’s energy mix near the end of the 2000s, and is now down to about 19 percent. Another 19 percent comes from nuclear, which hasn’t changed over the last few decades and 14 percent is from hydro and bioenergy. The rest has been solar and wind, which combined are up to 42 percent of the mix in 2026. Here’s a pretty chart, with cheerful yellow solar energy and cool blue wind energy growing, and icky grey coal rapidly fading into nothing.
Here’s why the replacement of gas with renewables matters so much: Because wholesale electricity prices at any given time are set by the most expensive energy plants needed to meet demand, and gas is usually that most expensive source, getting more solar and wind on the grid during high-demand daylight hours brings down wholesale prices a lot. (snip-MORE)
Go and read, and click the links if you have time. It is heartening, even though it’s not happening here.
We have 29 more days to make our views known in regard to the executive wishing all federal workers to sign a very broad NDA. This will crush transparency and notice of abuse, and there will likely be no more whistleblowing.
Anyway, here it is, along with the link so we can make our comments (of course it is not hyperlinked on the page, we need to copy it and paste it into our browser. WP has made it a live link in this post, but it doesn’t work.) It’s our duty and a right we still have; if we do not use it, we will most certainly use it. I found out about this yesterday on MPS’s post; it just took me a bit to get to this.
You can find this here. (This hyperlink is good; I made it myself and it works.) It is a .pdf. The NDA notice begins in the lower right-hand column.
From within the public notice, here is the info for submitting our comments:
ADDRESSES: You may submit comments
using the Federal eRulemaking Portal at
https://www.regulations.gov. Follow the
instructions for sending comments.
The general policy for comments and
other submissions from members of the
public is to make these submissions
available for public viewing at https://
http://www.regulations.gov without change,
and including any personal identifiers
or contact information. Before finalizing
the NDA, OPM will consider all
comments received on or before the
closing date for comments. OPM may
make changes to the NDA after
considering the comments received.
And a little more:
Request for Comment
OPM welcomes public comments on
all aspects of the draft NDA, including
whether the Privacy Act statement’s
description of the authority, principal
purposes, routine uses, and effects
provide sufficient notice to employees.
The draft NDA is available in the docket
for this notice on regulations.gov. See
https://www.regulations.gov/document/
OPM-2026-0100-0003. OPM specifically
requests comment on the following
issues.
There are several other things there, if you have some time and want to see what the exec is doing besides trying to hide all they do and finally/fully cut off our representation, even as we are taxed for government work. I don’t believe we can let this slide, but maybe that’s only me. Anyway, if you also don’t like this, please go, read the bit, and write what your conscience tells you. I’m certain you will not be alone in doing so. The thing is, our government, for which we all pay, is not a business. The only parts that should not be public are those that actually shield the actual security of the country, things such as when we go after Osama Bin Laden, and locations of items that other countries might like to drone. There should be no covering of regular day-to-day government business-that is our business and we have the right to know.
Trumpeter Robyn Steward thought clubs weren’t for her until she encountered Fabric’s accessible upgrade – the new home for her radically inclusive, space-themed night
Working the crowd … Robyn playing at one of her Robyn’s Rocket nights at Fabric. Photograph: Siân O’Connor
Until May last year, trumpeter Robyn Steward had never been in a nightclub space, save for playing trumpet with Lancaster duo the Lovely Eggs at London’s Heaven, and a few nights in a university hall that doubled as a lunch room. Steward is autistic and has multiple disabilities including cerebral palsy. “Sometimes strobes can trigger migraines for me, or feel overwhelming,” she says. “I feel like my body’s a bit lost.”
When she wanted to see a gig at Fabric nightclub in London, she asked a friend to go with her as a carer. “I was amazed at how accessible it was,” she says. Subtle touches integrate multiple access needs into the space. “The mezzanine level meant that I didn’t have the strobes in my face. There was a rail that I could hold on to, and there was seating opposite the balcony so I could sit and watch the gig.” She also noticed Fabric’s recently upgraded sensory dancefloor, which deliberately transforms sound into tactile vibrations to better cater for the hearing impaired. “I could see that the lights were strobing and everything, but I felt safe,” Steward says.
Inspired, she contacted Fabric to see if they might host her long-running, space-themed experimental music night Robyn’s Rocket, which since 2017 has been booking noise bands, DJs and improv groups in London venues from Deptford to Dalston. While it champions disabled and autistic performers and audiences, Robyn’s Rocket is principally about integration. “People with and without learning disabilities – and autistic and non-autistic people – should spend time together, where there isn’t any kind of power dynamic,” she says. Her aim is to create a space “where people are all just having a really nice time together”.
We meet in a music studio in Deptford, south London, the day before the Rocket’s first night at Fabric. Steward, 39, is relentlessly upbeat; straight after the interview, she heads to the shops where a friend helps her figure out an unspecific drinks rider request. It’s in keeping with the Rocket spirit of clarifying what might usually be assumed or implied. Online, she supplies detailed visual storyboards of how an evening will progress. All artists fill out detailed tech and access riders. Every box and cable is given a name, shape or colour. All Rocket gigs are livestreamed and timings are strictly adhered to so those streaming the gig don’t get lost. “The schedule, once it’s agreed, it’s pretty non-negotiable,” Steward says.
On arrival, everyone is presented with a silver rocket-shaped badge, angled up, across or down as a visual barometer of how much communication they’re comfortable with. Fabric is adorned with more than 100 posters: signposts always feature words and shapes and are populated with cartoon characters, human and alien. Silver foil covers the stage, and live projections from visual artist Rucksack Cinema are suitably astral. “You’re into new planets, are you?” crows the frontman of “cosmic dross” band Henge.
For Steward, the space theme is also about imagining an equitable new world. “You might meet somebody here with a learning disability, or an autistic person. You might not. But everyone is equal in this space.” The Robyn’s Rocket nights echo the aesthetic and political spirit of Afro-futurist jazz visionary Sun Ra and his Arkestra. “The idea that you can create a different dimension, almost a different planetary experience, at these events is very consistent,” says Mark Williams, co-founder of the Deptford-based arts charity Heart N Soul (where Steward is an associate artist). “It’s using imagination and creativity to free people, and to exist on a different kind of plane.”
Steward was born in Suffolk, and took to music when a tutor brought instruments to her primary school: “I really wanted to go on the trumpet, but they ran out of time, so I spent a whole week blowing raspberries.” The tutor returned for an assembly the next week, and Steward immediately requested the trumpet. “I played a clear note straight away.”
As an infant, Steward used Makaton (a language that uses a combination of signs, symbols and speech) to communicate until she attended Musical Keys, a group for children with special needs, aged three: “It was song based, and so I learned to speak that way – there was a lot of repetition.” Once she learned to speak, she wouldn’t stop; her parents got her a Dictaphone for long car journeys: “They’d say, ‘You can talk to this Dictaphone as much as you want, but leave us alone in the front.’ I would make my own radio shows that would come out sounding like Alan Partridge’s Knowing Me, Knowing You.”
Unlike her East Anglian counterpart, Steward is an excellent, direct communicator. The first half of her career was spent delivering autism training, speaking at conferences, and in research. She’s also written books such as The Autism-Friendly Guide to Self Employment. But, by age 30, Steward became “very conscious that I needed to think about what I want to spend the rest of my life doing”. She had recently learned to improvise on trumpet through the big band at a local adult education centre, and seeing a gig by trumpeter Andy Diagram (who plays the trumpet with guitar pedals) proved crucial to developing her own art. With the help of Heart N Soul, she built Robyn’s Rocket up from a small residency in Deptford to a regular slot at Cafe Oto in east London, later inviting musicians including Alabaster DePlume, Coby Sey and Mica Levi to perform.
The vocalist Seaming To played a Rocket night in 2024. “More and more friends of mine are realising that they have neurodivergent aspects,” Seaming To says. “And quite a lot of them find it really awkward coming out to noisy places. At Robyn’s night, you can admit to feeling awkward, and it’s all acceptable.”
On the night, Steward dons her trademark purple fedora and doubles up as space trumpeter and energetic MC. “I’ve done this gig partly because I just wanted to put Henge on,” she says, beaming from the stage. For all the very human practicalities of Robyn’s Rocket, Steward still has celestial ambitions. “And why wouldn’t you want to put them on in a homemade spaceship?”
On Tuesday, Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows ruled that a proposed ballot initiative banning trans students from school sports and bathrooms will not appear before voters this November. The billionaire-funded campaign initially submitted 79,692 signatures—well over the 67,682 required to qualify—and the Secretary of State’s office certified the question for the ballot in March. But indications soon emerged that the signature-gathering process was riddled with improper procedures and, in at least one documented case and potentially many others, outright forgery. After a court remand, an evidentiary hearing, and a sworn-testimony review of the petitions, 12,542 signatures were invalidated, leaving the campaign 532 short of the threshold. Barring an appeal—which is likely though its success is far from certain—transgender students in Maine can rest a little easier this election cycle.
The infractions are striking. One out-of-state circulator left his petition forms unattended at a Topsham polling place on Election Day—twice—allowing voters to sign without a witness present, in direct violation of Maine law. Another circulator did the same at a Saco polling place, leaving her table for extended periods while crowds of voters signed unwitnessed petitions. When asked under oath whether she had destroyed the unwitnessed forms as required, she said yes—but a photograph submitted into evidence showed one of those forms was in fact turned in for validation. Most troubling of all, an out-of-state signature gatherer paid per signature submitted forms that appear to contain outright forgeries: one voter listed on her petition testified under oath that she had never signed it and had never even heard of the initiative. After the Oxford town clerk flagged additional suspicious signatures, an Elections Division review compared every name on the circulator’s forms against voter registration applications—and concluded that every single one of her validated signatures should have been thrown out as signed by another person.
Based on the evidence, Bellows ruled Tuesday that the initiative had failed to qualify for the November ballot. The decision marked a reversal of her own March certification, when her office initially determined that the petition contained enough valid signatures to move forward. That earlier ruling was challenged in Cumberland County Superior Court by three Maine voters, who alleged that thousands of signatures had been collected in violation of state law. In April, Justice Deborah Cashman agreed that the original review had been incomplete and remanded the case back to the Secretary of State’s office for further factfinding, ordering a new determination of validity within thirty days. That process produced the May 12 evidentiary hearing—where witnesses, including town clerks and voters whose names appeared on petitions, testified under oath—and ultimately the decision invalidating thousands more signatures than the initial review had caught. Bellows adopted that recommendation in full.
The initiative would have done far more than what its sports-focused branding suggested. It would have defined a person’s sex for school purposes as “a person’s biological status as male or female recorded at birth on the person’s original birth certificate”—a definition that would have stripped transgender students of legal recognition in Maine schools. It would have required public schools to “maintain separate restrooms, locker rooms, shower rooms, and other private spaces for each sex,” extending the ban well beyond athletics and into every gendered space in a school building. It would have created a private right of action allowing any student to sue their school for “direct injury” suffered from a violation of the act, effectively turning every transgender student’s presence in a bathroom or on a sports team into potential litigation. And it would have specifically carved transgender students out of the Maine Human Rights Act.
The anti-trans signature drive was not a grassroots effort. It was bankrolled by Illinois billionaire Richard Uihlein, the co-founder of Uline office supplies, who donated $800,000 to fund the entire effort. Uihlein has given more than $250 million to political causes since 2016, and is a major funder of the American Principles Project, which routinely spends tens of millions on anti-trans campaign ads during election years. He is not alone: an independent analysis published by Atmos and HEATED found that 80% of 45 major anti-trans organizations in the U.S. have received funding from fossil fuel companies or billionaires. The Maine initiative was part of that broader pattern—an attempt by a small handful of extraordinarily wealthy donors to use direct democracy as a workaround in states where elected legislatures have refused to engage in anti-trans legislation.
The decision was greeted with relief by the LGBTQ+ coalition that has fought the initiative since the day it was filed. “Maine has strict rules in place to protect the integrity of our elections and our system of direct democracy. The paid, out-of-state signature gathers and the billionaire who paid to try to put this question on the ballot failed to follow the rules,” said David Farmer, campaign manager for the Campaign for Free and Fair Schools, the coalition led by EqualityMaine, GLAD Law, and the Maine Women’s Lobby. “We believe that the appeals process and the reviews by the Secretary of State are working as the law intends. They are protecting the integrity of our elections.”
The Maine ruling is not the end of fight. Similar billionaire-backed initiatives have been certified for the November ballot in Washington and Colorado, where voters will decide whether to bar transgender students from sports as well as medical care restrictions. Both efforts are also funded by conservative megadonors, and both are part of the same strategy that produced the Maine initiative: use ballot initiatives to roll back trans rights in states whose elected legislatures have refused to do so. The Maine anti-trans campaign is expected appeal Bellows’ decision to Maine Superior Court within the ten-day window the law allows.
May 12, 2026, 8:30am
Cesar Chavez, Eric Swalwell, Justin Fairfax, and the gender politics of keeping their dirty secrets.
News about powerful men committing violence against women has bombarded the United States in recent months.
On April 16, 2026, Virginia’s former Lieutenant Gov. Justin Fairfax killed his wife, Dr. Cerina Fairfax, and then himself inside their family home. The shocking news came days after Rep. Eric Swalwell, a Democrat from California, resigned from Congress following multiple sexual misconduct allegations.
A few weeks prior, in March 2026, an investigation about labor movement leader Cesar Chavez revealed a decades-long pattern of sexual abuse, including against another farmworker icon, Dolores Huerta.
All three of these powerful men had known patterns of alleged predatory sexual behavior. But their secret was protected—in some cases for decades—not only by other men, but also by some of the same women they’d hurt.
Somehow, no matter how much progress we think we’ve made, women keep being sacrificed—or sacrificing ourselves—for men’s accomplishments and legacy. Our lives and futures and mental health are even sacrificed on the altar of their potential political accomplishments and legacy.
I’m a legal historian and commentator on sexism and gender-based violence. I’ve studied violence against women and the criminal trials that let male perpetrators off the hook. I’m also a woman who experiences sexual harassment so often that it has become a dull hum following me throughout my day.
This self-sacrifice seemingly stems from what seems to me to be a societal belief that the men who commit harm are more needed than the women who are harmed. Our ideas, organizing, and logistical labor—often dismissed as “secretarial” work—can’t compete with the fear of losing a single powerful man.
When the allegations against Swalwell first broke, some on the left rushed to defend him. Some on social media claimed it was a Republican smear job because he’s been opposed to Trump’s policies and was running to be the next governor of California.
Eventually, as more women came forward and D.C. insiders said that they’d heard rumors about Swalwell’s behavior for years, Democratic leadership called for Swalwell to drop out of the governor’s race.
Women often come forward with their stories when a man is running for political office because they feel that information is relevant to voters. Or, they may speak out because it’s difficult to see one’s abuser portrayed so incompletely in the news.
Yet some people cast doubt on the timing of the Swalwell accusations, suggesting people were out to get attention or take a “good man” down before he can further ascend in his career. On social media, posts compared the situation to Al Franken resigning from Congress in 2017 over sexual misconduct allegations.
Franken’s resignation is often treated as an example of #MeToo going “too far,” because some reporting suggests that the initial accusation against Franken may have been trumped up. But he was sexually inappropriate with women both before and after taking office. His resignation was important to live up to progressive values, and the left didn’t actually lose any political clout over it: Franken’s replacement, Tina Smith, has been a fantastic senator.
It’s relatively rare for members of Congress to resign after being accused of sexual misconduct. According to the National Women’s Defense League, 23 lawmakers with public accusations are running for reelection in 2026 in 16 states, including nine people running for Congress.
The group held a press conference on April 21, 2026, to discuss two new reports on sexual misconduct in Congress and state government. According to its research, 80 percent of candidates publicly accused get reelected.
The calculus for marginalized women to come forward about sexual assault is even tougher.
The first line of Dolores Huerta’s public statement about her abuse says she kept quiet for nearly 60 years because she “believed that exposing the truth would hurt the farmworker movement I have spent my entire life fighting for.”
I believe many women stay quiet when they think coming forward could hurt a movement—in this case, one Huerta helped to build. But they may tell their story if they’re worried not doing so could cause even more harm.
Her story details two incidents of sexual assault that resulted in two hidden pregnancies. She gave both children up for adoption.
Soon after the investigation broke, Chavez’s name was erased from monuments across the country. That’s not necessarily an indication of local leaders taking sexual violence seriously. In some places, it may just as well reflect a desire to erase Mexican American achievements and the progress of the United Farmworkers Union in securing rights for migrant laborers, some of the most marginalized workers in the country.
I say that because we have the perfect replacement for Chavez’s legacy in Huerta herself. It would be so easy to simply rename every street and monument after her, rather than simply erase commemorations of the movement.
Huerta was already forced to sacrifice so much by Chavez, must she now watch as her life’s work goes down with him, too?ire News Group is a reader-supported, independent nonprofit newsroom.
In my own Jewish community, there is a long history of pressuring victims of domestic violence and sexual assault to stay quiet—and not air their suffering outside the community.
Doing so would be an example of “lashon hara,” or evil speech or gossip. If we report our abuse to police, we are contributing to negative ideas about the Jewish men in our community. Some men in the Jewish community even claim that because of Jewish teachings and customs, Jewish men can’t ever actually abuse their wives, because domestic violence is a Christian affliction of gentile culture—that is, a non-Jewish problem.
This myth persists outside the Jewish community, and it can impact how Jewish women are treated in secular American courts.
My doctoral dissertation research covered a case of a Jewish woman in New York City murdered in 1875. Both suspects in her killing were Jewish men protected by the community. During the trial, the victim was used as a cudgel against her own people to prove that Jews were dangerous.
If she had survived and was given the choice to report the violence she faced would she have feared exposing a man from her community to the criminal justice system?
This concern is even more heightened for Black women. If their abusers are Black, they know that reporting them means increasing exposure to a racist criminal justice system.
Research also suggests Black women are less likely to be seen as victims by the dominant society and more likely to be blamed for harming men of their own community, or accused of trying to “take down a good man.” (Think back to how accusations against R. Kelly, Mike Tyson, Bill Cosby, and Clarence Thomas were greeted.)
As Aishah Simmons, Black feminist and activist, explains, many people “think that exposing and addressing intra-racial sexual violence against Black women divides the community … and we should only focus … on racism since that is the ‘real problem.’”
This community protection can feel even more important when the abuse comes from a so-called “good Black man,” as author Kaitlyn Greenidge wrote on April 19, 2026, of Cerina Fairfax’s killing. The promise of a Black middle class life with a politician husband like Justin Fairfax is supposed to guarantee a safe and protected life.
Cerina Fairfax stood by her husband even after two women accused him of sexually assaulting them; one alleged incident occurred back when he and his accuser were undergraduates at Duke University.
The accusations against Fairfax came to light during a crisis in Virginia politics when he was poised to possibly take over the governorship from the scandal-plagued Ralph Northam. Fairfax denied any misconduct and refused to resign. No criminal charges were filed. He ran for governor in 2021, and lost.
Fairfax later sued CBS for defamation (the suit was thrown out) and claimed he was experiencing a form of lynching (taking a page out of Justice Clarence Thomas’ book after Anita Hill’s accusations).
In this case, Democrats did lose leadership of the state. Before the sexual assault allegations, Fairfax was seen as a rising star in the Democratic Party. Had his accusers not gone public, he might have become the state’s next governor.
But it’s equally true that had he resigned in 2019, after they did, a new Lt. governor could have stepped in and potentially run successfully in 2021.
It irks me that Fairfax ran for governor after being accused of sexual misconduct. It irks me that Swalwell did, too.
Swalwell’s name remains on the primary ballots in the California governor race, and that will hurt the Democrats’ chances to hold onto that post. It was Swalwell’s hubris and entitlement hurt his party—not the women who came forward to prevent him from accruing more power.
I wonder: How many young staffers left politics because Swalwell was allowed to prey on his subordinates? What progress could have been made in the labor movement if the women abused by Chavez had instead been in leadership roles? Would Cerina Fairfax still be alive if her husband had been prosecuted in 2019?
We’ll never know how the world would look if the well-being of the women in these cases had been prioritized over the careers of their abusers. What I know is that the harm done to us as women is more important than the potential of the men who hurt us. And I know that the goals of movements or political gains can no longer rest on our silence and our labor.
I really enjoy this creator and how he has done this entire series on the Christian god and the inconsistancies of the bible and the figures in it. In this series the god is a self centered older teenager who only thinks of themselves and their needs/ wants. The full series starts out with a future highly technological civilization having graduates from school take a psychological test as them an omnipotent being and their assistant is actually their teacher in real life. But in this case “god” is so narcissistic it causes problems in the simulator they are all connected with. But the series does show how narcissistic and only thinking of their feelings, wants, and needs this Christian god is. Sadly the creator has moved on from making the series and the spin-offs from them as his main YouTube product but he still produces these videos which I am grateful for. But try to remember that God is a student and Jefferies is in reality his teacher still trying to teach him how to be a good person. Reverse the roles of the characters and you get the joke. Hugs.
Scottie's Playtime 