Hey, Raw America family. Welcome to the Sunday Wrapup. I’m on my second cup of coffee and I’ve spent most of the morning thinking about a well.

First, to everyone who subscribes and keeps this thing running: thank you. You’re the reason we don’t have a billionaire’s thumb on the scale. We answer to you, and that’s exactly how we like it.

If you’re reading this free and you’ve been meaning to jump in: today’s the day. We put Hunter Biden on the record this week, and we did it because you make it possible. You can subscribe to Raw America for just 22 cents a day — less than a cup of coffee. Make the investment today. Your support keeps us in the fight.

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Hunter Biden Sat Down With Us, And Gave Me Hope

On Friday, Raw America Managing Editor Carl Gibson sat down with Hunter Biden. The interview was fantastic, and you can watch the full thing here.

Asked about Republican corruption claims, Hunter said: look what’s actually in front of your eyes. He sat on a board. He got sober. He sold paintings. And every person who bought a painting had to testify under oath by name before Congress.

Meanwhile, Donald Trump Jr.’s 1789 Capital and its companies are swimming in Pentagon contracts, and Jared Kushner is making a fortune from a Saudi wealth fund.

But the real meat was what Hunter said about addiction, and his father’s love.

Carl asked Hunter about a 2018 voicemail from President Joe Biden.

“It’s Dad,” Joe Biden said. “I called to tell you I love you. I love you more than the whole world, pal. You got to get some help. I don’t know what to do.”

Lots of families, mine included, struggle with addiction. Hunter said that message wasn’t a one-off: it was one of dozens, maybe hundreds, his father left him during the worst of it. Picture that: a father calling into the dark again and again. His messages unanswered, but calling anyway.

When Carl asked what he’d say to someone in the grip of their own addiction, Hunter refused to offer a formula. “I don’t have a prescription for anybody else,” he said, “and I’m here to tell you, if anyone tells you that they do have, like, you go from A to Z, they’re not telling you the truth.”

What he could speak to was the one thing that saved him: a family that never let him go: his dad, his mother, and more than anyone, his three adult daughters.

The standard advice about addiction is that you have to let a person hit bottom before they’ll change. Hunter’s response was quiet and devastating: “The people that have hit bottom are dead.”

What pulled him back wasn’t the crash. It was that someone stayed. His family, he said, “kept shining the light down the well I had fallen into.” Recovery, he said, lives in the narrow moments when an addict can suddenly see clearly what they’re doing to themselves. And it matters whether there’s a hand reaching down when that window opens.

Hunter wouldn’t take credit for surviving. The people who get clean without the family he had, he said, “are the bravest, most amazing people in the world.” He wasn’t holding himself up as a success story. He was holding up the light. Telling anyone out there that the hand reaching down is what makes the difference, and that nobody has to climb out alone.

We’re Still Keeping Our Eye on ICE

We’ve stepped away from ICE for a few weeks, but I wanted to give you a grim update.

The Department of Homeland Security is planning to spend up to $20 million to outfit immigration agents with gloves that deliver electric shocks. Some jails and police departments already use them. Now they’re being directed to the agents carrying out the largest deportation campaign in modern American history.

Advocates are sounding the alarm that these things will eventually end up being used on protesters and on people held in custody. It’s time someone speaks out; we need to keep these in the box.

Also, a Guardian investigation this week found the administration used court orders to force-feed ICE hunger strikers on U.S. soil: a tube down the nose and throat. Trump’s team sought orders against roughly ten detainees; at least three were actually force-fed. One Kurdish asylum seeker was force-fed for nearly eight months. In six of the cases, the detainees had no lawyer. Human rights groups call it torture.

It makes me think of something Hunter Biden said about Trump: he’s not a president behaving badly, he’s “a one-man crime wave.” Look at the twenty million dollars, then look at what it’s for. Tell me that’s a man who respects democracy.

None of this reporting reaches you if outlets like ours don’t stay in the fight. We don’t have a corporate parent deciding the shock-glove story is too hot. We have you. Subscribe today.

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Democrats Are Finally Making Plans for the Supreme Court

Here’s some good news this week.

For years, the Supreme Court has felt like a dark cloud: a 6-3 machine handing down decisions on voting rights and presidential power that most of the country never asked for.

This week, Democrats stopped complaining and started legislating. They proposed several bills. One would expand the court from nine justices to thirteen. A second would cap lifetime appointments at eighteen years. Other legislation would create an enforceable ethics code and drag the court’s “shadow docket” into daylight.

Would they pass a Republican Congress? No. But Rhode Island senator Sheldon Whitehouse, who’s led the term-limits push, says the point is to “keep trying the case” with the American public.

Term limits for justices poll above two-thirds nationally. More than three-quarters of Democrats support it, as well as two-thirds of independents. Even Republicans support term limits by more than a majority. This isn’t a fringe demand.

Democratic House leader Hakeem Jeffries says everything’s on the table. Given its recent poor decisions, it’s great to watch people treat the court as something that can be changed.

Which brings me back to the well.

One Last Thing

The bottom of the well is dark right now. Shock gloves. Force-feeding. A Supreme Court that feels beyond anyone’s reach. And there’s a real temptation, on a Sunday like this one, to look away and wait for things to bottom out.

But Hunter reminded me that the people who wait for the bottom don’t come back. The ones who make it are the ones somebody kept a light on for.

That’s the whole job of a free press. Not to save anyone. There’s only us; we’re the hand reaching down into the well.

We can only do that because of you. Yes, I mean you, specifically. For 22 cents a day, less than the coffee I’m finishing right now, you can keep this light burning. Keep us in the fight.

Restore Independent Journalism

If you’ve been meaning to subscribe, let today be the day. Somebody down in the well needs to know we’re still up here.

Keep the door open. We’ll keep the light on.

I’ll see you next Sunday.

—John Byrne / Founder, Raw America and Raw Story

P.S. If you want to check out the full interview with Hunter, click below. With your help, we’re making moves!

Hey, Raw America family. Welcome to the Sunday Wrapup. I’m here with my cup of coffee, and I want to spend today’s newsletter on the things that went right.

This week, Trump tried to rewrite history, but a man who builds museums fought back. And Trump lost his twentieth case after trying to steal your voting data.

To the paying subscribers who kept us going this week: thank you. You’re the reason there’s a Raw America to read on a Sunday morning.

If you’re reading this newsletter for free, this is the week to jump in. There’s no billionaire behind us. No oligarch telling us what to write. You can subscribe to Raw America for just 22 cents a day — less than a cup of coffee. Make the investment today. Your support keeps us in the fight.

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A Man in Montgomery Shows Us How to Remember

The Trump administration is working overtime to erase the ugliest chapters of our history. They’ve pulled down National Park Service signs about slavery, reinstalled a Confederate general’s statue in Washington and ordered warning signs for the Smithsonian to caution visitors about “ideological capture.”

But there’s a man in Montgomery, Alabama fighting back.

Bryan Stevenson runs the Equal Justice Initiative, and what he’s built down in Montgomery is extraordinary. A lynching memorial. The Legacy Museum. A sculpture garden. A public square documenting the civil rights movement. Columnist M. Gessen, who just won the Pulitzer, profiled Stevenson this week and called each piece as powerful as any museum they’d ever walked through.

What’s remarkable is this: Stevenson took a city with dozens of Confederate monuments and one of the highest incarceration rates in the country, and turned it into a destination. People come from everywhere to see it, and the economy feels it. Montgomery is a place where Americans go to reckon with who we’ve been.

Stevenson’s museums aren’t dependent on federal funding, so Trump can’t shut them down. There’s a deeper argument in what Stevenson is doing. He draws a straight line from the past to the present, and puts himself, and all of us, in the story. The stories invented to justify enslavement, the ones that fueled lynching, and the ones that feed mass incarceration today.

The real evil was never just the chains and the cages, he says; it was the narrative that justified them.

Change the narrative, and you change what a country lets itself do next. That’s why Trump is so desperate to control the museums and the monuments. It’s not about the past. It’s about who gets to decide the future.

Stevenson talks about pride, too. Real pride, the kind you earn by revealing truth. He points to Germany’s Holocaust memorials and their promise of “never again” as a fundamentally hopeful thing. And when he describes what this country did to Black Americans, he says “we,” not “they.”

Asked why, he said: “I refuse to give America to anyone else.”

Trump wants us to unlearn what we know, and remove ourselves from the horror, and the truth. Stevenson won’t. Neither will we. Gessen’s profile is worth a full read.

Trump’s DOJ Just Went Zero for 20

Here’s a story that hasn’t gotten enough attention. On Monday in Colorado, a federal judge threw out Trump’s lawsuit demanding the state’s voter rolls and dismissed it with prejudice.

That makes Trump’s DOJ zero for twenty in its campaign to seize states’ voter data.

Trump’s DOJ has sued roughly thirty states demanding unredacted voter files. These include birthdates, addresses and partial Social Security numbers. Their goal? To run the data against a Department of Homeland Security database and establish the raw material for a national voter file. The Brennan Center says their goal is to purge voters from the rolls.

Secretaries of state — Democrats and Republicans both — keep telling them no. Judges keep tossing out Trump’s suits. A Rhode Island judge called it a “fishing expedition”; the Sixth Circuit ruled Michigan doesn’t have to hand over a thing.

Voting data is supposed to be managed by the states. This is what it looks like when the guardrails hold. Election officials in both parties did their jobs and the courts did theirs. That’s worth a cup of coffee.

If Raw America matters to you, this is the week to subscribe. Join now for just 22 cents a day.

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The President Is a Tenant, Not the Owner

You’ve seen the pictures of the East Wing rubble - the demolition Trump ordered to make room for a $400 million ballroom nobody voted for. On Friday, a federal appeals court ordered him to stop.

“The President of the United States is the steward of the White House for future generations of First Families,” Judge Richard Leon wrote. “He is not, however, the owner!” The appeals panel put it just as plainly: each president is a temporary tenant, not the owner, of the people’s house.

Trump’s vowed to take the case to the Supreme Court, and the order is paused for two weeks while he tries. But the principle matters: in this country, the White House doesn’t belong to whoever happens to be holding the keys. It belongs to us.

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The Ground Still Favors Us

Behind all the noise, the electoral map keeps tilting our way. A New York judge ordered Staten Island’s congressional seat, the state’s only Republican-held district, redrawn after finding it diluted the votes of Black and Latino residents. That’s a possible Democratic pickup.

Meanwhile, Democrats have overperformed in essentially every special election and off-year race since 2024. And the analysts watching the fundamentals still see the makings of a blue wave in November, even with redistricting losses.

None of this means the fight is won. The voting map got worse this year; the Supreme Court gutted the core of the Voting Rights Act in April. But a losing streak for the purge machine, a wall in front of the ballroom, and a museum in Alabama that refuses to let America forget: that’s a week where the truth held its ground.

Be One of the One in Twenty

Here’s what this week added up to, when you stack it end to end: the government is trying to erase what we know and grab what isn’t theirs, and good people are getting in the way. Judges. Election officials. A dreamer in Alabama who won’t let the country look away. Ordinary stubbornness — “good trouble” — doing what the powerful swore couldn’t be done.

That’s our whole model. Nobody can rescue us but ourselves.

Right now, the places where the truth still gets told out loud are going dark, one purchase at a time. Bezos’ Washington Post. The LA Times. CBS News. But we’re not, because we have you.

Raw America answers to you and only you: no owner, no advertiser. We’re not for sale. But I’ll say it straight: the money’s short this month, and I’d rather tell you that than pretend.

The math is simple. If just five percent of you became a paying subscriber today, we could cover everything: our reporter at the White House and on Capitol Hill, our editors and our video team. All of it.

So — will you be the one in twenty?

Be the 1 in 20 Today

I built Raw Story back in 2004, fresh out of college. We broke stories nobody else had out of Rep. John Conyers’ office and put a name to a CIA black site the Washington Post wouldn’t print. The rule was plain then and it’s plain now: we don’t bow to power. Not for access, not for anything.

Raw America is in your corner, and the reason we can afford a spine is that you keep paying for one. Come join us. Become a paying subscriber today.

Thanks for keeping us in the fight. See you next Sunday.

—John Byrne / Founder, Raw America and Raw Story

P.S. If you enjoyed Raw America this week, share a newsletter next week with a family or friend. Every new subscriber means another story we can fund, another report we can make. And if you haven’t subscribed, today’s the day to join the fight. It’s just 22 cents a day. I think we’re worth it.

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