Good morning. I’m Thom Hartmann.
MAGA is panicking after Michigan Democrats just nominated progressive U.S. Senate candidate Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, who surged past his AIPAC-backed rival despite being outraised by more than 60 million dollars. Right-wing billionaire David Ellison, who owns CBS’ parent company, recently wrote a New York Times op-ed trying to convince Americans he can be trusted with CNN, and it may have just blown up in his face. A North Carolina Republican congressman just dropped his re-election bid after an ethics investigation found he acted inappropriately toward female staffers. And a bombshell investigation reveals that ICE has been detaining and deporting the parents and spouses of active-duty American troops, upending the lives of military families in the middle of a war.
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MAGA Panics After Abdul El-Sayed Wins Michigan Senate Primary
Progressive epidemiologist Abdul El-Sayed has won the Michigan Senate Democratic primary over establishment favorite Haley Stevens. He declared victory around 7 AM. This was the most expensive Democratic Senate primary contest ever, with more than 60 million dollars in outside money flooding into the state, nearly all of it spent to boost Stevens or tear down El-Sayed. Most of that cash came from the Israel lobby, as it worked overtime to stop him.
El-Sayed ran on Medicare for All, cracking down on corporate money in politics, and ending military aid to Benjamin Netanyahu’s far-right regime in Israel. He’s the son of Egyptian immigrants, born and raised in Michigan, and if he wins the general election in November he’ll become the first Muslim U.S. senator in American history.
MAGA’s reaction was both immediate and unhinged. Republican Senator Ted Cruz of Texas went on Fox News, called El-Sayed an “Islamist,” and claimed there’s a “green-red convergence” of communists and Islamists who “hate Jews, hate Christians, hate capitalism, hate America.” He also said they want to cancel Thanksgiving and Christmas. MAGA influencer Laura Loomer called his win “disgusting.” Former Trump senior advisor Kellyanne Conway said El-Sayed represented a “completion of the Bernie Sanders revolution,” as if that were some kind of threat rather than an accurate description of the most popular politician in America’s impact on the Democratic Party.
What set MAGA off the most wasn’t even his policies, which are consistently popular in polls. It was that El-Sayed used the phrase “inshallah,” which translates to “if God wills it” in Arabic, on the campaign trail. Right-wing commentator Joey Mannarino actually said this made him “as dangerous” as New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani, apparently because he can’t distinguish between a common religious expression and a security threat.
Haley Stevens based her campaign on electability, warning Democrats couldn’t “take chances” in a battleground state. But she also called herself a “proud pro-Israel Democrat” and said she doesn’t believe Israel is committing genocide in Gaza, which is a stance in direct conflict with the United Nations. AIPAC alone spent more than 30 million dollars on her campaign, the most the group has ever put into a single race. But to her credit, she’d pledged during the campaign to back whoever won, and in the early hours of Wednesday morning she told her supporters that Democrats would unite behind the nominee to beat Mike Rogers.
El-Sayed will face Trump-endorsed Republican Mike Rogers in November. His primary win is proof that progressives can compete and win in battleground states, not just in deep-blue cities, even when they’re outspent by a well-funded establishment machine and a hostile foreign policy lobby.
Congress passed the Tillman Act back in 1907 because lawmakers of that era understood something we’ve been trained to forget, which is that when concentrated wealth can buy an election outright, the people have stopped governing themselves. Michigan just proved that idea still has a pulse, and that a movement built on small donors can still outrun $60 million in other people’s money.
Paramount Employees Say David Ellison Can’t Be Trusted with CNN
David Ellison, the chairman of Paramount Skydance and the son of centibillionaire Oracle founder Larry Ellison, recently published an op-ed in the New York Times making his case for Paramount’s proposed $111 billion acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery, which is CNN’s parent company. A dozen state attorneys general are suing to block the merger, along with the Writers Guild of America. David Ellison argued the real issue isn’t market share, but trust. Specifically, whether he can be trusted running one of the largest cable news networks in the world.
The billionaire heir insisted he has no intention of turning newsrooms into propaganda mills, and said he’s voted for both Democrats and Republicans. But in the very next breath, Ellison said he wants those newsrooms to “reflect the whole world, not one side of it,” which may sound neutral until you notice it’s a go-to conservative talking point when they complain about media bias.
CNN staffers aren’t buying it. Status spoke with ten CNN journalists, who were all in agreement that Ellison was gaslighting them. One called his op-ed “insulting,” pointing out that everyone can see with their own eyes what’s he’s already done to CBS. Another said it was obvious Ellison just “says whatever is best for him to get the merger through.”
Ellison’s tenure at CBS has been brutal since he took over. Ellison’s handpicked editor-in-chief, right-wing opinion columnist Bari Weiss, gutted 60 Minutes by firing executive producer Tanya Simon, executive editor Draggan Mihailovich, and celebrated correspondents Sharyn Alfonsi and Cecilia Vega on a single day that staff now call Black Thursday. A few days later she fired the legendary Scott Pelley, who’d been at the network for nearly 40 years, after he correctly accused her of “murdering” the program. She’s pushed out people over small disagreements, and has overseen record-low ratings for both CBS Evening News and CBS Mornings. She’s also gotten noticeably cozier with a White House that has consistently viewed journalists as the enemy.
Ellison says his critics should “judge us by the year we just had.” Fair enough. Let’s start with the year that included completely dismantling the #1 news program in the country and tanking morale across the newsroom. If we’re going by Ellison’s own standard, that’s an abject failure.
One CNN staffer told Status that Ellison’s track record at CBS “raises questions about his independence and willingness to toe a partisan line for commercial benefit.” Another said his leadership of CBS “inspires no confidence,” and said turning CNN into another version of that “is not the answer.”
The remainder of Ellison’s op-ed was mostly fluff, with the kind of vague, vanilla pablum about “facts and truth” that doesn’t mean anything when you refuse to explain how you’ll confront a president who is openly hostile toward the media. Keep in mind, that’s the exact same dodge Ellison gave a year ago when his colleagues pressed him on it directly. We all know CNN, and the media in general, would be much worse off with Ellison at the helm.
In 1945, Justice Hugo Black wrote for the Supreme Court in the Associated Press case that the First Amendment assumes the country is better off when information reaches us from as many independent and competing sources as possible. That’s the constitutional standard Ellison is being measured against, and a man who spent the past year merging newsrooms and thinning out the reporters inside them is asking us to grade him on a curve.
Taking on a billionaire owner is undoubtedly the most toxic thing a media outlet can do, because we can see what happens when an oligarch runs a newsroom: accountability reporting goes out the door, and it gets replaced with shameless propaganda that flatters the powerful. Raw America was built on a rejection of the billionaires and corporations ruining journalism. Subscribe and help us fight back.
Republican Congressman Ends Reelection Bid Over Allegations of Inappropriate Behavior
Republican Congressman Chuck Edwards of North Carolina announced early Wednesday morning that he’s dropping his re-election bid. He posted the news at 3:32 in the morning, saying “prayer and reflection,” led him to withdraw after his current term ends in January.
The timing behind his announcement was clear. Two days ago, the Republican-controlled House Ethics Committee recommended Edwards be censured for what it referred to as “persistent unprofessional and inappropriate conduct” toward two young female staffers.
The committee’s final report makes for uncomfortable reading. It describes the North Carolina Republican commenting on women’s appearance and clothing, buying them expensive gifts, inviting them on “intimate dinners and vacations,” and sending notes expressing what the report called “effusive affection.” Investigators made it clear there was no evidence of sexual misconduct or explicit propositions, but both women told the committee their boss’ behavior made them extremely uncomfortable. Edwards denies any sexual or romantic intent, and made it clear he fully cooperated with investigators. His attorneys filed a rebuttal saying the committee’s conclusions were unfounded.
Democrats have already recruited a strong challenger for Edwards’ seat in Jamie Ager. He’s a fourth-generation farmer with real local roots, and his brother serves in the North Carolina House of Representatives. Their father was also a state lawmaker who represented that same seat before him, and his grandfather Jamie Clarke even represented that same western North Carolina district in Congress. Democrats were already bullish on flipping Edwards’ seat before the scandal even broke, despite Trump having carried the district by nine points in 2024. Now, with Edwards out after already winning his March primary, Republicans are scrambling to find a substitute through the state party.
The Framers put it right there in Article One, Section Five, that each house of Congress may punish its own members, because they knew a republic can’t survive if the people’s representatives refuse to police themselves. That power sits mostly untouched for years at a stretch, so when a bipartisan committee finally reaches for it, we’re not looking at a gray area.
ICE Arrested and Deported Dozens of Service Members’ Spouses and Parents
A groundbreaking investigation from the Associated Press found that the Trump administration has detained more than 50 parents and spouses of active-duty American service members since taking office, and even deported at least six of them. At least eight immediate family members of active-duty troops are still currently in immigration custody.
The government doesn’t even track these numbers on its own. The AP had to piece it together from thousands of federal court records, media reports, and interviews with families and attorneys. Journalists say the real figure of those detained and deported is almost certainly higher.
The Department of Homeland Security says while it values service members’ contributions, military service alone doesn’t confer legal status or exempt anyone from immigration law. The agency declined to discuss individual cases, though it noted that at least seven of those detained had previously been removed from the country, while at least eight had current removal orders. At least two other detainees had drunk driving or drug convictions. The Pentagon wouldn’t comment at all.
For decades, both Democratic and Republican administrations have shielded immediate family of military personnel from deportations. But that understanding is now gone. Families are being held in federal custody for months while trying to navigate the very legal process the military itself advertises to recruits.
U.S. Army Sergeant Hedar Leonel Turcios Juarez told the AP it’s hard to focus on his military service when he’s worried sick about how his wife is doing, after she was detained outside a Walmart in front of their six-year-old daughter.
Air Force Technician Sergeant Wendy Gbeve watched her father get arrested during a routine immigration interview in Missouri. Within two weeks he’d been shuffled through detention facilities before being deported to Mexico, which he left decades ago to work on a ranch in rural Illinois. Nobody from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has explained to the family why it happened so fast.
Army Staff Sergeant Alexis Jaramillo is now on administrative leave from Fort Polk, Louisiana, and is now the sole caregiver for his five-year-old stepson after his wife was detained during what the family assumed was a routine meeting in Alabama.
This is even different from Trump’s first term. A former ICE deputy chief counsel who worked in the first Trump administration told the AP that immigration authorities rarely detained military family members unless they’d committed violent crimes. He called the current approach “insane” and “outrageous.”
The current military parole in place, which lets service members’ families adjust their status from inside the country, was created under George W. Bush during the Iraq War and fully codified under Barack Obama. But under the second Trump administration, the average wait time for that protection has more than doubled to a full year, meaning families are exposed the entire time they’re waiting for legal status.
This is all happening while U.S. Army and National Guard recruiters are actively advertising immigration benefits to convince young people to enlist. The U.S. Marine Corps stopped doing it last June. One soldier who spent nine months helping patrol the Southern border with Mexico said watching his own father get detained left him with nothing but regret for “all those families I broke.”
During the Great Depression this country rounded up and shipped out hundreds of thousands of people of Mexican descent, and by most historical estimates something close to a third of them were American citizens who had every legal right to stay. The machinery didn’t ask questions then and it isn’t asking questions now, except this time it’s grinding through the families of the very people we asked to put on the uniform and defend the rest of us.
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I’m Thom Hartmann. Thanks for reading, and thanks for supporting independent media.
