Wow: A 29-Year-Old Barista Is The New Face of Congress

Also: the ICE detention machine grinds on, and Paramount's CNN takeover rolls ever closer

Hey, Raw America family. Welcome to the Sunday Wrapup. I’m here with my cup of coffee, watching the smoke clear from the 4th of July. This week, progressives rallied, and ICE’s detention machine rattled on.

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A Barista Just Beat a 30-Year Incumbent

Let’s start with Denver. On Tuesday, Melat Kiros, a 29-year-old democratic socialist, unseated Rep. Diana DeGette, a Democrat who’s held that seat for nearly thirty years. Kiros was fired from her law firm in 2023 over a Substack letter defending criticism of Israel, and was most recently working as a barista. This is her first run for elective office; she took down an incumbent backed by a wall of super PAC money.

“This is a movement,” she told a crowd that had been singing and dancing before she took the stage. “We are just getting started.”

The numbers back her up. DeGette is the seventh House member to lose renomination this cycle — the third in seven days. Kiros’s win came a week after three insurgent candidates toppled incumbents in New York City races, all of them endorsed by Zohran Mamdani.

Justice Democrats knocked on tens of thousands of doors and made more than 200,000 calls in a single week to get her across the line. Bernie Sanders endorsed her. And in a solidly blue district, she’s favored to win in November.

DeGette argued that this moment requires experience, that you need a veteran to fight Trump. Voters decided they wanted someone unbought and unafraid instead. That’s not a rejection of fighting. It’s a demand for a different kind of fighter: one who owes nothing to the people funding the machine. That’s my idea behind Raw America, too.

Trump’s Self-Centered 250th

America’s 250th was supposed to belong to the country. Instead it belonged to Donald Trump. The “Salute to America” was built around him. It featured a slate of military flyovers, nearly every branch of the armed forces enlisted into a made-for-TV air show, and a record-breaking fireworks display of nearly 850,000 shells launched from the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool. (That’s the same pool he ordered repainted “American flag blue” in a renovation that ran past fourteen million dollars.)

Then the weather blew his party apart. He’d teased a marathon speech in triple-digit heat, telling a rally crowd he’d give “a really long speech just to show that I can do anything.” Washington hit 102 degrees, its hottest Fourth on record. Storms forced the National Mall to evacuate. The event started nearly four hours late, most of the musical acts got cut, and the remaining flyovers were canceled outright.

This is what the semiquincentennial became: a vanity project the sky itself wouldn’t cooperate with. The country’s founding was a rebellion against exactly this kind of rule. We didn’t fight a revolution to trade a king for a president who wants the fireworks pointed at himself.

ICE’s New ‘Normal’: 2,000 Arrests a Day

While the flags waved, the machine kept running. ICE arrested more than ten thousand people between Friday and Tuesday — over two thousand a day — and a source told NBC News this pace is the “new normal” the agency intends to hold. It’s quieter now, less of the masked-agent swagger we saw flooding Democratic cities in the spring, but bigger.

The tactics haven’t softened, just the optics. In New York, ICE agents defied two separate federal court orders barring courthouse arrests, detaining three men (from Ecuador, the Dominican Republic, and Guatemala) who showed up for their hearings exactly as the system demanded.

“ICE continues to flagrantly violate the law,” Rep. Dan Goldman said. The Legal Defense Fund released a tracker documenting roughly 400,000 arrests in the administration’s first fourteen months. Black and Latinx neighborhoods bore the brunt. There have also been at least twenty shootings, including the killings of Renée Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis.

I started Raw America to track ICE immigration abuses. None of this gets easier to write. But it gets more necessary. If this is the journalism you want to see more of, join our community today.

Paramount CNN Takeover Rolls Closer

The story we’ve been telling you for months is reaching its climax. Paramount’s $111 billion takeover of Warner Bros. Discovery, CNN’s parent, is closing in on the finish line, and the network’s staff is bracing for a Bari Weiss era. Paramount has said the deal could close as soon as July 15th.

We’ve seen this movie at CBS: Weiss installed with no broadcast experience, a “60 Minutes” purge, Scott Pelley going public to say the newsroom “is on fire.”

Now the same anxiety has migrated to CNN. Anderson Cooper has reportedly told colleagues he won’t work under Weiss. Paula Reid is already leaving. Kara Swisher says she’s out when the deal closes. CNN chief Mark Thompson has told Paramount he won’t share oversight of the network. David Ellison keeps insisting “editorial independence will absolutely be maintained,” the exact phrase every buyer uses right before it isn’t.

The UK government has signaled it may intervene even after the Justice Department’s antitrust division cleared the deal. But make no mistake: the man who reshaped CBS to Trump’s liking is about to control CNN. This is media capture happening right in front of us, with the executives narrating reassurances the whole way down.

Join Our Community Today

The founders didn’t pledge their lives to a flag. They pledged them to an idea: that power answers to the people, not the other way around. 250 years later, that idea is under strain. But we’re stepping up to the plate.

This week, we put more muscle behind that fight. Joining us in D.C. is veteran White House reporter Brian Karem, who’s spent years refusing to let this administration off the hook. He’s now working for us at Raw America.

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Thanks for reading. Happy birthday to a country still worth fighting for.

— John Byrne
Founder, Raw America and Raw Story