When we were teenagers growing up in rural Pennsylvania, Americans typically bought their first home at the age of 29. Now, first-time home buyers tend to be in their 40s.
As U.S. senators from different parties, we don’t agree on everything. But as friends, parents of nine children between us, and representatives of working families across Pennsylvania, we cannot accept this terrible trend.
The American dream — the promise that if you work hard and play by the rules, you can build a good life and financial security in a home that you own — must not fall out of reach of young Pennsylvanians.
That’s why we support the ROAD to Housing Act. This bipartisan bill, which the U.S. Senate is expected to vote on this week, will help address Pennsylvania’s housing crisis by making it easier to build more homes, more affordably, while also preserving and repairing the housing stock we already have.
The commonwealth has 100,000 fewer homes than it needs today and is on track to be short 185,000 by 2035.
As a result of this shortage, home prices have increased 75% in the last five years. More than one million Pennsylvania households spend over 30% of their income on housing, and more than half of our housing stock is over 50 years old, driving up repair costs and straining family budgets.
Sens. John Fetterman (D., Pa.) (left) and Dave McCormick (R., Pa.) greet before participating in a debate in Boston moderated by Fox News in June.
That combination — too few and too many aging homes — creates a squeeze felt from Erie to Philly: young families delaying having kids, seniors stuck in homes they can’t afford to fix, workers turning down jobs because they can’t find a place to live nearby.
The shortage will get even more acute as new investments in Pennsylvania’s energy and artificial intelligence, defense, and life-science industries generate great new jobs across the commonwealth.
We have celebrated these transformative investments, from U.S. Steel to the Philly Shipyard, but more jobs mean more workers, and workers need homes.
The ROAD Act delivers by taking three commonsense approaches. First, it tackles affordability at the source — supply — by reducing delays and lowering construction costs.
Second, it strengthens accountability and modernizes federal programs to ensure they work for the people they’re meant to serve.
Third, it empowers Pennsylvanians to build what fits local needs.
We’re proud that the bill includes provisions to protect Pennsylvania workers, veterans, and homeowners, which we championed together. Our Whole-Home Repairs legislation, for example, supports homeowners, especially in markets like ours with many historic residences, by offering grants and forgivable loans for repairs and upgrades of aging homes, keeping families in their homes and stabilizing neighborhoods.
This isn’t a Republican problem or a Democratic problem. It’s an American one, and it demands bipartisan action.
For these reasons, we stand united, as we have on many other issues, in voting yes for the ROAD to Housing Act.
Dave McCormick and John Fetterman represent Pennsylvania in the U.S. Senate.
When a messy land dispute between Gov. Josh Shapiro and his backyard neighbor poured into public view via federal court filings earlier this month, it jolted his sleepy Montgomery County neighborhood.
The picturesque suburban community tucked behind Penn State Abington is usually quiet and boring, current and former neighbors said, just the way they like it. It’s a great place to raise their kids, and where Shapiro’s four children have grown up. Among the biggest points of contention is when one neighbor fails to say hello to another. Many houses in the neighborhood sit a quarter-mile away from the main road, behind winding, tree-lined driveways. Some of the homes have been purchased in recent years for upward of $1 million. In many ways, the neighbors said, it’s the perfect picture of the suburban American dream.
But this month, the neighborhood also became the battleground for dueling lawsuits between Shapiro and his neighbors, Jeremy and SimoneMock, bringing tension to atranquil community.
What’s more: Shapiro’s office alleges the lawsuit against him is a political hit job to hurt him as he runs for reelection, citing the Mock family’s communications with the top Republican in the state Senate and his frequent sparring partner, President Pro Tempore Kim Ward. The family’s attorney in the lawsuit is also a local lawyer known to represent Republican causes, and whose former clients include the political campaigns of President Donald Trump and U.S. Sen. Dave McCormick.
The Mocks, meanwhile, argue in their lawsuit — filed in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania — that Shapiro has used his powerful position as governor to infringe on their constitutional rights and take their land.
The disputed land — a 2,900-square-foot strip between Shapiro and his neighbor’s lawn — had not been an issue between them until security updates were proposed to Shapiro’s home after a Harrisburg man firebombed the state-owned governor’s residence last April while Shapiro and his family slept inside, both the Shapiros and Mocks said in court filings. The man, Cody Balmer, later pleaded guilty to attempted murder and related crimes for the attack, and was sentenced to 25 to 50 years in prison.
Afterward, state police proposed security upgrades to Shapiro’s personal residence and the state-owned governor’s mansion in Harrisburg, suggesting the installation of an eight-foot fence along the perimeter of Shapiro’s personal property, along with tree trimming, a new security system, and other landscaping efforts expected to cost more than $1 million, Spotlight PA reported. The proposed taxpayer-funded improvements to the Montgomery County home — criticized by the Republican-controlled state Senate — came in addition to the more than $32 million in repairs and security upgrades made to the governor’s mansion in Harrisburg, which included the replacement of an existing security fence there.
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The Shapiros allege in a countersuit that they believed the disputed piece of lawn was theirs, and that they had maintained it for 22 years. When a land surveyor hired by the state to help with the security upgrade projects found that the Shapiros did not own the disputed part of the land, the Shapiros approached the Mocks in July to purchase or lease it.
Ultimately, the talks fell apart, as the neighbors blamed one another for being unwilling to make a deal.
Any resolution is now likely to be decided in court.
The Mocks in their lawsuit — represented by Delaware County attorney Wally Zimolong, who describes himself on his website as the “‘go-to’ lawyer in Pennsylvania for conservative causes and candidates” — accused Shapiro in his official capacity as governor of an “outrageous abuse of power” by illegally occupying a part of their yard that they pay taxes on. The Shapiro family quickly filed a countersuit in the Montgomery County Court of Common Pleas, arguing they have control of the land through adverse possession, a legal mechanism through which a person can gain ownership of a property they’ve actively used for at least 21 years.
The Mocks have asked a federal judge to find that Shapiro, as governor, violated their constitutional rights; as well as prohibit state officials from trespassing on their property moving forward; and to award them damages. Private attorneys representing Shapiro have asked the Common Pleas Court to find they are the owners of the disputed part of the yard and refund attorney fees.
‘Everybody got along’
Shapiro and his wife, Lori, have lived in the same home in the neighborhood for 22 years, purchasing the four bed, three-and-a-half bath property in June 2003 for $465,000 as the young couple wanted to move back to the Philadelphia suburbs after spending several years working as staffers on Capitol Hill. Shapiro ran for state House the following year and represented the area until 2011, in what was the beginning of his decades-long political career that has helped flip Montgomery County, the state’s third-most populous county, from red to blue.
Several current and former neighbors in the Philadelphia suburb raced to defend the Shapiros as great neighbors, adding they don’t mind the additional state police presence as his star rises as a top Democrat and after the governor and his family were victims of political violence. Others said they’ve had a good relationship with the Mocks so far.
“We had nothing but pleasant experiences with Josh. I have nothing that I can say negative in any way, shape, or form,” said Eileen Simon, who used to live next door to Shapiro until 2020. Simon lived in the neighborhood for 48 years. She hasn’t spoken to the Shapiro family in a few years, but recalled that her grandchildren would often play on the Shapiro’s backyard swing set.
“We were all neighbors together, and everybody got along,” Simon added. “I’m devastated that this has happened.”
Cathy Keim, who moved out of the neighborhood seven years ago and shared a boundary line with the Shapiros for some of the nearly 40 years she lived there, also recalled a neighborhood where everyone got along. Keim said she believes the current dispute is petty, and added thatwhen Shapiro first built his swing set behind her pool fence, he mistakenly put it on her property. When the Keims alerted him to it, Shapiro quickly moved it back onto his own backyard, she said.
“That area, it looked like it should be theirs because of the pool fence,” she said. “I had to tell them, ‘that’s our property,’ and they very quickly moved it.”
Stephanie Berrong, whose backyard also abuts the Shapiro’s property, said in a text message that after the arson attack, the Shapiros asked if they could remove a tree on her property to build the security fence. Berrong and her husband agreed, and said the Shapiros were “respectful of our time and our property” throughout the tree-removal process. She did not comment on the Mocks.
“We just felt it was the right thing to do, considering someone tried to burn down the governor’s mansion with them, and their kids, inside,” Berrong added.
This image provided by Commonwealth Media Services shows damage after a fire at the Pennsylvania governor’s mansion while Democratic Gov. Josh Shapiro and his family slept inside on April 13, 2025, in Harrisburg.
State police never built the security fence that started the land feud, instead opting to surround Shapiro’s home with updated landscaping. That escalated the conflict with the Mocks. In their lawsuit, the Mocks allege that despite ongoing negotiations over the strip of land, the Shapiros began planting arborvitae-type trees and other plants on the Mocks’ property, flying drones over it, and threatening to remove healthy trees. The lawsuit also accuses state police of “chasing away” contractors who came to work in the Mocks’ yard.
The Shapiros, meanwhile, argue in court filings that the Mocks’ alleged harassment is causing them irreparable harm and further threatening their safety. According to a source briefed on the conflict, the Mocks at one point posted a series of signs on the land and a tree that read “Hippity hoppity, stay off my property,” and “This is my property,” among other efforts to antagonize the Shapiros.
John Ginsberg grew up in the home now owned by the Mocks during the 1970s and ‘80s, and said he never thought of their property as stretching into the land now owned by the Shapiro family.
“It just wasn’t an area that was used,” said Ginsberg, who now works as an attorney in Washington. “It wasn’t maintained, and it was brambly.”
Another man, who requested anonymity to speak freely about his neighbors, said he lived next to the Shapiros for more than 21 years, and has for decades shared the upkeep on a portion of the property highlighted in the lawsuit with Shapiro, taking turns clearing and replanting the area.
“I don’t think either of us thought twice about that little strip of land,” he said.
The Shapiros have been great neighbors, he said, and the Mocks have been “good neighbors to us,” describing them as a “nice young family.”
Political allegations
Shapiro has faced ongoing scrutiny from the state Senate for implementing the $1 million in security upgrades to his personal home, in addition to $32 million in repairs and security upgrades to the governor’s mansion following the arson attack. All of the upgrades were implemented without legislative approval due to their urgent nature.
A Senate committee in December took the unprecedented step to subpoena Shapiro over the security upgrades to his personal home, arguing that his administration had not been transparent in previous inquiries about how state taxpayer dollars were being used to upgrade security at Shapiro’s personal home.
Ward, the top official in the state Senate, has been critical of the state spending on security upgrades, saying that taxpayer dollars should not be funding security upgrades to Shapiro’s private residence.
Shapiro’s office is quick to note that Ward has been in contact with the neighbors taking the governor to court — saying that helps show the land dispute lawsuit is politically motivated.
Ward, of Westmoreland County, told ABC27 earlier this month that she had had contact with the Mock family on two occasions. A person close to Ward said that the senator is an acquaintance of the Mocks, but that the family had already obtained legal counsel by the time Ward reached out to them, and that the lawmaker did not encourage Shapiro’s neighbors to take any legal action against him.
Senate President Pro Tempore Kim Ward leaves the House chamber Feb. 3 following Gov. Josh Shapiro annual budget proposal in Harrisburg.
Jeremy Mock has owned a small coffee business in Ward’s legislative district in western Pennsylvania since 2022, according to public business filings. He and his wife moved to the Abington Township neighborhood in 2017, and have had no issues with the Shapiros until the fence feud, according to both parties’ lawsuits.
“This dispute over a small piece of the Shapiros’ backyard has been turned into a shameless political stunt by their neighbors and members of the Republican State Senate, who are now harassing and exploiting the Shapiros,” said Rosie Lapowsky, a spokesperson for Shapiro, without directly naming Ward.
Zimolong, the Mocks’ attorney, said the fact that the couple was willing to work with the Shapiros to find a solution dispels any claim that their suit is politically motivated. The Mocks could have said “no” from the outset when the Shapiros approached them, he argued, but instead participated in negotiations.
“At base, this is a straightforward defense of the property rights of two innocent owners, who were living peacefully next to the Shapiros for over nine years,” Zimolong added in a statement.
“Even today, the Mocks remain open to resolving the dispute,” Zimolong said.
Gov. Josh Shapiro and his wife, Lori Shapiro, depart a talk for his new memoir “Where We Keep the Light” on Jan. 29 in Washington, D.C
Zimolong says he has never discussed the lawsuit with Ward or coordinated with her staff over the issue, “and I have no intention of doing so.”
He saidhe is one of few attorneys in southeastern Pennsylvania who is “not afraid to hold a powerful governor accountable” and does not have work before the state that would present an ethical conflict.
Erica Clayton Wright, a spokesperson for Ward, noted that taxpayer funds have now been used to pay for security upgrades to Shapiro’s personal residence and the property of his neighbors, and argued that it’s “not the first time Gov. Shapiro’s team has been put in the awkward position of pointing fingers to distract from Gov. Shapiro’s questionable methods of operation.”
“It is important not to lose sight of the need to ensure the governor and his family are safe while also safeguarding the processes in place to manage taxpayer funds,” Clayton Wright said.
“Absolutely no one but Gov. Shapiro himself is responsible for trying to take his neighbor’s property via squatter rights, which has resulted in federal and state lawsuits,” she said.
Staff writer Abraham Gutman contributed to this article.
A high-stakes fight is brewing between President Donald Trump’s administration and states such as Pennsylvania and New Jersey over the regulation of prediction markets, the online platforms that allow users to wager on everything from sports and elections to the weather.
States that have legalized sports betting in recent years say prediction markets amount to unauthorized gambling, putting consumers at risk and threatening tax revenues generated by regulated entities like casinos.
But the Trump administration this week said the federal government was the appropriate regulator, siding with the industry’s argument that the markets’ “event contracts” are financial derivatives that allow investors to hedge against risks.
The chair of the federal Commodity Futures Trading Commission on Tuesday said the CFTChad filed a brief in federal court to “defend its exclusive jurisdiction” to oversee these markets, amid litigation between state governments and platforms such as Kalshi and Polymarket.
Prediction markets “provide useful functions for society by allowing everyday Americans to hedge commercial risks like increases in temperature and energy price spikes,” CFTC Chairman Mike Selig said in a video posted on X.
New Jersey collected more than $880 million in gaming tax revenues last year, while Pennsylvania brought in almost $3 billion, according to regulators. The revenues fund property tax relief programs and the horse racing industry, as well as programs for senior citizens and disabled residents.
Pennsylvania’s gaming regulator has previously warned that prediction markets risk “creating a backdoor to legalized sports betting,” without strict oversight.
The state Gaming Control Board’s Office of Chief Counsel told The Inquirer Wednesday that it sees a distinction between certain futures markets — like those for agricultural commodities, which have long been regulated by the CFTC — and “event contracts” tied to “the outcome of a random Wednesday night NBA basketball game.”
Representatives for Gov. Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania and Gov. Mikie Sherrill of New Jersey, both Democrats, didn’t respond to requests for comment.
But former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie — a Republican who worked to legalize sports betting while in office and who’s now advising the American Gaming Association — said Tuesday on X that the Trump administration is trying to “grow the size of the federal government & their own power while trying to crush states rights and take advantage of our citizens.”
Beyond the courts, the GOP-led Congress could also choose to step in. Some Republican lawmakers have expressed concerns about a “Wild West” in prediction markets, notwithstanding Trump’s support for the industry.
Sen. Dave McCormick (R., Pa.) welcomed the CFTC’s announcement, writing on X that prediction markets “offer tremendous benefits to consumers and businesses.”
“A consistent, uniform framework for derivatives is essential to supporting U.S. markets,” he said.
The CFTC’s action means the federal government is backing an industry in which the Trump family has a financial stake. The agency’s brief supports Crypto.com, a platform that last year partnered with the Trump family’s social media company to launch a prediction market.
Ethics experts have said the Trump family’s ties to Crypto.com create a conflict of interest. The White House denies that and says the president’s holdings are in a trust controlled by his children.
Winding through courts
The U.S. Supreme Court in 2018 struck down a federal law that prohibited sports betting in most states, paving the way for states to legalize it. Pennsylvania and New Jersey both enacted laws authorizing sports gambling and imposing requirements on betting operators such as taxation on gaming revenues, consumer protection rules, and licensing fees.
Despite state laws, prediction markets now operate nationwide — even in states that prohibit gambling altogether, like Utah.
New York-based Kalshi launched its platform in 2021. The CFTC initially opposed Kalshi’s election-related contracts, but in the fall of 2024 the company won a case in which courts found the regulator failed to show how the platform’s “event contracts” would harm the public interest. Kalshi users proceeded to trade more than $500 million on the “Who will win the Presidential Election?” market.
Then came sports contracts. In January 2025, following the CFTC’s protocols, Kalshi “self-certified” that its contracts tied to the outcome of sports games complied with relevant laws.
The company has since offered event contracts on everything from the Super Bowl to Olympic Male Curling. Some established sportsbooks like Fanatics and DraftKings have also jumped into prediction markets.
States have tried to intervene. In March, New Jersey’s gaming regulator ordered Kalshi to cease and desist operations in the Garden State, alleging the company issued unauthorized sports wagers in violation of the law and state Constitution.
Kalshi filed a lawsuit, and a federal court issued an injunction prohibiting New Jersey from pursuing enforcement actions. Kalshi and other platforms have filed suits against other states, and courts have issued conflicting rulings.
The CFTC said it filed a brief in one such suit this week.
“To those who seek to challenge our authority in this space, let me be clear: we’ll see you in court,” Selig, the Trump-appointed CFTC chairman, said Tuesday.
Advertisements by the company Kalshi predict a victory for Zohran Mamdani in the New York City mayoral election before the votes are counted and polls close, Tuesday, Nov. 4, 2025, in New York.
‘Event contracts’
At issue is whether the “event contracts” offered by prediction markets amount to gambling — regulated by states — or, as Selig says, financial instruments “that allow two parties to speculate on future market conditions without owning the underlying asset.”
Platforms like Kalshi say they are similar to stock exchanges, where people on both sides of a trade can meet — and therefore subject to federal regulation of commodities. Unlike a casino, the platforms say, they don’t win when customers lose.
Pennsylvania regulators see it differently.
The state Gaming Control Board told The Inquirer Wednesday that it takes issue with “‘prediction markets’ allowing any consumer, age 18 years old or older, to purchase a ‘contract’ on any potential future event occurring, even when that event does not have any broad economic impact or consequence, such as the outcome of a random Wednesday night NBA basketball game.”
(Under Pennsylvania law, gambling is limited to those who are 21 or older.)
“The Board believes that is not what the Commodities Exchange Act contemplated when it was enacted by Congress and established the CFTC and is, in fact, gambling,” the board’s Office of Chief Counsel said in a statement.
If the courts side with the Trump administration, states worry that tax revenues from regulated sportsbooks would fall and customers would be vulnerable to markets they say are easily exploited by insiders.
“If prediction markets successfully carve themselves out of the ‘gaming’ definition, they risk creating a parallel wagering ecosystem where bets on sports outcomes occur with significantly less oversight regarding potential match-fixing,” Kevin F. O’Toole, executive director of the Pennsylvania Gaming Control Board, wrote in an October letter to the state’s congressional delegation.
For example, the gaming board has the ability to penalize licensed operators if they violate state regulations, O’Toole wrote, “something that an operator who ‘self-certifies’ their contracts/wagers [under CFTC rules] would never be subjected to.”
O’Toole said the board’s regulatory role in this area is limited to sports wagering, but he added that markets on non-sports related events — he cited examples from Polymarket such as whether there will be a civil war in the United States this year — are equally “if not more troubling.”
The CFTC says it is capable of overseeing the industry. “America is home to the most liquid and vibrant financial markets in the world because our regulators take seriously their obligation to police fraud and institute appropriate investor safeguards,” Selig wrote in a Wall Street Journal opinion piece this week.
When Sen. Dave McCormick stood on the Senate floor to call for nationwide rules mandating proof of citizenship and photo identification for voters, he invoked a drama that had played out three months earlier in Chester County.
The county had mistakenly left all third-party and unaffiliated voters off the Election Day voter rolls, creating a chaotic scene in which more than 12,000 voters were forced to cast provisional ballots, which take more time to count as officials must verify the eligibility of each voter. A subsequent investigation by a law firm hired by the county attributed the issue to human error and insufficient oversight.
“Every time Americans hear about election problems like Chester County’s, they rightly question the integrity of our electoral process,” McCormick said.
But in his recounting of events, the Pennsylvania Republican gave incomplete and inaccurate information about Chester County’s election error.
What did McCormick say about Chester County?
Americans, he said, overwhelmingly believe there are problems with U.S. elections, and he argued that has been demonstrated for them on multiple occasions, including in November when Chester County omitted more than 70,000 third-party and unaffiliated voters from its Election Day pollbooks.
“Registered voters were turned away at the polls. And an unknown number of unverified voters cast regular ballots,” McCormick claimed.
But there is no evidence that voters were turned away or that ineligible voters cast ballots. McCormick’s office did not respond to questions.
Were voters turned away?
According to county officials, no voter who wanted to vote was turned away.
Instead, for most of the day voters were offered the opportunity to vote by provisional ballot while county and state officials worked to get supplemental pollbooks distributedto polling places across the county.
Some voters did testify at county election board meetings that they voluntarily left their polling place when their name was not in the pollbook but that they returned later in the day when they could vote on machines.
Did unverified voters cast ballots?
There is no evidence that ineligible voters cast ballots. The identity and eligibility of all voters who cast ballots were verified, county officials said.
When the pollbook issue was discovered on Election Day, Chester County officials initially recommended that poll workers ask voters not included in the pollbook to sign the pollbook manually and vote as normal, according to the independent investigation of the incident.
To ensure those voters were eligible to vote, county officials said, poll workers were instructed to follow a detailed process that included verifying voters’ eligibility in the full voter list and verifying their identity with photo identification.
The Chester County Republican Committee has disputed the county’s version of events, contending that photo ID was not checked for all voters who wrote their names into pollbooks and that poll workers were unable to verify voters’ identities using signature matching.
Around 7:40 a.m., less than an hour after polls opened, Pennsylvania Department of State officials recommended the county shift to asking voters to cast provisional ballots to eliminate the risk of an ineligible voter casting a ballot, thereby invalidating the election.
A county spokesperson said there is no evidence that ineligible voters cast ballots during November’s election.
Whether voters wrote their names into a pollbook or cast a provisional ballot, “the identity and eligibility of each individual was verified by the poll workers,” said Chester County spokesperson Andrew Kreider.
Would the SAVE Act have changed anything?
The SAVE Act is a collection of election policies proposed by congressional Republicans that would require proof of citizenship to register to vote and mandate all voters show photo ID at the polls.
Such requirements would not have prevented Chester County’s error, which investigators determined was a clerical error resulting from inexperienced staff with insufficient training and oversight.
“Sen. McCormick was ignoring the facts and feeding into this larger narrative that our elections can’t be trusted and just feeding into the president’s narrative that there’s something wrong with Pennsylvania elections,” said Lauren Cristella, the CEO of the Committee of Seventy, a Philadelphia-based civic engagement and good-government organization.
In addition to Chester County, McCormick pointed to his own experience in close elections — both his 2022 primary loss and his 2024 general election win — as a reason he supports the bill’s proof of citizenship and voter ID requirements.
The policy, which passed the Republican-led U.S. House, still faces an uphill battle in the U.S. Senate, where it would need 60 votes to advance. It has faced significant opposition from Democrats who say it would needlessly make it harder for people to vote.
The proof of citizenship requirement, critics say, would place a higher burden on married people whose last names no longer match their birth certificates.
When President Donald Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio gutted the U.S. Department of State last year, they said they were doing it to make America “safer, stronger, and more prosperous.” Yet, Trump’s nominee to be assistant secretary of state for international organization affairs, Jeremy Carl, is a white supremacist conspiracy theorist who would undermine the United States’ standing at the United Nations and destroy our relationships with countries around the world.
As former American diplomats, we’ve worked to promote human rights globally. We know the inner workings of this world and can say unequivocally that Carl would be a grave threat in this post, and his nomination must be resoundingly rejected.
The assistant secretary of state for international organization affairs is the architect of U.S. policy at the United Nations and across a wide range of multilateral arenas. Few outside diplomatic circles have heard of this position, but it’s one of the central posts through which the U.S. interacts with the world.
For example, when we stop defending fair labor standards in places like Bangladesh or Vietnam, American workers pay the price as competitors in those countries cut corners and flood markets with cheaper goods. When we look away from corruption and repression in energy-rich regions, instability follows — driving up oil prices and hitting Americans at the pump. When we ignore humanitarian crises until they explode, we spend far more on aid and crisis response than it would have cost to prevent them.
These aren’t far-off problems. In an interconnected world, they’re immediate issues that impact American jobs, consumer prices, and national security. That’s why this role is so crucial.
Carl is moving quietly ahead in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, on which Pennsylvania Sen. Dave McCormick serves, and his nomination hearing is slated for Thursday. The Senate should stand up for American values and the interests of the American people by rejecting this dangerous nominee.
Carl is not just unqualified for the role — he has no experience working with the U.N. — he represents a dangerous rejection of the ideals of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights: that all humans are born with equal dignity and rights.
Carl has promoted the racist and antisemitic “great replacement” conspiracy theory — claiming that there is a covert effort led by elites to replace white people in Western countries through mass migration and high birth rates of people of color, Muslims, Jews, and immigrants.
He has promoted political violence, including calling for the execution of the president of the American Federation of Teachers, a Jewish lesbian. He claimed that identifying as transgender is “somewhere between demonic and laughable.”
Though he has deleted thousands of his inflammatory tweets, these views are memorialized in his book, The Unprotected Class: How Anti-White Racism is Tearing America Apart. He gave a speech last year titled, “On the Persecution of Whites in America.”
These are not stray remarks. They reflect who Carl is, and the message the U.S. would send by giving him a senior diplomatic post. They are so alarming that the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism wrote an entire article about his work to champion “anti-white racism.”
If Carl becomes the face the U.S. presents to the world, we’ll be telling the world that we care about only one group of people. We also will undermine our interests, because in our racially, religiously diverse world, other countries will rightly see Carl’s views as abhorrent.
A world where human rights are optional and the United States fails to hold abusers accountable is a world where corruption grows, conflicts fester, and authoritarian regimes operate unchecked. The result: increased human suffering at home and abroad, higher prices for Americans, fewer protections for American workers, and greater instability that threatens our own security.
Last month, the Trump administration issued an executive order withdrawing the U.S. from 66 organizations, including 31 U.N. mechanisms. The U.S. was not a significant political or financial supporter of all of them, so the substantive consequences of withdrawal are debatable.
Yet, the symbolism is clear: The U.S. is disproportionately targeting mechanisms that serve the most vulnerable and marginalized, like U.N. Women and the Permanent Forum for People of African Descent, or those tackling the climate crisis, like the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change. In other words, being unqualified, opposed to universal human rights, and seeking to undermine global governance is the point of Carl’s nomination.
We know what effective diplomacy looks like. It is steady, principled, and grounded in the belief that America’s power is greatest when guided by its conscience. It also treats the rights and dignity of the most vulnerable as a priority, not an afterthought.
When we lead with our values, we build coalitions that prevent wars and foster prosperity. When we abandon them, chaos fills the vacuum — and history shows that chaos never stays overseas.
Desirée Cormier Smith was the inaugural special representative for racial equity and justice. Jessica Stern was the special envoy for the advancement of the human rights of LGBTQI+ persons at the U.S. Department of State. They are now both cofounders and copresidents of the Alliance for Diplomacy and Justice, promoting human rights as a central pillar of U.S. foreign policy.
Maybe it’s because I’ve watched every blessed one of them, starting as a curious, nearly 8-year-old boy in 1967, but the Super Bowl has always felt like the ultimate barometer of where the American Experiment is at. Super Bowl LX (that’s 60, for those of you smart enough not to take four years of Latin in high school) was no exception. The actual game was something of a snoozefest, but the tsunami of commercials revealed us as a nation obsessed with artificial intelligence, sports betting, weight loss, and anything that can lift us from middle-class peonage without having to do any actual work. As Bad Bunny said, God bless America.
Bad Bunny’s real message: From P.R. to Minnesota, we are neighbors
Bad Bunny (center top) performs Sunday during the halftime show of the NFL Super Bowl XL football game between the Seattle Seahawks and the New England Patriots in Santa Clara, Calif.
Right-wing media prattled on for months about how Bad Bunny, the Puerto Rican reggaeton superstar who is the world’s most streamed artist, would politicize and thus ruin the NFL’s halftime extravaganza at Super Bowl LX in Santa Clara, Calif.
The babble became a scream seven days before the Big Game kicked off, when Bad Bunny won the record of the year Grammy Award and began his acceptance speech with the exhortation “ICE out!” adding, “We’re not savages, we’re not animals, we’re not aliens — we are humans, and we are Americans.”
But on the world’s biggest stage Sunday night — seen by 135 million in the United States, a Super Bowl record — Bad Bunny sang not one word about Donald Trump, not that MAGA fans even bothered to hold up a translation app. The white-suited Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio danced his way through the history of Puerto Rico and the Americas writ large, from the plantations of yore to the exploding power lines of the hurricane-wracked 21st century. He whirled past an actual wedding, stopped for a shaved ice, and for 13 spellbinding minutes turned a cast of 400 into what his transfixed TV audience craved at home.
BadBunny built his own community — a place not torn asunder by politics, but bonded by love and music.
Without uttering one word — in Spanish or English — about the dire situation in a nation drifting from flawed democracy into wrenching authoritarianism, the planet’s reigning king of pop delivered the most powerful message of America’s six decades of Super Bowl fever. Shrouded in sugar cane and shaded by a plantain tree, Bad Bunny sang nothing about the frigid chaos 2,000 miles east in Minnesota, and yet the show was somehow very much about Minneapolis.
Bad Bunny finally gave voice to what thousands of everyday folks in the Twin Cities have been trying to say with their incessant whistles.
We are all neighbors. The undocumented Venezuelan next door who toils in the back of a restaurant and sends his kids to your kids’ school is a neighbor. But Haiti is also a neighbor, as is Cuba. We are all in this together.
The word I kept thinking about as I watched Bad Bunny’s joyous performance is a term that didn’t really exist on New Year’s Day 2026, yet has instantly provided a name to the current zeitgeist.
The great writer Adam Serwer — already up for the wordsmithing Hall of Fame after he nailed the MAGA movement in 2018 in five words: “The cruelty is the point” — leaned hard into the concept of “neighborism” after he traveled to Minneapolis last month. His goal was to understand an almost revolutionary resistance to Trump’s mass deportation raids that had residents — many of whom had not been especially political — in the streets, blowing those warning whistles, confronting armed federal agents, and tracking their movements across the city.
Serwer visited churches where volunteers packed thousands of boxes of food for immigrant families afraid to leave their homes during the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids, and talked to stay-at-home moms, retirees, and blue-collar workers who give rides or money to those at risk, or who engaged in the riskier business of tracking the deportation raiders.
“If the Minnesota resistance has an overarching ideology,” Serwer wrote, “you could call it ‘neighborism’ — a commitment to protecting the people around you, no matter who they are or where they came from.” He contrasted the reality on the ground in Minneapolis to the twisted depictions by Trump and his vice president, JD Vance, who’ve insisted refugees are a threat to community and cohesion.
Of course, it’s not just Minneapolis, and it’s not just the many, liberal-leaning cities — from Los Angeles to Chicago to New Orleans and more — that were the incubators of the notion that concerned citizens — immigrant and nonimmigrant alike — could prevent their neighbors from getting kidnapped. Even small towns like rural Sackets Harbor, N.Y., the hometown of Trump’s border czar Tom Homan, rose up in protest to successfully block the dairy farm deportation of a mom and her three kids. It’s been like this everywhere regular folks — even the ones who narrowly elected Trump to a second term in 2024 — realize mass deportation doesn’t mean only “the worst of the worst,” but often the nice mom or dad in the house, or church pew, next to theirs.
Only now that it’s arrived is it possible to see “neighborism” as the thing Americans were looking for all along, even if we didn’t know it. It is, in every way, the opposite vibe from the things that have always fueled fascism — atomization and alienation that’s easy for a demagogue to mold into rank suspicion of The Other.
I’m pretty sure Bad Bunny wasn’t using the word neighborism when the NFL awarded him the coveted halftime gig last fall. But the concept was deeply embedded in his show. He mapped his native Puerto Rico as a place where oppression has long loomed — from the cruelty of the sugar plantations to the capitalist exploitation of the failed power grid — but where community is stronger.
Then Benito broadened the whole concept. Reclaiming the word America for its original meaning as all of the Western Hemisphere, Bad Bunny name-checked “Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay, Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador, Brazil,” and Canada, as well as the United States. These, too, are our neighbors. “God bless America,” he shouted — his only message of the night delivered in English.
So, no, Bad Bunny never mentioned Minneapolis, but a tender moment when he seemingly handed the Grammy he’d won just aweek ago to a small Latino boy had to remind viewers of the communal fight to save children like the 5-year-old, blue bunny hat-wearing (yes, ironic) Liam Conejo Ramos, who was just arrested, detained, and released by ICE. (A false rumor that the Super Bowl boy was Ramos went viral.)
But arguably, this super performance had peaked a few moments earlier, when the singer exited the wedding scene stage with a backward trust dive, caught and held aloft by his makeshift community in the crowd below. Bad Bunny had no fear that his neighbors would not be there for him. Viva Puerto Rico. Viva Minneapolis. Viva our neighbors.
Yo, do this!
Some 63 years after he was gunned down by a white racist in his own driveway, the Mississippi civil rights icon Medgar Evers has been having a moment. A fearless World War II vet whose bold stands for civil rights as local leader of the NAACP in America’s most segregated state triggered his 1963 assassination, Evers’ fight has become the subject of a best-selling book, a controversy over how his story is told at the Jackson, Miss., home where he was killed, and now a two-hour documentary streaming on PBS.com. I’m looking forward to watching the widely praised Everlasting: Life & Legacy of Medgar Evers.
After the Super Bowl, February is the worst month for sports — three out of every four years. In 2026, we have the Winter Olympics to bridge the frigid gap while we wait for baseball’s spring training (and its own World Baseball Classic) to warm us up. Personally, I try and sometimes fail to get too jacked up around sleds careening down an icy track, but hockey is a different story. At 2:10 p.m. on Tuesday (that’s today if you read this early enough), the puck drops on USA Network for the highly anticipated match between the world’s two top women’s teams: the United States and its heated rival Canada. Look for these two border frenemies to meet again for the gold medal.
Ask me anything
Question: How is it that some towns have been able to prevent ICE from buying warehouses and turning them into concentration camps, while others say they are helpless against the federal government? What does it mean that several are planned for within a couple of hours of Philly? — @idaroo.bsky.social via Bluesky
Answer: Great question. It seems ICE and its $45 billion wad of cash are racing in near-secrecy to make this national gulag archipelago of 23 or so concentration camps a done deal. The places where they’ve been stopped, like one planned for Virginia, happened because locals were able to pressure the developer before a sale to ICE was concluded. That’s no longer an option at the two already purchased Pennsylvania sites in Schuylkill and Berks Counties. The last hope is pressure from high-ranking Republicans, which may (we’ll see) have stopped a Mississippi site. Pennsylvanians might want to focus, then, on GOP Sen. Dave McCormick. Good luck with that.
What you’re saying about …
It’s conventional wisdom that the best argument for a Gov. Josh Shapiro 2028 presidential campaign is his popularity in his home state of Pennsylvania, the battleground with the most electoral votes. So it’s fascinating that none of the dozen or so of you who responded to this Philadelphia-based newsletter wants Shapiro to seek the White House, although folks seem divided into two camps. Some of you just don’t like Josh or his mostly centrist politics. “I think he’s all ambition, all consumed with reaching that top pedestal, not as a public servant, but because he thinks he deserves it,” wrote Linda Mitala, who once campaigned for Shapiro, but soured on his views over Gaza protesters, New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani, and other issues. Yet, others think he’s an excellent governor who should remain in the job through 2030. “Stay governor of Pa. when good governance and ability to stand up to federal (authoritarian) overreach is dire,” wrote Kim Root, who’d prefer Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear for the White House.
📮 This week’s question: A shocking, likely (though still not declared) Democratic primary win for Analilia Mejia, the Bernie Sanders-aligned left-wing candidate, in suburban North Jersey’s 11th Congressional District raises new questions for the Dems about the 2026 midterms. Should the party run more progressive candidates like Mejia, who promise a more aggressive response to Trump, or will they lose by veering too far left? Please email me your answer and put the exact phrase “Dems 2026” in the subject line.
Backstory on how the F-bomb became the word of the year
Billie Joe Armstrong of Green Day performs Sunday before the start of Super Bowl XL in Santa Clara, Calif.
I’m old enough to remember when the world’s most famous comedy riff was the late George Carlin’s “Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television” — its point driven home by Carlin’s 1972 arrest on obscenity charges that went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. A half century later, you still can’t say dirty words on broadcast TV — cable and streaming is a different story — but that fortress is under assault. In 2026, America is under seemingly constant attack from the F-bomb.
It is freakin’ everywhere. When the top elected Democrat in Washington, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, cut a short video to respond to the president’s shocking post of a racist video that depicted Barack and Michelle Obama as apes, he said, “[F-word] Donald Trump!” If uttered in, say, 1972, Jeffries’ attack would have been a top story for days, but this barely broke through. Maybe because that word is in the lexicon of so many of his fellow Democrats, like Mayor Jacob Frey, who famously told ICE agents to “get the [F-word] out of Minneapolis,” or Minnesota Sen. Tina Smith, who begged federal agents to “leave us the (bleep) alone.” (Smith is retiring at year’s end and seems to no longer give a you-know-what.)
The poor guys with their finger on the silence button at the TV networks, where you still can’t say Carlin’s seven words, can barely keep up. The F-bomb was dropped at this year’s Grammys, where award-winner Billie Eilish declared “(Bleep) ICE!” as she brandished her prize. The F-bomb was dropped, of course, at the Super Bowl, when the only true moment of silence during 10-plus hours of nonstop bombast came during Green Day’s pregame performance of “American Idiot,” when NBC shielded America’s tender ears from hearing Billie Joe Armstrong sing about “the subliminal mind(bleep) America.”
We’re only about six weeks into the new year, but it’s hard not to think that Merriam-Webster or the other dictionary pooh-bahs won’t declare the F-bomb as word of the year for 2026, even if I’m still not allowed to use it in The Inquirer, family newspaper that we are. So what the … heck is going on here? One study found the F-word was 28 times more likely to appear in literature nowthan in the 1950s, so in one sense it’s not surprising this would eventually break through on Capitol Hill or on the world’s biggest stages.
But the bigger problem is that America’s descent into authoritarianism and daily political outrage has devolved to such a point where, every day, permissible words no longer seem close to adequate for capturing our shock and awe at how bad things are. Only the F-bomb, it turns out, contains enough dynamite to blow out our rage over masked goons kidnapping people on America’s streets, or a racist, megalomaniac president who still has 35 months left in his term. Yet, even this (sort of) banned expletive is losing its power to express how we really feel. I have no idea what the $%&# comes next.
What I wrote on this date in 2019
What a long, strange trip for Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, one of the four richest people on the planet. Today, Bezos is in the headlines for his horrific stewardship of the Washington Post, which has bowed down on its editorial pages to the Trump regime, lost hundreds of thousands of subscribers, and laid off 300 journalists. It’s hard to recall that seven years ago, Bezos and Trump were at war, and there was evidence Team MAGA had enlisted its allies from Saudi Arabia to the National Enquirer to take down the billionaire. I wrote that “a nation founded in the ideals of democracy has increasingly fallen prey to a new dystopian regime that melds the new 21st century dark arts of illegal hacking and media manipulation with the oldest tricks in the book: blackmail and extortion.”
My first and hopefully not last journalistic road trip of 2026 took me to Pennsylvania coal country, where ICE has spent $119.5 million to buy an abandoned Big Lots warehouse on the outskirts of tiny Tremont in Schuylkill County. I spoke with both locals and a historical expert on concentration camps about their fears and the deeper meaning of a gulag archipelago for detained immigrants that is suddenly looming on U.S. soil. It can happen here. Over the weekend, I looked at the stark contrast between Europe’s reaction to the Jeffrey Epstein scandal — where ties to the late multimillionaire sex trafficker are ending careers and even threatening to topple the British government — and the United States, where truth has not led to consequences so far. The Epstein fallout shows how the utter lack of elite accountability is driving the crisis of American democracy.
One last Super Bowl reference: Now that football is over, are you ready for some FOOTBALL? Now just four months out, it’s hard to know what to make of the 2026 World Cup returning to America and coming to Philadelphia for the very first time, and whether the increasing vibe that Donald Trump’s United States is a global pariah will mar the world’s greatest sporting event (sorry, NFL). Whatever happens, The Inquirer is ready, and this past week we published our guide to soccer’s biggest-ever moment in Philly. Anchored by our world-class soccer writer Jonathan Tannenwald and Kerith Gabriel, who worked for the Philadelphia Union between his stints at the paper, the package provides not only an overview of the World Cup in Philly, but previews the dozen teams who will (or might) take the pitch at Lincoln Financial Field, with in-depth looks at the powerhouses (France) as well as the massive underdogs (Curaçao). June is just around the corner, so don’t let the paywall become your goalkeeper. Subscribe to The Inquirer before the first ball drops.
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In the suit, filed in U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, the Shapiros’ neighbors in Abington Township, Jeremy and Simone Mock, accuse the governor and his wife, Lori Shapiro, of illegally occupying part of the Mocks’ yard to build an eight-foot security fence last summer in what they claim in the lawsuit is an “outrageous abuse of power.”
In short, they asked a federal judge to order the Shapiros off their property.
The Shapiros quickly filed a countersuit in Montgomery County Court of Common Pleas on Monday against the Mocks, asking a judge to declare that the disputed chunk of the property has been theirs for years.
The attempt to build the new fence is part of a larger security upgrade for Shapiro and his family, following the April firebombing of the state-owned governor’s residence in Harrisburg, when a man broke in to the mansion and set off Molotov cocktails that quickly engulfed part of the home. Cody Balmer, 38, pleaded guilty in October to attempted murder and was sentenced to 25 to 50 years in prison.
The Mocks, whose property is adjacent to the Shapiros’ Montgomery County property, say the planned location of the fence is on their property unlawfully and violates their rights, according to the lawsuit.
The couple is represented by Wally Zimolong, a Delaware County attorney who is described as “the ‘go-to’ lawyer in Pennsylvania for conservative causes and candidates” on his firm’s website. He previously represented the political campaigns of President Donald Trump and U.S. Sen. Dave McCormick (R., Pa.), according to his website.
“The Governor looks forward to a swift resolution and will not be bullied by anyone trying to score cheap political points, especially at the expense of his family’s safety and wellbeing,” Will Simons, a spokesperson for Shapiro, a Democrat running for reelection, saidin a statement.
According to the Mocks’ lawsuit, the Shapiros approached their neighbors in July to discuss the construction of a security fence near where their yards meet. The Shapiros were interested in purchasing a portion of the Mocks’ property for the fence, and also discussed a lease option. But the couples couldn’t agree on the price, according to the suit.
Things took a turn in late August, when, according to the lawsuit, the Shapiros’ attorney told the Mocks they would obtain the chunk of land through “alternative actions.”
“What followed was an outrageous abuse of power by the sitting Governor of Pennsylvania and its former Attorney General,” the complaint says. (Shapiro served as Pennsylvania’s attorney general before he was elected governor in 2022.)
The Shapiros told the Mock family, according to the neighbors’ lawsuit, that they owned the land through adverse possession, a legal mechanism through which a person can gain ownership of a property they’ve actively used for at least 21 years. The Shapiros have lived in their Montgomery County home for 23 years.
The governor and first lady then began planting arborvitae-type trees and other plants on the Mocks’ property, flying drones over it, threatening to remove healthy trees, and “chasing away” contractors who came to work in the Mocks’ yard, the lawsuit claims.
The complaint also accuses Shapiro of directing state police to patrol the property. Troopers instructed the Mocks to leave the area of the yard multiple times, calling it a “disputed” area or “security zone,” the suit says.
The Mocks purchased the house in 2017, according to property records, and their lawsuit says they have paid taxes on the property over the time period. The offer to purchase the land shows the Shapiros knew it wasn’t theirs, according to the complaint.
“The Shapiros continue to occupy the Mock Property without permission or any legal justification whatsoever,” the lawsuit says.
The security fencing for the Shapiros’ home was purchased but ultimately never installed, and is being repurposed at the Pennsylvania State Police training academy, Spotlight PA previously reported.
Zimolong declined to comment on the lawsuit Monday.
The Shapiro’s countersuit
The Shapiros’ lawsuit doesn’t dispute many elements of the Mocks’ suit, but casts them in a different light.
As the Shapiros tell it, a land surveyor discovered in summer 2025 that the Mocks actually owned about 2,900 square feet of land that the Shapiros had believed was a part of their property since they bought the home in 2003. That time period, 22 years, satisfies Pennsylvania’s adverse possession law.
The Mocks didn’t consider that part of the property to be theirs, according to the complaint, until the Shapiros told them.
But after negotiations fell apart when the Shapiros attempted to purchase the land, the Mocks sought a permit to erect their own fence and include the disputed area on their property, the suit says.
Shapiro’s security detail denied a tree-removal contractor access to the area, according to the complaint, because the first couple believe they possessed the land.
And the state police troopers the Mocks saw were part of Shapiro’s security detail, which after the April attack have conducted review of his Abington home.
The governor and his wife are asking a judge to find that they are the “legal and equitable owners” of the area in dispute.
This image provided by Commonwealth Media Services shows damage after a fire on April 13, 2025, at the Pennsylvania governor’s mansion while Democratic Gov. Josh Shapiro and his family slept inside.
Scrutiny over security
Shapiro has faced scrutiny for using taxpayer dollars with little transparency to upgrade the security of his personal home, which is the primary residence for two of his four children, who are school-aged. State Police spent at least $1 million to upgrade security on his Abington Township property, in addition to more than $32 million in upgrades and repairs to the Harrisburg governor’s mansion.
The GOP-controlled Senate Intergovernmental Operations Committee in December took the rare step of subpoenaing Shapiro for access to records about how taxpayer dollars were spent to upgrade the Shapiro property and home, including a new security system and landscaping work previously reported by Spotlight PA. Sen. Jarrett Coleman (R., Lehigh), who chairs the committee, argued the subpoenas were necessary because the Shapiro administration did not turn over the requested documents, or turned over incomplete records.
As the Democratic governor of the nation’s fifth most-populous state, Shapiro continues to face threats to his safety. Police arrested a Carlisle man last week for allegedly sending messages to the governor’s office, that said “I do plan on stalking and hurting your family, before adding “metaphorically speaking of course.” The man, George R. Brown Jr., later told police they were “fake threats” and he was trying to get help with an eye injury he suffered while at Cumberland County Prison, PennLive reported.
Is this actually an honest-to-goodness turning point in the war for the soul of America? Monday night, the deny-everything-admit-nothing Trump regime surprised observers by revealing that violence-provoking Border Patrol commander Greg Bovino has been sent home from Minneapolis and may even be retiring. That’s a giant win for the power of everyday people resisting, but turning around the battleship of tyranny will still take much more work.
Corporate America may pay a steep price for its cowardly ICE neutrality
Protesters gather Friday at Target’s corporate headquarters in Minneapolis.
One of the many remarkable and lasting ideas the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. placed into the national conversation was the concept of something he called “negative peace.”
Although the phrase began appearing in the writings of the civil rights leader in the late 1950s, King made the idea famous in his 1963 “Letter From Birmingham Jail,” where he was locked up for fighting segregation in Alabama’s largest city. He was annoyed by a letter from eight local white clergymen, titled a “Call for Unity,” that begged King to end a civil disobedience crusade for racial integration and seek progress through negotiations and the courts.
When an aide smuggled the newspaper into King’s cell, he began furiously scribbling his response in the margins of the ad before writing more on any scrap of paper he could find. His key passage argues that the white moderate was a greater threat to Black freedom than the KKK, because he was someone “more devoted to ‘order’ than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice,” and who wants African Americans to wait for a “more convenient season.”
Flash-forward 63 years, and the grand pooh-bahs of U.S. capitalism have learned nothing from this. On Sunday, 60 major corporations based in Minnesota — feeling caught in the crossfire of the federal immigration raids tearing apart Greater Minneapolis and the growing resistance movement — issued a cowardly and pathetic call for a negative peace to reduce the tensions.
The open letter that was released through the Minnesota Chamber of Commerce was signed by the CEOs or equivalents of almost every major Gopher State brand that you could think of — including Target, 3M, General Mills, Hormel, UnitedHealth (yes, that UnitedHealth), and all five major sports franchises. Some of these firms are beginning to see real economic fallout from the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids and protest activities, which have kept some frightened Black and brown workers at home and triggered a large general strike last Friday.
The letter reads little differently from the Birmingham ministers’ “Call for Unity.”
“With yesterday’s tragic news” — a vague, bloodless reference to the 10 shots fired by federal officers into a 37-year-old intensive care nurse named Alex Pretti — “we are calling for an immediate deescalation of tensions and for state, local and federal officials to work together to find real solutions,” the letter states. It notes that Minnesota business leaders have been in touch with Gov. Tim Walz, the Donald Trump White House, and others in pleading for what it hopes would be a solution to the state’s crisis.
Pretti is never mentioned in the letter. Neither is Renee Nicole Good, the 37-year-old mother of three who was gunned down behind the wheel of her family SUV by an ICE agent as she attempted to drive away from a confrontation. In fact, ICE is never mentioned, nor are the federal agency’s most outrageous tactics, such as the seizure of a 5-year-old boy as “bait” to detain him and his father, or dragging a barely dressed Hmong refugee who is a U.S. citizen out of his home in frigid weather.
The entire letter is remarkable not for what it says — since it says very little beyond praying this whole mess somehow goes away so they can go back to making money without thinking about such dreadful things — than for what it doesn’t say.
There is no condemnation of the murders of two U.S. citizens who did nothing beyond legally monitoring the federal officers and their activities while on public streets. There is no condemnation of the ICE tactics in seizing hardworking migrants with no criminal records who are the backbone of the Minnesota community. There is nothing about what MLK would have called “positive peace” — a desire for real justice.
That’s probably because positive peace requires bold choices and displays of real courage — qualities that modern corporate America seems to have misplaced in a giant warehouse somewhere.
Exhibit A would have to be Target, the large national retailer that, with its hundreds of stores and its name slapped on the NBA’s Timberwolves’ arena, is now to many Americans the corporate face of Minnesota. Under pressure from demonstrators, including more than 100 clergy who protested outside Target’s Minneapolis headquarters on Friday, the retailer still said nothing — before the tepid group letter — about the ongoing ICE raids, or why agents have been allowed to stage operations in its parking lots and even inside stores.
There’s a bleak history here. In 2020, Minnesota became the epicenter of the fight for racial justice when the Minneapolis police murder of George Floyd was captured on video. That time, the state’s CEOs not only expressed moral outrage but pledged to spend heavily on diversity initiatives. Five years later, the local news site Racket reported many of these firms had backtracked, and that barely a third of the pledged $550 million had been spent.
This time, the business leaders just want the “tension” to disappear. That’s not so easy. Just ask Target. Its early 2025 move to end its diversity initiatives as Trump took office sparked calls from Black leaders for a boycott that has cut into store traffic and lowered Target’s stock price. It seems that moral surrender actually does have a price.
Also on Sunday, the team chaplain for the Timberwolves — ironically, one of the teams that signed onto the corporate letter — issued a personal statement with loud echoes of the “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” calling out any churches that had prayed that morning for peace and unity but not for justice.
“Peace is what the powerful ask for when they don’t want to be interrupted,” Matt Moberg wrote in a short piece that went viral on social media, adding, “Unity that refuses to name violence is just loyalty to the ones holding the weapons.”
This wouldn’t be the first time corporate America misread the room. Sunday’s statement suggested a continued deer-in-the-headlights reaction from the shock of Trump’s return to office — even as the CEOs ignore not just the power of the Target boycotts but the recent success of economic justice campaigns against firms from Disney to Avelo Airlines, not to mention the solidarity that drove the Minneapolis general strike.
Already, there is growing talk of a national general strike or expanded boycotts by millions of citizens who are also consumers, and who are both furious over the Good and Pretti murders and now flabbergasted by the corporate cone of silence. America’s business leaders don’t understand that cowardice has a steep cost attached.
Yo, do this!
There’s no better writer about the long fight for social justice in America than historian Heather Ann Thompson. Her searing 2016 book about the 1971 Attica prison uprising — Blood in the Water — won a well-deserved Pulitzer Prize, and locals were thrilled when it was reported that the next book from Thompson, who taught for a while at Temple, would be on the 1985 MOVE bombing. Instead, she has taken a detour. Her Fear and Fury: The Reagan Eighties, the Bernie Goetz Shootings, and the Rebirth of White Rage is out today. I just downloaded the audiobook, and cannot wait to listen.
It’s Academy Award season, and so — hopelessly snowed in on Sunday — I took a family break from football (!) to rent a movie … from 2009. Given my obsession with 1960s rock and roll radio, it’s weird that I’d never seen Pirate Radio, a fictional homage to the U.K.’s government-defying offshore radio stations of the British Invasion era that stars the late Philip Seymour Hoffman. The plot can be muddled at times, but it’s maybe the best movie soundtrack ever!
Ask me anything
Question: Why do Dem Leaders want to save ICE, when nobody really else does? What’s the motivation? — @keynesaddiction.bsky.social via Bluesky
Answer: I wonder this, too. Both ICE and the current crew at U.S. Customs and Border Protection have been simmering for far too long in a toxic, unredeemable culture that cannot be reformed. What’s more, the shocking abuses on display in Minnesota and two killings have now convinced a plurality of U.S. voters that ICE should be abolished. Still, I can understand the Democrats’ bind, since at the moment the party has no other political leverage beyond the ability to block most Senate legislation with the filibuster. It might be best to push hard for as much as can be done in 2026, while running in the midterms on a platform of abolishing ICE when they gain power on Capitol Hill.
What you’re saying about …
LOL — remember that whole Greenland thing? It feels like that was five years ago, but some of you had some good responses on dealing with Trump’s bluster about an American takeover, even if things have temporarily cooled down. Tom Desmond said the Europeans “need to quit pretending that they can ‘manage’ him through flattery and soft words. Instead, they need to apply threats — i.e., whatever tariffs he imposes on Europe over Greenland they will return against the U.S. three-fold.” Jo Parker said Congress needs to reassert its powers over tariffs and declaring war, but “With the spineless [Dave] McCormick and [John] Fetterman representing us, I’m not sanguine that such actions will take place, however.”
📮 This week’s question: Things are coming to a head in Congress over funding for ICE and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. Should Democrats make a deal for ICE reforms, such as unmasking and requiring arrest warrants, or must they push for bigger concessions, or even abolishing ICE? Please email me your answer and put the exact phrase “ICE funding” in the subject line.
Backstory on the day (a) Fetterman spoke out
U.S. Sen. John Fetterman and his wife, Gisele Barreto Fetterman, await the arrival of President Joe Biden at Philadelphia International Airport in July 2024.
I must confess that keeping up with the downward spiral of Pennsylvania’s Democratic Sen. John Fetterman since he took office in 2023 can get tiresome. At first, Fetterman’s rightward tack seemed largely a function of his zealous support for Israel, which caused him to wave off allegations of war crimes by Benjamin Netanyahu’s right-wing government. Soon, others pointed to his health woes — hospitalizations for a stroke and depression, among other things — as he endorsed more and more Trump-flavored ideas.
Amid mounting outrage over Trump’s aggressive immigration raids, Fetterman made some comments that had his growing legion of critics wonder if the senator’s real heart issue was whether he had one. “ICE performs an important job for our country,” the Democrat posted on X last July, adding that any calls to abolish the agency were “inappropriate and outrageous.” Even after the Jan. 7 ICE killing of Renee Nicole Good in Minneapolis, Fetterman’s middle-of-the-road stance was this: “Secure the border. Deport all the criminals. Stop targeting the hardworking migrants in our nation.” In the immediate aftermath of Saturday’s killing of Alex Pretti by federal agents, even Pennsylvania’s GOP Sen. Dave McCormick had called for a congressional investigation before Fetterman said anything.
On Sunday night, though, Fetterman issued a heartfelt and moving statement. Well, a Fetterman did.
“For more than a decade, I lived undocumented in the US,” the senator’s wife, Gisele Barreto Fetterman, a native of Brazil, posted on X. “Every day carried the same uncertainty and fear lived in my body — a tight chest, shallow breaths, racing heart. What I thought was my private, chronic dread has now become a shared national wound. This now-daily violence is not ‘law and order.’ It is terror inflicted on people who contribute, love, and build their lives here. It’s devastatingly cruel and unAmerican.” Her post ended with an emoji of a broken heart.
Sen. Fetterman finally issued a statement nearly a day later. He called for “an immediate end” to the ICE operations in Minnesota, adding, “It has become an ungovernable and dangerous urban theatre for civilians and law enforcement that is incompatible with the American spirit.” But Fetterman still disappointed critics of Trump’s immigration policy, insisting that while he wants ICE reforms, he still supports the embattled agency, and won’t join other Democrats in shutting down the federal government if those reforms aren’t happening.
Pennsylvanians thought they were getting a progressive voice and a moral leader when they elected Fetterman in 2022. It feels now like we elected the wrong Fetterman.
What I wrote on this date in 2010
It was only 16 years ago, but at the dawn of the 2010s, there was still a robust conversation about how to save the traditional journalism outlets— especially newspapers — that had flourished in the 20th century. On Jan. 27, 2010, I criticized an idea coming from Apple that a new kind of $1,000 iPad, nicknamed “the Jesus tablet,” would fix everything. I wrote: “To survive, we need to change our whole worldview — finding ways to encourage more dialogue with readers and more community involvement so that local readers feel they have a stake in this thing. And we also need to do a better job at the thing we claim to be already good at — real journalism that makes a difference.”
On the national beat, there’s no bigger story than the fallout from the inhumanity of the Trump regime’s mass deportation policies. In my Sunday column, I looked at the other way people are dying in ICE’s reign of terror: inside the growing network of squalid and overcrowded jails and detention camps. The death rate in these facilities so far in 2026 is already 10 times higher than it was in the last year of the Biden administration. Over the weekend, I quickly shifted gears and turned a planned column about faith leaders in Minneapolis and an America yearning for morality into a lament over the shocking ICE murder of a 37-year-old observer, Alex Pretti. The contrast between good and evil in America has never been more stark.
The many tentacles of the mass deportation story stretch well beyond Minneapolis and other hot spots like Maine, including stepped-up ICE enforcement activity here in Philadelphia since Trump returned to office. The Inquirer’s veteran immigration reporter, Jeff Gammage, has drilled deeply into the human stories on the front lines here. Written with colleague Michelle Myers, this week’s installment was both poignant and infuriating. A local family of four is returning to Bolivia after the dad — the prime caregiver for his 5-year-old son, being treated at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia for brain cancer — has stopped fighting his deportation after five months in ICE detention. As his family prepares to leave, the child’s future in a South American country with substandard medical care is highly uncertain. Old-school beat reporting like this is what local community journalism is all about. You support this vital work when you subscribe to The Inquirer.
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“It has become an ungovernable and dangerous urban theatre for civilians and law enforcement that is incompatible with the American spirit,” Fetterman said in a statement Monday.
The senator’s comments come two days after a federal agent shot and killed Alex Pretti, an intensive care nurse at a VA hospital, on Saturday amid the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown in Minneapolis. An ICE agent shot and killed Renee Nicole Good, a 37-year-old poet and mother, on Jan. 7, provoking protests nationwide.
But Fetterman stopped short of backing other Democrats’ calls to shut down the government if ICE does not withdraw from the city. The U.S. Senate is poised to vote on funding for the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees both ICE and the Border Patrol.
Sen. Dave McCormick (R, Pa.) called for a “full investigation into the tragedy in Minneapolis” on Sunday evening, joining a number of Republicans in voicing concern about the escalating tensions in the wake of President Donald Trump’s immigration enforcement crackdown.
“We need all the facts,” McCormick said in a post on X Sunday, adding that, “We must enforce our laws in a way that protects the public while maintaining its trust. This gives our law enforcement officers the best chance to succeed in their difficult mission.”
Fetterman ‘wants a conversation’ about DHS funding
Fetterman said that both Pretti and Good should “still be alive.” And noted that he believes in a secure border while also believing “there needs to be a path to citizenship for those hardworking families who are here.”
Some Democrats said they would vote against DHS funding in light of Saturday’s shooting, unless restrictions on immigration enforcement were put in place. This could potentially trigger a federal shutdown for the second time in four months.
Fetterman said he will never vote for a shutdown. However, he does support having a “conversation on the DHS appropriations bill and stripping it from” the overall government funding package.
“A vote to shut our government down will not defund ICE,” Fetterman said, noting the agency received nearly $180 billion in Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which he opposed.
“I reject the calls to defund or abolish ICE. I strongly disagree with many strategies and practices ICE deployed in Minneapolis, and believe that must change,” Fetterman said.
“We must find a way forward and I remain committed to being a voice of reason and common sense,” he added.
The senator’s public comments followed a Sunday evening social media post from his wife, Gisele Barreto Fetterman, who was formerly living undocumented in the U.S. for more than a decade after emigrating from Brazil.
“Every day carried the same uncertainty and fear lived in my body — a tight chest, shallow breaths, racing heart,” she said in a post on X. “What I thought was my private, chronic dread has now become a shared national wound. This now-daily violence is not ‘law and order.’ It is terror inflicted on people who contribute, love, and build their lives here. It’s devastatingly cruel and unAmerican.”
Other Democrats in the region plan to block the funding package without changes.
Sen. Lisa Blunt Rochester (D, Del.) said in a statement that ICE and federal agents’ actions are “shameful and disturbing.” She called for an end to ICE’s presence in Minnesota, a full investigation into Pretti’s death, and said that she would not be voting for DHS funding.
“I refuse to support this current package of funding bills as federal agents shoot Americans in the street,” she said.
McCormick siding with the NRA
McCormick is one of several Republicans who have voiced concern over violent incidents involving immigration enforcement, without denouncing ICE or Border Patrol. The National Rifle Association, the country’s top gun lobby which has deep ties to the GOP, has called for an investigation.
“Responsible public voices should be awaiting a full investigation, not making generalizations and demonizing law-abiding citizens,” the group said in response to a post on X from the first assistant U.S. attorney for the Central District of California, who said: “If you approach law enforcement with a gun, there is a high likelihood they will be legally justified in shooting you. Don’t do it!”
McCormick said in his statement Sunday that he agreed with the NRA’s statement, which preceded his own, and others in calling for the investigation of Pretti’s killing.
McCormick qualified his statement on Sundayby maintaining his support for federal immigration enforcement and accusing Minnesota politicians of exacerbating tensions.
It’s the second time in two days that McCormick spoke out on a highly controversial move by the Trump administration. On Saturday, McCormick said he disagreedwith the National Park Service’s decision to dismantle exhibits about slavery at the President’s House at Independence National Historical Park.
Dina Powell McCormick, a former Trump official and former member of Meta’s board, has been hired as the company’s new president and vice chair, CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced Monday morning.
“Dina has been a valuable member of our board and will be an even more critical player as she joins our management team,“ Zuckerberg wrote on Threads,one of Meta’s platforms alongside Facebook and Instagram. ”She brings deep experience in finance, economic development, and government.“
He also noted that she will be involved in all of Meta’s endeavors, but will particularly focused on ”partnering with governments and sovereigns to build, deploy, invest in, and finance Meta’s AI and infrastructure.”
Powell McCormick has extensive business leadership and government experience. She spent 16 years in different leadership roles at Goldman Sachs, according to her LinkedIn page. Powell McCormick was most recently the vice chair, president, and head of global client services at BDT & MSD Partners, a banking company.
She worked in the White House and the U.S. Department of State under former President George W. Bush and was deputy national security adviser during President Donald Trump’s first term.
The move also signifies what appears to be Meta’s intention to create stronger tieswith the federal government as it develops artificial intelligence tools. Trump praised Zuckerberg’s decision Monday.
“A great choice by Mark Z!!! She is a fantastic, and very talented, person, who served the Trump Administration with strength and distinction!” Trump said on Truth Social, his social media platform.
U.S. Sen. Dave McCormick (R., Pa.), Powell McCormick’s husband, has been heavily involved with AI and tech policy. For instance, he convened an AI summit in Pittsburgh in July 2025 where billions of dollars in planned projects for Pennsylvania were announced.
McCormick, in a post on X Monday, said he is “incredibly proud” of his wife.
Asked about how he would mitigatepotential conflicts of interest that arose from Powell McCormick’s position, a spokesperson for the senator said: “As he has from day one, Senator McCormick will continue to comply with all U.S. Senate ethics rules and honorably and enthusiastically serve the great citizens of Pennsylvania.”
Powell McCormick is also the second former Trump official to be hired by Meta in recent weeks, CNBC reported. Earlier this month, Meta said that it had hired Curtis Joseph Mahoney, a former deputy U.S. trade representative, to be its chief legal officer.
