people

We are being ruled by the “Epstein class,” and voters deserve to know the details of that particular scandal, and to be able to expect better of their leaders in the larger sense.

That’s the message we’ll be hearing a lot in the coming weeks and months now that Democrats have successfully moved forward their effort to release the full investigation into former President Trump buddy Jeffrey Epstein.

“When you take a step back, you have a country where an elite governing class has gotten away with impunity, and shafted the working class in this country, shafted factory towns, shafted rural communities,” Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Fremont) told me Wednesday.

He represents parts of Silicon Valley and is one of the authors of the House push to release the full government investigation into Epstein. But in the Epstein case, he also sees an opportunity to reach voters with a larger promise of change.

“What Epstein is about is saying, ‘we reject the Epstein class governing America today,’” Khanna said.

How appropriately strange for these days would it be if Epstein, who faced sex trafficking charges at the time of his death, provided the uniting message Democrats have been searching for?

“Epstein and economics” sounds like a stretch on the surface, but it is increasingly clear that Americans of all political stripes are tired of the rich getting richer, and bolder. The Epstein files are the bipartisan embodiment of that discontent.

Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Fremont), left, and Rep. Robert Garcia (D-Long Beach) have led Democrats’ push for release of the Epstein files.

(Sue Ogrocki and J. Scott Applewhite / Associated Press)

Our collective frustration with what can appear only as a cover-up to benefit the wealthy and powerful is an unexpected bit of glue that binds regular Americans, because the corruption and hubris of our oligarchy is increasingly undeniable and galling.

Whether it’s our president’s obviously wrong contention that grocery prices are down; our vice president being willing to take on the pope about true Catholic doctrine; or our FBI chief flying his girlfriend around on the taxpayer dime, the arrogance is stunning.

But where each of those examples becomes buried and dismissed in partisan politics, sex trafficking girls turns out to be frowned upon by people from all walks of life.

“It’s universal,” said Rep. Robert Garcia (D-Long Beach), the ranking Democrat on the House Oversight Committee, and another Californian. “This is clearly a White House and a president that is the most corrupt person we’ve ever had in office serving as a chief executive, and this is just another piece of that corruption.”

Khanna, along with Republican Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky, built the unlikely but unstoppable effort that brought together once-loyal Trumpers including Reps. Lauren Boebert, Nancy Mace and Marjorie Taylor Greene with Democrats.

Those staunch right-wingers are tied in to their voters, and probably understood just how unpopular sex trafficking is with a base that grew into maturity on QAnon-inspired fear mongering about kidnapped children.

“It’s the only thing since Trump walked down the escalator that’s been a truly bipartisan effort to expose corruption and where there’s been a break in his coalition,” Khanna said.

And by “exposing rich and powerful people who abuse the system and calling them out clearly, we start to rebuild trust with the American people,” Khanna argues, the trust required to make folks believe Democrats aren’t so terrible.

Long before he was a linchpin in the Epstein saga, Khanna built a name as a force on the progressive left for a positive and inclusive economic platform that resembles the New Deal, which Franklin Delano Roosevelt used to rebuild democracy in another era of hardship and discontent.

It’s all about real payoffs for average Americans — trade schools and affordable child care and jobs that actually pay the bills. That’s the message that he hopes will be the top line as Democrats push forward.

On Wednesday, the buildup of resentment that might make that possible came into full focus in Washington, as Congress opened up to anything but business as usual. Democrats, led by Garcia, released emails raising questions about Trump’s knowledge of Epstein’s crimes.

Trump “spent hours at my house” and “knew about the girls,” Epstein wrote, even as Trump’s press secretary argued this was all a “fake narrative to smear” her boss.

Republicans countered the emails with a massive information dump probably meant to obscure and confuse. But House Speaker Mike Johnson, out of excuses, finally swore in Rep. Adelita Grijalva (D-Ariz.), who promptly provided the final signature on the discharge petition to call a House vote on releasing the entire Epstein files.

That happened just hours after Boebert, one of the key Republican backers of that effort, was called to the White House in a last-minute, heavy-handed bid to pressure her into dropping her name from the demand. She did not.

Enough to make your head spin, honestly. About 10 more dastardly, intriguing and unexpected things happened, but you get the gist: President Trump really, really does not want us to read the Epstein files. House Democrats are ready to fight the long fight.

Garcia said House Democrats aren’t caving, because the cover-up keeps growing.

“There’s a lot of folks now that are obsessed with hiding the truth from the public, and the American public needs to know,” he said. “The Oversight Committee is committed to fighting our way to the truth.”

But it will be a long fight, and one with only a slim chance of winning the release of the files. Any effort would have to clear the Republican-held Senate (and after the shutdown collapse, who knows if Senate Democrats have the stomach for resistance), then be signed by Trump.

Judging from his near-desperate social media posting about the whole thing being a “hoax,” it’s hard to imagine him putting his scrawl on that law.

But unlike the shutdown, the longer this goes, the more Democrats have to gain. People aren’t going to suddenly start liking pedophiles. And the more Trump pushes to hide whatever the truth is, the more Democrats have the high ground, to message on corruption, oligarchs and even a vision for a better way.

“Epstein and economics” — linking the concrete with the esoteric, the problem with the solution.

The bipartisan message Democrats didn’t know they needed, from the strangest of sources.

Democrats’ caterwauling this week after a few of their senators caved to end the government shutdown couldn’t completely drown out another noise: the sound of President Trump pinballing dumb “policy” ideas as he flails to respond to voters’ unhappiness that his promised Golden Age is proving golden only for him, his family and his donors.

On social media (of course) and in interviews, the president has been blurting out proposals that are news even to the advisors who should be vetting them first. Rebates of $2,000 for most Americans and pay-downs of federal debt, all from supposed tariff windfalls. (Don’t count on either payoff; more below.) New 50-year mortgages to make home-buying more affordable (not). Docked pay for air traffic controllers who didn’t show up to work during the shutdown, without pay, and $10,000 bonuses for those who did. (He doesn’t have that power; the government isn’t his family business.) Most mind-boggling of all, Trump has resurrected his and Republicans’ long-buried promise to “repeal and replace” Obamacare.

It’s been five years since he promised a healthcare plan “in two weeks.” It’s been a year since he said he had “concepts of a plan” during the 2024 campaign. What he now calls “Trumpcare” (natch) apparently amounts to paying people to buy insurance. Details to come, he says, again.

With all this seat-of-the-pants policymaking, Trump only underscores the policy ignorance that’s been a defining trait since he first ran for office. No other president in memory put out such knee-jerk junk that’s easily discounted and mocked.

In his first term, Trump didn’t learn how to navigate the legislative process, and thus steer well-debated ideas into law. He didn’t want to. Even more in his second term, Trump avoids that deliberative democratic process, preferring rule by fiat and executive order (even if the results don’t outlast your presidency, or they fizzle in court). For Trump, ideas don’t percolate, infused with expertise and data. They pop into his head.

But diktats are not always possible, as the shutdown dramatized when Republicans couldn’t agree with Democrats on the must-pass legislation to keep the government funded.

With Republicans controlling the White House and Congress (and arguably the Supreme Court: see recent decisions siding with the Trump administration to block SNAP benefits), the Democrats were never going to actually win the shutdown showdown — not if winning meant forcing Republicans to agree to extend health insurance tax credits for millions of Americans. Expanding healthcare coverage has never been Republicans’ priority. Tax cuts are, mainly for the wealthy and corporations, and Republicans pocketed that win months ago with Trump’s big, ugly bill, paid for mainly by cuts to Medicaid.

Yet Democrats won something: They shoved the issue of spiraling healthcare costs back onto politics’ center stage, where it joins the broader question of affordability in an economy that doesn’t work for the working class. Drawing attention to the cruel priorities of Trump 2.0 is a big reason that I and many others supported Democrats forcing a shutdown, despite the unlikelihood of a policy “W.” (I did not support the Senate Democrats’ caving just yet, not so soon after Democrats won bigger-than-expected victories in last week’s off-year elections on the strength of their fight for affordability, including health insurance.)

The fight isn’t over. The Senate will debate and vote next month on extending tax credits for Obamacare that otherwise expire at year’s end, making coverage unaffordable for millions of people. Even if the Democrats win that vote — unlikely — the subsidies would be DOA in the House, a MAGA stronghold. What’s not dead, however, is the issue of rising insurance premiums for all Americans. It’s teed up for the midterm election campaigns.

Such pocketbook issues have thrown Trump on the defensive. The result is his string of politically tone-deaf remarks and unvetted, out-of-right-field initiatives.

On Monday night, having invited Fox News host Laura Ingraham into the White House for an interview and a tour of his gilt-and-marble renovations, he pooh-poohed her question about Americans’ anxiety about the costs of living with this unpolitic rejoinder: “More than anything else, it’s a con job by the Democrats.” When Ingraham, to her credit, reminded Trump that he’d slammed President Biden for “saying things were great, and things weren’t great,” Trump stood his shaky ground, sniping: “Polls are fake. We have the greatest economy we’ve ever had.” (False.)

On Saturday, Trump had posted that Republicans should take money “from the BIG, BAD Insurance Companies, give it to the people, and terminate” Obamacare. He told Ingraham, “Call it Trumpcare … anything but Obamacare.” Healthcare industry experts pounced: Such direct payments could allow younger, healthy people to get cheaper, no-frills coverage, but would leave the insurance pools with disproportionately more ailing people and, in turn, higher costs.

As for Trump’s promised $2,000 rebates and reductions in the $37 trillion federal debt, he posted early Sunday and again on Monday that “trillions of dollars” from tariffs would make both things possible soon. On Tuesday night, he sent a fundraising email: “Would you take a TARIFF rebate check signed by yours truly?”

Maybe if he’d talked to Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, who professed ignorance about the idea on ABC News’ “This Week” on Sunday, Trump would have learned that tariffs in the past year raised not trillions but $195 billion, significantly less than $2,000 rebates would cost. Not only would there be nothing to put toward the debt, but rebates would add $6 trillion in red ink over 10 years. That would put Trump just $2 trillion short of the amount of debt he added in his first term.

When Ingraham asked where he’d get the money to pay bonuses to air traffic controllers, Trump was quick with a nonanswer: “I don’t know. I’ll get it from someplace.” And when she told him the 50-year mortgage idea “has enraged your MAGA friends,” given the potential windfall of interest payment for banks, Trump was equally dismissive: “It’s not even a big deal.”

Not a big deal: That’s policymaking, Trump-style.

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The treaty, which comes more than 220 years after the state was colonised, creates an assembly and truth-telling body.

The first treaty between Indigenous people and a government in Australia has entered into law in the state of Victoria after it was finalised and signed.

Members of the state’s First Peoples Assembly gathered for a ceremony to sign the document on Wednesday evening before state Governor Margaret Gardner added her signature to the treaty on Thursday morning.

Jill Gallagher, a Gunditjmara woman and former commissioner of the Victorian Treaty Advancement Commission, told Australian public broadcaster ABC that the treaty represents “the story of the Aboriginal people’s resistance”.

“I feel very happy. I’m just over the moon,” Gallagher said.

“Today marks a turning point in our nation’s history, a moment where old wounds can begin to heal and new relationships can be built on truth, justice and mutual respect,” she said.

Victoria’s Premier Jacinta Allan described the signing of the treaty as marking a “new chapter” in the state’s history.

“It is a chapter that is founded on truth, guided by respect and carried forward through partnership … a partnership to build a stronger, fairer, more equal Victoria for everyone,” Allan said.

Australia was colonised by the then-British Empire in 1788, with settlers first arriving in what is now known as Victoria in the early 1800s.

While British powers entered into treaties with Indigenous peoples in other colonised countries, including Canada, New Zealand and the United States, no treaty was ever signed in Australia.

The treaty, which has been described as historic by the United Nations human rights chief Volker Turk, formalises the creation of the permanent First Peoples’ Assembly of Victoria.

Turk said the treaty “addresses the continued exclusion of and discrimination against the country’s First Peoples – the result of colonisation”.

The agreement, he added, had the “potential to be truly transformative, ensuring the First Peoples have a direct voice in advising and shaping laws, policies and practices that affect their lives”.

The treaty process began in 2016 and included the Yoorrook Justice Commission, a formal truth-telling body which concluded in June this year and heard from Indigenous people harmed by colonisation, including members of the Stolen Generations, who were Indigenous children taken from their families and communities by state agencies and religious organisations.

Australia held a referendum in 2023 that sought to change the constitution and create a permanent Indigenous voice to inform parliament on issues related to Indigenous people.

The referendum failed to achieve enough support to change the constitution.

The referendum followed after the 2017 Uluru Statement from the Heart petition, which had called for an Indigenous voice to inform parliament, and emphasised that Indigenous people had 60,000 years of ancestral ties to their land. This “sacred link” could not be erased from world history in “merely” 200 years, according to the statement.

WASHINGTON — Time was — not that long ago — that after a mass shooting, gun rights advocates would nod to the possibility of compromise before waiting for memories to fade and opposing any new legislation to regulate firearms.

This time, they skipped the preliminaries and jumped directly to opposition.

“The most effective tool for keeping kids safe is armed law enforcement on the campus,” Texas Republican Sen. Ted Cruz said to MSNBC a few hours after a shooter killed at least 21 people in Uvalde, Texas. “Inevitably, when there’s a murder of this kind, you see politicians try to politicize it. You see Democrats and a lot of folks in the media whose immediate solution is to try to restrict the constitutional rights of law-abiding citizens. That doesn’t work.”

The speed of that negative reaction provides the latest example of how, on one issue after another, the gap between blue America and red America has widened so much that even the idea of national agreement appears far-fetched. Many political figures no longer bother pretending to look for it.

Broad agreement on some steps

And yet, significant agreement does exist.

Poll after poll has shown for years that large majorities of the public agree on at least some, limited steps to further regulate firearms.

A survey last year by the Pew Research Center, for example, showed that by 87% to 12%, Americans supported “preventing people with mental illnesses from purchasing guns.” By 81% to 18% they backed “making private gun sales and sales at gun shows subject to background checks.” And by a smaller but still healthy 64% to 36% they favored “banning high-capacity ammunition magazines that hold more than 10 rounds.”

The gunman in Uvalde appears to have carried seven 30-round magazines, authorities in Texas have said.

So why, in the face of such large majorities, does Congress repeatedly do nothing?

One powerful factor is the belief among many Americans that nothing lawmakers do will help the problem.

Asked in that same Pew survey if mass shootings would decline if guns were harder to obtain, about half of Americans said they would go down, but 42% said it would make no difference. Other surveys have found much the same feeling among a large swath of Americans.

The argument about futility is one that opponents of change quickly turn to after a catastrophe. It’s a powerful rhetorical weapon against action.

Esmeralda Bravo, 63, holds a photo of her granddaughter, Nevaeh, one of the Robb Elementary School shooting victims, during a prayer vigil in Uvalde, Texas, on Wednesday.

(Jae C. Hong / Associated Press)

“It wouldn’t prevent these shootings,” Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) said on CNN on Wednesday when asked about banning the sort of semiautomatic weapons used by the killer in Uvalde and by a gunman who killed 10 at a Buffalo, N.Y., supermarket 10 days earlier. “The truth of the matter is these people are going to commit these horrifying crimes — whether they have to use another weapon to do it, they’re going to figure out a way to do it.”

Republican Texas Gov. Greg Abbott made a similar claim at his news conference on Wednesday: “People who think that, ‘well, maybe we can just implement tougher gun laws, it’s gonna solve it’ — Chicago and L.A. and New York disprove that thesis.”

The facts powerfully suggest that’s not true.

Go back roughly 15 years: In 2005, California had almost the same rate of deaths from guns as Florida or Texas. California had 9.5 firearms deaths per 100,000 people that year, Florida had 10 and Texas 11, according to data from the National Center for Health Statistics.

Since then, California repeatedly has tightened its gun laws, while Florida and Texas have moved in the opposite direction.

California’s rate of gun deaths has declined by 10% since 2005, even as the national rate has climbed in recent years. And Texas and Florida? Their rates of gun deaths have climbed 28% and 37% respectively. California now has one of the 10 lowest rates of gun deaths in the nation. Texas and Florida are headed in the wrong direction.

Obviously, factors beyond a state’s laws can affect the rate of firearms deaths. The national health statistics take into account differences in the age distribution of state populations, but they don’t control for every factor that might affect gun deaths.

Equally clearly, no law stops all shootings.

California’s strict laws didn’t stop the shooting at a Taiwanese church in Laguna Woods earlier this month, and there’s no question that Chicago suffers from a large number of gun-related homicides despite strict gun control laws in Illinois. A large percentage of the guns used in those crimes come across the border from neighboring states with loose gun laws, research has shown.

The overall pattern is clear, nonetheless, and it reinforces the lesson from other countries, including Canada, Britain and Australia, which have tightened gun laws after horrific mass shootings: The states with America’s lowest rates of gun-related deaths all have strict gun laws; in states that allow easy availability of guns, more people die from them.

Fear of futility isn’t the only barrier to passage of national gun legislation.

Hardcore opponents of gun regulation have become more entrenched in their positions over the last decade.

Mostly conservative and Republican and especially prevalent in rural parts of the U.S., staunch opponents of any new legislation restricting firearms generally don’t see gun violence as a major problem but do see the weapons as a major part of their identity. In the Pew survey last year, just 18% of Republicans rated gun violence as one of the top problems facing the country, compared with 73% of Democrats. Other surveys have found much the same.

Strong opponents of gun control turn out in large numbers in Republican primaries, and they make any vote in favor of new restrictions politically toxic for Republican officeholders. In American politics today, where most congressional districts are gerrymandered to be safe for one party and only a few states swing back and forth politically, primaries matter far more to most lawmakers than do general elections.

Even in general elections, gun issues aren’t the top priority for most voters. Background checks and similar measures have wide support, but not necessarily urgent support.

Finally, in an era defined by “negative partisanship” — suspicion and fear of the other side — it’s easy to convince voters that a modest gun control proposal is just an opening wedge designed to lead to something more dramatic.

That leads to a common pattern when gun measures appear on ballots: They do less well than polling would suggest.

The same thing happens to measures in Congress. Nine years ago, for example, supporters of gun control made their last big push for legislation, after the slayings of 26 people, including 20 children, at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn.

Then, as now, polls showed strong support for requiring background checks for sales that currently evade them. But support for the legislation was sharply lower than support for the general idea, Pew found.

Almost 8 in 10 Republican gun owners favored background checks in general, they found, but when asked about the specific bill, only slightly more than 4 in 10 wanted it to pass. When asked why they backed the general idea but opposed the specific one, most of those polled cited concerns that the bill would set up a “slippery slope” to more regulation or contained provisions that would go further than advertised.

Faced with that sort of skepticism from voters, Republican senators who had flirted with supporting the bill mostly walked away, and it failed.

Then-Vice President Joe Biden led the unsuccessful effort to pass that bill. Nearly a decade later, the political factors impeding action have only grown more powerful.

Texas school shooting

The recent string of devastating shootings has renewed calls for tighter gun restrictions. But as Kevin Rector reported, a loosening of gun laws is almost certainly coming instead, largely because of an expected decision from the Supreme Court, which is likely to strike down a broad law in New York that doesn’t allow individuals to carry guns in public without first demonstrating a “special need” for self-defense.

For all the impassioned speeches and angry tweets, for all the memes and viral videos of gun control proponents quaking with rage, most of the energy and political intensity has been on the side of those who favor greater gun laxity, Mark Barabak wrote.

The shooting has generated a lot of questions from parents about what their own schools are doing for safety. Howard Blume looked at what California officials say about school security.

The latest from Washington

Biden marked the second anniversary of George Floyd’s murder by a Minneapolis police officer by signing an executive order aimed at reforming policing at the federal level. As Eli Stokols reported, Wednesday’s order falls short of what Biden had hoped to achieve through legislation. It directs all federal agencies to revise their use-of-force policies, creates a national registry of officers fired for misconduct and provides grants to incentivize state and local police departments to strengthen restrictions on chokeholds and no-knock warrants.

Sluggish response and questionable decisions by the Food and Drug Administration worsened the nation’s infant formula shortage, agency officials told lawmakers at a congressional hearing. “You’re right to be concerned, and the public should be concerned,” said FDA Commissioner Robert Califf. The agency’s response “was too slow and there were decisions that were suboptimal along the way,” Anumita Kaur reported.

Only a couple of months ago, U.S. and European officials said a renewal of the Iran nuclear deal was “imminent.” But with little progress since then, and a shifting global geopolitical scene, the top U.S. envoy for the Iran negotiations testified Wednesday that prospects for reviving the Iran deal are “at best, tenuous,” Tracy Wilkinson reported. “We do not have a deal,” the Biden administration’s special envoy for Iran, Robert Malley, told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

Cuba will not attend next month’s Summit of the Americas, a major conference to take place in Los Angeles, after the U.S. refused to extend a proper invitation, the country’s president, Miguel Díaz-Canel, announced Wednesday. As Wilkinson reported, the decision throws the summit, which is crucial to the U.S.’ ability to demonstrate its influence in the Western Hemisphere, into further disarray.

The latest from California

GOP Rep. Young Kim would seem to have a relatively easy path to reelection in November — the national mood favors her party, she has a lot of money and the newly drawn boundaries for her Orange County district give her more Republican constituents. But Kim is suddenly campaigning with a sense of urgency, Melanie Mason and Seema Mehta report. She’s unleashed $1.3 million in advertising, and outside allies are coming to her aid with more spending. Most of it is aimed at fending off Greg Raths, an underfunded GOP opponent who has been a staple on the political scene in Mission Viejo, the district’s largest city.

Gov. Gavin Newsom and top legislative Democrats pledged Wednesday to expedite gun legislation. Among the bills are measures that would require school officials to investigate credible threats of a mass shooting, allow private citizens to sue firearm manufacturers and distributors, and enact more than a dozen other policies intended to reduce gun violence in California, Taryn Luna and Hannah Wiley reported. “We’re going to control the controllable, the things we have control of,” Newsom said during an event at the state Capitol. “California leads this national conversation. When California moves, other states move in the same direction.”

The Los Angeles mayor’s race has seemingly devolved in recent days into a rhetorical brawl between two of the city’s richest men, Benjamin Oreskes wrote. Hollywood mogul Jeffrey Katzenberg, who supports Rep. Karen Bass, says Rick Caruso’s history of supporting Republican candidates and being registered as a Republican a decade ago disqualifies him from being mayor. That came after Variety published an interview with Caruso in which he attacked the former Walt Disney Studios chairman for “lying” about him in ads by a pro-Bass independent expenditure committee predominantly funded by Katzenberg.

The growing corruption scandal in Anaheim has cost the city’s mayor his job, endangered the city’s planned $320-million sale of Angel Stadium to the team and provided a rare, unvarnished look at how business is done behind closed doors in the city of 350,000. Read our full coverage of the FBI probe into how the city does business.

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WOLF POINT, Mont. — On the open plains of the Fort Peck Reservation, Robert Magnan leaned out the window of his truck, set a rifle against the door frame and then “pop!” — a bison tumbled dead in its tracks.

Magnan and a co-worker shot two more bison, also known as buffalo, and quickly field dressed the animals before carting them off for processing into ground beef and cuts of meat for distribution to members of the Fort Peck Assiniboine and Sioux Tribes in northern Montana.

As lawmakers in Washington, D.C., plod toward resolving the record government shutdown that interrupted food aid for tens of millions of people, tribal leaders on rural reservations across the Great Plains have been culling their cherished bison herds to help fill the gap.

About one-third of Fort Peck’s tribal members on the reservation depend on monthly benefit checks, Chairman Floyd Azure said. That’s almost triple the rate for the U.S. as a whole. They’ve received only partial payments in November after President Trump’s administration choked off funds to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program during the shutdown.

Fort Peck officials say they anticipated such a moment years ago, when they were bolstering their herd with animals from Yellowstone National Park over objections from cattle ranchers worried about animal disease.

“We were bringing it up with the tribal council: What would happen if the government went bankrupt? How would we feed the people?” said Magnan, the longtime steward of Fort Peck’s bison herds. “It shows we still need buffalo.”

Treaty obligations

In October, the tribal government authorized killing 30 bison — about 12,000 pounds of meat. Half had been shot by Tuesday. A pending deal to end the shutdown comes too late for the rest, Magnan said. With Montana among the states that dispersed only partial SNAP payments, Fort Peck will keep handing out buffalo meat for the time being.

Tribes including the Blackfeet, the Lower Brule Sioux, the Cheyenne River Sioux and the Crow have done the same in response to Washington’s dysfunction: feeding thousands of people with bison from herds restored over recent decades after the animals were hunted to near extinction in the 1800s.

Food and nutrition assistance programs are part of the federal government’s trust and treaty responsibilities — its legal and moral obligations to fund tribes’ health and well-being in exchange for land and resources the U.S. took from tribes.

“It’s the obligation they incurred when they took our lands, when they stole our lands, when they cheated us out of our lands,” said Mark Macarro, president of the National Congress of American Indians. “It lacks humanity to do this with SNAP, with food.”

Fort Peck tribal members Miki Astogo and Dillon Jackson-Fisher, who are unemployed, said they borrowed food from Jackson-Fisher’s mother in recent weeks after SNAP payments didn’t come through. On Sunday they got a partial payment — about $196 instead of the usual $298 per month — Agosto said.

It won’t last, they said, so the couple walked 4 miles into town to pick up a box of food from the tribes that included 2 pounds of bison.

“Our vehicle’s in the shop, but we have to put food on the table before we pay for the car, you know?” Jackson-Fisher said.

Moose in Maine, deer in Oklahoma

Native American communities elsewhere in the U.S. also are tapping into natural resources to make up for lost federal aid. Members of the Mi’kmaq Nation in Maine stocked a food bank with trout from their hatchery and locally hunted moose meat. In southeastern Oklahoma, the Comanche Nation is accepting deer meat for food banks. And in the southwestern part of the state, the Choctaw Nation set up three meat processing facilities.

Another program that provides food to eligible Native American households, the Food Distribution Program on Indian Reservations, has continued through the shutdown.

Mi’kmaq is among the tribes that don’t have the program, though the tribe is eligible. The Mi’kmaq also get funding for food pantries through the federal Emergency Food Assistance Program, but that money, too, was tied up by the shutdown, tribal Chief Sheila McCormack said.

Roughly 80% of Mi’kmaq tribal members in Aroostook County are SNAP recipients, said Kandi Sock, the tribe’s community services director.

“We have reached out for some extra donations; our farm came through with that, but it will not last long,” Sock said.

The demise of bison, onset of starvation

Buffalo played a central role for Plains tribes for centuries, providing meat for food and hides for clothing and shelter.

That came to an abrupt end when white “hide hunters” arrived in 1879 in the Upper Missouri River basin around Fort Peck, which had some of the last vestiges of herds that once numbered millions of animals, Assiniboine historian Dennis Smith said. By 1883 the animals were virtually exterminated, according to Smith, a retired University of Nebraska-Omaha history professor.

With no way to feed themselves and the government denying them food, the buffalo’s demise heralded a time of starvation for the Assiniboine, he said. Many other Plains tribes also suffered hardship.

Hundreds of miles to the west of Fort Peck, the Blackfeet Nation killed 18 buffalo from its herd and held a special elk harvest to distribute meat to tribal members. The tribe already gave out buffalo meat periodically to elders, the sick and for ceremonies and social functions. But it’s never killed so many of the 700 animals at once.

“We can’t do that many all the time. We don’t want to deplete the resource,” said Ervin Carlson, who runs the Blackfeet buffalo program.

In South Dakota, the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe has distributed meat from about 20 of its buffalo. The tribe worked to build its capacity to feed people since experiencing shortages during the COVID-19 pandemic. It now has a meat processing plant that can handle 25 to 30 animals a week, said Jayme Murray with the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe Buffalo Authority Corp. Tribes from Minnesota to Montana have asked to use the plant, but they’ve had to turn some down, Murray said.

A former ‘food desert’ leans on its own herds

The Lower Brule Sioux Tribe in central South Dakota recently got its first full-fledged grocery store, ending its decades-long status as a “food desert” where people had to drive 100 miles round trip for groceries. The interruption to SNAP benefits stoked panic, tribal treasurer and secretary Marty Jandreau said.

Benefits for November were reduced to 65% of the usual amount.

But the Lower Brule have buffalo, cattle and elk in abundance across more than 9 square miles. On Sunday, the tribe gave away more than 400 pounds of meat to more than 100 tribal members, council members said.

“It makes me feel very proud that we have things we can give back,” tribal council member Marlo Langdeau said.

Brown and Brewer write for the Associated Press. Brewer reported from Oklahoma City, and Schafer, who reports for ICT, from Lower Brule, S.D.

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court’s justices, citing the right to bear arms in the 2nd Amendment, sounded ready Wednesday to strike down laws in New York and California that deny most gun owners permits to carry concealed guns in public.

Most of the justices said people who live in “high-crime areas” and fear for their safety should be allowed to carry a gun for self-defense. And they said this applies equally to people who live in cities as well as in rural areas.

“Think about people who work late at night in Manhattan,” said Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. “It might be somebody who cleans offices. It might be a doorman at an apartment. It might be a nurse or an orderly [or] somebody who washes dishes” who is “scared to death” to head home. “How is it consistent with the core right to self-defense” to deny that person the right to have a gun with them? he asked.

In defense of New York’s law, state Solicitor General Barbara Underwood argued for limiting the number of guns in densely populated areas. Too many guns in too many hands would increase the danger of gun violence, she said.

But Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh disputed that view and said people there may have a greater need to protect themselves with a gun.

“How many muggings take place in the forest?” Roberts asked her.

Kavanaugh said the 2nd Amendment protects a right to have a gun for self-defense, which suggests the decision to be armed should rest with the gun owner, not a state or local licensing official.

“Why isn’t it good enough to say I live in a violent area and I want to be able to defend myself?” he asked.

During their comments and questions, the court’s six conservative justices made clear they are highly skeptical of laws that authorize state or local officials to deny gun permits to law-abiding residents.

Only the court’s three liberal justices spoke in defense of these laws and said there has been a long history of regulating guns in public.

Still, a gun rights ruling in the New York case could be limited. The justices, both conservative and liberal, said cities and local governments would not be prevented from enforcing bans on guns in “sensitive places,” and that could include subways, football stadiums and university campuses.

“Can’t we just say Times Square on New Year’s Eve is a sensitive place?” said Justice Amy Coney Barrett.

Washington attorney Paul Clement, who was representing the gun owners, avoided a clear answer on where guns could be excluded, but he agreed the city would retain that authority to restrict guns in certain places.

At issue on Wednesday in the case of New York State Rifle & Pistol Assn. vs. Bruen were the laws in New York as well as similar measures in California and six other states that limit who may obtain a license to carry a concealed handgun in public.

Typically gun owners are required to show they have a “special need” or “good cause” to be armed, not simply a general fear for their safety. In New York City and Los Angeles, these permits are rarely granted.

UCLA law professor Adam Winkler, who has written widely on the 2nd Amendment, said the outcome could force local officials to shift their focus to declaring certain places off-limits to guns.

“New York may be forced to allow more people to carry but can still broadly define sensitive places to make it hard practically to carry in New York City,” he said.

The ruling will also have a direct effect in California as well. “If New York’s law is struck down, the precedent will lead to overturning California’s carry laws too,” he said.

Gun control advocates heard little to cheer from the argument.

“We are on high alert about the dangerous consequences of a potential ruling in favor of gun extremists,” said Hannah Shearer, litigation director for the Giffords Law Center. “But the court still has an opportunity to reject the unprecedented and historically inaccurate view that the 2nd Amendment precludes meaningful gun safety regulations in public.”

But Eric Tirschwell, executive director of Everytown Law, pointed to the justices’ comments about restricting guns in sensitive places.

“Even the court’s most conservative justices have hesitations about granting the gun lobby its ultimate goal in this case — the unrestricted right to carry guns in all public places,” he said.

The case heard Wednesday and the likely outcome highlight the change in the makeup of the court.

In the last decade, the justices had turned down several challenges to the gun-permitting laws, including in California. But with the arrival of Justices Kavanaugh and Barrett, the court appears to have a new majority to bolster individual rights under the 2nd Amendment.

The case began when Robert Nash and Brandon Koch, who live near Albany, N.Y., applied for general concealed-carry permits but were turned down by a county judge because they did not “face any special or unique danger.” They were, however, licensed to carry guns for hunting or target shooting.

They sued along with the New York State Rifle & Pistol Assn., alleging the restrictions violated their rights under the 2nd Amendment to bear arms for self-defense.

Don’t expect to see Oscar Isaac reprise his role as hot-shot pilot Poe Dameron in the “Star Wars” franchise any time soon.

The “Frankenstein” star admitted in a GQ interview released Monday that he’s not interested in working for the media company given its acquiescence to the Trump administration.

“I’d be open to [returning to ‘Star Wars’], although right now I’m not so open to working with Disney,” Isaac said. “But if they can kinda figure it out and, you know, not succumb to fascism, that would be great.”

The interview, while released this week, was conducted in the days immediately following the shooting death of conservative influencer Charlie Kirk and Walt Disney Co.-owned broadcaster ABC saying it was pulling “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” indefinitely following sharp backlash over the host’s remarks about Kirk’s death. Kimmel’s program ultimately returned to ABC on Sept. 23, after nearly a full week off air.

“But if that happens, then yeah, I’d be open to having a conversation about a galaxy far away. Or any number of other things,” Isaac continued.

The 46-year-old actor was also the lead in the 2022 Disney+ original series “Moon Knight,” based on the Marvel superhero of the same name who first appeared in print in 1975.

In a 2020 interview with Deadline, Isaac voiced hesitation about returning to the “Star Wars” franchise following 2019’s “The Rise of Skywalker.”

“I enjoyed the challenge of those films and working with a very large group of incredible artists and actors, prop makers, set designers and all that was really fun,” he said five years ago. “It’s not really what I set out to do. What I set out to do was to make handmade movies, and to work with people that inspire me.”

When asked point blank if he would accept a “Star Wars” role again, Isaac blankly answered in 2020, “Probably, but who knows. If I need another house or something.”

Responding to the flippant nature of his previous response, Isaac noted how seemingly obnoxious that quote sounded.

“Yeah. That was a real likable quote. Jesus Christ,” the “Dune” actor said in the recent GQ interview. “Y’know, people ask you things, you say stuff, you don’t really think about it that much. I said a slightly d— thing.”

BELGRADE, Serbia — Thousands of protesters in Serbia symbolically formed a human shield Tuesday around a bombed-out military complex, vowing to protect it from redevelopment as a luxury compound by a company linked to President Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner.

Youth-led protesters drew a red line as they encircled the sprawling buildings in the capital, Belgrade that were partially destroyed in a 1999 NATO bombing campaign. The site faces demolition and redevelopment under a plan backed by the populist government of President Aleksandar Vucic.

The $500-million project to build a high-rise hotel, offices and shops at the site has met fierce opposition from experts at home and abroad, as well as the Serbian public. But last week Serbian lawmakers passed a special law clearing the way for the construction despite legal hurdles.

Vucic’s pro-Trump government says the project would boost the economy and ties with the U.S. administration, which has imposed tariffs of 35% on imports from Serbia. It has also sanctioned Serbia’s monopoly oil supplier, which is controlled by Russia.

However, critics say the building is an architectural monument, seen as a symbol of resistance to the U.S.-led NATO bombing that remains widely viewed in the Balkan country as an unjust “aggression.”

Serbia’s government last year stripped the complex of protected status and signed a 99-year-lease agreement with Kushner-related Affinity Global Development in the U.S. But the redevelopment project came into question after Serbia’s organized crime prosecutors launched an investigation into whether documents used to remove that status were forged.

The buildings are seen as prime examples of mid-20th century architecture in the former Yugoslavia. The protesters demanded that the protected heritage status for the complex be restored, and the buildings rebuilt.

“This is a warning that we will all defend these buildings together,” one of the students said. “We will be the human shield.”

The issue has become the latest flashpoint in yearlong street protests that have shaken Vucic’s firm grip on power. Protesters have accused his government of rampant corruption in state projects. The protests started after a concrete canopy collapsed at a train station in the northern city of Novi Sad after renovation, killing 16 people.

Tens of thousands of people marked the tragedy’s anniversary on Nov. 1 in Novi Sad.

Serbia was bombed in 1999 for 78 days to force then-President Slobodan Milosevic to end his crackdown on separatist ethnic Albanians in Kosovo. Anti-NATO sentiment remain strong in Serbia, and the U.S. role in revamping the military buildings is particularly sensitive among many Serbians.

Earlier this year, the government in Albania, another Balkan country, approved a $1.6 billion plan from Kushner’s company for a project to develop a luxury resort on a communist-era fortified island on the Adriatic coast.

Gec writes for the Associated Press.

Destin Conrad didn’t expect to release a jazz project so early in his career — let alone just a few months after dropping his debut album, “Love on Digital.”

The 25-year-old singer-songwriter, who first made millions of people laugh on Vine when he was a preteen, entered the music industry as a fresh-faced R&B artist, following in the footsteps of the artists he grew up listening to such as Brandy, Musiq Soulchild and Usher. His first official EP “Colorway” (2021) and the slew of bite-size projects that followed were melodic and honest meditations on love, lust, queer identity and simply having a good time.

But during the summer, Conrad found himself gravitating to jazz, the genre he was introduced to in high school when he was enrolled in jazz choir. He was inspired by all of the greats and contemporary work by artists like Vanisha Gould, and decided that it was time for a slight departure in his own sound.

“I feel like it’s always kind of been in me,” Conrad says over Zoom during an off day from his second headlining tour in support of “Love on Digital.” “It’s always been a tool that I never really got to exercise that I knew I really wanted to.”

After a two-week whirlwind in L.A. filled with studio sessions with some of his bucket list collaborators like Gould, trumpeter Keyon Harrold and beloved L.A. saxophonist Terrace Martin, Conrad unveiled “Whimsy,” an 11-track alternative jazz detour. Rich with songwriting tinged with sensual winks, live instrumentation (piano, horn section and drums) and a spoken word interlude by Bay Davis (that is reminiscent of Meshell Ndegeocello), “Whimsy” is a masterclass in following your own intuition and creating freely — a testament to his Cancer sun.

“I think it’s some of my best work actually,” Conrad says, adding that it was the most fun to make, which is evident on tracks like “Whip,” a cheeky double entendre about trading places in the bedroom and “A Lonely Detective,” which explores the life of a man living a double life. “Things that I’ve spent more time on, I don’t feel as connected to, but I really love “Whimsy.”

Conrad, who performs at the Wiltern on Nov. 14, phoned in the day before Grammy nominations were announced to talk about why he was nervous to release “Whimsy,” why he thinks jazz deserves more attention and what he’s still learning about being an artist in the digital age. Little did he know that by the next morning, he’d receive his first solo Grammy nod for progressive R&B album.

Now that your debut album, “Love on Digital,” has been in the world for a few months and you’ve experienced fans singing it back to you at shows, how does it feel to look back on the journey of releasing it?

It’s been amazing. I think it’s made me look forward to putting more music out. I feel like this tour taught me a lot. While making this album, I had touring in the back of my mind, so I’m really excited that it’s being received well. Also, it’s kind of wild that I put out another project a [few] months later but I’m glad I have such cool fans that receive me in a good way.

Speaking of that, you turned around and released “Whimsy” in August. Can you talk about how that all came together and how your single “Wash U Away” inspired it?

I made the majority of it in a two-week span. “Wash U Away” and “Whip” I had, but they weren’t jazz songs. So I had “Wash U Away” in the tuck for years — I think I made it in like 2021 — but we had it replayed by actual musicians because before, it was just a very bare beat. Then the rest of it I made within those two weeks. I also had “The W” with James Fauntleroy and Joyce Wrice already, but same thing — it wasn’t a jazz song. I knew I wanted to make a jazz album. I didn’t know I was going to do it so soon after my debut album, but I was kind of on a wild one and was like “Why not?” But I’m really glad I did it because I feel like my fans really like that album and I really like that album as well. I think it’s some of my best work actually. Things that I spent more time on, I don’t feel as connected to but it’s something that I’m really proud of.

Take me back to those two weeks in L.A. when you starting working on this project. Was it summer time?

It was summertime, yeah. I live in Brooklyn now, so I was like “I’m going to fly to L.A. and stay there for two weeks to knock this project out.” I told my managers, “Get me in with everybody. Here’s my list of people I want to work with. Let’s figure it out.” We flew out Vanisha Gould, who’s one of my favorite jazz musicians. I was so ecstatic that she was down. She’s such a jazz head. She was kind of like “What the f— am I doing? Are they going to kidnap me? I’m just flying out here to work with this random ass R&B singer.” But I’m so glad she came and we low-key became besties. Same with Terrace Martin. I’ve been a fan forever. He’s the G.O.A.T. James [Fauntleroy]. All these people who I was very adamant about working with. And eventually I want to do another jazz [project]. Maybe a “Whimsy 2” and just keep that world alive because I feel like jazz is such a special genre that gets overlooked and it’s something that I really feel passionate about. Especially because I was in jazz choir in high school and it kind of taught me more about soul music and the origins and how there’s so many synchronicities within other genres like gospel, and how R&B and all of them just tie into each other. I think it’s just really cool.

What was going on in your world when you started making “Whimsy?” Were you listening to a lot of jazz at the time?

Yeah, I was listening to a lot of jazz music. I was listening to a lot of Vanisha Gould and I was like, “I need to do this jazz album.” I thought I was just going to start it and be like “I’m not done.” But I was like “No, I’m done. This is it. This is what I have to say.” But yeah, I always listen to jazz. As I said, I was in jazz choir in high school. My jazz instructor Mr. O put me onto hella jazz. He showed me Frank Sinatra and all these jazz standards. I have videos that I’ll eventually show the world of me performing at my jazz Christmas show. I feel like it’s always been within me. It’s always been a tool that I never really got to exercise but I knew I really wanted to. But like I said, I didn’t know I’d make it in two weeks and that it’d be such a quick thing. It was so fun to make. It’s probably one of the most fun projects I’ve made.

You can definitely hear how much fun you were having on tracks like “Boredom” and “Lonely Detective.” I feel like jazz was once viewed as a genre that older people listened to, but that’s been changing within the last few years. It feels like it’s becoming more popular with younger audiences. What do you think about this?

Personally, I don’t think it’s becoming more popular. I would love to be part of some sort of push of making it more of a thing and I feel like a lot of my fans are younger. I’d like to say in my head that I’m helping push the genre forward.

It’s just not super prominent. There’s not a lot of new jazz artists. If you look at the jazz charts, a lot of what’s still charting is like Frank Sinatra [and] Miles Davis. Laufey is one of the newer faces of jazz that I feel like is pushing it aside from like Robert Glasper. But I don’t know. I feel like a lot of the jazz even that I listen to is the older stuff. There’s a very select few of newer jazz artists that I’m like “Yes.” Like Vanisha Gould, a perfect example. I’m obsessed with her. I think she’s one of the most talented musicians that I know, period.

How did you feel about dropping “Whimsy”? Were you nervous about how people would receive it?

Umm I thought about it [but] what I really thought about were the jazz heads. I thought the real, super crazy into jazz people were gonna be like, “This s— ain’t f— jazz” because I do consider it an alternative jazz album. I remember talking to Terrace [Martin] about that because he’s a jazz head and he’s also older than me and he’s been in it for longer. I was telling him [that] I feel like people are going to have s— to say about it because it’s not traditional and I’m not a trained musician. I don’t know how to read music. I just go with my [gut], and he was like, “That’s why it’s so fire. That’s what makes people feel it.” He was like, “I can tell that you’re young and when I listen to this, I hear a 25-year-old,” and I’m like, “Tight.”

You’ve essentially grown up online and in the public eye. How has that evolution shaped the way you see yourself as an artist, and what have you learned about navigating visibility over the years?”

I feel like it’s an advantage. I always talk about that especially with my artist homies. I was an internet baby so I kind of have just a slight advantage because I knew really early how it worked. I feel like I’m still learning how to promote my music because I know how to get on the internet and be an idiot all day. I can do that literally in my sleep, but being an idiot who knows how to promote his music is different. [laughs] So yeah, I’m still learning that. I used to think it harmed me because I was so scared that people wouldn’t take my music seriously. But no, I use it to my advantage for sure.

We’re at a time in music where it’s common for artists to be open and proud about their identity and sexuality without feeling like they need to use coded language. I think of artists like Frank Ocean, Steve Lacy and Durand Bernarr. Can you talk about why talking about your queerness is important to you?

I feel like I’m a pretty honest person in general. I try not to lie and I feel like all I can do really is just keep it a bean. Most of the time, I try to write about my personal experiences and I deal with men, so that’s just my truth [laughs]. I do also write from other perspectives like things that my friends or my homegirls tell me. I don’t always write from my point of view, but when I do, it’s about a man and that’s all I can really do.

Allison Mack is addressing “the bad things she’s done” as a high-profile member of the “sex cult” NXIVM in a new podcast.

Released Monday, “Allison After NXIVM” is a seven-episode series that features the former “Smallville” star detailing her time as a young actor and how she became involved in the purported self-improvement group, as well as her role in manipulating women into becoming sex slaves for NXIVM leader Keith Raniere and the eventual criminal fallout.

“I don’t see myself as innocent,” Mack says in an early episode as she acknowledges using her success as an actor as “a power tool … to get people to do what I wanted” and that she was “very effective in moving Keith’s vision forward.”

In a later episode, she accepts claims that she was a “harsh monster” during her time at NXIVM.

“I was not kind and I was aggressive and I was abusive,” Mack says. “I was harsh and I was callous and I was aggressive and forceful in ways that were painful for people. [I] did make people feel like they had no choice and was incredibly abusive to people, traumatic for people.”

In 2019, Mack pleaded guilty to racketeering charges related to her role in NXIVM and its subgroup DOS, a so-called “secret society” of women who were branded with Raniere’s initials and forced to have sex with him. Mack was among one of the “masters” in the group, a lieutenant tasked by Raniere with recruiting and coercing other women. She was sentenced to three years in federal prison in 2021 and was released in 2023. (Raniere is currently serving a 120-year sentence after being convicted of sex-trafficking and other charges.)

But while she acknowledges that “100% all those allegations are true,” she also contends that she is “someone who cares deeply and wanted very much to grow and wanted very much for everybody that I was involved with to grow. … [B]oth of those things are true about me.

“I definitely recognize and admit that I was abusing my power,” Mack says. “But I also can’t negate the fact that there was a part of me that was altruistic and was desperate to help people. [I] wanted to be better, and I was willing to do anything to be better in myself and to help other people be better.”

The podcast series also touches on what Mack has been up to since being released from prison. She is pursuing a master’s in social work and looking into PhD programs in expressive arts therapy. She is also working at a nonprofit to help bring creative arts such as music, theater and poetry to prisons.

Over the summer, Mack got married to Frank Meeink, a prominent former neo-Nazi who now speaks out in support of racial diversity and acceptance. The couple met in a dog park not long after Mack’s release from prison in 2023. According to the podcast’s host, Natalie Robehmed, Mack now goes by Allison Meeink.

Robehmed also mentions that “Allison After NXIVM,” which is the latest installment of the true crime podcast “Uncover,” came to be after Mack reached out to journalist Vanessa Grigoriadis following her release from prison, hoping to tell her own story for the first time. Grigoriadis, who serves as an executive producer on the series, had interviewed Mack before her arrest.

NXIVM also has been the subject of the 2020 documentary series “The Vow” and “Seduced: Inside the NXIVM Cult.”

A strange scene unfolded at the Adams/Vermont farmers market near USC last week.

The pomegranates, squash and apples were in season, pink guavas were so ripe you could smell their heady scent from a distance, and nutrient-packed yams were ready for the holidays.

But with federal funding in limbo for the 1.5 million people in Los Angeles County who depend on food aid from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program — or SNAP — the church parking lot hosting the market was largely devoid of customers.

Even though the market accepts payments through CalFresh, the state’s SNAP program, hardly anyone was lined up when gates opened. Vendors mostly idled alone at their produce stands.

A line of cars stretches more than a mile as people wait to receive a box of free food provided by the L.A. Food Bank in the City of Industry on Wednesday.

(Genaro Molina/Los Angeles Times)

As thousands across Southern California lined up at food banks to collect free food, and the fight over delivering the federal allotments sowing uncertainty, fewer people receiving aid seemed to be spending money at outdoor markets like this one.

“So far we’re doing 50% of what we’d normally do — or less,” said Michael Bach, who works with Hunger Action, a food-relief nonprofit that partners with farmers markets across the greater L.A. area, offering “Market Match” deals to customers paying with CalFresh debit cards.

The deal allows shoppers to buy up to $30 worth of fruit produce for only $15. Skimming a ledger on her table, Bach’s colleague Estrellita Echor noted that only a handful of shoppers had taken advantage of the offer.

All week at farmers markets where workers were stationed, the absence was just as glaring, she said. “I was at Pomona on Saturday — we only had six transactions the whole day,” she said. “Zero at La Mirada.”

CalFresh customers looking to double their money on purchases were largely missing at the downtown L.A. market the next day, Echor said.

A volunteer loads up a box of free food for a family at a drive-through food distribution site in the City of Industry.

(Genaro Molina/Los Angeles Times)

“This program usually pulls in lots of people, but they are either holding on to what little they have left or they just don’t have anything on their cards,” she said.

The disruption in aid comes as a result of the Trump administration’s decision to deliver only partial SNAP payments to states during the ongoing federal government shutdown, skirting court order to restart funds for November. On Friday night, Supreme Court Associate Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson temporarily blocked the order pending a ruling on the matter by the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

But by then, CalFresh had already started loading 100% of November’s allotments onto users’ debit cards. Even with that reprieve for food-aid recipients in California, lack of access to food is a persistent problem in L.A., said Kayla de la Haye, director of the Institute for Food System Equity at USC.

A study published by her team last year found that 25% of residents in L.A. County — or about 832,000 people — experienced food insecurity, and that among low-income residents, the rate was even higher, 41%. The researchers also found that 29% of county residents experienced nutrition insecurity, meaning they lacked options for getting healthy, nutritious food.

Those figures marked a slight improvement compared to data from 2023, when the end of pandemic-era boosts to state, county and nonprofit aid programs — combined with rising inflation — caused hunger rates to spike just as they did at the start of the pandemic in 2020, de la Haye said.

“That was a big wake-up call — we had 1 in 3 folks in 2020 be food insecure,” de la Haye said. “We had huge lines at food pantries.”

But while the USC study shows the immediate delivery of food assistance through government programs and nonprofits quickly can cut food insecurity rates in an emergency, the researchers discovered many vulnerable Angelenos are not participating in food assistance programs.

Despite the county making strides to enroll more eligible families over the last decade, de la Haye said, only 29% of food insecure households in L.A. County were enrolled in CalFresh, and just 9% in WIC, the federal nutrition program for women, infants and children.

De la Haye said participants in her focus groups shared a mix of reasons why they didn’t enroll: Many didn’t know they qualified, while others said they felt too ashamed to apply for aid, were intimidated by the paperwork involved or feared disclosing their immigration status. Some said they didn’t apply because they earned slightly more than the cutoff amounts for eligibility.

Even many of those those receiving aid struggled: 39% of CalFresh recipients were found to lack an affordable source for food and 45% faced nutrition insecurity.

De la Haye said hunger and problems accessing healthy food have serious short- and long-term health effects — contributing to higher rates of heart disease, diabetes and obesity, as well greater levels of stress, anxiety and depression in adults and children. What’s more, she said, when people feel unsure about their finances, highly perishable items such as fresh, healthy food are often the first things sacrificed because they can be more expensive.

The USC study also revealed stark racial disparities: 31% of Black residents and 32% of Latinos experienced food insecurity, compared to 11% of white residents and 14% of Asians.

De la Haye said her team is analyzing data from this year they will publish in December. That analysis will look at investments L.A. County has made in food system over the last two years, including the allocation of $20 million of federal funding to 80 community organizations working on everything from urban farming to food pantries, and the recent creation of the county’s Office of Food Systems to address challenges to food availability and increase the consumption of healthy foods.

“These things that disrupt people’s ability to get food, including and especially cuts to this key program that is so essential to 1.5 million people in the county — we don’t weather those storms very well,” de la Haye said. “People are just living on the precipice.”

Nov. 9 (UPI) — The Trump administration has ordered states to stop distributing benefits to 42 million food insecure Americans, including critical nutrition and aid to the Women, Infants and Children program.

The move follows an order last week by two federal judges that ordered the administration to provide the benefits that hungry children rely on.

A memo from the U.S.D.A. Food and Nutrition Service directs states to “immediately undo any steps taken to issue” full payments to recipients of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program

The Administration has called on states to issue partial payments, about 65% of a typical monthly SNAP benefit, to recipients.

The memo threatens states with total cuts in federal funding they need to pay SNAP administrative costs if they don’t heed the warning.

As of Sunday morning, officials in many states said they were unsure how the USDA order will affect their aid, the fate of which has been uncertain as courts and the Trump administration volley back and forth over the amount to be distributed, if any.

Washington funds SNAP, but the federal government and states share the administrative costs of distributing the benefits to recipients.

Friday night, Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson blocked a Rhode Island judge’s order that, earlier in the week, directed the Trump administration to issue full SNAP benefits for the month of November.

The Trump administration said Friday that it was working to distribute the aid, and it appealed to the Supreme Court to block the Rhode Island judge’s order.

The SNAP program provides aid to more than 42 million Americans, including elderly people, children and low-income families.

It has been at the center of the historically long government shutdown, as recipients have been unsure, often on a day-to-day basis, whether they are going to receive the funds they need to buy food they need to survive.

Proposition 50 has passed, and with it goes the warm spotlight of never-ending press coverage that aspiring presidential contender Gavin Newsom has enjoyed. What’s an ambitious governor to do?

My vote? Take inspiration from President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who not only pulled America through the Depression, but rebuilt trust in democracy with a truly big-tent government that offered concrete benefits to a wide and diverse swath of society.

It’s time to once again embrace the values — inclusiveness, equity, dignity for all — that too many Democrats have expeditiously dropped to appease MAGA.

Not only did FDR make good on helping the average person, he put a sign on it (literally — think of all those Work Projects Administration logos that still grace our manhole covers and sidewalks) to make sure everyone knew that big, bold government wasn’t the problem, but the solution — despite what rich men wanted the public to believe.

As he was sworn in for his second term (of four, take that President Trump!), FDR said he was “determined to make every American citizen the subject of his country’s interest and concern,” because the “test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little.”

Roosevelt created jobs paid for by government; he created Social Security; he created a coalition that improbably managed to include both Black Americans everywhere and white Southerners, northern industrialists and rural farmers. In the end, he created a United States where people could try, fail and have the helping hand to get back up again — the real underpinning of the American dream.

The similarities between Roosevelt’s day and now aren’t perfect, but they share a shoe size. FDR took office in 1933, when the Great Depression was in full swing. Then, like now, right-wing authoritarianism was cuddled up with the oligarchs. Income inequality was undeniable (and worse, unemployment was around 25%) and daily life was just plain hard.

That discontent, then and now, led to political polarization as need sowed division, and leaders with selfish agendas channeled fear into anger and anger into power.

Like then, the public today is desperate for security, and unselfish, service leadership — not that of “economic royalists,” as FDR described them. He warned then, in words sadly timeless, that “new kingdoms” were being “built upon concentration of control over material things.”

“They created a new despotism and wrapped it in the robes of legal sanction,” FDR said when accepting the presidential nomination for the second time.

“We’re in a similar moment now,” said New Deal expert Eric Rauchway, a distinguished professor of history at UC Davis.

But Roosevelt wasn’t just fighting what was wrong, he pointed out. He “wanted to show people that he was going to not put things back the way they were, but actually make things better.”

Like then, America today isn’t just looking to overcome.

Despite the relentless focus on cost of living, there is also hunger for a return to fairness. Even cowed by our personal needs, there is still in most of us that belief that Ronald Reagan articulated well: We aspire to be the “shining city upon a hill … teeming with people of all kinds living in harmony and peace.”

Washington, D.C., resident Sean Dunn distilled that sentiment for the modern moment recently, standing outside a courthouse after being found not guilty of a misdemeanor for throwing a turkey sandwich at an immigration officer.

“Every life matters, no matter where you came from, no matter how you got here, no matter how you identify,” Dunn said. “You have the right to live a life that is free.”

But America needs to pay the bills and affordability is fairly the top concern for many. Voters want a concrete plan for personal financial stability — like FDR offered with the New Deal — grounded in tangible benefits such as healthcare, housing, jobs and affordable Thanksgiving turkeys that do not require lining up at a food bank.

The Republicans understand only part of this complicated mix — the affordability angle. Though, like the robber barons of the Roaring ‘20s, MAGA elite are finding it increasingly difficult to dismantle government and strip the American people of their wealth while simultaneously pretending they care.

Trump made a big to-do about the price of Walmart’s Thanksgiving meal this year, about $40 to serve 10 people (though it comes with fewer items than last year, and mostly Walmart house brand instead of name brands).

Walmart “came out and they said Trump’s Thanksgiving dinner, same things, is 25% less than Biden’s,” he said. “But we just lost an election, they said, based on affordability.”

Billionaire-adjacent Vice President JD Vance summed up that Republican frustration on social media after Democrats won not just Proposition 50, but elections in New Jersey, Virginia and even Mississippi.

“We need to focus on the home front,” Vance said, using weirdly coded right-wing nationalist language. “We’re going to keep on working to make a decent life affordable in this country, and that’s the metric by which we’ll ultimately be judged in 2026 and beyond.”

Vance is partially right, but FDR ultimately succeeded because he understood that the stability of American democracy depends not just on paying the bills, but on equality and equity — of everyone having a fair shake at paying them.

Despite all the up-by-the-bootstraps rhetoric of our rich, the truth is healthy capitalist societies require “automatic stabilizers,” such as unemployment insurance, access to medical care and that Social Security FDR invented, said Teresa Ghilarducci, a professor of economics at the New School and another expert on the New Deal.

Left or right, Republican or Democrat, Americans want to know that they won’t be left out in the cold, literally, if life deals them a bad hand.

Of course, Newsom isn’t president so all he can do is give us a vision of what that would look like, the way FDR did as governor of New York in the early years of the Great Depression, before moving to the Oval Office.

There’s the evergreen refrain that as governor Newsom should stay in his lane and focus on the state, instead of his ambitions. To which I say, that’s like shaking your fist at the rear of a bolting horse. Newsom is running for president like Secretariat for the Triple Crown. And since we do in fact need a president, why shouldn’t he?

Next is the equally tired, “Republicans can’t wait for him to run because everyone hates California. Wait until Newsom hits Iowa!” But regular people hate despair, poverty and Nazis far more than they hate California. And the people who actually hate California more than they hate despair, poverty and Nazis are never going to vote for any Democrat.

For once, thanks to MAGA’s fascination with California as the symbol of failure and evil, the Golden State is the perfect place to make an argument for a new vision of America, FDR-style. In fact, we already are.

At a time of increasing hunger in our country, California is one of a handful of states that provides no-questions-asked free school lunches to all children, a proven way to combat food insecurity.

With Trump not only destroying the scientific institutions that study and control environmental and health safety, California is setting its own standards to protect people and the planet.

California has fought to expand access to affordable healthcare; stop the military on our streets and push back against masked police; and it leads our country in livable wages, safety nets, social equality and opportunities for social mobility. The state is doing as much as one state can to offer a new deal to solve old problems.

What if Newsom built off those successes with plans for Day One executive orders? Expansion of trade apprenticeships into every high school? A pathway for “Dreamers” to become citizens?

How about an order requiring nonpartisan election maps? Or declaring firearm violence a public health emergency? Heck, I’d love an executive order releasing the Epstein files, which may be America’s most bipartisan issue.

But, Rauchway warns, Newsom needs to be more like FDR and “put a sign on it” when he puts values into action.

“That investment has to be conspicuous, positive and very clear where it came from,” he said.

We are not a nation of subtlety or patience.

If Newsom wants to stay relevant, he has to do more than fight against Trump. He needs to make all Americans believe he’s fighting for them as FDR did — loudly and boldly — and that if he wins, they will, too, on Day One.

There are three essential components to a healthy democracy: elected officials, voters and political opposition. The first two make the most noise and get the most attention.

But that third pillar really matters too.

According to Ballotpedia, the online nonpartisan organization that tracks election data, of the nearly 14,000 elections across 30 states that the group covered this week, 60% were uncontested — with only one candidate for a position, or for some roles, no candidate at all.

Much of this week’s postelection analysis has been focused on the mayoral race in New York City and Zohran Mamdani’s victory. Yet the same night, as democracy in America took center stage, more than 1,000 people were elected mayor without facing an opponent.

Only about 700 mayoral races tracked by Ballotpedia gave voters any choice. Dig a little deeper and you find more than 50% of city council victories and nearly 80% of outcomes for local judgeships were all without competition.

That’s a problem.

Elections without political opposition turn voting — the cornerstone of our governance — into performance art. The trend is heading in the wrong direction. Since Ballotpedia began tracking this data in 2018, about 65% of the elections covered were uncontested. However, for the last two years the average is an abysmal 75%.

It’s a symptom of broader disengagement. Over two and a half centuries, a lot of lives have been sacrificed trying to perfect this union and its democracy. And yet last November, a third of America’s eligible voters chose not to take part.

Are we a healthy democracy or masquerading as one?

Doug Kronaizl, a managing editor at Ballotpedia who analyzes this data, told me the numbers show Americans are increasingly more focused on national politics, even though local elections have the greatest effects on our daily lives.

“We like to view elections sort of like a pyramid, and at the tippity top, that’s where all of the elections are that people just spend a lot of time focused on,” said Kronaizl, who’s been at the nonprofit since 2020. “That’s your U.S. House races, your governor races, stuff like that. But the vast majority of the pyramid — that huge base — is like all of these local elections that are always happening and end up being for the most part uncontested.”

Take New York, for example. For all the hoopla around Mamdani’s win, the fact is most of the state’s 124 elections weren’t contested. Iowa had 1,753 races with one or zero candidates; Ohio had more than 2,500.

And that’s being conservative. In some cases, if an election is uncontested, ballots aren’t printed and the performance art is canceled. Ballotpedia says its data doesn’t include outcomes decided without a vote.

We have elected officials. We have voters. But political opposition? We’re in trouble — especially at the local level, down at the base of the pyramid. The foundation of democracy is in desperate need of repair.

* * *

The former mayor of Tempe, Ariz., Neil Giuliano, has dedicated most of his life to public service. He said when it comes to running for office, people must remember the three M’s: the money to campaign, the electoral math to win and the message for voters.

“It used to be the other way around,” he told me. “It used to be you had a message and you talked about what you believed in.” Now, however, “you can talk about what you believe in all day long,” he said, but if you don’t have the money and the data to target and reach voters, “it’s either a vanity effort or a futility effort.”

When an interesting electoral seat opens in Arizona, Giuliano — who was elected to the city council in 1990 before serving as mayor from 1994 to 2004 — is sometimes approached about running again. For two decades now, his answer has been the same: No, thank you.

Instead, the 69-year-old prefers mentoring candidates and fundraising. He also sits on the board of the Victory Fund, the 30-year-old nonpartisan organization that works to elect openly LGBTQ+ candidates at all levels of government.

Giuliano said the rise in uncontested elections can be explained by two discouraged groups: Some people don’t run because they believe the positions don’t matter. Others are “so overwhelmed with everything going on they’re not going to alter their life,” he said. “It’s already challenging enough without getting into a public fray where people hate each other, where people need security, where people are being accosted verbally and on social media.”

That sentiment was echoed by Amanda Litman, co-founder and president of Run for Something. Her nonprofit recruits and supports young progressives to run for local and state offices. Since President Trump was elected last November, Litman said, the organization has received more than 200,000 inquiries from people looking to run for office — which could indicate some hope on the horizon.

“I think the problems have gotten so big and so deep that it feels like you have to do something — you have to run,” she said. “The number one issue we’re hearing folks talk about is housing. The market in the last couple of years has gotten so hard, especially for young people, that it feels like there’s no alternative but to engage.”

* * *

Indeed, these are the times that try men’s souls, to borrow a phrase from Thomas Paine. He wrote those words in “The American Crisis” less than two years into the Revolutionary War, when morale was low and the future of democracy looked bleak. It is said that George Washington had Paine’s words read out loud to soldiers to inspire them. And when the bloodshed was over and victory finally won, the founders drafted the first article of the Bill of Rights because they knew the paramount importance of political opposition. That is what the 1st Amendment primarily protects: freedom of speech, the press and assembly and the right to petition the government.

Today, the crisis isn’t tyranny from abroad, but civic disengagement.

And look, I get it.

Whether you watch Fox News, CNN or MSNBC, it usually seems as though no one in politics cares about you or your community’s problems. We would have a different impression if we listened to local candidates. There are thousands of local elections every year, starving for attention and resources, right at the base of the pyramid. Since the 20th century — when national media and campaign financing exploded — we have been lured into looking only at the tippity top.

One reason political opposition in local races is critical to democracy is that it teaches us to get along despite our differences. The president will never meet most people who didn’t vote for them, but a local school board member might. Those conversations will affect how the official thinks, talks, campaigns and governs. When the system works, politicians are held accountable — and are replaced if they get out of step with voters. That’s a healthy democracy, and it’s possible only with all three elements in place: elected officials, voters and political opposition.

* * *

Former Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa has dedicated most of his life to public service. He said he learned early on to care about his community because he grew up during the civil rights movement, “when they were sending dogs to attack human beings.”

Today, the 72-year-old is a 2026 gubernatorial candidate in California. He told me when it comes to the rise in uncontested elections, people have to remember “democracy is a living, breathing thing.”

“Not everybody can run for office, not everybody wants to run for office, but everybody needs to be involved civically,” he said. “We have an obligation and a duty to participate, to read about what’s going on to understand and yes sometimes to run when necessary.

“We got to stand up to the threat to our democracy, but we also got to fix the things we broke … and it’s a lot broken.”

Voters often want something better than the status quo, but without political opposition on the ballot, it can’t happen. That’s the beauty of democracy: It comes in handy when elected officials forget government is meant to serve the people — not the other way around.

Leanna Hubers contributed to this report. YouTube: @LZGrandersonShow

The uproar over Tucker Carlson’s interview with white nationalist and Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes has sparked yet another round of MAGA civil war talk.

Full disclosure: I previously worked for Carlson at the Daily Caller, so I’ve had a front-row seat for this ongoing battle for a long time now.

In case you missed the latest: Carlson invited Fuentes onto his podcast. What followed wasn’t an interview so much as a warm bubble bath of mutual validation — the kind of “conversation” that helps launder extremist ideas.

Enter Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation — once the intellectual vanguard of conservatism, now something closer to an emotional support group for people who think President Reagan was too soft. Responding to whispers that Heritage might distance itself from Carlson, Roberts rushed out a video to reassure the faithful: Heritage will have no enemies to its right.

Roberts disagreed with Fuentes (good for him) but insisted Heritage didn’t become the top conservative think tank by “canceling our own people or policing the consciences of Christians.” He also called Carlson’s critics a “venomous coalition” who “serve someone else’s agenda” — which echoes one of the oldest antisemitic tropes in the book.

And then something surprising happened: People inside Heritage actually pushed back (a brave move, given Heritage’s Orwellian “one voice” policy). Some even resigned.

The broader right-wing commentariat weighed in, too. Ben Shapiro called Carlson an “intellectual coward.” Ted Cruz made some noise. The Wall Street Journal editorial board huffed. And talk radio host Mark Levin criticized Fuentes and Carlson during a speech to the Republican Jewish Coalition. For a brief moment, it looked like accountability was actually trending.

But … why this moment? Why now?

Keep in mind: Then-former President Trump dined with Fuentes in 2022 and wrongly claimed immigrants were eating pets in 2024. As president, he told the Proud Boys to “stand back and stand by” in 2020. And of course he launched his political career by questioning President Obama’s birth certificate. I could go on.

Despite all of this, Trump’s grip on the conservative movement only grew firmer.

Meanwhile, right-wing antisemitism has metastasized on Trump’s watch — despite his support for Israel.

Charlottesville, anyone?

The “alt-right” has shed its “alt.” They’re just “right” now.

This is especially observable when it comes to young conservatives who came of age during the Trump era. Indeed, one Heritage staffer told the New York Post that “a growing number” of Heritage interns “actually agree” with Fuentes.

And here’s the irony: The same conservative media figures now sounding the alarm helped build the machine.

Take Levin. Fuentes recently admitted that it was Levin’s radio show that first radicalized him. “He planted the seed, at least,” Fuentes told Carlson.

Likewise, aside from endorsing Trump in 2024, Shapiro made conspiracy theorist Candace Owens famous when his Daily Wire hired her to host a podcast on its platform after she became buddies with Kanye West and after she suggested the only problem with Adolf Hitler was that “he had dreams outside of Germany.”

So if these more mainstream Trumpers are horrified now, it’s probably because they helped create monsters — and those monsters are now coming to devour their creators, as monsters always do.

Rest assured, though, this rot is not limited solely to antisemitism. In recent months, MAGA figures such as Vivek Ramaswamy, FBI Director Kash Patel and even Vice President JD Vance (who is married to an Indian American woman) have all been targets of racist abuse online.

It’s important to note that none of these folks are considered “Never Trump” or Reagan conservatives. They are Trump allies. The revolution devours itself. (First they came for the Never Trumpers.…)

Again, this is far from the first skirmish in the MAGA civil war. But all of these internecine fights obscure the root cause of the problem: Trump. And yet, the orange emperor himself? Off-limits.

The fever won’t break while Trump’s still around, serving as a magnet for the worst people and cultivating the toxic ecosystem that made all of this right-wing racism possible, if not inevitable.

So by all means, conservatives: Condemn Carlson, denounce Fuentes and scold Heritage for failing to police the right and only punching left.

But as long as you avert your eyes from Trumpism, your righteous outrage is just theater — the political equivalent of aggressively mopping the floor while the pipes keep bursting.

Matt K. Lewis is the author of “Filthy Rich Politicians” and “Too Dumb to Fail.”

YouTube TV customers are bracing for another frustrating weekend.

For the last week, YouTube TV’s 10 million subscribers have been denied access to ESPN, ABC and other Walt Disney Co. channels in a dispute that has swelled into one of the largest TV blackouts in a decade. Instead of turning on “College GameDay,” “Monday Night Football” or “Dancing With the Stars,” customers have been greeted with a grim message: “Disney channels are unavailable.”

The standoff began Oct. 30 when the two behemoths hit an impasse in their negotiations over a new distribution contract covering Disney’s channels and ABC stations.

Google, which owns YouTube, has rebuffed Disney’s demands for fee increases for ESPN, ABC and other channels. The Burbank entertainment giant has been seeking a revenue boost to support its content production and streaming ambitions, and help pay for ESPN’s gargantuan sports rights deals.

Talks are ongoing, but the two sides remain apart on major issues — prolonging the stalemate.

“Everyone is kind of sick of these big-time companies trying to get the best of one another,” said Nick Newton, 30, who lives near San Francisco and subscribes to YouTube TV. “The people who are suffering are the middle-class and lower-class people that just love sports … because it’s our escape from the real world.”

Both companies declined to comment for this article.

The skirmish is just the latest between YouTube and programming companies. Since August, Rupert Murdoch’s Fox Corp., Comcast’s NBCUniversal and Spanish-language broadcaster TelevisaUnivision have all complained that YouTube TV was trying to use its market muscle to squeeze them for concessions.

Here’s a look at what’s driving the escalating tensions:

Google’s growing clout in television

The struggle between Disney and YouTube reflects television’s fast-shifting dynamics.

Disney has long entered carriage negotiations with tremendous leverage, in large part because it owns ESPN, which is a must-have channel for legions of sports fans.

Programmers, including Disney, structured their distribution contracts to expire near a pivotal programming event, such as a new season of NFL football. The timing motivated both sides to quickly reach a deal rather than risk alienating customers.

But for Google’s parent, Alphabet, YouTube TV is just a sliver of their business. The tech company generated $350 billion in revenue last year, the vast majority coming from Google search and advertising. That gives YouTube a longer leash to hold out for contract terms it finds acceptable.

“This dispute is not that painful for Google,” said analyst Richard Greenfield of LightShed Partners, noting that YouTube TV could probably withstand “two weekends without college football, and two weeks without ‘Monday Night Football’ — as long as their consumers stay with them.”

Disney, however, depends on TV advertising and pay-TV distribution fees. The week-long blackout has already dampened TV ratings, which means less revenue for the company.

Consumers like YouTube TV

For decades, throngs of consumers loathed their cable company — a sentiment that Disney and other programmers were able to use in their favor in past battles. Customer defections prompted several pay-TV companies to find a compromise to restore the darkened TV channels and stanch the subscriber bleeding.

But YouTube is banking on a more loyal user base, including millions of customers who switched to the service from higher-priced legacy providers.

“I’ll stick this thing out with YouTube TV,” Newton said, adding that he hoped the dispute didn’t drag on for weeks.

“This is one of the problems facing Disney,” Greenfield said. “It’s been a noticeable change in tone from past carriage fee battles. If customer losses stay at a minimum, then Disney is going to be in a tough place.”

It boils down to power and money

YouTube TV is the fastest-growing television service in the U.S. Analysts expect that, within a couple of years, YouTube TV will have more pay-TV customers than industry leaders Spectrum and Comcast.

In the current negotiations, Google has asked Disney to agree to lower its rates when YouTube TV surpasses Comcast’s and Spectrum’s subscriber counts. Disney maintains that YouTube already pays preferred rates, in recognition of its competitive standing, and that Google is trying to drive down the value of Disney’s networks.

“YouTube TV and its owner, Google … want to use their power and extraordinary resources to eliminate competition and devalue the very content that helped them build their service,” top Disney executives wrote last Friday in an email to their staff.

People close to YouTube TV reject the characterization, saying the service has been a valuable partner by providing a strong service that brings Disney billions of dollars a year in distribution revenue.

“The bottom line is that our channels are extremely valuable, and we can only continue to program them with the sports and entertainment viewers love most if we stand our ground,” the Disney executives wrote in last week’s email. “We are asking nothing more of YouTube TV than what we have gotten from every other distributor — fair rates for our channels.”

Higher sports rights fees

A major reason Disney is asking for higher fees is because it’s grappling with a huge escalation in sports costs.

Disney is on the hook to pay $2.6 billion a year to the NBA, another $2.7 billion annually to the NFL, and $325 million a year for the rights to stream World Wrestling Entertainment. Such sports rights contracts have nearly doubled in the last decade, leading to the strain on TV broadcasters.

In addition, deep-pocketed streaming services, including Amazon, Apple and Netflix, have jumped into sports broadcasting, driving up the cost for the legacy broadcasters.

The crowded field also strains the wallets of sports fans, and appears to be adding to the fatigue over the YouTube TV-Disney fight.

Newton wrote in a recent Twitter post that he was spending $400 a month for his various internet, phone and TV services, including Disney+ and NFL Sunday Ticket, which is distributed by YouTube TV.

“I’m already on all the major subscriptions to watch football these days,” Newton, a third-generation San Francisco 49ers fan, said. “You need Netflix. You need Peacock, you need Amazon Prime and the list goes on and on. I’m at the point where I’m not paying for anything else.”

This article contains some spoilers for the Netflix miniseries “Death by Lightning.”

If politics today make your head spin, wait until you see Netflix’s “Death by Lightning.” The four-part miniseries, premiering Thursday, chronicles one of the more jaw-dropping stretches of post-Civil War American history, when corruption ran rampant, a presidential nominee was drafted at the 11th hour, only to be assassinated early in his term by one of his biggest fans — becoming perhaps the greatest head of state we never really got to have.

And the show answers the burning expletive-laced question posed by its first line: Who is Charles Guiteau?

“I’ve been in a James Garfield rabbit hole for seven years of my life at this point,” says showrunner Mike Makowsky, who adapted Candice Millard’s 2011 chronicle of Garfield and Guiteau, “Destiny of the Republic.” Those who paid attention in history class probably remember that Garfield served briefly as our 20th president in 1881 before being shot and killed. Those who remember more than that are few and far between.

“My own agent half the time refers to him as Andrew Garfield,” says Makowsky. “And I have to confess, I knew very little about Garfield, like most Americans, until I picked up Candice Millard’s remarkable book.”

Realizing he knew little about one of the four American presidents to be assassinated, Makowsky thought, “Since I would desperately like to be on ‘Jeopardy!’ someday, I was like, ‘Let me educate myself.’ I wound up reading the entire book in one sitting.”

“Death by Lightning,” directed by “Captain Fantastic” auteur Matt Ross, boasts a remarkable cast: Betty Gilpin as First Lady Lucretia Garfield; Nick Offerman as Garfield’s successor, a hard-drinking, hard-partying Chester A. Arthur; Michael Shannon as James Garfield, the polymath president, crusader against corruption and noble to a fault; and Matthew Macfadyen as Charles Guiteau, the frustrated office-seeker who shot him.

“I wanted to cast people who were somewhat counterintuitive,” says Ross. “If you read the cast list for this, you might assume Michael Shannon was playing Guiteau because he has played a lot of complicated, for lack of a better word, villains — tough guys, bad guys. And Matthew Macfadyen has played more heroic characters.”

Guiteau is definitely no Darcy from “Pride and Prejudice,” or Tom Wambsgans from “Succession,” for that matter. In the series’ conception of him, he shares more DNA with Martin Scorsese’s unhinged protagonists than he does with Darcy — or, certainly, with Garfield.

The proto-incel with a gun

As portrayed in “Death by Lightning,” Guiteau is a rotten-toothed, scheming, big-dreaming, delusional charlatan and possible sociopath. He’s the proto-incel, and the diametrical opposite to Garfield, whom Makowsky defines as “lawful good,” to borrow the Dungeons & Dragons classification.

“I think the most reductive view of Guiteau is ‘chaotic evil,’ right? But that’s the least interesting rendering of this person,” he says. “What are the societal factors that alienate a man like Guiteau from his fellow human beings? The show is meant to probe into his psyche.”

He was a member of the Oneida community, a religious sect based in New York that practiced communalism, free love and mutual criticism, which is depicted in the series (and yes, they founded the flatware company). But Guiteau couldn’t partake in what Makowsky delicately called the “benefits” of such a society, largely because his delusions of grandeur alienated him from others there. The women reportedly nicknamed him “Charles Gitout.”

“Everyone who encountered him described him as being disagreeable, odd, rude, selfish,” Ross says, explaining the need for an actor who had the opposite qualities. “He’s an extreme example of someone who had no work to be seen for, but was so desperately looking for affirmation and love.”

Charles Guiteau (Matthew Macfadyen) was part of the Oneida community, which practiced communalism and free love, but he wasn’t accepted by its members.

(Larry Horricks/Netflix)

Ross describes Macfadyen as someone who’s empathetic, warm and funny. “I wanted that humanity because the real Guiteau was a deeply disturbed man who was psychologically brutalized by his father to the point he was a non-functioning person.”

Makowsky says as he was reading Millard’s book, he thought of Rupert Pupkin, Robert De Niro’s deranged-fan protagonist in Scorsese’s “King of Comedy.” “This guy showing up, day in and day out, hoping for an audience with his hero [Garfield], being continually rebuffed to the point where something in his brain breaks,” he says of Guiteau. “He felt like a direct historical antecedent to the Rupert Pupkins and Travis Bickles of the world. He fell through the cracks and we lost potentially one of our greatest presidents because of it.”

Makowsky recalls shooting the only dialogue scene between Garfield and Guiteau, when the “greatest fan” finally gets to meet his idol. To Makowsky’s surprise, Macfadyen’s Guiteau “just burst into tears. That wasn’t scripted. It was so overwhelming to him. I think in that moment, more than any other in the series, you feel something for this man.”

Party (hearty) over country

Garfield was succeeded in office by Chester A. Arthur, whom Makowsky calls one of the least likely persons to ever become president. “The man had never held elected office,” he says. “His one political appointment prior to his nomination for vice president was as chief crony of the spoils system of [New York Sen.] Roscoe Conkling’s political machine. The level of corruption was so audacious and insane.”

He’s played with oft-drunken brio by Nick Offerman, whose voice Makowsky says he heard in his head as soon as he started writing the role: “I was like, it has to be Nick Offerman.” He took some liberties with the character and events, including a memorable sequence where Arthur and Guiteau go on a bender. Makowsky says they “probably never had a wild night out in New York, but it was an indelible proposition and I couldn’t resist.”

Nick Offerman plays eventual President Chester A. Arthur, who was closely aligned with New York Sen. Roscoe Conkling (Shea Whigham).

Betty Gilpin portrays First Lady Lucretia Garfield as her husband’s intellectual equal. (Larry Horricks / Netflix)

As to the first lady, “Lucretia Garfield was every bit her husband’s intellectual equal. But she couldn’t vote. There was a ceiling to what a woman in her day could accomplish,” Makowsky says, wistfully musing on what she might have achieved, given the chance. “And Betty [Gilpin] radiates that strength and that acute intelligence.”

Having recently given birth, Gilpin took her family along to Budapest for filming, voraciously researching Lucretia and reading her entire correspondence with her husband. The role gets meatier as the series progresses until she initiates an unforgettable, blistering encounter with Guiteau to button the story.

“Betty jokingly said to me, ‘If you cut that scene, I will kill you.’ I was like, ‘There’s no way that scene is being cut. It’s one of my favorite scenes in the entire show,’” Ross recalls. “Everyone who read it was like, ‘Oh my God, this scene.’ And Betty just knocked it out of the park, take after take after take.”

The forgotten president

Ross says when he first read Makowsky’s scripts, he thought they were “fantastically relevant” and offered a fresh look at American history. “As an American, I’m always trying to figure out what it means to be American,” he says. “The story of Garfield, you couldn’t make it up. He was a hero of working people and the promise of American democracy — having a representational democracy where those in power and the wealthy are not controlling the laws of the land, which could not be more relevant today.”

Makowsky calls Garfield “a poster boy for the American dream,” rising from poverty to the nation’s top office.

“He was a war hero and a Renaissance man that did math theorems while he was in Congress and who could recite Homer from memory,” he says. “This remarkable individual, fiercely intelligent and a brilliant, powerful orator, was far ahead of his time on certain political questions of the day. He was an outspoken proponent for civil rights and universal education and civil service reform.”

In real life, and as depicted in the series, Garfield worked with notable Black leaders like Frederick Douglass and Blanche Bruce, the first Black register of the Treasury, whom he appointed.

“The great tragedy is we were robbed of a potentially generational leader in Garfield,” Makowsky says.

“Death by Lightning” showrunner Mike Makowsky says Americans were robbed of a “potentially generational leader” in James Garfield.

(Larry Horricks / Netflix)

Garfield wasn’t even seeking the nomination when he spoke on behalf of another candidate at the Republican National Convention of 1880, but his speech so moved the delegates that they eventually persuaded him to accept the nomination after more than 30 votes failed to produce another winner. It reminded Makowsky of then-Sen. Barack Obama’s 2004 speech at the Democratic National Convention, where he presented “a strong and confident, optimistic vision for the future of our country.”

Nowadays, such a rise seems less likely. “I don’t know if that would happen today, obviously because of money in politics; no one can run if they don’t have phenomenal backing,” Ross says.

Ross emphasizes the show is “not a history lesson,” drawing a distinction between drama and documentary. At times, “Death by Lightning” plays like a black comedy. Makowsky’s dialogue, while usually honoring what we think of as the formality and vocabulary of the 1880s’ idiom, occasionally veers into hilariously cathartic invective that bracingly reminds us these were living, breathing people with fire in their bellies.

“Ken Burns could make a 10-hour documentary to encapsulate all the nuances of this incredible story,” says Ross. What Makowsky did, Ross says, was contextualize the history through the prism of two very different people, Garfield and Guiteau.

“One is this incredibly admirable American figure I think everyone should know about, the greatest president we never really had. And then the other is a charlatan, a deeply broken, deeply mentally ill man who just kind of wanted to be Instagram-famous, just wanted to be known. You see this moment in history through their eyes, and I thought that was delicious.”

President Trump has long acknowledged that he doesn’t read books, so perhaps he’s never cracked the spine of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby.” But hasn’t he seen one of the several movies? Does he really not know that Gatsby is a tragedy about class, excess and hubris?

It seems not. On Halloween, there was Trump, dressed as himself, hosting a Gatsby-themed party at his Gatsby-era Mar-a-Lago estate. The president was fresh from a diplomatic tour of Asia during which he’d swept up an array of golden gifts (a crown!) from heads of state paying tribute in hopes of not paying tariffs.

Trump’s arriving guests, costumed as Roaring ’20s flappers, bootleggers and pre-crash tycoons, passed a scantily clad woman seductively writhing in a giant Champagne glass, then entered his gilded ballroom beneath a sign in Art Deco script pronouncing the night’s theme: “A little party never killed nobody.”

That’s the title of a song from the soundtrack of Baz Luhrmann’s 2013 film take on Gatsby, the most recent. Perhaps Trump is unaware that in the wake of the fictional Gatsby’s own debauched party, three people died, including Gatsby.

The tone-deaf Trump faced a comeuppance far short of tragedy after his party, but painful nonetheless: a blue wave in Tuesday’s elections. Revulsion at his imperial presidency swamped Republican candidates and causes.

The apparent ignorance of Mr. Make America Great Again about one of the great American novels, now in its centennial year, wasn’t the worst of Trump’s weekend show of excess. This was: The president of the United States held court at Mar-a-Lago, amid free-flowing liquor and tables laden with food, hours before federal food aid would end for 42 million Americans. Meanwhile, more than 1 million federal employees were furloughed or worked without pay amid a five-week-old government shutdown, some of them joining previously fired public servants at food banks. The online People magazine juxtaposed a photo of Trump surveying his Palm Beach party with a shot of nearby Miamians in a food line.

The president, who for nearly 10 months has seized powers he doesn’t have under federal law and the Constitution, professed to be all but powerless to avert the nutrition assistance cutoff, despite two federal judges’ rulings that he do so. And, characteristically, he claimed to be blameless about the shutdown that provoked the nutrition crisis.

“It’s their fault,” Trump said of congressional Democrats as he flew to Mar-a-Lago for the fete. “Everything is their fault. It’s so easily solved.”

How? Why, Democrats have to bend the knee, of course. They must abandon their quest to get Trump and Republicans to reverse their Medicaid cuts and to extend Obamacare subsidies for the working poor. Even as Mr. Art of the Deal claims (falsely) to have settled eight wars, bargaining even with Hamas, he’s refused to negotiate with Democrats. The shutdown is now the longest ever, on Tuesday surpassing the 35-day record Trump set in his first term.

There’s more.

En route to Florida aboard Air Force One, the presidential plane that Trump is replacing with a truly royal jet, a gift from Qatar, and having left behind the ruins of the East Wing where his $300-million ballroom will rise, Trump took to social media to boast of his latest project in the Mar-a-Lago-fication of the White House: an all-marble and gold do-over of the bathroom adjoining the Lincoln Bedroom. “Highly polished, Statuary marble!” he crowed, sending two dozen photos in a series of posts. Trump wrote that the previous 1940s-era bathroom “was totally inappropriate for the Lincoln Era,” but his changes fixed that.

“Art Deco doesn’t go with, you know, 1850 and civil wars and all of the problems,” he’d told wealthy donors last month. “But what does is statuary marble. So I ripped it apart and we built the bathroom. It’s absolutely gorgeous and totally in keeping with that time.”

And with that, Trump again showed his ignorance of America’s history as well as its literature. That said, the new bathroom is more attractive than the one at Mar-a-Lago in which Trump stashed boxes of government documents, including top-secret papers, after his first term.

Trump’s lust for power and its trappings seems to have made him blind to bad optics and deaf to the dissonance of his utterances. The politician who’s gotten so much credit — and won two of three presidential elections — for speaking to working-class Americans’ grievances now seems completely out of touch. There’s also his family’s open accrual of wealth, especially in crypto, and Trump’s recent demand for $230 million from the ever-accommodating Justice Department, to compensate him for the past legal cases against him for keeping government documents and attempting to reverse his 2020 defeat.

All of this while Americans’ costs of living remain high, people are out of jobs thanks to his policies and longtime residents, including some citizens, are swept up in his immigrant detentions and deportations, sundering families.

This week’s election results aren’t the only thing that suggests Trump is finally paying a price. So did the release of several polls timed for the first anniversary of his reelection. Despite Trump’s claims to the contrary, his job approval ratings are the lowest since the ignominious end of his first term. Majorities oppose his handling of most issues, including the ones — the economy and immigration — that helped elect him.

The narrator in “The Great Gatsby” famously says of two central characters, “They were careless people, Tom and Daisy — they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.”

I’m looking forward to the day when the careless Trump is gone and his mess can be cleaned up — including all that gold defiling the People’s House.

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NEW YORK — At the top of his victory speech at a Brooklyn theater late Tuesday, Zohran Mamdani — the 34-year-old democratic socialist just elected New York’s next mayor — spoke of power being gripped by the bruised and calloused hands of working Americans, away from the wealthy elite.

“Tonight, against all odds, we have grasped it,” he said. “The future is in our hands.”

The imagery was apropos of the night more broadly — when a beaten-down Democratic Party, still nursing its wounds from a wipeout by President Trump a year ago, forcefully took back what some had worried was lost to them for good: momentum.

From coast to coast Tuesday night, American voters delivered a sharp rebuke to Trump and his MAGA movement, electing Democrats in important state and local races in New York, New Jersey and Virginia and passing a major California ballot measure designed to put more Democrats in Congress in 2026.

The results — a reversal of the party’s fortunes in last year’s presidential election, when Trump swept the nation’s swing states — arrived amid deep political division and entrenched Republican power in Washington. Many voters cited Trump’s agenda, and related economic woes, as motivating their choices at the ballot box.

The wins hardly reflected a unified Democratic Party nationally, or even a shared left-wing vision for a future beyond Trump. If anything, Mamdani’s win was a challenge to the Democratic Party establishment as much as a rejection of Trump.

His vision for the future is decidedly different than that of other, more moderate Democrats who won elsewhere in the country, such as Abigail Spanberger, the 46-year-old former CIA officer whom Virginians elected as their first female governor, or Mikie Sherrill, the 53-year-old former Navy helicopter pilot and federal prosecutor who won the race for New Jersey governor.

Still, the cascade of victories did evoke for many Democrats and progressives a political hope that they hadn’t felt in a while: a sense of optimism that Trump and his MAGA movement aren’t unstoppable after all, and that their own party’s ability to resist isn’t just alive and well but gaining speed.

“Let me underscore, it’s been a good evening — for everybody, not just the Democratic Party. But what a night for the Democratic Party,” Gov. Gavin Newsom said during his own remarks on the national wins. “A party that is in its ascendancy, a party that’s on its toes, no longer on its heels.”

“I hope it’s the first of many dominoes that are going to happen across this country,” Noah Gotlib, 29, of Bushwick said late Tuesday at a victory party for Mamdani. “I hope there’s a hundred more Zohrans at a local, state, federal level.”

On a night of big wins, Mamdani’s nonetheless stood out as a thunderbolt from the progressive left — a full-throated rejection not just of Trump but of Mamdani’s mainstream Democratic opponent in the race: former Gov. Andrew Cuomo.

Mamdani — a Muslim, Ugandan-born state assemblyman of Indian descent — beat Cuomo first in the Democratic ranked-choice primary in June. Cuomo, bolstered by many of New York’s moneyed interests afraid of Mamdani’s ideas for taxing the rich and spending for the poor, reentered the race as an independent.

Trump attacked Mamdani time and again as a threat. He said Monday that he would cut off federal funding to New York if Mamdani won. He even took the dramatic step of endorsing Cuomo over Curtis Sliwa, the Republican in the race, in a last-ditch effort to block Mamdani’s stunning political ascent.

Instead, city voters surged to the polls and delivered Mamdani a resounding win.

“To see him rise above all of these odds to actually deliver a vision of something that could be better, that was what really attracted me to the [Democratic Socialists of America] in the first place,” said Aminata Hughes, 31, of Harlem, who was dancing at an election-night party when Mamdani was announced the winner.

“A better world is possible,” the native New Yorker said, “and we’re not used to hearing that from our politicians.”

In trademark Trump fashion, the president dismissed the wins by his rival party, suggesting they were a result of two factors: the ongoing federal shutdown, which he has blamed on Democrats, and the fact that he wasn’t personally on people’s ballots.

Stephen Miller, one of Trump’s chief advisors, posted a paragraph to social media outlining the high number of mixed-status immigrant families in New York being impacted by the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown and mass deportation campaign, which Miller has helped lead.

Democrats in some ways agreed. They pointed to the shutdown and other disruptions to Americans’ safety and financial security as motivating the vote. They pointed to Trump’s immigration tactics as being an affront to hard-working families. And they pointed to Trump himself — not on the ballot but definitely a factor for voters, especially after he threatened to cut off funds to New York if the city voted for Mamdani again.

“President Trump has threatened New York City if we dare stand up to him. The people of New York came together and we said, ‘You don’t threaten New York,’” said Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.). “We’re going to stand up to bullies and thugs in the White House.”

“Today we said ‘no’ to Donald Trump and ‘yes’ to democracy,” New Jersey Democratic Chair LeRoy J. Jones Jr. told a happy crowd at Sherrill’s watch party.

“Congratulations to all the Democratic candidates who won tonight. It’s a reminder that when we come together around strong, forward-looking leaders who care about the issues that matter, we can win,” former President Obama wrote on social media. “We’ve still got plenty of work to do, but the future looks a little bit brighter.”

In addition to winning the New York mayoral and New Jersey and Virginia gubernatorial races, Democrats outperformed Republicans in races across the country. They held several seats on the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, and won the Virginia attorney general’s race. In California, voters passed Proposition 50, a ballot measure giving state Democrats the power to redraw congressional districts in their favor ahead of next year’s midterms.

Newsom and other Democrats had made Proposition 50 all about Trump from the beginning, framing it as a direct response to Trump trying to steal power by convincing red states such as Texas to redraw their own congressional lines in favor of Republicans.

Trump has been direct about trying to shore up Republicans’ slim majority in the House, to help ensure they retain power and are able to block Democrats from thwarting his agenda. And yet, he has suggested California’s own redistricting effort was illegal and a “GIANT SCAM” under “very serious legal and criminal review.”

Trump had also gone after several of the Democrats who won on Tuesday directly. In addition to Mamdani, Trump tried to paint Spanberger and Sherrill as out-of-touch liberals too, attacking them over some of his favorite wedge issues such as transgender rights, crime and energy costs. Similar messaging was deployed by the candidates’ Republican opponents.

In some ways, Trump was going out on a political limb, trying to sway elections in blue states where his grip on the electorate is smaller and his influence is often a major motivator for people to get out and vote against him and his allies.

His weighing in on the races only added to the sense that the Democrats’ wins marked something bigger — a broader repudiation of Trump, and a good sign for Democrats heading into next year’s midterms.

Marcus LaCroix, 42, who voted for Proposition 50 at a polling site in Lomita on Tuesday evening, described it as “a counterpunch” to what he sees as the excesses and overreach of the Trump administration, and Trump’s pressure on red states to redraw their lines.

“A lot of people are very concerned about the redistricting in Texas,” he said. “But we can actually fight back.”

Ed Razine, 27, a student who lives in the Bed-Stuy neighborhood of Brooklyn, was in class when he heard Mamdani won. Soon, he was celebrating with friends at Nowadays, a Bushwick dance club hosting an election watch party.

Razine said Mamdani’s win represented a “new dawn” in American politics that he hopes will spread to other cities and states across the country.

“For me, he does represent the future of the Democratic Party — the fact that billionaires can’t just buy our election, that if someone really cares to truly represent the everyday person, people will rise up and that money will not talk,” Razine said. “At the end of the day, people talk.”

The Associated Press and Times staff writer Connor Sheets contributed to this report.

Netflix on Wednesday touted a surge in popularity for its low-cost streaming plan with ads, as it looks to tap into the lucrative the world of brands.

The streaming giant said it now has more than 190 million monthly active viewers watching ads through a plan that costs $7.99 a month. The lowest cost ad-free plan costs $17.99 a month.

In May, Netflix said it had 94 million monthly active users watching ads through the cheaper plan. That translated to roughly 170 million monthly active viewers, the company said at the time.

However, the Los Gatos, Calif.-based company is now using a different methodology to measure its audience watching ads, making exact comparison’s difficult.

Netflix now defines monthly active viewers as customers who watched at least 1 minute of ads on Netflix per month. It then multiplies that by the estimated average number of people in a household. Previously, Netflix had measured monthly active users based on the number of Netflix profiles watching content with ads.

The streamer said its previous measurement didn’t illustrate all the people who were in the room watching.

“Our move to viewers means we can give a more comprehensive count of how many people are actually on the couch, enjoying our can’t-miss series, films, games and live events with friends and family,”wrote Amy Reinhard, Netflix’s president of advertising in a post on the streamer’s website on Wednesday.

On Wednesday, Netflix executives said the growth in ad viewers was in line with their expectations.

“We are very satisfied with where we are at,” Reinhard, said in a press briefing. “We think there is a lot of opportunity to grow on this plan around the world, and we’re going to continue to make sure that we are offering our customers a great experience and a great buying experience on the advertising side.”

Netflix began its foray into ad-supported streaming in 2022, after it received pressure from investors to diversify how it makes revenue. Previously, Netflix mainly made money through subscriptions and for many years had been ad-adverse.

The company said last month it was on track to more than double its ad revenue in 2025, but did not cite specific figures. Netflix Co-CEO Greg Peters said in an earnings presentation in October that the ad revenue is still small relative to the size of the company’s subscription revenues, but advertisers are excited about Netflix’s growing scale.

“We see plenty of room for growth ahead,” Peters said.

On Wednesday, Netflix said it is expanding its options for advertisers, including demographic targeting in areas such as education, marital status and household income.

Netflix also said it has partnered with brands including brewing company Peroni Nastro Azzurro in ads for its romantic comedy series “Emily in Paris,” and tested dynamic ad insertion with programs including WWE Raw this quarter and will offer that feature in the U.S. and other countries for NFL Christmas Gameday.

Many streamers have been increasing the cost of their subscriptions in order to become more profitable. Earlier this year Netflix raised the prices on plans.