Blue State Governors Get It. Why Don’t Washington Democrats? In Washington, it’s land acknowledgments and sternly worded letters. In the states, Democratic governors are taking the fight to MAGA Julie Roginsky Aug 31 Labor Day Sale! Just for today, we’re running 10% off on annual subscriptions to Salty Politics. Now’s your chance to get access to every single post, upcoming paid subscriber chats, our upcoming six-week Disinformation and How to Counter It seminar and more. It’s time we talk about Washington Democrats. My D.C. friends, what are you doing? Seriously, the only thing standing between Donald Trump and full-on authoritarianism is you — and you can’t get out of your own way. The DNC’s summer meeting last week kicked off with — you guessed it — a “land acknowledgment” statement. If you have not been spending your time attending these kinds of events, you might not know that a land acknowledgement statement requires you to announce that you stand on colonized land stolen from Native Americans. The treasurer of the Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party (DFL) began the DNC meeting with this recitation: The DNC acknowledges and honors the Dakota Oyate – the Dakota people – who are the original stewards of the lands and waters of Minneapolis. The Dakota cared for the lands, lakes and the Wakpa Tanka – the “Great River,” the Mississippi River – for thousands of years before colonization. This land was not claimed, or traded – it's a part of a history of broken treaties and promises. And, in many ways, we still live in a system built to suppress Indigenous peoples' cultural and spiritual history. If this is not making you want to gouge your eyes out, you haven’t been paying attention to the fact that Democrats are at their lowest approval rating in our lifetime. Who is this virtue signaling supposed to help? Did anyone at the DNC meeting spend any time examining how to provide a better quality of life for Native Americans or did they think that calling the Mississippi River the “Wakpa Tanka” was going to absolve them of doing the hard work of actually improving the circumstances of Native Americans? Here is the brutal reality: the typical white family has twice the wealth of a Native American family. Nearly 80% of Native Americans do not hold a college degree. They have less access to economic opportunity than almost anyone else. They were disproportionately affected by the COVID pandemic, have higher rates of chronic health conditions and are less likely to have health insurance than others. In a Brookings post-mortem after last year’s election, Native American respondents overwhelmingly said that cost-of-living and inflation were paramount in determining their vote (55%); jobs and the economy (31%); housing costs and affordability (29%); abortion/reproductive rights (24%); and healthcare costs (20%) came next. To the extent that Native Americans reported concern about issues specific to their own circumstances, they cared mostly about land rights (59%) and tribal sovereignty (58%). In other words, they don’t particularly care that a bunch of politicos are virtue signaling about land stolen from their ancestors hundreds of years ago. It goes on and on and it’s not just taking place at Ken Martin’s DNC down the street from the Capitol complex. When Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer isn’t busy sending sternly worded letters to the White House, what has he done to make Democrats, independent voters and an increasing cohort of disenchanted Republicans understand what he is doing to stand up to Trump and to improve their lives? When House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries isn’t busy making the firing of the Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook all about race, what is he doing to remind voters every single day that Speaker Mike Johnson is protecting Trump by refusing to subpoena all the Epstein files from the Department of Justice? With national leaders like this, it’s no wonder that Democrats are at a 33% favorability rating. Contrast that with what Democratic governors are doing. From Gavin Newsom in California to JB Pritzker in Illinois to Wes Moore in Maryland, blue state executives are taking the lead in both sticking it to Trump and showing the country how Democrats govern. They are not cowering in the corner or waiting for focus groups to tell them how to navigate this moment carefully. Instead, they are taking the fight to MAGA both politically and governmentally. Early next week, I will be doing a deep dive newsletter into what blue states can and should be doing to meet this unprecedented moment in history. In the meantime, pay attention to which Democrats are experimenting with new and innovative ways to fight back against the dawning of American fascism and which ones are still acting as though sternly worded letters and social media posts crafted by committee should govern this moment. Sign up for our seminar on Disinformation and How to Counter It! Starting on September 17th, Olga Lautman and I will be running a 6-week discussion on information warfare, disinformation, and media manipulation, exclusively for paid subscribers. We will meet weekly on Wednesdays (Sept 17–Oct 22) at 3 PM on Zoom. If you can’t make it live, we will email slides and a recording the following day. Cut-off for registration is September 17 at 2:00 PM ET. If you are a paid subscriber, please sign up at the link below. https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSccVY1gdQvAJLIsN8ahz0oRRl1bsyqDupu1Ixx5SEcWZLZ6kg/viewform?usp=header If you are not yet a paid subscriber, now is the time to become one, so you can join us. Here’s what we will cover: Session 1: From KGB Playbooks to Today’s Information War — How It Started and How to Stop It How Cold War “active measures” evolved into modern disinformation tactics — and what we can learn from their long history to push back today. Session 2: Weaponized Information Ecosystems — And How to Disrupt Them An inside look at how authoritarian regimes exploit media platforms, algorithms, and identity politics — and how their tactics have been mirrored in far-right U.S. media spaces. Session 3: Influence Agents, Front Groups, and Narrative Laundering How think tanks, NGOs, media figures, influencers, and politicians are co-opted to launder state propaganda — from Kremlin-funded platforms to U.S. propagandists. Session 4: U.S. Media — Far-Right Echo Chambers and Mainstream Complicity How MAGA-aligned media disseminate disinformation, echo Kremlin narratives, and how mainstream outlets can unwittingly amplify disinformation through false balance, clickbait, and leaks. Session 5: Hybrid Warfare and the Move from Online Indoctrination to Offline Violence How online propaganda fuels radicalization and real-world extremism — from Stop the Steal to Telegram militias to sabotage recruitment efforts across Europe and the U.S. Session 6: Countering Disinformation — Lessons from Ukraine, the Baltics, and Beyond Successful strategies for fighting back. We’ll look at what some countries are doing right — and what we can learn from those on the front lines of the information war. Dumb Legacy Media Story of the Week: Pete Hegseth is publicly calling for a repeal of the 19th amendment, which gave women the right to vote; demanding that gay sex be banned; retweeting videos extolling the virtues of some slave owners; and restoring portraits of seditious confederate generals to the halls of America’s military academies. Robert F. Kennedy Jr is firing epidemiologists and waging a war on the vaccines that have saved generations from death and severe illness. And that’s just this month. But you might be forgiven for thinking of these two as just two overenthusiastic rascals who decided to get into a good-natured fitness challenge. The New York Times actually deployed people on their payroll to report and edit a story with this lede: Last week, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. challenged Pete Hegseth to a test of fitness in which each of them would do 50 pull-ups and 100 push-ups in 10 minutes or less. “Try to get under five minutes,” Mr. Kennedy, the health secretary, said of each section of the challenge, while wearing his standard gym attire of a tucked-in T-shirt and jeans. The “Pete and Bobby Challenge,” as Mr. Hegseth, the secretary of defense, called it, circulated widely in videos posted to social media by both men, as well as to the official YouTube account of the Department of Health and Human Services. The challenge might have seemed novel to some, but high-volume calisthenic couplets like this are nothing new — and fitness experts caution they may not be for everyone. It’s not the the Times has not covered Kennedy’s assault on the CDC is granular detail (though it has focused on Hegseth’s outrages much less). It’s that it is writing stories about the two that would not be out of place for coverage of the Biggest Loser or some other reality show. Except these two are not reality contestants. They are men who hold the lives of billions of people in the palms of their hands — and any coverage of them needs to focus on that, not on human interest stories where they feature. “When you buy apples, when you buy bacon, when you buy eggs, they would double and triple the price over a short period of time, and I won an election based on that. We're going to bring those prices way down." - Donald Trump, Meet the Press, December 8, 2024. Below is the most recently available national data on the average price of apples, bacon, and eggs. It’s been over seven months and those prices are not “way down.” Apples (Honeycrisp, per pound): $2.94 (up from $2.31 when Biden left office and up from $1.88 this time last year) Bacon (sliced, per pound): $7.118 (July, 2025, up from $6.915 in December, 2024, which was Biden’s last full month in office and up from $6.883 this time last year) Eggs (Grade A, Large, per dozen): $3.60 (July, 2025, down from $4.15 in December, 2024, which was Biden’s last full month in office and up from $3.08 this time last year) Salty Monday: Active Measures Series Nazis, the Kremlin and Trump Julie Roginsky and Olga Lautman · Aug 25 Putin’s Dresden Days Read full story Salty Wednesday: The End of America as We Know It Julie Roginsky · Aug 27 The student has not quite become the master but Donald Trump has learned so much from Vladimir Putin — from how to control a pliant legislature to how to rule with increasing autocracy — that he is now engaging in the same active measures that the Kremlin used to help bring Trump to power in 2016 and to launch its disastrous war in Ukraine. Read full story Salty Thursday: Salty Friday: Who Put the Hit on Witkoff? Julie Roginsky · Aug 29 Even at Donald Trump’s Tuesday suckupalooza-cum-cabinet meeting, where aides fell over themselves to praise Dear Leader, Steve Witkoff stood out. Witkoff, the Special Envoy to the Middle East is not a member of the cabinet but he was there (as he is anywhere) because he golfs with Trump and is the father of the Trump family’s Read full story Bonus Content: On Saturday, we hosted an emergency Coffee and Conversation about Trump’s health. Catch it here: Have a great rest of the week and stay Salty! Julie