A federal judge in Massachusetts just smacked down Donald Trump’s last-minute attempt to gut mail-in voting just weeks before the midterms. Fox News is apparently so rattled by the popularity of democratic socialism that primetime host Jesse Watters ran a segment attacking Raw America’s interview this week with Florida U.S. Senate candidate Angie Nixon. A new poll shows a significant chunk of the young voters who helped put Trump back in the White House are now regretting that decision. And a Florida sheriff’s deputy who his bosses named the 2025 “Deputy of the Year” is now under investigation after allegedly using Flock cameras to stalk his ex-girlfriend.
Before we get to what’s happening, a quick update: Raw America was just mentioned on a Fox News primetime show, which means we’re breaking through to mainstream America less than eight months after our launch. But because we have no wealthy backers keeping us afloat, we’re counting more than ever on readers like you, who understand the importance of independent journalism, to keep this work going. If you’ve been thinking for awhile about supporting us one day with a paying subscription, today is the day. You can upgrade your free subscription to a paying one for just 22 cents a day.
This one has huge implications for November: a federal judge in Massachusetts just halted the Trump administration’s new mail voting restrictions in a ruling handed down Thursday night. U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani, who was appointed by Barack Obama, put the rule on hold for two weeks, saying the government never produced any actual evidence of the fraud it claims the rule is meant to stop.
This case has been litigated for months. Talwani already paused the rule once before. But then the Supreme Court’s MAGA majority stepped in Monday and allowed the Trump administration to move forward with the new restrictions, ruling that the states and voting rights groups sued too soon as the rule hadn’t yet gone into effect.
But here’s what the Roberts Court conveniently left out: the U.S. Postal Service had already published the final version of that rule one business day before the ruling came down. That means the states and voting rights groups were actually right on time with their lawsuit, which they refiled Wednesday, prompting Talwani’s Thursday night restraining order.
The Trump administration is also not wasting any time. The White House was pushing the rule forward all week, and even publishing an FAQ on Thursday explaining how the rule would work, all while telling the courts it wasn’t trying to dictate how states run their own elections.
So what does the rule actually do? It creates complex new requirements for mail ballot envelopes that state election officials say would be effectively impossible to put in place before November. It also requires states to hand over a list of every voting-age citizen so the federal government can cross-check them against U.S. citizenship data. It also prevents the U.S.P.S. from delivering or picking up ballots from anyone who doesn’t clear that federal check.
Talwani wrote plainly that the disenfranchisement risk to voters this November massively outweighs whatever unproven fraud problem the administration says it’s solving.
Every single state allows some form of mail voting. Eight states, mostly out west, along with Washington, D.C., mail a ballot to every registered voter automatically. This fight is about millions of people’s basic ability to cast a vote, and it’s not over. The administration is expected to appeal, so keep watching this one.
Back in 1864, with the country tearing itself apart, states rewrote their election laws so Union soldiers could mail ballots home from the battlefield, because a nation at war decided that being far from your polling place shouldn’t cost you your voice in who governs you. More than a century and a half later, we’re arguing about whether the Postal Service ought to be allowed to carry a ballot at all, and that tells you the argument was never really about fraud.
Fox News primetime host Jesse Watters put Raw America’s work front and center on his show last night for a segment trying to scare his viewers about democratic socialism.
Watters featured Raw America managing editor Carl Gibson’s Wednesday interview with Angie Nixon, Florida’s Democratic nominee for U.S. Senate, on his Thursday episode as an example of what he framed as a warning sign for Republicans heading into the midterms. During her appearance on Raw America, Nixon laid out exactly how she plans to flip a Republican-held Senate seat in Trump’s adopted home state.
Her pitch to voters is pretty straightforward. She’s running on implementing a Medicare for All healthcare system, which a Yale study found would save over $1 trillion and more than 100,000 American lives every year compared to the current system. And she wants to get big corporate money out of American politics. And even though Republicans have long treated Florida as safe territory, Nixon says her platform is catching on with working-class Floridians in one of the most expensive states in the country.
That interview got noticed by Fox News bosses, which signifies that independent media is breaking through. When one of America’s most-watched cable networks feels the need to spend segment time highlighting an interview from an independent outlet with no billionaire backing or corporate parent, that’s a sign that small outlet is making a big splash.
Raw America proudly rejects money from billionaires who want to control the narrative, and we don’t answer to a corporate parent company. That independence is exactly why we’re able to conduct in-depth interviews with people like Angie Nixon without having to worry about a call from upstairs ordering us to spike it.
Ida B. Wells had her Memphis press destroyed and her paper shut down in 1892 because her reporting on lynching was landing exactly where it hurt, and she kept publishing from exile anyway. The rich and well-connected have a long history of trying to downplay and dismiss people working to make a difference, but the arc of history shows their tactics have never worked.
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New polling numbers are likely causing headaches for Republican strategists heading into November. A new survey from Navigator Research poll is finding that 31 percent of Gen Z voters who backed Trump in 2024 now regret their decision. 28 percent of Millennial Trump voters feel the same way, along with 20 percent of Gen X voters who backed Trump. Older voters are also having buyer’s remorse, with 10 percent of baby boomers expressing regret for how they voted in 2024.
The Gen Z bloc turning against Trump is especially significant. Trump won 42 percent of the youngest voters who were born in the late 1990s and 2000s, compared to the 55 percent of that cohort who voted for then-Vice President Kamala Harris. Losing even a fraction of that bloc is a huge development.
Trump’s approval rating among Gen Z sits at just 33 percent. That’s the lowest of any generation surveyed. Millennial Trump support registered at 38 percent, while only 39 percent of Gen X respondents approved of Trump. Only 41 percent of boomers approve of the job Trump is doing in the Oval Office, putting him underwater with every single age demographic.
Navigator’s director of polling and analytics, Tina Tang, told The Hill that 40 percent of Gen Z Americans view politics as central to their identity, and many aren’t satisfied with the direction the country is going under Trump’s second term. Whichever party manages to put together a real plan on the affordability crisis has a real shot at winning these voters over in November.
We ratified the Twenty-Sixth Amendment in 1971 because a generation old enough to be drafted and sent to die in Vietnam pointed out they had no say in the government doing the sending, and it moved through the states faster than any amendment in our history. Every generation since has had to learn the harder half of that lesson, which is that a vote only counts for as much as you’re willing to demand with it after election day, and Gen Z is learning it right now.
This story shows exactly why putting Chinese-style mass surveillance tools in the hands of local law enforcement is a big mistake.
404 Media reported that sheriff’s deputy in Brevard County, Florida named Michael Fultz resigned after an internal investigation uncovered a stunning pattern of misconduct. Fultz first joined the sheriff’s office in 2024 and his bosses even named him Deputy of the Year in 2025. The same day he received that award, Fultz’s former girlfriend sent the sheriff’s office a formal complaint detailing his unstable behavior. That complaint triggered the internal investigation that ultimately ended his career.
Investigators found Fultz had posed for photos dressed as Adolf Hitler and frequently used racial slurs freely in text messages. He once photographed his ex with his service weapon in her mouth during sex. And he used the controversial Flock cameras — the network of controversial automated license plate camera system that have drawn nationwide scrutiny — to track her movements. He even bragged to her about doing it.
When investigators confronted him, he denied using Flock cameras to spy on his ex. But when the office checked Flock’s system logs, they found he had indeed run multiple searches on her vehicle. He’d labeled the reason for his searches as “investigation,” even though there was no case linked to her.
He’d even accessed Flock’s systems while he was off duty, using his department-issued phone rather than a work computer. The photos involving Fultz’s service weapon came after he shot and killed a man while on duty in April 2025. His ex told investigators the act was consensual but that she eventually realized how inappropriate it was given his position as a sheriff’s deputy.
Investigators also found a pattern of reckless behavior tied to Fultz’s motorcycle-related social media accounts. He was at over 100 miles an hour on several occasions, and repeatedly covered his license plate. He got out of traffic tickets each time by telling officers he was a fellow cop. Even after getting a direct order to keep his plate visible, he rode out of the sheriff’s office parking lot covering it up less than half an hour later. All of that was caught on video.
The sheriff’s office concluded that while termination was necessary, but since Fultz had already left the department, they simply closed the file.
Fultz is far from the only case of an officer using Flock cameras to spy on women. Officers across the United States have been caught abusing Flock’s camera network to track ex-partners, including multiple cases in Georgia and South Carolina that led to arrests. One town suspended its Flock Safety contract after officers were caught spying on women. What makes Fultz’s case stand out is that he admitted to his victim he was using Flock cameras to track her. Most people targeted this way never even find out until months or even years after the fact.
In 2018 the Supreme Court ruled in Carpenter v. United States that police need a warrant before they can pull your phone’s location history, because even Chief Justice Roberts could see that a record of everywhere you’ve been tells the government nearly everything about your life. A camera network logging every car on every road hands that same power to whoever happens to be on shift, and right now the only thing standing between that power and a woman’s front door is the personal character of the man typing in the search.
Raw America works hard to bring you the stories that you won’t find in the pages of Jeff Bezos’ Washington Post, or on David Ellison’s airwaves on CBS. The fact that we’ve rattled Fox News with our coverage shows we’re on the right track. The media outlets that answer to MAGA billionaire owners can’t report on stories like a Florida cop using Flock cameras to stalk his ex-girlfriend, or about Trump bleeding support from a key bloc of voters. But we can, because we don’t answer to them. We answer to you, the reader.
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I’m Thom Hartmann. Thanks for reading, and thanks for supporting independent media.
