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In Texas, Republican Senate candidate Ken Paxton was caught blaming Donald Trump for his sinking poll numbers. Out in California, Google co-founder Sergey Brin has dumped more than $100 million of his own money into killing a proposed one-time five percent tax on billionaires. In Ohio, local residents protested Republican Senator Jon Husted over his support of AI data centers that are driving up their electric bills. And in Arizona, researchers now say that Trump’s border wall construction tore through an ancient desert carving that’s even older than Stonehenge and Egypt’s first pyramid.
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Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton’s U.S. Senate campaign just got a whole lot messier. According to a bombshell Wednesday report in the New York Times, Paxton was secretly recorded at a GOP fundraiser last week complaining about President Donald Trump, whose endorsement helped him beat longtime incumbent GOP Senator John Cornyn.
One event attendee asked Paxton whether Trump was “a little bit of a drag” on the Republican ticket. Paxton replied that when Trump held his midterm convention in Dallas earlier this month “it dropped our numbers.” He added that “everybody’s numbers dropped” after the convention. The Times reported the recording came from a Paxton critic who was at the fundraiser.
Punchbowl News founder Jake Sherman wrote on X that the report is clearly “not good for Paxton,” pointing out that he criticized the president in front of donors while trying to dodge blame for trailing Democrat James Talarico in the latest polls. Sherman wondered whether the leak might push the Senate Leadership Fund and its Texas PAC to hold off on a planned $125 million infusion of funds for the Texas Senate race in October.
The timing of his comment is even worse for Paxton. Sherman observed that Trump had just been bragging about his convention was while meeting with tech and AI executives at the White House.
Paxton was already in a tight race in Texas, which Republicans have long since viewed as a GOP stronghold. This is a Republican who was impeached by the GOP-controlled Texas House of Representatives, indicted for securities fraud and dogged by years of corruption and sex scandals. It’d be one of history’s great ironies if the nail in the coffin for the Texas Senate race is a Republican telling Republican donors what he really thinks about the Republican president.
In August of 1974, Barry Goldwater walked into the Oval Office and told Richard Nixon to his face that he’d lost the support of his own party. Today’s Republicans only tell the truth about their president when they think nobody is recording them. A party so deathly afraid of one president can’t be counted on to defend our republic from him.
Google co-founder Sergey Brin is pouring more than $100 million of his own money into defeating Proposition 40. If passed, Prop 40 would impose a one-time five percent tax on the total assets of California residents valued at more than $1 billion.
That sounds like a lot until looking closer at the math. Bloomberg pegged Brin’s net worth at approximately $270 billion, making him one of the five richest people on the planet. Under Prop 40, he’d owe close to $14 billion. For a man with so much wealth, spending $102 million to get out of paying a $14 billion bill is a steal.
Prop 40 would hit only affect around 250 people in a state of roughly 40 million. It applies to anyone living in California as of the beginning of 2026, meaning billionaires can’t dodge it by moving to the Nevada side of Lake Tahoe. University of California-Berkeley economist Emmanuel Saez, who helped craft the measure, said it’s “too late to leave now,” explaining that Prop 40 was announced in late November 2025. Tax experts also believe it’s essentially impossible to completely sever California residency in just one month.
Supporters of Prop 40 say the money is sorely needed due to Republicans’ so-called One Big Beautiful Bill Act gutting federal support for Medi-Cal. California is looking at estimated $20 billion annual shortfall on the healthcare program that insures low-income and disabled Californians.. Backers estimate Prop 40 could raise as much as $100 billion, which would cover that gap for close to five years. Berkeley professor Brian Galle, who also helped draft Prop 40, warned that healthcare providers serving vulnerable populations will be hit especially hard and could be at risk of shutting down without that additional revenue.
Brin, who was born in Moscow, defended his opposition to the proposed tax by comparing the tax to the Soviet system his family fled in 1979. The Google co-founder told the New York Times he didn’t want California “to end up in the same place.” Of course, it wasn’t that long ago when Republican President Dwight Eisenhower oversaw a top marginal income tax rate of 91 percent, whic helped build the interstate highway system and create the largest middle class in human history. Nobody ever accused Ike of being a Soviet plant.
Brin’s $102 million check went to a group called Building a Better California, which is backing two rival ballot initiatives — Propositions 41 and 42 — that would limit new state taxes. If either one passes with more votes than Prop 40, it could end up wiping the wealth tax off the books. Palantir co-founder Peter Thiel, Kleiner Perkins chairman John Doerr and Stripe CEO Patrick Collison have also spent millions of dollars opposing Prop 40.
The spending gap is teetering on the absurd. Opponents of the measure have bought close to $100 million in TV ad time according to AdImpact. Prop 40 supporters have only reserved about $100,000 in ads, making the disparity roughly 1,000 to one. Even so, the polls show most Californians favor the proposal. A UC Berkeley IGS poll released last month found 48 percent of likely voters were in favor while 41 percent were opposed. A September survey from the Public Policy Institute of California showed 52 percent of respondents supporting Prop 40.
Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom, who is expected to run for president in 2028, says he’ll vote no to Prop 40 and is calling for a national minimum tax on billionaires instead. Both candidates vying to replace him in November — Democrat Xavier Becerra and Republican Steve Hilton — are also opposed to Prop 40.
Brin’s own politics have taken a decisively rightward shift over the last decade. Back in 2017, he joined protests against Trump’s Muslim ban at the San Francisco International Airport. But since Trump was reelected in 2024, he not only attended the inauguration, but has also dined at the White House and donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to the Republican National Committee. Brin is also bankrolling Trump-backed Steve Hilton’s gubernatorial campaign. Saez called Prop 40 a potential historical turning point, and said it could mark “the first time when democracy succeeds in fighting back against billionaires.”
Teddy Roosevelt saw all of this coming way back in 1910 when he stood in Osawatomie, Kansas and called for graduated taxes on massive fortunes, because he understood that vast sums of wealth translates into direct political power. When one man can spend nine figures trying to drown out the voices of voters of the largest state in the union, we’re no longer debating tax policy but rather having a conversation about who really runs this country.
Residents of the southern Ohio town of Ironton — which borders both Ashland, Kentucky and Huntington, West Virginia — held a rally on Tuesday against Republican Senator Jon Husted over his support of the data centers popping up across the region. Supporters of Democrat Sherrod Brown are calling Husted the “face of data centers,” which have become increasingly unpopular among members of both parties.
Lawrence County, Ohio resident Anne Artis told local media that the significant power demand from nearby data centers is causing her electric bill to skyrocket. She’s a senior citizen on a fixed income, and is worried about what will happen if utility costs keep climbing. She told reporters her quality of life “is going to go down as all these prices rise.” she said. One of the facilities she’s concerned about is under construction in neighboring Scioto County.
Husted has been responding to the data center outrage by promoting something he calls the Ratepayer Protection Act, which he says would keep America globally competitive in the AI race while protecting Ohioans from higher electricity bills. But Ironton resident Bob McCollister doesn’t buy it. He said that legislation doesn’t actually force Big Tech to do anything about electricity rates, water bills or noise pollution. Rather, the bill only “makes suggestions to Ohio regulators.”
Ironton City Council member Jacob Hock has been busy speaking out against data centers in southeastern Ohio for more than a year. He said people in the area are sick of being taken advantage of by data center developers, and that those facilities are coming to the area only “because no one else wants them.”
This is the oldest play in the corporate handbook. Tech companies with bottomless pockets keep all the profit from the AI boom while retirees in Appalachia are forced to pick up the tab through higher electricity bills. Participants in the rally argued they’re fighting not only for themselves, but for the next generation of Ohioans.
We’ve had this fight before. Back in 1935, after the power trusts had spent years milking ratepayers to enrich far-off holding companies, Franklin Roosevelt signed the Public Utility Holding Company Act to break up the utility monopolies, because he saw electricity as a public necessity rather than a way for the richest people in society to get even richer. If Big Tech wants the electricity, they can pay for it themselves.
In Arizona’s Sonoran Desert, Donald Trump’s border wall construction is tearing up an ancient ground carving that is actually far older than anyone realized. New research published in The SAA Archaeological Record dates the Las Playas Intaglio — a giant fish carved into the desert — to at least 6,500 years ago. It could also even be a thousand years older than that.
That makes the ground carving the oldest known geoglyph in the Americas. The new research confirms Las Playas Intaglio is roughly 2,000 years older than Egypt’s first pyramid and about 1,500 years older than the first construction at Stonehenge. It’s even roughly 4,000 years older than the famous Nazca Lines of Peru. Researchers previously believed it was only around 1,000 years old.
The Center for Biological Diversity found that in April, federal contractors building a second wall along the Arizona-Mexico border scraped a 50-foot swath through the carving, which spans 272 feet. The carving is on the ancestral homeland of the Tohono O’odham and other Indigenous tribes. The center’s Russ McSpadden told NBC that the “already devastating loss” to the carving made the damage even more profound, saying it was a cultural and historical atrocity for ancient art to be damaged in such a significant way.
A spokesperson for U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) told the network that the contractor “inadvertently disturbed” the site, and that CBP Commissioner Rodney Scott is working with tribal leaders on next steps. According to the agency, the remaining portion has been properly secured and that the agency is currently reviewing construction protocols.
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) was able to bulldoze through the area in the first place because the Secure Fence Act, which passed Congress in 2006, allows for the waiving of laws aimed at protecting the environment, along with water resources and cultural, historical and religious sites.
The Tohono O’odham Nation, whose reservation straddles the Southern border of the United States and has long cooperated with CBP on border security, is now appealing a federal judge’s refusal to block wall construction through its territory. The tribe is also trying to safeguard Quitobaquito Springs, which is a sacred desert water source in Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument that’s home to multiple endangered species. In Texas, a federal judge has temporarily halted construction in the Big Bend National Park after a Lipan Apache nonprofit and a local business sued. However, wall construction is still ongoing elsewhere in the region.
The very first sentence of Article I says all legislative powers belong to Congress. The Founders wrote it that way all the way back in 1787 because they’d lived under officials who switched off the law with the stroke of a pen. A democracy that lets one signature erase seven millennia of human memory has clearly forgotten what laws are actually for.
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