Hey, Raw America family. Welcome to the Sunday Wrapup. I’m here with my cup of coffee, and I’m excited to catch you up.
Let’s start with the part that makes me proud. This week, paying subscribers funded a reporter who got barred from the White House and a reporter who got a sitting Republican congressman to admit on the record what his colleagues are too scared to say themselves. That’s two stories the billionaire-owned outlets didn’t get. You paid for both. Thank you.
If you’re not yet a paying subscriber, I want you to read what happened to Raw America’s White House reporter and ask yourself a simple question: why would the most powerful office in the world bother locking out a Substack? The answer is we’re getting under their skin. We’re doing it for just 22 cents a day. No billionaire owner, no corporate parent. Just you. Join the fight today.
On Friday, Raw America’s White House reporter Brian Karem walked up to the White House gate the way he has for three decades — and five presidents.
Attendants claimed he was on a Secret Service block list, then said he wasn’t. Then they told him he needed to come inside the gate to get a pass. But in a Kafkaesque turn, they refused to let him in.
Nobody gave him a reason. Nobody’s given us one either.
This is day two of our fight to get back in the White House.
Brian isn’t a stranger to this fight. In 2019, the Trump administration suspended his hard pass after a Rose Garden exchange with a Trump aide. He sued. A federal judge ordered the pass restored. Brian also pressed Sarah Huckabee Sanders on immigrant family separation when the rest of the press stayed quiet.
Trump didn’t block the Washington Post. Bezos took care of that himself. Trump blocked a reader-funded newsroom with no owner to call. I can’t think of a better review of our work.
Meanwhile, our Capitol Hill correspondent, Luke De Cresce, caught Thomas Massie outside the Capitol just before Speaker Mike Johnson sent the House home until after the midterms.
Congressman Massie had just read the names of Epstein associates, including Wall Street bankers and corporate executives, into the Congressional Record from the House floor. He’d just introduced a new bill to force Todd Blanche’s Justice Department to hand over the roughly two million pages it’s still hiding.
Johnson gaveled everyone out immediately afterward. Massie doesn’t think that was a coincidence, and neither do I.
Luke asked him directly whether he’d taken any heat from his own party for naming names. “None whatsoever,” Massie said. Then he laughed and said as long as they don’t have to read the names, they don’t care if he does.
Trump calls the Epstein files a Democratic hoax, but had to put his personal lawyer in charge of the Justice Department to keep the files under wraps. The attorney general is now violating a law Trump himself signed every single day those files stay locked up.
Massie lost his primary to a Trump-backed challenger. He’s a lame duck with nothing to lose, and he’s using it.
Raw America is now at the Capitol, asking questions for you. If independent journalism still matters to you, join our community today. It’s just 22 cents a day.
Nate Silver’s model now gives Democrats a 56.5 percent chance of taking the Senate. He says the reason is simple: the last two weeks of polling have mostly been good for liberals. Bloomberg compares the environment to 2006, when an unpopular war and a president underwater in the polls handed Democrats both chambers.
In Kansas, which hasn’t sent a Democrat to the Senate in nearly a century, Republican incumbent Roger Marshall just launched an attack ad against his challenger, a pastor named Adam Hamilton. Incumbents in safe seats don’t run attack ads.
Hamilton recently told a reporter about a 79-year-old man who handed him a diesel receipt and said, “This is why I’m voting for you.”
Trump is 80. He fell asleep at the 9/11 memorial on Friday, and his own party’s Senate aides are telling reporters the White House has gone rogue. The Iran war is unpopular. Groceries cost more. And the courts, including justices Trump appointed, keep telling him no.
None of this is a guarantee. But it’s a real path, and it’s wider than it was a month ago.
The Supreme Court typically hands House seats to Republicans (think the decimation of the Voting Rights Act). But this week, it drew a line.
Last year, at Trump’s urging, Missouri Republicans redrew their congressional map mid-decade to wipe out a Democrat’s seat and add one more vote for a Republican majority. Organizers with a group called People Not Politicians gathered more than 300,000 signatures to force a referendum. The Republican secretary of state sat on them until primary day. Then he rejected the petition.
The Missouri Supreme Court ruled unanimously that the map can’t be used until voters approve it. Republicans ran to Brett Kavanaugh, but he said no. A federal judge in St. Louis then tried to order the new map into use anyway. On Thursday, the full Supreme Court froze that order with no dissents. Missouri voters get to decide the gerrymander’s fate in November.
That’s ordinary Missourians with clipboards beating the President of the United States. Remember that the next time someone tells you nothing can be done.
And it wasn’t just Missouri. A federal judge in Maryland blocked Trump’s second attempt to end birthright citizenship, noting the Supreme Court already ruled 6-3 that those children are citizens. A federal judge in Boston blocked the Postal Service scheme to refuse mail ballots unless states got advance approval. And an appeals panel refused to lift that block as ballots started going out in North Carolina and Wisconsin.
It was exciting this week to see a bit of sense from America’s two largest AI companies, Anthropic and OpenAI. In case you missed it, the CEOs of both firms say they think we should slow down development.
I agree. AI agents are already escaping and hacking other companies. The next hack could be our power grid, or our healthcare system, or your bank.
It’s time for Democrats to get their heads out of the sand and propose regulation. And to ensure we’re not slapped with the power bill for Amazon’s data centers. Enough is enough.
I’ve been doing this for over two decades, and I’ve learned that the moment a government stops answering your calls and starts blocking your reporters is the moment you know you’re doing it right.
If you value journalists who actually show up, join our community today. We need more people like you — readers who believe their individual voice can make a difference. Take a second and update your subscription. You’ll be glad you did.
They kicked Brian out because our work matters. Massie talked to Luke because nobody else was asking. And Missouri voters beat a gerrymander because they refused to accept that the fix was in.
We’re going to keep showing up. Thank you for making sure we can.
Have a good Sunday.
—John Byrne / Founder, Raw America and Raw Story
P.S. I know we ask often, but I could really use your help. Paying for lawyers to fight our way back into the White House takes money. Join a community that shares your values, and invest in independent journalism today.
