America’s 45-year crisis runs deeper than politics, raising a defining question about whether the nation can rebuild economic fairness, restore democracy, and revive the American Dream… Something big is in the wind.

Millions march against authoritarianism while a handful of powerful men control the digital public square, shape our news, and decide which voices Americans get to hear… As many of us were showing up this past Saturday for our local No Kings marches, with over 3,000 of them underway, the movement’s organizers suddenly found themselves locked out of their Instagram account for hours. Meta blames it on a software glitch or something close to that, but that episode illustrates exactly the concern progressives and anti-fascists have been voicing for years: that Big Tech and the billionaires behind it have way too much power, and that they are using it to control public opinion to their own benefit. Then yesterday morning Christiane Amanpour announced that after reporting for CNN for 43 years she’s leaving the network. While she didn’t mention nepo-baby David Ellison who now owns the network, she didn’t have to: back in May at a journalism summit in London she said she was “concerned” about Ellison ownership and how it might bring about the same kind of “ideological realignment” that he’d already imposed on CBS News. What we’re seeing here with these two companies in microcosm is that the men who own the social media digital square where a near-majority of people get their news, and the people who own the TV networks and papers like The Washington Post, are the same handful of billionaires with political and financial axes to grind that fit nicely with Trump’s vision of a strongman state run by a ruling elite. Whether it turns out that Meta did something for politics or it was just an error doesn’t change the fact that one company run by one man can switch off a national movement’s megaphone and doesn’t legally owe anybody an explanation.

Part two of the Frederick Hoffman story. The industry playbook against universal coverage was written in 1917, and it’s still in use... Last Sunday you met Frederick Hoffman, the Prudential statistician who spent his life “proving” that helping Black Americans by giving them access to free healthcare would only hasten their extinction. This week’s chapter is about what he and his colleagues did with that belief once real money was on the line. When 200,000 people showed up in Los Angeles to hear President Teddy Roosevelt speak, he pitched a platform that included “social insurance” for all Americans that included comprehensive health coverage. By 1915 the American Association for Labor Legislation (AALL) was demanding that every state enact comprehensive, universal, government-funded health insurance. By 1916 eight states, New York and California among them, had taken up its model bill, which used government money to cover all medical costs and up to 26 weeks of paid sick leave. The American Medical Association had even endorsed it.

What if we could break the grip of oil and gas companies, slash electricity bills, and unleash an American energy revolution that starts on our own rooftops? Over the next three weeks, Colorado voters will get to vote on an amendment to their constitution giving one single industry the ability to largely prevent any regulation of itself or its pollution. Amendment 82 says that the state would establish a “right” for the natural gas industry to sell its products. It’ll be the only industry in any state to have a state constitutional right assigned to it. Things like pollution controls to protect air and water that might reduce consumption would violate that right. So would local communities trying to limit or ban gas wells or pipelines. Even during a dry fire time, an effort to ban gas-fueled camp stoves and outdoor grills or lights would be a violation. The amendment is being pushed by a dark money group called Advance Colorado; the original donors behind it are hidden, but it’s not hard to guess. And if it passes in Colorado, expect similar amendments and laws to pop up in every state in the union. This is, frankly, nuts. Instead of increasing the power of the fossil fuel industry and encouraging more consumption of their planet-destroying products, we should be helping Americans tap into nuclear fusion power that’s free, compliments of that giant reactor 93 million miles away that we call our Sun.