TomDispatch, New York, NY (2026)

10/13/2026

When I was an editor at Pantheon Books, a million years ago (or at least in the last century), I published the wonderful John Berger's books here in the U.S. After all these years, it's kind of amazing to see him suddenly get so much attention, including this New York Times piece by Andersen Tepper and a new biography. Tom

"Look into the eyes of John Berger, and what do you see?

Berger, the British-born author of such boundary-pushing collections as “Ways of Seeing” (1972) and “About Looking” (1980), stares back from jacket photographs with a magnetic gaze.

How could it be otherwise? Berger (pronounced Ber-jer), who died in 2017 at 90, made a career of looking deeply at art and the visual world. “Ways of Seeing,” a companion to Berger’s breakthrough BBC series, vigorously examined the social context of images and became an instant classic. Yet over six decades, Berger’s creative output ranged across multiple landscapes — novels, short fiction, essays, poetry, biography, film, drama, drawing — often combining several within a single book.

Berger’s output was prodigious, relentlessly inventive and defiantly political. Many of his books became markers of their eras: “A Seventh Man,” his 1975 collaboration with the photographer Jean Mohr, on the lives of migrant laborers; “And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief As Photos” (1984), his poetic rumination on time, storytelling and the effects of capitalism; “Here Is Where We Meet” (2005), a novel of encounters with beloved, absent spirits in cities like Lisbon, Geneva and Kraków.

Indeed, the sheer volume of Berger’s work can be overwhelming, evidenced by the growing tower of titles that Verso and New York Review Books have been reissuing over the past year.

Last month, Verso — which has already put out 10 books as part of their Berger Classic series — published “John Berger: From Life,” the long-awaited biography by Tom Overton, who cataloged the writer’s British Library archive.

Three more Verso titles are due out in November, in time for the centennial of Berger’s birth. Meanwhile, New York Review Books published a new edition of “About Looking” this month, with more works to come next year, including his “Into Their Labours” trilogy and collected letters.

If Berger seems to be enjoying a revival, in many ways he never lost his relevance, according to his biographer.

“He kept working long enough to mean different things to different generations,” Overton explained over email. “In the ’50s, it was the energy of his criticism; in the ’60s, it was his presence on TV and his novels; then later on the depth of his compassion for migrant workers, peasants and Palestinians.”

For many contemporary writers, Berger has remained an important touchstone. In her recent memoir, “Mother Mary Comes to Me,” Arundhati Roy calls him “one of the most tender, attentive, beautiful writers I have read.” Michael Ondaatje’s blurb for Berger’s 1995 novel “To the Wedding” is priceless: “Wherever I live in the world, I know I will have this book with me.”

Berger befriended both Roy and Ondaatje, as well as the British writer Geoff Dyer, who perhaps has done more than anyone to raise his global profile. (Dyer wrote “Ways of Telling: The Work of John Berger” in the mid-’80s and edited Berger’s “Selected Essays” in 2001.) Dyer said he has aspired to produce a body of work as “wide-ranging” as Berger’s, “not just in terms of subject matter but in sustained creation of new forms and, crucially, tone.”

Berger — who moved to the rural French Alps in the early ’70s to chronicle its vanishing peasantry — “was a profound thinker,” Dyer noted over email, who “believed that truth was something that had to be hewn from the hard rock of experience.” Dyer likened Berger to Susan Sontag, but stressed that “unlike Sontag, he was also a first-rate writer of fiction.”

The author and photographer Teju Cole was also influenced by Berger’s themes and sensibility. “He wrote about the subjects that interested me: Caravaggio, Vija Celmins, Palestine, the Alps, drawing, heroic individuals, resolutely unheroic ordinary individuals,” Cole explained by email. “And he wrote about subjects I didn’t know I was interested in until I read him.”

While “Ways of Seeing” was “a kind of manifesto,” Cole added, “his essays were that manifesto in practice: how to look at art (and the world) with precision, curiosity, lightly-worn learning and above all a willingness to love what merited our love.”

The novelist and poet Ben Lerner has written the introduction to the New York Review Books edition of Berger’s 1972 Booker Prize–winning novel, “G.” His body of work, Lerner asserted in an email, amounts to an “argument that political materialism must involve wonder before the sensual world.”

Lerner sees “G.,” the story of an Italian Lothario at a time of upheaval in the early 20th-century, as his “major statement about the link between political and erotic energies.” (Berger famously donated half his Booker earnings to the British Black Panther Party; the rest went to fund his study on migration.)

Berger’s work made a strong impression on the writer Amitava Kumar, too, who first encountered “Ways of Seeing” as an 18-year-old student in Delhi. Later, Kumar said, he modeled his book “Passport Photos” on the collagelike quality of “A Seventh Man.” After seeing Berger’s drawings in “Bento’s Sketchbook” (2011), he began drawing himself.

Berger’s intense visual awareness is both a central motif and way of being, according to Kumar. “No other writer has done so much for the verb ‘looking.’ In his books we are always looking at pictures, photographs, paintings, postcards, faces, memories,” Kumar wrote in an email. “We live, as Berger told us, in a world saturated with images.”

The Canadian writer Madeleine Thien — whose latest novel, “The Book of Records,” like “Bento’s Sketchbook,” explores the life of Spinoza — has also been moved by Berger’s “deep looking” and direct, unadorned language.

“The lucidity and precision of his lines change the tempo of our reading,” she explained in an email. “We slow down, we walk with him and we perceive. It isn’t possible to read Berger quickly, just as it isn’t possible to read Spinoza quickly.”

“When I feel hopeless and afraid, I turn to his writing,” Thien continued. “It gives me a pathway because he has described so well how there is a way of telling stories that is … about accompanying the invisible, and thereby passing hope from hand to hand.”

The return of Berger’s voice — engaged, searching, alive to seen and unseen worlds — feels encouraging, even vital, in these fraught times. “A biography is an argument that a consciousness should be kept going,” Overton insisted, claiming that “the common thread that unites all Berger’s variousness is the question of how we live with the dead.”

It is there, he said, in Berger’s early thoughts on the old masters and in later works like “Here Is Where We Meet.”

Like the shadowy figures in that 2005 book, Berger’s legacy continues to exert a palpable force. As Cole wrote in an elegy to Berger in “Black Paper: Writing in a Dark Time”: “When I got the terrible news that you’d died, it felt to me like a sudden darkness. But, John, since then, I’ve been discovering a fragment here, a passage there, a drawing over there, signs of you around the world, and these are like feathers you’ve thoughtfully placed in the places where we meet.”

Now there are even more places to encounter the transformative spirit of John Berger."

A new biography and a flurry of reissues underline how the prolific author of “Ways of Seeing” continues to be read and embraced.

10/13/2026

The Washington Post on the Trumpian grim search of Ilhan Omar’s home and what she had to say about it. Tom

"Federal authorities searched the D.C. home of Rep. Ilhan Omar on Monday morning, three people familiar with the matter said, intensifying long-standing immigration-related accusations from Republicans regarding the nation’s first Somali American lawmaker.

Homeland Security Investigations, the investigative arm of the Department of Homeland Security, executed the search. The Justice Department confirmed that it secured a court-authorized warrant for a law enforcement action Monday morning, but the agency did not name Omar or confirm what investigation the search was connected to.

“Today in the Washington, D.C. area, Homeland Security Investigations executed a judicially authorized search warrant secured by the Department of Justice. This enforcement action is part of an ongoing federal criminal investigation,” the Justice Department statement said.

President Donald Trump, asked about the search, said “I understand they are looking at her very carefully.”

“I think she’s a terrible person, but that’s really up to the DOJ,” he told reporters at The White House. “I have nothing to do with it.”

Last month, U.S. officials said federal authorities were investigating whether Omar unlawfully entered the country by falsifying her immigration paperwork. Omar (D-Minnesota) and her team have repeatedly denied accusations that she committed immigration fraud.

“Make no mistake: this is an attempt to target political enemies and weaponize federal law enforcement,” she wrote on X. “For ten years, Trump has targeted me with baseless lies and smear campaigns. This is just the latest escalation in his campaign of political intimidation.”

The search of Omar’s home appears to be the type of action that law enforcement officials have typically avoided so close to an election in the past. Omar is up for reelection in November after winning the Democratic primary in her district.
Omar, the nation’s first Somali American lawmaker, immigrated to the U.S. at age 12 in 1995. (Demetrius Freeman/The Washington Post)

In the 60 days before an election, the Justice Department enters a “blackout” period, during which the agency typically refrains from taking public steps in politically related cases — such as executing a search warrant or indicting someone — that could be perceived as politically motivated and potentially affect the results of the election.

The Justice Department is not legally mandated to follow the 60-day blackout period and has been accused of running afoul of it in the past. In 2016, then-FBI Director James B. Comey was accused of violating the rule in connection with statements he made about the investigation into Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server while she was serving as secretary of state.

And in 2024, Trump accused special counsel Jack Smith of violating the blackout period when he submitted evidence to a federal judge less than 60 days before that year’s presidential election describing how Trump allegedly obstructed the 2020 election results. In that instance, Smith and his team of prosecutors were responding to a judge’s deadline and were not opting to take a public law enforcement action.

A government official said Monday that the Justice Department adhered to the 60-day rule in executing the search by first consulting the Public Integrity Section, as required in instances in which the timing of an investigation could be called into question. Attorney General Todd Blanche signed off on carrying out the warrant, said the official, who like others in this report spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss an ongoing investigation.

The Trump administration has effectively dismantled the Public Integrity Section and often cuts the office out of politically sensitive investigations.

A senior Trump administration official confirmed that Omar’s residence was raided Monday as part of an investigation into possible criminal immigration fraud. The official said the investigation involved White House deputy homeland security adviser Anthony Salisbury, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services Director Joseph Edlow and Blanche.

The investigation, which has accelerated in recent weeks, is viewed as controversial within the administration and some officials have begun referring to it as “World War Eleven,” the senior official said. The phrase seemingly references a statement Omar made at a news conference in 2025. Reading from notes at a lectern, she mistakenly said “World War 11 ... two, sorry.”

A federal prosecutor in the deputy attorney general’s office was overseeing the day-to-day development of the inquiry, a person familiar with the matter said.

Allegations regarding Omar’s immigration history have circulated in conservative circles for years, though federal officials who have promoted the claims have not provided substantiating evidence.

Born in Somalia, Omar fled the country’s civil war with her family when she was a young girl, spent four years in a Kenyan refugee camp and immigrated to the United States at age 12 in 1995.

Omar became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 2000 and was elected to Congress in 2018.

Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin last month said that “something’s going to happen” and that there is an “ongoing investigation.”

Mullin told conservative commentator Benny Johnson, without providing evidence, “There may be more to this, the whole family migration and possibly some illegal activity for them to come to the United States to begin with. … If we can prove it that you shouldn’t have been here in the first place, we’ll deport you.”

Omar and her team have repeatedly denied this accusation.

Asked by Fox News on Sept. 13 whether an investigation of Omar has been opened, White House border czar Tom Homan said that “things are going on,” adding, “Look, I said months ago that it’s something that’s been reported and it needs to be looked at.” But he declined to give specifics.

A DHS spokesperson referred a request to comment to the Justice Department.

On Monday morning, federal law enforcement vehicles and HSI officers lined a block in Northeast Washington where a house associated with Omar is located. Agents wearing “POLICE HSI” jackets went in and out of the house every few minutes, and some removed cardboard boxes from the house. Neighbors milled around, talking about how they learned of the raid.

Omar has faced many personal attacks, including from Trump, who in December called her “garbage” and said she must get “the hell out” of the country. Trump increased direct attacks against the congresswoman as a fraud scandal implicated dozens of Somali Americans in her state, prompting a Trump administration immigration crackdown. Omar was not accused of any wrongdoing in the scandal.

In January, a man used a syringe to spray a liquid at her during a town hall meeting, which authorities later said was apple c***r vinegar.

“Every time the president of the United States has chosen to use hateful rhetoric to talk about me and the community that I represent, my death threats skyrocket,” Omar said.

On Sept. 24, DHS issued a statement calling on politicians to “stop violent rhetoric against ICE” and included a speech by Omar in which she called for the abolishment of ICE on a list of “some of the most egregious examples of hateful rhetoric.”

Federal immigration law states that criminal immigration charges generally must be brought within five years of the offense. Criminal denaturalizations have a 10-year statute of limitations. Civil immigration proceedings, including civil denaturalizations or efforts to deport someone, are not subject to a statute of limitations.

Critics of the Trump administration’s focus on Omar have noted that she entered the U.S. as a child and naturalized more than 25 years ago, raising questions of why her case is being prioritized.

Trump has repeatedly targeted Somali immigrants, often in harsh and disparaging terms.

“This feels very performative, very targeted to make a larger political point by this administration,” said Kerry Doyle, who worked as an immigration judge at the Justice Department but was removed under Trump as part of a wave of firings.

Doyle cautioned that she had not seen any allegations but called the investigation “extremely unusual.”

U.S. immigration authorities do open denaturalization cases against people related to decades-old actions, but those cases historically have been tied to serious transnational crimes, including war crimes and genocide.

Daniel Delgado, a former immigration policy official at DHS during the Biden administration, said the effort appeared intended to intimidate other immigrants.

“It’s hard to see this as anything other than being politically motivated given how close we are to the midterm elections,” Delgado said.

Several Democratic officials and Minnesota leaders issued statements condemning the search.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York) wrote, “We cannot and will not accept this unprecedented abuse of power.” House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-New York) called it a “deeply disturbing” raid that “raises serious questions about the continued corrupt weaponization” of the government.

Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison wrote that the action marked a “dangerous escalation of [Trump’s] authoritarian and fundamentally un-American behavior” and was “an extension of his racist attacks on Somali Americans and yet another attempt to throw chaos into our elections.”

Trump administration officials and associates have themselves been entangled in controversies related to immigration issues in the past.

Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, who was born in South Africa, worked illegally at the start of his U.S. career, The Washington Post reported in 2024, months before Musk joined the Trump administration.

Musk denied wrongdoing at the time.

The Associated Press reported in 2016 that Melania Trump had been paid for modeling jobs two decades earlier, before receiving legal work authorization. An attorney for Melania Trump challenged the report at the time."

Homeland Security Investigations, the investigative arm of the Department of Homeland Security, executed the search.

10/13/2026

Satirist Andy Borowitz on target as ever... Tom

WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—Fearing a humiliating midterm defeat in Texas, on Monday a desperate Donald J. Trump attempted to return the state to Mexico.

Amid news that Texas would no longer be a part of the US, spontaneous celebrations broke out on the streets of Austin.

Meanwhile, the populations of Oklahoma, Arkansas, Louisiana, and New Mexico demanded that a new border wall be built to keep Texans out of their states, “and make Texas pay for it,” they said.

In Mexico, President Claudia Sheinbaum said she would accept the return of Texas “as long as it doesn’t include Paxton and Abbott.”

The move was a sign of desperation, political experts said.

10/12/2026

At the Guardian, Kat Lay offers a distinctly grim vision of our world. Tom

"Humans could become extinct by the year 2100 due to malicious use of AI or nuclear conflict, according to a new global risk assessment.

They top a list of 17 major threats to human health over the next 75 years, which also includes cuts to aid spending by wealthy countries, the climate crisis and childhood malnutrition.

The experts behind The Lancet Commission on 21st Century Global Threats to Health said all the threats interact, meaning they must be addressed together – but stressed that there was “a realistic route to act” on each.

“Decisions made by leaders today will shape the health and wellbeing of the next generation,” said Prof Christopher Murray, commission co-chair and the director of the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, University of Washington.

To create its list, the commission modelled how many years in good health might be lost due to sickness, disability or early deaths due to each threat, based on current trajectories – a measure known as disability-adjusted life years (Dalys).

“Malicious use of AI, including bioweapons, and nuclear conflict with nuclear famine carry risks of extinction in the next 75 years,” the report said, adding that while their likelihood remained low, they had the potential to end humanity in the case of nuclear conflict by injecting enough particles into the upper atmosphere to block sunlight and cause famine, or via AI-created biological weapons. An accompanying Lancet editorial, published alongside the report, warned: “The scale of harm, should they be realised, would inflict an apocalypse on humanity.”

Other risks that could cause more than 1bn cumulative Dalys, and therefore deemed “major catastrophic threats”, included air pollution, antimicrobial resistance, childhood malnutrition and climate breakdown, as well as conventional conflict, declining overseas aid, high alcohol use, high blood pressure, income inequality, low educational attainment, naturally occurring pandemics, obesity, poor mental health, smoking and unhealthy ageing.

To be included on the list, threats not only had to potentially cause a high number of lost healthy years, but also to have potential solutions.

Ibrahim Abubakar, commission member and professor of infectious disease epidemiology at UCL, said: “We are not starting from a point of view of ‘oh look, we want to scare you – we’ve got X many threats facing humanity’. We’re starting from the premise that if you are a policymaker today, whether at the global multilateral level or at the national level, these are the potential threats that you could face, and this is the magnitude by which, if you act, you can actually make a difference.”

Action to limit global heating to about 1.8C (3.2F) rather than letting it reach 4.4C could prevent 1.89bn years of healthy life being lost, according to the report, which modelled best and worst case scenarios for each threat.

In higher income regions, non-communicable diseases such as obesity and poor mental health were the dominant threats, while in lower income regions health loss was driven by issues such as low educational attainment.

Many major donor nations, including the US and UK, have announced large cuts to aid spending over the past year. The potential collapse of, or steep reduction in, international health aid could cause up to 1.5bn Dalys before 2100, the commission found, nearly 70% of which would be in sub-Saharan Africa. The region also bears the brunt of child malnutrition.

The commission was made up of 35 experts, and its findings will be shared on Sunday at the World Health Summit in Berlin, Germany. Their assessment will be updated annually to re-evaluate the 17 threats identified, incorporating new data and any emerging hazards.

The authors urged leaders to address the risks before they escalated into crises, including via investment in technological innovations and by strengthening health systems.

“We started this process three years ago, thinking that there were three big threats: conflict, climate, and pandemics,” said Murray. “There’s a much larger number of threats that we need to worry about, and governments really need to dedicate some money and staff to the task of anticipation, prevention and preparation for this more diverse set of threats.”

Newly established commission identifies 17 catastrophic threats to human health but says ‘realistic route to act’ on each exists

10/12/2026

Yikes! As Theodore Schleifer reports at the New York Times, Elon Musk is pouring a literal fortune into Republican midterm congressional coffers. Let's hope it's money down the drain. Tom

"Elon Musk has quietly funneled more than $276 million into Republican groups and his super PAC since the start of July, building a huge turnout operation to help the party battle headwinds in the midterm elections.

The staggering amount of money makes Mr. Musk, the richest person in the world, by far the largest known donor in the midterms. Representatives for Mr. Musk supplied the previously unreported figures on his political giving to The New York Times before a federal filing deadline on Thursday.

In an effort to save Republicans’ Senate majority, he gave a total of $158 million this summer to the Senate Leadership Fund, the main super PAC backing the party’s candidates for the chamber, according to his team. In sum, that is one of the largest political donations in American history, and more than the group’s Democratic rival raised from all of its donors that quarter.

Mr. Musk has also built a major Republican turnout operation through a super PAC he founded in 2024, America PAC. He donated over $76 million this summer to the group, which in turn spent that much on building a sprawling canvassing program to try to turn out hard-to-reach Republican voters. The group is active in seven Senate battlegrounds and nearly three dozen House races.

Elon Musk’s campaign contributions

2025-2026

$366 mil.

2023-2024

$290 mil.

Since July 2026

+$276 mil.

Prior to July 2026

$90 mil.

2025-2026

$366 mil.

2023-2024

$290 mil.

Since July 2026

+$276 mil.

Prior to July 2026

$90 mil.

Sources: Federal Election Commission filings (prior contributions), representatives for Mr. Musk (most recent contributions).

Jillian Vordick/The New York Times

Mr. Musk has already given far more money, about $366 million, to federal committees during the 2025-26 election cycle than he did during the 2024 election, when he laid out roughly $290 million to help return President Trump and Republicans to power. He has given even more in undisclosed donations during both elections, according to people briefed on the giving.

The latest torrent of spending has helped give the Republican Party a financial advantage in the midterms, as well-funded outside groups like Mr. Trump’s powerful super PAC flood the airwaves with advertising in the final weeks. No Democratic billionaire is spending nearly as much as Mr. Musk, and money remains a central worry for the party in an otherwise favorable political environment.

The donations also clear up the mystery of how much staying power Mr. Musk wants to have in American politics.

“In terms of political spending, I’m going to do a lot less in the future,” he said in May 2025.

Mr. Musk, who oversees a vast business empire that has benefited from enormous federal contracts, is famously unpredictable and often jumps from one project to another. He has been far quieter about his political work since his dramatic blowup with Mr. Trump last year. After months of wielding vast influence inside the White House and overseeing Mr. Trump’s government cost-cutting project, he raged against the president’s major domestic policy bill and floated threats to start a third party.

But the two men have warmed back up, appearing together at three events in the last two weeks and praising each other.

Now Mr. Musk has donated more than a quarter-billion dollars to help Mr. Trump and Republicans in the midterms. The money signals his commitment to the right and sets him up as a potential player in the 2028 presidential election, when his super PAC says it intends to remain active — the first time it has confirmed such plans.

Beyond Mr. Musk’s donations to his super PAC and the Senate Leadership Fund, his representatives said that from July through September, he had given smaller but still substantial amounts to other conservative groups:

$20 million to the Congressional Leadership Fund, the main super PAC for House Republicans

$10 million to Lone Star Liberty PAC, a group supporting Ken Paxton, the Republican nominee for Senate in Texas

$10 million to the Republican Governors Association

$2 million to the Republican Attorneys General Association

“If Democrats take control of Washington and win key gubernatorial and attorney general races this November, then America risks becoming a socialist, woke and borderless country,” said Andrew Romeo, a spokesman for America PAC. “These robust investments have allowed the G.O.P. apparatus to get its message out so Republicans can have a fighting chance to defy history.”

Pushing for Paxton

On voters’ doors across Texas, the campaign literature carries a stark warning: “Radical Democrat socialists are winning elections.

The hanging door cards are the work of Mr. Musk’s voter-turnout operation, which deployed nearly 3,000 paid canvassers last week around the country, according to America PAC officials.

The group has devoted most of its more than $76 million in midterm spending so far to this canvassing program, shelling out smaller amounts on advertising, mail, phone calls and text messages. Much of the messaging targets Democrats, sometimes in misleading or overheated ways.

This spring, Mr. Trump’s political advisers asked Mr. Musk to reprise America PAC’s 2024 field program, a person familiar with the conversation said. Despite the challenging environment for Republicans, some party strategists believe that a field program can make the difference in particularly tight races.

America PAC relies on a few voter-canvassing firms that compete aggressively with one another for work and for staffing, according to people briefed on the operation.

Turnover in the canvassing industry is high. One canvasser who worked for America PAC told The Times that he was paid between $1.50 and $3.00 for each door he knocked on across Texas in the heat. America PAC says it has knocked on about 6.5 million doors across the country so far.

Mr. Musk and his operation, people close to them say, have been particularly focused on the Texas Senate race. The group has unloaded over a third of its disclosed spending in that expensive race, more than in any other. It is uncommon to run an extensive field campaign in large states like Texas, where television ads are more often used to reach voters.

Mr. Musk, a resident of Austin, has extensive business interests and property holdings in Texas. Mr. Paxton, the state attorney general, has investigated Mr. Musk’s opponents, like Media Matters, a liberal group.

Mr. Musk’s $10 million donation to Mr. Paxton’s super PAC came at a critical time, when the Republican candidate was being badly outspent.

And Mr. Musk’s $158 million in donations to the Senate Leadership Fund, the most the super PAC has ever received from a single donor in a quarter, may have made it possible for that group to suddenly spend big for Mr. Paxton after months of reluctance.

That is because Mr. Musk’s donations preceded the decision in late August by the super PAC, led by allies of Senator John Thune of South Dakota, the majority leader, to start what has become a $149 million pro-Paxton ad campaign.
A Focus on Transgender Issues

As it did in 2024, Mr. Musk’s operation is focused not on persuading swing voters, but on registering and turning out voters with conservative beliefs — especially “low-propensity” ones who are less likely to cast a ballot.

This is a lot harder for Republicans in a midterm election, without Mr. Trump at the top of the ballot.

To do it, Mr. Musk’s super PAC is leaning hard into the culture wars, especially transgender issues. (Mr. Musk’s daughter, who is transgender, has spoken about their clashes over her identity, and he has suggested that this led to his increased political engagement.)

At voters’ doors in Texas, canvassers are told to target Gina Hinojosa, the Democratic candidate for governor, over her record on transgender issues, according to parts of a script reviewed by The Times.

Similarly, the Musk operation is leaving literature on doors that claims that James Talarico, the Democratic nominee for Senate in Texas, has a “radical trans agenda.” And America PAC’s top ad in the state, according to the media tracking firm AdImpact, denounces Mr. Talarico over his past comments suggesting that “God is nonbinary.”

The Musk group is also targeting other Democratic Senate candidates over transgender issues, including Josh Turek, the party’s nominee in Iowa. Nationally, one of the super PAC’s most visible ads on Facebook features a man in makeup and reads: “He made his plan to vote. Did you? Don’t stay home while crazies elect radicals.” The group is running ads and sending mail on a broad range of topics, but socialism is a core theme. The Musk super PAC regularly attacks Democrats as socialist and ties them to figures like Mayor Zohran Mamdani and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, according to 48 pieces of direct mail shared by Mintt, a mail-tracking firm.

Online, it is even running personalized messaging that invokes a voter’s first name. For example, in a video showing smiling Democrats: “Why are they smiling? Because Christopher hasn’t made a plan to vote yet.”

Much of this outreach points voters to an America PAC website where conservatives can learn about how to register to vote. The super PAC is pushing what it calls an “America Pass,” a digital card on Apple or Google wallets on voters’ phones that lists their registration information, along with election dates and deadlines in their home state.

While Mr. Musk is spending big again and using some tactics that are similar to those he deployed two years ago, this is not 2024 anymore.

He is in a different place politically. While he and Mr. Trump appear to be on good terms again — “our modern-day Thomas Edison,” the president called him on Thursday — Mr. Musk is taking a hands-off approach this election and does not appear as personally passionate.

He has not brought up the midterm elections or the Trump presidency much in private conversations with friends, according to people who have spoken to him in recent months. He is focused on his businesses, these people say, and he and his business lieutenants have taken a less active role in America PAC’s operations, entrusting major decisions to Chris Young, his top adviser.

And on X, a semi-reliable indicator of where the billionaire’s mind is, Mr. Musk has written just seven direct posts this year about candidates in competitive midterm races, according to a Times review, a far cry from his relentless calls throughout 2024 to elect Mr. Trump. Five of those posts focused on Mr. Talarico — and one appeared critical of Senator Susan Collins, a vulnerable Republican in Maine.

Gone, too, are Mr. Musk’s barnstorming campaign stops, like the ones he did in Pennsylvania in October 2024 or a Wisconsin judicial election in the spring of 2025. There are no more sweepstakes where he personally hands an oversize check of $1 million to those who register voters or sign a petition, a gambit that drew legal challenges.

Mr. Musk has not evidently grown infatuated with candidates this time around, as he did with Mr. Trump. The closest he came was a $10 million donation for a long-shot Republican running for the U.S. Senate in Kentucky — an investment that went poorly.

The $276 million figure is, of course, just what is publicly known. Mr. Musk has also made some seven-figure donations to support midterm candidates through groups that are not required to disclose their donors, according to a person with knowledge of the matter."

The world’s richest person has quietly become by far the biggest known midterm donor, trying to save Republicans’ Senate majority with some of the largest donations in American political history.

TomDispatch

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