Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) on Thursday announced an alliance with 18 other states to push back against President Biden’s support for environmental, social and corporate governance investing, known as ESG.
Site Navigation
Search
Latest Stories
Join a growing community committed to civic renewal.
Subscribe to The Fulcrum and be part of the conversation.
Top Stories
Latest news
Read More
Recommended
A group of Bus youth pose for a photo with Senator Noel Frame at the Millionaires Tax signing. (2026)
Credit Washington Bus Facebook
Two Washington nonprofit organizations are shaping the state’s future
Jul 10, 2026
Washington is a politically active state where, through protests, parades, nonprofit organizations, and community groups, people have proven they will advocate for the causes and issues they care about.
Seattle, a major hub for nonprofits, boasts nearly 25,000 nonprofit organizations focusing on a wide range of local, national, and international issues. These groups reflect activism efforts across major issues impacting the United States, such as advocacy for police accountability initiatives, rights for the LGBTQ+ community, and demands for action against crime, violence, and drug trafficking.
The Seattle government has also taken steps to protect citizens’ right to protest. It has enacted policies and initiatives like the City Policy on Immigration Enforcement, the Stand Together Initiative, and Know Your Rights resources, which provide information on how to recognize Seattle Police officers and vehicles.
Beyond city government initiatives, organized groups with missions to advocate for or with targeted populations continue to work toward building a better state.
Two organizations in particular are making a difference in Washington through their own initiatives, reflecting the broader work being done to elevate voices and communities across the state.
Washington Bus
The Washington Bus is the largest youth-led organization working to harness and empower the political power of Washington’s youth, especially those who have been historically disenfranchised.
Despite the name, there is no bus involved in their work; rather, the name represents the organization’s mobility across the state as it sponsors leadership development, advocacy efforts, and voter mobilization for Washington youth.
“We consider ourselves the political home for young organizers in Washington state, advocating for progressive change in a multiracial democracy,” Bailey Medilo, the communications manager for Washington Bus, said. “We are the ones who are constantly in collaboration with community leaders, especially government institutions, elected officials, and grassroots organizations, to build capacity and access for young people in political spaces.”
The Bus acts as a stepping stone for young activists to learn to become better leaders and advocate for the issues they care about. By providing a space for youth leaders to grow, Medilo said these leaders are likely to engage their peers and encourage more youth to get involved in activism, organizing, and voting.
The Bus acts as a stepping stone for Washington youth who are activists in their communities and can learn to become better leaders and advocate for the issues they care about. By providing a space for youth leaders to grow as activists, Medilo said their leaders are likely to engage their peers and more youth to get involved in activism, organizing, and voting.
“[We] ensure that youth organizations can persist in a healthy, expansive way in Washington state and build on existing infrastructure,” Medilo said. “But we also explore ways that we can reimagine how political spaces for young people can be developed and created.”
To get involved with the Washington Bus, there are some paid positions available, as well as several ways to participate through events, cohorts, and councils. The Bus Underground is a youth-led organizer clinic that offers leadership development to help youth build connections with a community of like-minded activists and organizers.
One of their most successful initiatives has been their summer fellowship, where 12 people from across the state are selected from communities in need of intensive youth leadership training. The Bus helps them gain skills that can lead to professional positions, including campaign managers and political activists.
“We have a philosophy of believing in the best intentions of our youth population and our youth voters,” Medilo said. “We believe that if young people are given the tools and the resources to engage in change-making, they will engage in change-making.”
Civic Commons
Civic Commons has the overarching goal of uniting people across Washington state to achieve greater racial and economic equity.
The organization uses three core programs—Belonging, Scorecard, and Network Weaving—to provide training, relationship-building, and a network to empower communities to achieve equitable outcomes, such as homeownership.
“We’re bridging the fragmentation across sectors and communities to build the trust and relational muscle that’s necessary to tackle the issues to get to outcomes,” Michael Brown, the founder and Chief Architect of Civic Commons, said.
The Belonging programs offer programming to build a sense of belonging in neighborhoods, towns, cities, and campuses across Washington state. They aim to build trust and a sense of community before helping groups reach shared goals. The Scorecard for Shared Prosperity serves as a data resource to measure change across the Puget Sound region and help provide insight into how communities are evolving.
The Network Weaving program builds relationships across two major initiatives: the Black Home Initiative, which works to increase the rate of Black homeownership in Western Washington, and Starter Home Plan WA, which works to make homeownership more accessible for low- and moderate-income households.
Through Starter Home Plan WA, Civic Commons provides the resources and tools necessary to help lower-income households in Washington begin their homeownership journey with confidence and knowledge.
Brown identifies the Black Home Initiative as one of their most successful and impactful programs. The organization developed a plan to help 1,500 low-to-moderate-income Black individuals become homeowners between South Seattle and Thurston County by 2028, with a long-term goal of reaching 3,000 homeowners over 10 years.
Brown said the initiative’s progress so far has been possible as a result of “A network bridging sectors and a community working together to achieve something none of them could do on their own.”
Brown added that many other cities and states have begun modeling their own initiatives after the Black Home Initiative to increase homeownership rates among low- to moderate-income Black individuals.
“The essence of our work is the foundational pieces around belonging, but once we create that, it’s really then appealing to the leaders across those various sectors and communities,” Brown said.
Civic Commons has made an impact across the state, particularly in Seattle, where it continues to create new programs and products that accelerate the journey toward building a more racially and economically equitable state.
Both the Washington Bus and Civic Commons are driving change in Washington in unique ways. Through their models, they are helping diverse demographics across the state not only improve their lives and build a better society, but also advocate for their own futures and aspirations.
Daniela Mattson is a student at the University of Southern California and a Fulcrum Fellowship cohort member.
The Fulcrum is committed to nurturing the next generation of journalists. To learn about the many NextGen initiatives we are leading, click HERE.
Keep ReadingShow less
ICE agents stand guard in front of protesters outside the federal immigration center at Delaney Hall in Newark, where ICE is housing detained immigrants on May 26, 2026 in Newark, New Jersey.
Spencer Platt / Getty Images
Your Face Is in a Federal Database and ICE Put It There
Jul 10, 2026
Last week, while the world watched JD Vance fly to Switzerland to negotiate an Iran deal, a quieter document surfaced from inside the Department of Homeland Security that may matter more to the daily lives of Americans than anything that happened at Lake Lucerne. A DHS Privacy Threshold Analysis, obtained and reported by NPR, outlines plans to give approximately 1,300 local police forces access to the same facial recognition technology that federal ICE agents currently use in the field. The app is called the ICE Task Force Module. It allows an officer to photograph any person they stop, run the image against federal databases, and receive an identity match in seconds. Every photograph taken is stored in a DHS system for fifteen years. The document states plainly that this surveillance will sweep up American citizens. The DHS knows this. It is proceeding anyway.
This is not an immigration story. It is a surveillance infrastructure story, and the distinction is the most important thing to understand about what is being built.
The ICE Task Force Module is already in partial operation. Community members in Minnesota and Maine have reported that federal immigration officers photographed their faces and license plates during enforcement operations, and that officers appeared to already know their names and addresses before approaching them. That is what real-time facial recognition plus a fifteen-year database looks like in practice: it means that attending a public event, standing on a sidewalk near an ICE operation, or legally observing an enforcement action can result in a photograph entering a federal file that persists for over a decade.
DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin acknowledged to Congress that the agency has already used facial recognition on protesters, including identifying people who attended protests in Oregon and cross-referencing them with individuals present at protests in Newark. That is not an incidental use of immigration technology. That is the surveillance of political activity, conducted by a federal immigration agency, stored in a database for fifteen years.
The DHS's own document provides the clearest evidence of what the program will do to people who are not its stated targets. The text reads: "It is conceivable that a photo taken by an ICE non-federal law enforcement officer using the TFM mobile application could be that of someone other than a removable individual, including U.S. citizens." The use of the word "conceivable" is the bureaucratic tell. The document is not describing an edge case. It is describing the standard operating reality of any biometric surveillance system deployed on public streets. Facial recognition software makes errors. It makes more errors with darker skin tones. The people most likely to be wrongly identified and detained are the people who were already most exposed to aggressive enforcement.
Patrick Eddington of the Cato Institute put it directly: giving 1,300 police agencies this capability makes face surveillance "ubiquitous on American streets." This is no longer a speculative concern about future technology. It is a description of a program being rolled out now, through a network of local police forces who were never elected to run a federal surveillance operation and who have no independent oversight mechanism for how the photographs they collect are used.
The most important thing about what is being built is that it will not end with this administration. Surveillance infrastructure, once constructed and normalized, almost never contracts. The fifteen-year retention window for photographs taken today means that a database assembled under a deportation mandate in 2026 will still exist, fully searchable, in 2041. A different administration with different priorities will inherit a tool capable of identifying, locating, and tracking millions of Americans whose faces were captured during immigration operations they had nothing to do with.
Congress has the authority to require that biometric data collected in the course of immigration enforcement be purged after a defined period, that its use be restricted to the stated purpose of that enforcement, and that any secondary use, including tracking protest attendance, require a warrant. None of those safeguards currently exist. None appear to be under serious consideration. The database grows, photograph by photograph, fifteen-year retention by fifteen-year retention, while the debate remains focused on Switzerland.
Consider what this looks like on the ground. On March 27, 2026, ICE agents in Huntington Beach surrounded a man next to his vehicle, failed to establish his identity through conventional means, and then attempted to scan his face using facial recognition technology. The man was not suspected of any crime. No warrant had been issued. He was a United States citizen. On December 10, 2025, in Cedar-Riverside, Minneapolis, a 20-year-old American citizen named Mubashir Khalif Hussen was stopped by masked ICE agents walking to lunch. He repeated, "I'm a citizen, I'm a citizen." The agents refused to look at his ID. He was shackled and driven to a federal building before being released. His face is now in a federal database. It will remain there until 2041.
These are not isolated incidents. Facial recognition systems have already misidentified individuals, leading to wrongful arrests and months of detention for people with no connection to any alleged activity. Fifteen known people in the United States have been wrongfully arrested due to facial recognition errors; virtually all of them were Black. The system that generated those errors is now being scaled to 1,300 local police forces and integrated into a fifteen-year federal database.
The political will to stop this exists, but it is not being applied. The technology is being deployed in the noise of a news cycle saturated with Iran, Switzerland, and British politics. By the time the public focuses on what has been built, most of the building will already be done. That is, of course, precisely the point.
Imran Khalid is a physician, geostrategic analyst, and freelance writer.
Keep ReadingShow less
Citizens cast their vote during the 2026 presidential runoff in Colombia on June 21, 2026 in Barranquilla, Colombia. Ivan Cepeda, candidate for the Pacto Historico party and Abelardo de la Espriella, candidate for the Salvación Nacional, face in a tight runoff to rule Colombia from 2026 to 2030.
Leonardo Castañeda/Getty Images
Colombia’s Election Matters—Especially to Ecuador and the U.S.
Jul 10, 2026
In a closely fought election on June 21, conservative outsider Abelardo De La Espriella prevailed over Iván Cepeda, an ally of current leftist president, Gustavo Petro. Central to the electorate’s choice were distinct policy proposals to fight criminality and the drug cartels, who control large swaths of Colombian territory. The policies president-elect De La Espriella will bring to the fight against these issues matter greatly, not only to Colombia, but to neighboring Ecuador and the United States.
Earlier in March, Ecuadorian President Noboa, desperate to gain traction in his own drug war, announced a partnership with the U.S. to conduct joint operations against drug cartels. The partnership quickly went awry. A New York Times investigation of the first strike indicates that what the joint militaries considered a drug camp was in fact a dairy farm, with no drug connection. Then, on March 17, Colombia accused Ecuador of bombing within its territory with U.S. involvement. These incidents resulted in U.S. lawmakers calling for a suspension of joint operations on May 13. Very quickly, the U.S. partnership has reopened the scars of the Plan Colombia era of the early 2000s, where an overly militaristic approach to the drug war funded by the U.S. resulted in human rights abuses and false positives.
As former Deputy Director of USAID’s mission in Colombia from 2021 to 2025, I’ve seen first-hand how these policies matter both in Colombia and Ecuador. When USAID closed in September 2025, my family and I moved to a small town in Ecuador. In my nine months there, I’ve experienced how the once-peaceful country has been transformed by the cocaine economy.
In Colombia, farmers plant coca and the cartels convert it into cocaine in hidden labs, but the drug is most often exported via Ecuador. During current Colombian president Petro’s tenure, cocaine production flourished, increasing 53% from 2022 to 2024, according to the UN.
Meanwhile, neighboring Ecuador’s murder rate increased by nearly seven times between 2020 and 2025, turning the once-peaceful country into the second-most dangerous in the hemisphere, following Haiti. It is estimated that 70% of the world’s cocaine passes through Ecuadorian ports and that 84% of cocaine in the United States is produced in Colombia.
Coca is grown in Colombia, crosses the border to Ecuador as cocaine, then proceeds to the U.S. and other markets. But, while the cocaine gets exported, it leaves behind horrific violence and crime in Ecuador.
Colombia’s approach to controlling drug production matters to Ecuador in three important ways. The first is through surging narco-on-narco violence. In late November, the small town where we live held its annual fiesta. One Sunday afternoon, with the party in full swing at the town’s soccer stadium and the police fully occupied with the event, a store owner and bystander were gunned down in the center of town, just 200 yards from our house.
The criminals had used the ongoing fireworks to disguise their gunfire. They calmly exited town, leaving behind a dead store owner and an innocent bystander and father, who had left his 7-year-old son in the car while making a quick purchase. The store owner was Colombian and was rumored to have minor involvement in the drug trade.
We were terrified by these events and questioned the wisdom of our decision to move back to Ecuador. We changed our routines and no longer took a daily run to the town’s market for fruits and vegetables, located quite close to the incident. It served as an unpleasant reminder that we were no longer in the Ecuador of our memories.
Next, the cocaine economy has transformed Ecuador by allowing property-related crime to flourish. As police focus on the increase in drug-related crime and violence, their focus on common crime has weakened.
In March, in a neighboring town, a beloved priest, Father Max, was murdered in his home. The outrageous act in highly Catholic Ecuador stunned my neighbors, normally inured to daily reports of crime, like purse-snatchings and break-ins. Neighbors said that laptops and televisions were stolen from Father Max. Others added that the Swiss-born priest had not taken rising crime seriously enough and thus became an easy target for criminals.
Lastly, Colombia’s cocaine economy has transformed the two countries’ bilateral relationship. In January, Ecuadorian president Daniel Noboa raised tariffs on Colombian goods by 30%, stating that Colombia had done little to stem the flow of cocaine into Ecuador and calling the tariffs a “security tax.” Noboa called out a lack of cooperation from Colombia, stating, “Given the lack of reciprocity and decisive action, Ecuador will apply a 30 percent security tariff on imports from Colombia starting February 1.”
Colombia reciprocated and refused to sell electricity to Ecuador. However, on June 1, the dispute was resolved, and tariffs on both sides were eliminated.
The whole episode greatly impacted trade and the economy, especially in much-smaller Ecuador. For regular citizens, Colombian goods disappeared from supermarket shelves, power outages became more common, and the principal border crossing was often closed by protesters.
Colombia’s election matters for Colombia, Ecuador, the United States, and the region as a whole. It's critical that President-elect De La Espriella implement serious and effective policies to reduce cocaine production for its own citizens’ welfare, but also for its neighbors in Ecuador. Doing so will give Ecuadorians a chance to bring back the much-valued security they had enjoyed for years.
Jeremiah A. Carew was the deputy mission director of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) in Colombia from 2021 until the mission’s closing in August 2025. Over his 21-year career with USAID, he served in Peru, Afghanistan, Uganda, Vietnam, South Sudan, and Washington, D.C. He currently resides in Ecuador, where he writes on international development topics for Razón Pública in a monthly column; his work has also appeared in Foreign Policy, El Tiempo and the Foreign Service Journal.
Keep ReadingShow less
Load More
Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Graham Platner speaks to voters at a town hall at the Elks Lodge 188 on June 7, 2026, in Portland, Maine.
McConnell and Platner both feel entitled
The two men could not be more different. One, a Republican, octogenarian, seven-term Southern senator, the other a progressive, millennial Maine oysterman who’s never spent a day in elected office.
But Mitch McConnell, the senior senator from Kentucky who’s been MIA for the past few weeks and Graham Platner, the Maine Senate candidate who’s facing calls to drop out of his race against Sen. Susan Collins, apparently do have something in common: an outsized sense of entitlement.
McConnell, who is 84 and not running for reelection, has been hospitalized for three weeks, and yet we still don’t fully know what he was admitted for or what his condition is. Per CNN, “his office has not disclosed a medical reason for the hospitalization or provided specifics on his health status beyond saying last week that he ‘continues to improve’ and ‘is working closely with his staff on Kentucky and Senate matters.’ ”
While several legislators have said they’ve talked to him and insist he sounds strong, others have said they are completely in the dark. One MAGA influencer, Laura Loomer, posted ”High level source close to the White House tells me ‘Mitch McConnell is officially brain dead. He’s not coming back.’ ”
Meanwhile, up in Maine, Platner has been artfully dodging calls from his own party to drop out of his race after several allegations of misconduct from women, including a sexual assault allegation from a former girlfriend, came to light. While Platner, who has managed to survive a Nazi-tattoo scandal, a sexting scandal, and several old tweets scandals, denies the allegations, he has not quit.
High-profile Democrats including Sens. Bernie Sanders and Chuck Schumer, the latter of whom had unsuccessfully hand-selected Maine Gov. Janet Mills to face Collins instead of Platner, have urged Platner to drop out, while other Dems have accused him of trying to influence the picking of his replacement.
Maine Democratic Party Executive Director Devon Murphy-Anderson released a statement Tuesday, which said in part:
“Unfortunately, Graham Platner’s team has repeatedly reached out to us in an attempt to put their thumb on the scale of what this process looks like. We have repeatedly reiterated to Graham Platner’s team that they have no role in determining our next Democratic nominee for the U.S. Senate nor in determining what this process looks like.”
Both incidents show a deep lack of accountability to voters, who in one case deserve to know whether their senator is capable of performing his duties, and in another deserve a candidate who isn’t being accused of crimes, bigotry and deception.
The offensive and odious entitlement of both McConnell and Platner stands out not because it is particularly unique among today’s political class. Tom Kean, the New Jersey GOP congressman, missed more than 100 votes, only sharing after a three-month mystery absence that he was dealing with depression.
Former President Joe Biden’s Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin failed to disclose a hospitalization for prostate cancer surgery, flouting the established rules for Cabinet members and senior U.S. officials.
From Biden’s insistence on running for reelection despite his obvious cognitive and political weaknesses to Trump’s brazen flouting of laws and norms, few politicians seem to appreciate that their public service job comes with responsibilities to constituents, including transparency and honesty.
But both parties increasingly justify the chicanery, because the stakes of winning elections and keeping power are simply too high. But that’s no excuse. If we’ve learned anything over the past decade, it’s that character and accountability do, in fact, matter. And when we, the voters, stop caring about it, well, so do they.
S.E. Cupp is the host of "S.E. Cupp Unfiltered" on CNN.