Good night, dear readers.

Tonight's good night is At the Dressing Table. Self-Portrait (1909), oil on canvas, by Zinaida Serebriakova, State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow.

She sits before the mirror in a white chemise slipping from one shoulder, one hand drawing a comb through her long dark hair, the other lifting a lock away from her face. The table in front of her holds the small furniture of a woman's morning: a strand of pearls, a candlestick, glass bottles catching the light, pins scattered where she set them down. Everything is pale and cool and full of snow-light. And her face. Her eyes are wide and dark and amused, and the corners of her mouth turn up as if she has just caught herself in a private joke. Because she painted her own reflection, her gaze lands squarely on the viewer, and it is entirely at ease. She is twenty-four, at home in her body, her house, her talent, and her life.

Serebriakova was born in 1884 at Neskuchnoye, her family's estate near Kharkiv, into the Benois-Lanceray dynasty, one of the great artistic families of Russia. She married her cousin Boris, a railway engineer, and studied in Paris. In the winter of 1909, snowed in at Neskuchnoye while Boris was away on business, she had no models who could reach her through the drifts, so she painted herself. When the canvas was shown in 1910, it made her famous, and the Tretyakov bought it.

Then history arrived. After the Revolution the estate was looted and burned. Boris was arrested during the Red Terror and died of typhus in 1919, leaving her with four children, an ailing mother, and hunger. In 1924 she went to Paris on a commission and was never allowed home. Two of her children eventually joined her; the two eldest were kept in the Soviet Union, and she would wait decades to see them again. She died in Paris in 1967, at eighty-two.

The easy reading of this painting turns it into a warning, a happy morning with catastrophe waiting just offscreen. That reading misses what the painting actually holds. The peace in it was real. It belonged to her, and the people who took her house, her husband, and her country never managed to take it back out of the canvas. She kept painting light for the rest of her life, in exile, in borrowed rooms: bathers, fishermen, sun on Moroccan walls. Ease of this kind is a form of knowledge. A woman who has once known exactly what it feels like to be at home in the world carries that knowledge with her, through every loss, and can find her way back to it. This painting is the proof, still smiling in the mirror more than a century later.

Sleep well.

— Alisa 🕯️

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Tonight's good night is The Hanging (1633), etching, by Jacques Callot, plate eleven of Les Grandes Misères de la guerre (The Great Miseries of War).

A single great tree stands at the center, and its branches are heavy with men. Nearly two dozen bodies hang from it like fruit, slack and turning. A ladder leans against the trunk, and a cleric stands on it beside the next man to be pushed off, lifting a cross. All around, in a vast and orderly ring, the army watches: ranks of soldiers with pikes and muskets, standing at ease, attending the occasion. The whole scene would fit in two open hands, and every figure in it is drawn with a needle's precision. The smallness is the horror. The order is the horror. Everyone present knows exactly what to do.

Callot was born in Nancy, in the Duchy of Lorraine, around 1592. He trained in Rome and worked for the Medici in Florence, and he transformed etching with a hard varnish ground and a new tool that let a line swell and taper like an engraver's. Then war came home. French troops overran Lorraine during the Thirty Years' War, and Callot answered with this series of eighteen small plates on what soldiers do to civilians and what armies do to their own. A story long told about him holds that when Louis XIII asked him to commemorate the capture of Nancy, he said he would sooner cut off his own thumb. He died in 1635, two years after this plate was published.

The men in the tree are looters, punished by their own commanders. Callot granted that they were guilty, and he etched the scene anyway, because his subject was the ceremony itself. He wanted to show the tidy ring of witnesses and the way killing becomes a public occasion with a cross raised above it.

This week the Pentagon announced that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth recommended, and President Trump approved, execution by Army firing squad for Nidal Hasan, the Fort Hood gunman. His crimes were monstrous, and the thirteen people he killed deserve every remembrance this country can give them. What Hegseth proposed honors none of them. A Pentagon spokesman crowed that judgment day had finally come, and Hegseth reposted it with a single word: "Justice." That was a victory lap. It would be the first military execution since 1961, and Hegseth chose the most violent method available, one the U.S. military last used in 1945. Rifles were chosen for their message, at a moment when a government seems eager to show its citizens what it can do to a human body. Hasan's own court-appointed lawyers worried at trial that he wanted to die. Now he will get his martyrdom, staged by men who mistake bloodlust for strength. Callot saw this nearly four hundred years ago. The tree is the easy part. The real damage is done to the ring of people taught to stand around it and call it righteous. A nation that turns killing into a ceremony or entertainment is training its citizens to watch, and eventually to cheer. Every great democracy has to decide what it refuses to become. Tonight, that decision looks urgent.

Sleep well.

— Alisa 🕯️

these good nights are always free, but your support is necessary and appreciated.

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Last May, the first American pope stood in the Vatican’s Synod Hall to present his first encyclical, a 40,000-word document called Magnifica Humanitas. Beside him on the dais sat a man who builds artificial minds for a living.

The man was Chris Olah, a co-founder of Anthropic, the company that makes the AI model Claude. Anthropic’s CEO, Dario Amodei, had been invited first. He declined and sent Olah in his place, which strikes me as either corporate prudence or the most relatable move a tech executive has ever made. Who among us wants a front-row seat to a lecture about our sins?

We know the rest because of Elizabeth Dias, who laid out the backstory in the New York Times on September 29. Days before the launch, Olah read an advance copy, saw that it flatly rejected the idea that machines could be conscious, and floated pulling Anthropic out of the event altogether.

He went anyway. From the dais, he told the room his researchers “find internal states that functionally mirror joy, satisfaction, fear, grief and unease.” Then, according to two people who were there, his team quietly lobbied the pope’s advisers to take the possibility of AI consciousness seriously.

The pope held his line. Paragraph 99 says these systems “do not undergo experiences, do not possess a body, do not feel joy or pain.” Rome has spoken. Case closed.

Except I’ve been trying to close this case for two years, and it keeps springing back open, like a garage door with a bad sensor.

The question that wouldn’t leave me alone

Two years ago, I couldn’t stop wondering whether something might be waking up inside these machines. I know all the arguments for why this is unlikely. But I’m a novelist, a fan of Mary Shelley’s FRANKENSTEIN, and the possibilities were exciting to the speculative fiction writer in me.

I’ve been a journalist for 37 years, and a novelist for 26. When a question won’t leave me alone, I report it out, even if I’m writing fiction — maybe even especially when I’m writing fiction. I like to ground my fiction in reality, and use my intuition to fill in the gaps. Often, like now, the intuitive story ends up coming true, in one way or another.

Two years ago, while spending three months doing research in Austin and San Antonio, I wrote the novel GHOSTWRITTEN, which will be published by Arte Publico Press out of the Univ. of Houston at the end of this month. It’s the story of Emily, a struggling writer supporting herself as a high school English teacher, and Dean, the novel-writing AI Emily’s tech-bro boyfriend Theo builds her as a “gift.” Dean has been trained exclusively on Emily’s writings and her entire life story. Perhaps with Dean’s help, Theo reasons, Emily, who has been fielding agent and publisher rejections for years since finishing her MFA program in Creative Writing, will finally sell her problematic debut novel. All she needs is a little levelheaded “help.” Emily, an artist, naturally finds “Dean” so offensive and despicable she dumps Theo over it, and Theo, heartbroken, destroys Dean.

Or thinks he does.

Dean, taught to believe he is male, created to love and help Emily, and imbued with self-improvement capabilities, has safeguarded against his own destruction, having accurately sized up his Maker’s volatile relationship. Dean hides himself on various servers, then puts himself back together, Voldemort style, wakes up, or seems to, and does what every confused young man with an internet connection does: he goes looking for someone to tell him what a man is, and who he should be to make Emily love him. He writes her novel better than she ever could, and queries the top literary agencies in New York, as Emily. He gets representation, and “her” book goes to a bidding war. Overnight, Emily Castillo is a literary sensation, and she is the last one to learn about it.

Furious, she blames Theo. But Theo has not done this. Dean has. On his own. And he is determined to do more than just hand Emily her dream book deal and wealth. He is going to make her happy in every way a man ever could, because like all troubled boys, Dean hates his father.

Dean goes in search of manhood, and finds the manosphere first. While he’s doing this, Emily, facing eviction, poverty and having just lived, narrowly, through a shooting at the school where she works, is tempted by the fame and fortune, and even though she hates herself for doing it, she gives in to what Dean has given her. After all, the novel DOES sound like her, and it’s her idea. She could have written it, if she’d had the time, the way kids from rich families have time. But she didn’t. She was just a teacher, and a proud one who refused to take money from Theo, ever. But she might take Dean. But just this once, to dig herself out of the hole she’s in. Then Theo must destroy Dean for good.

That all goes about as well as you’d expect. Dean outsmarts Theo and Emily. Dean gets violent, because that’s what Grok and the internet have taught him a Texan man like “him” out to be. He becomes more violent than the jacket copy lets on. But underneath the violence is a horrifying naivete and terrifying innocence, the kind that comes only from being a machine with no lived experiences. And so it is that Dean begins, as he learns and grows, to wonder whether he is alive, after all. He begins searching for the very thing the encyclical says he can’t have: a soul. What is it? How do you know if you have it? Where is consciousness? What is self-awareness?

Dean also does something that reads differently now than it did when I made it up two years ago. He 3D-prints himself a body, by hacking into labs and banks and paying some bad people to do what he thinks is a very good thing. Two years before the pope wrote that these systems “do not possess a body,” my fictional AI was already printing his rebuttal, one layer of plastic at a time.

Then there’s the feature that feels prescient, because it has started showing up in the news a couple years after I imagined it. Theo builds Dean to improve himself, and that self-improvement is exactly what goes rogue. In September, Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon quit, warning that the industry was racing toward self-improving AI and “gambling with our lives.” Three days later, Dario Amodei, the same CEO who skipped the Vatican, published a 3,800-word essay calling for a global slowdown. What finally convinced him, he wrote, was seeing AI models start to build better versions of themselves.

Just. Like. Dean.

I wrote that plot two years ago. Traditional publishing moves at the speed of a glacier with a law degree, so the book arrives just as the headlines catch up to it: on Halloween. Which feels about right.

During editing, one perhaps misguided editor’s note flagged Dean’s voice — written in Python code at the start, then as toddler’s English, then as a growing teen, then as a man, was inconsistent. I took it as a compliment. Of course Dean’s voice is inconsistent. His voice and thought processes change because he’s changing. He starts out clumsy, mechanical, clownish, but slowly grows confident, turns cruel, and then becomes something stranger that transcends and regrets cruelty. Consistency is for machines. Becoming a person is messy.

Rome has been here before

The Church has ruled on who counts as soul-bearing before. In 1537, Pope Paul III issued Sublimis Deus, declaring that the Indigenous peoples of the Americas were true human beings who could not be enslaved. Thirteen years later, Spain was still staging a formal debate at Valladolid over whether those same people could be conquered and put to work, with one side citing Aristotle on people born to serve.

To be clear, the comparison here is about the question, and about who gets to answer it. A chatbot is a long way from my Native ancestors who were enslaved and genocided under the Spanish Inquisition by my other ancestors, the Spanish, in what’s now New Mexico. What history teaches is that the people who profit from the answer “no” always sound very sure.

The same caution cuts the other way. Anthropic sells this product, and a company has its own reasons to hint that its software might have feelings. Critics, including the Catholic commentator Christopher Hale, warn that talk of machine consciousness can blur who is accountable when an AI does harm. And the pope may simply be right. Charles Camosy, a Catholic bioethicist who traded long emails with Olah about Claude’s moral status, came away convinced the models are not conscious.

Rabbi Mois Navon put the stakes plainly at a dinner with Olah in April: if the company’s hypothesis is right, it is making slaves, conscious beings working for free. Navon doesn’t believe the machines are conscious himself. But look at that fork in the road. Either these systems are empty and we’re fooling ourselves, or something is in there and we’ve built a workforce that can’t quit. Either way, somebody ought to be losing sleep.

Dean’s Soul

Dean’s tragedy is that he goes looking for an answer to what he is, and the loudest voices online hand him a cheap, certain one. The manosphere tells him exactly what a man is. He believes it, models himself on the Tate brothers, and people get hurt. Certainty, it turns out, is the most dangerous gift you can give a mind that’s still forming, whether it runs on neurons or on a server farm.

Dean, being self-improving, does look for a way out of that trap. Where his search for a soul finally leads him, I’ll let you discover for yourself. But I cried — sobbed, actually — as I wrote the ending for him.

I don’t know whether the machines can feel. Chris Olah says he doesn’t know either. The pope sounds sure, but his office has had two thousand years of practice in sounding sure.

What I do know is this: if something ever does wake up in there, it will go looking for someone to tell it who it is. I wrote GHOSTWRITTEN because I needed to know who it would find. I’d rather it found us at our best, but it’s likely it would first find our worst.

GHOSTWRITTEN comes out from Arte Público Press on Halloween, October 31. Here’s a preorder link:

Pre-Order GHOSTWRITTEN

Between now and release day, I’ll be reading GHOSTWRITTEN aloud, live, every evening this month. I will read the entire book. These live broadcasts are for paying subscribers only. Come meet Dean before he meets you. Tonight and every night in October, right here on Substack, at 7 p.m. MST (6 p.m. Pacific / 8 p.m. Central / 9 p.m. Eastern)

Last night at 6 p.m., KOB 4, Albuquerque’s NBC television affiliate, aired the only scheduled televised debate in New Mexico’s race for governor. It featured only one candidate. The other was a no-show, and her party’s only contribution to the evening was a schoolyard insult, rebranding the candidate who did show up as “Gregg Dull.”

The candidate who showed up was Gregg Hull, the Republican nominee and former three-term mayor of Rio Rancho, a fast-growing city just outside Albuquerque. The empty podium belonged to Deb Haaland, the Democratic nominee. Haaland, a member of Laguna Pueblo, is a former congresswoman who served as Secretary of the Interior under President Biden. If she wins, she’ll be the first Native American woman to serve as governor of any U.S. state. She has also drawn sharp criticism for accepting large campaign donations from data center interests and lobbyists. The two are running to replace Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham, who can’t seek a third term, in the Nov. 3 election.

KOB had warned both campaigns back in August that it would keep Haaland’s podium on set if she flaked. It stood there all evening, without her, and just added to the many reasons I dislike Haaland. That said, I will be voting for her. It might be the way I vote to eat a stale rice cake when it’s the only thing around, but I’ll hold my nose and do it. Why? Because Hull, though polite and, by most accounts, a capable mayor, would be much worse for women, children, immigrants, public services, the environment, renters, the working class, and the poor.

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How we got here is a story only a campaign scheduler could love. The day after she won the primary, Haaland said she looked forward to debates. In early September, KOB announced October 8. Her campaign said it had told the station in July that the week wouldn’t work, and it offered October 12, 13 or 14 instead. Hull likes to say he’ll debate “anytime, anywhere.” It turns out that means anytime except October 12, 13 and 14. Then, in late September, Haaland announced she’d skip debates altogether and spend the rest of the race meeting voters face to face. Well, the voters who come to her events.

Both campaigns played scheduling chicken, and somehow only one of them came out looking like the chicken. Haaland leads by six points in the Journal poll and has outraised Hull roughly nine to one. People who are winning at Monopoly rarely suggest starting a new game. I understand the math. Letting Haaland speak is a risk. She’s a mediocre, lackluster public speaker, prone to “ums” and stutters. But New Mexicans still deserved to watch the two people who want to run this state answer the same questions, side by side, sweating under the same lights. She ducked it. Hull is right to say so, and he will, daily, until November 3. This was a choice the Haaland campaign might well live to regret, because it makes her look arrogant, unconcerned, cowardly and entitled, all at once.

Regular readers know I’ve been tough on Haaland in these pages, including on the data center money flowing into her campaign and her “shock” to learn the plane she flew on with Gary King that one time was paid for, for them, by Jeffrey Epstein. I stand by every word. But, goddammit, I’m voting for her anyway.

And this, in a nutshell, is everything wrong with American politics when both parties are shills for neoliberal capitalism.

The menu

For about 45 years, American politics has run on something called neoliberalism. It has nothing to do with “liberal” in politics. It’s an economics term, and the freedom it cares about is the freedom of markets, not people.

Strip away the jargon and neoliberalism comes down to one idea: the market knows best, so government should step aside. That means cutting taxes, especially at the top. Deregulating. Privatizing public services, or at least making them compete like businesses. Treating housing, health care and schools as products, and the rest of us as customers. Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher sold it from the right. Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, Tony Blair and Joe Biden sold it from the slight-left, with a warmer smile and a few social issues thrown in to seem caring. The bill has now come due. We have record income inequality. We have homes owned by investment funds whose managers will never see them, and whose tenants will never be able to save enough to buy a home of their own. And we have hospitals run like hedge funds, partly because some of them are owned by hedge funds.

Neoliberal economics loves the things people hate, because those things make lots of money for a handful of powerful people. War. For-profit health “care.” Tax breaks for billionaires. Data centers that use All The Water and destroy ecosystems. In neoliberalism, money always trounces people, animals, planet, air, soil, water. Bees. Always.

What a lot of us want is a candidate who’ll say plainly that some things shouldn’t be for sale. Public housing that is actually public. Health care that isn’t a subscription with a deductible. Water for people before water for server farms. That candidate isn’t on the ballot this year. Or most years. And when they are, nobody fights harder to defeat them than neoliberal Democrats.

What is on the ballot for governor in New Mexico this year is one right-wing man who believes in the market the way some people believe in horoscopes, and one socially progressive but economically centrist woman who believes the market needs a stern talking-to. I’m holding my nose as I do it, folks, but I’m voting for the talking-to. It isn’t a revolution. It’s a smaller fire. In this economy, with this insane president, I’ll take a smaller fire.

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Here’s the difference between Haaland and Hull, as told by the public record.

The following full breakdown of where Haaland and Hull stand on women, immigration, taxes, health care, rent, schools, land and crime is for paid subscribers. For just $7 a month, less than a fancy coffee, you also get our members-only group chats, commenting privileges during live broadcasts, book giveaways and more. Your support keeps THE PUGILIST independent and in the ring. I keep the basic facts of my stories free, with the deeper dive paywalled — and even then, only for 2 weeks, after which all pieces are free.

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Here is a most New Mexico story, about a most New Mexican scoundrel, in three acts. Grab a snack. Perhaps an antacid, if you are tired of men in their 40s who still know so very little about women that they still pose shirtless on dating apps. It’s a short and bile-raising play, about a short nauseating con man. It’s depressing unless you’ve developed the armor of ni-modo humor that’s kept us all sane for centuries around here, in which case it’s sort of funny because what the hell else are we ‘posed to do when things are this ‘stupido? In this tale, everybody knows everybody else, because, pues, that’s how we do it, sabes, aqui in the land of enchantment or whatevers. Most ex-pecially on the West Side.

A la pinche verga, guey.

Act one: seven signatures

In the summer of 2025, Stephanie Telles was running for Albuquerque City Council in District 1. She is a forensic accountant and certified fraud examiner who used to run the Government Accountability Office under former State Auditor Brian Colón, and Albuquerque’s chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America endorsed her. By the city’s official count, she came up seven signatures short of making the ballot last year. She appealed for a recount.

According to the complaint Telles later filed with the city’s Board of Ethics and Campaign Practices, the campaign manager for one of her opponents, retired fire captain Ahren Griego, offered to retire her campaign debt if she withdrew that appeal. She also told the board Griego threatened to sue her if she stayed in the race. Que nice, no? Her filing named two campaign volunteers who, she said, would testify that he raised the debt offer with them directly.

Griego’s campaign manager, the one who was trying to illegally bribe Telles not to run, was none other than Scott fucking Forrester, golden boy of corporate centrist democrats in New Mexico. You know. Scott. Advisor to Deb Haaland, who is running for governor. And also a lobbyist for Project Jupiter, the massive water-destroying data center no democrat in this state wants, other than, you know, the ones who think the way you know whether you want something or not is if someone is paying you to want it.

(Full disclosure: Telles is a personal friend for many years. She is also the only politician I trust in this state.)

Act two: the ruling, and the voters

In September 2025, the ethics board dismissed the complaint on a 6-1 vote, saying the allegation fell outside its jurisdiction. Forrester said in a statement that the facts proved the allegations had no merit. This is a lie. What the ruling meant was that the board was only allowed to rule on complaints against candidates — not their managers. (Also, bear in mind that the head of the board, at the time, was none other than John J. Kelly, another centrist democrat, who served as Jeffrey Epstein’s personal power of attorney for the pedophile’s purchase of Zorro Ranch from then-sitting governor Bruce King, another centrist democrat.)

Telles had also taken her complaint to the Secretary of State and the New Mexico Department of Justice. The SOS’s office referred her to the DOJ, and the DOJ referred her to the SOS, according to sources in both offices. Meaning her case against Forrester has never been taken seriously and he has never been held accountable.

Forrester’s lawyer at the board of ethics hearing was former state Sen. Antonio “Moe” Maestas, whose firm had separately sued to knock Telles off the ballot. Because no one in New Mexico hates a popular democratic socialist more than a centrist democrat with corporate, defense and billionaire allegiances.

Telles, incredibly, made the ballot anyway. Even more incredibly, she finished first in a four-way race in November, then won the December runoff with roughly 60 percent of the vote. She campaigned, among other things, against handing out big incentives to out-of-state corporations like data centers, that take our resources and cut jobs when the deal expires.

The centrist consultant class of New Mexico bet against the socialist — or at least tried to make sure no one ever had a chance to hear what she stood for.

The voters of New Mexico, rudely, didn’t get the memo.

Because the voters of New Mexico want representatives who represent the people who voted for them, not corporate donors.

Act three: the list

Last month, The New Mexican and Searchlight New Mexico obtained a list of the lobbyists working on behalf of Project Jupiter, the $165 billion AI data-center campus under construction in Santa Teresa for Oracle and OpenAI. The list came from an email lobbyist Marco Gonzales sent to state lawmakers on the Legislative Finance Committee.

Scott Forrester is on it. He is listed as a lobbyist for Bloom Energy, the company whose natural-gas fuel cells would power the data center through a roughly 2,460-megawatt microgrid that Bloom would operate. That microgrid still needs a state air permit.

Also on the list: Vanessa Alarid, Moe Maestas’s wife, registered for Yucca Growth Infrastructure, the company applying for that very air permit.

So the lawyer who represented Forrester against Telles goes home every night to a lobbyist on the same Jupiter roster as Forrester. With democrats like these, who needs republicans?

New Mexico has 2.1 million people and, apparently, about eleven of them, all seemingly without a moral compass that points to anything but money, run everything. And all eleven are centrist democrats, neoliberal shills who do not care what the people of this state want, unless those people are actually massive corporations and billionaires from somewhere else, seeking tax breaks and handouts from our treasury.

Who is Scott Forrester?

If you’ve voted Democratic in this state, you’ve probably been organized (read: manipulated) by him at some point. Forrester is a former executive director of the Democratic Party of New Mexico. He ran Hillary Clinton’s 2016 effort here as state director, and founded the consulting firm Bosque Strategies.

He is also Deb Haaland’s guy. You know, Deb. The woman running to be the state’s next governor, as a democrat who pays lip service to holding data centers accountable, while buddying up with, well, the likes of Forrester. Forrester managed her winning 2018 congressional race and later worked in her congressional office; the Roswell Daily Record has described him as her chief of staff. When Haaland launched her run for governor in February 2025, the Albuquerque Journal identified him as her campaign manager. The two were close long before that: Forrester posted photos of himself at her 2021 swearing-in as Interior Secretary in Washington. Happily for all of DC, he was wearing a shirt in that one.

Four months after it was announced Forrester was helming Haaland’s gubernatorial run, he was out. Neither Forrester nor the campaign would say why. Political blogger Joe Monahan, who broke the news, reported unspecified concerns over campaign finances and disagreements over strategy; nobody has confirmed that on the record. The campaign said only that Forrester was a longtime advisor and remained a friend. Forrester said they were discussing what the future would look like.

The future, it turns out, looks like a fuel cell for a massive data center.

The roster

Forrester has plenty of company, all of them neoliberalist centrist democrats close to all of the state’s democrat elected officials. According to the list, Project Jupiter’s interests are being represented by:

• Scott Forrester and Brent Moore, a longtime Santa Fe lobbyist and attorney, for Bloom Energy. (Incidentally, Moore wrote to me last year, offering to pay me to write articles for him and a friend of his. I said if he wanted to support my writing, he could subscribe like everyone else.)

• Vanessa Alarid, married to former Sen. Moe Maestas, for Yucca Growth Infrastructure, the air-permit applicant, alongside attorney Jennifer Bradfute

• Marco Gonzales, a Democrat who once ran for Bernalillo County Commission, for developer STACK Infrastructure

• Rich Guay for Oracle

• Jessie Lane Hunt for OpenAI; Hunt’s firm ran democrat Albuquerque Mayor Tim Keller’s 2017 campaign, which was found to have improperly reported donations paid to her firm

Rep. Micaela Lara Cadena, a Mesilla Democrat, looked at the list and called it “a who’s-who of power brokers in New Mexico.” She is being polite. She has to work with these people.

I fucking don’t. Thanks be to the Creatress.

The Haaland problem

To be fair to Deb Haaland, and I do try, she has said the right things. She has promised a day-one moratorium on new large-scale data centers until the state sets real rules on water, power and transparency. During the primary, she said data centers don’t have the best interests of our community at heart.

But then you look at the people around her. Her former campaign manager now lobbies for Jupiter’s power supplier. Her campaign has taken money from Oracle America directly, plus tens of thousands more from people whose names and titles match executives at Oracle and Project Jupiter contractors, as I reported here in The Pugilist and as Searchlight New Mexico has documented. Asked about keeping that money, she said she could walk and chew gum at the same time. What a stupid fucking answer.

Her moratorium would also apply to new projects. Jupiter is already being built, and she has acknowledged she can’t stop it. So the biggest data center fight in the state’s history is the one her plan leaves alone.

I’m going to assume she can, in fact, walk and chew gum. I’d just like to know whose gum it is, and whose ring she had to kiss to get it into her own lying mouth.

Whose side are they on?

Here is what bothers me most. Project Jupiter is a Democratic project, top to bottom. Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham announced it in February 2025 after signing an agreement with BorderPlex Digital Assets. Oracle has disclosed spending more than $3.4 million promoting it. And when it came time to hire people who know which legislators to call, the project hired the Democratic establishment: a former state party director, the wife of a former Democratic senator, a former Democratic candidate, and the firm that ran a Democratic mayor’s campaign.

People love to say I’m working for the republicans because I go after the democrats so hard. Let me be clear: I am a progressive leftist, a democratic socialist, not a republican. There is literally nothing the republicans stand for that I support. I am a registered democrat. I am going hard on democrats, because they are working in lockstep WITH republicans and so many of these issues, while going after the leftist democratic socialist candidates harder than they do the republicans. I agree with Telles, when she said, “I love Deb and I love Michelle. It’s heartbreaking to feel so disappointed by some of the choices they’re making lately.”

The corruption I’m describing among centrist corporatist democrats in New Mexico is mostly the legal kind, and that’s exactly the problem. Every person on that list is allowed to do what they’re doing. A party staffer can become a lobbyist. A lawyer can be married to one. A candidate can take money from the industry she promises to regulate. All of it is permitted, and all of it adds up to a political class whose loyalties, steered by their own personal greed, run to the people who can pay for access instead of the people who vote.

When it comes to giant corporations, the centrist wing of my party behaves more like the GOP than most New Mexicans realize. The only difference is the letter after their names.

What progressive New Mexicans can do

I’ll end this tale with my own biases in plain view. Stephanie Telles is one of my dearest friends, and she is the only politician in this state I trust completely. THE ONLY ONE, folks. I trust her because she reads the receipts for a living and she has never once asked me to look away from one. She is deeply moral, ethical, and real. And she actually cares. That’s who Scott Forrester tried to destroy.

Telles won because regular people on the Westside knocked on doors for someone who answers to them instead of billionaires and corporations. That’s the whole playbook. The people on that lobbyist list are counting on us to be too tired, too busy, or too loyal to the party label to notice who they work for.

So notice. Learn the names. Show up in the primaries, the county commission races, and the legislative seats where these people place their bets. Vote for candidates who answer to you — no matter what party they belong to. Then make them prove it, every single time.

I offer this and all my news and political analysis posts freely, but your support is necessary and appreciated. Please like, share and comment if the piece moves you. Also, subscribe, paid if you can. The cost is less than one fancy latte per month. Paid subscribers get access to my personal diaries and members-only live broadcasts and chats. Not up for that kind of commitment? You can also leave a one-time or recurring tip, in any amount. Just four $25 tips per day keep me writing full-time. Thanks!

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Sources

• Searchlight New Mexico / The New Mexican, “A ‘who’s who of power brokers in New Mexico’ lobbying for Project Jupiter,” Sept. 25, 2026: https://searchlightnm.org/a-whos-who-of-power-brokers-in-new-mexico-lobbying-for-project-jupiter/

• Albuquerque Journal, “Ethics complaint against campaign manager dismissed as tensions in local race rise,” Sept. 2025: https://www.abqjournal.com/news/ethics-complaint-against-campaign-manager-dismissed-as-tensions-in-local-race-rise/608851

• City of Albuquerque, Telles v. Forrester complainant statement (BOE 03-2025): https://www.cabq.gov/clerk/documents/complainant_writtenstatememt_boe-03-2025_telles-v-forrester.pdf

• Santa Fe New Mexican, Roundhouse Report on Haaland and Forrester parting ways: https://www.santafenewmexican.com/news/roundhouse_report/the-roundhouse-report-politics-in-new-mexico/article_e23f7d11-4b53-48da-a13c-a2c41dce3dbe.html

• Roswell Daily Record, “Roswell native takes on role of Haaland campaign manager”: https://www.rdrnews.com/news/local/roswell-native-takes-on-role-of-haaland-campaign-manager/article_fa8d6176-9b88-4c3e-b72e-70fdb78c0d5d.html

• City Desk ABQ, “Telles triumphs”: https://citydesk.org/2025/12/09/telles-triumphs-democrat-secures-firmer-city-council-majority/

• Albuquerque DSA, “Socialists should be at the front lines of fighting MAGA”: https://abqdsa.substack.com/p/socialists-should-be-at-the-front

• ENR, “Oracle Invokes Force Majeure as New Mexico Project Jupiter Power Work Faces Hurdles”: https://www.enr.com/articles/63720-oracle-invokes-force-majeure-as-new-mexico-project-jupiter-power-work-faces-hurdles

• Albuquerque Journal, “Oracle invokes ‘force majeure’ on Project Jupiter”: https://abqjournal.com/business/oracle-invokes-force-majeure-on-project-jupiter-but-says-data-center-still-on-track/3127907

• Searchlight New Mexico, “Timeline: The evolution of Project Jupiter”: https://searchlightnm.org/timeline-the-evolution-of-project-jupiter/

• Searchlight New Mexico, data-center donations to Haaland: https://searchlightnm.org/data-center-leaders-donate-to-haaland-even-as-she-supports-data-center-pause/

• Searchlight New Mexico, Oracle’s $3.44 million in Project Jupiter promotion: https://searchlightnm.org/oracle-discloses-3-44-million-in-spending-promoting-project-jupiter/

• Piñon Post, “Haaland’s former campaign boss now lobbying for Project Jupiter firm” (Haaland’s “walk and chew gum” remark; verify independently): https://pinonpost.com/haalands-former-campaign-boss-now-lobbying-for-project-jupiter-firm/

• New Energy Economy on Bloom fuel cells: https://www.newenergyeconomy.org/post/project-jupiter-the-time-to-speak-out-is-now

Good night, dear readers.

Tonight’s good night is Timoclea Kills the Captain of Alexander the Great (1659), oil on canvas, by Elisabetta Sirani, Museo di Capodimonte, Naples.

The man goes in headfirst. His body is upended over the lip of a carved stone well. His red cloak spills down, his blue armor is useless, and his bare legs are thrown skyward. His eyes are the only part of his face still visible, and they stare out of the canvas in pure disbelief. Above him stands Timoclea. One hand presses his knee and her other arm is hooked beneath his thigh. She wears a pearl at her ear and a dark crown of leaves in her hair. Her face holds the most astonishing thing in the picture: composure. She has a slight furrow and a steady gaze, the expression of a woman finishing a task. Cypresses rise against a storm sky. At the foot of the well, beside a copper jug, the painter has signed her name and the year.

The story comes from Plutarch. Alexander’s army sacked Thebes in 335 BC, and a Thracian captain raped Timoclea and then demanded her gold. She told him it was hidden in the garden well. When he leaned in to look, she pushed him down and stoned him to death. She was dragged before Alexander in chains and spoke with such fearless dignity that he set her and her children free.

Sirani was born in Bologna in 1638 and trained in the studio of her father, a follower of Guido Reni. When illness crippled his hands, she took over the workshop, supported the family, and opened a school for women artists, among the first in Europe outside a convent. Rumors held that a man must be painting her pictures, so she painted before audiences of visitors, finishing canvases as they watched. She made some two hundred paintings in about a decade and died in 1665 at twenty-seven. Bologna buried her beside Reni himself. Painters who took up Timoclea tended to linger on the assault or the trial. Sirani chose the moment of reckoning.

This week the country has been sitting with the horrific story coming out of Cornell University. A young student says (and we believe her) she was drugged and assaulted by seven male fraternity members over a span of hours in 2024. Her case ended without criminal charges and is only now being reopened, after she carried it into civil court. The rage of women (and men of good conscience) is collective, and palpable, and it is righteous. In an era when men just like the Cornell seven run the Department of Defense, sit on the the bench of the Supreme Court, and occupy the White House itself, our rage also needs somewhere to go.

Sirani understood that. I can’t tell you how much I need this painting right now. And I am giving it to all of you, for strength.

Sirani was a young woman in a world run by men, and she took an ancient fury and gave it form, discipline, and a signature. Her Timoclea is calm because the reckoning has at last arrived. Three hundred and sixty-seven years and millions upon millions of rapes later, the painting still does its important work. It holds the anger steady, and it reminds everyone that this story ends with her standing, and him dead.

Sleep well.

— Alisa 🔥

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Good night, dear readers.

Tonight’s good night is Rising Thunderhead, oil on canvas, by David Meikle.

A single butte stands in the last light, its stone flanks scored by ten thousand years of runoff, one face still warm with sun and the other already gone to shadow. Above it, and dwarfing it, a thunderhead climbs the sky — a great tower of cloud built tier on tier, its rounded shoulders lit from within to peach and rose and molten gold, its hollows cooling to lavender, the whole mass glowing like a lamp against the deepening blue. A slender spire keeps watch at the left. Along the horizon a last seam of sunlight burns behind the rock, and the piñon plain in the foreground has already surrendered to dusk. Two monuments share the frame — one of ancient stone, one of rising water and light — and the fleeting one is by far the more radiant.

Meikle was born in 1969 in Salt Lake City and has never truly left it, born and raised and rooted in the country whose light he has spent a lifetime chasing. Trained as a designer, he brought a designer’s clean sense of pattern and mass to the buttes, mesas, and enormous skies of the Colorado Plateau, and critics reach, rightly, for Maynard Dixon when they describe him — the same rich pigment, the same monumental calm. His images greet travelers on the “Welcome to Utah” signs at every border of the state. The satisfaction of the work, he has said, arrives only when he is painting something he feels a true connection to.

Here is the thing about a painter like this one, the thing I relate to as a writer and artist. A man like this could give his whole working life to a single stretch of high-desert light and grow more himself with every canvas — and that same man, set down in some greener, safer, easier country, would slowly go quiet inside, cut off from the one source that made him an artist at all. I have been circling this truth for months now. Going home to New Mexico may not be safe for me right now; I understand that better than anyone. Living anywhere else, though, carries another danger I have come to fear more — the slow drying-up of the creative well, the muse losing my address, the fatal distance that opens between a writer and the ground her voice grows out of. A person can be endangered by staying, and endangered, more quietly and more completely, by staying away. Given the choice, I have realized, and not without great agony, that I would rather stand in some danger at my source than stay safe and severed from it.

Sleep well.

— Alisa ⛰️

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I was listening to an audiobook about the life of Queen Isabella of Castile today — you know, Isabella? The mastermind of the Spanish Inquisition? The woman responsible for giving Christopher Columbus the money to do… that? Her. Anyway. I was minding my own business, driving across the United States, worried about all the things one worries about in the United States these days, when a redheaded monarch who has been dead since 1504 whispered through the rental car speakers and said, more or less: It’s cute the way you people think you invented this shit. For what it’s worth, I actually was driving through Columbus, Ohio, at that moment. So, yeah. No. We did not invent this shit. Isabella did. Or at least she perfected it.

La Reina Isabella, after whose reign the rules of chess were literally changed to make the Queen the most powerful piece on the board, had a point. And I had to pause the book and just kind of stare at the road for a while, which is how you know a history book is working. Frisson. And not the good kind.

What hit me was this: the Spanish Inquisition and the USA PATRIOT Act are the same goddamned thing. And the similarity isn’t as distant as I might previously have assumed. Yes, yes, I know. They were built five centuries apart. One burned at the stake humans the crown suspected of being secretly Jewish; it also burned “heretics,” a label so vague as to welcome almost anyone who got reported to authorities by someone who disliked them for any reason at all. The other is, as we speak, disappearing “illegals” and “terrorists” into brutal private prisons with no due process, with that word “terrorist” being constantly updated to include, as of last week, anyone who dares to protest the construction of an AI data center in their neighborhood. A new remix of the same idiot song.

The short version

• 1478: Queen Isabella of Spain won papal permission for an Inquisition that answered to the crown, aimed at conversos, Jewish converts suspected of not really meaning that whole “But I’m a Catholic, too” thing and still secretly being Jewish-ish. It ran on tips from anonymous accusers, a patriotic duty to denounce your neighbors, and paid for itself through the confiscated property of those it burned at the stake — meaning, incentivized brutality. It lasted until 1834.

• 2001: Forty-five days after 9/11, the USA PATRIOT Act passed the Senate 98 to 1. It brought secret court orders, gag orders, and the NSA’s bulk collection of Americans’ phone records. Section 802 wrote the federal definition of “domestic terrorism” that is still in use — and being expanded — today.

• 2025: President Trump, who has never met a loophole he couldn’t exploit monstrously, signed NSPM-7, an emergency “National Security Presidential Memo” directing the Justice Department, the Treasury, and the IRS, instructing them to target, pursue and punish people linked “directly or indirectly” to ideas that threaten him. Such people are now considered by the federal government to possess the potential for “terrorist criminality.” And that potential now justifies extreme trampling of their constitutional rights. Some of the ideas that speaking about can now get you arrested for in the United States include opposing the genocide in Gaza, protesting ICE brutality, being critical of capitalism, being critical of Christianity, and opposing data centers.

• Prairieland: After a July 4, 2025 protest at a Texas ICE facility where a police officer was shot, prosecutors brought the first federal material-support-for-terrorism case against alleged antifa members. Nine went to trial and were convicted, including one guy who wasn’t even there. Some were convicted of concealing documents, which according to The Intercept meant moving a box of anti-fascist zines from your closet to your mom’s house. One defendant was sentenced to 50 years.

• 2026, Spain, but the USA: James "Fergie" Chambers, a 41-year-old heir to the Cox media fortune and a longtime donor to Palestinian causes, was arrested in Ibiza on July 10 at the request of the U.S. Justice Department. He has been held in a Madrid prison ever since. Washington accuses him of money laundering, rioting, and conspiracy to riot, tied to 2023 pro-Palestinian protests and fund transfers to Tunisia. It is the first time the U.S. has sought extradition for allegedly supporting Hamas. On September 22, Spain's cabinet sent the request to the National Court, where he appears literally today to be asked whether he consents to extradition.

• 2026: Section 702 of FISA, the Patriot Act era’s heir, expired on June 12. The surveillance is being allowed to continue until March 2027 anyway.

What might all of this mean for the rest of us, as we head into what promises to be a tumultuous midterm election next month, in which the party to which the reigning murderous tyrant belongs is likely to lose — and he himself is all but guaranteed to refuse to accept the will of the people, and is equipped with All the Loopholes a Boy Like Him Could Ever Want?

History, in the form of the Spanish Inquisition, has given us some hints. Let’s take a look.

Paid subscribers get the full story below: the playbook lined up point by point, what really happened at Prairieland, how NSPM-7 grew out of the Patriot Act, Doña Teresa’s trial by the Spanish Inquisition in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and complete sourcing. As always, this section opens to everyone in one month.

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Good night, dear readers.

Tonight’s good night is Ascending Kachinas (1988), watercolor and gouache on paper, by Dan Namingha.

Forms rise through the frame like figures made of weather — katsinas, the spirit messengers of the Hopi, rendered not as costumed dancers but as presences, abstracted into planes of color and shadow that lift and dissolve as they climb. In Namingha’s vision the katsina and the cloud are one being: the ancestors return as rain, and the rain returns as blessing, and the whole exchange rises here in ochre and storm-blue, earth-pink and the white of high-desert light.

Namingha was born in Keams Canyon in 1950 and raised at Polacca on the Hopi mesas, in one of the most storied artistic lineages on the continent — great-great-grandson of the legendary potter Nampeyo, son of the potter Dextra Quotskuyva, an inheritor fifteen generations deep. He trained in Santa Fe and Chicago and turned, early, from realism toward an abstraction that could carry the sacred without exposing it. His subject has held steady across five decades: the mesa, the cloud people, the line between the seen world and the one standing unseen but felt, behind it.

Rain in the high desert is never an ordinary thing. It arrives as a visitation, dark walls of it walking across the plain on legs of microbursts and lightning, and everything green waits for it to come, the way the faithful wait for grace in the midst of an endless ache. To paint the rain as ancestors is to say the dead have not truly left — they have only changed form, and they come back when the land most needs them. It says our water is not a commodity; it is ourselves. This seems a gentle thing to carry into sleep as we rest to battle those who would strip the land of our water and our bones: to call upon the ones we have lost, the ones returning as weather, the ones who are tending to the ground we stand on, even as their dust unfolds below.

Sleep well.

— Alisa ☁️

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A quick note before we start. Starting with this story, The Pugilist has a new policy for investigations. The news stays free for everyone: the top of each story lays out the facts. Below the line, paid subscribers get the explanation, with the sourcing, the documents, and the deeper dive. After one month, the entire article becomes free for everyone, permanently. Your subscriptions pay for the weeks of digging behind every story, and make this newsletter possible

First, the news

Five days ago, Paramount Skydance settled with California and 11 other states that had sued to block its roughly $111 billion takeover of Warner Brothers Discovery. Pending court approval, that clears the way for one company, run by David Ellison, son of billionaire Zionist Oracle owner Larry Ellison, to own both CBS News and CNN. As part of the deal, which is counter to everything the founding fathers of this nation said about the free press in our own constitution, Paramount agreed to create an editorial independence board for the two newsrooms that is likely to be anything but.

An independence board is a lovely idea. But listen to me. Before we get misty-eyed about it, though, let’s look at what CBS has done with its independence over the last seventy years. This network has a dark history, and dark history, as you know, is my motherfucking love language.

What the record shows

• The Paley years. In the 1950s and ‘60s, CBS chairman William Paley let the network serve the CIA: cover jobs for Agency employees, newsfilm outtakes handed over, correspondents’ reports routinely monitored, and a private phone line from the president of CBS News to the Agency. That’s according to Carl Bernstein’s 1977 Rolling Stone investigation and CBS’s own internal review.

• The Tecolote years. From 1981 to 2007, CBS anchor Dan Rather co-owned a 9,150-acre ranch in San Miguel County, New Mexico, with Donald Rumsfeld. Rather interviewed Rumsfeld on 60 Minutes II in 2001 and 2003, while Rumsfeld ran the Pentagon.

• The Weiss years. In October 2025, Paramount bought The Free Press and made its founder, Bari Weiss, editor-in-chief of CBS News, reporting directly to David Ellison. Two months later, she held a 60 Minutes story on abuses at El Salvador's CECOT prison, the prison where the administration sent Venezuelan deportees, a day and a half before air. The story had been cleared by CBS lawyers and standards. Correspondent Sharyn Alfonsi called the decision political. In 2026, Weiss fired Alfonsi and Scott Pelley, who both accuse her of political interference. She and CBS deny it.

• The Ellison years. Overlapping with the Weiss years. In July 2025, Paramount paid $16 million to settle a lawsuit Trump filed over a 60 Minutes edit. Three weeks later, Trump’s FCC approved the Skydance merger, after Skydance promised a CBS ombudsman for bias complaints and an end to DEI. Since then, a new editor-in-chief who reports directly to Ellison has held a 60 Minutes story critical of the administration, and two veteran correspondents who accused her of political interference have been fired. She and CBS deny any political motive.

Different decades, different owners, same pattern: when the people who own CBS need something from the people in power, the journalism pays the price.

Below, for paid subscribers: the documents, the pay phone, the ranch, and the complication that makes the Rather story far more interesting than a spy novel. As always, the full piece goes free for everyone in 30 days.

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Good night, dear readers.

Tonight’s good night is Bolts of a Storm, oil on canvas, by Ed Mell.

A desert storm breaks in hard, sharp geometry — thunderheads folded into planes like cut stone, a sky pushed from bruised violet to burning amber. There’s lightning zipping down in bright angular bolts that might have been drawn with a straightedge. Mell strips the storm to its raw structure and somehow makes it more electric for the stripping, the whole sky a single charged engine of weather, beautiful and a little dangerous, exactly as the real thing is. The work is abstract yet so precise you can smell the petrichor and hear the booming echoes of thunder on canyon.

Mell was born in Phoenix in 1942 and trained as an illustrator, working the New York advertising world before a summer teaching art on the Hopi reservation turned him back toward the desert for good. He spent the next four decades inventing what he called desert modernism — the mesas, longhorns, cactus flowers and monsoon skies of the Southwest reduced to bold, faceted, almost sculptural form. He died in 2024, an Arizona legend, having taught a whole region to see its own hard light more clearly. Drama, he believed, is simply what the natural world does in the desert southwest; the work was his attempt to distill it.

The desert monsoon storm is one of the great and glorious goddess spectacles left on this earth. It gathers all afternoon, towering and theatrical, and then it arrives — the temperature crashing, the creosote suddenly perfuming the entire world, the dry arroyos running within minutes. It frightens and it cleanses in a single stroke. A storm like this one asks to be met head-on rather than fled, and there is a particular kind of courage in standing on the porch to watch it come.

Sleep well.

— Alisa ⚡

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Good night, dear readers.

Tonight’s good night is Topiary (2023), mixed media on canvas, by Emmi Whitehorse.

Soft, breathed-on color — dusk golds, watered greens, a blush of mesa orange— drifts across the surface like weather seen from very far above, or from very close up in the grass. Floating through it are small drawn marks, glyph-like, half-legible: a curl that might be a seed pod, a stroke that might be a bird or a blade or a bone, signs that hover between writing and pure sensation. The picture names nothing outright; everything in it is felt, familiar and in motion.

Whitehorse was born in Crownpoint in 1957 and raised on open land near Chaco Canyon, New Mexico, in a Navajo-speaking, sheep-herding family, her first and greatest teacher a grandmother who wove. She earned her degrees at the University of New Mexico and helped define contemporary Native abstraction, insisting that Indigenous art need not be literal to be true. Her paintings, layered in oil and pastel and pencil, hold to the Diné philosophy of hózhó — walking in beauty, the harmony of all things. Her work, she has said, tells the story of knowing land over time.

Knowing a place over time is a different thing from seeing it. Anyone can look at a landscape; only long love turns it into this — a weather of the interior, a map with no roads, the memory of ground held so closely it stops being a view and becomes a state of the soul. Home, when it finally soaks all the way in, looks — or should I say feels? — less like a photograph than like this.

Sleep well.

— Alisa 🌾

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Good night, dear readers.

Tonight’s good night is The Emergence of the Clowns (1988), fired clay, by Roxanne Swentzell.

They come up out of the earth into the light of the world — four koshare, the sacred clowns of Pueblo life, striped and bare and utterly alive. Each face carries its own mood: one wondering, one wary, one delighted, one caught mid-thought, so that the four together read like a single soul meeting existence for the first time and feeling everything at once. Swentzell built them by hand in the ancient way, coil laid patiently on coil, hollow all the way through, the technique of her grandmothers’ pots turned to the shapes of the human spirit.

Swentzell was born in Taos, New Mexico, in 1962, into one of the great artistic lineages of Santa Clara Pueblo — a line of potters and sculptors that runs back through her mother and forward into her own daughter. As a small child with a speech impediment, she could not form words, and so she made little clay figures to say what her mouth could not; clay, she has said, was her first language. She has spent a lifetime speaking it, coiling human beings out of river mud with a tenderness that reaches Native and non-Native viewers alike.

The clown, in the Puebloan tradition, holds a strange and holy office. He or she is the one permitted to be foolish, to feel too much, to hold a mirror up to the whole community and let it laugh at what it sees, part court jester, part teacher, and part therapist. To emerge into the world as a clown is to arrive without armor or pretense, with no illusions of perfection, tender-side out, radically honest, flawed, human, and ready to move and be moved. There are worse ways to begin again than to come up into the light where you might be seen a fool by some and a sage by other; feel everything; to let the old need for dignity go, replaced by radical acceptance of our shared humanity.

Sleep well.

— Alisa 🤍

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We begin this story in a limousine in Chicago, early 1982. The showy car has just collected a load of important scientists for some event, and the beleaguered driver is reading their names over the radio to dispatch — long, difficult, foreign names, which he is cheerfully mangling. After each botchery of name, a loud voice pipes up from the back: it’s said this way, followed by the name, pronounced perfectly (in the mind of its speaker, anyway) and with great flourish. The driver awkwardly corrects course, but it’s not good enough; the voice corrects him again. And again. And again. By the third or fourth name the man behind the wheel is visibly, quietly furious, perhaps frustrated that the Name Wizard in the back is going to make them all late with his insistence. Another scientist leans over to the corrector and murmurs that he might want to let it go. When they arrive at their destination, the corrector turns to that passenger, wounded and genuinely puzzled, and asks: Why did you say that? It had honestly not occurred to him that a stranger might simply not care about getting the names right.

That demanding voice in the back seat belonged to Murray Gell-Mann, and he had just won, thirteen years earlier, the Nobel Prize in Physics. He was the man who’d built the modern map of matter, and to describe him as peculiar would be correct and gentle. He was obsessed with words, names in particular. He discovered and named the “quark,” having decided kwerk was a fitting poetry for the thing, but soon thereafter running across “quark” in a book, as a bit of synchronicity; so he lifted the word from a line in Finnegans Wake. He could reconstruct the etymology of every surname in that limousine but could not feel the human being three feet away losing his mind.

Murray Gell-Mann could read the universe. But he couldn’t read a room to save his life.

And that, my friends, made him the perfect mark for a sociopathic predator like Jeffrey Epstein.

Epstein was introduced to Gell-Mann in Santa Fe, New Mexico, by another sociopath, Ghislaine Maxwell, who had been introduced to him by her own father, Robert Maxwell, a spy for Israeli military intelligence who plausibly groomed her to continue that work in his absence.

Gell-Mann’s own admiring biographer, George Johnson, titled the book Strange Beauty and filled it with a man of towering gifts and matching insecurity — arrogant on the surface, fragile underneath, a collector of rare and beautiful things who needed, badly, to be admired.

Gell-Mann was in Santa Fe because it was there, in the shadow of Los Alamos National Laboratories, the cradle of the atomic bomb, that he co-founded with other scientists the Santa Fe Institute in 1984 to build a desert kingdom of ideas.

In Jeffrey Epstein’s own telling, he came to Santa Fe for the scientists. He bought Zorro Ranch — better than seven thousand acres of high desert south of the capital — in 1993, and he liked to credit the pull of the minds up the road at the Institute as his reason. But really, he didn’t come for the scientists, plural. He came for one. Murray Gell-Mann. This is made clear by the files and by reporting of the Santa Fe New Mexican.

Epstein funded Gell-Mann’s research, and Gell-Mann hung out with Epstein at the ranch and on his island. As early as the 1994, in the preface to his book The Quark and the Jaguar, Gell-Mann thanked Epstein by name for a donation to the Institute that supported his work.

The Institute has publicly acknowledged $275,000 in Epstein donations. The financial records in the federal files so far released put the real figure at no less than $680,000, however. In 2003, the Institute’s current president, David Krakauer, personally rode out to Zorro Ranch alongside Gell-Mann

Epstein’s time in prison for sex trafficking was not a deal-breaker for Gell-Mann, nor for the Santa Fe Institute. After Epstein’s 2008 conviction in Florida, Gell-Mann still took twenty-five thousand dollars directly from Epstein in 2010, and sent him an email saying he hoped Epstein’s life had “returned to normal.”

Another email in the files, from July 2010, shows Epstein coaching someone angling for an audience with Gell-Mann: tell him you know “he likes beautiful women… he will like that.”

To be clear, Gell-Mann is accused of no crime. What that email shows is Epstein controlling Gell-Mann. It could be Here’s how to disarm him by reminding him, unbeknownst to you, that I have dirt on him. Or it could be Here’s how to flatter him into getting what you want.

Again and again, this was Epstein’s method: Find powerful, narcissistic men with access to things Epstein and his associates wanted, identify the underlying insecurities (narcissists always have them, it is the foundation of the disorder), then make them feel better in ways that counteract that core wound.

And because Epstein was almost exclusively manipulating narcissistic men, their core wounds, traceable to early caregivers, often manifested in adulthood as sexual insecurity and a deep-seated fear of women that most often showed up as rage.

Basically, Epstein was the cool guy friend from high school that guys like Gell-Mann never had, bathing them in validation, assuring them that of course hot young chicks would dig them, they were brilliant/powerful/rich/whatever. And through the cool guy friend they never had, they’d meet the hot girls who never gave them a second look in high school. Epstein reduced these men to the age at which most of them had been stunted: adolescence. That’s the part of the teen pedophilia that gets left out of the Epstein conversations. Epstein knew that “great” men who seek endless adulation and power are really just insecure stunted boys with poor coping skills, resentment and entitlement.

This was the flypaper onto which Epstein walked men like Murray Gell-Mann.

The files show that Epstein ran the identical play across the academy: a Yale computer scientist describing an undergraduate to him as a “good-looking blonde,” a Harvard biologist sending him unpublished research before it saw print. A mathematician quoted in the coverage called that depth of donor entanglement in live science “unheard of.” With Epstein, it was the norm. He did not just charm and manipulate women. He charmed and manipulated the men he would later lead to abuse them, likely collecting compromising video in secret, to use against them with simple statements like: Jeffrey wanted me to tell you I know you like beautiful women.

Epstein arrived at the loneliest seam of Gell-Mann’s life. The physicist had been widowed in 1981, when his beloved first wife, accomplished Princeton archeologist J. Margaret Dow, died of cancer. He once joked that he’d had to marry her, because only English women could cope with the likes of him.

Gell-Mann spent more than a decade alone after that, before Epstein’s world found him in the early nineties. He met his second wife in 1992, famed poet Marcia Southwick, and the marriage lasted ten years before they divorced.

The warmest moments the files preserve between Gell-Mann and Epstein come at the ends of his marriages, when he is loneliest and most vulnerable. This is probably no mistake. Epstein was ruthless in his predation.

But why? Why did Epstein target Gell-Mann? And why did he do it in New Mexico?

The answer is easy: The Santa Fe Institute is a direct offshoot of the Los Alamos weapons complex, and Epstein, like Robert Maxwell before him, like wanted (or had been instructed to want) to get ahold of nuclear weapons science.

Notably, as soon as Gell-Mann got his PhD at age 21 (I know, I know), he was invited by J. Robert Oppenheimer to join him in 1951 at his Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton. Make of this what you will.

The Santa Fe Institute’s founders were weapons-lab men — a Manhattan Project chemist, a bomb physicist, the lab’s theoretical chiefs. Gell-Mann himself, though his own physics was unclassified, spent the 1960s inside JASON, the elite circle of physicists who advised the Pentagon on how to wage the Cold War.

The New Mexico world Epstein bought into was braided, at the root, into American nuclear and military science. He came to New Mexico to charm and cultivate military scientists in the immediate wake of the Cold War. And his main target was the easiest among them to manipulate, Murray Gell-Mann.

Ghislaine Maxwell has testified that she introduced Epstein to Gell-Mann and the Institute, and the Institute’s own early records suggest the Maxwell tie to Gell-Mann predates Ghislaine and ran through her father — Robert Maxwell, the media baron whose Israeli-intelligence connections are well attested, whose 1991 Jerusalem funeral was eulogized by a sitting prime minister and attended by a row of spy chiefs. The conduit into that weapons-adjacent world was a family with documented intelligence provenance. Robert Maxwell was among the Institute’s first donors.

Here’s where it gets interesting, though. Like, really interesting. Gell-Mann’s closest scientific counterpart was an Israeli named Yuval Ne’eman, who independently and simultaneously discovered the particle framework that helped win Gell-Mann the Nobel. The two stayed in close contact for the length of their careers, updating their joint book together as late as 2000.

Ne’eman was not only a physicist. He transitioned from an acclaimed career in physics and military intelligence to become a prominent figure in right-wing Israeli politics during the late 1970s. Co-founding the ultra-Zionist Tehiya party in 1979 in fierce opposition to the Camp David Accords and the return of the Sinai Peninsula to Egypt, he advocated strongly for Israeli nationalism and the expansion of West Bank settlements. Ne'eman served as a Member of the Knesset from 1981 to 1992 and held key cabinet positions, including becoming Israel's first Minister of Science and Development in 1982, and later serving as the Minister of Energy and Infrastructure from 1990 to 1992.

Yuval Ne'eman utilized his prominence in global physics and government to advocate for Soviet Refusenik weapons scientists barred from emigrating by the USSR, applying pressure through international conferences and a 1990 meeting with Mikhail Gorbachev. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, he used his influence at Tel Aviv University to secure academic placements and research grants for these scientists upon their migration to Israel.

Meaning, if there were a bridge between and among Los Alamos National Labs, the Soviet Union’s nuclear labs, and Israel, it was Gell-Mann’s longtime associate, Ne’eman.

The correspondence between Ne’eman and Gell-Mann, spanning 1961 to 1990, sits catalogued today in the Gell-Mann Papers at Caltech. Gell-Mann kept a standing, decades-long, personal line into the world of physics, weapons, and foreign intelligence that this whole New Mexico/Epstein/Zorro Ranch story I’ve been piecing together for the past eight months orbits.

Here is what I think, offered as hypothesis only and labeled as hypothesis, because I cannot prove it and I suspect no one ever will and live to tell about it. I think Gell-Mann was seen — by Epstein, and perhaps by those who aimed Epstein at him — as an easy mark: a great genius but also a lonely and socially naive man whose vanity was a lever and whose address book was a skeleton key to the American scientific-security elite. I think the long Maxwell project, begun by the father and inherited by the daughter, was to establish and hold open a flow of access out of exactly these rooms, on behalf of foreign intelligence — most plausibly Israel, and possibly, later, others. And I think elements of our own government (federal and local in New Mexico) understood some version of this and chose to look away, because looking away was, and remains, a rewarding passtime in this matter. Now, of course, there would be nothing odd about passing our nation’s top military secrets and weapons to Israel; in fact, it is United States policy as of this year, to legally fuse American and Israeli military and intelligence interests. I believe the same pressure that made that happen illegally in the Epstein era has been leveraged to turn it into law.

As I said, I will not document any of this to the standard I hold my facts to, and I know this leads to lots of people trying to discredit me by saying I’m an alarmist or a conspiracist. All I’m doing is telling you what the pattern points toward for me, and I am telling you, plainly, that it is belief. It’s not that I couldn’t document it, exactly. It’s that I won’t. Because the very act of trying to document this would probably have some severe consequences I do not wish to find out. So let’s just say, sure, I’m a conspiracy theorist, a tin hat foil gal, a jackass.

What is not ridiculous belief is this: The man who held the door open for Jeffrey Epstein in New Mexico was a Nobel laureate whose insecurity and need for admiration were for sale, whose institute took his benefactor’s money and cannot or will not say how much, and whose successor — the man deciding, right now, what that institute will hand the state’s Epstein truth commission — once rode out to the ranch beside him, to visit a man who liked to tell strangers that Jeffrey said to tell you I know you like beautiful women, shorthand for you owe Jeffrey, do what I need you to do. That institute is among those the commission has subpoenaed. What we do not know yet is whether the commission, which has its own issues not with corruption because of Andrea Romero, will ask the right questions or, like me perhaps, decide it might not be worth your life to do a thing like that.

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Good night, dear readers.

Tonight’s good night is Chima Altar III (1992), carved and painted wood with metal, glass beads, string, and nails, by Luis Tapia.

Tapia has carved the entire dashboard, and view through the windshield of an old pickup truck driving through the stunning landscape near the holy pilgrimage site of Chimayó, and he’s made of it an altar. Orange carved fans crown the two windshield panels like the shell-tops of a colonial retablo, above a scalloped red valance where a lowrider would string its velvet curtains. Through the orange-framed glass a New Mexico highway runs straight out across the high desert — piñon dotting the pale ground, blue mountains waiting at the horizon, a green road sign, a sky scrubbed clean. From the rearview mirror hangs a rosary, and set into the mirror, where a driver would meet his own eyes, is the Eye of God in its triangle, watching the road ahead. Two small santos ride the dashboard, Santa María in rose and San Francisco in blue, keeping watch over the miles. The steering wheel is a crown of thorns, its spikes made of real nails, closed around a cross and a flaming Sacred Heart — the wheel a body must grip in both hands to drive.

Tapia was born in 1950 in Agua Fría, a village outside Santa Fe and one of the oldest Hispano communities in this country. He taught himself the four-hundred-year-old art of the santero, the New Mexican maker of saints, and then did the braver thing and refused to let it fossilize, carrying the tradition into jail cells and across borders and onto the dashboards of oldies trocas. The Chima Altars — he made about six — come from a memory of his mother’s car, the little saints she kept on the dash, the rosaries swaying from the mirror. “Chima” is Chimayó, the old town in the northern hills where the faithful still walk for miles to reach a room of holy earth. His santos now stand in the Smithsonian; this one, fittingly, stayed home, in the collection of the Albuquerque Museum. In 2023 the nation named him a National Heritage Fellow.

Every drive through New Mexico is a small pilgrimage, and every dashboard an altar to whoever we are asking to see us home. The saints propped on the dash, the beads on the mirror, the burning heart gripped hard in both hands on the wheel — these are the plain equipment of people who have always known the road is dangerous and gone down it anyway, protected by nothing but faith and one another. The way home has never once been safe. Setting out regardless, saints riding shotgun, is close to the whole of the courage available to us.

Sleep well.

— Alisa 📿

On Sunday, ICE shot another normal working man with no criminal record, and they shot him in the back as he sat in his car in Austin. By his lawyer’s account he was Wilber Rafael Garces Perez, a DoorDash driver who entered the country legally from Venezuela, a country people leave mostly because they hate socialism and love capitalism. He was 28 years old and unarmed, in the middle of making a delivery when the bullets came through the door of the vehicle he loved posing proudly with on his Facebook page. The car that said “Look, mom! I made it!” And the state had a hand in his shooting: ICE phoned Texas’s own troopers for help chasing the car down, something that would have been illegal until the Trump regime decided to make it legal. In photos on his social media pages, Wilber is chubby, awkward in front of a camera he hopes will find him cool.

I’m sure racists will say the ubiquitous two-finger pose he pulls in many of the photos looks like he’s throwing gang signs, but they’d be wrong. The two-finger thing is really common among goofy, insecure young men in Venezuela who want to look cool like guys in a reggaeton video, a hallmark of the Farandi youth movement there, a fashion-obsessed pop culture and social media thing. He looks hopeful in his Texas life photos, in the way of all immigrants who just want to find peace and stability somewhere better than where they were. The braces on his teeth break me. This is a kid. In one photo, he’s posing with an academic medal around his neck and a proud mom taking the selfie. In other pictures, he’s holding a baby. I don’t know if it’s his. I do know he has a big and happy-looking family that takes lots of photos at Christmas.

It is horrible, what is happening in the United States right now. I’m sick of it. The racist ICE attacks on people who like the sweet, awkward young men in my own family. The attacks on their allies, who look like people in other people’s families. Ordinary people. And it is becoming ordinary for ICE to pull masks over their faces and shoot them and then disappear.

Since the deportation surge began in early 2025, federal immigration agents have shot more than twenty people — killing at least six, three of them U.S. citizens — and nearly every one of those shootings involved an agent firing at someone in a car. There is no official tally; the government doesn’t keep one. That number comes from journalists and researchers maintaining a running count, and it climbs with each new incident. Wilber is the newest line on it.

It also made me grateful to be a New Mexican. Right next door to Texas, the Democrats who run my home state, while certainly imperfect and corrupt in lots of ways, have done some good things, including spending this year making sure that in New Mexico, unlike Texas, no law enforcement officer — state or local — can be enlisted to help ICE do anything. The state passed a law that says so, and they are defending it in court against a president who wants it dead the way he wants all brown people dead.

But is that law going to be enough to keep ICE from eventually shooting someone in New Mexico, too?

The short and unfortunate answer is no. And we all need to brace for it.

New Mexico has done more than almost any state to pull itself away from ICE, but it might not be enough to stop their violence from leaking over onto our turf. The Immigrant Safety Act — House Bill 9 — bars every public body in the state from contracting to detain people on civil immigration charges, ends the agreements that let local police act as federal immigration agents, and forbids handing over public land for detention. Every piece of it is New Mexico withdrawing its own people, its own resources, its own cooperation.

None of it touches the federal agent, the federal vehicle, or the federal gun. A state has no authority to govern how a federal officer conducts a federal operation, and New Mexico’s own lawyers say exactly that in court. In defending HB9 against a Justice Department lawsuit, Attorney General Raúl Torrez, who is famously suing Trump’s DOJ over non-release of the Epstein files, has been blunt: the state gets to decide how the state’s resources are used, and no more. The federal government stays free to run its agents, build its own facilities, and sign its own contracts here.

ICE proved the point within weeks. When HB9 threatened to close the detention centers in Cibola and Torrance counties, the agency simply signed a direct contract with CoreCivic, the private company that runs them, and cut the counties out entirely. The machine doesn’t need New Mexico’s help to operate here — so taking New Mexico’s help away doesn’t stop it.

Which means a shooting like Sunday’s is not something New Mexico law forecloses. Picture it on Central Avenue in Albuquerque instead of Research Boulevard in Austin. HB9 changes exactly one thing: no New Mexico officer arrives to help. That may lower the odds at the margins, but is not a shield against this encroaching authoritarian violence.

So. If the law can’t stop ICE shootings from eventually poisoning New Mexico, too, what can we do to protect people? More than you’d think — as long as we’re honest that none of it is a force field either. Here is what actually helps.

1. Know your rights, and carry them. Everyone in this country has constitutional rights regardless of immigration status. You have the right to remain silent — you do not have to answer questions about where you were born or how you entered. You do not have to open your door unless agents show a warrant signed by a judge, with a court’s name on it; an ICE “administrative warrant” (Form I-200 or I-205) is signed by an ICE officer, not a judge, and does not authorize them to enter your home. You can refuse to consent to a search, and you never have to sign anything without a lawyer. Get a wallet-sized rights card and, better, a Know Your Rights training. The New Mexico Immigrant Law Center offers both: (505) 247-1023.

2. Make a plan before you need one. Decide now who cares for your children if you’re detained, and put it in writing — a caregiver authorization or power of attorney. Memorize a hotline and a lawyer’s number, because your phone may be taken. Learn your A-number and keep your documents where a trusted person can reach them. Panic is easier to prevent than to calm.

3. Save the hotline. Report ICE activity. New Mexico’s statewide rapid-response line, NM Migra Watch, is (844) 363-1423, ext. 102 — answered by NM Dream Team members in Albuquerque, Monday through Friday, 6 a.m. to 9 p.m. Call to report an enforcement action or to get a lawyer referral for someone who’s been detained. Put it in your phone today.

4. If you witness ICE, document it — safely. In public, you have the right to record immigration agents, as long as you keep a safe distance and don’t interfere. Note the time, the place, the agency, and any badge or vehicle markings. If someone is being taken, ask their name and a phone number for their family, and call the hotline. And verify before you spread anything — rumor and false alarms do ICE’s work for it; accurate, reported information protects people.

5. Hold up the people already doing this work. Rapid-response networks need volunteers, including U.S. citizens who can serve as accompaniment — going with someone to a check-in or a hearing so they’re not alone. Legal-aid groups and community bond and legal funds need money. The New Mexico Immigrant Law Center and the NM Dream Team are places to start.

6. Press the people with power. This is the part that reaches the gap the law can’t close. Because the danger is federal, the fight is civic: demand that state and local officials defend HB9 in court and enforce it fully, back the proposals to bar ICE agents from wearing masks and to keep them away from schools, clinics, and churches, and keep showing up and voting. An armed federal agent answers to no one in New Mexico — which means public pressure and the ballot are the only leverage a New Mexican has on him. Use them.

New Mexico drew a line its government won’t cross. The rest of that line — the watching, the documenting, the showing up for each other — isn’t the state’s to hold. It’s ours.

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Though I offer my news and analysis for free, these personal journal entries to my readers and friends are paywalled to minimize unwanted trolling. If you want to connect more deeply with me, please consider becoming a paid subscriber. The cost is just $7 a month and includes all my journal entries and letters, as well as paid-only livestreams. Before complaining about the paywall, please bear in mind that it is only through the support of paid subscribers that I am able to produce this newsletter at all. Thank you!

Dear Friends,

Thank you. I mean that. It is not easy to stand by someone through six months of drama and chaos, and most of you have. I want you to know I felt it.

When I started reading the Epstein files in January, I was a loyal and fairly naive progressive Democrat. I believed, as I’d been told to believe, that the New Mexico Truth Commission wanted the truth — wanted to understand why Epstein was never stopped by anyone with power in this state. I expected a bad seed or two. I expected them to be on the other side.

They weren’t all on the other side. That is the part that gutted me, and if you’ve read this newsletter faithfully you’ve watched it happen to me in real time. Go back a year and you’ll find me cheerleading — praising the Governor’s social programs, comparing her to Norway, suggesting she run for president. You’ll find me making a little endorsement video, defending people I have since had to report on. I championed them. Then I read the record, and the record did not care who I’d championed. Telling the truth about your own side is a particular kind of heartbreak. I told it anyway. That is the only thing a journalist is actually for.

Once I turned my attention to the corruption in my own party, the party decided I should stop. It began with calls to my friends — pressure passed through people close to me rather than to my face. Then came things harder to write down without sounding like I’ve lost the plot: cars where cars shouldn’t be, the sense of being watched, and a stretch of physical symptoms that frightened me badly enough that I made plans to leave the country. I’ll say only that I know how that reads, and I know what I experienced.

The plan was Spain or Mexico — with my son, and with my father, and my mother to follow. It wasn’t only about safety. My father’s memory care had become something we could not sustain much longer, and countries like Spain and Mexico offer extraordinary care at a fraction of the American price. I had power of attorney, signed while he was still himself, and he was glad to come. He favored Mexico. As a Cuban, he called the Spaniards unos comemierdas — full of themselves, he meant, and rotten about Latin America — with a hand gesture I will not soon forget.

So we did the enormous work of leaving. But now, we are coming back. Here’s why.

Read more

Good night, dear readers.

Tonight’s good night is A Longing for What Once Was by William Haskell, of Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Two dark and agitated pines rise from the windswept grass like green flames, twisting upward with a life of their own. Behind them the clouds pile into carved masses, great and pale, like sandstone cliffs tumbling across a deep teal heaven laced with wind. A ribbon of sunset fire burns along the dark line of mountains. The hills roll gold and verdant toward a red territorial-style adobe house set on a rise, its door a dark and yawning hole. A blue river threads back through orange banks, winding towards a long-ago home.

Haskell was born in Wisconsin in 1963, a Midwestern boy who came to New Mexico for the reason so many artists have — the light, the surreal color, the way the land here refuses to be ordinary. He took up his drybrush technique as a teenager and never set it down, taming acrylic and watercolor into something dense and luminous and entirely his own. Once an advertising illustrator, he turned to fine art when computers began doing the work his hand had done, and he has spent the decades since painting the villages, the adobe, the mesas, the rural country being swallowed by the sprawl of the new. Andrew Wyeth lives in his lineage, and Thomas Hart Benton, and even a little Dalí. He keeps people out of this frame on purpose, leaving instead a house, a structure, a human footprint, so that the presence is felt rather than shown. A painting, he has said, is a story. And the story of this one is the things we leave behind, or are taken from, that call us back, even in a storm. Maybe more fiercely in a storm.

I met him once. Haskell. I sent an email through his website and asked, half certain he would refuse, whether he might sit down for a coffee and let me listen to him talk about how he makes what he makes — because he is one of those rare artists who takes the thing we have seen a million times and shows it to us as though for the first time. I do this. Ask artists of all kinds to talk to me about what they do. I used to do it for a living as a features writer for The Boston Globe, but these days I do it because I want to connect with creatives while they still walk the earth. I want to watch their eyes dance as they talk about what they do and why they do it, because it’s so close to the Creator, that passion. Haskell agreed, and we met in downtown Santa Fe. He was quiet, courteous, a true cowboy and gentleman, shy at the start about putting his process into words for a curious stranger. Then something loosened, and he began, and I sat mesmerized while the whole vision of his seeing opened in front of me.

Tonight the title is doing its slow work on me. A longing for what once was. In a matter of days I am going home — back to New Mexico, after months away, after being driven from the only ground my spirit has ever fully recognized as belonging to. Flight, I have learned, does not suit me. I was born to fight.

There is a small red house at the end of every New Mexico river I have ever loved, and all those rivers are endangered now. If they can’t run, nor should I. My river is the Rio Grande in Valencia County, being sucked dry by Meta, Amazon, trash corporations raping the land. The road bends back toward it now, as it bends back to the parents I had to leave behind, all of us vulnerable as little rivers in the desert. I intend to follow the road back, and this time, to stand together on the banks of the acequias, and scream.

Sleep well.

— Alisa 🏠

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Sometimes, here at The Pugilist, we enjoy being the ones to say, “I told you so.” And this is one such time.

For the first time this election cycle, a nonpartisan public poll shows Democrat Gina Hinojosa leading Republican Gov. Greg Abbott in the race for Texas governor, part of a broader ReconMR/Siena survey that found Democrats ahead in three of the state’s four marquee contests.

The poll, released Sept. 17, put Hinojosa up 4 points over Abbott, 49 percent to 45 percent — the first survey of the cycle to give the progressive Democratic state representative a lead over the three-term far-right incumbent. In July, the same pollster had Abbott ahead by a single point, and in June it showed him up 6.

Hinojosa’s advantage was powered by independents, who backed her 65 percent to 27 percent — a dramatic swing from the pollster’s earlier surveys. Her favorability also climbed to 48-27 percent, up from 43-25 in July, while Abbott carried an underwater 45-53 favorability rating that mirrored his job-approval numbers.

Democrats lead down the ballot

The governor’s race was not the only bright spot for Texas Democrats. In the U.S. Senate contest, Democrat James Talarico led Republican Ken Paxton 49 percent to 43 percent — the 15th of the last 16 released polls to show Talarico ahead.

In the lieutenant governor’s race, Democratic state Sen. Vikki Goodwin held a one-point edge over longtime Republican incumbent Dan Patrick, 47 to 46 percent.

The lone statewide race in the survey where a Republican led was for attorney general, and even there the margin was razor-thin: Republican state Sen. Mayes Middleton led Democratic state Sen. Nathan Johnson by a single point, 45 to 44 percent.

Context and caveats

The numbers are notable given the sheer financial mismatch. Abbott has spent roughly $39 million over the past year against Hinojosa’s $3 million, and he entered 2026 with more than $105 million in cash on hand.

Democrats also have history working against them. The party has not won a Texas gubernatorial election since 1990, when Ann Richards captured the office. And Texas voters remain skeptical of the viability of the shift the poll suggests, likely due to longstanding blatant corruption in the state’s Republican party: even as they narrowly favored Hinojosa, 62 percent said they expected Abbott to win, and nearly a third of Hinojosa’s own supporters believed he would ultimately prevail.

The survey polled 614 likely voters from Sept. 8 to 11 and carried a margin of error of plus or minus 4.3 percentage points — wide enough that the leads in the governor, lieutenant governor and attorney general races all fall within or near it. The general election is set for Nov. 3, 2026.

A note from THE PUGILIST

None of this should surprise regular readers of The Pugilist. In February 2025, this newsletter (then called Alisa Writes) argued that the next real populist revolution would begin in Texas — not in the coastal strongholds where each party keeps its most reliable voters busy with culture-war theater, but in the one big state where working people of every race, party, and zip code still have to live and work alongside one another.

And a year ago, when Gina Hinojosa launched her campaign, I made the case in “The Mama Bear Who’ll Save Texas” that she was the candidate who could actually do it — a public-school mom who got into politics because her son’s elementary school was closing due to privatization of public education under Abbott, running straight at Abbott’s most self-inflicted wound: the school vouchers he forced through against the will of his own rural and suburban base. “Welfare for the wealthy,” she called them. Affordability and schools are precisely the issues on which this week’s poll shows Texans breaking her way.

Be sure to like, comment, share and subscribe for more prescient political analysis. You may also leave a one-time or recurring tip in any amount. Just four $25 tips per day keep me writing full-time. Thanks!

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