Dear Readers:
We’ve got a fantastic roundup of clips for you this week. First, video correspondent Landry Ayres reports on the FBI’s recent raid on the Ohio Organizing Collaborative, a group whose entire job is registering voters. More than 100 federal agents descended on five Ohio cities in a single day, in some cases without warrants, to chase down fraud allegations that Ohio’s own track record shows are almost never substantiated.
Next up is a clip from senior editor Andy Craig’s recent conversation with Boston University law professor Jed Shugerman on the Supreme Court’s birthright citizenship ruling—and the gap between what everyone expected and what the court delivered. (Their full conversation, which is full of really valuable insights and expertise, is here).
In our third clip, editor-in-chief Shikha Dalmia powerfully conveys, drawing on her experience as an immigrant in this country, what being an American means to her.
But wait, there’s more! We also have a bonus clip from an upcoming episode of The Reconstruction Agenda that you won’t want to miss. That’s right—tomorrow, Craig’s conversation with political scientist Lee Drutman drops. We give you a teaser of this excellent convo below.
For more videos from The UnPopulist, go here: YouTube, TikTok, Instagram.
1) Trump’s FBI Raids an Ohio Voter-Registration Group
More than 100 federal agents showed up at the homes and offices of Ohio Organizing Collaborative staff and volunteers—a group whose only job is helping people register to vote. Some agents came without warrants; by one board member’s account, they even followed staffers’ kids to school.
They had a pretext, of course—but that’s all it was. The office had filed 1,200 fraud referrals from Ohio’s secretary of state for allegedly registering noncitizens to vote, which seems serious. But the state’s own track record tells a different story: a previous batch of 621 referrals over a decade produced just nine indictments.
In our roundup’s first video, Ayres connects the dots to explain why this is part of Trump’s broader vote-suppression agenda.
2) The Birthright Citizenship Ruling Should Never Have Been Close
Oral arguments in the birthright-citizenship case left experts expecting a lopsided ruling, somewhere between 7-2 and 9-0. Birthright citizenship is, after all, straightforwardly constitutional. Instead, it came down 5-4—prompting Shugerman, an esteemed law professor, to ask what the justices were listening to, if not the arguments everyone else heard.
The 5-4 framing is also a bit misleading, he notes, since Justice Kavanaugh didn’t actually dissent—he agreed the executive order was invalid, just by a different route, which makes his opinion a concurrence by any first-year law student’s standard. That he insisted on calling it a dissent anyway, Shugerman argues, tells you exactly who he’s performing for: not the court, but the anti-birthright-citizenship wing of MAGA.
3) What America’s 250th Means to an Immigrant
In our third clip, Dalmia notes that by Vice President JD Vance’s own framing, a “heritage American” descended from Revolutionary War soldiers would outrank a naturalized citizen like her. But she argues that an outsider’s vantage point reveals American virtues easy to miss if you’ve never known anything else.
Her larger point cuts against a common assumption: America isn’t great because it draws the best people from around the world, but because its freedom from tyranny and hierarchy draws the best out of people, native-born and immigrant alike. (It also drew the best out of Dalmia’s photography skills—the backdrop is no Zoom filter; it’s a photo she herself took!)
One Last Thing … A Sneak Peek
We promised you a bonus, so here it is! The following clip is actually a preview of our upcoming episode tomorrow in which Craig sits down with the brilliant political scientist Lee Drutman to talk about why our politics increasingly feels like existential trench warfare—and what that’s doing to American democracy.
© The UnPopulist, 2026
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I am not from the US. But they say, "When America sneezes, the rest of the world catches a cold." So I watch what is happening, and I am terribly worried too. The trend is alarming. The “rigged elections” narrative is slated to play a major role in the scheme of things about to unfold. Watch out for the ever-increasing role of ICE. And to top it all, the final intended purpose of the ballroom – the final abode, a bomb shelter. Brace for impact!
The discussion highlights how legal decisions can play an important role in protecting election procedures and public trust. Keeping track of official filings and court activity can help readers separate confirmed developments from political claims. For those researching public legal information, https://sonomacountycourt.org can also be a useful reference. Clear records and reliable sources are especially valuable during contentious election periods.