The Dictatorship

East Wing of White House is gone. | Some of the history made there…

Published

7 months ago

October 28, 2025

East Wing of White House is gone. | Some of the history made there…

WASHINGTON (AP) — Betty Ford reportedly said that if the White House West Wing is the “mind” of the nation, then the East Wing — the traditional power center for first ladies — is the “heart.”

That “heart” beat for more than 100 years as first ladies and their teams worked from their East Wing offices on everything from stopping drug abuse and boosting literacy to beautifying and preserving the White House itself. It’s where they planned White House state dinners and brainstormed the elaborate themes that are a feature of the U.S. holiday season.

That history came to an end after wrecking crews tore down the wing’s two stories of offices and reception rooms last week. Gone is an in-house movie theater, and a covered walkway to the White House captured in so many photos over the years. An East Wing garden that was dedicated to Jacqueline Kennedy was also uprooted, photographs show.

Republican President Donald Trump ordered the demolition as part of his still-to-be approved plan to build a $300 million ballroom.

The former real estate developer has long been fixated on building a big White House ballroom. In 2010, he called a top adviser to Democratic President Barack Obama and offered to build one. Trump made no secret of his distaste for the practice of hosting elegant White House state dinners underneath tents on the South Lawn. The offer was not followed up on.

Now Trump, in his second term, is moving quickly to see his wish for what he calls a “great legacy project” become reality. He has tried to justify the East Wing tear-down and his ballroom plans by noting that some of his predecessors also added to the White House over the years.

First ladies and their staffs witnessed history in the East Wing, a “place of purpose and service,” said Anita McBride, who worked there as chief of staff to first lady Laura Bush.

“Tearing down those walls doesn’t diminish the significance of the work we accomplished there,” McBride told The Associated Press.

Construction workers, bottom right, atop the U.S. Treasury, watch watch as demolition continues on the East Wing of the White House to make room for a new ballroom, in Washington, Oct. 22, 2025. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin)

McBride said she supports a ballroom addition because the “large and expensive tent option” that has been used when guest lists stretched longer than could be comfortably accommodated inside the White House “was not sustainable.” Tents damage the lawn and require additional infrastructure to be brought in, such as outdoor bathrooms and trolleys to move people around, especially in bad weather, she said.

Others feel differently.

Krish O’Mara Vignarajah, who was policy director for first lady Michelle Obama, said the demolition was a “symbolic blow” to the East Wing’s legacy as a place where women made history.

“The East Wing was this physical space that had seen the role of the first lady evolve from a social hostess into a powerful advocate on a range of issues,” she said in an interview.

Here’s a look at some of the history that came out of the East Wing and the first ladies who spent time there:

Rosalynn Carter

She was the first first lady to have her own office in the East Wing. Most first ladies before Carter had worked out of the private living quarters on the second or third floor of the residence. Carter wanted a place where she could separate work and home.

“I always need a place to go that is private, where I don’t have to dress and don’t have to put on makeup,” she wrote in her memoir. “The offices of the staff of the first lady were always in the East Wing, and it seemed a perfect place for my office too.”

In her memoir, Carter wrote about her favorite route to her office in winter months. She walked through the basement, past laundry rooms and workshops and the bomb shelter kept for the president and his staff. The thermostats in the residence above had been turned down low because of President Jimmy Carter’s energy conservation program, making the East Wing so cold that she was forced to wear long underwear.

The subterranean passageway shown to her by a residence staffer provided some relief. “With Jimmy’s energy conservation program, it was the only really warm place in the White House, with large steam pipes running overhead,” the first lady wrote.

Nancy Reagan

Photos from the East Wing in the early 1980s show the first lady meeting with staff, including her press secretary, Sheila Tate. For a generation of Americans, Nancy Reagan was most closely associated with a single phrase, “Just Say No,” for the anti-drug abuse program she made a hallmark of her White House tenure.

As Reagan once recalled, the idea for the campaign emerged during a 1982 visit with schoolchildren in Oakland, California. “A little girl raised her hand and said, ‘Mrs. Reagan, what do you do if somebody offers you drugs?’ And I said, ‘Well, you just say no.’ And there it was born.”

Hillary Clinton

President Bill Clinton, flanked by Governors Ann Richards of Texas, left, and Mario Cuomo of New York, watches the Dallas Cowboys and Buffalo Bills play in the Super Bowl with his daughter Chelsea and their cat, Socks, in the White House, Jan. 31, 1993, in the family theater. (AP Photo/Wilfredo Lee, File)

Clinton bucked history by becoming the first first lady to insist that her office be in the West Wing, not the East Wing. In her memoir, Clinton wrote that wanted her staff to be “integrated physically” with the president’s team. The first lady’s office relocated to what is now the Eisenhower Executive Office Building while Clinton was assigned an office on the second floor of the West Wing.

“This was another unprecedented event in White House history and quickly became fodder for late night comedians and political pundits,” Clinton later wrote.

Laura Bush

Bush wrote in her memoir about what it was like at the White House after the Sept. 11 attacks. Most of her staff members, then in their 20s, “kicked off their high heels and fled from the East Wing” after they were told to “run for their lives” when reports suggested the White House was a target.

“Now they were being asked to come back to work in a building that everyone considered a target and for a presidency and a country that would be at war,” she wrote.

Michelle Obama

Obama was the first Black woman to serve as first lady, becoming a global role model and style icon who advocated for improved child nutrition through her “Let’s Move” initiative. She and her staff in the East Wing also worked to support military families and promote higher education for girls in developing countries.

Photos from the time show Obama typing on a laptop during an online chat about school nutrition and the White House garden she created.

A large ribbon is displayed outside the East Wing of the White House during a preview of the 2016 holiday decor, Nov. 29, 2016, in Washington. (AP Photo/Andrew Harnik, File)

Melania Trump

Trump pushed the boundaries of serving as first lady by not living at the White House during the opening months of Donald Trump’s first term. She stayed in New York with their then-school-age son, Barron, so he wouldn’t have to switch schools midyear. When she eventually moved to the White House, she and her East Wing aides launched an initiative named, “Be Best,” to focus on child well-being, opioid abuse and online safety.

Jill Biden

Biden was the first first lady to continue a career outside the White House. The longtime community college English professor taught twice a week while serving as first lady. But in her East Wing work, she was an advocate for military families; her late father and her late son Beau served in the military. Biden also advocated for research into a cure for cancer and secured millions of dollars in federal funding for research into women’s health.

The Dictatorship

Anti-tax Republicans have talked themselves into a big mistake in Florida

Published

2 hours ago

June 6, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

Jun. 6, 2026, 6:00 AM EDT

ByFla. Its. Shevrin Jones

The Florida Legislatureconvened for a special session this week and passed Gov. Ron DeSantis proposal to put a gradual elimination of homestead property taxes on November’s ballot. As a legislator who represents a vibrant, diverse community in South Florida, I could not in good conscience support this measure. I voted “no” because the math does not add up and Floridians deserve honesty, not political theater.

The resolution would raise the homestead exemption from $50,000 to $150,000 in 2027 and to $250,000 in 2028, with a stated path toward full elimination of homestead property taxes. Florida is already one of nine states in the United States without an income tax.

Florida is already one of nine states in the United States without an income tax.

On the surface, getting rid of such property taxes might appeal to Floridians across the political spectrum. We all deserve affordability and the ability to make ends meet without taking on crushing debt or working multiple jobs just to stay afloat. Like Americans across the country, the people in Florida face an affordability crisis as the cost of grocerieshousing, healthcare, gas and other everyday expenses continues to skyrocket.

Every single person in the communities I serve is feeling the pressure of rising costs, and I take that seriously. But this resolution does not solve that problem — it shifts it. It takes the financial burden off property owners and quietly drops it on the backs of renters and the most vulnerable communities we serve.

Republicans across the country, including many here in Florida, have talked for so long about lowering taxes or eliminating taxes that they seem to have forgotten that taxes pay for things that people need and that getting rid of taxes in such a haphazard way will cause pain for individuals and local governments across the state.

Under this measure, local governments across the state, including those in Miami-Dade County and across South Florida, stand to lose billions in revenue. That revenue pays for police and fire protection, public health services, infrastructure and the community programs that working families count on. The state’s constitutional prohibition on cutting first responder funding changes the basic fiscal reality: When you eliminate a tax base, someone else pays. And there’s no solution in place to make up for this massive loss and the impact it will have on communities and residents’ daily lives.

My district is home to hardworking families, seniors on fixed incomes, renters who will never see a dime of this tax break and small business owners who are already navigating an extremely difficult economic climate. They are not asking for a constitutional amendment that most benefits the wealthiest homeowners. They are asking for real, targeted relief that addresses the actual affordability crisis without gutting the services that keep our communities safe and functioning.

Property tax reform that is sustainable, equitable and helps the Floridians who need it most would get my support, but that’s not what this plan is.

When you eliminate a tax base, someone else pays.

We can expect Gov. DeSantis and his allies to paint this resolution as “cost saving,” but if the state’s voters approve the constitutional amendment in November, the shift in tax burdens will hit many Floridians’ pocketbooks hard.

Florida is already navigating the aftermath of devastating hurricane seasons the past few years, with communities still rebuilding and local governments stretched thin. To introduce a structural revenue shock of this magnitude, one that disproportionately benefits high-value homeowners in wealthier zip codes isn’t just bad policy but a choice about whose recovery matters.

Just like the hype that surrounded Donald Trump’s so-called One Big Beautiful Bill last year, we have seen this playbook before: A headline-grabbing tax cut gets framed as relief for everyday families while the fine print tells a different story. The president, for example has focused on the law’s provision on allowing certain tax filers who get paid tips to not pay taxes on them, but the law overwhelmingly benefits the country’s wealthiest Americans.

Similarly, the exemption headed to Florida’s ballot helps those with the highest-value homes while, say, a senior renting a modest apartment would see nothing. A working family leasing a home would see nothing as the county budget that funds their children’s after-school programs, their neighborhood’s road repairs and their emergency services absorbs the blow.

Extreme anti-tax strategies like this are anything but “fiscally responsible.” The hidden cost is paid in crumbling roads, understaffed fire stations and shuttered public libraries — the very infrastructure that holds communities together. When revenue is deliberately starved from local governments, it isn’t abstract bureaucracies that suffer. It is the elderly neighbor who can no longer afford the ambulance response time that doubled, the child whose school lost its reading specialist and the small business owner whose street floods every rainy afternoon because the drainage system went unrepaired for a decade. A community that guts its own foundations doesn’t liberate its people — it auctions off their shared future to the highest bidder, leaving everyone else to pay the real price.

Fla. Its. Shevrin Jones

Florida state Sen. Shevrin Jones, the first openly LGBTQ+ member of the Florida Senate, represents District 34, which includes communities in the northern portion of Miami-Dade County.

The Dictatorship

Boredom is better for children than AI will ever be

Published

2 hours ago

June 6, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

Jun. 6, 2026, 6:00 AM EDT

Late last month, American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten called for what would amount to a significant reversal of the education establishment’s embrace of technology when she suggested restrictions on artificial intelligence and electronic screens in schools. Though her call to action stopped short of a total ban, Weingarten said restrictions are needed “to harness the benefits of technology while mitigating harms.”

Schools have spent billions of dollars rushing devices into children’s hands. Such spending was especially high during the Covid-19 pandemic, and the results have been profound. As of last school year, 88% of public schools reported providing every child with a laptop, tablet or similar device. Just last year, the AFT partnered with Microsoft, OpenAI, Anthropic and others to launch a $23 million National Academy for AI Instruction aimed at helping educators use AI responsibly and effectively in schools.

All this tech has been a huge experiment on kids, and experiments can go wrong.

American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten

But in a May 27 speech at the National Press Club, Weingarten said, “All this tech has been a huge experiment on kids, and experiments can go wrong.”

Much of the debate over AI in schools has focused on the loss of students’ analytical skills, cognitive offloading and shrinking attention spans. Those are legitimate concerns. But we should pay more attention to another essential cognitive function being systematically engineered out of existence: boredom.

Often misunderstood as a passive state, boredom is a transitional state that frequently precedes curiosity, imagination and original thought. Boredom is deeply tied to children developing the ability to think for themselves.

Doomscrolling social media and watching endless short video clips already make a state of boredom harder to reach. But there are still gaps where a child (or adult) can drift into boredom, and from there, imagination.

AI systems, however, anticipate the idle moment. They analyze our behavior and preferences to personalize content, predict our questions before we finish asking them and generate answers before we can wrestle with a problem. Every pause is filled before the mind has a chance to wander somewhere unexpected. Thus, they reduce the cognitive friction that often gives rise to insight. Psychologists call that friction a “productive struggle.”

To the student assigned an essay, the blank page creates a kind of discomfort. Where to start? Which ideas are worth pursuing? What questions need answering? If a person stares at the page long enough, boredom will eventually give way to emerging ideas. But when such writing is outsourced to AI, that discomfort disappears, along with the friction that sparks creativity.

For years, educators have treated boredom as an enemy of learning and something to be eliminated. The last thing a teacher wants is a disengaged or disinterested student, right? But there’s a difference between apathy and a boredom that triggers curiosity in the unoccupied mind. Boredom can provoke students to ask unusual questions, meander through half-formed ideas and try to solve problems or complete tasks in unconventional ways. But constant digital stimulation makes that less likely.

Boredom is not a bug in human cognition. It’s a complex neurological feature.

Boredom is not a bug in human cognition. It’s a complex neurological feature that can fuel introspection, invention and the activation of the brain’s default mode network. That’s the state associated with mind-wandering, reflection and original thought — and the occasional inspiration to dye our hair neon.

Bored children learn to tolerate frustration, entertain themselves and persist through uncertainty. Those are skills that adults who grew up before smartphones and generative AI didn’t have to work to acquire.

From Newton’s theories to Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein” and Alexey Pajitnov’s Tetris, these creators were driven by the same impulse: to fill the silence of the mind with something new. But that requires having access to that idle moment, something AI and other technologies are actively patching out.

You’ve likely heard the counterargument: that AI, by automating mundane tasks, frees us for higher-level thinking and creativity. However, a a 2022 study found that five-minute, low-effort, low-distraction pauses boosted productivity by 7.12%. And in a 2012 studyresearchers found that participants who completed a dull task later performed better on creative problem-solving tasks. That suggests “boring” tasks are not a waste of time but may enhance creative thinking.

Another recent study by Katy Tam and Michael Inzlicht published in Communications Psychology found that people are paradoxically more bored in the digital age than before it. Technology, they found, is eliminating idle mental space and making people feel more bored when constant stimulation is not available. Various studies have shown that attempts to escape boredom contribute to problematic uses of digital technologies and declining mental health.

Weingarten is right that we’ve been running an experiment on children. But while we may track reading levels and test scores, we don’t know what happens to children who don’t develop the ability to sit in discomfort long enough for their minds to wander.

What are the long-term consequences when an entire generation is deprived of the opportunity?

Technology is eliminating idle mental space and making people feel more bored when constant stimulation is not available.

The antidote isn’t just reduced screen time, though that’s part of the equation. We need to embrace boredom, engineering it back into our lives, our lesson plans and the design of the technology students use.

Answers could include device-free spaces, unstructured school time, outdoor playchallenging students to solve problems that cannot be completed with digital tools, incorporating 15–20 minutes of daily meditative silence, increasing physical activity or deliberately introducing friction, latency and moments that prompt human reflection and ideation into the AI technologies we use.

We need to reclaim agency over the systems designed to eradicate boredom out of our lives. Weingarten must know that students will complain that they’re bored if their screens are taken away. And when they do, their teachers can tell them that’s the point and hand them a blank page. Because what comes next is what we’re trying to preserve.

Katherine Brodsky is a journalist (WIRED, Newsweek, Skeptic) and author who often covers the intersection of technology, psychology and culture. She publishes the “Random Minds” newsletter on Substack.

The Dictatorship

Democrats can do better than Graham Platner. They must demand he drop out.

Published

2 hours ago

June 6, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

Jun. 6, 2026, 6:00 AM EDT

Graham Platner needs to drop out of the Maine Senate race — and Democrats should be the ones to coax him toward the door.

When Platner first threw his hat in the ring last year, there was a reasonable argument for his candidacy — here was a political outsider with a fresh perspective who represented a new generation of political talent for Democrats.

But everything we have learned about Platner over the past several months suggests that he is a moral and political trainwreck, with enough skeletons in his closet to fill a graveyard.

Platner has been caught in so many lies that it’s difficult to take anything he says seriously.

Indeed, since Platner announced his candidacy last year, there has been an unceasing drumbeat of scandals about him. He filled a Reddit message board with sexist, racist and off-color comments. He has exaggerated his working-class background and appears to have spent most of his life living off handouts from his parents. But above all, there was the revelation last fall that he had gotten a Nazi Totenkopf tattoo on his chest two decades ago — and by his account only realized it was a Nazi tattoo in the fall of 2025, as he began his campaign for the U.S. Senate.

In recent days, the stories about Platner have taken on a darker, more troubling hue. Last week, The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times revealed that soon after his marriage in 2023, Platner was caught by his wife sexting as many as a dozen women. His profile page on Kikan anonymous social media site often used for dating, was still active.

Then on Thursday, The New York Times published an account of three former girlfriends of Platner who described him as volatile, unfaithful and physically threatening. One woman, Lyndsey Fifield, a conservative activist, reported that during an argument, Platner “twisted her arm behind her back, shoved her into a bedroom and held the door closed from the other side so she couldn’t get out.” Another former romantic partner, Jenny Racicot, who is a Democrat, said of Platner, “This person does not respect women.” The Times spoke with several other women Platner dated who spoke well of him, including that “they felt safe with him” and remain friends with him to this day. Platner on Thursday told MS NOW’s Chris Hayes that “some allegations” in the Times’ article “are simply not true,” specifically, “anything alleging physicality, anything alleging that I knew what my tattoo was.” Platner did acknowledge that he spent a good amount of time “struggling, not being a good boyfriend, certainly self-medicating with alcohol.”

Fifield also told the Times that Platner had joked to her about his Nazi tattoo — contradicting his denials — and even produced a screenshot from a group chat in August 2025 of her talking to friends about the Nazi emblem. Platner has said he didn’t know about the tattoo’s Nazi origins until months later.

Platner has been caught in so many lies that it’s difficult to take anything he says seriously. And every time Platner is caught, he makes the same excuse: that he was in a dark period after he returned from serving in Iraq. While one can sympathize with Platner’s post-war experiences, this justification for his past behavior should not and cannot excuse a pattern of consistently bad behavior that dates back years and was occurring as recently as a few years ago.

Yet none of these revelations have pushed congressional Democrats to call on Platner to stand down. In fact, some are rallying around him.

According to Rhode Island liberal Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, the latest reports about Platner’s behavior toward women “seems like a lot of nothing.”

Where will Platner’s numbers be in November after five months of GOP ads hammering him?

Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., called Platner’s behavior “wrong and toxic,” but that’s not stopping him from appearing at a rally with Platner in Maine this weekend. When asked earlier in the week about Platner, Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., who has publicly endorsed him, offered a classic whataboutist defense: “Is he a saint? I guess not. I don’t know too many saints here”

Even New York Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, who led the charge against former Minnesota Sen. Al Franken when he was accused of sexual impropriety, has refused to condemn Platner, telling reporters, instead, “We are still going to win Maine.”

Put aside the hypocrisy of national Democrats, who have long preached the idea of believing women when they claim sexual harassment or violence; none of this makes sense from a political standpoint. Recent polling suggests Platner has a narrow lead over Republican Sen. Susan Collins.

In a political environment that heavily favors Democrats and in a state that has voted for the Democratic presidential candidate in each of the past three presidential elections, Democrats should be well-positioned to flip the Maine seat from red to blue. And this is the polling situation today, before Maine voters have fully digested the latest Platner scandals. Where will Platner’s numbers be in November after five months of GOP ads hammering him? That’s not even taking into account the very real possibility that more scandals will emerge. Quite simply, even if one thinks that Platner is a unique political talent — and there isn’t much evidence that he is — why take the risk?

Sticking with Platner is not only a dangerous political move, but it also opens up Democrats to charges of hypocrisy, especially when they attack Republicans for sticking with morally and ethically flawed candidates like Ken Paxton in Texas. And after all, if there is one party that should care about how a man treats women, both in public and in private, it’s Democrats. It’s not as if Republicans have much of a leg to stand on with President Donald Trump as their standard-bearer.

In an ideal world, Platner would recognize that he is a flawed candidate who is putting the Democrats’ chances of flipping the Senate in significant danger. But he appears more focused on his political aspirations than doing what’s best for the Democratic Party. His staff would tell him the same thing, but they seem more focused on covering up for his sins than doing what’s best for the party.

That’s why it’s incumbent on national Democrats to demand Platner drop out of the race, either before or after Maine Democrats go to the polls next week. They can look to Democratic Gov. Janet Mills, who, even though she dropped out of the race, is still on the ballot. Or they can look to recruit the runner-up in the competitive Democratic primary for governor. At least that person will have been vetted by the media. But considering how politically vulnerable Collins is, the mood of the electorate and Maine’s Democratic tilt, seemingly anyone would be a better option than Platner and his heavy baggage.

Heading into November with Platner as their nominee risks Democrats losing both the Maine Senate race and their souls.

Michael Cohen is the publisher of the newsletter Truth and Consequences and hosts the weekly podcast “That ‘70s Movie Podcast.”