Good Day, this is the Commonwealth Report. News for the public, not the powerful.
Is The Bedrock Of American Citizenship Crumbling?
This year marks 160 years since the 14th Amendment was passed by Congress and sent out to the states for ratification. That amendment, hammered out by the Radical Republican Thaddeus Stevens and his allies after the Civil War, declared that all persons born or naturalized in this country are citizens. Full stop. It overturned Dred Scott. It birthed equal protection under the law. It built the modern American republic.
Now Donald Trump’s trying to gut it. His Executive Order 14160, signed on the first day of his second term, tries to strip citizenship from babies born here to undocumented parents and even to people on legal student and work visas. Federal judges have called the order “blatantly unconstitutional.” The Supreme Court heard arguments in April, and even conservative justices grilled Trump’s lawyer for relying on sources written by avowed white supremacists.
What Stevens fought for, what Frederick Douglass and the abolitionists bled for, this president is trying to erase with a single signature. If he succeeds, citizenship becomes whatever the strongman in the White House says it is on any given Tuesday.
Why Are Americans Paying $4.48 For A Gallon Of Gas?
A new NPR, PBS News and Marist poll out this morning is brutal for Donald Trump. By 63 to 37 percent, Americans blame him personally for the spike in gas prices. That includes a full third of Republicans. AAA says the average price of regular hit $4.48 yesterday, up 31 cents in just one week and up a full 50 percent since Trump’s war with Iran began.
The reason? The Strait of Hormuz, where a fifth of the world’s oil normally flows, has been effectively shut. Then the Trump administration blocked Iranian ports, choking off even more supply. Crude oil hit $112 a barrel last month. More than eight in ten Americans now say the cost is straining their household budget at the kitchen table.
And here’s the political earthquake hidden in the numbers. Six months out from the midterms, Democrats now lead the generic congressional ballot by 10 points. Trump is the most unpopular he has ever been. When you bomb your way into a war and the working class ends up paying at the pump, voters notice. Every single time.
Did TikTok Hand Trump The 2024 Election?
A peer-reviewed study published this morning in the prestigious journal Nature says yes, at least in part. Researchers at NYU built hundreds of dummy TikTok accounts, geolocated them across swing states, and trained them on partisan content. The result was stark. TikTok’s algorithm fed the pro-Republican accounts 11.5 percent more aligned content than it fed the pro-Democratic ones. And Democratic users were shown significantly more anti-Democratic content than Republican users were shown anti-Republican content.
NYU professor Yasir Zaki told the Guardian that in an environment of thin margins, systematic differences in political information are “worth taking seriously.” Voters between 18 and 29, TikTok’s primary audience, swung a stunning 10 points toward Trump compared to 2020.
So an app first controlled by a Chinese company, now being handed off to Trump’s billionaire cronies, may well have put this wannabe king back in the White House. If you still think Silicon Valley billionaires aren’t picking our presidents, you really aren’t paying attention.
Why Was A Fox News London Correspondent Standing Outside A Secret FBI Raid In Virginia?
This morning the FBI raided the office of Virginia State Senator Louise Lucas, the Democrat who spearheaded the new map giving her party a 10 to 1 advantage in Virginia’s congressional delegation. SWAT teams stormed the building with weapons drawn, ordered everyone out with hands up, and hauled at least three people off in handcuffs.
Now here’s the wild part. Fox News London correspondent Alex Hogan was somehow already there, live on air, getting personal reaction from Senator Lucas herself. Yes, Fox flew their London correspondent across an ocean to a small Virginia city for an unannounced raid the FBI insists was secret.
Veteran journalist Scott MacFarlane pointed out that DOJ rules require “high-level approval” before tipping off any reporter to a raid. Trump appointee Kash Patel runs the FBI now. You connect the dots. When the political opposition gets raided right after passing a fair map and the regime’s favorite cable network just happens to be set up with cameras rolling, that’s not journalism. That’s choreography.
Are Republicans Erasing Black Voters All Across The South?
And it’s not just Virginia. South Carolina Republicans this morning are joining Alabama, Tennessee, and Louisiana in a frantic mid-decade redistricting blitz, all of it aimed at gutting majority-Black congressional districts. Their target in South Carolina? Jim Clyburn’s 6th District. In Tennessee, it’s Memphis. In Alabama, it’s the Black Belt.
The Supreme Court handed Republicans the weapon just last week, ruling that Louisiana’s second Black-majority district relied “too heavily on race.” Tennessee state Senator Raumesh Akbari called the new Memphis map “an act of hate.” Martin Luther King III sent a letter warning the plan could undo his father’s lifelong work. Protesters chanted “shame, shame, shame” right inside the Senate chamber.
Trump’s allies have already primaried out five of seven Indiana Republicans who refused to play ball. Eight states have redrawn their maps in just one year. This is a coordinated, country-wide assault on the Voting Rights Act. The Confederacy lost the war in 1865. They’re trying to win it back now with crayons and computers.
How Heavy Is The Epstein Truth?
Seventeen thousand pounds. That’s the weight of the paper about to land in a New York gallery space called the Donald J. Trump and Jeffrey Epstein Memorial Reading Room. The Institute for Primary Facts, a transparency nonprofit, has stacked up every single page the DOJ released after Congress passed the Epstein Files Transparency Act last November.
Three and a half million pages. Thousands of photos and videos. And buried inside that mountain of evidence are more than 38,000 separate mentions of Donald Trump’s name. The exhibit traces his close friendship with the convicted child sex trafficker from 1987 all the way through to 2007, including Epstein’s full membership at Mar-a-Lago.
You couldn’t read it all in a single lifetime. And that’s exactly the point. They piled it up by the literal ton because words alone weren’t doing the job anymore. So now the truth weighs as much as a small school bus, and it’s parked in Manhattan with the front doors wide open.
And that’s the way it is, Today Wednesday, May 6, 2026. I’m Thom Hartmann.
