DJ Bracken learned that Utah had $2.8 million in “school lunch debt”—a phrase that should not even exist!—so he called up his local school district to confirm it; the woman he spoke with did so,

And then, almost as an afterthought, she mentioned that Bluffdale Elementary — a school I had no personal connection to — had about $835 in outstanding lunch debt.

$835.

The figure hit me like one of those rare moments of absolute clarity, utterly devoid of irony or ambiguity. Eight hundred and thirty-five dollars was the cost of preventing dozens of children from experiencing that moment of public shame I couldn’t stop imagining. It was less than some monthly car payments. It was approximately what I had spent the previous month on DoorDash and impulse Amazon purchases. The grotesque disproportion between the trivial financial sum and the profound human consequence felt like a cosmic accounting error.

“Can I just… pay that?” I asked, half expecting to be told about some bureaucratic impossibility.

“Um, sure,” she said. “Let me transfer you.”

No family should be in debt because they can’t afford to pay for lunch at school, and $835 should never prevent kids from eating nutritiously. That’s beyond unacceptable—it’s outrageous.

States should pay for food for all students, equally, in the same way they pay for books, heating, and teachers.

(And yes, as I write that, I’m painfully aware of the many schools that fail to meet even that basic standard.)

In 2021 California became the first state in the nation to provide free breakfast and lunch for all K-12 students regardless of income—and without “lunch shaming”—a phrase regrettably so well-established it has a Wikipedia page.

Today, only eight states ensure universal free school meals. Meanwhile the annual national public school meal debt is approximately $262 million. Individuals and not-for-profits (like Utah Lunch Debt Relief Foundation, which Bracken founded, or All For Lunch, which supports schools nationwide) are working to eliminate this debt. I applaud the efforts, and intend to support them myself, but I find myself caught in what Bracken identifies as “the philosophical contradictions” of eliminating the debt, rather than confronting the reasons the debt exists:

On Monday, I’ll find myself arguing passionately that school lunch should be universal and free, like textbooks or desks — a basic educational supply. On Tuesday, I’ll be raising money to pay off debts in a system I just spent Monday arguing shouldn’t exist at all. The cognitive dissonance is sometimes overwhelming. Am I enabling a broken system by patching its most visible failures? Am I letting policymakers off the hook by providing a band-aid that makes the bleeding less visible?

I experience this cognitive dissonance often, but Bracken nails the harsh reality:

One particularly sleepless night, I found myself spiraling into what I’ve come to think of as “the advocacy paradox”: If I succeed completely in paying off all lunch debt, will that remove the urgency required to change the system that creates the debt in the first place? But if I don’t pay it off, actual children — not abstractions, but specific kids with specific names who like specific dinosaurs and struggle with specific math problems — will continue to experience real shame and real hunger tomorrow. The perfect threatens to become the enemy of the good, but the good threatens to become the enemy of the fundamental.

[…]

But what if the truth is that we need all of these approaches simultaneously? What if paying off a specific child’s lunch debt today doesn’t preclude advocating for a complete structural overhaul tomorrow? What if the emotional resonance of specific, concrete actions is precisely what builds the coalition necessary for systemic change?

Bracken, again:

My daughter asked me recently why I spend so many evenings on the phone talking about school lunches. I told her about the kids who get their trays taken away. Her face scrunched up in that particular way that children’s faces do when they encounter an injustice so fundamental it cannot be reconciled with their understanding of how the world should work.

“That’s stupid,” she said with 7-year-old clarity. “Why don’t they just let them eat?”

Why indeed.

Sara Boboltz, at HuffPost:

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said Tuesday that President Donald Trump is exploring legal pathways to “deport” U.S. citizens to El Salvador, where the administration has already arranged to house deported immigrants in a prison known for its human rights abuses. […] “These would be heinous, violent criminals who have broken our nation’s laws repeatedly. These are violent, repeat offenders on American streets,” Leavitt told reporters at a press briefing.

“The president has said if it’s legal, right, if there is a legal pathway to do that. He’s not sure, [and] we are not sure if there is,” Leavitt continued. “It’s an idea that he has simply floated and has discussed very publicly in the effort of transparency.”

They desperately want concentration camps.

This should be setting off klaxons across the country, and every newsroom should be leading with this story. Donald Trump Suggests Sending American Citizens to Foreign Prisons.

Instead, those newsrooms will dismiss it as the nonsensical ravings of a lunatic mind, because they still haven’t learned that when Trump says something, even if it was just a stray stream of consciousness thought, that statement becomes a part of his identity and he can’t back down from it. He must defend it, double down on it, make it real. It’s a crippling personality flaw that he can never be wrong, and the toadies he surrounds himself with enable it. Little miss can’t be wrong.

RawStory quotes Trump:

“I love that,” Trump said. "If we could take some of our 20 time wise guys that push people into subways and hit people over the back of the head and purposely run people over in cars, if he would take them, I would be honored to give them.

Those who purposely run people over in cars you say? I wonder if he means this guy? Or maybe this one? He could mean the guy who put someone in a wheelchair, or any of these guys. Perhaps this police officer, or anyone from this list. Wait, he definitely means this guy. Right?

Brandi Buchman breaks this story for HuffPost: 

Commemorative bronze duplicates of the Congressional Gold Medal awarded to Jan. 6 police officers who defended the U.S. Capitol appear to have been removed for sale from the U.S. Mint’s website.

There’s also this apparently independent report from NBC News where the author, Ryan J. Reilly, describes the removal as:

another instance of President Donald Trump’s administration moving to take down material related to the violent episode stemming from his falsehoods about the 2020 presidential election results.

I saw this just days after I questioned if some US Mint coins this administration might deem “woke DEI” would even get minted today, so I was immediately outraged, but held off on linking to it. As tempting as it was to unleash righteous indignation on Trump for this, I didn't want my confirmation bias leading me to the wrong conclusion about a change that could have a perfectly innocuous and reasonable explanation. After all, there was only the HuffPost report (and later, the NBC one), with no indication of why or when this medal was removed. 

The why remains uncertain, but the when has a smidge more clarity: The Internet Archive’s January 9, 2025 snapshot of the US Mint’s Medals page shows an entry for “Those Who Protected the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021.” I presume it’s the medal in question. That page has a “last updated on” date of November 26, 2024.

(The Medals page lists all medals available from the US Mint.)

A February 22, 2025 snapshot—with a “last updated on” date of February 5, 2025—does not list the medal.

I can therefore say with some confidence that this entry—and, I presume, the medal—was removed sometime between November 26, 2024 and February 5, 2025. That’s a pretty broad window, spanning the last months of the Biden administration and the first weeks of Trump’s.

I can also say with confidence that the only change to the page was, in fact, the removal of that one medal entry.

This is not dispositive. It’s possible the Biden administration or the US Mint decided—for completely practical, pragmatic, and uncontroversial reasons—to remove this medal from the site.

The alternative is to suggest that Donald Trump—who denied the insurrection, pardoned 1,500 rioters, purged Department of Justice prosecutors and FBI agents who worked the Jan. 6 cases, scrubbed the DOJ’s “comprehensive website cataloguing the largest criminal investigation in modern department history,” and has lied, repeatedly about Jan. 6—directed the US Mint to remove a commemorative medal “Honoring the service and sacrifice of those who protected the U.S. Capitol” on Jan. 6.

It’s quite the coin flip.