Equinox

Thank you to everyone who tuned into my live video! This marks my fifth Congressional candidate interview in July — with more on the way in the following months.

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Why One of Congress’ Most Polarizing Democrats Is Finally Facing a Serious Primary Challenge

After years of reporting on Jared Moskowitz’s political evolution, I sat down with the only Democrat trying to unseat him.

For years, Jared Moskowitz has cultivated a national image as one of the Democratic Party’s sharpest critics of Donald Trump. His viral committee exchanges and cable news appearances have made him one of the party’s most recognizable faces.

But I know Jared. We were friends once. And I know the facade he presents is nothing like the man underneath the mask.

Before the pandemic, I worked alongside Moskowitz while he led the Florida Division of Emergency Management. After I was fired from the Florida Department of Health for opposing the state’s misleading COVID messaging, he became an unlikely source, communicating with me privately even as I publicly challenged Gov. Ron DeSantis’ pandemic response. That relationship—and the political dynamics surrounding it—was later documented by the Miami Herald in an extensive investigation.

As Moskowitz’s political career moved to Congress, so did my reporting.

What I found increasingly conflicted with the public image many Democrats had of him. His campaign finance, political relationships, and, most importantly, his legislative record painted a more complicated picture than the one presented on television.

Last year, I published a legislative analysis examining dozens of key House votes where only a small fraction of Democrats broke with the party. Rather than measure speeches or social media posts, I looked exclusively at how members actually legislated. Moskowitz consistently ranked among the Democratic members who most frequently sided with Republicans on high-profile, divisive legislation.

Now, for the first time, that record is being directly challenged at the ballot box.

A Different Kind of Democrat

Oliver Larkin isn’t running as a moderate.

He’s running as a Democratic Socialist.

Key Issues for Democratic Socialists:

Universal Healthcare: Creating single-payer systems like Medicare for All to guarantee medical care as a right.

Expanded Public Services: Providing universal child care, and publicly built or managed housing.

Wealth Tax: Raising taxes heavily on high earners, top corporations, and large fortunes to fund social programs.

Criminal Justice and Civil Rights: Reforming or reducing the footprint of policing, scaling back mass incarceration, and supporting progressive social justice movements

Labor Power: Strengthening labor unions and boosting minimum wages

Conventional political wisdom, often by paid consultants who prefer safety over progress, would suggest that makes winning a competitive South Florida district difficult. Larkin argues exactly the opposite.

His campaign is built on the idea that voters are looking for Democrats willing to fight unapologetically for working-class families rather than compromise with Republicans. During our conversation, he repeatedly returned to two themes he hears from voters: protecting democracy and addressing the rapidly rising cost of living.

For Larkin, those issues are inseparable.

He argues that concentrated corporate wealth has not only driven higher housing, insurance, and health care costs, but has also distorted American democracy through campaign financing and political influence.

That philosophy shapes nearly every part of his platform: Medicare for All, banning congressional stock trading, rejecting corporate PAC money, universal child care, paid family leave, and stronger labor protections.

The Campaign’s Central Argument

Perhaps the most interesting part of our conversation came when I asked Larkin how he responds to Democrats who argue that Democratic Socialists fall outside the party mainstream.

Rather than argue he is further left than today’s Democratic Party, he argued he is actually more loyal to it.

Larkin contends that his disagreements with Democratic leadership come from pushing for stronger protections for civil liberties, labor rights, and economic equality — not from supporting Republican priorities. By contrast, Moskowitz’s voting record frequently places him among the small minority of Democrats willing to support GOP-backed legislation.

Whether voters ultimately agree with that assessment remains to be seen.

But it reflects a broader debate now unfolding within the Democratic Party over whether moderation is still an electoral asset — or whether voters increasingly want representatives willing to draw sharper contrasts.

In 2024, a party-wide shift to the right, of which Kamala Harris’ campaign fell victim to, resulted in major election losses across the board.

Climate Still Matters

As readers of Mesoscale News might expect, our conversation eventually turned to climate change.

Unlike many congressional interviews where climate becomes an afterthought, Larkin spoke at length about Everglades restoration, protecting Florida’s coral reefs, investing in renewable energy, modernizing the electric grid, and opposing the rapid expansion of energy-intensive AI data centers.

For a state already grappling with sea-level rise, worsening hurricanes, insurance instability, and ecosystem collapse, those issues aren’t abstract policy debates.

They’re existential.

Democracy Begins in the Primary

Democrats often ask why voters lose faith in institutions.

Part of the answer is that too many incumbents stop being seriously challenged.

Primaries are not acts of disloyalty. They’re one of democracy’s most important accountability mechanisms.

Whether Oliver Larkin ultimately succeeds is as important as the questions his campaign forces Democratic voters to confront.

Should representatives be judged primarily by viral moments and television appearances?

Or by the bills they sponsor, the votes they cast, and the coalitions they build?

Those questions extend far beyond one congressional district in South Florida.

Florida’s Democratic primary for the 25th Congressional District will be held on August 18, with early voting beginning in early August depending on the county. Whatever the outcome, Democratic voters now have a choice, and, perhaps more importantly, a conversation that has been overdue for years.

Record Versus Reputation

One reason this race matters is because it raises a larger question than who represents Florida’s 25th Congressional District.

How much should voters weigh legislative records against political branding?

Over the past two years, my reporting has focused on that disconnect.

I’ve written about Moskowitz’s relationships with prominent Florida Republicans, his campaign financing, and the contrast between his media persona and congressional voting history. My legislative index was designed specifically to remove personality from the equation, evaluating members solely on votes cast and legislation supported.

The results consistently placed Moskowitz among the Democratic caucus’ most significant outliers. As one of the most MAGA democrats, it would difficult to downgrade outside of electing a Republican.

Larkin is someone whose ambitions are to serve the people, not himself.

And for that, we should all be rallying around him.

Disclosure: I worked with Jared Moskowitz while we were both at the State Emergency Response Team during multiple hurricanes and the COVID-19 pandemic. To learn more about our relationship, read this article by the Miami Herald.

To read my previous warnings about Jared Moskowitz, click here.

Dear Readers:

Climate change isn’t just threatening our future. It’s erasing our past.

The story you’re about to read begins with a Climate Central investigation into the threats facing Jamestown. It led me back to my own research on disappearing Indigenous sites along the Gulf Coast — places that preserve histories thousands of years older than the United States itself.

This kind of reporting takes time: digging through academic literature, historical records, scientific studies, and the lived experiences of communities whose stories are too often overlooked. If you believe science journalism should connect data to people, history, and power, please consider becoming a paid subscriber.

Paid subscriptions make investigations like this possible and help ensure these stories aren’t lost, too.

At Jamestown, Virginia, archaeologists are racing against the water.

More than four centuries after English settlers established the first permanent English colony in North America, researchers are working methodically to excavate the site before rising seas and recurrent flooding claim what remains.

Climate Central recently documented the growing threat facing Jamestown, where sea level has risen approximately 1.6 feet over the last century and is projected to rise several feet more in coming decades. Archaeologists there now describe their work as a form of triage: deciding what pieces of history can be saved before they disappear.

It’s a sobering question.

But along the Gulf Coast, another race against time has been underway for decades, largely outside the national spotlight.

Seas are rising at a rate of 5.27 mm per year in Virginia. However, the rate of sea level rise in south Louisiana is 8.44 mm per year.

In Louisiana, climate change is not only threatening historic sites associated with the founding of the United States. It is erasing places that preserve histories that predate the nation itself — Indigenous landscapes, sacred places, archaeological sites, burial grounds, and oral histories that stretch back thousands of years.

And unlike Jamestown, many of these places were never fully documented to begin with.

The First Americans’ Vanishing Coast

Louisiana loses land faster than almost anywhere else in North America.

A combination of sea level rise, land subsidence, oil and gas development, saltwater intrusion, and increasingly destructive hurricanes has transformed large portions of the state’s coastline over the last century. Entire communities have relocated. Others remain trapped in a cycle of rebuilding and retreat.

For Indigenous nations whose histories are inseparable from the wetlands and bayous of south Louisiana, the consequences extend far beyond economics or infrastructure.

The land itself is the archive.

For generations, archaeologists and historians have treated Indigenous communities primarily as observers of environmental change. But my own research on Indigenous sites along the northern Gulf Coast has suggested a different perspective: Indigenous peoples were not simply witnesses to environmental catastrophe. They documented it through stories, migration patterns, settlement choices, burial practices, and the physical landscapes they constructed.

In many cases, those landscapes may contain records of extreme weather events that occurred centuries or even millennia before modern meteorological observations began.

Today, those records are disappearing.

The Stories the Land Remembers

Long before satellites and weather stations, Indigenous communities across North America developed sophisticated systems for observing and interpreting environmental change.

Researchers working with Indigenous communities in Australia, Canada, and the Pacific Islands have found that traditional ecological knowledge systems often preserve detailed observations about changing weather patterns, species behavior, sea levels, seasonal cycles, and environmental disruptions across generations.

These observations are not simply folklore. They represent long-term environmental datasets encoded in stories, practices, language, and lived experience.

In British Columbia, Indigenous elders have documented changes in species distributions, weather patterns, and ecosystem behavior occurring over their own lifetimes. Researchers there argue that Indigenous communities possess unique adaptive knowledge precisely because they have spent millennia living with environmental change.

The same is true along the Gulf Coast.

For the Houma, Point au Chien and Isle de Jean Charles people of south Louisiana, hurricanes are not historical anomalies. They are part of a collective memory passed from one generation to the next.

“Hurricane stories are an integral part of Houma folklore,” writes T. Mayheart Dardar, Vice Principal Chief of the United Houma Nation. “The tales of winds and water have been told and repeated over the generations.”

The Chenière Caminada hurricane of 1893. The storms of 1915 and 1926. Betsy. Camille. Katrina. Ida.

These storms are remembered not simply because they were destructive, but because surviving them required adaptation, migration, rebuilding, and the preservation of communal knowledge.

For centuries, the pattern was familiar: a storm would come, communities would rebuild, and life would continue.

Climate change is altering that equation.

When the Land Doesn’t Come Back

Dardar’s account of returning to his hometown after Hurricane Camille in 1969 is haunting.

“Houses were destroyed, tossed about like toys,” he wrote. “Trees were uprooted, cars flooded, boats scattered on the bank, and dead animals were hanging from trees.”

But his community returned.

The wetlands remained. The fisheries survived. The land endured.

Today, many Indigenous communities across coastal Louisiana face a fundamentally different reality.

The islands are shrinking.

The marshes are disappearing.

The cemeteries are flooding.

Sacred places and archaeological sites that survived hundreds or thousands of years of hurricanes are now disappearing beneath rising seas and accelerating erosion.

Many were never mapped.

Many were never excavated.

Some survive only in oral histories passed between generations.

Once these places disappear, they cannot be reconstructed.

Who Gets Remembered?

Climate Central’s reporting on Jamestown raises an uncomfortable but necessary question: in an era of climate change, what can we save?

Some places can be protected.

The Cape Hatteras Lighthouse was moved inland. Jamestown’s seawall has been reinforced. Archaeologists there are deploying sophisticated technologies to preserve as much of America’s colonial history as possible.

But many places cannot be relocated.

And some histories have never received the resources, recognition, or political attention required to preserve them.

The irony is difficult to ignore.

The United States is mobilizing to save the birthplace of colonization while many of the places preserving the histories of the people who lived here long before the nation’s founding are disappearing with comparatively little public attention.

Climate change is forcing us to confront a question far larger than sea walls or archaeological excavations.

It is forcing us to decide whose history matters enough to save.

Because along the Gulf Coast, the water is not only claiming land.

It is claiming memory.

And unlike Jamestown, many of these stories exist nowhere else.

If this story resonated with you, I hope you’ll consider becoming a paid subscriber.

At Mesoscale, I don’t just cover climate change as a future threat. I investigate how it intersects with history, democracy, public health, and the communities living through it right now. That means original reporting, archival research, interviews, scientific analysis, and, sometimes, revisiting research I’ve spent years pursuing to tell stories that larger outlets often miss.

As seas rise and storms intensify, we’re not only deciding what kind of future we want to build. We’re deciding what parts of our shared past are worth saving — and whose stories get remembered.

Your subscription helps make sure those stories continue to be told.

We need to face hard truths about how our crimes in the Middle East will come back to us. The media is failing us on that front.

Twice in less than five years I've had police bust through my door with guns raised.

The first time because I wouldn't be silent while DeSantis lied about COVID, lies that led to the preventable deaths of tens of thousands of Americans.

The second time was for refusing to stay quiet about the manufactured hysteria around the murder of a podcaster in Utah a few weeks ago.

This time the police showed up to protect us. That doesn’t erase the pattern.

Rape threats. Death threats. A home invasion. I won’t pretend these are abstract dangers — they’re real, and they’re aimed at people who speak out.

Don’t expect MAGA to condemn this. Don’t be surprised if their allies rationalize it, deny it, or fold it into their larger propaganda.

They’ve normalized violence and fear — and then pointed fingers at the people they themselves put at risk.

I refuse to be silenced. I also will not put my family in more danger. So I’m logging off for a few days while the police investigate. I’m leaving town. I’ll be back when it’s safe.

If you want to help: amplify this. Every time a MAGA politician spreads lies about how “dangerous” the left is, call out what their people are doing in real life. Share this. Hold them accountable.

Look out for one another. America’s slide toward authoritarianism is happening faster than many expected. Dissenters are being targeted. They’ve made hit lists. They’re breaking into homes. History is clear about what follows — and we must act like we know the ending we’re trying to avoid.

Chaya Raichik (of Libs of Tiktok) put me on her public hit list of people she's calling “Charlie's Murderers.”

I spent most of today at the police station reporting death threats because of it. Those threats have escalated and my family is in danger.

While MAGA adds people like me to lists of people to “hunt down,” the lives of the people they’re targeting (for the crime of not mourning a white supremacist Christian nationalist) are completely turned upside down.

Travel costs, time off work, the repeated stress of meeting with the police and reporting every vile threat issued against you and your family.

Our system protects the people making those threats.

A system people like Chaya helped build.

A system that perpetuates violence.

You can help me by not allowing yourself to be silenced by these people, by demanding jail time for people who threaten people, and by never backing down in the face of violent threats.

As someone who was fired for refusing to manipulate public health data to suit a political narrative, I am deeply disturbed—but not surprised—by the removal of Dr. Erika McEntarfer from her post as Commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Dr. McEntarfer is a highly respected economist and public servant whose only “offense” was doing her job—reporting accurate employment data that happened to reflect poorly on those in power. The decision to fire her is not just an attack on her personally, but on the integrity of our national statistical institutions, and on every civil servant who has committed their life to truth, accuracy, and public accountability.

When data becomes inconvenient, authoritarian leaders reach for the same tools: censorship, retaliation, and intimidation. This is what I lived through in Florida. This is what scientists, economists, and public officials across the country are now experiencing at the federal level. The dismissal of Dr. McEntarfer is a signal—loud and clear—that no number, no fact, no dataset is safe if it conflicts with a campaign slogan.

Americans deserve to know the truth about their economy, their health, and their future. Firing experts who tell that truth doesn’t change reality—it just obscures it from the public eye. We cannot afford to normalize the purging of truth-tellers from government service.

I stand in solidarity with Dr. McEntarfer and every public servant who refuses to bend the facts for political gain. The integrity of our democracy depends on people like her.

I joined a WPI Conference Panel featuring with John Kirlakou, Ted Blickwedel, and Jackie Garrick for Whistleblowers of America, where we discussed how whistleblowers can take control of their story. Listen to the episode!