Two big stories landed over the weekend.

The first harks back to the furor last May when the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health—the decision overturning the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision that recognized abortion rights as a constitutional right—was leaked to Politico before it was released. At the time, Chief Justice John Roberts called the leak a “singular and egregious breach of…trust” and ordered an investigation to find the leaker. In late October, Justice Samuel Alito told the Heritage Foundation that the leak was a “grave betrayal of trust by somebody, and it was a shock” that had made the court’s right-wing majority “targets for assassination.”

On Saturday, Jodi Kantor and Jo Becker of the New York Times reported that the Reverend Rob Schenck, formerly an antiabortion activist, wrote to Roberts in July (although the letter was dated June 7, 2022) to say that in 2014 he had received advance notice of the court’s decision in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby—the decision allowing corporations to deny their employees contraceptive health care coverage—from a woman who had just had dinner with Justice and Mrs. Alito. The dinner guest told Schenck that she had learned that Alito was writing the decision and that it would favor evangelical Christians. Schenck, who has become an advocate of choice as he is trying to mark himself as a progressive evangelical leader, signed the letter to Roberts, “Yours in the interest of truth and fairness.”

Schenck provided the reporters with contemporary emails suggesting he knew the outcome of the Hobby Lobby case ahead of time, and they talked to four people who confirmed that he had confidential information about it before the court handed it down. He used that information to prepare a public relations push ready to go the minute the decision was public.

The leak of a Supreme Court decision is shocking and potentially illegal, but even more shocking than the revelation that there have been two major leaks from the court—both of right-wing opinions authored by Alito—was the story the reporters unraveled of the degree to which evangelical activists worked to become close to the justices, especially through participation in the court’s historical society, as well as religious events, a plan Schenck called “Operation Higher Court.” Their goal was to influence the justices quietly, and it appears to have been at least somewhat successful: in July, Peggy Nienaber, the executive director of Liberty Counsel’s D.C. ministry, who worked with Schenck, was caught on a hot mic saying she prayed with certain Supreme Court justices.

Data suggests that most past pledges to move to Canada didn’t pan out. For example, after Trump’s election in 2016, Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada, which tracks immigration into the country, found that only 655 more Americans gained permanent residence in Canada in 2017 than in 2016 — that’s just 9,140 people versus 8,485. And while 2018 numbers ticked up slightly to 10,900, they generally plateaued in 2019.

To be fair, moving can be expensive — on the order of thousands of dollars, even for a local relocation, according to industry experts — making this an unfeasible option for many Americans. Uprooting your everyday life to potentially gain access to a specific kind of health care isn’t an investment a lot of people can make. And those who can afford to do so are also more likely to be able to travel across state lines in a health care emergency, making the case to move in light of stricter abortion laws less urgent.

Even when Americans do move, they don’t go far. In fact, an overwhelming number don’t live that far from their hometown. That includes young people, one of the most likely demographic groups to say they want to move and perhaps among the most flexible in being able to lay down new roots. A Center for Economic Studies research paper released in July, for example, found that 80 percent of young Americans live within 100 miles of where they grew up, and 58 percent live within just 10 miles.

But that data implies that local moving patterns, especially around increasingly progressive cities situated in more conservative states, may be worth a closer look. The level of political diversity within states has become easy to spot on electoral maps — clusters of blue in major metropolitan areas like Atlanta, Nashville and Austin, for example, amidst redder spreads throughout the states of Georgia, Tennessee and Texas. Comparing these cities with their states may reveal more than comparing, say, all of California to all of Texas.

What do you think Americans should be doing right now?

Organize as massively as possible: non-violent civil disobedience. Instead of just fighting over environmental legislation in Congress, ending up in a bill that’s as much a subsidy to the auto industry and to fossil fuel as anything else: start sitting-in in the board rooms and offices of the big polluters, all these meetings where the Kochs and other oil producers sit down with Republican politicians.

In 2020, there were massive street protests all over the US, and the world, after the police killed George Floyd. Yet you’ve argued the left in America has surrendered the streets to the far right. Why?

Republicans are doing a splendid job of combining protest movements with electoral politics. It’s not only that Republicans have mastered low-intensity street-fighting, it’s that they’ve also been able to sustain a dialectic between the outside and the inside in a way that progressive Democrats haven’t been able to do.

Both of our kids [the couple’s now 18-year-old twins], all their friends turned out for Black Lives Matter. So much attention was given to the participation of whites in the protests, but I think the most exciting part was the number of new immigrant kids, Latinos, who were in the thick of it. After summer 2020, they kind of became orphans. What to do, where to protest, what to join, how to conceive of the possibility of a life dedicated to struggling for social change – all of that went unanswered.

The base for a more activist, more aggressive, but also more strategic left politics exists. Students in inner-city high schools in California are a sleeping dragon. If you measure things by opinion polls, this generation is more leftwing than the 1930s. A huge number of people under 30 say they’re in favor of socialism or they’re prepared to listen to arguments for socialism. That’s astonishing.

The Daily Beast brings us this one. As a Russian military expert waxed on about his concern that the American "campaign of fomenting hatred" against Trump could lead to his "political assassination" on one of the state's propaganda shows, host and Russian State Duma member Evgeny Popov piped up with one proposed solution:

"We should ask [Russia’s] Federal Security Service to start protecting our Donald."

Whether Popov's plan would involve sending Russian security agents to Florida to "protect" Donald or the scenario would be one in which Donald is spirited away to a Moscow apartment is not clear, and it won't do you much good to ponder it because this is Russian state television, where Duma members come up with wacky plans like this on a daily basis. The first possibility would have Russian special agents volunteering to protect Mar-a-Lago, the place where Donald Trump was keeping state nuclear secrets as personal mementos and the place that FBI agents still can't be 100% sure they've cleared those nuclear documents out of.

The second possibility would have Donald Trump fleeing to Moscow for political asylum, which Russian strongman Vladimir Putin would probably find even more appealing now that he knows Donald might bring along extra-special thank you presents. It's also the plan that would get the most American support. Yeah, by all means—set Donald Trump up with his very own Moscow residence. He likes tall buildings, and he loves balconies.

These developments come after Republicans have spent much of the week attacking the DOJ and insisting that it comment on the ongoing investigation. As Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said in an angry statement implying that the Justice Department is inappropriately keeping important details about this investigation secret, “the country deserves a thorough and immediate explanation of what led to” the search. He added that Garland “should have already provided answers” and “must do so immediately.”

But McConnell, who once served as a deputy assistant attorney general within the Justice Department, almost certainly knows better. The Justice Department has explicit policies and very strong norms that prevent it from speaking publicly about ongoing investigations, and these policies are bolstered by external rules that bind the department’s lawyers. All of these limitations exist for very good reasons. They not only protect the Justice Department’s own investigations, they also protect potential suspects from being disparaged by the government before they are charged with any crime.

But not everyone who joined the so-called Great Reshuffle is better off.

More than a quarter — or 26% — of workers who quit regret their decision, according to a recent survey of more than 15,000 job seekers by Joblist, a job-search platform.