Trump and Johnson Are Still Seething Over the Epstein Vote

After months of MAGA infighting and an unusual Republican break with President Donald Trump, the GOP-controlled House on Tuesday is expected to overwhelmingly pass a bill seeking to force the Justice Department to release a huge trove of files related to Jeffrey Epstein.

The bill’s passage—now seen as a foregone conclusion—appears to mark a rare legislative loss for Trump, who, after months of efforts to kill the measure, reversed course this weekend. Faced with certain defeat, he attempted to save face by directing House Republicans to back the bill after all. “Sure,” he even said when asked if he’d sign the legislation should it pass both chambers of Congress.

But Trump’s sudden acquiescence, as he stares down yet another humiliating news cycle tying him to a notorious pedophile, seems little more than a facade. The president’s own comments, just hours before the vote, betrayed significant anger.

“Quiet! Quiet, piggy,” Trump snapped at a female reporter on Monday when asked about the Epstein files. (The official White House transcript, which does not appear auto-generated, appears to skip the Epstein question, while leaving out “piggy” in Trump’s response.) Trump’s rage, wrapped in characteristic cruelty after failing to convince even his most loyal House supporters not to back the bill, was clear; this was not a man at peace.

A similar frustration animated Mike Johnson this morning, when the House speaker announced that he, too, would support the Epstein bill. “The move is a remarkable pivot for Johnson, who had urged Republicans to reject the effort,” is how Axios characterized it. That’s true, from one angle. But the hostility with which Johnson announced his reversal reveals, like Trump, a man still seething. Hours before the vote, Johnson once again blamed Democrats for “forcing a political show vote” that his own caucus overwhelmingly backs. He also released a memo outlining the alleged legal problems with the discharge petition, including privacy concerns for Epstein’s victims, even though the bill explicitly addresses such concerns.

With the bill likely careening toward the Senate, Johnson’s comments could be seen as a potential blueprint should Majority Leader John Thune wish to prevent the files from being released. As for Trump’s “piggy” remarks, they once again reveal the anger of a man on the eve of a vote that could potentially reveal more ties to the notorious pedophile who was once Trump’s close friend.

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New Report Indicates a Growing Public Resistance to Data Centers

This story was originally published by WIRED and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

On Election Day, Peter Hubbard was one of two Democratic candidates who took a decisive—and surprising—victory in Georgia. Hubbard was elected to the Georgia Public Service Commission (PSC), the body that regulates the state’s electric utility. It’s the first time Democrats have won statewide seats in statewide elections in Georgia in nearly two decades.

Residents have complained for years about a series of rate hikes from the PSC. But during Hubbard’s campaigning, he noticed another topic coming up again and again with his future constituents. “The number one issue was affordability,” he says. “But a very close second was data centers and the concern around them just sucking up the water, the electricity, the land—and not really paying any taxes.”

Georgia has become a hot spot for data center development over the past few years: Some research indicates it’s one of the fastest-growing markets for data center development in the country (thanks, in part, to some generous tax breaks). It’s also now a nexus for organizing against those same data centers. Community opposition to data centers, a new report finds, is on the rise across the country. And red states, including Georgia and Indiana, are leading this wave of bipartisan opposition.

The new report was released by Data Center Watch, a project run by AI security company 10a Labs that tracks community opposition to data centers across the country. The company has been keeping eyes on this topic since 2023, and released its first public findings earlier this year. (While 10a Labs does offer risk analysis for AI companies, report author Miquel Vila says that the Data Center Watch project is separate from the company’s main work, and is not paid for by any clients.) But this week’s report finds that the tide has turned sharply in the months since the group’s first public output. The second quarter of this year, the new report finds, represented “a sharp escalation” in data center opposition across the country.

“The little guy finally won, which rarely happens in any industry, let alone where the Magnificent Ten play.”

Data Center Watch’s first report covered a period from May 2024 to March of 2025; in that period, it found, local opposition had blocked or delayed a total of $64 billion in data center projects (six projects were blocked entirely, while 10 were delayed). But Data Center Watch’s new report found that opposition blocked or delayed $98 billion in projects from March to June of 2025 alone—eight projects, including two in Indiana and Kentucky, were blocked in those three months, while nine were delayed. One of those projects, a $17 billion development in the Atlanta suburbs, was put on hold in May after the county imposed a 180-day moratorium on data center development, following significant pushback from local residents.

There are some “methodological caveats” to the new Data Center Watch report, Vila acknowledges. The new report, which is based solely on public documents including media reports, legal filings, and social media, covers a period of time when data center construction in the US exploded: Industry website ConstructConnect estimates that US spending on data construction by August of this year exceeded all spending in 2024. More data center projects may simply mean more communities are reacting to ones coming to their backyards; more media attention on these projects also may juice up opposition. But the sharp increase in other data observed by Data Center Watch between March and June—including nearly 50,000 signatures on petitions opposing specific data centers across the country in that time period—indicates that there has been “a turning point” in the issue, Vila says.

“Before, [resistance] was something that could happen,” he says. “Now it seems that it’s very likely that when you are developing [a data center], potentially someone is going to organize.”

Hubbard, who won the Georgia PSC seat, isn’t the only political candidate who has had opposition to data centers play a role in their race, nor is Georgia the only battleground. In Virginia, the country’s data center hub, governor-elect Abigail Spanberger said she wanted to have data centers “pay their own way” for power. Last week, climate journalism site Heatmap profiled John McAuliff, a former Biden climate adviser who won his election based in large part on opposition to data centers. Separate polling from Heatmap, also released last week, shows that less than half of Americans from all political persuasions would support a data center.

Josh Thomas is a Virginia state delegate from Prince William County, which, the county claims, has the highest concentration of data centers in the world. He introduced multiple bills during the last legislative session to rein in data centers in Virginia, and data center issues figured prominently in his most recent election. (His opponent, a Republican, alleged that Thomas did not go far enough in trying to stop data center sprawl.)

Thomas, who won reelection last week, points to the local pushback against the proposed Prince William Digital Gateway, which would put more than 30 data centers on the edge of a national reserve located in the north of the state. A group of homeowners have challenged the project in court, and a judge voided zoning in August, which temporarily halted construction.

“The little guy finally won, which rarely happens in any industry, let alone where the Magnificent Ten play,” he says, referring to the US’s biggest tech companies. “I think that rallied people politically in Virginia.”

Thomas, like Hubbard, also says he sees a lot of his constituents concerned about how data centers will affect their electricity bill. “People are just a lot more cost-conscious,” he says. Energy bills, Thomas says “are something that was kept relatively static for a number of years.” But in Virginia, electricity load from data centers are helping to drive up utility bills, Thomas says.

“I have Republicans and Democrats coming to me saying, ‘How can we help with this issue?'”

Both Thomas and Hubbard are Democrats, but opposition to data centers, the Data Center Watch report stresses, has been thoroughly bipartisan. And some national Republican politicians, including Sen. Josh Hawley, Rep. Thomas Massie, and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, have begun to speak out against them.

“People you have got to pay close attention to your local city, county, and state approvals of data centers and demand your water and energy bills be protected!!!” Greene, who has criticized data center expansion for months, posted on X on November 7.

Big tech companies have to date made few public statements about pushback to data center projects. While some, like Meta, provide public-facing information on their data centers, others in the industry lean heavily on nondisclosure agreements when building new data centers, providing little to no information to communities about these projects—including which tech companies may be involved.

In a statement, Dan Diorio, the vice president of state policy for the Data Center Coalition, a leading industry group, said that the industry is continuing to see “significant interest” from communities across the country in hosting data centers and that members are committed to “continued community engagement and stakeholder education,” as well as “being responsible and responsive neighbors in the communities where they operate.”

“The US data center industry provides significant benefits to local communities—creating hundreds of thousands of high-wage jobs across the nation, providing billions of dollars in economic investment, and generating significant local, state, and federal tax revenue that helps fund schools, transportation, public safety, and other community priorities,” Diorio said. “All told, US data centers supported 4.7 million jobs and contributed $162 billion in federal, state, and local taxes in 2023.”

The sea change in public sentiment may not be enough to stem the market enthusiasm for data center build-out. While $93 billion in delayed and blocked investments is certainly not a small number, it’s chump change compared to the massive influx of cash from big tech companies that is, analysts say, currently driving the US economy. (Meta alone said last week that it will invest $600 billion into AI infrastructure, including data centers, over the next three years.) And even though some communities are successfully pushing back against data centers, those wins can be temporary. The ruling on the Prince William Digital Gateway, for instance, was stayed in October, allowing construction to resume as the case moves towards trial next year.

Still, Thomas has big plans for data center reform in Virginia’s next legislative session, including reintroducing a reform bill of his that passed the legislature in May but was vetoed by Gov. Glenn Youngkin.

“I have Republicans and Democrats coming to me saying, ‘How can we help with this issue? My constituents are talking about it like they never have before,’” he says. “Our coalition of data center reform-minded legislators has just grown to a very large number.”

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Federal Cash for Lead Pipe Replacement Isn’t Making It to Illinois Communities

This story, a partnership between Grist, Inside Climate News, and Chicago-area public radio station WBEZ, is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Lead pipes are ubiquitous. At this point, no state has gotten rid of all of its toxic lead service lines, which pipe drinking water to homes and businesses. But some cities like Chicago, New York City, and Detroit have more lead plumbing than others, and replacing it can cost tens of thousands of dollars. The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, the Biden-era infrastructure law, promised $15 billion for lead pipe replacements across the country to be disbursed over five years.

But in a letter to the Environmental Protection Agency sent earlier this week, a group of Illinois congressional delegates allege that $3 billion appropriated for lead pipe replacements nationwide for the fiscal year that ended in September has not reached communities yet. They warn that the delay is a “dangerous politicization” that puts children and families at risk.

“It feels like it’s targeting blue states or blue cities that might require more of this mitigation.”

“Federal resources are not partisan tools—they are vital lifelines intended to serve all Americans,” the letter notes. “Using federal funds as leverage against communities based on political considerations represents a dangerous abuse of power that undermines public trust and puts lives at risk.”

The move comes as communities in Illinois, which is among the top five states with the most lead service lines, and across the country are grappling with the overwhelming cost of removing the hazardous metal piping from water systems. The Trump administration has already withheld congressionally appropriated funding for infrastructure and energy projects from Democrat-led states like New York, Colorado, Minnesota, New York, and Massachusetts. Now, lawmakers fear money for lead pipes is stuck in Washington too.

“I think that they’re playing games,” said Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi, one of the lawmakers who led the effort to send the letter. “It feels like it’s targeting blue states or blue cities that might require more of this mitigation than other parts of the country.”

Lead is toxic and dangerous to human health. Lead plumbing can flake and dissolve into drinking water, which can lead to brain damage, cardiovascular problems, and reproductive issues. The EPA advises that there is no safe level of lead exposure.

A spokesperson for the federal agency said it is “actively working” on allotments for lead service line replacements. The Illinois Environmental Protection Agency, which is responsible for disbursing the federal funds to local governments, did not respond to a request for comment. The Chicago Department of Water Management said it received $14 million from the Illinois EPA for the 2025 financial year and was approved for $28 million for the next fiscal year.

“The estimated replacement cost for the Chicago region alone is $12 billion or more, and statewide, it could be $14 billion,” Krishnamoorthi said. “Whatever amounts would come to Chicago would not be enough to do the entire job, but the federal component is vital to get the ball rolling.”

Chicago has more than 412,000 lead service lines, the most of any city in the country. So far, the city has replaced roughly 14,000 lead pipes at a cost of $400 million over the past five years. That’s due in part to the high cost of replacing lead pipes. In Chicago, a single lead pipe replacement can cost on average $35,000. Federal rules require that Chicago replace all its pipes by 2047, but city officials have cited concerns over the unfunded federal mandate.

“This is impacting people’s health,” said Chakena Sims, a senior policy advocate with Natural Resources Defense Council. “The federal government politicizing access to safe drinking water is an all-time low,” she added. “It’s encouraging to see our Illinois congressional leaders stand up for communities.”

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How the Right Uses “Gender Ideology” to Blame Trans People for Everything

Hours after being sworn in for a second term, President Donald Trump used his constitutionally vested powers to define “man” and “woman.” In an executive order, he said his administration would recognize only two immutable, biological sexes, determined at conception, in the name of “defending women” from a rising scourge: “gender ideology.”

It was the first-ever use of the phrase in an official White House statement, but it wasn’t new. Over the last decade, the fear of “gender ideology” has been used to mobilize right-wing movements from Argentina to Poland to Turkey. Now it’s a part of American parlance, too. It appeared in federal legislation in 2022, and Republicans have wielded it ever since to attack health care, picture books, and pronouns.

Like critical race theory and “wokeness,” “gender ideology” is both a bogeyman for the right and a reactionary backlash to social progress. The expression is generally used to scorn the idea that gender is a social construct different from biological sex (a distinction that has existed in the United States since at least the mid-20th century). For many people, this isn’t an ideology at all—just lived experience. But the Heritage Foundation describes “gender ideology” as a form of brainwashing: “the belief that children can be born in the wrong body,” which “inspires opaque proclamations like ‘transwomen are women.’”

In the right’s telling, the origins of this supposed ideology are varied: It is false consciousness, a leftist lie, a plot by globalist elites, a spiritual affront to the Lord—or all of these things combined. These ascribed meanings are both capacious and inconsistent, and that ambiguity is key to its weaponization. By condensing a range of anxieties into a single enemy, the phrase produces “existential fear”—your core values are under attack!—that “can then be exploited” by authoritarians, as philosopher Judith Butler argues in their 2024 book, Who’s Afraid of Gender?

The right seeks to cast gender identity not as something you are, but as something dangerous that you believe.

Butler traces the term’s provenance to the 1990s, when conservative Catholics began warning that the very concept of “gender” had subverted God’s will and “inspired ideologies” that were imperiling the nuclear family. In a 2004 letter to bishops, the Vatican decried homosexuality, railed against feminists for making women “adversaries” of men, and reaffirmed binary masculinity and femininity as the purest expression of God’s love. Any subversion of traditional gender roles wasn’t merely sinful. It wrought a culture, the Vatican said, that corrupted society at large.

The idea of a cancerous gender ideology really took off in the mid-2010s, appearing first in political debates in predominantly Catholic Latin American countries, and later getting cited by some of the world’s most notorious right-wing authoritarian leaders.

Brazil’s former President Jair Bolsonaro­—recently convicted of plotting a coup to stay in power—pledged in his 2019 inauguration speech to “combat gender ideology and rescue our values.” In an address to US Republicans at the 2022 Conservative Political Action Conference, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán likened its spread to a foreign invasion. “We had to build not just a physical wall on our borders,” he said, “but a legal wall around our children to protect them from the ‘gender ideology’ that targets them.” Russia’s Vladimir Putin has repeatedly claimed that the notion of “gender freedoms” is a “decadent” threat, imported from the West.

The MAGA right deploys the phrase as an allegory for a broad liberal agenda it claims is polluting the nation—the idea is that trans people are part of “a corrupt elite that [have] imposed a whole bunch of ideologies from the top down on ‘regular people,’” explains Jules Gill-Peterson, a scholar of transgender history at Johns Hopkins University.

Trump famously exploited that notion­­ to rally his base, pinning economic hardship on trans people. One notable campaign ad opened with the line “Kamala supports taxpayer-funded sex changes for prisoners,” and concluded with: “Kamala is for they/them. President Trump is for you.” More recently, as the federal government shutdown caused SNAP benefits to lapse, the Trump administration saw an opportunity to blame trans people and immigrants for the imminent hunger of 42 million Americans. “Senate Democrats are withholding services to the American people in exchange for healthcare for illegals, gender mutilation, and other unknown ‘leverage’ points,” read a banner on the US Department of Agriculture’s website.

The right’s gripe isn’t just that trans people exist, but that their existence is tearing down the old world—of good men, obedient women, traditional family structures—and unleashing a new, godless age of chaos and precarity on you. Never mind that this idealized past of “American values” never existed. Trump and his allies stoke the fear of a false history’s destruction so they can, as Butler writes, “enter as forces of redemption and restoration.”

This is why Trump’s executive order promises specifically to “protect” women. And why the right echoes the rhetoric of trans-exclusionary radical feminists (TERFs), who have been some of the loudest voices calling for the eradication of “gender ideology.”

“There is a benefit for right-wing anti-feminist groups in adopting and legitimizing themselves [with] the vocabularies provided by feminism,” Sophie Lewis, author of Enemy Feminisms , told me. But, she notes, it’s not as straightforward as “a co-optation or a weaponization or a sort of bad-faith borrowing.” The same extinction panic animates TERFs and Republican politicians alike. Both claim trans people pose an eliminationist threat, endangering not just women’s physical safety, but womanhood as we know it.

This perceived existential battle is, in part, why the anti-trans movement has focused so much of its attention on children. Stripping trans kids of gender-affirming health care and banning certain books and curricula are part of how the right attempts to enact its vision for the nation’s future.

Of late, the anti-trans messaging has grown increasingly sinister. Prominent Republicans now frequently ­peddle the lie that trans people are violent, dangerous, and out for blood. Donald Trump Jr. has called trans people, who make up about 1 percent of the US population, “the most violent domestic terror threat, if not in America, probably [in] the entire world.” In September, conservative commentator Megyn Kelly claimed trans activists and individuals have “been running around killing Americans in the name of transgender ideology.”

With its hateful rhetoric, the right seeks to cast gender identity not as something you are, but as something dangerous that you believe. An escalating regime of persecution and repression is therefore justified; we aren’t against trans people, just their ideology. Yet the end goal is the same: to wipe out transness itself.

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How Many Republicans Will Defy Trump and Vote to Release the Epstein Files?

On Tuesday, the Republican-controlled House of Representatives will finally vote on the bipartisan Epstein Files Transparency Act. If passed, the bill would force the Department of Justice to release all unclassified records related to Jeffrey Epstein’s sex trafficking of minors, including flight logs, names of people and entities with ties to Epstein, sealed settlements, and internal DOJ communications related to the case.

The Tuesday vote—which was first reported by Politico on Friday, citing three anonymous sources—has been a long time coming. The bill was first introduced in the House by Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) in July; in early September, he and co-sponsor Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) put forth a discharge petition to force the legislation out of the Rules Committee for a floor vote. Last week, when House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) finally swore in Rep. Adelita Grijalva (D-Ariz.), they secured the last signature needed to make the legislation eligible for a vote.

Now, the question is whether enough House Republicans will turn on President Donald Trump—who has been doing everything he can to tank the vote—to move the bill forward. Only four Republicans—Massie, Rep. Nancy Mace (R-S.C.), Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), and Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.)—signed onto the discharge petition, and CNN reported that the White House held a meeting with Boebert in the Situation Room to pressure her to take her name off of it. (She declined.) Trump has called the effort to release the files “a Democrat hoax” but, confusingly, also ordered the DOJ on Friday to investigate Epstein’s ties to prominent Democrats.

But at least some on the right appear undeterred. On ABC’s This Week on Sunday morning, Massie said he expects “a deluge of Republicans” to vote for the bill, adding, “There could be 100 or more.” (On NBC’s Meet the Press on Sunday, Khanna offered a more conservative estimate, of at least 40 Republicans he expects to vote in support of the bill.)

Rep. Massie says that he expects a “deluge” of House Republicans will vote to compel the release of the Epstein files: “I’ve never said these documents will implicate Donald Trump. I think he’s trying to protect a bunch of rich and powerful friends.” https://t.co/DVClWBcAj0 pic.twitter.com/fPhMYOYabf

— This Week (@ThisWeekABC) November 16, 2025

Massie said he is hoping to secure a veto-proof majority in the House—which would require two-thirds of present members to vote to pass the bill—to ensure Trump could not tank it if it gets to his desk. But that would also require a veto-proof majority in the Republican-controlled Senate, which appears unlikely given that Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) has refused to even commit to holding the vote. A handful of Senate Republicans, including Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), and Thom Tillis (R-Fla.), have called for the files’ release.

Still, Massie is hopeful. Senators, he said, could “force the vote in spite of the leadership’s effort” by inserting the language as an amendment to a larger bill to ensure it passes. “I just hope John Thune will do the right thing,” he said, adding, “the pressure’s going to be there if we get a big vote in the House.” (If the bill did pass the Senate, but without the two-thirds vote, Trump could still veto it.)

“I just hope John Thune will do the right thing.”

After championing a House vote, Rep. Thomas Massie tells @jonkarl there are “other ways” the release of the Epstein files can be brought up for a vote in the Senate. https://t.co/DVClWBcAj0 pic.twitter.com/V3uM3PvQwK

— This Week (@ThisWeekABC) November 16, 2025

Massie added that the investigations Trump ordered the DOJ to conduct on Friday against high-profile Democrats could be “a big smokescreen…as a last-ditch effort to prevent the release of the Epstein files.”

“I’ve never said these documents will implicate Donald Trump,” he said. “I think he’s trying to protect a bunch of rich and powerful friends, billionaires, donors to his campaign, friends in his social circles.”

“I don’t think we’ve had a scandal like this in this country, and what we’re asking for is justice for those survivors. So it’s not about Donald Trump—I don’t even know how involved Trump was.”

Massie added that, through conversations with the victims’ lawyers, he has learned that “there are at least 20 people in those files—there are politicians, billionaires, movie producers—who are implicated criminally who haven’t been investigated.”

“When I see Donald Trump announce a bunch of investigations,” Massie continued, “I don’t see him going after these rich elites that are implicated in these files, according to the survivors.”

Khanna, on Meet the Press, offered a similar assessment: “There is a group of rich and powerful men who abused young girls. It’s the one thing this country agrees was horrible. I don’t think we’ve had a scandal like this in this country, and what we’re asking for is justice for those survivors. So it’s not about Donald Trump—I don’t even know how involved Trump was.”

Spokespeople for Khanna and Thune did not immediately respond to requests for comment from Mother Jones on Sunday; a spokesperson for Massie referred questions to his appearance on ABC.

Survivors of Epstein’s sex trafficking and abuse are also hoping enough Republicans vote to pass the bill. In a letter Friday, a handful of them wrote: “Dear Esteemed Members of the Senate and the House of Representatives, You have the ability to vote to release the Epstein files, and with it, deliver a promise the American people have awaited far too long. We implore you to do so.”

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Don’t Be Fooled: Marjorie Taylor Greene Still Wants to Reconcile With Trump

There was a time when Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) compared President Donald Trump to Jesus Christ and called him “the greatest President of my lifetime.”

Those days are over.As I wrote back in July, Greene has been increasingly critical of Trump’s second term in office: She has railed against his decision to launch strikes on Iran, his renewed support for Ukraine, and his backing of H-1B visas, which allow employers to sponsor immigrants for high-skill jobs, mostly in science and tech fields. Greene has alleged these decisions betray MAGA’s supposed “America First” philosophy. And while she has been calling for the Department of Justice to release the Epstein files for months now, she recently turned that talk into action, becoming one of only four Republicans to back a discharge petition that would force a vote requiring the DOJ to release the full files. (The petition finally got its last vote this past week, and the vote on the legislation is expected in the House on Tuesday.)

Greene’s critiques seem to have finally become too much for Trump to handle. On Friday night, the president officially disavowed Greene in a Truth Social rant, claiming, “all I see “Wacky” Marjorie do is COMPLAIN, COMPLAIN, COMPLAIN!” He went on to call her a “ranting Lunatic,” and claimed her change of heart “seemed to all begin when I sent her a Poll stating that she should not run for Senator, or Governor, she was at 12%, and didn’t have a chance (unless, of course, she had my Endorsement — which she wasn’t about to get!).” Greene ruled out runs for both offices earlier this year, and her current term in the House ends in 2027. But according to Trump, “if the right person runs” against her, “they will have my Complete and Unyielding Support.”

About 12 hours later, Trump couldn’t help but send one more break-up “Truth”: “Marjorie ‘Traitor’ Green is a disgrace to our GREAT REPUBLICAN PARTY!” he wrote.

“I don’t worship or serve Donald Trump,” Greene wrote on X.

Greene clapped back within the hour. “President Trump just attacked me and lied about me,” she wrote on X, attaching screenshots of texts she claimed were to him and his assistant explaining her calls to release the Epstein files. “Apparently this is what sent him over the edge.”

“I have supported President Trump with too much of my precious time, too much of my own money, and fought harder for him even when almost all other Republicans turned their back and denounced him,” Greene continued. “But I don’t worship or serve Donald Trump.”

In other posts, Greene claimed Trump was attacking her due to her refusal to take money from the pro-Israel lobbying group AIPAC and a bill she recently introduced seeking to end the H-1B visa program. Regardless of what caused the break-up, on Saturday, Greene wrote on X that she was receiving threats from people who were “being fueled and egged on by the most powerful man in the world. The man I supported and helped get elected.”

Apparently, these threats have been enough to force Greene—who, as my colleague David Corn has pointed out, previously liked social media posts calling for the executions of former House Speaker and current Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and former President Barack Obama—to turn over a new leaf. On CNN on Sunday morning, she appeared with her tail between her legs. “I would like to say humbly that I’m sorry for taking part in the toxic politics,” Greene told host Dana Bash. “It’s very bad for our country. And it’s been something I’ve thought about a lot, especially since Charlie Kirk was assassinated.”

BASH: “We have seen these kinds of attacks or criticism from the President at other people. It's not new. And with respect, I haven't heard you speak out about it until it was directed at you.”

GREENE: “Dana, I think that's fair criticism, and I would like to say humbly, I'm… pic.twitter.com/mEURshZcfI

— State of the Union (@CNNSOTU) November 16, 2025

When Bash pressed Greene about her prior support for those violent social media posts, she replied: “Of course I never want to cause any harm or anything bad for anyone…I think America needs to come together and end all the toxic, dangerous rhetoric and divide, and I’m leading the way with my own example, and I hope that President Trump can do the same.”

But for all her claims that she has changed, Greene still seems to possess a fealty to Trump that she can’t entirely shake. When Bash asked Greene if she thought she and Trump could repair their relationship, Greene replied: “I certainly hope that we can make up…I’m a Christian, and one of the most important parts of our faith is forgiveness, and that’s something I’m committed to.”

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene on whether she can fix her relationship with President Trump:

"Well, I certainly hope that we can make up. And there's you know, again, I can only speak for myself. I'm a Christian and one of the most important parts of our faith is forgiveness. And… pic.twitter.com/GH4qT2uoHt

— State of the Union (@CNNSOTU) November 16, 2025

Luckily for Greene, it seems that a reconciliation with Trump is not entirely implausible. Consider, for example, his reunion with Elon Musk. And Greene has long been arguing that criticism of Trump doesn’t mean she has abandoned MAGA, as I wrote in July:

Is the anger of MAGA and Greene a sign of a more lasting break with the president? Even with all the drama, it’s highly unlikely. According to Greene herself, dissent within MAGA isn’t proof of its weakness, but its supremacy. “Contrary to brainwashed Democrat boomers think and protest about, Trump is not a king, MAGA is not a cult, and I can and DO have my own opinion,” she wrote last month.

But whether Trump feels the same way remains to be seen.

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Trump Finally Admits His Tariffs Raise Prices

President Donald Trump, who ran in 2024 on the promise to bring down prices “on day one,” has finally admitted that his tariffs do the opposite.

On Friday, the Trump administration announced that it would exempt a broad array of groceries—including staples like beef, coffee, and bananas—from the tariffs the president proudly implemented in April. While Trump, of course, did not concede outright that his tariffs have helped stoke sticker shock, the tariff reversal is a clear bid to ease the high prices currently plaguing American consumers.

More than half of Americans said food costs were a “major source of stress.”

The Trump administration appears to be scrambling for an affirmative economic message in the wake of the GOP’s recent stinging electoral losses. Earlier this month, Republican candidates were defeated in not only the Virginia and New Jersey gubernatorial elections, but also in a string of local races. Meanwhile, democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani surged to victory in the New York City mayoral race on an affordability agenda.

On November 5, the day after the elections, Trump discussed affordability on Fox News, claiming that it was a “new word” being pushed by Democrats. While he insisted his administration has brought prices “way down,” he also said that Republicans don’t talk enough about affordability. That evening, he rehashed his argument on Truth Social: “AFFORDABILITY is a Republican Stronghold. Hopefully, Republicans will use this irrefutable fact!”

While inflation has come down from its Biden-era 2022 peak, federal data from September shows that grocery prices have risen since the start of Trump’s presidency, with costs climbing at the quickest annual pace since 2022. (October’s data has not been released, with the Trump administration saying its publication is unlikely after the government shutdown impaired collecting statistics.) In an August poll by AP-NORC, more than half of Americans said that grocery costs were a “major source of stress” in their lives.

Despite warnings from most economists and the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, Trump has repeatedly claimed that his tariffs do not raise prices. But if tariffs had no impact on consumer prices, then Trump would not now find the need to roll them back.

“We just did a little bit of a rollback on some foods, like coffee as an example, where the prices of coffee were a little bit high. Now they’ll be on the low side in a very short period of time,” Trump admitted to reporters on Friday. (Over the last year, coffee prices increased 19 percent. Much of the US’s coffee comes from Brazil, which Trump slapped with a 50 percent tariff citing, among other reasons, an ongoing court case against former President Jair Bolsonaro over his attempted coup.)

An October CNN poll found that less than a third of Americans believe Trump has lived up to his affordability promises. More than 60 percent said he’s made this country’s economic conditions worse.

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Trump Calls for an Epstein Investigation Into Everyone But Him

For months, President Donald Trump begged America to forget about Jeffrey Epstein. But this week a House committee released a trove of the late sex offender’s emails, and Trump’s name was all over them. Now, he’s suddenly once again very interested in figuring out who enabled or even partook in Epstein’s prolific sexual abuse of underage women—as long as the only people being investigated for crimes are Democrats.

“It’s astonishing really how hard he’s fighting to stop the Epstein files from coming out.”

On Friday, Trump directed the Department of Justice, Attorney General Pam Bondi, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation to “investigate Jeffrey Epstein’s involvement and relationship with Bill Clinton, Larry Summers, Reid Hoffman, J.P. Morgan, Chase, and many other people and institutions, to determine what was going on with them.” Bondi quickly hopped on the case, announcing on X that she had assigned a prosecutor to “pursue this with urgency and integrity.”

Trump, a friend of Epstein for many years, has strenuously denied any knowledge of Epstein’s crimes. But his Friday directive reversed the Trump administration’s previous stance that there was nothing left to see in the Epstein case: In July, Bondi’s DOJ and the FBI released a memo claiming it had exhausted all of the evidence in the government’s possession and determined that “no further disclosure would be appropriate or warranted.” That move was itself a stunning reversal, angering many of Trump’s supporters who believed he would fulfill his campaign promise to release all files from the government’s Epstein investigation. After the July announcement, Trump blasted his supporters who felt betrayed as “stupid” and “foolish” for still believing in the “Jeffrey Epstein hoax.”

A bipartisan coalition of lawmakers emerged to push for the full Epstein files. Following the long-awaited swearing in of Arizona Rep. Adelita Grijalva on Wednesday, a Democrat whose support was needed to advance the release, the House will soon vote on a bill that could compel the DOJ to release what it has.

The emails made public on Wednesday by the House showed that Epstein once referred to Trump as “the dog that hasn’t barked” and alleged that Trump had once spent “hours” at his house with a sex trafficking victim.

But Trump would rather that you not pay attention to any of that. Instead, he ordered the government’s law enforcement apparatus to target former president Bill Clinton and his treasury secretary Larry Summers, who were also mentioned in Wednesday’s document release, along with LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, a major Democratic donor. It has been widely speculated that his administration could cite the newly-launched investigation in a coming battle with Congress to forestall making any further information public.

Trump’s about-face on releasing the full Epstein files has infuriated Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, (R-Ga.), once a staunch ally of the president. Their public feud escalated on Friday, with Trump calling Greene a “ranting lunatic” on Truth Social and announcing he would be “withdrawing his support and Endorsement,” suggesting he would back a primary challenger to her if the “right person runs.”

Greene issued a length response on X, claiming that it was their split over the Epstein files that “sent [Trump] over the edge.”

“It’s astonishing really how hard he’s fighting to stop the Epstein files from coming out,” she wrote.

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In a Mississippi Jail, Inmates Became Weapons

Chris Mack has been locked up in Mississippi’s Rankin County Jail on and off since he was a teenager. In a lawsuit, he detailed a jailhouse assault that left him with broken ribs, a broken nose, and two black eyes. But it wasn’t just guards who attacked him. Mack said a group of inmates joined in—men in the jail’s Trusty Inmate Program, who had special privileges and wore blue jumpsuits.

“They were called the blue wave,” Mack said.

Through more than 70 interviews with former inmates and officers, reporters from Mississippi Today and the New York Times discovered a system in which guards ordered beatings, inmates who participated were rewarded, and those trying to raise an alarm about the system for more than a decade were ignored.

This week on Reveal, on the heels of our reporting on abuses in the Rankin County Sheriff’s Department run by Sheriff Bryan Bailey, we expose a wave of violence in his county jail.

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Bill Pulte Is Really Having a Week

If you had never heard of the Federal Housing Finance Agency—a small niche of the government that oversees much of the mortgage industry—this might be the week that put the FHFA on your radar, all because of its director, a 37-year-old official named Bill Pulte who was this week’s Washington Main Character (Non-Epstein Division).

Over the past few days, news stories have revealed a slew of criticisms and even an agency investigation into the dubious moves he has made in recent months as he has tried to ingratiate himself with President Donald Trump, including claims that he fired more than a dozen ethics staff who questioned his actions and that he presented bad ideas to the president that have embarrassed the White House.

Pulte arrived at his job running the FHFA amid a flurry of criticisms that he is both a “nepobaby” and unqualified for the job. Pulte is an heir to a real estate and construction fortune and has no professional experience in the mortgage industry he is now tasked with supervising. Yet since taking over the FHFA this spring, he has anointed himself as something of a mortgage fraud expert, digging up old documents and using them to accuse the president’s political foes—from New York Attorney General Letitia James to California Sen. Adam Schiff and Fed governor and economist Lisa Cook—of financial crimes to his millions of Twitter followers, before referring them to the Justice Department for investigation. All of the people he’s accused of such crimes are prominent Democrats, even as journalists revealed that mortgage data points to similar errors committed by three GOP officials in Trump’s Cabinet.

Pulte’s claims made news—Trump even used the accusations against Cook to fire her from job at the Federal Reserve, a move she is now contesting before the US Supreme Court. Still, though none of Pulte’s allegations became criminal charges (Letitia James is now facing a claim unrelated to what Pulte dug up), they begged the question of how Pulte was accessing the private data behind his accusations.

During the recent government shutdown, Pulte flew down to Trump’s Palm Beach golf club to present his idea for the president’s demand: a 50-year mortgage.

This week, the Wall Street Journal revealed that an ethics team at Fannie Mae, one of the mortgage giants Pulte oversees, had begun to investigate exactly this question. They started because some of their internal staff had expressed concern that senior leaders at the FHFA were pushing them to improperly access mortgage loan paperwork. The ethics watchdog then escalated their inquiry to the internal oversight office at the FHFA, who passed it federal prosecutors.

Not long after all this, many of the people who had touched the investigation got fired, including a dozen members of the Fannie Mae watchdog team, its chief ethics officer, and the top investigative official at the FHFA who had alerted prosecutors to the ongoing inquiry. Yet Pulte claimed the Fannie layoffs were merely part of a bid to end DEI programs.

This week, the Associated Press revealed that around the same time that this probe was ramping up in October, Pulte was making other questionable moves at Fannie Mae. Emails show that he asked the company’s head of marketing, a confidant of his, to share confidential pricing information with officials at Freddie Mac, Fannie’s main competitor, in a move that could open up Fannie Mae to allegations of collusion to fix mortgage rates. When senior officials at Fannie Mae questioned the conduct, they, too, were fired.

Somewhere in the middle of all this, Trump directed Pulte to think about ways to use Fannie and Freddie to ramp up housing production and address the country’s critical housing shortage. During the recent government shutdown, Pulte flew down to Trump’s Palm Beach golf club to present his idea for the president’s demand: a 50-year mortgage. Politico reported this week that Pulte went to Trump with a 3-foot-by-5-foot posterboard that discussed the idea in a few pictures and captions, and claimed if Trump did this, he would be among the “Great American Presidents.” Ten minutes later, Trump took to Truth Social to post in support of the idea, with a photo of the poster itself. Soon, the White House was flooded with calls pillorying the idea: a 50-year-mortgage could actually make the housing crisis worse, and raise costs to households in the long run.

“The thing that became clear from this latest episode—if it wasn’t already clear—is that Bill Pulte doesn’t know the first fucking thing about how the mortgage markets operate,” one person who was familiar with what happened told Politico. “After publicly humiliating the president with his moronic 50-year mortgage plan it’s safe to assume that his days are numbered.”

None of these criticisms or revelations have seemed to slow Pulte, or make him question his actions: The day after the Wall Street Journal revealed the probe looking into how Pulte is accessing private mortgage data, the FHFA director accused yet another prominent Trump critic, California Rep. Eric Swalwell, of—guess what?—mortgage fraud.

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New Docs Show DHS Gathering Drivers’ License Data in Voter Fraud Crusade

The Trump administration is quietly undertaking an effort to expand a Department of Homeland Security (DHS) tool used for citizenship verification to include drivers’ license and passport information—personal data it plans to utilize in its voter fraud crusade.

You’ve probably never heard of the DHS system known as SAVE (or Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements), which the agency has historically used to confirm individuals are citizens and therefore eligible for government assistance. But if the Trump administration gets its way, SAVE will soon know a lot about you_._

Since SAVE’s inception in 1987, government agencies have analyzed immigrants’ citizenship status by plugging immigration identification numbers into the system, which then checked the information against other federal databases.In May, Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) added social security numbers as information that SAVE could query. DOGE further boosted SAVE’s capacity by allowing bulk searches, rather than searching individuals one-by-one.

“By sweeping up driver’s license and passport data from across the country,” they’re laying the groundwork for a system that could easily be misused to make it harder for people to exercise their constitutional right to cast a ballot.”

But late last month, DHS indicated in a public notice posted to the federal register that it planned to build out the program even further, by adding the ability to search drivers’ license information from all 50 states. The federal government could accomplish this either by requesting access to the drivers’ license data from each state individually, or perhaps by relying on national data compiled by a private law enforcement nonprofit. DHS says SAVE will soon have access to the US passport database, too.

According to US Citizenship & Immigration Services (USCIS), the division of DHS that oversees SAVE, the expansion is an effort to verify voter eligibility more efficiently. Non-citizen voting has been an obsession of Donald Trump’s ever since he falsely claimed that he lost the popular vote in 2016 because three million undocumented immigrants voted in California. “[W]e are reinforcing the principle that America’s elections are reserved exclusively for American citizens,” USCIS spokesperson Matthew J. Tragesser says.

But experts are concerned by SAVE’s expansion from a tool used to ascertain the status of an immigrant applying for public benefits to what is effectively an amalgamated database that can research hundreds of thousands of voters at once. They say it could be used to spread misinformation about the frequency of non-citizen voting, which studies show is incredibly rare, or even to try and remove eligible voters from state voter rolls based on the weaponization of faulty data. Responding to questions from Mother Jones, USCIS rejected the notion that SAVE is a database, though the agency referred to it as one in its own 2025 press release.

Using SAVE in this manner amounts to what Chioma Chukwu, the executive director of American Oversight, a nonprofit government accountability group that files a litany of public records requests, describes as a “vast federal data system of Americans’ most sensitive personal information [created] under the guise of ‘election integrity.'”

“By sweeping up driver’s license and passport data from across the country,” she adds, “they’re laying the groundwork for a system that could easily be misused to make it harder for people to exercise their constitutional right to cast a ballot.”

The administration has been discussing plans to expand SAVE since the first months of Trump’s presidency. In May, US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) official Brian Broderick joined a conference call with the National Association of Secretaries of State (NASS) to explain a new initiative to prevent non-citizen voting.

According to a summary of the conference call American Oversight obtained through public records requests and shared with Mother Jones, Broderick discussed how the Trump administration planned to grow SAVE by connecting “enumerators”—or new ways to verify citizens—to the system.

Suppose a state wanted to check its entire voter roll for non-citizens. It’s unlikely they would find many—if any—actual non-citizens on its roll, given that most states require some type of identification to vote and that non-citizens face steep penalties (deportation, prison time, etc.) for even trying to register. But the expansion of SAVE would allow the secretary of state’s office to check on someone’s citizenship status using just their drivers’ license information. As ProPublica reported last month, this would allow states whose voter rolls don’t include Social Security numbers to use SAVE for voter verification.

For the expansion to be successful, DHS would presumably need access to all 50 states’ drivers license databases, which are controlled separately. Broderick admitted this wouldn’t be easy, saying the process could “take several months to implement,” according to the the summary of the call.

The number of drivers’ license databases isn’t the only hurdle. States compile their drivers’ license data differently, with some collecting more data than others. People also move across state lines and their drivers’ license numbers change. It’s feasible that outdated drivers’ license information in the system could cause a voter to be wrongly flagged as a non-citizen by SAVE.

Both the public notice and the call summary obtained by American Oversight indicate the administration is exploring the possibility of using drivers’ license data collected by the National Law Enforcement Telecommunications System, which offers law enforcement agencies a centralized system to search drivers’ license data throughout the country. (If you’ve ever been pulled over while on vacation, this information-sharing system is how an out-of-state cop runs your license.)

This approach would spare DHS from negotiating data access with each state—something DHS has already brought up with Texas officials, according to emails between the federal department and the Texas Department of Public Safety reported by ProPublica last month. (A Texas official told DHS that Texas was “always happy” to support the SAVE program.)

While the public notice focuses on how SAVE could be used to verify voter eligibility, it also indicates that the federal government will offer SAVE access to “appropriate federal, state, local, tribal, territorial, foreign, or international government agencies.” DHS would provide state and local agencies access to SAVE for free.

Indeed, the Trump administration tried to share SAVE access with various law enforcement groups in Florida last spring, the documents obtained by American Oversight show. Aram Moghaddassi, a former member of DOGE who is now the chief information officer for the Social Security Administration, reached out to state officials in Florida about the program.

“We’re working on SAVE access for Florida law enforcement now,” Moghaddassi wrote to an aide to Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and law enforcement officials in March 2025.

Moghaddassi also requested voter registration data from Florida to check for voter fraud right away. He claimed that ICE “has several leads on non-citizen voting in Florida and would like to work with Florida to investigate and prosecute these cases.” (Documents show Moghaddassi’s contact information was also shared among Texas officials.)

Even in its more limited form, SAVE has previously incorrectly flagged naturalized citizens as non-citizens. Experts worry that adding additional datasets to the system may cause significantly more inaccurate assessments. Some populations may be at heightened risk of coming up in SAVE as potential non-citizens. For example: just-married women who are in the process of changing their last names, or recently naturalized citizens.

Election deniers could then use the inaccurate data to suggest widespread fraud is afoot, as Trump has repeatedly claimed. Worse yet, overzealous election officials could take the names incorrectly flagged by SAVE as gospel and remove those voters from the rolls, imperiling their right to vote.

“There’s no transparency, no clear explanation of how this data will be used, and no apparent safeguards against the inevitable errors and discrimination this kind of effort invites,” says Chukwu.

There’s reason for her to be concerned. In 2012, Florida attempted to remove 2,600 voters (the list originally included 182,000 names)—the majority of whom were people of color—from Florida’s voter rolls, alleging they were noncitizens after comparing the voting rolls to drivers’ license data. Many of those individuals had presented legal, non-citizen immigration documents when first obtaining their licenses, but had since obtained citizenship. The state’s drivers’ license database had outdated information—as is often the case.

Citing multiple people on the Florida list who were indeed citizens, the bipartisan US Commission on Civil Rights would later call the comparison method “extremely faulty.”

The Department of Justice has already sued eight states (seven of which are led by Democrats) to demand access to their full voter rolls to hunt for voter fraud. They want to create the federal government’s first ever national voter database, which could turbocharge the Trump administration’s voter suppression efforts while endangering voter privacy and becoming a prime target for hackers. The documents obtained by American Oversight show just how dangerous the expanded SAVE tool could be when used in conjunction with the voter roll data the Trump administration wants to compile.

“Given this administration’s track record of weaponizing federal agencies to chase baseless voter-fraud conspiracies and challenge voters’ eligibility,” says Chukwu, “the public should be deeply concerned about what’s being built behind closed doors with their tax dollars and the threat it could pose to voters.”

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Trump Eyes Mining of Pacific Seafloor Near the Marianas Trench

This story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

The Trump administration is expanding its deep-sea mining ambitions to the region around the Marianas Trench in the western Pacific, and is nearly doubling the proposed seabed mining area around American Samoa from 18 million acres to 33 million acres, an area bigger than Peru.

The move disregards unified opposition from Indigenous leaders in American Samoa, who imposed a moratorium on seabed mining last year. Governor Pulaali’i Nikolao Pula has asked the Trump administration not to proceed without the territory’s consent, but the federal government plans to move forward with an environmental review. “Our fisheries are essential for food security, recreation, and the perpetuation of our Samoan culture,” said Nathan Ilaoa, director of American Samoa’s Department of Marine & Wildlife Resources, last week in the Samoa News. Tuna makes up 99.5 percent of the territory’s exports.

In a press release, acting Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM), director Matt Giacona said the minerals could help US manufacturing and defense. “These resources are key to ensuring the United States is not reliant on China and other nations for its critical minerals needs,” he said. In April, the Trump administration issued an executive order to accelerate offshore mining despite international opposition and widespread concern from scientists about how little is known about the deep-sea ecosystem and the impacts mining could have on it.

The announcement is the first time that the Trump administration has indicated interest in mining the waters around the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, a US territory that is made up of 14 islands in the Marianas archipelago in the western Pacific. The southernmost island in the archipelago is Guam, a separate US territory. It’s the latest of at least four areas in the Pacific that the Trump administration has sought to open up to mining since April, including the waters surrounding the Cook Islands and the Clarion-Klipperton Zone, a mineral-rich area south of Hawaiʻi.

Nearly 100 square miles of the waters surrounding the Marianas archipelago are part of the Marianas Trench National Marine Monument. “These reefs and waters are among the most biologically diverse in the Western Pacific and include some of the greatest diversity of seamount and hydrothermal vent life yet discovered,” reads the description of the monument on the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s website. “It has many secrets to yield and many potentially valuable lessons that can benefit the rest of the world.”

The mining would take place west of the monument in an area spanning 35 million acres with its southernmost point between the islands of Rota and Guam, according to a notice published in the Federal Register Wednesday that opens up the plan to public comment until December 12. “The (Request for Input) does not constitute a decision to hold a lease sale but rather invites and encourages input from territorial and local governments, Indigenous communities, industry, ocean users, and the public,” the BOEM said. The commonwealth is home to about 44,000 residents, including Indigenous Chamorro and Carolinian peoples.

The update from the federal Bureau of Ocean Energy Management this week comes just days after researchers from the University of Hawaiʻi concluded that deep-sea mining could harm zooplankton, the tiny sea creatures who make up an integral part of the ocean’s food web. The researchers found that a massive sediment plume stretching hundreds of kilometers created by mining operations clouded the ocean. Zooplankton then fed on particles in the sediment that were found to be 10 to 100 times less nutritious than their typical food. “Because this is such a tightly linked, such a tight community food web, that will have these bottom-up impacts where zooplankton will starve and then the micronekton (that eat them) will starve and this community could collapse,” said Michael Dowd, lead author of the report.

Dowd initially chose to study the waters at a depth of 1,250 feet because that’s where The Metals Company planned to release its sediment. The company has since decided to do so at a lower depth, at 2,000 feet below sea level, in part due to data that found there’s fewer zooplankton there, and said that concerns about zooplankton at lower depths are overblown. Dowd said the absence of studies at that depth is not reassuring. “We really don’t know what that deeper community is like,” he said.

In the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, where plunging tourism has sparked a prolonged economic downturn this year, forcing hotel and business closures, the news of potential deep-sea mining was met with both concern and interest. “Success will depend on careful environmental management, respect for local and Indigenous interests, and transparent, science-based decision-making to ensure development aligns with both national and regional priorities,” Floyd Masga, the head of the local Bureau of Environmental and Coastal Quality, told Marianas Press.

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Kash Patel, the FBI’s Agent of Chaos

This column originally appeared on author Garrett Graff’s site Doomsday Scenario, which you can subscribe to here.

This week’s huge news has to be the latest Jeffrey Epstein revelations, a story that intersects with what can only be called the slow public unraveling of Kash Patel’s tenure director as FBI director. Patel, as you might remember, had long crusaded for the release of the Epstein files and victim lists—only now in office to reverse course, downplay the whole thing, and become one of the leaders of the effort to muzzle the release of further information. Yesterday, he was part of an effort in the White House Situation Room to pressure Rep. Lauren Boebert to change her vote and block the House effort to release more Epstein files.

There was literally nothing in Kash Patel’s background to indicate he was going to be a good FBI director. He was a grifting conspiracist with no meaningful executive management or leadership background, who knew little about the bureau or its traditions, and had never served a day in the military or worked as an FBI agent nor as an intelligence or law enforcement officer. Unlike every modern FBI director before him, he’d never served in a Senate-confirmed role before. Woke snowflake Bill Barr said that the idea Patel could handle a senior job at the FBI showed “a shocking detachment from reality” and would happen while he was attorney general only “over my dead body.” Patel’s former government colleagues said he had little regard for protocols, procedures, or organizational precedents and that his recklessness during the first Trump term had endangered national security and lives. His conflicts-of-interest and questionable personal choices since then abounded: A Russian-friendly filmmaker had paid Patel $25,000 to blast the FBI in a documentary, and Patel indicated he intended to hold onto a million dollars in stock in the Chinese company Shein even while serving as FBI director.

From the start, there was every reason to believe Patel was nominated for the role specifically to undermine the three traditional pillars of the FBI—its Fidelity, Bravery, and, especially, its Integrity. An FBI led by Kash Patel and his somehow-even-less-qualified deputy Dan Bongino, as I wrote in February, was a bureau designed “to troll the libs—and, more dangerously for every American, to weaponize the normally fiercely independent bureau in service to Donald Trump personally.”

A recent spate of reporting indicates that Kash Patel’s time as director is going about as well as could be expected—which is to say, it’s an organization-soul-crushing and morale-killing disaster that imperils national security.

The longer this chaos continues, the more likely we’re going to face a catastrophic intelligence failure.

In many ways, Patel’s time as FBI director is a classic Washington scandal: The slow-motion, slightly-off-the-front-page collapse of an incredibly important institution. I’ve always believed as a reporter that the biggest, most consequential stories play out as repeated mini-scandals that appear below-the-fold in news coverage. But in case you’ve missed any of them, the collection of Kash Patel mini-scandals is quite something now:

• He’s lost our foreign allies. The biggest story of this week was about how Patel broke an important personal pledge to the head of MI5, the British domestic intelligence agency and, arguably, the FBI’s closest partner in the entire world. MI5’s head had asked Patel personally to preserve an FBI liaison officer in London who was vital to certain advanced surveillance tools the Brits relied on for monitoring Chinese activities in the UK. In the face-to-face meeting, Patel agreed and promised—but then reneged when the White House wanted to cut the position as part of its misguided efforts to trim the FBI budget, “leaving MI5 officials incredulous.” It is almost impossible to capture how critical the intelligence relationship between the US and the UK has been over the last eighty years, as well as the larger English-speaking intel partnership known as “Five Eyes,” which includes the US, UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. The idea that you would break a promise to a Five Eyes leader would normally be an anathema to any competent US intelligence leader—and the episode also clearly demonstrates both inside and outside the bureau that Patel doesn’t have the political juice to run the FBI, if he can’t fight and win at the White House for a key position requested by our closest ally. The betrayal of MI5 stings particularly because as the Trump administration’s illegality and incompetence spreads, we’re seeing some of our closest allies begin to pull back on the foundations of, well, being allies. In recent weeks, we’ve seen the Dutch—which have a fantastically capable intelligence apparatus—begin to pull back on intelligence sharing and Britain has begun to limit what information it shares with the US about drug smuggling, for fear of being implicated in the egregiously illegal military strikes on boats in the Caribbean and Pacific.
• He’s lost the public. The MI5 story might be the most consequential of the week, but the juiciest and gossipiest has to be a tremendously amusing (if it wasn’t about, you know, the leader of the nation’s premier law enforcement agency) Wall Street Journal story about Kash Patel’s shenanigans and preening as director. Come for how during the government shutdown, while his employees weren’t getting paid, he literally took an FBI Gulfstream jet to a place called “Boondoogle Ranch”; stay for the how he’s showing up at meetings in hooded sweatshirts. His exploits in the FBI jet—including using it to fly to hockey games, wrestling matches, and his girlfriend’s country music concerts—are becoming so high-profile that even _People Magazine_is now covering them. Needless to say, by the time People is writing about a federal law enforcement leader’s personal life, you’ve lost the plot.
• He’s lost his agents, Part I. Patel has spent the year engaged in a highly confusing and capricious house-cleaning of the FBI, largely (but not exclusively) targeting agents who had been involved in the many investigations and prosecutions of then-former President Trump. He also fired the FBI agents who were captured kneeling in a famous moment during the 2020 George Floyd protests, a moment that at the time was lauded for helping to deescalate a tense situation. All told, the firings have targeted upwards of 30 agents, the reassignments even more, and led this month to the FBI Agents Association releasing a blistering statement saying, “Director Patel has disregarded the law and launched a campaign of erratic and arbitrary retribution.” Many senior agents have retired, robbing the bureau of its most experienced leaders. The firings have been so confusing that the US Attorney for DC, Jeanine Pirro, worked to get some of them reversed because Patel had targeted agents who were working on vital cases. A New York Times story traced how some agents have been inaccurately targeted by right-wing influencers and conspiracists—only to be fired by Patel anyway. Lawsuits stemming from the firing campaign allege the White House is driving the show when it comes to personnel at the bureau—which, again, any normal competent director would see as a red line.
• He’s lost his agents, Part II. The stories of Patel’s day-to-day management of the bureau are quite something, as that Wall Street Journal and other articles have traced. Early on, he seemed remarkably uninterested in the daily director’s briefing—holding it just twice a week, instead of daily—and drew criticism for publicly wearing an FBI badge, a move effectively unprecedented for a modern director. (When I was covering Robert Mueller, he kept the director’s badge in his briefcase.) Patel and Bongino hardly evince cool-under-pressure leadership inside the bureau; an internal conference call after the Kirk shooting was described as “profanity-laced.” He’s also started using polygraphs internally, to help stop leaks, to “intensif[y] a culture of intimidation.” As one experienced FBI polygraph expressed in surprise, “I never used them to suss out gossip.”
• He’s lost the attorney general. Yes, technically, the FBI director reports to the deputy attorney general, but in day-to-day practice there’s no more important relationship between an FBI director and an attorney general. They have to trust each other deeply and implicitly. That’s not exactly how things have gone with Pam Bondi, where even right-wing media are now writing about the growing tensions. Patel’s “bonehead screwups” have Bondi gunning for the director — in part because she believes, evidently, that the bureau is trying to undermine her on the Epstein files, a source of tension going back months and one that led to a summer crisis where it appeared Bongino might resign. This feels very much like a situation that cannot last much longer—the center, as they say, cannot hold.
• He’s failing to protect the country, Part I. Since Patel took over—and particularly since this summer’s nationwide immigration push—he has reassigned thousands of highly-trained and specialized agents to tasks that the FBI isn’t equipped to do. As much as a quarter of all FBI agents—including highly specialized counterintelligence and counterterrorism agents in key field offices like Washington, New York, and San Francisco—have been reassigned to assist ICE and CBP with immigration enforcement. In those larger field offices, statistics show that as much as 40 percent of all agents are now working immigration—an issue not normally on the FBI’s radar at all. Chasing terrorists and spies are normally the FBI’s highest priority—in part because the bureau is the lead agency to do that in the government—and reassigning those teams to help ICE and CBP roust day-laborers in Home Depot parking lots is a shocking abdication of our nation’s security. Again, any competent leader of the FBI would understand that and be able to make that case effectively to the White House—the fact that Patel doesn’t, won’t, or can’t is its own indictment of his tenure.
• He’s failing to protect the country, Part II. It was perhaps inevitable that if you appoint an unserious social media influencer to a job that requires sober thought and restraint that Patel would appear temperamentally unfit for the job. In multiple incidents this fall, Patel’s need to score social media cred has appeared to interfere with unfolding FBI investigations. In the hours after the Charlie Kirk shooting—apparently while he was having dinner in New York at the exclusive Rao’s, rather than rushing to headquarters to oversee the investigation—he trumpeted on Twitter that the FBI had the shooter in custody. Ninety minutes, he backtracked, saying the suspect had been released. (The family of the actual alleged shooter made arrangements for him to surrender to authorities the following day, as you may remember.) Patel, who has a weird obsession with calling his agents “cops”—a name that agents abhor and that traditionally is only used by CIA officers to refer to FBI agents pejoratively— then cheered the arrest, saying, “This is what happens when you let good cops be cops.” His comments around and since the Kirk shooting, too, has only made the case harder for prosecutors, especially since Patel himself was involved in processing the crime scene in Utah for some odd reason? “Patel’s handling of the Kirk investigation is a reminder that the skill set required to succeed as an influencer is not the same as what is required to effectively run the FBI. It’s not just amateur hour at the FBI, but influencer hour,” The Atlantic’s Quinta Jurecic wrote. Or, as the New Yorker wrote, the Kirk episode showed that Patel is “play[ing] a G-Man on TV.” (Again, much like People Magazine, by the time the New Yorker’s television critic is writing about the FBI director, you’ve really lost the plot.)
• He’s failing to protect the country, Part III. Most recently, Patel appeared to mess up a fast-unfolding terrorism investigation in Michigan, tweeting on Halloween morning, “The FBI thwarted a potential terrorist attack,” at a time when charges hadn’t even been filed yet. According to the Wall Street Journal, “There was one problem: No criminal charges had yet been filed and local police weren’t aware of the details. Two friends of the alleged terrorists in New Jersey and Washington state caught wind of the arrests and moved up plans to leave the country, according to court documents and law-enforcement officials familiar with the investigation. Justice Department leaders complained to the White House about Patel’s premature post, saying it had disrupted the investigation, administration officials said.”

Needless to say the totality of all these scandals, controversies, and missteps would be unsustainable for any other FBI director or intelligence leader in a normal administration. And yet, for now, Patel remains—although in August, the White House appointed Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey as a new “co-deputy director” to the FBI, a position that has never existed before, and one that many observers think is effectively a babysitter, a director-in-waiting for whenever Patel finally flames out.

All of this is amusing, yes, but it’s also deeply worrying—we all, as Americans, have a vested interest in a strong, well-functioning FBI that hews closely to the Constitution, protects civil rights and civil liberties, and focuses on investigating the biggest, most pressing threats to our country. I have plenty of my own critiques about the bureau and its sometimes less-than-sterling history, but having covered and written about the bureau for ten years, I also know we are less safe as a country when the FBI is distracted.

The longer this chaos continues, the more our allies feel they can’t trust us, the fewer agents on the streets investigating terrorists and spies, the more likely we’re going to face a catastrophic intelligence failure.

I return, again, to what I wrote in February: “The bells that have rung now at the FBI cannot be unrung. And we will rue the day we didn’t hear them as dire warnings for the country’s future.”

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Megyn Kelly Suddenly Finds Pedophilia Very Hard to Define

Megyn Kelly is known for offering absurd takes that nobody asked for.

There was her insistence that Santa Claus is white, for example, and her claim that wearing blackface used to not be so bad (that one got her fired from NBC News). Wednesday, on her eponymous SiriusXM show, Kelly picked another hill to die on: She implied, in conversation with NewsNation host Batya Ungar-Sargon, that it wasn’t quite fair to call Jeffrey Epstein a pedophile because he was “into the barely legal type” of minors—which Kelly appallingly defines as “like, 15-year-olds”—who look like they could be legal adults. Epstein was charged with sex trafficking of minors and conspiracy to commit sex trafficking of minors, and the Department of Justice said he abused and exploited dozens of underage girls, some as young as 14.

But Kelly said she nonetheless questioned how to characterize Epstein because, she claims, she knows “somebody very, very close to this case who is in a position to know virtually everything,” and “this person has told me from the start, years and years ago, that Jeffrey Epstein, in this person’s view, was not a pedophile.”

Kelly continued: “This is this person’s view, who was there for a lot of this, but that he was into the barely legal type. Like, he liked 15-year-old girls. And I realize this is disgusting. I’m definitely not trying to make an excuse for this. I’m just giving you facts, that he wasn’t into, like, 8-year-olds. But he liked the very young teen types that could pass for even younger than they were, but would look legal to a passerby.”

Kelly said the characterization from her unnamed source—that Epstein was “not a pedophile”—”is what I believed…until we heard from [Attorney General] Pam Bondi that they had tens of thousands of videos of alleged…child sexual abuse material on his computer that for the first time, I thought, ‘Oh, no, he was an actual pedophile.’ I mean, only a pedophile gets off on young children abuse videos. [Bondi has] never clarified it, I don’t know whether it’s true. I have to be honest, I don’t really trust Pam Bondi’s word on the Epstein matters anymore.”

“Or anything else,” added Ungar-Sargon.

“Yeah,” Kelly replied, “so I don’t know what’s true about him, but we have yet to see anybody come forward and say, ‘I was eight, I was under 10, I was under 14, when I first came within his purview.’ You can say that’s a distinction without a difference.”

“No, it’s not,” Ungar-Sargon says.

“I think there is a difference,” Kelly continues, “there’s a difference between a 15-year-old and a 5-year-old, you know?”

In fact, we don’t know.

The comments read as something of a shift for Kelly. Back in 2023, she lashed out against Republicans who were defending British comedian and right-wing darling Russell Brand against rape allegations from three adult women and one minor. (Brand was charged with five counts of rape and assault in the UK earlier this year and pled not guilty. He has denied the allegations.)

“You’re 31 years old and you have sex allegedly over a three-month period with a 16-year old?” Kelly said of the allegation against Brand by the minor. “We’re done. I’m unsubscribing. And I am sick of conservatives online trying to defend that as though she had a role in it. She was a minor. Just because you can’t be prosecuted for it doesn’t mean it’s right.”

@gbnews

‘We’re done!’ | Megyn Kelly reacts to the allegations being made against Russell Brand #RussellBrand #MegynKelly #DanWootton #news #GBNews

♬ original sound – GB News

Kelly has also railed against grooming by convicted pedophiles such as ex-Subway spokesman Jared Fogle, whose victims reportedly ranged from 6 to 17 years old. And she has condemned what she has called “the exploitative and predatory nature of the entertainment industry for minors.” (Kelly has also, of course, used the term “grooming” in the baseless, homophobic and transphobic way that many right-wingers do, to describe activities like drag—which does not remotely constitute grooming.)

Epstein’s victims have described the abuse they sustained as derailing their lives, despite the fact that they were, in Kelly’s view, “very young teen types” as opposed to five-year-olds. Take Marina Lacerda, an immigrant from Brazil, who—as I wrote back in September—described how the abuse affected her education at a Capitol Hill press conference back in September:

Lacerda recounted entering Epstein’s orbit while working three jobs to support her mother and sister as a high school student, and a friend offered her $300 to give a man, presumably Epstein, a massage. “It went from a dream job,” she said, “to the worst nightmare.”

Lacerda said she started getting called upon to go to Epstein’s house so frequently that she dropped out of ninth grade and never returned. Her only way out, she said, came when Epstein told her she had gotten too old to work for him.

Kelly’s comments came the same day that the House Oversight Committee released another 20,000 pages of records, provided by Epstein’s estate, including emails in which Epstein called President Donald Trump “the dog that hasn’t barked” and said he “knew about the girls as he asked [co-conspirator] Ghislane [Maxwell] to stop,” as my colleague Inae Oh wrote. (White House officials claimed that the emails in fact proved Trump’s innocence and called them a “distraction” from the government shutdown.)

In a statement provided to Mother Jones, Elisa Batista, a campaign director at UltraViolet Action, an advocacy group against sex abuse, called Kelly’s comments “reckless and irresponsible.”

“Jeffrey Epstein is a pedophile. Full stop,” Batista said. “A middle-aged man grooming and sexually exploiting 15-year-old girls is child abuse. Full stop.”

Lawyers for several of Epstein’s victims did not immediately respond to requests for comment on Thursday afternoon.

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The Elections Were a Referendum on Energy—And Democrats Won

On the campaign trail in 2024, President Donald Trump promised to halve Americans’ energy bills by January 2026.

After his win, his administration pushed policies that undoubtedly contributed to their rise. They tried to squash cheap, local energy from renewable sources while bankrolling the dying coal industry. They put tariffs on materials needed to keep the grid running smoothly. And they gutted regulations to help the AI industry build more and more energy-gobbling data centers—all while trying to power them with fossil fuels.

With less than two months to Trump’s self-imposed deadline, household electricity bills are up 11 percent on average since his inauguration. Gas bills have spiked even higher. More than 70 percent of Americans—regardless of party—say they’re concerned about rising utility payments. Trump, undeterred by reality, is claiming that “our energy prices are down.”

Voters have taken notice. In last Tuesday’s elections, Democrats notched major wins, including in conservative areas, at least in part because energy was on the ballot.

Democrats beat GOP incumbents on Georgia’s utility commission by 20 points—the party’s first statewide win in nearly two decades.

In New Jersey, where electricity bills have risen up to 20 percent since June, Democratic Governor-elect Mikie Sherrill ran on electricity prices, promising to freeze utility rates on day one in office.

In Virginia, data center Ground Zero, Democratic Governor-elect Abigail Spanberger promised to make the power-intensive centers pay for the grid updates needed to keep them running, alongside investing in green energy to meet the growing electricity demand.

Democratic and Republican positions on energy policy have been night and day, explains Daniel Jasper, a senior policy advisor with the climate nonprofit Project Drawdown.

“Republican messaging has been very incoherent on this issue,” says Jasper, adding that “much of [it] has been predicated on outright lies.” In addition to failing to articulate concrete policy plans for reducing costs, Jasper says, Republican platforms frame renewable energy and fossil fuels as two sides of a culture war.

Democrats, on the other hand, have a clear message, he says: “Renewable energy will be one big part of the solution for rising costs.” More than that, they are able to emphasize that the cheap, local energy “increases energy security and reduces our reliance on things like foreign oil,” he adds.

“Democrats want to bring cheaper energy online faster to drive down costs,” Lori Lodes, the executive director of Climate Power, wrote in an election-night memo, “while Republicans are taking energy options offline to benefit their billionaire donors and spike costs for everyone else.”

What really demonstrated that energy was on the ballot was the unexpected visibility of the Georgia Public Service Commission race. The commission is an obscure, often-ignored state office that regulates electricity prices. Residential customers of the state’s largest utility provider, Georgia Power, have faced year-over-year price hikes of $518, on average, according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Renewable energy and affordability–focused Democrats Peter Hubbard and Alicia Johnson ousted incumbent Republican board members by a margin of 20 points, the first time in nearly 20 years that the Democratic Party has won a statewide office in Georgia.

“Incumbent public service commissioners very rarely lose reelection,” Caroline Spears, head of Climate Cabinet, remarked on the podcast Volts. “To come out of Tuesday with a 60-40 is pretty unprecedented.”

“I don’t remember the last time there was such national attention on such a very specific election,” Jasper, of Project Drawdown, noted. The focus on the Georgia race, he says, signals “an important bellwether for the fact that energy is going to be a very prominent issue going forward.”

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At UN Climate Summit, Gavin Newsom Labels Trump “An Invasive Species”

This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

California’s governor, Gavin Newsom, has said Donald Trump is an “invasive species” whose dismissal of the climate crisis is an “abomination,” in a fiery attack at the UN climate talks in Brazil—from which Trump and his administration have been completely absent.

Newsom is the most senior American politician at the Cop30 summit in Belém, after Trump took the unprecedented step of not sending a delegation to the talks. Newsom sought to fill the notable void of official US activity by lambasting the president for tearing up climate policies and pushing for burning more of the fossil fuels that have caused dangerous global heating.

On Tuesday, it emerged that Trump has drawn up plans to open up the coast of California for oil and gas drilling, a move that Newsom said would happen “over my dead body, full stop. He said he wants to open up the coast of California, but he doesn’t want oil-drilling rigs off the coast of Florida, not across the street from Mar-a-Lago. He’s silent on that. But it’s not going to happen. It’s dead on arrival.”

Accusing Trump of an assault upon the climate and on democracy, Newsom said of the president: “He’s an invasive species, he’s a wrecking-ball president. He’s trying to roll back progress of the last century. He’s trying to re-create the 19th century. He’s doubling down on stupid.”

Trump has called the climate crisis a “con job” and urged countries to remain wedded to coal, oil, and gas, and even remove their climate policies if necessary in order to purchase more US fossil fuels.

The Republican president declined to send any representatives to Cop30, where countries are thrashing out new emissions-cutting targets and climate finance.

Newsom said Trump’s rolling back of climate policies and removing the US from the Paris climate agreement is “an abomination, it’s a disgrace” and added this would benefit China, which is dominating the world in the manufacture and deployment of clean energy such as solar and wind.

Trump’s absence “creates opportunity” for local leaders to step into the fold on climate policy, Newsom said.

“You know who is cheering, who is singing his praises? President Xi of China,” Newsom said. “They are sitting back and dominating supply chains, because they understand the great opportunity of clean energy.”

Newsom, a Democrat who became governor of California in 2019, is heading an alternate US delegation at Cop30 that includes more than 100 elected officials who are stressing that subnational jurisdictions in the US are still committed to tackling the climate crisis.

Newsom is one of 24 governors who are part of the US Climate Alliance, a group of states that represents more than half of the US’s population and has stated support for climate action.

This motley group has not glossed over the jarring absence of the US government in Belém, however, and some other leading figures at the talks have expressed relief that the Trump administration wasn’t there.

Christiana Figueres, former executive secretary of the United Nations framework convention on climate change, said on Tuesday that the US’s absence from the talks “actually is a good thing.”

“Ciao, bambino,” was her response to the US’s departure from the Paris agreement.

At a press gaggle, Newsom said: “That’s a hell of a statement coming from the mother of the Paris agreement.” In light of the Trump administration’s behavior at an international maritime meeting last month, where officials menaced some foreign leaders and threatened tariffs on those who supported a carbon fee on shipping, a US presence could be a threat, Newsom added.

Trump’s absence “creates opportunity” for local leaders to step into the fold on climate policy, Newsom said.

“What stands in the way becomes the way. This is an opportunity for us bottom up at the local level to assert ourselves,” he said. “He pulled away. That’s why I pulled up.”

Newsom is considered a leading candidate for the Democratic nomination for the 2028 presidential race. While he said he wouldn’t be drawn on whether he would run, he stressed that Democrats needed to reframe the debate around the climate crisis, to focus on simple messages around cost of living and the problems American households are facing in getting insurance due to repeated climate-fueled disasters.

Joe Biden attempted to sell his climate policies as being a benefit for jobs and the economy, a pitch that failed to resonate with voters. Biden then dropped out of his struggling re-election campaign, with Kamala Harris losing to Trump.

“Climate change can seem abstract,” Newsom said. “We need to talk in terms that people understand. It’s about people, places, lifestyles, and traditions. If we put things in those terms, we can start winning people over.”

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Florida’s Governor Is a Veteran. So Are Seven Inmates He’ll Send to the Execution Chamber This Year.

This article first appeared on The War Horse, an award-winning nonprofit news organization educating the public on military service. Subscribe to their newsletter.

The caravan of executions started with a US Army veteran in March.

It continued in May with a former Army Ranger who served in the Gulf War, then an Air Force veteran in July, a former National Guard member in August, and a Navy veteran in October.

This week, a former Marine, and next week, yet another Army veteran are scheduled to die in what Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has called the “most veteran-friendly state in the nation.”

He’s the one who signed all seven of their death warrants. The governor wielding the executioner’s pen is a Navy veteran himself.

“They are coming so hard and so fast that it’s hard to keep track,” said William Kissinger, a Vietnam veteran who spent over four decades behind bars in Louisiana and now advocates on behalf of veterans on death row. “It’s heartbreaking.”

It’s also historic. Florida is on pace to more than double its record of eight executions in a year since the US Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty nearly a half-century ago. The number of military veterans on the list is startling.

While veterans represent an estimated 12 percent of Florida’s 256 death row inmates, they account for nearly 40 percent of the 18 death warrants that the governor has signed this year.

DeSantis, a former JAG officer who served as a legal adviser to SEAL Team One in Iraq, has ignored the pleas of some veteran advocates and refused to address the disproportionate ratio of former service members he is sending to the Florida State Prison’s execution chamber.

“I don’t think he [DeSantis] is targeting vets specifically,” said Art Cody, a retired Navy captain and director of the Center for Veteran Criminal Advocacy. “He is just not taking [their military backgrounds] into consideration.”

But should he?

Veterans and capital punishment opponents have congregated outside the Florida State Prison to protest each execution, including this gathering on May 1 when Jeffrey Hutchinson was put to death.Courtesy of Maria DeLiberato of Floridians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty

While death penalty opponents and tough-on-crime hard-liners clash over the moral arguments and political motivations of DeSantis’ historic urgency, another debate is suddenly raging: Should an inmate’s military service matter when a judge, jury, or governor decides who deserves the ultimate punishment for society’s most heinous crimes?

The US Supreme Court weighed in on that question 16 years ago in a case out of—none other than—Florida. The justices overturned the death sentence of Gregory Porter, a decorated Korean War veteran convicted of killing his former girlfriend and her boyfriend, because his attorney had presented no evidence about the combat that left him “a traumatized, changed man.”

“Our Nation has a long tra­di­tion of accord­ing lenien­cy to vet­er­ans in recog­ni­tion of their ser­vice, espe­cial­ly for those who fought on the front lines.”

“Our Nation has a long tra­di­tion of accord­ing lenien­cy to vet­er­ans in recog­ni­tion of their ser­vice, espe­cial­ly for those who fought on the front lines,” the court stated in a 2009 opinion. “Moreover, the relevance of Porter’s extensive combat experience is not only that he served honorably under extreme hardship and gruesome conditions, but also that the jury might find mitigating the intense stress and mental and emotional toll that combat took on Porter.”

What makes the recent surge in veteran executions stand out, veterans advocates say, is how they contrast with the historic declines in death sentences nationally and the rising understanding of the traumatic impact of military service.

A new report released this week by the Death Penalty Information Center tallied more than 800 veterans sentenced to death in the US since 1972.

About one-fifth of those veterans served in a major conflict, with the largest group—106 veterans—from the Vietnam War. About 40 percent of those Vietnam veterans had a known diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder, and many had been exposed to Agent Orange, the report found.

Jeffrey Hutchinson, the Gulf War veteran executed in Florida this May, traveled what the report called the ​“bat­tle­field-to-prison” pipeline. The former Army Ranger’s appeals for mercy included his diagnoses for PTSD, trau­mat­ic brain injury, and neu­ro­tox­in expo­sure.

“In many cases in Florida, the juries that sentenced these veterans to death never understood how seriously they were harmed by their experience in the military and what effect those injuries had on their ability to conform their behavior to the law,” said Robin Maher, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, a nonprofit research center that focuses on how the death penalty is implemented. “Gov. DeSantis is in a position to recognize that and do something about it. But he, instead, has been scheduling them for execution and letting them be executed at his sole discretion.”

Yet, victims’ advocates argue that Hutchinson’s horrific crimes speak for themselves: He was convicted for the murder of his girlfriend and her three children, after busting down the front door of their north Florida home on Sept. 11, 1998, and finding them in the master bedroom. He shot mom Renee Flaherty and her kids, seven-year-old Amanda and four-year-old Logan, all in the head. Then he turned the gun on nine-year-old Geoffrey.

“The terror suffered in that moment is incomprehensible to this court,” the trial judge said.

More than 26 years later, Florida carried out Hutchinson’s execution.

Gov. Ron DeSantis (right), commander in chief of the Florida National Guard, accompanied by Maj. Gen. Michael Calhoun, outgoing adjutant general of Florida, Maj. Gen. James O. Eifert, incoming adjutant general of Florida, and Col. Gregory Cardenoas stand atop a Humvee to inspect the troops during a change of command ceremony at Camp Blanding Joint Training Center on April 6. During the ceremony, Eifert assumed command from Calhoun, who retired after 36 years of serviceU.S. Air National Guard/Master Sgt. William Buchanan

Until this month, DeSantis said little about why he has so dramatically accelerated the pace of executions in the Sunshine State. Before this year, Florida had executed nine people—including two veterans—since the Republican became governor in 2019. Six of those were in 2023, critics note, as DeSantis launched an unsuccessful campaign for the White House.

The governor said during an appearance in Jacksonville earlier this month that he’s trying to do his part for victims’ families who deserve to see justice served.

“We have lengthy reviews and appeals that I think should be shorter,” DeSantis said, according to WUSF. “I still have a responsibility to look at these cases and to be sure that the person is guilty. And if I honestly thought somebody wasn’t, I would not pull the trigger on it.”

But the governor has failed to address why so many of those inmates this year are veterans.

“By the time I’m writing about one, he has already signed another death warrant,” said Kissinger, a former airman first class and Vietnam War veteran who has led appeals to the governor on behalf of Florida’s veterans on death row. Three years after returning from the war, Kissinger killed a man during a drug robbery and was locked up in the Louisiana State Penitentiary, where he eventually became an inmate counselor on death row.

“By the time I’m writing about one, he has already signed another death warrant.”

Kissinger was among 161 veterans who signed a letter calling on DeSantis to stop signing death warrants for veterans, including former National Guard member Kayle Bates, convicted for the 1982 murder of an office manager in Lynn Haven near Panama City.

A week before Bates’ execution in August, many of those petitioners gathered in Tallahassee, urging DeSantis to reconsider, arguing that executing veterans affected by war and denied mental health care was “not justice.”

They called the executions a “final abandonment.”

When asked for last words, Bates, who had been deployed during the deadly 1980 Miami race riots, said nothing. He had maintained his innocence for more than 43 years.

He was the fourth veteran executed in Florida this year. But his lethal injection became a tipping point for scores of veterans and death penalty opponents who say serious questions remained about his case.

When The War Horse reached out to DeSantis’ office with questions about Bates and whether the governor takes into account an inmate’s military service, a spokesperson replied with the same two sentences shared with other media: “Kayle Bates was executed after receiving the death penalty for murder, sexual battery, kidnapping, and robbery. His sentence had nothing to do with his status as a veteran.”

Kayle BatesCourtesy

In 1982, Bates was an active member of the National Guard when he was charged in the brutal murder of Janet Renee White. Prosecutors say he abducted White from her office, stole her diamond ring, attempted to rape her, and stabbed her to death.

The trial of Bates, who was Black, opened with a prayer from the victim’s minister, who asked for the judge and the all-white jury to have “wisdom.” With no mention of Bates’ military background, he was sentenced to death within an hour of deliberations.

But the Florida Supreme Court threw out his original death penalty and ordered the trial court to reconsider his sentence. This time, attorney Tom Dunn, a US Army veteran, represented Bates with one aim: to persuade the jury that Bates was not the “worst of the worst,” and that life in prison, not death, was appropriate.

Dunn presented Bates’ military service and lack of criminal history, and put forth 18 character witnesses, including fellow National Guard members.

They testified about how Bates’ deployment to the Miami riots, two years before his arrest, had affected him. Bates was among thousands of National Guard members sent into Miami after an all-white jury acquitted four white police officers in the beating of Arthur McDuffie, a Black Marine Corps veteran, left in a coma after a traffic stop in December 1979. For three days, Black neighborhoods in and around Miami burned. Vehicles were set on fire, people were dragged and beaten, and businesses were looted. At least 18 people were killed and hundreds injured.

One fellow Guard member described how Bates was afraid and nervous during patrols, according to court records, and another testified about the gruesome violence, especially against Black residents. No one came out of that experience unaffected, the Guard member testified.

Bates’ wife described him as distant and plagued by nightmares, and she said he often woke up screaming and not recognizing where he was. A forensic neuropsychologist testified that the trauma Bates endured could have influenced his later behavior.

But Bates’ attorney Dunn also focused on another argument: As an alternative to a death sentence, he said, the jury should be able to recommend life in prison without the possibility of parole, a new option under Florida law. At Bates’ original trial, the only alternative to death was 25 years to life. By 1995, Bates had already served nearly 13 years on death row, so Dunn worried jurors would feel forced to impose the death penalty so Bates couldn’t be eligible for parole in another 12 years.

When the jury asked the court after nearly three hours of deliberation if it could sentence Bates to life in prison without parole, the judge said no.

Ultimately, the jury voted nine to three to sentence Bates to death again. In a US federal court, the lack of a unanimous decision would lead to a hung jury and no death sentence. That is not the case in Florida.

A dissenting Florida Supreme Court judge later criticized the ruling, calling the court’s refusal to accept Bates’ waiver “unnecessarily harsh” and inconsistent with past rulings.

The execution chamber at Florida State Prison in Raiford, pictured here around 2012. Courtesy of Florida Department of Corrections

In 2024, almost three decades after his resentencing and a year before his execution, Bates’ legal team uncovered information suggesting a potentially fundamental problem with his original conviction: The jury may have included a relative of the victim. They asked the Florida Supreme Court to allow them to interview the juror.

If true, such a discovery could have led to a retrial. Florida law, like that of most other states as well as the federal system, explicitly bars jurors related to a victim by blood or marriage. The court, however, rejected the request as beingtoo late, records show.

So on July 18, 2025, almost 42 years after Bates’ conviction, Gov. DeSantis signed a letter addressed to the warden of the Florida State Prison in Raiford about 140 miles away.

The death warrant was brief, outlining Bates’ court rulings, and concluded with a note saying that the governor’s office did not find executive clemency “appropriate” for him. It did not provide any further explanation for the decision.

Janet White’s husband, Randy, had been waiting for this resolution for four decades. He said he attended every hearing and every trial to “let Renee know that justice has finally been served for her,” he told USA Today. He attended the execution, but not out of revenge, he said. He had actually made peace and forgiven Bates years ago as a way to move forward.

“You’ve got to find a shorter route than 43 years,” he told USA Today. “There’s got to be a better system that will see all these appeals through quicker.”

On D-Day, just over two months before Bates was executed, DeSantis signed three separate bills “strengthening Florida’s support systems for veterans and their families,” according to a news release.

One was toward long-term care access for veterans and their spouses; another aimed to expand the state’s suicide prevention program specifically for veterans; and the last one proposed a crackdown on those trying to exploit veterans seeking their benefits.

“On D-Day and every day, Florida honors those who served our country in uniform,” the governor said in his announcement. “Florida remains the most veteran-friendly state in the nation.”

“Florida remains the most veteran-friendly state in the nation.”

It is also one of the seven states in the US where a dedicated clemency board listens to pleas to commute sentences and is required to make recommendations to the governor. But unlike in the other states, Florida’s four-member board is headed by the governor himself. The state has not granted clemency to a death row prisoner since 1983.

That appears to also be the case in the two executions scheduled for this month—both of whom are veterans: Bryan Jennings, a Marine Corps veteran, has been on death row for more than four decades for the rape and murder of a six-year-old girl in 1979; Richard Randolph, an Army veteran, was convicted of the 1988 rape and murder of his former manager.

This week, Jennings’ attorneys filed a final legal appeal for the U.S. Supreme Court to intervene.

“Florida’s practice transforms clemency from a constitutional safeguard into a secret administrative ritual,” his lawyers wrote.

For Kissinger, who has become a vocal advocate for criminal justice reform in Florida, the quest to be heard has become an endless battle. As the dizzying pace of executions keeps growing, he has repeatedly requested a meeting with the governor to discuss veterans on death row.

He knows it’s a long shot.

“I keep waiting on emails,” he said. “I keep waiting on some sort of acknowledgement.”

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Mike Johnson Will Finally Swear In His Worst Nightmare

More Epstein files could, in theory, be coming soon.

That’s because, at 4 p.m. ET on Wednesday, House Speaker Mike Johnson will finally swear in Rep. Adelita Grijalva, the Arizona Democrat who has promised to provide the final congressional signature on a discharge petition to force a vote on a bipartisan bill to release government files from the Jeffrey Epstein investigation. That would include flight logs, names of people and entities with ties to Epstein, sealed settlements, and internal Department of Justice (DOJ) communications related to the case.

The dischargepetition—introduced by Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) and Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.)—back in July, allows members to bypass House leadership and force a floor vote once 218 members have signed on. It currently has 217 signatures, with four Republicans—Massie, Rep. Nancy Mace (R-S.C.), Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.), and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.)—among them. Grijalva, who won her House seat in a special election in September, will provide the critical 218th vote to move the vote forward; she told Semafor that signing the petition is the first thing she plans to do after being sworn in. The rules of the House stipulate that members can initiate a floor vote seven days after filing a successful discharge petition, and that the Speaker must schedule a floor vote within two days of getting that notice, which Johnson has committed to doing. Top aides told Politico they expect the House vote will take place just after Thanksgiving.

In the nearly two months since Grijalva won the election to fill her late father’s seat, Johnson has refused to swear her in—pointing to the government shut down and his own decision to largely keep the House out of session as justification for his obstructionism. Last month, Grijalva and Arizona’s attorney general filed a lawsuit against the House, alleging that the delay was unconstitutionally leaving Grijalva’s district without representation. Survivors of sex abuse and trafficking by Epstein and his co-conspirator, Ghislaine Maxwell, also called for Grijalva’s swearing-in, alleging the delay “appears to be a deliberate attempt to block her participation in the discharge petition that would force a vote to unseal the Epstein/Maxwell files.”

Johnson has denied claims that he delayed Grijalva’s swearing in due to the files and has called the discharge petition a “gambit,” arguing the GOP-controlled House Oversight Committee is already working on releasing the files. The committee has, indeed, released more than 33,000 pages of documents that it secured by subpoenaing the DOJ, and it released another 20,000 pages on Wednesday morning provided by Epstein’s estate. Democrats and Epstein survivors have pointed out that some of the documents released by the committee had already been made public through prior court cases. Rep. Robert Garcia (D-Calif.), the committee’s ranking Democrat, said Wednesday that the DOJ has more files and alleged that the White House is behind a “cover up” to prevent their release.

On CNN Tuesday night, Grijalva called the delay to swear her in “unconstitutional” and “illegal,” adding, “This kind of obstruction cannot happen again.” The newly elected congresswoman also said that House members are “hoping” to expedite the vote on the Epstein files. “I feel like at this point we’re done sort of tap dancing around what it, the implications of those files really mean,” Grijalva told host Kaitlan Collins. “And anyone who is implicated needs to deal with the legal consequences for breaking the law and committing horrific crimes against children and women.”

Adelita Grijalva tells me she plans to address the delay in swearing her in with Speaker Johnson tomorrow. pic.twitter.com/e7J5eHvklR

— Kaitlan Collins (@kaitlancollins) November 12, 2025

If the bill passes the House, which Massie has said he expects, it would still need to get through the Republican-controlled Senate. Leadership there has not indicated on whether they would allow a vote, but Politico reports that Republicans expect it to die there. If public pressure does succeed in pushing it through the Senate, President Donald Trump could still choose to veto it. Trump, of course, is the guy who has called the whole thing “a hoax”—despite the fact that, according to newly released emails sent by Epstein, Trump may have been aware of at least some of what Epstein was doing.

White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters that House Democrats’ release of those emails represented “nothing more than bad-faith efforts to distract from President Trump’s historic accomplishments, and any American with common sense sees right through this hoax and clear distraction from the government opening back up again.”

In the meantime, the president already appears to be doing everything he can to try to tank the petition’s chances of success: CNN reported Wednesday afternoon that Trump officials have a meeting planned with Attorney General Pam Bondi, Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, FBI Director Kash Patel, and Boebert to discuss the matter. Meanwhile, the New York Times reports Trump has also been trying to get Mace to remove her name. Neither she nor Boebert, according to the Times, have agreed to Trump’s request.

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Trump Sent Men to Torture in El Salvador, Report Confirms

Beatings. Sexual assault. Psychological abuse. These are some of the horrors endured by the more than 250 men the United States sent to El Salvador on flimsy evidence of gang membership, according to a new comprehensive report released on Wednesday by Human Rights Watch and Cristosal, a human rights group focused on Central America.

In early 2025, the Trump administration flew Venezuelan migrants to Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele’s notorious Terrorism Confinement Center, where they were held for four months without communication with their families and lawyers. The US government had accused the men of being members of the transnational gang Tren de Aragua and removed most of them from the United States under the Alien Enemies Act—an 18th-century law that President Donald Trump has invoked for only the fourth time in US history.

The men sent to CECOT by the Trump administration used their own blood to write “we are migrants, not terrorists” on a bed sheet.

As Mother Jones and other outlets have reported extensively, most of the men had no serious criminal history in the United States or elsewhere in the world. What they often had insteadwere tattoos that bore no relation to the gang.

The new report offers even more evidence of the inhumane treatment the Venezuelan migrants endured in El Salvador. Based on the testimonies of 40 men who were detained at CECOT, as well as interviews with 150 other people—including lawyers and relatives in Venezuela, Colombia, and the United States—it paints a damning picture of the abuses inflicted at CECOT.

The Venezuelans were released in July and returned to their country of origin as part of a prisoner swap deal. Shortly after their release, three of the men told us that they faced severe abuse.

“They’re going to kill me here,” Neri Alvarado told us he remembered thinking. “If I survive, I’ll be locked up my entire life.” Alvarado’s case was emblematic of the cruelty of the CECOT detentions. He was targeted by the Trump administration because of his tattoos—the largest of which was an autism awareness ribbon adorned with the name of his younger brother.

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“What They Did There Was Torture Us”

These stories were common. Once free, many of the young men were finally able to recount what had happened to them in the Salvadoran prison. They described routine beatings and humiliations, medical neglect, and severe punishments in an isolation cell referred to as la isla, or the island, according to our reporting. “What they did there was torture us,” one of the men said.

HRW and Cristosal found similar evidence of abuse. They concluded that the Venezuelans sent to CECOT “were subjected to what amounts to arbitrary detention and enforced disappearance under international human rights law.” They also found that detainees were subject to “constant beatings and other forms of ill-treatment,” including sexual violence. They also noted guards withholding food and medicine. “Many of these abuses constitute torture under international human rights law,” the report says.

The human rights organizations determined that the abuse was the result of “systematic violations,” rather than independent actions by guards and other officials at the prison. All forty of the men interviewed reported facing severe psychological and physical abuse on an almost daily basis.

The researchers found that the United States became complicit in the men’s forced disappearances by repeatedly denying family members information about where their loved ones were being held. According to the report, the Trump administration violated its legal obligation to uphold the principle of non-refoulement, which prohibits sending people to countries where they are likely to be tortured or persecuted.

In several cases, the men had originally left Venezuela fleeing threats and persecution by the government’s security forces and criminal organizations like Tren de Aragua. After seeking asylum in the United States, they have now been sent back to their home country before they could make their case for protection before an immigration judge in the United States.

“These are hundreds of men who were disappeared into a prison, never accused of anything, with no due process, and no jurisdiction to appeal,” Noah Bullock, Executive Director of Cristosal, said in a press conference on Wednesday outlining the report.

“After the gringa left, the guards came in to beat us,” said one detainee of what occurred after a visit from DHS Secretary Kristi Noem.

The report also sheds new light on the nightmares faced by family members trying to locate relatives who disappeared from the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s detainee locator system after being flown to El Salvador. It documents numerous cases in which ICE officials refused to tell relatives where their loved ones were. Instead, the agency’s representatives would only say that the men were no longer in the United States. “Don’t insist,” one family member recalled being told over the phone by an ICE official. “They’re no longer here, find a lawyer to help you.”

The men interviewed by the human rights organizations reported facing severe beatings following visits by Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and Red Cross officials. “After the gringa left, the guards came in to beat us,” one former detainee recalled. “The usual, kneeling outside in the hallway and we were hit with sticks, fists, kicks, slaps on the head … I think that lasted about seven minutes, and then they took us back to our cells.” He also recalled that guards took away their food and confiscated the hygiene products that had been distributed before Noem arrived.

Another Venezuelan, identified in the report as Daniel B, said that after speaking with Red Cross staff, he was taken to “the island” and hit in the stomach until he started choking on the blood.

“My cellmates shouted for help, saying they were killing us,” he recounted, “but the officers said they just wanted to make us suffer.”

In April, riot police retaliated against the men, after they protested guards pepper-spraying a fellow detainee who fainted, byfiring rubber pellets at close range. At some point during a hunger strike, the men even used their own blood to write “we are migrants, not terrorists” on a bed sheet.

Along with beatings, the Venezuelans were denied any contact with their families and lawyers as they were held in inhumane conditions. The men said the cells were dirty and moldy and the water—which they used for bathing once a day, as well as drinking—had “visible vermin.” Thirty-seven out of the 40 former detainees interviewed reported falling sick while detained. CECOT, the report states, “appears to have been built to violate the dignity and rights of the people held there.”

The Venezuelan migrants interviewed by HRW and Cristosal said guards repeatedly told them they would never leave CECOT alive and that their loved ones had forgotten them. Some expressed feeling suicidal. “I thought I would be better off dead,” one former detainee said. After their release,many havereported lingering physical injuries and trauma from their time in prison. They described feeling depressed and anxious and having trouble sleeping. “I wake up traumatized, thinking that they are going to arrest me and beat me up,” a man identified as Felipe C. said. “I can’t sleep well. Another told the interviewers: “I feel like I’ve lost everything.”

The organizations are now calling on the Trump administration to stop sending any so-called third-country nationals to El Salvador. They also recommend that Trump revoke the Alien Enemies Act proclamation, and that Venezuelans deported to El Salvador under the act be given a chance to return to the United States to pursue asylum claims.

Human Rights Watch’s Washington director Sarah Yager said the White House, when presented with the findings of the report, repeated that the men sent to El Salvador were criminals.

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Epstein: Trump Knew

House Democrats on Wednesday released a set of emails in which Jeffrey Epstein called President Trump “the dog that hasn’t barked” and alleged that Trump had once spent “hours at my house” with a sex trafficking victim.

“[Trump] has never once been mentioned,” Epstein wrote in a 2011 email.

In another 2019 email, Epstein wrote to the writer Michael Wolff, of course [Trump] knew about the girls as he asked Ghislane [Maxwell] to stop.”

The shocking correspondences, part of 23,000 additional documents in the Epstein case, further tied Trump to Epstein despite the president’s repeated and vehement insistence that he did not know about his longtime friend’s sex trafficking.

This is a breaking news post. We’ll update as more information becomes available.

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The Secret History of Santacon, America’s Most Hated Christmas Party

In the winter of 1996, a cadre of police officers met an airplane as it landed in Portland, Oregon. Santa Claus had come to town.

It was the early years of what would come to be known as Santacon, and the plane carried a contingent of pranksters aiming to create a bit of Yuletide mischief. While the event is best known today as a Christmas season bar crawl, at the time, the Santas involved were all connected to the Cacophany Society, a group of artists, urban explorers, and troublemakers with chapters in several cities.

“It was time for something to happen. It was time for Santa.”

Their first events in San Francisco in 1994 and 1995—then loosely known as Santarchy—were designed to plumb the chaos-producing potential of a crowd dressed up like Santa, and were greeted with a mixture of bewilderment, amusement, and some hostility: the Santas packed department store escalators and danced through the lobby of the Hyatt Regency, chanting “ho, ho, ho” in a militaristic and frankly terrifying fashion. They rode the hotel’s revolving doors like a merry-go-round, tossed fake snow, and, once they were inevitably kicked out, flooded the street to stand on newspaper boxes and exuberantly greet passing cars. In Santacon, a straightforwardly named new documentary examining the event across three decades, camcorder footage from that day makes it clear this was a different era: pre-meme, pre-flash mob, pre-viral stunts performed for the internet. Bystanders’ faces reflect unedited shock, worry, confusion, and wild delight. A Hyatt security guard grimly demands, “Who are you guys?”

“Santa!” comes the reply, in a boisterous chorus.

While each member and chapter of Cacophany Society was different, they all saw comedic and artistic possibility in holiday masquerade. But today, Santacon has become a bit of a different sort of cultural juggernaut, a now-infamous yearly event wherein drunken Santas take to the streets of major cities and loose unspeakable quantities of bodily fluids upon them. People hide in their apartments from Santacon, take alternate routes to avoid it, and write screeds against it. It is, safe to say, a nuisance, a bummer, and a major cause of power-washing large areas of midtown Manhattan.

While the chaos is well known to the NYPD, when the Santas came to Portland in 1996, cops there were convinced that something akin to terrorism was taking place. The police knew their itinerary and trailed them around. “There were like 200 cops,” says John Law, an early participant. “Someone dropped the dime on us. I have a lot of suspicions about who. They said evil anarchist Santas were coming to Portland.”

The Santas edged cautiously around town, unsure what activities would get them arrested, or maybe even beaten up. The weekend culminated with a line of Santas facing off against a line of riot cops in face shields, who seemed, the Santas thought, worryingly eager for an excuse to crack some furry-hatted heads.

“We really didn’t want to get arrested,” Law says. “Our intention wasn’t to fight the police. It was just to have fun.” By the end of the weekend, the Santas returned home, and Portland was safe from the too-exuberant Christmas cheer for another year.

You can see these tender and utterly weird early years of Santacon in the documentary from director and co-producer Seth Porges, the filmmaker behind Class Action Park and How to Rob a Bank. (He knows a little something about crime, chaos, and injury.) The movie, which premieres November 13 at the DOC NYC festival, combines interviews with some of the earliest Santas with archival and little-seen footage of the first Santacons. With Christmas just around the corner, it is a timely reminder that the event’s roots are far more interesting, anarchistic, and creative than what it has become.

“People go into the film like ‘Fuck Santacon,’” Porges told me. “By the end, they come to a more nuanced perspective, that’s like acceptance in a way.”

The unruly seeds of what would eventually become Santacon were accidentally planted in the US by this very magazine. In 1977, Mother Jones ran a story about Solvognen, a radical Danish theater troupe who had launched a cheerful anti-capitalist protest counterprogramming Christmastime materialism. The article’s description sounds remarkably like what the first few American Santacons looked like, with Santas descending on a Copenhagen department store, pulling books off shelves and insisting shoppers take them for free. After police arrived, the Santas were beaten and thrown into paddywagons.

“Watching bystanders are horrified,” author Ellen Frank wrote. “Children became hysterical.”

The Danish Santas also scaled the walls of a recently closed General Motors plant and serenaded the remaining employees, and delivered a disquisition on workers’ rights outside a local court. All of it, one participant explained, had a larger purpose: “We are trying to help the political movement to not be so square.”

While this Mother Jones connection isn’t mentioned in the film, the movie does make clear that the event’s earliest American participants were, and are, the kind of people who take part in influential art stunts; ambitious urban exploration expeditions; site-specific, secretive, highly weird parties; and other things that usually stay mostly hidden. (Full disclosure: in a jolly coincidence, a number of my friends and acquaintances in New York and San Francisco were early Santacon participants, including Law. I didn’t know this for years, because most of them will not publicly admit it. Recently, I told a close friend I was working on this story, and he began to speak about what he experienced at the first New York event. He stopped the moment I took out my phone to take notes. “Put it away,” he instructed, stonefaced. “I disavow.”)

One person who read the article was Gary Warne, a co-founder of the Suicide Club, a, secretive San Francisco collective who, according to Law, “were the first group that I know of to formalize urban exploration.” Law, now 66, was an original member, as well as an early member of the Cacophany Society, which came later and shares cultural and artistic DNA and a few common members. Law is also a co-founder of the Billboard Liberation Front, which helped pioneer the now-well known practice of “culture jamming” billboards, and also of what was then known as the “Burning Man Festival,” though he hasn’t been involved in that project since 1996. (While he has a great deal to say about what the event has become roughly once a year, otherwise he tries not to think about it.)

“The beauty of Santas or anyone wearing a mass costume—it allows you to be who you really are.”

Something about a mass of Santas causing anti-consumerist, merry chaos felt deeply appropriate to the Suicide Club ethos. Warne, who died in 1983, passed the Mother Jones article around, even including a copy in the group’s newsletter, which went out to around 100 people. “He was like ‘Wow, what a funny idea,’” Law says.

One could call this foreshadowing, a faint trembling before the stampede. What would become Santacon didn’t actually begin until two decades later, when Rob Schmitt, a Bay Area Cacophany Society member, saw a postcard with a drawing of a bunch of Santas playing pool at a bar. The idea struck him as beautifully simple, elegant, and very funny. He was also inspired by Burning Man’s first themed camp, which was a Christmas camp, replete with decorated trees and, of course, Santas. While Schmitt says he wasn’t inspired by Warne’s sharing of the Mother Jones article, it doesn’t surprise him that two people connected to the same prankster movement would be struck by the same notion.

“It’s a wonderful thing…Nobody really has an idea. Everybody has it in their head, somewhere, some way,” he says, “It was time. It was time for something to happen. It was time for Santa.”

That first San Francisco event was “magical,” Schmitt says. Besides their hijinks at the Hyatt, Schmitt says he secured 100 cable car tickets so the Santas could stuff together and glide across San Francisco’s hills. They snuck into a debutante ball while the Smothers Brothers performed, and began, as Schmitt puts it, “stealing wine and dancing with the ladies.” They were chased out, but headed to the Tonga Room, a renowned tiki bar where the band plays on a pool-borne boat, and took over the craft. The vibe was uncontrolled but not violent; the goal was to confuse, disorient, and possibly even delight.

“Nobody expected all these Santas,” Schmitt says happily.

“You can’t control Santa,” he adds. “You just can’t.” He loved “the anonymity of this whole thing,” he says, especially when it came to dealing with cops and security guards: “‘Who’s doing this?’ Santa. ‘Who’s in charge?’ Santa.”

“We did it organically,” Law says. ”We didn’t sit down and figure out a ten-point situationist plan on what we were going to do. That’s pretentious bullshit.” (Law was, at one point during the 1995 Santacon, mock-lynched in costume, which does make its own point fairly clearly.)

The one thing Schmitt doesn’t support, then or now, he says, is a bad Santa. “Santa is a good thing. You don’t destroy people’ cars or faces by fighting and things like that. A good Santa doesn’t destroy.”

Not everyone is so tenderhearted about Santa. Chris Hackett—a Brooklyn Cacophany Society member and a co-founder of the Madagascar Institute, an “art combine” that he describes as conducting “massively collaborative” guerilla projects since 1999, helped organize New York’s first Santacon in 1998.

Like Schmitt, Hackett saw Santacon as a time to consider the role of anonymity and mass disguises in society—but he doesn’t think what comes of that is always a beautiful or magical Christmas. “It’s not noble,” he says, sounding upbeat. “It’s not good. It’s kind of fucked up. And that’s the beauty of Santas or anyone wearing a mass costume… It allows you to be who you really are, and who you are is fucking disgusting.”

The New York group prepared gifts, wrapping cigarettes and matches in copies of the Village Voice’s x-rated backpage ads. They wrote “Start early, kids” on the packages, Hackett says, and “handed them out to children.”

“I did not create a pub crawl with people who barf in playgrounds.”

Mo, another early New York Santacon attendee who didn’t want her full name used, recalls a slightly different approach. While she remembers a “workshop” making mutilated toys to be handed out along with “a whole lot of coal,” she also says there were “one or two people who were designated to interact with children and they had candy canes, and clean costumes, and were mostly sober, and they had non-messed up toys.”

“We had fun,” she says. “But ‘Don’t fuck with the cops, don’t fuck with kids,’ that was our MO.”

“Everybody had different ideas about what they were doing with Santacon,” Law concedes. “We had no ideology whatsoever. We were really anti ideology.”

Almost as soon as Santacon began, though, this circle realized it had very little continued creative or chaos potential. Many never participated again. (“One and done,” Hackett says dryly. “I don’t drink.”)

As the original participants drifted away, Santacon took on a new life, becoming the “largely unmediated,” as Law puts it, street party that it is today. “It became the ultimate sign of depravity,” he says. “A lot of my friends, these sophisticated quasi-intellectual types, got embarrassed.”

“I apologize to people all the time,” says Mo. “But I did not create a pub crawl with people who barf in playgrounds.”

“People are going to take and bastardize something and make it their own,” Hackett says, philosophically. “The thing is, this is a weird balance. You have to have some group of people creating the stuff, the organic movements, so that the people whose job it is to exploit those things have a pipeline.”

Schmitt says he hopes that people are inspired by Santacon, past or present: “Art gives people ideas. I hope other people have ideas, and realize they have permission.”

There is an organizational structure to the current version of Santacon, which describes itself as a “charitable” event. But in 2023 Gothamist found that over an eight year period “less than a fifth” of the money raised by the New York event went to charitable causes, with more than one third of that money going to “groups or individuals who appear connected to Burning Man.” Ryan Kailath, the investigation’s author, also reported that the organization made—and lost money on—crypto investments. (Santacon NYC did not respond to an email seeking comment.)

Porges’ documentary is not the first such evaluation of the event; a particularly beautiful 2017 Harper’s story examined the early years of Santacon, and Schmitt and Law’s long and generative friendship. (The two men are housemates, surviving in San Francisco at a time when many artists and creative troublemakers have been pushed out.) Archivist Scott Beale, the founder of the influential culture site Laughing Squid, has collected the most complete selection of material on Santacon’s earliest years.

But the current-day Santacon organizers seem particularly excited about the new film, even as they don’t seem entirely in on the joke. “When I first heard about this project a few years ago, I worried it might be another ‘shit-on-Santacon’ hit piece,” a Los Angeles Santacon organizer, who calls himself Santa Vescent, wrote on Substack. “But it’s not that at all.” (Maybe not. But without spoiling the documentary’s ending, I can tell you that while its final, more contemporary, scenes are hilarious, they are also deeply unsettling.)

“The folks who created Santacon disowned it as it transformed into something they no longer recognized,” Porges, the filmmaker, told me. “Eventually, that happens to all of us: We find ourselves living in a world we no longer understand or feel at home in. But what do we do next? Do we choose to be angry and demand that things return to some imaginary good old days? Or do we find a way to keep on going through it all, despite it all?”

The more time he spent with the Santacon founders, Porges added, “the more I began to think of this as a movie about living in the rubble. About that most 2025 of feelings: That maybe we now live in a world that doesn’t make much sense to us anymore, even if we were responsible for creating it in the first place.”

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Executions Are Rising in the US. This Reverend Witnesses Them.

About 2,100 people are on death row in America. Some have been there for decades, in part because executions have been on the decline in the US. But that’s changing. So far this year, 41 people have been executed, up from 25 last year, and six more executions are scheduled.

Early in his second term, President Donald Trump—a longtime proponent of the death penalty—signed an executive order reinstating federal executions while encouraging states to expand the use of capital punishment. One man has seen many of these executions up close.

The Reverend Jeff Hood is an Old Catholic Church priest, an ordained Baptist minister, a racial justice activist, and something of a go-to spiritual adviser for many currently on death row. Hood often tells people that his job is to become death row inmates’ best friend “so that their best friend will be with them when they’re executed.” On the day of the execution, he goes inside the chamber for the final moments of their lives. This kind of work, he says, is a natural outgrowth of his longtime activism for racial equality and the Black Lives Matter movement.

On this week’s More To The Story, Hood sits down with host Al Letson to describe his work as an advocate for death row inmates, what it’s like being a white Southern reverend vocally advocating for racial justice, and how capital punishment in the US today illustrates American society’s increasing movement in a more violent direction.

Find More To The Story on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio, Pandora, or your favorite podcast app, and don’t forget to subscribe.

This following interview was edited for length and clarity. More To The Story transcripts are produced by a third-party transcription service and may contain errors.

Al Letson: Tell me, Jeff, right now the thing that I am the most curious about is how did Jeff Hood become Jeff Hood?

Jeff Hood: Man, I thought you was going to say, “How do I keep this head shaved?” Man, that’s what you was going to ask. I grew up in South Atlanta and that had a tremendous effect on me growing up. I mean, I was constantly influenced by all of these great civil rights heroes, Andy Young, Joe Lowery. I don’t think you can be around that without it getting in your bones.

Yeah.

I guess as I got older, I looked at Atlanta and I said, “They got enough help.” And so they got a lot of people working up there, and so I needed to go somewhere that was terrible and Little Rock, Arkansas fit the bill.

See, I ain’t going to talk bad about Little Rock like that. I can say some things, but I ain’t going to do it.

I’ll tell you, this is the ultimate nowhere place, which has its pluses and minuses.

When did you join the ministry?

Man, I was a young man. So I grew up in a southern Baptist congregation that was sort of this bastion of white evangelicalism and a world of sort of black middle-class folks on the South side of Atlanta. I always tell people, man, that one of the defining characteristics of where I lived is that a couple streets over, Tiny had her nail shop. So that tells you everything you need to know.

So growing up, we had a very conservative theology, but I was also again, very influenced by the civil rights culture that somehow faith can achieve change and faith can mean more than just sitting in the church praying, that you can actually make the world a better place. I came through my undergrad and was interested in the ministry and I had this mentor that matters so much to me.

I mean, he was in a conservative religious environment, but he was very open-minded, poured into me, encouraged me to think widely and deeply, and I go to seminary and I’m right there in the middle of seminary again preparing for ministry, and I get a phone call from him and he revealed that he had lung cancer.

I go down to Atlanta and he brings me into next to his bedside. They had the hospital bed set up. I mean, just a classic sort of, he was dying with his wife and kids in the next room over. He reveals to me that he had lived his life as a closeted gay man.

Wow.

And he had pastored all of these churches as this-

Wow.

… southern Baptist minister. And so all of a sudden I’m sitting here with this sort of epiphany and it’s like, “I love Jesus, but here’s this person that had really been Jesus to me and poured into me so much, and all of a sudden Jesus is gay.” And that sort of blew up all that theology that I had had prior. And I think that that pushed me deeper into this sort of search. And I felt like if I could push into the liberal and I’ll keep “Liberal.” Now, tell everybody I’m doing my fingers with the liberal in the air quotes.

Yeah.

But I thought I’m going to pour, push into the liberal crowd and see what they can teach me. So I went to Emory. I did a graduate degree there in Atlanta at Emory in theology. And man, I began to find these liberal folks just as backwards as a lot of these conservative folks, I’m going to put up the flag but don’t expect me to march. I had been so influenced by again, those civil rights leaders that I knew I was supposed to go all the way. I was supposed to give my body.

I began to find a lot of the sort of black gay culture in Atlanta and was ready to push into these spaces of injustice in a way that I had never seen before. And so I was so affected by this sort of courage that these folks were showing. I mean, they was going into the black church and saying, “Y’all can talk about social justice all the time, but y’all are treating us like shit.”

And then going into white spaces and saying, “Y’all ain’t just racist, you’re homophobic, you’re transphobic” and on down the line. But I was brought into the ministry in a conservative environment, 22, 23, and then sort of baptized in this sort of queer culture that in many ways led me to this sort of radicalization that continued to come through the years that’s led me to Black Lives Matter work, work in queer liberation and eventually to death row. Most people, they’re their radicalists when they get first ordained. I feel like I-

It seems like you-

I went the opposite direction.

Right. You kept getting more radical after the ordination.

Yeah. And it just seems like now I have a lot of sympathy for a lot of conservatives. And the reason I have sympathy for a lot of conservatives is a lot of the times it feels like a lot of these folks don’t know no better. I don’t have any sympathy for liberal folks. I find liberal Christians to be one of the most disgusting group of people that I have ever encountered because, and apologize for some of the folks who would call themselves liberal out there that’s actually nice people.

But my point is this sort of space in the middle that Dr. King talked about in the letter from the Birmingham Jail, those are the people that are most bothersome to me now. I mean, look, we are in a society right now where we’re getting undocumented folks being pulled out of the houses, drug through the streets, and I hear all the time, “We’ll pray for you.” I don’t need your damn prayers. I need your help. I need you there in the streets with me. I need your bodies. And it’s the same way with these guys on death row. And I encountered churches all the time who say, “Well, we’ll pray for you.”

Yeah.

This guy is about to literally be killed.

Let me ask you, in your trajectory, how did you find yourself working with Black Lives Matter?

I think my gateway, if you will, was when Troy Davis was about to be executed in Georgia. And I was a student at Emory at the time, and I remember Officer Mark MacPhail was the victim in that case out of Savannah. Everybody had on the “I am Troy Davis T-shirts.” That was the swag I guess back then for the moment. And I remember just thinking about that situation and really being so deeply convicted that if Officer Mark MacPhail had been black, then none of this stuff would be happening.

Of course, I was an Obama kid 2008, 2009, and I was a part of this generation that was so determined and dedicated to see this hope and change and looking at the White House and saying, “Everything we’ve hoped for has finally arrived.” And I remember doing that Troy Davis campaign, everybody saying, “Obama’s going to find a way to save him.”

And I remember getting to the night the execution there in Jackson, Georgia. On one side, the phalanxes of troopers and police are lined up. They got all their fancy equipment. And on the other side is all of these students from Atlanta and various activists. And I remember even then people talking about, “Well, Obama’s going to do something.” And I remember that night when he was executed, going home and just being like, “Something has to get more radical, man.”

Do you feel like that was the moment that radicalized you? You had been building up.

Yeah.

And learning all of these things and then Troy Davis happens and it’s just like that was it, that broke the dam open.

I think that my minister coming out to me was something that put me on a different trajectory and caused me to start asking questions. But I do think that that Troy Davis moment was the moment where I said, “Change can’t happen through these venues that everybody tells me it can happen.” I began to realize political change wasn’t going to happen through elections. And that’s not to say that we need to have this violent overthrow of the government, but it is to say that you can’t trust anybody.

I mean, and when you start trusting folks, that’s when you start getting complacent. And in the years that followed, obviously you had incident after incident, shooting after shooting. I went to Ferguson and was there and marched. And the reality is that I didn’t know what I was doing. I didn’t have the language, I didn’t have white guy trying to do right. I mean, I didn’t know anything except that I wanted to be where I felt like Jesus was and I wanted to be where I felt like real hope and real change was. I found it in the streets.

In 2016, you helped organize a rally in Dallas that was in response to the killings of two black men by white police officers. At that protest, five officers were shot and killed. Can you tell me about that? What happened?

It was me and another guy named Dominique Alexander, and we had done a lot of organizing together and I had called him and I said, “Look, we got to do something.” He was like, “Okay, set up the Facebook page.” So I set up an event page and started inviting people. And I remember he was out pocket and I couldn’t get ahold of him. And I remember thinking to myself, “Holy shit, we’re about to have thousands of people in the streets and I’m going to be there by myself.” So we get to the day of, I mean, it was really, really hot.

And by the time I got up there, I remember thinking, man, “If I don’t meet the anger of this crowd, then this is going to be a nasty moment.” Because people were angry, very angry and rightfully so. And so I got up and I said, “God damn white America.” And then I said, “White America is a fucking lie.” And at the time, I mean that shit hit, man. Those were the words that needed to be said, really pushing into this idea that white America, the things that we’re being taught, the history that is being upheld is a lie. That’s not the totality of the American story. It’s not what’s important. What is important is all of us.

Describe for me the scene in Dallas and what was that feeling like?

It was a real feeling of eeriness. It really felt like, here’s a lot of people we don’t know and we don’t know what could happen.

And just to help our listeners remember, is that this was a really tense time in the country. The spotlight was being turned on black people dying at the hands of police. So tension had to be high with everybody, not just with the protesters, but also on the police side as well, because they don’t know what’s coming as well.

And also at the end of the day, this was a situation where we were trying to make it as safe as possible. So you’re protesting the police, but also working with them.

Working with them. Yeah.

We always felt like if something horrific was going to happen, it was going to be the police shooting protesters. We were never prepared for something to come from within. We got all of these people, people of goodwill coming together and then all of a sudden it’s just crushed by this act of violence. We are going down the street. I had an officer right next to me and really good guy, somebody that I had become friends with, he had served as sort of a protection for me and other organizers.

And so I’m going down the street and I’m looking up ahead and I started seeing these shots fired and these officers dropping to the ground and this officer pushes me to the ground and literally ready to give his life for me. And I had a big old six foot cross I was carrying. I was ready to go for the protests, but I wasn’t prepared for those shots. I guess what I’m trying to say is I feel like I’ve become who I am based on the difficulty of trying to be human in this society, trying to figure out a way to let love make a way instead of hate in vengeance.

I think my life has been defined by these conundrums, being a Southerner, having this accent, but at the same time wanting to see a new South. And I think a lot of Southerners experience this in that you’re proud of this civil rights history, you’re ashamed of this history of slavery, while at the same time you realize that the entire region is defined by violence, it’s defined by the violence of slavery, the violence of placing your body on the line to try to secure justice and whatnot. So it feels like all of these pieces just keep crashing together in my life, and I, for whatever reason, feel like God just keeps calling me to push into the chaos.

Let me ask you, in all of this, do you get a lot of pushback for being a white man who is speaking loudly about racial injustice?

Hell yeah, absolutely. I mean, as a white guy, I mean, come on.

And I’m sure you get it from both sides, right?

Yeah. I feel like the nature of following Jesus is often finding yourself in these places where you got one side saying, “What a asshole. He’s full of shit. He shouldn’t be doing this.” And you got the other side saying, “What a asshole. He’s full of shit. He shouldn’t be doing this.”

I mean, I can’t tell you how many rooms I’ve sat in with old white women talking about and crying the whole time about how racist they are, and I’m sitting here going, “Do something, do something. Quit talking, do something.” I think we have grown as a society where we are willing to hear different perspectives. There’s different leadership.

Oh, Jeff, I disagree. I don’t think we’ve grown at all.

Well, maybe not.

I think we’ve regressed. I think that the truth of the whole Black Lives Matter is that it was forcing America to look at itself in a way that was very uncomfortable. And I think that America looked at it and said, “Nah, I’m good.” And doubled down into closing its eyes and pretending like that thing didn’t happen. So I think that what was happening is that America got to look in a mirror and it said, “Yeah, I’m good. I don’t want to look at it anymore.”

Yeah. I guess what I was, the point that I was trying to make is that you do have white leftist politicians that are talking about race now in a way that they never would have, I feel like 10 years ago.

Yeah, I agree.

The opposition has gotten more diverse. But I do think that you are right. I mean, we are in a space where racism has become normal. I don’t know. I mean, I think you’re right, Al. I think that there is just this space now where people don’t want to talk about it.

I want to talk about your work on death row because I feel like when we talk about death row, I feel like number one, we really don’t want to talk about it. Society would prefer to let this thing happen in a dark corner and not bring it up and talk about it. On the flip side, you have a lot of people would consider themselves pro-life but are also a pro-death penalty. Tell me about your experience with it.

I think one of the things that influenced me the most, there was a rash of trans murders in Dallas, trans women of color being murdered in Dallas. And I was part of a group of people that were doing vigils at the sites where the bodies were found. Some of the most powerful organizing I’ve ever done because you’re lifting up people that society has said, “These people are absolutely disgusting and we want nothing to do with them whatsoever.” At the same time, I’m doing that organizing.

I was working with a guy on death row named Richard Masterson, who was a serial killer of trans women. He had been convicted of one, and there was a speculation that he had committed many other acts. And that sort of dichotomy of people getting really ticked off that I was working with this guy on death row that had been such an oppressor of the community while trying to uplift the community. It’s sort of, unless you know you ain’t going to have a home. And if you ain’t got a home, then you just want to do what’s right. And I think that that’s how I felt about the BLM movement, that’s how I felt about responding to folks who are critical of me. I just wanted to do what was right.

Yeah. When you work with these men and women on death row, tell me about them. Who are they?

Well, they’re all sorts of people. I mean, one of the places where I get in trouble by the sort of anti-death penalty crowd, anti-death penalty movement is when I say, I said this the other day, it was a guy named Chuck Crawford who was killed in Mississippi and he had murdered a young woman and horrible crimes, snatched her up. All of these crimes are horrible. And I said, somebody asked me at a press conference, they said, “What would you do if it was your daughter?” And I said, “Well, I would want to take my hands and rip them apart myself. I would want to kill them myself.”

The question is not what do we want to do as much as it is, what should we do? I don’t meet the person who committed the crime as much as I meet the person 20, 30 years later whose sat in prison and had a lot of time to grow and move and expand their life and their horizons. I mean, it’s sort of like most of these guys are committing these crimes at 19, 20, 21 years old. Well, that person is incredibly different than somebody that’s 50. These folks are most of the time desperate for any sort of touch, any sort of connection, any sort of relationship, any sort of just humanity. They just want to be treated like human beings in a system that has dehumanized them to the point where it wants to kill them.

So you’ve been to several executions, right?

Man, 10 right now.

What is it like going into that chamber?

I mean, it’s horrible. I say that it’s like going down a rabbit hole. And I tell people all the time that the question is not whether I’m going to go down the rabbit hole with these guys, the question is whether I’m going to come back. And what I mean by that is there’s such an emotional and physiological and psychological toll that it takes that you… I mean, its… I don’t know, Al, there’s just not words to describe the starkness of the walls, the feeling that the ceiling is going to crash in at any moment. The cold sweat that comes over you, the windows and seeing witnesses come and feeling like you’re in a fishbowl.

And there’s all of these sort of spaces that experientially are so horrible. And then you look up and here’s this person that you’re very close to strapped down, defenseless, and most of the time they already have an IV in and or in the case of a nitrogen execution, they already have the mask on. It looks like a respirator mask. And you’re sitting there, Al, and this is when we talk about moral injury, this is about as big of a moral injury I think as one can face.

You’re asked to sit there and pray with this person, love this person, your best friend. I tell people that my job is to come in six to three months, when somebody has six to three months left to live, and my job is to become their best friend so that their best friend will be with them when they’re executed. And so literally someone that you have worked so hard to develop that intimate of a relationship with, and your job is to sit there and do nothing while they’re murdered. And you think about it, I mean, imagine if your wife, your kids, your best friend, I mean, even a stranger being asked to sit there while they’re murdered and being expected to do something.

I mean, I get all the time, “Oh, you’re a hero, you’re so brave, you’re so this, you’re so that.” And it’s like, “No, no, I’m not. In many ways I’m a coward because I don’t do anything.” And I think that what I’m trying to speak to is the, again, that conundrum, that moral conundrum and just trying to do what is right and what is best, even amidst the horror. And I don’t know. Last night I had this nightmare that I saw all the guys that I’ve been with who’ve been executed, all of my friends, people that I’ve loved so much, and they all look at me in my dreams and say, “Jeff, why didn’t you help me?”

In the moment, in this horrible circumstance, and I’m not asking for any hope or anything like that, I’m just generally curious. These men have lived with this for well years, but as it’s getting closer and closer and closer, it must consume their thoughts as it has to consume your thoughts as well. I mean, it’s a countdown to death. Do they have a moment of peace? Are they scared the whole time? How does that play out?

I’ve had many of my guys say, “I’m the lucky one.” And I said, “What do you mean by that?” The constant thing that they say is, “We’re both going to go through this, but you’ve got to walk out of there and I get to not have to deal with any of it anymore.” And so I think the piece comes from it being the end. The thought that there’s peace in murder, I mean, it’s horrible obviously. I would be remiss if I didn’t describe what one of these nitrogen look like.

Yeah. I was just about to ask because I think it’s not because I have weird a curiosity, but I think that we as a society, whether we agree with the death penalty or not, the fact that the state is doing it, the state is basically doing it in our name, and if the state is doing it in our name, we should know exactly what the state is doing. We should deal with the weight of that.

You said a phrase that I think activists love to use, and I feel like it is the most liberal, wishy-washy bullshit is when people say, “Not in my name.”

Yeah.

And it’s like, “No, hell no. It is in your name.”

It is. It is, because you’re a part of the state.

You are guilty.

Right.

Yeah. Everybody wants to, it’s like Pilate. Everybody wants to wash their hands and act like, “We’re doing the best that we can.” Well, fuck your best. We don’t need your best, we need your body. When you go into these spaces, you hear people say all the time, “I’m either for the death penalty” or “I’m opposed to the death penalty.” And the reality of it is they don’t have any clue what they’re talking about. You catch these Southern governors all the time, like Ron DeSantis in Florida, they’ve executed 14 people this year, and he’s always talking about how awful they are and how terrible they are, and blah, blah, blah.

And he’s so glad that justice was served. These folks are cowards, man. If you are so interested in killing people, then do it yourself or at least have the courage to be there. These folks don’t want to see no executions. Judges and juries, they hand down these death sentences, but they never have to get their hands dirty. They never have to see it. They never have to participate in it. And I think we have a criminal justice system in which the courtroom and the sentence is so far removed from the lived experience of the condemned that it’s like nobody knows what they’re talking about.

Emmanuel Littlejohn, who was executed last year, somebody that I was very close to, when he was executed, I came in and he was a really funny guy, really sweet guy. But he was messing with me and I had brought some oil in the room and it was in a little bag, and I had pulled it out and I was going to anointing and said, “Well, oh.” And he said, “Shit.” And I was like, “What?” And he said, “I thought you done brought me some weed.” And so here he is, and we’re having this really human loving interaction.

And on the other side, you’ve got these state officials who are just acting like they’re at the water cooler. “What’d you do last night? Did you watch the game?” All that kind of stuff. And they ask him for his final words, and you can see the poison coming through the line and when it hits, there are seconds before the paralytic hits. And I told him I was sorry, that I did everything I could to try to stop this thing. And I told him I was sorry. And he said, really, one of the kindest things he’s ever said to me. He said, “We wouldn’t have gotten as far as we did if it hadn’t been for you.”

And it just is devastating. And then all of a sudden he goes quiet. And a lethal injection now looks like a medical procedure in a lot of ways. The paralytic hits and they’re completely unconscious. And there’s movements which sort of speak to the fact that something happens after the… I mean, obviously death happens after the paralytic, but something physiological torturous happens.

It takes sometimes 21, 22 minutes to happen and they begin to sort of gargle. And there’s this sort of watery, yawn, watery breath. And what that seems to indicate is that there’s feelings of drowning. Fluid begins to feel the lungs. The real horror there is losing your friend and just the sitting there and watching again, someone be murdered. But on the other hand, these nitrogen executions, which I was in the first one in January of 2024, Kenny Smith in Alabama.

Yeah, I’m not familiar with this.

What has happened is companies have consistently said that they don’t want their drugs used in these lethal injections like Pentobarbital and a number of other drugs, Midazolam. The pharmaceutical companies have said, “These are not what these drugs are created to do.” And so the more that people have pushed back, the harder it’s been for states to get drugs to execute people. And so what states have turned to is more novel ways of executing people and including firing squads. And also this process called nitrogen hypoxia. And it’s been done in Alabama and once in Louisiana. In January of 2024, I walk into the chamber and that was the first time they’d ever tried it.

And so nobody really knew what it was going to be like. The state of Alabama made me sign a waiver to say that if they killed me, my descendants wouldn’t hold the state accountable, liable. We go in and this respirator mask is on his face. It’s goes from the top of sort of the hairline underneath the chin. And as I go in, I pray with him, hold his hand for a bit, read scripture, and then I back up. And they start this thing and we were told that it was going to be like going to the dentist. You get knocked out and anesthetized and that’s it. It’s peaceful and whatnot.

Well, they turned the nitrogen on and Kenny begins to heave back and forth, back and forth over and over, and the face mask on this respirator mask is sometimes glass, sometimes Plexiglass, but the back of the mask was attached to the gurney. So every time he slammed his head forward, it was like his face was hitting like a plate glass window, just boom, boom, boom, over and over. And he’s popping back and forth and back and forth. And as he does that inside the mask, saliva and blood and snot, it begin to coagulate on the inside of the mask. There’s this waterfall of body fluid, and he just keeps heaving over and over and over again. It looks like there’s a million ants underneath his skin.

His skin is going every different direction. His muscles are tensed up. This lasted for almost nine minutes, eight or nine minutes. And I guess what it speaks to is the fact that there was a certain level of violence that people were accustomed to in carrying out these executions. I mean, it’s violent to strap someone down to, run an IV and kill them. This is a whole other level of violence. And it speaks to the fact that as a society, we have moved in a more violent direction. We’ve moved in a space where we are comfortable with terrorizing marginalized and oppressed people. And I think it really speaks to the fact that a lot of the movements and moments that happened in the 2010s have become just that, moments. And we’re in this space again where violence seems to be raining.

What is attending these executions, what has it done to your mental health?

Oh man, it’s terrible. I mean, it takes months after these executions to be able to function. I don’t want to even say normally, but yeah, it’s awful. And I wouldn’t wish it upon anybody. But at the same time, scripture that talks about anybody putting their hand to the plow and looking back is not fit for the kingdom of God. And so I feel like as long as there’s someone who needs me, I have to keep going until I can’t.

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Distraught, Betrayed, and Mad as Hell: Your Takes on the Shutdown

On Monday night, the Senate passed a bill that marks the first step towards potentially reopening the government after the 42-day shutdown.

For Democrats, the bill comes with a major cost: It does nothing to address the rapidly-approaching expiration of Affordable Care Act (ACA) subsidies which, according to health policy think tank KFF, will more than double enrollees’ monthly premiums. While Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) has pledged to hold a vote on the issue next month, it’s unlikely to pass in any form Democrats would want in the Republican-controlled Congress, and House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) has refused to commit to holding a vote on the matter in the House. (Spokespeople for Thune did not respond to a request for comment.)

But the 60-to-40 vote passed thanks to seven Democrats, and one Democrat-aligned independent, who defected to pass the bill. As Mother Jones‘ editor-in-chief Clara Jeffery pointed out on Bluesky, none of the lawmakers are up for reelection next year. The officials have said they cast their votes because Americans were already being harmed by the shutdown—low-income Americans have gone without food stamps and flights have been delayed at the busiest time of year for holiday travel—and they felt confident in Republicans’ commitment to give them a later vote on extending the ACA subsidies. Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.), one of the defectors, also cited the fact that the bill has a provision to rehire federal employees who lost their jobs during the shutdown and to provide back pay to those who had been furloughed.

Predictably, all this has caused even more infighting among Democrats, who have already been sparring over their party’s future following President Donald Trump’s reelection and the party’s subsequent internal reckoning over how it happened. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) called it “a very bad vote,” and Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) said, “there’s no way to defend this.” Rep. Becca Balint (D-Vt.) told Axios the bill is “complete BS,” while Rep. Jared Huffman (D-Calif.) said it “sounds like a lousy deal to me.” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) have also opposed the bill for failing to address the expiring ACA subsidies—but Schumer is also facing blowback from congressional Democrats who say the defection of some members proves he is not up to the task of leading Democrats in the Senate. (A spokesperson for Schumer did not respond to a request for comment.)

Mother Jones readers are also, overall, quite angry about the Democrats’ response. When I asked subscribers to our daily email newsletter yesterday to weigh in with their thoughts, we received a flood of replies. Many described being, as one anonymous reader put it, “mad as hell.” Reader Andrea Scharf called the vote “disgraceful” and “another show of weakness.” Tom Chojnacki wrote: “Those Democrats are weak minded cowards. They are aiding and abetting the Republicans goal of remaking the US into an oligarchy.”

The word “spineless” came up frequently to describe the eight defectors: Steve Anchell said, “I think they are spineless cretins that don’t deserve to hold public office. The only thing they seem to be good at is begging for campaign money.” Angela Ross wrote: “I THINK THEY ARE SPINELESS, MEALY MOUTHED, BLOOD SUCKING, TWO FACED BOTTOM FEEDERS.”

Several joined in the calls for Schumer to be ousted as the Senate Minority Leader. Eileen, who did not give her last name, said Schumer “needs to hand over the minority leader position to a Democrat who will fight tooth and nail.”

Other said the defectors were mistaken to believe the Republicans would actually vote to extend the ACA subsidies. “Trump and the GOP have time and time again broken promises. They will do so again,” wrote David Clayman. “The pain inflicted upon the populace has been in vain.”

Some, like Grace Hammond, said they believed the Democrats gave up leverage they had following their spate of wins in last week’s elections. “Democrats had clear, tangible leverage for the first time in this fight, undeniable pressure, and they cave,” Hammond wrote. “I was having a glimmer of hope after the elections,” Suzann Cornell said. “Now that we caved, those hopes are dashed again.” (Polling also showed that most Americans blamed Republicans, not Democrats, for the shutdown.)

A smaller group of respondents, such as Kathy Walker, reported having “mixed feelings” due to “too many people suffering” during the shutdown. Some readers reported already feeling those effects themselves.

“Our son and wife will be unable to afford medical insurance until next year when they will qualify for Medicare. In the meantime, I, nearly 90, will have to help them pay their premiums from my Social Security benefits,” wrote Dell Erwin.

Michelle Mellon said her family’s premiums will triple next year, adding, “It’s this politicized, short-term, zero-sum thinking that’s going to be our downfall as a nation.” Christine Morrissey said the premium increases “are forcing families, including mine, to cancel insurance policies in favor of paying for energy costs, grocery costs, rent costs, mortgage costs, and home owner’s insurance costs, all [of] which have also increased since Trump became president.”

A handful of anonymous readers shared stories about how ACA subsidies helped them, and their family members, receive necessary treatment and medications. Without the subsidies, they wrote, they will lose their coverage, and potentially their health. As one put it: “I am distraught. I feel betrayed by the Democratic Party.”

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Then They Came for the Dreamers

On the morning of August 13, Paulo Cesar Gamez Lira was pulling up to his mother’s house in Horizon City, Texas, when three unmarked cars blocked the driveway. Seven officers in plain clothes—some wearing masks, at least one armed—surrounded Gamez Lira’s truck. They ordered him to turn off the engine and step out of the vehicle.

Gamez Lira, 27, looked startled. He had somewhere he needed to be. His 3-month-old daughter had left the hospital less than a month earlier after being born with a condition known as gastroschisis. Gamez Lira was dropping off his other children with his mother and heading to a doctor’s appointment for the infant.

Still, Gamez Lira did not resist as the men handcuffed him—and, in the process, according to a habeas corpus petition Gamez Lira’s counsel later filed in federal court, dislocated his shoulder. His 3- and 7-year-olds, who were in the car, cried as their father was detained. The kids’ screams are audible in a video recorded by a home security camera.

The attack on DACA has wrought fear, uncertainty, and chaos on the lives of young people brought to the United States as children.

As the agents moved on him, Gamez Lira’s mother rushed outside. She pleaded with the men: Her son should not be a target; he had protection under Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA. The policy safeguards certain undocumented immigrants brought to the United States as children from deportation. But the men carried on with the arrest. In a matter of minutes, they put Gamez Lira in a car and drove away.

“Barely three weeks had passed since our baby finally left the hospital and we were enjoying our new life as a family, when [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] unjustly took him away,” Gamez Lira’s wife, Alejandra, said in a September statement about the arrest. “In that instant, they destroyed our family.”

When President Barack Obama established DACA more than 13 years ago, he explained that protecting undocumented youth was simply “the right thing to do.” It made no sense, in his words, to purge immigrants who were American in every way except for their lack of papers. “We are a better nation than one that expels innocent young kids,” Obama said then. That commitment enjoyed public support, even if the administration conceived of DACA as a stopgap—a temporary fix until Congress could help Dreamers, as the young people who came to the country as children are often called, get a path to permanent legal status by hashing out a bipartisan consensus on immigration.

Hundreds of thousands of Dreamers like Gamez Lira took the administration at its word. They entrusted the US government with their personal information and whereabouts in exchange for the assurance that they would be shielded from immigration enforcement. For a teenage Gamez Lira, brought to the country from Mexico as an infant, the program was an opportunity to come out of the shadows, work lawfully, and build a better future.

“DACA gave him hope,” Alejandra recounted during a press call. Gamez Lira did everything that the government asked of him—paid fees, submitted to background checks, reapplied every other year—to earn that protection. In fact, he had recently renewed his two-year status through August 2026.

But Congress never acted, and then Donald Trump won the presidency twice on a platform that demonized immigrants. His administration, helmed by White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller and border czar Tom Homan, has made mass removals a priority, pushing for 3,000 arrests a day and 600,000 deportations by the end of the year. But as ICE and other federal agencies storm cities across the country in a sweeping immigration crackdown, one seismic policy change has largely flown under the radar: the assault on DACA and the more than 515,000 recipients currently in the program.

Many like Gamez Lira have been arrested, detained, and put in removal proceedings, despite having protection from deportation under the policy. The attack on DACA has wrought fear, uncertainty, and chaos on the lives of young people who bought into the American Dream that the US government sold to them. “What the government is trying to do is really unprecedented,” said Rebecca Sheff, a senior staff attorney at the ACLU of New Mexico who represented Gamez Lira, describing it as “a real betrayal.”

That abandonment marks a major shift in the federal government’s attitude toward one group of immigrants that has, for years, been seen on both sides of the aisle as perhaps the most obvious candidates for legalization: those who were brought here as children and have barely lived anywhere else.

It also threatens to disrupt every corner of DACA recipients’ lives—from their health care to their chance at education. In June, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services finalized a rule excluding DACA recipients from eligibility for health coverage through the Affordable Care Act marketplace. In July, the Department of Education launched an investigation into five universities over scholarships for students with DACA status. That same month, a Department of Homeland Security spokesperson said the quiet part out loud: DACA beneficiaries “may be subject to arrest and deportation” and should consider the option to self-deport.

Just a few weeks later, Gamez Lira was hauled away from his life as a forklift driver and father of four US citizen children. After Gamez Lira’s arrest, the men took him to a Customs and Border Protection facility near a port of entry in El Paso, Texas. He was then transferred to ICE’s Otero County Processing Center in Chaparral, New Mexico. (DHS pinned his arrest on the fact that Gamez Lira pleaded guilty almost a decade ago to disorderly conduct from a reduced charge for marijuana possession.)

His wife, Alejandra, was left to care for their baby, who needs daily medication, while Gamez Lira languished in ICE custody. She said her husband felt “betrayed by the only country he has ever called home.”

DACA has long been under threat, and the fate of its beneficiaries vulnerable to volatile court rulings and political whims. But these days, the potential cost of that uncertainty is higher. The specter of a Trump crackdown has DACA recipients on edge. Many are fearful of drawing unwanted attention.

A Houston-era beneficiary of the program, whom I’m calling Fernando because he asked not to use his real name, said he lives with constant caution. When driving, he looks around for cars that could be federal immigration officers. Before leaving the house, he checks social media for information about ICE sightings. He also carries his driver’s license and work authorization as proof that he’s a DACA recipient—even if that might no longer prevent him from being detained.

“It’s scary to hear these cases happening,” Fernando, who moved to Texas from Tamaulipas, Mexico, at age 3, told me. “It’s a risk that I have to recognize.”

One Dreamer was taken to ICE’s El Paso processing center, where she said an officer mocked her, asking, “Are you scared we’ll deport you?”

In September, the Home Is Here coalition launched a tracker documenting cases of DACA recipients, and other Dreamers, who have been detained or deported, counting nearly 20 instances across the country.

They include a myriad of worrying cases. There is the Kansas resident with DACA status who was stopped at Dallas Fort Worth International Airport in March after returning from abroad and was promptly denied entry and flown back to Mexico, despite having valid travel authorization. And there is the DACA recipient from Miami and father of two, JeanCarlos Alexis Fiallos Manzanares, who has been detained since May. (His DACA and work permit renewal were recently approved for two more years, according to Fiallos’ sister.)

Over the summer, a deaf DACA recipient was picked up during an ICE worksite raid at a car wash in California’s San Gabriel Valley and spent more than 20 days in detention without contact with family or lawyers. In August, CBS Newsreported that a DACA recipient was among the detainees at Florida’s Alligator Alcatraz. And in October, ICE detained a Filipino activist and photojournalist after the Trump administration reportedly moved to revoke his DACA status because he has been outspoken on social media against Israel’s war on Gaza and the detention of pro-Palestinian protesters.

“These are just the cases we know of,” said Ayah Al-Durazi, campaign manager for Home Is Here, warning that there could be others that haven’t yet been covered in the media or come to the attention of immigrant rights groups and lawyers.

One arrest in particular has stood out to advocates for what it shows about the administration’s brazenness and resolve in sweeping up DACA recipients. In 2005, community organizer Catalina “Xóchitl” Santiago’s parents moved the family from Oaxaca, Mexico, to South Florida, where they settled as farmworkers. She was 8 at the time.

When DACA became available in 2012, Santiago and her brother Jose applied. Jose remembers the anxiety of “giving all your information to immigration and having to go through this whole background check and always being afraid of eventually this ending.” Still, he added, the program was like a “safety net…knowing we can’t be detained or deported.”

Over the summer, that anxiety proved justified. In the early hours of August 3, two CBP agents stopped and arrested Santiago without a warrant as she prepared to board a flight from El Paso to attend a conference in Dallas. One of the officers, a video Santiago recorded shows, told her to turn off her phone so they could question her about her documents.

“What’s the questioning for?” Santiago asked.

“How you got the employment authorization,” the officer replied.

When Santiago, 28, demanded to see her lawyer, one of the officers said it wouldn’t be possible because they were already past the security checkpoint.

Catalina “Xóchitl” SantiagoPaul Ratje

Reflecting back on that day, Santiago, who is Indigenous Zapotec, told me she thought about how it marked the anniversary of the 2019 racist mass shooting at a Texas Walmart and El Paso’s history of racialized violence. She described the agents’ line of interrogation as “fearmongering,” saying they asked about her relatives and where they lived.

“I was angry and frustrated, but I couldn’t feel anything else at the time,” Santiago said. “I was pretty much just trying to numb my feelings as a way to get through.”

Santiago was then taken to ICE’s El Paso processing center, where she said one officer mocked her, saying, “Are you scared we’ll deport you?”

In statements to the media, DHS referred to Santiago as a “criminal illegal alien,” pointing to one conviction and other charges for disorderly conduct in connection with civil disobedience actions and an arrest in Arizona for alleged trespassing and possession of drug paraphernalia. (Prosecutors dropped that case due to “insufficient information.”)

In early September, an immigration judge terminated Santiago’s removal proceedings because she had valid DACA status that prevented her from being deported—at least until April 2026. Santiago sought release in federal court, challenging her detention as unlawful. Her lawyers argued that US Citizenship and Immigration Services, the agency in charge of visas and other benefits, had never attempted to revoke her DACA status and noted that past criminal charges and conviction had not disqualified her from successfully renewing it six times.

But the government, while acknowledging that Santiago could not be deported due to DACA, fought to keep her in custody, claiming it could remove her after her protection expires in the spring. Advocates and lawyers worried the administration was arguing that it should be allowed to indefinitely detain DACA recipients without cause, while running out the clock on their reprieve from deportation. The end result, Santiago’s legal counsel team argued, would be a “de facto termination [of DACA] without any process whatsoever.”

On October 1, a federal judge in El Paso concluded that the government had no “individualized explanation of any kind” to detain Santiago and ordered her immediate release. “A core benefit of DACA is that it allows recipients to live, study, and work in the United States without fear of arrest or deportation,” Judge Kathleen Cardone wrote in her decision. “It would be incongruous to find that DACA recipients acquire a constitutionally protected interest in their DACA benefit, but not one of its essential facets: their liberty.”

That freedom afforded by DACA appears to be what the administration is trying to undo, Santiago’s US citizen spouse, Desiree Miller, told me: “At its core, [the case] was about whether or not the administration can get away with trying to deport people with DACA and claiming that it no longer protects people from deportation.”

In a response to emailed questions from Mother Jones, DHS Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin said, “An activist judge chose to grant a criminal illegal alien who has previously been charged for trespassing, possession of narcotics, and drug paraphernalia bond and to be free on American streets. We will not let one judge put the safety of the American people at risk and will explore every available option to remove this criminal from our country.”

Santiago, who is eligible to adjust her immigration status to a green card based on marriage, said the experience has made her more aware of the injustices of the for-profit immigration detention system and the narrow views around who is deserving of a place in America. “I find myself angrier at how this world has been organized,” she said, “and at the same time feel moved by the small things that I get to do now that I was restricted from doing.”

During his first term, Trump tried to rescind DACA, only to be blocked by the Supreme Court. After his reelection fueled by a mass deportation agenda, some worried that he would try again. But in December 2024, NBC News’ Kristen Welker asked the then-president-elect whether undocumented youth should worry. “The Dreamers are going to come later,” Trump said. “And we have to do something about the Dreamers.” When probed further on whether he wanted them to be able to stay in the country, Trump said yes, then blamed Democrats and then-President Joe Biden for not having worked out a solution for that group.

The reality is more complicated. Both Democrats and Republicans have failed to take the political goodwill toward DACA recipients and turn it into a path to permanent residence and citizenship, said Andrea R. Flores, who served as an immigration policy adviser during the Obama and Biden administrations and worked on getting DACA off the ground. “Trump actually being the one to now try and deport them is the biggest violation of this group, but the reason he can is because they were betrayed long before that,” she said.

Without a permanent solution in sight, DACA’s legality has instead wound through the courts, creating openings to either shore up or chip away at the program, depending on the political winds. Biden took the former approach: After a federal judge in Texas found DACA unlawful and blocked new applications in 2021, Biden rolled out a regulation to codify and strengthen the original policy. This year, a federal appeals court partially upheld that prior ruling but continued to allow active recipients to renew their status.

“They’re basically getting away with it and terrorizing the community. What else are they going to do?”

As the litigation moves forward, the Trump administration has staved off taking an official stance on DACA’s future, while also targeting individual recipients. When CBS News asked USCIS Director Joseph Edlow whether the Trump administration planned to end the program, he demurred: “We’re still engaging in conversation…We’ll see where we land.” Edlow, who has called DACA “de facto amnesty,” attributed the absence of a stated policy from the White House to the pending legal battle.

For immigrant rights advocates, the arrests and detention of immigrants with valid DACA protection is proof that the administration is trying to create something of a loophole: undermining the program’s core protections piecemeal without formally—and publicly—terminating it through regulation. “The administration doesn’t want to look like it’s going after DACA in a full-frontal attack,” said Todd Schulte, president of FWD.us. “I think our concern is they may try to slowly grind down the program” and condemn DACA to a death “by a thousand cuts.”

Like with Santiago, the courts also reaffirmed DACA’s safeguard against detention in the case of Gamez Lira, the father arrested in his mother’s driveway. “For the last ten years, he lived under the understanding that he was unlikely to be subject to enforcement proceedings,” US District Judge William P. Johnson wrote in a September order to prevent the government from transferring Gamez Lira outside of New Mexico. “At the very least, he justifiably expected that his DACA status would not terminate without notice and the opportunity to respond. In contravention of that expectation, Gamez Lira was not provided any process at all in the course of his arrest, processing, and detention in immigration custody.” Later that month, the judge ordered Gamez Lira to be released from detention.

A DHS spokesperson reiterated in an email to Mother Jones that DACA recipients “are not automatically protected from deportations” and “may be subject to arrest and deportation for a number of reasons including if they’ve committed a crime.”

“What’s been truly new and concerning here is the government saying, ‘No, we’re not necessarily taking away your DACA right now, but we’re saying we can detain you,’” attorney Sheff said. “It just doesn’t make any sense other than the government trying to strike fear in the hearts of immigrant communities.”

Crystal Sandoval, with Las Americas Immigrant Advocacy Center, an organization working on Gamez Lira’s immigration case, agrees. “They’re basically getting away with it and terrorizing the community,” she said. “What else are they going to do? It makes me very scared about what’s going to come next.”

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One Rule Is Dooming the UN Climate Talks

This story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
When Christine Peringer attended her first United Nations climate conference in 2019, she was not exactly impressed. As a professional facilitator and a member of Mediators Beyond Borders International, she said she was “appalled” by the “lack of sophistication in their methods of running the meetings.”

She described the typical rigmarole: First, delegates gather for a plenary session, where they can deliver surface-level position statements about some draft text prepared by the conference’s chair. Then they break out into small groups and “just start working things out very quickly,” with people agreeing or objecting as they go—sometimes they talk over one another, sometimes they fail to translate interjections into non-English languages. It gets worse in the final hours, when delegates crowd around a single sheet of paper, making revisions in ink.

“I don’t know how they come up with anything in such a haphazard process,” Peringer said.

Peringer’s experience is typical of those attending the U.N.’s annual climate negotiations, known as COPs (for “conference of the parties”), which have been going on for more than 30 years and aim to align global efforts to combat climate change. The dysfunction has had consequences: Since the early ’90s, annual greenhouse gas emissions have grown by 40 percent, despite the climate pledges made under the Paris Agreement, which was itself a product of COP21 in 2016. No country on Earth has a climate pledge in line with the agreement’s 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) target, according to the collaborative research project Climate Action Tracker; instead, the pledges made by countries a decade ago are projected to cause up to 3.1 degrees C (5.6 degrees F) of warming.

Many other observers have called the conferences “broken,” “mayhem,” and a “circus,” and each year, there are calls for reform. These range widely, from banning fossil fuel lobbyists at the negotiations to limiting opportunities for greenwashing.

One mundane procedural issue stands out, however: voting. Due to the concerted efforts of oil-producing countries like Saudi Arabia, participants in the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, or UNFCCC—the treaty that kicked off the yearly COP negotiations—are unable to vote on contentious issues. Instead, they have to pursue consensus, giving every country a de facto veto power over proposals they don’t like. Environmental groups have called this a “poison pill” that has undermined climate progress for decades. Many are trying to stop it from sullying other international environmental agreements, like the UN plastics treaty.

Now that COP30 in Belém, Brazil, has kicked off, the question is once again rearing its head: Should the negotiation’s participants be able to vote? Mads Christensen, Greenpeace International’s executive director, wrote in September that a lack of voting was “at the heart” of the COP’s paralysis: The conferences must “push ahead with science, justice, and majority voting to ensure progress,” he said. Christiana Figueres, one of the architects of the Paris Agreement, made a similar suggestion in August. But it’s not clear whether this is possible, or the extent to which it would actually resolve the climate treaty’s problems.

It’s unusual that the UNFCCC precludes voting. Most UN bodies, including its General Assembly, Security Council, and Economic and Social Council, allow voting in at least some circumstances. The same is true of several other U.N. environmental treaties, like the Stockholm Convention.

The difference with the UNFCCC is that oil-producing countries blocked the adoption of the agreement’s “rules of procedure” way back in 1991—the part of the treaty that lays out its decision-making protocols. Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and their allies objected to a mundane provision allowing two-thirds majority voting as a “last resort,” once efforts to achieve consensus had been exhausted. On the advice of US-based climate denial groups, they insisted that the treaty’s decisions be made by consensus only.

Since then, the rules of procedure have only been provisionally applied to the annual climate conferences, with the text about voting cordoned off in brackets to indicate that it hasn’t been agreed to and thus can’t be used. Formally adopting the rules of the procedure to allow voting would, ironically, require consensus, due to the rules of the United Nations. According to Joanna Depledge, a research fellow at the University of Cambridge’s Centre for Environment, Energy and Natural Resource Governance, “adoption of the rules of procedure” is now the longest-standing unresolved item on the COP agenda.

“There is something to be said for saying, ‘We want everyone on board.’ But what we see is really just a stalling of progress.”

“I would say that the climate regime has settled into a kind of routine,” Depledge said.

There are benefits to consensus. Incorporating every country’s viewpoints gives decisions greater legitimacy and makes it more likely that they’ll be adhered to and enforced. The Paris Agreement, for all its flaws, had such a high level of buy-in because of the decade of negotiations preceding it, in which delegates haggled their way toward a universally acceptable outcome.

But these are benefits of a consensus-building process, not necessarily of consensus itself. Most UN treaties, even those with voting, recognize this and ask countries to always seek the broadest level of agreement before putting something to a vote.

“The only reason consensus works is because there is a threat of a vote,” said Melissa Blue Sky, a senior attorney with the nonprofit Center for International Environmental Law.

The Basel Convention, for instance, has successfully reduced the international trade of hazardous waste—like discarded electronics—largely by consensus. Likewise, with the Stockholm Convention, which rarely actually uses voting but has still been able to phase out a number of toxic pesticides. Other treaties that allow voting but don’t often use it include the 2013 Minamata Convention, which aims to protect people and the environment from mercury, and the 1987 Montreal Protocol to prevent the destruction of the ozone layer, which didn’t vote on anything until 2016.

When differences are irreconcilable, however, voting allows a way forward, as demonstrated earlier this year by the International Maritime Organization. More than 60 countries voted to approve a new target for reducing the shipping industry’s greenhouse gas emissions, overcoming opposition from 16 countries and abstentions from 24. (A vote to officially adopt the regulations was delayed for another year, however, after interference from the Trump administration, which is opposed to them.)

Delegates to the climate COPs understand the unfortunate dynamic they’ve gotten themselves into. The countries that don’t want strong climate policies—mostly those with a significant fossil fuel sector—see a huge advantage from consensus. Because they’re OK with the status quo, they can simply refuse to compromise on key “red lines” and just wait for the rest of the world to compromise instead. The former president of the Maldives put it well during COP17 in 2011 when he said that “two parties reach an agreement, a third one comes along and says it doesn’t agree and it reduces the ambition of the others.” He called the negotiating process “stupid, useless, and endless.”

A diplomat from Bangladesh expressed a similar sentiment during COP27 in 2022: Consensus was leading to “lowest common denominator” outcomes, and any decision reached on this basis would be “so weak, so ineffective that it is not going to be anywhere near the challenges of today.”

There have been some attempts at reform. During COP17 in 2011, Mexico and Papua New Guinea submitted a creative proposal to amend the UNFCCC, rather than its rules of procedure. This would have circumvented the need for consensus; changes to the UNFCCC can be made by a three-fourths majority vote. But the idea never got enough support to move forward, and it has remained on the subsequent conferences’ provisional agendas.

Simon Stiell, United Nations climate chief, speaks during a plenary session in front of a graphic on the Paris Agreement at COP30.Fernando Llano/AP

At another conference, in 2013, a procedural issue led Russia to request a legal review of the UNFCCC’s decision-making processes. This was placed on the agenda for COP19 and could have been an opportunity to bring up voting rules, but it never was discussed.

Depledge, with the University of Cambridge, thinks the Mexico-Papua New Guinea proposal or another one like it is the most likely path to voting at the COPs—she said it would be “nigh on impossible” to ever adopt the rules of procedure outright. Earlier this year, she wrote an op-ed suggesting that new voting rules should require a supermajority or a double majority of developed and developing nations. “We should have voting rules, and they should be deployed as much as possible,” she said. She is, however, skeptical that this will be sufficient to change the trajectory of global climate action. A lack of voting “is not the number one reason why we are not achieving as much as we could be.”

Depledge added that the voting issue is unlikely to come up in Belém, due to geopolitical issues—President Donald Trump’s assault on international institutions, war in Gaza and Ukraine—and related questions around the future of international climate diplomacy itself.

The experts Grist spoke to were hesitant to predict how past climate negotiations would have been different had negotiators been able to vote. But one could imagine stronger language around a “phaseout” of fossil fuels, rather than a “phase-down,” or stricter requirements for wealthy countries to lend money and other resources to poor countries that have done little to cause global warming yet are suffering the most from its consequences. Going forward, COP30 and future meetings might yield stronger collective commitments to ratchet up emissions reductions, even if they’re not legally binding and mostly serve as a “norm-setting” function for the rest of society.

Short of trying to introduce voting rules, Peringer, the professional facilitator, thinks future climate conferences should reinterpret consensus. Instead of conflating consensus with unanimity—meaning the enthusiastic, affirmative agreement of all parties—what if consensus meant that each country could simply “live with” a given decision?

“You only block consensus if you really believe that this is, like, so detrimental to the whole process, or in opposition to values that are held dear,” she said.

In an academic paper elaborating on this idea in 2023, Peringer suggested that COP facilitators should play a more active role in determining when consensus has been reached, and then asking any holdout countries to “stand aside” in the interest of the larger group. There’s already some precedent for this within climate negotiations, notably from COP16 in 2010. In order to adopt a package of decisions called the Cancún Agreements, then-COP president Patricia Espinosa overruled a last-minute objection from Bolivia, saying that “consensus does not mean that one country has the right of veto, and can prevent 193 others from moving forward.”

Of course, it takes a skilled and confident facilitator to do something like that, and many of the recent COP presidents have not demonstrated this leadership ability. Plus, the tactic is less likely to work if there’s a larger group of countries blocking consensus.

One risk of moving away from the consensus decision-making model is that countries may feel alienated from the UNFCCC or Paris Agreement. If they’re overruled in an important decision, they may choose to simply opt out and walk away. This would obviously affect the treaty’s efficacy, since those countries most likely to leave are those with the deepest commitment to continuing to use oil, gas, and coal.

But to Erika Lennon, a senior attorney with the Center for International Environmental Law, the risks could be worth it. Oil-producing countries are already not participating in good faith, she said, and other nations are watering down their own ambitions to accommodate their delaying tactics. She and Blue Sky said they’re open to smaller coalitions of countries working at a much more ambitious level to phase out fossil fuel products, and using trade policy to influence other nations that refuse to get on board. This is an approach that has increasingly been floated in the context of the U.N. plastics treaty, which also lacks a voting mechanism and has similarly been plagued by delay tactics from petrostates.

At least one other international treaty, the Ottawa Treaty, followed this trajectory. After failed attempts by the UN to negotiate a ban on land mines, Canada launched its own process to hammer out an agreement in the late ’90s. The Ottawa Treaty now has more than 160 signatories, though several have recently withdrawn in light of Russia’s war in Ukraine.

“There is something to be said for saying, ‘We want everyone on board,’” Lennon said, referring to global climate negotiations. “But what we see is really just a stalling of progress…and the consequences of it are measured in people’s lives or livelihoods and in the destruction of potentially whole countries.”

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The Many Problems With the FDA’s Big Menopause Announcement

On Monday, the Department of Health and Human Services made an announcement that it promised would change the lives of millions of American women for the better: Hormone replacement therapy, the combination of hormone drugs that can treat the symptoms of menopause, was about to be depathologized.

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) had decided to remove a black-box warning on the medication that cautioned patients that its use could cause cancer and stroke. HHS Secretary RFK Jr. and FDA commissioner Marty Makary said that the warning, which first appeared in 2003, had been based on an overblown interpretation of a decades-old study. “The FDA is announcing today that it will remove the misleading black-box warnings from all HRT products,” said Kennedy. “For the first time in a generation, the FDA is standing with science and standing with women.”

“For the first time in a generation, the FDA is standing with science and standing with women.”

The change was welcome news to many doctors who treat the often-debilitating and long-dismissed symptoms of menopause: hot flashes, brain fog, insomnia, and recurrent urinary tract infections, to name but a few. “This decision aligns with the latest evidence-based research and helps eliminate the unnecessary fear that this warning has long perpetuated,” the Menopause Advocacy Working Group, a group of physicians that promotes increased awareness around menopause, said in a statement on social media. (Two of the group’s members were among the speakers at Monday’s event.)

But the specialists with whom Mother Jones spoke said that Monday’s panel, which included doctors with robust social media presences, had at times overstated both the negative health effects of menopause and the science on the benefits of hormone replacement therapy. Spokespeople for HHS did not immediately respond to questions for this story.

Here are just a few of the more questionable claims they made:

Menopause causes divorce.

Dr. Kelly Casperson, a urologist and “expert and advocate for sexuality and hormones,” warned that “families fracture” if women don’t get treated for the symptoms of menopause. Dr. Makary listed “divorce” alongside well-documented symptoms like mood swings and hot flashes. For Adrian Sandra Dobs, a professor of Medicine and Oncology at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine’s Division of Endocrinology, Diabetes and Metabolism, this claim was “pretty ridiculous.” She continued, “It is true that there can be mood swings and this can affect a marriage,” but to blame a divorce on menopause is “really stretching it.”

Menopause kills women.

“HRT has saved marriages, rescued women from depression, prevented children from going without a mother,” Dr. Makary said. “Menopause shortens women’s lives,” added HHS Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health Director Alicia Jackson. Dr. Esther Eisenberg, a Professor Emerita at Vanderbilt University Medical Center who is working on the American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists’ (ACOG) forthcoming guide to menopause, called the notion that menopause kills women “absurd.” Menopause, she said, “has nothing to do with a woman’s lifespan.” Dr. Jen Gunter, a gynecologist and the author of the 2021 book The Menopause Manifesto, noted in a Bluesky post that, on average, women actually live longer than men.

Marty Makary thinks that menopause kills women and shortens their lifespan, except women live longer than men

— Dr. Jen Gunter (@drjengunter.bsky.social) 2025-11-10T16:43:06.969Z

HRT improves the lives of all women.

“We have the opportunity to add up to a decade of healthy years to the life of every woman that you love!” proclaimed Dr. Jackson. Except for, as Drs. Dobs and Eisenberg noted, the millions of women for whom HRT is contraindicated—such as those with a previous history of blood clots or stroke, certain blood conditions, and many of those with a history of breast cancer.

Lifelong vaginal estrogen therapy helps breast cancer patients live longer.

“They need their oncologist to know that women with breast cancer who use it may actually live longer, and they need their primary doctors to know how to write the prescription, recommend it for life,” said panel member Dr. Rachel Rubin, a urologist and sexual medicine specialist. Dr. Dobs wasn’t so sure. “I can’t agree with that,” she told Mother Jones. “We shouldn’t be afraid of it, but I couldn’t make a statement that vaginal estrogen makes women with breast cancer live longer.” (Breast cancer patients and survivors are typically advised to avoid most forms of HRT, though emerging evidence suggests vaginal estrogen may be safer.)

Doctors should test the estrogen levels of patients in perimenopause before prescribing HRT.

“We are sticking with our philosophy that the government is not your doctor,” said Dr. Makary. Nonetheless, he did recommend “having a doctor evaluate your estrogen levels to figure out when is the right time to start.” Yet the North American Menopause Society explicitly recommends against testing for estrogen levels in perimenopausal women because they fluctuate so much throughout a woman’s cycle. Instead, doctors should prescribe estrogen based on a woman’s symptoms. Of Makary’s advice for women to ask their doctors to test their estrogen levels, Dr. Eisenberg said, “that recommendation comes out of the sky.”

Makary cast these claims as the results not only of “a robust review of the latest scientific evidence” but also of “listening to women who have been challenging the paternalism of medicine.” In a surprisingly feminist statement, Makary added, “A male-dominated medical profession, let’s be honest, has minimized the symptoms of menopause, and as a result, women’s health issues have not received the attention that they deserve.”

“A male-dominated medical profession, let’s be honest, has minimized the symptoms of menopause, and as a result, women’s health issues have not received the attention that they deserve.”

Makary’s criticism of paternalism in medicine might strike some as being particularly ironic when considering some of the other recent actions the FDA has taken on women’s health, which have included adding warnings to medications already proven to be safe. Back in July, for instance, the agency convened a so-called expert panel to discuss the use of antidepressants by pregnant women. The event featured a majority-male panel, several of whom called for adding a black box warning to SSRIs for pregnant women, which reproductive health experts say could increase stigma for women who could benefit from taking the pills. The members of that panel mostly spewed misinformation while railing against the use of antidepressants during pregnancy, to such an extent that the president of ACOG promptly released a statement calling the meeting an “alarmingly unbalanced” event that “did not adequately acknowledge the harms of untreated perinatal mood disorders in pregnancy.”

In addition, Kenedy and Makary confirmed in a September letter to Republican attorneys general that they would undertake a review of the safety of mifepristone, one of the two drugs used in medication abortion, even though more than 100 scientific studies have confirmed the pills are safe and effective—including when they are prescribed virtually and mailed to patients. Reproductive rights advocates are concerned that this “review” could lead to a decision to restrict access to the pills by recommending they should not be prescribed virtually and mailed to patients, or that they should not be used through ten weeks’ gestation, as the FDA currently allows. (Abortion advocates say the pills can be safely used later in pregnancy, and the World Health Organization guidelines note they can be used anytime in the first trimester.)

The newfound enthusiasm for HRT has been building over the past few years, as awareness of menopause, its symptoms, and the myths around hormonal medications has increased. All the attention on menopause, though, has elevated a new cadre of doctor-influencers, two of whom were featured speakers at Monday’s event. Casperson, a urologist who hosts a podcast and has written two books about menopause and sex, has 435,000 Instagram followers. At her Bellingham, Washington clinic, which doesn’t accept insurance and instead offers memberships that start at $3,000 for 4-6 months of treatment. Casperson says she aims to help women “stop should-ing all over your sex life.” Rubin, also a urologist who doesn’t accept insurance, has 185,000 followers on Instagram. She trained under the controversial physician Irwin Goldstein, who advocated for the first-ever women’s libido drug, which the FDA approved back in 2015.

Dr. Dobs cautions against relying on influencers selling supplements or claiming that HRT will solve all women’s health problems. “Unfortunately, nothing really keeps us young except things like stopping smoking, exercising, and lifestyle modification,” she said. “There’s a lot of hype to hormones—we think they’regoing to cure everything, and they really don’t.”

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Trump Claims He “Pardoned” His Fake Electors. He Doesn’t Have That Power.

Donald Trump has reportedly pardoned high-profile attorneys accused of joining in his plot to try to steal the 2020 election, along with dozens of so-called fake electors alleged to have played small roles in the effort. The pardons were announced by Ed Martin, the president’s pardon attorney, who posted a proclamation by the president outlining them on X.

The pardons, which on Monday afternoon had not appeared on White House page listing Trump’s clemency grants, are symbolic. They are part of Trump’s larger effort to downplay his attempt to subvert the 2020 election and his responsibility for the January 6, 2021, attack on Congress. None of the people he pardoned Sunday—including lawyers Rudy Giuliani, Sidney Powell, John Eastman, Jenna Ellis and Jeffrey Clark—face federal charges. But many on the list have been charged with state crimes related to the fake elector scheme. The president has broad clemency power over federal crimes, but has no authority over state charges.

Mother Jones first reported in June that Martin, who is himself a former “Stop the Steal” organizer and activist attorney for January 6 defendants, was working on a plan for Trump to pardon alleged fake electors. A person familiar with the pardon plan acknowledged at the time that such pardons would have no legal weight, though the source argued that attorneys for defendants might cite the presidential proclamation in court filings urging judges to dismiss fake elector cases.

Prosecutors in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada and Wisconsin have charged so-called fake electors in those states with crimes including fraud. These are mostly small-time Republican activists who falsely claimed to be the legitimate electors, in claims that were part of Trump’s push to pressure Vice President Mike Pence to reject the legitimate election results and accept pro-Trump slates of electors that could throw the election to him. The circumstances in each state differ, but generally, local prosecutors are struggling to persuade judges that the defendants broke the law by claiming to be legitimate electors. Many defendants may not welcome Trump’s legally worthless but politically charged attempt to intervene in their cases.

The Sunday pardons are part of a recent clemency spree by Trump. His latest pardons include former New York Mets star Darryl Strawberry and Changpeng Zhao, a Chinese-born founder of the cryptocurrency exchange Binance. Strawberry is one of various celebrities Trump has pardoned. Zhao is one of several Trump pardons that appear corrupt: Zhao, who pleaded guilty to US money laundering charges in 2023, paid Trump associates to lobby for his pardon, and Binance earlier this year cut a deal with Trump World Liberty Financial, a crypto company launched by Trump’s sons, that has helped to enrich the Trump family.

Martin served as interim US Attorney for the District of Columbia until his nomination to hold the job permanently failed in the Senate in May. He has since worked as Trump’s pardon adviser and head of a so-called weaponization task force in the Justice Department, efforts he has aggressively publicized. He has touted his role in federal prosecutions of New York Attorney General Letitia James and former FBI Director James Comey in statements that bolster widespread views that those cases are acts of political retribution.

Martin’s original plan for fake elector pardons went further than Trump did on Sunday—for example, Martin considered recommending that Trump pardon John F. Kennedy supporters who in 1960 signed paperwork saying they were Hawaii’s presidential electors when a recount left the actual winner of the state uncertain. Kennedy won Hawaii, and those electors were accepted as the state’s legitimate slate and never accused of crimes. Also, they are dead.

But pardoning them, the person familiar with the plan said, would have been a gesture aimed at boosting Trump supporters’ claims that 2020 fake electors did nothing wrong. The source did not explain why that part of the fake elector pardon plan did not move forward. But it may have been a step too far, even for Trump.

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Did the Off-Year Elections Settle the Democrats’ Big Debate?

A version of the below article first appeared in David Corn’s newsletter, Our Land_. The newsletter comes out twice a week (most of the time) and provides behind-the-scenes stories and articles about politics, media, and culture. Subscribing costs just $5 a month—but you can sign up for a free 30-day trial._

Ever since the reasonable woman lost to a narcissistic, racist, and misogynistic autocrat wannabe, the Democratic Party has been going through yet another painful round of the all-too-familiar debate: Should the party move to the center or adopt a more progressive stance to amass an electoral majority? This face-off has been recurring within the party for decades. For all the jawboning over the years, it has produced no consensus, and this fight is…boring. With the election results last week—a Democratic sweep everywhere—the debate is over. Or, at least, it should be.

That doesn’t mean there’s a resolution to the binary argument. One can end a debate without an ultimate and final decision. That’s what the Democrats ought to do. There’s never been a clear answer to the center-or-left question. And this election showed that within the party, lefties, such as Zohran Mamdani in New York, and centrists, such as Abigail Spanberger in Virginia and Mikie Sherrill in New Jersey, can each kick ass. Many commentators have made the obvious point: Candidates need to match the local electorate. Mamdani likely could not win statewide office in Virginia, and Spanberger likely could not excite the young voters who turned out in NYC for the democratic socialist.

There’s no need for the Democrats to continue shooting at each other and feeding the notion they have an identity crisis. The message is simple for them: We have a large tent and, dear voters, we offer you a buffet.

The Democrats reflect a wider swath of the electorate. That’s not a weakness. It’s a strength they should embrace.

Looking for a politician to identify with? We give you a choice: Mamdani, Spanberger, Sherrill, Gavin Newsom, AOC, Andy Beshear, and others. Take your pick. No single one of them must be anointed the leader of the party. Desire a fierce progressive who will (rhetorically) kick Trump in the teeth? There’s this young buck in New York. Want a savvy strategist with a mostly liberal record who strives not to be seen as too liberal? Check out the governor of California. Looking for less-splashy, nose-to-the-grindstone workhorse politicians (big on mom energy), see Virginia and New Jersey. The Democratic Party can be a choose-your-own-adventure party. It is not in disarray. It is diverse. It even has something of a unifying message—affordability—which can be tailored to different electorates. In New York City, Mamdani vowed to address high rents; in New Jersey, Sherrill focused on rising energy prices.

This is the opposite of the current GOP, which is no more than a homogeneous cult of personality tied to one man and his whims. It has jettisoned principles and policies to serve an erratic authoritarian. It’s nothing but Trump. Love him, love the party. Otherwise, you’re out of luck. The Democrats, in contrast, reflect a wider swath of the electorate. That’s not a weakness. It’s a strength they should embrace.

Indeed, the party will more tightly define itself when it chooses a presidential nominee. That’s a winner-take-all process. One person gets the party crown and campaigns for the highest office. In European parliamentarian systems, parties as a whole compete to gain control of the executive branch. Not so here. In the United States, parties must select and swing behind a single politician who comes to represent the party. That will happen in 2027 and 2028, and what’s likely to be a competitive and robust primary contest will produce the party’s banner carrier. Until then, the Democrats should not obsess over the left-center branding issue.

For about 60 years, the Democrats have been a center-left party. Both sides by now ought to understand that they need each other.

For about 60 years—ever since Southern conservative Democrats bolted the party in response to its support for civil rights measures—the Democrats have been a center-left party. Both sides by now ought to understand that they need each other. It’s my hunch—and you might disagree—that a fully left party probably could not succeed on the national level in the United States within its two-party duopoly. And given the profound threat posed by Trump and his cronies, the formation of a popular front that covers a wide stretch of the ideological gamut is essential. Last week’s elections demonstrate that the Democrats, with the help of independent voters, can build that.

Mamdani’s triumph was stunning, his win a tremendous accomplishment for the party’s left wing. He’s a generational talent. And now he will have the opportunity to prove whether a democratic socialist can successfully implement left-wing proposals—which should yield important lessons for progressives. Governing the sprawling Big Apple government, which too often has been prone to corruption, is a tough task, let alone changing its culture and injecting into it an ambitious agenda. Let’s wish him well. The question now is not whether a democratic socialist is good for the party, but whether one can succeed governing the biggest city in the nation.

In a way, the New Jersey race was more of an indicator of the current state of politics in America. Sherrill led Republican Jack Ciattarelli, a GOP businessman who had twice run for governor, by only a few points in the polls prior to Election Day. He had previously positioned himself as a not-so-Trumpy Republican. In this race, he campaigned with MAGA personalities and enthusiastically accepted Trump’s support. But he did not dwell on the president. A poll in October showed incumbent Democratic Gov. Phil Murphy’s job approval rating at 35 percent—lower than Trump’s.

The Democratic Party does not have time for navel-gazing. It’s a to-the-barricades moment.

This looked like a tight contest, especially since four years ago Murphy beat Ciattarelli by only 3 points in this Democratic state. Yet Sherrill won by a whopping 13 points. Jersey voters rallied behind this centrist Democrat more than New Yorkers flocked to Mamdani. And it’s hard not to read her margin of victory as a referendum on Trump. Though voters were dissatisfied with the Democratic governor and upset with rising food prices and skyrocketing health care premiums, they did not take it out on Sherrill. They renounced the candidate of the Trump Party. This is the election that Republicans across the country—especially those few House members in swing districts—ought to worry most about. Their biggest concern should not be a young socialist, but a working mom who campaigns as a mainstream Democrat.

At this moment, the barbarians are not at the gate; they are inside the White House, attacking democracy and deconstructing the United States of America. Millions of citizens are at risk of going hungry and losing their health care. The Democratic Party does not have time for navel-gazing. It’s a to-the-barricades moment.

I have no illusions. There will be squabbling over strategy and tactics. Centrists will still fear the agenda of progressives, and the progressives will gripe about opposition and obstacles posed by centrists. Look at the disagreement within the party over resolving the government shutdown. Yet these election results are a sign that that Democrats can win without settling this big who-are-we matter. Voters are not waiting for this debate to be concluded and a winner proclaimed. Few are interested in it. Precisely calculating an ideological course that appeals to a particular group of voters is not the key to Democratic victory. It can be a distraction. “Let a hundred flowers bloom, let a hundred schools of thought contend.” Mao said that. He was a dictator who did not stick to his own advice, but that’s the right idea. Different strokes for different folks, as Sly Stone sang.

These off-year elections—let’s call it the Ballroom Blowout—included surprising Democratic wins in Mississippi and Georgia, and there’s a lesson for Democrats. With Trump continuing his cruel mass deportations, holding let-them-eat-cake parties while threatening food stamps for millions, razing parts of the White House and showing off his new marble bathroom, turning tariffs on and off recklessly, doing little to address economic concerns, and ignoring court orders, the Democrats are presented with much opportunity. Continuing to argue among themselves is counterproductive. They don’t need consensus to succeed. They need authentic candidates who have something to say and who convince voters they will be fighters for them. Remember what a Republican president once said about a house divided. The Democrats have been shown the way.

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Trump’s Vendetta Against EVs Is Driving Up Costs for Every Vehicle Owner

This story was originally published by Vox and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

As President Donald Trump sees it, environmental regulations that attempt to improve efficiency and address climate change only make products more expensive and perform worse. He has long blamed efficiency regulations for his frustrations with things like toilets and showerheads. He began his second term in office to “unleash prosperity through deregulation.”

But there’s at least one big way that American companies and households may end up paying more, not less, for the president’s anti-environment policy moves.

If you’re in the market for a vehicle, you’ve probably noticed: Cars are getting more expensive. Kelley Blue Book reported that the average sticker price for a new car topped $50,000 for the first time in September.

“I think ‘chaos’ is a good word because [automakers are] getting hit from every angle.”

And they aren’t just getting more expensive to buy; cars are getting more expensive to own. For most Americans, gasoline is their single-largest energy expenditure, around $2,930 per household each year on average.

While a more efficient dishwasher, light bulb, or faucet may have a higher sticker price up front—especially as manufacturers adjust to new rules—cars, appliances, solar panels, and electronics can more than pay for themselves with lower operating costs over their lifetimes. And Trump’s agenda of suddenly rolling back efficiency rules has simultaneously made it harder for many industries to do business while raising costs for ordinary Americans.

No one knows this better than the US auto industry, which has whiplashed between competing environmental regulations for over a decade.

President Barack Obama tightened vehicle efficiency and pollution standards. In his first term, Trump loosened them. President Joe Biden reinstated and strengthened them. Now Trump is reversing course again—leaving the $1.6 trillion US auto industry unsure what turn to take next.

In July, the Environmental Protection Agency began undoing a foundational legal basis that lets the agency limit climate pollution from cars. Without it, the EPA has far less power to require automakers to manufacture cleaner vehicles, which hampers efforts to reduce one of the single biggest sources of carbon emissions.

Trump’s Transportation secretary, Sean P. Duffy, said in a statement over the summer that these moves “will lower vehicle costs and ensure the American people can purchase the cars they want.”

But in reality, the shift may have the opposite effect.

That’s because when the rules change every few years, automakers struggle to meet existing benchmarks and can’t plan ahead. The Alliance for Automotive Innovation, a trade group representing companies like Ford, Toyota, and Volkswagen, sent a letter to the EPA in September saying that the administration’s moves and the repeal of incentives for electric cars mean that the current car pollution rules established under Biden and stretching out to 2027 “are simply not achievable.”

The Trump administration responded by zeroing out any penalties for violations—but the industry is already planning for a post-Trump world where rules could drastically change yet again.

“Repealing [auto emissions] standards in particular would set America back decades.”

Because it takes years and billions of dollars to develop new cars that comply with stricter rules, carmakers would prefer if regulations stayed put one way or the other. Every rule change adds time and expense to the development lifecycle, which ultimately gets baked into a car’s price tag.

Changing rules are also vexing for electric car makers, whose models are gaining traction both in the US and around the world, even as the Trump administration has ended tax incentives for EVs. Trump is making things even more difficult by pulling support for domestic battery production that would help US car companies build electric cars.

It all adds up to a huge headache for the industry. “Particularly in the last six months, I think ‘chaos’ is a good word because they’re getting hit from every angle,” said David Cooke, senior associate director at the Center for Automotive Research at Ohio State University.

And all that uncertainty is making cars more expensive to buy and run, with even more expensive long-term consequences for people’s health and the environment.

As the government relaxes efficiency targets, progress will stall and car buyers will get stuck with cars that cost more to operate.

Energy Innovation, a think tank, found that repealing tailpipe standards could cost households an extra $310 billion by 2050, mainly through more spending on gasoline. Undoing the standards would also increase air pollution and shrink the job market for US electric vehicle manufacturing due to lower demand.

Even the Trump administration’s own analysis of the effects of undoing the EPA’s greenhouse gas emissions regulations found that his moves would drive up gasoline prices due to more fuel consumption from less efficient vehicles.

“Repealing these standards in particular would set America back decades,” said Sara Baldwin, senior director for electrification at Energy Innovation.

“These changes in regulations are really disruptive to the industry.”

While the Trump administration shifts gears, other countries are racing ahead. Automakers can design electric cars faster than conventional internal combustion-powered vehicles, since EVs generally have fewer components, and manufacturers don’t have to worry about designing pollution controls to meet tightening restrictions. Since EVs are mechanically simpler, they also need less maintenance.

Conventional cars, by contrast, typically take around five years to go from the drawing board to dealer lots, so the gasoline-powered cars being designed now won’t come out until 2030—when someone else will be in the White House.

The US auto industry also serves other countries. Markets like Europe are holding fast to their environmental regulations and are looking to ban the sales of internal combustion vehicles altogether. Meanwhile, China is making some of the cheapest and most popular EVs in the world.

That’s why some American carmakers are setting their sights beyond US shores and are continuing to bet on more EVs. Earlier this year, Ford announced that it was developing a $30,000 electric pickup truck for the US and for export, a sign the company sees huge potential in cheap electric cars despite the Trump administration’s efforts to pump the brakes on electrics.

Though car companies often grumble about the expenses and effort they have to expend when environmental regulations become stricter, regulatory uncertainty continues to be a much bigger nuisance. “These changes in regulations are really disruptive to the industry and are hurting our global economic competitiveness,” said Gregory Keoleian, co-director of the Center for Sustainable Systems at the University of Michigan. “It’s not only hurting in terms of setting us back with regard to decarbonization of the transportation sector, but the cost to consumers in the United States.”

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Florida Takes On Planned Parenthood

In anti-abortion Republicans’ latest attack on abortion pills, Florida’s attorney general is suing Planned Parenthood for allegedly misrepresenting the safety of the drugs—despite the fact that more than 100 scientific studies have shown they are safe and effective.

The 37-page lawsuit, announced by Attorney General James Uthmeier’s office on Thursday and filed in Florida’s First Judicial Circuit Court, alleges that Planned Parenthood “sells profitable abortions to vulnerable women by lying to them about abortion pills being safer than Tylenol.” Experts routinely make the comparison that use of the abortion pills—which include mifepristone, which blocks the pregnancy hormone progesterone, and misoprostol, which expels the pregnancy—are safer than Tylenol or even full-term pregnancy. Research shows that serious complications from medication abortion occur in less than half a percent of cases.

The Florida lawsuit claims that all abortions “violate the Hippocratic Oath and deny the inalienable rights of all human beings.”

But Uthmeier’s lawsuit paints a far more dire picture. It’s riddled with familiar anti-abortion arguments and misinformation. For example, it cites openly anti-abortion sources, including the anti-abortion group Live Action, as well as a non-peer reviewed report from the right-wing Ethics and Public Policy Center that claimed to show higher rates of complication from the pills, but that experts say has a flawed methodology, as I have previously written. The Florida lawsuit also claims that all abortions “violate the Hippocratic Oath and deny the inalienable rights of all human beings.” Uthmeier is suing under the state’s deceptive marketing and racketeering laws, and is seeking more than $350 million in damages, attorneys’ fees, the dissolution of Planned Parenthood in Florida, and the revocation of its state licenses.

Spokespeople for Planned Parenthood did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Mother Jones on Sunday, but in a statement provided to the Associated Press, Susan Baker Manning, general counsel for the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, said: “Anti-abortion lawmakers and officials are relentless in their effort to end access to all abortion care, and to stop patients from getting accurate medical information. We will continue to be just as relentless in our effort to defend access to this safe, effective care. See you in court.” Alexandra Mandado, the president and CEO of Planned Parenthood of Florida, told the Tampa Bay Times the lawsuit is “a politically motivated attack” and an “attempt to erode access to all abortion care.”

Abortion is banned in Florida after six weeks of pregnancy, but telehealth abortion providers have continued prescribing and mailing abortion pills into Florida and other states with bans. More than 70 percent of reproductive age women in the state believe abortion should be legal in all or most cases, including a majority of Republicans, KFF, the group formerly known as Kaiser Family Foundation, found last year. After the Supreme Court overruled Roe v. Wade in June 2022, use of abortion pills drastically increased nationwide, and they now account for more than 60 percent of all abortions. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) permits use of mifepristone to end a pregnancy throughten weeks’ gestation, but abortion advocates say it is safe and effective later as well; the World Health Organization says, for example, that it can be used anytime in the first trimester.

But as the pills’ popularity has increased, so have the coordinated attacks, as I wrote back in September:

Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and FDA Commissioner Marty Makary announced that HHS would conduct a new review of mifepristone, after hinting they would do so back in May, as I reported at the time. In their announcement, which reportedly came as a response to a letter Republican attorneys general wrote to Kennedy and Makary back in July, the officials cited a report produced by the Ethics and Public Policy Center, a right-wing organization that was on the advisory board of Project 2025, which claims to have unearthed a higher-than-previously-reported rate of complications from the pills.

[…]

As my colleague Madison Pauly and I reported back in January, anti-abortion groups sent letters to the Department of Justice and FDA requesting they roll back access to medication abortion by enforcing the 19th-century anti-obscenity Comstock Act, restoring the seven-week gestational limit, and rescinding the Biden-era telehealth regulation. Project 2025, the lengthy playbook for Trump’s second term, also recommended the DOJ enforce the dormant Comstock Act to ban the mailing of abortion pills, though President Donald Trump claimedlast year that it was “very unlikely” the FDA would roll back access or that the DOJ would enforce Comstock.

In 2022, an anti-abortion group calling itself the Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine sued in Texas, challenging the FDA’s initial approval of mifepristone as well as the agency’s later moves to expand access. The Supreme Court rejected the suit last year, saying the anti-abortion medical providers didn’t have standing to bring it. But attorneys general in at least six red states, including Texas and Florida, have since intervened in a bid to revive the case. Other suits are trying to curtail access by claiming mifepristone could contaminate drinking water.

There have also been myriad efforts to limit and penalize access at the state level. Last year, Louisiana became the first state to classify mifepristone and misoprostol as controlled substances, a move that one doctor predicted would also impact non-abortion-related care, including postpartum hemorrhages and IUD insertions. This month, Texas enacted a radical bill that allows allows private citizens to sue anyone who “manufactures, distributes, mails, transports, delivers, prescribes, or provides” abortion pills to Texans for at least $100,000. Officials in Texas and Louisiana have sought to punish doctors in New York and California who mailed abortion pills into their states under shield laws.

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