Republican Con Artist From Queens Reports to Prison

Former Rep. George Santos (R-N.Y.) reported to federal prison on Friday, after pleading guilty in 2024 to identity theft and wire fraud, stemming, in part, from a spectacular straw-donor scandal that was dwarfed by his still-more-spectacular “entire life story” scandal. As political prisoners go, Santos is not quite on par with his friend and mentor Nelson Mandela, buthe has hinted in recent days that he may be killed in prison for what he knows. I don’t wish that on him, of course, but also don’t take it very seriously. Before becoming the first member of the House to get expelled from the chamber in more than two decades, he’d spent barely enough time in Washington to know where the Speaker’s Lobby is—let alone where the bodies are buried.

But Santos’ banishment and subsequent imprisonment does make him an exceptional case in one key way: Santos showed that it was possible for party leaders and rank-and-file members to act swiftly to deal with a fabulist whose very presence insulted the office he held—provided it was just a powerless back-bencher whose transgressions they could all laugh away.

Because Santos was a relative nobody, his colleagues could be honest about who he was in a way that for nearly a decade they have never been about their party’s leader or, frankly, themselves.

When the New York Times first exposed Santos’ biography as largely fictitious after the 2024 election, a lot of people spent a lot of time asking how someone like this could win. There was, of course, a major failure from Democrats in New York to pick up on basic red flags over the course of two successive campaigns. And there was a failure by Republicans’ vaunted Nassau County machine to do the same before twice giving their official imprimatur to a man who lied about being both Jewish and the producer of the Broadway musical, Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark. These were fair questions, but they also tended to obscure a larger one.

Some of the loudest voices in favor of expulsion were Santos’ fellow New York Republicans, eager to cast out their colleague as a MAGA imposter and condemning his lies and transgressions with unusual directness. It’s that age-old, never-quite-true maxim: This is not who we are. Because Santos was a relative nobody, his colleagues could be honest about who he was in a way that for nearly a decade they have never been about their party’s leader or, frankly, themselves.

Santos’ fleeting ascent is no great mystery if you view it in the larger context of a party leadership that’s desensitized to scammers and a party base that’s uncommonly susceptible to them. His claims to have played varsity volleyball at a college he never attended are not so different from the president’s recent claim to have an uncle who taught the Unabomber at a college the Unabomber never attended. The president, of course, was convicted on 34 felony counts in 2024 of falsifying business records to circumvent campaign finance laws. His administration seems to lie about everything, as a matter of course. It requires more than a little bit of credulity to blame the rise of a transparent a grifter like Santos on bandwidth issues at the vetting department; “How could a con artist from Queens make it so far in Donald Trump’s Republican party?” is a question that seems to answer itself.

None of this is to excuse Santos’ illegal behavior. It’s bad when people in politics abuse the public trust. But also: It’s bad when people in politics abuse the public trust! And in an age of court-sanctioned impunity for presidential crimes, of mass pardons for insurrectionists and political allies and seemingly anyone who has been convicted of public corruption in recent memory, it sort of feels like a joke that the one Republicans actually facing consequences for his actions is this guy.

There’s a famous quote from the late UNLV basketball coach Jerry Tarkanian about the false morality at the heart of college athletics: “The NCAA is so mad at Kentucky,” he said, “it’s going to give Cleveland State two more years of probation.” I don’t think you need to know much about college sports to get the basic point. The Republican Party in the Trump era is awash in grifters, weirdos, and frauds. The animating purpose is a mass public deception for the sake of wide-scale fleecing by a billionaire hustler. So it got rid of George Santos as fast as it could.

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“Woke” Superman Versus MAGA Whiners—Guess Who Won?

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._

There’s nothing like a $125 million opening weekend to overcome MAGA whining, and Superman just walloped the bad-faith culture warriors of the right.

The conservative movement has long relished ginning up moral panics to distract from more important matters, such as its never-ending assault on low- and middle-income Americans and its obeisance to plutocrats. The right resorts to culture warfare over abortion, guns, gay rights, immigration, and religion to win over voters who might otherwise recoil at GOP efforts to increase the power and wealth of corporate America and 1-percenters. And Trump and Co. have followed this playbook, with their crusades against wokeness, transgender rights, and demographic diversity. So when James Gunn, the director of the new Superman, told the Times of London that “Superman is the story of America, an immigrant that came from other places and populated the country,” cranky voices on the right leaped at the chance to accuse Hollywood of making Superman “woke” to advance a left-wing agenda.

Fox host Jesse Watters half-joked, “You know what it says on his cape? MS-13.” For Fox, immigrant equals gang member.

Before the film hit theaters, Fox News informed its viewers that the new Superman embraced “pro-immigrant themes.” And MAGA pundit Kellyanne Conway, appearing on the network, huffed, “We don’t go to the movie theater to be lectured to and to have somebody throw their ideology on to us.” Fox host Jesse Watters half-joked, “You know what it says on his cape? MS-13.” For Fox, immigrant equals gang member.

No surprise, the MAGA pundits had no idea what they were talking about. The only pro-immigrant theme in the movie is rather basic and hardly objectionable. Superman (David Corenswet), an alien who fervently wants to help humans, is propelled by an elementary motivation: kindness. He is so empathetic that when his nemesis Lex Luthor (Nicholas Hoult)—in this telling, an Erik Prince-like character who’s an arms dealer and tech genius who has invented the “pocket universe” (don’t ask me to explain)—unleashes a 30-story-tall dinosaur-like beast (think Godzilla) in the middle of Metropolis, Superman insists on neutralizing, not killing, the monster so it can be taken to a sanctuary to be studied. Other superheroes helping him just want to blast it to smithereens.

There are certainly reflections of present-day crises in the movie. The film’s main tale is Luthor’s unrelenting attempt to destroy Superman, who stands in the way of Luthor’s diabolical schemes. One piece of Luthor’s plan is to delegitimize Superman, and he does this with the accusation that Superman is an untrustworthy alien who has a secret agenda to take over the Earth and claim as many wives as is needed to restore the Kryptonian race that perished on his home planet. In other words, this immigrant is an existential threat and a sex fiend. Luthor’s effort to demonize Superman does initially turn public opinion against the Man of Steel, showing how easy it is to other-ize and vilify a migrant.

It’s laser-guided weaponry versus pitchforks. And it’s nearly impossible not to think of the ongoing war in Gaza.

The other callback to the real world is a burgeoning war between two fictitious nations, Boravia, an ally of the United States, and Jarhanpur, its neighbor. At the start of the film, Superman intervenes to prevent Boravia, which is being armed by Luthor’s transnational corporation, from invading Jarhanpur. But this leads to a superhuman created by Luthor defeating Superman in battle. Through the rest of the movie, the prospect of war looms, with Boravia’s high-tech army poised to slaughter the civilians of Jarhanpur at the border. It’s laser-guided weaponry versus pitchforks. And it’s nearly impossible not to think of the ongoing war in Gaza. Reporter Lois Lane (Rachel Brosnahan), Superman’s gal pal, tells him that his unilateral interference in the Boravia-Jarhanpur conflict raises questions of politics and morality. But Superman sees it more simply: What could be more important than preventing the bloodshed of war?

Gunn has pointed out that he wrote the script before the Gaza war broke out. He said that Superman “doesn’t have anything to do with the Middle East. It’s an invasion by a much more powerful country run by a despot into a country that’s problematic in terms of its political history, but has totally no defense against the other country. It really is fictional.” Yet the imbalance of power between these make-believe countries and the suggestion that one is poised to wipe out civilians in the other offers a strong example of art imitating life. No wonder Palestinian activists have hailed the work.

Put all the political chatter and sniping aside, Superman is a fun and smart take on an all-too-familiar story. It’s not a great film. The character of Superman—a tremendously non-dark superhero—does not lend itself to profound drama. This is no The Dark Knight with a brooding and conflicted hero (Batman) facing a nihilistic villain who seeks to illuminate and exploit the hypocrisies of modern society (Joker).

Superman is a fine summer distraction for the tough times of the moment. But if you want to look past the titanic fight scenes and gee-wiz CGI and be prompted to think about more, Gunn provides that opportunity.

But Gunn does tease out for dramatic purpose the dilemmas and inner conflicts Superman/Clark Kent faces in dealing with both geopolitics and interpersonal relationships. The script is packed with creatively choreographed intense action scenes. Superman is confronted with challenges he might not be able to overcome—though you know he will. The side characters—particular superhero Mr. Terrific (Edi Gathegi)—are well drawn. The movie is infused with the same delightful sass that animated the Guardians of the Galaxy films Gunn previously directed. And, as you might have heard, the dog Krypto steals scene after scene.

Superman is a fine summer distraction for the tough times of the moment. You can munch popcorn and watch the ultimate good guy triumph over a villain who bears a resemblance to today’s tech billionaires. But if you want to look past the titanic fight scenes and gee-wiz CGI and be prompted to think about more, Gunn provides that opportunity, for Superman is a reminder of the pressing need to recognize and serve the basic commonality of our species—as sappy as that sounds.

It’s an antidote to the perverted political culture Donald Trump has forged. Since he entered politics, Trump has presented mean-spiritedness as an asset. In the White House, he and his henchmen have implemented and celebrated policies of cruelty. And Elon Musk, the champion of Big Tech libertarianism, recently belittled the concept of empathy, dismissing it as weakness. Superman is a retort to all this.

In the Times interview, Gunn said the movie “is mostly a story that says basic human kindness is a value and is something we have lost…[O]bviously there will be jerks out there who are just not kind and will take it as offensive just because it is about kindness. But screw them.” It’s a sad comment on our present circumstances that such talk can spur controversy—which makes Gunn’s Superman more important and necessary than the average summer blockbuster.

By the way, Superman, who was created by Jerry Siegel and Jospeh Shuster, each the son of Jewish immigrants, has always been woke:

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The Hague Just Upped the Stakes on Trump’s “Drill Baby, Drill” Agenda

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

Tuesday’s landmark advisory opinion from the International Court of Justice on climate change came as residents of some island nations are already “scraping barnacles off our grandfathers’ graves” as sea-level rise accelerates, said Julian Aguon, an Indigenous human rights lawyer and writer from Guam, in a poem he recited outside the Peace Palace as the judges started their two-hour presentation.

That sense of urgency for action also came through in the 15-judge panel’s unanimous opinion. The court stated that a range of international laws charge governments with legal duties to “prevent significant harm to the environment” and “use all means at their disposal” to prevent activities within their territories from causing significant harm to Earth’s climate.

Even when governments withdraw from or haven’t ratified international climate agreements, they still have legal obligations to address climate change, the court ruled.

Among the obligations cited in the opinion are requirements for historically high polluters to cut emissions and enhance their sequestration of greenhouse gases. Governments could be violating their international legal obligations if they continue subsidizing fossil fuels and issuing new licenses for oil and gas production, the court said during an oral reading of its key findings.

If governments breach those obligations, they could be legally liable, and potentially subject to orders from the ICJ or other courts requiring them to cease climate-harming activities or make compensation payments to climate-impacted people or countries, the opinion noted.

The court also recognized climate change as a threat to human rights.

“States have obligations under international human rights law to respect and ensure the effective enjoyment of human rights by taking necessary measures to protect the climate system and other parts of the environment,” the court noted.

The court also affirmed the right to a clean, healthy and sustainable environment, as recognized by more than 150 countries. That right, the court said during its oral presentation, “is essential to the enjoyment of other human rights.”

While nonbinding, the court’s opinion interprets existing laws that are binding, and the opinion can be cited in future legal actions.

The opinion was “unexpectedly clear and strong,” said Philippe Sands, an international law expert at University College London. It marks the environment coming of age in the international legal order and its unanimity gives it extra heft, he added.

The court rejected the argument from some high-emitting nations that the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change is the primary source of international climate governance, which they argued requires little of nations.

The opinion also made clear that even when governments withdraw from or haven’t ratified international climate agreements, they can face similar obligations under other international laws.

The process leading to the advisory opinion was sparked by young students in Pacific Island countries who have watched their homes and futures being swallowed by rising seas. Spearheaded by Vanuatu, the United Nations General Assembly in 2023 formally requested the ICJ advisory opinion.

The result is a “milestone for climate action and the discourse on climate change,” said Ralph Regenvanu, Vanuatu’s minister of lands, geology and mines, energy and water resources.

A nation’s failure to control emissions from private companies, the judges agreed, can be a breach of its international legal obligations.

“For the first time in history, the ICJ has spoken directly about the biggest threat facing humanity, which is climate change,” he said. “I want to also reflect on the importance of the science. We’ve heard in this advisory opinion that climate science is the heart of climate law and the compass for climate justice.”

The opinion recognized the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change as the best available source of climate science and quoted the IPCC’s prior findings that 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming is unsafe for most nations and people.

Environmental attorney Margaretha Wewerinke-Singh was co-lead counsel with Aguon for Vanuatu in the ICJ proceedings. She said the opinion will assist countries pursuing reparations for the harms they are enduring from global warming. “The court has provided critical guidance that is very helpful to those seeking climate justice,” she said.

The court made clear that when governments breach their legal obligations to address climate change, they can cause losses and damages in other countries. And the ICJ’s opinion clarified that “when there is injury or loss and damage…when a state commits a wrongful act, it is under a legal obligation to make full reparations for the damages caused.”

That’s important, Wewerinke-Singh said, “because there was an argument that liability and compensation had been excluded or made impossible” by the Paris Agreement.

Some countries with high emissions had argued that the diffuse nature of the drivers of climate change, with myriad human activities around the world adding greenhouse gases to the atmosphere, made it impossible to assign individual liability to one country or emitter, but the court dismissed that reasoning.

“The court noted that the science has evolved so much that it is actually possible to establish these causal links,” Wewerinke-Singh said. “The court made it clear that these are not necessarily obstacles.”

The judges were not required to address “each and every obligation of the parties under climate change,” said ICJ President Yuji Iwasawa, but focused on the main obligations under the UNFCCC, the Kyoto Protocol and the Paris Agreement.

The “ultimate objective” of the agreements is to stabilize greenhouse gas concentrations at a level that “would prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system,” to make sure it’s done soon enough to allow ecosystems to adapt, and to ensure secure food production and sustainable development, Iwasawa said.

The opinion also said governments have obligations to regulate private companies and people, and failure to control emissions from private companies can be a breach of their legal obligations to address climate change.

Climate groups cheered the ruling, which has come amidst a series of rollbacks on environmental protections in a number of countries. Among them is the world’s most historically polluting nation, the United States, which is leaving the Paris Agreement and the UN climate negotiations.

“We’re a decade on now from the Paris Agreement,” said Vanuatu’s Regenvanu. “It’s very important now that we make sure our actions align with…what came out today from the courtroom. Today’s ruling, I’m sure, will also inspire new cases where victims around the world, in a legal sense, realize that they can claim their rights and seek accountability.”

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How a Rich Dad’s Obsession With the Estate Tax Nearly Tore His Family Apart

Amid the rancor and rhetoric of the fight over the “big, beautiful bill,” we heard many a story about Americans likely to suffer as a result of it—families who might lose access to elder care and food stamps and homes and health insurance and other important things. Largely missing were insiders’ views of the kinds of families who stood to gain.

To be fair, Harvey Schein—the central figure in Death & Taxes, a new documentary from his son, filmmaker Justin Schein—passed away in 2008. When the younger Schein began collecting family footage, he wasn’t so much thinking about tax policy as the unraveling of his parents’ marriage—which as it happened was tangentially related to tax policy.

Harvey, raised in Depression-era Brooklyn, had managed to hustle and scrape his way up the corporate ladder, aided by the GI Bill, to make his fortune in the entertainment industry as a top executive at companies like Columbia Records, Sony America, and Polygram. Harvey saw himself as self-made, and multiplied his wealth with investments in the stock market.

He was frugal, however, and bristled at the notion of Uncle Sam taking a bite of his nest egg. He’d worked hard and paid his taxes and the estate tax was “double-taxation,” he would say—a common if misleading sentiment, as the film reveals by exploring myriad wealth-friendly aspects of the tax code his argument fails to account for.

Justin and his brother, Mark—Harvey’s heirs—were uncomfortable with their privilege. Growing up in New York City in the 1970s, Justin took notice of the stark inequality around them. As a teenager with growing political awareness, he pushed back against his father’s rigid worldview, and they bickered. He attended Stanford, but rather than going on to Wall Street or Harvard Business School, he began making documentaries—which Harvey felt impractical: “One minute he would be very proud that he helped facilitate my career. They next minute he asked when I was going to start making, you know, real movies. That was Dad.”

But Harvey was a difficult person to live with—loving but prone to depression and angry outbursts. His tax obsession made matters worse. His wife, Joy, is a consummate New Yorker who’d been a professional dancer before marrying Harvey. But after Harvey retired, he was so dead set on avoiding taxes that he resolved they would relocate to spend more than half of each year in Florida, which, unlike New York, doesn’t have an estate tax.

Joy was not joyful there, to say the least.

Harvey Schein in his office at Sony America in 1977Schein Family Archives

The marriage suffered, and in the end Harvey would be stricken with lymphoma. “I stopped shooting when it was clear that, you know, a film needs drama and my family needed peace,” Schein told me in the interview excerpted below.

After his father died, he shelved his footage until 2017, when Donald Trump came to power and Republican lawmakers began plotting their regressive tax cuts. “I was seeing the reality that the estate tax could be abolished, and I was wanting to explore that,” he recalls. “I asked around and nobody would talk to me about their estates, and it became clear that this footage of my family could be a good foundation.”

It was indeed. The film humanizes an aspect of our unequal society seldom explored in a nonfiction visual medium—the way wealth, and our desire to hoard it and pass it to our children, can result in unhappiness even for the haves—while the policies that enable the hoarding beget further misery for the have-nots. Schein sits down with experts ranging from liberal economists, academics, and policy wonks to conservative anti-tax crusaders to explore the issues, while his family saga provides a compelling thread.

Death & Taxes is well-timed, with this month’s passage of a wildly unpopular Republican bill that rewards America’s richest at the expense of its poorest. The film is showing this week in selected theaters in New York City and Los Angeles—other big cities are expected—along with an evolving list of one-off showings in smaller cities. (I will be moderating a post-showing conversation at Berkeley’s Elmwood Theater on Tuesday, August 5, at 7 pm.)

Schein also hopes to get the film in front of wealthy audiences, where it might jumpstart some useful conversations. He expects it will be available for streaming in the fall or early winter, though no deal has yet been inked.

“PBS was interested, but then the arm that PBS wanted to show it on was eliminated,” he told me. “I’ve had festivals invite us and then retract it because they’re afraid that their funders would be offended. So it’s a little bit of a minefield, but it also means that it’s, you know, more relevant.”

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

This all began with you documenting what was happening with your family, and only later did you come to focus on your dad’s tax obsession. Was there a particular moment or event that prompted that pivot?

Well, I always I knew that I had this footage, and he and I were butting heads about politics and his insistence that taxes and his pocketbook took precedence over anything else. That started when I was a teenager. I was in like seventh grade when Reagan was elected, and at first I was like, Oh, Dad’s voting for Reagan. Maybe that’s cool. Maybe I should be behind that? And then slowly, as I got into the punk scene and became more aware, and as I was looking to push away from my dad, we would argue. We argued about apartheid and abortion—things like that. And taxes.

Harvey and Justin Schein in 1972.Schein Family Archies

As you were becoming more aware of the inequality in our society?

Yeah. In the film, there’s that moment where I took the bus up to Horace Mann every day, right through Harlem, which was a burned-out shell, and that was 10 blocks from my house. It became clear, looking out the window, that there was a lot of inequality. And nobody was talking about it, certainly not when I got off the bus at school. So that bus ride was a really important part of my education.

The other side of it was the fact that my dad was very proud that he had a rags-to riches-story where he worked hard and was the only kid in his family to go to college and he became so successful. And this was what America was supposed to be about. And it was just becoming clear that it was becoming much harder for everybody to work hard and achieve success.

In the 1980s and 1990s, estate taxes were way higher than they are now, and the exemption—the amount of money you could give your kids tax-free, was a lot lower. I see why your dad might not like that. But the top tax on large estates is now 40 percent and Congress doubled the exemption in 2017. It’s now $28 million for a couple, soon to be $30 million thanks to the “big, beautiful bill.” It’s a little nuts that a child can now inherit tax-free superwealth.

Yeah. Until 1976, the exemption was $60,000, and I think like 10 percent of Americans were subject to it. That was problematic and needed to be changed. People should be able to pass on a reasonable amount of their security and wealth for their kids. But the loopholes are causing a problem: Huge fortunes are going untaxed. There’s the stepped-up basis rule.

Right, and also these grantor trusts and other tricks that help rich sidestep the estate tax entirely. Your dad is pretty focused on this idea of double taxation. He says he worked his ass off and paid taxes, so why should he pay more? That sounds reasonable on the surface, right? So why should we have an estate tax?

For one thing, it’s this myth that these successful people do it on their own, and so they deserve to keep more of it. My dad went to college and law school on the GI Bill. When he rose to prominence in the ‘50s and ‘60s, taxes were super high and that was creating this fertile ground for American economy to prosper, with infrastructure and stability and a stable working and middle class and education—all these things contributed, I believe, to his success, and is a reason we need a reasonable estate tax.

Would it be fair to say most Americans don’t understand the nuances, and may well think they’re going to be taxed on minor transfers of wealth to their children?

Yeah. There’s definitely this myth. And I think it was John Steinbeck who said, “Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat, but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.”

When you go out on the street and ask people about the American dream—which I did—it’s universally accepted that America is a meritocracy and anybody could strike it rich. People still come to America hoping for that. But we need to understand that that is becoming harder and harder to achieve. And I don’t think that’s a partisan issue.

The film talks about how unrealized investment profits escape taxation. A guy like your dad, most of his wealth is from investment gains over the years. And the failure to tax those returns until those assets are sold is a major reason we’re seeing this massive concentration at the very top.

I mean, looking back at my dad over the years, there was this whole period where there were tax shelters—there was the Schein cattle company and the Schein oil company. And those were, I think, just on paper—I don’t think we ever had a cow or an oil well. Eventually those loopholes were closed.

So these companies were totally bogus?

I have no idea. I was a little kid then. It was legal. It was clearly a strategy that worked for a number of years and then was closed. It’s a game people who have this money love to play. And why wouldn’t you? It’s better than any casino, because you’re the one writing the rules with your other wealthy friends.

Harvey, post-retirement, and Joy. Sanibel, Florida, 1994Schein Family Archives

But you could just as easily ask, why would you? Because there’s the competing idea that, hey, I have plenty of money, so maybe I don’t need to do this?

Yeah. And the fact that my dad went from being this very Brooklyn kid—who wanted to raise his family amid this diversity—to living on an island in Florida surrounded by millionaires. You lose the sense of community and why your contribution to society is important. I think we need to change the conversation so that when Trump says it makes him smart to avoid taxes, people realize that “smart” is subjective, and it’s clearly in some ways un-American to be hoarding wealth.

Or quintessentially American!

[Laughs.] Yeah. But there have been times when there was more of a sense of community and responsibility to each other. I think that’s possible again in our country. The estate tax was created in a time very similar to this one, and was partially intended to keep America from being too aristocratic.

Things have clearly gone haywire, which is why [former Trump adviser Gary] Cohn said “only morons pay the estate tax.” That’s why the estate tax wasn’t abolished in this last budget: It doesn’t need to be because it’s been completely emasculated. It’s almost like a front.

Will you talk a bit more about the the discomfort you and your brother had knowing that you stood—or stand—to inherit a lot of money?

It is complicated, because I still hear my dad telling me that it’s not my money, and I have a responsibility for my grandchildren to pass it to them. But the reality was that, in the film, I received a letter from my dad when I was in college telling me how unhappy he was, and I saw what [his obsession with holding onto his wealth] did to my parents’ marriage.

Nobody is talking about making rich people poor. We’re talking about stopping this bizarre game we’re playing to avoid as much taxes as possible at the expense of our democracy. Now that I have kids of my own, two boys like my dad did, I see the harm being done to the country. And I feel like inheritance goes beyond stocks and bonds.

That’s a good point. I also want to bring up the part in the film where you ask your wife what she thinks about you doing this. And she basically says you should be careful, because people will pull out the world’s smallest violin in response to a rich boy’s discomfort with his privilege. People will say stuff like, You have issues with inheritance? Hey, send the money my way.

I’m already getting that.

But the discomfort is real.

I mean, if you don’t have the feelings, that’s more of a problem than having them.

One thing you didn’t touch on is this argument Republican politicians dust off every time the estate tax comes up. They claim it hurts family-owned companies and family farmers and small businesses. But that’s very misleading, isn’t it?

Yeah, it’s completely false—certainly the farm issue is complete disinformation. First, family farms are being destroyed by giant agribusiness. But also, show me one family farm that has been lost because of the estate tax. There are so many rules that protect them.

And the number of estates that exceeded the exemption was very, very small even before Trump and Congress doubled it.

Yeah, maybe that was an issue in the 1970s that needed to be corrected.

And it was.

It was overcorrected. And now we have a big problem.

We never do learn what happened after your father’s death, insofar as you and your brother presumably inheriting his wealth and how you’re dealing with that.

Part of the reason that is that my mom is still alive. Technically the estate goes to her. But there are trusts and LLCs and things that have been created. I mean, we haven’t actually had to deal with it. I have had to deal more with thinking about my own kids.

My dad started on day one with me, you know, passing money. And I have been extremely derelict in doing that because, partly because of my conflicted feelings. We have 529 [college savings accounts] for our kids and things like that. But I haven’t created any network of trusts, and I’m certainly not moving to Florida.

I don’t have to do much, because as privileged and wealthy as I am, this [$30 million] exemption pretty much does the job. I mean, I’m happy to speak out against it, and if and when that changes, I would create a situation where my kids didn’t have to worry about their health care and would have a down payment for a house. But I’m not doing what Harvey did.

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ICE Arrests an Immigrant Whom SF Judge Said May be Mentally Impaired

This story was originally published by Mission Local_, a nonprofit newsroom covering San Francisco. You can donate to them here._

Three asylum-seekers leaving routine court hearings at San Francisco immigration court Thursday morning were arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers, including one man who a judge had just said might be mentally impaired.

They’re the latest in a series of ICE actions, where over 30 immigrants have been arrested by federal agents while leaving San Francisco immigration court, at 100 Montgomery Street or 630 Sansome Street—which also has an ICE field office and is where Thursday’s arrests took place.

After a Department of Homeland Security attorney on Thursday moved to dismiss the case of the man, a strategy federal attorneys have recently been using to make asylum-seekers easier to remove, immigration judge Patrick O’Brien raised doubts over his mental ability, saying, “it’s obvious to me that there are competency issues.”

The man—who was only fluent in Mam, a Mayan language primarily spoken in Guatemala—had been muttering to himself throughout the morning, O’Brien said.

Later in court, the man was unable to tell O’Brien his address. O’Brien even asked the man at one point if he was on medication.

There appear to be competency issues beyond just a language barrier, O’Brien said. (After a few hours of requesting one, the court had been able to find a remote Mam interpreter to help with the man’s hearing.)

Prior to her arrest, one woman said she wanted a chance to explain why she came to the US and was afraid to return to her home country. “We’re not going to do that today,” said the judge.

O’Brien then proceeded to ask the Department of Homeland Security attorney for a continuance of the case, rather than a dismissal, due to the man’s possible mental incompetence. The man needed time to find a lawyer and other support, O’Brien said. “He’s clearly not understanding the questions,” O’Brien said. “Is this someone the department really wants to move to dismiss a motion to appear on?”

The DHS attorney agreed, and allowed for a continuance of the case, which essentially means the man will come back for another hearing in a few months. The DHS attorney said she could “renew” the motion to dismiss another time.

But as the manleft the hearing room, Mission Local observed about five ICE officers stopping the man and then leading him out a side door. The man’s arrest was the third over the course of three hours Thursday morning.

Earlier that morning, the DHS moved to dismiss two other cases, both of women who appeared in court alone. In both cases, the DHS attorney recited what has become a standard script in recent months: “Circumstances have changed” since the women were first told to appear in court.

When DHS moves to dismiss cases, it does so with the goal of placing asylum-seekers in a process called expedited removal, which can fast-track them out of the country without appearing before a judge again.

Judges in San Francisco rarely immediately grant those motions. On Thursday, O’Brien told the women he would give them time to respond to the motion. He would not rule on it that day.

However, as would happen to the potentially impaired man later that morning, and has happened routinely in recent weeks, both women were arrested directly following their hearings anyway.

In court, O’Brien appeared to try to prepare the women for a possible arrest. “I am pretty sure you won’t be coming back to my court,” he said. He also urged them to get a lawyer as soon as possible.

Both women were at first confused. “How am I supposed to respond to this motion if I don’t understand it?” one asked in Spanish, through an interpreter. They quickly became terrified. Both started crying as they asked O’Brien questions at the front of the courtroom.

The same woman said that she wanted a chance to explain to the judge why she came to the United States, and why she was afraid to return to her home country. “We’re not going to do that today,” O’Brien said.

The moment the women walked out of the courtroom into a hallway, Mission Local observed ICE officers arresting them. The officers ordered them to turn around and face the wall, and then handcuffed them.

Over the course of the morning, Mission Local asked two ICE offices for their badge numbers. They refused to provide them.

After arrest, asylum-seekers are normally taken two floors up from the immigration courtroom, to a temporary detention and processing center on the sixth floor of 630 Sansome St. After a couple of hours, they are generally then placed into long-term detention at one of the for-profit private prison detention centers elsewhere in California, or the country.

At most public hearings, attorneys for the Bar Association of San Francisco are present under the “Attorney of the Day Program.” They provide legal support to asylum-seekers and transmit information to the Rapid Response Network, allowing for attorneys to be dispatched to support the immigrants placed into detention. They also warn those asylum-seekers who have cases that DHS moved to dismiss that they might be detained.

But Thursday morning, no attorneys were present. As a result, none of the arrests can be independently confirmed. According to Milli Atkinson who runs the program, immigration support services “are working backwards from limited info we have.”

Moments after the women’s arrest, the courtroom returned to business as normal. Classical music played over a speaker phone while the judge sat on hold for a remote interpreter. Moments later, he heard the case of a family of four: two parents, a toddler and a baby. The four of them had been scammed by a lawyer so were still unrepresented, they said. They had driven from their new home in Oregon for the hearing.

O’Brien was apologetic for both. “I appreciate you folks making it on time, with two young children as well,” he said, then filed paperwork to move their case to a court nearer their new home.

As of noon, ICE officers were still hovering in the hallway outside the immigration court. Public court hearings had ended for the day.

Frankie Solinsky Duryea contributed to this report.

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“Walking Corpses”: Israel’s Blockade of Aid Starves Gazans, Aid Groups Say

Two months ago, a coalition of aid groups warned that Israel’s war on Gaza—and restrictions on food entering the strip—would cause mass starvation in Gaza imminently. Now, it has arrived, according to officials and aid groups.

On Wednesday, more than 100 aid groups issued a statement outlining just how dire the situation has become for Palestinians as doctors report record rates of malnutrition as a result of Israel’s aid blockade. “As the Israeli government’s siege starves the people of Gaza, aid workers are now joining the same food lines, risking being shot just to feed their families,” the letter states. “[H]umanitarian organisations are witnessing their own colleagues and partners waste away before their eyes.”

The signatories of the letter—which include Amnesty International, Doctors Without Borders, Oxfam International, and Save the Children—urged governments to “open all land crossings; restore the full flow of food, clean water, medical supplies, shelter items, and fuel through a principled, UN-led mechanism; end the siege, and agree to a ceasefire now.”

As of Tuesday, more than a dozen children and adults had died from hunger within 24 hours, according to the UN, which cited reports from local health authorities. The World Food Program (WFP) says that nearly one in three people is going days without eating in Gaza and that 90,000 women and children need urgent malnutrition treatment.

Muhammad Zakariya Ayyoub al-Matouq dropped from 9 to 6 kilograms and struggles to survive in a tent in Gaza City, where milk, food, and other basic necessities are lacking.Omar Ashtawy/APA/ZUMA

The latest developments come two months after the launch of the so-called Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, a US-backed Israeli aid distribution system that aid groups have decried as inefficient and dangerous. They say the four distribution sites, all under the control of the Israeli military, are difficult to access and do not distribute enough food. Israeli officials have claimed the system is necessary to prevent Hamas from interfering with food distribution, though officials have not provided evidence that this was ever happening in a coordinated way.

Gazans who do make it to the distribution sites often fear death. Harrowing reports have emerged of hordes of Palestinians being gunned down and killed at the sites. On Sunday, the WFP reported that a crowd of people seeking food from its convoy in northern Gaza were shot and killed by “Israeli tanks, snipers and other gunfire.” The organization’s director of emergencies called the incident “one of the greatest tragedies we’ve seen for our operations in Gaza and elsewhere while we’re trying to work.” Subsequent reports suggested that at least 80 Palestinians were killed in that incident and at least 95 people injured, and that 40 others were killed in other attacks near aid points in Rafah and Khan Younis over the weekend.

Injured people and bodies were brought to Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City after Israeli forces opened fire on civilians who were waiting for humanitarian aid in north Gaza on Sunday.Omar Ashtawy/APA/ZUMA

This week, the Untied Nations reported that more than 1,000 Palestinians have been killed by the Israeli military since the new aid system debuted, nearly 800 of whom were killed near the US-backed aid sites, and the rest of whom were killed near UN and other humanitarian groups’ aid convoys.

Spokespeople for the Israeli Defense Forces did not immediately respond to questions Thursday from Mother Jones. President Donald Trump, who previously floated taking over Gaza and driving Palestinians off the land to an unspecified “permanent place,” has so far been silent on the latest details about the starvation in Gaza; his most recent comments appear to be from May, when he acknowledged “a lot of people are starving.” Spokespeople for the White House did not immediately respond to questions from Mother Jones on Thursday.

The US has funded Israel’s war broadly. A report from Brown University, published last fall, states that the US government had spent at least $18 billion on Israel’s military operations in Gaza since the war began with Hamas’ attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, which killed approximately 1,200 people and led to more than 250 being taken as hostages, 50 of whom reportedly remain in captivity.

Abdul Jawad Al-Ghalban, 14, died from severe malnutrition at Nasser Medical Hospital in Khan Younis. He is pictured on Tuesday.Moaz Abu Taha/APA/ZUMA

Aid groups say that they have supplies to support those in need, but that Israeli forces are preventing them from entering Gaza. Philippe Lazzarini, the commissioner-general of the UN Agency for Palestinian Refugees, said in a post on X on Thursday that the UN agency has “equivalent of 6,000 loaded trucks of food & medical supplies in Jordan and Egypt,” and called for “unrestricted & uninterrupted humanitarian assistance.” He quoted a colleague in Gaza who he said told him, “People in Gaza are neither dead nor alive, they are walking corpses.”

“When child malnutrition surges, coping mechanisms fail, access to food & care disappears, famine silently begins to unfold,” he wrote. “Most children our teams are seeing are emaciated, weak & at high risk of dying if they don’t get the treatment they urgently need.”

“Parents are too hungry to care for their children,” Lazzarini continued. “Those who reach UNRWA clinics don’t have the energy, food, or means to follow medical advice. Families are no longer coping, they are breaking down, unable to survive. Their existence is threatened.”

Lazzarini added that the agency’s health workers “are surviving on one small meal a day, often just lentils, if at all,” and “increasingly fainting from hunger while at work.”

“When caretakers cannot find enough to eat,” he added, “the entire humanitarian system is collapsing.”

A charity organization distributes hot meals to Palestinians in Gaza City on Thursday.Omar Ashtawy/APA/ZUMA

News organizations have also warned that the few journalists left in Gaza are also facing starvation. On Thursday, Agence France-Presse (AFP), the Associated Press, BBC News, and Reuters issued a joint statement saying they are “desperately concerned for our journalists in Gaza, who are increasingly unable to feed themselves and their families.” Earlier this week, a group of AFP journalists issued a statement outlining the dire conditions facing the ten who remain in Gaza: “We watch their situation worsen. They are young and losing strength. Most no longer have physical capacity to travel the enclave and do their jobs,” says the statement, translated from its original French.

The statement quotes a post the group’s photographer, Bashar, 30, put on Facebook over the weekend: “I no longer have the strength to work in media. My body is weak and I cannot work.” His brother died of hunger over the weekend, the statement says.

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Employees Kept in the Dark as EPA Dismantles Scientific Research Office

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

Employees of the crucial scientific research arm of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) have been left with more questions than answers as the agency moves to officially wind down the office following months of back-and-forth.

On Friday evening, the EPA issued a press release announcing a reduction in force at the Office of Research and Development, citing the move as part of a larger effort to save a purported $749 million. On Monday, some employees at ORD, the largest office in the agency, began receiving emails saying that they’d been assigned new positions within the EPA.

“Please note, this is not an offer, but a notice of reassignment,” says a letter sent to an employee and viewed by WIRED. The employee had previously applied to positions within the agency, as ORD employees were instructed to do in May. “There is no action you need to take to accept the reassignment, and there is no option to decline.”

On a call with ORD administrators and staff held Monday afternoon, audio of which was obtained by WIRED, leadership—including ORD acting administrator Maureen Gwinn—was unable to answer basic questions from employees, including a timeline for when the agency planned to permanently end ORD, how many employees would be transferred to other offices, and how many would lose their jobs.

Employees at ORD who spoke with WIRED say that Friday’s public-facing email was the first concrete news they had heard about their organization’s future. One worker told WIRED that employees often learned more from news outlets, including WIRED, “than we do from our management.”

“We wish we had more information for you,” Gwinn told staff on the call. “I’ll speak for myself, I wish we weren’t at this point today.”

An EPA spokesperson, who declined to give their name, wrote in response to a series of questions from WIRED that the agency is currently offering its third voluntary resignation period, known as a DRP, which ends on July 25. “The [reduction in force] process entails a number of specific procedures in accordance with OPM regulations,” they said. “The next step in this process is to issue intent to RIF notices to individual employees.”

That number “won’t be clear,” they said, until after the DRP process was over.

“If you’re going to end up rolling back air quality regulations…you’re going to see excess cases of death and illness.”

“This is not an elimination of science and research,” the spokesperson wrote. “We are confident EPA has the resources needed to accomplish the agency’s core mission of protecting human health and the environment, fulfill all statutory obligations, and make the best-informed decisions based on the gold standard of science.”

At the start of the year, ORD was composed of between 1,000 and 2,000 scientists at labs spread across the country as well as in Washington, DC. The branch’s work provides much of the science that underpins the policy formed in the agency, from research on chemicals’ impacts on human health and the environment to air quality and climate change to planning for emergencies and responding to contamination in air, soil, and water. The office contains many groups and initiatives that are crucial to protecting the environment and human health, including a team that studies human health risks from chemicals.

Several EPA scientists stressed to WIRED that ORD’s current structure, which allows research to happen independent of the policy-making that occurs in other parts of the agency, is crucial to producing quality work. One told WIRED that they worked in a scientific role in an EPA policy office under the first Trump administration. There, they felt that their job was to “try and mine the science to support a policy decision that had already been made.” The structure at ORD, they said, provides a layer of insulation between decisionmakers and the scientific process.

ORD was heavily singled out in Project 2025’s Mandate for Leadership document, the policy blueprint that has closely anticipated the Trump administration’s moves in office. It described the branch as “precautionary, bloated, unaccountable, closed, outcome-driven, hostile to public and legislative input, and inclined to pursue political rather than purely scientific goals.”

The plan did not, however, propose doing away with the organization. But in March, documents presented to the White House by agency leadership proposed dissolving ORD, resulting in backlash from Democrats in Congress.

In early May, the EPA announced it would be reorganizing its structure, which administrator Lee Zeldin wrote in a Newsweek op-ed would “improve” the agency by “integrating scientific staff directly into our program offices.” The agency said that it would create a new Office of Applied Science and Environmental Solutions, which would sit under the Office of the Administrator.

Putting much of ORD’s scientific work in policy offices, the scientist who previously worked in a policy office told WIRED, means that “we’re going to end up seeing science that has been unduly influenced by policy interests. I don’t think that’s going to result in policy decisions that are empirically supportable.”

Following May’s reorganization announcement, ORD employees were encouraged to apply for jobs within other parts of the agency. Multiple workers who spoke with WIRED say the job postings for these new positions were bare-bones, with little description of what the work would actually entail. One job posting seen by WIRED labels the role simply as “Interdisciplinary Scientific & Engineering Positions,” with no information about the topic area, team, or scientific expertise required.

The EPA’s reorganization efforts were temporarily stalled by lawsuits. Earlier this month, the Supreme Court paused a preliminary injunction blocking further mass reductions in force at 17 federal agencies, including the EPA.

There was one bright spot on Monday’s call: ORD leadership told employees that all of the ORD-affiliated labs would be kept open, a piece of news that ran contrary to some previous reports. Still, workers say that it’s becoming increasingly difficult to do science at the EPA. More than 325 ORD workers—around a fifth of ORD’s ranks—had taken voluntary retirements since the start of the year, according to the EPA spokesperson.

A scientist told WIRED that while they usually would have had a small team helping with their field work, they’ve been left to handle everything alone, including “washing dishes and labeling bottles.” Cumbersome new financial approval processes, they said, have also resulted in chemicals that they ordered being delayed for months and expensive equipment sitting without any repairs.

Since taking office, Zeldin has made it clear that he intends to relax environmental regulations, especially those affecting business. Last week, he authored an op-ed in Fox News advertising how the agency would essentially erase the Clean Air Act permitting process for power plants and data centers in order to “make America the AI capital of the world.” ORD scientists fear that the dissolution of their office will only make this pro-business mission easier.

“If you’re going to end up rolling back air quality regulations—and we know, conclusively at this point, that ozone pollution is causing premature mortality and chronic effects—if you roll back the rules, you’re going to see excess cases of death and illness,” one scientist tells WIRED. “My guess is that [EPA leadership] don’t want to know the answer to the question of how bad it is going to be.”

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He’s Suing His Girlfriend’s Doctor for Prescribing Abortion Pills. Could This Gut Access Everywhere?

In a case squarely aimed at breathing new life into the federal Comstock Act—and at thwarting the efforts of abortion-friendly states to protect providers and patients—a Texas man has sued a California doctor for allegedly mailing abortion pills to his girlfriend and is asking the court to prevent the woman, who is currently pregnant, from having another abortion.

In a wrongful death lawsuit filed Sunday, Texas residentJerry Rodriguez is accusing California-based Dr. Rémy Coeytaux of violating numerous Texas abortion laws, as well as the Comstock Act—an 1873 anti-obscenity law that is still on the books**—**by providing the abortion pills that were used to terminate two of his girlfriend’s previous pregnancies.

The lawsuit was filed in federal court in Galveston, Texas, by former Texas Solicitor General Jonathan Mitchell, the architect of some of the most radical and punitive abortion laws in the country. Mitchell is a leading proponent of using so-called “zombie” laws—pre-Roe v. Wade abortion bans that were unenforceable for almost half a century—to outlaw abortion post-Dobbs. The most potentially sweeping of these zombie laws is the Comstock Act, the long-defunct sexual purity law that prohibits the mailing or receiving of anything used to perform or obtain an abortion.Mitchell and his allies argue that Comstock is still the law of the land—and, if fully implemented, would amount to a de facto national abortion ban. But first, he has to get the courts to go along.

Now, he’s asking a federal judge in the Southern District of Texas to take the Comstock baitby issuing an injunction that stops Coeytaux from“distributing abortion-inducing drugs in violation of state or federal law.”

The case is the first known test of whether abortion opponents can use federal court lawsuits to circumvent state shield laws aimed at protecting providers—a major escalation of attacks on abortion-friendly states. “The whole game for Jonathan Mitchell is to get into federal court,” says Mary Ziegler, an abortion historian and law professor at the University of California-Davis, “both because he wants to shut down doctors in shield-law states, like everyone in the anti-abortion movement, and because he wants a federal court to weigh in on the Comstock Act.”

“The whole game for Jonathan Mitchell is to get into federal court, both because he wants to shut down doctors in shield-law states, like everyone in the anti-abortion movement, and because he wants a federal court to weigh in on the Comstock Act.”

The federal court could choose to evade the Comstock claim and base its rulings solely on Texas’s wrongful death and abortion laws. “What Mitchell would like, if he won, would be a court to say, yeah, this guy is violating [both] Texas law and the Comstock Act,” Ziegler says. Mitchell’s ultimate goal, she adds, is “to somehow get that question appealed all the way up” to the US Supreme Court, where ultra-conservative justices have shown signs of being receptive to the Comstock claims.

In another alarming twist, Mitchell is seeking to certify the case as a class action on behalf of “all current and future fathers of unborn children in the United States.” That language “seeks to confer rights on the unborn,” says Rachel Rebouché, dean at Temple University’s law school, “embedding fetal personhood in arguments around abortion pills as a national matter, and not just in states with personhood laws.”

Mother Jones reached out to Mitchell for comment, but he did not respond.

The facts of the case are exceptionally messy. According to the complaint, Rodriguez began dating his girlfriend last summer, while she was legally separated but still married to her estranged husband, Adam Garza of Galveston County. When she became pregnant in July 2024, the suit alleges, Garza was “displeased” and “ordered abortion-inducing drugs online from Coeytaux,” paying $150 via Venmo. The woman took the pills and terminated the pregnancy in September.

She became pregnant again a few weeks later, the lawsuit says, and Rodriguez claims she saidshe intended to keep the pregnancy. But, according to the complaint, Garza again obtained abortion pills from Coeytaux and terminated the pregnancy this past January.

She became pregnant a third time in May, Rodriguez says. In his filing, he tells the court, “There is a substantial risk that Adam Garza will obtain abortion pills illegally from Coeytaux and provide those” to her.

Coeytaux is a Stanford-trained licensed physician and a former medical school faculty member at Wake Forest University, Duke University, and the University of North Carolina. In November 2024, NBC News cited him as a representative of A Safe Choice, a network of doctors prescribing abortion pills by mail, mostly to patients in states with abortion restrictions. He recently acquired an office in Sonoma County, California. His website advertises $150 15-minute consultations.

Coeytaux is also the brother of Francine Coeytaux, an abortion rights activist and public health expert who for years has played a leading role promoting access to family-planning medications. At the Population Council in the 1980s and ’90s, Francine worked on the public introduction of the abortion medication mifepristone in France and helped bring the morning-after pill, Plan B, to market in the United States. Years later, in 2015, with other reproductive health experts and activists, she co-founded Plan C, a campaign to promote the provision of abortion pills by mail. When the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, Plan C’s online information hub about medication abortion—with listings of clinics and services willing to mail abortion pills into all 50 states—became a popular resource for patients in states with abortion bans.

A man answering the phone at the number listed on Rémy Coeytaux’s website told Mother Jones, “No comment is being made at this time. I appreciate your interest, and I hope you can do a good job with the story, but there is no comment.” Francine Coeytaux did not return a request for comment.

Elisa Wells, another cofounder of Plan C, emphasizes that clinicians who provide abortion by telehealth are operating legally under the laws of their states. “Providers that are doing this are serving a real need,” she says. “The fact that there are these efforts to criminalize them or bring civil suits against them is outrageous.”

Now, Rémy Coeytaux is in the crosshairs of Mitchell, who—among other things—pioneered the “bounty hunter” laws giving individuals the right to sue anyone who “aids or abets” an abortion, with potential damages of $10,000 per violation. This has made it significantly harder for abortion-rights advocates to challenge some extreme restrictions.

Recently, Mitchell has been helping men use the Texas bounty hunter law to retaliate against people who helped the men’s partners obtain abortion care. As Abortion Every Day’s Jessica Valenti has reported:

He’s represented at least three other men who’ve sued over women’s abortions—including Marcus Silva, who sued his ex-wife’s friends for helping her get abortion pills. That case was eventually dropped, but not before it came out that Silva tried to use the lawsuit to blackmail his ex into having sex with him.

Since then, Mitchell and other anti-abortion activists have been cozying up to men’s rights groups, “abortion recovery” ministries, and crisis pregnancy centers—on the lookout for more angry men eager to sue their partners or exes for ending a pregnancy.

Mitchell has also been pushing legislation and filing court cases aimed atreviving the Comstock Act, named for the 19th-century anti-vice crusader who championed it. The law made it a federal crime to send or receive any “obscene, lewd, or lascivious” writings, or “any article or thing designed or intended for the prevention of conception or procuring an abortion.” Over the years, courts greatly narrowed the statute’s scope, and in 1971, Congress removed most of its restrictions on contraceptives. But Congress never formally repealed the statute’s abortion-related provisions, even after the Roe decision in 1973 rendered them moot.

President Donald Trump has so far resisted pressure from anti-abortion opponents to use the Comstock Act to institute a federal ban, even though the idea is embraced by the Heritage Foundation’s playbook for the second Trump administration, Project 2025.

Meanwhile, Texas and other conservative states have passed increasingly draconian laws targeting providers of mail-order abortion medication. Abortion-friendly states have sought to defend against such aggressive tactics by passing shield laws designed to protect providers from out-of-state investigations and prosecutions, professional discipline, and civil liability. Some 22 states and the District of Columbia have passed some sort of shield statute, with eight states, including California, adopting the most robust protections. Thanks to these laws, as well as the availability of abortion pills and telemedicine, the number of abortions has risen since Dobbs.

So far, shield laws have helped protect at least one doctor.Last December, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton sued a New York-based telehealth provider, Margaret Carpenter, in Texas state court and secured a $113,000 judgment against her. But a county clerk in New York has repeatedly rejected Paxton’s attempts to collect the fine, citing the state’s shield law. In January, prosecutors in Louisiana indicted Carpenter for allegedly providing abortion pills to a teenager. But, again citing the shield law, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul has refused to extradite her.

“We’ve seen this dynamic before, with activists finding ways to bypass politicians because their incentives don’t line up.”

Those were both state court cases. Until the Rodriguez case, shield laws have been untested in the federal courts, where the state claims could face major resistance.

Ziegler says it’s unclear why Paxton and Louisiana officials haven’t taken the shield law issue to federal court already, but the new case shows that Mitchell—who has a history as an anti-abortion provocateur—is once again unwilling to wait. “We’ve seen this dynamic before,” Ziegler says, “with activists finding ways to bypass politicians because their incentives don’t line up.”

The federal judges in Texas are famously conservative and have proven extremely sympathetic to anti-abortion efforts to curtail access to abortion pills and other reproductive health care. As of Tuesday evening, the Rodriguez case was assigned to Magistrate Judge Andrew M. Edison, who was appointed in 2018.

With Rodriguez’s girlfriend already two months pregnant, Rodriguez claims that he fearsthat Garza “will again pressure [her] to kill his unborn child and obtain abortion pills from Coeytaux to commit the murder.”

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As Palantir Cashes In on Trump 2.0, Peter Thiel Is Bankrolling Republicans Again

In 2023, Peter Thiel, the billionaire tech titan and investor, issued a proclamation: He would not make political donations in 2024 to any candidate, including Donald Trump, whom he had backed in 2016.

Now, after sitting out the 2024 election cycle, Thiel is back in the game. He has quietly donated more than $850,000 this year to finance Republican incumbents attempting to retain their party’s control of the House in next year’s midterm elections.

That renewed largesse comes as the stock price of Palantir, the company Thiel founded and still owns much of, soars, with the firm raking in profits from contracts awarded by the Trump administration.

Palantir, which describes itself as a software company that helps clients manage data, has played a supporting role in the administration’s mass deportation efforts. It also is helping implement Trump’s call to create a massive, searchable federal database, reportedly using information from Americans’ tax returns.

Critics, including congressional Democrats, say Thiel’s company may be helping the administration to violate privacy laws and to implement an unprecedented US surveillance state. Republican lawmakers appear uninterested in scrutinizing the company’s work.

Asked about its federal contracting, a Palantir spokesperson replied in an email, “We are delighted to support the US government as our growth reflects growing government AI adoption. Meanwhile, our growth in the private sector still significantly outpaces our government growth (45% vs. 71%).”

A spokesperson for Thiel did not respond to multiple inquiries from Mother Jones seeking comment about his political donations.

Thiel was once a steady source of campaign funds for Republicans, including Sens. Orrin Hatach and Ted Cruz, as well as for libertarian groups and the anti-tax Club for Growth. In 2016, he contributed $1.25 million to Trump’s campaign, earning himself a speaking slot at the Republican convention. And in 2022, he poured $15 million into the Senate campaigns of JD Vance of Ohio and Blake Masters of Arizona. Thiel’s support for Vance, who once worked for Thiel’s venture capital firm, was crucial for launching the vice president’s political career.

Trump’s first term, however, left Thiel disappointed. Thiel, who presents himself as a political theorist, was yearning for a slashing of regulations and demolition of the so-called administrative state. That, he hoped, would foment disruption conducive to the development of a futuristic libertarian techno-state that could deliver flying cars, new forms of food production, and scientific efforts to achieve something approaching immortality. That’s not what happened. (In 2009, he had written, “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.”)

When Trump campaigned for reelection in 2020, Thiel sat it out. There was no public endorsement from the billionaire, and no contributions, though he did support congressional Republicans that year and in the 2022 midterms. But apart from his funding of Masters and Vance, the donations were relatively modest.

This year, Thiel has returned aggressively, with a focus on helping Republicans preserve their majority in the House. In February, he gave $852,200 to House Speaker Mike Johnson’s political action committee, Grow the Majority. The PAC then distributed those funds to the House GOP campaign arm and to Republicans in competitive districts around the country. Recipients included Reps. Brian Fitzpatrick in Pennsylvania, Don Bacon in Nebraska, Young Kim in California, and Derek Van Orden in Wisconsin.

Thiel’s support this early in the 2026 midterm cycle may augur more to come for Republican lawmakers.

To hear Thiel tell it, his political aims are high-minded—if kind of out there. During a recent interview with New York Times columnist Ross Douthat, he groused that current politics have led to a societal stagnation that impedes technological progress. He decried government regulation. He warned against the rise of a “one-world totalitarian state” that would exploit popular concerns over climate change and nuclear war and choke the development of AI and other technologies. He mused about the threat posed by the coming of a woke “Antichrist”—possibly in the form of environmental activist Greta Thurnberg.

He did not enthuse about Trump. Rather, he described the president like an investment that hadn’t panned out. Thiel said he supported Trump in 2016 hoping the populist candidate would cause a disruption that would bring about technological dynamism. This turned out to be “a preposterous fantasy,” he told Douthat. But he remarked that the populism of Trump 2.0 is “still by far the best option we have.”

Asked whether he had stopped funding politicians, Thiel did not mention his recent support of Republicans. Instead, he replied, “I am schizophrenic on this stuff. I think it’s incredibly important and it’s incredibly toxic.” He indicated that he did not enjoy the criticism he has received after backing conservative candidates.

Thiel chided Elon Musk for having been sucked into political brawls over such common issues as the federal budget. He recounted to Douthat a conversation he had with last year with Mus: “I said: ‘If Trump doesn’t win, I want to just leave the country.’ And then Elon said: ‘There’s nowhere to go.’”

Musk, as Thiel saw it, had lost faith in his hope that populating Mars would save humanity: “In 2024 Elon came to believe that if you went to Mars, the socialist US government, the woke AI would follow you to Mars.”

Here on Earth, Thiel also has more pedestrian interests. In April, Palantir inked a contract to assist ongoing efforts by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement to remove undocumented immigrants by building a platform to track migrants’ movements in real time. That deal helped the company pull in more than $113 million, as of early May, as part of its new and previous federal contracts, according to the New York Times. That figure does not include other contracts Palantir has obtained from the Trump administration including a $795 million deal—which could go as high as $1.3 billion—to provide AI-powered software to the Department of Defense.

These deals have helped Palantir’s stock rise from around $40 a share in November to more than $150 a share on Wednesday.

That’s good news for White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, the influencial architect of Trump’s fanatical immigration policies. He owns $100,000-$250,000 worth of Palantir stock, according to his financial disclosure form, a holding that creates a colossal potential conflict of interest, the Project on Government Oversight reported last month.

If the Democrats manage to recapture either congressional chamber in 2026, they will likely make Washington less hospitable for Palantir. Last month, Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), Rep. Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), and eight other Democrats sent a letter peppering the company with questions about its “enabling and profiting from serious violations of Federal law by helping the Trump Administration compile a database including Americans’ taxpayer data.”

Palantir has issued statements disputing the lawmakers’ letter and the New York Times reporting on its federal contracts. The company contends that its software is supporting US soliders and helping hospitals save lives. “We are committed to America, regardless of which party the American people have voted into office,” the firm said.

But the Democrats’ plans are clear. These legislators asked Palantir to preserve records related to its work for the Trump administration for “future Congressional oversight.”

“Congress will fully investigate and hold accountable Trump Administration officials that violate Americans’ rights, as well as contractors like Palantir that profit from and enable those abuses,” they wrote.

Thiel talks about encouraging political disruption that unleashes AI and allows tech pioneers to run unfettered. But as he bankrolls Republican lawmakers, keeping the Democrats from gaining subpoena power may also be on his mind.

Russ Choma contributed to this report.

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Did That Weird Birthday Letter to Jeffrey Epstein Sound Like the Work of Donald Trump?

This story was originally published by Popular Information, a substack publication to which you can subscribe here.

This past Thursday, the Wall Street Journal published a bombshell report about President Trump’s relationship with convicted child sex abuser Jeffrey Epstein. According to the Journal, the materials collected as part of the Department of Justice’s investigation into Epstein included a 2003 birthday message from Trump to Epstein.

Trump’s alleged message consists of “several lines of typewritten text framed by the outline of a naked woman, which appears to be hand-drawn with a heavy marker.” The drawing, which the Journal describes as “bawdy,” includes “[a] pair of small arcs denotes the woman’s breasts, and the future president’s signature is a squiggly “Donald” below her waist, mimicking pubic hair.” Inside the figure of the woman was the following text:

Voice Over: There must be more to life than having everything

Donald: Yes, there is, but I won’t tell you what it is.

Jeffrey: Nor will I, since I also know what it is.

Donald: We have certain things in common, Jeffrey.

Jeffrey: Yes, we do, come to think of it.

Donald: Enigmas never age, have you noticed that?

Jeffrey: As a matter of fact, it was clear to me the last time I saw you.

Donald: A pal is a wonderful thing. Happy Birthday — and may every day be another wonderful secret.

Trump told the Journal that the letter is “fake” and quickly sued the paper, its owner Rupert Murdoch, and the two reporters who wrote the story for $10 billion. On Truth Social, Trump insisted that the letter is “not the way I talk.”

Meanwhile, numerous allies of the president have echoed this claim, arguing that the letter is inauthentic because its language does not sound like Trump.

“Does anyone honestly believe this sounds like Donald Trump?” Vice President JD Vance asked rhetorically on X. White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said the letter published by the Journal is “not at all how he speaks or writes.” Trump’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., said it is obvious the letter is inauthentic because it doesn’t match his father’s “very specific way of speaking.”

To evaluate these claims, Popular Information examined the most distinctive aspects of the letter and assessed whether they are consistent with Trump’s history.

“Enigma“

The most distinctive single word in the letter is “enigma.” Is it plausible that Trump, known for using simple language, would use that word?

Trump’s defenders do not believe so. “I find it to be an enigma that Donald Trump would use the word enigma,” billionaire Bill Ackman, a prominent Trump supporter, wrote on X.

Sean Davis, the CEO of the right-wing publication The Federalist, posted that he asked Grok, the chatbot created by xAI, to “search every record of Trump speaking or writing” for the word “enigma” and determined “there is no record of him ever saying or speaking the word.” (Trump Jr. reposted Davis’ claim.)

Davis’ confident assertion is false and demonstrates the hazards of relying exclusively on AI tools for research. In 2015, Trump used the word “enigma” twice to describe Ben Carson, one of his Republican primary opponents. “Now, Carson’s an enigma to me,” Trump said. “Carson’s an enigma.”

Trump also used the word “enigma” twice in his 2004 book, Trump: How to Get Rich. “Dan Rather is an enigma to me,” Trump wrote on page 166. He uses enigma again on page 55, writing that entrepreneurial skills are “one of those grey areas that remain an enigma even to those with finely-honed business instincts.”

Trump also used the term in his 1990 book, Trump: Surviving at the Top. “Any discussion of Mike’s affairs eventually leads to the subject of Don King,” Trump wrote about Mike Tyson on page 200. “Don, like Mike, is something of an enigma.”

So, while enigma is not a commonly used word, it is one that Trump has deployed in a variety of contexts for many years.

“Pal“

The word “pal,” which appears at the end of the letter to Epstein, is somewhat old-fashioned and less commonly used than the more straightforward term “friend.” Trump, however, has used “pal” over the years to describe his close associates.

In a 2018 roundtable on tax reform, Trump talked about his friendship with Steve Witkoff, who is currently Trump’s special envoy to the Middle East. “He’s become a very wealthy, successful man,” Trump said. “And he’s my pal.”

During a 2011 speech to the Nevada Republican Party, Trump referred to developer Phil Ruffin as “my pal.”

Maurice Sendak

Perhaps the most distinctive characteristic of the letter is the opening line: “There must be more to life than having everything.” This is a direct quote from Higglety Pigglety Pop!, a classic 1967 book by children’s author Maurice Sendak. It comes off like an inside joke between the two men.

Sendak and Trump have a history. In 1993, Sendak published We Are All in the Dumps with Jack and Guy. The book, which stirred controversy due to its exploration of weighty topics such as the AIDS crisis, garnered extensive coverage in the national media, including the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and the Palm Beach Post—the local paper for Mar-a-Lago.

It also featured a direct attack on Trump, with one illustration featuring homeless children against the backdrop of Trump Tower. The children exclaim, “Tricked. Trumped. Dumped!”

Maurice Sendak

A September 5, 1993, story in the New York Times highlights Sendak’s criticism of Trump. The reporter, Degen Pener, said he reached out to Trump for comment. (Trump did not respond.)

Trump is a voracious consumer of media, especially when it involves him, so he almost certainly would have read the coverage of Sendak’s book. The fact that the New York Times, a paper Trump follows closely, reached out to him increases those odds further.

The timing of the incident, 1993, coincides with a period during which Epstein and Trump were known to socialize together regularly.

Third person

Another distinctive feature of the letter is that it creates a fake dialogue between Trump and Epstein, in which Trump refers to himself in the third person.

Trump frequently refers to himself in the third person. A Washington Post analysis of this habit, published in 2019, refers to Trump as the “third-person-in-chief.”

Trump also enjoys recounting conversations between himself and another person. Many of these tales are apocryphal. For example, during a June 2020 rally, this is how Trump relayed a conversation between himself and First Lady Melania Trump after Trump was filmed having difficulty drinking from a glass of water:

I call my wife, I said, “How good was that speech? I thought it was a…” But I call my wife and I said, “How good was it, darling?”

She said, “You’re trending number one.”

I said to our great first lady, I said, “Let me ask you a question. Was it that good, the speech, that I’m trending number one? Because I felt it was really good.'”

“No no, they don’t even mention the speech. They mention the fact that you may have Parkinson’s disease.”

So, so then my wife said, “Well, it wasn’t only the ramp. Did you have water?”

I said, “Yeah. I was speakin’ for a long time. I didn’t wanna drink it, but I wanted to wet my lips a little bit, you know?” … So what happens is I said, “What does it have to do with water?”

They said, “You couldn’t lift your hand up to your mouth with water?”

I said, ‘I just saluted 600 times like this, and this was before I saluted, so what’s the problem?

The same speech involved Trump narrating extended conversations between himself and the CEO of Boeing, as well as with an unnamed general. In other words, the form of the letter is consistent with one of Trump’s favorite rhetorical devices.

The “picture”

Trump also claimed the letter was fake because it featured a picture drawn by Trump, and “I don’t draw pictures.”

In fact, Trump has drawn many pictures, frequently using a “heavy marker,” just as the Journal described the Epstein letter. The pictures were sometimes auctioned for charity.

Juliene’s Auctions

He also discusses his artistic talents (and uses the third person) in his 2008 book, Trump Never Give Up: How I Turned My Biggest Challenges Into Success.

“It takes me a few minutes to draw something, in my case, it’s usually a building or a cityscape of skyscrapers, and then sign my name, but it raises thousands of dollars to help the hungry in New York through the Capuchin Food Pantries Ministry,” Trump wrote.

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Ibram X. Kendi vs. America’s “Antiracism Backlash”

Just a few years ago, historian and activist Dr. Ibram X. Kendi seemed to be everywhere. At the height of the Black Lives Matter movement, Kendi became one of the leading voices on racism in America—and particularly what he described as antiracism. In 2019, his book How to Be an Antiracist became a best-seller. And later, just months after the death of George Floyd—a Black man killed by a white police officer in Minneapolis—Kendi founded The Center for Antiracist Research at Boston University, receiving $55 million in funding.

But over the last few years, as a backlash grew against the BLM movement, Kendi also came under attack. His ideas urging people to be actively antiracist were often the target of conservative critics fighting against DEI policies and the teaching of critical race theory. Kendi was also accused of mismanaging the antiracism center at BU, which laid off much of its staff before closing last month. (BU cleared Kendi of financial mismanagement.) Later this fall, Kendi will head up another academic project, this time at Howard University’s Institute for Advanced Study, which will focus on racism and the global African diaspora.

As the Trump administration eliminates DEI initiatives and erases parts of Black history throughout the federal government, Kendi places this moment alongside two others in American history: the end of Reconstruction in the 1870s and the racial violence that marked the segregation era during the 1920s. “These are moments in which you had very powerful racist forces who were seeking to eliminate policies and practices and ideas that had been created to bring about more democracy and equity and equality,” Kendi says. “We’re literally right now in a very pitched battle for the future of justice in the United States and frankly around the world.”

On this week’s More To The Story, Kendi discusses this historical moment with host Al Letson, responds to the criticism he faced at Boston University, and talks about Malcolm Lives!, his new book for young readers about Malcolm X.

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: So I was first introduced to your work when I read your 2019 book, How to Be an Antiracist. Now, I had never heard that term antiracist before. It was a new way of looking at how to address racism. For those who haven’t had a chance to read it, what does it mean to be an antiracist?

Dr. Ibram X. Kendi: Well, the book and what I try to show through my research is that the true opposite of racist is not not racist, it is antiracist. That historically, and even in our moment, typically people who self-identify as not racist, they do so largely after they just did or said something that was racist. It’s also the case that the term not racist is a term that’s widely used without a definition. So I actually have yet to see somebody actually define clearly what it means to be not racist. And then thirdly, the reason why antiracist is the true opposite of racist is because most people understand, for instance, that a racist idea is a notion that suggests racial hierarchy, that a particular racial group is superior to another racial group, or inferior. What’s the opposite of hierarchy? Equality. There’s a true opposite. And antiracist ideas suggest racial equality, that no racial group is superior or inferior.

If a racist policy is yielding racial inequity between groups, what’s the opposite of that? A policy that yields racial equity. It’s a clear opposite. And so I’ve tried to show that we should be supporting antiracist policies that lead to racial equity. We should be expressing ideas, antiracist ideas about racial equality, and ultimately we should be striving to be antiracist, which is to say we should be actively seeking to confront the structure of racism, while recognizing that if we do nothing in the face of the status quo of racial inequity, then that racial inequity and injustice will persist. And those who are seeking to conserve that status quo want the rest of us to do nothing. That’s literally the goal of racist ideas, to convince us that there’s no problem other than, let’s say, Black people. And so that’s why being antiracist is an action. It’s an active term, it’s an active practice, while being racist could be active or even passive. You just do nothing and allow racism to persist.

I guess the thing that I’m thinking about a lot is, when you talk about race in America, what triggers a lot of white people, at least the white people that I’ve spoken to specifically on this topic, is that they feel like they have worked extremely hard for the things that they have. And when you tell them that there’s another group of people who have had it harder, and some of them have come from very hard circumstances. I remember someone talking years ago about, try explaining white privilege to people who are living in Appalachia with nothing. And so I’m wondering, how do we bridge that gap?

One of the ways in which those of us who study racism, one of the findings and one of the things we’ve tried to show in recent years, and I certainly showed this in a chapter called “White” in my book, How to Be an Antiracist, Heather McGee has written about this in a book called The Sum of Us. There’s another book called Dying of Whiteness by Jonathan Metzl. And the throughline between these three books is really showing through evidence the ways which it is the case that white people benefit more, let’s say, than peoples of color from racist policies and practices. But what we’ve also shown is that they, white people, would actually benefit even more from antiracist policies and practices.

In other words, white people are less likely to be disenfranchised because of the series of voter suppression policies that have been instituted in this country in the last few years, frankly since the undermining of the Voting Rights Act in 2013. It’s less likely for them to struggle to vote. But that doesn’t mean that there are not white people that are still struggling to vote, particularly white people who are students, particularly white people who are poor, particularly white people who are senior citizens. And so a truly equitable and antiracist electoral policy that would make it easy for all of us to vote would actually make it easier for more white people to vote, just as it would make it easier for people of color to vote.
So the current system benefits white people more than it does people of color, but an actual truly equitable policy would benefit us all. So I think one of the things we’re trying, let’s say, to show white people is that Donald Trump is not an aberration. Which is to say, a person who is trying to say to white people, “I am your defender” when his actual policies are harming the majority of white people and people of color, is not an aberration. That’s racism in and of itself.

Yeah. So I want to move on to your work and where it’s been and where it’s going. And you founded the Center for Antiracist Research at Boston University, and you just closed up shop there. So there have been reports that there were some mismanagement, and the university said that the investigation found no evidence of wrongdoing. Can you walk us through what happened? Because it was a really big deal when you opened up the center.

Well, what happened is we created a center for antiracist research, and it was founded in 2020 in the middle of the pandemic, in the middle of the so-called racial reckoning. And so of course we had really ambitious ideas for our center, and we started receiving resources and hiring people and pursuing projects. And by 2021, especially 2022 and 2023, a lot of the support we were receiving had started to get dried up. And at the same time, the attacks on so-called critical race theory and so-called wokeism and so-called DEI was picking up tremendously. And of course we as a center became the subject of that. And frankly, if you’re a Black leader, chances are somebody have claimed that you mismanaged something, because apparently Black leaders, we can’t manage anything. And so it wasn’t surprising for me or anyone who sort of studies racism that those allegations surfaced. And just as it wasn’t surprising to us when ultimately it was investigated, and in our center there was really no wrongdoing.

Can you talk to me about what it feels like to be in the center of the storm? I’ve actually on social media at times been a subject of conversation, but nowhere near the amount of being in the eye of the storm that you’ve been in. And I imagine having a center like this in a time when basically, at least when your center was going on, it was at the start of what I consider a Blacklash, where people were tired of hearing about antiracist policies. They were tired of 1619, and they’re tired of it because they’re being pushed by provocateurs to look at this as like it’s a bad thing and it’s harming the country. So what is it like to be in the center of the storm while that’s all going on?

I think ultimately the biggest challenge of being at the center of a storm is not taking it personally. That ultimately-

Oh my God, how do you do that? I don’t know how to do that.

Yeah, it’s incredibly hard to not do. But ultimately, even by 2020, the major talking point that emerged to really undermine those of us who were engaged in antiracist work was actually an old white nationalist talking point, which essentially was that antiracist is code for anti-white. And so those of us who were striving for racial justice, who were striving for equal opportunity, who were striving for equity, we were misrepresented as striving to somehow harm white people or take away opportunities or resources for them. And that was purposeful, because there was an attempt to anger white Americans and to manipulate them into somehow seeing that all these efforts are going to harm them, as opposed to, as we talked about earlier, help them just as it was going to help peoples of color.

And so I became one of the faces of that. And again, I had to figure out a way to know that this had nothing to do with me. That even as my name was being used, my image was being used, anyone who had read my work could know that I was being misrepresented. And so at the time, I really had to trust readers. I had to trust people who consumed my work. And I had to also, again, not take it personally. But it was very difficult because there was people who hated me who never read my work, and it was pretty obvious by the things that they said. The other part of it that I think is less talked about is, there’s not only a lot of these attacks coming from people who want to conserve racism, but then there’s also people who have been challenging racism who personally want to be the person in the spotlight, and they take issue with anyone who is in the spotlight. There’s a certain level of envy there as well.

And so when you’re in the spotlight, particularly in this context, you not only get attacked, bad faith attacks by people who want to conserve racism, but even bad faith attacks by people who claim they want to challenge racism, because they didn’t enter this arena truly committed to the eradication of racism. They entered the arena because they’re interested in fame and resources. And then those who are in the spotlight, they project themselves onto those people. So that’s also incredibly difficult. And it’s particularly difficult when those persons I’m speaking about are Black.

So now you’re heading back to DC, you’re going to Howard University, and you’re launching a new institute there. So what are you hoping for with this new institute?

Well, just first and foremost, I feel like this is a full circle moment for me personally, because I really started my journey to be an intellectual at Florida A&M University, at an historically Black university. And I don’t know if I would have embarked on that journey if I had not been in that space. And so to be able to return to Howard University, to be able to work very closely with Howard faculty and students and alumni, to be able to be in a space where there’s a long history of nurturing scholars like me who study racism, is something I’m incredibly excited about. And to be there with other, again, scholars whose work I’ve studied and admired for a long time, I’m just really excited about the prospects.

Yeah. So I grew up in Jacksonville, Florida, so I’m a big Rattlers fan. So going to Howard University, and your work primarily is in antiracism, I’m just wondering, how do you adapt that for a school that is celebrating their Blackness? I think the beautiful things about HBCUs is that in many ways the world of America, the world that rejects Blackness, is on the outside of those campus walls, and on the inside of that campus is nothing but love and nurturing for these young Black minds moving forward. And so antiracism is definitely something to be talked about there, but it’s different than being at BU, isn’t it?

So I think the way that I have conceived of being antiracist, and let me actually even return to How to Be an Antiracist, most of that book, which is largely a story of my journey, my journey of internalizing anti-Black racist ideas, and ultimately how I was able to begin to liberate myself from those ideas and strive to be antiracist, most of that book is actually set in Black spaces, is actually set in which I’m interacting with other Black people. And there are multiple chapters in that book on FAMU, in which I talk about how at FAMU I experienced and witnessed colorism, how at FAMU I experienced and witnessed beliefs that certain groups, Black ethnic groups, were better or worse than others. And how I went on to another Black space in African-American studies and found that there were certain views that Black men were better than Black women, or had it worse.
And so I mention that because even within Black spaces, there may be a general consensus that there’s nothing inferior about Black people in general, but that doesn’t necessarily mean there’s a recognition that there’s nothing inferior about any group of Black people, whether they’re dark-skinned Black people or Black women or Black poor people, or Haitian Americans or African-Americans. And so I’ve always, through my work on being antiracist, ensured that being antiracist was something that Black people most importantly needed to do. And so I’m excited to really show that and convey that and codify that in a Black space like Howard.

Yeah. I want to take a few minutes to really dive into your new book. So let’s talk about Malcolm Lives! How important was it to introduce Malcolm X to young readers for you? I would tell you that for me personally, reading The Autobiography of Malcolm X literally changed my life. I remember when I read it, I was in middle school. The book had been around, I don’t know if you remember, but the autobiography had a painted cover with a black background of Malcolm X on it. It was such a beautiful book, and I remember seeing it around the house, and I picked it up one day and just started reading it, and it literally shifted the trajectory of my life. So when I heard that you were writing this new book, Malcolm Lives! for young readers, I was just immediately excited.

Yeah. And frankly, what’s striking about Malcolm is, so many people like you have been completely transformed by reading his autobiography, or other people have been transformed by people who were transformed by reading Malcolm’s autobiography.

Right, right.

And so Malcolm’s story is truly transformational. And why should young people have to wait until, let’s say they’re in high school, to be able to be transformed too by Malcolm’s story, by Malcolm’s ideas? And so that’s one of the reasons why I thought it was critically important to write Malcolm Lives! and to write it for young people so that they can be transformed just like we have.

Yeah, I still remember going to see Spike Lee’s movie, Malcolm X, which I will argue with anybody is the greatest American biopic ever. And that’s all I have to say. But again, watching his life and taking in the lessons and the turns that his life made, it sounds like your book is concentrating on his life after he came back from his trip to the Middle East and Africa. Is that right?

So it narrates, certainly, his transformation after coming back from Mecca, after recognizing and realizing that nation of Islam theology that white people could not be Muslim and that they were inherently evil, that that simply was not true. Because he came across many white Muslims in Mecca and came across white people who treated him equitably and equally. And so him realizing racial equality, obviously, and narrating how he came to that, and also how he came to the importance of Pan-African, global Black solidarity through meetings that he had with leaders of African states, newly decolonized African nations, was absolutely pivotal. And I think it was also pivotal in Malcolm Lives! to show the ways in which as a young person, everything that he went through, which you can’t really understand Malcolm as an adult, you can’t really understand Malcolm as this revolutionary who’s become so clear and audacious in his challenge to global white supremacy and racism, without understanding the ways in which he was impacted by those structures as a young person constantly and consistently. And so I also wanted young people to see that and learn about that.

Yeah, you can’t understand Malcolm X unless you understand Malcolm Little and then understanding El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz. It’s like the whole trajectory of it.

Definitely.

Last question for you, and this is a big one. Given that you are a historian, a public thinker, you’ve studied these movements for a very long time, where do you think we’re going?

So I think we’re headed for, I think this moment is actually quite similar to moments like the 1870s or even the 1920s in American history. And these are moments in which you had very powerful racist forces who were seeking to eliminate policies and practices and ideas that had been created to bring about more democracy and equity and equality. And so we’re literally right now in a very pitched battle for the future of justice in the United States, and frankly around the world. And so it’s hard to say where we’re going, but I can say what the battle is. And the battle is between equality and inequality, between justice and injustice, between democracy and dictatorship. And we all have to figure out what side of that battle that we’re going to be on.

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The FDA Held a Misinformation Fest About Antidepressants in Pregnancy

Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has long railed against antidepressants, and now he has very practical ways to attack them.

As my colleague Kiera Butler has written, Kennedy has claimed, without evidence, that they can cause addiction and school shootings. He even proposed sending people who take them to “wellness farms,” where they can grow their own organic foods, get “re-parented,” and wean themselves off antidepressants and other medications.

But on Monday, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) appeared to move closer towards realizing RFK’s goal of getting people off the drugs, quietly convening a so-called expert panel to discuss selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors—a type of antidepressant commonly known as SSRIs—and pregnancy.The two-hour panel was livestreamed and is available to watch on the FDA’s YouTube page. It was moderated by a pair of FDA staffers, who gave each panelist five minutes to make an opening presentation and then asked a few questions submitted by the public. While 13 percent of Americans use antidepressants, whose efficacy varies but have been shown to help at least 20 percent of people who take them, a far smaller number of pregnant women—research suggests six to ten percent—are on them.

Many of the panel’s ten participants—a combination of researchers and practicing psychologists, several of whom have publicly spoken out against the use of antidepressants—largely repeated what one women’s health expert called “MAHA talking points” against medications and the biological legitimacy of anxiety and depression. Often, panelists’ arguments were so full of misinformation that Steven Fleischman, the president of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG), a professional group for OB-GYNs, promptly put out a statement calling the panel “alarmingly unbalanced” and alleging that the majority “did not adequately acknowledge the harms of untreated perinatal mood disorders in pregnancy.”

There are, indeed, major mental health struggles facing American moms. Research published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in 2020 found that approximately one in eight women experience postpartum depression (PPD) after giving birth, which can lead to difficulties bonding, developmental delays for the infant, and other negative health outcomes. The latest CDC data, from 2017 to 2019, shows that mental health conditions, including suicides and overdoses, were the leading underlying causes of pregnancy-related deaths. The picture has only grown more dire recently: Research published in February in the Journal of Health Economics and Outcomes found that the Supreme Court’s decision overruling Roe v. Wade led to an increase in PPD diagnoses in states with abortion bans compared to those without. Another large study, published in the May issue of_JAMA Internal Medicine_, found that American mothers reported large declines in their mental health from 2016 to 2023, with single and low-income mothers reporting particularly large drops.

But listening to the FDA panel on Monday, you would be forgiven for thinking that perinatal depression—which refers to depression both during and after pregnancy—is not, in fact, real.

In his introductory remarks, FDA Chief Dr. Martin Makary—an abortion opponent and a former surgeon and professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine—called for more study of the “root causes” of perinatal depression. “We have to talk about the role of healthy relationships, of communities, of natural light exposure, of other modalities and co-factors that may be involved,” he said.

Another panelist, Dr. Josef Witt-Doerring, a psychiatrist whose practice focuses on weaning people from their psychiatric medications, similarly claimed that in contrast to physical conditions, it is impossible to point to distinct causes for mental health disorders. Instead, he claimed, personal problems like loneliness and job dissatisfaction tend to triggerdepression. “These are not things to be fixed with medical intervention,” added Witt-Doerring, who also runs a YouTube channel that spotlights the stories of people who have faced adverse side effects from taking psychiatric medications.

Women are “naturally experiencing their emotions more intensely, and those are gifts. They’re not symptoms of a disease.”

Roger McFillen, a psychologist and host of a podcast on which he and guests have railed against vaccines and birth control, suggested that women are “naturally experiencing their emotions more intensely, and those are gifts. They’re not symptoms of a disease.” McFillen also suggested, without evidence, that “many women feel coerced” to get on medications to treat perinatal depression.

"If you want to increase suffering, you fundamentally get people to battle their own internal experiences. You learn not to trust your emotions, you judge them as symptoms." We are facing an epidemic of iatrogenic harm. Manufacturing a disease to sell more drugs. There are better… pic.twitter.com/KTFCF9FmJB

— Dr. Roger McFillin (@DrMcFillin) July 22, 2025

I reached out to Wendy N. Davis, a psychotherapist and the president and CEO of Postpartum Support International, to get her take on the panelists’ characterization of perinatal depression. “That kind of thinking is not evidence-based,” she said, “and not even anecdotally true.” Indeed, physicians and researchers who treat and study PPD note that a combination of genetics, a history of anxiety and depression, and psychosocial factors can play a role in the development of the disorder. Experts say it can be effectively treated through a combination of therapy, medication, and support groups.

David Healy, a former professor of psychiatry at McMaster University in Canada and Bangor and Cardiff Universities in the UK, agreed with Witt-Doerring, claiming that people with depression and melancholia, a severe type of depression, can often “recover spontaneously,” even within a few months. But the American Academy of Pediatrics recommends that new parents should repeatedly be screened for PPD until the baby is six months old, noting that, if left untreated, it can lead to “long-term adverse health complications.” A 2020 study published in the journal Pediatrics found that 25 percent of nearly 5,000 mothers studied had higher rates of PPD at some point in the three years after giving birth.

Then there was the misinformation about actually treating perinatal depression with medication. Several of the panelists suggested, for example, that theuse of SSRIs during pregnancy can lead to an increased risk of autism in infants. But while some studies have found a higher occurrence of autism in these babies, researchers have cautioned against drawing a causal inference, and several large studies have found no association at all between SSRI use in pregnancy and autism.

Another claim repeated by many panelists was that doctors have withheld information about the risks of SSRIs from pregnant patients. In response, Fleischman, from ACOG, explained, “Patients who choose to continue taking SSRIs during pregnancy with the support of their OBGYNs do so following counseling on the risks and benefits that includes discussion of the data and consideration of their own needs, values, and priorities.”

“The claim that the FDA’s expert advisory process is ‘one-sided’ or politically driven is insulting to the independent scientists, clinicians, and researchers who dedicate their expertise to these panels.”

Panelists offered several suggestions for the path forward. They argued the FDA should strengthen its warnings about SSRI use during pregnancy to include more information about the impacts on preterm birth, preeclampsia, and postpartum hemorrhage. “There is now more than enough evidence to support strong warnings from the FDA about how these drugs disrupt fetal development and impact moms,” panelist Adam Urato, chief of maternal-fetal medicine at MetroWest Medical Center in Massachusetts, claimed. But studies show that SSRIs have only small or negligible impacts on the health issues that Urato raised.

A spokesperson for HHS said the agency would not comment on potential future policy decisions, adding, “The claim that the FDA’s expert advisory process is ‘one-sided’ or politically driven is insulting to the independent scientists, clinicians, and researchers who dedicate their expertise to these panels.”

Dr. Kay Roussos-Ross, an OBGYN and the director of the Perinatal Mood Disorders program at the University of Florida College of Medicine, was a rare expert in this group who pointed out that research has shown how untreated depression and anxiety in pregnancy can lead to a host of health problems for the pregnant person and their baby, including preterm delivery, inadequate prenatal care, substance abuse, and developmental delays for the child. Roussos-Ross also pointed to one study that revealed women who stopped taking medications in pregnancy were five times more likely to experience a relapse of symptoms compared to those who remained on them. “Not every single woman will need an antidepressant,” Roussos-Ross said during the panel, “but for those that do, it’s life-changing and life-saving.”

Jen Gunter, an OB-GYN and author of three books on menstruation, menopause, and vaginal health, called most of the panelists “depression deniers” who did not share basicevidence-based information. In a post on Bluesky, she praised Roussos-Ross for “shutting down all the others who were fear-mongering.”

Davis, from Postpartum Support International, said she just hopes struggling mothers understand that there is evidence-based help out there. “A mom can’t call the FDA panel,” she said, “and it’s not going to help her to listen to it.”

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Did Christian Nationalist Leaders Prompt Mike Johnson’s Epstein Flip-Flop?

On Tuesday, House Speaker Mike Johnson, in a departure from his previous calls for transparency, announced that he would not ask for a vote on whether the files pertaining to accused sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein should be released. Only a week before, on the right-wing podcast “The Benny Show,” he had said, “It’s a very delicate subject, but we should put everything out there and let the people decide it.” This week, he changed his tune, and at a press conference, he said, “We need the administration to have the space to do what it is doing.” He allowed that should there be a “neccesary or appropriate” need for further congressional action, he would look at it. But then said emphatically, “I don’t think we’re at that point yet, because we agree with the president.”

It’s impossible to truly know what prompted Johnson’s about-face, but it’s worth noting that he has long been connected to the New Apostolic Reformation, a charismatic evangelical movement that teaches that Christians are called to take “dominion” over all aspects of society, including the government. Johnson has publicly acknowledged that NAR has had a “profound influence” on his life, according to a report issued by the Congressional Freethought Caucus last year.

It’s also worth noting that arguably the most influential and visible NAR leader, a Texas business strategist named Lance Wallnau, has been outspoken in recent weeks in his defense of Trump on the Epstein issue. On July 14, Wallnau told his 100,000 YouTube followers that he believed that Trump was acting in the best interest of the country by not releasing the files. Wallnau’s line of reasoning began with his suggestion that both the assassination of JFK and the assassination attempt on Trump last year in Butler, Pennsylvania, were inside jobs. He went on to describe Trump’s critics on the left as “demonic” people who “smell disunity” in MAGA and are using the infighting as an opportunity to tarnish Trump’s reputation. “I think they would be willing to plant information and evidence and create false trails, all kinds of booby traps,” he said.

Among Wallnau’s followers are some powerful people. As I reported last year, Wallnau has forged strong connections with GOP leaders—for example, he hosted a Pennsylvania campaign event for JD Vance last September. He also helped develop Project 19, a right-wing political initiative to win 19 key counties in swing states for Trump. Wallnau has called Kamala Harris a “Jezebel” and speculated that people on the political left may be controlled by demons.

Another prominent Christian nationalist influencer, Texas pastor Joel Webbon, has also arrived at a belief in Trump’s innocence—but from a different perspective. Webbon isn’t connected with the NAR like Johnson and Wallnau—instead, he’s a member of the TheoBros, a network of Christian nationalist millennial influencers. Many of them believe that women shouldn’t be allowed to vote, and that the Ten Commandments should replace the US Constitution. Like NAR, the TheoBros are also well-connected to Republican politicians. US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth attends a TheoBros-aligned church, and Vance has socialized with members of the movement, as well.

Last week, Webbon devoted an episode of his YouTube show, which has 123,000 followers, to the Epstein files. His guest was Scott Horton, a libertarian podcaster and staunch critic of the left-wing government “deep state” that Trump has consistently blamed for all of America’s ills. In the episode, Horton asserted that he didn’t believe that Trump would be implicated in the Epstein files. Moreover, he argued that Epstein was a foreign asset, likely working with the Israeli national intelligence agency Mossad to entrap Trump.

He’s not alone in believing this particular conspiracy theory; it was also put forth by right-wing broadcaster Tucker Carlson, who also hosted Horton on his show. “This isn’t just like, ‘oh my goodness, maybe we had somebody working with Israeli intelligence that was blackmailing politicians here in America,'” said Webbon. “The reality is that [US-Israeli relations have] been a toxic relationship stretching back decades.” He added, “This is becoming a massive problem that people are noticing, as the kids say.” The latter was an allusion to the antisemitic trope of “noticing,” a phrase that refers to people taking note of the fact that a powerful person is Jewish.

A link between Epstein, who was Jewish, and Mossad fed neatly into Webbon’s preexisting biases. He has routinely expressed antisemitic views on social media. Last November, he posted on X, “I hate Judaism but love Jews and wish them a very pleasant conversion to Christianity.” In a podcast episode, he called Judaism a “parasitical” religion. “What it has done historically throughout the ages is typically go into other countries, other peoples with other religions, and kind of cozy up but not really for their benefit—not a mutually beneficial relationship, but where they ultimately get far more out of the deal than the Christian nation does.” In an email to Mother Jones last year, Webbon said he stands by “everything I’ve said about Judaism. It is a pernicious evil.”

Meanwhile, some other evangelicals—though not Trump supporters— are pushing for the administration to release the files. Last week, Christianity Today editor-in-chief Russell Moore penned an op-ed in his magazine titled “Why We Want to See the Epstein Files.” The main reason was that “we want justice done,” he wrote. “We want to believe that our institutions—even in the present crises of credibility that most are going through—are not wholly corrupt.”

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“The Mosquitoes Are Getting Worse”: Life Inside Florida’s Alligator Alcatraz Detention Camp

Earlier this month, Florida Rep. Anna Eskamani, a Democrat from Orlando, joined several state lawmakers on a tour inside Alligator Alcatraz. When Eskamani entered a large white tent where detainees are separated into chain-link fenced areas, each containing 32 beds and three toilets, the men began chanting “Libertad!”—which means liberty in Spanish.

Eskamani and the other lawmakers, who had sued Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis after previously being denied access to the facility, were not allowed to speak to detainees. Florida Division of Emergency Management director Kevin Guthrie, who guided the tour, said the facility was housing about 900 immigrants and would be able to accommodate up to 4,000 by the end of August, Eskamani says.

State Sen. Shevrin Jones, a Democrat from Miami-Dade County, was also there and recalls that someone with a thermometer showed that the temperature at the entrance of one of the tents was 81 degrees. He noticed that one of the detainees was bare-chested, with his shirt wrapped around his head.

Jones, whose office is in touch with some families, read me a text he received from a detainee’s wife. She wrote that one of the men in her husband’s cell was using the toilet when guards had ordered the men to stand by their beds for a head count. Guards began to yell at him. In another text, she wrote, “He told me that [the guards] all flip their badges over so that you can’t read their names.” The text continued,“The mosquitoes are getting worse, and they don’t spray them with bug spray.”

In the days since the tour, Eskamani says she has heard reports from detainees’ loved ones of rampant mosquitoes swarming the tents, as well as leaks after summer rainstorms. “In a weather situation, not even a hurricane, just a general rainy day in Florida,” Eskamani says, “this facility is not one that is sustainable.”

Wearing mosquito netting, Florida State Sen. Shevrin Jones, State Rep. Michele K. Rayner and Rep. Anna V. Eskamani, PhD, are denied entry along with fellow representatives into Alligator Alcatraz in Collier County, Florida.Al Diaz/Miami Herald/Tribune News Service/Getty

Hastily erected on a remote airfield by Big Cypress National Preserve, and predicted to cost $450 million per year to run, Alligator Alcatraz has been unusually controversial even within the already controversial area of immigration detention. As reported by family members, attorneys, and lawmakers, the facility is fraught with malfunctioning air conditioners, scarce food, and no recreational time for detainees. State and federal officials running the center have previously stated that it would hold immigrants with criminal records. But as the Miami Herald recently reported, many detainees have no prior arrests. One is a 15-year-old boy. Another is a recipient of DACA, an Obama-era program that provides temporary legal status to immigrants who came to the US as children. In addition, environmental groups have accused Florida and federal officials of opening the center in the middle of the Everglades without first weighing the environmental risks. Alligator Alcatraz is the only immigration detention facility that a singlestate is responsible for both creating and managing.

Even before the second Trump term, Florida had distinguished itself for its outsized approach to immigration. Florida State Republicans have pursued aggressive immigration enforcement laws, including one that criminalized the act of driving undocumented immigrants into the state, and another that made it a crime to reside in Florida without legal status. Both were blocked by courts that ruled that immigration enforcement is a federal responsibility. As I reported in April, Florida also leads the nation in the number of 287(g) agreements between local law enforcement and Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Alligator Alcatraz is a kind of crucible for what can happen when federal enforcement efforts are fully supported by a sympathetic state infrastructure, while those who are taken there reportedly face nearly inhumane conditions. Emma Winger, deputy legal director at the American Immigration Council, describes the new detention camp as “a culmination of Florida and the governor’s efforts to essentially create its own immigration system.”

The new detention camp is “a culmination of Florida and the governor’s efforts to essentially create its own immigration system.”

The Florida Division of Emergency Management, which runs Alligator Alcatraz, has not responded to my requests for comment. An ICE spokesperson referred me to the Florida emergency agency for further information on the facility.

For Rep. Eskamani, Alligator Alcatraz is “a political stunt with environmental damage and everyday lives being harmed. It needs to close immediately.”

The detention camp is now at the center of several lawsuits. As I reported last month, environmentalist groups sued Florida and federal officials to shut down Alligator Alcatraz, arguing that the project moved forward without an environmental assessment or public comment.

The groups also raised concerns about the detention camp’s impact on the area’s various ecosystems and wildlife. Traffic to and from the detention site increases the likelihood of panthers being struck by vehicles, according to court filings, and light pollution could destroy the nighttime foraging abilities of bats in the area. Aerial photos also indicate that previously undeveloped areas are now paved over with asphalt.

US President President Donald Trump tours a migrant detention center, dubbed “Alligator Alcatraz,” located at the site of the Dade-Collier Training and Transition Airport in Ochopee, Florida on July 1, 2025. Andrew Caballero/AFP/Getty

Other parties have also weighed in on the case. The advocacy group Florida Immigrant Coalition filed an amicus brief arguing that “only the federal government can authorize a place of immigration detention.” And the Miccosukee Tribe of Indians, which has resided in the preserve near the detention facility for generations, filed a motion in support of the lawsuit. Today, there are 15 active villages within Big Cypress National Preserve. “The facility’s proximity to the Tribe’s villages, sacred and ceremonial sites, traditional hunting grounds, and other lands protected by the Tribe raises significant concerns about environmental degradation and potential impacts caused by the construction and operation of a detention facility,” their filing states.

In its response to the lawsuit, the US Department of Homeland Security said it was not in charge of operations at Alligator Alcatraz, and that the facility was solely the responsibility of Florida, “using state funds on state lands under state emergency authority.” In what appears to be a Catch-22, the state argued the environmentalist groups are seeking relief under the National Environmental Policy Act, which does not apply to state agencies. A hearing is scheduled for August 6.

Last week, another lawsuit was filed against officials operating the facility. Since the detention camp’s opening, attorneys have reported being unable to have contact with or speak to detainees. Several law firms, with support from the American Civil Liberties Union, sued in federal court to gain access to their clients. Some have driven to the facility to ask how they can meet with clients, only to be provided with an email address to schedule an appointment that resulted in bounced back messages, the lawsuit states. “No instruction exists as to which immigration courts have been designated for submission of motions for bond redetermination for people detained at Alligator Alcatraz,” the complaint reads. “As a result, detainees held at Alligator Alcatraz effectively have no way to contest their detention.”

Regardless of the outcome of the lawsuits, the detention camp opened just before the peak of hurricane season, when storms are most likely to form in August and September. It’s a scenario that state Sen. Carlos Guillermo Smith, a Democrat from Orlando, says could be inevitable. “How are they going to decompress that site? Where are all these detainees going?” he says. “It’s not a question of if, it’s when we get a hurricane that will blow through that site.”

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Unpacking the MAHA Mirage: Trump Guts Healthcare While Preaching Wellness

More than 100 million Americans are obese, 38 million are diabetic, 116 million are hypertensive, and 26 million suffer from asthma. Whether or not you’re among the 60 percent of Americans whose medical chart lists a chronic illness, everyone suffers from them: They keep people out of work and in pain and contribute to skyrocketing healthcare bills that come out of the country’s coffers and yours. Most importantly, they shatter families whose loved ones die prematurely from the conditions.

At a White House event in May, President Donald Trump affirmed he was intent on addressing this public health crisis. Flanked by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.—whose remit includes the National Institutes of Health, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the Food and Drug Administration—Trump said the rate at which Americans develop chronic illnesses is nothing short of “alarming, unbelievable, terrible.”

In principle, this issue might be a rare point of agreement between most public health experts and the president and his HHS secretary. But while Trump and his administration have championed the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) initiative, it’s more like an optical illusion with roundtables and flashy baseball hats. Though promoting what may appear to be a worthy endeavor, health experts argue the MAHA slogan is undermined by policies that do the opposite—especially for low-income Americans whose relative health status and long-term outcomes are disproportionately worse than for affluent ones. \

“Health is wealth” is a popular saying among crunchy MAHA influencers. But the reality in the US, especially when the Trump policies and budget cuts begin to hit, is the inverse: wealth is health. In just six months, this “pro-health” administration, whose initiatives are led by an anti-vax advocate, has terminated 2,100 NIH research grants and withheld $140 million worth of funding already earmarked for fentanyl addiction response. Those cuts are small in comparison with the dual blows wrapped into the Republican-led One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which Trump signed into law on the Fourth of July. The legislation gifted roughly 16 million people the loss of health insurance (to begin in 2027) and removed $186 billion in funding for food assistance programs for low-income people.

“Health is wealth” is a popular saying among crunchy MAHA influencers. But the reality in the US, especially after these cuts, is the inverse: wealth is health.

The duplicity of an administration that trumpets its commitment to transforming the state of health in the US versus the dire consequences of its policies confounds public health experts, hospital administrators, and physicians alike.

“It is incongruous to say ‘I’m making America healthy,’ and then, on the other hand, say, ‘But I’m taking away the resources that are necessary to make people healthy,’” Dr. Richard Carmona, who served as the US Surgeon General under President George W. Bush, tells me. “It doesn’t make a lot of sense.”

Consider the federal free and reduced-cost school lunch program, which has been shown to reduce rates of poor health by at least 29 percent and lower rates of obesity by at least 17 percent. The program is connected to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), which supports 12 percent of US households, nearly half of which include children. Put simply, cuts to SNAP eligibility mean fewer recipients of free breakfast and lunch at school.

As my former colleague Tom Philpott explained in a recent article, the new budget bill Trump signed into law is “literally taking food off the tables of poor people and handing much of the savings to large-scale commodity farmers.”

Then there is projected $1 trillion in Medicaid cuts over the next decade, which will have even more obvious and drastic effects on public health than the SNAP cuts. Some Medicaid expansion enrollees will see their co-pays increase, and others may see reduced benefits as state governments cut optional services when they become responsible for a larger share of the costs.

Additionally, new Medicaid work requirements require beneficiaries to more frequently prove their eligibility, which is anticipated to result in the loss of benefits for many people who do have jobs. As the Atlantic put it, the increase in arduous paperwork is akin to “annoying people to death.”

There is one population that Jill Rosenthal, the director of public health policy at the Center for American Progress, anticipates will be especially hard hit by new bureaucratic hurdles and tightened eligibility: cancer patients and people who will develop cancer, cases of which are increasing.

“People who are uninsured are more likely to be diagnosed with cancer later in the progression of their cancer, they’re less likely to get evidence-based preventive care, screening, treatment, and end-of-life care,” she says. Not a problem, according to Republican Sen. Joni Ernst of Iowa. She reassured her constituents who were expressing concerns about Medicaid cuts by saying, “Well, we all are going to die.”

Privately insured Americans will feel the pinch, too. The Medicaid changes are anticipated to burden hospitals, especially those in rural areas that treat more Medicaid patients. Even without insurance,low-income people will still have medical emergencies requiring hospital care, and hospitals are legally obliged to stabilize them. This increase in what healthcare administrators call “uncompensated care” will lead to staff layoffs, reduced services, or even hospital closures, as has already taken place in Curtis, Nebraska.

Kevin Stansbury, the CEO of a 25-bed hospital about 107 miles Southeast of Denver, recently told me that about a quarter of its patients are on Medicaid. If program cuts pushed the county-owned hospital out of business, the next closest emergency room would be 85 miles away. And what would happen in the community if they closed? “More fatalities,” he said.

A little credit where credit is due: The MAHA movement has raised important questions about the health of the food items that dominate grocery store aisles and our pantry shelves.

Roughly 60 percent of what Americans eat (and 67 percent of what kids consume) is ultra-processed, such as sugary cereals, frozen meals, sodas, and fast food—all of which Kennedy refers to as “poison.”

While this isan exaggeration—for all their liabilities, these foods do go through safety testing—he’s correct that the overconsumption of processed foods has been linked to poorer health outcomes. A 2024 review of 10 million study participants found “convincing” evidence that ultra-processed foods increase the risk of cardiovascular disease by 50 percent. The same review found “highly suggestive” evidence that people whose diets are dominated by these foods are at much greater risk for obesity, sleep disorders**,** and depression. A separate study, published in 2022, concluded that men who ate large amounts of ultra-processed foods were 29 percent more likely to develop colon cancer.

“That is something that could improve Americans’ health, and so it’s a valid issue,” Rosenthal says about reducing the consumption of ultra-processed foods.

But potato chips and frozen pizzas can be extremely difficult to resist—not only thanks to marketing and synthetic ingredients, which certainly help, but because this is what appears in stores that serve low-income communities, areas often referred to as food deserts.

“Communities that don’t have access to grocery stores and need to buy their food from other sources often can’t find good, nutritious food, and they often find that it’s more expensive,” Rosenthal explains.

In other words, slashing a benefit that helps poor Americans afford more nutritious alternatives is effectively to say, “Kale for me, but not for thee.” (Just look at the ultra-processed chicken bacon ranch pasta dishes Kennedy is eagerly sending to Medicare and Medicaid patients.)

Former Surgeon General Carmona adds that Kennedy’s interest in increasing the consumption of more natural foods is “a great opportunity” for bipartisanship. But that would require breaking through the “hyper-partisan, divisive, acronym politics that we are dealing with today.”

Outside of hyping healthy foods, some of MAHA’s other priorities are more suspect. The 73-page MAHA report the White House published in May, stridently argues for more research to explore a long-discredited theory linking childhood vaccinations and autism.

Most experts reason that diagnoses of neurodivergence have increased due to increased societal awareness and improved diagnostic criteria. But for those still unsure, a newly released study tracking more than 1.2 million children across 21 years found no connection between early childhood vaccines containing aluminum and any of the 50 conditions that were reviewed, including autism and ADHD.

Meanwhile, measles outbreaks continue to rise alongside the decline of vaccination rates for a disease whose incidence was nearly eradicated over the last sixty years. That kind of data should matter to anyone who says they are serious about making America “healthy again.”

“They’re moving us back almost into the Dark Ages,” says Carmona. “The ramifications are extraordinary, and the policies that are being promulgated are ignorant.”

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Tulsi Gabbard’s Dangerous Disinformation Campaign Against America

The Trump administration has launched a war on former Obama administration officials, and to do so, it has engaged in one of the most egregious and obvious acts of politicizing intelligence in decades.

On Friday, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard released formerly classified US intelligence reports about the 2016 election that she said were evidence of an Obamaadministration “conspiracy to subvert President Trump’s 2016 victory and presidency.” In a hysterical press release, she accused former President Barack Obama and his national security aides of having “manufactured and politicized intelligence to lay the ground for what was essentially a years-long coup against President Trump.” Describingthis as a “treasonous” plot, shesaid she was forwarding documents to the Justice Department, presumably toinitiate a criminal investigation. Naturally, she went on Fox News to amplify her allegations against Obama and his advisers.

It’s all a fabrication. What’s worse, her skullduggery appears to have been the catalyst for one of PresidentDonald Trump’s most disturbing and dangerous social media posts: An AI-generated video of Obama in the Oval Office visiting a smiling Trump, being manhandled and arrested by FBI agents, and then tossed into a prison cell.

Gabbard claims that the Obama administration and its top national security officials schemed to create and promote a phony intelligence finding to undermine Trump. On January 6, 2017, two weeks before Trump was to begin his first term as president, the intelligence community released an assessment (called an ICA) that stated Russia had attacked the 2016 election with a covert hack-and-leak operation and a secret social media campaign designedto sow political discord in the United States, harm Hillary Clinton’s chances, and help Trump win. Ever since, Trump has called the Russia story a “hoax” and each of the subsequent investigations a “witch hunt.”

Gabbard, acting muchlike a Soviet commissar, is trying to disappear that assessment and the taint it applies to Trump’s 2016 victory.So on Friday, she released over 100 pages of documents that she insists show that the ICA was concocted to purposefully present the false finding to the public. But she is engaging in a sleazy sleight of hand.

Gabbard offers her case in an 11-page memo that quotes excerpts of intelligence records from 2016. The first one is an August 16 document that was sent to James Clapper, then occupying the position Gabbard now has asthe director of national intelligence. It said, “There is no indication of a Russian threat to directly manipulate the actual vote count through cyber means.” A September 9 record cites an intelligence official observing, “Russia probably is not trying to going to be able to influence the election by using cyber means to manipulate computer-enabled election infrastructure.” A September 12 assessment published by the intelligence community noted, “[F]oreign adversaries do not have and will probably not obtain the capabilities to successfully execute widespread and undetected cyber attacks on the diverse set of information technologies and infrastructures used to support the November 2016 presidential election.”

Following the election, Gabbard’s memo points out, DNI Clapper’s office concluded, “Foreign adversaries did not use cyberattacks on election infrastructure to alter the US Presidential election outcome.”

Gabbard then delivers the j’accuse moment of this memo: The ICA, which was produced on Obama’s order, said Russia had waged a clandestine operation to influence the operation, even though this previous intelligence reported “Russia lacked intent and capability to hack the 2016 election” and did not impact the election through cyber hacks on the election.”

This proves, she says, that the ICA was “politicized intelligence that was used as the basis for countless smears seeking to delegitimize President Trump’s victory, the years-long Mueller investigation, two Congressional impeachments, high-level officials being investigated, arrested, and thrown in jail, heightened US-Russia tensions, and more.”

The ICA was not the basis for the FBI investigation, which began months earlier and eventually morphed into the Mueller probe. Nor did it trigger the first or second impeachment of Trump. More importantly, Gabbard is deliberately misleading the public about the intelligence she cites.

The ICA’s finding that Russia had clandestinely interfered in the election to assist Trump was a separate matter from anotherconcern of the intelligence community: the possibility that Russian operatives would monkey-wrench vote-counting systems and throw Election Day into chaos.

That had been a worry for the Obama administration throughout 2016, after it received reports that Russian intelligence had penetrated and probed election boards in several states. The prospect of a Russian cyber-attack on the election system was the subject of intense intelligence reporting and analysis, and, as the documents Gabbard released indicate, the intelligence community came to believe that Russia would not be able to rig election results. The ICA reported this, noting that the Department of Homeland Security had assessed “that the types of systems we observed Russian actors targeting or compromising are not involved in vote tallying.”

Yet in this memo, Gabbard applies intelligence reporting on the potential election tampering to an entirely separate issue: the Russian attack that included the operation that hacked Democratic targets and released their emails to impede the Clinton campaign, and that ran an influence operation through secret social media efforts to denigrate Clinton and boost Trump. These are twodifferent matters. The conclusion that Russian cyber operatives were unlikely to impact the electoral infrastructure is unrelated to the assessment that the Russians were seeking to sabotage the campaign through covert action and a clandestine social media propaganda campaign.

The person in charge of overseeing the US intelligence community ought to know this.

Gabbard is engaging in blatant cherry-picking and gaslighting. And she’s being sloppy with her subterfuge. Her case is easy to debunk. The intelligence reporting she cites does not contradict the ICA and does not indicate there was a high-level plot to produce a bogus report to damage Trump. She is providing a phony and weak cover story, both for Trump and Vladimir Putin. After all, long after the ICA was produced, the Mueller report and two congressional investigations confirmed that the Russians had assaulted the 2016 election, facts that Gabbardneglects to mention in her memo.

When it comes to perilous conspiring, Gabbard is the guilty one, especially when she suggests that Obama and his aides broke the law. Her moves follow similar conniving by CIA director John Ratcliffe, who recently released a sketchy report attacking the ICA and referred former CIA director John Brennan and former FBI Director Jim Comey to the Justice Department for criminal investigations.

Ultimately, this is about rewriting history to serve Dear Leader and seeking vengeance on his behalf against those who dared investigate the Russian effort to help himreach the White House—an effort Trumpaided by denying its existence. These endeavors to pervert intelligence demonstratethat the nation’s spy services are being led by lackeys subservient to an autocrat who places his own interests above responsible concerns for national security. But they also supply fodder for Trump’s never-ending and treacherous campaign to demonize his political foes and brand them as traitorous criminals who deserve to rot in prison. An intelligence community that serves a president and not the truth is a threat to the republic—especially when that president yearns to be an authoritarian.

Spy services often conduct clandestine disinformation operations. These are supposed to target adversaries overseas. To prove her loyalty to Trump, Gabbard is running adevious disinfo op, this one against the American public.

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“Like a Zombie Apocalypse: Trump’s Budget Cuts Stir Fears of Frightening Pipeline Mishaps

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

On a clear February evening in 2020, a smell of rotten eggs started to waft over the small town of Satartia, Mississippi, followed by a green-tinged cloud. A load roar could be heard near the highway that passes the town.

Soon, nearby residents started to feel dizzy, some even passed out or lay on the ground shaking, unable to breathe. Cars, inexplicably, cut out, their drivers leaving them abandoned with the doors open on the highway.

“It was like something you see in a movie, like a zombie apocalypse,” said Jerry Briggs, a fire coordinator from nearby Warren county who was tasked with knocking on the doors of residents to get them to evacuate. Briggs and most of his colleagues were wearing breathing apparatus—one deputy who didn’t do so almost collapsed and had to be carried away.

Unbeknown to residents and emergency responders, a pipeline carrying carbon dioxide near Satartia had ruptured and its contents were gushing out, robbing oxygen from people and internal combustion engines in cars alike.

“I worry we could see increased incidents now. The drop in enforcement is very troubling.”

“We had no idea what it was,” said Briggs, who moved towards the deafening noise of the pipeline leak with a colleague, their vehicle spluttering, when they saw a car containing three men, unconscious and barely breathing. “We just piled them on top of each other and got them out because it’s debatable if they survived if we waited,” said Briggs.

Ultimately, the men survived and were hospitalized along with around 45 other people. More than 200 people were evacuated. “It was like we were all being smothered,” said Jack Willingham, director of emergency management in Yazoo county, where Satartia is situated. “It was a pretty damn crazy day,”

The near-fatal disaster was a spur to Joe Biden’s administration to, for the first time, create a rule demanding a high standard of safety for the transport of carbon dioxide, a small but growing ingredient of pipelines increasingly captured from drilling sites and power plants.

“There’s been a lot of concern about safety among states that permit CO2 pipelines,” said Tristan Brown, who was acting administrator of the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials and Safety Administration (PHMSA) until January. “Stronger standards like the ones we drafted last year have the dual benefit of addressing permitting concerns while also improving safety for the public.”

But shortly before the new safety regulations were due to come into force early this year, Donald Trump’s new administration swiftly killed them off. A crackdown on gas leaks from pipelines was also pared back. This was followed by an exodus of senior officials from PHMSA, which oversees millions of miles of US pipelines. Five top leaders, including the head of the office of pipeline safety, have departed amid Trump’s push to shrink the federal workforce.

Broader staff cuts have hit the regulator, too, with PHMSA preparing for 612 employees in the coming year, down from 658 last year. There are currently 174 pipeline inspectors within this workforce, PHMSA said, which is 30 percent less than the number Congress required it to have when authorizing the agency’s budget in 2020.

These 174 inspectors have the task of scrutinizing 3.3 million miles of pipe across the US, or around 19,000 miles per inspector. The indiscriminate nature of cuts at PHMSA “has real world consequences in terms of undermining the basic foundations of safety for the public,” Brown said.

“A lot of expertise has left and that is worrying,” said one departed PHSMA staffer. “The attitude from DOGE [the so-called Department of Government Efficiency] was, ‘Your job is meaningless, go and work in the private sector.’ Many people have thought they can’t go through this for four years.”

America has more miles of pipeline—carrying oil, propane, gas, and other materials—than it does federal highways, and a federal regulator that was already overstretched. Brown said typically just one or two people have the responsibility of inspecting America’s transported nuclear waste while a mere dozen staffers have to oversee more than 170 liquified natural gas plants.

“The overall state of pipeline safety is really languishing…We are not making good progress.”

Each state has its own pipeline regulatory system and inspectors, too, but PHMSA is responsible for writing and enforcing national standards and is often the one to prosecute violations by any of the 3,000 businesses that currently operate pipelines. However, enforcement actions have dropped steeply under the Trump administration, which has initiated just 40 new cases this year, compared to 197 in all of 2024.

“All of these things will contribute to an increase in failures,” said Bill Caram, executive director of the nonprofit Pipeline Safety Trust. “A strong regulator helps prevent awful tragedies and I worry we could see increased incidents now. The drop in enforcement is very troubling.”

“Everyone at PHMSA is focused on safety, there’s not a lot of fat to trim, so it’s hard to imagine that any reduction in force won’t impact its ability to fulfill its duties. I can’t believe they were ever prepared to lose so many people at once.”

In some contexts, US pipelines can be viewed as very safe. A few dozen people are killed or injured each year from pipeline malfunctions, but the alternatives to moving around vast quantities of toxic or flammable liquids and gases aren’t risk-free.

Trains can come off their tracks and spill their loads, as seen in East Palestine, Ohio, while the death toll on American roads from accidents is typically about 40,000 people a year. “There is some super duper bad stuff that happens on the interstates,” said Briggs.

Still, as Caram points out, there is a significant pipeline incident almost every day in the US, ranging from globs of oil spilling onto farmland to raging fireballs from ignited gas. Many of the pipelines snaking under Americans’ feet are aging and need replacement, which can lead to failures. There has been a worrying uptick in deaths from pipeline accidents recently, too, with 30 people killed across 2023 and 2024, the most fatalities over a two-year period since 2010/11.

“This is not the time to look at deregulatory efforts, this is not time to look to save money and deregulate,” Caram said. “The overall state of pipeline safety is really languishing with poor performance. We are not making good progress and we need stronger regulations.”

A PHSMA spokesman said the agency is “laser-focused on its mission of protecting people and the environment while unleashing American energy safely” and is in the process of appointing “well-qualified individuals” to fill the departed senior officials.

“PHMSA has initiated more pipeline-related rule making actions since the beginning of this administration than in the entire four years of the preceding administration,” the spokesman added. “Each of these rule makings represents an opportunity for us to promote pipeline safety by modernizing our code and encouraging innovation and the use of new technology.”

The agency spokesman added that pipeline firm Denbury, now owned by ExxonMobil, paid $2.8 million in civil penalties for its regulatory violations in Satartia and agreed to take corrective actions. PHMSA also warned other operators to monitor the movement of earth and rock, to avoid a repeat of the Satartia incident where sodden soils shifted following days of rain and crunched into the pipeline, severing it.

The leak was only confirmed after an emergency responder called Denbury to ascertain what happened, more than 40 minutes after the rupture, according to the PHMSA investigation. Communications between the company and the emergency services has improved since, according to both Briggs and Willingham. Denbury was contacted for comment.

Today, Sartartia bears few visible scars. The pipeline is obscured from passing view by trees and blankets of kudzu, the invasive vine. The town’s sleepy, tree-lined streets contains a micro town hall, as big as a tool shed, a couple of small churches, a single shuttered store. On a recent summer day a single person was outside, contentedly cutting the grass, as if that harrowing day in 2020 was a surreal dream.

“We will see how it goes with the changes, I hope it doesn’t affect the safety we’ve worked so hard to get,” Willingham said of the cuts at PHMSA. “We don’t want a day like we had in Satartia again. In 35 years in emergency service I have seen some crazy stuff but that was a wild, wild day.”

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Six Months in, Trump Has Made American Life Immeasurably Worse

Sunday marked six months of President Donald Trump’s return to office.

To celebrate, he and top Republicans kicked the hagiography into full gear. “Today is Six Month Anniversary of my Second Term. Importantly, it’s being hailed as one of the most consequential periods of any President,” Trump claimed in a Truth Social rant. House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) claimed in a post on X, “JUST SIX MONTHS into President Trump’s second term, America is safer, stronger, and more prosperous”—despite ample evidence to the contrary. Meanwhile, the White House posted an absurd cartoon depicting a slimmed-down Trump with $100 bills and bald eagles flying in the air around him, plus a nearly two-minute-long video that touted his alleged accomplishments.

But millions of Americans would disagree with those assertions. In fact, a closer look at the reality of Trump’s second term so far shows that his administration hasmade life worse for huge swaths of the electorate. Let’s count the ways.

• His so-called Big Beautiful Bill is expected to explode the deficit to $3.4 trillion, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, and kick 10 million off their health insurance; defund Planned Parenthood, which poor women disproportionately use to access services such as cancer screenings and birth control (though this measure has currently been paused by a federal court); slash billions earmarked for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), which helps poor people buy food; raise energy prices; and secure tax cuts for the rich at the expense of the poor.
• Trump and DOGE’s dismantling of the federal government has undermined the future of the federal workforce. Gutted offices include those that promote healthy pregnancies, combat human trafficking, track gun injuries, and work to prevent intimate partner violence, just to name a few examples. DOGE has also effectively abolished USAID, the agency that supports foreign aid abroad, which has already undermined responses to crises abroad and reportedly already led to more deaths. Researchers also estimate the cuts could lead to another 14 million deaths by 2030. (It’s no wonder that other countries kind of hate us right now.)
• ICE agents have kidnapped student protesters and lawful residents, harassed the volunteers who support immigrants, and snatched asylum seekers after court hearings. The staggering increase in ICE funding, outlined in the recent Republican spending bill, is set to make all this worse.
• The administration launched a full-scale assault on transgender Americans. This includes the shutting down of a suicide hotline for LGBTQ youth; banning trans troops from the military; unscientifically declaring there are only two genders; attacking gender-affirming care; removing resources relevant to LGBTQ people from federal websites; and targeting teachers who support trans and nonbinary students.
• Progress disabled people have made has been steadily rolled back across government, which will likely lead to lower pay and more housing discrimination for people with disabilities, among other outcomes.
• The administration has also enacted an assault on rural America. Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill could lead 140 rural hospitals to close; his ever-shifting tariff proposals have thrown farmers into whiplash; the Department of Agriculture suspended billions of dollars in payments for programs for farmers and rural communities and gutted the department’s regional offices, which support farmers; and the defunding of public media will disproportionately harm local stations in rural communities.
• Despite Trump’s campaign trail pledge to make IVF more accessible, he has yet to do so, more than two months after a self-imposed deadline. Other ways his administration has undermined reproductive health include seeking to restrict access to abortion pills and nominating anti-abortion officials to lead critical federal agencies in which they could further crack down on abortion access.
• Trump has emboldened political violence and extremists from his first day back in office, when he pardoned nearly 1,600 peoplewho participated in the January 6 attack at the US Capitol. The administration has also quietly dismantled an office at the Department of Homeland Security charged with preventing violence; he has also shut down the Office of Gun Violence Prevention and ordered the rollback of firearm regulations.
• Trump and his allies demolished progress on climate change by withdrawing the US (again) from the Paris Climate Agreement, challenged state laws aimed at targeting climate change, and dismissed nearly 400 contributors to the government’s annual study on climate change.

When you consider the past six months in their totality, it’s clear that it was an historic start to Trump’s second term—just not in the ways he thinks.

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ICE Agents Keep Snatching Asylum Seekers Immediately After Their Court Hearings

This story was originally published by Mission Local_, a nonprofit newsroom covering San Francisco. You can donate to them here._

Three asylum-seekers were arrested Friday directly after court hearings at San Francisco immigration court, continuing a weeks-long pattern of federal agents waiting just outside courtrooms and arresting people as they step into the halls.

Mission Local saw all three arrests, which took place at 630 Sansome Street, which houses an ICE field office and several courtrooms. The first was at about 8:40 a.m., when a woman, surrounded by people who appeared to be ICE agents, was handcuffed in the hallway outside of the courtroom.

The second and third arrests were later that morning, before noon. In both cases, asylum-seekers had barely stepped outside the courtroom when about five federal agents, some of whom clearly wore Immigration and Customs Enforcement badges, arrested them. They were swarmed and directed through a nearby door.

One lawyer pleaded with a courtroom security guard to let a man use his cellphone to text his attorney: “He’s about to be arrested outside.”

In all three cases, a Department of Homeland Security attorney had moved to dismiss the asylum-seekers’ petition, a novel tactic the Trump administration is using to arrest immigrants and put them on a fast-track to deportations. In at least two of the three cases, the judge did not accept the attorney’s motion.

Instead, the judge gave the asylum-seeker time to respond in writing, which should have given them protections from deportation. But, as has happened routinely in San Francisco, ICE agents arrested them anyway.

They are likely to be taken to detention centers in California or even outside the state. There are no centers near San Francisco, so for most people arrested at court, it means travel to far-flung parts of the state like the Golden State Annex in McFarland or Mesa Verde in Bakersfield.

Friday’s arrests are the latest at increasingly-tense courtrooms in San Francisco: ICE has made more than 30 arrests after court hearings since May 27, and on Friday agents, at least one of whom was armed, walked up and down the hallways outside the courtrooms, waiting to make arrests.

Those inside the courtroom are more fearful than ever: One woman, who arrived at court with a young child, started crying in the back of the courtroom. When the judge asked her how she was, she told him in Spanish through an interpreter, “Nervous.”

While immigration attorneys giving free legal advice have typically conferred with asylum-seekers in a private room, on Friday and, at a different courtroom at 630 Sansome Street on July 10, they huddled in the back of the courtrooms instead. The attorneys knew that if they stepped out into the halls even en route to give legal advice, the asylum-seekers would be detained immediately.

These attorneys, dispatched to court by the Bar Association of San Francisco under the “Attorney of the Day Program,” also collect contact information of relatives, so they can be told that their family member may be detained.

But even that simple communication is facing increasing scrutiny from court security.

On Friday, a security guard came into the courtroom and tried to get an asylum-seeker—whose case DHS had moved to dismiss and who was about to be arrested—to put away his phone while in court as he spoke with the immigration attorney. The attorney pushed back and stood between the guard and the asylum-seeker.

“He’s about to be arrested outside,” she said. He would not be able to contact his attorney out in the hall, he said, “because he’s about to be arrested.”

The security guard relented. But he stood just a few feet from the asylum-seeker, occasionally looking over his shoulder, as the man whispered to his lawyer and continued to text.

Electronics are not allowed in court, though the rule has not always been strictly enforced. Mission Local has observed security guards cracking down, and on Friday a guard told two court observers to put their phones away.

In a different courtroom at 630 Sansome Street on July 10, Mission Local saw a security guard raise his voice at a member of the public who was observing court for having her phone out. The judge in that courtroom, Patrick O’Brien, told the security guard to let him handle it.

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Mamdani Skewers Racist Critics With Delightful Video

As Zohran Mamdani, the democratic socialist who made history last month with his stunning victory in the Democratic primary for New York City mayor, continues to rake in powerful endorsements, he made a scheduling announcement: He’s ona brief trip to celebrate his February nuptials with “family and friends.”

Such bland news wouldn’t normally require the creation of an entire social media video. But it was the trip’s destination—Uganda, where Mamdani was born and lived for seven years before moving to the United States—that Mamdani highlighted to cheekily skewer his critics head-on.

In the clip, Mamdani played on the explosion of racist attacks telling him to “go back” to Africa. He also prepared a string of pun-heavy headlines for the conservative-leaning New York Post.

“UGANDA MISS ME.”

“HE AFRI-CAN’T BE SERIOUS.”

The clip once again underscored the Mamdani campaign’s ability to use social media videos to engage with everyday New Yorkers in ways that are widely praised as authentic, a crucial ingredient to his success. In turn, Mamdani’s opponents, Andrew Cuomo and Eric Adams, have used Mamdani’s social media savvy to attack him. “Let’s be clear: They have a record of tweets,” Adams said last month when he launched his independent campaign.

Good morning! I'm in Uganda to visit family and friends.

But depending on your perspective, don't worry or I'm sorry: I'll be back by the end of the month.

See you soon, NYC. pic.twitter.com/fIOf5NcZqy

— Zohran Kwame Mamdani (@ZohranKMamdani) July 20, 2025

The Uganda trip follows a much-maligned New York Times story on Mamdani’s 2009 college application to Columbia University, in which Mamdani identified as both African-American and Asian. The leaked info used by the Times came from a right-wing eugenicist, whom my colleague Noah Lanard later reported once wished a happy birthday to Adolf Hitler, and used a racial slur when saying those who are attracted to Black people should kill themselves.

Since stunning the country with his victory last month, Mamdani has worked to charm his detractors, including powerful figures in the business community, with direct meetings. On Friday, he scored the powerful endorsement of a local health care union, which had previously backed Mamdani’s opponent, Andrew Cuomo, who told an audience at a Hamptons fundraiser hosted by Gristedes billionaire John Catsimatidis this weekend that he would move to Florida if Mamdani becomes mayor.

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Trump Really Did Try to Drag His Musk Feud Into Pure Revenge Territory

As President Donald Trump’s bitter feud with Elon Musk spilled into public view last month, aides to the president reportedly launched a behind-the-scenes effort to carry out Trump’s threats to terminate Musk’s contracts with the federal government. Those threats marked an alarming willingness by the president to take his wrestling match with Musk to a potentially new level of lawlessness.

Ultimately, aides to the president, the Wall Street Journal reports, concluded that SpaceX contracts were too critical to operations at the Defense Department and NASA, once again underscoring the federal government’s heavy reliance on Musk’s technologies. But it’s the review itself, that it happened at all, that should cause considerable alarm, even if it involves an unsympathetic character such as Elon Musk.

As my colleague Jeremy Schulman wrote: “In a democracy, politicians simply cannot be allowed to punish dissent by threatening to destroy the businesses of people who cross them—whether those businesses are media companies, law firms, or a defense contractor run by the world’s richest man.” Of course, such concerns can be identified nearly everywhere throughout Trump’s second term, as he uses the enormous powers of the federal government to target his perceived enemies: top law firms, cultural institutions, Biden officials, civil servants, and more. Just look at the bogus “investigation” into a renovation at the Federal Reserve as Trump openly considers firing Fed Chair Jerome Powell.

With SpaceX, Trump may have been thwarted. But that might only be temporary. As the WSJ reports, the review remains ongoing, and aides are sure to be looking into other areas of retribution against Musk as he continues pouring gasoline over their feud. (Musk, who earlier appeared to suggest that Trump may be named in the Epstein files, is now one of several prominent MAGA characters to claim a full-blown “coverup” by the president.) Whatever you might think of the billionaire, that should frighten you.

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Los Angeles Is Rebuilding Very Slowly From Its Devastating Wildfires. Here’s why.

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

In the wake of the record-breaking wildfires in Los Angeles in January—some of the most expensive and destructive blazes in history—one of the first things California Gov. Gavin Newsom did was to sign an executive order suspending environmental rules around rebuilding.

The idea was that by waiving permitting regulations and reviews under the California Coastal Act and the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA), homeowners and builders could start cleaning up, putting up walls, and getting people back into houses faster.

But that raised a key question for housing advocates: Could California do something similar for the whole state?

Earlier this month, Newsom took a step in that direction, signing two bills that would exempt most urban housing from environmental reviews and make it easier for cities to increase housing by changing zoning laws. Newsom also signed another executive order that suspends some local permitting laws and building codes for fire-afflicted communities with the aim of further speeding up reconstruction.

“Anecdotally, we’ve heard that a lot of people have decided they don’t want to go through the process of rebuilding in LA because it is quite onerous.”

Housing reforms can’t come soon enough for the City of Angels. Blown by hurricane-strength Santa Ana winds over an unusually dry, grassy landscape, the wildfires that tore through LA burned almost 48,000 acres and damaged or destroyed more than 16,000 structures, including more than 9,500 single-family homes, 1,200 duplexes, and 600 apartments in one of the most housing-starved regions of the country.

Los Angeles is a critical case study for housing for the whole state, a test of whether the Democratic-controlled government can coordinate its conflicting political bases—unions, environmental groups, housing advocates—with a desperate need for more homes. Revising the state’s environmental laws was seen by some observers as a sign that the Golden State was finally seeing the light.

But despite the relaxed rules, progress in LA has been sluggish. More than 800 homeowners in areas affected by wildfires applied for rebuilding permits as of July 7, according to the Los Angeles Times. Fewer than 200 have received the green light, however. The City of Los Angeles takes about 55 days on average to approve a wildfire rebuild, and the broader Los Angeles County takes even longer. (Los Angeles County has a dashboard to track permitting approvals in unincorporated areas.)

“LA’s process is super slow, so that’s not surprising,” said Elisa Paster, a managing partner at Rand Paster Nelson based in Los Angeles and specializing in land use law. “Anecdotally, we’ve heard that a lot of people have decided they don’t want to go through the process of rebuilding in LA because it is quite onerous.”

Now, half a year out after the embers have died down, it’s clear that changing the rules isn’t enough. Advocates for CEQA say the 55-year-old law is really a scapegoat for bigger, more intractable housing problems. Other factors, like more expensive construction materials and labor shortages, are still driving up housing construction costs, regardless of permitting speeds. And some environmental groups worry that the rush to rebuild everything as it was could re-create the conditions that led to the blazes in the first place, a dangerous prospect in an area where wildfire risks are only growing.

CEQA is one of California’s tentpole environmental laws, signed by Gov. Ronald Reagan in 1970. It requires that state and local governments preemptively look for any potential environmental harms from a construction project, like water pollution, threats to endangered species, and later, greenhouse gas emissions. Developers need to disclose these issues and take steps to avoid them. The law also allows the public to weigh in on new developments.

In the years since, CEQA has been blamed as a barrier to new construction. Many critics see it as a cynical tool wielded to prevent new housing construction in wealthy communities, even being invoked to challenge highway closures and new parks on environmental grounds. It’s one of the villains of the “abundance” movement that advocates for cutting red tape to build more homes and clean energy.

“The question is, how does one really exist within a natural system that’s designed to burn?”

However, CEQA isn’t necessarily the gatekeeper to rebuilding single-family homes after wildfires, according to Matthew Baker, policy director at Planning and Conservation League, a nonprofit that helped shepherd CEQA in the first place.

For one thing, CEQA already has broad exemptions for replacing and rebuilding structures, and new construction of “small” structures like single-family homes. “Our general take is that the executive orders around revoking environmental review and environmental regulations around the rebuilding [after the fires] did little to nothing beyond what was already in existing law,” Baker said. He added that the vast majority of projects that face CEQA review get the go-ahead, and less than 2 percent of proposals face litigation.

But the mere threat of a lawsuit and the precautions to avoid one can become a significant hurdle on its own. “CEQA can be an expensive and lengthy process, especially for large or complicated projects. This is true even if there is not litigation,” according to a 2024 report from California’s Little Hoover Commission, the state’s independent oversight agency. “Preparation of an Environmental Impact Report under CEQA can take a year or longer and cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, or even, in some cases, more than $1 million.”

In addition, CEQA does come into play for people who want to make more extensive changes to their property as they rebuild, like if they want to expand their floorspace more than 10 percent beyond their original floor plan. The law is also triggered by broader wildfire risk reduction initiatives, namely brush clearance and controlled burns, as well as infrastructure upgrades like putting power lines underground to prevent fire ignitions or installing more pipelines and cisterns for water to help with firefighting. Exempting these projects could help communities build fire resilience faster.

For multifamily homes like duplexes and apartment buildings, CEQA can be an obstacle, too, if the developer wants to rebuild with more units. “We have multifamily buildings in the Palisades that had rent-controlled units, and what we’ve been hearing from some of these property owners is like, ‘Yeah, sure. I had 20 rent-controlled units there before, but I can’t afford to just rebuild 20.’ Those people want to go back and build 50 units, 20 of which could be rent-controlled, or all of which are rent-controlled.” By bypassing CEQA, higher-density housing has an easier path to completion.

Rebuilding after fires is always going to be expensive. Your home may have been built and sold in the 1970s, but you’ll have to pay 2025 prices for materials and labor when you rebuild. California already faces some of the highest housing costs in the country and a shortage of construction workers.

The Trump administration is pushing the price tag higher with tariffs on components like lumber and its campaign to deport people. About 41 percent of workers in California’s construction industry are immigrants, and 14 percent are undocumented.

But even before they can rebuild, one of the biggest challenges for people who have lost their homes is simply becoming whole after a loss. “From the clients that I’ve spoken to, they’ve had to argue with their insurance company to get full replacement value or reasonable compensation, and that’s where they’re getting stuck,” said David Hertz, an architect based in Santa Monica.

“There’s a balance” between housing and environmental concerns. “Nature doesn’t have its own voice.”

On top of the tedious claims process, insurance companies in California have been dropping some of their customers in high fire-risk areas, leaving them no option besides the FAIR Plan, the state’s high-priced, limited-coverage insurer of last resort. But after the multibillion-dollar losses from the Los Angeles fires, the FAIR Plan had to collect an additional $1 billion from its member companies, a move that will raise property insurance prices. People who can’t get property insurance can’t get a mortgage from most lenders.

There’s also the concern of exactly where and how homes are rebuilt. In 2008, California updated its building codes to make structures more resistant to wildfires, but bringing burned-down old homes to new standards in high fire risk areas adds to the timeline and the price tag.

“There’s this tension between all of us wanting to have people be able to rebuild their homes in their communities, and there’s the question of ‘Are we just going to build back the same thing in the same unsafe place? Are we going to try to do things better?” Baker said.

All the while, wildfires are becoming more destructive. Wildfires are a natural part of Southern California’s landscape, but more people are crowding into areas that are primed to burn, and the danger zones are widening. That increases the chances of a wildfire ignition and makes the ensuing blazes more damaging.

With average temperatures rising, California is seeing more aggressive swings between severe rainfall and drought. The 2025 Los Angeles fires were preceded in 2024 by one of the wettest winters in the region’s history, followed by one of the hottest summers on record, and bookended by one of the driest starts to winter. It created the ideal conditions for ample dry grasses and chaparral that fueled the infernos.

“The question is, how does one really exist within a natural system that’s designed to burn?” Hertz said. Reducing wildfire risk on a wider scale requires coordination between neighbors.

For example, Hertz said that in many of the communities that burned, there are likely many residents who won’t come back. Neighbors could coordinate to buy up and swap vacant land parcels to create a defensible space with fire-resistant trees like oak to serve as fire breaks and water storage to help respond to future blazes. Hertz himself leads a community brigade, trained volunteers who work to reduce wildfire risk in their neighborhoods.

He also cautioned that while there’s a lot of well-deserved pushback against regulations like CEQA, the reasoning behind it remains sound. Development without any environmental considerations could put more homes in the path of danger and destroy the ecosystems that make California such an attractive place to live. “I think there’s a balance,” Hertz said. “Nature doesn’t have its own voice.”

At the same time, without speeding up the pace at which California restores the homes that were lost and builds new ones, the housing crisis will only get worse. The state will become unlivable for many residents. Long after the burn scars fade and new facades are erected, communities will be altered permanently.

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Trump Sues the Wall Street Journal Over Epstein Birthday Album Story

Donald Trump filed suit late Friday afternoon against the _Wall Street Journal’_s parent company, media mogul Rupert Murdoch, and several other defendants, saying he was defamed by a story that claimed he contributed to a 50th birthday album for Jeffrey Epstein in 2003. Trump is demanding $10 billion in damages; in a post on TruthSocial, he called the legal action a “POWERHOUSE Lawsuit,” calling the article “false, malicious, defamatory, FAKE NEWS” and the Journal a “useless ‘rag.'”

The story concerns a birthday album compiled by Epstein’s ex-girlfriend and procurer Ghislaine Maxwell, who’s now serving 20 years on sex trafficking charges. In the album, the paper wrote, was a “bawdy” letter bearing Donald Trump’s name.

“It contains several lines of typewritten text framed by the outline of a naked woman, which appears to be hand-drawn with a heavy marker,” reporters Khadeeja Safdar and Joe Palazzolo wrote. “A pair of small arcs denotes the woman’s breasts, and the future president’s signature is a squiggly ‘Donald’ below her waist, mimicking pubic hair.” The typewritten text features an imaginary conversation between Epstein and Trump, written in the third person. The letter closes with the words, “Happy Birthday — and may every day be another wonderful secret.”

The Journal story also prominently featured Trump’s denial, in which he called the letter “a fake thing,” adding, “I never wrote a picture in my life. I don’t draw pictures of women,” he said. “It’s not my language. It’s not my words.”

In the complaint, Trump’s lawyers write that Safdar and Palazzolo “failed to attach the letter, failed to attach the alleged drawing, failed to show proof that President Trump authored or signed any such letter, and failed to explain how this purported letter was obtained.”

Trump also immediately threatened to sue the paper, “just like I sued everyone else.” Paramount recently agreed to pay a $16 million settlement to settle a suit from Trump alleging that CBS had engaged in election interference by what he loudly insisted was unfair editing of a 60 Minutes interview with then-presidential nominee Kamala Harris. (For good measure, CBS is also canceling Stephen Colbert’s show, days after he called the Paramount settlement “a big fat bribe” on air, citing vague financial concerns.) In December 2024, ABC News agreed to make a $15 million donation to Trump’s presidential library to settle a lawsuit over comments that anchor George Stephanopoulos made about writer E. Jean Carroll’s civil lawsuits, which she brought against Trump for sexual abuse and defamation. Trump was ordered to pay Caroll $5 million, a judgment that was just upheld by a federal appeals court in June. But Stephanopoulos incorrectly stated that Trump was “found liable for rape,” which he was not.

In his suit against Murdoch and the Journal, filed by Florida law firm Brito PLC, Trump also names Dow Jonesand NewsCorp CEO Robert Thomson as defendants as well as each journalist on the story individually. In the complaint, Trump’s lawyers write that Safdar and Palazzolo “failed to attach the letter, failed to attach the alleged drawing, failed to show proof that President Trump authored or signed any such letter, and failed to explain how this purported letter was obtained.” It also complains that the story went “viral” on the internet and Twitter, including screenshots of organizations like the Lincoln Project and figures like former MSNBC host Keith Olbermann sharing it.

In a post on TruthSocial after the lawsuit was filed, Trump cast it as part of a long history of legal actions against the media.

“We have proudly held to account ABC and George Slopadopoulos, CBS and 60 Minutes, The Fake Pulitzer Prizes, and many others who deal in, and push, disgusting LIES, and even FRAUD, to the American People,” he wrote. “This lawsuit is filed not only on behalf of your favorite President, ME, but also in order to continue standing up for ALL Americans who will no longer tolerate the abusive wrongdoings of the Fake News Media. I hope Rupert and his ‘friends’ are looking forward to the many hours of depositions and testimonies they will have to provide in this case.”

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There’s a Lot We Still Don’t Know About Jeffrey Epstein

“I want every email from Epstein,” declared MAGA activist, self-styled journalist, former men’s rights advocate, former Pizzagate promoter, and former juicing evangelist Mike Cernovich recently, speaking to MAGA-world figure and disgraced BuzzFeed plagiarist Benny Johnson. “It might embarrass people, I don’t care. We’re done.”

In the decades since the Jeffrey Epstein scandal began, it has attracted a lot of attention from very strange and distinctly unsavory people, each drawn to the case for their own reasons. Cernovich, for instance, got involved in his capacity as a quasi-journalist and promoter of conspiracy theories involving wealthy and powerful cabals of sexual abusers. He was one of the people who sued to unseal documents in the civil case of Victoria Giuffre, a woman who alleged that Epstein trafficked her to numerous wealthy and powerful men.

But these days even the frequent disinformation peddlers like Cernovich have a reasonable point: There is a disturbing amount that we still don’t know about Jeffrey Epstein.

The first real question is about Epstein’s personal fortune; it’s never been clear how, exactly, he got so rich.

The basic facts are clear, of course: Epstein was a billionaire pedophile and friend to the world’s wealthy and powerful who, in all likelihood and according to every piece of available evidence, died by suicide in 2019 while incarcerated and facing sex trafficking charges. But from the time Epstein’s crimes first began to attract notice from the police and press in the early 2000sto the scandal and chaos that ensued this month after Trump’s FBI and Department of Justice tried to quietly close the book on the case, there have been loose ends, unanswered questions, unreleased documents, and an endless amount of fodder for future conspiracy theories.

The first real question is about Epstein’s personal fortune; it’s never been clear how, exactly, he got so rich. In a 2019 story, the New York Times attempted to answer that question, noting that in the 1980s, Epstein befriended Victoria’s Secret founder Lex Wexner, quickly becoming his personal money manager. Epstein had worked for two years as a math and physics teacher at the elite Dalton School and then as an options trader for Bear Stearns before being dismissed in 1981. From there, he founded his own money management firm for billionaire clients. That business was an immediate, almost baffling, success. As New York magazine wrote in 2002, “There were no road shows, no whiz-bang marketing demos—just this: Jeff Epstein was open for business for those with $1 billion–plus.”

By the time Vicky Ward wrote a famous profile of Epstein for Vanity Fair in 2003, he was committed to a life of secrecy, what Ward described as “fastidiously, almost obsessively private.”

Among those clients—central among them, as far as anyone can tell—was Wexner of Victoria’s Secret. Those around the executive also couldn’t understand why Epstein had so quickly assumed a position of trust in his financial life. “Virtually from the moment in the 1980s that Mr. Epstein arrived on the scene in Columbus, Ohio, where L Brands was based,” the Times wrote in its 2019 story, “Mr. Wexner’s friends and colleagues were mystified as to why a renowned businessman in the prime of his career would place such trust in an outsider with a thin résumé and scant financial experience.” And it was through his association with Wexner’s companies that Epstein began trying to expand his access to young women, the Times wrote, “trying to involve himself in the recruitment of lingerie models for the Victoria’s Secret catalog.”

(While Wexner didn’t speak to the Times after Epstein’s second arrest, he told his employees in a 2019 letter acquired by the paper that he was “NEVER aware of the illegal activity charged in the indictment.”)

By the time Vicky Ward wrote a famous profile of Epstein for Vanity Fair in 2003, he was committed to a life of secrecy, what Ward described as “fastidiously, almost obsessively private—he lists himself in the phone book under a pseudonym.”

“There are many women in his life, mostly young,” Ward wrote, in a line that now sounds incredibly ominous. “But there is no one of them to whom he has been able to commit.”

It would take until 2019 before Epstein was indicted again, this time on federal sex trafficking charges, with the date of the alleged offenses listed as from 2002 to “at least 2005.”

By the early 2000s, Epstein was living in a Palm Beach mansion. There, he and his accomplices, including ex-girlfriend Ghislaine Maxwell, hired teenage girls to massage him; during these sessions, Epstein would sexually abuse them. (Maxwell was not charged until 2020; she’s now serving 20 years on sex trafficking charges.)

Epstein was finally indicted in 2006, but as journalist Julie K. Brown at the Miami Herald has meticulously documented for years, he was almost immediately handed an extraordinarily, scandalously gentle plea deal. Epstein pleaded guilty to just two felony prostitution charges, and he and his accomplices received a federal non-prosecution agreement where he wasn’t charged for sex trafficking. Top federal prosecutor Alex Acosta was directly involved in brokering the deal; years later, while serving as Donald Trump’s labor secretary, renewed criticism of his role in the Epstein deal led him to resign. Epstein served just 13 months in county jail, where he spent most of his time at his office on what was dubbed work release. A jail supervisor wrote in a memo that his jail cell should be left unlocked “for the time being” and he should be given “liberal access to the attorney room where a TV will be installed.” It would take until 2019 before furor over the non-prosecution agreement reached a fever pitch and Epstein was indicted again in New York, this time on federal sex trafficking charges, with the date of the alleged offenses listed as from 2oo2 to “at least 2005.”

Besides the mystery of Epstein’s wealth and his exceptionally soft-handed treatment by the justice system, there’s also a mountain of unreleased material attached to the many civil and two criminal cases filed against him. As Brown outlined in March, material from numerous cases has never been released, including discovery documents for a civil case filed in 2008 against the FBI by Epstein’s alleged victims. There’s also unreleased evidence relating to Epstein’s properties in the US Virgin Islands, Little Saint James and Greater Saint James.

“Why were personnel told to flag records in which President Trump was mentioned?” Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) wrote in open letters to Attorney General Pam Bondi, FBI Director Kash Patel, and FBI Deputy Director Dan Bongino.

(After weeks of criticism, Trump recently called for the release of grand jury records from Epstein’s Florida and New York cases; since grand jury records are usually secret, the process of releasing those records could take a very long time. “I have asked the Justice Department to release all Grand Jury testimony with respect to Jeffrey Epstein, subject only to Court Approval,” Trump wrote on TruthSocial on Saturday morning. “With that being said, and even if the Court gave its full and unwavering approval, nothing will be good enough for the troublemakers and radical left lunatics making the request. It will always be more, more, more. MAGA!”)

Besides all the unreleased court records and the mystery of Epstein’s wealth, there is, of course, the question of why the FBI and DOJ released an unsigned memo declaring the case closed. And just this week, Senate Democratic whip Dick Durbin of Illinois alleged that the FBI was told to “flag” any Epstein files relating to Trump. The implications of that allegation, however, are not yet fully clear.

“Why were personnel told to flag records in which President Trump was mentioned?” Durbin wrote in open letters to Attorney General Pam Bondi, FBI Director Kash Patel, and FBI Deputy Director Dan Bongino. “What happened to the records mentioning President Trump once they were flagged?”

One of the less compelling allegations in the Epstein saga is the idea that a Deep State assassin snuck into his Manhattan jail cell in 2019. In all likelihood, Epstein died alone, facing something approaching a real consequence for the first time in his sordid life. But it’s absolutely true that it’s still not fully clear who aided his rise, bolstered his fortune, and possibly helped him evade responsibility for his crimes, nor is the extent of those crimes or the infrastructure of wealth, power, and coercion that made them possible. In a rare moment of unity for the American public during an impossibly fractured time, that, at least, is something we can all agree on.

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The Landlord Gutting America’s Hospitals

In April 2024, medical staff testified before Louisiana’s House Health and Welfare Committee about just how bad things had gotten at the Glenwood Regional Medical Center.

The West Monroe hospital had been under fire from the state Health Department over lapses in patient care that seemed to be escalating. The hospital had stopped paying bills for oxygen supplies, the blood bank, and repairs to the elevators that take patients up to surgery.

Former Glenwood nurse Debra Russell testified that there wasn’t a cardiologist available when a man suffered a heart attack or a $5 piece of equipment she needed for a routine procedure.

“You would send a nurse to go get it,” Russell said. “And she would come back and say, ‘Oh, Miss Debra, I don’t have any.’ I said, ‘Go to another unit.’…‘We don’t have one.’”

Glenwood was run by Steward Health Care, at the time one of the country’s largest for-profit health care operators. But its building was owned by Medical Properties Trust—a real estate company based in Birmingham, Alabama, that charged Glenwood monthly rent.

Related

Wall Street Gutted Steward Health Care. Patients Paid the Price.

State Rep. Michael Echols, a Republican whose district includes Glenwood, had been flooded with concerns from community members. Echols had begun to wonder whether the high rent to MPT was fueling Glenwood’s financial crisis. He struggled to get real answers.

Glenwood is just one of nearly 400 health care facilities owned by MPT and rented out to hospital chains. Nine companies that leased hospitals from MPT have gone bankrupt—including Steward, Glenwood’s former operator. And while dozens of hospitals have been sold, entangled in bankruptcy proceedings, or become depleted shells, MPT’s top brass has earned millions.

This week on Reveal, Mother Jones reporter Hannah Levintova and Reveal producer Ashley Cleek dig into MPT—its history, its business model, and how treating hospitals like financial assets leaves them gutted. And don’t miss Levintova’s yearlong reporting project on Steward’s demise, including our collaboration with Al Jazeera’s Fault Lines:

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Why Flash Flood Warnings Are Never Enough

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

This year’s Fourth of July was the first time that the town of Comfort, Texas, used the sirens intended to warn its roughly 2,000 residents of imminent flooding. Founded by German abolitionists in 1854, Comfort sits along the Guadalupe River in an area known as “flash flood alley.” It installed its siren-based warning system last year, a move that neighboring Kerr County, where well over 100 people died in this month’s floods, opted against.

One Comfort resident told Grist that when she heard the sirens, she had no way of knowing just how much urgency was called for. “In my mind, I’m going, ‘Okay we’ve got a couple hours before it gets up to the house, because it’s a 50-foot drop from our house to the creek,” she said. Her husband started walking down to check on the water level, but quickly ran back inside. “You’ve got five minutes,” he told her. “Grab everything you need.’”

Ultimately, she and her husband were lucky—they were able to shelter with a neighbor whose house is on higher ground—but their close call captures a dilemma that’s taking on new urgency as flash floods claim lives from Texas to North Carolina: Even the most comprehensive disaster warnings are only as helpful as the responses of those who receive them.

“If you’ve never seen water rise in front of you in minutes, it’s hard to conceive of how quickly that can happen—and how quickly your life and property can be at risk,” said Rachel Hogan Carr, executive director of the Nurture Nature Center, a nonprofit focused on flood-risk communication.

“There’s barriers to warning delivery from things like internet connectivity, people not having cell phones, or being asleep when a warning comes in,” added Hogan Carr, who is also a co-chair of Integrated Prediction of Precipitation and Hydrology for Early Actions (InPRA) a working group within National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration that researches early warning systems. “Communities need to anticipate these barriers, and set up local systems in order to amplify the distribution of warnings when they come in.”

”It has to be really a comprehensive strategy of community support.”

In the aftermath of the July 4 deluge, questions about the efficacy of local warning systems have swirled, particularly in Kerr County, which saw the most devastating flooding. Although the county had the ability to use FEMA’s Integrated Public Alert and Warning System (IPAWS), to push out aggressive, vibrating alarms to residents’ mobile phones—similar to those that sound when an AMBER alert is issued to inform residents of a given area about a missing child—that system wasn’t used until days after the flood, as more rain headed towards the area.

That said, cellphone customers in the at-risk service area were sent a variety of warnings—including a flash flood warning from the National Weather Service—but their effects appear to have been limited. Many received no alert, or only received an alert after the flood had overtaken them. Even if the county had sent additional warnings, many residents likely would have missed them if their phones were off or out of reach for the night.

Plus, a warning from local officials may have carried more weight than the alerts from the National Weather Service, Abdul-Akeem Sadiq, a professor at the University of Central Florida who studies emergency management, told the Washington Post. People tend to be more receptive to warnings that are tailored specifically to them, added Hogan Carr.

“We saw this in Superstorm Sandy,” she explained. “Even though the entire New Jersey shoreline there was at risk, if it didn’t say somebody’s specific small town name, they often decided it [didn’t apply] to them.”

On the night of the flooding, Kerr County resident Martha Murayama says she was woken up by an audible alert on her phone. But she turned it off without reading the warning, assuming that it was an AMBER Alert. Murayama lives in the gated subdivision of Bumble Bee Hills, which sit directly across from the Guadalupe between Kerrville and Ingram, Texas. By then, the flood was already well underway. Not long after she got back to bed, Murayama received a panicked call from her neighbor, saying that someone was banging on the door. It was a family who lived directly across from the river, trying to warn people as they moved to higher ground. Murayama was worried—her neighbor, Joe, suffers from Parkinson’s and was not in good health. When Murayama’s husband went outside to investigate, he was quickly swept away by floodwaters, although he was ultimately able to make his way back to the house.

Just up the hill, Ramiro Rodriguez was awoken by the same family seeking shelter. Like Murayama, he too thought immediately of Joe and made his way down to the house through floodwaters to help Joe and his wife up the hill. As they managed to pop the garage door open, Rodriguez spotted a tow strap, which he used to haul the couple to his house. “I tied up Joe to my hips,” he said. “And right about that time, you can hear the flash flood warning.”

But just as quickly as the water arrived, it receded. Since July 4, Murayama says, she’s gotten new flood alerts constantly.

Flash floods are among the deadliest natural disasters and the most difficult to accurately predict. Less than 1 percent of waterways across the United States have stream gauges that monitor rising water in real time; the National Weather Service often relies on computer modeling to assess flood risk in smaller creeks and streams. (Kerr County only has six river gauges, which makes predicting floods more difficult).

But nearby development can quickly render these models outdated. For example, a stream bordered by concrete will flood much faster and cause much more damage in the surrounding community than one that runs alongside a park, which has natural features that can absorb water.

Even when floods can be anticipated, communicating their severity to the public is a tall order. Because flash floods are very localized, even neighborhood-level warnings may seem like false alarms to some residents, leading to what the journalist Zoë Schlanger has dubbed “alert fatigue.”

That’s why early community education is such an integral part of a functioning warning system, according to Hogan Carr. “If you get a flash flood warning and you never see it, you got lucky,” she said.

Many people do not understand the speed with which floods move, which can lead to them driving through areas that are about to be submerged, for example. Warnings such as the ones sent in Texas, encouraging residents to “move to higher ground,” don’t necessarily convey urgency, according to Ashley Coles, an associate professor of environmental geography at Texas Christian University who studies flash flooding.

“I spoke to somebody regarding the flooding in Texas. They said, ‘You know, if I had gotten that message I would’ve gotten together a go bag and then gone to bed.’ So they would have been ready to evacuate if needed, but it came so fast that they would have been swept away,” said Coles. “It makes it very difficult even for people who are trying to be cautious.”

The National Weather Service has defended its response to the floods, pointing out that it issued warnings at 1:14 am, two hours before the flood waters reached inhabited riverside areas like Camp Mystic. But the warnings, though they cautioned that “life-threatening” flooding was possible, did not order evacuations.

As climate change makes flash floods and other extreme weather events more common and deadly, researchers across the country are struggling with how to effectively communicate risk to the public, without losing their trust through over-warning.

”It has to be really a comprehensive strategy of community support, wrapped around the issuance of a formal flood warning,” said Hogan Carr, explaining that ideally, the local weather service would have a forecaster whose job was dedicated to doing community outreach, explaining local risks, where forecasts come from, and where residents can get reliable information in an emergency. “It’s an investment of time and resources proactively, that could pay off tremendously during these large-scale events,” she added.

In the meantime, Kerr County residents are hoping for a siren system, like the one used in neighboring Comfort. “I slept through [the phone alert],” said Rodriguez. “If it wasn’t for those people knocking on the door, I would have slept right through it.”

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“We Were Kidnapped”

On Friday, María Daniela learned that her younger brother, Neri Alvarado Borges, and more than 200 other Venezuelans sent by the Trump administration to El Salvador were being released after spending more than four months in an infamous prison. “Now it’s done,” María Daniela said in a call from Venezuela. “Now we can say we are done with this nightmare.”

Alvarado’s case, which Mother Jones reported on in March, was emblematic of the cruelty of the Trump administration’s decision to send hundreds of Venezuelans to Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele’s Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo (CECOT) prison. Like many others, Alvarado, who worked as a baker in the Dallas area, appears to have been targeted simply because he was a Venezuelan man with tattoos. It did not matter that his most prominent tattoo was an autism awareness ribbon adorned with the name of his teenage brother.

“We got a beating for breakfast. We got a beating for lunch. We got a beating for dinner.”

The Venezuelans were released as part of a prisoner swap deal including 10 Americans. (The Venezuelan government has been reported to imprison foreign nationals to gain diplomatic leverage.) The exchange comes after a previous deal being negotiated fell through, and despite the Trump administration’s insistence in court and in public statements that it did not have the power to compel El Salvador to return the removed migrants to the United States. (Court records show that Bukele’s government told the United Nations the men were under the authority of the United States, contradicting the White House’s claims.)

A relative shared a video from Venezuelan broadcaster teleSUR featuring his brother, Arturo Suárez, on the plane after it landed near Caracas. “We spent four months without any contact with the outside world,” Suárez said. “We were kidnapped.” He went on to say: “We got a beating for breakfast. We got a beating for lunch. We got a beating for dinner.”

Arturo Suárez raises his arm as he leaves the plane upon arrival in Venezuela.Ariana Cubillos/AP

Family members of some of the Venezuelan men held at CECOT told Mother Jones they were relieved, but still heartbroken over what they consider a wrongful detention. On Friday, families had been instructed by the Maduro government’s office to go to the airport near Caracas to reunite with their relatives.

Anaurys Orlimar, the sister of one of the men, Julio Zambrano, said that earlier on Friday their mother was contacted with “good news” and told to travel from Maracay to the Caracas area. Her son, Julio, had been seeking asylum in the United States. The father of two was detained in January during a routine check-in with Immigration and Customs Enforcement. His then-pregnant wife, Luz, said an officer told her they suspected Zambrano—who has two tattoos of a crown with his name and a rose—was part of a gang, which his relatives dispute.

“We are all happy and eager to see him,” Orlimar, who lives in North Carolina, said. “We didn’t expect this. We didn’t know anything. What we all did was cry with emotion knowing that my brother is going to return, that he’s going to get out of this.” Later, she recognized her brother, wearing a red face mask and a Puma t-shirt, in Telemundo’s live coverage of the flight’s arrival.

A screenshot of a text message from the sister of Julio Zambrano, who had been detained at CECOT for four months.

Mariangi Sierra, sister of Anyelo Sierra Cano, said in a message she was feeling “emotional, happy, truly something inexplicable.”

For some relatives, the news of the men’s return to Venezuela evoked more mixed feelings. Maria Quevedo, the mother of Eddie Adolfo Hurtado Quevedo, told Mother Jones she was feeling relieved but still scared. “Happy because God gave me the gift of seeing my son free on my birthday,” she said. “Scared because my son is going to Venezuela, where he was threatened by the [paramilitary group] colectivos.”

Dozens of Venezuelans sent to CECOT had pending asylum applications in US immigration courts when they were removed. In some instances, their cases have been dismissed by immigration judges. They could now be vulnerable to potential harm and persecution back in Venezuela.

“The bitterness is still there,” said a friend of one of the men sent to CECOT about the release. “The anger about what happened to him is still there.”

The men released today had been held at the maximum security prison since March, when the Trump administration sent more than 230 Venezuelans accused of being gang members to El Salvador. At least 130 of them were removed without due process under the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, a wartime power that Trump invoked for only the fourth time in US history. Investigations by Mother Jones and other publications revealed that many of the men had no connection to Tren de Aragua and appeared to have been targeted over benign tattoos—like Alvarado’s autism awareness ribbon. Most of them had no criminal history in the United States, according to ProPublica and Bloomberg. (The administration has repeatedly refused to provide evidence to support its assertion of gang affiliation.)

In a statement on Friday, the Venezuelan government said it had secured the release of 252 Venezuelan nationals who “remained kidnapped and subjected to forced disappearance in a concentration camp” in El Salvador. “Venezuela has paid a high price,” the statement continued, to free the men as part of an agreement with US government authorities. The deal also reportedly included the return to Venezuela of seven migrant children who had stayed behind in the United States after their parents were deported, according to the country’s Interior Minister Diosdado Cabello.

When María Daniela, Alvarado’s sister, spoke to Mother Jones on Friday, she and her family were about to make the roughly four-hour drive from their home to the Caracas area. Once there, they would finally be reunited with Alvarado, the brother and son they had no contact with for more than four months.

Related

“You’re Here Because of Your Tattoos”

Juan Enrique Hernández, a US citizen who came to the United States from Venezuela nearly three decades ago, was Alvarado’s boss at the bakery in the Dallas area. The two became good friends, and Hernández visited Alvarado in detention in Texas multiple times following his February arrest.

Hernández said he did everything in his power to get Alvarado out. “I went to many lawyers here and none wanted to take the case,” he explained. “They said they didn’t have jurisdiction.”

“I have mixed feelings. I’m happy on one hand,” Hernández said on Friday about Alvardo’s imminent release. “But the bitterness is still there. The anger about what happened to him is still there.”

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Colbert’s Cancellation Is a Dark Warning

On Thursday, Stephen Colbert, the beloved, sharp-tongued comedian and host of the Late Show, announced that CBS was cancelling the legendary franchise. “This is all just going away,” Colbert told the audience, as they responded with a wave of gasps and jeers. Online, the news was met with a similar blend of shock and anger.

The move to cancel one of television’s last remaining crown jewels of broadcast programming came just days after Colbert publicly criticized CBS’s corporate owner, Paramount, for agreeing to pay President Donald Trump $16 million to settle an outrageous $20 billion lawsuit against the company. Trump has now long claimed that 60 Minutes producers unfairly edited their interview with then-presidential nominee Kamala Harris, a complaint widely viewed by legal and media experts as completely baseless. The agreement was the latest in a series of bootlicking moves by Paramount as its chairwoman, Shari Redstone, desperately tries to sell the company to Skydance Media, a deal that requires federal approval.

If that sounds like the groundwork for a bribery, Colbert agrees. In his opening monologue on Monday, the host called the settlement a “big fat bribe.” CBS has since claimed that Colbert’s cancellation is “purely financial,” even though the Late Show currently clocks in as the highest-rated show on late-night.

So, what’s the truth? There’s little to doubt that the finances surrounding late-night production are probably not great. TV, particularly shows that require original writing and a marquee host, is an expensive undertaking. But the details of what led to the decision to sack Colbert are certain to expose an extraordinary level of eagerness by Paramount’s top brass to grovel at the feet of this president, as he targets his perceived enemies—the nation’s top schools, law firms, and so forth—with colossal funding threats, lawsuits, and beyond. Remember that Redstone, daughter of Paramount founder Sumner Redstone, reportedly saw nothing wrong with instructing CBS leaders to shelve negative stories about Trump until after the Skydance merger was officially sealed.

But Paramount’s future aside, the end of Colbert signals a dark new chapter in Trump’s authoritarian slide. Though his second term has already produced a string of stunning capitulations by some of the most powerful forces in the country, one could argue that Trump’s attacks had yet to take down our actual culture. I’m talking about the literal content we consume—the television, art, movies, literature, music—no matter how much Trump complained. That it remained protected and free-willed, a rare area of control for a public that otherwise feels powerless to take action. Clearly, that was magical thinking.

The only upside is that Colbert will soon be free to go scorched earth against a president he detests. Every other network stands to gain enormously right now. Here’s to hoping a spine emerges.

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Kashana Cauley’s Latest Book Conjures a New Villain for Our Times: The Debt Police

After Kashana Cauley earned her first television writing gig on the Hulu animated series The Great North, her media friends in New York were thrilled, in a jealous kind of way. “You did it!” they told her. “You made it out—you’re in a stable profession!” Cauley began her professional career in antitrust law, then built a following on Twitter that caught the attention of editors and producers who liked her pithy observations about race and gender. She grabbed bylines in The Atlantic, the New Yorker, and Esquire before landing a staff writing gig on the Daily Show With Trevor Noah. But Great North, a sitcom job, seemed like the start of a more stable career in Hollywood. And it was: The show ran for five seasons. Networks and streamers all wanted content—until they didn’t. “There is so much less TV on the air than there was, say, five or six years ago,” she told me.

Professional instability isn’t new for Cauley, and it’s at the heart of her second novel, The Payback, which published this week. The book’s main character is Jada, who is very good at her retail job that doesn’t pay her enough to make ends meet. Like Jada, Cauley worked a retail job too: six years at JCPenney. She was the first person in her family to go to college and wanted to pay her way through. She knew that going back to Madison, Wisconsin, where she was raised, to work on the General Motors assembly line like her dad was no longer an option. The closest plant closed in 2009. The money she earned at JCPenney was nowhere near what she really needed, and without anyone to help navigate the maze of college majors and white collar career prep, she landed in law school. She graduated with her law degree—and six figures of student loan debt.

As Hollywood pulled back on TV production, war broke out in Ukraine. Cauley watched it all. She was fascinated with ethical hacking, the idea that small bands of Robinhood-minded techies could help even life’s uneven playing fields. She looked into zero-day hacks, which exploit gaps in software security systems, often of large private or government institutions. She thought about the people she had met across her many careers: the wardrobe folks at the Daily Show, the costume designers in late night television, the interns at Kenneth Cole. What might a revolution look like if it were led by the fashionable creatives of the world?

“In America, if you have financial problems, there isn’t a ton of infrastructure to help you solve them. You are forced to come up with your own solutions to these big societal issues.”

In The Payback, Jada leads a trio of down-on-their-luck retail workers in a fight against the fictitious Debt Police. It’s Cauley’s second work of speculative fiction; her first book, The Survivalists, followed another woman’s perilous journey up the corporate ladder. Her new book is an action-packed thriller for everyone who’s fed up with our current political situation. “What if we looked beyond the realm of what’s happening and toward the future of possibilities?” she asks. “In this era, that’s a good place to put your head.”

I recently talked with Cauley about living with debt, leaving Twitter, and finding humor in dark times. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

What inspired The Payback‘s Debt Police?

I compare it to the Department of Education, which has been really enforce-y lately. All of a sudden, they can garnish wages, they can yank your driver’s license if you’re not paying back your student loans. In America, if you have financial problems, there isn’t a ton of infrastructure to help you solve them. You are forced to come up with your own individualistic solutions to these big societal issues. I drew up three girls who were just like, “We are all we have.”

On top of that, it was important for me to include some Debt Police who were Black, because there are plenty of Black people who have bought into ideas of policing and enforcement—it’s an American value.

You fought those battles yourself, working for at JCPenney to help pay for college and law school. These days, how do you actually afford to be a writer?

I have a very financially and emotionally supportive husband. I ended up paying off my loans with TV money, but I don’t think you should have to win the lottery—which is basically what I did—to better yourself.

My husband is my support, along with my book advances, but I have definitely had periods where I’ve been the top earner in my house. It’s hard to think of a stable industry in American culture right now. We’ve all got to learn how to roll and take the punches.

A lot of folks first encountered your work via your hilarious social media presence. Why did you decide to leave Twitter and embrace Bluesky?

I was cutting down on my time there for most of 2023 after they changed the algorithm and I stopped getting responses and seeing my friends. We had an unsatisfying group of social media sites that rose up in the interim. Bluesky is the first that really feels like a place where a lot of people have joined and stayed. They post and they hang out, and I see a lot of the people I used to see on Twitter.

“I am the only person in America who is not on Pete Hegseth’s group chat. I feel left out.”

I’m sad about that transition. Twitter was a great place to hang out. Every once in a while, there were, like, missing Black people, and we found them! I don’t know if we’re gonna be able to find missing Black people again.

Who are the funniest Black women who inspire your writing?

I am an enormous Danzy Senna fan. She is so funny and is a really good observer of contemporary Black life. She wrote a book called New People, where one of her characters works on a dissertation about Jonestown. I didn’t know it was a thing where older Black women from the South, largely, were trying to find their way to equality through singing and alternative religion. All these people born in, like, 1915 in Alabama and they end up with Jim Jones drinking the Kool-Aid in Guyana. I was crushed.

I also got to work with Dulcé Sloan on The Great North, and she’s just fabulous—great energy, great vibe. And then everybody cites Fran Ross, who wrote Oreo. She tears your chest open and goes right to the heart of the joke. I love her for that. She was basically the only woman in the Richard Pryor Show writers’ room. Comedy is still trying to work out its relationship with women. She was not afraid of swinging. I love Black women like that. They are my idols.

What’s the importance of humor in this political moment?

Sometimes I cannot listen to things being told seriously. I need a new angle. Humor shakes me out of the constant depression that is the news and our politics. I live in LA, where we’ve had the National Guard in town for a few weeks, and it’s terrifying. You can’t live life on sheer terror. You will have a panic attack and die.

I mean, the Defense Department is taking the Blackness out of Jackie Robinson’s biography. The fact that he broke the color barrier was why he is on the dod’s history page. It’s important to be able to make fun of some of these folks in our public life. There’s a lot of incompetence there. I am the only person in America who is not on Pete Hegseth’s group chat. I feel left out.

Back in the day, I volunteered for Howard Dean and then the Obama campaign. I called swing voters in Ohio back when that was less terrifying. I did Kamala [Harris] stuff, too. I understand that things are sad and they’re bad, but humor is how I get people to listen to me. I’m tricking folks.

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America’s Worst Polluters See a Lifeline in Power-Gobbling AI—and Donald Trump

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

AI is “not my thing,” President Donald Trump admitted during a speech in Pittsburgh on Tuesday. However, the president said during his remarks at the Energy and Innovation Summit, his advisers had told him just how important energy was to the future of AI.

“You need double the electric of what we have right now, and maybe even more than that,” Trump said, recalling a conversation with “David”—most likely White House AI czar David Sacks, a panelist at the summit. “I said, what, are you kidding? That’s double the electric that we have. Take everything we have and double it.”

At the high-profile summit on Tuesday—where, in addition to Sacks, panelists and attendees included Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, Google president and chief investment officer Ruth Porat, and ExxonMobil CEO Darren Woods—companies announced $92 billion in investments across various energy and AI-related ventures. These are just the latest in recent breakneck rollouts in investment around AI and energy infrastructure. A day before the Pittsburgh meeting, Mark Zuckerberg shared on Threads that Meta would be building “titan clusters” of data centers to supercharge its AI efforts. The one closest to coming online, dubbed Prometheus, is located in Ohio and will be powered by onsite gas generation, SemiAnalysis reported last week.

For an administration committed to advancing the future of fossil fuels, the location of the event was significant. Pennsylvania sits on the Marcellus and Utica shale formations, which supercharged Pennsylvania’s fracking boom in the late 2000s and early 2010s. The state is still the country’s second-most prolific natural gas producer. Pennsylvania-based natural gas had a big role at the summit: The CEO of Pittsburgh-based natural gas company EQT, Toby Rice—who dubs himself the “people’s champion of natural gas”—moderated one of the panels and sat onstage with the president during his speech.

All this new demand from AI is welcome news for the natural gas industry in the US, the world’s top producer and exporter of liquefied natural gas. Global gas markets have been facing a mounting supply glut for years. Following a warm winter last year, Morgan Stanley predicted gas supply could reach “multi-decade highs” over the next few years. A jolt of new demand—like the demand represented by massive data centers—could revitalize the industry and help drive prices back up.

“I don’t think anyone has any idea, even a few years hence, how much electricity data centers are gonna use.”

Natural gas from Pennsylvania and the Appalachian region, in particular, has faced market challenges both from ultra-cheap natural gas from the Permian Basin in Texas and New Mexico as well as a lack of infrastructure to carry supply out of the region. These economic headwinds are “why the industry is doing their best to sort of create this drumbeat or this narrative around the need for AI data centers,” says Clark Williams-Derry, an energy finance analyst at the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis. It appears to be working. Pipeline companies are already pitching new projects to truck gas from the northeast—responding, they say, to data center demand.

The industry is finding a willing partner in the Trump administration. Since taking office, Trump has used AI as a lever to open up opportunities for fossil fuels, including a well-publicized effort to resuscitate coal in the name of more computing power. The summit, which was organized by Republican senator (and former hedge fund CEO) Dave McCormick, clearly reflected the administration’s priorities in this regard: No representatives from any wind or solar companies were present on any of the public panels.

Tech companies, which have expressed an interest in using any and all cheap power available for AI and have quietly pushed back against some of the administration’s anti-renewables positions, aren’t necessarily on the same page as the Trump administration. Among the announcements made at the summit was a $3 billion investment in hydropower from Google.

This demand isn’t necessarily driven by a big concern for the climate—many tech giants have walked back their climate commitments in recent years as their focus on AI has sharpened—but rather pure economics. Financial analyst Lazard said last month that installing utility-scale solar panels and batteries is still cheaper than building out natural gas plants, even without tax incentives. Gas infrastructure is also facing a global shortage that makes the timescales for setting up power generation vastly different.

“The waiting list for a new turbine is five years,” Williams-Derry says. “If you want a new solar plant, you call China, you say, ‘I want more solar.’”

Given the ideological split at the summit, things occasionally got a little awkward. On one panel, Secretary of Energy Chris Wright, who headed up a fracking company before coming to the federal government, talked at length about how the Obama and Biden administrations were on an “energy crazy train,” scoffing at those administrations’ support for wind and solar. Speaking directly after Wright, BlackRock CEO Larry Fink admitted that solar would likely support dispatchable gas in powering AI. Incredibly, fellow panel member Woods, the ExxonMobil CEO, later paid some of the only lip service to the idea of drawing down emissions heard during the entire event. (Woods was touting the oil giant’s carbon capture and storage business.)

Still, the hype train, for the most part, moved smoothly, with everyone agreeing on one thing: We’re going to need a lot of power, and soon. Blackstone CEO Jonathan Gray said that AI could help drive “40 or 50 percent more power usage over the next decade,” while Porat, of Google, mentioned some economists’ projections that AI could add $4 trillion to the US economy by 2030.

It’s easy to find any variety of headlines or reports—often based on projections produced by private companies—projecting massive growth numbers for AI. “I view all of these projections with great skepticism,” says Jonathan Koomey, a computing researcher and consultant who has contributed to research around AI and power. “I don’t think anyone has any idea, even a few years hence, how much electricity data centers are gonna use.”

In February, Koomey coauthored a report for the Bipartisan Policy Center cautioning that improvements in AI efficiency and other developments in the technology make data center power load hard to predict. But there’s “a bunch of self-interested actors,” Koomey says, involved in the hype cycle around AI and power, including energy executives, utilities, consultants, and AI companies.

Koomey remembers the last time there was a hype bubble around electricity, fossil fuels, and technology. In the late 1990s, a variety of sources, including investment banks, trade publications, and experts testifying in front of Congress began to spread hype around the growth of the internet, claiming that the internet could soon consume as much as half of US electricity. More coal-fired power, many of these sources argued, would be needed to support this massive expansion. (“Dig More Coal—The PCs Are Coming” was the headline of a 1999 Forbes article that Koomey cites as being particularly influential to shaping the hype.) The prediction never came to pass, as efficiency gains in tech helped drive down the internet’s energy needs; the initial projections were also based, Koomey says, on a variety of faulty calculations.

Koomey says that he sees parallels between the late 1990s and the current craze around AI and energy. “People just need to understand the history and not fall for these self-interested narratives,” he says. There’s some signs that the AI-energy bubble may not be inflating as much as Big Tech thinks: in March, Microsoft quietly backed out of 2GW of data center leases, citing a decision to not support some training workloads from OpenAI.

“It can both be true that there’s growth in electricity use and there’s a whole bunch of people hyping it way beyond what it’s likely to happen,” Koomey says.

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