Can the World Address Climate Change Without the US?

For many environmental advocates, the COP30 climate negotiations ended this weekend in disappointment. The annual United Nations conference, which brought together more than 190 countriesin Belém, Brazil, concluded without any firm plans to phase out fossil fuels—a key step scientists say is urgentlynecessary to address the climate crisis.

In part, experts say, that’s because of the United States, which had been noticeably absent from the summit. While more than 100 local US leaders reportedly attended, including California Gov. Gavin Newsom, the Trump administration sent zero delegates—marking the first time in the talks’ 30-year history that leadership from the world’s largest economy (and largest historical emitter of CO2) had no official presence.

At the beginning, says Matt McDonald, a professor of international relations at the University of Queensland in Australia, the lack of an American delegation may have offered a sense of “relief” to some countries hoping to negotiate bold climate action. Donald Trump, after all, might be something of a wet blanket at a climate conference; he has repeatedly referred to climate change as a “hoax,” and withdrew from the Paris climate agreement twice.

But as the talks continued, McDonald says, the vacuum left behind by the US may have also “emboldened” petrostates like Russia and Saudi Arabia to resist plans to move away from oil, coal, and gas.

Indeed, much like the Paris agreement 10 years ago, the lukewarm agreement officials ultimately settled on at COP30 doesn’t include the term “fossil fuels.”

“A climate deal without explicit language calling for a fossil fuel phaseout is like a ceasefire without explicit language calling for a suspension of hostilities,” climate scientist Michael E. Mann posted on Bluesky.

That’s despite the fact that, at this year’s conference, the first draft of an agreement proposed several suggestions on ending the international fossil fuel habit. More than 80 countries rallied behind the idea. “This is an issue that must not be ignored, cannot be ignored, and we are saying very, very clearly must be at the heart of COP,” said UK energy secretary Ed Miliband.

“The intensity and the clarity of this call was new and unprecedented in the history of COPs,” said Genevieve Guenther, a founding director of End Climate Silence.

“There’s certainly been a break from some of the same ways of talking about thinking about discussing pathways forward,” said Max Boykoff, a University of Colorado Boulder climate communications researcher at who attended the conference.

That was perhaps facilitated by the US’ absence, which Boykoff said “provided a motivating push for the rest of the world to say, ‘This is time for us to be stepping forward.'”

How exactly the coalition of nations backing a fossil fuel phaseout crumbled is a mystery; the press is not allowed to observe negotiations, but global oil powers reportedly lobbied hard for its exclusion. By the end of the weekend, the goal set out under the 2015 Paris agreement—to limit warming to below 2 degrees Celsius—seemed further away than ever.

But as McDonald sees it, while the overall climate outlook isn’t great, there are reasons not to abandon all hope for climate action.

As he noted in a piece for The Conversation in October, the world is making modest progress on CO2 emissions, with or without the US. Some scientists believe emissions are close to peaking, he writes, driven in part by “unprecedented global investment in renewable energy.” China, currently the largest emitter of carbon emissions, although still very much invested in fossil fuels, has also invested record-breaking amounts in renewable energy, particularly wind and solar, and has committed to reducing carbon emissions by at least 7 percent by 2035.

“China is an economic realist,” McDonald says, operating with the long-term understanding that “renewables are going to be where it’s at, rather than fossil fuels.” Still, he notes, China did little to advocate for a fossil-free agreement at COP30, largely avoiding the debate.

Individual US states can make a dent in global emissions, too. “California is the really obvious example,” McDonald says, “because it is incredibly consequential for global emissions. It’s a massive economy”—the fourth in the world, to be exact, and home to one of the largest carbon-trading markets.

In Belém, Newsom was among the most vocal US leaders to attend, reportedly saying that Donald Trump’s absence was an “opportunity” for local leaders to step up. “He pulled away,” Newsom told reporters, according to the Guardian. “That’s why I pulled up.”

Even without all countries on board, a significant subset of climate-minded nations could have real impact. In response to the lack of global consensus on dropping fossil fuels, a group of at least 24 countries, led by Colombia and the Netherlands, has announced that it will hold a counter-conference in April to establish a plan to do just that.

“There is a world in which these nations band together and create a global trading bloc that could essentially force the petrostates to start decarbonizing,” says Guenther. “I’m not claiming this would be easy,” she says, “but I’m saying it could be a way forward.”

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It’s One of the Most Influential Social Psychology Studies Ever. Was It All a Lie?

On the night before Christmas in 1954, a Chicago housewife named Dorothy Martin begged her followers to step outside, sing together, and wait, at last, for the aliens.

Things hadn’t been going well for Martin, the leader of a small UFO-based religious movement usually known as the Seekers. She had previously told her followers that, according to her psychic visions, a UFO would land earlier that month and take them all to space; afterwards, a great flood would bring this fallen world to an end.

Research based on recently unsealed records claims the book When Prophecy Fails leans on lies, omissions, and serious manipulation.

When that prediction failed to happen, Martin said an updated psychic transmission—known as her “Christmas message”—had come through, saying they had spread so much “light” with their adherence to God’s will that He had instead decided to spare the world. She soon followed with another message commanding the group to assemble in front of her home and sing carols, again promising that they would be visited by “spacemen” who would land in a flying saucer and meet them on the sidewalk. Martin told the Seekers to notify the press and the public.

At 6 p.m. on Christmas Eve, the group gathered, sang, and waited; eventually, they retreated to Martin’s living room. A large crowd of journalists, curious gawkers, and some hecklers stood outside.

Dorothy Martin is helped into her home on Christmas Eve, 1954. Charles Laughead walks behind her, bareheaded.Charles E. Knoblock/AP

We know about these shifts because the Seekers were, unbeknownst to Martin or anyone else, full of undercover researchers covertly taking notes. The observers were primarily interested in what Martin and her followers would do when the aliens repeatedly failed to land. What transpired was recorded in a 1956 book, When Prophecy Fails, written by Leon Festinger, Henry W. Riecken, and Stanley Schachter. It is considered an enduring classic in the fields of new religious studies, cult research, and social psychology.

One Seeker, the book reported, said they actually had spied a spaceman in the Christmas Eve crowd wearing a helmet and “big white gown,” adding that he was invisible to nonbelievers. But in the face of another no-show, a more common response in the group, the authors reported, was to continue to insist that the spacemen would yet come, and their belief would not be in vain. The repeated “disconfirmation” of their beliefs that December, the researchers claimed, only strengthened their faith, and made them more eager to reach out, to convert nonbelievers, journalists, and anyone else who would listen.

The book is gripping, an in-depth social and psychological study of Martin’s group and how they behaved, both as it was forming and after their prophetic visions failed to take place. It has served as a key basis for the psychological concept of cognitive dissonance: what happens to people when they hold conflicting beliefs, when their beliefs conflict with their actions, or when they clash with how events unfold in the real world. The theory was taken further by Festinger, who wrote a widely-cited followup book on cognitive dissonance and how people try to engage in “dissonance reduction” to reduce the psychological pressure and unease they experience when confronted with conflicting information.

But a new study that examined Festinger’s recently unsealed papers claims that Prophecy leans on lies, omissions, and serious manipulation. The article, published this month in the peer-reviewed Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, also argues that, contrary to the researchers’ longstanding narrative, the group members all showed clear signs of quickly abandoning their beliefs when the UFOs failed to arrive, and that the group soon dissolved.

Thomas Kelly, the paper’s author, found that while core members of the group stayed active in UFO spaces, they did not keep insisting on a world-ending flood, or that aliens would land and take them away. To the contrary, Kelly says, the Seekers were quick to disavow those beliefs. Even Martin herself rebranded, insisting to an interviewer that she had never believed she’d be taken away by an actual spaceship.

“Dorothy Martin distanced herself completely from these events, even rewriting the story of how she developed her psychic powers,” Kelly writes in the paper, shifting from claiming they had emerged after she awoke one morning with a tingling sensation, to a story where they came about after “she had been in a car accident, developed cancer, and was miraculously healed by an appearance of Jesus Christ,” as she told an interviewer in the 1980s. “The failed prophecy and Christmas message were omitted entirely,” Kelly writes, from her later narrative.

Kelly’s paper not only undercuts the researchers’ claims and their application of the theory developed from them, but also alleges they committed scientific misconduct, including “fabricated psychic messages, covert manipulation, and interference in a child welfare investigation.”

“The conventional wisdom is just wrong.”

Subsequent studies of new religious movements failed to replicate _Prophecy’_s findings, which isn’t surprising: a well-known replication crisis has shown that findings in psychological studies often can’t be repeated. But in the worlds of psychology, social science, and the study of UFO cults, the book has has remained a narrative juggernaut, influencing how we talk about cults, systems of belief, what it takes to change one’s mind, and why people cling to “unreasonable” or disproven beliefs. (In over a decade spent reporting on conspiracy theories and alternative belief systems, I have repeatedly cited the book myself.)

Kelly hopes his paper will show that “the conventional wisdom is just wrong. The expected outcome of a failed prophecy, what normally happens, is that the cult dies.”

Kelly, a conservative-leaning researcher who’s worked on biosecurity and health policy, is not a social scientist or an expert on cults or new religious movements. Previously a fellow at the Horizon Institute for Public Service, a think tank that says it bridges the worlds of technology and public policy, today he says he works as a “consultant for different advocacy groups” that he declines to name. He has advocated for tax credits for living kidney donors and written a paper on expanding access to pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) for HIV. In addition to his Substack, he has written for right-leaning publications including the Federalist and City Journal. One could argue he’s pushed fringe ideas himself: a recent piece for the conservative Jewish magazine Tablet expresses concern about gain-of-function virology research, and gives credence to the idea that Covid-19 was created in a lab.

“This is a side project I care a lot about,” Kelly says of his work on Prophecy. He read the book a few years ago “out of personal interest” and found that it made him “really nervous.” He was bothered by the authors’ claims that Martin and the Seekers never tried to proselytize before their prophecy failed at the same time the book actually provides several examples of just that: Martin enthusiastically talked to journalists and anyone who would listen about her psychic visions, even after claiming she received a visitation from mysterious visitors warning her not to discuss them. Another member, Charles Laughead, sent letters to at least two editors promoting Martin’s prophecies.

Laughead and his wife Lillian were Martin’s two most important followers. Kelly was able to determine they, well before Christmas Eve 1954, were holding study groups at their house and engaging in aggressive outreach to try to tell the world about Martin’s visions. Charles Laughead, a physician, was actually twice fired by Michigan State University ahead of that Christmas Eve for trying to convert his student patients.

Given all this, the book’s claim that proselytization only took place after the Christmas message “nagged at me,” Kelly says. “It seemed like a strange interpretation.” He argues that the researchers twisted the group’s behavior to fit their thesis, downplaying the proselytization they did before the prophecy failed and playing up any proselytization that occurred after.

This interpretation is important, because the thesis of When Prophecy Fails is clear: after Martin’s failed prophecy, her group doubled down, not only by refusing to acknowledge that their core predictions had utterly failed, but banding together with a new zeal to spread them.

Both Prophecy and Festinger’s 1957 followup, A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance, argued that the group employed cognitive dissonance to maintain internal consistency. According to Festinger and his coauthors, Martin and her followers reframed how situations had transpired, made changes and justifications to what they said they believed, and rejected information that didn’t align with their beliefs.

“I can’t afford to doubt. I have to believe, and there isn’t any other truth.”

When Kelly looked at Festinger’s 1957 book, though, he felt that the details of the Seekers relayed there didn’t really match what was in _Prophecy—_that Festinger was, in his words, already “massaging” the facts to make them match his emerging theory of cognitive dissonance. For instance: while Prophecy concedes that a few people walked away from the group after disconfirmation, Festinger’s followup book describes a more total state of belief for everyone involved that grew even stronger after the disappointments of December 1954.

“The conviction of those persons who had met the disconfirmation together did not seem to waver,” Festinger wrote. “Indeed, the need for social support to reduce the dissonance introduced by the disconfirmation was so strong, and the social support so easily forthcoming from one another, that at least two of these persons, who before had occasionally shown some mild skepticism concerning certain aspects of the beliefs, now seemed completely and utterly convinced.”

Festinger’s papers, held at the University of Michigan, were unsealed in early 2025, giving Kelly more insight into the authors’ behavior during their time with the Seekers. Kelly says he was disturbed by what he found, including evidence of clearly unethical intervention and manipulation from the researchers and the observers they hired. He told me that he even found evidence the researchers briefly broke into Dorothy Martin’s house through a back door and looked around, though they found nothing of note; the incident is not mentioned in his published paper.

One focus of Kelly’s paper is Riecken, who immediately acquired a high-level of status in the group—he was even dubbed “Brother Henry”—for reasons that, Kelly writes, weren’t clear. The archival materials, he writes, show that Riecken manipulated his position “to shape group behavior including… pivotal events” in December 1954.

For example, according to notes by Riecken that were included in Festinger’s papers, after the spacemen initially failed to land that month, Riecken decided to bitterly mock Martin, calling a new psychic message she offered after the first time no aliens turned up “pretty dense.” Then he went aside with Charles Laughead, told him he was struggling with a lack of faith, and begged Laughead to reassure him. Laughead did so, responding with a long monologue about the need to stay committed.

“I’ve given up just about everything,” Laughead declared, according to Riecken. “I’ve cut every bridge. I’ve turned my back on the world. I can’t afford to doubt. I have to believe, and there isn’t any other truth.”

Riecken then returned to the group, proclaiming his doubts were gone and his faith restored. Reassured, Martin brightened and began frantically writing what would become her Christmas message. “Martin’s despair, Laughead’s defiant affirmation of belief, and the Christmas message were all driven by Riecken,” Kelly concludes.

Martin, who predicted a cataclysm on December 21, chats with Laughead in her Oak Park, Illinois home on December 22.Charles E. Knoblock/AP

Kelly writes that another paid observer, Liz Williams, also ingratiated herself to the group—even becoming part of the Laughead household—under false pretenses, claiming to have had psychic visions, including “a mystical dream in which a mysterious, luminous man rescued her from a flood.” According to Kelly’s research, she also tried to manipulate another, less popular group member—one Williams admitted to finding “stupid” and disliking—into thinking she was psychic by performing automatic writing sessions in front of her. “So much of her writing is about how much she hates this one woman,” Kelly noted dryly in our interview; in an appearance on the Conspirituality podcast, Kelly describes the research team as being “gleeful” about how “easily fooled” group members were.

“I wouldn’t have published this.”

The interference Kelly uncovered goes beyond manipulation. At one point, he writes that the Laugheads were being investigated by family services agents after Charles’ sister had contacted his bosses at Michigan State, concerned whether the Laugheads were fit to care for their two children. Williams and another observer, Frank Nall, intercepted a social worker affiliated with the university who had been sent to the Laugheads house, told her about the ongoing study, and instructed her not to interfere. The social worker, under pressure from her boss at the university, dropped the matter. (Prophecy notes that the Laugheads won a court case over their parental rights and moved their family away soon after the books’ events.)

Williams and Nall got married after their time at Michigan State and had a child together. Williams died in June at 99 years old, after a long career as a professor, researcher, and women’s rights advocate. Nall himself, now 100, has only spotty memories of his role in the study, and none of the incident involving the social worker. (“That was 75 years ago, how the hell do you expect me to remember that?” he said in a brief phone call, laughing.)

As for “Brother Henry,” Kelly writes that the researchers exploited Riecken’s exalted position in the group to the very end: “As the study wound to an end, the researchers wanted to gather additional information, so they invoked Brother Henry’s spiritual status,” having him proclaim himself “as the ‘earthly verifier’ who had been tasked with comparing the accounts of the members to what was already known to the Space Brothers.” Under that guise, he had Seekers sit with him for interviews and gained access to “private documents and ‘sealed prophecies’” belonging to Martin. According to notes by Riecken and Schachter, Riecken examined the box holding them, bound it with his own magical “Seal of Protection,” as the researcher called it, and gave it to another paid observer.

“This contradicts the account in When Prophecy Fails,” Kelly writes, which claimed the box had been obtained from a true believing member they called Mark. The authors even claimed that Mark, Kelly writes, “wanted to open the box to retrieve some of his own documents that had been sealed in there, but was unwilling to do so since it would risk breaching the seal.” The authors, he charges, “use this apparently fabricated incident as an example of belief surviving disconfirmation.”

One professor with extensive experience in archival research, cults, and religious studies isn’t persuaded by the arguments in Kelly’s paper, and isn’t convinced it meets the rigorous scholarly standards they would expect from a peer-reviewed article.

“I wouldn’t have published this,” says Poulomi Saha, a University of California-Berkeley associate professor in critical theory who is writing a book on the cultural fascination with cults. “This author ends up doing what he accuses the authors of When Prophecy Fails of doing, which is cherrypicking evidence,” says Saha, who reviewed Kelly’s paper at my request. Kelly used “a fairly narrow reading of limited archival materials,” Saha says, to argue that the researchers were “the singular lynchpins of what happens to this group,” as with Kelly’s interpretations that Laughead only delivered his monologue on continuing to believe because Riecken coaxed it out of him, and that Martin only wrote her Christmas message because of his influence as Brother Henry.

Saha was also concerned by Kelly’s admission that he could not read one of Martin’s notes he found in Festinger’s archive, which he describes as revealing that she told Brother Henry he was “the favorite son of the Most God.” Kelly writes in an endnote that the note saying this “was written in faded ink in an old‐fashioned style of hand‐writing (cursive) on thin paper which I found difficult to read.” Kellysays that he used ChatGPT to decipher the text, which, Saha says, “wouldn’t pass muster with any real historian.” (Kelly concedes the words AI determined to be “the Most God” were completely indecipherable to his own eyes, but says that was the only place he relied on a machine interpretation of the text.)

“We’re talking about different academic and scholarly methods 70 years ago.”

Saha also says the way Prophecy is generally viewed today is more nuanced than Kelly suggests. “It’s considered a really interesting case study. It’s not considered a definitive psychological theory.” It is never cited, they say, “as the reason some other event should be credible or not.”

Overall, Saha says Kelly’s paper “asks good questions,” ones that they hope will prompt other scholars to reevaluate Prophecy by also delving into Festinger’s archives. “If we want to critique the methods and think about how methodology has changed in 70 years, I would encourage that,” Saha adds. ”We’re talking about different academic and scholarly methods 70 years ago around things like participant observation.”

Indeed, unethical and grossly manipulative science was far from uncommon at the time the Prophecy authors were working. The Tuskegee experiments, a 40-year syphilis study in which Black men were left untreated, were ongoing. The CIA mind control experiments known as MKULTRA began in 1953; before they were halted in 1973, both soldiers and civilians would be drugged with LSD, barbiturates, and amphetamines, usually without their knowledge or consent. In the 1940s and ‘50s, children at a Massachusetts school were secretly fed irradiated oatmeal in a study funded by the U.S. government and Quaker oats; survivors were eventually paid a $1.85 million settlement.

In that way, the alleged misconduct from the Prophecy researchers isn’t unusual, Kelly concedes: “It’s disappointing—it’s not surprising.” Other famous midcentury psychology studies also came under fire after a hard look, he points out, including the Stanford Prison Experiment, which purportedly demonstrated that people given the role of prison guards would quickly deploy brutality if ordered to do so, but which has been undermined by revelations of sloppy methodology and unethical researcher interference. An account of the murder of New York woman Kitty Genovese gave rise to a host of studies on the so-called bystander effect, but the notion that people watched idly while Genovese was killed has been proven false.

“The academic standards in the ‘50, ‘60s, and ‘70s were perhaps not as high as they are today,” says Thibault Le Texier. He’s an associate researcher at France’s European Centre for Sociology and Political Science who reviewed a previous version of Kelly’s paper favorably when it was submitted to the journal American Psychologist. (It was not accepted; Kelly says the version was written before he gained access to Festinger’s files.)

It was a “time of great enthusiasm for psychology,” Le Texier says, when “you could do quite strange and uncontrolled studies” that would no longer be authorized. “When you look at the methodology of these studies, it’s based on a few elements or pieces of evidence. The experiment is not well controlled.”

Le Texier’s 2018 book critiquing the methodology and conclusions of the Stanford Prison Experiment was recently translated into English, and has been hailed in the scientific world as a serious challenge to the research’s validity. (Philip Zimbardo, the experiment’s lead researcher, who died in 2024 at the age of 91, defended the his work after Le Texier’s book was published in French and, in a 2020 paper, accused Le Texier of making “unusually ad hominem” attacks.)

“My research is really bad for the integrity of When Prophecy Fails, and bad for its use in new religious studies,” Kelly told me recently. That said, he adds, “in itself it doesn’t show that all cognitive dissonance theory is wrong.”

Le Texier agrees. “Cognitive dissonance theory has been proven on many other occasions,” he says. “There’s very strong literature on the subject. You can’t debunk the whole concept based on one experiment that’s flawed. It casts doubts on the seriousness of the authors and casts a dark shadow on their other work. But the theory of cognitive dissonance is a concept that lives on.”

Earlier this year, Kelly published another paper in a different journal arguing that “group demise” is a more common outcome after disconfirmation occurs. That’s also more or less what he found happened to the Seekers, even if Martin’s Christmas message after the aliens first failed to come briefly delayed its breakup.

“If Festinger’s theory of cognitive dissonance is right, reappraisal of the value of When Prophecy Fails may be slow.”

“Rather than immediately admit to a hostile press that their beliefs were false,” he writes, “they instead acted as if their beliefs were true for up to several days after the prophecy failed.” Given that short timeframe, Kelly argues that the 1956 book’s authors wildly overstated the importance of their findings when they claimed “that their case study provided insight on the origins of the Christians, and the Millerites, and the Sabbateans who maintained their beliefs for years (or millennia) after outside events proved those religions wrong.” Kelly, an Episcopalian, argues it did no such thing, with the authors failing “to show any evidence of long‐term persistence of belief” of Martin’s UFO prophesies.

Sometimes, though, people’s belief or lack thereof is not black-and-white, says Saha, the Berkeley professor, especially when judged from the outside. ”A failed realization does not always mean a loss of belief,” they explain. “You continue to believe and the world now says you’re wrong. That’s a profound psychological barrier to talking about it… We can’t know what people believe—only what they say.”

“That’s the question that this author doesn’t have any room for,” Saha says, finding Kelly “very dismissive” of the fact that group members continued to believe in UFOs.

After the failure of Christmas Eve, Kelly writes, the Seekers quickly dissolved. Martin briefly went into hiding, concerned she might be charged with disturbing the peace or contributing to the delinquency of a minor. She soon left Chicago and relocated to a “dianetics center” in Arizona, according to Prophecy. (Martin had been an early Scientology practitioner, in addition to her many other interests.)

“Exactly what has happened to her since, we do not know,” the Prophecy authors wrote, adding that, judging from a few letters received by the researchers and her followers, “she still seemed to be expecting some future action or orders from outer space.”

It isn’t true, Kelly argues, that Martin disappeared. She actually quickly and publicly recanted, telling Saucerian magazine in 1955 that she “didn’t really expect” to be picked up by “a spaceman.” Yet Prophecy, published in 1956, depicts her, in Kelly’s words, as “completely committed.”

“Within 2 years,” Kelly writes in his paper, “Martin was publicly denying any ability to predict the timing of cataclysms.” She would go on to a long and fruitful career in the New Age movement, renaming herself Sister Thedra, living mostly in Mount Shasta, California and throughout the Southwest, and transmitting psychic messages that she said had been delivered by various astral entities.

One of Kelly’s central points is that the main subjects in Prophecy were reachable and findable, and indeed, spent a lot of time talking to UFO magazines. The Laugheads and Martin even met up briefly in Latin America to study aliens again. So why didn’t anyone uncover this before?

The elisions in the book could have been clear, Kelly writes, had “anyone sent a postcard to Dorothy Martin, Charles or Lillian Laughead, or their daughter,” he says, concluding the book “could have collapsed decades ago.”

“You could have asked Dorothy herself,” Kelly says, or several other Seekers. Despite the pseudonyms deployed in the book, he says, “they weren’t hard to find.”

“My research is really bad for the integrity of When Prophecy Fails, and bad for its use in new religious studies,” Kelly told me. But he is realistic in his paper that his critical look at Prophecy may never be widely accepted—ironically, because its alleged inaccuracies might create some cognitive dissonance in the fields it has influenced.

“If Festinger’s theory of cognitive dissonance is right, reappraisal of the value of When Prophecy Fails may be slow,” Kelly writes in the paper. “If he is wrong, perhaps reappraisal will be swift.”

“If you spent a lot of your career teaching and citing this, it’s hard,” he told me.

“There are findings that people want to hear and findings that people don’t want to hear,” Le Texier says. “If studies such as the Stanford Prison Experiment and When Prophecy Fails gained a lot of attention and will probably continue to, in spite of being debunked, it’s also because these are fascinating stories, as riveting as a great movie.”

For now, at least, Prophecy continues to be widely referred to as a classic of the genre. The aliens, it must be said, have not yet landed.

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Even Trump Wants to Extend Obamacare Tax Credits—But Republicans Stopped Him

After teasing a plan by President Donald Trump to extend Affordable Care Act premium subsidies—currently on track to end within weeks—the White House has indefinitely delayed the announcement under pressure from congressional Republicans, MS NOW reported on Monday.

The last-minute change of plan signals the GOP’s priorities: the party has fought to cut or repeal the ACA since it entered law in 2010, and was uncompromising in opposing the subsidies during the record-breaking government shutdown that ended earlier in November.

“I don’t see how a proposal like this has any chance of getting majority Republican support,” an anonymous House Republican told MS NOW. “We need to be focused on health care, but extending Obamacare isn’t even serious.”

Unless a deal is reached, Affordable Care Act tax credits expanded during the Biden administration are set to expire at the end of 2025, which would lead to the largest-ever annual spike in ACA premiums. The enhanced credits led to more signups for health insurance through the ACA marketplace: Nearly 25 million Americans in 2025, more than double the roughly 11 million who used it in 2020, according to the Bipartisan Policy Center.

The last thing Republican elected officials want to see, the Center for American Progress’ Bobby Kagan posted on social media Monday, is a deal that protects ACA subsidies.

“That’s why they didn’t extend them in OBBBA, and that’s why they kept calling them a ‘December problem’ even though open enrollment began on November 1,” Kagan, the group’s senior director for federal budget policy, wrote.

It’s because congressional Republicans want the enhanced subsidies to expire. That’s why they didn’t extend them in OBBBA, and that’s why they kept calling them a “December problem” even though open enrollment began on November 1.

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— Bobby Kogan (@bbkogan.bsky.social) November 24, 2025 at 10:36 AM

Extending the enhanced ACA credits does have support among everyday Republicans: A November poll by KFF found that, among Republican and Republican-leaning independents, 72 percent who didn’t identify with MAGA—and almost half of MAGA supporters—wanted ACA tax credits to continue.

If Trump doesn’t sign legislation before December 15 to extend ACA tax credits, millions of Americans will be forced to pay far more—often several hundred dollars a month—for health insurance, or forgo it altogether.

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Twitter’s Foreign Influence Problem Is Nothing New

Late last week, the X social media platform rolled out a new “location indicator” tool, plans for which had first been announced in October. Suddenly, it became much easier to get information on where in the world the site’s users are actually posting from, theoretically helping to illuminate inauthentic behavior, including attempted foreign influence.

“It is clear that information operations and coordinated inauthentic behavior will not cease.”

As the tool started to reveal accounts’ information, the effect was like watching the Scooby Doo kids pull one disguise after another from the villain off the week. Improbably lonely and outgoing female American GI with an AI-generated profile picture? Apparently based in Vietnam. Horrified southern conservative female voters with surprising opinions about India-Pakistan relations? Based somewhere in South Asia. Scottish independence accounts? Weirdly, many appear to be based in Iran. Hilarious and alarming though it all was, it is just the latest indication of one of the site’s oldest problems.

The tool, officially unveiled on November 22 by X’s head of product Nikita Bier, is extremely simple to use: when you click the date in a user’s profile showing when they signed up for the site, you’re taken to an “About This Account” page, which provides a country for where a user is based, and a section that reads “connected via,” which can show if the account signed on via Twitter’s website or via a mobile application downloaded from a specific country’s app store. There are undoubtedly still bugs—this is Twitter, after all—with the location indicator seemingly not accounting for users who connect using VPNs. After users complaints, late on Sunday Bier promised a speedy update to bring accuracy up to, he wrote, “nearly 99.99%.”

As the New York Times noted, the tool quickly illuminated how many MAGA supporting accounts are not actually based in the U.S., including one user called “MAGA Nation X” with nearly 400,000 followers, whose location data showed it is based in a non-EU Eastern European country. The Times found similar accounts based in Russia, Nigeria, and India.

While the novel tool certainly created a splash—and highlighted many men interacting with obviously fake accounts pretending to be lonely, attractive, extremely chipper young women—X has struggled for years with issues of coordinated inauthentic behavior. In 2018, for instance, before Musk’s takeover of the company, then-Twitter released a report on what the company called “potential information operations” on the site, meaning “foreign interference in political conversations.” The report noted how the Internet Research Agency, a Kremlin-backed troll farm, made use of the site, and uncovered “another attempted influence campaign… potentially located within Iran.”

The 2o18 report was paired with the company’s release of a 10 million tweet dataset of posts it thought were associated with coordinated influence campaigns. “It is clear that information operations and coordinated inauthentic behavior will not cease,” the company wrote. “These types of tactics have been around for far longer than Twitter has existed—they will adapt and change as the geopolitical terrain evolves worldwide and as new technologies emerge.”

“One of the major problems with social media is how easy it is to create fake personas with real influence, whether it be bots (fully automated spam) or sockpuppet accounts (where someone pretends to be something they’re not),” warns Joan Donovan, a disinformation researcher who co-directs the Critical Internet Studies Institute and co-authored the book Meme Wars. “Engagement hacking has long been a strategy of media manipulators, who make money off of operating a combination of tactics that leverage platform vulnerabilities.”

Since 2018, X and other social media companies have drastically rolled back content moderation, creating a perfect environment for this already-existing problem to thrive. Under Musk, the company stopped trying to police Covid misinformation, dissolved its Trust and Safety Council, and, along with Meta and Amazon, laid waste to teams who monitored and helped take down disinformation and hate speech. X also dismantled the company’s blue badge verification system and replaced it with a version where anyone who pays to post can get a blue checkmark, making it significantly less useful as an identifier of authenticity. X’s remaining Civic Integrity policy puts much more onus on its users, inviting them to put Community Notes on inaccurate posts about elections, ballot measures, and the like.

While the revelations on X have been politically embarrassing for many accounts and the follower networks around them, Donovan says they could be a financial problem for the site. “Every social media company has known for a long-time that allowing for greater transparency on location of accounts will shift how users interact with the account and perceive the motives of the account holder,” she says. When Facebook took steps to reveal similar data in 2020, Donovan says “advertisers began to realize that they were paying premium prices for low quality engagement.”

The companies “have long sought to hide flaws in their design to avoid provoking advertisers.” In that way, X’s new location tool, Donovan says, is “devastating.”

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This Pig’s Bacon Was Delicious—and She’s Alive and Well

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

I’m eating Dawn the Yorkshire pig and she’s quite tasty. But don’t worry. She’s doing perfectly fine, traipsing around a sanctuary in upstate New York. Word is that she appreciates belly rubs and sunshine.

I’m in San Francisco, at an Italian joint just south of Golden Gate Park, enjoying meatballs and bacon not made of meat in the traditional sense but of plants mixed with “cultivated” pork fat. Dawn, you see, donated a small sample of fat, which a company called Mission Barns got to proliferate in devices called bioreactors by providing nutrients like carbohydrates, amino acids, and vitamins—essentially replicating the conditions in her body. Because so much of the flavor of pork and other meats comes from the animal’s fat, Mission Barns can create products like sausages and salami with plants but make them taste darn near like sausages and salami.

I’ve been struggling to describe the experience, because cultivated meat short-circuits my brain—my mouth thinks I’m eating a real pork meatball, but my brain knows that it’s fundamentally different and that Dawn (pictured above) didn’t have to die for it. This is the best I’ve come up with: It’s Diet Meat. Just as Diet Coke is an approximation of the real thing, so too are cultivated meatballs. They simply taste a bit less meaty, at least to my tongue. Which is understandable, as the only animal product in this food is the bioreactor-grown fat.

Cultivated pork is the newest entrant in the effort to rethink meat. For years, plant-based offerings have been mimicking burgers, chicken, and fish with ever-more convincing blends of proteins and fats. Mission Barns is one of a handful of startups taking the next step: growing real animal fat outside the animal, then marrying it with plants to create hybrids that look, cook, and taste more like what consumers have always eaten, easing the environmental and ethical costs of industrial livestock. The company says it’s starting with pork because it’s a large market and products like bacon are fat-rich, but its technology is “cell-agnostic,” meaning it could create beef and chicken, too.

Lab-grown meat ballsMatt Simon

Honestly, Mission Barns’ creations taste great, in part because they’re “unstructured,” in the parlance of the industry. A pork loin is a complicated tangle of fat, muscle cells, and connective tissues that is very difficult and expensive to replicate, but a meatball, salami, or sausage incorporates other ingredients. That allows Mission Barns to experiment with what plant to use as a base, and then add spices to accentuate the flavors. It’s a technology that they can iterate, basically, crafting ever-better meats by toying with ingredients in different ratios.

So the bacon I ate, for instance, had a nice applewood smoke to it. The meatballs had the springiness you’d expect. During a later visit to Mission Barns’ headquarters across town, I got to try two prototypes of its salami as well—both were spiced like you’d expect but less elastic, so they chewed a bit more easily than what you’d find on a charcuterie board. (The sensation of food in the mouth is known in the industry as “mouthfeel,” and nailing it is essential to the success of alt meats.) The salami slices even left grease stains on the paper they were served on—Dawn’s own little mark on the world.

I was one of the first people to purchase a cultivated pork product. While Mission Barns has so far only sold its products at that Italian restaurant and, for a limited time, at a grocery store in Berkeley—$13.99 for a pack of eight meatballs, similar to higher-end products from organic and regenerative farms—it is fixing to scale up production and sell the technology to other companies to produce more cultivated foods. (It is assessing how big the bioreactors will have to be to reach price parity with traditional meat products.)

The idea is to provide an alternative to animal agriculture, which uses a whole lot of land, water, and energy to raise creatures and ship their flesh around the world. Livestock are responsible for between 10 and 20 percent of humanity’s greenhouse gas emissions—depending on who’s estimating it—and that’s to say nothing of the cruelty involved in keeping pigs and chickens and cows in unsavory, occasionally inhumane, conditions.

“I also love the idea of taking their pork fat and putting it in a beef burger.”

Getting animal cells to grow outside of an animal, though, ain’t easy. For one, if cells don’t have anything to attach to, they die. So Mission Barns’ cultivator uses a spongelike structure, full of nooks and crannies that provides lots of surface area for the cells to grow. “We have our media, which is just the nutrient solution that we give to these cells,” said Saam Shahrokhi, chief technology officer at Mission Barns. “We’re essentially recapitulating all of the environmental cues that make cells inside the body grow fat, [but] outside the body.”

While Dawn’s fat is that of a Yorkshire pig, Shahrokhi said they could easily produce fat from other breeds like the Mangalitsa, known as the Kobe beef of pork. (In June, the company won approval from the US Department of Agriculture to bring its cultivated fat to market.)

Fat in hand, Mission Barns can mix it with plant proteins. If you’re familiar with Impossible Foods, it uses soy to replicate the feel and look of ground beef and adds soy leghemoglobin, which is similar to the heme that gives meat its meaty flavor. Depending on the flavor and texture it’s trying to copy, Mission Bay uses pea protein for the meatballs and sausages, wheat for the bacon, and fava beans for the salami. “The plant-based meat industry has done pretty well with texture,” said Bianca Le, head of special projects at Mission Barns. “I think what they’re really missing is flavor and juiciness, which obviously is where the fat comes in.”

But the fat is just the beginning. Mission Barns’ offerings not only have to taste good, but also can’t have an off-putting smell when they’re coming out of the package and when they’re cooking. The designers have to dial in the pH, which could degrade the proteins if not balanced. How the products behave on the stove or in the oven has to be familiar, too. “If someone has to relearn how to cook a piece of bacon or a meatball, then it’s never going to work,” said Zach Tyndall, the product development and culinary manager at Mission Barns.

Lab-grown salamiMatt Simon

When I pick up that piece of salami, it has to feel like the real thing, in more ways than one. Indeed, it’s greasy in the hand and has that tang of cured meat. It’s even been through a dry-aging process to reduce its moisture. “We treat this like we would a conventional piece of salami,” Tyndall said.

Cultivated meat companies may also go more _un_conventional. “I also love the idea of taking their pork fat and putting it in a beef burger—what would happen if you did that?” said Barb Stuckey, chief new product strategy officer at Mattson, a food developer that has worked with many cultivated meat companies. “Mixing species, it’s not something we typically do. But with this technology, we can.”

Of course, in this new frontier of food, the big question is: Who exactly is this for? Would a vegetarian or vegan eat cultured pork fat if it’s divorced from the cruelty of factory farming? Would meat-eaters be willing to give up the real thing for a facsimile? Mission Barns’ market research, Le said, found that its early adopters are actually flexitarians—people who eat mostly plant-based but partake in the occasional animal product. But Le adds that their first limited sale to the public in Berkeley included some people who called themselves vegetarians and vegans.

There’s also the matter of quantifying how much of an environmental improvement cultivated fat might offer over industrial pork production. If scaled up, one benefit of cultivated food might be that companies can produce the stuff in more places—that is, instead of sprawling pig farms and slaughterhouses being relegated to rural areas, bioreactors could be run in cities, cutting down on the costs and emissions associated with shipping. Still, those factories would need energy to grow fat cells, though they could be run on renewable electricity. “We modeled our process at the large commercial scale, and then compared it to U.S. bacon production,” Le said. (The company would not offer specific details, saying it is in the process of patenting its technique.) “And we found that with renewable energy, we do significantly better in terms of greenhouse gas emissions.”

Whether or not consumers bite, though, remains to be seen. The market for meat alternatives in the US has majorly softened of late: Beyond Meat, which makes plant-based products like burgers and sausages, has seen revenues drop significantly, in part because of consumers’ turn away from processed foods. But by licensing its technology elsewhere, Mission Barns’ strategy is to break into new markets beyond the United States.

The challenges of cultivated meat go beyond the engineering once you get to the messaging and branding—telegraphing to consumers that they’re buying something that may in fact be partially meat. “When you buy chicken, you get 100 percent chicken,” Stuckey said. “I think a lot of people go into cultivated meat thinking what’s going to come onto the market is 100 percent cultivated chicken, and it’s not going to be that. It’s going to be something else.”

Regardless of the trajectory of cultivated fat products, Dawn will continue mingling with llamas, soaking up the sunshine, and getting belly rubs in upstate New York—even as she makes plants taste more like pork.

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Bill Cassidy Is Still In Denial About RFK, Jr.

Back in February, Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.) went to great lengths to justify his decisive vote to confirm Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. as Health and Human Services Secretary.

Cassidy, a physician and chair of the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee, demanded, among other things, that if confirmed, Kennedy would ensure the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) website did not edit a webpage stating that vaccines do not cause autism.

Of course, under Kennedy’s leadership, the CDC did just that this week, as my colleague Kiera Butler covered:

Among other dubious assertions, [the new webpage] informed readers, “The claim ‘vaccines do not cause autism’ is not an evidence-based claim because studies have not ruled out the possibility that infant vaccines cause autism.” Also, it asserts, falsely, “Studies supporting a link have been ignored by health authorities.”

Despite Kennedy’s flagrant flouting of this apparent agreement with Cassidy, the senator still cannot seem to directly criticize him, or own up to the fact that he played a key role in elevating a conspiracy theorist and vaccine skeptic with no medical training to head the country’s health agencies.

On CNN’s State of the Union on Sunday, Cassidy refused to face the facts when host Jake Tapper said, “Dr. Cassidy, he lied to you.” Instead, Cassidy doubled down on the very message that Kennedy is undermining: “Vaccines are safe,” he insisted. “That’s the most important message.”

After Tapper pressed him, asking if he was worried about the impact the CDC website could have on Americans’ decisions whether or not to vaccine, Cassidy conceded that the messaging was a problem, but still refused to name Kennedy as its source or express regret over confirming him. “Anything that undermines the understanding, the correct understanding, the absolute scientifically based understanding that vaccines are safe and that, if you don’t take them, you’re putting your child or yourself in greater danger, anything that undermines that message is a problem,” Cassidy said.

Tapper: "You were the deciding vote that allowed RFK Jr. to ascend to the role of HHS secretary…You just said that you've never met anybody other than pediatricians who read the CDC website, but back then you were talking about the important of the CDC website. Did you give RFK… pic.twitter.com/EQXkxml6BO

— The Bulwark (@BulwarkOnline) November 23, 2025

He proceeded to downplay the importance of the website, claiming that he has “never met any parent who wasn’t a pediatrician as well who actually reads the CDC website”—even though, as Tapper pointed out, Cassidy made it a condition of Kennedy’s confirmation that he would not edit the website. After more tough questioning from Tapper, Cassidy conceded: “[The changes to the website] are important, because you need to send the consistent signal that vaccines are safe.” He then pointed to an asterisk that remains on the site, which says: “The header ‘Vaccines do not cause autism’ has not been removed due to an agreement with [Cassidy] that it would remain on the CDC website.”

So, in case you’re confused about all this hair-splitting: Yes, the updated webpage now dismisses the claim that vaccines do not cause autism—contradicting the site’s own (correct) heading. This is apparently the extent to which Cassidy managed to reign Kennedy in.

Changes to the CDC website were not the reason Kennedy made even more headlines this week. There was also the heartbreaking essay from his cousin, Tatiana Schlossburg, published by the New Yorker on Saturday, in which she revealed her terminal cancer diagnosis and excoriated Kennedy for defunding cancer research and clinical trials and attacking vaccines and medications she benefitted from. The 35-year-old mother of two and daughter of former Ambassador Caroline Kennedy—who last year urged the Senate not to confirm Kennedy as HHS Secretary—wrote that she “watched from my hospital bed as Bobby, in the face of logic and common sense, was confirmed for the position, despite never having worked in medicine, public health, or the government.”

TAPPER: RFK Jr., according to his own family, is causing real damage to the health of the United States of America. You don't seem willing to criticize him by name at all, unlike members of his family.

CASSIDY: So, Jake, clearly, clearly, this conversation, you want me to be on… pic.twitter.com/tm44jalKWZ

— State of the Union (@CNNSOTU) November 23, 2025

Faced with Schlossburg’s unflinching criticism of her own family member, Cassidy still refused to directly criticize Kennedy. “Clearly, this conversation, you want me to be on the record saying something negative,” he told Tapper.

“I know it’s titillating,” Cassidy said later, “but I think we need to move beyond the titillation and actually what matters to the American people.”

Someone may want to tell him that includes protecting vaccines.

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The Uncanny Gmail Clone That Drops You Straight Into Epstein’s Inbox

Earlier this month, the House Oversight Committee released a flotilla of Epstein emails—more than 20,000 in total. The revelations created a tidal wave of news. In perhaps the most famous email, Jeffrey Epstein claimed Trump “knew about the girls.” Epstein also called Trump “the dog that hasn’t barked” and alleged that Trump had once spent “hours at my house” with a sex trafficking victim.

A trove of that size would ordinarily be difficult and time-consuming to sort, but this digital dump was especially cumbersome: packaged in oddly titled folders, and tossed with a random assortment of unsearchable detritus and system files.

What if you were able to just… read them like emails?

That’s the simple premise behind “Jmail,” a re-skinning of the documents programmed to look and feel like an everyday Gmail account, with all the design details impeccably parodied and emails displayed in sequential chains, just like your own inbox. It even includes a working search function. Its release this week created it’s own internet storm.

It's at https://t.co/bA2ikCiWjz. Made by @lukeigel and me

— Riley Walz (@rtwlz) November 21, 2025

The uncanny execution—a boon to journalists, but so realistic it can leave you disturbed, as if slipping directly into Epstein’s life—was created by two Bay Area internet wizards.

The San Francisco Standard identified the duo as Luke Igel, an AI engineer, and Riley Walz, whom they describe as the city’s “favorite internet rascal.” Before Jmail, he was famous for, among other pranks, creating a website showing the exact locations of the city’s parking police by reverse-engineering the municipal ticket system to reveal, in almost real time, where tickets were being issued (an endeavor that worked for just four hours, according to The New York Times—enough to cement Walz’s internet stardom).

“Many people have made fun of how weird and quirky the whole delivery method was,” Igel told The A.V. Club, describing the Congressional email release. “Someone made an amazing indexed database of those emails using Google Journalist Studio. Problem is that once you click on this beautifully indexed document, it’s really hard to read a PDF. So we just decided to do that, to fix that.”

As The A.V. Club recounts:

To fix it, Igel and Walz used an LLM to convert the plain text in the PDFs back into an email format. Then, once the data was prepped, they used an app called Cursor, which, according to Igel, is an ‘amazing tool that allows you to use AI to code really, really fast,’ to ape Gmail’s aesthetics for a web app.

The two creators selected a list of commonly occurring senders and listed them on the site of their web app: Michael Wolff, Larry Summers, Steve Bannon, and Ken Starr among them. The inclusion of a “Random Page” button sweeps you into a random portion of the chronology.

While we wait for exactly what gets released under the Epstein Files Transparency Act, which the president signed into law this past week, you can check out Jamil here. And of course, don’t forget Mother Jones’s investigation in which Leland Nally called everyone in Epstein’s notorious “little black book.”

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So What’s Next for MTG? Her Latest Social Posts Don’t Clarify Much.

What will Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) do after her shock resignation from Congress in January, announced on Friday? Good question.

President Donald Trump, for one, already seems to be reversing course on their breakup. Not long after (again) calling her a “traitor” on Truth Social on Saturday, the president told NBC News he would “love to see” her revive her career in politics. (Ever one to put the feelings of others ahead of his own, Trump first advised, “she’s got to take a little rest.”)

But Greene is aggressively shutting the rumors of her return down. In response to a Time story claiming that Greene was considering running for president in 2028, the congresswoman wrote today on X: “I’m not running for President and never said I wanted to and have only laughed about it when anyone would mention it. If you fell for those headlines, you’re still being lulled everyday into psychosis by the Political Industrial Complex that always has an agenda when it does something like this.”

“Running for President requires traveling all over the country, begging for donations all day everyday to raise hundreds of millions of dollars, arguing political talking points everyday to the point of exhaustion, destroying your health and having no personal life in order to attempt to get enough votes to become President all to go to work into a system that refuses to fix any of America’s problems,” Greene continued. “The fact that I’d have to go through all that but would be totally blocked from truly fixing anything is exactly why I would never do it.”

Ever prone to seeing conspiracies everywhere—despite her recent mea culpas—Greene also said she doesn’t believe she would be allowed to ascend to the pinnacle of American political power even if she tried to: “The Political Industrial Complex has destroyed our country and will never allow someone like me or you to rise to power and actually solve the crises that plague all of us,” she wrote. “That would go against its business model.”

Earlier this year, Greene appeared to be considering a Senate run. But Trump claimed, in one of his break-up texts, he had dissuaded her from doing so, which Greene denied last week on CNN’s State of the Union. “I don’t want to have anything to do with the Senate,” she said last week. “I think the past two months of the government shutdown should have shown America exactly why I would never want to be there.”

For now, this is Greene’s story—that she’s done with politics—and she and her allies are sticking to it. A person close to Greene told NBC News: “It’s safe to say she’ll probably take a step back and be a private, normal person again.”

Time will tell.

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A Surprisingly Powerful Tool to Make Cities More Livable

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

If you’ve spent any time on a roof, you know that it’s not especially pleasant up there—blazing in the summer, frigid and windy in the winter. Slap some solar panels up there, though, and the calculus changes: Shaded from gusts and excessive sunlight, crops can proliferate, a technique known as rooftop agrivoltaics. And because that hardware provides shade, evaporation is reduced, resulting in big water savings. Plus, all that greenery insulates the top floor, reducing energy costs.

Long held in opposition to one another, urban areas are embracing elements of the rural world as they try to produce more of their own food, in community gardens on the ground and agrivoltaics up above. In an increasingly chaotic climate, urban agriculture could improve food security, generate clean electricity, reduce local temperatures, provide refuges for pollinators, and improve mental and physical health for urbanites, among other benefits.

“This summer we had cucumbers that were the size of baseball bats, that were perfectly suited to the green roof.”

With relatively cheap investments in food production—especially if they’ve got empty lots sitting around—cities can solve a bunch of problems at once. Quezon City in the Philippines, for instance, has transformed unused land into more than 300 gardens and 10 farms, in the process training more than 4,000 urban farmers. Detroit is speckled with thousands of gardens and farms. In the Big Apple, the nonprofit Project Petals is turning vacant lots in underresourced neighborhoods into oases. “You have some places in New York City where there’s not a green space for 5 miles,” said Alicia White, executive director and founder of the group. “And we know that green spaces help to reduce stress. We know they help to combat loneliness, and we know at this point that they help to improve our respiratory and heart health.”

That makes these community spaces an especially potent climate solution, because it’s getting ever harder for people to stay healthy in cities due to the urban heat island effect, in which the built environment absorbs the sun’s energy and releases it throughout the night. Baking day after day during prolonged heat waves, the human body can’t get relief, an especially dangerous scenario for the elderly. But verdant patches reduce temperatures by releasing water vapor—essentially sweating into the neighborhood—and provide shade. At the same time, as climate change makes rainfall more extreme, urban gardens help soak up deluges, reducing the risk of flooding.

Oddly enough, while the oven-like effect is perilous for people, it can benefit city farms. On rooftops, scientists are finding that some crops, like leafy greens, thrive under the shade of solar panels, but others—especially warm-season crops like zucchini and watermelon—grow beautifully in harsh full-sun conditions. “Most of our high-value crops benefit from the urban heat island effect, because it extends their growing season. So growing food in the city is actually quite logical,” said horticulturist Jennifer Bousselot, who studies rooftop agrivoltaics at Colorado State University. “This summer we had cucumbers that were the size of baseball bats, that were perfectly suited to the green roof.”

Plants grow on a roof at Colorado State University.Kevin Samuelson/CSU Spur

That’s not all that’s thriving up there. Bousselot and her team are also growing a trio of Indigenous crops: corn, beans, and squash. The beans climb the corn stalks—and microbes in their roots fix nitrogen, enriching the soil—while the squash leaves shade the soil and reduce evaporation, saving water. In addition, they’ve found that saffron—an extremely expensive and difficult-to-harvest spice—tolerates the shade of rooftop solar panels. Water leaving the soil also cools the panels, increasing their efficiency. “We’re essentially creating a microclimate, very much like a greenhouse, which is one of the most optimal conditions for most of our food crops to grow in,” Bousselot said. “But it’s not a system that needs heating or cooling or ventilation, like a greenhouse does.”

Growers might even use the extreme conditions of a rooftop for another advantage. Plants that aren’t shaded by solar panels produce “secondary metabolites” in response to the heat, wind, and constant sunlight that can stress them. These are often antioxidants, which a grower might be able to tease out of a medicinal plant like chamomile—at least in theory. “We are sort of exploring the breadth of what’s possible up there,” Bousselot said, “and using those unique environments to come up with crops that are hopefully even more valuable to the producer.”

Down on the ground in New York City, Project Petals has seen a similar bonanza. Whereas agricultural regions cultivate vast fields and orchards of monocrops, like grains or fruit trees, an urban farm can pack a bunch of different foods into a tight space. “If you could grow it in rural areas, you could grow it in the city as well,” White said. “We’ve grown squash, snap peas, lemongrass. In our gardens, I’ve seen just about everything.”

Workers tend to crops in Queens, New York.Project Petals

That sort of diversification means a cornucopia of nutritious foods flows into the community. (Lots of different species also provide different kinds of flowers for pollinators—and the more pollinators, the better the crops and native plants in the area can reproduce, creating a virtuous cycle.) That’s invaluable because in the United States, access to proper nutrition is extremely unequal: In Mississippi, for example, 30 percent of people live in low-income areas with low access to good food, compared to 4 percent in New York. This leads to “silent hunger,” in which people have access to enough calories—often from ultraprocessed foods purchased at corner stores—but not enough nutrients.

Underserved neighborhoods need better access to supermarkets, of course, but rooftop and community gardens can provide fresh food and help educate people about improving their diets. “It’s not only about growing our own veggies in the city, but actually too it’s a hook to change habits,” said Nikolas Galli, a postdoctoral researcher who studies urban agriculture at the Polytechnic University of Milan.

In a study published last month in the journal Earth’s Future, Galli modeled what this change could look like on a wide scale in São Paulo, Brazil. In a theoretical scenario in which the city turned its feasible free space—around 14 square miles—into gardens and farms, every couple of acres of food production could provide healthy sustenance to more than 600 people. Though the scenario isn’t particularly realistic, given the scale of change required, “it’s interesting to think about that, if we use more or less all the areas that we have, we could provide the missing fruits and vegetables for 13 to 21 percent of the population of the city,” Galli said. “Every square meter that you do can have a function, can be useful to increase the access to healthy food for someone.”

Without urgent action here, silent hunger will only grow worse as urban populations explode around the world: By 2050, 70 percent of humans will live in cities. Urban farms could go a long way toward helping feed all those people, and could indeed benefit from rural farmers making the move to metropolises. “They’re able to pass it on to the community members like me from New York City, who maybe didn’t have the expertise,” White said, “and helping them to find their way in learning how to garden and learning how to grow their own food.”

Whether it’s on top of a roof or tucked between apartment buildings, the urban garden is a simple yet uniquely powerful tool for solving a slew of environmental and human health problems. “They’re serving as spaces where people can grow, where they can learn, and they can help to fight climate change,” White said. “It’s so good to see that people are starting to come around to the fact that a garden space, and a green space, can actually make a bigger impact than just on that community overall.”

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RFK Jr. Wants You To Know He’s Personally Responsible for Anti-Vax Misinformation on CDC Website

In an interview published Friday, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. told the New York Times that he’d personally directed the CDC to put a new page on the agency’s website, casting doubt on the fact that vaccines don’t cause autism.

“The whole thing about ‘vaccines have been tested and there’s been this determination made,’ is just a lie,” Kennedy told the Times, lying. He added, “The phrase ‘Vaccines do not cause autism’ is not supported by science.”

Kennedy employed confused logic in his conversation with the Times, telling journalist Sheryl Gay Stolberg that he doesn’t believe there’s adequate proof to claim that vaccines don’t cause autism. “He said he is not saying vaccines cause autism,” Stolberg wrote. “He is simply saying there is no proof that they don’t.”

Kennedy also claimed that he was merely offering a more accurate look at “the state of the science,” telling Stolberg, “I think the way to drive up vaccine utilization, ultimately, is to be honest with people,” he said, adding, “My job is not to gaslight Americans but to give them accurate information about the state of the science.”

It’s unclear what possible standard of evidence would satisfy Kennedy, who’s been a dedicated anti-vaccine activist since 2005. Dozens of studies both in the U.S. and internationally have made it clear that there’s no link between the aluminum adjuvants in vaccines and autism, including a landmark Danish study that followed 1.2 million children for 24 years. The study was published this summer in the Annals of Internal Medicine and also found no link between vaccines and a variety of other health conditions, including asthma, allergies, and autoimmune diseases. Kennedy has baselessly called for the study to be retracted, which he does not have the power to demand, and which the journal declined to do. According to Nature, the journal’s editor-in-chief Christine Laine wrote in a note on the study’s webpage that retraction “is warranted only when serious errors invalidate findings or there is documented scientific misconduct, neither of which occurred here.”

Kennedy’s directive has horrified CDC staffers, one of whom told my colleague Kiera Butler, “The best way I can put it is it feels like we’re on a hijacked airplane.” (As Butler wrote this week, the new “Vaccines and Autism” web page contradicts other information still available on the CDC website.) Public health experts told the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy (CIDRAP) that CDC’s guidance can no longer be trusted, creating an unprecedented challenge for Americans looking for accurate health guidance from their government.

While Kennedy’s version of the CDC focuses on reviving false claims about vaccines, the United States is at risk of losing its measles elimination status. Measles cases are at their highest level in three decades, with 45 outbreaks so far this year nationwide. According to—for now—the CDC, in 92 percent of those cases, the patient’s vaccination status was listed as either “unvaccinated” or “unknown.”

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Majorie Taylor Greene No Longer Trusts the Plan

In a stunning announcement posted to Twitter/X on Friday night, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) said that she will resign her seat in the House on January 5, 2026. The announcement comes after Greene publicly skirmished with Donald Trump over the release of the Epstein files. Trump has responded by calling her a “traitor,” a “lunatic,” and “wacky,” saying he’ll refuse to take her phone calls, and that he’ll consider supporting a primary challenger against her.

In her announcement, Greene decried Trump’s attacks on her, writing, “Loyalty should be a two-way street.” Greene also said she’s being punished by Trump and the larger Republican Party for demanding a full release of files related to dead pedophile and one-time Trump friend Jeffrey Epstein: “Standing up for American women who were raped at 14, trafficked and used by rich powerful men, should not result in me being called a traitor and threatened by the President of the United States, whom I fought for.” Lurid to the last, Greene also said she refused to be, as she put it, “a ‘battered wife’ hoping it all goes away and gets better.”

“If I am cast aside by MAGA Inc and replaced by Neocons, Big Pharma, Big Tech, Military Industrial War Complex, foreign leaders, and the elite donor class that can’t even relate to real Americans, then many common Americans have been cast aside and replaced as well,” Greene wrote (caps hers).

As first noted by journalist Will Sommer, Greene’s announcement also declared “There is no ‘plan to save the world,’” which is the title of a viral 2018 video by a well-known QAnon promoter. Greene repeatedly promoted QAnon conspiracy theories both before and after becoming a member of Congress, but has intermittently disavowed those beliefs of late years, most recently during an early November appearance on ‘The View.’

“There is no ‘plan to save the world’ or insane 4D chess game being played,” Greene wrote in her announcement, referring to QAnon believers’ claims that Trump is enacting a complex, hidden plan to bring a powerful pedophilic cabal to justice.

Greene first took office in January of 2021, quickly establishing herself as part of the most radical and conspiracy theory-addled wing of the Republican party. Before her first candidacy, Greene spent a lot of time on Facebook posting hateful, racist, Islamophobic, antisemitic, and otherwise toxic viewpoints, which included suggesting the Parkland and Sandy Hook shootings were hoaxes, and appeared to support committing political violence. Things did not improve after she began serving as an elected official: she promoted stolen election conspiracy theories and appeared as a surprise speaker at a 2022 conference organized by white nationalist and antisemite Nick Fuentes, then pretended she had simply no idea how she’d found her way there or about Fuentes’ background and beliefs.

Since Trump was reelected and took office for the second time, Greene has tempered her Trump sycophancy and even offered public criticisms of him. She’s also espoused what are seen as more progressive views, including calling the war in Gaza a “genocide” this summer. Greene has also been vocal in her calls to release files related to Jeffrey Epstein in full; days ago, she appeared at a press conference with several Epstein survivors and called Trump’s handling of the scandal “destructive” to MAGA.

“Watching this actually turn into a fight has ripped MAGA apart, and the only thing that will speak to the powerful, courageous women behind me is when action is actually taken to release these files, and the American people won’t tolerate any other bullshit,” Green said.

In her retirement announcement, Greene was clear that her plans to retire are directly linked to Trump’s attacks, writing, “I have too much self-respect and dignity, love my family way too much, and do not want my sweet district to have to endure a hurtful and hateful primary against me by the President we all fought for, only to fight and win my election while Republicans will likely lose the midterms.”

In a recent Instagram Live video talking to her constituents, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) offered a different explanation for Green’s rebellion against Trump, saying that because Greene wanted to run for Senate “and Trump said no.” AOC dubbed Greene’s recent behavior a “revenge tour;” Greene responded by calling AOC “really jealous” of her.

Trump responded to Greene’s announcement early Saturday morning on TruthSocial, dubbing her “Majorie ‘Traitor’ Brown,” for some reason, and adding: “Her relationship with the WORST Republican Congressman in decades, Tom Massie of Kentucky, also known as Rand Paul Jr. because he votes against the Republican Party (and really good legislation!), did not help her. For some reason, primarily that I refused to return her never ending barrage of phone calls, Marjorie went BAD. Nevertheless, I will always appreciate Marjorie, and thank her for her service to our Country!”

Greene didn’t give any indication in her announcement of what she plans to do with her sudden abundance of free time. Under federal law, by retiring after five years in office, Greene will be leaving precisely when she’s eligible to collect retirement benefits.

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Iran’s Capital Must Relocate Due to Dire Water Situation, President Insists

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

Tehran is running out of water.

Rationing has begun in Iran’s capital city, with some of the approximately 10 million residents experiencing “nightly pressure cuts” between midnight and 5 am. The entire country is in an unprecedented drought, facing its driest—and hottest—autumn in nearly 60 years. Tehran has received no rain at all since the start of September, and no rainfall is expected for the foreseeable future.

The city depends on five major reservoirs for its water supply. One has dried up completely, with another below 8 percent capacity. The managing director of the Tehran Regional Water Authority told state media last week that the Karaj Dam has only two weeks of drinking water left. The drought extends beyond the city, too. The water reserves of Mashhad, the second largest city in the country, have dropped below 3 percent capacity, putting 4 million people at imminent risk.

But if nothing changes, Tehran may soon face Day Zero—or when a municipality can no longer supply drinking water to its residents and taps run dry. In October, President Masoud Pezeshkian claimed that Tehran could no longer serve as the country’s capital, citing the water crisis as a major factor.

”If it doesn’t rain in Tehran by late November, we’ll have to [formally] ration water,” Pezeshkian told Iranian state media on Thursday. “And if it still doesn’t rain, we’ll have to evacuate Tehran.”

(Update: On Thursday, Pezeshkian president again said the capital will need be moved.)

While it’s unlikely evacuation will happen any time soon, Tehran’s water crisis is not made equal. When the taps run dry, more affluent Tehranis purchase mineral water or rely on water tankers, a prohibitively expensive option for many. The rest must rely on charity, or they will die of thirst.

Water use in Tehran is quite high, even for cities. But Iran’s water problems go deeper than this record-breaking drought.

The country is uniquely isolated and subject to numerous sanctions, crippling the economy and making it very difficult for Iran to obtain state-of-the-art water technologies. It’s an enemy state to many of its neighbors, as well as regional leaders in desalination technology—Israel, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates. But desalination is largely irrelevant in an Iranian context, often coming at a high environmental cost.

According to water issues analyst Nik Kowser, Iranians are under the thumb of a “water mafia”—a shadowy and well-connected network driving these megaprojects for their own gain. “Iran faces water bankruptcy, with demand far outstripping supply,” Kowsar wrote in Time. “The collapse of water security in Iran has been decades in the making and is rooted in a mania for megaprojects—dam building, deep wells, and water transfer schemes—that ignored the fundamentals of hydrology and ecological balance.”

Trying to relocate 10 million people would be an incredible logistical challenge.

Iran is also particularly vulnerable to the effects of climate change: Over 82 percent of the country is arid or semi-arid, and Iran is sixth on the list of countries most prone to natural disasters. The country grows thirsty crops, and its quest for food security and self-sufficiency is a tremendous driver of its water bankruptcy. The agricultural sector comprises up to 90 percent of the country’s total water withdrawals.

But Iran’s environmental crisis does strain existing geopolitical tensions both inside and outside of the country. Water is sometimes transported from one region of the country to supply another, driving fears that certain ethnic populations are intentionally being deprived at the expense of others.

Yale University historian and Iran expert Arash Azizi, who is also a contributing writer for The Atlantic, told me that despite the tremendous humanitarian cost of continued sanctions, they are very unlikely to be removed in response to the water crisis.

Tehran joins many, many other cities that have approached Day Zero, and it certainly will not be the last. São Paulo in Brazil and Cape Town, South Africa, had similar crises that ended with rainfall. Tehran might not be so lucky in terms of its weather forecast, though.

So, let’s loop back to the idea of evacuating Tehran.

It is, of course, incredibly unpopular. Iranians balked at the idea when the president mentioned the possibility. Former Tehran Mayor Gholamhossein Karbaschi said this was “a joke…Evacuating Tehran makes no sense at all.”
Azizi thinks it’s unlikely that Iran will end up moving its capital anytime soon. The majority of jobs are in Tehran. And evacuating a city of upward of 10 million people would be an incredible logistical challenge.

More importantly, relocation won’t fix the immediate issue of water access. But the current strategy of trucking in supplies, rationing water, and praying for rain is woefully inadequate to meet the moment. And water rationing is a stopgap measure.

“Actually cutting off the supply to households or to individual neighborhoods de facto reduces their consumption,” said David Michel, senior fellow for water security at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “But the underlying demand is still there.”

However, there are other kinds of strategies cities like Tehran could employ. Michel argued that cities have to prioritize business models that provide the resources and revenues needed for water systems to operate, maintain, and expand to serve new customers.

“That challenge has put many city water systems around the world into this very challenging spiral where lots of municipal water systems’ revenues don’t cover the costs of operations and maintenance, much less expanding supply,” Michel said.

Economic incentives like volumetric tariffs, where the cost of water is proportional to the amount consumed, could be beneficial. The more you use, the higher price you pay, essentially, with the hope of reducing pressure on the poorest consumers.

Relief can’t come to Tehran soon enough. American cities in California and the southwest, with similarly arid climates and dwindling water supplies, should take heed. And everyone should pay attention when the president of Iran says the residents of its capital city may have to evacuate in a few months’ time.

“You can imagine the psychological effect,” Azizi said. And that could be “the future of everywhere in the world.”

This story was updated to reflect the Iranian president’s latest announcement.

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In Rural America, Public Radio Saves Lives

When a typhoon hit Alaska, public radio station KYUK was on the air, broadcasting critical information about conditions, evacuations, and search and rescue operations. An estimated 1,600 people were displaced, and many were saved in the biggest airlift operation in state history.

“The work that we do in terms of public safety communication literally does save lives,” said Sage Smiley, KYUK’s news director.

KYUK is small, scrappy, and bilingual. It broadcasts in English and Yugtun, the language of an Indigenous population that lives in villages along two massive rivers. The station airs NPR content, but also high school basketball games, local call-in talk shows, and even a show hosted by the volunteer search and rescue team, answering listeners’ questions about ice conditions and safety. The station is a lifeline for this unique region.

KYUK covers an area the size of the state of Oregon, but after Congress passed the Rescissions Act over the summer, it lost 70 percent of its operating budget. Republicans have targeted public media since its inception in the late 1960s. But this is the first time they have successfully ended the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, wiping out more than $1 billion in funding for public media.

This week on Reveal, we take listeners inside KYUK as it grapples with this new reality. Host Al Letson sits down with Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski to discuss how the cuts are affecting her state. And we take a trip to WQED in Pittsburgh for a look back at how Fred Rogers, the host of Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood, defended public television throughout its decadeslong struggle to survive Washington politics.

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“Embarrassing” and “Horrifying”: CDC Workers Describe the New Vaccines and Autism Page

Earlier this week, a new page titled “Vaccines and Autism” appeared on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention website. Contrary to previous CDC guidance, the page alleged, “The claim ‘vaccines do not cause autism’ is not an evidence-based claim because studies have not ruled out the possibility that infant vaccines cause autism,” adding that “studies supporting a link have been ignored by health authorities.” Those claims aren’t supported by evidence, but they do reflect talking points regularly promoted by anti-vaccine activists—of which Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is a leader.

I spoke with five CDC staffers on Thursday and Friday to find out their reactions to the announcement. While they declined to be identified for fear of retaliation, they all said that they and their colleagues were shocked and dismayed by the misinformation put forth on the new page. “It’s horrifying, it’s embarrassing, it’s scary, it’s heartbreaking—it’s all of those things,” said a staffer at the CDC’s Injury Center. “To see our agency being used to spread lies and misinformation is a gut punch,” a CDC communicator with the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Disease wrote in a message. “People will be harmed by this—parents will decide not to vaccinate their kids because of false information, and kids will get sick and die as a result.”

Another longtime CDC employee who works in communications said, “The best way I can put it is it feels like we’re on a hijacked airplane.”

Several employees noted that there had been no warning about the new page before it was posted—in fact, said the NCIRD staffer, even department leadership had “only learned about it today when somebody saw it the same way everybody else did.”

Others doubted the new page had gone through the agency’s rigorous protocol for vetting public-facing information, which the longtime communications staffer said, “can be clunky and take a long time. It is the bane of many people’s existence who work at CDC because it is so laborious and it requires so many different stages of review.” The new page, on the other hand, “popped up without going through CDC clearance processes.”

“I don’t even know who is updating these web pages, or if anyone at CDC has anything to do with any of that,” said another staffer who works on immunizations. Department supervisors told employees that “their understanding is that these updates to the website are not coming from CDC. Somebody at the HHS level is going in and changing these pages.”

HHS did not respond to a request for comment from Mother Jones.

“I think people are starting to see that we can’t fulfill our mission here, like I think it’s that is becoming more and more clear and loud and unavoidable with each day.”

The concerns about the Autism and Vaccines page are only the latest blow to morale at the CDC. First came the appointment of Kennedy, who formerly ran an anti-vaccine activist group. Then there were the waves of layoffs, and after that, a record-breaking government shutdown. Several of the people with whom I spoke, some who had been with the CDC for years, said that morale at the agency was so low that they and most of their colleagues were currently looking for new jobs. “I changed my mind 20 times over the course of one meeting about whether I’m going to quiet quit and look for something else while still collecting a paycheck as long as I can, versus lean in and fight and try to protect the possibility of doing good work in the future,” said the Injury Center staffer. “I think people are starting to see that we can’t fulfill our mission here, like it’s becoming more and more clear and loud and unavoidable with each day.”

On the other hand, the longtime communications staff member said, “We’re still getting really important health information out, and if I leave, that will stop, and I don’t want to leave CDC when so many experienced people have left—or been forced out.”

In an internal memo from earlier this week shared with Mother Jones, HHS leadership outlined 16 “strategic initiatives” for the agency, including “Evaluating funding support for jurisdictions,” “invigorating the CDC workforce,” and “enhancing scientific rigor at CDC.” In the comments section, employees expressed skepticism about the initiatives. “Additional clarification on initiative #4 (enhancing scientific rigor) would be appreciated, given recent updates to the public-facing webpages that did not follow the agency’s clearance guidelines,” one comment read. In response to the goal of invigorating the workforce, another commenter wrote, “This leaves me very confused and with many questions since the cadre of our colleagues new in their careers and in probationary status were summarily dismissed earlier this year.”

Everyone with whom I spoke emphasized that the new page does not reflect the work or viewpoints of the vast majority of CDC employees. “The bulk of staff who work here still believe the same science and want to do the same good public health,” said someone with the CDC’s National Center for Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion. They emphasized that their actual day-to-day work had not been compromised, though some worried that it soon could be.

When asked if the CDC was still a reliable source of public-health information, the employees said that most of the public-facing information remained unchanged. A critical problem was that there didn’t appear to be a good way for the public to discern the difference between accurate and politicized messaging. “I don’t know how they would distinguish that,” the Chronic Center staffer said. “There’s not a disclaimer saying posts were approved by political appointees and not by career scientists, so I don’t know.”

“It’s really easy from inside the agency to know what is real information and what has just been added there for political reasons,” added the longtime communications staffer. “But I can see that it would be really hard if you’re outside the agency to know the difference.”

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The Texas Gerrymandering Case Is a Test of the Supreme Court’s Integrity

President Donald Trump’s quest to gerrymander red states so that the Republican Party cannot lose the House of Representatives in 2026 hit a snag on Tuesday when a federal district court blocked Texas’ redrawn map from taking effect. Republican state legislators designed the infamous map to give their party five new congressional seats. Its passage in August made Texas the first state to sign on to Trump’s gerrymandering demands. But Texas Republicans, aided by the Trump Justice Department, pulled off this political heist so poorly that they have endangered the keystone achievement of the president’s anti-democratic attack on the midterm elections.

“They didn’t just grab what was on the shelves—they decided to break into the cash register, too.”

The case now heads immediately to the Supreme Court, which will quickly rule on whether to allow Texas to use its new map in the 2026 midterms or let stand the lower court ruling andkeep it on ice. This decision will force Chief Justice John Roberts and the other Republican-appointed justices to pick between enforcingthe gerrymandering rules they created and their evident loyalty to the GOP.

Over the past few years, the Roberts’ court has made excessive gerrymandering easier to get away with—even though it is both unconstitutional and incompatible with the basic premise of democracy. In 2019, Roberts ruled thatgerrymandering undertaken for political gain could not be challengedin federal court. The decision, Rucho v. Common Cause, letlegislators rig maps to protect their own party. Then last year, Justice Samuel Alito authored an opinion in Alexander v. South Carolina State Conference of the NAACP that made it easier to sort voters by race—even though doing so deliberately is also unconstitutional. If a redrawn map hurts minority voters but legislators can plausibly claim it was drawn for partisan gain, Alito wrote, courts must presume that “the legislature acted in good faith” and rule in their favor. The decision combinedwith Rucho’s greenlight on partisan gerrymanderingto createa roadmap that legislatures could use to bypass the constitution’s prohibition on racial gerrymandering.

“What a message to send to state legislators and mapmakers about racial gerrymandering,” Justice Elena Kagan wrote in dissent in Alexander. “Go right ahead, this Court says to States today… It will be easy enough to cover your tracks in the end: Just raise a ‘possibility’ of non-race-based decision-making.”

Thus, in two decisions that pitted Republican versus Democratic appointees, the GOP-aligned majority created a blueprint for getting away with unconstitutional gerrymandering. “They did leave a path open for people who are not inclined to live up to their constitutional responsibilities,” says Justin Levitt, a voting rights expert at Loyola Law School.

He outlines an analogy to explain: “They said ‘You shouldn’t shoplift—and we’re leaving the store unlocked and turning around and walking out.’”

So when Trump demanded that Texas embark on a mid-decade redistricting mission, the state’s Republicans could have kept to saying they were doing it to maximize partisan gain. Under Rucho, that couldn’t be challenged in federal court. And under Alexander, they could likely even get away with using racial data to do it, as long as they didn’t say they were doing so. This wasn’t a perfect plan, because it might involve admitting to an excessive partisan gerrymandering scheme that technically remains unconstitutional. But, due to the mess this Supreme Court has made, it’s an unconstitutional scheme they could get away with.

Fast forward to this week, when two judges on a three-judge panel found the Texas map was likely an unconstitutional racial gerrymander, and blocked the state from implementing it. The reason Trump and Texas Republicans lost is that they didn’t stick to the Supreme Court’s roadmap. The state’s problems began in July, whenHarmeet Dhillon, the top civil rights official at the DOJ, attempted to offer a legal rationale for redrawing the map. In a letter to Texas Gov. Greg Abbott and Attorney General Ken Paxton, she warned that the department had found Texas’ 2021 map contained unlawful racial gerrymanders. The letter falselyclaimed that a 2024 circuit court opinion, Petteway v. Galveston County, meant Texas must dismantle three “coalition districts” where nonwhite majorities had been created by combining multiple minority groups together, and threatened to sue the state if it did not. Abbott quickly obliged, adding redistricting to the legislature’s agenda “in light of constitutional concerns raised by the U.S. Department of Justice.”

As the panel ruled this Tuesday, if either the DOJ or Abbott or his fellow Republicans in the legislature justadmitted that this was a partisan scheme instead of targeting the districts over false claims about the legality of their racial composition, their case would be much stronger. “Had the Trump Administration sent Texas a letter urging the State to redraw its congressional map to improve the performance of Republican candidates, the Plaintiff Groups would then face a much greater burden to show that race—rather than partisanship—was the driving force behind the 2025 Map,” federal district judge Jeffrey Brown wrote, because of Rucho‘s hall passon partisan gerrymandering and how Alexander makes proving race was used impermissibly very difficult.

The reason Trump and Texas Republicans lost is that they didn’t stick to the Supreme Court’s roadmap.

Texas might also have had a stronger case—even afterthey admittedthey aimed to eliminate districts where minority voters held sway—had they also increased the GOP’s advantage by redrawing majority-white Democratic districts into Republican districts. But Texas Republicans not only said they picked their targets based on race, Brown found that they had left a majority-white Democratic district intact. According to figures Brown cited in his opinion,they transformed coalition districts into districts where a single racial group held the majority with almost exactly 50 percent—an improbable outcome unless race was used to shuffle voters. They even deconstructed a coalition district that votesRepublican, which wouldn’t have happened if they had simply been engaged in partisan gerrymandering.

“If you like my shoplifting metaphor,” Levitt says, “they didn’t just grab what was on the shelves, they decided to break into the cash register, too. Which the court never said was okay.”

The weakness of the DOJ letter and the Petteway excuse should not have been news to Texas Republicans. As my colleague Ari Berman has pointed out, the Texas legislature heard testimony that the DOJ’s legal arguments the coalition districts were illegal and needed to be dismantledwere unsound. Even the state’s Republican-run attorney general’s office pushed back on Dhillon’s letter, insisting that the 2021 Texas’ map that created the coalition districts was legal because it was drawn for partisan gain without considering race.

“That letter was hot garbage,” says Levitt, who worked on voting rights in the Obama Justice Department and Biden White House. Brown, a conservative Trump appointee, piled on in his opinion, slamming Dhillon’s letter for containing “so many factual, legal, and typographical errors.”

Once the new map was challenged and Texas needed to defend it in court, they changed their tune and said it was a partisan gerrymander all along. Brown and another district judge, Obama appointee David Guaderrama, didn’t believe them. Instead, Brown laid out legislators’ statements from the August special session about sorting voters based on race, and found that the evidence “overcomes the presumption of legislative good faith” otherwise required by Alexander. In a dissent that shocked legal observers for its personal attacks and ranting tone, Judge Jerry Smith of the 5th Circuit held that the new map likely was a partisan gerrymander and that it should be allowed to stand under Rucho and Alexander.

Now Roberts and the Supreme Court’s GOP-majoritywill decide whether to excuse Texas’ blundering in order to let its new Trump-advantaging map go into effect for next year’s elections. “The real question for Roberts and rest of the justices is, ‘Do I save you from your own idiocy without, by the way, a legal reason to do that?’” says Levitt. They shouldn’t, he says, but“I wish I were more confident in the result.”

If the Supreme Court allows the new map to take effect, handing Republicans up to five seats, it will be tossing the roadmap it set out with Rucho and Alexander—one that lets politicians push through racial gerrymandering as long as they don’t say what they are doing out loud. Letting Texas get away with it after politicians not only said it, but appeared to implement it, would raise the question of whether the Court has any rules it won’t let the GOP blow past for political gain.

Hanging over the case is the political reality that Texas is not the only state engaged in gerrymandering ahead of the midterms. Its new map set a national arms race in motion, with California countering by redrawing its own map.

But California, by contrast, followed the court-sanctioned path for getting away with gerrymandering that might otherwisebe found illegal. After Texas kicked things off, California’s legislature passed a map to give Democrats an additional five seats, and voters approved it in November elections. The legislature and governor framed their map as a response to Texas’—an obvious partisan motivation. Official ballot materials sent to voters stressed the partisan reasons for the new map. In other words, it is precisely the kind of partisan gerrymander that Rucho and Alexander should protect, unless it can be proven that it was primarily achieved through impermissible race-based map-drawing. In an ironic twist, the California GOP and the Justice Department are suing to block the map by claiming it was motivated by race. The facts—and the same precedents working against Texas’ map—make thata very tough case.

The California map increases the political stakes of the justices’ pending Texas decision. If they block the Texas map, knowing the California one is on much stronger legal footing, they will be handing Congressional Democrats a leg-up. That would be contrary to the political goals exhibited by the court’s GOP-aligned majority, which has demonstrated its willingness to cast the law aside in order to protect Trump and his party.

And so Texas hands the Republican majority yet another test of their integrity: will they uphold the gerrymandering rules they created? Or will they let Texas’ racial gerrymandering slide?

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Thousands of Toxic US Sites at Risk of Future Flooding

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

More than 5,500 toxic sites nationwide could face coastal flooding by 2100 due to rising sea levels, according to new research.

The study, published on Thursday in Nature Communications and led by scientists at the University of California, warns that if heat-trapping pollution continues unabated, rising seas will flood a wide range of hazardous facilities including those handling sewage, toxic waste, oil and gas, as well as other industrial pollutants.

The analysis relies on projections of a 1 percent-annual-chance flood—commonly called a 100-year flood—under two emissions scenarios: a high-emissions scenario and a lower-emissions scenario.

After examining 23 coastal states and Puerto Rico, scientists found that flood risk is far from evenly distributed. Florida, New Jersey, California, Louisiana, New York, Massachusetts, and Texas account for nearly 80% of the hazardous sites expected to be at risk by 2100.

By examining over 47,600 coastal facilities across the US, more than 11%, or 5,500 facilities are projected to be at risk of a 1-in-100-year or more frequent flood event by the end of the 21st century.

The study also noted: “Restricting greenhouse gas emissions to the low emissions scenario makes little difference in terms of the number of projected sites at risk in the near term (2050) but would reduce the number of at-risk sites from 5,500 to 5,138 (a reduction of 362 or 7% of sites) in the long term.”

“Flooding from sea level rise is dangerous on its own—but when facilities with hazardous materials are in the path of those floodwaters, the danger multiplies.”

Moreover, it found that most of this risk is already locked in due to past emissions. By 2050, nearly 3,800 hazardous facilities are projected to face flooding threats.

The study found that under a high emissions scenario, over a fifth of coastal sewage treatment facilities, refineries and formerly used defense sites, roughly a third of power plants and over 40 percent of fossil-fuel ports and terminals are projected to be at risk by 2100.

In addition to mapping toxic sites vulnerable to flooding, the study examined communities living nearby. It found that under a high-emissions scenario, neighborhoods with one or more at-risk facilities contain higher shares of renters, households in poverty, Hispanic residents, linguistically isolated households, car-less households, older adults and non-voters than neighborhoods without such sites.

The study added: “Racial residential segregation and the inequitable distribution of stormwater infrastructure further contribute to racialized patterns of flood risk across US cities.”

Pointing to the many health risks posed by floodwaters contaminated with industrial waste and sewage, Sacoby Wilson, a professor at the University of Maryland’s School of Public Health, outlined a range of symptoms during a press briefing about the study. These include rashes, burning eyes, headaches, fatigue and respiratory issues, as well as longer-term dangers such as cancers and organ damage to the kidneys and liver.

“Based on this research, we see that you have underlying vulnerabilities that drive risk…Think about those communities that are overburdened by those industrial hazards…or agricultural hazards like CAFOs [concentrated animal feeding operations],” Wilson said. “And so you have compounding vulnerability when it comes to their socioeconomic status, in some cases, the role of racism…and also you have a hazard vulnerability, plus you have the geographic vulnerability based the proximity to the hazard.”

Researcher Lara Cushing of UCLA’s Fielding School of Public Health said: “Flooding from sea level rise is dangerous on its own—but when facilities with hazardous materials are in the path of those floodwaters, the danger multiplies. This analysis makes it clear that these projected dangers are falling disproportionately on poorer communities and communities that have faced discrimination and therefore often lack the resources to prepare for, retreat, or recover from exposure to toxic floodwaters.”

Rachel Morello-Frosch, a researcher at UC Berkeley’s School of Public Health, said there were potential solutions “if policymakers are ready to move forward. And there is a clear need for disaster planning and land-use decision-making, as well as mitigation strategies to address the inequitable hazards and potential health threats posed by sea level rise.”

Thursday’s study comes as a number of the US’s east coast cities including New York, Baltimore and Norfolk are sinking, with subsidence linked to groundwater extraction, natural gas, and building weight pressing into the ground.

It also follows a June study by the Union of Concerned Scientists that found rising sea levels, driven by climate warming, will threaten nearly 3 million Americans across 703 coastal communities. Critical infrastructure including affordable and subsidized housing, wastewater treatment facilities, schools, and hospitals could face monthly disruptive flooding by 2050, the study found.

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The Feds Suddenly Want to Drop Their Charges Against a Woman Shot by a Border Patrol Agent

Remember the horrifying text messages that caught a Border Patrol agent bragging about shooting someone in Chicago last month?

Well, it seems that those texts—and the looming release of even more potentially damaging messages—are now prompting federal prosecutors to move to dismiss their charges against the woman, who prosecutors had accused of assaulting an officer.

A bit of a refresher on the case: On October 4, Charles Exum, a supervisory Border Patrol agent, shot Marimar Martinez, a US citizen, multiple times and accused Martinez of ramming her car into his vehicle. Martinez was part of what the government alleged was “a convoy of civilian vehicles” that had been trailing the federal agents during their immigration enforcement operations. A lawyer for the government said Martinez had been broadcasting the incident on Facebook Live for a couple of minutes before the shooting.

As I wrote earlier this month:

When Exum got out of the car, Martinez allegedly drove her car “at” him, and the officer then fired five shots at her.

Martinez has pled not guilty, and contests the government’s allegations. In her account, Exum sideswiped her car, and fired the five gunshots at her “within two seconds” of exiting his vehicle, according to court documents filed by her lawyer. After driving about a mile from the scene, Martinez took an ambulance to a hospital, where she was treated for gunshot wounds and later arrested. She has been released from custody on $10,000 bond; a jury trial is scheduled for February.

This all occurred as federal officials were conducting immigration raids in the Chicago area, as part of an action dubbed “Operation Midway Blitz” by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).

Soon after, court documents revealed Exum expressing pride over the shooting. As I wrote:

In one exchange, the agent sent an article from the Guardian describing the shooting, adding, “5 shots, 7 holes.” In another, he clarified that he was explaining his pride of his abilities as a marksman: “I fired 5 rounds and she had 7 holes. Put that in your book boys.” (Reuters reported that, when asked about these messages at a court hearing on Wednesday, Exum said: “I’m a firearms instructor and I take pride in my shooting skills.”)

In other messages, Exum wrote: “I’m up for another round of ‘fuck around and find out’” and “Sweet. My fifteen mins of fame. Lmao.”

According to CNN, Martinez’s lawyer, Christopher Perente, asked Exum about another text, in which Exum wrote about the incident: “I have a MOF amendment to add to my story.” Exum explained ‘MOF’ meant “miserable old fucker,” a term meant to refer to someone trying to one-up others, per CNN’s account. Exum explained the text by saying: “That means illegal actions have legal consequences.”

Following that explosive hearing, a federal court directed the government’s lawyers to provide the agent’s unredacted texts to the judge for her private review. Then, on Monday, the judge told the government’s lawyers they needed to provide the texts to Martinez’s lawyer, which would wind up making them public. But rather than do that, the government on Thursday moved to dismiss the case entirely, just hours before another hearing was scheduled to take place.

So what do those additionaltexts say? For now, we don’t know. Neither the lawyer representing Martinez nor spokespeople for the Department of Justice and Border Patrol immediately responded to requests for comment from Mother Jones on Thursday afternoon.

But for the government to drop the case entirely, there’s a good chance they are even more embarrassing for Exum than the previous texts were. And they likely add to a disturbing trend our reporting has repeatedly revealed: The federal agents the government claims are helping the supposedly terrified residents of American cities are, in fact, posing a danger to residents themselves. And sometimes, they’re even bragging about it afterwards.

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Trump Endorses Hanging Democratic Members of Congress

It’s been a week of Donald Trump outrages—he barked at a female reporter, “Quiet, quiet, piggy,” and during a meeting with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, he denigrated Jamal Khashoggi, the Washington Post columnist who was slain and dismembered by Saudi operatives, allegedly on bin Salman’s orders. Butperhaps his most horrendous transgression, so far, is his amplification of a call to execute Democratic members of Congress.

Yes, the president of the United States endorsed hanging senators and representatives.

This distinctly Trumpian episode began with a video made by six Democratic lawmakers who each served in the US military or the intelligence community: Sens. Mark Kelly of Arizona (Navy) and Elissa Slotkin of Michigan (CIA), and Reps. Chris DeLuzio of Pennsylvania (Navy), Maggie Goodlander of New Hampshire (Navy Reserve), Chrissy Houlahan of Pennsylvania (Air Force), and Jason Crow of Colorado (Army).

Addressing members of the military and the intelligence community, these legislators noted that the Trump administration “is pitting our uniformed military and intelligence community professionals against American citizens.” They pointed out, “Like us, you swore an oath to protect and defend this Constitution,” and they stated that “right now the threats to our Constitution aren’t just coming from abroad but from right here at home.”

Then the Democrats presented a dramatic reminder to service members and intelligence officers: “You can refuse illegal orders.” In fact, the six noted, “You must refuse illegal orders.” They acknowledged that this could be “hard” and that “it’s a difficult time to be a public servant.” But they added, “We have your back.” The video ended with a plea to stand up “for our laws, our Constitution” and the message, “Don’t give up the ship.”

We want to speak directly to members of the Military and the Intelligence Community.

The American people need you to stand up for our laws and our Constitution.

Don’t give up the ship. pic.twitter.com/N8lW0EpQ7r

— Sen. Elissa Slotkin (@SenatorSlotkin) November 18, 2025

The video was posted on social media on Tuesday, and within two days it had 12 million views and had made national headlines.

Republicans immediately howled about the video. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth called it “Stage 4 [Trump Derangement Syndrome].” On Fox News, Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) said, “It is inconceivable that you would have elected officials that are saying to uniformed members of the military who have taken an oath that they would defy the orders that they have been given to execute their mission.”

And Trump went ballistic.

On Thursday morning, the president, on his Truth Social account, posted a link to an article about the video and wrote, “This is really bad, and Dangerous to our Country. Their words cannot be allowed to stand. SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR FROM TRAITORS!!! LOCK THEM UP??? President DJT.”

Trump went further and reposted messages from other users of his social media platform decrying the video as “treason” and “insurrection,” calling these Democrats “domestic terrorists,” and urging their arrest. Among the posts Trump boosted was one that exclaimed, “HANG THEM GEORGE WASHINGTON WOULD!!”

Trump was spreading a call for deadly violence against members of Congress. Then Trump put up his own post directly suggesting these Democrats deserved execution: “SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR, punishable by DEATH!”

Besides behaving like a tyrant, Trump was also showing his ignorance. Insurrection or sedition involve the use of force. It does not include encouraging anyone to disobey an illegalorder.

This is not the first time Trump has endorsed the execution of a critic. Two years ago, he suggested that Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was a traitor who deserved to be executed. And he pardoned violent January 6 rioters, some of whom had chanted “Hang Mike Pence” while they attacked the US Capitol.

Trump has long been a purveyor of violent rhetoric, and he has been accused of stochastic terrorism—the demonization of a foe so that they might become targets of violence. In recent days, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), who earned Trump’s wrath by pushing for the release of Epstein files held by the Justice Department, has bitterly complained that Trump branding her a “traitor” has led to death threats against her. No surprise, Trump brushed aside a question from a reporter about violent threats Greene has received: “I don’t think her life is in danger. I don’t think. Frankly, I don’t think anybody cares about her.”

Elevating and echoing an explicit call for killing senators and representatives is a new high—or low—for Trump. For years, he has gotten away with horrific conduct that exacerbates and encourages political division and that could fuel violence. His supporters don’t recoil, and Republicans rarely say boo. Noting that Trump “just called for Democratic members of Congress to be executed,” Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.), posted, “If you’re a person of influence in this country and you haven’t picked a side, maybe now would be the time to pick a fucking side.”

Trump promoting a death threat should not be dismissed as just one more of his excesses. When a wannabe autocrat aligns himself with a call to execute political foes, it’s not just another Trump social media post. It’s another warning.

If you appreciate David Corn’s kick-ass reporting and analysis, sign up for his Our Land newsletter at www.davidcorn.com.

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The CDC’s New Autism Page Reads Like an Anti-Vax Blog

Despite the anti-vaccine proclivities of the US Department of Health and Human Services under its secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the agency’s public-facing sites about vaccines had remained largely unchanged, reflecting scientific consensus.

That is, until Wednesday.

That’s when a new page from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on “Autism and Vaccines” appeared. Among other dubious assertions, it informed readers, “The claim ‘vaccines do not cause autism’ is not an evidence-based claim because studies have not ruled out the possibility that infant vaccines cause autism.” Also, it asserts, falsely, “Studies supporting a link have been ignored by health authorities.”

In an emailed response to a request for comment from Mother Jones, HHS Communications Director Andrew Nixon repeated those statements and added, “We are updating the CDC’s website to reflect gold standard, evidence-based science.”

The information on the new page directly conflicts with that on other CDC pages that are still up. For example, an existing page about thimerosal, a vaccine additive, stated, “Research does not show any link between thimerosal in vaccines and autism, a neurodevelopmental disorder.” A separate page about autism spectrum disorder states, “Many studies have looked at whether there is a relationship between vaccines and ASD. To date, the studies continue to show that vaccines are not associated with ASD.” A note at the end of the new site clarified the reason for the apparent contradiction, stating, “The header ‘Vaccines do not cause autism’ has not been removed due to an agreement with the chair of the US Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee that it would remain on the CDC website.”

The chair of this committee is Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.), who is also a physician and cast the deciding vote to confirm RFK Jr. to his post. On social media, critics of the new change have pointed out that Cassidy appeared to require the old language to stay on the site as a condition of his vote to confirm:

RFK Jr had committed to Bill Cassidy, as a condition to win his vote, that he would keep website language.Cassidy in February: “If confirmed… CDC will not remove statements on their website pointing out that vaccines do not cause autism.”Note the language in second photo.

— Dan Diamond (@ddiamond.bsky.social) 2025-11-20T02:42:20.762Z

“We call on the CDC to stop wasting government resources to amplify false claims that sow doubt in one of the best tools we have to keep children healthy and thriving: routine immunizations.”

In response to the new page, Susan J. Kressly, president of the American Academy of Pediatrics, expressed strong disapproval. “The conclusion is clear and unambiguous: There’s no link between vaccines and autism,” she wrote in an emailed statement. “Anyone repeating this harmful myth is misinformed or intentionally trying to mislead parents. We call on the CDC to stop wasting government resources to amplify false claims that sow doubt in one of the best tools we have to keep children healthy and thriving: routine immunizations.”

In contrast, Children’s Health Defense, the anti-vaccine group Kennedy founded, cheered the change:

Children's Health Defense applauds the CDC's new "Autism and Vaccines" webpage, posted today, November 19.

Finally, the CDC is beginning to acknowledge the truth about this condition that affects millions, disavowing the bold, long-running lie that "vaccines do not cause… pic.twitter.com/f2AZGc0E58

— Children’s Health Defense (@ChildrensHD) November 20, 2025

On X, Informed Consent Action Network, the anti-vaccine advocacy group helmed by Del Bigtree, a TV and film producer and close Kennedy ally, took credit for the new addition. “This is the culmination of more than 6 years of work for @icandecide, which sued the CDC in 2020 to remove the unscientific claim from its website,” the group posted. “This represents vindication for the 40-70 percent of Autism Parents in America who have been marginalized because of that unsupported claim.”

The new page is just the latest move by Kennedy’s HHS to sow doubt about the scientific consensus on vaccines. As my colleague Anna Merlan and I wrote:

Long before he became secretary of the US Department of Health and Human Services under President Trump, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was laying the groundwork for his war on vaccines. As the head of the anti-vaccine nonprofit Children’s Health Defense, Kennedy amplified once-fringe conspiracies about vaccine safety and joined a larger crusade against the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program, the government initiative that was established in the 1980s by Congress to compensate people who were able to prove a likely vaccine injury. In his current leadership role, Kennedy has leveraged political power, transforming conspiracy theories into action—and reshaping American vaccine policy in just a few short months.

Read our timeline of Kennedy’s anti-vaccine crusade here.

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How the Federal Shutdown Broke America’s Food Chain

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

In a dramatic twist of political defections and contentious concessions, the longest ever federal shutdown came to a close last week as Congress finally managed to agree on a deal to reopen the government. Federal agencies are now beginning to resume operations, employees are returning to work, and payments are beginning to flow once again.

Experts say, though, that the shutdown has left behind fractures on the nation’s food system that are only beginning to appear. These cracks will only widen with time as they join with all of the other major food and farming policy changes enacted by the Trump administration—which altogether are affecting who eats what, where that food comes from, and which communities get left behind.

“The United States was definitely the leader in agricultural research in the entire world, and that’s slipping out of our grasp.”

“When agencies like the USDA or FDA halt or scale back operations, there are ripple effects through the supply chain because of the effect on crop payments, insurance, inspections, and nutrition programs,” said Ginni Braich, a data scientist studying food insecurity and climate change at the University of Colorado, Boulder. “These, along with unpredictable policies, can erode public trust and market transparency, weaken these support systems, and increase vulnerabilities to shocks like disease outbreaks or extreme climate events.”

Grist spoke to federal workers, farmers, economists, recipients of food benefits, and analysts throughout the country to piece together how the longest shutdown in US history is likely to affect America’s food system in the weeks, months, and years to come.

Among the furloughed federal staffers was Ethan Roberts, who represents the employee bargaining unit at the National Center for Agricultural Utilization Research as union president and also works for the Department of Agriculture as a physical science technician. After six weeks out of office, Roberts returned to work at the Agricultural Research Service in Peoria, Illinois, on Thursday.

Going into the shutdown, Roberts said his lab “mothballed” nearly all of their projects, including their work on fungal diseases, such as fumonisin toxin and wheat scab blight, in addition to finding new uses for crops: “Basically, we just lost, like, a month and a half worth of progress and work, and a lot of those things will have to be restarted.”

Some of Roberts’ colleagues had to file for unemployment to pay their bills. Many were forced to look for other work. More still might not return to the USDA at all. The losses only add to the cuts that the Trump administration made before the shutdown. Upward of 20,000 USDA staffers, or roughly a fifth of the agency’s workforce, have lost their jobs this year. Only a small group of staffers in Roberts’ lab stayed on through the shutdown to continue work that the USDA considered critical, including the cryogenic preservation of the largest publicly available collection of microorganisms in the world.

Without adequate federal financial support, “the nation’s food is on track to become more expensive and more limited in supply.”

The consequences of the lab’s dwindling administrative capacity will eventually reach the country’s ranchers and farmers. “It is our job to find new products, new uses, new everything for the crops that farmers produce,” said Roberts. “So if we’re not working on that for a month and a half, that’s time we weren’t working on solutions and implementations to assist these farmers.”

Fewer employees at labs like Roberts’, of course, also means that the USDA will fall further behind on agricultural research. “The United States was definitely the leader in agricultural research in the entire world, and that’s slipping out of our grasp,” he said. “In terms of ripple effects, it can’t get much bigger than that.”

This growing exodus of federal workers doesn’t just compromise research capacity, but also food safety oversight, putting Americans’ health at risk. Leading into the shutdown, federal food safety agencies had already faced significant staff losses threatening their ability to ensure the safety of the national food supply. Between January and April, the Food and Drug Administration lost around 4,000 staffers to mass layoffs, according to government data. Operational slowdowns during the shutdown then limited routine inspections, facility oversight, and ongoing food safety investigations.

Quietly tucked into the stopgap funding bill that will keep the government open through January 30 was a one-year extension of the 2018 farm bill and an annual USDA funding bill.

The two bills will get essential services—think farm loans, conservation assistance, and local food grants—operating after weeks of disruption. But the appropriations bill also cut more than $75 million from conservation technical assistance programs, while the farm bill extension removed payment limits for cost-sharing conservation programs. Combined, this is both bad news for climate-weary farmers and could result in inequitable distributions of those funding pots, according to Mike Lavender, policy director at the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition.

All told, farm bankruptcies are soaring, and farm debt is set to hit a record high this year. Farmers are currently being squeezed by low commodity-crop prices, spiking interest rates, struggles following several successive federal funding cuts, blowback from the president’s tariffs on markets, and stubbornly high costs of energy and fertilizer, among other inputs. Livestock producers are confronting supply chain constraints, persistent droughts, and rising production costs. Climate change and extreme weather have been amplifying all of these existing issues—as has the shutdown. “When the government is closed for 43 days, it really does stunt the possibility of federal policy to provide more timely solutions,” said Lavender.

“When SNAP shrinks, the whole food economy shrinks.”

“The negative effects of the shutdown on the US agricultural industry, coupled with climate change-driven disruptions to agriculture in the US and globally, could create crop deficits and contribute to rising prices of food,” said Alla Semenova, an agricultural economist at St. Mary’s College of Maryland. Other typical effects of delayed climate adaptation include rising food production and transportation costs, falling nutritional quality of foods, and deteriorating population health.

The shutdown also further exposed the US agricultural sector’s high reliance on federal financial assistance, such as farm subsidies and loan programs. That reliance, warned Semenova, is at risk of only increasing over the next two years because of climate change.

“As the government shutdown froze financial assistance to farmers during the critical harvesting and crop-planning season,” Semenova said, it has created “potential risks to the US food supply chain in 2026 and 2027. Without adequate financial assistance from the federal government, the nation’s food is on track to become more expensive and more limited in supply.”

On Monday, USDA Deputy Secretary Stephen Vaden announced that the administration will release another tranche of the billions in emergency assistance to help struggling farmers authorized by Congress last December. According to Vaden, the agency is now opening up applications for another installment of a $16 billion pool for weather-related aid.

The effects of the shutdown have already begun reverberating throughout the supply chain. Nearly 42 million Americans who rely on programs like SNAP spent weeks waiting on their supplemental grocery stipends, while the Trump administration fought a series of legal battles to hold off on paying those benefits during the shutdown.

According to Parker Gilkesson, a senior policy analyst who researches SNAP at the Center for Law and Social Policy, every $1 in SNAP benefits generates up to $1.80 in economic activity. Even a single week’s suspension of the food stamp dollars, said Gilkesson, can drive lasting effects on everything from supplier relationships to business revenue.

She’s also near certain it will further inflate America’s rising food insecurity problem. New SNAP work requirements taking effect, alongside historically unprecedented program funding changes—now coupled with USDA warnings of an imminent program overhaul—threaten to push the nation’s food safety net to a breaking point. But tracking the fallout on food access will be close to impossible. That’s because, preceding the shutdown, the Trump administration got rid of the nation’s primary tool that would do so. “When SNAP shrinks, the whole food economy shrinks. And it doesn’t just affect households who receive SNAP. It affects every household,” said Gilkesson.

Jared Grant, an agricultural economist who specializes in food security at Ohio State University, said that the shutdown exposed vulnerabilities throughout the nation’s supply chain that could shift consumer behavior in the grocery stores and slow overall consumer spending. A new preliminary report from the University of Michigan found that consumer confidence dropped to its lowest point since June 2022 this month, largely driven by the shutdown.

“The government shutdown is going to affect consumers in their perception and behavior,” said Grant. “They might think they see higher prices on certain items.”

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The Anti-Vax Movement’s Wildest Claim Yet: Polio Wasn’t So Bad

Even in the house of horrors that is vaccine-preventable illnesses, polio stands out as particularly terrifying. Before the rollout of the vaccine in the 1950s, the disease paralyzed or killed more than 500,000 people worldwide every year. The disease was especially catastrophic for children, some of whom were confined for years to wheelchairs or a mechanical breathing chamber known ominously as the iron lung. Older people remember being forbidden to play outside during summer outbreaks for fear that they would catch the disease.

The darker chapters of public health history do not seem to faze anti-vaccine activists, who have long claimed that measles, a catastrophic disease, is no big deal. Now, it’s polio’s turn to be downplayed.

Over the last few months, a handful of influential anti-vaccine activists have dabbled in polio denialism. In September, for example, Larry Cook, founder of the anti-vaccine group Stop Mandatory Vaccination, falsely claimed to his 137,000 followers on X that polio “was cured with high dose vitamin C” and that “the polio vaccine NEVER stopped polio. We’ve been lied to for decades and decades.”

Then, in October, Suzanne Humphries, a holistic medicine practitioner and anti-vaccine activist, appeared on Joe Rogan’s wildly popular podcast. “The early injection caused more paralytic polio than it prevented,” she told Rogan. “And that’s the part that people don’t understand when they say, ‘What about polio? Because there’s no more iron lungs, there’s no more crippling, there’s no more of these poor little kids walking around with their casts.’ Well, that’s not true because the iron lung is now called a ventilator.” She went on to argue that “we still have polio that we had in 1953” because many of the cases back then weren’t technically polio but rather paralysis triggered by vaccines, tonsillectomies, and exposure to toxic substances like arsenic.

To call those claims dangerously misleading is an understatement, so let’s briefly dispense with them. The early injections were, in fact, remarkably effective, with cases declining by 90 percent within the first three years of the vaccine rollout; ventilators are not the same as iron lungs; polio was a distinct virus that scientists successfully isolated in stool samples.

Humphries isn’t the only one spreading misinformation about polio on Joe Rogan’s show. A month after her appearance, Gavin de Becker, a security specialist, mega-donor to RFK Jr.’s failed presidential campaign, and anti-vaccine activist, made similarly specious claims on the show. “Here’s the reality of polio, right from the CDC website: 99 percent of people who get polio never have any symptoms,” he said. What’s more, he said, polio killed just 500 people last year and paralyzed an additional 500, and many of the cases were actually caused by the live virus contained in vaccines. He went on to claim that historic cases of polio paralysis were actually caused by exposure to the pesticide DDT.

Again, a real grab bag here. First off, let’s address the outright falsehoods: polio paralysis, as Politifact and Factcheck.org confirm, was never caused by DDT. Now, for the more slippery assertions: Yes, it’s true that 99 percent of polio cases are asymptomatic and that only 1,000 people last year died of or were paralyzed by the disease. True as well that today, most polio cases are caused by the live virus in the vaccine.

What de Becker conveniently ignores is that all these current realities are actually strong arguments in favor of vaccination. The fact that the yearly death toll and paralysis numbers are so low is because of widespread vaccination efforts, which have resulted in polio infection decreasing by 99 percent worldwide since 1988 and led to it being considered as eradicated in all but two countries (Afghanistan and Pakistan). Even a paralysis rate of one percent is catastrophic at scale—let’s remember that the disease killed or paralyzed half a million people every year before vaccines. As for vaccine-derived polio, ironically, it is much more likely to spread and mutate in undervaccinated populations.

Anti-vaccine advocacy groups were quick to amplify Humphries’ and de Becker’s claims. Children’s Health Defense, the organization Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. founded, jumped at the chance, as did the MAHA Institute, a group that focuses on fundraising and policy around Kennedy’s Make America Healthy Again initiative.

Then, earlier this week, a video of a man holding a baby while talking about polio made the rounds. In addition to repeating Humphries’ and de Becker’s dubious talking points, he claims that modern sanitation could stop the spread of polio. “You have to literally put the feces of a polio-infected human being into your mouth to contract polio,” he announces. “And that sounds more like a sanitation issue rather than a vaccination issue.” (Presumably the baby this guy is holding does not attend daycare, where the fecal-oral route of disease transmission is, uh, robust.) The video has been viewed 376,000 times on X and counting.

Only a generation or two back, someone who claimed that polio wasn’t so bad would have been swiftly shouted down—because most people knew someone for whom polio had indeed been very bad. It is precisely because of the success of vaccines that polio misinformation can now find a foothold. Last month, infectious disease doctor Neil Stone tweeted a photo of an iron lung. “This is an iron lung for polio victims,” he wrote. “Remember these? Me neither. It’s now in a museum…where it should stay. Why? Because vaccines work.”

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Inside the $3 Billion Industry Built on America’s School Shooting Epidemic

The entrepreneurs who are part of the booming school safety industry face a cruel irony: they are dependent on the uniquely American epidemic of school shootings.

“Every time there is a shooting, we see an uptick in business,” says one, featured in the new HBO documentary Thoughts and Prayers, who sells bulletproof wall art and skateboards. “Every time there is a tragedy, it economically benefits my family. That’s not what I wanted. We could be a $300 million company by the time this documentary airs.”

There are, as the documentary shows, bulletproof desks that can double as shields, blackout shutters to block visibility into classrooms, and video game simulations that test how teachers respond to a fake threat of a school shooter. The school safety industry has become an estimated $4 billionjuggernaut, aided in part by a $1 billion infusion from Congress in 2022 to support mental health services and infrastructure upgrades, instead of meaningful gun reform.

Despite the documentary’s critique of the American gun culture that has given rise to mass shootings, political debates and depictions of gun violence are absent from the film. Instead, there are sit-down interviews with teachers reluctantly learning how to shoot guns and kids learning to live with the looming threat of mass shootings. The filmmakers were also present for lockdown drills and a highly realistic mass casualty simulation at a school district in Oregon that included volunteer students portraying gunshot victims. For co-directors Jessica Dimmock and Zackary Canepari, the goal of making the documentary was to “look at what people are trying to do” to combat mass shootings, Dimmock told me, “and ask the audience to consider whether or not this is going to work. And do we want to live like this?”

I spoke with Dimmock and Canepari by Zoom on Monday to discuss their approach to making the film, the limits of the products they highlight, and what they learned from the kids they spoke to.

This interview has been lightly condensed and edited.

The film implicitly critiques these school safety products while also taking an earnest look at how they’re being used and why they were created. Why did you feel it was important to take this approach?

Jessica Dimmock: We wanted to make a gun violence film where gun violence doesn’t happen. I think we’ve all seen so much of it, and it’s so hard to take, so we knew we wanted to make a film where no one actually gets hurt, and everything you see is a simulation. There is, of course, some skepticism on our part that any of these products are going to be the way that we actually get through this issue. But that being said, a lot of people that are making products and programs are trying to come up with a solution in the absence of real gun reform.

One of the people you interviewed, a self-defense trainer and ex-Green Beret who goes by the name Thrasher, says he doesn’t think guns are the root cause of our country’s mass shooting epidemic, and that “family structures [and] the lack of tribalism” are, instead, to blame. Was this the view of most of the people selling these safety products who you interviewed, or were their assessments more mixed?

Zackary Canepari: Yeah, I think for the most part. It’s interesting—I don’t know if they would have brought up guns if we didn’t ask. I think one thing that we tried to do in the film was point out that a lot of the trainers and people running the programs have police and military backgrounds, so they’re already coming from a place in which violence is much more present than what we experience as civilians.

JD: They’re bringing that kind of militarized approach into a non-military setting.

ZC: Thrasher’s response was kind of intense, but very much in line with what we heard, which is that mental health crises, family structure issues, things like that, are the reasons that this is happening with such frequency. And the only group that had a clear response were the kids. For the most part, the kids just understood what the problem was. They were the ones who were experiencing it. They’ve all grown up in this world where gun violence is the norm and lockdown drills are something they’ve always done. They’re the ones who say to the audience that guns are the number one killer of kids in this country. It’s not the adults that are saying that.

What else did you learn from the kids you spoke to for the film about how they cope with the threat of school shootings?

JD: I think what’s so tragic, and the thing that we’ve heard over and over again, is that they are thinking about it all the time—when they are in school and out of school. Obviously, shootings don’t just happen at schools; they happen at supermarkets and churches and nightclubs and all types of places. We would hear over and over again, kids are preparing. They’re sitting there thinking about what the safest exit would be when they’re in a confined space. When they’re in theaters, they think about where they could run away. It’s just a mental noise going on all the time, and that’s very tragic. And then when you also think about what else could and should be filling that brain space, it’s really awful.

In the mass casualty simulation you follow, volunteer students become actors who scream for help while wearing makeup to depict fake gunshot wounds. It’s hard to watch. What kind of rationale did officials provide for why they felt it was important to do these reenactments, given that leading groups of gun safety and education advocates, and psychologists, say that drills should not simulate actual events and that children should not routinely be part of them? Who or what did you get the sense they were for?

ZC: I think they’re mostly for two groups. One is actual first responders. I think the second group is the more important one, which is that it’s training civilians to be first responders. In the case of our film, that’s teachers. It’s really about getting adults prepared, mentally and even physically, for what to do in an active shooter event.

The people that are there fastest are going to be the civilians, and so in order to save lives, those civilians need to be prepared to run, hide, fight, and also stop the bleeding and barricade and all these different skills that are being taught across the country.

The kids are there because the belief system amongst most of the people in this space is that—and this is literally the slogan of one of the companies—’your body can’t go where your mind has never been.’ The idea is that if you drill and there’s not this level of intensity and blood and screaming, the drills won’t be effective. So the kids are there to give that extra push to the participants, and they’re there also because they’re part of these communities as well.

Did your own perceptions of the simulation change after watching them unfold?

JD: It took a while for it to dawn on us that everything that we were seeing is practice and not prevention, and I think that was kind of a mental switch for us. At a certain point, you realize that everything you’re seeing is about practicing what to do when it eventually happens, and that’s so defeatist, and yet, that’s where we’re at.

ZC: A crazy byproduct of this is that often these communities are united in these drills. They do feel empowered by them because they’ve done it together, and that makes a lot of sense. I think they could do a lot of other things together besides this, but this is the void that they’re trying to fill.

One of the most chilling parts of the documentary for me was the footage, during the simulation, of school shooters in Parkland, Florida and Nashville, Tennessee entering the schools where they ended up killing nearly two dozen people combined. Viewers may not even realize what they’re watching. Why did you integrate those clips in that way?

We’re talking about a very real American thing, and it’s probably the most shameful part of our national makeup.

JD: It’s meant to be subtle. You want the audience to remember that after all of this theater, this is a reference to the real thing. We really wanted to make sure we made a film in which no one ever gets hurt, in part because we want audiences to actually be able to sit down and watch it. And yet, at the end of the day, we’re talking about a very real American thing, and it’s probably the most shameful part of our national makeup.

Lawmakers don’t really feature much in the film at all, other than a few clips early on of some of them debating assault weapons bans. Can you talk about this choice?

JD: I think we just knew that if we approached this politically, there would automatically be this whole section of an audience that just wouldn’t watch it. They don’t want to be told what to think, they don’t want to hear from one type of politician or the other.

We didn’t want to preach to people. We felt like if we did that, we’d be probably preaching to the choir. I want parents to see this film. I want teachers to see this film. I want students to show this film to their parents. I don’t want to get in a red or blue, Democrat or Republican debate here.

ZC:It’s one of the reasons why the film is kind of built around the statistic about guns being the number one killer of kids in America. We didn’t need politics to argue over that.

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This Ohio County Banned Commercial Wind and Solar. Not So Fast, Residents Said.

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

Restrictions on solar and wind farms are proliferating around the country, with scores of local governments going as far as to forbid large-scale clean-energy developments.

Now, residents of an Ohio county are pushing back on one such ban on renewables—a move that could be a model for other places where clean energy faces severe restrictions.

Ohio has become a hotspot for anti-clean-energy rules. As of this fall, more than three dozen counties in the state have outlawed utility-scale solar in at least one of their townships.

In Richland County, the ban came this summer, when county commissioners voted to bar economically significant solar and wind projects in 11 of the county’s 18 townships. Almost immediately, residents formed a group called the Richland County Citizens for Property Rights and Job Development to try and reverse the stricture.

​“To me, it just is bad for the county — the whole county, not just one or two townships.”

By September, they’d notched a crucial first victory, collecting enough signatures to put the issue on the ballot. Next May, when Ohioans head to the polls to vote in primary races, residents of Richland County will weigh in on a referendum that could ultimately reverse the ban. It’s the first time a county’s renewable-energy ban will be on the ballot in Ohio.

From the very beginning, ​“it was just a whirlwind,” said Christina O’Millian, a leader of the Richland County group. Like most others, she didn’t know a ban was under consideration until shortly before July 17, when the commission voted on it.

“We felt as constituents that we just hadn’t been heard,” O’Millian said. She views renewable energy as a way to attract more economic development to the county while reining in planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions.

Brian McPeek, another of the group’s leaders and a manager for the local chapter of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, sees solar projects as huge job opportunities for the union’s members. ​“They provide a ton of work, a ton of man-hours.”

Many petition signers ​“didn’t want the commissioners to make that decision for them,” said Morgan Carroll, a county resident who helped gather signatures. ​“And there was a lot of respect for farmers having their own property rights” to decide whether to lease their land.

While the Ohio Power Siting Board retains general authority over where electricity generation is built, a 2021 state law known as Senate Bill 52 lets counties ban solar and wind farms in all or part of their territories. Meanwhile, Ohio law prevents local governments from blocking fossil-fuel or nuclear projects.

The Richland County community group is using a process under SB 52 to challenge the renewable-energy ban via referendum. Under that law, the organization had just 30 days from the commissioners’ vote to collect signatures in support of the ballot measure.

All told, more than 4,300 people signed the petition, though after the county Board of Elections rejected hundreds of signatures as invalid, the final count ended up at 3,380—just 60 more than the required threshold of 8 percent of the number of votes in the last governor’s election.

Although the Richland County ban came as a surprise to many, it was months in the making.

In late January, Sharon Township’s zoning committee asked the county to forbid large wind and solar projects there. After discussion at their February 6 meeting, the county commissioners wrote to all 18 townships in Richland to see if their trustees also wanted a ban. A draft fill-in-the-blanks resolution accompanied the letter.

Signed resolutions came back from 11 townships. The commissioners then took up the issue again on July 17. Roughly two dozen residents came to the meeting, and a majority of those who spoke on the proposal were against it. Commissioners deferred to the township trustees.

“The township trustees who were in favor of the prohibition strongly believe that they were representing the wishes of their residents, who are farming communities, who are not fans of seeing potential farmland being taken up for large wind and solar,” Commissioner Tony Vero told Canary Media.

He pointed out that the ban doesn’t cover the seven remaining townships and all municipal areas. ​“I just thought it was a pretty good compromise,” he said.

The concerns over putting solar panels or wind turbines on potential farmland echo land-use arguments that have long dogged rural clean-energy developments—and which have been elevated into federal policy by the Trump administration this year. Groups linked to the fossil-fuel industry have pushed these arguments in Ohio and beyond.

“It’s a false narrative that they care about prime farmland,” said Bella Bogin, director of programs for Ohio Citizen Action, which helped the Richland County group collect signatures to petition for the referendum. Income from leasing some land for renewable energy can help farmers keep property in their families, and plenty of acreage currently goes to growing crops for fuel—not food. ​“We can’t eat ethanol corn,” she added.

Under Ohio’s SB 52, counties—not townships—have the authority to issue blanket prohibitions over large solar and wind farms, with limited exceptions for projects already in the grid manager’s queue.

In Richland County’s case, the commissioners decided to defer to townships even though they didn’t have to.

The choice shows how SB 52 has led to ​“an inconsistently applied, informal framework that has created confusion about the roles of counties, townships, and the Ohio Power Siting Board,” said Chris Tavenor, general counsel for the Ohio Environmental Council. Under the law, ​“county commissioners should be carefully considering all the factors at play,” rather than deferring to townships.

“I think it’s important for my children to have…the opportunities that go along with having wind and solar.”

Even without a restriction in place, SB 52 lets counties nix new solar or wind farms on a case-by-case basis before they’re considered by the Ohio Power Siting Board. And when projects do go to the state regulator, counties and townships appoint two ad hoc decision-makers who vote on cases with the rest of the board.

As electricity prices continue to rise across Ohio, Tavenor hopes the state’s General Assembly will reconsider SB 52, which he and other advocates say is unfairly restrictive toward solar and wind—two of the cheapest and quickest energy sources to deploy. “Lawmakers should be looking to repeal it and make a system that actually responds to the problems facing our electric grid right now,” he said.

Commissioner Vero, for his part, said he has mixed feelings about the referendum. “It’s America, and if there’s enough signatures to get on the ballot, more power to people,” he said. However, he objects to the fact that SB 52 allows voters countywide to sign the petition, even if they don’t live in one of the townships with a ban, and said he hopes the legislature will amend the law to prevent that from happening elsewhere.

Yet referendum supporters say the ban matters for the entire county. “It affects everybody, whether you live in a city, a township, or a village,” McPeek said.

As he sees it, restrictions will deter investment from not only companies that build wind and solar but also those that want to be able to access renewable energy. ​“To me, it just is bad for the county—the whole county, not just one or two townships.”

Renewable-energy projects also provide substantial amounts of tax revenue or similar PILOT payments for counties, helping fund schools and other local needs. ​“I think it’s important for my children to have more clean electric [energy] and all the opportunities that go along with having wind and solar,” Carroll said.

Now that the referendum is on the ballot, the Richland County group will work to build more support and get out the vote next spring. ​“Education and outreach in the community is basically what we’re going to focus on for the campaign coming up in the next few months,” O’Millian said.

“So now it goes to a countywide vote, and the population of the county gets to make that decision, instead of three guys,” McPeek said.

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This Is All John Roberts’ Fault

Imagine: you are at a baseball game, but something is off. When the blue team is at bat, the umpire calls every pitch a strike. But when the red team is up, the umpire won’t call a single one. When a red batter hits the ball into a blue player’s glove—out!—the umpire sends him to first base anyway. You can’t believe what you are seeing. This is crazy, right? This is crazy. You look around. Does everyone else see what is happening?

Twenty years ago, John Roberts promised that as chief justice of the Supreme Court, he would be like an umpire, calling balls and strikes. His promise charmed senators and the media, who believed that his predilection for executive power and long-held antipathy for civil rights could be moderated by this commitment to faithfully apply the law. The delusion was so powerful that for two decades, the media defaulted to portraying him as a moderate institutionalist, pointing to high-profile decisions—to uphold parts of the Affordable Care Act or striking down President Donald Trump’s attempt to ask about citizenship in the 2020 census—in which he broke from conservative orthodoxy. But those decisions were always the exception. Today, as the Roberts court rewrites the Constitution in the image of Trumpian autocracy, it’s become clear that Roberts’ promise to be a neutral umpire was a lie. We are watching a rigged game, and Roberts set it up.

Trump needed Roberts to win—and Trump’s victory came just in time for Roberts.

The Roberts court has spent Trump’s second term not applying the law so much as clearing it out of his way. In a matter of months, the court’s 6–3 GOP-aligned majority has permitted a long list of lawless actions, including firing independent agency commissioners, using racial profiling in immigration sweeps, disappearing immigrants to authoritarian and war-torn nations, and defying Congress’ power of the purse. But the court’s acquiescence to an antidemocratic America didn’t start in 2025. Roberts has been embedding white-dominant authoritarianism into the country’s source code for two decades. It’s impossible to imagine today’s crisis without the Roberts court having first undermined the foundations of our democracy.

“You really can trace, in so many ways, the moment we’re in to critical decisions surrounding our law of democracy,” says Ryan Doerfler, a Harvard Law professor who studies the judiciary’s role in a democratic system.

Democracies are built on the right to vote and choose representatives. The United States finally recognized this right for all people with the Voting Rights Act of 1965. But over the last five decades, Roberts has taken aim at the law, beginning as a young lawyer in President Ronald Reagan’s Justice Department fighting its reauthorization, when he claimed it would “lead to a quota system in all areas.” He lost that skirmish when Congress overwhelmingly voted to strengthen the VRA in 1982, but he won the larger battle decades later as chief justice, helping craft a string of rulings kneecapping the law, starting with his 2013 opinion in Shelby County v. Holder. The decision overruled Congress and freed states with histories of discrimination to change their voting rules, spurring the creation of 115 voter suppression laws in more than 30 states. Many were inspired by Trump’s election lies.

In 2019, Roberts toppled another pillar of democratic governance—if you don’t like a politician, you can vote them out—by writing in Rucho v. Common Cause that federal judges could not even review claims of partisan gerrymandering, deeming them “political questions beyond the reach of the federal courts.” In the decision, Roberts pinkie-swore that courts could still block “racial discrimination in districting,” but now the Supreme Court is on the verge of making that nearly impossible. After October’s oral arguments in a Louisiana redistricting case, observers expect Roberts and the GOP justices to declare that districts drawn to preserve representation for voters of color are either unconstitutional or subject to insurmountable barriers. It’s a decision that would turn the 14th and 15th Amendments—passed under Reconstruction to give formerly enslaved people citizenship and equal rights—on their heads, and turbocharge Trump’s gerrymandering push. Such redrawn maps could shift up to 19 seats to the GOP in 2026 and “really runs the threat of just creating permanent GOP control of Congress,” Doerfler warns.

Roberts didn’t just strip political power from ordinary people—he handed it to billionaires. His decisive vote in 2010’s Citizens United v. FEC lifted restrictions on political spending, while ludicrously insisting it would not “lead to, or create the appearance of, quid pro quo corruption.” Political spending by billionaires has since increased 160-fold. There’s a direct line between the ruling and Elon Musk buying Trump the White House with more than $290 million and being given free rein to fire his companies’ regulators in return.

Roberts is sworn in before his 2005 Senate hearings to join the Supreme Court as its chief justice.Brooks Kraft LLC/Corbis/Getty

The chief justice didn’t wait till he was on the Supreme Court to empower Republican presidents—he auditioned for the job by showing his willingness to break the rules and come through for his team. In 2004, as a DC appeals court judge, he landed on a panel in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, President George W. Bush’s attempt to circumvent both the Geneva Conventions and the US justice system’s protections to try enemy combatants in military tribunals. As he considered the case, Roberts attended a series of secret meetings with top administration officials about joining the Supreme Court. Rather than recuse, and in violation of a federal conflict of interest law, Roberts signed on to a sweeping victory for Bush the same week his nomination was made official—a decision that endorsed vast new executive powers. His opinion went too far for his future colleagues on the Supreme Court, who soon struck it down. But it wouldn’t be the last time Roberts made such a bargain with the leader of his party.

The Roberts court has spent Trump’s second term not applying the law so much as clearing it out of his way.

Nor was it out of character. When Reagan entered the White House, Democrats controlled the House, and Roberts pitched in on Justice Department efforts to increase the president’s powers by cooking up the unitary executive theory—the idea that a president has absolute authority over the entire executive branch. Once he reached the high court, Roberts began to write the theory into law, usually by expanding the president’s power to fire officials Congress vested with independence. But even with the Roberts court’s increasingly radical record—from its elimination of the right to reproductive choice to allowing businesses to deny services to LGBTQ clients—many legal analysts argued that Roberts would draw the line at saying the Constitution protected presidents from criminal liability. As Trump’s lawyer conceded in a lower court, such a ruling would mean a president could order SEAL Team 6 to assassinate a political rival with impunity. But the assertions that the Roberts court wouldn’t go so far as to give the president the power of a king proved to be wishful thinking. On July 1, 2024, Roberts’ infamous decision in Trump v. United States granted presidents criminal immunity for official acts. Legal scholars were aghast. But University of Chicago law professor Aziz Huq notes that the decision is the capstone to a chain of Roberts’ opinions endorsing the unitary executive theory, thereby granting “the presidency the option, essentially, to opt out of statutory laws.”

Upon regaining office in January 2025, Trump immediately put this to the test, firing inspectors general, dismantling agencies created by Congress, withholding spending appropriated by Congress, removing regulators protected by Congress, and defying numerous other laws. As if to underline his lawyer’s courtroom admission on assassination, Trump has had boatloads of civilians killed over his baseless accusations that they were trafficking narcotics.

We are now operating under a Robertsian reimagining of the separation of powers, in which laws passed by Congress are mere suggestions for a monarchical president. “By creating out of whole cloth this ‘presidents can commit crimes with immunity’ doctrine that is anathema to the Constitution and rule of law, the Roberts court validated Trump’s view of himself as above the law, beholden to no one,” says Sarah Lipton-Lubet, president of Take Back the Court Action Fund, which advocates for adding justices to alter the court’s makeup.

Long before Roberts and his colleagues assented to Trump’s lawless second term, they helped him get one. Not since 2000, when the justices put George W. Bush in the White House, has the court done so much to pick a president. In March 2024, the court overruled Colorado’s decision to keep Trump off its ballot under Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, which bars oath-breaking insurrectionists from office. Given that Trump had sicced an armed mob on the US Capitol, Colorado’s Supreme Court found that he fit the bill, but the justices disagreed that the state could remove his name. In an unsigned decision, five conservative justices invented new law by saying only Congress could enforce Section 3, and only in the specific way the court dictated. Meanwhile, as special counsel Jack Smith waited to move Trump’s election interference case forward that spring, the court delayed reaching a decision on presidential immunity that could have allowed a trial. When it did, four months after the Colorado ruling, Roberts’ opinion instead effectively halted the prosecution. That November, Trump won.

By then, the Roberts court had handed Trump almost unlimited power to defy the law without accountability. And once Trump was back in office, it weaponized the shadow docket to bless his lawless actions, reversing lower court findings, often without a word of explanation. As of this writing, the right-wing majority has used the shadow docket to uphold Trump’s actions roughly 90 percent of the time, repeatedly bailing him out of any obligation to follow the law. These unexplained rulings have befuddled judges charged with applying the high court’s precedent. That’s because Roberts has totally replaced the rule of law with partisan loyalty—for example, ruling that ICE can consider race when seizing people off the street while colleges can’t when admitting students, which is consistent only insofar as both outcomes are supported by Republicans, or letting Trump withhold funds appropriated by Congress in defiance of the legislature’s spending power. In the birthright citizenship case, the 6–3 majority used the shadow docket not only to overrule lower courts’ orders blocking an obviously unconstitutional policy, but to more broadly strip them of authority to fully stop any lawless president—rigging the underlying system of checks and balances to help Trump.

“This is the third moment in the country’s history where court reform was a mainstream political topic.”

Trump needed Roberts to win, and Trump’s victory came just in time for Roberts. The court’s increasing radicalism had been fueling a movement for reform by adding justices or enacting term limits. The court had also spent the past year under an ethical cloud, beginning with the revelation that Justice Clarence Thomas had secretly taken millions of dollars in gifts, vacations, and loans from a handful of billionaires with interests before the court. Thomas also refused to recuse himself from January 6–related cases, even though his wife had fought to overturn Trump’s 2020 loss. Justice Samuel Alito also didn’t recuse, despite flying flags outside his homes that valorized Trump’s failed coup. Congress was demanding answers, and calls for an enforceable ethics code were growing. Moreover, Thomas and Alito were in their mid-70s, raising the odds that if Trump lost, the court could flip to a liberal majority. So Roberts did what he had done for Bush in 2005—he gave the president broad new powers, and in so doing secured them for himself.

His corrupt bargain has had an exorbitant cost, both for the nation and the court’s reputation. “The court has traded public legitimacy as a significant basis for its authority in favor of just alignment with the GOP,” Doerfler says. As the justices keep rushing to Trump’s aid, Democrats grow more open to reform if they return to power—and thus Roberts lashes himself more tightly to Trump’s mast. “It seems like what the court is trying to do is maximize the likelihood of future GOP control,” Doerfler says. Beyond likely finishing off the VRA this term, the court is weighing one of the last remaining limits on billionaires financing campaigns; it’s no mystery how the justices are likely to rule.

At this point, the court is in a love triangle with Republicans and billionaires, facilitating a jurisprudence that subordinates workers’ rights and responsive democracy to the whims of the ultra-rich. Beyond Thomas, Alito, too, has accepted private trips from Republican billionaires and recently began hobnobbing with a right-wing German princess. Justices Brett Kavanaugh and Neil Gorsuch, both from well-off families, enjoy summer jaunts in Europe paid for by the same billionaires who bankroll the conservative legal movement and its Supreme Court recruitment process. Roberts appears to have avoided such overtly compromising relationships, but he hasn’t needed them, with his wife bringing in millions as a legal recruiter for top law firms, including some that have argued cases before her husband.

The ethics scandals could explain some of Roberts’ and his colleagues’ recent decisions, like how they’ve consistently torn down public corruption law on the premise that bribery is just a part of politics. “The eager embrace and encouragement that you’ve seen from the Roberts court for Trump’s lawlessness is just marinating in the right-wing justices’ belief that rules don’t apply to them either,” Lipton-Lubet says. “Justices who are comfortable taking essentially undisclosed bribes from fellow ideologues end up deciding that the president they support is above the law. They’ve created this culture for themselves of­ ­accountability-free corruption, and that extends, I think, to the way that they view the administration.” She adds, “You can only live in a rule-free environment for so long before it cooks your brain.”

The question lingering over this mess is how it will end. The past may be instructive. “This is the third moment in the country’s history where court reform was a mainstream political topic,” Doerfler says. In 1857, the Supreme Court held in Dred Scott that Black people could not be citizens. The decision helped spur the Civil War and was overturned by the Reconstruction amendments, which ended slavery and aimed to extend political equality to the newly freed. When President Franklin Roosevelt’s administration fought the Depression, the Supreme Court struck down his initiatives, most notably attempts to regulate industrial policy and stabilize farming, as well as a minimum wage law. Ultimately, Roosevelt’s threat to pack the court cowed the justices, who permitted New Deal legislation like Social Security and labor laws to endure.

In the 1930s, the court itself changed. The justices chose to preserve the institution, with four retiring in quick succession, allowing Roosevelt to appoint new ones. But in the postbellum era, the opposite had occurred. Attempts to guarantee equality under the law and Constitution were rolled back by a Supreme Court that, by 1896’s Plessy v. Ferguson, officially gave Jim Crow the Constitution’s blessing.

Today’s court is on the same trajectory, bent on retrenching white political dominance. But it will go further. It will greenlight Trump’s corrupt, self-enriching behavior and unlawful power grabs. The majority will instinctively know that its fate is tied to the fate of Trump’s movement, and so it will protect it. The result will be a democracy in name only.

Under the Roberts court, it won’t be enough to rewrite the rules of the game. The umpires are the problem.

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At the Justice Department, Civil Rights Now Means Gun Rights

This story was co-published with The Trace, a nonprofit newsroom covering gun violence in America.

In September, the US Department of Justice sued the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, alleging that it had deprived “thousands of law-abiding” Californians of their fundamental rights. The lawsuit—spearheaded by the DOJ’s storied Civil Rights Division—was unusual. It didn’t take aim at the notorious “deputy gangs” that have operated inside the sheriff’s department for decades. Nor did it target the department’s former leadership for allegedly stonewalling outside investigations of deputies suspected of abusing detainees. Instead, the DOJ accused LA County’s top cop of slow-walking concealed carry permits in a “systematic obstruction” of Second Amendment rights.

Under Trump and Dhillon, the Civil Rights Division has morphed into a potent weapon in MAGA’s nonstop culture battles.

The case—which the Trump administration touted as the DOJ’s first-ever “affirmative lawsuit in support of gun owners”—relies on a decades-old statute intended to help the feds crack down on local law enforcement agencies engaged in a “pattern or practice” of civil rights violations. It’s the latest sign that under President Donald Trump, the Civil Rights Division has made a hard break with its onetime commitment to protecting the politically disempowered and has morphed into a potent weapon in MAGA’s nonstop culture battles.

“First-of-its-kind lawsuit dropped—the Second Amendment rights of Californians will NOT be trampled,” Harmeet Dhillon, a Republican activist and lawyer Trump picked to lead the Civil Rights Division, posted on X after filing the suit.

First-of-its-kind lawsuit dropped—the Second Amendment rights of Californians will NOT be trampled. This @CivilRights Division will fight LA’s deliberate delays on concealed carry permits, defending your 2A rights!

https://t.co/Egh11Rivn5 pic.twitter.com/ArJXqCfNKL

— AAGHarmeetDhillon (@AAGDhillon) September 30, 2025

Seven months into Dhillon’s tenure, the Civil Rights Division is unrecognizable. Founded in 1957, it focused initially on ensuring that Black Americans in the South had access to the ballot. Its mandate grew with the 1964 Civil Rights Act and other legislation barring discrimination based on traits such as race, religion, sex, and national origin. Congress enacted the “pattern or practice” law in 1994, three years after the videotaped police beating of Rodney King in Los Angeles. The provision quickly became the DOJ’s chief tool for bringing oversight when officers engage in rampant, unchecked misconduct against marginalized groups.

Under the Obama administration, the DOJ used the law to force a settlement with the same LA Sheriff’s Department after finding in 2013 that officers had subjected Black and Latino people to brutal violence, illegal searches, and other forms of discrimination. Until this year, the law had never been invoked on behalf of gun owners, whose right to possess firearms for self-defense the Supreme Court recognized only in 2008.

In interviews, Civil Rights Division veterans who left during the current or previous administrations said various Trump executive orders—which often seek to undermine existing civil rights policies—are guiding enforcement. Christy Lopez, a professor at Georgetown Law who served in the division and led the Obama-era investigation of the LA sheriff, said, “It’s clear that they are co-opting the division to serve an agenda that is in some ways antithetical to civil rights.”

Dhillon has an appetite for provocation and dispute. In 1988, as the editor of Dartmouth College’s right-wing student paper, she cited the school’s “liberal fascism” in defense of her decision to publish a satirical opinion piece by another student that likened the college president to Adolf Hitler and campus conservatives to Holocaust victims.

She earned a law degree in 1993 from the University of Virginia, where she was president of the school’s Federalist Society. This year, Dhillon and a DOJ deputy who is also a UVA alum went after diversity efforts at the school, intensifying a broader conservative pressure campaign to get rid of university President James Ryan, who resigned in June.

“Gun owners are not in any way an oppressed minority.”

Dhillon’s advocacy work hasn’t always been on behalf of right-wing interests. After the September 11 terrorist attacks, Dhillon, a practicing Sikh who immigrated from India to London to the United States as a child, helped lead efforts to protect her community from growing harassment. “While my brother, a turbaned Sikh lawyer, was being called ‘Osama’ at Candlestick Park and Sikh taxi drivers were being assaulted, we made it a priority to keep Sikhs and other Americans safe from this irrational and discriminatory violence,” she told the Senate Judiciary Committee in a written questionnaire this year. “I spent hundreds of hours drafting legal memoranda and advocacy materials for publications, training for law enforcement, and more.” Her efforts drew the notice of the ACLU of Northern California, which appointed her to a two-year stint on its board.

In the Trump era, Dhillon has become a MAGA world star. She co-chaired Lawyers for Trump in 2020, spread doubts about that year’s election results, and called on the Supreme Court to intervene on Trump’s behalf. Her private San Francisco-based firm collected $10 million from Trump’s political operation in the 2024 cycle, and it has fought against gender transition for minors, alleged anti-white bias, and the perceived stifling of conservative speech.

Dhillon has drawn occasional heat from some extreme elements on the right. Her faith became an issue in a failed 2023 bid to chair the Republican National Committee. She told Politicoat the time that it had been hurtful to discover that “a handful of RNC members” had “chosen to question my fitness to run the RNC by using my devout Sikh faith as a weapon against me.” Dhillon delivered a Sikh prayer at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee in 2024, prompting a particularly venomous response from some commentators.

But Dhillon retained Trump’s loyalty. She’s become a key figure in implementing the president’s legal agenda and has worked overtime to mollify powerful firearms groups that, at times, have criticized the Trump DOJ for being insufficiently aggressive in opposing gun control laws.

Satisfying the gun rights crowd is work that Dhillon—whose former private firm dabbles in Second Amendment law—touts publicly. Neither she nor the DOJ responded to written questions for this story. But in a recent issue of the Dartmouth alumni magazine, Dhillon suggested that the division’s gun rights work is just getting underway, telling an interviewer that “we’re forming a Second Amendment section of the Civil Rights Division. That’s never been done before.”

The concealed carry lawsuit against the LA Sheriff’s Department, which is the division’s highest-profile move on behalf of gun interests, isn’t frivolous. The county’s permit program has indeed been plagued by delays, and last year, in a lawsuit brought by gun rights groups, a federal judge found that the agency had likely violated the plaintiffs’ Second Amendment rights.

Yet the existence of a well-resourced private lawsuit highlights another way in which the Civil Rights Division’s intervention marks a departure from past practice. Historically, it has stepped in to uphold the rights of those with limited political clout and access to levers of power. “Proponents of Second Amendment rights have an abundance of political power that has allowed them to not only protect, but dramatically extend their rights,” said Lopez, the former DOJ official now at Georgetown. “Just because they don’t always get what they want, or because there are some process issues in getting them what they want, doesn’t mean they are a politically marginalized group.”

“It was extremely shocking to see the press release.”

Before bringing a pattern or practice suit, the DOJ typically issues a report that sums up evidence the government has collected. These reports alert the public to substantiated misconduct and can be a basis for settlements. When the DOJ settled with the LA sheriff in 2015, reforms were tailored to the findings that the DOJ had made public two years before. The DOJ released no such report before filing its concealed carry suit in September. In March, when the agency first announced its investigation of the permit delays, lawyers who specialized in law enforcement oversight were caught unaware, said several division attorneys who left this year. “It was extremely shocking to see the press release,” said one, who spoke anonymously to share internal details of the episode. “It was just such a sharp departure from the norm.”

Lopez has written critically of the division across administrations, arguing that it has too often favored symbolic gestures over aggressive enforcement and that it has been overly attuned to political considerations. Though imperfect, she said the division has done vital work. While allowing that a scenario like the permit delays in LA may lead to constitutional rights violations, she said the suit is a dubious use of limited resources. Lopez fears that such moves could undermine the legitimacy of the division and the broader federal government.

“I am worried that once this administration is gone, the ability of the division to enforce civil rights protections will be forever compromised,” Lopez said. “And it will be viewed as what it is now, this cynical, entirely political division, which is actually pushing an anti-equity agenda.”

Career staff and leadership have been forced out under Dhillon. Figures the DOJ gave Congress and a list of departures released in October by Justice Connection, a network of agency alumni, suggest that nearly 400 people, including 75 percent of attorneys, have left the division since January. When Dhillon gave an interview to her former client Tucker Carlson in May, she described the reaction of career DOJ attorneys to her arrival. “They had crying sessions, struggle sessions,” she said. “There was open crying in the halls.”

A recently departed DOJ lawyer, who spoke anonymously to provide details on the current situation, said: “It’s almost impossible to quantify losing three-quarters of the expertise of the Civil Rights Division. The people who are left, God bless them, are treading water and cannot pursue the work that is necessary to defend the constitutional rights of every American.”

The division’s focus, the lawyer noted, has shifted dramatically. Under Trump and Dhillon, “it has targeted universities that allowed peaceful student protests, rather than standing up to landlords extorting sex from vulnerable women, police departments engaged in widespread use of excessive force, and the jailing of people who are unable to pay petty fines.”

Before Trump was reelected, there were more than 30 attorneys in the unit enforcing the pattern or practice law, the lawyer said. There are now three, they said. In the private suit brought by gun groups against the LA sheriff—in which the parties reached a tentative settlement October 31—six attorneys represented the plaintiffs.

Lawyers newly tapped to serve in Dhillon’s division include an attorney who represented January 6 rioters and likened them to victims of the Nazis and a GOP activist from Florida who called Covid-19 vaccines “the mark of the beast.” There have been wholesale mission reversals. Citing concerns over “election integrity,” the division has sued to obtain voter information in blue states and dispatched staff to six heavily Latino counties in California and New Jersey to “ensure transparency, ballot security, and compliance with federal law.” Last week, the division joined a suit filed by the California GOP, alleging that congressional maps recently approved by state voters—an effort by Democrats to counteract recent Republican-led gerrymandering in Texas and elsewhere—are themselves illegal. Dhillon’s former law firm is representing the state GOP in the case, and Dhillon is recused from the case.

Entire areas of work, like oversight of police departments and prisons, have been largely shelved and the division’s work wholly subordinated, in Dhillon’s words, “to the priorities of the president.” Among those priorities, Dhillon’s focus on Second Amendment rights stands out as entirely new terrain for the division. In part, the modern gun rights movement arose in the 1970s amid a broader conservative reaction to the upheaval and shifting societal norms of the 1960s, which the Civil Rights Division reflected. In the decades since, gun advocates have adopted the resonant language and narratives of the civil rights struggle and deployed them on behalf of gun owners, who are predominantly white and male.

Timothy Zick, a professor at William & Mary Law School who has studied the rhetoric of the gun debate, said arguments that gun owners are misunderstood victims of discrimination and judicial bias are, like most underdog stories, potent. However, he said there are good reasons to doubt that the Second Amendment has been relegated to “second class” status, as advocates maintain. Most states now allow gun owners to carry in public without a permit and constrain local firearms restrictions. Many states have passed anti-discrimination laws to protect gun rights, and multiple jurisdictions nationwide have refused to enforce gun laws, declaring themselves Second Amendment sanctuaries.

“Gun owners are not in any way an oppressed minority,” Zick said. “If anything, the Supreme Court and lower courts are treating the Second Amendment as a super-right. It has privileged status.”

In a federal financial disclosure completed before being confirmed as head of the Civil Rights Division, Dhillon said she planned to sell her private firm to her brother. Since her departure, Dhillon Law Group has continued to bring suits against federal agencies, including one filed in May against the DOJ seeking agency records related to former President Joe Biden’s “mental fitness.”

At the Dhillon firm, gun rights litigation has been a modest part of the practice. Firm attorneys have sued over pandemic restrictions that stifled a gun rights rally on the grounds of California’s State Capitol building, a state data breach that exposed confidential personal details of gun permit holders, and San Jose’s requirement that gun owners carry liability insurance.

The firm’s highest-profile gun rights work has been representing Rare Breed Triggers in cases involving the DOJ. Rare Breed makes forced reset triggers, which allow certain semiautomatic rifles to fire more rapidly. The company’s founder is also behind an apparel company called Pipe Hitters Union—“pipe hitter” is slang for special operations military personnel—and another that sells Spartan- and Christian Crusader-themed AR-15 components.

In a complaint that Merrick Garland’s DOJ brought against Rare Breed in 2023, the government alleged that company principals were brazen in their defiance of the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, continuing to sell forced reset triggers after being told it was illegal to do so. Rare Breed objected to the basis of the suit, arguing that the government’s classification of its product as an illegal machine gun was bogus.

In August 2021, the complaint states, the ATF received a call from a number associated with the law office of one of Rare Breed’s owners. The caller said that the government was engaging in “treasonous” behavior and that they planned to assemble and protest at an ATF office. “We are bringing the rocket launcher,” the caller said. The Rare Breed owner denied any involvement in the threatening call, and a federal judge ultimately found that the government had failed to prove otherwise.

Representing Rare Breed for Dhillon Law Group in those cases was David Warrington, a founder of the National Association for Gun Rights, which was involved in related DOJ litigation. Gary Lawkowski, another attorney at the firm, represented the gun rights association. Trump named Warrington, who had worked on his campaign, as White House counsel on December 4, 2024, and Lawkowski joined him as a deputy. Trump nominated Dhillon five days later.

On May 16, the DOJ announced a settlement with Rare Breed that allows the company to sell its triggers. The settlement requires Rare Breed to refrain from selling similar devices for handguns and “to take all reasonable efforts” to enforce its patent by seeking court injunctions against copycat manufacturers. Public safety is the stated rationale for these requirements, but some in the gun world have questioned the deal, suggesting that the DOJ awarded Rare Breed a market monopoly for a product the government had previously asserted was illegal.

Patent law experts I contacted were perplexed. “It’s just strange,” said David Schwartz, who teaches intellectual property at Northwestern University’s law school. “I’ve never seen an agreement to enforce a patent as part of a settlement with the government—and this is not even a patent case.” Schwartz said the agreement could help Rare Breed defend its turf. After finding that a patent has been infringed, courts balance several factors, including the public interest, when deciding whether an injunction is warranted, he said, and the settlement could bolster Rare Breed’s arguments.

Charles Duan, a law professor at American University, said by email that the settlement confers a clear edge. “Rare Breed’s device is now effectively safe-harbored from regulation, whereas other producers would still be at risk, giving the company a huge market advantage given the patent,” Duan wrote. “The question in my mind is: Are other companies going to lobby the DOJ now to favor their patents similarly?”

Warrington withdrew from the case days before Trump’s inauguration. According to a White House official who provided information on background, neither Warrington nor Lawkowski were involved in the settlement. There is no indication that Dhillon played any role in the case. Rare Breed officials and current Dhillon Law Group attorneys who represented the company did not respond to requests for comment.

Questioned on the settlement in a June interview posted to YouTube, Rare Breed’s president, Lawrence DeMonico, dismissed the notion that the DOJ had awarded a monopoly, saying Rare Breed had always intended to enforce its IP rights, settlement or not. “We already have a government-sanctioned monopoly,” he said. “It’s called a patent.”

In addition to filing suit against the LA sheriff, Dhillon, in her DOJ role, has filed several briefs in support of gun rights groups seeking to strike down firearms restrictions. On September 22, a federal appeals court heard arguments in a challenge to an Illinois law that restricts the sale of assault weapons and high-capacity magazines. The DOJ intervened, and Dhillon personally appeared in court to argue against the legislation.

“The United States has a strong interest in ensuring that the Second Amendment is not relegated to a second-class right,” she told the court, “and that all of the law-abiding citizens of this circuit remain able to enjoy the full exercise of their Second Amendment rights.” Dhillon chronicled her involvement on X, posting about her consuming preparation and noting that she was unwinding by making a needlepoint image of an eagle.

“The United States has a strong interest in ensuring that the Second Amendment is not relegated to a second-class right.”

In May, she filed a brief with the Supreme Court on behalf of challengers to a Hawaii law that restricts the carrying of guns on private property; the court will hear the case in January. Then in September, Dhillon filed a brief with the 3rd US Circuit Court of Appeals backing a challenge to New Jersey’s assault weapon and large-capacity magazine bans.

Until now, every appeals court to consider an assault weapon or high-capacity magazine challenge has upheld those laws, but judges in the Illinois and New Jersey cases have yet to rule. If the plaintiffs in either case prevail, it will increase the already-high likelihood that the Supreme Court will soon consider such bans, which could result in the prohibitions—one or both of which are in place in 14 Democratic-leaning states and the District of Columbia—being declared unconstitutional.

Still, gun rights groups have not been happy with all of the Trump DOJ’s moves on guns. In January, for instance, the 5th Circuit struck down a federal law that prohibits firearms dealers from selling handguns to those under 21. But the DOJ convinced a lower court to issue a narrow ruling applying only to the individual plaintiffs and members of the gun rights group behind the suit. The DOJ also urged the Supreme Court not to consider a separate challenge to the same law.

Andrew Willinger, executive director of the Duke Center for Firearms Law, said those moves are consistent with a broader pattern: Trump’s DOJ has been eager to challenge firearms restrictions in blue states, but quick to protect federal gun laws, particularly those that allow the government to prohibit certain classes of people—drug users and felons, for example—from owning guns.

“It seems as if they don’t want courts telling them whether these prohibitions are constitutional,” Willinger said of the DOJ, which is establishing a program that will allow some felons to have their gun rights restored. “They want to decide, as an executive branch matter, who is sufficiently reformed to get their guns back.”

Willinger said there’s an element of performance to the DOJ’s involvement in these cases—the agency clearly wants to be seen as crusading for gun rights. And he expects the DOJ to ally with gun rights groups in cases in which “it can most successfully characterize state or government actions as motivated by anti-gun animus.”

Among the Second Amendment groups expressing dissatisfaction with the DOJ has been the National Association for Gun Rights, the Dhillon Law Group client founded by Warrington, who now serves as White House counsel. On October 10, citing DOJ legal moves aimed at preserving federal gun laws, the group accused Attorney General Pam Bondi of having “failed the Second Amendment” and called for her firing, leading Dhillon to defend her boss.

“Please trust and believe that this is the most Second Amendment friendly Department of Justice in history,” Dhillon said in a video posted to X. “Yes, that’s a low bar, yet we’ve managed to rise way above it.”

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Why America Is Obsessed With True Crime

In 2001, John J. Lennon killed a man on a street in New York City. He was convicted of murder several years later and given the maximum sentence—25 years to life in prison—on top of three additional years for two other convictions. From behind bars, Lennon began reckoning with his crime through in-prison writing workshops and soon fell in love with journalism. He’s since made a name for himself as an incarcerated journalist and has been published in The Atlantic, Esquire, and the New York Times Magazine, often writing about the criminal justice system and conditions in correctional facilities, all from the inside.

In the decades Lennon’s been behind bars, America has become increasingly fixated on stories like his —true crime—through endless podcasts, documentary series, and streaming shows. But Lennon argues that tragedy is too often being turned into entertainment. “I think with true crime, it creates this thirst for punishment,” he says.

On this week’s More To The Story, Lennon joins with host Al Letson to discuss how his first book, The Tragedy of True Crime: Four Guilty Men and the Stories That Define Us, inverts the basic structure of the true crime genre. They also discuss how his portrayal on a cable news show hosted by Chris Cuomo inspired him to write the book and how Lennon now views the murder he committed almost a quarter-century ago.

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

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

Al Letson: Can you tell me how you ended up in Sing Sing and all about your time there?

John J. Lennon: Yeah, for sure. I’m from Brooklyn and in 2001, at 24 I was involved in a criminal lifestyle, selling drugs and shot and killed a man on Brooklyn Street. And I was sent away with a 28 years to life sentence. Yeah, I mean, along the way I found myself. I guess a turning point for me was getting stabbed at a prison and transferring to another prison, finding a writing workshop. And that was around 2010, my first piece published in 2013 and just found journalism as something to help me with just my identity. Just helped me get a life and a place where you could really feel, frankly, like a loser, like you’ve screwed up your life and hurt a lot of people along the way. So journalism helped me with my identity.

I just want to break it down a little bit. So you were a part of a criminal lifestyle in Brooklyn for a while, and so correct me if I’m wrong, but in the state of New York, if you got, I think you said 28 to life, am I correct in that?

Yes. So I was convicted of, I was already serving time for selling drugs and I was already serving another sentence for possession of a gun. So I had a whole host of criminal charges. I’m on my 24th year right now and I’ll go to the parole board in about three-ish years.

So how long into your time in jail did the stabbing happen?

Yeah, so that was probably, it was around 2008. For me, that was the turn in my story, where I started at Sing Sing, went to other different prisons. In your first years, you’re finding yourself and honestly perpetuating that behavior. I was perpetuating the behavior that got me at doing drugs, selling drugs, just up to no good, gossiping in the yard. Prison was where I belonged in the beginning, and for me, that point, it was that point when I got stabbed pretty bad in the yard, it was retaliation for the man I killed in Brooklyn.

I mean, I knew the guy who stabbed me was his friend, and at that point I got hit pretty bad and you’re like, wow. I got hit in the lung and I was just like this is, everyone knew I was getting hit but me that day in the yard. And I was just like, this is a disgusting place and I’m a disgusting person. I just want to be better. It was just, at that point I transferred to Attica and in the worst prison in New York State, I’ve got sober and I joined that writing workshop.

Yeah. I think it’s really incredible that you came from the street, you’re in prison and you’re just doing what you’ve always done, just trying to survive in there, and then this moment where you get to reflect on your life and in probably one of the worst places in the world, a place that I think nobody ever wants to go, you realize that you have to make change. I mean, making change in those circumstances has to be really hard.

Yeah, it was ground zero. I had fantastically failed in life. Attica’s a tough joint, but I had a great 12-step meeting, though. Had these really cool volunteers, and if anything’s going on in prison, it’s always through the volunteer programs, people with a lot of decency that come in this nasty place and just try to show us some love. And I got sober around the same time that another volunteer came in and he was an English professor and he came in and started showing us, started tossing us some Best American Essays and started reading some of these pieces. And it was probably around that time, it was probably helpful that I was getting sober around the time that I was learning to write because it maybe edified, maybe, my voice a bit or at least gave me some clarity with my thoughts that I was doing some work on myself.

How did you gravitate towards journalism?

There was these pieces, again, there was these essays that I would write and that we were reading and I would see where these essays were published in these Best American Essay Collection and Best American Magazine Writing, that the professor would give us these books and I just started reading these pieces and I started subscribing to those magazines. It worked for me because I had a bit of a learning disability too. I wasn’t a great reader, but I loved story and magazine writing and my mom would subscribe to these different magazines and these different, the Atlantic, Esquire, [inaudible 00:08:04], all these different magazines. And interestingly, that’s the kind of writing I took to initially. So it was by reverse engineering and I also knew, I was self-aware enough to know that I had some personality issues. I was a mess.

So tell me about that first piece, the idea that someone who’s currently locked up could become a journalist and get published in The Atlantic, one of the most prestigious magazines in the country. How did it all take place?

I think you have to feel like you have something to say. I remember it was like 2013 at the time and it was this horrible shooting in Sandy Hook and I remember I had used the same gun in my crime and everyone was talking about gun control and I was just like, I know how to get guns easy. They don’t even know what they’re talking about. So I mean, I felt like I had something to say. It just clicked for me. From the beginning, I knew that I had a lot of conflict, but I knew to lean into that, and if I could write about this in a sober way and an accountable way, and I think people would listen to what I had to say.

So after the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary happens, you feel like you have something to say. What was the process of writing the essay and submitting it for possible publication?

I wrote in my cell, I was workshopping it every two weeks, the workshop, sometimes every month. You’re hanging on the red ink, hanging on the words of the professor. His name is Doran Larson, he was a Hamilton College professor who would come in. And it was like five or six of us in the group and we would hang onto his words, but he would give me some red ink. I would go back and work it. I mean, eventually it looked clean and I kept reading it out loud in my cell. I’d read other op-eds, see how they read. It was a lot of reverse engineering and I sent it out just on a whim to the Atlantic. Even he was like, “Good luck, you’re shooting for this stars there.” And I got a letter back from David Graham, who’s a writer today for The Atlantic, and he said, “Man, I’d love to publish this piece.” My life changed after that.

Wow. And so did you send it out to anybody else or just the Atlantic?

Just one shot, the Atlantic.

Wow, that’s excellent. All right, so you write this piece, the Atlantic publishes it. Talk to me about that second piece, dying in Attica. What was that about and how did it come about? Because this is the first true reported piece.

That wasn’t really my second piece. I wrote … actually a piece on Nick Kristof’s blog, so it was another gun piece. But my instructor was like, “What, are you going to be the gun guy? Write something else.”

I wrote this piece about this guy, Lenny. He was dying of colon cancer on my tier and it was just so difficult for him because he had a colostomy bag and I was just like, wow. This was around the time that I got diagnosed with Crohn’s and my mother was always in my ear, saying, “That’s a terrible disease.” I actually have a mild case of it, but back then it was on my mind and I was thinking of this guy and I was seeing how he lived and I was seeing how people were holding their noses when he changed his bag because he was a few cells down, and it was just a terrible place, prison, to live with any kind of illness. I was just like, if I could capture that, and that would be cool.

After you were finished with that piece, I mean, I’m sure that just lit a fire and you just wanted to do more of this type of journalism.

Yeah, absolutely. I didn’t really realize how significant it was, but somebody said, “You could do something with this.” I felt like they gave me the rock and I was in the game and I was just like, I have to do something with it. I just started writing more and it was good timing that The Marshall Project opened at that time. Bill Keller who’s just, he runs the New York Times. In 2014, he shifts to open up The Marshall Project. I read that in one of my subscriptions my mom gave me, I’m connecting the dots. I’m like, oh, this is big. This could be something.

And I’m like, I reach out to him and then I write that story about Lenny, the bank robber. That was the first piece that wasn’t, I jumped in a little bit with relating to him, but I really made it about him. And if I was relating to him, it was about my own reflections. I mean, it’s not like I wasn’t incapable of empathy, but it was just the work itself boosted this idea of healing for others because prison’s a place where you mind your business. Journalism transcends that.

Can you tell me a little bit about A, how you came to think of true crime as a tragedy, and then also just about these men that you have talked to and written this book about?

Yeah, so we were talking about the kind of work that I was doing initially, which I thought, and which you framed as, I appreciate the way you put it. It was just substantive journalism. And I even took it further and I started writing long form features, like in magazines and Esquire and Vice. And by 2018, I had transferred from Attica to Sing Sing, and around that time, Bill Keller and I just wrote a piece in New York Magazine about a man who was suffering from schizophrenia, actually in this block. And so I was making my rounds, like who wants to talk? Maybe I could talk about this crisis on the radio. And we actually did, we did talk on the radio. So I had reached out to somebody I knew at CNN, but I didn’t know that they were working at H.L.M. And ultimately they had sent, I told them I wanted to talk up this crisis.

She lined me up with her colleagues and told me, and they had come to see me and they wanted to do a show about my redemption, they told me in this career that I had built for myself. It was a bait and switch. It was all a lie. It came up and it was really the show. They told me show was called Inside. It was Cuomo, and it was. The first season was, but the second season was called Inside Evil and the third season was the one that they were grooming me for, and they said it wasn’t going to be Inside Evil. They said it was going to be about our stories of redemption. And I was like, “Oh wow, this is great. I’m so glad you thought of me.” And by the time they came up with Chris Cuomo, it wasn’t about that at all. So that was my experience that I had. And I didn’t walk out on Chris Cuomo because …

Well, he’s Chris Cuomo.

Yeah. And it’s like brother’s the governor. It was just a lot.

Yeah, there’s a big power imbalance there. I mean, you are a prisoner. Chris Cuomo is a celebrity, CNN, at the time, guy and his brother, at the time, was the governor of the state that you are currently in prison. I mean, tell me if I’m wrong, but it’s possible that at the time the Governor Cuomo could have pardoned you, right?

Absolutely. And he was pardoning guys I knew. I’m talking about guys in the block, in cell blocks. I’ve seen guys right next to me walk right out. What happened was they showed me that they saw me as a murderer and not as a journalist. And the reason why I wrote this book was to show, well, twofold. Personally, I had a chip on my shoulders and I felt like I had something to say. It’s the first similar feeling that I had when I started writing. And I thought I could tell better stories than this dude and I have better access.

I’m not telling these stories from a perch, but I could tell fuller stories about the men I live with and the fuller stories, Al, included the punishment thing. You mentioned these other true crime shows, these podcasts. I mean they’re structured the same way, every story. You watch one, you watch them all. Bang, bang, police tape, 911 calls, drop back, you meet the characters. But I inverted that whole structure with The Tragedy of True Crime. So I write about three men. I introduce you to them where they are, in prison with me, at different timeline, and you get to know them before you learn about their crime. But I don’t shy away from their crime. I describe their crime, but I deliver it to the reader in a different structure than traditional true crime.

Do you feel like the structure is what separates what you’re doing from true crime? Or is it the structure is born out of the idea that you’re doing something different than true crime?

Well, it’s one of the things. Voice and agency is obviously the other. I write about three men who’ve also killed, but I would argue that the three men that I write about, one of whom has been the villain his whole life, and he hasn’t known how to overcome that. I was talking about Robert Chambers. Another one is a gay man named Michael Shane Hale, who, he’s an amazing person and killed his lover. And then the third is Milton Jones, who, at 17, killed two priests. These are different crimes, but ultimately I use my own agency to put myself, I don’t judge them. I tell their stories without, I would say, a lot different than how, say for example, Chris Cuomo told my story and told the stories of other people on that show, Inside Evil.

It’s ability to tell a story. I come clean about my own crime and I try to be candid with the reader and that enables me to be a trusted narrator. With that, I’m able to tell the stories of these other men, not judge them, and at times put myself beneath them in terms of just explaining, hey, I’m actually more culpable than Michael Shane Hale, who I call Shane, but why does Brooklyn decide to execute him? Why is he the first man selected in 1995, when New York brings back the death penalty, to execute? What’s that about? And I unpack that and I explain what happened in each of these cases. But you asked the question about voice and the narrator. I’m a narrator that’s done this as well. It’s pretty unusual. When you think of a trusted narrator, you don’t think of a guy in prison who’s killed a man. So I have to reckon with that, but I try to do that early on in the book and I tell the story, with my own woven through.

Yeah. So let me ask you, I think one of the complicated parts of talking about people’s stories, especially people that have killed somebody, is really that with that is the victim and what the victim’s family has gone through as well and how you handle both parts of it. There’s a story about redemption, which everybody wants to hear. I think that redemption stories are so powerful because we all want redemption. So I think that when you hear redemption stories, it pulls you in. On the other side of that redemption story, though, is a family who lost a family member. And I’m wondering how do you balance those two?

Yeah, I mean it’s difficult. Look, I mean, I knew going into this, this book was going to be more about me having access to these guys in here, showing you what the punishment side is. I do reach out to, I think doing the work, right? At a certain point, when we think about three of the men I write about, I reach out to the family members, people that they killed.

What about the family of the man you killed? Have you been able to reach out and talk to them?

It’s one of the toughest parts of my career. Yeah, I wrote a piece in Washington Post years ago about just trying to come to terms on my own of writing an apology letter. The sister of the man I killed, she rejected it and she asked, in a letter to the Washington Post, that I not use his name in my writing. That would serve her better than my apology. I’ve respected her wishes, and that’s why I don’t refer to him by name in the piece. But look, I don’t pretend to, I understand what brings me pride, writing, I mean, it may cause her and her family more pain. Look, that causes me shame. But that whole equation, at least for me, is this idea of remorse, because this inner conflict, there’s no easy answers to that.

Yeah. No, I mean, on one side of it, you should be able to talk about your story and the things that you’ve gone through. On the other side of it, there’s a family who lost a loved one, and I think it’s fair that they don’t want to hear it.

No easy answers.

So John, I want to go back a little bit and talk about true crime. I’m wondering, in your opinion, how has the genre influenced how we view crime and the people who commit those crimes?

I think with true crime, yeah, it creates this thirst for punishment. I started critiquing this stuff before I wrote the book, Al. I started developing these ideas, critiquing other writers of true crime, New York Review of Books and the New York Times Magazine, and I started really clocking the way we consume true crime and even critiquing Dick Wolf. And Rolling Stone, I had a big piece critiquing him. It’s just about who’s telling our story and how are they telling them? That’s one of the themes that runs through The Tragedy of True Crime. You zeroed in on, I think, a fair observation. Like, wait, dude, you’re a murderer. And it’s like, what if the people that I killed, the guy you killed, his family is not really digging this? What does it mean when people that are so disconnected … crimes are the ones that are telling, that are shaping the narratives?

He grew up on the Upper East Side. What does Chris Cuomo, this guy grew up in the governor’s [inaudible 00:26:02]. That’s who y’all are relying on? What if I can develop my voice and be fair-minded about it, give it to you guys real, and also be accountable? I’m just saying that. I’m not an activist, I’m a journalist. That’s not what I’m doing. I want to create an experience, but I want to just offer an experience. I’m a narrative journalist. I’m a guy that did a pretty terrible thing. I shot a man 10 times. I was deeply immersed in this lifestyle. I reckon with that on the page and people that read my stuff, and there’s a way that I connect with them and account for what I did, and I’m not blaming the system.

Do you wrestle with the possibility that you’re a little too close to these guys to write about them objectively? Is that something that you’re constantly thinking of as you you’re writing it?

I’d be lying to myself and the reader if I’m saying that I’m an objective journalist. I think we come to life and to our work with our life experiences, and I’m writing about men in prison who live behind bars, and I also go to sleep behind bars. So I think I’d be kidding myself and the reader to say I’m 100% writing an objective story. This is a first person, immersive, [inaudible 00:27:29] personal journalist. You call it what you want. It has many names, as you know, Al. I don’t know, was Hunter Thompson being asked, “Do you think you’re an objective journalist?” This guy’s riffing about all kinds of stuff. You know what I mean? But his work had value. And he had so many flaws. As do I.

I would just, can I just say something else about the objective thing?

Yeah, please. Please do, go ahead.

I would also like to think I’m being objective with scenic writing and with these riffs and these digressions that I do in the book. For example, there’s a scene in the book where guy just offers me some drugs. I deny it. I don’t want it. I’ve relapsed after I got sober. And it’s always a struggle to stay sober in prison. And prison, the heroin now in prison has fentanyl it all in it. I remember another guy, it was just stuff going around in a cell block and there was this guy that overdosed and the COs are running to his cell and the whole block is silent and they’re going to work on this guy, the COs, the guards.

They’re doing CPR, everything. They’re running in and the whole block is silent. And everyone knows there’s drugs in the block and everyone knows that it’s probably fentanyl, but it’s just this culture that we live in. It’s awful. We’re foul. There’s parts of us that are foul in here, and I acknowledge that in the book, that these COs are like, they’re working, they’re busting their ass trying to save this guy’s life. And it’s just like they’re contending with this foul culture and it’s just awful. And that’s the culture that we live in. And I think when you create those scenes, you show what it is. There’s a lot going on right there from that scene. There’s a lot.

Yeah. How do you rise above that culture? Everything you just described sounds really hard for somebody to figure out how to navigate that.

It’s harder at the end, Al. It’s harder at the end, when you know you’ve … I’m doing this interview with you, I’m outlining a piece for the New York Review of Books, and there’s just suffering and it’s a mix of just stupidity and suffering. Difficult to not get angry at it, and then just to have empathy. It’s really difficult when you can’t shake it, you can’t get away from it. It’s hard, Al. The time gets really hard at the end, when you’ve transcended this place and it’s just tough. I mean, it was so much easier when we started this interview and I came in and I was just like, wow, I am. I belong here. I’m a low life. This is where I belong. But fast-forward 24 years and where I am today, this is the toughest time.

You’re up for parole soon, two years from now. How are you feeling about it? I mean, you must know a lot of people who have gone through the parole process in the past, so what are your thoughts going into it?

I think one of my concerns is, it’s just the idea that I think society wants us to come to prison, get our lives together, and just not be criminals and get out. Just like go get a job, don’t be bad. I never went into this thinking writing would be a passport to freedom or anything like that. You know what I wanted? I wanted to just to get a life, not be a loser. I had some green lights along the way and this has become, I found some success and I’m grateful for that. But I just hope I’m not resented for that. That’s what I fear.

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Trump Meets Business Partner In the Oval Office

Donald Trump has never been particularly critical of the Saudis, despite a human rights record that has brought harsh condemnations from his predecessors. Unlike previous presidents and even many in his own party, Trump has generally struck a conciliatory, or even friendly, tone when dealing with the country’s ruler, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. And he has always been very clear about the reasons why.

“Saudi Arabia, I get along with all of them,” Trump said at a campaign stop in 2015. “They buy apartments from me. They spend $40 million, $50 million. Am I supposed to dislike them? I like them very much.”

“They buy apartments from me. They spend $40 million, $50 million. Am I supposed to dislike them? I like them very much.”

The United Statesonce had a strong relationship with the kingdom dating back decades. But in recent years, the country’s abysmal human rights record—fomenting war in Yemen and feuding with Qatar—as well as its strong grip on the oil market, have led to an often tense relationship. At least, until Trump came along.

As that tension has receded, the business relationships between the Trump family and the Saudis have only grown closer—whether through state-owned enterprises, like the Saudi Public Investment Fund (PIF), which handles international investments of Saudi surplus money at the direction of MBS, or individual real estate developers who operate under the watchful eye of Saudi royals.

Trump’s love of golf has offered special opportunities for the Saudis. In 2022, after the PGA tour abandoned Trump for his divisive politics during his first term that culminated in the January 6 attack on the Capitol, the LIV Golf league brought its tour to Trump-owned golf courses. The LIV league, owned by PIF, challenged golf’s staid norms and paid players previously unheard of nine-figure salaries. It already has brought its tournament and likely multi-million dollar fees to Trump-owned golf courses seven times—with an eighth event planned in 2026 at Trump’s golf course outside Washington, D.C.

During a deposition in 2022 as part of New York Attorney General Letitia James’ civil fraud lawsuit against him, Trump even intimated that he could sell one of his Scottish golf courses to Saudi Arabia for an “astronomical” amount of money—far more than the course is actually worth, he said. Pressed on the idea, he quickly demurred and refused to offer further details.

As a real estate mogul, Trump has found other opportunities to work with them. Between his two terms, Trump struck a deal to build a handful of properties in partnership with Dar Global, a Saudi firm that grew out of a major Saudi real estate developer. The company’s CEO attended Trump’s inauguration in January, enthusiastically posting videos and pictures from exclusive events. Since then, the company’s plans with Trump have expanded to include a tower in Dubai, a golf course in Qatar, three resort properties in Oman, two projects in the Saudi capital of Riyadh, and another tower in Jeddah, the gateway city for Islam’s holy city of Mecca.

Ethics experts have roundly condemned Trump’s conflicts of interest in the Middle East—which, to be fair, involve several other countries, not just Saudi Arabia—as anything but appropriate.

Hours before MBS arrived in Washington, the Trump Organization announced its latest project with Dar Global. They plan to build a resort in the ultra-exclusive Maldives Islands in the Indian Ocean, using crypto to finance the project.

During Trump’s first term, Saudi operatives murdered and dismembered MBS critic and Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi. In response, in the midst of global outrage, Trump offered a gentle condemnation.

“This is a bad situation, ” he said at the time, “We can not let this happen to reporters, to anyone.”

On Tuesday, during the Crown Prince’s White House visit, after seven years and many business deals, Trump offered a far less sympathetic view. When reporters asked the president, seated next to MBS, about Khashoggi, his reply was terse.

“A lot of people didn’t like that gentleman that you’re talking about, whether you like him or didn’t like him, things happen,” Trump said. He insisted that MBS knew nothing about the murder—a CIA assessment later found it highly likely that MBS actually ordered the killing—and complained that the press was embarrassing a guest.

As unsurprising as Trump’s about-face on Khashoggi was, his denial on Tuesday that there has been anything improper about his own personal and financial relationship with Saudi Arabia, was even more outlandish.

“What my family does is fine. They do business all over,” Trump told reporters. “They’ve done very little with Saudi Arabia actually, I’m sure they could do a lot.”

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Trump-Appointed Judge Blocks Trump’s Texas Gerrymander

In a bombshell decision on Tuesday, a federal court in Texas blocked a new congressional map that was created after President Donald Trump demanded that the state redraw district lines to hand Republicans five new seats.

“Substantial evidence shows that Texas racially gerrymandered the 2025 Map,” wrote Jeffrey Brown, a Trump-appointed district court judge. His opinion—backed by David Guaderrama, an Obama appointee and the district’s senior judge—found that Texas’ map violated the 14th and 15th Amendment by discriminating based on race. Judge Jerry E. Smith, a Reagan appointee, filed a dissenting opinion.

The decision is the latest defeat for Trump in the gerrymandering arms race.

The panel’s two-judge majority pointed specifically to a Justice Department letter from early July that claimed that four congressional districts where Black and Latino voters comprised a combined majority were “unconstitutional racial gerrymanders.” Texas Gov. Greg Abbott cited that letter as therationale when calling a special legislative session that month to redraw its congressional map. “The Governor explicitly directed the Legislature to redistrict based on race,” Judge Brown wrote.

Texas Republicans claimed the redistricting effort was motivated by partisan politics, a practice which the Supreme Court has said cannot be reviewed in federal court. But Brown concluded that “the letter instead commands Texas to change four districts for one reason and one reason alone: the racial demographics of the voters who live there.” The judge was unsparing in his criticism of the Justice Department, writing that the letter was “challenging to unpack” given its “many factual, legal, and typographical errors.”

The court concluded that the legislature “dramatically dismantled and left unrecognizable all four districts” targeted by the DOJ. The state ultimately eliminated seven “coalition districts” where two or more minority groups had joined forces to elect their preferred candidates, and turned them into districts where a single race predominated instead.

“It wasn’t enough for the map to merely improve Republican performance,” Brown wrote. “It also needed to convert as many coalition districts to single-race-majority districts as possible. That best explains the House bill’s authors’ comments during the legislative process and the map’s stark racial characteristics. The bill’s main proponents purposefully manipulated the districts’ racial numbers to make the map more palatable. That’s racial gerrymandering.”

Gene Wu, the Democratic leader in Texas’ House of Representatives, hailed the decision, praising the court for stopping “one of the most brazen attempts to steal our democracy that Texas has ever seen.”

Texas will appeal the decision directly to the Supreme Court, which is already weighing whether to destroy the remaining protections of the Voting Rights Act, whose provisions encourage the creation of districts where minority voters have an opportunity to gain political power. It’s very possible, perhaps even likely, that the Supreme Court will ultimately side with Texas; its justices have given the president king-like power and ruled in favor of Republicans in nearly every major voting dispute.

But for now, the decision on Tuesday is the latest in a string of defeats for Trump in the gerrymandering arms race he started. On November 4, California voters overwhelmingly approved a new map designed to offset the Texas gerrymander and give Democrats five new congressional seats. On November 10, a state judge in Utah ordered a map that creates a new pro-Democratic district. And on November 14, the head of the Indiana state Senate said he would not push forward a map that could have given Republicans a 9-0 advantage there. Taken together, the developments raise the prospect that Democrats could break even in—or even win—a redistricting war that was initiated by Republicans.

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Trump and Johnson Are Still Seething Over the Epstein Vote

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

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

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

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

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

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

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New Report Indicates a Growing Public Resistance to Data Centers

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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