Ban on AI Regulations in Trump’s Tax Bill Carries a Huge Environmental Cost

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

Republicans are pushing to pass a major spending bill that includes provisions to prevent states from enacting regulations on artificial intelligence. Such untamed growth in AI will take a heavy toll upon the world’s dangerously overheating climate, experts have warned.

About 1 billion tons of planet-heating carbon dioxide are set to be emitted in the US just from AI over the next decade if no restraints are placed on the industry’s enormous electricity consumption, according to estimates by researchers at Harvard University and provided to the Guardian.

This 10-year timeframe, a period of time in which Republicans want a “pause” of state-level regulations upon AI, will see so much electricity use in data centers for AI purposes that the US will add more greenhouse gases to the atmosphere than Japan does annually, or three times the yearly total from the UK.

The exact amount of emissions will depend on power plant efficiency and how much clean energy will be used in the coming years, but the blocking of regulations will also be a factor, said Gianluca Guidi, visiting scholar at the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health.

_“_By limiting oversight, it could slow the transition away from fossil fuels and reduce incentives for more energy-efficient AI energy reliance,” Guidi said.

“To just proscribe any regulation of AI in any use case for the next decade is unbelievably reckless.”

_“_We talk a lot about what AI can do for us, but not nearly enough about what it’s doing to the planet. If we’re serious about using AI to improve human wellbeing, we can’t ignore the growing toll it’s taking on climate stability and public health.”

Donald Trump has vowed that the US will become “the world capital of artificial intelligence and crypto” and has set about sweeping aside guardrails around AI development and demolishing rules limiting greenhouse gas pollution.

The “big beautiful” reconciliation bill passed by Republicans in the House of Representatives would bar states from adding their own regulations upon AI and the GOP-controlled Senate is poised to pass its own version doing likewise.

Unrestricted AI use is set to deal a sizable blow to efforts to tackle the climate crisis, though, by causing surging electricity use from a US grid still heavily reliant upon fossil fuels such as gas and coal. AI is particularly energy-hungry—one ChatGPT query needs about 10 times as much electricity as a Google search query.

Carbon emissions from data centers in the US have tripled since 2018, with an upcoming Harvard research paper finding that the largest “hyperscale” centers now account for 2 percent of all US electricity use.

“AI is going to change our world,” Manu Asthana, chief executive of the PJM Interconnection, the largest US grid, has predicted. Asthana estimated that almost all future increase in electricity demand will come from data centers, adding the equivalent of 20 million new homes to the grid in the next five years.

The explosive growth of AI has, meanwhile, worsened the recent erosion in climate commitments made by big tech companies. Last year, Google admitted that its greenhouse gas emissions have grown by 48 percent since 2019 due to its own foray into AI, meaning that “reducing emissions may be challenging” as AI further takes hold.

Proponents of AI, and some researchers, have argued that advances in AI will aid the climate fight by increasing efficiencies in grid management and other improvements. Others are more skeptical. “That is just a greenwashing maneuver, quite transparently,” said Alex Hanna, director of research at the Distributed AI Research Institute. “There have been some absolutely nonsense things said about this. Big tech is mortgaging the present for a future that will never come.”

While no state has yet placed specific green rules upon AI, they may look to do so given cuts to federal environmental regulations, with state lawmakers urging Congress to rethink the ban. “If we were expecting any rule-making at the federal level around data centers it’s surely off the table now,” said Hanna. “It’s all been quite alarming to see.”

Republican lawmakers are undeterred, however. The proposed moratorium cleared a major hurdle over the weekend when the Senate parliamentarian decided that the proposed ban on state and local regulation of AI can remain in Trump’s tax and spending mega-bill. Texas Republican Sen. Ted Cruz, who chairs the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation, changed the language to comply with the Byrd Rule, which prohibits “extraneous matters” from being included in such spending bills.

The provision now refers to a “temporary pause” on regulation instead of a moratorium. It also includes a $500 million addition to a grant program to expand access to broadband internet across the country, preventing states from receiving those funds if they attempt to regulate AI.

The proposed AI regulation pause has provoked widespread concern from Democrats. The Massachusetts senator Ed Markey, a climate hawk, says he has prepared an amendment to strip the “dangerous” provision from the bill.

“The rapid development of artificial intelligence is already impacting our environment, raising energy prices for consumers, straining our grid’s ability to keep the lights on, draining local water supplies, spewing toxic pollution in communities, and increasing climate emissions,” Markey told the Guardian.

“However, instead of allowing states to protect the public and our planet, Republicans want to ban them from regulating AI for 10 years. It is shortsighted and irresponsible.”

The Massachusetts congressman Jake Auchincloss has also called the proposal “a terrible idea and an unpopular idea.”

“I think we have to realize that AI is going to suffuse in rapid order many dimensions of healthcare, media, entertainment, education, and to just proscribe any regulation of AI in any use case for the next decade is unbelievably reckless,” he said.

Some Republicans have also come out against the provision, including Sen. Marsha Blackburn (Tennessee) and Sen. Josh Hawley (Missouri). An amendment to remove the pause from the bill would require the support of at least four Republican senators to pass.

Hawley is said to be willing to introduce an amendment to remove the provision later this week if it is not eliminated beforehand.

Earlier this month, Georgia congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene admitted she had missed the provision in the House version of the bill, and that she would not have backed the legislation if she had seen it. The far-right House Freedom caucus, of which Greene is a member, has also come out against the AI regulation pause.

Continue Reading…

Senate Version of “Beautiful” Bill Will “Kill” America’s Clean Energy Sector, Experts Say

The Senate version of President Donald Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill,” unveiled to the public at Midnight on Friday, went even further than the House version in its hostility toward the nation’s burgeoning renewable energy sector. The House version merely seeks to end the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) subsidies for wind and solar development enacted under President Joe Biden. Now, Republican senators want to levy punishing new taxes on wind and solar projects.

“I hate to say it, but it would kill [America’s] renewable energy market,” says Kenneth Gillingham, a dean and professor of environmental and energy economics at Yale University.

“It would kill it!” concurs Bob Keefe, executive director of E2, a national organization of business leaders advocating for smarter climate policies and the author of a recent book titled Clean Economy Now.

If solar and wind projects aren’t finished by 2027, per the Senate version, the developers will face a tax that would add an additional 10 to 20 percent to their costs, per Rhodium Group‘s analysis. The American Clean Power Association estimates that this will cost companies $4 billion to $7 billion by 2036 and raise consumer electricity costs by 8 percent to 1o percent.

Red-state voters “will be losing out on jobs that they would have been getting otherwise, but they might not know that.”

Ending the IRA subsidies would cause a big industry slowdown, Gillingham says, but the proposed taxes are nails in its coffin. The Senate bill, he says, shifts the economy away from wind and solar—the fastest-growing energy sources here and worldwide—and back toward fossil fuels. “It very clearly shows the policy priorities of the Republicans who are drafting this bill. They are entirely pro-fossil fuels,” says Gillingham.

Jesse D. Jenkins, an energy systems engineering professor at Princeton University, calls the bill a “truly bizarre, a self-defeating measure,” especially from a “party that claims to stand for American energy dominance.” Its provisions, in addition to hindering the development of clean power, Jenkins says, will lead to more pollution and higher energy bills for homes and businesses.

Indeed, according to an analysis by Michael Thomas, founder and CEO of the clean energy data platform Cleanview, the bill will increase electricity costs substantially for customers in every state—in some cases by more than 20 percent.

That’s particularly notable now that demand for electricity has begun to increase after a decade of flatlining. The rise in demand, Keefe told me, referring to Trump’s invention of a crisis to rationalize his “drill, baby drill” energy policies, could well turn into an actual “energy emergency.” And the only way to fix that, he says, “is through solar, wind, and batteries.”

The Republicans’ bill utilizes what journalist Jael Holzman calls the party’s’ “anti-China trap.” Namely, wind and solar companies won’t have to pay the excise tax if they extract their supply chains from China—as if that’s remotely possible. “It would take several years to get to a point where a supply chain would not face this tax, if possible at all,” Gillingham told me. “In the meantime, the manufacturing would be destroyed.”

Keefe calls is a “worthwhile goal” to move manufacturing to the United States from China, the global renewable energy leader by leaps and bounds, but he says this bill would do the opposite. Fueled by the IRA funding, the US renewables industry was just starting to gain a stronger footing. “All of those projects now are at risk because we’re killing the tax policies that made them possible,” Keefe says.

The economic losses would almost certainly hit red, rural districts the hardest, because 78 percent of the IRA tax credits for clean energy have gone to these areas. And all the new jobs being created in states like Georgia were just the start. “The greater loss is actually on the jobs that would have happened within the next year or two,” Gillinhgam says. “They will be losing out on jobs that they would have been getting otherwise, but they might not know that.”

Keefe emphasizes that the losses won’t stop with IRA-funded projects. “Business investments were prompted because of the market signal that the previous administration set when it said it was shifting to a cleaner economy,” he says. Even if the bill fails, $14 billion and 10,000 clean jobs already have been lost just thanks to uncertainty created by the administration’s energy and trade rhetoric.

A handful of Republican Senators are balking at the new renewables taxes—three are backing an amendment to ease the proposed levies in ways that could jeopardize the larger bill.

In any case, the crux of the matter goes well beyond economic and political considerations, Keefe says, citing the bill’s downstream effects: “We’re going to be going backwards on protecting the air that you and I breathe, in the water that we drink, and and the planet that we live on.”

Continue Reading…

These New England Fishermen Made Peace With Offshore Wind. Trump Wants to End It.

This story was produced by the independent, nonprofit newsroom Canary Media and co-published by Mother Jones_._

Gary Yerman, 75, sat nervously in a noisy ballroom in Virginia Beach, Virginia, counting down the minutes until he could shed his ill-fitting double-breasted suit for a sun shirt and blue jeans. He introduced himself as a fisherman of 50 years to a stranger seated next to him at the banquet table.

“That sounds really hard,” the other man replied.

“Not as hard as it’s going to be to go accept this award and talk to a room full of people,” joked Yerman. Moments later, his name was called, and he walked onto a professionally lit stage to accept a small crystal trophy from the Oceantic Network, a leading trade group for the burgeoning multibillion-dollar US offshore wind industry.

It was an unlikely sight. America’s fishermen have long treated wind developers as their sworn enemies.

The conflict started in the early 2000s, when the first plans for New England’s offshore wind areas were sketched out. In packed town hall meetings that often devolved into shouting matches, fishermen claimed the projects would make it harder to earn a living: fewer fishing grounds, fewer fish, damaged ocean habitat.

Few of these predictions have come to pass in places like the UK, which has already built over 50 offshore wind farms in its waters. Wind areas there are thriving with sharks and serving as a surprising habitat for haddock. But even today, fisher-led groups in the US are spearheading lawsuits aiming to halt at least two offshore wind farms under construction on the East Coast. One former offshore wind executive told Canary Media that the amount of pushback from fishermen in America has made offshore wind investments riskier than in Europe.

“Everyone knows that fishermen hate offshore wind companies. Well, guess what? Offshore wind companies hate fishermen.”

Yerman was one of the first fishermen in the US to cross this bitter divide. He’s become the reluctant face of a group of over 100 fishermen and fisherwomen who go by the name Sea Services North America. They’ve decided to work for offshore wind farms—not against them. Doing so supplements their income from scalloping, a centuries-old bedrock of the New England fishing economy that has seen revenues dry up.

Pursuing work in wind power has come at a cost. After the awards event, back in blue jeans and with a celebratory beer in hand, Yerman recounted the exact word New England fishermen used when he and his crew first crossed the Rubicon.

“They called us traitors,” he said.

Those tensions have become supercharged with the election of President Donald Trump, who has called offshore wind “garbage” and “bullshit” and, in the weeks leading up to his inauguration, pledged that​ “no new windmills” would be built in the US during his presidency. He’s backed up those words with action since taking office, stopping new projects from proceeding and attempting to block some of the country’s eight fully permitted offshore wind projects, too.

Yerman and his crew are left wondering if the industry they’ve bet their livelihood on—and work they’ve risked their reputations for—will all come crashing down.

Many of the fishermen who work through Sea Services voted for Trump. And if the president fulfills his promise to halt the industry, it would be devastating not only for the Northeast’s climate goals and grid reliability—but for thousands of workers in the region, from electricians to welders to Sea Services’ fishermen.

One of Sea Services’ captains, Kevin Souza, put it simply: The impact would be “big time.”

Six years ago, Yerman was like the others—angry with offshore wind developers, particularly Danish giant Ørsted, which had set up shop in his hometown of New London, Connecticut.

Concerned that wind turbines might push his son out of the scalloping business, he pulled one of the only levers he could think to pull and contacted his state senator at the time, Paul Formica, a Republican who owned a local seafood restaurant.

Formica wanted to see the two sides get along. He arranged a meeting between Yerman and an Ørsted executive named Matthew Morrissey, who happened to be a native of New Bedford, Massachusetts, the most lucrative commercial fishing port in America.

Offshore wind turbine blades in the staging area of the recently modernized Marine Commerce Terminal in New Bedford, Massachusetts, this spring.Clare Fieseler/Canary Media

Yerman found in Morrissey a sympathetic ear, and in turn, he listened to what the executive had to say—that Ørsted was open to partnering with fishermen. Morrissey had seen, with his own eyes, fishers working for and coexisting with Ørsted in a tiny port in Kilkeel, Northern Ireland. The energy firm had a team of about two dozen marine affairs employees, Morrissey relayed, who could help make something like that happen in America if Yerman was on board. He pitched it as a win-win.

“Everyone knows that fishermen hate offshore wind companies. Well, guess what? Offshore wind companies hate fishermen, too,” Morrissey, who no longer works at Ørsted, told Canary Media earlier this year. “Our goal here is to spread the understanding that these two industries can and do and will work together.”

The idea intrigued Yerman. In the US, profits from scalloping have fluctuated from year to year, and, following a crash in the 1990s, scallop numbers remain unpredictable. In his view, if offshore wind companies were moving into their waters—like it or not—they might as well make some money from it.

Yerman got to work.

His first call was to Gordon Videll, a longtime friend and affable small-town lawyer, who knew things about contracts that Yerman didn’t. The two flew to Kilkeel—on their own dime—to see the model for themselves. Videll noticed that some of Kilkeel’s fishermen were driving cars nicer than his. He and Yerman were inspired.

When they returned to Connecticut, Yerman recruited about a half dozen of his commercial fishing buddies, and Videll started putting together the paperwork. They dubbed themselves Sea Services North America and in 2020 landed their first small contract, with Ørsted. It was a pilot, said Morrissey, to see if this arrangement would work here in America.

“Everyone was skeptical,” recalled Morrissey with a laugh. “Because their boats were in such poor safety condition. But you know what? They pulled it off.”

Since taking office in January, President Trump has launched an all-out assault on the offshore wind industry.

Today, Sea Services operates like a co-op and has brought 22 fishing boats up to certified safety standards. With Videll at the helm as part-time CEO, the group has completed over 11 contracts in eight different wind farm areas, from Massachusetts to New Jersey. Instead of hiring ferries or work boats, developers rely on Sea Services fishermen to provide safety and scout services for offshore wind vessels.

It’s important work: making sure, for example, no fishing gear, like crab traps, is in the way of cables, monopiles, or survey operations. If necessary, Sea Services fishermen move gear—with the owner’s approval. When not cleared, these obstacles have caused days and sometimes weeks of costly delays for developers, according to Morrissey.

Sea Services was an “indispensable partner” in helping to build South Fork Wind, which went online last year and became America’s first large-scale offshore wind project, wrote Ed LeBlanc, a current Ørsted executive, in an email to Canary Media. The firm has since contracted the group for other projects, in no small part because of their expertise about local waters, he added.

Cooperation between these two sides—offshore wind and commercial fishing—does exist elsewhere in America. For example, Avangrid and Vineyard Offshore, the codevelopers of the Vineyard Wind project off the coast of Massachusetts, have paid out $8 million directly to local fishermen unaffiliated with Sea Services for similar safety jobs over the past two years.

But Sea Services is unique. Today the group offers an expansive network of 22 partner vessels based in six states and is led by a commercial fisherman. Videll brought on new technology, allowing developers to track their work remotely. He said they adopted a co-op model to maximize the amount of money going into participants’ pockets.

Receiving the Oceantic Network award in late April was a big deal for the collective, said Videll. It’s an example of how successful the venture has been in a short period of time—and, more importantly, it should be good for business. Industry awards mean visibility. More visibility could mean more Sea Services contracts.

Cofounders of Sea Services North America wait among gala attendees on April 29, 2025, to receive a Ventus Award from the Oceantic Network. Clare Fieseler/Canary Media

But, right now, the Sea Services business faces headwinds that no award can help overcome.

Since taking office in January, President Trump has launched an all-out assault on the offshore wind industry. On his first day in office, he halted new lease and permitting activity and called for a review of the nine projects that already had their federal permits in hand. In March, his Environmental Protection Agency chief revoked a key permit for Atlantic Shores, a fully permitted project that has since been called off in part due to roadblocks created by the administration.

The most eyebrow-raising step came in April, when Trump’s Interior Department issued a stop-work order for Empire Wind 1, two weeks after the project had begun at-sea construction.

It was a wake-up call for Sea Services, which works for Norwegian energy giant Equinor on the project. Videll, Sea Services’ CEO, said at the time that the cessation of Empire Wind would be a crushing blow that could cost the co-op a total of $9 million to $12 million worth of work.

In May, the administration suddenly lifted the stop-work order. Sea Services’ contract was safe, at least for the time being. But it was the most bracing illustration yet that the business, in spite of all its success, now faces very choppy waters under the Trump administration.

On a cloudless late-February day at the New Bedford port, 57-year-old Souza hovered over a checklist and laptop in the captain’s quarters of the Pamela Ann. Souza is the captain of the boat, and he needed to make sure everything was in order before he and his crew left New Bedford that afternoon. They’d be at sea for 10 days, working in many of the spots Souza had fished in for decades.

Those 10 days at sea would not be spent dredging up scallops from the seafloor and tallying their catch, however, but conducting safety operations for the Revolution Wind offshore wind project, which is being built off the coast of Rhode Island and Massachusetts.

The hulking scalloping boat, with its ebony-painted hull and wood-paneled interior, was bustling ahead of the journey. In the galley, Souza’s 25-year-old son, one of the three mates onboard, sorted through the food they’d need. Jack Morris, a 73-year-old scalloper and Sea Services manager, paced around the Pamela Ann checking in on its recently updated safety assets, like a new tracking beacon and safety suits.

Trips like these have become a lifeline for Souza, his crew, and an increasing number of fishermen who depend on the struggling scalloping industry.

Today, there are roughly 350 vessels sitting in ports from Maine to North Carolina that have licenses to harvest sea scallops. For several decades, East Coast scallopers managed to eke out a comfortable middle-class lifestyle on scalloping alone. Morris said that “years ago” he’d pull in $200,000 to $300,000 of profit annually as a scallop boat captain.

“Yeah, those days are gone,” scoffed Morris.

While the price of scallops remains high, making it one of the most lucrative US fisheries, rules passed over the last 30 years have restricted when and where scallopers can harvest, resulting in fewer days at sea, fewer scallops caught—and less money for the entire industry.

Souza has mixed emotions about the regulations.

On the one hand, scallops are no longer being overfished. A 2024 third-party audit of the fishery said it “meets the requirements for a well-managed and sustainable fishery.” In fact, for over a decade, US sea scallops sold on grocery store shelves have carried a little blue-check label—the mark of a seafood certified by the Marine Stewardship Council.

But most scallop fishermen are now limited to an extremely short window of time during which they can harvest scallops—in 2025, it was just 24 days. Some of their favorite fishing grounds are regularly closed for scallop recovery. There are simply fewer scallops to go around. Souza estimates that captains who stick to scalloping alone are making half of what they did in years past: “They’re probably lucky to make a hundred [thousand].”

Offshore wind work has helped fishermen like Souza and Morris ease the sting of that lost income.

“You’ll have the lobster guys and they’ll say shit to you—like, ‘traitor.’ Or ‘Trump’s gonna shut that down, ha ha ha.'”

Across Revolution Wind’s two-year construction window, Souza expects to make over $200,000 as a part-time boat captain. For the younger generation, who Souza said as deckhands can expect to make only around $30,000 per year from scalloping, offshore wind work makes it possible to keep earning a middle-class wage.

In the past year, Souza has recruited to Sea Services both of his sons, his nephew, and a few other young folks from longtime fishing families who might have otherwise left the scallop industry if not for the supplemental income.

“This wind farm business is the number one way for scallop guys, captains, mates, deckhands, to make extra money,” said Morris.

It’s also helping to revitalize the port of New Bedford, a city of 100,000 that is not only the most valuable fishing port in America but also a place of tremendous historic importance to the industry. It was once the epicenter of the whaling world and serves as the backdrop for the opening scenes of Herman Melville’s “Moby Dick.”

In just 10 years, the offshore wind industry has ushered in a transformation the city hadn’t seen “since the whaling era,” according to Jon Mitchell, the city’s mayor since 2011.

The companies building Vineyard Wind now stage their offshore wind infrastructure in New Bedford. Their presence has brought a flood of public and private funding to the city, with over $1.2 billion already invested and pledged to help give the terminals, docks, and harbor a facelift, according to Mitchell.

For all the money offshore wind has brought to the city—and into the pockets of locals like Souza and Morris—offshore wind remains highly controversial among many commercial fishermen in New Bedford.

That’s in spite of Mitchell’s insistence that, when push comes to shove, New Bedford’s local government will always side with scalloping.

Still, Mitchell, one of New England’s fiercest offshore wind defenders, remains unpopular with many down at the boat docks. “I’ve put myself in the loneliest place in American politics, which is right in the middle. Between offshore wind and commercial fishing,” he said.

The fishermen who take part in Sea Services also float in that lonely place.

It’s not uncommon for them to face harassment from other fishermen over the radio when out on the water, Yerman said. One time, he said a Sea Services fisherman was turned away from a Rhode Island dock, in what Yerman characterized as an act of revenge.

The hardest part of Yerman’s job is overcoming this cultural aversion and getting fishermen to the table, convincing them that working for the offshore wind developers is a way to sustain a livelihood whose viability has begun to fade.

“You’ll have the lobster guys and they’ll say shit to you—like, ‘traitor.’ Or ‘Trump’s gonna shut that down, ha ha ha,’” Souza said, imitating the taunts he receives over the marine radio bolted to the wall near the helm of the Pamela Ann.

The lobstermen have a point regarding Trump. As frustrating as their remarks may be, the biggest threat to offshore wind is not snipes from colleagues, but the actions of a president who many Sea Services members—including Souza—voted for.

Captain Kevin Souza prepared the Pamela Ann, a scallop-fishing vessel docked in New Bedford, for an Captain Kevin Souza prepared the Pamela Ann, a scallop-fishing vessel docked in New Bedford, for a February excursion.Clare Fieseler/Canary Media

As Souza prepared to leave the New Bedford port in February to go help Ørsted build giant wind turbines in the ocean, something Trump swore would not happen during his term, he explained his support for the president.

“Trust me, I want Trump to ‘drill, drill, drill.’ I’m all for it,” said Souza of the president’s plans to expand oil and gas production.

But he still thinks offshore wind is necessary to get more power onto New England’s grid and lower energy costs. Experts say that the federal permitting process for offshore wind in America takes too long—about four years. But, in the Northeast region, according to energy analyst Christian Roselund, finishing the deployment of the offshore wind projects already in the permitting pipeline will be much faster than starting up new nuclear or fossil-gas power plants.

“Once we ‘drill, drill, drill,’ you’re still gonna need more electricity,” Souza said. “Where are you gonna get it? My electric bill at my house is stupid high!”

“When you put that first wind turbine up there,” Avila recalls other fisherman saying to him, “we’re going to hang you from it!”

Most of the fishermen in New Bedford are Trump supporters, he insisted. Morris, who also voted for Trump, agreed. Overall, Trump won 46% of the city’s votes in last November’s election—a much higher proportion than his Massachusetts statewide total of 36.5%. The “TRUMP 2024” flags flown from the dozens of scallop boats docked across New Bedford’s port underscored the point. A few of those Trump flag-flying boats even work for the offshore wind companies, Morris claims. ThePamela Ann_,_ for its part,does not have a Trump flag.

“I support Trump even though I know he’s against wind. … I believe this will still be around,” said Souza, gesturing toward the ocean, where somewhere over the horizon an array of wind towers was being erected. “He’s gonna see the light.”

Trump, of course, has not seen the light—though he did revoke his stop-work order against Empire Wind.

After being grounded for a month, Sea Services fishermen began operations on Empire Wind again in early June, when the project resumed at-sea work. The co-op’s members are helping Equinor’s construction vessels lay boulders on the seafloor to stabilize all 54 wind towers that will be raised over the next two years and eventually supply much-needed carbon-free power to New York City.

But nothing is certain. When the Trump administration unpaused the project, it left open the door to stopping it again—or killing it altogether. A May letter from the Interior Department to Equinor noted that it is still conducting an “ongoing review” to determine if the project’s permits were “rushed” and therefore illegitimate in the eyes of the Trump administration.

Meanwhile, a coalition of a dozen fishing companies and several anti-offshore wind groups typically allied with Trump sued the administration on June 3, just days before Empire Wind restarted at-sea construction, in an attempt to reinstate the stop-work order. The move came weeks after wind opponents asked Trump to also pause Revolution Wind, one of the more lucrative contracts Sea Services holds.

In his opposition to offshore wind, Trump has positioned himself as a defender of the commercial fishing industry, claiming falsely at a May 2024 campaign rally in Wildwood, New Jersey, for example, that the turbines “cause tremendous problems with the fish and the whales.”

But for the increasing number of fishermen working with offshore wind companies, halting the industry would not help—it would crush a financial lifeline.

Not long ago, in 2017, Sea Services captain Rodney Avila remembers being one of the only fishers in New Bedford willing to seize this lifeline. He recalled with a laugh what a long-time fisherman friend said to him then: “When you put that first wind turbine up there…we’re going to hang you from it!”

Times have changed. In New Bedford alone, almost 50 local fishing vessels have performed some kind of safety or scouting work for offshore wind projects. At least one captain lowers his MAGA-supporting flag before setting out to work on the projects the president has sworn to stop, according to Avila. He said politics has always been tangled up in fishing. And work is work.

“They don’t care whether it’s red, or blue, or whatever color…They don’t care,” Avila shrugged, while sipping coffee inside a Dunkin’. Five scalloping boats bobbed on calm water just beyond the parking lot.

“It’s money that they need to support their families, wherever it comes from.”

Continue Reading…

Pharma Giant Roche Hires Trump to Sell Swanky Condo

Donald Trump’s realty firm is representing one of the country’s largest pharmaceutical companies in its effort to offload a $12 million New York condo—an arrangement that represents yet another apparent conflict of interest for the 47th president of the United States.

The condo on the 39th floor of the Trump International Hotel and Tower at Columbus Circle has been on and off the market for several years but hasn’t been successfully sold. According to real estate websites, it was listed by a different realty firm, Sotheby’s, until late last month. Around that time, it was listed for sale on Trump International Realty’s website. If it sells at its current listing price, it would likely earn hundreds of thousands of dollars in commissions for Trump’s firm.

According to New York real estate records, the Swiss pharmaceutical giant Roche bought the swanky 3,000-square-foot condo back in 2006. The two-bedroom unit features “sweeping views of Central Park,” along with “lacquered custom tray ceilings with custom lighting, custom pocket doors, Steinway black lacquered doors, Corian counters, subzero refrigerator, Wolf convection oven, wine cooler and marble bath.” It’s unclear why Roche—which has offices across the United States—originally purchased the property or why it recently turned to Trump’s real estate firm for help. Roche and its American biotech subsidiary, Genentech, did not respond to requests for comment. Nor did the Trump Organization or Karina Lynch, an attorney with the powerhouse firm DLA Piper, who was recently announced as the Trump Organization’s “outside ethics adviser.”

Trump International Realty is far from the president’s most profitable venture, but it’s still plenty lucrative. Boasting a “luxury portfolio” full of “exclusive listings,” the firm pulled in $2.4 million in revenue last year, according to Trump’s most recent financial disclosure filing. Trump owns 55 percent of the firm, and his children own the rest. It currently lists 10 properties for sale in New York, with a combined listed price of $42.6 million. Most are inTrump-branded luxury buildings.

The Roche condo is, by far, the priciest unit. But the second-most expensive—a $6.6 million condo in a nearby building known as Trump Parc—also raises some questions. According to real estate records, that unit has been owned since 2001 by a British Virgin Islands-based company. The identity of the individual or individuals behind that company are unclear. An accountant whose name appears on the deed did not respond to a request for comment.

The amount of commission a realty firm earns on a property sale can vary, but real estate websites say the typical seller’s commission in New York is around 2.7 percent. At that rate, selling Roche’s condo for the asking price of $11,950,000 could earn the Trumps’ realty business about $323,000 in commissions. And selling the mysterious Trump Parc condo could bring in another $178,000. It’s not clear what portion of those commissions would go directly to the individual real estate agents employed by Trump International Realty and what portion would be retained by the Trumps.

Roche has massive and complex interests in Washington, DC, and the Trump administration has considerable authority over the price of pharmaceuticals and the approval of new products. The drugmaker is one of heaviest spenders on K Street, with the company and its subsidiaries shelling out more than $10.7 million on lobbying expenses last year. In the first three months of 2025, the company reported nearly $3.6 million in federal lobbying. Most of that spending went to Genentech’s in-house lobbying team. In March, Genentech also hired MAGA-linked K Street firm Miller Strategies to lobby the Executive Office of the President and other parts of the administration. Roche’s overall spending this year on lobbyists ranks 6th in the pharmaceutical industry and just outside the top 25 of any special interest.

The possibility that one of Trump’s businesses could collect a substantial commission from a major corporation during his presidency is deeply problematic, says Robert Maguire, research director for Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, a watchdog group.

“The optics are terrible, but there’s also all of the unanswerable questions which are raised by it, like did someone tell them that by enriching the president, they’d have a better chance of having their interests heard by the administration?” Maguire says. “Or is there just a general perception that if you do business with the president, if you enrich the president, you will get better treatment by the administration?”

Even if the decision by Roche to list its condo for sale with the sitting president’s realty firm was unrelated to politics, it could undermine public confidence in the integrity of the regulatory system, Maguire says.

Roche has had its fair share of high-stakes dealing with the Trump administration over the last few months. As a Swiss-based drug company, it potentially has a lot to lose from Trump’s tariffs—the standard tariff of 10 percent is supposed to rise to 31 percent on many of its products. In April, Roche made a splash by announcing it would be investing up to $50 billion in the United States and creating as many as 12,000 jobs—a move that would theoretically help it avoid tariffs by moving some manufacturing to the US. The company’s CEO told investors that the firm was in ongoing discussions with the White House about the tariffs, and a few days later, Roche’s announcement earned praise from the administration.

In May, Trump signed an executive order that attempted to force pharmaceutical companies to tie their US drug prices to the prices they charge in other developed countries. Roche was one of the first—and loudest—companies to complain about the move.

By early June, though, the company’s US investment plans were once again being touted by the administration. “Since President Donald J. Trump took office,” the White House crowed, “his unwavering commitment to revitalizing American industry has spurred trillions of dollars of investments in US manufacturing, production, and innovation—and the list only continues to grow.”

Ethics experts have long urged Trump to divest from his businesses, but he has steadfastly refused to do so. As Maguire notes, conflict-of-interest rules would prohibit any federal official other than the president and vice president from hanging onto a business like Trump International Realty.

“He’s the president, so he’s exempted from any of these rules that would apply to other people—hundreds of thousands of other government employees would be restrained or prohibited from this kind of thing,” Maguire says. “It’s just another instance of how at every turn, the Trump family and their businesses are demonstrating why these rules exist in the first place.”

Continue Reading…

The Bezos-Sánchez Hangover

As the dust settles in Venice, where some of the world’s richest gathered to bless the union of Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sánchez, I’m wondering what to make of the multi-day affair. Plenty has already been written about the blinding tackiness of each event; in terms of ostentatiousness, it met my expectations.

But even as someone who enjoys celebrity news, I was struck by how activated my ever-eager algorithm was by the events in Venice, and the relentlessness with which it churned out constant glimpses of these nuptials. It was a gluttonous buffet of the in-your-face aesthetics that define this political and cultural moment, and it has since left me with the feeling of a trashy hangover.

There were the Kardashian-Jenners, whose outfits seemed designed to send algorithms into overdrive. Sydney Sweeney and Oprah Winfrey. A newly single Orlando Bloom nearly chomping at the bit at the prospect of fresh skin. The over-the-top Vogue spread. The flood of reactions to the Vogue spread. Jerry Seinfeld, Gayle King, Usher. Many of these guests were seen waving to onlookers as they departed on little boats to the island of San Giorgio Maggiore, as though they had been unaware that the city hated their guts.

Leonardo DiCaprio is a MOOD in Venice for Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sanchez's wedding https://t.co/8wfYNmTwG1

— hunter harris (@hunteryharris) June 27, 2025

One guest who did not wave was Leonardo DiCaprio, who instead arrived with a black baseball cap pulled down to cover his face. Some speculated that DiCaprio, a self-fashioned environmentalist, did not want to be seen attending the environmentally noxious affair. (Nearly 100 private planes reportedly landed in Venice for the weekend.) But that’s a generous guess, one that presumes a capability for shame. The truth is that no one in attendance cares about what you and I will ever think.

I’m feeling icky, but they’re flying high on their jets back home. Meanwhile, thanks to the father of another guest, Ivanka Trump, they stand in spitting distance from even higher levels of wealth.

Continue Reading…

Elon Musk Rips Into Trump’s “Utterly Insane” Tax Bill Again

After a brief interlude, Elon Musk on Saturday resumed his public wrestling match with President Donald Trump, ripping into the president’s domestic policy bill as “utterly insane and destructive” just as the Senate met to vote on a key procedural step to pass the “big beautiful bill.”

“The latest Senate draft bill will destroy millions of jobs in America and cause immense strategic harm to our country!” the billionaire wrote on X. In a later post, Musk warned that the bill would be “political suicide” for the Republican Party.

Musk’s apparent attempt to influence the vote ultimately failed; after several hours, the Senate ultimately cleared the procedural hurdle. But in this crucial moment for the president’s massive spending agenda, Musk’s latest attacks are certain to infuriate his former boss as their rift widens once more. Are we moments away from the return of ugly insults? Will Musk expand on his Jeffrey Epstein accusations? Will a new level of lawlessness be unlocked? As of this writing, Trump has yet to respond. But as I predicted only weeks ago, it was only a matter of time before their feud returned to the public sphere.

But what is certain, as Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” now heads to the House for final approval, is that the country is on the verge of passing one of the most dangerous bills in US history. It will decimate spending on Medicaid and food stamps while adding an estimated $2.8 trillion to the deficit; send energy bills skyrocketing across American households; unleash billions for Trump’s border wall; and far more.

Continue Reading…

Firefighting Foams Contain Toxic Chemicals. Why Not Switch to Soybeans?

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

Jeff King has served on the volunteer fire department in Corydon, Kentucky, for over 30 years. He is well aware of the dangers of the job—including one that may be hiding in the supplies he and his crew use to keep others safe.

Many of the foams firefighters spray to extinguish blazes contain per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS. Known as “forever chemicals,” PFAS are a class of human-made chemicals that repel water and oil; it’s this quality that makes them effective at battling tough-to-put-out fires, like those started with diesel fuel. The chemicals are also tied to a host of human health problems, from reproductive issues to high cholesterol to certain types of cancer. King admits that some of the foams he’s used over his career “may or may not be good for us.”

That’s why he visited Dalton, Georgia, last year to meet with representatives from Cross Plains Solutions, a company that developed a PFAS-free firefighting foam made from soybeans. After seeing the foam in action, he was impressed. “The product performs just fantastic,” said King. And because it has been certified as PFAS-free, he figured, “there’s nothing in it that could potentially make me or any other firefighter in this country that uses it sick. I just thought, ‘Wait a minute, this is almost a no-brainer.’”

There’s another upside for King in all of this: In his day job, he’s a soybean farmer himself. A new application for the humble soybean would be good for business.

The search to find a PFAS-free firefighting foam is relatively new, as a growing body of research illuminates the harmful impact that these chemicals have on humans and the environment. Soybean farmers have presented their crop as a surprising solution to this problem. Although more research and development are needed to ensure soy-based firefighting foam holds up under the toughest circumstances, the product is catching the attention of local fire departments.

“There is a good bit of interest,” said Alan Snipes, CEO of Cross Plains Solutions. He estimated that his company’s product, aptly named SoyFoam, is now being used in 50 fire departments around the country, mostly in the Midwest. That’s not a coincidence: Snipes pointed out that many rural fire departments in the middle of the country depend on volunteer firefighters. “A lot of the volunteers are farmers, and a lot of the farmers grow soybeans,” he said.

Cross Plains began to look into creating a PFAS-free, soy-based firefighting foam after being approached by the United Soybean Board. Snipes was first in touch with the board more than 30 years ago, when he worked in the carpet industry and started using soy-based compounds to manufacture backing for commercial carpets. He started Cross Plains Solutions about 13 years ago to produce a bio-based cooling gel for mattresses. Then, three years ago, the United Soybean Board offered the company funding to develop and test a biodegradable firefighting foam.

“The majority of the headache” with PFAS foams “is the military application, because of all of the military bases and the training activities.”

The board, whose members are appointed by the US Department of Agriculture, exists to collect one-half of one percent of the market price of every bushel of soybeans sold by US farmers. This congressionally mandated process, called the soybean checkoff program, is used to fund research into new markets for soybeans.

The United Soybean Board partners with both public and private actors, like universities and corporations, to fund research into and commercialization of new soybean uses. Often, this looks like investing in more sustainable alternatives to fossil fuels—like using soybean oil as a petroleum replacement in tires, straws, and shoes. In a partnership like the one with Cross Plains, the checkoff program is hoping to create a business opportunity that might help farmers sell more bushels down the line. The result is a “win-win,” said Philip Good, chair of the United Soybean Board.

After King returned home to Kentucky, his fire department voted to exclusively use SoyFoam going forward; according to King, it was the first in the country to do so.

SoyFoam is not unique. There are other alternatives to PFAS-based firefighting foams on the market with different formulations and applications, said Danielle Nachman, a senior staff scientist at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory. “They can span all kinds of chemistry,” said Nachman. Some are bio-based, like a gel made with canola oil, while others try to replicate the chemical properties of PFAS without relying on fluorinated compounds.

The big hurdle for SoyFoam and other PFAS-free firefighting foams is meeting requirements set by the Department of Defense for military firefighting and training activity. PFAS-containing firefighting foams were first patented by the United States Navy in the 1960s, following a series of devastating fires on aircraft carriers and other ships. In the 1970s, virtually every US military base began using these foams for emergencies and training exercises—leading to dangerous contamination in the surrounding areas.

“The majority of the headache when it comes to PFAS [in firefighting foams] is the military application,” said Mohamed Ateia Ibrahim, an adjunct assistant professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering at Rice University, “because of all of the military bases and the training activities.”

The Department of Defense has been working to transition away from firefighting foams that contain PFAS—but SoyFoam has a ways to go before it could be fully embraced by the military. The Pentagon has not tested Cross Plains Solutions’ product, but Snipes said the agency has encouraged the company to seek further funding to continue its R&D.

The Department of Defense didn’t respond to Grist’s request for comment.

Ibrahim said he supports the development of bio-based, PFAS-free foams, but that companies need to be more transparent about what exactly goes into their products. “We need more clarification about the other components and whether they are, as a whole, really better or not” than PFAS-based firefighting foams, said Ibrahim.

According to Snipes, SoyFoam is made up of things you could find in your pantry—although when asked to specify what those components are, he demurred, calling the information proprietary.

Continue Reading…

Hungary Banned Pride Events. Thousands Marched Anyway.

Earlier this year, Hungary’s parliament passed legislation banning Pride events and allowing the use of facial recognition technology to identify attendees. The ban is supported by Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, a conservative nationalist and Trump ally whose regime has been widely described as anti-democratic. Orbán has for years decried “gender insanity” and “woke globalists,” the New York Times reports, “distracting attention from Hungary’s faltering economy and revving up his right-wing rural base.”

“None of us are free until everyone is free.”

But in spite of the ban, tens of thousands of people marched through Budapest on Saturday during the city’s 30th annual Pride march, according to several news outlets. At least 70 European Parliament members also attended, CNN reported. The event had the support of Budapest’s liberal mayor, Gergely Karácsony. “They have trapped themselves by trying to ban something that cannot be banned,” Karácsony said, according to the Times.

On Friday, Orbán suggested that law enforcement would not actively intervene in the demonstration, calling Hungary a “civilized country,” but held the door open to later legal action.

“We are adults, and I recommend that everyone should decide what they want, keep to the rules… and if they don’t, then they should face the clear legal consequences,” Orbán told state radio, according to Reuters.

Thousands of marchers pack Budapest’s Elisabeth Bridge on Saturday.Genaro Molina/Los Angeles Times/Getty

Despite the ban and Orbán’s remarks on Friday, the event attracted large crowds, who began their march from the steps of Budapest’s city hall. Livestreams of the event showed participants of all ages flooding the streets with rainbow flags and supportive signs. “Solidarity is our pride,” one placard read. “None of us are free until everyone is free,” another sign said.

“The right to assembly is a basic human right, and I don’t think it should be banned. Just because someone does not like the reason why you go to the street, or they do not agree with it, you still have the right to do so,” one attendee, Krisztina Aranyi, told the Guardian.

Continue Reading…

Environmentalists Sue to Stop Florida’s ‘Alligator Alcatraz’ Deportation Center

Deep in the Everglades, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’s administration has swiftly begun construction of an ICE detention center on an airfield surrounded by wetlands that will house up to 1,000 detainees and could open as soon as next week. In a Friday interview with Fox News, DeSantis called the new center “Alligator Alcatraz” and said deportation flights could also take off from the airfield, which was previously used for military and law enforcement training. “This is going to be a force multiplier and we’re really happy to be working with the federal government to satisfy President Trump’s mandate,” he said.

DeSantis has pushed anti-immigrant laws and encouraged police to collaborate with ICE.

Florida is expected to pay $450 million a year to run the facility, with the possibility of being reimbursed by the federal government, the Miami Herald reported. Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier said the detention center will be mostly comprised of “light infrastructure,” the Herald reported, such as tents and trailers.He suggested in a video posted to X that the facility’s location would deter escapes: “People get out, there’s not much waiting for them other than alligators and pythons,” Uthmeier said

The project has faced considerable backlash in recent days from immigrant advocacy groups, environmentalists, and Miami-Dade county mayor Daniella Levine Cava. The Miccosukee Tribe has also publicly opposed the construction of the center on its ancestral lands. “The state would save substantial taxpayer dollars by pursuing its goals at a different location with more existing infrastructure and less environmental and cultural impacts,” Talbert Cypress, chair of the tribe, wrote in a statement posted to Facebook.

On Friday, two environmentalist groups filed a lawsuit in federal court against federal and state officials to halt the project, the Tampa Bay Times reported, arguing that the project proceeded without an environmental review and opportunity for public comment. Instead, the complaint reads, construction has already commenced at a “breakneck pace,” as crews transported kitchen facilities, restrooms, industrial lighting, and dump trucks onto the airfield.

The site is located within the Big Cypress National Preserve, “a nationally and State protected, and ecologically sensitive, area that serves as habitat for endangered and threatened species like the Florida panther, Florida bonneted bat, Everglade Snail kite, wood stork, and numerous other species,” according to the environmental groups’ complaint.

Plans for the center are largely a response to a nationwide surge in immigration detention. As my colleague Isabela Dias recently reported, the number of people held by ICE now surpasses 56,000—an unprecedented level. “The record high detention numbers also raise concerns about overcrowding, especially since the Department of Homeland Security is imposing new rules restricting access by members of Congress to ICE facilities,” she wrote.

That Florida is undertaking such a massive detention center project is not a surprise. As I reported in April, under DeSantis the state has passed a slew of anti-immigrant laws and has encouraged local police and jails to collaborate with ICE on immigration arrests.

Continue Reading…

The Collapse of the World’s Coral Reefs is “Death by a Thousand Cuts”

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

The Kenyan marine ecologist David Obura is chair of a panel of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), the world’s leading natural scientists. For many decades, his speciality has been corals, but he has warned that the next generation may not see their glory because so many reefs are now “flickering out across the world.”

Why are corals important? Multiple reasons. They are home to a huge amount of biodiversity, which provides food and environmental services. They also serve as coastal buffers, protecting coastlines from storms and swells. In many ways, coral are like underwater forests. The algae living inside corals are photosynthetic and grow very much like trees. Together, they are the ecosystem architects, and if you lose those, you lose the entire ecosystem.

What is happening to coral reefs ? There are sudden collapses and also long linear declines. It depends on the circumstances. Climate change and pollution are really changing the background environmental conditions that coral reefs need to survive in. And then through fishing and other exploitation, a lot of their biomass is being extracted. There are so many of these different pressures happening at the same time that it’s a death by a thousand cuts. In the end, you lose the interactions and the complexity that characterises a coral reef. Half of the total area of live coral has been lost already. Many reefs no longer support the diversity and abundance that they used to.

When scientists talk about a tipping point for coral reefs, what do they mean? Tipping points occur when the characteristics of a given system cease to exist. In the case of coral reefs, that happens due to a loss of the diversity and abundance of different species. At a certain point, this leads to the breakdown of the functions and the ecosystem processes of the entire system and if you don’t have any of those, then you don’t have a coral reef any more.

For people who are not experts, what are the signs of a collapsing reef system? Firstly, less color, because there’s less coral and other brightly colored invertebrates. Instead, drab algae tend to dominate, and other invertebrates, such as sponges.

Then in the water, you see less abundance and diversity of fish. What you hear is also very different: On a vibrant coral reef, there are so many sounds, it is just like walking through a forest and listening to all the insects and birds. But a degraded, simpler reef has fewer animals making sounds, and they sound deathly quiet.

Finally, the three-dimensional structure breaks down. This may only take 10 years or so and then all the complexity is gone.

Where is this most pronounced? It is easier to say where it is not pronounced. The last major holdout is perhaps the “Coral Triangle” in the Indonesian-Philippine archipelagos. It shows some resilience, though even there some places are strongly impacted because of local threats or climate change. In almost every other region, you’re seeing declines in coral cover and diversity and a loss of abundance and diversity of fish and invertebrates. That weakens the general health of the reef systems, and makes them more vulnerable to diseases and microbial activity, which are very harmful to coral species.

The most pronounced losses are probably in the Caribbean because it’s a smaller sea; a regional basin surrounded by land-based impacts. That’s also true of the Persian-Arabian Gulf, where there are many places that may no longer be called coral reefs. Whole regions are now vulnerable to ecosystem collapse and specific corals within them are increasingly endangered.

How close are coral reefs to a tipping point or has this already happened? There’s a huge amount of discussion about that. Should we consider a tipping point at a small local scale, or at the level of an island or a coastline, or a region or the whole world?

Certainly it is already evident at a local scale; many reefs across the world have passed a point of no return. At the regional scale, I think the Caribbean may have tipped as an integrated coral reef system, even though there are locations that are still very vibrant, like the Mesoamerican barrier reef and some of the islands. All the coral reef regions that have so far been assessed on the red list of ecosystems have been classed as threatened, which means there is a high risk they may collapse within a 50-year period—unless the right actions are taken.

How much global heating do scientists estimate coral reefs can withstand? We have recently revised the temperature threshold. Up to 2022, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said the tipping point for coral reefs would occur when warming is between 1.5 C and 2 C above preindustrial levels. But in 2023, we revised that to between 1 C and 1.5 C. The world is already close to that upper limit and it will certainly come within the next 10 or 20 years as a result of committed climate change—which comes from cumulative emissions that have already gone into the atmosphere. So have we already gone past the tipping point for coral reefs in global terms? Perhaps.

What are the consequences? The most obvious is the loss of the physical presence of coral reefs, their diversity of species and their functions. That has an effect on people because reefs protect coastlines and are habitats for fish that we eat. They are natural capital—assets that support our lives. When we lose coral reefs, we lose a lot of the foundations of societies and economies that depend on them.

Which fish depend on coral reefs? Most affected are fish that eat or live in corals. They are mostly small, ornamental species, such as butterfly fish, damsel fish and things like that. But more importantly, corals provide the structure that sustains a much wider diversity of fish that eat algae, plankton, invertebrates and many other sources. All are impacted when the structure of the reef simplifies.

Are there any redeeming impacts? Not at all. When coral cover goes down, it gets replaced by algae. Sometimes this can lead to an increase in herbivorous fish, because there’s more food for them. That may be good for fishing in the short-term, but any benefits disappear quickly as the three-dimensional structure of the reef declines.

Will this also affect people who don’t live near coral reefs? They’ll feel it in many different ways. First, psychologically—instead of going on holiday to see beautiful coral reefs or getting messages from friends about their amazing colors and biodiversity, they will hear news of loss and decline. Second, there will be an economic impact. People won’t get fish on their plate from coral reefs, and tourism and coastal economies that depend on reefs will decline.

More broadly, the loss of corals will herald wider, systemic threats because corals are a canary in the coal mine for climate and other compounding threats. It means there will be a lot of other hidden tipping points, of other beautiful landscapes or the ecosystems that rural communities and even cities depend on. We’ve basically been using nature for free. If we had incorporated the cost of really caring for nature in our economies, we wouldn’t be in this situation right now.

Is there any way to restore corals? Not yet at scale. Many techniques are being trialled, and many show promise—but they cannot replace what we are losing. There are now fewer and fewer healthy coral systems, more and more isolated from one another. The water is just getting too hot and too polluted, and there is too much extraction, all of which is punching big holes in the mosaic of reefs along our coastlines. Restoring coral reefs in this context is an uphill battle, and existing technologies are too difficult, and too expensive to apply at scale. What restoration does do is engage people in visible and tangible efforts to care for reefs, and this may deliver the greatest benefit, to finally build commitment to conserve coral reefs much more broadly.

What about experiments to artificially grow coral? Is there any hope of a technological solution? There are a lot of trials, and many innovations. I’m a scientist, so I think we always need research into new techniques, otherwise we’ll never discover them. But the thing that I am adamant about, particularly coming from Africa, is that money that would go into community development and local resilience and building up low-income communities should not be going into the pockets of researchers and consultants doing artificial coral restoration. Research funding could and should be available, but we have to be very conscious of the rights and the equity issues around hi-tech fixes—who benefits and who doesn’t.

Putting aside scientific knowledge acquisition, how do you feel about the state of the world’s corals? Angry, more than anything else. I want to point my fingers at the people who are responsible so they change what they’re doing. It’s not the billions of poor people around the planet; they face local challenges and environmental degradation, but they don’t have a global footprint. The global footprint that is causing a decline of corals and so much else is from the much smaller number of high-income consumers and economies.

Until that is understood and they transform what they’re doing, we won’t be able to resolve the challenges at the bottom end of the income pyramid. You, in the global north, have to change what you’re doing in order for there to be an option for better futures, rather than just giving up and letting the worst futures come about. This is my mission now—to make waves for change.

Continue Reading…

Sen. Elizabeth Warren Presses Oil Firms on Lobbying for a Huge Tax Break in the Budget Bill

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

Democratic lawmakers led by the Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren are pressing two energy companies about their efforts to “win a $1.1 billion tax loophole” in Donald Trump’s so-called One Big Beautiful Bill.

The proposed exemption, which Senate Republicans inserted into their version of the reconciliation megabill this month, would exempt fossil fuel companies from paying a tax codified by Biden in 2022. “It’s an insult to working people to give oil companies a massive tax handout while slashing healthcare and raising energy prices for millions of families,” Warren, who was a major advocate for the tax, told the Guardian.

“Americans deserve to know if Big Oil paid for these Republicans in Congress to carve out tax breaks just for them.”

Enshrined within the Inflation Reduction Act, the corporate alternative minimum tax (CAMT) requires corporations with adjusted earnings over $1 billion to pay at least 15 percent of the profits they report to their shareholders, which are known as “book profits,” in taxes. The Senate Finance Committee’s proposal would shield domestic drillers from that tax by allowing companies to deduct certain drilling costs when calculating their income—a change that would allow some companies to pay zero dollars in federal taxes.

Winning the tax tweak has been a major priority for fossil-fuel interests this year. The oil major ConocoPhillips and Denver-based petroleum company Ovintiv directly lobbied for the change, federal disclosures show.

On Thursday morning, Warren, along with Senate Democratic colleagues Sheldon Whitehouse (Rhode Island), Ron Wyden (Oregon), and Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, sent letters to ConocoPhillips and Ovintiv pressing for answers on their role in shaping the CAMT change. “Your company’s lobbying disclosures explicitly prioritize this handout,” read the letters, which were shared exclusively with the Guardian.

Both companies could “benefit tremendously from this provision,” read the letters, which are addressed to the ConocoPhillips CEO, Ryan Lance, and the Ovintiv CEO, Brendan McCracken, respectively.

The Guardian has contacted ConocoPhillips and Ovintiv for comment.

In their missives, the senators asked how much each company has spent on lobbying for the provision and will spend this year, how much each has donated to elected officials advocating for fossil fuel tax cuts, and how much of a reduction in taxes each company would see if the provision is finalized, requesting answers by July 9.

“The rationale for CAMT was simple: for far too long, massive corporations had taken advantage of loopholes in the tax code to avoid paying their fair share, sometimes paying zero federal taxes despite earning billions in profits,” the signatories wrote.

The proposed change, the letters note, closely resembles a bill introduced by the Oklahoma senator James Lankford this year, which would allow companies to subtract “intangible drilling and development costs” from their CAMT income calculations.

Lankford accepted nearly $500,000 in donations from the fossil fuel sector between 2019 and 2024, making it his top source of industry funding. The Guardian has contacted the senator for comment.

Deductions for intangible drilling costs—referring to costs incurred before drilling, such as for labor and equipment—have been on the books since 1913, making them the oldest, largest US fossil fuel subsidy, according to one report on the Lankford proposal.

“Big Oil now wants this deduction to apply not only for purposes of their taxable income, but for book income purposes as well,” the letters say. “Put another way, if enacted, this provision would reduce or even eliminate tax liabilities for oil and gas companies under CAMT, allowing some to pay no federal income taxes whatsoever.”

Other energy-related provisions in the draft reconciliation bill would phase out incentives for clean energy manufacturing and energy efficiency, causing utility bills to rise and jobs to be lost. This makes the tax break proposal “especially insulting,” says the letter, which was sent as temperatures spiked across much of the US.

“Americans deserve to know if Big Oil paid for these Republicans in Congress to carve out tax breaks just for them,” said Warren.

As drafted, the reconciliation bill would also jeopardize energy security by curbing the growth of renewable energy, Schumer told the Guardian.

“The Republicans’ plan is a complete capitulation to Big Oil at the expense of clean energy and American families’ wallets,” Schumer said. “Republicans would rather kill over 800,000 good-paying jobs and send energy costs skyrocketing than stand up to their Big Oil billionaire buddies.”

Continue Reading…

“Disaster Looms”: Justice Jackson’s Warning for the Country

Once upon a time, there was a president who wanted to be king. His Congress was acquiescent. The high court approved. But lower federal courts held firm to the rule of law. Time and again, they blocked the president from seizing power and violating the nation’s laws. So the president turned to the justices on the Supreme Court for a favor: please stop these meddlesome little courts from getting in my way. And then one day in June, the Supreme Court granted his wish.

This is not how democracy works. But it is, now, the law of the land.

This is what happened on Friday in a case about birthright citizenship before the United States Supreme Court. The Trump administration’s blatantlyunconstitutional executive order from January denying birthright citizenship to the children of certain classes of immigrants quickly ran up against lower court judges, who prohibited the Trump administration from violating one of the country’s most sacred Constitutional rights.

The administration used this case as a vehicle to ask the Republican-appointed majority on the Supreme Court to protect it, and not only in this case, from alluniversal injunctions, which judges issue to block potentially illegal government actions on a nationwide basis. The six GOP appointees that form a right-wing majority acquiesced, finding that universal injunctions likely exceed the powers of the lower courts. As a result, no matter how brazenly unconstitutional a presidential act may be, the courts cannot protect anyone who does not personally sue or is unable to join a class action lawsuit.

“No right is safe in the new legal regime the Court creates,” Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in her dissent, which was joined by her fellow Democratic appointees, Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson. “Today, the threat is to birthright citizenship. Tomorrow, a different administration may try to seize firearms from law abiding citizens or prevent people of certain faiths from gathering to worship… That holding renders constitutional guarantees meaningful in name only for any individuals who are not parties to a lawsuit.” When the Constitution and the president face off, the Constitution falls.

“The Court’s decision is nothing less than an open invitation for the Government to bypass the Constitution,” Sotomayor warned. “The Executive Branch can now enforce policies that flout settled law and violate countless individuals’ constitutional rights, and the federal courts will be hamstrung to stop its actions fully.” This is the new America.

This case, called Trump v. CASA, is the second time in a year that the Supreme Court has ended its term with a ruling that threatens American democracy to its core. On July 1, 2024, the Supreme Court granted presidents broad criminal immunity for official acts, pushing the evolution of the presidency further toward monarchy. Dissenting from that decision, the three Democratic-appointees warned that America’s very system of government was eroding. One year ago, it was the president in his personal capacity whom the Republican justices placed above the law. Today, those same six justices place the president’s prerogatives above the legal and constitutional rights of everyone else.

Justice Jackson, in her own dissent, digs into the profound threat this decision poses to the rule of law by, in effect, exempting the president from following it. Whether or not this decision has the practical effect of denying birthright citizenship to children born on US soil, Jackson warns, this decision has altered our system of government and, sooner or later, may destroy it. “Disaster looms,” she warns. If a court cannot command the executive to follow the law, then there exists “a zone of lawlessness within which the Executive has the prerogative to take or leave the law as it wishes, and where individuals who would otherwise be entitled to the law’s protection become subject to the Executive’s whims instead.” This is, of course, not how democracy works. But it is, now, the law of the land in the United States.

Jackson’s dissent is meant to explain the precise ways the majority’s decision undoes our system of government, by pulling back from the power-sharing structure the Framers crafted and replacing it with the monarchical system they had just cast off. The Framers hoped that the ambitions of each branch would cause them to zealously check the excesses of the others. But, under Trump, the other branches channel their ambitions not through their own power, but fealty to his.

“The Court’s decision is nothing less than an open invitation for the Government to bypass the Constitution.”

“In this country, the Executive does not stand above or outside of the law,” Jackson writes. But her dissent is also a warning that this is becoming less true. A year ago, the Republican appointees exempted the president from the dictates of criminal law. Now, it suggests that even if a court finds the administration’s actions illegal or unconstitutional, it can continue to enforce them against those who haven’t challenged the action in court, either individually or as part of a class action. As a result, the president rises beyond the bounds of the law, and individuals slip from the embrace of its protection.

But as the old saying implies, if first they come for those without lawyers, then they will come for the rest of us. A partial king will seek to become a complete ruler. “I have no doubt that, if judges must allow the Executive to act unlawfully in some circumstances, as the Court concludes today, executive lawlessness will flourish, and from there, it is not difficult to predict how this all ends,” Jackson wrote. “Eventually, executive power will become completely uncontainable, and our beloved constitutional Republic will be no more.”

The nation’s highest court could have said no to this eventuality. But today, it said yes.

Continue Reading…

The Other Reason MAGA Is Melting Down Over Iran

When President Donald Trump announced on Truth Social on Saturday that the United States had bombed three sites in Iran, he spoke to a MAGA-verse divided. Many of his most ardent supporters—former Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz, for instance, and far-right political activist Laura Loomer—applauded his decision. But others—including media personality Tucker Carlson, hard-right commentator Candace Owens, and former Trump adviser Steve Bannon—were against the bombing from the beginning. “A bombing campaign against Iran will set off a war, and it will be America’s war,” Carlson warned his 16.4 million followers on X in March. “Don’t let the propagandists lie to you.”

The political fight seemed to boil down to a battle between those who believed that the United States had a responsibility to its foreign allies and others who saw Trump’s decision as a betrayal of his “America First” campaign promise.

But there is another dynamic propelling the deepening rift within the MAGA faithful. Underlying the divide over intervention in the Middle East is not geopolitics but a substantial theological schism within the community of Christian nationalists, and their belief about the “end times,” or the imminent end of the world.

Broadly speaking—though there are certainly exceptions— many of the most ardent supporters of Trump’s decision to bomb Iran identify as Christian Zionists, a group that believes that Israel and the Jewish people will play a key role in bringing about the second coming of the Messiah. As Christians, they are called to hasten this scenario, says Matthew Taylor, a senior scholar at the Institute for Islamic, Christian, and Jewish Studies (ICJS) in Baltimore and author of The Violent Take It by Force: The Christian Movement That Is Threatening Our Democracy. “The mission, so to speak, is to get the Jews back to Israel and to establish themselves within Israel,” he says. “Then you fulfill the preconditions, or one of the preconditions, for the second coming.”

During his first term, Taylor noted, Trump made strong connections with influential figures in the New Apostolic Reformation, a charismatic Christian movement that teaches followers to take “dominion” over all aspects of society, including government. Over the last decade or so, Christian Zionism has become an important part of NAR theology—so much so that during worship, some adherents now wear Jewish prayer shawls and blow shofars, the ram’s horn instruments that ancient Israelites used to call troops to battle and still features in some Jewish holidays. This is an example of what Taylor refers to as philosemitism—the idea of loving Jewish customs and cultures. But within end-times theology lurks a dark side to Christian Zionists’ fixation on Judaism. Once the Messiah arrives, many Christian Zionists are convinced that the Jews will convert en masse to Christianity; in many versions, those who don’t convert will perish. “If you actually read up on antisemitism and philosemitism,” Taylor says, “they really are two sides of the same coin.”

“If you actually read up on antisemitism and philosemitism, they really are two sides of the same coin.”

Even before the bombs were dropped that Saturday, Christian Zionists were hailing a possible strike as divinely ordained. One of their most prominent and politically powerful adherents is former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee, who currently serves as the US ambassador to Israel. On a podcast last year, Huckabee described himself as an “unapologetic, unreformed Zionist,” adding, “there really isn’t such a thing” as Palestine. He refers to the West Bank exclusively by its biblical name, “Judea and Samaria.” In the Jerusalem Post’s list of the most influential Christian Zionists, Huckabee comes in second. He follows former Minnesota congresswoman Michele Bachmann, who recently helped launch an Israel institute at Regent University, a Christian college in Virginia Beach, Virginia.

On June 18, three days before the United States bombed Iran, Huckabee texted President Trump, comparing him to “Truman in 1945,” who was faced with the existential decision of whether to bomb Hiroshima and Nagasaki. “God spared you in Butler, Pennsylvania, to be the most consequential president in a century, maybe ever,” Huckabee wrote. “I believe you will hear from heaven and that voice is far more important than mine or ANYONE else’s.”

Hours before news of the bombing broke, Lance Wallnau, an influential Texas NAR leader, with robust ties to the Trump administration—last year he hosted a Pennsylvania campaign event for JD Vance— warned his 129,000 followers on X, “Satan would love to crush Israel, humiliate the United States, destroy President Trump’s hope of recovery for America, and plunge the world into war.” But then he reassured them, “That’s not going to happen. Why? I was reminded again just a few moments ago what the Lord told me about Donald Trump in 2015.” He explained that he had received a message from God that Trump was a “modern-day Cyrus,” an Old Testament Persian king whom God used to free the Jews, his chosen people. On his YouTube channel two days after the bombing, Wallnau concluded that the prophecy was coming true. “Jesus is coming back, and I believe this is all part of him setting the stage for his return,” he said.

In Trump’s speech shortly after the bombing, he appeared to give a presidential nod to the Christian Zionist crowd, saying, “I want to thank—in particular—God. I want to just say, ‘We love you, God!’” In those words, some evangelicals thought they heard an affirmation of a common Christian Zionist refrain: “God will bless those who bless Israel.” Eric Metaxas, an evangelical radio host who has collaborated with Wallnau and was present at the rally leading up to the January 6th attack on the Capital, tweeted to his 240,000 followers, “Trump was obviously choked up & meant it,” he wrote. “No president has ever said anything like that. An extraordinary & historic public declaration of faith. God WILL bless this nation. Hallelujah.”

Taylor noted that another NAR leader, the Colorado evangelist Dutch Sheets, had a similar message for his 359,000 YouTube followers on Monday. “We are entering this time,” he said. “Millions of [Iranians] will come to Christ. Be assured: God is involved in this war.” A key figure in the campaign to overturn the 2020 election and the leadup to the January 6th attack on the Capital, Sheets has long held that Trump is a divinely appointed leader.

The Heritage Foundation, the powerful right-wing think tank that was the driving force behind the Project 2025 roadmap for Trump’s second term, also celebrated the Iran strikes. A particularly vocal Heritage staffer on this issue is Victoria Coates, vice president of the group’s Institute for National Security and Foreign Policy. Coates, a Christian, leads Project Esther, Heritage’s roadmap for quashing the pro-Palestine movement in the United States; the name is a reference to Queen Esther, a biblical heroine who saved the Jews in Persia from slaughter. Coates is also the author of the 2023 book The Battle for the Jewish State: How Israel―And America―Can Win. In a statement the Heritage Foundation released the day after the attack, Coates made the case that by bombing Iran, the United States actually progressed toward ending the age-old conflicts in the Middle East. “Now that Iran’s self-defeating dreams of nuclear military power have been decimated,” she said, “we are closer to peace.”

Unlike the Christian Zionists, some Christian members of the crowd that criticizes Trump’s decision to bomb Iran believe modern-day Israel has little to do with the Holy Land of the Bible. In fact, some of them hold that the Christian church now plays the role that Israel itself once did in ancient times, explains Taylor, the religion scholar. He explains the dynamic as more of the absorption of Jewish and Gentile Christians into a single church unit, which then becomes “a kind of replacement theology” in which Christianity supersedes Judaism and “replaces it.”

One group that strongly rejects the idea that Israel and the Jewish people are key to the second coming is the TheoBros, mostly millennial, extremely online men who proudly call themselves Christian nationalists. Great fans of Trump, in the wake of the US bombing, some of the TheoBros’ comments have veered into the terrain of antisemitism. The day after Trump announced the bombing, Stephen Wolfe, author of the 2022 book The Case for Christian Nationalism, tweeted to his 31,000 followers, “2% of the population demand 100% of the wars,” presumably an oblique reference to the roughly 2 percent of the American population who identifies as Jewish. (Wolfe did not respond to a request for comment from Mother Jones.)

The same day, Texas pastor Joel Webbon, another Christian nationalist TheoBro, weighed in, tweeting to his 39,000 followers, “Gentile Christians are not second class citizens of heaven, and Jews aren’t special.” On a Monday airing of his podcast, he clarified that his disdain for Israel did not amount to tacit support for Muslims, using slurs as he referred to adherents of that faith. “I’m not a fan of sand demons and the sand people who worship them, and I’m also not a fan of the synagogue of Satan.” Later in the same episode, he said, “My son is not going to go to war and bleed out and die for my country, with its gay rainbow flag, defending Judaism and Christ-rejecting, hating, spitting-on-Christians Israel, no sir.”

“My son is not going to go to war and bleed out and die for my country, with its gay rainbow flag, defending Judaism and Christ-rejecting, hating, spitting-on-Christians Israel, no sir.”

One of the loudest critics of the Iran strikes is right-wing media personality and erstwhile Trump fan Tucker Carlson—and on this issue, he has clashed dramatically with the Christian Zionist crowd that sees Israel and Judaism as one and the same. A few days before the bombing, Carlson interviewed Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), a Christian Zionist who strongly supports American military action in Iran. The exchange was a microcosm of the broader MAGA divide. Cruz accused Carlson of having an “obsession with Israel,” to which Carlson responded, “Oh, I’m an antisemite now?” and added, “Shame on you for conflating Jews and Israel.” Cruz was apoplectic. “Give me another reason, if you’re not an antisemite, why the obsession with Israel?”

Carlson mainly sees the Middle East conflict as a geopolitical quagmire, not a spiritual battle for a holy land. This stance is likely influenced by the “America First” anti-interventionist crowd he’s long been aligned with. But he too has strong ties to the TheoBro world. Earlier this year, he hosted Andrew Isker, a podcaster and pastor who is part of a movement to build a Christian nationalist community in Appalachia, and regularly tweets about his desire for Jews to convert to Christianity. He also strongly endorses the idea that Jews no longer have any particular claim to Israel. “You talk a lot about the Old Covenant and this idea of Jews and Gentiles. Is that all done now, are they one?” Tucker asked Isker. “Absolutely,” replied Isker. “In the New Testament, Paul makes it clear—there is ‘neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free’; in Christ we are one true Israel. The old dividing lines are abolished.” Carlson chuckled. “To come to the opposite conclusion does sort of make you wonder—have you actually read the Bible?”

A curious figure in the religious MAGA infighting over Iran is US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. While Hegseth currently attends a TheoBro-adjacent church, in the past he was a devoted Christian Zionist. In 2018, when he was still a Fox News anchor, he gave a speech in Jerusalem at a conference hosted by the right-wing Israeli news site Israel National News. “If you walk the ground today, you understand there is no such thing as the outcome of a two-state solution,” he said. “There is one state.”

In the same speech, he referred to the return of the prophesied Jewish diaspora to Israel, the event that Christian Zionists believe will herald the second coming of the Messiah. “There’s no reason why the miracle of the reestablishment of the Temple on the Temple Mount is not possible,” he said. “I don’t know how it would happen. You don’t know how it would happen. But I know that it could happen.”

Despite his current church’s beliefs, Hegseth appears to be holding fast to his Christian Zionist roots—and his allegiance to Trump. At a Wednesday press conference, the defense secretary railed against the media for reporting on intelligence that found that Iran’s nuclear program had not been completely destroyed. Shortly after, he tweeted, “I will always defend @POTUS leadership, especially our skilled and amazing warfighters.”

To Taylor, the divide between the Christian Zionists and their also-Christian detractors reveals a deeper truth about the theological clashes within the MAGA movement. “Everyone can kind of be pro-Trump and pro-Maga, but underneath that, there are real theological and ideological disagreements, and especially in around Jews and Judaism,” he says. “The ideological rift, even among the Christian Trump supporters, is very, very real.”

Continue Reading…

Trump Once Said Congress Should “Always” Approve Military Strikes

At nearly 8 p.m ET Saturday, President Donald Trump delivered shocking news that would quickly rouse global angst about the threat of nuclear war. He did so on social media.

“A full payload of BOMBS was dropped on the primary site, Fordow,” he thumbed out on Truth Social about three Iranian nuclear enrichment sites that U.S. military had, apparently, just attacked. “NOW IS THE TIME FOR PEACE! Thank you for your attention to this matter.”

Us lowly civilians across the country weren’t the only ones to learn of the military strike that evening; members of Congress were notified around the same time. In theory, that isn’t how it’s supposed to work: Presidents are expected to consult Congress before deploying armed forces, and—at least in the past—that was Trump’s position too.

In March 2015, when Trump was merely flirting with the idea of launching an aspirational bid for president, he told the New Hampshire Union Leader that presidents should “always” get Congressional approval to launch military action.

Reporter: “Under what circumstances would you think the president should be able to use military force without authorization from Congress?”

Trump: “I think we should always get authorization, and if something is right, you can get authorization and quickly. Whether you’re a Republican or Democrat, they want to see this country survive and do well. And I think you should get authorization.”

His answer at the time reflected Article 1 of the Constitution, which says that Congress—and Congress alone—has the authority to declare war.

But the 1973 War Powers Resolution gives presidents some temporary wiggle room: It stipulates that, in situations where war hasn’t been declared, presidents must still notify Congress within 48 hours of military action, and provide rationale for why, and under which authority, the decision was made. (The resolution also says that military action not pre-authorized by Congress must end within 60 days.)

Many Democrats have expressed concern over Trump bombing of Iran’s nuclear sites without consulting—or even properly notifying—Congress. According to the Associated Press, lawmakers hadn’t received any new intelligence about Iran’s nuclear program since March, when Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard said the administration did not believe the country was building a nuclear weapon.

“Trump ran on no new wars, but now, mere months into his presidency, he’s ignoring the will of the American people and tempting full escalation without congressional approval,” Democratic National Committee chair Ken Martin said in a statement to Mother Jones. “To quote Donald Trump: ‘Whether you’re a Republican or Democrat … you should get authorization.’ Seems like the Trump Republican Party has forgotten that principle.”

After canceling an earlier briefing, the Trump administration says CIA Director John Ratcliffe, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Secretary of State Marco Rubio will hold a closed-door session with senators on Thursday; House members are slated to receive a similar briefing on Friday.

Like Trump, Rubio has previously boasted about the importance of Congress’ role in decisions on the use of military force. “You can’t put strategy in legislation, that’s up to the commander-in-chief working with military officials,” Rubio told a journalist in 2015. “We can certainly have oversight over the strategy, criticize it and not fund it if we think it’s wrong and so forth—but the most important role we play is whether or not to authorize it.”

Continue Reading…

The Supreme Court Just Weakened a Key Civil Rights Law

The headline from the Supreme Court on Thursday is that the GOP-appointed justices green-lit efforts by Republican-controlled states to defund Planned Parenthood by withholding Medicaid funding. The decision imperils the health of millions, denying Medicaid patients access to their preferred provider and shoe-horning patients to a smaller number of available doctors.

This is a health care catastrophe. But Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson’s dissent in the case, Medina v. Planned Parenthood South Atlanti_c,_ also went after the court for a secondary blow it more broadly dealt to a foundational civil rights law.

“Today’s decision is likely to result in tangible harm to real people.”

Joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor, Jackson skewered her Republican colleagues for twisting their own precedents to reach a tortured outcome—one that denies patients the freedom to pick their doctor despite the law’s clear conveyance of that right. As my colleague Madison Pauly lays out, the “case began in 2018, when South Carolina Republican Gov. Henry McMaster disqualified the regional Planned Parenthood affiliate from receiving Medicaid reimbursements for the extensive non-abortion services it offers, such as birth control, sexually transmitted infection treatment, and screening for cervical and breast cancer.”

The precise legal question in Medina is technical, but its ramifications could prove very broad: Whether Medicaid recipients can sue to enforce their ability to choose their provider, as is guaranteed by law. In a 6-3 decision, the GOP-appointed majority found that Medicaid recipients cannot go to court to enforce the law’s free-choice-of-provider provision—possibly dooming patients’ access not only to Planned Parenthood in South Carolina, but to any provider that a state decides to deny Medicaid reimbursement.

The ability to sue that the court curtailed today is enshrined in a Reconstruction era law, the Civil Rights Act of 1871. One provision, referred to by its location in the US Code as Section 1983, gave citizens the right to sue in federal court to obtain “any rights, privileges, or immunities secured by the Constitution and laws,” Jackson explained. Jackson and her Democratic-appointed colleagues argue that Medicaid’s guarantee that individuals can pick their providers is just the kind of right that can be vindicated with a Section 1983 suit, because Congress created that right in the Medicaidstatute.

Thus the case presented the Republican-appointed majority with the opportunity to cut back on two things they dislike: access to reproductive care and access to the courts to vindicate individual rights. And that’s just what they did, not only tossing out the ability of individuals to sue to enforce this part of the Medicaid statute, but alsomaking it harder for anyone to sue to vindicate their rights under this Reconstruction era law. Justice Neil Gorsuch’s majority opinion raises the bar for any such suit by requiring what the justices deem clear “rights-creating language” in the original statute. In essence, the majority roll back what Congress wanted on the grounds that Congress didn’t word the law according to the court’s new test.

As Jackson put it: “The Court’s decision to foreclose Medicaid recipients from using §1983 to enforce that provision thwarts Congress’s will twice over: once, in dulling the tool Congress created for enforcing all federal rights, and again in vitiating one of those rights altogether.”

Jackson placed Thursday’s decision in a long line of Supreme Court decisions the undermined the civil rights guarantees of Reconstruction. “The Court’s decision today is not the first to so weaken the landmark civil rights protections that Congress enacted during the Reconstruction Era,” she wrote. “That means we do have a sense of what comes next: as with those past rulings, today’s decision is likely to result in tangible harm to real people.”

Section 1983 is a common target of the right, and in a concurrence, Justice Clarence Thomas invited the court to even more dramatically limit Section 1983. In Thomas’ view, the law was intended for narrow use, but was expanded starting in the 1960s—coincidently when both the Supreme Court and Congress began to vindicate the promises of Reconstruction era amendments in the face of the civil rights movement. Jackson, previewing a future case that would allow the court to undermine 1983 further, charges in her dissent that Thomas’ narrow reading of the statute is ahistorical and insufficiently researched.

One of the projects of the Roberts Court is to undo the progress of the 1960s and make the 19th century great again. Today, this key right to sue has been weakened. But the court’s backward march certainly won’t end there.

Continue Reading…

In Trump’s Wartime Reality Show, Truth Is a Casualty

Donald Trump often does not tell the truth. The intelligence community produces classified reports that are unavailable for outside evaluation. Thus, the public cannot trust what Trump and his crew say about the intelligence.

This is a fundamental problem. We cannot accept as fact what Trump, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard or other senior administration colleagues tell us about the US military strike on Iran. It certainly caused immense damage. But what was the impact? Did it end Iran’s nuclear program or merely set it back? If the latter, is that for months, a few years, or longer? This a key question. Yet whatever Trump says about this will be suspect—as is true for most topics. His administration cannot be considered a reliable source for anything, especially military matters, for which the truth can be hazy in the best of times.

In the run-up to the bombing raid, Trump and his gang demonstrated that they were willing to play politics with intelligence. In March, Gabbard testified to Congress that Iran was not pursuing a nuclear weapons program—a finding that was included in the intelligence community’s annual worldwide threat assessment. Yet last week Trump declared that Iran was close to a nuclear weapon and that he didn’t care what Gabbard (and, by extension, the entire intelligence community) had concluded.

Gabbard quickly showed that her allegiance is to Dear Leader, not her own team, by asserting that she and Trump were on the same page. Amid Washington speculation that Trump was not happy with Gabbard, she placated him rather than represent the truth as the intelligence agencies saw it. This sent a message: The intelligence system is rigged.

Throughout this episode, Trump has conveyed—yet again—that he doesn’t care about facts.

When Hegseth, following the raid, was asked whether new intelligence had come in since Gabbard’s March testimony, he ducked the question. That seemed to mean no. On Meet the Press, Vice President JD Vance said he and Trump had faith in the intelligence assessments: “Of course we trust our intelligence community, but we also trust our instincts.”

That is, we will trash assessments that undermine our policy desires.

And as we’ve seen for a decade now, Trump is an inveterate liar, highly erratic. He indicated last Friday that he was seeking a negotiated settlement, and then he launched the attack on Saturday. On June 17, he told reporters on Air Force One, “We’re not looking for a ceasefire [in the Israel-Iran war]. I didn’t say I was looking for a ceasefire…We’re looking for a real end, not a ceasefire. Something that would be permanent, giving up entirely.” But when an uneasy ceasefire came, he hailed the development and claimed credit for it.

At one point, he urged the evacuation of Tehran, as if the United States would be bombing the city. After Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio insisted regime change was not on the agenda, Trump, in a social media post, hinted it might be. Trump also proclaimed the bombing raid resulted in the total “obliteration” of the Iranian nuclear program; Gen. Dan Caine, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, reported the morning after only that there had been “extremely severe damage.” (On Thursday, Rafael Grossi, the head of the United Nation’s International Atomic Energy Agency said the strikes rendered the centrifuges at the Fordow site “no longer operational” but noted it would be “too much” to assert that the nuclear program was “wiped out.”)

The culture of lying that imbues Trumpworld has dangerous ramifications. The US public cannot believe statements from him and his top officials on vital national security matters, and members of Congress ought not trust the briefings they receive from this administration. (A militarybriefing for senators and representatives was scheduled for Thursday, but news reports noted the White House would be limiting the classified information it intended to share.) And given how the Trump crew operates, intelligence analysts ought to fear producing intelligence that contradicts Trump’s pronouncements and policies—a career killer. (During his first presidency, Trump complained mightily about intelligence reports that said Russia had continued interfering in US elections after attacking the 2016 election to help him win.)

Trump’s ever-shifting stances and false statementsare a national security threat. They render him less effective as a negotiator with other nations. Allies and foes cannot rely upon his word. He often makes hollow threats. (He told Putin he had two weeks to demonstrate he was serious about ending his war against Ukraine. Putin did nothing; Trump said nothing.) And if Trump pledges to negotiate, well, maybe he won’t. Initially skeptical of attacking Iran, he reportedly changed his mind after watching Fox News segments celebrating Israel’s strikes on Tehran and encouraging US involvement.

Intelligence is often a political matter. So is war. And the Trump administration is hitting new heights in this regard. At a Pentagon press briefing Thursday morning, Hegseth started off with a long diatribe against the media, complaining it was more interested in tearing down Trump than accurately reporting the glories of the Iran assault.

Hegseth singled out reporters—including one from Fox, where he used to be a commentator—and accused them of seeking to undermine the nation. He was behaving more like a minister of propaganda than the civilian head of the military. Asked about whether Iran had removed highly enriched uranium from the Fordow facility before the bombing, he sidestepped the matter.

There’s plenty of precedent for abuse of intelligence. President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney manipulated and politicized the intelligence in the run-up to their misguided 2003 invasion of Iraq. (I co-wrote a whole book on that.) But Trump and his aides have gone much further.

The Bush-Cheney administration toiled hard to present a case for war. They cherry-picked intel, ignoring inconvenient findings. They spent months manufacturing arguments full of purported facts and conclusions from the intelligence community about Saddam Hussein’s supposed weapons of mass destruction and ties to al Qaeda. It was all bunk. But it was important to them to convince he public that they were acting rationally and responsibly on the basis of solid intelligence.

Trump felt no such obligation. He dismissed the intelligence assessments and then shifted his stance back and forth without tying it to any new intelligence. He prematurely declared the total annihilation of Iran’s nuclear program. Throughout this episode, he has conveyed—yet again—that he doesn’t care about facts. War is just another chapter in his reality-TV presidency, in which reality takes a backseat to the demands of the Trump Show.

Continue Reading…

Murder Rates Could Hit Record Lows This Year, But Killings by Police Are Rising

There’s a good chance the United States will see the lowest murder rate it has ever recorded this year, a major change from the early pandemic, when killings skyrocketed.

In 2023 and 2024, homicides fell at what appears to be a record pace—and they’re continuing to plummet so far in 2025, according to a recent report by crime data analyst Jeff Asher. There’s a “strong possibility,” he writes, that the country could see fewer than 4.45 murders per 100,000 people in 2025—besting the record low from 2014, which was similar to the rates recorded all the way back in 1962, when the FBI first started tracking data like this.

The extreme decline is happening nationally, with most cities trending in the same direction. No one knows for sure why we’re seeing this shift. But given that killings increased so dramatically in 2020, when the pandemic first struck and cities went into lockdown, Asher and some other criminologists suspect that murders started receding when local governments resumed normal operations and began investing again in jobs, infrastructure, and violence prevention programming.

Interestingly, the plunge in homicides probably wasn’t driven by a decrease in guns (they’re still everywhere) or an increase in police, Asher writes: There are far fewer cops today in most big and medium-sized cities than there were before the pandemic.

Meanwhile, while Americans as a whole are killing less, America’s police are doing the opposite. The number of people fatally shot by cops has increased every year since 2020—in 2024, officers killed at least 1,226 people nationwide, an 18 percent increase over 2019, according to an analysis by the New York Times that drew on data from the Washington Post and the nonprofit Mapping Police Violence.

The uptick in police violence hasn’t occurred everywhere. Many Democratic-leaning states that enacted reforms after George Floyd’s death in 2020 saw police killings fall slightly in the years afterward, according to Samuel Sinyangwe, the data scientist who leads Mapping Police Violence.

But Republican-leaning states that didn’t enact reforms saw major increases. “There has been a backlash to the protests,” Sinyangwe says, referring to the countless demonstrations sparked by Floyd’s murder, “whereby Red states further funded and encouraged more aggressive policing practices and imposed barriers on local jurisdictions trying to enact reforms.”

The federal government seems unconcerned by police homicides. In April, President Donald Trump signed an executive order with the goal of “strengthening and unleashing law enforcement,” and his Justice Department is no longer investigating police departments accused of excessive force. “Safe communities rely on the backbone and heroism of a tough and well-equipped police force,” the order states. The data, it seems, tells a different story.

Continue Reading…

Zohran’s Next Challenge: Another Disgraced (Former) Democrat

As certain corners of the political elite panic over Zohran Mamdani’s historic victory in New York’s Democratic primary, the city’s scandal-plagued mayor is suddenly swaggering.

“No one does it like New York, no one,” Eric Adams said at his official reelection announcement on Thursday. “We laid the foundation, and now it’s time to build the future.”

To protesters, some of whom shouted “criminal” as he spoke, Adams had this to say: “You can call me all the names you want, but I’m going to answer to only one: Mayor Eric Adams.”

Such were the fighting words of a man newly reinvigorated as a chill falls over a certain class of New Yorkers. They are an invariable mix of establishment-type Democrats, billionaires, and racists united in a shared desperation to stop the 33-year-old democratic socialist. Though several have already met with Adams, it has yet to be seen whether the full levers of power and capital rally behind him. But the mayor is already hellbent on showing that he’s ready to punch. There he was on Fox and Friends, decrying Mamdani as a “snake oil salesman.” (“He will say and do anything to get elected,” Adams warned, apparently missing the piercing irony of the accusation coming from an elected official so recently accused of vast abuses of power.)

On X, Adams’ reelection campaign rattled off a list of his perceived achievements—many of them questionable, at best—before zeroing in on Mamdani. “We’re not about to throw away all that progress to a socialist who will tear it all down with false promises he can’t keep. The cruelest thing one can do to a family in need is to promise them something that you can’t deliver.”

It’s easy to laugh off Adams’ reawakened confidence. It arrives despite an almost comical parade of (alleged) corruption. The selling out of the city’s immigrants. Trump-like behavior against the press. Constant partying that veers from tacky to ethically challenged. Monstrously ignorant policy. But the Democratic Party has always been ready to back less-than-ideal candidates when they think it benefits them. It’s a playbook close to this very race in the string of Democrats who endorsed Cuomo after calling for his resignation less than four years ago. Could the arc repeat itself once more?

Consider 2001, when heading into the mayoral election, polls had consistently shown Democrat Mark Green in the lead. But it was technocrat Mike Bloomberg, who had changed his voter registration from Democrat to Republican, who ultimately won in November, thanks, in part, to the September 11th attacks.

In Novemeber, for those freaking out—and with money to beat back change—it might come down to the simple fact that Eric Adams is a living, breathing man who is not Zohran Mamdani. Cuomo, too, is a living, breathing man who isn’t Mamdani. But even with the money and backing of the Democratic establishment, Cuomo ran into a problem. He is a living, breathing man named Andrew Cuomo.

Correction, June 26: This post has been updated to reflect the spelling of Zohran Mamdani’s name.

Continue Reading…

Zohran Mamdani’s Supporters Celebrate an Astonishing Victory

Last night, with Zohran Mamdani on the verge of an extraordinary political upset in the New York City Democratic primary for mayor, the mood outside the candidate’s watch party in Queens was one of stunned glee. Few had expected such a swift and decisive victory for the young socialist state assemblymember over former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who by around 10:30 p.m. had already called Mamdani to concede.

The city was in the midst of a historic heat wave—temperatures earlier that day had topped 100 degrees and did not relent much into the night. Because the campaign was turning away supporters—and press—that had not made the list, a cheerful crowd began to form outside the rooftop bar in Long Island City where Mamdani was scheduled to speak. Most were young, and some had come out in their DIY Mamdani merch. A local group of cyclists, seeing that early results favored Mamdani, had diverted their weekly ride to the bar. One member, who gave his name as Joe, told me that Mamdani had spoken at a memorial event for a cyclist who had been killed in a hit-and-run leaving one of the group’s rides. “He’s a man of the people,” Joe said. “I want someone who’s gonna walk the streets of Manhattan rather than assault the people of Manhattan.”

A little after 11 p.m., fellow mayoral candidate and New York City comptroller Brad Lander—who had co-endorsed Mamdani in the last weeks of the race—emerged from a car to welcoming cheers and made his way into the party. A livestream of the speeches had been set up outside of the bar, where spectators were spilling into the street.

Many supporters had hoped against hope that Mamdani would prevail, and their surprise was evident, particularly at a moment of Democratic malaise. Varsha Suresh, who is one of Mamdani’s constituents in Queens, had made her way to the party to bask in the results. “It’s incredible to come here and just feed off of this energy in this time where it’s so difficult to even think of something positive in the United States—that New York can lead the way in showing how a new future is possible,” she said.

Mamdani’s campaign, with its nimble social media presence, won over large swaths of young voters. About 385,000 New Yorkers voted early in this Democratic primary—almost 200,000 more than in 2021—with voters aged 25 to 34 making up the largest share of the turnout, according to Gothamist.

“He activated so many Gen Z voters. People who I had no idea cared about politics were suddenly posting [on social media] about Zohran,” Elena Gonzalez, a 26-year-old who works in the entertainment industry, told me. She knew a number of new residents that Mamdani’s campaign had convinced to register to vote for the first time.

As the night stretched on, the crowd began to grow restless—and hot. A volunteer made rounds with a pitcher of water and a stack of plastic cups. The speeches began around midnight, with remarks from Mamdani’s campaign manager, US Rep. Nydia Velázquez, and New York Attorney General Letitia James. When Mamdani finally took the stage, cheers reached a fever pitch. He pulled Lander onto the stage, as well as his wife and parents (who are the filmmaker Mira Nair and Columbia professor Mahmood Mamdani).

Mamdani, perhaps aware that he may face a competitive general election in November, remained on message. “Today, eight months after launching this campaign with the vision of a city that every New Yorker could afford, we have won,” Mamdani said. “A life of dignity should not be reserved for a fortunate few. It should be one that city government guarantees for each and every New Yorker.”

And ultimately, it was this unrelenting focus on affordability that resonated most with voters. That it is prohibitively expensive is a defining factor of life in New York City. “As a person of color living in New York City under the age of 30—with all my dreams of being able to afford to live here—him winning makes me feel like that’s actually possible,” Suresh told me.

Continue Reading…

Mohsen Mahdawi Fought ICE and Won His Freedom. For Now.

Just a few months ago, pro-Palestinian college students around the country were getting arrested and detained by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement. But some are now challenging their detentions in court—and getting released.

Last week, Columbia University student activist Mahmoud Khalil, the first known pro-Palestinian activist arrested by ICE under the Trump administration, was let out of a Louisiana prison on bail by a federal judge who called his detainment unconstitutional. That decision followed the release of another previously detained student activist from Columbia: Mohsen Mahdawi.

In April, Mahdawi was scheduled for an immigration interview to obtain US citizenship. But after watching what happened to Khalil, Mahdawi knew he could be handing himself over to federal agents just by showing up. “I had conflicted feelings,” he says of appearing at the immigration office. “Is this an actual interview for my citizenship that I’d been waiting for for over a year? Or is it a trap?”

Soon after Mahdawi took an oath of allegiance to the US, ICE officers surrounded and arrested him, and the Department of Homeland Security accused him of jeopardizing the country’s foreign policy interests. But Mahdawi was prepared. Through his lawyers, he quickly sued the administration over his detainment and was released on bail a couple of weeks later. He says he believes he was detained “to intimidate other students, to make an example of me.”

On this week’s More To The Story, Mahdawi sits down with host Al Letson to discuss his arrest, the accusations that Columbia’s pro-Palestinian protests made Jewish students feel unsafe on campus, and the troubling images that linger from his time growing up in a refugee camp in the West Bank.

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

This interview was edited for length and clarity. More To The Story transcripts are produced by a third-party transcription service and may contain errors. Please be aware that the official record for More To The Story is the audio.

Al Letson: You went through a really traumatic experience. I want to kind of unpack all of it. So let’s just start from the beginning. Weeks before your arrest by ICE and April, you had a feeling that something might happen when you showed up for your citizenship interview. What tipped you off?

Mohsen Mahdawi: So, Mahmoud Khalil, who is my fellow student and a friend from Columbia, he was detained on March 8th. The night Mahmoud was detained, my phone was ringing over and over and over after 3:00 A.M. It was a Saturday, so usually it takes Saturdays to meditate. And generally speaking, I ignore phone calls or when people are reaching out to me, but when I saw that my phone was basically exploding with messages and phone calls, I decided to answer. And that’s when I picked up the news that Mahmoud was detained.
And there was fear and intimidation and serious concern in the student body, everybody was encouraging me to leave the city. But at that time, I said the best course of action would be sheltering in place because most likely if I get outside of the building where I was staying, I would be also caught, kidnapped, and taken to Louisiana. And that what sets the feeling for the interview. So the moment I received the interview, I had conflicted feelings. Is this an actual interview for my citizenship that I’d been waiting for over than a year, or is it a trap?

I imagine when you got the notice that you had this interview and all of this is going on, that it feels like this can’t be a coincidence.

That’s exactly right. And I saw also what ICE agents have done with other students. For example, two students from Columbia, one PhD, and one undergrad who’s in Barnard, they went to their own apartments and dorms, and ICE agents were activated there.

The first thing I’ve done when I received this, I emailed the legal team who I was working with, and they said, “We need to wait on this.” And they too were kind of confused. “Yeah, it might be a trap, it might be a legitimate interview.” But we knew that by that time because President Trump in January, he declared that pro-Palestine students would be deported, and there was a vicious attack by the extreme pro-war, pro-Israel groups that were calling for our deportation. And they actually launched a campaign against me starting in late January, about two months before Mahmoud was arrested.

What was the mood like on campus prior to Trump’s election? Did you ever think something like this would happen, i.e., them coming to take student protesters and basically deport them all because they were just exercising their first amendment rights to free speech?

The general sense was not there to be honest with you. I did not imagine that this is coming up and I hear the threats and the promises that is being delivered by Trump. And actually, some of my friends said, “You should speed up your citizenship interview because what if he comes into presidency and then he starts deporting people?” And I thought, “Well, I can’t see it happening for students with visas, but I am a green card holder. I’ve been in this country for 10 years. I’ve seen it through ups and downs. I’ve seen the first Trump’s administration policies and way of action. I have not seen anything like this.” So it was a very low possibility on my end, but I did not see it coming this way.

What did you do to try and prevent your detainment when you had a feeling that this might be coming down the road?

A number of things. What I did, actually, this is something I learned from Palestine because I was born and raised in a refugee camp living under the apartheid system of Israel and under occupation. So I knew the best thing to do is to limit my contact, to not create routines, to not be in public spaces and to shelter in a place where nobody else except a very, very tight trusted circle. And in fact, I was sheltering in a place for a long time, for over more than 20 days I was in the same spot, I did not leave the apartment.

I also tried to reach out to Columbia to engage the senior administration telling them that, “You have encouraged us to free speech and academic freedom, all what we do here.” So I tried to engage Columbia University as well in the conversation to provide protection to me and to move me from off campus, which is I was living basically nearby campus, but on the street. If I walk outside of the building, ICE agents could detain me.

Do you feel like there was a change in the administration of Columbia or do you feel like this is kind of always who they were since you started there?

I would say that there is a betrayal to the principles and values of the university because when it came to Ukraine, for example, I was at Columbia and I saw the statements that came out from the senior administration. They even lit Law Library, which is the most significant building if you’ve been on campus, they lit it with the Ukrainian flag and they made very strong statements. They encouraged the students to speak up and they provided resources to Ukrainian students. And keep in mind, I lost many family members after October 7th, and other Palestinian students also lost family members.

When people say the protests you were a part of at Columbia were anti-Semitic and made Jewish students feel unsafe, how do you respond to that?

I would say this is a false accusation. It’s part of this whole agenda of gaslighting American people and capitalizing on the trauma that the Jewish people have from the anti-Semitism in Europe, and they’re pointing the wrong directions. There are many reasons why this can be easily refuted. First of all, I have many partners who are Israelis who see the injustice, who stand against it, and who want to see peace and justice in the region. So they cannot be anti-Semitic. They call them self-hating Jews sometimes, but they cannot be called anti-Semitic, Israelis and Jews.
The second part, I have actually wrote a paper, a long paper, over 60 pages, about envisioning a peaceful resolution in the Middle East, especially between Palestinians and Israelis. Add to all of this, I’m a person who is empathetic. I understand and I empathize with the pain and the trauma of all people. And my empathy, as I mentioned in many different interviews, extends beyond the Palestinians, my people. It extends to the Israelis and to the Jewish people. And my whole project, my whole vision, is centered on basically alleviating and relieving the suffering and the pain of the children who are innocent of any guilt. The children who deserve to live free of trauma, free of pain, free of suffering.
And I am also a Buddhist practitioner. I believe in nonviolence, I believe in empathy, I believe in alleviating suffering. So the accusations of anti-Semitism, it’s a textbook tactic to basically create more intimidation and fear and to blind people from seeing the truth. The truth is very clear, that there is a genocide in Palestine and there is an apartheid in Palestine, and America is funding it.

So going back to the process that you were going through, what’s going through your head on the morning of the citizenship interview?

I would say on the night before the citizenship interview, I actually was meditating the night before. And by that time, keep in mind I have prepared well before the interview, not only for the questions that I would be asked for the citizenship about the constitution of this country, but also I prepared that this might be a very strong possibility. So I reached out to my representatives, to the senators and the congresswoman, to house representatives, to my community tight circle. And they said, “Just keep it confidential, but this is a possibility.” I did interviews with some media telling them, “I’m a peacemaker, I’m a person who’s advocating for ending the conflict and for justice. And this is my story because if I get detained, I may not have a voice anymore.”

And I also prepared with an intelligent team of lawyers who were so prepared that at the moment I get captured or detained or with the accurate names, kidnapped, because that’s what happened, they would be able to file on the spot to prevent my transfer from here to another place. So this is all before the day off, I was thinking, “How can I be comfortable during detainment?” So what I did is I chose the suit and the shirt that are most flexible and breathable. Instead of using formal shoes that would be difficult on my feet, I chose a sneaker, a white slip-in sneaker, and I ensured that I would be comfortable, so I was hydrating and trying to just be ready for that moment.

I think it’s really important to say just really clearly for the listeners that before this interview, you didn’t come to this country without documents. You have a green card, you were documented, you were here legally, all of this stuff that happened to you should not have happened under the rule of law.

That’s exactly right. And also, I’m like if one might say a perfect immigrant. I worked in this country, I paid taxes, I learned about the laws and respected the laws, never committed a crime. And I went to the top institutions to learn basically Western education and that is what has opened my world. So to make this exception and to want to basically silence me, that’s what they wanted, and to intimidate other students, make an example of me, is really a great violation I would say, to what we have seen in this country, even to the rule of law.

Can you tell me about the arrest itself? In the back of your mind, and maybe not even the back of your mind, in the forefront of your mind, you knew that this was a possibility. So you’re heading to the interview that’s been set up with immigration. Talk me through the arrest. How did it all happen?

We entered the USCIS office, which is the immigration where my interview should take place. It was myself, the lawyer, and a friend of mine. After we arrived, within less than 10 minutes, the lobby had nobody, everybody was processed and left the office except us, just three people sitting in the lobby. And it gets so quiet to the point I looked at my lawyer and my friend, they said, “The calm before the storm.” Well, the interview took place, I answered everything as I should, and I answered the questions. And there was this moment, actually after I was quizzed on the test, before you become a citizen, you have to study 100 questions about this country and the institution.

So I answered them correctly and the agent who was interviewing me, he said, “Would you be willing to take the Pledge of Allegiance to protect and defend the constitution of this country?” And I said, “This is why I’m here, because I believe in the principles of this country. Of course, I will.” And he asked me to sign a document. So I signed the document and he said, “Just give me a few seconds.” He opened the back door and all the sudden DHS agents stormed the office and they say, “You’re under arrest.” They isolate me from my lawyer, they don’t show me any paperwork, and I give them my hands. I didn’t want to be handcuffed to my back, so I give them my hands and I say, “I’m a peaceful man. I’m not going to resist.”

And I have to give them credit because they did not make the cuffs too tight on my hands and I noticed that they were gentle. And this is something special to Vermont, that generally speaking, even if you deal with ICE agents or with police in Vermont, the culture is a little bit different. And that is when basically I was taken out directly into an unmarked SUV and that’s the moment when I was very calm. I was able to be so aware of my surrounding and I saw somebody with a phone recording and that’s when I saw him, I wanted to send a message, and I gave the V sign and I smiled.

One of the things that really struck me was something that you had talked about before, which is the revelation while being detained about following the footsteps of your family members and your elders. Can you kind of talk me through that?

I thought that I was off the hook the moment I left Palestine, and off the hook means that I’m not no longer subjected to systems of injustice and being detained unjustly and being put in prison and being persecuted just for speaking up for justice and for truth. So over the years, after my family was exiled into the West Bank into a refugee camp, my grandfather was arrested unjustly and put in prison. My father and my uncles, and recently also over the past two decades, my cousins. So when I was detained and put in a cell in a prison that was seven by 12, this is the dimension of it, I really started thinking of how did they feel my family? And I felt connected to them. And it was ironic that this is happening in the United States in a place where I first knew the experience of freedom.

I never knew what freedom is before coming to the United States. Now I am being detained for speaking about my first-hand experience, the pain, the loss, the trauma that I felt in the refugee camp. And there was this very strong image actually because there is routines in the prison. So the guard would come with a flashlight at night and they would check regularly. And how would they check? They would shine the light through the squared window in the door. And one night while I’m laying in the bunk bed, the light was so strong in my eyes, it flashed in my eyes, and with it I had a memory flashing of my uncle Abed who had permanent red eyes from the torture in Israeli prisons, and that’s when I started connecting this whole image with my uncle, with my cousins, and with my father and my grandfather.

When you were younger, you experienced some violent incidents growing up in the West Bank. Can you tell me about those and how they shaped your worldview?

So, as a child, just living in a refugee camp is a level of suffering, very tight place, almost 61 acres with about 10,000 people. You have no space to play, no space to study except in refugee schools. And it’s a very difficult experience. Add to this, the very traumatic experience during the Second Intifada. And as a child, I saw my best friend who was actually a Black Palestinian, 12 years old, his name is Hameda, was shot by an Israeli soldier and killed in front of my eyes. We were playing basketball before and basketball without having actually a basket in the street. We just like shooting over kind of an edge, and if it lands 90 degrees, we consider it that we scored. Very innocent kid. Oh, his life was taken in a second and I felt that burn inside of me. That is unjust. He shouldn’t have been killed. He’s an innocent kid.

Also, I lost my uncle September 12th, 2001 after September 11, and that’s actually was my 11th birthday. Instead of my uncle celebrating my birthday, I walked in his funeral and I saw him with blood on his beard, blood on his body. He was shot twice in the head and once in the shoulder. And for a child, this is a traumatic experience to lose somebody who you look up to. And after that, this series continues. I lost two cousins, I was shot in my leg when I was 15 years old, and the trauma of the explosions, the shooting, seeing people body parts just torn apart all over the place and skin sticking on walls where I had to peel it with my little hands when I was 12 years old, to put their bodies in plastic bags. That’s all very strong images, trauma that can live with us forever, and I feel very blessed that I was able to process this trauma and to heal from it.

Here in America, America provided me, and Vermont provided me, with the space to reprocess and to feel a little bit safe and to be able to heal from this. So those experiences you feel at rest in your stomach, you feel a rage at the beginning and anger when you see them. This is something weird to say. I’m grateful for this path of suffering because without pain and suffering, I would not understand what healing and joy is. Without this path of loss and the trauma, I may not have that strong sense of empathy to alleviate stress and the trauma. And seeing what’s happening now in the West Bank and in Gaza and even what’s happening in Iran and in Israel, it makes me just empathize with children who are going through this. Wars are not an answer to making peace.

After this long journey and everything that you’ve gone through here in the United States, do you still want to be a US citizen?

I think the United States is in a very critical stage of its life. The country is in danger. I see that. And I’m not alone. It’s every other American who is concerned about equality, was concerned about democracy. It’s a struggle for humanity. And what’s going to happen in America is going to affect the rest of the humanity. So do I want to be a citizen? I am in solidarity with people here. We’ll see what’s going to happen.

I hear you. That’s not a clear answer though. So are you saying that, listen, I wouldn’t blame you for feeling differently after everything that you’ve gone through. This is not a trick question. I’m just curious that after everything you’ve gone through, would go into Canada be better? And so I just imagine that there’s got to be this feeling of like, “Where do I call home?”

What’s the alternative? The alternative is putting my life under risk to go under apartheid system that might assassinate me, that might imprison me, that might shoot me, to live in a West Bank under the Israeli terrorist settlers who are living there and attacking Palestinian communities every day. So this is the only home actually that I’ve known when it comes to being safe and loved. And yes, I want to be a citizen in this country.

When I look at the history of this country and I think of Martin Luther King, he was imprisoned, he was treated badly, he was spied on, he was attacked. John Lewis, he was hit with a bat and he continued to be persecuted and he was imprisoned, but they did not give up on the principles, because the principles are good principles, to be honest with you. The issue is the application of those principles. What makes America great really is this diversity and this continuous momentum for struggle. And it’s a struggle some people think for racial equality. No, it’s a struggle for humanity. We all now are yearning for this equality for humanity to be seen, to be respected, and to have our freedom and our rights, and we are in this together.

Continue Reading…

Most People Support Taxing Carbon Even If It Costs Them, Global Survey Shows

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

People in affluent countries around the world are willing to tax themselves to address climate change and ease poverty.

That idea defies conventional political wisdom, which typically holds that people hate taxes. It emerged in a survey of 40,680 people in 20 nations that found strong support for a carbon tax that would transfer wealth from the worst polluters to people in developing nations. Most of them support such policies even if it takes money out of their own pocket.

Adrian Fabre, lead author of the study published in Nature, wasn’t surprised by the results. He studies public attitudes toward climate policy at the International Center for Research on Environment and Development in Paris, and said this is the latest in a long line of studies showing that climate-related economic policies enjoy greater support, on the whole, than people assume.

This study asked people how they’d feel about a global carbon tax: The larger an individual’s contribution to climate change, the more they’d pay. In exchange, everyone in the world would receive about $30 per month. “People with a carbon footprint larger than the world average would financially lose, and those with a carbon footprint lower than the world average would win,” Fabre said.

The survey included 12 high-income countries and eight “middle-income” countries like Mexico, India, and Ukraine. The researchers surveyed at least 1,465 people in each nation over several weeks in May 2024. Japan showed the highest support, with 94 percent of respondents backing the idea of linking policies that combat inequality and climate change.

That said, the policy was least popular in the United States, where the average person is responsible for about 18 tons of CO2 a year. About half of Americans surveyed supported the tax. (Three in 4 Biden voters favored the idea. Among Trump voters, just 26 percent did. In contrast, support ran as high as 75 percent across the European Union, where per-capita emissions are 10 tons.

“We found that people in high-income countries are willing to let go of some purchasing power if they can be sure that it solves climate change and global poverty,” Fabre said. Americans would end up foregoing about $85 a month, according to the study.

That’s not to say such policies would remain popular once enacted. Canada learned this lesson with its tax-and-dividend scheme, which levied a tax on fossil fuels and returned nearly all of that money to households—most of which ended up receiving more money in dividends than they lost to the tax. People supported the plan when the government adopted it in 2019. But support slid as fuel prices rose, and the government scrapped it earlier this year amid pressure from voters and the fossil fuel industry.

“What matters ultimately is not the actual objective benefits that people receive,” said Matto Mildenberger, “but the perceived benefits that they think they are receiving.”

Mildenberger studies the political drivers of policy inaction at the University of California-Santa Barbara. In Canada’s case, the higher prices people paid at the gas pump weighed more heavily in their mind than the rebate they received later—especially when opponents of such a tax told them they were losing money. “One of the most critical factors in my mind that generates friction for these policies is interest group mobilization against them,” Mildenberger said.

Regardless of whether carbon pricing is the answer to the world’s climate woes, the fact that people are more supportive of climate policies that also fight poverty is telling, he said.

“Inequality-reducing policies are a political winner, and integrating economic policy with climate policy will make climate policies more popular,” he said. “The public rewards policies that are like chewing gum and walking at the same time.” The question now is whether governments are listening.

Continue Reading…

Conservatives Are Already Losing Their Minds Over Mamdani’s Apparent Win

It didn’t take long for conservatives to lose their minds after Zohran Mamdani’s apparent upset over Andrew Cuomo in the Tuesday night Democratic primary in the New York City mayoral race.

Why? He’s a 33-year-old Democratic Socialist who has promised free buses, free child care, and to freeze the rent. But the fact that seems to most trigger some on the right is the fact that he is Muslim, and would be the first Muslim ever elected as mayor of New York City if he wins in November.

Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.), Laura Loomer, and Charlie Kirk were among the right-wingers who fired off Islamophobic smears about Mamdani and Muslim New Yorkers to their millions of followers after Cuomo’s surprising concession. The posts come days after reports that Mamdani has faced threats and Islamophobic attacks prompting an investigation by the NYPD Hate Crimes Task Force.

Stefanik, who has teased a potential run for governor of New York, called Mamdani “antisemitic, jihadist, Communist” in a post on her personal account on X, which has one million followers. (Mamdani is not a Communist.) Addressing her post to Gov. Kathy Hochul (D-N.Y.), who did not endorse a candidate in the race, Stefanik wrote: “You own this dangerous insanity and are incapable of defeating it.”

Tick tock, tick tock Kathy Hochul…

We know you are in full blown panic mode as you frantically draft and send out the congratulatory tweet to the antisemitic, jihadist, Communist candidate you helped elect in your party’s Democrat primary because of your silence,…

— Elise Stefanik (@EliseStefanik) June 25, 2025

Loomer, a conspiracy theorist and informal advisor to Trump who has described herself as a “proud Islamophobe,” fired off a torrent of baseless allegations about Mamdani to her 1.7 million followers on X. “There will be another 9/11 in NYC and [Mamdani] will be to blame,” Loomer wrote in one post. “New Yorkers forgot all about the victims of 9/11 killed by Muslims. Now a Muslim Communist will be the mayor of New York City. Get out while you can,” she wrote in another. “He is literally supported by terrorists,” Loomer baselessly claimed in a different post. “NYC is about to see 9/11 2.0” (The 9/11 attackers were members of the Islamic extremist terror group Al-Qaeda.)

There will be another 9/11 in NYC and @ZohranKMamdani will be to blame.

— Laura Loomer (@LauraLoomer) June 25, 2025

“If the Muslim Brotherhood would have been designated as a terroist [sic] org, [Mamdani] could have been prevented from running for office,” Loomer wrote. “Get ready for Muslims to start committing jihad all over New York.”

Loomer and Charlie Kirk, founder of Turning Point USA, also targeted Mamdani for his prior stances calling to defund the police. Like Loomer, Kirk—who has more than five million followers on X—showed the depths of his bigtory: “24 years ago a group of Muslims killed 2,753 people on 9/11,” he wrote. “Now a Muslim Socialist is on pace to run New York City.”

24 years ago a group of Muslims killed 2,753 people on 9/11

Now a Muslim Socialist is on pace to run New York City

— Charlie Kirk (@charliekirk11) June 25, 2025

Spokespeople for Mamdani, the Mayor’s Office, Hochul’s office, the NYPD, and the White House did not immediately respond to requests for comment about the posts.

Curtis Sliwa, the Republican candidate for mayor, did not directly attack or reference Mamdani’s faith, but called him “extreme” and “radical.”

Earlier this year, Mamdani told my colleague Serena Lin that as a Muslim and a socialist, he is “no stranger to bad PR.” Indeed, he has been consistently accused of antisemitism, despite the fact that he has rejected those accusations, pledged to stand up for Jewish New Yorkers, and has said he believes “that Israel has a right to exist as a state with equal rights.” Mamdani also alleged earlier this month that a mailer proposed by a super PAC supporting Cuomo’s campaign was Islamophobic for altering the appearance of his beard to look longer and darker than it is.

The New York Times reported Tuesday night that Trump’s allies are preparing to turn Mamdani into a national target, particularly leading up to the midterm elections next year. If the comments some of them unleashed tonight are any indication, expect the GOP to continue to show that there is no bottom.

Continue Reading…

“He Won”: Andrew Cuomo Acknowledges Zohran Mamdani’s Stunning Primary Victory

It would be an understatement to say that Zohran Mamdani was a bit of an unknown when he began his campaign for mayor of New York City. As recently as January, the democratic socialist state assembly member from Astoria, Queens, was polling at just 1 percent in some polls. But now Mamdani is poised to make history.

Mamdani held a commanding lead over former three-term Gov. Andrew Cuomo after the first round of voters were counted on Tuesday. The race won’t officially be over until the ranked-choice votes are tabulated next week, but Cuomo himself seemed to concede there was too much ground to make up, saying, “Tonight is his night. He deserved it. He won.” The result, if it holds, is a seismic event not just for the city but for the Democratic Party, making the 33-year-old the clear frontrunner heading into November.

As I explained in a story this week, and on a recent episode of Reveal, the mayoral race was the first really big primary since everything fell apart for the party last November, and it was unfolding in a city where Democratic support collapsed—at least at the presidential level. In neighborhoods like Corona, Queens, Donald Trump carried precincts he’d previously gotten just a quarter of the vote. Mamdani leaned into this uncertainty about the party’s direction. He soft-launched his mayoral campaign just a few days after Trump’s victory, with a series of man-on-the-street interviews in diverse outer-borough neighborhoods that had swung sharply toward the president.

Anyone could name his core policy proposals: free buses, free child care, and a rent freeze.

It was a glimpse of the race to come—a camera-ready, ubiquitous candidate zeroing in on a core message of affordability. Anyone could name his core policy proposals: free buses, free child care, and a rent freeze. This sticky economic message allowed him to broaden his appeal beyond the lefty enclaves along the East River where democratic socialists have thrived and tap into broader dissatisfaction with the state of the city among a wide range of voters. As he told my colleague Serena Lin in a profile in March:

“The directness of our politics requires no translation. Our campaign is driven by a belief that, while there may not be an ideological majority in New York City, there is a majority of New Yorkers who feel left behind by the economic policies of this mayor and by politics today.”

It helped that Mamdani was everywhere. At Knicks games. On podcasts. Last Friday night, he walked the entire length of Manhattan. Stuck in Albany for the legislative session, Mamdani confronted Trump’s deportation czar at the state capitol over the Trump administration’s detention of former Columbia University graduate student Mahmoud Khalil.

In a party divided over how to push back against Trump and what fights to pick, Mamdani offered a clear sense of direction.

Cuomo, by contrast, ran like the damaged goods he was. The former governor, who resigned his office in 2021 after a state attorney general’s office investigation found he had sexually harassed 11 women (charges he denied), pitched himself as the savior of a declining and scary New York. His own campaign launch video—which clocked in at more than 17 minutes—warned of graffiti, migrants, and “mentally ill” people on the subway. It was the case for Christopher Nolan’s Batman—with Bruce Wayne’s money lined up behind him. Some of the richest people in the city, and across the country, pumped tens of millions of dollars into super-PACs that sought to cast Mamdani as too radical for the city. But while Cuomo entered the race as the favorite, he never really picked up much new support. He was largely missing on the campaign trail, dogged by questions about his residency and past scandals.

Maybe it shouldn’t have as come as so much of a shock that voters went with the new guy.

The implicit and sometimes explicit case for Cuomo was that progressives had led the city and the party astray. But he—and the donors and editorial writers who stood behind him—were in denial about what Democrats in the city were looking for. In the battle between a generational political talent and a creep from the suburbs they just threw out in disgrace, well, maybe it shouldn’t have as come as so much a shock that voters went with the new guy.

If Mamdani clinches the Democratic nomination, he’ll be the clear favorite heading into a general election that includes Republican Curtis Sliwa and current Mayor Eric Adams. But there’s still one big variable left. Cuomo—the founder of the “Women’s Equality Party” back in the day—has already secured his own ballot line to run on in November (the “Fight and Deliver” party), and still could take advantage of the city’s lack of a sore-loser law. In which case, buckle up for Round Two.

Continue Reading…

Trump Expands His War on Truth to Iran

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

It was hard for me to ponder Donald Trump’s attack on Iran without thinking of this:

In the immediate aftermath of the US bombing raid on Iranian nuclear facilities, a careful evaluation of the mission and its purported success was impossible because Trump and his team lie.

We can surely state—as have Democratic and Republican critics of the strike—that the assault violated both the Constitution, which hands Congress, not the president, the authority to declare war, and the War Powers Resolution of 1973, which compels the president to obtain specific authorization from Congress before launching a military strike (unless the United States is attacked) and which, unfortunately, has often been breached by Republican and Democratic presidents.

We can also acknowledge there’s no way to judge the full results of a military action so quickly. Even if the US knocked out these nuclear sites, we can’t know what the consequences will be. “Cry ‘havoc!’ and let slip the dogs of war,” Shakespeare wrote. The 2003 invasion of Iraq looked like a success until it didn’t—and years of chaos and civil war ensued that consumed the lives of about 4,500 American troops and an estimated 200,000 Iraqi civilians. The 2001 invasion of Afghanistan routed the Taliban and dismantled the support system for al-Qaeda. But then came 20 years of fighting—and the loss of about 2,500 American soldiers and the spending of $2.3 trillion. For what? Throwing a strong first punch doesn’t always end the matter in war. There’s an old military saying: The enemy gets a vote.

As of now, the bombing raid has not yielded a larger war. But the dust has yet to settle. Iran has many avenues of retaliation available. Its counter may come soon, or in a while, or never at all. On Monday, it lobbed missiles at a US military base in Qatar and caused no reported injuries, in what was considered a just-for-show response. A few hours later, Trump issued a social media post announcing that Israel and Iran had agreed to a ceasefire. But the New York Times reported that a spokesperson for the Israeli military declined to confirm—or even comment on—Trump’s statement. The newspaper noted, “this is all a fluid and unclear situation.” (On Tuesday, Trump criticized both Israel and Iran for actions that were inconsistent with the ceasefire, as the fragile truce appeared to be holding.)

However this shakes out, one reasonable expectation is that the raid will convince Iran that now more than ever it needs a nuclear weapon. Or perhaps a large cache of biological and chemical weapons—and an armada of advanced drones to deliver them. Or that it should answer with asymmetrical warfare—that is, acts of terrorism. There likely will be uncertainty on this front for some time. Don’t break out the champagne yet. (For a good preliminary and skeptical look at the US attack, check out this day-after thread posted by Jeffrey Lewis, an arms control expert.)

Moreover, we can’t believe anything Trump and his crew say about the strike. In announcing the attack, Trump declared Iran’s nuclear program had been “completely and fully obliterated.” But the next morning, Gen. Dan Caine, the chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said the nuclear facilities had sustained “extremely severe damage and destruction.” That’s not annihilation. And other senior administration officials that day conceded that they did not yet have a read on what was left or even the whereabouts of Iran’s stockpile of highly enriched uranium. It was possible that Iran had moved enriched uranium and crucial equipment prior to the bombing raid. (Iran reportedly had no bomb-grade uranium but possessed uranium enriched far more than necessary for civilian use.)

The Trump gang even pulled out an old, discredited playbook: misrepresenting or ignoring intelligence. The intelligence community had been clear on Iran’s nuclear program. In March, it released its annual threat assessment, which stated: “We continue to assess Iran is not building a nuclear weapon and that Khamenei has not reauthorized the nuclear weapons program he suspended in 2003, though pressure has probably built on him to do so.” Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, during congressional testimony that month, said the same.

But that conclusion did not matter. Trump, who has often boasted that with his big brain he’s smarter than the generals and the analysts, didn’t feel compelled to even bother to claim that there was new intelligence that supported the case for attacking Iran. He just disregarded this assessment and pulled the trigger.

The morning after the attack, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth was asked what fresh intelligence had been acquired since the March report that showed Iran was now developing nuclear weapons and, thus, posed a pressing threat. He responded, “The president has made it very clear that he’s looked at all the intelligence and come to the conclusion that the Iranian nuclear program is a threat.” In other words, there was no new intelligence. The president had tossed aside the intelligence community’s finding, and the administration didn’t care how this looked.

On Meet the Press, Vice President JD Vance was pushed on this point, as well. Asked if he and Trump trusted the intelligence community and its assessments, he replied, “Of course, we trust our intelligence community, but we also trust our instincts.” He was saying that Trump went to war on a hunch.

Maybe Vance realized this sounded ridiculous, for he added that the administration had gathered intelligence that the Iranians were “stonewalling” the ongoing negotiations. He did not elaborate. Yet on Friday, the day before the attack, the White House said it supported the ongoing European talks with Tehran, and earlier in the week Trump indicated he would give negotiations two weeks. It’s hard to believe that intel came in that indicated Iran was suddenly slow-walking the talks and, therefore, a strike had to be launched right away.

There was even double-talk about regime change—the bugaboo of the MAGA right with its association with so-called “forever wars.” Following the raid, Secretary of State Marco Rubio proclaimed, “This wasn’t a regime change move.” And Vance said, “Our view has been very clear that we don’t want a regime change.” But then Trump shot out a social media post:

It’s not politically correct to use the term, “Regime Change,” but if the current Iranian Regime is unable to MAKE IRAN GREAT AGAIN, why wouldn’t there be a Regime change??? MIGA!!

So who knows? Trump Sycophant No. 1 Lindsey Graham quickly jumped on this with a post that said, “President Trump is spot on with his desire to make Iran great again by changing the regime.” With this coy reference to regime change, Trump was undermining his top officials and suggesting to Iran (and the world) that these assurances meant nothing.

After the attack, House Speaker Mike Johnson released a statement saying, “The military operations in Iran should serve as a clear reminder to our adversaries and allies that President Trump means what he says.” It actually was a clear reminder of the opposite. Trump had indicated he was willing to give diplomacy a chance. Then he didn’t. He said the targets were completely destroyed. Maybe not. His team insisted the attack was not part of a war of regime change. He signaled it might be. How should other nations in the future—friends or foes—regard his statements? How should we? If Iran were now willing to engage in diplomacy, how could it cut a deal with a man whose word (or social media posts) means nothing? A major victim of this attack is American credibility.

“In war,” Aeschylus said, “truth is the first casualty.” Trump long ago killed the truth. Lies and disinformation are his most treasured weapons. Consequently, he paved the path to this war with erratic statements, disingenuousness, and dishonesty. Whatever the impact of the attacks on Iran’s nuclear program—we can’t believe what Trump will say about this—his deployment of such a toxic mix is unlikely to make the world a safer place.

Continue Reading…

Trump Is Ignoring Court Orders, and the Supreme Court Seems OK With That

The Trump administration argues it has the right to deport certain immigrants to far-flung, dangerous locations such as Libya, South Sudan, and an infamous labor prison in El Salvador without the due process rights guaranteed by the US Constitution, immigration law, and international humanitarian treaties the United States has signed. In these countries, they face the possibility of torture, indefinite confinement, and death. Late on Monday, the GOP-appointed majority on the Supreme Court told the administration to go right ahead.

“Each time this Court rewards noncompliance,” Justice Sotomayor warned, “it further erodes respect for courts and for the rule of law.”

The majority’s one-paragraph order is stunning. Without a word of explanation, the justices may have condemned thousands to torture or death. Despite the GOP majority’s silence as to their motives, the balancing tests they weighed are evident. The majority found that the prerogatives of the president are more important than the lives of untold thousands, as well as domestic and international law. The majority also placed little importance on the fact that the Trump administration has defied and obfuscated lower court orders, both in this case and others on the president’s removal powers. The likely result is to encourage the administration to ignore future court orders—placing both individuals and the rule of law in jeopardy.

“The Government has made clear in word and deed that it feels itself unconstrained by law, free to deport anyone anywhere without notice or an opportunity to be heard,” Sotomayor wrote in a dissent, which Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson joined. “Only the District Court’s careful attention to this case prevented worse outcomes. Yet today the Court obstructs those proceedings, exposing thousands to the risk of torture or death.”

The case, DHS v. D.V.D., emerged from the Trump administration’s attempts to deport people subject to final removal orders to so-called third countries, when an immigrant cannot be removed to the country designated in their removal proceedings. If no country with a connection to the immigrant will take them, then the government seeks any nation that will. The issue in this case is whether the government must give non-citizens a chance to object to their removal to the third country before they are taken there. In late March, a Boston-based district court judge named Brian Murphy ordered the government to provide this due process before sending immigrants with final removal orders to third countries. Despite Murphy’s intervention, Trump officials subsequently flew four immigrants covered by the order to El Salvador, nearly sent 13 to Libya, and put another six on a flight to South Sudan—all without providing the due process the judge ordered.

The Trump administration chose to ignore the district court’s order that it providereasonable notice of removal and an opportunity to challenge it on grounds of fear of torture whenever it undertook such a removal operation. It also asked for a stay of that order, all the way up to the Supreme Court. It’s this request that at least five of the six Republican justices granted in an unsigned order on Monday, over the fierce dissent of the Democratic appointees.

“I’m not prone to hyperbole,” Georgetown law professor Stephen Vladeck wrote on Monday night, then proceeded to call this ruling “disastrous.” It’s a technical, unsigned order, but its effects will be vast. Vladeck notes that because the Supreme Court—in another unsigned, unexplained order from late May—allowed President Trump to revoke humanitarian parole for half a million people, many of those people may now be subject to removal to violent, authoritarian countries without any opportunity to object.

The decision is shocking on several levels. First, it condemns an untold number of people to possible torture or death in other countries, some roiling with violent unrest, others governed by brutal authoritarian governments. Second, it seems to find more legal weight in the president’s broad removal powers than in the guarantees of due process set out by Congress and even the Constitution. And it does this not in making a final decision on the law but in issuing an unsigned, unreasoned decision on what the government can do while the legal issues are litigated. Finally, by granting the Trump administration’s request—despite its flouting of lower-court orders—the majority condones this lawless behavior. It rewards the government for defying the courts, which will only encourage more defiance.

“The Government has made clear in word and deed that it feels itself unconstrained by law.”

As Sotomayor warned, the rule of law loses when court orders are ignored. “The Government’s misconduct” in this case threatens the rule of law, she wrote. But “so too does this Court’s decision to grant the Government equitable relief. This is not the first time the Court closes its eyes to noncompliance, nor, I fear, will it be the last. Yet each time this Court rewards noncompliance with discretionary relief, it further erodes respect for courts and for the rule of law.”

Just hours after Monday’s decision, the New York Times published a whistleblower’s account of how senior Justice Department officials chose to ignore court orders and deal untruthfully with judges. Senior DOJ official Emil Bove, whom Trump had nominated to a federal appellate judgeship, told a group of department attorneys in March that impending deportation flights must take place “no matter what,” the whistleblower alleges. Should a court try to halt those deportations, according to the whistleblower, Bove said that “D.O.J. would need to consider telling the courts ‘fuck you’ and ignore any such order,” The following day, a judge did order a halt to the flights and he was, in fact, ignored.

The whistleblower, former DOJ attorney Erez Reuveni, also detailed the Justice Department’s efforts to ignore a district court judge’s orders in the very case the Supreme Court decided late Monday. Over multiple days, Reuveni alleges, he tried to ascertain that guidance on Judge Murphy’s order requiring people slated for deportation get both a notice of removal to the third country and an opportunity to object had been disseminated to ICE and that it was being followed—only eventually to find out that guidance was being withheld, and that the order had indeed been ignored.

It’s embarrassing for the court to ignore the government’s obvious defiance of the district court, only for a newspaper to, a few hours after the justices’ order dropped, clue them into the behind-the-scenes obfuscation purposefully undertaken to facilitate that defiance. As the past few months have shown, a majority of the court will chastise this administration if their own instructions are ignored, but, as this case and others demonstrate, apparently have no qualms about undermining the authority of their colleagues on the lower courts.

In furtherance of that trend, hiding behind an unsigned, unreasoned opinion, the GOP-majority gave the Trump administration a green light—not only to put thousands in harm’s way, but to continue to thumb its nose at every court but their own.

Continue Reading…

The Bipartisan Billionaires Behind Andrew Cuomo’s Comeback

For a couple weeks, I’ve been getting negative campaign mailers for a New York City council district I don’t live in. I’m not really sure why. Maybe there was a data-entry error. Maybe someone’s used an outdated map. Maybe someone hates me.

They’re the sort of mailers you tend to get if you live in a major city these days. Paid for by an innocuous-sounding group called New Yorkers for a Better Future, they attack the incumbent council member—a Democratic-Socialist—for supporting drug injection sites and decriminalizing prostitution, and backing calls to defund the police. The incumbent “doesn’t care about our community,” the flyer reads. And there, at the bottom, is a legally required disclosure of one of the PAC’s largest donors: William A. Ackman.

You know, Bill.

The Trump-backing, DEI-bashing, billionaire hedge-funder who does not live in this immigrant-heavy, largely Asian and Latino outer-borough district either—despite all that language about “our community.” He purchased a posh Upper West Side penthouse a few years back. And, from what I can tell, he spends a lot of time in the Hamptons. If X were a real place, he’d probably live there. But he still funneled $250,000 toward this group. And that disconnect makes him a perfect symbol for this week’s elections in America’s biggest blue city.

In a lot of ways, as I’ve reported, the city’s Democratic primary elections are the first big test of the party’s post-November reset. The choice in the mayoral race between former governor Andrew Cuomo and a succession of challengers led by assemblymember Zohran Mamdani, is, in part, about what exactly you think Democrats have been getting wrong in the places they govern. But it’s also about money. Mamdani had a lot of it—almost $9 million, with most of it coming from public matching funds. But Cuomo’s super-PAC, Fix the City, raked in nearly three times what the assembly member could spend—with big checks from corporations and billionaires. Those funds have filled mailboxes and saturated the airwaves in the election’s final weeks.

There’s a funny little wrinkle to all this spending, though. You sometimes hear people say that politicians should have to dress up like NASCAR drivers, in outfits emblazoned with the logos of their corporate benefactors. Well, New York City kind of does that. Every piece of literature or advertising from a political action committee has to include the names of the three largest donors to the group. Has this dampened the influence of money in politics within the five boroughs? It doesn’t really look like it. Still, every piece of Cuomo literature voters got from Fix The City had to include the disclaimer that it was paid for by DoorDash ($1 million), along with Ackman ($500,000), and former mayor Michael Bloomberg ($8.3 million).

There were more interesting names if you scratched the surface. Media mogul Barry Diller and Netflix chairman Reed Hastings gave a quarter of a million. Home Depot co-founder and Republican mega-donor Ken Langone gave $100,000. Pro-Trump hedge-funder Dan Loeb gave $350,000. James and Kathryn Murdoch offered $50,000 apiece. So did Stephen Ross, who lives in the borough of West Palm Beach, Florida and owns the Miami Dolphins. Alice Walton, of the Bentonville, Arkansas Waltons, pitched in with a humble offering of $100,000. Both Greenwich, Connecticut’s Jeff Wilpon, and the man he sold the New York Mets to—Stamford’s Steve Cohen—were good for $25,000. Another pro-Cuomo PAC, Sensible City, received a big check from Trump-backing hedge-funder Ken Griffin, who lives in Miami by way of Chicago.

If Mamdani’s campaign is trying to demonstrate the power of organizing and viral campaigning, Cuomo’s is just a big blunt object—one that tells a different story about how politics and power work. These donors from the worlds of real estate, finance, media, and “philanthropy” each have their own peculiar politics. But faced with the prospect of a progressive or leftist mayor, the things that unite them have proven stronger than the things that divide them. Across different backgrounds and zip codes (if not tax brackets) they came together in an inspiring show of class solidarity.

In one attack ad paid for by Fix the City, which the PAC paid $220,000 to run, a voter stands on a subway platform rattling off Mamdani’s promises of “free everything.”

“Who’s gonna pay for all that,” he asks. “The tooth fairy?”

But it wasn’t such a mystery after all. Mamdani was proposing for the city’s wealthiest residents to foot the bill. The advertisements asked who would be paying for everything. And there, in the list of donors at the end, they answered the question too.

Continue Reading…

New York City’s Mayoral Election Is About Way More Than One City

A few days after the 2024 election, Zohran Mamdani filmed the first video in a mayoral campaign that would come to be defined by them. Standing on street corners in the Bronx and Queens, the 33-year-old Democratic-Socialist state assemblyman asked a procession of New Yorkers two simple questions: Who had they voted for, and why?

There was nary a MAGA hat in sight. But voter after voter—across a range of ages and backgrounds—explained that they’d either voted for Trump, or not voted at all. They were fed up with the rising cost of living. They wanted an end to the war in Gaza. And they felt like they were getting nothing from Democratic leaders.

The video, which has more than 2.6 million views on X, was both self-serving and illuminating—a campaign soft-launch rooted in a simple reality: If you want to understand the hole the Democratic Party is currently in, you have to get out of your swing-state bubble and join the Real Americans on the subway. The biggest on-the-ground development of the 2024 election was what happened in the places Democrats took for granted. In blue cities in blue states, President Donald Trump improved his performance among working-class non-white voters while Democratic support fell off dramatically. Trump’s popular-vote victory was an earthquake. And New York City was its epicenter.

Why did so many working class New Yorkers vote for Donald Trump last week — and even more not vote at all?

I went to Hillside Ave in Queens and Fordham Rd in the Bronx to find out. pic.twitter.com/1dXmnP01A4

— Zohran Kwame Mamdani (@ZohranKMamdani) November 15, 2024

Trump picked up nearly 100,000 more votes in his home city than he did four years earlier—while Kamala Harris ran more than half a million votes behind Joe Biden. And the more immigrant and working-class a neighborhood was, the greater the dropoff. The three congressional districts with the biggest swings toward Trump in the entire country last year were all in Queens or the Bronx (or both, in the case of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s 14th district). While the city and the state stayed comfortably blue, the results embodied a worrisome national trend for Trump’s opposition: The places where support for Democrats eroded the fastest were also the places where they have been in power the longest.

On Tuesday, New York City voters will cast their ballots again, in the biggest contest yet of the party’s post-Trump reset—the Democratic mayoral primary. The race has been, in a lot of ways, a characteristically local affair. The word “re-zoning” comes up a lot. Depending on who you ask, it’s a referendum on Mamdani’s inexperience, former governor Andrew Cuomo’s record of bullying and sexual harassment, or current mayor Eric Adams’ alleged crimes. But it’s also a referendum on where people in America’s biggest Democratic enclave think the Democratic Party went wrong.

You may not be surprised to learn that Mamdani and Cuomo both think the answer is the other guy. At a rally in Brooklyn last month, in a former steel plant that’s been converted into a concert venue, supporters wore buttons touting Mamdani’s campaign promises—free buses, free childcare, freeze the rent—and swag from the local chapter of Democratic Socialists of America. Aside from a few taxi drivers (whom Mamdani had joined on a hunger strike in 2021), and the candidate’s famous filmmaker mom, it was hard to find anyone who looked older than 40.

“I have a lot of friends in this field—except Cuomo” the Mamdani-endorsing Bronx state Sen. Gustavo Rivera told me, while the actor and Obama White House staffer Kal Penn emceed from the stage. “Cuomo is a piece of human garbage.”

Rivera repeated it again, in a sing-song voice this time, to make sure I got the message: “a piece of hu-man gar-bage, who’s an abu-sive bul-ly, who does not deserve to be anywhere near public ser-vice.”

The three congressional districts with the biggest swings toward Trump in the entire country last year were all in Queens or the Bronx.

Cuomo, the frontrunner, resigned his office in 2021 after an investigation by the state attorney general’s office found that he had sexually harassed 11 women—charges he disputes and says are politically motivated “cancel culture.” To Mamdani and a substantial subset of Democratic voters, Cuomo is the embodiment of how Democrats ended up in their current predicament.

“Democrats are tired of being told by leaders from the past that we should continue to simply wait our turn, we should continue to simply trust, when we know that’s the very leadership that got us to this point,” he said at a debate in June. “We need to turn the page for new leadership to take us out of it.”

Mamdani’s campaign is built on addressing what he calls the city’s “affordability crisis”—allowed to fester for too long by Democratic leaders, he believes—with a series of fits-on-a-button proposals that would require some combination of tax increases and political finesse to implement. But Mamdani is also at the vanguard of a generational challenge to the city and state’s old-guard Democratic leadership that’s been brewing since the last shock Trump victory.

Supporters hold campaign signs and chant slogans during a rally for Zohran Mamdani at Brooklyn Steel in Brooklyn New York on May 4 2025. Madison Swart/Hans Lucas/AFP

Cuomo spent years steamrolling his liberal critics as governor. He refused to even shake law professor Zephyr Teachout’s hand in 2014, while a top ally belittled the actress Cynthia Nixon as an “unqualified lesbian” four years later. Those progressives, in turn, believed New York was Blue America’s missed opportunity—a place mired in mediocrity by craven, corrupt, or just out-of-touch party leaders. This lack of ambition was epitomized by Cuomo’s support for members of the Independent Democratic Conference, a rogue faction of state senators who gave Republicans control of the chamber in exchange for legislative perks.

But in 2018, even as Cuomo cruised to re-election, progressive challengers knocked off six incumbent state senators in the primaries—mostly in the outer boroughs—and helped cement one-party Democratic control of the state government. The biggest jolt came that June, when a Democratic-Socialist bartender, Ocasio-Cortez, upset 10-term Rep. Joe Crowley—the chairman of the Queens Democratic Party. Those wins announced a new force in New York Democratic politics—youthful, diverse, and hungry to do things Democrats had been too timid to try.

“Along the 7 line in Queens, a new Democratic politics is born,” Bloomberg announced that summer. Local DSA members borrowed a slogan from a famous mural in the neighborhood of Jackson Heights: “Queens is the future.”

Cuomo’s theory of the race—notwithstanding the fact that he was elected governor three times, his dad was governor, and he has the backing of a bipartisan assemblage of billionaires—is that the party’s plummeting fortunes have less to do with him than with the people who don’t like him.

“They want to go further left. My argument is no, we lost because we were too far left,” he said at a private event earlier this year. “Because we were talking about bathrooms and who was gonna play on what team, boys and girls, you lose touch on what people care about, which is safety.” Cuomo has said that “Defund the police are the three dumbest words ever uttered in politics.” And he’s warned that if taxes on the city’s highest earners are raised like Mamdani wants, “the rich will move to Massachusetts.”

It’s a message that echoes what a lot of other national Democratic leaders have been saying since November—people like former Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel and California Gov. Gavin Newsom. Cuomo’s campaign launch video was the apocalyptic inverse of Mamdani’s man-on-the-street missive, invoking both the post-pandemic uptick in violent crime (which is now dropping) and the arrival of 230,000 migrant crisis in the city over a two-year period.

“You feel it when you walk down the street and try not to make eye contact with a mentally ill homeless person,” Cuomo says in the video, staring directly into the camera. “Or when the anxiety rises up in your chest as you’re walking down into the subway. You see it in the graffiti, the grime, the migrant influx, the random violence. The city just feels threatening, out of control, and in crisis.”

Our city is in crisis. That’s why I am running to be Mayor of New York City. We need government to work. We need effective leadership. https://t.co/a0vVYRF4iP pic.twitter.com/JIrhD1Edqs

— Andrew Cuomo (@andrewcuomo) March 1, 2025

It’s a bit more complicated than that. Homelessness is a product of a housing crisis Cuomo presided over, he took money from the subway as governor to bail out ski resorts, and the bail-reform law vilified by some New Yorkers bore his signature. But the pitch is the pitch. The party’s non-white working-class base, he argued, was “paying the highest price for New York’s failed Democratic leadership.”

If Queens is the future, what exactly is the future telling us? To understand how Democrats lost their groove in New York, I went back to the place where things seemed to be going so well for progressives—the heavily immigrant neighborhoods of Queens that produced Ocasio-Cortez’s 2018 upset. Over the last few months, my colleagues and I spent lot of time talking to residents and elected officials in the neighborhoods of Corona and Jackson Heights for a recent episode of Reveal.

Just off the 7 train on Roosevelt Avenue—the dividing line between AOC’s district and that of Rep. Grace Meng (which also swung 23 points to the right at the presidential level last year)—Trump carried some precincts where he won just a quarter of the vote in 2020. This part of Queens embodied the kinds of places Democrats suffered the most nationally: A large percentage of residents are first- or second-generation immigrants of Latin American or Asian descent, and a comparatively low percentage of voters have college degrees. By one projection, naturalized citizens swung 20 points toward the president last year, while Latino men shifted toward Trump by 16 points.

Part of the story is that while the surrounding neighborhoods formed the symbolic backbone of the city’s new-left politics—Ocasio-Cortez’s campaign hawks stylish Green New Deal prints, depicting high-speed trains whooshing through nearby Flushing Meadows Corona Park—Roosevelt Ave. was also becoming a powerful symbol on the right of perceived failures of progressive governance over the last few years.

“When you have a former president promising us we are gonna have immigration reform within the first a hundred days and four years later, we have nothing to show for it, people remember that.”

The “influx of migrants” Cuomo mentioned in that video were not evenly distributed across the city. Many of the newcomers, particularly Venezuelans, ended up in places like Corona, where they jostled for space with existing residents and struggled to make ends meet. (Asylum seekers are legally barred from seeking employment for about six months after applying for protection.) Many new immigrants tried to find work as street vendors, but lacked permits. (So did many vendors regardless of immigration status, due to a broken city permitting process—an example of dysfunctional bureaucracy Mamdani has zeroed in on in his campaign). Fox News devoted regular coverage to complaints about trash, crime, and sex workers in the area. It should have been easy to see a backlash coming down the pike. In the final weeks before the presidential election, Roosevelt Avenue’s “numerous brothels” were a punchline on Saturday Night Live.

“I think many people were experiencing and seeing crime go up,” said Jessica González-Rojas, a Democrat who represents part of the area in the state assembly. “With a lot of new arrivals, people were resentful, even those who were immigrants that have been around for generations. I think folks felt like their needs weren’t being addressed, which were the very material needs of the rising prices for food and groceries, rising costs of rent and housing, and again, the increases in crime. Many of us who are progressive have been talking about that, but I think it wasn’t resonating in those same ways.”

People felt squeezed on every front. Inflaming all of this was a sense that government hadn’t been there for people when they needed it. The pandemic came up over and over in our conversations. The area was “the epicenter of the epicenter,” as González-Rojas put it—and not by accident. “Essential workers” continued showing up to their jobs while more affluent, white-collar voters adjusted to Zoom. At Elmhurst Hospital, just a few blocks off Roosevelt Ave., so many people died in the first weeks of the pandemic that a mobile morgue unit set up outside. The hospital has just one bed for every thousand residents, noted Shekar Krishnan, the area’s Democratic city councilman, and it was the only facility serving the area. It’s hard to be the party of the social contract when the social contract is in tatters.

“There was a sense of almost lawlessness, right?” González-Rojas said. “Like you saw people blow through red lights. Crime ticked up. There was just a lack of order that something about the pandemic caused.”

Catalina Cruz, a progressive who represents a neighboring assembly district that includes parts of Corona argued that the pandemic response “had a lot of people disillusioned with government.” Ongoing detachment and disinvestment was layered onto existing inequities, and raised questions about who politicians really worked for. “Andrew Cuomo never stepped foot in Corona. Even during the pandemic, I had to fight him to get a vaccination site in my district. I had to fight him and [former mayor] Bill de Blasio.” (Politico recently reported that Cuomo had in fact attempted to block a vaccination site from opening at nearby Citi Field, because the site was de Blasio’s idea and not his.)

What exactly you think of as “disorder” can vary a lot. But it’s something that everyone from the progressives to the reactionaries seemed to agree there was more of after the pandemic—or at least that people felt like there was more of. And there was a propulsive quality to that anxiety. A recent piece in Vital City called New York City’s malaise an example of “negative social contagion”—essentially, the city has been so overwhelmed by bad vibes that the bad vibes were beginning to call the shots.

When we talked to shopkeepers in Corona about what they wanted from the next mayor, public safety was the top concern. It wasn’t just a bit of New York Post-driven hysteria: Major felonies nearly doubled in this police precinct after the pandemic. An Ecuadorean immigrant who sold soccer jerseys said she had been robbed three times in the last few years. Another voter we spoke with, a formerly undocumented immigrant named Mauricio Zamora who had voted for Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and Joe Biden after getting his citizenship, told us he switched to Trump because he felt like Democrats weren’t doing enough about crime. He’d formed a local community group to agitate against sex workers and “vagrants,” and he was leaning toward Cuomo.

There’s plenty for progressives to grapple with in stories like these. The fact that Mamdani is facing millions of dollars in attack ads featuring a five-year-old call to “#DefundtheNYPD” perhaps offers some lessons for aspiring lefty politicians when it comes to public safety messaging. But New York’s uneasy lurch presents a lot of challenges for status-quo Democrats too. These neighborhoods offer a glimpse of what happens when you don’t deliver on progressive policy promises—and when people feel ignored by their leaders. Zamora, for instance, supported a path to citizenship for undocumented residents, and was so frustrated that none of the Democrats he’d voted for in the past had delivered on it that he had stopped believing their promises.

“When you have a former president promising us we are gonna have immigration reform within the first a hundred days and four years later, we have nothing to show for it, people remember that,” Cruz, who was once undocumented herself, said of Biden. To her, national Democrats were dealing with the fruits of patronizing and ultimately empty leadership. Instead of showing up, they were just “sending 10,000 text messages telling us that it’s doomsday because we’re not sending $10 for you to do whatever the hell you’re doing.”

A billboard for candidate Andrew Cuomo along the Long Island Expressway in New York City on June 7, 2025.Alexandra Buxbaum/Sipa/AP

It’s hard to overstate just how dysfunctional the party is in the city and the state. In 1953, 93 percent of eligible voters participated in the mayoral election; in 2021, just 23 percent did. That disengagement is part of what made the left’s outer-borough rise possible—AOC won her primary in 2018 through hard work, yes, but also because the head of the Queens Democratic Party couldn’t even rustle up 13,000 people to vote for him. The New York State Democratic Party spent money on a 2018 primary mailer accusing Cynthia Nixon of enabling anti-semitism (which the party said was a mistake), but then spent nothing on three losing statewide ballot initiatives in 2021. Afterwards, Jay Jacobs, the party’s Cuomo-loving chair, explained that it had only spent $0 on key Democratic priorities conservatives had spent nine-figures attacking because no one had asked the party to spend more.

Faced with the fruits of their poor choices, party leaders have sometimes made peace with mediocrity. “We did well in Southern Brooklyn,” Brooklyn Democratic Party chair Rodneyse Bichotte Hermelyn—a Cuomo-backing state assemblywoman—said in November, after an election in which Democrats lost a state senate seat in the borough for the first time in eight years, and failed to even field a candidate in an assembly district where Democrats held a three-to-one registration advantage over Republicans. “He did a great job as chair, and he continues as chair,” Gov. Kathy Hochul said of Jacobs, after the party’s table-setting collapse in the midterms two years earlier. Last September, with the party careening toward another setback, Jacobs was reelected to his post again.

The problems of disillusionment and disengagement are particularly salient in New York, but they are a problem for Democrats in blue cities more broadly. In the counties that include Los Angeles and Chicago, nearly a million Democrats stayed home in 2024—and support fell dramatically in predominantly Black and Latino neighborhoods. Just 16.5 percent of voters showed up for a recent municipal election in Philadelphia, where flagging turnout and eroding support helped cost Democrats a Senate seat last year. (“Turnout doesn’t bother me, only bothers me [that] we win” Bob Brady, the city’s Democratic party boss, told the Philadelphia Inquirer.) Even more than the choice between Cuomo and Mamdani, the biggest indicator of whether Democrats are getting their act together might be how many of them show up to vote at all.

That’s not to say that everything happening in New York tells a story about everywhere else. This is a place that just discovered the existence of trash bins, but still can’t decide whether they’re good or not. (If elected, Cuomo has said he would scrap containerization requirements for “small properties.”) But all of the crosscurrents that have swamped the party over the last eight years are present in New York in an unavoidable way. It’s a test not just of left vs. center, but of the desire for change vs. doubling down, of new blood vs. wait-your-turn, of outsiders vs. insiders. This is where the pandemic hit hardest, first, and where the tangled immigration policies of the Biden era viscerally fell apart. Crime, housing costs, grocery bills, apathy—these were the tests Democrats failed in their backyards before they failed everywhere else.

For a long time, it has been tempting, in a world of red-and-blue electoral maps and swing-state fixations, for politicians to alternatively write off places like New York and take them for granted—a wellspring of safe votes and big checks. But the lesson of 2024 was a cautionary one: If you can’t make it here, you can’t make it anywhere.

Additional reporting by Noah Lanard and Nadia Hamdan.

Continue Reading…

Why Iran’s Nuclear Program Is So Essential to Its Identity

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

In October 1978, two leaders of the Iranian opposition to the British-backed shah of Iran met in the Paris suburbs of Neauphle-le-Château to plan for the final stages of the revolution, a revolution that after 46 momentous and often brutal years may now be close to expiring.

The two men had little in common but their nationality, age, and determination to remove the shah from power. Karim Sanjabi, the leader of the secular liberal National Front, was a former Sorbonne-educated professor of law. Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini was the leading Shia opponent of the Iranian monarchy since the 1960s. Both were in their 70s at the time.

Sanjabi had arrived in Paris with the draft declaration of goals of the coming revolution the two men were to lead. The document stated that the revolution would be grounded on two principles: that it be democratic and Islamic. Yet Sanjabi later recalled to historians that at the Paris meeting Khomeini in his own handwriting added a third principle to the declaration—independence.

Iran’s politics as a result for the past decade has been shaped by the sense that it was the wronged partner.

That third principle, the primacy of independence, born of Iran’s history of exploitation by colonial powers, helps to explain what may seem otherwise mysterious in the current dispute between Iran and the US: Iran’s dogmatic insistence that it must have the right to enrich uranium. It has been the issue that dogged the talks between Iran and the west over Tehran’s nuclear program since the turn of the century and was the sticking point in the two years of discussions that were eventually settled in Iran’s favor when the joint comprehensive plan of action (JCPOA) was agreed under the Obama administration in 2015. It is the reason why Iran is being bombed now by Israel and, over the weekend, by the US.

Yet to many American eyes, this obsession with enrichment inside Iran, instead of importing, for instance, from Russia, is only explicable if it is accepted that Iran covertly wants to build a nuclear bomb. The fatwa against “un-Islamic” nuclear weapons twice issued by the supreme leader has to be a smokescreen, this US perspective goes.

On social media last week, Vice-President JD Vance largely took that view. He wrote: “It’s one thing to want civilian nuclear energy. It’s another thing to demand sophisticated enrichment capacity. And it’s still another to cling to enrichment while simultaneously violating basic non-proliferation obligations and enriching right to the point of weapons-grade uranium.

“I have yet to see a single good argument for why Iran needed to enrich uranium well above the threshold for civilian use. I’ve yet to see a single good argument for why Iran was justified in violating its nonproliferation obligations.”

The process for enriching uranium to make civil nuclear energy and a nuclear bomb is broadly the same. It is generally accepted that uranium enriched to 3.67 percent is sufficient for civil nuclear energy, while purity levels of 90 percent are required for a nuclear weapon. Once purity levels reach 60 percent, as in the case of Iran, it is not a lengthy process to proceed to 90 percent.

Iran, of course, argues there is no mystery why it has enriched to these high levels of purity. It was part of a clearly signalled staged escalatory response to Donald Trump unilaterally pulling the US out of the JCPOA in 2018—an act that that had deprived Iran of the sanctions relief it had negotiated. Moreover, Trump, by imposing secondary sanctions, made it impossible for Europe to trade with Iran, the second planned benefit of the JCPOA.

Iran’s politics as a result for the past decade has been shaped by the sense that it was the wronged partner, and the US confirmed as inherently untrustworthy.

Centrist figures such as the former president Hassan Rouhani and the foreign minister Javad Zarif expended huge internal political capital to sign a deal with the west, and the west promptly reneged on it. Meanwhile, Israel, a country that is not a member of the nuclear nonproliferation treaty—unlike Iran—and which has a totally unmonitored and undeclared nuclear weapon, receives largesse and support from the west.

Nevertheless, Vance may have a point. As a casus belli, the right to enrich uranium to purity levels of 3.67 percent, the level permitted under the JCPOA, seems on the surface an implausible issue for the current supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, to risk martyrdom.

Former Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (pointing) during a visit to the Natanz uranium enrichment facility in 2008. Associated Press

Why did a country with large oil reserves feel such a need to have homegrown civil nuclear energy?

A persuasive new account by Vali Nasr, entitled Iran’s Grand Strategy, helps unlock the key to that question by placing the answer in Iran’s colonial exploitation and its search for independence.

He wrote: “Before the revolution itself, before the hostage crisis or US sanctions, before the Iran-Iraq war or efforts to export the revolution, as well as the sordid legacy of Iran’s confrontations with the west, the future supreme religious guide and leader of Iran valued independence from foreign influence as equal to the enshrining principles of Islam in the state.”

Khamenei was indeed asked once what was the benefit of the revolution, and he replied “now all decisions are made in Tehran.”

It was the British and the Americans who introduced nuclear power to Iran.

Nasr argues that as many of the lofty ideals of the revolution such as democracy and Islam have been eroded or distorted, the principle of Iranian independence has endured.

The quest for sovereignty, he argues, arose from Iran’s benighted history. In the 19th century, Iran was squeezed between the British and Russian imperial powers. In the 20th century its oil resources were exploited by British oil companies. Twice its leaders—in 1941 and 1953—were removed from office by the British and Americans. The popular prime minister Mohammad Mosaddegh was removed in a CIA-engineered coup in 1953 due to his demand to control Iran’s oil resources. No event in contemporary Iranian history is more scarring than Mosaddegh’s toppling. For Khomeini it confirmed Iran still did not control its destiny, or its energy resources.

Although civil nuclear power and the right to enrich became a symbol of independence and sovereignty after the revolution, Ellie Geranmayeh from the European Council on Foreign Relations points out it was the British and the Americans that introduced nuclear power to Iran in what was named an “atoms for peace” program.

The shah of Iran, with US approval, embarked on a plan to build 23 civil nuclear power stations, making it possible for Iran to export electricity to neighboring countries and achieve the status of a modern state. Michael Axworthy, the pre-eminent British historian of contemporary Iran, said: “Using oil profits in this way seemed a then sensible way of investing a finite resource in order to create an infinite one.”

In an interview with the Washington Post, Henry Kissinger later admitted that as US secretary of state he raised no objections to the plants being built. “I don’t think the issue of proliferation came up,” he said. Work started on two nuclear reactors including one at the port city of Bushehr with the help of the German firm Kraftwerk Union a subdivision of Siemens and AEG.

The shah recognized the dual use for nuclear power, and in June 1974 even told an American journalist that “Iran would have nuclear weapons without a doubt sooner than you think,” a remark he rapidly denied. Gradually the US became more nervous that the shah’s obsession with weaponry might mean Iran’s civil program turning nuclear.

“In my view, Iran’s nuclear program is a means to an end: it wants to be recognized as a regional power.”

After the Iranian revolution in 1979, progress on the near-complete two stations ground to a halt. Khomeini regarded nuclear power as a symbol of western decadence arguing bloated infrastructure projects would make Iran more dependent on western imperialist technology. He said he wanted no “westoxificiation,” or gharbzadegi in Farsi. The program was largely ended, to the disappointment of some nuclear scientists.

But within a year or two electricity shortages and the population boom put pressure on Tehran’s policy elite to start a discreet reversal of the shutdown. Iraq’s use of chemical weapons during the Iran-Iraq war, Tehran’s sense of diplomatic isolation in seeking international condemnation of Iraq’s repeated attacks on the incomplete Bushehr nuclear station, and finally multibillion-dollar legal wrangles with European firms over the incomplete nuclear program of the shah, together spawned a nuclear nationalism.

By 1990, Iran’s Atomic Energy Authority declared that by 2005, 20 percent of the country’s energy could be produced by nuclear electric power and 10 power vaults would be built over the next decade.

Hashemi Rafsanjani, Iran’s speaker of the parliament during the 1980-88 war and then president from 1989 to 1997, made numerous appeals to Iran’s nuclear scientists to return home and build the program. In 1988 he said: “If you do not serve Iran, whom will you serve?” Suddenly Iran’s nuclear program had shifted from a symbol of western modernism to a source of patriotic pride.

By the turn of the century, the Iranian nuclear program was erroneously thought to consist primarily of several small research reactors and the nuclear light water reactor being constructed by Iran and now Russia at Bushehr.

Rafsanjani later admitted Iran first considered a deterrent capability during the Iran-Iraq war, when the nuclear program first resumed. He said: “When we first began, we were at war and we sought to have that possibility for the day that the enemy might use a nuclear weapon. That was the thinking. But it never became real.”

Rafsanjani travelled to Pakistan to try to meet Abdul Qadeer Khan, the father of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons program who later helped North Korea to develop an atomic bomb.

In mid 2002, a leak from a dissident group, possibly via the Mossad, revealed that Iran had two secret nuclear installations designed for enriching uranium at Natanz near Isfahan and Kashan in central Iran. Iran said it was under no obligation to notify the International Atomic Energy Agency UN nuclear inspectorate of the existence of the plants because they were not operational. Iran added the nonproliferation treaty declared it was the “inalienable right” of all states to develop nuclear programs for peaceful purposes under IAEA safeguards. In itself, uranium enrichment is not a sign of seeking to make a nuclear weapon, but critics said it was hard to explain why Iran needed to make nuclear fuel at a stage in which it had no functioning nuclear reactor.

From then on, the diplomatic dance started and has continued at various levels of intensity ever since.

In October 2003 via the Tehran declaration, Iran under huge international pressure due to the leak, agreed to sign the additional protocol, which authorized the the IAEA to make short-notice inspections. In November 2004, under the Paris agreement, Iran agreed to suspend uranium enrichment temporarily pending proposals from the E3 (France, Germany and the UK) on how to handle the issue on a more long-term basis.

But in deference to Iran’s sovereignty, the E3 recognized that this suspension was a voluntary confidence-building measure and not a legal obligation. But Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Iran’s populist president elected in June 2005, became more assertive, insisting Iran’s technology was the peaceful outcome of the scientific achievements of the country’s youth. “We need the peaceful nuclear technology for energy, medical and agricultural purposes, and our scientific progress,” he said.

Gradually the case for negotiation increased. With the US demanding an end to enrichment and Iran insisting on its legal right to enrich, the E3 were caught in the middle. All kinds of compromises were floated, including by Brazil and India. But western opinion was shaped by the then head of the UN nuclear inspectorate, Mohamed ElBaradei, who said: “In my view Iran’s nuclear program is a means to an end: it wants to be recognized as a regional power, they believe that the nuclear knowhow brings prestige, brings power, and they would like to see the US engaging them.”

Rouhani made a similar point in an article in the Washington Post. He said: “To us, mastering the atomic fuel cycle and generating nuclear power is as much about diversifying our energy resources as it is about who Iranians are as a nation, our demand for dignity and respect and our consequent place in the world. Without comprehending the role of identity, many issues we all face will remain unresolved.”

Nevertheless, if Iran’s goal with its nuclear program was security and independence, and not something more sinister, the leadership has paid a huge and probably self-defeating price.

Continue Reading…

The Costs of Restricting Abortion? More Than $130 Billion Per Year.

When the US Supreme Courtdecided to overrule Roe v. Wade three years ago, the ruling had sweeping consequences for public health, making pregnancy much riskier, leading to the preventable deaths of pregnant women, and causing a spike in infant mortality. Now, research suggests the country has also suffered hundreds of billions of dollars in economic losses, with the ripple effects being felt in abortion-friendly and -hostile states alike.

A new analysis by the Institute for Women’s Policy Research (IWPR), a DC-based think tank, estimates that the 16 states with total or near-total abortion bans have sustained more than $64 billion in economic losses annually since the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision in June 2022. That’s enough to cover the average estimated health care costs related to pregnancy, childbirth, and the postpartum period for nearly all of the 3.6 million births that occurred in the US last year, the IWPR fact sheet says.

Nationwide, the Dobbs decision that overruled Roe has led to a staggering $133 billion in economic losses each year, IWPR estimates. Beyond the 16 state bans, the loss of federal protections that Roe offered, plus restrictions in other states that reduce abortion access—such as mandatory pre-abortion counseling and waiting periods, restrictions on providers, and gestational limits—have had an enormous economic toll, the think tank says. The restrictions keep more than a half million women out of the labor force each year, with Black women and Latinas suffering the greatest impacts, according to IWPR’s analysis.

This is not the first indication that Dobbs has shrunken the workforce and stunted the economy. Recent research from both IWPR and the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), for example, shows that young, highly educated people are moving out of states with abortion bans. And another recent NBER paper found that abortion restrictions increased rates of intimate partner violence by 7 to 10 percent, contributing to a projected increase of $1.24 billion in social costs, including health care and lost productivity for victims. But the new IWPR fact sheet provides some of the timeliest analysis of the economic impacts of Dobbs, and helps quantify the overall costs of rising abortion restrictions nationwide. “This is not just a women’s crisis, it’s really a national economic crisis of significant magnitude,” says Melissa Mahoney, senior research economist at IWPR and lead author of the report.

A new Harris poll published last week found that women on both sides of the political aisle already report being more worried about the state of the economy than men do. Even before President Donald Trump’s return to office, which has brought tariffs and fears of a recession, the skyrocketing cost of childcare and the lack of federal paid leave already made life difficult for working parents in the US. The latest data shows how abortion bans can exacerbate the problem, by driving women into lower-paying jobs or out of paid work entirely, Mahoney explains.

Yana Rodgers, a professor of economics at labor studies and employment relations at Rutgers University, who was not involved with the IWPR report but reviewed a copy of it provided by Mother Jones, said the findings are not surprising given ample research showing how abortion legalization impactswomen’s economic standing. If anything, she added, the costs of Dobbs are likely even bigger than the estimates in the report, given other expected ripple effects, such as increases in child poverty and more families relying on public assistance.

Unsurprisingly, the report found that it is conservative states with the most restrictive abortion policies whose labor forces and economies have been most negatively impacted. Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, and West Virginia, which have total abortion bans with extremely limited exceptions, would see the largest labor force participation increases among women of reproductive age if their current restrictions were reversed; those states have also sustained an average of $1.8 billion in annual economic losses, IWPR estimates. More than a dozen states, including Arkansas, South Carolina, and West Virginia, would see their gross domestic product, or GDPs—the total value of goods and services produced within one year—increase by 0.8 percent or more without their current restrictions. These red states already “tend to have worse supports and protections for families,” Mahoney says, adding that abortion restrictions will likely make the situation worse in the long run. Without abortion restrictions, the national GDP would also rise by 0.5 percent due to women’s increased labor force participation, the IWPR report says. Rodgers, from Rutgers, says that’s “substantial,” given that national GDP growth has hovered around 2.5 percent in recent years.

The Trump administration has also been undermining women’s workforce participation in other ways—for example, by moving to dismantle the 105-year-old Women’s Bureau at the Department of Labor, which has historically fought for working women. The administration also canceled congressionally-mandated grants administered by that office to get more women into trades, and is reportedly considering a slate of policies to encourage more mothers to opt out of paid work and stay at home to raise young children. The Trump-backed reconciliation bill Republicans are trying to push through Congress is also likely to harm women and families, through proposed cuts to Medicaid, Planned Parenthood, and food stamps, according to a brief from the National Women’s Law Center Action Fund.

In the absence of government support, business owners can implement policies to try to recruit and retain pregnant and parenting workers, Mahoney says. Among them: Offer paid family and sick leave, expand health care coverage and travel assistance to employees who need to access abortions out of state, and allow remote work to make it easier for people to manage families or avoid moving to states with abortion bans. Data suggests such policies are popular: A recent survey of 10,000 adults conducted by IWPR, Morning Consult, and the Center for Reproductive Rights found that the majority of employed adults believe companies should speak out in favor of reproductive rights, and nearly half say they would be more likely to apply for or accept a job if an employer provided reproductive health care benefits. Rodgers has also written about how facilitating employees’ access to abortion and fertility care, such as in vitro fertilization, saves money for employers, in part by reducing turnover due to parents leaving the workforce.

Unlike papers published in academic journals, the IWPR analysis is not peer-reviewed, a process that involves independent researchers’ extensive analysis of a paper’s methodology and findings. The authors of the IWPR paper relied upon assessments from the Guttmacher Institute, a research and policy organization that supports abortion rights, of the severity of state-level abortion policies as of last December. From there, IWPR researchers analyzed women’s labor force participation in those states and then estimated how labor force participation among women of reproductive age might differ without the abortion restrictions in place, using a methodology they previously developed. Then, they calculated the estimated impacts of women’s labor force losses on their earnings to estimate overall state and national economic losses due to abortion restrictions.

For anti-abortion Republicans who claim to be fiscally conservative, the new figures from IWPR may come as a shock. (Mother Jones shared a summary of the IWPR findings with spokespeople for the White House, the Department of Health and Human Services, House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.), Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.), and Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), who has urged Kennedy to restrict access to abortion pills. None responded to our requests for comment.)

For Mahoney, that’s IWPR’s goal: to help GOP lawmakers see abortion restrictions as the economic catastrophe that they are. “Conceptualizing things in terms of dollars,” she says, “may have some meaning to them.”

Continue Reading…

Why Trump Officials Keep Promising Inevitably Disappointing Disclosures

At the end of May, conservative radio host turned FBI deputy director Dan Bongino announced on Twitter/X that the agency would reopen three Biden-era cases: an investigation into who planted pipe bombs outside the DNC and RNC headquarters in January 2021, another on who leaked the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision, and—surely, the most pressing of all—the mystery of who dropped a half-empty bag of cocaine inside the White House in 2023.

Bongino and Patel are trying to transition from demanding to know the truth to being in a position to provide it.

On June 3, FBI director Kash Patel also said he would investigate whether previous, non-MAGAfied versions of the agency participated in “anti-Catholic targeting,” part of a wave of federal inquiries into whether the United States government has previously harbored anti-Christian bias. About a week later, Patel also told the far-right Epoch Times that he would investigate “possible Chinese influence” in what both he and the outlet called “riots” in downtown Los Angeles. (The Epoch Times is affiliated with the Falun Gong movement, which opposes the ruling Chinese Communist Party.) For good measure, Patel also recently claimed on Fox News that one of his predecessors, James Comey, tried to rig the 2020 election. And he tweeted just days ago that the FBI has “has located documents which detail alarming allegations related to the 2020 U.S. election, including allegations of interference by the CCP.”

“We’re now here to clean it up,” he tweeted in May, regarding Comey’s alleged role in the supposedly rigged election, “and the American people are about to see a wave of transparency.”

It’s unlikely, if not impossible, that any of these investigations will produce substantive new information. As the New York Times recently wrote, the conspiracy enthusiasts like Bongino and Patel who were tapped to be Trump Administration senior officials are running “what amounts to a conspiracy theory fulfillment center with unstocked shelves.”

But their primary mission isn’t to actually prove these claims, but instead to keep rolling new ones out—preferably at such a pace that no one has time to track any previous promises. These ludicrous claims of sweeping disclosures and big reveals serve several functions: they’re a way to keep a conspiracy-minded base engaged and enthusiastic, and to distract from the ongoing outrages, embarrassments, and various failures of the second Trump term. They also preserve the propagators a place in the conservative media ecosystem, where each of these officials will, if nothing more lucrative emerges, inevitably go when their time in office concludes. Like a celebrity promising they haven’t forgotten their roots, making constant promises to uncover the rot and corruption within the government is a way to make clear where their loyalties still lie.

Many of the Trump administration’s most famous figures are deeply engaged in the right-wing and conspiratorial internet. Bongino, for instance, had a long career as a conservative talking head, while HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was the chairman of Children’s Health Defense, which pumps out largely false anti-vaccine, anti-5G, and anti-GMO content at a furious clip. In office, senior Trump officials have devoted a lot of time and attention to ideas that circulate mainly in those right-wing and conspiratorial spaces: whether hundreds of thousands of children went missing under the Biden administration, whether the September 11 attacks were in fact a “controlled demolition,” or whether there were two shooters responsible for the JFK assassination. In some cases, Trump administration officials are content to simply bring these ideas up in public forums, without much followup. At other times, they mention these supposed mysteries, coverups, and scandals to pledge that they are doing something about them.

But where the conspiracy rubber has met the doing-their-jobs road, the outcome has usually been disappointing. That pattern emerged early, at Attorney General Pam Bondi’s showy “release” of new files concerning dead billionaire pedophile Jeffrey Epstein, where a cadre of conservative influencers waved binders full of supposedly previously unreleased information. The stunt failed when it became clear the material wasn’t actually new. Bondi moved on to soon promise that, working with Patel, she would release an Epstein “client list,” which has not happened thus far, because such a concrete list likely does not exist. In May, Bongino and Patel also angered the MAGA faithful by declaring that Epstein died by suicide, contrary to years of conspiracy theories that Bongino himself helped promote. Bongino has since tried to placate his angry fans by promising there’s “more coming” from the Epstein files.

Making constant promises to uncover rot is a way to make clear where Trump officials’ loyalties still lie.

Before taking charge of the FBI, Patel worked as an advisor to Trump and a director at Trump Media and Technology Group, the company that owns Trump’s social media platform TruthSocial. (He’s one of several administration officials who have been tied to TMTG, as has Bondi.)

During his time at TMTG, Patel worked especially hard to capture the interest of the QAnon community as part of a strategy to attract users. As Media Matters has reported, he and TruthSocial CEO Devin Nunes both heavily promoted an account on the platform that tried to sound like it was operated by “Q,” the supposed intelligence operative at the heart of that conspiracy, who left breadcrumbs of purported clues about a fantasy battle that Donald Trump has secretly waged against a Deep State cabal of famous Democrat pedophiles and child-sacrificers.

Patel also went on various QAnon-promoting podcasts to urge their listeners to join TruthSocial, saying that they were exactly the audiences the company hoped to attract. “We try to incorporate it into our overall messaging scheme to capture audiences,” he said on one such podcast, “because whoever that person [Q] is has certainly captured a widespread breadth of the MAGA and the America First movement. And so what I try to do is—what I try to do with anything, Q or otherwise, is you can’t ignore that group of people that has such a strong dominant following.”

Gathering a “strong, dominant” and loyal following was the game all along: an audience hotly expecting new disclosures and revelations around every corner is an inherently loyal one.

As a term, “disclosure” actually originates in the UFO community: it refers to the idea that the government is preparing to finally reveal what they know about UFOs and extraterrestrials. The QAnon movement played a similar game at its height, promising that the secret battle Donald Trump was waging would soon be made public, with mass arrests to follow. Thousands of the faithful followed along, poring over every “Q drop,” every piece of dubious evidence, every new cryptic non-revelation. Like a soap opera that ended each episode on a cliffhanger, a constant promise of what could be coming next kept audiences engaged and ravenously steadfast.

QAnon as a discrete idea began to peter out when Trump left office the first time without frog-marching a single Hillary Clinton-supporting pedophile into prison. But QAnon’s traces remain everywhere, not least in the knowledge that it is a savvy marketing tactic to repeatedly promise that evildoers will, someday soon, be revealed.

Today, with the conspiracy world full of ever more competing storylines, theories, and hoped-for outcomes, the idea of disclosure remains a singular focal point of longing; that someone high up, somewhere, will finally tell us what we are desperate to know. Against that backdrop, Bongino, Patel, and other Trump figures are still awkwardly trying to transition from demanding to know the truth to being the people in a position to provide it.

In the meantime, Bongino and other Trump figures are continuing to create content by churning out endless tweets, sending performatively verbose press releases, and making appearances on partisan news channels, all aimed at heightening their own profile and shifting blame from anything they have not yet achieved. Where before they cast themselves as independent investigators calling on a shadowy government to reveal its secrets, now they’re forced to play new roles, as dedicated and diligent public servants. This is, of course, boring: “I gave up everything for this,” Bongino lamented recently on Fox & Friends.

It’s still early enough in the second Trump term that these figures can act like brave truthtellers, and frame their efforts as digging through files that previous administrations were either too cowardly or too corrupted by Luciferian pedophiles to face. In a recent appearance on Joe Rogan’s podcast, Patel claimed that upon taking office, he’d discovered a secret room inside FBI headquarters, a “room that Comey and others hid from the world in the Hoover Building” filled with “documents and hard drives that no one had ever seen or heard of.”

“My guys are going through that right now,” he said, adding that the room contained “a lot of stuff.”

“They’re so arrogant,” Patel said, referring to some unspecified evildoers. “They think, ‘No one’s going to catch us. I’m going to write everything down. We’re going to put it in a lock box. We’re going to put it in a vault, and no one’s going to find it. Well, guess what? I found the vault, and now I’m going to work.”

Continue Reading…