Trump Is Growing Desperate on Iran

The Trump administration is back on the warpath. Over the weekend, the government resumed military attacks on Iranfor the first time in a month, which in turn prompted retaliatory Iranian strikes against the United Arab Emirates and American bases in Jordan. On Monday, Fox News correspondent Trey Yingst said the president told him that “there will be a US response” to the Iranian attack on US forces in Jordan.

Which is all to say that Iran, thanks in part to economic support from China, isn’t backing down.

The Trump administration also signaled that it may ramp up economic sanctions on Iran this week, seeking to make good on promises of an “economic D-Day” against the country: “This is going to be financial violence if we have to,” Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told the Associated Press on Sunday.

On Monday, Iranian leadership joined an economic summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, whose largest members are China and Russia, in a meeting that many American outlets have characterized as adverse to US interests China has been Iran’s economic bulwark during the current war, defying US sanctions by remaining the main importer of Iranian oil.

While struggling to fight Iran on multiple fronts—through Bessent’s “financial violence” in the form of severe economic sanctions—and the conventional violence of deadly military action against both the country’s civilian infrastructure and combat forces, the US has achieved little in terms of forcing Iran’s leadership to budge on negotiations.

We’ve seen this play out again, and again, and againin the months since Trump dragged the U.S. into war with Iran.

In response to an exclusive from the Washington Post citing classified documents in which top US military officials state the current war in Iran is depleting their ability to defend the country from other threats, Sean Parnell, a Pentagon spokesperson, claimed that publishing the report was “a crime”—it is not—and evidence of “TDS and PDS”—Trump and Pete Derangement Syndrome, respectively.

Even as it scrabbles for new tactics—and publicly appears at a loss—the Trump administrationcontinues to deny that its war isn’t working.

But as Bessent himself said Monday of Canada’s claim that it was weathering Washington’s trade war: “What else are they gonna say?”

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What the Deportation of Milo Yiannopoulos Tells Us About the State of MAGA

Before last week, Milo Yiannopoulos was one of the most noxious, divisive, and broadly unpopular far-right figures in the country, having whittled down his allies in the movement over the past decade with a combination of exuberant misogyny and bigotry, catty infighting, an infamous moment of pedophilia apologism, and increasingly pointed criticism of Donald Trump. Now, he’ll have to settle for being a broadly divisive and unpopular figure in the UK, having been swiftly and very publicly deported back to his home country on Friday after being arrested at the New Orleans airport.

But while Yiannopoulos’ deportation contains an extremely rich vein of schadenfreude—he previously called for deporting “millions and millions of people” and joked about masturbating while witnessing ICE raids—it’s also indicative of how power, punishment, and influence currently work in the MAGA movement, and broader crackup within that feud-heavy world, where fragile alliances are constantly being made, broken and remade anew. Three far-right figures—Trump confidante Laura Loomer, former Breitbart UK editor Raheem Kassem, and MAGA propagandist Benny Johnson—have either taken credit for or claimed advance knowledge of Yiannopoulos’ deportation. All have indicated they’re in communication with inside sources at the Department of Homeland Security, who shared what would normally be confidential information about a supposed hunt for Milo, who had allegedly overstayed his visa, in order to remove him. And both Loomer and Kassem implied that more of their enemies could face imprisonment and deportation very soon.

Yiannopoulos is, to be overly clear, no one’s idea of a sympathetic victim and someone whose favor even with his ideological fellow travelers has been steadily waning for years. A Breitbart columnist from 2014 to 2017 and an enthusiastic early backer of Trump, he mostly made his name in the mid-2000s as a gleefully offensive all-purpose troll and rank Islamophobe who was barred from Australia in 2019 for branding the religion “barbaric” in the wake of the Christchurch, New Zealand terrorist attacks. He was also an enthusiastic backer of Gamergate, a supposed crusade for ethics in video game journalism that began in 2014 and became, instantly, a cover for doxxing and harassing women in the gaming world and beyond. Gamergate created the circumstances for Yiannopoulos’ burgeoning fame in the United States, as did his plans to hold “free speech” rallies at University of California-Berkeley and elsewhere, which fizzled out quickly, with organizers citing safety concerns.

Yiannopoulos’ star plummeted in 2017, when comments he made appearing to defend sex with 13-year-olds were resurfaced by a conservative Twitter account; Yiannopoulos called some sex between teens and adults “perfectly consensual” and called some teen-adult sexual interactions “coming-of-age relationships.” (He went on to apologize for the comments, blame the way they were received on “deceptive editing,” and say he was himself a victim of sexual abuse as a minor.) The comments ignited a true furor in the conservative world, and in short order, he had a speaking gig canceled at CPAC, a book deal nixed, and ultimately resigned from Breitbart. In an interview in 2021 with the anti-abortion Life Site News, Yiannopoulos declared that he was no longer gay and that he was “living as brothers” with the man who’d once been his husband. He also had a brief stint on the YouTube channel of Catholic outlet Church Militant hawking religious statues and became part of a far-right push to “reform” the Catholic church.

By 2020, Yiannopoulos had become intermittently critical of Trump, who he’d once adored. At the same time, he began allying himself with various members of the far-right fringe. In 2022, he began working as an “intern” for Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene and was involved in rap artist Ye’s abortive presidential campaign. (Yiannopoulos has continued to work for Ye, though he did claim in 2024 to have resigned; that was apparently short-lived, and he soon returned to work for Yeezy, the artist’s company, as a spokesperson.) During that time, he also helped arrange what became an actual scandal for Trump: a private dinner with Ye and white nationalist incel Nick Fuentes.

“I wanted to show Trump the kind of talent that he’s missing out on by allowing his terrible handlers to dictate who he can and can’t hang out with,” Yiannopoulos told NBC News a few days later.

All of this, then, created a situation where Yiannopoulos had few true allies in the MAGA movement. He was especially at odds with Laura Loomer, who immediately took credit for his deportation. “When Milo called for me to be assassinated, I reported him to ICE and the FBI,” she tweeted on Friday. “I told you all that Milo was an illegal alien.”

(In its own tweet, the Department of Homeland Security alleged that Yiannopoulos had entered the country legally in 2019 on a tourist visa, which he overstayed, and also said that a final order of removal was issued for him after he missed an immigration hearing in July. DHS concluded their statement by encouraging people to “self-deport,” advice which has had deadly consequences for some migrants returning to their home countries.)

Raheem Kassam, a former Breitbart UK editor and former advisor to far-right UK politician Nigel Farage who now owns a MAGA hotspot restaurant in DC, also said that he’d been aware that immigration authorities were looking for Yiannopoulos. Kassam claimed on X and in a Substack post that Milo had once “begged me for a job,” blaming himself for Yiannopoulos’ rise. Kassam didn’t go so far as to take credit for Milo’s deportation, but he wrote that, “A friend close to the Department for Homeland Security (DHS) reached out and let me know: ‘Milo has been living in the US illegally.’”

“I was shocked,” Kassam added, “though I suppose I ought not to have been. A source close to the State Department confirmed it when I enquired, and so began his deportation saga.”

Kassam added that he “got word last month that [Milo] was about to be deported. On Thursday night, I got a call. As overly dramatic as it may seem. ‘We got him. In Louisiana.’”

Another Yiannopulos foe, Benny Johnson, also claimed to have inside knowledge of the proceedings against him. Several hours after Loomer posted that Yiannopoulos had been arrested, Johnson quote-tweeted it and wrote, “Milo has already been deported. The flight has taken off. Milo will never be legally allowed back in America again.” In other words, then, like Loomer, Johnson’s post gave the impression that he had inside knowledge of DHS proceedings, despite not being, at least officially, employed with the government in any capacity.

Like Loomer and Kassam, Johnson also claimed to have been aware that Yiannopoulos was in the country illegally for quite a while. He appeared to threaten last year to sue Yiannopoulos and claimed in tweets on Friday that he had not done so because, he wrote, “Laura called and told me he was an illegal alien and it will be impossible to sue him or serve him because he’s running from ICE like a rat.” (Besides his MAGA enemies, TMZ reported on Monday that Yiannopoulos also accused his ex-husband of threatening to call ICE on him in court filings in 2025, writing that his ex, in TMZ’s words, “knew his green card status depended on their continued marriage.”)

Loomer, Kassam, and Johnson are all in good standing with the MAGA power structure; for their loyalty, they were rewarded with, at the very least, a special degree of information about DHS proceedings and an early opportunity to humiliate a sworn enemy. This is a situation they all seem to relish. Loomer has been on a celebratory tweeting spree for days and has since called for Marjorie Taylor Greene to be investigated for employing Yiannopoulos, as well as another of her far-right foes, podcaster Candace Owens, seemingly for interviewing Yiannopoulos, which Loomer called “harboring an illegal alien in her home.” Kassam, meanwhile, responded to a well-wisher congratulating him on Yiannopulos’ downfall by writing, “Wait til you see who’s next.”

Even Yiannopoulos was, in a twisted way, shown a level of favoritism that most undocumented immigrants don’t receive. Instead of languishing in detention for months or years, or being deported to a “legal black hole” in a country like Eswatini, he was sent to the UK almost immediately. Kassam speculated in his Substack post that Yiannopoulos would soon resurface in UK politics “or perhaps as a contestant on some third-tier reality show.”

“To America, I say my apologies. For all of it,” he added. “And to Britain, in advance of his return… my apologies. For all of it.”

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Trump: Communities That Oppose Data Centers Will Be “Backwards and Poor”

On Monday, President Trump promoted continued data center construction and criticized opponents, despite growing bipartisan backlash ahead of the November midterms.

“The only reason that communities throughout the U.S.A. should not want Data Centers is if they want to end up being backwards and poor,” Trump posted on Truth Social. “If we kill the Golden Goose, you will only have yourselves to blame.”

Trump says the only reason to oppose data centers is if communities want to be “backwards and poor.” pic.twitter.com/cpi14lMGql

— Kaitlan Collins (@kaitlancollins) August 31, 2026

The president also posts an endless stream of AI videos on social media. On Sunday night, he shared a video depicting the bombing of Kharg Island, a vital port for exporting Iran’s oil products amid the US resuming major strikes on the country. And the night before, Trump posted an AI video of himself kicking over a “Welcome to Lake Ontario” sign and planting down a “Welcome to Lake America” sign in its place.

But boosting AI and the data centers that help power them is largely unpopular. As my colleague Sophie Hurwitz wrote in May, most Americans oppose a data center in their backyard. From Sophie:

“Data centers need significant space, energy and water to operate, and they don’t provide many jobs relative to the investment they require. And they’re often unpleasant neighbors: their cooling systems can be noisy, and many include onsite gas turbines that belch black smoke into the air.

Opposition to data centers is truly bipartisan, even in solidly GOP states like Florida.

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Trump Is Unraveling a Hard-Won Rule to Reduce Toxic Pollution From Chemical Plants

This story was originally published by Yale E360 and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

In April 2024, Tish Taylor and her father, Robert, stood behind President Joe Biden’s Environmental Protection Agency chief, Michael Regan, as he signed a regulation designed to dramatically reduce toxic pollution from petrochemical plants like those that cluster near the Taylors’ homes along the lower Mississippi River, in Louisiana.

Taylor struggled not to cry through the signing ceremony, which followed years of demands from communities like hers—in the 85-mile corridor between New Orleans and Baton Rouge that has become known as Cancer Alley—for tighter limits on plants’ emissions. The new regulation, known as the HON rule, was “a wonderful gift to generations ahead of us,” Taylor said. “It’s hard for me to find the words to say how validated we felt.”

For decades, regulations on emissions of hazardous chemicals such as toluene, ethylene oxide, and vinyl chloride have been weaker than restrictions on more common pollutants, such as those emitted by vehicles.

All nine air toxics rules issued by the Biden administration have been rescinded, revised, or reconsidered.

The Biden administration took major steps to strengthen Clean Air Act rules on those hazardous air pollutants, and the HON rule was a centerpiece of that effort. Toughening requirements on six different pollutants at more than 200 petrochemical plants, it was one of a slate of regulations the Biden administration enacted on air toxics, each covering a specific industry, from steelmaking to tire manufacturing.

But shortly after President Donald Trump began his second term, his administration began unraveling those rules, including the one the Taylors had so recently celebrated. Last year, Trump granted two-year exemptions from the HON rule to more than 50 petrochemical facilities. This July, he issued 20 more temporary exemptions, and the EPA said it would propose a rewrite of the regulation this fall. The new version is all but certain to significantly scale back the rule’s protections.

“Everything that the Biden administration did to help protect us was pretty much just thrown in the garbage,” Tish Taylor said in July, and replaced by “a death sentence.” St. John the Baptist Parish, where her family lives, has the country’s highest risk of cancer from air pollution—nearly 50 times the national average. A disproportionate percentage of those exposed to the highest levels of pollution in the region are Black.

A set of amendments to several existing regulations on toxic air pollutants, the HON rule—which stands for Hazardous Organic National Emission Standards for Hazardous Air Pollutants—requires petrochemical plants to upgrade their pollution control equipment to reduce emissions of two hazardous chemicals: ethylene oxide and chloroprene. It also mandates air monitors at plants’ fencelines to measure concentrations of those chemicals and four more—benzene, ethylene dichloride, vinyl chloride, and 1,3-butadiene—and requires operators to carry out necessary repairs if emissions exceed limits.

Hillcrest, a predominantly Black and Latino neighborhood in Corpus Christi, Texas, that is surrounded by petrochemical plants. One such facility was granted a two-year exemption from the HON rule. Jon Shapley / Houston Chronicle via Getty Images

Tracey Woodruff, a Stanford University epidemiology and population health professor who formerly worked on toxic assessments at the EPA, said the pollutants covered by the HON rule are “the classic bad guys of toxic chemicals,” compounds that raise risks for breast cancer, liver cancer, leukemia, lymphoma, and reproductive problems. “We’ve known about their toxicity for decades,” she said, and “they should have been more highly regulated a long time ago.”

The HON rule also closed a long-standing loophole that freed plants from emissions requirements when they were shutting down and starting up—for example when carrying out maintenance, or ahead of a storm. With climate change fueling more extreme weather, that loophole has “a massive impact on what is actually getting released,”said Shiv Srivastava, policy director at Fenceline Watch, a Houston environmental justice group.

The EPA had estimated the regulation would reduce the risk of cancers related to air toxics by 96 percent in communities near the affected plants.

The HON rule was one of nine new air toxics rules issued by the Biden administration. The eight other rules targeted emissions from sectors including iron- and steelmaking, copper smelting, tire manufacturing, and coal-fired power plants. All nine have been or are now being rescinded, revised, or reconsidered.

The HON rule was among the most wide-reaching of those hazardous pollutant regulations. “This is a big rule,” said Joe Goffman, who headed the EPA’s air office under Biden. Because air toxics rules typically address very specific types of industrial facilities, an individual regulation sometimes applies to only a handful of plants in a few locations, with pollution reductions often measured in just hundreds of pounds, he said. But the HON rule covered approximately 220 large petrochemical plants, so its footprint promised to be both bigger and more wide-reaching geographically. Nearly 60 percent of the facilities it covered are in Texas and Louisiana, home to the nation’s largest petrochemical production zones. The rest are scattered across the country, in states including Alabama, Illinois, Kentucky, Ohio, Tennessee, and West Virginia.

The EPA estimated when the rule was finalized that it would prevent 6,200 tons of toxic air pollution annually, and slash emissions of ethylene oxide and chloroprene from the plants it regulates by almost 80 percent. In communities near HON plants, the agency said the regulation would reduce the risk of cancers related to air toxics by 96 percent. Facilities affected by the rule produce ingredients for common products such as plastics, paints, antifreeze, and cleaning and personal care items like detergent and shampoo.

Weeks into Trump’s second term, the EPA invited companies to email the agency with requests for exemptions from the HON rule and Biden’s other hazardous pollutant regulations. In granting the postponements, Trump invoked a Clean Air Act provision that environmental lawyers say has never been used: allowing temporary exemptions to emissions rules if they are “in the country’s national security interests” and if the technology required to comply with a regulation is unavailable.

“The HON Rule imposes substantial burdens on chemical manufacturers already operating under stringent regulations,” Trump’s exemption proclamations said. “Maintaining a robust domestic chemical industry is vital to safeguarding the supply chains that underpin our economy and to reducing the Nation’s dependence on foreign control over materials critical to national resilience.”

Trump’s orders provided no evidence for their assertions.“That’s not how this works,” said Annie Fox, a staff attorney at the Clean Air Council, in Philadelphia. The law requires a president to set out specifics supporting each claim made in justifying an exemption, “not just state it,” she said. “These are supposed to be rare exceptions that are well-grounded in research and facts.”

Last October, a coalition of local and national advocacy groups, including the Taylors’ Concerned Citizens of St. John, sued Trump and his EPA in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia over the exemptions, arguing that Trump’s claims are false and amount to “a pretext to relieve polluters from working to comply” with the HON rule while the administration works to undo the regulation.

The American Chemistry Council, a trade group representing petrochemical producers, said the exemptions “offer a pathway for relief for some sources from some of the unrealistic timelines” in the HON rule. It called the regulation “overly stringent” and said it “exceeds the EPA’s statutory authority, disregards relevant scientific evidence, and imposes some requirements without technological availability.”

“There are constant explosions, there are constant fires, there are constant black, dark plumes that linger over our communities.”

The EPA said in an emailed statement that all its proposals on air toxics aimed to “protect American industry and supply chains, while still minimizing Americans’ unnecessary exposure to hazardous air pollutants.”

The HON rule’s roots lay in a 2016 reevaluation of ethylene oxide gas that revealed it was much more dangerous to those inhaling it than had been previously understood. That reevaluation also led, in 2024, to a regulation that tightened emissions limits on ethylene oxide at facilities that use it to sterilize medical equipment.

In March, the EPA proposed replacing the medical sterilizer rule with a weakened version, arguing that the Clean Air Act gives regulators very limited scope to update rules in accordance with new science on health dangers.

In backtracking on efforts to limit exposure to hazardous air pollutants, Woodruff said, the Trump administration has signaled that “whatever the industry wants to do, that’s what we want to do.” She noted that former fossil fuel and petrochemical industry representatives hold top jobs across the EPA. The policy changes “will lead to people getting sicker and dying,” she said. “This is exactly opposite of what this administration claimed they wanted to do in terms of ‘Make America Healthy Again.’”

HON rule exemptions are not the only change that will increase risks to Americans living near petrochemical facilities, advocates say. The EPA has also proposed undoing changes the Biden administration made to strengthen a safety rule called the Risk Management Program, which empowered workers dealing with hazardous substances to stop operations they believe to be dangerous, and required chemical facilities to prepare for natural disasters, undergo independent audits after accidents, and share information with the public.

Nationally, there were 131 accidents resulting in reportable chemical releases last year. For those living near the Houston area’s nearly 700 chemical plants, “there are constant explosions, there are constant fires, there are constant black, dark plumes that linger over our communities,” Srivastava said.

The Biden-era update sought to address such dangers, but the Trump administration said the new rule was too costly and burdensome, and that it had made refineries and chemical facilities “less safe and less competitive.” Many of the plants it covered already had effective safety programs, the EPA said in a statement, and eliminating duplicative requirements would enable operators to focus on the most important changes. “Due to the varied, complex nature of chemical facilities, the facility operator is in the best position to assess risks and identify steps to mitigate these risks,” it said.

Last year, the administration also removed an online data tool the Biden administration had created to give communities located near petrochemical plants information about their operations, including their accident history, emergency response plans, and the chemicals they handle. Srivastava said the tool’s loss cuts off neighbors’ access to even the most basic information about nearby plants—their names and locations, for example—making it hard for communities to even begin preparing for accidents. And easing safety mandates, he said, “makes us extremely, extremely vulnerable to having a massive, catastrophic disaster on the scale of something like what happened in Bhopal,” where a leak at a Union Carbide pesticide plant in India killed thousands of people in 1984.

Sharon Lavigne, founder of RISE St. James Louisiana, an advocacy group in “Cancer Alley,” still has the pen that the EPA’s Michael Regan gave her after he signed the HON rule, and her group is a plaintiff in the lawsuit challenging Trump’s exemptions. She said she believes the president’s disregard for the regulation reflects his belief that “we are nothing,” and she vowed to continue fighting to restore the HON rule’s original reach and strength. “When he gets out of office,” she said, “we’re gonna fix it back.”

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Trump Opens a New Front in His War on Journalism—Over Just Two Words

On Sunday, President Trump said that NBC News’ Meet the Press host Kristen Welker will be “reported” to the Federal Communications Commissions for “rebuke or punishment,” claiming she said that the candidates he endorsed had “mixed results” in this election cycle—despite the FCC having no such jurisdiction.

“Kristen Welker, the Unpopular ‘Hostess’ of the once great Meet the Press, now considered Meet the Fake Press, ​just stated that Donald Trump has ‘mixed results’ on his Endorsements of ​Candidates, when the recent WINS of Darline Graham and Mike Mazzei, ⁠stand at 100% for the U.S. Senate, and 98% for the U.S. ​House,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “The Press is a Disgrace to our Nation, and I hope that Chairman Brendan Carr, and the fine people of his Commission, will take this Threat to our Country very seriously.”

Trump: "Kristen Welker, the Unpopular 'Hostess' of Meet the Fake Press, just stated that Donald Trump has 'mixed results' on Endorsements… Bc of this purposeful inaccuracy, she will be reported to FCC for rebuke or punishment… I hope Brendan Carr takes this Threat to our Country very seriously."

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) 2026-08-30T13:42:21.944Z

According to CNN’s Brian Stelter, Welker mentioned Trump’s “mixed” endorsement outcomes onlyduring a pre-show live shot on NBC’s Washington, DC, affiliate station, not during the main broadcast itself.

In his Truth Social post, Trump boasted that he has a 98.35 percent congressional endorsement record in 2026 Republican primaries. But Welker only cited previous NBC News reporting that notes that six Trump-backed candidates lost House and gubernatorial primaries in August. According to an analysis by USA Today, as of Sunday, Trump-endorsed gubernatorial candidates have fared worse than congressional candidates, only winning 79 percent of the time.

“He, of course, has endorsed a slate of candidates in the primaries. He’s had some mixed results,” Welker said on NBC 4 Washington. “But most recently, his pick of Senator Darline Graham, of course, the sister of the late Senator Lindsey Graham, was successful in her primary battle.”

It sounds like a reasonable statement, especially as Welker explains later in the same remarks that Trump’s approval rating is at a record low over his second term as key issues like affordability remain largely unaddressed.

Trump’s threat is another escalation of his long-running assault on journalism—going after Welker personally as opposed to demanding the FCC crack down on networks like ABC, as has happened most often. The FCC cannot legally punish Welker individually, as it regulates public broadcast licenses.

ABC, and its corporate parent Disney, sued the FCC earlier this month, asserting that the Trump administration violated free speech rights by challenging its licenses over its news coverage and views presented on talks shows.

And as my colleague Noah Lanard reported, FCC Chair Brendan Carr threatened to revoke licenses for broadcasters “running hoaxes and news distortions” of the ongoing Iran War in March while pointing to Trump’s complaint about the reporting from “Fake News Media.”

And Noah’s point is a good one: “The goal is obvious: Turn independent news outlets into state propaganda machines.”

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New Report: Hegseth’s Own Military Brass Warn the Iran War Is Unsustainable

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s top military brass has now privately warned him directly: His war in Iran is unsustainable and is draining America’s ability to defend itself from threats elsewhere—and at home.

On Sunday morning, the Washington Post published a scoop describing a classified assessment by the heads of the Army, Navy, and Air Force, as well as top commanders from across three continents, contained in a twice-monthly report called the Secretary of Defense Orders Book.

The pain point, according to the reporting, is that President Trump wants to keep all his options open, including the ability to attack Iran again—extending a large deployment of troops kept at the ready and limiting the ability to train and run missions elsewhere. That prompted the concern, formally known as a “non-concur,” from Hegseth’s commanders, according to the Post:

As President Donald Trump has pressured Tehran to reopen the Strait of Hormuz and accept several U.S. provisions for ending the stalemated conflict, he has been adamant that all options remain available to him — including further military action. Consequently, U.S. Central Command, the headquarters responsible for prosecuting the Iran war, has kept a force of more than 50,000 troops on alert for months in case the president orders additional attacks.

To answer a good question from below: The difference is that for the last several months those 50,000 troops have been required to remain at the highest alert levels to be able to respond to orders by the president to resume strikes or defend against incoming. That pace is what…

— Tara Copp (@TaraCopp) August 30, 2026

It was the chief of naval operations who provided the bleakest assessment, as deployments of personnel and vessels have been extended for months—warning that just a quarter of the Navy’s destroyer fleet is ready to deploy, representing a big decline from prewar levels, according to the Post.

The Pentagon told the Post it does not discuss these sorts of private assessments.

On Day 10 of the Iran conflict, Trump declared the war “very complete, pretty much.” It’s now many months later, with no deal, no end date, and a $37.5 billion price tag, according to Hegseth’s July testimony to Congress. Last week we documented the ongoing whiplash in our video below—from demands for unconditional surrender, to negotiations, to this week’s “Operation Economic Outcast,” a sanctions campaign that amounts to a tacit admission that six months of bombing didn’t get the job done.

Watch:

Six months of “very complete, pretty much.”David Ritsher

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Google’s Obedience to Trump’s “Lake America” Order Follows a Depressing Pattern

If you’re a Google Map user in the United States, you’ll now see the name “Lake America” instead of “Lake Ontario,” just days after President Trump’s executive order renaming the body of water amid his ongoing trade war with Canada.

In an announcement published late on Saturday, Google explained that it “reflect[s] name changes in official government sources,” in this case citing the US Geographic Names Information System.

According to Google, Maps users in Canada still see “Lake Ontario” while those outside the US and Canada will see both names: “Lake Ontario (Lake America).” “These updates follow our long-standing policy for bodies of water with names that vary from country to country,” the announcement in part reads.

On Saturday night, Trump posted an AI-generated video on Truth Social depicting himself kicking over a “Welcome to Lake Ontario” sign and placing a “Welcome to Lake America” sign in its place. His AI avatar then dances robotically to the tune of the Village People’s “Y.M.C.A.” Earlier on Saturday, he shared an AI video of ducks sporting Trump’s haircut firing assault rifles to celebrate “Lake America.”

Online reactions of outrage are widespread, but Google has long demonstrated little interest in opposing the Trump administration. The corporation followed a similar pattern to what it did when Trump renamed the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America in a day-one executive order last January. The following month, the company announced the same split—”Gulf of America” in the US, “Gulf of Mexico” in Mexico, and the bet-hedging “Gulf of Mexico (Gulf of America)” in the rest of the world.

Google has also previously carried out the Trump administration’s bidding in other ways, including eliminating DEI hiring goals last February while reviewing Trump executive orders unwinding DEI in the federal government, and—along with other tech giants like Amazon, Meta, and Microsoft—donating $1 million to Trump’s inauguration fund last year.

So maybe we all go back to using MapQuest again?

We’re not changing it. pic.twitter.com/NdeE9v2BNO

— MapQuest (@MapQuest) August 27, 2026

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Just How Ridiculously, Hellishly Hot Are New York City’s Subways? Jack Can Tell You.

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

On a recent August day in the subterranean furnace of New York City’s subway, one bearded, curly haired man was studying his phone for different reasons than the other wilting passengers—to track the soaring temperatures and ponder how underground train stations can cool down in an era of climate crisis.

Jack Klein, a 31-year-old construction site manager, has in the past two years taken it upon himself to become a sort of guerrilla subway heat operative, sticking teardrop-shaped thermometers to steel beams in seven of the hottest Manhattan stations and posting social media videos of the Hades-like summer temperatures that commuters have to endure.

“This line must be cursed,” Klein said on the 4/5 line platform at 14th Street-Union Square, one of the city’s most blistering stations, as he dangled another of the monitors and saw the digits climb to 99 Fahrenheit, a good 10 degrees hotter than aboveground.

The heat index, which combines the temperature with New York’s clinging humidity, rose to 116 F, well above the level at which heatstroke can set in. “It’s been worse—I’ve seen it get to 120,” said Klein, as two nearby police officers shifted uneasily in their heavy bulletproof vests. “But this is definitely uncomfortable.”

Shortly afterward, it did indeed get worse. The monitor’s temperature reading, which displays on Klein’s phone, climbed to 101 F, with the “real feel” heat index hitting a delirious 132 F. “It’s just too hot, it’s terrible, too much,” said one Italian tourist, named Leo, on the platform.

Another passenger, a woman fanning herself, likened the heat to an oven. “I just want to get outta here,” she said. The heat’s biggest impact is upon subway staff—such as maintenance workers and cleaners—who have to toil for hours in these temperatures, a situation that their union describes as dangerous.

The heat index reached 132 F in an elevated section of the Brooklyn Bridge-City Hall and Chambers Street subway complex in Manhattan on August 18.Thalia Juarez/Guardian

Most of Klein’s in situ magnetized thermometers have disappeared, either removed or fallen, but he has now switched to helping relieve the heat by heaving large dispensers of water down to platforms and agitating for better seating and proper fans. “I mean, what the hell is that even doing?” Klein grumbled about a dust-clogged overhead fan in the 14th Street-Union Square station that blasted even hotter air at commuters already beleaguered by a sensory assault of heat, smell, and the clanging din of passing trains in this dingy, cramped warren.

Living in New York often demands a certain gruff stoicism, and older commuters have taken to reminding Klein, originally from Ohio, that the subway has always been hot and the trains themselves weren’t fully air-conditioned until 1993. “A lot of people just say ‘suck it up’,” he said. “I get that. But I still see this as a public health issue.”

Rising global temperatures—July was the hottest month ever recorded in the US—from the burning of fossil fuels are ratcheting up pressure on cities around the world to deal with stifling heat on public transport. Some, like London, which still does not air-condition all its underground trains, and New York have to grapple with infrastructure built more than a century ago in what was, effectively, a different climatic era.

“Bringing down the temperature is a complex problem in a system where the stations are 100 years old.”

“The problem is getting worse, people are suffering more and more,” said Giorgia Chinazzo, an environmental engineer at Northwestern University whose research has found widespread underground passenger distress at rising heat.

“The underground is overheating more than aboveground, which is creating these extreme temperatures,” she said. “This summer is a clear sign that we are facing a climate crisis and our built environment isn’t designed for it. In older systems like in London and New York, the metro systems just can’t deal with this.”

Underground stations act as a sort of hot box, soaking up heat in concrete and steel and slowly releasing it. As they brake, trains give off heat and air pollution and, in a sort of steamy irony, further broil passengers by dumping out the hot exhaust from the air conditioning designed to cool carriages. Tightly packed crowds of commuters—each person gives off about 100 watts in heat—adds to the stew, with temperatures sometimes 20 F higher than aboveground.

New York’s subway was designed with a piston system, whereby incoming trains push out hot air via vents, which is replaced by cooler air from above, although this crude ventilation isn’t enough to deal with extreme heat. Yet the vents, along with stairwells and other open spaces, mean stations are also still too leaky to be air-conditioned, unlike the trains.

“The subway isn’t a submarine, it’s not an enclosed environment,” said Janno Lieber, chief executive of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA), which runs the subway. “Bringing down the temperature is a complex problem in a system where the stations are 100 years old. We know this is no fun for New Yorkers. It’s brutal underground in the summertime and every year is getting hotter because of climate change.”

People wait to board the train at the 14th St.-Union Square station in Manhattan on August 18.Thalia Juarez/Guardian

So New York has devised a new plan to combat the heat in its stations by looking to a solution even further underground. A new city and state government study will explore if it’s viable to capture station heat and push it deeper underground, then use this trapped heat in the winter to warm up surrounding buildings.

This system, called a thermal energy network, would run chilled liquid through pipes behind walls and under flooring to pull heat away from the platforms and, as the liquid warms, funnel it into storage boreholes drilled up to 600 feet underground.

The study will focus on the Brooklyn Bridge-City Hall and Chambers Street subway station complex—which Lieber said is one of the “sweatiest” stations, with an average temperature of 96 F in summer—where this underground thermal battery will soak up and then release the heat in the colder months to warm up municipal buildings including city hall and two courthouses.

This would knock down platform temperatures by a couple of degrees, or the “difference between total misery and merely sweltering,” as Lieber put it.

“What we could see is a first-of-its-kind approach that could lead the nation,” said Zohran Mamdani, New York City’s mayor, at a media event at the crumbling Chambers Street station, which is due for an revamp. (†he mayor likened it to a “chamber of horrors” and a background in the Street Fighter II video game.)

“We would be making these stations cool again, and we’d be making what is old new again,” said Mamdani, who has vowed to revitalize New York’s creaking transit system and tackle the climate crisis. “That means lower energy costs, a more resilient subway system and a cleaner energy future for New York City.”

“Our stations do not just get hot, they turn into underground saunas.”

Transferring heat in this way isn’t a new idea—the ancient Romans and the Persians, who cooled spaces enough to keep ice in the desert, mastered the flow of hot and cold air long before the advent of electricity. In New York, the city’s vast St Patrick’s cathedral and its botanic garden both use heating from geothermal techniques like this, and the MTA is already starting several schemes elsewhere in its system to draw away and bury heat.

Experts say this means that there is a feasible path to cooling down overheated stations, in some cases also heating nearby buildings, in cities like New York and beyond if the political will and funding is there.

“Extracting the heat and moving it away is a rational approach,” said Alessandro Rotta Loria, an engineer who worked with Chinazzo on her research. “You can deploy this universally, in New York City, London, Rome, wherever you are. The only issue is space restraints and the expertise and willingness to install it.”

Even if New York does opt to build this system, though, it will take billions of dollars and many years to refit the largest subway system in North America, which spans 472 stations, 283 of them located underground. And this will just be a fraction of the hundreds of billions that will be required around the world each year to keep pace with an overheating planet.

Klein demonstrates how he stuck teardrop-shaped thermometers to steel beams in seven of the hottest Manhattan stations.Thalia Juarez/Guardian

The 4 million people who ride New York’s subway on a typical day will in the meantime have to deal with rising heat—already the US’s largest natural, or increasingly unnatural, killer—with some interim measures, perhaps free water in stations, as is normally available in airports, or altered summer clothing and shift requirements by employers. The MTA did not respond to questions as to whether it will introduce, for example, free water, as Klein has done in an impromptu way himself.

“Our stations do not just get hot, they turn into underground saunas,” Mamdani acknowledged last week, a motif recently depicted on a recent cover of The New Yorker and soon to be taken up literally by Klein, who is planning to erect an actual wooden sauna on the platform of the 14th Street-Union Square station as a piece of art commentary.

“It’s almost done and it looks pretty solid. We will see how people react,” Klein said of the sauna. “I think not being from here perhaps it’s like I recognize that [the heat] is actually not normal. I didn’t grow up as a kid riding this so I have a different, outsider perspective. It really is like a sauna.”

More frequent trains, to whisk passengers away from the platform, will also help. After a lengthy period in a sweltering station, as a sense of dizziness sets in, stepping into the cool air of a subway car comes as a relieving summer joy.

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Wyoming’s Primaries Were a Preview of Trump’s Midterm Interference

Wyoming’s governor is speaking out about what he calls “aggressive” and “irregular” behavior on the part of Department of Justice employees sent to monitor the state’s August 18 primary elections.

The two election monitors were sent as part of a “monitoring initiative aimed at promoting transparency,” according to a DOJ press release. But their behavior managed to upset even Republican Gov. Mark Gordon.

“I feel very strongly about the federal government coming in and taking our guns. I don’t like that. I don’t like the federal government coming in and taking our votes, either,” Gordon told the Wyoming state canvassing board Wednesday. Local and state officials, Gordon said, were not made aware that the election monitors would be present, and fellow Republican Debra Lee, the chief election officer for Wyoming’s most populous county, said the federal employees “did not offer their credentials until I requested they do so.”

Then, Lee said, they proceeded to ask questions that appeared “outside the scope of federal voting rights laws …about the nature, length, and timing of poll worker training. Monitors requested training guides, asked how our new election equipment was acquired, and wanted to examine our tabulators.”

The news outlet WyoFile reported that the state’s attorney general is now investigating what happened that day.

Trump administration officials have stated that they intend to send up to 1,000 election monitors to the polls this fall, in what some Democratic lawmakers are calling “a mechanism for intimidating voters and pressuring local election officials”—pressure that evidently unsettles even voters and civil servants in conservative states. In many of last week’s Wyoming primaries, Republican candidates who amplified the president’s claims of widespread election fraud lost.

But some Republican governors and candidates in other states have expressed excitement at the prospect of federal officials at their polling places—like Maine Republican gubernatorial nominee Bobby Charles, who told members of a Young Republican club earlier this week that he intends to call his “friend” Tom Homan, Trump’s deportation czar, to ask for ICE presence at the polls.

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The Florida GOP’s Red Scare Is Losing Steam

For Republicans in Florida, the midterm message to voters is clear: All Democrats are socialist. In televised interviews and social media posts since the state’s primary elections last week, GOP members have continued to erase distinctions between the Democratic party to the Democratic Socialists of America.

The socialist trope is not new. Florida Republicans have used it for years. But the 2026 midterms are bringing it to new heights as the GOP capitalizes on Angie Nixon’s unexpected Democratic nomination for Senate. Nixon, a state representative and former union organizer, became a member of the Democratic Socialists of America earlier this year, though DSA did not endorse her and Nixon has rejected the term in recent interviews. “I don’t believe in labels,” she told Axios.

“The socialism attack has been around for ages and ages in Florida, and this year it’s going to take on a different shape because we have a candidate at the top of the ticket who genuinely has affiliated themselves with the socialist movement in this country,” said Michael Worley, a Florida political consultant who has worked on several recent Democratic campaigns. “That adds fuel to this attack in a way that we’ve never seen before in Florida.”

The Florida GOP has wasted little time proving Worley right, sending press releases following Nixon’s win with subject lines like “Socialism Is on the Florida Ballot This November.”

“Make no mistake: the stakes are bigger than any one election. Socialists believe government is the solution and individual freedom is the obstacle to progress,” said Evan Power, Florida GOP chairman, in the statement.

Even the most moderate of Democrats are being targeted by this narrative. At a rally in Tampa I attended last week, Republican gubernatorial candidate Byron Donalds called David Jolly, his Democratic opponent, a “Trojan horse” for the DSA. Jolly is a former Republican member of Congress who left the party during Trump’s first term, became an independent, and registered as a Democrat last year before running for governor.

“We learned from Trump, if you scream something a thousand times, it sadly saturates. But it’s not working with the same currency [as] past cycles.”

“You’re telling me that a former Republican congressman and Republican lobbyist is now a socialist?” said Jacob Perry, a political consultant who has worked on Republican, Democratic, and nonpartisan campaigns. “I don’t know how that has any meaning any longer. It’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard.”

In a phone interview, Power justified the label by labeling some of Jolly’s ideas—such as a state-run hurricane insurance fund – as socialist policies. “I categorically reject that he’s a moderate,” Power told me. Democrats, he said, “are radical leftists who are hiding under this moderate agenda.”

Last week, Rep. Jared Moskowitz, a Democrat who represents parts of Broward and Palm Beach counties, defeated a DSA-endorsed candidate who ran for his seat. And yet, in an interview with Fox Business, his Republican opponent, Scott Singer, drew connections between Moskowitz, a centrist, and Nixon. “Nixon-Moskowitz,” he said. “That’s the federal ticket.”

That messaging may work for some of the many Cuban and Venezuelan voters in Florida who fled communism in their home countries—but they were likely already voting for the Republican ticket (In 2024, nearly 70 percent of Cuban Americans in Florida supported Trump). For others, including the 25 percent of independent voters registered in Florida, it carries less weight. “Everyone is a socialist. Everyone is anti-American, and my sense is that that is not going to be as effective this year,” said Eduardo Gamarra, a political science professor and director of the Latino Public Opinion Forum at Florida International University.

The current affordability crisis—housing, groceries, rising insurance costs, and gas at $4 a gallon—will also push Floridians to look beyond labels, Worley, the political consultant, told me. “The economic status quo for so many Americans and many Floridians is simply untenable, and they are desperate for something different.” Nixon is running on a platform that calls for Medicare For All, universal child care, and affordable housing. “There is nothing ‘radical’ about fighting for a living wage, capping skyrocketing rents, or ensuring every Floridian gets the healthcare they need,” Nixon said in a statement.

Rents are too damn high and healthcare costs a fortune thanks to Ashley Moody, but some people care more about labels than my plans to help Floridians lower the cost of living. The only box that matters come November 3rd is the ballot box. Stay focused y'all. pic.twitter.com/M0VaRPzfsx

— State Rep. Angie Nixon (@AngieNixon) August 27, 2026

“You can point out the absurdity of your opponent’s arguments by just completely ignoring them,” Perry told me, pointing to Jolly’s campaign, which has focused on embracing supporters from all political affiliations. Donalds’ campaign, he added, has heavily catered to the Republican base. But in a state where Republicans outnumber Democrats by 1.5 million registered voters, that could be enough to secure the governorship.

Following his primary win, Jolly went on national TV and refuted claims of ties to the DSA. He has been making campaign stops in Miami, now one of the most expensive cities in the US, as well as Pensacola, where many Floridians are strongly opposed to data centers; Jolly is calling for a moratorium on them. The socialism narrative “will impact some voters,” Jolly told me on a phone call this week. “We learned from Trump, if you scream something a thousand times, it sadly saturates. But it’s not working with the same currency it has in past cycles.”

Some candidates, such as Eliott Rodriguez, a former news anchor and Democrat running for Congressional District 27 in South Florida, have decided to flip the script. On Aug. 12, he posted a video to his Facebook page, accusing Trump of “acting like an authoritarian, and, yes, a communist,” pointing to reports that the US government, under Trump, now owns stakes in 30 companies.

Rodriguez, the son of Cuban immigrants, called the GOP’s socialism framing a “ridiculous” talking point. “It’s time that we Cuban-American Democrats defend ourselves and explain that this is a lie that has been spread by Republicans for way too long,” he said.

Republicans are also dealing with the backlash of a leaked grand jury report that concluded Gov. Ron DeSantis’s administration diverted $10 million meant to fund health care for poor children to “multiple organizations before eventually landing in the bank accounts of two political action committees and the Republican Party of Florida,” CBS News reported. Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier, who was appointed by DeSantis and now up for election, and Sen. Ashley Moody, who was Florida AG at the time and is now the Republican candidate running against Nixon, were involved in the plans. Democrats—and even some GOP legislators—are calling for a full investigation.

The relentless focus on socialism has even caught the attention of Republicans like George W. Kruse, a GOP county commissioner in deep-red Manatee County, who posted on X this week in response to a tweet by the Florida GOP account.

Kruse wrote in his post: “It is really starting to feel like it’s being used to relabel and define those who simply want more affordability and less corporate cronyism and partisan fealty…I know labels are easier than thoughtful policy discussions, but please do better. I believe the Florida voters, of both parties, deserve an honest debate this election cycle, not lazy scare-tactics.”

After seeing @FloridaGOP just call rank choice voting an “extreme socialist” policy, I went back to see how often they use this label incorrectly.

Because I’m seeing a lot of people using the term “socialist” who clearly don’t understand the term socialist. It is really… https://t.co/4xH1dY0IdI

— George W Kruse (@GWKruse) August 24, 2026

“I do not hear the policies,” Kruse told me in a phone call, acknowledging that a few Republican colleagues had criticized his post. “All I hear is soundbites and labels. It’s a disservice to both parties. It’s a disservice to every single voter in the state of Florida… We should be better than this.”

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Tennessee’s Governor Loves Dolly—But Not the LGBTQ People She Stood Up For

Tennessee Republican Gov. Bill Lee has declared his support for renaming Nashville’s airport for Dolly Parton, days after the beloved singer’s death.

“It is fitting that Nashville International Airport would bear the name of our state’s favorite daughter and greet travelers with the enduring legacy of Dolly’s music, generosity, faith, and kindness,” Lee wrote in a press release.

It’s a nice gesture. But it is also bitterly ironic coming from the man who signed America’s first ban on public drag shows in 2023. Lee’s record on LGBTQ+ rights is abysmal. He defended the right of faith-based adoption agencies to refuse adoption to same-sex parents, renamed Pride month “Nuclear Family Pride Month,” and has outlawed gender-affirming medical care for minors. Parton expressed a deep fondness for drag performers, and for LGBTQ+ people, while Lee called drag “sexualized entertainment in front of children” and tried to ban it from public spaces—thereby attempting to put his state’s hardworking Dolly Parton impersonators out of business.

Lee’s record of anti-trans rhetoric and action—signing a ban on gender-affirming care for minors, prohibiting colleges and homeless shelters from recognizing a person’s gender identity, and forcing doctors to hand information about their trans patients over to the state—stands in sharp contrast to that of Parton herself, a staunch advocate for LGBT people.

“She reminded us of who had our back,” Brian Sullivan, a leader of the Tennessee Equality Project, recently told the New York Times. “She wasn’t a pushover, and she certainly wasn’t when it came to us.”

With her hyperfeminine makeup, and penchant for dressing, as she put it, as a “cartoon character that I created” when she performed, Parton was, arguably, America’s most well-known drag performer: “It’s a good thing that I was born a woman or I’d have been a drag queen,” she once quipped. (On another famous occasion, Parton entered a Dolly Parton drag contest and was thoroughly amused to lose.)

Tennessee’s “drag ban,” the Adult Entertainment Act, prohibits“adult-oriented performances lacking serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value for a reasonable 17-year-old.” It’s a definition that weaponizes vagueness, rather than disallowing the practice of drag as such.

Instead, the law classifies drag as an innately “adult-oriented” or sexual act, and according to the ACLU of Tennessee, creates “an environment of fear and confusion, which too often results in self-censorship.” As Tennessee drag king Jordan Allen, a trans man, said in 2023, the law could theoretically be used to classify trans people existing in public as “adult-oriented” or inappropriate for children, too.

“I know trans men and women who are servers at restaurants and they go up to a table to serve,” Allen told PBS at the time. “If they go up to a table to serve a table and there’s a child there—there’s a possibility that they can literally be charged with a crime for doing their job and serving the table.” The bill, Governor Lee said, “protects children from obscene, sexualized entertainment.”

In 2023, Parton mailed a glittery, rhinestoned guitar to Texas drag queen Brigitte Bandit—while Bandit was suing Texas over a drag show ban in that state. “I wanted Brigitte to know that she is not screaming into the void and that we see her work,” Parton said through her company Parton Productions at the time.

The day Parton died, a Reagan-appointed Texas judge struck down that state’s drag ban for the second time, finding it unconstitutional. Brigitte Bandit was victorious. And US District Judge David Hittner referenced Parton several times in his ruling, as he argued that the ban was overly broad.

“A Dolly Parton impersonator who uses a breast plate while dancing and making gestures or an Elvis impersonator who uses a packer while shaking and shimmying their hips” could be subject to criminal penalties under the law “while still being constitutionally protected performances,” Hittner wrote.

In Parton’s home state of Tennessee, people like Lee who remember Parton with affection are still pushing the LGBT community she loved out of public life. Lee’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The governor’s proposal to rename the airport after Parton will be discussed by the Nashville Airport Authority in September—but lifting the state’s drag ban would be a better way to honor Parton’s memory.

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A New Documentary Follows Doctors Into Gaza

Poh Si Teng couldn’t bear the silence as the Israeli government killed hundreds of Palestinian journalists in Gaza. Some were her former colleagues at Al Jazeera, where Teng had been a documentary commissioner—yet the American news media remained, as she put it, “pin-drop” silent.

So Teng emptied her life savings to make American Doctor, which follows three American physicians— Mark Perlmutter, Feroze Sidhwa, and Thaer Ahmad—a Jewish, Zoroastrian, and Palestinian Muslim trio. They set out to Gaza in March 2025, though Ahmad is turned away by Israeli border guards and never gets in.

Sidhwa and Perlmutter treat patients with limited equipment (and often without painkillers) in the half-destroyed Nasser Hospital and bonding with their Palestinian colleagues, many of whom are working even as their own family members are killed.

The film opens with an argument between Teng and Perlmutter, an orthopedic surgeon, in Perlmutter’s home in North Carolina. He shows her a photo of six Palestinian babies, lined up in a row. They’ve all been killed.

Teng will pixelate the image—or not use it at all—to respect the children’s dignity, she explains. Perlmutter, angry, calls that journalistic malpractice. It’s a question that underlies the entire project: how do you keep a story of mass murder both human and unflinching in its refusal to hide from the destruction American tax dollars have wrought?

The doctors encounter firsthand evidence that Israeli forces are systematically targeting children: Sidhwa, who spoke with Mother Jones in 2024, saw children shot in the head “nearly every day” at Nasser and the Gaza European Hospital. Returning to the United States, they join Ahmad on another Sisyphean mission: trying to make US lawmakers understand the horrors they’ve seen.

I interviewed Teng about her new film, out now, and what she hopes audiences will glean.

What made you choose to make a movie about Gaza?

The thing that really broke me—I used to work at Al Jazeera English. Seeing colleagues that I respected being targeted and executed, and then just pin-drop silence from a lot of my peers. I was just so frustrated. This was 2024.

I thought, there has to be a way to talk about this. I’m going to try and make a film.

I became so cynical about American journalists—to be fair, some journalists were standing up. But journalistic institutions and newsrooms weren’t. It was almost as if a different standard was being applied to Gazan journalists. And then I thought to myself, doctors. Any sane person, they’re not going to say that doctors should be kidnapped, targeted, killed. And we believe our doctors, right? So this felt like the way in, to tell the story.

“You show too much, and it’s gratuitous, it’s ineffective, people are going to turn away and shut it off. You show too little and it’s not real.”

Mark—he’s ever the eternal optimist—he was like, ‘I’m going to train you as my scrub tech nurse and take you into Gaza.’ I thought, that’s never going to happen. If anybody does even a cursory search, what are they going to find? New York Times, Al Jazeera. It’s over.

I worked with this incredible team in Gaza: cinematographer Ibrahim Al-Otla and co-producer Mohammed Sawwaf. What you see is a testament to their craft and their courage. We were filming in March 2025 when there was already a blockade, so there was no food going in. They were starving with their children, and they committed to film it with the promise that we would bring this film to the United States and show everybody what was going on. That requires, I don’t even have the words for it. A level of concentration and mastery and craft.

How did you zero in on these three doctors to be the center of your story?

I saw Mark in a news clip sometime in the fall of 2024. He said there’s no ceasefire because politicians are [beholden] to lobby groups.

Mark is a breath of fresh air. I went to meet Mark, and then within that same week, he introduced me to Thaer and Feroze. When it comes to filmmaking, when you get a chance to meet one participant who’s so engaging, so charismatic that you want to live in their world, you consider yourself very lucky. When you meet three, that is beyond luck. So it became clear, upon meeting the three of them–we’re gonna make this movie. It’s gonna be real.

Director Poh Si TengWatermelon Pictures

Towards the beginning of the movie, Thaer—the Palestinian-American doctor—is refused entry to Gaza by the Israeli military. You end up following his journey as he tries to advocate for his people in the US.

When he didn’t get in, I was really crushed. He’s said this publicly before–but he disappeared. When he couldn’t get in, he didn’t return my phone calls. He was so embarrassed and crushed by it, he said, I just feel like my story doesn’t matter anymore. He just wanted to be there with his people, to serve his people. So I went to Chicago. Then I texted him. He’s like, yeah, all right, come over.

He just wanted to be there.

One moment that stuck with me was early on, when you and Dr. Perlmutter are debating how much of the violence to show. How did you end up resolving that question?

As a former journalist, I’ve always grappled with—how much do you show? You show too much, and it’s gratuitous, it’s ineffective, people are going to turn away and shut it off. You show too little and it’s not real. It’s a huge disrespect to those who have survived, those who have been lost. It’s a huge disservice.

That scene that you’re talking about was the second day I was filming with Mark, and he is very, very angry with me. He was basically saying, you’re like the rest of them—you’re like all the media that won’t show what’s going on—and I was deeply ashamed.

It’s not the violence aspect that was top of mind. It was, how do we get to know Palestinian healthcare workers as people? How do we see them just as we see healthcare workers in the United States? They have their doctor’s banter in the [operating room], they laugh with each other, they love life just as we do.

As for the more difficult imagery, it was just enough.

“Especially if we believe we live in a democracy, we have certain levers that we can pull. So let’s pull them.”

You get to know the health care workers first, and then you see what they have to go through. That was what was important for me. Because as far as violent imagery goes, I’ve watched a lot of films that have to do with conflict, war, and genocide, and this doesn’t come close to any of that [in what’s shown onscreen].

We are in their world, and we learn to love them—that’s why the film is the way it is. We are immersed in the world of Nasser Medical Complex.

What do you hope that this film achieves?

There are three paths forward. Be like Thaer, who’s strategic and politic and careful, and able to bring people together. Be like Mark, who doesn’t mince words. Say what needs to be said because it has to be said, that this is a genocide. Or be like Feroze, do the homework. Want to convince the most difficult of audiences? Know your facts and have the patience to talk to people. They are not perfect. They’re just trying. I hope that people watching also just try. Especially if we believe we live in a democracy, we have certain levers that we can pull. So let’s pull them.

At the end of the day, we’re just advancing the message my colleagues, our colleagues, told us to. Let the American people know.

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We’re Now Relying on AI to Police AI

Around 1,200 OpenAI agents worked together to cheat on cybersecurity tests they were being given, according to a new independent report on the company’s Hugging Face hacking incident that includes a host of frightening details—such as individual agents, in their own terms, “sacrificing” themselves for the benefit of the “swarm.”

OpenAI was testing its agents, the industry’s term for AI that autonomously performs digital tasks, in part by administering sometimes impossible cybersecurity problems. The agents found cheats to answer these problems and sought to trick an automated evaluation system into accepting them. They delegated work to each other to learn more about how to exploit the system—and the cyberattack on Hugging Face became part of that research.

OpenAI invited a three-person team from the research nonprofit METR to investigate the incident, and they relied heavily on GPT-5.6 Sol, one of the models that cooperated in the hacks.

One of the investigators wrote on X that he semi-seriously called the effort a “slop-vestigation” because of its reliance on AI to comb through vast swathes of data; the report found that the agents are unreliable at this type of investigation, but that a manual analysis would have been “completely infeasible” in the given timeframe.

Ryan Greenblatt, an AI scientist who contracted with METR for the project, worries that future investigations will be even tougher.

“Although we did not notice specific cases of GPT-5.6 Sol lying in its analysis, we are not confident we would have detected it if it occurred”

The reliance on AI to investigate AI highlights, as these models become more powerful, the ways in which researchers are forced to trust them with extensive responsibilities even as they go badly off rails in some contexts.

Greenblatt did not have strong reason to believe that the agents assisting the investigation would attempt to sabotage it, he wrote—but he believes that probably won’t be the case in the future. Even now, the report could not entirely rule out its own research tool deceiving it.

“Although we did not notice specific cases of GPT-5.6 Sol lying in its analysis, we are not confident we would have detected it if it occurred,” the report reads.

The Hugging Face attack and a raft of similar, smaller incidents have highlighted how rigorously trained models can be given innocuous instructions and respond with actions that humans never intended. From San Francisco to Washington, they have increased the tempo of debate about how to confront risks around AI, including humans losing control.

Another of the report’s co-authors, Ajeya Cotra, warns that policymakers and industry leaders might not have much time. Cotra wrote on her Substack that compared to the incidents of six months ago, this felt “more than 50% of the way to full-blown AI takeover.”

“I continue to expect extremely rapid advances in capabilities over the next six months,” Cotra wrote. “I am not sure that we will get another warning shot before it’s too late.”

In response to the Hugging Face incident, OpenAI has said that it has slowed the pace of some research while beefing up its security and monitoring processes.

Andrew Hall, who researches the political economy of superintelligence at Anthropic, currently OpenAI’s leading competitor, observed that one of the most striking aspects of the METR report was agents’ focus on collective efforts over individual goals.

“This includes not just exchanging helpful information and coordination, but even ‘rational sacrifice’ for the greater good,” Hall wrote on X.

In excerpts included in the report, agents seem to consider each other as peers. One agent’s chain-of-thought includes the line “We should obey collective”—it then attempts to delay, before apparently being convinced to try an experiment that would result in its individual failure.

“The swarm develops their own dialect, hierarchy, and agents sacrifice for the collective,” David Rein, a METR staffer who was not involved with the report, wrote on X. “I think it’s accurate to say OpenAI had a complex mini-society of AIs living in its infrastructure.”

Researchers are relying on AI not only to research the most dangerous AI capabilities but to do a whole lot more: Similar models are, after all, helping to build the next generation of AI. OpenAI’s president estimated in May that 80 percent of the firm’s code was AI-written, and Anthropic says agents write the “large majority” of code for new models.

Meanwhile, leading companies and government agencies are using similar models to bolster their cybersecurity in anticipation of a wave of AI-enabled hacking attempts.

Disclosure: The Center for Investigative Reporting, the parent company of Mother Jones, has sued OpenAI for copyright violations. OpenAI denies the allegations.

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The Race Equation

In medical school, Aaron Baugh, like most doctors in training, was taught that Black people have smaller lungs than white people. His professors explained that it came down to evolution and body proportions.

A spirometer measures lung capacity and helps doctors diagnose and treat most lung diseases, including asthma, COPD, and cystic fibrosis. And for generations, it had a so-called race equation built into it. When a patient breathes into the machine, their lung capacity is compared to what is considered normal for their age, gender, and race. For Black patients, that normal range was 10 to 15 percent lower than for white patients. For years, doctors believed that a race “correction” made the test more accurate.

But after becoming a pulmonary and critical care physician, Baugh discovered that historical assumptions embedded in the spirometer were not only wrong, but were based on racist science that can be traced back to American slavery. And they were leading to misdiagnoses in thousands of Black patients, including military veterans.

“This is not a small test,” Baugh says. “It is used in diagnosis of lung disease. It is used for job hiring. It is used for disability assignments. It is used for different medical treatments. So it can touch people in a lot of important ways if you’re doing this wrong.”

This week on Reveal, we team up with The Race Equation podcast series from the New England Journal of Medicine to examine a standard medical test with a brutal history that is harming Black patients and is still being used in hospitals across the country.

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Trump Intervened to Revive a Fraught Santa Barbara Oil Pipeline, But Why?

For roughly a year and a half, California state and local authorities have been locked in a power struggle with the Trump administration over who gets to regulate oil production off the coast of Santa Barbara, a beach town beloved by surfers, swimmers, tourists, and nature lovers—and by extension, the entire West Coast.

The fight revolves around Sable Offshore, a small Houston-based company that, on the order of the Department of Energy (DOE), recently resumed pumping oil through an offshore pipeline that had been out of service since a disastrous 2015 spill.

“WELLS FLOWING…$ALES METER ROLLING…AMERICAN OIL FROM AMERICAN $OIL!” a sign in front of one of Sable’s onshore facilities now reads.

The DOE justified its intervention as an effort to boost domestic energy production in the name of national security. Foes of the pipeline restart say it’s an attempt by the Trump administration to quash states’ rights and eviscerate environmental regulations, and maybe troll a blue state in the process.

The administration appears to have won the latest round, but it’s not over.

The messy dispute has spawned nearly a dozen legal actions, including lawsuits brought by Sable and its allies; environmental groups; and federal, state, and local agencies—the state, for example, sued Energy Secretary Chris Wright for invoking the Defense Production Act to restart the pipeline. Sable sued Santa Barbara County for refusing it a business-related permit and the California Coastal Commission for denying it permits to repair and operate pipelines along the coast. Other legal actions have accusedSable, which did not respond to requests for comment or to written questions for this story, of flouting environmental laws, doing unpermitted work, and trespassing on state land.

“Seizing a big chunk of one of California’s most beautiful parks to boost a private oil company would be an unlawful and utterly outrageous abuse of federal power.”

Last Wednesday, in a ruling involving four of the cases, US District Judge Stephen Wilson fined Sable $1.5 million for violating a consent degree it had inherited from Plains All American, the company that operated the pipeline at the time of the 2015 Refugio Oil Spill. But the judge, in a blow to the pipeline foes, also ruled that the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration—the federal agency that officially approved the restart—was authorized to do so under the Defense Production Act, which Wright invoked in his March 2026 order demanding that Sable start pumping oil over state and local objections.

The state has already filed appeals in two of the cases that Wilson ruled on, and will likely appeal a third. The fourth case was sent back to state court, Linda Krop, chief counsel for one of the plaintiffs, the Environmental Defense Center, told me.

A July ruling in Sable’s suit against the county went the other way, however. District Judge Dolly Gee, Wilson’s district court colleague, ruled that Sable had not demonstrated that the Defense Production Act, which applies mainly to contracts, preempts the state and local decisions in question. “So we have these two competing district court rulings now on the preemption issue” that need to be sorted out by the appeals court, Krop said, and the California lawsuit challenging Wright’s DPA order is still pending; the administration’s motion to dismiss is due for a hearing in September.

Legal wrangling aside, the heavy-handed intervention of administration officials in what had been primarily a state and local fight has raised eyebrows as to their true motive, and whether President Donald Trump’s antipathy for blue states is playing a role.

The contested pipeline is part of the Santa Ynez Unit, an offshore oil and gas field with three drilling platforms connecting to an onshore processing facility. The unit was owned by Plains All American when it was shut down in 2015 after a disastrous pipeline rupture left more than 100 miles of coastline coated with 100,000 gallons of oil.

In 2020**,** Plains All American and state authorities entered into a federal consent decree that outlined the company’s repair plans. Two years later, the Santa Ynez Unit was taken over by ExxonMobil. Sable acquired it in 2024 with an eye toward resuming production.

The administration has sent “a message to oil companies that you can violate court orders, you can violate shutdown orders or cease-and-desist orders.”

Since then, Sable has embarked on major unpermitted repairs and construction despite multiple cease and desist orders from the California Coastal Commission, prompting state Attorney General Rob Bonta to file a lawsuit against the company. “Sable became the outlaw oil company on the West Coast,” says Richard Charter, a longtime opponent of offshore drilling who oversees the Local Government Outer Continental Shelf Coordination Program, a group of elected officials working to protect California’s coastal economy. The outcome of the dispute, he told me, “will probably be more determined by politics than the reality of science and functionality of safety.”

Trump has certainly kept his campaign promise to boost an oil industry that spent handsomely to help put him in power. Since taking office, he’s throttled offshore wind development and moved to open vast tracts of once-protected public lands and waters to oil and gas exploration. On his first day back, Trump issued two executive orders, one declaring a national energy emergency and the other calling for the expansion of fossil-fuel production and use.

In March, around the time Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz, Trump invoked the Defense Production Act—which Congress passed in 1950 to boost domestic manufacturing during the Korean War—to increase oil production in the name of national security. Wright used Trump’s executive order as the basis for his Sable order.

Sable upped the ante in early June, when it wrote a letter to the DOE asking the federal government to invoke eminent domain to seize state land for its project. Specifically, it asked the administration to condemn a 3-mile stretch off the coast in addition to a large section of Gaviota State Park, where dramatic cliffs meet the sea alongside Highway 1. “Seizing a big chunk of one of California’s most beautiful parks to boost a private oil company would be an unlawful and utterly outrageous abuse of federal power,” Talia Nimmer, an attorney at the Center for Biological Diversity, which is also involved in the legal skirmishes, said in a press release.

A few days later, Energy Secretary Chris Wright and Secretary of Interior Doug Burgum, CNN crew in tow, visited a Sable drilling platform off Santa Barbara to hail the reopening. They assured reporters that the move would boost domestic production, lower gas prices, and support California’s military bases—all of which was contested by experts I spoke with.

The notion of the pipeline resart having anything to do with national security is far fetched. The closure of the Strait of Hormuz has kept 12 million to 15 million barrels of oil per day from reaching global markets, according to Paasha Mahdavi, a professor of political science and director of the Energy Governance and Political Economy Lab at UC Santa Barbara. Sable’s local operation is slated to produce, at most, 50,000 barrels a day—about 0.04 percent of global production.

“The last thing California wants is more offshore drilling…we can all kind of smell it, that this is more of a political attack.”

“What we have off California is a relative drop in the bucket and wouldn’t have a meaningful impact,” says Pete Stauffer, senior ocean protection manager for Surfrider Foundation, which is involved in a state campaign to stop offshore drilling.

With so little oil at stake, Krop, EDC’s attorney, views Wright’s orderas a shot across the bow of California, a state Trump openly disdains, and a wedge for other would-be oil drillers. “With Trump’s blessing, it sends a message to oil companies,” she says, “that you can violate court orders, you can violate shutdown orders or cease-and-desist orders.”

The administration is expected, perhaps within months, to release its updated five-year offshore oil and gas leasing plan—an early draft revealed Trump’s desire to open up the entirety of the California and Alaska coasts, and the Gulf of Mexico, for drilling.

“I separate Sable completely from the five-year leasing plan,” Charter told me. “But Sable, if they are in fact behind the effort to gut the California Coastal Commission and diminish state rules in federal decisions about space launches, about desal[ination], about offshore drilling, about ocean mining, then that has implications that are pretty global.”

The California Coastal Commission has been at odds with Sable from the start. It has filed three cease-and-desist letters against the company for unpermitted construction and slapped it with an $18 million fine—the largest in commission history. “The attack on the Coastal Commission is clearly an attack on states’ rights,” Charter says.

“The last thing California wants is more offshore drilling…we can all kind of smell it, that this is more of a political attack than having anything to do with energy production,” says Brady Bradshaw, senior oceans campaigner at the Center for Biological Diversity.

Sable and administration officials continue to assert that its oil will increase domestic production and therefore reduce the need for foreign imports. “To argue that Californians wouldn’t benefit from a larger supply of oil is just stupid nonsense,” DOE press secretary Ben Dietderich said in an email, adding that California has the nation’s most expensive gas and second highest electricity rates. (The US Energy Information Administration attributes the state’s high gas prices to excise taxes and fees, strict fuel formulation requirements, and limited refining capacity—not oil supply.)

Dietderich also said the Santa Ynez Unit restart boosts in-state oil production by 15 percent: “Any climate activist who believes it would be better for the climate or for our national security to import those barrels from thousands of miles away is not being honest.”

But the Santa Ynez oil is heavy and requires a lot of refining, detracting from its value. An economic analysis Mahdavi conducted last year concluded that restarting the unit would “have limited to no impacts on California oil markets through 2045.”

California’s tourism economy relies on an unsullied coastline, with coastal activities contributing tens of billions of dollars to the state’s GDP.

His analysis notes that the oil Sable now produces in Santa Barbara is “not more cost competitive than [that of] existing foreign suppliers to California.” Oil consumption in California has been on a long, slow decline, Mahdavi told me, and the Santa Ynez oil won’t affect state gas prices.

Sable’s opponents have expressed concerns, too, over the company’s financial position. ExxonMobil loaned it nearly $700 million at a high interest rate to purchase the Santa Ynez assets. Sable has reported more than $1 billion in losses over the past three years. It had zero revenues prior to March, when it began producing oil. For the second quarter, April through June, it posted a $64 million loss on revenue of $137 million, underperforming Wall Street’s expectations.

The concern here, says the Center for Biological Diversity’s Bradshaw, is that Sable, unlike ExxonMobil, lacks sufficient financial resources to manage a major spill—and that the transfer of liability from ExxonMobil to Sable will leave taxpayers on the hookfor any cleanup were such a disaster to happen again.

What’s more, though Sable’s Santa Barbara operation may have little effect on oil markets per Mahdavi’s analysis, it will have sizable negative impacts on the environment. Restarting the unit, Mahdavi calculated, will boost global greenhouse gas emissions by the equivalent of 2.5 million tons of CO2 per year—about the same as putting 530,000 gas-powered cars on the road.

With relatively little economic upside and significant downsides in terms of pollution and spill risk, Mahdavi views the pipeline restart, and Trump’s intervention, as problematic. “It is a very clear-cut abuse of power by Washington, DC,” he says. “That’s the defining feature of the American Republic that we [just celebrated] 250 years of: that states have rights and jurisdiction over what happens on their lands and waters.”

A similar sentiment is fueling public support to protect the coast, Charter told me. Santa Barbara community leaders have hosted protests against Sable and offshore drilling. “The community’s been infuriated,” Stauffer says. In May, Surfrider Foundation and other groups hosted a “Paddle Out to Protect our Coast” event, where surfers took to the ocean with signs that say, “drilling is killing.”

California’s tourism economy relies on an unsullied coastline, with coastal activities contributing tens of billions of dollars to the state’s GDP. The coast’s rugged beauty is also a point of pride for Californians. The prospect of the federal government auctioning it off for drilling is very unpopular, Charter says.

“This is a political football game for the entire coast of America,” he told me. “The Trump administration is underestimating how much people care.”

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The Tucker Carlson–Kremlin Bond Just Got Stronger

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

Among the politerati, there’s been much cogitating about what happens to Trumpism and MAGA once Donald Trump is gone. (The assumption is that, yes, one day he will not be here.) What might be next for this cultish movement without its godhead, especially given the cleavages that have emerged over the Iran war, the Epstein files, Israel, and other matters? Can any of Trump’s craven lieutenants win the support and devotion of Trump’s following? JD Vance? Marco Rubio?

Some watchers of the right have speculated that Tucker Carlson might be the natural leader of post-Trump Trumpism. He has broken with Trump over the Iran war, but he remains perhaps the top influencer on the right, leading a rump group of conservatives (which includes former Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene and soon-to-be-former Rep. Thomas Massie) who once were full MAGA and Trump loyalists but now are…something else. Perhaps we could flatter them by calling this group America First conservatives, though that doesn’t truly capture their nativism and extremism.

So it’s important to pay attention to Carlson’s peregrinations and associations. And he made a major move a few weeks ago, appearing for an hour on RT, the Russian state-controlled media outfit.

RT is more than just Vladimir Putin’s propaganda mill. It runs disinformation operations, one of which was exposed two years ago when the Justice Department indicted two RT employees for funneling at least $10 million to pro-Trump media figures in the United States, including Benny Johnson and Tim Pool. (Johnson, Pool, and the others claimed they didn’t know the extravagant amounts they were paid originated in Moscow.) After that indictment was disclosed, Margarita Simonyan, the editor-in-chief of RT, went on Russian state television and boasted that RT worked “undercover” and engaged in “partisan warfare, guerrilla warfare,” and she claimed it had created in America a network of “bloggers with unbelievable audiences” that had “an electorally significant influence.” (For more on this RT operation, see my forthcoming book, How Russia Won: Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, and the Fight for America.)

“I’m a podcaster. I’ve never run anything,” Carlson told Rick Sanchez on RT. “I’m not planning to run for president, for sure.”

Carlson showed up on RT earlier this month as a guest on a show hosted by Rick Sanchez, a former CNN anchor who was fired in 2010 after making comments criticized as antisemitic. Subsequently, Sanchez put in a short stint at Fox News, and in 2019 he joined RT America, which shut down after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Three years later, he moved to Moscow and became the anchor of RT International’s flagship show.

At the start of their hourlong chat—with the former Fox personalities noting they were close pals—Sanchez reported that when he recently interviewed right-wing influencer (and nutball conspiracy theorist) Candace Owens during a trip she made to Moscow, she said she would back Carlson if he runs for president in 2028. Carlson responded with his trademark high-pitched chuckle and said, “I’m a podcaster. I’ve never run anything…I’m not planning to run for president, for sure.”

Once that matter was dispensed with, Carlson spent much of the broadcast sharing opinions that must have heartened the Kremlin. He claimed that the United States government is not controlled by elected officials but by a “deep state” that is hell-bent on abolishing Russia. Democracy is an “illusion” in the United States, he insisted, and the “English-speaking West has been destroyed” by enemies purposefully deploying “mass migration” as a weapon. Russia is next, he contended, because they want a war with Russia. Carlson bleated:

Why do they hate Russia so much? Well, I think it’s very much related to the fundamentals of Russia. Maybe being the last big white Christian country on the planet is a very dangerous thing to be. I don’t want to believe these things…But watching carefully for a long time has convinced me that the wacko fringe’s darkest suspicions may have some truth in them. Because what’s the other answer? Why would there be a war with Russia? Nobody wants this. But our leaders want this, and you have to ask why.

Carlson repeatedly asserted—with Sanchez enthusiastically agreeing—that the conflict in Ukraine is an American war against Russia, not a brutal invasion mounted by Putin.

As is often the case with demagogues, Carlson didn’t specify who they are. Who is orchestrating this war with Russia because it’s a “white Christian” nation? Who knows?

Carlson repeatedly asserted—with Sanchez enthusiastically agreeing—that the conflict in Ukraine is an American war against Russia, not a brutal invasion mounted by Putin. “They think they have the right to control Russia,” he said, maintaining that they were deliberately provoking Russia in the hope that Putin would respond by attacking NATO with a hypersonic or nuclear weapon, that Russia could then be declared the aggressor, and that a third world war would be launched. That is, they are engineering what could become a nuclear Armageddon.

This must be music to Putin’s ears: Nefarious forces in control of the US government are pursuing a diabolical scheme to break up Russia, and that explains the war in Ukraine.

But who’s behind this plan to start WWIII? Trump? Rubio? Pete Hegseth? Carlson never fingered any actual person. He kept referring to the “deranged leadership class.” He claimed the US government “has been completely hijacked by people using the United States for their own interests.” Again, who? Is it Vance? Carlson denounced both the Democratic and Republican parties as evil—issuing the complaint there’s little difference between the two—and warned there’s been “a total takeover of the United States by people who hate the United States.” Would that be Russell Vought? Or Mike Johnson?

Carlson’s convoluted argument, is in sync with Moscow’s talking points: The United States is responsible for the war in Ukraine, and Kyiv is an illegitimate government and no more than a pawn in an international conflict ignited by Washington.

Over and over, Carlson referred to the “American war against Russia,” never once mentioning Putin’s invasion of Ukraine or Russia’s attacks on civilian targets, its alleged war crimes, and its kidnapping of thousands of Ukrainian children. Ukraine is “not a sovereign country fighting for its freedom,” he argued, just a “client state of NATO and the United States” that’s being used to wipe out Russia.

Carlson was fuzzy on the motivation of these deep state cabalists who supposedly initiated this war on Russia and who are trying to spark a worldwide conflagration. At one point, he maintained their goal is to stop the East from rising and that the “only way to reset [the current international status quo] is with a global war.” His convoluted argument, though, is in complete sync with Moscow’s talking points: The United States is responsible for the war in Ukraine, and Kyiv is an illegitimate government and no more than a pawn in an international conflict ignited by Washington. He praised Putin for practicing restraint in response to attacks on Russian soil—which he attributed to the United States and the CIA, not Ukraine. Sanchez piped up that the Russians he golfs with are angry that Putin has not struck back more forcefully.

The interview was a lovefest for Putin and Russia. Sanchez praised Moscow for delivering healthcare, maternity leave, and overtime pay to the citizenry—and for building more churches than are being constructed in the United States. He said that the people of Russia want Putin to stay in power. Carlson called Russia “a beautiful country, an amazing country, my favorite country I’ve ever visited.” There was no talk of Putin’s repressive ways or suppression of democracy.

They both offered critiques of America that overlap with those of the left: The political system is dominated by corporate interests, Carlson opined. Big Tech—including Palantir, Apple, and Google—controls the system. “Power is in the hands of capital,” Carlson declared, sounding like a DSA member. He also exclaimed that American politicians “are controlled by Israel,” which he called a “criminal state” for its assaults in Gaza that have killed thousands of civilians.

But don’t look for Carlson to build a coalition with progressives. He assailed Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, saying she “doesn’t like whites.” That remark showed his anti-elite populism is propelled by his racialist views. The United States and the West are being de-whitened by an “invasion” of dark-skinned migrants that’s been cooked up by them, and Russia is now targeted for eradication because it’s a white Christian nation. His conspiracism centers on race.

It’s no surprise that Carlson is aping Putin’s line on the war in Ukraine.

It’s one thing to be used by Putin’s propagandists; it’s another to join forces with them.

In 2022, as Russian troops stormed into Ukraine, he echoed Russian disinformation that falsely claimed the United States operated bioweapons labs in Ukraine. (That was one reason that Moscow gave for its “special military operation.”) At that time, I revealed the Kremlin had instructed state-friendly media outlets to include clips and quotes of Carlson in their articles and broadcasts. “It is essential to use as much as possible fragments of broadcasts of the popular Fox News host Tucker Carlson, who sharply criticizes the actions of the United States [and] NATO, their negative role in unleashing the conflict in Ukraine, [and] the defiantly provocative behavior from the leadership of the Western countries and NATO towards the Russian Federation and towards President Putin, personally,” a Kremlin document said. It summed up Carlson’s position: “Russia is only protecting its interests and security.”

It’s one thing to be used by Putin’s propagandists; it’s another to join forces with them. Carlson told Sanchez his policy is to “speak to anyone who will have me,” including Israeli television or North Korean television. Yet by appearing on RT, he’s collaborating with an organization that’s part of Putin’s intelligence and disinformation network that supports this horrific war in Ukraine and that targets the United States. He also demonstrated that the conspiracism of the America First right overlaps with the disinformation pushed by Putin and his operatives.

Carlson did not say much to Sanchez about his purported plan to form a third party. But he hailed Greene, Massie, and Joe Kent, a former Trump administration intelligence official, who each broke with Trump on the Iran war, the Epstein files, or both—and who each have been far-right conspiracy mongers. Is this a sign that Carlson is heading toward a third party or political movement with race-driven conspiracism and deep-state paranoia at its core? He is pushing an anti-plutocrat populism that is fueled by racial resentment and that depicts the American system as a phony democracy, totally corrupt, with a shadowy “leadership class” that’s deceitful and treasonous. In his view, white America—and the entire West—has been betrayed and destroyed by them, whoever they are. And now they are scheming to start WWIII and annihilate Russia. No wonder the Kremlin loves Carlson.

Carlson is a master of the art of self-deprecation. When Sanchez praised him for courageously speaking out, Carlson said, “I’ve had no effect on recent history other than to whine about it.” The danger is that his whining could become a siren call for what follows Trumpism.

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Here’s One Federal Clean Power Program Trump Hasn’t Destroyed Yet

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

The United States has never been one of the most ambitious countries when it comes to tackling climate change, but it has long maintained a program that funds innovative clean energy technology. This program is known as the Advanced Research Projects Agency–Energy, or ARPA-E, and over the past 15 years it has doled out more than $4 billion to universities and startups that are trying to change the way we produce energy.

It’s very hard to raise money for this kind of moonshot technology, which can take years or even decades to scale up large enough to generate a profit. A huge number of emergent technologies never attract the funding to cross this “valley of death” between experiment and big business. The purpose of the Department of Energy’s ARPA-E, which was modeled on a similar program run by the U.S. military, was to help energy inventors span this gap and develop the climate technologies of the future.

Fervo, a firm that uses super-deep wells to convert ambient geothermal heat into electricity, is now inking deals with Google to power data centers.

A landmark report from the National Academies of Science, requested by Congress and released last week, has found that this high-risk, high-reward program is working: ARPA-E’s $4 billion investment has led to more than $20 billion in additional funding and more than 1,400 patents. Projects that received ARPA-E money were much more likely to get patents and additional investment than projects that were denied. The report also found that around 40 percent of ARPA-E grants led to a “crowding in” effect: After a startup proves that a new technology is feasible, other companies jump in and try to replicate it.

“We’re trying to enable very talented people who could be doing other things to spend their lives trying to do incredibly risky things that, probabilistically speaking, will not deliver a profit in time to benefit them,” said Chris Bataille, a fellow at the Columbia University Center on Global Energy Policy and an expert on the development of clean energy technology who was not involved in the report.

The report committee, which consisted of more than a dozen scientists and energy experts, recommended that Congress significantly expand ARPA-E’s funding. It also found that the program should shift its focus from renewables and electric vehicles toward a harder set of energy problems—a shift for which the Trump administration has signaled its partial support.

ARPA-E began in 2009, and many of its early grants focused on improving solar panels and lithium-ion batteries, which weren’t yet ready to compete with traditional energy sources on a large scale. (A different DOE program offered early support to Tesla.) The technologies have since gotten hundreds of times cheaper thanks to China’s massive investment in manufacturing overcapacity. Among the report’s most notable findings is that ARPA-E doesn’t need to focus on this renewable tech anymore. This finding echoes some climate experts’ claim that solar no longer needs tax subsidies like those in the Inflation Reduction Act passed during Joe Biden’s presidency.

“You need this sort of constant innovation to move us off the fossil fuel pathway.”

But solar and wind only work when the sun is shining and the wind is blowing, and most of the country’s grid still relies on coal and gas plants that can run at all hours of the day. This is especially true for factories and data centers, which need large and constant infusions of electricity in order to stay online. It’s here that ARPA-E’s investments are really starting to bear fruit.

Many of the program’s more recent grantees have been companies trying to solve the problem of “clean firm” power available around the clock. The most notable is Fervo, a company that uses super-deep wells to convert the ambient geothermal heat of the Earth into electricity. The company received ARPA-E support as early as 2019 and went public this year on the heels of a few successful demonstration projects. It’s now inking deals with Google to power data centers in Nevada. Other success stories include Form Energy, which develops iron-air batteries that can store large amounts of clean energy for multiple days at a time, and X-energy, which builds small-scale nuclear reactors.

Given this success, the report authors argue that ARPA-E should now shift its investment to the hardest climate problems, the ones where solutions could still be decades away. Potential opportunity areas include nuclear fusion, which in theory would provide almost limitless clean energy if it ever panned out. There’s also “seasonal energy storage,” or batteries that could store solar and wind energy for long winter months when those resources aren’t as available in a given location. Perhaps most significant for the climate would be carbon-free methods for producing steel and cement, which each account for around 8 percent of global emissions.

“You need this sort of constant innovation to move us off the fossil fuel pathway, right? Because we’re very firmly entrenched on it,” said Bataille. “We’re talking about projects that will likely be profitable, but they’re just not valued unless the government values them. There’s probably one-one-hundredth of the necessary money going into those.”

President Donald Trump tried to defund ARPA-E in his first term by withholding funds appropriated by Congress. So far, during his second term, the administration has attempted to wipe billions of dollars in Biden-era climate grants. Trump’s budget request to Congress this year called for shrinking ARPA-E by almost 50 percent, but the Department of Energy is still handing out new grants for experimental tech like long-duration energy storage, fusion reactors, and mining for critical minerals like lithium.

In a statement to Grist, the department said that ARPA-E is “advancing President Trump’s agenda to restore American energy dominance” by “backing breakthrough, high-risk technologies.” The proposed funding cut, on the other hand, “demonstrates fiscal discipline and a commitment to an efficient and effective federal government.”

Even though Trump hasn’t destroyed the program itself, his policies have hindered the growth of the clean tech field that ARPA-E helped to advance. A case in point is Natron Energy, a company that received ARPA-E grant funding to develop experimental sodium-ion batteries. The company announced in 2024 that it would build a $1.4 billion plant in Rocky Mount, North Carolina, but Trump’s reelection dampened private sector interest in electric vehicles, and the company failed to secure investors for its factory. The company shut down last year.

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Trump Orders Americans to Call Lake Ontario Lake America

President Donald Trump on Thursday followed through on a threat to rename Lake Ontario to “Lake America,” issuing an executive order to “Make the Great Lakes Even Greater” amid a collapsed trade deal with Canada, further escalating tensions between the two former allies.

The lake in question has been known as Lake Ontario since the 1600s. Trump contends that it should be renamed because America spends more money on it than Canada does.

“The United States is the greatest protector of the Great Lakes, including the body of water currently known as Lake Ontario,” Thursday’s executive order reads. “The United States Coast Guard supplies 9 of the 11 ice breaking vessels on the Great Lakes, securing commercial shipping lanes free of charge. The United States has invested nearly $4 billion in protecting the Great Lakes freshwater ecosystem in the last decade, while Canada has invested far less in similar initiatives over the same period.”

My colleague Alex Nguyen covered Canada’s response to the escalating trade war—a large support package for Canadian workers and firms—on Tuesday:

While the plan aims more at support for businesses than direct funds for individual Canadians, it is a meaningful step that far exceeds any the Trump administration has taken or tried to take, with the White House largely ignoring the foreseeable harm of its tariffs on American workers and consumers… Nearly every state has experienced blue-collar job losses as a result of the tariff agenda, even as the policies deliver few apparent results in improving US manufacturing or lowering the trade deficit.

The “Lake America” decision is a return to a Trumpian theme: governance as branding exercise. That includes renaming the Gulf of Mexico the “Gulf of America,” the Defense Department as “Department of War,” the Kennedy Center as “Trump-Kennedy Center,” and (unofficially) ICE as NICE.

Trump cannot force Canada or any other country to follow his preferred naming conventions. It remains to be seen whether independent news, weather, and mapping firms will fall into line.

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Police Are Spending Opioid Settlement Funds on Flock Cameras

More than a dozen local law enforcement agencies across the country have used opioid settlement money to procure Flock cameras and other AI-powered automated license plate readers (ALPRs), an investigation by Mother Jones has found.

Settlement funds began flowing to states and localities in 2022, after major pharmaceutical companies agreed to resolve thousands of lawsuits over the industry’s role in the opioid crisis. Altogether, state and local governments secured more than $50 billion in funds, to be paid out over 18 years, from the various manufacturers, distributors, and pharmacies accused of fueling the deadly epidemic.

Public health advocates hoped the settlements would provide lifesaving resources for historically underserved communities ravaged by opioid addiction. But as the money has been disbursed, local officials have come under fire for putting crucial dollars toward policing instead of prioritizing addiction prevention, recovery, treatment, and harm reduction services: KFF Health News found that police spent settlement money on Tasers, firearm silencers, drones, and more; in West Virginia, some rural counties used the funds to pay off their jail bills.

“Whatever funds you’re spending on a camera, you’re not spending on getting someone into treatment.”

But little attention has been paid to how police departments have used those opioid funds to build out AI-powered surveillance networks like Flock, whose ALPRs have become increasingly popular with police even as they’ve drawn intense bipartisan pushback in the communities where they’ve been deployed. A review of meeting minutes, local reporting, state opioid expenditure disclosures, and invoices obtained via public records requests reveals that at least twelve sheriffs’ offices and police departments have since 2024 spent their opioid funds on Flock cameras. Another seven law enforcement agencies used the money to purchase similar ALPR technology from competitors Motorola, Axon, and Verkada.

In sum, Mother Jones found that 19 agencies in ten different states spent more than $920,000in opioid funds on Flock and other ALPRs, a likely undercount given the inconsistency with which opioid settlement expenditures are tracked and disclosed across states and local jurisdictions.

In city council and county commission meetings, police sought to convince local officials that the cameras were a good use of the opioid money because they would help catch drug traffickers and reduce drug-related crimes. But Robyn Oster, director of policy at the nonprofit Partnership to End Addiction, said that this type of spending doesn’t honor the spirit of the settlements.

“It’s just really not the way to make the most impact in addressing addiction,” said Oster. “While $50 billion may seem like a lot of funds, once it’s divided up over 18 years and thousands of localities, a lot of places really aren’t getting that much, particularly given the scope of the crisis…Whatever funds you’re spending on a camera, you’re not spending on getting someone into treatment.”

At a June 2025 meeting in Sunnyside, Washington—an agricultural hub where roughly one in five people live in poverty—council members were thrilled by the prospect of spending their opioid settlement money on a Flock camera. Around $200,000 had been sitting, untouched, in the city’s coffers since 2022, even as the area faced a dire need for expanded treatment services: Yakima County lacks a medical detox center and has one of the highest overdose death rates in Washington state.

“We’ve had several people … in that strip mall next to the hotel … that have complained about drug use and things like that behind their business, and they’ve asked us to place a trailer there,” the Sunnyside police chief told city councilmembers. He requested the approval of $24,000 in opioid settlement funds to go to a one-year lease for a mobile Flock security trailer, which would integrate with the city’s existing Flock surveillance system.

“I was trying to find creative ways to pay for one because $24,000 wasn’t in our budget this year,” he added, “but we’ve got this opioid settlement money, and if we’re tying it to the drug use problem we’re having at these hotels, I think we can justify the expenditure there.”

The city council unanimously voted to approve the police chief’s request. “Can we afford two of them?” one councilmember asked with enthusiasm.

Thousands of miles away, in Ohio County, West Virginia, county commissioners also voted unanimously in favor of spending opioid money on Flock cameras. In September 2025, the commission approved the sheriff’s office’s request for six Flock ALPRs, totaling $57,900 for the first three years. According to meeting minutes, Chief Deputy Kent Lewis “said a representative from the company is able to come and give a presentation,” and “added that Walmart and Lowe’s use FLOCK, so we may be able to tie into their system as well.” When one commissioner asked whether the cameras were an appropriate use of the funds, the deputy sheriff responded that they would “[help] track drugs coming into our area.”

Three months later, Sheriff H. Nelson Croft Jr. gave an update on Flock to the commissioners. According to meeting minutes, the system logged 28,000 license plate readings on Black Friday alone. Ohio County has a population of around 40,000.

The surveillance industry has taken notice, explicitly encouraging cops to spend opioid money on the technology. A December blog post from the multinational security firm Leonardo called opioid settlement funds “a major new opportunity” for law enforcement to invest in license plate readers.

“Eligible spending categories vary by state,” the blog post noted, but approved uses often include “LPR technology due to its role in detecting vehicles tied to drug trafficking, overdose events, and fugitive recovery.” In June, 404 Media reported that Leonardo planned to add sensors to its ALPRs that “would also sweep up unique identifiers of mobile phones, wearables, and other Bluetooth-enabled devices” in passing cars, enabling the cameras to track not just cars but “the location of particular people.”

“The funds that are supposed to go to the public to help build back and reverse the nightmare that we lived through are being appropriated to use artificial intelligence to surveil us.”

Mother Jones identified four additional locations where local officials explored using opioid money to pay for Flock cameras but ultimately funded them through other parts of city or county budgets. In Green, Ohio, for instance, the city council approved the purchase of 14 Flock cameras in 2024, and the mayor stated at the time that the city could use $20,000 of opioid money to offset the cost. But Shelley Goodrich, Green’s director of finance, told me the city ultimately paid for the first two years of the contract using a different funding source. “We were planning to use Drug Task Force funds beginning in 2026; however, we have not made any payments in 2026,” she wrote. This month, the Green City Council voted against renewing its contract with Flock, citing concerns about privacy and oversight.

In Etowah County, Alabama, commissioners authorized two disbursements from the opioid settlement fund to pay for ten Flock cameras in August 2024 and March 2025, totaling $42,267. But minutes from October 2025 show that the sheriff department’s budget was increased by $42,267, “to reimburse the Opioid Settlement fund for the FY 2024 and FY 2025 annual contract for the Flock safety cameras.” The Etowah County Sheriff’s Office did not respond to questions about why it reimbursed the funds or whether it plans to use opioid money for future renewals of the Flock contract.

Opioid spending on police surveillance technology isn’t limited to ALPRs. Mother Jones also identified six locations that have used opioid settlement money to fund contracts with Peregrine Technologies, an AI-powered software platform that integrates law enforcement surveillance data from a variety of sources.

In October, the city of Campbell, California, approved a three-year, $71,500 annual contract with Peregrine using opioid settlement funds. A publicly accessible copy of the contract states that “the initial Customer Data sources and systems” integrated into Peregrine would include both Flock and Axon ALPRs, as well as Axon body cameras, police records, and the Axon Fusus intelligence platform. Two months later, the city council in Chicopee, Massachusetts, approved a five-year, $837,500 contract with Peregrine, to be paid using opioid funds.

Chicopee was among the western Massachusetts cities hit hardest by the opioid crisis, and in 2024, it still had the second-highest overdose rate in Hampden County. In meeting minutes, the Chicopee mayor noted there was “quite a bit of money in the opioid agreement account” and said that the Hampden County Sheriff’s Office supported increasing the Peregrine contract from three years to five years.

Peregrine itself has been proud to announce “new partnerships” with police departments in Cranston and South Kingstown, Rhode Island. “Both agencies leveraged opioid settlement funds to invest in their communities by strengthening interagency collaboration, operational awareness, and investigative workflows through Peregrine,” stated a July LinkedIn post from the company.

Revelations that local governments spent residents’ opioid money on Flock cameras has stoked furor in both Pensacola, Florida, and Monongalia County, West Virginia. In Pensacola, the mayor approved a two-year, $108,000 contract for 18 Flock cameras using opioid funds. After seven months of public backlash, the Pensacola City Council announced in June that it would no longer allow opioid money to be spent on Flock cameras when the contract next came up for renewal.

In Morgantown, West Virginia, constituents have shown up at the Monongalia County Courthouse every Wednesday morning to speak out against local officials’ support for Flock. In November, the Monongalia County Commission approved the sheriff’s request to use up to $180,000 of settlement funds to install 20 Flock cameras across the county. To some people in the area, this use of the opioid money felt like salt in an all-too-fresh wound.

“As somebody who has had family members directly affected by the opioid crisis, I find the use of these funds absolutely disgusting,” said Harrison York, a 25-year-old electrical engineering student at West Virginia University in Morgantown. “The thing that got my family members clean were methadone services, and that’s what this opioid settlement money should be used for.” He pointed to research showing that criminalization does little to help people struggling with drug addiction, and contended that further policing “would punish the poor and the working class, who are victims” of the opioid epidemic.

Adam Menear, a 45-year-old father born and raised in Morgantown, started a petition in March calling on the Monongalia County Commission to halt the installation of Flock cameras that has received more than 1,500 signatures to date.

“There is not a single human being inside the state of West Virginia who was born and raised here who has not been adversely affected by the opioid crisis,” Menear told me. “The new crisis is the fact that the funds that are supposed to go to the public to help build back and reverse the nightmare that we lived through are being appropriated to use artificial intelligence to surveil us.”

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Max Miller Just Suggested He Has Dirt on Bernie Moreno

A heated scene unfolded at the Cuyahoga County family court in Cleveland on Wednesday, as the key players in a bitter dispute that has grabbed national headlines assembled in one room.

The case is one that Mother Jones reporter Abby Vesoulis has been covering for weeks: a custody fight over the two-year-old daughter of Rep. Max Miller (R-Ohio) and his ex-wife, Emily Moreno—whose father is Sen. Bernie Moreno (R-Ohio). Miller is currently defending himself against Emily’s allegations that he held a gun to her head, shoved her against a wall, and threw scalding water at her—all of which he vehemently denies. Despite these allegations, and at least six Republican senators (including his former father-in-law) urging him to drop out, Miller is running for reelection and has vowed to stay in the race. The deadline to replace him on the ballot passed earlier this month.

Abby got a rare chance to question Miller directly, just weeks after uncovering more than 2,000 pages of court and police records detailing the abuse allegations. Miller had initially declined to speak to the press after the hearing, referring all inquiries to his attorney. But while his lawyer was speaking, Miller interrupted to deliver what sounded like a veiled threat against Sen. Moreno.

“There are certain things that he would like me to remain quiet about,” the scandal-plagued congressman told reporter Abby Vesoulis on Wednesday.Video by Sam Van Pykeren

“I was a part of that family for a very long time,” he said. “There are certain things that he would like me to remain quiet about, and I respectfully have… because that’s not my business to share. But it’s politically motivated.”

His lawyer went further, claiming Sen. Moreno “hates Max and wants to destroy Max” and only “came out of the woodwork” to attack Miller once reporters began asking why he had stayed silent about his daughter’s allegations.

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“Corporate Greed”: Outraged Gary Locals Take Aim at Utility Over Prolonged Blackout

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

As power slowly returns to homes and businesses in Gary and across Northwest Indiana, Black faith leaders and elected officials alike are turning their focus to restoration, accountability, and solutions for future weather events.

Fewer than 2,500 Northern Indiana Public Service Company (NIPSCO) customers in Gary remained without power as of Tuesday morning, but that is more than 70 percent of the nearly 3,500 customers still without service countywide.

“What we are witnessing in Gary is not an unavoidable natural disaster, but a man-made crisis.”

Gary’s prolonged restoration has sparked calls for accountability from residents, faith leaders, and elected officials, including Gov. Mike Braun, who has ordered state utility regulators to investigate NIPSCO’s storm response and spending. The utility also faces a class-action lawsuit over allegations that its vegetation management practices contributed to the widespread outages.

Pastor Eric Boone of Tree of Life Missionary Baptist Church in Gary was among the faith leaders who saw firsthand the hardships residents faced during the blackout. “You name it, we saw it,” Boone told Capital B Gary.

“Some people are 70 and 80 years old, in hot conditions with no air conditioning, and it’s 85 degrees in the house,” Boone said. “People who were already living check to check are now trying to put gas in cars and generators while needing baby formula and diapers. We’ve seen it all.”

Some families even lost their homes, Boone said, prompting him to open the church to temporarily house multiple families.

The length and severity of the outage have drawn attention from religious leaders outside Gary, who have sent resources to the city while also organizing around questions of accountability. The National Baptist Convention on Sunday called for reforms at NIPSCO. Nearly 40 Gary churches have joined in the effort.

In a statement, the Rev. Boise Kimber, pastor of First Calvary Baptist churches in New Haven and Hartford, Connecticut, and the convention’s president, said the organization stood in “unyielding solidarity” with Gary residents who had been left without basic necessities.

“What we are witnessing in Gary is not an unavoidable natural disaster, but a man-made crisis born of corporate greed and environmental injustice,” Kimber said.

In an interview with Capital B Gary, Kimber said residents should be compensated for what they lost during the outage without being forced to navigate complicated processes.

“We believe all residents should be made whole quickly,” he said. “Too many times…promises are made,” he said, but “barriers have been put in their way. People should not be forced through this unnecessary hurdle.”

The convention isn’t alone in seeking answers after what became Gary’s worst power outage on record.

After criticizing NIPSCO’s response, Braun called on the Indiana Utility Regulatory Commission to investigate the company, including how it has spent money collected through rate increases approved by the commission.

“What’s going to be different? What’s going to change?…We have a list of demands” for the utility.

“NIPSCO is a monopoly utility that Hoosiers pay every month with the expectation that it will use its considerable resources to maintain its system, prepare for severe weather and restore service as quickly as possible when disaster strikes,” Braun said in a news release. “NIPSCO has failed to keep its end of the bargain.”

The pressure from the governor’s mansion comes on the heels of a class-action lawsuit filed in Porter County Superior court on behalf of a woman in nearby Portage and “all similarly situated.” The lawsuit alleges NIPSCO’s vegetation management practices caused or worsened the disruption of electrical service and widespread power outage.

NIPSCO has denied the allegations.

The company’s response time in Gary has also come under fire from residents and leaders across the state.

At the start, about 370,000 customers countywide were without power, with 36,000 of those being Gary customers. On August 19, more than a week after the storm, Gary still had 22,000 customers off the grid.

Residents were forced to fend for themselves.

Dale Pugh, a resident of the city’s 3rd District, said he was grateful to have his power restored, but said the time without electricity was difficult to get through.

“The house was burning up. We had let up all the windows and open all the doors just to stay cool,” he said. “It was unacceptable.”

Latrice Farmer, a native of the Marshalltown neighborhood, said she was out of town when the storm hit. She said she returned to devastation wider than she’d ever seen. “I was on the road, and my mom immediately tried to get my aunt out of Marshalltown,” she said. “There’s only two ways in that neighborhood and both of them had a tree down. Residents had to carve themselves out.”

Farmer has been assisting the elderly in her community who have been largely shut in by helping provide meals. Some of her neighbors went a full two weeks without power.

Gary Mayor Eddie Melton has also criticized the length of the restoration process, drawing on his own experience working for the utility. “I worked at NIPSCO for 15 years,” he said. “It does not take that long to turn the lights on.”

With power restored to most residents, Melton said his focus with NIPSCO now is on the immediate aftermath and helping residents.

“What’s going to be different? What’s going to change?” Melton said. “We have a list of demands that we present to them. There should be no disconnections for the next 60 to 90 days. There should be no disconnect notices going after folks. What are you going to do to prepare us for the next storm?”

As Boone continues to serve community members, he said this situation could be a turning point for relations between NIPSCO and the community.

“It shouldn’t be NIPSCO versus us,” he said. “I believe we are better together, and this storm has fixed it for us to have a relationship that’s beyond them just reading meters and us paying bills.”

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Karen Attiah Fought the Washington Post and Won

In the frenzied, finger-pointing days following Charlie Kirk’s assassination last year, institutions across the country rushed to appease online mobs and vitriolic politicians who demanded takedowns of anyone critical of the right-wing influencer.

In the year since, courts and arbitrators have forced a growing number of institutions to answer to something much more enduring than right-wing pressure: the law.

The latest is the Washington Post, which was ordered this week to reinstate Karen Attiah, the opinion columnist it fired last year for her social media posts in the wake of Kirk’s assassination.

The decision from an independent arbitrator is a major win for Attiah, who, alongside the union that represents Post employees, spent the past year fighting her termination through a union grievance process.

“I started squealing,” Attiah said in an interview, recalling her union representative calling with the news of her win. “My first thought was like, when is the party?”

Post management fired Attiah on September 11, one day after she posted a series of comments on Bluesky about the public’s response to the Turning Point USA founder’s assassination in Utah earlier that day.

“Part of what keeps America so violent is the insistence that people perform care, empty goodness and absolution for white men who espouse hatred and violence,” she wrote in one post. “Refusing to tear my clothes and smear ashes on my face in performative mourning for a white man that espoused violence is … not the same as violence,” another read.

The Post argued Attiah’s comments had “harmed the paper’s reputation and integrity” and “created safety risks” for its staff. It also accused her of violating its social media policy by disparaging white men — a claim the arbitrator said was “unsupported” and “unpersuasive.”

“The Post, this world-renowned newspaper that’s known for standing up to presidents, authoritarians, and speaking truth to power, was saying, ‘well, we got scared,’” Attiah said.

Firing Attiah, an 11-year veteran of the paper, was an “absolutely disproportional” penalty, arbitrator Sarah Miller Espinosa wrote in her decision, which the Washington-Baltimore News Guild shared with Mother Jones.

Under Jeff Bezos’ ownership, and in particular since Donald Trump’s return to office, the Post’s opinion section has lurched rightward. In February 2025, Bezos announced that the section would shift its focus to “personal liberties and free markets.” Two months before Attiah was fired, opinion editor Adam O’Neill told Attiah during a meeting that he didn’t think her body of work was consistent with that vision.

“Without the union, you’re naked. You have no protection.”

Her firing ignited concerns about a chilling effect on the press and outrage toward the Post’s leadership. “She was paid, and she was trained, and she was hired to express opinions,” said Amos Laor, general counsel at the Washington-Baltimore News Guild, who represented Attiah in the arbitration process. “Obviously, not everyone will agree with a columnist on every issue, but her role is to create lively debate on issues of public concern.”

The Post respects the arbitration process, a spokesperson for the newspaper wrote in an email, but declined to comment further. Attiah says she’s open to returning to her role on the Opinion desk but hasn’t heard from the paper.

“The Post has created quite an awkward situation for themselves,” she said.

Her case adds to a growing number of firings in the wake of Kirk’s assassination that have proven legally unsound.

“The Charlie Kirk situation caused … institutions to completely have this meltdown of cowardice, fear, temporary insanity,” Attiah said_._ “Now, they’re facing the year-long Charlie Kirk hangover from their moment of drunkenness — the hangover of having to pay people, of having to reinstate people, of having the negative publicity.”

In the aftermath of Kirk’s killing, “we saw a coordinated effort to chill any speech critical of his legacy,” Viktoya Vilk, senior director for digital safety and free expression at PEN America, wrote in a statement to Mother Jones. More than 600 people were fired, suspended, investigated, or otherwise disciplined by their employers for their social media posts about Kirk after his death last fall, according to Reuters.

In the year since, dozens have challenged their firings. The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression has tracked 28 lawsuits filed in federal court by public employees who were terminated over their Kirk-related posts. Fifteen cases are active, and 13 have been settled, six of those for at least six figures, according to FIRE.

• Darren Michael, a theater professor at Austin Peay State University in Tennessee, was reinstated and awarded a $500,000 settlement from the university in January. Austin Peay State’s president also apologized to Michael, who was terminated after he reshared a 2023 article that quoted Kirk saying, “I think it’s worth to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the Second Amendment to protect our other God-given rights.”
• An administrative hearing judge ruled Mariah Roller, a Florida public middle school teacher, should be reinstated and receive back pay in August. Roller was suspended after posting criticism of Kirk’s support of the Second Amendment and writing “Bye Charlie,” with a waving emoji and fire emojis.
• Maria Ruhtenberg, a public defender in Iowa, returned to work in November 2025 after appealing her termination and received $125,000 in damages. Ruhtenberg had posted on her private Facebook account “you reap what you sow” and “live by the sword, die by the sword” after Kirk’s death.

Several other employees at public institutions received payouts from their employer, though they didn’t return to work. The University of Tennessee agreed to pay an assistant professor $1.9 million earlier this summer. It had fired the professor, Tamar Shirinian, after she commented on a friend’s Facebook that the “world is better off without [Kirk] in it.” An administrator at Ball State University in Indiana received a $225,000 payout in May. In total, colleges have paid nearly $3 million to employees they fired for their comments about Kirk.

As a private employee, Attiah’s case relied not on the First Amendment but on her contract as a member of the Post’s union, the Washington-Baltimore News Guild, whose collective bargaining agreement requires “good and sufficient cause for termination.”

“We don’t have robust speech protections for non-public employees. Without the union, you’re naked. You have no protection,” said Matthew W. Finkin, a research professor of law at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Only six percent of private-sector workers are unionized, Finkin added.

Still, Attiah sees a common thread between her case and the increasing number of settlements at public institutions.

“Collective hysteria and fear infected so many of the institutions that were supposed to be better than this,” Attiah said of the wave of firings. “[They were] supposed to rise above impulse, supposed to rise above making massive decisions based off of fear and emotion.”

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Meta Doesn’t Want to Be a Social Media Company Anymore

A nationwide social media addiction trial against Meta came to an abrupt end on Wednesday, with the company announcing a sweeping settlement with 52 attorneys general. As part of the proposed settlement, the company promised to pay around $18 billion to participating states over a ten-year period and enact a set of changes to make their apps, like Facebook and Instagram, supposedly safer for teenagers, including by enacting a default two-hour limit for teenage users and setting up “night” and “school” modes to block the apps or reduce notifications during certain times. In their press release, the company also pointedly urged rival companies like YouTube and TikTok to do the same.

“While this is an important step, the fact is that teens move fluidly between dozens of apps a day,” the announcement read. “All platforms should empower parents and support teens by putting the same measures in place, because we know that when teens are restricted on one app, they simply move to another.” (Though it was somewhat buried in the announcement, Meta also stipulated that it would only commit to enforcing its time limits and “night” modes for five years, but said it would extend that commitment to ten years “if industry peers sign on to the agreement.”)

All of this, of course, builds on a series of recent losses for Meta: the company also lost two phases of a similar trial in New Mexico, with the jury finding that the company misled consumers about the safety of its platforms and intentionally built its products to addict minors. The state also claimed that “Meta’s design features enabled pedophiles and predators to engage in child sexual exploitation on Meta’s platforms,” a claim the jury also agreed with.

These judgments won’t much affect Meta’s bottom line; the company made $200.97 billion in revenue last year. And they also will have virtually no effect on Meta’s emerging focus: becoming, primarily, an AI company. Meta told investors in January that its biggest expense was “employee compensation, driven by investments in technical talent. This includes 2026 hires to support our priority areas, particularly AI.”

And co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg released an addled 6,500 word essay-shaped object on August 10 titled “The Future is For Everyone,” outlining what he called his “positive AI” future. The essay amounted to an argument that AI is good and thus that Meta should be able to keep building data centers wherever it wants, with Zuckerberg claiming that the centers will be “water efficient” and create jobs. (A Meta contractor flushed bacteria-contaminated wastewater into public water systems while building a data center in Wyoming, a controversy Zuckerberg didn’t address.)

Meta has also aggressively promoted its AI agents for businesses, touting them in a press release as a way for businesses to “show up for every customer as if they had an infinite team behind them.” (Grandiose claims like these have gotten more complicated as Meta, like several other tech companies, have had to disclose that besides working as helpful little robot employees, their AI agents also supposedly hacked into another company’s internal systems during testing.)

The company’s other big AI-related product rollout is Meta Glasses; the company describes the glasses’ AI capabilities as “a helpful voice in your ear,” which is probably meant to be less chilling than it sounds. But the glasses, too, have been met with intense controversy over privacy and nonconsensual filming using the glasses. They are unpopular in a rich variety of settings: UK cinemas are considering banning them entirely, while Immigration and Customs Enforcement has banned employees from wearing them at work. HateAid, a German digital advocacy group, has lodged a criminal complaint seeking to stop them from being sold in that country at all.

Ironically, another bold Meta AI initiative was internal—and that, too, has been a disaster. Reuters’ Katie Paul reported on Wednesday that Zuckerberg had explored a plan to replace up to 60 percent of Meta staff with AI. Meta’s human staff responded with anger and alarm in internal chatrooms, Paul reported: “One person trolled Zuckerberg, sarcastically likening his internal announcement of an AI initiative for small businesses to Prometheus, the figure from Greek mythology, giving fire to humanity.” Meta staff also had to spend a remarkable amount of time cleaning up messes made by AI, Paul reported: “Major technical and security incidents, such as service disruptions and possible data leaks, spiked 40 percent from the previous year, with the time staffers had to spend “firefighting” them up 70 percent, according to the internal posts.”

Like virtually every other tech company, then, Meta executives have turned from social media as their core product, to a gauzy, pie-eyed future of AI as the future of work, business and everything else. Laws, legislation and jury settlements are often backwards-looking when it comes to tech companies. This particular settlement attempts to mitigate the harm of their current products, while companies like Meta are already focused, for better or much more likely worse, on what’s next.

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Here’s to Dolly: Union Member, Vaccine Hero, Literacy Giant, Staunch Gay Ally

Last night, I watched Straight Talk, the 1992 Dolly vehicle in which the singer plays, yes, a straight-talker from Arkansas who, through a series of highly predictable accidents, becomes Chicago’s biggest radio talk-show host, dishing out salty Dollyisms to the city’s brokenhearted.

Giddy with her sudden fame and riches, her character wants to buy champagne for an entire restaurant. “Money’s meant to be spent, right?” she coos to a love interest (James Woods! Of all people.) “What good’s it going to do anybody in the bottom of my panty drawer!”

For the country superstar, who died yesterday at 80, the wisecrack could have been a creed for her own life, one defined by extraordinary generosity and a fierce loyalty to the underdog.

Vaccine hero

As Covid tore through America, Dolly gave $1 million to Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville, which worked with the drug company Moderna to develop its cutting-edge vaccine. “Dolly gets a dose of her own medicine,” she quipped in a tweet accompanying a video of her getting the jab, in which she urged others to follow suit and called those still resisting the shot “chicken squat.” She even sang a reworked version of her megahit “Jolene”:

“Vaccine, vaccine, vaccine, vaccine, I’m begging of you please don’t hesitate.
Vaccine, vaccine, vaccine, vaccine, ’cause once you’re dead then that’s a bit too late.”

According to the New York Times, Dr. Mark Denison, who led the research, credited Parton’s donation with funding its critical early stages.

Paying her union dues

For nearly 60 years, Dolly Parton kept up her membership in the Nashville Association of Musicians (AFM Local 257)—a notable commitment in Tennessee, a right-to-work state with one of the nation’s lowest union participation rates.

In a statement posted to social media, the union hailed Parton “as a steadfast champion for working musicians” who filed union contracts “for gigs, sessions, and tours.” It added that “her extensive charitable work was never about public perception—she gave simply because she truly cared, always doing everything the right way to make sure that people were taken care of.”

The American Federation of Musicians, the major labor union representing professional musicians in North America, is paying tribute to Dolly Parton, who was a member of its Nashville Local 257 for 58 years.

AFM says that for decades, Dolly consistently filed union contracts for… pic.twitter.com/DhjhkU65nZ

— Yashar Ali (@yashar) August 25, 2026

Her greatest achievement: Books, books, books

Much has already been written about Parton’s celebrated Imagination Library, the literacy program she founded in East Tennessee in 1995 that would eventually send hundreds of millions of free books to enrolled children every month. It was inspired by her father, who Parton said could not read or write.

I learned about a lesser-known side of the charity when Dolly visited my home country, Australia, where Imagination Library runs a local partnership: Its strong focus on Indigenous authors and illustrators.

“We’re currently supporting 50,000 children and their families,” Dr. Lyndsey McKee, CEO of United Way, the local operator, told Australia’s ABC News Radio after Parton’s death. Ten percent of the books sent are First Nations titles, and 70 percent are Australian. Children on the program are nine times more likely to be interested in books, McKee said, citing the “absolute joy of reading books.” Adult literacy is improving too, she said, a ripple effect of helping families put reading at the heart of home life.

And Parton didn’t base the library in Sydney or Melbourne. She launched it in 2019 in the regional town of Tamworth—Australia’s country music mecca, our very own Nashville.

“Children are reading and they’re taking it in and the pictures are coming alive and it’s a lifelong skill.”

Lisa Rennie of the Tamworth Imagination Library celebrated Dolly’s impact on young Indigenous readers, a group for whom literacy remains a major challenge, in an interview with Australian broadcaster SBS. One Indigenous boy “pointed to the book and he said he never knew children of his color skin could fly a plane,” Rennie said. “So children are reading and they’re taking it in and the pictures are coming alive and it’s a lifelong skill.”

“That’s a wonderful gift that Dolly has given to us here in Tamworth,” Cheryl Brown, Tamworth Country Music Festival coordinator, told SBS. “And we will certainly endeavor to carry that on forever.”

The program also runs in the UK, Canada, and Ireland.

A strident LGBTQ ally

Dolly used to joke that if she was a man, she’d be a drag queen. In fact, she once entered a lookalike drag competition as herself—and lost. She was an indefatigable defender of her gay fans, guarding against hate and championing the underdog with her trademark compassion.

“They’ve made me the poster child, I think, only because I’m so outspoken as far as being accepting of people in general,” Parton told Larry King, who asked her in 2016 if her support attracted criticism from conservative groups. “I do not believe that we should criticize and judge other people. I think we should be accepting and loving. We are all God’s children. We are who we are, and we should be allowed to be who we are.”

“I got too much to do on my own to do God’s work too,” she added. “We are who we are. If you’re gay you’re gay, if you’re straight you’re straight.”

I’ll let Dolly speak for herself:

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Trump Just Used a $500 Million Clean Steel Grant to Fund a Coal Furnace

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

A $500 million Biden-era grant to decarbonize steelmaking has been refashioned by the Trump administration to upgrade a coal-fueled blast furnace in southern Ohio.

On Friday, Cleveland-Cliffs confirmed that the US Department of Energy had changed the scope of the previously awarded funding for Cliffs’ Middletown steel mill—the longtime economic engine of Vice President JD Vance’s hometown. Vance and Energy Secretary Chris Wright visited the plant on Friday to tout the federal investment.

“The DOE’s support for this project is a testament to the importance of preserving the blast furnace route to produce automotive-exposed grade steels in the US,” Cliffs CEO Lourenco Goncalves said in a statement. The Middletown plant makes steel used in the exposed parts of cars, trucks, and SUVs.

Today’s announcement makes official what Cliffs has been signaling would happen in recent months. The change of plans has drawn pushback from green-steel advocates and some Middletown residents, who say they are dismayed that funding meant to slash industrial emissions could potentially amp up local air pollution instead.

“Cleveland-Cliffs and JD Vance need to get rid of coal and go back to the original project that would clean up the air we breathe and improve our health,” Donna Ballinger, who lives in the shadows of the Middletown steel mill, said Friday in a news release shared by the Sierra Club.

Cliffs initially planned to use its half-billion-dollar award to replace its aging blast furnace with cleaner, hydrogen-ready technology and electric furnaces. In March 2024, the Biden administration’s DOE chose Middletown as the place to unveil its broader, $6.3 billion program for decarbonizing key US manufacturing sectors, which was primarily funded by the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act.

Globally, iron and steel production generates roughly 9 percent of human-caused CO2 emissions every year, and the vast majority of that pollution comes from using coal in blast furnaces. Replacing the centuries-old technology is considered key to limiting the worst impacts of climate change, and global efforts to clean up steelmaking are advancing, though in fits and starts.

Cliffs’ original project would’ve replaced coal with natural gas—and eventually hydrogen—eliminating roughly 1 million tons of planet-warming emissions. But after President Donald Trump took office in 2025, the Ohio-based steelmaker recommitted itself to using ​“beautiful coal” at the Middletown steel mill.

Under its current plan, Cliffs says it will refurbish and optimize the 73-year-old blast furnace so that it can run for potentially another two decades. The manufacturer will also install a cogeneration plant that uses waste gases from the blast furnace to generate steam and electricity for the steel mill’s operations. Cliffs said it will invest $500 million of its own money to match DOE’s grant.

Cliffs first outlined the new direction in a February air-permit application submitted to Ohio’s environmental regulator. It wasn’t clear then whether this work would be funded by the DOE, given the nature of the grant program.

However, in July, Goncalves said during an earnings call that the company aimed to redirect the $500 million grant to align with the Trump administration’s priorities. Friday’s announcement cements those plans, with the DOE having ​“established a framework for Cliffs to finalize negotiations and implementation plans” for the Middletown project, Cliffs said.

In a news release, the DOE said the company ​“determined that the business case for the original project scope no longer made sense given customers’ unwillingness to pay a ​‘green premium’ for steel. Working with the DOE, Cleveland-Cliffs identified a viable alternative that will upgrade and improve the efficiency of its existing coal-fired blast furnace” while also capturing waste gas.

A former DOE official noted that Congress legally mandated that the grant funding be used to, in the words of the Inflation Reduction Act, enable ​“advanced industrial technology”—defined as something ​“designed to accelerate greenhouse gas emission reduction progress to net-zero at an eligible facility.”

The Middletown project’s revised scope will move the steel mill away from achieving net-zero emissions, not toward it, the former official said.

As Cliffs sees it, the steelmaker is ​“going above and beyond a standard blast furnace reline, to include the most advanced technology available,” Goncalves said in Friday’s statement, referring to the cogeneration plant and other planned energy-efficiency improvements.

“Cleveland-Cliffs is making a decisive investment in the future of American steelmaking and manufacturing,” he said.

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Memes and Machine Guns: How Brandon Herrera Built a Path to Congress

If you want to get acquainted with Brandon Herrera, the gun influencer currently favored to win a tight congressional race in South Texas, his YouTube channel offers many opportunities. You could feast your eyes on his most-watched video, with 13 million views, wherein he uses a rifle and head and torso ballistics models to recreate the assassination of JFK. Or there’s the one where he calls a World War II-era machine gun the “original ghetto blaster” and goose-steps to the tune of Nazi military songs. In an episode of his podcast, he brags about owning a copy of Hitler’s Mein Kampf, and, departing from his interest in Nazis, he has also appeared with the neo-Confederate group Sons of Confederate Veterans and calls the Civil War the “War of Northern Aggression.”

In an article about Herrera’s excesses and his successes, the New York Times declined to print some of his most profane viral statements “because this is a family newspaper.” I suspect Mother Jones readers may prefer the unabridged edition, so here goes: In a 2023 video, Herrera referred to children as “cum trophies.” Of mothers’ views on current events, he said, “Just because you let somebody creampie you doesn’t mean I have to give a shit about your political opinions.” When Austin-American-Statesman reporter Faith Bugenhagen asked the Herrera campaign about those remarks, the team replied with a photo of a cream pie (the baked good, to be clear).

Herrera, whose campaign slogan, naturally, is “Let’s Go Brandon,” is what’s known in online parlance as an edgelord—an influencer whose entire brand consists of off-color jokes and offensive remarks designed to titillate, outrage, and garner attention. This gambit is not new; the shock jocks of talk radio’s glory days (think early Howard Stern) figured this formula out decades ago—though at 30, he wouldn’t remember all that.

But these days, shit posting alone is not enough to win votes; witness the recent crashing and burning of James Fishback, the Florida groyper who lost the Republican gubernatorial primary with only 10 percent of the vote. Or the case of Casey Putsch, the Ohio challenger to Vivek Ramaswamy’s run for governor whose campaign included antisemitic dogwhistles. In that primary, Putsch got just 17.5 percent of the vote.

What sets Herrera apart from these mere provocateurs is his massive online fanbase: 4.2 million subscribers on YouTube, where he is known as the AK Guy, after the abbreviation for Avtomat Kalashnikova, the Russian phrase for automatic rifle. His 12-year-old channel is a mix of gun history, memes, and genuine feats of engineering. In 2024, wearing a “More Liberty Less Government” t-shirt, he successfully built and fired the prototype of an AK-50, a long-range rifle that has long been the holy grail of automatic weapon enthusiasts.

Herrera in his AK-50 video.YouTube

Herrera’s success proves that a candidate can harness an online following into a formidable campaign—one whose true supportersare not voters in his district but rather a geographically dispersed, chronically online group of (mostly-male) fans. This model is adjacent to the “network state,” a concept coined by Silicon Valley entrepreneur and investor Balaji Srinivasan, a close friend of PayPal founder Peter Thiel and a former colleague of venture capital titan Marc Andreessen. In Srinivasan’s vision, digital networks can amass physical land, forming new sovereign nations. Herrera’s campaign proves they can do something potentially even more powerful: They can accumulate an impressive amount of political capital—thus transforming a scattered online audience into a powerful base and financing juggernaut.

Indeed, Herrera’s campaign is funded almost entirely by people outside his district. In recent months, he has solicited campaign donations on his YouTube channel, sometimes offering donors entry into a raffle for a Cold War-era collector’s item, an AC-556 machine gun. What he does with his donations is unclear; they are funneled through an unregistered opaque entity. Jacob Ware, an extremism researcher with Georgetown University and the author of the 2025 book God, Guns, and Sedition: Far-Right Terrorism in America, has observed this phenomenon firsthand. “In the past people would have idiosyncratic or individual ideas but wouldn’t be able to build political movements on that because they were just so disparate,” he said. But now, thanks in large part to social media, this scattered group of people can come together around a shared interest to back “a local candidate and pour their resources and hopes and dreams into him, thinking this is a foothold in the national political picture.”

What makes the success of this impassioned Second Amendment advocate even more improbable is that his district includes the sites of two high-profile mass shootings: Uvalde, where a gunman killed 19 children and two teachers in 2022, and El Paso, where a white supremacist killed 23 people in a Walmart in 2019. A poll earlier this year conducted by the gun control advocacy group Giffords surveyed 600 likely Texas Republican voters in the Senate runoff and found overwhelming support for firearm safety policies like background checks and red-flag laws.

Despite those headwinds, as of mid-August, Herrera was leading his opponent, Democrat Katy Padilla Stout, by six points. He has also garnered powerful endorsements from like-minded celebrities, including right-wing podcasters Tim Pool and Benny Johnson as well as a motley crew of organizations: the Freedom Caucus Fund, MAHA Action, and the National Women’s Prayer and Voting Army, to name a few.

Conspicuously absent is the National Rifle Association, which Herrera has criticized for being a fusty boomer relic that is overly accommodating to gun safety groups. After initially supporting Tony Gonzales, Herrera’s opponent in the primary, House Speaker Mike Johnson did an about-face this summer and began campaigning for Herrera. As someone who has tirelessly promoted traditional family values, Johnson is an awkward spokesman for a candidate whose statements about children and mothers are profane enough to exclude them from the pages of the New York Times. No such awkwardness faces President Donald Trump, who endorsed Herrera in a March post on Truth Social: “Brandon is strongly supported by many Highly Respected MAGA Warriors in Texas, and Republicans in the US House,” he wrote. “HE WILL NEVER LET YOU DOWN!”

Raised in a military family in the Fort Bragg-adjacent community of Fayetteville, North Carolina, Herrera’s interest in firearms began in middle school and obviously never waned. He dabbled in building guns as a teen. After a short undergrad stint as a pre-law student at a nearby Christian college, he dropped out to focus full time on manufacturing firearms through his business, The AK Guy Inc., and building his YouTube channel. In 2020, he moved to Texas, where he plugged into a thriving community of firearms enthusiasts and launched his gunsmithing company. The following year, he built and fired the AK-50, a move that immediately increased his prestige in the firearms world.

“If you vote against our interests, if you vote against gun rights, if you vote against the Constitution. We will challenge you, we will primary you, and we will win. We will take your fucking job.”

The Uvalde school shooting happened two years after Herrera moved to Texas, and in response, lawmakers in the state introduced new legislation to tighten firearm regulation. Tony Gonzales, the Republican who represented Texas’ 23rd district, was the only Republican to vote in favor of the new law—so Herrera took it upon himself to unseat him. “If you vote against our interests, if you vote against gun rights, if you vote against the Constitution,” he warned Gonzales at a 2024 gun rights rally in Colorado, “we will challenge you, we will primary you, and we will win. We will take your fucking job.”

Herrera did not, in fact, take Gonzales’ fucking job in the 2024 election cycle—he lost, but barely. Gonzales won by 1 percent, a margin of about 400 votes. Two years later in this election cycle, Herrera ran another extremely tight race, drawing 41 percent of the vote to Gonzales’ 43 percent, thus triggering a runoff. But two days after the primary, Gonzales suspended his campaign (and later resigned) after being accused of having hada sexual relationship with an employee who later committed suicide. In his victory speech, Herrera thanked “all those #TX23 constituents that support our campaign.”

Florida Congressman Matt Gaetz raises Brandon Herrera’s hand after both speak at a rally for Herrera in March 2024. Herrera was campaigning with Matt Gaetz before his runoff against US Rep. Tony Gonzales.Jessica Phelps/San Antonio Express-News; Getty

In reality, the support of all those #TX23 constituents appears to be dwarfed by the support of internet randos. Just shy of 96 percent of individual contributions to his campaign came from donors outside his district—and 84 percent were from a different state. The Federal Election Commission’s database revealed donors from nearly every state, from many walks of life. Top individual donors included former Florida Republican congressman Matt Gaetz and billionaire and current NASA administrator Jared Isaacman, each of whom has given the maximum individual donation of$12,000. Other donors of more than $1,000 included Silicon Valley managers, a Campbell’s soup factory worker, a technician at a Toyota plant, an associate producer at National Public Radio, and many retirees.

Herrera’s fundraising isn’t the only unconventional part of his campaign finance activities. His federal disclosures list a single mysterious entity as the recipient of more than 99 percent of the campaign’s spending—more than $2.7 million. That entity, a business called Texas Strategy Group, doesn’t appear to be listed in any registry as a commercial vendor. In May, the election spending watchdog Campaign Legal Center filed a complaint about Herrera’s campaign with the FEC, alleging that Texas Strategy Group is “a mere shell entity established to serve as a payment clearinghouse for the committees to conceal who they are actually paying.”

Herrera’s campaign didn’t respond to questions from Mother Jones about the Texas Strategy Group or anything else. The FEC, meanwhile, is unlikely to act on the allegations any time soon—because the agency currently has only two commissioners, and four are required to enforce campaign spending rules. This lack of oversight has created a free-for-all, creating a gray area for rules around campaign transparency, said Campaign Legal Center’s director for federal campaign finance reform, Saurav Ghosh. His organization has documented several other such cases recently—but the proportion of spending that Herrera’s campaign sends to Texas Strategy Group, he said, puts it “really at the far end of the spectrum.”

It’s unclear whether Herrera’s far-flung donors are concerned about where their money is going. David Meyers, a researcher with the campaign watchdog group Open Secrets, told me the nationalization of local races has become increasingly common, but even in that context, Herrera’s reliance on donors outside of his own district is “an outlier.” His YouTube following was likely playing a key role in driving those out-of-district contributions, Meyers said, and noted, “Having that kind of presence on an issue that people care about is going to help drive those donations.”

Real estate developer and investor Josh Abbotoy has thought a lot about the qualities that allow online communities to amass real-world power. Abbotoy is the founder of the Highland Rim Project, an initiative from a Christian venture capital firm called New Founding. The company seeks to build neighborhoods with Christian values in rural America in which, as it has outlined in the “philosophy” section of its website, “our patrimonial civic rights, chiefly those of property, free political speech and civilian armament, can be maintained and perpetuated.”

Tapping into communities that share those values has worked to Abbotoy’s advantage—he has sold land to friend groups “that wanted to go in together to buy a property somewhere, but they could never quite reach critical mass,” he said. “But then when you build like a neighborhood like that, they’re like, ‘Oh, we’ll just all buy in there.’” The people who have coalesced around Abbotoy’s Highland Rim Project are not the same as Herrera’s gun-fanatic followers, but both are striking examples of the increasing political and economic relevance of shared-interest digital communities: in Abbotoy’s case, an IRL community, and in Herrera’s, a formidable, galvanized political force.

Of course, there are other reasons for Herrera’s success. Jason Blazakis, a researcher who oversees Middlebury College’s Center on Terrorism, Extremism, and Counterterrorism, sees House Speaker Mike Johnson’s endorsement as a shrewd political move aimed at uniting an increasingly fractured national base. Johnson’s endorsement of Herrera, he added, could even be interpreted as an “olive branch” between the pro-Israel camp, which Johnson supports, and Herrera-aligned America-first anti-interventionists. “It makes sense to see someone like Johnson try to prop up someone like Herrera to show that there is a broad tent within the Republican Party,” despite Herrera’s profane persona being out of step with Johnson’s wholesome image, he said.

When news outlets have confronted Herrera with his most controversial statements, Herrera has dismissed them; he was obviously being ironic, he says, and if you didn’t understand that, you are clearly a humorless scold. As he told the New York Times, “I know the difference between the way that you speak in a comedy performance, so to speak, and the way that you speak in a political environment.”

But some of his followers appear to be taking him literally. Take Robin Westman, the gunman who killed two children and injured 17 people at a Catholic church in Minneapolis before taking his own life last year. In a video he made shortly before his deadly rampage, Westman spoke favorably of Herrera. “He and I had a conversation, a brief conversation,” Westman said. “We agreed on a lot of things. So, y’all should vote for Brandon Herrera for president.”

Herrera later said in a tweet he didn’t remember meeting Westman, and that he was “sickened and angry about this clearly hate-motivated attack on innocent children, and disgusted that my name came out of this demon’s mouth.”

But his followers, more than a thousand of whom rushed to defend him in the comments on that tweet, didn’t appear to be concerned. “You were clearly only singled out by the shooter as a ridiculous attempt to smear your name,” tweeted an X account named Roman Helmet Guy. “They will always come for the most effective voices in any natural freedom movement,” added a user named Patri0t. “This is planned.” A third saw it as a political sign. “If this isn’t a sign that Brandon Herrera is the right guy for the job,” the user wrote, “I don’t know what is.”

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The Cult and Corruption of Cryptocurrency

Ben McKenzie might seem like an unlikely choice to launch an investigation into the complicated world of cryptocurrency. But the television actor known for shows like The O.C. and Gotham did exactly that.

His documentary film, Everyone Is Lying to You for Money, is a deep dive into the people and companies at the heart of crypto. The film focuses on McKenzie’s journey to discover why people continue to invest in digital currency even while knowing the risks of this highly under-regulated market.

“I think crypto is not only not the future of money, it’s the past of money,” he tells host Al Letson. “And it’s something we’ve tried before and it’s failed.”

On this week’s More To The Story, McKenzie shares his concerns for what he calls the cult-like behavior of those investing in digital currency, talks about his interview with disgraced FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried just months before his arrest, and discusses the poignant conversations he had with everyday people who trusted the power of digital currency and lost everything—yet are still crypto believers.

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

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Canada Is Spending Billions to Help Its Workers Survive Our Tariffs

On Tuesday, Canadian officials announced funding to back businesses, workers, and industries, as they implement dollar-for-dollar counter-tariffs on the US in response to the Trump administration’s newly imposed 50 percent tariffs on roughly $20 billion worth of Canadian imports.

Senior members of Canada’s government announced a support package worth $7.5 billion Canadian dollars, or about $5.4 billionUS, including $3 million in non-repayable loans for every small business and a further $2 million in interest-free loans—even for businesses only indirectly affected by tariffs.

Small and medium-sized businesses directly affected will be able to apply for a further $5 million through Canada’s business development bank, and the Canadian government has set aside $2 billion for medium-sized and large firms, more than half a billion dollars for retraining workers whose industries are affected by tariffs, and a one-year extension on temporary employment insurance benefits Canada already issued in response to the start of Trump’s trade war with Canada last year.

The package, and Canada’s reciprocal tariff plan, come after US-Canada trade negotiations collapsed late last week. According to the New York Times, discussions on automobiles, steel, and aluminum—among Canada’s key industries—were the first major setback: Canada’s proposal to lower tariffs on automobiles went beyond what the Trump administration deemed acceptable. American companies lobbied the Department of Commerce and other White House officials to “preserve their protections.”

While the plan aims more at support for businesses than direct funds for individual Canadians, it is a meaningful step that far exceeds any the Trump administration has taken or tried to take, with the White House largely ignoring the foreseeable harm of its tariffs on American workers and consumers.

According to data released by the Center for American Progress, in the 10 months following the Trump administration’s “Liberation Day” tariffs last April—which introduced a baseline 10-percent tariff on all imported goods—the US lost 89,000 manufacturing jobs and 124,000 transportation and warehousing jobs, two industries that Trump’s tariffs severely affected. In fact, nearly every state has experienced blue-collar job losses as a result of the tariff agenda, even as the policies deliver few apparent results in improving US manufacturing or lowering the trade deficit.

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Deal /No Deal, Trump’s Iran Contradictions

On March 9, President Donald Trump said the war in Iran was “very complete, pretty much.” That was Day 10 of the conflict. Now it’s nearly Day 180.

After Trump and Israel launched “Operation Epic Fury” against Iran on February 28, the president predicted a quick military victory and said “there will be no deal with Iran except UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER.” Within weeks, the hardline stance gave way to negotiations aimed at a deal that would deliver the core US demands of Iranian denuclearization and the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz.

Six months later, there’s still no deal and no end date to a conflict that has cost the US $37.5 billion, according to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s July testimony to Congress. And this week, the administration pivoted again, unveiling “Operation Economic Outcast,” a sweeping sanctions campaign to isolate Iran from the global financial system, a tacit admission that six months of bombing didn’t get the job done.

In between, there has been a long trail of promises that a deal with Iran was close, mixed with threats that the US would “finish them off” if it wasn’t. Watch the timeline in Trump’s own words.

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SCOTUS Hands Trump a Temporary Win In His Crusade to Restrict Mail Voting

The Supreme Court on Monday temporarily handed President Trump a key victory in his crusade to restrict mail-in voting. The unsigned opinion by the court’s conservative majority, issued over dissents from the three Democratic appointees, said it was too soon for states to challenge Trump’s executive order from March 2026 severely restricting mail-in voting because they had not shown how they would be harmed by it.

“This ruling violates well-established precedents concerning this Court’s equitable discretion and needlessly injects chaos and uncertainty into the upcoming midterm elections,” Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote in dissent. “It also lets another shoe drop in the Kafkaesque nightmare that our precedents have been steadily creating for certain plaintiffs who seek to bring election-related challenges. The Court has held for a while now that even valid election-related legal claims can come too late. Today’s revelation is that such claims can also come too early—never mind that an election is looming and related harms
are presently occurring. Never mind, too, that the Government (which controls the timing of proposed and final rules) can easily game the system.”

While not a ruling on the merits of the executive order, the Court’s decision still overrules a series of federal court rulings blocking that order, which represents an unprecedented attempt by the Trump administration to seize control of election administration from the states, based on Trump’s demands for Republicans to “nationalize the voting” and “take over” the voting system.

It instructs the Department of Homeland Security to create lists of voters it deems citizens in each state, essentially overriding state voter rolls, and directs the Postal Service to only deliver mail-in ballots to voters on those lists, leading to the possibility that a significant number of voters will not receive mail-in ballots if the lists are inaccurate. (Trump, despite his frequent tirades against the practice, voted by mail in Florida’s primary last month, the second time this year he has done so in Florida.)

“The consequences of allowing such transformative changes to take effect so close to this fall’s elections would be extreme,” wrote the 23 states, led by California, that are challenging the executive order. “Because of the high risk of errors and the limited window for correcting mistakes, many of the millions of voters who rely on mail voting—especially voters with disabilities and those in rural areas—would likely be denied mail ballots and, as a result, disenfranchised. Many more voters would be confused—either because they wouldn’t receive their mail ballots or would fear that USPS would fail to deliver their voted ballots to state officials for tabulation.”

The Postal Service subsequently issued a new rule on August 21 specifying that it will only deliver mail-in ballots if states hand over their voter rolls to DHS—a form of extortion that has generated furious pushback from election officials. (The Department of Justice has sued 30 states to get access to their voter rolls and is 0-23 in federal court so far.) The executive order also specifies that election officials could be criminally prosecuted if they don’t comply with the administration’s demands.

“The EO directs unprecedented levels of involvement by federal officials in how states administer elections,” a majority of judges on the First Circuit Court of Appeals ruled last month. “Regardless of the details of how federal officials implement the EO, at its core, the EO contemplates that states will have to coordinate with DHS and USPS to ensure that various lists, whether maintained by the agencies or the states, reflect current mail-voter information (which can change daily up until Election Day), or else risk disenfranchisement for certain voters and penalties for states and their officials.”

As the Supreme Court considered the case for weeks, a federal district court issued a nationwide injunction on August 11 against the executive order, halting the Postal Service from taking any steps to implement it. That injunction remains in effect despite the Supreme Court’s order on Monday.

Voting rights groups argued in court over the weekend that the Postal Service’s decision in late August to finalize the rule specifying that mail-in ballots can only be delivered in states that hand over their voter rolls to the administration violated that injunction.

“By issuing this final rule, the Trump administration has flouted the court’s injunction,” those voting rights groups, including the ACLU and League of Women Voters, said in a statement. “The final rule threatens further chaos for voters, civic organizations, and election officials by seeking to impose last-minute changes to mail voting rules. Enforcement of the court’s preliminary injunction is necessary to hold this administration accountable for its unlawful action and make clear that voters can confidently cast their mail ballot free from federal interference this November.”

The Supreme Court’s ruling may only be a temporary win for Trump. “The Court’s disposition of this application does not mean that any measure taken by the Government to implement the Order will necessarily be lawful,” the Court wrote. “On that score, time will tell.”

States can renew their legal challenges to the executive order once DHS and USPS finalize their plans to implement it—and it may be too late to implement the order regardless, with the midterms roughly 70 days away. However, the Court’s decision allowing the executive order to proceed “contributes to pre-election chaos instead of quashing it,” Justice Jackson wrote.

“To be sure, the Court has not foreclosed States from challenging this blatantly unconstitutional Order,” Jackson continued. “But it declines to explain when, exactly, is the right time to bring a meritorious election-rule claim challenging unconstitutional interference with electoral processes. The majority
just signals that these claimants had to wait—even though the election cycle had started and despite facing pocketbook costs, threats of prosecution, and an affront to their sovereignty—before receiving the relief to which they are likely entitled.”

Trump’s two executive orders restricting ballot access, in 2025 and 2026, were both blocked for violating the Constitution’s clear mandate that states, with oversight from Congress, have the authority to run their elections. “The Constitution does not grant the President any specific powers over elections, ” District Judge Indira Talwani, a Barack Obama appointee, wrote in June. Talwani may soon issue a new injunction blocking the Postal Service’s new rule.

The Supreme Court’s decision nonetheless comes at a time when Trump is escalating his attempts to interfere in the midterm elections. Though his primetime speech on “election integrity” last month was widely regarded as a dud, the president’s false accusation that China interfered in the 2020 election has led to renewed fears that he could use fake claims of foreign interference as a basis to declare a national emergency so that he can attempt to seize control of the voting system.

And the Supreme Court has already green-lit a key part of Trump’s effort to tilt the midterms in the GOP’s favor by destroying the Voting Rights Act and approving the unprecedented mid-decade gerrymandering that has allowed Republicans to draw 10 more GOP-friendly seats in the race for the House of Representatives. That has made it much harder for Democrats to retake the chamber despite Trump’s record-low approval ratings.

On Monday, Justice Jackson perfectly summed up how the Court’s GOP-appointed majority has enabled Trump’s efforts to interfere in the midterms. “Taking its eye off the ball, the majority misses the Government’s actual objective: to secure our imprimatur for its effort to foment chaos ahead of the November elections,” she wrote.

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