Your Questions About Trump, Putin, and Russia’s Election Interference Answered

On Friday morning, I hosted a Reddit AMA, in which participants could ask me anything. But the questions were practically all related to my new book: How Russia Won: Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, and the Fight for America. The queries were smart, and none were vituperative—which was surprising given that this topic has become so toxic because of Trump’s BS insistence that “Russia, Russia, Russia” is a Deep State “hoax” and “witch hunt” orchestrated to destroy him. Here’s an excerpt of the Reddit conversation. You can learn more about the book at HowRussiaWon.com.

With Russia’s equivalent of midterm elections happening today, tomorrow, and on Sunday, what do you think the level of US interference in Russia’s election is?

Also, historically—say, from the 1990s to now, if we take Russia’s interference in the US as 100 percent—where would you put US interference in Russia? Are the methods employed similar? Different?

DC: We know that historically, Russia has long accused the US and the West of intervening in its domestic affairs. And indeed, throughout the Cold War, the US ran covert actions around the world that intervened in elections and operations that helped overturn democratically elected governments (such as in Iran, Guatemala, and Chile).

But I’ve seen no evidence that the US is doing anything like that in recent years in Russia. Of course, there are intelligence operations that target Russia and Putin. But given that Russia is a closed society, without free media, in which dissidence is crushed and critics imprisoned and killed, there’s much less opportunity for the sort of information operations that Russia can target at an open society like the US and European nations.

Are there signs that the war with Ukraine has affected their ability to interfere with our election due to the allocation of resources?

DC: After Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, much of the Russian disinformation operations focused on the war.

Two main lines of false narrative were purported corruption (Zelenskyy is using millions of dollars to buy yachts!) and the bogus charge that the US was running bioweapons labs in Ukraine—an allegation that Tucker Carlson, Tulsi Gabbard, and other MAGA/right-wing influencers embraced and amplified (as I detail in my book).

But during the 2024 campaign, Russian intelligence pivoted to direct its disinfo ops toward the US election—to disparage Biden and then Harris and Walz. And in recent days, we have seen one of those disinfo networks—dubbed Matryoshka—which I wrote about in the book, start to target the midterms to disparage Democrats and encourage votes for the GOP.

Do you have specific examples of what these disinformation campaigns looked like, what each of their intents was, and the platforms they used to do so?

The book is full of examples. Here’s one: During the 2024 campaign, a Russian disinformation operator—an American fugitive cop living in Moscow named John Mark Dougan—appeared on a show on Rumble, a conservative video platform, hosted by a QAnoner and presented a man (in silhouette with his voice altered) who claimed he had been a Kazakhstan exchange student at the Minnesota high school where Gov. Tim Walz had once taught and coached football.

This anonymous person said Walz had inappropriately touched him. This baseless allegation—it turned out there were no exchange students from Kazakhstan at the time—was then spread across a network of phony websites set up by Dougan that had real-sounding names: The Boston Times, the New York News Daily, the Miami Chronicle, and was soon picked up by American social media users and went viral across assorted social media platforms.

“The best disinformation ops produce false narratives that become embraced and spread by authentic accounts—that is, real Americans.”

Eventually, Jack Posobiec, a MAGA influencer who gave us the bonkers Pizzagate conspiracy theory and was then working for the Trump campaign, and Candace Owens, another MAGA influencer, amplified this allegation. It’s a good bet that this baseless charge was seen by over 10 million Americans.

Now, how do you stop something like that? Well, social media platforms could do moderating. More importantly, political operatives and influencers could behave more responsibly. I know. Hah! Not in the world of Trump. But we also can try to encourage everyone to be more discerning in what they pass along. Again, hah! This is a problem. Disinfo ops work best when the phony narratives are embraced and transmitted by real people. How to stop that is a challenge.

When Russia interferes using influencers, are the influencers even aware? Or does Russia just pump money into influencers they believe have the talking points that disrupt or push their agenda?

DC: The best disinformation ops produce false narratives that become embraced and spread by authentic accounts—that is, real Americans.

And we have seen numerous cases in which Russian disinfo slipped into US social media is then widely amplified by MAGA influencers and even Republican officeholders. The book is full of examples of this. And there’s the Tenet Media case, in which RT, the Russian state-controlled propaganda outlet, funneled $10 million to MAGA influencers, including Benny Johnson and Tim Pool, who claim they did not know the exorbitant payments they were receiving—far above normal levels—came from Moscow.

But you have to ask: Why was Russia willing to provide millions to these pro-Trump influencers? What does it say about their role in the information ecosystem?
Trump lifted restrictions on using US-supplied weapons for long-distance strikes inside Russia proper, including providing targeting assistance. The blockade of Venezuela saw a further crackdown on the shadow fleet, further restricting Russia’s export capacity. The Russia-friendly Assad regime in Syria has collapsed, and the Russian forces stationed there have been forced to flee.

Why exactly do you think Putin is a fan of Trump despite all that?

DC: I think the answer is obvious. Putin’s key goal is to weaken and divide the Western alliance. Trump is single-handedly doing that, dumping on NATO, threatening Canada, and declaring his intention to grab Greenland. He has cut back on assistance to Ukraine and provided Putin plenty of leeway in that war. Remember when Trump said he would end that war in 24 hours? Well, he has barely tried.

“Russia’s interventions in the 2020 and 2024 elections were all aimed at harming the Democrats and helping Trump.”

And most recently, he has sided with Putin, with his son-in-law declaring Ukraine should give up land to end the war—Putin’s position. And Trump has definitely weakened the US. Look at the recent news about countries pulling out of their investments in the US. Our position throughout the world is weaker. Our economy is weaker. Trump denigrates American democracy, which is a key part of Putin’s message: You cannot rely on democracy; you need autocratic leadership to have a strong nation.

True, not everything Trump has done has been to Putin’s benefit. He attacked an ally of Putin: Iran. But that has created such upheaval and weakened the US military that it has had benefits for Putin, including raising the value of Russia’s oil reserves.

Does Russia want a specific party in power? Or just to sow division and chaos?

DC: It’s pretty clear that when Russia started to mess with US elections in 2015, its aim was to sow discord and impede the Clinton campaign. Putin hated Clinton—especially for criticizing the 2011 Russian parliamentary elections as fraudulent (which they probably were).

But as Trump became the nominee, the Russian operation included in its goals boosting his campaign. The evidence for this is pretty solid, as I explain in the book. That was the finding of the intel community in early 2017. And the Senate Intelligence Committee released a massive bipartisan 966-page report in August 2020—which got little attention—on the Russian attack on the 2016 election that concluded Putin’s aims had included helping Trump.

Who was chair of the committee at the time and signed off on this conclusion? A guy named Marco Rubio. And, as I detail in the book, Russia’s subsequent interventions in the 2020 and 2024 elections were all aimed at harming the Democrats and helping Trump. Though they do like to increase discord and conflict, as well.

Did you get to work with Nick Offerman for the video about your book?

DC: I did, and it was both a joy and a thrill to work with him as he recorded the narration, particularly because he asked for notes on his reading of the lines and generously considered suggestions from me and our producer.

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What Else Is the Pentagon Hiding From Us?

More US military personnel have reportedly died during the ongoing Iran war than the Pentagon has shared publicly, the latest and most serious evidence of the Trump administration’s ongoing cover-up around disastrous military failures in that conflict.

In a Washington Post report released Friday, six US officials with knowledge of internal Defense Department data on military casualties, attested that at least 22 service members have died. The Pentagon’s public database reports 14 military casualties as of Friday as a result of Operation Epic Fury, which began with the first US and Israeli strikes on Iran in February. Four more deaths are labeled in a separate category, “Overseas Operations,” despite the Defense Department previously reporting 18 deaths related to Iran.

In July, the New York Times reported that one reason the Trump administration removed four service members who were killed days earlier from the casualty list—three in Jordan and one in northern Iraq—was that they died after the president declared a ceasefire in April.

One official told the Post that the four additional deaths were not all directly tied to the Iran war, but included military personnel who were separately stationed in the Middle East.

When a US service member’s death is formally accounted for, the military initiates an investigation to determine whether they died while performing official duties. The evaluation directly affects the amount of benefits their families receive.

The listed cause of military deaths directly affects the amount of benefits that their families receive.

The Trump administration also appears to be hiding the extent of damage to US military bases. Earlier this week, CBS News shared photos leaked by active service members of a destroyed Boeing aircraft in an Air Force base in Saudi Arabia. Other photos show destroyed buildings and military barracks at the base. Camp Buehring, a US staging post in Kuwait, had damaged aircraft, as well as armored vehicles, that the administration had not previously acknowledged.

In addition, the Defense Department’s inspector general released a report earlier this week that the war in Iran “has resulted in strategic inventory shortfalls and revealed industrial base bottlenecks for munitions resupply.” In the first four months, the inspector general valued the cost of military operations at $33.4 billion, not accounting for costs of damaged facilities, while the Trump administration strugglesto accelerate weapons production—a move that the report says has “significant lead times.”

Trump’s attempts to conceal those failures—with even less believable claims that the US has “wiped every single force in Iran out very completely” or that the war is “pretty much” over—are prolonging a war that the White House seems determined to lose, and that haskilled thousands of people across the region.

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“Near a Breaking Point:” Trump Is Failing Firefighters in an Intense Burn Season

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

Firefighters battling enormous wildfires in the United States say the federal government is failing them at a time when supercharged blazes have made their jobs exponentially more dangerous.

While the US continues to grapple with a critical shortage of federal firefighters—with especially large gaps in essential management positions—the Trump administration has increased pressure on firefighting forces to rapidly and aggressively contain the flames.

Nine firefighters who spoke to The Guardian under the condition of anonymity because they are barred from disclosing the information, as well as several retired firefighters, described how spread-thin crews are being pushed to their limits amid an unrelenting and extreme year of fire.

“Accidents have been through the roof,” one firefighter said, adding that widespread fatigue has set in after being on near-nonstop fire assignments since April. Another firefighter, who works as part of a specializedhelicoptercrew, said he’s had to opt out of assignments this year because they were too high-risk or ill-advised.

The job has always carried inherent risks, especially as the climate crisis continues to turn up the dial, creating blazes that are harder to battle. But this year has been a particularly dangerous one.

“Firefighting capacity is kind of like wages, and the fire environment is like inflation—it has not kept up.”

Wildfires are overrunning firefighters at the highest rate in two decades, according to data from the Wildland Fire Lessons Learned Center, a federal agency. By mid-August there had already been 12 entrapments—exceptionally dangerous situations when flames roar into pre-established safety zones or block firefighter escape routes. That’s the highest number in 20 years, Reuters reported.

There have been 14 reported on-duty fatalities this year, including three firefighters who died battling Colorado’s Knowles fire. An additional member of their crew succumbed to his injuries weeks later and another was severely burned. The incident was the most deadly entrapment in 13 years.

Timothy Ingalsbee, a fire ecologist who began his career as a wildland firefighter with the US Forest Service (USFS), said he’s heard from safety officers that there has been a notable spike in burn injuries this year, a sign he attributes to “crews being pushed into aggressive direct attack in times when it is not effective.”

Ingalsbee is the executive director of Firefighters United for Safety, Ethics and Ecology, a nonprofit he cofounded in an effort to increase both safety and sustainability in firefighting, and he said he’s concerned that operations are heading in the wrong direction on both fronts.

“Climate change is half the explanation,” Ingalsbee said, for what he called “the perfect firestorm for a really bad season for firefighting.”

The Department of the Interior and the USFS did not respond to requests for comment from the Guardian or answer questions on the comprehensive number of injuries reported so far this year.

But in a letter issued last week to the heads of the US Department of the Interior and the US Department of Agriculture (USDA), which oversees the USFS, five senators said personnel have had to work extended assignments, requests for crews went unfilled in communities across the west, and that the agencies are facing the depletion of their combined $6 billion suppression budget with weeks left to go before the highest fire risks subside.

The letter claimed “that teams have worked more fires than is safe, using temporary supervisory structures because fully qualified personnel are not available.”

Signed jointly by Sens. Michael Bennet, Alex Padilla, Ron Wyden, Adam Schiff, and John Hickenlooper, they added: “This is exceptionally concerning given the high wildland firefighter fatality rate this season.”

“We’re going to kill people trying to put out those last couple percent and we’re going to spend a lot of money doing it.”

Taskforce leaders, division supervisors and heavy equipment bosses are essential to run large firefighting operations, and require decades of experience. Losses in these on-the-ground leadership roles have become extremely difficult to replace. Meanwhile, firefighters said the federal government has failed to scale up staffing levels overall to meet the rising needs, pushing resources to the brink season after season.

“Firefighting capacity is kind of like wages, and the fire environment is like inflation—it has not kept up,” said one fire captain who works out of the Pacific north-west.

“We have had shortages for 20 years—and it’s only gotten worse,” said Bobbie Scopa, a retired fire chief who now serves as a vice-president for the firefighter advocacy group Grassroots Wildland Firefighters. As the need for resources grew and limited numbers of leaders grew scarce, responsibilities were sometimes doubled up. “That sets everyone up for failure,” Scopa said. “It is not like we are trying to add bureaucracy—we are trying to keep people alive.”

The picture stands in stark contrast to the one painted by Tom Schultz, the USFS chief, who has repeatedly assured lawmakers and the public that the agency’s firefighting workforce is at full capacity.

“Our firefighting workforce is stronger than at any point in recent years,” Schultz said in testimony to a congressional subcommittee in July. “We are fully staffed and equipped to respond aggressively to every unplanned ignition.”

The Trump administration has pushed for more aggressive tactics, at times at the expense of firefighter safety, several firefighters said.

Brooke Rollins, the US agriculture secretary, and Interior Secretary Doug Burgum both issued directives this year that prioritize direct attack, a strategy that can be more risky.

Officials have also mandated a return to fast and full suppression, shifting away from recent policies that took a softer approach to containing flames that could be beneficial to a landscape.

“Their roster is depleted and there doesn’t seem to be any strategic prioritization.”

Agency leaders have argued a more aggressive approach is necessary to ensure firefighters and communities are protected as conditions set the stage for more catastrophic fires. But critics, which include many fire ecologists and firefighter advocates, have raised concerns the approach will only perpetuate a cycle that contributed to the current crisis—leaving more vegetation on parched landscapes to burn in the future—and will more quickly exhaust limited resources.

Scientists, forest managers and other fire experts have advocated for allowing some fires to burn, especially those far from communities or in places that are difficult or dangerous for firefighters to reach.

Firefighters already stop 98 percent of fires before they spread. The administration wants to tighten that gap. “We’re going to kill people trying to put out those last couple percent and we’re going to spend a lot of money doing it,” Scopa said.

Meanwhile, the busy and destructive season has left little room for rest. Crews have spent months going from fire to fire. By mid-September, roughly 54,400 blazes have burned through more than 8.4 million acres, 149 percent of the 10-year average.

The US was classified at “preparedness level 5” (PL5)—the highest level, and one that indicates resources are fully deployed—for 48 consecutive days, close to double the 10-year average for days at the level per year.

Long seasons of sleep deprivation, smoke inhalation, exhaustion and malnutrition have a cumulative effect, said Ingalsbee. “It impacts your ability to think clearly and act decisively to keep you and your crew members safe.”

The level dropped to PL4 on 4 September and then to PL3 a few days later. But thousands of firefighters are still committed across the US. There may still be months left to go before the highest risks fully subside. “There are some crews near the breaking point,” Ingalsbee said. “Their roster is depleted and there doesn’t seem to be any strategic prioritization where they are sent.”

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Cory Mills’ Career Imploded. Then His Grenade Factory Exploded.

Last month, Cory Mills’ career in Congress imploded when the Florida Republican lost his primary by 13 points. Now part of a weapons facility operated by a company that Mills co-owns has exploded.

The incident occurred on Wednesday evening at a Pacem Defense facility in northern Florida and caused no injuries, the Taylor County Sheriff’s Office said in a statement. Mills, who entered Congress in 2023, has said that he stepped away from running his arms companies years ago, but he still owns a majority stake in Pacem Defense, according to his most recent congressional financial disclosure.

The explosion at Pacem Defense, which specialized in making and selling high explosive grenades to foreign militaries, was apparently massive. The Taylor County Sheriff’s Office said in its statement that one building at the Pacem facility sustained “significant damage” in the explosion, adding on Facebook that “[m]any residents heard and felt” it. One person who lives about three miles away from the facility wrote on the site that her brick home started shaking.

The sheriff’s office said that neither of the workers who were at Pacem Defense at the time of the explosion was harmed. It added that the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, the Department of Defense, and the Florida state Fire Marshal’s office are now involved in the investigation.

The blowup is only the latest challenge for Mills. Since 2025, the scandal-plagued Florida man has been accused of stealing valor, placed under a restraining order by a judge after subjecting an ex-girlfriend to “dating violence” via cyberstalking, and was nearly arrested after being accused of domestic assault by a different girlfriend. (That partner later retracted the allegation, and no charges were filed.) As I reported in a February profile of Mills, the full list is much longer.

Nevertheless, Mills managed to secure Donald Trump’s “Complete and Total Endorsement” earlier this year. Despite that support, Mills was easily defeated in his August primary by Ryan Elijah, a former local TV news anchor.

In late 2025, Pacem indefinitely furloughed many of its employees after racking up tens of millions of dollars in debt, according to court records.It has remained largely shuttered since then, a former employee told me on Thursday. (In March, Craig Pittman called the Pacem facility a “ticking time bomb.”)

According to a Florida court filing, Pacem ended up owing a Canadian lender more than $66 million. In another case, Pacem is subject to an order under which it is obligated to pay $8 million to an arms company that bought grenades from Pacem but never received them. A status update submitted in federal court on Wednesday states that Pacem has still not “paid any portion of the judgment amount.”

Mills’ financial disclosure states that he also maintains a 100 percent interest in Pacem Estate Holdings, the real estate entity that owns the site where the explosion on Wednesday occurred. According to court records, Pacem Estate Holdings continued to receive $12,000 per month in rent from another Pacem entity while the company’s employees were out of work.

Last Thursday, after remaining mostly silent on social media in the wake of his primary defeat, Mills struck a defiant tone on X—posing in front of a wall of fire and water in a tight polo with a Swiss watch that can sell for tens of thousands of dollars.

A Phoenix rises from the ashes. Our fight is far from over! pic.twitter.com/wVa4rB5LhP

— Cory Mills (@CoryMillsFL) September 10, 2026

“A Phoenix rises from the ashes,” Mills declared. Six days later, the ashes appear to have become real.

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Killer AI Is Already Here. We’re Using It in Iran.

More than 60 percent of Americans believe it’s at least moderately likely that artificial intelligence will kill us all, according to a Politico survey released Wednesday.

It’s easy to see why. Arguments that AI companies are “gambling with our lives” have dominated the news this week. But despite our fear that AI might kill us en masse, another new poll shows that very few Americans know our government is already using AI to do just that abroad.

The US-Israel war on Iran is not only the least popular war the United States has ever waged, but also represents an unprecedented application of AI in warfare. New data from the Institute for Global Affairs and YouGov shows that the present weaponization of AI has flown under the radar, with most Americans largely unaware of our own military’s AI use.

“People would be pretty shocked that what they’re using for their homework or to summarize emails is also being used by intelligence officers.”

Only 8 percent of Americans have heard “a lot” about the military’s use of AI in the war with Iran. The majority, almost two thirds, have heard “only a little,” and four in ten have heard “nothing at all.”

“We wanted to get a gut check on, do Americans know this is happening?” survey co-author Jonathan Guyer said in an interview. Despite a long history of US military development eventually boomeranging back home, the answer to that question might be “no”—notwithstanding Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s relentless messaging about the “AI-first Department of War.”

“People would be pretty shocked that what they’re using for their homework or to summarize emails is also being used by intelligence officers,” Guyer said.

Cameron Stanley, the chief digital and artificial intelligence officer for the Department of Defense, wrote in June that xAI’s Grok “enabled U.S. forces to deploy over 2,000 munitions to 2,000 distinct targets within 96 hours during Operation Epic Fury.”

That admission, part of the administration’s case for the national security importance of Elon Musk’s data centers, is just the tip of the iceberg. The Pentagon’s Maven Smart System, built by Palantir, also uses Anthropic’s Claude AI—the same program that people use to create AI boyfriends for themselves or draft awkward texts to their roommates—to “semi-autonomously rank targets by strategic importance, drafting automated legal justifications for each strike along the way,” according to Katie Livingstone of Military Times.

Claude’s target selection is reportedly only about 60 percent accurate in good conditions, 30 percent accurate in bad weather. So Pentagon officials claim there’s always a human in the loop when selecting who to bomb.

“We follow the law and humans make decisions,” Hegseth told the Senate Armed Services Committee in May. “AI is not making lethal decisions.”

But it’s making lethal recommendations, which don’t appear to receive enough human oversight to prevent atrocities. In February, the US military fired Tomahawk missiles directly at a girls’ school in Minab, Iran and killed over 150 people—most of them young children. Seven months later, UN experts called the strike a crime against humanity.

As AI companies enter the battlefield, “the scale of atrocities committed…is rising correspondingly.”

In the immediate aftermath of the attack, much of the US news coverage focused on whether Claude was used to select the school as a target. But the fact that a human was at some pointinvolved does not lessen the harm done.

At a congressional human rights hearing September 16, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace’s Steven Feldstein explained how AI has facilitated a massive ramp-up in the speed of missile target selection.

“In the Iran war, during the first week of hostilities alone, the Pentagon reported it had struck more than 3,000 targets,” Feldstein said. By the time a ceasefire was announced 38 days later, that number of targets had risen to 13,000.

“In Israel, AI targeting systems have played a crucial role in supporting its military campaign against Gaza,” Feldstein added. One system, known as Lavender, identified 37,000 individuals as potential airstrike targets in the initial weeks of the war. As AI companies make their way onto the battlefield, Feldstein said, “the scale of atrocities committed by warring parties is rising correspondingly.”

In January of this year, Pete Hegseth released a memo directing the United States to embed AI in every part of the “kill chain.” As it moves to comply, the Department of Defense is placing relatively few checks on what technology companies can or cannot do when the United States is waging war. “We’re in a situation where the companies are essentially regulating themselves,” Guyer, of the Institute for Global Affairs, said.

Ethical principles for AI use that the Department of Defense adopted in 2020 require only that military AI be “governable” by humans. And the additional safeguards AI policy groups tend to propose revolve around stopping fully automated technology—not regulating the semi-autonomous technology that is already being used to kill at scale.

As American policymakers debate potential future AI threats, it seems as though the immediate threat of AI—the ongoing expansion of those “kill chains”—is not even making it into the AI safety discussion. Nor are the victims of AI-assisted warmaking.

That means tech companies are still the ones making the rules: “Their terms of service are defining how AI systems are being used for war to a greater extent than any laws that have been written, or to a greater extent than even executive branch guidelines,” Guyer said.

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Trump’s Friends Are Already Signing Deals to Take Venezuela’s Oil

“It’s a milestone deal in making the Western Hemisphere the center of the global energy system,” Energy Secretary Chris Wright said on Wednesday.

He was talkingabout a fellow Trump ally’s oil deal with Venezuela: oil tycoon Harold Hamm of Continental Resources, a US petroleum and natural gas production company, who announced a preliminary deal with PDVSA, Venezuela’s national oil company, that same day. The agreement, which allows Continental Resources to develop and operate 126,000 acres of oil fields—an estimated 30 billion barrels of oil—was presented by Hamm, with Wright beside him, at this week’s G20 energy summit in Houston.

Hamm is in Trump’s inner circle and has advised the president on energy issues to benefit his business ventures, including fracking, and personally contributed $4.3 million to Trump-aligned PACs for his 2024 election campaign.

The deal comes after Chevron became the first known major US oil company earlier this month to expand production in Venezuela since the Trump administration seized President Nicolás Maduro in January, investing $7 billion over five years to more than double its production to 600,000 barrels a day.

On Wednesday, The Wall Street Journal reported that ExxonMobil is close to signing its own deal with Venezuela, which could be completed as early as the end of this month and include more than 50 billion barrels in oil reserves (Venezuela says it has about 300 billion barrels in total reserves). The potential Exxon deal is notable as the company has repeatedly tried to win more money in restitution after former Venezuela President Hugo Chávez nationalized major foreign oil operations in 2007, forcing Exxon to abandon its Venezuela projects.

While some oil executives remain hesitant to invest in Venezuelan oil due to the uncertainty surrounding the Trump administration’s August deal with the country, the challenges of scaling up production, and the chaotic relationship between the US and Venezuela, it’s become more clear that it has opened the door for his friends and other wealthy companies to invest in the country’s massive oil reserves.

Since the Trump administration captured Maduro, acting President Delcy Rodríguez has overhauled regulations on oil to encourage outside investment, including lowering tax rates on production. Continental Resources cited these changes as a major reason to pursue its oil deal.

As Jeff Colgan, a political science professor at Brown University, told me earlier this month, the winners of Trump’s oil agreement won’t lower gas prices for American consumers or help everyday Venezuela residents—it will just “line the pockets of some American companies.”

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Microplastics in Soil Act Like a Tiny “Trojan Horse” for Delivering Toxins

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

Microplastics act like a “Trojan horse,” delivering pollutants, pesticides, and bacteria through the soil, a five-year multinational research project has found.

The EU-funded project, which has so far resulted in 22 peer-reviewed studies, found microplastics in the soil of all 227 agricultural fields it tested across 11 European countries. The researchers said this poses a global threat, with healthy soils essential for life on Earth.

“Once these plastics fragment into the ground, they’re practically impossible to remove.”

In many cases, this contamination reflected current farming practices as well as historical land use, demonstrating that plastic pollution can persist for many years.

The researchers also found that microplastics could interact with other agricultural stressors such as pesticides and veterinary drugs.

One study in Switzerland found that fields with the highest levels of tire-wear particles also had the highest levels of other toxic chemicals and metals.

Microplastics can create new microbial habitats on their surfaces. Known as the plastisphere, these surfaces form a hotspot for interactions between plastics, microbes, and agrochemicals, the researchers found.

An increase of antibiotic-resistant genes was found within plastispheres when compared with controls. Pesticides appeared to amplify this effect further.

Edoardo Puglisi, a partner of the project and professor of microbiology at the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart in Piacenza, Italy, said the smaller the microplastics were, the more they tended to adsorb pollutants, microbes and DNA, leading to a “Trojan horse effect that can potentially increase the diffusion of pathogens and antibiotic-resistance genes.”

This Trojan horse effect can have an impact on earthworms and soil organisms by disrupting critical processes such as nutrient cycles, one study found.

Biodegradable plastics were not automatically safer and could still degrade into microplastics.

Earthworms play a vital role in shaping the composition of the soil microbiome as well as the ecological functions of soils.

The EU-funded Minagris research project, in collaboration with the Countryside and Community Research Institute at the University of Gloucestershire, also found microplastics could affect plant growth and function. One study found that higher concentrations of microplastics reduced leaf area, chlorophyll content, photosynthetic efficiency, and plant biomass in lettuce.

When drought conditions were added, these effects became even more pronounced, with plants performing less well than under either stress alone.

Environmental assessments often consider pollutants individually, but the findings show pollutants can behave differently when they occur together. The researchers say policy needs to recognise that plastic contamination is part of a wider picture of soil degradation and pollution.

In an effort to reduce plastic pollution, there has been an increase in the use of biodegradable plastics. However, the project found biodegradable plastics were not automatically safer and could still degrade into microplastics, potentially causing ecological damage.

“Once these plastics fragment into the ground, they’re practically impossible to remove, acting as vectors for agrochemicals and altering critical soil ecosystems,” said Esperanza Huerta Lwanga, a research associate in soil physics at Wageningen University in the Netherlands.

“To protect long-term food production and soil health, policy must catch up. We urgently need standardised plastic monitoring, full manufacturer transparency, and risk assessments that evaluate through different species how microplastics interact with co-pollutants.”

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Mike Johnson Can’t Protect Pete Hegseth Forever

Speaker Mike Johnson announced Wednesday that he would send Congress home early for its seven-week campaigning recess ahead of November’s midterm elections. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth—who was scheduled for an impeachment vote brought by Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) on the basis of his conduct during the Iran war—has been marked safe, for now.

House Republicans had planned to remain in session until Thursday. Now, they’re taking their final votes of the session Wednesday night, after which they’ll head home to face voters.

Massie, who introduced Hegseth’s articles of impeachment, said the early dismissal reflected GOP leaders’ fear that Hegseth might actually be impeached.

Among the “high crimes and misdemeanors” listed in Massie’s 34-page resolution are assertions that Hegseth knowingly violated the War Powers Resolution, that he “knowingly executed and implemented unlawful orders to initiate war against a foreign nation notwithstanding the absence of congressional authorization,” and that he “acted in a manner contrary to his trust as Secretary of Defense and subversive of constitutional government.”

Massie, a libertarian, found himself supported by lawmakers across the aisle. Hegseth, Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) wrote on social media, “has presided over the slaughter of thousands of civilians in immoral wars, aided and abetted genocide, and led a campaign of extrajudicial assassinations.”

I support Rep. Massie’s articles of impeachment against Pete Hegseth.

He has presided over the slaughter of thousands of civilians in immoral wars, aided and abetted genocide, and led a campaign of extrajudicial assassinations.

He belongs in the Hague, not our government.

— Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib (@RepRashida) September 16, 2026

Mike Johnson, however, didn’t want to hear it. The articles of impeachment, he said, are “a publicity stunt by someone who wants attention. It will immediately be tabled, of course….We should not be playing games with national security.”

And there it is. Just as I predicted. They’re canceling Congress tomorrow to avoid the vote on IMPEACHING @SecWar. It will also make it harder for us to reach 218 signatures on the Epstein Discharge Petition before the election. We were at 190+ signatures last night. https://t.co/nltarUjayl

— Thomas Massie (@RepThomasMassie) September 16, 2026

Though Massie asserted on social media that the impeachment vote was the reason he’s being sent home early, Johnson didn’t say so directly. Instead, he told reporters, “It’s time for our members to go home to their districts and make the case to the American people.”

Hegseth, between announcing and rescinding military testosterone-supplementation guidelines, doesn’t seem to have found time to speak on the matter of his potential impeachment.

In a statement, Pentagon Press Secretary Kingsley Wilson said the “entire Department is unified behind the Secretary’s vision and will continue working to put our warfighters and America first.”

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The Macklemore-Ed Sheeran Dispute Is a Corporate Threat to Free Speech

Robert Kraft, the billionaire owner of, among a ton of other stuff, the New England Patriots and its stadium, allegedly pressured Ed Sheeran and his team to remove rapper Macklemore from his tour after Macklemore voiced support for Palestinians amid the ongoing genocide in Gaza. All four of the remaining opening acts withdrew from the tour in solidarity with Macklemore by Tuesday afternoon.

“Artists must not be silenced when they speak up for the oppressed,” Finneas, a music artist best known for co-writing and producing much of his sister Billie Eilish’s work, wrote on Instagram. “I have decided to withdraw from my upcoming tour dates with Ed Sheeran. I stand with Palestine and its people.”

On Monday, Macklemore alleged that Kraft told Sheeran that hewould not be permitted to perform at his New England Patriots NFL venue, Gillette Stadium, at a show scheduled for later this month. Kraft also rallied some other stadium owners to support Macklemore’s removal.

“Collectively they gave [Sheeran] an ultimatum: if Macklemore stays on the tour, you will not be allowed to play in our venues,” the rapper recounted.

Macklemore opened for two shows on Sheeran’s tour, playing at MetLife Stadium in New Jersey on September 4 and 5. During his set, the rapper performed “Hind’s Hall,” his 2024 song that voices support for protests at college campuses demanding a ceasefire in the Gaza war, divestment from Israel, and anend to the genocide. Activists renamed Hamilton Hall at Columbia University to “Hind’s Hall” to honor Hind Rajab, a five-year-old Palestinian girl killed by the IDF in 2024.

“Free Palestine,” Macklemore said to many cheers from the crowd before performing the song. “I want to say those words loud and clear so the people of Gaza all the way to the West Bank know that we have not forgotten them.”

According to the Guardian, the other owners who allegedly opposed future Macklemore performances oversee venues hosting Sheeran’s previously scheduled shows in Philadelphia (September 19), Atlanta, Charlotte, Indianapolis, Arlington, and Tampa. Notably, all of these stadiums are home to NFL teams—the Eagles, Falcons, Panthers, Colts, Cowboys, and Buccaneers, respectively.(Only two other shows are on Sheeran’s US leg of the tour, both at Hard Rock Live in Hollywood, Florida.)

These venues may be publicly owned, but they’re branded by corporations and controlled by billionaire team owners. This arrangement has become a mechanism for corporate censorship of political speech. Kanye West, who has a well-documented history of making antisemitic statements, performed in Tampa in June and is scheduled to play at the Cowboys’ stadium in November. So far, there’s been no pushback from owners. Pro-Palestinian speech, by contrast, gets an artist blacklisted.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) placed the focus on Kraft when asked about the removal of Macklemore on Tuesday.

“When you see what Robert Kraft did to line up all of the stadiums to censor speech in that one specific way, it’s become clear that this is not just about one music artist or two music artists, but this is about how just a handful of stadium owners and the elite can prevent an entire massive issue, in this case, the genocide in Gaza,” Ocasio-Cortez said in a clip shared by Fox News.

This isn’t the first instance of this kind of censorship over Gaza. Massive Attack, Bella Hadid, and Kehlani have all faced similar backlash. But the Macklemore-Ed Sheeran case may be the most prominent yet, given both its scale and what’s now known about how the decision was allegedly made. If Ed Sheeran, the sixth most-streamed artist of all time on Spotify as of April, isn’t safe, then no one is.

Macklemore said it best in his Monday announcement: “The victims are the Palestinian people. The men, women, and children who have been killed, starved, displaced, and forced to live through unimaginable violence. More than 20,000 children have been killed in Gaza alone. People are being killed today, and people will be killed tomorrow. I want to make sure that as I tell this story, we don’t lose sight of that.”

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The Trump Administration Is Imprisoning Somali Immigrants in Gitmo

“The worst place ever I’ve been in my life.”

That’s how Sakariye Abdi Mohamed described the detention center at Guantanamo Bay, where he and a handful of other Somali immigrants are being held by Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Late last month, ICE put 12 Somali men on a plane and told them they were being deported to Somalia, according to interviews with community leaders, friends, and family members who are in touch with the detainees. Instead, they arrived at the notorious US military base in Cuba, where seven or eight of them remain. Since then, the men have said, they have been subjected to frigid temperatures, and they are shackled at all times.

“Nobody tell us that we’re going to Guantanamo Bay,” Mohamed told me in a phone call last week. “Just like kidnapping.”

“Just like kidnapping.”

It’s a dramatic escalation in President Donald Trump’s long-running campaign to target immigrants from the east African nation. Last year, he asserted that Somalis “contribute nothing” to the United States and declared, “I don’t want them in our country.” The president then unleashed roughly 2,000 heavily armed ICE and Border Patrol agents in Minnesota, home to the country’s largest population of Somalis.

The US military and the CIA began using Guantanamo to detain alleged “enemy combatants” following the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. The base, in the words of the American Civil Liberties Union, became a “symbol of injustice, abuse, and disregard for the rule of law,” plagued by reports of torture and mistreatment of war on terrorism detainees. For years, ICE has operated its own, separate facility at Guantanamo called the Migrant Operations Center, which, according to a 2024 report by the International Refugee Assistance Project, was used to confine refugees apprehended at sea in “prison-like conditions.”

At the beginning of his second term, Trump ordered the Pentagon and the Department of Homeland Security, which includes ICE, to expand the Migrant Operations Center to “full capacity to provide additional detention space for high-priority criminal aliens.” The president promised to incarcerate as many as 30,000 of the “worst of the worst” immigrants at the Gitmo facility. That hasn’t happened, but over the past two years, ICE has used the base on and off to detain a smaller number of immigrants from countries including Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela. On August 28, Gillian Brockell—a journalist who closely tracks deportation flights—reported that migrants had been sent to the facility for the first time in months. Last week, Minnesota Public Radio first reported that at least some of those prisoners are members of that state’s Somali community.

The detainees have been allowed to make phone calls from Guantanamo, and many have spoken to Abdinasir Kahin—a Chicago-based Somali community leader who has worked to connect the prisoners with the outside world—and Elmi Ware, a journalist who immigrated to the US from Somalia. In reporting this story, I spoke to Mohamed, Kahin, and Ware, as well as to friends and family of several of the detainees.

In an email, a DHS spokesperson claimed that the Somalis flown to Guantanamo in late August “included some of the worst of the worst, with criminal histories including aggravated assaults, weapons offenses, robbery, multiple larcenies, police obstruction, possession of burglary tools, receiving stolen property, trespassing, unauthorized use of a vehicle, multiple drug charges, and DUIs.” He added that the detainees “have received due process, and all have final orders of removal issued by an immigration judge.”

DHS declined to specify which of the Guantanamo inmates had been accused of those crimes; in response to follow-up questions, the spokesperson appeared to indicate that he did not know. At least some of the detainees have told people they have spoken to that they are not criminals and have not been charged with crimes. MPR reported last week that one of the men, Adam Abdullah, had received two parking tickets but had no criminal record. Several of the men at Guantanamo were applying for asylum and had work authorization, and at least one detainee had filed a habeas corpus petition, seeking to be released from detention.

“I don’t have no criminal record,” Mohamed told me. “I don’t have no tickets.” I found no court records contradicting Mohamed’s assertion.

Mohamed had been living with his cousin Ibrahim in Ohio at the time of his arrest. He said he was driving a truck for a commercial trucking company when he was pulled over by an Alabama state trooper on I-65. He was held by ICE for nearly a year in Louisiana before being sent to Guantanamo.

“I told him at the time to stop working, because ICE was arresting everyone,” Ibrahim told me. But Mohamed refused. “He believed ICE was looking for criminals.”

Mohamed’s friend and colleague, also named Ibrahim, affectionately described him as the rookie truck driver, viewed by his co-workers as a “young kid.” Mohamed had done everything right, he said: applied for asylum, waited for his work authorization, gotten his commercial driver’s license, paid his taxes. He’d hoped to build a better, brighter future in America than what he had left behind in Somalia.

Now, he is detained in a facility originally meant for suspected terrorists.

Another Guantanamo detainee, Kamal Hassan Olow, was arrested in December in Ohio, part of ICE’s Operation Buckeye. Abdirahman—a friend of Olow’s who is in daily contact with him—told me that Olow was working two jobs at the time of his arrest: a full-time position with Amazon and a part time job with a rental car agency. According to Abdirahman, Olow had a valid work permit and paid his taxes. He has a wife and children in Somalia, whom he was supporting. I found no evidence that Olow had a criminal record.

The conditions at Guantanamo are harsh. There are cameras in the showers and the bathroom, according to Mohamed and those in communication with other detainees. The building is extremely cold—a condition that individuals previously detained by the CIA and the military at Guantanamo as part of the war on terrorism have also described.

The DHS spokesperson said that all of the detainees’ allegations of mistreatment are “false,” adding that they are “provided three meals a day, clean water, clothing, bedding, showers, soap, and toiletries. Illegal aliens also have access to phones to communicate with family members and lawyers. Detainees have privacy in bathroom and shower areas.”

According to Mohamed, guards at Guantanamo have said they are being held there because that’s what officials in Washington, DC, want. “There’s no other nation, only Somali people in Guantanamo Bay, in the prison,” he told me. “And when we ask them why we are here, they tell us…Washington…ordered to keep Somali people in the Guantanamo Bay.”

Detainees held a hunger strike for several days after arriving in Cuba. According to those in contact with the men, officials told them that if they ended the strike, they would get to leave the naval base. Now, they no longer trust anything the guards say.

When we spoke last week, Mohamed said he and the other detainees would once again be going on a hunger strike. This time, they would not be mollified by vague promises.

“We die, or we go back to our country, or we go back to the States,” he said.

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Why MAGA Went Gaga for Putin

My new book, How Russia Won: Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, and the Fight for America (HarperCollins), was published this week. It covers how Russia has mounted multiple influence and disinformation operations against US elections (often to help Trump) since 2016 and how Trump, the GOP, MAGA, and right-wing media have aided and abetted this attack by denying it’s occurring.

The book is an attempt to reclaim the Trump-Russia narrative in the face of Trump’s decadelong crusade to brand it a “hoax.” Putin has been waging a twilight war against the United States and the West, and Trump and his crew have unilaterally surrendered, and there are now signs Moscow intends to meddle in the midterms to assist Trump.

Below is an excerpt of the book from Chapter 14 (“Useful Idiots”) that first appeared in my Our Land newsletter and that shows how MAGA and many on the right came to be fans of Putin, a repressive and murderous tyrant and war criminal. This is a major development within the conservative movement that has not drawn sufficient attention.

But first, a video promoting the book, narrated by the inestimable Nick Offerman:

Tucker Carlson began his nightly Fox News show on February 22, 2022, talking about Vladimir Putin. A few days earlier, President Biden had revealed that the United States possessed intelligence indicating the Russian leader planned to invade Ukraine imminently, and Carlson was furious that Putin was being demonized. He railed:

Since the day that Donald Trump became president, Democrats in Washington have told you you have a patriotic duty to hate Vladimir Putin. It’s not a suggestion. It’s a mandate. Anything less than hatred for Putin is treason. Many Americans have obeyed this directive. They now dutifully hate Vladimir Putin. Maybe you’re one of them. Hating Putin has become the central purpose of American foreign policy. It’s the main thing that we talk about… Very soon that hatred of Vladimir Putin could bring the United States into a conflict in Eastern Europe…What is this really about?

Why do I hate Putin so much? Has Putin ever called me a racist? Has he threatened to get me fired for disagreeing with him? Has he shipped every middle-­class job in my town to Russia? Did he manufacture a worldwide pandemic that wrecked my business and kept me indoors for two years? Is he teaching my children to embrace racial discrimination? Is he making fentanyl? Is he trying to snuff out Christianity? Does he eat dogs? These are fair questions. And the answer to all of them is no…So why does permanent Washington hate him so much?

Carlson dismissed the ongoing Russia-­Ukraine conflict as a mere “border dispute.”

This soft-­on-­Putin stance was not surprising. During Trump’s first impeachment in 2019, Carlson had huffed, “Why do I care what’s going on in the conflict between Ukraine and Russia?! And I’m serious. Like, why do I care? And why shouldn’t I root for Russia? Which I am.”

Carlson deployed Russia denialism to justify his support for Putin.

A week after that declaration, Carlson doubled down and said he opposed the sanctions the United States had imposed on Russia for its annexation of Crimea. “I think we should probably take the side of Russia if we have to choose between Russia and Ukraine,” he remarked. And he tied his pro-­Putin fervor to the Trump-­Russia scandal. Referring to journalists who had challenged the Ukraine-did-­it conspiracy theory about the 2016 election, he exclaimed, “Putin, for all his faults, does not hate America as much as many of these people do.”

He went on: “Russia didn’t hack our democracy. The whole thing was a talking point, a ludicrous talking point, invented by the Hillary Clinton campaign on or about November 9, 2016, to explain their unexpected defeat in the last presidential election.” Carlson had deployed Russia denialism to justify his support for Putin.

Now, with Putin on the verge of launching an all-­out war against Ukraine to seize territory and prevent his neighbor from joining NATO, Carlson was on the side of the Russian dictator. His comments encapsulated the titanic shift that had occurred in recent years within the conservative movement. During the Cold War, a core principle of Republicans and conservatives was opposition to the Soviet Union. The GOP had long crusaded against the Red Peril. Ronald Reagan in 1983 decried the Soviet Union as “the Evil Empire.” For decades, the hawks dominated within the Republican Party. In 2012, GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney called Russia America’s “number one geopolitical foe.”

After Trump faced accusations of colluding with Russia’s attack on the 2016 election, ­his supporters came to see Putin, the enemy of their political enemies, as, if not a friend, then at least not an enemy.

But Trump—­and America’s culture wars—had changed all that. While campaigning in 2016, Trump repeatedly displayed his affection for Putin and praised the Russian for being “strong” and for speaking well of Trump. Many of Trump’s followers were swept along.

After Trump faced accusations of colluding with Russia’s attack on the 2016 election—accusations he and his propagandists characterized as the evil fantasies of the Democrats, the media, and the Deep State—­his supporters came to see Putin, the enemy of their political enemies, as, if not a friend, then at least not an enemy. After all, if Putin was the Democrats’ boogeyman, he couldn’t be all that bad.

Other factors contributed to the Right’s embrace of Putin. The conservative movement had long been a home for so-­called America First isolationists who now viewed (as did far-­left anti-interventionists) assaults on Putin as provocations that could lead to US involvement in an overseas conflict. Some within this camp considered the extension of NATO toward Russia and attacks on Putin to be the handiwork of imperialists and neoconservative hawks angling for war and the expansion of US hegemony. And Putin’s staunch opposition to gay and transgender rights, his purported advocacy of “traditional values,” and his support for the Orthodox Church, a mainstay of cultural conservatism, resonated with certain Americans. The measures that the religious right in the United States was pushing in state legislatures—­anti-­transgender bills and so-called Don’t Say Gay legislation—­echoed Russian laws.

During Obama’s presidency, right-­wingers hailed Putin’s toughness, largely as a dig at Obama. “People are looking at Putin as one who wrestles bears and drills for oil,” Sarah Palin, the former Republican vice presidential candidate, told Sean Hannity on Fox News. “They look at [Obama] as one who wears mom jeans and equivocates and bloviates.” The conservative cable channel promoted a side-­by-side image of Obama wearing a helmet while riding a bicycle and Putin bare- chested on a horse.

Far-­right commentator and former GOP presidential candidate Pat Buchanan, who feared the end of “White America” and the death of “Christian America,” looked to Putin for inspiration. “Is Vladimir Putin a paleoconservative?” he wrote in The American Conservative in 2013. “In the culture war for mankind’s future, is he one of us?” In 2014, Buchanan hailed Putin’s illegal annexation of Crimea as part of the Russian’s overarching goal to turn Moscow into “the Godly City of today and command post of the counterreformation against the new paganism.” He opined, “In the culture war for the future of mankind, Putin is planting Russia’s flag firmly on the side of traditional Christianity.” For Buchanan and other Christian nationalists, Putin was a global commander in the culture wars.

Mainstream Republicans—­a shrinking band—­still considered Putin a threat and Russia a strategic adversary. But a significant slice of the Right had jumped on Trump’s pro-­Putin bandwagon. During the 2016 campaign, conservative commentator Dinesh D’Souza tweeted that what Trump admires about Putin “is the way Putin—­unlike someone else we know—­LOVES his country & FIGHTS for its interests.”

According to Gallup, Putin’s favorable rating among Democrats dropped from 15 percent to 10 percent between 2015 and 2017, yet with Republicans, it increased dramatically from 12 percent to 32 percent.

The following year, right-­wing author Ann Coulter, picking up on the Buchanan vibe, declared, “In 20 years, Russia will be the only country that is recognizably European”—­apparently meaning white. Christopher Caldwell, a prominent right-wing commentator, gave a speech at Hillsdale College in which he said, “If we were to use traditional measures for understanding leaders, which involve the defense of borders and national flourishing, Putin would count as the preeminent statesman of our time.”

Putin had originally leaned into conservative values to bolster his domestic support from tradition-minded Russians unsettled by the rapid changes following the collapse of the Soviet Union. He then took this pitch international and positioned himself as a leader against the decadent and relativist modern values rooted in the West—­a stance that resonated within the American right.

Despite his military aggression and the brutal and thuggish repression he imposed on Russia—locking up rivals and critics, rigging elections, shutting down the opposition, suppressing the media, eliminating an independent judiciary, invading neighboring countries, murdering foes—­he won support and a degree of admiration within MAGA. According to the pollster Gallup, Putin’s favorable rating among Democrats dropped from 15 percent to 10 percent between 2015 and 2017, yet with Republicans, it increased dramatically from 12 percent to 32 percent. The Americans warmest to Putin were Christian nationalists.

By the time Putin ratcheted up his threats against Ukraine in early 2022, he had won over a chunk of American conservatives, with some MAGA figures declaring they cared not a whit about a military attack on Ukraine.

Rep. Matt Gaetz, a Florida Republican, tweeted, “I’m more concerned with the US-Mexico border than the Russia-­Ukraine border. Not sorry.” Michael Flynn, Trump’s former national security adviser who had become part of the QAnon movement, said of Putin, “The guy’s a very strong leader. He’s been in charge for a long time. And he’s not going to put up with the nonsense he’s seeing in Europe.” JD Vance, then a GOP candidate for Senate in Ohio, remarked, “It’s ridiculous we’re focused on this border in Ukraine…I don’t really care what happens to Ukraine one way or another.” And Charlie Kirk, leader of Turning Point USA, the pro-­Trump youth group, took Putin’s side and echoed the Russian talking point that many in Ukraine desired a Russian intervention: “It feels as if Putin is going into places that want him. They have voted overwhelmingly to be part of it. It is a family dispute that we shouldn’t get in the midst of, that’s for certain.”

Putin’s efforts to covertly assist Trump in 2016 were still paying off. As Moscow prepared for war, pro-­Trump voices in America were either on Putin’s side or contending the coming invasion meant little for the United States. They were ensuring that partisan politics would shape—­and possibly hamper—­the US response to a full-­scale Russian invasion.

What a propaganda triumph for Putin: the former American president referring to the invasion force Putin had assembled on the Russia-Ukraine border as peacekeepers.

In this fraught pre-­invasion period, Trump couldn’t resist praising the Russian leader. During a radio interview, he extolled Putin for the “smart” move of sending “the strongest peace force I’ve ever seen” to the Ukraine border to threaten Kyiv. “This is genius,” Trump said. “Putin declares a big portion of the Ukraine—­of Ukraine—­Putin declares it as independent. Oh, that’s wonderful…He used the word independent and ‘We’re gonna go out and we’re gonna go in and we’re gonna help keep peace.’ You gotta say that’s pretty savvy.”

What a propaganda triumph for Putin: the former American president referring to the invasion force Putin had assembled on the Russia-Ukraine border as peacekeepers. Rep. Liz Cheney, a Wyoming Republican, tweeted, “Former President Trump’s adulation of Putin today—­including calling him a ‘genius’—aids our enemies.”

With war almost at hand, MAGA strategist Steve Bannon and Erik Prince, the onetime head of the controversial Blackwater private security firm, had a jocular exchange on Bannon’s podcast about their fondness for the Russian leader. “Putin ain’t woke,” Bannon declared. “He’s anti-woke.” Prince replied, “The Russian people still know which bathroom to use.” Bannon countered, “How many genders are there in Russia?” Two, Prince answered. “They don’t have the pride flags,” Bannon said.

On the day of the invasion, Bannon echoed Putin’s propaganda, telling his listeners and viewers, “Ukraine’s not even a country. It’s kind of a concept.” He added, “It’s just a corrupt area where the Clintons have turned into a colony where you can steal money out of.” Carlson pushed the same Putin-­friendly talking point: “Ukraine is not a democracy. It has never been a democracy in its history, and it’s not now. It is a client state of the Biden administration.” No surprise, his remarks were promoted on Russian state television. (Several days earlier, Putin had called Ukraine a “puppet” of the United States.)

At the Conservative Political Action Conference underway at this time, Lauren Witzke, a conservative media personality, QAnoner, and recently failed GOP candidate for the US Senate in Delaware, summed it up: “Here’s the deal. Russia is a Christian nationalist nation. They’re actually Russian Orthodox…I identify more with Putin’s Christian values than I do with Joe Biden.”

On February 24, 2022, Putin launched extensive air strikes and a ground invasion against Ukraine from the north, south, and east. His goal was to decapitate the Ukrainian government and conquer the country within ten days, but Ukrainian forces mounted a stiff resistance. As Russia pummeled civilian targets, both sides hunkered down for what would become a long, bloody, and costly conflict.

Despite the death and destruction caused by Putin, prominent conservatives and Trumpers defended, justified, or supported the Russian assault.

At CPAC, Trump decried the Russian attack as “appalling” and “an outrage and an atrocity,” and he insisted it would not have happened if he had been in the White House. But he also called Putin “smart” and said the Russian leader was “playing Biden like a drum.” At a competing conference in Florida of white nationalists—­which was addressed by Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Georgia Republican—­Nick Fuentes, a white supremacist, Holocaust denier, and Hitler fan boy, solicited applause for Russia’s invasion and whipped up the crowd to chant, “Putin! Putin! Putin!”

Despite the death and destruction caused by Putin, prominent conservatives and Trumpers defended, justified, or supported the Russian assault. Religious right leader Pat Robertson emerged from retirement to declare that Putin “is being compelled by God” to invade Ukraine. Arizona state Sen. Wendy Rogers, a Republican and fanatical 2020 election denier, slammed Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy as “a globalist puppet for Soros and the Clintons.” (Globalist was a common code word used by antisemites to disparage Jews.) Rep. Madison Cawthorn, a North Carolina Republican, remarked, “Remember that Zelenskyy is a thug. Remember that the Ukrainian government is incredibly corrupt and is incredibly evil and has been pushing woke ideologies.”

Greene signal-­boosted one of Putin’s most noxious talking points: Ukraine was run by Nazis, and the war had been initiated to rescue the Ukrainian people from these fascists. (This was a bonkers assertion, especially since Zelenskyy was Jewish.) She tweeted, “NATO has been supplying the neo­Nazis in Ukraine with powerful weapons and extensive training on how to use them. What the hell is going on with these #NATONazis?” In an interview, she was a cheerleader for Putin: “There is no win for Ukraine here. Russia is being very successful in their invasion.”

Non-­MAGA remnants in the GOP were sticking with Ukraine. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell dismissed Cawthorn and Greene as “a few lonely voices off to the side,” and told CBS News, “The vast majority of the Republican Party writ large, both in the Congress and across the country, are totally behind the Ukrainians.” But much of MAGA was lost. Appearing on the podcast of a white supremacist and Holocaust denier, Witzke declared, “Everybody affiliated or standing with Ukraine is either transgender, a Satanist, or a straight-­up Nazi.”

I hope that whets your appetite for How Russia Won_. You can learn more about the book or order it_ here. And you can find it wherever you purchase books.

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With EPA’s Latest Move, Trump Topples the Last Pillar of Biden’s Climate Legacy

Coal is by far the dirtiest of the world’s major energy sources. It accounts for almost half of the cumulative global carbon emissions since the industrial era began—as much as oil and natural gas combined. And it generates much more carbon dioxide per unit of energy than either oil or gas. Most climate experts agree that phasing out coal power is the single biggest change the world could make to slow down global warming.

For almost 20 years, the United States has whipsawed on the question of whether the federal government should try to speed up that phaseout. After Barack Obama failed to push a carbon tax through Congress, his administration drafted the “Clean Power Plan,” which would have forced electric utilities to cut their emissions by shifting away from coal. President Donald Trump repealed that rule during his first term, and the Supreme Court later said that the president could not unilaterally force utilities to give up the fuel.

“The Obama and Biden administrations implemented a war on coal to destroy reliable and affordable energy,” said EPA chief Lee Zeldin.

Instead of forcing utilities to abandon coal, the Biden administration tried to work around the Supreme Court ruling in its 2024 rule by giving utilities a choice. They could either retire their coal plants sometime in the 2030s, or they could equip them with new machines that would capture almost all the carbon dioxide that would come out of their smokestacks. The result either way would be a significant drop in carbon emissions from the power sector.

The Trump administration is now repealing that rule. The Environmental Protection Agency announced on Monday that it plans to wipe away all federal regulations for carbon emissions from the electricity sector, essentially allowing utilities to warm the Earth as much as they want. The agency used the same justification as it did in its repeal of climate regulations on motor vehicles earlier this year, arguing that the science of climate change was uncertain and that the repeal would save consumers money on power bills.

“For over 15 years, the Obama and Biden administrations implemented a war on coal to destroy reliable and affordable energy,” said Trump’s EPA chief Lee Zeldin at an international energy summit in Texas. “We are working to go even further so that American energy can be fully unleashed. Realizing the full potential of American energy means more jobs, lower prices, and a more prosperous America.”

This repeal deals a significant blow to the federal government’s efforts to force the power sector away from coal. The whiplash between Democratic and Republican administrations has been so frequent and so severe that neither the Obama nor the Biden rules have done much to speed the decarbonization of the power sector, especially when compared to other federal efforts like the Inflation Reduction Act subsidies for solar and wind.

“The reason to have a target is that it sends a clear signal to decision-makers in companies,” said Kenneth Gillingham, a professor of environmental economics at Yale University and an economic adviser to the Obama administration, where he helped draft the Clean Power Plan. “If you’re on the fence between choosing two things, you might as well choose the one that’s in line with the target. That’s been undermined. There has to be some teeth behind it.”

Even though the Obama and Biden rules never took effect, coal power has still been plummeting in the United States over the past 20 years. That’s thanks to the shale fracking boom, which lowered the cost of natural gas and made it cheap for utilities to replace their coal plants with gas plants. When burned, natural gas does warm the Earth, but slower than coal, and the shift has caused overall power sector emissions to fall in the US by almost half.

The repeal of the Biden rule will likely delay that phaseout and will have significant effects for the nation’s public health. Coal plants also release harmful toxins like mercury and particulate matter, leading to thousands of premature deaths around the world. Inasmuch as the Biden rule would have sped up coal closures, it would also have prevented around $370 billion in health damages from climate change and air pollution. The Biden administration predicted that in 2035, the rule would have prevented hundreds of thousands of asthma flare-ups, hundreds of emergency room visits, and more than 1,200 premature deaths.

The rapid growth in power demand from data centers has led to a resurgence in demand for coal plants.

The artificial intelligence boom is also slowing the phaseout of coal. The Biden administration drafted its 2024 rule at a time when coal was expected to keep shrinking on its own; the rule projected a “continued decline in projected coal-fired steam generating unit capacity as well as a steady decline in annual operation of those [plants] that remain online,” driven largely by “eroding economic opportunities for coal-fired steam generating units to operate.”

Now the rapid growth in power demand from data centers has led to a resurgence in demand for coal plants, and has led many utilities to push out the retirement date for their legacy coal assets. For coal power plants that sell into wholesale markets like the Midwest and the mid-Atlantic, high prices have made it worthwhile to stay online. (The Trump administration has also ordered some coal plants to stay online past their planned retirements, a move that a federal court found to be unlawful earlier this month.)

A case in point is Southern Company, the massive utility that produces energy for states including Georgia and Mississippi. Under the Biden administration, the utility had planned to retire its major Mississippi coal plant by 2028, but Southern announced last year that data centers would necessitate keeping it online well into the 2030s. The company’s previous efforts to install carbon capture at its coal units, meanwhile, have ended in failure. Environmental groups have criticized these decisions and argued that AI demand is inflated, but the Trump administration is happy to give utilities leeway to keep coal online.

The next president who seeks to take action on climate change will face much the same coal challenge that Obama did: how to speed up the phaseout of a fuel that is declining, but not dying? Gillingham argues that the short-term boost provided by Trump and the data center boom may not help rescue the coal fleet. The nation’s coal plants are only getting older, and many utilities will choose to replace them with gas or other fuels rather than repair them. The next president may still need the regulatory “stick,” but by that time the sector may be on its last legs.

“We have more electricity demand than we did before, which is, on the margins, going to make it easier for a coal plant to stay on,” said Gillingham. “But the trend is pretty clear, and you can only fight markets so much.”

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Women Built MAHA. MAGA Bros Have Taken It Over.

Editor’s Note: When Robert F. Kennedy Jr. jumped on Donald Trump’s bandwagon in 2024, he brought with him the wellness-obsessed, vaccine-rejecting, food label-reading Make America Healthy Again voters who’ve been credited with helping Trump take back the White House. But there are signs that the MAHA–MAGA alliance is wearing thin, from squabbles over inaction to a tense standoff over regulating the herbicide glyphosate. In our MAHA and the Midterms series, a partnership between Mother Jones and the Food & Environment Reporting Network, we consider how MAHA is shaping the political landscape and upcoming elections.

This past February, as Super Bowl viewers chowed down on Buffalo wings and loaded nachos, they found themselves unexpectedly admonished. On their TV screens, in a black-and-white close-up, was former heavyweight champion and convicted rapist Mike Tyson, ripping his teeth through a carrot as though it were Evander Holyfield’s ear. “We’re the most powerful country in the world,” Tyson said. “And we have the most obese, fudgy people.” As he tore into an apple, white block script was superimposed over his face: “Processed Food Kills. Eat Real Food.”

The ad directed viewers to RealFood.gov, a website laying out the new food pyramid, a pet project of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. that literally flipped the previous model on its head: Now, whole grains are at the pointy bottom and protein, dairy, and fats get top billing. The ad was sponsored by the nonprofit MAHA Center, whose leader, publisher Tony Lyons, also co-founded MAHA pac. And it signaled a telling shift. This wasn’t your mother’s Make America Healthy Again (or Gwyneth Paltrow’s, for that matter). This was manly MAHA.

Much attention has been paid to the MAHA moms, and rightly so. Women have powered the movement, evangelizing for whole foods and raw milk on Instagram, urging President Donald Trump to appoint Kennedy to lead HHS, and protesting against food additives and agricultural chemicals, in particular glyphosate, found in the weed killer Roundup.

But it’s the movement’s men who have ascended to the highest levels of power. RFK Jr. is the most prominent, but the list also includes Dr. Mehmet Oz, administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services; Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, who is running the National Institutes of Health; and Dr. Marty Makary, who was commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration until he resigned earlier this year. And it’s not just in government. Health entrepreneur turned MAHA stalwart Calley Means is the man who suggested that Kennedy forge an alliance with Trump and remains an influential adviser to Kennedy at HHS. His sister, Casey, meanwhile, was a vaccine-skeptical doctor nominated for surgeon general—only to watch her prospects die in the Senate.

With the midterm elections approaching and MAHA voters increasingly dissatisfied with Trump, it’s worth asking: How exactly did a cause powered by women turn into one run by men? And will the women who built the MAHA movement ever revolt?

Calley Means spoke to a MAHA-friendly crowd at a news conference at the Health and Human Services Department last year.Andrew Harnik/Getty

MAHA is often characterized by its most scientifically questionable positions—opposition to vaccines and fluoride, a fondness for raw milk and beef tallow—but the truth is that it is a complex coalition. Surveys conducted by Politico suggest that the movement’s core priorities are what you might hear from any athleisure-clad shopper circling the outer perimeter of Whole Foods: fewer ultraprocessed foods, food dyes, forever chemicals, microplastics, and pesticides, and more physical movement.

“I believe if these women are ignored, we’re going to lose the midterms, and I believe we will lose 2028.”

Kennedy speaks all of these languages. His anti-vaccine activism gets the most press, but he has rallied against polluters and frequently inveighs against ultraprocessed Frankenfoods pushed on the public by corporations. In the lead-up to the 2024 election, food journalist Mark Bittman asked in The New York Times why Americans were hearing more about food from Trump than they were from Kamala Harris. The intersection of food, chemicals, chronic illness, and corporate power may not have been central for most voters. But it was a topic with significant social media reach, especially to the young, female, and politically disengaged—and that pulled many who might otherwise share a Democrat’s politics into Trump’s orbit.

Kelly Ryerson, a prominent MAHA leader who writes under the name “Glyphosate Girl,” came to the movement the way many women do: because of personal health problems that traditional medicine couldn’t solve. Attending a gluten sensitivity conference, she heard it suggested that the issue might not be the gluten itself, but rather the chemicals sprayed on American wheat. That started her down a glyphosate research rabbit hole and eventually, in 2018, to the San Francisco courtroom where Monsanto, the manufacturer of glyphosate, was being sued by a man claiming the herbicide caused his cancer. One of the lawyers on the case was RFK Jr.

“I’m politically independent,” Ryerson told me. “I feel that I really represent this massive group of women who have either their family member, their child, or they themselves have been struggling with some kind of chronic illness and are just fed up with the toxicity.” Ryerson, like other MAHA devotees, stuck with Kennedy even as he switched parties.

That came in the summer of 2024, as Kennedy’s own presidential campaign was lagging. When Trump was shot at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, Calley Means reportedly called Kennedy and “suggested that it might be a moment for unity—Mr. Trump had just narrowly escaped the same fate that had befallen Mr. Kennedy’s father and uncle,” according to The New York Times. By the end of August, Kennedy was out of the race and in Trump’s camp, and MAHA was an emergent force in American politics.

Ryerson, “Food Babe” Vani Hari, and other MAHA influencers supported the McDonald’s-eating Trump in large part because of his association with Kennedy. And, Ryerson says, while much of the MAHA movement’s true devotion was and is with Kennedy, its followers were smart enough to see that Trump’s idiosyncratic and unpredictable politics were a potential asset. “The thought behind Trump,” Ryerson said, “was that it was the only way forward with getting Kennedy into a role.” And she also believed that “the chemical industry has its grips so tightly on both parties that it’s like, well, we need someone that we might have a chance of him saying, ‘No, we’re done with that.’ And Trump is so volatile in many different ways, you don’t know which way he’s going to go.” Maybe, she thought, he would go hers.

Vani Hari, a blogger who goes by “Food Babe,” made a video during a rally outside the US Supreme Court, as justices heard oral arguments in Monsanto Company v. Durnell in April.Francis Chung/Politico/AP

Agriculture and public health advocate Kelly Ryerson, also known as Glyphosate Girl, pictured at an anti-glyphosate rally outside the Supreme Court in April, feels she represents “this massive group of women who have either their family member, their child, or they themselves have been struggling with some kind of chronic illness and are just fed up with the toxicity.”Francis Chung/Politico/AP

Spoiler alert: He hasn’t. Rather than forcing food and chemical companies to clean up their acts, the Trump administration’s senior health officials seem to be more preoccupied with the priorities of the manosphere. MAHA, says Monika McDermott, a professor of political science at Fordham University, “fits with the MAGA movement’s vision of the role that men play and the roles that women play. And so, yeah, women are figureheads and can do things about the family, but the experts are still the masculine figures.”

For expertise, they’ve turned to a smattering of “functional medicine” doctors (healthcare providers who focus on “root causes” of disease, like diet, exercise, and sleep), researchers, and activists, most of whom have podcasts or large social media followings, such as Dr. Mark Hyman and Calley Means. Before becoming an adviser to RFK Jr., Means co-founded a company called Truemed that helps consumers use tax-advantaged medical savings accounts, like HSAs and FSAs, to buy things like red-light therapy boxes, Meta glasses, and supplements. (Hyman is an investor in the company, which also sells his recommended supplements.)

The administration’s MAHA-adjacent decisions also have prioritized the interests of men. Take protein. Like anxieties about testosterone and “soy boys”—weak men supposedly feminized by eating too much tofu instead of red meat—the protein craze is as much about a robust male identity as it is nutrition.

The protein craze is as much about a robust male identity as it is nutrition.

“There’s been a steady drumroll of protein boosterism by characters in the manosphere who trade in ideas that masculinity is in decline and under attack,” says Samantha King, a professor in the School of Kinesiology and Health Studies at Queen’s University in Canada and co-author of Protein: The Making of a Nutritional Superstar. Joe Rogan, the megapopular podcaster whose endorsement of Trump was widely seen as boosting his support among young men, has complained that masculinity is unfairly vilified, while hawking protein supplements and talking about his own penchant for eating wild game. He went on a fully carnivore diet for a 30-day challenge, which resulted in “hellacious projectile doo-doo.” Popular manosphere figure Andrew Tate, who with his brother was fighting extradition to the United Kingdom for alleged rape and sex trafficking as of this writing, told Tucker Carlson in 2023 that “80 percent of my calories come from meat. I have 10 cups of coffee a day and three or four large cigars.” “Smoking is fantastic for your testosterone level,” he added. (The Tates have denied all charges filed against them.)

No one seems more dedicated to protein than RFK Jr. When he announced the inverted food pyramid earlier this year, he framed it as a triumphal end to the war on protein—a dog whistle, King said, for the war on men, and especially on the male manual worker. RFK Jr. claims to subsist almost exclusively on meat and fermented foods, a diet that has, according to The Wall Street Journal, been embraced by Vice President JD Vance, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, to no doubt pungent results. And let’s not forget the weird video that RFK Jr. made with Kid Rock, in which they both exercised shirtless in a sauna (Kennedy in jeans), before pounding milk in a hot tub.

Meanwhile, in the first year of Kennedy’s tenure, HHS announced the appointment of “five new agency leaders to advance MAHA goals.” Four of the five were men. The most prominent was Admiral Brian Christine, an “internationally recognized leader in men’s health” and the new assistant secretary for health at HHS.

As part of his mandate, Christine, a staunch anti-abortion Catholic, was responsible for overseeing the agency administering Title X, the federal family planning program that has traditionally funded contraception access for poor women across America. Earlier this year, HHS released radically revamped guidance for organizations applying for Title X grants. “Chronic disease” gets 14 mentions in the document; contraception gets one. Relatively little attention is given to helping women prevent unwanted pregnancy, the reason the Title X program was created in the first place. Much more is spent on male fertility concerns: testosterone levels, sperm counts and motility, avoiding pornography, and so on. In recent months, testosterone therapy has also become a new general HHS priority. In early September, The Washington Sun reported that the department had canceled more than half of the Office of Minority Health’s existing grants, focused on things like infant mortality and postpartum wellness, to instead prioritize programs devoted to exercise and the “root causes” of infertility, including erectile disfunction.

In recent months, testosterone therapy has become a new general HHS priority.

At the same time, the administration has been mostly unwilling to regulate Big Food and Big Ag—the MAHA moms’ main priority. After Trump appointed industry-friendly Lee Zeldin to run the Environmental Protection Agency, Zeldin immediately went on a deregulation spree, staffed the agency with former Big Ag and industry lobbyists, and appointed former industry representatives to oversee pesticide regulation. The EPA office once charged with research on toxic chemicals has been dismantled.

And then there is the administration’s actions related to glyphosate, long one of MAHA’s top targets. Earlier this year, Trump issued an executive order calling glyphosate critical for national security and urging production increases. In June, the Supreme Court sided with chemical giant Bayer, which acquired Monsanto in 2018, in a case related to its weed killer Roundup. Trump’s DOJ had advocated for the court to take on the case. On Forked, a food politics podcast, Ryerson called the administration’s role in the case “deeply, deeply devastating.”

Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. ate ice cream at the end of a news conference last year alongside former Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Martin Makary, who resigned in May. Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty

So where does all this leave the MAHA moms? Ryerson says that while MAHA men are largely the ones in the most powerful roles in government, women “are still dictating it from the grassroots,” and “if what we want isn’t happening, then they won’t win reelection.”

She, podcaster Alex Clark, and others have been warning Republicans that if they don’t show up for the women of MAHA, the women of MAHA may stop showing up for them. At the Turning Point USA Women’s Leadership Summit over the summer, Clark told a conservative interviewer, “I believe that we won 2024 because of these women; I believe if these women are ignored, we’re going to lose the midterms, and I believe we will lose 2028.”

Ryerson, for her part, said she’s still stunned that most Democrats in Congress haven’t jumped on these issues. One exception is Maine Rep. Chellie Pingree, who told The 19th: “I really don’t think that these are necessarily left or right. The questions around toxins in our food and food is medicine, and the opposition to Big Ag and big chemical companies is very universal.”

This dynamic—of women as foot soldiers while men take up command posts—is not unique to MAHA. The “wine moms” who powered Democratic victories in the suburbs for the last several election cycles, and the Black women who took on the lion’s share of the legwork of “souls to the polls” turnout machines, did most of the labor—and were often mocked instead of being credited. But they eventually translated that preparation into power: 43 percent of congressional Democrats are now female (for Republicans, it’s 15 percent); women account for nearly half of state Democratic legislators. Will MAHA’s largely female organizers and leaders take a similar path within the GOP—or will the Democratic Party convince them to defect?

Ryerson says that she continues to support Kennedy and that anecdotally, many MAHA women in her orbit believe he’s often hamstrung by the White House but still a force for good. And many Democrats are understandably hesitant to court followers of a movement they see as rife with dangerous quackery. But most of MAHA’s core issues—additives in food, microplastics, pesticides—used to be clearly Democratic issues. If Democrats were to back away from them now, Ryerson says, they’re leaving votes on the table.

MAHA voters, she says, are “up for grabs, and [politicians] should be battling it out to see who can propose the best exit out of this toxic world that we’re living in.”

This story was produced with the Food & Environment Reporting Network.

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Russia Targeted Past US Elections. Will It Meddle in the Midterms?

The 2016 election that put Donald Trump in the White House the first time was defined in many ways by the role of America’s longtime adversary Russia. Over the years, multiple investigations have concluded that Russia meddled in the election to boost Trump over Hillary Clinton and create political discord among voters. Trump, meanwhile, has repeatedly called the Russia investigations a “hoax.”

As the 2026 midterms approach, experts warn that Russia could interfere in US elections once again. Because as Mother Jones Washington bureau chief David Corn lays out in his new book, How Russia Won: Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, and the Fight for America, Russia has been waging a continuous campaign against the US.

“You have to wonder if Russia will be meddling yet again,” Corn tells host Al Letson, referring to the upcoming midterms. “And this time around, it’s different, because what Trump has done since he got back into the White House is to decimate all the government offices and agencies that would be looking for Russian interference and trying to counter it.”

On this week’s More To The Story, Corn talks about Russian President Vladimir Putin’s “twilight war” against the US and Western democracies, argues that the infamous Steele dossier ultimately helped Trump, and examines how the Trump White House has dismantled government agencies tasked with finding and fending off Russian disinformation campaigns.

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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Kash Patel Again Denies Firing Iran Experts Before Iran War

In an oversight hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Tuesday, FBI Director Kash Patel did little to acknowledge the continuing fallout around the firing of agents for their role in investigating President Trump’s alleged mishandling of classified documents—even though they were experts in tracking Iranian threats.

Several outlets have reported that at least a dozen fired FBI counterintelligence staffers belonged to a unit that specializes in investigating potential danger from Iran. The firings took place just days before the Trump administration launched its military campaign against the country in February.

During the hearing, Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) referenced those reports in his questioning: “Do you think firing the president’s political opponents is more important than retaining the decades of experience and expertise monitoring intelligence threats from Iran?”

“The individuals you are referring to are not experts [on Iran],” the FBI director responded. “I think what’s most important is [to] not have a weaponized FBI, and I will endeavor every single day to make sure we have no one there that is doing that.”

Blumenthal pointed out that Patel’s firings in effect politicized and weaponized the FBI against its own employees—despite previous claims that he would not target agents for participating in investigations.

“How can you make those two statements consistent?” the senator asked.

“Simple. If you weaponize law enforcement, you don’t get to work at the FBI,” Patel said—a remark that doesn’t actually address the question.

BLUMENTHAL: They were fired bc they worked on the classified docs case involving Trump. Do you think firing president's political opponents is more important than retraining decades of experience & expertise monitoring threats from Iran?PATEL: What's most important is not having a weaponized FBI

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) 2026-09-15T15:08:54.147Z

In a May Senate hearing, Patel also denied, multiple times, the accuracy of reporting that Iran experts were dismissed just before the current war began. Replying to Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.), Patel added that the situation was the subject of ongoing litigation—three FBI agents who were fired filed a class-action suit in March alleging a retribution campaign for investigating Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election—and claimed that he could not discuss it further. He again rejected the validity of the reporting in a March House committee hearing.

Although not firing thatgroup Iran investigators wouldn’t mean the Trump administration would have avoided the current war—which has killed thousands of Iranian civilians, over a dozen US servicemembers, and included several deadly military operations in neighboring countries—or even maintained a ceasefire later on, it does, yet again, suggest that targeting the administration’s opponents remains a greater priority for the White House than ensuring the semblance of government function.

Whether there will be any actual accountability for the FBI’s conduct is another question—one that doesn’t seem to interest Patel.

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The EPA Would Rather Monitor Water for Abortion Pills than Pollution

With his characteristic deregulatory zeal, Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin announced before an audience of G20 energy ministers in oil-rich Houston, Texas, that his agency would eliminate climate pollution standards for fossil fuel-fired power plants. “For over 15 years, the Obama and Biden administrations implemented a war on coal to destroy reliable and affordable energy,” Zeldin said in an EPA press statement issued during the Houston meeting. “The Trump Administration has come in to protect American energy and to make sure you can afford to keep the lights on.”

This announcement was yet another example of the Trump administration’s eagerness to reinforce what Republicans have long considered a priority: freedom from government intrusion or regulation. But only a few days before Zeldin reassured energy executives that the government would no longer prioritize protecting public health, the EPA announced a new study that would test the country’s water supply for abortion medication, contraception, and hormones used in gender-affirming care, along with over 1,000 other medications and chemicals. “We have heard loud and clear that Americans are concerned about potential unknown pollutants lurking in their drinking water,” Zeldin wrote in the study press release.

“The Pro-Life Generation is finally being heard!”

The testing of abortion medication has been championed by anti-abortion groups for years, especially by Kristan Hawkins, the leader of Students for Life, who tweeted a video of herself receiving the news that the study was made public. In her post, she wrote:

“BREAKING: The EPA will now test water for abortion pill pollution!! The FDA has recklessly, negligently allowed chemical abortion pills on the market and deregulated them. They’ve killed millions of babies, harmed mothers, and polluted our water for 26 years. For the last year, we’ve been calling on President Trump’s EPA to find out what’s in our water. After more than three years of innovative water testing, a peer-reviewed research paper, and the introduction of legislation in states, the Pro-Life Generation is finally being heard!”

The EPA’s unrelated but tandem announcements reveal an agency that has fundamentally overhauled its policies toward environmental and human health in pursuit of the Trump administration’s “energy dominance” and “Make America Healthy Again” agendas. Rolling back power plant pollution standards will lead to higher emissions of the greenhouse gases driving Earth’s warming to deadlier levels, as well as increased levels of smog, mercury, and lead contamination, which can cause health problems.

Coal and natural gas-fueled power plants are the second-largest carbon polluter in the United States behind the transportation sector. Under the Biden administration, carbon pollution rules for power plant emissions standards would have reduced carbon emissions by 1.38 billion metric tons by 2047. The recently announced plan will repeal these Biden-era regulations and could prevent future administrations from curbing carbon emissions. First reported by Bloomberg News, the EPA’s latest move caps off a year and a half of the agency’s overhaul of federal climate policy. In February, the EPA rescinded similar climate vehicle standards and the 2009 endangerment finding, the landmark ruling that asserted greenhouse gases threaten human health.

Much to the dismay of anti-abortion activists, the number of abortions in the United States has actually increased since the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision, which overturned the constitutional right to an abortion. One reason for this has been access to abortion medication, the two-drug regimen of mifepristone and misoprostol that act to terminate pregnancies. This has activated the anti-abortion movement to find new approaches to ending the procedure, and one of them has been environmental: focusing on the alleged presence of these medications in the water supply.

After Republican lawmakers urged the EPA to take up the water study in June, Nathan Donley, the environmental health science director at the Center for Biological Diversity, told The 19th that, compared to other pharmaceuticals, mifepristone is taken as a one-time dose by a small portion of the population. “There are legitimate water quality threats that we need to attack and rectify in a regulatory manner,” Donley said. “And then there are things that are out in left field that just distract people.”

Meanwhile, monitoring the water supply—which Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. wrote will “give Americans the truth about what is in their water”—may actually co-opt environmental policy to pursue anti-abortion policy. “I am deeply concerned,” Betsy Southerland, a former career scientist in EPA’s Office of Water, told Politico. “If there is any detectable level of mifepristone or its metabolites, the anti-abortion groups will scream that we are unknowingly aborting fetuses by drinking public tap water.”

According to Politico, the EPA insists the study will only determine if a chemical is present in the water supply, not its concentration. But pro-choice activists caution that the study could still pave the way for abortion access restrictions. “If the test finds any trace of abortion pills, conservatives will use it to legitimize their new legal front in the war on reproductive rights,” wrote activist and writer Jessica Valenti on her Substack, Abortion, Every Day. “The cruelty really is the point here, not science or health.”

As for the EPA’s other effort? Environmental groups are already planning their legal challenges to the EPA’s latest climate policy rollback. “The Trump administration is handing the fossil fuel industry a license to keep polluting,” Holly Bender, chief program officer for the Sierra Club, told The Guardian. “This is full-throated climate denial while the climate crisis happens in real time and a shocking betrayal of the American public.”

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Meet the Candidates Putting Bullets in Flock Cameras

In a campaign ad released Monday, Seth Bodnar—an Independent candidate running for U.S. Senate in Montana—warns viewers that Flock Safety cameras are tracking Americans “getting groceries,” “going to church,” and “buying ammo for the season.”

He then sets a surveillance camera on a tree stump, pulls a shotgun from his car, and just absolutely blows the thing away.

Trump says he ‘likes’ Flock cameras,” Bodnar wrote in a social media post. “I say ‘Flock off.”

Trump says he "likes" Flock cameras. I say "Flock off." pic.twitter.com/NekA0w4VJd

— Seth Bodnar for Montana (@SethBodnarForMT) September 14, 2026

Given America’s deep-seated gun culture—and mounting public frustration over automated license plate reader (ALPR) cameras—it makes a kind of sense that Bodnar isn’t the only candidate for national office taking aim at automated police surveillance.

Adam Heimerman, an Independent running for Congress in Tennessee’s 2nd Congressional District, allegedly used a shotgun to shoot four Flock cameras this past July. He couldn’t stand the sight of them on his way to a job as a river guide, he told the Washington Post.

So, while Bodnar (presumably) bought his own camera to shoot, Heimerman (allegedly) did some target practice with four government-owned license plate readers.

“When people act out in a manner that we’re witnessing, things have gotten bad, and they no longer feel like they’re being heard,” Heimerman said at the time. “People are tired of being told to sit down and be quiet and write a letter.”

Heimerman’s chances of winning against Republican incumbent Tim Burchett were already slim before he was hit with four felony counts of vandalism. Bodnar, who was until recently President of the University of Montana, might have a better shot. The most recent poll in his race has him only eight points behind his Republican opponent Kurt Alme—and Bodnar’s anti-surveillance stance might just close that gap.

In his camera-blitzing video, Bodnar points out that Alme has refused to take a position on surveillance. Other Republicans do not seem to have the same reservations. In the past month, the Republican governors of Florida and Texas have backed off of funding ALPRs on their roads, citing privacy concerns; in late August, Senator Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) launched an investigation into Flock Safety for assembling an “unprecedented national surveillance network” without Americans’ consent.

But divisions around the technology are emerging within the Republican Party. While Hawley might take the side of the camera-shooters—and of the Americans who share their surveillance concerns, if not their explosive tactics—President Donald Trump has declared his support for the cameras.

“I sort of like them…because of law enforcement, but some people don’t,” Trump told reporters on Air Force One last week, as the Washington Post reported. “They think it’s an infringement. I like them.”

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“A Sword of Damocles”: Salvadoran TPS Holders Are in Limbo as DHS Does Nothing

September 9 loomed large for the approximately 170,000 Salvadorans living in the United States with humanitarian protection for immigrants from crisis-stricken countries. The Temporary Protected Status (TPS) designation for El Salvador was set to expire that day, potentially putting one of the largest groups of TPS holders in the country at risk of losing legal status and making them vulnerable to deportation.

But the deadline came and went, withoutthe Trump administration either formally renewing or axing the protection for that population. Instead, the program’s website now says that an “announcement on El Salvador’s TPS will be made at the appropriate time.” Until then, Salvadorans with TPS will continue to be protected and authorized to work, according to the government.

The reprieve, while welcome, leaves these TPS holders who have lived and worked in the United States for decades in limbo. Or, as Aaron Reichlin-Melnick of the American Immigration Council put it, “with a sword of Damocles over their heads.”

“The only thing we know is that TPS for El Salvador is still alive and protecting people from detention and deportation,” says José Palma, a coordinator with the National TPS Alliance, an organization led by beneficiaries of the program. “But we are waiting for the official announcement on how long that protection is going to last.”

The Trump administration has yet to post a notice in the Federal Register, and under the statute, if the Homeland Security secretary doesn’t decide to renew or terminate a TPS designation 60 days before the expiration date, the protection is automatically extended for six months. That means, Palma says,“If they were to interpret the law based on how other presidents have interpreted it before, Salvadorans should be protected for at least six months.”

But Palma and other advocates worry Trump could still try to terminate TPS for El Salvador. The administration has previously moved to end TPS for more than a dozen countries, including Venezuela, Honduras, and Nicaragua. Earlier this year, the Supreme Court gave Trump the green light to terminate the protection for more than 350,000 Haitians and Syrians, with likely implications for several other nationalities and some 1.3 million recipients.

The justices ruled that the DHS secretary’s decisions about TPS aren’t subject to judicial review, barring most legal challenges against possible violations of the statute. Following the decision, the Trump administration started targeting Haitians for arrest and deportation. As my colleague Laura Morel reported, many are being forced to choose between staying in the United States without legal status or returning to a country experiencing a humanitarian crisis.

DHS didn’t respond to questions about the secretary’s review of protection for El Salvadorans or the status of TPS recipients’ work authorization, only sharing with Mother Jones the same statement that appeared on the website.

The plight of Salvadorans fleeing the country’s violent, twelve-year civil war was a determining factor behind the legislative framework for TPS. When Congress passed the Immigration Act of 1990 establishing the humanitarian program, it did so in part to address concerns about the inconsistent nature of—and political bias inherent to—the US government’s practice of suspending deportations that benefited certain nationalities but not others.

Throughout the 1980s, the United States had funded El Salvador’s bloody civil war, providing itsmilitary-led government with $1 million a day in aid to fight a coalition of left-wing guerrilla groups. In keeping with its Cold War foreign policy interests, the Reagan administration then denied protection to the vast majority of Salvadorans fleeing the country, characterizing them as economic migrants.

Years of grassroots organizing had put the issue of Salvadoran refugees at the center of the debate. Signed into law by President George H. W. Bush, the ImmigrationAct of 1990 explicitly designated Salvadorans for protection, and they became the first group to be granted TPS. Although that protection ended in 1992, El Salvador was later designated again in 2001, aftertwo devastating earthquakes made it impossible for Salvadorans in the United States to return safely to their home country.

“It wouldn’t exist without our community, and now they’re losing this protection that has helped so many other nations.”

“It was the Salvadoran community that actually pushed for the creation of TPS,” says Abel Nuñez, executive director at the Central American Resources Center. “It wouldn’t exist without our community, and now they’re losing this protection that has helped so many other nations.”

Arnoldo Díaz was one of the young organizers advocating for what would become TPS. As a leader of the student reform movement in El Salvador, he was considered a national security threat bythe government, and he fled the country in 1982 at the behest of his family. When I met Díaz last year in Silver Spring, Maryland, he recalled how his best friend died in his arms after getting shot at a demonstration to support an oil factory strike. “I’m not the first one, and I’m not going to be the last one to die in this struggle,” he told Díaz, who later survived an ambush by a death squad. “Just promise me that you’ll never give up on our people and will never stop fighting.”

In 1987, an immigration judge granted Díaz political asylum, despite the US government’s efforts to deport him back to Central America. “It always gives me goosebumps when I remember it,” he said of the courtroom packed with supporters. Díaz, who became a US citizen in 1995, has kept the promise to his friend to continue fighting.

“It’s heartbreaking,” Díaz says of the current situation. “Keeping people in limbo like that is psychological torture to push people to self-deport.” A co-coordinator with the National TPS Alliance, Díaz said the organization is hosting a legal clinic and offering family preparedness advice, including on how parents can use a “power of attorney” to give temporary custody of US citizen children to other caretakers in the event they have to leave the country. “We don’t want to tell people to give up because we are not giving up,” he says. “But also be ready just in case because you never know.”

TPS for El Salvador has been renewed several times over the years, making it one of the longest-running designations of all nationalities. Having been shielded from deportation for more than two decades, TPS holders from El Salvador have deep roots in US communities. More than 30,000 of them live in the Washington, DC, metro area.

The uncertainty around the future of the program means Salvadorans with TPS are preparing for different scenarios. “Before the announcement, the level of anxiety was already increasing because they didn’t know what they could do,” Nuñez says. “People who did not want to be here in violation of the law were already making plans to leave the country…so they’re still very concerned.”

Without clarity on how much longer they may have valid protected status, TPS holders may encounter challenges in obtaining driver’s licenses. They also have questions about employment authorization. “There are employers that are saying, ‘No, I can’t keep you working. I need to know that you are authorized to work, and therefore come back when you have the proper documentation,'” Palma says.

Palma has lived in the United States since leaving El Salvador in 1998 and was granted TPS in 2001. Like so many TPS holders, he lives in a mixed-status household; he has four US citizen children, and his wife is a legal permanent resident. Depending on what happens to TPS, he says his family is wondering if they should wait before buying a new car, or even if they should sell their home. “We have to be prepared for whatever happens,” he says.

The Trump administration has repeatedly argued that TPS is supposed to be temporary and should only last as long as conditions in the country remain unsafe for people to return. The State Department’s advisory for El Salvador puts it at the lowest level of risk for travelers, citing a decline in crime and gang activity. But international organizations have long decried widespread human rights violations under Trump-aligned Nayib Bukele’s strongman rule and state of exception. Earlier this year, a group of experts found the violations committed by the Salvadoran government—imprisonment, torture, enforced disappearance—may amount to crimes against humanity.

Palma doesn’t dispute that TPS was meant to be a reprieve, but he says the circumstances of Salvadorans and other Central Americans are unique because of how long they’ve been in the United States. For Palma, the administration should stop the detention and deportation of Salvadorans while Congress considers a path to legal status for TPS holders. “If somebody from El Salvador has TPS,” Palma explains, “that means they have been doing everything the government has been asking for the last 25 years.”

“Twenty-five years is not temporary,” Díaz says. “25 years is a lifetime. They’ve put all their youth into this country. We can’t just tell them, pick up your stuff, close your business, take your children, and go home.”

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Emily St. John Mandel Still Has Hope

Emily St. John Mandel is perhaps best known for her 2014 novel Station Eleven, which presciently depicted a devastating global pandemic. Her new novel, Exit Party,out this week, isn’t much sunnier: This one imagines the aftermath of the collapse of the United States as a nation, and both the banality and turmoil that might follow. Exit Party centers around Ari Waker—a character Mandel first introduced in her 2010 novel The Singer’s Gun—who has just been released from prison as the United States settles into its first spring after civil war. She and her roommate attend a party to celebrate the end of curfew, but something isn’t quite right. The party’s host steps outside for some air, and is never seen again.

As I read Exit Party earlier this year, ICE agents were taking over cities like Chicago and Minneapolis, scanning the faces of protesters for some unknown database. The US and Israel had just launched a military assault against Iran. The CDC confirmed 1,000 measles cases, four times the number from the same period last year. Mandel’s speculation about the disintegration of the country didn’t seem as far-fetched as her pandemic might’ve seemed in 2014. Still, I was surprised she was writing about such a dark topic, when in a 2023 Reddit AMA she mentioned that she’d written Station Eleven before having a child, and that she might not have been able to do so after, because “imagining the world ending with my daughter in it is unbearable.”

When we spoke earlier this summer, I asked how she was able to overcome that impulse. Though she said that looking at these ideas “dead on is a little bit unbearable,” the “speculative cloak” helps. And ultimately, what she wants readers to know, is that this novel, like her others, is full of hope, too.

Our conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.

There’s probably going to be a reaction to your new book, Exit Party, that’s like, “Oh no, the author who wrote a book about a pandemic years before Covid hit is now writing about the fall of the United States! What does she know?”

I know nothing. I’m not clairvoyant—I just read the news. There’s something incredibly uncomfortable about thinking about some of these scenarios that I’ve written about in Station Eleven, The Glass Hotel, and now Exit Party, but you may have to be willing to live with some discomfort to create interesting art. So I tried to lean into my fear and anxiety around the very dangerous path that the country is on.

What led you to want to write about this?

I am drawn to writing about the aftermath of catastrophe. There’s something very clarifying about how we respond to disasters as people. I’ve been thinking about this idea of the United States fracturing in a serious way since the early pandemic, when there was a real shortage of personal protective equipment and obviously a total vacuum of leadership in the first Trump administration. There was this weird moment where Northeastern states banded together to buy PPE as a bloc. I remember looking at these states on a map, thinking, “Well, here are these contiguous states working together to advance their interests, kind of at odds with the surrounding country. This kind of looks like a country. This kind of looks like a fracturing.” This feeling of there almost being two countries superimposed on top of the same geography with totally different cultures and ideas and understanding of reality—it’s that idea that animated the whole writing of Exit Party and channeling my political anxieties into fiction. Sometimes looking at something dead-on is a little bit unbearable, but putting it in this kind of speculative cloak makes it easier to consider more deeply.

You talk about your anxieties around the news being channeled into Exit Party, and surveillance seems to be a big part of that.

I think that we’ve surrendered a lot of our privacy, and we’ve done that very voluntarily. We’ve clicked on the videos; we’ve looked at the pictures. This dossier is being built around us. Another thing that scares me is the situation these days with ICE, and how it’s become normalized to have a secret police. Try to imagine how shocking it would have been five years ago for there to be a police force that floods the streets in American cities with masks on their faces. That’s not something that I think most of us would have anticipated for the United States or that we thought was possible in any kind of serious way, outside the conspiratorial fringes of the internet.

Early in Exit Party, some characters have a conversation about how boring living through catastrophe can be.

There’s kind of a banality of catastrophe, which I remember from the 2008 financial collapse, where you’re checking the news every day and after a while, there’s this feeling of “Yep, world still ending, still feels terrible.” I remember that from Covid, where you go from hitting refresh on the mortality graphs to thinking, “Well, yeah, okay, it’s another absolutely god-awful moment in a whole sequence of them.” There’s something both terrifying and hopeful in human psychology around the way that we can get used to anything and adapt to anything.

Yet your books are ultimately quite hopeful.

If a book is completely bleak, that feels implausible to me. Look, it’s a dark time in a lot of ways, but there is still a lot of joy, and there are still people resisting in honestly kind of silly ways that are super-effective. The actions we saw among citizens in Minneapolis were spectacular. Like that level of community organization and resistance and relentlessness in documenting what was going on and people helping their neighbors—that was pretty wonderful. You hear about things like that, and you think, “You know what? There is actually some hope here, even though the country does seem to be flirting with authoritarianism.”

A character in Exit Party says, “No country lasts forever.” Is that, to you, a hopeful statement or a terrifying one at this point in time?

That’s something that I found myself thinking about in the first Trump administration, when there was such despair on the left, and we comforted ourselves with this idea that “Well, nothing lasts forever. Life continues.” I don’t mean that in any kind of callous way. There’s something devastating about the idea of losing a country. At the same time, I’ve certainly met people who were born in places like Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia that no longer exist in those forms, and that is the reality of countries. They don’t always last forever. You hope that whatever comes next is better.

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Stop Trying to Sell Us Chris Brown’s Redemption Arc

“Your courage is contagious.”

In May 2026, while staring directly into the eyes of three of the survivors of Jeffrey Epstein—during a congressional hearing on the late financier’s sprawling web of rape, trafficking, and abuse—that’s what Rep. Jasmine Crockett said.

“I’ve been smiling probably more than I’m supposed to as I’ve sat here because y’all bring me so much joy. And let me tell you why,” she added. “The reason is this: because in spite of this incompetent government, y’all do not back down.”

Four months later, Crockett would take to the mic to express her joy once again, not at a congressional hearing but at the Texas AT&T Stadium, to bestow honors on a man who, in 2009, choked his then-girlfriend to the point that she “began to lose consciousness.”

On Sunday, the Texas Democratic representative joined Chris Brown onstage to sing his praises while awarding him recognition in the congressional record during the Texas stop of his joint tour with Usher.

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“We’re experiencing Black joy to the highest degree,” crowed Crockett, flanked by fellow Rep. Venton Jones.

For those not in the know, Chris Brown is a decorated R&B singer who’s been performing since he was a teen. Known for his smash songs, “Run It,” “Loyal,” and “Forever,” he’s been a staple of the genre for decades.

Nowadays, Brown is known less for his radio hits and more for the hits he allegedly bestowed on dozens of individuals, dating all the way back to 2009 when he brutally assaulted Rihanna, then his girlfriend. But his legal problems didn’t stop there. Over the past fifteen years, Brown has racked up so many convictions and allegations of assault and drug use that there’s an entire Wikipedia page dedicated to his legal issues.

Most notably, Brown has a long track record of alleged violence against women specifically. In 2009, he pleaded guilty to assault against Rihanna, whom he repeatedly struck, bit, and choked during an argument. In 2017, his then-girlfriend, Karreuche Tran was granted a restraining order against him after he threatened to “beat the s— out of” her in text messages. She also accused him of punching her in the stomach twice and pushing her down the stairs, which Brown has denied.

In 2018, a woman sued Brown for sexual assault in a case that settled out of court in 2020. In 2024, ID dropped the documentary Chris Brown: A History of Violence, in which several alleged victims of the singer came forward, including a woman who said Brown raped her in 2020 on Sean “Diddy” Combs’ yacht.

Brown’s penchant for violence has followed him throughout his entire career, but has somehow done absolutely nothing to stop dogged public support for the singer, especially among Black women.

Actress Keke Palmer attended Brown’s “Breezy Bowl” in 2025 despite interviewing Tran about Brown’s alleged assault against her in 2014. Throughout the 2020s, stars like Lizzo, Ciara, and Kelly Rowland have all given Brown his flowers. He’s collaborated with the likes of Normani, Chloe Bailey, and Cassie, who’s testified that Diddy sexually abused and exploited her.

But what separates Crockett from those figures is her status as a politician and her past use of her position to support victims of sexual violence. Throughout her career, Crockett rarely, if ever, shied away from calling out the Republican Party’s racism and misogyny. She’s steadfastly called out the Department of Justice’s failure to release the Epstein files and done the same with Trump for his sexual misconduct during his second presidency.

To (rightfully) lambast your colleagues for supporting a sexual abuser, only to have those politics fly out the window for something so inconsequential, is, on its face, a baffling choice. Saying Trump’s White House is covering up the Epstein files scores you viral clips circulated on the evening news. Calling survivors of sexual exploitation “courageous” leads to comments calling you “inspiring” and “OUTSTANDING.”

Apparently, it’s easier to denounce abusers when it’s politically advantageous.

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A New DHS Report Proves Alligator Alcatraz Detainees Were Right All Along

Alligator Alcatraz, the notorious immigrant detention camp erected in the Florida Everglades last year, routinely held detainees in “small metal enclosures” with just 18 square feet of floor space, a practice that the Department of Homeland Security’s independent watchdog called “highly unconventional and does not align with standards for humane treatment,” according to a DHS Office of Inspector General report.

First revealed by the New York Times on Monday morning, the document provides a rare comprehensive glimpse of life inside the facility, erected by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’s administration last year. Consisting of several soft-sided tents on a remote airfield surrounded by swampland, Alligator Alcatraz at its peak housed up to 1,500 immigrant detainees when DHS was short on detention beds in other facilities. As I’ve reported throughout the last year, since its opening in the summer of 2025, Alligator Alcatraz was criticized for its treatment of the migrants, with advocates noting that the tents were prone to flooding. There were also mosquito infestations, limited access to legal counsel, and food scarcity. The state of Florida officially closed it in June, citing the threat of hurricane season.

The report is based on an unannounced inspection by the DHS Office of Inspector General in January. They concluded that while the detention camp did adhere to intake and use-of-force standards, they discovered several violations. Most notably, the use by detention staff of tight metal enclosures to confine a total of 79 people for periods of time ranging from a few minutes to up to two hours. The metal mesh enclosures, roughly the size of a phone booth, measured about 4 feet by 4 feet and were nearly 8 feet tall. “Facility staff described the small metal enclosures as ‘calming areas’ for detainees to de-escalate and have time alone,” the report states. “Staff further maintained that detainees asked to spend time in the small metal enclosures.” But inspectors found at least one case in which the enclosure was used to discipline someone who failed to comply with a staff order.

Inspectors found several other violations. Each detainee should have at least 75 square feet of living space, but they received only 28 square feet at the camp. During their inspection, OIG officials saw as many as 32 people held within the facility’s eight cell areas. Detainees were also only allowed recreation outside of their housing units three days a week for one hour. As the report noted, “With the limited amount of recreation, detainees could not engage in recreational and exercise programs, which could negatively affect physical and mental health.” Detainees told inspectors that they did not have access to clean drinking water, and inspectors found that they could shower only three days a week—federal detention standards require access to daily showers.

“The absence of well-defined standards at detention facilities increases the risk that detainees may not receive appropriate care.”

Corene Kendrick, deputy director at the ACLU’s National Prison Project, called the report “horrifying.” “It confirms and reaffirms the cruelty of Alligator Alcatraz. It backs up everything that the people who were detained at that camp were reporting to advocates about the conditions and the lack of access to legal calls, the lack of access to going outside, the cages that were used as punishment,” Kendrick told me. “At the time when these allegations were being brought up by people in the facility and by their family members and their attorneys, ICE and the state of Florida repeatedly said that that was all made up and that people were exaggerating and it wasn’t true.” But this report, she added, confirms that “people were suffering.”

After touring the detention center and interviewing staff and detainees, OIG officials found there was a “lack of clarity” on whether Alligator Alcatraz was following state or federal detention standards. The report states, “The absence of well-defined standards at detention facilities increases the risk that detainees may not receive appropriate care.”

In its response to the Office of Inspector General, DHS officials blamed the state of Florida for the conditions, which the agency says maintained authority over daily operations. But the report noted that ICE personnel were frequently on site and federal funding was used to open and run the detention camp. The state Department of Emergency Management, which ran the camp, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

In a statement, Alex Lanfranconi, the communications director for the governor’s office, said: “At least ten million illegal aliens entered our country under the Biden administration. Florida decided to do something about it. The left-wing media wants to focus on a confinement area for violent criminal aliens who have proven they cannot remain peaceful while awaiting deportation. While it adheres to all federal standards for criminal confinement, we’d make it even smaller if we could.”

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States and Cities Sue To Stop Trump’s Immigrant “Wealth Test” Rule Before It Takes Effect

New York is leading a 22-state lawsuit against the Trump administration for unlawfully expanding the “public charge” rules that restrict entry to the United States for immigrants deemed likely to make use of public benefits. A group of municipalities, led by New York City, are separately suing over the same rules.

The new regulations, scheduled to go into effect September 18, reverse a set of 2022 rules which prohibited immigration officers from considering immigrants’ potential future use of non-cash public benefits—like food stamps, Children’s Health Insurance Program benefits, and Medicaid—when determining whether to grant visas. Under the rules scheduled to go into effect this week, officials can use an applicant’s need for food or medical aid to help determine grounds for inadmissibility.

In a report released this summer, health policy organization KFF estimated that between 1.4 million and 4.1 million Medicaid and CHIP enrollees in mixed-status households could disenroll out of fear. The cities and states suing over the rule change argue that it “throws out more than a century of settled law and decades of federal guidance and gives officers wide latitude to make decisions that are inconsistent and discriminatory,” representatives for New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani wrote in a press release.

Trump attempted to establish similar rules—sometimes described as a “wealth test for immigrants”—during his first administration. In 2020, as my colleague Noah Lanard reported, some mixed-status families were forced to choose between green cards and food for their children.

The public charge rule was sometimes described as a plan for denying green cards to people who used public benefits programs like food stamps and Medicaid. The reality is that immigrants are rarely eligible for public benefits until they get a green card. What the public charge rule did was deny green cards to people who immigration officials decided were likely to use public benefits after they became eligible for them.

It’s a revival of a 19th-century policy that grew out of a nativist backlash to Irish and Italian immigrants. The New York Times argued in 1887 that the public charge rule would prevent Italy from sending “monthly consignments of Neapolitan mendicants.”

“The new public charge rule seeks to push immigrant families away from the programs that have kept people fed and healthy for decades,” Mamdani said in a statement announcing the cities’ lawsuit. “That fear will not stop at the families that the federal government is targeting. Families who remain fully eligible for benefits will feel a chilling effect, and all New Yorkers will pay for it.”

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The Proud Boys Next Door

Michael Premo was gasping for air. It was January 6, 2021, and Premo and his partner, fellow filmmaker Rachel Falcone, were crushed against a wall in the Lower West Terrace tunnel at the US Capitol. Between the gas mask and the body armor compressing his torso, Premo was struggling to breathe.

Then Premo made eye contact with a man he recognized from past rallies, who used his body to wedge Premo and Falcone free. When they were safely outside, Premo’s first thought was to find a Proud Boy named Chris Quaglin, whom they’d been following but had lost in the melee. They had to decide whether to leave or continue to film.

“Now it’s dawned on us, the sort of gravity of this historical moment that we are bearing witness to, and at that point it’s like a war photographer,” Premo says. “I’m just following the story wherever it goes.”

The moment was the climax of a story Premo had been working on for three years. His documentary, Homegrown, follows three members of the far-right nationalist Proud Boys—Quaglin, Thad Cisneros, and Randy Ireland—before and after the 2020 election, which they believe was stolen from Donald Trump. The film, which recently won a 2026 duPont-Columbia Award and is currently streaming on GATHR, traces Cisneros’ attempts at bridge building with Black Lives Matter, Ireland’s steady role as an organizer and Proud Boys ideological anchor, and Quaglin’s radicalization. It is a verité film, showing the ordinary texture of the men’s daily lives alongside the violence, with no narration or talking heads to tell viewers how to feel about either. And it feels less like documentation of a historic event and more like access into a current reality—one that many people would rather dismiss as extreme.

I watched the film as part of Project All, an initiative of the equity-focused research institute PolicyLink that argues the country’s way forward means bridging ideological gaps. The invitation to the viewing stated: “Americans still hold a deep love for their country and for one another—an untapped source of energy that can be mobilized to chart a new course above the fray of polarization.”

For viewers eager to condemn the Proud Boys, Homegrown replaces moral distance with something more uncomfortable: the idea that these men are not extraordinary.

It seemed an odd choice to use a film about the Proud Boys as an opening to connection. But Homegrown raised some questions for me, including: How did Premo, a Black man, manage to embed himself within an organization that, while describing itself as non-racist “Western chauvinists,” has been repeatedly linked to white supremacy? And then there’s his portrayal of the men in the film. For viewers eager to condemn the Proud Boys, Homegrown replaces moral distance with something more uncomfortable: the idea that these men are not extraordinary. Premo’s refusal to editorialize or explain his subjects means viewers see men who are in many ways familiar, who love their kids, who push back against racism in their own ranks, and who genuinely believe they’re on the right side of history—just as many viewers might believe themselves to be.

Michael Premo attends the Homegrown green carpet during the 20th Zurich Film Festival in October 2024.Joshua Sammer/Getty

Premo, 44, says he’s always been driven to understand people across differences. Growing up in Albany, New York, the son of civil servants who worked for the state, he recalls as a child reading The Big Book of Peace, which included a drawing of an Israeli and a Palestinian. “I think the headline was something like, ‘Which is the Palestinian and which is the Israeli?’ and my younger self was trying to discern the difference,” he says. “And the point is there is no difference. They’re just people.”

When he was older, Premo went to college in Boston. He told me about an incident in which someone smeared urine and feces on his dorm door and wrote: “Michael Premo is a bitch N—.” While Premo says the school administration was sympathetic, they ultimately did little to resolve the issue and framed it as the person “acting out.”

“I told them that I wanted to make a film about people fighting for America and I wanted to understand what they were fighting for, and why.”

So in the aftermath of the 2016 election, Premo was surprised by how many people were shocked at Trump’s victory. He made Homegrown, in part, as an explanation. “To me he seemed to epitomize everything that America is but pretends it’s not,” he says. “I feel like Donald Trump was saying all of the quiet things out loud.”

He approached the men in the documentary from a place of wanting to understand. “I told them that I wanted to make a film about people fighting for America and I wanted to understand what they were fighting for, and why,” he says.

Before Premo started filming, he assumed that the far-right groups he met with would be predominantly white and was nervous about how he would be treated. But that didn’t turn out to be the case with the Proud Boys.

Founded in 2016, the group became known for street violence and confrontations with left-wing protesters. In 2020, Proud Boys tore down Black Lives Matter banners from two historic Black churches in Washington, DC; their leader, Enrique Tarrio, later pleaded guilty to burning one of them.

What Premo found was that the Proud Boys were multiracial, and, once he had earned the trust of Ireland and Cisneros, who were the leaders of their respective Proud Boy chapters, he was accepted. When some members did make racist remarks, Premo says Ireland defended him.

Still, Premo found the constant macho rhetoric and violence he witnessed while filming mentally and emotionally exhausting. He went to rallies dressed in protective gear, prepared for a riot. Even if there weren’t skirmishes between the Proud Boys and other groups, there were men talking about what they wanted to do to antifa or others.

While he included the violence in his film, Premo is clear that it is not meant to make these men exceptions, but to situate them within a broader pattern.

“One of my critiques of American history and polite, middle-class white liberal society is this idea that violence is only an aberration of the norm. It’s only something that is carried out by the fringe or the extremes of society, when fundamentally, the American project is a project built by violence,” he says.

Pro-Trump protesters gather in front of the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, in Washington, DC.Jon Cherry/Getty

In Homegrown, the result is an intimate if uncomfortable look that complicates existing narratives about the Proud Boys—and violence in America. Cisneros, Quaglin, and Ireland see themselves as fighting on behalf of disenfranchised men like themselves—middle and working-class people who have been ignored by a government that benefits the wealthy—and for a return to the ideals upon which they believe this country was built.

Quaglin, a 39-year-old electrician from New Jersey, becomes the film’s center of gravity. He and his wife—a Chinese immigrant who he says “100 percent is for Trump”—are preparing for the birth of their first child while his activism ramps up. We watch as he gets “punched in” to Ireland’s chapter after a rally—an initiation that involves reciting a pledge and getting decked by five Proud Boys. The film tracks Quaglin’s parallel storylines until they collide on January 6.

Premo chose to center Quaglin because his story was emblematic of many people Premo met while filming—men who had not been politically active before Trump’s 2016 election, but who then saw him as a solution. “Chris seemed to embody that individual who had these series of grievances, was trying to achieve something, though he wasn’t sure what he was trying to achieve,” Premo says. “It was really Trump that made him sort of hop up and go.”

Quaglin welcomed Premo and Falcone into his personal life. On the first day that they went to his house in New Brunswick to film, he woke up early to slow-cook pork on the grill for them. The night of January 6, Premo says that Quaglin left their hotel and returned with alcohol to celebrate. He’d remembered from some past conversation that Falcone liked Balvenie scotch and bought her a bottle.

It suggests something more uncomfortable: that the difference is often not one of belief, but of expression—who says what out loud, and who knows not to.

When I first watched Homegrown, I didn’t make it all the way through. The unfiltered look at Quaglin, in particular, was unsettling—not because of the violence or his racist comments, but because of the sense of normalcy with which they are presented. The opening scene shows Quaglin putting together a radiator cover in a nursery, in preparation for the birth of his son. Later, he outfits his truck to splatter paint over the Black Lives Matter sign on New York’s Fifth Avenue, carrying it out with methodical calmness. He is the only one of the men featured in the film who was at the Capitol on January 6, planning to go armed with knives and firearms for what he says will be a “CIVIL WAR.”

I found the ease with which Quaglin committed these acts astounding. The interspersion of political violence and domesticity doesn’t allow viewers to compartmentalize what’s on screen as fringe behavior, safely outside the bounds of ordinary American life. It suggests something more uncomfortable: that the difference is often not one of belief, but of expression—who says what out loud, and who knows not to.

As a Black woman, I know the quiet racism of liberal spaces, and the pretense that it is only perpetuated by those, like the Proud Boys, who are seen as extreme. The brilliance of Homegrown is that it forces viewers to confront that.

Ireland was the first of the Proud Boys in the film that Premo met, when they talked in a bar after a Trump rally in New York City. Ireland, 51, said that Premo shared that he was working on a film: “It was very much in general terms,” says Ireland. “That started a kind of friendship, I suppose.”

Ireland says Homegrown is a distortion of the Proud Boys because it focuses so heavily on Quaglin. “Chris is an extreme individual,” Ireland says. “I would say that Michael himself is more the standard.”

Cisneros, 49, challenges viewers’ preconceptions of who the Proud Boys are—and how they view the world. Before he agreed to participate in the film, Cisneros had his Proud Boys chapter in Salt Lake City watch Premo’s film Water Warriors, about Indigenous and white community members fighting to protect their water from a natural gas company. The “common man fighting the system” aspect of Water Warriors was something that resonated, Cisneros said.

One of the more surprising moments in the film is Cisneros’ partnership with Black Lives Matter activist Jacarri Kelley. Cisneros, who is Latino, says the Proud Boys and Black Lives Matter had shared goals in fighting for equality, because both groups were responding to a political system that had failed many working-class people. Kelley and Cisneros appeared together at rallies and public events. “The only way that we’re going to fix that,” Cisneros says in the film, “is if we recognize that we’re all sitting on the same plane and we’re all crashing into the same damn mountain.”

Cisneros was grateful that Premo was there to bear witness. “I’m honestly glad that I let Mike in in that way,” he says.

While some in his chapter were supportive of his decision, Cisneros says that within the nationwide Proud Boys Telegram chat, there was pushback. In the end, the partnership with BLM led to Cisneros being forced out of the Proud Boys.

His life spiraled out of control after January 6. He lost the Proud Boys, his dog, his relationship, and his freedom—he was recently released having served two years in prison in Texas for aggravated assault. Premo filmed some of Cisneros’ losses, including his father in hospice, but out of respect chose not to include them. Cisneros was grateful that Premo was there to bear witness. “I’m honestly glad that I let Mike in in that way,” says Cisneros, who has not yet seen Homegrown.

Meanwhile, Quaglin was incarcerated for his role on January 6 and was released in January 2025, after being pardoned by Trump. His wife divorced him, and Homegrown ends with a note that he had not held his son since his arrest in April 2021. Premo says Quaglin—who declined to speak to me for this story—blames him for the divorce.

Still from “Homegrown”Credit tktk

While the film focuses on the Proud Boys, Premo also followed other groups he describes as explicit white supremacists. He filmed what one framed as a border protection exercise, in which they patrolled in southern Arizona, some dressed in Nazi uniforms. One man told Premo he was an abomination who should be exterminated. Premo felt it was wiser not to respond and just let the man speak. “That just tested every sort of emotional thread I had,” Premo says.

Premo couldn’t watch the footage he shot on January 6 for more than a year.

He hasn’t yet processed the toll that working on the film has taken. He couldn’t watch the footage he shot on January 6 for more than a year. When the editors asked for his input during their first pass, Premo refused and asked them to just send the clips they thought they might use. Even then, he was reluctant to watch.

Premo tried therapy to cope with the mental and emotional exhaustion. “One therapist told me that in stressful situations I should take my shoes off and connect with the ground, and that didn’t seem to be applicable in my scenario,” he says. What worked was “bubble baths and cognac.” He also built in time, while filming, for hikes or to be in nature.

Premo and Falcone applied to film festivals in anticipation of the 2024 election cycle. While the film premiered at the Venice Film Festival that August, they encountered resistance from festival organizers in the United States. Some programmers saw little urgency, Premo says, doubting Trump could be re-elected. Others felt the film was platforming a hate group.

That shifted after Trump won. Homegrown now has been screened at more than 50 film festivals and won the duPont-Columbia in January. Along with its streaming agreement, it’s also available through an educational distribution agreement with New Day Films.

In making the film, Premo says he found that what people were fighting for came down to something more fundamental than politics: “I discovered,” he says, “that people are looking for belonging, meaning, and purpose.”

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States Already Have a Good Way to Ensure Election Integrity—and MAGA Hates It

In January 2022, at an event hosted by one of the scores of local “election integrity” groups inspired by Donald Trump’s fraudulent assertion that voter fraud had cost him the 2020 election, Louisiana Secretary of State Kyle Ardoin made a big announcement: His state was leaving ERIC.

This was puzzling because, amid all the Republican pearl-clutching over election integrity, ERIC was the single organization best equipped to help states ensure exactly that.

And suddenly MAGA Republicans wanted nothing to do with it.

Conspiracy theorists “spread lies about me… They spread lies about ERIC’s funding, what ERIC does, how ERIC works.”

ERIC is short for Electronic Registration Information Center. It’s a nonpartisan, nonprofit coalition established in 2012 by elections officials from seven states—then four red, three blue—who joined forces to bulletproof their voting processes. This, of course, was before the right twisted the term “election integrity,” much as they’d previously usurped the word “patriot,” as a partisan identifier somewhat opposite from its original meaning.

And what does ERIC do? Well, member states submit voter registration and vehicle registration data through secure channels, allowing for cross-referencing. That’s valuable because people frequently move within and among states. Young people become eligible. Noncitizens become citizens. Former felons have rights restored. Newly incarcerated people lose them. And lots of people die.

ERIC helps its members track voter moves and purge their lists of duplicate registrations (Michael Mechanic vs. Mike Mechanic) and dead people (hopefully neither of those). It identifies people who are eligible yet unregistered. And after a national election, if requested, ERIC will produce reports flagging any signs of potential illegal voting—of a person casting ballots in two or more states or casting more than one ballot in one state, or voting on behalf of a recently dead relative, for example.

“These are all laudable, uncontroversial goals that have made our voter registration rolls more accurate and our elections more accessible and secure,” Jonathan Diaz, an executive with the nonpartisan Campaign Legal Center, wrote in an article extolling ERIC’s virtues.

ERIC attracted more new members every year. By the time of Ardoin’s announcement, it had 31 member states, plus DC, and was respected on both sides of the aisle as a powerful tool to help keep voter rolls in shape, improve access, and flag potential fraud. John Merrill, Alabama’s secretary of state from 2015 to 2023, recalls that ERIC had more Republican-run than Democratic-run states at the time. “Its integrity has been intact from its creation,” he told me.

“The people who decided that they did not want to be a part of ERIC did so for political reasons,” says Alabama’s former secretary of state. “And I have a problem with that.”

And yet his state was next to fall. In January 2023. Merrill’s predecessor, Wes Allen, withdrew Alabama from ERIC as his first official act. (“Providing the private information of Alabama citizens, including underage minors, to an out of state organization is troubling to me,” he stated in his announcement.) Allen was followed by a parade of red-state officials, some echoing baseless conspiracy theories, such as a bogus claim that ERIC got funding from George Soros. David Becker, a nonvoting board member who’d helped establish ERIC but is no longer involved, also came under attack.

“Conspiracy theorists targeted ERIC. Apparently, it was working too well for them,” Becker, also the founder and director of the “fiercely nonpartisan” Center for Election Innovation and Research, recalled at a CEIR press briefing on Friday. “They spread lies about me,” he said, and “They spread lies about ERIC’s funding, what ERIC does, how ERIC works. We continue to see that.”

Trump himself piled on: “All Republican Governors should immediately pull out of ERIC, the terrible Voter Registration System that ‘pumps the rolls’ for Democrats and does nothing to clean them up,” he wrote on Truth Social in March 2023, showcasing his complete ignorance of ERIC’s role.

Red-state officials played along. After Alabama came Florida, Missouri, and West Virginia, then Iowa, Ohio, Virginia, and Texas. By 2024, nearly a third of the member states had bailed, though a handful of reliably conservative states (Alaska, Kentucky, South Carolina, and Utah) remain. Officials from the departing states “succumbed to that disinformation, even as they admitted that they knew it was false, and within days of leaving, were proudly trumpeting voter fraud investigations and prosecutions they did that came solely from ERIC,” Becker said. “We saw this in several states.”

“I think that the people who decided that they did not want to be a part of ERIC did so for political reasons,” Merrill told me. “I don’t know anybody that had a factual base for removing their state because of an exposed vulnerability, inconsistency, or irregularity that they felt was a problem for ERIC’s integrity—and if they did, they never shared that publicly. Never. And I have a problem with that.”

In 2022, the year Louisiana bailed, ERIC flagged some 2.4 million interstate moves, 7.3 million intrastate moves, 203,210 duplicate listings, and 65,437 dead voters. Four years later, post-exodus, those numbers were much reduced: roughly 604,000 interstate, 881,00o intrastate, 61,000 duplicates, and 17,000 dead. To boost election integrity, Republicans officials might well have considered recruiting more states to join ERIC instead of taking their ball and going home.

Member states do have some obligations. They must agree to use ERIC’s list maintenance reports to keep their rolls accurate. They must review all potential cases of illegal voting that ERIC flags and refer the credible ones to law enforcement regardless of which party benefitted. They also must, and this is another reason some red states soured on ERIC, use its “Eligible but Unregistered” report to offer basic voter registration information to the people it identifies.

“I don’t think there are five justices who want to own the chaos that would ensue” if the Supreme Court let Trump interfere with voting by mail.

Part of any secretary of state’s job is, or should be, to encourage voter participation. But apparently they don’t make ’em like they used to.

Merrill, who now runs a consultancy called Morning in Alabama LLC that sometimes works with voting groups, has experienced pushback for his outspokenness. “I’ve had conservative ideologues who have said, “Oh, you, you embrace the liberal agenda,” he told me. “I’m like, ‘What? Where’s the agenda?’ I never saw an agenda. I used ERIC as a tool, just like we use the Kansas Interstate Crosscheck System, to multiply our efforts in Alabama to ensure that we had the best election administration system that we could have.”

If anything, he says, withdrawing from the compact has damaged election integrity in those former member states, including his own.

Becker concurs. Those states, he said, “have really kneecapped their own ability to maintain accurate voter lists and potentially combat fraud, and all in service of conspiracy theorists who seem more concerned with raising money and diminishing American election integrity than actually contributing anything substantial.”

The red-state ERIC exodus isn’t a new story, but it’s timely again as Trump’s Department of Justice ramps up attacks on states that refuse to hand over their voter rolls to the feds. In its effort to obtain those lists, the DOJ has taken 30 states to court—and lost in 23 of the 23 cases decided to date. Administration officials have even threatened to prosecute election officials for ill-defined missteps, and have hinted, also vaguely, that they could dispatch ICE or federal troops to polling places. (“This is not going to happen,” Becker said on Friday.)

Most recently, and egregiously, the administration has made moves to monkeywrench postal delivery of ballots in those blue and purple states unwilling to hand over their lists—to a government, mind you, that has obliterated any presumption that it will play fair, and that it won’t weaponize state voter data for partisan advantage.

On Friday, Becker said he didn’t believe the Supreme Court would allow Trump to interfere with mail voting so close to the midterms. “I don’t think there are five justices,” he said, “who want to own the chaos that would ensue and, in some ways, the chaos that might affect Republican voters worse than Democratic voters.”

But if the administration’s purpose is to undermine public confidence in an election in which Trump’s party is expected to fare poorly, then they’ve already succeeded.

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Former EPA Officials: Trump Is Letting Data Centers Make People Sick

While tech oligarchs grandstand about the existential danger AI superintelligence poses to humanity, former Environmental Protection Agency officials say we should be worried about a more immediate threat to our health: the data centers that power those AI models.

The former EPA researchers, now working with the nonprofit Environmental Protection Network, are warning in a new report that since January 2025, Donald Trump’s EPA has embarked on a systematic weakening of pollution safeguards, permitting processes, inspection norms, and other guardrails—at least 30 different actions—that could increase the health risks associated with the data center boom.

There are currently about 3,000 data centers in the United States, and more than 1,500 new centers are in the planning stages. But as developers build out this vast, energy-hungry infrastructure, the country is losing the government regulatory safeguards that are needed to ensure that expansion is done safely, the ex–EPA officials say.

Dan Costa, who spent 35 years at EPA studying air pollution, noted that for decades the environmental agency, which was established in 1970, had a large and committed cadre of researchers who investigated emerging sources of pollution and new environmental threats.

“Over the decades, toxicologists, chemists, atmospheric scientists, modelers and engineers worked in concert with academic colleagues on behalf of the American people—not on behalf of industry,” Costa said in a press briefing last week. “We wanted to carry out EPA’s mission of protecting people’s health from industrial air pollution.”

Now, though, that work force has been gutted. The Trump administration has dismantled EPA’s main research office, and the agency’s priorities have shifted away from strict enforcement of pollution standards. “Transforming the nation’s energy system, while diminishing its scientific capacity to understand what the impacts are going to be, makes no sense,” Costa said.

But that appears to be the direction the country is heading in. President Donald Trump is “positioning America as the global leader in AI,” EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin wrote in a memo last year. The agency is “committed to bolstering” those efforts, Zeldin said, by “cutting heavy-handed regulations to ensure America can build and power the data centers essential to Making America the AI Capital of the World.”

Since Trump returned to the White House, data center developers have seized the opportunity to expand at a rapid pace, helped by the administration’s moves. In some cases, that deregulation has involved keeping old coal-fired plants online past their planned decommissioning times in order to power data centers; other times, it has meant easing regulations on the use of onsite fossil-fuel-powered turbines to power hyperscale data centers like xAI’s Colossus.

The agency has proposed a rule change that would let developers begin constructing data centers and their associated power plants before they get air pollution permits. And it has directed the agency’s enforcement staff to avoid any action that could “unduly burden or significantly disrupt” energy production or power generation.

According to one study the former EPA researchers cited in their new report, pollution associated with the AI boom may lead to 1,300 additional deaths per year.

Physician and former EPA administrator Lynn Goldman said some health impacts of increased data center pollution might be felt quickly—for example, heart attacks or premature births associated with particulate exposure. Others, such as cancer, might take years to emerge. “The AI industry’s race for advantage should not be a matter of life or death,” Goldman said at the press conference. “Families shouldn’t have to pay for the AI boom with their health.”

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Trump Keeps Using “National Security” to Do What He Wants

President Donald Trump has a favorite justification for everything he does: “It’s a national security matter.”

After 9/11, the United States built a vast, powerful, and generally unchecked national security apparatus. Twenty-five years later, Trump is using agencies and emergency powers that sprung up in the aftermath of the 2001 attacks—and have never been abolished or repealed—to threaten domestic dissidents and anyone else he views as an enemy, claiming that those who oppose his policies constitute threats to America.

Of course, American presidents have been using “national security” as an excuse to expand surveillance and start wars since before the smoke from the Twin Towers cleared, and Trump is no exception. In his first term, his long list of national security “threats” included Japanese cars, Chinese telecom equipment, and briefly, the gay hookup app Grindr.

But in his second term, Trump—whose constantly shifting stories about his own actions at Ground Zero defy credulity—has taken this tactic to even more absurd, and sometimes catastrophic, extremes. Here are some highlights.

Threatening to annex Greenland: Trump has periodically obsessed over “acquiring” Greenland, and, in various Truth Social posts, he has made his case for annexation. “The National Security of the United States, and the World at large, is at stake,” he wrote in a series of early-morning Truth Social posts in January. “The United States needs Greenland for the purpose of National Security. It is vital for the Golden Dome that we are building. NATO should be leading the way for us to get it. IF WE DON’T, RUSSIA OR CHINA WILL, AND THAT IS NOT GOING TO HAPPEN!” Trump renewed his threats to annex Greenland at the NATO summit in July.

Targeting ICE protesters as terrorists: Trump’s September 2025 National Security Presidential Memorandum-7 formally designates “antifa” as a domestic terrorist organization. Following that directive, dozens of ICE protesters across the country have been taken to trial as national security threats—some of them over things as small as moving a box of zines or wearing a shirt that says “I’m antifa.”

Related

The Religion of National Security

Halting offshore wind development: Since late 2025, administration officials have framed offshore wind turbines as a national security threat. Interior Secretary Doug Burgum has said a classified report from Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth proves offshore wind is a national security threat—but has never exactly explained how. The administration has also used national security concerns as a pretext for keeping coal plants online past their planned retirement dates and restarting a problematic California oil pipeline over fierce state and local opposition.

Building more hyperscale data centers: “It is a national security imperative for the United States to achieve and maintain unquestioned and unchallenged global technological dominance,” Trump, who has invested millions of dollars in companies that build data center infrastructure, wrote in a 2025 executive order.

Constructing a $400 million ballroom: After a federal judge in DC ordered Trump to halt construction on his unsanctioned White House ballroom, he unleashed a tirade on social media pitching the project as a military-grade command center. The ballroom wasn’t just a ballroom, apparently, but a “desperately needed National Security structure for the people of the United States of America,” Trump wrote on Truth Social in mid-August. The Supreme Court has, at least for now, allowed construction to move forward.

Stripping union protections from nearly a million federal workers: In a March 2025 executive order, Trump designated more than a dozen government agencies as performing “intelligence, counterintelligence, investigative, or national security work,” thereby robbing about 950,000 federal employees of their collective bargaining rights.

Putting tariffs on musical instruments: The Department of Commerce announced in early August that it plans to implement a 25 percent tariff on brass instruments—including trombones, trumpets, and tubas—citing national security concerns about America’s purported overreliance on foreign copper alloys. The National Association of Music Merchants has condemned the move.

Letting xAI pollute Memphis: NAACP lawyers contend that Elon Musk’s xAI should pay more than $100,000 a day in civil penalties for violating the federal Clean Air Act by operating unpermitted gas turbines in Memphis to keep Musk’s Grok chatbot—a.k.a. “MechaHitler”—online. This past June, the Department of Justice intervened in the case, not to safeguard Memphians, but rather to protect Grok. “Grok’s continued operation and availability is a matter of paramount national security,” the filing said, especially “in the event of armed conflict”—noting that the Department of War used Grok to “deploy over 2,000 munitions to 2,000 distinct targets within 96 hours during Operation Epic Fury.”

Protecting the US drone industry—and his sons’ pocketbooks: Last week, Trump proposed slapping tariffs of up to 100 percent on foreign-made drones, calling reliance on foreign drone components a “national security threat.” His older sons, Eric and Don Jr., have sizable holdings in the US drone industry, so this is probably great news for them.

Excluding trans people from public life: In May, the Trump administration released its latest “counterterrorism” plan, which labels transgender people a threat to the nation’s safety. Counterterrorism czar Sebastian Gorka told reporters at the time that the administration would “crush” any threat, “whether it is the cartels, the jihadists or violent left-wing extremists like antifa—and like the transgender killers, the nonbinary, the left-wing radicals who killed my friend, Charlie Kirk, we will take them on, head on.”

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The Inspirational Life of Environmentalist Wendell Berry

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

This coverage is made possible through a partnership between Grist and BPR, a public radio station serving western North Carolina. ​

Wendell Berry made his choices and stuck to them. He did not have a computer or a smartphone. He wrote more than 50 books of poetry, fiction, and essays, mostly with a pencil and paper, from his farmhouse in Henry County, Kentucky. By the time of his passing on August 31, the 92-year-old had lived many lives—as a farmer, teacher, philosopher, environmental activist—and inspired several generations of writers, farmers, and advocates in turn. From these varying perspectives, Berry grappled with humanity and the natural world.

His answer to the fundamental question of how to live right was to start small—to revere the Earth’s endless beauty, and to work a little, each day, to reverse the harm we’ve caused.

“There is no public crisis that is not also private,” Berry wrote in his essay “Think Little.” Written in 1972 as the environmental movement emerged, the piece marked a conflict of Berry’s: Despite strong environmental convictions, he sometimes despaired of the movement’s focus on bending the ear of politicians, without individuals healing the rupture between modern life and the land. “The changes that are required are fundamental changes in the way we are living,” Berry wrote.

Berry hated dualisms—between humanity and the natural world, body and soul, person who believes x and person who believes y.

He extolled this approach in one of his most well-known poems, “Manifesto: Mad Farmer Liberation Front”: “Invest in the millennium. Plant sequoias. / Say that your main crop is the forest / that you did not plant.”

The language of activism was often at odds with Berry’s worldview. It seemed to warn of a coming apocalypse, but to Berry, the world had no end and no beginning. To move in nature’s time meant to think in cycles of death and rebirth, not a straight line leading toward destruction or salvation.

That didn’t stop Berry from engaging with activism, even when it frustrated him, said Jeffrey Bilbro, an English professor at Grove City College in Pennsylvania, who’s written several books on Berry.

Berry was arrested in 1979 for protesting a nuclear plant in Indiana. In 2011, he was arrested again during a sit-in inside Kentucky state government offices while protesting mountaintop removal coal mining. He remained active in the fight against coal throughout the 2010s, helping to block the gates to a coal-fired power plant in Washington, D.C., and pulling his papers from the University of Kentucky after the school accepted a $7 million donation from Alliance Coal.

After Berry wrote his essay in Harper’s Magazine, “Why I am not Going to Buy a Computer” in 1987, some called him a Luddite. As a Grist article in 2014 pointed out, he was, in perhaps the truest sense, taking after that early 19th century movement, when textile workers at the advent of industrialization destroyed machinery to protect the dignity of their work. Berry refused, as much as he could, to let technology alienate him from his work. For this, he was sometimes criticized or called a curmudgeon.

His views didn’t fit neatly into modern politics. He believed that marriage and family strengthened community ties, but didn’t believe the government had authority to legislate such things. The law of nature, he said in one essay, was universal kinship and kindness, and Biblical stories and Psalms supported that.

“It is the time’s discipline to think / of the death of all living, and yet live.”

Berry was religious, but didn’t always like church, calling himself, according to Bilbro, a “bad weather church-goer” because he preferred to spend nice Sunday mornings walking in the woods. He hated dualisms—between humanity and the natural world, between body and soul, between person who believes x and person who believes y. This lent him broad appeal across the political and class spectrum, especially to those who felt that capitalism and industry had moved humanity away from a more honest way of life, whether through agriculture or other means.

“For an uncompromising person or a person of convictions, I think he recognized the need in a fallen world,” Bilbro said. “Our hands are all dirty, and we’re making these compromises, and it’s better to be honest about the necessity to do so and try to do what we can to live right, even if we can’t attain the purity that we might wish.”

The environmental crisis, according to Berry, takes hold in our lives and evinces itself as a sort of social decay. But living isn’t an unforgivable sin in itself, if we can only leave things better than we found them, knowing that the strip-mined mountaintop where we plant spruce, aspen, and wildflowers might not become a lush forest again until long after we’re gone.

In the poem, “A Discipline,” Berry imagines apocalypse: “it approaches / on every side, there is no other place / to turn.”

And yet, the poem continues, nothing ever really goes away: “It is the time’s discipline to think / of the death of all living, and yet live.”

Only the hard work of tending the land and learning its rhythms again can heal it, he believed. In coming into relationship with the smallest handful of earth, you can understand what it means to fight for change almost too enormous to fathom. To Berry, by tending a sprouted seedling in the ground, you can recognize you are it, and it is you.

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Conspiracists and Supporters Collide at Charlie Kirk’s Memorial

We went to Charlie Kirk’s one-year memorial service at the site of his death. And it was full of contradictions—conspiracy theorists colliding with diehard supporters and counter protesters.

September 10 marked the one-year anniversary of the death of conservative youth activist Charlie Kirk at Utah Valley University, which sits just outside of Salt Lake City, Utah. According to event organizers, thousands of people made the trek to the university event center to remember the founder of Turning Point USA. While it was mostly fans of Kirk and locals who had made the journey, none of the attendees happened to be from the Trump administration, unless you count Trent Staggs, the former mayor of Riverton, Utah and failed Senate candidate who now works in the Small Business Administration.

The event was subdued and received little media coverage because most of the political world was instead focused on President Donald Trump, who scheduled his midterm convention in Dallas, Texas, for the same night, reportedly without consulting Kirk’s widow, Erika, or the Turning Point leadership.

But the Utah event nonetheless drew Kirk’s diehard supporters, as well as a few conspiracy theorists who don’t believe that his death was the result of a lone gunman. (Tyler Robinson, the alleged shooter, is currently on trial in Utah.) And of course, there were a handful of protesters, mostly UVU students who were unhappy to have the memorial event held on their campus for a man whose views they found distasteful. We spoke to people from all camps. Watch:

Video by Peter Berger

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Trump’s DOJ Is Reportedly Investigating Gavin Newsom’s Travel Funding

The Justice Department’s probe into Gov. Gavin Newsom and his wife, Jennifer Siebel Newsom, is related to his international travel and how it was paid for, according to subpoenas reviewed by the San Francisco Standard in a story on Saturday.

These subpoenas were reportedly issued earlier this month and order six years of records from a nonprofit that paid for the governor’s travel. It also seeks internal communications among his current and former aides and associates.

Federal probes into Newsom’s circle reportedly began at least a year ago, and in June, Newsom said the probe was a politically motivated “fishing expedition.” He claimed the Trump administration was targeting him because he was considering a bid for president in 2028. (The president, of course, has a long history of going after his political enemies.)

“In recent days, federal agents have knocked on the doors of family friends and former employees,” Newsom said in a video message at the time. “Not because they found a crime, but because they simply are trying to find one.”

And in a statement Saturday, Newsom’s office said, “Governor Newsom went after the king—and as he warned in June, the tyrant is now coming after everyone around him. This is what Donald Trump does to his enemies: investigate first, hunt for a crime that doesn’t exist second.”

The California governor has a history of criticizing Trump. On Tuesday, he said the president lied when he told a story of two firefighters lifting him out of One Liberty Plaza on September 11, 2001.

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Ted Cruz Pushed His College Sports Bill on ESPN—and Was Booed Mercilessly

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) was on the receiving end of a nearly 10-minute chorus of boos on Saturday morning ahead of the heavyweight college football matchup between Texas and Ohio State, during an interview in which he shamelessly promoted his congressional bill live on ESPN.

ESPN had Ted Cruz on 'College GameDay' in a conversation with Rece Davis for nearly 10 minutes. Cruz was heavily booed by the crowd — and heard "Ted, you suck!" chants — in Austin.

— Awful Announcing (@awfulannouncing.bsky.social) 2026-09-12T14:21:12.607Z

His proposed legislation, the Protect College Sports Act, would allow the NCAA to unilaterally enforce its own rules on issues likerevenue sharing with college students and athletes transferring between schools. It also shields the NCAA from antitrust liability. Groups like the NAACP and AFL-CIO oppose the bill for further diminishing the voice and power of college athletes.

Other proponents of the bill—including former Alabama football coach Nick Saban and sports host Pat McAfee—have used ESPN airtime to support it. But the absence of an opposing viewpoint was glaring Saturday morning. As The Atlantic’s Jemele Hill wrote on Threads: “ESPN using its flagship college football show to openly advocate for this bill is egregious. Fine, have Ted Cruz on. But have on Senator Chris Murphy, who opposes this bill.”

And as sports news media site Awful Announcing points out, it’s ironic that ESPN provided room for a Republican senator from Texas to talk about politics the same week that ABC (which, like ESPN, is owned by Disney) stopped Jimmy Kimmel from airing an interview with Democratic Senate candidate James Talarico, following threats from the FCC. (Though it’s important to note that the FCC does not have oversight over cable television.)

It’s also a choice to haveCruz live on the air from Austin, Texas, given his infamous history at sporting events, particularly during the 2022 baseball postseason. During Game 4 of the American League Championship Series that fall between the team Cruz roots for, the Houston Astros, and the New York Yankees, the Yankee Stadium crowd booed and heckled Cruz, shouting “Loser!” and “Go back to Cancún!,” the latter a reference to his retreat from the 2021 winter storm that plunged Texas into a deadly power crisis. Weeks later, after the Astros took home the World Series, Cruz managed to get booed at the team’s victory parade.

Ted Cruz pulled off what I thought was impossible- getting booed at a championship parade. pic.twitter.com/B4oVgP404Q

— Chancellor Johnson (@ChancellorTV) November 7, 2022

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