Elon Musk’s Reward for Calling for a Race War? Becoming a Trillionaire.

British Labour Party leadership accused Elon Musk of inciting violence on social media ahead of massive ongoing white supremacist, anti-immigration riots centered in Belfast, Northern Ireland.

“It’s appalling. Anyone that is seeking to drive and exploit a situation like this to drive their own political agenda is grievously wrong and doing damage,” Labour Party Chair Anna Turley told LBC News on Wednesday, in reference to Musk’s remarks. “We’ve seen children, families having to flee their homes on the streets of Belfast last night.”

On Tuesday night, rioters reportedly lit buildings and vehicles on fire and broke into and damaged homes, with at least some targeting people of color, in response to news thata Sudanese refugee with legal status was charged with attempted murder for stabbing and attempting to behead another man on Monday night.

As far-right activists called for “mass protest” across the UK early Tuesday, Musk quoted one of the viral posts, writing, “Only by protesting REPEATEDLY and LOUDLY will there be any change!!”

Only by protesting REPEATEDLY and LOUDLY will there be any change!! https://t.co/73GDcLLFwv

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) June 9, 2026

What’s the “change” Musk is demanding? A short list of some his activity on X on Tuesday morning:

• Tuesday 11:03am ET: Musk posts: “The truth is that there are VASTLY more hate crimes, especially aggravated rape and murder, per person by Blacks against Whites than the other way around.”
• Tuesday 11:27am ET: Musk promotes a clip of remarks he made to a crowd last September via video during a separate anti-immigration protest in the UK where he said, “Whether you choose violence or not, violence is coming to you. You either fight back, or you die.”
• Tuesday 11:32am ET: Musk posts “This is the way” in response to Rupert Lowe, a right-wing member of Parliament vowing that his political party, Restore Britain, will “aim to prosecute officials and politicians who knowingly placed dangerous third world savages in our communities”—a campaign that will “apply retrospectively.”

The truth is that there are VASTLY more hate crimes, especially aggravated rape and murder, per person by Blacks against Whites than the other way around.

The is not remotely debatable, as the numbers are so extremely lopsided! https://t.co/li1ipYrHWu

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) June 9, 2026

He continued into Wednesday:

• Wednesday 8:48am ET: Musk boosts a post claiming that “the left” conducted the “greatest rhetorical heist of the century” by using the word “racist” to counter criticisms of their policies.
• And about an hour later: Musk reposts a graphic depicting a judge beating a person holding a “White Lives Matter” sign with their gavel.

pic.twitter.com/oIneMaNCFe

— Alice Smith (@TheAliceSmith) June 9, 2026

Elon Musk is pressing for a race war, where the violence from the left requires one to “fight back, or die.”

It’s a strange and perhaps fitting irony that Musk’s rhetoric comes the same week he could turn into the world’s first trillionaire with a SpaceX initial public offering that could tank your retirement fund.

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Why the Scandal-Ridden Democrat With a Nazi Tattoo Won Maine’s Senate Primary

Graham Platner, the rugged oyster farmer positioning himself as a progressive populist, won Maine’s Democratic Senate Primary on Tuesday, earning more than 70 percent of the vote so far. He is now slated to face incumbent Republican Senator Susan Collins in the November general election.

By some measures, the outcome was long-expected, since Governor Janet Mills announced she was suspending her Senate bid back in April. But at that point, only some of the salacious revelations about Platner’s past had come to light: namely, his tattoo resembling a Nazi Totenkopf symbol (he has since covered it up), and the racist and sexist posts he penned on Reddit more than a decade ago, including ones questioning why Black people “don’t tip” and criticizing sexual assault victims for not taking responsibility for what happened to them.

Since then, additional allegations against Platner have emerged. One June article by the New York Times quoted some of Platner’s past romantic partners, including one who was a Republican operative, who characterized their relationships with Platner as “unsettling.” And a May story by the Wall Street Journal indicated Platner had sexted other women while married. During his speech accepting the primary nomination on Tuesday, Platner leaned into a redemption-arc narrative. “If you believe, as I do, that we can change our politics, and change our country, then you must also believe that people can change,” Platner said, speaking at a YMCA. “And the reason I believe that is because I have lived it—and the reason I have lived it is because of my wife.”

“If you believe, as I do, that we can change our politics, and change our country, then you must also believe that people can change.”

A couple of decades ago, these revelations would have been disqualifying. But as the Democrats confront how to win back voters who have—now twice—elected a president with a penchant for his own sexist, racist, and even criminal behaviors, Platner’s proliferating controversies are perhaps less disqualifying, and possibly even endearing to some discontented Americans.

As New York Times opinion columnist Jamelle Bouie said in a recent podcast episode about the rise of the “dirtbag” Democrat, Platner is not just a candidate but a manifestation of the crossroads at which the Democratic Party now finds itself.

“It stands with how you view the kinds of people that Democrats tend to recruit to run for office. Should they be polished, with the right credentials?” asked Bouie. “Or should there be a bit of a looser and more open approach to candidate recruitment?”

And yet, character does matter. At least it seemed to be relevant in 2020, when Collins focused on her opponent, Maine Speaker of the House Sarah Gideon, the then-Democratic nominee, and accused her of not investigating a fellow state representative who had been accused of preying upon teenage girls. Six years later, I wanted to know how a candidate like Platner pulled off a victory in Maine’s Democratic primary in spite of—or maybe even because of—his questionable past. So I asked Musa al-Gharbi, an associate sociology professor at Stony Brook University who wrote the best-selling book “We Have Never Been Woke,” which examines how political correctness isn’t the remedy to inequality that elites have assumed.

The following conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Why do you think Graham Platner emerged as the winner in the Maine Senate Primary?

One thing that influenced how the primary shook out is that there are a lot of people within the Democratic coalition whorecognize there’s a large cultural distance between them and the rest of society. Maine is a pretty rural state; it’s a pretty purple state, and so they were maybe thinking, hoping, that someone like Platner would send a different set of social signals than the typical Democrat. The problem, though, is that on the one hand, he’s someone who positions himself as working-class, but the reality is he is from a pretty affluent family. He positions himself as an oyster farmer, but the farm provides stuff mostly to his mother’s restaurant. The house that he lives in was bought with a $200,000 loan from his father. An open question in the general election would be: To what extent are swing voters going to buy into this portrayal of himself that he’s tried to cultivate?

Sen. John Fetterman (D-Penn.) is another example of a wealthy person from elite schools who positions himself as this average-Joe kind of a person. Even to the point of wearing hoodies to Congress. Here’s a pro tip: Someone who’s genuinely poor and from a working-class background who made it into Congress wouldn’t be showing up in a hoodie.

So, how much do Platner’s alleged controversies factor into the choices of voters who are on the fence in the General Election?

A lot of working-class voters, irregular voters, and so on, are often willing to overlook various types of indiscretions of politicians who represent them, as long as they have the sense that this person is on their side and not looking down on them—even if the candidate isn’t a saint, even if they have serious character flaws.

In a world where a lot of voters have come to feel like neither party and almost no candidate is actually going to help them or improve their lives, then the main thing that they have left to vote on is basically, “Okay, well, if my life is not going to be meaningfully improved by these folks in Washington either way, then I can at least vote for the person who doesn’t hate me.”

In his best-selling 2024 book, “We Have Never Been Woke,” Sociologist Musa Al-Gharbi explains how elite progressives use social justice rhetoric to gain more power, without helping the marginalized people they claim to care about.

Is there a world in which Platner’s controversies and mainstream media’s reactions to them make him even more appealing to some voters in Maine?

To the extent that people feel like a politician is being held to an irrelevant standard (i.e. Who cares about his sex life? I’m not hiring him to be my son-in-law), or to a needlessly high standard, then that can redound to the benefit of the person who is being targeted. It can generate more sympathy.

For instance, when people were calling Trump racist. For a lot of voters who themselves feel unfairly maligned as racists, it just evokes something in them that actually makes this person more sympathetic to them than they otherwise might be—even if they don’t like the way the [politician] is talking about racial issues.

And you could see a lot ofthis in the polls and surveys, even from most Republican primary voters in 2016. Most Republican voters reported being deeply disturbed by Trump’s rhetoric and behaviors with respect to race and gender. They [largely] didn’t approve of them, which runs contrary to a lot of our assumptions that they voted for him because he’s a racist. No, they voted for him because the other choice was this person that they viewed as corrupt, who called them deplorables, who said that they wanted to put coal out of business.

You also saw this with President Bill Clinton. A lot of polls showed that the way that the media responded to Bill Clinton made the public sympathize with him more, even though they didn’t approve of his behavior. They didn’t approve of him cheating on his wife or exploiting an intern, but they thought the attacks were out of proportion and were devoid, importantly, from the main responsibilities of the job.

Don’t President Donald Trump and Platner have a few things in common? They both ran as populist outsiders facing various controversies regarding racism, sexism, and infidelity. They certainly aren’t perfect on paper, but maybe that makes some voters feel less judged for their own improprieties?

They’re both deeply flawed candidates in many respects. But one disadvantage that Platner has is that a lot of the people who have felt frustrated or alienated have voted Republican in recent cycles. The Republican Party has been the party of people who feel that sense of alienation, and in this case, Platner is running against a Republican—a Republican, sure, who bucks Trump sometimes, but Platner is also positioning himself as someone who’s bucking Trump. For the swing voters who still think the Republican Party is a better vessel for their frustrations and more proximate to them in various respects, Platner has an uphill struggle there.

That said, one thing you can clearly seein the polling is that a whole bunch of folks who drifted away from the Democratic party in recent cycles are now very frustrated with Trump. They still don’t hold the Democrats in high esteem, either. But it’s a two-party system, and Trump is the one in power, so if people are dissatisfied with the way things are going, that will probably benefit Democrats in these midterms.

Why do you think swing voters are becoming dissatisfied with Trump?

One of the things anti-woke people often take for granted when they get elected is that they were elected in the first place because the public is tired of culture-war stuff taking precedence at the expense of the things that they care about. Rather than concluding, “Oh, people are tired of the culture wars,” the message that anti-woke people often internalize is, “Oh, people are done with left-leaning culture wars.”

Some anti-woke people, like Trump, think voters want the culture wars to simply go in the other direction. If you look at the Trump administration and its focus on wanting to change the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America and put Trump’s face on everything from passports to coins—there’s this really intense focus on symbols, even though a lot of Americans are struggling with more concrete things. People whovoted against Biden voted because he seemed like this addled old man: The world seemed to be burning, and he seemed to be incapable of doing anything about it. Well, that’s basically the same situation that voters facenow with Trump in office, so that probably won’t work out well for him in the midterms.

If a conservative candidate were facing identical allegations to Platner’s, do you think the media and other perceived elites would be responding in the same way?

Certainly, if a Republican candidate said, “Hey, look, I got this Nazi tattoo. I didn’t know what it meant at the time”—they wouldn’t be given the same grace.

In terms of the extramarital stuff, that’s hard to determine, because Trump has really lowered the bar with that for Republicans. In the past, a Republican who had serial infidelity would have been lambasted by the media as a hypocrite, especially if he positioned himself as some kind of Christian or family-values kind of guy. In Platner’s case, he doesn’t really position himself that way. He says he loves his wife and all, but he’s not the family-values candidate, and the Democratic Party isn’t the family-values party. So he’s maybe less susceptible to that kind of angle.

What should establishment or elite Democrats and the mainstream media learn from Platner’s race so far?

Someone like Platner is kind of directionally correct for the party. He’s plain-spoken and tends to emphasize issues voters care about in a very economically populist way. He’s also unapologetically manly. He’s a war vet, he has a strong physique, he does a job that is, at least superficially, physically demanding. He has this kind of unapologetic masculinity about him that isn’t necessarily toxic, or that doesn’t have to be. You’d want a guy whose understanding of what manliness means is—among other things—taking care of your family, being a good leader, putting the needs of your community ahead of yourself and your own ambitions and desires. Unfortunately, the extent to which Platner could be this kind of positive male alternative is undercut by the allegations against him.

That doesn’t mean women can’t be strong Democratic candidates. The real problem for both Hillary [Clinton] and Kamala [Harris], wasn’t that they were women, it’s that they were both kind of urban, highly credentialed people whose whole public persona and manner was like, “Look, I have all these wonky technical plans, and I’ve workshopped everything I said with seven different committees before it comes out of my mouth.” If [Democrats] nominate a man who’s like that, that man is not going to succeed in Maine, either.

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Trump Told Prosecutors to Target ICE Protesters. A Chicago Jury Wasn’t Buying It.

The grand jury transcripts from the “Broadview Six” case, in which the federal government tried to charge six Chicagoans with felony conspiracy for their participation in an anti-ICE protest, were released this week, offering a rare look inside an aggressive federal prosecution.

The Broadview case collapsed in late May amid prosecutorial-misconduct allegations, a month after the harshest charges against the protesters were dropped. The transcripts show unnamed jurors repeatedly pressing prosecutor Sherri Mecklenburg on why defendants faced assault and conspiracy charges when the ICE agent whose vehicle they blocked was unharmed.

“This person wasn’t harmed, but by extension impeding and assaulting his vehicle, that constitutes simple assault?” one juror asked. “The law doesn’t require that you actually touch him,” Mecklenburg said.

The juror then asked whether the ICE agent had the right to drive into the protesters. “So if the person comes and stands in front of my car, do I have the right to drive against him?” the juror asked. Mecklenburg brushed it off. “That didn’t happen.”

“It happened,” the juror responded. “He moved.” In video from the protest, the ICE agent’s car can, indeed, be seen driving towards the crowd of protesters.

In another interaction, Mecklenburg explained the requirements of a charge of “conspiracy to impede or injure a federal officer,” which the Trump administration has repeatedly brought against ICE protesters.

“Are you actually presenting any new actual facts or just a different viewpoint on your side?” an unnamed grand juror asked.

“Okay. I’m feeling the skepticism already. Are you going to be able to listen with an open mind? Tell me the truth,” Mecklenburg said.

“I heard this case like last week, and I thought it was a crock of shit then and I still think it is,” the juror said. Prosecutors required multiple attempts across three separate days to secure an indictment—and a visit from Chicago’s U.S. Attorney Andrew Boutros, who gave a speech to the grand jury on the importance of impartiality, according to a special report released by his office.

The Broadview case is part of a larger federal effort to silence dissent. Last September, Donald Trump explicitly directed federal prosecutors to target ICE protesters, telling US attorneys’ offices to “charge all such persons with the highest provable offense available under the law.” Some prosecutors resigned rather than comply. Others followed orders: in Chicago, in Los Angeles, and in Washington State, prosecutors came for ICE protesters.

“The right does have a bloodlust to imprison dissenters,” Kat Abughazaleh, a former congressional candidate and Mother Jones contributor, said in an interview May 27. “I and a bunch of other people got hit by a car while exercising our First Amendment rights, and then the federal government tried to charge us with conspiracy.”

The conspiracy charges could have put the six defendants, who are all involved in local Democratic politics, in jail for the better part of a decade, all for standing in the way of one ICE vehicle. “The conspiracy charge got dropped about a month ago when we asked to see the unredacted grand jury transcripts,” Abughazaleh said.

“The government was embarrassed, just as they were embarrassed that ICE shot Joselyn Walsh, my co-defendant’s, guitar. And they should be embarrassed. This is absolutely pathetic behavior from supposedly the strongest government in the world.”

In Spokane, Washington, three people were found guilty last month of the same charge the Broadview protesters were charged with: “conspiracy to impede or injure a federal officer.” Cases against ICE protesters in Texas and Minnesota are ongoing.

“I think the goal is to make an example out of us,” Abughazaleh said.

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Most New US Data Centers Are Slated for Drought-Plagued Areas

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

A record-shattering drought has racked much of the United States. But the artificial intelligence industry is pushing ahead regardless, with the majority of planned data centers set to be built in drought-ridden locations, a Guardian analysis has found.

About two-thirds of upcoming data centers, which typically require a large amount of water to operate, are set to be built in places that have been among the driest in the country over the past year.

Of 809 planned data centers, 517 are in locations that have been in drought conditions throughout the past year, according to data from Cleanview and the federal government, which grades drought across four levels of severity. A similar proportion of existing data centers are already situated in drought-affected areas.

More than 60 percent of the contiguous US is currently at varying stages of drought, the largest expanse for spring in modern records, with a particularly severe lack of rain and snow in the Southeast and West desiccating croplands and raising fears of a disastrous wildfire season.

“There isn’t enough water to go around. Now with this explosion of data centers, I think a crunch point is inevitable.”

Scientists have determined that the climate crisis, caused by the burning of fossil fuels, is worsening the duration and intensity of droughts in the US.

But a stampede of new data centers are adding extra demands via their hefty energy and water requirements. Large data centers, some the size of small towns, can require up to 5 million gallons of water a day, equivalent to the water use of up to 50,000 people, in order to provide cooling to arrays of humming networked computers.

Overall, the multiplying data centers are set to demand as much as 73 billion gallons of water a year by 2028, up from about 17 billion gallons in 2023. Each 100-word AI prompt uses up roughly a half-liter of water due to the cooling needs of data centers, researchers have estimated.

“The AI industry is sprinting as fast as it can to gain market dominance, and the rest of us have to deal with a great increase in water demand in places already in drought,” said Christopher Dalbom, an expert in water resources law at Tulane University. “Even if there wasn’t climate change, we’d be feeling the effects of droughts more acutely, because water demand is going up and up, to feed more people and water more lawns and crops. There isn’t enough water to go around. Now with this explosion of data centers, I think a crunch point is inevitable.”

“I mean, ChatGPT is a pretty nice tool, but most people would prefer to have a beef steak.”

Companies such as Google, Meta, Microsoft, and Amazon are pouring billions of dollars into new data centers, with developers often drawn to dry, sparsely populated areas, due to the lower cost of land and generous tax breaks. Arid climates are also thought to cause the least amount of corrosion to equipment over time.

One of the world’s largest data centers, a complex twice the size of Manhattan, was controversially approved last month in a Utah county that has been deep in drought since summer last year. Meanwhile, Walla Walla county in Washington, site of a planned Amazon data center, has also been overwhelmingly in drought since July of last year.

In Texas, two of the largest new data centers are arriving in counties—Pecos and Carson—recently parched by drought. Data centers could account for 9 percent of Texas’s total water use by 2040, researchers recently calculated, with the state’s water development board forecasting Texas will have to deal with rising overall demand and falling supply of water in the decades ahead.

While an immediate water shortage is unlikely, hard choices will have to be made to avoid future clashes over water access, according to Dalbom. “When we get into a situation where there’s a limited amount of water available, are we going to limit water to residents and businesses before data centers?” he said.

“In the eastern US, we have always assumed an abundance of water, so the legal systems aren’t set up for shortages. We can’t just assume that people aren’t going to be asked to reduce their water use, while data centers and energy won’t be.”

Concerns over water use, as well as rising energy bills, have stirred local opposition to a rash of data center projects, causing some developments to be curtailed or canceled. These concerns have become a political headache for Republicans—Donald Trump has been a vocal supporter of the AI industry—with much of the opposition coming from rural, more conservative areas.

“Ranchers are being told to be conservative with water, to not waste water, and now there’s a new competing interest able to get near unlimited access to water,” said Andrew Coppin, chief executive of Ranchbot, a company that helps ranchers track their water use. “The concerns from farmers are real and justified. Data centers are flavor of the month now, but we wouldn’t make the choice to only be able to have a shower on Mondays, Wednesdays and Saturdays. I mean, ChatGPT is a pretty nice tool, but most people would prefer to have a beef steak if they had to choose.”

Data center developers say the industry’s current water use is still just a fraction of what much larger consumers, primarily agriculture, already take, causing growing strain on key sources such as the Colorado River. Even the irrigation of golf courses and lawns sucks up more water than data centers.

Guardian graphic based on data from Cleanview and NOAAGuardian graphic. Sources: Cleanview, Noaa

“Data center operators work closely with local authorities to ensure compliance with all applicable rules and regulations and to ensure operations do not stress local water supplies,” said Dan Diorio, vice-president of state policy at the Data Center Coalition. “The industry is actively prioritizing responsible water use through operational best practices and innovative development strategies, often collaborating with local authorities and conservation organizations on water restoration and reclamation projects. Data center operators are among the few private sector industries actively investing in local water infrastructure.”

The sector claims it is making progress to replace standard evaporative cooling with more efficient technologies such as closed-loop cooling, whereby the same coolant, such as water or glycol, is continually piped among the servers to absorb their heat.

However, while such cooling systems save water, they need more energy to run. This power typically comes from fossil fuels, which unlike cleaner forms of energy require copious amounts of water to generate electricity.

Such a trade-off is evident at Meta’s huge proposed data center, called Hyperion after the father of the sun in Greek mythology, in Louisiana. While the facility will use closed-loop cooling, it will also need the energy input of 10 gas-fired power plants that will use large amounts of water as well as emit planet-heating emissions.

“It will be an issue for farmers near the data center and if more data centers are approved to draw down the same aquifer you get a death by a thousand cuts,” said Dalbom. “You may see the water table going down so wells will have to be deeper to access the groundwater. There will still be water there but cost more to access.”

Meta said that it will prioritize on-site water efficiency to the extent that its water use will be less than if the land was used for agriculture purposes.

“I think there is an emerging consensus among the major hyper-scalers about the importance of water stewardship.”

“Meta estimates the data center will use as much as 1 billion gallons of water per year, drawing it from an aquifer currently used for agriculture, not from the community’s drinking water,” a company spokeswoman said.

The overall water impact of AI is far larger than data centers themselves, however. A January study found that data centers will be responsible for just 4 percent of the 30 trillion gallons of extra water that will be needed, globally, for AI expansion by the midpoint of this century. Power generation and semiconductor fabrication for AI will suck up much more water than the data centers themselves, the report states.

“Data centers are the most visible element to people but they are only part of the picture,” said Albert Cho, chief strategy officer at Xylem, the company behind the study. Cho said that data centers’ water use will remain smaller than other large sectors, such as agriculture, and use of renewable energy and reduced water waste will help reduce demand.

“Water tends not to be the top-line consideration,” when data center sites are chosen, Cho said, but he added:“I think there is an emerging consensus among the major hyper-scalers about the importance of water stewardship.”

Yet the public backlash has been so strong—polling shows 70 percent of Americans don’t want to live next to a data center—that some states are considering new restrictions. California, Michigan and Iowa, for example, are mulling bills to require operators to submit regular reports on water use while others, such as South Carolina and Kansas, may force developers to use closed-loop cooling systems. Lawmakers in New York have gone further, with plans for an outright moratorium on data centers.

In Utah, the state’s governor, who last year asked residents to pray for rain amid a deep drought, has attempted to reassure voters that the enormous new Stratos data center will not endanger the Great Salt Lake, which was already shrinking due to water overuse and rising global temperatures. A group opposing the county approval of Stratos is aiming to overturn this decision via a public referendum.

The data center is backed by Kevin O’Leary, a Canadian businessman who has featured on TV shows such as Shark Tank and is a keen supporter of Trump. O’Leary has, without evidence, accused opponents of Stratos of being paid protesters or in league with the Chinese Communist party.

“There could not be a worse advocate for this project than Kevin O’Leary, who has been absolutely dismissive of people in Utah again and again,” said Ben Abbott, an ecologist at Brigham Young University and the executive director of Grow the Flow, a Utah environmental group.

Alexa Chandler holds a sign at a protest against the construction of a data center on May 4, 2026 in Tremonton, Utah.Natalie Behring via Getty

“I haven’t found a single person in favor of this,” he added. “It has brought together urban and rural communities, farmers and environmentalists, linking arms against this. I think this project is mortally wounded as a result.”

The Great Salt Lake is “headed for an all-time low” and the massive 9 gigawatts of power needed for Stratos, as well as its cooling systems, will probably push the ecosystem into further water deficit, Abbott said.

“There couldn’t be a worse time to do this,” Abbott said of the Stratos project. “Climate change is causing important hydrological shifts and here in the west we have a less stable water supply due to the mega-drought. But, more importantly, we are also harvesting the fruits of a century of water overuse.”

O’Leary’s case for the project is that it would be a big economic win, bringing jobs and tax revenue to rural parts of the state while helping the US win on AI in its rivalry with China. Last week he agreed to make cuts to the scale of the project after pressure from state lawmakers and said in a post on X that he was “working around the clock to address every issue raised, from water usage and environmental impact to power generation and community benefits.”

A lawsuit has also been filed against the project brought by five local residents and a progressive group.

Worldwide, three-quarters of people could face drought impacts by 2050 all while data centers use 2.5 trillion gallons of water in the coming decade, enough to meet the drinking water needs of the planet’s human population for over a year, the UN has estimated.

Even when some withdrawn water is recycled by data centers, “large-scale withdrawals can strain aquifers and river systems, particularly in arid or groundwater-depleted regions,” a recent UN report warned.

“We need to rethink our relationship with water because at the moment there is just this unrestricted demand everywhere,” said Abbott. “We are in systemic water deficit almost everywhere on the planet.”

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Here’s What Pete Hegseth’s Religion Believes About Mormons

Last week, the Pentagon released a new list of 31 religions officially recognized by the US Department of Defense, edited down from more than 200 that had previously been accepted. The purpose of streamlining, Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell said in a statement, was not to delegitimize any one religion, but rather “to allow chaplains to quickly look at the religious composition of their units and determine how they structure resources to best provide for warfighters of all faith groups.”

But to some religious groups, the new list looked biased. Of the 31 groups listed, 22 were Christian. Atheists, pagans, and humanists, which had all been on the original list, were excluded. But the loudest complaints were about its structure. Members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints noted that while their faith was included, it had been sequestered from other Christian faiths—which they saw as part of a pattern of some denominations refusing to recognize LDS members as fellow Christians.

Indeed, Samuel Perry, a professor of rhetoric at Baylor University who studies Christian nationalism, noted that it wasn’t until evangelicals rallied around LDS politician Mitt Romney during his run for president in 2008 that mainline Christians accepted LDS as a Christian faith. That was, said Perry, “completely a political change in order to be able to move centrally around one candidate.”

Last week, after the Pentagon released its list, Utah’s two Mormon senators made their objections known on social media. Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) tweeted, “Can anyone tell me why The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints was left out of the list of Christian churches?” Sen. John Curtis (R-UT) was more pointed in his tweet:

Latter-day Saints are among the most patriotic, service-oriented individuals in our country. They are also unequivocally Christian—just look at who is in the name of the Church.

It is unacceptable for a government entity to characterize a faith in a manner that contradicts the… https://t.co/ywqk59ZtRz

— Senator John Curtis (@SenJohnCurtis) June 6, 2026

On Monday, the Department of Defense released a new list—and that version did list LDS as a “Christian” faith. But the Pentagon’s perceived slight is still roiling Christian social media, with some accounts rushing to defend the LDS church, and others, like firebrand pastor Joel Webbon, declaring to his 111,000 followers**,** “Mormons will go to hell.”

So was the original listing of Mormons apart from other Christian faiths simply an oversight, or a snub? In a tweet about the newest version of the list, the DOD claimed the former. “The Pentagon list included redundant and unnecessary labeling,” the agency said in a tweet on Monday, “and the mistake has been fixed.”

But in the past few days, some accounts on social media have pointed out that US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth belongs to a Christian nationalist denomination—called Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches (CREC)—that holds that Mormons aren’t Christians.

Which wouldn’t be terribly significant in the grand sweep of religious beliefs—except that CREC explicitly advocates for Christians to exert their faith’s influence over the government. Doug Wilson, the Moscow, Idaho, pastor who founded CREC, has described his vision of “a network of nations bound together by a formal, public, civic acknowledgement of the lordship of Jesus Christ and the fundamental truth of the Apostles’ Creed.” He has long argued in favor of Christian nationalism, and he has likened his fiefdom in Idaho—which includes a church, school, college, and publishing house—to a “working prototype” of what Christian nationalism could look like.

One theological point of distinction between LDS and other Christian denominations is that LDS members don’t accept the Apostles’ Creed because it states that God, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit are all one entity. In contrast, Perry, the Christian nationalism scholar, noted the LDS church teaches that they are three distinct beings. From Wilson’s description of his ideal version of America, it appears that everyone would have to live by the Apostles’ Creed—whether they believed in it or not. In Wilson’s Christian America, said Perry, “Anything that falls outside of the doctrinal vision that Wilson or CREC have would fall outside of what they consider to be kind of a true belief in Christianity, so there’s kind of an exclusivity that’s being cultivated.”

Over the last few years, Wilson has begun to move in influential political circles, speaking at the National Conservatism conference with Vice President JD Vance and appearing at an event about Christian political strategy with Project 2025 architect Russell Vought. Last year, he planted a new CREC church in Washington, DC, where Hegseth often attends services. Most significantly, in February, Wilson delivered a sermon at the Pentagon, at the behest of Hegseth.

In an email, Wilson confirmed that CREC’s version of Christianity doesn’t include Mormons. “We would consider the Mormons to be a non-Christian faith with Christian terminology,” he wrote, and added that his church would consider LDS people to be “polytheists.”

The LDS Church did not respond to a request for comment for this story, and the US Department of Defense directed me to its tweet about the most recent revision of the list.

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RFK’s Answer to the Maternal Health Crisis: Hide the Data

In April, during a congressional hearing that coincided with Black Maternal Health Week, Rep. Summer Lee (D-Pa.) pressed Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. about the US’ abysmal and largely preventable rates of maternal death compared to its peers.

Black women, Lee pointed out, fare three times worse than their white counterparts, even as the Trump administration continues to cut both health funding and research into racial health disparities.

She posed a question: “How are we going to solve the Black maternal mortality crisis if we cannot say ‘Black’?”

The GOP’s attacks on Medicaid—which finances health care for more than two in five births across the country—and the White House’s termination of thousands of federal health and science workers, including those tasked with compiling the country’s most comprehensive data on maternal and infant health, give even more weight to independent research like Listening to Mothers, a nationwide survey published by the nonprofit National Partnership for Women and Families on Monday.

The report—the group’s first nationwide survey since 2013—surveys thousands of mothers who gave birth in a hospital in 2023 and 2024 about their experiences with the maternal care system, revealing pervasive barriers to quality care and widespread failures by health systems.

The report ends by warning that “modest gains” like expanded postpartum Medicaid coverage “are now at risk of being rolled back.”

Around 40 percent of respondents said they’d been disrespected, dismissed, or ignored by providers during labor and delivery. More than a third reported unmet social needs during pregnancy—mainly a lack of income, difficulty paying utility bills, or finding childcare—particularly Black and indigenous respondents and those on Medicaid. After having their children, more than a fifth said at least one of those needs still hadn’t been met.

Before, during, and after their pregnancies, up to a fourth of respondents reported experiencing depressive symptoms. Symptoms of anxiety were even higher. Yet most people with either symptom received no treatment, even as late as 12 weeks after giving birth. And while research suggests that support from doulas and midwives improves outcomes, only a small fraction of respondents reported having access to or using either.

The report ends by warning that the “modest gains of recent years,” such as the expansion of Medicaid coverage to one year postpartum in all 50 states but Arkansas, “are now at risk of being rolled back.”

“We’re not where we should be,” said Nan Strauss, National Partnership’s senior director of maternal care. “We need to be adding to and improving people’s lives, making it easier for them to focus on their families at this really critical moment, and instead their own efforts to be the best new mom that they can are being undercut every step of the way.”

In July, congressional Republicans enacted major cuts to SNAP and Medicaid; my colleague Daniel Friedman noted at the time that the bill would cost millions of people their health insurance and reduce access to birth control and other reproductive care—imperiling maternity services at more than 140 rural hospitals, as my fellow colleague Nina Martin also reported.

As the administration slashes the social safety net, it’s also suppressing vast amounts ofdata on maternal health. For decades, the Center for Disease Control and Prevention’s Reproductive Health Division partnered with a majority of state health departments to survey tens of thousands of women about their experiences before, during, and after pregnancy as part of the Pregnancy Risk Assessment Monitoring System. But last April, the CDC team that oversaw PRAMS was put on leave, indefinitely cutting off federal support to the states collecting this data. (The termination of thousands of federal workers, including those at the CDC, is currently being challenged in court.)

In the aftermath, said Rita Hamad, a social epidemiologist at Harvard University who has used PRAMS data to research safety net policies like paid parental leave, “some states were not able to continue their data collection, in part because they were losing out on that technical assistance from the CDC.”

“One really heartbreaking example is Mississippi, which stopped data collection for most of 2025,” Hamad said, noting that the state declared infant mortality a public health emergency the same year. “I was just thinking, gosh, how are they going to be able to address this crisis?”

Cassondra Marshall, an associate professor in UC Berkeley’s Maternal, Child, and Adolescent Health Program, has used both PRAMS and Listening to Mothers data in her research. The data is “needed to develop interventions” by policymakers, Marshall emphasized. Yet policies like the Momnibus bills, which were reintroduced in March and seek among other things to expand the perinatal workforce and improve data collection, face an uphill battle in the Republican-dominated Congress.

As my colleague Madison Pauly put it last June, “With the White House and state governments denying the very idea of systemic racism and targeting anything that smacks of [DEI], structural change seems further away than ever.”

To make matters worse, the information the government is releasing isn’t exactly reliable. Last month, on Mother’s Day, HHS launched moms.gov, a website it described as offering “guidance and information to support the health and wellbeing of mothers and their families.” Yet the homepage contains no mention of parental leave or contraception, includes minimal mental health resources, and directs people to crisis pregnancy centers through another website operated by the Christian, anti-abortion Heartbeat International.

For decades, mothers and maternal health experts have been talking about the need for evidence-based, community-focused interventions. Under RFK Jr., public health seems to be moving in the opposite direction.

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Trump’s “Weaponization” Claim Is Total BS

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

Donald Trump’s pathetic and sleazy effort to create a slush fund of $1.776 billion that his lieutenants could dole out to his political allies, including, possibly, his violent January 6 brownshirts, appears to be dead. After even Republicans howled about this brazen corruption, acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, Trump’s former (and, in a way, still) personal lawyer, proclaimed the so-called “Anti-Weaponization Fund” kaput—though Trump continues to support this idea and there remains a possibility it could be revived in some form. But in all the brouhaha over this attempt by Trump to swipe nearly 2 billion smackers from American taxpayers, one damn big point has gotten lost: The claim that past administrations weaponized government against Trump and his right-wing confederates is complete bullshit.

There was no need for such a fund, because there were no such victims. This chief grievance of Trump and his MAGA cult is a myth that’s been created to cover up the many transgressions of Trump himself. And any acceptance of this notion of weaponization is a win for Trump.

Official reviews of the Russia investigation repeatedly declared it was a legitimate enterprise that was justifiably initiated and not a political hit job.

Trump has been braying for years that he has been the target of politically motivated investigations and prosecutions—what’s called lawfare. But that’s not true. The granddaddy of all this, as far as he is concerned, was the Russia investigation. He’s been moaning about the “Russia, Russia, Russia” probe for a decade, and through that stretch, he, his GOP lickspittles, and his right-wing media enablers have contended the investigation was a fraud cooked up by the Deep State, the Democrats, and the media.

But…no. Official reviews of the Russia investigation repeatedly declared it was a legitimate enterprise that was justifiably initiated and not a political hit job. This included a Justice Department inspector general report issued in 2019, a bipartisan report from the Senate Intelligence Committee released in 2020 (when then-Sen. Marco Rubio chaired the committee), and the 2023 final report produced by special counsel John Durham, who had been appointed in 2019 by then–Attorney General Bill Barr to investigate the investigation.

Each of these reviews concluded that inquiry was neither a hoax nor a witch hunt, as Trump and his lackey have never stopped proclaiming. (The IG report and Durham did criticize elements of the Russia investigation, most notably the FBI’s improper surveillance of Carter Page, a former adviser to Trump’s 2016 campaign.) And the Senate Intelligence Committee report reaffirmed (as did special counsel Robert Mueller’s final report) the intelligence community’s assessment that Moscow covertly attacked the 2016 election in part to help Trump win the White House.

There was no weaponization on this front. The Russia investigation led to solid indictments of several Trump aides, including Paul Manafort, Michael Flynn, George Papdopoulos, and Roger Stone. Each of them either pleaded guilty or were convicted by a jury. It was Trump who then politicized the process by pardoning all four at the end of his first term. (Trump’s Justice Department in April handed Flynn $1.25 million to settle an iffy lawsuit he filed that alleged he had been maliciously prosecuted, and the department can be expected to be sympathetic to similar claims from other Trump devotees.)

Trump’s other two big gripes about supposed weaponization concern the federal investigations mounted by special counsel Jack Smith of his efforts to overturn the 2020 election and his alleged swiping of top-secret documents when he left the White House. Both these inquiries were fully justified. During the House January 6 committee’s investigation, multiple Republican witnesses testified that Trump took actions that were possibly criminal to try to retain power. And a bipartisan majority of the Senate voted to convict him of impeachment charges following his incitement of the January 6 riot. (It was not the supermajority needed for a conviction.)

In each of these cases, a jury or judge found Trump guilty—a sign the cases had merit.

As for the stolen-papers case, throughout 2021 and the first half of 2022, the National Archives and the Justice Department repeatedly tried to retrieve from Trump the sensitive records he held on to when he departed 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Had Trump returned the records, there would have been no prosecution. He did give back some of the material, and one of his attorneys certified that all documents had been sent back. But that was false, and an FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago found 25 boxes that contained documents of the highest classification. The subsequent criminal case was no witch hunt.

Neither the stolen papers nor the 2020 election case went to trial because Smith closed them after Trump won the 2024 election, citing a Justice Department policy that states that a sitting president cannot be prosecuted on federal charges. (That’s the reason Mueller did not file obstruction of justice charges against Trump during the Russia investigation.)

Trump also argues that he was unfairly investigated in New York for tax fraud and for falsifying business records to cover up the hush money payments made to porn star Stormy Daniels, who claimed to have had an extramarital tryst with Trump. In each of these cases, a jury or judge found Trump guilty—a sign the cases had merit.

Beyond Trump’s own personal beefs, the MAGA crowd claims that the federal government in the Biden years was weaponized against right-wingers. They assert that the FBI targeted conservative Christians and school-board activists. An internal memo from the FBI’s Richmond, Virginia, field office, which was leaked in 2023, cited “radical-traditionalist Catholic” ideology as a possible pathway for domestic extremist violence. GOP officials and conservatives were outraged by this. But the memo was rescinded, and there was no evidence that it had resulted in any investigations or prosecutions. It was essentially the work of one junior analyst in a field office.

Right-wing groups also howled when the Biden Justice Department—following complaints that some parents protesting at school board meetings were threatening board members—issued a memo directing US attorney and FBI agents to discus this matter with local officials. They objected to comparing concerned parents—who often were religious conservatives—to terrorists. But this, too, did not lead to sweeping investigations of conservatives.

Then there’s January 6. MAGA luminaries—and Trump himself—have long championed the convicted rioters as victims of unfair and overreaching criminal investigations. A White House website—paid for with your tax dollars—makes this ludicrous case. And there was much worry that the Trump slush fund would dole out millions to these violent insurrectionists, thus endorsing and encouraging political violence.

Trump and his cult will continue insisting that he and his loyalists have been victimized by law enforcement. That’s what many crooks do.

To dub the prosecution of the J6 marauders “weaponization” of government is one of the biggest acts of gaslighting a White House has ever tried to pull off. It illustrates the fundamental absurdity of this propaganda campaign. We all saw what happened on that horrific day. Assailing the subsequent quest for justice as repressive federal overreach is bonkers and Orwellian in the extreme.

The investigations and prosecutions Trump bitches about were not acts of weaponization. They were appropriate government activity. But for years, Trump and his handmaids have been mounting this disinformation crusade without much opposition to its big lie. On top of that, Trump has shown us what the weaponization of government truly looks like with the criminal investigations he has ordered up of former FBI Director James Comey, New York state Attorney General Letitia James, Sen. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), former CIA Director John Brennan, and others, as well as the assaults he has launched on major law firms and universities.

The idea that he should be given $1.8 billion to hand out to his supporters who ran afoul of the law was preposterous but so too is the assertion that Trump and his comrades have been the targets of pervasive government weaponization. Yet that’s a major component of Trump’s self-glorifying mythology: He’s the target of a Deep State cabal and a martyr for MAGA. The pot of money for his malfeasants may be gone for now—though Trump still says, “I love it. I think it’s so important.” Whatever ultimately happens, Trump and his cult will continue insisting that he and his loyalists have been victimized by law enforcement. That’s what many crooks do. In this case, it’s a MAGA fairy tale and a cover story for a criminal president that deserves as much resistance as the corrupt slush fund has drawn.

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Heather Cox Richardson on the Real Genius of America

Heather Cox Richardson is one of today’s unlikeliest social media stars. The Boston College historian has been teaching and writing about 19th-century America, Reconstruction, and the Civil War for decades. But it was only in 2019 that her work took off when she began writing her daily newsletter, Letters from an American, a no-nonsense analysis of the news through the lens of US history.

The newsletter became one of the most popular on Substack. And today, Richardson has millions of loyal fans who rely on her to make sense of American politics and provide a little sanity and democratic reassurance even as she herself is concerned about the direction of the country today.

“I’m worried about where we’re going. Just don’t even start me,” Richardson tells host Al Letson. “But I am heartened in this moment by the number of people who are rediscovering that they do have agency to change the future. And of course, that’s always been the story of our democracy.”

On this week’s More To The Story, Richardson talks about the decades-long failure to hold corrupt American leaders accountable, the still-resonant death of Reconstruction, and what she sees as the tragic hypocrisy of Thomas Jefferson.

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

Note: If you buy a book using our Bookshop link, a small share of the proceeds supports our journalism.

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Becerra and Hilton Advance in California Governor’s Race

A week after polls closed in California’s closely watched open gubernatorial primary last Tuesday—following a slow trickle of votes that fueled unsubstantiated claims of fraud from the president—Democrat Xavier Becerra and Republican Steve Hilton will advance to the November general election, winnowing down a crowded race to succeed two-term Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom, who has held the position since 2019.

Since 2011, California has had a “jungle primary” system that allows voters to choose any one candidate for statewide offices, like the governor’s seat, regardless of their party—a method that sometimes yields runoffs of two Democrats or two Republicans. Out of the 62 names on the ballot, Becerra, the former state Attorney General and Health and Human Services Secretary under Biden, and Trump-endorsed Republican and former Fox News host Steve Hilton were the top two vote-getters, receiving 27.9 and 25 percent of the vote, respectively, as of Tuesday night. Tom Steyer, a billionaire businessman, climate activist, and 2020 Democratic presidential contender, placed third, with 22.5 percent.

The lead-up to the primary election was marked by the dropping out of then-frontrunner Democratic Rep. Eric Swalwell in April, who subsequently resigned from Congress following sexual assault allegations first reported by the San Francisco Chronicle. With no clear runner-up on the Democratic side, some worried that votes would be split among the handful of leading Democrats on the ballot, potentially resulting in Republicans taking the top two spots. (A Republican hasn’t won a race for California governor since moderate former Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger was reelected in 2006.)

With the field wide open, wealthy donors, special interest groups, and large corporations spent a record-breaking amount of money trying to influence the outcome of the primary. After Swalwell dropped out of the race, most of his supporters seemingly consolidated behind Beccerra, the favorite of the state Democratic establishment. Becerra also received significant backing from oil and gas companies, which spent millions of dollars in support of him and against his Democratic rival. Steyer, the former hedge fund manager, who has promised to divest from fossil fuels and vowed not to accept funding from the industry, contributed more than $200 million of his own money to his campaign.

The candidate with the second-most contributions was San Jose’s first-term mayor Matt Mahan, a moderate Democrat representing a key tech stronghold who entered the race late with support from Silicon Valley. Although venture capitalists and executives from Big Tech companies like Google, Amazon, and Palantir donated tens of millions to his campaign, Mahan received less than 4 percent of the vote—behind the roughly 10 percent won by Republican Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco, who seized more than half a million ballots in last year’s special election in an alleged investigation into ballot count discrepancies, and former Democratic Rep. Katie Porter, who received slightly more than 4 percent. While Porter, the only woman among the top six candidates, was well-known for flipping a Republican-held House seat in 2018 and grilling CEOs during congressional hearings, her campaign suffered after a series of viral setbacks.

Now, Becerra and Hilton will face off to become the next governor of the Golden State**—**although any path to the governorship will likely be a struggle for Hilton, given Trump’s unpopularity in the state.

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Lawmakers Demand Answers After We Revealed Forest Service Spraying Roundup All Over Public Lands

Two members of Congress have sent a letter to US Forest Service Chief Tom Schultz calling on the agency to justify its actions following an investigation by Mother Jones that found glyphosate—the controversial key ingredient in the herbicide Roundup—was being sprayed in record amounts on public lands.

“Given the recent scientific disputes, retracted studies, and litigation surrounding glyphosate due to serious ecological and health harms, we are deeply concerned by the alleged use of the herbicide and lack of information available regarding current and planned use,” wrote Reps. Chellie Pingree (D-Maine) and Jared Huffman (D-Calif.).

Rep. Chellie Pingree: “It’s bullshit. I’m really mad.”

While glyphosate is more well-known for its use in agriculture, its fastest-growing use in California—where our investigation analyzed more than 5 million state pesticide records—is on forestlands. Private timber companies and the Forest Service have been dousing hundreds of thousands of acres of the state’s forests in the herbicide, especially areas affected by wildfires.

Local communities have struggled to understand where the agency is spraying. In one case, the Forest Service published maps showing where it had sprayed glyphosate in the Lake Tahoe area, including at the ski resort Sierra-at-Tahoe, a full year after the work was done.

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“It’s bullshit. I’m really mad,” Congresswoman Pingree told me when asked about the Forest Service spraying in environmentally sensitive areas.

The lawmakers’ letter calls on the Forest Service to publish a database showing its herbicide use across the country, and to report what safety measures it has put in place—such as monitoring waterways and soils for contamination—following its use of Roundup and other glyphosate-based products.

They also wondered about potential harms to humans: “Have there been any reported worker illness incidents, accidental exposures, or contamination complaints associated with glyphosate applications?” the letter asks.

Workers contracted to spray Roundup on US Forest Service Land in 2021 not wearing required protective gear and exposed to an herbicide that the World Health Organization determined is a probable carcinogen. Photo credit: El Dorado County

Our investigation found that workers hired to spray Roundup on the El Dorado National Forest in 2021were covered in Roundup, including directly on exposed skin, and that they were not wearing the required protective equipment nor did they have the state-required training, according to a report by a county inspector.

Bayer, the German company that manufactures Roundup, provided a statement that “regulators, including the EPA, EU, and others around the world, have repeatedly concluded that glyphosate-based products—which are the most widely used and extensively studied products of their kind—can be used safely according to the product label directions.”

Glyphosate is at the center of several legal, scientific, and political controversies. Bayer is on the hook for more than $12 billion in legal payouts to people who say exposure to the chemical made them sick. The World Health Organization classified glyphosate as a probable carcinogen in 2015, and the Environmental Protection Agency says the herbicide likely harms 93 percent of endangered species. The EPA last approved the chemical’s safety in 1993. A more recent review in 2020 that found it was safe was overturned two years later by the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, which determined the agency had not fully assessed the risks to human health or the environment.

The Forest Service says it is using the chemical at record levels in California because it is the least expensive way to help conifer trees—the ones with pine needles—grow back after wildfires. The often stated goal of these Forest Service herbicide projects is to regrow trees more expeditiously. This helps the agency meet its desired forest density for future timber sales, according to hundreds of pages of Forest Service documents reviewed in our investigation. (The agency is part of the US Department of Agriculture and manages many of the nation’s public forests, similar to how a farmer oversees rows of corn: optimizing the land for higher yields, lower costs, and greater revenue.)

In 2025, President Trump issued an executive order for the Forest Service to increase timber sales by 25 percent, while the administration has cut the agency’s staffing. In 2026, Trump called for an increase in the domestic production of glyphosate.

Spraying glyphosate and other herbicides both before and after replanting conifer trees results in the death of all other plants that reemerge after fires.

In their letter to the Forest Service, Reps. Pingree and Huffman urged the agency to consider “safer or more sustainable approaches to forest management.” With such indiscriminate spraying of glyphosate,“you’re talking about just wiping out all biology, you know, just like all life forms. It’s bonkers,” Pingree told Mother Jones. “If there’s one thing we learned from Rachel Carson [author of Silent Spring] in the sixties it’s that we have to look at the cumulative impact, both on humans, but also the species and the food chain, and the loss of diversity.”

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Gwyneth Paltrow Just Goopified Drone Warfare

Despite reaping billions in the weapons industry as cofounder of the military-tech company Anduril, Trae Stephens says he does not believe that “wartime profiteering is ethical, really, in any way.”

That was just one takeaway from an hourlong conversation he had with Gwyneth Paltrow on her Goop podcast last week, during whichStephens held forth on God, great power conflict, the male loneliness crisis, and what he thinks the Pope really meant when he said “Jesus does not listen to the prayers of those who wage war, but rejects them.”

At first glance, they make a strange pair: Paltrow’s known for hawking vaginal eggs and antidepressive flower essences; Stephens sells drones. But the Goop podcast is actually the perfect stage for Stephens to do a little reputation-management for Anduril, which develops unmanned submarines, border-surveillance towers, missiles, and “smart battlefield” technology, with the aim of killing thousands more cheaply than traditional weapons might.

As for Paltrow’s role in the reputational war, on last week’s podcast, she appeared determined to make weapons-tech legible and even appealing to Goop’s affluent, wellness-focused audience. She sympathized with Stephens’ plan to build up America’s military arsenal, because of her trauma around the Cold War and 9/11: “I’ll never forget moving to New York City to start seventh grade, like in the height of the Cold War and being petrified at night that the Russians were gonna bomb us.”

An Anduril Bolt drone, designed as a tactical, backpackable and precision strike system, is used as a one-way attack drone delivering an explosive charge to the enemy, seen here at an undisclosed training ground near the Russian border in Finland.Ben Birchall/PA Wire/Zuma

Each spoke of their childhoods, and their children. Stephens wondered whether his children could be proud of him “without feeling like they’re in this really weird twilight zone where they’re constantly having to defend with their peers what it is that their dad does for a living.” His job is, after all, “complicated.”

Paltrow, charitably, responded that “We as human beings are complicated. We have all kinds of gradations of light and dark. And, you know, we’re always sort of fighting with the good wolf and the bad wolf within us to a certain degree.”

But the ease with which Paltrow and Stephens traded thoughts on light and darkness elides the morally questionable convergence of woo-woo, hippie aesthetics and the Silicon-Valley defense-tech universe. It comes amid a larger rightward turn in both Silicon Valley and American wellness culture,perhaps best exemplified by the rise of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Things got particularly odd when the two dug into religion. Stephens, a devout Christian, brought up the Pope’s Palm Sunday homily, in which Leo XIV declared that “Jesus does not listen to the prayers of those that wage war.”

“You could look at that and say, wow, what am I doing?” Stephens said. “Like, the Pope himself is telling me that the thing that I’m doing is bad.”

Luckily for him, Paltrow was there to apply a thick layer of mystical equivocation and soften the blow.

“You could approach it from a more mystical aspect of Christianity, like, as opposed to taking it literally,” she said. “This is just a random hypothesis. It’s occurring to me. If you were using it as a metaphor of someone who is engaged in against-ness all the time, you know. It could’ve been something more mystical or metaphorical.”

Stephens liked that. Warmongering can be good, he seemed to interpret, if only done with a pure heart, and without against-ness. “And so if you’re approaching it with a heart of peace, I think it’s very different on a mystical level than approaching it with a heart at war.”

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Dr. Oz: You Can’t Be Racist Anymore, Because That’s Racist

Apparently “because of woke,” disparaging a whole community of people based on their nationality and using that sentiment to justify extensive fraud investigations that lead to cutting social services and occupying cities with federal agents is racist.

“You’re not allowed to complain about Somalians because that’s racist,” President Donald Trump’s administrator for Medicare and Medicaid, Dr. Mehmet Oz, complained on Tuesday on Fox News. “And the worst thing you can be in Minnesota is a racist.”

He added that the state’s supposed response “was ironic because the people you’re hurting are often Somalians and other folks that look different than you.”

In other words, a guy who is implementing racist policies is decrying racism.

Just before, Oz claimed that investigators told him they were “ostracized” and “walked out of the building” when they tried to speak to Minnesota officials about alleged fraud in social programs.

Dr Oz: "You're not allowed to complain about Somalians, because that's racist. And the worst thing you can be in Minnesota is a racist."

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) 2026-06-09T13:43:31.348Z

Two things here: One, the Trump administration is hurting Somalians and “other folks that look different than you” the most, as several of my colleagues and I have reported amid the federal raids in Minnesota. Second, there seems to be an acknowledgement that the people who have the authority to hold others accountable all look the same.

And that idea is a significant part of why we are where we are.

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US Denies Entry to Africa’s Referee of the Year Ahead of World Cup

A World Cup referee from Somalia confirmed on Tuesday that US border patrol officials denied him entry into the country.

“I am very, very disappointed,” Omar Abdulkadir Artan, one of 52 referees chosen in April for the upcoming FIFA Men’s World Cup, told the New York Times. “I’m just simply a referee who’s trying to live his dream, the biggest dream of my life, to come to the World Cup.”

Artan added that he “had the right papers” and “the right visa.” According to the Associated Press, the Somalia embassy in Kenya said it processed his travel visa to the US last week.

US border officials said on Monday that Artan would not take part in the soccer tournament. Artan would have been the first Somali referee to officiate a World Cup game and was named the men’s referee of the year by Africa’s soccer federation in 2025.

According to a statement from the US Customs and Border Protection, Artan flew to Miami International Airport from Istanbul International Airport on Saturday. CBP inspected him “to verify information or determine admissibility” and was denied entry “due to vetting concerns.”

The federal agency did not disclose what specific “vetting concerns” it found.

A World Cup referee was denied entry on June 6 after arriving in Miami, a U.S. Customs and Border Protection spox confirms:

“On June 6, a Somali national arrived at Miami International Airport from Istanbul International Airport. During processing, the traveler underwent…

— Sophia Cai (@SophiaCai99) June 8, 2026

Artan told the New York Times that his immigration interview lasted for 11 hours. Afterward, he was put in a holding cell for several hours before being forced on a flight back to Istanbul.

Last June, the White House labeled Somalia as “a terrorist safe haven” with a government that “lacks command and control of its territory.” President Donald Trump has repeatedly hurled abuse at Somali immigrants, calling them “garbage” last December and using fraud cases in Minnesota involving them to justify cuts to social services like child care and the massive ICE raids in the state.

According to the Council on Foreign Relations, an American foreign policy and international relations nonprofit, the US gave 3,196 visas to travelers from Somalia between May 2024 and April 2025. In January 2025, Trump fully restricted people from Somalia from entering the US, noting national security and public safety concerns over “foreign terrorists.”

The CBP preventing Artan from refereeing at the World Cup is just one story in a series of US visa denials of national team players, staff, and other sports officials from making it to the tournament. As I wrote last week, according to Iran’s football federation chief, the players had not yet received their US visas. Since then, all of Iran’s players have received visas, but more than a dozen staff members—which can include coaches, medical professionals, and trainers—were rejected.

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The “Lobe Rangers” Are Fighting to Make Farming in Iowa More Sustainable

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

James Hepp is sick of excuses.

The 36-year-old farmer manages about 1,600 acres of corn, soy, and small grains in northern Iowa. He keeps a close eye on his bottom line and says he wants to build a business that his three young children would be foolish not to join. For Hepp, a first-generation farmer, that means doing things differently from his neighbors.

In an effort to preserve soil health, he tills only narrow strips of land, leaving much of his field undisturbed. Hepp also avoids applying nitrogen fertilizer when he’s not growing crops.

At first, Hepp’s approach to farming focused on cutting costs. It let him make fewer passes with the tractor, saving money by using less diesel, herbicides, and fertilizer. The benefits for soil and water quality were a bonus.

“We’re doing this and it works. Like, what do you mean that you can’t afford to do it?”

But after more than a decade of hearing government agencies and ag commodity groups in Iowa urge farmers to fall in line with the state’s voluntary Nutrient Reduction Strategy and adopt conservation practices that could limit the nitrogen and phosphorus runoff fouling waterways, Hepp is fed up with inaction.

“You know, the Nutrient Reduction Strategy has been around for what, 13 years now?” said Hepp, often held up as a role model for his runoff-reducing efforts. “If you’re not doing it now, I don’t know what’s going to make you do it besides regulation.”

Hepp represents one-third of the “Lobe Rangers,” a trio of corn and soy growers in Iowa’s flat and fertile Des Moines Lobe who have taken to social media to highlight the enormous gap between the conservation goals outlined in Iowa’s strategy for nutrient loss and the actual adoption of conservation practices on cropland. Fifth-generation farmers Matthew Bormann and Zack Smith round out the squad.

Bormann, Hepp and Smith are hardly the first Iowans to call for policies that target the environmental footprint of a relatively unregulated industry. Regulation has been a rallying cry in the last year for environmental groups, politicians and citizens who fear the state’s poor water quality could be linked to its rising cancer rates.

But as award-winning farmers and former county Farm Bureau board members who’ve made a living growing thousands of acres of Iowa’s two biggest commodity crops, Bormann, Hepp, and Smith represent a different demographic in the reform camp: industry insiders.

In March, the men began posting short videos to Facebook demonstrating regenerative practices at work on their farms and calling for policy interventions to improve water quality. Their posts quickly gained traction on social media feeds across the state.

As Iowa grapples with a worsening clean-water crisis fueled by agricultural pollution, the Lobe Rangers see themselves as proof that regulation won’t herald the downfall of Iowa farmers.

“We’re doing this and it works,” Hepp said. “Like, what do you mean that you can’t afford to do it?”

Last year, farmers in Iowa grew nearly 3 billion bushels of corn and 600 million bushels of soybeans. That’s enough grain to fill over 7,000 miles of railcars, a train that could stretch from the US East to West coast twice over.

But the large amounts of nitrogen and phosphorus fertilizer that farmers are applying in the state have unwanted consequences, often leaching off fields to fuel algal blooms or unsafe nitrate levels in the state’s waterways before traveling south and harming the Gulf of Mexico.

In 2013, Iowa unveiled its Nutrient Reduction Strategy as a set of guidelines to stem the flow of chemicals from farmland into waterways and public drinking water sources. Since its inception, as in most agricultural states, the strategy has relied strictly on voluntary farm conservation efforts.

State programs and federal grants through the US Department of Agriculture offer financial incentives and technical support for farmers who adopt conservation practices, like planting cover crops or adding buffer strips along waterways on their farms.

Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds and state Secretary of Agriculture Mike Naig doubled down on those incentives in a legislative package revealed in early May, which includes an additional $52 million to expand on-farm conservation in central Iowa and $100 million for public water treatment infrastructure.

On his northern Iowa farm, James Hepp plants cover crops after each harvest. Anika Jane Beamer/ICN

Critics, including the Lobe Rangers, say the favored voluntary approach has done little to improve Iowa’s water quality. “People want clean water. If that’s the case, we need to have policy that gives us a mathematical chance of that happening,” said Smith, sheltering in his farm shop before a spring storm. “We don’t have anything close to that right now.”

Scenarios outlined in the Iowa Nutrient Reduction Strategy in 2013 estimated that at least 60 percent of the state’s cropland would need to be planted with cover crops in the off-season to meet the state’s goal of 45 percent less nitrogen and phosphorus in major waterways by 2035. Yet last year, only about 17 percent of the state’s corn and soy fields were planted with cover crops.

“This sort of thing doesn’t get said by Republicans,” Smith said.

That discrepancy isn’t talked about enough, said Bormann, a former president of his county Farm Bureau and winner of a “Young Farmer Achievement Award” from the Iowa Farm Bureau in 2013.

“Right now, it’s easy to stick your head in the sand, because there’s no consequences, you know,” Bormann said. But Iowans must “start talking about it,” he added. “It’s just going to make agriculture better.”

While the Lobe Rangers’ posts often spark conversations among farmers in the comments, they aren’t trying to win over their peers, Hepp said.

Instead, the men are running their social media campaign to target politicians, political candidates and the voting public.

The three farmers think they are a valuable resource for lawmakers who fear hurting, or being accused of hurting, Iowa agriculture.

“We’re not tree huggers. We’re…farmers and, you know, we’re actually doing it. We’re actually doing it to scale,” Bormann said. “We can tell you what works, what doesn’t, what it’s actually going to take.”

Meanwhile, many of the organizations that have historically drawn attention to Iowa’s clean water crisis are “left-leaning groups” that get discounted because of their political bent or advocacy history, Smith said. “And that’s really unfortunate, because it doesn’t mean their ideas aren’t good,” he said.

So when the Lobe Rangers penned an op-ed in the Des Moines Register in April, calling on state legislators to restore funding to a water quality sensor network that’s relied on philanthropic grants since 2023, Smith thought the men needed to note their political affiliations: two Republicans and one independent.

“This sort of thing doesn’t get said by Republicans,” Smith said. “Even if you think it.”

“We want [politicians] to know that there is a group of farmers that know we have a problem, and that there are solutions,” he said.

In their mission to connect with political candidates, they’ve found common ground with Chris Jones, a career water scientist and Democrat running an underdog campaign for state secretary of agriculture. For years, Jones has been an unflinching advocate of regulatory fixes for nutrient pollution.

His 28-point policy solution for cleaner water includes a ban on fall tillage of cropland, taxation or restrictions on the use of fertilizer and manure, and a requirement that rented farmland be planted with cover crops at the owner’s expense.

“It is very important that we see that mainstream farmers can do it right,” Jones told Inside Climate News. “These guys, they show that you can survive by doing different things.”

Jones regularly reposts the Lobe Rangers’ videos to his campaign Facebook page. “What they’re doing could be perceived as somewhat radical,” he said. “From my perspective, it’s not radical. It’s common sense.”

Though they now have nearly 3,000 Facebook followers, none of the Lobe Rangers are particularly keen influencers. They’ve sought video-editing help from Smith’s college-aged daughters and developed their logo (a sort of Zorro and Lone Ranger hybrid, standing among stalks of corn with his sword drawn) using AI.

But the men aren’t entirely new to being spokesmen for the agricultural industry.

Each has been the subject of glowing profiles about their use of regenerative practices, written and shared by trade groups such as the Iowa Corn Growers Association and the Iowa Farm Bureau.

_Bormann wants the Lobe Rangers to draw attention to the gap between Iowa’s stated conservation goals and realities on the groun_d.Anika Jane Beamer/ICN

When industry leaders highlight the conservation efforts of just one or two farmers, it sends the wrong message about the reality of Iowa agriculture, Bormann said.

“It’s a PR thing where it makes it sound like Iowa farmers are doing such practices,” Bormann said. “And the truth is, they’re not.”

Just last year, Hepp received the Iowa Farm Bureau’s Young Farmer Leadership award. Now, his relationship with the group, which favors the current voluntary nutrient-pollution efforts, has cooled off. “We’ve kind of got our heads on the chopping block,” he said.

In an email to Inside Climate News, the Iowa Farm Bureau affirmed its ongoing support for Hepp.

The group invited him to upcoming farm bureau meetings and a July economic summit, a spokesperson wrote. And last summer, farm bureau staff attended a conservation field day on Hepp’s farm “in support of his efforts.”

“We value the opportunity to share a range of perspectives and practices that help farmers learn from one another,” the organization wrote.

Many farmers in Iowa’s aging agricultural economy are fearful of change, Hepp said. Adopting conservation practices is tantamount to admitting you were wrong.

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Barney Frank, My Dad, and the Boston They Knew

Sometime around 1970, Barney Frank called the head of the Boston Redevelopment Authority, all worked up.

Back then, Frank was the top aide to Boston Mayor Kevin White. Elected in 1968, White was a reformer, at least at first. And he’d empowered the BRA director, a guy named Hale Champion, to professionalize the agency by firing old political patronage hires on the payroll.

But there were limits. The BRA had gotten federal money from the Department of Housing and Urban Development to renovate Quincy Market, the old colonial area around Faneuil Hall that had fallen into disrepair. Those funds were made possible by Speaker of the House John McCormack, the political boss from the Boston area who preceded Tip O’Neill as Democratic leader and served in Congress for more than four decades.

One of the BRA officials on the chopping block, Frank told Champion, had to stay on: “He’s McCormack’s guy.”

“We’ve never seen him, Barney,” Champion countered. “He doesn’t come to work.”

“I don’t give a shit if he’s dead,” said Frank, who died last month at 86. “You want your HUD money? Keep paying him.”

That, at least, is how my father—at the time the press guy for the BRA—told it.

“I don’t give a shit if he’s dead,” Barney supposedly said. “You want your HUD money? Keep paying him.”

My dad had covered City Hall as a reporter before joining the White administration. He later managed real estate development for the Massachusetts Port Authority, mostly on the South Boston waterfront. The anecdotes he’d tell were heavy on politics and planning, set in locations around the city he’d encountered when he arrived in the mid-60s: In the press room at Old City Hall, a tabloid guy had cheerfully admitted to making up quotes from city councilors, correctly predicting they wouldn’t notice or care. At a South Boston restaurant, crooked state reps had sold their influence for just a few free meals.

I first knew some local politicians—Mike Dukakis, Ray Flynn, Father Drinan, and Barney, as Dad called him—as characters in those stories.

In 1968, my dad wrote what may have been the first newspaper profile of Frank, in the Boston Globe. It was largely laudatory. But my father, himself often unkempt, made much of the young aide’s messiness. There was an anecdote about Barney wandering City Hall shoeless, and a quip that Frank had “occasional moments of neatness.”

The Boston Globe

Later, my dad continued to refer to Barney with a kind of bemused appreciation. But also, I think, with leftover competitiveness toward a onetime sort-of peer who had ascended so high.

Another favorite story featured a City Hall softball game, where my father was the catcher. Barney was attempting to score. To avoid being tagged out, he tried, like he was Pete Rose, to run my dad over. My father claimed he’d used his old football training to knock the future House Banking Committee chairman to the ground.

That two Jews, from Bayonne and Brooklyn, would collide there, amid the Irish who dominated city hall, was less surprising after White’s election. White had hired a young, relatively diverse staff, with more minorities, non-Bostonians, and women—among them my mother, a Minnesotan who joined City Hall directly from Radcliffe.

These people were liberals, Kennedy-influenced products of the 1960s. Many lived in Cambridge, worked in Boston, and moved to Brookline, buying big old houses for amazingly low prices. They worked in city and the state government, with the belief that diligent, pragmatic policies could improve things. Today’s Massachusetts—regulated, prosperous, educated, and relatively healthy—makes a case that they were right.

Moving around the city with my brother and me, Dad pushed this gospel with localized anecdotes that were kind of like parables. In Back Bay, relaxed zoning on corner properties gave developers some of what they wanted, but preserved the neighborhood’s historic look. In East Boston, Massport moved entire three-deckers when the airport expanded. At the redeveloped Commonwealth Pier, in South Boston, which Fidelity took over, they couldn’t get rid of the seagulls that crapped everywhere—until a maintenance guy went on the roof with a shotgun.

Barney, elected to Congress in 1980, had moved on to other matters. But Brookline, where we lived, was in his district, one of the Jewish towns that made up his base. He would show up at all kinds of stuff there—rumpled, verbose, accessible. He once talked to my high school government class for 45 minutes, with his fly open.

But he was also a dick. He yelled at people there, his own constituents, all the time. He was, to be fair, kind of an egalitarian about it. He made many people feel important enough to berate. A girl I knew got an early dose of political disillusionment when her famous congressman, the gay rights icon, told her how little he thought of her opinion. I think it was about the Gulf War. He went to the wedding of the sister of an acquaintance of mine. She said she felt obligated to warn guests to be careful approaching him: “He’s not that nice.”

And it’s easy to imagine how for Barney, growing up as a closeted kid in a tough town, belittling people started as a defense. But when he was the most powerful person in the room, it was bullying. Barney, by all accounts, didn’t yell at Kevin White or Nancy Pelosi. He yelled at his staff.

I would argue, though, that his meanness jibed with the place he represented. The city I recall from childhood was not indifferent. It was hostile. Crime was rising, the newspapers were negative, and the racism of the busing days had become only a little less overt. Even in Brookline, we watched guys get out of their cars to fight over traffic disputes. Everyone seemed to hate Dukakis after he lost the presidential election. People supported the Red Sox by brawling at Fenway and booing the players. Their top target was Jim Rice, a career-long Red Sox player and eventual Hall of Famer. We were at a game where a guy ran on the field and mooned the crowd. He had “R-I-C-E” written on his ass.

I don’t think Barney’s constituents voted for him because he was a jerk. They just didn’t care that much. They didn’t prioritize kindness. They wanted smart and effective. He gave them that.

As a reporter, I learned that Barney was easy to reach. But watch out. At my first reporting job at a weekly paper in Boston, I got him on the phone. But when I tried a question he apparently wasn’t expecting, he said he “wasn’t interested in answering that.” Then he hung up.

Later, covering the House, I published a piece that listed him among lawmakers who didn’t participate in a key Democratic Caucus vote over a contested chairmanship. But unlike the other members I mentioned, Barney was himself running for a different chairmanship, which meant he couldn’t vote. His press secretary demanded a correction to clarify that he hadn’t ducked the vote. Trained by my editors to fight such requests, I declined and went home. When I got off the Metro, I had a 30-second voicemail. Addressing me as Mr. Friedman, my former congressman explained that I was an idiot. It was cutting because he was kind of right.

For awhile, I kept the message. I used to play it for people who thought you had to be important to be yelled at like that by Barney Frank. But I lost the voicemail a long time ago.

I never came close to telling him he’d known my parents, that in fact, my mother reputedly canvassed for him while pushing my brother and me in a stroller. He didn’t give the impression of someone interested in reminiscing.

I never checked my dad’s stories about him. But back at the BRA, supposedly, they kept McCormack’s guy, and got their federal funding. The new Quincy Market was ready for the bicentennial, in 1976.

Barney’s memorial service was held there on Monday, at Faneuil Hall. That’s right by the Greenway, the park over the highway that the Big Dig put underground. The city is nicer, safer, and much richer now. The success of the planners is that it feels like all that was inevitable. Hardly anyone remembers Quincy Market before they fixed it up.

So I mourn Barney along with my father, who died a few years ago. The stories he told are a way to remember those City Hall staffers, and the progress they made in the Boston that’s gone.

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How the Flamingo Became a Potent Protest Symbol

It’s not unusual for a protest movement to involve absurd-looking symbols. Unions deploy giant rat inflatables to picket companies using non-union labor, people at “No Kings” protests don puffy frog or dinosaur costumes, and Gen Z protesters worldwide can be seen waving a cartoon pirate flag from the show One Piece to symbolize anti-authoritarianism.

In Albania, the latest image of popular revolt against billionaire excess is the flamingo. For the past week, Albanians have protested Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner’s plan to pave a protected nature reserve and turn it into a luxury resort—a plan which, protesters say, could put the pink birds in jeopardy. Albania’s prime minister, Edi Rama, told Reuters Monday that he plans to continue backing the project.

The Kushners first encountered the island of Sazan, a former military base off Albania’s coast, back in 2021. While on a yacht trip, Ivanka Trump saw Sazan, and reportedly became convinced she would be able to “help realize its potential.” Now, Jared Kushner’s investment firm, Affinity Partners, is spending $1.6 billion to construct an “eco-resort” on Sazan and the nearby Vjosa-Narta lagoon. Environmentalists, however, aren’t sure how eco-friendly the resort will be. Thousands of protesters across Albania have rallied for days, waving cardboard and inflatable flamingos while clashing with police.

Ornithologist Ledi Selgjekaj told Reuters that more than 1 percent of the ​global population of flamingos is in Albania.

“Of course, it’s very important to have investments in the country. It’s very important ​for the economy, but you have to choose very wisely where to build it. There is a reason why this area is called a protected area,” she told Reuters.

BirdLife International, a global bird conservation NGO, has come out against the project.

“A protected landscape of global importance is under attack, and people are demanding an end to the devastation,” said Anouk Puymartin of BirdLife International in a statement. “Nature belongs to everyone, not a handful of investors.”

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World Cup Players’ Worst Foe on the Pitch This Year May Be the Extreme Heat

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

Sávio Bortolini Pimentel just missed getting on the roster to represent his national team, Brazil, at the 1994 FIFA World Cup in the United States.

At the time, he was a 20-year-old professional player with the Rio de Janeiro team Flamengo. He recalls other players telling him after the fact that the weather during some matches was just too hot. And the heat was “intense,” they said, during the final match at the Rose Bowl in Pasadena, California, on a 90 degree day when Brazil prevailed over Italy.

Players in the upcoming 2026 FIFA World Cup in June and July face an even greater risk of unsafe temperatures than they did in 1994, the last time the World Cup was held in the United States, according to estimates from researchers at Imperial College London. Human-induced climate change has made these conditions significantly more likely in the 16 host cities in the US, Mexico, and Canada, according to the report.

In extreme heat, “it becomes impossible to play with the same intensity.”

The report predicted that five games could take place in unsafe heat, up from three games in 1994. The report used a threshold for unsafe temperatures that may require postponements based on a wet bulb globe temperature of 83 F, which is recommended by FIFPRO, the international player’s union. Wet bulb globe temperatures are calculated based on a variety of factors including sun, humidity, and temperature, to show the stress on the human body. FIFA also uses wet bulb globe temperatures, but currently considers postponing matches only at levels exceeding 90.

Chris Mullington, a consultant anesthetist at the Imperial College London who presented the report at a webinar, explained why soccer uses wet bulb temperatures to calculate if weather conditions are safe for players.

“A 30 C [86 F] day in dry, breezy conditions is very different from a 30 C [86 F] day with high humidity, strong sun, and little wind,” he said. “High humidity reduces the evaporation of sweat, limiting the body’s primary cooling mechanism.”

Sixty current and former professional soccer players from around the world recently issued an open letter urging FIFA to update its heat guidelines for events happening under dangerous heat before the World Cup. “It can make you feel light-headed, dizzy, experience fatigue, muscle cramps and worse. You can run less and it becomes impossible to play with the same intensity as with more average temperatures,” the players wrote.

The players also asked the league to do what it can to ease the climate change crisis by dropping fossil fuel sponsors and changing game schedules to reduce travel and the league’s fossil fuel footprint.

People walk past of the FIFA World Cup 2026 countdown clock at Paseo Alcalde in Guadalajara, Mexico on June 25, 2025Ulises Ruiz/AFP via Getty

Friederike Otto, professor of climate science at the Imperial College London and one of the authors of the report, said the increased risk for hotter temperatures shows climate change is having a real and measurable impact on the viability of holding World Cups during the northern hemisphere summer. The final match of the tournament, scheduled to be played on July 19 at the MetLife Stadium in New Jersey, has a 12.5 percent chance of exceeding the 79 mark, and 3 percent chance of reaching 83.

“That the World Cup Final itself—one of the biggest sporting occasions on the planet—faces a non-insignificant risk of being played in ‘cancellation-level’ heat should be a wake-up call for FIFA and fans, highlighting the urgent need to realize that there is no aspect of society not affected by climate change,” Otto said.

The 2022 World Cup, held in Qatar, was moved from summer to winter because of the threat of extreme heat. Last summer’s Club World Cup, held in 12 locations around the United States, served in many ways as a prelude for this year’s World Cup. In that tournament, no games were postponed due to heat even though temperatures soared above 90.

Training only goes so far. In the heat “it’s increasingly demanding. The pace is automatically reduced.”

The Imperial College report shows nearly a quarter of all World Cup games are likely to be played in temperatures higher than 79 degrees and about 5 matches are expected to occur above 83—almost double the number from the 1994 World Cup.

Under severe heat and dehydration, athletes’ heart rates rise, their muscles fatigue faster and they sweat more. “Your body is trying to prevent the rapid rate of rise of your body temperature; it’s just a protective mechanism,” said Douglas Casa, chief executive officer of the Korey Stringer Institute, a nonprofit based at the University of Connecticut that works to educate and prevent heat illness and sudden death in athletes and laborers.

Under extreme conditions, around 104 degrees, Casa said the body enters into the volitional exhaustion phase, the point during exercise where you voluntarily stop because you feel unable to continue doing the same movements.

“The game turns into a different game, it’s more ‘mentality.’ The one that commits less mistakes is the one that ends up winning.”

Sávio said players now are likely more resilient to the heat. “There are athletes that are more used to the cold than to the heat—that’s normal,” he said. “But today’s athletes are much more prepared, and even more so than in 1994, due to the evolution of preparation techniques, equipment, and products.”

But training only goes so far. Sávio, who won bronze with the Brazilian team during the 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta and is now retired from soccer, said athletes feel the heat on the pitch much more dramatically.

“If we’re looking at 35 degrees C [95 F], like what happened in 1994 when we even heard of matches played at 40 degrees C [104 F], then yes, it’s increasingly demanding,” he said. “The pace is automatically reduced.”

But there are alternatives, even if FIFA does not choose to postpone eligible matches. Casa urged FIFA to make aggressive cooling strategies available at all stadium locker rooms. He also recommended extending hydration breaks from the mandated three minutes to six, as the heat could influence the athletes’ recovery from one game to the next.

“Do you realize people could easily be 103 or 104 degrees when they come in at halftime?” Casa said. “My point is, if you have 15 minutes and you get in quickly at the stoppage, you could have 10 or 11 minutes of aggressive cooling: rotating freezing cold wet towels over your whole body, going into a cold plunge, anything like that.”

Casa said he is not against playing games in the heat, but high temperatures and dehydration at the World Cup can lead to lower-quality soccer games.

“Why not give the fans who just spent a fortune on these tickets the best quality game that they could possibly watch with these elite soccer players?” he asked.

Kevin Muneton Ramirez, a 27-year-old American-Colombian dual citizen, is excited to watch the Portuguese star Cristiano Ronaldo play in what is expected to be his last World Cup. He bought tickets for the June 27 match in Miami between Portugal and Colombia, and he expects his home country’s team to win the game.

Muneton Ramirez said, as a fan, he does not really mind games when the players get exhausted at the end. “The game turns into a different game, it’s more ‘mentality,’” he said. “The one that commits less mistakes is the one that ends up winning.”

For fans, Casa said FIFA should at least include free water-filling stations inside stadiums. Fans could fall ill as a result of overwhelming heat and dehydration, even if they’re not moving too much.

According to FIFA’s recently updated stadium code of conduct, fans, “for the avoidance of doubt,” are no longer allowed to bring in an empty bottle that can be refilled at a water fountain or dispenser.

Muneton Ramirez does not usually go to stadiums to watch soccer.

“But if I have the opportunity to go to a World Cup … at least once in my lifetime, I’d go to any game,” he said.

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Inside Delaney Hall’s Black Box

Early Saturday morning, a woman whose husband is detained at ICE’s Delaney Hall in Newark, New Jersey, drove nearly two hours to visit him. She was turned away at the gate.

GEO Group—the multibillion-dollar ICE contractor that runs Delaney Hall—had cancelled family visitation for the day. She sat on a curb, cried, and drove home. Throughout the morning, I saw half-a-dozen women and children arrive: all were told they would not be seeing their loved ones that day.

More than two weeks since detainees began a hunger and labor strike inside Delaney Hall—and their allies outside answered with near-daily protests—it’s still incredibly difficult to find out what’s going on inside the facility. Often, family members find their visits rescheduled or canceled, and journalists have not made it in, either.

Members of Congress are allowed by law to conduct unannounced oversight visits to ICE facilities like Delaney. But politicians have been turned away, too. New Jersey congresswoman LaMonica McIver is facing assault charges after she was arrested alongside Newark mayor Ras Baraka trying to conduct an oversight visit last year. New Jersey governor Mikie Sherrill tried to visit the jail in late May, and was denied.

NEW: this morning, Sen. Andy Kim entered ICE’s Delaney Hall for an oversight visit. He saw people in visible medical distress—but GEO Group guards refused to let him speak to anyone detained there. pic.twitter.com/L2Tmqn8zIV

— Sophie Hurwitz (@sophiehurwitz) June 6, 2026

New Jersey Senator Andy Kim was pepper-sprayed when he tried to enter Delaney Hall last month, and as my colleague Alex Nguyen reported, he was forced to directly call Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin for admittance. Kim returned Saturday morning to try again—and this time, he made it inside.

But even Kim wasn’t able to find out much about the conditions there: “They refused to let me talk to any detainees,” he told me as he exited Delaney Hall.

“They told me that if I were to speak to any detainees, the oversight tour would immediately be cut off and stopped. This is impeding my ability to lawfully do the oversight that I’m legally allowed to do, and I told them I thought this was a deep breach of my responsibilities and what the American people are demanding.”

What he was able to see was disturbing.

As Kim walked past the women’s unit, he said, he saw a group of women frantically waving their arms and pointing at someone curled up on a bed in pain. “They’re just frantic and waving and pointing, and I saw the woman curled up on the bed. I asked, ‘What is happening here?’” The guards, Kim said, didn’t answer. (GEO Group and ICE did not respond to requests for comment.)

“They continue to have only one full-time doctor here for hundreds of detainees, many of whom have significant medical concerns,” Kim said. At this point, there are about 600 people jailed in Delaney Hall, a thousand-bed facility which has faced accusations of inadequate medical care, wormy food and abusive guards.

On his oversight visit, Kim asked the guards why detainees’ video calls are being restricted. “’We’ll get back to you,’” he said the guards replied. He asked after specific detained people, whose families had asked him for help. Again, he said, the guards responded, “’We’ll get back to you.’”

He asked about one detained woman who has been hospitalized for several weeks. “They aren’t telling her family where she is, which hospital she’s in. They’re saying it’s a security problem,” Kim said. Guards told the family to file a Freedom of Information Act request to find out where she is, he said. “Can you imagine if your loved one was in a hospital and you don’t know what hospital they’re in, and then you’re told to just file some bureaucratic papers, and cross your fingers that they’re going to get back to you?”

“That’s the stuff that just pisses me off about this. I was here to get answers for these family members that I talked with earlier today, and I didn’t get them.”

For over a year, a group of volunteers has operated a “radical hospitality” tent outside Delaney Hall—the same tent where medics cared for Kim after he was pepper-sprayed.

On most weekends, when hundreds of family members might come to visit their loved ones, it’s bustling: volunteers distribute water and grocery gift cards, and children play on the rocking horse inside the tent to get some respite from the sun. Diapers, a volunteer told me, are often the most asked-for item.

This Saturday, though, the tent—painstakingly rebuilt after ICE agents reportedly ransacked it days earlier—was nearly empty after visits were cancelled for the day. A few individuals, turned away at Delaney Hall’s gate, stopped for bottled water and directions to the nearest bus stop.

“This is our money going to detain these people, and we’re not getting any answers,” Kim said. “I’m not getting answers on behalf of you, on behalf of other Americans, on behalf of the families of those that are detained. They deserve to have answers, they deserve to have their rights.”

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“Can We Make the Protesters Look More Violent?”

Scott Pelley spent 37 years at CBS News, only to be fired last week after coming into conflict with Free Press founder Bari Weiss, who took control of the network last October. In a New York Times sit-down interview with Lulu Garcia-Navarro published Sunday, Pelley said Weiss personally interfered with the network’s coverage of the ICE officer who killed Renée Good in Minneapolis.

Pelley told Garcia-Navarro that, hours before an episode of 60 Minutes on the killings of Renée Good and Alex Pretti was set to air, Weiss sent an email to his boss asking for changes to the episode. “Two of the things in the email include, can we make the protesters look more violent? Now, I’m paraphrasing. I don’t have the quote, but that’s what was communicated to me. And the other thing, Renee Good’s car. You need to describe her as driving toward the officer.”

On June 3, Pelley posted on Instagram that “New management has instructed me to inject falsehoods and bias into a politically sensitive story.” Now, it’s clear that story was about the ICE agent who killed Renée Good: video of Good’s final moments posted by CBS Evening News does not in fact show her driving toward an officer.

A CBS spokesperson told the New York Times that Weiss’ comments “had no political motivation and were proposed solely to make the piece as strong, fair, and accurate as possible.”

“My impression at the time was that she was putting a thumb on the scale on behalf of the administration.”

“My impression at the time was that she was putting a thumb on the scale on behalf of the administration,” Pelley said. “Constantly looking out for the views of the president.” But that, to him, wasn’t the worst part. “The bigger problem, Lulu, frankly, is not any kind of political influence,” he told Garcia-Navarro. “The problem was the incompetence. You don’t break a deadline. That episode came within 19 minutes of not making it to air.”

CBS has previously pulled 60 Minutes segments, including one in December reporting on the Trump administration deporting people to a maximum security prison in El Salvador.

Paramount Skydance CEO David Ellison—a key ally of President Donald Trump—installed Weiss as editor-in-chief of CBS shortly after buying her website, The Free Press, for a reported $150 million.

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Hegseth Warns Europe to Defend Itself Against a Second D-Day

In a perplexing speech Saturday commemorating the World War II D-Day landingsin Normandy, France, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth called for European leaders to combat what he implied was a second, modern D-Day—in which European countries werebeing “stormed by different dangerous ideologies” accompanied by “boats and men.”

The original D-Day wasthe Allied invasion to liberate France from Nazi German domination: the defenders were Hitler’s National Socialists and their army, and the “dangerous ideology” was anti-fascism.

At Normandy in 1944,genocidal far-right extremists “defended” a conquered Europe against a multiracial force fighting for democratic ideas. In 2026, Hegseth’s speech suggested, it was happening again:“When will European capitals do something about that invasion?,” he asked.

Hegseth may have been confused—or, then again, we might be at the stage where our government explicitly aligns us with Nazism. After all, every single refugee we admitted to the US this year was supposedly fleeing anti-white persecution.

Commentators online noted Hegseth’s choice of words:

This is repulsive and confused, unless you're a Nazi… The beach-stormers are the good guys on D-Day. But Hegseth wants to make the liberators of Europe into a metaphor for economic migration. Probably because he hates both.

— Lindsay Beyerstein (@beyerstein.bsky.social) 2026-06-06T14:36:36.339Z

Hundreds of thousands of German Jewish refugees fled Nazi Germany and most were unwanted abroad, putting them back in the sights of the Nazis. Hegseth's analogy only points one way.

— Taulby Edmondson (@taulby.bsky.social) 2026-06-06T17:28:39.069Z

While the self-proclaimed “Secretary of War” didn’t explicitly mention what those “dangerous ideologies” were, his past remarks and actions make it fairly clear. Last June, Hegseth orderedAmerican troops to provide security during federal immigration raids in Los Angeles. In January, he thanked ICE for its invasion and occupation of Minnesota—“You are SAVING the country”—and followed the post with a graphic on X, listing three ways to avoid ICE: “don’t be here illegally,” “don’t attack I.C.E. officers,” and “obey federal and state laws.”

Since the beginning of Trump’s second term, Hegseth has fired or forcibly retired at least 24 generals and senior commanders without providing any merit-based justification provided; roughly 60 percent have been either Black officers or women of any race.

As my colleague Arianna Coghill wrote in September, for Hegseth, “a military with Black leadership, with women in senior roles, and without obstacles to a diverse officer corps is one in which white men have to take orders from the wrong kind.”

Hegseth, Trump, and JD Vance’s obsession with a more racist Europe is having an impact, with explicitly racist parties in multiple European countries touting their ties to the Trump administration and a white nationalist conference in Portugal recently inviting disgraced former Customs and Border Patrol “commander-at-large” Gregory Bovino to deliver a prominent address; earlier this week, the European Union advanced a plan to increase deportations and build detention centers abroad—which it calls “return hubs”—in a move with unmistakable echoes of Trump administration policies.

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US Accepts Only White Refugees For Sixth Consecutive Month

Every single one of the 599 refugees the US admitted last month was a white South African, according to data the State Department’s Bureau of Population released Friday.

In fact, so was every other refugee admitted this year. Since October 1, 2025, the US has accepted 6,668 refugees. Of those, 6,665 were white South Africans. Three—admitted last November—were from Afghanistan. No other refugees were admitted.

That data is backed up by the US Refugee Admissions Program, a federal public-private interagency collaborationprogram that works on refugee resettlement.

BREAKING: in May 2026, *every single one* of the 599 refugees admitted in the U.S. were white South Africans.In FY 2026, the U.S. has admitted a total of 6,665 white South Africans, three Afghans (back in November 2025), and nobody else. For reference, the U.S. admitted 100,060 refugees in 2024.

— Alex Ip 葉清霖 (@alexip718.com) 2026-06-06T05:48:44.164Z

In October, the Trump administration announced that it would cut the number of refugees admitted per year to the US to 7,500—practically all of whom will be white.

A country that made its name as a haven for immigrants, refugees, and asylum seekers, the United States has long accepted refugees in numbers an order of magnitude greater—and from all over the world. The Trump figures mark a precipitous drop fromfrom fiscal years 2022-2024; under Biden,in keeping with tradition,the annual limit was 125,000.

A presidential memo from September announced Trump’s intentions: that the refugees accepted “shall primarily be among Afrikaners from South Africa” and “other victims of illegal or unjust discrimination in their respective homelands.”

The Trump administration sees Afrikaners, an South African ethnic group descended primarily from European settlers, as victims of white “genocide”—a racist conspiracy theory promoted by many on the far right, notably Elon Musk.

InMay, the US increased the number of white South Africans it planned to admit by 10,000, to 17,500, claiming that “unforeseen developments in South Africa created an emergency refugee situation”—including South African immigration officials raiding a US refugee processing center in the country, arresting seven Kenyan nationals whom they alleged were working at the facility illegally.

A spokesperson for South Africa’s foreign ministry said to the New York Times that same month that “the resettlement of South Africans to the United States under the guise of being ‘refugees’ is entirely politically motivated and designed to question South Africa’s constitutional democracy.” And as my colleague Noah Lanard wrote at the time, the White House “has cut off aid to South Africa based on its specious claim about discrimination against white South Africans.”

The State Department said the estimated cost of resettling those additional 10,000 Afrikaner refugees would be $100 million.

It’s yet another way the US under Trump continues to ostentatiously demonstrate who it deems worthy of aid, and who it doesnot.

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“This is a Tragedy”: Swimming Snakes Are Wiping Out These Beloved Balearic Lizards

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

Irrefutable proof of what Spanish researchers and wildlife experts had long suspected, and long feared, finally presented itself in the form of a grainy video that was shot on a minuscule island in the Balearics in April 2024.

Ribboning its way through the turquoise waters that separate the east coast of Ibiza from the islet of Santa Eulària 450 meters away, came a pale and solitary horseshoe whip snake in search of new territory and fresh sustenance.

The arrival of the snake on Santa Eulària, recorded by a local wildlife ranger, confirmed that the insatiable invader from the Spanish mainland—which has almost wiped out Ibiza’s endemic population of dazzlingly colored wall lizards—had opened up a new front.

“They control insect populations—including agricultural pests—so that all changes when they disappear.”

“There’d beenincreasing anecdotal evidence from fishermen and tourists who’d seen the snakes swimming, so we’d thought it was happening very often,” said Oriol Lapiedra, a biologist at the Centre for Ecological Research and Forestry Applications (CREAF) in Catalonia. “But this was the first proper [evidence] we’d had of a snake swimming from Ibiza to the islet.”

The horseshoe whip snake, a nonvenomous reptile found across southern and eastern Spain, has become an existential threat to the lizards since it began appearing on the island two decades ago.

Its rapid colonization has been attributed to the fashion among wealthy property owners in Ibiza for importing ancient olive trees from mainland Spain to adorn the grounds of their homes. Unbeknown to them, however, the trees—replete with their nooks and hollows—have provided ideal travel berths for hibernating snakes and snake eggs.

Twenty years after it arrived, Hemorrhois hippocrepis is present across at least 90 percent of the island and has developed a taste for the unsuspecting lizards, whose familiar colors and outlines grace much of Ibiza’s tourist tat, from T-shirts and fridge magnets to towels and mugs.

These days, though, items of kitsch lizard merchandise may outnumber the real population. In October 2022, the International Union for Conservation of Nature moved the Ibiza wall lizard (Podarcis pityusensis) up its extinction red list from “near threatened” to “endangered.”

Treasured and beloved as the lizards are for their aesthetic appeal and tame natures, they are also a keystone species that plays a vital role in maintaining the region’s ecosystems.

“They control insect populations—including agricultural pests—so that all changes when they disappear,” said Lapiedra. “But they also pollinate flowers and disperse seeds.”

What is more, the lizards are something of an evolutionary wonder: Each of the dozens of islands and islets that make up the Pityusic Islands has a different population whose distinct colorations include green, blue, black, brown, gray, and orange.

No one knows how many invasive snakes there are in Ibiza. According to the Balearic regional government, which is working with CREAF and other groups to protect the lizards, more than 3,500 horseshoe whip snakes were captured on the island last year alone, and more than 16,000 have been culled since 2016. Even so, forecasts suggest they will be found across 100 percent of the island by the end of 2027.

“Each, or most, of the islets have these unique lineages that are being completely lost to science.”

On the mainland, the snakes tend to be skinny creatures that seldom exceed lengths of 1.8 meters. But they are thriving to such an extent on Ibiza that specimens have been found that are more than 2 meters long and weigh 2.5 times as much as their peninsular peers. As Lapiedra put it: “We’ve found animals that are as thick as my wrist.”

The biologist and his colleagues, whose research was published recently in the journal Ecology, believe increased competition for food among the snakes on Ibiza may have driven them toward the islets.

While the hope is that dwindling food sources may eventually bring down the number of snakes, the damage has already been done. Researchers observed 72 lizards on Santa Eulària in 2016 and just three in 2023. Today, the unique lizard populations of 10 islets—including Santa Eulària—have become extinct, taking with them thousands of years of unique evolution. Meanwhile, horseshoe whip snakes have been found on Ibiza’s neighboring island of Formentera.

In an effort to safeguard the species, a “Noah’s ark” captive breeding program involving lizards from eight populations was set up at Barcelona zoo last year and is doing well. But the small size of the islets, combined with the voracity of the snakes, leaves little room for optimism and still less for complacency.

Lapiedra likens the situation to that of the Pacific island of Guam, where the arrival of the brown tree snake on US military ships 80 years ago led to the extirpation of 10 of the 12 native forest bird species. **“**The only difference is that the snakes in Guam aren’t reported to swim,” he added. “So there are islands [around] Guam that still have the species that Guam used to have.”

And yet, as Lapiedra pointed out, all is not lost on Ibiza. In an ironic twist for a species that has been thrust into extinction’s fangs by the human compulsion to order and reorder the landscape, the safest lizard populations in Ibiza are now those in urban areas.

“The lizards are still present in the largest cities in Ibiza and the populations are fine,” he said. “Basically what’s happening is that in the urban areas, the snakes get run over and people there also kill them because they don’t like snakes. So for now, some of these urban areas have good lizard populations.”

But for Lapiedra, his colleagues and people across Ibiza, the rapid disappearance of the lizards is both an ecological and a cultural disaster.

“Each, or most, of the islets have these unique lineages that are being completely lost to science and to humanity right now,” he said. “So this is a tragedy—it’s like a fire in an old church.”

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We Get It. You Don’t Trust Us.

Every week, a group of men in their late 60s meets at the Corner Cafe in Elizabethtown, North Carolina. One important reason for these meetups is to discuss what’s going on in their community.

Local news has virtually dried up in their rural county, as well as neighboring counties, and some residents say they’re being left in the dark and don’t feel equipped to make informed decisions.

“I’m not gonna vote if I can’t get the information,” says Penny Abernathy.

Like in much of the country, roughly two-thirds of North Carolina’s counties are considered news deserts. And the lack of local journalism isn’t just making it harder for people to stay informed; it’s exacerbating a crisis of trust in the news media.

This week on Reveal, we partner with the podcast Scene on Radioand itshosts John Biewen and Chenjerai Kumanyika to understand how American journalism got here and what can be done to repair the cracked foundation of the Fourth Estate.

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ICE at the World Cup Is a Threat to Us All

We’re less than a week away from the first match of the FIFA Men’s World Cup, with tensions mounting over the United States’ role as one of the host countries, and it remains to be seen just how the Department of Homeland Security will respond to what it deems threats—or how active ICE will be at the tournament.

On Monday, Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin told Fox News that “every single” agency would be on site. “We’re going to have facial recognition, right. If we have people coming in that’s on the terrorist watchlist, we’re going to collapse on them. That’s not going to [just] be ICE, that could be state police that collapse on them. We’re all working together.”

ICE’s facial recognition systems can misidentify people and generate false matches—andthe agency reportedly places smartphone-based facial recognition matches ahead of physical evidence including birth certificates.

Perhaps to counter potential criticisms, Mullin stated that ICE will be there “not for immigration, but for terrorist threats” and that “for years, ICE has been around and no one knew who they were.”

Several cities hosting World Cup matches have announced that they would not cooperate with ICE enforcement, including Los Angeles, Atlanta, and Seattle. On Monday, LA County Sheriff Robert Luna claimed that Mullin personally told him that federal agents would not conduct civil immigration enforcement “at any of the games.” But the federal government has increasingly deployed the criminal legal system against people they allege to have violated immigration law, with little regard for their alleged offenses and despite the fact that unauthorized presence in the US is a civil offense, not a criminal one.

Even giving Mullin the benefit of the doubt—which may not be the best move—his statement leaves ample room for loopholes: will it apply between games? To areas outside the stadiums? That uncertainty impacts fans, visitors, families of players, journalists—all of whom face a heightened risk of human rights violations, according toa joint travel advisory issued by more than 120 civil society groups in April. Among the risks listed in their press release:

• Arbitrary denial of entry and risk of arrest, detention and/or deportation
• Expanded restrictions and limitation on travel and entry to the U.S.
• Invasive social media screening and searches of electronic devices
• Violent and unconstitutional immigration enforcement, including racial profiling
• Suppression of speech and protest and increased surveillance
• Cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment – and even death – while in ICE detention or custody

Given that ominous warning—and the Trump administration’s tendency to label political opponents and immigrants of all stripes as “criminal aliens,” “domestic terrorists,” or otherwise dangerous—a secondhand verbal promisethat there will be no civil immigration enforcement is not reassuring.

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Is Madonna the Nancy Pelosi of Pop?

While watching Madonna’s recent Times Square takeover—sponsored by the gay “dating” app Grindr—it struck me. And I couldn’t stop thinking about it.

Something about Madonna’s performance made me immediately think of Nancy Pelosi. (Do with that what you will.) Both women are legendary trailblazers in their own right, foundational to their respective worlds, and yet always in a complicated negotiation with the legacy they’re leaving behind.

From the very start, both women were dismissed by the world around them, eventually defying expectations and a male-driven culture that wished to deem them unworthy. They both found longevity in their worlds due to reinvention, navigating the changing winds of pop culture or political landscapes by having to shape shift in ways their male counterparts never had to.

It’s hard to put my finger on what exactly sparked the comparison—maybe initially, it was the superficial fact of both being women who take up powerful spaces and refuse to let the world tell them they can’t do powerful things. Maybe it’s also that when these women dare to exist in public, we write about it, talk about it, send clips to our group chats about it.

Butthere was something else too. As Madonna precariously dangled her leg over the edge of a Times Square banister while she promotes Confessions II, the long-awaited follow-up to her 2005 chart-topping Confessions on a Dance Floor, I was hit with a type of exhaustion. It was a feeling I felt when Pelosi was exiting Congress. Madonna and Pelosi, in all their power, once created the winds of culture and politics. Now, it seems, they chase them.

But maybe that’s real legacy. It’s not about newness or the albums or gavels, but the audacity to still be here, unbothered and reveling in knowing you already did it. In a culture terrified of irrelevance, there’s something loudly radical about two women who’ve already proved everything—and know it.

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Only Candace Owens Could Prompt MAGA to Acknowledge Russian Disinformation

Far-right podcaster Candace Owens made a surprise trip to Russia this week, where she spoke on a panel at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum (SPIEF), a Davos-style event meant to build relationships between Russia and other world powers. Owens, who initially claimed that she was only taking a family vacation, used her trip to tweet at length about the country’s beauty, safety, and friendliness to Christians. “The Christian expression and heritage here is unmatched,” she tweeted, alongside photos of Russian Orthodox churches. “Unsurprisingly, they are lying to us about Russia.”

“I’m starting to understand why the talking heads panic and shout and lie about ‘Russian collusion’ when they learn an American with a platform is traveling here,” Owens added in another tweet. “It’s Plato’s allegory of the cave. It is genuinely shocking how clean, beautiful and ordered this city is. It is so far removed from media depictions.”

The baldly propagandistic nature of Owens’ trip generated condemnation from an unusual quarter: other MAGA figures, who suddenly found themselves unusually concerned about Kremlin-backed disinformation.

“I’m just wondering how long some of these people… have been activated as foreign agents.”

Glenn Beck, for instance, tweeted that Owens’ trip is “proof that Russia and Alexander Dugin’s massive propaganda operation is working.” (Dugin is a political philosopher and ultra-nationalist figure who is sometimes referred to as “Putin’s brain” due to his reported influence on the president.) A MAGA podcaster named Matt Tardio responded in agreement: “I’ve respected Glenn Beck for years on his honest reporting. Finally, people are waking up. Russian disinformation has been fooling influential people in the west with one goal, to destroy us from within.”

“Candace continues lying openly to her audience and they still clap like brainless seals,” declared Jessica Reed Kraus, the MAGA gossip blogger who writes the House Inhabit substack. “Russia is cool guys!” she added, mocking Owens’ fans.

In truth, most of the MAGA media world had very little to say about Owens’ trip. The few people on the right who condemned it notably have longstanding feuds with her, part of a massive, omnidirectional set of beefs and internecine fights that have been dividing the movement for most of Trump’s second presidency. Beck, for instance, has defended Erika Kirk, the widow of slain Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk, against attacks from Owens. Other critics of Owens’ travel included her ex-boss Ben Shapiro, who referred to her trip as a “magical propaganda tour.” The two have been enemies for years after Shapiro fired Owens from the Daily Wire in 2024 for her rabidly antisemitic statements.

Laura Loomer, who’s been bitterly feuding with Owens for months, went further.

“I don’t think conservatives realize how much Russian propaganda we have been fed over the last few years as ‘independent journalism,’” she tweeted during Owens’ visit. “It’s starting to become very clear to me how many people who claimed to be defenders of the West were just saying that to suck in a pro-West audience so they could slowly brainwash them with foreign propaganda until they could convince their viewers to work against the West. Those ‘interviews’ we all defended were not actually interviews. They were psychological operations meant to weaponize political factions in America for the purpose of pushing foreign interests.”

The left, Loomer added in another tweet, “wasn’t entirely wrong when they called some people Russian puppets. Just like the right isn’t wrong when they call some people agents of the Chinese communists and Islamists. Now I’m just wondering how long some of these people I’ve known for years have been activated as foreign agents and who their handlers are.”

The MAGA movement as a whole has a mixed record on recognizing that disinformation or propaganda exist. Loomer, for instance, often dismissed reports that the Russian government attempted to interfere in U.S. elections as a “hoax.” And Beck had very little to say publicly about the Tenet Media scandal, in which numerous prominent right-wing influencers took money from a company that was secretly receiving financial backing from two people with ties to Russian state media. Lauren Chen, Tenet’s co-founder, had been a freelance contributor to Beck’s BlazeTV, although her contract was terminated after the indictment was released.

Russia uses the SPIEF as a display of economic might and soft power, mixing speeches from Vladimir Putin with ballet performances. Owens’ participation was first reported on X by national security analyst Ryan Mauro. Amid Russia’s continued attack on Ukraine, Western countries largely shun the event, but the Taliban did make an appearance this year. In a break with recent tradition, a U.S. official also attended: Rodney Mims Cook Jr, the Chairman of the US Commission of Fine Arts, who’s overseeing the construction of Trump’s new White House ballroom. Cook presented images of the ballroom during the panel, where he spoke alongside actor Steven Seagal, a Putin ally.

Owens, a dedicated rage-baiter, clearly understood her visit would generate controversy. “This has been the most triggering trip for the mainstream media,” she declared in an RT interview. “And it has been laughable to see the headlines they are coming up with.”

“Great news!” she tweeted on Friday morning, celebrating that she’s be attending a second day of the conference. “Thanks to the wall-to-wall western media meltdown about my trip to Russia, their entire nation became aware of my presence here. I have now been cordially invited to hear President Putin speak today at SPIEF. This is why we say there is no such thing as bad press.”

Owens also sought to leverage the presence of a U.S. official at SPIEF to defend herself from her erstwhile allies’ attacks: “Isn’t it kind of weird how Trump sent an entire delegation, (including the architect building his ‘ballroom’) and yet Zionists never accused any of them of being Russian spies? It’s almost as if the people who refuse to peddle their talking points, get smeared.”

(Owens often blames Jews or “Zionists” for unconnected world events—for instance blaming the Orthodox Jewish Chabad Lubavitch movement for U.S. involvement in Iran.)

Mitchell Jackson, a publicist for Owens and a slate of other controversial figures, told me that “Candace is not being paid to attend” SPIEF, adding, “Boeing, Goldman Sachs, and Morgan Stanley having previously hosted panels at this event, and everyone from Rex Tillerson to Jon Huntsman has spoken at this event.”

In 2018, Huntsman actually chose to cancel his address, and Tillerson’s appearance was before the United States enforced major economic sanctions against Russia. Today, the State Department advises Americans not to go to the country for any reason.

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Florida’s OpenAI Lawsuit Shows the GOP Splintering Over AI

OpenAI and its chatbot ChatGPT’s “success has not been earned; the rise of OpenAI is attributable to a web of deceit and the exploitation of users (including Floridians), leveraging their data and safety to boost OpenAI’s market value at unacceptable costs.”

Earlier this week, Florida, a state led by Gov. Ron DeSantis’ right-wing, pro-business administration, sued OpenAI and itsCEO Sam Altman, alleging they promoted their products while knowing it could hurt users.

On its surface, this lawsuit may seem odd: It was filed by Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier, the 2024 presidential campaign manager and former chief of staff to Gov. DeSantis, who has repeatedly struck down government regulation and championed businesses—often at the expense of everyday people.

And the Trump administration appears to be committed to expanding artificial intelligence, stating in a January 2025 executive order that the US had to be dominant in the field “to promote human flourishing, economic competitiveness, and national security.The Defense Department evenmade a deal with OpenAI to use the company’s AI technology for classified security networks.

But the first page of Florida’s complaintfeatures a screenshot of OpenAI’s explanation of its parental controls for ChatGPT, in part reading: “We work with experts, test safeguards, and update our systems regularly to reduce risks. ChatGPT is trained to avoid showing harmful material and to respond in a respectful way for all users.”

Florida’s response: “Not so.”

The opening page of the Florida AG's lawsuit against OpenAI is quite the statement.

— Geoff Brumfiel (@gbrumfiel.bsky.social) 2026-06-01T15:42:12.739Z

The lawsuit claimsthat “mass shooters have been aided and abetted in deadly rampages”—including onewhere an accused gunman had extended conversations with ChatGPT before a mass shooting at Florida State Universitylast year—and has pushed vulnerable people to take their own lives, among other allegations.

As my colleague Mark Follman reported last month, within a roughly 20-minute conversation with ChatGPT, the chatbot had given him advice on weapons and tactics while he simulated planning a mass shooting:

ChatGPT delivered these responses with lots of encouragement—and it kept going even after I talked of emulating the Uvalde mass shooter’s choice of weapon, asked about livestreaming with a body camera and using hollow-point bullets, and focused on defending against return gunfire from police.

Mark’s investigation is cited in the Florida lawsuit.

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

These are legitimate concerns and DeSantis’ administration is correct to pursue accountability against OpenAI and Altman. DeSantis also has a record—although largely only starting toward the end of 2025—of protecting Floridians from AI companies, including allowing local governments to reject data center development projects. Some of the governor’s efforts have even failed, with other Florida Republicans citing Trump’s messaging that states shouldn’t oppose AI development.

So are we looking at the “Heartbreaking: The Worst Person You Know Just Made a Great Point” meme?

Heartbreaking: The Worst Person You Know Just Made A Great Point https://t.co/PgJ9dvyE10 pic.twitter.com/t1zV2E9iWC

— ClickHole (@ClickHole) February 5, 2018

Perhaps, but the large range of public statements on AI regulation among prominent figures in the GOP demonstrate that officials may see different upsides and downsides to following the Trump administration on this one issue.

For DeSantis, Floridians across the state, many of whom are part of—or could be—his voting base, are organizing against data centers. “No political party has a monopoly on the anger locals feel,” the Tampa Bay Timesnoted on Thursday. “It’s common at anti-data center events for the speakers to not even mention political parties.” And as my colleague Sophie Hurwitz wrote last month, most Americans say they would be against living near a data center. It’s popular to at least visibly consider regulating AI.

And this pressure may be seeping into the White House. President Trump flip-flopped on calling for federal vetting of some advanced AI systems for national security risks before their release to the public (although participation from AI companies is voluntary), eventually signing the executive order on Tuesday. It is still unclear to what extent the executive order changed after Trump had initially voiced objections last month, but AI regulation is now an issue that may be worth alienating others on the right over.

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Trump’s Gift to Drug Cartels, Money Launderers, and Terrorists

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

There has justifiably been much attention paid to Donald Trump’s personal corruption: cutting sleazy crypto deals, trading stocks in companies affected by his administration’s decisions, doling out pardons to fraudsters who make hefty donations to his political organizations, and so much more. But what’s even more significant is how Trump is perverting the federal government to allow wealthy individuals and corporations engaged in crooked conduct to escape scrutiny, prosecution, and punishment. Corporate scumbags and felonious plutocrats have never had it so good.

The Trump administration has taken steps to make sure that the United States is a safe space for money launderers, drug cartels, and international financial rogues.

At the Securities and Exchange Commission, enforcement actions have fallen precipitously, and the commission ended several high-profile cryptocurrency inquires that involved Binance, Coinbase, and other firms. The workforce for the SEC’s enforcement division was cut by a fifth last year, with many experienced attorneys and accountants given the boot. The IRS, too, has been hammered by layoffs, and the number of audits of people with $10 million or more in income dropped by two-thirds from 6,786 in 2025 to 2,264 in 2026. With new priorities established at the Justice Department—such as essentially shutting down the pursuit of cases under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act—the number of white-collar prosecutions has fallen to its lowest level in at least 40 years, according to the Financial Times.

But beyond this, the Trump administration has taken steps to make sure that the United States is a safe space for money launderers, drug cartels, and international financial rogues. Who says so? The US Government Accountability Office. It recently released a report assessing Trump’s decision to loosen reporting requirements for shell companies. These are corporations that can have legitimate uses but are also set up so people or entitites can evade taxes, launder money, hide assets, and obscure the true beneficiaries of financial transactions. For instance, a sanctioned Russian oligarch might be able to use a shell company—or a string of them—to buy real estate in the United States and keep secret his ownership of the property.

The Corporate Transparency Act, a bipartisan bill passed in 2021, required most US firms to disclose to the Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) their “beneficial owners”—that is, the real people who control or own them. (In many instances, shell companies do not have to reveal their true owners and are registered in the name of others.) The aim of the legislation was to create a registry of owners and impede illegal financial activities, such as money laundering. An estimated 32 million businesses would have to register and note their real owners. (Several categories of business were exempted because disclosure requirements already applied to them—such as banks, credit unions, and securities dealers.)

But one month into Trump’s second term, his administration essentially eviscerated this reporting requirement, when FinCEN issued rules exempting domestic companies and Americans from this disclosure. As the GAO put it, this new exemption applied “to over 99 percent of entities that were previously targeted.”

The GAO report—in exceedingly dry language—notes this exemption is a boon for assorted malfeasants:

U.S.-based shell companies, often structured as LLCs or corporations, can pose significant risks of illicit finance activity. Treasury’s 2026 National Money Laundering Risk Assessment identified several cases in which shell companies were used to facilitate financial crimes, including laundering the proceeds of drug trafficking, cybercrime, and fraud, among others, indicating the continued risk posed by shell companies. The 2025 domestic reporting company exemption may perpetuate these risks.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, the senior Democrat on the Senate Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs Committee, quickly jumped on the GAO report and cited it as evidence Trump is on the side of the bad guys:

The Trump Administration continues to put cartels and criminals ahead of law enforcement, opening the door for them to move millions of dollars through our financial system. Today’s GAO report confirms that Treasury gutted a bipartisan law designed to crack down on the abuse of shell companies, exempted 99 percent of the entities previously required to report, and has failed to address the “significant risks” this rollback created. Law enforcement groups have warned that it will be harder to go after drug traffickers, sanctions evaders, and major criminal enterprises.

Warren noted that one of the main forces behind passage of the Corporate Transparency Act was a former senator named Marco Rubio. In 2020, he tweeted, “My ‘Corporate Transparency Act’ [is] the most significant anti-corruption and money-laundering legislation in decades [and] forces anonymous shell companies to disclose their true owners.”

“There is growing evidence that [Chinese money laundering networks] are taking advantage of shell companies to help cartels move billions through the U.S. financial system.”

Republican and Democratic senators have opposed the Trump administration’s wipeout of the Corporate Transparency Act, as have law enforcement organizations, business groups, and national security–minded think tanks of the right and left. The hawkish and neocon-ish Foundation for Defense of Democracies issued a statement last year that said, “Anonymous U.S. shell companies are not a theoretical vulnerability—they are a proven vehicle for illicit finance, sanctions evasion, corruption, terrorism, and transnational crime…FinCEN’s decision to exempt domestic entities would allow these practices to continue unchecked.”

Last year, Warren, Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.), and other Democratic senators wrote the Treasury to complain about the weakening of this requirement, noting, “There is growing evidence that [Chinese money laundering networks] are taking advantage of shell companies to help cartels move billions through the U.S. financial system.”

The Trump administration claims this disclosure obligation was too onerous for businesses, but it entailed minimal effort for the corporations compelled to register. So why kill this requirement? Warren and other legislators suspect Elon Musk had something to do with this. In a separate letter sent to Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent in April 2025, she and 18 other congressional Democrats asserted the Trump administration’s decision to neuter the Corporate Transparency Act was “seemingly triggered by a single Elon Musk social media comment.”

They pointed out that Musk, who at that time was a key adviser to Trump and engaged in a reckless dismantling of various government agencies, might have been “benefiting from foreign investments made through legal entities designed to hide the identities of the foreign investors.” They cited the Financial Times: “Wealthy Chinese investors are quietly funneling tens of millions of dollars into private companies controlled by Elon Musk” through “opaque structures” and “an arrangement that shields their identities from public view.”

During the 2020 presidential race, Trump’s campaign, according to the Campaign Legal Center, deployed an LLC to launder “$170 million in spending to conceal payments to people close to the Trump family and campaign.”

Responding to the recent GAO report, Warren asserted that this disclosure requirement would be beneficial for efforts to combat transnational crime, drug trafficking (including fentanyl smuggling), sex trafficking, the evasion of sanctions imposed on Iran, the theft of US technology by China and others, and fraud that targets US government programs. (The criminals that stole federal funds in Minnesota relied on shell companies.)

This may well be a personal issue for Trump. His Trump Organization is a collection of hundreds of shell companies. (Such entities are commonly used for real estate transactions.) And during the 2020 presidential race, Trump’s campaign, according to the Campaign Legal Center, deployed an LLC to launder “$170 million in spending to conceal payments to people close to the Trump family and campaign.”

Corporate reporting rules may seem like a wonkish topic. It certainly is not as visceral as Trump selling pardons or pocketing billions in crypto grift. But it may be more important, for Trump’s decision to protect the secrecy of shell companies—perhaps at the urging of Musk—has more far-ranging consequences than his own sticky-fingers corruption. It’s another way Trump is making America great for plutocrats, oligarchs, fraudsters, and scoundrels.

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Trump’s Justice Department Is Suing Cities and States to Dismantle Gun Laws

This story was originally published by The Trace_,_ a nonprofit newsroom covering gun violence in America. Sign up for its newsletters here.

Last December, the Department of Justice opened a new office in its Civil Rights Division called the Second Amendment Section. The goal of the office, as previously reported by Mother Jones and The Trace, is to identify firearm restrictions enacted by cities and states that the administration believes to be unconstitutional—and sue to overturn them.

And sue they have.

In the section’s first six months of operation, the Justice Department has brought cases against police departments in Los Angeles County and the Virgin Islands, the city of Denver, the state of Colorado, and the nation’s capital, Washington, DC. Virginia may be next: Minutes after Gov. Abigail Spanberger signed an assault weapon ban last month, Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon posted on X, “See you in court!”

“It’s great to have that giant 800-pound gorilla in the room with us.”

The Civil Rights Division typically fights for the disempowered by enforcing federal anti-discrimination statutes. It was created in 1957 to ensure Black voting rights and school desegregation. Gun rights “have never been a focus,” said Megan Marks, a former attorney in the division who is now deputy director and managing editor of Red Line for Civil Rights, a nonprofit initiative that tracks the politicization of civil rights enforcement under President Donald Trump.

Not surprisingly, pro-gun organizations are thrilled with the Civil Rights Division’s new direction. “It’s great to have that giant 800-pound gorilla in the room with us,” said Kostas Moros, director of legal research and education for the Second Amendment Foundation, which has more than 50 active lawsuits seeking to void gun laws across the country. “Because courts, like it or not, do take the DOJ more seriously. And frankly it’s nice to have the DOJ at least seeing the Second Amendment as equal to all the other rights.”

The DOJ’s suits come at a time when the Trump administration has departed from more traditional civil rights issues—discrimination against marginalized groups based on race, sex, disability, and religion—by pursuing conservative policies, reshaping DEI initiatives, investigating “reverse discrimination,” and suing universities over affirmative action practices.

“Under the leadership of President Trump, this is the most pro-Second Amendment Department of Justice in history,” a Justice Department spokesperson told me. “We are committed to maximizing law-abiding citizens’ ability to fully exercise their right to bear arms and evenhandedly enforcing federal laws that do not infringe on Second Amendment rights.”

The flurry of litigation began last September, when the Civil Rights Division filed suit against the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department over “unreasonable delays” in issuing concealed carry permits that allegedly stretched “as far as two years.” Six weeks later the division sued the police department in the Virgin Islands, a US territory, over “unreasonable delays” in its gun permitting process and requirements like bolted-in gun safes. Shortly after, the territory’s governor proposed laws establishing a 90-day deadline for approving or denying permits. The division then began targeting bans on semiautomatic rifles and high-capacity magazines, first in Washington, DC, in December, then in Colorado in May.

Some experts and veteran civil rights attorneys said they are troubled by the Justice Department’s new direction. “The history of racial discrimination in the US is this deep scar, while gun rights were never really under assault in a country that has more guns than people,” said John Donohue, a law professor at Stanford University. He said the Second Amendment Section is unnecessary because an army of well-funded pro-gun groups “are constantly bringing litigation.” He also pointed to the financial burden for states and municipalities that will have to spend money defending their laws in court.

For decades, the National Rifle Association and allied groups have successfully waged legislative and legal campaigns to loosen firearm regulations across the country. They argue gun ownership is an innate human right—one that’s constantly under attack. These days most states allow gun owners to carry a concealed weapon in public without a permit, and many even prevent municipalities from restricting the practice.

Marks, who spent nine years probing police misconduct in the Civil Rights Division before leaving in 2025, is concerned that the division is abdicating its responsibility to investigate serious law enforcement abuses in favor of instead “making AR-15s more accessible.” One of the key federal statutes that Marks and her colleagues enforced was passed after Rodney King was beaten by Los Angeles police in 1991. It authorized investigations to determine whether law enforcement agencies have engaged in a “pattern or practice” of civil rights violations, including excessive force or racial profiling.

The DOJ’s new Second Amendment Section is now utilizing that same language from the statute, but repurposing its meaning to “investigate law enforcement agencies that engage in a pattern or practice of infringing on law-abiding citizens’ 2nd Amendment rights.” That trade-off, experts said, comes with a cost.

“What we’ve seen play out is the department walking away from a number of completed investigations where they found systemic misconduct,” said Marks, referring to the traditional cases the Civil Rights Division has more typically pursued in the past. By focusing on gun rights, she said, “the department is walking away from its responsibilities to marginalized communities.”

Moros, of the Second Amendment Foundation, disagrees, pointing to a historical analogue for the Trump DOJ’s view that gun rights are a key component of civil rights. After the Civil War, he notes, the War Department established The Freedmen’s Bureau, a temporary division created essentially to stabilize the South and to protect the rights of formerly enslaved people. Among other things, the bureau helped formerly enslaved people become self-sufficient—and argued for their right to own guns. “I do think it’s a very clear precedent, because they stood up for people who the state and local governments were trying to disarm,” Moros said. “This is definitely something the federal government has taken an interest in in the past.”

Donohue, the law professor, rejects that argument, adding that the gun rights movement has a long history of co-opting the language of civil rights. The NRA, for example, describes itself as “America’s longest-standing civil rights organization” without a hint of irony.

Former employees of the Civil Rights Division told Mother Jones and The Trace last fall that the revered unit had been co-opted by the Trump administration “to serve an agenda that is in some ways antithetical to civil rights.” In December, more than 100 former DOJ civil rights attorneys and staff published a letter warning of the destruction of the division, citing the retirement or removal of 5,000 career attorneys from the department overall. The new focus on guns is just another example of how the division has been repurposed to fulfill the administration’s ideological objectives, said Marks.

Marks said she hopes that if the next administration disbands the Second Amendment Section, the Civil Rights Division can return to its original focus of fighting for the disempowered. But she said it will take time. “I think it’s a question of, can they rebuild the resources? Can they ensure and reestablish norms like independent enforcement by career experts? So many of those guardrails are gone now. I don’t know that it can happen overnight.”

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The Delaney Hall Strikers Are Hitting GEO Group Where It Hurts

It has now been almost two weeks since the laborers keeping ICE’s Delaney Hall mega-jail open went on strike—demanding a chance to speak with New Jersey Gov. Mikie Sherrill, reviews of their cases, and ultimately, their freedom. Those workers are the detainees themselves, who serve as custodians, line cooks, hairdressers, laundry workers, and janitors at the Newark prison-turned-detention center where a thousand people are trapped in DHS custody, working for wages as low as a dollar per day.

What began as a simultaneous hunger and labor strike has become largely a labor struggle, organizers with the immigrant rights group Cosecha New Jersey told me. That strike, according to a letter signed by 46 detained people and published June 3, is near-unanimous and ongoing: “people detained have all voluntarily stopped working and assisting with facility operations,” they wrote in a May 31 letter titled “We Demand Freedom.”

The for-profit firm GEO Group, ICE’s largest private contractor and Delaney Hall’s operator, runs what it calls a “voluntary work program” that in effect keeps the center operating, described in a recent GEO Group detainee handbook reviewed by Mother Jones.

While work is supposedly voluntary, “encouraging others to participate in a work stoppage or to refuse to work” is a “high offense” punishable by disciplinary transfer, isolation, or criminal proceedings.

“Any resident assigned to work in the kitchen will be paid $4.00 per day,” the handbook says. That’s the highest wage anyone gets: “Laundry Work Details and Barbershop Workers will be paid $3.00 per day. Special Work Details are paid $2.00 per day. All other job assignments are $1.00 per day. Ordinarily you will not be permitted to work more than eight hours per day or 40 hours per week.”

The document also lists the cost of a pair of shoes at GEO Group’s commissary: $24.28, equivalent to several weeks’ wages. A blanket costs eight dollars. ID cards, which detained people must pay to replace if damaged, cost $5 each, or a full week’s pay.

While the work program is labeled as voluntary, “encouraging others to participate in a work stoppage or to refuse to work” is listed in the detainee handbook as a “high offense,” punishable by disciplinary transfer, isolation, or initiating criminal proceedings.

“Engaging in, or inciting a group demonstration” is also a “high offense” and “prohibited act.” And, the detained strikers wrote in their June 3 letter, they have been “subjected to reprisals, discrimination, mockery, mistreatment, and threats” since their strike began.

People detained in Delaney Hall began a hunger and labor strike on May 22.Derek French/Zuma

“They are trying to force us to work in all areas of the facility (cleaning, kitchen, maintenance, laundry, floor polishing)” they wrote, adding that GEO Group staffers threaten “to deport us, transfer us to punishment units, and move us from one detention center to another” if they refuse to work. “They tell us we have no rights here.”

“They don’t have cleaning staff, they don’t have kitchen staff,” said Cat Adorno, an organizer with Cosecha. “Those jobs, the detainees are the ones that do that.”

“We’re hearing that the place is becoming really dirty, that it started to smell like feces, that the guards have become incredibly aggressive, threatening them that if they don’t resume their work, they’re going to get transferred or get additional charges,” Adorno added.

The profit margins of facilities like Delaney Hall depend on coercing people into working for otherwise illegal rates, Andrew Free, an immigration lawyer and journalist who researches conditions in ICE detention, said. “The way you keep the place clean is you use the people who are inside to clean it.”

Those dollar-a-day rates have held since 1950, when they were established by Congress. It was keyed to the “international standard for prisoners of war under the Geneva Conventions, which was three Swiss francs.” Since then, several courts have ruled that the Fair Labor Standards Act, which sets the federal minimum wage, does not apply to people detained by ICE. But the legal battle isn’t over: there are now more than a dozen lawsuits making their way through the courts regarding involuntary work for unjust pay in ICE detention.

GEO Group staffers did not answer questions about the strike, or about whether Delaney Hall cleaning and kitchen staff can sustain the facility without the labor of detained people.

**“**In all instances, our support services are monitored by ICE, including by on-site agency personnel…to ensure compliance with ICE’s detention standards and contract requirements,” a GEO Group spokesperson wrote in a statement.

Facilities like Delaney Hall are profitable in part because they can compel detained people to work for otherwise illegal rates.

For more than a year, a group of union activists calling itself “Labor Eyes On ICE” has held monthly vigils at Delaney Hall—and on Sunday, members of at least 12 unions, including the Teamsters and the American Federation of Teachers, picketed on a dusty road just under half a mile from the building, prevented from getting within detainees’ earshot by barricades and lines of police.

Teachers and librarians showed up to chant and picket, as did Amazon warehouse workers and university clerical staff. In a nearby tent, masked medics wearing red-tape crosses on their arms handed out goggles to protect people from tear gas—and told me quietly that in their day-to-day lives, many of them are unionized medical professionals.

Mitch Israel, an organizer with the Teamsters at Amazon, had the ties between that company and ICE on his mind outside Delaney Hall this week: “Amazon actually loses money on its package delivering business most years,” he said, “and it funds that by using its cloud computing platform, Amazon Web Services, to get huge contracts with ICE, with Palantir, and other groups that allow it to fund its abuse of workers. There is a direct connection between these things.”

The Delaney Hall detention facility has seen a surge of protests as detainees hold a hunger and labor strike over allegations of mistreatment and poor facility conditions. Riley Harty/Zuma

“This fight actually goes beyond Delaney Hall and back to our employers and our workplaces,” said Isaac Jimenez, a member of the administrative workers’ union at Rutgers University. At his employer, students, staff and faculty “have been calling for a sanctuary campus for over a year.”

“We’re supporting and uplifting the demands of the striking detainees and calling for this place to be shut down, calling on our governor, Mikie Sherrill, to meet with the strikers, and to help shut this place down as well,” Jimenez added. “I know it’s only really gotten to a head in the past 10 days, but this movement’s been growing for over a year, since Delaney Hall’s been reopened.” On Thursday, 13 days into the strike, Sherrill announced a $12 million increase in funding for legal services—enough to fund legal aid for “all low-income detainees in Delaney Hall.”

By withholding their labor, Free said, detained people “are in a real way hitting GEO where it hurts.” They are undermining the company’s revenue, “which is why the repression is so harsh.”

But it’s generally cheaper to let people go than to transfer strikers to different facilities, Free said. So when some detained people are released—like an 18-year-old who was freed from Delaney Hall earlier this week after missing her high school prom—“that is just as much a predictable consequence of these hunger and labor strikes as the repression and retaliation.”

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