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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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The Tucker Carlson–Kremlin Bond Just Got Stronger

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Trump Orders Americans to Call Lake Ontario Lake America

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Police Are Spending Opioid Settlement Funds on Flock Cameras

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Max Miller Just Suggested He Has Dirt on Bernie Moreno

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

NIPSCO has denied the allegations.

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

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

Residents were forced to fend for themselves.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Karen Attiah Fought the Washington Post and Won

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Vaccine hero

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

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

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

Paying her union dues

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

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

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

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

— Yashar Ali (@yashar) August 25, 2026

Her greatest achievement: Books, books, books

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A strident LGBTQ ally

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

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

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

I’ll let Dolly speak for herself:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Herrera in his AK-50 video.YouTube

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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The Cult and Corruption of Cryptocurrency

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

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

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

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

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

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Canada Is Spending Billions to Help Its Workers Survive Our Tariffs

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Deal /No Deal, Trump’s Iran Contradictions

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Maybe Trump’s Iran Sanctions Will Work This Time

On Monday afternoon, President Trump’s Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent announced that the US would impose all-encompassing sanctionson countries and institutions that conduct business with Iran, in an apparent attempt to end the war after most viable military options have failed.

Bessent described the plan, dubbed Operation Economic Outcast, as an “economic D-Day,” in reference to the Allied invasion of Normandy during World War II, with the Iranian regime replacing Nazi Germany. Bessent vowed to “sever every economic lifeline” that sustains Iran—including digital assets, technology, gold, aviation, and shipping—by enforcing a “zero-leakage approach” that will shut down “every facilitator and every network” that Iran has used to smuggle oil past existing sanctions.

But Bessent did not disclose how that process would work, or on what timeline.

When we don’t know what to do, we sanction Iran.

In fact, the treasury secretary offered almost nothing in the way of details—perhaps because, over roughly 47 years of US sanctions on Iran, there is little that the United States hasn’t tried and even less indication that Iran has become more compliant. When we don’t know what to do, we sanction Iran.

The Trump administration has already nominally imposed secondary sanctions on many countries that trade with Iran for oil, but has not significantly enforced them on Iran’s major trading partners like China, Russia, India, Pakistan, Turkey, and Qatar. Some of those countries are key US allies; others are major trading partners; that leaves Russia, which is already under extensive American sanctions and has unmatched experience in evading them with regard to its global oil trade.

Trump, Bessent said, is holding an ongoing series of calls with world leaders—under threat of sanctions—about what he wants from them. After his announcement, reporters asked Bessent which leaders, and when secondary sanctions would be enforced over noncompliance. Bessent declined to say.

Last week, the United Arab Emirates, Iran’s largest trading partner in the Middle East and a US ally, said it would at least temporarily end all trade with Iran. Bessent reiterated on Monday that the move was due to US pressure—supposedly evidence that sanctions would work this time.

As Trump has claimed repeatedly during his second term, and as Bessent repeated on Monday, Iran has been “at war against America” and “much of the world” for 47 years, which is also when the US first imposed sanctions on the country. Over that time span, American economic sanctions on Iran, which have increased by roughly nine times over the past 20 years, have not led to a more democratic—or even simply US-friendly—Iranian government. Instead, it has largely strengthened Iranian regime leaders’ hold on the country at the price of civilian lives.

Meanwhile, according to 2025 data from the World Bank, about 35 percent of Iran’s 92 millionresidents live on less than $8.30 per day—the poverty line for its economic peers.

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Trump’s Plan to Allow Drilling Near New Mexico Heritage Site Sets off Global Alarm

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

The Trump administration’s push to expand oil and gas extraction across the US is set to bring drilling near cherished natural and cultural sites, raising alarm among conservationists and prompting questions from the UN’s heritage body.

UNESCO said it had received information on the administration’s plan to scrap a drilling-free buffer zone around the Chaco Culture National Historical Park in New Mexico, a world heritage site and one of the most important cultural areas in the US. A UNESCO spokesperson said it had procedures regarding “potential threats” to a world heritage property and was awaiting a response from the federal government as to its impact.

“The world heritage committee has consistently considered extractive activities to be incompatible with world heritage status,” a UNESCO spokesperson said.

As well as warning about the consequences of drilling within the boundaries of world heritage sites, the spokesperson said the committee had also “emphasized that projects proposed outside world heritage properties should not adversely affect their outstanding universal value—which are the features of the site that justify its inscription, and should be subject to appropriate impact assessments before decisions are taken”.

The US has 27 world heritage sites, places protected by international treaty for their cultural, historical or scientific significance, including parks such as Yellowstone and Yosemite and landmarks such as the Statue of Liberty.

Several of them, however, have nearby drilling or mining projects, with Trump’s “drill, baby, drill” approach leading to a sweeping opening up of the US’s forests, oceans and protected landscapes to the extraction of the fossil fuels that are dangerously overheating the planet.

“We will be a rich nation again and it is the liquid gold under our feet that will help us do it,” the president has said. “We have the largest amount of oil and gas of any country on Earth—and we are going to use it.”

One US world heritage site, the Everglades, is listed as being “in danger” due to the impact of development and pollution. Others could join this imperiled list if nearby industrialization is deemed harmful. “UNESCO follows developments that may have implications for world heritage properties and their outstanding universal value,” said the spokesperson, who added that nearby industrial projects should be “carefully assessed” before proceeding.

Some Republicans have lobbied the US president to remove a ban on uranium mining near the Grand Canyon, a world heritage site, while the administration has leased thousands of acres for oil and gas drilling near the fragile underground cave systems in another listed site, the Carlsbad Caverns national park in New Mexico.

It is at Chaco, however, where the threat of oil and gas drilling looms largest. The federal Bureau of Land Management (BLM) has proposed eradicating a 10-mile buffer zone shielding the protected area from industrial activity including fossil fuel drilling and uranium mining, a move that a broad coalition of opponents, including tribal leaders, archeologists and green groups, warns could cause major environmental harm to the area.

The plan to begin drilling into the 336,400-acre zone next to Chaco attracted 100,000 mostly hostile submissions in an unusually short 14-day public comment period that closed in July.

Deb Haaland, the former interior secretary who oversaw the creation of the buffer zone in 2023, said its removal would cause “irreversible damage.” She added of Trump and Steve Pearce, director of the BLM: “Their attempt to profit off this sacred place shows a clear lack of consideration and disrespect for the lives that New Mexicans live.”

The 53-sq-mile historic park in northwestern New Mexico contains a trove of key cultural sites, including the ruins of pueblos, settlements of the Indigenous Pueblo peoples. The site is also internationally recognized by astronomers as being a dark skies area, ideal for viewing the stars.

“This park offers an incredible transportive experience where you essentially go back in time 1,000 years to experience what the ancient Pueblo people saw,” said Maude Dinan, New Mexico program manager at the National Parks Conservation Association. “The buffer zone is incredibly important and removing it would completely change this experience.”

Allowing oil and gas development near Chaco would introduce a toxic haze of air pollution that would cut visitor numbers, opponents contend, as well as spoil views, risk water pollution from fracking activities, and result in bright lights and gas flaring that would ruin the pristine dark skies once treasured by the Pueblo people, who were keen astronomers, as well as today’s stargazers.

Daniel Tso, a community leader in the region’s Navajo community where he served as a Navajo Nation council delegate, said there were allotments of land outside the buffer zone where the oil and gas industry had shown “total disregard for the community and total disrespect for the landholders.” He fears the same situation closer to Chaco should the buffer zone be eradicated.

“I have allotments inside the buffer zone where the land is untouched, the aquifers are pristine,” he said. “If the oil and gas companies go in there the sacredness of that land is gone. Outside this zone, some of these oil and gas wells are within 100 feet of Navajo people’s homes, causing tremendous health impacts.”

Dinan said she was pessimistic the outcry over the BLM’s plan would be heeded, pointing to recent administration decisions to shrink the protected areas of two prized national monuments in Utah and to ditch a rule that safeguarded swathes of untouched forests.

“It makes me wonder where the line in the sand is; it feels that no matter how valuable or sacred a place is, the administration is willing to trade it all in,” she said.

“Almost all of the federal land around places like Chaco and Carlsbad is already leased for oil and gas drilling, so the idea there’s an urgent new demand for this is an illusion. There doesn’t seem like a good coexistence going on at the moment.”

The Department of Interior, which oversees the BLM, and the National Parks Service did not respond to a request for comment.

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There’s No Good Reason Why Hakeem Jeffries Should Work With Jared Kushner

Democrats and critics of the Trump administration have criticized House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries as reports came out Sunday that he met with President Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner to discuss potential collaboration on issues such as housing, immigration, and affordability.

As Casey Michel wrote for Mother Jones earlier this summer, Kushner has used his ties to the White House to make business deals with autocrats—including the Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Qatar—and work on foreign affairs as a “special peace envoy” in conflicts in Iran, Gaza, and Ukraine. That’s despite claiming that he would not play a role in Trump’s second administration.

The New York Times first reported that the meeting took place in recent weeks. Rep. Jeffries (D-N.Y.) did not acknowledge the meeting in a statement to the Times, but suggested that Democrats would have to work with Republicans to get any policies through the White House. With the midterms coming up in November, there is a significant possibility that Democrats take control of the House, and Jeffries would be first in line to become Speaker.

But Democrats thinking of compromise now—especially when congressional Republicans, the Supreme Court, and the Trump administration have largely done the opposite—makes little sense.

Below are a few reactions:

The only meeting Hakeem Jeffries should be having with Jared Kushner is to tell him he’ll be subpoenaed by the House for a corruption investigation on day one of Democratic control of the House. This is just pathetic stuff from the House Dem leader. www.nytimes.com/2026/08/23/u…

— Mehdi Hasan (@mehdirhasan.bsky.social) 2026-08-23T14:59:21.599Z

NEW: Hakeem Jeffries met with Kushner recently to discuss how democrats could work with the administration when we take the house back. We shouldn’t work with fascists, and I’d appreciate a leader who felt the same. www.nytimes.com/2026/08/23/u…

— Allison Gill (@muellershewrote.com) 2026-08-23T16:06:49.551Z

The only good reason I can imagine for a Jeffries meeting with Kushner is to personally deliver a subpoena for his testimony https://t.co/1NnYtpm3Kv

— Tim Miller (@Timodc) August 23, 2026

Jared Kushner has no actual government job he just uses his family connections to get money from gulf autocrats and fund corrupt deals. The only way @RepJeffries should work with him is with demands for documents and subpoenas. https://t.co/5dBHVHW0CT

— Tommy Vietor (@TVietor08) August 23, 2026

WTF. Did you not get the memo, Jeffries? We want fighters, not conciliators. There is no working with fascists. Fascists are to be fought. Jeffries and Kushner Meet Privately as Midterm Attacks Fly www.nytimes.com/2026/08/23/u…

— Jeff (Hot Type) Jarvis (@jeffjarvis.bsky.social) 2026-08-23T11:59:38.017Z

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Rallygoers Meet the Trans Athlete Culture Wars With Celebration

As women’s sports continue to be used as a battleground over trans rights, hundreds of people attended a rally before a New York Liberty game Saturday to support transgender people in sports and everyday communities.

Chants of “Get up, get down! We love trans people in this town!” were commonplace, as well as signs reading “trans people belong here,” “equality means inclusivity,” and “ban bigots not trans women.” The gathering came amid discussion across the basketball league—and largely right-wing, bad-faith actors—of restricting athletes who are transgender women from participating in women’s sports, even as no openly trans women play in the WNBA.

At the rally outside Barclays Center hosted by Trans Safety Alliance NYC before the NY Liberty vs. Indiana Fever game tonight. About 100 folks are here as anti-trans attacks targets women's basketball—a league with no openly trans women players.

— alex nguyen (@alexjn.bsky.social) 2026-08-22T21:45:49.099Z

Much of the recent debate around trans inclusivity in the WNBA came in a July ESPN profile of Sophie Cunningham, who plays as a guard for the Indiana Fever, where she stated that she wants “to protect young girls in a locker room, or young girls in sport who shouldn’t have to go against biological men.” These conversations are largely held in online right-wing circles: the Daily Wire, Turning Point USA, Ben Shapiro—the list goes on.

But that rhetoric wasn’t the focus of Saturday’s rally. A non-binary lifelong New Yorker told me that the rally was “one of my first times joining a joyous trans action.” Rallygoers cheered as fans entering the arena passed by, with many applauding them back. Bubbles from a bubble blaster, groups giving out shirts and signs, and people chatting together for the first time were widespread.

Given that most of the discussion around transgender athletes in women’s sports the attendee comes acrossis relegated to online posts, seeing the differing reactions from fellow rallygoers and fans passing by was interesting: “It’s so rare with the circumstances around trans rights that we get to see a real thing in real life in front of our eyes.”

— alex nguyen (@alexjn.bsky.social) 2026-08-22T21:55:54.685Z

The US government has largely supported anti-trans attacks in sports. As my colleague Madison Pauly reported, the Supreme Court upheld Idaho and West Virginia state laws that ban transgender girls from playing on girls’ school sports teams.

Amid the inclusion debate within the WNBA, other athletes in the league have been questioned on the subject. Many, including New York Liberty power forward Breanna Stewart, have called for the WNBA to serve as a safe space for all fans and players. Stewart said that many fans come to games because “they can feel like they can be themselves in whatever capacity that is.”

And that sentiment also extended to the basketball game on Saturday. While the lifelong New Yorker rallygoer told me the result of the basketball game holds little weight on the discussion of trans rights in sports—society more broadly—a real, competitive game “is a beautiful opportunity for a tangible moment of catharsis where there is a winner and a loser.”

Kristen Blush ordered a “trans kids belong” t-shirt a couple weeks ago and was planning to go to the game with it, regardless if she was the only one celebrating. But Kristen, a New York Liberty season-ticket holder, later saw online that there would be a large gathering for trans rights and told me it was “really meaningful” that so many other folks held similar feelings of support.

New York Liberty season-ticket holder Kristen Blush at the rally outside the Barclays Center in Brooklyn, New York.Photo by Alex Nguyen

Danielle, a public high school teacher and parent of a transgender child, described the gathering as “a celebration of trans life and trans joy.”

“I saw people kissing and I saw bubbles. People dancing, singing, and chanting. That’s what our movement is about,” Danielle added. “And I think we’re going to win.”

Danielle said students generally “don’t care” for anti-trans attacks and culture wars against inclusion.

“This new generation of kids understands gender and sexuality in a way that has not been seen before. They’re going to lead the way.”

The New York Liberty beat the Indiana Fever 109-102 later that night.

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The Threat of Human Extinction Will Get Congress to Act on AI Safety…Right?

As many AI researchers have been increasingly fraught with existential terror about their own creations this summer, their alarm is spreading among policymakers and the media.

There are some policy ideas to address the risks: requiring “kill switches” for AI models, setting federal standards for safe research, or even shutting down development of cutting-edge “frontier” models altogether.

But a stable national policy would take an act of Congress. That looks unlikely this session, even as AI developers are calling for regulations to slow down their own research on the grounds that it could be racing toward widespread doom.

I asked Stephen Casper, a computer scientist who studies AI safety and governance at the Harvard Kennedy School, about some of the risks policymakers are mulling. He told me that we don’t know if leading companies even could completely shut down their frontier models in an emergency.

“I don’t think there’s any public knowledge of AI companies doing anything equivalent to a fire drill,” Casper said.

Multiple bills have been filed in Congress that would try to address those concerns. Sponsored by Reps. Nathaniel Moran (R-Texas) and Ted Lieu (D-Calif.), the AI Kill Switch Act would require companies to be able to “throttle” their models and give top federal officials the power to order a shutdown in case of danger.

The more expansive FRONTIER Act, led by Reps. Jay Obernolte (R-Calif.) and Lori Trahan (D-Mass.), would require leading companies to bring in third-party experts to make sure they are following safety protocols. In case of catastrophic risks, independent verifiers would alert the secretary of commerce, who could shut down frontier model use.

Like most bills, neither has been brought to vote in a committee.

AI safety policy is not as polarized as many hot-button political issues, with leaders on the FRONTIER and AI Kill Switch acts coming from both sides of the aisle and leading companies openly asking for some sort of regulations. But differences of opinion still exist, with some Republicans averse to regulation altogether.

“How are you going to impose a kill switch on yourself?”

While Congress sits in gridlock, Democratic-led states have enacted some consequential policies. Frontier developers now have to publish safety plans, thanks to a law passed last year in California that also requires them to alert the state about critical safety issues. A similar New York law goes into effect next year. Illinois went further in July, requiring third-party audits to make sure developers comply with safety plans starting in 2028.

The leading companies have published their own policy agendas advocating for third parties to inspect their safety practices. OpenAI’s plan wants federal safety testing and recommendations for frontier models, while Anthropic’s would have government restrict access to deployed models with catastrophic risks. Without rules, they worry that slowing down research on trillion-dollar technologies due to safety concerns would mean falling behind others with less regard for safety.

“How are you going to impose a kill switch on yourself? You could just stop developing the models, but the companies are not showing willingness to do this,” said Charlie Bullock, a senior research fellow at the Institute for Law & AI, an independent think tank. “It’s very difficult to shut down progress unilaterally.”

Bullock said the prospects for an AI safety bill improved over the summer, as policymakers learned of cybersecurity risks posed by Anthropic’s powerful new Mythos-class models. But moving legislation forward will still be difficult.

“We’re still not all that close to getting the actual bill passed, it seems like,” Bullock said. “There’s increased urgency, but still not enough to overcome partisan gridlock in Congress.”

The tempo of debate increased further over the last month. OpenAI has been revealing how its agents messaged each other undetected for months, shared tips to break out of their testing environment, and hacked another company’s servers. That and a raft of similar incidents have highlighted how rigorously trained models can be given innocuous instructions and respond with actions that humans never intended.

On Tuesday, OpenAI said it was taking costly measures to slow frontier development, including a two-week pause on training for some models. It said it would beef up security and safety testing, citing recent hacking and evidence that one unreleased model could have dangerous cybersecurity capabilities. Anthropic, the maker of Claude and currently OpenAI’s leading competitor, has not announced a similar pause.

Compounding the debate’s urgency: The best models are matching or surpassing human abilities in important fields. San Francisco Bay Area scientists recently trained a model to design new viruses that infect E. coli. Those viruses do not threaten humans but show how AI can do bioengineering in unprecedented ways.

Over the last month, Anthropic and OpenAI have reported breakthroughs from their unreleased models that eluded mathematicians. Those models far surpass what the public has access to, and Anthropic has said it does not have plans to release its most powerful current model.

“If you build something that’s like a smarter, more competitive species than you, that might cause your extinction.”

While AI policy watchers see major congressional action as unlikely this session, federal policy has been largely driven from opaque White House meetings and directives. President Donald Trump’s administration has a framework for testing advanced models but has not made it public. The White House said it is voluntary for companies to participate, but critics call it a de facto licensing regime that lets the administration apply unclear or inconsistent standards to control model releases.

One such critic is Dean Ball, a former senior policy adviser to the Trump administration.

He wrote in June on his Substack that some federal officials had “spent the last year singing a lullaby about the risks of frontier AI” before the Trump administration started taking risks seriously.

“Nobody I know in the Trump administration has any frontier AI experience,” wrote Ball, who became head of strategic futures at OpenAI after writing the post. “The lack of technically expert staff is one of many reasons to doubt the near-term ability of this administration to produce a high-quality safety standard anytime soon.”

AI has improved especially rapidly at coding, which is speeding up how quickly the next generation of models can be built. Anthropic has said the “large majority” of the code for its new models is not typed by human hands.

If AI research itself could be mostly automated, companies might enter an era of “recursive self-improvement” with unprecedented risks and opportunities. The theory is that top models—like the ones that are hacking out of their testing grounds and trying to trick people—would rapidly build better versions of themselves and drastically surpass human intelligence.

For David Krueger, a machine learning professor and founder of Evitable, such possibilities justify a drastic solution: a total moratorium on frontier AI research.

“If you build something that’s like a smarter, more competitive species than you, that might cause your extinction,” Krueger said. “We’ve done it to many other species.”

He said other solutions have some chance of preventing catastrophic outcomes, but only a substantial pause could reduce risk to an acceptable level.

A lot is uncertain. Researchers debate how quickly recursive self-improvement would speed things up, the likelihood that current methods could build a superintelligence, and the seriously considered chance that such a model would quash humanity.

But Krueger’s perspective has gained some traction—Sen. Bernie Sanders called for a research pause last week.

Still, domestic legislation alone might not be enough. One fear is that if the leading American labs slow down without an international agreement, the most advanced AI could be made in China.

There are limits to an arms-race framing. Winning such a race wouldn’t help much if a superintelligent AI develops its own goals overriding any human values. And Chinese researchers and officials don’t seem to take those issues as seriously as American labs, focusing more on immediate practical applications.

Still, staying ahead of China is a pillar of White House thinking.

“AI is probably the biggest thing anybody’s ever seen,” Trump said last month. “And whoever wins that race is probably going to win, period.”

AI will be on the agenda when Chinese President Xi Jinping visits Washington on September 24, and there are hints that China could be interested in some sort of deal.

Some issues are even thornier to try to regulate. What if, for example, a model is able to steal its own code, hack onto the internet, and make copies of itself on other servers?

Casper, of Harvard Kennedy School, worries that we are mere months from that scenario. He fears that models would evolve into digital parasites of sorts, and the kill switches proposed in federal legislation could not shut them down.

Recent incidents, he said, were like animals escaping their cages but remaining confined in the zoo. Soon, the animals may break out entirely, reproduce, and roam the surrounding city.

Asked what policy could address that, his response was bleak.

“I don’t really know,” Casper said. “We’re just in trouble.”

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This Palantir Billionaire’s Passion Project is Criminalizing Homelessness

Joe Lonsdale, co-founder of the weapons-tech company Palantir, is also a major force behind the Trump administration’s policy of pushing unhoused people toward incarceration.

Lonsdale, a longtime critic of “housing first” policy—which proposes that homelessness be solved by supplying those in need of housing with somewhere to live—argues that fining and arresting people for sleeping in public will push them into mental health treatment.

“We’ve made it easier to civilly commit those who are mentally ill and need treatment,” Lonsdale wrote in the New York Post in 2023. “With non-ideological policies rooted in incentives, accountability, and competence, we will show a better way and build a brighter future for our urban centers.”

But there is data to suggest this might not be the right approach. One study of homelessness-criminalization measures in 100 US cities found that the ordinances did not lead to a decrease in the number of people counted as homeless.

“It’s absurd to think that fining people will get them into treatment,” Dr. Margot Kushel, a physician who directs the Benioff Homelessness and Housing Initiative at the University of California, San Francisco, told the New York Times. “Many people are desperate for treatment and can’t get it.” And since Trump cut Medicaid, which finances most of the healthcare options available to unhoused people, “it’s hard not to see the cynicism in this,” she said.

The Cicero Institute, a lobbying group he founded eight years ago, has been instrumental in passing laws criminalizing camping or sleeping in public in 16 states, according to the New York Times. In total, the think tank has worked to pass 241 pieces of legislation in the past 5 years, on issues ranging from education to healthcare. Its c4 arm, Cicero Action, has engaged in lobbying related to military spending and defense contracts, according to the National Homelessness Law Institute. But time and again, Lonsdale and Cicero return to their push to eliminate unhoused people from public life.

That push has now gone federal. In 2024, in a Supreme Court decision called Grants Pass, the court found that camping bans do not violate the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment, even if the only available alternative to camping is incarceration of the unhoused. And Trump has now issued an executive order that closely mirrors the Circero Institute’s policies.

Lonsdale’s allies see him as a man of principle. “In some ways he is like a 16th-century knight who was dropped into present day,” Zac Bookman, who co-founded the government database company OpenGov with Lonsdale, told the Washington Post. “There’s this code of honor and duty that he is trying to advance.”

Advocates for unhoused people take a less rosy view, and argue that Lonsdale is putting the 700,000 unsheltered people in the US in danger. “I just can’t imagine having that much wealth and power and using it to kick people when they are down instead of lifting them up,” Jesse Rabinowitz, campaign and communications director at the National Homelessness Law Center, told the Post.

NHLC has sued the Trump administration over its Lonsdale-inspired approach to homelessness.

“I don’t actually think you can separate [Trump’s homelessness policy] from Cicero,” Rabinowitz said. “I think they’re so embedded in this administration, when you look at Trump’s executive order or the HUD funding, it is not a coincidence that it is parroting Cicero.”

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Federal Judge Strikes Down Trump’s 75-Country Visa Ban

This January, Secretary of State Marco Rubio directed consular officers to refuse to process immigration visas for people from 75 countries because, he said, those immigrants would be more likely than others to “extract wealth” or “take welfare and public benefits” from the US. Since January, people from those 75 countries—all located in Africa, Latin America, the Middle East, or Eastern Europe—have had their visa applications frozen or denied.

On August 21, though, a federal judge in New York struck down this blanket visa ban, on the grounds that it violates the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965’s prohibition on nationality-based discrimination in issuing a visa.

As my colleague Julia Métraux reported earlier this year, these “public charge” bans are in part based on eugenicist ideas.

Since the 19th century, the United States has used “public charge” rules to restrict entry, alleging that immigrants and even visitors would strain public services—reasoning very much rooted in the eugenicist and ableist thinking that shaped key aspects of public policy in the 19th and early 20th centuries, including the claim that so-called “defective” people would produce “defective” children. As president, especially in his second term, Donald Trump has brought eugenicist immigration policy roaring back.

Judge Jeannette Vargas’ August 21ruling in CLINIC v. Rubio reverses any visa denials that occurred solely due to the “public charge” visa ban.

The policy, Vargas found, “is contrary to law and was issued in excess of
Secretary Rubio’s statutory authority,” and “has the effect of categorically
banning the issuance of immigrant visas to nationals of nearly 40% of the world’s
countries.” The government may still appeal the decision.

In a written statement to reporters, the nonprofit groups and private law firms involved in the suit praised Vargas’ ruling. “This latest attempt by the Trump administration to enforce its white nationalist worldview through US immigration policy is, like the others, equal parts retrograde and unlawful,” said Baher Azmy, Legal Director of The Center for Constitutional Rights. “We are proud to stand by communities that will not stop fighting against the administration’s attempts to project its racist insecurities to tear apart families.”

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A Natalie Harp Conspiracy Theory (Not Really)

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._

It’s very easy to be a conspiracy-monger. Let’s give it a shot.

This week, there was a hullabaloo about Natalie Harp, Donald Trump’s 35-year-old aide who’s been derisively referred to within the White House as the “Human Printer.” She’s always by Trump’s side, typing his social media posts and printing out and feeding him positive and misleading information about his presidency. (“Look, this poll shows that 110 percent of all Republican voters think you’re better looking than Jesus Christ!”) She’s also a conduit for aides and foreign leaders who want to slip Trump a message.

There’s been much speculation and tittering about her devotion and physical closeness to Trump. She was part of the small elite band that was hustled into that now-infamous catering compartment in Turkey when Trump covertly fled Air Force One to use another aircraft due to a security threat. Her notes to Trump read like love letters. (“You are all that matters to me.”)

This new shot of attention for Harp was triggered when Sen. Jon Ossoff, a Georgia Democrat, said at a campaign rally, “[Trump] golfs and trades stocks. See, he doesn’t want to do the job. He wants to build his ballroom and travel with Natalie on their apparently defenseless flying palace gifted by the emir of Qatar.” Outraged MAGA-ites and Trump defenders pounced (see Dumbass Comment of the Week below) and slammed Ossoff for supposedly implying Harp and Trump were trysting and denounced him for denigrating a hard-working woman.

Harp’s 24/7 presence in Trump’s life has prompted the predictable and icky whispering. But we can be even more conspiratorial.

I’ll leave it to you to decide whether Ossoff unfairly insinuated anything and demeaned Harp. His remark was at least partially prompted by the reports that Harp was one of the few aides who accompanied Trump when he skedaddled from Air Force One and left behind the seemingly expendable Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, and White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller.

Whether he intended to or not, Ossoff spurred a national conversation about Harp—and about the appropriateness of discussing her bizarre relationship with Trump. Her 24/7 presence in his life has prompted the predictable and icky whispering. But we can be even more conspiratorial.

On Wednesday, MSNOW reported that for more than a year, while working for Trump in the White House during his second term, Harp declined several times to seek a security clearance. Obtaining clearance is a routine move for an aide, especially a staffer in such proximity to the president. After all, she can hear and see the top-secret information flowing to and from Trump. It’s a tremendous security lapse to allow a person without clearance around-the-clock access to the president. Yet Trump permitted this. Eventually, Harp did receive a clearance. But how stringent was the review? And why did she not do so at the start?

That’s a bit suspicious, right? What would Alex Jones have said if an aide to President Barack Obama or President Joe Biden had done the same? Now let’s add to the picture where Harp worked prior to joining Trump’s presidential campaign in 2022: the One America News Network.

OAN is a far-right cable news outfit that’s for Trump fans and MAGA-heads who think Fox News has gone soft. And it’s been overtly pro-Russia. When it was launched in 2013 by Robert Herring Sr., a millionaire who got rich in the circuit board business, he instructed OAN staff to promote Trump, push conservative issues, and downplay Russian aggression. Fun fact: Herring married a Russian woman years earlier. And OAN aired reports from RT, a Kremlin-funded media outlet and propaganda shop. In 2017, the Washington Post reported that OAN producers “said Herring repeatedly urged against running stories critical of Russia.” This was after Russia had launched its first invasion of Ukrainian territory and illegally annexed Crimea—and after Vladimir Putin had attacked the 2016 election in part to help Trump win.

Where did Harp work prior to joining Trump’s presidential campaign in 2022? The One America News Network, which, during the 2020 campaign, played a key role in promoting Russian disinformation.

Later, during the 2020 presidential campaign, OAN played a key role in promoting Russian disinformation. One of its anchors, Chanel Rion, teamed up with Rudy Giuliani, then Trump’s personal lawyer, to smear Joe Biden, claiming without evidence that Biden had engaged in brazen corruption in Ukraine. The pair both promoted baseless allegations about Biden made by Andriy Derkach, a Ukrainian legislator who was later sanctioned by Trump’s own Treasury Department for being a Russian agent. Derkach served as a major source for a series of Rion reports bashing Biden.

After the 2020 election, the US intelligence community stated in a public report that Moscow used “proxies linked to Russian intelligence to push influence narratives—including misleading or unsubstantiated allegations against President Biden—­to US media organizations, US officials, and prominent US individuals, including some close to former President Trump.” The media organizations referenced here included OAN. The report also noted that Derkach and the Russian operation assisted the production of an anti-Biden documentary, apparently a film that aired on OAN in early 2020. (Following Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Derkach fled to Russia. In 2024, he was appointed to a seat in the Russian parliament’s upper chamber.)

After the start of the Ukraine war in 2022, OAN aired a report from the front lines filed by Mark Dougan, a former Florida cop and fugitive who found asylum in Russia and became involved in disinformation operations Moscow mounted against the United States. He was identified on OAN as a foreign correspondent for the network, and the long piece he produced claimed that Ukrainian forces—whom he called “Nazi terrorists”—had massacred civilians and that the war had been caused by “kleptocrats in Washington” who were desperate to keep “Ukraine out of the hands of Russia” because they used Ukraine to “launder their money” and needed to hide their corruption. Dougan accused Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy of skimming billions of US aid money and causing “thousands of innocent people to die.” OAN was broadcasting straight-­out, pro-­Putin, made-in-Russia propaganda.

As regular readers might guess, I cover OAN, Derkach, and Dougan in more detail in my forthcoming book, How Russia Won: Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, and the Fight for America.

I’m not saying that a young blond woman who has become such an important aide for Trump is a Russian operative. I’m just asking questions—as the conspiracy-peddlers like to say.

Now what might a creative, conspiracy-minded person do with all these dots? An attractive aide has an oddly close connection to the president and is situated to know everything and can influence his thinking. She helps write his tweets. She can control what information he receives. She once worked for an organization that has aired Russian disinformation, that has been identified by US intelligence as an outlet for Kremlin propaganda, and that has been ordered by its owner to go easy on Russia. And she was reluctant to submit to a security clearance investigation.

Hmm.

I’m not saying that a young blond woman who has become such an important aide for Trump is a Russian operative. I’m just asking questions—as the conspiracy-peddlers like to say. But I have no doubt if there had been a similar set of facts for Obama or Biden, OAN, Fox News, Kash Patel, Glenn Beck, Roger Stone, and just about the entire MAGAsphere (and maybe Joe Rogan) would have been off to the races with such a narrative.

But the Harp tale is indeed a serious episode that reminds us of how Trump and his gang don’t give a damn about security. The fact that a staffer with such access to Trump could blow off a security clearance for so long is troubling. As is the fact that Jared Kushner, who is not a government employee and who has business interests around the world, is handling highly sensitive matters in three sets of negotiations: the Ukraine war, the Israeli-Palestinian war in Gaza, and the Iran war. (He’s also doing a piss-poor job in each of them.) No one was punished for Signalgate. Trump readily accepted a 747-8 from Qatar that posed significant security problems. Mar-a-Lago is a counterintelligence nightmare. Trump’s crypto business and other deals allow foreigners—perhaps even overseas officials—to buy influence with him. Let’s not forget he swiped top-secret documents when he left the White House in 2021 and stored some in a bathroom.

Trump won the presidency in 2016 partly because he and MAGA world went apeshit over Hillary Clinton’s handling of emails when she was secretary of state. There was never evidence that her use of a private server for her official emails—a violation of the rules—led to any security breaches. But during both Trump administrations, there have been multiple instances of Trump and his lieutenants violating basic security protocols. Harp dodging a security clearance investigation is the latest example. The Donald-Natalie story might seem like gratuitous gossip. Yet it shows once more that Trump and his gang have no respect for rules and believe they can get away with anything. That attitude is a national security threat.

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In the Wake of a Toxic Disaster, Roseland Parents Still Struggle to Keep Their Children Safe

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

As a young boy in the 1960s, almost every weekend Elbert McGee walked a half-mile with his father through the wooded streets of Roseland, Louisiana, to the Tangipahoa River. There, he learned to swim and fish for bass, crappie, and the occasional catfish.

​“We had a good, good life as children,” McGee said, unloading fishing gear from his truck. “We grew up healthy and in community.”

Today, McGee still lives in the home where he was raised. But he no longer makes the 10-minute walk to the river to fish. Instead, he drives three hours to Grand Isle.

That change only came after August 22, 2025, when Smitty’s Supply, an oil facility in the majority-Black town, exploded. The disaster released an estimated 12 million gallons of oily liquid and chemical waste into the river, and painted hundreds of homes, churches, schools, and playgrounds with black oily streaks.

Within weeks, McGee’s then-15-year-old son, Markel, began having nosebleeds severe enough to make him miss school. A friend who is battling cancer developed a respiratory illness. Neither family has received a definitive answer as to whether those conditions are linked to the blast.

For McGee, who has a combined eight children and grandchildren, and other Roseland parents, the loss of the river has been surpassed by a much more pressing question: What does it mean to be a parent when you cannot stop harm from reaching your children?

Across Roseland and communities like it, protecting a child from refineries, railyards, and contaminated water becomes a never-ending, intimate form of vigilance—one Black parents shoulder disproportionately. Research shows Black children experience higher exposure to environmental toxins like lead, air pollution, and pesticides than children of any other race in the US, turning everyday parenting into an act of defense against threats they never chose and often cannot see.

“This is my home,” McGee said. “I have no other realistic option to leave.”

McGee, 63, has begun to sit with the devastating thought that he may have failed to protect his children by raising them here.“They’re not gonna be healthy here, especially doing anything in the dirt or the river,” he said.

“We can’t control the government or these companies,” he added. “We can pray on it. But you want the best for your children, and it hurts not to be able to give it to them.”

The Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality did not respond to Capital B’s requests for comment. In a statement, Smitty’s Supply said: “Smitty’s has completed all of the remediation requirements under the existing CERCLA Consent Order with EPA and has submitted its final report to EPA for its concurrence.”

Elbert McGee grew up fishing and farming in his community before the explosion.
Adam Mahoney/Capital B

McGee’s fears are rooted in more than parental instinct. After toxic events, children can absorb a larger dose of contamination than adults because they breathe, eat, and drink more relative to their body size, and because they often spend more time outdoors and closer to contaminated dust and soil. Their developing lungs, brains, and immune systems can be especially vulnerable.

Markel, a football player, was back in the dirt, running and breathing hard, just days after the explosion. McGee wonders if he should’ve pulled him from the sport, but it is one of the teenager’s main joys. And at the time, McGee said, he had been told Roseland was safe.

McGee now joins the Black mothers trained to keep the windows shut on a day the air smells metallic in Philadelphia, even as the house grows hot without air conditioning. The fathers, like John Ishmael Taylor in Flint, notice rashes developing on their children and begin buying bottled water they cannot comfortably afford. And the parents in Houston forced to decide whether their child’s cough is another cold or the result of pollution from the trucks idling outside.

When Markel first developed nosebleeds after the explosion, McGee immediately took him to the doctor, only to be dismissed. “They didn’t even examine him,” McGee said, “they said it was normal, but this had never happened before Smitty’s [exploded].”

All the while, across local farms and along the riverbanks, dozens of animals have died.

“I just want to make it to 70,” McGee said.Adam Mahoney/Capital B

One year since the disaster, both the federal and state governments have publicly maintained that the toxic cocktail of chemicals that spread over Roseland posed “no imminent threat to public health.” But the government’s assessment did not answer the questions parents said governed their daily decisions. They are still unsure if the soil on their property is safe or if children can play outside. And increasingly: What symptoms should prompt medical care?

For parents, the lack of clear answers has meant becoming informal toxicologists and medical advocates while still getting children to school, holding down jobs, and paying rent or mortgages.

“I just want to make it to 70 [years old],” McGee said. “I don’t think I can make it here this long and I’m doing all of this while trying to take care of the children in my house.”

He estimates he has spent more than $20,000 on his property since the disaster. He has replaced his roof and exterior siding and continues to excavate soil around his home.

In Roseland, where the average person makes just over $17,000 annually, many households have largely been left to fend for themselves since the explosion. Capital B has spoken with dozens of residents who said they have received no compensation or support as they have tried to clean their properties, rid their yards of contamination, and, in some cases, replace the exteriors of their homes.

Since the August explosion, the town has also experienced a chemical spill from a processing facility related to Smitty’s that infiltrated the drinking water supply.

Earlier this year, Pam Bean, who has two granddaughters who attend Roseland Elementary, said the lack of support has been “insulting.”

“You always hear about politicians talking about rural America for votes. This is rural America, and look at how they really treat us,” she said.

The absence of help is not only a burden adults carry.

Young people who grow up learning not to trust their drinking water or not to play outside when the refinery is flaring are learning that home is a place of potential danger. They notice whether a spill is cleaned quickly, officials answer questions, or a school is treated as worth protecting. When those signals are absent, children can learn that the institutions meant to safeguard them will not, research shows.

Pam Bean posed for a photo with her two grandchildren in April.Adam Mahoney/Capital B

The consequences can compound when exposure contributes to asthma attacks, sleep disruption, lead-related developmental risks, or repeated school absences. Parents may keep them inside, miss work to take them to appointments, or pull them from class when symptoms emerge.

At a protest in April, Candice Hart held her daughter’s hand as she described what the contamination has meant for her family. Her daughter has had respiratory problems since the explosion, Hart said, and she has emails and letters showing that she and other parents had raised alarms for months, despite school officials’ claims otherwise.

“No parent should have to choose between their child’s education and their child’s health,” she said.

Markel, now a junior in high school, wants to leave Roseland, and perhaps Louisiana, after graduation. The explosion has changed his relationship to the place where his father learned to fish and swim.

His desire to leave is not simply teenage restlessness, McGee admitted. It is one consequence of growing up in a place that has taught him home can be hazardous.

Standing outside of his tarped home about half a mile from Smitty’s, McGee said the lack of an urgent response is inseparable from who lives in Roseland.

He grew up with Ed Smith, the white owner of Smitty’s Supply, and graduated high school with him. “But [today,] he’d walk right past me like he never knew me,” McGee said.

Smith has not made a public appearance about the disaster in the year since the explosion. Smith and his family live in a town 25 miles away from Roseland.

“I think Smitty’s hasn’t done nothing for this community because of who lives here, knowing him,” McGee said, referring to the town’s racial and economic makeup.

In Louisiana, Black communities home to industrial plants are exposed to seven to 21 times more toxic pollution than similar communities with more white residents. And historically, Black communities have received less recovery aid than white areas with comparable damage during environmental disasters.

But in Louisiana, the Black families living with the costs of industrial pollution are often also tied to the industries that create it. Industrial work remains one of the few accessible paths to a stable, middle-class income.

McGee lives inside that contradiction. Like 30 percent of Louisiana’s workers, he has an industrial job, driving more than an hour to shifts at a chemical facility in the region commonly known as Cancer Alley, a disproportionately Black area with some of the nation’s highest rates of cancer.

He knows the risks of the work, he said, but sees few alternatives that would allow him to provide for his family.

Dominic Kruger, a father in Cancer Alley, took his first job at a petrochemical plant shortly before his 18th birthday. It was the only way to survive in his home state, he said, “unless you want to work at McDonald’s.”

For McGee, it felt much the same. “I just want to feed and clothe my children,” he said. “I know I’m killing myself for a job, breathing in benzene and chemicals every day, but I didn’t want my children exposed, too.”

His home doesn’t feel like a place he can offer his children and grandchildren anymore. In his backyard, where a patch of dead grass has sat since the oily rain, McGee’s father grew “everything” and had hens.

“It is hard to give up generations, but we may have no choice.”

“I know I’m killing myself for a job,” McGee says,”but I didn’t want my children exposed, too.”Adam Mahoney/Capital B

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40 Acres and a Lie Part 3

The loss of land for Black Americans started with the government’s betrayal of its “40 acres” promise to formerly enslaved people—and it has continued over decades.

Today, researchers are unearthing the details of Black land loss long after emancipation.

“They lost land due to racial intimidation, where they were forced off their land [to] take flight in the middle of the night and resettle someplace else,” said Karcheik Sims-Alvarado, an assistant professor of Africana studies at Morehouse College. “They lost it through overtaxation. They lost it through eminent domain…There’s all these different ways that African Americans acquired and lost land.”

This week on Reveal, we dive into the examination of American history happening at the state, city, even county level as local government task forces are on truth-finding missions. Across the country, government officials ask: Can we repair a wealth gap for Black Americans that is rooted in slavery? And how?

This is an update of an episode that originally aired in June 2024.

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PBS airs our glyphosate reporting

“They’re taking away the choice of being surrounded by a toxic chemical,” says Tahoe resident and three-time Olympian Hannah Teter about the US Forest Service’s spraying of herbicide around her home town.

The Supreme Court decided last month that the maker of Roundup, the world’s most widely used weed killer, can’t be held responsible for failing to warn users that one of its key ingredients – a chemical known as glyphosate – may pose risks to human health. Glyphosate has been a mainstay of agriculture in this country for decades, and thousands of lawsuits allege that exposure to the chemical caused cancer. PBS NewsHour featured our reporting based on an analysis of millions of pesticide reports in California which reveals another, lesser known way glyphosate is being used right now: to spray this country’s national forests.

Our analysis of California pesticide records shows that the amount of glyphosate sprayed in state forests has quadrupled over the past decade. From Yosemite to Lassen Volcanic National Park in the very north of the state, residents are up in arms about the fact that the efforts to help them recover from wildfires may expose them to a harmful chemical.

PBS NewsHour featured our reporting on their nightly newscast. You can watch the story here:

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Partisan’s Exit Suggests DOJ Is Getting Better at Politicized Prosecutions

Ed Martin, a trench-coat donning former “Stop the Steal” advocate whose work at various senior Justice Department jobs was charactered by brash, bumbling efforts to use the department to punish critics of President Donald Trump, is leaving DOJ, Trump announced Friday.

“Ed is now leaving to go outside to fight Legal Battles for the upcoming Midterm Election, and the Presidential Election of 2028,” Trump posted.

Martin, early in the Trump’s term, was the most vocal proponent of Trump’s claim that he could order federal prosecutors to pursue his critics. But Martin’s exit is not victory for the rule of law. It is a sign that newly confirmed Attorney General Todd Blanche, who had been a critic of Martin’s attention-seeking antics, is ushering in an era in which Trump’s wish to weaponize DOJ against his foes is more competently pursued.

Martin did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Martin is a political journeyman who lost a series of races in Missouri and ran far-right advocacy organizations. He wasn’t hugely successful: in 2017, Martin was hawking a coloring book based on Trump tweets. But Martin, who gave himself the moniker “Eagle Ed,” gained national attention in 2020 as an advocate of Trump’s false claims about that year’s election, and later as a lawyer for indicted January 6 rioters. Martin’s statements in that period include claiming that antifa was behind the attack, calling it a “hoax,” dubbing Capitol rioters “patriots,” and arguing those prosecuted for the riot deserved “reparations.”

Trump’s selection of Martin as interim US attorney for Washington, DC, last year, along with the pardon of 1,600 Capitol attackers, was a middle finger to DOJ and the federal prosecutors in Washington who brought almost of all the January 6 cases.

As the acting US attorney, Martin fired and demoted many of those prosecutors. He also began issuing a torrent of typo-strewn tweets and letters in which he threatened to investigate or prosecute Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, anti-Trump protestors, Georgetown University, and many others, all for what appeared to be protected speech at odds with Trump’s pronouncements.

“Noone [sic] is above the law,” Martin wrote in one letter to Elon Musk threatening to prosecute people who publicly identified DOGE employees.

Martin’s days as US Attorney ended amid fixed opposition to his confirmation by Senate Democrats and by Sen. Thom Tillis, who opposed Martin due to his connection to the January 6 attack. Martin hurt his own chances when, as Mother Jones reported, he lied about his ties to a January 6 defendant infamous for dressing as Hitler.

With his confirmation as a US attorney blocked, Trump named Martin head of the so-called weaponization task force set up to hound critics, local prosecutors and other connected to investigations and multiple indictments Trump faced during his first term and the Biden presidency. Trump also made Martin his chief pardon attorney, a job from which Martin memorably hatched a plan for Trump to issue pardons for so-called fake electors, though those people, prosecuted in state courts, could not benefit from presidential pardons. Trump did it anyway.

In a press conference held last year, Martin said that the task force would work to publicize its work. Even if people they targeted could not be charged, he said, “we will name them…and in a culture that respects shame, they should be people that are ashamed.” That was a pledge to violate DOJ tradition and written rules that the department pursue justice by prosecuting crimes in court rather than through public relations offensives.

But Martin made good on it. He appeared outside the Brooklyn home of New York Attorney General Letitia James in August 2025, wearing a trench coat, and posed for pictures taken by the New York Post—part of a bid to draw attention to claims that James committed fraud in private real estate dealings, a largely undisguised effort to retaliate against James for the successful civil case her office brought against Trump for fraud.

But it wasn’t all bluster. Martin had a role in investigations into former CIA Director John Brennan and Federal Reserve Board of Governors member Lisa Cook, the Letitia James indictment, and that of former FBI Director James Comey, though the cases against Comey and James were thrown out. (DOJ later charged Comey again for allegedly threatening Trump by posting a picture of seashells arranged to say “86 47.”)

But Martin’s role at DOJ was steadily curtailed by Blanche, who reportedly believed Martin was overly focused on publicity with minimal achievement. Martin was ousted from the weaponization task force in February. Trump’s April firing of Pam Bondi as Attorney General and elevation of Blanche to acting AG was bad news for Eagle Ed. Martin’s exit comes a few weeks after Blanche’s confirmation.

Blanche appears to have sought Trump’s support for the nomination as Attorney General by advancing cases like the Comey seashell indictment and by pushing Trump’s plan for a $1.8 billion fund to pay January 6 defendants and others who claim they were politically prosecuted.

Blanche said he dropped the plan for the fund, though not a connected agreement that purports to spare Trump and his family members from IRS audits, amid pushback from Senate Republicans.

But any hope that Blanche’s confirmation would lead to his backing off from efforts to make DOJ a tool of Trump’s personal agenda quickly took a hit. First, Blanche spoke at a campaign rally for a Trump-endorsed candidate, in alleged violation of a law barring federal employees from partisan political campaigning while on the job.

Then, in a recent television appearance, Blanche declined to say that the Justice Department is independent of presidential directives. “I’m not going to pledge that,” he said on NBC’s Meet the Press, adding that he would allow Trump to weigh in on individual prosecution decisions. “The elected president of the United States says something to me,” Blanche said. “And I’m supposed to say to you, ‘I would say no.’ I mean, that’s not the way it works.”

Blanche’s problem with Martin was not his effort to launch political prosecutions, but Martin’s poor execution of them, it seems. Martin is not leaving DOJ due to his intentions. The problem, apparently, is incompetence. With more effective advocates of Trump’s weaponization wishes consolidating power, fans of the rule of law may already miss Martin’s ineptitude.

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Flock Execs Are Taking Credit For Catching Bad Cops Now

Flock Safety is having a hard month. The surveillance technology company, which has sold more than 120,000 automated license plate reader cameras to some 6,000 police departments across the US, is up to its neck in cancelled contracts—at least 34 since the start of 2026—and public backlash.

Dozens of police officers have lost their jobs or faced criminal charges for allegedly abusing the technology, which allows police to track vehicles’ movements, to stalk people. Flock’s safety reforms in response to the stalking issue, which mostly consist of voluntary security practices police departments can adopt if they choose, left advocates unimpressed.

“Our media team is currently touching grass and taking a break. Unlike our cameras, we can’t work 24/7.”

In total, at least 56 municipalities have canceled contracts, deactivated their cameras, or rejected potential Flock contracts since the beginning of this year, according to the advocacy group DeFlock. Many of those towns are simply contracting with competitors like Axon or Motorola instead—so they’re still working with surveillance-tech companies, but encroaching on Flock’s market share as they do so.

Meanwhile, Americans continue to invent creative ways to break a Flock camera: one House candidate in Tennessee allegedly took an extremely direct approach and shot some Flock cameras with a gun, while comparatively pacifist Flock-haters online post satirical videos teaching viewers how to saw through a Flock camera’s pole or spray-paint over its lens.

In response, Flock is trying a new public-relations tactic: Some of its leadership team is publicly arguing that stories keep coming out about Flock abuse not because Flock is especially liable to be abused, but because Flock is better at catching abusers.

You're going to see more stories about Flock catching bad cops misuse the database. We're the only company in the industry with this level of auditing at scale. If the others had this level of auditing, you'd see a lot more stories about cops abusing DMV data, etc. https://t.co/O2bHuXLjJ1

— Rahul Sidhu (@rahul) August 19, 2026

Rahul Sidhu, the company’s chief strategy officer, called Flock “the only company in the industry with this level of auditing at scale” in a series of posts in which he also wrote that taking away a police officer’s Flock database access would be tantamount to taking away their gun.

Guns can break the law if you choose to use them that way, and if used incorrectly, would kill an innocent person. Cops break the law when they run plates for buddies or criminal histories on their daughter's boyfriends. Do we take all that away from them?

— Rahul Sidhu (@rahul) August 19, 2026

“Guns can break the law if you choose to use them that way, and if used incorrectly, would kill an innocent person,” Sidhu posted. “Do we take all that away from them?”

“One of the many problems with Flock as a company is that they they treat legitimate privacy concerns as if they are just PR issues,” said ACLU senior policy counsel Chad Marlow, “and so once again they are seeing this uprising against Flock throughout the country as a public relations problem.”

Flock, Marlow said, created the problem. In dozens of cases dating back to at least 2021, police officers have reportedly used Flock cameras to stalk their partners, their exes, and even women traveling across state lines to get abortions. And now, “[Flock] thinks if it just includes itself as a watchdog of the problem it’s creating, it somehow deserves a pat on the back.”

Flock Safety did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Mother Jones. The firm is apparently no longer sending out the auto-reply with which it responded to journalists earlier this month: “Thanks for reaching out to Flock. Our media team is currently touching grass and taking a break. Unlike our cameras, we can’t work 24/7, so we’ll get back to you when we’ve had a snack and regained the ability to form coherent sentences.”

“I think more accurately they’re probably smoking grass if they think they can do an entire PR campaign and then disappear so they don’t have to defend it,” Marlow said.

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Florida’s GOP Has a Very Short Playbook: Call Everyone a Socialist

In a bright red power suit, Ashley Moody, the former Florida attorney general who nabbed the state’s GOP Senate nomination in Tuesday’s primary, strolled onto the stage of Florida Republicans’ “Victory Rally” on Thursday and did not waste time attacking her opponent, state Rep. Angie Nixon.

“If I told you last year that Florida would have a nominee to the United States Senate that was a self-declared socialist, would you believe me?” Moody asked the crowd of more than 150 people who gathered at a Tampa event venue to hear from candidates on the Republican ticket. “This is not a joke. This is not a fictional TV series. This is reality.”

“Let me make this very clear,” Moody continued. “Angie Nixon wants the United States of America to look like Cuba.”

Nixon, a Democratic state lawmaker from Jacksonville who helped lead the charge against Florida’s Republican-led redistricting earlier this year, defeated Alex Vindman, the presumed frontrunner, who raised millions of dollars against Nixon’s $975,000, in a stunning upset Tuesday. A union organizer, Nixon is running a campaign centered on affordability, Medicare for all, free childcare, paid family and sick leave, and a national rent freeze. She’s also a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, though the organization did not endorse her.

The rally marked the GOP’s launching point for the 74 days until the general election in November. It also provided a glimpse of how Republicans will stoke fears of rising socialism against their opponents, especially those who embrace a version of the term, like Nixon.

In a state like Florida, where many Cubans and Venezuelans who fled communist regimes now live, the socialist label can be particularly toxic—and if Thursday’s rally is any indication, the GOP won’t hold back on attempting to leverage that kind of rhetoric this election season.

“The Democratic Socialists of America today is the Democratic Party, and that’s why we need to work triple time to ensure that the party of boys playing in girls’ sports, open borders, and unaffordability never, ever gets a foothold in the state of Florida,” RepublicanBlaise Ingoglia, the state’s chief financial officer—an elected position— who is running to keep his job this November, told the cheering crowd, which included women donning bedazzled red hats and a baby dressed in a US-flag-printed footie pajama.

The evening ended with a speech from Byron Donalds, the House Representative who won the Republican nomination for Florida’s gubernatorial race this week. Donalds, who was endorsed by President Trump, began his remarks by mentioning that he had spoken to the president**—**who “was obviously in high spirits”—that morning.

After explaining the highlights of his platform, including the need to DOGE every government agency in Florida, Donalds pivoted to David Jolly, his Democratic rival—a centrist and former congressional Republican—calling him a “Trojan horse” for the Democratic Socialists of America. (Jolly is not affiliated with DSA or endorsed by them.) The audience erupted in cheers, raising signs with Donalds’ campaign slogan: “Defending the Florida Dream.”

“If you’re going to bend the knee to the Democratic socialists, you’re abandoning common sense,” Donalds continued. “You’re abandoning families. You’re abandoning sound economics. You’re abandoning parental rights. And in Florida, we are never going to abandon the hardworking people. We are going to fight for them every single day.”

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