Tennessee Teens Sue Elon Musk’s xAI Over Child Sexual Abuse Images

Tennessee teenagers are suing Elon Musk’s company xAI over allegations that its artificial intelligence tool Grok undressed photos of them as minors—the latest challenge against the wealthiest living person’s chatbot.

The three plaintiffs, two of whom are currently minors, are seeking damages after AI-generated images of them spread across Discord and Telegram and were eventually used as bartering tools for users to obtain other child sexual abuse material, according to the complaint detailed in new Washington Post reporting.

“xAI—and its founder Elon Musk,” the complaint reads, “saw a business opportunity: an opportunity to profit off the sexual predation of real people, including children.”

One of the plaintiffs said she received a link to a Discord server “which contained images and videos of at least 18 other minor females, many of whom Jane Doe 1 recognized from her school,” the lawsuit alleges.

Some of the images stemmed from her homecoming or yearbook photos.

The lawsuit comes after months of backlash against Musk’s chatbot after the company allowed Grok to undress people nonconsensually using the “Imagine” tool. The complaint argues that a “model that can create sexualized images of adults cannot be prevented from creating CSAM of minors.” According to earlier reporting from the Post, Grok’s previous leniency towards fulfilling users’ sexually explicit requests was a marketing technique, meant to increase the popularity of the chatbot.

A poster on a bus stop reads "WHO THE HELL WOULD WANT TO USE SOCIAL MEDIA WITH A BUILT-IN CHILD ABUSE TOOL."

Activist group ‘Everyone Hates Elon’ placed this anti-Musk and X poster in a bus stop on January 14, 2026, in London.Kristian Buus/In Pictures via Getty Images

Musk and his company didn’t respond to the Post in their coverage of the Tennessee lawsuit. Musk has repeatedly placed responsibility onto the individual users requesting such content and has held that Grok “will refuse to produce anything illegal,” despite the chatbot itself, in at least one instance, posting that its actions might have violated the 2025 TAKE IT DOWN Act, legislation criminalizing the nonconsensual publication of intimate images, including AI-generated deepfakes.

According to an investigation by the Center for Countering Digital Hate, Grok generated approximately 3 million sexualized images in just an 11-day period, from December 29 to January 8. Around 23,000 of those, according to researchers, appeared to depict children. In a January 14 post, Musk claimed that he was “not aware of any naked underage images generated by Grok. Literally zero.”

Later than month, 35 state attorneys general penned a letter to xAI demanding the company “take all necessary measures to ensure that Grok is no longer capable of producing” this kind of nonconsensual sexual imagery and child sexual abuse material. The European Union and regulators in the United Kingdom and California have launched investigations into Grok.

Grok Deepfaked Renée Nicole Good’s Body Into a Bikini

In January, following rising international ethical and legal objections to the mass spread of nonconsensual sexual imagery, some of Grok’s Imagine image generation features were limited to paid X users. Yet Grok image tools are still seemingly offered for free on the standalone website and application. And even if restricting elements of the service to paying users could limit the quantity of material, introducing a nominal fee for those hoping to create nonconsensual sexual imagery of people, including minors, doesn’t answer a key legal question: Will Grok be meaningfully changed to protect women and girls from this kind of digital abuse?

The Tennessee teens are just some of the scores of girls and women impacted by Grok’s undressing, reportedly including at least one woman who Musk knows personally.

Ashley St. Clair, a conservative content creator who has a child with Musk, said that Grok created nonconsensual sexual imagery of her. Some of the images, according to an interview she did with NBC News, were from when St. Clair was a minor.

Annika K. Martin, the lead counsel in the suit, had a question for Musk as a father:

“Your child’s voice on video screaming. Can you imagine that as a parent?” she asked. “Can you imagine that for your child and feel okay with what you’ve done?”

Mother Jones12 hours, 14 minutes ago

Dr. Oz Calls Medicare Fraud an Epidemic. Trump Keeps Pardoning the Culprits.

On Tuesday, the oversight and investigations arm of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce held a hearing to discuss alleged Medicare and Medicaid fraud—a major talking point of the Trump administration and Robert F. Kennedy’s Department of Health and Human Services, which have deployed fraud claims to help justify cuts to critical funding and programs used by a huge swath of aging, disabled, and low-income Americans.

“For too long, states have been permitted to run Medicaid programs with weak guardrails, making them easy targets for criminals to exploit,” subcommittee chair John Joyce (R-Pa.) said in his opening statement. “Under the leadership of Dr. Mehmet Oz, this administration is taking bold steps to stop this fraud more than any other presidential administration before it.”

There are false and exaggerated claims in systems the size of Medicare and Medicaid—both Republican and Democratic members agreed that fraud from providers does exist. But only Democratic members raised concerns that withholding Medicaid funds from Minnesota, for example—where investigations into large-scale social services fraud have become a major conservative talking point—will hurt disabled and aging people, as well as children. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services administrator Dr. Mehmet Oz, who has made similar allegations about “ethnic” fraud in the Los Angeles area, was not present, something Rep. Frank Pallone (D-N.J.) took offense to.

“I think he’s just a grandstander who likes to go on TV but doesn’t really do anything substantively that’s meaningful to help Medicare and Medicaid recipients,” Pallone said.

In Oz’s absence, CMS deputy administrator Kimberly Brandt claimed that the agency’s “fraud war room” was using artificial intelligence to root out alleged Medicare and Medicaid fraud, particularly increased rates of home and community-based services billing in New York and California.

“We are constantly using heat maps and data analysis to be able to look and see where we think the largest shifts are,” Brandt said.

A recent article published in the Health Affairs journal by four academics focusing on health and disability warned that such a focus by the Trump administration could lead to HCBS, an optional Medicaid program, being further dismantled. “Growth in HCBS spending does not reflect evidence of systemic corruption but rather bipartisan federal policy choices, demographic change, and structured statutory evolution,” they wrote. It is also not an easy process to qualify for HCBS, with each process slightly different per state, and over half a million people on waiting lists to even qualify.

Rep. Kevin Mullen (D-Calif.) said that he was very concerned that his constituents could lose access to Medicaid services if California came under the kinds of attacks that Minnesota now faces from federal agencies.

“My constituents deserve better than to have their lifesaving health care used as a pawn,” Mullen said.

During her turn on the floor, Rep. Lori Trahan (D-Mass.) raised doubts that the Trump administration actually cares about rooting out Medicaid and Medicare fraud.

“Donald Trump unilaterally fired the HHS inspector general immediately after taking office, contradicting his claim that combating fraud is a central goal of this administration,” Trahan said. “Not only did the President move the leading official for detecting fraud in Medicare and Medicaid, but he left the role unfilled for almost an entire year to then fill it with a partisan loyalist.”

Trahan also listed the names of convicted fraudsters of Medicaid and Medicare fraud who were pardoned by Trump, including Philip Esformes.

“These cases involve large-scale fraud against taxpayer funded health care programs intended to serve seniors, people with disabilities and low income families—and the President of the United States freed every single perpetrator of those crimes,” Trahan said.

Mother Jones12 hours, 24 minutes ago

Joe Kent Resigns From Trump Administration Over Iran War

Joe Kent has resigned as the director of the National Counterterrorism Center in protest of President Donald Trump’s ongoing war against Iran. Kent, a twice-failed Washington congressional candidate aligned with the isolationist MAGA right, is the highest-ranking Trump official to quit because of the war.

But Kent didn’t portray the president as the real villain in the lengthy resignation letter that he posted on X on Tuesday. That distinction goes to Israel and its supporters in the United States. “Iran posed no imminent threat to our nation,” Kent wrote, “and it is clear that we started this war due to pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby.”

Kent went on to argue that in the letter “high-ranking Israeli officials and influential members of the American media” launched a “misinformation campaign” early in Trump’s current term that undermined his America First agenda. Writing directly to Trump, Kent argued that this “echo chamber was used to deceive you into believing that Iran posed an imminent threat to the United States.” He added the Israelis had used the same approach to “draw us into the disastrous Iraq war.”

Trump, of course, is the president of the United States and commander-in-chief of the most powerful military in the world—not some hapless victim of Israeli deception. He willingly joined Israel to initiate the current war, despite the apparent reservations of some of his senior advisers. It was his responsibility to determine what was in the best interests of the United States, and he failed spectacularly in that task.

It is certainly true that Israel played a major role in pushing Trump towards war. Netanyahu has wanted the United States to attack Iran for decades, and he finally found a willing accomplice in the second-term version of Trump. It was not for nothing that a New York Times article headlined “How Trump Decided to Go to War” began with Netanyahu walking into the Oval Office in February determined to keep Trump “on the path to war.” The Israeli leader was particularly concerned that the Trump administration’s efforts to reach a diplomatic solution with Iran would prevent the battle he longed for.

After the war began, Secretary of State Marco Rubio all but admitted that the United States had been dragged into the war by its ally. “We knew that there was going to be an Israeli action, we knew that that would precipitate an attack against American forces, and we knew that if we didn’t preemptively go after them before they launched those attacks, we would suffer higher casualties,” he explained on March 2.

Still, Trump could have easily said no to that pressure. He chose not to.

On a political level, Kent’s resignation is one of the most significant public splits thus far over Israel among the president’s supporters. In one camp are traditional neoconservative hawks like Sens. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) and Ted Cruz (R-Texas). In the other is a more isolationist faction that includes Tucker Carlson and, at times, antisemitic figures like Nick Fuentes.

The energy within the GOP base—particularly among younger voters—is clearly with Carlson, who is known for being close to Vice President JD Vance. Former Fox News host Megyn Kelly’s recent decision to respond to criticism from hawkish conservative commentator Mark Levin in notably crude terms is another sign of how things have turned. Where that leads remains to be seen. But it is increasingly clear that should Trump’s second term turn out to be a bust, much of the far right is prepared to make Israel a convenient scapegoat for the president’s own incompetence. Some, like Fuentes, will no doubt extend the blame to Jewish Americans.

For Kent, seeing the United States launch itself into another poorly planned war has a deeply personal dimension. As I reported in a 2022 profile, Kent is a former Green Beret who did 11 combat deployments in the wake of 9/11. Serving in what came to be called the Global War on Terror was a radicalizing experience. “Was it worth it for our nation?” Kent said in a 2020 interview. “Was it worth it in terms of what we gained? It’s just hard to justify.”

Most tragically, Kent’s wife Shannon, a Navy cryptologist and the mother of his two boys, was killed by an ISIS suicide bomber in 2019. As I reported, Kent later said that he and fellow veterans lost so many comrades that putting their names on memorials became “one big numb.” He continued, “It’s still very surreal that Shannon is now one of those.”

In his resignation letter, Kent blamed Israel for drawing the United States into Iraq two decades ago. That contrasts with a 2024 interview he gave to the podcaster Shawn Ryan, in which he did not single out Israel when assigning responsibility for the senseless wars in which he served. “Where do you think the big push came from?” Ryan asked Kent about the Iraq War. Kent blamed “moneyed interests in Washington, DC,” before citing Vice President Dick Cheney’s ties to Halliburton. Iraq, as he put it, was “good for business.”

Kent’s populist anti-interventionism was always the area where he was most likely to overlap with some on the left. On domestic politics, though, there was far less common ground. As I wrote after Trump picked Kent last year:

The Black Lives Matter and antifa protests in Portland during the summer of 2020 triggered fears for him that the United States could similarly implode. Everything, he felt, was crumbling. He and his two young boys quickly left the city for rural Washington.

“We need to treat antifa and BLM like terrorist organizations. We need to use the tools of the federal government, the FBI, the US Marshals—go after them like organized criminals and terrorists,” Kent said in a 2021 conversation with the podcaster Tim Pool about the group’s leaders. “So, when we start arresting these guys and charging them with federal terrorism charges, that’s going to take away a lot of the incentive to go out and riot.”

That is part of what makes putting Kent in charge of the National Counterterrorism Center so unsettling. He is a trained counterinsurgent who is now far more attuned to threats from within than those from overseas.

Last May, the Times reported that Kent had pushed intelligence officials to rewrite an assessment of the relationship between the Venezuelan government and the criminal organization Tren de Aragua. The move came after Trump sent more than 200 Venezuelans to an infamous Salvadoran prison based on the false premise that they were all members of Tren de Aragua, and that the group was controlled by the Venezuelan regime.

Referring to Trump and his boss, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, Kent wrote, “We need to do some rewriting” and an additional analysis “so this document is not used against the DNI or POTUS.” In essence, Kent was pushing to twist intelligence to justify the indefinite detention of innocent men in horrific conditions. Unlike the Iran war, that, apparently, wasn’t a red line.

Mother Jones20 hours, 54 minutes ago

The Minneapolis “Dirtbag Lawyer” Challenging ICE Detentions—and Winning

On January 7, Daniel Suitor raced the less than half a mile from his home to the spot where a federal immigration agent had just killed Renée Good in Minneapolis. He had heard from a local group chat that someone had been shot, and he wanted to bear witness. At the scene, Suitor, a lawyer, started talking to witnesses. One observer who had recorded the incident shared the video with Suitor, who sent it to local authorities and the press and posted it on social media. Soon, the images were everywhere.

For most Americans, the shocking killing of Good, followed by government officials’ “domestic terrorism” claims, brought into stark relief the brutality of the immigration enforcement operations the Trump administration unleashed in cities across the country. In the weeks after the shootings of Good and then Alex Pretti, public sentiment has reportedly turned against the crackdown and the actions of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

That watershed moment proved to be a catalyst for Suitor, who, until now, primarily represented Minnesota tenants in various disputes. A couple of days after Good’s death, while recovering from emergency gallbladder surgery, he started to consider how to best employ his University of Minnesota law degree. He put his sole practice on hold and stopped taking on new cases. “It’s all hands on deck for the legal community,” Suitor declared on LinkedIn, issuing a call to action to other legal practitioners. “When this is over, will you be able to say you were one of the helpers? Which side are you on?”

Earlier this year, the self-described “nobody lawyer” and “dipshit with a 7-year-old laptop and a bad attitude,” Suitor turned to helpingimmigrants in Minnesota who have been swept up in the immigration enforcement dragnet and detained by ICE. Undeterred by his lack of immigration law experience**,** he has joined the ranks of attorneys nationwide filing so-called habeas corpus petitions in a massive legal counteroffensive to the Trump administration’s aggressive mass detention and deportation practices.

Here, Suitor describes his own experiences in this work. His observations have been edited for length and clarity.

I grew up in New Hampshire and spent most of my first few decades in New England. I moved here [to Minnesota] to go to law school. It was 2018, I was 29 years old, and I didn’t like my corporate job [as a financial analyst]. It was kind of boring. I was not living my values. It was the middle of the first Trump administration, and I’m like, what should I do? I really wanted to do employment law and fight for workers.

I wound up starting my career in tenants’ rights**,** working for a nonprofit called HOME Line, which I found suited me very well. Any tenant in the state can call and get free advice. Eviction is a huge deal in every state, but particularly in Minnesota. Keeping somebody in their home is one of the most powerful things you can do.

The first case I ever did [involved] a single mother. I think she had just had her third kid, and she sued for her security deposit herself and won. She got her security deposit back, but the landlord wouldn’t pay and hired a lawyer to get the judgment undone. It was a pretty simple case and a couple of grand, but it was such a lifeline for that person. Helping people, even in a small way, to claw back against these historic harms means something to my clients. And if it means something to my clients, it means something to me.

I left the nonprofit in September 2024 and did a year at a plaintiff employment law firm. I was fired in September 2025 for my pro bono work. I took a campaign practices case for two Democratic socialist candidates. I told my boss that I was going to take it on my own time. They told me not to file the case, and I said, I’m sorry, I filed it two days ago, and I was fired. I have no regrets. The next day**,** I started my solo practice [focused on landlord-tenant cases.]

Starting in December and January, as ICE really ramped up enforcement, a lot of people started responding. There was this loose coalition of movement lawyers who were starting to do habeas petitions and doing them really fast and dirty, and trying to just get as many people out of jail as possible. At that time, people were being moved out of state within hours. I got tapped into that.

After Renée Good was murdered, that was the moment when the legal community was like, “This is no longer just for the activists and the dirtbags around the edges.” I always joke that I’m probably like a bunch of respectable lawyers’ dirtbag lawyer friend, and then I’m a bunch of activists’ lawyer friend. I have a foot in both worlds. I put my practice on pause. My wife has a good job, but especially after I was fired, we were pretty paycheck-to-paycheck, and we didn’t have a lot of savings because she had cancer two years ago.

I was trying to make money and trying to take cases, and balance paid work with being committed to my community. I love tenants’ rights. There’s nothing I love more than going to housing court. If I could be a rat who lived under the stairs at that courthouse, I probably would. But my heart wasn’t in it. If I’m not going to give people my best, I don’t think I can take their cases. I just realized that’s what I had to do in that moment. There are times your skills really are needed and vital. What am I supposed to do? Work out retainer agreements while I feel like I could be helping people?

“What am I supposed to do? Work out retainer agreements while I feel like I could be helping people?”

This [Minnesota] law firm organized a habeas training, and 300 attorneys showed up on Zoom. There was another one within a week that I think over 250 people attended. There was this outpouring of support from the legal community. I was still a little worried about doing it because I’m not an immigration attorney. What held me back for a week or two was wondering, What if I screw it up? What if I keep someone in jail?

I started doing the trainings, and a case landed on my lap that needed emergency help. Somebody gets grabbed**,** and you start burning up your social network and every resource you have available. No one could take the case right away. I can’t just sit around waiting for the right time. There is no right time. There is no perfect time. I was in the Costco parking lot**,** and then I wound up filing the case at 1 or 2 a.m. the next morning.

People are working at 1,000 percent capacity right now. The nonprofits only have so many resources, and the private firms are taking a lot of these [cases]. A lot of the immigration firms have to make money. They can’t do this for free, so they’re charging. I’m taking a very specific subset of cases that aren’t getting help from other resources. I do them all for free. I haven’t charged anyone a dime for this work. I’ve filed 20 cases. I think I’ve been successful in 14 so far.

A lot of my clients have had criminal histories. Some of them were just one incident, 25 or 30 years ago, and they’ve had entire lifetimes since then. In all cases, they’ve paid their debt to society through imprisonment, through probation, through all sorts of penalties. The government can deport them the right way if they want. But they’re not doing it the right way. Due process in immigration is pretty thin to begin with. If the government can’t even bother to do that, then all these people deserve to be out of detention.

My first client was a Hmong man. He was on an order of supervision, and he got scooped up. They didn’t revoke his supervision until he was already detained. When he was released from jail, he brought with him a handwritten list of people’s names and alien numbers. He said, “This is the same story as what happened to me.” Of those 18 people**,** I personally filed on behalf of 10, a friend filed on behalf of another one, and we’ve gotten eight released. A few are waiting. Two were denied. I’ve represented people in three different jails in Minnesota—in Freeborn, Kandiyohi, and Sherburne [counties]. My clients have mostly been released without incident.

“I grew up like a New England Protestant. I believe that you toil and then you die, and you dig a ditch every day of your life**.** And at the end of your life**,** there’s the ditch. That’s how I treat this work. It’s gotten me to this point where I can help people and that’s enough for me.”

I’m a really small-time guy. Doing 20 cases in the last month was a lot. I can do these pretty quickly, and with every single one, I get better. But there are enough cases in Minnesota to keep me busy. I don’t think I’m a special talent in any way. I grew up like a New England Protestant. I believe that you toil and then you die. And you dig a ditch every day of your life. And at the end of your life, there’s the ditch. That’s how I treat this work. It’s gotten me to this point where I can help people, and that’s enough for me.

I don’t even want the attention for this work. I’m just one guy. There are so many people doing so much more than I. I just have one small corner. The reason why I’ve talked to people about habeas work is because I want to encourage people to do it. What I want to do is get the people who are on the fence, or maybe they have a lot going on, but they see that this work is really important. I think it’s good propaganda to show that we’re winning, that when you fight, you win. You can stand up to bullies. You don’t know when you’ll be next, but prepare your own community.

The level of enforcement activity is down, but it’s still very active. There’s still this long ripple effect because they put so many people in detention. I’m cleaning up the messes of people who were arrested a month ago or two months ago. They’re still arresting more people every day. Last week, I filed for somebody who had been detained two or three days before. They’re still throwing more people on the pile.

We got all these people out on habeas, but ICE is going to try to deport them. I always say I’m not an immigration attorney; I can’t stop your deportation. How do we train non-immigration attorneys to do removal defense? That’s the next battle. There’s a level of camaraderie right now in the state bar that I haven’t felt before in my relatively short career. As things slowly go back to normal, I hope we remember this moment.

Mother Jones20 hours, 54 minutes ago

Warming Oceans and Waterways Threaten a Key Human Protein Source

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

In the world’s waters, fish are making a quiet, biological retreat. The once simple rules of the ocean—grow larger than potential predators—are being rewritten as temperatures reach record highs. Desperate to survive, fish are hitting the fast-forward button on life in a biological shift that will soon impact what ends up on dinner tables globally.

“There are simply no real winners here.”

Fish are getting smaller and dying at higher rates as they adapt to warming waters, researchers warn in a report released Thursday in the journal Science. This evolutionary change will reduce global fish yields by one-fifth under current warming predictions, and up to 30 percent in high-emissions scenarios.

This will trigger potentially irreversible evolutionary processes, shaking up entire ecosystems and food webs, with consequences for the billions of people who rely on seafood for protein—a demand expected to increase.

“What I found frightening about this work was that it was difficult to identify winners and losers—there are simply no real winners here,” said Craig White, the study’s co-author and an evolutionary physiologist at Monash University in Australia. “The combination of warming and evolution was always bad for fisheries.”

Fish mortality rates have already been rising as waters warm. Although fisheries management often assumes fish are evolutionarily inert when it comes to overcoming such environmental changes, this is false. Instead, fish are maturing at a younger age and at a smaller size to improve their chances of surviving long enough to reproduce, according to the report.

Fishery yields were already expected to reduce by 14 percent when global temperatures reach 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. However, when incorporating evolutionary impacts, the researchers’ new model predicts this reduction worsens to 22 percent.

For the Alaska pollock—a key species for human consumption in North America—this would equate to a reduction of half a million metric tons harvested per year.

“This is a loss of over 1.1 billion meals of high-quality protein per year as a consequence of the effects of global warming on just one species,” said David Reznick, a professor of evolutionary ecology at the University of California, Riverside, who was not involved with the study but co-wrote a new piece about it in Science. “Climate change represents an immediate threat to the earth’s capacity to sustain human life.”

Decades of decreases in size, age at maturity and abundance in species like Atlantic salmon and Baltic cod appear to validate the model’s predictions. In total, the life histories of nearly 3,000 species of fish were tested to corroborate the model’s accuracy.

“What we can’t do is assume that species will evolve their way out of trouble in a way that suits us.”

Researchers noted impacts will vary by geography. Freshwater systems are predicted to warm more than oceans and will therefore see the most severe size reductions.

There will also be consequences beyond harvesting. “Much of what happens in the ocean in terms of who eats whom is based on body size: Big things eat smaller things,” said Joseph Travis, a biologist and former dean of Florida State University’s College of Arts & Sciences. If the size of harvested species decreases, they will become vulnerable to predation by other fish, said Travis, who co-wrote the Science piece about the study.

“The entire ecosystem could be thrown into an alternative configuration as the system moves past its tipping point,” said Travis, highlighting the example of the reconfiguration of Canada’s western Scotian shelf in the late 20th century. Here, the average size of 53 top predators—like cod and haddock—dropped 40 percent in 40 years. As a result, former prey increased by 300 percent as they became predators for young cod.

Increases in fish death frequency from disease, deoxygenation, or overfishing will only add further pressure. “If people try to compensate for smaller fish and less revenue per fish by harvesting more fish, then the problem worsens quickly,” said Travis, warning of potential stock depletion.“The net effect, in the long run, will be less protein available.”

“If humans, as predators, cause the fish to evolve, as do predators in natural ecosystems, then they also cause changes that will not spring back to their former state,” said Reznick. Indeed, as fish decrease in size, populations are losing the genetic variations that encode large bodies. And, as ecosystems shift, populations might be locked into new food chain states they cannot reverse.

“What we can’t do is assume that species will evolve their way out of trouble in a way that suits us,” said White, highlighting that effective climate policy could preserve roughly 18 million metric tons of fishery yields each year.

His message to policymakers is clear: While fish can adapt to survive, the only way to protect people who rely on fisheries for their protein and their livelihood is to reduce warming.

Mother Jones1 day, 11 hours ago

Trump: Help, the Iran War Is Going Great

Donald Trump painted his military campaign in Iran with the same gold shine as his plans for the new Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in remarks on Monday—but despite his assured posturing, he is asking for help.

The president’s comments came at a press conference prior to a Monday vote among Kennedy Center board members on whether to close the institution temporarily for repairs. Trump previously insisted the building was in disrepair and that its programming was “woke,” pushing Congress to appropriate $257 million via the One Big Beautiful Bill Act to fund renovations.

In Iran, the president has created more serious problems. In the same Monday remarks, despite claiming that the US military had bombed Iran’s mine-laying ships to the extent that vessels could safely transit the Strait of Hormuz, an essential passageway in the Persian Gulf where roughly 20 percent of global crude oil and natural gas flows, Trump reiterated calls on allies to help reopen the shipping lane.

“Every one of [the mine-laying ships] is gone, but it only takes one,” Trump stated. “It’s a little unfair [given] you win a war.”

“You need people to watch and people to see,” he added.

On Monday, Trump said that some nations were “enthusiastic” to help. But that appears to be an overstatement, as many NATO countries have refused Trump’s request for naval and other military support. And on receiving a tepid response, Trump warned allies on Sunday about a “very bad” future if they did not help, and complained at his Monday press conference that the US was not receiving reimbursement for providing protection.

“This war has nothing to do with NATO,” Stefan Kornelius, a spokesperson for German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, said on Monday. “NATO is a defensive alliance, an alliance for the defense of its territory.”

As Trump’s military campaign in Iran enters its third week, US and Israeli strikes have killed over one thousand people in the country and led to bombings across the region. The White House seems to have no set goal—let alone a plan—despite costs now well into the tens of billions of dollars.

Mother Jones1 day, 12 hours ago

Top Architecture Firm Won’t Design More ICE Prisons After Employees Revolt

For three years, Andrew Osborne helped his bosses promote the idea that good design could make imprisonment more humane. As a public relations specialist at DLR Group, one of the largest architecture firms in the world, he crafted campaigns for multimillion dollar projects, like the construction of a “youth campus for empowerment” in Nashville. Or the rebuild of San Quentin state prison—former home of California’s death row—into a “rehabilitation center.” It wasn’t about simply adding more windows, he argued in marketing material. Prisons could be revamped to prioritize education; jail space could be set aside to help people through mental health crises instead of booking them into the system.

“I was selling the shit out of it,” Osborne says. “I genuinely was a convert.” A 34-year-old creative type, he’d taken the job at DLR Group after earning master’s degrees in philosophy and English literature. He truly believed the design firm, which has over 30 offices and rakes in at least $500 million in annual revenue, was committed to the stated ethos of its Justice+Civic division: to pursue “healing, equity, and transformation for the individual and community” as “stewards of the built environment.”

“I think what ICE is doing is the worst thing America has probably done since the internment camps during World War II.”

So when he found out on February 4 that DLR Group held a current contract to turn an old private prison in Oklahoma into a new detention center used to hold the immigrants swept up in the Trump administration’s escalated, increasingly deadly ICE operations—the sense of betrayal was instant. “I think what ICE is doing is the worst thing America has probably done since the internment camps during World War II,” he tells me, comparing the agency’s use of racial profiling in arrests to the mandatory incarceration of Japanese Americans. “It’s horrific, they’re shooting people, and here I am hating that in my heart of hearts. And it turns out my company is involved in it.”

Osborne was working from home that day, and he felt “the maddest I’ve ever been in my life.” So he picked up the phone, called his supervisor, and said he intended to quit. He gave notice two days later.

His wasn’t a lone act of protest. That week, it had become widely known among DLR Group’s 1,800-some employees that the firm had connections to ICE through its deals involving the private prison company CoreCivic. The resulting outcry has thrown DLR Group into turmoil, according to interviews with three current employees—all of whom requested anonymity for fear of retaliation—as well as a review of posts on the firm’s internal message board and a recording of a mid-February call between executives and hundreds of workers, provided by an anonymous employee. In an emailed response to questions, senior principal and brand communications leader Andy Ernsting disputed that there has been “unrest” among DLR Group workers. “A small group of employees had questions and we had a firmwide, open dialogue about our justice work,” he wrote.

Yet amid the turmoil, on February 9, CEO Steven McKay wrote to employees that “moving forward, DLR Group will not do work—be it upgrades, modernization, or new construction—for ICE detainment or deportation facilities.” DLR Group wouldn’t walk away from its existing contract, or commit to ending its relationship with private prisons, executives communicated to employees. But it would donate the estimated $300,000 in profits from the Oklahoma job to immigration-related causes.

McKay might have been expecting the announcement to appease disgruntled workers and close the door on the controversy. But employees say the revelations about the firm’s business ties have caused them to lose faith in company leaders and thrust them into an ongoing crisis of conscience—and more are considering departing.

The uprising within DLR Group isn’t the only example of workers pushing back on their employers’ business dealings with ICE—but it may be one of the more successful ones. Since the surge of ICE enforcement in Minneapolis, more than two thousand tech workers at companies like Amazon and Microsoft have petitioned their White House-cozying CEOs to cancel ICE contracts, to no avail. A Minneapolis Hampton Inn refused to rent rooms to ICE agents, only for its parent company Hilton cut ties with the location. In March, hundreds of employees at the media and research company Thompson Reuters reportedly asked their employer to stop providing ICE with investigative software. (The company told the New York Times in a statement that it was committed to ensuring “our products and services are used in accordance with our contractual terms and applicable law.”)

But such organized pushback is rare in architecture, a “tight-knit profession” where “job security is a contradiction in terms,” says Joshua Barnett, a veteran construction project manager at the New York City Housing Authority and shop steward in his municipal union. “We’re taught to think of ourselves as art_eests_,” Barnett says, putting a flourish on the last syllable. “Collective action is very often anathema to how the profession is.”

The number of people in ICE custody in a given night hit a record high of 73,000 in January, up from 40,000 a year earlier.

But these are not typical times. The scale of the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown has produced a proportionate boom in the ICE detention system, the nationwide network of lockups that hold people waiting to see a judge or to be deported. The number of people in ICE custody in a given night hit a record high of 73,000 in January, up from 40,000 a year earlier. (Three quarters of them had never been convicted of a crime.) The agency, in search of beds and photo ops, sent detainees to Guantanamo Bay, CECOT prison in El Salvador, and Alligator Alcatraz. But the headline-grabbing measures weren’t enough to meet ICE’s demand, says Silky Shah, executive director of the nonprofit Detention Watch Network, and last summer, Congress approved $45 billion for new immigration detention centers. So, in addition to setting up immigrant tent camps and warehouses, ICE has also pursued its traditional strategy: making deals with private prison companies and local jails to hold detainees in their existing lockups.

The empty Diamondback Correctional Facility in Watonga, Oklahoma, owned by the private prison company CoreCivic, was prime real estate. So, last September, ICE cut a deal with CoreCivic to hold detainees in the 2,160-bed prison, using the Oklahoma Department of Corrections as a middleman. Such deals have become a regular part of the business model for private prison companies, which are generally paid a nightly fee for each person they incarcerate. As state prison populations have fallen in recent years, these companies have looked to ICE detention to bolster their business. In 2025, CoreCivic received 35 percent of its $2.2 billion total revenue from the agency as it operated at least 19 immigration detention centers, including Diamondback, according to its annual report.

But the vacant, hulking prison needed some remodeling before it could reopen—$30 million worth of “upgrading the pumps, the security systems, the doors, the locks,” Oklahoma Department of Corrections executive director Justin Farris testified at a February budget hearing. To transform the building, CoreCivic turned to subcontractors including DLR Group, which formally signed on to the job in October. By late December, ICE was shipping detainees to Diamondback.

By early February, word of the detention center job had gotten out beyond DLR Group’s Justice+Civic division. Some workers started circulating a Google Form that gathered opinions on whether DLR Group should try to terminate the contract and avoid ICE work going forward.

In response, Justice+Civic leader Darrell Stelling posted on the company message board. “I need to address and clarify misunderstandings,” he wrote. For one thing, he emphasized, the primary contract for Diamondback was with the Oklahoma Department of Corrections, not ICE. Second, the firm had accepted the Diamondback job in August, he wrote, “well before anyone understood the aggressive approach ICE would take in cities across the nation.”

“To be crystal clear,” he added, “if a contract hit my desk today for direct ICE work, we would not sign it, as ICE’s current approach to facilities conflicts with our guidelines, DLR Group’s core values and Justice+Civic ethos.”

At first, company leaders responded to Stelling’s post with praise. But soon, other workers started raising questions: How did working on ICE detention ever align with the company’s code of ethics? What had really changed between October, when DLR Group signed the Diamondback contract, and February? “I think we’re not being fully honest about the situation,” Osborne wrote in a reply to Stelling’s post. “If there was any indication that ICE would be involved, how did we arrive at the decision to move forward?”

“I was shocked that we ever signed this project,” an engineer tells me. They assume that the evolution in the firm’s thinking between October and February was largely based on fears about a changing public perception—”how negative the public reaction has been toward ICE since everything that’s happened in Minneapolis.”

Within a week, more than 75 different employees had spoken out against the Diamondback project, work on ICE detention centers, or DLR Group’s relationship with CoreCivic on the company’s message board. Some of them had surfaced more examples of DLR Group’s connections to ICE: a past contract to expand Otay Mesa, a CoreCivic-owned ICE detention center in California; renovations at a Texas ICE detention center named after a CoreCivic founder.

Reading over these examples on the message board rattled the employees who spoke with me. “By the time I got to ‘This isn’t even our first detention center,’ that’s when the cold sweat hits,” says a second engineer. “One of my greatest fears in life—and this is going to sound dramatic—but I don’t want to be one of the people in the village who said they didn’t know. This has turned me into one of those people. I am now actively profiting off making people disappear.”

“I don’t want to be one of the people in the village who said they didn’t know.”

As he read the posts, an architect says he couldn’t stop thinking about a picture taken during Trump’s first term, of a toddler sobbing at an ICE agent’s feet as her mother is detained at the border. “Picture how you were feeling, looking at that photo the first time you saw it, just having your heart ripped out through your chest,” he says. “It was like feeling that all over again.”

In his emailed statement, Ernsting emphasized that DLR Group’s Justice+Civic work is broader than ICE detention and private prisons, and focuses on rehabilitation and making conditions more humane. “We work to engage with a system that is not always equitable or just to improve conditions and outcomes,” he wrote. “This work would be abandoned, not improved, if responsible design firms walked away from the sector entirely.”

Part of the reason the revelations cut so deep, according to Osborne and the three current employees, is because DLR Group’s workers believed their company was genuinely committed to the idea that design could change the world for the better. “The major reason I pursued getting a job there aggressively is because they had a solid code of ethics,” one of the engineers tells me. Osborne says when he interviewed for his PR job, he was specifically told the company no longer worked on private prisons. (One of the engineers I spoke with said he was told the same thing.)

Other employees held the same belief—though information about DLR Group’s longstanding ties to CoreCivic wasn’t hard to find online. “I recognize that it was my responsibility to have done the research [but] it wasn’t in me to be suspicious about this,” the architect says. “I personally told myself that I have nothing morally against federal prison work, as long as it’s under the auspices of trying to improve conditions.” But for him, working for private prisons was a step too far. “I find CoreCivic to be a gigantic, insidiously evil corporation that profits off people’s misery.”

“Our detention facilities are purpose-built to ensure that our staff can care for each person respectfully and humanely while they receive the legal due process that they are entitled to,” CoreCivic senior director of public affairs Ryan Gustin said in a statement. “CoreCivic does not enforce immigration laws, arrest anyone who may be in violation of immigration laws, or have any say whatsoever in an individual’s deportation or release.”

About a week after the Google Form came to light, the firm held a pair of “fireside chats” with McKay, Stelling, and the firm’s diversity, equity, and belonging leader. During one of them, Stelling said the Justice+Civic division would be “discussing” its connection to CoreCivic. “We will be having those discussions to see how that relationship might transform,” he said. “That not an easy decision with somebody that you’ve worked with for over 30 years.”

According to Ernsting, DLR Group has made an “explicit, firmwide” commitment limiting its work for private prison companies, which are obligated to act in their shareholders’ interests by maximizing profits.“We will not do work to expand the portfolio of facilities that private providers own and operate with a fiduciary interest in promoting actions that increase the use of incarceration,” he wrote.

The field of architecture has long debated the morality of prison design. In 2020, the American Institute of Architects adopted new ethics rules banning members from designing execution rooms or solitary confinement cells. “There is a spectrum within the profession,” explains Rand Lemley, an architect on the administrative committee of the Architecture Lobby, a nonprofit that pushes for better working conditions in the field. Some firms specialize in public safety design and pursue jail and prison contracts without qualms. Other architects like Lemley—himself formerly incarcerated—reject the idea of building prisons entirely. “If we imagine and believe that prisons are part of a system that should be dismantled, we shouldn’t be constructing things that 50, 75, 100 years down the road are obsolete,” he says. In the middle are those who believe they can improve outcomes for prisoners. “They focus on bringing in natural light, warmer materials, more places for activities,” Lemley says. “It sounds great, but it doesn’t ultimately challenge the system that’s in place.”

DLR Group—recently ranked by a trade publication as the country’s top “justice facility” architecture firm—has tried to walk that middle road, at least publicly. “We’ve always been a detention firm,” McKay emphasized to employees during one of the fireside chats in February. “We’ve never tried to hide that. And in fact, what we’ve always tried to do is say we can make a difference.”

He apologized for the strain employees had gone through since the Diamondback contract came to light. But now, he said, the company had made its response. “Now every individual must make their own decision as to whether they’re committed to work that the firm holistically does,” he closed the call. “I’ll leave you to think about that.”

For Osborne, the choice is already made. He says he’s speaking out because he has lost faith that management will stick to its promises to no longer work on ICE detention, especially if the firm remains willing to work with private prison companies. “Even if this is the most progressive design in history, if you give it to CoreCivic, they have no problems re-contracting their space out to ICE,” he says. He and others also want the company to overhaul how it chooses Justice+Civic projects, with more oversight and input from employees.

“Something design people always try to say—and I think they’re right—is that every single thing that happens in the country needs a building,” Osborne says. “So every time you hear about a kid being removed from his parents, somebody had to make that choice, and somebody had to produce those plans and those blueprints.”

Mother Jones1 day, 18 hours ago

Trump’s DOJ Is Helping a Convicted FBI Informant Tied to Russian Intelligence

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._

For a year, the Trump Justice Department has been on an odd mission: to assist a mysterious former FBI informant with ties to Russian intelligence who ended up in prison for passing disinformation about Joe Biden to the bureau. His crime deeply affected American politics. The false claim he slipped to the FBI—that Biden and his son Hunter each were paid a $5 million bribe by a Ukrainian energy company—became the main evidence in the House Republicans’ reckless and ill-fated impeachment drive against the 46th president.

For pushing this phony tale, Alexander Smirnov, who pleaded guilty of lying to the FBI, was sentenced a year ago to six years of incarceration. (The punishment also covered failing to pay taxes on more than $2 million in income.) But for some strange reason, Trump’s DOJ has been helping him to get out of prison. On March 4, in a move that has drawn no media attention, the department quietly filed an unusual brief—submitted by Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche—supporting Smirnov’s attempt to throw out his sentence and withdraw his guilty plea.

The Smirnov saga has the feel of a spy thriller.

This was not the first time the Trump Justice Department sided with Smirnov in his ongoing legal battle. It has forged a curious alliance with this convicted Russia-connected fabricator whose lies were embraced by Trump, MAGA Republicans, and right-wing media and cited as smoking-gun evidence for Biden’s impeachment.

The Smirnov saga has the feel of a spy thriller. A fortysomething Israeli American businessman who grew up in Ukraine, he was a longtime confidential informant for the FBI. Court filings do not reveal the details of his work for the bureau, but they note he participated in operations in which he was authorized to engage in illegal activity as part of FBI criminal investigations. He apparently shared information about oligarchs and the business contacts he made around the world, possibly including some shady characters. He made millions of dollars through activity federal prosecutors could not identify.

During the 2020 campaign, Republicans—most notably, Rudy Giuliani—were promoting the debunked allegation that Biden, when he was vice president, had threatened to withhold a $1 billion loan guarantee to Ukraine unless its government quashed an investigation of Burisma, a Ukrainian energy company that had recruited his son Hunter to be a well-paid board member. As that conspiracy theory was being hyped by the right, Smirnov told his FBI handler that in late 2015 or 2016 the CEO of Burisma had said to him that Hunter, through his father, could end an investigation of Burisma if the two Bidens each were paid a $5 million bribe.

The FBI handler dutifully recorded Smirnov’s account in what the bureau calls an FD-1023 form. The FBI reviewed this information—which was much at odds with previous statements Smirnov had made to his handler about Burisma—and decided there was nothing to it. (There was no active probe of Burisma at the time of the supposed bribe.) And that was that.

Yet three years later, someone in the FBI passed the FD-1023 to congressional Republicans, and they went to town, claiming this was the proof President Biden had pocketed a huge bribe and was leading a crime family.

The document clearly stated there was no confirmation of the hearsay information Smirnov had provided. But for months, through that summer and fall and into 2024, House Republicans—led by Rep. James Comer of Kentucky, who chaired the House oversight committee—hailed the FD-1023 (which redacted Smirnov’s name) as Exhibit A for their baseless impeachment inquiry targeting Biden. Fox News aired scores of segments about it. Kash Patel and other MAGA stalwarts cited it as evidence of Biden criminality.

His new allegations about Hunter Biden were also false. It appeared he had been trying to plant anti-Biden information within the bureau.

With Republicans raising a fuss about this once-confidential report, the FBI brought Smirnov in for questioning. He stuck to his story. He even added new allegations about Hunter Biden that he said he had received from four Russian officials, including two associated with Russian intelligence, telling the bureau the Russians had made incriminating recordings of the president’s son.

The bureau dug into all of this—reviewing Smirnov’s travel records and other information—and concluded that he was lying and that he had never even had those conversations with the Burisma CEO outlined in the FD-1023. His new allegations about the younger Biden were also false. It appeared he had been trying to plant anti-Biden information within the bureau.

On February 14, 2024, as Smirnov arrived from an overseas trip at Harry Reid International Airport in Las Vegas, FBI agents arrested him. The next day, David Weiss, a Justice Department special counsel who had been appointed to investigate Hunter Biden, announced that Smirnov had been indicted for making false statements to the FBI. His indictment was later expanded to cover the tax charges. Smirnov’s arrest outed him as the confidential informant cited in the FD-1023—and essentially ended the GOP impeachment crusade. The Republicans had been duped.

In subsequent legal filings, federal prosecutors stated that Smirnov professed to have contacts with multiple foreign intelligence agencies, including the Russian spy services. The feds characterized Smirnov’s interactions with Russians as “extensive.”

“Smirnov’s contacts with Russian officials who are affiliated with Russian intelligence services are not benign,” the prosecutors said—a suggestion that Smirnov had actively been in cahoots with the Russians.

One filing revealed he had numerous contacts with a Russian official “who has been described by Smirnov in a number of ways, including as the son of a former high-ranking Russian government official” and someone “who purportedly controls two groups of individuals tasked with carrying out assassination efforts in a third-party country,” a reference to Ukraine. “Smirnov’s contacts with Russian officials who are affiliated with Russian intelligence services are not benign,” the prosecutors said—a suggestion that Smirnov had actively been in cahoots with the Russians.

The Justice Department’s filings in the case depicted Smirnov as having “spread misinformation” about Biden, adding “the misinformation he is spreading is not confined to 2020. He is actively peddling new lies that could impact U.S. elections after meeting with Russian intelligence officials in November [2024].” It looked as if Smirnov had been part of a Russian operation to tarnish Biden in both 2020 and 2024.

On January 8, 2025, after Smirnov accepted a plea agreement, federal Judge Otis Wright of the Central District of California sentenced him to six years. “In committing his crimes he betrayed the United States,” Weiss stated in court papers.

A scamster tied to Russian intelligence who had promoted disinformation to the FBI to harm Biden in two elections was behind bars. A win for the Justice Department. Case closed.

Not quite. Shortly after his conviction, Smirnov requested he be released on bail from prison pending an appeal he had filed. The Justice Department, now tightly controlled by Trump, joined Smirnov in supporting this request. Smirnov and the feds filed a joint stipulation asking he be freed while his appeal was underway.

This was weird. The Justice Department had just locked him up. But with Trump in the White House, it was under new management.

What was different now—and peculiar—was that that the Justice Department had flipped and was supporting the request of a man who had tried to deceive the FBI and who, as Weiss said, betrayed the United States.

During Smirnov’s criminal case, Justice Department lawyers had argued that because he had access to $6 million in funds (the origins of which he hadn’t been able to explain), was an Israeli citizen who could easily obtain an Israeli passport, and claimed to have contacts with multiple foreign intelligence services, he was a flight risk. They requested he be kept in prison prior to his trial. Smirnov’s lawyers contended at that time that he ought to be released on bail because he had a serious medical condition related to his eyes that required continuing care. The court didn’t buy that and imprisoned him while he awaited trial.

Following his conviction, Smirnov made the same argument: Due to his eye condition, he should be let out on bail while his appeal proceeded. What was different now—and peculiar—was that that the Justice Department had flipped and was supporting the request of a man who had tried to deceive the FBI and who, as Weiss said, betrayed the United States.

The government had once said Smirnov was a flight risk; now it argued the opposite. During a hearing last April, a department prosecutor pointed out that Smirnov had “the lowest incentive that he would ever have to flee the country…when he has a receptive ear to people who are willing to look anew” at his case. A “receptive ear”? That was a surprising statement, indicating that the Trump Justice Department was considering reviewing the case of this suspected Russian agent. The Trump administration was advocating for him.

On April 30, 2025, Judge Wright turned down the joint Smirnov–United States request for his release, noting that nothing significant had changed since Smirnov was determined a flight risk and “the fact remains that Smirnov has been convicted and sentenced to seventy-two months in prison, providing ample incentive to flee.”

That was not the end of the Trump Justice Department’s cooperation with Smirnov. And the former informant did catch a break after losing the fight for bail.

In November, independent journalist Jacqueline Sweet discovered that Smirnov had been released from FCI Terminal Island, a low-security prison in Los Angeles, where he had been fulfilling his sentence. A process server who had been trying to serve Smirnov with papers related to a civil lawsuit had been informed that Smirnov was “furloughed.” David Chesnoff, Smirnov’s lawyer, told the New York Post that his client had been released on a “medical furlough” due to his eye condition, which required surgery. A health-related furlough from a federal facility can last up to 30 months. Chesnoff said at the time he expected to request multiple furloughs for Smirnov.

With Chesnoff, Smirnov had a high-powered and widely connected lawyer who was part of the Trump administration. A well-known celebrity attorney based in Las Vegas, he was appointed in June to serve on an advisory council for the Department of Homeland Security.

Several years ago, Chesnoff represented Republican political operative Corey Lewandowski, when Lewandowski was accused of harassing and inappropriately touching a Trump donor at a fundraising event. Chesnoff obtained a plea agreement in which Lewandowski admitted no wrongdoing but agreed to impulse control counseling and 50 hours of community service. When Chesnoff was named to the DHS council, Lewandowski was serving as the chief adviser to Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem. Other members of this advisory board include Giuliani, venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, right-wing commentator Mark Levin, Bikers for Trump founder Chris Cox, and Lewandowski.

It’s unclear how long Smirnov was out of prison for the medical furlough. Chesnoff did not respond to an inquiry. On Friday, a spokesperson for the Bureau of Prisons confirmed Smirnov was currently in custody at Terminal Island.

This month, the Justice Department continued to go all-out for Smirnov. On March 4, with no fanfare, it submitted a filing supporting Smirnov’s appeal of his conviction.

Smirnov had agreed to a plea deal in which he acknowledged lying to the FBI and committing tax evasion. But following his conviction, he filed an appeal that hinged on a technical point. He claimed Judge Wright had not stuck to the deal’s provision regarding a reduction in Smirnov’s sentence to match his pretrial detention.

The Trump administration appears to be bending over backward to help him escape his sentence and win another trial—or perhaps avoid one.

The plea agreement between the Justice Department and Smirnov stated that Smirnov was “entitled” to a credit for time served. But at sentencing, Judge Wright said he would not “get involved” in the calculation of the credit and would leave that to the Bureau of Prisons.

In the appeal, Smirnov’s lawyers argued that even though Smirnov ended up being credited by BOP with time served, Wright, by not directly recommending the time off to BOP, had not adhered to the plea agreement. Consequently, they contended, the sentence should be revoked and Smirnov permitted to withdraw his guilty pleas and return the case to the pre-agreement stage. The Justice Department filing supports Smirnov’s argument and his requests.

The Trump administration appears to be bending over backward to help him escape his sentence and win another trial—or perhaps avoid one. There’s no guarantee the Justice Department would continue the prosecution if Smirnov succeeds with his appeal. One government official who has followed this case tells me he wonders if the ultimate plan of the Trump administration is to let Smirnov go free.

Judge Wright has challenged this argument advanced by Smirnov and the DOJ. In a ruling last year, he said that Smirnov’s claim that he had not followed “all of the stipulations” of the plea agreement was “factually and legally incorrect.” Wright cited the exact language of the agreement: “The parties also agree that the defendant is entitled to credit…for the period of his pretrial detention…and that credits that the Bureau of Prisons may allow…may be credited against this stipulated sentence.”

Wright pointed out the agreement did not “provide that the Court would order that Smirnov receive credit for time served…This provision regarding credit requires nothing of the Court.”

Smirnov’s case does not seem a strong one, turning on the question of whether the provision that he was “entitled” to credit for time served compelled Wright to make an explicit recommendation to the BOP. It certainly doesn’t come across as a matter that would call for the participation of the deputy attorney general. Yet Blanche signed this filing. Deputy attorneys general usually don’t get involved in such matters.

I asked the Justice Department why it decided to back Smirnov’s appeal. A spokesperson replied, “We have no comment.” I also asked if the DOJ would renew its prosecution of Smirnov if he wins his appeal. I received the same response.

Trump’s Justice Department has shown an unusual amount of consideration for Smirnov, a confessed criminal tied to Russian intelligence who betrayed the FBI and who perpetuated a fraud that roiled American politics. But he did make trouble for Biden and the Democrats. This case warrants scrutiny as Smirnov’s appeal proceeds.

Mother Jones1 day, 20 hours ago

Middle East Desalination Plant Attacks Highlight Risks of Relying on “Fossil Fuel Water”

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

Recent attacks in the Middle East on desalination plants, facilities that remove salt from seawater, raise the potential for a humanitarian crisis if the region’s freshwater production facilities are subjected to more widespread destruction. The attacks also underscore the region’s heavy reliance on an energy-intensive method of producing drinking water that is powered almost entirely by fossil fuels.

On Saturday, Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi accused the United States of striking a desalination plant in southern Iran. The US has since denied any role in the attack. The next day, Bahrain accused Iran of damaging a desalination plant in a drone attack. The targeting of freshwater production facilities follows attacks on schools, airports, hotels and refineries since Operation Epic Fury began in February. Attacking desalination plants is a violation of the Geneva Conventions, which established humanitarian laws for the treatment of non-combatants in war.

The CIA has previously warned that widespread disruption of desalination plants through sabotage or military action could lead to a “national crisis” for certain Gulf nations.

“It has erased previous red lines about attacking energy infrastructure, civilian infrastructure, and then the final red line of attacking desalination infrastructure,” Michael Christopher Low, director of the Middle East Center at the University of Utah, said of the Iran War. “It’s the most grievous kind of war crime that you can dream up.”

Of the world’s nearly 18,000 desalination plants, nearly one-third are located in the Middle East, with 2,382 facilities in Saudi Arabia alone, according to a recent study published in the journal npj Clean Water.

In the Middle East and North Africa, 83 percent of the population already faces severe water scarcity, a figure projected to rise to 100 percent by 2050, according to the World Resources Institute’s Aqueduct Water Risk Atlas. The Middle East is home to 6 percent of the world’s population and holds less than 2 percent of the world’s renewable freshwater. The rapid growth of the region’s cities has increased reliance on desalination.

“All of these great Gulf cities, Riyadh, Doha, Dubai, Abu Dhabi, they’re not possible without man-made, fossil fuel water,” Low said.

However, desalination, which typically uses a process called reverse osmosis to push seawater through ultra-fine membranes to remove salt and other contaminants, is a costly and energy-intensive process powered, and indirectly funded, by the region’s oil and gas wealth.

“You can’t step away from fossil fuels and fossil fuel production, because your water production is so closely linked,” said Low, who is currently writing a book titled “Saltwater Kingdoms: Fossil-Fueled Water and Climate Change in Arabia.”

The connection between desalination and fossil fuels has long-term implications beyond the immediate attacks. “It’s not just the vulnerability of desalination to military campaigns or sabotage, but it’s also the embedded risk that is climate change,” Low said.

Such heavy reliance on desalination facilities makes cities in the Middle East particularly vulnerable. As early as 1983, the CIA warned that widespread disruption of desalination plants through sabotage or military action could lead to a “national crisis” in countries such as Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Bahrain.

During the 1991 Gulf War, Iraq intentionally destroyed much of Kuwait’s desalination capacity. In 2016 and 2017 a Saudi-led coalition bombed desalination plants in Yemen. In 2019, Houthi rebels claimed responsibility for attacking a desalination plant in Saudi Arabia. Israel destroyed or otherwise shut down much of Gaza’s desalination capacity following Hamas’ attack on Israel in October 2023.

“Unless you go to solar or a nuclear solution, you’re most likely contributing to more fossil-fuel use.”

Erika Weinthal, chair of the Environmental Social Systems Division at Duke University’s School of the Environment, monitors attacks on desalination plants and other infrastructure in the Middle East and North Africa. The Targeting of Infrastructure in the Middle East project, a database maintained by Weinthal and colleagues, focuses on water, sanitation, energy, health and transportation infrastructure in conflict zones throughout the region since 2011.

Weinthal said the initiative is an attempt to provide a more complete understanding of warfare’s impacts by moving beyond immediate casualties.

“You are also harming civilians and the environment over the long term in ways that can’t be counted immediately,” Weinthal said. “If people don’t have access to clean drinking water, you will see more waterborne illnesses and infectious disease among the population.”

Weinthal said the frequent coupling of large desalination facilities and the power plants that feed them makes such facilities particularly vulnerable. “You don’t even have to destroy a desalination plant or a water treatment plant if you take out a power plant,” Weinthal said.

As the planet warms, the region will likely become increasingly dependent on desalination. Precipitation across the Middle East and North Africa is anticipated to decrease by 10 to 30 percent over the next century. By 2050, the region is projected to incur economic losses equal to 6 to 14 percent of its gross domestic product due to climate-induced water scarcity, according to the World Bank.

Climate change will also increase coastal water temperatures and salinity, reducing the efficiency of desalination plants, concluded a 2022 report by the Regional Organization for the Protection of the Marine Environment, an intergovernmental organization of eight Persian Gulf states.

Currently, almost all the Middle East’s desalination plants are powered by fossil fuels, with 93 percent of the required electricity coming from burning natural gas and 6 percent from burning oil. Some countries, including Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, have begun to develop renewable energy or nuclear power to drive desalination. However, only about one-third of Middle Eastern countries employ renewable energy for that purpose or have immediate plans to integrate it with freshwater production.

Globally, reverse osmosis desalination uses an estimated 100 terrawatt hours of energy per year, equivalent to approximately 0.4 percent of global electricity consumption. Emissions associated with that energy use were approximately 76 million tons of carbon dioxide in 2014, a figure projected to increase to 400 million tons of CO2 by 2050, according to a recent report by TRENDS Research & Advisory, an independent think tank based in Abu Dhabi. That 2050 figure is equal to the annual greenhouse gas emissions of 93 million automobiles, according to the US Environmental Protection Agency.

“Unless you go to solar or a nuclear solution, you’re most likely contributing to more fossil-fuel use [and] more carbon forcing,” Low said. “It’s kind of a vicious cycle.”

Mother JonesMar 15, 2026, 6:36 PM

Hegseth’s Pentagon Is Trying to Turn a Newspaper for Troops into Propaganda

Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s Pentagon has come up with a plan to limit the independence of Stars and Stripes, the news publication for members of the US military that has been published continuously since World War II.

Under the new policy, Stars and Stripes, which has historically operated with a large degree of editorial freedom, reports that it will generally be blocked from carrying news stories from wire services like the Associated Press, as well as from publishing comics. It is also being directed to publish material from the Defense Department’s own public affairs offices.

The memo is part of a broader pattern of the Pentagon under Hegseth trying to shape and limit the amount of information the public receives about US military operations. It comes as the Trump administration wages an unpopular war in Iran that has sent oil prices soaring.

The “interim” requirements for Stars and Stripes are included in an eight-page memo that is dated March 9. The news outlet was not notified about the memo. Instead, a staff member at the publication found the memo on DoD’s website. Stars and Stripes reported on Friday that the document was written without any input from the publication.

The memo follows a January post on X from Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell announcing that DoD was planning to “refocus” the content of Stars and Stripes “away from woke distractions that syphon morale.” The newspaper, which receives much of its funding from the Pentagon, would also shift to being a digital-only outlet, which would bring to an end to its more than 80 years in print. (The paper was first published by Union soldiers during the Civil War and later revived.)

Stars and Stripes editor-in-chief Erik Slavin told NPR that he was especially concerned about a requirement in the memo that the publication’s articles “must be consistent with good order and discipline.” That phrase comes from the Uniform Code of Military Justice, the foundation of US military law.

“If they were to complete a story that the Defense Department did not like, and did not find ‘consistent with good order and discipline,’ would they be in legal jeopardy?” Slavin said in the interview with NPR. “We don’t know the answer to that.”

The paper’s ombudsman Jacqueline Smith, who is tasked by Congress with protecting Stars and Stripes’ editorial independence, said in an interview with the Washington Post that the memo “threatens Stars and Stripes’ continued editorial independence, and it does so at the detriment of the troops who rely on the newspaper for complete coverage and continued accurate coverage that is not propaganda.”

The memo also states that Stars and Stripes “should” republish content from the DoD’s public affairs offices, which would be labeled as coming from the Pentagon rather than Stars and Stripes‘ own reporters. Slavin, the editor-in-chief, said he has “no plans to commingle military public relations offerings with our independent reporting.”

In a further effort to kneecap the paper’s reporting, the memo bars reporters at Stars and Stripes from submitting Freedom of Information Act requests on behalf of the publication. Stars and Stripes reporters are also prohibited from publishing “controlled unclassified information.” A related push to restrict the work of reporters at other outlets led to dozens of members of the Pentagon press corps turning in their press badges last year.

Mother JonesMar 15, 2026, 5:09 PM

FCC Chair Threatens to Revoke Broadcast Licenses Over Iran War Coverage

Amid surging oil prices and an unpopular war of choice in Iran, Federal Communications Commission Chair Brendan Carr is threatening not to renew the licenses of broadcasters for “running hoaxes and news distortions.” The Saturday post from Carr on X is not subtle: It explicitly warns broadcasters that they “have a chance now to correct course before their license renewals come up.”

Carr’s missive came in response to a Truth Social post on Saturday from President Donald Trump, which the FCC chair included in full as a screenshot. The post from Trump focused on coverage of the war in Iran by outlets like the New York Times and Wall Street Journal, along with “other Lowlife ‘Papers’ and Media.” (Unlike networks such as ABC and NBC, which broadcast over public airwaves, newspapers do not have licenses that the FCC can go after.)

The broader context is clear: Trump and senior administration figures are trying to coerce independent news outlets into parroting the government line. The effort comes as poll numbers show most Americans do not approve of the war in Iran and oil prices top $100 per barrel.

Broadcasters that are running hoaxes and news distortions – also known as the fake news – have a chance now to correct course before their license renewals come up.

The law is clear. Broadcasters must operate in the public interest, and they will lose their licenses if they… https://t.co/7bBgnsbalw

— Brendan Carr (@BrendanCarrFCC) March 14, 2026

Trump’s Truth Social post fixated on a short update from the Wall Street Journal reporting that five refueling planes had been damaged in recent days during an Iranian strike against an air base in Saudi Arabia. The more fundamental issue is that Trump seems to recognize that he is now stuck in a poorly planned and unnecessary war of his own choosing that has upended the global economy. Rather than admit that, Trump administration officials—in a classic authoritarian move—are trying to use state power to get news outlets to obscure their incompetence.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has not been subtle about that. During a Friday news conference focused on the war in Iran, Hegseth said that he was looking forward to CNN being taken over by David Ellison, the son of the Trump-supporting Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison, who is worth roughly $200 billion.

One day later, Carr tried to subvert the editorial independence of broadcasters. Nor is it the first time Carr has tried to do so. Last year, Jimmy Kimmel’s late-night show was “indefinitely” pulled off the air after the FCC chair threatened to target ABC. Kimmel only returned to the air following a massive backlash.

With the likely takeover of CNN by Ellison, who installed Bari Weiss at the top of CBS News after purchasing the network last year, the administration is pursuing what may prove to be a more effective track. Instead of trying to coerce outlets, it is working to put friendly billionaires in charge. From there, the oligarchs can do the administration’s bidding without even being told.

Mother JonesMar 15, 2026, 12:00 PM

Nature’s Ability to Adapt to Human Activities Seems to be Slowing Down

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

Nature is slowing down, and its ability to regenerate is failing in the face of climate change, according to the authors of a new analysis of the speed of species turnover in ecosystems across the world.

The finding comes as a big surprise to many ecologists. They have long predicted that nature will respond to climate change and humanity’s other assaults by ramping up the rate of turnover, with existing species moving out and new ones moving in. Some studies have appeared to confirm this is happening.

But the latest and largest analysis, published last month by researchers at Queen Mary University of London, has found the opposite. And the slowdown is big. Measured as comings and goings over a time frame of up to five years, species turnover is down by a third since the mid-1970s, when the current trend of rapidly rising global temperatures began.

This is bad news, says the lead author Emmanuel Nwankwo. “Nature functions like a self-repairing engine, constantly swapping out old parts for new ones. But we found this engine is now grinding to a halt.”

Species turnover, most ecologists now agree, is a sign of “the ongoing back-and-forth of a healthy ecosystem.”

Nwankwo and his Queen Mary University colleague Axel Rossberg analyzed research assembled in BioTIME, a unique global database of hundreds of separate studies of the composition of ecosystems. Encompassing everything from North American birds to terrestrial plants, freshwater ecosystems, and fish on the seabed, it contains records from more than half a million locations, gathered over the past 150 years.

“We were very surprised at the discovery,” says Rossberg. “We did not expect at all to see the slowdown.” Such findings are “the opposite of existing expectations,” agrees ecologist Christopher Terry of the University of Oxford, who in a separate study with Rossberg found short-term turnover decline in the data on North American birds in habitats modified by humans.

Most ecologists contacted by Yale Environment 360 endorsed the new findings. “The results look quite convincing to me,” says Ryan Chisholm, a theoretical ecologist at the National University of Singapore.

These scientists suggested that, by concentrating on changes on a short timescale of five years rather than the longer periods of other research, the new study had identified an important phenomenon of slowdown in natural “intrinsic” species turnover that could influence how ecosystems are able to respond to external forces such as climate change.

Yet the head of BioTIME’s leadership council, biologist Maria Dornelas, says her analysis of data from two large, long-term studies in her database—the North Sea International Bottom Trawl Survey and the 60-year old North American Breeding Bird Survey run by the US Geological Survey with Canadian and Mexican counterparts—found an increase in species turnover in recent decades. Comparing her work with that of Nwankwo, she says: “I am finding it difficult to reconcile the two findings.”

Other researchers attributed any discrepancies in estimates of the rate of species turnover to the time frames of the different studies.

“You might get pushback from people who have observed a net increase in turnover rates using a long time window,” says Jacob O’Sullivan, an ecology modeler at Forest Research, an agency of the British government. “But slowdown does appear to be the correct interpretation [of] their results.”

The new research findings have rekindled a long-running argument among ecologists about how communities of species in natural environments function. At root is the question of whether changes in the composition of natural ecosystems are prevalent, and whether they should be seen as good or bad for the ecosystem.

Most ecologists once believed that healthy ecosystems are naturally stable, with a low turnover of species. Left to themselves, they reach a perfected equilibrium that the influential 19th-century American botanist Frederic Clements termed a “climax ecosystem.” After any disruption, they return to this stable state, a process called succession.

This stability was seen as vital, because the functioning of the ecosystem—whether tropical rainforests, temperate grasslands, or polar tundra—depended on tight living relationships between species that had evolved together and were mutually dependent. Predators and prey, and plants and the insects that fed on them and pollinated them, were inseparable. Species turnover disrupted those associations and could lead to ecological breakdown.

Echoing this idea, many ecologists still quote the “rivet-popper hypothesis,” first articulated in the 1980s by biologist Paul Ehrlich of Stanford University. He likened an ecosystem to an aircraft, in which each part, down to the smallest rivet, is vital for the plane to fly safely. Removing a single apparently insignificant species from an ecosystem might be like popping a rivet in the aircraft. It could cause the aircraft to crash—or the ecosystem to collapse. In this framing, species turnover looks like a bad thing.

In an ecological sporting analogy, there are fewer players “on the bench” to make tactical substitutions.

But detailed long-running studies of unperturbed ecosystems have shown that even the most pristine ecosystems are not so unchanging. In a famous long-term tracking of nature on an island in Lake Superior, Daniel Botkin at the University of California, Santa Barbara, documented ecosystems constantly changing their composition. “Species in ecosystems are not fixed entities, even without human-induced change,” says Anne Magurran of St Andrews University, the founder of BioTIME. “All ecosystems experience natural turnover.”

Ecologists call this natural churn within unstressed ecosystems “intrinsic turnover.” And most now agree that this turnover is a sign not of fragility and imminent breakdown, but, as Terry puts it, “the ongoing back-and-forth of a healthy ecosystem.” It can be driven by internal dynamics such as natural fire regimes that periodically wipe out forests, cycles in predator-prey relationships, or periodic outbreaks of disease. Or it can be essentially random.

Many species, from lemmings to jellyfish, have boom-and-bust cycles with no obvious external cause. Whole ecosystems can also be made up of mosaics of habitat patches that spontaneously shift, such as the regular switches between woodland and grassland seen in some savannah regions of Africa.

Rossberg likens these internal dynamics to a giant, unending game of rock paper scissors. And far from being a sideshow, he says, they appear to be the dominant cause of short-term species turnover. Moreover, in a world of growing external pressures such as a changing climate, increased turnover may indicate that the ecosystem is responding and adapting, with some species going locally extinct or migrating out, while other colonizers move in. Which makes it a positively good thing.

If those who adhere to the rivet-popper hypothesis are right, then the new evidence of slowdown might be good news. For it would suggest that most ecosystems are growing more stable, and remain largely uninfluenced by human activities, including climate change. But if, on the other hand, significant species turnover is the healthy norm for ecosystems, a sign of resilience rather than fragility, then any decline in turnover is bad news, especially when turnover is increasingly needed as a survival strategy in a world of widespread human interference in nature.

So, what is causing this unexpected slowdown? Terry says it likely shows that “humans are disrupting the background [intrinsic] turnover of these systems.” Rossberg says the central problem is probably that natural landscapes are increasingly fragmented. So, as some species disappear, there are fewer opportunities for replacement colonists to migrate from nearby. This “slows the pace at which species replace one another,” he says, reducing the ability of the isolated ecosystems to conduct running repairs and threatening their long-term survival.

O’Sullivan agrees. His own research has found that species turnover “increases with both the size of the regional species pool and the connectivity of the landscape. The new study makes the case that a regional decline in [species] richness may explain the local decline in turnover.”

“Once we accept natural turnover as a force, we must accept change as natural and not to be fought against.”

In a sporting analogy popular with some ecologists, there are fewer players “on the bench” to make tactical substitutions if things are not going well on the field. A less fragmented landscape will have a larger species pool “on the bench,” ready to replace those disappearing, and allowing increased species turnover if the situation demands.

Something like this is suggested by a major study published in January on tree-species diversity in the Amazon and Andes. Covering more than 400 forest plots surveyed over four decades, the study found that plots in areas with less fragmented forest had faster turnover rates, as lost species were replaced by new colonists. Their biodiversity held up. But more fragmented forests lost biodiversity, because they were less able to recoup losses with new arrivals from surrounding forests.

The bottom line, most ecologists contacted for this article agree, is that ecosystems in the 21st century need to change faster, with more turnover of species, in order to cope with human impacts, whether local land degradation or global climate change. Staying the same is no longer an option. But if the new study is right that turnover is declining sharply in most places, then they are in even more trouble that we thought.

So, what does this mean for conservation? One implication is conceptual. The prevailing assumption among conservationists today remains that, as Jacob O’Sullivan of Forest Research puts it, ecological communities “turn over predominantly in response [to] environmental change and direct anthropogenic pressures.” That assumption makes ecosystem change synonymous with ecosystem degradation and suggests that halting species turnover—keeping the ecological rivets in place—should be conservationists’ primary task.

But if, as the new ecology appears to demonstrate, species churn is a routine and necessary feature of healthy ecosystems, then protecting the rivets makes much less sense. “Once we accept natural turnover as a force, we must accept change as natural and not to be fought against, despite our intuition to the contrary,” says James Rosindell at Imperial College London.

Allowing rare and endangered species in some cases to disappear from ecosystems in the expectation that other perhaps more common and adaptable species will take their place, may be a stretch for most conservationists. But Rosindell and other ecologists say we should be more relaxed about the possible local disappearance of species.

“Trying to freeze communities in stasis may well be pushing against the tide,” says Terry. It may simply be putting another wrench in the “engine” of species turnover, blocking the processes of adaptation that ecosystems require in order to survive. It may end up trying to save ecosystems from themselves.

Mother JonesMar 14, 2026, 3:56 PM

First Trump Scrapped “DEI” Coins. Now the New Dime Is Losing the Olive Branch.

When Charles Thomson and William Barton designed the Great Seal of the United States more than 200 years ago, they were unambiguous about its meaning. A bald eagle would clutch arrows in one set of talons, symbolizing war, and an olive branch in the other, symbolizing peace. In 1945, President Harry Truman officially declared that the bird’s head should always face toward the olive branch—denoting America’s preference for peace.

Now, the administration of the self-proclaimed “president of peace”—who claims to have ended eight wars, even as he starts new ones—will mint dimes without the olive branch at all. It’s part of the US Mint’s semiquincentennial line, a one-year-only redesign of US coinage commemorating America’s 250th birthday.

The new designs were unveiled in December, but the absence of the olive branch on the back of the dime came under renewed scrutiny this past week after it was highlighted by Fortune. News editor Catherina Gioino wrote that the “omission is hard to read as accidental,” calling it a “cultural signal” of our war-torn times.

The medallic artist behind the dime, Eric David Custer, told Spotlight PA in February that the lack of the olive branch is a reference to the American Revolution, when colonists were striving for peace but hadn’t yet achieved it. But Frank L. Holt, an emeritus professor of history at the University of Houston, said in an interview with the Washington Post that the controversy over the dropped olive branch “condemns the whole design.”

“Money talks, but it should speak plainly and with clear purpose,” Holt said.

The commemorative coin line is just one of many ways that the Trump administration has used America’s 250th anniversary as an opportunity to crusade against diversity, equity, and inclusion and rewrite America’s history in Trump’s image.

Indeed, it’s difficult not to see the new dime within the context of other coinage decisions at the US Mint. All of the semiquincentennial designs had to receive final approval from Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, who axed several recommendations developed under President Joe Biden’s administration by the Citizens Coinage Advisory Committee. The rejected designs included coins that featured renowned abolitionist Frederick Douglass and ones commemorating women’s suffrage and school desegregation. In December, US Treasurer Brandon Beach decried those designs as part of Biden’s “DEI and Critical Race Theory policies.”

“The new Semiquincentennial Quarter designs will celebrate American history and the founding of our great nation,” Beach told Fox News. “The Trump administration is dedicated to fostering prosperity and patriotism.”

The commemorative coin line is just one of many ways that the Trump administration has used America’s 250th anniversary as an opportunity to crusade against diversity, equity, and inclusion and rewrite America’s history in President Donald Trump’s image. Scowling next to portraits of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, Trump’s face has graced National Park Service passes and massive banners draped from federal buildings.

And, naturally, Trump’s face was one of the designs proposed by the US Mint for a semiquincentennial $1 coin.

In December, Sens. Catherine Cortez Masto (D-Nev.) and Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.) introduced a bill, titled the “Change Corruption Act,” to block any living president from appearing on US currency.

“While monarchs put their faces on coins,” Cortez Masto said in a press release, “America has never had and never will have a king.”

Mother JonesMar 14, 2026, 2:26 PM

The Trump Administration Will Somehow Make $10 Billion Off the TikTok Deal

The yearslong battle over TikTok’s ownership has concluded in a $10 billion windfall for the Trump administration. On Friday, the Wall Street Journal reported that investors in the recently completed deal to create a US-controlled TikTok will pay the government the exorbitant sum for its role in helping broker the transaction. The fee is about 70 percent of the new US TikTok’s $14 billion valuation.

Finalized in January, the TikTok deal concludes a saga that began in 2019, when US politicians began raising alarms about the Chinese-owned app’s potential threat to national security. In 2024, President Joe Biden signed a bipartisan bill that required TikTok’s Chinese parent company, ByteDance, to sell the app or face a ban.

But Trump—despite being the first president to attempt such a ban—made “saving TikTok” one of his focal points in his second term, recognizing the app’s appeal with young voters. Trump’s solution? Transfer ownership of TikTok’s US operations to an American investor group led by one of his billionaire allies, Larry Ellison.

Critics have raised concerns that the Trump-brokered TikTok sale would enrich the president’s allies.

Ellison is the chairman and co-founder of the software giant Oracle, which now holds an ownership stake and board seat in US TikTok. Private equity firm Silver Lake and Emirati artificial intelligence investment company MGX are also lead investors, while ByteDance retains a 19.9 percent stake, the most permitted by law.

Critics have raised concerns that the Trump-brokered TikTok sale would enrich the president’s allies. Ellison—one of the richest men in the world—hosted a $100,000-per-person fundraising dinner for Trump in 2020. His son, David, has used his recent acquisition of Paramount Skydance as an opportunity to push CBS News to the right. (The Ellison family might soon add CNN to its media empire, a prospect that seems to thrill the Trump administration. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth recently crowed to reporters, “The sooner David Ellison takes over that network, the better.”) MGX, meanwhile, has used the Trump family’s World Liberty cryptocurrency to make a hefty investment in the crypto exchange Binance.

Now, with this $10 billion fee, it’s clear that the TikTok arrangement will be mutually beneficial. As the Journal reports, for advising on similar deals, investment bankers typically receive fees of less than 1 percent of the transaction value. Bank of America, for instance, is receiving $130 million for advising a $71.5 billion Norfolk Southern deal. That’s one of the largest transaction fees on record for a bank—and still remarkably lower than the Trump administration’s payout.

Administration officials told the Journal that the fee accurately reflects Trump’s role in preserving TikTok’s US operations while addressing lawmakers’ security concerns. When reached by the New York Times, spokespeople for Oracle, MGX and Silver Lake either declined to comment or did not respond.

Mother JonesMar 14, 2026, 1:31 PM

A Federal Judge Just Called Out the DOJ for Politically Motivated Prosecutions

Federal Judge James Boasberg quashed two grand jury subpoenas on Friday afternoon that are part of the Justice Department’s criminal investigation into Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell, finding ample evidence that the subpoenas were intended to harass or coerce Powell into lowering interest rates, with no evidence pointing toward wrongdoing.

“A mountain of evidence suggests that the dominant purpose is to harass Powell to pressure him to lower rates,” wrote Boasberg, a district court judge in Washington, DC, referencing many, many social media posts and statements urging Powell to lower interest rates and then demeaning him when he did not. “Against such extensive and persuasive evidence of improper motive, the Government counters with only a tenuous assertion of a legitimate purpose.” Even when invited to submit more evidence, Boasberg noted, prosecutors declined.

US attorney Jeanine Pirro immediately announced in a press conference that she would appeal the decision. Pirro, a longtime Trump toady, called Boasberg’s opinion a dangerous precedent. She insisted that the reasons for investigating Powell—that the Fed’s renovation project is far over-budget and that there may be discrepancies in testimony Powell gave about it to Congress last year—are legitimate grounds for an investigation. Now, she warned, judges would feel empowered to block DOJ’s grand jury investigations.

But Boasberg’s straight-talk opinion was a long time coming. The obvious result of a Justice Department co-opted by a corrupt president was always going to be a department that judges cannot trust. Boasberg’s decision rubs the shine off the Justice Department, exposing it for what it has become.

“The President spent years essentially asking if no one will rid him of this
troublesome Fed Chair,” Boasberg wrote.

Boasberg, who already has a history with the lies and evasions of the Trump Justice Department, was remarkably frank about why he is not giving prosecutors the benefit of the doubt. He laid out quite clearly that Trump wants to get rid of Powell; that allegations against Powell originated with Bill Pulte, the same official who found bogus evidence for the department to go after several other of Trump’s political targets; and that the DOJ has a history of pursuing these phony prosecutions at Trump’s command.

“The President spent years essentially asking if no one will rid him of this
troublesome Fed Chair,” Boasberg wrote. “He then suggested a specific line of investigation into him, which had been proposed by a political appointee with no role in law enforcement, who hinted that it could be a way to remove Powell. The President’s appointed prosecutor promptly complied.”

Boasberg found that the facts of this particular case pointed to improper motive. But he also looked at the bigger picture of the department’s actions in Trump’s second term. For one, Boasberg was clear-eyed about the connection between Trump’s wishes and DOJ’s deeds. “The U.S. Attorney was appointed by the President and can be fired by him,” he wrote, noting that the US attorney across the Potomac was pushed out for refusing to indict James Comey in what was clearly a political prosecution. “The signal to other U.S. Attorneys was hard to miss.” He further noted Pirro’s absurd investigation into six Democratic members of Congress over a video that Trump didn’t like—which a grand jury unanimously rejected. Boasberg likewise found it noteworthy that Trump ordered Attorney General Pam Bondi to prosecute Comey, New York Attorney General Leticia James, and Sen. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.)—and that the department promptly complied.

Justice Department independence was always a norm, not a law. And so Trump’s determination to break down the traditional wall between White House and DOJ and direct investigations and prosecutions was always possible.

This is the context in which Pirro seeks to investigate Powell: with the Justice Department’s prosecutorial reputation in tatters because it has taken up ridiculous case after ridiculous case for the obvious purpose of pursing people Trump doesn’t like. With regard to Powell, as Boasberg pointed out in his opinion, it’s about more than punishing an opponent: It’s about coercing a policy result that Trump doesn’t officially have the power to demand. In this case, the goal is circumventing the Fed’s independence and bulldozing his way to lower interest rates in order to juice the economy in the short term.

Trump insists on treating the Justice Department as his coterie of personal attorneys—he’s even appointed his personal attorneys to top DOJ posts—and Boasberg is treating it as such. This was the predictable outcome of the end of DOJ independence ushered in by both Trump and the Supreme Court.

Justice Department independence was always a norm, not a law. And so Trump’s determination to break down the traditional wall between White House and DOJ and direct investigations and prosecutions was always possible. But the result of an unrestrained and vengeful president taking over the department is that its prosecutors—as well as many of its other officials—lose their credibility.

The Supreme Court further urged the end of Justice Department independence in its immunity decision, Trump v. United States, in July 2024. In that decision, the court’s Republican-appointed majority found that the president could direct the DOJ to launch sham investigations and prosecutions, even in furtherance of a crime, and that this was within the president’s unassailable constitutional powers. It’s long been understood that the attorney general is the nation’s chief law enforcement officer. But in the immunity decision, Chief Justice John Roberts changed that: “The Attorney General…acts as the President’s ‘chief law enforcement officer,’” Roberts wrote.

The blatant use of the Justice Department as a political weapon leads to the obvious conclusion that its actions must be closely scrutinized and possibly rejected.

Roberts’ view is truly an aberration in modern times—and far from what Congress envisioned when it created the Justice Department in 1870. In 2006, for example, the politically motivated firings of at least seven US attorneys exploded into a major scandal of undue political influence by George W. Bush’s White House. In such a world, judges might trust that a criminal investigation was legitimate. Instead, the blatant use of the Justice Department as a political weapon leads to the obvious conclusion that its actions must be closely scrutinized and possibly rejected.

The appeal of this case could pose a serious question for the Supreme Court, should it go that far. The majority has already rolled back the authority of the lower courts since Trump’s return to office, easing some of Trump’s illegal policies past the blockade of the lower courts. If so inclined, the justices could use this as an opportunity to once again make it harder for judges to stand in Trump’s way by adjusting the rules for when a district court judge can quash a grand jury subpoena.

The Supreme Court may not be inclined to do so; as this case demonstrates, it would make it easier for Trump to circumvent Federal Reserve independence that might imperil the economy. This very case seems to demonstrate a worst-case scenario for making it harder to stop improper prosecutions. The justices have signaled at least some dedication to Fed independence, a bedrock of our economic order. At the same time, Roberts is dedicated to empowering the president, even to break the law.

Whether or not this case ultimately reshapes the law, it is a stark declaration of the current state of the Justice Department and the Trump administration: a reputation so sullied by corrupt behavior that it is now imperiling its own corrupt ends.

Mother JonesMar 14, 2026, 7:01 AM

The Racist Hoax That Changed Boston

In 1989, Chuck Stuart called 911 on his car phone to report a shooting.

He said he and his wife were leaving a birthing class at a Boston hospital when a man forced him to drive into the mixed-race Mission Hill neighborhood and shot them both. Stuart’s wife, Carol, was seven months pregnant. She would die that night, hours after her son was delivered by cesarean section, and days later, her son would die, too.

Stuart said he saw the man who did it: a Black man in a tracksuit.

Within hours, the killing had the city in a panic, and Boston police were tearing through Mission Hill looking for a suspect.

For a whole generation of Black men in Mission Hill who were subjected to frisks and strip searches, this investigation shaped their relationship with police. And it changed the way Boston viewed itself when the story took a dramatic turn and the true killer was revealed.

This week on Reveal, in partnership with the Murder in Boston podcast and associate editor and columnist Adrian Walker of the Boston Globe, we bring you the untold story of the Stuart murder: one that exposed truths about race and crime that few white people in power wanted to confront.

This is an update of a show that originally aired in May 2024.

Mother JonesMar 13, 2026, 7:54 PM

This Oscar-Nominated Doc Says Now’s the Time to Resist

Pavel Talankin is a teacher from a small mining town in Central Russia. He spent two and a half years documenting how his school was conscripted into Putin’s war propaganda machine for the Oscar-nominated documentary, Mr. Nobody Against Putin.

After Russia invaded Ukraine, his school changed almost overnight– teachers ordered to deliver government scripts and students marched through military drills. Talankin was required to film it all as the school videographer, and what he witnessed made him want to walk away from his job entirely. Instead, he connected with documentary director David Borenstein, and together they turned his footage into a feature film.

Borenstein said Talankin “wanted to show how quickly totalitarianism can take over a school, a workplace, a government, and how our complicity becomes fuel in that fire.”

It’s a message Talankin originally hoped to share with fellow Russians. But he now believes the film speaks to a far wider audience than he could ever have anticipated when he began filming.

He points to a joke circulating in Eastern Europe: the Belarusians say they and the Russians are watching the same TV series- only Russia is a few episodes behind.

“I am sorry to tell you,” he says, “that America has begun watching this series, too.”

Mother JonesMar 13, 2026, 5:47 PM

The Other Iran War Crisis: It’s Threatening Global Food Supplies

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

Up until the end of February, a steady flow of ships bound for destinations across the world would pass daily through the Strait of Hormuz. A narrow channel running between Oman and Iran, the waterway serves as the only natural maritime link between the Persian Gulf and the global economy. That all changed on March 2, when, after days of military strikes led by the S and Israel, Iran effectively closed the strait for the first time in history and warned that any ships passing through would be fired upon. Ever since, vessels moving through the channel have been attacked and set ablaze, and hundreds of tankers remain stranded. At least 1,800 people have been killed in the war, including Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and other top government officials.

The Persian Gulf is a linchpin of the planet’s oil and gas production; normally, roughly one-fifth of global oil and gas flows through the strait. Now, as it remains embattled, oil and gas prices have surged, and many experts warn an energy crisis is imminent. Restaurants across India are scaling back operations and warning of closures amid fuel shortages from the maritime blockade, while cooking gas prices are spiking in Sri Lanka.

“The fact that obviously nothing is leaving means that there’s going to be a large hole in the market for fertilizer.”

Another world crisis sparked by the war in Iran may also be in the offing. That’s because the region’s oil and gas production has made it one of the world’s leading exporters of nitrogen fertilizers, which are indispensable to the global food system. To produce the chemicals used to grow much of the planet’s crops, natural gas is broken down to extract hydrogen, which is combined with nitrogen to make ammonia, and then mixed with carbon dioxide to make urea. All told, nearly a third of the global trade for nitrogen fertilizer passes through the Strait of Hormuz, while almost half of the world’s sulfur, essential in producing phosphate fertilizers, also travels through the corridor.

The waterway is a lifeline for food, too. Palm oil exports coming from Southeast Asia face potential major disruptions. Grain shipments headed to Gulf countries reliant on rice and wheat imports have been stalled.

“A worrying amount of food, or inputs into modern agriculture, are going through this very small channel,” said Ginni Braich, a data scientist who studies food insecurity at the University of Colorado Boulder’s Better Planet Laboratory. She estimates that the strait is in the top 20th percentile of all the worlds’ transportation corridors just based on the sheer volume of food that passes through it.

The sudden and cascading effects of trade halting through the waterway, according to Braich, “really underscores how interconnected everything is, and how fragile…just any small amount of disruption can have huge aftershocks that reverberate all around the world.”

The timing, Braich said, could not be worse, as spring planting in the northern hemisphere—crop farmers’ biggest season—is approaching. “So, basically, vessels that were leaving the Middle East today would be arriving in mid-April,” she said. “Now, the fact that obviously nothing is leaving means that there’s going to be a large hole in the market for fertilizer.”

“There are many stops along the way from closing the Strait of Hormuz to a child in Malawi being fed.”

If the war persists, experts warn that the drop in supply and the increase of cargo insurance premiums and freight rates could raise prices for everyone along the supply chain. Unlike with oil, there is no meaningful strategic reserve for nitrogen-based fertilizer, so there’s no equivalent stockpile to help buffer the shocks.

While the US does produce some of its own fertilizer, domestic producers cannot rapidly replace millions of tons of fertilizer supplies. Other countries more reliant on fertilizer imports from the Middle East, such as India, will be hit hard by the cessation of traffic on the strait. China, Indonesia, Morocco, and several sub-Saharan African nations are also expected to be affected by the global gridlock of sulfur exports flowing from the Gulf.

Moreover, Braich warned, any prolonged increase in shipping and inventory costs “is going to be felt by the consumer.”

For some, the impact is already here. Prices for key fertilizer products are up because of the war and are expected to squeeze growers’ profit margins—which could lead farmers to ration fertilizer use, reducing yields, or even to shift from planting input-intensive crops. Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins told reporters in Atlanta, Georgia, on Tuesday that the Trump administration was “looking at every possible option” to address “skyrocketing” fertilizer costs for US farmers “based on actions on the other side of the world.”

About 4 billion people on the planet eat food grown with synthetic nitrogen fertilizers. Roughly half of the global population, in other words, is alive because of these chemicals converted into nutrients for plants, said Lorenzo Rosa, who researches sustainable energy, water, and food systems at the Carnegie Institution for Science at Stanford University.

Of course, the fact that natural gas is the key to mass-producing synthetic fertilizers carries its own terrible climate implications. Together, manufacturing and applying synthetic fertilizers to fields and farms accounts for over 2 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions—just about equal to the CO2 emissions from global aviation. There are low-emissions alternatives to this process, Rosa argued: Nitrogen could be recycled from waste, and natural gas plants could be powered by local or renewable energy sources and built closer to the farms that require fertilizer.

The US “will ensure the FREE FLOW of ENERGY to the WORLD,” Trump wrote on social media. He made no mention of fertilizer, or food.

Normally, the fossil fuel-based, centralized—and, thus, fragile—supply chain for fertilizer and food is far cheaper than its alternative. But major shocks like the U.S.-Israel war against Iran expose the dangerous vulnerability of that system, as efficient and financially sound as it may be. “At some point, a country will have to decide: ‘Do I want the cheap fertilizer, importing it from the Strait of Hormuz or another country? Or do I prefer to pay a green premium and have my own domestic production and energy and food security?’” said Rosa.

USDA Secretary Rollins acknowledged this vulnerability in Tuesday’s press conference. “We are getting almost all of our urea, almost all of our phosphate, almost all of our nitrogen from other countries around the world, and that has to stop,” she said.

The catch, however, is that decentralizing this supply chain could inadvertently create a green divide—splitting the world between the nations and farmers who can afford domestically produced fertilizer and those who can’t. Many countries confronting widespread famine in Africa, for instance, already pay the highest fertilizer prices in the world and are unable to withstand further inflation.

“There are many stops along the way from closing the Strait of Hormuz to a child in Malawi being fed,” said Cary Fowler, president of the nonprofit Food Security Leadership Council and former US Special Envoy for Global Food Security in the Biden administration. “The clear thing is that those two things are connected.”

The same countries that stand to face the most harmful food security effects because of the conflict in Iran are also the ones struggling to feed their citizens following the collapse of global food aid after President Donald Trump dissolved the US Agency for International Development, or USAID, last year. Emergencies like these are where the international community’s response becomes increasingly important, Fowler said.

In addition to the dissolution of USAID, which halted international research efforts and initiatives to improve farming practices in lower-income nations, the World Food Programme has in recent months sounded the alarm over historically low donations from the US and other major Western donors.

“If we don’t invest in that sustainable productivity growth, then we put ourselves in a situation where we’re going to need a lot more humanitarian aid, particularly when there’s flare-ups like we’re experiencing now,” said Fowler. “And that gives us another choice—whether to provide that humanitarian aid or not. And that’s a choice of whether we want to, at least in the short-term, solve the problem. Or do we want to watch children starve to death on TV?”

It’s not clear how long the strait will remain closed, although Trump has swung between stating the war with Iran could stretch on through April, if not longer, and declaring it nearly done. Last week, the president announced that the US might begin to escort oil tankers through the embattled channel. “No matter what, the United States will ensure the FREE FLOW of ENERGY to the WORLD,” Trump wrote on social media, before later declaring “death, fire, and fury” if Iran continues its shipping blockade. On Sunday, he told Fox News that ships holding there should “show some guts” and push through.

The president made no mention of fertilizer—or food.

Rahul Bali of WABE, Atlanta’s NPR station and a Grist partner, contributed reporting.

Mother JonesMar 13, 2026, 3:36 PM

Tommy Tuberville Didn’t Just “Suggest” Muslims Are the Enemy. He Said It With His Chest.

On Thursday, college football coach turned Senate dunce Tommy Tuberville took to X to quote-retweet a post from the account @EndWokeness. The original tweet were side-by-side photos of New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani and a plane hitting the second tower on 9/11. “Less than 25 years apart,” the account wrote.

Tuberville’s contribution? “The enemy is inside the gates,” he wrote.

The enemy is inside the gates. https://t.co/YSNHIpDnds

— Coach Tommy Tuberville (@SenTuberville) March 12, 2026

That story was picked up quickly the likes of the Washington Post, Fox News and Politico, which even wondered aloud on X if Tuberville was suggesting that Muslims were the enemy.

Actually, no. On Friday, Tuberville clarified his intentions. “To be clear, I didn’t ‘suggest’ Islamists are the enemy,” he wrote. “I said it plainly.”

Got it, Coach.

To be clear, I didn’t “suggest” Islamists are the enemy.

I said it plainly. https://t.co/3D6RK9LTbO

— Coach Tommy Tuberville (@SenTuberville) March 12, 2026

And he’s still going:

Democrats are calling me a “racist” for speaking the truth about Radical Islam.

But it isn’t a race. It is a DEATH CULT that teaches its followers to kill Americans.

— Coach Tommy Tuberville (@SenTuberville) March 13, 2026

Really clears things up.

Mother JonesMar 13, 2026, 11:30 AM

Utah Moves to Rein In Its Runaway Private Adoption Industry

For years, Utah has been a hub of the private adoption industry, drawing pregnant women and prospective adoptive parents from across the country thanks to its notoriously permissive laws and thriving network of agencies. But the practice can become exploitative, as I reported in an investigation for Mother Jones and PBS News Hour last year, with some expecting mothers feeling pressured or rushed into relinquishing their babies after being enticed to Utah by promises of cash stipends and free lodging.

Now, Utah lawmakers are dramatically reining in how adoption agencies operate in the state. The state legislature passed a bill late last month with a veto-proof supermajority that will increase oversight and transparency of the industry and introduce protections for birth parents. Gov. Spencer Cox is expected to sign the legislation into law this month.

“We need to take care of them, and it didn’t seem like these women were being taken care of.”

The legislation introduces a 72-hour revocation period after adoption papers are signed, during which a birth mother can change her mind for any reason; prohibits agencies from advertising financial incentives to expecting mothers; bans lump sums paid out to birth mothers; requires adoption agencies be registered as nonprofits by 2027; and creates a consortium of adoption agencies, run by the state’s Department of Health and Human Services, to oversee the implementation of the new guardrails and collect data on the industry.

Republican state Rep. Katy Hall, the bill’s sponsor and a nurse who worked for years in postpartum care, knows that birth mothers are in a fragile place. “We need to take care of them, and it didn’t seem like these women were being taken care of,” she says.

She’s not sure she was aware of the state’s reputation as a hub for adoption tourism until watching the News Hour investigation. The video tells the story of Tia Goins, a mother who was flown from Detroit to Salt Lake City by adoption agency Brighter Adoptions and, she says, pressured to give up her child. Only after she relinquished her child did agency owner Sandi Quick coordinate Goins’ flight home. On the way to the airport, Quick—who now goes by Sandi Benson—gave Goins $4,000 in cash.

(Benson said last year that she had always centered the needs of birth mothers and that she ensures that mothers “fully understand the implications of adoption.” The adoptive mother said that Goins was a “willing and active participant” in the process.)

Adoption reform has historically been contentious in Utah, in part due to a strong adoption industry lobby. But a stream of investigative stories—The Cut, the Times of London, and the Salt Lake Tribune also published investigations into predatory practices in Utah—helped bring other adoption agencies to the table, says Hall. “I think as those other agencies saw the reputation of Utah possibly being damaged by those couple bad actors in the space, they were more willing to say, ‘Okay we see that something needs to change and we’re willing to do what that takes.'”

“The reality was there was a reputation to address,” says Democratic state Sen. Luz Escamilla, who has pushed for adoption reform for years. She notes that the state has been home to several high-profile adoption scandals over the years, including the case of Paul Petersen, the Arizona official who pleaded guilty in 2020 to human smuggling and other charges for operating a multi-state adoption scheme that brought in pregnant women from the Marshall Islands.

Brighter Adoptions, meanwhile, announced late last month that it was suddenly closing. “The legal landscape of adoption has changed significantly in the last year,” Benson wrote in an email to prospective adoptive families, “making advertising more difficult” and leading to “opposition in bringing moms to Utah.” (Benson didn’t respond to requests for comment for this story.)

“I think I’m probably still a little bit in shock,” says Ashley Mitchell, cofounder of Utah Adoption Rights and a longtime advocate for adoption reform. “When we had that final vote go through the senate to pass, I just cried.” Mitchell says Utah will now be operating with similar legislation to other states. “I think it’s embarrassing,” she says, “that it’s taken so long and so many people have had to have been hurt.”

Mother JonesMar 13, 2026, 11:30 AM

I Analyzed 1,500 “Pizza” Mentions in the Epstein Files. Here’s What I Found.

Less than two months before his arrest on sex-trafficking charges in 2019, Jeffrey Epstein was on top of the world—at least going by his iMessages.

Over the course of three days in May, he fired off more than 60 texts to his powerful besties. A self-appointed expert on any topic, Epstein sparred with a cocky Steve Bannon over Trump’s first-term trade war with China and discussed Bannon’s recent trip to Norway.

For reasons we’ll perhaps never know—Bannon didn’t get back to me—their banter turned to the political leanings of a mass killer.

“Did you tell Norwegians that the child murderer was a lefty radical?” Epstein asked Bannon—presumably a reference to Anders Breivik, the far-right extremist who killed 77 people in the country in 2011, most of them teenagers. “Yes yes yes,” Bannon replied. “Went over well!!!”

Epstein noted the killer “gave a Nazi salute” and claimed he’d also made an antisemitic crack comparing Jews and pizza: “The pizza doesn’t scream when you throw it in the oven.”

This joke, if you can call it that, isn’t about pizza, not really. But it is one of nearly 1,500 mentions of “pizza”—literal, figurative, or just plain strange—across more than 10,600 pages culled from the Epstein files that are breathing new life to an old conspiracy. Internet sleuths have seized on the appearance of the word “pizza” in the files as code for children, just as they did during Pizzagate, the thoroughly debunked conspiracy theory that spun the WikiLeaks release of Hillary Clinton aide John Podesta’s emails into false claims that Democrats ran a child-sex ring out of Comet Ping Pong, a D.C. pizzeria. The use of “cheese pizza” in those emails was first suggested by a 4chan user to be coded language for “C.P.” or “child porn,” while “pizza” itself was used to mean girls, alongside other supposed shorthand terms tied to pedophilia.

“What the fuck is pizza? How far does this go? How come this never got released before? What is happening?”

This has convinced some readers of the Epstein files that Pizzagate was “right this whole time” and that Epstein was involved. Tucker Carlson tweeted that “it looks like Pizzagate is basically real.” Talking about the Epstein files, the world’s biggest podcaster, Joe Rogan, complained: “What the fuck is pizza? How far does this go? How come this never got released before? What is happening?”

Meanwhile, Congresswoman Lauren Boebert asked Secretary Clinton during a House Oversight Committee hearing about whether she had examined links between Epstein and Pizzagate. “Comet Ping Pong Pizza, used as code, possibly?” she pressed. Clinton was withering: “I can’t believe you’re even referencing it.”

Madam Secretary, I can take things from here.

A photo of a string of lights that lead to a neon sign that reads "Comet" in red. Around the words "Comet" are triangles in green, yellow, blue and pink.

Comet Ping Pong, the D.C. pizzeria falsely linked to a child-sex conspiracy in 2016. The release of the Epstein files has revived those claims.Michael S. Williamson/The Washington Post/Getty

Using the A.I. tool Claude Co-work, I pulled every “pizza” reference from the Justice Department’s searchable Epstein website, then reviewed and labeled them—bank statements, emails, spam, legal filings, text chains—flagging duplicates along the way.

What’s in abundant evidence is that Epstein’s crimes were horrific and far-reaching, and left scores of victims still seeking justice. The vast trove released under the Epstein Files Transparency Act has already toppled prominent figures by revealing the international conspiracy of silence that enabled his abuse—sparking new investigations here and abroad.

But a pizza conspiracy? Not so much.

On that front, the big finding in my analysis was pure ubiquity. Americans adore pizza, after all: More than one-in-ten are eating pizza on any given day. Epstein and his crew, well, they loved pizza too. Seen this way, it’s no surprise that pizza appears throughout a trove that reconstructs everything that touched Epstein’s life over a decade, another lens through which to view his personality and his crimes. Or if you’re a Pizzagate proponent, distract you from them.

It appears in a 2001 Bear Stearns statement tied to a shadowy Epstein trust, which records the sale of 500 California Pizza Kitchen shares through another entity later run by Epstein’s lawyer, Darren Indyke—who is now in the process of settling a case brought by Epstein’s victims, alleging Indyke facilitated sex trafficking. (Indyke’s lawyer said in an email he agreed to settle to “achieve finality” and “did nothing wrong.”) Pizza appears again in about $2 million worth of Domino’s Pizza stock trades in April 2012 for a firm associated with the husband of Lesley Groff, Epstein’s longtime executive assistant. It appears in the text logs and transcripts of federal agents, and petty-cash logs for Epstein’s staff, and menus across Manhattan and West Palm Beach. In Little Saint James, a.k.a. Epstein Island, staff proposed paying a popular “sailboat pizzeria” for extra water-borne security to deter unwanted visitors. “Better than pizza,” claims Massage for Dummies, a book that is excerpted multiple times in the files because Epstein gave the book to victims he paid to massage him. It’s what Epstein victim Virginia Giuffre, then 17, said she ate after he sexually assaulted her during a massage on her first trip to New York—slipping out of the mansion for a “giant slice of pepperoni pizza… the best I had ever had.”

Pizza also provided social grease, bringing the rich and powerful together inside Epstein’s lavish Manhattan mansion throughout the decade when the deceased financier was rebuilding his social circle after his first arrest and incarceration—dishing out slices just as he did favors and money. To aid in such dinner parties, Woody Allen’s wife Soon-Yi Previn once sent Epstein’s staff in 2015 a prim dinner-party tutorial—flowers on the table for height, never forget salad plates nor candles for “romantic mood”—scolding them for serving pizza from the Mark Hotel last instead of first. Previn didn’t return my emails; faux pas experts can debate.

Food chat was overlaid with the coordination of Epstein’s Stendra medication for erectile dysfunction.

Nearly half of all pizza references I analyzed in the files are found in personal emails and texts, Epstein’s and those of various figures in his multiverse. Plenty of the Pizzagate-style sleuthing has centered on correspondence involving Epstein’s urologist, Dr. Harry Fisch, in which Fisch repeatedly used the phrase “pizza and grape soda.” Fisch didn’t respond to my email or texts asking if there was anything more to these pizza references. But the references were among many texts about snacks and treats. They discuss Jewish deli food, like kasha from 2nd Ave Deli, pastrami, kishkas, and Chinese cookies. “Greenberg’s bakery just started making pop-tarts,” Fisch enthused; Epstein set a date to go. Fisch shared photos of the food he mentioned throughout, including one of literal pizza and actual grape soda. All this food chat was overlaid with dinner invites to hang out with Woody Allen, and the coordination of Epstein’s Stendra medication for erectile dysfunction.

In August 2017, Epstein wrote an email berating financier Leon Black, with whom he was falling out, for ignoring his acumen: “LEON You are not running a pizza place, a pilates studio in queens or an internet start up. you have a 6 billion operation.” Asked if this mention was a Pizzagate euphemism, a spokesperson for Black said, “This is ridiculous. There is no other interpretation than another of the many derogatory comments by Epstein about the way Mr. Black’s family office was being run which along with his constant demand for more in fees is among the reasons Mr. Black fired him.”

In August 2018, Microsoft’s first CTO Nathan Myhrvold wrote to tell Epstein he was off to Italy to research a book about pizza—what would become Modernist Pizza: three hardcover volumes, 2021 retail price $425. Epstein forwarded a chain email listing discounts at pizzerias (“10% off” for the over-sixties) to his partner-in-crime, Ghislaine Maxwell, and then to Jean-Luc Brunel, the deceased modeling honcho who took his own life while awaiting trial for sex crimes in France in 2022. “Don’t lose the list,” Brunel replied. “Yoou [sic] might want to use it one day.” Todd Meister—the ex-husband of Hilton heiress (and Paris’s sister) Nicky Rothschild—forwarded Epstein flyers for a secretive, invite-only roving strip night known as Saint Venus Theater, featuring complimentary pizza at 11 p.m. “A gift,” he wrote. Neither Myhrvold nor Meister got back to me.

These are just a few of the many strangely revealing pizza mentions in the pile. But it’s one man’s unrivaled love for a New York slice that dominates roughly a third of all the pizza correspondence I uncovered.

Bobby Slayton is a retired stand-up comic once billed as the “Pitbull of Comedy.” When he toured New York City, Epstein offered him an apartment at 301 East 66th Street, the complex where he also housed models and, at times, former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak.

“The only thing I’m guilty of is being friends with that idiot.”

When I spoke to Slayton recently about Epstein, he was impassioned. “I never saw any of this shit with the young girls,” he said. “I just wanted this in writing—that I was never a witness, or a party to his repulsive activities, okay? I mean, the only thing I’m guilty of is being friends with that idiot.”

Slayton told Mother Jones in 2020 that “Jeffrey was a giant comedy fan, huge.” And Slayton told me that he was willing to indulge Epstein because he was thrilled by the free apartment, which he dubbed “Chez Slay” in scores of emails. “If an apartment is empty it will save me a ton of dough!” he wrote to Lesley Groff, in May 2014. “Then I can afford to take JE out for pizza!” Could that be code? In the screenplay version of their email relationship, Slayton’s standing offer to take Epstein out for pizza would be a running gag. He got his wish, at least once, in October 2013, when the records show they met at Arturo’s Pizza, one of Slayton’s favorite haunts.

Bobby Slayton, an older man with white hair and black-framed glasses, points toward the camera while holding a microphone during a stand-up comedy performance. He wears a black T-shirt against a dark stage backdrop.

Bobby Slayton, the self-described “Pitbull of Comedy,” in 2022. “I’m kind of known as a foodie and a pizza freak,” he said.Michael S. Schwartz/Getty

“I’m kind of known as a foodie and a pizza freak,” Slayton told me. “It’s right there in front of you: I’m really talking about fucking pizza, goddamn it.”

On this point, the evidence is incontrovertible.

Across a six-and-a-half-year arc during which Epstein was living as a convicted sex offender—January 2013 to May 2019—Slayton chronicled his pizza exploits to Epstein and Groff with the dedication of a battlefield historian. “Walked 65 blocks in fucking FREEZING weather to the Village for pizza,” he wrote in one of the earliest exchanges. “Gonna TRY to walk back and conk out by 9PM like the old Jew I am.” After three of his four Long Island shows were cancelled the following month, Groff offered Epstein’s apartment so he “can hole up and write, drink wine, eat pizza and sleep!” In May 2013, he wrote that he “walked 50 blocks to East Harlem Patsy’s for pizza,” delighted by the money he’d saved on lodging: “Money I can spend on pizza AND wine!!!!” An August 2017 trek, Slayton claimed, spanned 300 blocks and hit Rao’s, John’s, Joe’s, and Pasquale Jones—all New York institutions. “How do you stay fit with all that pizza!?” Groff marveled at one point. “Wait, you are probably walking there from the apartment.” In one of his last pizza dispatches, he’s practically giddy, describing Christmas at Spago, where he ordered the off-menu “salmon pizza with caviar”—“Wolfgang Puck’s signature pie,” he raved. “He used to call it the ‘Jewish Pizza!’”

“I’m glad YOU like the jew pie!” Groff wrote. “I’ll stick with a plain cheese!” (In actual fact, Groff once picked up a Lean Cuisine vegetable pizza from a Food Emporium in New Canaan, Connecticut: $3.89.)

His infatuation with “real pizza, an honest-to-God pizza,” he told me, was “nothing to do with children or pedophilia.”

“A real fucking pizza. That’s it. That’s it. On my mother’s life!”

Slayton’s ties to Epstein weren’t only about pizza. Epstein introduced him to Woody Allen. “He wanted me to bring comedians over—and the comedians wanted to meet Woody Allen,” Slayton told me. He recalled a few dinners at Epstein’s townhouse. “They’d put out a sumptuous meal, and [Epstein] would sit there with Oreo cookies and a grilled-cheese sandwich,” he said. “He ate like a five-year-old, you know?”

Still, all that pizza diplomacy paid off: Slayton landed a small role in Allen’s 2016 Amazon miniseries, Crisis in Six Scenes.

A black-and-white photo of a slight, bespectacled man tossing pizza dough into the air in front of a stone oven in a kitchen with rows of other untossed dough on the table.

Woody Allen in “Play It Again, Sam,” 1972. In the Epstein files, Allen is a recurring dinner guest—and his wife Soon-Yi Previn once chided Epstein’s staff for serving the pizza course in the wrong order.Screen Archives/Getty

Receipts themselves show why pizza is everywhere in the Epstein files.

The Epstein Pizza Economy was geographically vast. Nearly 30 percent of the pizza mentions I found appeared in financial records—bank statements, cash ledgers, and food orders. I identified more than $2,400 in pizza charges on Epstein’s own accounts. By dollar amount, his favorite spot was Pizza Al Fresco, a palm tree-studded courtyard restaurant about a mile from his Palm Beach compound. Records from his local New York joint, Pizza Park Pizzeria on Manhattan’s East Side, go back even further—to 2004, when he picked up orders for $8.50.

Seamless deliveries for Karyna Shuliak, Epstein’s last known girlfriend, suggest pricier tastes: Burrata Pizza from Lavo ($30.05); Fresh Margherita from Mediterraneo (with apple pie and tiramisu, $45.80); Funghi Pizza from Bella Blu ($30.05); Reginella Pizza from Numero 28 UES ($20.51).

Financial documents gathered during the 2000s also include extensive petty-cash logs meticulously tracking daily expenditures for groceries, gas, and travel for Epstein’s staff. The logs appear to have been compiled by Epstein staffer Janusz Banasiak, who was subpoenaed to give evidence against his boss. From 2005 to 2006, I found about 40 charges for Papa John’s pizza at $12.77—the price of a large pie at the time, including tax.

“Remember that you see nothing, hear nothing, say nothing, except to answer a question directed at you.”

Scroll a little further into this file, beyond the hundreds of dollars worth of pizza orders, and be reminded that you don’t need to hunt for code to find Epstein’s darkness. In this case: a “household manual” for his Palm Beach estate at 358 El Brillo Way. “Remember that you see nothing, hear nothing, say nothing, except to answer a question directed at you,” it reads. The manual was dated Valentine’s Day 2005, exactly one month before a Florida couple came to the Palm Beach Police Department alleging “some kind of sexual relationship” between their 14-year-old daughter and a local older man—sparking the initial investigation against Epstein.

A woman in a white tank top stands next to an open refrigerator in a kitchen. The refrigerator, which is taller than the woman, is stocked with containers of food, among which are mustard, strawberries, whipped cream, yogurt and eggs.

Ghislaine Maxwell at one of Epstein’s properties. The files are full of mundane details—grocery runs, pizza deliveries, Lean Cuisine receipts—that still offer a lens into the conspiracy of silence that enabled his abuse.Department of Justice

As federal investigators pursued leads into Epstein’s crimes, his death, and Ghislaine Maxwell’s conduct, Pizzagate conspiracism inevitably bled into the case files. Days after Epstein’s arrest in 2019, emails from a redacted sender apparently caught in the blast radius, complained that “things have really revved up.”

“I have found myself at the center of the QAnon conspiracy,” the writer said, referring to the Pizzagate-offshoot theory that Donald Trump was secretly fighting a global, deep-state cabal. “It has become a very distressing situation,” they added, reporting that Q followers were posting “violent messages daily.” Fearing for their safety, they wrote that they hoped the FBI was doing something about Pizzagate.

The files reveal the methodical work of investigators pressing ahead regardless, the ubiquity of pizza visible every step along the way. The day after Epstein died in New York City’s Metropolitan Correctional Center, text logs between federal agents show the logistics of gearing up for raids. As one crew flew to St. Thomas, another agent placed an order for 19 pizzas. After Epstein’s apparent suicide, investigators soon interrogated the on-duty prison guards, seizing their bank statements (and bringing more pizza orders into the files), and they canvassed a pizzeria where, according to the documents, a correctional officer met another individual. It was fruitless: “The pizza establishment did not have working cameras.”

In May 2021, two federal agents concluded an interview with a practicing psychotherapist and reflexologist about her work at Epstein’s Zorro Ranch between 1999 and 2008—an hour occasionally interrupted by her dogs, Irvin and Stella, according to the transcript. Before the recorder clicked off and the agents hit the road, something appetizing wafted through. Cue small talk.

“Smells like somebody’s bakin’ bread,” the subject said. After a beat, she corrected herself: “No, I don’t think so. I think the place next door is a pizza place.”

Mother JonesMar 12, 2026, 4:09 PM

Trump’s New Nuclear Nightmare in Iran

Donald Trump says he’s bombing Iran to prevent the regime from obtaining a nuclear weapon. But he may be providing with Tehran more incentive to sprint toward developing a nuclear bomb, which is now easier for Iran to make—thanks to Trump.

After Trump, during his first White House stint, ripped up the Iran nuclear deal that President Barack Obama and other world leaders had negotiated with Tehran in 2015, Iran responded by enriching its uranium to a much higher level than it had been doing under the agreement. Because of that move, it now possesses an estimated 970 pounds of highly enriched uranium that’s a lot closer to the level of refinement needed for bomb-grade material. And international nuclear inspectors—who were able to keep track of Iran’s uranium stockpile before Trump bombed Iran’s nuclear facilities in June—aren’t sure where this uranium is now.

“I see no sign that they knew what they were doing. It seemed to be just literally bomb, bomb, bomb. There didn’t seem to be a plan for how you were going to get that particular material. If there is one, it hasn’t emerged.”

In short, with his war in Iran, Trump has created a big, possibly catastrophic problem: A half-ton of highly enriched uranium, which can be made bomb-ready, is somewhere…out there—available for use by Iran’s new regime or perhaps not fully secured and susceptible to theft or expropriation.

I spoke to Joe Cirincione, a veteran nuclear policy expert, about this stockpile and the challenges it presents.

He notes that it would not take much for Iran to enrich this material—a gaseous form of uranium—from its present state of 60-percent enrichment to the 90-percent level necessary for a bomb. (Uranium at the 60-percent level can be used for a crude and large bomb that would be akin to the weapon dropped on Hiroshima but not a bomb that could be delivered by a missile.) He points out that under the Iran deal that Trump rejected, Iran had only been enriching uranium to the 4-percent level.

Once uranium is enriched to 90 percent, there are other critical steps required to manufacture a bomb that Cirincione estimates could take Iran nine months to a year, and this could happen perhaps even after the massive US-Israeli bombing campaign on the country.

So, Cirincione says, when Trump, to justify the war, proclaimed Iran was two weeks away from producing a nuclear weapon, he was misleading the public. And he was also wrong to have boasted of destroying Iran’s nuclear program last year. “This is the great fallacy of the June bombing, where Trump said he obliterated the program,” Cirincione remarks. “All of us knew at the time he hadn’t gotten that 60-percent enriched uranium. It was too deeply buried…So now it’s sitting there as literally a ticking time bomb.”

Then what ought to be done now about this treasure chest of uranium that is believed to be at a facility deep underground near the city of Isfahan? Cirincione says there are only two alternatives:

The United States either has to conduct some high-risk military maneuver where we would land people from the 82nd Airborne or an Israeli commando unit into the site at Isfahan and try to find the uranium, go down hundreds of meters underground, retrieve the uranium and pull it out or perhaps destroy it on site. That is a high risk proposition.

What you’re left with is really the only other solution where we started: a negotiated deal. You have to get Iran’s agreement to secure that material, declare it, allow inspectors, and then either secure it under inspection or downblend it—the process in reverse, bring it down to a 3-percent or 4-percent level. That’s the only two solutions to this problem.

As of now, it’s hard to envision productive negotiations between the United States and Iran—especially since Trump launched this war while nuclear talks were still underway. And the new supreme leader is said to be more of a hardliner than his father was.

Cirincione believes that eventually there will be some sort of negotiations:

Almost all wars end by some sort of negotiation. If you project forward several weeks, it’s going to have to end. Usually there’s some sort of arrangement that’s made to end a war. With Donald Trump, who seems to be flying by the seat of his pants and making this up as it goes along, we just don’t know. But it’s possible that Trump has put us into the worst of all possible worlds. He’s made it impossible for us to have a negotiated solution to this. And we can’t use any military means to solve the problem. So we’re left in this worst of all worlds, which is Iran is holding all the nuclear cards at the end of this war.

So did Trump and his advisers not think hard before the war about what to do about this stockpile of HEU? There have so far been no indications that Trump, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and whoever else was involved prepared for this part of the mess. “This may be the worst planned war in history,” Cirincione says. “I see no sign that they knew what they were doing. It seemed to be just literally bomb, bomb, bomb. There didn’t seem to be a plan for how you were going to get at that particular material. If there is one, it hasn’t emerged.”

He adds: “As you know, the members of the Senate and the House that have emerged from classified briefings on the war are appalled at the lack of planning, not just for what they were going to do when they started the war, what the goals were, but there seems to be no plan for how to end this war.”

That ending, whatever it may be, has to take into account this half-ton of uranium, which exists because the Iran deal was dumped. It is a crisis of Trump’s own making.

Mother JonesMar 12, 2026, 11:30 AM

Bugs Were Supposed to be the Future of Food. Now, the Industry is Collapsing.

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

“We have to get used to the idea of eating insects.”

This proclamation came from, of all people, an insect researcher. Dutch entomologist Marcel Dicke pitched eating bugs in his 2010 TED talk as critical to sustainably feeding a growing human population, because insects have a much smaller carbon footprint than beef, pork, and chicken.

To make his point, he even featured photographs of what might be a common meal in this bold new future: a stir-fry with mealworm larvae, mushrooms, and snap peas, finished with a chocolate dessert topped with a large fried cricket.

Three years later, the United Nations published a comprehensive report that echoed many of Dicke’s ideas and argued that insects could be a more eco-friendly food source not just for humans, but also for livestock. The report received widespread media coverage and helped to trigger a wave of investment from venture capital firms and governments alike into insect farming startups across Europe, the US, Canada, and beyond, totaling some $2 billion.

“Evidence is building that there’s a form of sentience there in insects.”

There’s a ring of truth, it turns out, to the conspiracy theory that the globalist elites want us to eat bugs.

This money was pouring into insect agriculture at a time when investors and policymakers were hungry for new models to fix the conventional meat industry’s massive carbon footprint. And what’s more disruptive and novel than farming and eating bugs?

You personally might recoil at the thought of eating fried crickets or roasted mealworms, but many cultures around the world consume insects, either caught from the wild or farmed on a small scale. And while grubs don’t feature prominently in current paleo cookbooks, our paleolithic ancestors most certainly ate plenty of bugs.

But the past decade has shown that even if you build an insect farm, the global market may not come. Of the 20 or so largest insect farming startups, almost a quarter have gone belly up in recent years, including the very largest, Ÿnsect, which ceased operations in December.

All told, shuttered insect farming startups account for almost half of all investment into the industry. “Things have gone from bad to worse for the big insect factory business model,” one insect farming CEO said late last year in a YouTube video.

And Vox can exclusively report that plans to build a large insect farm in Nebraska—a joint project between Tyson Foods, America’s largest meat company, and Protix, now the world’s second largest insect farming company—are indefinitely on hold.

Beyond the financial woes of the insect farming industry, some philosophers worry about the ethical implications of potentially farming tens of trillions of bugs for food, as emerging research suggests insects may well have some form of consciousness and hold the capacity to feel pain and suffer.

“Evidence is building that there’s a form of sentience there in insects,” Jonathan Birch, a philosopher at the London School of Economics who leads the Foundations of Animal Sentience project at the university, told me last year.

But it looks like they may not have too much to worry about. In spite of the initial hype surrounding the bug farming boom, the insect agriculture industry has learned just how difficult it is to compete with the incumbent, larger animal-based meat industry—and that, perhaps, it never really made sense to try doing so with bugs.

Insect farming is similar to other types of animal farming. The insects reproduce, and the offspring are raised in large numbers in factory-style buildings. Many of the same welfare concerns for farmed chickens and pigs are present on insect farms, like disease, cannibalism, and painful slaughter. In the case of insects, the creatures are killed by a variety of means. They might be frozen, baked, roasted, shredded, grond, microwaved, boiled, or suffocated.

In 2020, insect companies farmed an estimated 1 trillion bugs, and the most commonly farmed species today are black soldier fly larvae, mealworms, and crickets.

While some people might tell researchers they’re open to adding bugs to their diet, these smallest of animals remain a novelty food in the US and Europe, as opposed to a commodity capable of displacing wings or burgers.

“The human food market, basically, has not materialized,” Dustin Crummett, a philosopher and executive director of The Insect Institute—a nonprofit that researches the environmental and animal welfare implications of large-scale insect agriculture—told me. “Only a tiny fraction of farmed insects are used for human food.”

“It doesn’t really make sense to buy chicken feed to feed insects to feed to chicken.”

But insect farming startups haven’t only sought to put insects on our plates or grind them into protein bars; many want to sell insect meal (ground up insects) as feed for other farmed animals. It’s a sustainable alternative, they argue, to the soy fed to factory-farmed chickens and cattle, much of which is grown on deforested land. Insect meal could also replace fishmeal (largely composed of small, wild-caught species, like anchovies and sardines), which is fed to farmed fish and heavily contributes to overfishing.

This approach of farming insects for livestock feed, however, isn’t materializing either, and much of it comes down to cost.

According to a 2024 analysis published in the journal Food and Humanity and co-authored by Crummett, the cost of insect meal is about 10 times that of soybean meal and 3.5 times that of fishmeal, a major cost gap that is unlikely to narrow anytime soon.

Insect meal is so expensive, in part, because feeding insects is expensive. Farmed insects are typically fed agricultural “co-products”—like wheat bran and corn gluten—most of which is already fed to livestock, and so insect farmers have wound up in competition with big meat companies to buy up these ingredients. This simple fact weakens the narrative often driven by insect farming startups that they are putting food scraps that otherwise would’ve been thrown away to good use.

“Organic waste from the industry becomes feed for insects,” Protix’s website reads. “This circular food production mirrors nature’s circle of life.” But this is misleading; Protix feeds its insects ingredients like oat husk and starch, which are typically used in traditional livestock feed anyway. “It doesn’t really make sense to buy chicken feed to feed insects to feed to chicken,” as one insect farming startup founder told AgriTech Insights a couple of years ago.

And it’s not guaranteed that insect meal will be more sustainable than soy or fishmeal. According to a UK government report, the environmental impact of insect farming depends on a number of factors, including what insects are fed and whether startups power their farms with fossil fuels or renewable energy.

Energy usage explains a lot of the industry’s cost challenge. Farmed insects require warm temperatures, and in Europe, where so many of the startups are based, energy prices have sharply risen in recent years.

To lower costs and develop new revenue streams, some insect farming startups have pivoted to become “waste management” companies, too. Rotting food waste in landfills is a huge source of global greenhouse gas emissions, and insect farming companies can earn money by taking it off other companies’ hands and letting bugs eat it.

But here, too, the industry has run into obstacles, including strict EU regulations around what can be fed to insects and an inconsistent product. When insects are fed food waste, their final nutritional profile can vary widely depending on what they’re fed, but livestock feed companies need nutritional consistency.

And it turns out that even the largest and most powerful companies in the space can run into hard, economic realities when trying to rear bugs on waste en masse.

In late 2023, America’s biggest meat company, Tyson Foods, announced it had invested an undisclosed sum of money in Protix, a large Dutch insect farming startup. That Tyson was putting its weight behind it seemed like much-needed proof that insects could be the future of food, as so many startups, investors, and researchers had claimed.

The two companies planned to build a massive insect farm together near Tyson’s cattle slaughterhouse in Dakota City, Nebraska. At the insect farm, Protix would raise and kill around 70,000 tons of larvae annually—what I estimate to be approximately 300 billion individual insects. The bugs would feed on cattle paunch, partially digested plant matter removed from the stomachs of cattle slaughtered at Tyson’s plant. After a few weeks of feeding on the animal waste, the larvae would be slaughtered and ground up into insect meal, destined to become food for pets and livestock.

It was a way for Tyson to “derive value” from its waste, as it told CNN.

Now, Vox can exclusively report that Tyson Foods has withdrawn its air permit application to build the plant, and the plant itself is “on hold indefinitely.” That’s according to email exchanges last December between Tyson Foods and the Nebraska Department of Water, Energy, and Environment, which were obtained through public records requests by the nonprofit Society for the Protection of Insects.

Tyson and Protix did not respond to questions for this story.

The companies’ stalled plans aren’t unique in the insect farming space.

In early 2024, Innovafeed—currently the largest insect farming startup—opened a pilot plant in Decatur, Illinois, in partnership with ADM, the massive food and livestock feed manufacturing company. The US Department of Agriculture awarded Innovafeed a $11.7 million grant to turn insect waste into fertilizer at the plant, but a year and a half after it opened, it suspended operations, citing funding challenges.

Through a public records request, Society for the Protection of Insects obtained over 600 pages of documents pertaining to the grant, though about half of it is redacted, including much of the environmental review and Innovafeed’s commercial records. Last week, the organization sued the USDA over the heavy redactions, arguing it’s in the public’s interest to fully disclose the details of the deal.

The USDA declined to comment on pending litigation, and Innovafeed did not respond to questions for this story.

The biggest blow to the industry yet came late last year when the largest startup of them all—France-based Ÿnsect, which had raised over $600 million, representing nearly a full third of the sector’s funding—ran out of money. And a quarter of that backing had come from the French government. A recent whistleblower investigation alleged severe mismanagement at Ÿnsect’s production facility that led to filthy conditions and health problems for workers. The company didn’t respond to a request for comment.

As insect farming startups struggle to stay afloat, their main trade group—the International Platform of Insects for Food and Feed (IPIFF)—is going so far as to call on the European Union to mandate publicly funded food services, like school cafeterias, to buy insect meat and publicly owned farms to buy insect meal to feed to their animals. IPIFF didn’t respond to an interview request for this story, nor did the North American Coalition for Insect Agriculture.

As for the outlook of the insect farming sector, more startups will probably go under in the years ahead, and for the survivors to continue on, they may need to leave Europe and North America for warmer climates and lower operating costs.

But the rise, fall, and resettling of the industry isn’t uncommon in the agricultural technology field, Crummett says. Vertical farming, for example, seemed like a great idea on paper, but it’s been an economic failure.

Mother JonesMar 11, 2026, 10:55 PM

Fake War Videos Are Degrading Our Trust in Reality

A US aircraft carrier destroyed by Iranian missiles. American bombs leveling a nuclear power plant. The Burj Khalifa engulfed in fire.

None of it happened, but that didn’t stop people from spreading fake videos online.

In the days since Trump’s weekend strikes on Iran, AI-generated videos realistically depicting entirely fabricated events have been spreading like wildfire on X and other social media platforms.

For years, X (formerly Twitter) was one of the most valuable tools for real-time information during breaking news events. But that era seems to be over. Since Elon Musk’s takeover of the company, the platform’s usefulness as a reliable news source has steadily eroded. Moderation has been gutted, the algorithm rewards engagement over accuracy, and resources funneled into their own, uniquely problematic AI platform: Grok.

In a disturbing sign of how deep the problem goes, Grok—X’s own AI tool—has been misidentifying AI-generated content as real.

We’ve seen political AI content creep into the platform before—like a fabricated video depicting Jake Paul at Iranian protests—but the recent strikes in Venezuela, and now Iran, have unleashed an onslaught of misleading AI video content.

The motivations behind the content vary. Some creators appear to be celebrating, using AI video to glorify Trump and Netanyahu’s military actions. Others seem aimed at manufacturing doubt about the war, undermining American public confidence, and muddying the information environment so badly that no one knows what’s real.

And in a disturbing sign of how deep the problem goes, Grok—X’s own built-in AI tool—has been misidentifying AI-generated content as real. (A spokesperson for X didn’t immediately address a request for comment, but shared links to recent posts by the firm’s safety team.)

Last month, Mother Jones’ Arianna Coghill spoke with AI content expert Jeremy Carrasco about exactly this kind of scenario. Carrasco finds the fake content concerning, but says the deeper harm is what this flood of AI content does to our relationship with real video. When fake footage is convincing and common enough, people start doubting everything—including authentic footage of things that actually happened. That’s the environment we’re now operating in.

Staying informed has never been more important, but in this moment, that means being particularly careful about what you accept as real—even if you think you see it with your own eyes.

Mother JonesMar 11, 2026, 7:14 PM

US Responsible For Killing Iranian Schoolchildren, Investigation Finds. Trump Previously Blamed Iran.

The United States is responsible for killing at least 175 people, many of them children, in a Tomahawk missile strike on an Iranian elementary school on the last day of February, according to US officials and others familiar with the ongoing military investigation who spoke with the New York Times. The death toll was reported by Iranian officials.

The deadly strike on the girls’ school, Shajarah Tayyebeh elementary, followed incorrect targeting intelligence about the area. The school is nearby buildings used by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Navy—which the US also targeted on the same day it decimated Shajarah Tayyebeh. Before it was a school, the site was connected to the base. But, according to a visual analysis for the Times, the school area has been sectioned off from the base for at least a decade. US military intelligence, the preliminary report findings indicate, might have been operating off of old data.

The investigation isn’t over and more information is poised to come out about how the school became designated as a target. While there have reportedly been instances of the US using Claude, the AI model created by Anthropic, in their offensive against Iran, it is unclear if the AI was used in the strike against the school. Government officials told the Times that it may have been the result of human error.

The Times’ sourcing requested anonymity due in part to the fact that President Donald Trump has suggested, without evidence, that Iran was responsible for the elementary school strike.

Evidence was already mounting against the United States and their culpability for the strike. For example, the US was the one targeting the nearby Iranian base and its military is the only one involved in the conflict that uses Tomahawk missiles.

Still, Trump on Saturday told reporters that, “In my opinion, based on what I’ve seen, that was done by Iran.”

On Monday, a Times reporter asked the president why he was why he was alone in his administration in blaming Iran. Top officials including Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth have referred to the ongoing investigation when asked about the school strike. “Because,” Trump began, “I just don’t know enough about it.”

Images and videos circulating online of the decimatedschool and recently dug graves for the dead children illustrated the human cost of the strikes.

Dozens of graves seen from above.

In this aerial handout picture released by the Iranian Press Center, mourners dig graves during the funeral for children killed in a reported strike on a primary school in Iran’s Hormozgan province in Minab on March 3, 2026. Iranian Press Center / AFP via Getty Images

One mother described the scene on that day in February to NBC News. She received a call from the school that the war had begun and she needed topick up her child. She didn’t make it in time. Her son died in the strikes.

“By the time we arrived, the entire school had collapsed on top of the children,” the mother, who asked not to be identified, told NBC News. “People were pulling out children’s arms and legs. People were pulling out severed heads.”

Mother JonesMar 11, 2026, 6:35 PM

Thanks to Trump, Petro-Imperialism Is Back

Following the US-Israeli strikes on Iran beginning in late February, Iran has effectively halted all traffic through the Strait of Hormuz, a chokepoint in the Persian Gulf through which about 20 percent of global crude oil and natural gas flows. Many Americans are now experiencing the effects: skyrocketing gas prices. That’s not likely to change any time soon.

Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) shared his observations on social media Tuesday that the Trump administration had “no plan” on how to respond.

Did the Trump administration ever really have a plan? To try to answer that question, and its ramifications, I spoke with Jeff Colgan, a political science professor and Director of the Climate Solutions Lab the Watson Institute for Public and International Affairs at Brown University. He’s written extensively about the role of oil in international politics and war, and how it impacts energy and the environment.

What is the Strait of Hormuz?

The Strait of Hormuz is the most important chokepoint in the world, particularly for oil and natural gas. So this is absolutely the nightmare scenario that many risk analysts have been worrying about for decades.

Although this region has seen a lot of warfare over the decades, the tanker flows [to transport crude oil] have managed to continue. Often, the combatants on both sides want the flow of oil to continue because at least one of the sides are profiting from it.

So this does put us in uncharted waters where the Strait of Hormuz gets bottled up in a modern context.

Why is the Strait of Hormuz bottled up right now?

Because the US attacked Iran and Iran has no viable counter strategy to strike back at the US. In some sense, this is an extreme step by Iran, but they feel like they have no other choice. Their leadership is wiped out, and they’re fighting for their lives.

So in this war, unlike others, they are using their full capacity to lash out in every direction, including all of the US military bases that are located in the region—in Bahrain, UAE, and Qatar especially. Iran was also in a difficult “use it or lose it” situation with their missiles because the US bombing campaign was directed toward destroying missiles to make sure they couldn’t use them.

Iran has long avoided closing the Strait of Hormuz because Iran’s own oil has flowed through it and they don’t want to cut off their only revenue source. But their backs are to the wall.

It seems like the Trump administration started the war in Iran without a plan for the Strait of Hormuz. What are your thoughts on the administration’s handling of the situation?

It is shocking and, frankly, appalling how little planning and foresight the White House has brought to the situation. The poor planning of the war appears to be on many issues, including many Americans who are in Gulf countries, munitions, etc.

It’s striking because it seems like they have tried to walk back from the situation on Monday and say, “We’re going to wrap this war up quickly.”

How do you see the blockade on the Strait of Hormuz from a historical perspective?

I have been writing for a couple months now about the Trump administration’s return to what I call “petro-imperialism”—the idea that the US, prior to 1973 would intervene in global oil markets in support of American oil companies and use force like the 1953 coup in Iran backed by the CIA when Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh nationalized oil.

This happened in multiple countries: “We’re going to select your political leader, and if you don’t pick the right one, we’re going to get rid of them.”

In Trump’s rhetoric, with regard to Venezuela, especially, but also with Iran, we see echoes of that.

What do you think is the immediate impact on oil and trade?

One thing we saw in the 1980s was the so-called Tanker War between Iran and Iraq. Tankers are resilient to being hit by missiles so it is possible to keep the flow of oil going during the war. But this warfare has changed. Drone technology [in Iran] is untested waters.

It’s striking to see how even oil markets reacted very strongly on Monday, bringing the oil price way back down, because the president signaled that we wanted to keep the war from getting out of hand. But it’s not like oil markets always get it right either.

There’s real uncertainty on how long it will take to restore the flow of oil when statements like the one today from Saudi Aramco [the national oil company of Saudi Arabia] saying that if the situation doesn’t stop very soon, the effects will be “catastrophic.”

On Tuesday, Energy Secretary Chris Wright made an announcement on X that the US Navy escorted an oil tanker through the Strait of Hormuz. In response, oil prices plunged and stocks jumped. But shortly after, the post was deleted. Is this mixed messagingsomething you’ve come across before?

The fog of war is a problem for all wars, where you have misinformation and uncertainty. On the other hand, the Trump administration has far more inconsistency and incoherence than a typical US administration. There are probably multiple reasons why they are more incoherent, but we can observe how President Trump himself has said conflicting things about the war—that it’s pretty much complete and then demanding unconditional surrender in the next breath.

As someone trying to absorb everything going on in Iran, is there something key that you think we should understand?

We have choices about how we consume energy, and what isn’t spiking right now is the price of sunshine and wind. We should be thinking, as consumers, about the choices that [the U.S. government is] making and the energy security, economic security, and national security consequences. No energy source is perfect and there’s always trade-offs, but renewables have a significant national security advantage in situations like this, where the basic fuel source of fossil fuels can be interrupted by political events. It’s not only wars, but also embargoes, as we saw with Russia and Ukraine and the negotiations with Europe about various flows of fossil fuels. What kind of energy we consume does matter.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Mother JonesMar 11, 2026, 4:41 PM

The Pro-MAGA Press Can’t Agree on How to Cover Trump’s War on Iran

Last week, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth conducted a remarkably peevish press conference on the United States and Israel’s attacks on Iran. At various points, journalists in the breifing room asked—reasonably enough—whether there was “a concern of this spiraling into a longer war.”

“Did you not hear my remarks?” Hegseth responded, sounding indignant. “I mean, we’re ensuring the mission gets accomplished, but we are very clear-eyed, as the president has been, unlike other presidents, about the foolish policies of the past that recklessly pulled us into things that were not tethered to actual clear objectives.”

The “mission for our warfighters,” Hegseth added a moment later, still sounding moderately ticked off, “is very, very clear. And they’re executing it right now, violently.”

There’s rarely been a more stark divide within the MAGA press.

The prickly exchange was notable, considering that the current Pentagon press pool is almost entirely made up of right-wing outlets who typically provide overwhelmingly pro-Trump coverage. The previous Pentagon press corps walked out en masse in October after refusing to sign a restrictive media policy and were largely replaced by a variety of conservative media organizations and influencers.

It was inevitable, then, that one day those reporters and influencers and others in the MAGA-flavored press would be called upon to cover an actual news event that does not always reflect favorably on the president. With the invasion of Iran, that day has now arrived.

Following that press conference, Hegseth quickly had to bat away suspicion he had again put a thumb on the scale. Pentagon spokesperson Kingsley Wilson, who herself has a history of bigoted and xenophobic statements, denied a report from CNN’s Brian Stelter that Hegseth only took questions from handpicked outlets. “He is not Sleepy Joe Biden,” she retorted on X. “Hope that clears up any confusion.” That take-all-comers bravado was undercut on Wednesday when the Washington Post reported the Pentagon had since acted to [bar two photographers][4] from further Iran briefings after they published photos of Hegseth his staff deemed “unflattering.”

With the Iran invasion, Hegseth and the rest of the Trump administration are facing unusually heavy criticism from unexpected quarters. Conspiracy theorists who have often been pro-Trump have made it apocalyptically clear that the war has made them sour on the president: Natural News, a [floridly weird][5] anti-vaccine and pro-conspiracy [outlet][6], called the Iran attack “the final, convulsive act of a dying American empire,” arguing that it would, in the end, guarantee “a seismic shift in global power, and it hands the ultimate leverage not to Washington, but to Tehran.” But many, more prominent, far-right figures [have also come out unequivocally][7] against it, including Steve Bannon, Candace Owens, Tucker Carlson, Megyn Kelly, former Congresswoman [Marjorie Taylor Greene][8], and Infowars kingpin Alex Jones. (Carlson even claimed on his program, which airs on X, that he’d flown to Washington “[three times in the last month][9]” to try to dissuade Trump from attacking Iran.)

Those figures seemed clear—unusually clear, in many cases—that the stakes are high. On Monday’s Infowars broadcast, Alex Jones warned that he thought the attacks would “absolutely escalate to World War III 99% of the time.”

“The full invasion of Iran is going down,” he said, anticipating a ground invasion. “We have days, maybe a week, to stop this… It’s all happening.”

The Federalist, often a home for more genteel pro-Trump puffery, also pumped the brakes, [writing][10] that the administration has been asked reasonable questions that “Trump and his top officials can’t answer consistently and coherently.”

The simple questions, according a piece by Federalist senior editor John Daniel Davidson, include “what is our goal in Iran? Why did we launch this war now? What is our theory of victory, and how will we know when we have achieved it? These four questions in particular deserve answers. So far, we haven’t got them.”

Other pro-Trump media outlets, including several that make up the new Pentagon press corps, seems less sure how to cover the invasion, toggling between a neutral accounting and— sometimes in the same breath—kowtowing to the president and the administration by framing the conflict in their preferred terms. The National Pulse, for instance, an outlet founded by former Breitbart London editor Raheem Kassam—he’s also an investor in [a “MAGA hot spot”][11] restaurant in Washington—ran an item on Tuesday about how the war is, in Trump’s words, “[very complete][12]” and praised US and Israeli forces for “effectively decapitating the Islamist regime’s top leadership and crippling” its military capabilities.

The new Pentagon press corps often follows up questions with some manner of praise.

In the Pentagon briefing room, reporters asking questions often use the Trump administration’s preferred language, not only by referring to Iran’s forces as “the enemy” and “the adversary,” but by proceeding from the premise that the war is going exceedingly well. In a (calmer) press conference on Tuesday, for instance, in which Hegseth and Air Force Gen. Dan Caine, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, took questions, they often served as opportunities to stress that the mission was under control and wouldn’t expand into a broader war. Alexandra Ingersoll, an anchor with the exceedingly pro-Trump [One America News][13], helpfully asked about the degradation of Iran’s missile capabilities. Another journalist tossed up a softball and asked about Trump’s boast that he had a “really good call” with Russian President Vladimir Putin; Hegseth affirmed that he had.

In contrast, Eric Schmitt from the New York Times asked about a timeline for the bombings to end, prompting one of the most revealing exchanges of the war so far, when Hegseth responded by declaring that President Trump “controls the throttle,” adding, “It’s not for me to posit whether it’s the beginning, the middle or the end.”

The new Pentagon press corps members are often careful to follow up any question, no matter how bland, with some manner of praise for the administration. After asking about the government’s “message to Americans” at this time, and whether Israel “might be taking advantage of the U.S.’s backing,” Jordan Conradson, a writer from the far-right and heavily conspiratorial Gateway Pundit, [tweeted ][14]that he was “proud to be in the Pentagon asking fair questions for our readers” and thanked Hegseth and the Joint Chiefs of Staff for “for having us taking my questions” [sic].

The Epoch Times, which has been traditionally been [rabidly pro-Trump,][15] has so far mostly stuck to bland and newspaper-like recountings of the bombing campaign. But the paper, which is backed by China’s Falun Gong religious movement, also ran [a carefully worded][16] opinion piece by a frequent contributor, praising the “current mission” as a “precise air and naval operation without American boots on the ground.” But, the author added, “Lessons learned from the Afghanistan, Iraq, and Vietnam quagmires informed us that nation building rarely is effective and democracy can’t be transplanted.”

There’s rarely been a more stark divide within the MAGA press as the one visible between the often-cheerleading Pentagon briefing room and the critics on the outside. On Monday night, Alex Jones said Infowars wouldn’t cover the invasion “like it’s an entertainment show or we’re watching a war movie”—a strong claim from someone who’s covered [virtually every mass shooting][17] as though it isn’t real, spinning those claims into poisonous and virulent infotainment for his audience.

“This is real,” Jones declared, for once. “We’re living this.” He needed, he added, to “stop the show” for a few hours and pore over his clips and headlines in order to better communicate what was happening to his audience.

“When you’re eating bug protein,” Jones darkly added, referring to his frequent claims that Americans are destined to be enslaved by elites and forced to [eat insects][18], “you’ll remember this broadcast.”

[4]: http://%28According to the Washington Post, the Pentagon also recently barred two photographers [5]: https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2024/12/bird-flu-pandemic-conspiracy-inauguration/ [6]: https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2014/07/popular-conspiracy-site-likens-pro-gmo-journalists-nazi-collaborators/ [7]: https://abcnews.com/US/voted-maga-voices-warn-iran-backlash-grow-longer/story?id=130835257 [8]: https://x.com/FmrRepMTG/status/2030719678935429554?ref%5Fsrc=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E2030719678935429554%7Ctwgr%5E88c90c5ad5cd2c2276d09e87fd52c466434e0ca0%7Ctwcon%5Es1%5F&ref%5Furl=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.mediaite.com%2Fmedia%2Fnews%2Fmarjorie-taylor-greene-rips-trump-spoxs-comments-on-iran-karoline-leavitt-doesnt-rule-out-a-draft%2F [9]: https://www.tiktok.com/@middleeasteye/video/7614495195870072086?%5Fr=1&%5Ft=ZT-94VNwpglTif [10]: https://thefederalist.com/2026/03/10/four-questions-about-the-iran-war-that-deserve-clear-consistent-answers/ [11]: https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2026/03/butterworth-maga-trump-kassam-menu.html?pay=1773168128684&support%5Fjournalism=please [12]: https://archive.is/https://thenationalpulse.com/2026/03/09/trump-i-think-the-war-is-very-complete/ [13]: https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2020/06/one-america-news-network-staff/ [14]: https://x.com/ConradsonJordan/status/2031362969339097582?ref%5Fsrc=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Etweet [15]: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/24/technology/epoch-times-influence-falun-gong.html [16]: https://archive.is/tXvwE#selection-517.55-525.15 [17]: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/14/opinion/alex-jones-sandy-hook-trial.html [18]: https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2025/10/maga-conspiracy-theories-lab-grown-meat/

Mother JonesMar 11, 2026, 4:10 PM

A Dumb War Makes Trumpworld Dumber

A version of the below article first appearedin 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._

War is an extreme action and, thus, triggers extreme reactions. Including extreme stupidity. It’s always disheartening—or ought to be—to see what should be a last resort comes to pass. It’s worse when a war is accompanied by cruelty, callousness, recklessness, and idiocy, though for obvious reasons that might be unavoidable. As for Trump’s war in Iran—which could well be an immense blunder—it has been enveloped in layers of excessive dumbness.

I’m not talking about the strategic wisdom—or lack thereof—of this attack, which could precipitate calamities throughout the region and beyond. Or the madness of impulsively launching such a war without planning for what comes afterward. I’m referring to how it has prompted imbecility among its supporters, including at the White House.

At 1600 Pennsylvania, the belief seems to be that war is the continuation of trolling by other means. First, the White House released a video intercutting scenes of bomb strikes with video game footage. (Look how fun it is to slaughter people!) Then it posted a video featuring movie clips to hype the awesomeness of this war—a military action that opened with a strike, probably American in origin, on a girls’ elementary school that massacred scores of students.

This White House video moves quickly from Iron Man 2 to Gladiator to Braveheart to Top Gun to Better Call Saul to John Wick to Breaking Bad to other fare, including Tropic Thunder, Superman, and Transformers,and ends with a sound clip from the Mortal Kombat video games declaring, “Flawless victory.” Then a fade to the White House emblem. In the middle of all this, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth intones, “F.A.”—as in “fuck around, find out.”

JUSTICE THE AMERICAN WAY. pic.twitter.com/0502N6a3rL

— The White House (@WhiteHouse) March 6, 2026

It’s juvenile and demonstrates a lack of somberness about the nasty and brutal business of war. Kudos to Ben Stiller, who directed, co-wrote, and starred in Tropic Thunder, for demanding the White House remove the clip from his film: “We never gave you permission and have no interest in being part of your propaganda machine. War is not a movie.” Or a video game.

Making light of warfare that’s killing hundreds, perhaps thousands, and creating potential environmental and health disasters and perhaps a humanitarian crisis shows an utter disregard for human life and dignity.

The video is also pretty dumb. Several of the characters featured, such as Saul Goodman and Walter White of Breaking Bad, are ethically challenged criminals, not the types you want to hail as role models or heroes. Russell Crowe (Gladiator) and Mel Gibson (Braveheart) are from New Zealand and Australia, respectively, and each play a rebel who opposes an invasionary and imperial force. That’s not quite the current storyline.

Making light of warfare that’s killing hundreds, perhaps thousands, and creating potential environmental and health disasters and perhaps a humanitarian crisis shows an utter disregard for human life and dignity. But, hell, pop open a Red Bull and let’s have a ball. There’s no better way to convince the public this war is being run by adults who care about the sanctity of life, respect the Iranian people, and went to war only because there was absolutely no other choice.

We also saw what might be called war frivolity at the Free Press,where Nellie Bowles, who created the site with spouse Bari Weiss, found lots of fun in the latest war news, joshing that Trump will pick Iran’s new leader “via swimsuit competition,” celebrating the torpedoing of a ship (“Welcome back to water warfare, baby!”), and joking that it was a good thing a downed American pilot “didn’t land in Minneapolis.”

Curtis Yarvin, a self-proclaimed political theorist of the far right who denigrates democracy and celebrates monarchy, got into the act. He blamed the United States’ problem with Iran on the American left, tweeting, “The Iranian Revolution was a diplomatic crime of the American left. The Islamic Republic, like its proxy Hamas, is a client power of the American left. Trump is only bombing Tehran because he can’t bomb Brooklyn.”

The Iranian Revolution was a diplomatic crime of the American left.

The Islamic Republic, like its proxy Hamas, is a client power of the American left.

Trump is only bombing Tehran because he can’t bomb Brooklyn https://t.co/XETXhygzOh

— Curtis Yarvin (@curtis_yarvin) March 8, 2026

There is so much inanity in those three sentences.

The Islamic Revolution was a product of 26 years of repressive rule from the Shah, who was installed by the United States after Washington and London orchestrated the coup that overthrew Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh, a democratically elected leader who dared to nationalize the British-controlled oil industry. Moreover, the fundamentalists of Tehran have more in common with anti-woke Trumpists than they do with NPR listeners in Park Slope. (Ask them about queer people, abortion, and secular relativism.) And it’s swell of Yarvin to suggest that fellow Americans deserve to be bombed.

Such nonsense from him is not surprising. After all, he has called for liquidating democracy, the Constitution, and the rule of law and handing power to a CEO-ish leader who would turn the US government into “a heavily-armed, ultra-profitable corporation.” Sounds like a nutball, right? Yet he’s pals with JD Vance and Peter Thiel. So be afraid.

For outright ignorance, we have Rep. Rick Crawford (R-Ark.). On Fox News, he proclaimed, “We have been at war with Iran since 1947.”

House Intelligence Chair Rick Crawford: "We have been at war with Iran since 1947" pic.twitter.com/sSJXaGW6Al

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) March 8, 2026

Nope. As noted above, from 1953 to 1979, Washington was pals with the Shah, helping him run his authoritarian regime. And here’s the kicker: Crawford is the chair of the House intelligence committee. Ponder that.

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) probably knows the United States has not been at war with Iran for 79 years. But he sure doesn’t know how to talk to a skeptical public about Trump’s war. One recent poll found that only 36 percent of Americans approve of Trump’s actions in Iran and that a majority believes Iran poses a minor threat or no threat to the United States.

Yet with public sentiment tilted against this war, Graham believes it’s fine to turn up the warmongering dial to 11. On Fox News—of course—he bellowed, “We’re going to blow the hell out of these people.”

LINDSEY GRAHAM: Israel and the United States — you just wait to see what comes the next two weeks

BARTIROMO: Meaning what?

GRAHAM: We're going to blow the hell out of these people pic.twitter.com/kfz8BZL0Ze

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) March 8, 2026

Performances like that are sure to settle the nerves of worried Americans. Even Republican pundit Meghan McCain saw how counterproductive such rhetoric can be for the fans of this war. She tweeted, “I’ve known Lindsey Graham since I was a child. I am imploring anyone who will listen in the Trump administration to stop sending this man out as a surrogate. He is scaring people and doing damage to whatever message you’re trying to sell to the American public about the Iran war.”

Daniel Pipes, a longtime Islamophobic foreign policy analyst, expressed his disappointment and surprise that the Iranian people last week did not mount a revolution against the regime: “The populace now appears cowed into near-silence.”

The uprising in Iran in early January suggested an even greater insurgency would then follow on the U.S.-Israeli campaign to erode regime power. Yet, the populace now appears cowed into near-silence.

This ranks as the most surprising and disappointing development of the past… pic.twitter.com/19aVj3IV6B

— Daniel Pipes دانيال بايبس (@DanielPipes) March 7, 2026

When bombs are raining down, many people might prefer to seek shelter and protect their families rather than hit the streets in protest. Also, given Trump’s erratic signals—first he suggested the US would support an uprising, then his team drew back from that—Iranians opposed to the regime might be a tad reluctant to move on the government, while the 200,000-member Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps is still intact. Perhaps they can apologize to Pipes for letting him down.

The biggest dunderhead move, though, was Trump’s. As the war raged, with reports of new American casualties and US embassies in the region being ordered to evacuate, Trump this weekend showed the nation and the world that he was on top of things by…golfing. Nothing says you’re serious about protecting the troops and ending a war as soon as possible as zipping about in a golf cart at Trump National Doral in Miami and then signing autographs in the clubhouse. (Look, a buffet!)

You might think that a demagogue keen on imagery and PR stunts would realize the value in creating the impression that he’s a committed and engaged commander in chief during wartime—even if he was only faking that—by spending the day in the Situation Room with military brass or in the Oval Office on the phone talking to world leaders about the various crises being triggered by his war. Instead, he’s devoting hours to swinging a stick at a tiny ball.

Video of Trump golfing this morning as US troops he deployed to the Middle East remain in harm’s way pic.twitter.com/mcU2wsubNr

— PatriotTakes (@patriottakes) March 8, 2026

Didn’t any of Trump’s brilliant advisers suggest that for just this weekend he skip the links? This decision demonstrated tremendous lack of judgment. It suggested Trump views himself as an emperor who can do whatever he pleases and need not worry about consequences. Anyone who pulls such a dumb move cannot be trusted to run a war—or a country.

Mother JonesMar 11, 2026, 11:30 AM

Bombing of Iranian Oil Facilities Is Causing a Health and Environmental Nightmare

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

Israel’s bombing of Iran’s oil infrastructure will have major long-term environmental repercussions, experts have warned, as monitors admitted they were struggling to keep track of the environmental disasters arising from the widening war.

Even as Iranians filled the streets to mark the appointment of a new supreme leader, the Shahran oil depot northeast of Tehran and the Shahr-e fuel depot to its south continued to burn on Monday, two days after they were bombed by Israeli warplanes.

In the immediate aftermath of the attacks, Iran’s environmental agency and the Iranian Red Crescent Society had warned Tehran residents to stay at home, warning the toxic chemicals spread by airstrikes on five fossil fuel installations around the city could lead to acid rain and damage the skin and lungs.

“There will be a real cocktail of chemistry, including significant amounts of aromatic compounds that are known to interact with DNA and have been linked to cancers.”

On Monday, the head of the World Health Organization, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, said: “Damage to petroleum facilities in Iran risks contaminating food, water, and air—hazards that can have severe health impacts especially on children, older people, and people with pre-existing medical conditions.”

Iran’s deputy health minister, Ali Jafarian, told Al Jazeera that the soil and water supplies around Tehran were already beginning to be contaminated by the fallout from the weekend’s explosions.

The black rain that fell across Tehran in the hours after the bombings was a mixture of soot and fine particulate matter from the explosions with rain from a storm that was already moving across the region, according to Dr Akshay Deoras, a research scientist at the University of Reading.

“The airstrikes on oil depots released soot, smoke, oil particles, sulfur compounds, and likely heavy metals and inorganic materials from the buildings, whilst a low‑pressure weather system, which typically sweeps across Iran and west Asia around this time of year, created conditions favorable for rainfall,” Deoras said.

“In terms of atmospheric chemistry, the oil fires produce sulphur and nitrogen compounds that could form acids if they dissolve in rainwater,” he said. “The risks to human health come from inhaling or touching the smoke and particles. Immediate impacts can include headaches, irritation of the eyes and skin, and difficulty breathing—particularly for people with asthma, lung disease, older adults, young children, and those with disabilities.”

Tehranis reported difficulty breathing on Sunday, as well as headaches and burning sensations in their eyes and throats. But the acute effects of the black cloud that spread across the city could just be the beginning, according to Prof Andrea Sella, professor of inorganic chemistry at the University College London.

“The explosions will have exposed the local population to all manner of undesirable and toxic chemical species, a problem that is well known to accompany warfare,” he said, explaining that the crude oil will have contained a range of elements, including metals, that would “also be spread indiscriminately.”

“There will be a real cocktail of chemistry, including significant amounts of aromatic compounds that are known to interact with DNA and have been linked to cancers. Whether or not this manifests will depend strongly on how long and serious the exposure is of any individual.”

“We are now aware of hundreds of environmentally problematic incidents in Iran.”

“And on top of this, once the containment provided by the tanks and pipes is destroyed the material will flow everywhere leaving a mess of harmful material that permeates the soil and coats everything else. There is the potential for contamination of drinking water supplies.”

Despite US efforts to distance itself from the attacks, there are growing fears the attack might spark a tit-for-tat cycle of retaliation after a spokesperson for the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps warned it could take “similar actions [against oil infrastructure] in the region.”

On Monday, Bahrain’s state-owned energy company Bapco Energies declared force majeure on its operations after Iran attacked the country’s only oil refinery, and Saudi Arabia reported intercepting four Iranian drones targeting its Shaybah oil field.

Those attacks followed drone strikes last week on the world’s largest natural gas export plant in Qatar, the Saudi refinery at Ras Tanura, fuel storage hubs in Oman and the United Arab Emirates, and multiple tankers in the Persian Gulf, each of which posed a potential environmental catastrophe.

Doug Weir, director of the Conflict and Environment Observatory, said that his organization’s efforts at tracking incidents of environmental harm caused by the fighting around the Persian Gulf was becoming increasingly difficult.

“We are now aware of hundreds of environmentally problematic incidents in Iran and the region but the ongoing conflict, internet restrictions and delays in the availability of satellite imagery mean that this figure is an understatement,” Weir said. “Piecing together the war’s environmental footprint and its potential impacts on people and ecosystems will be a huge task, and one that grows more complex with every day that the war continues.”

“After the first few days where military sites were targeted we are now seeing an expansion into civilian and dual-use facilities, with this comes a broadening of the range of environmental and public health risks associated with military actions,” he added.

Mother JonesMar 11, 2026, 10:00 AM

How RFK Jr. is Dismantling America’s Health Policies

The new food pyramid says it all. In January, the federal government released updated dietary guidelines for Americans that reimagine the pyramid by literally turning it upside down. The guidelines, which once prioritized foods like grains while minimizing fats, now recommend red meat, whole milk, proteins, and healthy fats. It’s one of the most unmistakable ways that US Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has ushered the Make America Healthy Again movement into the federal government. But it’s also illustrative of how the entire Trump administration has tried to turn just about everything in Washington on its head.

And it’s not just the food pyramid. Over the last year, RFK Jr. has reshaped the country’s vaccine advisory committee with vaccine skeptics, fired thousands of employees at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Institutes of Health, and revised the CDC’s stance on the unfounded link between vaccines and autism. The moves, often influenced and cheered by folks in the MAHA movement, are ones that infectious disease epidemiologist Jessica Malaty Rivera says are not merely misguided, but dangerous.

“MAHA is asking the right question: How do we make America healthy again? But they’ve come to the table with answers already to that question that are not rooted in evidence. And that’s the concerning part,” Rivera tells host Al Letson. “This is not saying science should never be questioned. Science is always being questioned. But when you come in with answers to questions and hypotheses already, that’s the backwards way to do science.”

On this week’s More To The Story, Rivera examines how Big Ag has influenced the nation’s latest dietary guidelines, whether the US is on the cusp of a national measles outbreak, and why the CDC dropping vaccine recommendations could have potentially long-term and deadly consequences.

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