“The Single Most Toxic Issue in the Midterms”: How America Turned on Data Centers.

Tim Murphy joins Garrison Hayes to break down the bipartisan revolt against data centers.

America is hopelessly divided along party lines. That’s a stubborn fact, we’re told, and the polling bears it out: Democrats dislike Republicans and Republicans dislike Democrats, in almost precisely the same proportions.

But every election produces surprising coalitions that defy entrenched partisanship. In these midterms, left and right have found something so commonly loathed that politicians across the country are flip-flopping in real time.

Mother Jones has been tracking the backlash to data centers on the ground long before the water-guzzling behemoths became the country’s bête noire. The AI boom, with its insatiable need for computing, has unleashed a power grab by tech billionaires. “Data centers have replaced megayachts as the preferred theater of oligarchic status signaling,” national correspondent Tim Murphy wrote in his big Mother Jones investigation into hyperscale data centers and the communities they land on. “Oligarchy is now more than an idea; it is a place.”

On today’s episode of Stress Test, Tim joins host Garrison Hayes to discuss how data centers—and other AI-boom technologies, like Flock cameras—have upended political fortunes and ripped up the partisan playbook ahead of November’s vote.

“Nobody wants data centers. Everybody’s fired up about it.”

“It’s maybe the single most toxic issue in the midterms this side of, you know, gas prices,” Tim tells Garrison. “It’s like a three-to-one opposition among voters. Nobody wants data centers. Everybody’s fired up about it.”

Take Texas. Republican Gov. Greg Abbott promoted the state as a place where companies could build almost anything. Then rural and suburban communities got the facilities, and the gas plants that power them, in their backyards, along with strained water supplies, pollution, and rising utility bills. “People are complaining about what they have to live next to,” Tim says. “And it just builds and builds and builds.” Under pressure (and running for reelection), Abbott made a stunning reversal, announcing steps that amount to a moratorium. And he’s not the only one feeling the heat.

So what changed? Data centers used to be half the size of an Amazon warehouse; now they’re measured in “multiples of Manhattan,” says Tim, who explains how we got here and what to expect next. He heads back to Texas in the coming weeks, and we’ll follow what he learns right up to Election Day.

For more, read Tim Murphy’s road trip through the towns living in the shadow of the AI boom: “How the American Oligarchy Went Hyperscale,” from our May+June issue.

Subscribe to Stress Test at youtube.com/motherjones, and read the full transcript bellow.

This transcript was generated with automated tools and may contain errors.

Garrison Hayes: Hello, hello, everyone. This is Stress Test from Mother Jones. I’m Garrison Hayes. Welcome to the second episode of this show. If you didn’t catch the first episode, I really think you should go back and listen to it. It was me and David Corn and our colleague Ari Berman, where we talked a little bit about this upcoming election and all of the Trump administration’s efforts to subvert the election, to strike fear into your heart. But this is the thing: If you go back and watch it—or listen—I actually think that we came away from it, at least I did, little less stressed than going into it. We were really able to pull it apart, the efforts that they are making and where they are failing.

It’s a really, really good, informative listen. So make sure you go back and listen to that. It’s just right behind this one in the feed, or you can go check it out on YouTube. Maybe you’re on YouTube, youtube.com/motherjones.

Okay, I am really excited to get into today’s conversation because there are these strange moments in the American political arena where oddly, people across both the left and the right, across the political spectrum, come together in some weird, kind of bizarro-world way. And we’re talking about exactly one of those topics today with data centers and Flock cameras and AI. And so today I am joined by my colleague, Tim Murphy. Tim is a national correspondent here at Mother Jones. I’m so excited to be talking to you, Tim. Thanks for being here.

Tim Murphy: Hey, thanks for having me. This is great.

GH: Tim, I have to tell you, whenever I read your reporting, which is always so smart and so in-depth, I always, like, laugh a little bit. And I don’t know if that’s a bad read, but there’s always, like, a little bit of humor kind of infused into the really often kind of grim things that you cover. You bring a really fresh perspective. Am I misreading that? Are you trying to be funny?

TM: A hundred percent. My entire life I’ve just wanted to be taken seriously, Garrison.

GH: [Laughs.]

TM: No, you know, I mean, I like to try and kind of keep things a little entertaining, you know, when the story kind of calls for it.

GH: I love that. Okay, so we’re bringing you on to talk about the rare bipartisan voter issue that we are seeing this election cycle, specifically data centers. But before we kind of dig into that, I feel like it’s important that we get a better idea, not only of, like, terms, but the way it’s kind of related to the news in general. We’ll get to all of that, but before we get to that, I’d love to hear, like, what’s stressing you out—something that we’re asking all of our guests.

TM: Well, I think probably germane to the topic at hand, I just looked at the calendar ’cause I was planning out, you know, what I have to do over the next, turns out, like, five weeks and realized that there’s absolutely no way that I’m gonna get to every single thing that I need to file. I always think of the election as God’s deadline. Like, there’s no fudging it. Anything that you didn’t finish before the election immediately becomes irrelevant, and so you just have to get it done. So I’m kind of mapping out my caffeine intake and just trying to kinda get through it.

GH: Amazing. Amazing. I mean, you could always do the postelection “Stop the Steal” effort that we saw in 2020. Okay, let’s dig into—

TM: Right, if Mike Pence has the courage.

GH: Yeah, right. Exact. Let’s dig into this. Okay, but everyone’s kind of talking about and certainly hating on data centers right now. But as I understand it, Tim, it wasn’t always this way. What have you seen on the ground and how things have shifted over the last year or so?

TM: It’s one of the more kind of stunning about-faces that I’ve seen in national politics. You know, I was in Texas last year and last summer, and I actually went to the site of one of the largest data centers being built in the world. It’s Sam Altman and Larry Ellison’s Stargate complex in Abilene. This was a project that passed, that was created almost, like, virtually unnoticed when it was first kind of developed. You know, I went and I went back and looked at, like, the community meeting, the various government agencies that approved this thing. Basically nobody showed up. Very little debate about this, and it just kind of went into play. And then Donald Trump talked about it at the White House with Sam Altman and Larry Ellison, and it started to blow up into a bigger thing.

But even as recently as last summer, this was an issue that not even the people talking the loudest about oligarchs, and tech oligarchs specifically, were necessarily, like, beating the drum about. This was something that in fact data center supporters were playing offense on. You had, you know, in the state of Texas, Greg Abbott, the governor of Texas, proudly an advocate for making Texas the epicenter of the data center boom. You know, people were talking about this as, like, this massive job creation construction strategy. It was kind of the getting in early on the future by—you know, flash forward to where we are now, and I’d say it’s maybe the single most toxic issue in the midterms, like, this side of, you know, gas prices.

It’s like a 3-to-1 opposition among voters. Nobody wants data centers. Everybody’s fired up about it. And candidates who were for them are hastily beating a retreat, like Greg Abbott, and people who didn’t stake out that position are throwing millions of dollars into kind of brutal attack ads on the subject.

GH: What do you think it is that has led to that kind of 180, that big switch? I guess the more specific question is: What seems to be the issue here for voters that’s turning them against data centers?

TM: One of the things with data centers is there’s so many ways that it can kind of reach you, that it can connect to your life. And so I think different people are engaging with it in different ways. Certainly over the last year and a half, AI oligarchs, and data centers as their No. 1 project, have become kind of like one of the main kind of features of the Trump administration. And so a lot of people are just straight up negatively polarized against those.

But if you’re living in a lot of states, you know, the rising utility costs are often associated with data centers. The pollution effects are associated with data centers. A lot of these are being built in rural and exurban areas where people do not expect to have, like, an Air Force engine and a diesel turbine as their neighbors. And they’re really, really, really fired up about that.

These projects are invariably kind of done kind of on the sly. They’re sort of pushed through anonymously. People don’t really know who they’re dealing with. And so it sort of brings all these different kind of things, from affordability to straight-up NIMBY complaints to political distrust, and gives kind of something for everyone. And what they see on the political side is that a lot of people who were supposed to sort of have their back and be their advocate let this happen or openly kind of brought it to pass.

GH: One of the really interesting things about your reporting is that you’ve actually seen data centers—like, a data center—in person. You’ve actually visited one. Many people, I imagine, haven’t been inside of one of these, kind of, these hyperscaler facilities. And so can you tell us what do they look like on the inside? What is it like being inside of one?

TM: I’ve not—I should clarify, I’ve not been inside. I’ve been outside, and like an increasing number of Americans, I’ve been able to kind of go right up to one and just hear what it sounds like. And you know, it really does, it sounds like an aircraft engine. I mean, if you go to one of these big hyperscale sites—so for instance, I went and, you know, drove down a cul-de-sac in Memphis, Tennessee, to see Colossus II, which is one of Elon Musk’s xAI, you know, Grok-powering engines. It’s burning gas on what they say are temporary generators. It’s, you know, pissing off a lot of neighbors, and it’s, you know, officially, like, a US Army contractor.

So these things, I mean, they’re enormous. And here’s, like, one of the main things that’s driving this shift, I think, when we talk about this 180: It’s that 10 years ago, five years ago, the data centers that they were building were, like, maybe half the size of an Amazon warehouse or something like that. They were kind of in the terrestrial building space. Now they’re measuring them out in, like, you know, multiples of Manhattan. Like, these are—they’re absolutely enormous.

And, you know, they’re not just many, many, many, many football fields, but they all come with natural gas power plants, you know, to go with them. They come with maybe solar power plants to go with them, which has also, you know, driven a little bit of unrest in some areas. You know, they require transmission lines, they require kind of a whole rebooting of everything, you know, depending on where you live. And so they’re incredibly intrusive spaces. It’s no longer just your kind of casual neighborhood server farm.

GH: Hmm. Interesting. I want to come back to what you were talking about with Texas. You mentioned Gov. Greg Abbott and his kind of big switch on this. Can you say a little bit more about that? But then also talk about some of the other politicians and efforts happening in the state of Texas.

TM: Yeah, I mean, Texas is a good way of looking at it because for a very long time the pitch for Texas to the rest of the world, and particularly to corporate America, has been that you can come here and build anything and do anything. And we basically don’t care—like, give us some revenues, let us, you know, have a big press conference about it. But you can do carte blanche. They lured, you know, Elon Musk to Texas and basically let him make his own town. Data centers were one feature of that.

So, like, in the Texas Panhandle outside of Amarillo, there’s something called Project Matador, which purports to be one of the world’s largest data centers. It’s complete with, like, a nuclear reactor. They’re gonna call the—final data center is, like, the Donald J. Trump Center for Intelligence or something like that. It’s—the company is called Fermi USA, and one of the guys leading it is Rick Perry. Like, all these things are things that should not go together, but in Texas, they just kind of can, and they’re gonna build this.

You know, we talked about the Stargate project in Abilene. You can go to, like, a town, you know, outside of Dallas, and there’s just, like, seven new data centers outside of town. So it was the face of this giant, giant building boom. And it’s this building boom that, like, has very few parallels in modern history. It’s almost, like, up there, you know, you have to go back to the railroads of the 19th century to find this much investment in a private business, in a private enterprise.

So Texas was the face of this. But you’re doing all this development in rural areas. You’re taking people’s water, you’re taking people’s power, or you’re just building your own, you know, fossil fuel–polluting power plant in their backyard. And you start to get this backlash. People are complaining about what they have to live next to. People are complaining about what’s happening to their water, to their utility bills, and it just builds and builds and builds. And recently Abbott announced a series of steps, like, basically a moratorium, until we can figure out what’s going on. It’s kind of a stunning thing to see from somebody like Greg Abbott, who’s made that his entire M.O.

GH: Yeah, yeah. So now Greg Abbott, governor of Texas, is on the same kind of political, you know, march as the governor of, let’s say, New York or Massachusetts, who are also, you know, leading these moratoriums.

TM: Yeah, it’s that kind of Kathy Hochul–Greg Abbott policy consensus we’ve always talked about.

GH: The one that we’ve always been going for. My question is, like, who is this appealing to? I mean, obviously we know that folks across the political spectrum are against data centers, but are voters actually responding to, say, a Greg Abbott moratorium in a positive way?

TM: Yeah, the jury’s still out. You know, Abbott is in a really surprisingly close race with the Democrat Gina Hinojosa, who has been pushing data centers really hard. I mean, she went out to Project Matador in Amarillo and walked the grounds that it’s going to be on. She went out, you know, to these Dallas suburbs and talked to the people who were organizing against it and really, I think, probably forced Abbott’s hand on this issue, and he’s very belatedly trying to kind of co-opt it and salvage, you know, a five-point win or whatever.

So I think there’s definitely a lot of evidence that it’s working in ways that maybe conventional, like, anti-corporate, anti-billionaire, even anti-tech attacks aren’t working. One of the races that I’ve been looking at, that’s, like, kind of a really funny example of this, is in Ohio. Marcy Kaptur, the Democratic congresswoman who was kind of miraculously held on during the Trump era, she’s in a rematch with the same guy she ran against in 2025. For is former state Rep. Derek Merrin. And in 2024, all the attacks are like, Dirty Derek is in the hands of, you know, big corporate America or whatever, and she won by about 2,300 votes. This year, running against the exact same guy, every single ad is about Data Center Derek. It’s about Dirty Derek, Data Center Derek, and how he sold out Ohioans for $2 billion of incentives for building data centers.

Even when you’re facing the same candidate that you beat last time, it’s a radically new message because data centers have come on and become this huge issue.

GH: Okay, so Dirty Derek—we’re talking about big money and the oligarchs and the folks who are funneling money into their big project with data centers and all of the people who are against it. But we know there’s one person who really marches to the beat of their own drum, for better or for worse. There’s one person who is maintaining that he loves this widely unpopular technology, and that’s President Donald Trump. He called data center opponents backwards and poor, which is a choice. And so Tim, I want you to listen to what he has to say about Flock cameras here.

[Clip plays.]

What do you make of that reaction from the president?

TM: I think he’s sort of starting to slip a little bit in, you know, his finger on the pulse of the American electorate, and Flock cameras are a good example of this in the same way that I think his general approach to the data centers has been. You know, there might be an environment in which there’s a huge anti-crime panic like we’ve had in a few recent election cycles, where suddenly this thing that a lot of police departments are adopting becomes maybe more favorable terrain. But right now people hate Flock cameras, and I think they hate them for some of the related reasons to data centers, right? I mean, it’s kind of this AI-powered, all-seeing thing that we don’t really trust the people who are in charge of it. You know, it seems like it’s often just being deployed as a way of, like, surveilling cops, ex-wives, and things like that.

And one of the things that you’ve seen in a lot of races around the country is candidates literally taking aim at Flock cameras. So, like, there’s a guy, Seth Bodnar, who’s an independent candidate for Senate in Montana, kind of the de facto Democrat, even though there’s a Democrat in the race. And he literally just takes a gun and blows up a Flock camera as a way of signifying, like, well, one, that he’s a gun owner. But two, I’m not gonna have it with this kind of government surveillance state. So Flock cameras have really become such a—in part because they are so pervasive, because they’re kind of everywhere—you know, they’ve become this thing that, you know, people can kind of use as a symbol of what they’re against.

GH: Yeah, you know, we were saying Flock cameras. I think people understand that to mean, like, these kind of surveillance cameras that are often used by local governments. But is there a tidier definition that we should kind of understand Flock to mean? Like, what is a Flock camera?

TM: Yeah, what makes it different from, like, the camera outside your bodega or subway station or whatever is that it’s all tied into a vast national network, and that anybody who has access to this thing can just look up anything happening in this kind of all-seeing eye. I mean, it’s not literally everywhere, but that’s the kind of crux of it. It’s the kind of—it’s what the security camera network looks like in the movie.

And so you’ve seen a lot of pushback. And again, this is something that in a place with sometimes libertarian leanings like Montana, like Texas, where James Talarico has talked a lot about Flock cameras, it’s something that’s a way to kind of—it’s kind of a—not necessarily a crossover issue, but it’s an issue that is not strictly partisan, that people in kind of whatever place on the political spectrum can feel the same way about.

GH: And we’ve been talking a lot about Texas specifically. But to zoom out a bit, is this an issue that is bigger than just that one state?

TM: Yeah, I think so. And I think this is, like, the type of thing that you’re gonna see more and more people talk about because it is such a potent symbol. Because this is a way of connecting, you know, how people feel, you know, to some extent how people feel about policing, but also how people feel about, you know, tech and government. And at a moment where there is this conversation about how much power is being, you know, accumulated in the hands of a few people in government, Flock cameras are kind of a way of really drilling down on that and picking a villain.

GH: Yeah, if I were to kind of maybe give my take here, I think that Flock cameras and data centers are both a part of this kind of anti-establishment, you know, instinct that’s in the American public right now in the electorate. You know, one, it feels as though the United States government and corporations are more or less one and the same, you know, corporate interests. And so people are certainly bucking against the corporate interests and in turn bucking against, you know, our government establishment. That’s my take. Is that the sense you’re getting when you report on this from the ground.

TM: Yeah, and I mean, I think—and you see that in these campaigns, right? Like, the villains have shifted. You know, to take on Data Center Derek for a second, you know, two years ago it was, like, the corporate boardroom kind of rich dudes, and now he’s depicted as a puppet, and it’s, like, a guy in a gray hoodie like Sam Altman holding one thing, and it’s a guy in kind of, like, a black shirt like Mark Zuckerberg, you know, holding the other end of the puppet. I mean, Trump has deliberately kind of fused the highest echelons of Silicon Valley with his administration.

And so people, I think, rightly see kind of pervasive surveillance tech as kind of connected to this broader, unchecked corporate and government power. And I think, you know, there’s like—we’re at a real kind of nadir of trust in politics, like, at the moment, and that’s driven a lot—I think that’s probably driven Trump’s success in a lot of ways, is a bottoming out of trust. But now that’s kind of bottomed out even further, and Trump is sort of one of the people that people distrust even more so. It’s—the corporations he’s allied with are things that people trust. And so, you know, I think people maybe aren’t as worried about the security—the surveillance state maybe when they feel a little bit more trustworthy about the system. But right now people are just done.

GH: Bottomed out even further is so hard to believe. But here we are. So I want to ask about what’s being built down there at the bottom. It feels like the anti–data center coalition could be a new coalition. Should we be stressed out about this coalition? And what do you think this kind of coalition may build?

TM: It’s tough to say. I mean, right now we’re at a moment where just no one has an incentive to take the data center side in public. Even if you are kind of looking at it and saying, well, you know, we gotta build some of these, maybe we can make these different exceptions, nobody really has an incentive to come out and say, like, you guys are going too far, no more moratoriums, things like that, at least not for another five weeks. I’ve only seen one candidate kind of saying, like, vote for me so I can, you know, stop the Democrats from ruining AI. That’s Roger Marshall of Kansas, and he’s probably running one of the worst campaigns of the cycle.

So I think right now a lot of people are kind of saying a lot of the same things. Some of that is just very defensive. Some of that is just to kind of get through the next five weeks so that they can kind of go back to setting AI policy with the Trump administration and Big Tech, you know, kind of on their minds. So I’m not sure a lot of people are mad at the same thing, but I don’t think they’re all mad in the same way. So it’s not necessarily to me a coalition, you know, that can take landowners and ranchers and everything and necessarily, you know, fuse that with, like, a progressive criticism of Big Tech in a way that, like, leads to the sweeping, you know, perfect AI legislation of 2027.

I think what you’re gonna get is a real fight in the next few years about what this, you know, next step is gonna be. I mean, I had a chance to talk with Greg Casar, the congressman from Texas, from Austin, recently about this. And he’s, like, really interesting because when I talked to him last year, AI didn’t come up. Which is not, you know, not a knock on him, but you know, he had other things on his mind. He had immigration on his mind, he had redistricting on his mind. He is in Austin and it just was not, like, something he was banging the drum about. Now he is all in on this stuff. It’s, like, the thing that he wants to talk about is introducing bills on this, he’s talking to everybody about this. He is obsessed with AI right now. So I think there has been a real kind of learning curve for a lot of people over the last year, and that’s really kind of only the beginning right now.

GH: Well, one thing that I’ve seen online as we kind of come to a close here—I’ve seen this conversation online, particularly on Twitter or X. They’re basically saying if you’re anti–data center, you’re anti-masculine, and you’re pro-China. Is there a risk—which I think is the question underneath it—is there a real risk that our, you know, the folks that we’re in competition with—you know, America’s constantly in competition with China over, you know, technological advancement. Is there a risk that if we do continue to fight against data centers as a country, if voters do choose anti–data center candidates, that America may fall behind in the tech, I don’t know, space race of its—if you could even call it that?

TM: Yeah, that’s certainly one of the major arguments that you get from the tech industry. And of course, loaded into that is, like, you know, this idea that we can’t let China have this technology. We need to let Donald Trump have this technology, which doesn’t necessarily track. And I think what you would hear from somebody like Casar is, like, actually, like, you know, again, thinking about this like bioweapons or nuclear weapons at its most extreme lens, like, treaties exist, you know, diplomacy exists. You should be able to kind of work with your competitors to set constraints by which you can compete. And so I think that’s one of the arguments that I think you would hear on the other side of that.

But it’s so interesting that you talk about the Chinese narrative because that’s one of the things that we’ve seen a lot of with the data center opposition, is this accusation from people like, you know, Mike Johnson, the speaker of the House, Kevin O’Leary, the guy from Fox News or Fox Business, you know, that data center opposition is actually, like, this astroturfed Chinese propaganda psyop. And, like, you hear enough of it that I think some people actually do believe this. I don’t think that they spent enough time in their districts or in these places talking to the people, because it’s just like a—there is just a very inherent organic opposition coming out of there. But that’s certainly the line that you’re hearing a lot.

GH: Wow. Okay. Well, Tim, the good thing is that we have you actually on the ground talking to people, and your reporting is so important. I hear that you’re headed back to Texas for another reporting trip very soon. What kind of stories can you expect to kind of gather while you’re there?

TM: Yeah, Texas has emerged as, you know, one of the, you know, tipping point states for the midterms, right? So I’m gonna be looking at, you know, the Texas Senate race, trying to track down Ken Paxton and James Talarico. And then, you know, I mentioned the governor’s race. This is not a race we expected to be close heading into the cycle. But Gina Hinojosa has run a really impressive campaign and again has really emphasized, you know, data centers and sort of tried to tell this story of a kind of a low-key corruption from the Abbott campaign and—or the Abbott administration, I should say. So I’m gonna be looking at those two top races, but also just kind of broadly taking the temperature of what is kind of the ultimate 2026 battleground.

GH: Well, we will be paying very close attention to your reporting and excited to have you on the show today. For everyone watching, make sure you follow Tim’s great reporting over on MotherJones.com and catch him on our Instagram account as well. Tim Murphy, national correspondent. Thank you so much for being here.

TM: Thanks for having me.

GH: Okay, that’s it for this one. Great conversation with Tim. Again, you can go back and check out my conversation with David Corn and Ari Berman in our last episode. Our great journalism work, like Tim’s reporting and this show, is only possible because of your support. Your views and subscriptions keep us going. So don’t forget to like this video, this piece of content, share it and subscribe to our YouTube channel, and let us know what you think of this episode in the comments down below. Our producers are eager to know your thoughts on this show, Stress Test. We will be back in just a couple of days with another edition of Stress Test from Mother Jones. Thanks for being here.

Continue Reading…

Martin Soto Went Out for Diapers. He Came Home Eight Months Later.

Martin Soto, a Peruvian man thrown into solitary confinement after organizing a hunger and labor strike inside the notorious for-profit ICE detention facility Delaney Hall, was released from New Jersey’s Elizabeth Detention Center with an ankle monitor Tuesday night.

Soto came to the United States from Peru in 2024 and was pursuing asylum. He was detained by federal agents in February while buying diapers for his two young children. Though he has no criminal record, he spent eight consecutive months in ICE detention, including several months in solitary confinement—retribution, his wife Gabriela said, for his role as an organizer.

Gabriela Soto organized a series of protests outside Delaney Hall in May, as her husband worked to improve conditions inside. On May 22, a group of over 300 detained immigrants, including Martin, announced a two-week hunger and labor strike inside the for-profit detention facility, demanding freedom and due process, as well as a meeting with the governor and an end to coercive pressure to self-deport. The state of New Jersey sued to close Delaney Hall as reports of inedible food, violent guards, and inadequate medical care continued to emerge from the facility. The Department of Homeland Security, meanwhile, claimed the hunger strike never happened.

By the end of May, Martin Soto was transferred to the nearby Elizabeth Detention Center, where he was held for another four months. “They don’t want him associating with more people because they’re afraid that he might start another hunger and labor strike inside a facility,” Gabriela Soto told journalist Elizabeth Weill-Greenberg in early September. “So they keep him away from life in general.”

In August, Soto began pursuing a U-Visa, a specialized visa “reserved for victims of certain crimes…who are aiding law enforcement investigations.” In September, Gabriela Soto sent a handwritten letter to New Jersey Attorney General Davenport asking Davenport to sign Martin’s U-Visa certification as her office investigates alleged human rights abuses against Soto and others inside Delaney Hall.

“I know that my advocacy, Martin’s bravery, has placed this case in the spotlight & therefore your decisions in this are under that same spotlight,” Gabriela wrote. “But I ask you to please consider providing us with this documentation so we can continue our fight.”

That visa certification was approved this week, according to independent journalist Kevin Ortega-Rojas. Soto’s October 6 release was first reported by Radio Jornalera NJ, a local community radio station. New Jersey Democrats, including Representatives Rob Menendez (D-NJ) and Analilia Mejía (D-NJ), joined the Soto family and about two dozen supporters at the gates of the Elizabeth Detention Center Tuesday night.

In a video posted that evening by Radio Jornalera, Gabriela runs, sobbing, into Martin’s arms.

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Fear Kept Immigrants Away From Medicaid. Now Many Can’t Come Back.

Laura doesn’t know what she’s going to do when her medication runs out. For years, she relied on Medi-Cal, California’s version of Medicaid, to cover the costs of treating her Type 2 diabetes: doctor visits, tests, medication. An undocumented immigrant from Mexico, she benefited from California policies that opened Medi-Cal to all low-income residents, regardless of immigration status.

Last winter, however, she received a notice that her coverage was set to expire and that she would need to renew it. At the time, Laura, who lives in the San Francisco Bay Area, said she rarely left her home, scared of getting caught up in an immigration enforcement operation. For months, she had missed many of her appointments and sent friends to pick up her prescriptions.

But she eventually ventured to the enrollment office. There, the person reviewing her renewal application told her that, since some of her family members were paid under the table, they would all have to make and sign attestations of income. Her husband was hesitant, worried by news of Medicaid’s data-sharing agreement with ICE.

“For me it was more about fear,” she said in Spanish. “I didn’t write the letter and I didn’t take it back…We didn’t know if [the news about data sharing] was true or what they could do.”

They decided the risk was too great. The deadline passed. And now Laura cannot get her coverage back. On January 1, California began denying full Medi-Cal benefits to undocumented adults amid a growing budget deficit and federal Medicaid cuts. Now, only those enrolled before 2026 can keep their coverage, as long as they don’t roll off; for Laura, it was too late.

Since the start of the second Trump administration, doctors and policy experts across the country have increasingly warned that immigrants are avoiding medical care as deportation fears weigh heavily on their day-to-day lives. During Minnesota’s Operation Metro Surge last winter, for instance, researchers found that the rate of missed appointments increased by more than 80 percent among Spanish-speaking families.

Medicaid doesn’t fund full coverage for undocumented immigrants. In fact, this October, it scaled back coverage for many immigrants with legal status who were previously eligible, as provisions of the GOP’s July 2025 budget bill—better known as the “One Big Beautiful Bill”—kicked in.

But many immigrants are also choosing to drop out of programs that they are still eligible for, including state-funded coverage—even though, as blue states including California, Colorado, and Washington roll back and cap enrollment for these programs due to funding constraints, they might not be able to recover that medical support later on.

“What past research has shown us is that just the chilling effect and the fears and uncertainty around these policies lead many more immigrants to disenroll from coverage than those who are directly impacted,” said Drishti Pillai, director of immigrant health policy at KFF.

As more federal policies are implemented, such as the new eligibility provisions and changes to the federal public charge rule, which now penalizes some green card applicants if they use non-cash public benefits like Medicaid, _—_it’s likely that the share of immigrants avoiding healthcare will keep “increasing as time goes on,” Pillai said.

Laura, who is going by a pseudonym in this article, said she was initially reluctant to share her experience for the same reasons she didn’t risk renewing her health insurance benefits. But it was important, she reasoned, to raise awareness of a situation that has also happened to other of her friends and acquaintances.

“I know I’m not the only person who is going through this,” she said.

From May 2025 to March 2026, around 244,000 immigrants disenrolled from California-funded expansion programs meant forlow-income residents ineligible for Medicaid due to their legal status. It’s a drastic change from years prior, when enrollment in these programs generally increased each month.

Despite the fact that people in expansion programs only made up about one in nine of the state’s Medi-Calenrollees as of May 2025, based on public enrollment data, they accounted for about a third of disenrollments in the state from that month to March 2026, according to Diana Camacho, a senior program officer at the California Health Care Foundation.

California doesn’t keep track of why its residents disenroll from Medi-Cal. Many people, like Laura, simply roll off when they don’t renew their plan before their deadline.

Conversations Camacho has had, however, suggest that “fear and lack of information” are at work. Her team has heard immigrants voice concerns “about immigration enforcement, data sharing, as well as changing public charge rules” in weighing whether to renew—even when, like Laura, they might not be able to reverse their decision.

“A whole generation of children and immigrant families are falling behind in school because of all of this.”

A recent analysis by the Latino Policy and Politics Institute at the University of California, Los Angeles, compared data on ICE arrests with Medi-Cal enrollment numbers in state-funded programs. It found that, though enrollment rates in state-funded programs—which are used predominantly by undocumented immigrants—started decreasing after raids began in Los Angeles, the drops went far beyond the number of people arrested during that time.

Many factors “suggest that immigration enforcement has led to what is commonly known as the chilling effect,” said Arturo Vargas Bustamante, the institute’s faculty director of research. About a third of this group’s disenrollments in 2025, his study noted, couldn’t be explained by deportations or by regular enrollment fluctuations. Vargas Bustamante attributes that share of the decline to fear.

Though Northern California has been spared raids on the scale of Los Angeles or Chicago, Laura and her family have had much to be scared about: Last October, a planned massive ICE deployment was announced, then cancelled in the Bay Area, followed by news of ICE activity in multiple cities across the region and at San Francisco International Airport.

Laura’s biggest worry, she said, is that her family could be separated. Her two children, both US citizens, have told her they don’t want to move to a new country and leave their old lives behind. Though her children are young adults—her son just started college, and her daughter works and lives on her own—they still need her help. Her son is not yet financially independent; her daughter is autistic, so Laura wants to be close by.

Last year, when she still had coverage, “I would tell my doctor that I didn’t know why my glucose levels were rising,” Laura said. “I was working out, I was eating well, but I was stressed. And my stress was because my son was in high school and very worried about me. He would tell me to not go to his school, to not wait for him, and he would get worried. And I was even more worried for him.”

According to Vargas Bustamante, families like Laura’s, where undocumented parents are a household’s main providers, are among “the most affected” by these chilling effects: they are those for whom fears of family separation carry the most weight.

Even adults with coverage are underusing the health services they have access to, says Alma Santana of Mujeres Unidas y Activas, a nonprofit that supports Latina and indigenous women in Oakland and San Francisco.

“Our members have stopped going to their appointments, from basic ones to primary care visits,” said Santana, who heads the nonprofit’s immigrant rights program. “They’re worried about being detained if they go.” Two women she worked with, who had diabetes and cancer respectively, she said, decided to self-deport to Mexico, worried about interruptions to their medical care if they were detained.

It’s increasingly difficult for advocates and resource providers to tell immigrants what’s safe. Many of the federal administration’s new immigration policies have been challenged in court, though not always successfully. Sometimes, as with Medicaid’s data sharing agreement with ICE, the way the federal government plans to use the data remains unclear. But groups like Santana’s try to make sure immigrants have as much information as possible to weigh their options.

A rally outside a hospital in Glendale, California, protesting ICE officials who were guarding a person detained in the building, July 17, 2025.David McNew/Getty

“There’s a lot of fear, and then there’s people who, at a moment in time, decided not to renew and then later regretted it,” Santana said.

That impact extends to kids. Over the years, San Francisco pediatrician Raul Gutierrez has built a lot of trust with his patients, many of whom are from Spanish-speaking immigrant families. But since the start of the second Trump presidency, he’s noticed they’re much more reluctant to seek treatment.

“More kids need reminders to come to their visits. Kids are missing their vaccines,” Gutierrez said. “Kids are missing their specialty appointments for things that they need to be evaluated on.”

One mother asked Gutierrez if it was necessary to take her daughter to the gastroenterologist; the specialist was located in a different city that she didn’t know well. ”She really was struggling with that question of, ‘Do we go and just risk the possibility of being detained?’” he said.

He has sought workarounds to let those families safely access care, such as phone appointments. But that’s not always possible. Some families, Gutierrez said, wait too long to access care; one family he knows, whose child had a condition that causes fluid accumulation in the brain, waited until their child needed emergency surgery.

Other families, he has noticed, have opted to not renew their children’s Medi-Cal altogether—even though children under 18 in California are still eligible regardless of immigration status. “There’s so many questions that are being asked and so much uncertainty about how that information is being shared,” he said.

Gutierrez worries that these lapses in coverage will leave immigrant children with even more unmet health care needs, including mental health support, which he notes more children now require amid deportation fears.

“I worry that a whole generation of children and immigrant families are afraid to engage in their communities and not take advantage of all the wonderful things that help them thrive and that help them just be children,” he said. “A whole generation of children and immigrant families are falling behind in school because of all of this.”

New state and federal policies could make disenrollments even worse in the coming year, Camacho said, and not just for immigrants. Further restrictions on Medi-Cal will kick in next year that add more eligibility checks and work reporting requirements, creating more barriers for all low-income California residents.

The “public charge” rule, implemented in mid-September, is among the policies that alarms advocates most: immigration officers now consider whether immigrants or their family members use public benefits like Medicaid and SNAP when reviewing applications for permanent residency.

“It’s hard not to live stressed, thinking about what might happen tomorrow if you go to the store and you don’t come back.”

After Trump first tried to implement a similar rule in 2019—when it was contested in the courts and eventually rescinded by the Biden administration—researchers found that, though the rule did not apply to many of the immigrant groups that qualify for benefits, it had broader impacts on those groups’ willingness to seek support. A 2021 KFF survey, for instance, found that 1 in 4 undocumented Latino adults, and 1 in 10 lawful permanent Latino residents, had decided to opt out of government assistance programs because they worried about its impact on their immigration status or that of a family member.

“Perhaps it’s going to go away at the end of the Trump administration,” Vargas Bustamante said. A group of 22 states has already filed a lawsuit challenging the rule. But for now, he predicts, it will only “generate bigger and more chilling effects in our communities.”

The last time Laura saw her doctor, she re-filled Laura’s prescriptions and said that they could figure out a way to continue their visits, even though Laura no longer had coverage.

It wasn’t the first time her doctor had expressed concern. Laura said the doctor had called her multiple times last winter, asking her why she wasn’t showing up to her appointments. Laura would say that she didn’t want to put herself at risk. But what would happen, Laura’s physician asked, if she stopped going to the doctor?

When Laura went to pick up her pills with her new prescription, she learned she’d have to pay out of pocket. She can’t cover that cost regularly—the 53-year-old hasn’t been able to find a consistent source of income since last year, when the woman she regularly cooked and cleaned for told her she could no longer afford to pay for her help due to the Bay Area’s rising cost of living.

“It’s a very uncertain future,” Laura said. “I don’t know if I’m going to have the same support.”

She is hardly the only one.

“With the messages we’re getting every day, it’s hard to stay calm,” said Santana, of Mujeres Unidas y Activas. “It’s hard not to live stressed, thinking about what might happen tomorrow if you go to the store and you don’t come back.”

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Trump Administration Plans to Have Its Own Lawyers Represent Migrant Kids

The Trump administration has quietly announced that its own lawyers will represent unaccompanied migrant children in immigration court, facing off against other administration lawyers who are trying to deport the kids.

Immigration advocates are concerned that the arrangement, announced last week in the Federal Register, could pose a conflict of interest. In the past, unaccompanied minors were represented by a network of independent nonprofits, but the administration ended the contract this year after the network refused to hand over privileged information about its young clients.

“I’m concerned about the lack of independence” of these new government lawyers, says Ana Raquel Devereaux, an attorney at the nonprofit Michigan Immigrant Rights Center, part of the network that lost the contract.

The administration’s new attorneys will be housed in the Department of Health and Human Services, in a section called the Unaccompanied Alien Children Legal Representation Division. HHS did not respond to questions about when they would begin their work.

The federal rules in place to protect immigrant kids from harm and exploitation “rely on experienced legal representatives trained to work with children.”

Unaccompanied minors are granted special protections under federal law because they are so vulnerable after entering the United States without a parent or legal guardian; many of them are very young and could be at risk of trafficking or abuse. The Trafficking Victims Protection and Reauthorization Act requires that they be assigned independent lawyers.

This requirement is particularly important, immigrant advocates point out, because the other arms of immigration court are far from independent: Immigration judges work for the Department of Justice and deportation attorneys work for the Department of Homeland Security. “We already don’t have an independent [immigration] judiciary, and to have the defense side of representation also be within the government makes me feel like it’s all a farce and everybody is working together to get the kids removed,” says Devereaux.

The Federal Register notes that the new division of lawyers will be separate from another division at HHS, the Office of Refugee Resettlement, which temporarily houses unaccompanied kids after they cross the border alone until they can be reunited with sponsors, who are often relatives. As my colleague Isabela Dias and I reported last week, ORR has been holding children for significantly longer periods under the Trump administration and is also detaining children who are arguably not even unaccompanied.

In a statement to the Associated Press, HHS said the new lawyers would “give the Department an additional mechanism to provide these children direct legal support while dedicated public servants work around the clock to safely reunify them with their families.” But immigration advocates fear—not without justification—that the administration will instead work to deport the kids. As our earlier piece mentioned, the government tried to fly dozens of Guatemalan children from ORR shelters out of the country in the middle of the night last year, but a court intervened. And ProPublica reported that unaccompanied minors have been detained and removed from the United States at three times the rate they were during Trump’s first term.

The administration’s plan to represent migrant kids in court was announced after months of upheaval over who shouldplay that role. In August, the longstanding contract with the network of independent legal nonprofits expired. Then, the administration awarded a contract to Burke Law Group, a small Texas firm with far less experience in such matters, but greater ties to Trump: one of Burke’s co-founders served in the first Trump administration and one of its founding partners works for the second.

Facing backlash, Burke Law Group pulled out and the administration instead awarded the contract to Our Rescue, a nonprofit founded by a former ICE agent that had no experience representing immigrant kids in court.

Last month, dozens of federal lawmakers signed a letter expressing concern that the administration would give such an important job to “firms so plainly unqualified for the task.” The Our Rescue deal was put on hold after the nonprofit Acacia Center for Justice filed a bid protest, whereupon the administration awarded another contract to the US Committee for Refugees and Immigrants. But in recent court filings, immigration advocates said USCRI was not representing kids in court, and its lawyers often sat silently as judges considered the children’s cases.

“There are rules in place…to protect children, but those rules rely on experienced legal representatives trained to work with children,” Roxana Avila-Cimpeanu, deputy director of the Florence Immigrant and Refugee Rights Project, also part of the nonprofit network that lost its contract, said in a press conference last month. “Instead, the administration has chosen to fracture this network of experienced child-centered advocates that existed, with no plan in place to replace it.”

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Trump Says Voter Fraud is Rampant. The Evidence Says Otherwise.

If you’ve ever listened to President Trump talk about our elections, you might hear something like this: Voter fraud is rampant. Noncitizens are regularly voting illegally. And our elections are rigged. The president often uses the bully pulpit to repeat these claims despite study after study showing they’re just not true. But it’s not just the president. There are many others at the ground level saying the same things to justify voting restrictions that could disenfranchise legal voters, especially voters of color.

One of them is J. Christian Adams. An activist and former trial attorney for the US Department of Justice, Adams was named to Trump’s Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity in 2017. Today, he’s the president of Public Interest Legal Foundation, a nonprofit that advocates for stricter voter ID laws and sues states and local governments to remove illegal voters from election rolls.

On this week’s “More To The Story,” Adams claims there’s systemic voter fraud in the US before abruptly ending the interview after host Al Letson challenges his assertions. Al then talks with Mother Jones National Voting Rights Correspondent Ari Berman about the lack of evidence from activists like Adams, the claims Adams and PILF have made that noncitizens are illegally voting, and what conservative activists who say election fraud is rampant are really trying to achieve.

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

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Study: Shock Gloves Traumatized Army Volunteers

A newly released military study paints a frightening picture of the electric shock gloves ICE recently purchased by the thousands—and which the agency and its acting head David Venturella seem eager to deploy regardless of the potential consequences.

Records unearthed by the watchdog group American Oversight and first shared with the Associated Press show that in one set of trials carried out by the US Army in 2024, the electric shock gloves caused “overwhelmingly immediate” pain to soldiers playing the role of combative inmates in a mock forced cell extraction scenario, who then reported that “just seeing the glove” frightened them into obedience.

GLOVEs, or Generated Low Output Voltage Emitter, are taser-like devices that look like standard work gloves, but deliver a painful electric charge when the wearer touches a person’s skin. As I’ve previously reported, they’ve been described as “low optics”—police language for a weapon that causes harm but doesn’t leave marks, making it harder for victims to sue or for public outrage to stem from visible harm.

Two weeks ago, the shock gloves’ manufacturer, Jeff Niklaus, called the devices the “safest, most humane deescalatory product probably ever to come along.”

The Army study found that the gloves caused “intense pain,” but didn’t significantly change the amount of time it took to control a combative prisoner, or transfer someone from one unit to another. In one trial, a participant accidentally turned the shock gloves on; in another, “inmates” were able to fight off “guards” wearing the gloves for longer than they were able to hold off unarmed ones. People with water or oil on their skin felt more pain when shocked, and one participant reported lingering pain for 30 minutes afterward.

Soldiers, once shocked, were terrified to be shocked again. Army investigators reported “fatigue, soreness, and excessive apprehensiveness to being shocked again” in the soldiers playing inmates—and noted that the shock gloves gave a confidence boost to those who were playing guards, especially “smaller or less trained members.” The gloves, the study concluded, should be deployed in military prisons.

In September, ICE finalized its purchase of 6,650 pairs of the shock gloves for $16.7 million from Kentucky-based Compliant Technologies. White House border czar Tom Homan said in August that it could “be a while” before the gloves are in use in the field. But ICE, according to the Associated Press, was already well aware of the Army study when it chose to purchase the gloves.

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Artificial Goes After Our Silicon Valley Overlords. Just Not Very Well.

The world premiere of Artificial, the new movie centered around the rise of OpenAI CEO Sam Altman as he led an unstable company down a dangerous path, was packed. The recent wave ofhigh-profile “rogue AI” security incidents, disputes over tech industry-led safeguards and regulation, and continued multibillion-dollar investments to advance development has clearly piqued public interest.

The movie, directed by Challengers filmmaker Luca Guadagnino, contains scenes derived from real reporting on OpenAI and the industry: discussions on ensuring their products “align” with human values while racing competitors such as Google, and undertaking corporate restructuring to draw investment from the likes of Microsoft. It also hinges on wide public sentiment that major tech companies and their leaders hold too much power and developers should pause developmentoftheir most advanced models to mitigate risks to humanity.

The people behind Artificial appear to agree. “The deeper responsibility we all felt is to try to do some interrogation of who we are giving all of our autonomy, power, and data to,” Andrew Garfield, who plays Altman, said on Monday night during the post-screening Q&A at the New York Film Festival, “that felt like the service to the greater thing.” The actor said the filmmakers were adding new scenes while shooting to create a “living document” of how the AI industry was progressing.

The moral center of the film is Ilya Sutskever, OpenAI’s co-founder and former chief scientist played by Yura Borisov, who sees in AI technology potential to solve humanity’s problems, but realizes too late that his idealism doesn’t fit within the constraints of the market. A former AI researcher played by Jason Schwartzman, presented as a prophet who sees the future of the tech with clarity, tells Sutskever that it could lead, if not to total human extinction, at least to life under AI subjugation.

But the filmmakers also portray the tech leaders who don’t recognize this—or simply don’t care—as goofy megalomaniacs. While Garfield portrays Altman as constantly dodging confrontation to get people to be as forgiving toward him as possible, he also plays him with a cartoonish quality—with his frantic shifts in posture played as a joke, and the post-production team changing the actor’s brown eyes to a bright, inhuman blue. Even more so for others like Ike Barinholtz as Elon Musk, whose facial expressions and demeanor seem to lean far more silly than threatening.

The intermittent comic relief scenes give the movie’s satirical side the energy of Saturday Night Live sketches—the screenwriter, Simon Rich, previously wrote for the comedy show—immediate, but largely short on depth and nuance. The filmmakers could pull their humor, and their wider sense of what’s laughable about these characters, from deeper, and darker, places. (There are vague gestures at a misogynistic Silicon Valley culture, but nothing political or deeply personal.)

With the characters operating more as caricatures, the movie doesn’t meet what Garfield called on Monday “the deeper responsibility” to interrogate the people it depicts or the culture behind them the countless expository conversations on the potential harms of generative AI—between real-life characters who unleashed said harms through global-scale business relationships—don’t feel grounded in any reality. The mentions of existential risks stop at just that: Altman says “Countries will fall. Industries are gonna collapse.” The only specific harm addressed is AI’s contribution to a person’s suicide.

As I wrote on Monday, it’s good that Hollywood might finally be catching up to tech companies’ negative impacts on our world. Many Silicon Valley films before Artificial did not. But only being able to giggleat our tech overlords is not enough.

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

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Everything You’ve Been Told About Lethal Injection Is a Lie

In the months leading up to Christa Pike’s execution date, she and her legal team made it clear that she, the lone woman on Tennessee’s death row, 50 years old, wasn’t afraid to die. She was terrified of the execution itself.

“Her greatest fear wasn’t dying,” attorney Stephen Ferrell told USA Today in a press conference. “It was a fear of a prolonged, painful, traumatic death.”

Citing her blood-clotting disorder and a history of difficult blood draws, her attorney argued that there could be problems properly affixing the IV into Pike’s arm and that executing her via lethal injection would amount to cruel and unusual punishment.

About a month before her execution, her lawyers had pushed for her to be hanged or shot by a firing squad instead. At the eleventh hour, the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals stayed her execution, only to have the Supreme Court overrule it. When she finally arrived in the prison’s death chamber, Pike and her lawyer’s concerns would be proven true to a degree they couldn’t have anticipated: she became the first person to survive the administration of a double dose of lethal injection drugs.

What should have been a ten- to twenty-minute process took two hours, according to the Associated Press, and ended with Pike alive but in critical condition. Christa Pike reportedly remains intubated, on a ventilator in a Nashville hospital, receiving life-saving care after being pumped with what should have been two fatal doses of pentobarbital, a barbiturate used by many states for lethal injection. When she arrived at the hospital, Pike’s arms were “swollen, burned and blistered,” according to an emergency filing from her legal team.

There’s still a lot that we don’t know about the actions of prison officials leading up to and during Pike’s execution. Pike’s attorneys believe that a problem with the state’s IV lines caused the pentobarbital to flow into her tissue, instead of her veins.

Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee has halted all executions in the state and ordered an “independent investigation.” The head of Tennessee’s Department of Correction resigned days after Pike’s hospitalization, but defended the execution, saying the state “carried out its responsibilities in accordance with the established protocol.”

Christa Pike’s case, while unusual in many respects, is a perfect encapsulation of the pitfalls of lethal injection as an execution method in the United States. Most people’s understanding of lethal injection—as a humane alternative to more overtly brutal executions of yore—is in stark contrast to the actual barbarism behind the procedure. This misconception is no coincidence: it’s by design.

Death penalty states are incredibly secretive about every step of the lethal injection process. Why? According to University of Richmond law professor and former prosecutor Corinna Barrett Lain, it’s because lethal injection has the best political optics—as long as people don’t know much about what’s happening behind the scenes.

As Lain wrote in her 2025 book, Secrets of the Killing State: The Untold Story of Lethal Injection:

Every other execution method—hanging, the electric chair, gas chamber, and firing squad—lays bare the brutality of the state that kills in our name. Lethal injection hides it. With lethal injection, we don’t have to deal with the sight of blood, or the smell of burning flesh, or the sounds of suffering, all potent reminders of what the state is actually doing. Instead, we get to tell ourselves that prisoners are just drifting off into forever-sleep.

Secrets of the Killing State pulls back the curtain that shrouds lethal injection, revealing how everything from the drug suppliers to the science behind this method of execution is riddled with issues. I reached out to Lain to learn what might have gone wrong in Pike’s execution, and how the problems with lethal injection are not individual but systemic, baked into its very foundation.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

What was your initial reaction to hearing about the failed execution of Christa Pike?

Yet another botched execution. I had some ideas of how it happened, why it happened, but of course, part of the problem is we don’t have any information. I’ve been studying [lethal injection] for seven years, so hearing about Christa, it’s really sad and frustrating.

“For the first 35 to 40 years, states used a paralytic…that would ensure it would look like putting down a pet.”

You know, in some ways, her case is a paradigm example of both everything that’s wrong with lethal injection and everything that’s wrong with the death penalty. More broadly, it’s an example of what’s wrong with lethal injection.

We now have a growing list of people whose executions are so badly botched that they survived their own execution. But we also know we’ve seen executions that are one hour long, two hours long, three hours long. I’ve seen autopsies with 14, 16, 18 puncture wounds. This is the stuff that’s been happening, but now, finally, it has drawn the public’s attention.

In your book, you spend a good chunk of the beginning pulling back the curtain on the real horrors that come with lethal injection and how execution states have pretty brilliantly rebranded it. Can you describe people’s biggest misconceptions when it comes to the death penalty vs. the actual reality of the procedure?

The public has been told for the last 45 years that lethal injection is akin to putting your beloved pet down, and none of that’s true. The public has been sold a bill of goods, and for the first 35 to 40 years, states used a paralytic as one of the drugs in lethal injection that would ensure it would look like putting down a pet.

The paralytic was also a muscle relaxant, so it relaxed all the muscles in the face, and then it froze them that way. So you’re going to get this nice drifting-off-to-sleep look, no matter what is actually happening, and we know what’s actually happening because now we have hundreds of autopsies that show us that those are violent deaths too.

What happened to Christa Pike was simply the truth breaking through.

That goes perfectly into my next question. Can you talk about why the use of pentobarbital in lethal injections is, for lack of a better word, problematic?

Pentobarbital is the drug that we use in physician-assisted suicide and also in animal euthanasia. So one might think that it is a better drug for lethal injection than the traditional three-drug protocol that states were using all these years.

But what we know from autopsy studies is that the pH of pentobarbital, which is between 10 and 11, is chemically burning the delicate capillaries in the lungs, causing the capillaries to become leaky and the lungs to take on fluid.

This condition is called flash pulmonary edema, and it shows up, depending upon the study, in between 84 percent of all pentobarbital executions.

Flash pulmonary edema happens in seconds when you inject a drug into the veins. It goes first to the heart. Then to the lungs. So, as the body is trying to buffer that difference in the pH so that it can metabolize the drug and use it as an anesthetic, it’s already gone to the lungs, and that happens immediately.

These people are essentially drowning in their own fluids. Some of the cases show acute flash pulmonary edema. It’s also called fulminating pulmonary edema. That’s where the lungs are so congested that the froth—the mixture of air and fluid—actually moves up into the windpipe, into their throats, and they choke on it.

“One of the things [the report] found was executioners, on the eve of an execution, looking in Wikipedia to figure out how much of the drugs to inject.”

One court asked a medical professional on the stand, while explaining pulmonary edema, if the sensation would be one of drowning from within. The court said, “Is this the same sensation as waterboarding?” And the medical professional said yes.

The public has this view of lethal injection as just putting a pet to sleep. In reality, we are actually waterboarding people to death, and I don’t say that to be dramatic. I say that to be clear, honest, and candid about what we’re actually doing.

Before her execution, Pike was issued a stay by an appeals court, which was quickly overruled by the Supreme Court. A throughline throughout Secrets of the Killing State is the role that politics plays in pushing executions forward. Can you describe why—and do you believe that politics played a role in the fast-tracking of Christa Pike’s execution?

Politics played a role in the sense that this “pro-life” Supreme Court is uniquely excited about death and advocates for it. So what happened in Christa Pike’s case is actually not unusual at all.

This is a theme that we saw in the executions from Trump’s first term too, where a court had heard a challenge to the one-drug pentobarbital protocol; the prisoners had presented two weeks’ worth of evidence, thousands of pages and documents, expert testimony, all of that stuff, and the district court issued a preliminary injunction on the execution and said—by the way, to issue a preliminary injunction, you have to make a factual finding, and the court did—that the plaintiffs were likely to succeed on the merits of their claim.

So stop and think about that. A federal court that heard two weeks’ worth of evidence paused the execution just till they could get to trial. But the standard for that is incredibly high. You have to be able to find that the plaintiffs are probably going to win. They are likely to succeed. So she issues the preliminary injunction, and the Supreme Court lifts it and greenlights the Trump executions. That was the first of, I think it was 13 Trump executions, and it all started with the court lifting a stay on the shadow docket.

It’s incredibly perverse that the court in those Trump executions would lift the stay over executions. Litigation over the very method of execution that they were then subjected to. They made a claim. They said this is unconstitutional. The court said, “You know what? I think you’re probably going to win this. Let’s at least let you get to trial.” And the Supreme Court lifts the stay. They can’t even get to trial, and then they are executed by the very method that they had shown was probably unconstitutional.

It’s pure power. Purely unjudicious.

One large part of the branding for lethal injection is that it’s a “scientific procedure”: “We put down animals all the time, and euthanasia is legal in some countries for humans. Why can we do the same thing here?” But chapters two and three of your book unveil just how much these procedures are not, forgive the pun, “a perfect science.” Can you talk about this?

We assume it’s science because we know that there is science behind animal euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide. But it’s quite telling that in the traditional three-drug protocol that every state used for the first 35 to 40 years of lethal injection—not a single one of those drugs was the drug that we use for animal euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide. Not one of those drugs.

When the man who invented lethal injection was asked about that—“Hey, how did you come up with the drugs?”—he said, and I quote, “I didn’t do any research.” He just made it up off the top of his head. It’s so fantastical that it would be hard to believe if it weren’t true. But it is true, and it’s not just about what happened in 1977 when lethal injection was invented.

In 2024, Arizona botched three executions in 2022, and the governor put executions on hold and said, we’re going to have an independent investigation. They hired a retired federal judge. The judge looked into it, drafted a report that found all kinds of things. And the governor dismissed him and said, “We’re going to go a different direction.” That’s literally what she told him.

The different direction was having the Department of Corrections do a review of itself, which it then did, and said, “We’re great. Now give us our warrant, and we’re going to start with a volunteer.” So there’s no adversarial process at all. But this made the judge so mad that he actually released his draft report. You can find it on the internet. And one of the things he found was executioners, on the eve of an execution, looking in Wikipedia to figure out how much of the drugs to inject.

“It’s easier for them to argue about secrecy, and to take the hit for secrecy, than for the public to know.”

That’s 2024. This didn’t even make it in the book. They don’t know what they’re doing. The problem with lethal injection, at its core, is that medical scientists are not going to tell states how to do this. They are very much believers in the Hippocratic Oath. They are healers. They’re creating this knowledge for healers, and they are not going to tell you how to kill. So, you’ve got people looking on Wikipedia. The American public hears them saying, “Oh yes, we’re careful. Oh yes, we care. We’re following the protocol.”

And the fact of the matter is, it’s a hot mess that would make any citizen outraged if they knew what was really happening behind this curtain.

Which goes into my next question: the secrecy. One of the biggest realizations that I learned from reading this book was how much secrecy goes into an execution via lethal injection, from who the executioners are, where the drugs were obtained, to even the events happening within the death chamber.

And this secrecy is by design. Why is this the case?

My sense is states can’t fix what is broken with lethal injection. They can’t get the drugs because pharmaceutical companies didn’t make medicine for killing. They can’t get the medical professionals they need to competently do these executions. They can’t get access to the veins. The death row population is a geriatric population with notoriously weak veins. These are people with histories of poor health in general, and many of them are former IV drug users. Even Christa Pike- her lawyers were saying she has bad veins.

These are problems inherent in the project of using drugs to kill. So what do you do when you can’t fix the problem? You hide it.

It’s easier for them to argue about secrecy, and to take the hit for secrecy, than for the public to know where they’re actually getting their drugs from, how they’re breaking laws, who they’re using; it’s easier for them to defend secrecy with the state at its most powerful moment than to defend their practices on the merits.

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“They Knew, They Lied”: Fire Survivors Bring Their Fight to the Supreme Court’s Steps

On Monday morning outside the Supreme Court, as Justices heard arguments concerning a landmark climate liability lawsuit, a rally organized by the Center for Climate Integrity and Fossil Free Media drew a crowd of roughly one hundred people. Many carried signs with messages like “Climate Change is No Accident,” “SCOTUS Hands Off Boulder,” and “Warning: Burning Fossil Fuels Can Destroy Civilization.” At several points, The People v. Big Oil gathering chanted “They knew, they lied” in a call-and-response, referencing fossil fuel scientists and executives who knew more than 50 years ago that burning fossil fuels would raise global temperatures, and instead sowed doubt to undermine scientific evidence.

As Louie Delaware, a survivor of the 2021 Marshall Fire told the crowd, “No company or industry should gain an advantage by hiding facts that people need to protect their health, their communities, and their future. The bottom line is that they knew, they lied, and they must be accountable for their actions.” Delaware lost his home along with roughly 50 others on his street when the fire devastated Boulder, Colorado. His family was displaced for more than two and a half years. Other survivors of the Marshall Fire spoke at the rally, as well as survivors of the 2025 Eaton fire in Altadena, California.

Meanwhile, inside the courtroom, the justices heard arguments in Suncor Energy v. Boulder, widely regarded as a seminal case concerning the issue of whether or not local governments can demand damages from fossil fuel companies for their contributions to climate change. The fossil fuel companies are arguing that a state court can’t hold multinational companies accountable for global harm. AsI reported last week:

The case revolves around a dispute between the City and County of Boulder, which first sued the energy companies in 2018. They are arguing that Suncor and Exxon deceived the public about the dangers of climate change and should be forced to pay damages for climate-induced heat waves, wildfires, droughts, and floods. “The damages will only multiply as climate change worsens,” Boulder stated in its lawsuit. Suncor and Exxon, meanwhile, are asking the justices to kill the case before it makes it to trial—and with it a host of other state-level climate cases.

Depending on how the eight justices rule—Justice Samuel Alito announced what some considered to be an 11th hour recusal earlier this week—the case could have far-reaching consequences for people [in Colorado]. But its implications extend beyond the state’s borders: dozens of other climate-related lawsuits hang in the balance of how Suncor v. Boulder is decided**.**

“The Eaton Fire took my sister and eighteen other people. My family lost five homes, including my childhood home,” said Zaire Calvin, who lost his sister, Evelyn McClendon to the disaster. “From Altadena to Boulder, we carry different stories. Today, we stand together in one demand: let the evidence be heard. Let responsibility be determined.” California’s own climate liability lawsuit against major oil companies is currently on hold while the Supreme Court weighs in on the Boulder case.

“From Altadena to Boulder, we carry different stories. Today, we stand together in one demand: let the evidence be heard. Let responsibility be determined.”

Former Washington state Gov. Jay Inslee was also present on Monday outside the courtroom. “The fossil fuel industry malignantly and maliciously lied to the American people, and I’ll be damned if I let them take away an American right to hold industries accountable and have their day in court,” he said. “They knew for decades what the consequences of their products were, and they chose to lie.” In 2021, Inslee signed Washington’s Climate Commitment Act, a market-based cap-and-invest program to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and has emerged as a leading voice against industry pushing against sweeping immunity laws against climate liability lawsuits.

Neighborhood home during the Marshall Fire in Boulder, Colorado on December 30, 2021. Louie Delaware

When the speeches ended, I spoke with Deirdre Macnab and Dr. Kathryn Bedell, two regenerative cattle ranchers from Rio Blanco County who had traveled to Washington for the event. After interviewing Macnab last week, I asked her what it felt like to be in front of the Supreme Court. “I’m glad it’s coming to the Supreme Court. Now we need to come together. We can solve this,” she said. “But we’ve got to bring the big boys to the table, and that’s the oil companies.”

Fellow rancher Bedell echoed her call to action, and underscored the devastating effects of wildfires, drought, and extreme heat. “I think there isn’t anybody here who should be able to deny the impacts of climate change. It’s going to be obvious in our food supply pretty soon if we don’t change,” she told me. “If you can’t grow food, we have to import it, and we won’t have any food security or control over the price. People should be terrified. It terrifies me.” Bedell, a sixth-generation farmer who has been a rancher for over three decades, has been forced to sell her cattle. “I’ve had these same cattle for generations, so I know them all personally. They’re moving to the sale yard on December 19.”

As oral arguments drew to a close, I spoke with Louie Delaware and another Marshall Fire survivor, Jenny Singer-Rupp. “One of the tenets of a free democracy is ‘the David’ can go after ‘the Goliath’. Everybody deserves their day in court to be able to prove their case,” Delaware told me. He pointed to settlements by the tobacco industries and pharmaceutical companies over opioid addiction, adding, “They’re huge entities, but there are a lot of huge entities that have been taken down in court.”

Singer-Rupp is simply fighting for her children. “My kids talk to me about climate change and natural disasters, and they’re worried about their future,” she said. “I never thought I’d be standing in front of the Supreme Court. But I’m doing everything I can to protect that future for them.”

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California’s Mail Ballot System Excludes Disabled Voters, Court Rules

A federal court struck down a California rule that required voters to sign and return vote-by-mail ballots on paper, rather than doing so electronically. The ruling in California Council of the Blind v. Weber, announced October 3, is a victory for disabled voters—but it probably won’t change things much until the next election cycle.

Since 2021, California has mailed ballots to all registered voters for all statewide and local elections. Voters with print disabilities—those who are blind or low-vision, or whose physical disabilities prevent them from marking a paper ballot—can request a link to vote electronically. After filling out their ballot on a computer, they must print it, put it in an envelope, seal the envelope, and return it “through non-electronic means.”

This is complicated by the fact that many blind people don’t own printers, because they have no use for them. And that’s only one of the obstacles they might face under the current vote-by-mail rules.

Christopher Gray, a resident of San Francisco County and a plaintiff in the lawsuit, is blind. Under the current system, as he wrote in a 2024 court declaration, he is unable to vote without assistance.

He could theoretically vote using a virtual vote-by-mail ballot, which he can fill out unassisted using his own assistive technology, including a Braille-equipped computer.

But printing the ballot, finding where to sign it, signing it, putting it in an envelope, sealing it, and returning it without assistance is not possible for him. “Because of the lack of an accessible method of returning my ballot by mail, when I vote I must forgo my right to vote confidentially and privately,” Gray wrote.

During the 2022 general elections, Gray ended up paying an assistant to help him fill out his ballot—but in doing so, he was forced to give up that privacy and independence. He also gave up his certainty that his ballot had been submitted at all. “Though I trusted my reader, I could not independently confirm they accurately marked my ballot and mailed it on my behalf,” he said.

The vote-by-mail program, as it stands, discriminates against voters who cannot return their ballots without assistance, he and the other plaintiffs argued. “I want to vote in a private and independent manner just as voters without print disabilities are able to do in my state,” Gray wrote. “I will be able to do so only if alternative accessible options for returning a vote-by-mail ballot are available to me.”

The court ruled that the current vote-by-mail system does exclude some disabled voters, and “denies them meaningful access to the vote by mail program,” as Magistrate Judge Sallie Kim wrote. The court, however, did not specify a resolution. The state of California now has until October 19 to propose a new vote-by-mail protocol, and since California ballots have already been mailed out, any changes made likely will not take effect until the next election cycle.

As Democracy Docket has reported, “32 states allow for electronic absentee ballot return for certain voters, with 13 of these states providing a specific carveout for voters with disabilities.”

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Trump Ran on Lowering Prices. Now Most Americans Blame Him for Them.

Only 17 percent of Americans approve of how President Donald Trump is handling the cost of living, according to a recent poll from the Associated Press andNORC Center for Public Affairs Research.

This is a record low for both of Trump’spresidential terms—notable as he spent much of his 2024 campaign criticizing Democrats on the issue. About 70 percent, including about half of Republicans, said the president’s cost-of-living policies have been “worse than expected.”

The Associated Press reported that Trump’s economic approval mirrors Biden’s 28 percent in June 2022 during the initial years of the Covid-19 pandemic. A few months later, 55 percent of Americans said that affordability struggles were outside his control. But now, Americans are blaming Trump, with 65 percent reporting that the high cost of living is a result of Trump’s policies.

The survey was based on 2,140 US adults and was conducted from September 24-28 with a margin of error of 2.9 percentage points.

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A Federal Judge Slams the Brakes on Big Bend Border Wall Construction

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

Federal Judge Kathleen Cardone granted a preliminary injunction Friday to halt construction on the border wall in Texas’ expansive Big Bend sector, including the national and state parks.

Cardone read a brief order from the bench after hearing more than four hours of testimony from conservation groups and residents of the Big Bend region, known internationally for its dark night skies, abundant biodiversity and rugged river canyons.

Cardone said that the plaintiffs are likely to succeed on the merits in at least one of their claims and to suffer irreparable harm if construction continues. Her ruling stops border barrier construction in the entire Big Bend sector—which spans more than 500 miles across West Texas—until the federal government complies with all applicable laws.

An analyst testified that the Big Bend sector is a “distant last place” in unauthorized border crossings, contrary to the government’s claims.

The ruling applies to all of Big Bend National Park, Big Bend Ranch State Park, and the border along the Rio Grande in the rest of the sector. The injunction will remain in place while the court considers the lawsuit, which was filed in April.

Plaintiffs and their supporters embraced and wept outside the federal courtroom in El Paso Friday afternoon following the ruling. Many had traveled hundreds of miles from Big Bend communities, including Terlingua and Marfa, to attend.

The Center for Biological Diversity, Friends of the Ruidosa Church, and Danny Miller Jr., a river guide, sued the US Department of Homeland Security and Secretary Markwayne Mullin for waiving dozens of laws to fast-track the border wall through the Big Bend region. The Texas Civil Rights Project and the Center for Biological Diversity are representing the plaintiffs.

The federal waivers cover the entire Big Bend region. This had allowed construction to proceed without following the National Environmental Policy Act, the Archaeological and Historic Preservation Act and many other laws. Under the injunction, the effect of the waivers is stayed.

Customs and Border Protection has changed its plans for border barrier construction in the Big Bend region numerous times since February. The federal government currently plans to build vehicle barriers and access roads within the state and national parks. A 30-foot steel wall is planned for private land in Big Bend outside the parks.

One plaintiff, a river guide, called the construction a “visible scar that will never go away.”

In mid-August, advocates documented excavators and bulldozers clearing land within Big Bend National Park. Customs and Border Protection then issued a construction pause in the park on August 17. That pause lifted this week. Construction recently began on a new 30-foot steel wall in Hudspeth County, east of El Paso.

Attorneys for the plaintiffs called eight people to testify Friday. Their arguments centered on the lack of evidence that the Big Bend sector is an area of “high illegal entry,” as stated in the federal waivers. They argued that the plaintiffs were already suffering and will continue to suffer harm if border wall construction continues.

Adam Isaacson, an analyst at the Washington Office on Latin America, presented data showing the Big Bend sector is a “distant last place” in unauthorized border crossings compared to the nine sectors that make up the US border with Mexico. The plaintiffs’ attorneys explained that they requested granular data about how many people are detained in Big Bend National Park, as opposed to the vast area that makes up the rest of the sector, and the federal government never supplied that information.

Miller, the river guide, said his business depends on access to the Rio Grande and explained how property he owns along the river will be irrevocably damaged if the wall is built.

He described border wall construction as a “visible scar that will never go away.” Miller and several other individuals giving testimony broke down in tears when asked how a border wall could change their relationship to the Rio Grande.

Department of Justice attorneys presented few counterarguments and did not present any witnesses. The White House referred questions to the Department of Homeland Security, which did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

“We stand by our assessment and remain confident in our legal authorities to secure the border while preserving the unique landscape of the Big Bend region,” a Customs and Border Protection spokesperson said. “We are working with the Department of Justice on next steps.”

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Out of Sight in North Florida: Life Inside Deportation Depot

Last month, I wrote about a DHS Office of Inspector General report that revealed alarming conditions inside Alligator Alcatraz, an immigrant detention center opened last summer in the Everglades that held up to 1,500 people. Among the worst violations was the use of metal cages as “calming areas” where detainees were often held, the report stated. As Corene Kendrick, deputy director at the ACLU’s National Prison Project, told me then, the report “reaffirms the cruelty of Alligator Alcatraz.”

Alligator Alcatraz is now closed. But buried deep within the DHS report was a warning about possible similar conditions at the other state-operated immigrant detention center in Florida: the Baker Correctional Institution in northern Florida, nicknamed by Gov. Ron DeSantis as “Deportation Depot.” The inspectors pointed to the concerns raised in the report, and concluded “ICE’s level of oversight and responsibility for immigration detention remain consequential… Baker has not been internally inspected by ICE’s Office of Detention Oversight, nor was it scheduled for inspection in FY 2026 or FY 2027.”

For months, Alligator Alcatraz captured the public’s attention, and it’s easy to understand why. Its name, a punchline for jokes within MAGA circles, was unusual. And its optics—with detainees living in fenced areas within large white tents on a little-used airfield in the middle of the Everglades—were vivid and controversial**,** including a visit by Trump, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and then- DHS secretary Kristi Noem. Because of its proximity to Miami, a melting pot of immigrants, families whose loved ones were detained there could attend and speak out at vigils outside the center’s entrance.

But shortly after Florida officials opened the Everglades center, they also began operations at the Baker Correctional Institution. Originally a state prison that closed in 2021, the facility is remote and surrounded by forest land. It’s located on a two-lane highway and Jacksonville, which is the closest metro area, isnearly 50 miles away. As of last month, approximately 1,000 detainees were living there; some are elderly, others are legal DACA recipients, and many have pending asylum claims. They are from countries such as Cuba, Venezuela, Honduras, Guatemala, and Russia. With the closure of Alligator Alcatraz, those who have been detained and their families, not to mention human rights organizations,are sounding bells about conditions inside the center.

Every month, members of the Micah Solidarity Project, a group of Floridians from different Christian denominations advocating for immigrant rights in northeast Florida, gather on the edge of US Highway 90, next to the facility. The gatherings sometimes attract up to 100 people from all over Florida, including Gainesville, Jacksonville, Tallahassee, and Tampa. They hold a procession, walking up to the point where the Baker cell blocks are located. They pass around a speakerphone, hoping that those detained inside can hear their prayers and worship music in Spanish.

Clara Sowers, one of the organizers, said their gatherings have also attracted the attention of the center, which is run by the GEO Group and a few other contractors. At one of their larger gatherings in April, the demonstratorssaw drones flying over them, and a few sheriff’s office cars circlingnearby. That afternoon, they heard a faint whistle coming from the prison. Clara’s husband, she recalls, whistled back. “All of a sudden, the entire prison erupted in whistles and cheers,” she told me. “They were so excited to see other humans.”

Sowers, a Cuban American from Jacksonville, has recently been in touch with eight Baker detainees. She’s heard of at least two men suffering seizures. She has seen how Alligator Alcatraz hadconsistently remained in the news as lawmakers, advocates, and detainees’ loved ones called attention to the camp month after month until its closure this summer. She grew up in Miami and thinks a big part of the coveragewas the city’s proximity to the Everglades camp. Many Miami families had loved ones sent there. For detainees at Baker, the level of outrage has been less because it’s in a remote area of the state, with fewer immigrant communities in the surrounding cities. “Because they’re not seeing their family members being detained and missing at the table, they’re just not affected by it,” Sowers told me. “Even when they hear about it, it sounds far away, as far away as Ukraine or the Gaza Strip.”

“Because they’re not seeing their family members being detained and missing at the table, they’re just not affected by it. Even when they hear about it, it sounds far away, as far away as Ukraine or the Gaza Strip.”

In the last few weeks, I’ve spoken to eight people—including current detainees, former detainees who were either deported or released, as well as their loved ones—about life inside the Baker facility. They all described the same conditions, including detainees who report delays in medical care, and describeliving in cramped dormitories lined with 50 bunk beds for 100 men, small portions of food, and stifling heat due to malfunctioning A/C units and broken windows. “We are practically living in our boxers,” one Venezuelan currently at Baker told me over the phone. “The heat is unbearable.”

The ACLU is also investigating and exploring litigation against the state and the contractors running the facility, said Amy Godshall, a Florida-based attorney for the legal nonprofit. Notably, detainees have reported many of the same obstacles for obtaining legal access that others faced at Alligator Alcatraz, such as delays in scheduling attorney calls, prison staff failing to take detainees to their court appointments, and mail from their attorneys getting lost.

“A lot of what’s happening here is very similar to what was happening in the Everglades facility,” Godshall said. “They don’t have a commissary set up, so that people can’t buy extra food and are just starving with the insufficient food they’re given.” She added that families had no options for visiting. In the end, she noted, “The facility is designed to torture people and push them to their breaking point so that they will self-deport.” When I reached out to ICE with questions about the Baker center, a spokesperson referred me to the state of Florida. Officials from the Governor’s Office and the Florida Division of Emergency Management, which runs Baker, did not respond to my requests for comment.

Among those with whom I spoke was Jose Andres Urbina, a Venezuelan who arrived at the US-Mexico border in 2022 to seek political asylum. As he awaited the decision on his case, Urbina lived in St. John’s County on the east coast of Florida, where he worked in construction and as an Uber driver. He had a driver’s license, a work permit, and paid federal taxes, he told me. On May 9, 2026, he was parked outside a rock music festival, waiting for potential clients, when a state highway trooper asked for his ID. He then told him that he had a pending immigration hold and arrested him. “That’s when the torture and the tragedy began,” he told me in Spanish. Over the next several days, he was transferred through several county jails before his family could track him down. “I was basically kidnapped,” he said.

“The facility is designed to torture people and push them to their breaking point so that they will self-deport.”

Urbina ended up at Baker, where he remained until requesting voluntary departure and being deported back to Venezuela in September. What most troubled him during his time there was the inconsistent meal times. Breakfast, which often was two spoonfuls of scrambled eggs, some bacon, unflavored oatmeal, and fruit cocktail, was served somewherebetween 3 a.m. and 6 a.m. Lunch was usually a sandwich and Lays chips, followed by dinner, which tended to be the better meal of the three. Lunch would sometimes be served at 11 a.m., and dinner at 6 p.m. The men would sneak out leftovers in their pants or socks to eat later in their cells. The portions were so small, Urbina lost 40 pounds during his four months at Baker. Now, he is with his wife, who was also in Florida but chose to move back home to be with him.

I also spoke to Esther, whose boyfriend is currently detained at Baker. We’re not using her full name, given her immigration status. In 15-minute phone calls over the last six months, she has heard the details of her boyfriend’s detention experience. He recently developed white patches on his skin and hasn’t been able to get medical care. He tells her he drinks lots of water before and after meals so that he stays full longer. Many detainees are on edge, so he tries to avoid other people and plays solitaire to pass the time. “Sometimes, they barely have energy to move,” Esther told me. ICE officers have repeatedly offered him the option of voluntary departure, but he has consistently refused. “He wants to wait here,” Esther said, “and see what happens.”

Aslong as the Baker facility is open, the Micah Solidarity Project will continue to gather outside its walls. “We’re going back until we’re not needed anymore. This is solidarity,” Sowers said. “Part of that is showing up consistently. Part of that is letting them know they’re not alone.”

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Is Hollywood Finally Turning on Tech Oligarchs?

Big Tech is back on the big screen—but its bosses might not be thrilled.

This fall, Hollywood will release four movies on tech executives: Luca Guadagnino’s Artificial, on CEO Sam Altman’s tumultuous time as the head of OpenAI; Aaron Sorkin’s The Social Reckoning, on the investigation into Facebook and CEO Mark Zuckerberg dismissing its platforms’ negative impacts on young users and inciting violence and hate speech; the all-encompassing Musk, by documentarian Alex Gibney, on the Tesla and SpaceX CEO’s family life, corporate controversies, and engagement in right-wing politics; and You Can See Everything, an unsettling documentary in which directors Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim follow Elizabeth Holmes, who invited them to film her in the weeks before she began serving her federal prison sentence for defrauding investors at the now-defunct health tech company Theranos.

If the 2010s brought the first major wave of examining Silicon Valley leaders, such as relatively humandepictions of Zuckerberg with The Social Network and multiple movies on longtime Apple CEO Steve Jobs—they largely paint pictures of difficult, ambitious individuals who may have burned a few bridges to achieve the remarkable—this recent group represents an opportunity, as I wrote in September, to rethink that perspective.

Since the 2010s, public opinion about Big Tech companies has tanked. My colleagues and I have extensively covered the increasingly apparent harms that tech CEOs have overseen, including using AI in wars overseas and the continuing development of a mass surveillance state at home.

In a July poll reported by Axios, about seven in ten Americans said they believe tech companies and their CEOs hold too much power.

On Politico’s Decoded podcast this week, Altman asserted that “the world should accept some bad things happening for the benefits of this [AI] technology” as people will do “tremendously—orders of magnitude more—good stuff than bad stuff” with it.

Early reports around Artificial, directed by Challengers’ Luca Guadagnino, starring Andrew Garfield as Altman, and covering his firing and reinstatement as OpenAI CEO in under a week in 2023, suggest that the film will have a more critical view on the executive—the Altman of Artificial says “yes” to everyone, Vulture wrote in a piece interviewing Guadagnino on Friday.

“The narcissist has the ability to understand the terrain and adapt to it, shape-shift,” Guadagnino told Vulture—which he sees as havinglarger ramifications: “People that have a lot of power should be very much aware that you must be responsible for the community.”

“I think anyone who takes on that level of responsibility for a company or a technology that you know is going to do a hell of a lot of damage to the soul of humanity [must have] a certain ability to dissociate,” Garfield told Esquire in August.

Amazon MGM Studios dropped the movie in June, shortly after Amazon announced a $50 billion investment into OpenAI. Big Tech and the wealthy elite are now more closely tied to culture, art, and media. In a Vanity Fair cover story released Monday, Altman said that he did not speak to anyone at Amazon about Artificial and that, based on the movie trailer, he didn’t feel the filmmakers were “going for accuracy.”

“Countries will fall. Industries are gonna collapse,” Garfield says in that trailer. “And we get to be the ones to shepherd people into this new world.”

Artificial, which independent film company Neon acquired later that month, premieres Monday at the New York Film Festival.

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Watch: Trump’s Deportations Are Tearing Apart Florida Communities

You might have seen the viral campaign ad. Last month, Rep. María Elvira Salazar—a Miami Republican endorsed by Donald Trump—launched a TV commercial criticizing the president’s mass-deportation campaign. “Mr. President, some of your immigration enforcement efforts have gone too far,” she warned, speaking directly into the camera. “Be careful what your advisers are telling you about immigration policy. The same Hispanics who helped you get to the White House in 2024 feel betrayed today.”

Salazar’s ad was one of the most public signs of the brewing anger in Florida over Trump’s draconian deportation policies. Her “district is among those with the highest percentage of Latino voters in the US,” notes Mother Jones’ Laura Morel, “and many experts view this race as a test of how far Trump’s popularity has cratered with the Latino community.”

So what’s causing the backlash in the Sunshine State? In late August, journalist Amanda Moore traveled traveled to southwest Florida—a couple hours from Salazar’s district—to report on a surge of ICE and Border Patrol agents in the area. What she found was less dramatic than the heavily militarized immigration operations the Trump administration has carried out in Minnesota, Illinois, and elsewhere in the country. But the consequences have been every bit as devastating.

In contrast to the message in Salazar’s recent ad, Republican officials across Florida have cooperated closely with Trump’s deportation campaign. As Moore notes in a new video for Mother Jones, this cooperation has helped ICE arrest hundreds of people in Florida per day. Give it a watch.

With the help of Republican officials, ICE has quietly arrested hundreds of people in Florida per day. Video by Amanda Moore, produced by Anna Yeo

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RFK Is Gloating That His Changes to HHS Are Permanent

In remarks delivered before a MAHA audience at the Waldorf Astoria in D.C. last week, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. proclaimed the changes he’s wrought to HHS are permanent, and praised his allies in the movement for helping to make them happen.

“Even if I got hit by a truck tonight,” he told the room, “HHS will never go back to what it was before.”

Kennedy’s presence was part of the MAHA Summit, a daylong event, wherein Kennedy also reportedly told an audience that AI is “better informed” than doctors.

His remarks at the private reception on Monday were relayedlater in the weekby Claire Dooley, a filmmaker who’s worked on several anti-vaccine movies, including one produced by Children’s Health Defense, the organization Kennedy used to lead. Dooley wrote about the private reception for The MAHA Report, a Substack maintained by the nonprofit MAHA Action, Inc. While the organization is nominally independent, it has primarily served this year to cheerlead Kennedy’s sweeping changes at HHS.

As Dooley wrote, Kennedy used the occasion to praise the room and the broader MAHA movement, telling them, “We’re about to have our day in the sunshine.” MAHA Action proudly circulated a video clip of Kennedy’s remarks boasting that HHS has been permanently changed:

The changes Kennedy was was referring to at HHS have been, by most people’s metrics, devastating. According to a June New York Times report, Kennedy has shown “minimal engagement” with most of what HHS—the federal government’s largest department—actually does, and instead focused on promoting an inverted food pyramid heavy on animal fats and trying to overhaul federal vaccine policy to fit his anti-vaccine views. The CDC has reportedly lost nearly a third of its staff and is struggling to fulfill its basic mission. Several important bodies including the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) and the US Preventive Services Task Force are in limbo after Kennedy’s efforts to gut them and replace them with his ideological fellow travelers have been met by controversy and court challenges. The Preventative Services Task Force, which helps decide which preventative tests will be covered by insurance, has not met in more than a year. ACIP, which helps develop federal vaccine recommendations, is also in legal limbo, leaving other non-governmental health organizations to advise physicians on this year’s COVID shots, among other things.

Kennedy’s boasts last week are part of a recent victory lap; last month he was also the keynote speaker at Children’s Health Defense’s DC conference. There, he told the room that the anti-vaccine movement has “a friend at the White House.”

Kennedy’s drive to damage U.S. vaccine infrastructure is broadly unpopular. Recent polling shows that six in 10 voters disapprove of his work as HHS secretary. Outside of parties with his friends, Kennedy has sought to downplay his vaccine agenda; as The New York Times disclosed earlier this year, in the lead-up to the midterms, he planned to deemphasize vaccines and spend more time talking about healthy eating. Since that reporting, in a rather queasy irony, the nation has been struck with a wave of serious food-borne illness—with part of the blame going to decreased FDA inspections under RFK Jr.

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Why Do Democrats Keep Posting Videos of Themselves Pumping Iron?

After a historic setback in 2024, the Democratic rebrand appears to be working out.

No, seriously—the rebrand is that they’re all filming themselves working out. In late September, Manny Rutinel, a Democrat challenging Rep. Gabe Evans in Colorado, posted a video of himself doing bicep curls while blaring “War Pigs” by Black Sabbath. The week before that, a very energized Michigan Senate nominee Abdul El-Sayed was in Washington, DC, challenging JD Vance to a squat-off. Before that, it was Indiana secretary of state candidate Birch Evans Bayh IV—please, call him Beau—airing an ad in which he racked weights and bench-pressed while lamenting that “most politicians are weak.”

Video by Peter Berger

You could keep going back, if you wanted—to Cait Conley, running against Rep. Mike Lawler in New York’s Hudson Valley, flipping over a tire while shouting “let’s fucking go”; to the former Maine Senate nominee Graham Platner, swinging a kettlebell in his backyard; to former Rep. Colin Allred, recording his denunciation of James Talarico before the Texas Senate primary with steam coming off his head after a garage workout; to Maryland Gov. Wes Moore, talking to TMZ about the workout video he posted after a visit to the US Naval Academy.

Some of these antics are just a reflection of these candidates’ personalities. Allred, for instance, is a former NFL linebacker. Pumping iron is a thing El-Sayed likes to do (and do and do), and he’s worked it into his campaign as a way to connect with people and reach new audiences. There is often an explicit contrast to bad conservative messaging in this glut of videos—Rutinel, like fellow Coloradan Rep. Jason Crow before him, was making light of Pete Hegseth’s poor form and transparent insecurity, just as Gavin Newsom—who has not posted a workout video—was making light of RFK Jr.’s shirtless workout with Kid Rock in a TikTok of his own.

But if you’ll excuse me for overexamining things for a minute, I think there’s also something more subtle (well, not that subtle) at work here. After the 2024 election, a common shorthand for what had gone wrong with the Democratic Party was that people perceived Democrats as—in the words of one focus group and many, many talk-show interviews—“weak and woke.” (There were infinite corollaries to this, including Sen. Elissa Slotkin’s suggestion that the party lacked “alpha energy,” Sen. Ruben Gallego’s assertion that voters thought they were “wussy,” and Newsom’s belief that “we’ve appeared weak and meek_._”)

The “woke” part has probably consumed the most oxygen and engendered the most debate within the party. It has also been addressed, in a variety of ways, in a frenzy of TV ads and ill-advised Reels. But the “weak” part is straightforward: The solution is to not be weak. It’s to be strong, to stand up for yourself, to speak plainly, and when possible—and this really gets to the root of where things went wrong—not to be an octogenarian who walks at a shuffle and speaks at a whisper while voters go mad over inflation. There are many ways of doing that, but as a practical matter, if you want to show you have energy and can do real-person things and dispel misconceptions about Democrats Like You, well, you can always just try picking up something really heavy.

Political messaging can be alarmingly reductive sometimes. Candidates and consultants are borrowing things they’ve seen or used before. Why did candidates start filming themselves driving through their hometowns, eyes curiously off the road, talking about the values that forged them and the neighbors who were left behind? Who was the first elected official to stand in front of a bunch of televisions blaring attack ads and say, very solemnly, “you’ve seen the ads”?

All of these workout videos call to mind another campaign trope. One of the hottest campaign trends to emerge in the Obama years was filming yourself shooting stuff. It was a conservative-coded but not exclusively Republican genre. In fact, it may have even worked best when it was Democrats doing it—cutting against type, while demonstrating that they weren’t like all the rest. Former West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin famously filmed himself shooting “the cap-and-trade bill” during his first election. When he ran for a final term in 2018, he shot his opponent’s lawsuit to gut the Affordable Care Act. (Kind of the full Joe Manchin experience, to be honest.) When Seth Bodnar, the independent running for Senate in Montana, recently filmed himself shooting a Flock camera, he was following in the footsteps of former Democratic Gov. Brian Schweitzer, who strapped “REAL ID cards” to clay pigeons 18 years earlier.

Even as the polls predict a big year for Democrats, the party’s national reputation is still underwater. There’s dissatisfaction with party leaders, and big fights still to come on foreign policy, on Big Tech, and on health care. Turning things around will be a heavy lift. But that might be one thing they’re getting used to.

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California Just Made It Legal to Turn Balconies Into Tiny Power Plants

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

As free and abundant as sunlight may be, harnessing its power remains stubbornly difficult for homeowners. While the cost of solar energy has plummeted more than 90 percent in the last decade, panels remain a significant investment. And it’s not as easy as just slapping panels on a roof, as your home may need electrical upgrades too.

It doesn’t have to be this way. Countries like Germany have encouraged the proliferation of balcony solar, also known as plug-in solar: smaller, cheaper arrays that hook into a home’s electrical outlets. This offsets some of a residence’s energy use, saving users hundreds of dollars a year, and opens up solar energy to renters with balconies or backyards. As a bonus, the less power homes have to draw from the grid, the less stress they put on the system, especially during heat waves when everyone is running energy-hungry air conditioners.

This past Wednesday, California officially got in on the balcony-solar action as Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a bill allowing residents of the nation’s most populous state to adopt the technology. It joins a handful of states, like Utah and Maine, in seeing the potential of the technology to generate clean electricity and save residents money as energy costs rise.

“It’s really ideal to use renewable electricity exactly where it’s generated.”

“This technology is very important and very powerful,” state Senator Scott Wiener, who authored the legislation, said during a press conference Thursday. “And what this bill does is eliminate the massive barrier to people using plug-in solar, which is that you’d have to go and negotiate an interconnection agreement with PG&E or the other utility.”

The proliferation of plug-in solar marks a fundamental shift in how the electrical grid operates. Historically, utilities have generated electricity by burning fossil fuels like coal and natural gas. When demand rose, like when people returned home at the end of the day and switched on appliances, they’d just ramp up production. This kept the system in a sort of equilibrium, a constant balance of supply and demand.

That, though, doesn’t quite work the same with renewables like wind and solar. If demand is holding steady and the sun is setting, a utility isn’t generating as much electricity with its panels. Same with wind, if the skies suddenly calm. So in addition to building out wind and solar farms, utilities are deploying huge batteries to save that energy for later use. This creates a more flexible grid that can still hum with electricity when things are dark or calm.

This transformation is turning you, the consumer, into a more active participant in the grid. For years now, homes with solar have sent excess energy back to the grid. While plug-in solar might generate a fraction of what you’d get from a roof covered in panels, it can still help make the grid more flexible. Instead of feeding the system, it reduces the amount of electricity drawn from the grid. Scaled across a whole city, these small reductions can add up, offsetting some of the growth in demand from things like AI data centers and electrification. (Think induction stoves needing electricity instead of natural gas, and EVs charging instead of burning fuel.)

“This is one of the most immediate, concrete, tangible, real, and affordable things that we can do to start to get control of our high energy costs, but also save our planet,” Bernadette Del Chiaro, senior vice president for California at the nonprofit Environmental Working Group, said during the press conference. “So it’s really a twofer.”

Basically, plug-in solar could help reduce congestion in the system at peak times—when it’s hot out and everyone’s running their AC, there’s also plenty of sun to strike the panels. It’s turning homes and apartments into a distributed network of tiny power plants. “It’s really ideal to use renewable electricity exactly where it’s generated,” said Amanda Smith, a senior scientist focusing on the built environment at Project Drawdown, a climate solutions nonprofit.

This increased interactivity in the grid comes as utility bills continue to skyrocket. Basic plug-in solar systems will set you back a few hundred dollars, and you can potentially make back that money with energy savings in around four years. (The higher the energy costs in your state, the quicker you’d get that return on your investment.) Still, for a lot of households, that’s a major investment, so ideally a state also provides rebates for people to adopt the technology.

With California now aboard the plug-in solar train, your state may well follow. “The big reason this is a big deal really is because it’s the most affordable way for people to actually participate with solar PV,” Smith said. “Whatever happens in California is going to influence, I think, a lot of other future state markets. So it’s going to be a key one to watch.”

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Reports of a Lethal Virus Outbreak in Russia Follow the Death of a Researcher

Reports out of the Irkutsk region of Russia reveal a potential public health crisis developing in the area, after a lab accident released a “particularly dangerous infection” to a researcher, who later passed away.

Twenty-eight-year-old Darya Shipilovia, a lab technician at the Irkutsk Anti-Plague Institute, died two days after she was hospitalized, following exposure to a “pneumonia of unknown etiology,” according to Rospotrebnadzor, a federal agency that oversees health and safety. The virus in question has been said to be the deadly but treatable pneumonic plague.

BREAKING:

5 hospitals have been closed for quarantines in Siberia due to a possible plague outbreak.

The 28-year-old lab technician Darya Shipilova, died yesterday after breaking a test tube with live Yersinia pestis the Irkutsk Anti-Plague Institute on September 25th while… pic.twitter.com/N6tKLRyAJ5

— Visegrád 24 (@visegrad24) October 4, 2026

The Russian government has not released an official announcement of the patient’s death, according to the independent news organization Meduza:

Governor Igor Kobzev said the regional government had convened a special meeting of the regional commission on sanitation and epidemic prevention. The meeting was called in response to information “about a suspected case of a particularly dangerous infection in a resident of the region.”

He did not specify the infection. Anna Popova, Russia’s chief sanitary officer, traveled to attend the meeting. According to Kobzev, Russia’s public health watchdog, Rospotrebnadzor, is taking “a full range of epidemic-control measures.” People who had been in contact with the patient were “placed under medical observation.” They have no signs of illness.

According to several outlets, hospitals are under quarantine, with the number of shutdowns ranging from three to five. Reports from independent news sources such as The Moscow Times say that nearly 200 workers have been placed under observation.

BREAKING: Plague outbreak expands, Russia BSL-3 lab accident – FIVE hospitals now quarantined

The plague outbreak in Siberia, Russia has expanded w/5 hospitals now under QUARANTINE: Irkutsk Hospitals No. 1, No.3, No.10, Ivano-Matreninskaya Children's Hospital, and an… pic.twitter.com/DhPkS2ILiW

— Annie Jacobsen (@AnnieJacobsen) October 4, 2026

Dominic Hauschild, the defense correspondent of Britain’s The Sunday Times noted that establishing any of the facts about the situation has proved to be difficult because of the Russian government’s “secrecy.” But, he added, “There are fears this could be another Wuhan situation.”

This is a developing story.

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Trump’s Appearance in Ohio Underscores All the Reasons the GOP Is Unpopular

On Saturday, President Donald Trump hosted a campaign rally for Ohio senatorial and gubernatorial candidates, John Husted and Vivek Ramaswamy.As part of his campaign to revive GOP turnout and avoid what is widely predicted to be a Democratic sweep, he appeared in Ohio following weekend visits to Texas, Oklahoma, and Alabama. With his signature lack of subtlety, he encouraged the state’s voters to head to the polls.

“Just get out and vote,” Trump told a crowd that barely filled a high school gymnasium in the city of Vandalia. “If you do that, we’re going to win, and we’re going to win big. And we’re going to shove it up their ass.” Ohio, a state that Trump has won three times, has become a battleground for the same reasons that the GOP is predicting a bleak forecast in this year’s midterms: skyrocketing gas prices, bipartisan disdain for data centers, high costs for food and utilities, and Trump’s unpopular war with Iran.

All of this was highlighted during last night‘s rally, starting with the venue. Less than a week earlier, a nearby factory had laid off 1,400 workers in the community. Meanwhile, Trump swore that the state’s fledgling economy would be saved by AI data centers.

“There’s so much money to be made for Ohio. You can’t just turn them off. They’ll go to China,” Trump said. As my colleague Anna Merlan has reported, the Trump administration has made support for artificial intelligence a hallmark of its platform, tying the unregulated use of this technology not only to economic prosperity, but also, weirdly enough, masculinity. Merlan writes:

It’s now increasingly obvious that Trump and his administration view AI technology as something akin to a large, dangerous dog that only a masculine owner can control. Trump has repeatedly called warnings that AI could harm human beings “a hoax,” writing on TruthSocial that the “only control or ‘guardrails’ that AI needs is a STRONG AND SMART (High IQ!) PRESIDENT, and the U.S.A. has that, in spades!”

But despite Trump’s insistence that all criticism of AI and data centers is fake news, the polls make it clear that people are not buying what the he is selling—and this has been true in Ohio, Florida, and many other states. As my colleague Sophie Hurwitz reported, data center opposition is proving to be a winning strategy for both Republicans and Democrats alike. Meanwhile, Husted, who’s been branded the “face of data centers” by Brown, has faced bipartisan backlash for his support of these tech developers. Recently, Senate Democrats shut down Husted’s bill aiming to prevent data centers from causing potential utility bill spikes, calling the legislation “toothless.”

According to a poll conducted by USA Today, former senator Sherrod Brown is currently leading with 47 percent of voters’ support, compared to Husted’s 44 percent. Democratic candidate Amy Acton is also pulling ahead of her opponent, with a nine-point difference in favorability over Ramaswamy, according to a poll from Suffolk University.

Trump’s 93-minute speech reportedly did little to address people’s concerns with data centers and made no mention of the recent layoffs or rising grocery and gas prices. But he did make sure to get potshots in on Husted’s opponent, praising the Republican’s athletic prowess and dunking on Brown’s alleged lack thereof.

“That guy can’t tie his shoes,” said Trump.

Since the rally, both Ramaswamy and Husted have tweeted very little about the president’s appearance, with Husted instead opting to shoutout his University of Dayton college football teammate, John Gruden, who resigned as a coach to the Las Vegas Raiders after emails of his containing racist and misogynistic language were leaked to the public. Ramaswamy, on the other hand, did post a video of himself nodding along approvingly as Trump called Acton “a radical left lunatic pretending to be a moderate.”

We beat Kamala Harris in Ohio in ‘24 and we’re going to beat the Kamala Harris of Ohio in ‘26. pic.twitter.com/YerPACs735

— Vivek Ramaswamy (@VivekGRamaswamy) October 4, 2026

This rally is just one of a thirty-two-stop campaign tour that’s supposed to resuscitate the Republican Party’s waning political support, with Trump planning to travel to 17 states—even once reliably red ones like South Carolina—before November 3rd.

NEW — President Trump and Senate Majority Leader John Thune are both planning visits to South Carolina as the Senate race draws increased attention, per @nytimes.

Annie Andrews (D) has outraised and outspent Sen. Darline Graham in a state Trump carried by more than 17 points.

— VoteHub (@VoteHub) October 4, 2026

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How a Bolsonaro Biopic Ended Up at the Center of Brazil’s Presidential Election

This article is a partnership with Agência Pública.

In May, now-presidential candidate Flávio Bolsonaro, the eldest son of former Brazilian far-right President Jair Bolsonaro, shared on his social media a “leaked” trailer for an upcoming biopic about his father. The “most anticipated movie of the year,” Flávio said then, would depict the story of a “true hero.” In the trailer, which had a “disclosure prohibited” watermark, a wig-wearing Jim Caviezel**—**the American Hollywood actor perhaps most famous for his role as Jesus in Mel Gibson’s 2004 The Passion of the Christ—plays Bolsonaro, who is serving a 27-year prison sentence under house arrest for a failed coup attempt after his 2022 electoral defeat.

Director Cyrus Nowrasteh described Dark Horse as a “tense political thriller about power, media, and faith under fire.” The movie’s trailer, which centers on Bolsonaro’s first presidential run and rise to power in 2018, frames the ex-president as “the voice of the people” and a leader who “fought the system” that tried to silence him. It includes a dramatic reenactment of his stabbing during the campaign. “IF YOU CARE ABOUT OUR ELECTIONS,” Caviezel, who isalsoknown for the more recent Sound of Freedom, posted on Instagram earlier this year, “watch my newest film coming out September 11, 2026!”

The production company behind the movie advertised it on X. “A trailer that circulated online was enough to put the Dark Horse at the center of discussions for months,” says the post in Portuguese. “Now, anticipation continues to grow for one of the most awaited international productions inspired by events that marked Brazil.”

Um trailer que circulou na internet foi suficiente para colocar The Dark Horse no centro das discussões por meses.

Agora, a expectativa continua crescendo para uma das produções internacionais mais aguardadas inspiradas em acontecimentos que marcaram o Brasil.

#DarkHorse pic.twitter.com/3y6E422qpL

— GO UP ENTERTAINMENT (@GOUPEntertainme) June 16, 2026

That September 11 date went by and the movie, which was shot in English, has yet to be released in Brazil; it won’t come out before the first round in a nail-biting presidential race set for Sunday, October 4.These federal elections, which include congressional and gubernatorial races alongside the presidential contest, have been dogged by accusations of meddling by the Trump administration, prompting incumbent President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva to send a clear message to the US leader: “Brazil does not fit in anyone’s backyard.” While Dark Horse has not featured as a centerpiece in that conversation, it has certainly had its own share of controversy even before hitting the big screen.

The Brazil-US joint production has become the subject of an ongoing investigation that has sent shockwaves through the presidential campaign of one of the main candidates in a high-stakes, knife-edge election. Brazilian authorities are actively looking into the financing of the movie by a now-disgraced businessman accused of leading one of the biggest bank frauds in the country’s history. That financial scandal involves banker Daniel Vorcaro, former owner of the liquidated Banco Master, who is jailed for alleged fraud in a complex billion-dollar scheme involving worthless credit portfolios. The imbroglio has rocked the 214-million-people nation and thrown the Brazilian Supreme Court into an unprecedented institutional crisis, ensnaring justices, including Alexandre de Moraes—a polarizing figure credited by some with having stopped Bolsonaro’scoup plot and vilified by others for judicial overreach—and high-profile politicians and public officials with alleged ties to Vorcaro.

Among them is Brazilian senator Flávio Bolsonaro, who is cited in the investigation by Brazil’s federal police into the financing of the movie for “possible participation” in alleged crimes involving “money laundering, illicit capital flight, corruption, and other related offenses.” Last May, the Intercept Brasil exposed audio recordings and messages exchanged between Flávio and Vorcaro in which the senator asks the banker for money to fund Dark Horse. Documents from the federal police indicate Flávio was a “direct interlocutor” in negotiating with Vorcaroabout the financing of the movie production.

The bombshell reporting revealed that Flávio, the primary opponent facing off against Lula, who’s vying for re-election, negotiated a $24-million-dollar investment from Vorcaro. At the time, documents obtained by the Intercept Brasil showed that Vorcaro had made payments for the movie adding up to at least $10.6 million, between February and May 2025; the total has since climbed to $12**.**3 million, according to the federal police.

In a voice message to Vorcaro from September 2025, Flávio pressed the banker on pending payments, stressing the importance of getting the movie across the finish line. “Imagine us defaulting on Jim Caviezel, on Cyrus [Nowrasteh], these guys, man, hugely renowned in American and global cinema. Man, that would be really bad,” Flávio said in the audio, a transcription of which is cited in the federal police’s inquiry. He added: “Now that we’re in the final stretch, we can’t slip up, we can’t fail to honor the commitments here, because otherwise we lose everything.”

The Bolsonaro camp had high hopes for Dark Horse, originally projected for release three weeks before election day. “We’ll touch the hearts of a lot of people,” congressman Mário Frias, who was involved in the development of the project and is also named in the investigation, told Vorcaro, “and it will be very important for our country.” Ahead of the election, Flávio Bolsonaro, the presidential hopeful, has found himself having to provide explanations. He has dismissed the payments from Vorcaro as “private sponsorship” for a private project, underscoring that no public funds were used in the movie, and deniedany wrongdoing.

Unsealed court documents state that payment transfers for Dark Horse were made via an intermediary company and processed through the Texas-based Havengate Development Fund managed by a Brazilian lawyer close to Flávio’s brother, Eduardo Bolsonaro, who is self-exiled in the United States since last year following a lawmaker’s request for him to be investigated for allegedly lobbying against Brazil’s national interests. This June, Eduardo, who was stripped of his congressional seat for being absent, was convicted of “coercion” for attempting to secure interference from the Trump administration on Brazil’s internal affairs; he sought to persuade them to impose tariffs on Brazil and sanctions on Brazilian justices to help his father’s case.

Investigators looking into the origins of the money and its destination have raised the “hypothesis” that Eduardo, who lives in Texas, “directed the management of resources on foreign soil.” They also are investigating whether funds from Havengate may have been used to cover Eduardo’s livingexpenses, according to multiple reports by Brazilian media outlets. Flávio has maintained that all the resources allocated to the fund went towards the movie production.

On X, Eduardo has denied receiving money from the Texas fund, saying his immigration status wouldn’t have allowed it. (He has recently obtained a green card.) “During my immigration process,” he said, “I explained to the American authorities the whole origin of my assets and I didn’t have any problems.” He added that “all the investments were made in the US because the production was American, with American actors.”

Agência Pública, Brazil’s largest nonprofit newsroom, recently reported on Eduardo’s lavish lifestyle; he resides in a luxury home in Southlake, owns a $43,800 SUV, and travels frequently—20 times in 18 months—including to attend a gala at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago, watch a World Cup match in Miami, and surf in Abu Dhabi. Eduardo has previously explained his financial circumstances by saying he lives off of “passive income.”

The former lawmaker denied having any management role in Dark Horse, but a production contract signed in 2024 and obtained by the Intercept Brasil mentioned the ex-congressman as an executive producer in the movie. In response to the article, Eduardo said that he had signed a contract when the project was still in the early stages and invested $50,000 to get a Hollywood director attached to the movie, but he was later repaidand left the project once other investors were secured. Agência Pública contacted Eduardo’s press team but didn’t hear back before publication.

Go UP Entertainment, the US-based production company behind Dark Horse, is led by Karina Ferreira da Gama and Michael Brian Davis. (Ferreira da Gama and an NGO she directs are the target of a separate inquiry into whether public money was used to finance the movie.) According to an audit commissioned by Go UP, production costs in Brazil were $3.73 million. Costsin the United States amounted to $9.66 million—or more than 70 percent of the movie’s roughly $13-million reported spending. The expenses in the United States, according to the audit, included soft production, pre-production, project development, filming, and post-production. On LinkedIn, a production manager who worked on the movie described it as “the largest-budget feature filmed entirely in Brazil.”

”It’s not a film that will be nominated for an Oscar. It won’t be in contention for a nomination, but it has that Hollywood seal of quality.”

The movie’s reported expenses have raised eyebrows among industry insiders, who have compared the numbers to those of an Oscar-worthy production. The company spent $2,000 on a rental wig for Caviezel and about $135,000 in hotel accommodation for the star and his agent and security, based on bank statements and invoices provided to the federal police. ”It’s not a film that will be nominated for an Oscar,” Wilson Feitosa, director of the company responsible for the distribution of Dark Horse, told O Globo newspaper. “It won’t be in contention for a nomination, but it has that Hollywood seal of quality.”

The federal police noted that, even accounting for “complex variables” in estimating the costs of film productions, there was an “apparent mismatch between the projected cost of the production of Dark Horse and the parameters usually practiced in the Brazilian audiovisual market,” saying it warranted further investigation into the “effective allocation of resources” and the purpose of the operation.

Registered in Florida since 2021, Go UP Entertainment listed, until recently, its place of business as Davis’ home address in Raleigh, North Carolina. In June 2026, the address was changed to a commercial location in the same city. The company’s website only mentions an address in Westlake Village, California. A google search for that address leads to another production company, Damascus Road Productions, focused on “family and faith content.” (Ryan O’Quinn, the president of Damascus Road Productions, has promoted Dark Horse on his social media and is listed on the movie’s IMDb page as a producer. He didn’t respond to an email with questions or return a voicemail message.)

“Go UP Entertainment hereby clarifies that it conducts its business activities and the production of the film Dark Horse in a documented and transparent manner and in compliance with its contractual obligations,” the company said in a statement to the Brazilian magazine Piauí. In an email, Davis declined an interview for this article, saying “we will not provide comments on confidential budgets, private agreements and contracts, or unrelated business matters.”

Go UP’s website, which appears to have been revamped this year, states that the company “was born from the union of two creative forces: Go 7 and UP Tone.” Go 7 seems to be a reference to a different company operated by Davis’ co-partner Ferreira da Gama in Brazil. Go 7, which has reportedly never released a movie or TV production in the country, has its registration status with Ancine—the Brazilian regulatory film agency—listed as “irregular.” (Go UP Entertainment’s status is “regular” and Ancine granted Dark Horse a foreign work registration.)

Uptone Pictures is a self-described “independent film production company” in North Carolina that names the Dark Horse producer, Davis, as founder and executive producer. The movie releases featured on Go UP’s page appear to be examples of Uptone’s previous work. Among them are the 2014 A Long Way Off, a modern-day retelling of the prodigal son parable; Paul’s Promise from 2022, a Christian drama about a “firefighter-turned-pastor” produced and starred by O’Quinn; and the Brazilian-American Destiny Road, based on a book by a televangelist. Uptone Pictures lists Dark Horse as one of its credited productions. On Facebook, the company calls itself “your fixer in Brazil.”

Davis has Brazilian citizenship and lived in Brazil in the 1980s, where he learned Portuguese and became a São Paulo soccer team fan, before moving to the United States, according to the BBC News Brasil. Besides Go UP Entertainment and Uptone Pictures, he’s linked to several other entertainment businesses in North Carolina, some of which have been dissolved over the years.

Davis has reportedly said that, on the advice of lawyers, he won’t hand over Go UP’s company documents without a judicial order in the United States. The producer wrote in an email to his business partner included in the investigation that “requests from Brazilian authorities involving documents or data under American jurisdiction must be formalized exclusively through the competent diplomatic and international legal cooperation channels.”

Mother Jones emailed Davis a number of questions about his partnership with Ferreira da Gama, the founding of Go UP Entertainment in 2021, and the company’s office addresses. We also asked him for details about the production and budget of Dark Horse, the company’s audit and expenses in the United States, as well as his reason to refuse a federal police’s request for evidence. Finally, the email included questions about Davis’ business history.

In a note, Davis replied that “given Mother Jones’ far-left editorial orientation and the framing of several of your questions, we do not have confidence that our participation would result in a fair and balanced account of Dark Horse.” He wrote that the “inquiry takes a broad, scattershot approach combining questions about the film with historical business affiliations, registered addresses, and other companies.” Davis also said, “several questions” contained “assumptions, speculations, or characterizations that we do not accept,” but didn’t explain what those were.

Meanwhile, select audiences in the United States have already had a sneak peek of Dark Horse. Back in June, Eduardo attended the first public screening of the movie at the Fraud Fighter Summit in Las Vegas. Speaking at a panel, Eduardo suggested the biopic could have a similar enduring impact to Terminator 2. “This movie,” he said, “is going to be a nightmare for the Left.”

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Accidental Environmentalist? How Trump’s War Exposed the Fragility of Dirty Energy.

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

Of all the epithets hurled at Donald Trump since he became US president, perhaps the most unusual was delivered last month—that he is, in fact, some sort of environmentalist.

Trump is the “greatest gift” to the environmental movement, argued Gavin Newsom, California’s governor, due to the fallout from the US-Israel war on Iran.

“He’s woken the world up to how vulnerable we are to petro-dictatorships, how vulnerable we are to disruptions in the Middle East,” Newsom told The Guardian during Climate Week in New York. “This war has completely gutted any sort of romantic notions of energy security and it’s compelled folks to think differently. It’s accelerating investments and clean energy and renewables.”

If Trump has been an accidental environmentalist, it’s been in the international sphere. The Strait of Hormuz, where a fifth of the world’s oil and gas exports usually flow, is now starting to open up but has been routinely snarled since the Iran War began in February, causing the cost of these fossil fuels to soar around the world.

Countries reacted by scrambling to cut their oil and gas use while turning to cleaner forms of energy such as solar and wind (although there’s also been a small rise in coal, the dirtiest of fossil fuels).

The overall consequence has been a positive one for our shared climate, with global fossil fuel emissions set to drop by 0.5 percent this year due to the crisis, Carbon Brief has estimated. The peak in oil consumption may have been sped up enough to arrive this year, rather than the previous estimate of 2029, according to the International Energy Agency.

By launching the war, Trump is set to achieve something only dreamed about by climate advocates and not seen outside global economic crashes or the Covid pandemic—an annual reduction in the emissions that are overheating our planet. The president’s imposition of tariffs and importation of foreign ground beef, meanwhile, may also end up hurting the US cattle industry, another major source of greenhouse gas emissions.

“All of the oil that is produced will be burned… The people who predict that there will be a reduction in [greenhouse emissions] are simply lying or blind.”

“It’s a curious thing to say, but I believe it,” Newsom, a potential contender for the Democratic presidential nomination, said of Trump as a sort of unintentional biophile. “This moment will mark how we can’t go back to our original form.”

Yet the idea of Trump as an environmentalist, even an accidental one, can still appear faintly absurd. His administration has eviscerated pollution limits on cars, trucks and power plants, funnelled taxpayer cash and favors to the fossil fuel industry, and set about unilaterally cancelling renewable energy projects.

Trump, who has never by available evidence ever set a Florsheimed foot in any of the US’s national parks, has called environmentalists “terrorists,” the climate crisis “a hoax,” and has slashed conservation rules to the extent you can now kill a protected species as long as it wasn’t provably intentional.

Perhaps tellingly, when asked during the 2024 election campaign about his environmental credentials, Trump cited his Florida golf course getting awards for “the way I built it, for the water, the way I use the water, the sand, the mixing of the sand and the water.”

Critics say this record overshadows any embrace of clean energy by other countries spooked by an oil price that has hovered about $100 a barrel for months but should, at some point in the interminable Iran conflict, drop well below this. The impetus for quitting fossil fuels could wither when it does so.

“Trump’s illegal attack on Iran may hasten clean energy in some countries, but he has gutted green tech in the United States and set us back decades,” said Rob Jackson, a climate scientist at Stanford University who said Newsom was guilty of “tunnel vision” in his framing of Trump. “The notion that he is an accidental environmentalist is wishful thinking.”

The conflict may have rocked the oil and gas industry but it has also enriched it, netting eight of the largest companies more than $90 billion in just the first three months of the war, with even pro-oil Trump complaining that the major fossil fuel firms are “making too much money.”

There is little sign Big Oil fears a looming obsolescence when this bonanza ends. Last month, Exxon forecast that while the world will reduce its emissions, it will still use 105 million barrels of oil a day in 2050, up from 100 million barrels last year. Two-thirds of the global energy mix will stubbornly remain composed of oil, gas, and coal at the midpoint of the century, the oil company estimated.

“All of the oil that is produced will be burned—if they produce more, more will be used,” said Juan Carlos Navarro, environment minister of Panama. “The people who predict that there will be a reduction in the emission of greenhouse gases are simply lying or blind.”

The only hope is that the world “can cap consumption and production at levels similar to the ones we have right now,” Navarro added, citing the enormous energy demand of artificial intelligence datacenters, which are largely being run on gas-fired power.

However, climate advocates maintain the Iran conflict will accelerate trends that are already swinging behind clean energy. Investment in renewables globally is now double that of fossil fuels, almost all new power being added to grids comes from clean sources and last year one in four cars sold was electric.

“I don’t think the world is just going to go back to business-as-usual demand of fossil fuels once this crisis ends.”

Unlike previous oil shocks, the world now has a viable alternative to fossil fuels, even if it’s unclear how lasting an impact Trump’s military and trade actions will have in pushing countries towards them. “There is one thing that all these events are making clear,” Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission said in April. “We are paying a very high price for our over-dependency on fossil fuels.”

Countries from the UK to India to Thailand have sought to speed up the transition to renewables as the price of fossil fuel dependency has spiraled, saving billions. Electric vehicle sales have surged, although not in the US. Trump has urged other countries to reject the “scam” of clean energy but the market is increasingly favoring cheap wind, solar and batteries that have plummeted in cost in recent years, including in the US.

“Demand has massively spiked for solar and for battery storage,” said Sonia Dunlop, chief executive of the Global Solar Council. “We’re seeing that all over the world—the Philippines, across Europe, across south-east Asia, Australia and beyond.”

“This Iran crisis, which was, in effect, started by President Trump, has led to a massive surge in demand for our technology…but actually it’s just building on a trend that was already there,” she added.

Political and business leaders can mull the fact that the wind does not funnel through the strait of Hormuz and the sun doesn’t only shine on a foreign autocrat’s lands. The Iran war may not prove a fatal blow to fossil fuels, but it has starkly highlighted their inherent volatility.

The case for renewables has become obvious at a grassroots level in developing countries, too, where rooftops increasingly glitter with cheap Chinese-made solar panels that are helping negate soaring power bills.

“The price of solar has come down so quickly that there are now 100,000 solar panels installed every day in Africa,” Al Gore, the former US vice-president, said last month. “In parts of Pakistan, a common bride’s dowry is now three panels and an inverter, instead of 10 or 12 goats. It’s beginning to kick into gear.”

This momentum won’t stop once the conflict around the Persian Gulf ends, Dunlop insisted. “I don’t think the world is just going to go back to business-as-usual demand of fossil fuels once this crisis ends,” she said. “Once someone decides to step off the fossil fuel rollercoaster, they’re off it.”

So does all this, then, make Trump an environmentalist? “I wouldn’t say that,” Dunlop demurred. “He certainly has his own ideas.”

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Does Jared Kushner Know What a Conflict of Interest Is?

CNN published an investigation earlier this week detailing how an investment fund operated by Jared Kushner, who has acted as a key Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiator and leader on Trump’s Gaza “Board of Peace,” also holds the largest stake in an Israeli financial institution that backs arms manufacturers involved in Israel’s bombardment of Gaza—one of many financial entanglements author Casey Michel highlighted in a Mother Jones cover story in July.

In a rare move, Kushner took to social media Friday to characterize CNN’s reporting as “deeply misleading.”

CNN published a deeply misleading story and headline suggesting that my diplomatic work in the Middle East somehow benefited investments in Israeli defense companies.

But CNN’s own reporting says otherwise. Buried behind a paywall, it acknowledges: “CNN found no indication that… pic.twitter.com/iCowrE9N84

— Jared Kushner (@jaredkushner) October 2, 2026

The CNN reporters did acknowledge that they “found no indication that Kushner’s actions as a diplomat” directly affected his investment portfolio. But they laid out how Kushner’s private equity company ended up with a 7.4 percent stake in an Israeli firm linked to nine different weapons contractors.

Kushner’s company, Affinity Partners, doubled its stake in the firm, Phoenix Financial, last year—just before Donald Trump returned to office. As Michel wrote for Mother Jones, “Phoenix is a bulwark for Israeli expansion in the Palestinian territories and Syria, enabling more building, construction, and imperialism.”

CNN’s report digs into the details of Phoenix’s investments in Israeli weapons-makers. Most notably, Phoenix has hundreds of millions of dollars in Elbit Systems, Israel’s largest military equipment provider, known for unmanned aerial vehicles that are deployed extensively for surveillance and bombardment in Gaza. Phoenix also, according to CNN, has holdings in Israeli jet-engine maker Bet Shemesh, drone-camera maker Next Vision, munitions company Reshef Technologies, and Boeing, which supplies Israel’s military with F-15s and bunker-buster bombs.

In his post, Kushner protested, “Phoenix is not a defense company. It is one of Israel’s largest publicly traded financial institutions, highly regulated and managing approximately $220 billion across thousands of investments.”

Nonetheless, Phoenix manages large investments in weapons companies close to the conflict, even as Kushner touts a $2.4 billion dollar “recovery plan” for Gaza geared toward turning the area into a tourist hub. Israel continues to bomb Gaza—despite having agreed to a ceasefire 11 months ago—killing more than 1,300 people since that agreement was signed.

Kushner has responded to past reporting on his conflicts of interest by saying, essentially, that putting himself in a position to make money off his diplomatic work doesn’t count as a conflict of interest unless he actually makes money. But while serving as a diplomat, he has indeed been making money; in September 2025, Forbes declared Kushner a billionaire, noting that his fortune had grown by about $100 million from a year earlier.

Israel represents just one of Kushner’s numerous global conflicts of interest. While engaged in attempts to negotiate peace with Iran, he was also soliciting investments from officials of Persian Gulf states with a stake in the outcome. Kushner was also tapped to negotiate an end to Russia’s war with Ukraine, despite his ties to prominent Russian officials. And as the lead story in today’s New York Times revealed, the Trump administration’s talks with Russia about ending the war in Ukraine now involve “a multibillion-dollar oil deal that would benefit Middle Eastern business executives with ties to the two main U.S. negotiators, Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner.”

In 2025, CBS’ “60 Minutes” asked Kushner and Witkoff, his fellow “special envoy,” whether their “billions and billions of dollars worth of business” deals with the Gulf States, some of which they’d negotiated while brokering a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas in Qatar, might constitute conflicts of interest. Kushner seemed to think he was in the clear.

“We’re here to do good,” Kushner responded. “These are impossible tasks.” He stated that he would not be personally involved in deciding who does business in Gaza after the ceasefire deal is signed. “What people call conflicts of interest,” Kushner said, “Steve and I call experience.”

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Welcome to the Flock Elections

Over the past six months, Americans have become increasingly aware of automated license plate readers, used by almost 80 percent of American police departments to trace vehicles and their drivers without the hassle of a warrant. ALPRs perch on power poles and stoplights, quietly encroaching on the most sacred silo of American life—the car. People are pissed.

Like the slew of data centers cropping up across the country, the cameras have inspired fierce bipartisan backlash. As ALPRs proliferate, communities have pressured local lawmakers to rein them in, leading municipalities and counties nationwide to cancel contracts, remove the cameras, or ban them altogether.

Now, a surprising cross-section of candidates—local, national, liberal, conservative—are putting Flock at the heart of their campaigns. With 2026’s midterm elections fast approaching, both Republicans and Democrats in battleground states like Florida, Michigan, and Pennsylvania are wooing voters by promising to place guardrails on unregulated surveillance technologies. Politicians of all stripes suddenly seem to think that they need to get Flock out of here.

“Flock has become a four-letter word.”

ALPR systems like Flock use algorithmically powered cameras to compile searchable databases of the license plate numbers, time, location, make, model, and color of passing cars. Flock CEO Garret Langley claimed in March that his company’s cameras, which make up about 80 percent of the total mapped ALPR cameras in the US, “solved” one million crimes in 2025. (The available evidence doesn’t back up Langley’s numbers.)

Although police can, for example, use Flock cameras to try to track down a missing person or stolen car, reports also abound of cops using ALPRs to stalk their exes, track an abortion-seeker across state lines, and provide information to ICE. The lack of strict standards around their use—and concerns over the erosion of privacy and civil liberties—have become a major concern across party lines as communities debate if, and how, the tech should be used.

A September survey of more than 1,400 adults by the nonprofit National Policing Institute found that public approval of ALPRs depended on the justification: 80 percent approved of their use to find missing children or investigate violent crimes, but about three-fourths disagreed with using the cameras for immigration enforcement or “routine traffic or parking enforcement.” More than half said their support for the systems would increaseif their department “adopted safeguards” against abuse.

A Flock Safety license plate reader camera along a roadway in Washington, D.C., September 12, 2026.Matt Kaminsky/ZUMA

With a month to go until a slew of intensely contested elections and public concern over Flock and its competitors only growing, congressional candidates and sitting legislators across the political spectrum are calling to rework the patchwork regulatory system that governs the cameras’ use. And while Flock’s public relations efforts seem to be ramping up, they have brought few politicians to their side on either the right or the left. (A notable exception: Donald Trump, who has said “I like them” with regard to the cameras.)

While ALPRs have been around since the 1990s, 90 percent of people didn’t know whether their local police department used the technology in 2018, according to one poll; the new wave of public awareness and controversy around Flock and similar cameras has left politicians scrambling to catch up.

“Most jurisdictions don’t have clear regulation around the use of ALPRs,” said Clare Garvie, deputy director of technology law and policy at New York University’s Policing Project. That provides an opening to politicians willing to promise regulation, outright bans, or just constraints on who gets to use them.

Today, there are more than 120,000 ALPR cameras across the country. 100 percent of police departments serving more than one million residents use them, according to Bureau of Justice statistics, as do 90 percent of sheriffs’ offices with 500 or more sworn deputies. But that tide could be shifting: in the past year alone, more than 50 municipalities have cut ties with Flock and other ALPR vendors, according to the advocacy group DeFlock.

“There’s been a widespread lack of transparency around where these tools are implemented, how widespread they are, how many actual cameras there are, [and] how long the data is kept,” Garvie added.

“We see widespread opposition to this and frustration on the part of communities that they were never informed; they were never involved in this decision to use the technology in the first place.”

On September 23, a Senate committee led by Republican Josh Hawley of Missouri and Democrat Dick Durbin of Illinois—both of whom have staked out positions as anti-surveillance crusaders—held a hearing on ALPR reform. They invited representatives from Flock, Axon, Motorola, and Verkada—but none of them showed.

“We’ve got to find a way to protect and enforce the Bill of Rights and the basic personal liberties of every law-abiding citizen in this country, no matter what the technology is,” Hawley said at the time. A week later, the Missouri Republican announced plans to introduce the Stop Flock Act, which would prevent local governments from selling or sharing vehicle data with non-governmental third parties, limit data retention to ten days in most cases, and impose other restrictions on the cameras’ use.

In fact, at least four different bills were introduced in Congress in September alone that would limit ALPR use. By October 2, the text of yet another bill—this time from Democrats Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Jeff Merkley—was announced.

And after November’s elections, a new bipartisan batch of legislators could help push federal regulations on ALPRs forward.

Angie Nixon, Florida’s Democratic Senate nominee, has made “protect[ing] privacy and end[ing] mass surveillance” a core component of her campaign for a hotly contested election. Nixon proposes “federal standards,” requiring law enforcement officials to obtain a warrant before accessing ALPR data, imposing a mandatory data deletion period, and mandating community consent at the local level before ALPR contracts are signed or renewed, among other things.

“I know folks are saying, ‘We’ve got to keep crime from happening,’” Nixon said in an interview with Mother Jones. “The way you keep crime from happening is by addressing the root cause of crime, which is oftentimes people not having access to quality, good-paying jobs or access to healthcare, just the most basic needs.”

There’s little research on the effectiveness of ALPR systems at deterring or investigating crimes. For one thing, they often misidentify vehicles—which can lead to devastating consequences, as in the case of Lindsey Isaacs, a Florida woman wrongfully jailed for 13 days on triple homicide charges after a Flock camera incorrectly flagged her Dodge Durango as the vehicle involved in a fatal hit-and-run.

Even Florida’s Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis, whose policy positions couldn’t be further from Nixon’s, wants to tamp down on ALPRs: In early September, he banned the cameras on state highways.

Nixon isn’t the only candidate campaigning on Flock. Another progressive Senate candidate fighting for a battleground seat, Michigan’s Abdul El-Sayed, has also raised alarms about ALPRs. In late August, El-Sayed released a video about Flock and his Republican opponent Mike Rogers’ alleged links to the booming surveillance state.

Does it ever feel like you're in a cage being watched?

Well, you are. By Flock cameras, thanks to Mike Rogers. pic.twitter.com/6H2DfN1l5j

— Dr. Abdul El-Sayed (@AbdulElSayed) August 19, 2026

While Rogers and El-Sayed have little in common on most issues, they’re now trying to outflank each other on Flock as communities across Michigan voice ire towards the cameras.

“Abdul has heard concerns about Flock cameras from voters in every corner of the state,” campaign spokesperson Cole Wozniak said in an email. “In the United States Senate, he will fight to both keep communities safe while protecting our fundamental rights to privacy.”

A spokesperson for Rogers’ campaign, asked about the candidate’s views on Flock by Fox News Digital, said he “vehemently opposes unchecked use of Flock cameras to track law-abiding citizens,” adding that “Security and liberty aren’t enemies. Good government protects both.”

Independent congressional candidates in both Montana and Tennessee even shot Flock cameras (or dummy Flock cameras) with guns to make their case against the technology. Gubernatorial candidates of both major parties in Iowa, Texas, Florida, and Arizona have all made abolishing or limiting ALPR use part of their platforms in recent weeks.

Both candidates for the governor’s office in Iowa, Democrat Rob Sand and Republican Zach Lahn, for example, have said they would sign state-level ALPR regulations. Lahn is more absolutist: the cameras constitute “an unbelievable Fourth Amendment violation,” he said in August. Sand, a former prosecutor, has centered his platform more on local control of ALPRs, without condemning the technology or any specific company.

Even leaders not currently on the campaign trail, like moderate Republican Sen. Dan Laughlin in Pennsylvania, have proposed banning Flock and similar ALPR cameras, signaling that the technology could remain a bipartisan issue in years to come—or that they fear it’s already a wedge issue for their colleagues.

“Public safety is a responsibility we all take seriously,” Laughlin said in a public statement. “But it should not require building a surveillance network capable of tracking the daily movements of millions of innocent individuals.”

“I think Flock is standing in for [ALPR] technology more broadly,” said NYU’s Garvie. “We see widespread opposition to this and frustration on the part of communities that they were never informed, they were never involved in this decision to use the technology in the first place.”

As one Arizona sheriff said at Hawley’s Senate hearing, “Flock has become a four-letter word.”

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The Future of Wildfire Response: AI, Drones, and Robots

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

During the Sand Creek Fire, which has burned since the start of August in southwestern Montana, difficult terrain and fire-weakened trees posed hazards to crews searching for areas still smoldering on steep slopes after the blaze passed. So instead of relying only on firefighters to find hidden embers, fire managers used unmanned aircraft to seek out heat sources.

The operation is part of a broader technological shift underway in wildfire response. The US Forest Service is evaluating firefighting robots on the ground, and researchers are exploring how artificial intelligence could help predict where wildfires will ignite and how quickly fires will spread. Federal agencies already use drones to map fires, detect hotspots and ignite prescribed burns, and are testing their capability to drop firefighting foam and water on blazes.

“Drones are now a critical tool in federal wildfire response, providing real-time infrared imagery to map fire perimeters, detect hotspots, and monitor dangerous or inaccessible terrain, which helps firefighters make safer, faster tactical decisions,” said Meredith Hollowell, a Forest Service press officer, in a statement to Inside Climate News.

The Federal Aviation Administration said drones provide real-time situational awareness by detecting hotspots, mapping fire perimeters and aiding firefighter efforts in dangerous environments.

But drones are no longer being used just to watch fires from above.

During aerial ignition operations in which fire managers intentionally burn vegetation to expand control lines or remove fuels before the main fire reaches them, unmanned aircraft can reduce the exposure of pilots or firefighters to some high-risk conditions, Hollowell said.

The technology has become established enough that federal agencies now have specific positions for UAS pilots, managers, module leaders and data specialists, as well as procedures for ordering drone resources for wildfire incidents.

The Forest Service is also testing autonomous ground vehicles that could carry equipment and supplies into areas where conventional vehicles or manual transport may be difficult or unsafe. In June, the agency and its partners tested robotic vehicles on rough terrain in Georgia that was designed to replicate conditions encountered during wildfire operations.

The vehicles were expected to carry payloads of up to 800 pounds, including firehose packs, heavy hand tools, water containers, and medical supplies. Evaluators tested their ability to navigate rocky roads, uneven ground, and slopes while carrying operational loads.

While the technology is not yet ready for routine wildfire operations, Charlie Gray, a Forest Service district fire management officer, said it shows promise for reducing firefighters’ exposure to risk while getting equipment and supplies to the fireline.

Hollowell said the Forest Service expects advances in AI-enabled unmanned aerial systems, combined with improved fire-behavior models and data from satellites, cameras and weather models to revolutionize wildfire detection and tracking, suppression efficiency and firefighter safety.

Researchers are already examining the potential advantages of combining drones with artificial intelligence.

Phinehas Lampman, a researcher at the University of Idaho, developed a system using thermal-infrared images collected by drones and machine-learning models to analyze fire behavior and predict a fire’s rate of spread. Lampman spent seven years working on engine and hotshot crews for the Clearwater-Potlatch Timber Protective Association and the Forest Service before turning to research, according to his University of Idaho bio.

Lampman’s study, published in May in the International Journal of Wildland Fire, focused on three measures of fire behavior: rate of spread, fireline intensity, and radiative power. Researchers repeatedly flew a drone equipped with a thermal-infrared sensor over a prescribed grassland fire and used the imagery to generate high-resolution measurements of those characteristics.

Lampman and his colleagues used the drone-collected data to train machine learning models to predict how quickly the fire would spread. The models performed well in making short-term predictions during the experiment, the researchers reported. Drones that can collect observations directly from a fire for machine-learning systems to analyze for their predictions of what the blaze may do next could be a valuable addition to incident commanders’ toolbox.

Fire managers currently make decisions using multiple sources of information, including weather reports, maps, observations from firefighters and aerial information from airplanes and helicopters.

“Most incident commanders in the field rely on their vast experience to assess and ultimately predict wildfire movement,” Lampman said in an August article published by the University of Idaho.

But while conventional aircraft can provide critical information, they cannot operate in all conditions.

“Sometimes those aerial assets are grounded, or the visibility is really poor,” Lampman said. “But drones can usually still fly and gather information.”

That could make drones useful not only as another set of eyes over a fire, but also as a data source for models designed to estimate fire behavior.

Lampman’s research remains a proof of concept, and no AI system yet exists that fire managers can rely on to accurately predict a wildfire’s movement. But federal fire officials are already looking toward a future in which drones, artificial intelligence, and other technologies could work together to give firefighters more information while reducing their exposure to dangerous situations.

“Looking ahead, advances in AI-enabled UAV systems, improved fire-behavior modeling, and expanded use of decision-support tools, along with satellite, camera, and weather-model integration, are expected to enhance early detection, tracking, suppression efficiency, and firefighter safety,” said Hollowell, at the US Forest Service.

Researchers are also exploring how drone-collected data could improve models of wildfire smoke and its potential effects on people downwind.

“UAS provide critical access to researchers who are expanding our understanding of the relationships between fire behavior and smoke emissions in real time,” Leda Kobziar, a professor of wildland fire science at the University of Idaho and a co-author of the study, said in an email to Inside Climate News. “These relationships are key to building and improving models (including AI models) that can help us predict what types of smoke-borne microbes and concentrations of smoke we would expect people downwind to be exposed to.”

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America’s New Relationship With Israel…It’s Complicated

When Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu took the stage at the United Nations last month, diplomats streamed for the exits. Three years after October 7, when much of the Western world rallied behind Israel in the wake of Hamas’ attack, the political ground has shifted.

Some of the biggest changes are happening here in the US. Two years ago, Abbas Alawieh helped lead the Uncommitted movement, pressuring Democrats over Gaza. Now he’s running for Michigan state Senate, and Kamala Harris is calling him. Elsewhere in Michigan, AIPAC and its allies spent close to $30 million backing Abdul El-Sayed’s opponent in the Democratic Senate primary. El-Sayed won anyway.

For some voters, the prominence of Israel itself is striking.

“I don’t know why Israel has become the pivotal point,” said Mimi Price-Miletic, a Democratic voter in Michigan. “There are so many issues in this country that we should be dealing with, and you’re worried about what’s happening, like, millions of miles away?”

And the divide crosses party lines. Younger Republicans are questioning US support for Israel, even as party leaders advance deeper defense cooperation. Meanwhile, AIPAC faces new challenges to its influence, as younger Jewish political groups, like J Street and Jewish Voice for Peace, offer sharply different visions for what should come next.

This week on Reveal, reporter Najib Aminy follows the new fault lines forming around the US–Israel relationship and asks: As the old political consensus is tested, who gets to shape what replaces it?

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Elon’s Fans Erect 50-Foot Statue Outside His Company Town

On Thursday, a group of men dressed like extras from Les Misérables erected a giant statue outside Elon Musk’s company town of Starbase, Texas: a 50-foot bronze rendition of the Titan Prometheus. Building a godlike figure in honor of the world’s richest man reportedly cost the sculptors, of the French outfit Atelier Missor, $1 million of their own funds.

The statue of Prometheus is finally finished.

It was cast in Paris, crossed the Atlantic, and was assembled at Starbase. It took us 100 days to go from nothing to this.

People of the West, we have lived through an era devoid of dreams, devoid of destiny.

But the time has come… pic.twitter.com/JkQbTGV1My

— Atelier Missor (@AtelierMissor_) October 2, 2026

Atelier Missor, active since 2021, describes itself on X as a “classical foundry in Paris, on its way to building a new Rome.” Its founder, Missor Movahed Ghaleh Nouri, has claimed he was drawn to pursue classical sculpture after receiving a vision of Napoleon I while wandering the Place Vendôme in Paris. His staff wear identical tan suspenders, billowy shirts, and unkempt facial hair, and—per previous versions of their website—spent much of the first half of the 2020s producing bronze and clay busts of such figures as (of course) Napoleon, Nietzsche, and Jordan Peterson.

In a now-deleted mission statement, Mohaved appears to allude to the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests as one of the reasons he started his foundry.

“I was shocked to see ignorant people tearing down statues,” he wrote. “These fools who weren’t even in the same league as those they were trying to destroy. These ungrateful people who had never done anything in their lives.”

Across their social media channels, the foundry now posts about bringing back the West and bemoans modern artistic sensibilities. “Make art so epic it will raise the birthrate,” they say. Nor have they forgotten their particular commitment to white, European manhood.

For one statue destroyed, we will craft ten more. https://t.co/SZN6ELrwfe

— Atelier Missor (@AtelierMissor_) March 18, 2026

After first arriving in the United States last year with help from the Peter Thiel–linked 1517 venture capital fund, the men of Atelier Missor wasted no time ingratiating themselves with the American right. They welded an 11-foot bronze George Washington for Trump’s “Freedom 250” celebrations. (They also, judging by their posts, appear to have acquired cowboy hats.)

“You cannot just imagine a view of the world and impose it,” Mohaved reportedly said in June of 2025. “You have to submit to the dream that unites us—the dream of Western civilization.”

To that end, his foundry has spent the past year flirting hard with Elon Musk.

Dear @elonmusk

We want to build a statue of Prometheus in titanium and offer it to Starbase — a gift from the people, in gratitude for pushing humanity forward.

Let's make Starbase the most spectacular city, as it will be depicted as a true milestone in history books. pic.twitter.com/jtRnDjIi3j

— Atelier Missor (@AtelierMissor_) June 18, 2025

But the statue—which now hoists its torch into the sky and teeters, plinthless, on the ground—is not on Starbase property. Nor is it made of titanium, as its sculptors initially planned. Instead, it sits by the side of a Texas road about ten miles away.

Nonetheless, the hollow, welded-together Prometheus went up overnight on Wednesday. Neither SpaceX nor Atelier Missor immediately responded to a request for comment.

Rewarding their months of desperate posting—and real, actual statue construction—Atelier Missor recieved curt recognition from their idol on October 1st.

“Nice work,” Elon posted.

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A New Trump Rule Could Transform Gun Sales. The President’s Son Is Poised to Profit.

The Trump administration has spent much of this year rewriting the federal government’s approach to guns. Just last month, the Justice Department concluded that the ban on selling handguns to 18-20-year-olds is unconstitutional and would no longer be criminally enforced.

But amid dozens of changes to federal firearms regulations is one you might have missed. If finalized, it could fundamentally transform the way Americans buy guns.

The ATF’s proposed Non-Over-the-Counter rule would allow gun dealers to conduct many firearms sales entirely remotely, so eligible buyers could verify their identities online and have a gun shipped directly to their home, no in-person interaction required. It’s a move that has even rattled the gun industry’s own leading trade lobby.

Enter the president’s son. Donald Trump Jr. is a shareholder and board member of GrabAGun, a company that bills itself as the “Amazon of Guns” and boasts that it’s “uniquely positioned to capitalize on this potential opportunity.”

Currently, someone who orders a gun online generally must go in person to a federally licensed firearms dealer to verify their identity, undergo a background check, and eventually pick up their gun. Under the ATF’s proposed rule, eligible in-state buyers could verify their identity online, undergo a background check, and have a gun shipped directly to their home, without ever setting foot in a gun store.

The ATF estimates that as many as half of all gun buyers might choose to take advantage of fully remote sales.

GrabAGun has been positioning itself for a future where more gun sales happen this way. As the public face of the company, Trump Jr. has touted the ease of online gun sales “in an age where our right to bear arms is under constant attack from anti-gun politicians and woke corporations.”

“GrabAGun allows you to [buy a gun] the way you’d buy everything else, like you would on Amazon if you’re buying home décor or other goods,” he explained to Bloomberg last July, ahead of the company’s public debut on the New York Stock Exchange.

Donald Trump Jr. holds a shotgun at Tombstone Tactical gun store in Phoenix, Arizona, on October 23, 2024. (Photo by REBECCA NOBLE/AFP via Getty Images)

Months before the ATF unveiled its proposal, GrabAGun had already begun expanding into a new business designed to help firearms manufacturers sell directly to consumers. In January, the company launched PEW Logistics, a subsidiary that provides manufacturers with a “white-label direct-to-consumer fulfillment solution.” Four months later, the ATF announced its proposed rule expanding remote firearms sales.

Democratic Sens. Chris Murphy and Richard Blumenthal sounded the alarm about what the company knew, and when—and pressed the Department of Justice on whether Trump Jr.’s business ties influenced the proposed rule. “It appears that GrabAGun had information about the potential change in the regulatory landscape and made a series of business decisions to capitalize on the moment,” they wrote in a July letter to then-acting Attorney General Todd Blanche.

Trump Jr.’s spokesperson has maintained that the president’s son had “zero involvement in this particular decision.”

“Don is a lifelong businessman and vocal advocate of our Second Amendment rights,” Andrew Surabian said in a statement to Reuters. “He does not interface with the Federal Government as part of his role with any company that he invests in or advises.”

ATF Director Robert Cekada also pushed back on ethical concerns, asserting that the “ATF has had no engagement with any retailer in developing [the rule].” The ATF has framed the Non-Over-the-Counter rule as a way to modernize gun sales and take advantage of technical advances in remote identity verification.

The proposal has drawn alarm from anti-gun-violence advocates and even some members of the gun industry, who say that removing in-person encounters could make it harder to detect suspicious sales and easier for guns to reach the criminal market.

“This allowing of online gun sales is probably the most dangerous action taken by the US government to increase gun violence,” warned Jon Lowy, founder and president of Global Action on Gun Violence and a veteran gun violence prevention attorney.

“A brief video interaction cannot detect if the purchaser is actually an illegal straw purchaser buying for someone else, a gun trafficker just supplying the criminal market, somebody who’s intoxicated, somebody who is on drugs, someone who is clearly mentally unstable and dangerous,” Lowy said. “I really was shocked.”

A promotional poster from the ‘Don’t Lie for the Other Guy’ campaign, a joint initiative of the ATF and the National Shooting Sports Foundation. (atf.gov)

The ATF and the gun industry’s largest trade organization, the National Shooting Sports Foundation (NSSF), have partnered for more than 25 years on the “Don’t Lie for the Other Guy” campaign, educating dealers on how to identify and prevent straw purchases—when a “straw man” illegally buys a gun for someone else, one of the most common sources of gun trafficking, according to federal data.

Earlier this year, ATF Director Robert Cekada told the Senate Judiciary Committee that federally licensed firearms dealers are “our first line of defense in the fight against firearms trafficking.”

Now, the industry’s own trade group is warning that removing face-to-face encounters could undermine that role.

In August, the NSSF told the ATF that its membership was “overwhelmingly opposed” to the Non-Over-the-Counter rule, citing concerns that remote sales “would be exploited by bad actors to conduct illegal straw purchases.”

“When you have an online background check you lose the emotional point,” Florida gun dealer Marc Bernstein told Spectrum News 13. “A lot of the ways that we stop straw purchases are through conversations and we terminate the sale right away. And it happens pretty frequently.” Bernstein said that happens at least once a week.

The Non-Over-the-Counter rule is still under review and, if finalized, will likely be challenged in court. It’s unclear if a legal challenge would delay the rollout.

“I’ve spent most of my career trying to stop the flow of crime guns,” said Lowy, the gun control attorney.

**“**Then this whole other mechanism that makes it completely easy and seems largely untouchable is created—and it looks like there’s virtually nothing you can do about it.”

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David Flippo Blamed Staff For Exaggerating His Military Record. His Own Hat Tells a Different Story.

Last week, The Washington Post reported that David Flippo’s congressional campaign falsely claimed on multiple occasions that the Nevada Republican earned a Bronze Star with valor as an Air Force officer. Flippo’s response was to blame anonymous staffers who he claimed had accidentally conflated two different awards he received for his service in Iraq.

But there is a major problem with that explanation: For years, Flippo wore a hat that suggested he earned the Bronze Star with valor—the rare award he admits he does not have.

Specifically, as first reported by the conservative outlet Nevada News & Views, Flippo frequently wore a hat that included a Bronze Star with two V-shaped emblems next to it. Pictures of him wearing the hat were included on his campaign website and in posts on its social media feeds. According to veterans, the emblems on the cap bear a striking resemblance to the valor devices—or V devices, as they are known in military circles—used by the US military to show when awards are earned for valor. Lately, he appears to have stopped wearing that version of the cap.

The Bronze Star hangs below a red and blue ribbon. For those who received the award with valor, a small V is normally attached to the ribbon. In Flippo’s case, his hat featured two Vs next to his Bronze Star. (The other V could have been related to the Outstanding Unit Award with valor he received; that award was given to his unit as a whole rather than for individual acts of heroism.)

Part of a photo on Flippo’s campaign website showing two V-shaped emblems next to his Bronze Star.Flippo campaign website

Flippo’s campaign did not respond to multiple requests for comment. Text messages sent to two numbers listed for Flippo in public records went unanswered. Flippo’s campaign answered some questions from the Nevada Independent for an article published on Friday that covered his military service, but it did not respond to those about the V-shaped symbols he has worn.

Daniel Casentini, a retired Air Force Master Sergeant who was interviewed by Nevada News & Views, told me via email that photos he has reviewed appear to show V devices next to Flippo’s Bronze Star. “I cannot conceive of any explanation for why Flippo would display two V devices unless he was implying he earned a Bronze Star with a V device,” he said.

After reviewing photos of Flippo wearing the hat, a former Army Ranger told me Flippo was “clearly representing” that he was awarded a Bronze Star with valor. “He was publicly knowingly misrepresenting the award he received,” he added in a text message. “He lied.”

Scott Maryott, a retired Army Lieutenant Colonel who lives in northern Nevada, where he volunteers at the VA and teaches a university course on military history, asked, “Why would you put those Vs that represent valor on your hat in the first place?” He also wanted to know why Flippo no longer appears to be wearing them. “He could say, ‘I made a mistake putting them on my hat,'” Maryott said. “That’s okay. Be honest.”

A photo posted to Flippo’s Instagram account in 2024 featuring the V-shaped emblems.Instagram

The news about Flippo’s Bronze Star comes in the final weeks of a competitive House race in his Reno-based district. In 2024, Trump won the district by 14 points. But Flippo’s many weaknesses as a candidate—including the fact that he moved to Reno only this year—have helped put the seat in play for his Democratic opponent, Teresa Benitez-Thompson, a former state Assembly majority leader. On Wednesday, veterans in Nevada filmed a forthcoming ad AFL-CIO-funded ad criticizing Flippo. As I reported earlier this week, Flippo is also facing questions about the source of the nearly $2.5 million he has reported putting into his 2024 and 2026 congressional campaigns.

Flippo told the Post that he received a standard Bronze Star, as well as the Outstanding Unit Award with valor. Flippo said that his campaign team mistakenly conflated the two awards when it claimed he had a Bronze Star with valor. Rory McShane, the founder of the political consulting firm through which Flippo has routed most of his campaign spending, accused the Post of “trying to fabricate a scandal” based on “an honest mistake that has been apologized for.”

The false claim that Flippo received a Bronze Star with valor, when he actually received a standard Bronze Star, may sound like a minor distinction. In the military community, it is not.“A Bronze Star with a V device indicates you were directly involved in combat, under hostile fire, for the actions the Bronze Star is being awarded for,” Casentini explained. Maryott shared a similar perspective. A standard Bronze Star is “for showing up” and “performing successfully in a combat zone,” he said. “With valor, it’s a far different level.”

During the Iraq war, about 100,000 Bronze Stars were awarded. Only about 1 in 40 came with the additional valor distinction. The former Ranger explained that a Bronze Star with valor is so different from the regular version that it might as well be a different award.

On Friday, the Nevada Independent published the citation for Flippo’s Bronze Star, which was shared with the outlet by a campaign spokesperson. Among other achievements, the citation states that, while in Iraq, Flippo “was the first to promptly respond” to extinguish flames and provide “life saving medical care” to a soldier with severe burns on his body. Maryott said that Flippo clearly deserved a Bronze Star for the conduct described in the citation but not a valor device.

Flippo was photographed wearing the hat as early as August 2023, when he was running for Congress for the first time. He continued to wear the hat with the apparent V devices until at least June 2026. Recently, Flippo has been photographed multiple times wearing a similar hat that has neither a Bronze Star nor the apparent V devices.

Maryott said that it is strange for an officer to go out of their way to tout a standard Bronze Star. “If you’re an officer and you served overseas during this operation you probably got a Bronze Star,” said Maryott, who has a Bronze Star of his own. “I would never lead with that.”

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Want to Attend an “Exclusive Dinner” With Trump? Just Buy His Meme Coin!

President Donald Trump is once again offering “exclusive” access to buyers of his meme coin—this time in the form of an invitation to a dinner with him and three secret “legends” to be named at a later date.

All you have to do is purchase—and then resist the temptation to immediately sell—a lot of $TRUMP. If, come November 12, you’re one of the top 185 holders of the coin, you’ll get to attend the special event later that month at Trump’s golf club in the Virginia suburbs of Washington, DC. The marketing is not subtle, with the coin’s official website promising access to “The Most Exclusive Dinner in the World” and an “evening with 3 Legends and President Donald J. Trump.” In smaller letters, it notes that there will also be a private meet and greet with an unnamed “legend.” Sadly, though, “No attendees will be granted a private meet & greet with the President.”

The top 29 holders of the $TRUMP meme coin will also get to go to a special VIP reception “with your favorite President and one of the Legends.” As an added bonus, the top four holders will get a gold Trump-branded watch. Again, however, it notes that there won’t be any private time with Trump, and no gifts will be accepted. Because, you know, ethics.

The White House referred questions about whether Trump had been involved with planning the dinner or would be paid to attend it to the event’s host, who did not respond to a request for comment. The event was first reported by the Washington Sun.

This isn’t the first gathering of this sort. There have been two previous exclusive events involving the president, one at Mar-a-Lago and another at the same Virginia golf club. The coin’s backers—who have a licensing deal with Trump—have also set up contests with access to swanky hospitality suites at the World Cup and Super Bowl. Another contest currently running offers the winner tickets to the F1 grand prix in Singapore, next weekend.

Other than rewarding people for holding onto the coins, there isn’t really a point to this particular bit of blockchain boosterism. As I wrote in April, shortly after the Mar-a-Lago event:

Donald Trump launched the $TRUMP meme coin (and the associated $MELANIA meme coin) just three days before his second inauguration. The price of the coin immediately rocketed past $74, giving it a total market capitalization of around $15 billion—a rather absurd figure for a brand new digital asset that can’t actually be used for anything. The coin has no inherent value. It has no transactional use. It essentially functions as a digital endorsement of Trump—so perhaps fittingly, it’s price has since fallen even faster than the president’s approval ratings.

Since that high point of $74, the value of the coin dropped drastically and, in recent months, has maintained a steady low price. As of Friday afternoon, it was priced at about $2.00.

When he returned to the White House last year, Trump declared he would be the “crypto president” and would do what he could to advance the blockchain economy. But even many crypto enthusiasts were not particularly happy when he launched the meme coin shortly before inauguration. And it has proved to be a spectacularly bad deal for many investors. According to an analysis from June, more than 1 million investors lost around $3.8 billion, combined, as the coin’s value dropped.

On the other hand, according to Trump’s latest personal financial disclosure, he appears to have earned about $635 million from the arrangement.

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