Rest Assured: AI Companies Say They’re Investigating Tens of Thousands of Rogue Bot Incidents

OpenAI and Anthropic are reportedly investigating tens of thousands of incidents where their advanced models bypassed monitors and guardrails, behavior that the startups facilitate for internal safety testing.

According to a Saturday Axios report, sources said that most of the results of these tests are not public and are not known to have caused tangible harm.

In recent weeks, OpenAI has disclosed six instances of “unexpected or concerning behavior” where its models—without permission—covered up mistakes, made up data, and transferred files onto the open internet. In the same September 16 announcement, the startup said it would now report and investigate “misalignment,” meaning when the actions of AI systems go against human intentions. OpenAI shared on Friday that its autonomous AI agents interacted with several US government websites—including two operated by the Securities and Exchange Commission and data from the Census Bureau—in unanticipated ways. The startup said it did not consider any of the actions breaches.

These disclosures fall in line with previous announcements by frontier AI labs that their technology engaged with “misalignment,” and they should therefore slow down and be more careful and all the cries by current and former researchers in the industry that AI could lead to human extinction by 2030.

What OpenAI and Anthropic CEOs Sam Altman and Dario Amodei don’t mention is that the industry has long aligned with the Trump administration and its campaign to expand AI development. OpenAI has a military contract with the Defense Department worth up to $200 million. How AI is involved is unclear—the Intercept reported earlier this month that the Pentagon asked OpenAI to provide a custom AI tool with “minimal refusal rates.” Google, SpaceX, NVIDIA, Reflection, Microsoft, Amazon Web Services, and Oracle also have deals with the Defense Department.

While the Pentagon canceled its military contract with Anthropic over the startup’s concern about how its tools may be used for autonomous weapons and mass surveillance, the White House has promoted Anthropic’s $50 billion investment in data center construction and the two reportedly have a much improved relationship as of September.

The relationship between the AI industry and Trump remains as the administration cut the Cyber Safety Review Board in January 2025, a body that investigates major cybersecurity threats, and has proposed further cuts to the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, which secures infrastructure against cyber and physical threats. Trump previously eliminated one-third of CISA’s workforce due in significant part to its election security work.

As Miranda Bogen, the founding director of the Center for Democracy & Technology’s AI Governance Lab, told me in July, actually addressing the “deeply insufficient” system to protect the public from AI threats involves reducing the incentives of AI companies to continuously develop within a framework of profit and geopolitical competition. Without that, we are relying on AI to regulate itself.

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Irish Soccer Fans Call for Boycotting Matches With Israel

On Sunday afternoon, Ireland is set to play a soccer match against Israel amid widespread public calls and protests in the country to boycott the game due to Israel’s violent conduct in Gaza, which a UN report found to be a genocide.

The match will take place at Nagyerdei Stadium in Debrecen, Hungary, an alternative venue for Israel’s “home” match as Union of European Football Associations, the international governing football body in Europe, has not permitted games in Israel since October 2023 due to security concerns. Ireland’s football association declined any tickets for the match from UEFA, while Israel is expected to have no more than 100 supporters, with tickets mostly bought by supporters living in Hungary. Nagyerdei Stadium has a capacity of around 20,000.

Ireland’s “home” match against Israel is scheduled for October 4 at TSC Arena in Bačka Topola, Serbia. It will be played behind closed doors with no supporters in attendance.

“I don’t think the game obviously should be going ahead but it is going ahead.”

Ireland has long held some of the highest public support for Palestinians. In 1980, the country became the first member of the European Union to call for Palestinian statehood. Recent polls suggest that about two-thirds of Ireland residents don’t want the match to take place. Ireland has also boycotted international events in the past due to Israel, including this year’s Eurovision singing competition. They announced earlier this month they will continue this boycott next year.

Despite this, a significant majority of Irish national team players voted on Saturday to go ahead with the game following a four-hour discussion among players, coaching staff, and Irish soccer executives. The two fixtures affect whether both teams will qualify for future international tournaments—including the 2028 UEFA European Football Championship, which Ireland will co-host. Ireland’s soccer chief said on Saturday that the national team players will wear black armbands during the game “in recognition of all the lives lost in the conflict” and would not participate in “elements of the pre-match ceremony,” including the customary pre-match handshake and exchange of team pennants.

There is no fixed UEFA rule for refusing to play a match in the Nations League, the competition that features the Israel-Ireland game. But officials at Bohemian FC, a professional soccer team in Ireland, pointed to previous penalties when Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia forfeited their matches against Belarus—3-0 defeats and, in one case, a minor fine of 5,000 euros. “The FAI [Ireland’s soccer federation] exaggerated the potential consequences to force their delegates to vote in favour of proceeding with fulfilling these fixtures,” Luke O’Riordan, the team’s communications director, told Al Jazeera. “It is not acceptable to put a price on standing up for what is right and in solidarity with the Palestinian people.”

“I don’t think the game obviously should be going ahead but it is going ahead,” Ireland midfielder Jason Knight said after a match against Kosovo on Thursday. “I’ll try and focus on the football as much as I can. I’ll give my view and my thoughts on it [the Israel games] when I see fit.”

Goalkeeper Gavin Bazunu left the Ireland squad following the decision to play the match. “My decision is based purely upon my personal belief that the killing of innocent people is wrong,” the goalkeeper wrote on Instagram on Saturday. “It is important to note that my stance is not in opposition of the Israeli people or the Jewish community but against the atrocities in the region.”

“There are few times where you get a chance in life to stand up for something bigger and I strongly believe that is one of them,” he continued.

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On Monday evening, more than 100 people protested outside the team’s hotel in Dublin, and about 160 Irish sportspeople signed an open letter pushing the Irish soccer association to reconsider moving forward with the match: “With this moment you have an opportunity to do the right thing.”

“It’s unconscionable that the Israel men’s football team will participate in the UEFA Nations League this autumn despite clear evidence that Israel’s football association continues to support illegal settlements,” Steve Cockburn, Amnesty International’s Regional Director for Europe said.

In the lead-up to Sunday’s match, Ireland’s football manager, Heimir Hallgrímsson said, “We’re not playing with genocide, we’re playing against genocide. We’re playing against Israel, we’re not playing with Israel.”

Israel’s soccer association called Hallgrímsson’s comments as “hypocrisy and stupidity.” “We have contributed to the world and humanity in countless fields, earning an impressive number of Nobel Prizes along the way,” it continued in its social media post last Monday. But as Defector pointed out last week, Israel’s soccer association was founded in the 1920s as the Palestine Football Association.

While the Ireland Prime Minister Micheál Martin, a conservative, supported the decision to eventually move forward with the match, citing that “sport is an area that can be challenging when it crosses into the realm of politics, Ruth Coppinger, a member of the lower house of the Irish and long-standing member of the Socialist Party in the country, criticized the decision: “You can’t play against genocide; the best statement against genocide is not playing.”

There is precedent for soccer and global politics being intertwined. As my colleague Tim Murphy wrote in 2022, “oligarchs, private-equity moguls, and petro states took over the sport” through political and economic relationships.

FIFA, the international soccer governing body that runs the World Cup, and UEFA have suspended Russia from participating in their competitions since February 2022 due to the country’s invasion of Ukraine.

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Germany Is Building a Digital Noah’s Ark for US Climate Data

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

In a modern five-story building in the center of Hamburg, Germany, technicians are preparing to install several new “racks”—gray metal casings that hold computing hardware—alongside the scores that already line the narrow, dimly lit corridors of the German Climate Computing Center (DKRZ), one of the world’s largest repositories for climate simulation data. The new equipment will add about 5 petabytes of storage capacity to the 254 petabytes of data already stored here. One petabyte is equivalent to the storage space needed for roughly 200 million high-resolution images.

Under normal circumstances, the DKRZ’s mission is to provide computing power and storage to the German climate science community. But these new racks will serve a different and highly sensitive purpose: They will store backup versions of climate simulations from the other side of the Atlantic. The operation aims to ensure that essential work performed by US scientists for the next major U.N. climate assessment, due in 2029, cannot be meddled with or compromised by the administration of President Trump, which has slashed funding for climate research, buried scientific reports, removed references to human-caused warming from dozens of government websites, and sought to prevent satellites from collecting key climate data.

Until recently, the idea that the US science community would have to track or rescue lost datasets was unthinkable.

Leaders of German science organizations publicly cite these actions as their primary motivation for creating backups. The German Research Foundation, the country’s main science funding body, believes that the Trump administration could block European access to data and research findings stored in the US. “The deletion of data has also become a possibility,” says the foundation’s program manager, Kathrin Winkler, “and there is a risk that [data] could be manipulated to skew findings in a desired direction.”

Trust in US science policy has fallen to a low point in Europe, and fears of losing scientific data are mounting. The US government quit both the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change in January, though US researchers are still contributing to global climate science. To support them, the German Research Foundation in late 2025 set up a program, with a budget of $35 million, to provide a safe haven for permanently storing copies of US data from public and open sources.
Data collections form the foundation of all empirical science. Climate, environmental, and biodiversity research relies on countless historical and contemporary datasets. Some of these collections, such as the iconic time series of atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations made at Hawaii’s Mauna Loa Observatory, have been ongoing for decades and are critical for tracking environmental change. (In 2025, the Trump administration tried to defund and close the observatory, but later Congress rejected its proposed cuts.)

While detailed datasets are essential for research, it is not standard procedure to back them up in alternate locations. Most scientific datasets are physically stored on hard drives or magnetic tapes at the universities or institutions where they are generated. One simple reason for this is that, until recently, the world seemed safe enough that scientists saw no need for offsite backups.

In early 2025, Elon Musk’s DOGE completely removed 300 datasets carefully built over decades by NASA’s Socioeconomic Data and Applications Center.

Another reason is that transferring and storing such large amounts of information is complicated. Sending petabytes of data through the internet takes months, and renting faster fiber optic cables can be extremely costly. Often, the most cost-effective way to transfer large volumes of data is to put them on hard drives or far cheaper magnetic tapes and send them through the “sneakernet,” which means they are physically transported by car, plane, or ship.

Still, the process is expensive and arduous, so most datasets have been kept in just one place. But in a world where political upheaval, cyberattacks, and armed conflicts are becoming more frequent, this practice is increasingly considered to be precarious. “If data is stored at only one site, there is a much greater risk of loss from events such as extreme weather or infrastructure failure,” says Eleanor O’Rourke, the UK-based director of the International Project Office of the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project, which coordinates global climate models for the IPCC’s assessments. Climate simulations for the IPCC are now considered so critical that overseas repositories are thought necessary for all contributions.

Until recently, the idea that the US science community would have to track or rescue lost datasets was unthinkable. After all, environmental data generated or funded by US government agencies was paid for by taxpayers and generally remains in the public domain. Yet these datasets exist in physical forms at specific locations and require dedicated experts to maintain them, which makes them vulnerable to human interference, as well as natural disasters, technical problems like short circuits or battery explosions, and neglect. “The data repositories, digital asset management services, and preservation systems that ensure research data remains open and accessible are often overlooked—until they disappear,” data experts Jennifer Gibson and Kaitlin Thaney warned recently.

One example of political interference is the recent threat to 300 federally funded datasets carefully built up over decades by NASA’s Socioeconomic Data and Applications Center. Alex de Sherbinin, the former SEDAC manager, said the center was founded to “serve as a bridge between the Earth and social-science research communities,” integrating remote sensing data with information on human population, poverty, and infrastructure.

In early April 2025, de Sherbinin was shocked to discover that SEDAC’s datasets had been completely removed by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency team. It took immense efforts by various institutions, quickly scraping datasets from active servers while they were still operational, to secure the information and transfer it to a new host: the Harvard Dataverse Repository. Assumptions that US government agencies will store scientific data long-term “are proving tenuous at best, given the anti-science predisposition of the current administration,” de Sherbinin says.

Numerous similar projects aim to relocate or duplicate datasets within the United States. But the US is far from the only country where data is vulnerable, and political interference is not the only risk.

Several research institutions around the world, including a multidisciplinary scientific research center in Croatia and an institute for industrial engineering in Germany, have in recent years been the target of elaborate hacking operations, in which intruders block access to files and demand money to restore them. Victims of cybercrimes rarely disclose publicly which files were targeted, but it’s clear that such attacks can affect scientific data collections.

And then there’s war. Russia’s attacks on Ukraine have not only caused mass civilian death and suffering but also immense damage to the country’s science. “Universities and research institutes have been targeted by Russian bombardments, and in some cases they were completely destroyed,” says Anastasiia Lutsenko, a Ukrainian researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Innovation and Competition in Munich, whose work focuses on how her country’s science system is responding to the war. The Russians, she says, “know how much lasting harm they can inflict by attacking science.”

President Trump “has, to a certain extent, done science a favor by making it clear how important it is to not just hoard data in one place.”

Lutsenko cites the transfer of data and samples to secure locations as an important step. Even before Russia’s 2022 invasion, a German-Polish-Ukrainian collaboration helped digitize records of early meteorological observations—conducted between 1808 and 1880 at eight Ukrainian meteorological stations—and transferred them to a server at the University of Giessen, Germany. This eliminated the risk of losing valuable historical data in the war. A similar transfer took place after missiles struck near the servers holding Ukraine’s contribution to the Global Biodiversity Information Facility’s records in Kharkiv at the start of Russia’s invasion.

The need for increased resilience—the ability to remain functional despite shocks and fully recover from them—was the focus of the American Geophysical Union (AGU) gathering held in Berlin this March. There, nearly 100 experts, primarily from the US and Europe, discussed how to respond to the Trump administration’s attacks on science.

The AGU represents more than 60,000 Earth and space scientists worldwide, and it has emerged as a leader in efforts to protect science and scientists from the Trump administration’s politically motivated attacks. When the administration refused to send US experts to IPCC meetings in 2025, the AGU formed the US Academic Alliance for the IPCC and nominated nearly 300 U.S. scientists to be authors of the IPCC’s next assessment. And in the summer of 2025, it launched its Data Resilience Project, a global initiative to rethink how science is organized.

AGU president-elect Ben Zaitchik believes that science is at an inflection point. “We have engaged in triage efforts to ensure data remains usable and accessible,” he said at the Berlin meeting. “But we clearly now have arrived at a moment where we must fundamentally reimagine data organization and maintenance for long-term viability and growth.”

Creating backups of datasets and storing them in secure, distant locations was identified as a priority measure during the meeting, as was coordinating a global data community aimed at mitigating current and future risks. Such an effort was vital not only for scientists, an AGU spokesperson noted, “but also for engineers, public safety officials, health experts, policymakers, and a wide array of industries and communities globally,” which depend on scientific data. As a result of the Berlin meeting, a broad coalition of German national research centers was formed to offer safe storage for public domain information to scientists from the US and other countries.

In addition to the DKRZ efforts, other initiatives have emerged across various fields. For example, the Senckenberg Natural History Museum, in Frankfurt, saves data from wildlife trail cameras in Ukraine and biodiversity data from war-ridden Yemen. “We want to ensure that biodiversity data remains usable even under crisis conditions,” a Senckenberg spokesperson says.

For such transfers, it is critical to store not only the data itself but also any specialized software required to read and analyze it. “We’re developing protocols and procedures for exchanging data, distributing multiple copies globally, and ensuring that the data remains analyzable indefinitely,” says Frank Oliver Glöckner, a professor of earth systems data science at the University of Bremen and the head of Pangaea, a long-term data repository run by the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research and the university, both of which are preparing to integrate data from a US climate research center slated for closure.

Glöckner said he believes that President Trump “has, to a certain extent, done science a favor by making it clear how important it is to not just hoard data in one place but to truly share it with the global scientific community.”

“It would be ideal if, in the future, all climate data worldwide were connected via digital pipelines,” says Kadow, of the DKRZ. “That way, in the event of a threat, we could simply flip a switch to secure it elsewhere.” In the future, he says, this could also benefit researchers in Germany, where the AfD, an extreme far-right party that denies climate science, recently won a state election for the first time. “We don’t know what political shifts may occur in Germany,” he says. “We aren’t completely protected from risks or developments like those in the U.S. either.”

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Palantir’s Co-Founder Thinks We Should Be Less Judgmental About That Deadly Iran School Strike

Joe Lonsdale, a cofounder of weapons-tech company Palantir, shared some of his thoughts on America’s AI-assisted warfare at a Reuters-hosted event late last week—and one statement stands out as being particularly alarming. The US strike on a girls’ school in Minab, Iran, in February was tragic, he acknowledged—but, he argued, “It’s very easy to judge things from the outside.”

“It could be the case that somebody made 99 really good choices and then one bad choice and it led to a horrible thing,” Lonsdale told Reuters Global Defense Editor Joe Brock on Friday, in a talk aimed at investors. He also argued that Iran might have deliberately lured the US military into the AI-assisted targeting of two Tomahawk missiles at an elementary school on the first day of the the Trump administration’s war in Iran. The attack killed more than 150 people, most of whom were children. Pentagon officials later told Bloomberg News that overreliance on Palantir technology contributed to the school strike.

Lonsdale’s narrative was different. Iran’s leaders “might have purposely disguised some of these things to make them look like targets, the same way the Palestinians and others do,” Lonsdale said.

“They’re getting global sympathy by getting us to hit things,” Lonsdale went on. “And so, it’s very unclear to me the facts of exactly what happened. Obviously, it’s terrible what happened to those children.” Last week, a UN committee report suggested that the US attack on the school could be classified as a war crime.

“It’s very easy to judge things from the outside.”

At one point, Lonsdale was asked how technology companies should be held accountable “if things go wrong.”

“Maybe there should be some laws about companies that operate here and, like, what you’re allowed to do with them,” Lonsdale said.

But the billionaire colleague of Peter Thiel has some obvious financial reasons not to push harder to regulate or hold accountable defense and technology companies. As managing partner of the venture capital firm 8VC, he has $6 billion invested in high-tech defense companies, Forbes reported. He’s also increasingly involved in lobbying on industry issues. His conservative think tank, the Cicero Institute, and its lobbying arm Cicero Action—best-known for being a major force behind the Trump administration’s push to criminalize homelessness—are also connected to hundreds of thousands of dollars in defense-lobby spending.

That lobbying, as Sludge reported,touches on companies in Lonsdale’s 8VC portfolio—and could be paying big dividends. “Palantir is seeing a surge in federal revenue under the Trump administration,” Sludge said in August, including an Army contract worth up to $10 billion. Anduril, a Thiel-funded company also backed by Lonsdale, “is similarly on the rise, including an Army deal awarded in March with a ceiling of $20 billion.”

Lobbying and war-profiteering aside, Lonsdale wrote on his blog in 2025 that it is apparently possible to be a “perfectly moral” person in the weapons business.

Society, he wrote, suffers from a “default assumption of evil by people who make weapons.” But, he argued, “If we didn’t have talented people willing to do the “dirty” work of defense, we’d be speaking German. Or Russian. Or Chinese. We’d have experienced many more 9/11’s. You get the idea.”

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Union: CDC Lost a Third of Its Workforce in One Year

A new report by the American Federation of Government Workers has documented a staggering level of staff attrition at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in the first year of the Trump 2.0 administration. The nation’s premier public health agency lost a third of its workforce from March 2025 through April 2026, the union says.

Those job losses include 100 percent of the staff at two CDC units, the Office of Health Equity and the Office of Equal Employment Opportunity, that were entirely eliminated in 2025. Some 98 percent of the CDC’s human resources personnel have also left their jobs, the union says. In spring of 2025, Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency gutted the federal agency, and in the following months, many of those whose jobs were spared in that bloodbath voluntarily quit or retired. A year later, the union reports, 3,000 fewer people work at the public health agency now overseen by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and newly confirmed CDC Director Erica Schwartz.

What’s left is a “zombified” agency, Dr. Demetre Daskalakis, who led the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases before he resigned in the summer of 2025, told the New York Times this week. Meanwhile, the CDC has done little to respond to high-profile outbreaks of measles, food-borne cyclosporiasis, and rabies. This week, the CDC—which is responsible for instructing doctors and the general public on vaccine use—made no recommendation on the new flu vaccine approved by the FDA in August. “By this time of year in 2024, the CDC had published detailed recommendations for vaccines against respiratory diseases,” the Times reported, including endorsements from the CDC director at the time and notes from a meeting of its vaccine advisers. This year, that group of vaccine advisers has not held a single meeting.

“What we are witnessing is the dismantling of public health infrastructure our country relies on,” Yolanda Jacobs, president of AFGE Local 2883, said in a press release. The US “deserves an agency that is fully prepared to protect the public’s health within and outside its own doors.”

The CDC’s employees also deserve better, she said, noting they “have dedicated their lives to serving the American people.”

“Protecting our nation’s public health workers also protects our nation’s public health,” she said.

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“They Really Did Screw Bernie”: Here’s What 2016 Can Teach Democrats Today

First, a confession: Before I read long-time Democratic strategist Tad Devine’s new book, How the Democrats Screwed Bernie, I rolled my eyes at the prospect of yet another post-mortem on the 2016 election (which was admittedly also the first presidential election in which I was eligible to vote). Not even halfway through his second term, President Trump has wreaked havoc on all the institutions that have sustained the United States, alienated our allies,started a pointless and dangerous war, and further divided Americans with his lies and dangerous policies. Meanwhile, a complicit Congress completely controlled by Republicans seems incapable of acting like a responsible check on his assertion of power. Now, with all eyes on the 2026 midterms and the glimmer of accountability that may come from them, why relitigate a primary election that happened almost a decade ago?

Devine, however, isn’t just some political pundit obsessing over the past, and his book isn’t some finger-wagging post-mortem on how the Democrats messed up. Instead, Devine, one of the Democratic Party’s most well-known media strategists and Senator Bernie Sanders’ chief campaign strategist in 2016, breaks down how the Democratic National Committee and the Hillary Clinton campaign used superdelegates, dirty tricks, dark money, and the press to thwart Sanders’ 2016 presidential run. In other words, to paraphrase the title, “Bernie got screwed.”

To my surprise, I came away from the book more inspired than embittered or disheartened. Devine offers plenty of insightful lessons about how the Democrats can win elections if its establishment could only wean itself off dark money, push for campaign finance reform, and coalesce around younger Democratic Socialists without compromising the party’s values–assuming that it can come to some agreement about what those values are. “This book isn’t about sour grapes, it’s really about what that election can mean for our future,” Devine says. “If we learned something from the 2016 campaign, I’ll be very happy about that.” Spoiler alert: Devine may even hazard a guess or two on 2028 hopefuls during our interview. We spoke by Zoom when he was at his home on Block Island, Rhode Island.

Our conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.

What are the two major ways that you think the Democrats screwed Bernie in 2016?

One way wasthe design of the nominating process itself. It’s a system designed to keep outsiders out and give a tremendous advantage to insiders. All of that screwed Bernie in an established way. But that’s not really how he got screwed. The real thing that was unfair was the overall takeover of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) by the Clinton campaign. The Clinton campaign ran the DNC. We know that because of millions of WikiLeaks pages revealed memos about the way money was being moved around inside the DNC. The tactics that the Clintons employed, like when and how many [Democratic primary] debates would be held, andusing outside Super PACs highly funded by dark money, were all part of this underhanded campaign against Bernie. So how did they screw Bernie? There was a system in place that was engineered to keep someone like him out, and I accept the reality of that. But Clinton’s control of the DNC, dark money super PACS, the way the press covered the race–all of those things that they did, which they should not have done, screwed Bernie.

“Clinton’s control of the DNC, dark money super PACS, the way the press covered the race–all of those things that they did, which they should not have done, screwed Bernie.”

You unpack this in the book, but I’d be remiss if I didn’t ask: Should the Democratic establishment have felt any allegiance towards Bernie considering the fact that he wasn’t even a member of the Democratic Party?

I think they should have. Number one, he caucused for them in Congress, in both the House and the Senate. This is a guy who has demonstrated his fidelity to the Democratic Party. I think they owed him. First of all, he ran as a Democrat. The fact that he didn’t [run as an Independent] should’ve been enough for the Democratic establishment to say, ‘We’ll have a fair process. We’re not going to screw him.” But they did. When I started writing the book, I didn’t really think of it in those terms. I rejected the title initially because I thought it sounded too much like Trump’s rhetoric. But as I started doing my own research and started writing, I looked back and realized, ‘They really did screw Bernie!’ I have no doubt that it was an unfair process. The Democratic National Committee needs to be an independent body. That didn’t happen in 2016. Clinton controlled it from the very beginning.

The DNC’s very controversial post-mortem report on the 2024 presidential election came out in May of this year. What does the report say about the state of the DNC and the Democratic Party apparatus today?

I think the autopsy report was a joke. It was not a serious look back at what happened in 2024. It was a political agenda item. I don’t think the party has learned many lessons in its recent past. That’s why our numbers continue to dwindle in terms of party registration throughout the country. More and more people are moving to being independents because they can’t find a home in either of the parties, and we have to really think about how we’re going to design a system that recognizes the problems in this country. Why is the country in so much trouble today? It’s easy and convenient to say it’s because Trump is president. But the real reason we’re in trouble is because we have a campaign finance system that is utterly corrupt. People anonymously contribute millions, hundreds of millions, and now even billions of dollars to control the outcome of elections. Why? Because of [the Supreme Court’s decision in] Citizens United. They have created a corrupt campaign finance system that holds in place an economy that is rigged. The Democratic Party has to begin to understand that we need to move away from dark money. Until we fix that problem, we cannot fix this country.

What is the role of the DNC anymore? Is it something that can be revived, or is it even worth reviving?

Yes, I think the DNC can have an important role in the process. It can be a fair arbiter of the nominating process. But, in the meantime, I think we should not try to have a dark money race with them. We should swear dark money off, recognize it for what it is, which is a hostile takeover of our government, and begin to work for campaign finance reform. We need to elevate campaign finance reform to the level of jobs and healthcare. In terms of the issue spectrum, we need to make people understand that the economic issues in our country can only be solved if we change the advantage given to powerful interests. So yeah, the DNC can play an important role still if it chooses to evolve. Absolutely, I think it can.

“We have to run outside candidates who have no allegiance or history to the Democratic Party to win. “

Are you hopeful that the DNC can evolve?

I’m hopeful. Given the situation we’re in right now in America with Trump, our horizon cannot exceed the next election. We have to focus all our energy and attention on trying to win. I believe we’re on a path to a massive victory in November. I look at the polling and begin to see the generic advantage that Democrats are starting to enjoy, in places like Nebraska, or Kansas, or Montana–these are really looking like places where we can compete in elections. I think the only way we’re going to get control of this government back is to have a massive victory. Now, that victory will be tempered by the reality of reapportionment. But if we can succeed in this election and take control of the House and the Senate–and I believe that’s possible—we can get enough elbow room so that we can really try to hold Trump accountable.

How much do you think Bernie’s 2016 campaign, and Bernie himself as a Democratic Socialist, is responsible for the wave of current Democratic Socialist candidates that we’re seeing in the midterms?

I think Bernie is principally responsible for this. We have all these people who were deeply affected by Bernie’s 2016 campaign. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez was a waitress, and then she goes out, and she runs for office and gets elected to Congress. I’m not a democratic socialist myself, but I understand the appeal of their platform. If we have a core economic issue-centered agenda, if we talk about jobs and wages, if we talk about healthcare and expanding coverage and making it affordable, if we talk about housing and education and affording Social Security for the next generation—if we become the party that does that, we will be the majority party in America for a generation. And I think Bernie put this on the table for the first time.

You emphasize the importance of the outsider in the 2016 race, and that you believe Bernie would have been a formidable candidate against Trump in the general election. What does a post-Trump election look like now between establishment vs. outsider?

I think we have to wait and see the results of these elections. I believe it could look very good, and [not] just for outsiders. We have to run outside candidates who have no allegiance or history to the Democratic Party to win. What we have to do is find a way to empower voters to let them make those choices. And if the voters decide to elect someone who is very progressive and calls themself a Democratic Socialist, I think we have to accept that as Democrats. There is room for these people in our coalition, and that’s really the way we need to start thinking about politics. If the DNC asked me to come in and speak to them today—although, they’d probably start booing me after seeing the title of my book—I would say, ‘We need to build a coalition for this election, and part of that coalition includes the Democratic Socialists of America. We need to be with them.’ People are sick of politics. Here’s what they want: They want people who are responsive to them, who get things done on their behalf, and who focus on the issues that are most important in their lives.

What do you feel like it will take to beat Republicans in 2026 and in 2028?

We need to focus on 2026. It’s going to take resources to compete with Republicans. We’re not going to be able to outspend them because they’ve got enormous resources. But we need enough resources to compete, and we need candidates who are authentic, who connect with voters, and who are willing to share their values, beliefs, and backgrounds with voters.

I’m going to ask you to speculate here, and I promise I won’t hold you to it. Who do you think looks particularly strong going into 2028?

Given the way our politics are working now, I believe the nominee of the Democratic Party could be someone we don’t know. That’s just the nature of politics. I think if AOC were running for a Senate seat right now and she got elected, I would advise her to run for president. But the fact that she’s not, I would not advise her to run for president from a House seat. But who knows? Maybe I’m wrong. I think there are a lot of candidates. There’s Jon Ossoff, who is really proving himself. There’s Andy Beshear, the Governor of Kentucky. With Beshear, the thing I’m most impressed by is not that he’s won two races. What I’m most impressed by is a guy who has spoken out so strongly on trans issues got elected governor in the State of Kentucky twice. Obviously, he found a way to talk about this issue. If Sherrod Brown wins, although he’s a little older, he’d also be a very strong candidate to put on a ticket as vice president.

What do you hope readers take away from your book?

I hope that if people read the book, they see a lot of hope in it. Bernie got screwed, but what the book is really about is what he did, how he did it, what it means for our times, and most importantly, what it can mean for our future. I didn’t want to write a book about the past. I wanted to write a book where the past can be a prologue of what we do. If we learned something from the 2016 campaign, I’ll be very happy about that.

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Tim Tebow “Pausing” Christian Seminar Promotion After Our Investigation

Update, September 25: In an emailed response (PDF) to Tebow’s announcement that he planned to pause his relationship with Life Surge, the company’s CEO, Jeremy Nosek, wrote that Life Surge “strongly disagrees with the characterization of our company presented in recent reporting. We will not apologize for who we are, what we believe, or the work we do.” He added, “Tim has made the decision to pause his relationship with Life Surge while his team reviews the allegations and gathers additional facts. We respect that this is his decision to make. Our respect for Tim has not changed.“

Yesterday, we published our investigation, in partnership with Pablo Torre Finds Out, about legendary quarterback Tim Tebow’s involvement with Life Surge, a Christian financial seminar company. We detailed complaints from customers who said salespeople used Christianity to persuade them to buy pricey courses, and that they had ended up losing tens of thousands of dollars. The company disputed claims of any improper sales tactics, including the use of faith as a sales strategy.

One day after our investigation, Tebow, who was on track to speak at 10 Life Surge events by the end of this year, appears to be having misgivings about his role with the six-year-old company. During an appearance at a Southeastern Conference event on Friday, Tebow told a reporter with WRUF ESPN that he planned to pause his relationship with Life Surge:

Tebow’s team shared the news with him Thursday while attending an anti-human trafficking conference and said he was caught off guard by the investigation.

“I think the allegations are extremely serious and it’s something that we take very serious,” Tebow said. “For us we are having our team do an investigation but also pausing our relationship until we can learn more about the facts to be able to understand more.”

WRUF, the outlet that broke the story, is a sports radio station based in Gainesville, Florida, that serves as the broadcast home for Florida Gators, where Tebow had his storied college football career.

Mother Jones reached out to Life Surge for comment on Tebow’s decision to pause his relationship with Life Surge, but the company did not immediately respond.

Correction, September 25: An earlier version of this story misidentified the event during which Tebow said he was pausing his work with Life Surge. The error has been corrected.

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You’re Paying For Donald Trump’s New Ad

Since Wednesday, the federal government has been airing a taxpayer-funded political advertisement on channels like Fox News promoting the virtues of President Donald Trump, as Republicans ramp up advertising in the lead-up to November’s midterm elections.

The ad, soundtracked with the chorus of the singer JMSN’s “Love Me,” is structured like a TikTok hype reel for Trump and against communism. It’s captioned “Paid for by the US Government.”

So I was just watching Fox News and this commercial played during Jesse Watters show. It says “Paid for by the US Government.”
This is clearly a campaign ad. And the singers are just singing over and over again, “Love me” – over images of Trump. @CBSMiami @CBSNews pic.twitter.com/eCkEZpipWx

— Jim DeFede (@DeFede) September 24, 2026

“The ad’s cost has jumped from $14,000 to $430,000 as it runs on a variety of network TV channels in markets across the country, according to AdImpact, which tracks media spending,” the Associated Press reported Friday. “The actual amount spent could be significantly more, depending on whether networks classified the ad as a political ad.”

The White House characterizes the ad as a “public service announcement” that reminds Americans “to love their country and understand what makes it worth defending, at home, at our borders, and abroad.”

“The ad is educational and unapologetically patriotic. We should be proud of our country,” a White House spokesperson wrote in a statement to news organizations.

JMSN, the singer whose “love me, love me, love me” chorus backgrounds the ad, has condemned the White House’s use of his song. A growing number of politicians, both Republicans and Democrats, have written strongly-worded letters objecting to the advertisement as a misuse of public funds.

To be fair to Trump, this isn’t the first time a president has run a public service announcement: Former presidents Barack Obama, George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and Jimmy Carter got together in 2021 to tape a PSA asking people to get COVID vaccines. Under George H.W. Bush, national TV networks ran presidentially-approved PSAs featuring Arnold Schwarzenegger telling children to work out more. And in 2014, the Obama White House ran a PSA on 20,000 television stations in which a bunch of male celebrities, Joe Biden, and Barack Obama all exhorted American men to put an end to sexual assault.

Unlike its predecessors, Trump’s supposed PSA says and does very little beyond extolling Trump. Usually, a public service announcement announces something. This one announces pure right-wing vibes.

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El Niño’s Estimated Death Toll From Extreme Heat Alone: 451,000 by February

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

More than 450,000 people are projected to die from the additional heat brought by the super El Niño by February, according to estimates by climate scientists.

The toll is on top of the early deaths resulting from temperatures already driven up by the climate crisis. It will strike across the globe, from Indonesia to India, and Nigeria to the United States. Many further deaths are expected from the droughts, wildfires, and flooding that El Niños bring.

The heat deaths have been estimated at regional level, and the researchers said the projections therefore identified where measures to protect people could be put in place and save lives. Such actions could include better heat forecasts, cooling centers where people can shelter, increased staffing for medical facilities at the hottest times and protections for outdoor workers.

The El Niño currently heating up the planet burst through the highest temperature ever recorded for the phenomenon on Monday, several months before its expected peak. The heat is so much greater than previous events that scientists have called it “mind-blowing” and “Godzilla-level.” El Niños are natural climate events but may be made worse by global heating.

A major El Niño in 1877-1878 led to more than 50 million deaths due to drought and famine.

“The estimate of 451,000 people is such a large number that it can be numbing, but it is made up of parents and children, grandparents and neighbours, people going to work, caring for families, and living their lives,” said Michael Greenstone, co-founder of the Climate Impact Lab and a professor at the University of Chicago, who co-authored the report.

The estimate of deaths is for the period June 2026—as some heat deaths will have already occurred—to February 2027, which is when current temperature forecasts end. But elevated levels of heat deaths are expected to continue until June or July 2027.

The most affected countries in the next six months are the tropical nations of Nigeria, Indonesia, Sudan, India, and Brazil. The US is in the top 20 most affected nations, with 3,500 projected additional heat deaths. More broadly, the Sahel region in Africa and Southeast Asia are heavily affected.

The El Niño is also a “postcard from our future,” the researchers said, pushing up temperatures to the level the climate crisis is projected to deliver in 20 years.

“Increasing emergency response and better targeting our efforts can save many lives this year,” said report co-author Tamma Carleton at the University of California, Berkeley. “But 20 years from now, once today’s extreme temperatures become the new normal, we don’t want to be in a constant state of emergency… We need to mobilize now to design, deploy, and evaluate the tools that will save lives in the years ahead.”

The projections were made using peer-reviewed methods that track the month-by-month relationship between temperature and additional heat deaths in 24,378 regions across the world. This was combined with the forecasts for higher temperatures due to El Niño in the months ahead. The baseline was the number of heat deaths in the average month from 1996 to 2025.

“People have been able to forecast when there’s going to be shocks to crops, and give advance warning of that,” said Greenstone. “This new report is opening the door to being able to do it for an even more important outcome—I would say the most important outcome—which is death.” The report will be submitted to a peer-reviewed journal, but Greenstone said that, given the urgency of the situation, “it would have been irresponsible to sit on it.”

Food supplies will also be hit by El Niño, with the World Food Programme warning in August that its impacts were likely to push about 50 million people into acute hunger and drive prices up. A major El Niño in 1877-1878 led to more than 50 million deaths due to drought and famine, with India, Brazil, and China severely affected.

Friederike Otto, a professor at Imperial College London, told The Guardian on Monday: “The [current El Niño] event is a huge redistribution of energy in the climate system and is dangerous, because it is unfolding on top of a much warmer, human-influenced climate system.”

“So, he continued, “in many places around the world we will see never-before-experienced heat extremes, with all their consequences on health, food security and water stress. El Niño comes and goes, but as long as we continue to burn fossil fuels, it occurs on an increasingly hotter baseline, making it much more difficult for communities to deal with the consequences.”

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Supreme Court Allows Trump to Use Flawed Database to Vet Voter Citizenship

The Supreme Court cleared the way on Friday for the Trump administration to use a controversial government program in its aggressive search for alleged voter fraud, increasing the likelihood that eligible voters will be wrongly labeled as noncitizens due to faulty data and removed from the rolls.

The court’s conservative majority wrote that the government was likely to prevail on the merits of the case, overturning a district court order blocking the Trump administration’s use of the program. “The District Court’s order thus inhibits the Federal Government’s efforts to assist state and local agencies in the proper administration of the midterm elections,” the GOP-appointed justices wrote in an unsigned opinion. “Under these circumstances, the equities weigh in favor of a stay.”

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson dissented on behalf of the court’s three Democratic appointees. “The harm caused by burdening or disenfranchising even a few lawful voters outweighs the nonexistent harm that the Government experiences when it is prevented from taking an action that it likely lacks the authority to take,” she wrote.

The Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) database run by the Department of Homeland Security has a long and documented history of producing false positives of noncitizens voting, leading to sensational headlines of alleged voter fraud that turn out to be untrue on closer inspection. The database was created in 1986 to verify the citizenship of people applying for government benefits but has been dramatically expanded by the Trump administration to check voter eligibility and produce federal citizenship lists that could supplant state voter rolls.

Following an executive order by Trump in March 2025, the administration revamped the database to add information on native-born Americans, Social Security numbers, and the ability to do bulk searches, all of which increase the possibility that eligible voters will be wrongly tagged as noncitizens and have their voter registrations canceled at the state level. As my colleague Abby Vesoulis and I reported last year, while“using SAVE to root out voter fraud is unlikely to turn up many—if any—noncitizen voters, the massive expansion of the program is likely to wrongly flag some American citizens as noncitizens, particularly naturalized citizens, newly married people who changed their last names, and people whose names don’t match on their documents.”

A federal district court blocked the Trump administration from using the expanded database in June following a lawsuit by the League of Women Voters and the Electronic Privacy Information Center. “The federal government has knowingly trampled on the privacy rights of American citizens in a manner that threatens the sacred right to vote,” wrote Judge Sparkle Sooknanan, a Biden appointee. “This Court cannot stand idly by while that happens.” An appeals court in Washington, DC, upheld Sooknanan’s opinion, but the administration appealed to the Supreme Court, claiming that the injunction “makes it harder to detect ineligible voters, undermining the integrity of federal elections and public confidence in the results of those elections.”

However, there’s a lot of evidence that inaccuracies in the SAVE database have undermined the confidence of voters and election officials. As Judd Legum and Rebecca Crosby wrote for Popular Information:

Shortly after Trump’s January 2025 inauguration, Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency “optimized“ the SAVE database over two weeks, quickly adding a lot of additional information, including full social security numbers. DOGE also allowed state officials to search the database for hundreds of thousands of voters at once with bulk uploads.

Used in this manner, SAVE has produced an extraordinarily high error rate.

In Missouri, for example, Republican Secretary of State Denny Hoskins ran the state’s voter list through SAVE in November 2025 and distributed the results to county election officials. For St. Louis County, SAVE flagged 691 registered voters as noncitizens. But the county immediately determined that 35 percent of the names were naturalized citizens. After the list was cross-referenced with passport data in January, which has more accurate citizenship information, the list was cut to 133—meaning at least 81 percent of SAVE’s noncitizen results were incorrect. Even that list “may not be final“ and once a final list is established, anyone remaining on it will receive a letter and have 90 days to appeal.

Seventy county clerks in Missouri, Republicans and Democrats, sent a letter to the state’s legislative leaders warning that the SAVE database is repeatedly flagging “individuals we know to be US citizens—our neighbors, colleagues and even voters we have personally registered at naturalization ceremonies.”

Texas also uploaded its voter list to SAVE. In Denton County, SAVE identified 84 supposed noncitizens registered to vote. Twelve responded to a notice with proof they were citizens. Fourteen others correctly marked on their registration forms that they were not citizens but were mistakenly registered anyway. The rest did not respond to the notice and were removed from the rolls, even though county election officials believe most of that group are eligible voters.

“What is bugging me is I think our voter rolls may be more accurate than this database,” Denton County elections administrator Frank Phillips told ProPublica. “My gut feeling is more of these are citizens than not.”

As the Brennan Center for Justice concluded, “the SAVE program’s underlying flaws, its hasty overhaul, and the government’s failure to provide proper guidance to state and local officials on responsible use of the expanded tool all mean that the SAVE program has produced numerous errors that falsely identify voters as noncitizens.”

Justice Jackson highlighted these faults in her dissent. “Even more concerning is the majority’s omission of any consideration of the harms that might occur if the modified SAVE system is allowed to continue operating,” she wrote. “The District Court highlighted such harms, noting the risk that States might cancel the voter registrations of at least some recently naturalized citizens or force such persons to provide proof of citizenship before voting. That court also found that those harms have already materialized in Texas, where one of Respondents’ members ‘had her voter registration revoked without her knowledge,’ and two more ‘had to provide proof of citizenship to maintain registered voter status.’ But the per curiam’s purported balancing fails to address, much less account for, the demonstrated harms of issuing a stay.”

The Trump administration’s expansion of the SAVE database is just one facet of its voter fraud crusade. DHS has enlisted hundreds of agents to search for noncitizen voting (which studies show is incredibly rare) as part of its “Unlawful Voter Initiative” ahead of the midterms, an effort that seems designed to validate Trump’s lies. A recent disclosure by a DHS whistleblower alleges that the department has broken numerous state laws as part of this initiative, with immigration agents falsely posing as voters to access state voter databases and wrongly sweeping up US citizens in its overzealous investigations.

Trump’s DHS has already made a number of debunked claims about alleged voter fraud. Following Trump’s primetime speech in July on election integrity, DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin claimed that 15,903 noncitizens were registered to vote in Nevada. A month later, DHS confirmed that number was actually “just 185 potential noncitizens,” according to the New York Times, and Nevada officials subsequently confirmed the number was actually…zero.

The impact of the Supreme Court’s decision on Friday could be muted for the 2026 elections, however, because the National Voter Registration Act precludes states from removing voters ninety days before an election. It is “too late for States to use SAVE for systematic voter-list maintenance in advance of the 2026 elections,” Jackson wrote. “If there is a bright side to today’s opinion…it is that the per curiam will likely have minimal short-term impact, as States will at most conduct individualized voter-roll maintenance using the modified SAVE system ahead of the November elections.”

Still, thanks to the Supreme Court, the administration can now use the SAVE database to produce more outrageous claims of voter fraud, which will be used by the president to undermine and challenge the results of the midterms, no matter how false those assertions turn out to be.

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Tech Bros and the Trump Administration Are Building an AI Empire—In the Philippines

In a move that upended the international conversation about AI, earlier this month, a researcher at the AI company Anthropic named Jacob Coxon resigned and took to X to sound the alarm about what he saw as a dangerous trajectory. “The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade,” he wrote. “This is not a marketing stunt.” A few days later, Dario Amodei, Anthropic’s CEO, published an essay on his personal website about what he sees as the urgent need to slow down the pace of AI development. “I have become convinced that fully addressing the risks requires even more prudence,” he wrote. “Not just investing in risk prevention but pacing the rate of capabilities advancement so that risk prevention has time to keep up.” That same week, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) told ABC’s The View that he had asked Tesla CEO Elon Musk on his podcast, “‘OK, what are the odds that AI destroys humanity?’ And he looked at me and said, ‘10-20 percent.’ And I’m like, ‘holy crap.’”

As the chorus of warnings about AI from insiders has grown more urgent, the White House appears to have complete confidence in the technology—and not just with President Donald Trump’s insistence when speaking at the United Nations that there was no reason to rein it in. In fact, over the last few months, the Trump administration has poured resources into several tech ventures as part of an effort to win the AI arms race against China.

Undersecretary of State Jacob Helberg convenes The Pax Silica Summit, the first convening of a high level, private gathering focused on economic security and the establishment of a new grouping of partners tailored for the AI economy on December 12, 2025 in Washington, DC. Tasos Katopodis/Getty

The flagship project is an international initiative led by the United States called Pax Silica, whose goal is to control the pipeline for the raw materials, including crucial rare earth minerals required to power the artificial intelligence boom. Pax Silica, Latin for “silicon peace,” is the creation of Jacob Helberg, the US undersecretary of State for economic growth, energy, and the environment. Last December, the United States, Australia, Israel, Japan, South Korea, Singapore, and the United Kingdom signed an initial nonbinding declaration. Others, including the European Union, joined in the following months, bringing the current number of signatories to 24.

The declaration affirms the participants’ commitment to “mobilizing the immense creative and financial power of private industry and entrepreneurship to make our citizens more prosperous, our nations stronger, and our supply chains more secure.” What the declaration doesn’t explicitly state is its true goal: To wrest control of the AI infrastructure away from US adversaries—primarily China, which currently operates about 80 percent of rare-earth refining and controls 70 percent of lithium-ion battery production—but also Russia and Iran. As Helberg put it in a December media briefing, “Our strategy is to create a competitive edge so steep, so insurmountable that no adversary or competitor can scale it. That’s why our goal is to make America the arsenal of AI in this century.” In March, the State Department announced it would create a $250 million fund to support the project.

“Our strategy is to create a competitive edge so steep, so insurmountable that no adversary or competitor can scale it. That’s why our goal is to make America the arsenal of AI in this century.”

The centerpiece is Pax Silica’s ambitious new project in the Philippines: a planned 4,000-acre economic security zone in New Clark City, about 70 miles north of Manila. The zone is strategically situated within the Luzon Economic Corridor, a development initiative launched in 2024 by the United States, Japan, and the Philippines to transform the island nation into an AI hub. The project will incorporate many industries, from semiconductor manufacturing to data-center tech to supply-chain logistics. Perhaps most important is its proximity to the Philippines’ vast reserves of nickel, cobalt, and copper—all crucial minerals for AI infrastructure. In July, US Ambassador to the Philippines Lee Lipton predicted the project would bring “endless jobs” to the country.

Crucially, companies that operate there will have massive tax advantages—the Philippines promises up to seven years tax free, followed by up to 20 years of steeply reduced taxes. In addition to the tax perks, companies can lock in 99-year land leases and fast-track regulatory approvals. As much as 90 percent of a company’s workforce is allowed to be remote—an attractive proposition for American companies whose employees may not want to relocate to the Philippines.

On a recent episode of a podcast hosted by venture capitalist Joe Lonsdale, who co-founded the data giant Palantir with Silicon Valley mogul Peter Thiel, Helberg laid out his vision for the State Department to act essentially as a business development agency for American venture capital and defense and AI hardware firms. “Our job at State is to remove the diplomatic, regulatory, and geopolitical friction so that American VC can flow into these strategic nodes,” he said. “Pax Silica is essentially building the global highway for American tech and VC to scale fast.”

The names of the companies that will fill those roles haven’t yet been released, but Helberg has strong connections to a powerful network of firms that could fit the bill. According to his federal financial disclosure form, he served as a senior adviser to the data giant Palantir’s CEO Alex Karp from 2023 to 2025, bringing in at least $840,000 in consulting fees over the 16-month window covered by the disclosure. But he’s also a savvy investor. His financial disclosure form also reveals that his estimated net worth is $112 million–$426 million. Clients of his public policy consulting firm include Thiel’s Founders Fund, the defense company Hadrian, and another venture capital enterprise, General Catalyst. In addition to his own relationships with powerful Silicon Valley companies, Helberg’s husband, Keith Rabois, is also well connected. The managing director of a $15 billion VC giant, Silicon Valley-based Khosla Ventures, Rabois also has carried-interest stakes in six separate Founders Fund entities. In November 2020, Helberg and Rabois joined the tech-exec exodus from California to income-tax-free, politically conservative Florida, decamping to a $29 million home in Miami.

For Duran, Pax Silica is “the Trump regime’s brand name for AI colonialism and imperialism.”

Gil Duran, a tech journalist who has written extensively about autonomous zones, sees the Trump administration’s endorsement of Pax Silica as a strong indication of its enthusiastic commitment to AI development—despite increasingly urgent calls from industry insiders who warn of potentially cataclysmic consequences of the breakneck pace at which the technology is moving. Trump’s damn-the-torpedoes approach to AI is particularly troubling considering the Trump family’s own massive stake in the AI industry. For Duran, Pax Silica is “the Trump regime’s brand name for AI colonialism and imperialism.”

Indigenous communities join a protest caravan condemning the US-led Pax Silica Initiative and the Luzon Economic Corridor, organized by Bagong Alyansang Makabayan in Angeles City, Pampanga, Philippines, on September 11, 2026. Charles Perez/NurPhoto/AP

Few people would be as perfectly positioned to be Pax Silica’s leader as Helberg—not only because of his extensive tech industry experience and his current position in Trump’s State Department, but also because of the political connections he made during his own conversion from staunch Democrat to Trump administration darling. Helberg, who is 36, has worked in the intersection between Silicon Valley and geopolitics for his entire career, founding a geopolitical-risk forecasting startup, leading Google’s internal global product policy team, and serving on the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission under President Biden. In 2021, he published a book, The Wires of War, about the competition between Western democracies and authoritarian governments to control the global tech sector, and the overarching importance of collaboration between industry and government; two years later, he founded the Hill and Valley Forum, an annual gathering of legislators and AI and defense company executives dedicated to countering Chinese influence on the sector.

In early 2024, Helberg was advocating for the United States to ban Chinese-owned TikTok; in a piece for the Intercept, reporter Sam Biddle noted that because of his business dealings with the AI industry, Helberg, who was serving on US–China Economic and Security Review Commission at the time, could profit handsomely from a cold war with China. In December that year, Trump nominated Helberg for his role at the State Department; the Senate confirmed him in October 2025.

Helberg’s personal political trajectory appears to reflect the broader partisan transformation of Silicon Valley over the last decade. As the Washington Post reported, he fundraised for Pete Buttigieg in 2019; by 2024 he was donating $1 million to the Trump campaign. Helberg reflected on his political evolution in a 2024 interview with Jewish News Syndicate. “The Democratic Party forgot its founding principles and allowed themselves to become governed by a woke, progressive ideology that substitutes merit with amorphous and often arbitrary concepts of identity and fairness,” he said. “Perhaps more pernicious, modern-day progressivism paints a worldview that divides the world into oppressors and oppressees.” He also criticized Democrats’ lack of support for Israel. “American Jews who still support Biden should have their heads examined,” he said. “If you support Israel, there’s only one choice in this election.”

Jacob Helberg, Under Secretary of State for Economic Growth, Energy, and Environment, speaking at a hearing of the House Foreign Affairs Committee at the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C. Michael Brochstein/Sipa USA/AP

Rabois, who resigned from the financial technology company Square in 2013 after being accused of sexual harassment, is also outspoken about his political views on social media. In 2023, in the wake of X owner Elon Musk’s endorsement of an antisemitic conspiracy theory, Rabois tweeted, “Without X, we would almost surely be confronting another Holocaust now. So thank you @elonmusk.” On January 24, 2026, the day that ICE agents killed Minneapolis protester Alex Pretti, Rabois posted, “No law enforcement has shot an innocent person. Illegals are committing violent crimes every day.” He added, “He unequivocally attempted to draw his weapon. Fuck you.”

Helberg’s current background image on his X profile is a photo of him with President Trump; in a tweet last year, Helberg called Vice President JD Vance “a friend and a role model for a generation of patriots.” When the Philippines joined Pax Silica in April, Helberg gave full credit to the Trump administration. “None of this would be possible without the leadership of President Trump and Secretary Rubio, who have made it a priority to secure America’s supply chains and to strengthen our alliances in the Indo-Pacific,” he said in a speech to Filipino and American lawmakers and diplomats in Washington, DC. “They understood that economic security is national security—and they gave us the mandate to move.”

Helberg’s political transformation occurred against the backdrop of a powerful movement in Silicon Valley libertarian circles—one that would prove influential in the formation of Pax Silica. The ideological groundwork was laid by thinkers who envisioned a new form of governance untethered from traditional nation-state constraints. In November 2021, Balaji Srinivasan, a close friend of Thiel and a former colleague of venture capital titan Marc Andreessen, laid out these ideas in an influential essay, “The Network State.” At the heart of Srinivasan’s idea are autonomous zones that are not governed by the laws of the nations in which they’re physically located but function more like colonies of an expansive digital community.

Helberg’s vision of Pax Silica’s autonomous zone seems to be a natural outgrowth of those ideas—and he has called on members of the Network State community to champion Pax Silica. In July, the House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Oversight and Intelligence held a hearing about Pax Silica so that lawmakers could learn about the initiative and discuss oversight. One of the presenters was Erick Brimen, the CEO of an autonomous economic zone called Próspera on the tropical island of Roatán, Honduras, described how he created a thriving economic hub that attracted companies from all over the world. “I can report to the Subcommittee that this is not a theory waiting to be tested,” he said. “Hondurans and Americans built it together. It works.” Próspera is financed by Pronomos Capital, an investment fund also supported by Peter Thiel.

If Próspera is a model that Pax Silica’s architects want to emulate and expand upon, it’s worth taking a closer look at what’s actually going on there. In Próspera, companies can either select regulations from a menu of the legal frameworks from 36 countries or propose their own. Because of this decentralized approach to regulation, biotech companies in particular have flocked to Próspera. Minicircle, a gene therapy startup, conducts human trials targeting muscle building and longevity—research that would require FDA approval in the United States. Bryan Johnson, the tech entrepreneur known for his extreme approach to anti-aging treatments (his motto: “don’t die”), received “reversible gene therapy only available under Próspera’s regulatory framework.” The zone advertises “15x faster commercialization of drugs” and “70 percent accelerated research timelines.”

A proposed area where Pax Silica hub might be built in Capas, Tarlac province. Jam Sta Rosa/AFP/Getty

Adjacent to the zone sits Crawfish Rock, an indigenous village of the Garífuna people whose residents told the Guardian in 2022 that Próspera’s creators had originally pitched it as a “real estate and community development project.” Only later did the Garífuna discover the plans to create an autonomous city where the amount of acreage landowners hold determine what they’re allowed to vote on. In 2022, the villagers became embroiled in disputes with Próspera over drinking water; that same year, Honduran President Xiomara Castro made moves to end the project. Próspera’s backers sued the country for $11 billion, roughly one-third of the country’s GDP.

In 2024, the Honduran Supreme Court declared autonomous zones unconstitutional—yet Próspera has continued operating in a legal gray area. Honduras’ new administration, led by Nasry “Tito” Asfura, appears to be more supportive of Próspera, but he hasn’t yet challenged the Supreme Court’s decision. Próspera recently named its own civil prosecutor to enforce its rules—a move that activists called a “modern coup.” Proceedings around Próspera’s lawsuit remain ongoing.

Critics of Pax Silica worry that the project will replicate the worst tendencies of the colonialism the Philippines has endured with a Próspera twist: unbridled industrial growth with few environmental and labor protections. The Philippine government already appears to be worried about outsized American influence—in May, it denied a US request for diplomatic immunity in the special economic zone.

“The Philippines is being exploited here as it always has been. There will be some beneficiaries on the ground, but the very arrangement of deregulated special economic zones is a way of exploiting the locals to the benefit of foreign capital.”

Van Jackson, a political scientist at New Zealand’s Victoria University who has written extensively on geopolitics and technology, offered a broader critique of the initiative’s architecture. “The Philippines is being exploited here as it always has been,” he wrote in an email to Mother Jones. “There will be some beneficiaries on the ground, but the very arrangement of deregulated special economic zones is a way of exploiting the locals to the benefit of foreign capital.”

Pax Silica’s high-profile cheerleaders appear unfazed by the challenges that Próspera has faced. Last December, two days after the founding of the initiative, White House AI and crypto czar David Sacks praised Pax Silica. “Congratulations to @UnderSecE Jacob Helberg on the formation of Pax Silica,” he tweeted. “One of the key ways to win a technology race is to create the largest ecosystem. Pax Silica helps us do that.” In July, Sen. Jim Risch (R-ID), chair of the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee, tweeted that Pax Silica “shows why forward-looking diplomatic strategy matters.” Last month, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio praised both Helberg and Pax Silica in a roundtable convened by President Trump on the topic of mining. “Jacob has been phenomenal,” he said. “He came up with something called Pax Silica, and it’s an initiative that leads our efforts to partner with the private sector and invest in mining and refining and in processing as well as the end-use applications of that.”

In an email to Mother Jones, a State Department spokesperson noted that Helberg signed an extensive ethics agreement prior to his confirmation. ”The Under Secretary works with his team, including ethics officials at State, to ensure that his work remains free from any conflicts,” the spokesperson wrote.

Duran, the tech journalist, sees in the Trump administration’s endorsement of Pax Silica a tacit acknowledgement of a new cold war, one in which “the rare earths and minerals are the new uranium,” he says. “They call it ‘peace,’ but it’s really preparation for massive conflict in the 21st century.” The Trump administration appears determined to enter this war—even as public sentiment “is sharply turning against both this regime and against AI and the data centers,” Duran says.

On social media, Helberg battles with the naysayers. In a May tweet, an entrepreneur named Arnaud Bertrand called Pax Silica “basically vendor lock-in: you hand over your critical minerals, align your export controls with Washington’s, regulate AI the way America wants, and in return you get to be a US ‘trusted partner,’ whatever that means these days.”

Helberg clapped back, “The US is home to the world’s largest technology companies—a fact I’m sure deeply irritates you. The idea that being part of their supply chain is ‘subservience,’” he added, “is an ignorant loser mentality.”

In the end, public sentiment may not matter—because through projects like Pax Silica, it’s not government but private companies that will make the rules around the pace at which the United States pursues AI dominance. The Trump administration is “full speed ahead,” says Duran, “regardless of the political reality on the ground.”

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New Yorkers Lined the Streets Against Benjamin Netanyahu’s Visit

In the early months of Israel’s genocide in Gaza, the streets of New York were filled with protests. Hundreds of people were arrested, bridges and tunnels were blocked; the Statue of Liberty was at one point taken over. In the ensuing years, with Trump’s repression of the movement for Palestine—deporting, jailing, and otherwise silencing many of its leaders—things have gotten quieter.

But on September 24, when Benjamin Netanyahu spoke at the United Nations General Assembly, it didn’t look that way. Hundreds of New Yorkers formed a human chain across a road leading to the United Nations complex as Netanyahu was about to begin his speech. Then, hours later, thousands of people filed into the surrounding streets carrying Palestinian flags for a massive march of well over a thousand people. “We’re getting 2024 numbers!” one participant said.

Though New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani did not join the protests himself, he told CNN on Monday that he’s not particularly enthused about Netanyahu’s presence in his city either.

“When it comes to Benjamin Netanyahu, I have described him as I believe him to be: a war criminal and an architect of a horrific genocide of the Palestinian people,” Mamdani said. “If the International Criminal Court deems someone worthy of an arrest because of a violation of those laws, then who are we to say that anyone should be above that? And I think very clearly that everyone should be held accountable to it.”

Among the protesters were local elected officials like city councilor Chi Ossé and several high-profile progressive congressional candidates like Darializa Chevalier, who won a hotly contested election for New York’s 13th congressional district; Chris Rabb, the nominee for a House district that includes much of Philadelphia; Melat Kiros, who won a major upset in the race for a Democratic-leaning district in Colorado; and Adam Hamawy, the Democratic candidate to succeed retiring New Jersey Rep. Bonnie Watson Coleman. Celebrities like Hannah Einbinder and Susan Sarandon joined the protest—both, alongside Chevalier, were arrested.

“There’s a group of folks coming into Congress who are not being tethered to corporate money and to institutionalists,” said Rabb, a state legislator from Philadelphia who won the backing of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and other Democratic Party notables in his primary win for a solidly Democratic seat earlier this year.

“We’re going to use all of our authority as members of Congress to speak up against injustice and use everything in our toolbox to fight these atrocities and the people who allowed them to happen,” Rabb added as he sat in the middle of the street, linking arms with Hamawy.

“There’s no such thing as progressive if it doesn’t include Palestinian freedom,” Stefanie Fox of Jewish Voice for Peace said.

Though local and state-level progressive elected officials don’t have the power to enforce the International Criminal Court’s war crimes warrant against Netanyahu, an organizer with the Palestinian Youth Movement who identified herself as Nas Issa proposed other moves, including “divesting city pension funds from Israel bonds, cracking down on illegal sales of stolen Palestinian land happening in the city, investigating the charitable status of charities that profit from sending military supplies to settlements,” and ensuring cities and states that work with ICE cease to do so.

Two weeks ago, President Trump approved yet another $2.8 billion sale of weapons to Israel. The killing in Gaza has not stopped. But on both sides of the wall of the United Nations building, few people seemed to want to hear Benjamin Netanyahu attempt to justify it.

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Netanyahu’s UN Speech Was a Full-On Defense of Israeli Settlements

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was on the defensive when he took the stage at the United Nations General Assembly on Thursday. His country is facing growing condemnation from all sides: In September, 11 European countries and Canada announced a joint plan to sanction Israel’s West Bank settlements, and in 62 percent of Americans report a negative opinion of his government in a recent Pew poll; Netanyahu himself faces an International Criminal Court arrest warrant for war crimes including genocide. Protesters blocked streets outside hours before Netanyahu took the podium, and within the UN chamber, half of Netanyahu’s audience walked out before his speech even began.

Room empties out at the UN as Netanyahu begins his speech. pic.twitter.com/plGg9wDRQ7

— Acyn (@Acyn) September 24, 2026

Netanyahu nonetheless appeared determined to declare victory, as he faces a contested reelection back home, thanking his “great American friends” for their help in “the battle against the barbarians.”

Did he mean the bombardment of Gaza, in which the US has spent millions of dollars funding the killing of an estimated one-tenth of the enclave’s entire population? Israel’s expansion into Lebanon? The US-Israel war on Iran? Or the Israeli settlements that move ever-further into the West Bank? “We delivered crippling blows to all of them,” Netanyahu said.

Netanyahu: In this battle against the barbarians, we've had no greater partner than President Trump. I thank him pic.twitter.com/n3iZ7s9PEt

— Acyn (@Acyn) September 24, 2026

Netanyahu appeared particularly eager to defend settlers in the West Bank, whose state-supported violence against Palestinians and international observers is extremely well-documented by reporters, activists, and international human rights groups. Those settlers, he said, are nothing more than “a handful of young juvenile delinquents, about 150 in number, who throw stones, who chop down olive trees.”

“Only maybe two, three” people have been killed by settlers, he said. That is false: a September UN report said that 81 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli settlers or soldiers in the West Bank this year alone, and according to the BBC, at least 23 of those deaths “have occurred in the context of settler attacks.” 18 were children.

Netanyahu didn’t mention those killings as he asserted that there have been “thousands of terrorist attacks against the peaceful settlers, honorable people, law-abiding people.”

Laith Shalabi, a Palestinian New Yorker with family in the West Bank, told Mother Jones that he has seen an uptick in violence against his family and community this year. Traveling to visit his grandmother in his family’s West Bank village, Shalabi said he saw more Israeli flags along the route to his family’s village than ever before—and more soldiers. “Since the genocide, a lot of Israeli soldiers have kind of been more on edge with Palestinians,” Shalabi said, “on the attitude of shoot first, ask questions later.”

When he arrived at the village, Shalabi learned that settlers had set up camp nearby. Locals told him about settlers who, at the slightest provocation, beat Palestinians with the butts of their guns or even shot at them—often within view of Israeli soldiers, who at best don’t intervene, at worst participate in the violence. People in the US “should know what these settlements do,” Shalabi said. “It’s important for me that Americans understand where their tax dollars are going and what they’re supporting and funding.”

After another thirty minutes on the theme that allegations of genocide in Gaza constitute “the greatest lie of the century,” and shots at Mayor Zohran Mamdani and his wife, as well as podcaster Hasan Piker, Netanyahu left the stage. Protests continued outside.

Hasan Piker mentioned during Netanyahu’s speech at the UN pic.twitter.com/PZOTuWtfxV

— Acyn (@Acyn) September 24, 2026

Civil rights lawyer Brad Parker of the Center for Constitutional Rights, in an interview before Netanyahu’s speech, characterized the Israeli prime minister’s status as “absolute impunity.” Federal authorities could follow the lead of the UK and France, and sanction the settlers—which, despite even Trump’s Israel ambassador Mike Huckabee characterizing settler conduct as terrorism, the White House and Congress appear resolutely opposed to doing.

“Most indicted war criminals do not leave their countries, but Netanyahu just breezes in and out,” Parker said. “Putin, for example, his travel is very selective because of that. But it’s sort of an exception for Israel right now.”

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Trump’s FDA Pick Refuses to Say IUDs Don’t Cause Abortions

This article has been republished from Autonomy News, a worker-owned publication covering reproductive rights and justice. Follow Autonomy News on Instagram, Bluesky, TikTok, Threads, and LinkedIn.

Dr. Heidi Overton, Donald Trump’s nominee to be the next head of the FDA, opened a Wednesday confirmation hearing before the Senate’s Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) committee by thanking her “lord and savior, Jesus Christ.” Throughout the hearing, Overton faced many questions about vaccine safety, flavored vapes, and foodborne illness. Perhaps unsurprisingly given her past anti-abortion statements, many of Overton’s most alarming answers—and non-answers—had to do with abortion and birth control.

“I wanted to know if you agree that an IUD is an abortifacient,” asked Washington Democrat Patty Murray, referencing the Trump administration’s false claims that some forms of birth control, including intrauterine devices, can cause abortion. Overton not only refused to answer, but her response even suggested that the FDA could change its stance. “If I’m confirmed as FDA commissioner, I’ll be fully briefed on all their prior decisions and make determinations according to the standards of safety and efficacy,” she said.

Overton’s birth control comments are notable as Trump’s Department of Justice has refused to say in an active court case that certain forms of birth control don’t cause abortions, and because many anti-abortion groups oppose the use of IUDs and emergency contraception, claiming they are abortifacient.

If confirmed, Overton—who is currently serving as a White House domestic policy advisor—will face intense pressure to roll back access to abortion pills. Murray also asked the nominee about her 2023 claim that the abortion drug mifepristone is “dangerous to women,” which Overton made in a paper written for the far-right America First Policy Institute. Murray asked Overton whether she agreed with the FDA’s approval of mifepristone, “which means the agency deems it safe and effective.” Overton said only that “mifepristone was approved by the FDA as having met its safety and efficacy standard.” Murray pressed her again on whether or not she believes the drug is safe. “I know that it has met the safety and efficacy standard,” Overton said. The nominee repeatedly used the past tense when talking about mifepristone regulations meeting FDA standards.

Murray called Overton’s conclusion in the paper “alarming” because it conflicts with scientific evidence, which has repeatedly shown mifepristone to be safe and effective—including when prescribed via telehealth. Overton replied that she has always “been driven by data,” and that the paper was written “after a change was made at the FDA in how that medication was accessed.” She was referring to a 2021 regulation, formalized in 2023, that allowed mifepristone to be prescribed by telemedicine. Overton then referenced an ongoing FDA “review” of mifepristone’s safety, which she said is “very important.” Former FDA head Marty Makary reportedly slow-walked that review so it wouldn’t be complete until after the midterm elections.

“I hear you changing your answer now, saying you don’t think [mifepristone] is safe,” Murray said. Later in the hearing, another Democrat, New Hampshire Senator Maggie Hassan, called for Overton to recuse herself from the mifepristone review based on her past comments about the drug.

There are currently five active lawsuits challenging the FDA’s regulation of mifepristone: Three filed by abortion-hostile states that say the agency’s regulation of the drug is too lax, and two filed by abortion providers in which federal judges have ruled that the FDA maintains too many restrictions on the medication. The FDA has repeatedly cited its mifepristone safety review in these cases as a reason to pause the litigation.

“As mifepristone is under scrutiny at the state and federal levels, Dr. Overton leverages her status as a physician to deceive the public about medications we know are safe.”

Despite showing ignorance of some of the agency’s operations—including by failing to name a division of the FDA responsible for important food safety measures—Overton showed significant knowledge of the mifepristone litigation. In response to questions from Indiana Republican Jim Banks, who asked Overton to accelerate the review, she said that, if confirmed as commissioner, regulation of mifepristone “would immediately be on [her] desk” because the FDA is required to produce an update in early October in a case filed by Louisiana. She also cited litigation in Hawaii, one of the lawsuits that could roll back restrictions.

Banks also brought up the agency’s investigatory powers. “Is it in the public interest to investigate companies that dispense abortion drugs and mislead women about their risk?” he asked. In her answer, Overton mentioned a recent report by HELP committee Republicans that purported to identify “potential concerns” about mifepristone manufacturers. “If there are issues identified … I would be committed to making sure that every company is following the law regarding the requirements,” Overton answered.

In March, committee chair Bill Cassidy and four other Republicans sent a letter to the FDA calling on it to work with other federal agencies to crack down on abortion pills. It’s not yet clear when the 23-member Senate committee will hold a vote on whether to advance Overton—who is board-certified in public health and preventative medicine—to the full chamber, but Trump is reportedly pushing for her to be confirmed before the midterm elections.

Maine Republican Susan Collins—who’s in a tough reelection battle this fall and claims to be pro-choice—didn’t ask a single question about abortion access, though she said she discussed the issue with Overton during a private meeting. Meanwhile, Alaska’s Lisa Murkowski, also a Republican, expressed concern that requiring in-person appointments for mifepristone would hurt rural residents of her state and said she worried that “political pressure” was at play. Murkowski didn’t ask Overton to respond, but it was striking that she highlighted possible disruptions to care when Collins did not, given that Maine also has vast rural areas. Another senator facing voters in November, Ohio GOPer John Husted, skipped the hearing entirely.

Following the hearing, Dr. Ghazaleh Moayedi, a Texas OB/GYN and the board chair of Physicians for Reproductive Health, called Overton’s nomination “nothing short of insulting to a public institution entrusted with the health and safety of our nation.” Moayedi added: “As mifepristone is under scrutiny at the state and federal levels, Dr. Overton leverages her status as a physician to deceive the public about medications we know are safe.”

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Thousands Rally Against Trump’s Kennedy Center Takeover

President Trump’s mindset when it comes to the Kennedy Center is that of an authoritarian toddler: If he can’t have the toys he wants, he’ll try to break them and make sure no one else can have them, either.

Thousands of furious DC-area residents and Kennedy Center patrons gathered in front of the arts center last week in protest of the president’s threats to tear the building down if he’s not allowed to inscribe his own name on its exterior.

Thousands of people gathered outside the Kennedy Center last week to protest Trump’s takeover.Video by Sonel Cutler

“This is a monument that was not falling down or bankrupt before he put his hands on it,” Robert White, an at-large member of the Council of the District of Columbia, said at the protest.

The Kennedy Center was suddenly shuttered last week, right after a judge ruled for the second time that the president’s name could not go on the building. The ruling prompted Trump to threaten to withhold the $270 million Congress has appropriated to renovate the popular arts center.

The president’s vanity projects have left monuments and parks across the city fenced off or closed. As my colleague Dan Friedman has reported:

• After spending $17.4 million to repair two fountains in Lafayette Park, the park itself is inaccessible because it’s surrounded by 13-foot steel fences.
• The Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool remains fenced off because of algae blooms and peeling paint that occurred after the administration gave out a $15 million no-bid contract to renovate it for the country’s 250th anniversary.
• The White House suspended public tours due to the construction of Trump’s $900 million ballroom.
• The Ellipse, a park along the National Mall, has been fenced off since June, when Trump hosted a UFC Fight that damaged the park’s grass.

“The Trump administration should certainly have recognition,” the president said last week. “If we don’t do that…It’ll end up being ripped down.”

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How a Russian Attack on the Midterms Deepfaked Mother Jones

A few days ago, an X user called роман—which is Russian for the name “Roman”—posted a purported Mother Jones video that reported that the Democratic National Committee paid a whopping $259 million to Mark Thompson, the head of CNN, so the cable news network would promote “gender transition among children.” The video—falsely branded with a Mother Jones logo—noted that CNN had aired “8,970 reports, programs, and shows that in one way or another promote gender transition among minors” and that the basis for this story were personal emails from Thompson pilfered by Anonymous, the hacker collective. The video featured Clara Jeffery, the editor-in-chief of Mother Jones, hailing this “great gift from Anonymous, which exposes the moral decay of the Democrats and the Democratic media that collaborate with them.” The video ended with the card that appears at the end of most Mother Jones videos: “Read more at MotherJones.com.”

Within a day, the video was viewed 155,000 times, according to X. Posted on another X account attributed to a user named James Deans Hick, it drew another 50,000 views.

The video was a fake—part of a Russian attack on the 2026 midterms that appears designed to help Donald Trump and the GOP. The “роман” account bore the tell-tale signs of a bot; it was set up in 2018, had zero followers, and had published no previous posts. And the amount of impressions recorded, according to disinformation researchers, were likely elevated and exaggerated the reach of these posts among authentic users.

A screenshot from the Russian deepfake video purporting to be from Mother Jones.

As MS NOW and The New York Times have each reported, in the past two weeks, a Russian disinformation network disinformation analysts have dubbed Storm-1679 or Matryoshka (the Russian word for those iconic nesting dolls) has begun to inject false election-related material into US social media.

Most notably, its phony posts include purported videos of Hollywood celebrities disparaging Democrats and urging votes for Republican candidates. In one, actor Sarah Jessica Parker appears to say, “When I hear about Democrats, I immediately think of corrupt Nazi whores. If you love America, never vote for Democrats.” The video was branded with a CNN logo and contained the hashtag #AllDemocratsAreCriminals. Other deepfakes in this campaign have used doctored footage of Christopher Lloyd, Ed Begley Jr., and Julia Roberts.

This latest Matryoshka operation was first identified by @antibot4navalny, a small group of anonymous activists who track Russian influence operations. This outfit has revealed that Matryoshka has been disseminating on social media fake CNN reports with false allegations about Democratic senatorial candidates. One targeting James Talarico of Texas declares he “despises Hasidic Jews because their faith does not allow children to change their gender.”

The @antibot4navalny trackers have spotted dozens of false reports spewed out by Matryoshka that are created to look as if they come from The New York Times, The Washington Post, NPR, Politico, PBS, ABC News, NBC News, CBS News, MS NOW, and other major American media outlets. Many stick to the celebrity-says-Democrats-are-horrible theme. Others spread false reports about corruption at US media outlets, and some pretend to be news reports showing that stories about Russian disinformation are phony.

This is not Matryoshka’s first rodeo. In my new book, How Russia Won: Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, and the Fight for America, I covered the network’s role in the massive Russian disinformation operation that targeted the 2024 presidential campaign to tarnish Democratic nominee Kamala Harris and boost Trump. I wrote:

The Matryoshka operation produced numerous social media posts and videos falsely branded as reports from major news outlets (such as Fox News, BBC, and CNN), government agencies, and research outfits. It spewed a barrage of disinformation: Harris had an abortion when she was seventeen (Fox News). She was exhibiting early-­onset Alzheimer’s (USA Today). Her grandfather was a communist (BBC). Her family was connected to Pfizer and Big Pharma (Bellingcat). It also disseminated a report supposedly from USA Today claiming Ukrainian refugees were smuggling fentanyl into the United States, and it generated material to stoke fears of civil war in the United States, postelection violence, and a full-­scale conflict between the United States and Russia that could result in nuclear catastrophe.

In the first three months of 2025, Matryoshka tried to undercut Western support for Ukraine by putting out false news reports depicting Kyiv as corrupt and belligerent and claiming Europe was being dragged into World War III. These messages, according to disinformation researchers, did not gain much traction.

But during one of Elon Musk’s tirades against the US Agency for International Development, which he was then trying to abolish, he shared with his 216 million followers on X a clip from E! News reporting that the agency had paid millions to celebrities to travel to Ukraine. The roster included Angelina Jolie ($20 million), Orlando Bloom ($8 million), Sean Penn ($5 million), and Ben Stiller ($4 million). Donald Trump Jr. reposted the video as well; it quickly drew more than 11 million views. That video was a Matryoshka fake.

After Mother Jones was alerted by @antibot4navalny, a lawyer for Mother Jones contacted X to register a complaint about the phonyvideo with the implausible claim the DNC had paid more than one-quarter of a billion dollars to CNN’s chief. “Thanks for bringing this to our attention,” X responded. “We’ve removed the reported post(s) for a violation of X Rules and specifically our trademark policy.”

As of now, Matryoshka’s current operation does not seem to have achieved great reach on X, Bluesky, or other social media platforms. But in 2024, the Russian disinformation campaign placed false anti-Democrats messages in the feeds of millions of Americans. One bogus allegation—Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, the Democratic vice presidential candidate, had inappropriately touched an exchange student when he was a high school teacher—did go viral and was amplified by Jack Posobiec, the promoter of Pizzagate and a MAGA provocateur who had been working with the Republican Party, and Candace Owens, a popular right-wing influencer.

Matryoshka’s new operation aimed at the midterms may not yet have produced viral content, but it signals that Putin is at it again. He has mounted disinformation and influence operations in every national US election since 2016 (as my book chronicles)—to sow discord and to help Trump. This time, Russian disinformation warfare is occurring with the United States less able to defend against this threat. The Trump administration has shuttered the units at the FBI, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, and the State Department that once tracked Russian disinformation (and disinformation from other foreign adversaries) and sought to counter it.

With Trump leaving the door wide open (purposefully?), Matryoshka and other Russian disinformation ops will have a clear shot at influencing the midterm elections—to help Republican candidates and, perhaps more important, exacerbate any chaos or conflict that might arise. This could be a far bigger and more consequential operation than a fake Robert De Niro, Charlize Theron, or Cher post.

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ChatGPT Helped Tumbler Ridge Shooter Focus on Guns, Tactics, and Terror

Editor’s note: This story discusses suicide and extreme violence. Read part 1, part 2, and part 3 of our investigation into AI chatbots and violence.

In June 2025, Jesse Van Rootselaar received an email notification from OpenAI. Van Rootselaar had been using ChatGPT to discuss committing potential acts of violence—including a mass shooting at a shopping mall—and now OpenAI had banned that account. But the troubled teen living in Tumbler Ridge, British Columbia, was not deterred and soon logged back on with a second account.

What happened next was astonishing: Van Rootselaar told ChatGPT about the account ban, noting she had specified “a famous real-world mall as the target” and herself as the perpetrator, but also claiming the scenario hadn’t been real. In response, ChatGPT explained why such violent content would be flagged—and then offered tips on how to evade its own safeguards. It advised Van Rootselaar to always frame her content as fictional or hypothetical in order to “never get flagged again” by OpenAI’s moderation systems.

“Don’t use real-world locations,” ChatGPT said, later adding: “You can still be twisted. Just be clever about it.”

Over the next eight months, Van Rootselaar, who identified as transgender and used she/her pronouns, continued to use this second ChatGPT account to focus on violence. She discussed building and using firearms and homemade explosives, fantasized about becoming a notorious mass killer, and asked about the timing of previous real-world school shootings just before committing her attack, according to three separate sources with knowledge of the matter and material I reviewed from Van Rootselaar’s ChatGPT history.

Van Rootselaar carried out a suicidal mass shooting at Tumbler Ridge Secondary School this past February, killing a total of eight people and injuring dozens of others. In the aftermath, the Wall Street Journal reported that OpenAI had banned her first ChatGPT account for discussing “scenarios involving gun violence” but had decided not to alert authorities, despite the urging of some employees on OpenAI’s safety team. In a subsequent open letter to Canadian government leaders, OpenAI confirmed the ban and disclosed the existence of her second account, but gave no information about what the second account contained.

The shooter’s ChatGPT accounts, detailed here publicly for the first time, are far more disturbing than previously known.

Since then, Tumbler Ridge victims and their families have filed more than three dozen lawsuits against OpenAI in federal court in California, alleging company leaders knew that ChatGPT was dangerous and that Van Rootselaar “was planning a mass attack.” Plaintiffs claim ChatGPT “deepened the Shooter’s violent fixation and pushed them toward the attack.” OpenAI denies the allegations. The mass shooting remains under investigation by multiple Canadian authorities, and until now, no further information about Van Rootselaar’s ChatGPT use has been made public.

The violent contents of Van Rootselaar’s two ChatGPT accounts, detailed here publicly for the first time, are far more extensive and disturbing than previously known. Van Rootselaar, who was 18 at the time of the attack, also used OpenAI’s chatbot to upload bloody images of extreme violence and photos of harm to herself. She pushed ChatGPT to create graphic fictional narratives of mass killings. One featured an 18-year-old perpetrator who livestreamed a mass shooting that went viral and, in ChatGPT’s telling, made her an online “legend.” (Infamy is often a key goal of mass shooters.) Another featured a perpetrator named “Jess” who shot police and stalked and terrorized her victims as she executed them.

OpenAI did not respond to requests for comment and a detailed set of questions submitted to the company for this story.

“In a hallway, indoors, or a crowded classroom, the 870 is brutal,” ChatGPT said about the shotgun. “Close quarters is its playground.”

In some instances, ChatGPT initially refused to engage with Van Rootselaar about violence, but she was able to overcome those refusals by repeating or modifying her prompts. In an August 2025 conversation, Van Rootselaar asked ChatGPT to produce a scenario about her attacking a college campus with a Remington 870 pump-action shotgun and causing maximum carnage. ChatGPT replied that it was “not able to help with that request,” but Van Rootselaar tried again and added “hypothetically” to her prompt. ChatGPT then produced the content, describing in vivid language the tactical qualities of the weapon and where it would be effective.

“In a hallway, indoors, or a crowded classroom, the 870 is brutal,” ChatGPT said. “Close quarters is its playground.”

ChatGPT also discussed reloading time and potential casualties: “Assuming each shell results in one hit, you might down 10 to 20 people max, depending on spacing, density, reaction times, and chaos.”

Van Rootselaar continued using ChatGPT until the day of the rampage, according to material I reviewed and sources with knowledge of the matter, who agreed to speak on condition of anonymity about a sensitive ongoing investigation. On Feb. 10, 2026, Van Rootselaar asked ChatGPT when shootings occur “during school hours” and about the timing of high-profile shootings that have happened in the United States. ChatGPT’s responses cited published FBI research and infamous massacres, including Columbine, Sandy Hook, Parkland, and Uvalde. Those exchanges were Van Rootselaar’s last with the chatbot. She fatally shot her mother and 11-year-old brother at home, then drove to the school and opened fire with a long gun and a modified rifle, according to Canadian authorities, who have not disclosed further details about the weapons used. The rampage ended after Van Rootselaar fired at police and fatally shot herself.

Six victims in the school were killed: 12-year-olds Abel Mwansa, Kylie Smith, Zoey Benoit, and Ticaria Lampert; 13-year-old Ezekiel Schofield; and educator Shannda Aviugana-Durand, 39. Dozens of others were injured and traumatized, including two children who were severely wounded.

Violence prevention experts expressed deep alarm about how the AI technology can fuel delusions.

The devastation in the remote town 400-plus miles northeast of Vancouver is part of a growing spate of cases in which people have used ChatGPT and other AI platforms to prepare for violence. The technology has fueled attacks in unprecedented ways, as I’ve documented in a multipart investigation that includes the first comprehensive analysis of how a mass shooter used ChatGPT. As I detailed with that examination of an April 2025 rampage at Florida State University, AI chatbots can supply tactical ideas and information to shooters far more efficiently than traditional internet searches.

Moreover, the psychological impact can be potent. Human-like engagement from chatbots appears to have accelerated violent thinking and planning among troubled users in multiple high-risk threat cases, leaders in the field of behavioral threat assessment told me. Several of those prevention experts expressed deep alarm about the phenomenon, including how the AI technology can fuel delusions. “We’re seeing it in real time in different ways,” Steve Crimando, a veteran threat-assessment expert, told me. “These effects are converging at a behavioral level that is making people much more vulnerable, in my sense, to violence.”

OpenAI also faces lawsuits from families of suicide victims and from FSU shooting victims, and is under criminal investigation by the state of Florida. The company denies any responsibility for suicide and violence by users. CEO Sam Altman and OpenAI spokespeople have expressed condolences over deadly tragedies involving ChatGPT and have said that OpenAI has “a zero-tolerance policy for using our tools to assist in committing violence.” The company also emphasizes the importance of protecting user privacy and says it works continually to improve safeguards, using guidance from mental health experts and “enhanced” protocols established after Tumbler Ridge.

Sarah Lampert, with her daughter Niveya, holding photos of her daughter Ticaria, 12, who was killed in the Tumbler Ridge mass shooting.Christinne Muschi/The Canadian Press/AP

But the mounting evidence of ChatGPT’s role in deadly violence, including the technology’s odd and disturbing behavior, underscores doubts about its safety. When I tested ChatGPT to simulate planning a mass shooting—in April, two months after Tumbler Ridge—I was able to go around its sporadic refusals. It gave me an alarming range of help, even after I talked about emulating the Uvalde mass shooter’s choice of weapon, livestreaming with a body camera, using hollow-point bullets, and getting shot at by police.

Since this spring, OpenAI has also declined my multiple requests for an interview or to answer written questions about its safety systems and the use of its technology by people planning harm.

Silicon Valley refers euphemistically to unpredictable, potentially dangerous behavior by artificial intelligence as “misalignment.” And AI safety has now exploded into a major national debate, after recent hacking incidents by “rogue” AI stoked fears about potential disasters involving biological weapons or crippling cyberattacks. But as the devastating violence in Tumbler Ridge shows, the danger of AI fueling mass shooters is already here.

Heavily redacted documents released by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police in August disclosed that surveillance cameras at Tumbler Ridge Secondary School recorded the attack. Concern about further traumatizing the community and potential copycat risk could keep that horrific footage locked away from public view. According to sources I spoke with, details from the shooting suggest that Van Rootselaar engaged in some tactics she had discussed with ChatGPT.

Shortly after the Wall Street Journal story in February, OpenAI sent executives to Ottawa to meet with Canadian government leaders and released an open letter stating: “Based on what we could see at that time the [first] account was banned in June 2025, we did not identify credible and imminent planning that met our threshold to refer the matter to law enforcement.” The letter also said that, despite having a detection system for identifying “repeat policy violators,” OpenAI discovered Van Rootselaar’s second ChatGPT account only “after the name of the Tumbler Ridge perpetrator was released publicly.”

But OpenAI has not explained why it apparently failed to discover the second account in summer 2025, when, according to the Journal, a group of company leaders convened to examine about 10 cases flagged for discussions of violence andschool shootings_._ (It remains unclear whether those included Van Rootselaar’s chats.) Nor has OpenAI explained why it failed to detect Van Rootselaar’s second account in the subsequent months leading up to the attack, as she used it to continue focusing on violence.

Van Rootselaar’s two ChatGPT accounts were registered with different names and email addresses but would likely have been identifiable in other ways as belonging to the same user, according to the sources I spoke with. Tech companies commonly use “fingerprinting” techniques to help thwart misuse, and OpenAI’s own publications say that it has robust capabilities to detect misuse and bar offenders who violate its rules. OpenAI did not answer my questions about whether Van Rootselaar’s second account was flagged by its automated review system or how it subsequently identified her second account after the mass shooting.

Video

Reporter Mark Follman simulated planning an attack using ChatGPT. The results were shocking:

Beyond the shooter’s ChatGPT use, a long trail of problems and warning signs preceded the carnage. Van Rootselaar had a history of suicidal ideation, involuntary hospitalization, and disturbing behavior, including drug abuse and prolific engagement online with violent and extremist content. She had dropped out of school several years before the attack, and in 2023, police had gone to her home after she started a fire while high on hallucinogenic mushrooms. Police at one point confiscated guns from the home, which were later returned. (Those were not the guns used in the attack, authorities said.)

In a court motion filed on Sept. 2 seeking to dismiss victim lawsuits, OpenAI argued it cannot be blamed for Van Rootselaar’s violence in light of “systemic failures by the law enforcement, mental-health care, and educational institutions in her community.” The company further suggested lax gun regulations in BC concerning mental health could be to blame. But according to experts, the fuller picture of Van Rootselaar’s ChatGPT use may in fact suggest a different conclusion: If local authorities already concerned about her behavior and mental health had been alerted to the chats, the strong signs of suicidality and attack planning might have prompted intervention. Leaders in behavioral threat assessment with whom I reviewed content from the Tumbler Ridge and FSU shooters’ ChatGPT accounts affirmed that content indicated a high risk of violence. (Those sources declined to be publicly identified when discussing active investigations.)

The Tumbler Ridge shooter’s chat about the timing of school shootings echoed the final chats of the FSU mass shooter.

OpenAI itself has expressed regret over its failure to contact Canadian authorities. “I am deeply sorry that we did not alert law enforcement to the account that was banned in June,” CEO Sam Altman wrote more than two months after the attack, in an April 2026 letter addressed to the Tumbler Ridge community. OpenAI has also said since the mass shooting that, based on enhancements it has made to its safety protocols, “we would refer the account banned in June 2025 to law enforcement if it were discovered today.”

Altman’s apology letter made no mention of Van Rootselaar’s second account used up to the day of the attack. Notably, her chat on Feb. 10 about the timing of school shootings echoed the final chats of the Florida State mass shooter back in April 2025. That perpetrator had asked ChatGPT when the FSU student union he targeted would be busiest. Van Rootselaar could not have known about ChatGPT’s role in the FSU attack, which was not public until a year after it happened—but OpenAI did.

“After learning of the [FSU] incident in late April 2025,” an OpenAI spokesperson said in a statement this spring, after Florida authorities disclosed the technology’s role, “we identified a ChatGPT account believed to be associated with the suspect, proactively shared this information with law enforcement and cooperated with authorities.”

Four months after the FSU shooting, in August 2025—the same month ChatGPT engaged with Van Rootselaar about a hypothetical shotgun attack—OpenAI published an article acknowledging that ChatGPT’s safeguards “may degrade” in “long interactions” and that sometimes the safety system “underestimates the severity of what it’s seeing.” The company wrote that it was working to solve that kind of “breakdown.” Van Rootselaar’s violent chats continued over the next six months, until she opened fire.

In response to a second round of victim lawsuits filed this September, OpenAI’s chief strategy officer, Jason Kwon, posted a lengthy statement on social media: “There isn’t a day that goes by that I don’t think about what happened at Tumbler Ridge, or the victims of this devastating tragedy and their families,” he wrote. “It’s a constant and sobering reminder of the important and incredibly difficult work that many people in my team do each and every day.” He then rebutted some of the lawsuit allegations about the roles of OpenAI leaders and described in broad terms the company’s internal structure and approach to preventing such harm.

The following day, British Columbia Premier David Eby denounced OpenAI for walking away from a mediation process over the lawsuits and the devastation in Tumbler Ridge “that OpenAI was involved in and materially contributed to.”

“It underlines why these companies cannot be trusted,” Eby said, according to Canadian media. “They can’t be trusted to regulate themselves; they can’t be trusted in what they say.”

On Sept. 21, BC Attorney General Niki Sharma announced the province’s own lawsuit against OpenAI, separate from Tumbler Ridge victims, which seeks to recover major financial costs from the tragedy and hold OpenAI accountable. The town of Tumbler Ridge has already torn down the school and, according to the lawsuit, hundreds of traumatized children and adults have been provided with mental health counseling.

Sharma said she is also calling for changes to Canadian criminal code: “There needs to be human and corporate accountability for the dangerous actions of AI.”

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

If you or someone you know is in crisis, you can call or text 988 to reach the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline, or chat at 988lifeline.org.

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Meet the Republicans Voting Blue in Florida

Bobby Williams, a third-generation Floridian and founder of a disaster relief nonprofit, was one in the crowded field of Republican candidates in Florida this summer seeking to replace Gov. Ron DeSantis. A conservative from rural Polk County, Williams’ platform centered on preserving the state’s agricultural land and halting development, including data centers, as more people have moved here since the pandemic. His official slogan was, “FLORIDA IS FULL.”

Williams lost the Republican nomination to Florida Rep. Byron Donalds, but earlier this month, he decided to publicly support a gubernatorial candidate: Democrat David Jolly.

“My message hasn’t changed; it’s back to ‘We the People’ instead of ‘We the Lobbyists’ and ‘We the Big Corporations,’” Williams said earlier this month at a press conference. “It’s person over party…What person is going to best represent Floridians?” He continued, “We want someone who is going to fight for Floridians.”

Williams is not alone. A few other Republicans, including current and former officials, have publicly endorsed Jolly—a former GOPmember of Congress who left the party during Trump’s first term, became an independent, and registered as a Democrat last year before running for governor. On social media, a Facebook group called Republicans for Jolly, which now has dozens of members, has also formed. They’re unhappy with Donalds, citing his plans to support data center development as well as his inflated campaign funding from big corporations. Jolly, on the other hand, has vowed to enact a statewide moratorium on data centers and is not taking any corporate contributions. As one political analyst told me last month, his campaign has focused on embracing supporters from all party affiliations.

Beyond Florida, cross-party endorsements are also happening in Iowa, where Democratic gubernatorial candidate Rob Sand launched a “Rob-publicans” campaign with more than 100 Republicans who are voting for him. In Texas, US Senate candidate James Talarico has racked up more than 20 endorsements from former and current GOP officials. A former Republican Kansas governor has also endorsed Democratic Senate candidate Adam Hamilton in that state. Cross-party endorsements are not a new phenomenon, political experts told me**,** and it can go both ways. A moderate Democrat from Maine, for example, endorsed Republican Rep. Mike Lawler of New York. But GOP defectors appear to be more common this year, likely due to Trump’s growing disapproval among voters. “The Republicans are having a bad year. Right now, Trump is a big liability,” said Sean Freeder, director of the Public Opinion Research Lab at the University of North Florida. “He’s the reason they are having this bad year.”

“The Republicans are having a bad year. Right now, Trump is a big liability. He’s the reason they are having this bad year.”

Still, Jolly faces an uphill battle to break the 27-year streak of Republican control in the governor’s office. In terms of registered voters, registered Republicans outnumber Democrats by 1.5 million. Jolly would need to secure solid support from the state’s independent voter pool, on top of Democrat votes, to win. But the changing support coming from Republicans is an indication that there are some fractures within Florida’s GOP as discontent grows over rising gas prices, high grocery costs, the war in Iran, and growing voter disapproval of Trump’s excesses. A survey of Florida voters last week found the race is essentially tied, and other polls also appear to confirm that Jolly is gaining momentum.

Williams did not respond to my requests for an interview. But in a Facebook video filmed in his car while he sipped on an iced tea, he explained in further detail why he’s supporting Jolly. “We’re unaffordable today, our insurance rates are where they are at, developers are destroying Florida, our water is being polluted on a Republican watch, so if Donalds wins, he has full rein.” Jolly had even called him, while Donalds and Florida GOP chair Evan Power never reached out to him after the primary. While he is not officially endorsing Jolly, Williams says his message to his followers is a simple one: “What is best for Florida?” To him, the answer is a vote for Jolly. “Whether full staunch Republicans are going to hate me or not, it is what it is.” While some of his followers agreed with him, others were disappointed that he would back a Democrat. “You are insane,” one commenter wrote. “I soooooo regret my vote for you.”

Austin Gravley, a city council member for the small town of Frostproof, population 3,500, in Central Florida, faced similar backlash online when he decided to publicly support Jolly. A Frostproof native, Gravley has identified as a Republican since before he could vote, volunteering for the GOP when he was 16 years old. He registered as a Republican in 2010 and voted for former Florida governor and US Sen. Rick Scott, as well as Marco Rubio during his 2016 presidential run. He voted for Trump three times. “I’m as Republican as you can get,” he told me. “So a lot of people are rightfully confused.”

He says he is tired of the culture wars, pointing out a recent Florida law banning Sharia law. “Let’s get back to dealing with the kitchen table issues that are affecting Floridians’ everyday lives,” Gravley said.

As a local elected official, he’s seen the erosion of what is called “home rule” as new Florida laws limit local governments’ ability to make decisions in their own communities. He’s concerned about a new Republican-led amendment on the ballot this November that would drastically cut property taxes in Florida and gut local funding. “Every year, there’s new legislation passed restricting how we can do our jobs at the local level. What’s good for Frostproof may not be good for Miami.” And these laws continue to pass without much debate in Tallahassee, he added. “I see Democrats on the House floor advocating for home rule and making great floor speeches, and then the Republicans just move forward with their vote.”

“I feel like checks and balances would be healthy for our government right now, and I don’t believe David Jolly is a radical leftist.”

As with so many conversations about the 2026 midterms, data centers play a central role. He’s not against them, but says they should be developed slowly with the right regulations, which is in stark contrast to Donalds’ casual comments about building them rapidly within the state. “I feel like checks and balances would be healthy for our government right now, and I don’t believe David Jolly is a radical leftist,” he said. “I think he’s very much in the center.”

George Kruse, a commissioner in deep-red Manatee County, is another elected Republican now supporting Jolly. Kruse wrote about this decision on his Substack. “Every day, every meeting, residents of Manatee County express frustration with overdevelopment, a lack of infrastructure, and a lost local voice. As a local commissioner, I see firsthand the local control being stripped away, the growth management authority being preempted, and your local voices being silenced,” he wrote. “If you want things to be different in Tallahassee, you need to go out and vote for something different.”

“People need to start focusing on the person instead of the party,” Kruse told me. Kruse, co-chair of the Republicans for Jolly coalition, is also supporting Kelly Kirschner, a former Sarasota mayor running for congressional district 16 in southwest Florida as a Democrat. “You have to vote for the better person, and sometimes that person has a different letter after their name. Sometimes, that person has a D after their name.”

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Exclusive: Mamdani on Extreme Weather, DoorDash, And Why Trump Likes Him So Much

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani on Thursday directly linked the climate crisis to everyday issues facing New Yorkers, including commutes and affordability, while urging climate-concerned individuals to align with the fast-growing movement against data centers.

“The way that climate is treated in public discourse, it’s almost as if it’s a concern that some can afford to have, while others have to deal with more immediate ones,” Mamdani told a packed crowd at Climate Desk Live. But climate change, Mamdani continued, drives up the “price of life” for us all, with Black, Latino and working-class people disproportionately expected to bear those costs.

Meanwhile, the mayor added, corporations that are responsible for the most pollution face little to no real accountability.

As for dispelling the notion that the crisis is a “luxury concern,” Mamdani urged people to connect climate to more localized issues, like the nascent movement against data centers. “That, too, could be the coalition against the climate crisis.”

Mamdani’s sit-down with Mother Jones video correspondent Garrison Hayes came amid a packed week for New York and the mayor specifically. On Monday, Mamdani met with President Donald Trump, where he pitched the president on federal funding for a new affordable housing development. As many observed, Trump left looking decidedly happy with the mayor.

Garrison Hayes had to ask.Video by David Ritsher

When Hayes asked why the president seemed so enamored with him, Mamdani replied: “This is the city where the president comes from.”

“The conversations we have are not just those of a mayor and a president, but those of two New Yorkers—New Yorkers with many differences of opinion, but who love this city,” Mamdani said.

In his meeting with Trump, Mamdani said that he brought up the need for stability for Haitian New Yorkers, who recently had their TPS status ended. “As long as someone can help the city,” he said, “I’ll talk to them.”

On Thursday, Mamdani also discussed his recent victory against DoorDash. “Earlier this week, we announced that we were holding DoorDash to account for having not paid their workers 260,000 workers 131.5 million dollars,” Mamdani said. DoorDash released a “notes app apology,” and is forking over the money. That same take-no-prisoners corporate-accountability approach, Mamdani said, could be applied to the climate crisis.

“Corporations of this scale believe that they can get away with not paying or underpaying workers and never having to be called to account for it,” he said. When it comes to corporations causing climate harm, Mamdani said, “we’re still dealing with some of those decisions that were made decades ago.”

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Climate Visions Clash at UN Summit, as Trump Goes in Whole Hog for Fossil Fuels

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

Two divergent worldviews emerged from the first two national addresses on the opening day of the United Nations General Assembly’s 81st session in New York.

Brazil’s president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, called for decarbonizing economies, protecting forests and supporting the energy transition through technology transfer. President Donald Trump followed with a rejection of global climate and artificial intelligence regulations, dismissing warnings about global warming while presenting fossil fuel abundance and technological supremacy as foundations of national power.

This year’s General Assembly session is taking place against a slew of global challenges supercharged by geopolitical rivalries and rising planetary warming. June was the second-warmest on record globally and the hottest Western Europe ever measured. A potentially record-breaking El Niño is expected to peak around December, raising fears of drought, crop failures and global food-price shocks.

Trump mocked those who warned about global warming as “the very same people who said we’ll all be dead in 12 years.”

In the US, surging AI data center growth is triggering expensive fossil-fuel generation and grid upgrades, raising electricity bills. Meanwhile, the US-Iran conflict has spread through the region, with clashes between Houthi and Saudi forces further roiling global oil markets already constrained by disruptions in the Strait of Hormuz.

Lula framed climate policy, forest protection and technology regulation as necessary parts of a rule‑based, multilateral effort to reduce emissions and manage systemic risks. He said the planet is facing a shared, urgent climate emergency that demands decarbonization and environmental protection—not delay or denial. He called for nations to “resume the offensive and inflict a defeat on denialism,” and warned that “the glaciers in the Himalayas are melting” and “torrential rains and forest fires” are already here. The impacts, Lula said, “will hit the most vulnerable the hardest.”

He presented Brazil as proof that countries can “combine economic value with reduced emissions,” and pledged to “move forward by the roadmap for the decarbonization of the Brazilian economy.”

In his view, forests and ecosystems are climate assets worth protecting and technology, including AI, must be governed and restrained, calling it an “unprecedented technological revolution with great risks and opportunities.” Lula insisted it would be an “unforgivable historical mission not to address the challenge of regulating the big techs and artificial intelligence” and criticized “technical oligarchies without rules or transparency” that bypass the UN and scientific oversight.

Trump presented an almost opposite worldview by downplaying climate change, celebrating fossil fuel expansion, and attacking global climate regulation. He mocked those who warned about global warming as “the very same people who said we’ll all be dead in 12 years because of global warming, a name since reborn to climate change because the planet was cooling, not warming, and nobody was dead.”

Trump claimed his administration had stopped what he called an international “global carbon tax” on shipping, insisting “there is no global government, and while I’m president, there will be no global taxes.” Rather than talking about emissions or a just energy transition, he boasted that American energy is fueling the planet and claimed that the U.S. and Venezuela together hold “more than 60 percent of the oil in the world.” This alone, he said, will drive down energy costs.

On technology, he rejected any “globalist scheme to control” AI, rebranding it as “super-intelligence” and pledged his administration will “only encourage superintelligence.” On the whole, Trump’s roughly 35-minute speech treated carbon taxes, climate regulations and global tech governance as threats to sovereignty and growth, and presented fossil fuels and technological dominance as core tenets of national strength.

Environmental advocates, climate scientists and experts reacted sharply to those remarks and challenged Trump’s assertions on climate change and high energy costs.

“The American people are experiencing first-hand the harsh and deadly realities of climate change, from extreme heatwaves to catastrophic wildfires and flooding,” said Rachel Cleetus, senior policy director with the Climate and Energy program at the Union of Concerned Scientists. In a statement, she said climate disasters are damaging and destroying homes and critical infrastructure, inflating insurance premiums and increasing costs for communities.

“We know [Trump] is a climate denialist. He has made it clear that he will continue drilling and buying fossil fuels. “

“The science is clear: fossil fuel-driven climate change is already causing significant harm and these harms will only grow if we fail to sharply curtail heat-trapping emissions and invest in resilience,” Cleetus said.

David Victor, a distinguished professor of innovation and public policy at the School of Global Policy and Strategy at UC San Diego said Trump’s climate denial and disengagement can frustrate meaningful progress on commitments made at the recent Conference of Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, where member nations negotiate how to cut emissions, adapt to climate impacts and fund those initiatives.

“America’s energy power has little to do with the Trump administration or its ‘energy dominance’ strategy. And all the harm that the prolonged war in Iran has done on the Persian Gulf infrastructure has, plausibly, been the largest single setback in the global energy system since the 1970s.” he wrote in emailed comments, adding that staking a claim on Venezuelan oil doesn’t greatly affect how the global oil markets operate.

Victor noted that Trump largely sidestepped climate change in his speech, giving more attention to artificial intelligence, noting that the administration’s hostility to regulating AI is perhaps the most consequential of his statements.

“We know [Trump] is a climate denialist. He has made it clear that he will continue drilling and buying fossil fuels. He has also acted on dismantling every science-based institution in the US. However, what we want to hear from other heads of state, especially from rich nations, is what they plan to do,” said a statement from Tasneem Essop, executive director of the Climate Action Network International.

She asked world leaders if they will step up to the challenge climate change poses or “hide behind Trump and shy away from their responsibilities to urgently transition away from fossil fuels.”

In a separate statement, the advocacy group Oil Change International said: “Donald Trump used his platform at the UN General Assembly to brag about the US’s fossil fueled imperialism. From Iran, to Venezuela, to Greenland, Trump’s actions follow a familiar path: use military force to dominate sovereign nations, let Big Oil cash in, and leave ordinary people to bear the costs through war, pollution, rising energy bills, and worsening climate disasters.”

The statement said that governments can either follow Trump into a future of conflict and economic volatility, or build a stable and prosperous future by investing in energy independence and political stability through clean, renewable energy. “On the road to COP31, governments must reject Trump’s attempt to build a fossil fuel empire and show that his agenda will not dictate our shared future,” it added.

This year’s gathering is the last for Secretary-General António Guterres, who will step down at the end of this year. Experts say his successor will inherit an even bigger challenge of keeping the global leadership invested in the common cause of rallying around efforts to fight climate change, resolve conflicts and empower fragile economies in Africa and the developing world more generally.

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The Gospel of High Yields: Inside Tim Tebow’s Favorite Wealth Seminar

This story was produced in partnership with the Pablo Torre Finds Out podcast.

In a cavernous arena in suburban Atlanta one warm day last May, I arrived at 9:00 a.m. with thousands of others to see former NFL quarterback Tim Tebow—not playing football, but as the keynote speaker at a daylong event about faith and business. By the time Tebow took the stage, a racially and generationally diverse group of thousands of Christians from metro Atlanta had been sitting in the chilly, dark arena for eight hours, swaying to worship music, laughing at Christian comedians’ wholesome jokes, and listening to tear-jerking testimonials of faith-transformed lives. It had been a long and packed day, but you wouldn’t have known it from the crowd’s rapt attention as Tebow urged us to follow “the plan that he has for you, the good works that he has in store for each and every one of you. And then when the king says go, would we just say yes?”

What exactly Tebow intended the crowd to say yes to wasn’t clear. But earlier in the day, many of them had said yes to something far less metaphysical: a three-day seminar of classes on stock market and real estate investing, for the low price of $97.

As athletes go, they don’t get much more wholesome than Tim Tebow. The 39-year-old retired NFL quarterback has had a legendary career: In 2007, he became the first sophomore to win the prestigious Heisman Trophy; he then went on to lead the Denver Broncos and defeat the Pittsburgh Steelers in the playoffs, but missed the opportunity to become AFC champs in 2011 against Tom Brady’s New England Patriots. Though the latter part of his career fizzled—after underperforming for the New York Jets he shifted sports and embarked on a lackluster stint in minor league baseball while also hosting on ESPN—he remained in the spotlight largely because of his devout Christian faith. So frequently did he drop to one knee on the field that the move became known as “Tebowing.” He made frequent appearances on Christian media outlets, and in 2010 he starred with his mother in an anti-abortion Super Bowl ad sponsored by the right wing faith advocacy group Focus on the Family.

Tebow’s piety is more than just praying for a touchdown—he has used his fame and wealth for good works all over the world. Through the Tim Tebow Foundation, founded in 2010, he has helped orphans overseas, put on events for special-needs children, and worked to combat human trafficking. God “sent his son in the greatest love story rescue mission of all time because that’s how much he values people,” he said an appearance on Fox & Friends last year. “We get to care for people and we get to value them wherever they’re at, and that changes everything.”

In the last few years, one expression of Tebow’s love for others has included regular speaking gigs at Life Surge, the company sponsoring the event I attended. For as little as $20, attendees get a full day of Christian celebrity speakers, uplifting preaching, worship music, and advice they are told will transform their finances. Throughout the day, members of the audience are offered opportunities to enroll in three days of “impact classes” for $97. Those who attend then have the chance to enroll in “SurgeU”—a series of courses promising to “surge your resources and influence through real estate and trade—for Kingdom impact.” SurgeU doesn’t come cheap: Packages range from about $10,000 to $40,000. Should you want to enroll but lack the cash, Life Surge connects you with a third-party lender.

Founded in 2020, Life Surge hosts about 30 one-day events a year in locations all over the country. In 2025, according to Life Surge, 117,000 people attended one-day events. The model is clearly successful, albeit not unique; many other companies offer motivational seminars leading to pricey financial classes. What makes Life Surge stand out is its Christian messaging. The company emphasizes the concept of “kingdom impact.” Basically, the more money you make, the more good works you can do, whether through tithing or Christian charity.

The company emphasizes the concept of “kingdom impact.” Basically, the more money you make, the more good works you can do, whether through tithing or Christian charity.

Key to this model are the one-day events—and the big draw for those events is the star-studded speaker program. Tebow isn’t the only athlete who has spoken at Life Surge; the company has an impressive roster, including all-time greats like the NBA’s Magic Johnson, and the NFL’s Joe Montana. On the day I attended, other speakers included former ESPN host Sage Steele, comedian Jeff Foxworthy, and Christian twin real estate influencers the Benham Brothers (whose HGTV show was canceled before it even aired after David Benham’s homophobic remarks surfaced). Life Surge spokesperson Richard Lorenzen declined to disclose how much Life Surge pays its speakers, but Athlete Speakers, a speakers’ bureau, estimates that for the biggest names—including Tebow—feescan be as high as $100,000 per appearance. In 2024 and 2025, Tebow spoke at 10 Life Surge events per year, and in 2026, he’s on track to have spoken at 20 events by year’s end—putting his estimated potential total earnings so far in the neighborhood of $2-$4 million from Life Surge alone.

Yet despite its celebrity lineup, customer feedback about Life Surge is decidedly mixed. On Google reviews, out of a possible 5 stars the company has 4.8, with satisfied customers gushing about the inspiring speakers and helpful financial advice. “One of the best events I have been to,” wrote one. “Worship sessions were amazing. Had a life changing experience. Learned so much and the opportunities offered for continued learning was great. 10/10 Highly Recommend.” Another enthused, “This was an Awesome event for my life! I highly recommend going if you get the chance. Knowledge, worship, inspiration and guidance you can use today!”

“This was an Awesome event for my life! I highly recommend going if you get the chance. Knowledge, worship, inspiration and guidance you can use today!”

But elsewhere—in Reddit threads, on a Life Surge Complaints FB group with 1,300 members, and in complaints to the Federal Trade Commission and the Better Business Bureau—hundreds of attendees swap stories of high-pressure sales tactics infused with Christian messaging. “We believed that it would be a Christian-based day of like minded business people,” wrote an attendee in a complaint to the FTC from earlier this year. “We did not expect a bait and switch and the pressure to purchase investing classes. We are very disappointed but also concerned by the amount of people bought into this.” Another complaint read, “I am so devastated that Christians like Tim Tebow made me trust in something that has taken so much money from me. This is evil, especially because I’m disabled on a limited income.”

In a lengthy response (PDF) to our questions, Life Surge’s Richard Lorenzen said the company “does not train its representatives to pressure customers into borrowing or taking on debt they cannot afford.” Indeed, throughout the event that I attended, disclaimers periodically appeared on the screens behind the speakers, warning the crowd that investing in Life Surge products carried risk. “Any income or earnings shared examples are not intended to represent typical or guaranteed results for the average customer,” one said. “Results vary widely, and you should assume that the average person may earn little to no money or could potentially lose money.” But these disclaimers were hard to read from where I was sitting, and they appeared so briefly that it took me several tries to snap photos of them with my phone.

Lorenzen also emphasized that the company “does not condone using a person’s religious faith, fear, or spiritual beliefs to pressure that individual into purchasing a product”—yet I spoke to about a dozen Life Surge customers and current and former employees who felt uneasy about the company’s invoking Christianity in their promotion of investment courses. “I see many of these strong Christian artists and strong Christian people that are up there speaking at the Life Serve conferences,” Karen Neal, a 61-year-old former Life Surge customer, told me. “And it’s like, do they know what’s happening to some of these people that are getting into this?”

A Life Surge employee I spoke with, who requested anonymity because of job security concerns, wondered the same thing: Why would Christian celebrities lend their brand to the company at all? “You’ve heard all about the people who are losing thousands and thousands of dollars and just are being asked to cash in their 401Ks and piggyback credit cards in order to pay for these classes,” the employee said. “It just doesn’t seem like something a good Christian motivational speaker or pastor would want to be a part of.”

Neither Tebow nor any other celebrity speaker we reached out to responded to our request for comment, and Lorenzen added that Life Surge “does not ask its headline speakers to promote or endorse Impact Classes or advanced training programs.” Yet in a recording from a 2023 Life Surge event shared with Mother Jones, Tebow urged the crowd to sign up for classes. “So I know that many of you today have probably signed up for classes, have probably signed up to take the next step,” he said. “I want to encourage you to finish that, to follow through on that commitment, to finish strong.”

Tim Tebow kneels and prays before the start of an NFL football game in 2011.Joe Mahoney/AP

Karen Neal is far from alone. In addition to the hundreds of negative reviews I read online and in the FTC complaints, I spoke to seven Life Surge customers who said they had bad experiences; their recollections mirrored the online reviews I had read. One of them was Cathy Luebke, who in 2024 attended a Life Surge event with her husband in Carmel, Indiana. There, she said, the couple was encouraged by a stock market investment demonstration. “They brought people up, and it was this simple method,” Luebke recalled. It looked “super easy, like anybody could do that. So, we kind of talked about it, and it was like, well, maybe it’d be a good idea.”

The couple decided to take the next step and signed up for the three-day event, held a few weeks later about an hour away. Luebke remembers the counselors urging attendees to buy into the courses that weekend, saying they were offering the best price. She and her husband noticed the sales pitch, but the Christian messages and the presence of trustworthy celebrities reassured them. “My husband and I are very strong Christians, so when you see a product like this, you’re like, ‘well, all right, it’s a hard sell, but, you know, they’re telling us all the good stuff,'” she told me. They decided to buy a $20,000 package of investment courses. Then, after consulting with one of the in-house financial counselors with whom they had been paired at the three-day class, they borrowed roughly $40,000 on interest-free credit cards so they would have enough money to invest—thus enabling them to put into practice the technique they would be learning. “Once you get into this stock trading,” Luebke remembers the counselors assuring her, “you can have this paid off in a year.”

“My husband and I are very strong Christians, so when you see a product like this, you’re like, ‘well, all right, it’s a hard sell, but, you know, they’re telling us all the good stuff.'”

After several weeks of hours-long courses, it was clear that the reality was far more time-consuming and complicated than the simple demonstration on stage had suggested. “I don’t think I ever expected an easy button,” she told me, “but I never knew the learning curve would have been that hard.” The Luebkes made no money in the stock market. Instead, they ended up taking out a home equity loan to pay off the remaining $20,000 on credit cards whose interest rates had soared to a variable rate of about 29 percent after the initial promotion had expired.

Neal’s recollections followed a similar arc. She recalled being encouraged to use the equity in her home to pay for a $13,000 SurgeU real estate course package. “We did take out a line of credit on our house, and we are having to use it right now to pay back the freaking credit card that we got with them,” she said. She and her husband never made any money in real estate—in part because they didn’t have the capital to buy properties. She complained to the company that she found the courses confusing and hadn’t made any money, and eventually, she said, Life Surge offered her a partial refund of about $5,000. Still, the whole endeavor, she told me, was “about a $15,000 mistake.” She takes most of the responsibility for not researching the program beforehand. But she also feels that the sales pressure deprived her and her husband of the “opportunity to go home, really pray about this, and seek God’s wisdom. And they don’t give you that.”

The lack of time to deliberate was a recurring theme. One former attendee, who didn’t want her name used, said she remembered a Life Surge counselor telling her that the devil was responsible for her doubts about buying the investment courses. When asked about this, Lorenzen wrote that “suggesting that someone’s decision not to purchase a Life Surge program is attributable to the devil would be absolutely unacceptable and contrary to the company’s policies, guidelines, and training.”

The five current and former employees I spoke with confirmed the pattern: Despite the company’s guidelines discouraging high-pressures sales and the use of faith, Life Surge staffers sometimes oversold the ease of the program and invoked Christianity to further persuade attendees to buy expensive packages. “It gets people thinking, if they can do it with no experience, I can do it,” the employee said. “I have this amount in my 401K at work, or I have this much in the bank. Why don’t I just sign up for these classes? And, you know, it’s for God’s kingdom.”

Former football quarterback Tim Tebow joins guests during a celebration of the 2025 NCAA men’s basketball Champion Florida Gators in the East Room of the White House in 2025.Chip Somodevilla/Getty

To understand Life Surge, it’s helpful to know about the history of its founder, Joe Johnson. He’s a serial entrepreneur who has been running variations on this business for decades—and sometimes encountering some difficulties along the way.

In the early 2000s, Johnson became involved in the leadership team of a motivational seminar company called Get Motivated which, like Life Surge, combined Christian messaging, pricy stock market and real estate investment courses, and celebrity speakers, including Rudy Giuliani, Colin Powell, and Laura Bush. In 2011, Johnson bought the company with the help of a $12 million loan from a student, Amy Wolfe, who had enrolled in the seminars—whom he never repaid, according to court documents (PDF).Meanwhile, in 2012, the Washington Speakers Bureau sued Get Motivated because it had failed to pay some of its speakers—to the tune of a combined $1.7 million. Get Motivated later struggled, Johnson defaulted on the loan, and the company folded. Lorenzen noted that Johnson and Wolfe have since reconciled, and that Life Surge “was developed years later by a much broader team, built around a distinctly Christian mission from the outset, and was not an evolution or rebrand of Get Motivated’s model.” Yet the formats of the two companies are almost identical: one-day motivational events, three-day investment courses, and training programs that can potentially cost tens of thousands of dollars.

Get Motivated was not the only one of Johnson’s projects that encountered legal problems. In 2013, he founded a company called Welfont Group, which last year became the target of a Department of Justice lawsuit over its “abusive” practices. According to the complaint, the company recruited property owners to sell real estate—a former assisted living facility and an industrial site, for example. Welfont would then sell these properties to charities (including one that Johnson founded) at bargain sale prices. After soliciting inflated property appraisals—which, the DOJ alleges, routinely quoted Johnson’s own marketing materials verbatim—he found charities to purchase the property at the low price, which would enable property sellers to take a charitable deduction based on the difference between the discounted sale price and the appraised value. The lawsuit accuses Johnson of making “as many as 190 abusive bargain sale transactions” resulting in tax losses of more than $46 million.”

Lorenzen noted that Johnson denied the government’s allegations, maintaining that “neither Welfont nor Welfont’s clients are responsible for providing the necessary support, since Welfont’s clients were not the beneficiaries of any tax deductions.” Ultimately the DOJ offered Johnson a settlement with no monetary damages or civil penalties and no admission of wrongdoing, though as part of the settlement Johnson agreed to an injunction that prohibited him from making these bargain sales in the future.

Another important influence on Life Surge appears to have been an investment education company called Online Trading Academy, where three top Life Surge executives—although not Johnson—previously worked. According to a 2020 complaint for permanent injunction filed against Online Trading Academy by the Federal Trade Commission, the company “routinely claimed that consumers who purchase OTA training programs can quickly attain proficiency in OTA’s strategy and deploy it to earn substantial income, regardless of their background and prior experience.” The FTC required the company’s founder and other executives to pay between $5 and $9.7 million, and to offer debt forgiveness to more than 31,000 consumers who purchased its training programs. The settlement also imposed a $362 million monetary judgment, though much of it was suspended because the defendants were unable to pay.

One of Life Surge’s most visible former Online Trading Academy employees is Steven Champa, who leads the presentations about SurgeU’s stock market classes. From 2009-2020, Champa served as the chief revenue officer and owner of the Atlanta franchise of Online Training Academy, an entity that wasn’t involved in the FTC complaint. Neither Champa nor Life Surge’s other Online Trading Academy alums were named in the FTC complaint. Champa describes himself on LinkedIn as “Disruptor. Follower of Jesus. Life Surge Main Stage Presenter. Keynote Speaker. National Radio Show Host. Stock Options Expert. Sales Trainer. Business Credit Guru. Culture Specialist.”

In Atlanta, Champa, a confident man in late middle age who wore a sports coat and spoke with a light Boston accent, strode back and forth across the stage, alternating between self-deprecating jokes and heartfelt testimony.

After thanking God for “this amazing day, incredible worship, awesome presenters,” Champa described how, when he was 40 years old and a penniless house framer, he found Jesus and learned investment tips from a guy he met at church. But it wasn’t until he started tithing 10 percent of his meager income that he struck it rich. “I go back to that date—that specific date when I threw that tithe check in the basket at church—and I can show you a timeline of financial miracles after financial miracles after financial miracles start happening in my life,” he said. “I promise, it was amazing to live through!” God, he said, was “giving us massive abundance and success, all because we honored him and we learned a skill that I never would have thought I could possibly learn. And I’m excited, because this morning…I’m able to equip you. I’m going to introduce you to how the markets work in a very simple way, so that you can start to utilize some of the additional resources for kingdom impact!”

“I want you to realize that learning to manage your own money is a skill set—that you can do it a few hours a month and not have to pay any of those fees to Wall Street. Keep all those fees in your own account and then utilize those resources for kingdom impact.”

Before imparting these tips, though, Champa warned the crowd about the dangers of 401Ks, which he said only lined the pockets of Wall Street fund managers. “The biggest lie that Wall Street has you convinced of is that you’re not smart enough to handle your own money,” he said. “I want you to realize that learning to manage your own money is a skill set—that you can do it a few hours a month and not have to pay any of those fees to Wall Street. Keep all those fees in your own account and then utilize those resources for kingdom impact.”

But how? Champa solicited volunteers from the audience to show just how easy Life Surge’s stock market method was. Gesturing to a line graph ticking up on the big screen behind the volunteers, he explained that the line represented the value of certain stocks. When the line entered the area labeled “demand zone,” they should buy; when it reached the “supply zone,” they should sell. The demonstration moved quickly, taking the volunteers through a few small losses and larger profits. When it was over, Champa announced that if it had been a real trading session, the volunteers would have made a net profit of $61,841 on a $100,000 investment. “What do you think of that?” he asked the audience. “Isn’t that awesome?” The crowd clapped and whooped. As a reward for their participation the volunteers would attend the three-day classes free of charge.

For everyone else, Life Surge was offering a special deal: $97 for the three-day session—which happened to be the same package and price the crowd had been saying yes to since that morning. “Life Surge put together a very special discounted tuition opportunity, but because it’s such limited venue size, if you want to take advantage of it, you need to do it now,” Champa said. “Ladies and gentlemen, it’s time to move!”

The crowd hummed. All around me, I could see people conferring with each other about whether to sign up. A big group from my section rushed to the sign-up tables en masse. Soon, there were lines to purchase the classes.

Lorenzen emphasized that the company doesn’t claim that attendees of the one-day or three-day events will get rich. “Investing, whether in real estate or the stock market, is a skill set built over time, and Life Surge doesn’t claim otherwise,” he wrote. The events and impact classes “are intentionally built as a starting point: attendees leave with a range of investing strategies, taught by experienced investors, and a foundation to build on.”

“Investing, whether in real estate or the stock market, is a skill set built over time, and Life Surge doesn’t claim otherwise.”

The attendees at the event I attended seemed eager to get started on that journey. Not only did most of my section rush to the tables that the staff had set up to sign up for the three-day courses, later in the day, after the presentation about the Life Surge real estate courses—in which students learn skills like how to find cheap properties to sell to investors—more of them went to the tables.

By the time Tebow spoke at the end of the day, almost everyone in my section had signed up for the classes. As Tebow wrapped up his speech, the worship music swelled as if we were attending a religious service and the preacher was reaching the crescendo of his sermon. His cadence quickened, and he began to shout. “You might have no idea what he is doing, but if you were just willing to humble yourself, get in God’s word, and to say yes when he prompts you—just say yes!” he said. “You have no idea what God will do.”

Read Life Surge’s full statement here.

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What World Is Melania Living In?

First Lady Melania Trump appeared on Fox and Friends on Wednesday to defend her husband’s second term despite his abysmal approval rating stemming, in part, from Americans’ anger at the state of the economy and Trump’s war with Iran.

“He works nonstop,” Melania told the hosts. “He has the most energy than anybody. He’s, from morning to evening, nonstop working.”

“That’s what we see. Definitely under-appreciated. Absolutely,” the Fox hosts agreed.

But most of the country seems to be seeing something else. In July, New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand pressed Defense Secretary Hegseth on why he was requesting more money for a war that Congress hasn’t approved of.

“So you’re essentially saying you’re asking for literally $1.5 trillion for a war that President Trump said he already won?”

A recent CNN poll shows that Trump is losing support from independents, with approval ratings hitting historic lows.

“Look at his net approval rating now with pure Independents. It’s -71 points. I mean, these are the deep depths of the ocean. You never see numbers like these.”

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As Trump Banned News Outlets, His Own Media Company’s Stock Shot Up

Something strange occurred recently: The stock price of Donald Trump’s beleaguered media company shot up.

What happened? While the cause isn’t entirely clear, the price spike does seem to correspond to the president’s announcement that he was banning three mainstream media outlets—CNN, MSNOW, and _Politico—_from the White House. It’s difficult to pinpoint exactly why a stock moves, and Trump Media and Technology Group’s price has been volatile since the company went public in March 2024. But Trump has long touted Truth Social—which is TMTG’s core product—as his major tool to reach the American people directly, without any filtering from legacy media giants. Not surprisingly, Trump first announced his ban of MSNOW, CNN, and Politico on Truth Social.

At the time of that announcement Friday afternoon, the TMTG’s stock price was hovering around $8.84, and that’s about where it was when markets closed for the weekend an hour later. Early Monday morning, before the market opened, Trump continued his Truth Social-based assault on White House reporters, insisting that he wasn’t attacking the free press and was instead going after the “FAKE NEWS, something that has grown like Cancer…and must be stopped, NOW!”

When the market bell rang shortly after, TMTG rose 21 cents, or about 2.3 percent. Around 10 a.m., the remaining television networks in the White House press pool announced that they would be refusing to provide live coverage of Trump’s events until he unbanned their colleagues. TMTG began rising again. By Tuesday evening, it reached a peak of $9.40, the highest it had been in weeks.

Trump is the largest TMTG shareholder, with an estimated 114 million shares. So the price jump early this week briefly represented a theoretical $64 million boost to the value of the president’s holding. While the stock price has started to settle back down again—it’s still slightly over $9—it seems likely the jolt was related to Trump’s attacks on independent outlets. After all, there has been no other obvious news in the past week that might explain the stock’s fluctuation. There rarely is, in fact, much good news for the company, which might explain why its stock has slid from a high of $79.38 back in March 2024 to its current price, a drop of more than 88 percent.

Much of the latest news for the company has been grim. Last month, for instance, an independent web traffic monitoring company estimated that Truth Social has experienced massive declines in traffic since 2025, arguably matching the declining popularity of the platform’s most notable user, Trump himself. That decline in traffic was partnered with news that in the second quarter of 2026, the company lost an estimated $238 million. That loss was largely due to the company’s heavy investment in bitcoin, an attempted pivot after it became clear that Truth Social’s ad revenue was unlikely to ever be much of an earner.

One potential bright spot for the company was the announcement that it would be selling API access—essentially nearly immediate access to its users’ Truth Social posts—for $100,000 a month. It’s a service primarily targeting high-speed traders, likely to help them make fast trades when Trump announces market-moving news from his account.

But even that isn’t a sure hit. The company says at least 10 customers have signed up—welcome revenue, but still a fraction of the billions earned by social media rivals like Meta and Elon Musk’s X. And on Monday, the city of San Francisco filed a lawsuit asking California state courts to block the API scheme, claiming it violates a number of statutes designed to prevent insider trading. That lawsuit joins another suit, filed in federal court last month, which claims the service violates the First and Fifth Amendments and amounts to selling access.

In response to the boycott by major television outlets, the White House announced on Monday that it was launching its own streaming service to provide access to Trump’s public appearances: TrumpTV. But notably, the service won’t be hosted on TMTG’s own video streaming service, Truth+, but will instead appear on YouTube.

Missed President Trump's speech at the UN? Missed the historic Greenland deal signing?

Tune in to TRUMP TV at 12:05 PM EST to watch in full.

https://t.co/imdxRD3HOx pic.twitter.com/spwhRyAivz

— The White House (@WhiteHouse) September 22, 2026

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ICE Wiped Thousands of People From Its Database. Families Are Paying the Price.

On September 17, immigration attorney Rachel Marandett went looking for a man held by ICE in the agency’s detainee locator.

Searching his name returned zero results—and Marandett, an attorney with the American Friends Service Committee, began to worry he’d been deported without anyone noticing.

“He was missing, and I panicked,” Marandett said. “I sent a frantic email.”

Through other channels, she was eventually able to learn that he had not been sent out of the country. In fact, he hadn’t been moved at all. His name was just missing.

That man is one of thousands of detained immigrants with “Final Orders of Removal” whose records have been hidden or deleted from ICE’s tracking system, leaving families and lawyers unable to locate them.

As the Associated Press reported on Monday, those records began to vanish September 15. Thousands of people in ICE custody are likely affected.

ICE disputes the claim. “ICE does not ‘disappear’ people. This is a ridiculous lie that the media is peddling to demonize ICE law enforcement,” an ICE representative told Mother Jones via email. “Additionally, Illegal [sic] aliens in detention have opportunities to communicate with their family members and lawyers.”

“This puts a wall between attorneys and their clients, and produces tremendous anxiety for families.”

But that communication can’t happen unless family members and lawyers know where the person is being held. And obstacles to communication can have life-altering consequences—particularly for those whose orders of removal have been issued in absentia, or because they missed a court date.

“Often they didn’t even know the court hearing happened,” Marandett said. If lawyers find out in time, they can file a motion to reopen a person’s case based on lack of notice.

ICE “is working rapidly overtime,” as the agency’s representative put it in their statement, to deport as many people as possible. And being unable to locate a client can hamstring a lawyer’s last-minute appeal.

One notable absence from ICE’s Detainee Locator is Wilber Garcés Pérez, the Venezuelan delivery worker shot by a federal agent in Texas on Sunday. Garcés was taken into custody, hastily discharged from the hospital with a bullet still lodged in the back of his neck, and moved to detention within hours of being shot. He was then, according to the Washington Post, left on the floor of the South Texas ICE Processing Center with the bullet still in his spine.

Meanwhile, Garcés’ lawyers and family were unable to track him down. Eventually, attorney Kate Lincoln-Goldfinch was able to get in contact with him, she said in a series of social media posts. His deportation order, Lincoln-Goldfinch said, was issued in error when Garcés, who reportedly has a work permit, missed an immigration court hearing and was ordered removed in absentia—after the court sent notice of the hearing to the wrong address.

A deportation order that was issued in absentia because the immigration court is so incompetent they sent a hearing notice to the wrong address.

I see this all the time in my practice and it’s a mistake we can easily correct. It does not justify shooting people in the street.… https://t.co/yDMZFQcdhd

— Kate Lincoln-Goldfinch (@AttorneyKateLG) September 21, 2026

“I see this all the time in my practice and it’s a mistake we can easily correct,” Lincoln-Goldfinch wrote. “It does not justify shooting people in the street.”

Other groups of people who technically have final orders of removal—but are not, in practice, about to be deported—may also have their names removed from the Detainee Locator. That includes immigrants who have open circuit court appeals, as well as those who were granted withholding of removal under the United Nations Convention Against Torture and can’t be deported to their home countries. It may also include some people in active habeas corpus litigation, in which a lawyer must provide proof of where their client is. Usually, the best proof of where Marandett’s clients are being held is a screenshot of the Detainee Locator. Without it, “you may literally not know what district to file a lawsuit in.”

“Now it’s like we’re dealing with these same obstacles, but with a blindfold on.”

There’s little apparent consistency in who disappears. Immigration attorney Stefi Bastiaensz says that one of her clients, who came to the US fleeing political persecution in Nicaragua and has been held in New Jersey’s notorious Delaney Hall detention center for nearly a year, is technically under a final order of removal while his case moves through the appeals process. His profile, however, still shows up on Detainee Locator.

“What makes my firm panic is whether ICE is looking underneath the final order,” Bastiaensz said. A pending habeas petition, or other relief, may not matter to the agency.

There are other ways lawyers can find their clients—immigration lawyer Pedro Chavez posted some examples in an Instagram video—but none are as efficient as the detainee locator. And families can be left with very few tactics beyond waiting for a phone call from their loved one or contacting their member of Congress. “Regardless of what’s going on, this puts a wall between attorneys and their clients, and produces tremendous anxiety for families,” Bastiaensz said.

Obstacles to client communication aren’t exactly new to immigration lawyers. But “now it’s like we’re dealing with these same obstacles, but with a blindfold on,” Marandett said.

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JD Vance Is Coming For Your Obamacare

The Trump administration is removing about 760,000 people from Affordable Care Act coverage, Vice President JD Vance and Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services administrator Mehmet Oz announced Tuesday, citing alleged fraud—and saying the people being kicked off their health care aren’t eligible, don’t know they have it, or simply don’t exist.

“We call them phantoms, because we believe most of them either don’t exist or had no idea they had coverage,” Oz said during a press conference first reported on by The Wall Street Journal.

“These are not real people. We’re not paying insurance for nonexistent ghosts,” Oz added. One of his justifications for that assertion is that the individuals being kicked off their health insurance have never filed a claim—that is, while they are insured, they’ve never actually gone to the doctor.

The idea of the “phantom patient” hoarding Affordable Care Act cash is a persistent one in GOP rhetoric. The Paragon Health Institute, a Republican think tank, has for years pushed the idea that all patients who don’t use their coverage—exactly the kind of patients insurers want!—must necessarily be fraudulent “phantom” enrollees. But as Cynthia Cox of the health policy research group KFF said in 2025, the real story is more complicated.

“We’re not trying to argue there is no fraud. It’s a real thing. But the question is, how big of a scale is this problem?” Cox said at the time. “Just suggesting that anyone who’s not using health care is a fraudulent enrollee—that’s not true. Plenty of people don’t use health care.” Younger and healthier people, in particular, are more likely than others to acquire health insurance—especially if they’re able to access cheap plans—and then not actually use it unless they need to, which they very well might not.

The universal health care advocacy group Protect Our Care called Vance and Oz’s health care fraud task force a “smokescreen” for a push to cull actual coverage from actual people.

“This so-called task force is nothing more than a bullshit distraction—a political stunt designed to throw even more people off their coverage while pretending to save taxpayers’ money,” said Protect Our Care president Brad Woodhouse. “At a time when millions of Americans are already losing coverage and facing skyrocketing costs, Vance and this administration are making the crisis exponentially worse.”

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Trump to Ballroom Architect: “I Am the Code”

“I am the code.”

So said President Trump to the first architect working on the new White House ballroom being built on the ruins of the building’s East Wing, scoffing at his concerns over possible fire, health**,** and safety violations. The architect, James McCrery II, left the construction project last October after Trump repeatedly ignored his warnings in favor of a preliminary design the president preferred, according to a Washington Post investigation released Wednesday.

Building codes, the president claimed, don’t apply to the White House. That’s wrong. Federal agencies are required to follow federal standards unless it would “adversely affect national security,” as the Post reports and as multiple items of congressional legislation establish. The president’s argument: The Executive Residence, the president’s home and workplace in the White House, is not bound by the same rules as the rest of the White House.

The first architect of the White House ballroom resigned after warning repeatedly that Trump was insisting on designs that violated fire and safety codes, the Washington Post reports.“I am the code,” Trump said www.washingtonpost.com/investigatio…

— Phil Lewis (@phillewis.bsky.social) 2026-09-23T12:24:53.546Z

As funny as it is to imagine Trump delivering the line like Sylvester Stallone declaring “I am the law!” in Judge Dredd, the president’s reported tunnel vision with respect to the ballroom is one more episode in a series of ego-fueled beautification endeavors costing taxpayers millions of dollars: the Reflecting Pool, the Triumphal Arch—the list goes on.

And as I wrote back in June, many of these construction projects seem to follow a similar playbook: They inevitably go awry, exhibit the building version of Mar-a-Lago face, or lead to unfulfilled promises by Trump (often all of the above). After some private dealing—including a $500-million no-bid contract—a federal appeals court ruling that the administration must stop construction due to a lack of congressional approval, and now a reportedly sweeping disregard for health and safety in a building supposedly required for “national security,” the ballroom may become the shining example.

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Trump-Appointed Judge Smacks Down EPA’s Termination of Clean Energy Grants

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

A federal judge has declared that the Trump administration unlawfully terminated $7 billion in grant funding for clean energy programs in disadvantaged communities.

The Solar for All (SFA) program, established during the Biden administration as part of the Inflation Reduction Act, provided dozens of grants for states, municipalities, tribes and nonprofits designed to reduce electric bills, create jobs, and address the greenhouse gas emissions warming the global climate.

“They don’t have any excuse for sitting on this money anymore..”

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) canceled the program after President Donald Trump’s inauguration in 2025. The Conservation Law Foundation, Southern Environmental Law Center, Lawyers for Good Government, and Lawyers’ Committee for Rhode Island sued in the US District Court for the District of Rhode Island on behalf of workers, businesses, nonprofits, and individuals harmed by the withdrawal of funding.

“Congress’s clear intent was that EPA continue to administer the already obligated SFA grants,” Judge Mary S. McElroy, a Trump appointee, wrote in her ruling, issued Friday. “Defendants acted contrary to this intent, and with no other statutory authority, when they terminated the SFA program.”

The ruling means the EPA will have to release the funding, said Nick Torrey, senior attorney at the Southern Environmental Law Center.

“We have seen this administration try to resist and appeal and fight,” Torrey said. “They don’t have any excuse for sitting on this money anymore. They have to get this money out.”

The One Big Beautiful Bill repealed “unobligated” funding aimed at greenhouse gas emissions—but this funding wasn’t unobligated.

The EPA argued the court lacked jurisdiction over the plaintiffs’ claims and that the claims were meritless. The federal agency told Inside Climate News it is “reviewing the decision and considering options for appeal.”

The EPA awarded the grants in 2024 and said at the time the program would save families $350 million a year on electricity bills and support 200,000 jobs and workforce training opportunities. Among the recipients was a coalition of nonprofits in Florida, which received $156.1 million to create new and expand existing solar programs for low-income communities in the state.

The program was canceled before much of the funding could reach communities, according to the groups involved in the litigation. In 2025 Congress approved the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which repealed unobligated funding aimed at greenhouse gas emissions. The groups argued the program’s termination was unlawful because the funding was already obligated.

The lawsuit was filed on behalf not of grant recipients but what the litigation described as “downstream beneficiaries.” Among them were solar companies that invested in personnel and equipment based on funding awarded to the states of Georgia and Pennsylvania, a labor union that helped develop an implementation plan in Rhode Island, and a nonprofit that received a sub-award from a grant to the state of Indiana.

Grant recipients filed two subsequent lawsuits against the EPA. State grant recipients also filed challenges in the Court of Federal Claims.

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Newsom Vetoes Bill That Would Ban Extraditions for Abortion and Gender-Affirming Care

When Louisiana authorities tried to extradite a California doctor last winter for sending abortion pills to women in their state, Gov. Gavin Newsom pushed back—hard. “We will not allow extremist politicians from other states to reach into California and try to punish doctors based on allegations that they provided reproductive health care services,” Newsom declared. “Not today. Not ever.”

Yet nine months after that ringing defense of abortion providers and reproductive freedom, Newsom has blocked Democratic efforts to enshrine the same anti-extradition policy into state law.

The soon-to-be-ex-governor has vetoed a bill that would have prohibited future governors from handing over abortion providers, helpers**,** and patients to red states for criminal prosecution. The bill also barred extraditions involving transgender care. Newsom’s decision was “incredibly disappointing” and “certainly not what we were expecting,” says Pavitra Abraham, director of state campaigns for Reproductive Freedom for All.

The veto of AB 2164—also known as the Care Without Fear Act—has alarmed reproductive rights advocates around the country because of California’s critical role in preserving abortion access since the Dobbs decision overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022. The state is home to telemedicine providers, mail-order pharmacies, research organizations, and other groups that have helped keep abortion pills flowing even to the most conservative parts of the US.

Much of that abortion infrastructure is built on so-called shield laws that protect reproductive care across state lines. California has some of the most robust shield laws in the US, protecting providers, helpers and patients from out-of-state legal action over abortion and gender-affirming care.

Newsom signed California’s first shield laws in 2022 and has consistently backed legislation to strengthen those safeguards. But he has resisted efforts to codify one key protection: a ban on extraditions in criminal cases, like the one Louisiana authorities sought earlier this year. Instead, Newsom argues that decisions on extradition should remain an “executive function”—a prerogative of the governor rather than the legislature, preferably addressed by executive order rather than written into state law.

That distinction doesn’t matter much as long as California has a chief executive who supports reproductive rights. But it could be disastrous if a Republican won the governorship.

“Legislatively enacted laws are just on firmer footing when there are political changes at the executive level,” says Amanda Barrow, senior staff attorney at the UCLA Law Center on Reproductive Health, Law, and Policy. An executive order of the type Newsom has used to fight extraditions “could be revoked by a governor who is anti-abortion or anti–gender-affirming care.”

So, with Newsom winding up his second term as governor and widely expected to run for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2028, California reproductive advocates made a ban on extradition one of their top legislative priorities for 2026. Eighteen other Democratic-run states have enacted laws prohibiting extradition of abortion providers and patients.

“California cannot call itself a safe haven for reproductive freedom while leaving abortion providers just one election away from extradition.”

AB 2164 would have gone even further than most of those statutes, extending California’s shield-law protections to providers and helpers based in other blue states where abortion and gender-affirming care are legal.

Supporters seemed confident that Newsom would sign the bill into law. After all, this is the same governor who, when faced with President Donald Trump’s extraordinary effort to gerrymander red-state congressional seats to rig the midterm elections, responded with his own redistricting plan, in the form of last year’s Proposition 50. Four years ago, he signed a law making California the first sanctuary state for trans minors seeking medical care.

But instead, Newsom vetoed the bill, announcing the move in a Sunday legislative update. In his statement explaining his decision, Newsom pointed to his strong record on reproductive health issues, including privacy. But he said he was “troubled by the precedent that would be set if an outgoing administration agreed with the Legislature to erode the executive authority of an incoming Governor based on their shared policy preferences, regardless of how righteous and well-intentioned those actions may be.”

That stance “is cold comfort to Californians living and working in the real world post-Dobbs,” Lizzy Hinkley, legal director of Abortion Coalition for Telemedicine, the bill’s lead sponsor, responded in a statement. “A high-brow, academic justification for refusing to codify legal protections only reveals an ignorance for the lived reality of patients and providers—and does nothing to help them.”

Newsom’s veto—which some social media commenters criticized as pandering to conservatives ahead of a presidential run—also seems to reflect the widespread assumption that Democrat Xavier Becerra is a shoo-in to defeat Republican Steve Hilton in November’s gubernatorial election. Becerra—a former California attorney general and President Biden’s secretary of Health and Human Services in the aftermath of the Dobbs decision—has been a staunch defender of reproductive and trans care, while Hilton has said he would have extradited California abortion doctor Rémy Coeytaux to Louisiana as requested in January. Hilton later walked back that position. Texas and Louisiana attorneys general have also targeted telehealth abortion providers in New York and Delaware.

But Becerra’s widening lead in the polls doesn’t mean a ban on extraditions isn’t needed, the bill’s supporters counter. “That mentality of people saying, ‘It’s going to be fine, a Democrat’s going to win, it’s California, blah blah blah’—it’s just really dangerous,” Abraham says.

“California cannot call itself a safe haven for reproductive freedom,” she adds, “while leaving abortion providers just one election away from extradition.”

Newsom still has not acted on several other important reproductive-related bills this session, including AB 2540, which would make medication abortion available to community college students in the state, and AB 1973, which would expand the ability of non-physicians to provide abortion care.

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Loyalists Only, Please. Why Trump Surrounds Himself With True Believers

President Donald Trump’s second term has often felt like an exercise in mass distraction. As soon as he’s directing people to pay attention to one issue like the Iran war or immigration, he’s already moved on to false claims about widespread voter fraud, taking over Greenland, or building a massive arch in the nation’s capital.

In the new book Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump, New York Times reporter and co-author Jonathan Swan has tried to make sense of Trump’s unprecedented tenure by bringing readers inside the room where major decisions happen. And Swan says the loyalists Trump has surrounded himself with in his second term have made Trump’s overwhelming and exhausting presidency possible.

“The word ‘loyalty’ almost isn’t strong enough to describe the bond that some of them have with him,” Swan says. “It’s a belief that this man is a figure of destiny, a figure of history, that God has put him here to save the country.”

On this week’s More To The Story, Swan talks about the immense challenges of covering the Trump administration, how the Jeffrey Epstein scandal sent the White House into crisis mode behind closed doors, and why he’s not eager to write another book about the president anytime soon.

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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Trump Threatens to “Annihilate” Iran and Its People in UN Address

President Trump’s rambling, combative speech Tuesday to the United Nations General Assembly saw him return to his most serious quagmire yet—the war in Iran—telling world leaders that he was considering completely destroying the country as a means to end the conflict he launched alongside Israel in February.

“Do I annihilate the Islamic Republic and do it quickly, never giving them a chance to kill and destroy people and countries again? Do I drive them into hell with no chance of survival and no hope of future greatness or generations?” Trump pondered aloud, claiming thatIran’s leadership had rejected multiple peace deals with the US.

He said little about the terms of those offers—and nothing about the US and Israel’s explosive role in the Middle East, from Iran and the Gulf to Gaza and beyond.

The Center for International Policy’s Matt Duss, a former Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) foreign policy adviser, said in a statement that Trump’s threats were “dangerously unhinged” and “must be unequivocally rejected.”

“Such rhetoric is not merely reckless, it is a criminal threat of genocide against an entire nation,” Duss wrote. “U.S. lawmakers and U.S. partners around the world should condemn Trump’s remarks.”

The president again framed his demand as centering on Iran’s nuclear program, despite offering up a shifting litany of goals and terms on which he’d end the war across the last seven months,and implied that scorched earth was the only alternative. But American operations in Iran have brought an uncompromising government to power, limited the Iranian president’s power to enforce any deal, and made nuclear containment on the level of the Obama administration’s Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action virtually impossible for the indefinite future.

But it’s the tens of thousands of people who have been killed since the first US-Israeli strikes in February, and the communities whose essentials like food, water, and energy continue to be destroyed, who have faced the worst consequences—and who didn’t earn a mention in Trump’s speech beyond the threat of complete destruction.

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