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

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

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

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

The Smirnov saga has the feel of a spy thriller.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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FCC Chair Threatens to Revoke Broadcast Licenses Over Iran War Coverage

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

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

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

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

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

— Brendan Carr (@BrendanCarrFCC) March 14, 2026

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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The Racist Hoax That Changed Boston

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The president made no mention of fertilizer—or food.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Got it, Coach.

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

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

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

And he’s still going:

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

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

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

Really clears things up.

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Utah Moves to Rein In Its Runaway Private Adoption Industry

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Madam Secretary, I can take things from here.

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

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

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

But a pizza conspiracy? Not so much.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

On this point, the evidence is incontrovertible.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Trump’s New Nuclear Nightmare in Iran

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Fake War Videos Are Degrading Our Trust in Reality

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Thanks to Trump, Petro-Imperialism Is Back

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

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

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

What is the Strait of Hormuz?

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

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

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

Why is the Strait of Hormuz bottled up right now?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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A Dumb War Makes Trumpworld Dumber

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

— Curtis Yarvin (@curtis_yarvin) March 8, 2026

There is so much inanity in those three sentences.

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

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

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

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

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) March 8, 2026

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

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

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

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

BARTIROMO: Meaning what?

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

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) March 8, 2026

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

— PatriotTakes (@patriottakes) March 8, 2026

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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How RFK Jr. is Dismantling America’s Health Policies

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

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

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

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

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

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How Taxpayers Are Still Getting Screwed on Kristi Noem’s Big Beautiful Jet

Kristi Noem is out as Homeland Security Secretary, but a luxury 737 she has traveled on remains in government hands. That plane, reportedly dubbed the “Big, Beautiful Jet” by DHS staffers, has been quietly leased to the department by a company linked to William Walters, a former State Department official who donated thousands of dollars to a pro-Noem political action committee. Walters owns a constellation of businesses that—despite a dearth of prior experience working for the government—won lucrative contracts with Noem’s DHS over the past year.

One Walters company is selling half a dozen planes to DHS, in a deal that has raised questions within the department and on Capitol Hill about the cost of the aircraft. Another firm owned by Walters landed a contract worth up to $915 million last year, through a procurement process that one DHS official said was flawed and “created an appearance of favoritism,” according to previously unreported court documents.

President Donald Trump fired Noem Thursday, announcing via social media that Sen. Markwayne Mullin (R-Okla.) will replace her at the end of the month. But her exit doesn’t undo the massive deals that DHS struck with a vast array of contractors, many with close ties to Noem, her adviser Corey Lewandowski, and other top administration officials.

The 737 jet gained extensive attention in February when the Wall Street Journal reported that Noem and Lewandowski were traveling together on the plane. DHS is reportedly using money meant for the Trump administration’s self-deportations program to lease the plane and is in the process of buying it outright for $70 million. The taxpayer-funded aircraft, Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) noted Wednesday, has “a queen-size bedroom” and a “deluxe” bar. “A big, beautiful jet paid for by the Big, Beautiful Bill,” Raskin remarked.

“A big, beautiful jet paid for by the Big, Beautiful Bill.”

During the same congressional oversight hearing, Rep. Sydney Kamlager-Dove (D-Calif.) referenced “reports of a romantic relationship between” Noem and Lewandowski and asked Noem if she had “sexual relations” with Lewandowski during her time at DHS. Noem called the allegation “tabloid garbage”; she and Lewandowski, who are both married, have previously denied being romantically involved with each other. Public tittering over the situation reached a crescendo last month when the Daily Show dubbed the 737 “a taxpayer-funded fuck plane,” though no evidence has emerged of anyone actually having sex on the jet.

Noem told lawmakers last week that she had only been on the plane “once.” And she said the plane was being used by other administration officials, though she didn’t name them.

On Friday, Axios reported that Noem and Lewandowski loaned the jet to First Lady Melania Trump, “who used it on several flights from D.C. to New York.” The plane last flew from DC to New York City on March 1, and Melania Trump spoke to the United Nations Security Council the next day. The White House did not respond to questions about the First Lady’s reported use of the plane.

Noem has also asserted that the plane is being “refurbished” to transport detainees.

That claim has drawn derision. A sales brochure says the aircraft—a Boeing BBJ Max 8—“caters to the most discerning of travelers, offering an exquisite flying experience like no other,” and notes that in addition to the bedroom and bar, it includes showers, a kitchen, and four large flat-screen TVs. That would create an unusually sumptuous set-up for deportees who DHS has sometimes shackled on flights.

“What kind of deportee justifies being flown out of the country in a luxury jet with a bedroom?” Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) asked Noem last Tuesday.

Typical 737 Max 8s have between 162 and 178 seats, according to Boeing’s technical specs. The brochure for the 737 Max 8 Boeing Business Jet that Noem has used says the aircraft has a passenger capacity of just 17 people. The department has said it plans to add seats by eliminating “at least one of the bedrooms.” On the evening of March 4, after Noem testified before the Senate, the luxury jet flew from New York City to Lake Charles, Louisiana, where there is a facility for modifying jets.

“Wouldn’t it have been cheaper just to buy a deportation plane in the first place?” Raskin asked at the House hearing. “It’s like buying a Rolls-Royce to turn into a Metro bus.”

Other details suggest the plane is primarily intended for high-level passengers. Last year, it received a new registration number: N471US—note the 47. (The Federal Aviation Administration allows aircraft owners to pick their own registration number.) The plane also got a new paint job and design scheme similar to the 47th president’s proposal for Air Force One.

DHS did not respond to a question about when Noem or other DHS employees used the plane. But Mother Jones and Project On Government Oversight found that the jet flew to Amman, Jordan, on December 15 and left the next day. Noem was in Amman meeting with Jordan’s King Abdullah II on December 16, according to his office.

The plane flew to Bermuda on January 14 and to the Dominican Republic on January 15. Other flight records since December show it going to the closest major airport to Mar-a-Lago, and to various other domestic locations. It’s not clear if Noem or any other administration officials were on those flights.

Walters—the former head of a State Department unit called the Bureau of Medical Services that helped to evacuate personnel in emergencies—left government service in 2021 and later emerged as a vocal Trump supporter. In the fall of 2024, he spoke out in support of Trump’s immigration agenda and received an award from the America First Policy Institute, a pro-Trump think tank.

After leaving the State Department, Walters launched a series of businesses. Following Trump’s election, his firms began seeking federal contracts to help implement the president’s plan to deport millions of people.

“We have serious concerns about the cost to the American taxpayer.”

Those contractors all seem to be headquartered in a few suites alongside a cluster of other related firms in a nondescript office building in Arlington, Virginia, across the Potomac River from Washington. We found over two dozen companies there that list either Walters or two of his former State Department colleagues—with whom he now works—as registered agents.

One company in that building is Valkyrie Aviation Holdings Group, which owns the luxury 737 being leased to DHS. That firm, incorporated last August in Delaware, does not list its ownership or the people who run it. But the FAA’s website shows that the company shares an office suite with Soterex Financial Services, a Walters-run company. Journalist Gillian Brockell previously reported that Valkyrie Aviation is in the same building as the Walters-linked companies, among other ties.

None of the companies responded to queries, and we were unable to access the offices when we attempted to visit the Arlington building.

DHS agreed to pay one of the firms in the building, Daedalus Aviation, $140 million for six 737s, the Washington Post reported in December. Though legally separate from Valkyrie, Daedalus, according to its website, is hiring pilots and a mechanic to work on a 737 MAX 8—specifically one designated “BBJ,” for Boeing Business Jet. In other words, a luxury plane that matches the description of the one owned by Valkyrie. The solicitation contains no suggestion the plane will be used for deportations. Instead, Daedalus states that the pilots will be “executing global flight operations on behalf of a senior executive or government official.”

Federal Aviation Administration records show Daedalus acquiring five 737s to date, none of which is a Max 8 Boeing Business Jet, like the one owned by Valkyrie. Tricia McLaughlin, a former DHS spokeswoman, has claimed that the planes being acquired via Daedalus will save the government money, in part by allowing “more efficient flight patterns.”

But DHS has not provided details to bolster that claim, which has drawn broad skepticism.

“For months, we’ve requested a briefing from DHS about its purchase of these aircraft because we have serious concerns about the cost to the American taxpayer,” Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.), the ranking member of the House Homeland Security Committee, said in a statement. “DHS has refused to provide basic transparency and continues to stonewall the Committee.”

An agency official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, raised concerns about the cost of the planes. That official said that former acting DHS Under Secretary Christopher Pratt was involved in arranging to buy the jets. Pratt—who overlapped with Walters at the State Department—recently left DHS, according to two DHS officials. Pratt did not respond to inquiries.

Two other companies linked to Walters appear to have quietly provided even more planes to DHS. Vigilant Aviation Holdings and Transnational Aviation Holdings—which were both registered in Delaware on the same day as Valkyrie—own business-class jets operated by DHS, according to flight tracking data. Both of these Gulfstream G650 jets have Trump-themed tail numbers that are strikingly similar to that of the luxury 737: N472US and N473US. FAA records show Transnational has the same business address and suite number as Daedalus Aviation. And the tail number for the Gulfstream jet owned by Vigilant was initially registered to Valkyrie, according to the FAA. As with its luxury 737 job posting, Daedalus is seeking a pilot to fly a Gulfstream 650 for a senior government official.

Walters’ biggest piece of DHS business appears to have come through a contract the department awarded last year to yet another firm he owns. That company, Salus Worldwide Solutions, is also located at the Arlington address, though apparently one floor up from Valkyrie. Under that contract, which is worth up to $915 million, Salus is supposed to arrange free flights for immigrants who agree to self-deport; it is also tasked with processing $1,000 exit bonuses for individuals and $2,500 stipends for unaccompanied minor children who take part in the program. Additionally, the company provides DHS with “diplomatic engagement” support to boost work by foreign governments to persuade their citizens to leave the United States.

Mother Jones and the Project On Government Oversight previously reported that DHS awarded the contract to Salus through a “limited competition,” following extensive contacts between company employees and top DHS officials, among them Pratt.

“I can’t think of any legitimate reason there could not have been a full and open competition for this work.”

A rival contractor, CSI Aviation, sued the federal government last August over the Salus deal, calling the award “a sham competition with a predetermined outcome.” CSI’s suit notes that Salus had no previous record of contracting directly with the federal government—though a court filing states that a $113 million State Department subcontract Salus was awarded a few weeks after Trump’s inauguration “was a significant factor in DHS’s award decision.”

In a December court filing, federal officials, even as they opposed CSI’s lawsuit, made striking admissions about flaws in the procurement process.

The government said that Salus won its DHS contract after contacting the department with an unsolicited proposal to provide services on January 23, 2025, just days after Trump’s inauguration. That’s a legal but unusual inversion of a standard solicitation, in which the government determines a need and then seeks bids from contractors to fill it. Salus’ pitch, according to DHS’s own account, led to extensive contacts between DHS and company officials about a potential contract.

A DHS contracting officer found that Salus had “appeared” to shape the government’s requirements for the contract that the firm was trying to win, which suggested “biased ground rules,” the filing says. The officer, according to the filing, also found that DHS officials “shared high-level budget and task information with Salus that was not available to the public, suggesting an unequal access to information.” All of this “created an appearance of favoritism toward Salus,” the officer found.

But, according to the court filing, the contracting officer recommended waiving restrictions meant to prevent conflicts of interest and the appearance of impropriety, citing steps DHS said it took to mitigate Salus’ advantages. A higher-level official concurred, noting the contract’s supposed urgency and “national security considerations.” And then Salus got the contract.

“I can’t think of any legitimate reason there could not have been a full and open competition for this work, and it’s not as though the government hasn’t contracted for charter flights before,” said Don Fox, a former acting head and general counsel of the Office of Government Ethics.

Noem and other DHS officials have touted their voluntary deportation program, which they call Project Homecoming, as a success. DHS said last fall that “tens of thousands of illegal aliens” had used the Customs and Border Protection app to assist with self-deportation.

However another court document in the Salus case suggests the program is failing to meet the administration’s hopes. Taundria Cappel, Salus’ chief financial officer, revealed that, as of December 1, Salus had paid out more than 17,000 stipends to voluntary deportees and had contacted tens of thousands of immigrants. But Cappel said the company, since receiving the contract in May 2025, had provided just “9 chartered aircraft flights” which supported “917 voluntary departures.” At that pace, Salus’ performance will fall far short of what, according to a CSI court filing, was the department’s stated goal of “1480 charter flights over three years.” Neither Cappel nor DHS responded to questions about those figures.

Other Walters-run companies are also involved in DHS’s effort to facilitate self-deportations. Soterex Financial Services, the company that shares an office suite with Valkyrie, appears to be handling payments made to people who agree to voluntarily deport, according to payment records on DHS letterhead listing Soterex as the sender reviewed by Mother Jones and POGO.

Soterex, which was formed just days after Trump announced the launch of Project Homecoming, does not itself appear to hold a federal contract. That suggests the company is working under the contract held by Salus, in effect as a subcontractor for a company run by the same person. A government procurement website does not show any federal contracts or subcontracts held by Soterex Financial, although subcontracting data is often missing.

Noem told lawmakers last week that neither she nor other political appointees at the department have influenced who receives contracts. But Noem has also touted a policy under which her office must personally approve any significant DHS spending, including contracts. In Senate testimony last Tuesday, Noem said she had personally evaluated all contracts worth more than $5 million. That gave her an undeniable role in the department’s procurement decisions.

And there’s another link she has to Walters.

In October 2024, Walters donated $10,000 to a political action committee tied to Noem, who at the time was the governor of South Dakota and widely seen as angling for a cabinet post if Trump won. That super PAC, American Resolve, is part of a network of groups that support Noem. Another, American Resolve Policy Fund, a nonprofit, paid Noem’s personal company $137,842 that year for “fundraising consulting,” the watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington reported in January. American Resolve Policy Fund also paid $265,500 to a Lewandowski company, according to its tax filing.

Noem did not reveal those payments to her South Dakota constituents or in the financial disclosure form she filed after her nomination as DHS secretary. They remained secret until Propublica last year reported that the group had paid Noem $80,000 in 2023.

Noem was not asked about those payments at last week’s hearings. Much of her testimony involved defending her statements falsely accusing Alex Pretti and Renee Good, Minneapolis residents killed by DHS agents, of domestic terrorism. (Prior to her firing last week, POGO called for Noem’s removal, in part because of how she responded to the shootings of Pretti and Good.)

Noem also said about 650 DHS agents remain in the Twin Cities “to get to the bottom” of widespread social services fraud in Minnesota. Noem has suggested DHS would look into public officials there who, she implied, had profited from their positions. Just after Good’s death, Noem said she was sending more agents to Minneapolis “to uncover the true corruption and theft that has happened.”

This story was reported with POGO Investigates, the news reporting division of the Project On Government Oversight.

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Trump’s Wars Are Splintering My Home Town Ahead of the 2026 Midterms

On Monday evening, as his administration escalated air strikes on Iran, President Donald Trump openly mused about his next moves on Cuba. “It may be a friendly takeover, it may not be a friendly takeover,” he said. “It wouldn’t matter because they’re really down to, as they say , fumes. They have no energy, they have no money.” He told CNN last week that “Cuba is gonna fall pretty soon.”

From the capture of Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro to a blockade on oil shipments to Cuba, President Donald Trump’s efforts to reshape Latin America are in full swing—impacting millions of lives. People in Venezuela continue living under a repressive government now supplying oil to the US. Meanwhile, Cuba’s healthcare system has been strangled by the US-orchestrated fuel crisis there. The fear across the region is being fanned by a US arsenal aimed at killing what Trump has labeled drug dealers.

Across the globe, protestors have condemned the administration’s recent actions in Venezuela and Cuba. But as my new three-part video series for Mother Jones reveals, I saw a different story unfolding in my hometown.

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Miami is home to the country’s largest Venezuelan community, which largely wanted Maduro gone, according to recent polling. It’s also home to a Cuban community that I was born into and helped raise me—one that has historically encouraged US-backed regime change.

At the same time, these communities—which had organized together to shape US foreign policy toward Latin America—now share another concern: the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown. The White House has targeted Venezuelan migrants at seemingly every turn, from revoking their temporary protected status to trying to use a wartime deportation law against them. And the administration is now repatriating Cuban migrants, who had long benefitted from uniquely generous immigration policy, in record numbers.

“If Cubans fall off the Republican bandwagon and the Democrats take the opportunity to do something about it, then you have a chance to shift things,” said Guillermo Grenier, the lead researcher behind Florida International University’s Cuba poll.

But the longheld assumption that younger Cubans would drive that shift has gone unfulfilled. In fact, polling shows that younger Cubans have swung rightward. It’s a reality that’s difficult to square with my personal experience.

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When I turned 16, I didn’t get my driver’s license. This enraged my grandfather, who worked for decades as a driving instructor and bus driver. It also delighted him, because it meant he could keep picking me up from school. His car speakers always blared conservative talk radio, which in the runup to the 2016 election—and after spending eight hours closeted in an all-boys Catholic school—was the last thing I wanted to hear. Mostly I just sat silently, listening to what my grandfather agreed with and wondering what he would think of me if he were ever to truly know me.

It’s easy to remember the car radio and forget the time he took every day to wash out the tumbler, fill it with a cold drink, drive across town to spend a fraction of my day with me, and then drive across town again, back to Little Havana. During my grandfather’s life, I focused on political divides between us. After his passing, I’ve thought more about what united us.

Generational politics in Miami’s Cuban American community also produced the government official at the heart of all this. The complex history of US imperialism in Latin America is bigger than any one person. But we can’t understand our current chapter in that history without understanding Secretary of State Marco Rubio.

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Rubio, the son of Cuban exiles from Miami, is the senior US government official in charge of foreign policy. That includes the capture of Maduro, the oil blockade against Cuba, and regime change efforts elsewhere. He’s project managing US intervention in Cuba, with the president’s trust and backing. And Trump is reportedly testing Rubio’s name for a possible presidential run in 2028. And to understand how this man at the highest levels of government is reshaping global politics, we need to understand something he and I have in common: the experience of growing up Cuban American in Miami.

What does it mean to be an heir to the Cuban diaspora, a group both targeted by and largely encouraging US imperialism? Marco Rubio and I have different answers to that. His could explain where Venezuela, Latin America, and our world are heading—and why Rubio is steering us there.

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Trump’s Iran War Is Driving Up Energy Prices. Here’s Who Profits.

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

The war with Iran has brought shipping traffic to a virtual standstill in the Strait of Hormuz, the narrow Persian Gulf channel through which roughly one-fifth of the world’s oil and gas flows. That has sent fossil fuel prices surging—and with them, the potential for profit.

The price of Brent crude, the global oil benchmark, is up more than 10 percent since the conflict started almost a week ago, and natural gas prices in some places, especially Europe, have doubled. US consumers are already feeling the effects, with gasoline around 27 cents per gallon higher than before the war. But industry analysts say that, at least in the short-term, higher prices could be a windfall for producers that aren’t dependent on Persian Gulf supplies, such as ExxonMobil, Chevron, Shell, and the French company Total.

“What’s delayed, what’s disturbed, and what’s destroyed, I think that’s the whole key.”

“If you are operating, if you’re producing, and you’re going to enjoy higher prices for your product, you are going to benefit,” said Abhi Rajendran, who leads oil market research at the analysis firm Energy Intelligence and is a fellow at Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy. “These high prices are going to be good for energy companies in general.”

Energy stocks are to some degree reflecting those price jumps, with firms like Venture Global and Cheniere Energy seeing notable gains this week. An analysis by the EnergyFlux newsletter, for example, found exporters and traders of American liquefied natural gas are set to earn nearly $1 billion more per week based on higher prices. Refineries in the region have sustained damage that will make that business more profitable for companies located elsewhere, too.

The stock gains aren’t ubiquitous. ExxonMobil, for example, is down slightly and Chevron has been hovering around its pre-war price. Those more tepid responses could be due to a range of factors, such as geopolitical uncertainty or increased refining costs that come with high prices, but even those companies are probably selling their product for more than they were last week.

“You are opportunistic in a sense. You see a price spike and you want to capture that upside,” said Vincent Piazza, senior equity analyst at Bloomberg Intelligence. At the same time, he said, “I don’t think anyone is happy with volatility.”

Shell declined to comment, and none of the other companies named in this article responded to requests for comment. But Piazza said long-term oil and gas futures show that investors expect stabilization, meaning that the gains companies are seeing now may not last. “It provides them with a modest short-term windfall,” he said. In the 12-month futures market, “prices in the latter months haven’t changed.”

Both Piazza and Rajendran made comparisons to the war between Russia and Ukraine. Energy prices skyrocketed at first—far more than they have during the Iran conflict—but eventually moderated. That also implies, of course, that there is still plenty of room for the current situation to continue to escalate before it improves.

President Trump has said US and Israeli strikes could continue for four to five weeks. More than 1,000 people have died in Iran since the United States and Israel launched their attack Saturday. Iran’s retaliatory strikes throughout the region have killed more than a dozen civilians and seven American troops.

The energy impacts have so far been relatively temporary, said Piazza, and confined mostly to delays in delivery. Prices are already coming down off their initial spikes. But if, say, a major gas port in Qatar or oil infrastructure in Saudi Arabia is severely damaged or destroyed, that would drastically change the outlook. A prolonged war could also cause countries like Iraq to shutter production that couldn’t easily reopen. EnergyFlux says that if Qatari gas remains offline into the summer, companies could see as much as $20 billion more in profit each week compared to before the war.

“What’s delayed, what’s disturbed, and what’s destroyed, I think that’s the whole key,” Piazza said of the benchmarks he’s watching as the conflict continues. “Think of it as a massive storm hitting the Gulf Coast as opposed to a tsunami that wipes out entire sections of infrastructure.”

Rajendran also warned that prices could rise high enough that demand slumps, and it backfires on producers. “Once you start getting to $100 or $100-plus range, then it starts becoming economically disruptive even for the oil companies,” he said. But for now, he added, “as long as oil prices remain where it doesn’t become disruptive and destructive, oil companies are going to benefit.”

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ICE Locked Up a Deaf Kid Without His Hearing Aids—And Wouldn’t Let Him Have Them Back

When six-year-old Joseph Rodriguez got sick, his mother had to bring him along to her regular check-in at a California ICE office. There, last week, he was immediately detained and quickly deported—all without his hearing aids.

Rodriguez is Deaf; he and his mother Lesly Rodriguez Gutierrez, an asylum seeker from Colombia fleeing domestic violence, live in the congressional district of Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.), who sent staff to Colombia over the weekend to return Rodriguez’ assistive devices. A relative who attempted to provide them to the boy while he was in ICE detention was turned away; ICE officials refused to give him the hearing aids, according to local station KRON.

“This child has been dragged from detention center to detention center, to places that are not meant for children,” his attorney said to KRON. “They are definitely not built for children with severe disabilities. It’s inhuman, illegal, and unconstitutional.”

The family, who were deported as a group—six-year-old Joseph, his four-year-old brother, and Rodriguez Gutierrez, their mother—had lived for four years in the Bay Area city of Hayward, until their detention last week without due process or contact with their lawyers. Joseph was enrolled at the California School for the Deaf in nearby Fremont.

“Think about that for a moment: a six-year-old child with a disability suddenly in a different country, separated from the country he has come to know,” Swalwell said, “now surrounded by silence. The horror stories from this White House continue from ICE.”

Unlike many other medical devices, most hearing aids are highly customized to an individual’s hearing loss, and quality hearing aids can easily cost thousands of dollars, making them extremely difficult or impossible to replace in a situation like Rodriguez’s. (Some Deaf people choose to not use hearing devices and rely entirely on signing; Rodriguez and his family’s proficiency in ASL or other sign languages is unclear, and ICE facilities are not equipped to accommodate Deaf people without assistive devices.)

At the press conference, Swalwell also referenced ICE’s deportation of a six-year-old with cancer, among other deportations and deaths in custody that sum to a pattern of sometimes fatal hostility towards kids and adults with disabilities or other health needs. As I reported in February, the Department of Homeland Security now has just a few staff investigating civil rights complaints, meaning the department and its officials are unlikely to face any internal repercussions for their conduct—or any pressure to change course.

Swalwell, who is also running for governor of California, said that his office was working with the family’s lawyers to secure their return under humanitarian parole, but it’s not clear how long that would take.

“We will not stand by while ICE tears our families apart and endangers innocent children,” Swalwell said at the conference. “What happened here was not about public safety.”

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Zohran Mamdani Supports Peaceful Protest In Wake Of Attempted Bombing

Zohran Mamdani maintained the right to peaceful protest on Monday, two days after two counterprotesters allegedly deployed two explosive devices during an anti-Muslim demonstration targeting the New York City mayor.

“Anti-Muslim bigotry is nothing new to me, nor is it anything new for the one million or so Muslim New Yorkers who know this city as our home,” Mamdani said in a Monday press conference. “While I found this protest appalling, I will not waver in my belief that it should be allowed to happen.”

Mamdani called the demonstration a “vile protest rooted in white supremacy,” but stressed that “violence at a protest is never acceptable.”

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani confirms that he and his wife, Rama Duwaji, were at a museum in Brooklyn when an improvised explosive device was thrown near their home during a weekend protest.

— NBC News (@nbcnews.com) 2026-03-09T16:51:09Z

Jake Lang, a right-wing influencer and pardoned January 6 rioter, organized Saturday’s demonstration outside Mamdani’s official residence at Gracie Mansion. The rally, billed as “Stop the Islamic Takeover of New York City, Stop New York City Public Muslim Prayer,” drew counterprotesters who allegedly detonated two explosive devices at the scene. Lang has a history of organizing similar events; in January, he led an anti-immigration, pro-ICE rally in Minneapolis shortly after federal agents killed Renée Good.

According to NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch, Lang’s weekend protest drew about 20 people. The counterprotest, called “Run the Nazis out of New York City, Stand Against Hate,” drew about 125 demonstrators.

Tisch said one protester from Lang’s group used pepper spray against counterprotesters. About 15 minutes later, an 18-year-old counterprotester threw a lit device toward the protest area, where it hit a barrier and went out. The same counterprotester then took a second device from a 19-year-old and dropped it on the ground about a block from Gracie Mansion; that device also failed to detonate. No injuries from either device were reported.

Six people were arrested following the protest on Saturday: the two men involved in handling and deploying the devices, the person who used pepper spray, and three others related to disorderly conduct.

Mamdani said that he and his wife, Rama Duwaji, were not at the residence during the incident.

During the Monday press conference, Tisch said at least one of the devices NYPD officials found contained TATP, a chemical commonly used in improvised bombs. The two men who were arrested for deploying the devices would be prosecuted in federal court. The incident is being investigated as an act of “ISIS-inspired terrorism.”

A federal criminal complaint was released on Monday afternoon, which charges the two men with attempting to provide support to ISIS and using weapons of mass destruction.

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Trump’s Holy Warriors Finally Got the Apocalypse They’ve Prayed For

Last week, the United States and Israeli governments attacked Iran in a dramatic series of airstrikes dubbed Operation Epic Fury. One of the bombings took out Iran’s 86-year-old leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei; another killed an estimated 165 people at a girls’ school in the city of Minab. In the days that followed, the US and Israel continued their siege, and Iran retaliated with strikes across the Middle East. Every day offered new evidence that the conflict appears to be spreading beyond that region: On Thursday, Iran struck Azerbaijan.

The death toll of the conflict is already high: According to the New York Times, by late last week it had surpassed 1,000, including six members of the US military and around 11 Israeli civilians. World leaders have expressed alarm about the expanding conflict. French President Emanuel Macron warned of “serious consequences for peace and international security,” while Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez vowed that his country would not “be complicit in something that’s bad for the world.”

But a powerful subset of evangelical Christians sees something positive in the rapidly spreading violence. The so-called Christian Zionists, who believe Israel must vanquish its Muslim enemies to usher in the second coming of Jesus, consider the current war to be a prelude to the End Times. As I wrote last year:

Some evangelicals interpret passages from the Bible to mean the Messiah will reappear­­ only when Jews who have scattered to the corners of the Earth return to Israel. Once Jesus comes back, those who accept him will be saved, and everyone else—including recalcitrant Jews—will perish and be damned to hell. “I don’t want to say [evangelicals with these beliefs] don’t care what happens to the Jews, but they understand that there are some things in their theology that are necessary for the salvation of the world,” Rabbi Jack Moline, president emeritus of the religious pluralism advocacy group Interfaith Alliance, told me. “You have to break the eggs to get the omelet.”

I reached out to Matthew Taylor, a scholar with the Institute for Islamic, Christian, and Jewish Studies and the author of the 2024 book about Christian nationalism, The Violent Take It by Force, and he explains that this particular kind of Christian Zionist wants “to see Israel become a much more dominant force in the region.”

It’s not just members of the fundamentalist Christian fringe who embrace this theology—some of its most outspoken proponents, such as US ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee, are top leaders in the Trump administration. Matthew Boedy, a religion scholar at the University of North Georgia and the author of a new book on Christian nationalism, The Seven Mountains Mandate, sees Operation Epic Fury as an indication that these leaders are now in a position not only to espouse these views, but actually to attempt to accomplish them. The Trump “administration and its allies,” he says, “are trying to fulfill the prophecy on their own.”

Shortly after the first bombs fell in Iran last week, a chorus of prominent Christian Zionists cheered. In a broadcast of the evangelical show “FlashPoint,” Lance Wallnau, a Texas-based leader in a rapidly spreading charismatic Christian nationalist movement called the New Apostolic Reformation, declared that the war was evidence that “Jesus is back on the menu.” He theorized that the conflict’s timing to coincide with the Jewish holiday of Purim, which commemorates Queen Esther’s triumph over a wicked Persian king who had been persecuting the Jews, was no accident. “During their feast of Purim, when they had a reversal of a destructive threat, we’re watching that reversal happen again in our day,” he said. Greg Laurie, a California pastor who founded a popular charismatic event called the Harvest Crusades, predicted the likely trajectory of events on his show, “Once the first domino falls, the others will fall: the emergence of the Antichrist, the tribulation period, the battle of Armageddon, the second coming, the millennial reign of Christ.”

“Once the first domino falls, the others will fall: the emergence of the Antichrist, the tribulation period, the battle of Armageddon, the second coming, the millennial reign of Christ.”

The timing of the attack to coincide with the holiday of Purim also struck Sean Feucht as propitious. A Christian musician who has convened prayer rallies on the steps of state capitol buildings across the country, Feucht posted to his 209,000 followers on X about what he saw as the divine alignment taking place. “Purim is a yearly reminder that even when He seems silent, He is actively orchestrating redemption,” he wrote. “Today, Iran occupies the territory of ancient Persia. As threats against Israel rise again from that same region, the historical echo is sobering.”

Then there is John Hagee, head of the influential Christian Zionist group Christians United for Israel. His audience is massive: Christians United for Israel claims more than 10 million members. He posted on his YouTube channel a video titled “God’s Coming Operation ‘Epic Fury.’” In it, he thanked God for President Donald Trump, “whose wisdom and courage have crushed the enemies of Zion,” he said. “Today we rejoice in the prophetic scriptures of Ezekiel, revealing God’s operation fury for the enemies of Israel.”

Another powerful Christian Zionist group is the International Fellowship of Christians and Jews, which says it has raised a staggering $3.6 billion for Israel and to support the Jewish people more generally since its founding in 1983. Though its leader, Yael Eckstein, is an orthodox Jew living in Israel, 92 percent of its donors are Christians, mostly in the United States.

When I asked Eckstein last year whether she thought Christian Zionists were right about the role of Jews like her in their end-times scenario, she shrugged. “Everyone’s entitled to have their own beliefs, their own philosophy, their own theology,” she said. “We’ll have to wait and see.”

In the meantime, Eckstein continues to embrace Christian Zionist beliefs in her appeals to IFCJ supporters. “We know how this ends,” she said on IFCJ’s YouTube channel in a broadcast from Israel last week. “All of the evil that Iran has been exporting, all of the slogans that they’ve been yelling, ‘Death to Israel, Death to America,’ all the times that they’ve burned the American flag on the parliament floors—everything turns around for the good.”

In another broadcast a few days later, Eckstein told her viewers that “the holiday of Purim right now during this war is more relevant than ever before” because “the wicked leaders of Iran, right now, from ancient Persia, are still trying to kill the Jews.” Purim, explained Eckstein, is a time when “we have the ability to go into the kingdom, to go into the inner chambers of God’s kingdom, and to ask for anything we want, to ask for peace, to ask for blessings!”

Eckstein’s remarks echo another prominent theme in Christian Zionism: focusing on Genesis 12:3 in which God tells Abraham about the children of Israel, “I will bless those who bless you, and whoever curses you I will curse; and all peoples on Earth will be blessed through you.” The idea that God will reward those who “bless Israel” with material wealth is a common refrain among Christian Zionist pastors. In a sermon last year, for example, Hagee proclaimed, “When gentiles start doing practical things to bless the Jewish people, God goes way out of his way to answer your prayer and to bring special blessings to you.” In a Facebook post, Terri Copeland Pearsons, daughter of the televangelist titan Kenneth Copeland, told her followers, “Standing with Israel isn’t just a choice; it’s a biblical principle that releases God’s favor and protection!” As I wrote last year:

The message that Christian Zionist leaders are giving their followers is simple: Their donations are part of a divine plan. As Florida pastor and Latino Coalition for Israel head Mario Bramnick put it at an event in Jerusalem earlier this year, “I literally feel God is giving Israel a blank check.”

Christian Zionists include not only powerful pastors and religious influencers but also leaders at the highest levels of the Trump administration. As I wrote last year, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, US ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee, and House Speaker Mike Johnson have all embraced the rhetoric of Christian Zionists. Johnson has defended Israeli settlement expansion as being events that had been foretold in Scripture. Hegseth, a devout Christian who has also visited Israel frequently, sports a tattoo of a Jerusalem cross, a symbol from the coat of arms of the ancient kingdom of Jerusalem associated with the Crusades.

Johnson and Huckabee have framed the geopolitical situation in Iran in overtly religious terms. Huckabee, who is also a Baptist minister as well the ambassedor, says he has visited Israel 100 times. On a podcast last year, he described himself as an “unapologetic, unreformed Zionist,” adding, “there really isn’t such a thing” as Palestine. Days before the US and Israel began their most recent bombing campaign, when right wing broadcaster Tucker Carlson asked Huckabee if he believed that Israel’s right to land in the Middle East was divinely ordained, Huckabee responded, “It would be fine if they took it all.” (He quickly clarified that he meant simply that Israel has a right to the land currently within its borders.) At a press conference last week, Johnson serenely referred to Iranians’ “misguided religion”—an example of the Islamophobia that often accompanies Christian Zionism.

In a contrast that reveals some of the fissures within the Christian nationalist movement, Hegseth has not made explicitly religious statements about the military action in Iran—and that could be because his current flavor of Christianity does not espouse Christian Zionism. Hegseth, who used to be a Baptist, is now an acolyte of Doug Wilson, a self-proclaimed Christian nationalist pastor in Moscow, Idaho, who is the unofficial patriarch of the ascendant TheoBros movement. Unlike more mainstream evangelicals, TheoBros generally discount the importance of Israel and the Jewish people in ushering in the second coming of Jesus. Since the Hamas attacks on Israel of October 7, 2023, tensions over Israel have divided the MAGA movement, says Taylor. “On a deeper level, it’s also about this America-first kind of anti-interventionism, blood and soil, white Christian nationalism versus this more global, populist, authoritarian imperialist vision that is deeply Christian Zionist and pro-Israel.”

It is too soon to say how that deepening rift will influence the outcome of the war, but so far Operation Epic Fury still has broad Republican support. When the US House of Representatives had an opportunity to vote to stop the war, it instead voted to reassert Trump’s expansive powers; the Senate did the same. After the House vote, House Speaker Johnson issued a triumphant press release. “Peace is secured through strength,” he wrote. “That’s what this administration is demonstrating, and that is why America is the last great superpower on the planet, and all freedom-loving people around the world are grateful to God for that.”

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The Infuriating History of the Law That Doomed Abortion Rights

This piece is adapted from Amy Littlefield’s new book, Killers of Roe: My Investigation into the Mysterious Death of Abortion Right_s_, published by Legacy Lit (Hachette) on March 10.

In 1974, an Internal Revenue Service attorney named Paul Haring pitched an idea to Catholic leaders that would shape the lives of millions of women for the next half-century.

A record of his plan, titled “Paul Haring’s Proposal,” details what then seemed like an improbable scheme. Haring, a devout Catholic with a history of anti-abortion activism and a flair for longshot legal maneuvers, wanted Congress to ban federal funding of abortion by passing an amendment to an appropriations bill.

Roe v. Wade had legalized abortion nationwide the year before, and Catholics were up in arms. But more Americans supported the ruling than opposed it, and an outright abortion ban wasn’t going to happen. So Haring and his allies came up with a new plan: a ban that targeted only poor women, a group far less popular than Roe, and did so through a backdoor, as a rider to an appropriations bill.

The Catholic church needed to endorse the idea—the same church that championed poor people in many of its teachings. The bishops weren’t ready. “The political strategists are sure this won’t work,” according to a memo shared with me by Sean Kelly, a scholar who discovered it in the bishops’ archives.

Unfortunately for generations of poor women, those strategists were wrong.

The policy Haring had failed to sell the bishops in 1974 would pass two years later and become the Hyde Amendment, a ban on federal Medicaid funding of abortion that will mark its 50th anniversary this year. As I researched my new book Killers of Roe: My Investigation into the Mysterious Death of Abortion Rights, I came to see the Hyde Amendment as the key to understanding the anti-abortion movement’s gradual destruction, and eventual reversal, of Roe v. Wade.

The amendment was the first major, successful use of the movement’s incremental approach to undermining abortion rights. It was an early example of co-opting the rhetoric of the civil rights movement to demonize abortion, in this case by claiming they were saving poor, Black babies (or, as the policy’s namesake, Republican Illinois Rep. Henry Hyde, called them, “little ghetto kid[s]”).

More broadly, it marked an early collaboration between Catholic social conservatives and Republican fiscal conservatives, under the guise of protecting “taxpayers”—an alliance that has been one of the most defining in American politics. This age-old American idea—that white men should be spared the burden of paying for things that women of color needed to keep themselves and their children alive—was moving to the forefront of national politics in the 1970s, when conservative “revolts” against taxes foreshadowed the election of Ronald Reagan.

Illinois Rep. Henry Hyde delivers a statement during the Iran-Contra hearings in 1987.Bettmann/Getty

The Hyde Amendment was an opening salvo in two contemporary wars: on women and on the poor. On a material level, the funding ban shaped the lives of women and the abortion rights movement in ways we take for granted now. The right to abortion became a right only for those who could afford it. In the years since its passage, an estimated one in four women who would otherwise have obtained an abortion paid for by Medicaid have instead given birth.

Yet the history of the amendment is mostly unknown, often reduced to a single quotation from its namesake, a jovial Catholic congressman from the Chicago suburbs. “I certainly would like to prevent, if I could legally, anybody having an abortion, a rich woman, a middle-class woman, or a poor woman,” Henry Hyde famously said in 1977. “Unfortunately, the only vehicle available is the . . . Medicaid bill.”

As I discovered in writing my book, Henry Hyde didn’t come up with the idea for the Hyde Amendment. Behind his actions, I found an assortment of mostly forgotten men, some infamous in their time, others obscure, a few still alive in their eighties. In my two years of digging and reading and listening, I also found a common motive that I never would have imagined. Many of these men seemed to share a genuine belief that by restricting abortion, they were earning something everlasting for themselves—a ticket to Heaven.

Mother Jones illustration; Photo courtesy of Amy Littlefield

The Racist

The idea for restricting abortion for specific subsets of women originated with a Southern politician with a notorious mean streak. The late Senator Jesse Helms of North Carolina once refused to meet with the mother of a child who had died after contracting HIV from a blood transfusion because he believed HIV was just a gay disease that gay people deserved to die from. He tried to prevent Martin Luther King Jr. Day from becoming a national holiday. He called all Black men “Fred” because he thought it was funny.

He deserved far worse than having his house covered in a giant condom that read, “Helms is deadlier than a virus” (a brilliant stunt AIDS activists somehow pulled off in 1991). Instead, he spent 30 years in the Senate, retired in 2003, and died five years later, old and comfortable, on the Fourth of July. Helms was so Trumpian that researching him made me wonder if he had hidden a piece of his soul for our president to discover, like Tom Riddle’s diary at Hogwarts. He started out as a pundit on talk radio. He disregarded norms. He knew how to harness white male anger through blistering populism. He was even said to have small hands. Plus, he opposed sending US aid down what he called “ratholes” in poorer countries of the world, places that decades later Trump would call “shithole[s].” That was why he introduced the Helms Amendment in 1973, a ban on the use of foreign aid funds for abortion—a policy that under Reagan expanded with the Global Gag Rule. Fifty years later the Helms Amendment remains in place, renewed regularly by Congress, and an estimated 17,000 women die each year as a result. Trump, fittingly enough, broadened the Global Gag Rule’s restrictions on foreign aid in January, reaching beyond abortion to restrict international work around diversity and transgender rights. Helms would have been proud.

The Little Brother

The first Congressional record I found of the Hyde Amendment—in essence, a domestic version of the Helms Amendment—was introduced, in November 1973, by Senator James Buckley. He was a staunch Catholic and abortion opponent who, along with Helms, would try unsuccessfully to ban abortion outright through a constitutional amendment. He served a single term in the Senate from 1971 to 1977 after winning an unlikely victory in New York on the third-party Conservative Party ticket. He was also the less-famous younger brother of William F. Buckley Jr., the founder of the National Review and the man who turned refusing to pay for the needs of poor people into an elite intellectual movement. It was Senator Buckley who suggested that if Congress was going to pass the Helms Amendment and prohibit federal funds from being used to help “foreign women” get abortions, “then at least we could accord the same protection to our own.” By February 1974, the Nixon administration was reported to be “quietly resisting the amendment.” (Watergate probably didn’t help.)

The Devout Bureaucrat

Paul Haring grew up in Goliad, Texas, where he went to Catholic church twice a week, sitting with his father on the side reserved for men while his devout mother, for whose sake the family attended these services, sat alone on the side for women. He would make a name for himself in the nascent anti-abortion movement in 1971, when he filed a lawsuit arguing that as a “taxpayer” he should have the right to stop abortions scheduled to take place at a Texas air force base under a federal policy that allowed the procedures under certain circumstances. He served a brief stint as head of Americans United for Life, which is now a major anti-abortion organization, but which back then, apparently, couldn’t afford to pay its director. Haring told me he did the job as a volunteer while working at the IRS. In other words, a man who would set about trying to revoke taxpayer funding for abortion was subsidizing his own activism with taxpayer funds in the form of his government paycheck.

Haring told me he wrote a version of the Hyde Amendment that was introduced in the House in the summer of 1974, months before he tried to sell the idea to Catholic leaders. It defined abortion as “the intentional destruction of unborn human life, which life begins at the moment of fertilization”—an early iteration of personhood. The House rejected a modified version of Haring’s proposal by a margin of 2 to 1. Another version of the bill was quashed in the Senate. Unfortunately for Medicaid recipients, that wasn’t the end.

The Closeted Tax Avoider

If it hadn’t been for the sex scandal that torpedoed his political career, Bob Bauman might have gone down in history as a run-of-the-mill Republican tightwad with a fetish for offshore tax avoidance. Instead, in 1980, an FBI investigation revealed that the Maryland congressman and married father of four had been drunkenly cruising the streets of Washington, DC, behind the wheel of a Lincoln Continental with congressional plates, picking up men and paying them for sex. At least one of the men turned out to be a boy of 16. Bauman was far from exceptional as a closeted gay man in DC, but he was exceptional as a closeted gay man who was widely considered one of the most conservative members of Congress.

Unsurprisingly, Bauman lost his reelection bid later that year. He eventually moved to Wilton Manors, Florida, known as one of the gayest cities in the United States, and built a second career writing dictionary-length manifestos with titles like Where to Stash Your Cash Legally and Swiss Money Secrets. It was a perfect encapsulation of the conservative movement’s wider political project; the man who had helped cut off taxpayer funding of abortion had gone on to a second career helping corporations and the ultrawealthy avoid paying taxes at all. To reach him with an interview request, I had to fill out a form pretending I was a potential client with an eight-figure fortune. Thankfully, Bauman never asked me about my finances. Once I disclosed I was a journalist he likely realized I was notworth eight figures.

Official portrait of Robert Bauman of Maryland, who served in Congress from 1973 to 1981.Collection of the U.S. House of Representatives

Like many of the men involved in the early days of the Hyde Amendment, Bauman was a devout Catholic. But his opposition to abortion wasn’t just religious—he was adopted. “I think, probably looking back on it, maybe it was my own adoption and the fact that I didn’t know who my mother was, I could have died, you know, and so on,” he told me. “But that was not an openly conscious thing; it might have been a subconscious thing.”

Bauman was also extremely unpopular on Capitol Hill. A 1976 New York Times profile described him as the “gadfly of the House, its most active nitpicker, its hairshirt, its leading baiter of its most powerful members.” When he introduced his own version of a federal abortion funding ban in 1975, it went down to defeat.

But he was smart enough to know how to work around his unpopularity. Understanding that the rules of Congress were approximately the rules of the playground, he looked for someone cooler and more popular to put his name and face to the idea. Bauman found his man in a 6 foot 3 former basketball player, the affable Illinois Republican, Henry Hyde.

“Henry was a very dynamic speaker. He was a large man,” Bauman, who was stocky and short, told me. “Very, very humorous, and a very friendly person.” One day in 1976, Bauman sidled up to his Midwestern colleague outside the House cloakroom and suggested that, in Hyde’s words, they “sneak an amendment” into the House appropriations bill.

Republican Henry Hyde, then chairman of the House Judiciary committee, at a press conference.Luke Frazza/AFP/Getty

The Namesake

Henry Hyde served in Congress for 32 years until just months before his death in 2007 at the age of 83. Abortion first came across his radar in 1969 when he was serving in the Illinois General Assembly and a Democratic colleague asked if he would cosponsor a bill to liberalize the state’s abortion ban. Four years before Roe, bills like these were being introduced all over the country. Women sickened by unsafe, illegal abortions were dying of infections and hemorrhages in hotel rooms and hospital septic wards. But Hyde was a Catholic, and he “quickly decided that abortion was something to be resisted strenuously,” he later wrote. Instead of supporting the bill, he worked to defeat it.

After coming to Washington in 1975, Hyde carved out a powerful role on the House Judiciary Committee, where he eventually became chairman. As leader of the Clinton impeachment trial, he was forced to make the embarrassing admission that he had carried on an extramarital affair of his own. On Capitol Hill, I learned from my reporting, he was also known for his propensity to grope women.

A former congressional staffer named Margaret Goodman told me Hyde had grabbed her ass one day while she was just trying to do her job. She wanted to slap his hand away but there was a room full of people watching, so she took a deep breath, steadied herself, and kept walking.

“You just made sure, you sort of sidled along with your back up against the wall,” she told me, “because Henry Hyde liked to reach out and grab you. On your butt, just, surreptitiously.”

Then there was the time, Planned Parenthood’s ex-president Faye Wattleton told me, he made a pass at her during a break in the Phil Donahue show. A man with a habit of treating women this way ought to have been disqualified from making laws about their bodies, although that would probably have disqualified many lawmakers from that era (which, come to think of it, might have been fine). But Hyde’s behavior didn’t make a dent in his popularity; instead, he went down in history as one of the most influential conservatives of his time.

The Democratic Accomplice

Even with Hyde as the front man, getting the Hyde Amendment to pass was no easy feat. A main obstacle was Democratic Pennsylvania Rep. Dan Flood, a cape-wearing former Shakespearean actor who oversaw the subcommittee in charge of the bill. Flood hated the Hyde Amendment. Yes, he represented a heavily Catholic district and believed abortion was wrong. But a “vote for this amendment is not a vote against abortion,” he fulminated. “It is a vote against poor people. That is what it is, as plain as the nose on your face.”

That should have been that—except that now the Catholic leaders who had doubted Paul Haring were fully on board with the plan. A lobbyist for the Catholic bishops got every Catholic pastor in the district to write Flood a letter, the lobbyist would later brag to scholar Sean Kelly. Flood was flooded with anti-abortion mail. Suddenly he became a champion of the Hyde Amendment.

He was far from the only Democrat implicated in this history. After all, Democrats controlled the House and the Senate in 1976, when the Hyde Amendment passed. Many of these Democrats likely supported the right to abortion. But many of them likely realized that voting in favor of public funding of abortion so close to the 1976 election, when evangelical Christians were becoming a crucial new electoral force, would put them at risk of punishment by anti-abortion diehards.

That summer, pro-choice groups were doing their best to push back against this anti-abortion deluge. But as a NARAL lobbyist would write in a memo I found in the group’s archives, abortion opponents had “really outstripped” them. Records show that even as the pro-choice movement tried to fight the ban in Congress, they were shifting their hopes to what would become their primary strategy for the next 50 years: challenging abortion restrictions in court. In a July 1976 memo, the pro-choice Republican Senator Ed Brooke wrote that groups including NARAL were banking on the belief that they could defeat the ban with litigation. “The group[s] would prefer leaving the Hyde Amendment in if there is not sufficient support to strike it altogether, for they feel that they would have a strong court case against the Hyde Amendment,” he wrote, according to the memo shared with me by the scholar Nicola Beisel.

Unfortunately, they were wrong. In 1980’s Harris v. McRae, the Supreme Court upheld the ban, expressing in legal form the driving narrative of American conservatism: that being poor, especially when you’re pregnant, and most especially if you are a woman of color, is an individual moral failing, not a societal one. Or, as the court put it, a woman’s constitutional right to abortion did not grant her a “constitutional entitlement” to the resources she might need to exercise that right.

The Secret Motive

“If I don’t answer on the first few rings, be patient,” Bob Bauman wrote to me before our phone interview in late 2022. “At 86, I don’t move as fast.”

Before speaking with him, I devoured his 1986 autobiography, The Gentleman from Maryland: The Conscience of a Gay Conservative, which dripped with sordid details about his complicated life. “I did not want to write this book,” Bauman admitted in the preface. “I wrote it because I need the money.”

This one of the many contradictions that plagued Bauman throughout his life. Although he was a single-minded devotee of fiscal conservatism, Bauman had been profligate with money. Once his family was saved from ruin by a friend, the intellectual champion of fiscal conservatism himself, National Review founder William F. Buckley Jr.

When I asked Bauman his thoughts on the impact of the Hyde Amendment, he expressed a motive I didn’t expect.

“Well, if I get any credit when I get to Saint Peter at the gate, I hope that’s on my list,” he said. “I think it’s the most important thing I ever did in Congress.”

His words would be echoed the following year when I interviewed Paul Haring at a public library near his home in suburban Virginia. Haring used our interview to try to convert me to Catholicism and save my soul from hell.

“The most important thing is we go to heaven,” Haring told me, over and over, until his words took on the tenor of a marketing pitch.

Henry Hyde also shared a preoccupation with eternity, I discovered. “I believe that I will one day render an account to God for what I did and failed to do about the issues that have caused such deep distress in our national life,” he once wrote.

The Hyde Amendment has long been understood as an opportunistic use of the appropriations bill to restrict abortion access. But there were more opportunities hiding in the stories of the strange crew of men who brought it into being. My two-year investigation into the death of Roe led me to the conclusion that the anti-abortion movement succeeded because of mutually beneficial alliance between opportunists, like Dan Flood, and true believers, like Paul Haring.

But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that the true believers were opportunists, too. In their quest for heaven, it turned out, the architects of the Hyde Amendment had their eyes on the greatest opportunity of all.

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