Mother Jones: Posts

Mother Jones

Storm Deaths Mount, Exacerbated By DOGE and Trump’s Climate Chaos

On Friday and Saturday, a mega-storm system hit the Midwestern and southern United States with a devastating combination of tornadoes, wildfires, high-speed winds, flooding, dust storms, and blizzard-like conditions.

Winds in Texas and New Mexico approached 100 miles per hour. Eighteen-wheeler trucks were knocked over. Dozens or hundreds of houses were leveled from Texas to Indiana. There are still more than 300,000 power outages affecting over 170 million households, per USA Today‘s grid tracker. At least 35 people have been reported dead as of Sunday in Kansas, Texas, Mississippi, Arkansas, Oklahoma, and Missouri.

Meteorologists predict the storm complex—now focused on more central areas of the country—will move towards the east coast. Seven states from Florida to Ohio are under a tornado watch.

The storms come just weeks after the Trump administration cut the jobs of hundreds of federal weather forecasters. The New York Times reported last week that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which is responsible for tornado warnings and other weather forecasts, is set to cut 20 percent of its workforce. Meteorologists and scientists warned earlier this month that eviscerating weather agencies would risk public safety.

“It’s going to affect safety. It’s going to affect the economy,” warned former NOAA Administrator Rick Spinrad in an interview with the Associated Press, pointing out that the country was “getting into prime tornado time.”

As the devastated areas begin to rebuild, they will also have less help. At the directive of Elon Musk’s “Department of Government Efficiency,” the Federal Emergency Management Agency also cut 200 positions barely a week ago and is making preparations to cut more.

More events like this, with consequences exacerbated by those cuts, may be on the horizon. Research shows that climate change creates storm conditions favorable for tornadoes, and that the timing and locations of tornadoes is shifting to become less predictable. The administration, of course, is cracking down on research that includes the word “climate”—and, for that matter, “resilience.”

Continue Reading…

Mother Jones

Colorado Has Become a Battleground for Disputes Over Hunting and Trapping

This story was originally published on the Substack Public Domain, to which you can subscribe here.

The agenda for Colorado Parks and Wildlife Commission’s March 5 meeting included few controversial issues—mall alterations to grouse hunting regulations, tweaks to the big game draw and, perhaps most contentiously, an update to the state’s wolf reintroduction program.

But when general public comment opened, those topics were quickly overshadowed. The commission spent the next few hours getting an earful from carnivore advocates demanding limits on the trapping of bobcats, foxes, coyotesm and other furbearers.

“The public needs to understand that you do not support this killing spree that sees wildlife as commodities,” advocate Rainer Gerbatsch said. “Glorifying trapping as conservation is a slap in the face of evolution.”

Colorado has emerged in recent years as one of the key battlegrounds for the future of wildlife management, with a growing movement of activists aiming to swap the state’s emphasis on maximizing deer and elk for hunters with a more holistic approach that prioritizes ecosystem health.

The movement scored one of its biggest wins in 2020, when a referendum to reintroduce gray wolves squeaked through on a 51 to 49 percent vote, over the impassioned objections of ranchers and outfitters on the western slope who saw wolves as a threat to their livelihoods. But a separate vote last year that would have banned mountain lion hunting and bobcat trapping failed by a wider-than-expected margin, 55 to 45, leaving activists struggling to find their footing.

“People tell me that we’re extirpating populations and they have no idea what is harvested nor any idea of what is sold.”

While they have yet to unify behind a single demand, the movement is taking aim at trapping as its next major target. “Unlimited trapping is not aligned with the public’s values,” Samantha Miller, senior carnivore campaigner with the Center for Biological Diversity, told Public Domain. “This just flies in the face of responsible wildlife management.”

Those who spoke out against trapping at the hearing objected to killing animals to sell their pelts. Some asked the commission to end trapping entirely. Others suggested a reasonable limit for all 16 furbearers, whose populations vary widely, might be two specimens per species. Several raised concern that non-target animals like eagles or the state-endangered lynx might perish in traps.

A few questioned the wisdom of indiscriminately trapping beavers , given that the ponds they create can help mitigate wildfires, or swift foxes, which the state had until recently classified as a Tier II species of greatest conservation need.

And many described the lack of trapping limits as a conservation threat to bobcats specifically, with several denouncing the use of strangulation to kill them, at times in gory detail.

At least three commission members expressed concern about strangling bobcats to death. But current state regulations already prohibit it, Colorado Parks and Wildlife Assistant Director for Field Services Ty Petersburg later told them, though it wasn’t easy to understand from the convoluted descriptions in the regulations.

CPW plans to field focus groups later this year and identify stakeholders in response to strong public interest in trapping. A spokesperson acknowledged beavers’ beneficial impact on groundwater recharge and wildfire mitigation, but noted that low levels of harvest, about 600 on public land last year, was unlikely to have a major impact. Swift fox populations have remained stable for 20 years under current management, he added.

Trappers say the activists’ concerns are overblown, noting that the state already passed a referendum in 1996 outlawing snares and foothold traps, leaving only the most passionate hobbyists in the field.

“We’ve got box traps and that’s it—it pretty much gutted the entire trapping community as a whole,” Colorado Trappers and Predator Hunters Association President Dan Gates told Public Domain. “This is an anti-hunting campaign… They don’t want you to harvest anything, period.”

“I let go a couple of bobcats this year because they were young…I’m not in the business of trying to wipe them out.”

With trappers limited to expensive and less-effective cage traps, they are less likely than hunters to kill several species of furbearers, according to Gates. Hunters have accounted for at least 40 percent of the annual bobcat kill since 2019, state data show.

Only 212 of the 1,524 coyotes sold at the Colorado Trappers and Predators Association’s fur auction last year had been killed in the state of Colorado, Gates said. An even smaller portion of bobcats, 14 out of 145, came from within the state. Many of the Coloradan animals made their way into the auction after getting trapped at the request of landowners to deal with nuisance animals or control damage. The most common requests came from industrial firms like airports and power plants, or suburban homes.

“People tell me that we’re extirpating populations and they have no idea what is harvested nor any idea of what is sold,” Gates said. “Nobody goes out and traps skunks for the hell of it. They do it for damage and they do it for nuisance.”

Box traps make by-catch a non-issue, said Adam Warren, the organization’s vice president.One time he caught a mountain lion in a trap intended for a bobcat. He simply opened the door and let it scamper away.

“I let go a couple of bobcats this year because they were young,” Warren said. “I’m not in the business of trying to wipe them out. I want to conserve the population—I don’t want to destroy it.”

CPW says bobcats do not face conservation concerns, though the state does not survey the population. A pending citizen petition asks CPW to collect more robust data, Director Jeff Davis said.

Hunters and trappers killed fewer than 1,000 annually in recent years over a three-month season running from December to February, according to CPW. About 20,000 people bought a Colorado license to hunt or trap furbearers in the 2023-24 season, the most recent for which the state has published data. By contrast, the state sold more than 200,000 licenses to pursue big game like deer and elk.

Still, many wildlife activists view fur trapping as the lowest-hanging fruit for a movement pushing for more carnivore-friendly policies.

Trapping to sell pelts conflicts with one of the basic tenets of the North American Model of Wildlife Conservation, which uses hunting and fishing license sales and excise taxes on firearm and ammunition to finance wildlife management and habitat restoration. The hunter-conservationists who developed the model early last century aimed to eliminate the profit motive from wildlife management, after unregulated hunting to feed urban markets for meat, hide and feathers pushed virtually every animal with commercial value to the brink of extirpation or outright extinction.

But unfettered fur trapping for profit lingered on, largely because it focused on animals widely viewed as pests, or carnivores that prey on ungulate species prized by hunters, like deer and elk—though in practice, pelts do not fetch high enough prices to employ many full time trappers, especially with Colorado’s limitations.

Some carnivore activists want to revise the state’s endorsement of the North American model. House Bill 25-1258, authored by Democratic Colorado Reps. Tammy Story and Elizabeth Velasco, proposed nixing a statute that commits the state “to utilize hunting, trapping, and fishing as the primary methods of effecting necessary wildlife harvests.”

Instead, the bill proposed that the state “may authorize hunting, trapping, and fishing in accordance with the best available wildlife and ecological science to benefit wildlife, whole ecosystem health, and all Coloradans.”

“This is not an attack on hunting,” Rep. Velasco told the committee during last week’s meeting. “We’re not restricting or limiting hunting in any way. But we do want to make sure that the science is up to par and science is being utilized wherever we are managing our public spaces.”

Supporters viewed the short bill as a new, more holistic mission statement for the agency. Some of them used the committee hearing to air grievances about furbearer trapping specifically. Two children testified, trading verses for the committee: “Trapping is cruel—please vote yes,” they said. “I feel sad that an unlimited amount of bobcats can be trapped each year in Colorado.”

But several commenters saw the bill as an attack on hunting that threatened to create new problems without solving any. Liz Rose of the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership, a conservation group, told the committee that she had asked the authors to provide evidence of how the law might help the state address a practical conservation problem. She said they didn’t provide any.

And etching the impossible-to-define standard “best-available science” into statute would pave the way for legal challenges to virtually any wildlife commission decision, according to former CPW Commissioner Gaspar Perricone.

“I don’t perceive this bill as offering any additional tools to the agency that they don’t currently possess,” Perricone told the committee. “What is the necessity of this legislation at this point in time?”

The committee voted the measure down, with only three members supporting it—including the two authors.

Continue Reading…

Mother Jones

Election Denier Michael Flynn Attended Trump’s Justice Department Speech

President Donald Trump stormed into the Justice Department on Friday to give a speech that news outlets described with a grab-bag of foreboding words, including “bellicose” and “unprecedented.” In the speech, Trump railed at his political opponents, whom he described as “scum” and “thugs,” and falsely claimed, once again, that the 2020 election had been stolen from him.

Seated in the audience was retired General Mike Flynn, Trump’s former national security adviser, who’s spent a great deal of time pushing both stolen election claims and QAnon-related ideas. (Flynn has distanced himself publicly from QAnon. Two of his family members also sued CNN for a chyron calling them “QAnon followers.” Flynn reportedly called QAnon “total nonsense” in a private conversation with attorney Lin Wood, who released a recording of the call on Telegram.)

Trump singled out Flynn for special praise during his speech; afterward, Flynn’s sister snapped a picture of him posing with FBI director Kash Patel.

The speech, which lasted more than an hour, featured Trump claiming once again that law enforcement agencies had been unfairly weaponized against him. “A corrupt group of hacks and radicals within the ranks of the American government obliterated the trust and goodwill built up over generations,” he declared. “They weaponized the vast powers of our intelligence and law enforcement agencies to try and thwart the will of the American people.” He also crowed about stripping security clearances from what he called “the Biden crime family,” and referred to previous elections as “rigged and crooked.”

Flynn’s sister posted a photo of him and Kash Patel afterward, writing, “My 2 Favorite Hero American Giants! Gentlemen, time to Save Our Country, the Kids and take out the Trash while you’re at it!!!”

“I was attacked by a political opponent and probably it helped that I was attacked more than anybody in the history of our country,” Trump also claimed, before adding a bizarre metaphor, comparing his treatment to that of a notorious gangster. “Alphonse Capone, the great Alphonse Capone, legendary Scarface, was attacked only a tiny fraction of what Trump was attacked.”

Trump also specifically praised Flynn, saying, “General Flynn, thank you for being here. Here’s a man who went through hell, by the way, and he shouldn’t have. It was—he’s a patriot, he went through hell.”

Flynn was pardoned by Trump in 2020 after being convicted of lying to the FBI; since then, he’s turned peddling far-right conspiracy theories into what the New York Times called a “lucrative and sprawling family business” and commands a vast and loyal audience on social media, including Twitter, where his previously banned account was restored in 2023 after Elon Musk took over the company. In October, he claimed that “weather modification operations” controlled by the Department of Defense were “clearly connected” with Hurricane Helene.

Flynn’s sister Mary Flynn O’Neill was present with him for the speech; O’Neill posted a photo of Flynn and Kash Patel afterward, writing, “My 2 Favorite Hero American Giants! Gentlemen, time to Save Our Country, the Kids and take out the Trash while you’re at it!!!” Flynn himself posted on Twitter, in all caps, “A GREAT DAY AT THE DOJ!”

The significance of Flynn’s attendance wasn’t lost on anyone. Republican propagandist and journalistic plagiarist Benny Johnson also posed for a photo with him, tweeting, “The last time General Flynn was in the DOJ the demons running this building had him in handcuffs and were preparing to end his life. Now, Flynn returns as a free man, totally vindicated, a conqueror. What man intends for evil, God intends for good!”

Continue Reading…

Mother Jones

Donald Trump Just Signed an Order Gutting Seven More Federal Agencies

In an executive order signed late Friday, Donald Trump effectively dismantled seven more federal agencies, this time with cuts that will impact work on homelessness, libraries, support for minority-owned businesses, and the US Agency for Global Media, which funds Voice of America (VOA) and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and Radio Free Asia. The cuts are expected to leave thousands more federal workers unemployed; in the case of VOA, it furthers a specific vendetta Trump has had since his first term.

The order will affect the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service, the United States Agency for Global Media, the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in the Smithsonian Institution, the Institute of Museum and Library Services, the United States Interagency Council on Homelessness, the Community Development Financial Institutions Fund, and the Minority Business Development Agency. It instructs the head of each agency to submit a report to the Office of Management and Budget “explaining which components or functions of the governmental entity, if any, are statutorily required and to what extent.” In practice, as has happened with other federal agencies in recent weeks, it’s expected to leave these agencies a shell of themselves and fundamentally nonexistent; in the case of the US Interagency Council on Homelessness, it destroys the only federal agency solely focused on addressing the homelessness crisis.

During his first term, Trump called VOA’s reporting “disgraceful.” This time around, he placed Trump loyalist and 2020 election denier Kari Lake as a “special advisor” to the agency.

The move against the US Agency for Global Media has attracted the most attention, and could have the largest implications abroad. VOA specifically has been active since the 1940s, where it broadcast stories into Germany that were meant to counter Nazi propaganda. During his first term, Trump called VOA’s reporting “disgraceful.” This time around, he placed Trump loyalist and 2020 election denier Kari Lake as a “special advisor” to the agency. In December, he wrote that she would “ensure that the American values of Freedom and Liberty are broadcast around the World FAIRLY and ACCURATELY, unlike the lies spread by the Fake News Media.”

Lake made it immediately clear that she wouldn’t respect VOA’s editorial independence, telling a crowd at the Conservative Political Action Conference, “VOA has been telling America’s story to the world for 83 years this Monday. Sometimes the coverage has been incredible, and sometimes it’s been pitiful. We are fighting an information war, and there’s no better weapon than the truth, and I believe VOA could be that weapon.”

VOA made other efforts to appease Trump, including placing leading journalist Steve Herman on leave for supposedly anti-Trump comments. Under Lake, the organization also canceled millions of dollars in contracts with other news agencies, including the Associated Press, Reuters, and Agence France-Presse.

Some of the seven agencies that were just gutted could challenge the order in court; the US Agency for Global Media, for instance, was founded by a congressional charter and could argue that it can’t be dismantled by an executive order. The authority of Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency to make the staggering cuts they’ve already made to government agencies is also being challenged in numerous lawsuits.

Continue Reading…

Mother Jones

The Gutting of US Weather Forecasting Abilities Could Prove Very Deadly

This story was originally published b_y the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists a_nd is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

This isn’t what I had in mind when I studied Edward Lorenz’s chaos theory.

Lorenz was a mathematician and meteorologist perhaps most famous for his description of the “butterfly effect,” which poses that small changes in initial conditions can produce large changes in long-term results. This became evident to him when running numerical weather forecasting models, in which even the rounding of a variable from six digits to three digits would lead to vastly different predicted outcomes in the atmosphere. His work led to great leaps in weather forecasting, and today’s era of ensemble forecasting in which multiple weather predictions are generated from the same set of different yet similar initial meteorological conditions.

The butterfly effect came to mind when I read that upper air weather observations were being temporarily halted by the National Weather Service in parts of Alaska, New York, and Maine due to staffing shortages. The Trump regime’s chaotic approach to so-called efficiency in the federal workforce has wreaked havoc upon civil service, including at NWS and its parent agency, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

At stake is our ability to predict “whether a future Sandy-like superstorm takes a left turn into New York City or not.”

NWS was already short-staffed before the new administration came into power. I have firsthand knowledge of Meteorologists in Charge, the title for the director at each NWS office, forced to cover operational shifts (including overnights) several weeks a year to be able to keep their offices functioning.

Now hundreds more NOAA and NWS employees have been fired.

With offices running on skeleton crews, the NWS Weather Forecast Offices in Kotzebue, Alaska; Albany, New York; and Gray, Maine; simply can’t spare the man-hours to launch their radiosondes. These instrument packages are attached to weather balloons that lift them through the troposphere, or the lowest layer of the atmosphere within which all the weather happens.

Temperature, humidity, pressure, and wind data collected by the radiosondes allow meteorologists to determine the profile and stability of the atmosphere twice a day over specific, strategically selected locations. It also feeds into the dynamical weather models that have so impressively advanced in their capability to forecast the weather since the Lorenz era.

On the days these atmospheric profiles go missing, weather forecast quality will suffer. It’s worse than Lorenz’s rounding of variables—it’s holes that will lead to less granularity in data being ingested into the models that will inevitably lead to poorer predictions. And while that may be fine on a 30 degree Celsius (86 Fahrenheit) summer day in which, perhaps, it ends up partly sunny instead of mostly sunny, it’s a whole different story when we’re talking about knowing whether a future Sandy-like superstorm takes a left turn into New York City or not.

Balloon-launch gaps are only one example of critical meteorological information that is on track to go missing in 2025. Two flight directors and an electronic engineer from NOAA’s Hurricane Hunters were fired too. The flight directors’ job was to evaluate weather conditions in tropical cyclones to ensure the safety of the mission from a meteorological perspective. Understandably, every reconnaissance flight must have a flight director on board.

Now, some flights this hurricane season are in jeopardy because they may not have a flight director available. While the Air Force Reserve 53rd Weather Reconnaissance Squadron also flies into storms, any reduction in the combined number of NOAA and Air Force flights into fledgling tropical storms could lead to disaster.

This is no exaggeration. Two recent major disasters in Mexico’s Pacific coast came without warning because of the lack of hurricane hunter data: Hurricanes Otis in 2023 and John in 2024. Aircraft reconnaissance simply isn’t flown as often in the eastern Pacific as it is in the Atlantic for reasons that are beyond the scope of this article. The data gaps in 2023-24 resulted in Acapulco and nearby areas being devastated by storms that were first forecast by the NWS’s National Hurricane Center (NHC) to be relatively benign.

Both Otis and John underwent extremely rapid intensification that turned them from modest tropical storms into major destructive hurricanes in the span of about a day. NHC’s methods for remotely estimating storm intensity were insufficient and imprecise compared to the direct measurements that hurricane hunters provide.

The ability to observe, forecast, and warn of impactful weather is being degraded, putting lives and the economy in danger.

In the case of Hurricane Otis, this lack of information turned into a “nightmare” underestimation of its intensity which left those in its path with very little time to prepare. Based on satellite imagery, NHC was estimating Otis to be either a strong tropical storm or a category 1 or 2 hurricane on the Saffir Simpson scale when the only reconnaissance mission flown into the cyclone arrived. The Air Force crew recorded windspeeds already at category 3, and the hurricane continued to intensify all the way until it made landfall near Acapulco causing death and widespread destruction.

I’m confident that NHC forecasters suffered through some sleepless nights thinking of how just one more hurricane hunter flight may have saved lives. After all, NWS and its NHC branch are two of several US government agencies that pursue the most noble of goals: to save lives. In its mission statement, NWS states that it exists “for the protection of life and property and the enhancement of the national economy.” In the United States, life and property are considered so sacrosanct that their protection is enshrined in 5th and 14th Amendments to the Constitution.

Speaking of property, think for a moment about why NOAA sits within the Department of Commerce? Weather can impact the economy in many ways, and when it becomes extreme, monetary losses can spread regionally to a majority of businesses. The United States has sustained hundreds of weather and climate disasters since 1980 in which overall costs reached at least $1 billion. Added together, the total cost of these 403 events from 1980 to 2024 approaches $3 trillion (with a “T”).

Yet when it comes to protecting the economy and our people from clear and present dangers like disease (the work of agencies such as NIH, CDC, FDA, USDA, USAID), environmental degradation (e.g. EPA, Dept. of Interior), and severe weather (e.g. NOAA/NWS), the new administration is throwing caution to the wind and allowed the DOGE wrecking ball to swing wildly and indiscriminately.

Shortly after coming into power in January, the administration concocted a “deferred resignation” program to start thinning out the federal ranks. According to the White House, about 75,000 federal employees signed up. That was followed in February by broad firings of federal workers during their probationary period—generally one or two years into their new jobs. As of March 7, more than 100,000 employees have been fired or offered buyouts.

Many of the fired civil servants on probation were not new hires fresh out of college. I know of very experienced and valuable NOAA employees that were two decades into their careers but had recently been promoted. Because every government promotion comes with probationary status, they’ve now lost their jobs.

Or have they?

Part of the chaos we’re living through is that the president and advisers—maybe deliberately—can’t seem to make up their minds. The second weekend in March, the termination of probationary staff at NWS was apparently rescinded. At the same time, it was reported that NOAA needs to prepare for another round of firings that would lead to the loss of another 1,000 workers. We can’t lose sight of the fact that the dismantling of NOAA is an integral part of Project 2025 because, according to the Heritage Foundation, it is a source of “climate alarmism.”

All signs point to the dismemberment of the national meteorological and hydrological service (NMHS) that had been the envy of the world. Whether it is by hitting it with a sledgehammer or delivering death by 1,000 cuts, NOAA and NWS staff are already spread thin and demoralized. The ability to observe, forecast, and warn of impactful weather is being degraded. This is putting American lives and the American economy in danger.

I may be known for my hurricane acumen, but I cannot do my job without NOAA. I may be the voice of reason in a storm, but the NWS serves as my vocal cords. The American public needs to relentlessly continue contacting their elected representatives to save NOAA and NWS, and more broadly, to save science, which is under siege in this country.

Because without the National Weather Service, there is no Jim Cantore, no Al Roker, and no John Morales.

Continue Reading…

Mother Jones

The Horrific Details of Mahmoud Khalil’s Detainment

Mahmoud Khalil, a recent Columbia graduate who is Palestinian, was detained by the Department of Homeland Security almost one week ago. Since then, Khalil, who is in the United States on a green card, has still not been charged with a crime. And representatives from Columbia University remain markedly silent on his case. On Friday morning, the university said the Trump administration sent ICE agents to raid Columbia dorms.

BREAKING: The US Justice Department is examining whether student protests at Columbia University over the genocide in Gaza violated federal terrorism laws, Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche said today.

Blanche’s department previously said the investigation is also looking… pic.twitter.com/sLuUs8dgjQ

— Drop Site (@DropSiteNews) March 14, 2025

Amid the crackdown, the arrest has sparked large protests—both for Khalil’s individual freedom, and for the Palestinian cause he publicly championed on Columbia’s campus.

“He has no connections to Hamas whatsoever. His one and only goal was to get Columbia University to divest from its complicity in Israeli government crimes in Gaza and the West Bank.”

For many days, it was unclear how Khalil was being detained, as lawyers struggled to talk to their client. We now have a better idea of the horrific conditions Khalil has gone through since his arrest. The former Columbia student’s legal team released an updated filing on Thursday, detailing the circumstances of his case. They also held a press conference today, further elucidating what has happened to Khalil.

Here are some key details:

Unclear Legality of Detainment

The legal logic for Khalil’s deportation is obscure. The case against him rests on a little-used provision of the law that allows the Secretary of State to determine whether he is someone whose “presence or activities in the United States would have potentially serious foreign policy consequences for the United States.” Per Khalil’s lawyers, “Secretary Rubio made this determination based on Mr. Khalil’s lawful activity protected by the First Amendment: his participation in protests and his statements regarding Palestine and Israel.” However, Secretary Rubio cannot just unilaterally revoke Khalil’s green card without process, his lawyers say. Amy Belsher of NYCLU said such claims are “extremely misleading,” and that the state still must “prove in immigration court that he is deportable under the Immigration and Nationality Act.”

Lawyers Say White House Was Possibly Involved in Khalil’s Arrest

The White House, Khalil’s lawyers say, may be directly involved in their clinet’s detainment. “During his transport, Mahmoud was transferred through various state lines…during that process, he was surrounded by many people he believed to be DHS agents. He believes that he heard one of them say that the White House wants an update on what’s going on,” Samah Sisay, of the Center for Constitutional Rights said. “We have reason to believe that many people within the executive branch of the government were involved, including the White House.”

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by ACLU (@aclu_nationwide)

DHS Official Implied “Pro-Palestine Activity” Is a Criminal Act

When pressed as to what Khalil’s “activities with serious foreign policy consequences” are, DHS has been oblique. One official, Troy Edgar, recently went on NPR’s Morning Edition. When questioned on why Khalil was arrested, he had few answers and conflated “pro-Palestine activity” with a criminal act. One of Khalil’s lawyers, Ramzi Kassem of CUNY’s CLEAR law project, said that while Trump administration officials have accused Khalil of “distributing pro-Hamas fliers” outside of court, the state has introduced no such evidence. “As we are all sadly all too familiar, the White House makes all kinds of claims about all kinds of subjects, and this is no exception,” Kassem said. “They have not introduced any fliers in court, and Mr. Khalil vehemently denies doing anything like that. He has no connections to Hamas whatsoever. His one and only goal was to get Columbia University to divest from its complicity in Israeli government crimes in Gaza and the West Bank.”

Khalil Is Being Held In a Private Prison in Louisiana

Khalil is being held at the LaSalle Detention Facility in Jena, Louisiana, a GEO Group-owned private prison that houses thousands of immigrants and is notorious for poor conditions. In 2023, over 300 detainees at the facility attempted a hunger strike to protest medical neglect, inadequate personal hygiene items, and long waits for immigration hearings.

The Trump Administration Reportedly Threatened Columbia to Crackdown

On Thursday, the Trump administration sent a letter to Columbia University, demanding that the school comply with MAGA political priorities in order for $400 million of its federal funding to be restored. The letter called for a full on-campus mask ban, the expulsion of student activists, further authority to arrest students on campus, and that the Middle East, South Asian, and Africa Studies department be placed under external supervision.

Khalil Asked Columbia for Protection

The night before DHS agents arrested him at his university-owned apartment building, Khalil sent Columbia an email asking for protection from potential retaliation by the Trump administration. “I urgently need legal support, and I urge you to intervene and provide the necessary protections to prevent further harm,” Khalil wrote.

Pro-Israeli Groups Pushed American Politicians to Target Khalil

Sen. John Fetterman (D-Pennsylvania) reportedly worked with Ross Glick of the fascist-influenced pro-Israel organization Betar to escalate the matter of Khalil’s address to the highest levels of the Trump administration. Betar claims to have submitted “thousands of names” of student activists to the government.

Khalil and Other Students Sued Columbia University

Another lawsuit, filed by Khalil and a group of anonymous Columbia students, accuses the university of collaborating with the Trump administration by illegally sharing student disciplinary records with Congress and other third parties.

Khalil Compared His Detention to Kidnapping Experienced in Syria

Khalil will likely remain at the LaSalle/Jena facility in Louisiana until at least March 17th. His first child is due within the month. His wife, being eight months pregnant, is unable to fly to Louisiana.

In the legal briefing, Khalil said the arrest by DHS felt like he was being “kidnapped.” It reminded him, the briefing says, of “fleeing arbitrary detention in Syria and forced disappearance of his friends in Syria in 2013.”

Another Columbia Student Has Been Arrested

Another Palestinian Columbia student, Leqaa Kordia, who is originally from the West Bank, was arrested March 14th for overstaying her student visa, according to DHS. DHS secretary Kristi Noem alleged in a statement that Kordia “advocate[d] for violence,” but did not elaborate on that claim.

Continue Reading…

Mother Jones

Tulsi Gabbard Wanted a Promoter of Pro-Putin Commentators to Be Her Deputy

This week, Tulsi Gabbard had her first brush with controversy as President Donald Trump’s director of national intelligence, when it became known that she had picked as her deputy a right-wing podcaster named Daniel Davis, who had regularly assailed the Israeli government and its war in Gaza, accusing Israel of “pursuing ethnic cleansing” and criticizing US support for what he called “Netanyahu’s war.” Within hours of Jewish Insider breaking this story on Wednesday, which sparked immediate criticism, Gabbard reversed course on appointing Davis, a senior fellow at the Koch-funded Defense Priorities think tank, to this powerful position that oversees the compiling of the President’s Daily Brief, the collection of intelligence assessments that goes to the White House and top policymakers.

Davis’ fervent opposition to Israel’s war—rooted in the non-interventionist tradition of the far right—was too much to bear for senators and Trump administration officials. He became a victim of the never-ending campaign mounted by pro-Israel hawks to keep such critical voices far from positions of power. But the focus on Davis’ stance on Israel distracted from a truly scandalous aspect of this near-appointment: By picking Davis, a former Army lieutenant colonel with no intelligence community experience, Gabbard sought to hire for this important and highly sensitive position a prolific disseminator of pro-Russia messaging, who himself has been embraced by state-controlled Russian media outlets for the positions he espouses and platforms. Yet Davis’ extensive amplification of pro-Putin talking points received little, if any, attention in the media coverage of this hullabaloo.

Davis posts episodes of his YouTube Deep Dive podcast daily; sometimes he produces multiple episodes a day. In recent months, most shows have focused on the Russia-Ukraine war, with Davis and his guests usually pounding on Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and criticizing US assistance for Ukraine. There is not much, if any, criticism of Russian leader Vladimir Putin, his launching of the war, or the atrocities committed by his forces.

In a January episode typical of the show, retired Army Col. Douglas Macgregor called on Trump to walk away from Ukraine: “The win for us is extricating us from this tar baby, get out, say good bye move on… Announce we’re leaving, we’re out, we’re not going to do this anymore.” He noted that the United States should not even try to craft a negotiated end to the conflict. Davis agreed and said, “This is what makes sense.” He then cited a key Kremlin talking point, asserting that Russian leader Vladimir Putin has no interest in moving against other European nations and is only “focused on protecting the ethnic Russians in the eastern part of what was Ukraine.”

Because of conversations like these, Davis’ show, which has 134,000 subscribers on You Tube, has been regularly promoted on Russian state media. One private analysis obtained by Mother Jones shows that Russian state media outlets have cited Davis’ show nearly 300 times in the past 18 months. For instance, when Davis hosted Macgregor in late 2023 and he proclaimed the Russian economy was doing “brilliantly” and Moscow was about to win the war, Rossiyskaya Gazeta a government daily newspaper, published a news story on this episode under the headline, “Colonel Macgregor: Biden has made Putin stronger than ever.”

Macgregor has been, by far, the most frequent guest on Davis’ podcast, some weeks appearing several times. In 2020, Trump named him to be US ambassador to Germany, but after CNN revealed his history of making xenophobic and racist comments, his nomination died. Following Putin’s invasion of Russia in 2022, Macgregor often appeared on Fox News programs, spouting a pro-Putin line. He told Tucker Carlson that it would be pointless to impose sanctions on Russia. On another show, he said that Russian forces were “too gentle” during the opening days of the invasion and that Zelensky was a “puppet.” He blasted all information coming from Ukraine as propaganda.

During one Fox appearance, Macgregor said the United States should not demonize Putin, provide no aid to Ukraine, and let the Russian leader take whatever part of Ukraine he desired.

Former Trump Advisor Douglas MacGregor says we need to stop demonizing Putin, lift all sanctions, stop providing weapons and aid, that it’s “hopeless,” and just let Putin take whatever part of Ukraine that he wants. pic.twitter.com/HBnLWVdVgD

— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) February 28, 2022

In his podcast episodes, Davis often seconded Macgregor’s remarks and presented him as a fellow whose extreme views should be heeded by the president and US policymakers.

Another regular guest for Davis has been Larry Johnson, who was a CIA analyst for several years in the 1980s. As the Voice of America reported recently, “The Kremlin uses Johnson’s often false and misleading claims to promote pro-Russian narratives and improve its image.”

Johnson is a longtime critic of US intelligence and an advocate for Russia—and a promoter of conspiracy theories. After the 2016 election, he repeatedly appeared on Russian state media to refute the US intelligence finding that Russia had covertly interfered in that contest to help Trump. (He claimed the CIA might have engineered the hacking of Democratic sources—a crime widely attributed to Russian operatives.) He also pushed the bogus claim that British intelligence services had spied on Trump. As a blogger in 2008, he spread the rumor that Michelle Obama had been recorded uttering a slur about white people.

More recently, in 2023, he contended that US intelligence was scheming to assassinate Zelenskyy and make it look as if he had been killed in a Russian airstrike. Citing his claim, RIA Novosti, the Russian- state-owned news agency, declared that “U.S. intelligence agencies are planning to assassinate Zelenskyy.” Last September, Voice of America reported that leading Russian state media outfits had cited or referred to Johnson more than 1000 times in the previous twelve months, as he often predicted Ukraine was about to suffer a major setback or even lose the war.

On Wednesday, Davis featured Johnson on his show once again, and Johnson reported that he had just attended a small meeting in Moscow with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov. Davis nodded approvingly, as Johnson voiced Russian talking points, praised Lavrov, and said it was “quite an honor” to speak with the Russian. (On his website, Johnson hailed Lavrov, a longtime Putin henchman, as “a gentleman and the walking definition of a master diplomat.”) Johnson blamed the West for the Russia-Ukraine war and the United States for tensions with Russia. He said of Putin, “As a lawyer, he is a stickler for the law.” Davis did not challenge this observation.

While in Moscow, Johnson and right-wing commentator Andrew Napolitano, also met with Russia oligarch Konstantin Malofeev, a Russian media mogul and Putin supporter who was sanctioned by the United States in 2014 for supporting Russian forces in eastern Ukraine and who was indicted by the US in 2022 for allegedly conspiring to violate US sanctions. Talking to Davis about his trip, Johnson recounted that he saw few cops and cited this to suggest that Russia was not a police state. He praised Moscow’s clean streets.

During this podcast, Johnson insisted that Americans should knock off criticizing Russia for corruption. He said he expected the “news” to break “in the next month or two” that members of Congress “took money from Ukrainians, $50 billion worth that wound up in banks in the Caribbean. Fifty billion.” Davis replied, “Yeah.” Johnson dumped on Zelenskyy, saying, “he is not a legitimate negotiating partner.” He called on Ukraine to stop fighting and withdraw its soldiers. He did not say the same about Russia. Davis pointed out that Trump had been right to halt US military aid to Ukraine—which has since been resumed—and remarked, “Trump agreeing to the Russian side isn’t a capitulation. It isn’t a surrender. It is an acknowledgement of reality… There is no other alternative.”

Davis did not respond to a request for comment, nor did Gabbard’s office. Macgregor and Johnson also did not reply to requests for comment.

Davis’ appointment was sabotaged in part because he has defied the pro-Israel hardline deeply ingrained within the Trump administration. (The Anti-Defamation League called him “extremely dangerous” and “unfit for this key security role.”) But his selection should have been problematic for another reason: This conservative non-interventionist has made common cause with and amplified pro-Russia commentators of dubious credibility, and that has rendered him useful for Putin’s state-run media. What’s most troubling is that Gabbard saw him as qualified and suitable for this position. A supposed military expert who relies on and boosts pro-Putin proponents and a conspiracy theorist ought not be in charge of the daily intelligence report the president receives. Gabbard’s initial decision to hire him shows that she, not Davis, is the real problem.

Continue Reading…

Mother Jones

The Trump Administration Is Learning to Ignore Their Employees’ Scandals

Last week, I reported on the long history of bigoted and xenophobic remarks by Kingsley Wilson, a 26-year-old MAGA enthusiast who’s now a deputy press secretary at the Department of Defense. Following that article and and other outlets’ reporting on Wilson, members of Congress, the Anti-Defamation League, and the American Jewish Committee, among others, have expressed concern about Wilson’s extreme rhetoric and her fitness for the job.

Most scandals pass with little comment from the White House, Trump, or the agencies involved.

The response from the White House and the Pentagon has been notable: near-complete silence. With Wilson, as with other recent controversies involving Trump administration officials, the White House and federal agencies are making a clear and somewhat novel choice to ignore them entirely.

Wilson spent years espousing extreme ideas on Twitter and on various podcasts, including promoting the debunked lie that Jewish lynching victim Leo Frank was guilty of the crime for which he was wrongfully accused, an idea that is rarely repeated outside of dedicated antisemitic and white supremacist circles. She also aligned herself with extreme anti-immigrant and nationalist sentiment, repeating a phrase associated with the German far-right, and, on Twitter, advocating to make “Kosovo Serbia again,” a particularly bizarre sentiment for someone who now works for the U.S. government, which supports an independent Kosovo and maintains military forces there.

Both the ADL and the AJC expressed outrage at her Leo Frank comments, with the AJC calling her “clearly unfit for her role” and the ADL describing itself as “deeply disturbed” and calling for her to retract them. Congressman Ritchie Torres (D-N.Y.) wrote to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth calling for Wilson to be removed from her role. Republican Senators Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and Deb Fischer of Iowa also condemned her remarks to Politico, which featured other senior Republican staffers wondering anonymously if she had been vetted.

The Pentagon didn’t respond to five requests for comment from Mother Jones made over the course of the last week about Wilson’s comments and whether she passed a background screening or underwent other vetting before being hired. Other outlets making similar inquiries reported that a spokesperson referred their inquiries to Wilson herself, who didn’t respond. Both the ADL and Congressman Torres’ office confirmed to Mother Jones that they too haven’t received any response from the Pentagon, except an automated response to an email from Torres’ office, confirming receipt. (When reached for comment, the AJC said it did “not have anything new to share beyond our statement on X.”)

Wilson briefly stopped tweeting from her personal account after her controversial statements started to gain attention last week, she continued sharing only retweets of her professional account. By Tuesday had returned to celebrate President Trump buying a Tesla.

It’s not just Wilson who is holding down an administration job under the cover of silence. The White House was also notably mum on several other scandals involving fresh hires, including Edward Corisitine, the 19-year-old DOGE employee who’s also gone by “Big Balls” online. According to Wired, the company he founded, Tesla.Sexy LLC, has several Russian-registered domains, which would have raised red flags in a security review. So might his possible participation in an online hacking forum, where, the outlet reported, someone using a screenname that’s been associated with Corisitine suggested they were seeking help carrying out a distributed denial-of-service attack. The administration also had no response to the fact that, according to CNN and other outlets, Coristine was “terminated” for leaking information to a competitor during an internship at an Arizona cybersecurity company.

Nor has there been any real response to reporting on Office of Personnel Management spokesperson McLaurine Pinover, who used her working hours to try to launch herself as a fashion influencer, posting outfit videos from her government office as she was tasked with defending the deep cuts that OPM and DOGE have inflicted on the federal workforce.

Even the previous Trump administration didn’t approach personnel issues this way.

CNN reported that OPM didn’t respond to a request for comment. OPM did, in a sense, respond to Mother Jones, sending an unsigned email with information that the sender declared to be “off the record.” (For a conversation to be off the record, a reporter and a source must both agree; it cannot be unilaterally invoked.) The email said that Pinover had deleted her Instagram account to avoid being “being flooded with whatever attention might come from that,” and added that she was receiving threats.

There are also two cases that didn’t result in real consequences, but at least kicked off some public comment. When the Wall Street Journal found that DOGE staffer Marko Elez had a history of racist tweets, he did resign—but was brought back after Musk, Trump and Vice President JD Vance all defended the tweets as boyish errors. And when CNN reported that acting State Department official Darren Beattie had repeated false statements about his boss Marco Rubio’s sexuality and called him “low IQ,” Beattie issued a statement to the outlet praising Rubio as “100 percent America First” and professing to be honored to work with him. Ironically, Beattie serves as an acting undersecretary for public diplomacy.

Beattie’s own career shows that even the previous Trump administration didn’t approach personnel issues this way; he was fired as a White House speechwriter in 2018 after a CNN report catalogued his racist, homophobic and otherwise offensive tweets and revealed that he’d spoken at the H.L. Mencken Club conference, an event regularly attended by white nationalists. In February, Rubio refused to comment to reporters at a press gaggle about Beattie’s past comments and associations, but defended him as someone who was “strongly committed to ending the censorship programs that were being operated out of the State Department” that Rubio said had targeted “American voices.”

Other Trump administration officials departed the first time around following a variety of scandals, large and small. Two White House staffers, Rob Porter and David Sorenson, resigned after news outlets revealed that both men had previously been accused of domestic violence. Tom Price, who served as HHS secretary, resigned after reporting showed he took charter jets instead of flying commercial; his resignation came hours after Trump said publicly that he didn’t like the “optics” of his pricey travel. And VA secretary David Shulkin left after an ethics scandal involving tickets to Wimbledon and European travel.

This time, though, most scandals are seemingly passing with little public comment from the White House, Trump himself, or the agencies involved. Coupled with the White House’s promotion of a new state media, a group of ultra-conservative outlets and influencers who are granted unusual degrees of access if they cheer the administration’s every move, a clearer picture is emerging.

The administration, it seems, feels empowered to ignore news they don’t like, lavishly reward pseudo-coverage that paints them in a flattering light, and avoid public accountability for issues that would be messy or embarrassing to deal with. It’s another irony for an administration that has dubbed itself “the most transparent administration in history,” and it’s unlikely to be the last.

Continue Reading…

Mother Jones

Environmentalist Sound Alarm as the Fossil-Fuel Industry Seeks Legal Immunity

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

As fossil fuel interests attack climate accountability litigation, environmental advocateshave sounded a new warning that they are pursuing a path that would destroy all future prospects for such cases.

Nearly 200 advocacy groups have urged Democratic representatives to “proactively and affirmatively” reject potential industry attempts to obtain immunity from litigation.

“We have reason to believe that the fossil fuel industry and its allies will use the chaos and overreach of the new Trump administration to attempt yet again to…shield themselves from facing consequences for their decades of pollution and deception,” reads a letter to Congress on Wednesday. It was signed by 195 environmental groups such as the Sierra Club, Earthjustice, and Sunrise Movement; legal nonprofits including the American Association for Justice and Public Justice; and dozens of other organizations.

Over the last decade, states and municipalities have brought more than 30 lawsuits accusing big oil of intentionally covering up the climate risks of their products, and seeking potentially billions in damages. The defendants have worked to kill the cases, with limited success.

Now, with Republicans in control of the White House and both congressional chambers, advocates fear the industry will go further, pursuing total immunity from all existing and future climate lawsuits. To do so, they could lobby for a liability waiver like the one granted to the firearms industry in 2005, which has successfully blocked most attempts to hold them accountable for violence.

“Lawmakers must decisively reject any attempt by the fossil fuel industry to evade accountability and ensure both justice today and the right of future generations to hold polluters responsible for decades of deception,” said the missive, which is addressed to House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer.

Fossil fuel companies have vied for such a get-out-of-jail-free card for years. In 2017, a coalition of Republican officials, economists, and oil companies proposed legal liability as a condition of a carbon tax, arguing the industry could not weather both. When the council abandoned the waiver proposal two years later, ExxonMobil threatened to leave the group, documents subpoenaed by the Senate show.

Then, in 2020, a waiver was quietly included in a draft of a Covid-19 spending package but was later removed, the investigative climate outlet Drilled found.

Such a waiver could only pass through the Senate with supermajority support, requiring backing from some Democrats. In a January interview, Michael Gerrard, a climate law expert at Columbia University, said it is “hard to imagine” it winning bipartisan backing. But the advocates fear oil companies could lobby officials to once again quietly tuck the proposal into a larger, must-pass piece of legislation.

“If they are seeking a liability waiver, they might also seek congressional action precluding the state climate superfund laws.”

“Democrats need to be on guard,” said Aaron Regunberg, the climate accountability project director at the consumer advocacy group Public Citizen, which signed the letter.

The authors of the letter do not have hard evidence of a current industry push for legal immunity, but their concerns come amid wider attacks on climate litigation.

On the campaign trail, Trump pledged to “stop the wave of frivolous litigation from environmental extremists.” And this month, a rightwing think tank launched a campaign attempting to shoot down litigation from “radical climate groups,” which it called the “biggest risk” to Donald Trump’s energy agenda, E&E News reported. The think tank has ties to Leonard Leo, who is widely known as a force behind the Federalist Society, which orchestrated the ultraconservative takeover of the American judiciary.

Last year, Leo-tied groups also launched another campaign, which one expert called “unprecedented,” to convince the Supreme Court to shield oil companies from lawsuits. In decisions this week and in January, the high court denied their request.

A truck parked outside a major fossil fuel conference on Monday in Houston, warned that “lawfare and anti-energy laws are threatening America’s pro-consumer energy dominance,” linking to an op-ed from a group with links to Leo.

Another development sparking worry at oil companies: “climate superfund” bills, meant to make big polluters help pay for climate action.

Last year, Vermont and New York passed such measures, which are loosely modeled on the US superfund program. Ten other states are considering similar proposals, which could each cost the industry billions or trillions.

Red states and oil lobby groups are legally challenging the laws. This week, the Federalist Society—which Leo co-chairs—hosted a panel criticizing the measures.

“If they are seeking a liability waiver, they might also seek congressional action precluding the state climate superfund laws,” Gerrard said.

It is a major fear for Cassidy DiPaola of the pro-climate superfund group Make Polluters Pay, which signed the letter. “What’s at stake here isn’t just who pays for climate disasters,” she said. “It’s whether our democracy allows powerful industries to simply rewrite the rules when justice catches up to them.”

Continue Reading…

Mother Jones

Report: Trump Family May Invest in Crypto Giant Binance as Founder Seeks Pardon

The Trump family has allegedly been discussing a possible investment in the crypto exchange Binance—a deal that, especially in light of Binance’s multi-billion-dollar valuation, would raise a host of conflict-of-interest questions. The discussions were first revealed by the Wall Street Journal on Thursday, which also reported that Binance’s founder, Changpeng Zhao, is simultaneously seeking a presidential pardon after pleading guilty in 2023 to violating anti-money-laundering laws.

Zhao disputed the Journal’s reporting, posting on X Thursday that the paper “got the facts wrong” and that he’d “had no discussions of a Binance US deal with … well, anyone.”

On top of the ethical issues raised by the possible entanglement of executive clemency powers with a lucrative financial transaction, such an investment deal could also turn the Trump family into business partners with a Middle Eastern royal family.

News of the alleged Binance talks comes one day after an Abu Dhabi-based investment firm, MGX Fund Management, announced it is making a $2 billion investment in Binance, securing a minority stake in the exchange. MGX’s chairman is Tahnoun bin Zayed Al Nahyan—who is the national security adviser for the United Arab Emirates and brother of the UAE’s current ruler, Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan.

Tahnoun bin Zayed is also the chairman of a separate investment firm called G42 Just last year, the Republican-led House Select Committee on China raised concerns over that firm’s close connections with the Chinese government and its possible involvement in the transfer of sensitive American technology to China through a deal it proposed with Microsoft. (Microsoft later added safeguards to the deal in response to congressional concerns.)

Zhao founded Binance in 2017, and it quickly grew to be one of the most important crypto exchanges in the business, alongside Sam Bankman-Fried’s FTX. In fact, it was a failed merger and personal acrimony between the two companies and their founders that seemed to trigger the collapse of FTX. But Binance ran into its own troubles when, following years of criticism over its security and privacy practices, the company in 2023 was charged with money laundering and sanctions evasion. Among other accusations, the US government charged that the company had helped users evade sanctions against Russia, Iran, and Cuba. A Reuters report found that Korean hacking groups, investment frauds, and drug networks all had used the exchange to move money.

Eventually, the company agreed to a $4 billion fine, and Zhao agreed to resign and personally pay a $50 million fine. He also served four months in prison.

According to the Journal’s report Thursday, the possibility of bringing on the Trump family as investors was first raised by Binance, and Steve Witkoff, a Trump family friend who was recently named as the US special envoy to the Middle East, has been involved in the discussions. Witkoff has known Trump for decades, and last year his son, Zach Witkoff, founded the Trump-backed World Liberty Financial crypto company. The Journal reported that an administration official denied involvement by Steve Witkoff in any Binance talks.

The Journal reported that one source indicated that Binance may be seeking to follow the path blazed by crypto investor Justin Sun, who was facing a civil fraud investigation by the SEC under the Biden administration. Last fall, Sun invested $75 million into the World Liberty Financial platform—triggering an $18 million payday for Trump. Last month, the SEC announced it was halting its investigation into Sun.

Continue Reading…

Mother Jones

This CDC Nominee May Have Been Too Anti-Vax Even for RFK Jr.’s HHS

Republican lawmakers may not have considered avowed anti-vaxxer and conspiracy theorist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to betoo radical to run a federal health agency—but it turns out that Dr. Dave Weldon is.

On Thursday, the White House reportedly withdrew the nomination of the 71-year-old physician and former GOP representative from Floridato run the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) just hours before his initial committee confirmation hearing was set to take place, according to Axios, which was the first to report the news, and a statement from Weldon. As I reported back in December, Weldon, who spent more than a decade representing Florida in the House of Representatives before returning to practice as a physician, has a staunch anti-vaccine record. This is what may have reportedly posed a barrier to his confirmation in light of the measles outbreak across several states, especially Texas and New Mexico, that has led to more than 250 cases and killed two people, including an unvaccinated child (though the cause of one of the deaths is under investigation, according to the CDC).

After the withdrawal of former Rep. Matt Gaetz to be attorney general, Weldon isthe first Trump nominee who failed to make it through the Senate confirmation process—though there hasbeen no shortage of unqualified nominees. The webpage for the Senate Health Committee notes that his Thursday morning hearing has beencanceled. Spokespeople for the White House and the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) did not immediately respond to requests for comment from Mother Jones on Thursday morning.

As I previously wrote of Weldon’s history:

The physician and ex–Florida congressman’s track record includes introducing legislation that would have stripped the CDC of its authority to conduct research on vaccine safety and instead given it to an independent agency within the Department of Health and Human Services. Weldon has also promoted the unfounded theory that vaccines lead to childhood autism—a false claim boosted infamously in the past by Trump’s pick for HHS Secretary, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.

After he was catapulted to national attention following Trump’s November announcement of his nomination, Weldon seemed to try to soften his stance, telling the New York Times, “I believe in vaccination.” But as I previously reported, anti-vaxxers stillcelebrated his nomination. “He is one of us!! Since before our movement had momentum,” the co-director of the anti-vax group Mississippi Parents for Vaccine Rights wrote on social media.

“He is one of us!! Since before our movement had momentum.”

No word from those groups on Weldon’s withdrawal—butChildren’s Health Defense, an anti-vaccination group founded by RFK Jr., said the group was “disappointed” with the decision. Democrats, on the other hand, celebrated it. Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.) said in a post on X: “During one of the worst measles outbreaks in years because of Trump, Weldon should NEVER have even been under consideration to lead CDC.”

Weldon’s anti-abortion record left Democrats and abortion rights supporters opposed to his nomination. For them, Weldon’s withdrawal came as a rare “win for public health and reproductive freedom,” said Fatima Goss Graves, president and CEO of the National Women’s Law Center, which last week sent a letter to senators signed by more than 80 organizations opposing Weldon’s nomination.

As I reported in December:

And on abortion, Weldon is responsible for an eponymous federal law that prohibits HHS from funding any entities that “discriminate” against health care providers, hospitals, or insurance plans who opt out of providing abortion care—which the Trump administration “weaponized” to enact its anti-abortion agenda during his first term, according to the National Women’s Law Center. Weldon introduced the amendment in the House in 2004, and it has been passed as part of the HHS spending bill every year since 2005.

While in Congress, Weldon also co-sponsored legislation that sought to bar HHS from providing any Title X family planning funding to entities that provide abortions. (Then-Rep. Mike Pence sponsored that bill, and Trump enacted that policy in office, when Pence was vice president.) Weldon also supported a bill that proposed studying unsubstantiated links between abortion and depression.

In a lengthy statement released Thursday, Weldon said he got the news from the White House last night that he did not have enough votes to be confirmed because Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) and Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.)—a physician and chair of the Senate Health Committee—were planning tooppose him. A staffer for Cassidy told Mother Jones that “the decision to pull Dr. Weldon’s nomination did not come at the request of Senator Cassidy.” A spokesperson for Collins did not immediately respond to a request for comment.Weldon also suggested other forces were at play: “The concern of many people is that big Pharma was behind this which was probably true.”

But Weldon’s withdrawal does not mean RFK Jr. is suddenly in favor of evidence-based research about vaccines. Weldon alleged in his statement that RFK Jr. was “very upset” when he told him his nomination was dead, adding, “[Kennedy] said I was the perfect person for the job.”

Earlier this month, RFK Jr. wrote an op-ed for Fox in which he called for making measles vaccines “readily accessible for all those who want them”—but also said it was a “personal” decision. Soon after, he said in an interview that steroids and cod liver oil could be used to treat measles, despite there being no supporting evidence. He spoke with Texans who were working to distribute these and otherunproven disproven measles remedies, as my colleague Kiera Butler reported.

This week, the Washington Post reported that the National Institutes of Health (NIH) is terminating or limiting more than 40 grants related to researching vaccine hesitancy, and Reuters reported that the CDC is planning a large study into potential connections between vaccines and autism, despite the fact that theories of such links have been disproven. Those moves havemade CDC employees working on vaccine research and public health responses fearful that their work could be targeted, as I reported yesterday. Now, it appears they’ll have one less militant anti-vax leader whose agenda they will have to fight—at least until the next nominee is announced.

Continue Reading…

Mother Jones

The Trump EPA’s Baffling New Agenda Consists of Throttling Major Environmental Rules

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

Donald Trump’s administration is to reconsider the official finding that greenhouse gases are harmful to public health, a move that threatens to rip apart the foundation of the US’s climate laws, amid a stunning barrage of actions to weaken or repeal a host of pollution limits upon power plants, cars and waterways.

Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) issued an extraordinary cavalcade of pollution rule rollbacks on Wednesday, led by the announcement it would potentially scrap a landmark 2009 finding by the government that planet-heating gases, such carbon dioxide, pose a threat to human health.

The so-called endangerment finding, which followed a Supreme Court ruling that the EPA could regulate greenhouse gases, provides the underpinning for all rules aimed at cutting the pollution that scientists have unequivocally found is worsening the climate crisis.

“The Trump administration’s ignorance is trumped only by its malice toward the planet.”

Despite the enormous and growing body of evidence of devastation caused by rising emissions, including trillions of dollars in economic costs, Trump has called the climate crisis a “hoax” and dismissed those concerned by its worsening impacts as “climate lunatics.”

Lee Zeldin, the EPA administrator, said the agency would reconsider the endangerment finding due to concerns that it had spawned “an agenda that throttles our industries, our mobility, and our consumer choice while benefiting adversaries overseas.”

Zeldin wrote that Wednesday was the “most consequential day of deregulation in American history” and that “we are driving a dagger through the heart of climate-change religion and ushering in America’s Golden Age.” He boasted about the changes and said his agency’s mission was to “lower the cost of buying a car, heating a home and running a business.”

Environmentalists reacted with horror to the announcement and vowed to defend the overwhelming findings of science and the US’s ability to address the climate crisis through the courts, which regularly struck down Trump’s rollbacks in his first term.

“The Trump administration’s ignorance is trumped only by its malice toward the planet,” said Jason Rylander, legal director at the Center for Biological Diversity’s Climate Law Institute. _“_Come hell or high water, raging fires and deadly heatwaves, Trump and his cronies are bent on putting polluter profits ahead of people’s lives. This move won’t stand up in court. We’re going to fight it every step of the way.”

_“_Zeldin’s EPA is dragging America back to the days before the Clean Air Act, when people were dying from pollution.”

In all, the EPA issued 31 announcements within just a few hours that take aim at almost every major environmental rule designed to protect Americans’ clean air and water, as well as a livable climate.

The barrage included a move to overturn a Biden-era plan to slash pollution spewing from coal-fired power plants, which itself was a reduced version of an Obama administration initiative that was struck down by the Supreme Court.

The EPA will also revisit pollution standards for cars and trucks, which Zeldin said had imposed a “crushing regulatory regime” upon auto companies that are now shifting towards electric vehicles; considering weakening rules limiting sooty air pollution that is linked to an array of health problems; potentially axing requirements that power plants not befoul waterways or dump their toxic waste; and considering further narrowing how it implements the Clean Water Act in general.

The stunning broadside of actions against pollution rules could, if upheld by the courts, reshape Americans’ environment in ways not seen since major legislation was passed in the 1970s to end an era of smoggy skies and burning rivers that became the norm following American industrialization.

Pollutants from power plants, highways and industry cause a range of heart, lung and other health problems, with greenhouse gases among this pollution driving up the global temperature and fueling catastrophic heatwaves, floods, storms and other impacts.

_“_Zeldin’s EPA is dragging America back to the days before the Clean Air Act, when people were dying from pollution,” said Dominique Browning, director of the Moms Clean Air Force. “This is unacceptable. And shameful. We will oppose with all our hearts to protect our children from this cruel, monstrous action.”

The EPA’s moves come shortly after its decision to shutter all its offices that deal with addressing the disproportionate burden of pollution faced by poor people and minorities in the US, amid a mass firing of agency staff. Zeldin has also instructed that $20 billion in grants to help address the climate crisis be halted, citing potential fraud. Democrats have questioned whether these moves are legal.

Former EPA staff have reacted with shock to the upending of the agency.

“Today marks the most disastrous day in EPA history,” said Gina McCarthy, who was EPA administrator under Obama. “Rolling these rules back is not just a disgrace, it’s a threat to all of us. The agency has fully abdicated its mission to protect Americans’ health and wellbeing.”

The Trump administration has promised additional environmental rollbacks in the coming weeks. The Energy Dominance Council that the president established last month is looking to eliminate a vast array of regulations in an effort to boost the fossil fuel industry, the interior secretary, Doug Burgum, told the oil and gas conference CeraWeek in Houston on Wednesday. “We will come up with the ways that we can cut red tape,” he said. “We can easily get rid of 20-30 percent of our regulations.”

Additional reporting by Dharna Noor

Continue Reading…

Mother Jones

Trump’s American Caste System

In 1995, then–Assistant Attorney General Walter Dellinger testified in Congress about proposed legislation to deny certain immigrants’ children automatic citizenship upon birth. He was clear. Such a bill, Dellinger argued, was “unconstitutional on its face.” Even the lawful alternative—an amendment to the Constitution—would go against the country’s history and traditions.

“They could be deported anywhere the administration chooses. They could become stateless. These folks are going to be living in fear.”

Perhaps more importantly, Dellinger made a compelling and enduring case for why lawmakers and judges shouldn’t be entrusted with the power of excluding an entire class of US-born children from the right to citizenship. Tampering with birthright citizenship would “create a permanent caste of aliens, generation after generation—born in America but never to be among its citizens.” He continued: “To have citizenship in one’s own right, by birth upon this soil, is fundamental to our liberty as we understand it.”

Thirty years later, that notion is once again being put to the test by a Trump administration’s executive order meant to take away birthright citizenship from the American-born children of undocumented immigrants and visa holders. Mother Jones spoke with Carol Nackenoff, the Richter Professor Emerita of Political Science at Swarthmore College and co-author of American by Birth: Wong Kim Ark and the Battle for Citizenship, about the order’s ramifications, the specter of a caste system, and the potential creation of countless stateless people in the United States.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Can you talk about the origins of the text of the 14th Amendment—which is at the heart of arguments guaranteeing birthright citizenship—as a product of the post-Civil War moment and a reaction to white supremacy?

I should first say that the notion of birthright citizenship didn’t start with the Civil War. It started long before that and we brought it over in American jurisprudence from English common law. It dates at least back to 1608—the idea that citizenship follows the soil on which you were born. A number of nations in the 19th and 20th centuries had birthright citizenship rules, especially settler nations.

The 14th Amendment was a reaction to the Dred Scott [Supreme Court]ruling of 1857 in which the chief justice writing for the majority said that Dred Scott had no standing in a US federal court to raise the question about his freedom because the framers never intended for slaves or formerly enslaved people to be part of “We the People,” part of the citizenship of the United States. The framers of the 14th Amendment surely wanted to correct the understanding in Dred Scott and make slaves, or former slaves, born on this soil citizens of the United States—and they wanted to use a simple language to do it.

When the members of Congress were deliberating the 14th Amendment, some people said: What about gypsies? What about the Chinese? And the response was, yes, if they’re born on this soil, they’re citizens. If they started saying that people who were born here had to be naturalized or were not citizens, they were concerned about the American-born children of people who had come here from England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales, Germany, and so on. People who they had no desire to exclude and, in fact, were happy to have here. So they made a conscious decision not to exclude anybody from this general statement.

In a recent interview, a Harvard law professor described birthright citizenship as a “rule of non-racial citizenship” that “avoids the creation of a hereditary caste of people who are not citizens.” In what ways would Trump’s executive order on birthright citizenship enforce a caste system in the United States?

The 14th Amendment makes everyone born here equal. It is a non-caste-based notion of citizenship and once you start meddling with that, you’re introducing classes of people whose expectations and life chances will vary with their citizenship status. The people born after this artificial date will be treated very differently than people born beforehand.

People won’t be able to get social security numbers, passports, birth certificates, and driver’s licenses. They can’t cross international borders securely and expect to come back. If they find low-wage work, they’re going to be subject to the whims of their employers. They’re unlikely to be able to get health insurance. They’re going to be like any other undocumented resident, even though they were born here. They may lack fluency in another language, they may lack any contact with another country, and they could be deported anywhere the administration chooses. They could become stateless. These folks are going to be living in fear. They’re going to be living in the shadows. They’re going to become liminal.

Also, everybody’s going to have to provide proof of their parents’ citizenship status at the time of their own birth. My mother’s birth certificate is a handwritten note from a country doctor before there were any kind of standardized birth certificates. My father’s birth certificate was held in some kind of facility in St. Louis, and there was a fire and they were all burned up. There are an awful lot of people who are going to be caught in limbo, who are not going to be able to provide documents. Some scholars, including ProfessorLinda Bosniak, have talked about this sort of long-term limbo based on alienage, for example, as another form of caste. There will be a new kind of stratification among people put in place if this were allowed to go into effect.

Opponents of birthright citizenship have long argued for it to be abolished. Is there something different about the effort at this current moment?

Without someone like Trump in the White House, I don’t think we would be where we are right now. But there is still a growing vocal contingent speaking out against liberal birthright citizenship. I would say there are three things going on. One, there is a global trend to make birthright citizenship less generous. I think it’s partly due to ethno-nationalism and the rise of populism. A second reason is we’ve seen a huge surge in immigration. A third reason is a lot of people have been freaking out since population projections started indicating that we were going to become a majority-minority nation by 2050. For some folks, that is uncomfortable and intolerable. It’s not their country, it’s our country.

At the core of Trump’s attack on birthright citizenship is a centuries-old conflict over who gets to be an American citizen and who decides that. You co-authored a book titled American by Birth that covers some of that history in a context where anti-immigrant sentiment was also very prevalent. What is the importance of the Wong Kim Ark Supreme Court case for today’s debate?

Wong Kim Ark was born in the United States [to Chinese parents] in probably 1873 and always maintained an address in San Francisco. He was classified as a laborer. So, if he had been trying to come from China after 1882 he would not have been allowed in [under the Chinese Exclusion Act] if he had not been born here. He traveled with his family to China to find a bride and his parents stayed there. On return, he was not allowed to land. At this point, there were some US officials who wanted a test case about birthright citizenship. They were arguing that Wong Kim Ark was born to alien parents who were subjects of the Emperor of China and therefore he was not subject to the jurisdiction of the United States.

The Supreme Court rejected all those arguments and Justice Horace Gray wrote for a 6-2 majority that Wong Kim Ark was a citizen by birth. They read the 14th Amendment very simply and the exceptions very narrowly. What’s ironic is we like to love Justice [John Marshall] Harlan, who wrote the dissent in Plessy v. Ferguson that “there is no caste here, our Constitution is colorblind and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens.” But he dissented in Wong Kim Ark, saying the nation has a right to exclude a race that it considers unassimilable.

Trump’s executive order has already faced several legal challenges, with lower courts blocking its implementation. Do you anticipate that the Supreme Court might take up this case and, if so, how do you think the justices might rule?

I don’t see the Trump administration yet trying to make an argument that Wong Kim Ark should be overturned. But the argument that children of people who themselves broke the law to come here without the nation’s consent shouldn’t be birthright citizens scares me a little bit, given this current court. They tend, right now ,in these federal cases to say that it’s different because Wong Kim Ark’s parents were here with the permission of the United States. They were legally domiciled here. I could imagine the possibility, if [the justices] get really aggressive, that they would say there is a difference.

One thing that might slow things down is that in the current version of the Immigration and Nationality Act, the rule is the Wong Kim Ark rule. It’s reading the 14th Amendment very simply and the exceptions very narrowly. And Congress hasn’t changed that. They’ve proposed changes to birthright citizenship laws every Congress since 1993 and most of them don’t even get a hearing. This year, 40 people introduced an amendment to the INA that mirrors the language in Trump’s executive order, except it adds protections for children of non-citizens who are actively serving in the US armed forces. The court could simply say: Congress has spoken and the executive order doesn’t override it.

Continue Reading…

Mother Jones

Wildlife and Conservation Scientists Are Next in Line for Trump’s Chopping Block

This story was originally published b_y High Country News a_nd is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

The scientists responsible for crucial fish and wildlife research projects in the West involving species like elk, mule deer, sage grouse, and wild horses might be next in line for the Trump administration’s chopping block to improve government efficiency.

Like many of the federal workforce cuts that include biologists, trail crews, and even waste-water treatment managers, experts say rather than improving government efficiency, laying off employees from the US Geological Survey Cooperative Research Units could actually end up costing taxpayers more.

It’s still unclear exactly how deep the cuts could be, although the Department of Interior told the USGS and cooperative units to present plans to slice their budgets by 10 percent, 25 percent, and even 40 percent, said Ed Arnett, CEO of The Wildlife Society. Any cuts to the agencies will have ripple effects throughout the wildlife world, experts say, while cuts of up to 40 percent could cause permanent harm to fish and wildlife, from mule deer and elk to endangered desert tortoises and sage grouse. And Western states and nonprofits, which have millions of dollars of their own money wrapped up in hundreds of research projects, are bracing themselves for the worst.

“My concern is really high. The Nebraska Game and Parks Commission has over $4 million worth of projects, either ongoing right now, getting close to wrapping up, or new projects,” said the commission’s director, Tim McCoy, including projects on the greater prairie chicken, studying declines in wild turkey numbers, and how to more efficiently manage invasive carp. “Our co-op unit is pretty integral to our ability to do and answer the real applied science questions, like declining populations.”

The federal government established the cooperative fish and wildlife research units, often just called co-ops, in 1935. Congress codified it in 1960, allowing for annual appropriations to be nestled within the US Geological Survey under the Department of Interior. Their mandate was clear and simple: Help states with research projects they didn’t have the capacity to do on their own, offer technical assistance and train the next generation of biologists.

And so they did, often as teams of two or three, working in 44 universities spread across 41 states—at most about 120 scientists altogether, at least until the recent cuts, which already laid off nearly half a dozen probationary employees. “Losing (the co-ops) would be devastating,” said John Carroll, a University of Nebraska wildlife professor and president of the National Association of University Fish and Wildlife Programs.

The co-ops are already lean, he added; in many ways, they are the definition of efficiency. They are the opposite of “ivory tower” university programs, providing a critical link between university science and local fish and wildlife needs.

“This is blue-collar, boots-on-the-ground, getting-it-done stuff,” said Tony Wasley, former head of the Nevada Department of Wildlife and current president of the Wildlife Management Institute, which partners with the USGS, the US Fish and Wildlife Service, universities, and state wildlife agencies to run the units.

About 700 projects are underway at any given time across the country, supporting more than 1,000 jobs each year for skilled workers including graduate students, postdoctoral researchers and research technicians. Ultimately, they raise about $3 for every $1 they receive from the federal government.

Projects include the Wyoming Migration Initiative, which sprang out of the University of Wyoming’s cooperative unit and led to the mapping of dozens of big game migration routes across the state. That co-op also worked with other states around to the West to produce atlases that help state wildlife agencies and lawmakers remove harmful fences, invest in easements and identify good locations for highway over- and underpasses that save both wildlife and human lives.

The scientific research the co-ops do helps state agencies address the threats that fish and wildlife face from development and diseases, said Jerod Merkle, a University of Wyoming assistant professor of migration ecology and conservation. In Wyoming, scientists provide information the state uses to maintain its wildlife and fisheries and preserve the state’s hunting and fishing heritage.

Arnett said he anticipates cuts perhaps as early as mid-March. The USGS did not respond to requests for comment.

The firing of hundreds of biologists across the country is creating a chilling effect, not only on those who lose their jobs as well as those who remain, but also on the future of wildlife and fisheries research. Many fired biologists were local people who shook hands with landowners, discussed important programs over coffee and maintained critical relationships between the government and Westerners who live with fish and wildlife.

And co-ops are responsible for training many of the biologists who go on to work for state fish and wildlife agencies, said Wyoming Game and Fish Director Angi Bruce. “The added benefit of working with these young scientists and giving them exposure to real application in the field is something we couldn’t find anywhere else.”

Continue Reading…

Mother Jones

After 2024, We Need to Rethink “Ground Game” Completely

When a presidential campaign ends in failure, small things prepared for the victory die with it. Celebratory merchandise rots in boxes; laudatory magazine covers leak to social media instead of going to the printers. And, as the news moves on, election season narratives that hardened over the campaign float away. Moments away from becoming doctrine, these explanations are half-forgotten, never to be used by journalists and historians to authoritatively describe what Middle America is and what it cares about again. The way that politics will never be the same again end up never to be at all.

The campaign of former Vice President Kamala Harris had many such stories prepared to explain her victory. Remember when the election would be decided by the celebrity endorsements? Remember when—following a comedian calling Puerto Rico “garbage” at the Trump campaign’s capstone rally—Latino voters would reject Trump? Recall Harris winning enough of the “quiet female” vote to topple the right’s embrace of the manosphere? What about the theory (which I took) that pollsters might be overcorrecting for mistakes made in past Trump elections? There was even a final big headline to fit Harris’s main attack on the 45th president and gain the many moderates: Former White House Chief of Staff John Kelly declared Trump a fascist in the New York Times—which was made into a key push at the end of Harris’ campaign.

Each of these stories and theories gave those to the left-of-center reasons to hope that a margin-of-error election would end well. But, among all of these late-breaking reports and declarations, there was one anecdote hung above the rest. This was perhaps the narrative-of-all-narratives on liberal social media at the tail end of the election: that Harris had a major advantage over Donald Trump because of the strength of her “ground game.”

As the story—and real reporting—explained, Harris’ campaign had used their substantial financial advantage to build what was described as a “turnout machine”: a tightly-structured effort centered around 2,500 paid campaign staffers who went out to knock on doors, recruit volunteers, and get voters to the polls. Trump, on the other hand, had largely outsourced his field operations to a constellation of inexperienced, risible individuals. Most notably, he predominantly relied on PACs led by Charlie Kirk, mostly known for attempting to own the libs as a podcaster, and Elon Musk, the world’s richest and most brain-rotted by X man.

Reports seemed to confirm that this choice by the Republican was a disaster. On October 30th, Wired reported that a firm associated with Musk’s America PAC had tricked volunteers into signing up, moved them across the country in the back of U-Hauls, and threatened to withhold pay unless unrealistic quotas were met. Maybe that explained why The Guardian had reported less than two weeks earlier that canvassers associated with Musk’s PAC were committing serial fraud. Roughly a quarter of door knocks in Arizona and Nevada recorded were potentially faked, the paper said.

But then, disaster did not come. Once the election results rolled in, it was hard to find much evidence that Harris’ heralded field operation yielded her benefit. Trump swamped her in all of the seven swing states where her campaign had made their major investments. Campaign staffers, in post-mortems, have often noted the most fiercely-contested states wound up swinging to the right by less than the country overall. But it was hardly clear that even that was a direct result of her campaign effort. Three of the states most resilient to the national rightward shift (Washington, Utah, and Oklahoma) saw basically not investment whatsoever by either campaign.

Those who followed the 2016 election likely felt a sense of déjà vu. Hillary Clinton supposedly had a major advantage in “ground game” in her contest against Trump, too. Famously, Trump’s campaign office in one of the largest counties in Colorado had a 12-year-old as key in helping coordinate volunteers and the get out the vote operation. But, just like what happened eight years later, this supposedly insurmountable gap wound up meaning nothing. In the end, Trump won not just all of the truly important contested states, but also either contending in or carrying several places that Clinton’s supposedly sophisticated operation never even thought of as competitive.

It all begs the question: What is it the “ground game” that Democrats supposedly are winning? And why is it alluring to talk up, despite the fact that they keep losing?

Field operations are very far from new to American politics. In fact, for most of early American history, the activities that might be described as a “ground game” essentially encompassed all of American political activity. Parties were structured as vote-producing machines, with elections being won and lost based on the efforts by operations like Tammany Hall. As late as the 1960s, Republicans alleged political machines manipulated democracy, even outright stealing a presidential election. The “new politics” of the 1960s and 1970s were organized as an explicit revolt against this status quo, one that would ultimately triumph with the dismantling of the New Deal coalition by Ronald Reagan in the 1980s. Machine politics, it appeared, were out, and a politics defined by TV-style branding and polarization was in.

This consensus would prevail over American politics over the following decades, ultimately shifting styles towards a brand of telegenic centrism embodied by the likes of former President Bill Clinton and an early “compassionate conservative” version of former President George W. Bush. Over this period, as detailed in Sam Rosenfeld and Daniel Schlozman’s book The Hollow Parties, the structures of both parties would atrophy until they served little purpose other than raising funds from their favored batch of the rich.

A major break came—or, at least, seemed to come—with the campaign of former President Barack Obama. The then-young Illinois Democrat positioned himself as an opponent to the establishment. He adopted grassroots, and online fundraising—a direct social media presence combined with a robust “ground game” across the country. It followed in the geeky hope of Howard Dean’s campaign that was screamed out of existence. And the effort received substantial media attention, first during the campaign itself but especially after it seemingly brought results. Obama won in a landslide, and his field operations were immediately memorialized as one of the many innovations that allowed him to run laps around his old, stodgy opponents.

Studies found Obama’s field operations had a real impact. But, on reflection, they also helped enshrine an idea of “ground game” as simple effort and innovation: the political equivalent of Apple producing a better mobile phone than its competitors and the technocrat hope of Democrats generally to outsmart politics. There was a sense that Obama had essentially “solved” politics; that, in the words of one expert, “In the 21st century, the candidate with [the] best data, merged with the best messages dictated by that data, wins.”

Through this, one understanding of Obama’s success took a unique form. Rather than focusing on what he actually represented—his promises, rhetoric, and charisma—both the media and political establishment chose to fixate on the nuts-and-bolts of his campaign. His organization, not his message, was understood to be the thing that future Democratic campaigns needed to replicate. From this, we got the false promise of our modern “ground game”: a form of political organizing that didn’t require, well, politics.

In 2016, that idea met disaster. That year, Hillary Clinton—whose evident political liabilities were all but ignored by an establishment class who presumed to have hacked elections themselves—employed many of the same staffers from Obama 2012. Instead of crafting the kind of cohesive messages her opponents did, she tallied endorsements and often honed messages for swing voters based on specific demographics to be targeted. During the general election, she infamously left the campaign trail for nearly the entire month of August to tour the fundraising circuit, presumably to fund her expansive operation. Once the election finally came, her effort had everything you’d want for a successful campaign, but very little of what you would want for a successful candidate. In the end, it failed dramatically. The product itself mattered far more than how it was sold.

In the years since, these elements of Clinton’s campaign have been understood separately: a bizarre case where an effort utterly unable to define itself also managed to create a robust organizational structure. But, in light of the Harris campaign seeming to do the exact same thing often with the same Obama-era people in charge, it’s worth considering that this contradiction isn’t really much of a contradiction at all. Think about what it would entail if it actually were the case that better field operations were all that were needed to win national elections? You wouldn’t need to make any hard decisions or tough promises. No candidate would be any worse than any other. Politicians would come to power with no obligations to anyone besides the volunteers and the donors—especially the donors—who provided them with the resources to create their new political machines. If you’re the kind of person in D.C. who doesn’t hold any real beliefs other than the idea that it should be you working in the White House, it must sound like an absolute dream come true. It may even be appealing enough that you’d bet the country on it twice.

In and of itself, there’s nothing wrong with having a “ground game”—even a robust one. But if there is anything that the Trump era has made clear, it is that an effective organization is absolutely no substitute for a deficient product. After two attempts to push forward a deliberately vague candidacy on the back of field organizers, one can hope Democrats won’t assume a third time try will be the charm.

Continue Reading…

Mother Jones

Goodbye, Kevin Drum

Our friend and colleague Kevin Drum passed away on March 7. He was 66 and had been living with multiple myeloma for 11 years, and being the extraordinary journalist he was, he had taken readers along on the journey, sharing health updates on his blog. They were, in trademark style, matter-of-fact, data-driven, and wry; the last one included, like so many of his posts, a chart he’d made (this one to track the status of his C-reactive protein, a marker of inflammation). There were 140 replies, many from readers who had followed him for years and decades. They worried for him, wished him a speedy recovery, and one wrote:

If, however, it is “time” I wish for YOU the same thing that my Dad wished for my Mom. May your journey be pain free, and your memories clear! You have brought more joy to others than you received. Nothing in this life on earth is better than going when it’s your time, with the knowledge that you brought to others joy, and happiness.

This was quite in line with Kevin’s own thinking about death and dying. In 2016, two years after he was first diagnosed, he wrote an in-depth piece about the death with dignity movement. It had in-depth reporting, but he also grappled with the decisions he would have to make. He wasn’t sure how much longer he might have—“Five years? Ten years? Two?”—but he was very clear that when the time came, he wanted the option of going out on his own terms.

It was an extraordinary piece of writing and like any great piece, it was also a gift to the rest of us, helping make sense of something messy, scary, and confusing. That was Kevin’s talent, from the moment he first started posting as Calpundit as a pioneer of the blogosphere, later blogging at Washington Monthly under the sobriquet of Political Animal. His sweet spot was making complicated political and economic topics accessible to the rest of us, and by the time we took the helm of Mother Jones in 2006, he was one of our favorite bloggers. (Who couldn’t love the inventor of Friday cat blogging?) We asked him if he’d write for the magazine, and then whether he would consider bringing his blogging over to MoJo, and, by 2008, he’d agreed to both.

That began a 13-year run during which, it’s no exaggeration to say, Kevin was a big part of turning Mother Jones into a force to be reckoned with. When he went long, he went big: He wrote a groundbreaking piece on the link between lead exposure and crime rates that helped advance the conversation about environmental racism. Long before most people were paying attention, he explained how the destruction of unions was bad for the whole middle class and how AI was going to take all of our jobs. He unpacked the aftermath of the housing crisis and bank bailout. He told his mostly liberal audience that earmarks were good, actually. Meanwhile, producing posts at a breathtaking clip, his blog routinely reached hundreds of thousands of people, sometimes millions, a month. His most loyal readers were a fierce community who debated the finer points of this or that feat of statistical analysis, laughed with him at the antics of the pompous and entitled, and cooed over the cat photos he faithfully posted every Friday.

Smiling man sitting on floor of a home office, petting a black and white cat.

Kevin Drum with one of his many cats, 2015.Kendrick Brinson

Like every blogger worth his salt, he sometimes shot from the hip and occasionally missed; unlike some, he had the courage and integrity to take the resulting flack, listen, and change his mind. And true to his menschy self, he turned down every proposed increase to his modest salary, asking that we use the money to help more junior staffers instead.

No matter the topic or format, Kevin loved busting myths, puncturing truisms, and perhaps most of all, helping all of us see that regardless of how bizarre, unnerving, or terrifying things got, the end of the world was not yet nigh. On hearing of Kevin’s passing, our former colleague Dave Gilson, a fellow chart genius who often worked with Kevin, sent us a note that read, “Kevin was passionate and principled, but his default setting was calm in the face of hyperventilation and hyperbole. So when he did get angry, you knew it was bad.”

When Kevin first had to undergo cancer therapy that took him out of commission for a time, he worried about abandoning his readers. Other staffers helped fill in, but we also reached out to the OG blogging community, to see if they had a post to offer in honor of him. A veritable who’s-who—Ezra Klein, Matt Yglesias, Ann Friedman, Ana Marie Cox, Jonathan Chait, David Dyden, Felix Salmon, and many others—signed up. Over the next few years, his health ebbed and flowed but eventually got to a point where he decided he had to blog at his own pace and timing. He eschewed Substack—didn’t like the vibe—and set up his own blog, naming it Jabberwocking. And he spent the next few months working on a long piece for us about how Fox News had made America so angry.

Donald Trump did make Kevin angry, but even in the chaotic weeks of the second Trump administration, he found ways to knock the chaos-mongers down a notch. He had a realist’s idealism—a cautious, but steadfast faith in the ability of democracy to muddle through its darkest hours and come out the other side. In these last ten years, that was unique and sanity-preserving for so many of his readers, us included.

A few weeks ago, when he was in the hospital struggling with pneumonia, Kevin had a low point and posted a brief update that ended with the words “Take care of Donald Trump for me.” It was a little cryptic, but also classic Kevin: He didn’t want us to take ourselves, or Trump, too seriously. He knew that this, too, would pass.

Kevin was a passionate amateur photographer and loved to post about some new thing he’d accomplished with a lens, or an evening he’d spent outdoors trying to capture some moment in the skies. He set up Jabberwocking so as to display one of his photos every time you reloaded it, along with a quote from some writer or blogger. When we checked it after learning of his death, it showed a photo of the Santa Ana Mountains, shot from Irvine in Orange County, California, where he spent his entire life. The quote that accompanied it was “Everything takes longer than you think,” and it was from Kevin himself. We’d like to think it was a reminder: these tough, confusing times will be hard, and will last longer than we’d like, but not forever.

Kevin’s wife Marian has set up a remembrance page on Facebook and we encourage his fans to leave their goodbyes there.

Continue Reading…

Mother Jones

The Many Misrepresentations of Mahmoud Khalil

Early this week, as Columbia students scrambled to respond to the United States government’s arrest of recent graduate Mahmoud Khalil, a series of logistical hurdles emerged. What would the protesters do if approached by police? What did the fine print of Columbia’s recently-updated public events policy say? What should the group tell the media?

As one student told me, there was a grim humor amid the discussion. “Shit,” they thought each time an obstacle came up, “Mahmoud would’ve known what to do.”

“My husband was kidnapped from our home, and it’s shameful that the US government continues to hold him because he stood for the rights and lives of his people,” Khalil’s wife said.

Khalil, according to the many student protesters I spoke with, was an anchor for the movement, though he reportedly did not participate directly in the Columbia encampment. Rather, he was a spokesperson and a mediator: as the group navigated a tumultuous spring of protest, Khalil always seemed to know how to move forward calmly under pressure. Politicians and outsiders have painted a different—and more sinister—picture of Khalil, who is Palestinian, labeling him as “aligned” with terrorists and in need of deportation.

On the evening of March 8th, plainclothes Department of Homeland Security officers—including one who was given a shoutout at President Donald Trump’s inauguration, as Drop Site News reported—stopped Khalil outside his home, detained him in front of his eight-months-pregnant wife, and, without presenting a warrant, took him away. In legal filings, Khalil’s lawyers said his wife was not told where her husband would be taken.

NEW: The docket for the Mahmoud Khalil case has been updated with today's orders:
– Restrictions on filings have been lifted
– Govt will file its motion to transfer or dismiss for improper venue by midnight
– Parties will file opposition by noon 3/14, replies by 5pm 3/17 https://t.co/c1o8LimAJ9 pic.twitter.com/M0urvPjab9

— Tyler McBrien (@TylerMcBrien) March 12, 2025

Federal agents told him they were there to revoke his student visa, according to his lawyers. When Khalil told the officers he is a legal permanent resident with a green card, they told him they would revoke that instead.

“My husband was kidnapped from our home, and it’s shameful that the US government continues to hold him because he stood for the rights and lives of his people,” Khalil’s wife said in a statement delivered Wednesday. “His disappearance has devastated our lives—every day without him is filled with uncertainty, not just for me but for our entire family and community.”

At noon on Tuesday, March 11th, Columbia students and faculty staged a sit-in on the Low Library steps, demanding that ICE leave Columbia’s campus and return their friend. Within ten minutes, public safety officers had the area fenced off, as helicopters hovered overhead. It was a different campus from one year ago: nearly every green space was fenced-in, and almost no outsiders were allowed through Columbia’s gates.

At the protest, a student named Carly—a classmate of Khalil’s from Columbia’s School of International and Professional Studies—said the detained graduate’s friends know him as someone who wants to help others, even when that means making himself a target.

“He has really gone above and beyond to protect his peers and protect those around him in a way that has even directly harmed him,” Carly said. During last spring’s protests, “when Columbia University admin threatened student safety, Mahmoud served as a mitigator to protect students, which also made him more directly targeted.”

Joseph Howley, a classics professor at Columbia, has known Khalil for a year. The professor had grown to rely on Khalil, he said. “Throughout the year, I came to realize that Mahmoud is someone you can always count on to get a straight answer and to talk you through a difficult situation,” Howley said. “Last year, anytime I had a question about what someone was doing or concerns about something in the protest movement and wanted to get some facts checked, I could always call Mahmoud and get a straight answer.”

Carly—who wore a Magen David necklace and a large heart-shaped necklace with the word “Palestine”—said that as a Jewish Columbia student, she felt her supposed “safety” was being used as a pretext for arresting her friend.

The evening that Mahmoud was taken from his university-owned apartment, Carly said, she was messaging back and forth with him about how to keep other students safe from deportation threats. “The night of his detainment, there was a call to action among students, about how we can help with this threat from ICE,” she remembered. “Mahmoud was one of the first people to respond and ask, ‘How can I help?’” Hours later, he was arrested.

These descriptions of Khalil stand in stark contrast to how politicians have spoken of him. President Donald Trump took credit for the arrest. His administration has promised “many more to come.” Border czar Tom Homan called Khalil a “national security threat,” and asserted that he violated free speech “limits.” Homan said on Fox News that they were “absolutely” allowed to deport Khalil.

Even Democratic Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), in condemning Khalil’s arrest, still made time to equivocate by prefacing his statement by declaring “I abhor many of the opinions and policies that Mahmoud Khalil holds and supports” (though the Senator did not say what those opinions might be). House Majority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.), similarly, asserted that Khalil “created an unacceptable hostile academic environment for Jewish students and others” before calling on DHS to stop his deportation.

For Schumer and Jeffries, Khalil’s first-amendment rights are seemingly limited by the alleged content of his speech. But, they say, deportation is out of line. For Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio—who said “this is not about free speech”—Khalil is an example of the coming crackdown and reminiscent of the War on Terror limits of political thought. “The allegation here is not that he was breaking the law,” an unnamed White House official told Bari Weiss’ Free Press. but that Khalil “is a threat to the foreign policy and national security interests of the United States.”

Reporting in The Forward suggests that the Trump administration may have obtained his name via a targeted campaign on social media by pro-Israel doxxing groups like Betar and Canary Mission—and that Columbia, as the owner of the property Khalil lives on, did not stop DHS agents from entering. (Columbia has released a statement saying that they did not “request” the presence of ICE agents on campus, and that agents “must have a judicial warrant to enter non-public university buildings.”)

On Wednesday morning, Khalil’s attorney Diala Shamas said outside a Manhattan courthouse that the legal team was unable even to get a call with their client. “A phone call with his lawyers is the bare minimum, and it’s what we need to do…to simply be able to file the papers we need to file to get him back,” Shamas said.

New York federal judge Jesse Furman said he would order the government to allow Khalil’s lawyers to speak with him once on Wednesday, and once on Thursday. So far, despite his lawyers’ hopes, Khalil remains in Louisiana, where he was sent to a GEO Group facility that has reports of previous human rights abuses.

“Fundamentally everything that’s happening to Mahmoud is because of his advocacy for Palestinian rights,” Shamas said. Documents obtained by the Washington Post show that the specific provision the US government is trying to invoke against Khalil requires Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s personal assertion that ““the Secretary of State has reasonable ground to believe that your presence or activities in the United States would have potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States.”

“The government is invoking this very rarely used provision of the immigration and nationality act that they claim allows them to deport people simply because of their political opinions,” Shamas said.

Khalil’s Columbia classmates disbanded their sit-in after five hours. That same evening, another large protest marched through Manhattan in support of Khalil. And the following morning, he appeared in court. He had still not been accused of any crime.

At a briefing Tuesday, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said this was just the beginning. Khalil, she said, was present while “pro-Hamas propaganda fliers” were distributed (which is not a crime) and suggested that the Department of Homeland Security is in possession of a list of further Columbia students to deport.

Columbia University, when asked for comment on his case, still has not responded.

Najib Aminy contributed reporting.

Continue Reading…

Mother Jones

‘Health Security Is At Risk’: Inside the Purge of HHS

On Monday night, a longtime employee of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) sat down with his wife at their kitchen table in a D.C. suburb and decided to leave the job he loves.

Three days earlier, he was one of thousands of employees at the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) who received an email offering them up to $25,000, pre-tax, to leave their jobs. Initially, the NIH employee, who analyzes how grants are spent, was not sure he’d take it. The deadline is this Friday at 5 pm, which gives workers only a week to decide whether or not to leave jobs that many have been in for decades. (HHS officials make the final decisions about who gets approved for the buyouts based on who says they want them, according to the Office of Personnel Management, or OPM.)

But over the weekend, the NIH employee considered the toll the past six weeks since President Trump’s inauguration—especially the antics of unelected billionaire Elon Musk—had taken on his mental and physical health and his productivity at work. By Monday, he had made up his mind: “I’m out,” he said.

He and his wife had crunched the numbers and determined they had enough retirement savings—plus from her higher salary—to get by. (He and the other HHS employees Mother Jones spoke to for this story are being granted anonymity for fear of retaliation for speaking out.)

“I just can’t take the hostile work environment and what this administration is doing to our country and to public health in general,” he told me. “I can’t, in good conscience, serve this administration any longer.”

He also worries about what a mass exodus of employees from the agency, either voluntarily due to the buyouts or forcibly as a result of more layoffs, could mean for public health. Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., an unqualified anti-vaxxer and conspiracy theorist, is now running the agency. “I absolutely feel like I’m making [this decision] under duress—we’re not being given enough time to think about it,” the NIH worker said. “I didn’t want to leave under these circumstances.”

I spoke with five HHS workers over the past two days who are eligible for the buyouts, three of whom said they plan to try to take it. Two others said they will stay in their jobs. Each one characterizes the choice as a daunting one: Leave and lose income and abandon critical work, or stay and try to continue to make a difference in public health as officials at the highest levels of government seem hellbent on undermining them and imposing burdensome working conditions.

“Somebody has to stay to help clean up the mess that they’re most likely going to make,” a public health advisor on infectious diseases at the CDC told me. “If you want to get rid of me, you’re basically going to drag me kicking and screaming out of here.”

Spokespeople for HHS did not respond to ten detailed questions from Mother Jones on Thursday.

The buyouts are the latest efforts to scale back the workforce at HHS, a massive and highly consequential umbrella agency that employs more than 80,000 people.

Last week, eligible HHS employees were also offered early retirement buyouts under a separate program also managed by OPM, according to an email sent to staff. HHS also reportedly lost 5,200 probationary employees following the purge of those workers across the federal government. The agency has since reportedly rehired some. An unknown amount also resigned from HHS following the January “fork in the road email” that offered federal workers eight months of pay if they resign. It is not immediately clear how many workers at HHS had accepted the latest buyouts. But on Tuesday, HHS seemed to try to entice more workers to do so, by offering employees eight weeks of full pay and benefits in addition to the lump sum, according to a copy of an email to staff reviewed by Mother Jones.

HHS is not alone in trying to lead staff to the door. The Education Department and the Social Security Administration are among those that have also reportedly offered workers the same buyouts HHS workers were offered. And more layoffs will soon hit the entire government, given that Thursday is the deadline for agency heads to come up with “reorganization plans” to implement “large-scale reductions in force,” based on one of Trump’s executive orders, according to OPM.

RFK Jr. has been tight-lipped about which HHS workers will be on the chopping block, saying on Fox last month that he has a “list in my head” of who he wants to go; he also previously said he would fire and replace 600 NIH workers on day one of a second Trump term, as my colleague Anna Merlan wrote—though that has not happened yet.

Ingraham: Do you have list of people that need to be removed and quickly?

RFK JR: I have a list in my head pic.twitter.com/4fyv2wldx7

— Acyn (@Acyn) February 14, 2025

Experts say the impacts of losing thousands more HHS workers could be broadly felt by Americans given the agency’s vast mandate. For some, this is motivation to stay and fight. “Health security is at risk,” said a CDC researcher who studies infectious diseases and plans to reject the buyout. “We had enough problems keeping up during COVID, just having enough employees to be part of the response.”

She and the other CDC researcher pointed to the fact that the CDC is monitoring more than 220 measles cases in Texas and New Mexico, which have led to two deaths so far—incluidng of an unvaccinated child. (RFK wrote in an op-ed for Fox earlier this month about the importance of the measles vaccine—but also characterized vaccination as a “personal” choice. As my colleague Kiera Butler wrote, he has also promoted unproven measles remedies such as steroids and cod liver oil.) Officials are also tracking the bird flu, of which there are 70 cases and one death so far. And influenza, or the flu, has also been surging this season—at the same time that the meeting of the FDA’s flu vaccine panel, to determine the composition of the next flu shot, has been canceled.

Employees working on vaccine-related research are also concerned that their work could be impacted by RFK Jr.’s opposition to it. On Monday, the Washington Post reported that the NIH is terminating or limiting more than 40 grants related to researching vaccine hesitancy. On Sunday, Reuters reported that the CDC is planning a large study into potential connections between vaccines and autism, despite the fact that theories of such links have been disproven. (As of Tuesday afternoon, the CDC website—last updated in December—still noted that.)

The NIH worker who is taking the buyout said those directives are prime examples of why he is leaving. For those who stay at HHS, he predicts “there’s going to be a lot of people forced to do things that go against their personal sense of morality.”

That has already been the case since Trump took office. Several HHS employees say they had to reluctantly carry out his executive orders targeting transgender people and diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs across government. “I had two grant applications where I had to tell people, ‘you need to go back and take up every single reference to DEI in this application, because we can’t fund it,’” said a worker in the Administration for Children and Families (ACF), an agency that oversees child welfare, including programs such as Head Start and Temporary Assistance for Needy Families. Another day recently, the worker—who plans to take the buyout—spent four hours combing through hundreds of pages of documents to eliminate DEI-related language. “It’s insulting,” she said. “They’re just trying to push people out.”

President Donald Trump and Elon Musk, senior advisor to the president, on the South Lawn of the White House in March.Samuel Corum/Pool/Cnp/CNP/Zuma

For some, it’s working. A scientific review officer at NIH, who oversees grant applications and plans to take the buyout, recounted “realizing that things that you hold important are no longer valued and are actually demonized” when she was told to remove her pronouns from her email signature and that grant reviewers should ignore parts of applications focused on diversity to comply with the anti-DEI orders. “The things that brought me to public health years ago,” she told me, “are not the things that are being prioritized, if we’re not allowed to be looking at how we create an equitable environment for everybody.”

While lofty ideals may motivate some federal workers’ decisions on the buyouts, practicalities also matter. A sticking point for the scientific research officer is the mandated return-to-office policy, as dictated by one of the executive orders Trump signed on his first day in office.

Some HHS employees reportedly had to return to the office last month, while others—those who live within 50 miles of an HHS office—have to return Monday. Those who live outside the 50-mile radius have been ordered to work from any federal office starting next month.

“Where do we sit? How do we buy things?” one of the CDC researchers asked, noting that offices may not be equipped for an influx of staff from other agencies. There’s also the $1 spending limit imposed by DOGE, which staff worry could prevent them from buying basic office supplies. “It’s hard to function on a day-to-day basis without some assurance that the resources and assets that you might need to do your job are readily available,” the other CDC employee said.

The return-to-office mandate comes at the same time that the administration has curtailed work-related travel. Internal emails that are first being reported by Mother Jones confirm the NIH cancelled its plan to send some National Cancer Institute (NCI) employees to an annual conference, put on by the American Association of Cancer Research (AACR), in Chicago in late April, despite it being the only federal office dedicated to researching cancer. The email does not provide a reason why NCI will not exhibit at the conference this year, only saying it’s “in light of current guidance.” An AACR spokesperson said the decision is believed to be due to a travel ban in place at the agency.

An employee of NCI, who was supposed to attend and is not eligible for the buyouts, called the AACR conference “one of the most important cancer research meetings.” Not having a larger presence there, she added, ultimately limits NCI’s reach. The internal NIH email more or less acknowledges this: “We recognize the valuable opportunity that our exhibit booth provides to engage with grantees and the broader research community,” it says, “so we will continue to search for alternative ways to connect and engage with these audiences.” It also says some NCI staff will still be able to attend the conference in-person or virtually, but only to present at sessions on NCI funding opportunities—as long as the content complies with Trump’s executive orders.

Taking the buyout brings its own set of uncertainties and frustrations.

Both NIH employees who plan to leave said they are not sure what they will do next. “This wasn’t my career plan—I came to the NIH thinking I’d be able to grow within this agency and do good,” the scientific review officer said. One thing she cannot easily do anytime soon is return to the federal government: If employees who take the buyout resume working for the federal government within five years, they have to pay it back.

A small consolation, though, is that the agency she is leaving does not feel like the same one she joined. “Given that we’re not funding so much important science at this point,” she said, “it’s hard to imagine the work you do is going to matter anyway.”

Meanwhile, those who are rejecting the buyouts on principle are bracing for the fact that they could wind up being fired anyway. “I hope I do not get let go,” one of the CDC researchers said, “but if I do, I don’t worry about myself as much as I worry about who will do the work if we are gone.”

Continue Reading…

Mother Jones

How Musk, Trump, and Your Boss Learned to Hate Democracy

You sit in a cubicle. You stand behind a cash register. You press your knees into the ground, straining to fix a burst pipe. It is a Thursday at 11 a.m., and you are at work. Are you free?

Professor Elizabeth Anderson in her book Private Government: How Employers Rule Our Lives (And Why We Don’t Talk About It) says, in a way, no. You are not in a democracy in your workplace; you’re under a private government run by a dictator: your boss. The rules are set. And you—especially if you’re not in a union—have almost no say.

As the New Yorker noted, Anderson’s idea hits on a “striking American contradiction.” Private Government shows how, “on the one hand, we are a freedom-obsessed society, wary of government intrusion into our private lives; on the other, we allow ourselves to be tyrannized by our bosses, who enjoy broad powers of micromanagement and coercion.”

Since Elon Musk and President Donald Trump, two CEOs, took the reins of the United States government, I have been thinking a lot about Anderson’s theory of bosses as dictators.

Musk and Trump have framed a series of blatantly anti-democratic and disruptive executive branch actions as the efficient maneuverings of “high-IQ” businessmen. The president has signed a series of executive orders that are likely illegal, as he stretches the law in the name of his “mandate.” Musk and his legion of engineers have been dismantling the government under the righteous banner of fighting “fraud.” If the violent January 6 riot was a seditionist insurrection, how should one describe the 2025 version of a MAGA takeover?

The moves by DOGE, Musk, and Trump—running roughshod over norms and republican democracy—seem more familiar to me than armed revolt. It’s downsizing; it’s layoffs; it’s control by one annoying guy who for some reason is richer than you and is convinced that “working the weekend is a superpower.” It’s government run like a business. (Specifically a start-up.) The president not as democratic leader within a system of checks and balances, but as an imperious CEO with the power to do what’s needed. It’s dictator as boss, and boss as dictator.

I think when you consider that businesses are run by dictators—that a firm is not a democracy—it makes sense why a series of rich guys at the top of the capitalist world think government can be run without following any laws. I called up Anderson to discuss all this. We talked about DOGE, Musk, capitalism, and much else.

This interview was edited for length and clarity.

How do you think understanding your boss as a dictator helps us make sense of what’s happening right now in the Trump administration?

Once we grasp that the default constitution of the capitalist workplace is a dictatorship—that the business class feels that it’s infinitely superior to government workers; that they think they could clean things up and make things way more efficient by running government as a “business”—we realize what they’re essentially saying is: We gotta run government like a dictatorship, a place where the boss rules.

That’s the picture. And so, they think these bosses can ignore all the regulations and constraints on the internal operation of the agencies; they can fire people at will without cause; they can just go through smashing and disrupting stuff—and, somehow, innovation will come out of it.

It’s this Ayn Rand-ian element of glorifying the megalomaniacal CEO. Musk can say: Let me do my thing, because I am the brilliant, disruptive innovator who’s going to transform everything. But I can only do that if I can fire people en masse and destroy all industries—so that I can emerge as the hero.

Rand’s idea of freedom was that the smart people, like John Galt in Atlas Shrugged, were screwed by rules and restrictions on the talented. And so we need to free people like him and other brilliant CEOs to do whatever they want. The key is not empathy but empowering the right people. And whatever happens to other people, so be it.

Exactly, because Rand thinks those other people don’t matter—deep down.

That’s why under capitalism now there’s a selection effect. It is the megalomaniacs—the narcissists—who rise to the top, given the incentive structure of the system. But, you know, these narcissists…they’re very thin-skinned. In their inner psychic lives they feel wounded every time somebody doesn’t worship them.

Which sounds a lot like anyone’s annoying boss—powerful and thin-skinned. It also helps me understand why so many on the right are obsessed with IQ. It can’t be that bosses got lucky. It has to be that they are naturally destined to rule.

Musk is a classic example of this. He has had genuine entrepreneurial success. I’ll grant him that. But he thinks that it’s because he has general intelligence. IQ is actually only measuring like a tiny part of intelligence. Musk is a total idiot when it comes to public policy. He believes any kind of crap that some idiot posts on X. He has no sense of reality outside of his business. He just goes smashing through, thinking that he’s a great innovator; in fact, he’s wrecking everything.

The capitalist firm, as it is set up right now, rewards that kind of person.

Right, and it rewards the kind of people who think that the rest of us are nobodies and it doesn’t matter what happens to us.

Right now, there’s the abstract boss behavior: I am the ruler, god of government, I don’t have to follow the rules for executive orders. And also the literal ways in which they’re acting like a boss: Elon Musk telling employees to send me an email of five things you did this week or you will be fired. How do you connect those two things?

The history of all right-wing parties is their base is business owners—small, medium, and large. And thecapitalist firm is a dictatorship, that’s its constitution. The boss, whatever he says, goes.

Most American workers who are not unionized have false ideas about their entitlement to a job. Most American workers are not aware that the default status of employment is at will. You can be fired at any time, for any reason (except for like a handful of anti-discrimination rules).

That power changes how bosses think. They don’t think they have to follow rules. They can do what they want to you.

Then you look wider. What are the objectives of so many policies over the last 50 years of neoliberalism? It’s plutocracy: To make capitalists rule, not just within the firm. That’s happening now. They get to be the bosses of everything.

That makes me think of the radicalization of the supposedly “normal” Silicon Valley types. I listened to a podcast with Marc Andreessen. He’s among many rich tech people who talked about being radicalized to vote for Trump. And he didn’t say it started with President Joe Biden’s attack on tech or Black Lives Matter protests. He said: I was radicalized around 2012 by all the annoying “kids” working for me. His experience as a boss is a big part of what moved him further right.

That’s exactly right. The problem that the tech bros got into is that in order to attract talented engineers for their start-ups they had to give them a lot of power within the firm. You attract a lot of talent if the workers feel like they’re empowered and they’re being listened to and treated with respect.

But then that turned in the 2010s. At some point, the tech bros become billionaires. Then, they feel miffed. The money goes to their heads! They feel like they’re Superman. Why aren’t people respecting them? And this is where respect means following orders, keeping your silence—it’s not your place to talk back to them, because look at how much richer they are than you. And they started getting pissed off.

That merges with the ideology of the tech world, where there is a cult of the founder. And it can turn into dictatorial ideology. Now, we have nutcases like Curtis Yarvin whispering about the benefits of monarchism.

Now it’s not just rulers of their company. They think they ought to be rulers of the world.

The philosophy changes as it appeals to what they need. Monarchism becomes appealing when you’ve been a monarch in a company.

Another point here is that often the tech bros have been cast as libertarian-right. They just want freedom. But, no, what they want is freedom for themselves. They want impunity for themselves to do whatever they like. That is to be free of government regulation, but also to be free of criticism.

They always billed themselves as libertarians, but in reality there’s always been a symbiotic relationship between libertarianism and authoritarianism within the capitalist firm. And once you’re a billionaire, you have a much bigger footprint than just your firm. You can affect whole states just by threatening to leave, like Amazon.

When you talk about Amazon like that, it reminds me of what you mentioned earlier, when you talked about the goal of neoliberalism. That term can be confusing. But really—and I think I am getting this right from Quinn Slobodian’s book—it’s that many people in the 20th century and during decolonization wanted money and capital to float freely above the constraints of a specific country. This gave businesspeople supreme power, and it gave companies power to act like nation-states themselves.

You’re totally right about that. It was in the 70s, somebody wrote a book called The Sovereign State of ITT. ITT was this big, sprawling, global company of its day. And basically it said: Look, this is not, you know, just your ordinary, run-of-the-mill corporation. It really is acting like a sovereign state. That’s what we have today in spades, with these much bigger, more powerful companies than ITT ever was.

What do you think being in charge of one of those companies, like Musk and Trump have been, makes you think of democracy?

Well, what good is it? I mean, that’s what they think.

That was there for a long time in Silicon Valley culture: disruption. What was disruption? I’m going to walk in there and start breaking a lot of laws and establish my business model. And that’s essentially how Uber got launched—ignore, just completely disregard, laws.

The thing is, many people want this. They want to see government “run the government like a business.”

Like a dictatorship, is what they’re saying.

There is a grain of truth in some of this: private for-profit corporations make decisions much quicker than the bureaucracies of democratic states do. Absolutely, that’s true. And so what happens is, when you have an encounter between what are these very successful corporate types and a civil servant, they just look at the civil servant and they think: These guys are idiots; I can run circles around them. To a certain extent, it’s due to the fact that there’s been a systematic repression and defunding for a lot decades of government, too.

I was actually thinking more about the obsession with Lee Kuan Yew in Singapore. Which is to say that so often it seems totally fine to many people not to have a democracy as long as the streets are clean. It’s popular.

But also, we also have to factor in the fact that people don’t know what the government does for the middle class—it’s enormous, but it’s hidden. It’s buried in the tax code, like the mortgage interest deduction, the fact that you don’t pay income taxes on employer-covered health care, these enormous tax advantages, the tax deferral of your pension plan. It’s there for the better-off middle class.

That’s the neoliberalism part: It was about both freeing markets and the government working through markets—so we hid the government’s work.

I mean, what’s interesting about DOGE is it will take a while for the American people to realize that this random, nihilistic destruction—just for the gleeful destruction of it all—actually comes back to bite. Because people are unaware of how much they depend on government services. Still, now you’re starting to see people show up at town halls yelling. Veterans can’t book an appointment at a Veterans Affairs hospital. They serve their country, and now they’re getting screwed over. They’re getting pissed, not to mention that almost a third of civil servants are veterans.

Another example: you can look at it both from the employment perspective and the consumer perspective. The National Park Service has been gutted, so now people who would spend their vacation camping out at Yellowstone, maybe they can’t get a reservation because the systems have broken down.

Well, everything is broken.

Continue Reading…

Mother Jones

If You Think Tesla’s Stock Is Bad, Check Out Trump’s Truth Social

Donald Trump took to Truth Social Monday night to offer support to his most important political ally, promising to buy a “brand new Tesla” as a “show of confidence.” Elon Musk’s electric car company has been rocked by protests in recent weeks, and its share price has fallen by more than 50 percent since its post-election peak in mid-December.

But Musk isn’t the only member of the administration with a company that is plummeting in value: Trump’s own business has been suffering, as well.

A week before the election last fall, the stock price for Trump Media & Technology Group—which operates Truth Social— spiked to $51.51. But thanks to an unrelenting string of bad news about the company’s business prospects—along with the consequences of Trump’s economic policies, which have sent nearly all stocks plunging—the company’s shares briefly fell below $19 on Tuesday.

In some ways, Trump’s business predicament appears more significant than Musk’s. Tesla is confronting steeply declining levels of consumer interest, but it still earns substantial revenue and owns major assets. Truth Social’s financials, by contrast, have since the very beginning been bad—and downright inexplicable for a company that is said to be worth $4 billion (even at the greatly reduced share prices of late). For a company that, in theory, has the eyes of the world on its biggest user, Truth Social had just $3.6 million in revenue in 2024.

To put that in context, according to a recent review of fast food restaurant chains, Trump’s entire social media operation had less revenue than the average Chik-Fil-A, Raising Canes, What-a-Burger, or Shake Shack location—and just barely more in sales than your typical McDonald’s. If that’s an odd comparison to make, it’s because it’s almost impossible to compare Truth Social’s revenue to other social media companies—Facebook and Instagram owner Meta booked $164.5 billion in revenue in 2024. That’s about 45,500 times more revenue than Truth Social.

Those lousy revenue numbers would suggest that the company’s profitability is also lousy—and that’s absolutely true. In its 2024 year-end filings, Truth Social reported losing more than $400 million.

But it’s not just the fact that the company has scant advertising sales and few users. It also seems to be spending money in odd and unhelpful ways—it paid Trump’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., $813,000 (or almost a quarter of its revenue) just for showing up at board meetings. And company CEO Devin Nunes has made at least $6.3 million running the company since 2022, a stunning figure for a firm that is struggling to earn any money.

Investors might be able to forgive that pay arrangement if there appeared to be real innovation happening at the company. But in the last month, some of company’s press releases have trumpeted rather mundane accomplishments, including:

  • Paying tribute to former Florida congressman Lincoln Diaz-Balart, who passed away last week.
  • Paying lawyers to join a lawsuit in Brazil, in support of Rumble, a MAGA-friendly video-hosting site meant as an alternative to YouTube.
  • Filing paperwork to move the company headquarters to Florida (where it has been physically based since the beginning).

Since Trump’s Truth Social post Monday, Tesla’s stock has seen a small rebound—up about 4 percent, as of Tuesday afternoon. Truth Social was down slightly for the day. Based on its current price, Trump’s stake in the company is now worth about $3 billion less than it was in October.

Continue Reading…

Mother Jones

Why the Right Is to Blame for Distrust in the Media

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._

Recently, I attended a conference in Washington, DC, on the all-important topic of “Innovating to Restore Trust in News.” The Semafor-sponsored event featured one-on-one interviews with such media bigshots as Joe Kahn, the executive editor of the New York Times;Emma Tucker, the editor-in-chief of the Wall Street Journal; Mark Thompson, the CEO of CNN; Katherine Maher, the CEO of NPR; Bret Baier, the chief political anchor of Fox News; Mehdi Hasan, the editor-in-chief of Zeteo; Cesar Conde, chair of the NBCUniversal News Group; Brendan Carr, the Trump-appointed chair of the Federal Communications Commission; and Megyn Kelly, the former Fox host who’s now a podcaster.

The prompt for the conversation was a Gallup poll that shows that only 31 percent of Americans have some degree of trust in newsies, a drop from about 70 percent in 1972. Yet there was not much talk of specific innovations that could restore this trust. And it wasn’t until the reception afterward—tuna tartare!—that I realized what had been absent from the hours-long discussion: any consideration of why polls record a decline in trust of the media. I’ll get to that in a moment.

Rupert Murdoch had to pay Dominion $787.5 million for knowingly broadcasting falsehoods. Given that, what qualifies a Fox anchor to talk about trust in the media?

I’m not sure what one could expect from a lineup of media honchos who, if they had a brilliant idea, would probably not want to share it with competitors. But most of the speakers sidestepped the notion that news organizations could whip up something shiny and new to forge stronger bonds with their audiences. Kahn did speak about actions the New York Times has adopted to boost the relationship between its reporters and its readers, such as featuring them on The Daily, the paper’s daily podcast. If you know these folks, you’re more likely to trust their stories, Kahn told the crowd. (Kahn also referred to X as “a cesspool for attacks.”)

His remarks came closest to hitting the target Semafor had set up. Thompson proclaimed that he himself didn’t trust the media and commented, “I’d rather have a questioning audience than a compliant audience that is deferential to media.” He touted CNN’s future, noting its growth will not occur on its cable television platform but on the internet. Baier basically defended his daily show as a straight-news operation. Semafor editor-in-chief Ben Smith did not grill him on the Dominion Voting Systems lawsuit that revealed that Fox had pushed Trump’s Big Lie about the 2020 election and that showed the world this network is more a propaganda-for-profit shop than a news outlet. Rupert Murdoch had to pay Dominion $787.5 million for knowingly broadcasting falsehoods that catered to its audience’s paranoia and bias. Given that, what qualifies a Fox anchor to talk about trust in the media?

Conde boasted that NBC News is the largest news organization in the nation and hailed its local news operations as means for enhancing trust in the media. (Local reporters often score well on the trust-o-meter.) Maher sought to slay the shibboleth that NPR is too liberal and said one way the network engenders trust is to “show our work” to the audience. Hasan was pressed by Semafor’s Max Tani on why he hasn’t disclosed the investors in Zeteo, the media startup he launched a year ago. He countered that this question has been raised by those who fear his tough coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and who want to suggest he’s secretly backed by pro-Arab interests. (He said his investors were friends and relatives, many of whom do not wish to be targeted because of their support.) On the matter of trust, Hasan remarked that many news consumers are “fed up” with the “coziness” they see when mainstream news people conduct interviews with prominent subjects. That produces a “trust deficit,” he asserted.

Tucker, when asked if Washington was freaking out too much about Trump, replied, “Maybe yes, a little bit.” I imagine that thousands of federal workers dismissed abruptly and perhaps illegally from jobs in which they provided essential services might disagree with her—as might needy people overseas who were cut off from food, clean water, and health care necessary for their survival because of the Trump-Musk blitzkrieg on government agencies.

Carr called social media companies “the greatest threat [to free speech] that we have seen over the last several years.” He did not seem to have X in mind and focused instead on the conservative complaint that the Biden administration leaned on these platforms during the Covid pandemic. He also defended his decisions to investigate NPR and PBS over their advertising policies and to revive complaints into CBS, ABC, and NBC. He told the audience he would fast-track a probe of how CBS News covered the last presidential election. His remarks were more about vengeance than trust.

Pointing to the huge audience her internet show draws, Megyn Kelly brayed, “I’m not having a trust issue.”

A real head-scratcher was Kelly’s place on the list of participants. What could this ex-Foxer tell us about restoring trust in the news media? After all, she endorsed Trump last year and campaigned for him, and Trump is arguably the biggest liar in the history of American politics. No surprise, she had nothing productive to offer. She snarked at CNN (too lefty!) and MSNBC (too, too lefty!). She did a mean-girl thing about Rachel Maddow and sneered that Amazon billionaire and Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos had bent the knee for Trump. (Even a broken clock…)

Pointing to the huge audience her internet show draws, Kelly brayed, “I’m not having a trust issue.” The problem, she claimed, was that every establishment media institution is left-leaning—which is what you’d expect a Trump backer to say. Kelly had not much to share about how the legacy media could regain trust. Her suggestion seemed to be that these outfits ought to cover Trump’s lies as truth. Moreover, her presence at this “summit” was odd. If you want to boost trust in the media, why legitimize a right-wing journalist who became a partisan and helped elect a prodigious liar? By inviting Kelly to this shindig, Semafor indicated it believed she had something to contribute to this important conversation. She didn’t.

Back to the question of why trust in media is low. At the conference, there were crickets regarding the reason for this. A casual glance at the polling provides some insight. In 1972, according to Gallup, 72 percent of Democrats had a great deal or some trust in the media; 68 percent of Republicans felt the same way. Not much of a difference. Independents back then were the least trusting at 59 percent.

Then came a major split. From that point on, the numbers steadily dropped for all three groups. But the decline was sharpest for Republicans. Today, only 12 percent of them trust the media, while 54 percent of Democrats do.

So the overall collapse in trust has been driven most by Republicans losing faith in the media. Trust has fallen for all three groups—though on the chart above you can see there have been times when Democratic trust has rebounded to above 70 percent. Republicans have not hit the 50 percent mark in over 20 years. Take Republicans out of the equation, and the trust-in-media problem looks much less dire.

No one at the conference noted this. What also went unmentioned was that Trump, the GOP, and right-wing media (most notably Fox) have done much through the decades to degrade the national discourse with lies and disinformation, while simultaneously and purposefully encouraging profound distrust and hatred of media outlets that don’t buy their bunk.

The GOP war on the media is not the only reason for the free-falling trust numbers. But it’s a large slice of the story.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Republicans and the right began a crusade against the mainstream media, looking to delegitimize it in the eyes of conservatives. Sen. Jesse Helms (R-N.C.), a hero of the ultra-right, excoriated the “liberal media,” which he despised for its coverage of the civil rights movement. Other conservatives assailed the conventional media for their critical reporting on the Vietnam War and Watergate. All of this fueled an extensive and well-planned effort on the right that aimed to discredit the media. In the 1970s, this media-bashing became a bedrock of Republican politics, and it has continued to this day. Trump turbocharged this tradition with his vituperative attacks on the press as the “enemy of the people.”

So here’s a basic fact: A long time ago, the right initiated a scheme to encourage distrust and, no surprise, it worked—at least among Republicans and probably among GOP-leaning independents.

The GOP war on the media is not the only reason for the free-falling trust numbers. But it’s a large slice of the story. And as the Republican Party has turned into the MAGA cult, it retains a sharp interest in undermining media that would challenge the “alternative facts,” lies, and disinformation peddled by Trump and his crew. Trump benefits from distrust in the media, and he has deliberately spurred it.

He and his minions don’t want to increase trust in the media because a trusted media would pose a threat to them. During Trump’s first administration, the Washington Post chronicled more than 30,000 lies, false claims, or misrepresentations from Trump. Imagine if Republican voters accepted the newspaper’s portrayal of Trump as a con man. But thanks to the long-running right-wing project to undermine the credibility of the mainstream media, Trump and other GOP politicians are insulated from such damning truths.

No one at the Semafor gabfest pondered why this dramatic decrease on the GOP side has occurred. Consequently, there was no discussion of how this distrust was, to a degree, orchestrated by the right. And if you’re not going to look at what’s driving the problem, you’re not going to be able to fix it.

Perhaps Kelly was right: Throw more right-wing slop at Republicans, and they will trust the media more. But would that bring us to a better spot? Distrust of the media is not a nonpartisan issue. If media barons don’t recognize this, they will not likely concoct innovations that effectively address it.

Continue Reading…

Mother Jones

Energy Secretary Chris Wright, a Fracking Industry CEO, Touts Fossil-Fuel Expansion

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

The world needs more planet-heating fossil fuel, not less, Donald Trump’s newly appointed energy secretary, Chris Wright, told oil and gas bigwigs on Monday.

“We are unabashedly pursuing a policy of more American energy production and infrastructure, not less,” he said in the opening plenary talk of CERAWeek, a swanky annual conference in Houston, Texas, led by the financial firm S&P Global.

Wright, a former fracking executive who was picked by Trump to the crucial cabinet position, also attacked the Joe Biden administration for focusing “myopically on climate change.”

“The Trump administration will end the Biden administration’s irrational, quasi-religious policies on climate change that imposed endless sacrifices on our citizens,” he said at the conference, for which tickets cost upward of $10,000. “The cure was far more destructive than the disease.”

Wright has been called a climate skeptic, for instance for repeatedly denying that global heating is a crisis. “This is simply wrong: I am a climate realist,” he said.

“The Trump administration will treat climate change for what it is, a global physical phenomenon that is a side-effect of building the modern world,” he added. “Everything in life involves trade-off.”

Though he admitted fossil fuels’ greenhouse gas emissions were warming the planet, he said “there is no physical way” solar, wind and batteries could replace the “myriad” uses of gas—something top experts dispute. Further, a bigger and more immediate problem was energy poverty, Wright said.

“Where is the COP conference for this far more urgent global challenge,” he said, referring to the annual United Nations climate talks, known as the Conference of the Parties. “I look forward to working with all of you to better energize the world and fully unleash human potential.”

Chris Wright is “one of us,” noted an oil industry rep in advance of the press conference.

The night before his CERAWeek plenary session, Wright had a meeting with top executives of fossil fuel firms including TotalEnergies, Freeport-McMoRan, Occidental Petroleum, and EQT, Axios and Reuters reported. Trump’s interior secretary Doug Burgum, who will address CERAWeek attenders on Wednesday, also attended the dinner meeting.

Trump obtained record donations from the fossil fuel industry in his 2024 campaign. In April, he came under fire for a meeting at his Mar-a-Lago club in Florida, at which he reportedly asked more than 20 executives, from companies including Chevron, ExxonMobil, and Occidental, for $1 billion and promised, if elected, to slash climate policies.

Under Biden, Wright said, ordinary Americans suffered. “The expensive energy or climate policies that have been in vogue among the left in wealthy western nations have taken a heavy toll on their citizens,” he said, putting the word “climate” in scare quotes.

US citizens “heat our homes in winter, cool them in summer, store period foods in our freezers and refrigerators and have light, communications and entertainment at the flip of a switch,” he said—a lifestyle that “requires an average of 13 barrels of oil per person per year.”

Meanwhile poorer countries lack energy, he said, meaning they need more fossil fuels. “The other 7 billion people on average, consume only three barrels of oil per person per year,” he said. “Africans average less than one barrel.”

The comments came after Wright addressed the Powering Africa Summit in Washington DC on Friday, saying that it would be “paternalistic” and “100 percent nonsense” to encourage Africa to halt coal development because of climate concerns.

“Coal transformed our world and made it better, extended life expectancy and grew opportunities,” he said.

The comments came under fire from climate advocates globally. “One of the transformations caused by American fossil fuels was destroying our previously well-balanced climate and plunging some of the poorest and most vulnerable people in Africa into a life dealing with extreme weather and lost homes and livelihoods,” said Mohamed Adow, founding director of Power Shift Africa, a non-governmental organization and thinktank based in Nairobi.

The African continent also had huge potential to expand renewable energy, “but lacks the right investments to exploit these resources”, said Ali Mohamed, the chair of the African group of negotiators and Kenya’s special envoy for climate change.

At CERAWeek, Wright said the Trump administration was embracing an “all-of-the-above” energy strategy. “Anything that adds affordable, reliable energy, we are in favor of,” he told reporters in a press conference after his speech, where he also announced the extension of a permit for the company Delfin, which is developing a floating liquefied natural gas project off the coast of Louisiana.

But domestic oil and gas production soared to record levels under Biden. And Trump has launched a war on renewable energy, temporarily suspending all clean energy development on federal lands and attacking wind and solar in speeches.

Wright’s speech was not made available to the public via live stream, sparking outrage from climate advocates. “As energy secretary, Chris Wright is supposed to serve the American people, not the fossil fuel industry,” said Allie Rosenbluth, a campaign manager at the non-profit Oil Change International. “It’s unacceptable, though not surprising, that this former fracking CEO is depriving the public of the chance to see what he’s saying to fossil fuel executives.”

Wright has long been a fixture at the CERAWeek fossil fuels conference. Before joining the Trump administration, he led the oil and gas company Liberty Energy for 13 years. Ahead of his press conference, one representative from an oil industry podcast said the energy secretary was “brilliant.”

“He’s one of us,” the person said. “He gets us.”

Additional reporting by Oliver Milman

Continue Reading…

Mother Jones

Supreme Court to Decide Whether States Can Ban Anti-LGBTQ Conversion Therapy on Kids

In what couldforeshadowa major new onslaught against queer and trans children, the US Supreme Court announced on Monday that it will hear a case challenging a 2019 Colorado law forbidding licensed therapists from trying to turn LGBTQ kids straight and cisgender.

The court’s decision to hear the case next fall is a major victory for practitioners of “conversion therapy,” a term used colloquially to describe attempts to shift a person’s sexual orientation or gender identity. Before the 1970s, when being gay was still considered a mental illness, conversion therapy was the standard treatment—sometimes involving “aversion” techniques like electric shocks or chemically induced nausea paired with images of gay porn. Today, conversion therapy mostly involves talk therapy, often between conservative religious clients and practitioners.

Still, talk-based conversion therapy can cause immense harm to LGBTQ people’s mental health, according to leading experts. The American Psychological Association has concluded that efforts to change peoples’ sexual orientation lack “sufficient bases in scientific principles” and that people who have undergone such therapies are “significantly more likely to experience suicidality and depression.”

The same goes for therapies aimed at making trans people identify with the gender they were assigned at birth. In 2015, the federal Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, part of the US Department of Health and Human Services, published a report concluding that “none of the existing research supports the premise that mental or behavioral health interventions can alter gender identity or sexual orientation.” Interventions aimed at a fixed outcome, such as gender conformity or heterosexual orientation “are coercive, can be harmful, and should not be part of behavioral health treatment,” the authors concluded. (Since President Donald Trump took office and ordered government websites stripped of information related to so-called “gender ideology,” the SAMHSA report has been taken down.)

“None of the existing research supports the premise that mental or behavioral health interventions can alter gender identity or sexual orientation,” federal experts wrote in a now-deleted report.

States started banning conversion therapy on minors in 2012, as gay rights was achieving widespread acceptance and the scientific community increasingly recognized that efforts to change sexual orientation both didn’t work and could cause harm. Today, according to the Movement Advancement Project, 23 states have passed laws to revoke licenses from mental health professionals practicing conversion therapy on queer and trans people under the age of 18, and more states have executive orders restricting the practice.

But as soon as those laws began to pass, conversion therapists began fighting back, filing at least 11 lawsuits in eight states from 2012 through 2023. Typically, those cases have argued that the restrictions on therapists’ conversations with minors infringes on the therapists’ First Amendment right to free speech.

Federal appeals courts mostly haven’t bought that argument, ruling that that states have the power to regulate medical treatment, even when that treatment consists entirely of spoken words. But in 2020, the 11th Circuit went the other way, overturning a local conversion therapy ban in Florida in response to a lawsuit by the former president of the Alliance for Therapeutic Choice and Scientific Integrity, the leading US advocacy group for licensed conversion therapists.

During an ATCSI conference I attended in late 2023, presenters showed a video illustrating what their therapy technique, which they called “mindfulness,” looked like:

A young adult client, played by an actor, sits nervously across from [counselor Joseph] Nicolosi Jr. in a room filled with books. Nicolosi Jr. asks him to describe his ideal sexually attractive man. The client responds that the man would be strong, confident, informal. “I would definitely say a guy who’s like, um, on the taller side,” he says.

Then, Nicolosi Jr. asks the client what he would change about himself: Shorter or taller? Stronger or weaker arms? More or less confident? He urges the client to compare himself to the imagined man, and the client says he feels inadequate. “How do you feel about the fact that you feel that inferiority, weakness?” Nicolosi Jr. asks.

“Sadness,” the client says.

“Feel your sadness as you continue looking at that guy,” Nicolosi Jr. urges. “And as you hold them together right now, zero to 10, how strong is your sexual attraction toward him?”

As my colleague Henry Carnell and I reported in that investigation last year, conversion therapists have seized on disputes over the treatment of trans youth—a controversy fomented by religious-right organizations and anti-LGBTQ fringe groupsand exploited by Republican politicians—to argue that they should be allowed to encourage kids to not be trans. Accordingly, in recent years, conversion therapists’ lawsuits have increasingly focused on trans people and gender identity, rather than gay people and sexual orientation.

That’s the argument made by Kaley Chiles, the licensed counselor in Colorado who filed Chiles v. Salazar, the case the US Supreme Court has now agreed to hear. Conversion therapy bans “silence counselors’ ability to express views their clients seek on a topic of ‘fierce public debate’—’how best to help minors with gender dysphoria,”‘ Chiles’ petition to the court argues.

Chiles is represented by the Alliance Defending Freedom, the powerful religious-right law firm behind the most significant anti-LBGTQ Supreme Courtcases of recent years. Targeting Colorado in particular, ADF has found great success using the First Amendment to chip away at the state’s strong anti-discrimination protections for queer and trans people in the name of “religious freedom.” The court’s conservative supermajority has repeatedly sided with ADF, deciding that First Amendment allows Christian cake-bakers and weddingwebsite designers to refuse service to LGBTQ people planning same-sex weddings.

ADF’s argument on behalf of Chiles likewise centers on her religious beliefs—in this instance, her feelings about trans people. “A practicing Christian, Chiles believes that people flourish when they live consistently with God’s design, including their biological sex,” her petition argues. “Many of her clients seek her counsel precisely because they believe that their faith and their relationship with God establishes the foundation upon which to understand their identity and desires. But Colorado bans these consensual conversations based on the viewpoints [Chiles and her clients] express.”

Like all other conversion therapy bans, Colorado’s ban applies only to licensed therapists, not to religious advisers like priests and pastors. (Of course, church-based conversion therapy can also cause immense harm, as Carnell reported.)

At least two Supreme Court justices are known to be friendly to the argument that conversion therapy for minors is protected by the First Amendment. Last year, when the court declined to take up a nearly identical case challenging a conversion therapy ban in Washington state, Justice Clarence Thomas issued a dissent, joined by Justice Samuel Alito, that described bans on conversion therapy for minors as “viewpoint-based and content-based discrimination in its purest form.”

“Although the Court declines to take this particular case, I have no doubt that the issue it presents will come before the Court again,” Thomas wrote at the time. “When it does, the Court should do what it should have done here . . . consider what the First Amendment requires.” With arguments in Chiles v. Salazar expected to be scheduled for next fall, Thomas will soon get the chance he’s been waiting for.

Continue Reading…

Mother Jones

Where Is Mahmoud Khalil?

Around 8:30 p.m. on March 8th, Mahmoud Khalil, a recent graduate of Columbia and a student leader in last year’s protest encampments, was returning to his University-owned apartment after an iftar meal when he was arrested by Department of Homeland Security agents. Khalil, who is Palestinian, is a legal permanent resident and green card holder, his lawyers say. His arrest marks a dramatic escalation in President Donald Trump’s crackdown on free speech.

“ICE agents wrongfully arrested Mahmoud Khalil, claiming his student visa was revoked—even though Mahmoud is a legal permanent resident”

“This is the first arrest of many to come,” Trump posted on Monday afternoon, personally taking credit for Khalil’s arrest. “We will find, apprehend, and deport these terrorist sympathizers from our country—never to return again.”

On Sunday, the US Homeland Security X account posted that ICE arrested Khalil for leading “activities aligned to Hamas, a designated terrorist organization,” in order to enforce Trump’s January executive orders on “combatting anti-semitism.” (“Aligned to” is a term that is not used in the US law on “inadmissible aliens” referenced by Trump’s executive order; as of now, there are no reports Khalil has been charged with a crime.)

As we have previously reported, Trump promised to deport student protesters during his campaign. This is his administration’s first explicit attempt to do so. According to public detainee location data, Khalil was taken first to an Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility in New Jersey, then to an ICE detention center in Louisiana. His lawyers and wife spent Sunday scrambling to find him.

“ICE’s arrest and detention of Mahmoud follows the US government’s open repression of student activism and political speech, specifically targeting students at Columbia University for criticism of Israel’s assault on Gaza,” Khalil’s lawyer, Amy Greer, told press. “The US government has made clear that they will use immigration enforcement as a tool to suppress that speech.”

In Trump’s first term, Columbia declared itself a “sanctuary campus,” saying it would not turn over student information to Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Last year, the Manhattan university’s campus was one of the epicenters of mass student protest calling for divestment from companies that do business in Israel, among other demands. The university has, for now, not commented on the arrest.

The day before Khalil’s arrest, the Trump administration announced that they would be “pulling $400 million in grants” from Columbia as part of the “joint task force to combat antisemitism.” ( The task force was launched February 3rd and has produced no reports.)

Members of a Columbia-donor WhatsApp chat, including Trump advisors, celebrated the funding changes. “One group chat member wrote on Friday that they ‘can’t wait for the rest of the funding to be cut,’” as Natasha Lennard of The Intercept reported. This group chat reportedly includes professors who discussed deporting pro-Palestinian foreign students and faculty.

By the time DHS officers showed up at Khalil’s door, right-wing commenters on and off Columbia’s campus had been agitating for his arrest for days. Shai Davidai, a Columbia professor banned from campus for harassing pro-Palestinian students, posted on X thanking Secretary of State Marco Rubio for the withdrawal of funding—and directly encouraging him to take “strong action” against Khalil individually.

Khalil’s lawyers disagree. “ICE agents wrongfully arrested Mahmoud Khalil, claiming his student visa was revoked—even though Mahmoud is a legal permanent resident (green card) and not in the US on a student visa,” Greer said. “Confronted with that fact, the ICE agents detained him anyway.”

Khalil is reportedly in a repurposed prison, owned by private-prison company GEO Group. A petition calling for his release has gained over one million signatures in the last 48 hours, and a protest is planned outside ICE’s office in downtown New York on Monday afternoon.

Continue Reading…

Mother Jones

Musk and Trump Bash Immigrants While Destroying Programs to Stabilize Their Home Countries

Two days before staffers at the US African Development Foundation (USADF) refused to let DOGE staffers enter the door to their offices, Donald Trump stood before Congress and mocked what he described as “appalling waste” in foreign aid.

“Eight million to promote LGBTQ+ in the African nation of Lesotho, which nobody has ever heard of,” the president scoffed. “Sixty million for indigenous peoples and Afro-Colombian empowerment in Central America. Sixty million.”

Grassroots aid aims to help communities “solve their own problems”—and stem migration to the U.S.

The expenditures he outlined weren’t USADF programs, and it’s unclear if the Lesotho funding, for instance, is even real—the country’s government has said it has “no idea” what Trump was referring to. But as Trump and Elon Musk’s DOGE team continue trying to dismantle foreign aid, they’ve stepped beyond the USAID to set their sights on two very small agencies: the USADF and the Inter-American Foundation (IAF), which was founded by Congress in 1969 and funds community development in Latin America and the Caribbean.

On February 19, Trump issued an executive order directing that both agencies should “eliminate non-statutory functions and associated personnel to the extent consistent with applicable law.” In practice, that has meant quickly gutting both in ways that the agencies themselves and some Democratic members of Congress say is illegal, given that both were founded by Congress and should only be dismantled by an act of Congress.

As Trump’s speech made clear, the campaign against these tiny agencies has relied on literal, government-backed disinformation. Trump and DOGE have twisted and mischaracterized the U.S.’ own aid programs to make them sound frivolous, wasteful, and unimportant. Ironically, both agencies have worked towards goals that Trump and Musk have claimed they support: the IAF was specifically focused on reducing what they call “irregular migration” to the United States. And the USADF tries to stabilize economies in rural Africa, in part, a USADF staffer tells Mother Jones, to discourage people from joining terrorist groups which destabilize the region and could be hostile to the United States.

The USADF works in Somalia, where the group Al-Shabaab is based, and in Uganda, which borders the Democratic Republic of Congo; that border is where a rebel group called the Allied Democratic Forces is based, who, among other acts, attacked a Ugandan school in 2023 and killed at least 41 people, many of them students in dormitories that were set on fire.

“If we leave there’s going to be a vacuum not just of U.S. presence, but economic stability,” says a USADF worker who asked for anonymity to freely discuss their work. “And a significant increase in unemployment in young men who are now much more susceptible to joining a terrorist organization… you’re going to start seeing those terrorist organizations reach into other countries and end up In Europe and America.”

The anti-foreign aid campaign has been pushed forward by wide mockery from Musk’s DOGE and their allies at outlets like Fox News of purportedly “questionable” foreign spending, including “$813,210 for vegetable gardens in El Salvador, $731,105 to improve the marketability of mushrooms and peas in Guatemala, $677,342 to expand fruit and jam sales in Honduras, $483,345 to improve artisanal salt production in Ecuador and $39,250 for beekeeping in Brazil.” The Fox News article refers to these as “big ticket items”—which they are not; they are in fact trivially small amounts compared to the billions spent by, for instance, the Pentagon. A supposedly automated Twitter/X account dedicated to extolling DOGE’s achievements also mocked Guatemalan mushrooms, calling the outlay “a prime example of taxpayer dollars funding foreign pet projects while ignoring American needs.”

But in fact, as the IAF’s now-deleted website made clear, the real goal of funding such grassroots programs was to help communities “realize opportunities and solve their own problems”—and to stem migration to the U.S.

“If we leave there’s going to be a vacuum not just of U.S. presence, but economic stability.

“People in the Latin American and Caribbean region leave their homes due to violence and insecurity, lack of viable economic opportunities, food insecurity, and increasingly harsh environmental conditions that exhaust their household resources,” a 2023 version of the IAF website explained. “With corruption and impunity commonplace, people can also lose faith that their governments will effectively meet their needs.”

The organization explained that people are “less likely to uproot their lives and migrate if they can remain safely at home, earn a living, provide for their families, and have a say in making decisions to improve their quality of life. We also understand that people are most motivated to stay when they can tackle and see improvement on multiple issues.” In a story on the shuttered IAF website, a Guatemalan woman working with a local mushroom cooperative is quoted saying, “I haven’t migrated to the U.S. because I’ve had the opportunity to work here.”

Given Trump and Musk’s virulently anti-immigrant rhetoric (despite Musk being an immigrant himself), those efforts to reduce immigration would presumably have been something they should have supported.

If DOGE is looking for “big ticket items” to cut, they also won’t find any at USADF, where the maximum amount that could be given to any organization was $350,000, “after thorough due diligence and a background check on the organization,” according to the employee who worked there.

Trump’s foreign aid freeze caused many of the people the agency works with in Africa to immediately lose their jobs “with no severance or notice,” the USADF worker said. “These are our colleagues. We work with them daily.”

Musk’s DOGE, along with Trump ally and State Department official Peter Marocco, have been the architects of the destruction of foreign aid. Marocco was placed in charge of IAF last week, after the White House fired its CEO Sara Aviel, who did not respond to a request for comment. Redacted minutes from a hasty February 28 board meeting where Marocco declared himself to be in charge of IAF show that the only people present were Marocco and two DOGE staffers, Ethan Shaotran and Nate Cavanaugh. During the meeting, Marocco claimed he was convening the board on an emergency basis pursuant to Trump’s executive order to reduce the agency’s staffing, and said that he had not been able to reach anyone associated with IAF before calling the meeting.

“Until I am more familiar with the agency and can appoint a new one, I am designating myself as the acting CEO and president of the IAF,” Marocco declared before immediately closing the meeting.

An IAF employee told Mother Jones that workers at the agency have been issued reduction in force notices, which are usually given 60 days before employees will be let go. In the case of IAF, for reasons that weren’t explained, it was only 30. “Intentional cruelty is their M.O.,” the employee said.

USADF has filed a lawsuit laying out DOGE’s aggressive tactics in trying to wrest control.

The shuttering of the IAF also means that millions of dollars from private foundations will also have to be returned. “As a result of this illegal destruction of the agency, taxpayers are giving back more than $5 million dollars donated by the private sector and private philanthropy,” that person told Mother Jones. “Half was in hand and half was committed legally; nearly all will never be invested on behalf of the U.S. in the region.”

On Wednesday March 5, Marocco arrived at the USADF offices with DOGE staffers to try to execute an administrative coup similar to the one they engineered at IAF. There, however, employees refused to let them enter. The following day, Marocco and the DOGE staffers returned to USADF with five U.S. Marshals, according to the Washington Post. USADF employees, meanwhile, left through a back entrance, one tells Mother Jones.

Later that day, USADF filed a lawsuit suing Trump and DOGE, laying out the aggressive and highly unusual tactics Marocco and the DOGE staff took in trying to wrest control of the agency. On Thursday night, USADF won a preliminary injunction to keep from being shut down, at least for a few days: a judge’s order bars current CEO Ward Brehm from being removed from the foundation’s board and prevents DOGE from adding members to it.

Nonetheless, a USADF employee told Mother Jones on Friday morning that workers were unable to enter the building with their key cards, which appear to have been disabled. The employee saidthey and their colleagues plan to try to continue doing their jobs as long as they legally can: “Just as Trump did, I also took an oath of office and I’m abiding by it. I take it very seriously.”

“I’m resigned to the fact that I’m going to lose my job,” the USADF worker said. “But if you’re going to fire me, fire me legally.”

Continue Reading…

Mother Jones

Tesla Protests Spread Nationwide

“Do not buy swasticars.”

“Constitution, yes. Musk, no.”

“No one elected Elon Musk.”

These are a sample of the messages that targeted Elon Musk over the weekend, as thousands of protesters across the country flooded local Tesla dealerships to express their outrageover the tech CEO’s escalating war on the federal government.

Pro-democracy patriots protest outside a Tesla showroom in downtown Chicago. Hit Elon Musk in the pocketbook, which is all he cares about. Check out TeslaTakedown.com for protests near you.

Mark Jacob (@markjacob.bsky.social) 2025-03-08T19:39:06.331Z

#teslatakedown#teslatakedownalhambraGreat turnout today. We will be back tomorrow!

Alhambra, CA Tesla Protests (@alhambraprotest.bsky.social) 2025-03-09T21:13:18.181Z

From Ohio to California, people demonstrated outside Tesla showrooms, some attracting large police presences.In New York,where at least nine NYPD officers were seen protecting a single Cybertruck, at least six protesters were reportedly detained. Instances of property damage against Teslas were also reported. Meanwhile, Tesla’s numbers have taken a significant dip amid Musk’s illegal takeovers and mass firings.NBC News reports that February was the electric vehicle company’s “worst month on the stock market since 2022.”

https://twitter.com/pop4climate/status/1898432151105732633

Musk responded to the protests on X Saturday, claiming, without evidence, that an unspecified “investigation” had discovered that ActBlue, a Democratic political action committee, was behind the protests.

Protest at a Tesla Showroom in New York City, NY (Sipa via AP Images)

Protest in New York City , New York (Photo by Steve Sanchez/Sipa USA).(Sipa via AP Images)

Protest in New York City, New York (Photo by Gabriele Holtermann/Sipa USA)(Sipa via AP Images)

Protest against Elon Musk in New York (Photo by Michael Nigro/Sipa USA)(Sipa via AP Images)

The protests targeting Musk come as Democrats struggle to find their political footing under Donald Trump’s administration. As my colleague David Corn wrote, “The Democrats are bringing a teaspoon to a gunfight. This is not how a party battling for its survival and the survival of the nation behaves.”

Continue Reading…

Mother Jones

RFK Jr. Reportedly Had a Call With Texans Helping Distribute Unproven Measles Remedies

The measles outbreak underway across West Texas and New Mexico has intensified, sickening 228 people, and killing two, a child and an adult. Amid the worsening public health emergency, a local historian in Seminole, Texas, Tina Siemens, has been helping a holistic medicine clinic raise money to distribute unproven remedies to families affected by the outbreak.

The same activist told Mother Jones that she had a phone call last week with Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. to understand the unique health challenges in the Mennonite community.

Siemens said she had been working with a clinic called Veritas Wellness in Lubbock, Texas, to distribute medications, including Vitamin C, cod liver oil, and the inhaled steroid budesonide. Last week, an online fundraiser appeared to collect donations that it says will be “used to defray the cost of essential vitamins, supplements, and medicines necessary to treat children enduring complications from the measles virus and other illnesses.” The fundraiser’s website says the funds will go to Tina Siemens and it lists its creator as Brian Hooker, a biologist and the chief scientific officer of Children’s Health Defense, the anti-vaccine advocacy group that Kennedy helmed until he ran for president.

On March 2, Kennedy penned an op-ed for Fox News in which he appeared to endorse the measles vaccines, writing that the shots “not only protect individual children from measles but also contribute to community immunity, protecting those who are unable to be vaccinated due to medical reasons.” Yet in an interview last week, Kennedy claimed, without citing research, that treating measles with steroids, antibiotics, and cod liver oil yielded “very, very good results.” Cod liver oil contains Vitamin A, which is often used in much higher concentrations to prevent complications from the disease, including blindness. There is no credible evidence that cod liver oil itself can treat or prevent measles.

Neither the US Department of Health and Human Services nor Veritas immediately responded to a request for comment for this story.

Siemens told Mother Jones she had been motivated to help in part because she believed that local Mennonite families had been unfairly blamed for causing the outbreak because some of them chose not to vaccinate their children against measles.

She said that she had had a phone call last week with Kennedy and Veritas’ Dr. Edwards, and that the topic of the phone call had been “to understand the Mennonite culture,” which, she said, was important “because Mennonites have typically gotten the blame” for spreading the illness. She noted that not all of the local Mennonite families had skipped the vaccination. “The media is spinning it as it’s all the unvaccinated, uneducated Mennonites, and that’s just not the truth,” she said.

Veritas sells supplements and offers services including “peace consultations,” “movement consultations,” and a “menu” of medications and supplements it can deliver intravenously. According to the website, Dr. Edwards opened the clinic when “a divine appointment in 2011 opened his eyes to the fact that US medical schools only teach a very narrow way of disease and symptom management with pharmaceuticals instead of disease and symptom resolution by addressing root causes.”

The online fundraiser has collected more than $12,000 in donations so far. Siemens said that she had already helped Dr. Edwards to distribute medications to “150 to 200 families,” and that she was glad that people in the community had the choice of whether or not to receive the vaccine. “I’m very, very grateful that we live in a community that has that choice,” Siemens said. “We live in a state that has that choice, for the parents to make that choice for their family.”

Continue Reading…

Mother Jones

As Europe Criminalizes Environmental Protest, Some Activists Turn to Sabotage

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

It was raining and the sparkling lights of the City of London shone back from the cold, wet pavement as two young men made their way through streets deserted save for a few police and private security. In the sleeping heart of the global financial system, they felt eyes on them from the city’s network of surveillance cameras, but hoped their disguise of high-vis vests and hoods hiding their faces would conceal them.

Reaching Lime Street, they stopped by a maintenance hole and looked around to make sure no one was watching. One took off the cover, located a bundle of black cables and started hacking away. Hours later, an email was circulated to news desks: “Internet cut off to hundreds of insurers in climate-motivated sabotage.”

Five years ago, climate activists from Extinction Rebellion (XR) and the school strikes movement believed getting huge numbers of people on the streets could persuade the powerful to change course on the climate crisis. Then protesters from groups such as Insulate Britain and Just Stop Oil (JSO) put their bodies and freedom on the line to disrupt business as usual, in an effort to concentrate minds.

Now, with climate breakdown worsening and fossil fuel emissions showing no signs of peaking, let alone abating, some of them say it is time to escalate the campaign of disruption, by carrying out clandestine acts of sabotage against the corporations they see as responsible for the destruction of the climate.

“The actual number of people who are committed to risk jail time to do this are pretty small in number.”

In a manifesto published on the WordPress blogging platform, Shut the System (STS), the group that claimed credit for London action that took place in January, says it is “kickstart[ing] a new phase of the climate activist movement, aiming to shut down key actors in the fossil fuel economy.”

“We vow to wage a campaign of sabotage targeting the tools, property and machinery of those most responsible for global warming, escalating until they accept our demands for an end to all support for fossil fuel expansion.”

The Guardian spoke over the Signal encrypted messaging service to an activist from STS. He did not reveal his identity and the Guardian was unable to verify his claims.

He said new laws further criminalizing disruptive protests had made traditional, accountable methods of activism increasingly unsustainable, and a clandestine approach increasingly attractive. He pointed to the case of activists from JSO who received sentences of four and five years—reduced last week after an appeal—for organizing road blocks on the M25.

“If you want to do anything that is disruptive, the penalty is pretty massive now, and so these draconian laws mean it is hard to get very much pressure…by following the kind of things that [Extinction Rebellion] and JSO have done in the past, because people will be arrested and put away for a long time,” he said.

“You can’t just keep doing that,” he said. “The actual number of people who are committed to risk jail time to do this are pretty small in number.”

STS is not the first group to take clandestine direct action against fossil fuel targets. In 2022, unknown activists targeted a pipeline being built to funnel jet fuel from Southampton to west London, cutting holes in the pipe and severing hydraulic cables on a construction vehicle.

This month, another group claimed responsibility for drilling holes in the tires of more than 100 SUVs parked at Land Rover dealerships in Cornwall—a repeat of an action carried out last year. And the Tyre Extinguishers, a campaign group that urges people to take autonomous clandestine action against SUVs in cities by deflating their tires, have targeted hundreds of vehicles through activists heeding their call.

In the City of London, the action of STS, though carefully planned, had minimal impact. “We did our research, as best as we could and we planned about what sort of cables to be looking for, how they might be laid out, and we taught ourselves about opening up these manholes,” the activist said. “We did everything we could to maximize safety for everyone, and then in my small group we found targets and divvied them up.”

A cybersecurity expert said there had been “significant slowdown of internet speed” in the area, but the network continued to function.

“We had varying success throughout the UK,” the activist admitted. STS also claimed actions in Birmingham, Sheffield and Leeds. “I am aware of people in other areas that did this…where they then called up the next day and the phone lines were down. There is obviously a learning curve to these things.”

But actions such as this pale in comparison with the scale of those taken by climate activists abroad. In Germany, activists last year staged attacks against gas pipelines, while others escalated a campaign against concrete with two arson attacks on a Cemex plant in Berlin.

But it is in France where the tactic has been most widely used, with actions ranging from activists filling the holes in golf courses with cement to a full-scale riot when a crowd descended on the construction site of an agricultural reservoir in the country’s drought-stricken south, intent on dismantling it.

Andreas Malm, an associate professor of human ecology at Lund University, said, “France really is the one case in recent years…where you’ve had a radical mass movement that has actually been quite successful—and this is the only movement that has also deployed sabotage consistently as a tactic.”

Four years ago Malm, a Swedish social ecologist, penned How to Blow Up a Pipeline, a polemic on the future of effective climate action and an exploration of the tactic of sabotage. It has become a set text in the movement, and even spawned a movie adaptation.

Malm says that, with issues such as Israel’s wanton destruction of Gaza taking up activist energy, and the energy crisis precipitated by Russia’s war in Ukraine potentially discrediting those targeting fossil fuels as “stooges of Putin,” militant action for the climate has been on a downswing.

Nevertheless, he still sees it as the only sustainable route for climate activists increasingly facing a severe pushback against non-violent disruptive protest.

“One mistake made by the offshoots of XR [such as Just Stop Oil]—they started escalating a little bit and doing slightly more radical stuff…while still sticking to the protocol to wait until the cops come and arrest them,” he said. “If you want to actually escalate and do real material damage to fossil fuel property you cannot stick to this idea. You have to do this without offering yourself as a kind of virtue sacrifice.”

The STS activist who spoke to the Guardian did not see the group’s actions as more extreme than the kinds of things already carried out by other groups. “The only difference is that they stayed around to be arrested,” he said.

Continue Reading…

Mother Jones

Trump and His Commerce Secretary Differ Over Whether His Tariffs Will Spark a Recession

Here’s something you won’t read in Mother Jones too often: President Donald Trump was actually right about something—or at least, more right than one of his cabinet secretaries.

In a rare moment of honesty during a Fox News interview that aired Sunday morning, Trump declined to rule out the possibility that the 25 percent tariffs he imposed on Mexico and Canada this past week (and then paused—again), could trigger a recession.

When Sunday Morning Futures host Maria Bartiromo asked if Trump expected a recession this year, he replied, “I hate to predict things like that. There is a period of transition, because what we’re doing is very big—we’re bringing wealth back to America.”

“It takes a little time, it takes a little time,” he added.

Indeed, as Bartiromo pointed out, the Federal Reserve Bank ofAtlanta estimates that GDP is expected to shrink by 2.4 percent in the first quarter of 2025—a decline of nearly 5 points from the bank’s positive estimates from mid-February, before the tariffs took effect.

Today exclusively on @SundayFutures with @MariaBartiromo, President Trump @POTUS @realDonaldTrump spoke about tariffs and the economy.@FoxNews pic.twitter.com/wT6zo49wyU

— SundayMorningFutures (@SundayFutures) March 9, 2025

One person who probably was not watching Trump’s interview? Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, who was more optimistic in an interview on NBC’s Meet the Press, saying that Americans should “absolutely not” brace for a recession—despite the fact that, as host Kristen Welker noted, major banks like JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs have recently said there is a higher likelihood of it.

“Donald Trump is a winner. He’s going to win for the American people. That’s just the way it’s going to be. There’s going to be no recession in America,” Lutnick told Welker. He conceded that “some products that are made foreign might be more expensive” but argued that “American products will get cheaper, and that’s the point.”

But as this past week hasproved, it’s no so simple: When Trump’s tariffs took effect on Mexico and Canada, the stock market took a nosedive and Canadian officials said they would impose retaliatory tariffs, ultimately leading Trump to pause the tariffs, as he’d already done once before—though he has also said global retaliatory tariffs will take effect on April 2.

Economists have warned that tariffs, which are taxes countries levy on imported goods, will be passed on to consumers. That’s because tariffs raise the wholesale cost of finished goods like cars, clothing, produce, and toys, and also the cost of raw materials for farming, manufacturing, and refining (such asCanadian heavy crude, steel, lumber, fertilizer, gypsum, auto parts, etc). Sellers may eat some portion of the increase, but the rest will be reflected in higher prices, economists predict. What’s more, data from Lutnick’s own department showed that retail sales plunged in January.

Spokespeople for the White House and the Commerce Department did not immediately respond to an email on Sunday asking why Trump and Lutnick are not on the same page. In any case, the boss appears to be right on this one.

Continue Reading…

Mother Jones

Federal Health Agency Offers $25,000 Employee Buyouts—With Ramifications for Millions of Americans

As an outbreak of measles drags on in Texas, and wary officials monitor the bird flu, the Trump administration is reportedly offering $25,000 buyouts to most employees at the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).

A purported copy of the buyout email, shared by a Rolling Stone reporter on social media, suggests it was sent out Friday night, directing employees to reach out to their HR offices by day’s end next Friday if they want to accept the offer.

The email says the Office of Personnel Management—the same office that sent the “what did you get done this week” email championed by Elon Musk, unleashing chaos across the federal workforce—had approved HHS to offer “voluntary separation incentive payments to a broad population of HHS employees.” OPM’s website also notes that “agencies that are downsizing or restructuring” can offer buyouts up to $25,000 to employees of at least there years who are in good standing. (Thousands of probationary, earlier-career federal workers have already lost their jobs.)

HHS is the vast and highly consequential umbrella agency overseeing the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), National Institutes of Health (NIH), and Food and Drug Administration (FDA), among others. The Associated Press reports that workers in all three of these agencies got the email, although it’s unclear how many of HHS’s more than 80,000 overall employees received it. (HHS representatives did not immediately respond to questions from Mother Jones sent on Sunday.)

With anti-vaxxer and conspiracy theorist Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. at the helm, the ability of HHS to carry out its core functions has become uncertain. Last year, as my colleague Anna Merlan reported at the time, RFK said he would fire and replace 600 people at the NIH on his first day as HHS Secretary. Kennedy did not wind up doing that, but Friday’s email signals the first large-scale effort to drastically reduce theHHS workforce.

The buyout offer comes at a pivotal moment for public health: The CDC is currently monitoring a bird flu outbreak (70 US cases so far, and one death) and a measles outbreak (more than 220 cases, most in Texas and New Mexico, and two deaths). The Republicans’ proposed cuts to Medicaid could affect many of the 72 million low-income, elderly, and disabled people who rely on it for coverage. Medicaid, thenation’s largest health insurance program, is administered by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, which is also part of HHS. (Trump has nominated celebrity doctor Mehmet Oz to run it.)

Logic, though, has never stopped Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency from seeking to cull federal workers who are tackling problems and providing crucial services to Americans. As I reported on Friday, DOGE is pursuing massive cuts to the Department of Housing and Urban Development in the midst of a housing affordability crisis and record homelessness.

HHS workers, at the very least, will have no shortage of colleagues to commiserate with.

Continue Reading…