What DOGE is Getting Wrong About Privatizing USPS

On Thursday, United States Postal Service workers, retirees, and supporters gathered in dozens of cities nationwide to protest the Trump administration’s efforts to privatize the USPS as part of the American Postal Workers Union’s Day of Action.

The March 20 demonstration in New York City was a cold, rainy day, but hundreds of demonstrators showed up in front of Manhattan’s James A. Farley Building, holding signs reading, “The Post Office Belongs to The People Not the Billionaires” and “Hands Off Our Mail.” The crowd also chanted in call-and-response, “Whose Post Office? The People’s Post Office” and “U.S. Mail. Not for Sale!” To the side, volunteers were handing out flyers to people passing by on the street.

An American Postal Workers Union flyer from March 20’s Day of Action.Nguyen/Mother Jones

The APWU, which represents over 200,000 USPS employees and retirees, announced these protests earlier this month. The union warned at the time that if privatization happened, the move would lead to “higher prices, reduced service, and the destruction of tens of thousands of union jobs.”

US Postmaster General Louis DeJoy told congressional leaders in a March 13 letter that he signed an agreement to work with Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency in a cost-cutting initiative that includes plans to lay off 10,000 workers within 30 days through a “Voluntary Early Retirement program.”

The agreement drew criticism from many unions and lawmakers. Rep. Gerald E. Connolly (D-Va.), a ranking member of the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, said that DeJoy’s plan would allow DOGE to “profit off Americans’ loss,” especially those who “rely on the Postal Service every day to deliver mail, medications, ballots, and more.”

A few hours after a March 14 meeting with the APWU National Executive Board aboutDeJoy’s decision, APWU President Mark Dimondstein told me that the DeJoy-DOGE partnership didn’t surprise him since lawmakers and corporations have spent decades trying to gut the agency. “We don’t think they’re about efficiency at all,” he said, referring to DOGE. “We think they’re about how to rip off the public sector for the benefit of private profit.”

Dimondstein was also concerned about privacy for workers and people, pointing to DOGE’s threat to government-held data: “If need be, we’re ready to roll into all sorts of action, whether it’s enforcing our rights under our union contract or going into court to defend the privacy of postal workers.”

Earlier this year, Dimondstein told me that the US needs to reframe its approach: Instead of attempting to privatize the Post Office, what if it was expanded?

There’s new opportunity for financial services—tens of millions of low-income people are either unbanked or underbanked. In many parts of the world, people do basic banking and financial services through a public postal service.

In New York City, there were several speakers, including union leaders, Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-N.Y.), and retirees. “I got 37 years in the Post Office, but this fight is not about me,” Jonathan Smith, the president of the New York Metro Area Postal Workers Union told the crowd. “It’s about my children and my children’s children having the opportunity that was given to me. There’s no greater feeling than a living wage job where you can buy your own house or car. That’s what the Post Office represents.”

Bill Bachmann, a retired USPS maintenance worker, pointed to the calls for better pay, benefits, and working conditions—there were signs that read, “Protect Good Living Wage Jobs” and “Hands Off Our Medicare”—as indicative of the moment many workers are living in. “It’s a war on working-class and poor people to transfer wealth to very wealthy people,” Bachmann told me at the demonstration. “It’s legal looting, and as I say, it’s all tied together.” Because of this, for Bachmann, “collective action” is needed that goes beyond simply writing to one’s congressperson.

Although other unions representing postal workers are also hosting protests across the nation, employees and retirees were not the only people at the rally—I talked with Cindi, a New York resident not affiliated with USPS who showed up in solidarity. “The Postal Service is American. It’s a public good. It’s not here to make a profit and we all depend on it,” she said. “There’s nothing like getting a letter in the mail—a real letter from somebody that you love.”

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Remembering One of Our Founders

Mother Jones lost a major figure from its early history with the death, on March 13, 2025, of Jeffrey Klein. He had been in ill health for some years, suffering from a painful nerve disease. He was 77.

Jeffrey was part of the core group that started planning this magazine many months before we began publishing in 1976. At that early stage, there were a mere half dozen of us, working out of a two-room office. Only 27, he was one of the youngest of our crew, his intense face under a thatch of red hair looking little different than it had when he was an undergraduate at Columbia just a few years before. Undaunted by the prospect of persuading established writers to contribute to a magazine that didn’t yet even exist, he energetically barraged a wide array of them, both famous and unknown, by the means available at the time: letter, phone, and just showing up. On a trip to New York, one of the people he called on was the late Ted Solotaroff, a well-known book and literary magazine editor. Solotaroff was so impressed by Jeffrey’s zeal for tracking down writers that he said, “Now I’m going out to lunch. Stay here and copy anything you want from my Rolodex.” Jeffrey’s determined outreach brought in, for our very first issue, a memoir that he edited, “Peking! Peking!” by Li-Li Ch’en. It won the highest honor in our line of work, a National Magazine Award.

Soon after that, Jeffrey occupied the position of managing editor, that we then began rotating yearly. Feisty, provocative, and with a productive contrarian streak, he always pushed us to be both trenchant and unpredictable. Over the half dozen years following Mother Jones’ launch, he brought in scores of pieces by other writers and wrote many of his own. His reporting unearthed ties between Richard V. Allen, at one point President Ronald Reagan’s national security adviser, and Robert Vesco, a shady investor who had fled the country to avoid prosecution. His other subjects ranged from a charismatic psychic to basketball star Bill Walton to porn mogul Larry Flynt to Jewish refusniks barred from leaving the Soviet Union. Soviet customs agents confiscated copies of the issue containing the latter piece at the Leningrad airport when we tried to bring them to some of the people he had written about.

Klein in Moscow on assignment for Mother Jones, 1978.[][2]

One 1979 cover story Jeffrey wrote was about 60 Minutes correspondent [Mike Wallace][3], famous for his brash, aggressive questioning of people on camera. Wallace, however, was extremely skittish about being interviewed by Mother Jones and refused to talk. “When we persisted,” Jeffrey wrote, “he said repeatedly that he’d get back to us and then never did.” Jeffrey did not give up, and when Wallace gave the excuse that he was about to fly across the country, Jeffrey said, “Then I’ll book the seat next to you.” Jeffrey kept his tape recorder on for almost the whole trip from Los Angeles to New York. He asked Wallace, among other things, why he seemed so soft on Richard Nixon, whether his friendships with many of the wealthy and powerful gave him “an unconscious bias,” why 60 Minutes never talked about the inequities of American income distribution, and whether “invisible hand signals are passed from the top” about what the show should or shouldn’t cover.

Wallace must have been glad when the plane finally landed.

In 1992, after a stint at another magazine, Jeffrey returned for a second spell at Mother Jones to serve as its editor-in-chief. In the six years he held that role, he greatly widened MoJo’s reach, not least by launching the first website run by a general-interest magazine. He also established a popular annual feature, [“The Mother Jones 400,” ][4]which had thumbnail portraits of the country’s biggest political donors—and details of what they expected in return for their money. In 1996, he published a special issue on the American tobacco industry, including an [investigative story][5] about its ties to that year’s Republican presidential candidate, Senator Robert Dole. A frequent target of Klein and his reporters in those years—a choice that proved prescient, given his lasting influence on the Republican Party—was Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich.

Klein during one of his appearances on C-SPAN.Photo courtesy of Adam Hochschild

Between and after his stints at Mother Jones, Jeffrey was editor-in-chief of San Francisco Magazine and founded and edited West, the prize-winning Sunday magazine of the San Jose Mercury News. He also founded a tech start-up, worked in public television, taught journalism classes at UC Berkeley and Stanford, and published a novel, The Black Hole Affair.

Jeffrey’s work as an editor and writer was often focused on the injustices of the world. He also experienced and overcame many of his own. When he was 12 his father died suddenly of a heart attack. When he was in high school, living alone with his mother, she became bedridden from multiple sclerosis for the remaining few years of her life. And, when he was 48 his first wife and the mother of his two children, Judith Weinstein Klein, died after a long struggle with breast cancer. He is survived by his wife Claudia Books Klein, who cared for him in his last illness, by his sister Carol White and brother Ken Klein, by his sons Jacob and Jonah Klein, by their wives Liz and Ana, and by four grandchildren. The family requests that any memorial contributions be made to theInternational Consortium of Investigative Journalists, https://www.icij.org/?form=donate.

[2]: Photo courtesy of Adam Hochschild [3]: https://www.motherjones.com/politics/1979/04/mike-wallace-60-minutes-interview/ [4]: https://www.motherjones.com/politics/1996/03/mother-jones-400-1996-overview/ [5]: https://www.motherjones.com/politics/1996/03/smoked-out/

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Tesla’s in Trouble. Elon Blames…Trans People?

Elon Musk and his GOP acolytes are using the proliferation of Tesla protests to double down on their transphobia.

As my colleague Sam van Pykeren recently reported, Americans across the country have been showing their dissatisfaction with the unelected billionaire’s dismantling of the federal government by protesting at Tesla dealerships—including one last weekend in Palo Alto, the Silicon Valley city that Musk previously called home. While many of the protesters have been peaceful, there have been some instances of violence and vandalizing Tesla vehicles, including in both Las Vegas and Kansas City earlier this week, where unidentified people lit Teslas on fire, according to law enforcement. In a statement provided to Mother Jones on Thursday, the FBI’s national office said the agency is working with local law enforcement to investigate “a number of incidents in which Tesla charging stations and dealerships were damaged.”

In the meantime, Musk appears to be doing his own investigation into the incidents at Tesla facilities—and by “investigation,” I mean boosting transphobia by blaming trans people for the events and reposting dubious data suggesting they are more violent than cisgender people.

On Thursday morning, Musk reposted a post from an X user who goes by the name Insurrectionist Barbie. “Of course 3 out of 4 of the people who have been arrested for vandalizing Teslas are transgender or nonbinary,” the user wrote, adding an eye roll emoji.

The user appeared to be parroting a story from the right-wing Daily Caller website, which identifies three people who have been arrested—Lucy Grace Nelson, Erin White, and Adam Matthew Lansky—who appear, based on media reports or their social media accounts, to be gender non-conforming. (It’s unclear, though, how Nelson, White, and Lansky self-identify.) According to a DOJ spokesperson, Lansky and Nelson are two of three people—along with Daniel Brendan Kurt Clarke-Pounder—who are facing charges related to allegedly vandalizing Tesla property. The charges carry a minimum of five years and a maximum of 20 years in prison, Attorney General Pam Bondi announced Thursday.

Unsurprisingly, Musk ran with the fact that some of the people charged with the Tesla vandalism may be gender non-conforming, suggesting that it pointed to a larger phenomenon of violence perpetrated by trans people. “What are the statistics on trans violence?” Musk asked in his repost of Insurrectionist Barbie’s post. Ever the dilettante, Musk quickly answered his own question—with more of the baseless transphobia he has long spewed on his platform. “The probability of a trans person being violent appears to be vastly higher than non-trans,” Musk falsely claimed. “Hormone injections cause extreme emotional volatility. That is simply a fact.”

Actually, it’s not. Here are some actual facts: Trans people are more than four times as likely as cis people to be victims of violent crime, according to research conducted by the Williams Institute at the UCLA School of Law. The recent efforts of Musk and his right-wing cronies—including Rep. Nancy Mace (R-S.C.) and Libs of TikTok—to suggest that there’s an epidemic of violence being perpetrated by trans people are not new; the same assertions circulated after trans people were alleged to have been behind a mass shooting at a Christian school in Nashville, Tennessee in 2023 and a shooting at a Houston church last year—but there was no evidence to support those claims then, either, PolitiFact repeatedly reported. And while hormones naturally affect the emotions of trans and cis folks alike, gender-affirming hormone replacement therapy has been found to reduce depression and psychological distress.

As a spokesperson for GLAAD put it: “Promoting false narratives about transgender people, including baselessly characterizing them as violent, has become an all too common tactic in anti-trans fearmongering.”

Musk’s fearmongering did not stop with his repost of Insurrectionist Barbie, though. Just a few minutes after that Thursday morning post, he shared a graphic from a user by the name of Hanjo Girke that purports to show a higher proportion of trans women in British prisons incarcerated due to sex crimes than cis men or women. “Wow, trans violence is EXTREMELY FAR above normal levels!!” Musk wrote in the post, which he promptly pinned to the top of his X account.

What Musk missed, though, is that the data presented in that graphic is deeply skewed. The graphic claims that there are 48,000 trans women in the UK, and that 92 trans women are incarcerated for sex offenses. But the source of the latter figure is unclear, and previous data shared by the Ministry of Justice said the overall figure of trans people incarcerated for sex crimes was lower—about 60 total, which did not distinguish between trans men and trans women. Plus, the U.K. government’s own data shows that there are likely more than 48,000 trans women in the U.K. In the most recent census, which was the first to ask about gender identity, an additional 118,000 people reported that their gender identity is not aligned with their sex assigned at birth, but did not elaborate further; another 30,000 identified as nonbinary; 18,000 wrote in a different gender identity; and 2.9 million people skipped the question entirely. (The UK’s Ministry of Justice did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the figures.)

All of which is to say, the proportion of trans women incarcerated due to sex crimes compared is likely far lower than the X post suggests, because the number of trans women in the UK is likely far greater than the number listed. And as a 2020 report from the Bent Bars Project, an organization that supports incarcerated LGBTQ people in England and Northern Ireland, notes, trans people are generally undercounted in the prison system—which the UK government itself has noted—making claims that a higher proportion of trans people are incarcerated for sex offenses than cis people dubious. And as the report notes, marginalized communities are often policed, charged, and convicted for crimes at rates higher than other groups, meaning that the data is inherently skewed—even if a higher proportion of trans people were incarcerated for sex crimes, it wouldn’t tell us that they’re inherently more likely than cis people to commit them.

Trans rights advocates slammed Musk’s latest posts as disinformation designed to distract from his unpopularity and his suffering business interests.

“Rather than cosplaying as a medical professional and spreading misinformation on the internet, perhaps Elon Musk should focus on his rapidly deteriorating business portfolio and the growing American rage at his hostile takeover of government,” Brandon Wolf, national press secretary at Human Rights Campaign, said in a statement provided to Mother Jones.

“Elon Musk is the wealthiest man in the world, but spends his days scapegoating a small, vulnerable community,” Caius Willingham, senior policy analyst at Advocates for Trans Equality, added. “That is because Musk wants Americans to be focused on the one percent of trans people instead of the one percent of the wealthiest people in the world so that he and his unelected cronies can profit from the dismantling of the U.S. Government.”

Musk’s latest transphobic tirade came on the same day that his estranged trans daughter, Vivian Jenna Wilson, was profiled in Teen Vogue—and she’s not giving her dad, or his unhinged X posts, any brain space. “He’s a pathetic man-child,” she told the magazine.

Henry Carnell contributed reporting.

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A Child Died of Measles. Then Her Parents Appeared in an Anti-Vax Video.

The measles outbreak in Texas, New Mexico, and Oklahoma continues to grow, with 290 confirmed cases and at least one death. Last week, I wrote about Veritas Wellness, a holistic clinic in Lubbock, Texas, that is reportedly distributing untested remedies—including cod liver oil, vitamin C, and the steroid budesonide—to households with measles patients with help from an online fundraiser that has been organized by the anti-vaccine advocacy group Children’s Health Defense, which Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. helmed until he ran for president. Last week, Kennedy reportedly had a phone call with Dr. Ben Edwards of Veritas Wellness, along with a local historian and member of the local Mennonite community.

Late last week, two Children’s Health Defense staffers, chief scientific officer Brian Hooker and Polly Tommey, the group’s director of programming for its video division, traveled to the west Texas region where the outbreak is most widespread. There, they filmed a conversation withthe parents of the unvaccinated six-year-old child who had died of the highly contagious viral disease a few weeks earlier. The young couple, members of the Mennonite community, attributed their other four children’s mild cases of measles to treatments they received from Veritas Wellness.

This week, Children’s Health Defense aired the video of Hooker and Tommey’s conversation with the parents. The harrowing interview could reasonably be interpreted as a strong case in favor of measles vaccination—had she received the MMR immunization, the child would likely still be alive. But stunningly, the anti-vaccine activists see in the parents’ story a very different message: that shots are unnecessary as long as measles patients have access to untested treatments.

Speaking in a dialect of German through a translator, the parents said, at first their child seemed to be suffering from a typical case of measles, with the hallmark rash accompanied by fever and mild respiratory symptoms. A few days into the illness, though, the girl’s fever persisted, and her breathing was becoming more labored. They took her to the emergency room where she was diagnosed with pneumonia. After being transferred to the Intensive Care Unit, the child was placed on a ventilator, before she died.

After the girl’s funeral, the couple said, their other four children, who range in age from two to seven, also contracted the disease and were treated by Veritas Wellness’ Dr. Ben Edwards. “Dr. Ben came helping us, and he gave them treatments, or like medicine,” the children’s mother said. “And they had a really good, quick, recovery.”

At one point, Children Health Defense’s Tommey observed, “We spent the morning at Dr. Ben Edwards’ clinic, and the parents are all still sitting there saying they would rather have this than the MMR vaccination because they’ve seen so much injury, which we have as well. Do you still feel the same way about the MMR vaccine versus measles and the proper treatment with Dr Ben Edwards?”

“Absolutely not take the MMR [vaccine]. The measles wasn’t that bad. [The other children] got over it pretty quickly. And Dr. Edwards was there for us.”

The mother did not hesitate. “Absolutely not take the MMR [vaccine],” she said. “The measles wasn’t that bad. [The other children] got over it pretty quickly. And Dr. Edwards was there for us.”

It’s statistically likely, however, that the siblings of the child who died would have had mild cases—whether or not they received the treatment. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, one in five unvaccinated children with measles end up hospitalized. Dr. Pedro Piedra, a pediatric infections disease specialist at Baylor University College of Medicine in Texas, notes that about one in 20 develop pneumonia, and 1-3 out of every 1,000 children with measles will die from complications of the disease.

For children who do survive measles, Piedra notes, long-term complications, ranging from lung problems resulting from pneumonia to a rare fatal neurological syndrome, can occur years after recovery.

Piedra emphasized that the treatments that the deceased child’s siblings received are not backed by robust scientific evidence. But they do reflect statements made recently by Kennedy from his position as head of HHS. In a Fox News interview earlier this month, 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 severe complications from the disease. There is no credible evidence that cod liver oil itself can treat or prevent measles. If these treatments are “so efficient as an antiviral,” Baylor’s Piedra asks, “Why do we still have almost one in 20 children being hospitalized for pneumonia or some other complications due to measles?”

During their interview, the couple repeated several other unfounded claims about measles. The father added through the translator that he believed that measles strengthened the immune system overall, for instance, and that their children would then be protected from other diseases like cancer in the future. That’s not true—although the measles virus is being studied as a potential therapy for some types of cancer, research has found that it is more effective for vaccinated patients.

In a lengthy commentary section after the interview, Tommey described her visit to Veritas Wellness. “These parents had no fear,” she said. “They’re not wearing any masks. There’s no Plexiglas. There’s no six feet apart. They were sitting around in chairs, and at times, laughing. Their babies still have these ghastly coughs and stuff, but there was no fear in the room.” They also suggested without evidence that many vaccinated people were coming down with measles and wondered aloud whether they would be infected with the disease themselves after having visited the clinic. (Tommey said she had previously had the measles and Hooker said he had been vaccinated.) Children’s Health Defense did not immediately respond to a request for comment for this story.

Children Health Defense’s Hooker is also listed as the creator of the online fundraising campaign to help Dr. Edwards distribute measles remedies. The $16,000 it has reportedly collected so far 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,” its website states.

In response to a query from Mother Jones about the clinic’s promotion of unproven measles remedies, a CDC spokesperson provided a link to a February 27th statement on the outbreak. “Vaccination remains the best defense against measles infection,” it said. “Supportive care, including vitamin A administration under the direction of a physician, may be appropriate.”

On Wednesday, Children’s Health Defense aired a follow-up video in which Hooker and Tommey claimed that they had obtained the deceased child’s hospital records and had come to the conclusion that she had not died of measles but rather as a result of the hospital using the wrong treatment protocol. The doctor who reviewed the medical records was Pierre Kory, a pulmonologist who gained notoriety during the Covid pandemic for his promotion of the antiparasitic drug ivermectin as a treatment for the disease, despite abundant evidence that it wasn’t effective. The American Board of Internal Medicine has since revoked Kory’s certification.

The parents of the child who died said in the interview that their daughter’s death had been very hard for the whole family, especially her siblings, with whom she had shared a bed. But they believed that her death was God’s will. “It was her time on Earth,” the translator said. “They believe that she’s better off where she is now, versus all the negativity and all the stuff going on. They think she was too good for this earth.”

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How Chinese EV Manufacturer BYD Hopes to Drive Tesla off the Road

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

The leading Chinese electric carmaker BYD has soared in value after it said its latest batteries charge fast enough to 249 miles of range in only five minutes.

BYD’s Hong Kong-listed shares gained 4.1 percent on Tuesday to hit a record high of 408.80 Hong Kong dollars (US $40.58), as investors bet that the company could strengthen its already commanding market position.

The Chinese company is already the world’s biggest manufacturer of battery electric and plug-in hybrid electric cars that combine a battery and a polluting petrol engine. Investors including Warren Buffett have bet that the company can extend its lead in electric car production—and the sale of batteries to rival carmakers.

Here is what you need to know.

What’s special about the cars?
BYD founder Wang Chuanfu—often described as China’s Elon Musk—said flagship models would be able to receive 1 megawatt of power, or 1,000 kilowatts (kW), allowing the company to “completely solve users’ charging anxiety.”

The first models to have the super-fast charging technology will be the Han L saloon and the Tang L SUV. At megawatt speed, the new cars achieve “the same speed of oil and electricity” in terms of charging time.

A 10C rating means it can charge to full in six minutes—every second adds about 1.25 miles in range.

How does in compare with the competition?
Tesla narrowly retained its title as the biggest maker of pure electric cars in 2024, but BYD’s announcement appeared to prompt investors to question whether the company run by Musk—distracted by his allegiance to Donald Trump—could fall behind. Most of Tesla’s “supercharger” network—a key part of its appeal to early electric car buyers—can provide enough charge in 15 minutes to drive 172 miles at a power level of up to 250kW, although its latest chargers will reach 500kW.

Tesla shares shed almost 5 percent on Monday; as of Wednesday evening, they remained down about 6 percent from the start of the week.

Eunice Lee, the Asian autos analyst at Bernstein, an investment research company, cited Chinese rivals XPeng and Zeekr, whose respective 5C and 5.5C charging systems can add about 280 miles and 342 miles of range in 10 minutes. She was “generally impressed” by BYD’s claims, after it had lagged behind rivals.

For comparison, a mains plug (standard socket) offers about 2.3 kW of power—compared with the 1,000 kW that BYD claims. In the UK, “ultra-rapid” is generally considered to be above 150 kW, although there are dozens of chargers on main roads as fast as 350 kW.

How is such fast charging possible?
The chargers need to deliver ultra-high voltage and ultra-large current at the same time. But big currents, in particular, cause problems for batteries because they tend to generate damaging heat. BYD said it had managed to reduce the internal resistance of the new battery, allowing the highest charging speeds for any production vehicle.

To handle the high voltages, BYD also had to produce a new generation of silicon carbide power chips, it said.

BYD also said it would install a network of 4,000 “flash-charging stations” across China to allow for the fast charging.

Are there any disadvantages?
The obvious one is cost: The new electrical technology will add to the cost of producing the vehicle—although the speed of the charging could make the cars more desirable for people with “range anxiety.”

Another big problem will be the cost of energy. Faster charging costs more, because more power is needed. That requires expensive connections to power grids, which mean that the fastest chargers command a big premium.

Added to that, it is unclear what effect such fast charging could have on batteries, which degrade over their lifetimes. In existing technology, regular fast charging comes at the expense of reducing overall range.

Will every car have this tech?
No—or not soon, at any rate. Premium carmakers will scramble to keep up with BYD, but in the mass market a lot of the focus is on reducing costs of batteries rather than going for the most advanced. Many drivers—and particularly those with private charging—will rarely need to charge at public chargers, except for the occasional long-distance holiday. Otherwise, they can top up overnight when energy prices are lowest.

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Republicans’ Social Security Attacks Disproportionately Harm Retirees of Color

On March 31, the Social Security Administration will cease allowing people to confirm their identity over the phone when enrolling or changing their bank information, according to a memo obtained by journalist Judd Legum’s Popular Information. The policy change means that anyone who cannot confirm their identity independently online will have to appear in person, a shift framed as minor but likely to harm a large number of the program’s approximately 70 million beneficiaries.

The move came as Elon Musk continues to claim—without providing any evidence—that there is a sweeping Democratic conspiracy to orchestrate supposed benefits fraud among noncitizens. This is not the only move that Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency has taken to undermine the Social Security Administration and the disabled and aging adults who need its services. DOGE is, among other things, closing 10 of the agency’s field offices throughout the country, which will compel some of those users drive up to 100 miles for appointments—like the in-person appearances the agency’s new phone rules would entail. SSA also plans to terminate 7,000 workers, around 12 percent of its workforce.

Retirees of color are more likely to rely on Social Security as their sole source of income.

Last week, 13 senators—including Sens. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), and Raphael Warnock (D-Ga.)—sent a letter to their colleague, Finance Committee Chairman Sen. Michael Dean Crapo (R-Idaho), urging him to hold a hearing on Musk’s attacks on Social Security. “At a time when the agency’s workforce is at a 50-year low,” the letter reads, the potential loss of centuries’ worth of agency experience will risk worsening backlogs, lengthening wait times, and interrupting benefit payments,” the senators wrote.

Advocates say that the changes will have a greater impact on aging adults living in rural areas, who are less likely to have steady internet service. The Affordable Connectivity Program, launched in 2021 under the Biden administration to ease the cost burden of internet use, ended in June 2024; moreover, not all older adults have access to a smartphone and computer, or the ability to use them unaided for sensitive, high-stakes tasks like identity checks. Pew Research Center reports that 61 percent of aging adults, defined as people 65 and older, have a smartphone; 44 percent, likely with some overlap, have a computer.

There are also reasons to believe that Trump and Musk’s attacks on Social Security will disproportionately impact retirees of color. According to the National Academy of Social Security Insurance, retirees of color are more likely to rely on Social Security as their sole source of income in comparison to white retirees—a consequence of being more likely to have jobs that don’t contribute to retirement funds or provide pensions, and of being less likely to have generational wealth.

“Adding additional barriers such as discontinuing some phone services, imposing new online requirements, and closing field offices will harm low-income older adults of color disproportionately,” Tracey Gronniger, managing director of economic security at advocacy group Justice in Aging, said in a statement to Mother Jones. “When Social Security is your sole source of income, losing even one month of benefits can lead to hunger, poor health, and housing precarity.”

According to research from the National Equity Alliance, people of color across different income levels are also less likely to have access to a car, making it more difficult to travel between cities (or even within a city with less-than-robust public transit) to get to a Social Security Administration office for identity verification—none of which appears to be of any concern to Musk.

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Trump and Musk Are Running a Disinformation Campaign on Social Security

Donald Trump keeps saying he has no intention of slashing Social Security, but…he and his mini-me, Elon Musk, won’t stop making outlandish claims about the program and appear to be setting the table for cuts that they will try to call something other than “cuts.”

Just about every time they mention the program and entitlement spending, they lie. Musk recently denigrated Social Security as a “Ponzi scheme.” It isn’t, but if it were, shouldn’t you whack away at it? And during an interview with Fox Business, he claimed there’s $500 to $700 billion in annual waste and fraud within entitlement spending—when there is no evidence of that (as Forbes notes). Moreover, he and Trump have falsely insisted there are a gazillion dead people on the rolls, implying checks are going out to ghosts.

If things go to hell at the SSA, older voters might get truly get pissed.

This duo of deceit is doing all they can to raise doubts about the most popular and arguably the most important government program. Meanwhile, Musk and his dodgy DOGErs have moved to shitcan or force out thousands of employees at the Social Security Administration, perhaps as many as 10,000. (Good luck reaching someone there on the phone.) The downsizing that has already occurred at the agency has led to “a significant loss of expertise,” according to one former employee. If things go to hell at the SSA, older voters might get truly get pissed.

Unlike ideologues of the right who have long salivated at the thought of shrinking entitlements and privatizing Social Security, Trump realizes such a move could be political suicide. So he has repeatedly vowed not to reduce the program. But should his promise be believed? (That’s a rhetorical question.) After Musk uttered an inartful statement this week about eliminating purported waste and fraud within entitlement programs—which some people interpreted as an expression of his desire to kill these programs—the White House rushed out a press release declaring, “The Trump Administration will not cut Social Security, Medicare, or Medicaid benefits. President Trump himself has said it (over and over and over again).” But here’s the tell that the White House cannot be trusted on this front: The statement was full of lies about entitlement spending.

The press release claimed Musk was correct to opine that waste and fraud in entitlement programs totaled up to $700 billion each year. To back this up, the White House listed four “facts” and provided citations. Nerd that I am, I clicked on the links and discovered—wait for it—these citations did not support what the Trump White House was asserting. Let’s run through them:

FACT: The US Government Accountability Office estimates taxpayers lose as much as $521 billion annually to fraud—and most of that is within entitlement programs, such as Medicare and Medicaid.

That is not what the GAO said. Its report stated, “The federal government could lose between $233 billion and $521 billion annually to fraud.” That is, could. Not that it does. And this estimate of possible fraud included Covid pandemic-fraud, which likely boosted the number. As for the claim that most of this comes from entitlement program, the citation supplied by the White House links to a GAO report that says there was an estimated $236 billion in “improper payments” in 2023. But it adds, “Such payments are essentially payment errors that can be the result of many things—including overpayments, inaccurate recordkeeping, or even fraud.” Medicare and Medicaid did have the most payment errors—$186 billion—but, again, that’s not necessarily due to fraud.

FACT: Over the past two decades, the federal government has made an estimated $2.7 trillion in “improper payments”—the majority of which come in the form of “payments to deceased individuals or those who no longer [are] eligible for government programs.”

This is highly misleading. The GAO report cited says that most of the improper payments were overpayments. As an example of an overpayment, it pointed to “payments to deceased individuals or those no longer eligible for government programs.” It did not say that payments to dead people or ineligible recipients comprise the majority of these improper payments—only that they account for some of these errant payments.

FACT: The Social Security Administration made an estimated $72 billion in improper payments between 2015 and 2022.

This “fact” left out important context. The inspector general of the SSA, who came up with this statistic, noted that the $72 billion was “less than 1 percent of the total benefits paid during that period.” While $72 billion seems like a lot of money, a 1 percent error rate is rather admirable for an immense and complex program. Plus, the IG said that some of these payments were deemed improper because of errors made by beneficiaries in reporting changes in their circumstances. These might not be instances of fraud.

FACT: The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services estimated it made $140+ billion in improper payments in 2024 alone.

The White House is mugging the truth to foster the impression that Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid are ridden with fraud.

This was quite the whopper. Click on that link and you get a Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services fact sheet on improper payments. Add up the figures, and the total is $86 billion, not $140-plus billion. More important, the CMS states, “It is important to keep in mind that not all improper payments represent fraud or abuse. Improper payments are payments that do not meet CMS program requirements. They can be overpayments, underpayments, or payments where insufficient information was provided to determine whether a payment was proper. Most improper payments involve a state, contractor, or provider missing an administrative step.” It added, “Of the 2024 Medicaid improper payments, 79.11% were the result of insufficient documentation.” In other words, these payments might have nothing to do with waste and fraud.

You can see what’s going on here. The White House is mugging the truth to foster the impression that Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid are ridden with fraud. No doubt, within enormous programs that disburse a combined total of about $2.8 trillion a year, there will be waste, abuse, and fraud. That needs to be addressed, and the feds routinely spend a lot of resources each year trying to do so (without having to be besieged by the minions of DOGE). In its fact sheet, CMS reported that the improper payment rate had dropped for several of its major programs.

By and large, the stats ain’t so bad. Yet Trump and Musk are running a disinformation campaign that targets Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, inaccurately depicting them as rotting with criminality. Why do that? What are they setting up? It’s not too hard to imagine.

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Mindless USDA Job Cuts Could Raise Food Prices and Unleash Agricultural Pests

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

Before he was abruptly fired last month, Derek Copeland worked as a trainer at the US Department of Agriculture’s National Dog Detection Training Center, preparing beagles and Labrador retrievers to sniff out plants and animals that are invasive or vectors for zoonotic diseases, like swine fever. Copeland estimates the center lost about a fifth of its trainers and a number of other support staff when 6,000 employees were let go at the USDA in February as part of a government-wide purge orchestrated by the Trump administration and Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).

Before he received his termination notice, he says, Copeland had just spent several months training the only dog stationed in Florida capable of detecting the Giant African land snail, an invasive mollusk that poses a significant threat to Florida agriculture. “We have dogs for spotted and lantern flies, Asian longhorn beetles,” he says, referring to two other nonnative species. “I don’t think the American people realize how much crap that people bring into the United States.”

“We could be back to pandemic-level issues for some goods if we don’t fix this.”

Dog trainers are just one example of the kind of highly specialized USDA staff that have been removed from their stations in recent weeks. Teams devoted to inspecting plant and food imports have been hit especially hard by the recent cuts, including the Plant Protection and Quarantine program, which has lost hundreds of staffers alone.

“It’s causing problems left and right,” says one current USDA worker, who like other federal employees in this story asked to remain anonymous for fear of retaliation. “It’s basically a skeleton crew working now,” says another current USDA staffer, who noted that both they and most of their colleagues held advanced degrees and had many years of training to protect US food and agriculture supply chains from invasive pests. “It’s not something that is easily replaced by artificial intelligence.”

“These aren’t your average people,” says Mike Lahar, the regulatory affairs manager at US customs broker behemoth Deringer. “These were highly trained individuals—inspectors, entomologists, taxonomists.”

Lahar and other supply chain experts warn that the losses could cause food to go rotten while waiting in ports and could lead to even higher grocery prices, in addition to increasing the chances of potentially devastating invasive species getting into the country. These dangers are especially acute at a moment when US grocery supply chains are already reeling from other business disruptions such as bird flu and President Trump’s new tariffs.

“If we’re inspecting less food, the first basic thing that happens is some amount of that food we don’t inspect is likely to go bad. We’re going to end up losing resources,” says supply chain industry veteran and software CEO Joe Hudicka.

The USDA cuts are being felt especially in coastal states home to major shipping ports. USDA sources who spoke to WIRED estimate that the Port of Los Angeles, one of the busiest in the US, lost around 35 percent of its total Plant Protection and Quarantine staff and 60 percent of its “smuggling and interdiction” employees, who are tasked with stopping illegal pests and goods from entering the country. The Port of Miami, which handles high volumes of US plant imports, lost about 35 percent of its plant inspectors.

Navigating the workforce cuts has “been absolute chaos,” says Armando Rosario-Lebrón, a vice president of the National Association of Agriculture Employees, which represents workers in Plant Protection and Quarantine program.

“These ports were already strained in how they process cargo, and now some of them have been completely decimated,” Rosario-Lebrón says. “We could be back to pandemic-level issues for some goods if we don’t fix this.”

The Department of Agriculture did not respond to a request for comment. Republican senator Joni Ernst, who has been a vocal backer of DOGE’s efforts, previously publicly supported the USDA’s dog training program and cosponsored legislation that would give it permanent funding. Her office declined to comment on cuts made to it.

Two federal judges and an independent agency that assesses government personnel decisions have already ordered that fired USDA employees be reinstated. Earlier this week, the USDA said that it was pausing the terminations for 45 days and would “develop a phased plan for return-to-duty.” But affected staff remain in the dark about their future, and the Trump administration has signaled it will fight court decisions to reinstate employees, with White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt calling one of the rulings “absurd and unconstitutional.”

As these legal and regulatory battles continue to play out, Hudicka says he anticipates a number of trickle-down effects to happen, such as local market wars over resources, which bigger cities and larger grocery chains will be better equipped for than mom-and-pops and rural communities. Hudicka says that allowing shipping containers to sit uninspected could also impact other sectors, as the delays will prevent them from being reused for other kinds of goods. “Those containers are supposed to be moving stuff every day, and now they’re just parked somewhere,” he says.

Kit Johnson, the director of trade compliance at the US customs broker John S. James, also predicts prices and waste to increase. But what raises the most alarms for him is the increased likelihood of invasive species slipping through inspection cracks. He says the price of missing a threatening pest is “wiping out an entire agricultural commodity,” an event that could have “not just economic but national security impacts.”

Decimating the Department of Agriculture could even have consequences for US Customs and Border Protection, which deploys the dogs trained by Copeland and other staffers at the National Dog Detection Training Center. CBP works closely with the USDA in other ways as well, particularly at points of entry. The two agencies run the Agricultural Quarantine Inspection program, but it’s funded by the USDA. Many Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service programs do not rely on taxpayer dollars to operate but instead collect fees from importers and other industry players. In this way, it subsidizes some of CBP’s agriculture-related activities. CBP did not respond to a request for comment.

As the fired USDA workers wait to hear whether their reinstatements will actually take place, ports are beginning to feel their absence. “There aren’t as many inspections being done, and it doesn’t just put us at risk,” says Lahar. “It puts our farmers and our food chains at risk.”

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Israel Is Bombing Gaza Again. Here’s What Doctors Are Seeing On The Ground.

The ceasefire agreement between Hamas and Israel, instituted in mid-January, was always shaky. It could even be argued it never fully existed. Sixteen days ago Israel imposed a total blockade on Gaza, prohibiting any food or medical supplies from entering the territory, and cutting off electricity to Gaza’s water desalination plants. At the beginning of March, Israeli negotiators refused to move into the second—more durable—phase of the ceasefire agreement. Three days ago, Israeli airstrikes killed dozens of Palestinians, including a group of journalists. In total, between the ceasefire’s start on January 19th and yesterday, Israeli forces killed at least 170 Palestinians.

Then, the official break: Over the past day, Israeli airstrikes killed over 404 Palestinians and wounded 560, targeting residential areas and reportedly wiping out entire families. Now, it is inarguable. The ceasefire is dead.

“We haven’t had any meat or chicken in Gaza for the last two weeks.”

The United States was helpful throughout to its partner. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was in direct consultation with US President Donald Trump’s administration as he ordered airstrikes, White House spokesperson Karoline Leavitt said. In late February, Trump bypassed a congressional review to authorize $3 billion worth of arms transfers—mostly, 2000-pound bombs—to Israel. (Netanyahu benefitted personally, too; he was excused from a scheduled court hearing for his corruption trial today. And the mass killing has paid other dividends—ultranationalist right-wing minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, in an apparent response to the airstrikes, said today that he will rejoin Netanyahu’s governing coalition.)

Netanyahu has called the offensive “open-ended,” making it unclear whether this means another ground assault into Gaza, where Palestinians have hardly begun rebuilding from the previous sixteen months of nearly nonstop bombardment.

“This is only the beginning,” Netanyahu said Tuesday. Future ceasefire talks, he said, will take place “only under fire.”

Gazan doctors being trained by an international delegation to perform ultrasounds.Dr. Sabrina Das

Trump’s justification for his “full backing” of these airstrikes was that Hamas has not released all of the scheduled Israeli hostages. But many hostage families are decrying the resumption of violence. Bombing the place where their family members are being held hostage puts relatives in danger.

The international condemnations are rolling in, too. United Nations Human Rights Commissioner Volker Türk described this round of bombing as “adding tragedy onto tragedy.” Palestinians themselves want more than condemnations, though. As Palestinian UN ambassador Riyad Mansour told his colleagues Tuesday, “You are the Security Council. Act. Stop this criminal action. Stop them from denying our people food in the month of Ramadan. You have resolutions. Act. You have power. Act.”

Throughout both the bombardment and the ceasefire the only internationals allowed into Gaza have been doctors and aid workers. Two of those doctors called me from Gaza and told me what they saw.

Sabrina Das, an OBGYN from the UK, entered Gaza earlier this month hoping to be part of the rebuilding effort. She was there to train primary healthcare workers in using ultrasound machines for prenatal care. She traveled from south to north Gaza each day to go to the clinic.

“All I could think was: We’re going to go back to this, and the world is going to continue to not care.”

The training was “really, really successful,” Das said. “There’s just been this real thirst for knowledge and development, and also, you know, just normalcy.” She was planning to bring handheld ultrasound machines to the north Gaza clinic where she holds the training “within the next couple of days.”

But, in the middle of the night on March 18th, she woke up to the sound of bombs—and the news that the Netzarim Corridor between north and south Gaza was closed once again. That meant she wouldn’t be able to deliver the ultrasound machines after all.

A damaged UNRWA clinic.Dr. Sabrina Das

“I mean, my brain knew that the ceasefire might or might not hold,” Das said. But her colleagues’ hope to rebuild their lives was infectious. “I’d just gotten so caught up in the optimism all around me.”

She and her colleagues plan to go to Nasser Hospital and serve as extra hands while they can. And for some of those doctors, this all feels familiar. Dr. Tammy Abughnaim, from California, has been to Gaza three times in the past year.

“I think ceasefire is a very loose term,” Abughnaim said. “Although the frequency of air strikes was minimized, that did not necessarily guarantee our safety.” When she arrived, the infrastructure around her was still demolished—and, two weeks before today’s bombings, Israel stopped letting food into Gaza. “I wouldn’t say we entered Gaza at a time of peace and quiet.”

“We haven’t had any meat or chicken in Gaza for the last two weeks,” she said. “There’s only so many ways that you can make canned tuna, and they’re utilizing all of them.”

Nonetheless, Abughnaim said, the day before the bombing was the most normal she had ever felt in Gaza. She had the chance to walk on the beach, and she even planned to take a bus north to visit friends. People sold goods out of pop-up market stalls in front of the hospital complex, and children played in the streets. There was, for once, “a semblance of people returning to life around us.”

Then they woke up to the bombs.

“We were up from two to 6 a.m., maybe got a half-hour of sleep, and all I could think was: we’re going to go back to this, and the world is going to continue to not care,” Abughnaim said. “I don’t know why more people aren’t burning shit down over this, I really don’t.” She has tried to talk to her legislators about Gaza, she said, but is met with canned responses that Israel has the right to defend itself.

El Shifa hospital, destroyed in previous attacks.Dr. Sabrina Das

Meanwhile, she said, she was receiving dispatches from colleagues across the strip. One doctor, at Shifa Hospital, went out on the balcony after a night spent intubating children and counted 50 bodies in the courtyard.

“I’ve gotten messages from nurses saying, this is the worst night we’ve experienced in a very, very long time,” Abughnaim said. Today, outside the guest house where the foreign physicians are staying, there were no children playing.

“Americans need to know that the Trump administration has signed off on all of this,” Abughnaim said. “They need to know that Israel has violated the terms of the ceasefire by this unprovoked attack, and they need to know that the ceasefire itself was not, in reality, a ceasefire. It has been a time of strategic mass starvation for the Palestinian people. I don’t know what kind of ceasefire agreement includes provisions for mass starvation, but it’s not one that any reasonable person would accept.”

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Ken Paxton Finally Found Healthcare Providers to Charge With “Illegal” Abortion

In what appears to be the first arrests of healthcare providers for allegedly violating a post-Roe v. Wade state abortion ban, Maria Margarita Rojas, a midwife working in the region around Houston, and her employee, medical assistant Jose Manuel Cendan Ley, were taken into custody by Texas authorities on Monday.

Court records from Waller County, west of Houston, show that law enforcement initially accused Rojas with practicing medicine without a license, but on Monday, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton announced that he was adding the illegal performance of an abortion to her indictment—a second-degree felony in Texas, carrying a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison. Ley is facing the same charges.

The New York Times reports that court documents allege that Rojas “attempted an abortion” on a woman on two occasions in March and was “known by law enforcement to have performed an abortion” on another patient this year. In his press release, Paxton claimed that Rojas ran a network of clinics in towns around Houston that “unlawfully employed unlicensed individuals who falsely presented themselves as licensed medical professionals.” The website for the network, Clinicás Latinoamericanas, advertises urgent care services, treatment for chronic illness, and dietary counseling to a Spanish-language community. Paxton’s office said it had filed for a temporary restraining order to shut down the clinics.

On Tuesday, Paxton announced that a third person associated with the clinics, nurse practitioner Rubildo Labanino Matos, whose license is currently on probation, was arrested on March 8 and charged with conspiracy to practice medicine without a license.

“I will always do everything in my power to protect the unborn, defend our state’s pro-life laws, and work to ensure that unlicensed individuals endangering the lives of women by performing illegal abortions are fully prosecuted,” Paxton said in his statement on Monday. “Texas law protecting life is clear, and we will hold those who violate it accountable.”

Maternal deaths have surged in Texas since it enacted its abortion ban, according to an analysis published last month by ProPublica. Dozens more pregnant and postpartum patients died in Texas hospitals in 2022 and 2023, compared to before the pandemic. Sepsis rates likewise rose more than 50 percent among women who were hospitalized after losing their pregnancies in the second trimester. Experts attribute the increasing danger of being pregnant in Texas to doctors delaying or withholding treatments out of fear of running afoul of the state abortion ban, which only provides a narrow exception to save the life of a patient.

It’s unsurprising then that these charges are coming from Paxton, the three-term state attorney general who survived a 16-count impeachment effort in 2023. Ever since Texas implemented its near-total abortion ban, Paxton, a longtime abortion opponent, has embarked on zealous enforcement efforts of anti-abortion laws, even beyond his state’s borders. Nonetheless, until now in Texas, as in other states that have passed near-total abortion bans, law enforcement has struggled to identify abortion providers to prosecute—much to the frustration of the anti-abortion movement. The Texas legislature is currently considering a bill that would expand Paxton’s power by enabling him to target providers who send abortion pills through the mail. Like a mini “Comstock Act,” the measure focuses on the telehealth practitioners and community activists who, post-Dobbs, have become a critical part of the US abortion access infrastructure by mailing abortion medications into red states.

Instead of directly going after providers, Paxton has found other ways to carry out his anti-abortion crackdown. He sued the city of Austin last fall over its creation of a fund to help pregnant patients travel out of state to get abortions. He’s fighting to overturn 25-year-old HIPAA privacy rules shielding patient data from state investigators as well as recent regulations adding extra protections for abortion patients’ private health information. And, according to the [Washington Post,][12] last year Paxton’s office quietly launched an initiative to find cases to prosecute by collecting tips from the male sex partners of women who receive abortions.

“The doctors all across the state are saying that they are afraid that their judgment is going to be second-guessed,” Marc Hearron, interim associate director of US litigation at the Center for Reproductive Rights, told [The Cut][13] on Monday. “All of these actions show that Paxton is chomping at the bit to go after anybody who provides an abortion.”

A tip from the male partner of an abortion patient is what reportedly led Paxton, last December, to [file a civil ][14]lawsuit against Margaret Carpenter, a New York doctor accused of using telehealth to prescribe the abortion medication mifepristone to a Texas patient. Carpenter, who is protected by New York’s shield law for abortion providers, has not appeared in Texas court to defend herself but recently was [ordered][15] to pay a $100,000 fine. In late January, a prosecutor in Louisiana followed Paxton’s lead and indicted Carpenter for allegedly prescribing abortion pills to a pregnant teenager. But New York Gov. Kathy Hochul has [blocked][16] attempts to extradite her.

The case against Rojas appears to represent the first time a healthcare provider has been arrested and jailed on charges of providing an illegal abortion. A [website for a birthing][17] center linked to Clinicás Latinoamericanas says Rojas was born in Peru, received her Texas midwife certification in 2018, and has attended “over 700 births in community-based and hospital settings.” The birthing centeropened the same year Rojas got her license. Its website describes the center as focusing “on providing comprehensive care to pregnant woman and their families…Women here are treated with love and respect, empowering them to fulfilling their desire for a natural childbirth.”

Rojas’ friend and fellow midwife, Holly Shearman, reacted to the charges with shock, the New York Times reported. “They’re saying that she did abortions or something?” Shearman told the Times. “She never ever talked about anything like that, and she’s very Catholic. I just don’t believe the charges.”

According to [Bloomberg][18], Rojas’ bail has been set at $1.4 million, and Ley’s at $700,000.

[12]: http://ale sex partners of women who decided to end their pregnancies. [13]: https://www.thecut.com/article/texas-abortion-arrest-maria-margarita-rojas-midwife.html [14]: https://apnews.com/article/abortion-pills-lawsuit-shield-laws-texas-telemedicine-74c9b7d5c3c152e4c8f199b29132daec [15]: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/13/health/texas-new-york-abortion-pills-lawsuit.html [16]: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/13/nyregion/abortion-extradition-louisiana-doctor.html [17]: https://www.houstonbirthhouse.com/about [18]: https://news.bloomberglaw.com/litigation/texas-midwife-arrested-in-paxton-abortion-investigation

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A Constitutional Crisis Is Here

On Saturday evening, federal judge James Boasberg unambiguously ordered the Trump administration not to deport any Venezuelans using an extreme wartime presidential power. Boasberg made clear that the order applied even if it meant turning around planes that were already in the air. The Trump administration ignored the order.

Officials kept jets carrying Venezuelans flying towards El Salvador, where right-wing President Nayib Bukele has struck a deal with the US to house the immigrants in an infamous prison. The deportees had their heads shaved upon arrival in a dystopian video that was quickly promoted by Secretary of State Marco Rubio and the White House.

Senior Trump officials have left little doubt that they willfully disobeyed. “We are not stopping,” White House border czar Tom Homan said on television on Monday. “I don’t care what the judges think. I don’t care what the Left thinks. We’re coming.” President Donald Trump has now called for Boasberg to be impeached, writing on social media, “This Radical Left Lunatic of a Judge, a troublemaker and agitator who was sadly appointed by Barack Hussein Obama, was not elected President.”

Lee Gelernt, the ACLU attorney representing the Venezuelans suing to prevent their deportation, made the stakes clear on Monday. “I want to choose my words very carefully,” Gelernt told the court. “There’s been a lot of talk over the last few weeks about constitutional crises. I think we’re getting very close to it.”

“It’s essentially, sending someone, we believe, outside of the United States with no due process. With no ability to refute the allegations against them.”

Boasberg issued his oral order blocking removals at about 6:45 pm Eastern Time on Saturday. “You shall inform your clients of this immediately,” he said. “However that’s accomplished, whether turning around a plane or not embarking anyone on the plane or those people covered by this on the plane, I leave to you.” A written order to the same effect appeared on the court’s docket about forty minutes later.

Flight data analyzed by the Washington Post shows three removal flights taking off from Texas on Saturday, landing in Honduras, and then continuing on to El Salvador. Two of those flights were en route to Honduras at the time of the court order. They then took for El Salvador despite Boasberg’s command that they be turned around. The third flight appears to have taken off in Texas about 50 minutes after Boasberg’s oral order.

The administration alleges that the last flight did not carry any Venezuelans covered by the ACLU’s suit. In a filing on Tuesday, the Trump administration said two of the planes departed before 7:25 pm, and the one that departed after the judge’s written order had only individuals with final orders of removal who were not being “removed solely on the basis of” the proclamation.

At a Monday afternoon hearing before Boasberg about the flights, the Trump administration made an absurd and unconvincing case for why not turning around the flights complied with the court orders. Deputy Associate Attorney General Abhishek Kambli argued that because Boasberg only ordered flights to turn around orally—and not explicitly in writing—the administration was free to keep them flying to El Salvador. “The idea that because my written order was pithier it could be disregarded,” Boasberg replied, “that’s one heck of a stretch.”

Kambli also suggested on Monday that the administration officials felt entitled to ignore Boasbaerg because the first two planes headed to El Salvador were allegedly outside of US territory by the time the judge weighed in. Georgetown Law professor Steve Vladeck has made clear that it is essentially nonsense to claim that Boasberg lost authority over government-chartered planes as soon as they left US airspace.

Nor does the administration have the legal authority to ignore a federal judge because they think he’s wrong. They must comply with court orders and then file appeals in the hopes of having them overturned. Instead, the administration defied Boasberg. As a senior Trump official told Axios over the weekend, “There was a discussion about how far the judge’s ruling can go under the circumstances and over international waters and, on advice of counsel, we proceeded with deporting these thugs.”

Bosaberg responded on Monday by ordering the government to provide information about the deportation flights or, if the administration refused to do so, to submit an explanation as to why the information could not be provided. The government respond by largely doubling-down on its logic. The Trump administration also said that because their motion to stay the judge’s order is pending, “the Government should not be required to disclose sensitive information bearing on national security and foreign relations until that motion is resolved, especially given that this information is neither material nor time-sensitive.”

Amidst the legal back and forth, it is easy to lose sight of what led the ACLU and Democracy Forward to sue in the first place. The removal flights to El Salvador resulted from the White House quietly invoking the Alien Enemies Act on Friday. The law, which came into force shortly before the now infamous Sedition Act of 1798, had only been invoked three times in US history before: during the War of 1812; World War I; and World War II. The White House has said that 137 Venezuelans have been deported so far under it.

Trump is providing no due process for Venezuelans who are accused of being members of Tren de Aragua. It means that they can be deported without ever having a chance to make their case to a judge. That is particularly disturbing because the administration’s now largely abandoned plan to deport Venezuelans to the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base made clear that US officials often appear to be falsely accusing people of being gang members.

The Venezuelans sent to El Salvador in defiance of Boasberg now face a terrifying reality as they are indefinitely held at a mega-prison notorious for human rights abuses, while cut off from lawyers in the United States. Lindsay Toczylowski, the president and CEO of the Los Angeles-based Immigrant Defenders Law Center, told Mother Jones on Monday that her organization is representing a Venezuelan asylum seeker who she believed was in that position after entering the United States last year.

Toczylowski said the client, whose name she is withholding due to fear of potential retaliation, had been detained in the United States last year after being falsely accused by US immigration officials of being a gang member because of tattoos. In reality, she explained that the asylum seeker, who previously worked in the arts, had tattoos “that you really could see on any art student in LA or New York.”

“They’re fairly benign. Clearly not gang tattoos,” Toczylowski continued. “But we never got to the point where we could dispute that fact because our client was supposed to have court on Thursday. And when our attorney went to court, the client was not produced by ICE.”

By the time of the Thursday hearing, Immigrant Defenders’ client had already been moved to Texas. They learned on Friday that he had been moved again but they were unable to determine to where. By Saturday morning, he had disappeared from ICE’s detainee locator system.

“This is someone whose had a lawyer the entire time,” Toczylowski stressed. “It’s truly a terrifying development in deportation [procedures]. It’s essentially, sending someone, we believe, outside of the United States with no due process. With no ability to refute the allegations against them. And in the case of our client, it’s happening to someone that we can definitively say has been wrongly accused of being in a gang.”

Later on Monday, around the same time Boasberg was hearing from the Trump administration, Immigrant Defenders’ and the Venezuelan asylum seeker were supposed to be in immigration court again. This time, his legal team got confirmation from the government: Their client is in El Salvador. They have no way to contact him, or any idea what will happen to his theoretically still pending asylum claim. A man with American lawyers has effectively disappeared into a Salvadoran gulag in defiance of a federal court order.

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Mass Protests Rock Serbia and Hungary. Their Autocratic Leaders Blame USAID.

As massive protests swept through the capitals of Hungary and Serbia in recent days, the embattled and increasingly autocratic leaders of both countries moved to crack down on critics, who, they insisted, have received quiet assistance from a hostile foreign entity: the United States Agency for International Development.

Hungary’s Viktor Orban and Serbia’s Aleksandar Vucic, facing protests over economic conditions and corruption, have attributed their political woes to foreign conspiracies. They’ve blamed the movements threatening their power on EU bureaucrats in Brussels, on the 94-year-old George Soros, and—inspired by the actions by President Donald Trump and Elon Musk—on USAID.

In Budapest Saturday, tens of thousands demonstrated against Orban amid anger over inflation. The right-wing populist leader—who has trailed a center-right opponent in polls ahead of an election next year—vowed to purge critics at non-governmental organizations and media outlets that, he claims, were paid by the EU and the United States.

“After today’s festive gathering comes the Easter cleaning,” Orban said. “The bugs have overwintered. We will dismantle the financial machine that has used corrupt dollars to buy politicians, judges, journalists, pseudo-NGOs and political activists. We will eliminate the entire shadow army.”

Those remarks seemingly referenced Orban’s vow last month to go “line by line” through pro-democracy organizations in Hungary that have received US funding in an bid to “make their existence legally impossible.”

In Belgrade on Saturday, a crowd the government said was just over 100,000 people—and which protesters said was at least 300,000—rallied in the city center against President Vucic, another right-leaning populist. The assembly was part of a mounting anti-corruption protest movement set off by the November collapse of a concrete canopy at a train station that killed 15 people. Critics have blamed the disaster on shoddy work by contractors and alleged corruption by government officials.

But Vucic has called the movement a “color revolution,” using a term popularized by Vladimir Putin to suggest protesters are part of a western-funded regime-change effort. And recently, he has added USAID to the constellation of groups he says are part of the plot against him. Vucic last month cited Trump’s attack on USAID to justify raids against good-government groups, some of which had received modest funding from the agency. When a Serbian journalist last month asked Vucic about his son’s alleged links to criminals, the president responded: “How much money have you received from USAID?”

Such rhetoric has quickly become common among governments in central and eastern Europe. Leaders are using Trump’s and Musk’s hyperbolic and often false attacks on USAID—including Musk’s claim that the agency is a “criminal organization”—as a cudgel to attack domestic critics and civil society.

In Georgia, increasingly pro-Russian and autocratic Prime Minister Irakli Kobakhidze has cheered Trump’s suspension of foreign aid and has accused USAID of joining in a “coordinated” attack on Georgian interests, the Guardian has reported. Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico—who critics accuse of dismantling anti-corruption efforts to help political allies facing prosecution—has similarly celebrated the attacks on USAID and has asked Musk for information on past US support for non-governmental groups in that country.

But the trend of adopting USAID as a bogeyman looks particularly ominous in Serbia and Hungary, as those countries’ leaders edge toward using past US support, real or alleged, as an excuse to shut down democratic opposition.

“We are certainly seeing this played out in Hungary and Serbia with Orban and [Vucic] using Musk’s and others’ negative statements about USAID as a justification for cracking down on some groups that received USAID funding,” said Thomas Carothers, a democracy expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

Trump and his allies aren’t simply enabling such efforts—they are encouraging them. In a visit last week to Serbia, Donald Trump Jr. used his podcast to conduct a fawning interview with Vucic, in which the US president’s son eagerly amplified the Serbian leader’s claim that USAID funds were part of an international conspiracy aimed at undermining the Vucic government.

Trump Jr. asked if the canopy collapse that set off was anti-corruption protests in Serbia had been “weaponized, perhaps like our January 6.” Vucic said he had already reached that conclusion: “I was saying the same to my people here,” he claimed.

Asked by Trump Jr. about the extent to which the protests against him are “manufactured,” the Serbian president indicated the movement is wholly the work NGOs funded by USAID and other foreign organizations. “I am absolutely certain that your father and…Elon Musk and some others guys, they can recognize it easily,” Vucic said.

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The US Used the Alien Enemies Act to Detain Their Families. Now, They Are Watching History Repeat.

Heidi Gurcke Donald does not remember much about the Crystal City family internment camp in South Texas. She was barely three at the time. But Donald can picture certain moments. There were the floodlights, atop the barbed-wire fence, shining through the curtains her mother had sewn for the bedroom windows; the nursery school singing game in which she and her younger sister played Sleeping Beauty in the middle of a circle as the other kids stood tall and held their hands together in the air to form a hedge; the icicle her German-born father snapped from the edge of the roof on a frigid winter and offered on a cracked plate.

The Gurcke family was among the first group of German nationals and Latin Americans of German origin deported from Costa Rica to arrive in Texas in February 1943. They had been rounded up and shipped away as part of a secretive transnational State Department program known as Special War Problems. The hope was to trade “enemy aliens”’ in exchange for American hostages. Through the initiative, the US government orchestrated the uprooting of more than 6,000 Germans, Italians, and Japanese—connected through citizenship or ancestry to the Axis countries—residing in Latin America and sent them to domestic internment camps across the United States.

“It’s what happened to us, only on steroids.”

As Donald would later document in her memoir, We Were Not the Enemy: Remembering the United States’ Latin-American Civilian Internment Program of World War II, the Gurckes became “one of many caught in the far-flung net cast by US authorities seeking the enemy.” After the bombing of Pearl Harbor, President Roosevelt’s proclamations authorized broad detentions premised on promoting hemispheric security. “They swept up all of us,” Donald said in an oral history interview conducted by the Texas Historical Commission in 2009 “with none of us being serious threats of any sort.”

Now, Donald, and descendants of those interned during World War II, are watching as the same law that authorized the imprisonments then is used again by President Donald Trump—this time without the United States at warand with the goal of speeding up mass deportation.

On March 14, President Donald Trump quietly signed a presidential proclamation invoking the wartime Alien Enemies Act of 1798. The 18th-century statute gives the president extraordinary powers to summarily detain and remove noncitizens from a foreign country during a “declared war” or while under an “invasion or predatory incursion.” Last used during World War II, the law served as the legal rationale behind the forced relocation and internment of 120,000 Japanese Americans, as well as people of German and Italian descent.

As we previously reported, the Trump administration has long spoken of using the ancient wartime statute to justify hasty deportations, arguing migrants are leading an “invasion” of the United States. The executive order states that alleged members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua—which the administration previously designated as a foreign terrorist organization—are “conducting irregular warfare and undertaking hostile actions” in coordination with or “at the direction” of the regime of Nicolás Maduro and therefore operating as a de facto government.

In a lawsuit filed on March 15 challenging the executive order as unlawful, the American Civil Liberties Union and Democracy Forward argue the Alien Enemies Act—which has only been used three times before, always in times of war—can’t be deployed against citizens of a country, in this instance Venezuela, that isn’t engaging in “warlike actions” against the United States. As a result of the proclamation, the class action complaint states, “countless Venezuelans are at imminent risk of deportation without any hearing or meaningful review, regardless of their ties to the United States or the availability of claims for relief from and defenses to removal.”

By invoking the centuries-old statute during peacetime, the organizations further claim, the president is trying to supercharge mass deportations while sidestepping the judicial process. “The Trump administration’s intent to use a wartime authority for immigration enforcement is as unprecedented as it is lawless,” Lee Gelernt, lead counsel and deputy director of the ACLU’s Immigrants’ Rights Project, said in a statement. “It may be the administration’s most extreme measure yet, and that is saying a lot.”

US District Judge James Boasberg in Washington, DC, issued a temporary restraining order stopping the removal of Venezuelans based on the proclamation and instructed that deportation planes should be turned around. The Trump administration reportedly ignored the court order, deporting 137 Venezuelans to El Salvador—to be held in a notorious prison—under the wartime authority. (The administration said flights had already departed the United States.) “The White House welcomes that fight,” one official told Axios. “This is headed to the Supreme Court. And we’re going to win.” On appeal, the Department of Justice argued the federal judge’s decision violated the president’s inherent authority to remove those determined to be national security threats.

As Katherine Yon Ebright, a counsel in the Brennan Center’s Liberty and National Security Program explained, the US government has previouslyused the Alien Enemies Act to target noncitizens deemed “dangerous” solely based on their identity. In reaction to the Trump administration’s proclamation, she lamented that former internees and family members have “to watch their country fail to learn from the mistakes of its past.”

“I think my mother would have been completely terrified by this,” Donald says. “It’s what happened to us, only on steroids.”

In the 1920s, Donald’s father, Werner Gurcke, and her uncle Karl Oskar chose to relocate from Hamburg to Costa Rica. Werner married US citizen Starr Pait in 1936, and they settled in the capital San José, where Donald and her sister Ingrid were born. Werner set up a thriving enterprise as a middleman for imported goods. But by 1941, amidst growing concern of the Axis powers establishing a foothold in the region, the British and US governments blacklisted Werner and Karl. “I’m still an American,” Starr wrote in a letter to a friend at the time “and have written to the Government stating our innocence of any conspiring against it.”

Both men were jailed in July 1942 despite no evidence of their sympathy for or association with the Nazi regime. Later, an independent investigation would show that Werner was considered one of the “most dangerous German nationals” in the country partly because he had been treasurer of the local German Club. “People were just picked up because the neighbor down the street thought they were bad guys or somebody had heard what they thought was the sound of secret meetings late at night as they were passing by,” Donald says. “They were German and therefore they must be enemies.”

“When you allow the rule of law to disappear for one group of people in the country, it will soon disappear for everybody. And then we lose everything which we believe the United States should stand for.”

That December in 1942, the police took Starr and the girls to the German club, where they were holding the wives and children of those detained. The family was then made to board an overcrowded ship to the United States. Passengers had their passports confiscated and, without documents, were charged with illegal entry upon docking in California. After undergoing interrogation, they were handed identification numbers and put on a train to Crystal City, where a Popeye tribute served as a marker of the small desert town’s status as “spinach center of the world.” They entered the vast camp, once a migrant labor site, on February 12, 1943.

In a photo taken not long after the family’s arrival, a white-blonde Donald sits by her father. She’s not looking at the camera, instead eyeing her sister, both sick from whooping cough. The mug shot of the “Gurcke family criminals,” as Donald calls it, mirrors a similar photo she has seen of an interned Japanese Peruvian family. “The same exhaustion in the parents’ eyes and the same wariness in the children’s faces,” she says.

Donald didn’t learn the full story of her family’s ordeal and the impact it had on her parents until adulthood. Her father didn’t talk about it when she was growing up. Having lost his business and determined to provide for his family, Werner became a workaholic and a chain smoker, passing away from lung cancer in his early sixties. “It consumed him,” she says. Eventually, Donald decided to ask her octogenarian mother, who couldn’t recount what they had gone through without crying. “It was the most terrible experience in her life, and I hadn’t even been aware of it.”

Like Donald, Conrad Caspari had to puzzle together the events that led to his German-born father, Fritz, being sent to the Tuna Canyon Detention Station, in the Los Angeles area, in September 1942. He studied a 120-page FBI case file obtained through public records request and other documents found in his parents’ basement. Caspari learned how flimsy the evidence the US government had against Fritz, who opposed Hitler’s totalitarian rule, was: One of the allegations accused him of sharing intelligence about high-power transmission lines with German authorities; in reality, his father had been followed by agents who mistook his harmonica for a mirror to send a Morse code message.

“The charges were essentially the result of a lot of hysteria,” Caspari says. His father would be acquitted and released in January 1943. But, not without losing his teaching job in the United States. “People’s livelihoods were taken from them without any good reason.”

Caspari, a director on the board of the Tuna Canyon Detention Station Coalition, fears the Alien Enemies Act can be similarly weaponized again, unless repealed. “When you allow the rule of law to disappear for one group of people in the country,” he says “it will soon disappear for everybody, and then we lose everything which we believe the United States should stand for.”

The grandson of a Tuna Canyon detainee, Colorado-based researcher Russell Endo has looked into the files of 500 Japanese arrested in Southern California in the 1940s and found no indication of subversive acts or allegiance to imperial Japan. “The people were completely innocent,” he says. “But they were swept up because of the abuse of the Alien Enemies Act.”

Endo, who grew up in the vicinity of the former detention camp, sees another parallel between the wartime period and the current moment: the impulse for the mass arrests had to do with public pressure for the federal government to respond forcefully to the attack on Pearl Harbor, all in the name of safety and national security. “If that argument sounds familiar today,” Endo says “it’s because history is repeating itself.”

After the Gurckes were released from Crystal City in May 1944, they moved to Starr’s family beach house in Santa Cruz, California. A government review later found no evidence that Werner engaged in pro-Nazi activity. Still, he remained at risk of repatriation because of the illegal entry charge until 1948, when the US government granted him suspension of deportation. Four years later, Werner became an American citizen.

Donald still lives near the beach house. “Maybe that’s how I’m affected,” she says. “I’ve stayed very close to the first safe place that I knew.”

In 2002, Donald, her sister Ingrid, and their husbands returned to the site of the Crystal City camp for the first time to join a former internees’ reunion. The siblings sat by what used to be the swimming pool, one of the only remaining features of the original place. Realizing that, unlike their parents, they both could freely walk away, they were overcome with emotion.

Donald co-founded the German American Internee Coalition to preserve this lesser-known history. Over the years, many families have contacted the organization looking for information about the unknown fate of their relatives, even decades later. One case stuck with her: an 80-year-old woman who had been just a child when her father was taken away and the family never heard from him again. Although the group couldn’t help her, they have offered leads to others.

“It’s dying just like we are,” Donald says. “We’re going to be a memory fairly soon and we haven’t done all we wanted to do, which was to prevent something like what’s happening today from happening again to another group of people.” She adds: “I know to some extent what these people that are now being targeted for pickup and sending off are going to go through not because I remember it, but because I feel it.”

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The Washington Post Canceled Me for Currygate. Jeff Bezos Was My Unlikely Savior.

When Jeffrey Bezos came for the journalists in the Washington Post‘s Opinions section a few weeks ago, their colleagues in the paper’s news sections didn’t protest too loudly, because they were not in the Opinions section.

Then Bezos came for the newsies.

Post people wondered: What’s next, face-eating leopards?

The recent pattern of Chernobylic meltdowns at the Washington Post has been stupefying, a display of serial journalistic malpractice by a seniormanagement beholden to the whims and ruthlessness of its billionaire owner—the man who turned Amazon into a retail behemoth while pushinghis prole workers so hard that the drivers began peeing into bottles to meet draconian delivery quotas.

I’ve had an interesting vantage point from which to view all of this—close up and bone-deep—but also at a felicitous remove. I no longer work for the Post, but I did for 30 years, to significant acclaim, until I violated a sacrosanct stricture: I embarrassed the newspaper and subjected it to the ire of a ravening, cancel-crazed global Internet.

And so I was gone.

The timing proved fortuitous for me. I had an indigenous institutional knowledge of the place, and many loyal friends within it, but since I no longer worked for the Post when all this happened, I was free to report exactly what I found out and say exactly what I thought about it, lobbing grenades at my old employer from safe in my bunker, a Substack newsletter called The Gene Pool.

The Gene Pool can be nasty. And it turns out people like nasty in these deeply polarized, paranoid times because they are so angry at, and scared of, the Trump-Musk-Bezos troika that they are willing to part with their hard-earned ducats to see these people spanked ruthlessly in indelible digital print by someone who writes with insider authenticity.

The same Internet that chased me from the Post has now rescued my wallet, my career, and (so far) my reputation.

I’m the guy who infamously doesn’t like Indian food.

In late 2021, I wrote exactly that in a humor column that was mostly at my expense, reflecting on my own infantile understanding of cuisine. I wrote that drowning a hot dog in a wet heap of a half dozen dressings was as big a crime as drowning a puppy in a toilet. I said that Old Bay Seasoning tasted like dandruff from a corpse. I claimed that balsamic vinegar broke up the Beatles, and that sweet pickles made as much gustatorial sense as chicken-flavored jelly beans. Readers laughed. Then, in the same column, I wrote that Indian curry—which I incorrectly described as a single spice, instead of a varying mixture of different spices—was pungent enough to “knock a vulture off a meat wagon.” Readers stopped laughing.

Because I had casually insulted an entire subcontinent and its diaspora, the wrath on Twitter was overpowering and relentless. My bosses at the Post were similarly, and understandably, unamused. They decided my food column had been, ironically, tasteless. Also culturally insensitive, which it was. And that, as they say, was that.

Except it wasn’t that, as it turns out.

I started my Substack roughly a year later because, even at 71, I did not want to have to dip into my retirement savings. For about two years, The Gene Pool was a modest success. Then Jeff Bezos started perpetrating grandiose, self-serving malfeasances, mauling the integrity of the paper I loved, infuriating the staff, and prompting a hemorrhage of canceled subscriptions (more than 300,000 as of this writing.)

Bezos’ first, and most dramatic, move came late in October, shortly before the presidential election, when he learned that the Post planned to endorse Kamala Harris. His response was to order his Opinions staff not to endorse any presidential candidate, and he then evidently ordered the Post‘s publisher to lie about why—the obvious truth being that he wanted to ingratiate himself with a new, vindictive, spiteful president notorious for punishing his perceived enemies. (Bezos’ financial empire relies on federal contracts.)

With that, The Gene Pool, previously a versatile, thrice-weekly general interest column, became much more voluble, focused, and occasionally embittered. I began writing five or six days a week.

I created a snarkynew masthead for the Post, for whenever I write unpleasant things about its managers and express rage at their spinelessness:

My response to Bezos’ order was a post titled, “Courage and Cowardice,” a lengthy diatribe unflatteringly comparing him to a famous previous owner of the newspaper, Katharine Graham. You can guess which of the two represented courage.

It included these paragraphs:

In his statement, publisher William Lewis, a Rupert Murdoch protégé, lied nakedly about what had happened, and why. He said the newspaper made its choice in order to “return to their roots,” to reset itself to a prior, better, more genteel time when the Post declined to endorse presidential candidates.

If you think that’s even remotely true, you are the idiot he takes you for.

Elsewhere in the piece, I wrote:

On July 17, 2001, when Mrs. Graham died after a fall on the street, her employees walked the halls of the Washington Post building, tearful.

Jeff Bezos has earned billions in his life, but he will never earn that.

And finally:

There is such a thing as moral authority. It may be intangible, but it is there, and it can be powerful. It is essential to newspaper opinion writing. The Washington Post owner flushed it down the toilet yesterday. What is left is invertebrate.

This action has damaged everyone, not the least of whom are the dedicated, talented employees of the Post, whose careers are likely now diminished because, well, do they work for a great newspaper anymore? They are like homeowners whose neighborhood suddenly gets a pig slaughterhouse. All the home values are diminished.

In the one or two days before the election, expect to read a banal, obligatory piece in the Post—most newspapers do it—urging everyone to vote, for the sake of civic responsibility. Why should you believe it from the Post, now? The hypocrisy is thick and gooey. This is a newspaper that looked at the stark, existential choice facing the country, with the people in fear, and decided to sit this one out. They’re not voting. Why should you?

This post went semi-viral—almost as viral as my initial foray into apparent anti-Indian colonialism. Over the next four months, the number of _Gene Pool_subscribers, the ones I had managed to amass in the first two years, more than tripled.

There would be more mile markers to come. After each new depredation by the Bezos team, readers searched for reliably dissenting voices and found my Substack. The leaps insubscribership inevitably accompanied Post executives’ leaps in lickspittlery:

November: Bezos, the owner of the newspaper of record for the nation’s capital, a role demanding political impartiality and restraint, writes Trump an obsequious tweet applauding his, er, historic achievement.

Big congratulations to our 45th and now 47th President on an extraordinary political comeback and decisive victory. No nation has bigger opportunities. Wishing @realDonaldTrump all success in leading and uniting the America we all love.

— Jeff Bezos (@JeffBezos) November 6, 2024

December: Bezos, via Amazon, decides to gift the Trump administration $1 million for its inaugural festivities and stream the events on Prime Video, which is worth another $1 million.

January: Amazon announces it has agreed to produce a documentary about Melania Trump for which the First Lady will receive at least $28 million. Melania—who’d written a largely insipid memoir the year before—gives the following explanation to a TV interviewer. It seems right out of the Broadway musical_Sunset Boulevard_: “I get so many messages and letters how they enjoyed the book and they would love, my fans and people, would love to hear more from me.”

The deal smelled a lot like a bribe—I implied that.

But February and March were my most fecund months for new subscribers because Bezos continued to act like a member of the Trump administration in his handling of the Post. His behavior coincided with my decision to discard the word “administration” and just start calling it the “Trump regime.”

Then Bezos did something really stupid, and characteristically arrogant. He instructed the Opinions staff that henceforth, they would only write stories “in defense of personal liberties and free markets.” He was instructing some of the nation’s most distinguished journalists to only write opinions that agreed with his own. Opinions editor David Shipley resigned immediately.

And so, my next post consisted of two op-ed ideas that ostensibly aligned with the new rules:

To the Washington Post:

Please accept this submission for your op-ed pages. I have included illustrations for your exclusive use. I believe my piece conforms to your new strictures, requiring only opinions defending free markets and personal liberties:

I’m mad as hell about all the threats to the existence of free markets, particularly tariffs. Instead of leveling the playing field, tariffs distort it. For example, imagine you are a Mexican boxer fighting against an American boxer in Altoona, Pa. And your bucktoothed American hosts make you, and not your opponent, drag around one of these balls and chains.

(Here I placed an illustration of a faceless character wearing the classic ball and chain.)

You’re gonna get your ass kicked! Is that free? Is that fair? So then, when an American goes to fight a Mexican guy in, say, Guadalajara, they’re gonna get back at us. They’re gonna make the American wear a chastity cage!

(Here was a racier illustration of an actual product—a stainless steel cage designed to fit very, very tightly over a man’s penis.)

So, no. I, like all wise Americans, am in favor of no restrictive or punitive tariffs. Let’s compete as usual on the basis of product quality and bribes where necessary.

And don’t get me started on personal liberties!

Too late. I’m going to start. I’m all for extending personal liberties by reducing Deep State control over our lives. And by “our,” I include corporations, which, according to the Supreme Court, are people except for not being able to have sex and defecate.

For example, this whole patent and trademark thing. Why should the government regulate our personal business decisions like that? Why shouldn’t I be able to manufacture a line of bidets under the name “Trump® Ass Washers”? Or the “Amazon®” line of airline vomit bags?

And why should the government be able to tell me what sex I am? We have freedom of expression! If I want to identify as a schnizzle, which I declare to be a sterile, twelve-breasted egg-laying fish with gonads the size of mature gophers, why should the jackbooted government stop me?

We should not be subject to the whims of the politicized, left-leaning justice system. Shouldn’t we all have the freedom, without fear of prosecution, to continue the recent practice of depositing warm dog poop bags on Teslas parked in the street? Should I not also be free, if it is my desire, or if it is my parents’ desire, for me to die of measles, like that kid just did in Texas, the anti-vaxx state?

The Post‘s writers helped me out out in this crusade by being outraged, but also silenced because they still needed to take home a paycheck. Fortunately, they had someone to vent to on background: the proprietor of that alternative news source, the Washington Pist!

I learned, for instance, that the newspaper’s media critic, Erik Wemple, had submitted an essay about his disappointment in the new edicts. Then I found out that the piece had been spiked, and wrote about that.

One of Bezos’ dumbest moves was yet to come. His promise—or implied promise—alwayshad been for everyone not to worry, because he would keep his hands off the news side of the paper.

That’s the default: Most reputable news organizations maintain a strict ethical firewall between the business side—owners, publishers, advertising reps—and the news operations.

But then it was reported that the Post’s publisher—whom Bezos had hand-picked—had met privately with the editor of the Washington Free Beacon, a muckraking hard-right news organization of squishy ethics, to ask how he could recruit more conservative journalists.

The initial report of the meeting did not specify that the Post was seeking news reporters—as opposed to staff opinion writers, who serve at the publisher’s pleasure—but that’s how it was widely reported. The Free Beacon, after all, prides itself on its “combat journalism.”

Bezos’ hands were now all over the news side, apparently. It felt like a groping incident.

All along, writers and editors were leaving the paper in daunting numbers. The Post lost its gifted political cartoonist Ann Telnaes, who quit after one of her cartoons was spiked. The cartoon in question depicted Bezos and other media moguls as Trump suckups. Matea Gold, the Post‘s widely admired managing editor, and its White House reporter Tyler Pager went to the NewYork Times. Political reporters Michael Scherer and Ashley Parker jumped ship for The Atlantic. Political columnist and blogger Jennifer Rubin quit the Post and started her own Substack,The Contrarian. (Slogan: “Not owned by anybody.”)

The most recent notable departure was Ruth Marcus, a universally respected Opinions columnist and associate editor. She quit after the Post spiked one of her columns about the lamentable state of affairs at the newspaper. I believe I was the first to break that story. But I couldn’t get access to her spiked column.

Marcus published it herself a few days laterin The New Yorker. You should read it. It’s elegant from start to finish, and heartbreaking in places.

She writes: “We have lost so much talent in the newsroom in the past few months as reporters and editors have defected to competitors—and we’re still publishing remarkable work. (I’ll never stop saying ‘we’.)”

Marcus summarizes her reason for leaving in one grandly efficient line: “My job is supposed to be to tell you what I think, not what Jeff Bezos thinks I should think.”

For once, I had nothing to add. The Washington Pist was silent that day.

Gene Weingarten, a former Washington Post staff writer, syndicated humor columnist, and author of a nonfiction collection, The Fiddler in the Subway, has won two Pulitzer prizes for feature writing. To subscribe to his Substack, The Gene Pool, click here.

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Department of Veterans Affairs Ends Transgender and Intersex Care Directives

On Monday, citing Donald Trump’s “Defending Women” executive order, the federal Department of Veterans Affairs announced that it would “phase out treatment for gender dysphoria” by discontinuing hormone replacement therapy for patients not already in treatment.

The agency provides health care and benefits for about nine million veterans, tens of thousands of whom—by the VA’s estimate—identify as trans. Its press release says that the agency’s LGBTQ+ veteran care coordinators, who run its LGBTQ Health Program, would not be affected by the changes. But Pete Hegseth, Trump’s secretary of defense, has been vocal about his ire toward the LGBTQ community and his support for cutting VA health care.

Although the VA has never provided gender-affirming surgeries, it has been able to provide letters in support of veterans seeking them. That’s now on the chopping block.

“It’s infuriating,” a medical professional with the agency, speaking on condition of anonymity, told Mother Jones. “To be honest, I don’t understand how it’s allowed—how are they able to tell providers what they can and cannot treat?”

The announcement follows reporting in the Advocate on a Veterans Health Administration memo with similar provisions circulated on March 14, which rescinded the agency’s 2018 directive establishing health care standards for transgender and intersex veterans. In response to subsequent coverage by National Public Radio, VA press secretary Peter Kasperowicz told NPR that there had been no policy change—but by Saturday night, the agency officially published the memo, which showed otherwise.

The VA’s press release claims that funds spent to treat transgender veterans will be redirected to treatment of paralyzed veterans and amputees, a supposed annual savings of $2.4 to $8.4 million, according to the RAND Corporation, or 0.04 to 0.13 percent of military health expenditures.

Notably, the memo rescinded VHA Directive 1341(4), “a policy for the respectful delivery of health care” for transgender and intersex veterans.The policy provides background on the transgender and intersex veteran populations and their healthcare needs, defines the “respectful delivery” of that care, and outlines what the VA benefits package covers. It can no longer be found on the VA’s website.

The department’s new memo rescinding those standards claims to apply to intersex veterans, in addition to transgender ones, though it isn’t clear to what extent they will. Intersex people, who make up approximately 1.7 percent of the population, have sex characteristics outside of the binary of female and male. Those variations can present in external genitalia, gonads, hormone production, internal reproductive organs, and chromosomes. Intersex people can be prescribed hormone replacement therapy to aid with gonadal function or help masculinize or feminize secondary sex characteristics, among other uses.

Some intersex folks require HRT because of non-consensual surgeries as infants—as intersex activist Alicia Roth Weigel said to NPR, “By removing my testes, they basically put my body into artificial hormone withdrawal and didn’t give me new hormones until a certain age.”

Right now, the VA’s former policy supporting intersex healthcare is moot, but the agency hasn’t outlined a direction for its future.

According to the new policy, anyone without previous Veterans Affairs health coverage is “not eligible for cross-sex hormone therapy.” But what constitutes “cross-sex” hormone therapy for intersex veterans? Is it based on the sex they were assigned at birth? What happens when that conflicts with what the current administration defines as sex—based on the production of certain sizes of reproductive cells?

In fact, what is cross-sex hormone therapy for anyone? Everyone has both testosterone and estrogen at varying levels. It is increasingly common for cisgender people to take hormones associated with the other sex.

The VA health care professional who spoke to Mother Jones said that the agency now seems to have “no official stance on the treatment of intersex people.” The source takes that to mean that, “in theory,” things won’t necessarily change—though “it can definitely lead to confusion for providers attempting to treat patients,” they acknowledged.

It’s not the first time intersex folks have been swept up in anti-trans policies and legislation.

The VA, the memo states, “provides care and treatment…compatible with generally accepted standards of medical practice.” Hormone replacement therapy falls into that category: Every major medical association in the United States supports gender-affirming care for transgender people.

The VA staffer who spoke to Mother Jones said it felt “frustrating that the party that pushes against the idea of government involved in your health care [is] taking the opportunity to define for care providers what they can and cannot treat.”

The department did not respond to a request for clarification about its current policy dictating care for intersex veterans.

Additional reporting by Anna Merlan.

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A Florida Cinema Showed a Documentary About Palestine. Now, The Mayor Could Shut It Down.

Kareem Tabsch, co-founder of Miami Beach’s O Cinema, loves his hometown. He’s made an award-winning movie about Miami Beach’s historic Jewish community. He has been lauded in his local press for his contributions to South Florida’s artistic culture. And in 2008, he co-founded an arthouse movie theater to give his neighborhood access to independent films that would otherwise pass it by in favor of more lucrative screens elsewhere.

But, until last week, Tabsch had never interacted much with Miami Beach’s municipal government. That changed on March 11th, when the cinema received a letter from Miami Beach mayor Steven Meiner, telling the business they had to cancel their planned showings of “No Other Land,” a documentary about a Palestinian village struggling to survive in the West Bank amid Israeli government and settler violence. If the movie theatre failed to comply, Meiner said he would introduce a City Council resolution to terminate the cinema’s lease in a city-owned building and revoke at least $40,000 in grant money.

On March 3rd, “No Other Land” made history when it won the Oscar for Best Documentary. But it still does not have a US distributor. That means that one-on-one deals with independent theaters like O Cinema are the only way US audiences can see the film.

Tabsch’s patrons, he told Mother Jones, wanted “No Other” Land in particular: so, despite the eviction threat, O Cinema went ahead and screened the film. They sold out every single showing.

“We recognize that some stories—especially those rooted in real-world conflicts—can evoke strong feelings and passionate reactions. As they should,” O Cinema CEO Vivian Marthell said in a statement. “Our decision to screen ‘No Other Land’ is not a declaration of political alignment. It is a bold reaffirmation of our fundamental belief that every voice deserves to be heard.” T

he resolution canceling O Cinema’s lease and withdrawing city funding is due for a vote on Wednesday. That same night, O Cinema’s public schedule lists another showing of “No Other Land.”

I talked with Tabsch about what happens when your local government decides screening a film is “not consistent” with your city’s values.

How was the decision to screen “No Other Land” made?

The film had been on our radar pretty much all last year, because it’s been so universally lauded. People started asking us: When are you going to show it? So discussions began in the fall of last year. It’s a 69-seat theater, so scheduling is tricky…we kind of earmarked this early 2025 window. That was before the Academy Awards. We always try to show as many of the Academy Award nominees as possible, which is pretty common for art-house theaters.

At the time, when we programmed it, we were the only theater in South Florida showing “No Other Land.” We may have been the only theater in the state of Florida.

Now, after we’ve shown it, other theaters are coming in to show it.

O Cinema movie theater.Courtesy O Cinema

Let’s talk about what happened with the mayor. How did you first hear about this threat of eviction?

We received a letter from the Mayor. The initial reaction, from many of us, was that this very clearly felt like a threat from our elected officials. And I don’t think in our history we have ever received any outreach from any local politician asking us about or questioning our programming.

It came across as a not-so-veiled threat to our future. Initially, we felt the future of our indie theater was threatened, and decided that we were not going to show the film. Vivian [Marthell, CEO of O Cinema] sent a letter to the mayor saying as much. But, very quickly, I think we all realized that was really against the mission of our organization, the spirit of independent film, and really an affront to the First Amendment. So, within 12 hours, she sent an email to the mayor where she informed him that we were actually going to go through with the screenings.

And we went through with the screenings! Every screening of “No Other Land” at O Cinema was sold out.

The overwhelming feedback that I heard from members of the community was very positive. They were thankful that we were showing the film. Folks walked up to the staff and thanked them for showing the It’s very clear that Miami Beach audiences, in particular, wanted to see the film and were grateful to be able to do so.

You, yourself, are a documentarian. As someone who makes documentary films, what was your reaction to all this?

As someone who’s born and raised and lives in this community and has seen the trajectory of its growth and evolution, I was really taken aback by the course this has taken. We see more and more attempts at censorship at different levels—especially at the federal government level, we’re seeing a lot of threats to freedom of expression.

But I never truly expected that in this vibrant cultural community that is Miami Beach, where folks have so many different backgrounds, and many of them came fleeing oppression… I never expected our local government to decide that showing a film was so much against the values of the city that they had to shut us down. I never expected our local government to enact retribution against an arts organization for extending and fulfilling their artistic license and freedom to show films.

So, what happens now?

The Mayor’s resolution to defund the cinema and cancel its lease will come to a vote and a discussion on Wednesday. It’s my sincere hope that we will find an amicable solution to this.

I mean, listen, I respect deeply held views. And I know the subject matter of the film is certainly provocative, and it could evoke strong feelings. But good films evoke strong feelings. As a filmmaker, I always say you don’t have to like my movies, but I want to make you feel something one way or another.

This film, clearly, evokes strong feelings in local government. But I hope cooler heads will prevail and we can move forward operating in the city, because we love the city of Miami Beach, and our community loves us. That’s evident by how they come out to see our films, and how they came out to see this one.

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The Absurdity of Trump’s Autopen Meltdown

President Donald Trump has a new hobbyhorse: That his predecessor, President Joe Biden, didn’t legally grant pardons to people Trump wants to harass because the pardons were signed with an autopen, a device for replicating a signature, rather than by hand.

Trump has identified some signature requirement as the one rule presidents must obey.

“The ‘Pardons’ that Sleepy Joe Biden gave to the Unselect Committee of Political Thugs, and many others, are hereby declared VOID, VACANT, AND OF NO FURTHER FORCE OR EFFECT, because of the fact that they were done by Autopen,” he ranted on Truth Social just after midnight on Monday. “In other words, Joe Biden did not sign them but, more importantly, he did not know anything about them!”

This argument is hilarious.

Trump and his MAGA allies have embraced a lawless approach to the presidency. Trump’s executive orders, actions, and legal filings all point to an understanding of the president as far more powerful than previously understood, with king-like powers over the entire executive branch. The president, they argue, is unbound by rules over firing officials or the civil service, by criminal laws, by the legal interpretations of other agencies (including the Justice Department), by Congress’ power of the purse, and it would seem—in multiple cases—unbound by court orders. But in Trump’s midnight rage-posting, he has identified some signature requirement as the one rule presidents must abide by.

The logic is absurd. Last summer, the Supreme Court granted presidents immunity from criminal prosecution for acts within their core powers, including the pardon power. Now, a president can literally trade a pardon for a bribe. As Justice Sonia Sotomayor warned in her dissent, “Takes a bribe in exchange for a pardon? Immune.” According to Trump’s new rubric, she omitted the golden rule that the pardon had to be signed by hand. Then, feel free to bribe away.

According to Trump, he can appoint the world’s richest man to dismantle federal agencies, halt payments, cancel contracts, and enrich himself—all outside the purview of Congress. It’s an extraordinary assertion of executive branch power—the power to delegate, in effect, all the executive’s power, and then Congress’ to boot. But what he cannot delegate is the signing of his signature to an autopen?

Usually the Trump administration is all about automation. They are reportedly using artificial intelligence to scan the social media posts of visa-holders and flag for deportation anyone it judges has made pro-Hamas or pro-terrorist comments. This dragnet is certain to ensnare people who merely criticized Israel’s tactics against Gaza or the United States’ support of that war—and that indeed may be the entire point. In other words, they are outsourcing a crackdown on free speech to AI.

It’s not the administration’s only use of AI. According to multiple reports, AI is being deployed across the federal government to reduce the workforce and transform federal agencies into an AI-run bureaucracy. So not only has Trump outsourced his job to Musk, but Musk is now outsourcing his—and most other federal employees’—to a chatbot. Whether a job exists or a deportation is ordered or your data remains private will now depend on an algorithm and the few DOGE employees who utilize it.

But outsource to an autopen? That’s a bridge too far.

Trump, of course, isn’t preoccupied just with the autopen but with what he claims it means: That Biden was too senile to govern, and the automatic signature is proof that someone else was calling the shots. It is obviously proof of no such thing. Conversely, signing by hand is no indication that Trump has read all of the dozens of executive orders he has issued since January 20. (We’ve all claimed to have read the fine print, haven’t we?) But Trump, in his zeal to delegate vast authority to Musk and AI, obviously is authorizing things he doesn’t know about or cannot foresee—like the time his administration fired the team working to stop a bird flu pandemic and then scrambled to hire them all back.

Usually the Trump administration is all about automation. But outsource to an autopen? That’s too far.

There are practical concerns with the no-autopen rule. What if a president is away from his desk when a pardon must be issued in order to avert, say, a wrongful execution? What if he injures his hands and cannot sign? Does he lose the pardon power? The pardon power has been set out by the Supreme Court as one of the president’s “core powers” that cannot be proscribed—yet somehow, according to Trump’s logic, this power can be entirely undone by use of an autopen?

To Trump’s credit, it doesn’t appear that he came up with this legal strategy. Instead, it seems to have emerged from the Heritage Foundation in an attempt to poke legal holes in Biden’s executive actions. Trump, according to remarks on Sunday, is so desirous to prosecute people Biden pardoned in the waning days of his administration—like former Rep. Liz Cheney, who co-led the January 6 Committee—that he intends to ask the courts to throw out Biden’s pardons on the strength of his autopen argument. “It’s not my decision; that’ll be up to a court,” he said. “But I would say that they’re null and void.”

Perhaps Trump is imagining that Chief Justice John Roberts, the author of the decision granting presidential immunity, will finally draw a line on executive authority. Do what you want, Roberts might decree, but you have to sign the document by hand.

Even for this Supreme Court, that level of absurdity is certainly too much.

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In Your Face: The Brutal Aesthetics of MAGA

In the early morning hours of January 28, as dozens of Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers arrived in New York to round up undocumented immigrants, a shimmering Kristi Noem appeared in the Bronx. She wore a bulletproof vest and a baseball cap, but also dramatic makeup and hair coiled to show off a set of pearl earrings. “We are getting the dirtbags off these streets,” the new Homeland Security secretary said in a three-second clip she posted to social media.

The operation seemed designed for maximum coverage, despite actual goals achieved. (While Trump officials claim operations round up felons, many of the migrants arrested by ICE so far have no criminal record.) Still, Noem would later tell CBS News that the raid was not about creating a “spectacle.” Instead, she said the government simply sought “transparency.” But was that all? Here was a top-ranking Trump appointee asserting the absence of performance after a theatrical show of force. That Noem tagged along for the predawn crackdown in the full glam of a Real Housewife made the claim even more absurd.

Noem’s anti-immigrant politics might have been familiar to South Dakotans. But did they recognize their former governor? Noem is one of several figures—a few men, but mostly women—in President Donald Trump’s orbit to undergo striking physical transformations as the boundaries that once delineated celebrity and political power fully disintegrate. The resulting look has since sparked satirical backlash online, with critics mocking “conservative girl makeup.”

Clockwise from top left: Kristi Noem, Matt Gaetz, Kimberly Guilfoyle, and Lara TrumpChip Somodevilla/Getty(2); Ivan Apfel/Getty; Dominic Gwinn/Zuma

But the most jarring aesthetic in this burgeoning MAGA stagecraft is the unbridled embrace of face-altering procedures: plastic surgery, veneers, and injectables like Botox and fillers. (As one Daily Mail headline declared, “Plastic surgery was [the] star of [the] show” at the Republican National Convention in 2024.) The overall look has since been disparagingly referred to as “Mar-a-Lago face.”

Although plastic surgery and injectables are enjoyed far beyond conservative circles, what distinguishes Mar-a-Lago face from what you and I might contemplate getting done on an especially self-flagellating day is the aggressive, overt nature with which MAGA-ites seem to pursue it. “Over the top, overdone, ridiculous,” is how one New York plastic surgeon I spoke with described it.

“What we’re seeing with something like Mar-a-Lago face is a swing back toward [an era of plastic surgery when] people can tell that people have had work done,” Alka Menon, a professor of sociology at Yale University, told me.

The lack of discretion within the current GOP might feel strange today when many—even Kim Kardashian—appear to prize confidentiality. But for the MAGA-verse, today’s tweaks seem intended to signal membership with Trump, a man notoriously obsessed with the literal pageantry of beauty, and his broader efforts to force strict gender norms onto the electorate.The aesthetic is, like Trump’s politics, ridiculously blunt.

“Over the top, overdone, ridiculous,” is how one New York plastic surgeon described it.

“I read it as a sign of physical submission to Donald Trump, a statement of fealty to him and the idea that the surface of a policy is the only thing that matters,” says Anne Higonnet, a professor of art history at Barnard College. “In a way, these women are performing a key part of Donald Trump’s whole political persona.”

Take Noem. Soon after Trump said that he was considering her to be his running mate, Noem released an infomercial-style social media video debuting dental work. The new smile, one Republican strategist told the New York Times, was “all about her appeal to an audience of one.” Noem never got the VP role, and she was sued for “deceptive advertising practices.” That lawsuit was dismissed, and she denied being compensated for any advertisements. Still, Trump did appoint her to lead the Department of Homeland Security, despite the fact she had neither worked in the department nor had a background in law enforcement.

What Noem did seem to have was the face for the job. “I want you in the ads, and I want your face in the ads,” Noem recently recalled Trump saying, referring to a set of new taxpayer-funded ads celebrating the immigration crackdown. “I want you to thank me. I want you to thank me for closing the border.”

Is one’s proximity to power in Trump’s administration, then, governed at least partly by a willingness to mold oneself to the MAGA aesthetic, no matter how severe the undertaking? As Menon put it to me: “Plastic surgery that is very visible makes it clear that women have invested in their body, and that’s a signal that they’re sending to everybody that they’re putting in this work.”

Call it girlboss logic with a MAGA facelift.

Strange and self-abasing tactics to signal affinity with the ruling class have always existed. During Queen Elizabeth I’s reign, artificially blackened teeth were considered fashionable among those who wanted to mimic the genuinely decaying teeth of a monarch who consumed too much sugar.

If plastic surgery operates as a kind of professional certification, a move to level you up in this administration, then is it not an act of empowerment? It isn’t far-fetched to imagine these women and men—former Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.), to start—believing that going under the knife could be a form of legitimate labor, getting the literal work done to maximize one’s economic and political standing.

Our capitalist beauty bonanza, of which I am a faithful adherent, insinuates similar ideas: Botox advertises injectables as a path to confidence for women. On TikTok, openness about the procedures you’ve undergone is seen as a critical ingredient for virality.

The right has adopted this laboratory to sell itself to women, too. Trump-era Republicans have long played a similar trick with the pop feminist catchphrase of “empowerment.” In 2016, Lara Trump led a “Women Empowerment Tour” for the man who would later gut Roe v. Wade and destroy initiatives to help women get equal job opportunities. “Blazing a trail to empowerment” is how a lifestyle magazine described Kimberly Guilfoyle, who led fundraising for Trump’s 2020 presidential campaign. In 2019, now-Attorney General Pam Bondi wrote a Sun Sentinel editorial urging voters to reelect Trump headlined: “President Trump empowering women across America.”

Casting Mar-a-Lago face as a path to female freedom isn’t that odd, considering the fun-house mirror feminism of the GOP. As Corey Robin wrote in The Reactionary Mind, one need only turn to Phyllis Schlafly—the godmother of the Republican women’s movement—to see how the right “adopts, often unconsciously, the language of democratic reform to the cause of hierarchy.” Schlafly famously co-opted the language of feminists when she criticized the Equal Rights Amendment as “an attack on the rights of the wife.” (Noem’s office was generally evasive when reached for comment on this piece. But one exchange struck me: “I imagine you are focusing on men, right?”)

The new look among MAGA women is consistent with the conservative movement’s decades-old willingness to embrace women’s rights—up to a point. As Ronnee Schreiber, a politics professor at San Diego State University, notes: “The caveat is, ‘Of course, women should have the ability to make choices, but we don’t want to go as far as the feminists.’”

At a time when the GOP is viciously exploiting transgender Americans as a cultural scapegoat, Schreiber notes, hyper-femininity also helps reinforce the “norms and differences between femininity and masculinity.” In this way, women in Republican politics show their male counterparts that they are committed to the same conservative goals, but are not threatening. “It reaffirms the femininity of women,” she adds, “even if they have power.” Here is the gender-affirming care the right can celebrate.

Cut deeper. What happens to the self when surgery is embraced for the purpose of political conformity, consciously or otherwise? At its most extreme, the result might look something like a steady stream of fembots, indistinguishable and dulled. But the urge to do Mar-a-Lago face also feels familiar to any woman.

“To me, it’s less about the gaze of one man,” Schreiber explains of Mar-a-Lago face, “and more about the broader political meaning of gender.” For women to have power, she notes, they often feel they must appease, with their appearance, a man in power. This plays out in garish ways in Trumpworld. But the pressure on women is not unique to politics.

Trump’s Taj Mahal in Atlantic City, New Jersey, once offered a winner $25,000 worth of plastic surgery.

We already know what happens when digital trends and algorithms dictate real-life beauty standards. Just look at everyone’s cheeks. After years of popular buccal fat removal procedures, Allure reports that in 2025, facial fat grafting, wherein fat from other parts of the body is used to fill in those recently hollowed-out faces, will be the look to chase.

Yet as fast-moving as our digital trends are, so too are the whims of Trump, a man notorious for his chaotic management style. Naturally, the whiplash extends to his views of plastic surgery.

After bringing Laura Loomer to several events to commemorate September 11 last year, prompting alarm that the right-wing, xenophobic internet troll could serve somewhere in his administration, the Atlantic reported that one of the final factors to convince him otherwise was not only her hateful views, but also the extent of her surgery.

The president has also specifically gone after face-altering procedures to humiliate women. “She was bleeding badly from a facelift,” he once said as president in 2017, referring to MSNBC’s Mika Brzezinski. Meanwhile, it’s been alleged that Trump himself has had work done—which is to say nothing of the many women in his orbit who have seemed to enjoy unfettered access to procedures. Heralded as his most ambitious real estate endeavor, Trump’s Taj Mahal in Atlantic City, New Jersey, once offered a winner $25,000 worth of plastic surgery.

But young conservatives seem to be struggling with the aesthetics of their MAGA elders. As MAGA influencer Arynne Wexler told New York’s Brock Colyar in January: “We need to be better. That’s why I put my face in my videos. People need to see that I look like a liberal! I look like a girl that would, ugh, vote for Kamala [Harris].”

The urgency with which Wexler underscores a need to look “normal,” even like a “liberal,” is clarifying: Young conservatives see many things to celebrate about Trump—the end of DEI, the return of the r-word, cruelty—but looking like a fembot is not one of them. It hints at the possibility that MAGA’s aesthetic choices could expire as quickly as all the facial injections.

Or it simply could be the fact that they’re still young. The ambient pressure will eventually come for them; it comes for us all.

When was the last time I caught a stranger looking at me with subtle desire? Working full time from home at the cusp of early middle age, as a relatively new mom with a 3-year-old, I genuinely can’t recall. I look like garbage most days and since giving birth, the internal hormonal shift has left me, at times, smelling like an Italian sub. (Botox could fix that, too, I know.)

So far, I have resisted the siren song of cosmetic enhancements, even as friends, and many with increasing regularity, dabble in procedures. Yet I am just as mesmerized by the standards of our internet-fueled homogeneity as anyone else. It simply feels good to look good. And when the world feels so bad, why not use everything available to feel good? So I spend too much on serums and dodge the mirror in the mornings.

I look like garbage most days and since giving birth, the internal hormonal shift has left me, at times, smelling like an Italian sub.

You could attribute my current resistance to a bunch of factors. But I suspect that one of the strongest is having already experienced what seems like our future every time I visit South Korea, the plastic surgery capital of the world and my parents’ birthplace. The faces of manipulated uniformity—double eyelid surgery, face-whitening injections, breast implants on laser-toned thin bodies—are jolting to witness. And at first, it’s almost funny; the absolute chokehold is weird to behold! But by the third or fourth day, the ambient sense that I am the odd one, even ugly, starts to creep in. Perhaps a quick visit to one of Seoul’s 600 plastic surgery clinics would fix things.

Which is to say that I hesitate to fault anyone in the eyeshot of the most powerful person in the world—against all the signals both in and out of the White House—for aesthetic choices made on their paths to power. Look at Joe Biden, who in his own catastrophic stubbornness to retain the presidency was suspected of heavy Botox.

But any empathy one might have for those who apparently feel a need to conform to Mar-a-Lago face instantly evaporates when power is wielded for the shocking cruelty we now see before us: mass deportations, but make it sexy. Noem in a cowboy hat threatening “economic pain” upon other nations. Inhumanity as ASMR. Each features a callous energy that courses through. In the same way their aesthetics build on conservative notions of gender, ultimately producing such garishness, Trump builds on old American ideals—empire and capitalism—and turbocharges them into the nightmare before us.

This is the real brutality of the Mar-a-Lago aesthetic. It’s not the makeup or potential plastic surgery, but the eagerness with which its adherents capitulate to the whims of their king. American politics, like our faces, may never recover.

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What If Trump Is Serious About Annexing Canada?

President Donald Trump has some strange obsessions: Diet Coke, windmills, water pressure, and more recently, annexing Canada. “The only thing that makes sense is for Canada to become our cherished Fifty-First State,” Trump wrote on social media recently, in one of his many comments suggesting that the US will subsume its northern neighbor.

The Canadians have not been amused by such rhetoric. “What he wants is to see a total collapse of the Canadian economy, because that’ll make it easier to annex us,” former Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau warned earlier this month after talks with Trump. And many Canadians don’t view Trump’s ranting about annexation as simply an extension of his trade war but as a possible prelude to a real war.

“Trump is delusional if he believes that 40 million Canadians will passively accept conquest without resistance,”Aisha Ahmad, an international security scholar and professor at the University of Toronto, wrote last month in The Conversation. “There is no political party, or leader, willing to relinquish Canadian sovereignty over ‘economic coercion,’ and so if the US wanted to annex Canada, it would have to invade.”

Thus far, Trump has not raised the possibility of sending actual troops to Ontario. Instead, he seems to believe he can achieve this Canadian Anschluss by simply crushing Canada’s economy and leaving it no choice but to join the US.

But Canada in 2025 is not Austria in 1938. “Canada will never, ever be part of America,” declared newly elected Canadian Prime Minster Mark Carney last week, making the country’s position crystal clear. And, last month, the Canadian Armed Forces announced that after years of declining enrollment, it had seen a surge in enlistments since Trump took office, with about 1,000 more applicants than last year. (Canadian officials couldn’t attribute the new rash of interest to Trump’s threats, but they didn’t rule it out, either.)

Given that Canada will never voluntarily join the US—which it is adamant about—would Trump try to use force to annex it? And would Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth go along with this crazy plan?

During Trump’s last administration, his own staff obstructed him from following through on some of his more harebrained schemes—military action against Iran, for instance, or Venezuela. Former Defense Secretary Mark Esper has said he had to head off Trump’s calls for law enforcement to shoot protesters in the legs during the George Floyd disturbances outside the White House. Former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley once had to call his counterparts in China to reassure them that, in fact, Trump was not going to order a military strike on the country.

But that was then. Now complete loyalty to Trump seems to be the primary qualification for government service. His new Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth does not seem inclined to serve as a bulwark against his commander-in-chief’s basest instincts. The former Fox News host appears to have been chosen specifically because he seems to lack either the intelligence or sobriety to stop Trump’s crazy schemes.

During Hegseth’s confirmation hearing, Sen. Mazie Hirono (D-HI) pressed him about whether he’d agree to use military force against our allies. He didn’t say no. “Senator, one of the things that President Trump is so good at is never strategically tipping his hand,” he replied. “And so, I would never, in this public forum, give one way or another direct what orders the President would give me in any context.”

While Hegseth may be a well-known Trump sycophant, what about rank-and-file soldiers, who would have to do the dangerous work of attacking some of our closest allies?

Last weekend, I went to a ham radio event in Vienna, Virginia, where a lot of guys who spend their time prepping for various disasters, EMP attacks, or the zombie apocalypse had gathered to trade vintage radio tubes and portable antennae. Many of the amateur radio enthusiasts also were veterans, and I thought they might have some insights into whether ordinary soldiers would agree to attack Canada.

“Why would we do that?” said Frank Haynes, a 94-year-old Korean War veteran, who seemed utterly baffled by my absurd question.

Robert Jeffery, a 20-year Navy veteran and former Virginia militia member who I’ve known since he was active in the tea party movement, said there was no way the military would go along with such a scheme. “Let’s just say that if [Trump’s] going to invade Canada,” he told me, “he’s going to do it solo.”

“Let’s just say that if [Trump’s] going to invade Canada, he’s going to do it solo.”

Later, I put the Canada invasion question to another Trump voter I know, Gary Durand, a retired DC police lieutenant and a former Army paratrooper who served in Panama shortly before the US invaded it the last time. “I think if he did that, Congress would immediately invoke the 25th Amendment,” he told me. “It would most likely be considered an unlawful or immoral order. But I also don’t believe he would ever order that.”

Durand is not alone among Trump supporters who believe the president would never engage in such aggression against an ally. After all, Trump campaigned as the “peace” candidate, with surrogates like MAGA influencer Scott Presler directly appealing to young men with promises that Trump would never send them to war.

Republicans have largely dismissed Trump’s territorial expansion plans as a spitballed idea no more likely to materialize than his military base on the moon. In a January interview about Trump’s threats to also take over Greenland, Sen. James Lankford, R-Okla. downplayed Trump’s language as just another example of how the president “speaks very boldly” as a negotiator. He insisted that Trump “is the president that kept American troops out of war. He is not looking to be able to go start a war, to go expand American troops.”

Lankford’s comments, though, sound a lot like the Wall Street masters of the universe and other Republican Trump supporters who were sure that the erratic reality TV star would never follow through on his campaign pledge to impose high tariffs on US allies. Billionaire hedge fund manager John Paulson, then angling to become Trump’s next Treasury Secretary, assured the Wall Street Journal back in October that any tariffs Trump imposed would be “strategic” bargaining chips, not blanket trade sanctions that would destroy the economy. Brian Riedl, who served as an aide to former senator Rob Portman (R-Ohio), told the Washington Post in September that Republican officials he’d spoken with believed Trump’s tariff threats were just “bluster.” (He also added that he thought theywere “in denial.”)

But here we are, six months later, with Trump intentionally crashing the stock market with massive tariffs on allies as he follows through on some of his campaign promises.

At least one important MAGA luminary thinks Trump is deadly serious about annexing Canada. In early February, former Trump White House adviser and convicted felon Steve Bannon told Global News, a Canadian news outlet, that he believes that Trump’s rhetoric about Canada is evidence that he’s seeking “hemispheric control.”

Trump has “really thought this through,” Bannon said, explaining the sophisticated geopolitical strategy he believes informs the president’s plans. Trump’s fight with Canada, Bannon argued, stems from his focus on the Arctic, parts of which are becoming more accessible to China and Russia because of climate change. The region, he said, is going to be the “great game of the 21st century,” and Trump knows that Canada’s northern border is poorly defended. If Canada doesn’t agree to become the 51st state, Bannon suggested, Trump will force it to.

A few Democrats in Congress have also seen the danger of Trump’s annexation threats. “As with everything with Trump, it’s hard to know whether he’s serious, whether he’s lying, whether he’ll back off,” Rep. Seth Magaziner (D-R.I.) told me in an interview. “But I think we have to take him at his word when he says he wants to expand the territory of the United States.”

Magaziner says that for him, “the alarm bells started ringing” during Trump’s inauguration. “In his speech, he said one of his goals was to expand our territory, which to me was jarring,” Magaziner told me. “That has not been the goal of the US president in well over a century.”

In contrast to some of the people with whom I spoke, Magaziner thinks the military definitely would follow Trump’s orders if he wanted to attack Canada. “That’s their job and their role,” he said. “But Congress doesn’t have to go along with this.” That’s why, earlier this month, he introduced the “No Invading Allies Act,” which would ban military funding for any operations to invade or seize territory in Panama, Greenland, or Canada without Congressional authorization.

So far, the bill has only a few co-sponsors, all Democrats, and it will require Republicans to move it forward in the House. But despite the unlikelihood of garnering GOP support, Magaziner thought it was important to put the issue on the table given Trump’s continued sparring with Canada.

“It’s insane that we’re having to have this conversation,” Magaziner said. “But the Republicans do not have the courage to stand up to Trump. I think they are in a state of denial, just as they were in denial about tariffs and his plans to cut Medicaid. Trump’s not letting it go. And we can’t ignore the possibility that he’ll do something reckless.”

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Democrats Are Furious With Chuck Schumer

In the wake of votes by a handful of key Democrats, led by Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, to pass a GOP-led continuing resolution funding federal operations through the end of September, fissures have expanded within the Democratic Party on how best to counter Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s ongoing assault on government agencies.

The resolution, which cuts non-defense spending by $13 billion and increases defense spending by approximately $6 billion, includes—among other steep cuts—a 57 percent slashing of the Department of Defense’s medical research programs; a 44 percent cut to Army Corps of Engineers projects, which build and maintain essential infrastructure; and more than $3 billion in cuts to the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s community development, rental assistance, and homelessness services programs.

Congressional Republicans near-unanimously backed the resolution, though some lamented losses to programs in their communities. Most Democrats, meanwhile, voted against it—except for a contingent led by Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.). This marked a “clear division in strategy” between Schumer and House Minority Leader Rep. Hakeem Jeffries, also of New York, Delaware Democratic Sen. Chris Coons told the press.

Jeffries said that he and other Democratic opponents of the resolution “do not support a bill that is designed to hurt the American people,” arguing that the GOP presented a “false choice” between a “reckless” bill and a government shutdown.

Schumer’s case that a shutdown would only put more power in the hands of the executive branch has drawn the ire of many of his colleagues. “As bad as passing the [resolution] is,” Schumer said on the Senate floor Thursday, “allowing Donald Trump to take even more power via a government shutdown is a far worse option.”

But the bill itself gives Trump and Musk more power over government spending, since it doesn’t specify how signficant parts of the funding are to be allocated. Through the bill, for example, the White House—rather than Congress—will now be able to determine which Army Corps of Engineers construction projects are funded.

“It is a huge move to give the White House and DOGE more power of the purse—they will have much more discretion over how to spend money,” Charles Kieffer, who served in senior positions in the White House budget office under the Reagan, George H.W. Bush, and Clinton administrations, told the Washington Post. Jessica Riedl, a senior fellow at the conservative Manhattan Institute, agreed: “It absolutely opens up more flexibility for Trump.”

Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.), the top Democratic member of the Senate Appropriations Committee, called the bill a “slush fund continuing resolution that would give Donald Trump and Elon Musk more power over federal spending”—and provided [receipts][7].

New York DemocraticRep. Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez was one of the loudest voices against the bill—and one of the most notable against Schumer. “I think there is a deep sense of outrage and betrayal,” she [told reporters][8] in Washington. Schumer and his allies, she [said][9], might as well “completely roll over and give up on protecting the Constitution.”

While the impending government shutdown may have been halted, something new is brewing: a change in winds around Democratic leadership.

In a shift from Ocasio-Cortez’s long stretch as a relative outsider on the party’s left, many in the Democratic Party seem to share her sentiments of betrayal toward the Senate minority leader and longtime top Democrat. [Indivisible][10], a progressive group, put out a press release calling on Schumer to step down; privately, some House Democrats are pressuring Ocasio-Cortez to primary Schumer in 2028, [CNN reports][11].

Schumer addressed the backlash in an [interview][12] published today in the New York Times, defending his vote and leadership—”I had to do what I had to do,” Schumer told the Times—while also declining to take a position on whether Trump-aligned New York City Mayor Eric Adams should resign, and rejecting allegations that Israel is perpetuating genocide in the Gaza Strip.

[7]: http://list of dozens of examples of programs that the measure could allow Trump to change. [8]: https://www.instagram.com/msnbc/reel/DHKWF2bxe02/ [9]: https://abc7ny.com/post/aoc-house-democrats-express-fury-ny-sen-charles-schumer-senate-counterparts-gop-spending-bill/16022086/ [10]: https://indivisible.org/statements/indivisible-calls-schumer-step-aside [11]: https://www.cnn.com/2025/03/13/politics/ocasio-cortez-schumer-democratic-shutdown-plan/index.html [12]: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/16/magazine/chuck-schumer-interview.html

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Tesla’s Hometown Has a Message for Elon Musk

Across the nation, citizens have been protesting unelected budget-cut overlord Elon Musk and his “Department of Government Efficiency”—in part at Tesla auto dealerships, where, this weekend, Musk’s former neighbors in Palo Alto took a stand.

The Bay Area city was home to Musk and his electric vehicle empire for more than a decade. Both have since relocated to Texas, where Musk can draw even bigger paychecks, create his own SpaceX company town, and launch rockets over the Gulf-that-shall-not-be-named.

MoJo‘s Sam Van Pykeren stopped by the Palo Alto protest, organized in part by Raging Grannies, a group known for their song and humor-filled protests. While peaceful, protesters were upset, calling Musk a “fraud” and “felon.”

The ire is notable, since Palo Alto residents originally rallied behind Tesla as early buyers. In 2018, close to two-thirds of the electric vehicles sold in Palo Alto were Teslas, compared to about half nationwide.

But the residents of his former town now have some choice words for him.

“It’s important that we’re in the middle of Silicon Valley,” says Lori Poultney, 56, “There are people that have bought Teslas that are getting rid of them. And I think our voice lies with our protests and with our money.”

“The community that they got rich off of is not going to put up with their BS,” said Bryce, 25, who asked that his last name be omitted.

Whether due to the protests, Musk’s behavior, or the fact that his Cybertrucks are literally falling apart, there has been a significant dip in Tesla’s market cap since its post-election high.

The White House has stepped in to protect the “first buddy.” During a White House Tesla showcase that looked and sounded like a sales pitch, Trump said that any violence against Tesla would be considered “domestic terrorism,” and has, ludicrously, called the prospect of a Tesla boycott “illegal.”

Meanwhile, the Department of Justice is launching investigations into the Tesla protest movement. “If you’re going to touch a Tesla, go to a dealership, do anything, you better watch out, because we’re coming after you,” Attorney General Pam Bondi said in a Fox News interview Friday.

The Palo Alto protesters were careful. “We’re not actually preventing anybody from entering the storefront,” said protester Dylan Jow, 28, “but somebody driving by might think twice.”

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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.”

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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.

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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!”

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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.

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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.

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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.”

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.”

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