Can Bacteria Serve as ‘Microscopic Miners’ of the Metals We Need?

“This story was originally published on the author’s substack, Field Notes with Alexander C Kaufman, to which you can subscribe here.”

Five years after President Donald Trump signaled his support for extracting metals from the moon, his new administration is seeking to satisfy the United States’ hunger for critical minerals by encouraging mining under the polar ice caps, amid warzones, and at the bottom of the ocean.

A breakthrough by a startup backed by two of the world’s biggest mining companies points to a different path to obtaining the metals needed for manufacturing next-generation energy and defense technologies: Microbes.

Last week, the Denver-based company Endolith announced the completion of tests on whether its mix of genetically modified microbes could extract significant amounts of copper from the type of low-grade, hard-to-process ores left over in mining waste that make up 70 percent of the world’s known reserves of the metal.

The results “outperformed conventional approaches to low-grade heap leaching and revealed new value in mineralized waste previously considered uneconomic to process.”

In other words, the company said it proved its “microscopic miners” are “remarkably good at extracting metals that conventional chemistry leaves behind,” Endolith CEO Liz Dennett told me, noting that her company was prepared to deploy its microbes at scale.

“We don’t need to mine the moon or venture 20,000 leagues under the sea to solve our copper shortage,” she told me over email. “The microbes have been doing this work for billions of years, we’re just finally paying attention.”

The US federal government is just starting to pump money into researching the use of microbes for mining. The Australian mining behemoth BHP provided Endolith with funding for testing and site-matched ore samples through its in-house innovation program. The London-based metals giant Rio Tinto, meanwhile, backed the Founders Factory startup accelerator that helped Endolith get started. Still, neither company has made a formal investment in Endolith.

Here’s how Endolith’s process works: First, the company analyzes the ore and the native microbes—which include both bacteria and archaea, the tinier single-celled organisms—at each site to understand the baseline conditions. Then, using a microbial library and genomic techniques, its researchers select and adapt strains that are best suited to the specific mineralogy and conditions of the site.

Once that’s established, Endolith grows the optimized microbes in portable bioreactors, ensuring that the microbes are fresh and consistent with the location. Finally, the company adds the microbes via liquid sprinkled or dripped onto heaps of wasted dirt at the mine and continuously monitors the activity to make real-time adjustments to maximize how much copper the microbes are recovering.

“We’re creating a new industrial paradigm at the intersection of biology and mining.”

“We’re creating a new industrial paradigm at the intersection of biology and mining,” said Dennett, who earned a Ph.D in geosciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and went on to work at NASA’s astrobiology program and run data architecture for Amazon Web Services before founding Endolith. “Our goal is simple: reshape supply chains for the most important technology transitions of our lifetime.”

Extracting metals with microbes is nothing new. The process of using microbes to convert copper ions in liquid into metal through calcification dates back more than 2,000 years. While the actual biological function wasn’t yet understood, Han dynasty prince Liu An described using water to concentrate copper as far back as 120 BCE, a method Chinese scientists later put into practice in 1086 under the Northern Song dynasty.

It wasn’t until the mid-20th century that miners found convincing evidence showing “that microbes were active participants in leaching copper and some other metals from ores,” according to a 2003 paper from the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

In recent years, scientists have ratcheted up research into different kinds of bacteria that could be used to produce rare earth metals. But there’s been little commercial activity outside laboratories.

Endolith’s test results are a “significant and potentially meaningful step forward in the field,” said Patricio Martínez Bellange, the director of biomining at Universidad Andrés Bello’s Center for Sustainable Biotechnology in Chile.

“While further validation is necessary, Endolith’s reported results represent a promising advancement in unlocking significant copper resources from low-grade ores in a potentially more sustainable manner,” he told me in a LinkedIn message after reviewing the company’s announcement. “This could indeed be a meaningful milestone in the quest for a more secure and environmentally responsible supply of critical minerals.”

Still, he cautioned that different ore types, “the long-term stability of the microbial cultures under industrial conditions, and the overall economics at scale will need to be thoroughly evaluated.”

Competition with the naturally-occurring microbes at mines represents “the next challenge” to “fully scaling up this process in the field,” said Buz Barstow, an associate professor of biological engineering at Cornell University.

If Endolith’s real-time monitoring “can solve this problem,” then they will truly be onto something,” said Barstow, who reviewed the company’s announcement for this newsletter.

But one solution can beget another problem. “If they do solve this problem,” he said, “then it creates the new problem of containment of these genetically engineered microbes.”

These are still the early days of researching biomining, Barstow said. National funding for researching metal-mining microbes has been scarce.

That was starting to turn around. In 2023, the National Science Foundation opened the door to financing research into the nascent field. Barstow said he and colleagues proposed a project called the Microbe-Mineral Atlas, consisting of 22 principal investigators at 11 universities in four countries—the US, Britain, Japan, and Canada—that would discover new knowledge about how microbes interact with minerals and metals and how they could be engineered for biomining.

The British, Japanese, and Canadian funders rejected the project as “too ambitious,” he said. But the Biden administration’s National Science Foundation “took a risk on the US part of the team, and gave us a small down payment on the funding we asked for.”

Since January, Barstow said, his team has been working on sampling microbes from “geologically unusual environments, trying to figure out new genes that control mineral and metal interactions.”

But his hopes are dimming now with the Trump administration slashing all kinds of federal grants.

“With funding cuts from the government,” Barstow said, “this type of work is in danger of never getting off the ground.”

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Rage and Resentment Are Killing the Great American Road Trip

A record 45 million Americans were expected to travel this Memorial Day weekend, long considered the unofficial kickoff to summer. And most of them were hitting the road. Sarah Kendzior is no stranger to the family road trip. Her family, in fact, has visited 38 states—and counting. These trips were born out of a love and curiosity for America and a desire to explore small towns, vast National Parks, and the unexpected oddities along the way. And when money was tight, the best way for her family to see the country was simply to jump in the car and go.

In her new book, The Last American Road Trip: A Memoir, Sarah chronicles those family trips while grappling with a country she believes is failing to uphold its own ideals. Sarah says she feels an urgency to share the country she loves with her children but often wonders if these travels—and the version of America she knows—might be coming to an end. “Every trip I describe in that book,” Sarah says, “I set off wondering: Is this the last time the four of us will get to be together exploring America with the freedom that we have now?”

On this week’s More To The Story, Sarah chats with host Al Letson about trying to show her children the America she adores while holding a light to its flaws, her concerns for the nation’s future, and why hitting the road is often the best way to understand yourself—and your country.

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

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Trump Has Nothing to Do Today. So, of Course, He Posted.

Nothing is listed on President Donald Trump’s public schedule today. In theory, that could mean it will be a relatively calm day from our commander-in-chief.

But, no. On Tuesday, Trump awoke and grabbed hold of his Truth Social account for a special string of posts. First, he went after a “transitioned Male athlete” in California, threatening to pull federal funding “maybe permanently” if the state did not adhere to his executive order banning trans women from women’s sports. Then, perhaps most alarmingly, Trump continued by ordering local law enforcement officials to block the trans athlete, whom he did not identify, from participating in the state finals. (As CNBC reports, a trans high school student has been the source of media attention in recent weeks; state finals for track and field are slated for next weekend.)

As with most things related to instructions abruptly cast from the Oval Office, it wasn’t immediately clear how the president wanted law enforcement officials to intervene. The post marked a dramatic escalation of the administration’s anti-trans policies, as well as Trump’s willingness to single out vulnerable individuals in his attacks.

But just before noon, the president appeared to move onto a different issue: Russia’s intensified military operations in Ukraine. “What Vladimir Putin doesn’t realize is that if it weren’t for me, lots of really bad things would have already happened to Russia, and I mean REALLY BAD. He’s playing with fire!”

The post, which appeared to show Trump openly admitting that he has protected Putin from serious repercussions over Russia’s war in Ukraine, could stand alone in the power of its unmatched absurdity. It also hinted that Trump, who has yet to impose any punishments against Russia after its recent assaults in Ukraine, is unlikely to go beyond Truth Social to call out Putin after the two engaged in strange name-calling over the weekend.

So there you have it: the president appears to be reading the news and then wildly posting new, radical positions our government will take, with little thought. Fun!

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Trump’s Big Fail: Making America the 1980s Again

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

Gargantuan tax cuts for the well-heeled, draconian cuts in programs for low-income Americans, boondoggle spending for iffy missile defense, and siding with the whites of South Africa: Donald Trump is making America the 1980s again. Last week, he shoved the nation into a time machine and transported it to the Age of Reagan, embracing the worst excesses of the era. In several instances, he has surpassed the outrages and extreme measures of our first made-on-TV president. Trump is putting the failed policies of the past on steroids in his relentless crusade to derail and damage the nation.

On Thursday, House Republicans passed a megabill covering taxes, government spending, and much else that Trump has called for. The tax cuts are obscene—the typical Republican fare, throwing piles of money at the upper crust and crumbs (at best) to the rest. According to the nonpartisan Penn Wharton Budget Model, the top one-tenth of a percent—people with incomes greater than $4.3 million—will receive on average a $389,000 annual boost from the tax provisions, if the GOP-controlled Senate accepts this plan. Many Americans who make less than $51,000 could lose about $700 a year in after-tax income. It’s truly a rob-the-poor-to-pay-the-rich scheme.

The true beneficiaries of the Trump-GOP measure ain’t a secret. Look at this chart from the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy:

One quarter of the entire tax cut ends up in the pockets of the 1 percent. It’s a good time to be an oligarch. The bill proves that the purported populism of Trump and MAGA is a big con.

And why only screw hard-pressed Americans on taxes, when you can screw them by ripping apart social programs they rely upon?

It also illustrates that Republicans—surprise, surprise—are huge hypocrites when it comes to the deficit. They don’t give a damn about red ink, if the green flows to the wealthy. The conservative Manhattan Institute estimates this tax bill will cost more than Trump’s 2017 tax cuts, the Covid stimulus act, Joe Biden’s infrastructure bill plan, and his Inflation Reduction Act combined, adding $6 trillion to the deficit over 10 years. (One GOP House member claimed it would add $20 trillion!) Still, party on, dude. (Okay, Wayne’s World was a 1990s film.)

And why only screw hard-pressed Americans on taxes, when you can screw them by ripping apart social programs they rely upon? To cover a slice of the costs of this tax-cut orgy for oligarchs, the House Republicans included historic slashes of the safety net. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that the measure’s assorted reductions and changes in Medicaid and other programs would decrease federal spending on health care by more than $700 billion and leave 8.6 million Americans uninsured by 2030.

It would also shrink the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program—a.k.a. food stamps. Ty Jones Cox, vice president for food assistance policy at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, told CNBC this is the “biggest cut in the program’s history.” It would be the first time since SNAP began that the federal government would not ensure children in every state have access to food benefits.

This is so Reaganesque. Remember ketchup as a vegetable?

Trump and his minions on Capitol Hill are trying to revive trickle-down Reaganomics, claiming these tax cuts for plutocrats will juice the economy for all. But supply-side economics has long been discredited. Reagan’s embrace of it led to a recession and such large deficits in the early 1980s that even Republicans voted to raise taxes, and President George H.W. Bush, his successor, accepted the reality that taxes had to be hiked up for fiscal sanity, despite his “read my lips” campaign vow not to increase them.

Trump and his minions on Capitol Hill are trying to revive trickle-down Reaganomics, claiming these tax cuts for plutocrats will juice the economy for all.

In addition to bringing back the trickle-down catastrophe, Trump rebooted another old show: Star Wars. Reagan, enamored with the idea of preventing nuclear war, launched the Strategic Defense Initiative that was supposed to deliver a system for shooting down nuclear missiles lobbed at the United States. The military spent up to $100 billion and perhaps as much as $400 billion—no one seems to know for sure how much was wasted—and no such system was ever built. Top scientists at the time said the whole thing was not technically feasible, and many nuclear strategists feared it would destabilize the nuclear balance and incentivize a Russian first strike on the United States. Eventually—after much money went down the drain—SDI withered.

But it’s back. Last week, Trump announced Golden Dome, a supposedly “next generation” missile defense shield that would go beyond the aspirations of SDI and protect the nation from not only ballistic missiles but cruise missiles, hypersonic missiles, and drones. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said the initial down payment would be $25 billion. Once again, scientific experts are calling this a pipe dream. In March, the American Physical Society released a report that concluded:

Creating a reliable and effective defense against the threat posed by even the small number of relatively unsophisticated nuclear-armed ICBMs…remains a daunting challenge. The difficulties are numerous, ranging from the unresolved countermeasures problem for midcourse-intercept to the severe reach-versus-time challenge of boost-phase intercept. Few of the main challenges have been solved, and many of the hard problems are likely to remain formidable over the 15-year time horizon the study considered.

Sound familiar? The report added, “The costs and benefits of such an effort therefore need to be weighed carefully.” It doesn’t seem like such a weighing is underway.

A Carnegie Endowment paper reached a similar conclusion, noting “the challenge of developing a space-based missile defense shield remains formidable.” It cited a National Research Council study from 2012 that estimated the total cost of a space-based missile defense system could be as much as $831 billion (in 2025 dollars).

Hundreds of billions of dollars, a system that might not work, more weapons, more global instability—what a deal.

It added that this program will likely prompt Russia to build more and better nukes: “Russia will…need to respond. That will entail accelerating existing efforts to modernize each leg of the nuclear triad by replacing Soviet-era delivery systems with newer Russian designs. We can also expect renewed emphasis on exotic weapons that promise to evade all conceivable missile defense systems.” The latter includes the Poseidon, a nuclear-powered torpedo that can hit coastal targets in the United States. Say, New York City. “Golden Dome,” this paper noted, “will therefore press Russia into a new arms race.”

Hundreds of billions of dollars, a system that might not work, more weapons, more global instability—what a deal.

As for South Africa, Trump hosted a visit from that nation’s president, Cyril Ramaphosa, on May 21. In front of his guest in the Oval Office, Trump pushed the fraudulent notion that Afrikaner farmers have been the victims of a white genocide. That’s why he said he had to take in 59 of them recently as refugees—because they are victims of persecution. (Trump’s administration is not accepting persecuted refugees from other African nations for some reason.) With all this, Trump was promoting a phony narrative that has also been championed by Elon Musk, who was born in South Africa, as well as by white nationalists.

A recent analysis by PolitiFact cast this story of white genocide as rubbish: “White farmers have been murdered in South Africa. But those murders account for less than 1% of more than 27,000 annual murders nationwide. Experts said the deaths do not amount to genocide, and Trump misleads about land confiscation.” It quotes Gareth Newham, who heads a justice and violence prevention program at the Institute for Security Studies in South Africa, who said, “The idea of a ‘white genocide’ taking place in South Africa is completely false. As an independent institute tracking violence and violent crime in South Africa, if there was any evidence of either a genocide or targeted violence taking place against any group based on their ethnicity this, we would be amongst the first to raise (the) alarm and provide the evidence to the world.”

In the White House, Trump was peddling a racist fairy tale promulgated by bigots—in what was yet another throwback to the decade of Reagan. Throughout his presidency, Reagan and the right fought the anti-apartheid movement, voicing support and sympathy for the racist regime of Pretoria. They opposed calls for divesting from South Africa. They denigrated Nelson Mandela and his freedom movement as commies. Some right-wingers went so far as to buy Krugerrands, gold coins minted in South Africa that were boycotted around the world, to express solidarity with the repressive white ruling class.

Decades later—after the liberation of South Africa—it might be tough for Trump to call for reinstating apartheid. (Make Apartheid Great Again?) But he has found another way to exploit that country for his racism-fueled politics. With this unfounded conspiracy theory, he depicts a Black-ruled nation as a place of savagery. Thus, he signals to white nationalists he’s on their side and characterizes Blacks as a threat to white people.

It’s back to the future. (That movie came out in 1985!) We’ve dumped big hair and tacky leg warmers, but Trump is emulating policy disasters of the past, and he’s poised to do far more damage than Reagan. The nation has not learned from the past. We are reliving it with another show-biz president—as both farce and tragedy.

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What’s One Way to Help Preserve the Antarctic Climate? Penguin Poop.

New research shows that penguin guano in Antarctica is an important source of ammonia aerosol particles that help drive the formation and persistence of low clouds, which cool the climate by reflecting some incoming sunlight back to space.

The findings reinforce the growing awareness that Earth’s intricate web of life plays a significant role in shaping the planetary climate. Even at the small levels measured, the ammonia particles from the guano interact with sulfur-based aerosols from ocean algae to start a chemical chain reaction that forms billions of tiny particles that serve as nuclei for water vapor droplets.

The low marine clouds that often cover big tracts of the Southern Ocean around Antarctica are a wild card in the climate system because scientists don’t fully understand how they will react to human-caused heating of the atmosphere and oceans. One recent study suggested that the big increase in the annual global temperature during 2023 and 2024 that has continued into this year was caused in part by a reduction of that cloud cover.

“I’m constantly surprised at the depth of how one small change affects everything else. This really does show that there is a deep connection between ecosystem processes and the climate.”

“I’m constantly surprised at the depth of how one small change affects everything else,” said Matthew Boyer, a coauthor of the new study and an atmospheric scientist at the University of Helsinki’s Institute for Atmospheric and Earth System Research. “This really does show that there is a deep connection between ecosystem processes and the climate. And really, it’s the synergy between what’s coming from the oceans, from the sulfur-producing species, and then the ammonia coming from the penguins.”

Aquatic penguins evolved from flying birds about 60 million years ago, shortly after the age of dinosaurs, and have persisted through multiple, slow, natural cycles of ice ages and warmer interglacial eras, surviving climate extremes by migrating to and from pockets of suitable habitat, called climate refugia, said Rose Foster-Dyer, a marine and polar ecologist with the University of Canterbury in New Zealand.

A 2018 study that analyzed the remains of an ancient “super colony” of the birds suggests there may have been a “penguin optimum” climate window between about 4,000 and 2,000 years ago, at least for some species in some parts of Antarctica, she said. Various penguin species have adapted to different habitat niches and this will face different impacts caused by human-caused warming, she said.

Foster-Dyer has recently done penguin research around the Ross Sea and said that climate change could open more areas for land-breeding Adélie penguins, which don’t breed on ice like some other species.

“There’s evidence that this whole area used to have many more colonies…which could possibly be repopulated in the future,” she said. She is also more optimistic than some scientists about the future for emperor penguins, the largest species of the group, she added.

“They breed on fast ice, and there’s a lot of publications coming out about how the populations might be declining and their habitat is hugely threatened,” she said. “But they’ve lived through so many different cycles of the climate, so I think they’re more adaptable than people currently give them credit for.”

In total, about 20 million breeding pairs of penguins nest in vast colonies all around the frozen continent. Some of the largest colonies, with up to 1 million breeding pairs, can cover several square miles. There aren’t any solid estimates for the total amount of guano produced by the flightless birds annually, but some studies have found that individual colonies can produce several hundred tons. Several new penguin colonies were discovered recently when their droppings were spotted in detailed satellite images.

A few penguin colonies have grown recently while others appear to be shrinking, but in general, their habitat is considered threatened by warming and changing ice conditions, which affects their food supplies. The speed of human-caused warming, for which there is no precedent in paleoclimate records, may exacerbate the threat to penguins, which evolve slowly compared to many other species, Foster-Dyer said.

“Everything’s changing at such a fast rate, it’s really hard to say much about anything,” she said.

Recent research has shown how other types of marine life are also important to the global climate system. Nutrients from bird droppings help fertilize blooms of oxygen-producing plankton, and huge swarms of fish that live in the middle layers of the ocean cycle carbon vertically through the water, ultimately depositing it in a generally stable sediment layer on the seafloor.

Boyer said the new research started as a follow-up project to other studies of atmospheric chemistry in the same area, near the Argentine Marambio Base on an island along the Antarctic Peninsula. Observations by other teams suggested it could be worth specifically trying to look at ammonia, he said.

Boyer and the other scientists set up specialized equipment to measure the concentration of ammonia in the air from January to March 2023. They found that, when the wind blew from the direction of a colony of about 60,000 Adélie penguins about 5 miles away, the ammonia concentration increased to as high as 13.5 parts per billion—more than 1,000 times higher than the background reading. Even after the penguins migrated from the area toward the end of February, the ammonia concentration was still more than 100 times as high as the background level.

“We have one instrument that we use in the study to give us the chemistry of gases as they’re actually clustering together,” he said.

“In general, ammonia in the atmosphere is not well-measured because it’s really difficult to measure, especially if you want to measure at a very high sensitivity, if you have low concentrations like in Antarctica,” he said.

The goal was to determine where the ammonia is coming from, including testing a previous hypothesis that the ocean surface could be the source, he said.

But the size of the penguin colonies made them the most likely source.

“It’s well known that sea birds give off ammonia. You can smell them. The birds stink,” he said. “But we didn’t know how much there was. So what we did with this study was to quantify ammonia and to quantify its impact on the cloud formation process.”

The scientists had to wait until the wind blew from the penguin colony toward the research station.

“If we’re lucky, the wind blows from that direction and not from the direction of the power generator,” he said. “And we were lucky enough that we had one specific event where the winds from the penguin colony persisted long enough that we were actually able to track the growth of the particles. You could be there for a year, and it might not happen.”

The ammonia from the guano does not form the particles but supercharges the process that does, Boyer said.

“It’s really the dimethyl sulfide from phytoplankton that gives off the sulfur,” he said. “The ammonia enhances the formation rate of particles. Without ammonia, sulfuric acid can form new particles, but with ammonia, it’s 1,000 times faster, and sometimes even more, so we’re talking up to four orders of magnitude faster because of the guano.”

This is important in Antarctica specifically because there are not many other sources of particles, such as pollution or emissions from trees, he added.

“So the strength of the source matters in terms of its climate effect over time,” he said. “And if the source changes, it’s going to change the climate effect.”

It will take more research to determine if penguin guano has a net cooling effect on the climate. But in general, he said, if the particles transport out to sea and contribute to cloud formation, they will have a cooling effect.

“What’s also interesting,” he said, “is if the clouds are over ice surfaces, it could actually lead to warming because the clouds are less reflective than the ice beneath.” In that case, the clouds could actually reduce the amount of heat that brighter ice would otherwise reflect away from the planet. The study did not try to measure that effect, but it could be an important subject for future research, he added.

The guano effect lingers even after the birds leave the breeding areas. A month after they were gone, Boyer said ammonia levels in the air were still 1,000 times higher than the baseline.

“The emission of ammonia is a temperature-dependent process, so it’s likely that once wintertime comes, the ammonia gets frozen in,” he said. “But even before the penguins come back, I would hypothesize that as the temperature warms, the guano starts to emit ammonia again. And the penguins move all around the coast, so it’s possible they’re just fertilizing an entire coast with ammonia.”

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Inside Palm Springs’ Queer Rodeo

In early May, the small city of Banning, California, hosted the Palm Springs Hot Rodeo. The competition, which has occurred most years for the past 50, salutes the homoeroticism of rodeo culture. The four-day event—an official stop on the International Gay Rodeo Association circuit—features traditional rodeo events like steer wrestling and calf roping, along with more whimsical activities like a wild drag race, in which a person in drag rides a steer while their teammates guide it, and goat dressing, in which a pair attempts to put tighty-whities on a goat as quickly as possible.

All events are open to any gender—men can barrel race and women can bull ride. “A lot of gay people can’t be incorporated into the other rodeo world,” contestant Savannah Smith told me. “You can do whatever you want here,” she added, “and everyone here is supportive.”

This year, the festive event took place against increasing attacks on queer rights. Two days after the rodeo ended, the Supreme Court allowed the Trump administration’s ban on transgender soldiers in the US military. It is unclear what will be targeted next; some fear the overturning of Obergefell v. Hodges, the landmark 2015 decision legalizing gay marriage. Against this backdrop, the Hot Rodeo serves as an important reminder of the resilience of queer culture in America, with its inclusive celebration of LGBTQ athleticism and joy.

Curt Black and Bob Bayne set up contestant registration at the Tool Shed, a gay bar in Palm Springs, 30 minutes away from Banning, where the Hot Rodeo takes place.

Alexander Saites partners with Matthew Garcia during the rodeo’s dance contest.

Curt Black shows off his Palm Springs Hot Rodeo Outstanding Volunteer buckle.

Zac Rogen, a Hot Rodeo participant, says gay rodeos help keep queer representation in Western culture.

Brian Helander warms up his horse before competing in the Hot Rodeo.

Bob Bayne and Daniel Guevara participate in the rodeo’s “riderless horse” tradition. The riderless horse symbolizes those involved with the International Gay Rodeo Association who have since died, particularly those who died from complications with AIDS.

Rodeo director Sylvia Mower takes off her hat during the riderless horse procession.

David Lawson and Greg Begay compete in the steer decorating event. The goal is for a team of two to tie a ribbon on a steer’s tail as quickly as possible. Begay, who has been involved with gay rodeos for years, says, “It’s always been my goal in life to rodeo, and it just so happens that I’m gay.”

Brian Contratto and Gunner Sizemore compete in the goat dressing event. The goal is to catch a goat and place a pair of underwear on it as quickly as possible.

Brian Contratto shows off a tooth that broke in half during his steer riding event.

Katie Shaw and Pepe Lozada compete in the team roping event.

Love Bailey, the rodeo’s community grand marshal, performs during the grand entry.

Chris Otten holds his cowbell, painted with a pride flag, after competing in the bull riding event.

Rodeo contestants Steven Housley and Scott Reed pose for a portrait. The Palm Springs Hot Rodeo is the first gay rodeo Reed has participated in. “It’s the most welcoming group I’ve ever been around,” he says, adding, “Everyone here is equal.”

Two men dance together at the Dancing Under the Stars party hosted by the Palm Springs Hot Rodeo at Oscar’s, a bar in downtown Palm Springs.

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Trump Unleashes Bizarre Commencement Speech at West Point

You may assume that derision of drag shows would not come up in a commencement address at the prestigious US Military Academy known as West Point—but you would be wrong.

In a nearly hour-long speech by President Donald Trump on Saturday at the academy in New York—his second time speaking there—Trump also trashed diversity, equity, and inclusion policies; took credit for rebuilding the military; and cast himself as an unfairly persecuted victim who beat the odds by becoming president for a second time. Curiously, he madeno mention of his Defense Secretary, Pete Hegseth (a former Fox News host accused of alcoholism, mismanagement, and sexually inappropriate behavior and rape, which Hegseth’s lawyer has denied) or the recent classified war plans that Hegseth infamously shared in a Signal chat.

There were a few moments of normalcy in the commencement speech: Trump praised the students’ accomplishments, congratulated a few standout students in particular, told them to thank their parents; and urged them to “never give up.” But they were sandwiched in between multiple bizarre comments from Trump, some of which are excerpted below, alongside fact checks:

• “The job of the US Armed Forces is not to host drag shows, to transform foreign cultures, but to spread democracy to everybody around the world at the point of a gun.” (Under the Biden administration, Department of Defense officials said military bases could not host drag shows, though reportedly there is no evidence federal funds were ever used for such events—so it’s unclear what Trump was referring to.)

"The job of the US Armed Forces is not to host drag shows, to transform foreign cultures, or to spread democracy … at the point of a gun," says @POTUS.

"The military’s job is to dominate any foe and annihilate any threat to America — ANYWHERE, ANY TIME, and ANY PLACE." pic.twitter.com/u1dv6mCAzQ

— Rapid Response 47 (@RapidResponse47) May 24, 2025

• “Peace through strength. You know the term, I’ve used it a lot. Because as much as you wanna fight, I’d rather do it without having to fight. I just wanna look at them and have them fold. And that’s happening.” (Russia’s war in Ukraine is still raging more than four months since Trump re-assumed office—its military just killed at least a dozen people in a drone and missile strike in Ukraine on Sunday—despite Trump’s campaign trail claim that he would end the war within 24 hours if reelected.)
• “And we are buying you new airplanes, brand-new, beautiful planes, redesigned planes, brand-new planes, totally stealth planes. I hope they’re stealth. I don’t know, that whole stealth thing, I’m sorta wondering. You mean if we shape a wing this way, they don’t see it, but the other way they see it? I’m not so sure.” (Trump conspicuously did not mention the $400 million luxury jet his administration formally accepted from Qatar this week, despite the objections of Republicans and Democrats who worry that doing so violates the Emoluments Clause of the Constitution and that the plane will lack proper security measures to prevent surveillance.)
• “We couldn’t get anybody to join our military. We couldn’t get anybody to join our police or firefighters. We couldn’t get anybody to join anything. And right now, just less than a year later, we just set a brand new peacetime recruiting record.” (As CBS News reports, Trump’s attempt to take credit for boosting military recruitment is misleading: Data show the military is still struggling to recruit compared to earlier this decade, and experts say recent progress is likely due to reforms introduced under former President Joe Biden.)
• “There will be no more critical race theory or transgender for everybody forced onto our brave men and women in uniform or on anybody else for that matter in this country. And we will not have men playing in women’s sports if that’s okay.” (Where to start with this word salad of right-wing paranoia? As retired Gen. Mark Milley previously told Republican lawmakers, “We do not teach critical race theory. We don’t embrace critical race theory, and I think that’s a spurious conversation.” Less than two percent of the population identifies as transgender, and approximately 0.2 percent of the military is estimated to be trans, based on Defense Department data released earlier this year; still, the Trump administration has moved to ban trans troops from the military—a decision the Supreme Court upheld earlier this month.)
• “I went through a very tough time with some very radicalized sick people, and I say, I was investigated more than the great late Alphonse Capone. Alphonse Capone was a monster, he was a very hardened criminal. I went through more investigations than Alphonse Capone, and now I’m talking to you as president, can you believe this?” (Trump was found guilty of 34 felony counts of fraud and former DOJ Special Counsel Jack Smith said that he believed Trump would have been convicted for trying to overthrow the 2020 election had he not won reelection last November. A prior fact check from CNN found that Trump’s claim he was indicted more than Capone was false: Trump has been indicted four times, but Capone was indicted six times.)

Too bizarre for a fact check: Trump telling the graduates to avoid marriages to “trophy wives” while delivering a rambling story about real estate developer Bill Levitt.

Trump's West Point commencement audience is totally silent as he rants about trophy wives and yachts pic.twitter.com/LRb97OXJ7K

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) May 24, 2025

Trump departedafter concluding his rant, breaking with his predecessors’ traditions of shaking all graduates’ hands as they crossed the stage. Trump claimed he had to go “deal with” Russia and China.

A White House spokesperson, Taylor Rogers, provided a different explanation, stating in an email to Mother Jones that Trump “shook hundreds of hands of military leaders and cadets right before his speech and has shaken the hands of thousands of military members during his first and second term.”

Rogers also echoed Trump’s claim that he had pre-scheduled calls with Russia and China, and added: “While the mainstream media fabricates falsehoods, President Trump is planning a magnificent parade as a grand tribute to honor the service and sacrifice of the brave soldiers who have fought, bled, and died to keep us free.”

Rogers made no mention of the fact that the military parade is scheduled to take place on Trump’s birthday, June 14, and could cost an estimated $25 to $45 million, according to an Army spokesperson.

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Report: Police Killings Rose in the Five Years After George Floyd’s Murder

Five years ago today, George Floyd, a 46-year-old unarmed Black man, was murdered by Derek Chauvin, a white police officer, in Minneapolis.

The harrowing footage of the murder—in which Chauvin kneeled on Floyd’s neck for more than nine minutes after a nearby store clerk alleged he tried to purchase cigarettes with a counterfeit $20 bill—sparked nationwide protests over police brutality against Black people, and the persistence of anti-Black racism more broadly. Chauvin was found guilty on all charges in the case and sentenced to more than 20 years in prison; three other officers who were also on the scene and failed to get Floyd help as he struggled to breathe were found guilty of federal civil rights violations and sentenced from 30 to 42 months in prison. But a new report from the New York Times, coupled with recent actions from the Trump administration, suggests that whatever progress appeared to come in the wake of Floyd’s murder was not lasting.

A New York Times analysis published Saturday, based on data from the Washington Post and the database Mapping Police Violence, found that the number of police killings nationwide has risen every year since 2020—with Black people constituting a disproportionate number of the victims. Last year, for example, there were a total of 1,226 people killed by police, an 18 percent increase from 2019, the Times found. While most of the victims killed by police reportedly were armed, some, like Floyd, were not. Last year, 53 unarmed people were killed by police, compared to 95 in 2020, according to the Times analysis. Over the past decade, Black people have been killed by police at more than two times the rate of white people. (Native Americans were the racial group with the highest rate of police killings, according to the Times data.)

The rates of police killings were higher—and have increased since 2020—in the redder states that President Donald Trump won in the last election; the bluer states that former Vice President Kamala Harris won, on the other hand, saw stabilized rates of police killings since 2020.

The actions of the Trump administration do not inspire confidence that those numbers will decrease anytime soon. This week, the Department of Justice announced it was dismissing lawsuits and consent decrees against police departments in Minneapolis, where Floyd was murdered, and in Louisville, Kentucky, where police killed Breonna Taylor in March 2020. (Officials in Minneapolis and Louisville said they would continue working to implement police reforms.) The DOJ also announced it was ending Biden-era investigations into a half dozen other police departments that the prior administration accused of constitutional violations. Civil rights groups said those moves would likely worsen police violence; the ACLU said Trump’s DOJ was sending “a message that the government is willing to look away from harm being inflicted on our communities—even when the harm is plain as day.”

Those shifts come as the Trump administration has also prioritized the abolishment of diversity, equity, and inclusion policies, or DEI, across the federal government and beyond.

The current political climate may help explain why more than 70 percent of adults recently surveyed by the Pew Research Center said they do not believe the increased focus on race following Floyd’s murder made Black Americans’ lives better. And the amount of Americans who say they support the Black Lives Matter movement has dropped 15 points since 2020, though a majority—52 percent—still say they are in favor of it, according to Pew.

On Sunday,various Democratic lawmakers commemorated Floyd’s passing on social media, including Minnesotans Gov. Tim Walz and Rep. Ilhan Omar, along with Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.), Rep. Monica McIver (D-N.J.), Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D-Texas), and Sen. Raphael Warnock (D-Ga.). Crockett, Omar, and McIver called on Congress to pass the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, a bill first introduced in 2021 that would increase accountability for law enforcement. Its measures include creating a national registry to track police misconduct, limiting no-knock warrants and chokeholds, and requiring training on implicit bias and racial profiling for law enforcement officers. The bill was most recently reintroduced in the House last year by Rep. Sheila Jackson-Lee (D-Texas), but it failed to get a vote.

Mother Jones video correspondent Garrison Hayes sees reasons for hope, despite the limits to the progress of the past five years:

If 2020 was The Awakening, and the last four years have been The Retrenchment, then 2025 may mark the beginning of a new phase: The Reevaluation.

I think the 2020 BLM protests were about bolstering Black social and political power, and despite all of the attacks that effort has endured, Black people aren’t giving up on it any time soon.

In Louisiana, Black voters helped defeat a constitutional amendment that would have made it easier to try children as adults — a move that many viewed as a veiled attempt to deepen mass incarceration.

We’re seeing it in economic protest too, with Black consumers leading boycotts of major corporations like Target, disrupting profit margins and forcing boardroom conversations.

And we’re seeing it in grassroots organizing. Activists like Angela Rye and journalist Joy Reid are crisscrossing the country on the State of the People Power Tour, mobilizing and educating Black communities on how to build lasting political power from the ground up.

So, five years later, when we ask what’s changed, maybe the most honest answer is that we changed; and that might be the most powerful change of all.

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Another Trump Casualty: A Tiny Office That Keeps Measurements of the World Accurate

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

Cuts made by the Trump administration are threatening the function of a tiny but crucial office within the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration that maintains the US framework of spatial information: latitudes, longitudes, vertical measurements like elevation, and even measurements of Earth’s gravitational field.

Staff losses at the National Geodetic Survey (NGS), the oldest scientific agency in the US, could further cripple its mission and activities, including a long-awaited project to update the accuracy of these measurements, former employees and experts say. As the world turns more and more toward operations that need precise coordinate systems like the ones NGS provides, the science that underpins this office’s activities, these experts say, is becoming even more crucial.

The work of NGS, says Tim Burch, the executive director of the National Society of Professional Surveyors, “is kind of like oxygen. You don’t know you need it until it’s not there.”

“NOAA remains dedicated to providing timely information, research, and resources that serve the American public and ensure our nation’s environmental and economic resilience,” NOAA spokesperson Alison Gillespie told Wired in an email when asked about the downsizing of NGS.

NGS was formed in 1807 by Thomas Jefferson, the son of a surveyor and cartographer. Originally called the Survey of the Coast, the organization, led by a young Swiss immigrant named Ferdinand Hassler, was tasked with mapping the coastlines of the new country. Over the next 200 years, its mission expanded to cover the practice of geodesy: the science of calculating the shape of the Earth, its orientation in space, and its gravitational field.

“Hassler understood that before you put pen to paper and make a chart or a map, if you wanted to [know how] things relate accurately one to another, especially if you’re going to do that over a large area like the United States, then you have to have a very strong mathematical foundation to put all these pieces together,” says Dave Doyle, a former chief geodetic surveyor at NGS. “That is, in a very simple way, what the science of geodesy brings to the nation.”

NGS is currently responsible for maintaining and updating what’s known as the National Spatial Reference System, a consistent system of physical coordinates used across federal and local governments, the private sector, and academia. This includes not only latitude and longitude but also measurements of depth and height as well as calculations around Earth’s gravitational field—crucial mathematics that inform much of the basic infrastructure around us, from constructing bridges to mapping out water and electric lines. NGS also maintains and operates more than 1,700 federally owned satellite receivers across the US, which provide publicly available geospatial information.

While individual surveyors can compare heights and distances in smaller areas, it’s far more difficult to compare mountains thousands of miles from each other or know exactly how sea level rise may be affecting different areas of the country that have vastly different coastlines. Having a coordinated frame of reference across the entire country—both latitude and longitude as well as depth and height—underpins the accurate positioning of locations across the US in relation to each other, as well as in relation to other geospatial measurement systems across the world.

The Earth is also constantly shifting: the motion of tectonic plates causes latitude and longitude coordinates to slowly move, mandating that they be updated every few decades. In some places—like the coast of Louisiana, where subsidence is causing between 25 to 35 square feet of land loss each year—these shifts manifest much quicker.

“Most people can stand on the beach and see the water and turn around and look at a dune behind them and go: ‘Oh, yeah. That’s about 5 or 6 feet above sea level,’” says Doyle. But when it comes to building things, you need to be able to accurately take measurements at scale. “You have to have some system of heights that is standardized across a large geographic body. I want consistent heights from New York to Maryland so we can build highways, so we can build utility infrastructure. You want to make sure water is always flowing in the appropriate direction.”

“Do you want to get in an autonomous taxi that is plus or minus two and a half meters going down the road? I don’t. That is part of the critical piece here: all these systems have to be this tight and this precise moving forward.”

The US is currently working with a particularly outdated set of coordinate systems. The current measurements contained in the National Spatial Reference System—including latitude, longitude, and vertical heights, a set of reference systems called datums—were established in the 1980s, shortly after the US launched the world’s first GPS satellites. In the years since those datums were created, increasingly advanced satellite technology has enabled geodesists to more accurately measure the shape and orientation of the Earth and to better position their measurements. As a result, each point of measurement in the US datums is now, on average, around two meters off from its actual, accurate location. In some locations, it’s even more extreme.

As anyone who has tried to go for a run with a glitchy Garmin watch knows, current GPS technology has limits in terms of on-the-ground precision. For everyday navigation, exact locations aren’t truly necessary—but for a variety of activities, from mapping floodplains to building bridges to measuring sea level rise, every centimeter becomes crucial. Ensuring hyper-accurate location is also becoming increasingly important as more and more industries are building up around automation that relies on precise spatial measurements.

“Do you want to get in an autonomous taxi that is plus or minus two and a half meters going down the road?” says Burch. “I don’t. That is part of the critical piece here: all these systems have to be this tight and this precise moving forward.”

In order to update the US’s datums to be in line with satellite data, land shifts, and accurate measurements of the Earth, staff at NGS were planning on rolling out a long-awaited modernization of the National Spatial Reference System, bringing it into the 21st century and making it easier to update moving forward. Originally scheduled to be completed in 2022, the agency posted a notice in the federal register last fall detailing its updated timeline for rolling out the new datums and associated products in 2025 and 2026.

But three former staffers who left NGS in the past month say this planned rollout may be pushed even farther behind by staff losses, thanks to employees like them who took retirements, left their jobs, or were laid off as part of federal restructuring. According to former staff, NGS was sitting at 174 employees at the start of the year, with staff looking to fill an additional 15 positions to help with rolling out the new datum and educating federal agencies and local governments on their use. Since January 20, the agency has lost nearly a quarter of its staff and has had to freeze planned hiring. (When asked about the accuracy of these numbers, Gillespie, the NOAA spokesperson, told WIRED that the agency has a “long-standing practice not to discuss personnel or internal management matters.”)

The remaining staff are in an “all hands on deck” situation with the rollout, says Brett Howe, the former geodetic services division chief at NGS, who opted to retire at the end of April. Despite a dedicated staff, Howe says that the loss of many in senior leadership with decades of experience and institutional knowledge means that the agency can’t afford to go through any more cuts.

“If we get to hire back some people, we are still going to have trouble meeting that timeline of 2025 and 2026 [for the rollout], but we’ll be able to make it work,” he says. “If there are further cuts, or we’re not able to execute our [National Spatial Reference System] modernization plan, and then we get to a year, a year and a half from now, and we lose more people—either through other layoffs or they just retire—then I think we’re in real trouble. Then I wonder how we function as an agency.”

“At this time, the ongoing NSRS modernization plans are still aligned with the dates in the Federal Register notice,” Gillespie told WIRED. “NGS will be releasing foundational data and supporting products for testing and feedback in 2025.”

The fate of NGS under the Trump administration is unclear. A NOAA budget proposal from the White House Office of Management and Budget sent to the agency in April cuts the budget for the National Ocean Service, which houses NGS, by more than half. Project 2025 does not mention NGS by name, but it does mandate moving NOAA’s surveying capabilities to other agencies.

“We don’t speculate about things that may or may not happen in the future,” Gillespie said when asked about potential upcoming changes to the agency. “NOAA will continue to deliver weather information, forecasts, and warnings, and conduct research pursuant to our public safety mission.”

The sharp drop in staff numbers at NGS is the tail end of a long decline for the practice of geodesy in the US. In 2022, a group of leading geodesic experts authored a paper on what they dubbed the US’s “geodesy crisis,” detailing how other world powers have invested in training geodesists over the past three decades while the US has wound down funding and training. China has invested particularly heavily in creating more geodesists: the country graduates between 9,000 and 12,500 geodesy students per year, many of whom are then employed by the government. By contrast, around 20 students graduated with advanced degrees in geodesy from US universities over the past decade.

This, the authors argue, has contributed to China rapidly overtaking the US in geospatial technologies and disciplines of all kinds. Nowhere is this clearer than with China’s satellite navigation system, BeiDou, which has been gaining on the US’s GPS system in accuracy. In 2023, a US government advisory board on GPS stated in a memo that GPS is now “substantially inferior” to BeiDou.

Like other cuts to public science made under the Trump administration, the losses from blows to this agency could be substantial. A 2012 analysis found that every taxpayer dollar spent on NGS’s coastal mapping program returned $35 in benefits, while a 2019 report found that the NGS program that models gravitational fields would provide between $4.2 and $13.3 billion worth of benefit over 10 years. The private sector also relies heavily on public data provided by NGS. Some analyses project that the geospatial economy will grow to $1 trillion by the end of the decade. It’s even more crucial, experts say, to have an updated spatial reference system in the US, as well as institutional knowledge of the basic science of how to measure and understand our Earth.

Many industries now “want that high accuracy positioning” that comes with advanced geospatial technology, Doyle says, “yet they don’t understand the basics of the science. Now you’ve got all these people punching buttons and getting numbers, and only a tiny percentage of them really understand what the numbers mean, and how one set of numbers relates to another.”

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IDF Deliberately Targeting Children in Gaza, US Doctors Allege

When Dr. Mimi Syed returned from her first volunteer trip to Gaza in the summer of 2024, she started flipping through her notes—and came to a shocking conclusion. In one month, the ER physician had treated at least 18 children with gunshots to the head or chest. And that’s only the patients she had time to make a note of.

“They were children under the age of 12,” she says. “That’s something I saw every single day, multiple times a day, for the whole four weeks that I was there.”

Syed’s not the only one. Other physicians who have worked in Gaza report seeing similar cases on a regular basis, suggesting a disturbing pattern. The doctors allege that members of the Israeli military may be deliberately targeting children.

This week’s Reveal, in partnership with Al Jazeera’s Fault Lines, follows Dr. Syed from the Gaza Strip to the halls of Congress and the United Nations, as she joins a movement of doctors appealing to US and international policymakers to address the humanitarian crisis in Gaza.

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Utah Study on Trans Youth Care Extremely Inconvenient for Politicians Who Ordered It

In 2022, Utah Gov. Spencer Cox was the rare Republican governor who seemed to truly care about the well-being of transgender kids. “I don’t understand what they are going through or why they feel the way they do. But I want them to live,” he wrote in a letter that year, explaining why he was vetoing a bill that would have banned four trans middle- and high schoolers in Utah from playing on sports teams with classmates who shared their gender identity. “All the research shows that even a little acceptance and connection can reduce suicidality significantly.”

Meanwhile, nationally, Republican politicians were making opposition to trans rights a core tenet of their platforms, filing hundreds of bills attacking trans kids at the doctor’s office, at school, and on the field. Early in the 2023 legislative session, Cox capitulated, signing a bill that placed an indefinite “moratorium” on doctors providing puberty blockers and hormone therapy to trans kids with gender dysphoria. The bill ordered the Utah health department to commission a systematic review of medical evidence around the treatments, with the goal of producing recommendations for the legislature on whether to lift the moratorium. “We sincerely hope that we can treat our transgender families with more love and respect as we work to better understand the science and consequences behind these procedures,” Cox said at the time.

Now, more than two years later, that review is here, and its conclusions unambiguously support gender-affirming medical care for trans youth. “The conventional wisdom among non-experts has long been that there are limited data” on gender-affirming pediatric care, the authors wrote. “However, results from our exhaustive literature searches have lead us to the opposite conclusion.”

The medical evidence review, published on Wednesday, was compiled over a two-year period by the Drug Regimen Review Center at the University of Utah. Unlike the federal government’s recent report on the same subject, which was produced in three months and criticized gender-affirming pediatric treatments, the names of the Utah report’s contributors are actually disclosed on the more than thousand-page document.

The authors write:

The consensus of the evidence supports that the treatments are effective in terms of mental health, psychosocial outcomes, and the induction of body
changes consistent with the affirmed gender in pediatric [gender dysphoria] patients. The evidence also supports that the treatments are safe in terms of changes to bone density, cardiovascular risk factors, metabolic changes, and cancer…

It is our expert opinion that policies to prevent access to and use of [gender-affirming hormone therapy] for treatment of [gender dysphoria] in pediatric patients cannot be justified based on the quantity or quality of medical science findings or concerns about potential regret in the future, and that high-quality guidelines are available to guide qualified providers in treating pediatric patients who meet diagnostic criteria.

In a second part of their review, the authors looked specifically at long-term outcomes of patients who started treatment for gender dysphoria as minors:

Overall, there were positive mental health and psychosocial functioning outcomes. While gender affirming treatment showed a possibly protective effect in prostate cancer in transgender men and breast cancer in transgender women, there was an increase in some specific types of benign brain tumors. There were increased mortality risks in both transgender men and women treated with hormonal therapy, but more so in transgender women. Increase risk of mortality was consistently due to increase in suicide, non-natural causes, and HIV/AIDS. Patients that were seen at the gender clinic before the age of 18 had a lower risk of suicide compared to those referred as an adult.

Submitted with the review was a set of recommendations—compiled by advisers from the state’s medical and professional licensing boards, the University of Utah, and a Utah non-profit hospital system—on steps the state legislature could take to ensure proper training among gender-affirming care providers, in the event it decides to lift the moratorium.

But according to the Salt Lake Tribune, legislators behind the ban are already dismissing the findings they asked for. In response to questions from the Tribune, Rep. Katy Hall, who co-sponsored the 2023 ban, issued a joint statement with fellow Republican state Rep. Bridger Bolinder, the chair of the legislature’s Health and Human Services Interim Committee, that dismissed the study’s findings. “We intend to keep the moratorium in place,” they told the Tribune. “Young kids and teenagers should not be making life-altering medical decisions based on weak evidence.”

Why ignore their own review? Polling, the legislators’ statement suggests. “Utah was right to lead on this issue, and the public agrees—polls show clear majority support both statewide and nationally,” Hall and Bolinder added in their statement. “Simply put, the science isn’t there, the risks are real, and the public is with us.”

Others, like former state Rep. Mike Kennedy, a co-sponsor of the 2023 ban who now represents Utah’s 3rd district in Congress, have so far been silent on the state review’s findings—as has Gov. Cox, who did not respond to the Salt Lake Tribune‘s request for comment.

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Trump Administration Ordered to Undo Yet Another Wrongful Deportation

Late last night, a federal district court judge in Massachusetts ordered the US government to “facilitate” the return of a Guatemalan man who was deported to Mexico despite having presented evidence that he had been kidnapped and raped there on his way to the United States last year.

The man, known in court documents as O.C.G., won an order in his immigration case in February protecting him from being deported to Guatemala, which he said he fled after facing violence and persecution for his sexuality. Two days later— thinking, according to court documents, that he was being released from immigration detention—he was loaded onto a bus with other men and brought from the US to Mexico, where authorities then deported him to Guatemala anyway.

O.C.G. is now living in hiding in Guatemala, avoiding going out or being seen with family, according to a sworn declaration filed in his lawsuit. “The people who targeted me before know who I am and they have shown me twice before what they’re capable of,” he said. “I can’t be gay here, which means I cannot be myself. I cannot express myself and I am not free.”

District Judge Brian E. Murphy, who also ruled Wednesday against the Trump administration’s attempt to deport migrants not from South Sudan to that country, wrote in his order that O.C.G. was likely to succeed in showing “that his removal lacked any semblance of due process” and that the federal government couldn’t legally send him to Mexico without taking additional steps in the immigration case. “Those necessary steps, and O.C.G.’s pleas for help, were ignored,” Murphy wrote. “In general, this case presents no special facts or legal circumstances, only the banal horror of a man being wrongfully loaded onto a bus and sent back to a country where he was allegedly just raped and kidnapped.”

Now, it’s up to US authorities to bring O.C.G. back—or, in the language of the court order, to “facilitate” his return. Last month, the Supreme Court likewise ordered the government to facilitate the return of Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, a man from Maryland who was mistakenly deported and sent to CECOT, El Salvador’s notorious “terrorism confinement center.” Yet Abrego Garcia remains in custody, with the US government claiming it lacks the authority to remove him from El Salvador’s custody—even as Trump insists he “could” return him with a phone call.

Murphy, in his order on Friday, appeared to anticipate that the US government would similarly fail to act in O.C.G.’s case. He added in a footnote that that the word “facilitate” in his order should “carry less baggage than in several other notable cases. O.C.G. is not held by any foreign government.”

Murphy also slammed government lawyers for previously asserting that O.C.G. had, at some point, said he was unafraid of being sent to Mexico. Because of that claim, Murphy had stopped short of ordering O.C.G. returned in an earlier order. But when the government had to produce a witness to back up that claim, its lawyers told the court it had been an “error.”

“Defendants apparently cannot find a witness to support their claim that O.C.G. ever said that he was unafraid of being sent to Mexico,” Murphy fumed in his Friday order. “The Court was given false information, upon which it relied, twice, to the detriment of a party at risk of serious and irreparable harm.”

If Murphy appears fed up, it’s because he’s spent the week dealing with the government’s attempts to deport immigrants to third-party countries without giving them a chance to object. In April, the judge issued a preliminary injunction in a lawsuit brought by O.C.G. and other immigrants ordering the United States to give them a “meaningful opportunity” to express a fear of death, torture, or persecution before they are sent to a country that is not their own.

“This case presents a simple question,” Murphy wrote in that order: “Before the United States forcibly sends someone to a country other than their country of origin, must that person be told where they are going and be given a chance to tell the United States that they might be killed if sent there?”

On Wednesday, Murphy ruled that the Trump administration had violated his injunction when it attempted to send a plane full of immigrants from multiple countries to South Sudan, as my colleagues Isabela Dias and Noah Lanard reported this week:

The complaint alleges at least two of the men, a national of Myanmar identified as N.M., and T.T.P., a Vietnamese man, were given a notice of removal on Monday, May 19, in English only, despite the requirement in JudgeMurphy’s preliminary injunction that the form be provided in a “language the alien can understand.” They declined to sign the notice, according to court documents.

A Justice Department attorney said during the hearing thatthe men remained in the custody of Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The plane reportedly landed in Djibouti, in East Africa, according to ICE flight trackers and the New York Times, instead of South Sudan. As of Wednesday, the men were still believed to be in Djibouti, which is home to a US military base.

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Trump Has Dropped the Pretense of Ethics

Do Donald Trump and his family “actually give a fuck” about appearing to profit from his presidency? Evidence is mounting that they don’t.

Mother Jones reported yesterday on various ways that corporations, foreign governments, and random rich people with agendas are giving money and other benefits to the first family—and noted that the president and his kin have largely dispensed with even their first-term pretense of adherence to ethical norms.

This view was seemingly bolstered by Arthur Schwartz, an adviser to Donald Trump Jr., who, while explaining his unwillingness to address my questions about conflicts resulting from Trump Jr.’s business ventures, texted: “Write your ridiculous story. Literally no one cares…We don’t actually give a fuck.”

The president indeed did not appear overly troubled by extensive bipartisan criticism when he accepted, on Wednesday, a plane from Qatar (a country where his business just cut a deal to develop a golf resort) to use as Air Force One. And he ignored critics accusing him of corruption again on Thursday, when he hosted a dinner at his Virginia golf course rewarding 220 of the largest purchasers of his $TRUMP meme cryptocurrency, including dinner guests who said they hoped to use the access to influence him.

“Write your ridiculous story. Literally no one cares…We don’t actually give a fuck.”

“They really don’t seem to be making much of an effort to show they care about appearance of conflicts of interest or corruption,” Noah Bookbinder, president of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, said in a recent interview.

As brazen as Trump’s recent actions may appear, he nevertheless has continued to argue they are not corrupt. Trump this week threatened to sue ABC News again for reporting, he said, “that Qatar is giving ME a FREE Boeing 747 Airplane”—Trump insists the plane is going to the Department of Defense, rather than to him personally, despite having repeatedly said he plans to eventually transfer it to his presidential library.

White House spokespersons, too, continue to profess indignation about media reports suggesting that there is anything untoward about the president taking gifts or money from people attempting to influence him. “It’s absurd for anyone to insinuate that this president is profiting off of the presidency,” White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said Thursday. “This president was incredibly successful before giving it all up to serve our country publicly.”

The White House has claimed Trump’s businesses don’t create conflicts of interest because “the president’s assets are in a trust managed by his children.”

But these arguments are belied by Trump’s failure to limit the appearance or reality that he is using his power to reward people who help enrich him. Trump continues to benefit from the family companies now run by his sons, and ethics experts note that because Trump has not set up a blind trust, the president can keep track of who is paying or investing in those firms in hopes of influencing him.

The Trump Organization and White House have declined to renew modest ethics restrictions they imposed during Trump’s first term. In 2017, the Trump Organization, run by Eric and Donald Trump Jr., said it would not ink foreign deals during the Trump presidency. This time, the company is reaching foreign deals. And while they claim to be avoiding agreements with foreign governments, the Trumps are making development deals that rely on approval by foreign governments. The Trump family also appears to be benefiting from a plan by a state-backed United Arab Emirates firm to use a Trump-affiliated digital coin in a multibillion-dollar deal.

Donald Trump Jr., speaking Wednesday in at an economic conference in, of all places, Qatar, elaborated on this decision.

“In the first term, we actually said we’re not going to do any foreign deals,” he said. “The reality is, it didn’t stop the media from constantly saying you’re profiteering anyway. We’re like, we stopped entirely, even the deals that were totally legit, it didn’t stop the insanity. So this time around, we said, ‘Hey, we’re going to play by the rules,’ but we’re not going to go so far as to stymie our business forever, lock ourselves in a proverbial padded room, because it almost doesn’t matter—they’re going to hit you no matter what.”

This comment raises questions about what Trump Jr. thinks padded rooms are used for, and what not “totally legit” deals he may have in mind. But it also suggests that he understands the purpose of ethical norms to be avoidance of criticism. Critics of the first family’s mix of business and politics, by contrast, are concerned about actual corruption occurring.

The president and his family hear those concerns. But they don’t seem to give a fuck.

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The Supreme Court Makes Sure the Law Does Not Get in the Way of Trump’s Takeover

On Thursday night, the Supreme Court’s six Republican-appointed justices allowed President Donald Trump to remove two executive branch officials: Gwynne Wilcox of the National Labor Relations Board and Cathy Harris of the Merit Systems Protection Board. In doing so, the court refused to enforce a major precedent. The decision indicated that, despite recent rebukes, the court is willing to disregard longstanding precedent for Trump to proceed with his overhaul of the federal government.

Before the court’s actions, a unanimous 1935 Supreme Court precedent called Humphrey’s Executor insulated both Wilcox and Harris, as members of independent boards, from removal without good cause. On Thursday, the GOP-appointees effectively cabined—or overturned—Humphrey’s Executor, in a glib order; they discarded the precedent that undergirds the modern executive branch in the same way they might toss out an old shirt they no longer feel like wearing.

The court offered a few justifications. First and foremost, it nodded at the Unitary Executive Theory. The theory rests on the idea that the Constitution vests all the executive authority in the president, and therefore it’s unconstitutional to place limits on how the president uses that authority. This theory was crafted by conservative lawyers in the 1980s and early 1990s, when Republicans seemed to have a lock on the presidency but couldn’t get control of Congress and therefore needed a justification for the president to act unilaterally. The Roberts court has spent the last 15 years embedding the theory into constitutional law—even though many academics argue it is an inaccurate and opportunistic reading of the Constitution and the nation’s history.

“Because the Constitution vests the executive power in the President…he may remove without cause executive officers who exercise that power on his behalf, subject to narrow exceptions recognized by our precedents,” Thursday’s anonymous order reads. “The stay reflects our judgment that the Government is likely to show that both the NLRB and MSPB exercise considerable executive power.”

The order did not come in the normal course of business, after full briefings, oral arguments, and deliberation. Instead, the court issued an unsigned opinion on its emergency docket, granting the administration’s request to remove Wilcox and Harris while the lower courts continue to consider the case. It would be a significant moment if, in the regular course of business, the Supreme Court overturned a 90-year precedent upon which Congress has relied to shape the federal government. But it is more irksome to do it on the sly, effectively telling the administration to go ahead and fire whomever they want, never mind Congress’ statutes or the court’s own precedents.

The decision also has one key reservation. The court did tell Trump that some officials are off limits: the members of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors and the Federal Open Market Committee (a body within the Federal Reserve that sets the nation’s monetary policy). The court attempts to justify this differentiation by asserting that “the Federal Reserve is a uniquely structured, quasi-private entity that follows in the distinct historical tradition of the First and Second Banks of the United States.”

The question of the Fed has weighed on this case from the beginning. On the one hand, court observers know that the GOP-appointed justices are all in for a unitary executive of nearly unlimited power. On the other hand, that would implicate the independence of the Federal Reserve, and with it the world financial order and global economy. The majority managed to split the baby with what Justice Elena Kagan, in her dissent for the Democratic appointees, termed the “bespoke Federal Reserve exception.” It’s not consistent with the law. But it is consistent with the justices’ own preferences.

The Unitary Executive Theory also shines through the majority’s order in unwritten ways. It states that “the Government faces greater risk of harm from an order allowing a removed officer to continue exercising the executive power than a wrongfully removed officer faces from being unable to perform her statutory duty.” Here, the order equates the “government” with the president in what almost reads like a Freudian slip. But it is Congress that created the NLRB and MSPB, with removal protections for its expert commissioners, so that those bodies could carry out their functions. Thus, this case does not pit the government against Wilcox and Harris but Trump against Congress—a body whose prerogative unitary executive theory nearly reads out of the Constitution.

As recently as last week, the Supreme Court looked like it might actually rein in Trump. It is an immeasurably good thing that (most) of the justices take seriously Trump’s efforts to banish people to foreign gulags and appear ready to require at least due process first. In the course of its litigation over Trump’s unlawful deportations, as well as birthright citizenship, the justices have begun to recognize that this administration cannot be trusted to follow either the law or court orders.

But, even as the court tries to limit Trump’s most authoritarian impulses, it is augmenting his power as it reshapes the government in the mold of the unitary executive theory. As this week’s decision demonstrates, when this court’s agenda and the president’s align, precedent and Congress are shoved aside.

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Everything Changed After George Floyd. Five Years Later, What Have We Learned?

It’s been five years since George Floyd was murdered on a Minneapolis street in the Spring on 2020. Though far from novel, this particular act of state violence shocked the world and ignited one of the largest protest movements in modern history. In my latest video, I argue that this moment was much bigger than Floyd; from the horrors of the Middle Passage to the chains of mass incarceration, from slave codes to Jim Crow, the full weight of America’s long-standing commitment to anti-Blackness bore down on that moment and the months of protest that followed.

People were energized: books written about Black authors topped the New York Times‘ bestseller lists, corporations pledged billions of dollars toward racial justice, and diversity, equity and inclusion practitioners were in high demand. From London to Lagos to Los Angeles, the world seemed to unite under one banner: Black Lives really do Matter.

But five years later, it’s worth asking: What actually changed?

The answer is complicated. In many ways, the mass awakening of 2020 gave way to a powerful retrenchment over the four years that followed.

A year after the world marched for George Floyd, conservative politicians and pundits began rallying against so-called “Critical Race Theory”an academic field of study based on the honest examination of racism’s historical and present-day impact on society—and twisted it into a catch-all for anything conservatives didn’t like. Within a couple of years, Republican-led book bans would target bestselling titles that once spurred on a America’s “racial reckoning.”

Nowhere is that clearer than in the debate over of police reform: the most substantive policy demand of the Black Lives Matter protests. Despite efforts by lawmakers like Senator Cory Booker and then-Senator Kamala Harris to introduce police reform legislation as early as June 2020, Congress ultimately failed to pass a bill curbing chokeholds, no-knock warrants, or qualified immunity.

Instead, in many cities, police budgets grew and a dozen states have broken ground on large-scale police training centers — dubbed “Cop Cities” by critics.

The penultimate act of America’s racial retrenchment came in the fall of 2024 when Donald Trump, buoyed by replacement theory fears and anti-“woke” campaign ads, was reelected president of the United States of America.

We’ve seen the rapid deterioration of civil rights protections, a commitment to arming police with surplus military gear, and the cancellation of Biden-era federal investigations into the police departments involved in the deaths of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor. All while his most vocal supporters call for a federal pardon for Derek Chauvin, the officer convicted of murdering Floyd.

Yet, despite all of this, I think there is still reason for hope.

If 2020 was The Awakening, and the last four years have been The Retrenchment, then 2025 may mark the beginning of a new phase: The Reevaluation.

I think the 2020 BLM protests were about bolstering Black social and political power, and despite all of the attacks that effort has endured, Black people aren’t giving up on it any time soon.

In Louisiana, Black voters helped defeat a constitutional amendment that would have made it easier to try children as adults — a move that many viewed as a veiled attempt to deepen mass incarceration.

We’re seeing it in economic protest too, with Black consumers leading boycotts of major corporations like Target, disrupting profit margins and forcing boardroom conversations.

And we’re seeing it in grassroots organizing. Activists like Angela Rye and journalist Joy Reid are crisscrossing the country on the State of the People Power Tour, mobilizing and educating Black communities on how to build lasting political power from the ground up.

So, five years later, when we ask what’s changed, maybe the most honest answer is that we changed; and that might be the most powerful change of all.

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How John Fetterman Became “Trump’s Favorite Democrat”

In early April, Tracy Baton helped organize a “Hands Off!” rally protesting President Donald Trump in downtown Pittsburgh that was attended by more than 6,000 people. But she wasn’t just angry at the president—she was also incensed by her state’s Democratic senator, John Fetterman. So was the crowd.

“Fetterman?” one speaker yelled from a stage near the steps of City Hall.

“Jagoff!” protesters shouted back in unison.

“Fetterman?”

“Jagoff!”

The term is Pittsburghese for “jerk.”

“It means you’ve broken the social contract,” says Baton, a 62-year-old social worker. “It’s a neighbor who you know won’t give you a cup of sugar.”

Or, in Fetterman’s case, it describes a politician who campaigned as a Bernie Sanders–loving populist and vowed to help Democrats advance their priorities past the party’s two obstructionists, Sens. Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin—only to reprise their roles once in Congress and cozy up with Republicans.

“He ran in the 2022 primaries against Joe Manchin, and now he’s become Joe Manchin,” says Mike Mikus, a longtime Democratic operative in Pennsylvania. “An unprincipled Manchin.”

He’s sided with Republicans on denying immigrants due process, voted to confirm a 2020 election denier to lead the Department of Justice, and approved a GOP budget that freed Trump to slash spending without oversight. His recent actions have enraged progressives, mystified colleagues, and alarmed former and current aides.

Even Conor Lamb, who ran to Fetterman’s right in Pennsylvania’s 2022 Democratic Senate primary, doesn’t know what to make of the metamorphosis.

“John has changed who he was, and he’s never really adequately explained that,” the former member of Congress says. “He presented himself as fighting for people and caring about the minimum wage and the people who were just barely getting by. I think all those people are wondering now, where is he?”

In May, a bombshell profile by New York magazine’s Ben Terris provided a feasible rationale. The story was a gutting dive into the psyche of the senator, who had a stroke during his campaign and required six weeks of hospitalization to treat clinical depression shortly after taking office. Terris laid out concerning behind-the-scenes behavior in striking detail: outbursts that drove away staff, paranoid and grandiose delusions, reckless driving, and a near-fatal crash that injured his wife. As anybody with mental health struggles can attest, Fetterman is a victim of whatever demons he’s fighting. But he’s not the only one: He also has 13.1 million constituents to think about—not to mention a party in free fall.

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The Unorthodox Political Rise of John Fetterman

Fetterman’s unique backstory is as familiar as his trademark gym shorts and hoodie: A hulking Harvard Kennedy School grad settles in the Rust Belt town of Braddock, Pennsylvania, runs for mayor, and uses the perch as a springboard to loftier ambitions.

As mayor, a position that came with little power, he used family money to launch a nonprofit to cut through red tape. The organization, Braddock Redux, did nothing to revive the steel industry, but it did bring a new community center and green space. A James Beard Award–nominated chef opened a (short-lived) fine-dining restaurant downtown. Yet this modest revitalization brought a flood of national attention, including an appearance on the Colbert Report and a New York Times Magazine profile.

In 2016, he launched a long-shot Senate primary bid against establishment Democrats who, Fetterman said, weren’t progressive enough on fracking or the minimum wage. The New Republic dubbed Fetterman a member of “Bernie’s Army” who got “emotional talking about opportunity for all,” including “immigrants seeking a better life.” Fetterman aggressively sought Sanders’ endorsement, telling Slate, “I’m sitting here with my corsage, waiting.”

Two years later, he successfully ran for lieutenant governor and, in 2022, made another Senate run, taking on celebrity doctor Mehmet Oz. In addition to criminal justice reform, Fetterman focused on reducing economic disparities and supporting LGBTQ rights. He also warned of climate change, though he eased his opposition to fracking.

“He was absolutely comfortable speaking in terms of progressive issues, progressive concerns, and being quite aligned with the left of his party,” says Christopher Borick, political science professor and polling director at Pennsylvania’s Muhlenberg College.

His campaign was catnip to out-of-state Democrats desperate to halt an exodus of working-class voters. It helped that Fetterman did not fit the image of a stereotypical progressive. “He’s 6’ 8”, weird-looking. Doesn’t dress up in a suit and tie and doesn’t look like someone you’d think would be a Bernie-­endorsed candidate,” says a former Fetterman campaign staffer. “People would see him and they wouldn’t think, ‘Oh, this guy’s a crazy lefty.’ They would think this is a normal guy who lives next door to their grandma.”

Just five months before the election, an ischemic stroke took Fetterman off the campaign trail for three months and forced him to rely on closed captioning to process speech. Still recovering and facing $84 million in outside spending, he nonetheless beat Oz by nearly 5 points, with hefty backstopping from staff and his wife, Gisele, who became his most visible surrogate.

To those contemplating the party’s future, it looked like Fetterman and his everyman persona had blazed a path for battleground-state Democrats. Rebecca Katz, his former chief campaign strategist, even launched a political consulting firm that cites Fetterman’s win as the model to “elect more and better Democrats.” But what Katz didn’t say was that she quit working for Fetterman after nine years as his mental state declined. He seemed, as she reportedly texted colleagues in March, “meaner.”

Terris reported that just weeks after taking office in January 2023, Fetterman began displaying alarming symptoms, including, at his lowest, experiencing delusions that family members were wearing wires. He was hospitalized at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center and treated for depression in February. By late March, Fetterman’s doctor reported marked improvements.

“His treatment gradually produced remission of his depression,” the neuropsychiatry chief wrote in a discharge note. “He expressed a firm commitment to treatment over the long term.”

But a little over a year later, Fetterman seemed to be unraveling again. His driving was so dangerous that staffers reportedly wouldn’t ride with him, and in June, he rear-ended an elderly woman while speeding “well over” the 70 mph limit, according to a police report.

Senior employees, including back-to-back-to-back communications directors, quietly departed. But some began to speak out. One of the first was Annie Wu Henry, a former campaign social media strategist. “In the past, I’ve described the 2022 Pennsylvania Senate race as one where we voted for a candidate with empathy and character,” she posted on X in May 2024. “Today, I’m apologizing to everyone who also believed that was the case.”

That month, according to New York, Fetterman’s chief of staff, Adam Jentleson, sent a long email to the senator’s doctor with the subject line “concerns.”

Fetterman’s positions, an ex-aide says, are “clouded through a fuck-the-opposition-left” mindset.

“We often see the kind of warning signs we discussed,” Jentleson wrote. “Conspiratorial thinking; megalomania…high highs and low lows; long, rambling, repetitive and self-centered monologues; lying in ways that are painfully, awkwardly obvious.”

Fetterman did not respond to questions from Mother Jones, but told New York that the magazine’s revelations came from “disgruntled employees,” that his staff was not informed about his personal health, and that he’s felt like the “best version” of himself in recent months. (A week after the story published, the Associated Press reported on a new “outburst” from Fetterman. While meeting with a teachers union, he questioned why “everybody is mad at me” and “why does everyone hate me?,” according to the AP, which also reported a member of his staff broke down crying.)

Much of Fetterman’s worrisome behavior took place at the same time he was staking out defiant (and sometimes befuddling) policy positions, especially his bellicose support for Israel. Despite consuming what an ex-aide describes as a lot of far-right news and rarely reading staff memos, he self-identified as the smartest thinker on the subject.

That staffer, who worked for Fetterman both on the campaign trail and in Congress, believes it was the Israel-­Hamas war that really broke him, leaving his positions “clouded through a fuck-the-opposition-left” mindset. “Had the war never happened, he would maybe have voted to confirm Marco Rubio­. He wouldn’t be voting for Pam Bondi.”

His bombastic rhetoric on Israel caused a rift not only between ­Fetterman and his aides, but between Fetterman and his wife. Eventually, according to New York, Gisele confronted him in his office about Israel’s bombing of refugee camps in Gaza.

Fetterman reportedly shot back: “That’s all propaganda.”

Fetterman and Arizona Sen. Kyrsten Sinema applaud during Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s address to a joint meeting of Congress in Washington, DC, July 24, 2024.Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call/Getty

There are plenty of pro-Israel politicians in Washington. But Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu bestowed only Trump and Fetterman with mementos celebrating the exploding-pager strike targeting Hezbollah militants that resulted in 32 deaths and thousands more injured. Fetterman had famously tattooed the dates of Braddock homicides on his arms to remember the victims, yet he accepted a silver beeper from Netanyahu: an unmistakable symbol of Israel’s brutal aggression that has left tens of thousands of civilians dead.

“That kind of an evil…whether it was Nazi Germany or Imperial Japan or the Confederacy here in the South, that kind of movement has to be destroyed,” Fetterman told the New Yorker, referring to Hamas. “That’s why Atlanta had to burn.”

His new position on immigration was similarly stark, especially considering his wife’s own background. When she was 7, Gisele’s family illegally crossed the border, fleeing violence in Rio de Janeiro. “Every time there was a knock at the door when we were not expecting guests, it was like my heart would drop,” she told a podcast in 2021.

During his Senate campaigns, Fetterman was sympathetic to people with stories like hers, stating on his 2022 website, “I would not have my family if it weren’t for immigration.” But as Trump was poised to return to the White House, he was one of just two Senate Democrats to co-sponsor the Laken Riley Act, which requires the Department of Homeland Security to detain migrants accused of theft and other minor offenses and hold them without bail. He then was the only Democratic lawmaker on Capitol Hill to make the pilgrimage to Mar-a-Lago to meet with Trump, whose eldest son had repeatedly accused Fetterman of not having “a working brain.”

Fetterman has also voted to confirm more Trump Cabinet nominees than almost anyone else in his party. He was the only member of his caucus to vote yes on Attorney General Pam Bondi, who falsely claimed that voter fraud had robbed Trump of victory in 2020 in Fetterman’s home state. There was a time Fetterman had made a national name for himself calling out Trump’s Pennsylvania election lies on major networks, but today, a third ex-staffer says, he is “Trump’s favorite Democrat.”

In March, Fetterman backed the GOP budget bill, scoffing at the idea Senate Democrats should have followed the lead of their House colleagues and held out for a better deal. When Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) called for a “Democratic Party that fights harder,” Fetterman replied curtly: “We kept our government open. Deal with it.”

That prompted Lamb to come to AOC’s defense. On X, he accused Fetterman of “collaborating with—rather than fighting” Republicans. “It seems like the only time you hear from him,” he told me, “is about Israel or about attacking his fellow Democrats.”

It isn’t just antagonistic behavior; people who see him up close say that it also isn’t obvious he’s doing the work. He’s sponsored fewer bills than 75 percent of his fellow senators; on vote attendance, he ranks last.

“He’s not interested in any real legislating,” says a Democratic Hill source. “He misses a ton of votes. He’s not someone who you’re ever going to find in a back room leading the negotiation of a bill. It’s just not what he does.”

Even before May’s revelations, Fetterman was losing ground with his base as fundraising cratered, according to Federal Election Commission filings. As a fourth ex-staffer, who worked on his campaign, warns, “I don’t think that he’s going to have the same people putting time and energy and grassroots dollars into his race that he did last time.” That is, of course, if there is a next time.

When I checked back in with Tracy Baton after New York’s investigation, she had just returned from another anti-­Trump rally, where protesters had again vented at the senator, chanting: “Fetterman, Fetterman, stand up and fight. We don’t need no MAGA-lite.”

As a licensed mental health provider, she understands the nuance between struggling with a psychiatric condition and losing yourself in one. “If you have a mental illness,” she told me, “you still have to be accountable for your actions and their consequences.”

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The Paris Agreement Target for Warming Still Won’t Protect Polar Ice Sheets

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

Sea levels in some parts of the world could be rising by as much as 8 to 12 inches per decade within the lifetime of today’s youngest generations, outpacing the ability of many coastal communities to adapt, scientists warned in a new study published this week.

The research by an international team of sea level and polar ice experts suggests that limiting warming to 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit (1.5 degrees Celsius) above the pre-industrial temperature—the Paris climate agreement’s target—isn’t low enough to prevent a worst-case meltdown of Earth’s polar ice sheets.

A better target for maintaining a safe climate, at least for the long term, might be closer to 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit, said Durham University geographer and glacier expert Chris Stokes, a co-author of the new paper.

“There have been a couple of quite high-profile papers recently, including a synthesis in Nature looking at safe planetary boundaries,” he said. “They made the argument that 1 degree Celsius is a better goal. And a couple of other papers have come out suggesting that we need a stricter temperature limit or a long-term goal. And I think the evidence is building towards that.”

It’s not a new argument, he said, noting that climate research predating the first Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report in 1990 already highlighted the high risks of more than 1 degree C of warming.

“Those studies were saying, ‘We’re warming. We really don’t want to go past 1 degree. We really don’t want to exceed 350 parts per million of carbon dioxide,’” he said. “Because we know what could happen looking at past warm periods, and at simple calculations of ice sheet mass balance. And you know, 30 years later, 40 years later, here we are seeing the problem.”

Scientific calls for a more ambitious long-term climate goal are rising just as Earth’s average global temperature has breached the Paris Agreement target of 1.5 degrees C of warming over the pre-industrial level nearly every consecutive month for the past two years. Atmospheric carbon dioxide has reached a concentration of 430 ppm, a 50 percent increase over pre-industrial levels.

But missing those goals doesn’t diminish the importance of potentially revising the target, for which the Paris Agreement includes a review mechanism, Stokes said. Even if the global temperature overshoots the 1.5 degree mark, it’s important to know for the long term how much it would have to be lowered to return to a safe climate range.

The new study focused on how melting polar ice masses drive sea level rise by combining evidence from past warm periods that were similar to the present, measurements of how much ice is being lost under the present level of warming, and projections of how much ice would be lost at different warming levels over the next few centuries.

Sea level rise of several inches per decade would likely overwhelm adaptation efforts by many coastal communities in the U.S., said co-author Andrea Dutton, a geoscientist and sea level expert at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

“Coastal communities that are adapting to and preparing for future sea-level rise are largely adapting to the amount of sea-level rise that has already occurred.”

“Coastal communities that are adapting to and preparing for future sea-level rise are largely adapting to the amount of sea-level rise that has already occurred,” she said. In a best-case scenario, she added, they are preparing for sea level rise at the current rate of a few millimeters per year, while the research suggests that rate will double within decades.

The last time atmospheric carbon dioxide was at a concentration similar to now was in the mid-Pliocene warm period, just over 3 million years ago, when average global sea levels rose 35 to 70 feet higher than today over the course of thousands of years.

But the current rate of warming is far faster than any other time identified in the geological record. How the ice sheets will respond to warming at that speed is not clear, but nearly every new study in the past few decades has shown changes in the Arctic happening faster than expected.

The United States’ ability to prepare for sea level rise is also profoundly threatened by the cuts to federal science agencies and staffing, Dutton said.

The current cuts to science research, the retraction of funds already promised to communities through the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022, the abandonment of the congressionally mandated National Climate Assessment, and changes to federal rules on air pollution “collectively threaten our ability to project future sea-level rise, to prepare our communities and to mitigate climate change and stem the rate at which sea-level is rising,” she said via email.

Many researchers are working closely with coastal communities, but as federal grants continue to get cut, these collaborations will founder, she added.

“The ice sheets won’t care what different political parties ‘believe’ about climate change,” she said. “Like it or not, they are simply at the mercy of rising temperatures.”

The mass of ice lost from the polar ice sheets has quadrupled since the 1990s, and they are currently losing around 370 billion metric tons of ice per year, said co-author Jonathan Bamber, a physicist at the University of Bristol who focuses on studying how Earth’s frozen regions interact with the rest of the climate system.

“We switched on some new technology 30 years ago, and we discovered that the ice sheets are responding with a large amplitude and rather rapidly,” he said. The extent of the changes to the ice sheet are much greater than models had ever suggested they would be, he noted. “That was a bit of a shock for the whole community.”

Most of the climate models of the past three decades projected only about half as much melting as has actually been observed during that time, he said. That suggests the “safe operating zone for humanity is about 350 ppm” of atmospheric carbon dioxide, corresponding to about 1 degree C of warming.

“I think we’ve known for a long time that we’re interfering with the climate system in a very dangerous way,” he said. “And one of the points of our paper is to demonstrate that one part of the climate system, the ice sheets, are showing some very disturbing signals right now.”

Some of the most vulnerable places are far from any melting ice sheets, including Belize City, home to about 65,000 people, where just 3 feet of sea level rise would swamp 500 square miles of land.

In some low-lying tropical regions around the equator, sea level is rising three times as fast as the global average. That’s because the water is expanding as it warms, and as the ice sheets melt, their gravitational pull is reduced, allowing more water to flow away from the poles toward the equator.

“At low latitudes, it goes up more than the average,” Bamber said. “It’s bad news for places like Bangladesh, India, Vietnam, and the Nile Delta.”

Global policymakers need to be more aware of the effects of a 1.5 degree C temperature increase, Ambassador Carlos Fuller, long-time climate negotiator for Belize, said of the new study.

Belize already moved its capital inland, but its largest city will be inundated at just 1 meter of sea-level rise, he said.

“Findings such as these only sharpen the need to remain within the 1.5 degree Paris Agreement limit, or as close as possible, so we can return to lower temperatures and protect our coastal cities,” Fuller said.

While the new study is focused on ice sheets, Durham University’s Stokes notes that recent research shows other parts of the Earth system are already at, or very near, tipping points that are irreversible on a timescale relevant to human civilizations. That includes changes to freshwater systems and ocean acidification.

“I think somebody used the analogy that it’s like you’re wandering around in a dark room,” he said. “You know there’s a monster there, but you don’t know when you’re going to encounter it. It’s a little bit like that with these tipping points. We don’t know exactly where they are. We may have even crossed them, and we do know that we will hit them if we keep warming.”

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Trump Is Trying to Scrap Basic Protections for Unaccompanied Immigrant Children

The Trump administration filed a motion Thursday to end the decades-old legal ruling that established basic standards for the treatment and release of migrant children—a move that immigrant rights advocates say they will challenge.

The Flores Settlement Agreement, which dates back to 1997, requires the government to move migrant children from jail-like detention facilities to state-licensed, child-appropriate facilities as quickly as possible, and to ensure that children are kept in safe and sanitary facilities.

“The fact that the government refuses to be held accountable to even these most basic standards to keep children safe speaks volumes.”

The settlement agreement “provides nothing more than bare minimum protections for vulnerable children—far less than any of us would demand for our own children,” says Mishan Wroe, an immigration attorney at the National Center for Youth Law. “It requires things like soap, toothpaste and toothbrushes, and adequate food and water. The fact that the government refuses to be held accountable to even these most basic standards to keep children safe speaks volumes.”

During President Donald Trump’s first term, his administration tried, unsuccessfully, to dissolve the agreement. The government is using a similar argument now, that circumstances have changed dramatically since the agreement was established decades ago, with different immigration laws in place and far more migrant children. The government is also arguing that the district court overseeing the settlement lacks jurisdiction.

A hearing is scheduled for July 18.

Thursday’s motion was filed the same day that House Republicans passed a historic budget bill that, if signed into law, would allocate more than $160 billion in new funding for immigration and border enforcement, including $45 billion for adult and family detention.

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Republicans Snuck Two Devastating Health Care Measures Into Trump’s Megabill

In the early morning hours on Thursday, after an all-night session of tense negotiations, House Republicans narrowly passed President Donald Trump’s sweeping domestic policy package.

In addition to the largest cuts to Medicaid in US history, the bill contains provisions that have alarmed health care advocates since they first showed up in earlier versions of the bill. Among them is a plan seeking to defund Planned Parenthood, which the organization warns will affect its ability to provide critical services, including pap smears, cancer screenings, and birth control.

But on Thursday, two last-minute additions went even further: The reconciliation bill that was passed now seeks to ban Affordable Care Act health care plans from covering abortion and gender-affirming care for all Medicaid patients, including adults, after initially proposing to ban care for just minors.

Together, the 11th-hour additions represent an even more extreme version of Trump’s domestic agenda. With nearly one in seven Americans covered through ACA marketplace plans since 2014, the impacts of the proposed abortion ban would be “catastrophic” if passed by the full House and Senate, Reps. Diana DeGette (D-Colo.) and Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.), co-chairs of the Congressional Reproductive Freedom Caucus, said in a statement. “Donald Trump and Congressional Republicans’ claims that they will not ban abortion nationwide were always a lie. Overnight, the receipts came in,” they added. “We will continue to call out this attack on the people for exactly what it is: a Big Bogus Backdoor abortion ban.”

About half of states already ban ACA plans from covering abortion, while 13 states require marketplace plans to include abortion coverage, according to the health policy research organization KFF and the reproductive rights research and policy organization the Guttmacher Institute. Research from Guttmacher shows that six percent of people who obtained abortions between 2021 to 2022 had insurance through the ACA.

“Abortion coverage on both public and private plans is already severely limited and difficult to access—including on Marketplace plans—and this newly added reconciliation provision seeks to further restrict this coverage,” said Anna Bernstein, Guttmacher’s principal federal policy advisor.

The provision seeking to ban gender-affirming care could affect the 152,000 trans adults who are on Medicaid, according to the UCLA Williams Institute. As of 2019, a dozen states already excluded coverage for such care in their Medicaid plans, but 18 states and DC. included, or were in the process of including, gender-affirming care in their Medicaid plans, according to the Williams Institute.

Jennifer C. Pizer, chief legal officer at Lambda Legal, a civil rights nonprofit supporting LGBTQ rights, told Mother Jones that the inclusion was an “overt, mean-spirited, unjustifiable attack on transgender people by members of the House.” She hopes it won’t pass the Senate, but if it does, it will be challenged. “There’s no legitimate reason for it. And so whatever standard of constitutional review is used, it should fail,” she emphasized.

Kelly Baden, vice president of public policy at Guttmacher, called the bill “a reckless and dangerous encapsulation of President Trump’s health policy agenda that seeks to strip people of health care options and bodily autonomy.”

“We are witnessing an escalating crisis in reproductive health and rights—and this bill would only exacerbate those harms and worsen our economy,” Baden added. “We urge the Senate to reject this bill and eliminate all measures that erode our bodily autonomy and access to essential health care.”

When it comes to defunding Planned Parenthood, Alexis McGill Johnson, president and CEO of Planned Parenthood Action Fund, said in a statement on Thursday that if the budget passes as proposed, nearly 200 of its health centers could be forced to close and more than 1.1 million patients could lose access to health care. The organization has said that more than half of its patients rely on federally-funded programs to access its care, and research has shown that other health centers “would need to dramatically increase their contraceptive client caseloads” if Planned Parenthood was, indeed, defunded.

“Cancers will go undetected, [sexually-transmitted infections] will go untreated, and birth control will be harder to get—all while charging the taxpayers nearly $300 million to do it,” McGill Johnson said, referring to the preliminary estimate from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) that the provision to defund Planned Parenthood would increase the deficit over a decade, which I previously wrote about. (NOTUS reported Wednesday that some hardline conservatives said they believe Planned Parenthood should be defunded even if it would increase the deficit, with one, Rep. Ralph Norman (R-S.C.), saying he did not believe the CBO’s projection.)

As Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) said in a speech on the House floor at around 2 a.m.: “When this country wakes up in the morning, there will be consequences to pay for this.”

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Federal Judge to Trump: Reinstate Fired Education Department Employees

A federal judge has ordered the Department of Education to reinstate thousands of employees it fired in advancing President Donald Trump’s mission to eliminate the department.

On Thursday, US District Judge Myong J. Joun granted a preliminary injunction on the department’s widespread reduction in force.Initiatedin early March, the firings dealt a massive blow to the agency’s workforce even before Trump signed an executive order directing Education Secretary Linda McMahon to “facilitate the closure” to the “maximum extent appropriate and permitted by law.” The department, which is responsible for disbursing funds to states and schools, enforcing civil rights laws, and overseeing federal student loans, was already one of the smallest in the federal government. Its staffing of just over 4,100 was cut by more than half and seven of the agency’s 12 regional civil rights offices were shuttered.

Despite the Trump administration’s claims that the firings were to enhance the agency’s efficiency, Joun wrote that the “record abundantly reveals that Defendants’ true intention is to effectively dismantle the Department” without Congressional approval. There is “no evidence that the RIF has actually made the Department more efficient,” Joun wrote. “Rather, the record is replete with evidence of the opposite.”

In two lawsuits filed by school districts, education groups, and more than a dozen states, plaintiffs outlined the predictable chaos the firings caused. All attorneys specializing in K-12 grants, equity grants, and grants for disabled students were fired. The entire staff of the Office of English Language Acquisition was eliminated. Reductions at the Federal Student Aid office hamstrung the remaining staff’s ability to oversee the federal government’s $1.6 trillion student loan portfolio. State education departments reported being unable to withdraw already-allocated federal funds and receive reimbursements.

“The record abundantly reveals that Defendants’ true intention is to effectively dismantle the Department.”

The Office of Civil Rights has been responsible for investigating violations of and enforcing federal anti-discrimination statutes, including Title IX for sex discrimination, Title VI for race discrimination, the Americans with Disabilities Act, and Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973. As detailed in the judge’s ruling, the sudden closures of more than half of the regional offices halted communication between civil rights investigators and students and their families.

One of the fired employees, Ariel Shepetovskiy, an attorney in the Cleveland, Ohio, Office of Civil Rights who joined the department in September, told me she was locked out of the case managing system even before she received her RIF notice. The entire staff of the Cleveland office was eliminated, with no communication from the department detailing plans for transferring existing cases to the remaining offices.

“Many people at OCR have been there for years, for decades, and have built really, really long and strong careers, but the other thing that they’ve been building is relationships.”

“Many people at OCR have been there for years, for decades, and have built really, really long and strong careers, but the other thing that they’ve been building is relationships,” Shepetovskiy says. “Now all of the expertise, and all of those relationships, are gone.”

Most Education Department responsibilities are codified by law and cannot be eliminated without an act of Congress. Bypassing Congress completely in their evisceration of the agency,Trump, McMahon, and the administration’s Republican allies in Congress have offered suggestions for where its responsibilities could be transferred. The Department of Justice could handle civil rights complaints, for example, and the Department of Health and Human Services could oversee funding allocations under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act. As my colleague Julia Métraux has reported, the arch-conservative blueprint, Project 2025, suggested IDEA funds be administered through the Administration for Community Living. Meanwhile, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. eliminated the ACL in late March.

The plaintiffs, Joun emphasized, are likely to succeed in arguing that the RIF served to effectively render the department unable to perform its statutory duties. In addition to blocking the firings, the preliminary injunction halts further implementation of Trump’s executive order to dismantle the department. Joun ordered the Trump administration to provide a status report within 72 hours on steps taken to restore the agency “to the status quo” that had existed before the president was inaugurated.

The evidence in the proceedings, Joun wrote, “paint a stark picture of the irreparable harm that will result from financial uncertainty and delay, impeded access to vital knowledge on which students and educators rely, and loss of essential services for America’s most vulnerable student populations.”

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House GOPers Just Voted for the Biggest Medicaid Cuts in History—After Promising to Protect It

House Republicans whose seats are not safe in the 2026 midterm elections voted early on Thursday morning to advance the largest cuts to Medicaid in history, endangering health care for millions of the poorest Americans. Several cast these votes after making promises to protect the Great Society program that provides health care to millions.

Democrats are already hoping the vote will cause them to lose re-election next year. “When the votes are ultimately cast on that first Tuesday in November,” House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries said, “this day may very well turn out to be the day that House Republicans lost control of the United States House of Representatives.”

“Anyone saying the GOP is cutting Medicaid is lying,”
Rep. Luna falsely posted.

The first months of the Trump administration have been dominated by its authoritarian impulses and corrupt money-grabbing, from disappearing people to El Salvador to his on-again-off-again trade war to the president collecting millions through his personal crypto currency. But the bill Republicans just passed is classic GOP: Cut vital benefits for the poor to line the pockets of the rich.

The bill places work requirements on Medicaid recipients, which is expected to cost millions of people their health insurance. Pushing people off the Medicaid rolls is the point, because it is how the GOP found some of the savings it would use to offset tax cuts for the wealthy. (The bill also funds the tax cuts by increasing the deficit by trillions of dollars.)

The work requirements are slated to go into effect by the end of 2026. Notably, that deadline is a few weeks after the 2026 midterm elections, an obvious attempt to shield House members from any political fallout.

Still, Democrats will surely attempt to use elected Republicans’ own past statements they would preserve Medicaid against them as they try to take back control of Congress.

Rep. David Valadao (R-Calif.), for example, posted less than a month ago “I won’t support a final reconciliation bill that includes any reduction in Medicaid coverage for vulnerable populations.” In 2023, the Hill recently reported, “48.7 percent of Valadao’s constituents… were covered by Medicaid.” But this morning he voted for the bill.

His colleague, Rep. Kent Calvert (R-Calif.), likewise assured constituents “I am committed to protecting Medicaid benefits for Americans who rely on the program, including children, mothers, and the disabled.” He also voted yes.

From Arizona, GOP Rep. Juan Ciscomani supported the bill, despite having promised that “from day one in Congress” he was “committed to ensuring access to Medicaid to those who need it.” That’s the opposite of what work requirements do, as it is not always possible for people to find jobs necessary to keep their Medicaid, and those with jobs often lose it because of onerous reporting requirements.

Or take Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-Fla.) who posted bluntly in March, that “Anyone saying the GOP is cutting Medicaid is lying.”

The bill now goes to the Senate. If it passes there without major modification and Trump signs it into law, as appears very likely, then Republicans will have succeeded in slashing both Medicaid and food support through SNAPat the same time the president’s economic policies are threatening to put the US economy into a recession.

It’s an opportunity for Democrats—if they can convince voters that the president and congressional Republicans are to blame for the coming carnage.

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For Trump’s Interior Secretary Doug Burgum There’s “Plenty of Time” to Solve Climate Crisis

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

The US has “plenty of time” to solve the climate crisis,” the interior secretary, Doug Burgum, told a House committee on Tuesday.

The comment came on his first of two days of testimony to House and Senate appropriators in which he defended Donald Trump’s proposed budget, dubbed the “one big, beautiful bill”, that would extend tax reductions enacted during Trump’s first term, while cutting $5 billion of funding for the Department of the Interior.

In addition to slashing spending on national parks, historic preservation, and other key interior department programming, the budget proposal would cancel billions of dollars in infrastructure investments, environmental programs,and research grants. It would also gut funding for renewable energy, including by rolling back clean tax credits from Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act.

Maine representative Chellie Marie Pingree, the ranking member of the House appropriations committee, said this would amount to “effectively gutting this critical sector”.

“This disregards the climate change concerns that we have,” she told Burgum at Tuesday’s hearing.

“We will have plenty of time to solve any issues related to potential temperature change.”

Scientists have long warned that world leaders must urgently phase out fossil fuels and boost green technology to avert the worst possible consequences of the climate crisis. But Burgum said that is not the threat the Trump administration is worried about.

“The existential threats that this administration is focusing on are: Iran cannot get a nuclear weapon, and we can’t lose the AI arms race to China,” he said. “That’s the number one and number two. If we solve those two things, then we will have plenty of time to solve any issues related to potential temperature change.”

Despite Burgum’s reference to “potential” warming, there is scientific consensus that the climate crisis is already reshaping global weather patterns and ecosystems, increasing the severity and frequency of extreme weather events, and costing the US billions of dollars a year.

During Trump’s first four months in office, the interior department has already seen massive cuts to staff, including the firing of 2,300 probationary employees and the resignation of 2,700 workers who accepted buyout packages.

“How you can sit there and hold somebody’s feet to the fire when there’s a whole bunch of empty desks,” asked Republican representative Mark Amodei of Nevada.

Representative Pingree said she was “disappointed” by the changes to the agency.

“In just four months, the department has been destabilized, and there’s been a stunning decline in its ability to meet its mission,” she told Burgum.

Burgum’s firing-happy approach to leading the interior department, as well as his fossil fuel boosterism, have sparked outrage among activists in Washington, DC. Ahead of his Tuesday testimony, consumer advocacy group Public Citizen unveiled a new video criticizing Burgum’s efforts to sell off public lands to the oil, gas, and mining industries, which is being played on a mobile billboard circulating outside the Capitol.

“Americans want clean air, access to nature, and a future where public lands stay public,” Alan Zibel, a research director with Public Citizen, said. “Instead, they’re getting a secretary more interested in pleasing big oil than protecting our shared resources.”

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Trump Admin Forges Ahead With Taking Luxury Jet From Qatar

So much for the Constitution.

The Trump administration has accepted the offer of a free jet from Qatar despite ample concerns from both Democrats and Republicans that the gift would potentially violate the Emoluments Clause of the Constitution, which prohibits any person holding elected office from accepting gifts “from any King, Prince, or foreign State.”

Sean Parnell, chief spokesperson for the Pentagon, confirmed in a statement to Mother Jones on Wednesday afternoon that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth hadaccepted the Boeing 747. “The Department of Defense will work to ensure proper security measures and functional-mission requirements are considered for an aircraft used to transport the President of the United States,” Parnell added. He directed further questions to the Air Force, whose spokesperson said the branch was “preparing to award a contract to modify a Boeing 747 aircraft for executive airlift,” adding that details related to the contract are classified. The plane will require security upgrades that would take “years, not months” to complete, according to a Defense Department official who previously spoke to the New York Times.

The gift is among the largest foreign gifts the United States has ever received and has drawn sharp condemnation over the clear ethical questions it poses. In an apparent effort to minimize such concerns, Trump has claimed that he will eventually transfer the plane to his presidential library once his term ends and denied that he would use it for personal travel. But Trump has not offered any concrete legal assurances binding him to those promises. As Mother Jones reported last week, he would face few restrictions on using it even if he hands it over to his library foundation.

This, of course, is a pattern for the president. Trump and his allies have similarly claimed that leftover funds from the $250 million raised for his inauguration, money raised by a pro-Trump PAC hosting one-on-one meetings with the president for up to $5 million, and settlements paid by media companies he has sued will all go to his library fund. But Trump has yet to present details on how those funds would be transferred. Nor has his office addressed concerns that the library foundation could effectively function as a slush fund to provide him and his family with things likesalaries, office space or transportation.

The Trump administration’s characterization of the jet, which it has repeatedly portrayed as a gift, also appears suspect. As CNN reported this week, it was the Trump administration that first asked Qatar about potentially buying the plane in light of long-delayed upgrades to Air Force One that remain ongoing. But the White House has insisted otherwise. On Monday, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt claimed that Qatar “has offered to donate this plane to the United States Air Force, where that donation will be accepted according to all legal and ethical obligations.”

Trump, too, has staunchly defended taking the plane, even as his own allies have raised concerns about it. When NBC News Chief White House Correspondent Peter Alexander asked Trump about the Pentagon officially accepting the plane following his Wednesday Oval Office meeting with the president of South Africa, Trump did what he often does when cornered: launched personal insults and evaded the question.

“What are you talking about? You know, you oughta get out of here,” Trump replied. “They’re giving the U.S. Air Force a jet, okay, and it’s a great thing.” He went on to call for an investigation into Brian Roberts, chairman and CEO of Comcast, which owns NBCUniversal, the parent company of NBC News. “You’re a disgrace,” Trump concluded. “No more questions from you.”

But unfortunately for Trump, questions about his new Qatari jet are likely just beginning.

After President Trump shows videos about genocide, @PeterAlexander asks about jet from Qatar.

President Trump: ""What are you talking about? You know, you oughta get out of here…you're a terrible reporter." pic.twitter.com/4KgjHOvEUF

— CSPAN (@cspan) May 21, 2025

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Unpacking the Flaws of Techbro Dreams of the Future

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

Elon Musk once joked: “I would like to die on Mars. Just not on impact.” Musk is, in fact, deadly serious about colonizing the Red Planet. Part of his motivation is the idea of having a “back-up” planet in case some future catastrophe renders the Earth uninhabitable.

Musk has suggested that a million people may be calling Mars home by 2050 — and he’s hardly alone in his enthusiasm. Venture capitalist Marc Andreessen believes the world can easily support 50 billion people, and more than that once we settle other planets. And Jeff Bezos has spoken of exploiting the resources of the moon and the asteroids to build giant space stations. “I would love to see a trillion humans living in the solar system,” he has said.

Not so fast, cautions science journalist Adam Becker. In “More Everything Forever,” Becker details a multitude of flaws in the grand designs espoused not only by Musk, Andreessen, and Bezos, but by Sam Altman, Nick Bostrom, Ray Kurzweil, and an array of tech billionaires and future-focused thinkers whose ambitions are transforming today’s world and shaping how we think about the centuries to come.

Becker targets not only their aspirations for outer space, but also their claims about artificial intelligence, the need for endless growth, their ambitions for eradicating aging and death, and more—as suggested by the book’s subtitle: “AI Overlords, Space Empires, and Silicon Valley’s Crusade to Control the Fate of Humanity.”

Becker finds the idea of colonizing Mars easy to deflate, explaining that dying may in fact be the only thing that humans are likely to do there. “The radiation levels are too high, the gravity is too low, there’s no air, and the dirt is made of poison,” he bluntly puts it. He notes that we have a hard time convincing people to spend any great length of time in Antarctica—a far more hospitable place. “Mars,” Becker says, “would make Antarctica look like Tahiti.”

“Nobody’s going to boldly go anywhere, not to live out their lives and build families and communities—not now, not soon, and maybe not ever.”

The solar system’s other planets (and moons) are equally unwelcoming, and star systems beyond our own solar system are unimaginably distant. He concludes: “Nobody’s going to boldly go anywhere, not to live out their lives and build families and communities—not now, not soon, and maybe not ever.”

Becker sees space colonization as not only unrealistic but also morally dubious. Why, he asks, are the billionaires so keen on leaving our planet as opposed to taking care of it? He interviews the astronomer Lucianne Walkowicz, who sees their focus on killer asteroids and rogue AIs—and their seeming disinterest in climate change—as an evasion of responsibility. “The idea of backing up humanity is about getting out of responsibility by making it seem that we have this Get Out of Jail Free card,” Walkowicz says.

Becker targets not only tech gurus but also so-called longtermists (who prioritize the flourishing of humans who will live eons from now), rationalists (who believe decision-making should be guided by reason and logic), and transhumanists (who hold a variety of beliefs related to extending human life spans and merging humanity with AI). These groups perceive the future in a multitude of ways, but underlying many of their visions is what Becker sees as a misplaced faith in artificial intelligence, sometimes imagined to be on the verge of blossoming into “AGI” (artificial general intelligence) but also potentially perilous if its goals diverge from those of humanity (the so-called alignment problem).

Not everyone shares this fear of AI running amok, and Becker makes a point of speaking with skeptics such as Jaron Lanier, Melanie Mitchell, and Yann LeCun, all of whom are far from convinced that this is a real danger. He also cites the entrepreneur and web developer Maciej Cegłowski, who has described the unaligned superintelligent AI alignment problem as “the idea that eats smart people.” Still, the book is not mere AI-guru-bashing on Becker’s part: He spells out what it is these devotees believe, before presenting a more skeptical alternative view.

Becker also notes that computer power may not be destined to increase as quickly as many proponents imagine. He scrutinizes Moore’s law, the notion that the number of transistors in integrated circuits doubles roughly every two years, noting that this growth will inevitably come up against limitations imposed by the laws of physics. Becker points out that Gordon Moore himself estimated in 2010 that the current rate of exponential growth would come to an end in 10 or 20 years—in other words, now or very soon.

As Becker sees it, faith in Moore’s law is just one facet of a poorly thought-out commitment to endless growth that some technophiles seem to be advocating. Exponential growth, in particular, is by definition not sustainable. He cites an analogy that inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil has made about the growth of lily pads in a pond: Every few days, the number of pads will have doubled, and before you know it they’ve covered the whole pond. “That’s true,” Becker writes, “but that’s also where the lily pads’ growth ends, because they can’t cover more than 100 percent of the pond. Every exponential trend works like this. All resources are finite; nothing lasts forever; everything has limits.”

Becker says that if we keep using energy at our current (and accelerating) rate, we’ll be exploiting the full energy output of the sun in 1,350 years, and a bit more than a millennium later, all the energy emitted by all the stars in the Milky Way—and so on.

Becker also takes issue with the idea at the core of longtermism—that the needs of countless billions or even trillions of future humans are as important as the needs of those alive on Earth today—and perhaps more important, because of their (eventual) vast numbers. (Many of these ideas are spelled out in philosopher William MacAskill’s 2022 book, “What We Owe the Future.”)

For the longtermists, our actions today ought to be focused on allowing this bountiful future to unfold, even if it means sacrifices in the here and now. The problem, writes Becker, is that we just can’t know what conditions will prevail centuries from now, let alone millennia, so it’s presumptuous to imagine that today’s decisions can be tailored to benefit people who won’t be born for an unfathomably long time.

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The Christian Right’s Plot to Purge Pro-Palestine Activism From the United States

For the last 18 months, the Heritage Foundation, the right-wing think tank responsible for Project 2025, has been organizing to quash pro-Palestine activism in the United States, the New York Times reported this weekend. The initiative is called Project Esther—after the courageous Old Testament queen who saved the Jews from a wicked Persian king—and it recommends that government officials instruct college administrators to jettison pro-Palestine curriculum or risk losing federal funding. It also called for foreign students who took part in anti-Israel demonstrations to be deported. Overall, Project Esther says its goal is to “dismantle the infrastructure that sustains the [Hamas Support Network] and associated movements’ antisemitic violence inside the United States of America within 12 to 24 months.”

In November 2023, a month after Hamas attacked Gaza and pro-Palestinian demonstrations took place across the US, the Heritage Foundation announced the precursor to the Esther Project: a coalition called the National Task Force to Combat Antisemitism. This group, it said at the time, was “dedicated to combating antisemitism at home and abroad and to supporting the state of Israel.” Notably, the coalition was composed of about a dozen groups, generally not Jewish but rather evangelicals who proudly call themselves “Christian Zionists.” Many of them are big names in the world of right-wing activism: the evangelical nonprofit Family Research Council, the conservative Christian advocacy group Independent Women’s Forum, and the Trump-aligned America First Policy Institute, to name a few.

Last year, I wrote about how, for some Christian Zionists, Israel plays a key role in their end-times scenario of choice. To bring about the Messiah’s second coming, some believe, the Jews must return to Israel. Once that happens, however, most of the Jewish inhabitants of Israel will perish, and those who remain will finally accept Jesus and convert to Christianity. This set of beliefs is common among adherents of the New Apostolic Reformation, a network of charismatic Christians who believe that God speaks directly to modern-day prophets and apostles and that Christians are called to take dominion over the United States. They will do so by electing Christian leaders who will, in turn, appoint Christian judges, enact laws and policies that promote Christian values, and allow Christianity to be taught in public schools.

Some of the Christian Zionist participants in the Heritage Foundation’s coalition appeared in another of my pieces last year. For example:

Take the Philos Project, a decade-old nonprofit with an annual budget of $8 million whose mission is to “promote positive Christian engagement in the Near East.” The group, which in 2020 received a $9.4 million grant from the public charity National Philanthropic Trust, says on its website that it supports “some variant of the two-state solution—ideally a Jewish state with a Palestinian minority and a Palestinian state with a Jewish minority.”

On Facebook in January, the organization’s executive director, Luke Moon, posted a photo of himself in Israel proudly signing a bomb that was “bound for Hezbollah.” That summer on Facebook, he posted a photo of himself wearing a T-shirt with a picture of Jesus giving the thumbs-up sign, accompanied by the slogan “Jesus Was a Zionist.” Philos Project leaders devoted a recent podcast episode to debunking what they called a “conspiracy theory” that AIPAC wields political power.

Last October, the Philos Project hosted an event in Washington, DC, to recognize the one-year anniversary of Hamas’ attack on Israel. Headlining the event was then-vice-presidential candidate JD Vance. In March on Facebook, Moon posted a photo of himself meeting with Israeli president Benjamin Netanyahu. Moon also announced a new group, the Conference of Christian Presidents, a group of leaders of like-minded organizations who he said would “help ensure the unique relationship between Israel and the United States goes from strength to strength.”

According to the New York Times, Moon was one of the founders of the Esther Project; the others were a charismatic Christian leader and president of the Latino Coalition for Israel Mario Bramnick, senior Heritage Foundation staffer James Carafano, and Ellie Cohanim, who served as Trump’s antisemitism envoy during his first presidency. Of those four, only Cohanim is Jewish.

Regent University, a Christian college in Virginia Beach, Virginia, also is included in Heritage’s task force. It’s home to the Israel Institute, a new center that says it is dedicated to “promoting robust Christian scholarship on Israel,” which was founded in part by Regent’s Robertson School of Government dean, Michele Bachmann, the former Republican representative from Iowa and 2012 presidential hopeful. Bachmann, a devoted Christian Zionist, has emerged as a firebrand on the subject of Israel and Palestine. As I wrote:

Last year, in remarks at a conference hosted by the right-wing student group Turning Point USA, Bachmann said of Palestinians, “They need to be removed from that land. That land needs to be turned into a national park.” In an October 2023 appearance in Los Angeles, Bachmann theorized that “wokeness” in Israel prevented the military from anticipating the attack. “It’s entirely possible that perhaps the intel service in Israel also had wokeness and decided not to pass the information along,” she said.

Project Esther appears determined to ensure that Americans don’t fall prey to that same wokeness, with the goal of ensuring that all pro-Palestine groups become associated in the public consciousness with Hamas and terrorism. “The virulently anti-Israel, anti-Zionist, and anti-American groups comprising the so-called pro-Palestinian movement inside the United States are exclusively pro-Palestine and—more so—pro-Hamas,” the group’s initial report states. To silence that movement, it says, Project Esther must act strategically. “After 9/11 and more than 20 years of the global war on terrorism, the vast majority of Americans associate al-Qaeda and Islamic extremism with ‘bad,’” the report says. “This is precisely the effect Project Esther strives to generate when Americans hear ‘Hamas Supporters’ or ‘Hamas Support Network.’”

The Trump administration hasn’t officially acknowledged Project Esther, although many of its initial goals have been accomplished or at least are being implemented. The government has withheld funds for Ivy League colleges and universities, for example, and it has made aggressive efforts to deport student activists. As Robert Greenway, Heritage Foundation’s National Security Director, told the New York Times, it’s “no coincidence that we called for a series of actions to take place privately and publicly, and they are now happening.”

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She Denied Mel Gibson a Gun—Then Trump’s DOJ Fired Her

When Liz Oyer was appointed US pardon attorney in 2022 by President Joe Biden, she’d landed her dream job. As a longtime public defender, Oyer was now in a position to advise the president on the backlog of thousands of individuals seeking presidential clemency. But earlier this year, her dream job ended abruptly.

In March, Oyer was asked to make a recommendation to Attorney General Pam Bondi to reinstate actor Mel Gibson’s gun rights, which were rescinded after a domestic violence conviction in 2011. Oyer reviewed the case and refused. Within hours, she says she was terminated.

Last month, Oyer testified about her firing in front of Congress. She not only accused the Department of Justice of “ongoing corruption” and abuses of power, but she also said the administration tried to send armed US marshals to her home carrying a letter warning her against testifying. Oyer says it felt like “an attempt to display the power of the Department of Justice” and “make me afraid of telling the truth about the circumstances leading up to my termination.”

In a statement, Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche called Oyer’s allegations about her firing erroneous and said her decision to voice those accusations is “in direct violation of her ethical duties as an attorney and is a shameful distraction from our critical mission to prosecute violent crime, enforce our nation’s immigration laws, and make America safe again.”

On this week’s episode of More To The Story, Oyer sits down with host Al Letson to discuss the details of her firing, the role of the US pardon attorney, and how an advocate and defender of January 6 insurrectionists took her place inside the Justice Department.

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

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FDA to Cut Covid Booster Access, Excluding In-Home Carers

On Tuesday, the Food and Drug Administration announced that Covid booster shots will be limited to people over 65 and those with pre-existing health conditions that would put them at higher risk of acute complications.

The FDA’s move is not surprising, given that Trump-appointed Covid contrarians Vinay Prasad, the director of the Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, and Marty Makary, the recently confirmed FDA commissioner, have openly advocated for such restrictions since before the initial vaccine was even approved. “The FDA will approve vaccines for high-risk persons and, at the same time, demand robust, gold-standard data on persons at low risk,” the two wrote in a New England Journal of Medicine article that was published on Tuesday.

Many groups of people face new or added risks as a consequence of the FDA’s decision; notably, the agency has not signaled any intention to establish carveouts for caregivers of people who still qualify for Covid vaccines under its new rules. People who qualify for the vaccine, including disabled children, those with cancer, and aging adults, may rely on the support of caregivers to keep them healthy and help them function in day-to-day life. Even with masking and other protective measures, added immunity for people caring for those with Covid, or at risk of contracting it, is important in reducing the odds of infection and of subsequently contracting Long Covid, which 20 million people in the US have been diagnosed with.

“By restricting vaccine access to caregivers who don’t meet age or high-risk criteria,” said Jason Resendez, CEO of the National Alliance for Caregiving, “the FDA creates a dangerous public health gap, as unvaccinated caregivers face increased risk of contracting and transmitting Covid-19 to the older adults and seriously ill individuals who depend on their care.”

Beth Connor, who lives in North Carolina—which also enacted a mask ban in 2024—is the mother of a six-year-old with a chronic lung disease who has had a tracheostomy. Her son requires round-the-clock care, which is provided by her, her husband, and a nurse; they would not be eligible for vaccines under the FDA’s new policy.

“If one of us were to get sick, it would really impact our ability to care for our son, who is very dependent on us for meeting all of his basic needs and keeping him safe,” Connor told me.

Anna Sanders, who is based in Texas, lost her dad following a kidney transplant after one of his nurses came to work with Covid. Sanders, now assisting in care for her 71-year-old mother, is concerned that “limiting access to the vaccine will only cause more situations like this.”

Other options—like traveling to Canada to get vaccinated—are much less practical for families like Connor’s, with a child who has complex health issues. Other full-time caregivers are in the same boat.

Like Sanders, Connor is concerned that limiting who can get the Covid vaccine, and thereby lowering herd immunity, would limit what her family is able to do for and with her son.

“Once we got [the Covid vaccine] and more people getting it, it felt like we could actually go to a playground, go to a library, just things that our kid enjoys,” Connor said. “If people are not able to get it, that really impacts our ability just to be in the community.”

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Trump Still Hasn’t Produced Plans to Make IVF More Accessible

Monday marked 90 days from February 18—the day President Donald Trump signed an executive order that falsely claimed to fulfill a campaign promise to expand access to in vitro fertilization, also known as IVF.

In reality, all the executive order actually did was commission a relatively low-level Trump administration official to submit to the president a list of policy recommendations.The deadline for those recommendations has now come and gone, and the White House has yet to announce any new actions to expand access to IVF or clarify its timeline for doing so.

Barbara Collura, president and CEO of the advocacy group Resolve: The National Infertility Association, is one of several advocates I spoke to who say they’re confused about whether the White House actually has any plans to help make it easier for Americans to have kids, as Trump and some of his closest advisors, including Elon Musk, have pledged to do.

“There was a big deal made about this executive order in February,” she added. “IVF is a big deal. This President has made it a big deal. It impacts a lot of people in our country, and we’re waiting. We would love to know what those policy recommendations are.” IVF can cost up to $20,000 per cycle, and less than half of states have laws mandating insurance coverage for fertility treatments, according to Resolve. More than 40 percent of American adults say they or someone they know have used fertility treatments, according to Pew Research.

In response to a question from Mother Jones on Monday night, White House spokesperson Kush Desai said in a statement: “The Domestic Policy Council has worked closely with external stakeholder groups over the past 90 days to deliver on President Trump’s executive order to formulate a plan on expanding IVF access for American families. This is a key priority for President Trump, and the Domestic Policy Council has completed its recommendations.” Spokespeople for the White House did not respond to repeated follow-up questions about whether the recommendations would be released publicly or whether any policy actions on IVF access would be forthcoming and when.

Sean Tipton, chief advocacy and policy officer at the American Society for Reproductive Medicine, a research and advocacy organization, said he expects the White House will publicly announce the recommendations. But he acknowledged that “there’s some growing concern that this administration excels at making big announcements, and then…there’s not a whole lot there when you really start looking.”

Adding to Tipton and Collura’s frustration is the fact that their groups were not among those consulted by the White House on how to expand IVF access, despite their leadership on the issue. “We [didn’t] need 90 days,” Collura told me. “We’ve been doing this for 40 years. I could put these recommendations down in the matter of a couple of hours. This is what we do: We advocate for access.”

Back in February, Tipton ticked off a few ways that Trump could immediately expand IVF access, including requiring the health insurance programs for both federal employees and members of the military and their families to include fertility benefits, and pushing Congress to pass legislation that would require health insurance companies to cover IVF. Tipton had previously said he and other advocates wished the HOPE with Fertility Services Act, which would require health insurance plans to provide appropriate fertility coverage and had bipartisan support when it was introduced last year, would be re-introduced in March, but that has yet to happen.

Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Fla.), who is co-sponsoring that legislation with Rep. Zach Nunn (R-Iowa), said she hoped that Trump would deliver on his promise, and that she planned to continue advocating for the HOPE Act. “Trump promised frantic families that IVF insurance coverage was coming. I hope he doesn’t break their hearts now that the 90 days on his EO have lapsed,” she said in a statement provided to Mother Jones.

The New York Times recently reported that the White House consulted infertility doctors and conservative policy groups that are skeptical of IVF. The process typically involves discarding embryos, which some of the most ardent abortion opponents contend should be treated as full human beings. One of the companies named in the Times report, Inception Fertility, said in a recent post on LinkedIn that they were part of an alliance of fertility providers that went to the White House to make policy recommendations. One of their suggestions was to create a health workforce grant program to create more reproductive endocrinologists and embryologists.

That recommendation is particularly ironic given last month’s massive purge of workers from the Department of Health and Human Services. Among those whose jobs were slashed was the six person team working on assisted reproductive technology (ART), including IVF, at the Division of Reproductive Health at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, as I reported at the time. Their work included collecting data from assisted reproductive technology clinics on their pregnancy success rates. A former member of the team told me they were in the middle of researching how to make treatments cheaper through state-mandated insurance when they were fired. “How does cutting this program support the administration’s position?” the former staffer previously asked. “I don’t understand at all.”

Democrats and reproductive rights advocates have pointed to moves like the firing of that team—as well as congressional Republicans’ push to defund Planned Parenthood in the reconciliation bill and their repeated refusal to vote on a bill to protect IVF access during the last session—as an indication that Trump and his party do not actually care about expanding access to the treatment.

Reps. Diana DeGette (D-Colo.) and Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.), co-chairs of the Congressional Reproductive Freedom Caucus, said in a joint statement provided to Mother Jones that the silence from the White House makes clear that “the Trump administration’s February Executive Order was nothing but an empty, performative gesture while they continued their assault on reproductive health care.”

“We have always known that Donald Trump’s comments about IVF were lip service and that he was never serious about wanting to make IVF more accessible,” said Mini Timmaraju, president and CEO of the nonporift advocacy group Reproductive Freedom for All.

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Does Kristi Noem Even Know What Habeas Corpus Is?

Days after the Trump administration threatened to attempt to suspend habeas corpus in an effort to bulldoze due process protections for its mass deportation campaign, one key Cabinet member seems a bit confused about the scheme.

“What is habeas corpus?” Sen. Maggie Hassan of New Hampshire asked Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem during a committee hearing Tuesday.

“Habeas corpus is a constitutional right that the president has to be able to remove people from this country, and suspend their right to—,” Noem responded, before a visibly alarmed Hassan intervened.

“Let me stop you,” the Democratic lawmaker interjected. “Excuse me, that is incorrect.”

“President Lincoln used it,” Noem insisted.

Hassan then corrected the record: “Habeas corpus is the legal principle that requires the government to provide a public reason for detaining and imprisoning people. If not for that protection, the government could simply arrest people, including American citizens, and hold them indefinitely for no reason.”

“I support habeas corpus,” Noem said later in the exchange. “I also recognize that the president of the United States has the authority under the Constitution to decide if it should be suspended or not.”

But in response to similar claims from the administration, a number of legal experts have noted that it is actually “clear from the Constitution’s text and structure” that only Congress, not the president unilaterally, can suspend habeas corpus. Among other things, the suspension clause at issue appears in Article I of the Constitution, which lays out the powers of Congress. According to George Mason law professor Ilya Somin, “most legal scholars” believe that only Congress can suspend habeas corpus, and Georgetown’s Steve Vladeck described this as a “near-universal consensus.”

Hassan emphasized this point on Tuesday. “It has never been done without approval of Congress,” she said. “Even Abraham Lincoln got retroactive approval from Congress.”

Later in the hearing, however, Noem admitted that she was unaware of key aspects of this argument. Asked by Sen. Andy Kim if she knew where in the Constitution the suspension of habeas corpus was discussed, Noem replied: “I do not. Nope.”

So, some simple questions emerge: Does the secretary know what habeas corpus is? Does she understand that it is a fundamental right belonging to individuals and not a dictatorial privilege belonging to the president? Do she and her administration colleagues know who can suspend habeas corpus and when?

Her responses on Tuesday don’t inspire confidence.

We’ve reached out to Noem’s office to learn more. But in the meantime, it’s everyone’s responsibility to follow Hassan’s example and forcefully correct the record.

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Report: Abortion Providers Are Confronting a New Wave of Extremism

In November 2023, while an abortion provider in the South was on vacation, someone broke into their home, shattered the windows, and scribbled “Baby Killer” on a whiteboard. The case is still open.

That same year, a man crashed his car into a new abortion clinic in Danville, Illinois, trying to start a fire. A few months after that,someone left a one-star Google review for a Florida clinic that read, “I have a bomb waiting to go off.” The clinic was evacuated and the FBI was called to investigate.

These incidents, highlighted in a recent report from the National Abortion Federation, are among hundreds of threats and attacks experienced by abortion providers across the US in the nearly three years since Roe v. Wade was overturned. The end of Roe “emboldened anti-abortion extremists,” NAF reports, leading to “an immediate spike in major incidents,” including arsons, burglaries, and death threats.

Violence has remained high, NAF says, even as dozens of clinics have shut down in states where abortion has been banned or greatly restricted. In 2023 and 2024, NAF members reported621 trespassing incidents, 296 death threats, 169 acts of vandalism, and almost 130,000 protests targeting their facilities—but the actual numbers are likely much higher. “Providers and clinic staff are experiencing intense burnout and fatigue as a consequence of today’s abortion landscape and may not have the resources, staff, or capacity to track incidents,” the report says. “Sadly, many clinic staff also normalize the unacceptable harassment, threats, and violence they endure, which likely contributes to underreporting.”

Meanwhile, NAF’s members have been bracing for new attacks after President Donald Trump pardoned nearly two dozen anti-abortion activists convicted of targeting providers in recent years. I spoke by phone with Melissa Fowler, NAF’s chief program officer, about the report and the kinds of harassment and threats that abortion providers and patients can expect to encounter for the foreseeable future. Our interview has been lightly condensed and edited for clarity.

The most common incidents in the NAF report were vandalism, trespassing, death threats, and harassment. Do any particular anti-abortion strategies stand out in terms of their approach to targeting abortion providers?

For the last couple of years, there has been a strategy just to try and make it as difficult as possible for patients to access care. That can take the form of obstructing people’s access to entrances, invading clinics, and trying to delay access to care, as well as acts of vandalism and arson designed to actually destroy the physical locations of clinics.

The Trump administration has made clear it plans to dramatically scale back enforcement of the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act, known as the FACE Act, which was passed in 1994. When you look ahead, what impacts could this have on the kinds of violence and disruption that abortion providers experience?

The FACE Act has been an important tool that has led to a decrease in some of the more significant acts of violence that we saw in the ’90s. When you think about the significance of FACE, you have to think about the landscape that necessitated its drafting.After Roe v. Wade was handed down in 1973, we saw an increase in anti-abortion attacks that escalated to large-scale obstructions and blockades. The FACE Act was passed in response to that increasing violence and harassment, and it did lead to an immediate decrease in some of those types of activities. It’s never been enough, but it has been an important tool when enforced.

And in the last few years, we have seen some enforcement and some individuals actually being charged with FACE violations and convicted. Unfortunately, the Trump administration pardoned many of those individuals early this year, which sends a very frightening message to our providers across the country. What we’ve seen this year has been unprecedented, with the Department of Justice saying that they’re only going to enforce the FACE Act in grave circumstances. It shouldn’t take someone being murdered for a law to be enforced.

“Unfortunately, the Trump administration pardoned many of those individuals early this year, which sends a very frightening message to our providers across the country.”

In the ’80s and ’90s, we saw extreme violence against providers that resulted in the murders of several doctors. How does what we saw back then compare to what we’re seeing today?

We are seeing people in the anti-abortion movement calling for a return to those days, calling for people to go back to the large-scale blockades and obstructive events that took place in the early ’90s. Some of the people who were pardoned have already stated that they plan to go back and invade clinics and practice acts of obstruction. So I think we could see a return to that, especially if people know that the FACE Act is not going to be enforced.

One thing that struck me about the NAF report was that attacks and threats can happen anywhere—in red states or blue states. Are there any differences in what providers face depending on their location, or is it pretty much the same across the board?

It really varies. What we’ve seen since the Dobbs decision has been a shift, where some of the states that historically have been more protective of abortion are seeing more incidents of harassment and targeting of providers. This is because when clinics closed in some states, the people who targeted those clinics are now traveling—or have even moved to new communities—to target the clinics that remain open.

We’ve been working with a number of our members since Dobbs who are in areas that are usually more protective and friendlier for providers, and they’re now experiencing an increase in some of these activities, like protests and obstruction. It really can happen anywhere because anti-abortion individuals are focused on wherever there are clinics. Some of it is still happening in the states where abortion is banned, where some of those clinics that are open for other services continue to be targeted as well. Some of them are seeing pregnant patients who are getting an ultrasound and then coming up with a plan on how they’re going to travel and access [abortion] care. So they’re trying to target those patients.

Based on this report, what kinds of harassment and other problems are likely to face abortion providers in the near future?

Since the inauguration, some providers talk about seeing a shift in their protesters—they’re more aggressive and more of them are present. They seem to be emboldened by the pardons and the actions from this administration. I think providers are bracing for that—for increased targeting and a lot more hostility. I think providers are also preparing for more clinic invasions, as some of the people who are pardoned return to those activities.

Providers are trying to think about community support and working with local law enforcement because we know there’s not going to be a lot of support federally. Even now, when the landscape has changed so dramatically and we’ve had so many clinicsclose in really hostile places, there still remains this constant campaign of harassment and violence targeting providers in places where abortion remains legal. It shouldn’t be the way that things are. This shouldn’t be part of the job when you choose to be an abortion provider. States that have wanted to be actively protective of the legal right to abortion need to make sure providers are safe and can run sustainable practices in those states.

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