Labor Department Moves to End Disability Hiring Goal for Federal Contractors

Back in 2013, the Obama administration introduced a low-profile but deeply impactful rule for federal contractors: to remain compliant with Section 503 of the Rehabilitation Act, the legions of firms contracting with the federal government would have to work towards a staff that was at least 7 percent disabled. That target, which went into effect in March 2014, was designed to address hiring disparities and biases that factored into disabled people’s disproportionate unemployment rate.

For more than a decade, those Obama-era targets led to more hiring of disabled employees, countering wage and employment gaps and bringing disabled workers more economic independence. Now, that’s likely to change.

On July 1, the Department of Labor under Trump nominee Lori Chavez-DeRemer introduced a proposed rule that would both end the disability hiring goal for federal contractors and the practice of collecting information about it—supposedly on the basis that those practices violate Americans with Disabilities Act “restrictions on pre-conditional job offer disability inquiries.”

The public comment period for the Labor Department’s proposed rule ends on September 2, after which the department appears likely to put it in practice.

“Instead of expanding opportunities for people with disabilities, we’re rescinding them.”

Anupa Iyer Geevarghese, who was the deputy director of policy in the Labor Department’s Office of Federal Compliance Programs until January, disagrees with the Trump Labor Department’s assessment, calling the move “tragic.” “Instead of expanding opportunities for people with disabilities, we’re rescinding them,” she said.

“When you strip those two provisions away, what is left of [Section] 503, and what are they actually enforcing?,” Geevarghese said. “Anything that gives you a strong basis for enforcement is sort of whittled away.”

Geevarghese’s other question: where this rule is coming from, given the lack of lobbying against it. “The contractor community wasn’t coming out there and opposing 503,” she said.

A 7 percent goal for workers with disabilities is reasonable, not burdensome, Geevarghese said, and hasn’t drawn wide objections from employers—especially given the growing number of people with disabilities who work.

But the Trump administration, especially in its second term, has been persistently hostile to disabled people across the board, from immigration and education to labor and civil rights, sometimes in high-profile attacks but often through procedural changes that slip under the radar. The rule to end disability contracting goals was introduced during a frenetic period when disability advocates were trying to prevent major cuts to Medicaid. (Nor was it lost on Geevarghese that the department’s proposed rule was introduced on the first day of Disability Pride Month.)

Sarah von Schrader, of Cornell University’s Yang-Tan Institute on Employment and Disability, surveyed the implementation of Section 503 rules in a 2018 report, finding that it led to the expansion of disability-focused hiring and recruitment programs, partly through new partnerships with community organizations.

That also incentivized workers to acknowledge disabilities, a valuable step in securing accommodations and better working conditions—otherwise a challenge in an environment where “there’s really no benefit to the individual to self-identifying,” von Schrader noted.

Other Trump administration attacks that harm disabled people, like its plans to gut Medicaid, are longstanding goals that date back to the president’s first term; attacks such as the current one, targeting hiring opportunity programs, have become a more defining characteristic of his second. During Trump’s first term, Geevarghese said, the Department of Labor Office of Federal Compliance Programs director Craig Leen “did these in-depth assessments of employer practices,” even including “areas where compliance needs to be improved.”

There’s nothing stopping federal contractors from continuing to try to meet such targets. “I would think a smart employer would want to continue with some of those with some of those practices that they’ve seen be successful,” said Cornell’s von Schrader.

Such programs, von Schrader contends, are “always about merit.” “Nobody’s hiring people just out of the goodness of their heart,” she continued. “They’re doing it because they want really good, qualified employees.”

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How Trump’s Big Bill Devastates the US Food System

This story was produced in partnership with the Food & Environment Reporting Network.

Even before Donald Trump retook the White House, US policymakers had created a paradox of plenty in the nation’s agricultural system: environmentally destructive overproduction of a few major food commodities, combined with stubbornly high and rising hunger rates, particularly among children. Now, the Trump administration and its congressional allies have found a way to intensify and prolong both crises at once, with a radical reshaping of food and farm policy nestled within their Big Beautiful Bill.

The consequences promise to be devastating for the economy, the environment, and public health.

The BBB slashes food aid for poor people while showering cash on already lavishly subsidized farmers, mainly corn and soybean producers. These food and farm programs normally get funded in a once-every-five-years legislative ritual known as the farm bill that, however imperfect, embodied the kind of bipartisan compromise that has been largely abandoned in American politics.

In 1964, Congress mashed food aid and farm aid together, hoping to protect the flagship US food-aid initiative, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), from budget-cutting conservatives. The idea was that urban congressional members would support farm subsidies in exchange for preserving SNAP, and rural members would support SNAP in exchange for votes for farm subsidies. The compromise has worked ever since, though it began to fray with the rise of the Tea Party in the early 2010s. By bypassing the farm bill—which has been overdue to be reauthorized since 2023—and slipping its biggest programs into Trump’s Big Beautiful one, the GOP leadership has vaporized the old coalition, literally taking food off the tables of poor people and handing much of the savings to large-scale commodity farmers. One more headstone in the teeming graveyard of the Trump era’s shattered norms.

Jonathan Coppess, a former US Senate and Department of Agriculture staffer who now directs the Gardner Agriculture Policy Program at the University of Illinois, calls the move a “smash and grab” of anti-poverty resources on behalf of agribusiness. Under the farm bill, if agribusiness lobbyists or farm-state members of Congress wanted to boost subsidies, he says, they didn’t do it by raiding SNAP. And vice versa for anti-hunger proponents.

The end of the farm bill compromise couldn’t have come at a worse time. During the Covid-19 pandemic, food insecurity fell (after an initial surge) as the federal government poured money into relief efforts, bolstering local food-aid projects across the country. But Congress withdrew the extra funding in 2022 and 2023, and hunger has been rising ever since. Today, 20 percent of American kids regularly have trouble getting enough to eat, according to Feeding America, a nationwide network of food banks and pantries. It’s not hard to see why. Food prices have risen more than 25 percent since 2020, about 10 percentage points higher than the overall rate of inflation, pinching low-income families who spend a larger portion of their income on food than wealthier families.

Even before his signature bill, Trump was already hacking away at anti-hunger spending. In March, the USDA cut $1 billion in congressionally allocated funds to buy produce and meat from local farmers and ranchers from two institutions crucial to keeping hunger at bay: school cafeterias and food banks.

The Big Beautiful Bill revolved around Trump’s fixation on extending $4.5 trillion in tax cuts—passed during his first term—that accrue mostly to the wealthy, while also pumping fresh money into the military and giving hundreds of billions to US Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Desperate for spending cuts to offset at least some of the deficits generated by these moves, House leadership looked to SNAP, which provides food aid to 40 million people, including 16 million children, 8 million seniors, and 4 million non-elderly adults with disabilities, according to a Center on Budget and Policy Priorities analysis of Congressional Budget Office projections. Raiding SNAP had been a dream of congressional Republicans of the ultraconservative Freedom Caucus variety since at least the early 2010s. But because of the old farm bill quid pro quo, even many of the most right-wing farm-state Republicans in Congress declined to go along. Now, under pressure from Trump, which included threats to primary anyone who refused to get on board, almost all of them caved.

The new law slashes $185.9 billion from SNAP over the next 10 years, a 20 percent reduction. It does so by imposing red tape-laden work requirements on some SNAP recipients (including parents with children 14 years old or older) and by shifting as much as 15 percent of the spending burden to the states—knowing full well that many states will fail to take it on. “If a state can’t make up for these massive federal cuts with tax increases or spending cuts elsewhere in its budget, it would have to cut its SNAP program (such as by restricting eligibility or making it harder for people to enroll),” the CBPP analysis states. “Or it could opt out of the program altogether, terminating food assistance entirely in the state.”

The cuts can be expected to end food aid for more than 2 million current recipients nationwide, including 270,000 veterans, people experiencing homelessness, and former foster youth, Jacob Kaufman-Waldron, the CBPP’s director for media relations, wrote in an email.

The nation’s food banks, already pushed to the hilt by growing demand for their services and the earlier Trump cuts, will face another surge of people in need of aid once the SNAP rolls are purged starting later this year. The megabill also cuts $1 trillion from Medicaid and other healthcare resources for low-income people over the next decade. That will further stress grocery budgets, as paying for doctor visits and medicine means less money for food.

“Food banks say they are wholly unprepared to feed millions of Americans when Republicans’ cuts to traditional federal safety net programs take effect,” _Politico’_s Marcia Brown reported recently. “Those food banks would need to double their operations to close the gap SNAP leaves behind.” There’s little hope they can.

While low-income people got kicked in the teeth, large-scale commodity farmers cashed in from Trump’s bill. Driven largely by billions of dollars of annual incentives for all-out production embedded in decades of farm bills, farmers in the upper Midwest have maximized corn and soybean production in ways that have pushed this vital growing region to its ecological limits. Soil is rapidly eroding away there, and pollution from agrichemicals fouls drinking-water sources and feeds harmful algae blooms from the Great Lakes to the Gulf of Mexico. The rapidly warming climate makes both problems worse.

The new bill is projected to lavish an additional $66 billion on commodity growers through 2034, according to an analysis by the University of Illinois Department of Agricultural and Consumer Economics, thus accelerating these deleterious trends over the next decade.

The bounty of corn and soy the bill triggers won’t improve the dietary prospects for low-income people hurt by the SNAP cuts. The Midwest’s commodity farmers produce little healthy food for people to eat. The great bulk of what these subsidies churn out ends up as feed in vast industrial-meat operations and fuel for cars, in the form of ethanol and biodiesel.

The rest is transformed into a stunning array of sweeteners, fats, and additives that suffuse the ultra-processed foods that form the basis of the American diet. A growing body of science indicts this packaged fare as a major driver of the epidemic of diet-related diseases afflicting Americans, including Type 2 diabetes and heart disease. Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., Trump’s Secretary of Health and Human Services, has lambasted their ubiquity on our plates, but any notion that he might influence farm policy to move away from propping them up with subsidies crumbled with the Big Beautiful Bill’s passage.

In short, despite the very-online agitations of Kennedy’s Make America Healthy movement, the Trump administration successfully rammed through a bill that will likely make the least-healthy food even cheaper, rendering it even more attractive to millions of cash-strapped Americans whose food budgets the same bill has cut. And the bill’s massive increase in immigration-enforcement spending will likely target the undocumented people who harvest the bulk of US fruits and vegetables, making healthier choices even more expensive.

“This is a new era of farm bill policy and politics,” says Coppess. SNAP has taken what could be a permanent hit, he says, because it’s designed to help 40 million politically marginal recipients receiving “really small” benefits, while commodity subsidies accrue to a few hundred thousand farmers, backed by a potent agribusiness lobby, receiving “really big” annual payouts.

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The Shocking Rise of One of the Tech Right’s Favorite Posters

Jordan Lasker, an X user who goes by the username Crémieux, recently made news by providing the New York Times with hacked data that showed New York City Democratic mayoral nominee Zohran Mamdani identified as both Asian and African American on his undergraduate application to Columbia University. While Lasker quickly celebrated his time in the spotlight, critics were appalled that the Times was relying on a source they described as a “eugenicist.”

But Lasker, according to interviews with people who know him, appears to have a more worrisome history than the current backlash might suggest.

A Reddit account named Faliceer, which posted highly specific biographical details that overlapped with Lasker’s offline life and which a childhood friend of Lasker’s believes he was behind, wrote in 2016, “I actually am a Jewish White Supremacist Nazi.” The Reddit comment, which has not been previously reported, is one of thousands of now-deleted posts from the Faliceer account obtained by Mother Jones in February. In other posts written between 2014 and 2016, Faliceer endorses Nazism, eugenics, and racism. He wishes happy birthday to Adolf Hitler, says that “I support eugenics,” and uses a racial slur when saying those who are attracted to Black people should kill themselves.

“He’s a pathological liar,” said a person who knew Lasker in college.

“Low IQ savages have NOTHING to contribute to the West,” Faliceer wrote in a representative 2016 post. “If you want them to degenerate anyone’s heritage don’t make it someone else – fuck yourself up. Go have kids with a n—-r but do not push your race traitor propagandism on the masses.”

In the comments, the account used the name “Jordan” on one occasion, made clear that Lasker was a family surname, and posted an internet IP address associated with Lasker’s hometown of Macon, Georgia. There are at least two websites on which a “Jordan Lasker” has used the Faliceer handle. Additionally, a “Zlatan Lasker” of Atlanta has used the Faliceer handle on Chess.com. (On Reddit, Faliceer claimed the German Jewish chess grandmaster Emanuel Lasker was one of his ancestors.)

Lasker’s childhood friend also told Mother Jones that Lasker, who is now 29, according to public records, used the handle Faliceer while playing video games online. After Lasker’s Facebook posts seemed to take a strange turn in college, the friend searched to see whether Lasker was writing anything online as Faliceer. They came across the Reddit account and concluded that their old friend was posting “race science” as Faliceer. (Mother Jones obtained the Reddit posts independently of the friend.)

Numerous personal details shared by the Faliceer account also correspond with Lasker’s own biography. Both became Eagle Scouts around the same time, shared an interest in 5K road races in Macon, and were members of Alpha Epsilon Pi, a Jewish fraternity, during the 2014–2015 academic year. (Lasker did not respond to multiple requests for comment.)

Lasker could easily be ignored during the period that Faliceer was posting. That is no longer the case. On Substack, Crémieux has more than 23,000 subscribers—good enough for 14th in the science category. On X, his account has more than 260,000 followers. One is Vice President JD Vance. Others are major figures in the right-wing tech world (Joe Lonsdale, Chamath Palihapitiya, Marc Andreessen) or members of the Trump administration (FCC Chairman Brendan Carr, White House crypto and artificial intelligence “czar” David Sacks, Deputy Secretary of Health and Human Services Jim O’Neill).

Lasker’s ties to the current administration are unclear. He claimed last month to be a friend of O’Neill’s, who used to be the chief executive officer for the foundation of Palantir co-founder Peter Thiel. And a post from February indicated inside knowledge about the administration and Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency. During that time, Musk was frequently amplifying Crémieux’s posts on X.

The New York Times story about Mamdani’s 2009 application to Columbia was quickly seized upon by Mamdani’s detractors, who argued that he was trying to take advantage of affirmative action for Black applicants. Mamdani has said he was trying to capture the complexity of his identity as someone who was born in Uganda to parents of Indian descent.

An early version of the Times article stated that the hacked application data was obtained via an “intermediary who goes by the name Crémieux on Substack and X and who is an academic and an opponent of affirmative action.” A later version of the article added that Crémieux “writes often about I.Q. and race.” The Times also agreed to withhold Crémieux’s real name, even though it was already publicly known. The Guardian reported in March that Lasker was behind the account.

Lasker has been cagey about his connection to Crémieux—even when on camera. During a recent in-studio interview, right-wing media personality Charlie Kirk asked Lasker if he could identify him as Jordan. “Oh, Jay is probably better,” Lasker replied, appearing surprised to hear his real name. Kirk then asked his production team to “restart” because he wanted to “make sure I protect however you want to be presented.” (In keeping with Lasker’s request, a chyron identified Crémieux as “Jay Lasker.”)

These days, Lasker writes about a range of things as Crémieux, such as weight loss drugs, probability markets, and data analysis. Since gaining a following on X, Lasker has called Holocaust deniers “some of the dumbest people around” and has praised Adolphe Crémieux—the 19th-century French politician his account is named after—for promoting “classical liberal” principles. His account now appears to be popular with not only members of the tech right, but also some liberals and self-styled rationalists.

But it is clear that he remains interested in race science. Following the Times story, the Atlantic published a piece by former Mother Jones reporter Ali Breland about Lasker under the headline, “A Race-Science Blogger Goes Mainstream.” (Lasker wrote a detailed response on X containing his objections to the article in which he stated that he had “never supported racist policymatter, been hostile to members of any race for reasons of race, or anything that genuinely qualifies as racism.”)

Crémieux has alsoposted many times on X about Black people having lower IQs. In 2022, Lasker’s first article on Substack as Crémieux concluded with the claim that “whatever travails American Blacks suffered during slavery no longer matter for their socioeconomic attainment today.” Under his own name, Lasker has co-written papers with titles like “Racial and ethnic group differences in the heritability of intelligence: A systematic review and meta-analysis” and “Global ancestry and cognitive ability.” (The authors concluded in the latter that “European ancestry was a consistent predictor of cognitive ability, even after entering various controls into our models.”)

Another commonality between Lasker and the Faliceer account is a penchant for making outlandish claims about their relationship to Judaism. Specifically, the account claimed at different points to be an “atheist Jew” who was proficient in German, Yiddish, and Ladino; an Israeli with “a place in Eilat”; and “58% Ashkenazi.” (The claim about being majority Ashkenazi would have had a clear benefit for Faliceer, who argued the group has a genetic advantage when it comes to IQ.)

Despite the many claims about his Jewish identity, Faliceer self-identified as a Nazi. “I’m Jewish and a National Socialist,” Faliceer wrote. He claimed in 2016 that some of his own ancestors fit the same mold: “My family were considered to be Edeljude [noble Jews] because we were some of the first German nationalists and Hitler loved Germany so he declared us Aryan.”

Claims like these appear to have made Faliceer notorious on some parts of Reddit. In posts that are still available online, one Reddit user described Faliceer as “a ‘Jewish’ Nazi apologist,” a second user called out Faliceer for an alliterative post attacking a “Coalition of Kikes,” and a third user flagged a post from Faliceer that included the line: “Does this person not realize the huge negatives to racemixing or are they just ignorant?” (Faliceer posed the last question in a subreddit devoted to discussing the Gamergate online harassment campaign.)

Faliceer was also known to some members of the r/Judaism subreddit. As one user wrote about Faliceer’s posts on the notoriously racist r/European subreddit, “That user is probably the worst one on there. He actually claims to be Jewish.”

According to his childhood friend, Lasker was raised as a Christian and appeared to convert to Judaism in college. The friend found out after seeing on Facebook that Lasker’s display name was in Hebrew and discovered he had joined a Jewish fraternity. A second person told Mother Jones that Lasker’s parents are not Jewish and are of a Christian background.

A person who knew Lasker in college said Lasker rushed for Alpha Epsilon Pi wearing a kippah, adopted a Hebrew pronunciation of his first name, and would try to go “toe to toe” about his knowledge of the Torah with fellow members of the fraternity. “He would try to out-Jew some of the guys,” the person said. They added that Lasker is a “pathological liar” and doubt that he ever formally converted to Judaism.

The childhood friend said Lasker always wanted to be the “smartest person in the room” and had a reputation for being a “liar.” That appears to have included Lasker falsely telling people that he got what they considered to be a suspiciously high SAT score. “One of my friends asked for proof and [Lasker] just showed an image that looked like it had probably been saved from the internet,” the childhood friend said.

According to the friend, Lasker also told people that he had been admitted to Georgia Tech, the most competitive public school in the state. They added that the story fell apart when someone from their high school ended up in a freshman seminar with Lasker at another school, Georgia Southern University.

Lasker later moved on to a second college before ultimately graduating from Abraham Baldwin Agricultural College in southern Georgia. He then appears to have enrolled in a PhD program at Texas Tech University. It is unclear whether he graduated or is still affiliated with the university. An assistant vice president at Texas Tech told Mother Jones that in “accordance with federal privacy law, we are unable to provide any information regarding the referenced individual.”

Offline, Lasker appears to still be making false claims about his relationship to Judaism. Two people told Mother Jones that Lasker, at recent in-person events, has claimed to have been raised Jewish.

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The State Department Guts Its Office Combating Human Trafficking

As President Donald Trump takes a beating from his own MAGA crowd for his handling of the case of Jeffrey Epstein, the deceased pedophile and sex trafficker, his State Department pulled a surprising move: It decimated its office combating human trafficking.

As part of a downsizing, the Trump administration on Friday cut 1,353 positions at State, about 15 percent of its Washington-based staff, and the largest reduction in decades. This Reduction in Force (RIF) targeted foreign policy goals that don’t align with MAGA values. This included closing or eviscerating entire offices that promote democracy, combat genocide and violent extremism, help resolve armed conflicts, and supported women’s rights. Among them was the Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons, known as the TIP Office.

Politically, the timing of these cuts is ironic.

For 25 years, the TIP Office has worked to combat human sex and labor trafficking around the world. Its remit includes producing an annual report, as required by Congress, that grades every country on the issue. Those that fail can face economic repercussions from the US, putting teeth into the government’s efforts to end trafficking. This year’s report was due on June 30, but has not been released.

The TIP Office also works with local partners around the world to strengthen civil society groups, train prosecutors, and help other countries combat trafficking. The office’s mission, including managing tens of millions of dollars for these programs, has always had bipartisan support.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio submitted his reorganization plan for the State Department to Congress in April, but stopped its implementation after a federal judge in California halted such plans across 22 agencies. Last Tuesday, the Supreme Court lifted that injunction, and State rushed ahead with its reduction in force (RIF) on Friday.

According to reorganization plans shared ahead of time with State employees, workers in the TIP Office expected few job cuts, but believed their office would be demoted from a stand-alone entity into a component of the Office for Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor.

Perhaps the fact that the plans indicated they were being lumped into the category of democracy and human rights—ideas the Trump administration has sought to remove from the federal government’s foreign policy and had targeted in the departmental reorganization—should have been a sign that things would not go well. Still, workers there were blindsided when about half of the office’s full-time civil and foreign service employees received RIF notices Friday. When combined with Elon Musk’s deferred resignation program, the office now has about a third of the full-time staff it had in January.

“The sheer number of cuts has really decimated the office.”

“Everyone was caught off guard,” according to someone familiar with the cuts. Many of the approximately 35 workers who didn’t get laid off received notices late Friday that they would be reassigned and given a pay cut. The RIFs appeared to target employees with the shortest tenures, which meant there was no attempt to strategically preserve experience or expertise across the office’s projects. After Friday, for example, it appeared that just six of the 24 people responsible for researching andproducing the congressionally required report remained.

“The sheer number of cuts has really decimated the office,” says the source. “With that goes all of the expertise and connections and understanding” of each foreign country the office worked with. “That takes years to build up. It’s not like you can just reassign a few people in the office and somehow it’s going to work.”

A State Department spokesperson defended the cuts: “The world has changed. As we looked comprehensively across the Department, we saw that many of these offices had served an outdated purpose, had strayed from their original purpose, or were simply duplicative.”

Politically, the timing of the cuts is ironic. The Trump administration is battling perhaps its biggest intra-MAGA struggle over its handling of the Jeffrey Epstein investigation. President Donald Trump came into office promising to reveal the truth about the billionaire pedophile who killed himself in federal prison in 2019 while under federal charges for sex trafficking minors. Through a series of missteps, the Trump administration over-promised on its ability to release a rumored Epstein’s client list, then received blowback from the MAGA crowd when the Department of Justice tried to close the books on the case earlier this month without delivering any list or juicy new information. Moreover, thanks to the QAnon conspiracy that many of Trump’s supporters have embraced, the president’s base has been primed to believe that sex trafficking is rampant among America’s elite and that Trump alone can stop it.

But neither Trump’s reputation among QAnon followers for fighting sex trafficking, nor the fact that the Epstein debacle risks compromising that reputation, not to mention that trafficking prevention is a bipartisan priority, were enough to spare the TIP Office from crippling cuts.

Perhaps, the person familiar with the cuts wonders, the office had gained a reputation for being an aggressive “human rights gadfly,” producing an annual report that got in the way of other diplomacy efforts around the world.

“It was pushing back against other voices in the State Department,” they said. “That maybe made some enemies.”

On Tuesday, Michael Rigas, deputy secretary of state for management and resources, seemed to confirm the sentiment when he appeared before Congress and defended cuts to programs like the TIP Office: “For too long, single-issue offices have mushroomed in number and influence, often distorting our foreign policy objectives to serve their parochial interests and slowing down our ability to function.”

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Donald Trump: The Boy Who Cried Hoax

So often when Donald Trump is cornered, he manages to escape thanks to a simple tactic: He cries hoax. With his latest troubles—caused by his administration’s declaration that there’s nothing new to see or investigate regarding deceased pedophile and sex-trafficker Jeffrey Epstein—Trump is once again screaming “hoax.” Yet it is not quite doing the trick.

One of Trump’s brilliant moves as a demagogic politician was to train his supporters to believe that he was the target of conspiratorial forces and “fake news.” So whenever he was hit by a critical news report or investigation, he could explain it away by declaring that he was a victim of evil forces that aimed to destroy the nation.

This began in the earliest days of his first presidency. As the press, the FBI, and congressional committees investigated Moscow’s attack on the 2016 election and interactions between Trump’s campaign and Russia, Trump tried to swat all that away by declaring it was a “hoax” and a “witch hunt”—a product of “fake news.” No matter that the intelligence community, a special counsel, and congressional committees repeatedly confirmed the basic facts of that scandal—Vladimir Putin launched a covert operation to try to help Trump win, and Trump and his campaign aided and abetted that attack by repeatedly echoing Putin’s false denials—Trump consistently repeated these catchphrases. “Russia, Russia, Russia” became the derisive nickname he deployed to obliterate a significant reality of the 2016 election.

It worked.

His devotees fully embraced his characterization. Right-wing media constantly cast the Russia investigation as a scheme orchestrated by Democrats, something called the Deep State, and mainstream media. For Trumpland, it was indeed a “hoax.” For instance, Kash Patel, now Trump’s FBI director, has routinely asserted that the Russia inquiry was “the greatest political scandal” in US history, describing it as a con job entirely cooked up by spooks, Dems, and journalists. He has gone so far as to claim absurdly that Russia did not intervene in the 2016 election.

Once Trump established this Russia hoax narrative, he found he could apply it to other jams. When he was impeached for the first time for having threatened to withhold weapons from Ukraine unless its president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, launched an investigation of Joe Biden, Trump called this affair a “hoax,” comparing it to “Russia, Russia, Russia.” It was also a “witch hunt,” a “scam,” and a “sham.” Once more, Trump was the victim of diabolical plotting. During the impeachment hearings, Trump’s Republican defenders tried to deflect from the topic at hand by tossing out conspiracy theories about the Russia investigation.

When Trump lost his re-election bid in 2020, it was, in his view, another “hoax.” The Deep State—along with China, Venezuela, Dominion Voting Systems, the media, Italian satellite operators, and election workers in Atlanta—had rigged the election. Trump’s assaults on the news media for covering up the purported theft of the election were a callback to his “Russia, Russia, Russia” rhetoric.

After the insurrectionist January 6 riot that Trump incited, as the House moved toward a second impeachment of Trump, he again hurled the same charge: “The impeachment hoax is a continuation of the greatest and most vicious witch hunt in the history of our country.” For Trump, every new political or legal threat he faced was an extension of the vicious and underhanded war against him that began with the Russia investigation.

When the FBI raided his Mar-a-Lago residence in search of classified documents Trump took with him when he left the White House, his spokesman declared, “The Democrats have spent seven years fabricating hoaxes and witch hunts against President Trump, and the recent unprecedented and unnecessary raid is just another example of exactly that.” Trump called the prosecution that ended with him being convicted of 34 felony counts a “scam” and a “sham.” And E. Jean Carroll’s lawsuit accusing Trump of sexual assault? “It is a hoax and a lie just like all the other hoaxes that have been played on me for the past seven years,” Trump said in a deposition. At her one debate with Trump during the 2024 election, Kamala Harris slammed Trump for having said there were “very fine people on both sides” following the 2017 rally in Charlottesville organized by white supremacists that became violent; two days later, Trump called this the “Charlottesville hoax.”

In each of these episodes, the hoax strategy succeeded. At least with his people. MAGA World stood by him, and the right-wing media embraced his false accusations. So much so he won his way back to the White House.

Now he’s facing a tsunami of outrage and criticism from Republicans and MAGA champions for sitting on Epstein material that they assume would bolster their long-running QAnon-ish conspiracy theories. And Trump, yet again, is turning to his standby sidestep. He’s calling this a “hoax.”

As the anger swelled among his flock this past weekend, on his social media platform, Trump compared the fuss to the “Russia, Russia, Russia Hoax.” He complained that “selfish people” were trying to “hurt” his “PERFECT Administration” over Epstein. He asserted that the Epstein files were “written by Obama, Crooked Hillary, Comey, Brennan, and the Losers and Criminals of the Biden Administration.” That is, he was advancing another conspiracy theory: His enemies had concocted fake Epstein files. That didn’t make much sense. But Trump was trying to rope this latest hullabaloo into his long-running “hoax” narrative.

That post did not stem the fury from the right. Many replies to it were from self-declaredTrump backers who expressed dismay that Trump was not keeping what they believed was a promise to tell all about Epstein. MAGA influencers called for firing Attorney General Pam Bondi. Congressional Republicans urged the release of files from the Epstein case.

On Wednesday, Trump tried again withanother post. He once more proclaimed the whole Epstein thing was a hoax akin to “Russia, Russia, Russia.” He brayed, “these Scams and Hoaxes are all the Democrats are good at – It’s all they have… Their new SCAM is what we will forever call the Jeffrey Epstein Hoax, and my PAST supporters have bought into this ‘bullshit,’ hook, line, and sinker. They haven’t learned their lesson, and probably never will, even after being conned by the Lunatic Left for 8 long years.” He pulled out his classic pushback: the “Fake News” and Democrats were orchestrating “the Jeffrey Epstein Hoax.”

Talking to reporters in the Oval Office later in the day, Trump reiterated his new mantra: “I know it’s a hoax. It’s started by Democrats. It’s been run by the Democrats for four year….Some stupid Republicans and foolish Republicans fall into the net… I call it the Epstein hoax.”

Factcheck: Trump was not telling the truth. Most of the noise about the Epstein files has arisen not from Democrats but from MAGA—people who Trump now denounces as idiots and “past supporters.” And Trump, no surprise, did not specify what he means by “Jeffrey Epstein Hoax.” There’s no question that his Justice Department and FBI released a memo declaring that Epstein had committed suicide and that there were no new and undisclosed revelations—and no so-called clients list—within the files of his two criminal cases. Where’s the hoax? It looked as if Trump believed that after all these years of pushing the “hoax” button, he could do so once again as a getaway. Drop the H-word and—presto!—his believers will fall in line.

But the MAGA crowd wants more. After years of the right promoting conspiracy theories that demonized Democrats and elites as cannibals and pedophilic globalists—see Pizzagate and QAnon—Trumpers expected the Trump administration to finally produce the goods with presumed evidence from the Epstein case. Patel, Donald Trump Jr., deputy FBI director Dan Bongino, and other MAGA leaders had long demanded the Epstein files be released. Trump himself had indicated he would do that if elected to a second term.

Instead, nothing has been revealed, and Trump is saying it’s time to move on and castigating his fans who feel betrayed. That’s not playing well. There’s no telling yet if his familiar move of yelling “hoax” will work this time. His steady shouts of “hoax” over the years have themselves been a long-running hoax. Usually, his voters responded as he wished. This time they may see the real hoax.

If you enjoy David Corn’s kick-ass journalism and analysis, you can sign up for a free trial subscription to his Our Land newsletter here.

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Florida Tribe Joins the Fight Against “Alligator Alcatraz”

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

The Miccosukee Tribe in Florida joined environmental groups on Tuesday to sue the federal and state agencies that constructed an immigrant detention center known as the “Alligator Alcatraz” and located in the Everglades National Park.

In a motion to join a lawsuit, as one of the first tribes to potentially sue against the detention center, the case argues that the Department of Homeland Security, US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Miami-Dade County, and the Florida Division of Emergency Management did not seek an environmental review.

The filing alleges the center’s proximity to Miccosukee villages, ceremonial sites, and access to traditional hunting grounds, and “raises significant raises significant concerns about environmental degradation and potential impacts.”

“We are going to make sure that we fight this facility on whatever front is available to us,” said William “Popeye” James Osecola, who is the secretary of the Miccosukee tribal council. He hopes the lawsuit will “signify that the tribe will continue fighting to do what it’s always done, which is protect the land and save the land that saved us.”

According to Osecola, since the facility’s operation began, tribal members have been restricted from gathering plants and roots for uses such as medicine. “Obviously, that’s not an option for us right now,” he said. “At the moment, it’s the first time we’ve ever seen gates like that there, so it’s very jarring for us.”

Nearby the facility, 15 active tribal villages reside inside Big Cypress National Preserve, located within the Everglades.

During the 19th century, the Seminole Wars, which the Seminole Nation and Miccosukee Nation view as one continuous conflict against the United States, many members fled into the wetlands and used their natural environment as refuge.

In a press conference at the detention center last month, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said there would be “zero impact” on the wetland’s environment. The site is located on an abandoned airstrip, once a controversial project that aimed to be the world’s largest airport. Observers outside the facility said they could see lights on at all hours, attracting mosquito swarms. Recent satellite images also reveal that a freshly paved road has been laid down.

Last year, the tribe and the National Park Service signed a co-stewardship agreement for Everglades National Park. The partnership aimed to collaborate on protecting tribal practices, restoration efforts for the land’s vegetation, and protection.

In these cypress swamps and toothy sawgrass marshes, wildlife alongside alligators includes bats, turtles, and panthers. Because species such as the panther are critically endangered, Osecola implied that the continuous traffic at Alligator Alcatraz will “see more deaths with the wildlife.”

“It’s taken decades just to get Everglades restoration going like it is now,” he said.

While the Department of Homeland Security distanced itself after promoting the facility for weeks, claiming Florida controls the facility under state hands, critics are not convinced. Elise Bennett, Florida and Caribbean director at the Center for Biological Diversity, an organization that filed alongside Friends of the Everglades in the case last month, noted that “setting aside the funding for detaining immigrants is essentially a federal function. This is a federal project, regardless of what they say in their court filings.”

Last week, the Center for Biological Diversity filed a legal notice with an intent to sue that the construction also violates the Clean Water Act and Endangered Species Act, raising concerns such as light pollution and the use of insecticide to mitigate mosquitoes on-site that could affect the area’s wildlife and surrounding water.

Each day since its opening, protestors and groups have noticed trucks coming in carrying diesel, generators, and caged vehicles holding detainees. There are currently 3,000 beds inside the facility and at least 400 security personnel on-site.

After state legislators were blocked from entering the Alligator Alcatraz’s premises, Gov. DeSantis invited legislators and the state’s members of Congress to tour the facility over the weekend. According to Osecola, the governor did not extend that invitation to tribes.

Some Republican members claimed that the detention center was clean and safe. Others, such as Democratic state Rep. Anna Eskamani, reported that, “The environmental impact of this facility cannot be overstated—there is new asphalt, thousands of gallons of water used every day, and gas tanks powering generators. No alligators seen, but plenty of mosquitoes.”

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ICE Agents Are Harassing the Courthouse Volunteers Who Assist Besieged Immigrants

The recent, nationwide phenomenonof Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents showing up at federal courthouses to arrest undocumented people after their immigration hearings has inspired an outpouring of volunteers who come to observe the hearings and assist the immigrants and their families.

ICE personnel in Sacramento, California, clearly aren’t happy about this. Volunteers say agents there have been obstructing their work andharassing them, even though court hearings are open to the public under federal law and the First Amendment.

They “have been taking photos of our volunteers and have made threatening comments,” says Autumn Gonzalez, a volunteer with the nonprofit NorCal Resist. “People have been pushed, shoved. Officers have locked people in an elevator and pushed all the buttons. There’s very open hostility from the ICE agents toward people who are just community volunteers trying to make sure that nobody disappears and gets lost in the system without anyone knowing.”

NorCal Resist was established in 2018, during the first Trump administration. It accompanies immigrants to court appearances and ICE check-ins, runs a hotline to report ICE activity, offers legal assistance to asylum seekers who can’t afford attorneys, and operates a bail fund.

In May, it added a “court watch” program that will typically send a couple of volunteers to each courtroom to obtain an immigrant’s contact information before their hearing begins, enabling the volunteers to reach out to the person’s family or help them find legal counsel if they are taken into custody afterward. Sometimes the immigrants, fearing the masked agents in the hallways, ask the volunteers to escort them to and from the courtroom.

On June 12, volunteer Morgan Murphy was escorting immigrants into an elevator at the Sacramento courthouse when two ICE agents got in with them, rode with them down to the lobby, and then, before they could get out, “proceeded to push every single elevator button” and say, “‘We’ll just go for a little ride,'” she recalls.

“It was just an intimidation thing, to scare us and the other immigrants in the waiting room,” says Heidi Phipps, another volunteer who witnessed the incident. As the elevator stopped at every floor, one of the agents, a white man, joked that his ICE colleague, who had darker skin, had an immigration hearing coming up himself and didn’t know how to speak English, Murphy told me.

“It was jarring,” she said. “They have handcuffs hanging out of their pockets; I didn’t feel safe.”

The federal agents also have been photographing them escorting families, volunteers say, and sometimes threaten to use facial recognition tech to identify them, which they view as another intimidation tactic. One of the agents from the elevator incident,Phipps says, has even been sexually harassing her—she now asks colleagues to escort her to her car at day’s end. “It’s sexualized, flirtatious, unwarranted attention that I do not like, and I will turn my back when that agent is around, and it’s just nonstop,” she says.

Murphy corroborates this: “It’s a look in his eyes—he came in the waiting room recently and he’ll just stare at the women,” she says. He won’t reveal his name or badge number, the volunteers told me. Phipps says she hasn’t filed a formal complaint because she doesn’t think ICE would take it seriously.

In another troubling incident about a week after the elevator ride, two female volunteers were escorting a man from his hearing when “more than a dozen plainclothes ICE officers swooped in, pulling up their masks to hide their faces and forcefully snatching the man out of the grasp of the women,” wrote Robin Epley, an opinion contributor for the Sacramento Bee who witnessed the encounter. The agents shoved the volunteers to the ground and against the wall, leaving them with bruises and welts on their arms, she wrote: “I find myself struggling to describe just how terrible the situation truly was.”

These sorts of things arehappening regularly in Sacramento, according to Gonzalez. “They will start yelling and screaming at people that they are interfering with an arrest, that they will be arrested,” she says. “There’s usually one or two, maybe three, volunteers up there and 12 giant ICE agents. Our volunteers tend to be small women, some of them are older retired women. They can’t go up against 12 big guys. It’s not that kind of situation.”

“They don’t want anyone to see how they treat people,” she adds. “They want to be doing this”—their deportations—”with no witnesses.”

The Executive Office for Immigration Review, a Justice Department office that oversees immigration courts, declined to comment. In a written response, the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees ICE, seemed to lump together court watchers and protesters, calling them “rioters.”

“We are so glad Mother Jones is covering rioters at courthouses who have actively obstructed law enforcement as they enforce our nation’s immigration laws,” spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin said in an email. “While the media is trying to paint a sob story for these rioters, many of them have assaulted law enforcement.”

“Our observers,” responds Gonzalez of NorCal Resist, are “everyday community members who want immigrant families to feel safe in court. To call them ‘rioters’ or claim that they are assaulting ICE agents, who have guns and are in tactical gear, is absurd.”

The complaints aren’t limited to Sacramento.In San Diego last week, federal officers handcuffed a 71-year-old volunteer who had come to observe the court proceedings and detained her for eight hours. An ICE agent accused the volunteer, Barbara Stone, of pushing her. “Individuals like Ms. Stone are not innocent observers,” wrote DHS’s McLaughlin.

Stone disputes the agent’s account. “She is a soft-spoken person who was here to protect innocent refugees, and she is the last person in the universe who would hit an agent or interfere with their work,” her husband, Gershon Shafir, told local TV news affiliate NBC 7. ICE didn’t press charges against Stone, but her phone was confiscated and she was bruised by the handcuffs. “I feel mentally and physically traumatized,” she told the reporter.

In Denver, volunteer court watchers have been handcuffed and detained “without justification,” according to the ACLU of Colorado. They’ve also been “denied entry to the courthouse without explanation” and prevented from entering courtrooms due to “space constraints” when there are clearly empty seats. They’ve even been prohibited from taking notes, and have been “silenced” in the lobby and hallways, where “quiet and nondisruptive conversation has been permitted for years,” the ACLU adds.

“We condemn this brazen abuse of power,” Tim Macdonald, ACLU of Colorado’slegal director, said in a statement last month. “Detaining, arresting, and handcuffing legal observers reflects the aggressive and violent tactics that the government is using to try to limit due process and remove our immigrant neighbors without public awareness.”

In San Francisco, community court watchers report thatsecurity has gotten tighter. “They don’t want us to sit in the waiting room at times, don’t want us to be in the hallway, and that hasn’t always been the case,” says Sanika Mahajan, director of community engagement and organizing at the nonprofit Mission Action. (ICE agents often initiate arrests in the hallways.)

Part of the heightened security may be in response to the testiness of recent protests. Last week, agents clashed with activists who tried to block an arrest outside a San Francisco courthouse. After the agents loaded a detained immigrant into a van, protesters blocked the vehicle’s path, but the van drove off anyway, dragging a protester down the block. (Protests were continuing peacefully at the courthouse when I stopped by Tuesday morning.)

For about a week in June, federal authorities in Sacramento cut off public access to the courthouse altogether,prompting a response from Sacramento Assemblywoman Maggy Krell. “Everyone has a right to a fair process, and we need an open courthouse to assure that,” she told the Bee.

More recently, “no loitering” signs haveappeared in courthouse hallways, further discouraging volunteers who say agents have sometimes physically blocked them from interacting with the immigrants who show up for a hearing.

Limiting access is just one way the Trump administration has tried to shield itself from accountability while pursuing its mass deportations. The officers arresting immigrants out in the community now routinely wear masks and sunglasses to hide their faces. (Democratic senators introduced a bill last week that would ban the practice, but it is unlikely to win any Republican support.) In New York City, an immigration judge even allowed lawyers for ICE to keep their names off the record during court proceedings, according to a report by the Intercept.

The San Diego activists worry that ICE’s tactics will discourage volunteers from signing up to watch court hearings. Following Stone’s arrest, Ruth Mendez, a member of the group Detention Resistance, told NBC 7 that ICE was sending a message: “For us to be afraid to come back and do the work that we’re doing.”

“They’re just using any method possible to make us uncomfortable, thinking maybe that will keep us away,” Murphy says of the Sacramento situation. But “we’re still showing up,” adds Phipps, and “overcoming what they’re dishing out.”

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Emil Bove and Jeanine Pirro Won’t Condemn January 6. GOP Senators No Longer Care.

Despite vociferous objections by Democrats, the Senate Judiciary Committee looks set as of Thursday to approve Donald Trump’s former personal lawyer Emil Bove, now a senior Justice Department staffer, as a federal appellate court judge, and judge-turned-Fox News host Jeanine Pirro as US Attorney for the District of Columbia—with vital support from North Carolina Sen. Thom Tillis.

Tillis is just one of a dozen GOP senators who have indicated plans to vote for both Bove and Pirro in committee. But Tillis, who recently announced, while vocally opposing Trump’s “Big, Beautiful Bill,” that he won’t seek reelection next year, is the only one who stated—just last week—that President Trump “should know if there is anyone coming up for a nomination through any committee of my jurisdiction that excused January 6, that they’re not going to get confirmed in my remaining tenure in the US Senate.”

Bove recently gained attention when a former Justice Department prosecutor alleged that, as a top subordinate to deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, Bove told subordinates to violate court orders to execute Trump’s deportation plans: Bove told prosecutors to consider telling courts “fuck you” if judges raised legal objections, the whistleblower said. Bove, who denies saying that, also led the administration’s push to drop federal corruption charges against New York Mayor Eric Adams, a reversal that led to the resignations of many federal prosecutors in New York and Washington, and which Bove himself—while denying a “quid pro quo”—linked to Adams allowing Trump to enforce his immigration agenda in the country’s largest city.

Bove told prosecutors to consider telling courts “fuck you” in response to legal objections, the whistleblower said.

But Bove also served as arguably Trump’s top henchman in leading an effort to punish federal officials who investigated and prosecuted Capitol rioters. Bove ordered the firing of January 6 prosecutors, pushed FBI leaders to give him a list of agents who worked on Capitol insurrection cases, and advised Trump on an executive order offering blanket amnesty to about 1,600 January 6 defendants.

Pirro, as a Fox News host, was a leading promoter of Trump’s false claims that he won the 2020 election. She cited Sidney Powell’s infamous, bizarre, and baseless claims of an international conspiracy to rig the 2020 election to urge states that Biden won not to certify his electoral votes. Four days before the attack on Congress, Pirro used her show to egg on election deniers. And she called, this year, for January 6 prosecutors to face criminal charges.

In response to senators’ questions about January 6, which Mother Jones obtained, both nominees dodged and weaved, parsing their answers in an apparent effort to avoid angering Trump while also stopping short of overtly challenging Tillis. The North Carolina Republican in May torpedoed the nomination of Ed Martin, Pirro’s predecessor as acting US Attorney in Washington—due, Tillis said, to Martin’s ties to January 6 rioters. Still, both nominees, when pressed, sided with the president whose false claims incited the January 6 riot, and who continues to publicly push for DOJ to use its power to back those lies.

Asked by Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) whether he denounced “the January 6 insurrection,” Bove demurred. “The characterization of the events on January 6 is a matter of significant political debate,” he wrote, citing ongoing litigation. If Bove wanted to condemn January 6 without the “insurrection” characterization, he didn’t do it elsewhere in 165 pages of questions and answers.

In a January 31, 2025, memo ordering the firing of January 6 prosecutors, Bove wrote that Trump had “appropriately characterized” the cases they pursued as “a grave national injustice.” Bove has since claimed that he ordered the firing of prosecutors who worked on January 6 cases only because they had been hired on a probationary basis. And he claimed his orders to FBI leaders to compile lists of agents who investigated the attack were not an effort to identify them for punishment.

But when asked by the committee’s chairman, Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), about those actions, Bove again faulted DOJ efforts on January 6, even comparing the actions of DOJ and FBI personnel to those of the people who battled police officers at the Capitol.

“I condemn all forms of illegal activity,” Bove wrote. “That is especially true with respect to acts of violence against law enforcement. At the same time…I find overreach and heavy-handed tactics by prosecutors and law enforcement to be equally unacceptable. These concerns are not mutually exclusive, and publicly available materials suggest that both concerns were implicated by some of the events on January 6, 2021.”

Bove dodged many questions about January 6. He acknowledged advising Trump on his pardon on January 6 rioters, but also said he did not remember whether he helped draft Trump’s executive order announcing the pardons.

Some of these evasions are simply odd. Bove, who himself worked on January 6 prosecutions while working in the US Attorney’s office in Manhattan—an effort he has worked to downplay—told Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) that he wasn’t in Washington on January 6. But Bove also told Durbin, “I do not recall where I was on January 6, 2021.”

Bove, on another front, declined to state that Trump could not serve a third term without a constitutional amendment. (“As a nominee to the Third Circuit, it would not be appropriate for me to address how this Amendment would apply in an abstract hypothetical scenario.”) Nor, like most Trump nominees, would Bove acknowledge that Joe Biden won the 2020 election.

Pirro, who gave the same answer on the 2020 election, also evaded most questions she received on January 6.

In a January 2025 episode of a WABC show she hosted, a guest urged criminal investigations against January 6 prosecutors. Pirro responded: “I absolutely agree with that.” But when asked by Sen. Chris Coons (D-Del.), Pirro said she could “not recall” saying that.

Pirro also said she did “not recall” a January 2, 2021, monologue on her Fox News show in which she said: “January 6 will tell us whether there are any in Congress willing to battle for the America that those soldiers fought for, the one that you and I believe in.”

Pirro has also vociferously defended Trump’s amnesty for January 6 rioters, which, according to Just Security, included pardons for more than 600 people charged with assaulting or obstructing law enforcement—among them 172 who admitted to assaulting officers. But Pirro, the acting US Attorney in the office that prosecuted those cases, said this week, in writing, that she is “not aware that ‘rioters who were convicted of violent assaults on police officers’” received full pardons.

Back in May, after blocking Martin’s nomination, Tillis said, “We have to be very, very clear that what happened on January 6 was wrong.”

But Tillis in recent days said he would likely vote for Pirro due to what he called her strong “management” of her office, and that he would follow a “staff recommendation” to back Bove. That probably means both will be confirmed.

Tillis’ office did not respond to an inquiry about his planned votes, and he hasn’t further explained his apparent reversal. Regardless, the “clear” message he urged his colleagues to take on denouncing January 6 has become a muddle.

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Where Is Obama? “I’m Out Here!” He Told Me. Watch the Interview.

Over the past few weeks, you might have noticed a renewed flare-up in a yearslong liberal freakout: Where is Barack Obama?

That was the headline of a provocative essay in the Atlantic, which concluded that Obama had entered “the fierce lethargy of semi-retirement.” Cue the discourse: articles, interviews, TikTok clapbacks, and everything in between. Everyone seems to have an opinion on what the 44th president of the United States should be doing to defend democracy—just as they have, periodically, since Trump succeeded him in 2017.

So, I asked him about it—directly.

Last month, I sat down for an exclusive interview with the former president to talk about the 10-year anniversary of a tumultuous week near the end of his time in office. But, of course, I couldn’t help but ask him about the growing calls for him to do more. His response was simple:

“I’m out here!”

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A post shared by Garrison Hayes (@garrisonh)

Obama went on to acknowledge the unease that many Americans are feeling right now.

“You know, look, times are challenging,” he told me. He said that during his presidency, Americans “had a sense of things maybe being a little more stable,” and warned, that now, “for a lot of people, there’s a sense that anything can happen.”

In his post-presidency, Obama has been picking his spots strategically if rarely, careful to avoid diluting his voice in the fast-paced media environment. But behind the scenes, this argument goes, the former president and first lady have been focused on something far less headline-grabbing, but arguably more enduring.

“One of the things that I spend most of my time now doing is working through the Obama Foundation,” he told me. “Our goal is to train the next generation of leaders, to recognize the power they’ve got and the voice they have and to use it strategically—not just sink back in despair or cynicism but say, you know what, I can have an impact. I can have a difference.”

More recently, Obama used a fundraiser in New Jersey to scold Democrats, telling them to “toughen up,” arguing that “it’s going to require a little bit less navel-gazing and a little less whining and being in fetal positions.” He called out allies he sees as being “cowed and intimidated and shrinking away from just asserting what they believe.”

It was the kind of fighting language that many of Obama’s critics have been clamoring for. But the truth, in my opinion, is that Democrats who want more from Obama may misunderstand what they need from Obama.

In my new video, I contend that what Democrats need now, if anything, is the kind of broad political and cultural infrastructure that conservatives have been perfecting for decades: leadership pipelines, an influential media apparatus, and international allies. The stuff that takes time, in other words, that isn’t flashy and rarely trends, but wins in the long run. At least, that’s the goal.

From the outside looking in, it seems the Obamas are trying to play exactly that kind of long game. The question that remains—one Obama himself acknowledged recently—is whether democratic institutions can hold off autocracy long enough for that long game to play out.

Watch my longer interview with Obama here.

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Blame John Roberts for Enabling Trump’s Massive Power Grab in Texas

To justify their brazen effort to redraw US House districts in Texasahead of the 2026 midterms, stateRepublicans cited a Department of Justice letter alleging that four districts—all represented by Black or Latino Democrats—were “unconstitutional racial gerrymanders.”

But on Tuesday, President Trump said the quiet part out loud, admitting that a “very simple redrawing” of the congressional map would allow Republicans to “pick up five seats,” thereby making it much harder for Democrats to reclaim the US House.

Normally, a president directly undermining the constitutional argument of his Justice Department with a blatantly partisan justification would jeopardize the legality of any resulting map. But the GOP has a potential escape hatch: the conservative supermajority on the US Supreme Court.

In the 2019 case, Rucho v. Common Cause, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote for the majority that federal courts could not review, let alone strike down, claims of partisan gerrymandering. That decision upheld an overtly gerrymandered map in North Carolina. And, nationwide, it meant that politicians were free to draw skewed redistricting maps aslong as they did so for political reasons—like Trump’s plans for Texas.

The Rucho decision has already shaped control of the US House. After the case, North Carolina Republicans passed yet anotheraggressive gerrymander following the 2020 census that was struck down by the Democratic majority on the state supreme court. But when the Court flipped to GOP control after the 2022 midterms, it overruled the previous decision invalidating the maps, citing the Rucho decision. That allowed North Carolina Republicans to draw a new gerrymandered map ahead of the 2024 election that gave the GOP three new seats, helping them retain control of the US House.

“We would have been in the majority if North Carolina hadn’t egregiously redistricted and eliminated three Democratic seats.”

“We would have been in the majority if North Carolina hadn’t egregiously redistricted and eliminated three Democratic seats,” House Minority Whip Katherine Clark (D-Mass.) said at a press conference on Tuesday.

Texas is now following North Carolina’s example.

Roberts claimed that the Rucho opinion did not “condone excessive partisan gerrymandering” and said that states could still take action to prevent it, such as adopting independent redistricting commissions or bringing litigation in state courts.

But those are not options in Texas, which prohibits citizen-led ballot initiatives and has an all-Republican state supreme court that rarely breaks with the actions of the GOP-controlled legislature.

The only remedy, at the federal level, is if maps can be shown to discriminate against voters of color in violation of the Voting Rights Act or theUS Constitution. Indeed, in every redistricting cycle since the passage of the VRA, Texas has been found guilty of doing just that. Civil rights groups sued the state over its post-2020 congressional map, alleging that Republicans intentionally discriminated against Black and Hispanic voters, since 95 percent of the state’s population growth over the previous decade came from people of color**.** Nonetheless, the state drew two new seats in areas with white majorities. A federal trial recently concluded, with the verdict pending.

But the Supreme Court has also made it harder to challenge racial gerrymandering as well. In 2024, the conservative justices upheld a South Carolina congressional map that civil rights groups said discriminated against Black voters. And it recently postponed a ruling on the legality of Louisiana drawing a new majority-Black congressional district, leading to fears that the court’s conservative majority is preparing to further weaken the Voting Rights Act. If Texas Republicans pick up new seats by dismantling districts represented by Black or Hispanic Democrats—as they seem likely to do—it’s hard to feel confident that the Supreme Court would stop them. (The Court has already upheld, with the exception of one district, a prior mid-decade redistricting effort by Texas Republicans that took place in 2003.)

The GOP scheme in Texas could still backfire. Texas Democrats may flee the state to block the legislature from passing any map, as national Democrats are urging them to do. Blue states could undertake their own mid-decade redistricting efforts, although large Democratic states like California and New York are constrained by independent redistricting commissions. Texas Republicans, at Trump’s urging, could get too aggressive, jeopardizing some of their own members by moving too many GOP voters into Democrat-held districts.

But, in the end, if Trump and his allies in Texas are acting as if they exist in a legal-free zone, there is one simple reason: John Roberts.

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Trump Reaches a Breaking Point Over Epstein Files

President Donald Trump seems unfamiliar with the Streisand effect, the phenomenon of inadvertently drawing more attention to an issue by trying to make it go away.

The president on Wednesday unleashed another rant on Truth Social, claiming, without evidence, that Democrats are behind the uproar over the administration’s handling of the Jeffrey Epstein investigation. Referring to Democrats, Trump wrote on social media that their “new SCAM is what we will forever call the Jeffrey Epstein Hoax.” He then appeared to turn on his own supporters: “My PAST supporters have bought into this ‘bullshit,’ hook, line, and sinker. They haven’t learned their lesson, and probably never will, even after being conned by the Lunatic Left for 8 long years.”

Trump’s fury comes as several Republicans join prominent MAGA figures in the call to release more information regarding the disgraced financier, after the DOJ and FBI claimed last week that there was nothing more to publicly share on his death, nor was there any evidence that Epstein maintained a “client list.” The Republicans calling for more transparency include some of his most loyal allies: daughter-in-law Lara Trump, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), and now, Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.), Rep. Nancy Mace (R-S.C.), and conspiracy theorist Laura Loomer.

The most surprising and high-profile voice to weigh in, though, might be House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.), who told right-wing podcaster Benny Johnson on Tuesday, “We should put everything out there and let the people decide.”

BREAKING EXCLUSIVE: Speaker Mike Johnson says he supports Ghislaine Maxwell testifying to Congress and demands the DOJ release everything they have on Epstein:

"I’m for transparency. We should put everything out there and let the people decide. Pam Bondi needs to come forward… pic.twitter.com/diB5cDQmAk

— Benny Johnson (@bennyjohnson) July 15, 2025

On top of that, Rep. Tim Burchett (R-Tenn.) sent a letter to Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.), chairman of the House Oversight Committee, on Tuesday, requesting that the committee invite Ghislaine Maxwell—Epstein’s right-hand woman who was sentenced to 20 years in prison for the sex trafficking of minors—to testify before Congress, or subpoena her if she refuses. Greene and Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) both told Johnson they would support forcing Maxwell to testify. A spokesperson for the House Oversight Committee did not respond to a request for comment from Mother Jones on Wednesday.

Also on Tuesday, Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) said he was introducing a discharge petition calling for a vote on a bipartisan bill, introduced with Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.), to force the release of all the Epstein files; that would include flight logs, names of people and entities with ties to Epstein, sealed settlements, and any internal DOJ communications about declining to charge or investigate associates of Epstein. The petition allows representatives to bypass House leadership by bringing a vote on a bill provided they secure the support of 218 members. “We all deserve to know what’s in the Epstein files, who’s implicated, and how deep this corruption goes,” Massie wrote on X. “Americans were promised justice and transparency.” Whether that will garner enough support, though, remains to be seen; Republicans have twice voted against Khanna’s measure in the past two days.

Spokespeople for the White House did not respond to questions from Mother Jones about the latest calls from prominent Republicans to release the files.

In his Truth Social rant on Wednesday, Trump dismissed the groundswell of calls from within the GOP. “Let these weaklings continue forward and do the Democrats’ work, don’t even think about talking of our incredible and unprecedented success, because I don’t want their support anymore!” In the Oval Office shortly after, Trump doubled down, telling reporters he would support Bondi releasing “credible” documents, adding, “He’s dead. He’s gone. And all it is is certain Republicans got duped by the Democrats and they’re following a Democrat playbook.”

As my colleague Anna Merlan wrote yesterday, the combination of years-long calls by MAGA—led by Trump himself—to release the files, coupled with Trump’s now-desperate attempts to make it all go away, has all but guaranteed it never actually will.

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The Real Conspiracy Behind the Texas Floods

David Sirota can be a hard one to pin down. He’s a former speechwriter for Bernie Sanders. A onetime radio host. A co-writer of the Oscar-nominated “Don’t Look Up,” a dark comedy about the looming threat of climate change. (Spoiler: Most people do not, in fact, look up.) Today, Sirota is the editor-in-chief and founder of The Lever, an investigative news outlet that often reports on the pervasive and corrupting influence money can play in US politics.

But climate change—and our elected leaders’ persistent inability to address it—is never far from Sirota’s mind, especially following devastating weather events like the recent flooding in Texas, which has killed more than 130 people with dozens still missing. Scientists say climate change makes storms like the ones that pummeled Texas earlier this month wetter and more intense. To Sirota, the floods are not merely tragic, but highlight ongoing hypocrisy from those who deny climate change.

“This is happening in a state that is the headquarters of the industry that has been the funder of all the denialism that’s fueling, quite literally, the crisis itself,” Sirota says.

On this week’s More To The Story, Sirota sits down with host Al Letson for a wide-ranging chat about the Texas floods being a wake-up call, how President Donald Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” is “the class war in legislative form,” and why some Democrats still don’t know how to respond to socialist Zohran Mamdani’s upset win in New York City’s mayoral primary.

This following interview was edited for length and clarity. More To The Story transcripts are produced by a third-party transcription service and may contain errors.

Al Letson: I have to ask you about climate change because you co-wrote Don’t Look Up, a movie that is warning about climate change.

David Sirota: Yes.

When you witness the devastating floods in Texas and also just weather events happening throughout the United States and the world, what goes through your head?

Well, I saw some of the officials down there saying we never could have seen this coming. Nobody saw this coming. And I’m like, everybody saw it. At least this set of weather systems coming. That’s like saying in the movie, being in the movie, we never saw the asteroid, the comet coming headed at earth and it’s very frustrating to have made a movie with that metaphor. And actually what the movie ends up being is there’s an asteroid headed towards earth, nobody cares and everyone’s looking away. And so I feel like this keeps happening over and over again and I’m waiting for that moment where we can at least agree climate change is happening. It is making these weather systems, these disasters more prevalent and we have to actually get serious about at least defending ourselves from this. And the most tragic parts of this, this is happening in a state that is the headquarters of the industry that has been the funder of all the denialism that’s fueling quite literally the crisis itself.

And so you wonder people in Texas, it’s like is this a wake-up moment to say, hey, those oil companies, those fossil fuel companies in Houston are creating the environment that is fueling these more intense weather systems that are creating these kinds of disasters in our state. And you just wonder when that connection in the mass public consciousness is going to be made.

One thing I’ll add here is I think maybe part of the problem here is that the climate crisis feels so big, it feels so diffuse, there are so many factors that it feels like we can’t get our hands around it, that there’s really nothing we can do, even though that is absolutely not true. The programs in the big ugly bill that just passed, the United States was making real genuine actual progress on clean energy.

But that’s all gone now.

Much of it is absolutely gone. We made the decision for reasons that are still unclear other than Donald Trump paying back his fossil fuel donors. We made the decision … We were actually succeeding and our Congress made the legislative decision to repeal that progress at the same time that we’ve seen this flood, for instance, Congress passes this bill to repeal the clean energy programs and days later there is this flood disaster. It is like when are we going to look up? That’s not really an answer. That’s just my frustration speaking.

There’s a quiet disinformation thing going on. I’ve seen recently that people are talking about weather modification.

Oh my god. You know what the best response to that was? I’ve seen that. Like, oh, the government is secretly altering the weather. I’ve seen that. And it’s like actually there is a conspiracy to alter the weather. There’s a conspiracy by a group of very powerful corporations to pump as much carbon into the atmosphere as possible and to pretend that that’s not causing these weather … I’m being tongue in cheek here, but the point is, what’s incredible is instead of just saying, hey, all that science out there that’s telling us, that’s been telling us this, that this is happening, yeah, that’s actually what’s at issue. It’s like what about the conspiracy right in front of you? It’s right there.

Yeah.

One of the tragedies is how climate became a partisan topic. Because I think people can’t even remember. It didn’t used to be a partisan topic. It really didn’t. It wasn’t that long ago. It was in the late ’80s into the early ’90s. James Hansen testified on Capitol Hill. Republicans like George HW Bush, John McCain were saying, this is an emergency. The Pentagon, not exactly a left-wing organization was saying this is a huge problem. The scheme to turn climate change and to controversialize it and turn it into a partisan issue is one of the most dangerously successful political schemes that we’ve ever lived through and frankly, in a lot of ways, I’m not sure all of us are going to live through it. The climate casualties are mounting. I think one thing we have to do is try the best that we can to not depoliticize, but to make this less of a partisan issue. It is right there. That flood in Texas was not a Republican flood or a democratic flood. Climate change is not a Republican or democratic issue. It is a physical scientific fact.

So I want to move to what’s happening in Congress with Trump’s big beautiful bill. Tell me how you think this is going to play out politically because a lot of people are going to be affected.

It’s a real political quandary. My take on the bill is this, first of all, out of any bill that I’ve seen in my adult lifetime this bill is the class war in legislative form. Mathematically. The lowest income folks, according to the Republican-led Congressional budget office will lose … I think the estimate was somewhere between a thousand and $1,600 of income a year from this. The highest 10th of the income earners will gain … I think it was $12,000. So the point is this is literally taking from the poor and giving to the rich. I think the politics of it are confounding before we even get to the electoral politics. The politics of this are bizarre in this way. The Republican Party’s base of voters has become a more working-class base of voters. That coalition. This bill disproportionately harms working-class voters.

To put a more fine point on it, it arguably disproportionately harms Republican voters or at least Republican trending parts of the electorate. A Republican bill. And here’s the other crazy part, it helps affluent voters which are becoming more democratic. It is absolutely bizarre. And I think that the Democrat’s responsibility now is to make the point to Republican voters, the pain that you’re going to experience is because of this bill. There are complicating factors as you mentioned. That the seemingly good parts of this bill, or at least the bones that Donald Trump is pretending to throw to working class voters, the no tax on tips thing, the no tax on overtime, you can write off more of your car interest, these are relatively small things, but those things come before the election and the healthcare cuts come after the election. So there’s a political problem for Democrats that heading into the election, a lot of the healthcare cuts that are coming have not come into effect for Democrats to point to. They could point over the horizon to say they are coming. One other part of the political problem, it sounds so small, but the Medicaid cuts like the heart of the class war of this bill. Most states, the Medicaid programs are not called Medicaid. They have all sorts of different names. In Oklahoma SoonerCare. There’s all these different names and I think one of the political problems is-

They’ve disconnected. People don’t understand.

They’re like, oh, there’s Medicaid cuts over there. That’s not me. I’m on SoonerCare.

It’s the same problem with Obamacare and the Affordable Care Act. A lot of people realize that they think that they’re on the Affordable Care Act and they hate Obamacare and it’s the same thing.

Exactly.

Where do you see us as a nation right now, specifically through the lens of politics?

Look, in 2007, I wrote a book called The Uprising. It was my second book. And it was at a moment that feels like this moment does now. It was a moment where it was the second term of the Bush administration. We are now in the second term of the Trump administration. I think there’s a lot of dissolution and people feeling angry at the status quo by the way, on both the right and the left. And there felt back then there was an opportunity for this anger was going to go in one direction or the other. And my view is that what happened at that point back in 2007 was that the Obama campaign ended up successfully taking the anger on the center left and channeling it into the Democratic Party and really the Democratic establishment and the right ended up channeling the right of center anger into the Tea Party and the like. And I think what happened was that when Obama got in office and in my view really did not deliver on his populist campaign promises of hope and change. When he took that mandate and turned it into a mandate to essentially rescue Wall Street and the bankers who were foreclosing on millions and millions of people, that created a lot of, I think disillusionment and fuel for the right of center anger in the country among other things. And it created the conditions for Trump’s first successful run for president.

Forward to today, I think we’re in a similar situation where there is anger on both the right and left. And there is, once again, I think a potentially momentary situation in which the anger on the center-left can be channeled into something more like a so-called Tea Party movement. Not channeled into a particular political party for one particular politician, but into a larger movement to be more reflective of a populism, center-left populism that a lot of democratic rank-and-file voters want. That’s I think the moment that we’re in, but I’m not sure that what I’ve just laid out will play out. I thought back in 2007 it might play out that way and the premise was it’s going to go either in a right or left direction and back then it went in a right wing direction.

I think when you’re laying that out to me, the thing that comes to mind for me is that it feels like the Democratic Party is far too fractured for that to actually happen. That the Democratic Party gets caught up in arguing on things that … And I’m not saying whether they’re valid or invalid, but I would say that the Republican Party basically has a discipline that the Democratic Party does not have. And so I’m curious if you think that that’s going to get in the way.

Well, let’s take the historical view of that though. the Republican Party wasn’t always that way. If you go back to the mid-1970s, it’s incredible to imagine, but in the mid-1970s, 1976, you had a Republican primary where the incumbent non-elected president appointed president Gerald Ford, was in a presidential primary with Ronald Reagan where the primary was the liberal wing of the Republican Party and the newly ascendant conservative wing of the Republican Party. And they duked it out in that primary. Ronald Reagan lost very narrowly, of course, came back in 1980 and won the presidency. And I bring that up only to say that the Republican Party was fractured in a very deep way for a long time. And what ended up happening, I think over the course of decades was that the conservative movement through its organizing ended up unifying that party around its message.

Now, I think there are pitfalls to that. There’s a fine line between unifying a party completely around one set of ideas and creating essentially a cult. And I think today’s Republican Party 30, 40 years later from that 1970s moment, I think frankly does in some ways behave like a borderline cult, especially cult of personality when it comes to Donald Trump. But I guess what I’m saying is I think at the same time that happened with the Republicans, I think the work to actually unify the Democratic Party around a cogent economic message, a popular economic message and platform, I think that work really wasn’t done. I think a lot of work was actually done to divide the party. There was a lot of work done by the corporate wing of the Democratic Party to try to separate the party from its new deal, great society, legacy on economics. And I think that movement had great success in dividing the party, perhaps unifying the party only around so-called identity politics issues. My larger point is that I think this is a moment where the work to reunify the party around a set of popular economic policies where the diagnosis is that economic power, corporate power has become too concentrated in this new gilded age. That that work has an opportunity to happen in a real way and an accelerated way right now because we’re living in such an unequal moment.

Today’s Democratic Party is more of a cultural identity politics orthodoxy. You can be a corporate friendly corporate coddling Democrat and still be welcomed into the Democratic Party. It’s harder to be a Democrat who is a cultural moderate, who happens to be an economic populist. I bring that up because what it says is that’s where the real orthodoxy is. It’s on culture and identity and I think that you have to look at, so well then what happened? Well, when the Democratic Party became the party identified as the party that rammed NAFTA through Congress … Let’s take that as an example. There’s a lot of data out there to show that some of the most democratic districts, Congressional districts in the deep south quickly over eight years after that became some of the most Republican districts in the country. Now the question is why? One very interesting study said that because the culturally conservative voters in those districts who had been hanging on to the Democratic Party willing to overlook their differences with Democrats on cultural issues prior to NAFTA, were still willing to stick with the party because they felt that the party was at least on its side economically.
Then NAFTA happens. Hugely high profile. And that cohort of voters culturally conservative, but still sticking with the Democrats, it’s like, you know what? The Democrats are now screwing me on economics. Fine, I’ll just go be a Republican. The supremacy of culture in our politics and that as a dividing force in our politics, I think comes at a time of mass disillusionment. When people say, “Okay. Listen, neither party is really on my side economically so politics is just a game, a contest of culture because both sides are not really delivering for me economically.”

I don’t think that either party is serving its constituents. I think that when you look at where Americans are, I think what we’re seeing in the voting booth and the lack of people at times coming out to vote is because they feel like no matter what they do, it doesn’t matter. The system is broken for both sides.

I absolutely agree, and I think that disillusionment serves, ultimately, it mostly serves or tends to serve anti-government conservatives who basically say, “Look, the government doesn’t do anything. It can’t do anything for you. It’s not even trying to do anything for you. So just keep voting for us. We’ll keep tearing apart the government.” It’s a self-fulfilling cycle. We’ll make the government work even worse, then, oh, that fuels our anti-government argument. Give them a credit, I guess as a political strategy, the right, and the Republicans have a self-fulfilling ideology here that works for their political project. And I think part of the problem here is that Democrats have done a bad job of … They are the party of government, but they have done a relatively bad job at governance and at selling and explaining what they are doing.

That’s the thing that I agree with you that Democrats do poorly. I also think that while Republicans are constantly talking about tearing the government apart and they have pushed this thought process in the American public that I feel like I’d never hear any pushback on, the idea that like, well, so-and-so’s a good businessman. The government should run like a business.

I’ve come around a little bit on this topic on the run government like a business. I absolutely 100% agree that when that phrase is invoked, it makes no sense. But here’s one nugget that I think is important in that metaphor. The government has not done a good job of making what it delivers clear, simple, and easy. Now, think about this. Here’s a stat that might blow you away. The American public, including Democrats, rank Amazon as one of the top institutions that they have confidence in. But why does the average person say they have trust in the institution of Amazon? My theory is because Amazon has invested … Whether you love it or you hate it has invested a lot of time and resources into making everything you do on that site easy. And my point is that that is the opposite of the experience of most people when they deal with the government.

When you deal with the IRS, you’re on hold forever. You can barely get through to anybody when you have to file your taxes, when you’re dealing with any government agency, typically the experience can be miserable, And unnecessarily miserable. So that’s a long way of saying, I do think there’s one thing … And this goes back to Democrats. If you’re the party of government, you better be making sure that the programs that you’re creating are delivering what you say they’re going to deliver in a really efficient, easy, pleasant way.

Let’s talk about the relationship and the Democratic Party between corporations and oligarchs. Is it fair to view the party as a clash between corporationalists and oligarchs?

I would say this, oligarchy is a term I think that has been used a lot lately as a catch-all for everything from the billionaire who inherited their wealth to the large Fortune 500 company, to the Washington swamp of lobbyists. It’s essentially the money power. And I think the Democratic Party’s fundamental conflict right now, and it has been this way really for 40 years, when that movement I just mentioned to take the Democratic Party away from its new deal roots. That the party is caught in a conflict that I think frustrates a lot of people. And I explain it this way. That on the one side you have what the public and democratic voters want. Things like universal healthcare, break up large monopolies, better regulate and limit the power of Wall Street private equity and the financialized forces of this country. That’s stuff that the public wants.

Over here is stuff that the donors want. The donors, the oligarchy want none of that stuff. So the Democratic Party is … The Venn diagram is what does the public want that the donor class can tolerate and accept? And what you end up with is a very narrow set of issues that typically do not challenge the power of the donor class, even if they are important causes. And I’m talking about reproductive rights, we’re talking about civil rights, we’re talking about things, again, not unimportant things, but in many ways, not things that challenge the fundamental economic and political power of oligarchy. And the problem is that for the party, is that what the public wants goes way beyond that. What a public wants in a time where of nationwide affordability crisis … I can’t afford healthcare, I can’t afford my electricity bills I can’t afford, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. What the public wants are policies that the donor class does not want because the oligarchy is profiting off the current dystopian status quo.

So how does the Democratic Party get past that? Because if the donor class is actually paying for these campaigns and funding the party and politicians are listening to them, but the people disagree with those decisions, how does that pan out? I think a really clear example of this is the mayoral race in New York City. So the donor class does not want Zohran Mamdani to win, but everyday New Yorkers seem very much in favor of the policies he’s laying out.

Well, here’s why I think the oligarchy, the donor class in New York is freaking out so much. And by the way, let’s take a moment to note that this is not just a typical donor freakout. This is an epic nervous breakdown that we’ve seen. My view is they’re not really freaking out at Mamdani’s particular policies. His policies are not really radical at all. They’ve been portrayed as radical, but we’re talking about things like limiting rent increases. We’re talking about a couple of publicly funded grocery stores in food deserts. We’re talking about free buses.

Yeah. I would say they’re not radical for you because the way you think about democratic politics, I think most of the donor class would think that you’re radical.

For sure. Speaking in terms of the world-

I hear you. I hear you. I just wanted to frame that.

What major cities … No, that’s fair. That’s fair. I’m saying if you look at major cities … Look, Orlando, Florida has a free bus system. Orlando, Florida is not … And Mamdani’s proposal for some free buses was portrayed as this insane, crazy idea. So I’m just grounding it in the idea. Okay. He’s proposing policies that I think are far-reaching different for New York, but I don’t think the average corporate CEO in New York is like, I just can’t tolerate free buses in the city. I don’t think that’s what’s really at issue. What I think is really at issue here is that the oligarchy, the donor class has gotten so used to deciding elections, deciding political outcomes, that Mamdani winning was a situation, an election that they were prepared to fight. They fought really hard, they spent a lot of money, and they still lost.

I think what the freak-out is about is about a perceived or at least a fear of a loss of political control. A fear that democracy is actually working and it means they can’t decide every single political outcome. So we have to ask the question to go to your earlier question. Well, what about this conflict between the people who are paying for campaigns, what they want and what voters want? How does that circle ever get squared? Well, I think when you look in New York, how did Mamdani win? One of the big factors … It’s not very sexy, hasn’t been talked about. Guy has a great message, obviously great media savvy, good videos, et cetera, et cetera. But one of the factors that really hasn’t been talked about is New York City has a robust system of publicly financing campaigns. So Zohran Mamdani was able to raise …

The deal here is if you raise about a million bucks off of very small donations, the city matches that. I think it’s eight to one. So he raised a million dollars. You can’t really fully compete in a New York Mayor’s race with $1 million, but then you get $8 million. And so he had enough resources without having to go to big oligarch donors and beg them for money in exchange for legislative favors. He had enough public money to actually compete. And that’s what short-circuited, I think the typical formula where huge billionaire donors stomp in and just buy the election. And it’s no wonder that the oligarchy, the donor class is freaking out because all of a sudden, wait a minute, in the capital of global finance, you’re telling me that we can’t decide every single political outcome, and there’s a system here to allow people like Mamdani to be competitive. That must freak them out.

But that can’t be replicated on a national level though.

Well, look, it’s happening at the New York for the first time at the statewide level in New York. There are cities, and even in some state programs that have publicly financed campaigns. They haven’t been funded as well as they need to be funded. But a place like Florida, for instance, a deep red state has a publicly financed system of statewide elections. And the reason I spotlight this is because I think if people are looking for answers, how do we actually make the playing field more fair for democracy? One of the answers is, go to your town, go to your city, go to your state, start exploring how to replicate publicly financed systems of elections. I want to be clear, this is not a cure-all-

But it’s a step.

It’s a step. It is a step.

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Let’s Count All the Ways Marjorie Taylor Greene Is Angry With President Trump

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.)’s fealty to President Donald Trump has, for the most part, seemed nearly unshakable.

She has compared him to Jesus Christ. She has repeatedly—and falsely—claimed that the 2020 election was stolen from him. And she reportedly wanted to be Trump’s VP, claiming to the Guardian that her name was “on a list” of potential contenders before JD Vance was ultimately crowned the winner.

But lately, Greene appears to be breaking with Trump on several key fronts: His decision to launch strikes on Iran, his renewed support for Ukraine, and now the Department of Justice’s and FBI’s conclusion regarding the Jeffrey Epstein files.Together, against the backdrop of mounting anger within MAGA’s ranks, Greene’s increasingly outspoken words underscore just how much the president has alienated some of his most loyal supporters through a slate of consequential decisions made over the last few weeks.

On Monday, Greene told the Times that she opposed Trump’s new plan to sell US military equipment to European countries that can be transferred to Ukraine, arguing that the so-called “America First” policy of getting the US out of conflicts abroad is “what we campaigned on.”

“This is what I promised also to my district,” she added. This is what everybody voted for. And I believe we have to maintain the course.”

“I said it on every rally stage: ‘No more money to Ukraine. We want peace,” Greene continued.And while Trump said that European allies will ultimately pay for sending the weapons to Ukraine, Greene isn’t buying it: “I remain firmly opposed to any U.S. involvement, including backdoor deals through NATO, which American taxpayers overwhelmingly fund,” she said in a post on X Monday. (In fact, the U.S. only contributes one-sixth of NATO’s overall budget.)

Greene is not the only MAGA isolationist to speak out against the move. A former Trump campaign official, who was granted anonymity,told Politico, “We still hate it. This is not our war, and escalation isn’t in America’s interest.” Steve Bannon has also railed against the president’s Ukraine flip on his podcast.

The Epstein files, though, are a different story: MAGA-world appears to be far more united and vocal in its uproar, with Greene among the most prominent of Trump’s base to publicly air their fury. As my colleague Anna Merlan writes in a new piece out today:

The MAGA base, especially its more QAnon-y quadrants, feel deeply betrayed and increasingly suspicious by what they see as an unforgivable level of inaction and obfuscation on Epstein from the Trump administration. “Please understand the EPSTEIN AFFAIR is not going away,” General Michael Flynn tweeted recently at Trump. (While Flynn has denied being a QAnon believer, he was an early promoter of elements of the conspiracy theory before disavowing it; he continues to make claims about a secretive group of evildoers engaged in child trafficking and sexual abuse.) “You’re going to lose 10 percent of the MAGA movement,” warned former Trump adviser Steve Bannon. At the Turning Point USA conference in Florida over the weekend, much of the crowd booed when asked if they were satisfied with Trump’s handling of the Epstein case.

Greene told CNN on Monday that the Trump administration’s handling of the Epstein files is “a red line” for many MAGA supporters. “Jeffrey Epstein is literally the most well-known convicted pedophile in modern-day history…this is something that’s been talked about by many people serving in the administration, myself, and many others on the right and the left of there needing to be transparency of the rich and powerful elites that were in his circle while he was one of the worst serial abusers of young women,” she said. “It has been a very serious situation for the administration, and many people are speaking out,” she added.

MTG says there’s “pretty big” blowback among MAGA base over the Trump administration’s handling of Epstein files.

Asked if she agreed with Trump that it’s time to move on, MTG: “It's just a red line that it crosses for many people…I really think people deserve transparency.” pic.twitter.com/drzxkNEeoZ

— Manu Raju (@mkraju) July 15, 2025

Then there were Trump’s strikes on Iran last month, which subsequent reports suggest did not entirely destroy the country’s nuclear sites as the White House has claimed. (The White House has disputed those reports, once again claiming “total obliteration.”) For Greene, the strikes, whether successful or not, betrayed Trump’s campaign promise to end wars. “A complete bait and switch to please the neocons, warmongers, military industrial complex contracts, and neocon tv personalities that MAGA hates and who were NEVER TRUMPERS!” she said on X.

The White House did not respond to questions from Mother Jones on Tuesday afternoon.

Is the anger of MAGA and Greene a sign of a more lasting break with the president? Even with all the drama, it’s highly unlikely. According to Greene herself, dissent within MAGA isn’t proof of its weakness, but its supremacy. “Contrary to brainwashed Democrat boomers think and protest about, Trump is not a king, MAGA is not a cult, and I can and DO have my own opinion,” she wrote last month.

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The Pentagon Signs Up for Grok, Days After the Chatbot’s Antisemitic Meltdown

The Pentagon will start using Elon Musk’s AI-powered chatbot, Grok, days after ito published a string of antisemitic posts, the Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office announced on Monday.

The move is a part of a larger rollout of Musk’s company, xAI, for a new program called “Grok for Government,” which describes itself a as a “suite of frontier AI products available to United States Government customers.” xAI said that the $200 million contract with the US Department of Defense would allow “every federal government department, agency, or office, to access xAI’s frontier AI products.”

Announcing Grok for Government – a suite of products that make our frontier models available to United States Government customers

We are especially excited about two new partnerships for our US Government partners

1. a new contract from the US Department of Defense
2. our…

— xAI (@xai) July 14, 2025

The announcement comes days after Grok spewed antisemitic and racist statements to its users, including praise for Adolf Hitler and “the white man.” It also referred to itself as “MechaHitler.” The debacle kick-started a wave of celebration amongst online extremists, many of whom called for the creation of more hateful AI chatbots.

As my colleague Anna Merlan reported:

Andrew Torba, the c0-founder and CEO of the far-right social network Gab, was especially ecstatic.

“Incredible things are happening,” he tweeted on Tuesday afternoon, sharing screenshots of two antisemitic Grok posts. Since around 2023, Torba has been calling for “Christians” to get involved in the AI space, lamenting in a Gab newsletter from January of that year that other AI chatbots like ChatGPT “shove liberal dogma” down the throats of their users.

The Pentagon’s partnership with Grok comes amid the ongoing public feud between President Donald Trump and Musk, which has seen Musk calling the Republican spending bill “utterly insane and destructive.” The billionaire also seemingly accused the president of being named in the Jeffrey Epstein files. In response, Trump threatened to terminate Musk’s government contracts and even hinted at deporting Musk.

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Now It’s Epstein Forever

“We’re on one Team, MAGA,” Donald Trump wrote on TruthSocial over the weekend, “and I don’t like what’s happening.”

“We have a PERFECT Administration,” he added, “THE TALK OF THE WORLD, and ‘selfish people’ are trying to hurt it, all over a guy who never dies, Jeffrey Epstein. For years, it’s Epstein, over and over again.”

Dead billionaire pedophile Jeffrey Epstein has indeed been experiencing a remarkable moment of renewed relevance. An unsigned memo from the FBI and Department of Justice, first reported by Axios on July 6, said the government concluded Epstein was not blackmailing powerful people, did not maintain a “client list,” and was not murdered. Chaos and outrage ensued, and now, thanks to continued missteps by Trump and his administration, will continue more or less forever.

“Time is running out. And the president who promised to ‘demolish the Deep State’ is watching from the White House.”

The MAGA base, especially its more QAnon-y quadrants, feel deeply betrayed and increasingly suspicious by what they see as an unforgivable level of inaction and obfuscation on Epstein from the Trump administration. “Please understand the EPSTEIN AFFAIR is not going away,” General Michael Flynn tweeted recently at Trump. (While Flynn has denied being a QAnon believer, he was an early promoter of elements of the conspiracy theory before disavowing it; he continues to make claims about a secretive group of evildoers engaged in child trafficking and sexual abuse.) “You’re going to lose 10 percent of the MAGA movement,” warned former Trump adviser Steve Bannon. At the Turning Point USA conference in Florida over the weekend, much of the crowd booed when asked if they were satisfied with Trump’s handling of the Epstein case.

All of this could have been avoided, had Trump officials not committed themselves to a spectacular series of own-goals. The mess began when Epstein died by suicide on August 9, 2019 after understaffed, overworked, and negligent Bureau of Prisons staff, even after a previous suicide attempt, left Epstein alone for long periods of time in a cell well-stocked with bed linen.

Yet the fact that both his death and arrest on federal charges occurred during Trump’s first presidency did not prevent Trump and his allies from confidently declaring that when Trump took office again, he would expose the real truth behind both Epstein’s death and his crimes. They also helped set into motion the narrative that powerful people didn’t want his supposed “client list” released—a list that journalists covering the case for years, like investigative reporter Julie K. Brown, have said they do not believe exists. (Epstein’s address book, meanwhile, has been public since Gawker published portions of it in 2015. Writer and filmmaker Leland Nally called everyone in it and wrote about the results for Mother Jones in 2020; this didn’t always mean chatting up the world elite: “Sometimes I would have delightful conversations with normal people who had cleaned a car or given Epstein a facial, and only shared in my distaste for Epstein and his circle.”)

Trump’s own family got in on the game, pushing the idea of a conspiracy of silence: in January 2024 Donald Trump Jr. tweeted, “I keep hearing about some of the Jeffrey Epstein clients’ names being released today. But I’d be willing to bet that something happens between now and then that prevents those names from ever coming out. You just know that’s coming, though I hope to be proven wrong.” So did future administration officials, like FBI Director Kash Patel, who claimed in 2023 that the Epstein client list hadn’t been released yet “because of who’s on that list,” adding, “You don’t think that Bill Gates is lobbying Congress night and day to prevent the disclosure of that list?”

(While Gates did have a long friendship with Epstein that continued even after his then-wife reportedly expressed discomfort, he has said that spending time with Epstein was a “mistake” and called conspiracy theories about his own conduct “crazy.” He has never been accused of a crime.)

The MAGA base bought wholly into the notion that Trump was the only person who could expose Epstein—even with the awkward fact that Trump knew both Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell, Epstein’s ex-girlfriend and procurer, who’s now serving 20 years in prison for sex trafficking. The two men interacted socially for decades, with Trump describing Epstein as a “great guy” to New York magazine in 2002. He also flew on Epstein’s plane several times in the 1990s. (Now-HHS secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has said he took it twice.) Trump and Epstein are believed to have had a falling out, possibly over a failed business deal.

Neither Trump nor Kennedy has been credibly accused of engaging in sex crimes with Epstein, but in 2016, I and other journalists investigated a lawsuit filed against Trump accusing him of raping a 13-year-old at an orgy hosted by Epstein. The man promoting the suit to the media had a record of making unsubstantiated charges against prominent people, and neither I nor the other journalists who investigated the story ever proved that “Katie Johnson,” the pseudonym of the woman who allegedly filed the lawsuit, was a real person. Apart from one odd interview with the Daily Mail, the person claiming to be the plaintiff did not otherwise speak directly to the press before dropping her suit.

Much of the MAGA base’s current anger has settled on Attorney General Pam Bondi, who once promised that the Epstein client list was “on [her] desk” awaiting her review, as well as FBI Director Kash Patel. (Conservative talking head turned FBI deputy director Dan Bongino even reportedly stopped showing up for work over his supposed anger at Bondi over the handling of the list, leading his allies to speculate to Axios that he wasn’t coming back.) Bondi was also part of the failed February stunt in which conservative influencers were given binders of very old and previously released Epstein material that the administration claimed was new.

In the most serious error this time around, alongside last week’s memo the Department of Justice also released what they described as “raw” surveillance footage from outside Epstein’s cell on the night he died. But Wired’s Dhruv Mehrotra found that the footage showed clear signs of being edited, stitched together from several clips and processed by Adobe Premier before being made public. While it’s entirely possible that those signs are simply the result of the footage being formatted to upload to the internet, simply describing the footage as “raw” when it wasn’t has fueled yet more conspiracy theories. It didn’t help that one minute of video was missing; something Bondi defended as normal and something that happens daily.

All of this is excellent content for the many conservative and far-right media figures and talking heads who constantly need something new to feed to their own base—certainly it’s more exciting than talking about the slow controlled demolition of the federal government under Trump or his constant threats to impose large tariffs on America’s closest trading partners. Sometimes, this quest to keep Epstein front and center without any new information can even take darkly comic forms: several fringe far-right and conservative figures claimed over the weekend that Epstein’s client list had been released on the dark web by a hacker called “Island Boy.” One Twitter user with over 100,000 followers tweeted excerpts from the alleged list—many of them were simply people in Epstein’s long-released address book; the graphic the person included was the art that Mother Jones made for our 2020 story delving into Epstein’s wide ranging contacts.

Plenty of longtime Trump allies are now delicately scrambling to condemn the handling of the Epstein affair without condemning Trump himself. Often, this has led to even weirder conspiracy theories about what the Epstein files “really” reveal: Tucker Carlson, for instance, is among those on the right who have baselessly suggested that Jeffrey Epstein had “direct connections to a foreign government,” as he put it, and that “no one is allowed to say that foreign government is Israel.”

Grumbling about the Trump’s administration’s record on Epstein began before the release of the memo. Conservative legal organization Judicial Watch, for instance, whose president Tom Fitton and Donald Trump have long been mutual admirers, filed a FOIA lawsuit in April demanding Epstein-related files from the DOJ. Judicial Watch has suggested that the Epstein affair is but one element contributing to broader dissatisfaction over a lack of transparency under Trump. As Micah Morrison, an investigator for the group, wrote after the memo closing the Epstein case, FBI Director Kash Patel and Deputy Director Dan Bongino are “hostages,” as he put it, to a Deep State impeding disclosure, and that the two men and Bondi need to make good on Trump’s promises.

“Conservatives still wish them well,” he wrote, “but time is running out. And the president who promised to ‘demolish the Deep State‘ is watching from the White House. They will not be forgiven for bungling a historic opportunity.”

By Monday, eight days after the memo first made news, there were clear signs that the Trump administration had simply decided to cave to the outrage and claim that there actually were still revelations forthcoming and that they would reopen an investigation into Epstein’s alleged associates—even after saying definitively that such an investigation has already concluded. Conservative talking head and former Buzzfeed plagiarist Benny Johnson, who has close ties with the administration, hosted Lara Trump on his podcast Monday afternoon. In her appearance, the president’s daughter-in-law told Johnson that “he is going to want to set things right. I believe there will be more coming and anything they are able to release they will try to get out.”

Johnson himself then claimed on Monday evening that he’d been speaking to a “top federal law enforcement contact,” adding, “The change in approach to Epstein has been dramatic. Expect more disclosures.” (While Johnson didn’t disclose who he’d been speaking to, he’s described Bongino as a friend and mentor.)

“In short,” Johnson added, “Our voices are being heard, power to the people.”

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How ICE’s Arrest of a High School Student Activated a Massachusetts Town

Marcelo Gomes da Silva is still trying to get back to his old life. The 18-year-old, who was born in Brazil, wants to enjoy the summer before his senior year at Milford High School in Massachusetts—go to pool parties, hang out with friends. Since his arrest by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, he has been praised for his strength. “But that’s not really what I want,” he told Mother Jones on a video call. “I want everyone to think of me as Marcelo Gomes da Silva, just as I was before.”

On a Saturday morning in late May, ICE arrested Gomes da Silva on his way to volleyball practice. At first, when he noticed a white Ford Explorer trailing his car, he thought little of it. But when Gomes da Silva pulled into a friend’s driveway, an ICE agent walked up, knocked on the window, asked for his documents, and eventually handcuffed him. The officer asked Gomes da Silva if he knew the reason for his arrest. He said he did not. “Because you’re illegal,” the agent told him, “you’re an immigrant.”

“I hadn’t seen that kind of activation in the 22 years I’ve lived here. Nothing like it.”

Gomes da Silva had never thought of himself as undocumented. He came to the United States at age 7 as a visitor and later obtained a now-lapsed student visa. “I was just in shock,” he said. “I didn’t know what was going on and I was kind of questioning God…Why is this happening to me? Did I do something? I never really understood why I was there.”

The Department of Homeland Security said ICE officers “never intended to apprehend” Gomes da Silva but were instead looking for his father, the owner of the car, whom they accused of having a “habit of reckless driving.” To the US government, Gomes da Silva was an accidental target in the wrong place at the wrong time. These so-called “collateral arrests”—often warrantless apprehensions of immigrants without a criminal history—have become more commonplace as the Trump administration pushes the legal limits of its deportation dragnet.

Marcelo Gomes da Silva peers out of the window as he waits for his ride to come to take him to a TV news interview on June 11, 2025. Jessica Rinaldi/The Boston Globe/Getty

“I didn’t say he was dangerous,” acting ICE Director Todd Lyons said of Gomes da Silva at a press conference days after his detention. “I said he’s in the country illegally and we’re not going to walk away from anybody.” Gomes da Silva was taken to ICE’s Boston field office in Burlington, where he was detained for six days until a judge released him on bond in early June.

The arrest of the Brazilian-native honors student has thrust Milford into the national spotlight, making it a flashpoint for President Donald Trump’s turbocharged immigration enforcement. It has also served as a catalyst for resistance in a town where dynamics around immigration have at times created fissures. “It definitely brought the community much closer together,” said Coleen Greco, the mother of one of Gomes da Silva’s volleyball teammates. “I hadn’t seen that kind of activation in the 22 years I’ve lived here. Nothing like it.”

Word of Gomes da Silva’s detention spread quickly through Milford, a 30,000-person blue-collar town 40 miles southwest of Boston. When he didn’t show up to volleyball practice that Saturday morning, his teammates and coaches assumed he must have overslept. Then coach Andrew Mainini got a text from a player, an undocumented 17-year-old who was in the car with Gomes da Silva. ICE had let him go along with an exchange student from Spain, but held onto Gomes da Silva. Mainini recalled feeling shocked and helpless. “We didn’t know what to do,” he said.

After practice, school administrators gathered everyone in the locker room and shared the news. There was a deep silence. Some players cried. One of them threw up. “I knew it was happening in Milford, but I didn’t really know anybody who was detained,” said Greco’s son Colin. “That’s when emotion just hit everybody and we were like, ‘This is real.’”

In the weeks leading up to the incident with Gomes da Silva, communities in Massachusetts were already on high alert. In May, ICE Boston launched what it described as an “enhanced immigration targeted operation.” The monthlong clampdown dubbed Operation Patriot led to almost 1,500 arrests across the state, where immigration arrests are up by more than 300 percent, according to a New York Times analysis.

Diego Low, director of the Metrowest Worker Center in Framingham, said Milford had been hit the hardest by immigration enforcement. In the 48 hours before Gomes da Silva’s arrest, he said ICE agents were “pounding on the back door” of Catholic Charities Worcester County to be let in during a food distribution drive. And on May 30, a Milford father of twins in the process of applying for a green card was detained and later transferred to Burlington.

Because the region is a hub for construction workers, Low said, there had also been a noticeable surge in vans being stopped by officers in the early mornings. “It had been relentless,” he said. “Those of us who are connected to the town’s immigrant community were reeling.”

“I think that many people really believed that we were going to be deporting criminals. They didn’t think an innocent high school student from their community would be targeted for this.”

Milford is an immigrant town; almost 30 percent of its population is foreign-born. Over the past 15 years, the predominantly Irish and Italian ancestry community has seen a steady growth in the number of Brazilian and Hispanic residents, according to the Boston Globe. At times, this demographic shift has given rise to tensions between newcomers and locals.

Low specifically recalled an incident in 2011 in which an undocumented migrant from Ecuador struck and killed a motorcyclist, Matthew Denice. The man was later convicted of several charges, including manslaughter, and sentenced to serve 12 to 14 years in prison. ICE deported him in 2023. The year after Denice’s death, Milford became the first New England town to sign on to an ICE program to crack down on the hiring of undocumented immigrants.

“It just created this wave of rechazo,” Low said of the anti-immigration backlash that erupted in the town, which has the second-largest Ecuadorian population in the state. “And to some extent, there’s still a faint reverberation of that to this day.” Denice’s mother, Maureen Maloney, was invited on stage during a 2016 Trump campaign event in Arizona. (She spoke out recently in support of more immigration enforcement.)

When Colin texted his mother to say ICE had taken Gomes da Silva, Greco could not believe it. She thought it must have been a typo. But then she jumped into action. Greco reached out to her sister, an immigration attorney, who alerted a longtime immigrant rights advocate in the governor’s office. She also began contacting local reporters and helped connect Gomes da Silva’s parents, who are undocumented, with a legal team and Low, a Portuguese speaker. “The dad was obviously grief-stricken,” she said, “and his English was getting worse and worse because he was just so emotional.”

On June 1, Milford High School graduates protested outside of Milford Town Hall, a day after 18-year-old Marcelo Gomes Da Silva was detained by ICE on his way to volleyball practice.Jessica Rinaldi/The Boston Globe/Getty

On June 1, Massachusetts Gov. Maura Healey, a Democrat, issued a statement demanding information about Gomes da Silva’s arrest. He was supposed to play in the band at the high school graduation that day. After the ceremony, students, still in robes, marched a mile to the town hall, where they staged a rally calling for his release. They were joined by about 200 teachers, according to the Massachusetts Teachers Association, and many other community members. Democratic US Rep. Jake Auchincloss attended the rally and called out the Trump administration on X, saying it “pardons cop-beaters from Jan 6 but detains high-school volleyball players.”

The mobilization immediately after Gomes da Silva’s arrest struck Low as a “pivotal moment” for Milford, where Trump won 42 percent of votes in 2024. “It’s really the first time I can remember that there’s been a significant portion of the community speaking up on behalf of the immigrants who live here,” Low said, noting that he hadn’t heard a public official in the town espouse such a pro-immigrant stance in all his years of organizing work. “I think that’s really important going forward.”

Since the large-scale ICE roundups, his organization has shifted its primary focus from cases like worker wage theft to locating and assisting the families of people who have been detained. That includes an emergency mutual aid fund to provide legal support and pay for bond and an ICE watch group that monitors the agency’s presence. “None of us were prepared for how to respond to this moment,” Low added, “and so we’re inventing it…We’re trying to find ways the community can defend itself.”

To keep the momentum going, residents are holding community meetings to discuss how to prepare for future situations. Mainini, the volleyball coach, attended one gathering of about 20 people, which included teachers from different school districts and faith leaders working with the Brazilian and Ecuadorian immigrant populations. He’s joined a subcommittee dedicated to family preparedness and getting documents ready for parents to assign guardianship of their US citizen children in the event of their detention or deportation. Other groups are tasked with food and resource allocation and volunteer outreach.

When asked why Gomes da Silva’s case hit a nerve in Milford, Mainini underscored how integrated he was in the town. “When we think of undocumented immigrants, we don’t think of Marcelo, this boy that we went to school with since kindergarten,” he said. Some neighbors may not have even realized Gomes da Silva didn’t have legal status until now. “I think that many people really believed that we were going to be deporting criminals. They didn’t think an innocent high school student from their community would be targeted for this.” Mainini added: “It was a perfect storm.”

Marcelo Gomes da Silva looks for Milford’s flag inside The Great Hall at the State House on June 13, 2025.Jessica Rinaldi/The Boston Globe/Getty

While in ICE custody at Burlington, Gomes da Silva held on to this faith. He talked to other detainees about Jesus, and they prayed together before going to sleep on the concrete floor with the lights on and only a space blanket to cover themselves. In the facility, which is supposed to hold people only temporarily before they’re transferred to longer-term detention, he shared a single toilet with some 35 men. They weren’t allowed outdoors, Gomes da Silva said, so to pass the time, they sometimes played tic-tac-toe with water bottle caps on an improvised board someone scratched on the floor. “We never really got to know what was going on in the outside,” he said.

A day after his arrest, lawyers filed a habeas corpus petition seeking Gomes da Silva’s release. The document stated that Gomes da Silva has no criminal history. Not long after, a judge issued an order preventing ICE from transferring him out of state for at least 72 hours.

While Gomes da Silva waited, the local resistance continued. It was primarily led by the students, who walked out of class the Monday after the arrest wearing white T-shirts with the words “Free Marcelo.” An online fundraiser was set up to help the family. Neighbors began bringing them groceries. For several days, Greco’s house became a sort of command post as supporters flowed in and out to offer help and write affidavits attesting to Gomes da Silva’s standing in the community. “I don’t think he really understands how this all came together,” she said, “and just how fast…When I think about all the miracles I got to witness over those two weeks, it still blows my mind.”

On June 5, Immigration Judge Jenny Beverly in Chelmsford ruled that DHS had not proved that Gomes da Silva was a “danger to community” and set a $2,000 bond for his release. Outside the courthouse, friends and teammates celebrated the decision. Gomes da Silva was freed that day and, standing through a car’s sunroof, rode back home as his neighbors and relatives awaited waving signs. His father, in tears, apologized as he embraced him.

“He just kept bringing up that ‘I can’t believe my son was in handcuffs,’” Gomes da Silva said, “‘I can’t believe my son was in jail.’”

Gomes da Silva’s lawyers have since filed an asylum application on his behalf. While it’s unlikely that he could be redetained, he’s still vulnerable. “It’s still precarious in the sense that nothing is guaranteed,” said Robin Nice, a Boston-based immigration lawyer who started representing Gomes da Silva after learning about his case through a loose network of attorneys active on Facebook and Signal groups. “And the court process is probably going to take at least two years…He is in this kind of limbo status.”

Meanwhile, Gomes da Silva hopes to pay forward the support he received by helping other immigrants, especially those lingering in detention. This experience, he said, proved that “the love that you show to others will always come back.”

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Trump’s Policies Have US States Eyeing Offshore Wind Power From Canada and Elsewhere

This story was originally published by Canada’s National Observer and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Massachusetts is among the American states exploring sourcing electricity from planned offshore wind farms in Atlantic Canada, following the US market-stalling moratorium imposed on the industry by the Trump administration earlier this year.

The state, home to the pioneering 800-megawatt Vineyard Wind 1 project brought online last year, is one of six in the Northeast aiming to shift to renewable energy-based power grids before 2040.

But a representative from the Massachusetts energy department suggested they were being forced to rethink options for reaching a targeted 5,600 MW of offshore wind power this decade after Donald Trump—who has long been a vociferous opponent of “windmills”—made good on a threat to halt a number of multibillion-dollar projects on “Day One” of his second presidency.

Maria Hardiman, spokesperson for the Massachusetts Executive Office of Energy and Environmental Affairs, told Canada’s National Observer her department was now in “regular communication” around developing “new energy sources,” including Canadian offshore wind that would allow it to lower electricity costs and boost energy independence in the state and the wider Northeast.

“Building on our efforts to connect our regions through transmission, there are significant opportunities to construct new onshore and offshore wind projects across Canada and the [North American] northeast,” she said. “We will continue to explore these partnerships to bring down energy bills and bolster the energy independence of our region.”

Industry insiders say other states in the region, led by New York, are investigating tapping projects off the province of Nova Scotia, which is set for a first leasing of construction sites later this year.

Yet, Massachusetts was the only state that would specifically comment on whether it was looking to source Canadian offshore wind power, when approached by Canada’s National Observer.

A spokesperson for the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA), a public-benefit corporation that handles power procurement for the state—New York has a nation-leading target of bringing 9,000 MW of offshore wind onto its grid by 2035 — said it “continues to be focused on advancing the offshore wind industry in the US.”

“We applaud Canada for growing its offshore wind industry which will help to spur additional innovation and support expansion in the North American market,” NYSERDA spokesperson Deanna Cohen told Canada’s National Observer.

Industry observers suggest many states have opted to progress projects in “relative silence,” hoping that keeping a low profile will save their developments from Trump’s anti-offshore wind ire.

However, several market analysts believe Trump’s pullback on what had been a steadily-maturing US offshore wind sector will mean there is a “golden opportunity” for Canada to deliver power to key markets south of the border.

“The US, which was expected to become one of the world’s main [offshore wind] markets, is now going in completely the opposite direction for political reasons,” said Signe Sørensen, an analyst with Danish offshore wind consultancy Aegir Insights. “This could matter a lot to Canada.”

The New England states have been “spearheading the US build-out, procuring lots of offshore wind” as part of former US President Joe Biden’s objective of adding 30,000 MW of production by 2030, she said. “Delays to construction now will have ramifications far beyond Trump’s term.

“These states’ options to meet their clean energy targets with onshore renewables are quite limited,” said Sørensen. “So for this reason, large-scale Canadian offshore wind could come into the picture.”

John Dalton, president of Power Advisory, a US power sector consulting firm, told Canada’s National Observer there was “definitely a case” for future offshore wind production from Atlantic Canada being exported to New England.

“The Trump administration has largely derailed the realization of the [US Northeast’s] electricity market’s clean energy and offshore wind goals,” he said. “States will be pivoting to other resources…with policymakers very focused on securing low [electricity] costs.”

A price check between power purchase agreements finalized by US states with developers for wind farms now being built off the US—including the multibillion-dollar Empire Wind 1 and Sunrise Wind off New York and Revolution Wind off Rhode Island, which would together power well over 1 million American homes—and a number of the proposed projects off Nova Scotia compares “very favorably” with the Canadian sector.

“The economics of Nova Scotian offshore wind would certainly be competitive with these and future US offshore wind projects,” said Sørensen, though she declined to provide hard “levelized cost of energy} figures—the industry benchmark metric for the cost of a project over its lifetime compared to the revenue generated by purchase power agreements—citing commercial confidentiality.

Aegir CEO Scott Urquhart noted: “Nova Scotia has a huge area of shallow water that could house tens of gigawatts with excellent economics. Looking at distance to markets, interconnections to the US are not a crazy idea—they’ve been doing similar distances off Europe for years.”

Given the historically high electricity prices in the US Northeast and the fast-rising power demand forecast, Aegir calculations suggest Nova Scotian offshore wind supply could fit well with states’ pursuits of a strategy led by greater diversification of clean energy sources.

Winds rush along the coastlines of Canada’s Maritime provinces at speeds similar to those off Northern Europe—roughly 25 mph—where offshore wind farms have been generating power to the grid for more than 30 years and have led to the development of a sector employing over 300,000 people.

Canada’s Atlantic Economic Council said last year that offshore wind off Nova Scotia could become a $7-billion market by 2030, creating an initial 5,000 jobs amid other benefits for regional economies. Nova Scotia is set to hold its first auction, where waters would be leased to developers to harness a first 5,000 megawatts (MW) of energy, before the end of 2025. The Global Wind Energy Council, an industry body, said in its most recent annual report Canada could add a first 1,000 MW by 2034.

But under the aegis of making Canada an “energy superpower,” Nova Scotia Premier Tim Houston has pitched a 40,000 MW project called Wind West as a means of meeting 27 per cent of the country’s total energy demand. Multibillion-dollar visions of a massive offshore wind-powered transmission trunkline running along North America’s Atlantic coastline are not new. Several long-distance power transmission projects have been considered over the past decade, including the high-profile Atlantic Wind Connection backed by Google, Swiss green-energy private-equity house Good Energies, Japanese industrial conglomerate Marubeni, and Belgian transmission system operator Elia.

The New England-Maritimes Offshore Energy Corridor consortium calculates that a 2GW high-voltage, direct current power trunkline running roughly 620 miles from the Canadian Maritimes to the Gulf of Maine could deliver “economic and environmental benefits” of up to $800 million (US) a year.

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Churches Can Now Endorse Candidates and Trump Couldn’t Be Happier

On Monday, President Donald Trump spoke for nearly 90 minutes at the White House Faith Luncheon, a gathering of faith leaders and CEOs whose companies support faith-based groups. Though his speech wasn’t all about religion—he touched on the election, his “Big Beautiful Bill,” and foreign policy, among other topics—he devoted a portion of it to celebrating the recent decision by the IRS to redefine the rule against political activity at churches. The agency clarified that it considers political endorsements in the context of religious services to be private communications, and therefore not in violation of the Johnson Amendment.

“As President, I’ve ended the radical left’s war on faith, and we’re once again protecting religious freedom like never before in our country!” he told the approximately 60 people who had gathered.“We’re getting rid of the Johnson Amendment that didn’t let the pastors and ministers and everybody speak about politics. Now you’re able to speak about politics!” As my colleague David Corn wrote last week, the IRS’ decision represents a major change from how churches used to navigate political concerns:

Churches have long been allowed to participate in politics in various ways. Clergy could address political issues from the pulpit, and churches could distribute so-called educational material related to elections (such as the voting guides that the Moral Majority and other fundamentalist outfits have produced comparing candidates, which functioned as de facto endorsements). Inviting candidates to speak to congregations has been a popular action within Black churches. But churches were explicitly not allowed to back the election of a specific candidate. Support had to be delivered with a nod and a wink.

Trump recalled that when he was first campaigning for president in 2016, he was shocked to learn that a group of faith leaders he met with wasn’t allowed to publicly endorse him. “I said, ‘You have more power than anybody, but you’re not allowed to use your power.’ I said, ‘We’re going to get rid of that, because people want to hear what you have to say more than anybody else, pretty much.’ And we did get rid of it!”

Several members of Trump’s White House Faith Office were present at the luncheon, and he occasionally addressed them directly. “Paula, you can say, ‘I don’t like that guy, and they won’t take away your tax-exempt status,” he said. The “Paula” in question was likely Paula White, Trump’s senior adviser to the Faith Office.

White is a leader in the New Apostolic Reformation, a growing charismatic movement led by a loose network of self-appointed prophets and apostles. Many NAR leaders teach that Christians are called to take dominion over all aspects of society, including politics. Last fall, I wrote about her years-long influence on Trump—and her involvement in the lead-up to the 2021 attack on the Capitol:

Since 2016, many NAR prophesies have concerned Trump, whom adherents see as having been divinely chosen to lead the country. Trump’s introduction to the movement came in 2002 when he invited Florida apostle Paula White to be his personal minister after seeing her preach on television.

[…]

As the 2020 election drew near, their role became more important. White warned her followers that Christians who don’t support Trump will “have to stand accountable before God one day.” Shortly after Trump’s defeat, Sheets became an influential figure in the “Stop the Steal” campaign, leading rallies across the country. He warned that the results of the presidential election were “going to be overturned and President Trump is going to be put back in office for four years.” Around the same time, White-Cain gave a speech imploring religious Americans to “strike and strike and strike and strike and strike and strike and strike and strike and strike and strike until you have victory.”

During the speech, Trump also compared his own legal struggles with those of persecuted Christians. “I stopped the Biden administration’s persecutions of Christians and pro-life activists,” he said. “They would put people in jail if they even uttered the word, and well, look at me. I mean, look what happened to me! I was under investigation more than the late great Alphonse Capone!”

At the end of the speech, Trump called on White to lead the attendees in prayer. Before she bowed her head, she praised Trump for his support of religious leaders. “He is our greatest champion of faith, of any president, that the United States of America has ever had,” she said. Quoting the Old Testament story of Esther, the brave queen who saved the Jews from a wicked ruler, she assured the attendees, “You’ve been called by God to his kingdom for such a time as this.”

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Trump Just Made It OK to Continue Paying Disabled Workers Peanuts

On July 7, the US Department of Labor formally withdrew its plan for a rule—introduced during the Biden administration—that would federally end the practice of subminimum wage for disabled people. Over the past decade, 16 states have ended subminimum wage for disabled people, with a few more phasing out this practice.

“It’s a cruel irony for disabled people that the Trump administration announced they are rolling back this rule almost the same day as Congress voted for the [One Big Beautiful Bill] Act,” said Mia Ives-Rublee, the senior director for the Disability Justice Initiative at the Center for American Progress. “Now, not only will disabled people’s health care be ripped away, [but] many will have fewer opportunities to earn a fair wage.”

“It’s discouraging to see people being treated like they are 5 years old at a sheltered workshop,” said David Pinno.

Subminimum wage for disabled people was created as part of the Fair Labor Standards Act in 1938, when the minimum wage was established for other workers. While, at the time, these jobs were more commonly held by Blind people and veterans, it has since shifted to being more common among people with intellectual and developmental disabilities. For decades, companies have been able to apply for 14(c) certificates, which allow them to pay disabled people less than minimum wage. As of July, there are over 600 sheltered workshops across the United States with 14(c) certificates, and they each employ from a handful to over 300 people.

“The Department takes seriously the concerns expressed by Members of Congress and others that it lacks statutory authority,” part of the reasoning for the withdrawal reads. “The fact that some States ended their state-law subminimum wage provisions does not necessarily mean such provisions are no longer needed to prevent curtailment of employment opportunities.”

An argument in favor of subminimum wage has long been that it incentivizes employers to hire disabled people who simply would not find employment elsewhere. However, a study from last year disputed this fact, finding employment for disabled people either increased or stayed the same in two states that have retired subminimum wage. Disability advocates who have pushed to end the subminimum wage for disabled people have argued that making a living wage off of as little as 25 cents an hour was impossible. The federal minimum wage today is $7.25 an hour—which is not a living wage either.

David Pinno, who now works at McDonald’s and makes $14 an hour, was employed at a sheltered workshop from 2003 to 2011 in Manawa, Wisconsin. He sometimes made just $48 a week for stapling, labeling, and packaging products.

“If anyone realizes how bad I was treated at a sheltered workshop claiming to be Christian and agrees sheltered workshops should continue, [they] obviously never worked at one,” Pinno said. “It’s discouraging to see people being treated like they are 5 years old at a sheltered workshop.”

When Pinno was in his early 30s, he successfully moved out of subminimum wage work when he was hired by McDonald’s—where he still works a decade later—to be a crew member. Nonetheless, there are still 39 workshops in Wisconsin with over 2,000 disabled employees who are being paid less than minimum wage.

Carrie Varner, who is autistic, worked at a sheltered workshop for nearly 2 years between 2007 and 2009. The work, including cutting up buttons, was so menial that she “got really horribly depressed when I was there, and to the point where I became suicidal.”

But then she moved into a job in state government for North Dakota, and has been able to become more independent when she was paid a living wage.

“I was making really good money, and that’s how I was able to move…into my own home,” Varner said. “Most people who are in subminimum wage, they’re never going to get anything like that.”

While the federal government’s recent decision comes as a disappointment for many disability advocates, on the state level, the push to end subminimum wage continues. On May 1, Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp signed a bill that will phase out the payment of subminimum wage to disabled workers by 2027, saying, “Everyone deserves the chance to work and thrive.”

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The Club World Cup Was a Showcase for Donald Trump’s America

In an administration beset by self-inflicted chaos and personal feuds, there has been one gleaming constant at President Donald Trump’s side for much of the last four months.

It was there when Trump promised to “wean off FEMA” and claimed that “in theory, you shouldn’t have any forest fires.” It was there when he threatened to invoke the Insurrection Act against “animals” in Los Angeles and when he claimed that the Biden presidency had been usurped by an illegitimate robotic pen and when a black-eyed Elon Musk claimed that he had been punched in the face by his son. It was there when Trump proposed re-opening Alcatraz as a prison for immigrants, when he claimed that the 2020 election was “rigged,” and when he said that he had released living people’s Social Security numbers in the FBI’s JFK files intentionally, because “if you do delete it…people are going to say ‘why did you delete it?’”

There it was in March when Trump said he “was told” that people who had been indiscriminately sent to El Salvador “went through a very strong vetting process,” and that Democrats want “transgender for everyone.” You could see it over the president’s left shoulder as he floated war with Iran, occupation of California, and annexation of Canada. Sometimes it shared space with a big map that said “Gulf of America” or with some visiting luminary like Dr. Oz or NFL commissioner Roger Goodell or Cameron and Tyler Winkelvoss. It has seen things you wouldn’t believe. It has participated in more high-level meetings than JD Vance.

Oh, the things it might tell us, if the FIFA Club World Cup trophy could talk.

For much of his second term, the gleaming gold prize from Tiffany & Co.—which resembles the rings of Saturn or the logo of the Office of Nuclear Energy when unlocked with a specially designed key—has been Trump’s favorite prop in an increasingly gilded White House. He wheeled it out to a crypto conference. For a time, the trophy was even on display in the lobby of Trump Tower, where FIFA president Gianni Infantino recently opened a new office. On Sunday, after the soccer tournament came to an end, Trump even crashed the trophy presentation at MetLife Stadium in New Jersey to join the victorious players of Chelsea FC as they lifted the prize on the field. The gesture was Trumpian in its extreme—gifting to someone else a trophy that was never his.

Trump never missed a chance to make the Club World Cup about himself.

In some ways, Trump’s embrace of the Club World Cup fits a familiar pattern. For years, autocratic regimes have used major international sporting events to present a more flattering image of themselves to the rest of the world, and international organizations like FIFA have been all too happy to lend a hand. About a decade ago, human rights campaigners coined a term for all of this: “sportswashing.”

For countries like Qatar and Saudi Arabia, these big spectacles have served a variety of interlocking aims—to soften public perception, diversify their economies, and bolster their reputations as international powers. The revamped Club World Cup, which streamed for free on the Saudi-backed DAZN, was itself part of a broader Saudi effort to challenge the hegemony of European soccer while establishing the kingdom as a cultural superpower—a strategy that also includes its alliance with Trump in professional golf.

It makes sense that Trump would gravitate to this kind of approach. He has a clear affinity for Gulf-style governance. For the president, these rulers are not just business partners, but also a blueprint. After all, he’s an aspiring autocrat with a de-facto royal family, a fondness for pay-per-view spectacles, and plans for his own sovereign wealth fund. It feels like a step down for the United States to have to shamelessly launder its reputation like a repressive petro-state, but it’s hard to deny that that’s where we are.

And yet, as a sportswashing exercise, the Club World Cup was akin to taking a polar-bear plunge in the Passaic River. The reputations of Donald Trump and the United States haven’t gotten any cleaner in the wash—the sporting event just got grimier by association. That’s really quite an accomplishment when you’re talking about FIFA.

Instead of papering over its unpopular authoritarianism with a sparkling international spectacle, the Trump administration used the spectacle to draw more attention to its authoritarianism. It began even before the tournament kicked off, when Vice President JD Vance said—at a press conference to announce that the former Duke University golfer Andrew Giuliani would be in charge of preparations for next year’s men’s World Cup—that fans would be welcome from all over the world but would have to deal with Kristi Noem if they failed to leave when their visas up. It was a joke-like construct in a threat-like context. No one wants to be reminded of heavily armed men in masks roaming American cities with impunity when they’re planning a summer vacation.

Things went downhill from there. Ahead of the opening match, US Customs and Border Protection announced that its agents would be “suited and booted” and “ready to provide security” at opening-round games. A South Florida NBC affiliate reported that ICE would be working security at matches in Miami. Fans were warned to bring proof of legal status with them to the stadiums.

Lest anyone accept that this was run-of-the-mill security theater, Coast Guard and Customs and Border Protection even conducted an inspection of a yacht party in Miami, demanding crew members show their papers while the mayor of Miami-Dade and executives from Telemundo mingled nearby. DHS claimed this was all standard operating procedure, but it’s hard to accept claims that there was no intent to intimidate from an administration that is making Michael Bay movies about raiding swap meets.

The tournament itself was fine, if often a bit uncanny valley. While the soccer stars themselves traveled without a hitch, other international athletes—including members of Senegal’s national women’s basketball team—already have been barred from entering the country by Trump’s Department of Homeland Security, while news outlets have documented case after case of soccer players being removed from the country by the president’s deportation force.

“The entire world will focus on the United States of America,” FIFA’s Infantino said of the upcoming 2026 World Cup at the same White House summit where Vance joked about deporting soccer fans.

But maybe that’s not really a good thing. Trump never missed a chance to make the Club World Cup about himself—and to remind viewers at home just what exactly it means to do business with the US government in 2025. During an in-game interview with DAZN on Sunday, he claimed that the Club World Cup trophy that had been in his office would stay there, and that FIFA had simply made a new one to give to the players.

He was booed in the stadium before the match. After watching the final from a luxury suite with Attorney General Pam Bondi, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, and media mogul Rupert Murdoch, Trump lingered on the field until the victors wondered what was going on. “I thought he was going to exit the stage, but he wanted to stay,” Chelsea’s Reece James told reporters afterwards.

Welcome to the club.

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Red States, Defying Reality, Are Reclassifying Gas as a “Green” Fuel

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

In Louisiana, natural gas—a planet-heating fossil fuel—is now, by law, considered “green energy” that can compete with solar and wind projects for clean energy funding. The law, signed by Republican Governor Jeff Landry last month, comes on the heels of similar bills passed in Ohio, Tennessee, and Indiana. What the bills have in common—besides an “updated definition” of a fossil fuel as a clean energy source—is language seemingly plucked straight from a right-wing think tank backed by oil and gas billionaire and activist Charles Koch.

Louisiana’s law was based on a template created by the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a conservative organization that brings legislators and corporate lobbyists together to draft bills “dedicated to the principles of limited government, free markets and federalism.” The law maintains that Louisiana, in order to minimize its reliance on “foreign adversary nations” for energy, must ensure that natural gas and nuclear power are eligible for “all state programs that fund ‘green energy’ or ‘clean energy’ initiatives.”

But natural gas, also known as methane gas, is no more natural than any other fossil fuel. Its primary ingredient is methane, an intense heat-trapping gas that is far more potent than the carbon pollution produced by coal and oil, though it doesn’t stay in the atmosphere as long.

It’s often marketed as a “bridge fuel”—a less harmful fossil fuel that can be used as communities transition away from coal—but studies have found that over the long term, the planet-warming impact of the natural gas industry may be equivalent to that of coal. That’s because gas pipelines often leak; according to an Environmental Defense Fund analysis, natural gas pipelines in the US allow between 1.2 million and 2.6 million tons of methane to escape into the atmosphere each year.

“It’s classic greenwashing, right?…The intent of these laws is to allow the build-out of fossil fuel infrastructure.”

Louisiana state Rep. Jacob Landry first introduced a near-identical bill to the model posted on ALEC’s website and to the other bills that have passed in Ohio, Tennessee, and Indiana. (The Washington Post reported in 2023 that ALEC was involved in Ohio’s bill; ALEC denies involvement.) Landry, who represents a small district in the southern part of the state, is the recipient of significant fossil fuel-industry funding—and he co-owns two oil and gas consulting firms himself. During his campaign for the state Legislature, Landry received donations from at least 15 fossil-fuel-affiliated companies and PACs, including ExxonMobil (which has also funded ALEC) and Phillips 66. Those donations alone totaled over $20,000.

Landry did not respond to multiple requests for comment. ALEC did not get back to Grist in time for publication.

While Louisiana has one of the least reliable grids in the country, that lack of reliability is in large part due to the state’s reliance on natural gas, which provides most of its electricity, according to a 2025 report from the Louisiana Legislative Auditor’s Office. “Best practices have found that gas plants are susceptible to large-scale failures during extreme weather,” the auditors wrote. “Diversifying the energy sources used for electricity generation is a priority.”

Bills that benefit both the fossil fuel industry and the individual lawmakers who introduce them aren’t exactly a new genre in Louisiana, said Laura Peterson, a senior analyst with the Union of Concerned Scientists. What’s less standard is that this one is dressed up in climate-friendly language.

“Louisiana is a classic example of a captured state,” Peterson said. “Their state economy is just so dependent on fossil fuels and petrochemicals.” (The amount of money the fossil fuel industry brings to Louisiana’s people, though, has been on the decline since the turn of the century.)

The state accounts for about 10 percent of the country’s natural gas production and holds about 6 percent of U.S. natural gas reserves. Natural gas is already used to generate about three-quarters of the state’s electricity, and building out more pipeline projects to carry liquefied natural gas, or LNG, won’t necessarily make electricity bills cheaper for residents, Peterson said.

“Building LNG infrastructure is not going to lower anyone’s energy prices in the short term,” since it takes many years to build a pipeline, Peterson said. “And there’s a lot of research that shows that overreliance on gas leaves power grids vulnerable to extreme weather, which Louisiana has a lot of.”

Jeffrey Clark, president of the Louisiana Advanced Power Alliance—an industry group representing both renewable and fossil fuel energy companies and investors—testified in opposition to the bill in early June.

“This legislation is being promoted as a solution to Louisiana’s reliability challenges. But with all due respect, it is a solution in search of a problem,” Clark said. “We support fossil fuels as a key part of the nation’s energy mix, but codifying them as the only acceptable path forward dismisses a growing body of evidence that grid reliability depends on resource diversity.”

Fossil fuel advocacy groups lauded the move. Larry Behrens of the nonprofit Power the Future wrote that the legislation turns Louisiana into an “energy sanctuary state,” taking “a direct shot at the China-backed solar and wind lobby.”

Reclassifying natural gas as “green” energy means that proposed natural gas pipelines may be able to access funding that would otherwise have gone to new solar or wind projects; it may also make natural gas companies more appealing to environmentally conscious investors.

ALEC, the right-wing think tank that provided the template language for Landry’s bill, noted in a press release that resolutions like this could pave the way for more AI data centers in the state, too. “Redefining ‘green energy’ allows utilities to continue using natural gas while fulfilling state ‘green energy’ or ‘clean energy’ initiatives,” ALEC staffer Mark Lucas wrote.

Over the years, ALEC has succeeded in getting laws that benefit fossil fuel companies passed across the country. Recently the group, which was founded in the 1970s, has helped draft legislation criminalizing grassroots protest against pipelines, gas terminals, and other fossil fuel infrastructure—versions of that bill had passed in 17 states by 2022. Its members have also drafted bills aiming to punish economic boycotts of the oil industry. And there are currently 114 different model policies related to energy on ALEC’s website, 23 of which specifically address “green energy.”

“It’s classic greenwashing, right?” said Peterson of the new Louisiana law—using the language of sustainability to describe an activity that’s actually not sustainable at all. “The intent of these laws is to allow the build-out of fossil fuel infrastructure, which will perpetuate the use of fossil fuels for decades to come.”

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We May Have to Take Climate Risks Into Our Own Hands Now

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

In 2023, my husband and I bought our house in southwest Colorado, in part because it backed up to open space. That was the dream: trails just past the fence, a scrubby network of oak and sage stretching out into the hills beyond. But a little over a year into homeownership, I was questioning the wisdom of living so close to a burnable landscape.

This past winter’s spate of wildfires across Los Angeles made that fear of living alongside such a combustible landscape all the more real—fear that was only intensified by the weather. In my town, winter and its all important snow never really showed up. By spring, our snowpack was well below normal, winds were whipping, and I was becoming more paranoid about my wildfire risk.

It’s not just people like me—living on the edge of fire-prone terrain—who may be sharing that paranoia.

I wanted to find out what all of us could do to limit our risk.

More than 100 million people across 20 states and Washington, DC, live in the path of the increasingly fierce hurricanes. Most of the eastern half of the country is now at risk for tornadoes, and floods have increased in frequency and intensity in both coastal areas and river valleys. Over the Fourth of July weekend, extreme flooding in central Texas was among the most deadly of the past century.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) National Centers for Environmental Information found that 2024 held the second-most billion-dollar natural disasters ever for the US—right behind 2023. This year, with its already higher than average fire activity and predicted busy Atlantic hurricane season, is already shaping up to be significant, too.

At the same time, government cuts have undermined every critical juncture for disaster preparation. Federal programs for wildfire mitigation, proactive work like thinning forests and conducting prescribed burns, which help prevent large scale fires, have been halted due to staffing cutbacks and lack of funds.

Cutbacks to the National Weather Service, through reductions in force at NOAA, have already led to gaps in forecasting, which makes it harder for the public to plan for extreme weather events like the Texas Hill Country floods this month or the deadly May tornadoes, which killed at least 27 people as they swept across Kentucky, Missouri, and Virginia.

And the agency explicitly tasked with disaster relief is shrinking. FEMA has cut funding for its bipartisanly popular Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities program, a major tool for building flood-resistant infrastructure, among other resiliency projects. It has lost some of its ability to help us recover, too. FEMA, already understaffed in 2024, has lost a third of its workforce since the beginning of the year. It has scaled back training and stands to lose $646 million in funding. As if that’s not enough, President Donald Trump has said he plans to phase out FEMA as a whole after the 2025 hurricane season

In the face of all that, I wanted to find out what all of us could do to limit our risk.

The first step was pretty basic: Instead of just spiraling about hypotheticals, figure out the specific risks in your area. For now, FEMA’s National Risk Index, where you can identify the threats to your community, remains a good source. By looking through the index, I learned my county is high in wildfire risks—which I already knew—but also that the area is prone to landslides, drought, and severe lightning storms.

Once I knew the risks, I looked at how I could prepare.

But the answers weren’t obvious. I reached out to both my regional FEMA office, whose contact was easy to find online, and the national headquarters, because I wanted to know what sort of concrete things I could do to protect my home—and what kind of support I might expect if the worst-case scenario happened to hit my community. I got a short email back saying that I should contact local authorities.

And so I started the real journey there, by looking at my local resources.

The most meaningful thing you can do on your own is harden your own home against relevant disasters. I found online that my local fire department provides free wildfire assessments because they think reducing your own vulnerability is one that can also reduce community risk. “The less time I have to spend at your house,” Scott Nielsen, my local wildfire battalion chief, told me, the more he can spend fighting other parts of the fire.

Nielsen says that when it comes to mitigating fire, we can’t change things like topography or weather, but we can change the fuel—and often that fuel includes our homes.

When Loren Russell, who works for the wildfire division of my regional fire district, came over to assess my risks, what he said surprised me: Instead of the overgrown hill behind the house, which had scared me, he was worried about nooks in the eaves or corners of the deck where embers could get caught. He also worried about the the oily junipers in the yard, which could become ladder fuels that might allow fire to leap to the tree canopies, and about the ways those canopies connected, spreading sparks across the landscape.

“You go out and you build a concrete bunker and surround it with gravel, but now you live in a concrete bunker surrounded by gravel.”

Russell says it’s always the same few things that create risk. Looking at the splintering boards of my neighbor’s fence, he noted that he’d seen fires blow across whole subdivisions through fences. “Once embers are in a fence it’s like a wick,” he says.

There are strategies for personal protection, too—and not just for fire. FEMA says that if you live in a hurricane-prone area, you can install impact resistant doors (particularly garage doors), storm shingles, and reinforced roof bracing, all of which help your house withstand storms. If you’re in a floodplain, you can seal cracks in your foundation, move your electrical boxes higher, or build berms and drains into your landscaping so water runs away from your home.

There can be a range of costs for those projects, from your own sweat equity for landscaping to tens of thousands of dollars for a new roof. But there can be grants and tools available to offset some of the cost, like Alabama’s program to help fund home strengthening, which is run through the state insurance office. Check your state resources, like the division of emergency management.

There’s no perfect formula for what to do. Russell says mitigation makes a real difference, but that risk is personal, because it’s also tied up in tolerance, and in trying to predict the future. “You go out and you build a concrete bunker and surround it with gravel, but,” he says, “now you live in a concrete bunker surrounded by gravel.”

Turning your home into a bunker is expensive, unappealing, and it might not make a difference in your broader risk tolerance. And unfortunately, it doesn’t really change your insurance liability. At least not yet.

My insurance agent told me that they don’t yet factor home hardening into their policies and pricing, even though simply being in a disaster-prone area can raise your premiums or make it harder to get insurance—and sometimes, insurance companies will simply dump policy holders in risk-prone areas. More than 100,000 Californians in fire-prone areas have lost their insurance in the past five years.

Landscape scale problems, like fire, need landscape scale solutions: “You really are impacted by your neighbor’s property.”

Those drops don’t necessarily reflect what’s happening on the ground. “We had one insurance agency that was pretty happy to drop people. I looked at their reports and didn’t find them to be based in fire science,” Nielsen says, about our area of western Colorado. He says they’re based on zip codes, which can be relatively arbitrary, instead of on the kind of terrain and fuel supply that actually make a difference to fires. And they almost never reflect mitigation work.

One of the only ways home hardening and mitigation makes a difference for insurance is when it’s done on a neighborhood scale. For instance, in 10 states, communities that have been certified as firewise through the National Fire Protection Association are able to get insurance discounts.

That is reflective of actual risk, “You really are impacted by your neighbor’s property,” says Max Moritz, a wildfire specialist at the University of California Santa Barbara. He says that the LA wildfires showed just how much broader-scale hardening—or lack thereof—impacts risk. But regional tools, like consistent fire hazard mapping programs, or building code requirements for new construction can significantly reduce risk. That’s true of other natural disasters, too.

Nielsen says that landscape scale problems, like fire, need landscape scale solutions. Home hardening is a piece we can control, but it’s networked into a bigger system of land management, risk tolerance, and policy. When a tornado or a hurricane comes, it doesn’t just hit one house.

Nielsen thinks about what’s commonly called the Swiss cheese model of risk assessment, where multiple layers of protection. This includes everything from personal scale, like hardening your roof to withstand high force winds; to local and regional projects like floodplain mitigation or evacuation planning; to federal tools, like the National Weather Service, or FEMA, which apply to the whole country.

You can visualize each layer as a Swiss cheese slice in a sandwich. They all have holes, ideally, the gaps overlap, and the layers support one another—and stop a threat from becoming catastrophic.

That’s even more true for renters, or people who live in urban areas, who might not have as much control over their own homes, and who are even more impacted by the places around them. Hurricanes have wreaked havoc on major cities. If that’s you, ask your landlord what they’ve done to harden the property, ask about past damage, consider supplemental renters insurance and then get curious about municipal management like storm drains, which divert water away from housing, evacuation routes or fire mitigation, depending on your risks.

As federal support wanes, the things we can do individually or as a neighborhood collective become even more important.

Having a lot of layers of swiss cheese is especially important now.

It’s all connected. Preventative mitigation is networked into a broader system, but so is dealing with disasters when they come, whether they’re fires, floods, or storms. Marshalling national resources during and after large-scale disasters has been a federal responsibility since the 1970s. That kind of coordinated response is part of how we plan for natural disasters, but the current administration is planning to cut the budget and scope of FEMA and turn responsibility toward state and local governments, which aren’t always funded or prepared to manage large incidents.

The scientists and field workers I spoke to for this story told me they were worried about the lack of federal investment. Moritz says that he’s concerned about disaster response, but he’s also worried about understanding future preparedness. “Some of the big questions that we don’t have answers for yet rely on big labs and national level funding,” he says. “Research wise, a lot of Forest Service colleagues who do really good work in federal labs have been let go, or lost staff. Those are serious losses that will take a long time to get back from.”

He says that there are still big gaps in the research about exactly how home hardening fits into the puzzle of resilience, and what kind of choices are the most effective, but that in the face of that federal lack of support, the sort of things we can do individually or as a neighborhood collective become even more important.

When there are several fires burning at once—like in Los Angeles earlier this year—responding agencies are spread thin and every person might not be able to depend on their help, Mortiz told me. That makes education shared among neighbors even more important. “That’s the scale you can make a difference,” he said.

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One Year After Assassination Attempt, MAGA Reiterates “God Spared Trump”

One year ago today, a would-be assassin tried to kill Donald Trump at a presidential campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania. While he survived, one of his supporters, 50-year-old Corey Comperatore, was fatally shot; two other rallygoers were also wounded but survived. The shooter, whose motive remains unclear, was rapidly killed by Secret Service countersnipers.

On Sunday, Trump’s loyal supporters piled onto the claim that his survival was all about divine intervention. “One year ago today, God miraculously spared the life of President Trump, and He is using him to lead our county back to greatness,” House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) said in a post on X, accompanied by a video featuring audio of himself praising Trump.

“The Miracle in Butler occurred one year ago today,” White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller wrote, declaring, “God saved our President so that he could save our country.”

“Americans will never forget that God was looking down on President Trump that fateful day and miraculously spared his life by a quarter of an inch,” Rep. Elise Stefanik posted. “God’s hand was on that field,” Rep. Andy Harris, chairman of the House Freedom Caucus, said, adding, “President Trump’s life was spared and the MAGA movement was preserved for such a time as this.” Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins, Senate Majority Leader John Thune, Sen. Bernie Moreno, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, disgraced ex-congressman George Santos, Rep. Nancy Mace, and others made similar comments.

The US government officially also got in on the act:“The bullet hit—but by the grace of God, he stood up. Bloodied. Unbowed. And he fought harder. July 13th is a reminder: we fight, we win, AND WE NEVER SURRENDER,” the White House account posted on X, accompanied by a 90-second video praising Trump’s career trajectory. Another post featured a photo of Trump with blood dripping down his face and pumping his fist in the air, accompanied by the quote: “I WAS SAVED BY GOD TO MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN. I BELIEVE THAT.”

One year ago today, an assassin opened fire on President Donald J. Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania.

The bullet hit—but by the grace of God, he stood up. Bloodied. Unbowed. And he fought harder.

July 13th is a reminder: we fight, we win, AND WE NEVER SURRENDER. pic.twitter.com/0BMUYpGltE

— The White House (@WhiteHouse) July 13, 2025

In other posts, the White House memorialized Comperatore, including through a video interview with his wife, Helen.

This is, of course, not the first time that Trump’s allies have used the assassination attempt for political purposes. That went into full effect right after the attack, at the 2024 Republican National Convention, as my colleague Mark Follman detailed:

When Trump was nominated at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee five days later, his brush with death was a major theme. Large images of the iconic news photo of him being pulled from the rally stage, his fist in the air and face streaked with blood, provided a backdrop on the main stage. Multiple speakers referred to his survival as the result of divine intervention. Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina and others lionized Trump, literally, and declared his survival and candidacy nothing short of a holy miracle.

In his acceptance speech, Trump, his right ear still bandaged, gave a dramatic, graphic account. “I said to myself, ‘Wow, what was that? It can only be a bullet.’” He said he brought his hand down from his ear “covered with blood, just absolutely blood all over the place.” He then emphasized, “There was blood pouring everywhere, and yet in a certain way I felt very safe because I had God on my side.”

Meanwhile, on Saturday, Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) released a report produced at his request by the Government Accountability Office. The report said that senior Secret Service officials received information about a threat to Trump’s life 10 days before the Butler rally but failed to relay it to proper federal and local officials. Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) also released a report on Sunday, compiled by the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee; it asserted that the Secret Service denied multiple requests for additional security to protect Trump during the campaign, among other allegations.

One year later, the Secret Service said the assassination attempt “represents an operational failure that the Secret Service will carry as a reminder of the critical importance of its zero-fail mission and the need for continuous improvement.” The agency also said it has implemented more than 20 of the recommendations made by Congressional oversight committees, and that another 16 are in progress. Six people, it said, faced disciplinary suspensions over the debacle in Butler.

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I Watched Lara Trump’s “Interview” With the President So You Don’t Have To

On Saturday night, Fox News went full-on state media.

Lara Trump, the president’s daughter-in-law, sat down with the 47th president to “interview” him for her show, My View, that she definitely did not get through nepotism.

A journalist who lands a prime-time interview with the president might be expected to come with substantive questions, especially in a time when Texas is reeling from floods that killed more than 120 people, the MAGA base is revolting over the Epstein files, the State Department has enacted mass layoffs, and fears are mounting again about a global trade war.

Instead, Lara Trump treated her father-in-law to a glowing display of puffery, with questions including:

“Why is it that you are back here in this White House now, despite so many people saying it was impossible?”

“When will [people] actually start to see the positive impact from the one Big Beautiful Bill in their lives?”

“How important has family been to you in all of this?”

“Some people have called you the bodyguard of Western civilization. How do you feel about that title?”

.@POTUS: "When people see the horror show that we had for four years … It was almost like they tried to kill our country — and the beautiful thing is, now we have the hottest country in the world." pic.twitter.com/UTkA2bhUTi

— Rapid Response 47 (@RapidResponse47) July 13, 2025

As she proceeded, the ~~Fox News~~ Trump Newschyrons flashing across the bottom of the screen were similarly absurd:

“Trump: Golden Age of America Is Upon Us”

“President Trump praises his children”

And, perhaps most fittingly:

“President Trump calls out ‘fake news’”

.@POTUS: "I so admire honest reporting. There's not that much of it, though. We really don't have that much — and I think to Make America Great Again, we have to get a bigger percentage than we have." pic.twitter.com/C9PmQY0sc1

— Rapid Response 47 (@RapidResponse47) July 13, 2025

For his part, President Trump did his usual ranting and raving in response: about Democrats (“It was almost like they tried to kill our country”); former President Joe Biden (“He was the worst president in the history of our country”); the so-called Big Beautiful Bill (“It’s one of the most incredible bills ever passed”); and immigration (“Who would want open borders?”).

Of course, the fact that this was no legitimate news-making interview is not exactly surprising. Other than a brief stint early in her career working as a producer for Inside Edition, Lara Trump, despite her obsession with meritocracy, does not have any actual journalistic experience. Instead, she has built her career as a mouthpiece for the Trump empire and its familial version of the Republican party, including her role as co-chair of the Republican National Committee during the 2024 election cycle.

Other so-called interviews that Lara Trump has done on her show since its February premiere have been similarly unenlightening, including those with White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., and several other members of Trump’s cabinet. A recent review of My View conducted by Media Matters called the show “a ludicrous propaganda program” that Lara Trump and her interviewees have used to glorify the president.

Her sit-down on Saturday took this to its logical conclusion. Just consider her last question: “I don’t think we’ll ever forget President Donald J. Trump. But when history looks back on this time in our country, when history looks back on you, how would you like to be remembered?” she asked him.

“A good person,” the president replied, “but a person that saved our country.”

.@POTUS on his legacy: "I really believed our country was going down for the fall. I don't know if it ever could've come back. It was very close to the edge — and I really would like to be known as the man that saved our country." pic.twitter.com/xQQ2tDXalo

— Rapid Response 47 (@RapidResponse47) July 13, 2025

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Trump Threatens to Revoke the Citizenship of Celebrity Critic Rosie O’Donnell

President Donald Trump threatened on Saturday to revoke the citizenship of Rosie O’Donnell, an American-born comedian, talk-show host, actress, and long-time Trump nemesis who moved to Ireland after Trump won the 2024 election.

“Because of the fact that Rosie O’Donnell is not in the best interests of our Great Country, I am giving serious consideration to taking away her Citizenship. She is a Threat to Humanity, and should remain in the wonderful Country of Ireland, if they want her,” Trump wrote on his social media platform Truth Social. “GOD BLESS AMERICA!”

The Fourteenth Amendment, which protects “all persons born or naturalized in the United States,” forbids him from doing that.

Federal statute provides an exception to that standing when a judge—not the president—finds a citizen’s certificate of naturalization was “illegally procured or were procured by concealment of a material fact or by willful misrepresentation.” Some experts have concerns about judges misinterpreting the statute’s wording in cases regarding naturalized citizens: Harvard Law Professor Noah Feldman recently wrote in Bloomberg that “the law is not as precise as it should be.”

But his concern should not apply to O’Donnell, who was born in Commack, New York, and is no less American than Donald Trump.

Trump’s threat came a few days after O’Donnell blamed Trump for leaving Texas ill-equipped to handle the catastrophic floods that began on July 4, with 122 people confirmed dead so far. “These are the results that we’re going to start see on a daily basis because [Trump] has put this country in so much danger by his horrible, horrible decisions,” O’Donnell said. “People will die as a result and they have started already. Shame on him.” (She did not respond immediately to a request from Mother Jones).

The First Amendment’s free speech protections allow O’Donnell to share her critiques freely without fear of risking her right to return to the US. But Trump’s public threat to revoke her citizenship is a dangerous escalation of rhetoric that portends a dark future.

When an American president can get away with threatening people’s citizenship simply because he feels unfairly criticized, then journalists, political opponents, and everyday citizens—especially those who became so through the process of naturalization—had better beware.

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Trump Says He’ll Slap 30 Percent Tariffs on Mexico and the EU. Truth or TACO?

On Saturday morning, President Donald Trump announced plans to hit the European Union and Mexico with 30 percent tariffs starting on August 1.

If this gives you déjà vu, it is not without good reason. Trump has repeatedly announced, delayed, changed and rescinded major tariffs across the globe since he took office in January. The frequency with which he has threatened—and then called off—staggering tariff increases led a finance journalist to coin an unflattering name for this behavior: “TACO”—Trump Always Chickens Out.

Trump’s latest threats, which he posted to his social media platform Truth Social, are replete with strange capitalization choices and purport that a 30 percent tariff is a small price to pay—though it’s the American importers, and ultimately US customers, who pay it—for the great privilege of trading with the United States.

“We invite you to participate in the extraordinary Economy of the United States, the Number One Market in the World, by far,” Trump wrote in a letter to the president of the European Commission. “Our relationship has been, unfortunately, far from Reciprocal. Starting on August 1, 2025, we will charge The European Union a Tariff of only 30% on EU products sent into the United States.”

“Mexico has been helping me secure the border, BUT, what Mexico has done, is not enough. Mexico still has not stopped the Cartels who are trying to turn all of North America into a Narco-Trafficking Playground. Obviously, I cannot let that happen!” reads Trump’s letter to Claudia Sheinbaum, Mexico’s president.

Citing Trump’s growing impatience, and the TACO moniker apparently getting under his skin, four Trump-insider sources told Politico that they would not be surprised if he acts on his tariff threats this time around. “It would make little sense—politically or from a policy standpoint—for the president to offer any additional grace,” Politico reported.

Trade experts are not so sure. According to the Washington Post, UBS financial services executive Ulrike Hoffmann-Burchardi recently told clients: “We caution against overreacting in the near term given the lack of clarity on what policy will actually stick.

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Is the US Military Poised to Experience a New Surge in Conscientious Objectors?

This was created by The War Horse, a nonprofit news organization educating the public on military service. Subscribe to its newsletter here.

Joy Metzler had expected to still be in uniform, working as a junior officer at her Air Force engineering job. Instead, she found herself protesting outside the United Nations, weakened from participating in a 40-day fast as she called on authorities to deliver full humanitarian aid to Gaza and end US weapons transfers to Israel.

The soft-spoken 23-year-old had pursued military service with enthusiasm. She graduated from the Air Force Academy in 2023 and received her commission the same year, hoping that the military would provide a meaningful way to give back to a country that became her home when she was adopted from China as an infant.

“I wanted to protect people. I wanted to serve,” said Metzler, who met her husband, now an officer in the Space Force, at the academy. “And I don’t think it’s a far cry to say that I’m the kind of person who doesn’t mind putting my body on the line for things I believe in. So the military really just kind of made sense.”

Hotline callers were saying, “I do not want to be part of pointing a gun at US citizens and maybe shooting it.”

Then, a crisis of conscience changed everything.

Shaken by the United States’ support for Israel’s protracted bombing campaign on Gaza, Metzler took the dramatic step of applying for conscientious objector status, a way out of the military reserved for those who can prove that their beliefs no longer align with service. For her, an eight-month application process involving probing interviews and pages of essays resulted in her successful discharge as a conscientious objector in April.

But the emotionally grueling decision can come with a steep cost, from alienating military comrades and even family members to paying back tens of thousands of dollars for tuition and other military benefits.

Historically, the number of service members applying for conscientious objector status in the last quarter century from an all-volunteer force has been relatively low, with the Army seeing a dozen or fewer applications per year since 2019 and fewer than 75 in any year since 2001. By contrast, during the Vietnam War—the last US conflict to employ a conscripted force—some 170,000 men across multiple services were granted conscientious objector deferments, and about 61,000 in 1971 alone.

Volunteers who field calls from troops in moral quandaries say they recently experienced a surge that appears to be driven by another conflict: President Donald Trump’s contested order last month that sent 4,000 National Guard troops and 700 Marines to Los Angeles to quell protests related to immigration enforcement operations.

Soldiers with Alpha Company, 1st Battalion, 184th Infantry Regiment, California Army National Guard arrive at the Wilshire Federal Building in Los Angeles on June 22, 2025. Sgt. 1st Class Christy L. Sherman/US Army

Steve Woolford first noticed a change at the GI Rights Hotline the week of June 8. That was when Trump doubled the presence of National Guard troops in Los Angeles and ordered a contingent of Marines—an infantry battalion from Marine Corps Air-Ground Combat Center 29 Palms, California—into the city.

While the hotline typically receives between 200 and 250 calls a month, about 50 calls came through that Sunday alone, with additional messages left by callers who couldn’t get through, Woolford said.

Most, he said, also didn’t fit the conventional definition of a conscientious objector, opposed to wars and warfighting.

“What a number of them spoke to was, ‘I do not want to be part of pointing a gun at US citizens and maybe shooting it, like, I’m here to protect US citizens, even if they have different beliefs,’” Woolford told The War Horse. “So there were people who were having, I guess, a different version of ethical dilemma…They just didn’t believe this is all what they signed up for or agreed to.”

To be sure, it’s too early to know if the flurry of hotline calls might lead to a spike in conscientious objectors; it would be months before any resulting applications are processed.

At the heart of the tension is a court-contested deployment of troops—the members of the Guard, in a notable departure from standard practice, without approval from California Gov. Gavin Newsom—to back up domestic law enforcement, including support of ICE operations.

The ongoing legal dispute leaves troops little choice for now but to follow Trump’s order, said Carrie A. Lee, a senior fellow with the German Marshall Fund of the United States and a former professor at the US Army War College.

“It’s actually a very high bar for thinking about disobeying unlawful orders,” Lee told The War Horse. “There is no provision for what a service member decides is immoral or unethical, because those are personal judgments based on personal decisions about morality and ethics. And you know, you can’t be injecting every unique individual’s own ethics into military orders.”

The cluster of groups that staffs the GI Rights Hotline is cognizant of that tension. It means, at minimum, that refusing to go when ordered comes with a cost. Woolford, whose father was a Navy officer but who found his way into anti-war activism as an adult, says he practices “nondirective counseling”—helping troops identify their situation, options, and possible resources rather than pushing them toward a course of action. Sometimes, he said, that’s frustrating to callers.

“Some people, whatever they saw online [regarding the LA deployment] gave them the expectation that I was going to be able to say, ‘Yes, [the orders are] illegal and you can refuse them and nothing will happen to you,’” Woolford said. “But, yeah, I would not be telling someone truthful information if I said that.”

While the GI Rights Hotline dates to 1994, groups supporting conscientious objectors predate the all-volunteer force. The Center on Conscience and War, which supports the hotline, was founded in 1940 by churches disturbed at the abuse conscientious objectors underwent in World War I, according to Bill Galvin, the organization’s counseling director.

Conscientious objection, for its part, predates the Revolutionary War, as many early settlers, particularly in colonies like Pennsylvania, were Quakers, who were pacifists as part of their religious practice. Perhaps the most famous American conscientious objector was Desmond Doss, a World War II combat medic who refused to bring a weapon into battle yet earned the Medal of Honor—the nation’s highest military award—for heroism in saving dozens of wounded men under fire.

The typical call to the GI Rights Hotline comes from service members who have experienced a religious conversion or other change that alters their views on warfighting.

“You don’t have to be a full-on pacifist to be a conscientious objector.”

Another common call, Galvin said, comes from people registering as required by law with the US Selective Service System who want to put their conscientious objection on the record in the event the country ever brings back a military draft.

By the start of July, hotline calls had largely returned to the normal volume and rhythm, Woolford said.

In today’s all-volunteer force, enlistees must sign an affidavit that they don’t have an objection to war as part of entry paperwork. To be a successful objector after a service member has donned the uniform requires proving a genuine change of heart or conviction and showing they’re now opposed to bearing arms in war in any form. Opposition to a specific war or certain military policy doesn’t meet that bar.

While Metzler’s objection to war began with Gaza, it quickly broadened into opposition to supporting the military in any capacity. On the advice of her counselors in the organization Veterans for Peace, she avoided getting drawn into arguments about how she felt about World War II and other past conflicts when making her case to the military. These, she said, could trip objectors up while missing the point.

“How do you even define what warfare is? Because they don’t give you an answer for that,” Metzler said. “You don’t have to be a full-on pacifist to be a conscientious objector, I would say.”

Even when a service member meets the requirements, the path of conscientious objection carries significant personal costs. Flat refusal to follow an order can come with jail time. Those who apply for conscientious objector status must submit to months of scrutiny from senior officers seeking to determine that a change of heart from when they enlisted is sincere and consistent.

James Matthew Branum, who staffs calls for the hotline and also provides independent legal information to troops through his organization the Military Law Task Force, said objectors often have a monetary cost to pay as well.

“I don’t want to be associated with the military to any degree if the public is going to see us in a certain light.”

“If you received an enlistment bonus, you’re going to repay that. If you received educational benefits, for someone, let’s say, who went to West Point, that could end up meaning…you potentially are owing around $200,000,” Branum said. “There are ways of fighting that…but it can be very challenging.”

The social stigma from acquaintances, employers, and even family members that often comes with taking the objector’s path out of the military represents another level of cost, he said.

Joy Metzler salutes at her graduation from the Air Force Academy two years ago. She now owes the Air Force about $150,000 for her “unfulfilled commitment.” Courtesy of Joy Metzler

Metzler said she hasn’t received much direct blowback from friends and family about her decision, but the cost has raised eyebrows.

“Specifically, on the financial part, I think a lot of people go behind my back and talk to my husband and say, ‘Well, are you OK with this?’” Metzler said. “And to me, that signifies that they don’t really understand the gravity of the decision I was making.”

She’s on the hook for a prorated amount of her Air Force Academy tuition, Metzler said, “based on unfulfilled commitment” that amounts to more than $150,000.

She said she’s treating it like college debt.

Isaac Hummel, Metzler’s husband, said taking on the financial burden was a focus of their many conversations around her decision. They figured they were coming from a “place of privilege” and could afford to pay it off with his Space Force salary. He pushed her to see every side, to be certain she was as sure as she sounded, Hummel said: “I don’t think she ever doubted if it was worth it.”

While they’d both felt similarly about Gaza, Hummel said, he’d never considered taking such a radical step. “I don’t think I could ever be brave enough to do that,” he said.

He acknowledged that seeing the Marines deployed in California “really kind of shook me.”

“I don’t want to be associated with the military to any degree if the public is going to see us in a certain light,” he said.

Working at the Space Force, Hummel said, has given him “the privilege to feel a little disconnected from everything that’s going on.” But he knows he’s still part of the military. His coworkers fall into two camps on his wife’s decision: voice support or avoid the subject entirely. Only once, he said, has a colleague openly confronted him. The conversation ended in respectful disagreement.

The number of would-be conscientious objectors has remained relatively small in the years since September 11, 2001, but the numbers rise around new missions. The post-Vietnam peak followed the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

In the Army, the largest of the military services and the most commonly represented in both foreign and domestic missions, the highest number of conscientious objector applications over the last quarter century came in 2005, with 74 applications, of which 39, or 52 percent, were approved. By comparison, more than 73,000 soldiers joined the Army that fiscal year, and about 60,000 soldiers transition annually out of the service for all reasons.

In 2024, the Army granted five applications and denied one; to date this year, three have been granted and two are pending, according to data provided by Army headquarters. Given the work required to submit a conscientious objector application, it’s unlikely these numbers reflect any recent callers to the GI Rights Hotline.

So far, no military voices from the LA deployment have come forward publicly to describe the specific thinking of troops on orders there. “Most of the people who have talked to me were pretty scared,” Woolford said. “Like, they wanted to get out of this, but didn’t want to bring extra attention to themselves or their family.”

Galvin said he tries to make service members aware of alternatives to declaring themselves conscientious objectors, such as raising family hardships or preexisting medical issues that need to be addressed. Guard members, he said, can also claim community hardship, stipulating that their civilian job is too essential to leave for a deployment.

Lee, the German Marshall Fund fellow, said she appreciated the work groups like Galvin’s do to help troops think through moral and ethical issues. But, she said, quandaries in war and personal disagreement with a military order were not new and did not absolve troops from following the order.

“The ability to divorce your professional identity from your personal identity is the hallmark of a member of the profession of arms,” she said. “Part of that involves respect for the chain of command and respect for the missions that your president asks you to go do. And the ability to divorce that from your personal identity and what is going on with your family is incredibly difficult, but also extremely necessary.”

Lee said she worries, however, about the broader long-term impacts of the Los Angeles deployment and how it signals a shift in how the military is used.

“This suggests to me that the administration has some intention of using either federalized guardsmen or active-duty military quite regularly to support law enforcement,” she said. “If that is the case, then I think you’re looking at some really significant morale issues, some really significant retention issues, and potentially down the line, real recruiting issues.”

Notably, the controversy over the LA deployment comes as military recruiting experiences a historic boom, with the service branches hitting accession goals months early and the Pentagon touting the enthusiasm among recruits choosing to serve under President Trump.

Kevin Wallsten, a political science professor at California State University, Long Beach, said an unscientific survey of 400 veterans he conducted earlier this year ran aggressively along political lines: Conservatives are now extremely likely to recommend military enlistment, while liberals are extremely unlikely to do so.

“I think the longer-term question,” he said, “the longer-term problem, the longer-term challenge, is to find a foundation for military recruitment that becomes less dependent on the personalities that are setting policy in the Pentagon or in the White House.”

For Metzler, seeing active-duty troops deployed in a role that might require them to use force against American civilians was shocking and further affirmed the conviction she felt that she could not wear the uniform.

At the end of June, following the conclusion of her protest outside the UN—during which she was briefly arrested—she had her first meal following the 40-day fast: three pieces of pizza.

Next, she said, she plans to enter a graduate school program in mechanical engineering at the University of Central Florida. She’s still working to make sense of her brief time in the military. Though she never deployed and never served in combat, she feels guilt even over having supported military research in developing weapons of war.

Now, when Metzler considers her decision to leave behind the military, she expresses relief. Being able to look at suffering in places like Gaza and feel horror instead of rationalizing military objectives means she’s held on to a valued piece of her humanity, she said.

“Even though it’s emotionally taxing, I feel very fortunate that I still have the ability to not glaze over that,” she said. “I almost lost that because of being in the military.”

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First Came the Wildfires—then the Floods, and the Water Crises

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

First came the drought. After three years without significant rain, northern New Mexico’s dense forests of spruce, fir and ponderosa pines were baked to a crisp. Then came the spark—a prescribed burn lit by the US Forest Service in April 2022. It was supposed to reduce wildfire risk but instead got out of control, eventually becoming the largest wildfire in state history.

After the prescribed burn escaped its perimeter, it was dubbed the Hermit’s Peak Fire. Then it merged with the Calf Canyon Fire, a “sleeper” fire from January pile burns, in the hills above Las Vegas, New Mexico. (This is rare: Prescribed burns evade control and turn into wildfires only about 1 percent of the time, according to the Forest Service.)

“It feels like I’m running a restaurant through the apocalypse”

In June, rain finally fell—not enough to douse the flames, but enough to send rivers of soot, ash, and mud racing into downstream communities and homes. That put drinking water sources at risk, including private wells and a water treatment plant that was unable to turn the sludgy, contaminated water into anything safe to drink.

Firefighters contained the 340,000-acre fire in August. Now, three years later, people living in the burn scar and the roughly 13,000 residents of Las Vegas, less than 10 miles from the edge of the burn, still intermittently have trouble accessing clean drinking water. The ongoing problems expose how local, state and federal systems aren’t set up to deal with the long recovery times for increasingly large and destructive wildfires.

Las Vegas will remain vulnerable to flooding and drinking water will be at risk for at least the next five to 10 years, until shrubs regrow enough to help stabilize sloppy hillsides and scorched soil can hold moisture again. Now everyone holds their breath when summer monsoon season rolls around.

That June 2022 flood wasn’t the only disastrous deluge the community experienced even as the fire was still burning. In July, at least 2-4 inches of rain fell on ashy, water-repellant soil in just a few hours. A torrent of water raced downstream, surging into steep canyons and filling the Gallinas River with a chocolaty sludge of burned trees, dirt, and pine needles.

Flash flooding killed three people, washed out roads, and overpowered the city’s water treatment plant, which was not designed to handle post-wildfire conditions. Whenever floods pour dirt and ash into the river that feeds the city’s three reservoirs, the plant automatically shuts off to prevent permanent damage.

Then, last summer, it happened again: Heavy monsoonal rainstorms triggered more flooding, causing debris flows that left the water treatment plant unusable for roughly two weeks. It was intermittently shut down for months afterward, forcing city officials to close all nonessential businesses before the busiest weekend of the year, the annual Fourth of July Fiesta, which was cancelled.

The turbidity in some water samples—a measure of their clarity—was 200 times higher than federal drinking water standards. Locals were asked to limit their water use; businesses faced penalties if they didn’t comply. “It feels like I’m running a restaurant through the apocalypse,” said Isaac Sandoval, a Las Vegas local and owner of The Skillet restaurant. “It’s just one thing after another.”

“People are asking, ‘Is it safe to live here?’ ”

The solution is a new facility that can handle muddy, debris-filled water, and will cost over $100 million. But disaster recovery moves slowly. Despite $4 billion in congressionally approved fire relief and additional FEMA funding, design delays mean a new plant won’t open for at least four to six more years, according to Mayor David Romero.

In the meantime, maintaining the existing plant has cost Las Vegas $1 million over the last six months. And the city’s water still isn’t always clean. The New Mexico Environment Department’s Drinking Water Bureau has cited the city for violating state drinking water standards almost 60 times since 2023.

The effects of all this ripple throughout the community. Water shortages stress city firefighters. Closed businesses require more police patrols. Paper plates—dishwashing isn’t possible without clean water—and an estimated 1.2 million plastic water bottles burden the city’s garbage disposal system.

Other communities could face similar problems. More than 60 million people in the United States get their drinking water from streams that flow from the nation’s 193 million acres of national forests. Proactive thinning is underway in high-risk watersheds, including the one supplying Butte, Montana, as HCN reported last year.

And some rural areas, like Lake Madrone, California, have already paid the price. The 2020 North Complex Fire contaminated water pipes with toxic VOCs and trihalomethanes. More than four years later, residents of the 60 or so houses that didn’t burn down are still drinking from water tanks in their yards, dependent on truck deliveries for refills. FEMA denied the Lake Madrone Water District’s $8 million request to rebuild its water system, and the community can’t afford to replace the piping on its own.

Chaos at FEMA—in June, President Donald Trump said he wanted to phase out the agency and “give out less money” for disaster relief—will hurt the next community ravaged by a similar catastrophe. (So far, the Hermit’s Peak/Calf Canyon fire recovery funds have not been cut.) “It is unacceptable that the Trump administration is attempting to gut FEMA—making us less prepared for the next crisis,” New Mexico Sen. Ben Ray Luján said in an emailed statement.

Cyn Palmer and I stepped over the sandbags that still line the front door of her small townhome in Rociada, New Mexico, in April. Rociada is in the foothills about 30 minutes northwest of Las Vegas, due north of Hermit’s Peak and flanked by a horseshoe-shaped ridgeline. Snow blanketed the ground and the thousands of burnt trees that ring the valley resembled charred toothpicks. Many of her neighbors and friends lost their houses, and the community center and bar where Palmer, a retired wildlife manager, once picked up shifts burned down as well.

Palmer’s house has been through the wringer: Soot damage is still visible on its white walls despite cleaning, and repeated flooding has left mold in its wake. But one of her primary concerns is water. The rural communities scattered north of Las Vegas lack municipal water treatment plants; instead, residents rely on wells, either individual wells or community wells that serve a cluster of homes.

Floods can loosen well hardware and erode pump components. They can also ferry toxic runoff from burned areas into well water, contaminating it with chemicals, bacteria or microorganisms that require disinfection and flushing. “People are asking, ‘Is it safe to live here?’” Palmer said. “A lot of people don’t fully trust this water. I don’t trust the water.”

Palmer’s tap water comes from a community well owned and operated by the Pendaries Village Mutual Domestic Water Consumers Association. The association assured Palmer that, after repairs, its wells were safe and uncontaminated by flooding, but it refused to share immediate test results with her.

“I’m so concerned about the water,” Pacheco said. “How toxic is it?”

When Palmer tried to take advantage of free water quality testing from the New Mexico Environment Department, she recalls being told that her sample had been tossed out because the community well had already been tested by the association. (Department spokesperson Muna Habib said some testing events only focus on private or public, not always community, wells.)

Palmer also worries that the pipes that carry water from the well across the valley floor to her house were superheated during the fire. Radiant heat can cause plastic pipes to leach benzene and other toxic volatile organic compounds into water.

To this day, the water she drinks and brushes her teeth with comes from a ceramic dispenser on her kitchen counter or bottles of water. She refills 3-to-5-gallon jugs in Santa Fe and Albuquerque, where she also receives medical care for an anemia autoimmune disorder that developed after the fire. “There’s no point in taking a chance on this water, when you think about all the toxins that went into the watershed,” Palmer said. She’s tripped over sandbags repeatedly, once hurting herself and another time breaking a water jug.

The scope of the private well problem is not fully known, but the roughly 75-100 households who live in and around Rociada get their water from wells. “I worry about people that haven’t gotten sick yet,” Palmer said.

A few miles up the road from Palmer, Laura and Luis Silva live with six family members and run a small herd of cattle. Both sides of their families have lived here for five-plus generations. Manuelitas Creek, which runs through the Silvas’ property, is usually only a few feet wide. Since July 2022, however, it occasionally swells up to 75 feet wide and 12 feet deep, washing out driveways, damaging septic tanks, stock ponds and culverts, and pinning logs and other debris on fences.

The Silvas believe that chemicals from burned homes and fire retardant, which contain toxic heavy metals, ended up in the floodwaters that their cattle drank. It’s difficult to know how much fire retardant was released overall during the months-long fire, but 28,000 gallons were dropped on one day in May 2022. That year, several calves were born prematurely, small and without any fur. “We’ve never seen that before,” Laura Silva said. The calves didn’t survive.

It cost the family $575 to have their well tested for a variety of contaminants in March 2023, which they said FEMA didn’t reimburse. “People haven’t had their wells tested because they can’t afford it,” Laura Silva said. (In a statement attributed to Jay Mitchell, director of operations, FEMA disputed this and said private well testing was eligible for reimbursement before the fire claims reimbursement deadline of March 14.)

They’re concerned a septic tank damaged by flooding may be contaminating their water, an even more expensive problem to fix without FEMA’s help. So for now, they drink their water and hope there’s nothing wrong.

Some 40 miles south, in the mountains south of Hermit’s Peak, Michael Pacheco lives on 100 acres that were once covered with piñon pines, cedars and juniper trees. Most of them burned, and now, when it rains, water runs right off the soil, rather than soaking in. Pacheco, who is a minimalist, has never had running water at his trailer. But he used to draw as much water as he wanted from a nearby well. Now, it runs out after 30 gallons.

When we met for an afternoon lemonade in Las Vegas, Pacheco pulled up in an old turquoise truck. There was a 300-gallon plastic tank strapped in the back, and he planned to fill it with potable water before heading back to the hills. “I’m so concerned about the water,” Pacheco said. “How toxic is it?” The 2024 summer flooding kept Pacheco, who’s cut off from town by Tecolote Creek, from turning in water quality samples to the New Mexico Environment Department for free testing on time.

Though Pacheco lives dozens of miles away from Palmer and the Silvas, they share similar concerns: lingering chemical contamination from fire retardant and the lack of testing of private wells and surrounding waterways. Pacheco has fought environmental battles in the past, protesting and organizing against fracking and mining efforts in the region. “I’ve been an activist since I was a little boy,” he said. Now, safe drinking water is his next fight. He’s started pestering the city, the state, and the federal government to help fund testing and any cleanup necessary to ensure clean water. “It’s time to heal,” he said. “I’m going to help turn this all around.”

Reporting for this story was supported by a grant from the Institute for Journalism & Natural Resources.

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Watch: A Mother’s Journey Through a Devastating Adoption System

In the fall of 2018, Tia Goins was a new mother in crisis, facing eviction, unable to find room in a shelter, and confronting the prospect of homelessness in a Detroit winter—with her three-month-old baby.

“It was like, what do I do?” Goins said earlier this year. “I just—I just didn’t want her to be homeless with me.”

In a moment of panic, she Googled adoption options and clicked on the first link that came up: a website for Brighter Adoptions, an agency in Layton, Utah. Goins was hesitant—adoption wasn’t something she had ever seriously considered—but the agency representative was persistent.

“The lady just kept calling, kept calling,” Goins said.

Within 24 hours of Goins’ first phone call, Brighter Adoptions had flown her from Detroit to Utah to place her child for adoption. Though Goins texted the owner of the agency saying she was having second thoughts, the process moved quickly: Within two days, agency representatives were at Goins’ hotel room door with the final adoption paperwork.

Goins’ story is the subject of an investigation by the Center for Investigative Reporting (which publishes Mother Jones) that aired Thursday on PBS News Hour.

As I wrote in the January/February issue of Mother Jones, Utah has become a hub for domestic adoption, with agencies flying in new or expecting mothers from across the country to place their children. The agencies often offer cash stipends and free lodging to mothers—many of whom, like Goins, are in desperate financial and housing situations.

This cottage industry is enabled by so-called “adoption-friendly” laws in Utah that expedite the process. Many states build in protections for birth parents, allowing birth mothers to change their minds days or even weeks after signing adoption paperwork, and requiring that birth fathers have a chance to contest the adoption.

In Utah, such safeguards don’t exist. Once the papers are signed, the decision is irreversible. In addition, the children of unwed birth fathers can be placed for adoption in Utah without their notification or consent. And finally, Utah is the only state where finalized adoptions can’t be dismissed even if the adoption was fraudulent.

“In confusion,” says Texas A&M professor Malinda Seymore, “there is profit.”

Agencies like Brighter Adoptions say they’re providing needed services, centering the needs of birth mothers and finding loving homes for their children. In an email, Brighter Adoptions owner Sandi Quick said that the agency ensures that mothers “fully understand the implications of adoption.” But critics argue that moving mothers away from their support systems to a state that expedites adoptions makes mothers more vulnerable. Plus, they say, the adoption industry is fueled by agencies, lawyers, and facilitators that often profit off of the process.

“I think domestic, private, infant action in America toes that line of legalized trafficking,” says Ashley Mitchell, director of Knee to Knee, which runs support groups for birth parents.

Over the past decade, several states, particularly those with restrictive abortion laws, have passed “adoption-friendly” legislation. Georgia, Kentucky, and Indiana have shortened the period during which a birth mother can change her mind; Virginia and South Dakota put limits on the rights of birth fathers; Louisiana, Arkansas, and Texas require schools to provide adoption education. Texas also has launched a multimillion-dollar campaign promoting adoption.

Malinda Seymore, a law professor at Texas A&M University, says that the dramatic state-by-state differences in protections for birth parents benefits the adoption industry.

“In confusion, there is profit,” she says. “If you can move a birth mother to a different state and take advantage of more favorable laws for your client, why wouldn’t you?”

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The Texas Floods Amped Up the Battle Between MAHA and the Tech Right

One longstanding fight that has divided the political right has been over whether or not humans should be allowed to modify the weather, with religious conservatives saying absolutely not, while the tech visionaries are all for it. These debates were often theoretical, but then the catastrophic floods in Texas took place.

On July 2, two days before floods devastated communities in West Texas, a California-based company called Rainmaker was conducting operations in the area. Rainmaker was working on behalf of the South Texas Weather Modification Association, a coalition of water conservation districts and county commissions; the project is overseen by the Texas Department of Licensing and Regulation. Through a geoengineering technology called cloud-seeding, the company uses drones to disperse silver iodide into clouds to encourage rainfall. The company is relatively new—it was launched in 2023—but the technology has been around since 1947, when the first cloud-seeding experiment took place.

After news of the floods broke, it didn’t take long for internet observers to make a connection and point to Rainmaker’s cloud-seeding efforts as the cause of the catastrophe. “This isn’t just ‘climate change,’” posted Georgia Republican congressional candidate Kandiss Taylor to her 65,000 followers on X. “It’s cloud seeding, geoengineering, & manipulation. If fake weather causes real tragedy, that’s murder.” Gabrielle Yoder, a right-wing influencer, posted on Instagram to her 151,000 followers, “I could visibly see them spraying prior to the storm that has now claimed over 40 lives.”

Michael Flynn, President Trump’s former national security adviser and election denier, who pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about Russia, told his 2.1 million followers on X that he’d “love to see the response” from the company to the accusations that it was responsible for the inundation.

Augustus Doricko, Rainmaker’s 25-year-old CEO, took Flynn up on his request. “Rainmaker did not operate in the affected area on the 3rd or 4th,” he posted on X, “or contribute to the floods that occurred over the region.”

Meteorologists resoundingly agree with Doricko, saying that the technology simply isn’t capable of causing that volume of precipitation, in which parts of Kerr County experienced an estimated 100 billion gallons of rain in just a few hours. But the scientific evidence didn’t dissuade those who had already made up their minds that geoengineering was to blame. On July 5, the day after the floods, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) announced that she planned to introduce a bill that would make it a felony offense for humans to deliberately alter the weather. “We must end the dangerous and deadly practice of weather modification and geoengineering,” she tweeted.

Lawmakers in both Florida and Tennessee appear to feel similarly; they have recently passed laws that outlaw weather modification. But other states have embraced the technology: Rainmaker currently has contracts in several states that struggle with drought: Arizona, Oklahoma, Colorado, California, and Texas, as well as with municipalities in Utah and Idaho.

The debate over cloud-seeding is yet another flashpoint in a simmering standoff between two powerful MAGA forces: on one side are the techno-optimists—think Peter Thiel, or Elon Musk (who has fallen from grace, of course), or even Vice President JD Vance—who believe that technological advancement is an expression of patriotism. This is the move-fast-and-break-things crowd that generally supports projects they consider to be cutting edge—for example, building deregulated zones to encourage innovation, extending the human lifespan with experimental medical procedures, and using genetic engineering to enhance crops. And to ensure those crops are sufficiently watered, cloud-seeding.

The opposing side, team “natural,” is broadly opposed to anything they consider artificial, be it tampering with the weather, adding chemicals to food, or administering vaccines, which many of them see as disruptive to a perfectly self-sufficient human immune system. The “Make America Healthy Again” movement started by US Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., lies firmly in this camp.

Indeed, Kennedy himself has spoken out against weather modification. “Geoengineering schemes could make floods & heatwaves worse,” he tweeted last June. “We must subject big, untested policy ideas to intense scrutiny.” In March, he tweeted that he considered states’ efforts to ban geoengineering “a movement every MAHA needs to support” and vowed that “HHS will do its part.”

In April, Joseph Ladapo, Florida’s crusading surgeon general who emerged as a critic of Covid vaccines, cheered Florida’s geoengineering ban. “Big thanks to Senator Garcia for leading efforts to reduce geoengineering and weather modification activities in our Florida skies,” he posted, referring to Republican state senator Ileana Garcia, who had introduced the bill. “We have to keep fighting to clean up the air we breathe, the water we drink, and the food we eat.”

Unsurprisingly, both camps believe that God is on their side. “This is not normal,” Rep. Greene tweeted on July 5, a day after the Texas floods, when the extent of the damage was still not fully known. “I want clean air, clean skies, clean rainwater, clean ground water, and sunshine just like God created it!!”

The following day, Rainmaker’s Doricko tweeted, “I’m trying to help preserve the world God made for us by bringing water to the farms and ecosystems that are dying without it.” Last year, he told Business Insider, “I view in no small part what we’re doing at Rainmaker as, cautiously and with scrutiny from others and advice from others, helping to establish the kingdom of God.”

“I view in no small part what we’re doing at Rainmaker as, cautiously and with scrutiny from others and advice from others, helping to establish the kingdom of God.”

Indeed, for Doricko, the reference to the divine was not merely rhetorical. He reportedly attends Christ Church Santa Clarita, a church affiliated with the TheoBros, a group of mostly millennial and Gen Z, ultraconservative men, many of whom proudly call themselves Christian nationalists. Among the tenets of this branch of Protestant Christianity—known as Reformed or Reconstructionist—is the idea that the United States should be subject to biblical law.

His political formation was also ultraconservative. As an undergrad at the University of California, Berkeley, he launched the school’s chapter of America First Students, the university arm of the political organization founded by white nationalist “Groyper” and Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes. (Doricko didn’t respond to a request for comment for this article.)

More recently, he has aligned himself with a different corner of the right: the ascendant Silicon Valley entrepreneurs who are increasingly influencing Republican politics. Last year, PayPal founder and deep-pocketed right-wing donor Peter Thiel’s foundation granted Doricko a Thiel Fellowship, a grant awarded annually to a select group of entrepreneurs who have foregone a college degree in order to pursue a tech-focused business venture. Rainmaker has received seed funding from other right-leaning investors, including entrepreneurs and venture capitalists Garry Tan and Balaji Srinivasan. (This world isn’t as distant from Doricko’s religious community as it might seem; the cross-pollination between the Silicon Valley elite and TheoBro-style Christian nationalism is well underway.)

Yet for all his right-wing bonafides, Doricko also refers to himself as an “environmentalist”—a label that has historically been associated with the political left. And indeed, Rainmaker also has ties to left-leaning firms and politicians. Last March on X, Doricko posted a photo of himself with Lauren Sanchez, wife of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and head of the environmentally-focused philanthropy Bezos Earth Fund. “Grateful that Lauren and the @BezosEarthFund realize we don’t have to choose between a healthier environment and greater human prosperity,” Doricko wrote. A month later, he posted a photo of himself with former president Bill Clinton, adding, “It was a pleasure discussing how cloud seeding can enhance water supplies with #42 @BillClinton!”

Predictably, Doricko drew backlash from the right for those tweets, but he didn’t seem to mind, likely because he’s been too busy fighting weather modification bans IRL. Earlier this year, he testified before both the Florida House Appropriations Committee and the Tennessee Agriculture & Natural Resources Committee, imploring the skeptics to quit worrying and embrace technology. “If you’re in favor of depriving farmers in Tennessee from having the best technology available in other states, I would ask you to vote for the bill as it is,” he said in his testimony in the Tennessee statehouse. “In all things, I aspire to be a faithful Christian, and part of that means stewarding creation.

On Monday, Doricko appeared on a live X space, where he attempted to address the allegations that Rainmaker had caused the floods. “The flooding, unequivocally, had nothing to do with Rainmaker’s activities or any weather modification activities that I know of,” he said. Yet Doricko’s appearance seemed only to intensify the rift in the MAGA-verse.

“We have a right to KNOW if cloud seeding had a role in #TexasFlooding,” Fox &Friends host Rachel Campos Duffy tweeted to her 279,000 followers on July 9. “Also need to know why companies are allowed to manipulate weather without public consent??!!” The following day, Mike Solana, the CEO of Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund, posted to his 373,000 followers, “The hurricane laser people are threatening Augustus’s life for making it rain. They are idiots. But he *can* make it rain—and he should (we thank you for your service).”

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