Los Angeles Is Rebuilding Very Slowly From Its Devastating Wildfires. Here’s why.

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

In the wake of the record-breaking wildfires in Los Angeles in January—some of the most expensive and destructive blazes in history—one of the first things California Gov. Gavin Newsom did was to sign an executive order suspending environmental rules around rebuilding.

The idea was that by waiving permitting regulations and reviews under the California Coastal Act and the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA), homeowners and builders could start cleaning up, putting up walls, and getting people back into houses faster.

But that raised a key question for housing advocates: Could California do something similar for the whole state?

Earlier this month, Newsom took a step in that direction, signing two bills that would exempt most urban housing from environmental reviews and make it easier for cities to increase housing by changing zoning laws. Newsom also signed another executive order that suspends some local permitting laws and building codes for fire-afflicted communities with the aim of further speeding up reconstruction.

“Anecdotally, we’ve heard that a lot of people have decided they don’t want to go through the process of rebuilding in LA because it is quite onerous.”

Housing reforms can’t come soon enough for the City of Angels. Blown by hurricane-strength Santa Ana winds over an unusually dry, grassy landscape, the wildfires that tore through LA burned almost 48,000 acres and damaged or destroyed more than 16,000 structures, including more than 9,500 single-family homes, 1,200 duplexes, and 600 apartments in one of the most housing-starved regions of the country.

Los Angeles is a critical case study for housing for the whole state, a test of whether the Democratic-controlled government can coordinate its conflicting political bases—unions, environmental groups, housing advocates—with a desperate need for more homes. Revising the state’s environmental laws was seen by some observers as a sign that the Golden State was finally seeing the light.

But despite the relaxed rules, progress in LA has been sluggish. More than 800 homeowners in areas affected by wildfires applied for rebuilding permits as of July 7, according to the Los Angeles Times. Fewer than 200 have received the green light, however. The City of Los Angeles takes about 55 days on average to approve a wildfire rebuild, and the broader Los Angeles County takes even longer. (Los Angeles County has a dashboard to track permitting approvals in unincorporated areas.)

“LA’s process is super slow, so that’s not surprising,” said Elisa Paster, a managing partner at Rand Paster Nelson based in Los Angeles and specializing in land use law. “Anecdotally, we’ve heard that a lot of people have decided they don’t want to go through the process of rebuilding in LA because it is quite onerous.”

Now, half a year out after the embers have died down, it’s clear that changing the rules isn’t enough. Advocates for CEQA say the 55-year-old law is really a scapegoat for bigger, more intractable housing problems. Other factors, like more expensive construction materials and labor shortages, are still driving up housing construction costs, regardless of permitting speeds. And some environmental groups worry that the rush to rebuild everything as it was could re-create the conditions that led to the blazes in the first place, a dangerous prospect in an area where wildfire risks are only growing.

CEQA is one of California’s tentpole environmental laws, signed by Gov. Ronald Reagan in 1970. It requires that state and local governments preemptively look for any potential environmental harms from a construction project, like water pollution, threats to endangered species, and later, greenhouse gas emissions. Developers need to disclose these issues and take steps to avoid them. The law also allows the public to weigh in on new developments.

In the years since, CEQA has been blamed as a barrier to new construction. Many critics see it as a cynical tool wielded to prevent new housing construction in wealthy communities, even being invoked to challenge highway closures and new parks on environmental grounds. It’s one of the villains of the “abundance” movement that advocates for cutting red tape to build more homes and clean energy.

“The question is, how does one really exist within a natural system that’s designed to burn?”

However, CEQA isn’t necessarily the gatekeeper to rebuilding single-family homes after wildfires, according to Matthew Baker, policy director at Planning and Conservation League, a nonprofit that helped shepherd CEQA in the first place.

For one thing, CEQA already has broad exemptions for replacing and rebuilding structures, and new construction of “small” structures like single-family homes. “Our general take is that the executive orders around revoking environmental review and environmental regulations around the rebuilding [after the fires] did little to nothing beyond what was already in existing law,” Baker said. He added that the vast majority of projects that face CEQA review get the go-ahead, and less than 2 percent of proposals face litigation.

But the mere threat of a lawsuit and the precautions to avoid one can become a significant hurdle on its own. “CEQA can be an expensive and lengthy process, especially for large or complicated projects. This is true even if there is not litigation,” according to a 2024 report from California’s Little Hoover Commission, the state’s independent oversight agency. “Preparation of an Environmental Impact Report under CEQA can take a year or longer and cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, or even, in some cases, more than $1 million.”

In addition, CEQA does come into play for people who want to make more extensive changes to their property as they rebuild, like if they want to expand their floorspace more than 10 percent beyond their original floor plan. The law is also triggered by broader wildfire risk reduction initiatives, namely brush clearance and controlled burns, as well as infrastructure upgrades like putting power lines underground to prevent fire ignitions or installing more pipelines and cisterns for water to help with firefighting. Exempting these projects could help communities build fire resilience faster.

For multifamily homes like duplexes and apartment buildings, CEQA can be an obstacle, too, if the developer wants to rebuild with more units. “We have multifamily buildings in the Palisades that had rent-controlled units, and what we’ve been hearing from some of these property owners is like, ‘Yeah, sure. I had 20 rent-controlled units there before, but I can’t afford to just rebuild 20.’ Those people want to go back and build 50 units, 20 of which could be rent-controlled, or all of which are rent-controlled.” By bypassing CEQA, higher-density housing has an easier path to completion.

Rebuilding after fires is always going to be expensive. Your home may have been built and sold in the 1970s, but you’ll have to pay 2025 prices for materials and labor when you rebuild. California already faces some of the highest housing costs in the country and a shortage of construction workers.

The Trump administration is pushing the price tag higher with tariffs on components like lumber and its campaign to deport people. About 41 percent of workers in California’s construction industry are immigrants, and 14 percent are undocumented.

But even before they can rebuild, one of the biggest challenges for people who have lost their homes is simply becoming whole after a loss. “From the clients that I’ve spoken to, they’ve had to argue with their insurance company to get full replacement value or reasonable compensation, and that’s where they’re getting stuck,” said David Hertz, an architect based in Santa Monica.

“There’s a balance” between housing and environmental concerns. “Nature doesn’t have its own voice.”

On top of the tedious claims process, insurance companies in California have been dropping some of their customers in high fire-risk areas, leaving them no option besides the FAIR Plan, the state’s high-priced, limited-coverage insurer of last resort. But after the multibillion-dollar losses from the Los Angeles fires, the FAIR Plan had to collect an additional $1 billion from its member companies, a move that will raise property insurance prices. People who can’t get property insurance can’t get a mortgage from most lenders.

There’s also the concern of exactly where and how homes are rebuilt. In 2008, California updated its building codes to make structures more resistant to wildfires, but bringing burned-down old homes to new standards in high fire risk areas adds to the timeline and the price tag.

“There’s this tension between all of us wanting to have people be able to rebuild their homes in their communities, and there’s the question of ‘Are we just going to build back the same thing in the same unsafe place? Are we going to try to do things better?” Baker said.

All the while, wildfires are becoming more destructive. Wildfires are a natural part of Southern California’s landscape, but more people are crowding into areas that are primed to burn, and the danger zones are widening. That increases the chances of a wildfire ignition and makes the ensuing blazes more damaging.

With average temperatures rising, California is seeing more aggressive swings between severe rainfall and drought. The 2025 Los Angeles fires were preceded in 2024 by one of the wettest winters in the region’s history, followed by one of the hottest summers on record, and bookended by one of the driest starts to winter. It created the ideal conditions for ample dry grasses and chaparral that fueled the infernos.

“The question is, how does one really exist within a natural system that’s designed to burn?” Hertz said. Reducing wildfire risk on a wider scale requires coordination between neighbors.

For example, Hertz said that in many of the communities that burned, there are likely many residents who won’t come back. Neighbors could coordinate to buy up and swap vacant land parcels to create a defensible space with fire-resistant trees like oak to serve as fire breaks and water storage to help respond to future blazes. Hertz himself leads a community brigade, trained volunteers who work to reduce wildfire risk in their neighborhoods.

He also cautioned that while there’s a lot of well-deserved pushback against regulations like CEQA, the reasoning behind it remains sound. Development without any environmental considerations could put more homes in the path of danger and destroy the ecosystems that make California such an attractive place to live. “I think there’s a balance,” Hertz said. “Nature doesn’t have its own voice.”

At the same time, without speeding up the pace at which California restores the homes that were lost and builds new ones, the housing crisis will only get worse. The state will become unlivable for many residents. Long after the burn scars fade and new facades are erected, communities will be altered permanently.

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Trump Sues the Wall Street Journal Over Epstein Birthday Album Story

Donald Trump filed suit late Friday afternoon against the _Wall Street Journal’_s parent company, media mogul Rupert Murdoch, and several other defendants, saying he was defamed by a story that claimed he contributed to a 50th birthday album for Jeffrey Epstein in 2003. Trump is demanding $10 billion in damages; in a post on TruthSocial, he called the legal action a “POWERHOUSE Lawsuit,” calling the article “false, malicious, defamatory, FAKE NEWS” and the Journal a “useless ‘rag.'”

The story concerns a birthday album compiled by Epstein’s ex-girlfriend and procurer Ghislaine Maxwell, who’s now serving 20 years on sex trafficking charges. In the album, the paper wrote, was a “bawdy” letter bearing Donald Trump’s name.

“It contains several lines of typewritten text framed by the outline of a naked woman, which appears to be hand-drawn with a heavy marker,” reporters Khadeeja Safdar and Joe Palazzolo wrote. “A pair of small arcs denotes the woman’s breasts, and the future president’s signature is a squiggly ‘Donald’ below her waist, mimicking pubic hair.” The typewritten text features an imaginary conversation between Epstein and Trump, written in the third person. The letter closes with the words, “Happy Birthday — and may every day be another wonderful secret.”

The Journal story also prominently featured Trump’s denial, in which he called the letter “a fake thing,” adding, “I never wrote a picture in my life. I don’t draw pictures of women,” he said. “It’s not my language. It’s not my words.”

In the complaint, Trump’s lawyers write that Safdar and Palazzolo “failed to attach the letter, failed to attach the alleged drawing, failed to show proof that President Trump authored or signed any such letter, and failed to explain how this purported letter was obtained.”

Trump also immediately threatened to sue the paper, “just like I sued everyone else.” Paramount recently agreed to pay a $16 million settlement to settle a suit from Trump alleging that CBS had engaged in election interference by what he loudly insisted was unfair editing of a 60 Minutes interview with then-presidential nominee Kamala Harris. (For good measure, CBS is also canceling Stephen Colbert’s show, days after he called the Paramount settlement “a big fat bribe” on air, citing vague financial concerns.) In December 2024, ABC News agreed to make a $15 million donation to Trump’s presidential library to settle a lawsuit over comments that anchor George Stephanopoulos made about writer E. Jean Carroll’s civil lawsuits, which she brought against Trump for sexual abuse and defamation. Trump was ordered to pay Caroll $5 million, a judgment that was just upheld by a federal appeals court in June. But Stephanopoulos incorrectly stated that Trump was “found liable for rape,” which he was not.

In his suit against Murdoch and the Journal, filed by Florida law firm Brito PLC, Trump also names Dow Jonesand NewsCorp CEO Robert Thomson as defendants as well as each journalist on the story individually. In the complaint, Trump’s lawyers write that Safdar and Palazzolo “failed to attach the letter, failed to attach the alleged drawing, failed to show proof that President Trump authored or signed any such letter, and failed to explain how this purported letter was obtained.” It also complains that the story went “viral” on the internet and Twitter, including screenshots of organizations like the Lincoln Project and figures like former MSNBC host Keith Olbermann sharing it.

In a post on TruthSocial after the lawsuit was filed, Trump cast it as part of a long history of legal actions against the media.

“We have proudly held to account ABC and George Slopadopoulos, CBS and 60 Minutes, The Fake Pulitzer Prizes, and many others who deal in, and push, disgusting LIES, and even FRAUD, to the American People,” he wrote. “This lawsuit is filed not only on behalf of your favorite President, ME, but also in order to continue standing up for ALL Americans who will no longer tolerate the abusive wrongdoings of the Fake News Media. I hope Rupert and his ‘friends’ are looking forward to the many hours of depositions and testimonies they will have to provide in this case.”

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There’s a Lot We Still Don’t Know About Jeffrey Epstein

“I want every email from Epstein,” declared MAGA activist, self-styled journalist, former men’s rights advocate, former Pizzagate promoter, and former juicing evangelist Mike Cernovich recently, speaking to MAGA-world figure and disgraced BuzzFeed plagiarist Benny Johnson. “It might embarrass people, I don’t care. We’re done.”

In the decades since the Jeffrey Epstein scandal began, it has attracted a lot of attention from very strange and distinctly unsavory people, each drawn to the case for their own reasons. Cernovich, for instance, got involved in his capacity as a quasi-journalist and promoter of conspiracy theories involving wealthy and powerful cabals of sexual abusers. He was one of the people who sued to unseal documents in the civil case of Victoria Giuffre, a woman who alleged that Epstein trafficked her to numerous wealthy and powerful men.

But these days even the frequent disinformation peddlers like Cernovich have a reasonable point: There is a disturbing amount that we still don’t know about Jeffrey Epstein.

The first real question is about Epstein’s personal fortune; it’s never been clear how, exactly, he got so rich.

The basic facts are clear, of course: Epstein was a billionaire pedophile and friend to the world’s wealthy and powerful who, in all likelihood and according to every piece of available evidence, died by suicide in 2019 while incarcerated and facing sex trafficking charges. But from the time Epstein’s crimes first began to attract notice from the police and press in the early 2000sto the scandal and chaos that ensued this month after Trump’s FBI and Department of Justice tried to quietly close the book on the case, there have been loose ends, unanswered questions, unreleased documents, and an endless amount of fodder for future conspiracy theories.

The first real question is about Epstein’s personal fortune; it’s never been clear how, exactly, he got so rich. In a 2019 story, the New York Times attempted to answer that question, noting that in the 1980s, Epstein befriended Victoria’s Secret founder Lex Wexner, quickly becoming his personal money manager. Epstein had worked for two years as a math and physics teacher at the elite Dalton School and then as an options trader for Bear Stearns before being dismissed in 1981. From there, he founded his own money management firm for billionaire clients. That business was an immediate, almost baffling, success. As New York magazine wrote in 2002, “There were no road shows, no whiz-bang marketing demos—just this: Jeff Epstein was open for business for those with $1 billion–plus.”

By the time Vicky Ward wrote a famous profile of Epstein for Vanity Fair in 2003, he was committed to a life of secrecy, what Ward described as “fastidiously, almost obsessively private.”

Among those clients—central among them, as far as anyone can tell—was Wexner of Victoria’s Secret. Those around the executive also couldn’t understand why Epstein had so quickly assumed a position of trust in his financial life. “Virtually from the moment in the 1980s that Mr. Epstein arrived on the scene in Columbus, Ohio, where L Brands was based,” the Times wrote in its 2019 story, “Mr. Wexner’s friends and colleagues were mystified as to why a renowned businessman in the prime of his career would place such trust in an outsider with a thin résumé and scant financial experience.” And it was through his association with Wexner’s companies that Epstein began trying to expand his access to young women, the Times wrote, “trying to involve himself in the recruitment of lingerie models for the Victoria’s Secret catalog.”

(While Wexner didn’t speak to the Times after Epstein’s second arrest, he told his employees in a 2019 letter acquired by the paper that he was “NEVER aware of the illegal activity charged in the indictment.”)

By the time Vicky Ward wrote a famous profile of Epstein for Vanity Fair in 2003, he was committed to a life of secrecy, what Ward described as “fastidiously, almost obsessively private—he lists himself in the phone book under a pseudonym.”

“There are many women in his life, mostly young,” Ward wrote, in a line that now sounds incredibly ominous. “But there is no one of them to whom he has been able to commit.”

It would take until 2019 before Epstein was indicted again, this time on federal sex trafficking charges, with the date of the alleged offenses listed as from 2002 to “at least 2005.”

By the early 2000s, Epstein was living in a Palm Beach mansion. There, he and his accomplices, including ex-girlfriend Ghislaine Maxwell, hired teenage girls to massage him; during these sessions, Epstein would sexually abuse them. (Maxwell was not charged until 2020; she’s now serving 20 years on sex trafficking charges.)

Epstein was finally indicted in 2006, but as journalist Julie K. Brown at the Miami Herald has meticulously documented for years, he was almost immediately handed an extraordinarily, scandalously gentle plea deal. Epstein pleaded guilty to just two felony prostitution charges, and he and his accomplices received a federal non-prosecution agreement where he wasn’t charged for sex trafficking. Top federal prosecutor Alex Acosta was directly involved in brokering the deal; years later, while serving as Donald Trump’s labor secretary, renewed criticism of his role in the Epstein deal led him to resign. Epstein served just 13 months in county jail, where he spent most of his time at his office on what was dubbed work release. A jail supervisor wrote in a memo that his jail cell should be left unlocked “for the time being” and he should be given “liberal access to the attorney room where a TV will be installed.” It would take until 2019 before furor over the non-prosecution agreement reached a fever pitch and Epstein was indicted again in New York, this time on federal sex trafficking charges, with the date of the alleged offenses listed as from 2oo2 to “at least 2005.”

Besides the mystery of Epstein’s wealth and his exceptionally soft-handed treatment by the justice system, there’s also a mountain of unreleased material attached to the many civil and two criminal cases filed against him. As Brown outlined in March, material from numerous cases has never been released, including discovery documents for a civil case filed in 2008 against the FBI by Epstein’s alleged victims. There’s also unreleased evidence relating to Epstein’s properties in the US Virgin Islands, Little Saint James and Greater Saint James.

“Why were personnel told to flag records in which President Trump was mentioned?” Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) wrote in open letters to Attorney General Pam Bondi, FBI Director Kash Patel, and FBI Deputy Director Dan Bongino.

(After weeks of criticism, Trump recently called for the release of grand jury records from Epstein’s Florida and New York cases; since grand jury records are usually secret, the process of releasing those records could take a very long time. “I have asked the Justice Department to release all Grand Jury testimony with respect to Jeffrey Epstein, subject only to Court Approval,” Trump wrote on TruthSocial on Saturday morning. “With that being said, and even if the Court gave its full and unwavering approval, nothing will be good enough for the troublemakers and radical left lunatics making the request. It will always be more, more, more. MAGA!”)

Besides all the unreleased court records and the mystery of Epstein’s wealth, there is, of course, the question of why the FBI and DOJ released an unsigned memo declaring the case closed. And just this week, Senate Democratic whip Dick Durbin of Illinois alleged that the FBI was told to “flag” any Epstein files relating to Trump. The implications of that allegation, however, are not yet fully clear.

“Why were personnel told to flag records in which President Trump was mentioned?” Durbin wrote in open letters to Attorney General Pam Bondi, FBI Director Kash Patel, and FBI Deputy Director Dan Bongino. “What happened to the records mentioning President Trump once they were flagged?”

One of the less compelling allegations in the Epstein saga is the idea that a Deep State assassin snuck into his Manhattan jail cell in 2019. In all likelihood, Epstein died alone, facing something approaching a real consequence for the first time in his sordid life. But it’s absolutely true that it’s still not fully clear who aided his rise, bolstered his fortune, and possibly helped him evade responsibility for his crimes, nor is the extent of those crimes or the infrastructure of wealth, power, and coercion that made them possible. In a rare moment of unity for the American public during an impossibly fractured time, that, at least, is something we can all agree on.

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The Landlord Gutting America’s Hospitals

In April 2024, medical staff testified before Louisiana’s House Health and Welfare Committee about just how bad things had gotten at the Glenwood Regional Medical Center.

The West Monroe hospital had been under fire from the state Health Department over lapses in patient care that seemed to be escalating. The hospital had stopped paying bills for oxygen supplies, the blood bank, and repairs to the elevators that take patients up to surgery.

Former Glenwood nurse Debra Russell testified that there wasn’t a cardiologist available when a man suffered a heart attack or a $5 piece of equipment she needed for a routine procedure.

“You would send a nurse to go get it,” Russell said. “And she would come back and say, ‘Oh, Miss Debra, I don’t have any.’ I said, ‘Go to another unit.’…‘We don’t have one.’”

Glenwood was run by Steward Health Care, at the time one of the country’s largest for-profit health care operators. But its building was owned by Medical Properties Trust—a real estate company based in Birmingham, Alabama, that charged Glenwood monthly rent.

Related

Wall Street Gutted Steward Health Care. Patients Paid the Price.

State Rep. Michael Echols, a Republican whose district includes Glenwood, had been flooded with concerns from community members. Echols had begun to wonder whether the high rent to MPT was fueling Glenwood’s financial crisis. He struggled to get real answers.

Glenwood is just one of nearly 400 health care facilities owned by MPT and rented out to hospital chains. Nine companies that leased hospitals from MPT have gone bankrupt—including Steward, Glenwood’s former operator. And while dozens of hospitals have been sold, entangled in bankruptcy proceedings, or become depleted shells, MPT’s top brass has earned millions.

This week on Reveal, Mother Jones reporter Hannah Levintova and Reveal producer Ashley Cleek dig into MPT—its history, its business model, and how treating hospitals like financial assets leaves them gutted. And don’t miss Levintova’s yearlong reporting project on Steward’s demise, including our collaboration with Al Jazeera’s Fault Lines:

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Why Flash Flood Warnings Are Never Enough

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

This year’s Fourth of July was the first time that the town of Comfort, Texas, used the sirens intended to warn its roughly 2,000 residents of imminent flooding. Founded by German abolitionists in 1854, Comfort sits along the Guadalupe River in an area known as “flash flood alley.” It installed its siren-based warning system last year, a move that neighboring Kerr County, where well over 100 people died in this month’s floods, opted against.

One Comfort resident told Grist that when she heard the sirens, she had no way of knowing just how much urgency was called for. “In my mind, I’m going, ‘Okay we’ve got a couple hours before it gets up to the house, because it’s a 50-foot drop from our house to the creek,” she said. Her husband started walking down to check on the water level, but quickly ran back inside. “You’ve got five minutes,” he told her. “Grab everything you need.’”

Ultimately, she and her husband were lucky—they were able to shelter with a neighbor whose house is on higher ground—but their close call captures a dilemma that’s taking on new urgency as flash floods claim lives from Texas to North Carolina: Even the most comprehensive disaster warnings are only as helpful as the responses of those who receive them.

“If you’ve never seen water rise in front of you in minutes, it’s hard to conceive of how quickly that can happen—and how quickly your life and property can be at risk,” said Rachel Hogan Carr, executive director of the Nurture Nature Center, a nonprofit focused on flood-risk communication.

“There’s barriers to warning delivery from things like internet connectivity, people not having cell phones, or being asleep when a warning comes in,” added Hogan Carr, who is also a co-chair of Integrated Prediction of Precipitation and Hydrology for Early Actions (InPRA) a working group within National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration that researches early warning systems. “Communities need to anticipate these barriers, and set up local systems in order to amplify the distribution of warnings when they come in.”

”It has to be really a comprehensive strategy of community support.”

In the aftermath of the July 4 deluge, questions about the efficacy of local warning systems have swirled, particularly in Kerr County, which saw the most devastating flooding. Although the county had the ability to use FEMA’s Integrated Public Alert and Warning System (IPAWS), to push out aggressive, vibrating alarms to residents’ mobile phones—similar to those that sound when an AMBER alert is issued to inform residents of a given area about a missing child—that system wasn’t used until days after the flood, as more rain headed towards the area.

That said, cellphone customers in the at-risk service area were sent a variety of warnings—including a flash flood warning from the National Weather Service—but their effects appear to have been limited. Many received no alert, or only received an alert after the flood had overtaken them. Even if the county had sent additional warnings, many residents likely would have missed them if their phones were off or out of reach for the night.

Plus, a warning from local officials may have carried more weight than the alerts from the National Weather Service, Abdul-Akeem Sadiq, a professor at the University of Central Florida who studies emergency management, told the Washington Post. People tend to be more receptive to warnings that are tailored specifically to them, added Hogan Carr.

“We saw this in Superstorm Sandy,” she explained. “Even though the entire New Jersey shoreline there was at risk, if it didn’t say somebody’s specific small town name, they often decided it [didn’t apply] to them.”

On the night of the flooding, Kerr County resident Martha Murayama says she was woken up by an audible alert on her phone. But she turned it off without reading the warning, assuming that it was an AMBER Alert. Murayama lives in the gated subdivision of Bumble Bee Hills, which sit directly across from the Guadalupe between Kerrville and Ingram, Texas. By then, the flood was already well underway. Not long after she got back to bed, Murayama received a panicked call from her neighbor, saying that someone was banging on the door. It was a family who lived directly across from the river, trying to warn people as they moved to higher ground. Murayama was worried—her neighbor, Joe, suffers from Parkinson’s and was not in good health. When Murayama’s husband went outside to investigate, he was quickly swept away by floodwaters, although he was ultimately able to make his way back to the house.

Just up the hill, Ramiro Rodriguez was awoken by the same family seeking shelter. Like Murayama, he too thought immediately of Joe and made his way down to the house through floodwaters to help Joe and his wife up the hill. As they managed to pop the garage door open, Rodriguez spotted a tow strap, which he used to haul the couple to his house. “I tied up Joe to my hips,” he said. “And right about that time, you can hear the flash flood warning.”

But just as quickly as the water arrived, it receded. Since July 4, Murayama says, she’s gotten new flood alerts constantly.

Flash floods are among the deadliest natural disasters and the most difficult to accurately predict. Less than 1 percent of waterways across the United States have stream gauges that monitor rising water in real time; the National Weather Service often relies on computer modeling to assess flood risk in smaller creeks and streams. (Kerr County only has six river gauges, which makes predicting floods more difficult).

But nearby development can quickly render these models outdated. For example, a stream bordered by concrete will flood much faster and cause much more damage in the surrounding community than one that runs alongside a park, which has natural features that can absorb water.

Even when floods can be anticipated, communicating their severity to the public is a tall order. Because flash floods are very localized, even neighborhood-level warnings may seem like false alarms to some residents, leading to what the journalist Zoë Schlanger has dubbed “alert fatigue.”

That’s why early community education is such an integral part of a functioning warning system, according to Hogan Carr. “If you get a flash flood warning and you never see it, you got lucky,” she said.

Many people do not understand the speed with which floods move, which can lead to them driving through areas that are about to be submerged, for example. Warnings such as the ones sent in Texas, encouraging residents to “move to higher ground,” don’t necessarily convey urgency, according to Ashley Coles, an associate professor of environmental geography at Texas Christian University who studies flash flooding.

“I spoke to somebody regarding the flooding in Texas. They said, ‘You know, if I had gotten that message I would’ve gotten together a go bag and then gone to bed.’ So they would have been ready to evacuate if needed, but it came so fast that they would have been swept away,” said Coles. “It makes it very difficult even for people who are trying to be cautious.”

The National Weather Service has defended its response to the floods, pointing out that it issued warnings at 1:14 am, two hours before the flood waters reached inhabited riverside areas like Camp Mystic. But the warnings, though they cautioned that “life-threatening” flooding was possible, did not order evacuations.

As climate change makes flash floods and other extreme weather events more common and deadly, researchers across the country are struggling with how to effectively communicate risk to the public, without losing their trust through over-warning.

”It has to be really a comprehensive strategy of community support, wrapped around the issuance of a formal flood warning,” said Hogan Carr, explaining that ideally, the local weather service would have a forecaster whose job was dedicated to doing community outreach, explaining local risks, where forecasts come from, and where residents can get reliable information in an emergency. “It’s an investment of time and resources proactively, that could pay off tremendously during these large-scale events,” she added.

In the meantime, Kerr County residents are hoping for a siren system, like the one used in neighboring Comfort. “I slept through [the phone alert],” said Rodriguez. “If it wasn’t for those people knocking on the door, I would have slept right through it.”

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“We Were Kidnapped”

On Friday, María Daniela learned that her younger brother, Neri Alvarado Borges, and more than 200 other Venezuelans sent by the Trump administration to El Salvador were being released after spending more than four months in an infamous prison. “Now it’s done,” María Daniela said in a call from Venezuela. “Now we can say we are done with this nightmare.”

Alvarado’s case, which Mother Jones reported on in March, was emblematic of the cruelty of the Trump administration’s decision to send hundreds of Venezuelans to Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele’s Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo (CECOT) prison. Like many others, Alvarado, who worked as a baker in the Dallas area, appears to have been targeted simply because he was a Venezuelan man with tattoos. It did not matter that his most prominent tattoo was an autism awareness ribbon adorned with the name of his teenage brother.

“We got a beating for breakfast. We got a beating for lunch. We got a beating for dinner.”

The Venezuelans were released as part of a prisoner swap deal including 10 Americans. (The Venezuelan government has been reported to imprison foreign nationals to gain diplomatic leverage.) The exchange comes after a previous deal being negotiated fell through, and despite the Trump administration’s insistence in court and in public statements that it did not have the power to compel El Salvador to return the removed migrants to the United States. (Court records show that Bukele’s government told the United Nations the men were under the authority of the United States, contradicting the White House’s claims.)

A relative shared a video from Venezuelan broadcaster teleSUR featuring his brother, Arturo Suárez, on the plane after it landed near Caracas. “We spent four months without any contact with the outside world,” Suárez said. “We were kidnapped.” He went on to say: “We got a beating for breakfast. We got a beating for lunch. We got a beating for dinner.”

Arturo Suárez raises his arm as he leaves the plane upon arrival in Venezuela.Ariana Cubillos/AP

Family members of some of the Venezuelan men held at CECOT told Mother Jones they were relieved, but still heartbroken over what they consider a wrongful detention. On Friday, families had been instructed by the Maduro government’s office to go to the airport near Caracas to reunite with their relatives.

Anaurys Orlimar, the sister of one of the men, Julio Zambrano, said that earlier on Friday their mother was contacted with “good news” and told to travel from Maracay to the Caracas area. Her son, Julio, had been seeking asylum in the United States. The father of two was detained in January during a routine check-in with Immigration and Customs Enforcement. His then-pregnant wife, Luz, said an officer told her they suspected Zambrano—who has two tattoos of a crown with his name and a rose—was part of a gang, which his relatives dispute.

“We are all happy and eager to see him,” Orlimar, who lives in North Carolina, said. “We didn’t expect this. We didn’t know anything. What we all did was cry with emotion knowing that my brother is going to return, that he’s going to get out of this.” Later, she recognized her brother, wearing a red face mask and a Puma t-shirt, in Telemundo’s live coverage of the flight’s arrival.

A screenshot of a text message from the sister of Julio Zambrano, who had been detained at CECOT for four months.

Mariangi Sierra, sister of Anyelo Sierra Cano, said in a message she was feeling “emotional, happy, truly something inexplicable.”

For some relatives, the news of the men’s return to Venezuela evoked more mixed feelings. Maria Quevedo, the mother of Eddie Adolfo Hurtado Quevedo, told Mother Jones she was feeling relieved but still scared. “Happy because God gave me the gift of seeing my son free on my birthday,” she said. “Scared because my son is going to Venezuela, where he was threatened by the [paramilitary group] colectivos.”

Dozens of Venezuelans sent to CECOT had pending asylum applications in US immigration courts when they were removed. In some instances, their cases have been dismissed by immigration judges. They could now be vulnerable to potential harm and persecution back in Venezuela.

“The bitterness is still there,” said a friend of one of the men sent to CECOT about the release. “The anger about what happened to him is still there.”

The men released today had been held at the maximum security prison since March, when the Trump administration sent more than 230 Venezuelans accused of being gang members to El Salvador. At least 130 of them were removed without due process under the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, a wartime power that Trump invoked for only the fourth time in US history. Investigations by Mother Jones and other publications revealed that many of the men had no connection to Tren de Aragua and appeared to have been targeted over benign tattoos—like Alvarado’s autism awareness ribbon. Most of them had no criminal history in the United States, according to ProPublica and Bloomberg. (The administration has repeatedly refused to provide evidence to support its assertion of gang affiliation.)

In a statement on Friday, the Venezuelan government said it had secured the release of 252 Venezuelan nationals who “remained kidnapped and subjected to forced disappearance in a concentration camp” in El Salvador. “Venezuela has paid a high price,” the statement continued, to free the men as part of an agreement with US government authorities. The deal also reportedly included the return to Venezuela of seven migrant children who had stayed behind in the United States after their parents were deported, according to the country’s Interior Minister Diosdado Cabello.

When María Daniela, Alvarado’s sister, spoke to Mother Jones on Friday, she and her family were about to make the roughly four-hour drive from their home to the Caracas area. Once there, they would finally be reunited with Alvarado, the brother and son they had no contact with for more than four months.

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“You’re Here Because of Your Tattoos”

Juan Enrique Hernández, a US citizen who came to the United States from Venezuela nearly three decades ago, was Alvarado’s boss at the bakery in the Dallas area. The two became good friends, and Hernández visited Alvarado in detention in Texas multiple times following his February arrest.

Hernández said he did everything in his power to get Alvarado out. “I went to many lawyers here and none wanted to take the case,” he explained. “They said they didn’t have jurisdiction.”

“I have mixed feelings. I’m happy on one hand,” Hernández said on Friday about Alvardo’s imminent release. “But the bitterness is still there. The anger about what happened to him is still there.”

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Colbert’s Cancellation Is a Dark Warning

On Thursday, Stephen Colbert, the beloved, sharp-tongued comedian and host of the Late Show, announced that CBS was cancelling the legendary franchise. “This is all just going away,” Colbert told the audience, as they responded with a wave of gasps and jeers. Online, the news was met with a similar blend of shock and anger.

The move to cancel one of television’s last remaining crown jewels of broadcast programming came just days after Colbert publicly criticized CBS’s corporate owner, Paramount, for agreeing to pay President Donald Trump $16 million to settle an outrageous $20 billion lawsuit against the company. Trump has now long claimed that 60 Minutes producers unfairly edited their interview with then-presidential nominee Kamala Harris, a complaint widely viewed by legal and media experts as completely baseless. The agreement was the latest in a series of bootlicking moves by Paramount as its chairwoman, Shari Redstone, desperately tries to sell the company to Skydance Media, a deal that requires federal approval.

If that sounds like the groundwork for a bribery, Colbert agrees. In his opening monologue on Monday, the host called the settlement a “big fat bribe.” CBS has since claimed that Colbert’s cancellation is “purely financial,” even though the Late Show currently clocks in as the highest-rated show on late-night.

So, what’s the truth? There’s little to doubt that the finances surrounding late-night production are probably not great. TV, particularly shows that require original writing and a marquee host, is an expensive undertaking. But the details of what led to the decision to sack Colbert are certain to expose an extraordinary level of eagerness by Paramount’s top brass to grovel at the feet of this president, as he targets his perceived enemies—the nation’s top schools, law firms, and so forth—with colossal funding threats, lawsuits, and beyond. Remember that Redstone, daughter of Paramount founder Sumner Redstone, reportedly saw nothing wrong with instructing CBS leaders to shelve negative stories about Trump until after the Skydance merger was officially sealed.

But Paramount’s future aside, the end of Colbert signals a dark new chapter in Trump’s authoritarian slide. Though his second term has already produced a string of stunning capitulations by some of the most powerful forces in the country, one could argue that Trump’s attacks had yet to take down our actual culture. I’m talking about the literal content we consume—the television, art, movies, literature, music—no matter how much Trump complained. That it remained protected and free-willed, a rare area of control for a public that otherwise feels powerless to take action. Clearly, that was magical thinking.

The only upside is that Colbert will soon be free to go scorched earth against a president he detests. Every other network stands to gain enormously right now. Here’s to hoping a spine emerges.

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Kashana Cauley’s Latest Book Conjures a New Villain for Our Times: The Debt Police

After Kashana Cauley earned her first television writing gig on the Hulu animated series The Great North, her media friends in New York were thrilled, in a jealous kind of way. “You did it!” they told her. “You made it out—you’re in a stable profession!” Cauley began her professional career in antitrust law, then built a following on Twitter that caught the attention of editors and producers who liked her pithy observations about race and gender. She grabbed bylines in The Atlantic, the New Yorker, and Esquire before landing a staff writing gig on the Daily Show With Trevor Noah. But Great North, a sitcom job, seemed like the start of a more stable career in Hollywood. And it was: The show ran for five seasons. Networks and streamers all wanted content—until they didn’t. “There is so much less TV on the air than there was, say, five or six years ago,” she told me.

Professional instability isn’t new for Cauley, and it’s at the heart of her second novel, The Payback, which published this week. The book’s main character is Jada, who is very good at her retail job that doesn’t pay her enough to make ends meet. Like Jada, Cauley worked a retail job too: six years at JCPenney. She was the first person in her family to go to college and wanted to pay her way through. She knew that going back to Madison, Wisconsin, where she was raised, to work on the General Motors assembly line like her dad was no longer an option. The closest plant closed in 2009. The money she earned at JCPenney was nowhere near what she really needed, and without anyone to help navigate the maze of college majors and white collar career prep, she landed in law school. She graduated with her law degree—and six figures of student loan debt.

As Hollywood pulled back on TV production, war broke out in Ukraine. Cauley watched it all. She was fascinated with ethical hacking, the idea that small bands of Robinhood-minded techies could help even life’s uneven playing fields. She looked into zero-day hacks, which exploit gaps in software security systems, often of large private or government institutions. She thought about the people she had met across her many careers: the wardrobe folks at the Daily Show, the costume designers in late night television, the interns at Kenneth Cole. What might a revolution look like if it were led by the fashionable creatives of the world?

“In America, if you have financial problems, there isn’t a ton of infrastructure to help you solve them. You are forced to come up with your own solutions to these big societal issues.”

In The Payback, Jada leads a trio of down-on-their-luck retail workers in a fight against the fictitious Debt Police. It’s Cauley’s second work of speculative fiction; her first book, The Survivalists, followed another woman’s perilous journey up the corporate ladder. Her new book is an action-packed thriller for everyone who’s fed up with our current political situation. “What if we looked beyond the realm of what’s happening and toward the future of possibilities?” she asks. “In this era, that’s a good place to put your head.”

I recently talked with Cauley about living with debt, leaving Twitter, and finding humor in dark times. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

What inspired The Payback‘s Debt Police?

I compare it to the Department of Education, which has been really enforce-y lately. All of a sudden, they can garnish wages, they can yank your driver’s license if you’re not paying back your student loans. In America, if you have financial problems, there isn’t a ton of infrastructure to help you solve them. You are forced to come up with your own individualistic solutions to these big societal issues. I drew up three girls who were just like, “We are all we have.”

On top of that, it was important for me to include some Debt Police who were Black, because there are plenty of Black people who have bought into ideas of policing and enforcement—it’s an American value.

You fought those battles yourself, working for at JCPenney to help pay for college and law school. These days, how do you actually afford to be a writer?

I have a very financially and emotionally supportive husband. I ended up paying off my loans with TV money, but I don’t think you should have to win the lottery—which is basically what I did—to better yourself.

My husband is my support, along with my book advances, but I have definitely had periods where I’ve been the top earner in my house. It’s hard to think of a stable industry in American culture right now. We’ve all got to learn how to roll and take the punches.

A lot of folks first encountered your work via your hilarious social media presence. Why did you decide to leave Twitter and embrace Bluesky?

I was cutting down on my time there for most of 2023 after they changed the algorithm and I stopped getting responses and seeing my friends. We had an unsatisfying group of social media sites that rose up in the interim. Bluesky is the first that really feels like a place where a lot of people have joined and stayed. They post and they hang out, and I see a lot of the people I used to see on Twitter.

“I am the only person in America who is not on Pete Hegseth’s group chat. I feel left out.”

I’m sad about that transition. Twitter was a great place to hang out. Every once in a while, there were, like, missing Black people, and we found them! I don’t know if we’re gonna be able to find missing Black people again.

Who are the funniest Black women who inspire your writing?

I am an enormous Danzy Senna fan. She is so funny and is a really good observer of contemporary Black life. She wrote a book called New People, where one of her characters works on a dissertation about Jonestown. I didn’t know it was a thing where older Black women from the South, largely, were trying to find their way to equality through singing and alternative religion. All these people born in, like, 1915 in Alabama and they end up with Jim Jones drinking the Kool-Aid in Guyana. I was crushed.

I also got to work with Dulcé Sloan on The Great North, and she’s just fabulous—great energy, great vibe. And then everybody cites Fran Ross, who wrote Oreo. She tears your chest open and goes right to the heart of the joke. I love her for that. She was basically the only woman in the Richard Pryor Show writers’ room. Comedy is still trying to work out its relationship with women. She was not afraid of swinging. I love Black women like that. They are my idols.

What’s the importance of humor in this political moment?

Sometimes I cannot listen to things being told seriously. I need a new angle. Humor shakes me out of the constant depression that is the news and our politics. I live in LA, where we’ve had the National Guard in town for a few weeks, and it’s terrifying. You can’t live life on sheer terror. You will have a panic attack and die.

I mean, the Defense Department is taking the Blackness out of Jackie Robinson’s biography. The fact that he broke the color barrier was why he is on the dod’s history page. It’s important to be able to make fun of some of these folks in our public life. There’s a lot of incompetence there. I am the only person in America who is not on Pete Hegseth’s group chat. I feel left out.

Back in the day, I volunteered for Howard Dean and then the Obama campaign. I called swing voters in Ohio back when that was less terrifying. I did Kamala [Harris] stuff, too. I understand that things are sad and they’re bad, but humor is how I get people to listen to me. I’m tricking folks.

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America’s Worst Polluters See a Lifeline in Power-Gobbling AI—and Donald Trump

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

AI is “not my thing,” President Donald Trump admitted during a speech in Pittsburgh on Tuesday. However, the president said during his remarks at the Energy and Innovation Summit, his advisers had told him just how important energy was to the future of AI.

“You need double the electric of what we have right now, and maybe even more than that,” Trump said, recalling a conversation with “David”—most likely White House AI czar David Sacks, a panelist at the summit. “I said, what, are you kidding? That’s double the electric that we have. Take everything we have and double it.”

At the high-profile summit on Tuesday—where, in addition to Sacks, panelists and attendees included Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, Google president and chief investment officer Ruth Porat, and ExxonMobil CEO Darren Woods—companies announced $92 billion in investments across various energy and AI-related ventures. These are just the latest in recent breakneck rollouts in investment around AI and energy infrastructure. A day before the Pittsburgh meeting, Mark Zuckerberg shared on Threads that Meta would be building “titan clusters” of data centers to supercharge its AI efforts. The one closest to coming online, dubbed Prometheus, is located in Ohio and will be powered by onsite gas generation, SemiAnalysis reported last week.

For an administration committed to advancing the future of fossil fuels, the location of the event was significant. Pennsylvania sits on the Marcellus and Utica shale formations, which supercharged Pennsylvania’s fracking boom in the late 2000s and early 2010s. The state is still the country’s second-most prolific natural gas producer. Pennsylvania-based natural gas had a big role at the summit: The CEO of Pittsburgh-based natural gas company EQT, Toby Rice—who dubs himself the “people’s champion of natural gas”—moderated one of the panels and sat onstage with the president during his speech.

All this new demand from AI is welcome news for the natural gas industry in the US, the world’s top producer and exporter of liquefied natural gas. Global gas markets have been facing a mounting supply glut for years. Following a warm winter last year, Morgan Stanley predicted gas supply could reach “multi-decade highs” over the next few years. A jolt of new demand—like the demand represented by massive data centers—could revitalize the industry and help drive prices back up.

“I don’t think anyone has any idea, even a few years hence, how much electricity data centers are gonna use.”

Natural gas from Pennsylvania and the Appalachian region, in particular, has faced market challenges both from ultra-cheap natural gas from the Permian Basin in Texas and New Mexico as well as a lack of infrastructure to carry supply out of the region. These economic headwinds are “why the industry is doing their best to sort of create this drumbeat or this narrative around the need for AI data centers,” says Clark Williams-Derry, an energy finance analyst at the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis. It appears to be working. Pipeline companies are already pitching new projects to truck gas from the northeast—responding, they say, to data center demand.

The industry is finding a willing partner in the Trump administration. Since taking office, Trump has used AI as a lever to open up opportunities for fossil fuels, including a well-publicized effort to resuscitate coal in the name of more computing power. The summit, which was organized by Republican senator (and former hedge fund CEO) Dave McCormick, clearly reflected the administration’s priorities in this regard: No representatives from any wind or solar companies were present on any of the public panels.

Tech companies, which have expressed an interest in using any and all cheap power available for AI and have quietly pushed back against some of the administration’s anti-renewables positions, aren’t necessarily on the same page as the Trump administration. Among the announcements made at the summit was a $3 billion investment in hydropower from Google.

This demand isn’t necessarily driven by a big concern for the climate—many tech giants have walked back their climate commitments in recent years as their focus on AI has sharpened—but rather pure economics. Financial analyst Lazard said last month that installing utility-scale solar panels and batteries is still cheaper than building out natural gas plants, even without tax incentives. Gas infrastructure is also facing a global shortage that makes the timescales for setting up power generation vastly different.

“The waiting list for a new turbine is five years,” Williams-Derry says. “If you want a new solar plant, you call China, you say, ‘I want more solar.’”

Given the ideological split at the summit, things occasionally got a little awkward. On one panel, Secretary of Energy Chris Wright, who headed up a fracking company before coming to the federal government, talked at length about how the Obama and Biden administrations were on an “energy crazy train,” scoffing at those administrations’ support for wind and solar. Speaking directly after Wright, BlackRock CEO Larry Fink admitted that solar would likely support dispatchable gas in powering AI. Incredibly, fellow panel member Woods, the ExxonMobil CEO, later paid some of the only lip service to the idea of drawing down emissions heard during the entire event. (Woods was touting the oil giant’s carbon capture and storage business.)

Still, the hype train, for the most part, moved smoothly, with everyone agreeing on one thing: We’re going to need a lot of power, and soon. Blackstone CEO Jonathan Gray said that AI could help drive “40 or 50 percent more power usage over the next decade,” while Porat, of Google, mentioned some economists’ projections that AI could add $4 trillion to the US economy by 2030.

It’s easy to find any variety of headlines or reports—often based on projections produced by private companies—projecting massive growth numbers for AI. “I view all of these projections with great skepticism,” says Jonathan Koomey, a computing researcher and consultant who has contributed to research around AI and power. “I don’t think anyone has any idea, even a few years hence, how much electricity data centers are gonna use.”

In February, Koomey coauthored a report for the Bipartisan Policy Center cautioning that improvements in AI efficiency and other developments in the technology make data center power load hard to predict. But there’s “a bunch of self-interested actors,” Koomey says, involved in the hype cycle around AI and power, including energy executives, utilities, consultants, and AI companies.

Koomey remembers the last time there was a hype bubble around electricity, fossil fuels, and technology. In the late 1990s, a variety of sources, including investment banks, trade publications, and experts testifying in front of Congress began to spread hype around the growth of the internet, claiming that the internet could soon consume as much as half of US electricity. More coal-fired power, many of these sources argued, would be needed to support this massive expansion. (“Dig More Coal—The PCs Are Coming” was the headline of a 1999 Forbes article that Koomey cites as being particularly influential to shaping the hype.) The prediction never came to pass, as efficiency gains in tech helped drive down the internet’s energy needs; the initial projections were also based, Koomey says, on a variety of faulty calculations.

Koomey says that he sees parallels between the late 1990s and the current craze around AI and energy. “People just need to understand the history and not fall for these self-interested narratives,” he says. There’s some signs that the AI-energy bubble may not be inflating as much as Big Tech thinks: in March, Microsoft quietly backed out of 2GW of data center leases, citing a decision to not support some training workloads from OpenAI.

“It can both be true that there’s growth in electricity use and there’s a whole bunch of people hyping it way beyond what it’s likely to happen,” Koomey says.

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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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