“The Mosquitoes Are Getting Worse”: Life Inside Florida’s Alligator Alcatraz Detention Camp

Earlier this month, Florida Rep. Anna Eskamani, a Democrat from Orlando, joined several state lawmakers on a tour inside Alligator Alcatraz. When Eskamani entered a large white tent where detainees are separated into chain-link fenced areas, each containing 32 beds and three toilets, the men began chanting “Libertad!”—which means liberty in Spanish.

Eskamani and the other lawmakers, who had sued Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis after previously being denied access to the facility, were not allowed to speak to detainees. Florida Division of Emergency Management director Kevin Guthrie, who guided the tour, said the facility was housing about 900 immigrants and would be able to accommodate up to 4,000 by the end of August, Eskamani says.

State Sen. Shevrin Jones, a Democrat from Miami-Dade County, was also there and recalls that someone with a thermometer showed that the temperature at the entrance of one of the tents was 81 degrees. He noticed that one of the detainees was bare-chested, with his shirt wrapped around his head.

Jones, whose office is in touch with some families, read me a text he received from a detainee’s wife. She wrote that one of the men in her husband’s cell was using the toilet when guards had ordered the men to stand by their beds for a head count. Guards began to yell at him. In another text, she wrote, “He told me that [the guards] all flip their badges over so that you can’t read their names.” The text continued,“The mosquitoes are getting worse, and they don’t spray them with bug spray.”

In the days since the tour, Eskamani says she has heard reports from detainees’ loved ones of rampant mosquitoes swarming the tents, as well as leaks after summer rainstorms. “In a weather situation, not even a hurricane, just a general rainy day in Florida,” Eskamani says, “this facility is not one that is sustainable.”

Wearing mosquito netting, Florida State Sen. Shevrin Jones, State Rep. Michele K. Rayner and Rep. Anna V. Eskamani, PhD, are denied entry along with fellow representatives into Alligator Alcatraz in Collier County, Florida.Al Diaz/Miami Herald/Tribune News Service/Getty

Hastily erected on a remote airfield by Big Cypress National Preserve, and predicted to cost $450 million per year to run, Alligator Alcatraz has been unusually controversial even within the already controversial area of immigration detention. As reported by family members, attorneys, and lawmakers, the facility is fraught with malfunctioning air conditioners, scarce food, and no recreational time for detainees. State and federal officials running the center have previously stated that it would hold immigrants with criminal records. But as the Miami Herald recently reported, many detainees have no prior arrests. One is a 15-year-old boy. Another is a recipient of DACA, an Obama-era program that provides temporary legal status to immigrants who came to the US as children. In addition, environmental groups have accused Florida and federal officials of opening the center in the middle of the Everglades without first weighing the environmental risks. Alligator Alcatraz is the only immigration detention facility that a singlestate is responsible for both creating and managing.

Even before the second Trump term, Florida had distinguished itself for its outsized approach to immigration. Florida State Republicans have pursued aggressive immigration enforcement laws, including one that criminalized the act of driving undocumented immigrants into the state, and another that made it a crime to reside in Florida without legal status. Both were blocked by courts that ruled that immigration enforcement is a federal responsibility. As I reported in April, Florida also leads the nation in the number of 287(g) agreements between local law enforcement and Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Alligator Alcatraz is a kind of crucible for what can happen when federal enforcement efforts are fully supported by a sympathetic state infrastructure, while those who are taken there reportedly face nearly inhumane conditions. Emma Winger, deputy legal director at the American Immigration Council, describes the new detention camp as “a culmination of Florida and the governor’s efforts to essentially create its own immigration system.”

The new detention camp is “a culmination of Florida and the governor’s efforts to essentially create its own immigration system.”

The Florida Division of Emergency Management, which runs Alligator Alcatraz, has not responded to my requests for comment. An ICE spokesperson referred me to the Florida emergency agency for further information on the facility.

For Rep. Eskamani, Alligator Alcatraz is “a political stunt with environmental damage and everyday lives being harmed. It needs to close immediately.”

The detention camp is now at the center of several lawsuits. As I reported last month, environmentalist groups sued Florida and federal officials to shut down Alligator Alcatraz, arguing that the project moved forward without an environmental assessment or public comment.

The groups also raised concerns about the detention camp’s impact on the area’s various ecosystems and wildlife. Traffic to and from the detention site increases the likelihood of panthers being struck by vehicles, according to court filings, and light pollution could destroy the nighttime foraging abilities of bats in the area. Aerial photos also indicate that previously undeveloped areas are now paved over with asphalt.

US President President Donald Trump tours a migrant detention center, dubbed “Alligator Alcatraz,” located at the site of the Dade-Collier Training and Transition Airport in Ochopee, Florida on July 1, 2025. Andrew Caballero/AFP/Getty

Other parties have also weighed in on the case. The advocacy group Florida Immigrant Coalition filed an amicus brief arguing that “only the federal government can authorize a place of immigration detention.” And the Miccosukee Tribe of Indians, which has resided in the preserve near the detention facility for generations, filed a motion in support of the lawsuit. Today, there are 15 active villages within Big Cypress National Preserve. “The facility’s proximity to the Tribe’s villages, sacred and ceremonial sites, traditional hunting grounds, and other lands protected by the Tribe raises significant concerns about environmental degradation and potential impacts caused by the construction and operation of a detention facility,” their filing states.

In its response to the lawsuit, the US Department of Homeland Security said it was not in charge of operations at Alligator Alcatraz, and that the facility was solely the responsibility of Florida, “using state funds on state lands under state emergency authority.” In what appears to be a Catch-22, the state argued the environmentalist groups are seeking relief under the National Environmental Policy Act, which does not apply to state agencies. A hearing is scheduled for August 6.

Last week, another lawsuit was filed against officials operating the facility. Since the detention camp’s opening, attorneys have reported being unable to have contact with or speak to detainees. Several law firms, with support from the American Civil Liberties Union, sued in federal court to gain access to their clients. Some have driven to the facility to ask how they can meet with clients, only to be provided with an email address to schedule an appointment that resulted in bounced back messages, the lawsuit states. “No instruction exists as to which immigration courts have been designated for submission of motions for bond redetermination for people detained at Alligator Alcatraz,” the complaint reads. “As a result, detainees held at Alligator Alcatraz effectively have no way to contest their detention.”

Regardless of the outcome of the lawsuits, the detention camp opened just before the peak of hurricane season, when storms are most likely to form in August and September. It’s a scenario that state Sen. Carlos Guillermo Smith, a Democrat from Orlando, says could be inevitable. “How are they going to decompress that site? Where are all these detainees going?” he says. “It’s not a question of if, it’s when we get a hurricane that will blow through that site.”

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Unpacking the MAHA Mirage: Trump Guts Healthcare While Preaching Wellness

More than 100 million Americans are obese, 38 million are diabetic, 116 million are hypertensive, and 26 million suffer from asthma. Whether or not you’re among the 60 percent of Americans whose medical chart lists a chronic illness, everyone suffers from them: They keep people out of work and in pain and contribute to skyrocketing healthcare bills that come out of the country’s coffers and yours. Most importantly, they shatter families whose loved ones die prematurely from the conditions.

At a White House event in May, President Donald Trump affirmed he was intent on addressing this public health crisis. Flanked by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.—whose remit includes the National Institutes of Health, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the Food and Drug Administration—Trump said the rate at which Americans develop chronic illnesses is nothing short of “alarming, unbelievable, terrible.”

In principle, this issue might be a rare point of agreement between most public health experts and the president and his HHS secretary. But while Trump and his administration have championed the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) initiative, it’s more like an optical illusion with roundtables and flashy baseball hats. Though promoting what may appear to be a worthy endeavor, health experts argue the MAHA slogan is undermined by policies that do the opposite—especially for low-income Americans whose relative health status and long-term outcomes are disproportionately worse than for affluent ones. \

“Health is wealth” is a popular saying among crunchy MAHA influencers. But the reality in the US, especially when the Trump policies and budget cuts begin to hit, is the inverse: wealth is health. In just six months, this “pro-health” administration, whose initiatives are led by an anti-vax advocate, has terminated 2,100 NIH research grants and withheld $140 million worth of funding already earmarked for fentanyl addiction response. Those cuts are small in comparison with the dual blows wrapped into the Republican-led One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which Trump signed into law on the Fourth of July. The legislation gifted roughly 16 million people the loss of health insurance (to begin in 2027) and removed $186 billion in funding for food assistance programs for low-income people.

“Health is wealth” is a popular saying among crunchy MAHA influencers. But the reality in the US, especially after these cuts, is the inverse: wealth is health.

The duplicity of an administration that trumpets its commitment to transforming the state of health in the US versus the dire consequences of its policies confounds public health experts, hospital administrators, and physicians alike.

“It is incongruous to say ‘I’m making America healthy,’ and then, on the other hand, say, ‘But I’m taking away the resources that are necessary to make people healthy,’” Dr. Richard Carmona, who served as the US Surgeon General under President George W. Bush, tells me. “It doesn’t make a lot of sense.”

Consider the federal free and reduced-cost school lunch program, which has been shown to reduce rates of poor health by at least 29 percent and lower rates of obesity by at least 17 percent. The program is connected to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), which supports 12 percent of US households, nearly half of which include children. Put simply, cuts to SNAP eligibility mean fewer recipients of free breakfast and lunch at school.

As my former colleague Tom Philpott explained in a recent article, the new budget bill Trump signed into law is “literally taking food off the tables of poor people and handing much of the savings to large-scale commodity farmers.”

Then there is projected $1 trillion in Medicaid cuts over the next decade, which will have even more obvious and drastic effects on public health than the SNAP cuts. Some Medicaid expansion enrollees will see their co-pays increase, and others may see reduced benefits as state governments cut optional services when they become responsible for a larger share of the costs.

Additionally, new Medicaid work requirements require beneficiaries to more frequently prove their eligibility, which is anticipated to result in the loss of benefits for many people who do have jobs. As the Atlantic put it, the increase in arduous paperwork is akin to “annoying people to death.”

There is one population that Jill Rosenthal, the director of public health policy at the Center for American Progress, anticipates will be especially hard hit by new bureaucratic hurdles and tightened eligibility: cancer patients and people who will develop cancer, cases of which are increasing.

“People who are uninsured are more likely to be diagnosed with cancer later in the progression of their cancer, they’re less likely to get evidence-based preventive care, screening, treatment, and end-of-life care,” she says. Not a problem, according to Republican Sen. Joni Ernst of Iowa. She reassured her constituents who were expressing concerns about Medicaid cuts by saying, “Well, we all are going to die.”

Privately insured Americans will feel the pinch, too. The Medicaid changes are anticipated to burden hospitals, especially those in rural areas that treat more Medicaid patients. Even without insurance,low-income people will still have medical emergencies requiring hospital care, and hospitals are legally obliged to stabilize them. This increase in what healthcare administrators call “uncompensated care” will lead to staff layoffs, reduced services, or even hospital closures, as has already taken place in Curtis, Nebraska.

Kevin Stansbury, the CEO of a 25-bed hospital about 107 miles Southeast of Denver, recently told me that about a quarter of its patients are on Medicaid. If program cuts pushed the county-owned hospital out of business, the next closest emergency room would be 85 miles away. And what would happen in the community if they closed? “More fatalities,” he said.

A little credit where credit is due: The MAHA movement has raised important questions about the health of the food items that dominate grocery store aisles and our pantry shelves.

Roughly 60 percent of what Americans eat (and 67 percent of what kids consume) is ultra-processed, such as sugary cereals, frozen meals, sodas, and fast food—all of which Kennedy refers to as “poison.”

While this isan exaggeration—for all their liabilities, these foods do go through safety testing—he’s correct that the overconsumption of processed foods has been linked to poorer health outcomes. A 2024 review of 10 million study participants found “convincing” evidence that ultra-processed foods increase the risk of cardiovascular disease by 50 percent. The same review found “highly suggestive” evidence that people whose diets are dominated by these foods are at much greater risk for obesity, sleep disorders**,** and depression. A separate study, published in 2022, concluded that men who ate large amounts of ultra-processed foods were 29 percent more likely to develop colon cancer.

“That is something that could improve Americans’ health, and so it’s a valid issue,” Rosenthal says about reducing the consumption of ultra-processed foods.

But potato chips and frozen pizzas can be extremely difficult to resist—not only thanks to marketing and synthetic ingredients, which certainly help, but because this is what appears in stores that serve low-income communities, areas often referred to as food deserts.

“Communities that don’t have access to grocery stores and need to buy their food from other sources often can’t find good, nutritious food, and they often find that it’s more expensive,” Rosenthal explains.

In other words, slashing a benefit that helps poor Americans afford more nutritious alternatives is effectively to say, “Kale for me, but not for thee.” (Just look at the ultra-processed chicken bacon ranch pasta dishes Kennedy is eagerly sending to Medicare and Medicaid patients.)

Former Surgeon General Carmona adds that Kennedy’s interest in increasing the consumption of more natural foods is “a great opportunity” for bipartisanship. But that would require breaking through the “hyper-partisan, divisive, acronym politics that we are dealing with today.”

Outside of hyping healthy foods, some of MAHA’s other priorities are more suspect. The 73-page MAHA report the White House published in May, stridently argues for more research to explore a long-discredited theory linking childhood vaccinations and autism.

Most experts reason that diagnoses of neurodivergence have increased due to increased societal awareness and improved diagnostic criteria. But for those still unsure, a newly released study tracking more than 1.2 million children across 21 years found no connection between early childhood vaccines containing aluminum and any of the 50 conditions that were reviewed, including autism and ADHD.

Meanwhile, measles outbreaks continue to rise alongside the decline of vaccination rates for a disease whose incidence was nearly eradicated over the last sixty years. That kind of data should matter to anyone who says they are serious about making America “healthy again.”

“They’re moving us back almost into the Dark Ages,” says Carmona. “The ramifications are extraordinary, and the policies that are being promulgated are ignorant.”

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Tulsi Gabbard’s Dangerous Disinformation Campaign Against America

The Trump administration has launched a war on former Obama administration officials, and to do so, it has engaged in one of the most egregious and obvious acts of politicizing intelligence in decades.

On Friday, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard released formerly classified US intelligence reports about the 2016 election that she said were evidence of an Obamaadministration “conspiracy to subvert President Trump’s 2016 victory and presidency.” In a hysterical press release, she accused former President Barack Obama and his national security aides of having “manufactured and politicized intelligence to lay the ground for what was essentially a years-long coup against President Trump.” Describingthis as a “treasonous” plot, shesaid she was forwarding documents to the Justice Department, presumably toinitiate a criminal investigation. Naturally, she went on Fox News to amplify her allegations against Obama and his advisers.

It’s all a fabrication. What’s worse, her skullduggery appears to have been the catalyst for one of PresidentDonald Trump’s most disturbing and dangerous social media posts: An AI-generated video of Obama in the Oval Office visiting a smiling Trump, being manhandled and arrested by FBI agents, and then tossed into a prison cell.

Gabbard claims that the Obama administration and its top national security officials schemed to create and promote a phony intelligence finding to undermine Trump. On January 6, 2017, two weeks before Trump was to begin his first term as president, the intelligence community released an assessment (called an ICA) that stated Russia had attacked the 2016 election with a covert hack-and-leak operation and a secret social media campaign designedto sow political discord in the United States, harm Hillary Clinton’s chances, and help Trump win. Ever since, Trump has called the Russia story a “hoax” and each of the subsequent investigations a “witch hunt.”

Gabbard, acting muchlike a Soviet commissar, is trying to disappear that assessment and the taint it applies to Trump’s 2016 victory.So on Friday, she released over 100 pages of documents that she insists show that the ICA was concocted to purposefully present the false finding to the public. But she is engaging in a sleazy sleight of hand.

Gabbard offers her case in an 11-page memo that quotes excerpts of intelligence records from 2016. The first one is an August 16 document that was sent to James Clapper, then occupying the position Gabbard now has asthe director of national intelligence. It said, “There is no indication of a Russian threat to directly manipulate the actual vote count through cyber means.” A September 9 record cites an intelligence official observing, “Russia probably is not trying to going to be able to influence the election by using cyber means to manipulate computer-enabled election infrastructure.” A September 12 assessment published by the intelligence community noted, “[F]oreign adversaries do not have and will probably not obtain the capabilities to successfully execute widespread and undetected cyber attacks on the diverse set of information technologies and infrastructures used to support the November 2016 presidential election.”

Following the election, Gabbard’s memo points out, DNI Clapper’s office concluded, “Foreign adversaries did not use cyberattacks on election infrastructure to alter the US Presidential election outcome.”

Gabbard then delivers the j’accuse moment of this memo: The ICA, which was produced on Obama’s order, said Russia had waged a clandestine operation to influence the operation, even though this previous intelligence reported “Russia lacked intent and capability to hack the 2016 election” and did not impact the election through cyber hacks on the election.”

This proves, she says, that the ICA was “politicized intelligence that was used as the basis for countless smears seeking to delegitimize President Trump’s victory, the years-long Mueller investigation, two Congressional impeachments, high-level officials being investigated, arrested, and thrown in jail, heightened US-Russia tensions, and more.”

The ICA was not the basis for the FBI investigation, which began months earlier and eventually morphed into the Mueller probe. Nor did it trigger the first or second impeachment of Trump. More importantly, Gabbard is deliberately misleading the public about the intelligence she cites.

The ICA’s finding that Russia had clandestinely interfered in the election to assist Trump was a separate matter from anotherconcern of the intelligence community: the possibility that Russian operatives would monkey-wrench vote-counting systems and throw Election Day into chaos.

That had been a worry for the Obama administration throughout 2016, after it received reports that Russian intelligence had penetrated and probed election boards in several states. The prospect of a Russian cyber-attack on the election system was the subject of intense intelligence reporting and analysis, and, as the documents Gabbard released indicate, the intelligence community came to believe that Russia would not be able to rig election results. The ICA reported this, noting that the Department of Homeland Security had assessed “that the types of systems we observed Russian actors targeting or compromising are not involved in vote tallying.”

Yet in this memo, Gabbard applies intelligence reporting on the potential election tampering to an entirely separate issue: the Russian attack that included the operation that hacked Democratic targets and released their emails to impede the Clinton campaign, and that ran an influence operation through secret social media efforts to denigrate Clinton and boost Trump. These are twodifferent matters. The conclusion that Russian cyber operatives were unlikely to impact the electoral infrastructure is unrelated to the assessment that the Russians were seeking to sabotage the campaign through covert action and a clandestine social media propaganda campaign.

The person in charge of overseeing the US intelligence community ought to know this.

Gabbard is engaging in blatant cherry-picking and gaslighting. And she’s being sloppy with her subterfuge. Her case is easy to debunk. The intelligence reporting she cites does not contradict the ICA and does not indicate there was a high-level plot to produce a bogus report to damage Trump. She is providing a phony and weak cover story, both for Trump and Vladimir Putin. After all, long after the ICA was produced, the Mueller report and two congressional investigations confirmed that the Russians had assaulted the 2016 election, facts that Gabbardneglects to mention in her memo.

When it comes to perilous conspiring, Gabbard is the guilty one, especially when she suggests that Obama and his aides broke the law. Her moves follow similar conniving by CIA director John Ratcliffe, who recently released a sketchy report attacking the ICA and referred former CIA director John Brennan and former FBI Director Jim Comey to the Justice Department for criminal investigations.

Ultimately, this is about rewriting history to serve Dear Leader and seeking vengeance on his behalf against those who dared investigate the Russian effort to help himreach the White House—an effort Trumpaided by denying its existence. These endeavors to pervert intelligence demonstratethat the nation’s spy services are being led by lackeys subservient to an autocrat who places his own interests above responsible concerns for national security. But they also supply fodder for Trump’s never-ending and treacherous campaign to demonize his political foes and brand them as traitorous criminals who deserve to rot in prison. An intelligence community that serves a president and not the truth is a threat to the republic—especially when that president yearns to be an authoritarian.

Spy services often conduct clandestine disinformation operations. These are supposed to target adversaries overseas. To prove her loyalty to Trump, Gabbard is running adevious disinfo op, this one against the American public.

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“Like a Zombie Apocalypse: Trump’s Budget Cuts Stir Fears of Frightening Pipeline Mishaps

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

On a clear February evening in 2020, a smell of rotten eggs started to waft over the small town of Satartia, Mississippi, followed by a green-tinged cloud. A load roar could be heard near the highway that passes the town.

Soon, nearby residents started to feel dizzy, some even passed out or lay on the ground shaking, unable to breathe. Cars, inexplicably, cut out, their drivers leaving them abandoned with the doors open on the highway.

“It was like something you see in a movie, like a zombie apocalypse,” said Jerry Briggs, a fire coordinator from nearby Warren county who was tasked with knocking on the doors of residents to get them to evacuate. Briggs and most of his colleagues were wearing breathing apparatus—one deputy who didn’t do so almost collapsed and had to be carried away.

Unbeknown to residents and emergency responders, a pipeline carrying carbon dioxide near Satartia had ruptured and its contents were gushing out, robbing oxygen from people and internal combustion engines in cars alike.

“I worry we could see increased incidents now. The drop in enforcement is very troubling.”

“We had no idea what it was,” said Briggs, who moved towards the deafening noise of the pipeline leak with a colleague, their vehicle spluttering, when they saw a car containing three men, unconscious and barely breathing. “We just piled them on top of each other and got them out because it’s debatable if they survived if we waited,” said Briggs.

Ultimately, the men survived and were hospitalized along with around 45 other people. More than 200 people were evacuated. “It was like we were all being smothered,” said Jack Willingham, director of emergency management in Yazoo county, where Satartia is situated. “It was a pretty damn crazy day,”

The near-fatal disaster was a spur to Joe Biden’s administration to, for the first time, create a rule demanding a high standard of safety for the transport of carbon dioxide, a small but growing ingredient of pipelines increasingly captured from drilling sites and power plants.

“There’s been a lot of concern about safety among states that permit CO2 pipelines,” said Tristan Brown, who was acting administrator of the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials and Safety Administration (PHMSA) until January. “Stronger standards like the ones we drafted last year have the dual benefit of addressing permitting concerns while also improving safety for the public.”

But shortly before the new safety regulations were due to come into force early this year, Donald Trump’s new administration swiftly killed them off. A crackdown on gas leaks from pipelines was also pared back. This was followed by an exodus of senior officials from PHMSA, which oversees millions of miles of US pipelines. Five top leaders, including the head of the office of pipeline safety, have departed amid Trump’s push to shrink the federal workforce.

Broader staff cuts have hit the regulator, too, with PHMSA preparing for 612 employees in the coming year, down from 658 last year. There are currently 174 pipeline inspectors within this workforce, PHMSA said, which is 30 percent less than the number Congress required it to have when authorizing the agency’s budget in 2020.

These 174 inspectors have the task of scrutinizing 3.3 million miles of pipe across the US, or around 19,000 miles per inspector. The indiscriminate nature of cuts at PHMSA “has real world consequences in terms of undermining the basic foundations of safety for the public,” Brown said.

“A lot of expertise has left and that is worrying,” said one departed PHSMA staffer. “The attitude from DOGE [the so-called Department of Government Efficiency] was, ‘Your job is meaningless, go and work in the private sector.’ Many people have thought they can’t go through this for four years.”

America has more miles of pipeline—carrying oil, propane, gas, and other materials—than it does federal highways, and a federal regulator that was already overstretched. Brown said typically just one or two people have the responsibility of inspecting America’s transported nuclear waste while a mere dozen staffers have to oversee more than 170 liquified natural gas plants.

“The overall state of pipeline safety is really languishing…We are not making good progress.”

Each state has its own pipeline regulatory system and inspectors, too, but PHMSA is responsible for writing and enforcing national standards and is often the one to prosecute violations by any of the 3,000 businesses that currently operate pipelines. However, enforcement actions have dropped steeply under the Trump administration, which has initiated just 40 new cases this year, compared to 197 in all of 2024.

“All of these things will contribute to an increase in failures,” said Bill Caram, executive director of the nonprofit Pipeline Safety Trust. “A strong regulator helps prevent awful tragedies and I worry we could see increased incidents now. The drop in enforcement is very troubling.”

“Everyone at PHMSA is focused on safety, there’s not a lot of fat to trim, so it’s hard to imagine that any reduction in force won’t impact its ability to fulfill its duties. I can’t believe they were ever prepared to lose so many people at once.”

In some contexts, US pipelines can be viewed as very safe. A few dozen people are killed or injured each year from pipeline malfunctions, but the alternatives to moving around vast quantities of toxic or flammable liquids and gases aren’t risk-free.

Trains can come off their tracks and spill their loads, as seen in East Palestine, Ohio, while the death toll on American roads from accidents is typically about 40,000 people a year. “There is some super duper bad stuff that happens on the interstates,” said Briggs.

Still, as Caram points out, there is a significant pipeline incident almost every day in the US, ranging from globs of oil spilling onto farmland to raging fireballs from ignited gas. Many of the pipelines snaking under Americans’ feet are aging and need replacement, which can lead to failures. There has been a worrying uptick in deaths from pipeline accidents recently, too, with 30 people killed across 2023 and 2024, the most fatalities over a two-year period since 2010/11.

“This is not the time to look at deregulatory efforts, this is not time to look to save money and deregulate,” Caram said. “The overall state of pipeline safety is really languishing with poor performance. We are not making good progress and we need stronger regulations.”

A PHSMA spokesman said the agency is “laser-focused on its mission of protecting people and the environment while unleashing American energy safely” and is in the process of appointing “well-qualified individuals” to fill the departed senior officials.

“PHMSA has initiated more pipeline-related rule making actions since the beginning of this administration than in the entire four years of the preceding administration,” the spokesman added. “Each of these rule makings represents an opportunity for us to promote pipeline safety by modernizing our code and encouraging innovation and the use of new technology.”

The agency spokesman added that pipeline firm Denbury, now owned by ExxonMobil, paid $2.8 million in civil penalties for its regulatory violations in Satartia and agreed to take corrective actions. PHMSA also warned other operators to monitor the movement of earth and rock, to avoid a repeat of the Satartia incident where sodden soils shifted following days of rain and crunched into the pipeline, severing it.

The leak was only confirmed after an emergency responder called Denbury to ascertain what happened, more than 40 minutes after the rupture, according to the PHMSA investigation. Communications between the company and the emergency services has improved since, according to both Briggs and Willingham. Denbury was contacted for comment.

Today, Sartartia bears few visible scars. The pipeline is obscured from passing view by trees and blankets of kudzu, the invasive vine. The town’s sleepy, tree-lined streets contains a micro town hall, as big as a tool shed, a couple of small churches, a single shuttered store. On a recent summer day a single person was outside, contentedly cutting the grass, as if that harrowing day in 2020 was a surreal dream.

“We will see how it goes with the changes, I hope it doesn’t affect the safety we’ve worked so hard to get,” Willingham said of the cuts at PHMSA. “We don’t want a day like we had in Satartia again. In 35 years in emergency service I have seen some crazy stuff but that was a wild, wild day.”

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Six Months in, Trump Has Made American Life Immeasurably Worse

Sunday marked six months of President Donald Trump’s return to office.

To celebrate, he and top Republicans kicked the hagiography into full gear. “Today is Six Month Anniversary of my Second Term. Importantly, it’s being hailed as one of the most consequential periods of any President,” Trump claimed in a Truth Social rant. House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) claimed in a post on X, “JUST SIX MONTHS into President Trump’s second term, America is safer, stronger, and more prosperous”—despite ample evidence to the contrary. Meanwhile, the White House posted an absurd cartoon depicting a slimmed-down Trump with $100 bills and bald eagles flying in the air around him, plus a nearly two-minute-long video that touted his alleged accomplishments.

But millions of Americans would disagree with those assertions. In fact, a closer look at the reality of Trump’s second term so far shows that his administration hasmade life worse for huge swaths of the electorate. Let’s count the ways.

• His so-called Big Beautiful Bill is expected to explode the deficit to $3.4 trillion, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, and kick 10 million off their health insurance; defund Planned Parenthood, which poor women disproportionately use to access services such as cancer screenings and birth control (though this measure has currently been paused by a federal court); slash billions earmarked for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), which helps poor people buy food; raise energy prices; and secure tax cuts for the rich at the expense of the poor.
• Trump and DOGE’s dismantling of the federal government has undermined the future of the federal workforce. Gutted offices include those that promote healthy pregnancies, combat human trafficking, track gun injuries, and work to prevent intimate partner violence, just to name a few examples. DOGE has also effectively abolished USAID, the agency that supports foreign aid abroad, which has already undermined responses to crises abroad and reportedly already led to more deaths. Researchers also estimate the cuts could lead to another 14 million deaths by 2030. (It’s no wonder that other countries kind of hate us right now.)
• ICE agents have kidnapped student protesters and lawful residents, harassed the volunteers who support immigrants, and snatched asylum seekers after court hearings. The staggering increase in ICE funding, outlined in the recent Republican spending bill, is set to make all this worse.
• The administration launched a full-scale assault on transgender Americans. This includes the shutting down of a suicide hotline for LGBTQ youth; banning trans troops from the military; unscientifically declaring there are only two genders; attacking gender-affirming care; removing resources relevant to LGBTQ people from federal websites; and targeting teachers who support trans and nonbinary students.
• Progress disabled people have made has been steadily rolled back across government, which will likely lead to lower pay and more housing discrimination for people with disabilities, among other outcomes.
• The administration has also enacted an assault on rural America. Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill could lead 140 rural hospitals to close; his ever-shifting tariff proposals have thrown farmers into whiplash; the Department of Agriculture suspended billions of dollars in payments for programs for farmers and rural communities and gutted the department’s regional offices, which support farmers; and the defunding of public media will disproportionately harm local stations in rural communities.
• Despite Trump’s campaign trail pledge to make IVF more accessible, he has yet to do so, more than two months after a self-imposed deadline. Other ways his administration has undermined reproductive health include seeking to restrict access to abortion pills and nominating anti-abortion officials to lead critical federal agencies in which they could further crack down on abortion access.
• Trump has emboldened political violence and extremists from his first day back in office, when he pardoned nearly 1,600 peoplewho participated in the January 6 attack at the US Capitol. The administration has also quietly dismantled an office at the Department of Homeland Security charged with preventing violence; he has also shut down the Office of Gun Violence Prevention and ordered the rollback of firearm regulations.
• Trump and his allies demolished progress on climate change by withdrawing the US (again) from the Paris Climate Agreement, challenged state laws aimed at targeting climate change, and dismissed nearly 400 contributors to the government’s annual study on climate change.

When you consider the past six months in their totality, it’s clear that it was an historic start to Trump’s second term—just not in the ways he thinks.

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ICE Agents Keep Snatching Asylum Seekers Immediately After Their Court Hearings

This story was originally published by Mission Local_, a nonprofit newsroom covering San Francisco. You can donate to them here._

Three asylum-seekers were arrested Friday directly after court hearings at San Francisco immigration court, continuing a weeks-long pattern of federal agents waiting just outside courtrooms and arresting people as they step into the halls.

Mission Local saw all three arrests, which took place at 630 Sansome Street, which houses an ICE field office and several courtrooms. The first was at about 8:40 a.m., when a woman, surrounded by people who appeared to be ICE agents, was handcuffed in the hallway outside of the courtroom.

The second and third arrests were later that morning, before noon. In both cases, asylum-seekers had barely stepped outside the courtroom when about five federal agents, some of whom clearly wore Immigration and Customs Enforcement badges, arrested them. They were swarmed and directed through a nearby door.

One lawyer pleaded with a courtroom security guard to let a man use his cellphone to text his attorney: “He’s about to be arrested outside.”

In all three cases, a Department of Homeland Security attorney had moved to dismiss the asylum-seekers’ petition, a novel tactic the Trump administration is using to arrest immigrants and put them on a fast-track to deportations. In at least two of the three cases, the judge did not accept the attorney’s motion.

Instead, the judge gave the asylum-seeker time to respond in writing, which should have given them protections from deportation. But, as has happened routinely in San Francisco, ICE agents arrested them anyway.

They are likely to be taken to detention centers in California or even outside the state. There are no centers near San Francisco, so for most people arrested at court, it means travel to far-flung parts of the state like the Golden State Annex in McFarland or Mesa Verde in Bakersfield.

Friday’s arrests are the latest at increasingly-tense courtrooms in San Francisco: ICE has made more than 30 arrests after court hearings since May 27, and on Friday agents, at least one of whom was armed, walked up and down the hallways outside the courtrooms, waiting to make arrests.

Those inside the courtroom are more fearful than ever: One woman, who arrived at court with a young child, started crying in the back of the courtroom. When the judge asked her how she was, she told him in Spanish through an interpreter, “Nervous.”

While immigration attorneys giving free legal advice have typically conferred with asylum-seekers in a private room, on Friday and, at a different courtroom at 630 Sansome Street on July 10, they huddled in the back of the courtrooms instead. The attorneys knew that if they stepped out into the halls even en route to give legal advice, the asylum-seekers would be detained immediately.

These attorneys, dispatched to court by the Bar Association of San Francisco under the “Attorney of the Day Program,” also collect contact information of relatives, so they can be told that their family member may be detained.

But even that simple communication is facing increasing scrutiny from court security.

On Friday, a security guard came into the courtroom and tried to get an asylum-seeker—whose case DHS had moved to dismiss and who was about to be arrested—to put away his phone while in court as he spoke with the immigration attorney. The attorney pushed back and stood between the guard and the asylum-seeker.

“He’s about to be arrested outside,” she said. He would not be able to contact his attorney out in the hall, he said, “because he’s about to be arrested.”

The security guard relented. But he stood just a few feet from the asylum-seeker, occasionally looking over his shoulder, as the man whispered to his lawyer and continued to text.

Electronics are not allowed in court, though the rule has not always been strictly enforced. Mission Local has observed security guards cracking down, and on Friday a guard told two court observers to put their phones away.

In a different courtroom at 630 Sansome Street on July 10, Mission Local saw a security guard raise his voice at a member of the public who was observing court for having her phone out. The judge in that courtroom, Patrick O’Brien, told the security guard to let him handle it.

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Mamdani Skewers Racist Critics With Delightful Video

As Zohran Mamdani, the democratic socialist who made history last month with his stunning victory in the Democratic primary for New York City mayor, continues to rake in powerful endorsements, he made a scheduling announcement: He’s ona brief trip to celebrate his February nuptials with “family and friends.”

Such bland news wouldn’t normally require the creation of an entire social media video. But it was the trip’s destination—Uganda, where Mamdani was born and lived for seven years before moving to the United States—that Mamdani highlighted to cheekily skewer his critics head-on.

In the clip, Mamdani played on the explosion of racist attacks telling him to “go back” to Africa. He also prepared a string of pun-heavy headlines for the conservative-leaning New York Post.

“UGANDA MISS ME.”

“HE AFRI-CAN’T BE SERIOUS.”

The clip once again underscored the Mamdani campaign’s ability to use social media videos to engage with everyday New Yorkers in ways that are widely praised as authentic, a crucial ingredient to his success. In turn, Mamdani’s opponents, Andrew Cuomo and Eric Adams, have used Mamdani’s social media savvy to attack him. “Let’s be clear: They have a record of tweets,” Adams said last month when he launched his independent campaign.

Good morning! I'm in Uganda to visit family and friends.

But depending on your perspective, don't worry or I'm sorry: I'll be back by the end of the month.

See you soon, NYC. pic.twitter.com/fIOf5NcZqy

— Zohran Kwame Mamdani (@ZohranKMamdani) July 20, 2025

The Uganda trip follows a much-maligned New York Times story on Mamdani’s 2009 college application to Columbia University, in which Mamdani identified as both African-American and Asian. The leaked info used by the Times came from a right-wing eugenicist, whom my colleague Noah Lanard later reported once wished a happy birthday to Adolf Hitler, and used a racial slur when saying those who are attracted to Black people should kill themselves.

Since stunning the country with his victory last month, Mamdani has worked to charm his detractors, including powerful figures in the business community, with direct meetings. On Friday, he scored the powerful endorsement of a local health care union, which had previously backed Mamdani’s opponent, Andrew Cuomo, who told an audience at a Hamptons fundraiser hosted by Gristedes billionaire John Catsimatidis this weekend that he would move to Florida if Mamdani becomes mayor.

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Trump Really Did Try to Drag His Musk Feud Into Pure Revenge Territory

As President Donald Trump’s bitter feud with Elon Musk spilled into public view last month, aides to the president reportedly launched a behind-the-scenes effort to carry out Trump’s threats to terminate Musk’s contracts with the federal government. Those threats marked an alarming willingness by the president to take his wrestling match with Musk to a potentially new level of lawlessness.

Ultimately, aides to the president, the Wall Street Journal reports, concluded that SpaceX contracts were too critical to operations at the Defense Department and NASA, once again underscoring the federal government’s heavy reliance on Musk’s technologies. But it’s the review itself, that it happened at all, that should cause considerable alarm, even if it involves an unsympathetic character such as Elon Musk.

As my colleague Jeremy Schulman wrote: “In a democracy, politicians simply cannot be allowed to punish dissent by threatening to destroy the businesses of people who cross them—whether those businesses are media companies, law firms, or a defense contractor run by the world’s richest man.” Of course, such concerns can be identified nearly everywhere throughout Trump’s second term, as he uses the enormous powers of the federal government to target his perceived enemies: top law firms, cultural institutions, Biden officials, civil servants, and more. Just look at the bogus “investigation” into a renovation at the Federal Reserve as Trump openly considers firing Fed Chair Jerome Powell.

With SpaceX, Trump may have been thwarted. But that might only be temporary. As the WSJ reports, the review remains ongoing, and aides are sure to be looking into other areas of retribution against Musk as he continues pouring gasoline over their feud. (Musk, who earlier appeared to suggest that Trump may be named in the Epstein files, is now one of several prominent MAGA characters to claim a full-blown “coverup” by the president.) Whatever you might think of the billionaire, that should frighten you.

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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.

Related

“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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