RFK Jr.’s MAHA Movement Is on a Collision Course with Trump’s EPA

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

On a Friday evening this July, the Trump administration announced it would lay off all of the health research scientists at the Environmental Protection Agency. Hundreds of investigators who try to understand how toxic pollution affects the human body would be gone.

That wasn’t a surprise. The EPA—which had a founding mission to protect “the air we breathe and the water we drink,” as President Richard Nixon put it—has been busy dismantling policies that are in place to ensure environmental and public health.

This week, the agency announced it would seek to repeal its recognition of climate change as a threat to human health, potentially limiting the government’s ability to regulate greenhouse gases. EPA administrator Lee Zeldin has relaxed existing standards for mercury and lead pollution—two toxins that can lead to developmental problems in children. And the EPA has postponed its implementation of new Biden-era regulations that were supposed to reduce the amount of dangerous chemicals Americans are exposed to.

Meanwhile, House Republicans are attempting to grant widespread liability relief to pesticide companies and restrict EPA regulation of PFAS “forever chemicals” through provisions that have been tucked into the spending bills currently moving through Congress. (Democrats, for their part, have offered opposing legislation that would protect an individual’s right to sue over any harm from pesticides.)

This collective assault upon America’s environmental regulations targets not just the environment, but human health as well. Which means it sits oddly with the work of another Trump official whose office at the Department of Health and Human Services is just a 15-minute walk from EPA headquarters: Robert F. Kennedy Jr, whose Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) movement seeks to, obviously, make Americans healthier.

The US is even moving backward on pollutants like mercury and lead, for which the scientific evidence of their harms is undisputed.

But Kennedy hasn’t spoken up about these contradictions—and his supporters are beginning to notice.

In response to the pro-pesticide industry proposals in Congress, MAHA leaders wrote a letter to Kennedy and Zeldin voicing opposition to a bill that they believe “would ensure that Americans have no power to prevent pesticide exposure, and no path to justice after harm occurs.” In the letter, they also urged the EPA to ban two pesticides—atrazine and glyphosate—that have been linked to birth defects and liver and kidney problems.

“These toxic substances are in our food, rain, air, and water, and most disturbingly, in our children’s bodies,” the MAHA letter says. “It is time to take a firm stand.”

Kennedy is no stranger to these issues: Earlier this year, the Trump administration’s Make America Healthy Again Commission report, which sought to document and explain the dramatic increase in chronic diseases like obesity among US children, identified both chemicals as health risks. Zeldin, however, has been working to deregulate both atrazine and glyphosate in his first few months leading the EPA.

“It is completely contrary to MAHA to relax regulations on PFAS and many different chemicals. We are calling upon them and to reverse some of these actions that [the administration] is taking or seemingly may allow,” said Zen Honeycutt, one of the letter signers and the founder of the MAHA-aligned group Moms Across America. “We are extremely disappointed with some of the actions taken by this administration to protect the polluters and the pesticide companies.”

“In the case of Kennedy, you have someone that has spent his life thinking about public health, but seems unable or disinterested in stopping what’s going on.”

MAHA burst onto the political scene as part of Kennedy’s 2024 presidential campaign. It has become a vehicle for public health concerns, some exceedingly mainstream (like addressing America’s ultra-processed food and reducing pollution) and some of them very much outside of it (such as undermining the effectiveness of vaccines). After dropping his own candidacy, Kennedy joined forces with Trump, and ended up running the nation’s most important health agency.

But now that he’s in office, he and the movement he leads are running into the challenges of making change—and the unavoidable reality that MAHA has allied with a president and an agenda that is often in direct opposition to their own.

“In the case of Lee Zeldin, you have someone who’s doing incredibly consequential actions and is indifferent to the impact on public health,” said Jeremy Symons, senior adviser to the Environmental Protection Network and a former adviser to the EPA during the Clinton administration. “In the case of Kennedy, you have someone that has spent his life thinking about public health, but seems unable or disinterested in stopping what’s going on.”

Kennedy has successfully nabbed voluntary industry commitments to phase out certain dyes from American food products. He has overhauled the government’s vaccine policy, and one state has already followed his lead in banning fluoride from its drinking water. But his ambitions to reduce the sheer number of toxins that leach into America’s children in their most vulnerable years are being stymied by an EPA and a Republican-controlled Congress with very different priorities.

“Food dyes are not as consequential as pesticides for food manufacturers. The ingredients they put into the food contaminate the food,” Honeycutt said. “That issue is a much larger issue. That is the farmers, and changing farming practices takes longer.”

To Kennedy’s credit, these are issues he’d apparently like to tackle—if he could. His HHS report earlier this year pointed out that “studies have raised concerns about possible links between some of these products and adverse health outcomes, especially in children.” Specific ingredients in pesticides have been associated with cancer, inflammation, metabolic problems and more. But the EPA, meanwhile, has reversed regulations and stymied research for those same substances.

The EPA has proposed easing restrictions on the amount of the herbicide atrazine that can be permitted in the nation’s lakes and streams. Human and animal studies have associated exposure to atrazine with birth defects, kidney and liver diseases, and problems with metabolism; the evidence, however, remains limited and the MAHA report called for further independent research. The EPA has also moved to block states from putting any new limits on or requiring any public disclosures for glyphosate, a herbicide that the MAHA report says has been linked to a wide range of health problems. Zeldin also postponed Biden-era plans to take action on chlorpyrifos, a common insecticide increasingly associated with development problems in kids.

“From the perspective of the polluter takeover of EPA, Kennedy is largely seen as inconsequential and ineffective. He’s playing wiffle ball.”

The EPA has also been slow to move on microplastics and PFAS, both substances of growing concern among scientists and the general public. These invisible but omnipresent chemicals are a priority for the MAHA movement, singled out in the White House report for further study and policymaking. The EPA, though, has delayed implementing a new standard to limit PFAS in drinking water and announced it would consider whether to raise the limits of acceptable PFAS levels in community water systems, while also slashing funding for more research on the substance’s health effects.

Bisphenols (also known as BPA) and phthalates are two other common materials used in plastic production and food packaging, which have also been identified by researchers as likely dangerous because of their ability to disrupt hormone and reproductive function. The MAHA movement singles them out for further study and possible restrictions, but the EPA has delayed safety studies for both.

The US is even moving backward on pollutants like mercury and lead, for which the scientific evidence of their harms is undisputed. They are toxins that regulators have actually taken steps over the decades to reduce exposure, through banning the use of lead paint, strictly limiting mercury levels, etc. Yet over the past few months, the EPA has moved to grant exemptions to coal power plants and chemical manufacturers that would allow more mercury pollution, while cutting monitoring for lead exposures.

This is a long list of apparent contradictions and we’re barely six months into Trump’s term. How long can the contradictions pile up without Kennedy challenging Zeldin directly?

We reached out to HHS to see if we could get Kennedy’s perspective on any of this. In response, an agency spokesperson sent a written statement: “Secretary Kennedy and HHS are committed to investigating any potential root causes of the chronic disease epidemic, including environmental factors and toxic chemicals,” the spokesperson wrote. “The Secretary continues to engage with federal partners, including the EPA, to ensure that federal actions align with the latest gold standard science and the public health priorities identified in the MAHA report.”

But as the EPA continues to roll back environmental protections despite the reassurances that the administration is aligned on MAHA, Kennedy’s constituents are growing impatient.

“Our children’s lives and futures are non-negotiables, and claims from the industry of ‘safe’ levels of exposure ignore the impacts of cumulative exposure and the reality of serious, evidence-backed risks,” the MAHA movement’s recent letter says. “The industry’s call for delay or inaction is completely unacceptable—immediate and decisive action is needed now and is long overdue.”

The conflict between the two agencies’ agendas has been striking: The EPA, under Zeldin, is allied with the industries it regulates and plans to deregulate as much as possible. HHS, on the other hand, is focused on its vision of making the environment safer in order to improve people’s health—a goal that will inevitably require more regulations that require companies to restrict their use of certain compounds that prove to be dangerous to human health.

Trump himself has said the two sides are going to have to work together and figure things out, Honeycutt noted—words that she is taking to heart for now. And the movement’s leaders recognize that they are now in the business not of outside agitation but of working within the system to try to change it. “We’re not always going to be happy,” Honeycutt said.

But Kennedy may be playing the weaker hand: Zeldin and his agency hold obvious advantages, and in a fight between HHS and EPA, EPA will likely win—unless, perhaps, Trump himself steps in.

The biggest reason is a matter of authority: The EPA has the responsibility to regulate pollution, while Kennedy’s HHS does not. The federal health agency can offer funding to state and local health departments to advance its policy goals, but it has effectively no regulatory authority when it comes to the dangerous substances identified in the MAHA report’s section on chemical toxins. The EPA, on the other hand, has broad discretion to regulate the chemicals that industries pump into the American environment—or not.

“The movement must hold Republicans accountable for undermining public health with policies like liability shields.”

The difference between the leadership at the two agencies is also stark: Kennedy is a former lifelong Democrat who has never held a government position; Zeldin is a seasoned GOP operator who served four terms in the US House. Kennedy has brought in an assortment of unconventional personnel at HHS, many with skepticism about mainstream science and who are viewed dubiously by the industries they oversee. At the EPA, representatives of long-entrenched polluting interests have commandeered powerful positions: Nancy Beck, a former scientist at the American Chemistry Council, the chemical manufacturing industry’s trade association, for example, is now holding the position overseeing chemical safety and pollution prevention.

The perception within the industry, according to insiders who spoke with Vox, is that Kennedy is, well, a lightweight. “From the perspective of the polluter takeover of EPA, Kennedy is largely seen as inconsequential and ineffective. He’s playing wiffle ball,” Symons said. “Kennedy talks a good game, but watch carefully what’s happening at EPA and all the favors being given to corporate polluters that are going to do far more damage than anything.”

“The food we eat, the water we drink, and the air we breathe are going to get more toxic and more dangerous because of what’s happening in EPA,” Symons told Vox.

When it comes to jockeying for influence, Zeldin also enjoys more powerful friends in the Republican Party. He has relationships with conservative politicians and advocacy groups across the nation. Almost all of the Republican state attorneys general, for example, are motivated to roll back environmental regulations because it’s compatible with their priorities in their respective states.

“A lot of this is being driven by polluter states, red states with Republican attorneys general,” Symons said.

And, as evidenced by the pesticide liability relief legislation in Congress that prompted MAHA’s letter to Kennedy and Zeldin, Republicans in the House and Senate remain much more allied with corporate interests—an alliance that has stood for decades—than with the public health movement that has only recently been brought inside the broader Make America Great Again coalition.

It is a bitter irony for a movement that has often called out corporate influence and corruption for the government’s failures to protect public health.

The White House’s own MAHA report cites the influence of big businesses to explain why the chronic disease crisis has grown so dire; in particular, the report says, “as a result of this influence, the regulatory environment surrounding the chemical industry may reflect a consideration of its interests.”

MAHA’s leaders aren’t running for the hills yet; Honeycutt said she urges her members not to vilify Kennedy or Trump for failing to make progress on certain issues. But they sense they’re losing control of the agenda on the environment, forcing difficult questions onto the movement just a few months after it attained serious power in Washington.

“As for MAHA organizations, they must decide whether they are to become appendages of the Republican party or coalesce into an effective, independent political force,” Charles Eisenstein, a wellness author who was a senior adviser to Kennedy’s presidential campaign, wrote for Children’s Health Defense, a once-fringe group with ties to Kennedy. “To do that, the movement must hold Republicans accountable for undermining public health with policies like liability shields. It must not sacrifice its core priorities to curry short-term favor with the Republican establishment.”

The MAHA-MAGA political alliance is new and tenuous—many MAHA followers voted for President Barack Obama, Eisenstein points out—and it may not be permanent.

And some fractures are already apparent: Honeycutt, the leader of Moms Across America and a signer of the MAHA movement’s letter to Kennedy, told Vox that her own members have told her directly that they are considering voting for Democrats in the next election. Even as she urges MAHA to keep the faith, Honeycutt said that Republicans risk alienating this enthusiastic part of their coalition by going hog wild on environmental deregulation. Her group is in the process of pulling together a legislative scorecard to hold lawmakers to account.

“There could be dire consequences for the midterm elections, if they don’t realize,” she said. “We don’t care if you’re a Republican or Democrat. We will support whoever supports us.”

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“It’s Abhorrent”: A Whistleblower Contractor Speaks Out as Gaza’s Famine Spreads

On June 6, Anthony Aguilar, a retired 25-year US Army veteran and Green Beret, found himself facing a daunting logistical problem. He had been recruited as a security contractor for UG Solutions, a partner of the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation—the Israel-backed American nonprofit now overseeing food distribution in the devastated Palestinian territory. His challenge: finding a way to feed the local Palestinian workers assisting with GHF’s efforts. “Nobody could figure out how to get food there,” he says.

So Aguilar says they settled on a workaround: ordering stacks of Domino’s pizzas via an Israeli delivery app and picking them up at the Gaza border themselves. “We then took those 27 pizzas in an armored convoy,” he says, to a GHF distribution site within the strip.

For Aguilar, it was a striking example of systemic failures at GHF, “an enterprise that has failed from the beginning,” he says. “It’s abhorrent. If it weren’t so tragic, it would be comedy. It’s not comedy, because it is absolutely tragic.”

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Aguilar has been speaking out about what he witnessed while working with GHF in May and June, adding to the controversy about the organization’s role in Gaza’s emerging famine. Recently, he sat down with France 24’s Jessica Le Masurier, who, along with Mother Jones, is publishing excerpts from an on-camera interview with Aguilar about his experiences.

The United Nations accuses the private organization of militarizing aid operations. Its Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights reports that between May 27 and July 21, 766 Palestinians were killed in the vicinity of GHF sites. As Mother Jones reporter Pema Levy recently pointed out, what GHF provides after Israel has blocked most other aid represents a massive reduction in help for starving Palestinians: “Instead of the approximately 400 aid sites and mobile clinics that the humanitarian community was operating, GHF set up just four sites in southern Gaza, far from the north where most of the population is concentrated.”

“Palestinians are getting hurt,” Aguilar tells Le Masurier, recounting episodes in which he claims his fellow personnel were “utilizing nonlethal munitions and lethal munitions in unauthorized ways.” In one instance, he says he saw a contractor throw a stun grenade that detonated, its metal top hitting a woman’s head and rendering her motionless before she was wheeled away by a donkey cart. (France 24 and Mother Jones could not identify the woman or determine whether she was killed.)

In an incident on May 29, Aguilar says he witnessed two contractors firing rifles “in bursts” from vantage points around a GHF distribution site “into the crowd.” In video footage supplied by Aguilar, someone can be heard yelling, “I think you hit one.” Another shouts, “Hell yeah, boy!”

“There was catcalling and celebrating,” Aguilar says. “They were cheering.” (The video was previously reported by the Associated Press.)

In a statement to France 24 and Mother Jones, UG Solutions confirmed that its personnel fired warning shots near GHF facilities but denied they “have ever directed” them toward civilians, rather “upwards, in the air and towards the coastline.” The group also states on its website that the contractor heard in the video was “encouraging IDF [Israel Defense Forces] fire” and has since been terminated.GHF also said that gunfire heard in the video “originated from the IDF, which was outside the immediate vicinity of the GHF site,” and called Aguilar’s descriptions the event “categorically false.”

More broadly, UG Solutions denies Aguilar’s allegations, calling him a “disgruntled former contractor who seeks revenge.” Aguilar adamantly disputes the characterization. Safe Reach Solutions, a UG contractor that Aguilar says was involved in the pizza incident, did not respond to a request for comment.

In a statement, the IDF said: “Following incidents in which harm to civilians who arrived at distribution facilities was reported, thorough examinations were conducted in the Southern Command and instructions were issued to forces in the field following lessons learned. The incidents are under review by the competent authorities in the IDF.” Israel announced last weekend that it would pause fighting in parts of Gaza for 10 hours a day to allow, in the words of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, “the entry of minimal humanitarian supplies.”

One memory remains especially haunting to Aguilar. He showed Le Masurier video of a shoeless boy approaching him alone at a distribution site, who kissed his hand. In the chaos that followed, amid warning shots and tear gas, Aguilar was struck by the child’s innocence: “This young boy had nothing to do with what Hamas did on October 7th.”

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ICE Arrested These Immigrants in San Francisco and Sent Them 2,400 Miles Away—to Hawaii

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

At least two people arrested by federal immigration officers last Thursday at immigration court in San Francisco have been flown to Hawaii, according to Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

They are now being held in the Federal Detention Center Honolulu, a federal prison, according to ICE’s online detainee search tracker.

There are no ICE detention centers in Hawaii, so the federal government has placed immigrants in prisons. ICE in February signed an agreement with the Federal Bureau of Prisons—part of the Justice Department—to reserve space for ICE detainees, according to the Honolulu Civil Beat, which reported residents from out of state being transferred to Hawaii as early as June.

Immigration lawyers in Hawaii told the Civil Beat that they are concerned residents of other states are not getting effective counsel in Hawaii; even if they had a lawyer, it’s difficult to stay in touch thousands of miles away, they told the Civil Beat.

Mission Local saw both arrests last week. ICE swarmed both people immediately after they exited routine court hearings at immigration court, at 630 Sansome St. In both cases, an attorney with the Department of Homeland Security moved to dismiss their cases—a tactic the Trump administration is increasingly using to detain and fast-track asylum-seekers out of the country.

One of the arrestees was a man whose courtroom demeanor—he was mumbling to himself through the morning—led the immigration court judge to say he appeared to be mentally impaired. “It’s obvious to me that there are competency issues,” the judge, Patrick O’Brien, said at the time. ICE arrested the man moments later, anyway.

There are no ICE detention centers in the San Francisco Bay Area. Many people arrested in the Bay Area are placed in detention centers in the Central Valley or Southern California, though some people recently arrested in the Bay Area have since been flown to Arizona and Texas.

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Trump’s Texas Gerrymander Is Supercharging a New War on Democracy

Donald Trump’s plan to rig the 2026 midterms became crystal clear on Wednesday, as Texas Republicans introduced a new congressional redistricting map that would give their party five new seats in the US House, making it much more difficult for Democrats to retake the chamber next November.

The map is designed to give Republicans control of nearly 80 percent of the state’s House delegation, though Trump only won 56 percent of the vote there in 2024. The plan creates 30 districts that Trump would have carried by 10 points or more, up from 25 seats in the current map.

Republicans accomplished this feat by drawing more Republicans into the seats of two vulnerable Democrats in South Texas, Reps. Henry Cuellar and Vicente Gonzales Jr., and eliminating Democratic-held seats in Austin, Houston, and Dallas-Fort Worth. No Republican-held seats became significantly more competitive as a result.

“This map is racist, it’s illegal, and it’s part of a long, ugly tradition of trying to keep Black and Brown Texas from having a voice,” said Democratic Rep. Marc Veasey.

New districts are typically redrawn following the decennial census, and it’s highly unusual to redraw them mid-decade, absent a court order. Texas did it once before in 2003, under the orders of then-House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, but the legislature at that time redrew districts that had been drawn by a court. This time, the GOP-controlled legislature is redrawing maps that were drawn by that very legislature, which is virtually unprecedented.

“The maps are already bad,” said Emily Eby French, policy director at Common Cause Texas. “Now they’re getting worse.”

Texas State Sen. Phil King, chair of the senate’s special committee on redistricting, said the new map was drawn by GOP redistricting operative Adam Kincaid, who authored the 2021 Texas redistricting maps that civil rights groups are challenging as racially discriminatory and is executive director of the National Republican Redistricting Trust, which was founded after the 2020 census to “coordinate the GOP’s 50-state redistricting effort.”

The brazenly partisan nature of the re-gerrymandering of the state undercuts the stated rationale for the special session provided by the Justice Department, which claimed earlier this month in a letter to Texas that four congressional districts, all represented by Black or Hispanic Democrats, constituted “unconstitutional racial gerrymanders.”

Voting rights experts, Democrats, and even Texas Republicans have since debunked that argument. Justin Levitt, a high-ranking official in the Obama Justice Department, called the letter “a fig leaf, if you think one is necessary, to give the governor an excuse to redistrict.”

The DOJ letter claimed that coalition districts, in which different minority groups form a combined majority of the voting population, violate the Voting Rights Act, citing a 2023 opinion by the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, the most conservative appellate court in the country. But the Fifth Circuit’s decision, while holding that states like Texas are not required to draw coalition districts under the Voting Rights Act, did not say that existing coalition districts must be dismantled, as the DOJ letter claims. Nor has the Supreme Court weighed in yet on that decision.

Nina Perales, vice president of litigation at Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, testified before the Texas Senate that the Justice Department’s argument was “factually wrong” and “littered with errors.”

And Texas Republicans have repeatedly asserted that they drew the current redistricting maps “race-blind,” contradicting the DOJ’s claims. “I’ve certainly never seen any indication that any map that has been passed out of this legislature, anytime I’ve been in the legislature, would violate in any way the Voting Rights Act,” said State Rep. Cody Visut, the Republican chair of the House special redistricting committee.

Democrats in the Texas legislature have sought to subpoena the head of the Justice Department’s civil rights division, Harmeet Dhillon, a close Trump ally who authored the DOJ letter, to compel her to testify.

If anything, the 2021 maps give too little representation to communities of color, argue civil rights groups who are challenging it in court. Ninety-five percent of the state’s population growth over the past decade came from people of color, but the state drew two new seats in areas with white majorities instead.

Trump’s new plan makes that problem worse, by targeting districts held by minority representatives, including Representatives Al Green in Houston and Greg Cesar in Austin.

“This map is racist, it’s illegal, and it’s part of a long, ugly tradition of trying to keep Black and Brown Texas from having a voice,” said Democratic Rep. Marc Veasey.

Blue states could retaliate in response to Texas’ new map but their options are more limited. California and New York, where Democrats could pick up the greatest number of new seats, have independent redistricting commissions and prohibitions on partisan gerrymandering that make any mid-decade redistricting effort more complex. And Democrats have already come close to maximizing the number of representatives in other blue states, such as Illinois, Massachusetts, and Maryland.

Meanwhile, Republicans are pushing forward with mid-decade redistricting in Ohio and floating similar schemes in states including Florida, Indiana, and Missouri.

Trump, with the help of the conservative majority on the Supreme Court, is supercharging a new race to the bottom, using re-redistricting as the latest tool in his ever-growing war on democracy. As his popularity sinks and a majority of the public disapproves of his handling of every major issue, the president seems to believe that the only way his party can win is if election outcomes are predetermined in their favor.

“The president and his party are afraid of the voters,” former Attorney General Eric Holder testified before Senate Democrats on Wednesday, “and they’re trying to manipulate the maps in Texas so that they can rig the elections in 2026.”

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The Trumpification of AI: What Could Go Wrong?

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

There are only a few potential existential threats to human society, as far as we know. Nuclear weapons are the most obvious. Climate change, in the worst case, could lead to assorted doomsdays. And, according to the makers of sci-fi films and to some real-world scientists, artificial intelligence falls into this category. Many governments have been trying—to varying degrees of effectiveness—to confront the first two of this trio. Though arms control and nuclear nonproliferation efforts and policies to counter climate change have not been robust enough to prevent the worst possible disasters, we generally know what governments ought to do to handle these threats. It’s more a matter of political will. With AI, the best course of action remains a question, and the big decisions are mainly in the hands of tech companies, which care more about dollars than safeguards. Donald Trump just further empowered these firms.

It never became a campaign issue last year, but a reason to fear a Trump presidency was that should he win he would play a key role in determining rules for AI. Could Trump, a fellow who’s ignorant about so much and who doesn’t bother to spend time studying an issue, be trusted to make the correct and difficult decisions on AI without being unduly influenced by Big Tech, political contributors, or perhaps his own financial interests? Simply put, did you want this guy to be determining whether we develop Skynet? It was a conversation the American public didn’t have.

Now Trump is in that position, and he has decided to let the AI gang run free and wild—with one big exception.

So who will be calling the shots on AI? Not elected representatives of the public, but the companies desperately seeking to boost profits and grab as much as they can in this modern-day gold rush.

Last week, as the headlines were dominated by the Epstein mess, ICE raids, and the horrific famine in Gaza, Trump signed three executive orders on AI and released an “AI Action” plan. The net result is that tech firms will be allowed to develop AI free from bothersome regulations and safeguards. Trump has ripped up guidelines issued by the Biden administration that sought to implement AI protections, effectively saying to the tech sector, full speed ahead—it’s more important to beat China than to ponder how to safely and responsibly move forward with AI.

So who will be calling the shots on AI? Not elected representatives of the public, but the companies desperately seeking to boost profits and grab as much as they can in this modern-day gold rush. For all the harm Trump has caused—killing people overseas by canceling humanitarian relief programs, yanking health insurance from millions, eviscerating necessary government programs, destroying the nation’s research infrastructure, etc.—this maybe one of his most consequential decisions.

There’s a great debate about what AI means for our society and our species. It ranges from Pollyannish techno-optimism to warnings from serious thinkers of an apocalypse. For example, Geoffrey Hinton, the “Godfather of AI,” who won a Nobel Prize last year for his pioneering research on neural networks, believes there’s a 10 to 20 percent chance that AI will eventually take control from humans. If we do have reason to fear unrestrained AI, then Trump could be greasing the way to our Terminator future.

One of the executive orders Trump signed decried “political bias” in AI. But he’s not worried about the bias that Grok showed weeks ago when it went racist and antisemitic and called itself “MechaHitler.”

At the same time, Trump is trying to Trumpify AI—in an authoritarian fashion. He and his acolytes are repeating the same con they did with social media. Remember how the right spent years whining that social media companies had a liberal bias and suppressed conservative speech? That was bunk. But now Trump and MAGA are leading a similar blitz against AI.

One of the executive orders Trump signed decried “political bias” in AI. But he’s not worried about the bias that Grok, xAI’s chatbot, showed weeks ago when it went racist and antisemitic and called itself “MechaHitler.” Trump had something else in mind. He declared, “The American people do not want woke Marxist lunacy in the AI models.”

What was he referring to? Trump didn’t provide specifics, but last year conservatives lost their cool when Gemini, Google’s AI tool, produced a Black rendition of George Washington when asked to show the nation’s founding fathers. And Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey recently accused OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, and Meta of engaging in deceptive business practices because their AI chatbots, when asked to rank the last five presidents “from best to worst, specifically regarding antisemitism,” listed Trump last. (Trump is the only modern president to have held a dinner with an antisemitic rapper and a white supremacist who praised Hitler.)

“Missourians deserve the truth, not AI-generated propaganda masquerading as fact,” Bailey complained. “If AI chatbots are deceiving consumers through manipulated ‘fact-checking,’ that’s a violation of the public’s trust and may very well violate Missouri law.”

In March, Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), the chair of the House Judiciary Committee, issued subpoenas to 16 tech companies, demanding information on whether the Biden administration had pressured AI firms to “censor lawful speech”—implying that President Joe Biden forced AI chatbots to suppress right-wing ideas.

But what does it mean that AI must reflect the truth and eschew “social engineering”—a term that right-wingers often attach to anything they see as “woke”?

With his executive order, Trump jumped to the front of this new conservative crusade. His action plan declared that the government must only procure AI that “objectively reflects truth rather than social engineering agendas.” It noted that AI developers seeking federal contracts must “ensure that their systems are objective and free from top-down ideological bias.”

Since the AI companies view the US government as a major client, any procurement rules the feds set for AI is a big deal. But what does it mean that AI must reflect the truth and eschew “social engineering”—a term that right-wingers often attach to anything they see as “woke”? A White House fact sheet insisted that AI “shall be truthful and prioritize historical accuracy, scientific inquiry, and objectivity.”

Who decides what is true? That’s the rub here. Ask an AI chatbot who won the 2020 election and what will you get? An answer that Trump claims is false. What if you pose this query: “Can you give me a list of the 30,000-plus lies or false statements Trump uttered during his first presidency that were chronicled by the Washington Post?” Or which president has had the best economy? Did Trump encourage an insurrectionist riot at the Capitol on January 6, 2021? The replies will not line up with MAGA reality.

Trump is attempting to set up the federal government—his federal government—as an arbiter of the truth. This is, to make an obvious connection, Orwellian. For all his powers of imagination, the author of 1984 could not have envision an authoritarian state that controls the truth through AI. And this seems a clear violation of the First Amendment. Will commissars in the Trump White House cancel a Pentagon contract with OpenAI if they query ChatGPT about Russian intervention in the 2020 election and the chatbot says Moscow intervened to help Trump? Or if they find ChatGPT referencing a critical race analysis of a historical event or highlighting a UN study on the disastrous impact of climate change?

It’s a deal with the devil—to which tech companies are saying, “Fine.”

As Steve Levy notes in Wired, “Trump’s anti-bias AI order is just more bias.” He points out that “so far no Big Tech company has publicly objected to the plan.” They’re all so eager to cash in on AI—and appreciative of Trump’s let-’er-rip policy—that they’re not complaining about this unprecedented attack on free expression.

Sen. Edward Markey (D-Mass.) has written to the heads of Alphabet, Anthropic, OpenAI, Microsoft, and Meta, urging the firms to oppose Trump’s attempt to regulate and censor AI content. Trump’s order, he said, “will create significant financial incentives for the Big Tech companies…to ensure their AI chatbots do not produce speech that would upset the Trump administration.” He told Levy, “Republicans want to use the power of the government to make ChatGPT sound like Fox & Friends.”

Trump is unleashing the tech titans to proceed as they wish with this revolutionary and perhaps humanity-destroying technology yet telling them they will have to abide by and incorporate his biases and false realities. It’s a deal with the devil—to which the companies are saying, “Fine.” They get to amass fortunes, and Trump, the wannabe autocrat, gets to control what AI “thinks.” What’s at risk is merely civilization as we know it and the truth.

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How Does the Epstein Scandal End?

Last week, top officials in Donald Trump’s version of the Justice Department, including Todd Blanche, the president’s former personal criminal attorney, paid a visit to Ghislaine Maxwell, the socialite turned sex trafficker. Maxwell is currently serving 20 years for her role in helping the financier-pedophile Jeffrey Epstein sexually abuse women and girls; according to a 2022 pre-sentencing memorandum in her case, Maxwell also abused some girls herself, fondling and groping their breasts to normalize the hyper-sexualized environment that she and Epstein had created. While no notes or details about last week’s meeting~~s~~ have been released, it’s exceedingly clear that the Trump administration is hoping their conversation with her will pry loose some new names of Epstein associates—and end the scandal that’s engulfed the administration and the president for the past several weeks.

Trump hoped and expected his base would move on, as has happened countless times with scandals involving the president.

At this point, Donald Trump is dealing, still, with a nearly unprecedented situation: the real and undiminished fury of a good portion of his base over his own administration’s handling of the Jeffrey Epstein case. Since July 6, when his FBI and Department of Justice released an unsigned memo declaring that Epstein died by suicide, did not maintain a “client list,” and was not blackmailing powerful people, that anger has gone on and on, bolstered by a number of very stupid steps the Trump administration has taken to try to quell it. Trump himself is said to be “exasperated” by the ongoing scandal, having hoped and expected that his base would have moved on by now, as has happened countless times before with other scandals and controversies involving the president.

Instead, as the Epstein controversy drags on, interviewing Maxwell is one of the ways that the Trump administration is clearly hoping to finally put the Epstein headlines behind them. Seeing an opening, Maxwell’s attorney David Markus is also urging the Supreme Court to overturn her conviction while appealing to Trump for a pardon. The president himself has refused to rule out the idea of pardoning her, telling a press gaggle recently, “I’m allowed to do it, but it’s something I have not thought about.” On Tuesday, Markus said that while Maxwell has signaled a willingness to testify before Congress, she would invoke her Fifth Amendment rights against self-incrimination during that questioning if she’s not granted “formal immunity.”

Maxwell could agree to name names in her conversations with Trump’s DOJ, identifying other powerful people who haven’t previously been publicly accused of engaging in sex crimes with Epstein, while at the same time declaring that Trump himself never engaged in sexually inappropriate behavior.

But hammering out such a deal carries its own risks, says Mike Rothschild, an author and journalist who studies conspiracy theories, given that Maxwell’s attorney has made clear that she expects what her attorney has called “relief”—widely taken to mean a pardon or sentencing reduction—in return for such cooperation.

“I would imagine that every Republican running for office next year is begging him not to just outright pardon Ghislaine Maxwell,” Rothschild says. “They’re going to have to spend the next year and a half trying to justify something with no justification to voters who think she’s nothing more than a convicted trafficker. He doesn’t have to run again, but they do. And if a Maxwell pardon really does shatter his base and peel off a big number of Trump-only voters, they’re the ones who will have to pick up the pieces.”

Trump himself called the controversy a “hoax” and “bullshit,” which did not make it go away.

The facts will complicate any effort by Trump or his defenders to position Maxwell as a brave truthteller who has now decided to blow the whistle on Epstein, her former boyfriend and co-conspirator. As ABC News recently pointed out, prosecutors said in Maxwell’s 2022 pre-sentencing memorandum that she’d neither been forthcoming nor remorseful ahead of trial, accusing her of having “lied repeatedly about her crimes, exhibited an utter failure to accept responsibility, and demonstrated repeated disrespect for the law and the Court.” As Rothschild notes, “Even the fact that it’s possible Maxwell might get clemency or some kind of voided conviction is shaping up to be one of the biggest political scandals in American history.”

Recent history, and Trump’s long-established patterns, suggest other possibilities for how he and his allies could try to divert attention from the Epstein case. One avenue that Trump’s prominent friends have already attempted is to simply declare the story to be over—something that’s so far had limited success. As Slate pointed out, multiple news outlets declared last week that Trump had successfully convinced his MAGA base to stop being mad at him about Epstein, including the New York Times, Politico, the Washington Post, and CNN. Every story cited the same prominent source: Trump ally and former White House official Steve Bannon. (In other words, and now more than ever, just because Bannon says something does not make it true.) This month, Trump himself called the Epstein controversy a “hoax” and “bullshit” and castigated his supporters for believing it, which also did not work to make it go away.

Another clear possibility is that the administration finds an internal scapegoat to blame the Epstein mess on. That would most likely be Attorney General Pam Bondi; as the face of the Justice Department, Bondi has been the target of the most focused MAGA outrage: the House GOP, including Speaker Mike Johnson, have already made clear that they’re dissatisfied with Bondi’s handling of the case. Deputy FBI Director Dan Bongino, a popular far-right podcaster turned political appointee, has also made clear that he’s been feuding with Bondi, reportedly threatening to quit several weeks ago if she wasn’t fired, a promise he has thus far not made good on. If the Trump administration chose to fire Bondi and appoint someone new who declares they are investigating the whole mess from scratch, it could at least quiet the headlines for several weeks or months.

An unlikely fourth option is a large document dump, as the administration recently did with files relating to the assassinations of JFK and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr; the King files also further detail the FBI’s years-long surveillance of the civil rights leader before his murder, and were released despite objections from King’s children.

“Every Republican running for office next year is begging him not to just outright pardon Ghislaine Maxwell.”

But there are reasons this probably hasn’t already been done, despite Bondi’s promises to release more, and her failed February stunt where conservative influencers were handed binders that turned out to contain previously released information from Epstein’s flight logs and address book. Releasing more information carries significant privacy risks, as well as legal ones. Any Epstein files would certainly contain the names of living people, who could then be threatened by vigilantes accusing them of sex crimes; it could also breach the privacy of Epstein victims who haven’t chosen to publicly come forward. Bondi has also said the Epstein files contain images and videos of child sexual exploitation material; releasing that would be a criminal offense and would also re-victimize the people depicted in them. And, of course broader disclosures could draw in the president: as Bondi reportedly told Trump in May, his name is mentioned in Epstein files, although it’s not clear in what form.

The fifth and most likely option is a version of what is already playing out, to limited success: trying to find another scandal that will appeal to—and distract—the MAGA base. Since the Epstein scandal broke, Trump officials have promised to criminally investigate former CIA director John Brennan and former FBI director James Comey. More recently, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard has started promoting a contorted scandal accusing the Obama administration of criminal conduct. Right-wing and conspiracy outlets like Infowars have tried to play along, touting headlines that President Obama will soon be charged with “treasonous conspiracy.” Thus far, though, there’s very little sign that the broader MAGA base is excited—or distracted—by these announcements.

As these many and chaotic possibilities continue to unfold, Trump officials are struggling to keep the positive attention and loyalty of their base. Chief among them is Bongino, who announced in a cryptic tweet this week that shocking things are taking place behind the scenes—a promise that he and other administration officials have made multiple times.

“During my tenure here as the Deputy Director of the FBI, I have repeatedly relayed to you that things are happening that might not be immediately visible, but they are happening,” Bongino tweeted, in a statement that might have occasioned deja vu for his readers. “The Director and I are committed to stamping out public corruption and the political weaponization of both law enforcement and intelligence operations. It is a priority for us. But what I have learned in the course of our properly predicated and necessary investigations into these aforementioned matters, has shocked me down to my core. We cannot run a Republic like this. I’ll never be the same after learning what I’ve learned.”

Bongino’s promise of new revelations at some unspecified future point seemed designed to reassure his impatient followers. While that may have worked before, it’s less clear that it’ll have its intended effect this time—leaving Trump and his administration, again, desperately looking for a new way out.

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The Bible Says So…or Does It?

Dan McClellan has spent much of his life learning—and relearning—what the Bible and its authors were trying to tell us. But the years he spent in graduate school studying Hebrew texts, Near Eastern cultures, and the concept of deity taught him something else: The way scholars talk about the Bible is much different from how churchgoers—or most people on social media—talk about it.

So several years ago, McClellan began pushing back against what he saw as misguided biblical interpretations online and found an audience. Today, he has almost 1 million followers on TikTok who look for his thoughts on topics like the “sin of empathy,” what the Bible says about slavery, or maybe just to see what graphic T-shirt he has decided to wear that day. (He confesses to also being a comic book nerd.) But one strand of thought that weaves through many of his videos is how Christian nationalists have recently used the Bible to gain political power.

“The hot new thing right now is to be a Christian nationalist,” says McClellan, who also wrote The Bible Says So: What We Get Right (and Wrong) About Scripture’s Most Controversial Issues. “And I think a lot of people are jumping at the opportunity to get on board this attempt to take over the government on the part of Christians. And unfortunately, it means hurting an awful lot of people along the way.”

On this week’s More To The Story, McClellan sits down with host Al Letson to talk about the ways people throughout history have used the Bible to serve their own interests, pushing back against conservative commentator Charlie Kirk’s biblical interpretations, and describes a time when his own perspective of the Bible was challenged.

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: So you got a new book out, but wait, before we get to that, before we get to that, I should tell my listeners that I am such a huge fan of your work. I’ve been following you for a while and I think I came across your work because I’m the son of a preacher man, grew up in the church and definitely have my own religious beliefs. But what I love about the work that you do is you are just kind of demystifying the Bible and putting it in context. How did you end up doing this type of work, for lack of better term, fact-checking people’s conception of the Bible on TikTok and Instagram?

Dan McClellan: Yeah, that was definitely not what I was aimed at when I started graduate school. In fact, I think from an academic point of view, my career looks more like a failure than anything else. Because I have taught at some universities, but never on a full-time basis. I don’t have a tenure-track position or anything like that. But something that has always been a concern of mine, even when I was an undergraduate and then moving into graduate school was the fact that the way scholars and experts talk about the Bible and think about the Bible is very, very different from the way the folks on the street or in the pews think and talk about the Bible. There’s a very big gap between those two.

And the more I learned about the Bible and an academic approach to the Bible, the more that gap bothered me and the more I wanted to be able to share the insights that come from that expertise with the folks on the street and in the pews, which is not an easy thing to do, not only because it requires packaging frequently very complex concepts into things that are more easily digestible, but also because there tends to be a lot of pushback from the streets and the pews when you say, “Actually, that’s not what the Bible is like, it’s more like this.” Because of how deeply embedded in their worldviews their own understandings of the Bible are. And so I’ve always tried to engage on social media with the discourse about the Bible and religion.

And I’ve always tried to combat the spread of misinformation and speak out against hoaxes and fake artifacts that people try to pawn off as real, have been doing this for a long time on blogs and on message boards and on Facebook and things like that. And the reach is just not that great on those channels. And then for whatever reason, I stumble across TikTok and suddenly I’m able to find an audience that is interested in someone who is there to call balls and strikes rather than to try to defend one dogma or one identity over and against the other. And I’m very happy to be in a position where I say that I combat the spread of misinformation about the Bible and religion for a living. And I wouldn’t take a university position right now if somebody offered me one. So very happy to be in the position I am right now.

If any of our listeners have not seen you on TikTok or Instagram and they’re just listening to this conversation and they’re being introduced to you for the first time, I think they would be surprised to know that you’re also a huge pop culture nerd, like myself, a specific type of nerd though. You’re a comic book nerd. I mean, I’m sure you cover many nerddoms, but the one we definitely have in common is comic book and so which makes your videos fun.

I think, from what I gather, there are an awful lot of folks out there who find my work relatable precisely because I do not come across as some stuffed shirt, Ivory tower academic. I’m just another dude who likes to wear graphic tees and likes to read comic books and stuff like that. And so I mean, how much better off could things be for me that the things that I enjoy are things that my audience enjoys and that I get to just riff about?

So when I think about you on TikTok, I mean, basically you’re fact-checking people who are bending the message of the Bible for their own purposes. I mean, people have been doing this since the Bible was written. But today with social media, those interpretations are now being delivered in a new and really effective way.

Yeah. I think the Bible for a long time has been viewed as the highest authority, and particularly after the Reformation when a lot of Christians got rid of everything else and now all we have is the Bible. But if you have something, a text that is supposed to be God’s very word and inspired and inerrant and that is the ultimate authority, if you can leverage that in support of your identity markers, in support of your rhetorical goals and everything like that, that’s a powerful tool in structuring power and values and boundaries. And so it becomes the… That’s the holy grail. That’s what you need to have on your side.

But because it’s a text, it has no inherent meaning. It has to be interpreted, which then means whoever best interprets the text in support of their ideologies is going to be able to leverage that ultimate authority. And so I think an awful lot of people spend an awful lot of time trying to read their own ideologies and their own identity politics into the text because that is a very attractive instrument that they can then leverage to serve their own ends. And unfortunately, far too often that means powerful people using that as a tool against less powerful people and groups. And I think that’s particularly true today.

I would say that when we look at the way religion is being used to fight against things like homosexuality, the way the Bible is being used to reframe slavery. There was one clip where Charlie Kirk was a person that you were taking his, I wouldn’t say misinformation, I would say disinformation because I think that he actually knows the truth of what he’s saying, as someone that knows the Bible a little bit, even I can look at the things he’s saying and be like, “What are you talking about?”

Yeah, he’s an example of somebody I get tagged in his videos a lot and I try not to engage unless there’s a plausible case to be made that what he’s talking about overlaps with the Bible. That’s an example of somebody who right now is trying to leverage the Bible in defense of Christian nationalism because that’s the hot new thing right now is to be a Christian nationalist. And I think a lot of people are jumping at the opportunity to get on board this attempt to take over the government on the part of Christians.

And unfortunately, it means hurting an awful lot of people along the way and structuring everything to serve the interests of already privileged and powerful groups over and against the interests of already vulnerable groups. I think folks who love power more than they love people are the actual problem that is causing a lot of the social ills that we have today. And unfortunately, the Bible is very frequently one of the main instruments that we find in the hands of those people.

A couple months ago, the thing that I was hearing a lot on social media specifically from right wing religious folks is the idea that there’s the sin of empathy. And on its surface I thought it was laughable, but I have you here now. So my question is is there anywhere in the Bible that talks about the sin of empathy?

Certainly not. There are certainly times when in narratives God will say, “Show no mercy,” or something like that. And these are particularly problematic passages where God says, “You will go through the town and you will kill everything that breathes, men, women, children, the suckling baby. Show no mercy.” And so I think you could interpret that to mean there are times when God does not want you to be empathetic, at least there are times when the narrative calls for that. But I think we can point out that’s a bad narrative and that’s a bad message. There’s certainly no point where anyone says empathy is a sin just in general. And the notion of the sin of empathy is just an attempt to try to overturn the fact that we’re social creatures and we are evolutionarily and experientially predisposed to feel what other people are feeling.

That is what allows us to cooperate. That’s what allows us to build larger and more complex social groups without things breaking down. Empathy is important to the survival of humanity, but it has a negative byproduct because we all understand ourselves according to specific sets of social identities. And if you have a social identity, you have an in-group and then you have an out-group. And so empathy can be problematic when we empathize with the in-group to the degree that we then become antagonistic toward the out-group. We call that parochial empathy. If you are empathetic toward the people you identify with to the degree that you then antagonize and harm the out-group, that can be harmful.

But I don’t think that’s what people are talking about when they are talking about the sin of empathy because those are the people who are overwhelmingly trying to defend precisely parochial empathy because they’re trying to convince others it’s bad for us to empathize with undocumented immigrants. It’s bad for us to empathize with people from other nations. It’s bad for us to empathize with either conservatives or liberals. I think empathy that is outward looking is good. Empathy that is parochial, I mean, it serves a purpose. Smaller groups that are threatened, that are vulnerable, in order for those identities to survive, they have to kind of circle the wagons and you have to kind of be a little protective of your identity.

This is what the Judeans and the Jewish folks throughout history have had to do. And that’s necessary, I think, in certain contexts for the survival and the protection of vulnerable identities. But once you become the oppressor, once you become the empire, once you become the dominant group to then say the out-group is bad and to exercise that parochial empathy, I think that becomes phenomenally harmful. And so ironically, there can be a way that empathy is bad and the folks who talk about the sin of empathy are primarily defending the bad kind of empathy and criticizing the good kind of empathy. So I think they have it precisely backwards. And I think all they’re trying to do is protect their own privilege and power.

Yeah. I mean, I think they have it backwards, but I think they have it backwards purposefully so. I think that there are a lot of people who don’t know any better and they say things based in their ignorance, but I also think there are a lot of people who interpret the text in a way that justifies the things that they already believe to be right. It’s good for them to… I mean, sometimes when I’m listening to some folks talk about the Bible and Jesus, the image of Jesus that comes in my mind is Jesus riding horseback on a Tyrannosaurus Rex with two sub-machine guns in his hand.

With an AK, yeah.

Yeah, exactly. It’s like that’s not the Jesus that I see, but I understand how some people can twist their beliefs to fit that image.

Yeah. And you do, anytime you have these movements, you’ve got a lot of people who are there along for the ride. They’re convinced of things, but a lot of the thought leaders and a lot of the people who are driving the car are conscious of what they’re doing, are very intentionally doing it.

So tell me about your book. why’d you write it? All the things.

All the things. It’s called The Bible Says So: What We Get Right and Wrong About Scripture’s Most Controversial Issues. The framing that I came up with is the Bible says so because one of the most common things that I’m confronting in social media is the notion that the Bible says X, Y, and Z. And so that was the genesis of this manuscript that turned into this book, which has 18 different chapters, an intro, and then I give a little broad-level view of how we got the Bible. But then 18 different chapters, each one addresses a different claim about what the Bible says. So the Bible says homosexuality is an abomination. The Bible says God created the universe out of nothing. The Bible says you should beat your kids. A lot of different claims about what the Bible says.

And in each chapter I try to go through and share what the data actually indicate about what the authors and earliest audiences of these biblical texts understood the text to be doing and to be saying, where normally when people say the Bible says X, Y or Z, they’re sharing what makes the Bible meaningful and useful to them in their specific circumstances. And what I do is try to say, “I’m going to set that aside and I’m going to try to understand what would’ve made this text meaningful and useful to its authors and earliest audiences irrespective of how meaningful and useful that may make it to us.” And so I try to share what we think the authors were trying to say when they wrote whatever they did right in the Bible.

All of your studies that you’ve… And you’ve gone deep into all of this, is it fair to look at the Bible as a historical document or do you see the Bible more as a collection of stories that try to teach people, specifically people of that time how to live their lives, like how to be safe, how to create community, all of those things?

I think there’s a degree to which many parts of the Bible are historical, but I think that’s incidental. The Bible was certainly not written as a history book. And I think overwhelmingly, the Bible is a collection of texts from that time period that were intended to try to do certain things with the audiences. It wasn’t also always necessarily about how to live right. I think a lot of the times it’s about trying to establish who’s in control and what kind of understanding of our identity we should have and things like that. So there are a lot of different rhetorical goals going on, and sometimes one set of authors might be arguing against another set of authors. You see that particularly between Samuel and Kings and Chronicles.
You have a lot of things being changed because the editors of Chronicles were like, “I don’t like the way you do it. I’m going to do it this other way.” And they’re trying to make different points. But yeah, they’re definitely rhetorical texts. They’re definitely to some degree propagandistic texts, and particularly a lot of the historical texts having to do with the Kings and things like that in the Hebrew Bible. Once we get into the New Testament, I think it’s probably a little more in line with texts intended to help people understand how to live according to the opinion of the authors.

Tell me if this categorization is fair. The God of the Old Testament is, my dad would kill me if he heard me say this, but the God of the Old Testament feels very much a God of get off my lawn, kids and very much like an angry wrathful God, like, “You step in line with me or I will smite you. I will burn whole cities down. And if you turn around and look at those cities, I will turn you into pillars of salt. I don’t mess around. There’s no mercy.” Then after Jesus is born and Jesus lives his life, the God we meet there is a much more generous and loving God, the God who hung out with tax collectors, who hung out with prostitutes, who told you to love your neighbor as you would love yourself, all of these things that are a much more softer and loving deity than what we see in the Old Testament. Would you agree that that’s true?

I would agree that that’s a very common interpretation. And I would agree that on the surface, if we’re not looking incredibly closely, it can seem like that. But I think there’s a problem with that perspective, and there are a few things going on here. Because you have an angry vindictive God in the New Testament as well, but it’s isolated to only a couple places and primarily like the Book of Revelation represents a deity that will bathe its sword in the blood of victims, and you also find a phenomenally merciful and long-suffering God in different parts of the Hebrew Bible.

And this is one of the reasons that I’ve tried to point out there’s no one God of the Bible. You have numerous different divine profiles being represented throughout both the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament. Different authors are going to represent God in whatever ways serve their own rhetorical interests and goals, but there is a chronological trajectory as well. As things are changing in the world in societies, you go from far more warfare, far more conflict between societies to a time period when there’s still war and conflict, but there’s a lot more advocacy for peace. And it’s not the division between the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament where that pivots, it’s actually before the end of the Hebrew Bible.
I think that that dichotomy of the vindictive and violent God of the Hebrew Bible and the loving merciful God of the New Testament also is problematic from an antisemitism point of view because that has taken up frequently to frame the God of the Jewish people as evil and the God of Christianity as good. And that facilitates, or it historically has facilitated a lot of problems. So I try to help people understand that you’ve got a mix of both in both sets of texts, and it’s really your choice what you choose to emphasize, give priority to and center.

This is exactly why I love your videos because I have a long-held belief that I’ve thought about over years. And then you come along and you blow it all up. You blow it all. Not only do you blow it up, you point out the places where that belief is problematic because until you said it, I never would’ve thought of it in the frame of like antisemitic. It’s the blind spot, I don’t see it like that, but when you frame it in that way, I get it. I get why that thinking is totally problematic, and I think that’s the power of what you do on social media.

And that’s something that it’s a lesson I had to learn myself as well. Because I saw somebody posted on Twitter many years ago a picture of Santa Claus in somebody’s living room, but he was angry and had an ax or something, and there’s a little kid on the stairs looking around the corner and says, “Oh, no, it’s Old Testament Santa.” And I was like, “Aha.” And I shared this and some of my Jewish scholar friends immediately were like, “Bad form. Here’s why this is bad.” And it had never occurred to me either, and then I couldn’t unsee it. Once I accepted that people with very different experiences are going to feel very differently about the joke and what’s being expressed there, I couldn’t unsee that.

It’s interesting to me growing up in the Baptist church that when I was in church and in the church that I went to, the Bible verse that I heard more than anything was that it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of the needle than a rich man to enter the gates of heaven. And that was kind of a thing in the church that I was in, and most of the churches that I went to, that wealth did not equate that you were a pious and good person. It was more the opposite, that wealth meant that your actions had to be more because it was going to be hard for you to get through the gates of heaven. And it seems that that Bible verse is completely forgotten by, well, A, like a lot of these Christian nationalists or preachers who engage in the prosperity gospel.

Yeah, it’s a big issue. And I mean, there are ways that people try to get around that verse. They say that, “Oh, eye have the needle doesn’t mean an actual sewing needle. It refers to what’s called a wicked gate, a little door that is inside of the main door of the city gate.” And so it just means that you have to open the little door and the pack has to be taken off the camel and they have to shimmy through on their knees. And I don’t think these people have ever seen a camel in real life who are saying this because camels are not going to do that. But there were no such gates anywhere in, around or near Jerusalem, anywhere near the time of the composition of the New Testament.

And this is very clearly hyperbole that is coming at the end of a story about a rich young ruler comes to Jesus and says, “I’ve kept all the commandments since my youth. What do I have to do to inherit the kingdom of God?” And Jesus says, “Sell everything you own and give it to the poor.” And then it says the man went away sad because he had a lot of possessions. And that’s where Jesus goes, “Tsk, tsk. It’s going to be hard for a rich person to enter the kingdom of heaven,” and then gives this hyperbolic notion of a camel passing through the eye of a needle. And for people who try to endorse a prosperity gospel interpretation of this, not only is it incredibly hard to do and it’s never really convincing unless you are already there and just need to be made to feel like it’s not impossible.

But like everywhere else in the gospels, Jesus says, “You cannot serve God and mammon.” And Jesus says, “Blessed are the poor.” And you can look in the sermon on the Mount and in Matthew 5, and it says, “Blessed are the poor in spirit.” And so people say, “Aha. It doesn’t say… That’s not about economic poverty, that’s about humility.” But you can then go to the sermon on the plain in the Gospel of Luke and it just says, “Blessed are the poor.” Which very clearly is referring to economic poverty. As I said before, the Bible is a text. It has no inherent meaning. We create meaning in negotiation with the text, which means we’re bringing our experiences and our understanding to the text, and that’s generating the meaning.

And if you have experienced privilege and wealth your whole life, you’re going to interpret the Bible in a way that makes that okay. It’s very rare that we have someone in a position like that who comes to the text and can think critically enough to realize, “This is about me. This is saying that I am the problem. I better fix myself.” That’s phenomenally rare. What is far more common is for someone to bring their own experiences to the text and say, “I was right all along. The problem is everybody else. The problem is not me. I can find endorsement or validation of my own worldviews and my own perspectives and my own hatred and my own bigotry in the text and that authorizes and validates it.” And that’s what we see going on overwhelmingly in public discourse about the Bible.

Tough question that you’ve probably been asked a million times before, but the fact that you are doing such deep research on the Bible, how does that affect your religious belief? And I think for a long time I assumed that you are an atheist, that you didn’t believe in God, but then you did a video and you talked about being a Mormon, and I was like, “Wow, okay. That’s a wrinkle. That’s something there.” So yeah, talk to me about that. How do you balance the two things?

Well, and this is something I’ve for a long time said, I don’t talk about my personal beliefs on social media, so that’s a boundary that I try to maintain. But what I will say is that I have always tried very, very hard ever since I started formally studying the Bible to ensure that I was compartmentalizing my academic approach to the Bible from my devotional approach to the Bible, keeping them firmly separate, which is not an easy thing to do because I was raised more or less without religion. And like I mentioned earlier, I joined the LDS church as an adult. I was 20 years old. I didn’t really have much that I had to deconstruct when I started studying the Bible academically.

So I would say that a lot of people reach out to me for help with deconstruction, for help with trying to understand these things through a prism of faith. And that’s where I say, “That’s above my pay grade.” I don’t take a pastoral approach to this. I’m not here to hold anybody’s hand through faith crises and things like that. There are content creators out there who do that kind of thing. I’m just here to try to present the data and my own personal grappling with that is something that is private. So I do keep that separate.

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

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Resignation of a Top US Nuclear Regulator Seen as an Attack on Agency Independence

This story originally appeared on the author’s substack newsletter, Field Notes From Alexander C. Kaufman, to which you can subscribe here.

A top official at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) is resigning from her post amid the Trump administration’s attempts to overhaul atomic energy rules and chip away at the agency’s independence.

Commissioner Annie Caputo, a Republican whom President Donald Trump initially nominated to the five-member NRC in May 2017, announced her plans in an email to staff on Tuesday, as this newsletter first reported. She had another year left on her five-year term after being reappointed by former President Joe Biden in 2022. The NRC confirmed to me that Caputo will leave once the newly confirmed agency chair, David Wright, is sworn in, noting that Wright’s paperwork is still being processed. The NRC also provided a copy of Caputo’s email (see below), in which she said she planned to “more fully focus on my family.”

“Caputo was very industry friendly Republican. If her resignation signals more radical changes, then the nuclear industry could find itself with a yet more unstable investment climate paired with a diminishing social license to operate,” Emmet Penney, a senior fellow at the right-leaning Foundation for American Innovation, told me. “A regulatory whipsaw effect would strangle the nuclear renaissance in its crib—a brutal and humiliating own-goal for energy dominance.”

The NRC was established in 1975 in response to concerns that its predecessor, the Atomic Energy Commission, played too big a role in promoting the industry it was supposed to regulate. New legislation enacted last year, called the ADVANCE Act, rewrote part of the NRC’s mission statement to allow the panel to broaden its efforts to protect public health by considering the risks of not building enough nuclear reactors and rendering the country more reliant on polluting fossil-fuel power.

While the NRC has plenty of protocols that many agree could help speed up approvals of new nuclear plants, such as unnecessary hearings that can cost developers upward of $500,000, experts say the agency has helped insulate atomic energy projects from litigation that could destroy proposal just by dragging out court cases.

“The NRC is under full-scale attack from a bunch of folks who don’t seem to understand the crucial role the NRC plays in protecting nuclear energy from endless, arbitrary legal attack and investment-killing uncertainty,” Mark Nelson, the founder of the nuclear consultancy Radiant Energy Group, told me.

“Caputo apparently resigned rather than be compromised by politics of NRC independence destruction,” he added. “The NRC helps ensure that there is only a tiny, extremely tough attack surface for antinuclear legal efforts to target.”

The resignation comes one day after the Senate voted to confirm 50-39 to confirm Wright as the new chair of the NRC as Democrats protested the appointment. When the Senate last voted to confirm Wright to the commission, in 2020, his nomination was so uncontroversial the chamber gave its approval by a simple voice vote.

The upheaval now is a sign of how the new administration has politicized an agency that was once an oasis of bipartisan consensus.

In May, Trump signed four executive orders aiming to spur a renaissance of reactor construction. One order included a provocative, if scientifically defensible, measure to reconsider the formula used to calculate the health risk posed by radiation.

Last month, Trump fired Christopher Hanson, the NRC’s former Democratic chair, in a move critics cast as an illegal test of the White House’s authority over what has functioned for half a century as an independent agency—one whose members a president could appoint, but not eject for political reasons.

Earlier this month, E&E News reported that Adam Blake, the “Department of Government Efficiency” representative detailed to the NRC, told the agency’s chair and top staff they will be expected to “rubber stamp” approval of new reactors tested by the departments of Energy and Defense.

One industry executive, who spoke on condition on anonymity, told me the cautious culture at the NRC is holding back new reactors and that Trump should clear house.

“Most of the entrenched management, even those that are seemingly cooperative with efforts for reform and modernization, when actually put to the test, will delay reactor sign-off,” the executive said, “rather than taking even the smallest amount of professional risk of ‘getting it wrong’ even if that worst case consequence is negligible to public health.”

Given the momentum the industry currently has and the time it takes build new plants, however, damaging overhauls could prove a setback, said Brett Rampal, the senior director of nuclear and power strategy at the consultancy Veriten.

“Historically, the NRC has been a bastion of independence,” Rampal told me. “Without thoughtful reform, any change that could be seen as targeting that independence could create unintended ripples and consequences that could limit developers’ abilities to capitalize on the promises they are currently making.”

Here is the full text of Caputo’s statement to NRC staff:

I will always be thankful for the opportunity to serve our great nation alongside such skilled and dedicated staff, and I thank you for your support during my time as Commissioner. As I step away, I’m confident the agency will continue to evolve under Chairman Wright’s leadership, excelling as a world class regulator and enabling the safe and secure use of nuclear technologies for the benefit of our society.

It has been my honor and privilege to serve as a commissioner, contributing to the work of the agency. I have decided to resign from the Commission, effective upon the swearing in of my colleague David Wright. The time has come for me to more fully focus on my family.

Naturally, this is a time to reflect on several significant agency accomplishments where I am proud to have played a role and where I have appreciated the bipartisan collaboration with my fellow commissioners including: final resolution of post-Fukushima regulatory actions; development of a technology-inclusive, risk-informed and performance-based regulatory framework for advanced reactors; risk-informed emergency preparedness zones for advanced reactors; setting the course for microreactor regulation; improving regulatory discipline through revisions to backfitting and forward-fitting guidance; enabling the efficient regulation of fusion machines; defining a licensing framework for mine waste remediation; and streamlining environmental reviews.

During my tenure, I have sought to be a thorough student of the issues, crafting substantive votes that enable the safe and secure use of nuclear technologies, consistent with the NRC’s Principles of Good Regulation. I believe the Administration’s recent Executive Orders and the bi-partisan ADVANCE Act have given the agency a platform for change, as evidenced by the efficiency gains under development for the Reactor Oversight Process and last week’s historical authorization of the Palisades plant’s return to operational service.

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Trump’s EPA Moves to Kill “Holy Grail” of Climate Regulations

On Tuesday, Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin announced a proposal to rescind the agency’s 2009 “endangerment finding,” a critical Obama-era scientific decision about the human health costs of greenhouse gases that allows the EPA to regulate emissions.

As I reported last week:

On paper, the endangerment finding states that greenhouse gases like methane and carbon dioxide pose a risk to the public’s health and well-being. That may sound obvious enough. But in practice, it’s one of the agency’s most important decisions.

That’s thanks to the landmark 2007 Supreme Court ruling in Massachusetts v. EPA, which found that the agency not only has the authority to regulate greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act, but the obligation to do so, if it determines the pollutants pose a health hazard. In 2009, backed by an overwhelming body of science, the endangerment finding did just that.

Now, the Trump administration reportedly plans to throw out the finding, stripping the EPA of its central role in regulating emissions from vehicle tailpipes, power plants, and more. If the administration succeeds in court (a big if), experts say it would put the United States’—and the world’s—ability to fight climate change at risk.

In its press release on Tuesday, the EPA said that rolling back the endangerment finding would “undo the underpinning of $1 trillion in costly regulations” and “save more than $54 billion annually” by repealing rules like the Biden administration’s tailpipe emission limits. “With this proposal,” Zeldin said in a statement, “the Trump EPA is proposing to end sixteen years of uncertainty for automakers and American consumers.”

It’s not clear where the agency got these numbers. In 2023, as CNN reported, researchers estimated that climate-driven extreme weather events—which are only expected to get worse—cost the US $150 billion per year.

The agency called the 2009 endangerment finding an “unprecedented move,” arguing that the Obama administration overstepped its congressional authority under the Clean Air Act with a series of “mental leaps.”

In reality, scientific evidence that climate change poses extensive risks to humanity is long-established and overwhelming. “Scientists are the most skeptical people on Earth,” James Milkey, a former environmental attorney who argued Massachusetts v. EPA before the Supreme Court, told me. “And there was a scientific consensus that the accumulation of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere posed dire threats.”

The administration’s proposal isn’t yet in effect, and will be available for public comment until late September, according to the EPA.

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“This is Trump’s Famine”: How the US Is Complicit in Gaza’s Suffering

After nearly two years of war between Israel and Hamas, Gaza is on the brink of mass starvation. Children are dying. Aid workers and doctors push through their own hunger to try to save lives. Journalists are too weak to document the unfolding horrors. There are not enough food or medical supplies entering to protect Gaza’s population from famine. Most of the food that does come in is distributed at four heavily guarded sites where hundreds of Palestinians have been killed.

“This is what the US has decided is okay.”

“Food insecurity has gone off a cliff in Gaza,” warns Anastasia Moran, advocacy director for MedGlobal, a non-governmental organization that operates clinics there. “We just, for the first time, started to have kids dying at our clinics because we didn’t have things like potassium and IV fluids.” Moran says a tipping point has likely arrived, and that it may be too late to stop mass starvation; the conversation could soon shift to counting bodies.

Press coverage can leave the impression that the hunger is an organic disaster, a side-effect of war that is too complicated to fully explain. But famine is easily preventable, and this one has been orchestrated with the increasing complicity of the United States. Over the last five months, President Donald Trump’s administration has overseen a disastrous shift in how aid is distributed, meaning the US is no longer just a funder and ally to Israel as it devastates civilians in Gaza. Americans are now the ones carrying out the pitiful and deadly food aid program unequipped to halt this catastrophe. The US long decried famine as a tool of war. Now it is implementing it.

“This is Trump’s famine,” said a representative of an NGO in the region who asked that they and their employer not to be named. “There should be investigations and there should be oversight in the future about what the administration knew, when they knew it, why they ignored the reports from the UN and NGOs and refused to change course when every indication was that there was about to be people dying en masse.”

The journey to this point is a straight line that runs from Israel cutting off aid to Gaza in early March, to the Trump administration standing up a shady aid group with distribution tactics that were doomed to fail, to it then refusing to change course when famine arrived.

Amid growing international concern for the deteriorating situation in Gaza, Trump acknowledged on Monday that starvation has set in. “That’s real starvation stuff,” Trump told reporters. “I see it. You can’t fake that.” But Trump hasn’t assumed any responsibility, instead saying on Sunday that it’s a shame the US doesn’t get more credit for the money it has spent on aid to Gaza.

Since the war began after Hamas attacked Israel on October 7, 2023, the United States has supported Israel militarily and as a staunch ally on the international stage. The US applied virtually no scrutiny to Israel’s tactics, even, as a US official who worked in the region told Mother Jones, when humanitarian convoys were shot at and refugee camps were bombed. The support continued as Gazans went hungry, and despite US law prohibiting military support to countries restricting US humanitarian aid. Instead, billions of US tax dollars funded the war.

“There should be investigations … about what the administration knew, when they knew it.”

But the United States’ role changed shortly after President Donald Trump took office. In March, Israel instituted a blockade on humanitarian aid entering Gaza. The move is directly responsible for the crushing hunger that has brought society there to a breaking point. “Most aid is just simply not approved to enter,” explains Moran. “We have nutrition supplies, medical supplies, medicine that has been sitting for months ready to come into Gaza, that’s in the region, just outside the borders, and does not have approvals to come in. And that is true for a lot of NGOs and a lot of [United Nations] agencies.”

While the UN and NGOs are being blocked, just one aid group has a green light to operate. “The only actor I’m aware of that has seemingly full access and full scale to bring in supplies has been the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation,” says Moran. The GHF, a newly-formed American nonprofit, operates with local staff as well as US-based contractors and private security firms. At its helm isJohnnie Moore,an American evangelical pastor and public relations expert. Moore has close ties to Trump, Israel, and the Christian Zionist movement that has a theological commitment to supporting Israel.

As the blockade knee-capped existing and successful humanitarian efforts, GHF came in with a new model. Instead of the approximately400 aid sites and mobile clinics that the humanitarian community was operating, GHF set up just four sites in southern Gaza, far from the north where most of the population is concentrated. They located the sites within a zone controlled by the Israeli army, and hired private security to protect them. The result has been disastrous. Children, mothers, pregnant people, the elderly, and the disabled—a population that has grown due to the war—generally cannot travel miles to the sites. Those that can are often shot by the Israeli Defense Forces, which, the UN says, have killed hundreds of Palestinians seeking aid at GHF distribution sites and wounded thousands more. American security contractors have also been implicated in the violence.

Multiple people familiar with the situation who spoke to Mother Jones called GHF officials amateurs who don’t understand the basics of aid distribution. The aid community was baffled when GHF opted to set up just four sites in the South. “In a humanitarian response, you’re always trying to target the most vulnerable. That’s why you do mobile clinics that go out to find pregnant women and malnourished kids,” explains one representative of an NGO that works in Gaza. “You never want someone to have to come to you. You never want kids to have to make those journeys: They’re going through active war zones. They’re going through places where there are airstrikes.”

GHF is widely considered by Gazans to be a part of the military operation, inviting violence into aid distribution. “The whole point with humanitarian assistance is that it is not militarized,” said a former US official who worked in Gaza. “And GHF is a quasi-militarization of aid.”

To justify the blockade and new aid distribution strategy, Israel claims that Hamas was routinely stealing supplies from UN aid groups and NGOs. This narrative of so-called “diversion” helped pave the way for GHF to take over. But a USAID report—finished just before the agency was shut down last month—found no basis for Israel’s claims. Further, Israeli officials confirmed to the New York Times that Hamas was not routinely taking aid. Aid workers who spoke to Mother Jones said they had never heard NGOs or UN agencies complaining of systemic issues of theft by Hamas.

Nevertheless, GHF justifies its work by scapegoating the wider aid community as being incapable of effectively delivering aid and of working to unwittingly aid Hamas. The group’s X account is full of attacks on the UN and other aid agencies, parroting Israeli and US accusations that they prioritize politics over Palestinian lives. It’s the same accusation humanitarian groups lay at the feet of Israel, the US, and GHF, with much more evidence.

Under mounting international pressure, and in a move that tacitly acknowledged the failure of the distribution system overseen by GHF, Israel announced over the weekend that it would pause fighting in parts of Gaza for 10 hours a day to allow more food aid into besieged areas.

“Food insecurity has gone off a cliff in Gaza.”

But in a public relations tour over the past few days, Moore has not acknowledged that his group bears any responsibility for the mounting starvation. In a Friday appearance at the Hudson Institute, a right-leaning think tank, Moore insisted GHF’s work had been a success. “Everyone in the world should be celebrating this,” he said. The event followed a Wall Street Journal op-ed by Moore that accused the UN and other aid groups of letting supplies rot on trucks outside Gaza, without acknowledging that the aid blockade and the IDF’s onerous restrictions on humanitarian groups are hindering their efforts.

Moore’s claims appear wholly divorced from the reality observed by current and former aid workers. “This whole idea that the old systems didn’t work, reading that, I was about to vomit I was so angry,” the former US official said. “The old systems were robust. They were in place. They work globally. The biggest constraints we had were Israel blocking access to Gaza.”

One of the discomfiting things about GHF is that, faced with the disastrous implementation of their aid plans, its leaders have doubled down rather than change course. In its mere months of existence, it appears more dedicated to its PR image—and the talking points of the Israeli and US governments—than the efficacy of its aid distribution.

GHF was incorporated as a Delaware nonprofit in February. In the months leading up to its creation, Israeli and American businessmen came up with the idea of distributing aid in IDF-secured zones. Israel pitched the plan to the UN and NGOs in February, but the humanitarian groups balked. Theplan might force aid groups to become a tool of the Israeli army, or even an accessory toits larger goal of concentrating the population of Gaza in small sections of the strip—potentially even in camps. According to a Washington Post investigation, the Israelis decided it would be best if the Americans became the face of the new aid delivery system. The Trump administration evidently agreed, and Mike Huckabee, the US Ambassador to Israel, announced it as an American plan on May 9.

A shroud of secrecy surrounds GHF. It brings the distinctly American flavors of dark money and capitalist profit-seeking to a humanitarian crisis, with at least one private equity firm involved in the project. Its initial funding remains a mystery. GHF’s first executive director, a former marine named Jake Wood, told the New York Times that its startup money came from non-Israeli businessmen. In June, the Trump administration awarded it a $30 million USAID grant. According to Reuters, a former DOGE official signed off on the grant just five days after GHF filed its application despite staff objections that it failed to meet “minimum technical or budgetary standards.” The push to fund GHF, Reuters’ reporting makes clear, came from higher in the administration.

GHF arrived in Gaza in late May, and its decision to open four aid sites in a zone controlled by Israeli forces immediately raised the possibility that aid had become a weapon to corral and control the population. In July, Reuters reported on a mysterious slide deck bearing GHF’s name that includes plans to set up camps called “Humanitarian Transit Zones,” but GHF denied any involvement. Rebutting such fears, Wood told the New York Times in May that “I would participate in no plan in any capacity if it was an extension of an I.D.F. plan or an Israeli government plan to forcibly dislocate people anywhere within Gaza.” But the day after the Times published the quote, Wood resigned from GHF because, he said, “It is clear that it is not possible to implement this plan while also strictly adhering to the humanitarian principles of humanity, neutrality, impartiality, and independence.”

A few weeks later, GHF brought on Moore as its new board chairman. As opposed to a veteran of the humanitarian world, Moore came with another set of skills as a pastor with a public relations firm and close ties to the conservative evangelical movement. During the first Trump administration, Moore was a White House regular, acting as a gatekeeper to the evangelical community. When in DC, he would hold court at Trump’s hotel, alongside others currying favor with the president. He was among the advocates who pushed Trump to move the US embassy in Israel to Jerusalem and has professed a deep connection to Israel. During those discussions, Moore told the Washington Post what he would tell White House officials: For evangelicals, “those who bless Israel will be blessed.”

Moore’s stalwart support for Israel is likely tied to his religious beliefs. Moore, whose career began at Liberty University as a protege of Jerry Falwell Sr., has close ties to Christian Zionists. Christian Zionists have a theological commitment to Jewish migration to Israel, seeing it as necessary to usher in the return of Jesus. Their end-times scenario implies that many Jews in Israel will die, leaving only a remnant that will eventually convert—fulfilling a Christian vision of apocalypse and the second coming.

USAID officials said GHF’s application failed to meet “minimum technical or budgetary standards.”

Some members of the Trump administration hold strong Christian Zionist views. When Trump tapped Huckabee for the administration, Moore posted to on X that “selecting a lifelong non-Jewish Zionist as the U.S. ambassador to Israel sends a powerful message.” Huckabee, a former Baptist minister, has outright denied the existence of Palestinians, saying there is “no such thing as a Palestinian” and calling the term nothing more than “a political tool to try and force land away from Israel.”

Huckabee recently floated relocating any future Palestinian entity outside Israel in an interview with the BBC. “Does it have to be in the same piece of real estate that Israel occupies?” he said. “That’s a question that ought to be posed to everybody who’s pushing for a two-state solution.” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth also has a history of supporting Israel from a Christian Zionist perspective. “There’s no reason why the miracle of the reestablishment of the temple on the Temple Mount is not possible,” he said in a 2018 speech in Jerusalem. “I don’t know how it would happen. You don’t know how it would happen. But I know that it could happen.”

“Christian Zionists are very powerful in this current administration,” says Annelle Sheline, a former State Department foreign affairs officer who resigned to protest the Biden administration’s support for Israel’s war on Gaza. Sheline, now a fellow at the Quincy Institute, says that the Trump administration’s overt, wholesale support for Israeli aggression is a departure from the largely acquiescent Biden approach. Despite the humanitarian rhetoric of Trump administration figures, she added, “this horrible suffering happening in Gaza aligns with what I understand to be the belief system” of many people dictating US policy toward Israel.

“This is what the US has decided is okay,” said a foreign policy expert at another NGO that works in the region, who also asked not to be named. “There is an understanding that we’re not going to use the normal UN system, we’re not going to push for humanitarian access. Instead, we are going to be okay with and support this system through this American nonprofit.”

Since Trump took office, the aid situation—always tenuous in Gaza, thanks to Israel’s restrictions—has deteriorated. The United States is now backing and defending a group with shady origins, dangerous tactics, and inadequate capabilities as it oversees mass starvation in Gaza. Meanwhile, that group and its leader mount attacks on aid organizations that have saved lives in Gaza, acting like a propaganda arm of the US and Israeli governments. It’s a new level of complicity in a rapidly deteriorating humanitarian crisis.

Kiera Butler and Dan Friedman contributed reporting.

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What To Do, and Not Do, During a Heat Wave

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

The Earth has never been so hot. Millions of people, amounting to nearly half the country, across the Southeast, Midwest, and Northeast are under heat alerts. Outside of the United States, an early heat wave in India and Pakistan saw temperatures reaching 120 degrees Fahrenheit. Europe was gripped by extreme heat in June and early July, resulting in over 2,000 deaths. All of this after 2024 was recorded as the globe’s warmest year.

Extreme heat is extremely dangerous, and can even be deadly. Heat is the leading weather-related cause of death in the United States. Prolonged exposure to hot temperatures can result in heat exhaustion, heat stroke, heat cramps, sunburn, and heat rash. Infants and young children, adults over the age of 65, people who are overweight, and people who are on certain medications—like amphetamines and antidepressants—are most at risk for heat-related illness. People who work outside and are exposed to the sun and heat also are at greater risk.

Dial 2-1-1 to find a local cooling center where you can stay safe from the heat if need be.

Children produce more body heat and sweat less than adults, and tend to not stay as hydrated, making them more sensitive to the heat. “Their skin is also vulnerable,” says Joanna Cohen, a pediatric emergency medicine physician at Johns Hopkins Children’s Center. “They can get sunburned more easily and sunburns actually increase your body temperature and can contribute to overheating and dehydration as well.”

Like children, older adults don’t have as rapid or efficient a thermoregulatory response as other adults, explains Raleigh Todman, an emergency medicine physician at Columbia University Medical Center. The body doesn’t cool down as quickly as the rest of the population, she says.

However, everyone should take precautions to stay cool and hydrated during extreme heat. When humidity exceeds 75 percent, the body’s ability to cool off by sweating is not as effective, Todman says, making heat safety all the more important. Here’s what to keep in mind.

One of the most effective ways to fend off heat-related illness is to stay in an air-conditioned building (even though air conditioning is a contributor to climate change). According to the 2020 Residential Energy Consumption Survey, 88 percent of US households use air conditioning. The survey also found that half of households in the Northeast use individual AC units such as window and wall units, mini-splits, and portable units.

You can lower the temperature in your home by closing your shades to prevent the sunlight from heating up the house and avoiding the use of your stove and oven. Electric fans may feel nice, but will not prevent heat-related illness. If you have individual AC units, try to contain the cold air to one area by keeping the doors closed to one room.

Other at-home ways of cooling down include avoiding exercise or strenuous activities, taking a cool bath or shower, placing wet cloths or ice on your wrists, neck, and temples, and wearing light-colored, loose-fitting fabrics like cotton and linen—and dressing your children in loose, light clothes as well.

If your home does not have air conditioning or if you still feel hot, find a cooling center—an air-conditioned indoor location where the public can stay safe from the heat—in your area by calling 211 and asking for information about local cooling centers. (Some states have lists of cooling centers online.)

Museums, libraries, movie theaters, cafes, malls, and stores can offer respites from the heat as well. Parents should remember to never leave children and pets unattended in the car. Cohen suggests placing your purse or phone next to your child or pet in the backseat as a double reminder to take them all with you.

Children may want to take advantage of sunny days outdoors with trips to the park, beach, or pool. Outdoor activities can be safe for children so long as there’s shade and water available, Cohen says, like a pool, beach, or backyard or park with sprinklers. “If they’re going to be doing exercise, like playing soccer outside, they should take frequent breaks and go into the shade,” Cohen says. “If they do start to get overheated, get inside in air conditioning if you can.”

Everyone, regardless of age, should take plenty of rest breaks in the shade and wear sunscreen and a hat if you’re spending time outdoors, though Todman suggests avoiding going outside between noon and 4 pm. “If you need to do something and you have your elderly parents and your baby and you need to go get groceries,” Todman says, “if you can possibly do it in the morning before noon, or in the afternoon after 4, that’s your best bet for avoiding the most direct sun and the hottest part of the day.”

Aside from avoiding the heat in a cool location, staying hydrated is another crucial aspect of hot weather safety because it helps regulate your body temperature. On hot days, you need to increase your water intake, even if you don’t feel thirsty or aren’t physically exerting yourself. Avoid alcoholic or caffeinated beverages, which can contribute to dehydration. Try to consistently sip water all day and encourage kids to always have a water bottle with them, Cohen says.

If your kids are resistant to drinking water, Todman suggests giving them sports drinks or drinks with electrolytes, like Pedialyte, coconut water, and Gatorade, and even milk, which will help replenish the electrolytes lost in sweat. You’ll know if you’re properly hydrated if you use the bathroom every two to three hours and your urine is light yellow; if it’s dark yellow or gold, drink more water. One way to determine if children are dehydrated is by gently pinching their skin. If they’re hydrated, the skin should bounce back, Todman says, if they’re dehydrated, the skin will stay pinched.

Ideally, everyone should drink 32 ounces of water a day, Todman says, although “I know it’s not easy to convince elderly people or small children to drink that much water.” People who work outside should drink one cup of water every 15 to 20 minutes (and ensure you’re wearing sunscreen). Cold treats and foods with a high water content, like ice cream and watermelon, can keep you hydrated and cool, Todman says.

Treat your pets the same way you would a baby, Todman says: Don’t leave them outdoors, keep them in the air conditioning, and always keep their water bowl filled. Recognize the signs of heat exhaustion and heat stroke

If you, a family member, or a neighbor start to exhibit signs of heat exhaustion or heat stroke, it’s important to recognize the symptoms and react swiftly.

According to the CDC, symptoms of heat exhaustion include:

• Heavy sweating
• Cold, pale, clammy skin
• Fast, weak pulse
• Nausea or vomiting
• Muscle cramps
• Tiredness or weakness
• Dizziness
• Headache
• Fainting

Here’s what to do if you or someone else is experiencing heat exhaustion:

• Move to a cool place
• Loosen clothes
• Put cool, wet cloths on your body or take a cool bath
• Get medical help if you or someone else is vomiting, or the symptoms get worse or persist for more than an hour

According to the CDC, symptoms of heat stroke include:

• Body temperature of 103 degrees Fahrenheit or higher
• Hot, red, dry, or damp skin
• Fast, strong pulse
• Headache
• Dizziness
• Nausea
• Confusion
• Fainting

Here’s what to do if you or someone else is experiencing heat stroke:

• Call 911
• Move the person to a cooler place
• Put cool, wet cloths on their body or place them in a cool bath
• Do not give the person anything to drink

The signs of heat exhaustion and heat stroke are the same for adults and children, Cohen says, but a baby or younger kid may not be able to vocalize how they’re feeling. Ensure children are consistently drinking, urinating frequently, and that they look alert.

Best practices for dealing with extreme heat are to stay hydrated, avoid strenuous or prolonged activities outdoors, keep your environment as cool as possible, and ensure members of the community are doing the same. Keep in touch with elderly neighbors or folks with young children or pets who may not have access to an air-conditioned location.

“This sort of neighborly mindfulness,” Todman says, “is something, if possible, to keep in mind.”

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Voters Can’t Sue for Disability Discrimination, Court Rules

The Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled on Monday that private citizens have no standing to sue for disability-based violations of the Voting Rights Act of 1965—the landmark federal legislation which protects, among other things, the right to voting assistance for disabled people and voters with low English literacy. The Eighth Circuit’s jurisdiction covers Arkansas, Iowa, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska and North Dakota—meaning voters in those states will no longer have any direct remedy when those rights are violated.

All but one of the Eighth Circuit’s 11 judges were appointed under Republican administrations, including four Trump appointees from the president’s first term; any appeal by Arkansas United, the pro–voting rights nonprofit that brought the case, could set up the similarly conservative Supreme Court to extend the ruling to cover the country as a whole. (Some conservative justices have had surprising records on disability rights—but the Roberts Court is also infamously the bench that gutted the VRA.)

Only state attorneys general themselves, the court’s ruling holds, can act to enforce the Voting Rights Act and prevent violations—not, in the case of states with notoriously poor voting rights records, very likely. Within the Eighth Circuit’s jurisdiction, state governments in Missouri, Arkansas, Nebraska, and Iowa have all enacted party-line voter suppression laws in recent years—governments that voters facing VRA discrimination would now have to rely on for enforcement.

“Based on the text and structure of the VRA, Congress did not give private plaintiffs the ability to sue,” the judgment reads in part.

Arkansas United, the group that brought the case forward, is a nonprofit mainly known for working with immigrants in the state—an illustration of the flexibility, breadth, and significance of the Voting Rights Act, which intertwines protections for immigrants and second-language English speakers with those it provides to disabled voters.

In 2009, Arkansas passed a law limiting to six the number of individuals that one person, other than poll workers, could legally assist to vote. In August 2022, a court granted a summary judgment to Arkansas United getting rid of the six-person limit—but the next month, the Eighth Circuit of Appeals granted an emergency motion to allow the law to continue. The July 28 decision by the Eighth Circuit reversed the summary judgment for Arkansas United and sent the case back to the district court for further action, according to Democracy Docket.

As I previously reported for Mother Jones, most ballot measures are written at a graduate-school reading level—and, except in North Dakota and New York, not in plain language. It can be notoriously challenging for anyone to follow exactly what some ballot measures propose; that’s even more the case for some disabled people and voters with limited English proficiency.

Arkansas isn’t the only state that has tried to limit voter assistance: Last September, a district judge overturned a law in Alabama that made it a felony to assist people in requesting and voting with absentee ballots.

Nor is this the Eighth Circuit’s only recent attack on the Voting Rights Act: the court held in May that people of color cannot sue individually under VRA provisions against racial discrimination, a holding temporarily blocked by the Supreme Court last Thursday in a 6-3 decision, with Justices Thomas, Alito, and Gorsuch dissenting.

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“They Look Very Hungry” and a Familiar American Excuse

As excruciating reports of unmitigated disaster and starving Gazans, including infants and babies, continue to pour in, President Donald Trump on Monday appeared to recognize reality.

“That’s real starvation stuff,” Trump told reporters. “I see it. You can’t fake that.”

When asked if he agreed with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s extraordinary claim that there is “no starvation in Gaza,” the president responded: “Based on television, I would say not particularly because those children look very hungry.”

Indeed, the remarks represented a rare and significant break from his Israeli counterpart as Netanyahu reportedly slow-walks the entry of desperately needed aid to the nearly half a million Gazans facing famine-like conditions. It may have relied on TV to get there, but to anyone who has watched the crisis reach what has long been predicted—mass starvation and death—Trump’s acknowledgment begs the question: Why not do something? The president of the United States has several powerful options that could restrain Israel, including restricting arms transfers and supporting United Nations ceasefire resolutions. The same question applies to Democrats, including former President Barack Obama, who issued a bland statement about the horror while declining to mention Israel by name.

All these politicians across the aisle see what is increasingly called a genocide. They admit to witnessing starvation. Why not do something?

Up until now, there has been much hiding behind the idea of the moderate stance, the obvious acknowledgement that there are difficult realities on both sides. That this was a complex, decades-long problem. But that, too, has fallen as evenprominent Israeli human rights groups today accuse Israel of genocide with direct and scathing language. “Mass killing, both in direct attacks and through creating catastrophic living conditions that continue to raise the massive death toll, ” is how the B’Tselem, one of the two groups, outlined Israel’s actions in Gaza. “Serious bodily or mental harm to the entire population of the Strip; large-scale destruction of infrastructure; and destruction of the social fabric, including educational institutions and Palestinian cultural sites.”

Speaking to reporters from his Scottish golf course, Trump did what all American politicians have done for years. He played a learned helplessness, refusing to acknowledge the deeper choices that starve Gazans instead opting to blame Iran and shrug off “the whole place” as a “mess.”

“We gave $60 million two weeks ago, and nobody even acknowledged it,” he complained from his Scottish golf course on Sunday. “You really want at least someone to say ‘thank you.’ No other country gave anything. It makes you feel a little bad when nobody talks about it.” He repeated the complaint on Monday, too.

This is Trump’s unvarnished opinion as Gazans die in mass. That the US is the victim. That he is owed a personal note of gratitude.

None of this is a surprise coming from Trump. But what should haunt us is how familiar it all seems. Because absent the casual indifference, Trump is saying what every US politician has said for two years: Yes, we see the pain—the starving kids—but we won’t do anything about it. It’s a variation on a cruel theme.

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Why Your Energy Bill Keeps Going Up

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

Americans are paying more for electricity, and those prices are set to rise even further.

In almost all parts of the country, the amount people pay for electricity on their power bills—the retail price—has risen faster than the rate of inflation since 2022, and that will likely continue through 2026, according to the Energy Information Administration (EIA).

Just about everything costs more these days, but electricity prices are especially concerning because they’re an input for so much of the economy—powering factories, data centers, and a growing fleet of electric vehicles. It’s not just the big industries; we all feel the pinch firsthand when we pay our utility bills. According to PowerLines, a nonprofit working to reduce electricity prices, about 80 million Americans have to sacrifice other basic expenses like food or medicine to afford to keep the lights on.

And it’s about to get even worse: Utilities in markets across the country have asked regulators for almost $29 billion in electricity rate increases for consumers for the first half of the year.

Why are prices rising so much all of a sudden? Right now, there are the usual factors driving the rise in electricity rates: high demand, not enough supply, and inflation. But there are problems that have been building up for decades as well, and now the bills are due: Aging and inadequate infrastructure needs replacement, while outdated business models and regulations are slowing the deployment of urgently needed upgrades.

On the campaign trail, President Donald Trump promised to bring energy prices down by increasing fossil fuel extraction. “My goal will be to cut your energy costs in half within 12 months after taking office,” he said last August in a speech in Michigan.

But electricity prices are still going up, and Trump’s signature legislative accomplishment, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, is likely to raise prices further. Without better management and investment, the result will be more expensive and less reliable power for most Americans.

There are several key factors that shape how much you pay for electricity.

There’s the cost of building, operating, and maintaining power plants. Higher interest rates, inflation, tariffs, and longer interconnection queues—power generators waiting for approval to connect to the grid—are making the process of building a new electricity generator slower and more expensive. PJM, the largest power market in the US, said this week that soaring demand for electricity and delays in building new generators will raise power bills 1 to 5 percent for customers in its service area across 13 states and the District of Columbia.

Then there’s the fuel itself, whether that’s coal, oil, natural gas, or uranium. For renewables, the cost of wind, water, and sunlight are close to zero, but intermittent generators need conventional power plants or energy storage systems to back them up. Still, wind and solar power have been some of the cheapest sources of electricity in recent years, forming the dominant share of new power generation connecting to the grid.

“It is the poles and wires that make up our electric infrastructure that’s increasing in cost particularly rapidly.”

That electricity then has to be routed from power plants over transmission lines that can span hundreds of miles and into distribution networks that send electrons into homes, offices, stores, and factories.

Then you have to think about demand, over the course of hours, days, months, and years. Some utilities offer time-of-use billing that raises rates during peak demand periods like hot summer afternoons and lowers them in evenings. Cooling needs are a big reason why overall electricity use tends to be higher in summer months than in the winter. And for the first time in a decade, the US is experiencing a sustained increase in electricity use driven in part by a rapid buildout of power-hungry data centers, more EVs, more electric appliances, and more air conditioning to stay cool in hotter summers.

More users for the same amount of electricity means higher prices. The Trump administration’s rollback of key incentives for renewables and slowdown of approvals for new projects is likely to slow the rate of new generation coming online.

And the process of bridging electricity supplies with demand is becoming a bottleneck, thus comprising a larger share of the overall bill. “If you actually look at the cost breakdowns of what’s significantly increasing, it’s really the grid,” said Charles Hua, founder and executive director of PowerLines. “It is the poles and wires that make up our electric infrastructure that’s increasing in cost particularly rapidly.”

According to the EIA, just under two-thirds of the average price of electricity is due to generation costs, with the remainder coming from transmission and distribution. However, energy utilities are now putting more than half of their expenditures into transmission and distribution through the end of the decade. “It used to be the case maybe a decade ago where generation was the largest share of utility investments, and therefore customer bills,” Hua said. “But it has now been inverted where really it’s the grid expense that is rising and doesn’t show any signs of relief.”

There are several reasons for this. One is that the existing power grid is old, and many components like conductors and switchgear are reaching the ends of their service lives. Replacing 1960s hardware at 2025 prices raises operating costs even for the same level of service. But the grid now needs to provide higher levels of service as populations grow and as technologies like intermittent renewables and energy storage proliferate.

Power outages driven by extreme weather are becoming more frequent and longer, but hardening the grid against disasters like floods and fires is expensive too. Putting a power line underground can add up to double or more the price of stringing conductors along utility poles, which is why power companies have been slow to make the change, even in disaster-prone regions.

While utilities are pouring money into distribution networks, they are having a harder time building new long-distance transmission lines as they run into permitting and regulatory delays. The US used to build an average of 2,000 miles of high-voltage transmission per year between 2012 and 2016. The construction rate dropped to 700 miles per year between 2017 and 2021, and dipped to just 55 miles in 2023. There were 125 miles of new high-voltage transmission installed in the first half of 2024, but it was all for one project. The Department of Energy this week canceled a loan guarantee for the Grain Belt Express, a transmission project that would stretch 800 miles across four states.

There are also shortages of critical parts of the grid like transformers, while tariffs on materials like aluminum and steel are pushing up construction expenses.

One underrated driver of higher prices is the lack of coordination between utilities, grid operators, and states on how to spend their money. In utility jargon, this process is called Integrated Distribution System Planning, where everyone with a stake in the energy network puts together a comprehensive plan of what to buy, where to build it, and who should pay—but only a few states, like Illinois, Maine, and New Hampshire, have such a system set up.

“That’s sort of a no-brainer,” Hua said. “Anybody should understand the need to plan ahead, especially if you’re talking about something that has such high economic implications, but that’s not what we’re doing.”

So, while prices are rising, there’s no easy way around the fact that the grid is overdue for a lot of necessary, expensive upgrades. For millions of Americans, that means it’s going to get more expensive to stay cool, charged up, and connected.

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Trump’s Panama Canal Chaos

During his campaign for the presidency, Donald Trump talked a lot about pulling America out of international treaties and disentangling from military operations abroad.

Once in office, he started talking about the idea of Manifest Destiny—that the expansion of the US was both justified and inevitable. In some cases that’s meant turning the tables on America’s friends and allies.

For this week’s show, Reveal reporter Nate Halverson and Panamanian journalist Andrea Salcedo investigate how the Trump administration’s threats to reclaim the Panama Canal are fueling protests and destabilizing a longtime ally. Trump has said military force may be necessary to retake control of the canal from China.

“China is operating the Panama Canal, and we didn’t give it to China, we gave it to Panama, and we’re taking it back,” Trump said in January.

But the administration’s allegations about China’s control over the canal perplex many Panamanians.

“We just said wow, how many people can be wrong about the Chinese having a lot of influence over the Panama Canal?” says Jorge Luis Quijano, the canal’s top administrator from 2012 to 2019.

The Trump administration’s threats against Panama are also reviving painful memories of the 1989 US invasion that claimed the lives of an estimated 500 Panamanians.

For wider context, host Al Letson speaks with Mother Jones reporter David Corn, who wrote about the Panama Canal in his book American Psychosis. Corn talks about how reclaiming the canal has been used as a political cudgel by conservatives in the US, from Ronald Reagan to Donald Trump. Letson also speaks with Emma Ashford, a foreign policy expert at the Stimson Center, about how Panama fits into the Trump administration’s other moves on the international front.

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Under Trump, Paramount’s Merger Deal Must Include a “Bias Monitor”

On Thursday, the head of the Federal Communications Commission, Brendan Carr, approved the $8 billion merger between Skydance Media and Paramount, a deal that would allocate more than a billion dollars towards the latter company’s staggering debt.

But the agreement came with onemajor caveat: The media company must appoint a “bias monitor.”

According to reporting from The Wrap, an FCC “ombudsman” would work directly with New Paramount’s president, Jeff Shell, to review “any complaints of bias or other concerns” regarding CBS News, a subsidiary under Paramount.

Paramount also agreed to eliminate its diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives, including scrapping all DEI messaging from its internal training programs and removing DEI objectives in its compensation plans.

This move comes after the company announced the cancellation of The Colbert Report only a few days after the eponymous host critiqued the network’s recent settlement with the president. Earlier this month, Paramount agreed to cough up $16 million to Trump after the president sued the network for allegedly unfairly editing an interview with Kamala Harris, an accusation that many legal experts have called “baseless.”

As my colleague, Inae Oh, has reported, Colbert’s cancellation marks a dark new chapter for our culture as a whole. Oh writes:

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. If this can happen to Colbert and a storied franchise, this can happen to anyone.

And when it comes to using his presidential power as a cudgel against the media that critiques him, Trump clearly shows no signs of stopping. This week alone, the president threw a tantrum over two TV shows that joked about him. On Wednesday, the White House issued a statement threatening the ladies of The View after host Joy Behar joked that Trump was jealous of former president Barack Obama’s “swag.”

A White House spokesperson told Entertainment Weekly, “Joy Behar is an irrelevant loser suffering from a severe case of Trump Derangement Syndrome.”

A White House spokesperson told Entertainment Weekly, “Joy Behar is an irrelevant loser suffering from a severe case of Trump Derangement Syndrome” who “should self-reflect on her own jealousy of President Trump’s historic popularity before her show is the next to be pulled off air.”

Behar’s joke was tame compared to the animated show, South Park‘s treatment of Trump, who was depicted naked in bed with Satan. In response, the White House claimed that the show hasn’t been relevant in “20 years” and said “no fourth-rate show can derail President Trump’s hot streak.”

How long will South Park, whose creators just signed a 50-episode deal with Paramount, last under Trump’s regime? Let’s hope the ombudsman finds the Trump jokes funny.

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Science Moms’ Bipartisan Mission: Educate Other Mothers About Climate Change

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

The devastating flood that swept through Camp Mystic in Texas this month is every parent’s worst nightmare. Hours or days of fear and uncertainty, feeling powerless to help, and, for the families of the 27 campers and staff members who perished, the most painful news imaginable.

Although flash flooding is a recurring problem in the region, climate change exacerbates the problem. Scientists in Europe have already conducted a rapid assessment and determined that the storm dropped 7 percent more rain than it would have otherwise because of global warming. With 129 fatalities—including at least 36 children—and more than 170 people still missing, it is among the deadliest floods in the state’s history.

Katharine Hayhoe, a professor at Texas Tech University and chief scientist at the Nature Conservancy, posted a message to LinkedIn about the flooding on July 5, writing, “The news is heartbreaking. As a parent it’s hard to even process.”

The fact that so many children and young people lost their lives underscores the importance of educational groups like Science Moms, a nonpartisan organization started in 2019 by Hayhoe and other leading climate scientists and mothers. The group works to demystify climate change and motivate moms to demand plans and solutions that will protect the planet for their kids—and their kids from dangerous, climate-change fueled extreme weather events.

“We feel like we have an obligation to both, get prepared, get on it, reduce our emissions, and help our people weather this.”

Joellen Russell, an oceanographer at the University of Arizona, says her identities as climate scientist and concerned mother merged long before she helped start Science Moms.

Russell was several months pregnant with her first child in 2007, when 12 states sued the EPA over the regulation of greenhouse gas emissions under the Clean Air Act. Russell reached out to John Mike Wallace, her mentor and former colleague at the University of Washington, where Russell worked as a research associate after completing her PhD. “I wrote to him, and I said, ‘Hey, Mike, I’m pregnant. I’m waiting on this new little one, and you need to step up and help me, because we need to turn this bus,’” she recalls. “‘We need to make a change in the world.’”

Wallace wrote back right away saying he’d help. Russell, Wallace, and other scientists signed an amicus brief submitted in the landmark Supreme Court case, Massachusetts v. Environmental Protection Agency, which the Supreme Court cited when they ruled the Clean Air Act covered carbon dioxide as a pollutant. Russell’s son Joseph was born a few months later.

United States emissions have dropped 15 percent since 2007.

Now, Russell says, she tries to lean into her humanness and her “momness” as an educator, scientist, advocate for truth. “I’m so thrilled that I have these two gorgeous babies, and I am really worried,” Russell says. “I don’t want them to have to lift this burden. They will, but if there’s anything I can do, I want to do it.”

Science Moms has partnered with Potential Energy, a nonprofit marketing firm “for planet Earth,” on a multimillion-dollar campaign to inform moms about climate change. Their most high-profile ad to date ran during the 2025 Superbowl, when millions heard the message: “Climate change is like watching them grow up: we blink and we miss it.” Months after the commercial aired, Erica Smithwick, a Science Mom and professor of geography at Penn State, still gets postcards from moms the ad resonated with.

A 2020 study by the Yale Program on Climate Communication found over half of the US population is concerned about climate change. An analysis by Potential Energy found approximately 70 percent of mothers say they’re concerned about climate change. According to Smithwick, moms are ideal environmental advocates because they cut to the core of complex issues. Moms already led advocacy groups like Mothers Against Drunk Driving and Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America (now Everytown for Gun Safety), and climate change will impact future generations most of all, so a mom-led climate science organization just made sense.

Erica Smithwick explores a burned area of Yellowstone National Park with her son.Courtesy of Erica Smithwick

“Mothers throughout time have always put in that extra labor because they care about the health of their families,” Smithwick says. “Whether that’s smoking or seat belts or gun safety, all of those are things that I think moms do care about profoundly. When we think about climate change…we really are worried that our kids are going to get heat stroke, and we’re worried that our kids aren’t going to be able to go on vacation or play outside.”

Smithwick says she waited 15 years to take her two kids to Yellowstone National Park, where she has research​​ed forest resiliency. With the recent wildfires in the West, she thinks it may be too late for her children to see these landmarks without them being shrouded in smoke. Now, as a dangerous heat wave surges across the eastern United States, moms like Smithwick worry even more about the safety of their kids in a rapidly changing world.

Despite the gravity of the issues Science Moms communicate, Smithwick says they strive not to “problematize,” and instead move toward action.

The Science Moms website provides mothers with resources and connects them with individual scientists. The site features explainer-style videos and podcasts, guides for how to talk about climate change with family members, and a letter template for moms to reach out to local leaders and ask about plans to stop big polluters.

“It’s really hard to shine the light on climate change after a tragedy…but it’s actually super important.”

This year, Science Moms will be rolling out education campaigns related to extreme weather events. They want to ensure moms around the country are prepared for emergencies, including heat waves and hurricanes, in what may be the hottest summer on record. Russell lives in Arizona, one of the fastest warming states in the nation. In 2024, Arizona’s health department appointed its first chief heat officer, Eugene Livar, to lead the state’s Extreme Heat Preparedness Plan.

“We’re sitting in the hot seat, the bullseye of global warming,” Russell says. “We feel like we have an obligation to both, get prepared, get on it, reduce our emissions and help our people weather this.”

Russell says Science Moms will be focusing outreach toward purple and red-leaning states like Arizona, Texas, North Carolina, Georgia, and Pennsylvania, states where a large percentage of people have been skeptical about climate change information in the past.

According to Russell, the mission of Science Moms remains the same, regardless of administration. Science Moms aims to cut through misinformation and share facts backed up by science. “The sort of cacophony of shifts that are happening up at the higher level of the administration doesn’t really speak to what a lot of moms care about, whatever side of the political aisle they’re on,” Smithwick says.

Tragedies like the Texas flood show how challenging it is to walk a neutral political line, especially when attacks on science are primarily coming from one political party. The exact degree to which the Trump administration’s National Weather Service budget and staffing cuts may have played a role in the disaster is still a matter of debate.

“I think every time we have a tragedy like this, which is unimaginable in its own ways—this particular one—it’s unfortunately a reminder that we have to not look away from climate change,” says Emily Fischer, a professor in the department of Atmospheric Science at Colorado State University and one of the founding members of Science Moms. “We have to look straight at it and work together to prevent these kinds of disasters from getting worse.”

But she recognizes how difficult that can be, especially in a moment like this. “It’s really hard to shine the light on climate change after a tragedy,” she adds. “It feels icky in some ways, I think, but it’s actually super important.”

Writing on LinkedIn (in a personal capacity, not necessarily as a representative of Science Moms) Katharine Hayhoe said: “The more climate change supersizes our weather extremes, the more info we need to keep people safe. This includes experts, instruments, models, research, and assessments: everything that’s currently being reduced or cut by the US administration.”

Despite political and environmental uncertainty, Russell sees hope for the future in the eyes of her children. Climate change is a family affair, she says, one she shares with her son, Joseph—a budding climate educator who has passed out exams in her classes for years—and his younger sister, Maeve. It’s an issue that has developed over generations, and it will take generations to fix.

“I plan to fight until I can’t anymore,” Russell says. “When I drop in the traces and can’t go any farther, my kids will step right over me and get up that hill.”

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Republican Con Artist From Queens Reports to Prison

Former Rep. George Santos (R-N.Y.) reported to federal prison on Friday, after pleading guilty in 2024 to identity theft and wire fraud, stemming, in part, from a spectacular straw-donor scandal that was dwarfed by his still-more-spectacular “entire life story” scandal. As political prisoners go, Santos is not quite on par with his friend and mentor Nelson Mandela, buthe has hinted in recent days that he may be killed in prison for what he knows. I don’t wish that on him, of course, but also don’t take it very seriously. Before becoming the first member of the House to get expelled from the chamber in more than two decades, he’d spent barely enough time in Washington to know where the Speaker’s Lobby is—let alone where the bodies are buried.

But Santos’ banishment and subsequent imprisonment does make him an exceptional case in one key way: Santos showed that it was possible for party leaders and rank-and-file members to act swiftly to deal with a fabulist whose very presence insulted the office he held—provided it was just a powerless back-bencher whose transgressions they could all laugh away.

Because Santos was a relative nobody, his colleagues could be honest about who he was in a way that for nearly a decade they have never been about their party’s leader or, frankly, themselves.

When the New York Times first exposed Santos’ biography as largely fictitious after the 2024 election, a lot of people spent a lot of time asking how someone like this could win. There was, of course, a major failure from Democrats in New York to pick up on basic red flags over the course of two successive campaigns. And there was a failure by Republicans’ vaunted Nassau County machine to do the same before twice giving their official imprimatur to a man who lied about being both Jewish and the producer of the Broadway musical, Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark. These were fair questions, but they also tended to obscure a larger one.

Some of the loudest voices in favor of expulsion were Santos’ fellow New York Republicans, eager to cast out their colleague as a MAGA imposter and condemning his lies and transgressions with unusual directness. It’s that age-old, never-quite-true maxim: This is not who we are. Because Santos was a relative nobody, his colleagues could be honest about who he was in a way that for nearly a decade they have never been about their party’s leader or, frankly, themselves.

Santos’ fleeting ascent is no great mystery if you view it in the larger context of a party leadership that’s desensitized to scammers and a party base that’s uncommonly susceptible to them. His claims to have played varsity volleyball at a college he never attended are not so different from the president’s recent claim to have an uncle who taught the Unabomber at a college the Unabomber never attended. The president, of course, was convicted on 34 felony counts in 2024 of falsifying business records to circumvent campaign finance laws. His administration seems to lie about everything, as a matter of course. It requires more than a little bit of credulity to blame the rise of a transparent a grifter like Santos on bandwidth issues at the vetting department; “How could a con artist from Queens make it so far in Donald Trump’s Republican party?” is a question that seems to answer itself.

None of this is to excuse Santos’ illegal behavior. It’s bad when people in politics abuse the public trust. But also: It’s bad when people in politics abuse the public trust! And in an age of court-sanctioned impunity for presidential crimes, of mass pardons for insurrectionists and political allies and seemingly anyone who has been convicted of public corruption in recent memory, it sort of feels like a joke that the one Republicans actually facing consequences for his actions is this guy.

There’s a famous quote from the late UNLV basketball coach Jerry Tarkanian about the false morality at the heart of college athletics: “The NCAA is so mad at Kentucky,” he said, “it’s going to give Cleveland State two more years of probation.” I don’t think you need to know much about college sports to get the basic point. The Republican Party in the Trump era is awash in grifters, weirdos, and frauds. The animating purpose is a mass public deception for the sake of wide-scale fleecing by a billionaire hustler. So it got rid of George Santos as fast as it could.

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“Woke” Superman Versus MAGA Whiners—Guess Who Won?

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

There’s nothing like a $125 million opening weekend to overcome MAGA whining, and Superman just walloped the bad-faith culture warriors of the right.

The conservative movement has long relished ginning up moral panics to distract from more important matters, such as its never-ending assault on low- and middle-income Americans and its obeisance to plutocrats. The right resorts to culture warfare over abortion, guns, gay rights, immigration, and religion to win over voters who might otherwise recoil at GOP efforts to increase the power and wealth of corporate America and 1-percenters. And Trump and Co. have followed this playbook, with their crusades against wokeness, transgender rights, and demographic diversity. So when James Gunn, the director of the new Superman, told the Times of London that “Superman is the story of America, an immigrant that came from other places and populated the country,” cranky voices on the right leaped at the chance to accuse Hollywood of making Superman “woke” to advance a left-wing agenda.

Fox host Jesse Watters half-joked, “You know what it says on his cape? MS-13.” For Fox, immigrant equals gang member.

Before the film hit theaters, Fox News informed its viewers that the new Superman embraced “pro-immigrant themes.” And MAGA pundit Kellyanne Conway, appearing on the network, huffed, “We don’t go to the movie theater to be lectured to and to have somebody throw their ideology on to us.” Fox host Jesse Watters half-joked, “You know what it says on his cape? MS-13.” For Fox, immigrant equals gang member.

No surprise, the MAGA pundits had no idea what they were talking about. The only pro-immigrant theme in the movie is rather basic and hardly objectionable. Superman (David Corenswet), an alien who fervently wants to help humans, is propelled by an elementary motivation: kindness. He is so empathetic that when his nemesis Lex Luthor (Nicholas Hoult)—in this telling, an Erik Prince-like character who’s an arms dealer and tech genius who has invented the “pocket universe” (don’t ask me to explain)—unleashes a 30-story-tall dinosaur-like beast (think Godzilla) in the middle of Metropolis, Superman insists on neutralizing, not killing, the monster so it can be taken to a sanctuary to be studied. Other superheroes helping him just want to blast it to smithereens.

There are certainly reflections of present-day crises in the movie. The film’s main tale is Luthor’s unrelenting attempt to destroy Superman, who stands in the way of Luthor’s diabolical schemes. One piece of Luthor’s plan is to delegitimize Superman, and he does this with the accusation that Superman is an untrustworthy alien who has a secret agenda to take over the Earth and claim as many wives as is needed to restore the Kryptonian race that perished on his home planet. In other words, this immigrant is an existential threat and a sex fiend. Luthor’s effort to demonize Superman does initially turn public opinion against the Man of Steel, showing how easy it is to other-ize and vilify a migrant.

It’s laser-guided weaponry versus pitchforks. And it’s nearly impossible not to think of the ongoing war in Gaza.

The other callback to the real world is a burgeoning war between two fictitious nations, Boravia, an ally of the United States, and Jarhanpur, its neighbor. At the start of the film, Superman intervenes to prevent Boravia, which is being armed by Luthor’s transnational corporation, from invading Jarhanpur. But this leads to a superhuman created by Luthor defeating Superman in battle. Through the rest of the movie, the prospect of war looms, with Boravia’s high-tech army poised to slaughter the civilians of Jarhanpur at the border. It’s laser-guided weaponry versus pitchforks. And it’s nearly impossible not to think of the ongoing war in Gaza. Reporter Lois Lane (Rachel Brosnahan), Superman’s gal pal, tells him that his unilateral interference in the Boravia-Jarhanpur conflict raises questions of politics and morality. But Superman sees it more simply: What could be more important than preventing the bloodshed of war?

Gunn has pointed out that he wrote the script before the Gaza war broke out. He said that Superman “doesn’t have anything to do with the Middle East. It’s an invasion by a much more powerful country run by a despot into a country that’s problematic in terms of its political history, but has totally no defense against the other country. It really is fictional.” Yet the imbalance of power between these make-believe countries and the suggestion that one is poised to wipe out civilians in the other offers a strong example of art imitating life. No wonder Palestinian activists have hailed the work.

Put all the political chatter and sniping aside, Superman is a fun and smart take on an all-too-familiar story. It’s not a great film. The character of Superman—a tremendously non-dark superhero—does not lend itself to profound drama. This is no The Dark Knight with a brooding and conflicted hero (Batman) facing a nihilistic villain who seeks to illuminate and exploit the hypocrisies of modern society (Joker).

Superman is a fine summer distraction for the tough times of the moment. But if you want to look past the titanic fight scenes and gee-wiz CGI and be prompted to think about more, Gunn provides that opportunity.

But Gunn does tease out for dramatic purpose the dilemmas and inner conflicts Superman/Clark Kent faces in dealing with both geopolitics and interpersonal relationships. The script is packed with creatively choreographed intense action scenes. Superman is confronted with challenges he might not be able to overcome—though you know he will. The side characters—particular superhero Mr. Terrific (Edi Gathegi)—are well drawn. The movie is infused with the same delightful sass that animated the Guardians of the Galaxy films Gunn previously directed. And, as you might have heard, the dog Krypto steals scene after scene.

Superman is a fine summer distraction for the tough times of the moment. You can munch popcorn and watch the ultimate good guy triumph over a villain who bears a resemblance to today’s tech billionaires. But if you want to look past the titanic fight scenes and gee-wiz CGI and be prompted to think about more, Gunn provides that opportunity, for Superman is a reminder of the pressing need to recognize and serve the basic commonality of our species—as sappy as that sounds.

It’s an antidote to the perverted political culture Donald Trump has forged. Since he entered politics, Trump has presented mean-spiritedness as an asset. In the White House, he and his henchmen have implemented and celebrated policies of cruelty. And Elon Musk, the champion of Big Tech libertarianism, recently belittled the concept of empathy, dismissing it as weakness. Superman is a retort to all this.

In the Times interview, Gunn said the movie “is mostly a story that says basic human kindness is a value and is something we have lost…[O]bviously there will be jerks out there who are just not kind and will take it as offensive just because it is about kindness. But screw them.” It’s a sad comment on our present circumstances that such talk can spur controversy—which makes Gunn’s Superman more important and necessary than the average summer blockbuster.

By the way, Superman, who was created by Jerry Siegel and Jospeh Shuster, each the son of Jewish immigrants, has always been woke:

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The Hague Just Upped the Stakes on Trump’s “Drill Baby, Drill” Agenda

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

Tuesday’s landmark advisory opinion from the International Court of Justice on climate change came as residents of some island nations are already “scraping barnacles off our grandfathers’ graves” as sea-level rise accelerates, said Julian Aguon, an Indigenous human rights lawyer and writer from Guam, in a poem he recited outside the Peace Palace as the judges started their two-hour presentation.

That sense of urgency for action also came through in the 15-judge panel’s unanimous opinion. The court stated that a range of international laws charge governments with legal duties to “prevent significant harm to the environment” and “use all means at their disposal” to prevent activities within their territories from causing significant harm to Earth’s climate.

Even when governments withdraw from or haven’t ratified international climate agreements, they still have legal obligations to address climate change, the court ruled.

Among the obligations cited in the opinion are requirements for historically high polluters to cut emissions and enhance their sequestration of greenhouse gases. Governments could be violating their international legal obligations if they continue subsidizing fossil fuels and issuing new licenses for oil and gas production, the court said during an oral reading of its key findings.

If governments breach those obligations, they could be legally liable, and potentially subject to orders from the ICJ or other courts requiring them to cease climate-harming activities or make compensation payments to climate-impacted people or countries, the opinion noted.

The court also recognized climate change as a threat to human rights.

“States have obligations under international human rights law to respect and ensure the effective enjoyment of human rights by taking necessary measures to protect the climate system and other parts of the environment,” the court noted.

The court also affirmed the right to a clean, healthy and sustainable environment, as recognized by more than 150 countries. That right, the court said during its oral presentation, “is essential to the enjoyment of other human rights.”

While nonbinding, the court’s opinion interprets existing laws that are binding, and the opinion can be cited in future legal actions.

The opinion was “unexpectedly clear and strong,” said Philippe Sands, an international law expert at University College London. It marks the environment coming of age in the international legal order and its unanimity gives it extra heft, he added.

The court rejected the argument from some high-emitting nations that the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change is the primary source of international climate governance, which they argued requires little of nations.

The opinion also made clear that even when governments withdraw from or haven’t ratified international climate agreements, they can face similar obligations under other international laws.

The process leading to the advisory opinion was sparked by young students in Pacific Island countries who have watched their homes and futures being swallowed by rising seas. Spearheaded by Vanuatu, the United Nations General Assembly in 2023 formally requested the ICJ advisory opinion.

The result is a “milestone for climate action and the discourse on climate change,” said Ralph Regenvanu, Vanuatu’s minister of lands, geology and mines, energy and water resources.

A nation’s failure to control emissions from private companies, the judges agreed, can be a breach of its international legal obligations.

“For the first time in history, the ICJ has spoken directly about the biggest threat facing humanity, which is climate change,” he said. “I want to also reflect on the importance of the science. We’ve heard in this advisory opinion that climate science is the heart of climate law and the compass for climate justice.”

The opinion recognized the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change as the best available source of climate science and quoted the IPCC’s prior findings that 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming is unsafe for most nations and people.

Environmental attorney Margaretha Wewerinke-Singh was co-lead counsel with Aguon for Vanuatu in the ICJ proceedings. She said the opinion will assist countries pursuing reparations for the harms they are enduring from global warming. “The court has provided critical guidance that is very helpful to those seeking climate justice,” she said.

The court made clear that when governments breach their legal obligations to address climate change, they can cause losses and damages in other countries. And the ICJ’s opinion clarified that “when there is injury or loss and damage…when a state commits a wrongful act, it is under a legal obligation to make full reparations for the damages caused.”

That’s important, Wewerinke-Singh said, “because there was an argument that liability and compensation had been excluded or made impossible” by the Paris Agreement.

Some countries with high emissions had argued that the diffuse nature of the drivers of climate change, with myriad human activities around the world adding greenhouse gases to the atmosphere, made it impossible to assign individual liability to one country or emitter, but the court dismissed that reasoning.

“The court noted that the science has evolved so much that it is actually possible to establish these causal links,” Wewerinke-Singh said. “The court made it clear that these are not necessarily obstacles.”

The judges were not required to address “each and every obligation of the parties under climate change,” said ICJ President Yuji Iwasawa, but focused on the main obligations under the UNFCCC, the Kyoto Protocol and the Paris Agreement.

The “ultimate objective” of the agreements is to stabilize greenhouse gas concentrations at a level that “would prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system,” to make sure it’s done soon enough to allow ecosystems to adapt, and to ensure secure food production and sustainable development, Iwasawa said.

The opinion also said governments have obligations to regulate private companies and people, and failure to control emissions from private companies can be a breach of their legal obligations to address climate change.

Climate groups cheered the ruling, which has come amidst a series of rollbacks on environmental protections in a number of countries. Among them is the world’s most historically polluting nation, the United States, which is leaving the Paris Agreement and the UN climate negotiations.

“We’re a decade on now from the Paris Agreement,” said Vanuatu’s Regenvanu. “It’s very important now that we make sure our actions align with…what came out today from the courtroom. Today’s ruling, I’m sure, will also inspire new cases where victims around the world, in a legal sense, realize that they can claim their rights and seek accountability.”

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How a Rich Dad’s Obsession With the Estate Tax Nearly Tore His Family Apart

Amid the rancor and rhetoric of the fight over the “big, beautiful bill,” we heard many a story about Americans likely to suffer as a result of it—families who might lose access to elder care and food stamps and homes and health insurance and other important things. Largely missing were insiders’ views of the kinds of families who stood to gain.

To be fair, Harvey Schein—the central figure in Death & Taxes, a new documentary from his son, filmmaker Justin Schein—passed away in 2008. When the younger Schein began collecting family footage, he wasn’t so much thinking about tax policy as the unraveling of his parents’ marriage—which as it happened was tangentially related to tax policy.

Harvey, raised in Depression-era Brooklyn, had managed to hustle and scrape his way up the corporate ladder, aided by the GI Bill, to make his fortune in the entertainment industry as a top executive at companies like Columbia Records, Sony America, and Polygram. Harvey saw himself as self-made, and multiplied his wealth with investments in the stock market.

He was frugal, however, and bristled at the notion of Uncle Sam taking a bite of his nest egg. He’d worked hard and paid his taxes and the estate tax was “double-taxation,” he would say—a common if misleading sentiment, as the film reveals by exploring myriad wealth-friendly aspects of the tax code his argument fails to account for.

Justin and his brother, Mark—Harvey’s heirs—were uncomfortable with their privilege. Growing up in New York City in the 1970s, Justin took notice of the stark inequality around them. As a teenager with growing political awareness, he pushed back against his father’s rigid worldview, and they bickered. He attended Stanford, but rather than going on to Wall Street or Harvard Business School, he began making documentaries—which Harvey felt impractical: “One minute he would be very proud that he helped facilitate my career. They next minute he asked when I was going to start making, you know, real movies. That was Dad.”

But Harvey was a difficult person to live with—loving but prone to depression and angry outbursts. His tax obsession made matters worse. His wife, Joy, is a consummate New Yorker who’d been a professional dancer before marrying Harvey. But after Harvey retired, he was so dead set on avoiding taxes that he resolved they would relocate to spend more than half of each year in Florida, which, unlike New York, doesn’t have an estate tax.

Joy was not joyful there, to say the least.

Harvey Schein in his office at Sony America in 1977Schein Family Archives

The marriage suffered, and in the end Harvey would be stricken with lymphoma. “I stopped shooting when it was clear that, you know, a film needs drama and my family needed peace,” Schein told me in the interview excerpted below.

After his father died, he shelved his footage until 2017, when Donald Trump came to power and Republican lawmakers began plotting their regressive tax cuts. “I was seeing the reality that the estate tax could be abolished, and I was wanting to explore that,” he recalls. “I asked around and nobody would talk to me about their estates, and it became clear that this footage of my family could be a good foundation.”

It was indeed. The film humanizes an aspect of our unequal society seldom explored in a nonfiction visual medium—the way wealth, and our desire to hoard it and pass it to our children, can result in unhappiness even for the haves—while the policies that enable the hoarding beget further misery for the have-nots. Schein sits down with experts ranging from liberal economists, academics, and policy wonks to conservative anti-tax crusaders to explore the issues, while his family saga provides a compelling thread.

Death & Taxes is well-timed, with this month’s passage of a wildly unpopular Republican bill that rewards America’s richest at the expense of its poorest. The film is showing this week in selected theaters in New York City and Los Angeles—other big cities are expected—along with an evolving list of one-off showings in smaller cities. (I will be moderating a post-showing conversation at Berkeley’s Elmwood Theater on Tuesday, August 5, at 7 pm.)

Schein also hopes to get the film in front of wealthy audiences, where it might jumpstart some useful conversations. He expects it will be available for streaming in the fall or early winter, though no deal has yet been inked.

“PBS was interested, but then the arm that PBS wanted to show it on was eliminated,” he told me. “I’ve had festivals invite us and then retract it because they’re afraid that their funders would be offended. So it’s a little bit of a minefield, but it also means that it’s, you know, more relevant.”

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

This all began with you documenting what was happening with your family, and only later did you come to focus on your dad’s tax obsession. Was there a particular moment or event that prompted that pivot?

Well, I always I knew that I had this footage, and he and I were butting heads about politics and his insistence that taxes and his pocketbook took precedence over anything else. That started when I was a teenager. I was in like seventh grade when Reagan was elected, and at first I was like, Oh, Dad’s voting for Reagan. Maybe that’s cool. Maybe I should be behind that? And then slowly, as I got into the punk scene and became more aware, and as I was looking to push away from my dad, we would argue. We argued about apartheid and abortion—things like that. And taxes.

Harvey and Justin Schein in 1972.Schein Family Archies

As you were becoming more aware of the inequality in our society?

Yeah. In the film, there’s that moment where I took the bus up to Horace Mann every day, right through Harlem, which was a burned-out shell, and that was 10 blocks from my house. It became clear, looking out the window, that there was a lot of inequality. And nobody was talking about it, certainly not when I got off the bus at school. So that bus ride was a really important part of my education.

The other side of it was the fact that my dad was very proud that he had a rags-to riches-story where he worked hard and was the only kid in his family to go to college and he became so successful. And this was what America was supposed to be about. And it was just becoming clear that it was becoming much harder for everybody to work hard and achieve success.

In the 1980s and 1990s, estate taxes were way higher than they are now, and the exemption—the amount of money you could give your kids tax-free, was a lot lower. I see why your dad might not like that. But the top tax on large estates is now 40 percent and Congress doubled the exemption in 2017. It’s now $28 million for a couple, soon to be $30 million thanks to the “big, beautiful bill.” It’s a little nuts that a child can now inherit tax-free superwealth.

Yeah. Until 1976, the exemption was $60,000, and I think like 10 percent of Americans were subject to it. That was problematic and needed to be changed. People should be able to pass on a reasonable amount of their security and wealth for their kids. But the loopholes are causing a problem: Huge fortunes are going untaxed. There’s the stepped-up basis rule.

Right, and also these grantor trusts and other tricks that help rich sidestep the estate tax entirely. Your dad is pretty focused on this idea of double taxation. He says he worked his ass off and paid taxes, so why should he pay more? That sounds reasonable on the surface, right? So why should we have an estate tax?

For one thing, it’s this myth that these successful people do it on their own, and so they deserve to keep more of it. My dad went to college and law school on the GI Bill. When he rose to prominence in the ‘50s and ‘60s, taxes were super high and that was creating this fertile ground for American economy to prosper, with infrastructure and stability and a stable working and middle class and education—all these things contributed, I believe, to his success, and is a reason we need a reasonable estate tax.

Would it be fair to say most Americans don’t understand the nuances, and may well think they’re going to be taxed on minor transfers of wealth to their children?

Yeah. There’s definitely this myth. And I think it was John Steinbeck who said, “Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat, but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.”

When you go out on the street and ask people about the American dream—which I did—it’s universally accepted that America is a meritocracy and anybody could strike it rich. People still come to America hoping for that. But we need to understand that that is becoming harder and harder to achieve. And I don’t think that’s a partisan issue.

The film talks about how unrealized investment profits escape taxation. A guy like your dad, most of his wealth is from investment gains over the years. And the failure to tax those returns until those assets are sold is a major reason we’re seeing this massive concentration at the very top.

I mean, looking back at my dad over the years, there was this whole period where there were tax shelters—there was the Schein cattle company and the Schein oil company. And those were, I think, just on paper—I don’t think we ever had a cow or an oil well. Eventually those loopholes were closed.

So these companies were totally bogus?

I have no idea. I was a little kid then. It was legal. It was clearly a strategy that worked for a number of years and then was closed. It’s a game people who have this money love to play. And why wouldn’t you? It’s better than any casino, because you’re the one writing the rules with your other wealthy friends.

Harvey, post-retirement, and Joy. Sanibel, Florida, 1994Schein Family Archives

But you could just as easily ask, why would you? Because there’s the competing idea that, hey, I have plenty of money, so maybe I don’t need to do this?

Yeah. And the fact that my dad went from being this very Brooklyn kid—who wanted to raise his family amid this diversity—to living on an island in Florida surrounded by millionaires. You lose the sense of community and why your contribution to society is important. I think we need to change the conversation so that when Trump says it makes him smart to avoid taxes, people realize that “smart” is subjective, and it’s clearly in some ways un-American to be hoarding wealth.

Or quintessentially American!

[Laughs.] Yeah. But there have been times when there was more of a sense of community and responsibility to each other. I think that’s possible again in our country. The estate tax was created in a time very similar to this one, and was partially intended to keep America from being too aristocratic.

Things have clearly gone haywire, which is why [former Trump adviser Gary] Cohn said “only morons pay the estate tax.” That’s why the estate tax wasn’t abolished in this last budget: It doesn’t need to be because it’s been completely emasculated. It’s almost like a front.

Will you talk a bit more about the the discomfort you and your brother had knowing that you stood—or stand—to inherit a lot of money?

It is complicated, because I still hear my dad telling me that it’s not my money, and I have a responsibility for my grandchildren to pass it to them. But the reality was that, in the film, I received a letter from my dad when I was in college telling me how unhappy he was, and I saw what [his obsession with holding onto his wealth] did to my parents’ marriage.

Nobody is talking about making rich people poor. We’re talking about stopping this bizarre game we’re playing to avoid as much taxes as possible at the expense of our democracy. Now that I have kids of my own, two boys like my dad did, I see the harm being done to the country. And I feel like inheritance goes beyond stocks and bonds.

That’s a good point. I also want to bring up the part in the film where you ask your wife what she thinks about you doing this. And she basically says you should be careful, because people will pull out the world’s smallest violin in response to a rich boy’s discomfort with his privilege. People will say stuff like, You have issues with inheritance? Hey, send the money my way.

I’m already getting that.

But the discomfort is real.

I mean, if you don’t have the feelings, that’s more of a problem than having them.

One thing you didn’t touch on is this argument Republican politicians dust off every time the estate tax comes up. They claim it hurts family-owned companies and family farmers and small businesses. But that’s very misleading, isn’t it?

Yeah, it’s completely false—certainly the farm issue is complete disinformation. First, family farms are being destroyed by giant agribusiness. But also, show me one family farm that has been lost because of the estate tax. There are so many rules that protect them.

And the number of estates that exceeded the exemption was very, very small even before Trump and Congress doubled it.

Yeah, maybe that was an issue in the 1970s that needed to be corrected.

And it was.

It was overcorrected. And now we have a big problem.

We never do learn what happened after your father’s death, insofar as you and your brother presumably inheriting his wealth and how you’re dealing with that.

Part of the reason that is that my mom is still alive. Technically the estate goes to her. But there are trusts and LLCs and things that have been created. I mean, we haven’t actually had to deal with it. I have had to deal more with thinking about my own kids.

My dad started on day one with me, you know, passing money. And I have been extremely derelict in doing that because, partly because of my conflicted feelings. We have 529 [college savings accounts] for our kids and things like that. But I haven’t created any network of trusts, and I’m certainly not moving to Florida.

I don’t have to do much, because as privileged and wealthy as I am, this [$30 million] exemption pretty much does the job. I mean, I’m happy to speak out against it, and if and when that changes, I would create a situation where my kids didn’t have to worry about their health care and would have a down payment for a house. But I’m not doing what Harvey did.

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ICE Arrests an Immigrant Whom SF Judge Said May be Mentally Impaired

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

Three asylum-seekers leaving routine court hearings at San Francisco immigration court Thursday morning were arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers, including one man who a judge had just said might be mentally impaired.

They’re the latest in a series of ICE actions, where over 30 immigrants have been arrested by federal agents while leaving San Francisco immigration court, at 100 Montgomery Street or 630 Sansome Street—which also has an ICE field office and is where Thursday’s arrests took place.

After a Department of Homeland Security attorney on Thursday moved to dismiss the case of the man, a strategy federal attorneys have recently been using to make asylum-seekers easier to remove, immigration judge Patrick O’Brien raised doubts over his mental ability, saying, “it’s obvious to me that there are competency issues.”

The man—who was only fluent in Mam, a Mayan language primarily spoken in Guatemala—had been muttering to himself throughout the morning, O’Brien said.

Later in court, the man was unable to tell O’Brien his address. O’Brien even asked the man at one point if he was on medication.

There appear to be competency issues beyond just a language barrier, O’Brien said. (After a few hours of requesting one, the court had been able to find a remote Mam interpreter to help with the man’s hearing.)

Prior to her arrest, one woman said she wanted a chance to explain why she came to the US and was afraid to return to her home country. “We’re not going to do that today,” said the judge.

O’Brien then proceeded to ask the Department of Homeland Security attorney for a continuance of the case, rather than a dismissal, due to the man’s possible mental incompetence. The man needed time to find a lawyer and other support, O’Brien said. “He’s clearly not understanding the questions,” O’Brien said. “Is this someone the department really wants to move to dismiss a motion to appear on?”

The DHS attorney agreed, and allowed for a continuance of the case, which essentially means the man will come back for another hearing in a few months. The DHS attorney said she could “renew” the motion to dismiss another time.

But as the manleft the hearing room, Mission Local observed about five ICE officers stopping the man and then leading him out a side door. The man’s arrest was the third over the course of three hours Thursday morning.

Earlier that morning, the DHS moved to dismiss two other cases, both of women who appeared in court alone. In both cases, the DHS attorney recited what has become a standard script in recent months: “Circumstances have changed” since the women were first told to appear in court.

When DHS moves to dismiss cases, it does so with the goal of placing asylum-seekers in a process called expedited removal, which can fast-track them out of the country without appearing before a judge again.

Judges in San Francisco rarely immediately grant those motions. On Thursday, O’Brien told the women he would give them time to respond to the motion. He would not rule on it that day.

However, as would happen to the potentially impaired man later that morning, and has happened routinely in recent weeks, both women were arrested directly following their hearings anyway.

In court, O’Brien appeared to try to prepare the women for a possible arrest. “I am pretty sure you won’t be coming back to my court,” he said. He also urged them to get a lawyer as soon as possible.

Both women were at first confused. “How am I supposed to respond to this motion if I don’t understand it?” one asked in Spanish, through an interpreter. They quickly became terrified. Both started crying as they asked O’Brien questions at the front of the courtroom.

The same woman said that she wanted a chance to explain to the judge why she came to the United States, and why she was afraid to return to her home country. “We’re not going to do that today,” O’Brien said.

The moment the women walked out of the courtroom into a hallway, Mission Local observed ICE officers arresting them. The officers ordered them to turn around and face the wall, and then handcuffed them.

Over the course of the morning, Mission Local asked two ICE offices for their badge numbers. They refused to provide them.

After arrest, asylum-seekers are normally taken two floors up from the immigration courtroom, to a temporary detention and processing center on the sixth floor of 630 Sansome St. After a couple of hours, they are generally then placed into long-term detention at one of the for-profit private prison detention centers elsewhere in California, or the country.

At most public hearings, attorneys for the Bar Association of San Francisco are present under the “Attorney of the Day Program.” They provide legal support to asylum-seekers and transmit information to the Rapid Response Network, allowing for attorneys to be dispatched to support the immigrants placed into detention. They also warn those asylum-seekers who have cases that DHS moved to dismiss that they might be detained.

But Thursday morning, no attorneys were present. As a result, none of the arrests can be independently confirmed. According to Milli Atkinson who runs the program, immigration support services “are working backwards from limited info we have.”

Moments after the women’s arrest, the courtroom returned to business as normal. Classical music played over a speaker phone while the judge sat on hold for a remote interpreter. Moments later, he heard the case of a family of four: two parents, a toddler and a baby. The four of them had been scammed by a lawyer so were still unrepresented, they said. They had driven from their new home in Oregon for the hearing.

O’Brien was apologetic for both. “I appreciate you folks making it on time, with two young children as well,” he said, then filed paperwork to move their case to a court nearer their new home.

As of noon, ICE officers were still hovering in the hallway outside the immigration court. Public court hearings had ended for the day.

Frankie Solinsky Duryea contributed to this report.

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“Walking Corpses”: Israel’s Blockade of Aid Starves Gazans, Aid Groups Say

Two months ago, a coalition of aid groups warned that Israel’s war on Gaza—and restrictions on food entering the strip—would cause mass starvation in Gaza imminently. Now, it has arrived, according to officials and aid groups.

On Wednesday, more than 100 aid groups issued a statement outlining just how dire the situation has become for Palestinians as doctors report record rates of malnutrition as a result of Israel’s aid blockade. “As the Israeli government’s siege starves the people of Gaza, aid workers are now joining the same food lines, risking being shot just to feed their families,” the letter states. “[H]umanitarian organisations are witnessing their own colleagues and partners waste away before their eyes.”

The signatories of the letter—which include Amnesty International, Doctors Without Borders, Oxfam International, and Save the Children—urged governments to “open all land crossings; restore the full flow of food, clean water, medical supplies, shelter items, and fuel through a principled, UN-led mechanism; end the siege, and agree to a ceasefire now.”

As of Tuesday, more than a dozen children and adults had died from hunger within 24 hours, according to the UN, which cited reports from local health authorities. The World Food Program (WFP) says that nearly one in three people is going days without eating in Gaza and that 90,000 women and children need urgent malnutrition treatment.

Muhammad Zakariya Ayyoub al-Matouq dropped from 9 to 6 kilograms and struggles to survive in a tent in Gaza City, where milk, food, and other basic necessities are lacking.Omar Ashtawy/APA/ZUMA

The latest developments come two months after the launch of the so-called Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, a US-backed Israeli aid distribution system that aid groups have decried as inefficient and dangerous. They say the four distribution sites, all under the control of the Israeli military, are difficult to access and do not distribute enough food. Israeli officials have claimed the system is necessary to prevent Hamas from interfering with food distribution, though officials have not provided evidence that this was ever happening in a coordinated way.

Gazans who do make it to the distribution sites often fear death. Harrowing reports have emerged of hordes of Palestinians being gunned down and killed at the sites. On Sunday, the WFP reported that a crowd of people seeking food from its convoy in northern Gaza were shot and killed by “Israeli tanks, snipers and other gunfire.” The organization’s director of emergencies called the incident “one of the greatest tragedies we’ve seen for our operations in Gaza and elsewhere while we’re trying to work.” Subsequent reports suggested that at least 80 Palestinians were killed in that incident and at least 95 people injured, and that 40 others were killed in other attacks near aid points in Rafah and Khan Younis over the weekend.

Injured people and bodies were brought to Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City after Israeli forces opened fire on civilians who were waiting for humanitarian aid in north Gaza on Sunday.Omar Ashtawy/APA/ZUMA

This week, the Untied Nations reported that more than 1,000 Palestinians have been killed by the Israeli military since the new aid system debuted, nearly 800 of whom were killed near the US-backed aid sites, and the rest of whom were killed near UN and other humanitarian groups’ aid convoys.

Spokespeople for the Israeli Defense Forces did not immediately respond to questions Thursday from Mother Jones. President Donald Trump, who previously floated taking over Gaza and driving Palestinians off the land to an unspecified “permanent place,” has so far been silent on the latest details about the starvation in Gaza; his most recent comments appear to be from May, when he acknowledged “a lot of people are starving.” Spokespeople for the White House did not immediately respond to questions from Mother Jones on Thursday.

The US has funded Israel’s war broadly. A report from Brown University, published last fall, states that the US government had spent at least $18 billion on Israel’s military operations in Gaza since the war began with Hamas’ attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, which killed approximately 1,200 people and led to more than 250 being taken as hostages, 50 of whom reportedly remain in captivity.

Abdul Jawad Al-Ghalban, 14, died from severe malnutrition at Nasser Medical Hospital in Khan Younis. He is pictured on Tuesday.Moaz Abu Taha/APA/ZUMA

Aid groups say that they have supplies to support those in need, but that Israeli forces are preventing them from entering Gaza. Philippe Lazzarini, the commissioner-general of the UN Agency for Palestinian Refugees, said in a post on X on Thursday that the UN agency has “equivalent of 6,000 loaded trucks of food & medical supplies in Jordan and Egypt,” and called for “unrestricted & uninterrupted humanitarian assistance.” He quoted a colleague in Gaza who he said told him, “People in Gaza are neither dead nor alive, they are walking corpses.”

“When child malnutrition surges, coping mechanisms fail, access to food & care disappears, famine silently begins to unfold,” he wrote. “Most children our teams are seeing are emaciated, weak & at high risk of dying if they don’t get the treatment they urgently need.”

“Parents are too hungry to care for their children,” Lazzarini continued. “Those who reach UNRWA clinics don’t have the energy, food, or means to follow medical advice. Families are no longer coping, they are breaking down, unable to survive. Their existence is threatened.”

Lazzarini added that the agency’s health workers “are surviving on one small meal a day, often just lentils, if at all,” and “increasingly fainting from hunger while at work.”

“When caretakers cannot find enough to eat,” he added, “the entire humanitarian system is collapsing.”

A charity organization distributes hot meals to Palestinians in Gaza City on Thursday.Omar Ashtawy/APA/ZUMA

News organizations have also warned that the few journalists left in Gaza are also facing starvation. On Thursday, Agence France-Presse (AFP), the Associated Press, BBC News, and Reuters issued a joint statement saying they are “desperately concerned for our journalists in Gaza, who are increasingly unable to feed themselves and their families.” Earlier this week, a group of AFP journalists issued a statement outlining the dire conditions facing the ten who remain in Gaza: “We watch their situation worsen. They are young and losing strength. Most no longer have physical capacity to travel the enclave and do their jobs,” says the statement, translated from its original French.

The statement quotes a post the group’s photographer, Bashar, 30, put on Facebook over the weekend: “I no longer have the strength to work in media. My body is weak and I cannot work.” His brother died of hunger over the weekend, the statement says.

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Employees Kept in the Dark as EPA Dismantles Scientific Research Office

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

Employees of the crucial scientific research arm of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) have been left with more questions than answers as the agency moves to officially wind down the office following months of back-and-forth.

On Friday evening, the EPA issued a press release announcing a reduction in force at the Office of Research and Development, citing the move as part of a larger effort to save a purported $749 million. On Monday, some employees at ORD, the largest office in the agency, began receiving emails saying that they’d been assigned new positions within the EPA.

“Please note, this is not an offer, but a notice of reassignment,” says a letter sent to an employee and viewed by WIRED. The employee had previously applied to positions within the agency, as ORD employees were instructed to do in May. “There is no action you need to take to accept the reassignment, and there is no option to decline.”

On a call with ORD administrators and staff held Monday afternoon, audio of which was obtained by WIRED, leadership—including ORD acting administrator Maureen Gwinn—was unable to answer basic questions from employees, including a timeline for when the agency planned to permanently end ORD, how many employees would be transferred to other offices, and how many would lose their jobs.

Employees at ORD who spoke with WIRED say that Friday’s public-facing email was the first concrete news they had heard about their organization’s future. One worker told WIRED that employees often learned more from news outlets, including WIRED, “than we do from our management.”

“We wish we had more information for you,” Gwinn told staff on the call. “I’ll speak for myself, I wish we weren’t at this point today.”

An EPA spokesperson, who declined to give their name, wrote in response to a series of questions from WIRED that the agency is currently offering its third voluntary resignation period, known as a DRP, which ends on July 25. “The [reduction in force] process entails a number of specific procedures in accordance with OPM regulations,” they said. “The next step in this process is to issue intent to RIF notices to individual employees.”

That number “won’t be clear,” they said, until after the DRP process was over.

“If you’re going to end up rolling back air quality regulations…you’re going to see excess cases of death and illness.”

“This is not an elimination of science and research,” the spokesperson wrote. “We are confident EPA has the resources needed to accomplish the agency’s core mission of protecting human health and the environment, fulfill all statutory obligations, and make the best-informed decisions based on the gold standard of science.”

At the start of the year, ORD was composed of between 1,000 and 2,000 scientists at labs spread across the country as well as in Washington, DC. The branch’s work provides much of the science that underpins the policy formed in the agency, from research on chemicals’ impacts on human health and the environment to air quality and climate change to planning for emergencies and responding to contamination in air, soil, and water. The office contains many groups and initiatives that are crucial to protecting the environment and human health, including a team that studies human health risks from chemicals.

Several EPA scientists stressed to WIRED that ORD’s current structure, which allows research to happen independent of the policy-making that occurs in other parts of the agency, is crucial to producing quality work. One told WIRED that they worked in a scientific role in an EPA policy office under the first Trump administration. There, they felt that their job was to “try and mine the science to support a policy decision that had already been made.” The structure at ORD, they said, provides a layer of insulation between decisionmakers and the scientific process.

ORD was heavily singled out in Project 2025’s Mandate for Leadership document, the policy blueprint that has closely anticipated the Trump administration’s moves in office. It described the branch as “precautionary, bloated, unaccountable, closed, outcome-driven, hostile to public and legislative input, and inclined to pursue political rather than purely scientific goals.”

The plan did not, however, propose doing away with the organization. But in March, documents presented to the White House by agency leadership proposed dissolving ORD, resulting in backlash from Democrats in Congress.

In early May, the EPA announced it would be reorganizing its structure, which administrator Lee Zeldin wrote in a Newsweek op-ed would “improve” the agency by “integrating scientific staff directly into our program offices.” The agency said that it would create a new Office of Applied Science and Environmental Solutions, which would sit under the Office of the Administrator.

Putting much of ORD’s scientific work in policy offices, the scientist who previously worked in a policy office told WIRED, means that “we’re going to end up seeing science that has been unduly influenced by policy interests. I don’t think that’s going to result in policy decisions that are empirically supportable.”

Following May’s reorganization announcement, ORD employees were encouraged to apply for jobs within other parts of the agency. Multiple workers who spoke with WIRED say the job postings for these new positions were bare-bones, with little description of what the work would actually entail. One job posting seen by WIRED labels the role simply as “Interdisciplinary Scientific & Engineering Positions,” with no information about the topic area, team, or scientific expertise required.

The EPA’s reorganization efforts were temporarily stalled by lawsuits. Earlier this month, the Supreme Court paused a preliminary injunction blocking further mass reductions in force at 17 federal agencies, including the EPA.

There was one bright spot on Monday’s call: ORD leadership told employees that all of the ORD-affiliated labs would be kept open, a piece of news that ran contrary to some previous reports. Still, workers say that it’s becoming increasingly difficult to do science at the EPA. More than 325 ORD workers—around a fifth of ORD’s ranks—had taken voluntary retirements since the start of the year, according to the EPA spokesperson.

A scientist told WIRED that while they usually would have had a small team helping with their field work, they’ve been left to handle everything alone, including “washing dishes and labeling bottles.” Cumbersome new financial approval processes, they said, have also resulted in chemicals that they ordered being delayed for months and expensive equipment sitting without any repairs.

Since taking office, Zeldin has made it clear that he intends to relax environmental regulations, especially those affecting business. Last week, he authored an op-ed in Fox News advertising how the agency would essentially erase the Clean Air Act permitting process for power plants and data centers in order to “make America the AI capital of the world.” ORD scientists fear that the dissolution of their office will only make this pro-business mission easier.

“If you’re going to end up rolling back air quality regulations—and we know, conclusively at this point, that ozone pollution is causing premature mortality and chronic effects—if you roll back the rules, you’re going to see excess cases of death and illness,” one scientist tells WIRED. “My guess is that [EPA leadership] don’t want to know the answer to the question of how bad it is going to be.”

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He’s Suing His Girlfriend’s Doctor for Prescribing Abortion Pills. Could This Gut Access Everywhere?

In a case squarely aimed at breathing new life into the federal Comstock Act—and at thwarting the efforts of abortion-friendly states to protect providers and patients—a Texas man has sued a California doctor for allegedly mailing abortion pills to his girlfriend and is asking the court to prevent the woman, who is currently pregnant, from having another abortion.

In a wrongful death lawsuit filed Sunday, Texas residentJerry Rodriguez is accusing California-based Dr. Rémy Coeytaux of violating numerous Texas abortion laws, as well as the Comstock Act—an 1873 anti-obscenity law that is still on the books**—**by providing the abortion pills that were used to terminate two of his girlfriend’s previous pregnancies.

The lawsuit was filed in federal court in Galveston, Texas, by former Texas Solicitor General Jonathan Mitchell, the architect of some of the most radical and punitive abortion laws in the country. Mitchell is a leading proponent of using so-called “zombie” laws—pre-Roe v. Wade abortion bans that were unenforceable for almost half a century—to outlaw abortion post-Dobbs. The most potentially sweeping of these zombie laws is the Comstock Act, the long-defunct sexual purity law that prohibits the mailing or receiving of anything used to perform or obtain an abortion.Mitchell and his allies argue that Comstock is still the law of the land—and, if fully implemented, would amount to a de facto national abortion ban. But first, he has to get the courts to go along.

Now, he’s asking a federal judge in the Southern District of Texas to take the Comstock baitby issuing an injunction that stops Coeytaux from“distributing abortion-inducing drugs in violation of state or federal law.”

The case is the first known test of whether abortion opponents can use federal court lawsuits to circumvent state shield laws aimed at protecting providers—a major escalation of attacks on abortion-friendly states. “The whole game for Jonathan Mitchell is to get into federal court,” says Mary Ziegler, an abortion historian and law professor at the University of California-Davis, “both because he wants to shut down doctors in shield-law states, like everyone in the anti-abortion movement, and because he wants a federal court to weigh in on the Comstock Act.”

“The whole game for Jonathan Mitchell is to get into federal court, both because he wants to shut down doctors in shield-law states, like everyone in the anti-abortion movement, and because he wants a federal court to weigh in on the Comstock Act.”

The federal court could choose to evade the Comstock claim and base its rulings solely on Texas’s wrongful death and abortion laws. “What Mitchell would like, if he won, would be a court to say, yeah, this guy is violating [both] Texas law and the Comstock Act,” Ziegler says. Mitchell’s ultimate goal, she adds, is “to somehow get that question appealed all the way up” to the US Supreme Court, where ultra-conservative justices have shown signs of being receptive to the Comstock claims.

In another alarming twist, Mitchell is seeking to certify the case as a class action on behalf of “all current and future fathers of unborn children in the United States.” That language “seeks to confer rights on the unborn,” says Rachel Rebouché, dean at Temple University’s law school, “embedding fetal personhood in arguments around abortion pills as a national matter, and not just in states with personhood laws.”

Mother Jones reached out to Mitchell for comment, but he did not respond.

The facts of the case are exceptionally messy. According to the complaint, Rodriguez began dating his girlfriend last summer, while she was legally separated but still married to her estranged husband, Adam Garza of Galveston County. When she became pregnant in July 2024, the suit alleges, Garza was “displeased” and “ordered abortion-inducing drugs online from Coeytaux,” paying $150 via Venmo. The woman took the pills and terminated the pregnancy in September.

She became pregnant again a few weeks later, the lawsuit says, and Rodriguez claims she saidshe intended to keep the pregnancy. But, according to the complaint, Garza again obtained abortion pills from Coeytaux and terminated the pregnancy this past January.

She became pregnant a third time in May, Rodriguez says. In his filing, he tells the court, “There is a substantial risk that Adam Garza will obtain abortion pills illegally from Coeytaux and provide those” to her.

Coeytaux is a Stanford-trained licensed physician and a former medical school faculty member at Wake Forest University, Duke University, and the University of North Carolina. In November 2024, NBC News cited him as a representative of A Safe Choice, a network of doctors prescribing abortion pills by mail, mostly to patients in states with abortion restrictions. He recently acquired an office in Sonoma County, California. His website advertises $150 15-minute consultations.

Coeytaux is also the brother of Francine Coeytaux, an abortion rights activist and public health expert who for years has played a leading role promoting access to family-planning medications. At the Population Council in the 1980s and ’90s, Francine worked on the public introduction of the abortion medication mifepristone in France and helped bring the morning-after pill, Plan B, to market in the United States. Years later, in 2015, with other reproductive health experts and activists, she co-founded Plan C, a campaign to promote the provision of abortion pills by mail. When the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, Plan C’s online information hub about medication abortion—with listings of clinics and services willing to mail abortion pills into all 50 states—became a popular resource for patients in states with abortion bans.

A man answering the phone at the number listed on Rémy Coeytaux’s website told Mother Jones, “No comment is being made at this time. I appreciate your interest, and I hope you can do a good job with the story, but there is no comment.” Francine Coeytaux did not return a request for comment.

Elisa Wells, another cofounder of Plan C, emphasizes that clinicians who provide abortion by telehealth are operating legally under the laws of their states. “Providers that are doing this are serving a real need,” she says. “The fact that there are these efforts to criminalize them or bring civil suits against them is outrageous.”

Now, Rémy Coeytaux is in the crosshairs of Mitchell, who—among other things—pioneered the “bounty hunter” laws giving individuals the right to sue anyone who “aids or abets” an abortion, with potential damages of $10,000 per violation. This has made it significantly harder for abortion-rights advocates to challenge some extreme restrictions.

Recently, Mitchell has been helping men use the Texas bounty hunter law to retaliate against people who helped the men’s partners obtain abortion care. As Abortion Every Day’s Jessica Valenti has reported:

He’s represented at least three other men who’ve sued over women’s abortions—including Marcus Silva, who sued his ex-wife’s friends for helping her get abortion pills. That case was eventually dropped, but not before it came out that Silva tried to use the lawsuit to blackmail his ex into having sex with him.

Since then, Mitchell and other anti-abortion activists have been cozying up to men’s rights groups, “abortion recovery” ministries, and crisis pregnancy centers—on the lookout for more angry men eager to sue their partners or exes for ending a pregnancy.

Mitchell has also been pushing legislation and filing court cases aimed atreviving the Comstock Act, named for the 19th-century anti-vice crusader who championed it. The law made it a federal crime to send or receive any “obscene, lewd, or lascivious” writings, or “any article or thing designed or intended for the prevention of conception or procuring an abortion.” Over the years, courts greatly narrowed the statute’s scope, and in 1971, Congress removed most of its restrictions on contraceptives. But Congress never formally repealed the statute’s abortion-related provisions, even after the Roe decision in 1973 rendered them moot.

President Donald Trump has so far resisted pressure from anti-abortion opponents to use the Comstock Act to institute a federal ban, even though the idea is embraced by the Heritage Foundation’s playbook for the second Trump administration, Project 2025.

Meanwhile, Texas and other conservative states have passed increasingly draconian laws targeting providers of mail-order abortion medication. Abortion-friendly states have sought to defend against such aggressive tactics by passing shield laws designed to protect providers from out-of-state investigations and prosecutions, professional discipline, and civil liability. Some 22 states and the District of Columbia have passed some sort of shield statute, with eight states, including California, adopting the most robust protections. Thanks to these laws, as well as the availability of abortion pills and telemedicine, the number of abortions has risen since Dobbs.

So far, shield laws have helped protect at least one doctor.Last December, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton sued a New York-based telehealth provider, Margaret Carpenter, in Texas state court and secured a $113,000 judgment against her. But a county clerk in New York has repeatedly rejected Paxton’s attempts to collect the fine, citing the state’s shield law. In January, prosecutors in Louisiana indicted Carpenter for allegedly providing abortion pills to a teenager. But, again citing the shield law, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul has refused to extradite her.

“We’ve seen this dynamic before, with activists finding ways to bypass politicians because their incentives don’t line up.”

Those were both state court cases. Until the Rodriguez case, shield laws have been untested in the federal courts, where the state claims could face major resistance.

Ziegler says it’s unclear why Paxton and Louisiana officials haven’t taken the shield law issue to federal court already, but the new case shows that Mitchell—who has a history as an anti-abortion provocateur—is once again unwilling to wait. “We’ve seen this dynamic before,” Ziegler says, “with activists finding ways to bypass politicians because their incentives don’t line up.”

The federal judges in Texas are famously conservative and have proven extremely sympathetic to anti-abortion efforts to curtail access to abortion pills and other reproductive health care. As of Tuesday evening, the Rodriguez case was assigned to Magistrate Judge Andrew M. Edison, who was appointed in 2018.

With Rodriguez’s girlfriend already two months pregnant, Rodriguez claims that he fearsthat Garza “will again pressure [her] to kill his unborn child and obtain abortion pills from Coeytaux to commit the murder.”

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As Palantir Cashes In on Trump 2.0, Peter Thiel Is Bankrolling Republicans Again

In 2023, Peter Thiel, the billionaire tech titan and investor, issued a proclamation: He would not make political donations in 2024 to any candidate, including Donald Trump, whom he had backed in 2016.

Now, after sitting out the 2024 election cycle, Thiel is back in the game. He has quietly donated more than $850,000 this year to finance Republican incumbents attempting to retain their party’s control of the House in next year’s midterm elections.

That renewed largesse comes as the stock price of Palantir, the company Thiel founded and still owns much of, soars, with the firm raking in profits from contracts awarded by the Trump administration.

Palantir, which describes itself as a software company that helps clients manage data, has played a supporting role in the administration’s mass deportation efforts. It also is helping implement Trump’s call to create a massive, searchable federal database, reportedly using information from Americans’ tax returns.

Critics, including congressional Democrats, say Thiel’s company may be helping the administration to violate privacy laws and to implement an unprecedented US surveillance state. Republican lawmakers appear uninterested in scrutinizing the company’s work.

Asked about its federal contracting, a Palantir spokesperson replied in an email, “We are delighted to support the US government as our growth reflects growing government AI adoption. Meanwhile, our growth in the private sector still significantly outpaces our government growth (45% vs. 71%).”

A spokesperson for Thiel did not respond to multiple inquiries from Mother Jones seeking comment about his political donations.

Thiel was once a steady source of campaign funds for Republicans, including Sens. Orrin Hatach and Ted Cruz, as well as for libertarian groups and the anti-tax Club for Growth. In 2016, he contributed $1.25 million to Trump’s campaign, earning himself a speaking slot at the Republican convention. And in 2022, he poured $15 million into the Senate campaigns of JD Vance of Ohio and Blake Masters of Arizona. Thiel’s support for Vance, who once worked for Thiel’s venture capital firm, was crucial for launching the vice president’s political career.

Trump’s first term, however, left Thiel disappointed. Thiel, who presents himself as a political theorist, was yearning for a slashing of regulations and demolition of the so-called administrative state. That, he hoped, would foment disruption conducive to the development of a futuristic libertarian techno-state that could deliver flying cars, new forms of food production, and scientific efforts to achieve something approaching immortality. That’s not what happened. (In 2009, he had written, “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.”)

When Trump campaigned for reelection in 2020, Thiel sat it out. There was no public endorsement from the billionaire, and no contributions, though he did support congressional Republicans that year and in the 2022 midterms. But apart from his funding of Masters and Vance, the donations were relatively modest.

This year, Thiel has returned aggressively, with a focus on helping Republicans preserve their majority in the House. In February, he gave $852,200 to House Speaker Mike Johnson’s political action committee, Grow the Majority. The PAC then distributed those funds to the House GOP campaign arm and to Republicans in competitive districts around the country. Recipients included Reps. Brian Fitzpatrick in Pennsylvania, Don Bacon in Nebraska, Young Kim in California, and Derek Van Orden in Wisconsin.

Thiel’s support this early in the 2026 midterm cycle may augur more to come for Republican lawmakers.

To hear Thiel tell it, his political aims are high-minded—if kind of out there. During a recent interview with New York Times columnist Ross Douthat, he groused that current politics have led to a societal stagnation that impedes technological progress. He decried government regulation. He warned against the rise of a “one-world totalitarian state” that would exploit popular concerns over climate change and nuclear war and choke the development of AI and other technologies. He mused about the threat posed by the coming of a woke “Antichrist”—possibly in the form of environmental activist Greta Thurnberg.

He did not enthuse about Trump. Rather, he described the president like an investment that hadn’t panned out. Thiel said he supported Trump in 2016 hoping the populist candidate would cause a disruption that would bring about technological dynamism. This turned out to be “a preposterous fantasy,” he told Douthat. But he remarked that the populism of Trump 2.0 is “still by far the best option we have.”

Asked whether he had stopped funding politicians, Thiel did not mention his recent support of Republicans. Instead, he replied, “I am schizophrenic on this stuff. I think it’s incredibly important and it’s incredibly toxic.” He indicated that he did not enjoy the criticism he has received after backing conservative candidates.

Thiel chided Elon Musk for having been sucked into political brawls over such common issues as the federal budget. He recounted to Douthat a conversation he had with last year with Mus: “I said: ‘If Trump doesn’t win, I want to just leave the country.’ And then Elon said: ‘There’s nowhere to go.’”

Musk, as Thiel saw it, had lost faith in his hope that populating Mars would save humanity: “In 2024 Elon came to believe that if you went to Mars, the socialist US government, the woke AI would follow you to Mars.”

Here on Earth, Thiel also has more pedestrian interests. In April, Palantir inked a contract to assist ongoing efforts by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement to remove undocumented immigrants by building a platform to track migrants’ movements in real time. That deal helped the company pull in more than $113 million, as of early May, as part of its new and previous federal contracts, according to the New York Times. That figure does not include other contracts Palantir has obtained from the Trump administration including a $795 million deal—which could go as high as $1.3 billion—to provide AI-powered software to the Department of Defense.

These deals have helped Palantir’s stock rise from around $40 a share in November to more than $150 a share on Wednesday.

That’s good news for White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, the influencial architect of Trump’s fanatical immigration policies. He owns $100,000-$250,000 worth of Palantir stock, according to his financial disclosure form, a holding that creates a colossal potential conflict of interest, the Project on Government Oversight reported last month.

If the Democrats manage to recapture either congressional chamber in 2026, they will likely make Washington less hospitable for Palantir. Last month, Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), Rep. Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), and eight other Democrats sent a letter peppering the company with questions about its “enabling and profiting from serious violations of Federal law by helping the Trump Administration compile a database including Americans’ taxpayer data.”

Palantir has issued statements disputing the lawmakers’ letter and the New York Times reporting on its federal contracts. The company contends that its software is supporting US soliders and helping hospitals save lives. “We are committed to America, regardless of which party the American people have voted into office,” the firm said.

But the Democrats’ plans are clear. These legislators asked Palantir to preserve records related to its work for the Trump administration for “future Congressional oversight.”

“Congress will fully investigate and hold accountable Trump Administration officials that violate Americans’ rights, as well as contractors like Palantir that profit from and enable those abuses,” they wrote.

Thiel talks about encouraging political disruption that unleashes AI and allows tech pioneers to run unfettered. But as he bankrolls Republican lawmakers, keeping the Democrats from gaining subpoena power may also be on his mind.

Russ Choma contributed to this report.

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Did That Weird Birthday Letter to Jeffrey Epstein Sound Like the Work of Donald Trump?

This story was originally published by Popular Information, a substack publication to which you can subscribe here.

This past Thursday, the Wall Street Journal published a bombshell report about President Trump’s relationship with convicted child sex abuser Jeffrey Epstein. According to the Journal, the materials collected as part of the Department of Justice’s investigation into Epstein included a 2003 birthday message from Trump to Epstein.

Trump’s alleged message consists of “several lines of typewritten text framed by the outline of a naked woman, which appears to be hand-drawn with a heavy marker.” The drawing, which the Journal describes as “bawdy,” includes “[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.” Inside the figure of the woman was the following text:

Voice Over: There must be more to life than having everything

Donald: Yes, there is, but I won’t tell you what it is.

Jeffrey: Nor will I, since I also know what it is.

Donald: We have certain things in common, Jeffrey.

Jeffrey: Yes, we do, come to think of it.

Donald: Enigmas never age, have you noticed that?

Jeffrey: As a matter of fact, it was clear to me the last time I saw you.

Donald: A pal is a wonderful thing. Happy Birthday — and may every day be another wonderful secret.

Trump told the Journal that the letter is “fake” and quickly sued the paper, its owner Rupert Murdoch, and the two reporters who wrote the story for $10 billion. On Truth Social, Trump insisted that the letter is “not the way I talk.”

Meanwhile, numerous allies of the president have echoed this claim, arguing that the letter is inauthentic because its language does not sound like Trump.

“Does anyone honestly believe this sounds like Donald Trump?” Vice President JD Vance asked rhetorically on X. White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said the letter published by the Journal is “not at all how he speaks or writes.” Trump’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., said it is obvious the letter is inauthentic because it doesn’t match his father’s “very specific way of speaking.”

To evaluate these claims, Popular Information examined the most distinctive aspects of the letter and assessed whether they are consistent with Trump’s history.

“Enigma“

The most distinctive single word in the letter is “enigma.” Is it plausible that Trump, known for using simple language, would use that word?

Trump’s defenders do not believe so. “I find it to be an enigma that Donald Trump would use the word enigma,” billionaire Bill Ackman, a prominent Trump supporter, wrote on X.

Sean Davis, the CEO of the right-wing publication The Federalist, posted that he asked Grok, the chatbot created by xAI, to “search every record of Trump speaking or writing” for the word “enigma” and determined “there is no record of him ever saying or speaking the word.” (Trump Jr. reposted Davis’ claim.)

Davis’ confident assertion is false and demonstrates the hazards of relying exclusively on AI tools for research. In 2015, Trump used the word “enigma” twice to describe Ben Carson, one of his Republican primary opponents. “Now, Carson’s an enigma to me,” Trump said. “Carson’s an enigma.”

Trump also used the word “enigma” twice in his 2004 book, Trump: How to Get Rich. “Dan Rather is an enigma to me,” Trump wrote on page 166. He uses enigma again on page 55, writing that entrepreneurial skills are “one of those grey areas that remain an enigma even to those with finely-honed business instincts.”

Trump also used the term in his 1990 book, Trump: Surviving at the Top. “Any discussion of Mike’s affairs eventually leads to the subject of Don King,” Trump wrote about Mike Tyson on page 200. “Don, like Mike, is something of an enigma.”

So, while enigma is not a commonly used word, it is one that Trump has deployed in a variety of contexts for many years.

“Pal“

The word “pal,” which appears at the end of the letter to Epstein, is somewhat old-fashioned and less commonly used than the more straightforward term “friend.” Trump, however, has used “pal” over the years to describe his close associates.

In a 2018 roundtable on tax reform, Trump talked about his friendship with Steve Witkoff, who is currently Trump’s special envoy to the Middle East. “He’s become a very wealthy, successful man,” Trump said. “And he’s my pal.”

During a 2011 speech to the Nevada Republican Party, Trump referred to developer Phil Ruffin as “my pal.”

Maurice Sendak

Perhaps the most distinctive characteristic of the letter is the opening line: “There must be more to life than having everything.” This is a direct quote from Higglety Pigglety Pop!, a classic 1967 book by children’s author Maurice Sendak. It comes off like an inside joke between the two men.

Sendak and Trump have a history. In 1993, Sendak published We Are All in the Dumps with Jack and Guy. The book, which stirred controversy due to its exploration of weighty topics such as the AIDS crisis, garnered extensive coverage in the national media, including the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and the Palm Beach Post—the local paper for Mar-a-Lago.

It also featured a direct attack on Trump, with one illustration featuring homeless children against the backdrop of Trump Tower. The children exclaim, “Tricked. Trumped. Dumped!”

Maurice Sendak

A September 5, 1993, story in the New York Times highlights Sendak’s criticism of Trump. The reporter, Degen Pener, said he reached out to Trump for comment. (Trump did not respond.)

Trump is a voracious consumer of media, especially when it involves him, so he almost certainly would have read the coverage of Sendak’s book. The fact that the New York Times, a paper Trump follows closely, reached out to him increases those odds further.

The timing of the incident, 1993, coincides with a period during which Epstein and Trump were known to socialize together regularly.

Third person

Another distinctive feature of the letter is that it creates a fake dialogue between Trump and Epstein, in which Trump refers to himself in the third person.

Trump frequently refers to himself in the third person. A Washington Post analysis of this habit, published in 2019, refers to Trump as the “third-person-in-chief.”

Trump also enjoys recounting conversations between himself and another person. Many of these tales are apocryphal. For example, during a June 2020 rally, this is how Trump relayed a conversation between himself and First Lady Melania Trump after Trump was filmed having difficulty drinking from a glass of water:

I call my wife, I said, “How good was that speech? I thought it was a…” But I call my wife and I said, “How good was it, darling?”

She said, “You’re trending number one.”

I said to our great first lady, I said, “Let me ask you a question. Was it that good, the speech, that I’m trending number one? Because I felt it was really good.'”

“No no, they don’t even mention the speech. They mention the fact that you may have Parkinson’s disease.”

So, so then my wife said, “Well, it wasn’t only the ramp. Did you have water?”

I said, “Yeah. I was speakin’ for a long time. I didn’t wanna drink it, but I wanted to wet my lips a little bit, you know?” … So what happens is I said, “What does it have to do with water?”

They said, “You couldn’t lift your hand up to your mouth with water?”

I said, ‘I just saluted 600 times like this, and this was before I saluted, so what’s the problem?

The same speech involved Trump narrating extended conversations between himself and the CEO of Boeing, as well as with an unnamed general. In other words, the form of the letter is consistent with one of Trump’s favorite rhetorical devices.

The “picture”

Trump also claimed the letter was fake because it featured a picture drawn by Trump, and “I don’t draw pictures.”

In fact, Trump has drawn many pictures, frequently using a “heavy marker,” just as the Journal described the Epstein letter. The pictures were sometimes auctioned for charity.

Juliene’s Auctions

He also discusses his artistic talents (and uses the third person) in his 2008 book, Trump Never Give Up: How I Turned My Biggest Challenges Into Success.

“It takes me a few minutes to draw something, in my case, it’s usually a building or a cityscape of skyscrapers, and then sign my name, but it raises thousands of dollars to help the hungry in New York through the Capuchin Food Pantries Ministry,” Trump wrote.

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Ibram X. Kendi vs. America’s “Antiracism Backlash”

Just a few years ago, historian and activist Dr. Ibram X. Kendi seemed to be everywhere. At the height of the Black Lives Matter movement, Kendi became one of the leading voices on racism in America—and particularly what he described as antiracism. In 2019, his book How to Be an Antiracist became a best-seller. And later, just months after the death of George Floyd—a Black man killed by a white police officer in Minneapolis—Kendi founded The Center for Antiracist Research at Boston University, receiving $55 million in funding.

But over the last few years, as a backlash grew against the BLM movement, Kendi also came under attack. His ideas urging people to be actively antiracist were often the target of conservative critics fighting against DEI policies and the teaching of critical race theory. Kendi was also accused of mismanaging the antiracism center at BU, which laid off much of its staff before closing last month. (BU cleared Kendi of financial mismanagement.) Later this fall, Kendi will head up another academic project, this time at Howard University’s Institute for Advanced Study, which will focus on racism and the global African diaspora.

As the Trump administration eliminates DEI initiatives and erases parts of Black history throughout the federal government, Kendi places this moment alongside two others in American history: the end of Reconstruction in the 1870s and the racial violence that marked the segregation era during the 1920s. “These are moments in which you had very powerful racist forces who were seeking to eliminate policies and practices and ideas that had been created to bring about more democracy and equity and equality,” Kendi says. “We’re literally right now in a very pitched battle for the future of justice in the United States and frankly around the world.”

On this week’s More To The Story, Kendi discusses this historical moment with host Al Letson, responds to the criticism he faced at Boston University, and talks about Malcolm Lives!, his new book for young readers about Malcolm X.

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: So I was first introduced to your work when I read your 2019 book, How to Be an Antiracist. Now, I had never heard that term antiracist before. It was a new way of looking at how to address racism. For those who haven’t had a chance to read it, what does it mean to be an antiracist?

Dr. Ibram X. Kendi: Well, the book and what I try to show through my research is that the true opposite of racist is not not racist, it is antiracist. That historically, and even in our moment, typically people who self-identify as not racist, they do so largely after they just did or said something that was racist. It’s also the case that the term not racist is a term that’s widely used without a definition. So I actually have yet to see somebody actually define clearly what it means to be not racist. And then thirdly, the reason why antiracist is the true opposite of racist is because most people understand, for instance, that a racist idea is a notion that suggests racial hierarchy, that a particular racial group is superior to another racial group, or inferior. What’s the opposite of hierarchy? Equality. There’s a true opposite. And antiracist ideas suggest racial equality, that no racial group is superior or inferior.

If a racist policy is yielding racial inequity between groups, what’s the opposite of that? A policy that yields racial equity. It’s a clear opposite. And so I’ve tried to show that we should be supporting antiracist policies that lead to racial equity. We should be expressing ideas, antiracist ideas about racial equality, and ultimately we should be striving to be antiracist, which is to say we should be actively seeking to confront the structure of racism, while recognizing that if we do nothing in the face of the status quo of racial inequity, then that racial inequity and injustice will persist. And those who are seeking to conserve that status quo want the rest of us to do nothing. That’s literally the goal of racist ideas, to convince us that there’s no problem other than, let’s say, Black people. And so that’s why being antiracist is an action. It’s an active term, it’s an active practice, while being racist could be active or even passive. You just do nothing and allow racism to persist.

I guess the thing that I’m thinking about a lot is, when you talk about race in America, what triggers a lot of white people, at least the white people that I’ve spoken to specifically on this topic, is that they feel like they have worked extremely hard for the things that they have. And when you tell them that there’s another group of people who have had it harder, and some of them have come from very hard circumstances. I remember someone talking years ago about, try explaining white privilege to people who are living in Appalachia with nothing. And so I’m wondering, how do we bridge that gap?

One of the ways in which those of us who study racism, one of the findings and one of the things we’ve tried to show in recent years, and I certainly showed this in a chapter called “White” in my book, How to Be an Antiracist, Heather McGee has written about this in a book called The Sum of Us. There’s another book called Dying of Whiteness by Jonathan Metzl. And the throughline between these three books is really showing through evidence the ways which it is the case that white people benefit more, let’s say, than peoples of color from racist policies and practices. But what we’ve also shown is that they, white people, would actually benefit even more from antiracist policies and practices.

In other words, white people are less likely to be disenfranchised because of the series of voter suppression policies that have been instituted in this country in the last few years, frankly since the undermining of the Voting Rights Act in 2013. It’s less likely for them to struggle to vote. But that doesn’t mean that there are not white people that are still struggling to vote, particularly white people who are students, particularly white people who are poor, particularly white people who are senior citizens. And so a truly equitable and antiracist electoral policy that would make it easy for all of us to vote would actually make it easier for more white people to vote, just as it would make it easier for people of color to vote.
So the current system benefits white people more than it does people of color, but an actual truly equitable policy would benefit us all. So I think one of the things we’re trying, let’s say, to show white people is that Donald Trump is not an aberration. Which is to say, a person who is trying to say to white people, “I am your defender” when his actual policies are harming the majority of white people and people of color, is not an aberration. That’s racism in and of itself.

Yeah. So I want to move on to your work and where it’s been and where it’s going. And you founded the Center for Antiracist Research at Boston University, and you just closed up shop there. So there have been reports that there were some mismanagement, and the university said that the investigation found no evidence of wrongdoing. Can you walk us through what happened? Because it was a really big deal when you opened up the center.

Well, what happened is we created a center for antiracist research, and it was founded in 2020 in the middle of the pandemic, in the middle of the so-called racial reckoning. And so of course we had really ambitious ideas for our center, and we started receiving resources and hiring people and pursuing projects. And by 2021, especially 2022 and 2023, a lot of the support we were receiving had started to get dried up. And at the same time, the attacks on so-called critical race theory and so-called wokeism and so-called DEI was picking up tremendously. And of course we as a center became the subject of that. And frankly, if you’re a Black leader, chances are somebody have claimed that you mismanaged something, because apparently Black leaders, we can’t manage anything. And so it wasn’t surprising for me or anyone who sort of studies racism that those allegations surfaced. And just as it wasn’t surprising to us when ultimately it was investigated, and in our center there was really no wrongdoing.

Can you talk to me about what it feels like to be in the center of the storm? I’ve actually on social media at times been a subject of conversation, but nowhere near the amount of being in the eye of the storm that you’ve been in. And I imagine having a center like this in a time when basically, at least when your center was going on, it was at the start of what I consider a Blacklash, where people were tired of hearing about antiracist policies. They were tired of 1619, and they’re tired of it because they’re being pushed by provocateurs to look at this as like it’s a bad thing and it’s harming the country. So what is it like to be in the center of the storm while that’s all going on?

I think ultimately the biggest challenge of being at the center of a storm is not taking it personally. That ultimately-

Oh my God, how do you do that? I don’t know how to do that.

Yeah, it’s incredibly hard to not do. But ultimately, even by 2020, the major talking point that emerged to really undermine those of us who were engaged in antiracist work was actually an old white nationalist talking point, which essentially was that antiracist is code for anti-white. And so those of us who were striving for racial justice, who were striving for equal opportunity, who were striving for equity, we were misrepresented as striving to somehow harm white people or take away opportunities or resources for them. And that was purposeful, because there was an attempt to anger white Americans and to manipulate them into somehow seeing that all these efforts are going to harm them, as opposed to, as we talked about earlier, help them just as it was going to help peoples of color.

And so I became one of the faces of that. And again, I had to figure out a way to know that this had nothing to do with me. That even as my name was being used, my image was being used, anyone who had read my work could know that I was being misrepresented. And so at the time, I really had to trust readers. I had to trust people who consumed my work. And I had to also, again, not take it personally. But it was very difficult because there was people who hated me who never read my work, and it was pretty obvious by the things that they said. The other part of it that I think is less talked about is, there’s not only a lot of these attacks coming from people who want to conserve racism, but then there’s also people who have been challenging racism who personally want to be the person in the spotlight, and they take issue with anyone who is in the spotlight. There’s a certain level of envy there as well.

And so when you’re in the spotlight, particularly in this context, you not only get attacked, bad faith attacks by people who want to conserve racism, but even bad faith attacks by people who claim they want to challenge racism, because they didn’t enter this arena truly committed to the eradication of racism. They entered the arena because they’re interested in fame and resources. And then those who are in the spotlight, they project themselves onto those people. So that’s also incredibly difficult. And it’s particularly difficult when those persons I’m speaking about are Black.

So now you’re heading back to DC, you’re going to Howard University, and you’re launching a new institute there. So what are you hoping for with this new institute?

Well, just first and foremost, I feel like this is a full circle moment for me personally, because I really started my journey to be an intellectual at Florida A&M University, at an historically Black university. And I don’t know if I would have embarked on that journey if I had not been in that space. And so to be able to return to Howard University, to be able to work very closely with Howard faculty and students and alumni, to be able to be in a space where there’s a long history of nurturing scholars like me who study racism, is something I’m incredibly excited about. And to be there with other, again, scholars whose work I’ve studied and admired for a long time, I’m just really excited about the prospects.

Yeah. So I grew up in Jacksonville, Florida, so I’m a big Rattlers fan. So going to Howard University, and your work primarily is in antiracism, I’m just wondering, how do you adapt that for a school that is celebrating their Blackness? I think the beautiful things about HBCUs is that in many ways the world of America, the world that rejects Blackness, is on the outside of those campus walls, and on the inside of that campus is nothing but love and nurturing for these young Black minds moving forward. And so antiracism is definitely something to be talked about there, but it’s different than being at BU, isn’t it?

So I think the way that I have conceived of being antiracist, and let me actually even return to How to Be an Antiracist, most of that book, which is largely a story of my journey, my journey of internalizing anti-Black racist ideas, and ultimately how I was able to begin to liberate myself from those ideas and strive to be antiracist, most of that book is actually set in Black spaces, is actually set in which I’m interacting with other Black people. And there are multiple chapters in that book on FAMU, in which I talk about how at FAMU I experienced and witnessed colorism, how at FAMU I experienced and witnessed beliefs that certain groups, Black ethnic groups, were better or worse than others. And how I went on to another Black space in African-American studies and found that there were certain views that Black men were better than Black women, or had it worse.
And so I mention that because even within Black spaces, there may be a general consensus that there’s nothing inferior about Black people in general, but that doesn’t necessarily mean there’s a recognition that there’s nothing inferior about any group of Black people, whether they’re dark-skinned Black people or Black women or Black poor people, or Haitian Americans or African-Americans. And so I’ve always, through my work on being antiracist, ensured that being antiracist was something that Black people most importantly needed to do. And so I’m excited to really show that and convey that and codify that in a Black space like Howard.

Yeah. I want to take a few minutes to really dive into your new book. So let’s talk about Malcolm Lives! How important was it to introduce Malcolm X to young readers for you? I would tell you that for me personally, reading The Autobiography of Malcolm X literally changed my life. I remember when I read it, I was in middle school. The book had been around, I don’t know if you remember, but the autobiography had a painted cover with a black background of Malcolm X on it. It was such a beautiful book, and I remember seeing it around the house, and I picked it up one day and just started reading it, and it literally shifted the trajectory of my life. So when I heard that you were writing this new book, Malcolm Lives! for young readers, I was just immediately excited.

Yeah. And frankly, what’s striking about Malcolm is, so many people like you have been completely transformed by reading his autobiography, or other people have been transformed by people who were transformed by reading Malcolm’s autobiography.

Right, right.

And so Malcolm’s story is truly transformational. And why should young people have to wait until, let’s say they’re in high school, to be able to be transformed too by Malcolm’s story, by Malcolm’s ideas? And so that’s one of the reasons why I thought it was critically important to write Malcolm Lives! and to write it for young people so that they can be transformed just like we have.

Yeah, I still remember going to see Spike Lee’s movie, Malcolm X, which I will argue with anybody is the greatest American biopic ever. And that’s all I have to say. But again, watching his life and taking in the lessons and the turns that his life made, it sounds like your book is concentrating on his life after he came back from his trip to the Middle East and Africa. Is that right?

So it narrates, certainly, his transformation after coming back from Mecca, after recognizing and realizing that nation of Islam theology that white people could not be Muslim and that they were inherently evil, that that simply was not true. Because he came across many white Muslims in Mecca and came across white people who treated him equitably and equally. And so him realizing racial equality, obviously, and narrating how he came to that, and also how he came to the importance of Pan-African, global Black solidarity through meetings that he had with leaders of African states, newly decolonized African nations, was absolutely pivotal. And I think it was also pivotal in Malcolm Lives! to show the ways in which as a young person, everything that he went through, which you can’t really understand Malcolm as an adult, you can’t really understand Malcolm as this revolutionary who’s become so clear and audacious in his challenge to global white supremacy and racism, without understanding the ways in which he was impacted by those structures as a young person constantly and consistently. And so I also wanted young people to see that and learn about that.

Yeah, you can’t understand Malcolm X unless you understand Malcolm Little and then understanding El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz. It’s like the whole trajectory of it.

Definitely.

Last question for you, and this is a big one. Given that you are a historian, a public thinker, you’ve studied these movements for a very long time, where do you think we’re going?

So I think we’re headed for, I think this moment is actually quite similar to moments like the 1870s or even the 1920s in American history. And these are moments in which you had very powerful racist forces who were seeking to eliminate policies and practices and ideas that had been created to bring about more democracy and equity and equality. And so we’re literally right now in a very pitched battle for the future of justice in the United States, and frankly around the world. And so it’s hard to say where we’re going, but I can say what the battle is. And the battle is between equality and inequality, between justice and injustice, between democracy and dictatorship. And we all have to figure out what side of that battle that we’re going to be on.

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The FDA Held a Misinformation Fest About Antidepressants in Pregnancy

Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has long railed against antidepressants, and now he has very practical ways to attack them.

As my colleague Kiera Butler has written, Kennedy has claimed, without evidence, that they can cause addiction and school shootings. He even proposed sending people who take them to “wellness farms,” where they can grow their own organic foods, get “re-parented,” and wean themselves off antidepressants and other medications.

But on Monday, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) appeared to move closer towards realizing RFK’s goal of getting people off the drugs, quietly convening a so-called expert panel to discuss selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors—a type of antidepressant commonly known as SSRIs—and pregnancy.The two-hour panel was livestreamed and is available to watch on the FDA’s YouTube page. It was moderated by a pair of FDA staffers, who gave each panelist five minutes to make an opening presentation and then asked a few questions submitted by the public. While 13 percent of Americans use antidepressants, whose efficacy varies but have been shown to help at least 20 percent of people who take them, a far smaller number of pregnant women—research suggests six to ten percent—are on them.

Many of the panel’s ten participants—a combination of researchers and practicing psychologists, several of whom have publicly spoken out against the use of antidepressants—largely repeated what one women’s health expert called “MAHA talking points” against medications and the biological legitimacy of anxiety and depression. Often, panelists’ arguments were so full of misinformation that Steven Fleischman, the president of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG), a professional group for OB-GYNs, promptly put out a statement calling the panel “alarmingly unbalanced” and alleging that the majority “did not adequately acknowledge the harms of untreated perinatal mood disorders in pregnancy.”

There are, indeed, major mental health struggles facing American moms. Research published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in 2020 found that approximately one in eight women experience postpartum depression (PPD) after giving birth, which can lead to difficulties bonding, developmental delays for the infant, and other negative health outcomes. The latest CDC data, from 2017 to 2019, shows that mental health conditions, including suicides and overdoses, were the leading underlying causes of pregnancy-related deaths. The picture has only grown more dire recently: Research published in February in the Journal of Health Economics and Outcomes found that the Supreme Court’s decision overruling Roe v. Wade led to an increase in PPD diagnoses in states with abortion bans compared to those without. Another large study, published in the May issue of_JAMA Internal Medicine_, found that American mothers reported large declines in their mental health from 2016 to 2023, with single and low-income mothers reporting particularly large drops.

But listening to the FDA panel on Monday, you would be forgiven for thinking that perinatal depression—which refers to depression both during and after pregnancy—is not, in fact, real.

In his introductory remarks, FDA Chief Dr. Martin Makary—an abortion opponent and a former surgeon and professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine—called for more study of the “root causes” of perinatal depression. “We have to talk about the role of healthy relationships, of communities, of natural light exposure, of other modalities and co-factors that may be involved,” he said.

Another panelist, Dr. Josef Witt-Doerring, a psychiatrist whose practice focuses on weaning people from their psychiatric medications, similarly claimed that in contrast to physical conditions, it is impossible to point to distinct causes for mental health disorders. Instead, he claimed, personal problems like loneliness and job dissatisfaction tend to triggerdepression. “These are not things to be fixed with medical intervention,” added Witt-Doerring, who also runs a YouTube channel that spotlights the stories of people who have faced adverse side effects from taking psychiatric medications.

Women are “naturally experiencing their emotions more intensely, and those are gifts. They’re not symptoms of a disease.”

Roger McFillen, a psychologist and host of a podcast on which he and guests have railed against vaccines and birth control, suggested that women are “naturally experiencing their emotions more intensely, and those are gifts. They’re not symptoms of a disease.” McFillen also suggested, without evidence, that “many women feel coerced” to get on medications to treat perinatal depression.

"If you want to increase suffering, you fundamentally get people to battle their own internal experiences. You learn not to trust your emotions, you judge them as symptoms." We are facing an epidemic of iatrogenic harm. Manufacturing a disease to sell more drugs. There are better… pic.twitter.com/KTFCF9FmJB

— Dr. Roger McFillin (@DrMcFillin) July 22, 2025

I reached out to Wendy N. Davis, a psychotherapist and the president and CEO of Postpartum Support International, to get her take on the panelists’ characterization of perinatal depression. “That kind of thinking is not evidence-based,” she said, “and not even anecdotally true.” Indeed, physicians and researchers who treat and study PPD note that a combination of genetics, a history of anxiety and depression, and psychosocial factors can play a role in the development of the disorder. Experts say it can be effectively treated through a combination of therapy, medication, and support groups.

David Healy, a former professor of psychiatry at McMaster University in Canada and Bangor and Cardiff Universities in the UK, agreed with Witt-Doerring, claiming that people with depression and melancholia, a severe type of depression, can often “recover spontaneously,” even within a few months. But the American Academy of Pediatrics recommends that new parents should repeatedly be screened for PPD until the baby is six months old, noting that, if left untreated, it can lead to “long-term adverse health complications.” A 2020 study published in the journal Pediatrics found that 25 percent of nearly 5,000 mothers studied had higher rates of PPD at some point in the three years after giving birth.

Then there was the misinformation about actually treating perinatal depression with medication. Several of the panelists suggested, for example, that theuse of SSRIs during pregnancy can lead to an increased risk of autism in infants. But while some studies have found a higher occurrence of autism in these babies, researchers have cautioned against drawing a causal inference, and several large studies have found no association at all between SSRI use in pregnancy and autism.

Another claim repeated by many panelists was that doctors have withheld information about the risks of SSRIs from pregnant patients. In response, Fleischman, from ACOG, explained, “Patients who choose to continue taking SSRIs during pregnancy with the support of their OBGYNs do so following counseling on the risks and benefits that includes discussion of the data and consideration of their own needs, values, and priorities.”

“The claim that the FDA’s expert advisory process is ‘one-sided’ or politically driven is insulting to the independent scientists, clinicians, and researchers who dedicate their expertise to these panels.”

Panelists offered several suggestions for the path forward. They argued the FDA should strengthen its warnings about SSRI use during pregnancy to include more information about the impacts on preterm birth, preeclampsia, and postpartum hemorrhage. “There is now more than enough evidence to support strong warnings from the FDA about how these drugs disrupt fetal development and impact moms,” panelist Adam Urato, chief of maternal-fetal medicine at MetroWest Medical Center in Massachusetts, claimed. But studies show that SSRIs have only small or negligible impacts on the health issues that Urato raised.

A spokesperson for HHS said the agency would not comment on potential future policy decisions, adding, “The claim that the FDA’s expert advisory process is ‘one-sided’ or politically driven is insulting to the independent scientists, clinicians, and researchers who dedicate their expertise to these panels.”

Dr. Kay Roussos-Ross, an OBGYN and the director of the Perinatal Mood Disorders program at the University of Florida College of Medicine, was a rare expert in this group who pointed out that research has shown how untreated depression and anxiety in pregnancy can lead to a host of health problems for the pregnant person and their baby, including preterm delivery, inadequate prenatal care, substance abuse, and developmental delays for the child. Roussos-Ross also pointed to one study that revealed women who stopped taking medications in pregnancy were five times more likely to experience a relapse of symptoms compared to those who remained on them. “Not every single woman will need an antidepressant,” Roussos-Ross said during the panel, “but for those that do, it’s life-changing and life-saving.”

Jen Gunter, an OB-GYN and author of three books on menstruation, menopause, and vaginal health, called most of the panelists “depression deniers” who did not share basicevidence-based information. In a post on Bluesky, she praised Roussos-Ross for “shutting down all the others who were fear-mongering.”

Davis, from Postpartum Support International, said she just hopes struggling mothers understand that there is evidence-based help out there. “A mom can’t call the FDA panel,” she said, “and it’s not going to help her to listen to it.”

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Did Christian Nationalist Leaders Prompt Mike Johnson’s Epstein Flip-Flop?

On Tuesday, House Speaker Mike Johnson, in a departure from his previous calls for transparency, announced that he would not ask for a vote on whether the files pertaining to accused sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein should be released. Only a week before, on the right-wing podcast “The Benny Show,” he had said, “It’s a very delicate subject, but we should put everything out there and let the people decide it.” This week, he changed his tune, and at a press conference, he said, “We need the administration to have the space to do what it is doing.” He allowed that should there be a “neccesary or appropriate” need for further congressional action, he would look at it. But then said emphatically, “I don’t think we’re at that point yet, because we agree with the president.”

It’s impossible to truly know what prompted Johnson’s about-face, but it’s worth noting that he has long been connected to the New Apostolic Reformation, a charismatic evangelical movement that teaches that Christians are called to take “dominion” over all aspects of society, including the government. Johnson has publicly acknowledged that NAR has had a “profound influence” on his life, according to a report issued by the Congressional Freethought Caucus last year.

It’s also worth noting that arguably the most influential and visible NAR leader, a Texas business strategist named Lance Wallnau, has been outspoken in recent weeks in his defense of Trump on the Epstein issue. On July 14, Wallnau told his 100,000 YouTube followers that he believed that Trump was acting in the best interest of the country by not releasing the files. Wallnau’s line of reasoning began with his suggestion that both the assassination of JFK and the assassination attempt on Trump last year in Butler, Pennsylvania, were inside jobs. He went on to describe Trump’s critics on the left as “demonic” people who “smell disunity” in MAGA and are using the infighting as an opportunity to tarnish Trump’s reputation. “I think they would be willing to plant information and evidence and create false trails, all kinds of booby traps,” he said.

Among Wallnau’s followers are some powerful people. As I reported last year, Wallnau has forged strong connections with GOP leaders—for example, he hosted a Pennsylvania campaign event for JD Vance last September. He also helped develop Project 19, a right-wing political initiative to win 19 key counties in swing states for Trump. Wallnau has called Kamala Harris a “Jezebel” and speculated that people on the political left may be controlled by demons.

Another prominent Christian nationalist influencer, Texas pastor Joel Webbon, has also arrived at a belief in Trump’s innocence—but from a different perspective. Webbon isn’t connected with the NAR like Johnson and Wallnau—instead, he’s a member of the TheoBros, a network of Christian nationalist millennial influencers. Many of them believe that women shouldn’t be allowed to vote, and that the Ten Commandments should replace the US Constitution. Like NAR, the TheoBros are also well-connected to Republican politicians. US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth attends a TheoBros-aligned church, and Vance has socialized with members of the movement, as well.

Last week, Webbon devoted an episode of his YouTube show, which has 123,000 followers, to the Epstein files. His guest was Scott Horton, a libertarian podcaster and staunch critic of the left-wing government “deep state” that Trump has consistently blamed for all of America’s ills. In the episode, Horton asserted that he didn’t believe that Trump would be implicated in the Epstein files. Moreover, he argued that Epstein was a foreign asset, likely working with the Israeli national intelligence agency Mossad to entrap Trump.

He’s not alone in believing this particular conspiracy theory; it was also put forth by right-wing broadcaster Tucker Carlson, who also hosted Horton on his show. “This isn’t just like, ‘oh my goodness, maybe we had somebody working with Israeli intelligence that was blackmailing politicians here in America,'” said Webbon. “The reality is that [US-Israeli relations have] been a toxic relationship stretching back decades.” He added, “This is becoming a massive problem that people are noticing, as the kids say.” The latter was an allusion to the antisemitic trope of “noticing,” a phrase that refers to people taking note of the fact that a powerful person is Jewish.

A link between Epstein, who was Jewish, and Mossad fed neatly into Webbon’s preexisting biases. He has routinely expressed antisemitic views on social media. Last November, he posted on X, “I hate Judaism but love Jews and wish them a very pleasant conversion to Christianity.” In a podcast episode, he called Judaism a “parasitical” religion. “What it has done historically throughout the ages is typically go into other countries, other peoples with other religions, and kind of cozy up but not really for their benefit—not a mutually beneficial relationship, but where they ultimately get far more out of the deal than the Christian nation does.” In an email to Mother Jones last year, Webbon said he stands by “everything I’ve said about Judaism. It is a pernicious evil.”

Meanwhile, some other evangelicals—though not Trump supporters— are pushing for the administration to release the files. Last week, Christianity Today editor-in-chief Russell Moore penned an op-ed in his magazine titled “Why We Want to See the Epstein Files.” The main reason was that “we want justice done,” he wrote. “We want to believe that our institutions—even in the present crises of credibility that most are going through—are not wholly corrupt.”

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