Trump’s Energy Chief, a Former Fracking CEO, Aims to Tinker With Key Climate Reports

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

US Energy Secretary Chris Wright is facing growing criticism from scientists who say their “worst fears” were realized when Wright revealed that the Trump administration would “update” the US’s premier climate crisis reports.

Wright, a former oil and gas executive, told CNN’s Kaitlin Collins earlier this week that the administration was reviewing national climate assessment reports published by past governments.

Produced by scientists and peer-reviewed, there have been five national climate assessment (NCA) reports since 2000 and they are considered the gold standard report of global heating and its impacts on human health, agriculture, water supplies and air pollution.

“We’re reviewing them, and we will come out with updated reports on those and with comments on those reports,” said Wright, who is one of the main supporters of the administration’s “drill, baby, drill” agenda to boost fossil fuels, which are the primary cause of the climate crisis.

Wright was speaking days after his agency, the Department of Energy, produced a report claiming concern over the climate crisis was overblown. That energy department report was slammed by scientists for being a “farce” full of misinformation.

“Lying about that [climate risk] reality doesn’t change it; it just leaves people in harm’s way. “

Speaking to CNN about the national climate assessment reports, Wright claimed they “weren’t fair in broad-based assessments of climate change.” He added: “When you get into departments and look at stuff that’s there and you find stuff that’s objectionable, you want to fix it,” he said.

In recent weeks the Trump administration deleted the website that hosted the periodic, legally mandated, national climate assessments. (The most recent report can be read in full on the Guardian website.)

Asked about Wright’s comments on the national climate assessment reports, respected climate scientist Michael Mann said in an emailed comment to the Guardian: “This is exactly what Joseph Stalin did.”

In a statement on Thursday, Rachel Cleetus, policy director at the Union of Concerned Scientists, and one of the authors of the sixth NCA report due in 2028 that the administration dismissed earlier this year, said she was dismayed by Wright’s comments: “Secretary Wright just confirmed our worst fears—that this administration plans to not just bury the scientific evidence but replace it with outright lies to downplay the worsening climate crisis and evade responsibility for addressing it.”

“The process for developing the congressionally mandated National Climate Assessment reports is rigorous, ” she added, “with federal agencies and hundreds of scientists constructing this solid scientific foundation that decision makers, businesses and the public rely on to stay safe in a world made more perilous each day by climate change.”

“People across the country are already reeling from climate-fueled worsening heatwaves, floods, wildfires and storms. Lying about that reality doesn’t change it; it just leaves people in harm’s way. We urge Congress to intervene to safeguard the integrity of the NCA reports so they remain vital, lifesaving tools in the fight against climate change.”

The NCA reports are published by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and a Department of Energy spokesperson told CNN that Wright was “not suggesting he personally would be altering past reports.”

In May, the American Meteorological Society and the American Geophysical Union said they would join forces to produce peer-reviewed research on the climate crisis’ impact after the NCA contributors for the 2028 publication were dismissed.

The Energy Department’s climate report last week was published on the same day the Environmental Protection Agency announced a proposal to undo the 2009 “endangerment finding,” which allows the agency to limit planet-heating pollution from cars and trucks, power plants, and other industrial sources.

This raised concerns that the Trump administration was attempting to scrap almost all pollution regulations in steps likely to trigger battles in the courts in the coming years.

Continue Reading…

“It’s Not Just a Texas Problem. It’s an American Problem.”

A lot of people want to get a hold of James Talarico these days. The 36-year-old Texas state representative and seminary student is a rising Democratic star. You—like 5.6 million others—may have seen him in your social-media feed, calling a proposal to place the Ten Commandments in every public-school classroom “un-Christian” and the mark of a “dead religion.” Or perhaps you caught his recent two-and-a-half-hour conversation with Joe Rogan—who told him he should run for president. (He’s thinking about running for Senate.)

He’s also on the lam. The state speaker of the house ordered arrest warrants for Talarico and dozens of Democrats who left the state last weekend to prevent a vote on a mid-decade redistricting plan that would likely give Republicans five more congressional seats. “Right before we got on the flight to leave Texas, we all gathered in an interfaith prayer, holding each other’s hands, because this is not just a political struggle, it’s also a spiritual struggle,” Talarico says. I spoke to the legislator via Zoom from an undisclosed location outside Chicago on Thursday, hours after Republican Sen. John Cornyn—a man he may end up running against next fall—announced that the Trump administration would assign FBI agents to help “hold these supposed lawmakers accountable.” This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Tim Murphy: Sen. John Cornyn says the FBI has agreed to help locate you. How does it feel to officially be wanted by the FBI?

James Talarico: Well, I mean, I think Senator Cornyn is trying to stay relevant in his primary battle with Ken Paxton. So I understand the gimmick, but I think it should trouble us that any politician is trying to use the resources of the state to arrest or remove duly elected legislators who are exercising their constitutional right to break quorum. The Texas State Constitution gives us this tool in our toolbox as the minority to check the abuses of the majority, and so we’re not doing anything wrong. And there’s about 200 years of history in this country of legislators breaking quorum, including Abraham Lincoln. You know, we’re here in Illinois, in the Land of Lincoln. And that’s appropriate because, because Abraham Lincoln broke quorum in 1840 as a state senator by jumping out of the window of the Illinois State Capitol. And thankfully, I didn’t have to jump out of any windows back in Texas. But this is not unusual. It is a tool the minority has. And so for Greg Abbott to threaten to remove us from office, for Ken Paxton and John Cornyn to be threatening our arrest, it is unacceptable in a democracy, and this is a page out of an authoritarian playbook we’ve seen in other countries, and it should be alarming to all of us, regardless of our political party.

TM: So what’s at stake here? Why are you here—wherever you are?

JT: Trump is asking Texas Republicans to redraw the maps that they just drew in 2021 to get him five more seats to protect his majority in Congress, because he’s worried about losing it in the next election, and it’s because his policies are unpopular, right? He’s starting wars and wrecking the economy. He’s protecting pedophiles. He’s kicking millions of people off their health care to fund tax breaks for billionaires, and those policies deserve to be evaluated by the American people and the only way we can hold the most powerful politician our country accountable is through free and fair elections, especially in the midterms, and that’s what’s at stake here. And it’s not just a Texas problem. It’s an American problem.

TM: What persuaded you to actually leave? Because it seems like there was a bit of debate among Democrats, and not all of your colleagues actually have left the state.

JT: When Donald Trump asked Georgia Republicans to find him 11,000 more votes after he lost the 2020 election, they said, No, sir. But when Trump asked Texas Republicans to find him five more congressional seats ahead of the 2026 elections, they said, How about Thursday? So the responsibility to defend and fix this representative democracy of ours fell to Texas Democrats, and 57 of us answered the call, and we’re proud to do so, regardless of what consequences we may face.

TM: Can you tell me a little bit about where you are, as much as you’re able to say?

JT: Well, we’re here in Illinois, and in a nondescript hotel room, as you can see, and that’s for security reasons. As you may have read, we had a bomb threat called into our hotel, and Ken Paxton has put out a tweet asking his followers to “hunt us down.” And so, you know, we’re trying to keep all of our members safe, all of our staff members safe, as we do this important work of fixing this democracy of ours so that it can work for every Texan and every American.

TM: What was that bomb threat like?

JT: It was early in the morning. I woke up to the bomb threat, and a lot of my colleagues did. And it was certainly scary, because we all had to evacuate, and law enforcement swarmed the premises, and we were outside for hours. But I think it’s a reminder that what we’re doing is very important. They wouldn’t be trying to bomb you if you’re not doing something consequential. And we feel that we are at the front lines of protecting and hopefully advancing the American experiment, because if people—Democrats, independents and Republicans alike—can’t hold their elected officials accountable in a midterm election, if they’re not able to change their government from the bottom up, if they’re not able to elect the representatives of their choice, then we no longer have representative democracy and and we’re not ready to accept that.

TM: Texas legislators make something like $7,200 a year. You’re not swimming in inherited wealth or anything like that. Are you putting everything on your card while you’re up here or is somebody else paying for the hotel room? How does this work financially?

JT: It depends. You know, we’re facing financial penalties, fines from the state legislature for breaking quorum. It’s about $500 a day. Those we’re going to pay ourselves, which certainly won’t be easy to do depending how long this lasts, but we will be paying those fines ourselves. Travel, food, lodging—that we’re able to pay out of our campaign accounts, out of the caucus’ account. And thankfully, you know, we have been flooded with grassroots donations from all across Texas, from all across America. You know, $5, $10, $15—regular people funding this operation of ours. And it’s appropriate because we’re fighting for the people, not just Democrats, but independents and Republicans too, and it’s appropriate that those people are the ones funding this effort.

TM: What did you expect from this episode, versus what you’ve gotten? Because it seems a bit more intense than what you went through in 2021.

JT: I think that’s right. I’ve been frankly shocked at how Texas Republicans have conducted themselves, you know, endangering the safety of their colleagues, threatening to remove those colleagues from their duly elected positions and then, you know, people like Donald Trump sending in the FBI to find us. So that kind of rhetoric, those kind of actions, should be deeply disturbing to every American, regardless of their political affiliation, because we’ve seen how this authoritarian playbook works out in other countries, and it doesn’t lead anywhere good.

TM: There’s been a lot of legal threats swirling around this, from Ken Paxton, John Cornyn, Donald Trump, Greg Abbott. How much of this is kind of jockeying for the primary, as you mentioned, and how much of this is like real legal threats that you’re concerned about?

JT: It’s hard to tell. And you know, we think they’re on pretty dubious legal ground but unfortunately, our courts have become highly politicized. They’ve been bought by big money, particularly in Texas, and so it may not matter what the law says. It may just matter what the politics requires, and so we’ll see how this plays out. But my colleagues and I are not going to be deterred. We are here to fight for our constituents and fight for all Texans. We’re here to fight for free and fair elections for every single person in this country and we’re participating in a long American tradition of standing up to bullies, of speaking truth to power, of civil disobedience, of good trouble.

TM: There’s a push to have Democrats respond in kind with redistricting elsewhere. It’s something that Illinois Governor JB Pritzker has called for. Do you think that that’s something that Democrats can actually level the playing field with or is that a losing battle against a party that controls a lot more states?

JT: Our ultimate goal is to get the politics out of redistricting everywhere. We should ban gerrymandering across this country, in every state, red states and blue states alike. It’s why I filed a bill in the Texas legislature to create an independent, citizen led redistricting commission so that voters can choose their politicians instead of politicians choosing their voters. That said, if one side is intent on cheating—which is exactly what Texas Republicans are doing and what Donald Trump is doing by redrawing the maps in the middle of the decade at the direct request of the most powerful man in the country—they are attempting to rig the next election. There’s no other way to describe it. And so if that’s the case, if one side’s going to cheat, all bets are off. And Democrats should not unilaterally disarm, but we should maintain our vision for how we can ultimately fix this democracy so it can work for regular people all over the country.

TM: Do you really think that you can stop this particular redistricting effort from advancing, if you come back and Greg Abbott just calls another session and another session after that?

JT: If every American who took a brave stand throughout our history did it because they knew they were going to win, we’d probably have a very different country right now. Sometimes you have to stand up, even if you’re not sure if you’ll be successful. But I can just tell you, over the last four days of this special session and of this quorum break, we have shined a national, an international spotlight on this power grab in Texas, and that, in and of itself, is a victory. People and the media are talking about this in a way they weren’t before. Sometimes the media needs conflict to be able to report on the news, and so we’re happy to provide that to make sure that all Americans are informed about what’s happening in their name and what’s happening in their government, and how the most powerful politician in the country is trying to rig the upcoming midterm elections. But if we can inspire blue states to respond in kind, if we can inspire acts of courage across the country to stand up to these would be tyrants, then we’re going to consider that a victory.

TM: What would you like to be working on in a special session if you were back in Austin, not not dealing with redistricting?

JT: I think the top of the list is relief for those flood victims and their families in the Texas Hill Country, an area of the state that means a lot to me personally, where I’ve spent a lot of time, where my family has lived, and so we need to get that relief to that community, and we’ve got to prevent a disaster like that from happening ever again in our state. We showed up two weeks ago at the beginning of this special session, and we begged our Republican colleagues to prioritize flood relief and disaster mitigation, and they refused to do so. They held 12 hearings on redistricting, and they held two hearings on flood relief. They didn’t even file a flood bill, and so instead, they put flood victims and their families at the end of the agenda and used them as leverage to try to rig the next election and pass these correct maps. It’s cynical politics at its worst. It’s deeply immoral, and it should outrage all of us, regardless of our party.

TM: You’ve been floated as a candidate for US Senator and governor. Have you narrowed that search at all, or the timeline for that?

JT: Well, I am seriously looking at the US Senate race, but frankly, it’s kind of been put on hold. I was hired by 200,000 people in Central Texas to fight for them at the state capitol. I’m basically their attorney in state government, even though I’m not an attorney, I’m a former teacher. But that’s my job, to defend them and their interests, and that’s what I’m doing by breaking quorum and stopping their voices from being silenced, and I intend on doing this job before I start applying to other jobs. So once we stop this power grab and kill these corrupt maps, I’ll start thinking about other ways I may be able to serve in the future.

Continue Reading…

Relentless Climate Disasters Are Wiping Out Local Businesses

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

The United States is home to millions of small businesses that form the backbone of countless communities. Even during the best of times keeping shops solvent can be a struggle, but when climate-driven disasters strike, the impact on mom-and-pops can be particularly devastating—and prolonged.

“The news coverage has definitely focused on the physical destruction,” said Kyle McCurry. He is the director of public relations for Explore Asheville, an organization that promotes the North Carolina city, which Hurricane Helene pummeled with torrential rain and flooding last fall. “But sometimes what’s less visible is the economic impact on small businesses in our community over time.”

Whether it’s hurricanes, wildfires, heat waves, or ice storms, small businesses are more vulnerable to climate shocks than larger businesses, said Shehryar Nabi, a senior research associate at the Aspen Institute Financial Security Program. He co-wrote a recent report outlining the hurdles small businesses face from severe weather. They can be hobbled by a range of challenges, from limited preparation resources to a lack of post-disaster financing.

“One reason we focused on small businesses here is because of their importance to the US economy,” said Nabi. That was certainly the case in Asheville, a city known for its artists, breweries, and boutiques. Helene not only destroyed homes and upended lives, it sent the region’s economy into a tailspin.

In 2023, McCurry said, visitors to the area spent $2.9 billion. Last year, Helene hit Appalachia right before the busy fall foliage season, when tourists flock to places like Asheville to see the leaves turn. McMurry says the storm, which knocked out some municipal services for weeks, led to a 20 percent to 40 percent drop in annual business revenue.

Ten months later, a slew of businesses haven’t reopened: Vivian’s restaurant, Pleb Urban Winery, and TRVE Brewery, to name a few. Another was New Origin Brewery, which started pouring in 2021 and soon had fans lauding it as their favorite brewery in Asheville. Although the floodwaters inundated the business, the bulk of the destruction occurred when railroad cars floated off nearby tracks and crashed into the building.

“There’s not a way to get money for damages in that scenario,” said Dan Juhnke, one of New Origin’s founders. Even after maxing out the brewery’s flood insurance claim, it wasn’t enough to cover the damage. The only other option was to take on more debt from the federal Small Business Administration, or SBA, which didn’t seem prudent. Ultimately, Juhnke and his business partner decided to apply for a Federal Emergency Management Agency-funded buyout program that purchases flood-damaged property and limits rebuilding as a way to mitigate the damage from future storms.

“We signed up for it and have been waiting almost a year now,” said Juhnke.

“The natural tendency for many small business owners [is] to be reluctant to really engage with the risks that they’re exposed to.”

McCurry estimated that, overall, around 85 percent of Asheville businesses have reopened in some form, which is relatively good news. According to 2014 national data from FEMA and the Department of Labor, 40 percent of small businesses do not reopen after a natural disaster and another 25 percent shutter within a year.

These waves of impacts are coupled with limited support options for small businesses in both the long and short term. While FEMA has individual and public assistance programs, there is little if any funding for businesses. The SBA often offers low-interest loans, but the paperwork can be burdensome and the money might not start arriving for months.

Only 14 percent of businesses were able to rely on support from the federal government, according to an analysis of the 2021 Small Business Credit Survey conducted by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. “Support makes a meaningful difference,” said Nabi. “For a lot of businesses it is the difference between closing down and surviving, but it doesn’t reach all the businesses that could benefit.”

State and local governments, private lenders, and community fundraising are other potential sources of money. New Origin, for example, raised more than $100,000 via a GoFundMe campaign but fell short of its $300,000 goal. A fund that Explore Asheville established has brought in $2.1 million, which has been awarded to more than 500 businesses.

Still, Nabi said, these avenues don’t usually address one of the toughest challenges facing businesses after a storm: liquidity. Even a month or two of disrupted cash flow can devastate some operations, which is why experts point to pre-disaster planning as one of the most effective steps a business can take to help protect itself.

“Often businesses see contingency planning as a distraction from the core thing they want to do,” said Benjamin Collier, an associate professor in the Department of Risk and Insurance at the Wisconsin School of Business. But things like better understanding your insurance coverage, or where to move inventory in the event of a threat, should be routine steps for business owners and generally aren’t expensive.

“The natural tendency for many small business owners [is] to be reluctant to really engage with the risks that they’re exposed to,” he said. “This is a call to have more buffers and be more cautious.”

Nabi also underlined the importance of planning, but says structural change could help as well. Greater use of parametric insurance, which automatically pays out when a specific event like a disaster happens, would allow quicker access to funds. Shifting more money to pre-disaster preparation could help businesses avoid the worst impacts of a storm, too. “The financing for preparation is limited compared to what’s available post-disaster,” said Nabi.

Pat Nye is the regional director for the Los Angeles Small Business Development Network. Earlier this year the counties he oversees saw historically devastating wildfires, and one thing that he noticed was that unlike with residential properties, insurance companies hadn’t offered small businesses discounts for any improvements they might have made to make their buildings more fire-resilient.

“As it stands, there is no incentive that exists for this work,” said Nye. “A lot of stuff just focuses on homeowners.”

Governments often don’t do enough to include small businesses in their recovery plans either, contends Kristen Fanarakis, the associate director of small business policy and innovation at the nonprofit Milken Institute. She pointed to a landscaper in the Asheville area who spent weeks helping clear debris after Helene without pay and ended up facing eviction. Those are the kind of businesses, she said, that municipalities should be hiring and including in rebuilding efforts.

More broadly, a report Fanarakis wrote called for a cross-agency “small business resilience czar,” standardized disaster assistance forms, and quicker grant dispersal, among other recommendations. She called the current system “very reactionary” and argues for increased attention to not just the immediate impacts of disasters but the long-term economic fallout as well.

“When we think about fortifying small businesses,” she said, “it’s about going beyond a physical structure.”

Continue Reading…

A Doctor In Gaza Describes the Horror of Starvation

In 2018, while on a medical mission near the Gaza border, an Israeli sniper shot Dr. Tarek Loubani in both legs. Despite this, Loubani, an emergency room specialist and activist, has returned to Gaza almost every year from his home in Canada to help treat Palestinians. For the last two months, he has been working out of Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis.

The reports coming out of Gaza over the last month have been grim. Aid groups say a “worst case for famine” is playing out in the strip. The United Nations and humanitarian organizations report that only a fraction of the needed aid has been delivered to a starving population. One in three people have not eaten for days, according to a recent UNICEF report, and 80 percent of deaths of children in the region are due to starvation. A whistleblower told Mother Jones that aid distribution in the region is “abhorrent.”

These reports come in stark contrast to the publicity around efforts by the Trump Administration, including the touting of the US-backed Gaza Humanitarian Fund (GHF). Last week, US Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee and President Trump’s Special Envoy to the Middle East Steve Witkoff spent more than five hours touring a GHF food distribution site in Rafah, where the UN says more than 1,373 Palestinians have died trying to access aid since late May.

”President Trump and everybody around him belongs in jail. What they have done is to actively support and perpetuate a genocide.”

“Over 100 MILLION meals served in 2 months,” wrote Ambassador Huckabee in a post on X shortly after his trip. This week, Huckabee said that the US would throw in its support to expand the GHF from 4 sites to a total of 16 sites across Gaza. This is despite the Financial Times reporting the sites are “death traps” where hungry Palestinians go for food only to be shot at by the Israeli Defense Forces. (In a statement, the Gaza Humintarian Fund said reports about its failures are part of a “disinformation campaign” and some doctors in the region are “not aiding civilians, they’re aiding Hamas.”)

Dr. Loubani is about seven miles from Rafah. He spoke to Mother Jones last week about conditions on the ground.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

You’ve said that you’ve seen starvation in every patient that you’ve seen. What is that like in medical terms?

So when I first came, I understood that Palestinians hadn’t eaten for two months. But I was in denial about how bad it was. What I saw was that every day, patients were bad. I remember the first time that I saw a little girl, she was eight months old, brought to me—she was sticks and bones and she was dead. And her father had brought her for resuscitation because he assumed there was something we could do.

Realizing this is real… The patients kept getting thinner over the two months I’ve been here, until the point around a month ago, where I had to admit to myself that I’m not seeing any patients with fat anymore. I’m not seeing any patients where I can’t make out their ribs, or I can’t make out their spine.

The starvation, truly, is a hundred percent. What I can tell is that somebody used to be overweight before—you know, you can see how much skin they have or had. But right now every single patient that I see is suffering from some level of malnutrition, and most of the patients that I see are suffering from moderate to severe forms of malnutrition.

Special Envoy Steve Witkoff and Ambassador Mike Huckabee just made an unprecedented trip into Gaza, supporting the claim that the Gaza Humanitarian Fund has had 100 million meals served in just two months. Based on what you’ve been seeing, do you find that to be an accurate estimate?

The idea that a hundred million meals have been served is laughable. It would mean that there wouldn’t be such a level of famine, which is clearly not the case.

Palestinians are literally in a death run every single time that the GHF opens. Everything that my patients tell me is that they have to cross Israeli lines while under fire. They have to bunker down, wait until the GHF opens, and some days they don’t.

On the issue of starvation in Gaza, President Trump told Axios that “we want to help people. We want to help them live. We want to get people fed. It is something that should have happened [a] long time ago.” What would you say to President Trump?

President Trump and everybody around him belongs in jail. What they have done is to actively support and perpetuate a genocide. Words with no actions are completely meaningless. President Trump can, with quite literally one phone call, as we saw in January, end this thing; the American government can literally end this thing.

These statements don’t bother me in the sense that I don’t think about them. I don’t wonder about the veracity. I see how fake this kind of news is and how much these people are lying. If Trump genuinely cared about Palestinians, then he wouldn’t be behaving as he’s behaving now.

There is no sane human being who can look at the situation and not see a pile of war crimes and evidence of genocide everywhere that they look at this point. Anyone who doesn’t recognize what’s happening in Gaza as war crimes and a genocide is not serious. They are propagandists and that is it.

The only reason why people wonder if it is genocide is because of the tremendous interest in not declaring a genocide by very important countries—because that triggers legal obligations. Once you call it a genocide, it puts you under obligation. And what we’ve realized now is that for all of these countries that wrote these laws about genocide, they were never actually interested in putting themselves in uncomfortable positions against allies. They just wanted to use them as batons against other countries.

There has been some recent activity of Western countries coming out and expressing their support for recognizing a State of Palestine over the last few weeks, notably France and the United Kingdom. In light of the current state of the state, how does the prospect of this kind of international recognition translate on the ground?

What’s needed is not recognition of a Palestinian state. Palestinians don’t need their state to be recognized. It exists—and it’s happening. What the Palestinians need is for participants like France, Germany, Canada, and the United Kingdom to stop arming Israel.

You’ve been to Gaza several times in the past, but after being cleared on this recent trip, what were you expecting to see, and what have you been surprised to see?

I wanna draw you a little picture. I first came to Palestine, to Gaza, in 2011. I have been spending four months a year here ever since, until this war. I’m very, very familiar with this place. I remember making this realization in the 2010s that, oh my God, as bad as it is, and as much as I would always say to myself, it can’t possibly get worse than this, it always got worse because there were always more ways to turn the screws on Palestinians.

So I knew it was gonna be bad when I came. I knew it was gonna be bad. But there is no preparing you for this. During the previous wars, kids got killed. Of course, they got killed. They got crushed. They got bombed. They got shot. But this war, it’s as though the kids are the only targets. There are so many kids, and it’s so devastating, and there’s so little I can do for them. Nothing could have prepared me for that.

In every other war, there has been something missing. In 2014, we ran out of gauze. In 2012, we didn’t have stethoscopes. This war, we’re missing everything. And so what’s different this time on in terms of the the patients is that I have nothing that I can do for most of them, but sit there and watch them die—knowing that even if I can do a little bit to get them to the next step, they’re probably not going to heal well because they’re starving.

That’s the biggest difference for me.

Some readers might be asking themselves, “What can I do?” So, what do you think they could do to perhaps apply pressure to change the situation that’s taking place in Gaza right now?

I think the first thing to recognize is that everything people have done so far has helped. Every protest people have gone to, every letter they’ve written, every donation they’ve made—it has all helped. We think of things in terms of, you know, I’ve been to 10 protests. Why hasn’t it stopped? That’s because we’re not strong enough to make it stop in 10 protests.

But there is also a war of attrition happening, not just in the field, in Gaza, but also politically. So, for example, what the UK is doing right now is directly the result of their weekly protests and their increased organizing. It has been political attrition. Also, the tremendous boycott movement has resulted in economic attrition.

So, I think what this kind of person should look to do is to extract the highest cost possible on Israel and its supporters, like the United States, especially so that they can take an account of how much they’re losing and rethink this—by continuing to make sure that you run people in elections, that you keep it an active political issue, that you protest, that no politician who supports the genocide is comfortable.

Continue Reading…

South Park Comes for Kristi Noem and ICE

If anyone was wondering if South Park was going to ease up on the scathing Trump plot lines, this week’s follow-up offered an answer: Hell no.

On Wednesday night, the adult cartoon ripped into the Trump administration yet again, this time targeting JD Vance and right-wing podcast bros. But the episode’s harshest ridicule was directed at none other than Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, who is depicted as a wine-guzzling, Botox-loving, puppy-killing, tyrant as the leader of ICE. (The show spends much time ruthlessly skewering the agency, too.)

The episode, in its specific way, holds a comedic mirror to our cruel reality: ICE’s desperate recruitment efforts, an administration hellbent on disappearing immigrants without due process, and “torture.”

Continue Reading…

“What They Did There Was Torture Us”

After a few hours in the air, Neri Alvarado Borges and the other Venezuelans on a US Immigration and Customs Enforcement deportation flight landed in Honduras. Alvarado was hopeful. He had been detained by ICE in Texas in early February. Told he could face years in detention, he agreed to be deported. It was March 15, and Alvarado assumed he would soon be home.

During the brief stopover in Honduras, Alvarado recalls officials giving him and the other Venezuelans boxes of pizza. “Eat,” they said, “because later on we have another surprise for you.” When the plane landed a second time, an ICE agent told the men, “this is the surprise.” Opening the windows, the men realized they had been sent to El Salvador.

Confused, Alvarado asked why they were not in Venezuela. “Those are orders from the President,” the agent replied. The ICE officer told Alvarado to get off the plane quietly because the guards in El Salvador were different. “They are not like us,” he said. “They are going to treat you badly.”

“They knocked out one of my teeth. They messed up my knees. They messed up my ribs.”

The Trump administration had shipped Alvarado and more than 230 other Venezuelans deprived of due process to a notorious megaprison known as the Terrorism Confinement Center, or CECOT. In exchange for roughly $5 million, the Salvadoran government agreed to hold the men, who had been accused with scant or nonexistent evidence of being members of the transnational gang Tren de Aragua.

In March, our reporting showed that Alvarado and others had been targeted because of benign tattoos that had no connection to the criminal group. One of Alvarado’s tattoos is an autism awareness ribbon with the name of his younger brother, Neryelson. Alvarado’s story became emblematic of the cruelty of the Trump administration’s decision to disappear Venezuelan migrants to a foreign gulag, where they were held incommunicado for four months.

In his first media interview since the men were released from CECOT on July 18 as part of a prisoner swap deal, Alvarado described to Mother Jones the nightmare he and the others lived through from the first moment they arrived.

Alvarado, 25, said when the plane landed, Salvadoran police officers dragged him off in shackles and violently pushed him onto a bus as if he were a “trash bag.” As he tried to get his bearings, the officers hit him in the head; they cursed, yelling at him to keep his face down. The men were driven around for about half an hour before arriving at CECOT. “Welcome to El Salvador,” the police said.

As they entered the maximum-security prison, Alvarado remembers being thrown to the floor on his knees. He saw hair everywhere. All around him, guards shaved the men’s heads. (The process was recorded and shared as propaganda by the administration of President Nayib Bukele on social media.) “They grab me by the sweater and they were practically choking me,” Alvarado recalled. “It felt like they were choking me for about 15 to 20 seconds, which were the longest 20 seconds of my life because I felt like I couldn’t breathe.”

The guards gave them five seconds to change into the white prison t-shirt and shorts. If detainees took longer, they were beaten. The Venezuelans were then taken to Module 8, a warehouse-like wing of the prison with 32 cells. On the way, Alvarado said a guard asked him who he was and where he was coming from. “From Dallas,” Alvarado said. “What gang are you in?” the guard asked. Alvarado told him he was not a gang member. “But if you’re not a gang member, what are you doing here?” Alvarado wondered the same thing.

In the prison, he recalled seeing blood all over the floor. “They’re going to kill me here,” Alvarado thought. “If I survive, I’ll be locked up my entire life.”

Neri Alvarado reuniting with his family in Venezuela after being released from CECOT.Courtesy photo

Alvarado and two other Venezuelan men sent to CECOT spoke with Mother Jones about the horrific conditions they were held in. Their stories corroborate reports from others flown to El Salvador, who described CECOT as a place where detainees feared death and torture.Some men contemplated suicide. “I’d rather die or kill myself than to keep living through this experience,” Juan José Ramos Ramos told ProPublica. Guards in the prison enacted a “perverse form of humiliation,”Marco Jesús Basulto Salinas told the Washington Post: “The doctor would watch us get beaten and then ask us, ‘How are you feeling?’ with a smile.”

Wuilliam Lozada Sánchez, 27, told Mother Jones that he and other men were beaten with batons upon arriving at the Salvadoran prison. “They knocked out one of my teeth,” he said. “They messed up my knees. They messed up my ribs.”

Before leaving for the United States in 2023, Lozada worked at a factory that made jeans in Colombia. His goal was to save enough money to open a pants factory in his home state of Táchira. Instead, he ended up spending more than a year in US detention before being taken to CECOT in March. Lozada said they experienced a form of torture in the prison.

While being processed, the men were made to line up in a row and kneel. Then, according to Alvarado and other Venezuelans, the prison’s director told the men: “Welcome to hell.” “He told us that we were not going to leave anymore and that he was going to make sure that we never again ate meat or chicken,” Julio Zambrano Perez told Mother Jones. The only way out of that place, the director said, was in a black bag.

On a video call from Venezuela, Zambrano showed a cut on his left eyebrow that he said was from beatings he endured right after arriving in El Salvador. That first night at CECOT, Zambrano couldn’t sleep as he thought about how his life had been ripped away from him. In North Carolina, Zambrano, who, like Alvarado, turned 25 while at CECOT, worked shifts at a hotel and a restaurant to provide for his wife, Luz, and their two daughters, one of whom was born while he was in ICE detention. The family had applied for asylum in the United States.

During the months inside, Alvarado held on to a Bible verse for hope: “Blessed are they who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be satisfied.”

In late January, Zambrano had what he thought would be a routine check-in appointment with ICE. Instead, the agents took him to a room and started interrogating him about his tattoos, a rose and a crown with his name on it. He tried to explain it was normal for Venezuelans to have tattoos, but to no avail. ICE kept him detained and later moved him to Georgia and from there to the El Valle Detention Facility in Texas. “They never had any evidence to say that I belonged to a gang,” he said.

Alvarado had a similar experience. Originally from Yaritagua, a city about four hours west of Caracas, he studied psychology in school but had to abandon his studies for financial reasons. Alvarado went on to get certified as a personal trainer and worked as a swim instructor. (While he was at CECOT, members of the swim club in Venezuela where Alvarado coached made a video demanding his release.) In 2023, he decided to leave for the United States—partly in hope of being able to help pay for the medical bills for his brother, who has autism. Like many others, Alvarado made the grueling journey through the Darién Gap between Colombia and Panama before eventually reaching the US-Mexico border.

After he turned himself over to Border Patrol agents, Alvarado spent about 24 hours in custody before being released. He said border officials reviewed his tattoos and concluded that they were not indicative of gang membership. Along with the autism awareness ribbon, Alvarado has three tattoos written in English and Spanish: One reads “self love,” another “brothers,” and the third “familia.”

Once in Dallas, Alvarado started working at a Venezuelan bakery. It allowed him to send about $500 per month back home to help support his family and his younger brother. But his life was upended in February, when he said ICE and DEA agents, with guns drawn, arrested him outside his apartment. The officers took Alvarado to ICE’s Dallas field office, where he was questioned about his tattoos and gang affiliations.

Alvarado said during the interview he was struck by the ICE agent’s appearance. The man questioning him was covered in tattoos from his hand to his neck. The officer, Alvarado said, even had a tattoo of a rose—one of the tattoos that ICE has used as evidence of membership in Tren de Aragua.

When the agent asked Alvarado about his tattoos, Alvarado—who had been charged earlier in the Trump administration with the misdemeanor offense of entering the country illegally in April 2024—said he showed him the autism awareness ribbon on his leg. “Wow, that’s nice,” he remembered the agent saying in response. The officer then checked Alvarado’s phone and social media accounts before concluding that he had no relation to the gang. “Well, you came to the United States to do good,” Alvarado recalled the ICE agent telling him. “You have nothing to do with Tren de Aragua.” Moments later, a different ICE agent decided to detain Alvarado. (DHS did not respond to a request for comment about whether it sent Alvarado to CECOT in error.)

At his final immigration hearing, Alvarado said there was no mention of Tren de Aragua. He explained to the immigration judge that he had a valid Venezuelan passport and could return home on a commercial flight. Alvarado recalled the judge saying that it was not necessary. ICE would fly him back home soon.

Julio Zambrano Perez with his wife Luz and their daughter Danna.Courtesy of Julio Zambrano Perez

In CECOT, the men settled into a bleak daily routine. They slept on metal beds without mattresses, sheets, or pillows. Their diet was largely rice, beans, and tortillas. On occasion, Zambrano said, the guards would serve them a slightly better meal, only to snap a photo and take it away before they could eat. The lights were always on, and the men were allowed a single shower at 5 a.m. When they sought medical attention, they were given a pain pill and told to drink water—the same water they bathed in.

For a while, they were only allowed out of the cell twice a week to hear a few minutes of a religious sermon. To pass the time, they made dice out of tortillas. They tried to exercise inside the cell every day. “If we kept our minds busy,” Alvarado said, “we wouldn’t think so much about the situation we were going through.” During the months inside, Alvarado held on to a Bible verse for hope: “Blessed are they who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be satisfied.”

Alvarado and others say that those who resisted or complained about the conditions were brutalized in a small isolation cell they called la isla, the island. “What they did there was torture us,” Zambrano said. “They always wanted to take us to la isla for whatever reason.” He said he spent two days in the dark, confined space. When the guards weren’t kicking and beating them, they would hit the doors, laugh, and tell the men they would rot in there. Alvarado recalled hearing the screams and the thud sound from beatings. “They hit them everywhere, on the head, on the legs, on the back, on the abdomen, on the ribs,” he said.

One day, some of the men started protesting in their cell. The guards responded with tear gas. They hit one man so hard he passed out. “They left him there lying on the floor,” Zambrano said. Fearing he had been killed, the Venezuelans started a hunger strike that went on for a few days. “If we’re going to get out of here, dead or alive,” Zambrano reasoned, “then let’s get out defending ourselves.”

As the weeks dragged on, the men started wondering if they had been forgotten. Lozada said he had no idea that their cases were the subject of major legal battles in the United States. “They were telling us that our country—that our president—had abandoned us,” Lozada explained. “That our families had abandoned us as well, and that we were going to die there in prison…that no one was fighting for us.”

Alvarado recalled the Salvadoran guards saying, “There’s no family here, there are no lawyers here, nobody exists here.” During the four months at CECOT, he saw the sun only once.

Wuilliam Lozada reunited with his parents in Venezuela. Courtesy of Wuilliam Lozada

Like others, Alvarado said conditions improved slightly on the days when US officials like Homeland Secretary Kristi Noem or the Red Cross visited. They’d be given a thin mattress and a pillow, as well as deodorant, soap, and toothpaste. But, after the visits, everything was taken away. (El Salvador’s Vice President Félix Ulloa denied that the men were mistreated to ProPublica.)

After nearly four months, Alvarado said the men were asked to provide their shoe and clothing sizes. Soon after, they had check-ups with a dentist, a nutritionist, and other doctors. The next day, they were given a new pair of underwear and socks, along with deodorant and shampoo. Alvarado suspected something was about to happen, but was not sure what.

Finally, in the early hours of Friday, July 18, the guards woke them up and told them to get ready in five minutes. They were taken to the airport, where they were received by Venezuelan officials. But it wasn’t until the plane took off that they believed they were headed home. The men cried and applauded. “For a moment, we thought it was going to be impossible to get out of there,” Zambrano said. “It’s the first time we’ve seen a person get out of that prison alive.”

After arriving near Caracas in Venezuela, Zambrano called his wife, whose number was the only one he remembered by heart. He spent two days in a hotel and then was let go, late at night on a Sunday, to reunite with his mother. “I started to cry, we started to cry,” he said. “I imagined all the suffering they had gone through not knowing about me.”

Zambrano’s children and wife are still in the United States. He has yet to meet his youngest daughter, who’s only six months old, in person. When they had their first video call after his release, he said he barely recognized her because she had grown so much. Zambrano said he would like to go back to the United States to be with his family and continue to fight his asylum case. But he is scared of being detained again.

For now, the family talks on the phone every day. And he hopes for an acknowledgment of the evil done to him and othersand the fact that he is now separated from his wife and daughters. “The first thing I want is to clear our names and for justice be done for everything that happened to us there in El Salvador,” he said.

The day he arrived home, Alvarado said his block was packed with people waiting to greet him. He became overcome with emotion when he saw his family. “It was like I could breathe,” he said, “like finally I’m here.”

Still, the four months in CECOT have taken a toll on his mental health. He has had nightmares about being back in the prison before waking up and realizing with relief that he’s home. And if he sees a police officer or a patrol car, he grows anxious. “I remember everything that happened in CECOT,” he said.

Like Zambrano, Alvarado also hopes for accountability. “Now we’re free in our country,” he said, “but my life was already established in the United States. I was helping my family and now they have sent me back here, where I have to start from zero.”

His main goal, Alvarado said, is to support the younger brother whose name adorns his autism awareness tattoo.

Continue Reading…

ICE Is Extremely Desperate for You to Work For Them

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is apparently so desperate for staff that they are abolishing the agency’s age restrictions to allow any adult to apply to join the force.

On Wednesday, ICE announced that it would do away with its prior requirements that job applicants be at least 21 years old, no older than 37 to be considered for a criminal investigator role, and no older than 40 to be eligible to be a deportation officer, with few exceptions.

“In the wake of Biden’s open borders disaster, our country needs dedicated Americans to join ICE to remove the worst of the worst out of our country,” the agency’s announcement reads, under an Uncle Sam recruitment photo. In a social media post touting the change, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) wrote: “We’re taking father/son bonding to a whole new level,” alongside an illustration of both a younger and older man in camouflage tactical gear.

Recruits will still need to be at least 18 and go through medical and drug tests, and complete a physical fitness test. The Wednesday announcement also reiterated a slate of perks available to new ICE employees, including a signing bonus of up to $50,000, student loan repayment and forgiveness options, and “enhanced retirement benefits” after the passage of Trump’s so-called Big Beautiful Bill. The legislation allocated funding to hire 10,000 new ICE agents to join the 20,000 currently on staff to help meet the agency’s deportation goals.

The move to eliminate the age restriction comes as the Trump administration scrambles to fulfill his campaign promise to carry outmass deportations—specifically, a goal of one million deportations per year, according to an April report in the Washington Post. So far, the administration appears to have fallen far below that goal: Since February, the administration has deported an average of about 14,700 people per month, according to an NBC News report published last month. The administration’s efforts to bolster those numbers have included reviving old cases focused on immigrants who have since become citizens or died.

But reports suggest the sky-high deportation quota, coupled with the administration’s general inhumanity when it comes to the treatment of immigrants, has left morale within the agency plummeting. And while DHS Secretary Kristi Noem boasts about a recent surge in applications, related moves within ICE, including the agency reportedly forcibly poaching employees from across the federal government and other law enforcement agencies, appear to contradict those claims. The American Prospect reported on Wednesday, for example, that probationary Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) employees—those with under a year of service—were being reassigned to ICE or threatened with losing their jobs if they did not accept. A DHS spokesperson told the Prospect that the FEMA employees were being temporarily moved to work with ICE for 90 days, “to assist with hiring and vetting,” and claimed that the moves “will NOT disrupt FEMA’s critical operations.”

So will the elimination of the age limit make any difference? Time will tell, though Trump’s prior promises of a massive hiring spree for ICE and Border Patrol agents during his first term did not come to fruition. So far, though, the change has led to at least one newrecruit: 59-year-old former Superman actor Dean Cain.

Continue Reading…

Chemical Pollution Is a Rampant Threat to Humanity, Science Group Warns

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

Chemical pollution is “a threat to the thriving of humans and nature of a similar order as climate change” but decades behind global heating in terms of public awareness and action, a report has warned.

The industrial economy has created more than 100 million “novel entities,” or chemicals not found in nature, with somewhere between 40,000 and 350,000 in commercial use and production, the report says. But the environmental and human health effects of this widespread contamination of the biosphere are not widely appreciated, in spite of a growing body of evidence linking chemical toxicity with effects ranging from ADHD to infertility to cancer.

“I suppose that’s the biggest surprise for some people,” Harry Macpherson, senior climate associate at Deep Science Ventures (DSV), which carried out the research, told the Guardian.

“There isn’t necessarily the need for a massive collective action; it can just be demand for safer products.”

“Maybe people think that when you walk down the street breathing the air; you drink your water, you eat your food; you use your personal care products, your shampoo, cleaning products for your house, the furniture in your house; a lot of people assume that there’s really great knowledge and huge due diligence on the chemical safety of these things. But it really isn’t the case.”

Over eight months, as part of a project funded by the Grantham Foundation, Macpherson and colleagues spoke to dozens of researchers, nonprofit leaders, entrepreneurs and investors, and analyzed hundreds of scientific papers.

According to the DSV report, more than 3,600 synthetic chemicals from food contact materials—the materials that are used in food preparation and packaging—alone are found in human bodies, 80 of which are of significant concern. PFAS “forever chemicals,” for example, have been found in nearly all humans tested, and are now so ubiquitous that in many locations even rainwater contains levels regarded as unsafe to drink. Meanwhile, more than 90 percent of the global population breathes air that breaches World Health Organization (WHO) pollution guidelines.

When these chemicals contaminate our bodies, the results can be disastrous. The report found there were correlational or causal data linking widely used chemicals with threats to human reproductive, immune, neurological, cardiovascular, respiratory, liver, kidney, and metabolic systems. “One of the main things that came out quite strongly was links between pesticide exposure and reproductive issues,” said Macpherson. “We saw quite strong links—correlation and causation—for miscarriage and people basically struggling to conceive.”

The DSV research adds to previous findings by the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research that we have already far exceeded the safe planetary boundary for environmental pollutants, including plastics. On Sunday, another report warned that the world faces a “plastics crisis,” which is causing disease and death from infancy to old age amid a huge acceleration of plastic production.

The report also highlights critical shortcomings in current toxicity assessment, research and testing methods, exposing the ways in which existing checks and balances are failing to protect human and planetary health.

“The way that we’ve generally done the testing has meant that we’ve missed a lot of effects,” Macpherson said. He singled out the assessment of endocrine-disrupting chemicals, which are substances that interfere with hormones, causing problems ranging from infertility to cancer. These have been found to confound the traditional assumption that lower doses will invariably have lesser effects.

“One of the things is that when you have a chemical which is interfering with the endocrine system, it sometimes has a nonlinear response. So you’ll see that there’ll be a response at a very low dose, which you wouldn’t be able to predict from its behavior at a high dose.”

DSV describes itself as a “venture creator” that spins out companies aimed at tackling big problems in environmental and human health issues. Part of the purpose of the report is to identify problem areas that can be tackled by innovation.

Currently, chemical toxicity as an environmental issue receives just a fraction of the funding that is devoted to climate change, a disproportionality that Macpherson says should change. “We obviously don’t want less funding going into the climate and the atmosphere,” he said. “But this we think—really, proportionally—needs more attention.”

However, there were features of the problem that mean it lends itself more easily to solutions. “The good thing is that this can be potentially quite easily consumer-driven if people start to worry about things they’re personally buying,” Macpherson said. “There isn’t necessarily the need for a massive collective action; it can just be demand for safer products, because people want safer products.”

For his part, since starting the research, Macpherson is careful about what touches his food. He cooks with a cast-iron skillet. He especially avoids heating food in plastic. “Unfortunately, it is a recommendation to eat more organic food, but it is more expensive in general. So at least washing fruit and vegetables before eating them, but organic if you can afford it.”

Continue Reading…

Idaho Lost One in Three Obstetricians After Its Abortion Ban

Two months after the Supreme Court overruled Roe v. Wade, in June 2022, Idaho’s trigger ban outlawing most abortions—one of the strictest nationwide—took effect.

The fallout soon made headlines. The Biden-era Department of Justice sued, alleging that the Idaho ban violated a federal law that required hospitals to stabilize people who arrived in their emergency rooms facing threats to their life or health—including by providing abortions when necessary. (That kicked off a legal battle that made it to the Supreme Court last year, which avoided deciding the case on its merits.) And within months of the state ban taking effect, a maternity ward in rural northern Idaho closed, citing the state’s “legal and political climate.”

“When those people leave, that is a huge body of institutional knowledge that [walks] out of that state. It’s a big dang deal.”

As all this was happening, another shift was quietly unfolding across the state: obstetricians (OBs) in Idaho—doctors who specialize in delivering babies and providingcare for pregnant people during and after pregnancy—were leaving their jobs as they faced the threat of jail time, fines, and felony charges for providing abortions, even in the case of life-threatening emergencies. While there have been some reports of these departures, there has been limited data quantifying how many OBs the state lost after Roe was overruled—until now.

According to a new peer-reviewed paper published in JAMA Network Open last week, Idaho lost more than a third of its OBs—94 of 268 total—between August 2022 and December 2024. That figure combines the 114 who left their jobs and 20 OBs who moved to Idaho during the study period. It includes physicians who left the state—the most common outcome, accounting for about half of the total departures, according to J. Edward McEachern, the paper’s lead author—as well as those who stopped practicing obstetrics, closed their in-state practices, or retired. The new research supports the hypothesis that experts and abortion rights advocates floated after the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization: Abortion bans create ripple effects that harm other forms of health care.

“When those people leave, that is a huge body of institutional knowledge that walk out of that state,” said McEachern, who is also a distinguished scholar-in-residence at Boise State University and the chief medical officer at St. Luke’s Health Plan. “It’s a big dang deal,” he added.

AnnaMarie Connolly, a physician and the chief of education, workforce, and well-being at the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG), told Mother Jones that the findings are “a clear example of the damage abortion bans cause beyond abortion access.” Candace Gibson, director of state policy at the reproductive rights advocacy and policy organization the Guttmacher Institute, agreed, saying the data “shows how abortion bans destabilize the entire reproductive health system.” Other research has also illustrated this: A 2023 survey of more than 500 OB/GYNs conducted by KFF, for example, found that 68 percent of respondents said the Dobbs decision negatively impacted their ability to manage pregnancy-related emergencies. Reporting from ProPublica has also shown that sepsis and maternal deaths surged in Texasfollowing both Dobbs and the state’s six-week abortion ban, which was implemented in 2021.

To come up with their calculations, McEachern and three other researchers initially consulted a federal database of health care providers to find a list of licensed OBs in Idaho; then, they consulted another set of sources—including databases maintained by ACOG and the Idaho Medical Association, physicians’ and hospitals’ websites, and the actual physicians themselves—to verify both the amount of physicians practicing obstetrics in the state and those who had stopped doing so or left Idaho. While the new study did not try to establish causality by asking the physicians if the state’s abortion ban played a role in their decision to stop practicing obstetrics in the state or overall, McEachern points out that none of the OBs who researchers tracked moved to states with abortion bans. The Idaho Coalition for Safe Reproductive Health Care also found in 2023 that more than half of the 240 health care providers surveyed said they were considering or definitely leaving the state within the year in light of the new abortion ban.

I found a similar trend in my own reporting, when I covered the fallout of the hospital in rural northern Idaho, Bonner General Health, that discontinued its obstetrics care in 2023; the four OBGYNs who previously worked at the hospital all moved to states where abortion is legal, and they all told me Idaho’s ban contributed to their decisions to move.“Thinking about what our community has lost—that is gutting,” one of those doctors, Amelia Huntsberger, previously told me; Huntsberger relocated to Oregon that year.

Dr. Amelia Huntsberger unpacked some of the remaining boxes in her new home in Eugene, Oregon after moving from Idaho, in October 2023. Moriah Ratner/Washington Post/Getty

This exodus contributes to maternity care deserts, defined as areas that lack access to maternity care providers, which account for about 33 percent of counties nationwide. In Idaho, nearly 30 percent of counties are maternity care deserts, and nearly 20 percent of women have no birthing hospital within a 30 minute drive, according to the most recent data from March of Dimes. McEachern’s study signals this is only getting worse: It found that 85 percent of the state’s remaining OBs are concentrated in Idaho’s seven most populous counties. That leaves 23 OBs to serve more than 560,000 people in the remaining 37 counties—or, as McEachern puts it, “a very brittle and fragile system.”

“If one person gets hurt or retires or moves on,” he said, “it creates a system that is unsustainable.”

None of the obstetricians tracked moved to states with abortion bans.

Experts say the new data reveals the urgent need to bolster the state’s health care landscape. Connolly, from ACOG, said, “when a state’s OB/GYN workforce is already struggling to meet the volume of patient needs, like Idaho’s, each loss means more people who have to travel long distances for basic health care—or go without it altogether.”

Dr. Megan Kasper, an OB/GYN and president-elect of the Idaho Medical Association, called for “common sense changes to our law to ensure Idahoans have access to maternal health care now and in the future” in response to the study. While Idaho lawmakers have largely resisted calls to amend the state’s abortion laws, advocates have continued pushing for change, including by seeking to gather enough signatures to put an abortion rights ballot measure before voters next year.

McEachern and the other researchers, for their part, plan to continue tracking the losses of Idaho’s obstetricians. They also have several other related research projects planned, including one focused on the amount of time people have to drive to reach obstetrics care in Idaho, with the hope that collecting more reliable data will help improve health care access across the state.

As McEachern put it, “We want this place to be better.”

Continue Reading…

How Democrats Plan to Battle the GOP’s Redistricting Power Grab

For years, Republicans have sought to consolidate power at the state and federal level by controlling the redistricting process through which congressional boundaries are drawn.In places such as Wisconsin and Ohio**,** they have crafted cartoonishly distorted districts that have literally drawn Democrats out of power. But the longstanding battle between Republicans and Democrats over redistricting exploded recently when, with the encouragement of Donald Trump, Texas Republicans proposed a new congressional map—outside of the typical 10-year cycle—that could yield Republicans five congressional seats in next year’s midterm elections.

Democrats, who have historically abstained from the most glaring, self-serving forms of gerrymandering, insist they are now going to re-draw maps in states they control to help them offset their potential loss of seats from the GOP-drawn maps. “They’re not screwing around,” California’s Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom said of Republicans’ redistricting plans, which extend beyond Texas. “We cannot afford to screw around either. We have got to fight fire with fire.”

“We have a really asymmetric pattern of unilateral disarmament, and so if Democrats want to do what Texas is doing, they would have to undo some of the reforms they put in place over the last couple of decades to fight gerrymandering.”

But in addition to the tight timeline between now and the midterm elections, Democrats may encounter another problem: their own firewalls. Through efforts to keep extreme partisan bias out of redistricting, some states—like California and New York—have self-policed themselves into instituting independent commissions that shape the districts. Critically, it may prevent them from carrying out their threat of revenge.

“We have a really asymmetric pattern of unilateral disarmament, and so if Democrats want to do what Texas is doing, they would have to undo some of the reforms they put in place over the last couple of decades to fight gerrymandering,” says Harvard Law School professor Nicholas Stephanopoulos.

In the last week, they’ve started to try.

“We’re already working on a legislative process, reviewing our legal strategies, and we’ll do everything in our power to stop this brazen assault,” New York Governor Kathy Hochul said at a press conference this week. “The gloves are off, and I say ‘Bring it on.'”

The terms “redistricting” and “gerrymandering” are often used interchangeably in today’s political environment, but they aren’t supposed to be.

Redistricting is the legal process in which new congressional district boundaries are drawn to take into account changes in population since the last census. Gerrymandering is using the opportunity to redistrict to manipulate boundaries to favor one’s party over the other.

Yet, in most states, the majority party in the state legislature largely controls the redistricting process, especially when that party maintains the governor’s mansion too. Whether or not the party admits it, holding the gavel typically enables lawmakers to impose more favorable maps.

The “independent commission” model of redistricting reflects the Democratic Party’s intention to honor the democratic principle of “one person, one vote,” New York Senate Majority Leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins tells Mother Jones.

But, she says, Republicans have left Democrats without another option but to try and change the independent commission method in New York, at least temporarily.

“Republicans have decided that whatever they want to do, they should do. Democrats really have no choice but to look at what it is we must do in order to preserve democracy,” says Stewart-Cousins, who is also chair of the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee (DLCC), the party’s national arm for state legislative races.

The DLCC announced a more aggressive approach to redistricting as a coalition-wide objective on Monday. “The DLCC isn’t going to sit back and allow Republicans to cheat the system to keep themselves in power,” the group’s president, Heather Williams, said in a statement. “All options must be on the table—including Democratic state legislatures using their power to fight back and pursue redistricting mid-cycle in order to protect our democracy.”

The Democratic National Committee has also tacitly supported the DLCC’s move. In a statement, DNC chair Ken Martin said members of the party should be able “to combat Trump and Republicans’ craven scheme to rig the maps in their favor.”

But despite the buy-in, mid-cycle redistricting won’t be as easy as ripping up the old maps and drawing new ones over the next few months.

Democrats in the New York legislature proposed a state constitutional amendment last week that would allow state lawmakers to forgo the independent commission process and do their own re-districting in the middle of the usual 10-year cycle, but only if another state did it first. If it passes the legislature, the amendment would then go before New York citizens as a ballot measure.

Asked whether she could foresee New York Democrats successfully redistricting before the 2026 midterms, Stewart-Cousins said, “I am not aware of a way to do that… People are, I’m sure, taking a look to see what could be possible.”

There are similar challenges in the other Democratic-led states that have expressed desire to use Republicans’ own tactics against them.

Illinois Governor JB Pritzker has said “nothing is off the table” in terms of retaliatory redistricting. But maps in the midwestern state already disproportionately benefit Democrats. (There are only three congressional districts in the state that are not represented by Democrats.) Republicans have even pointed to the Illinois map in defense of their plans to regroup Texas.

California is another state with a willing governor and Democratic majorities in the state legislature. The state may be Democrats’ best—if only—option at picking up more than a couple of blue districts before the midterms, which is why Gov. Newsom has encouraged California Democrats to put new district maps in front of voters in a special election that would precede the midterms. This would be temporary, he says. The maps would stay in place only through 2030, at which point the independent redistricting commission would have the power again.

“Things have changed. We’re reacting to that change,” Newsom said at a recent news conference. “They’ve triggered this response, and we’re not going to roll over.”

In the short-term, Democratic lawmakers in Texas have blocked Republicans from carrying out their plan by fleeing the state to preempt the vote on the new districts. The strategy is almost inevitably temporary; the Texas legislators face $500-per-day fines for not appearing for legislative duty, and Gov. Greg Abbott has threatened to expel them from office. He’s also able to call another special session whenever he wants.

But beyond the questions of strategy and ineffectiveness, there is also the quandary about whether this is a path Democrats should even venture down.

“Now that we’re opening the door to re-redistricting, it really makes it impossible to dislodge gerrymanders,” says Stephanopoulos. “At least in the past, you could maybe hope by year six, year eight, or year 10 of a map that it’s less effective than it was in year one. But if Texas redraws the lines now, why not redraw them again in 2028? And again in 2030?”

Continue Reading…

The Massive Grand Canyon Fire Is Burning Out of Control

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

A wildfire that has closed the North Rim of Grand Canyon National Park raged out of control over the weekend and is now the largest currently burning in the country. The Dragon Bravo fire has burned more than 133,000 acres and was only 13 percent contained as of Wednesday morning, according to a federal interagency website that tracks wildfires.

The blaze, which was sparked by a lightning strike on July 4, has destroyed about 70 structures, according to the National Park Service, including the historic Grand Canyon Lodge and North Rim Visitor Center. The damage was bad enough to prompt the service to close the North Rim of the park for the rest of the 2025 season.

Thirty-nine large wildfires are burning across the country, covering about 523,000 acres in total, according to the National Interagency Fire Center. Dry and windy conditions pushed the Grand Canyon fire out of control last month, and it is now one of seven large fires burning across Arizona, more than in any other state.

The fires come as the National Park Service and other federal agencies face large cuts to their workforces, including personnel who help fight wildfires. Multiple reports have suggested that cuts made by the Trump administration to US Forest Service staffing have hampered the agency’s ability to fight fires.

The National Park Service has lost 24 percent of its permanent workforce under the Trump administration, according to an analysis last month by the National Parks Conservation Association. The group said the cuts have reduced visitor services and weakened wildfire response.

Pollution from wildfire smoke has become an expected part of summer across North America in recent years.

A Park Service spokesperson said in an email that the agency’s priority has been the safety of firefighters, staff, and the public, and that it had successfully evacuated about 900 people from the North Rim area. The spokesperson added that “extreme weather conditions and a shift in wind overwhelmed” the service’s efforts to contain the Dragon Bravo fire and that “these rapidly evolving conditions were the primary cause of the fire’s expansion.”

A White House spokesperson noted that no one has died in the fire, saying that outcome “is a direct reflection of coordinated evacuation efforts, interagency support, and proactive incident management before and during the fire’s rapid expansion.”

The spokesperson added: “It’s a shame that there are those who want to politicize this situation while firefighters are still putting their lives on the line,” and said that more than 7,200 Interior Department employees were qualified to respond to wildfires, about 800 more than in 2024.

Bill Wade, executive director of the Association of National Park Rangers, which supports park service staff, said he had not heard anything to suggest that staff shortages played a role in allowing the Dragon Bravo fire to grow out of control. But he said he is concerned the cuts could harm the service’s ability to respond to fires in the future.

Wildfires have closed parts of other national parks, too, including Black Canyon of the Gunnison in Colorado.

Climate change is worsening wildfire activity globally. Wildfire seasons have grown longer, and the smoke and climate pollution that fires emit is getting worse.

That pollution has become an expected part of summer across North America in recent years, casting an eerie haze through the sky and prompting air quality alerts across large swaths of Canada and the United States. Detroit, Toronto and Montreal were all among the 10 most polluted cities worldwide at one point on Monday, according to IQAir.

The total area burnt across the United States so far this year is below the 10-year average, but north of the border, Canada is having one of its worst wildfire seasons on record.

Increasingly, wildfires are also contributing to climate change by releasing greater volumes of carbon pollution into the air. Fires in Canada have released 180 million metric tons of carbon this year so far, the second most on record, according to the European Union’s Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service, which has been collecting data for 23 years. Arizona saw its worst July on record in terms of emissions, with 1.5 million metric tons of carbon released.

“It used to be that the main fire season was during the warmer part of the summer,” said Wade. “Now in many places, there’s no such thing as a fire season,” because the blazes burn throughout the year.

Continue Reading…

Gazans Are Starving. It’s a Manmade Catastrophe.

United Nations-backed food security experts say the “worst-case scenario of famine is currently playing out” in the Gaza Strip, home to roughly 2 million Palestinians. One of the few organizations still on the ground trying to feed Palestinians at risk of famine is the Gaza Soup Kitchen.

Abe Ajrami is one of the Gaza Soup Kitchen’s leaders. He was born and raised in Gaza and now lives in the US, where he helps coordinate the organization’s food aid. “This is manmade starvation,” Ajrami says. “There are thousands of people who are starving because the Israelis decide to use hunger as a weapon.”

On this week’s More To The Story, Ajrami sits down with host Al Letson to talk about the Gaza Soup Kitchen’s extraordinary efforts to help prevent famine in Gaza, the debate over whether the Israeli government is committing genocide against Palestinians, and whether a two-state solution is still achievable.

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: What are you hearing from the people you know in Gaza right now?

Abe Ajrami: What I’m hearing is a call, and people are praying, “Oh, God let the judgment day start.” I mean that’s really a common prayer is that people, this just, end this whole thing.

Can you unpack that for me? What do they mean when they say that?

Pretty much saying, let the end of time happen. Let’s, as faithful people believe that this whole life will end one day and we are all going to meet our Creator and there’ll be heaven and hell and all this stuff. And they’re saying just let it happen now.

And another thing, they often see those who were killed already in the war are the lucky ones. For example, I lost my oldest, one of my sisters, 72 years old, Halima, second week of the war. And it was a shock when it happened. And now my brothers and other siblings are looking back at it and saying, “She was the lucky one. We’re the one that’s unlucky to go through this hell for the past two years.” So that’s, that describes how bad things are happening. Everything is a struggle. Staying alive is a struggle. Finding food is a struggle. Finding drinking water is a struggle. I mean, just every minute of it is a brutal experience.

When I hear you say that and that phrase, it makes me feel like the people of Gaza just have no hope anymore, that this is like the status quo and it’s going to remain this way.

And that’s very true. The first one, the first things started going people, that’s not their first rodeo. So they thought, “Okay, we’ve been through this. It’s going to last for a month or two, going to rebuild again.” And then things were getting worse and they thought, “Okay, maybe the world would wake up and intervene to stop the genocide.” When the ICT, for example, took the case and declared that the war must stop, that these are indeed war crimes and issue arrest warrants for Netanyahu and his defense minister, people thought that’s the highest legal entity in the globe. Something must happen. Well, nothing happened since then. People will tell you this, talk about human rights, this talk about Western democracy, this talk about the Geneva Convention is meaningless because none of those conventions and laws help stop the genocide.

You call what’s happening in Gaza, a genocide. And I think there’s a debate. A lot of people have been pushing back on labeling it as a genocide. What would you say to them?

It seems to me only there are very few places in the world where that description is disputed and mostly in the American politics and to some extent some UK parliament. But the whole world, the United Nations is calling it genocide. Amnesty International is calling it a genocide. And so even so, Israeli human rights organization recently called it a genocide. So all these legal scholars calling it, and I challenge anyone who’s not even just, any ordinary citizen, look up the definition of genocide and see what’s happening in Gaza and look me in the face and tell me this is not a genocide.

I mean there are two things. The actions and the intent. The Israelis are not hiding their intent. As far as yesterday they said, “Our intent is to force Gazans out and settle Gaza with more Israeli settlements.” Their defense minister, before the war started, he said, “We are going to shut water, shut medicine, shut food, shut electricity of Gaza.” That’s collective punishment. That’s a war crime. So when you’re talking about as of yesterday, 60,000 Palestinians get killed, around 20,000 of them are kids, 70% are women and children, and there are thousands are still missing under the rubble. It’s obvious that the Israeli government is using food as a weapon.

And when you hear the peace talks and they say, well, Israelis agreed to let air drops happen, drop in food or allow certain countries to supply Gaza with food, that tells you they’re the ones shutting the borders from entering food. So you’re talking about 2 million people who were intentionally starved by another country.

I’ve seen a lot of talk about widespread hunger and the famine happening in Gaza right now, but a lot of times when I see the news coverage, they talk about the famine as in like this just happened. Like there’s nobody really responsible for it. Suddenly Gaza is now in famine conditions. Can you speak to that specifically?

Right. This is artificial. This is a manmade starvation. People aren’t hungry. They are made hungry by the siege and the Israeli bombing and closing the Gaza. It’s mind-boggling to hear my Jewish friends, the slogan of, “Never again.” And I love the slogan, I have several Jewish progressive friends who are great advocates of human rights and they’re using the history of the Nazi and the Holocaust to make sure it doesn’t happen again.

Unfortunately, it’s happening in Gaza because the irony is that you have thousands of people who are starving to death and right a mile across the Egyptian border, there are miles and miles of trucks full of food. So that’s really, it’s extremely sad that the world is watching this live on TV, seeing the irony of you get food on this side, plenty of food. And right across the border there are thousands of people who are starving because the Israelis decide to use hunger as a weapon to subdue the population and force them to leave Gaza.

I want to talk a little bit more about your organization and how it works. How many food distribution centers does the Gaza Soup Kitchen currently have operating?

Currently we have 11 feeding centers and the numbers change based on the situation. There are many factors. It’s not your typical, you go to Christ’s kitchen and it’s open and you eat a meal and eat and leave. It’s very hard. If you see the pictures, these guys either in a school that turned shelter for families or they’re out in the street behind demolished and rubble and they’re cooking.
In addition to those centers that feed the neighborhoods where they at, we have meal delivery to hospitals. We send meals to the staff and patients at the Al-Ahli Hospital and most recently to the children hospital, Nasser Hospital. We also have a medical clinic that’s staffed by physician and every once in a while we have a classroom for kids that gives some basic education and some entertainment services.

And how many people are running them?

Total employees averages between 60 and 65 people between the chefs and the workers that manage, and let me just expand on this. The whole process is extremely difficult. I mean, you collect donations here, that’s the easy part. Try to get that fund into Gaza is very, very difficult because all the banks were forced to shut down. So there is no standing financial system in Gaza. So you rely on money exchangers, just people who have some money and you go through, whether it’s Egypt or Turkey, any third party to get that money into Gaza. So we try to talk with farmers, with people who are providing what’s left of ingredients and vegetables in Gaza about accepting money transfer from a phone app to a phone app in lieu of cash. And we’ve been working for several months now. So there is trust relationship or they’ll accept the payment and people sometimes realize they’re helping their own communities, so they’ll help us get food one way or another. So, that’s just a cash part.

Trying to find fire logs is a challenge. So you try to scavenge a few logs here and there and wood often from houses that were bombed, try to find that wood and light because there is no propane, there is no electricity, no gas. So that’s how you fire up the pots is wood logs. And then find chefs who know how to cook. And sometimes the hardest part is how do you control the crowds? Because more to our, the three things we can never cross is one, you want to provide good quality food, decent food with dignity, and definitely treat people, these guys who cook are neighbors, we cook for our neighbors or friends. We’re not some third party coming in to Gaza to provide food. We are it. We are the Gaza people, so those who cook are locals, the chef is local, everybody that works. So that’s, the hardest thing sometimes is how do you control the crowds?

You’re talking about hundreds of hungry people and the lines extend so far. And initially the first few parts, everything goes well when those in the back start realizing there is only half a pot left, so I may not get to fill my plate and our instructions to these guys, and they know it. If somebody is so hungry that they’ll come attack and grab something, let them take it. He’s not being ugly, he is hungry. So that’s really the hardest part is finding enough food for these people and trying to feed as many people.

Do you have any idea how many people you’re able to serve each day?

On average, each feeding center feeds about between 250 to 400 people depending on the prices. And what, because that a hundred dollars can buy you a hundred meals if the prices are decent, it may buy you 20 meals if the prices are high, but on average is somewhere between 250 to 500 give and take depending mostly on the prices.

The UN says more than a thousand people in Gaza have been killed since May while trying to access food. And that most of those deaths, more than 760 have been near distribution sites run by an organization called the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation. Let me ask you specifically about the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation. It’s an Israeli and US-backed organization that was started this year and meant to replace UN efforts to distribute food. What are your thoughts on that group?

Right. Gaza Humanitarian Foundation is as close to humanitarian as the devil is close to enter into paradise. I mean, this is Gaza Humiliation Foundation in reality. And as recent as last week, a US ex-military employee, he worked in Gaza, came out and blew the whistle on what’s happening there and informed the world that actually these guys were shooting at hungry people. So people get killed, many get injured, it’s a scam. It’s really a trap where thousands of people get in. It’s such a humiliating, if you look at the videos and the footage of showing people just piled up, stuck between fences and those are starved people given the choice, you either stay home, die out of hunger, or you walk kilometers several miles to get to the GHF Feeding Center and you may get killed there. So these are the choices.

And I talk to people, I talked to my sister the other day and she said, “Guess what? My son walked several kilometers to the GHF site to get flour.” And I said, “Why? Isn’t that crazy?” And she said, “What were we going to do?” And I said, “So what happened?” She said, “I don’t know.” She said, “I’m still waiting. I’m hoping that he’ll come back alive.” I mean, that’s how bad the situation is, and it is just the whole thing is shady. You cannot feed people while drones are hovering over them and the bullets are flying over their heads. So that’s really, it’s a horrible thing that adds to the Israeli war crimes.

What does the Gaza Soup Kitchen do differently to try and protect people seeking food?

The thing is, just like any organization or charity, when you go seek food at Christ’s Kitchen or any place in the world that provide food, those who are giving the food aren’t carrying guns and aren’t masked. So what really sets us apart as an organization is that we’re purely local organization. Everybody that works in Gaza is part of the community. So when my brother goes and works in a feeding center, he’s feeding his neighbors, he’s feeding his friends in the neighborhood. So everybody knows everybody. Those who provide the food, the ingredients, those who light the fire, the chef that’s cooking and responsible for the recipe is a local in the community, and that’s what sets you apart. People trust our guys and our guys are part of the community. So not only we provide food, but we provide food with dignity.

So recently France, the UK and Canada announced support for a Palestinian State. I’m just curious, do you think that’s genuine support, political theater or something else?

It is way overdue. I mean, this should have been done many years ago. And ironically, even the US government for many years throughout all these administrations believe that the two state solution based on the 1967 border is the way to go. But yet when the issue is submitted to the Security Council to recognize the State of Palestine, the US government veto it. I mean, that’s your own stand. Why don’t you recognize Palestine as a state if you believe the two state solution is the way to go? So that’s way overdue.

Second is that either two opinions. I talk to my family and friends then they’re people who think, “Oh, that’s great. That’s better late than ever.” So they think it’s a good step forward. Others believe it’s just a stunt. It’s a fake cover for the Arab countries like Saudi and Bahrain and those countries to normalize relations with Israel because it would be very shameful on the eyes of their own people. You want to normalize relation with Israel, Israel is committing genocide in Gaza, so shame on you.

So they’re trying to show, well, actually we gained a lot of good things for the Palestinians. Look, we’re working with France and Britain and Canada and all these countries to recognize Palestine as a state, about the same time we have to recognize Israel. Well, if you recognize Palestine as a state without further actions, it would be meaningless. What recognition would change the status of those hungry people in Gaza? What is the British and Canadian and French recognition would help those farmers who losing their land in the West Bank?
So based on that recognition, if they truly recognize Palestine as a state, then those Israeli soldiers carrying the guns and roaming the streets of Gaza become illegitimate. It becomes an occupying force of another land, of another country. Those countries need to put sanctions on the occupying force, just like putting sanctions on Russia for occupying another country that’s called Ukraine. So that political recognition of Palestine as an entity has to translate into punishing Israel for occupying and subjecting Palestinians to all this brutal war and rewarding Israel if the Israeli government agreed to this two-state solution by opening borders with Arab countries and normalizing relationships. But the mere recognition itself, it carries symbolic political, a good thing that’s happening, but unless it translates to change the life on the ground, it won’t be that important.

Yeah. Abe, thanks so much for talking to me today and also thank you for your work in feeding people who are facing an extreme crisis right now.

Thank you, sir. If I may add-

Please.

And just something that I really shared with the American Jews and the Israelis themselves. I mean, we can continue to kill each other to the end of time, or we can sit together and say, how can we build a better future for our children, our grandchildren? It’s not about Hamas and it’s not about anything. It’s everybody knows that the source of the issue is that there are people called Palestinians who live in under occupation, and people throughout the world will pay a price no matter how high, to gain their freedom and get their dignity and have the right to self-determination. How long would it take the Israelis to realize this and the earlier and the faster we get to that point, see each other as humans, not as enemies, I think the closer we can get to a solution.

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

Continue Reading…

The Knock-Down, Drag-‘Em-Out Texas Redistricting Showdown Heats Up

An old-fashioned Western showdown is happening in Texas right now.

On one side you have Texas House Democrats who fled the state over the weekend to stop Texas Republicans from carrying out Trump’s orders to redraw the state’s maps. And Texas governor Greg Abbott who is very, very upset about it all. As of this writing, the move seems to have worked: the Texas House has failed to reach a quorum for two consecutive days. Now, Texas Senator John Cornyn wants the FBI to hunt down the Democrats and arrest them.

In this video I explain the standoff, the stakes and how both Republicans and Democrats are using the tool at their disposal to advance—or impede—competing visions for America.

Continue Reading…

The Supreme Court Prepares to End Voting Rights As We Know It

It is a truth universally acknowledged that if you want to hide what you are doing in Washington, announce it on a Friday evening in the heat of August. Better yet, in place of clarity, reference some pages in another document, so that people have to track that down and read it in order to grasp what you are telling them.

That is precisely what the Supreme Court did last week. But the news is too staggering to hide for long: The Republican-appointed justices have decided it is time to fully destroy the 1965 Voting Rights Act.

Republicans argue equal treatment of minority voters is actually discrimination against white voters.

Sixty years ago, the Voting Rights Act ended the Jim Crow regime and transformed the country, finally, into a multiracial democracy—albeit an imperfect one. But, with the court’s quiet announcement it would return to a paused case, the justices are now preparing to take us back to a time when elected officials at all levels of government were white, and the rights of minorities were trampled. The court’s eventual decision will impact how political maps are drawn, and will certainly hasten the precipitous decline of American democracy.

In its most recent term, the justices heard oral arguments in a redistricting case out of Louisiana. The state’s population is one-third Black, but after the 2020 census, the Louisiana legislature drew a Congressional map for its six seatswith just one majority-Black district. After two courts found that this map violated the Voting Rights Act’s mandate that minority voters have an equal opportunity to elect representatives of their choice, the legislature drew a new map with two Black-majority districts. That should have been the end of the saga, but a group of non-Black voters sued, arguing that the consideration of race in creating a second minority-majority district violated the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment.

It’s a perverse argument. Congress passed the Voting Rights Act to enforce the vision of equality enacted that animated the 14th and 15th Amendments. Indeed, the VRA was enacted under Congress’ express authority to use legislation to enforce the equal protection and voting rights guarantees of the post-Civil War amendments to the Constitution. Now, Republican lawyers are attacking the law, arguing that equal treatment of minority voters is actually discrimination against white voters. The amendments that ushered in a Second Founding of political equality are being reinterpreted to resurrect white supremacy.

Under the Roberts Court, equal protection has become a sword to wield against programs, policies, and laws intended to create an equal system. The lingeringLouisiana case now presents the Republican justices an opportunity to hollow out one of the few remaining protections of the VRA, the requirement of minority-majority districts, under this twisted reasoning.

Last term, rather than decide the case, the court punted on its final day of opinions in June. Then, on Friday night, it announced it would rehear the case in the coming term. This time, the court wants the parties to submit briefs on “Whether the State’s intentional creation of a second majority-minority congressional district violates the Fourteenth or Fifteenth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution.”

The court’s Friday order doesn’t mention the VRA. For that, you have to follow the breadcrumbs it leaves by referring to three pages from the brief of the non-Black voters. In those pages, the litigants argueusing race as a factor in drawing district maps under the VRA is unconstitutional, and that the time has come for the court to eliminate the use of race in political-map drawing. The court is accepting this invitation.

The Supreme Court’s assault on democracy and President Donald Trump’s are tightly intertwined. On Sunday, Democrats in the Texas House fled their state in order to block the Republican majority’s plans to redraw its Congressional map to create five new GOP seats in Congress—and help Republicans hold the House after the 2026 midterms. The plan came down from Washington; supported by Trump and given a veneer of respectability by a legally-ludicrous DOJ letter to Texas leaders alleging five seats held by Black and Latino representatives are illegal racial gerrymanders and requesting they redraw the map. Assuming new lines are enacted, a state with only a small majority of Republican voters will have boldly pushed through a map that gives three-quarters of its congressional seats to the GOP.

“It would be an earthquake in politics and make our legislative bodies whiter.”

Trump may be behind this plan, but it was the Supreme Court that made such brazen partisan gerrymandering possible. In 2019’s Rucho v. Common Cause, a 5-4 GOP majority announced federal courts could not hear challenges to partisan gerrymandering claims. Texas, and any other state that doesn’t have its own constitutional checks on gerrymandering, were greenlit to go ahead and rig their maps as much as possible. Nevermind that when the politicians pick their voters, the democratic mechanism of voting is diminished, if not extinguished.

Now, consider what might happen in the 2026 midterms and beyond if states are not only free to engage in partisan gerrymanders, but, as the GOP justices are presumably preparing to make reality, free from an obligation to create majority-minority districts. This week, UCLA election law expert Rick Hasen laid out the consequences in Slate: “It would end what has been the most successful way that Black and other minority voters have gotten fair representation in Congress, state legislatures, and local bodies. It would be an earthquake in politics and make our legislative bodies whiter and our protection for minority voters greatly diminished.”

Perhaps this sea change will come next June, when the court generally releases its biggest decisions at the end of the term. But the court set an early October due date for the new briefs, leaving open the possibility that if the Republican-appointed majority wants to give their party another leg up in the midterms, it could hear the case again this fall and release an opinion by January, giving states enough time to rush through new maps that replace minority (and usually Democratic) seats with white Republican ones in time for the midterms. Not all gerrymanders are enacted by authoritarians, but authoritarians use gerrymanderingto rig elections and hold onto power.

Whenever the justices release their opinion, they will undoubtedly couch the decision in principles of fairness, equality, and even democracy. But the movement to destroy the Voting Rights Act is closely tied to the MAGA movement and the Republican Party it has taken over. Take, for example, the man who represents the non-Black litigantvoters from Louisiana, who wrote the brief that the justices are likely to turn into law, a Missouri lawyer named Edward Greim. As I wrote earlier this year, “In 2020, Greim was one of the lawyers who tried to halt vote-counting in order to help President Donald Trump win the election. According to the Wisconsin Examiner, Greim later represented a fake elector from Wisconsin who was part of the plot to overturn the election results.” According to Politico, he also represented seven witnesses before the January 6 Select Committee investigation.

There are different ways to rig an election. Trump’s attempted coup in 2020 was one of them. This is another. Neither is compatible with multiracial democracy as we have known for the last 60 years.

Continue Reading…

Trump Will Restore a Confederate Monument in the Nation’s Capital

Since resuming office, President Donald Trump has sought to rewrite American history, rejecting any signs of historical division and exalting some of the nation’s most notorious oppressors.

On Monday, the latest chapter of this quest unfolded: The National Park Service (NPS) announced that officials will restore and reinstall a Washington, DC, statue of a Confederate general that protesters toppled during the June 2020 protests sparked by George Floyd‘s murder by Minneapolis police. NPS’ press release said that the statue of Albert Pike, which was authorized by Congress in 1898 and stood in Judiciary Square, honors his “leadership in Freemasonry,” the male-only secret society. What it does not mention: Pike was a Confederate States of America general who fought to preserve slavery, may have been involved with the Ku Klux Klan in the late 1860s, and commanded Native American troops in an 1862 battle in which they scalped at least eight Union soldiers.

Video obtained by the Washington Post shows protesters pulling down the Pike statue with ropes to cheers in June 2020, which Trump called “a disgrace to our Country!” in a social media post at the time. It was one of nearly 100 Confederate monuments that were removed from public spaces that year, according to a 2021 survey by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC).A report issued by the SPLC earlier this year found more than 680 Confederate monuments still standing.

The NPS cites two of Trump’s executive orders—”Making the District of Columbia Safe and Beautiful” and “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History“—as part of its justification for reinstalling the Pike statue. The news release adds that the statue has been in storage since its removal and is currently undergoing restorations, and will likely be reinstalled by October. Spokespeople for NPS and the White House did not immediately respond to requests for comment on Tuesday afternoon on the cost of the restoration or Pike’s history as a Confederate general and supporter of slavery.

Eleanor Holmes Norton, DC’s non-voting Democratic delegate to Congress, said in a statement on Monday that she will reintroduce a bill to permanently remove the statue. “The decision to honor Albert Pike by reinstalling [his] statue is as odd and indefensible as it is morally objectionable,” she said.

“A statue honoring a racist and a traitor has no place on the streets of DC,” Holmes Norton added.

As jarring as the move may be, it is just one of a series of measures Trump has taken to try to remake the nation’s history in MAGA’s fantasized image—that is, as an historically colorblind and virtuous society. He has attacked the Smithsonian, alleging they have “come under the influence of a divisive, race-centered ideology” and ordering officials to “remove improper ideology” from their properties; that led to the Smithsonian removing references to Trump’s two impeachments from an exhibit at the National Museum of American History, the Washington Post first reported last week. (The Smithsonian subsequently announced that the information would be restored within weeks.) Trump has also, implausibly, declared English the country’s official language.

His edicts have led the US Army to restore seven bases to prior names honoring Confederate leaders, and NPS to remove references to gender non-conforming and transgender people and slavery from its website. Trump’s sycophants in Congress have also tried to make DC a more Trump-friendly town, introducing legislation to rename Dulles International Airport after the president and the Kennedy Center Opera House after First Lady Melania Trump.

The latest news is just more proof that, as my colleague David Corn wrote back in April:

Trump has launched a crusade not only against public servants, legal and governmental norms, commonsense economics, science, higher education, DEI programs, and his critics and political rivals, as he vies for wide-ranging power that will allow him to rule as an autocrat. He is striving to become the Big Brother who determines which parts of the American story are legitimate and which are to be suppressed and deleted.

Continue Reading…

The Conservative Nature Lovers Trying to Nudge Trump in the Right Direction

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

In early July, the Bureau of Land Management quietly announced plans to trade away 2 million acres of public land along Alaska’s Dalton Highway. The immense stretch of boreal forest totters into tundra, an area almost three times the size of Rhode Island. It will be handed over to the state, likely opening the door to mining and development.

The exchange is one of many moves by the Trump administration to privatize public land and roll back climate and environmental protections. In just six months the White House has announced plans to shrink iconic national monuments, reopened oil and gas leasing, rescinded watershed protections to pave the way for mining, and opened millions of acres of national forest to logging. These decisions have been joined by a broader dismantling of climate and environmental regulations, including efforts to eliminate the Environmental Protection Agency’s ability to curb greenhouse gases.

Even as he continued upending how the country’s natural resources are managed, President Donald Trump signed an executive order vowing to “Make America Beautiful Again.” His directive, issued July 3, called for balancing environmental stewardship with economic growth, and established a commission to “advise and assist the President regarding how best to responsibly conserve America’s national treasures and natural resources.” It is unclear what policies this commission might develop or how much authority it will hold.

“Most conservatives understand the issue…They’re just tired of the moralism and want solutions aligned with their values.”

Benji Backer, a 27-year-old conservative conservationist, hopes to influence some of those details. He has built a national platform around the idea that caring about the environment and climate change is a bipartisan issue. After founding the nonprofit American Conservation Coalition, or ACC, eight years ago, Backer launched Nature is Nonpartisan this spring. While ACC was “strictly meant for conservatives, by conservatives,” he sees the new organization transcending partisanship, pursuing environmental action regardless of who holds political power. “If there’s a future for our environment, there has to be a center voice that’s willing to call balls and strikes, and not care about who they could potentially piss off,” he said.

The group’s board includes notable conservative figures like David Bernhardt,a lawyer who served as interior secretary during the first Trump administration and was investigated for failing to recuse himself from decisions affecting Halliburton, a former client. He now consults for oil and gas firms. Other advisers include Chris LaCivita Jr., a political consultant and son of the president’s 2024 campaign manager, as well as more centrist figures like Van Jones and David Livingston.

Shortly after the president took office Backer delivered a draft order to the White House containing a list of policy goals he’d developed in consultation with groups like Ducks Unlimited and the National Wildlife Federation. These included goals like restoring forests and combating plastic pollution. Though the final order, announced at the Iowa State Fair, does not explicitly mention climate change, Backer says it helps the EPA administrator and interior secretary “move in the right direction.” Based on his conversations with them, Backer says, “They’ve been focused on cutting. It’s my hope that they start building soon.”

“Our message to conservatives is that this country is worth protecting,” says Benji Backer.Grist/Courtesy of Benji Backer

Though the Trump administration’s revisions substantially altered the order, Backer was quick to celebrate it. “Working with the White House on this EO for the past six months has been an honor,” he posted on X shortly after Trump signed the document. “This is an incredible step that will leave a positive mark for our environment for generations!”

Backer’s optimistic tone marks a shift from a letter he co-signed with nine other Republican leaders in December, stating that Trump’s win “raises serious questions about both the durability of recent climate gains and the prospects for future progress.” At that time, the coalition statement focused on the election of climate-engaged Republicans like representatives John Curtis and Marianette Miller-Meeks, both members of the Conservative Climate Caucus. Like many liberal organizations preparing for a Trump administration, the letter also discussed shifting focus to state and local climate action.

Lobbying efforts by the American Conservation Coalition and its advocacy arm have met mixed success with the Trump administration. They appear to have spent $2.65 million trying to preserve key parts of the Inflation Reduction Act, particularly clean energy tax credits. “The tax credits empower the private sector to invest in clean, reliable energy,” Danielle Franz, ACC’s chief executive officer, told Grist. “It’s important to use our resources to reward innovation, and to have those free market or market-based incentives.”

“You’ve got to watch what [Republicans] are doing, not just what they’re saying,” says former New Jersey governor Christine Todd Whitman. The gap “is pretty stark.”

The budget bill debate also demonstrated how effective conservative voices can be in shaping environmental policy. When Utah Republican Senator Mike Lee proposed requiring the sale of millions of acres of federal land, it sparked swift and broad backlash, including from hunters, anglers, and right-leaning influencers like Joe Rogan. After widespread conservative criticism, Lee scaled back the bill, then withdrew it—underscoring the significant influence GOP conservation groups like ACC can have in determining environmental policy.

It was, Backer says, “a perfect example of what is possible. It basically just allowed us to go out there and show that millions of Americans are willing to stand together for the same environmental outcome.” He hopes to build on that momentum with practical goals: Nature Is Nonpartisan is developing a short list of priorities he believes are politically feasible, including providing more funding for easing water pollution, reforming the Endangered Species Act, and tackling the backlog of maintenance in America’s 63 national parks. (His list made no mention of climate change.) To garner support, Backer recently organized a coalition meeting of conservation groups, including right-leaning organizations like American Forests and Safari Club International, as well as more liberal conservation groups like the Nature Conservancy.

It’s part of a broader effort to tap into what he and others see as a growing awareness among conservatives. As Franz puts it, if you asked most conservatives if “climate change is real, they would say yes.” She points out conservation has deep roots in the Republican Party, from Teddy Roosevelt championing the creation of national parks to Ronald Reagan approving the Montreal Protocol to address the ozone hole.

She added that the document Grist obtained that outlines the lobbying effort was a “leaked, outdated draft that was never finalized or published,” and “appears to conflate” ACC and its advocacy group’s work. Those efforts ultimately failed: The reconciliation bill made significant cuts to clean energy policy, effectively halting federal incentives for wind, solar, and other renewable energy projects. The bill did retain some support for nuclear and geothermal power. Franz declined to criticize the decision or discuss specific energy policies, saying “in any bill you’re going to have give and take.”

Public opinion has shifted sharply since then, however. According to a 2024 Gallup poll, only 11 percent of Republicans consider climate change a great personal threat, down from 29 percent a decade ago. A Pew Research Center survey reveals that while a majority of Republicans support concrete policies like expanding solar farms and joining international climate agreements, only 12 percent say climate change should be a top national priority—underscoring how political polarization shapes broader attitudes. Though there may be pragmatic support for specific policies, Republicans still consistently prioritize consumer costs, and fossil fuels over renewable energy. “Most conservatives understand the issue,” Franz says. “They’re just tired of the moralism and want solutions aligned with their values.”

In the past, ACC has advocated for streamlining permitting and boosting nuclear energy, promoting an “all‑of‑the‑above” strategy that includes renewables. Franz says ACC is happy with Trump’s “energy abundance” strategy, arguing that traditional energy produced in the United States has “a net reduction for global emissions” because “American-made fossil fuels are cleaner than some other countries.”

The data tell a different story. The International Energy Agency has been unequivocal: To stay within global climate goals, no new fossil fuel development can move forward. Studies show US methane emissions are severely undercounted, especially from shale gas fields, and claims of American fossil fuels being cleaner obscure the urgent need to shift away from them altogether. “Look, I’m not here to defend what Trump’s done on the environment over the last six months,” Backer said. “This is not a black-or-white thing. This is a four-year administration, and we’re trying to shift them in the direction towards conservation as much as we possibly can.”

But hoping for a gradual course correction is at odds with the urgency of the crisis and the need for swift action, said Christine Todd Whitman, the former Republican governor of New Jersey who led the EPA under President George W. Bush. She is upset by the Trump administration’s dismantling of that agency, saying the president “has no respect for science.”

In the absence of climate leadership from Washington, Whitman said states will have to step up with their own agreements, like the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, a coalition of 11 eastern states that aims to limit and reduce emissions from the power sector. Although each of those states is currently led by a Democrat, several of them have had Republican governors since the coalition’s inception in 2005. “There are Republicans that really care about the environment and are doing work,” Whitman said. But while she agrees bipartisan advocacy is essential, she says there’s a clear disconnect between the rhetoric in Make America Beautiful Again and the administration’s policies. “You’ve got to watch what they’re doing, not just what they’re saying,” she added. The gap, she said, “is pretty stark.”

Still, Franz is optimistic about building conservative consensus around a sustainable future. “Our message to conservatives is that this country is worth protecting,” she says.

In its first six months, the Trump administration has aggressively expanded oil and gas leasing, rolled back critical environmental regulations, and weakened methane emissions, reversing previous conservation protections and US progress on global climate commitments. Asked about these policies, Franz said, “I think oftentimes these pieces want to relitigate and relitigate and relitigate the past, instead of talking about the future that conservatives see.”

Franz and Backer see themselves as guardians of a tradition that protects a natural heritage alongside economic freedom. They don’t see a gulf between a livable future and the reality unfolding in Washington—a White House that praises abundance while leasing away the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge; an administration that talks about stewardship while gutting the laws that made it possible.

Franz recently became a parent, an experience that’s deepened her commitment to her work. She wants her 4-month-old son to grow up seeing the north woods of Minnesota the way she did—deer tracks in the snow, the bite of a November wind, the smell of rifle oil. Franz talks about caring about outcomes, not performative belief tests, how conservatives are tired of virtue signaling, and focusing on solutions. She doesn’t see a tension between supporting oil and gas and promoting conservation at the same time. “It assumes a binary choice between use and between care, and I think that we can do both.”

Whether that’s true is no longer just an ideological debate. It’s a matter of time. As Franz says, “It’s not really a question of, ‘Do you believe in climate change?’ anymore. It’s more a question of, ‘What do you want to do about it?’”

Continue Reading…

Dems Are in Their “Revenge Gerrymander” Era and This Zellennial Candidate Is Here for It

Should Democrats be revenge gerrymandering?

“Hell yeah,” says Texas congressional candidate, Isaiah Martin.

On Sunday evening, Texas House Democrats fled the state to try to block an effort by state Republicans to redraw the state’s congressional map and flips five districts from blue to red. Some Democrats are now looking for blue states to return the favor. I asked Isaiah Martin, candidate for Texas’s 18th congressional district, for his thoughts on how Democrats should approach this moment.

Martin, 27, has skin in the game. A Houston native, he’s spent much of his young life working in politics, including as an advisor to the late Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee. Last week, Martin made headlines when he was arrested for disrupting a local redistricting hearing when he refused to yield once his time had expired.
“We should be talking about the fact that we live in a state that is unaffordable for people, our economy is wrecked, people cannot find good jobs, ” Martin said, “and you choose to go and gerrymander people out of their seats.”

Martin told me that he believes that Democrats should use every single tool at their disposal to fight back, and that they should be asking themselves if they are willing to “lose the country” because they are “playing into a moral high ground dilemma.”

WATCH:

Continue Reading…

Donald Trump and the Deconstruction of America

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._

Every day, Americans are bombarded with the bad news of Trump 2.0: concentration camps; cruel ICE raids targeting law-abiding residents; health insurance being yanked from millions; elite universities, media companies, and law firms yielding to mob-like extortion; crypto deals and other brazen grifting tied to a corrupt White House; rampant abuses of governmental power and threats of sham criminal prosecutions against the administration’s critics and political foes; drastic cuts in food assistance; assaults on women’s rights; the withholding of disaster relief; the reckless shutdowns and eviscerations of crucial government services and agencies that will result in hardship (and, in some cases, death) for Americans and people overseas.

This is, of course, a partial list. And it is exhausting to keep track of and absorb each new outrage. That is the clear intent. The Trump transgressions come so fast they distract from each other. Public attention rarely remains focused on any one atrocity. We’re bludgeoned by the never-ending stream of misdeeds and affronts—which each day come wrapped in propaganda extolling a new Golden Age and assorted false glories of Dear Leader. When one is caught in the crossfire, it is hard to see, let alone address, the big picture.

Trump and his gang are deconstructing America. It is the story that must be conveyed to the citizenry.

That is to Donald Trump’s advantage. For a long time, commentators have noted that he relishes generating chaos and believes he can exploit disorder for political advantage. It’s an escape route for him. The dizzying whirlwind he creates places critics and opponents off-balance. And perhaps best of all for him and his crew, it hides their overall plan and inhibits the development and promotion of an overarching counternarrative. Their foes are stuck decrying the individual acts of villainy, one at a time, without doing what is most necessary in American politics: telling a story.

Trump and his gang are deconstructing America. This is their purposeful goal and an obvious one, if you look past the daily barrage of absurdity, indecency, corruption, wrongdoing, and abuses of power. It is the story that must be conveyed to the citizenry.

For years, Trump’s lieutenants and allies—folks like alt-right leader Steve Bannon and the arch-conservative eggheads at the Heritage Foundation—have decried what they call the “administrative state” and urged its abolition. By this, they meant the permanent civil service that does the work of government, such as enforcing laws and implementing policies, regulations, and safeguards. It’s been a long-term desire of right-wingers to smash the state and disempower these public servants—and make way for an economically libertarian and socially conservative regime that, in the case of Trump, would be ruled by an autocrat. Government would no longer have the potential to be a countervailing force to the power of corporate interests and wealth. This is the dream shared by Elon Musk and the reason he jumped aboard the Trump train. Like many of his Silicon Valley brethren, he envisions a world in which profit-driven tech overlords plot our collective future free of the pesky meddling of government.

Trump’s master plan extends far beyond government. He is seeking to weaken and intimidate other influential sections of society that might provide a check on him and a corporate-friendly state.

To achieve something of this sort, Trump, following the playbook of Project 2025, is attempting to shift the basic balance of power in the United States and revoke a fundamental agreement of American society: The rich and the powerful get to be rich and powerful, while government constrains their excesses and looks out for the common interest of the rest of us. Under Trump, that deal—which often in American history has been executed shoddily and not infrequently ignored—is null and void. Look at artificial intelligence. Last month, Trump gave free rein to the tech firms to develop this new technology—which might present a risk to humanity—as they wish. There will be no consideration of the public interest or public safety.

But Trump’s master plan—of which he is hardly the main author—extends far beyond government. He is seeking to weaken and intimidate other influential sections of society that might provide a check on him and a corporate-friendly state. Embracing a decades-long crusade of the right, he has assaulted the media, looking to discredit news outlets and undercut their ability to hold him and his allies accountable. And big guns of corporate media—ABC News and Paramount, the owner of CBS News—have buckled, agreeing to pay Trump millions of dollars in extortion fees. A wave of baseless defamation suits from Trump and his confreres have sent chilling waves through the media. Brendan Carr, the chair of the Federal Communications Commission, has issued not-so-veiled threats against news organizations and media companies that rely on broadcast licenses issued by the federal government.

Trump has gone after powerful law firms in the same Sopranos-like manner, several of which settled and agreed to pay huge fees though they had committed no wrongdoing. Now big law firms are more reluctant to take on cases that might offend Trump. This week, Reuters published an investigation that concluded, “Dozens of major law firms, wary of political retaliation, have scaled back pro bono work, diversity initiatives and litigation that could place them in conflict with the Trump administration…Many firms are making a strategic calculation: withdraw from pro bono work frowned on by Trump, or risk becoming the next target.”

The Trump White House also zeroed in on Ivy League schools. So far, Columbia, the University of Pennsylvania, and Brown have settled bogus cases deployed against them by the administration. Columbia will pay $200 million directly to the government and be subjected to an independent monitor. Brown escaped such an intrusion and agreed to pay $50 million over 10 years to workforce development organizations in Rhode Island. Harvard, which initially seemed to be a front of resistance, is now reportedly in negotiations to forge an agreement with Trump that could entail a payment of $500 million. Universities and colleges across the nation are undoubtedly watching all this and discussing how to avoid the wrath of Trump.

Trump and his posse are waging an inexplicable war on science. Is that because they see science as a fount of liberalism, as if reality has a political bias?

As is Corporate America. Trump has been good to many executives and firms by slashing their taxes and weakening regulatory enforcement, especially for polluters and financial firms. (Tariffs are another matter.) But the men and women in the C-suites are no fools and realize that a price will be paid if they end up at odds with Trump. (See Jeff Bezos and the Washington Post.)

Trump has annihilated one of the centers of influential thought in the nation: the scientific research community. Slashing billions of dollars in funding for medical research and other scientific endeavors, he is wiping out a generation of science and scientists. One of the driving engines of American society and the US economy is being deprived of fuel. The United States is on its way to losing its preeminent standing in the global scientific community. That means lower likelihoods of breakthroughs in the search for treatments and cures for cancer, diabetes, Alzheimer’s, and other diseases, as well as increased challenges once the next pandemic strikes. Dramatic reductions in NASA’s budget will cause a severe decline in basic scientific research. Trump and his posse are waging an inexplicable war on science. Is that because they see science as a fount of liberalism, as if reality has a political bias?

With his mass deportation effort, Trump has turned a slice of American law enforcement into a police state. He has spread fear through many towns and communities, as his masked marauders round up law-abiding residents and threaten small businesses. Why go after people who are working hard, paying taxes, and contributing to their communities? It’s difficult not to see a racial motive and a desire to reverse the demographic diversity that is a key and dynamic ingredient of American society. At the same time, Trump has moved to make the United States less secular. His IRS issued a ruling to allow churches and other places of worship to become more directly involved in elections. On Monday, his Office of Personnel Management released new guidance that would allow federal employees to display religious items in the workplace, pray in groups, and proselytize their fellow workers.

It’s an everything-everywhere-all-at-once strategy to reshape America to the fancy of an autocrat and far-right advocates who crave blowing up the foundations of America they regard as liberal, woke, or otherwise at odds with their MAGA theology.

What Trump and Co. are doing brings to mind Christian dominionism. Fundamentalists who adhere to this theology believe that Christians ought to have dominion over the vital sectors of society: family, religion, government, education, media, business, and arts and entertainment. Trump is striving for such domination. He even seized control of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. (Republicans have proposed renaming it the Donald J. Trump Center for Performing Arts.) His White House has muscled the Smithsonian Institution to eschew exhibitions that in the Trumpers’ view reflect DEI concerns. As a result of pressure from the administration, the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Art History removed references to Trump’s two impeachments from an exhibit on impeachments in US history. In 1984, the Party has a slogan: “Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.”

It’s an everything-everywhere-all-at-once strategy to reshape America to the fancy of an autocrat and far-right advocates who crave blowing up the foundations of America they regard as liberal, woke, or otherwise at odds with their MAGA theology. And it entails amassing political clout unlike a president has ever done, with Trump illegally assuming powers he doesn’t possess (such as to impose tariffs and deport people without due process) and trying to rig the system (see the latest gerrymandering by Texas Republicans).

One huge question is how to tell this story? The individual components are so troubling they warrant their own headlines, and the conventional media is not adept at consistently portraying overarching narratives in a down-to-brass-tacks fashion. The key word in the last sentence is “consistently.” In today’s fractured and bubble-ized media ecosystem, plotlines don’t punch through unless there’s repetition and force in the presentation. It’s too easy to be distracted. Each day we are hit by thousands of impressions—social media posts, ads, emails, news stories, videos. How does an idea—such as, Trump is deconstructing American society—cut through the immense and never-ending clutter and register with a large number of people?

Before you quickly say, “The Democrats should be doing this,” I’ll note that, yes, the Democrats should be doing this. But let’s be real. There are few Democrats these days who have a national platform from which they can broadcast such a message. That’s not only because most are awful as communicators in the digital age, but also because the party locked out of the White House and the congressional majorities usually has difficulty gaining the attention of those Americans who don’t obsessively pay attention to politics.

The challenge of how to reach voters who do not engage with news or politics is the No. 1 problem for Democrats. You can’t rebrand if no one sees you trying to rebrand. Trump, a creation of reality TV and celebrity culture, commands attention—and even did so when he was not in office. There’s no Democrat with such standing. Thus, no Democrat is well positioned to inform Americans of the grand scheme underway.

The president was acknowledging he would use instruments of state power to try to lock up his political enemies. Richard Nixon musing about such things on the Watergate tapes was a massive scandal. Nowadays, it’s just another Tuesday.

That’s not to say that Democrats shouldn’t try. If enough of them use the daily outrages to illuminate the larger narrative and do so repeatedly, the message will reach some people. But this would require much repetition and discipline, as well as imagination and creativity regarding how to connect with people not looking for connections with politicians. At the moment, beating the Epstein scandal drum probably seems more effective for many Democrats, as they try to ride a wave of protest and upset created by Trump’s own base.

Reporters and commentators in the media could help share this story. But that might require breaking free of certain industry conventions. The gravitational pull within much mainstream media is toward neutral language and presentation. That aids bad-faith actors. It was shocking that when Trump recently said, “Whether it’s right or wrong, it’s time to go after people,” this remark did not lead to front-page headlines and days of high-octane coverage. The president of the United States was acknowledging he would use instruments of state power—in this instance, the intelligence community and the Justice Department—to try to lock up his political enemies. Richard Nixon musing about such things on the Watergate tapes was a massive scandal. Nowadays, it’s just another Tuesday.

Perhaps “deconstructing America” is not the best phrase for this task. “Destroying America” seems a touch vague and for some it might come across as hyperbolic. The “No Kings” slogan that apparently arose organically via national protests against Trump caught on, and it works as effective shorthand. But it may be too personalized, fixating on Trump’s pathological appetite for authoritarian rule, without sufficiently covering the transformational and wide-ranging attack on the nation that he and the right are perpetuating. I’m open to suggestions.

The point remains: The full impact of Trump’s rule has not seemed to register with most Americans, even as he slips in the polls. It is a frightening tale. He and his co-conspirators are forcing profound changes upon the nation—policies that do not have the support of the majority and that will cause much damage and be difficult to remedy. This is the narrative that needs to be conveyed, for if the people do not understand the sweeping dark reality of Trumpism, they will not be able to stop it.

Continue Reading…

Fleeing Texas Was the Only Way Democrats Could Block Trump’s Plan to Rig the Midterms

On Sunday evening, Texas House Democrats made the fateful decision to flee the state to block Republicans from quickly passing a new Trump-ordered redistricting plan that could give Republicans up to five new seats in the US House, rigging the midterms before a single vote has been cast.

It’s a risky and expensive strategy for Democrats; each member who leaves will be subject to $500 in fines per day. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott has threatened to arrest and expel Democrats who leave the state, citing a nonbinding legal opinion from Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton that will ultimately be up to the courts to decide. But denying Republicans a quorum was the only way Democrats could at least temporarily stop Trump’s Texas takeover and put pressure on their party to devise a national response.

“Republicans are stealing our democracy right before our very eyes,” Texas Democratic Rep. Trey Martinez Fischer said when a large contingent of Democratic House members arrived on Sunday outside Chicago, Illinois, joined by Gov. JB Pritzker. “Texas Democrats are here and we have a message to Donald Trump: not on our watch.”

“You’re saying to Texas voters: you don’t get to pick who represents you. Donald Trump picks who represents you.”

The decision by Texas Democrats to go to blue states like Illinois, New York, and Massachusetts underscores how nationalized this battle has become compared to the last time Democrats left the state to attempt to block a mid-decade redistricting plan, when they fled to Ardmore, Oklahoma in 2003.

Democrats left in a hurry because Texas Republicans were doing Trump’s bidding at lightning speed. On Friday, the Texas House redistricting committee held the only hearing on the GOP map, voted it out of committee on Saturday morning on a party-line vote, and were set to pass it through the House on Monday.

“In this moment of democracy survival, people need to be prepared to do anything in order to ensure that our constitutional system of government continues to exist,” former Obama Attorney General Eric Holder told me on Monday. “The authoritarian move that was dictated to Texas by the White House needs to be opposed by any means necessary.”

Instead of investigating how more than 135 Texans died in horrific flooding, the GOP-controlled legislature made re-gerrymandering the state their top priority.

Abbott claimed the new redistricting map was intended to address “constitutional concerns,” referencing a legally dubious letter from the Justice Department alleging that four districts, all represented by Black or Hispanic Democrats, were “unconstitutional racial gerrymanders.” But Republicans in the legislature admitted it was all about picking up as many seats as possible to further Trump’s plan to manipulate the midterms and insulate their party from an angry public through extreme gerrymandering.

“I’m not beating around the bush,” Republican Rep. Todd Hunter, who introduced the map, said at a legislative hearing on Friday. “We have five new districts, and these five new districts are based on political performance.” Contra Abbott and the Justice Department, he admitted the map was being redrawn “for partisan purposes.”

“This bill was not based off that DOJ letter,” added Rep. Cody Vasut, the chair of the House special committee on redistricting. “This bill was based off of improving political performance.”

The GOP plan would create 30 districts, out of 38, that Trump carried by 10 points or more, up from 25 in the current map, and reduce the number of seats that Trump carried by 10 points or less from two seats to zero.

“The Republican members on this dais have outsourced our democracy to Mar-a-Lago and the Oval Office,” responded Democratic US House Rep. Greg Casar, whose Austin-based district is effectively dismantled under the new map. Though non-white voters are 60 percent of Texas’s population and fueled 95 percent of new growth in the state over the past decade, the plan increases the number of majority white districts, from 22 to 24, and dismantles the districts of two lawmakers of color, Casar and Rep. Al Green of Houston.

“You’re saying to Texas voters: you don’t get to pick who represents you,” Casar said. “Donald Trump picks who represents you.”

Demanding that Texas redraw its maps mid-decade, when the legislature is practically the same as the one that passed the last congressional redistricting in 2021 and that map is being challenged in court for discriminating against voters of color, is yet another way that Trump is normalizing something that is deeply abnormal. And he’s setting off what Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) calls “a race to the bottom” that will lead to even more extreme gerrymandering nationwide.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom has already vowed to respond, floating a complex plan to convince the legislature to pass new maps targeting vulnerable Republicans and bypass the state’s independent redistricting commission, which voters would then be asked to approve in a special election this November. Other blue states could follow, although their options are complicated either by independent commissions or because Democrats have already maximized the number of seats they can pick up in such states. A case in point: Democrats already control more than 80 percent of US House seats in Illinois, where most Texas Democrats arrived on Sunday evening. That map received an F for partisan fairness from the Princeton Gerrymandering Project.

The Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee (DLCC) on Monday called on Democratic state legislatures to “pursue redistricting mid-cycle” while noting that their party will be at a distinct disadvantage in a gerrymandering arms race. According to the DLCC, “Republican state legislative majorities oversee 55 Democratic Congressional seats while Democratic state legislative majorities oversee only 35 GOP Districts.”

Holder, who has long supported an independent redistricting process, compared the Democrats newfound embrace of aggressive redistricting tactics to the US embrace of Joseph Stalin during World War II. “This is a perilous moment for our democracy, and so you have to do things that you wouldn’t necessarily support, and that over the long term, I do not support,” he told me. “I’m concerned about a race to the bottom where gerrymandering just proliferates all around the country. It’s what we’ve been fighting against. But what they are trying to do here in Texas really is, and I can’t emphasize this enough, a threat to our democracy, and as a result, extreme measures have to be taken to fight it.”

Red states, from Ohio to Florida to Missouri, and beyond, are sure to respond, engaging in the very type of behavior that voters abhor and that super-charges public distrust in political institutions: self-interested politicians pre-determining election outcomes to benefit themselves and their party while depriving the electorate of meaningful choices and representation.

It’s hard to see where this ends or how it ends in a good place for American democracy.

“If there’s a gerrymandering arms race, it ends with the American people being cheated of their democracy,” Holder said. “It ends with the American people being deprived of their most essential right, and that is to cast a meaningful ballot. These are temporary measures that the Democrats have to take, and then we’ve got to get back to fighting for fairness.”

The last time Texas Democrats broke quorum, to block a sweeping voter suppression bill in 2021, they went to Washington to lobby Democrats to pass federal legislation that would’ve banned this type of egregious partisan gerrymandering.

That effort failed when two Senate Democrats, Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, joined with Republicans to filibuster it. The consequences of that inaction, along with Supreme Court decisions effectively legalizing partisan gerrymandering and gutting protections against racial gerrymandering, are on full display today.

“This quorum break is not about the Democratic Party,” Martinez Fischer said on Sunday. “It’s about the democratic process.”

Continue Reading…

Legit Climate Scientists Slam Trump EPA Report as a “Farce” and an Embarrassment

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

A new Trump administration report that attempts to justify a mass rollback of environmental regulations is chock-full of climate misinformation, experts say.

On Tuesday, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced a proposal to undo the 2009 “endangerment finding,” which allows the agency to limit planet-heating pollution from cars and trucks, power plants and other industrial sources. Hours later, the Department of Energy (DOE) published a 150-page report defending the proposal, claiming scientific concern about the climate crisis is overblown. “Climate change is a challenge—not a catastrophe,” wrote the energy secretary, Chris Wright, in the report’s introduction.

The esteemed climate scientist Michael Mann said the report was akin to the result he would expect “if you took a chatbot and you trained it on the top 10 fossil fuel industry-funded climate denier websites.”

The energy department published the report hours after the EPA announced a plan to roll back 2009’s “endangerment finding,” a seminal ruling that provided the legal basis for the agency to regulate climate-heating pollution under the Clean Air Act. If finalized, the move would topple virtually all US climate regulation.

In a Fox News interview, Wright claimed the report pushed back on the “cancel culture Orwellian squelching of science.” But Naomi Oreskes, a history of science professor at Harvard University and expert in climate misinformation, said its true purpose was to “justify what is a scientifically unjustifiable failure to regulate fossil fuels.”

“Science is the basis for climate regulation, so now they are trying to replace legitimate science with pseudoscience,” she said.

The attack on the research underpinning the endangerment finding—which says greenhouse gases endanger public health and welfare—comes as part of Trump’s “drill, baby, drill” agenda to boost fossil fuels, which are the primary cause of global warming.

“This is an agenda to promote fossil fuels, not to protect public health and welfare or the environment,” said Rachel Cleetus, a director at climate and science non-profit Union of Concerned Scientists who was an author on the sixth US national climate assessment.

Asked about scientists’ assertions that the new report is rife with misinformation**,** an energy department spokesperson, Ben Dietderich, said: “This report critically assesses many areas of ongoing scientific inquiry that are frequently assigned high levels of confidence—not by the scientists themselves but by the political bodies involved, such as the United Nations or previous presidential administrations.”

“They cherrypick data points that suit their narrative and exclude the vast majority of the scientific literature.”

But the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) produces what is widely considered the gold standard compendium of climate science, compiled by a huge multinational team of scientists, peer-reviewed and agreed to by every national government.

The latest IPCC synthesis report, released two years ago, was a vast undertaking involving 721 volunteer scientists around the world. It states that it is “unequivocal” that human activity has heated the planet, which has “led to widespread adverse impacts and related losses and damages to nature and people.”

By contrast, the Trump administration report was crafted by five handpicked scientists who are seen as having fringe or contrarian views by mainstream climate scientists, with no peer review. The experts behind the report have previously denied being climate deniers. The energy department did not respond to a question about the authors.

“This report had five authors and was rushed over four months, and would not pass muster in any traditional scientific peer review process,” said Zeke Hausfather, a research scientist at the climate non-profit Berkeley Earth, who called the paper a “farce.”

Wright, the energy secretary, insisted he had not steered the report’s conclusions, while Judith Curry, one of the report authors, said in a blogpost she hoped the document would push climate science “away from alarmism and advocacy.”

Mainstream climate scientists, however, condemned the findings as distorted and inaccurate. “This is a report written by a couple of scientists who are outliers in their arguments for climate change,” said Natalie Mahowald, a climate scientist at Cornell University. “This document does in no way depreciate the value of previous assessments, but rather just cherrypicks the literature to pretend to create a new review.”

Mahowald said the lack of peer review meant it was “obviously not as robust” as the IPCC report or the US government’s periodic national climate assessment, which the Trump administration recently took offline. The latest national climate assessment, compiled by a dozen government agencies and outside scientists in 2023, concluded that the “effects of human-caused climate change are already far-reaching and worsening across every region of the United States”

“If almost any other group of scientists had been chosen, the report would have been dramatically different,” Andrew Dessler, a climate researcher at Texas A&M University, said of the new report. “The only way to get this report was to pick these authors.”

“Their denialist framing,” says scientist Michael Mann, “rejects not just the science, but what is plainly evident if you look out your window.”

Hausfather agreed that the authors’ work “might represent their views but is not consistent with the broader scientific literature on climate change.” He was among the scientists whose work the authors cited.

The new paper includes a chart from a 2019 report which he led, claiming it demonstrates how climate models “consistently overestimated observations” of atmospheric carbon. But Hausfather’s research actually showed that climate models have performed well.

“They appear to have discarded the whole paper as not fitting their narrative, and instead picked a single figure that was in the supplementary materials to cast doubt on models when the whole paper actually confirmed how well they have performed in the years after they were published,” he said. The energy department did not respond to a request for comment about Hausfather’s concerns.

That approach to research seems to underpin the entire paper, said Hausfather, who is also the climate research lead at tech company Stripe.

“This is a general theme in the report; they cherrypick data points that suit their narrative and exclude the vast majority of the scientific literature that does not,” he said.

Dessler said scientists are obliged to engage with the full range of evidence, even if it contradicts their initial assumptions. Ignoring this principle “can rise to the level of scientific misconduct,” he said.

“The report they produced should be thought of as a law brief from attorneys defending their client, carbon dioxide,” Dessler said. “Their goal is not to weigh the evidence fairly but to build the strongest possible case for CO2’s innocence.”

The lack of peer review in the administration’s report led to conclusions that deviated, sometimes wildly, from the scientific literature. Many of its claims are based on long-debunked research long promoted by climate deniers, said Mann.

“It is shop worn, decades-old, discredited climate denier talking points, dressed up in the clothing of some sensible new set of revelations,” he said. “What’s different is that it has the imprimatur of the EPA and the federal government now.”

The report, for instance claims that warming trends have been overstated, despite evidence to the contrary. It was published as extreme heat is affecting millions of Americans. “They’re literally trying to tell us not to believe what we see with our own two eyes…and instead buy into their denialist framing that rejects not just the science, but what is plainly evident if you look out your window,” said Mann.

The authors also write that ocean acidification is occurring “within the range of natural variability” and is beneficial for marine life despite the ocean’s acidic levels currently being the highest since 14 million years ago, a time when a major extinction event was occurring.

And the report references the apparent health of Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, which it says “has shown considerable growth in recent years.” The reef was recently hit by its sixth mass bleaching event since 2016, a devastating phenomenon for corals in which they whiten and sometimes die due to high sea temperatures. No widespread bleaching events were recorded on the reef before 1998.

The report is “tedious” and at times “truly wearisome,” according to Bob Kopp, a climate scientist at Rutgers University. Kopp recently worked on a paper showing how rising temperatures and drought will worsen crop yields, counter to the report’s claims that crops will flourish with extra carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

“Carbon dioxide fertilization is largely irrelevant to how increasingly extreme heat and intense drought will impact crop yields,” Kopp said. “As a former department of energy fellow, I’m embarrassed by this report.”

Continue Reading…

This $50 Billion Band-Aid Won’t Save Rural Health Care

In January 2021, 70-mile-per-hour winds ripped through the High Plains, from Eastern Colorado to Western Kansas, and enveloped a portion of Interstate 70 in a deluge of dust and debris that suddenly blinded drivers. The result was predictable: multiple pileups of cars and semi-trucks, with more than two dozen people injured amid tons of crushed steel. With the nearest major trauma center 80 miles away, paramedics brought most of the victims to a tiny, county-owned hospital in the small town of Hugo. There were only two emergency room beds.

“We had patients everywhere,” recalls Lincoln Community Health Center’s CEO, Kevin Stansbury.

Doctors splinted the broken bones and stitched up lacerations with ease. But they also stabilized the most critical patients, whom they prepared for transport to larger hospitals.

“I think what gets underestimated,” Stansbury says, “is the role that rural hospitals play in the trauma network across the country.”

The importance of these hospitals may become clearer when they begin to disappear. That’s the result rural health experts predict from the budget bill President Donald Trump signed into law on July 4. The downstream effects of cuts to Medicaid, on which a disproportionate amount of rural residents rely, are estimated to put 380 independent rural hospitals “at serious risk of closure nationwide,” according to Families USA, a non-partisan consumer health care nonprofit.

Responding to these concerns—and likely being mindful of the political fallout from cutting health care in rural, predominantly Republican areas—GOP lawmakers appended a $50 billion “Rural Health Transformation Fund” to the bill. But critically, public health experts say, this amount cannot possibly offsetthe $137 billion that rural health facilities are expected to lose under the legislation. Further, many contend that the methods with which the $50 billion will be distributed are perplexingly opaque and seemingly partisan.

“In any other time, we would be massively celebrating,” Heidi Lucas, executive director of the Missouri Rural Health Association, says of the $50 billion fund. But when taken in context of what hospitals in her coalition will lose, “it’s just a drop in the bucket.”

“It’s just not going to save our hospitals, clinics, and health centers.”

“It’s just not going to save our hospitals, clinics, and health centers,” she adds.

Among their most pressing concerns is the uncertainty among the providers about which health facilities will even benefit from the fund.

“I think the answer is,” Stansbury says, “nobody knows.”

The One Big Beautiful Bill Act specifically mentions “rural hospitals” 10 times. But what “rural” means is difficult to determine. For example, he says, some of the largest medical centers in the country may be classified as “rural” because they treat patients who live in rural areas and travel to the bigger facility for specialized care. These “Rural Referral Centers” include hospitals in wealthy cities like Napa, California; Greenwich, Connecticut; and Miami, Florida.

Stansbury also wonders about the Federally Qualified Health Centers, which provide primary and preventative care to underserved communities, but not necessarily in areas traditionally understood to be “rural.”

“Do they siphon a bunch of money out of the rural areas?” Stansbury asks. “I’d like to see a very tight definition and parameters of where the money should go.”

The ways in which the legislation divvies up the funds among states are perhaps even more problematic, says Timothy McBride, a health policy analyst and health economist at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, who detailed the breakdown in a recent Substack post.

Half of the $50 billion fund will be evenly distributed to states without accounting for factors like population size. In fact, this means that some of them—such as Wyoming and North Dakota—may receive more from the rural health fund than they lose in federal Medicaid funding. On the flip side, the $50 billion fund would leave other states—such as Kentucky, Washington, and Oregon—in the red. By McBride’s calculations, Wyoming is in an enviable position, potentially receiving stands to cover 1,453 percent of what the state loses in Medicaid cuts. Meanwhile, Kentucky is expected to lose $5.4 billion through the cuts and gain only $1.9 billion from the fund, covering just 36 percent of the state’s losses.

Coincidentally, the states that stand to gain the most from this half of the rural health fund’s distribution are governed by Republicans, and the states that stand to lose the most are not. But there may also be winners and losers for the second half of the fund, which the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) has the discretion to distribute mostly as it pleases. McBride says it’s fair to be concerned that a Republican administration would be biased against blue states when allocating money from this pot.

“One way to cut it is red versus blue,” says McBride. He adds that HHS could also, theoretically, deprioritize states that opted to expand Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act, a policy option the GOP has not fully embraced. States that expanded Medicaid to broader shares of their populations will be harder hit by the federal cuts.

For the rural health care facilities that ultimately do receive sizable sums, there are even more strings. The money will be limited to certain expenditures, such as recruiting and retaining clinical staff to serve rural areas for minimum periods of time, training new and existing staff on artificial intelligence, and providing technical assistance on cybersecurity.

The money can’t directly be used to make up for the care rural hospitals increasingly have to provide the estimated 16 million uninsured patients that Medicaid cuts are likely to create. And while there are certainly shortages of health professionals serving rural areas, the more pressing shortage, Lucas says, is cash to keep open the health care facilities that would employ them**.**

“If the hospital closes,” Lucas asks, “what good is it going to do to have these additional dollars to help with workforce recruitment?”

Continue Reading…

Alligator Alcatraz Swag Is the Hot New MAGA Merch

Even before the immigration detention camp deep within the Everglades officially opened, the name of the facility, Alligator Alcatraz, had become apunchline for jokes within MAGA circles.

“People get out, there’s not much waiting for them other than alligators and pythons,” Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier, who was the first to announce plans for the project, quipped in a video posted on social media in late June. A few days later, the US Department of Homeland Security shared on X an AI-generated meme of alligators wearing baseball caps emblazoned with the acronym ICE standing guard outside a detention facility. “Coming soon!” the post read. By the way, Alligator Alcatraz is not some clever nickname that appeared on social media. Florida officials have made it the official name of the site.

The humor didn’t let up during President Donald Trump’s tour of the camp in July. “They have a lot of bodyguards and a lot of cops that are in the form of alligators,” the president said outside one of the white tents where immigrants are detained, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis standing by his side. “You don’t have to pay them so much. But I wouldn’t want to run through the Everglades for long.”

The juxtaposition between reports of life inside Alligator Alcatraz and the comical branding of the facility by Republicans could not be more jarring. Since opening in early July, Alligator Alcatraz has been accused of dire conditions for the roughly 900 migrants detained there. As I reported last month, reports of theinhumane circumstances have emerged, such as mosquito infestations, malfunctioning air conditioning, and no access to attorneys. Detainees live under tents within chain-linked fenced areas that hold up to 32 beds and three toilets. The facility is at the center of lawsuits filed by environmentalists and human rights groups.

“This just looks like political theater,” Marsha Espinosa, a Biden-era assistant secretary for the Department of Homeland Security’s public affairs office, told ABC News last month. “If the goal is to enforce immigration effectively, building a camp in the middle of a swamp just doesn’t do it. The optics seem to be the point here. The Everglades location, the alligators, this is about visuals. It’s a campaign ad to make headlines.”

“The optics seem to be the point here. The Everglades location, the alligators, this is about visuals. It’s a campaign ad to make headlines.”

Even as Alligator Alcatraz has become a symbol of the Trump administration’s relentless deportation machine, Uthmeier, the Florida attorney general, is selling branded merchandise on his campaign website promoting the facility. Among the swag for sale are shirts with the phrase, “Nowhere to Run. Nowhere to Hide,” a gator ominously peering above the words. They include stickers, baseball caps, and beer koozies. The Republican Party of Florida is also selling similar merchandise, including a shirt for $30 with an image of a correctional facility being guarded by a giant alligator and python.

But the thrill of creating merch from a facility fraught with accusations of human rights abuses is not restricted to Florida. Others are also capitalizing on the camp’s notoriety. A search for “Alligator Alcatraz” on Amazon brings up shirts, hats, car decals, mugs, and flags. One $35 shirt reads, “Make Alligators Great Again.”

In fact, the narrative that alligators would be interested in human prey is inaccurate, according to Axios Tampa Bay. The creatures don’t consider humans a food source. And references of “the alligator lusting for human flesh is rooted in racism, dating back to Jim Crow, when tourists could buy postcards illustrating Black children as ‘gator bait,’” Axios reported.

Marcus Collins, a marketing professor from the University of Michiganwho studies culture and its impact on human behavior, has observed a connection between the days of Jim Crow and today. “This is a bit of a stretch, but it doesn’t feel too distant from when people used to take pictures of lynchings and sell them as postcards,” he says. “This consumption is signaling that these people aren’t people, at least not in the frame of how we evaluate humanity.”

We’ve seen what Collins describes in more recent history.A Business Insider story published in 2019 showcased items the US Navy was selling near the prison,where stories of human rights abuses of detainees emerged in the past. Items for sale included shirts with the phrase “JTO GTMO (meaning Joint Task Force Guantanamo) Detainee Operations” and baseball caps that read “Straight Outta GTMO,” a reference to the 1988 NWA album “Straight Outta Compton.”

I wanted to understand the motivation behind all the Alligator Alcatraz swag and how sales for shirts and other merchandise were going, so I reached out to Uthmeier’s campaign and the Republican Party of Florida for an interview. My emails and phone messages went unanswered.

David Dunning, a psychology professor at the University of Michigan, has written about the allure of Donald Trump for certain voters. He says that connecting the facility with merchandise or a nickname, and making “it sound like a tourist attraction as opposed to something like a concentration camp,” normalizes the facility. Political campaigns have always relied on merchandise to attract and unite supporters, but the Trump administration has “turned up the dial a little bit more than everybody else,” he noted. “You’re more likely to see a van or a pickup truck tricked out in MAGA.” The sale of Alligator Alcatraz swag is just the latest example of that.

Who the individuals and institutions are that market the merchandise also boosts its legitimacy. In this case, the items for sale come directly from powerful sources, such as Florida’s attorney general and the Republican Party. Supporters of Alligator Alcatraz receive tacit permission to engage and purchase the merchandise without fear of judgment. “These consumption patterns become a way of facilitating social coordination so we can find people who are like us,” Collins says. “For some, it’s repugnant. For others, it’s reality.”

Continue Reading…

How Our History Became “Divisive”

Weeks before losing the 2020 election, President Donald Trump offered a glimpse of the tactic that has defined his second term. It took the form of an executive order banning federal workplace diversity training; the tone was grave, the legalese pulsing with indignation. Public servants, contractors, and military personnel, Executive Order 13950 alleged, were being taught hate, and “divisive concepts” promoted by a “malign ideology” threatened to resurrect ideas “soundly defeated on the blood-stained battlefields of the Civil War.” This neo-Confederate enemy, as it turned out, was almost any mention of racism, and specifically critical race theory (CRT), an academic framework that studies how racism shapes law, health care, and education.

Joe Biden’s administration rescinded the order. But during his presidency, the right continued to obsess over CRT and DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion), contorting them into a raging kaiju. Red-state lawmakers piled on gleefully, introducing hundreds of bills, resolutions, and policies circumscribing how racism and inequality are addressed in public forums ranging from K–12 schools and universities to state health departments. “Critical Race Theory is divisive and undermines the cohesion of our troops,” Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) tweeted in 2021. Such “divisive concepts,” declared a 2022 Tennessee law barring diversity training at public universities, “exacerbate and inflame divisions.”

This eager embrace of the word “divisive” is another legacy of Executive Order 13950, which Trump restored immediately upon returning to office. Typically a humdrum means of deeming something controversial, the term has in recent years become a political blow dart. Seemingly innocuous, yet poison-tipped, it appears in condemnations of people and institutions that dare acknowledge the existence of discrimination and bias, subtly granting the accuser moral authority under the guise of meritocracy. The phrase depicts regressive cultural change as a commonsense return to sanity: “Museums in our Nation’s capital should be places where individuals go to learn—not to be subjected to ideological indoctrination or divisive narratives that distort our shared history,” asserted a March executive order directing Smithsonian exhibits to be less “negative.”

Such declarations treat national unity as a sacred object and division as sacrilege. Race, the thinking goes, has no place in Americans’ idyllic “shared history” because it breeds obsession and discord, preventing us from getting along. Why race holds such subversive power, and why it divides us, is never broached, of course, because that context and history (genocide, pillage, slavery, segregation, mass incarceration) might, if accurately recounted, be “divisive.”

When any mention of race is deemed too “divisive” for American discourse, history is relegated to comfortable fables.

Yet racial ideology perfuses the screeds against divisiveness, jeremiads that often universalize white angst. “I cannot tolerate a school that not only judges my daughter by the color of her skin, but encourages and instructs her to prejudge others by theirs,” a parent wrote in a 2021 open letter opposing anti-racism initiatives at his daughter’s private school. “If [the school] really cared about ‘inclusiveness,’” he wrote, it would abandon “the extraordinarily divisive idea that there are only, and always, two groups in this country: victims and oppressors.”

There is a low bar to declaring something divisive. The charge demands no burden of proof and lacks the force and risk of a label such as “racist.” All that’s required is a tittle of discomfort—a standard that benefits those with the most to lose if systemic racism were dismantled. Hence the indelibly hollow and affective language of statements rebuking divisiveness. Consider South Dakota’s law, echoing Trump’s 2020 order, that purports to “protect students and employees at institutions of higher education from divisive concepts” that might cause anybody “discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress.”

The law reads like a civil rights statute but its protections are fluff. It gets around First Amendment concerns the same way the word “divisive” is often used in arguments: by policing the imposition of feelings rather than speech. Despite their grandstanding denunciations of racial superiority, these laws and proclamations sneakily safeguard white American exceptionalism—the “white” being silent.

That plausible deniability is the draw of weaponizing “divisive.” Users of the word can feel they’re defending America rather than whiteness. The anti-anti-racists frequently present their crackdowns as a fix for corrupted institutions: Trump’s executive orders targeting DEI in the military and the Smithsonian are titled “Restoring America’s Fighting Force” and “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History.” Similarly, when Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin issued his own executive order denouncing “inherently divisive concepts,” he made sure to also pitch a rose-tinted version of history. In his flattering timeline, we have progressed “from the horrors of American slavery and segregation, and our country’s treatment of Native Americans, to the triumph of America’s Greatest Generation against the Nazi Empire, the heroic efforts of Americans in the Civil Rights Movement, and our country’s defeat of the Soviet Union and the ills of Communism.” There’s no debate, dissent, or actors in this narrative—just a phantasmal national spirit and its increasingly glorious works.

This vibes-based history makes putty of truth while claiming to protect it. “Proponents of identity politics rearrange Americans by group identities, rank them by how much oppression they have experienced at the hands of the majority culture, and then sow division among them,” wrote the authors of the 1776 Commission, a group of historians and panjandrums Trump convened to “recollect the great legacy of the American national experience.”

Again, division was invoked as a vague, treasonous plot against the truth of our greatness and unity. “American,” in the commission’s framework, isn’t an identity for people to define through the lens of their own experiences and heritage. Rather, it is the only valid identity—an orthodoxy the right aims to enforce with the full might of the federal government. Under this rigid order, there’s no room to interrogate our rocky history, let alone change it for the better. There’s just one nation, under God, indivisible—now, always, and forever.

Continue Reading…

White House Doubles Down on Baseless “Rigged” Claims About Poor Jobs Data

The shock and outrage over President Donald Trump firing the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) commissioner because of weak jobs numbers seems increasingly bipartisan.

Several Republican senators told NBC News that they did not support Trump’s firing of Erika McEntarfer if it was, in fact, motivated by his displeasure over the poor jobs numbers released on Friday. (All indications are that it was.) Democrats, meanwhile, said Trump’s latest move was the behavior of an authoritarian.

On Friday, Trump quickly claimed without any evidence that the revised jobs numbers, which showed weaker job growth in May and June than previously projected, had been “manipulated.” But experts on the work of the BLS, which is part of the Department of Labor, pushed back, saying Trump’s claim is not plausible.

Former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers, who served in the Clinton administration, said on ABC’s This Week that Trump’s firing “is way beyond anything that Richard Nixon ever did.” Summers explained: “These numbers are put together by teams of literally hundreds of people following detailed procedures that are in manuals. There’s no conceivable way that the head of the BLS could have manipulated this number.”

On CNN’s State of the Union, former BLS Commissioner William Beach, who was appointed by Trump in 2019, said “there’s no way” the jobs numbers were “rigged” as Trump put it. “The commissioner doesn’t do anything to collect the numbers,” he said. “By the time the commissioner sees the numbers, they’re all prepared. They’re locked into the computer system.” Beach added that the firing “really hurts the statistical system” and “undermines credibility in BLS.” In a post on X, Beach called the firing “totally groundless” and said it “sets a dangerous precedent.”

Former BLS commissioner @BeachWW453 on Trump firing his successor over weak jobs numbers: “I don't think there's any grounds at all for this for this firing. And it really hurts the statistical system. It undermines credibility…. This is damaging.” pic.twitter.com/q7lrqfNnjE

— State of the Union (@CNNSOTU) August 3, 2025

The White House, nonetheless, is doubling down. Appearing on NBC’s Meet the Press and Fox News Sunday, Kevin Hassett, the director of the White House National Economic Council, denied that Trump would fire anyone whose data he disagrees with. Even so, Hassett added on Meet the Press: “The president wants his own people there, so that when we see the numbers, they’re more transparent and more reliable.” (Notably, Vice President JD Vance, when he was a US senator from Ohio, voted to confirm McEntarfer.)

When host Kristen Welker pressed Hassett for “hard evidence” that the numbers were “rigged,” as Trump claimed, Hassett first replied, “the revisions are hard evidence”—even though such revisions are, in fact, standard procedure. Later in the interview, Hassett added, “if you look at the number itself, it is the evidence.” And on Fox News Sunday, Hassett alleged that there are “partisan patterns” in the data, while offering no proof of that.

WATCH: National Economic Council Director Kevin Hassett on trusting economic data: "The data have become very unreliable with these massive revisions over the last few years." pic.twitter.com/FtYB4UCBFv

— Fox News Sunday (@FoxNewsSunday) August 3, 2025

The only real pattern present seems to be a familiar one: bipartisan leaders and experts are decrying Trump’s actions as undermining and dangerous, while Trump and his cronies insist that they are the only ones who can be trusted.

Continue Reading…

Trump Administration Moves Quietly to Eliminate Life-Saving Abortions for Veterans

On Friday, the Department of Veterans Affairs proposed a policy change that advocates for reproductive rights say could become one of the strictest abortion bans nationwide.

The department filed a proposed rule seeking to eliminate coverage for the limited abortion services and counseling that have been available to veterans and their beneficiaries under the VA health care system for nearly three years.

In September 2022, a few months after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, the VA under the Biden administration began covering abortion counseling, as well as abortion services for veterans and beneficiaries who report experiencing rape or incest or whose health is endangered by carrying a pregnancy to term. Former VA Secretary Denis McDonough called the move “a patient safety decision,” and advocates praised the policy change for providing a lifeline for the most vulnerable veterans and their beneficiaries in the 15 states that had total or near-total bans at the time. (That tally is now 16 states.)

But the Trump administration alleges that the rule change was a matter of federal overreach, alleging it “contradicted decades of Federal policy against forced taxpayer funding for abortion.” And in arguing its position for yanking extremely limited abortion services from veterans and their dependents, the Trump administration has put forth misinformation and contradictions.

The proposed measure, says Sen. Patty Murray, is“unspeakably cruel and a grotesque assault on women who have put their lives on the line to keep us safe.”

The proposed rule states, for example, that the government would indeed allow abortions to proceed in life-threatening situations such as ectopic pregnancies or miscarriages. Yet, confusingly, the text also blasts “claims in the prior administration’s rule that abortions throughout pregnancy are needed to save the lives of pregnant women” as “incorrect.”

In fact, ectopic pregnancies are nonviable and life-threatening for the pregnant person, and incomplete miscarriages—in which abortion procedures are typically used to empty the uterus—can lead to hemorrhages, sepsis, and death. And contrary to the Trump administration’s claim that “no State law prohibits treatment for ectopic pregnancies or miscarriages to save the life of a mother,” reporting from ProPublica has shown that strict abortion bans have created a chilling effect for doctors, who have feared running afoul of abortion bans and have delayed intervening in medical emergencies, resulting in higher rates of sepsis and death.

The Trump administration further argues that minimal use of the existing policy by veterans makes it unnecessary in the first place. To abortion rights advocates, that claim is nonsensical and will cause harm. “After veterans put their lives on the line to protect our freedoms, the Trump administration is trying to rob them of their own freedoms and putting their health at risk,” Nancy Northup, President and CEO at the Center for Reproductive Rights, said in a statement. “This administration is sending a clear message to veterans—that their health and dignity aren’t worth defending.”

Women are the fastest-growing group of veterans, with more than two million living in the US, according to VA data. As of 2024, more than half of women veterans of reproductive age lived in states that banned abortion or were likely to, according to the National Partnership for Women and Families.

The Center of Reproductive Rights also notes that one in three women veterans report experiencing sexual assault or harassment during their military service, according to VA data, which can lead to a need for abortion services. Unplanned pregnancies—particularly as a result of sexual assault—can also exacerbate the post-traumatic stress disorder that many veterans experience.

Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.), a vocal advocate for abortion rights and a senior member of the Senate Veteran Affairs’ Committee, called the measure“unspeakably cruel and a grotesque assault on women who have put their lives on the line to keep us safe.”

“Donald Trump insisted time and again on the campaign trail that he supported exceptions for rape and incest—now he’s going after exactly those exceptions with this move to axe the incredibly limited abortion services VA provides for women veterans in desperate situations,” Murray said in a statement.

This policy move may come as no surprise, given that Project 2025 recommended it and Veterans Affairs Secretary Doug Collins has been vocal about his anti-abortion views, as I wrote back in January.

The administration’s filing on Friday in the Federal Register marks the first step in the process of changing the agency’s rules; the next step consists of a 30-day public comment period, beginning on Monday. After that, the agency can finalize the rule, and it would take effect 30 days after being published.

If the proposal is finalized, which appears likely, it will be just the latest example of efforts to restrict abortion, even in states where the procedure is legal.

Continue Reading…

See the Bizarre Life Forms Scientists Found More Than 31,000 Feet Under the Ocean Surface

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

The Titanic lies about 12,500 feet under the ocean surface. The pressure down there is so immense that even submersibles supposedly built for those conditions can, as we know, tragically fail.

Now imagine taking a sub nearly three times deeper.

That’s what an international team of scientists did last summer. Led by the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the researchers took a manned submersible to the bottom of deep-sea trenches in an area in the northwest Pacific Ocean, roughly between Japan and Alaska, reaching a depth of more than 31,000 feet.

Clusters of tube worms.Institute of Deep-sea Science and Engineering, CAS

The researchers weren’t looking for a shipwreck. They were interested in what else might be lurking on the seafloor, which is so deep that no light can reach it.

It was there that they found something remarkable: entire communities of animals, rooted in organisms that are able to derive energy not from sunlight but from chemical reactions. Through a process called chemosynthesis, deep-sea microbes are able to turn compounds like methane and hydrogen sulfide into organic compounds, including sugars, forming the base of the food chain. The discovery was published in the journal Nature.

This was the deepest community of chemosynthetic life ever discovered, according to Mengran Du, a study author and researcher at the Institute of Deep-sea Science and Engineering at the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

Collections of microbes at the bottom of a trench in the Pacific Ocean.Institute of Deep-sea Science and Engineering, CAS

Using a deep-sea vessel called Fendouzhe, the researchers encountered abundant wildlife communities, including fields of marine tube worms peppered with white marine snails. The worms have a symbiotic relationship with chemosynthetic bacteria that live in their bodies. Those bacteria provide them with a source of nutrients in exchange for, among other things, a stable place to live.

Among the tube worms the scientists encountered white, centipede-like critters—they’re also a kind of worm, in the genus macellicephaloides—as well as sea cucumbers.

The researchers also found a variety of different clams on the seafloor, often alongside anemones. Similar to the tube worms, the clams depend on bacteria within their shells to turn chemical compounds like methane and hydrogen sulfide that are present in the deep sea into food.

Institute of Deep-sea Science and Engineering, CAS

Unlike other deep-sea ecosystems—which feed on dead animals and other organic bits that fall from shallower waters—these trench communities are likely sustained in part by methane produced by microbes buried under the seafloor, the authors said. That suggests that wildlife communities may be more common in these extremely deep trenches than scientists once thought.

“The presence of these chemosynthetic ecosystems challenge long-standing assumptions about life’s potential at extreme depths,” Du told Vox in an email.

Continue Reading…

Texas Is Moving Forward With Its Radical Redistricting Plan

Texas is on its way to gerrymandering its own gerrymander. On Saturday, Republicans on the state house of representatives’ redistricting committee approved a new plan to add five Republican seats—part of a radical mid-decade scheme to help Republicans keep control of the US House of Representatives after the 2026 midterm elections. The plan could go to a full vote in the chamber early next week, after which it will move on to the Republican-controlled state senate.

It might also set off a chain reaction. In response to Texas Republicans’ threats (and now action), some Democratic governors have called for a proportionate response—changing the rules in states such as Illinois, California, and New York to maximize the party’s advantage. And in Texas itself, Democratic legislators are mulling whether to flee the state to deny a legislative quorum.

This is the second time this millennium Texas Republicans have done a mid-decade gerrymander, and it’s easily the most extreme. In 2003, after Republicans finally took control of the legislature for the first time since Reconstruction, they also set about redrawing the maps, looking to flip five Democrat-held seats. That was a big deal, of course, but the justification was a bit more plausible. Texas, by that point, was operating under an extremely outdated map from the early 1990s that preserved a Democratic congressional majority in a now-comfortably Republican state. Democratic legislators twice fled the state, to Oklahoma and New Mexico, but the gambit ultimately failed.

This time, though, the maps that Texas Republicans are trying to redraw were drawn by Texas Republicans just four years ago. And while the current map was not quite the maximalist gerrymander it could have been, it’s still advantageous to Republicans. Democrats won 13 seats out of 38 in 2024. If the party continues to lose support in its former stronghold of South Texas, that number could easily have fallen to 11 all on its own. The argument that has been rolled out by Gov. Greg Abbott to justify this emergency redistricting is that the map he previously approved is actually an illegal racial gerrymander. Therefore, urgent action must be taken, four years later, to redraw the maps that, again, Republicans themselves enacted.

As my colleague Ari Berman explained in a recent piece, the contradictory arguments for why Texas is moving ahead with this add up to a big, bad-faith mess. The actual explanation for why this is happening, though, is less convoluted: President Donald Trump asked them to do this, and Texas Republicans would sooner denounce germ theory and their own families than tell the president no.

The new map is, of course, a disaster for Democrats. To take one glaring example, 16-term Rep. Lloyd Doggett and Congressional Progressive Caucus chair Rep. Greg Casar would likely be forced to compete for the same Austin-based turf. But the cynicism of the ploy goes behind the gaming of the 2026 elections. As the New York Times wrote about the Democrats’ quorum quandary:

[D]oing so comes with political and practical risks: Republican leaders in the Texas House fast-tracked the redistricting legislation before introducing any bills responding to the deadly floods in the Texas Hill Country —putting Democrats in the position of potentially walking out on legislation that addresses needs caused by the flooding.

I think it’s a bit unfair to say that Democrats would be culpable for blocking flood relief when Republicans have made the very deliberate choice to condition flood relief on first arranging for the defeat of five Democratic representatives. Why, exactly, is defeating Rep. Vicente Gonzalez in 2026 more important than responding to a natural disaster? But that is the sort of calculus Republicans have created, not just in Texas, but everywhere. With Trump, everything is a hostage negotiation. And this time, he couldn’t have made his demands clearer.

Continue Reading…

We’re Officially in Donald Trump’s Mad King Era

This month’s jobs report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics was a bit of a bummer. The nonpartisan federal agency announced Friday morning that its relatively rosy forecast earlier this summer had been way off. While BLS had previously reported 291,000 new non-farm jobs in May and June, on further review, the agency concluded that number was more like 33,000. If that sounds like a big deal, it definitely is—perhaps a sign that massive cuts to government spending and employment, and a truly chaotic and possibly illegal tariff policy, are creating something less than the promised historic economic boom. It’s also exactly what you expect the BLS to release when confronted with more precise data. At a time when institutions inside and outside the government are compromising their independence to accommodate President Donald Trump, it showed that the gold standard in jobs data was still operating as it should.

That is, until Friday afternoon, when Trump responded to the poor jobs report by announcing his intention to fire Erika McEntarfer, the head of the BLS. “Important numbers like this must be fair and accurate,” he wrote on Truth Social. “[T]hey can’t be manipulated for political purposes.” Economic commentators and analysts of various political stripes condemned the move. Even the conservative businessman Kevin O’Leary told CNN that “whacking statisticians makes no sense whatsoever.”

When I say this is the kind of thing that happens in autocracies, I am not trying to be provocative. Three years ago, when Turkey’s economic statistics agency released a report showing that the country’s inflation rate was at 36 percent, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan fired the head of the agency and replaced him with a loyal ally. When it rains too much, true leaders fire the meteorologists.

When it rains too much, true leaders fire the meteorologists.

For now, the BLS is still staffed by the sort of professionals who would sooner file for unemployment themselves than fudge the unemployment numbers. But the impulsive firing seems to herald a new chapter in the president’s often delusional second term. Trump is officially in his Mad King era, demanding the impossible, lashing out at those who can’t provide it, and seeing vast conspiracies behind every setback. It is the heir to Caligula appointing his horse as consul, Empress Carlota of Mexico drinking from fountains because everything else was poison, and the Bishop of Quebec excommunicating the passenger pigeon for eating too many crops. (Well, they did eventually go away.) It is Britain banning productions of King Lear, in the twilight of George III’s reign.

But also, BLS aside, a lot of modern conservatism is kind of premised on this kind of cooking of the books (or banning them as the case may be). Trump’s attempt to intimidate the Bureau of Labor Statistics was a fitting end to a week in which his Environmental Protection Agency sought to walk back its landmark finding that greenhouse gases are a threat to public health. They are rejecting a scientific consensus, in other words, to accommodate Trump’s economic agenda. For years, Republican legislatures and administrations have worked to prohibit accurate climate science from informing environmental planning. The first seven months of his term have been defined by a purge of government health data and the people who produce it. At this point, it might as well be the ruling party’s mantra: Hear no evil, see no evil…profit?

Continue Reading…

They Followed Doctors’ Orders. The State Took Their Babies.

Jade Dass was taking medication to treat her addiction to opioids before she became pregnant. Scientific studies and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention say this leads to the best outcomes for both mothers and babies. But after Dass delivered a healthy daughter, the hospital reported her to the Arizona Department of Child Safety, which conducted an investigation and separated her from her newborn.

“I just couldn’t believe it, that people would act like this,” Dass says. “Like how they couldn’t see—it’s, like, you have no humanity if you’re gonna take someone’s baby.”

To understand the scale of this issue, reporter Shoshana Walter, data reporter Melissa Lewis, and a team of Reveal researchers and lawyers filed 100 public records requests, putting together the first-ever tally of how often women are reported to child welfare agencies for taking prescription drugs during pregnancy. This week on Reveal, we follow Dass as she grapples with losing custody of her baby—and makes one last desperate attempt to keep her family together.

Walter has turned some of her reporting for Reveal into a book about the addiction treatment industry, Rehab: An American Scandal, which comes out this month.

This is an update of an episode that originally aired in July 2023.

Continue Reading…

America’s Top Gas Exporter Claims Massive Tax Credit for “Alternative” Fuels

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

Liquefied natural gas vessels are fueled by their cargo—they’re built specifically to make use of the gas boiling off from their tanks. Now Cheniere Energy, the largest US exporter of LNG, is seeking “alternative fuel” tax credits for that.

The claim has baffled shipping experts, because what Cheniere Energy is doing isn’t, in any real sense, an alternative. It would also provide little climate benefit over fueling the vessels with diesel, and seeks to use the credit in a way that tax specialists say was never intended.

Yet if approved by the IRS, the claimed tax credits could yield a payout for the company exceeding $140 million, an Inside Climate News analysis found.

““It’s a very aggressive tax position…It just seems like they’re pushing the envelope here.”

In its annual report filed with the US Securities and Exchange Commission in February, Cheniere disclosed that it is “actively pursuing” alternative fuel tax credits for its use of LNG in its shipping vessels from 2018 to 2024, the year the credit expired. The IRS is reviewing those claims, the filing said.

The alternative fuel excise tax credit was signed into law by President George W. Bush in 2005. It was intended to incentivize the use of fuels other than gasoline and diesel—including biofuels, LNG, and liquid fuels derived from coal—for use in motor vehicles, and it set no requirements for the relative cleanliness of these fuels.

Cheniere noted in its financial report that LNG is a cleaner-burning fuel than diesel or heavy-fuel oils and that the use of LNG was part of an ongoing effort to mitigate emissions from the company’s shipping operations. However, critics point out that fueling LNG tankers with diesel would be absurd, given that the gas continually boiling off from the refrigerated liquid cargo would have to be burned off anyway, or re-liquefied, if it wasn’t used for propulsion.

“It makes no sense not to use the fuel that you already have because of boil-off,” said Kirsten Sinclair Rosselot, an environmental performance analyst who runs the consultancy Process Profiles and was the lead author of a 2023 study that assessed fuel use and emissions from LNG vessels. “It’s not an alternative fuel.”

Cheniere declined repeated requests for comment from Inside Climate News. The American Petroleum Institute, a trade association representing the US oil and gas industry, also declined to comment.

Cheniere’s eligibility for the tax credit may hinge on how the IRS interprets one word: motorboats. The statute states that tax credits can be claimed for the use of LNG and other alternative fuels “in a motor vehicle or motorboat.”

“It’s a very aggressive tax position,” William Henck, a former IRS tax attorney and agency whistleblower, said of Cheniere’s alternative fuel tax credit claim. “It just seems like they’re pushing the envelope here.”

The tax law doesn’t define what constitutes a motorboat. However, federal shipping regulations state it is a vessel no more than 65 feet long. LNG tankers typically extend nearly 1,000 feet. “They’re talking about a tanker,” Henck said. “Does that sound like a motorboat to you?”

If the IRS approves Cheniere’s claim, the company would be eligible for a 50 cent tax credit for each diesel gallon equivalent of fuel used. Cheniere declined to reveal the size of the tax credit it is claiming. However, according to calculations by Inside Climate News, it could exceed $140 million.

“If Cheniere is looking for a return on investment in its very generous contribution to the Trump campaign, this is certainly an excellent opportunity.”

From January 1, 2018, to December 31, 2024, Cheniere used company-chartered vessels to export LNG on more than 750 departures from its terminals in Sabine Pass, Louisiana, and Corpus Christi, Texas, according to shipping data from Kpler, a global trade analytics firm. The data was analyzed by Data Desk, which conducts investigative research on the oil and gas industry, and Inside Climate News.

Adapting methods used for an earlier Inside Climate News investigation of emissions from LNG tankers, ICN calculated that those export journeys burned about 770,000 metric tons of gas in the vessels’ main engines and generators. Applying the conversion factor approved for the tax credit, that corresponds to more than 280 million diesel gallons equivalent or a credit of roughly $140 million. These calculations do not include LNG used on the subsequent return journeys by the same vessels, which are fueled from a small quantity of the cargo retained for that purpose. If Cheniere is also claiming credits for these journey legs, the payout could nearly double.

ICN also calculated the total greenhouse gas emissions using LNG fuel, compared to a hypothetical situation in which ships were powered by the 280 million diesel gallons equivalent and simply flared the LNG boiling off from their cargo. Using LNG did reduce total CO2 equivalent emissions compared to the hypothetical diesel-fueled journeys, but only by about 12.5 percent. (LNG tankers have relatively high total emissions because of the methane that slips unburned through their engines.)

Companies should only assume the effects of a tax position in their financial projections when there is a 50 percent or more likelihood that their claims will be sustained after the IRS weighs in, according to guidance by the accounting firm PwC and the Financial Accounting Standards Board, which sets accounting standards for companies.

Cheniere stated in its SEC filing that it hasn’t included the tax credits in its projections. The company added that “we believe we qualify and are entitled to claim such credits” but acknowledged “there is ongoing uncertainty regarding the final determination of our eligibility.”

Anthony Burke, a spokesperson for the IRS, declined to comment, stating that “by law, federal employees cannot disclose tax return information.” He did not respond to follow-up questions about whether the IRS has received requests for guidance on the use of LNG in export vessels related to alternative fuel tax credits or whether the agency has provided such guidance to companies.

Lukas Shankar-Ross, deputy director of the climate and energy justice program at Friends of the Earth, said approval of the tax credit by the IRS would raise red flags. “If the IRS decides that Cheniere’s globe-spanning charter vessels the length of a city block are equivalent to 65-foot motorboats, then the independence of the IRS is obviously in question,” said Shankar-Ross, who drew Cheniere’s claim to the attention of ICN.

Fuel tax credits have long been a focus of controversy. Henck’s whistleblowing involved a situation in which the IRS began approving alternative fuel tax credits to paper mills for their use of something called black liquor.

“You can rest assured that if Cheniere gets approved, anyone else in the same situation will file refund claims.”

That byproduct from pulp manufacturing has been burned as fuel in paper mills for nearly a century. Adding in a small amount of diesel—as little as a few drops—qualified the blend for alternative fuel mixture credits that resulted in the use of more diesel, rather than less, and were ultimately worth $8 billion, according to the Washington Post.

“It was aggressive enough that they got the credit in the first place,” said Henck, who at the time advised teams of IRS agents examining tax returns for larger companies. “But what went way over the line, and the reason why I spoke out, is they didn’t even have to report that stuff as taxable income.”

The IRS approved the paper mills’ tax refund amid lobbying by the paper companies. Shankar-Ross said he worries something similar may be happening now with Cheniere, whose claims may get a sympathetic hearing from the fossil-fuel friendly Trump administration.

Company CEO Jack Fusco attended a private meeting at Mar-a-Lago in April 2024, when then presidential candidate Donald Trump urged oil and gas executives to donate $1 billion to his campaign, according to reporting by the New York Times. Trump said the money would more than pay for itself in saved taxes and legal expenses, the Times reported.

Two months later, Fusco donated a total of nearly $500,000 to a Trump political action committee and the Republican National Committee, according to Federal Election Commission data. “If Cheniere is looking for a return on investment in its very generous contribution to the Trump campaign, this is certainly an excellent opportunity,” Shankar-Ross said.

Shankar-Ross said he worries that if Cheniere receives tax credits for its use of LNG, others will follow. That happened with paper mills, Henck said.

“You can rest assured that if Cheniere gets approved, anyone else in the same situation will file refund claims,” Henck said. “I guarantee you that.”

Cheniere spent just over $1.7 million lobbying Congress and the administration with its in-house team in the first half of 2025, according to federal lobbying reports. Part of that sum was spent on lobbying the Treasury Department, of which the IRS is a part, and the Executive Office of the President on “tax issues impacting businesses and the LNG industry.”

Lobbying on tax credits, Henck has found, can make all the difference.

“I hate to say this, but the actual law or common sense has nothing to do with this,” Henck said. “If they can get inside access, one-on-one meetings with the decision makers in the IRS national office, they can get this thing through.”

Continue Reading…