Brazil’s Former President Jair Bolsonaro Found Guilty of Coup Attempt

A simple majority of Brazil’s Supreme Court justices voted to convict former far-right President Jair Bolsonaro of leading a coup attempt following his electoral defeat in 2022. Bolsonaro, painted by prosecutors as the orchestrator of the conspiracy, was found guilty on five counts, including coup d’état and attempted violent abolition of the democratic rule of law.

“Brazil nearly went back to being a dictatorship that lasted 20 years because a criminal organization made up of a political group doesn’t know how to lose elections.”

The historic decision marks the climax of a high-profile trial that has put the nation on edge. This is the first time a former Brazilian president has stood accused of crimes against democracy. The seventy-year-old Bolsonaro, who was previously ruled ineligible to run for office until 2030, faces 43 years in prison, with sentencing scheduled for Friday. His defense has denied all the charges.

As of Thursday, three justices in the five-member panel had voted to convict Bolsonaro and seven co-defendants, which included a close aide, senior members of the military, former Justice and Defense ministers, and the one-time head of Brazil’s intelligence agency. (A dissenting judge, Luis Fux, voted to acquit Bolsonaro.) The prosecution accused the defendants of integrating an armed criminal organization with the goal of undermining democracy and preventing then-President-elect Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva from taking office.

The conviction of Bolsonaro, a former army captain often described as the “Trump of the tropics,” is a monumental moment in the history of Brazil’s fraught democracy. It has only been 40 years since the country started the process of re-democratization after a two-decade military dictatorship that remains fresh in the public memory. Despite Brazil’s distinct context and past, observers and analysts have looked at the trial as a “test case” for other countries experiencing anti-democratic waves and the rise of populist movements, as well as a point of comparison to the United States.

Nowhere in the world, Justice Cármen Lúcia warned upon casting the decisive third vote in favor of convicting the defendants, “is there absolute immunity against the virus of authoritarianism.” The trial, in her words, represented an “encounter of Brazil with its past, its present, and its future.”

Justice Alexandre de Moraes, who presided over the trial, also referenced Brazil’s recent history. “Brazil nearly went back to being a dictatorship that lasted 20 years because a criminal organization made up of a political group doesn’t know how to lose elections,” he said. “Because a criminal organization led by Jair Bolsonaro doesn’t understand that the alternation of power is a principle of republican democracy.”

When explaining his vote for a conviction, Justice Moraes argued there was no doubt that there had been a coup attempt, laying out what he called Bolsonaro’s “authoritarian project” to hold on to power despite the election results. He pointed to the prosecution’s case showing a sequence of actions going back to 2021 that included threats to the judiciary, efforts to sow doubt on the electoral process, and unsupported claims of election fraud—including a now-infamous meeting with foreign diplomats where Bolsonaro spread fake news about Brazil’s electronic voting system. Moraes also mentioned a chilling plot dubbed “Operation Green and Yellow Dagger” to kidnap and assassinate his political rivals: Lula, vice-presidential running mate Geraldo Alckmin, and Justice Moraes himself.

The justice also cited, among other evidence, a coup-plotting draft decree that Bolsonaro would have discussed with commanders of the armed forces, who shot it down. The coordinated conspiracy didn’t cease after the 2022 presidential race, which Lula won by a very slim margin. Instead, prosecutors accused Bolsonaro of inciting his followers to rise up, leading to thousands storming government buildings in Brasília on January 8, 2023, in an attack eerily evocative of the failed US Capitol insurrection.

Bolsonaro’s allies in Congress, as well as his son Eduardo Bolsonaro—who has been tirelessly lobbying the US government and lawmakers on behalf of his father—are calling for amnesty for the former president and those convicted in connection with the violent riots. On Sunday, September 7, the day of Brazil’s Independence, Bolsonaro supporters, many carrying American flags, took to the streets, urging President Donald Trump to “save Brazil” and continue to escalate pressure on Brazilian authorities to quit what they see as a witch hunt against the one-time leader.

“Do people really believe that a tweet from an authority, from a foreign government, will change a Supreme Court ruling?” Flávio Dino, the second justice to vote in favor of a conviction, said, before alluding to tariffs and sanctions imposed by the Trump administration on Brazil and authorities like Justice Moraes. “Does anyone think that [losing access to] a credit card or Mickey Mouse will change the judgment?”

Mother JonesSep 11, 2025, 11:30 AM

The Cruel Catch-22 of Cash Aid

The Covid-19 pandemic’s stimulus checks and tax credits helped mainstream the idea that government could help unwealthy people through hard times by simply giving them cash—without conditions like work requirements or stringent income limits. Since then, the push for guaranteed income for the poorest Americans, for whom wage stagnation, inequality, and the disappearance of blue-collar jobs continue as a plodding catastrophe, has bloomed into a nationwide movement. Dozens of direct cash transfer pilots have sprung up, from rural Oregon to Chicago and South Texas, spearheaded by nonprofits, city governments, and even states.

There’s no shortage of evidence that no-strings-attached cash helps. Research has shown that, with extra money, participants buy necessities, increase savings, or even start businesses. They have an easier time holding onto housing and fleeing domestic violence.

Advocates for cash transfers argue they could be more efficient than aid programs that waste money administering rules that supposedly protect the government from being hoodwinked by the “undeserving” poor—like food stamps that can buy cold rotisserie chickens, but not hot ones. The punitive mindset that makes traditional welfare systems so unwieldy is also the reason guaranteed income hasn’t gained more of a foothold. Because even a slight rise in income can disqualify someone from receiving a wide array of public benefits, poor households considering enrolling in a GI program are often forced to choose between a cushion of cash or other income, health, or housing benefits—they can’t have both. Not only can that leave desperate people locked out of extra help, it has made the purported administrative advantages of the GI model harder to prove.

Among the many experiencing this guaranteed income dilemma is Portia, who was in high school in Flint, Michigan, estranged from her mother and bouncing between homes, when an autoimmune disease struck. The steroids doctors prescribed broke down her spine, leaving her in agony and paralyzed below the waist. She couldn’t manage the service jobs—Kohl’s, Walmart, McDonald’s—she’d come to rely on. It took a lawyer and more than a year before she was approved for the federal low-income disability benefits known as Supplemental Security Income (SSI).

Now a 27-year-old mother of a toddler and an infant, Portia, who asked that her real name not be used out of fear she could lose her $936 monthly check, says SSI barely covers their expenses—subsidized rent, clothes and diapers, medication, and groceries beyond what she buys with her meager SNAP benefits. Some months, it’s not enough, and her fridge runs empty.

Last year, Portia signed up for Rx Kids, a budding guaranteed income program in Flint giving $1,500 to expectant mothers, plus another $500 per month for the year after birth, with no work requirements or rules about other income. The goal of the program’s founders, prominent Flint pediatrician Dr. Mona Hanna and Luke Shaefer, a University of Michigan poverty researcher, was to combat “the lifelong consequences of early adversity.”

But the federal government doesn’t make handing cash to young mothers like Portia easy. Social Security would consider each $500 from Rx Kids income, triggering a nearly equal reduction in her monthly SSI. If Portia managed to save more than $2,000 of the money, she could be cut loose from the disability program altogether. But she couldn’t afford to think that far ahead. “If I wouldn’t have taken the $500, that would have been another two weeks before I was able to put anything in my refrigerator,” she told me. “These are the decisions that people are forced to make.”

Guaranteed income programs do their best to compensate. In Jackson, Mississippi, a program called Magnolia Mother’s Trust gives Black mothers living in subsidized housing $1,000 per month for up to a year, knowing that, after the state reduces other benefits like food assistance, it nets out at more like $700. “We do $1,000 a month because we wanted to make sure that we were doing good without harm,” says Aisha Nyandoro, the program’s founder.

The problem has been around since at least the early 1970s, when the federal government funded a series of “income maintenance” experiments in Seattle and Denver. Researchers were puzzled by the fact that, even though the programs offered more money than what was available through welfare, eligible residents passed. Why? Those who signed up not only lost other benefits, but their subsidized rents were raised, too. The program secured waivers from relevant agencies so participants could keep their benefits, but only after enacting a tangle of rules to prevent families from deliberately or accidentally double-dipping, creating a situation in which they could not receive public benefits and the income maintenance payments in the same month. The result was a frustrating and time-consuming ad hoc bureaucracy.

The federal government doesn’t make handing cash to young mothers like Portia easy.

Some federal agencies and states have taken notice of the problem: The Department of Housing and Urban Development recently stopped counting up to a year of GI payments when calculating rental assistance, and last year started looking into using cash transfers to replace its cumbersome Section 8 housing vouchers. According to Shaefer, the Rx Kids program, recognizing the lessons from Seattle and Denver, worked with Michigan officials to waive income caps for state-run benefits like child care and energy assistance.

Despite these creatively structured pilots, researchers have found it difficult to properly study the potential of cash transfers to deliver public aid at scale. Stacia West, director of the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for Guaranteed Income Research, is coordinating a study of 35 GI pilots with roughly 20,000 participants nationwide. “We have the biggest dataset in the world of guaranteed income recipients,” West told me. But people on SSI, for example, more than half of whom have no other income, rarely opt into these studies for fear of losing their benefits, and West says they’re largely absent from the data. “I can’t research anything about how this may impact folks who are experiencing homelessness, veterans who might be on these benefits due to disability. All of these subpopulations that are impacted by a disability that would prevent them from being able to work are not included.”

West says the signal of GI’s efficiency often gets lost in the noise of the broader social safety net. Guaranteed income pilots are generally temporary, only running a year or two, and once the cash stops, participants often have to recertify their eligibility for benefits. Welfare agencies spend time calculating how much they overpaid guaranteed income recipients, then spend more clawing the money back.

All this red tape around GI efforts makes studying their net cost difficult, but it’s not clear that even reams of definitive data would matter. For all their talk of shrinking unnecessary bureaucracy, neither the Trump administration’s DOGE hatchet squad nor its allies in Congress seem interested in reducing administrative burdens in the welfare system. This past winter, Republican lawmakers weighed making it even more difficult to get public benefits by subjecting more SSI recipients to financial scrutiny and adding restrictions on their behavior—like disqualifying truant kids and people with outstanding felony warrants.

“All of these things would really burden [Social Security Administration] staff to implement, and at a time when they’re having trouble answering the phones,” says Kathleen Romig, who studies Social Security policy at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

“Democrats and Republicans alike scream out for the need to simplify SSI,” says former Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley, who served as Social Security Administration commissioner in the Biden administration. “Yet those same congresspeople want to make it harder than hard for anybody to stay on SSI.”

The Social Security Administration can, in some cases, act on its own. Last fall, Rx Kids appealed to the agency to update its regulations so that payments like theirs would not put recipients’ SSI benefits at risk—in essence, to ensure someone like Portia could keep both food in her fridge and clothes on her children. O’Malley was all for it.

“We were on our way to putting forward regulations that would make clear the fact that you don’t want [SSI], a program that helps the poorest of the poor, helping them less because they happen to live in a state where legislators, in their compassion, decide that they should receive more,” O’Malley told me. Romig, temporarily working at the agency, was helping iron out details.

Then the election happened, O’Malley soon resigned, and the effort to accommodate guaranteed income evaporated. “We were so close,” Romig says.

Mother JonesSep 11, 2025, 10:00 AM

When All Protest Is Terrorism

On September 8, at least 800 peaceful protesters holding signs that read “I oppose genocide/I support Palestine Action,” were arrested in London’s Parliament Square, some on grounds of supporting an illegal organization under the United Kingdom’s Terrorism Act. The Labour Party administration of Prime Minister Keir Starmer had banned Palestine Action (PA), a group that engages in property destruction as part of its campaign against the “Israeli apartheid regime,” after it repeatedly sabotaged the factories of arms contractor Elbit Systems. A key supplier to the Israel Defense Forces, Elbit produces state-of-the-art rockets and bombs, attack drones, and guidance systems the companies says are battle-tested on the proving grounds of Gaza and elsewhere.

The PA actionists hadn’t harmed any living beings, but since the group’s founding in 2020, they have cost Elbit hundreds of thousands of dollars in damage. In 2022, Elbit lost out on a series of defense contracts with the UK government worth some $340 million, a loss which PA claimed was because their disruptions had become so widespread that Elbit was now an “unreliable supplier.”

In September, Elbit suddenly shut down a facility that the group had targeted dozens of times. Members of PA charged with criminal damage to an Elbit subsidiary were acquitted in December by a jury sympathetic to their argument that they were impeding civilian deaths in an ongoing genocide. “It was about valuing the lives of Palestinians more than the property and tools used to massacre them,” Palestine Action co-founder Huda Ammori told me.

Then came the declaration in July that Palestine Action was to be considered on the same footing as Al Qaeda, Hezbollah, and ISIS, along with other groups banned in the UK under the Terrorism Act, like Boko Haram, the Irish Republican Army, and the neo-Nazi Maniac Murder Cult. The decision roiled the Starmer administration. “It’s being widely condemned as a blatant misuse of anti-terror laws for political purposes to clamp down on protests which are affecting the profits of arms companies,” an anonymous source in the Home Office—roughly the UK’s Department of Homeland Security—told the Guardian.

The British public seems to agree, gathering by the thousands in cities across the country to signal their support for PA, or at least their condemnation of government overreach. Starmer hit back with the mass arrests of August and September, which set records for the largest number of protesters rounded up during a single demonstration in London. The circle of arrestees now widened to include those whose only apparent crime was that they supported the right to assemble and be heard. A lay minister named Martin Clay held a placard that said: “I don’t support Palestine Action but I support the right to support them.” He was arrested for expressing support for a terrorist organization.

In Glasgow, a 64-year-old man was arrested because he held a sign that said “Genocide in Palestine, time to take action.” His ostensible crime was that “Palestine” and “action” had been printed in larger font than the other words on his sign—here, in the nation that gave the world Magna Carta, habeas corpus, the modern parliamentary system, and the first bill of rights. “The mother of all democracies, people,” said a sign holder in Parliament Square as he was dragged to a paddy wagon.

Protesters gather at Parliament Square holding signs.

Protesters sit in Parliament Square with placards stating ‘I Oppose Genocide, I Support Palestine Action’. Over a thousand people gathered to show support for the activist group—which has been banned under anti-terrorism laws—and for Palestine.Vuk Valcic/ZUMA

The United States government doesn’t ban political organizations outright, but it does have a legal apparatus, put in place almost a quarter-century ago, for transmogrifying protesters into prosecutable terrorists. Following September 11, right-wing lawmakers saw an opportunity to broaden the definition of terrorists well beyond the likes of Al Qaeda members. A day after the attacks, Rep. Greg Walden (R-Ore.), took to the House floor to decry the Earth Liberation Front (ELF), which he said constituted a threat “no less heinous than what we saw occur yesterday here in Washington and in New York.” Starting in the mid-1990s, Earth Liberation Front cells across the United States had firebombed animal testing labs, ski resorts, and auto dealerships; released captive animals from industrial farms; and, central to Walden’s concerns, sabotaged logging and roading equipment. According to the FBI, the roughly 600 criminal acts attributed to the group between 1996 and 2002 resulted in more than $40 million in damages—but not a single injury or death.

Nonetheless, by 2005, ELF and associated saboteurs including the Animal Liberation Front (ALF) had been named by the FBI as “the No. 1 domestic terrorist threat.” The bureau’s Joint Terrorism Task Force issued a booklet regarding “terrorism imagery recognition” that depicted Osama Bin Laden, a Hamas suicide bomber, and a masked member of the ALF holding a primate. By 2012, Senator Rick Santorum (R-Pa.) inveighed against the “reign of environmental terror” by “radical environmental groups” that opposed his state’s fracking industry. Michael Loadenthal, a post-doctoral research fellow at the University of Cincinnati who studies the criminalization of dissent, posits that the figure of the “eco-terrorist” was a useful bogeyman for a government hell-bent on expanding its powers of surveillance and policing public protest.

“From the passage of the USA PATRIOT ACT, to the establishment of the federal DHS, increased electronic surveillance and the militarisation of domestic policing, the spectre of eco-terrorism has been touted at press conferences and in Congressional testimonies to shape budgets, craft policy and allow the State a freer hand in waging the ‘War on Terror,’” writes Loadenthal. At the same time, the eco-terrorist, by targeting industrial and commercial interests, was considered a genuine threat to the capitalist order.

The Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act, passed in 2006, marked the high point of the reactionary assault on environmental protest. Under AETA, crimes that had been prosecuted as misdemeanors punishable with fines or short stints in jail could be bumped up to felony “terrorism enhancements” that threatened punishments of decades in prison or even life sentences. Any person who engaged in any kind of disruption of a business that involved animals could be charged as a terrorist: throwing red paint on a meat processing plant; filming inside a slaughterhouse; picketing in front of the house of a researcher involved in animal testing—all prosecutable as acts of terror.

AETA only added to an already formidable arsenal for prosecuting terrorists, supplementing statutes passed by Congress in the 1990s that provided for increased prison sentences if any vaguely defined “material support” for terrorism could be proven. According to one recent study by a criminology student at the University of Alabama, the number of counts of material support in all terrorism cases post 9/11 increased by 3,130 percent.

Fast-forward to 2016, when resistance against the Dakota Access Pipeline involved thousands of people at the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation who came under attack by militarized police and private security units for blockading construction. Catholic Worker activists Jessica Reznicek and Ruby Montoya secretly sabotaged the pipeline for more than a year before they went public with their crimes. In October of 2016, five members of Climate Direct Action simultaneously turned emergency shut-off valves in four American states and then awaited arrest. State governments rushed to expand the criminal penalties for those who protested or sabotaged oil and gas facilities.

In Florida, trespassing on property that houses pipelines became punishable by up to five years in prison, as opposed to 60 days if convicted of trespassing on any other property type. Ohio lawmakers mandated up to six years in prison for those brazen enough to graffiti a pipeline, and up to ten years for entering a pipeline facility with the mere intention of tampering with it. In Arkansas and Alabama, citizens who trespass in any area that contains “critical infrastructure” risk between one and six years in prison and up to a $10,000 fine. Louisiana prosecutors can now file RICO charges, which carry a possible 50-year sentence, against protesters who “damage” fossil fuel infrastructure. In Mississippi, a conviction for impeding access to a pipeline or a pipeline construction site carries a sentence of up to seven years. If you protest a pipeline in North Carolina and “impede or impair” its construction, you could face more than 15 years in prison and a mandatory $250,000 fine.

Woman laying on the ground being arrested by police.

Protesters are arrested by police officers in Parliament Square for holding placards in support of Palestine Action, which has been banned by the British government as a terrorist group.Ray Tang/London News Pictures/ZUMA

The new pipeline trespass laws constituted the first wave of repressive legislation that targeted dissent in the era of Trumpian authoritarianism. The second wave arrived shortly after the George Floyd rebellion of 2020-21, when lawmakers introduced more than a hundred bills to restrict protests and ratchet up potential prison time. Thirty-five of those bills passed in 19 states, effectively criminalizing groups that protest in concert; at least 20 other anti-protest laws came into effect between 2017 and 2020.

“Nearly half of all Americans now live in a state where it’s harder to protest than it was eight years ago,” said Elly Page, an attorney who runs the US Protest Law Tracker at the International Center for Not-for-Profit Law. Some of the bills mandated extreme punishments for those who slow-march in roadways and block motorists. If 25 or more people impede traffic in Florida, they can be charged with “rioting” and face 15 years. Tennessee mandates up to 12 years for people convicted of “knowingly” obstructing roadways. In Louisiana, if you help plan a protest that might impede traffic—even if the protest never comes to pass—you can be charged with conspiracy and get six months. In Iowa, a driver who rams into protesters is safe from prosecution if he can prove to authorities that “due care” was taken.

Congress followed suit with its introduction in June of the Safe and Open Streets Act, which would make it a federal crime, punishable by up to five years in prison, to “purposely obstruct, delay, or affect commerce…by blocking a public road or highway.”

Defenders of a protest encampment outside Atlanta, who organized to protect forest habitat that was to be paved over for the construction of a police training facility dubbed Cop City, have been charged as domestic terrorists. Proposed bills in New York, Arkansas, West Virginia, Virginia, North Carolina, Oregon, and Texas would make blockading of streets during protest assemblies an act of “domestic terrorism” or establish potential terrorism charges generally for non-violent protesters.

We are now in the midst of the third legislative wave, in which lawmakers have struck back at pro-Palestine encampments and rallies—though so far in the US there’s been little of the kind of sabotage that Palestine Action has mounted, and almost no property destruction beyond the occasional graffiti. Arizona and Texas this year enacted blanket bans on all protest encampments on the campuses of state universities and colleges, while New York has proposed mandatory sanctions for campus protesters. Republicans in Congress have introduced four new bills that would block financial aid to students who commit an ill-defined “riot” offense, bar many student protesters from federal loans and loan forgiveness, and provide for visa revocation and deportation of noncitizens involved in a protest “riot.”

Naturally, the old bogeyman of the protester-as-terrorist has returned to center stage. “Many of our ‘elite’ academic institutions have become hotbeds for…pro-terror ideologies,” said Sen. Jim Banks (R-Ind.), sponsor of a bill that would make federal funds in colleges and universities contingent on tamping down on campus protest.

Trump’s attack on foreign students involved in pro-Palestine dissent on college campuses is tinged with the same protester-as-terrorist rhetoric. He declared Columbia University student Mahmoud Khalil, arrested in March and held without charge for three months, a “terrorist sympathizer.”

“This is the first arrest of many to come,” Trump wrote on social media. “We know there are more students at Columbia and other Universities across the Country who have engaged in pro-terrorist, anti-Semitic, anti-American activity.”

More arrests did come—not just of students, nor even domestic protesters. In July, an Ohio children’s hospital chaplain named Ayman Soliman was stripped of asylum and incarcerated based on his affiliation, well over a decade ago, with an Islamic charity once linked with the Muslim Brotherhood; Soliman now faces deportation to Egypt, a US ally that repeatedly tortured him as a dissident journalist.

The question now is whether the Trump administration will continue to expand the use of terrorism material support statutes to go after protest of all kinds—whether for Palestine, for racial justice, or for climate and the environment.

Mother JonesSep 10, 2025, 11:40 PM

“THIS IS WAR”: Some Right-Wing Figures Call for Retribution Following Kirk Killing

Wednesday’s fatal shooting of conservative influencer Charlie Kirk was greeted with widespread grief, horror, and shock by many MAGA and right-wing figures, some of whom counted Kirk as a friend or cited him as an inspiration for their own work. But while many simply expressed their grief for Kirk and his family, and politicians on both sides of the aisle condemned the killing, some public figures used the moment to make incendiary claims.

On Wednesday evening, FBI Director Kash Patel said a “subject” was in custody, although the identity and potential motivations of this “person of interest” remain unknown. (By that point, far-fetched conspiracy theories about Kirk’s death were already emerging, including claims that Kirk was assassinated by the Israeli government.)

But that did not stop some figures from stoking outrage, particularly against “the left,” whom—despite lacking any evidence as to the shooter’s identity—they blamed for the killing. Former DOGE head and Tesla CEO Elon Musk posted to his 225 million followers, “The Left is the party of murder.”

“The goal for Republicans in the next ten years shouldn’t just be to win elections, but to destroy the Democrat Party entirely and salt the earth underneath it.”

Conservative activist and Trump confidant Laura Loomer sent a barrage of posts to her 1.7 million followers. In one, she called for the Trump administration to “shut down, defund, & prosecute every single Leftist organization,” adding, “The Left is a national security threat.” After Kirk’s death was confirmed, she wrote: “They sent a trained sniper to assassinate Charlie Kirk while he was sitting next to a table of hats that said 47.” It is unclear which “they” she was referring to.

“More people will be murdered if the Left isn’t crushed with the power of the state,” Loomer added.

Former White House staffer and current podcast host Katie Miller, wife of White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, wrote on X that liberals “have blood on your hands.” And Rep. Nancy Mace (R-S.C.) went so far as to blame the killing on the Democrats.

Nancy Mace's very first words to reporters on Charlie Kirk was "democrats own what happened today"

When @ryanobles followed up about if that means Republicans "own" the shooting of Minnesota lawmakers she says "are you kidding me?"

From moments ago on the House steps pic.twitter.com/H6RXJITtTv

— Leah V. (@LeahVredenbregt) September 10, 2025

Sean Davis, the CEO and co-founder of the Federalist, an influential conservative publication, posted on X: “I hope that Trump also orders the extermination of the entire anarcho-terrorist network that has been terrorizing Christians in this nation unabated for more than a decade.”

In a separate post, Davis wrote, “When Democrats lose elections they couldn’t steal, they murder the people they were unable to defeat.”

The knee-jerk arguments that the killing was somehow orchestrated by the left called to mind the baseless blaming of Democrats following the attempted assassinations of President Donald Trump last summer. As our colleague Mark Follman noted at the time, allies of Trump, including his sons, repeatedly and falsely blamed Democrats for the attempts—claims that threat assessment and law enforcement experts warned could give rise to more political violence.

Others blamed Kirk’s killing on an unnamed group of opponents. On Fox News, host Jesse Watters claimed: “Whether we want to accept it or not, they are at war with us. And what are we going to do about it? How much political violence are we going to tolerate?” Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) wrote, “They just shot Charlie Kirk.” (It was unclear whom Watters and Greene were referring to.)

Jesse Watters goes full bloodlust in response to Charlie Kirk's death: "Whether we want to accept it or not, they are at war with us. And what are we going to do about it? How much political violence are we going to tolerate? … This is a turning point. And we know which direction we are going."

— Justin Baragona (@justinbaragona.bsky.social) 2025-09-10T21:16:53.583Z

Andrew Tate, the British-American masculinity influencer turned far-right culture warrior, kept his message simple: “Civil war,” he wrote. Anti-abortion activist and president of Students for Life Kristan Hawkins also invoked civil war and seemed to imply that Kirk’s killing was a result of his opposition to abortion. “We all know the work we do to protect Life comes at a cost,” Hawkins said. In another X post, she wrote: “This is a new civil war. One that we must fight with love to restore a Culture of Life.”

Chaya Raichik, the creator of the far-right Libs of TikTok Twitter account, quickly began sharing posts that were meant to show left-wing and progressive people, including many who aren’t public figures, celebrating Kirk’s killing. In her own post on X, she wrote: “THIS IS WAR.”

Some commenters claimed the killing was proof that “the left” could not be stopped. Darryl Cooper, a far-right activist who posts and podcasts under the name “Martyr Made,” told his 350,000 X followers, “Fascism is just the word used by freaks and degenerates when normal people realize that the Left won’t stop unless it’s forced to.”

Texas firebrand pastor Joel Webbon, a self-proclaimed Christian nationalist, told his 51,000 followers, “The Left will not stop until they are forced to. The Right must gain power, keep power, and wield power righteously. @realDonaldTrump, you have been appointed by Providence. You are commanded by Scripture to be a TERROR to those who do evil. Give them hell.”

William Wolfe, another Christian nationalist and a former Trump administration official, posted a video of the shooting with the comment: “The. Left. Must. Be. Destroyed.” In a separate tweet, he wrote, “The Democrats and the Left must be crushed. The goal for Republicans in the next ten years shouldn’t just be to win elections, but to destroy the Democrat Party entirely and salt the earth underneath it.”

Many of the most incendiary tweets called for the Trump administration to use every available tool for legal and political retribution. Conservative activist Christopher Rufo, who made a name for himself opposing critical race theory, called for swift action. “The last time the radical Left orchestrated a wave of violence and terror, J. Edgar Hoover shut it all down within a few years,” he posted to his 832,000 followers on X. “It is time, within the confines of the law, to infiltrate, disrupt, arrest, and incarcerate all of those who are responsible for this chaos.”

Without directly calling for retribution, other MAGA figures made it clear Kirk’s killing would forever change their own political trajectory. “Congratulations,” wrote conservative activist Ryan Fournier, a co-founder of the group Students for Trump. “You have now made a radical out of me. You fuckers deserve it.”

Mother JonesSep 10, 2025, 7:52 PM

Conservative Influencer Charlie Kirk Shot in Utah

Conservative influencer Charlie Kirk was shot in Utah on Wednesday, officials said.

Kirk, 31, was speaking at Utah Valley University in the suburb of Orem, about 45 miles south of Salt Lake City, when he was shot. Videos circulating on social media appeared to show Kirk being struck in the neck while he was sitting on a stool addressing an outdoor crowd. Kirk’s condition was not immediately clear.

FBI Director Kash Patel said in a post on X that agents will be dispatched to the scene. Utah Gov. Spencer Cox said he was being briefed by law enforcement, adding, “Those responsible will be held fully accountable. Violence has no place in our public life. Americans of every political persuasion must unite in condemning this act.”

Kirk is the founder of Turning Point USA, an organization that tries to get young people into conservative politics. He is a close ally of President Donald Trump and spoke at the Republican National Convention last summer. Kirk is married and has two children.

Officials on both sides of the aisle, including Trump and Vice President JD Vance, condemned the violence and called for prayers for Kirk. “A great guy from top to bottom. GOD BLESS HIM!” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “Dear God, protect Charlie in his darkest hour,” Vance wrote on X.

Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), whose husband was a victim of political violence, wrote on X: “Political violence has absolutely no place in our nation. All Americans should pray for Charlie Kirk’s recovery and hold the entire UVU community in our hearts as they endure the trauma of this gun violence.” Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-Calif.), who hosted Kirk on his podcast earlier this year, called the shooting “disgusting, vile, and reprehensible.” Gov. Josh Shapiro (D-Penn.) wrote on X: “The attack on Charlie Kirk is horrifying and this growing type of unconscionable violence cannot be allowed in our society.”

Information on a suspect or whether anyone else was injured was not immediately available. Spokespeople for the university and state police did not immediately respond to requests for comment from Mother Jones.

This is a developing story. Check back for updates.

Mother JonesSep 10, 2025, 4:55 PM

Republicans Want More Pregnant Women in Prisons. A New Book Describes What It’s Like.

Women are the fastest-growing population of incarcerated people. And if Republicans get their way, more pregnant women will be joining their ranks.

That’s because conservatives are behind a growing push to criminalize pregnancy outcomes nationwide, in part by giving full rights to fetuses. And while abortion opponents have long claimed they do not want to criminalize abortion-seekers themselves, since the Supreme Court’s 2022 overruling of Roe v. Wade, a growing number of conservative lawmakers have begun introducing bills that would treat abortion as homicide and criminalize abortion-seekers. These laws will likely put more Black women and Latinas, who are already imprisoned at higher rates than white women, behind bars.

President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown is also ensnaring pregnant immigrant women: A report issued last month by the office of Sen. Jon Ossoff (D-Ga.) alleged that officials identified more than a dozen credible reports of the mistreatment of pregnant women in Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody, which included not receiving adequate, or even urgent, medical care and being denied food. The Department of Homeland Security has disputed those allegations, saying in part, “Detention of pregnant women is rare and has elevated oversight and review.”

These recent events make Rebecca Rodriguez Carey’s new book, Birth Behind Bars: The Carceral Control of Pregnant Women in Prisons, incredibly timely. Based on in-depth interviews with nearly three dozen women who were incarcerated in prisons throughout the Midwest while pregnant, the book provides rare insight into the experiences of pregnant women behind bars—an issue that lacked federal data until the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) issued its first report on the state of pregnant women in prisons earlier this year. But even the exact number of pregnant women in prisons remains unclear, in part because incarcerated women do not always have access to pregnancy tests: The BJS report, for example, cites more than 320 in state and federal custody in 2023, but past research from scholars and advocates has estimated about 3,000 pregnant people are admitted to U.S. prisons annually. “This invisibility,” Rodrigeuz Carey told me, “really contributes to systemic neglect.”

In her book, Rodriguez Carey, an associate professor of sociology and criminology at Emporia State University in Kansas, counters this historic invisibility by relaying women’s experiences being pregnant, laboring, and giving birth while in prison. Some stories convey the despair and desperation you may expect: Some women recounted purposefully committing crimes in order to be pregnant in prison rather than on the streets; others recalled falling into postpartum depression after being separated from their babies after giving birth while incarcerated. But the book also spotlights the surprising ways women managed to cultivate hope, by hosting makeshift baby showers and making plans for how they would make their children proud once released.

I spoke with Rodriguez Carey via Zoom last month about the state of abortion access in prisons post-Roe, the persistent problem of shackling incarcerated people during childbirth, and what most surprised her during the course of her research.

This interview has been lightly condensed and edited.

I was struck by the fact that some of the women you interviewed deliberately committed crimes in order to have their basic needs for food, shelter, and medical care met in prison during their pregnancies. What do these women’s experiences indicate about the state of pregnancy care in the US more broadly?

Well it’s really, really bad care when you have women who are seeking refuge in a carceral system. And that’s not to say that that the care in prison is optimal care by any means, but for those who are living at the margins of society, who are in extreme poverty and don’t know where their next meal is coming from, don’t know where they are staying each night, for them the mark of being a good mother is to ensure that those basic needs are met. And so that means turning to our criminal legal system. It’s really interesting to me that the incarcerated population are the only group of people in the US that are constitutionally guaranteed health care—that really says something.

“There’s an absence of a social safety net, and we have people turning to the criminal legal system to ensure their basic needs are met.“

You have some prisons being more progressive with their efforts to provide wraparound services, but then you have other prisons where there’s not a lot of prenatal and postpartum care, and so there’s really just a wide variation of care there from state to state, and even from facility to facility. I think that speaks to the larger picture of inequalities in the US. There’s an absence of a social safety net, and we have people turning to the criminal legal system to ensure their basic needs are met.

Even before the Dobbs decision that revoked the constitutional right to abortion, accessing it in prison was difficult. Only two percent of participants in the BJS report had abortions; other research has found an even lower rate. What sort of barriers did incarcerated people face when Roe was still the law of the land?

Many states have laws that prohibit any sort of state funding to go toward abortion. That includes travel—so if an incarcerated woman is looking to access an abortion out of state, typically you have to have a correctional officer accompany that woman. That would require state funding, to be in a correctional van for transportation and to provide the salary for the accompanying correctional officer. Many women who are incarcerated may not know that they are even pregnant until they come to prison, if they are living on the streets, for example, and haven’t had access to routine health care in some time. And so by the time they learn of their pregnancy, it’s often too late, because many states have laws that regulate the number of weeks that an abortion can be performed.

Many pregnant women in custody remain shackled while laboring and giving birth despite the fact that leading medical groups have denounced this practice. What did your interviewees say this experience was like for them?

They felt like they were caged animals. When you are in the state of giving birth, you are extremely vulnerable. You’re not necessarily at a risk of fleeing; there have been no documented cases to date of a woman trying to escape while in labor. Many of the women that I interviewed had cesarean sections, so they were on the operating table, numb from the waist down—you are not going anywhere at that moment.

Most women who are incarcerated are there on non-violent crimes, and even if a woman is pregnant who committed a violent crime, she’s not necessarily posing a risk to society while you’re in that vulnerable state of childbirth, where your legs are in stirrups and you have a correctional officer often in the room. Many of these correctional officers are men, and a lot of the women I interviewed talked about how they had experienced sexual abuse growing up, so that adds just another layer of harm when you’re in this very vulnerable state, often in layers of undress or completely naked.

Most states have laws on the books now restricting shackling during delivery. But how widespread of a problem does this remain?

It’s really hard to say. A state may have a policy, but then we know that the policy is often different from the reality of what takes place. Many states that have issued restrictions on shackling still leave it up to correctional officers if there is a point of threat or perceived harm. And I think when we look at the different layers here, of who is more likely to be considered harmful or posing a risk to society, that’s women of color. So you still have these tropes that are persisting behind bars.

What about prison nursery programs that allow mothers to parent their newborns in prison—what benefits do they offer and why aren’t they more common? [Editor’s note: There are currently eleven state-run prison nursery programs, plus two more operated by the federal Bureau of Prisons.]

The first prison nursery program has actually been in place since 1901, so this is not necessarily new. Women who go through a prison nursery program and have access to that oftentimes there are reduced recidivism rates, there’s improved maternal mental health and fetal health outcomes. Otherwise they’re meeting their children, and they’re saying goodbye all in a span of 24 hours, and so that’s going to have negative health implications for years to come.

There are no national mandates or standardized policies governing the incarceration of pregnant women. As a result, it’s up to individual states—and even specific correctional facilities—to decide whether to invest in such programs. Unfortunately, awareness among policymakers remains limited. Prior to the 1900s, reformatories often emphasized family bonds, allowing incarcerated women to live with their newborns—much like today’s prison nursery programs. But by the 1970s, most states moved toward a more punitive approach, passing legislation that effectively eliminated many of these programs.

Some of your interviewees used their incarcerations during pregnancy as a “transformative period” and sought to “optimize pregnancy and birth outcomes” despite their circumstances. Can you say more about how they did so?

Many of the women that I interviewed had been pregnant before. Some of them had also been incarcerated before, but this was the first time they were both pregnant and incarcerated. Many of them talked about how being pregnant and incarcerated was rock bottom, and that this was very much a wake up call to do right by their unborn child. Many of the women interviewed talked about how during previous pregnancies they were out on the streets, doing drugs, getting into trouble left and right. And so when they were in prison, it was really this time where they could focus on their pregnancy. So that was really special for them, and it was a time where they were doing their best to take advantage of different programs and initiatives that they maybe had access to in their prisons, like pregnancy support groups, for example, reading all the books and trying their best to implement that advice. The women talked about how when you’re incarcerated, all you have is time to think and make the best choices for your unborn child.

Is there anything that surprised you in doing this research?

I think one of the biggest takeaways from me was how much hope is found inside prisons, where you have women coming together, given the absence of maternal healthcare, given the absence of institutional resources and support, creating their own networks of community and care. Food was a huge topic; pregnant women in prison don’t have access all the time to regular and nutritious foods. So you have other women who are incarcerated helping them out and coming together and saying, “Hey, I don’t want my baked potato, you can have it because I know you’re pregnant and you need these calories.”

Women are also taking pregnant women, especially the younger ones, under their wings, and saying, “be sure to get a job in the kitchen while you’re incarcerated, because that way you have regular access to food.” So you see these informal networks of support.

After a woman gives birth, she’s sent back to prison, often within 24 to 48 hours of giving birth and asked to fall back in line as if nothing has happened, even though her world has just been rocked. So you have women who are incarcerated really coming together and rallying around the pregnant women to provide that support and care.

What gives you hope for pregnant people in prisons and their newborns?

The Kansas Children’s Discovery Center in Topeka has a program called Play Free, which allows incarcerated mothers and grandmothers to spend a day at the children’s museum playing with their kiddo, free of these cages and environments that are not child- and family-friendly at all. It’s been really great to see the transformation, where it started just as a partnership with the Topeka Correctional Facility, and has since expanded to the men’s facilities in Kansas. You have incarcerated fathers as well, and centering the children in all of this is important.

Mother JonesSep 10, 2025, 4:15 PM

The Most Eye-Popping Parts of Kamala Harris’s New Memoir—So Far

Kamala Harris is back…with a vengeance.

The first excerpt of her forthcoming memoir, 107 Days, about her history-making presidential campaign after President Joe Biden dropped out, published on Wednesday morning in The Atlantic. And it is unexpectedly juicy for Harris, who is typically known to equivocate—and who, until now, staunchly defended Biden’s decision to run for a second term.

In the excerpt, Harris repeatedly takes Biden and unnamed members of his “inner circle” to task, for what she alleges was their distrust of her ambitions; their failure to support her, and acknowledge her successes, as vice president; and their resistance to her growing popularity as Biden’s declined. “Their thinking was zero-sum,” she writes of Biden’s closest confidantes. “If she’s shining, he’s dimmed.” (The Biden camp does not yet appear to have commented.)

Below are some of the juiciest topics she tackles.

Biden’s decision to run for president again

For the first time, Harris publicly admits that she should have considered telling Biden not to run for a second term:

During all those months of growing panic, should I have told Joe to consider not running? Perhaps. But the American people had chosen him before in the same matchup. Maybe he was right to believe that they would do so again.

Later, she characterizes administration officials as being “hypnotized” and reckless for failing to push Biden to drop out earlier, even as outside pressure was mounting:

“It’s Joe and Jill’s decision.” We all said that, like a mantra, as if we’d all been hypnotized. Was it grace, or was it recklessness? In retrospect, I think it was recklessness. The stakes were simply too high. This wasn’t a choice that should have been left to an individual’s ego, an individual’s ambition. It should have been more than a personal decision.

Biden’s age

Harris rejects the “narrative of some big conspiracy at the White House to hide Joe Biden’s infirmity,” but concedes that he had gotten “tired”:

Here is the truth as I lived it. Joe Biden was a smart guy with long experience and deep conviction, able to discharge the duties of president. On his worst day, he was more deeply knowledgeable, more capable of exercising judgment, and far more compassionate than Donald Trump on his best. But at 81, Joe got tired. That’s when his age showed in physical and verbal stumbles.

Relationship with the White House

A vast portion of the excerpt features Harris’s complaints about deep-seated distrust she alleges Biden’s staff harbored towards her:

Because I’d gone after him over busing in the 2019 primary debate, I came into the White House with what we lawyers call a “rebuttable presumption.” I had to prove my loyalty, time and time again.

When Fox News attacked me on everything from my laugh, to my tone of voice, to whom I’d dated in my 20s, or claimed I was a “DEI hire,” the White House rarely pushed back with my actual résumé: two terms elected D.A., top cop in the second-largest department of justice in the United States, senator representing one in eight Americans.

Later, she describes her frustrations with the White House communications team and their failure to adequately fight back against her bad press:

They had a huge comms team; they had Karine Jean-Pierre briefing in the pressroom every day. But getting anything positive said about my work or any defense against untrue attacks was almost impossible.

[…]

Worse, I often learned that the president’s staff was adding fuel to negative narratives that sprang up around me. One narrative that took a stubborn hold was that I had a “chaotic” office and unusually high staff turnover during my first year…the first year in any White House sees staff churn. Working for the first woman vice president, my staff had the additional challenge of confronting gendered stereotypes, a constant battle that could prove exhausting.

[…]

And when the stories were unfair or inaccurate, the president’s inner circle seemed fine with it. Indeed, it seemed as if they decided I should be knocked down a little bit more.

One example she references: The criticisms over her work tackling the root causes of migration from the Northern Triangle of Central America:

When Republicans mischaracterized my role as “border czar,” no one in the White House comms team helped me to effectively push back and explain what I had really been tasked to do, nor to highlight any of the progress I had achieved.

[…]

Instead, I shouldered the blame for the porous border, an issue that had proved intractable for Democratic and Republican administrations alike. Even the breathtaking cruelty of Trump’s family-separation policy hadn’t deterred the desperate. It was an issue that absolutely demanded bipartisan cooperation at an impossibly partisan, most uncooperative time.

No one around the president advocated, Give her something she can win with.

Harris also writes that Biden’s inner circle resented her growing popularity:

When polls indicated that I was getting more popular, the people around him didn’t like the contrast that was emerging.

As one example, she refers to a speech she gave on “the humanitarian crisis in Gaza” in Selma, Alabama in March 2024:

It was a speech that had been vetted and approved by the White House and the National Security Council. It went viral, and the West Wing was displeased. I was castigated for, apparently, delivering it too well.

Their thinking was zero-sum: If she’s shining, he’s dimmed. None of them grasped that if I did well, he did well. That given the concerns about his age, my visible success as his vice president was vital. It would serve as a testament to his judgment in choosing me and reassurance that if something happened, the country was in good hands. My success was important for him. His team didn’t get it.

That’s the last line of the excerpt. It ends abruptly—almost as abruptly as democracy as we know it seems to have ended the day Trump was sworn into his second term.

But it’s almost certain that we can expect more tea spillage when the book publishes, on Sept. 23.

Mother JonesSep 10, 2025, 2:18 PM

Inside the Hidden Conservative Network Bankrolling an “Ecosystem” of Right-Wing News

“Now more than ever, the world needs an honest newsroom.” With these words, the little-known Informing America Foundation was awarded the $250,000 Gregor G. Peterson Prize in “venture philanthropy” last December for its “high-quality journalism.”

If few had heard of IAF, hinted the nonprofit’s CEO, Debbie Myers, it was by design. “We stay very much under the radar,” she said, accepting the prize at the 2024 annual summit of the American Legislative Exchange Council, the corporate-funded group that works to advance conservative policies at the state level. IAF’s goal, Myers explained, was to create an “ecosystem” of news. The group boasts of funding a network of thousands of platforms that have quietly shaped public opinion by stoking an array of right-wing conspiracy theories, from the alleged corruption of Joe Biden to the supposedly nefarious mission of the US Agency for International Development, along with more recent attacks on critics of President Donald Trump.

Myers, who once led Gingrich 360, Newt Gingrich’s multimedia production firm, is a longtime TV executive who helped produce shows such as Little People, Big World; Talk Soup; and Punkin Chunkin. Her “partner in crime” in launching IAF in 2021, as she described him as he joined her onstage, is John Solomon, a former investigative reporter for the Associated Press and Washington Post and a DC fixture who has drawn criticism for pushing right-wing stories and smearing Democrats with the kind of allegations that a Post ombudsman once described as “‘gotcha’ without a gotcha.”

In 2019, Solomon was at the forefront of efforts to tie Biden to shady dealings in Ukraine on his son Hunter’s behalf, penning a series of columns for The Hill that reported dubious information from Ukrainian prosecutors with an axe to grind. A 2020 review of his work by the paper called its reliability into question, concluding Solomon had “failed to identify important details about key Ukrainian sources, including the fact that they had been indicted or were under investigation.”

In the wake of the controversy, he set up the independent outlet Just the News and launched a podcast, John Solomon Reports. In an email, Solomon defended his Hill reporting’s accuracy and claimed he has no formal role at IAF, while confirming he provides it an office at the same K Street address as Just the News and another Solomon enterprise, Bentley Media Group. In 2021, Myers and Solomon also formed the Affinity Media Exchange, an advertising business that soon inked a deal with Trump’s Truth Social to be one of the platform’s ad representatives.

IAF’s tax filings, which say its mission is funding “investigative, explanatory, data-driven and multimedia journalism,” show it brought in close to $8 million in contributions during its first year, with the largest nonprofit donation coming from the family foundation of Diana Davis Spencer, whose late father, an investment banker, once chaired the Heritage Foundation. In subsequent years, millions have flowed to IAF through donor-advised charities that do not disclose the source of their initial contributions.

IAF, in turn, has doled out funds to an array of right-leaning outlets, including Just the News and Off the Press, run by Joseph Curl, a veteran of Drudge Report and the Washington Times. ADN América, aimed at Spanish speakers, received more than $1 million from IAF in the site’s first three years of operation. The foundation sent another million-plus to Performance One Media, which owns Real America’s Voice, the right-wing network best known for carrying Steve Bannon’s War Room. Real America’s Voice gave Solomon his own nightly show in 2022, which he has used to promote IAF allies.

IAF has also directed more than $1.7 million to Star News Digital Media, a conglomerate of 12 mostly battleground state sites whose names suggest a local focus but that actually push pro-GOP partisan news. Star News’ Tennessee Star, for instance, featured a section called “KamaLawfare” prior to the 2024 presidential election that highlighted incidents from Kamala Harris’ prosecutorial tenure in California, but seemed to ignore top news events in the state. One day this past June, the homepages of Star News outlets in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Georgia, and Virginia looked almost identical, all covering transgender youth health care in California, New York City’s mayoral race, and a Florida sheriff’s threats against anti-Trump protesters.

Media observers have dubbed such agenda-driven news sites “pink slime”—so named for by-products added as filler to ground beef. Pink slime news is a growing phenomenon, according to University of Cincinnati journalism professor Jeffrey Blevins, rising as partisan interests take advantage of the devastated newspaper market. “We saw these news deserts popping up,” he says. “It was very cheap to put in a website and say, ‘Okay, we’re doing local news.’ Local news is always seen as being more credible.” Sites like the Tennessee Star, he explains, use that perception to push “poor-quality” coverage “funded by some outside political interest.”

In 2023, the most recent year tax records are available, filings show IAF’s largest contribution—more than $1 million—went to the Institute for Citizen Focused Service, a secretive nonprofit set up by Interior Department officials from Trump’s first term. In turn, ICFS has funneled money to Pipeline Advisors, which holds a portfolio of local outlets—including the Midland Times, Austin Journal, Federal Newswire, and others—that have also been described as pink slime. All told, IAF says its news “ecosystem” includes “more than 2,000 hyperlocal platforms and 10 national platforms” reaching an audience of more than 50 million people.

One hallmark of IAF-connected organizations is that they often promote the same allegations and storylines. This is no accident: At the award ceremony last December, Myers provided a glimpse into how IAF works, explaining that each morning, the team gathers on a call to choose the stories they believe the mainstream media is ignoring. After hanging up, “we amplify each other,” she said, “and get it to the hands of the American people.”

Star News outlets regularly repackage Just the News articles. Just the News writes stories based on Off the Press coverage and vice versa. They do not disclose their financial links. For example, Just the News covered the 2021 launch of Off the Press without noting that either organization was funded by IAF.

The network’s thousands of platforms have quietly shaped public opinion by stoking an array of right-wing conspiracy theories.

Solomon’s podcast often features guests from the broader IAF universe, including Mike Benz, a right-wing influencer and former Trump State Department official whose attacks targeting USAID as a “censorship octopus” helped fuel Elon Musk’s crusade to feed the agency to the “wood chipper.” Benz, a onetime alt-right Twitter troll, has appeared on Solomon’s show to rail against social media censorship and US foreign aid. In such appearances, he’s been identified as the executive director of the Foundation for Freedom Online—which is not a foundation, but which launched as a project of an organization called Empower Oversight that has also been heavily funded by IAF. An Empower Oversight spokesperson said the group served as FFO’s fiscal sponsor through February 2023. That year, Benz was paid $253,889 by ICFS.

In 2022, Benz began issuing reports from his one-man think tank positing a conspiracy to silence conservatives online. IAF-funded outlets have presented a drumbeat of interviews with him, in which he argued that outfits battling online disinformation—from media watchdogs like NewsGuard to the US military and Big Tech—were actually undertaking a project to suppress conservative voices. The interviews presented Benz as an independent expert—“Mike Benz exposes State Department’s use of USAID as an ‘intelligence cloak,’” said one Just the News headline—without revealing that his think tank was little more than a website whose existence seems to have been made possible by IAF. The interviews got repackaged as news by other outlets in the IAF stable, expanding their reach.

Empower Oversight, the organization that originally backed Benz, was formed in Virginia in 2021, just one day before IAF was registered in Washington, DC. IAF supplied Empower Oversight with the sole grant it received that year, a $400,000 allocation whose purpose, according to tax filings, was to “develop an infrastructure to cultivate, protect and work with whistleblowers.” Since its founding, Empower Oversight has focused heavily on typical MAGA obsessions, including the Russian collusion probe, purported FBI involvement in January 6, and Hunter Biden.

Empower Oversight is headed by Jason Foster—a longtime aide to Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley—whom ProPublica exposed in 2018 as an inflammatory blogger who wrote under the handle “Extremist.” According to ProPublica, Foster, a “partisan combatant” known for his “conspiratorial thinking,” was the main force behind the Senate Judiciary Committee’s scrutiny of research firm Fusion GPS and ex–British spy Christopher Steele, author of the 2016 memos alleging collusion between Trump and Russia.

Empower Oversight, which continues to receive most of its funding from IAF, represented Gary Shapley, an IRS criminal investigator who alleged that the Biden administration sandbagged a tax fraud investigation into Hunter Biden. (Earlier this year, Shapley briefly served as Trump’s IRS director.) Shapley’s allegations were heavily promoted by members of the IAF network, including Just the News, the Tennessee Star, and other Star News outlets such as the Pennsylvania Daily Star and the Arizona Sun Times.

During the Biden years, Empower Oversight’s work followed a familiar formula: First, it would file a battery of Freedom of Information Act requests to a federal agency, usually related to some right-wing intrigue or a query Grassley’s Senate office had submitted to that department. Empower Oversight then would frequently follow up with a lawsuit alleging deficiencies in the agency’s response. With the help of Solomon’s Just the News, it turned routine records requests and civil complaints into a PR bonanza, while fueling a narrative that the Biden administration and its supposed deep state allies were suppressing information.

While Benz did not respond to our requests for comment—and hung up when we called—he’s arguably delivered the most impact for IAF’s supporters. In April, the State Department shuttered its Global Engagement Center, which focused on combating foreign disinformation but which Benz had alleged was a government tool of anti-conservative censorship.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio rewarded Benz with an exclusive interview announcing the move. The next day, Just the News announced that the “censorship nerve center” had been shut down, and multiple Star News platforms dutifully signal-boosted the news. All cited Benz as merely a “former State official.”

Source: IRS

Mother JonesSep 10, 2025, 11:00 AM

The Threat That Could Destroy 20 Years of Progress in the Lower Ninth

This story was published in partnership with Capital B.

Willie Calhoun knows how to live with water. His home, cradled between the Mississippi River and a patchwork of canals, is split by the surging, ever-present current.

But it wasn’t always that way in New Orleans’ Ninth Ward. Before the city’s largest aqueduct, known as the Industrial Canal, was built, the stretch of land between the river and Lake Pontchartrain was a place meant for water, fish, and wading birds rather than for people.

The ground was soft and unstable, mostly swamp, dense cypress trees, and tangled undergrowth laced with meandering bayous. But in 1918, dredges cut through the wetlands, carving a straight channel that drained and filled the low ground, creating the Lower Ninth Ward and the impression that the land was ready for houses—and factories and ship traffic.

It then became home to Black families, who affectionally nicknamed the neighborhood the “Lower Ninth” or, simply, “the Nine.” They were drawn by promises of stability, only to inherit the vulnerabilities engineered into the landscape.

He still remembers a day, sitting at the dinner table when he was about 10. His longshoreman father, tired after a day on the barge, declared a warning almost as fact: “If a storm ever come up, it is gonna drown the Ninth Ward.”

An older African American man leans over pulpit. A wooden cross hangs on the wall behind him.

Willie Calhoun at Fairview Mission Baptist Church in the Lower Ninth WardTrenity Thomas

The storms did come. “He was right,” Calhoun said.

“Lower Nine was flooded. It drowned.”

Along Lake Pontchartrain, the river, and the navigation canals, levees and concrete floodwalls trace the edges like banks shaping the current. When storms press in, surge barriers and gates swing shut to calm the incoming rush, while pumps gather the rainfall and send it flowing back out.

It isn’t a single wall, but a braided system to protect the city below sea level. Roughly 350 miles of clay and concrete along the lake and river must all work in concert to keep the neighborhoods dry.

In 1965, when Calhoun was 15, the levees along the Industrial Canal failed when Hurricane Betsy struck New Orleans. Dozens of his neighbors trapped in their attics drowned as floodwaters rose to their rooftops.

Four decades later in 2005, Hurricane Katrina struck even harder. The Industrial Canal’s levees crumbled again. Water roared through the streets with enough force to rip houses from their foundations. Cars flipped, tricycles vanished beneath sludge, and bodies remained unrecovered for weeks.

Of the 1,300 people who died in Katrina, Calhoun lost two neighbors and one of his oldest friends.

Today, the sense of loss is palpable. On his block, just four homes remain.

A single-story white building, which serves as a church, is raised on stilts.

Fairview Mission Baptist ChurchTrenity Thomas

Calhoun, who is now the pastor of Fairview Mission Baptist Church, retired early from the federal government to rebuild a home for his mother in 2008, plunging into debt for the first time in his life. At 75, he is still paying for the honor to return.

Each flood and manmade catastrophe has demanded more than just rebuilding homes, Calhoun said.On some evenings, he stands in the neighborhood at the edge of the canal, sunlight gleaming off the concrete floodwalls rebuilt after Katrina. The shadows stretch across deserted fields and the shuttered Martin Luther King Jr. High School. The stillness feels uneasy: After all the storms he’s outlasted since his father first warned him of these waters, another threat is rising.

It is here where the US government is moving to restart a $4.7 billion canal reconstruction effort. This winter, on the heels of the 20th anniversary of Katrina and 68 years after the project was first approved by Congress in 1956, the US Army Corps of Engineers is expected to decide whether to seek funding for a plan to relocate the canal’s lock system, which transfers boats from the canal to the river and vice versa, and subsequently rebuild a portion of the canal’s flood protection system.

It would leave the city’s weakest flood defenses exposed for more than a decade and allow the Mississippi River—and its storm surges—to flow about a quarter of a mile deeper into the neighborhood. Supporters see it as a long‑delayed fix to a chokepoint vital to Gulf commerce; residents like Calhoun see years of disruption with uncertain protection and a fresh test of what “progress” means for Black families.

For decades, the construction had not moved forward due to sustained community opposition, environmental lawsuits, and shifting economic justification. (Over the last decade, the estimated cost has ballooned by $3.5 billion.)

But today, the Corps now finds itself in a more advantageous position. Lax environmental regulations, a steadily declining population, and the shifting priorities of federal policy have created fewer obstacles than ever before.

The decision will determine the neighborhood’s fate and signal the nation’s position on climate adaptation, equity, safety, and willingness to work with water instead of against it. If construction proceeds, the anticipated timeline would bring years of disruption, with uncertain guarantees. Benefits like job creation may come, but so might increased displacement and ecological harm.

Since Katrina, the rebuilding of his community has “been about how they can make a nickel or a dime off us,” Calhoun said. “And when you go back and you start looking at the history, you start looking at what’s really happening right now in all these 20 years, how is it that they have not produced more for the people here?”

“You can come back from water

if you respect it.”

Lower Ninth Ward in February 2006, six months after Hurricane Katrina.Mark Murrmann

The Choice at Water’s Edge

Across the Nine, weeds push through cracked sidewalks, power poles lean, and the hum of life is absent. The nearest full-service grocery store is miles away; small corner shops offer mostly canned goods and soda. Work is scarce. The neighborhood has less than half the number of working people as it did pre-Katrina, the starkest decline in the city. Unemployment is more than double the city’s rate, and most households earn less than half the national average.

Many blocks feel paused in time, as though the rush to rebuild never reached here.

Yet even as blocks stayed empty and storefronts went dark, the region poured roughly $14.5 billion into a fortified rim of levees, gates, and pumps meant to keep surge from ever reaching the Industrial Canal and the Lower Nine again. The Army Corps has been in charge of projects that have strengthened levees, floodwalls, and seagates and built the world’s largest pump station and storm surge barriers.

But that system now faces a cut in federal funding and will no longer receive regular monitoring, leaving the city more vulnerable to unnoticed weaknesses and potential disaster.

Already, parts of the new flood system are sinking by as much as 2 inches per year. Standing on the floodwall system in August, Calhoun could fit his finger through cracks in the slowly separating wall. The new project could worsen that decline. When levees settle unevenly, they crack, which weakens the city’s barrier against the fastest-rising sea levels in the United States.

The Corps knows this. “In New Orleans, you’re kind of building on pudding,” Ricky Boyett, a spokesperson for the Corps, said earlier this year. “If you build anything on that ground, it’s going to sink.”

A crane sitting in murky water lowers a large tarp over the edge of a sandy embankment.

Reconstruction of the levee in the Lower Ninth Ward in 2006Mark Murrmann

The Environmental Protection Agency knows it too.

Emails obtained through the Freedom of Information Act show that under the Biden administration, the regional office of the EPA privately voiced concerns about the project’s impact. Officials’ worries focused on the project’s potential to worsen flooding and pollution in a community already facing substantial environmental and health burdens. The emails also showed, at times, a hostile relationship with Corps staffers.

But the Port of New Orleans and the Industrial Canal form a vital gateway between America’s heartland and the world, channeling over $100 billion in economic impact and generating 1 in 5 jobs in Louisiana. In 2023, 81 million tons of grain, fossil fuels, and manufactured goods moved through the waterway, the fifth-largest amount for an American seaport.

To supporters of the project, the canal’s upgrade represents a lifeline for commerce: Every day, massive barges must wait hours—sometimes all day—to squeeze through the century-old lock that connects the canal to the river. The Corps and shipping companies argue that modernizing the waterway will finally break this bottleneck. They point to the stakes in simple terms: Without these improvements, a single stalled barge or shipment can delay millions of dollars in exports, slow deliveries to factories across the Midwest, and threaten the efficiency that keeps New Orleans at the heart of America’s trade with the world.

The port, having lost 15 percent of its volume to other Gulf ports in Texas, Alabama, and Mississippi since Katrina, has spent nearly a million dollars lobbying the Army Corps since 2020 for canal and harbor upgrades in hopes of maintaining its viability.

However, existentially, the project signals something even bigger, explained Rollin Black, a researcher and advocate focused on coastal restoration around New Orleans. In his view, the threats extend beyond the levees themselves.

For a century, the Gulf Coast has, on average, lost 1 yard of wetlands every single minute. And instead of bolstering coastal restoration or adapting to rising climate pressures, he warned, authorities are intensifying the city’s vulnerability by disrupting the very flows of water and sediment that sustain Louisiana’s wetlands against storms.

A green sign stands in a field near a floodwall with a brightly painted mural. The sign reads, "Industrial Canal Flood Wall," and summarizes the devastation that occurred when Hurricane Katrina breached the walls at the location.

A historical marker near the floodwall bordering the Lower Ninth WardTrenity Thomas

Recent environmental policy changes have weakened the safeguards that put this project on the Biden administration’s radar last year. Updates to the National Environmental Policy Act have cut public input and environmental justice reviews. The new EPA regional head who covers Louisiana, Scott Mason, was the main author of Project 2025’s EPA plan, which called for speeding up federal funding for water infrastructure by pushing for faster permitting and less environmental review for public works projects.

In response to several questions, Mason’s EPA office said it is working “closely with [the Army Corps] to ensure nearby residents of this project have their concerns addressed.”

But to Black, there is no addressing or mitigating the impact of this project.

“You can come back from water, if you respect it,” he said, but “I think if the canal project were to happen, it’d be a worse hit than Katrina.

“I don’t think they could come back from this project.”

This is in no small part due to the fact that every federal promise since Katrina—from reopened schools to genuine economic revival—has faded, he said.

It is the childhood fear of a forever-underwater Lower Ninth Ward that has kept Calhoun and his family against the project. When the project was first announced and floated throughout the 1960s, his parents were vehemently opposed.

“We understood then that the ground was sinking, that more and more of the waters were coming inland,” he said.

Calhoun argues the process is sidestepping Black elders. At a July public comment meeting, every local resident who spoke opposed the project, but only 15 percent were Black. Despite the community still being majority Black, the number of Black residents in the area is 67 percent less than it was in 2000.

The number of white residents has grown by 920 percent.

“They don’t understand the stakes,” Calhoun said.

While white transplants, drawn by cheap property and the neighborhood’s cultural cachet, now lead much of the opposition to the canal project, those voices, longtime residents said, can overshadow their own.

The Corps’ justification for the project relies partly on the neighborhood’s population change since the last flood, claiming the construction will have a lower human impact. Today, the area’s population is 7,500, down from 19,500 in 2000. It’s a circular logic, residents say: Destroy a community through incompetence, then use that destruction to justify further damage.

In response to questions, the Army Corps said it had developed two programs to mitigate risk, but that the lock expansion was “the least environmentally damaging practicable alternative under federal law.”

The federal government maintains that, though economic gains from the project may be debated, action is inescapable because the century-old lock is so deteriorated that it could fail unexpectedly. If it did, it could unleash floodwaters with catastrophic consequences for the community, regardless of whether the canal is upgraded or not. From their vantage along the river, officials argue that waiting is itself a gamble.

For residents like Calhoun, the compounding situation—the neglect, displacement, and erasure—raises questions about if the pre-Katrina community will ever have a say in its own destiny again.

“It’s about more than water,” he said. “We’re still Hurricane Betsy survivors. Still Katrina survivors. But who’s going to survive the next storm?”

“Twenty years after Katrina

We just want the Corps to focus on us for once.”

Lower Ninth Ward, February 2006Mark Murrmann

Crosscurrents in the Ninth Ward

As more muggy summer days surrender to dusk in the Lower Ninth Ward, the line between past and future blurs along the battered canal. Everyone in the neighborhood—old timers and newcomers—now stand at a crossroads shaped by water, memory, and power.

Across the neighborhood, there has been murmurs about what benefits the project could bring. Congress mandates allocating roughly 10 percent of the project’s cost, nearly $480 million in this case, for community-based projects. Proposed ideas from the Corps of Engineers include new green spaces, job training, support for youth and seniors, and historical markers recognizing Black community heritage.

Some arguments in support of the project rest on how federal infrastructure actually gets made. The Corps develops alternatives and mitigation packages through congressionally authorized studies and feasibility reviews, with public meetings and comment periods giving residents a way in. But the options are ultimately winnowed by cost‑benefit math, engineering risk, environmental review, and the politics of local sponsors and Congress. History here is instructive: pre‑Katrina canal decisions showed how neighborhood preferences could be sidelined when cheaper, faster designs won the day.

Opponents can delay a federal project through organizing, lawsuits, and relentless scrutiny, yet the decisive votes sit in Washington. And though neighborhood pushback has managed to postpone the canal project about six times since the 1960s, there’s a persistent fear that their objections will eventually be swept aside.

It is why many longtime residents, especially older Black homeowners directly affected by these decisions, have grown apathetic after decades of being ignored.

An older African American man sits in an overstuffed leather chair in a room full of framed art. On the floor next to him, a sign reads, "A Country Road, A Tree, Evening."

Robert Green, a survivor of Hurricane Katrina, sits in his home in the Lower Ninth Ward.Trenity Thomas

“Either you’re going to allow the project to happen and make it work for you, or you’re going to stand on the side and be frustrated, and it still happens,” said Robert Green, one of the few remaining homeowners on his street just two blocks from the canal. Katrina killed his mother and his 3-year-old granddaughter Shanai “Nai Nai” Green.

It is hard to get activated around the project, Green said, because he doesn’t have relationships with the people he sees leading the movement. Before Katrina, he knew all of his neighbors. Today, he does not.

Corps officials admit the greatest benefits of the canal expansion will go to navigation and shipping, not Lower Ninth residents, who will face years of upheaval. For many, it’s a familiar story: Black neighborhoods absorbing the health and environmental costs of Louisiana’s industrial corridor, reinforcing the region’s “sacrifice zone” status, even as calls rise to move away from fossil fuels.

“Twenty years after Katrina, we just want the Corps to focus on us for once,” said Chris Williams, a 46-year-old resident who attended the last public hearing.

Currently, half the canal’s cargo supports fossil fuel production, while an additional 38 percent serves other pollution-heavy industries. The powerful Gulf Intracoastal Canal Association, which backs the project, did not respond to requests for comment. The Port of New Orleans deferred all comments to the Army Corps.

No matter the outcome, grain, oil, gas, and coal will still flow through New Orleans tomorrow. The project, advocates argue, highlights the tension between economic promises and environmental reality. As global markets shift toward cleaner energy, in theory, these materials will go extinct soon.

A blue yard sign reads, "The canal will kill NOLA."

A sign in the Lower Ninth Ward protests the canal project.Trenity Thomas

Manufacturing and energy jobs anchor Louisiana’s economy, but since 2020, their stagnation has contributed to the state and New Orleans experiencing the steepest population loss in the country, said Allison Plyer, a demographer in New Orleans. Compared to 2004, the Lower Nine has 60 percent fewer industrial workers living in the neighborhood today. She urged greater scrutiny of whether new industrial projects truly reach locals. (The canal expansion would generate several hundred temporary positions.)

Andre Perry, director of the Center for Community Uplift at the Brookings Institution, noted that cities must pursue industries that provide income and protect local environments—a bar the Lower Ninth’s canal project may not clear. A joint report from Brookings and the Data Center warns that this fight plays out amid a deeper, decadeslong crisis. Despite post-Katrina investment, most Black neighborhoods remain close to toxic sites, air pollution, and soil laced with lead and arsenic. These are lasting scars that canal expansion could deepen.

The community closest to the canal is exposed to more pollution than 90 percent of the country. State records show that several major oil spills and fires have taken place in the canal since 2020, and at times, companies have been hesitant to follow state cleanup processes.

Federal documents received through FOIA also showed that soil at the bottom of the canal contains hazardous chemicals like DDT, a long‑lasting pesticide that can build up in fish and people, where it disrupts hormones, can harm the brain, and increases cancer risk. Plans to excavate and transport this contaminated soil have heightened neighbors’ fears about what further disruption the future may bring.

After Katrina washed the city with toxins, cleanup was slowest in these most polluted areas, prolonging health hazards and depressing property values. Now, with state regulators weakening enforcement and making it harder for communities to challenge polluters, these “sacrifice zones” remain locked in a cycle in which poverty magnifies pollution’s harm, and pollution in turn stifles recovery. The Brookings report calls for a new approach: Make polluters pay into a resilience fund, clean up the neighborhoods most burdened by industry, and channel investment into “green zones” that give residents a healthier, more secure future against the guarantee of more storms.

Portrait of an older woman sitting on couch in her home.

Deborah Campbell at her home in the Seventh WardTrenity Thomas

As it stands today, said Deborah Campbell, a 72-year-old lifelong resident who was thrust into activism after Katrina, “the only thing we’re looking forward to—what they’re trying to push in our backyard—is poor health and stress.”

Campbell’s group, A Community Voice, believes the project has greater legs under a Trump administration because President Donald Trump’s strongest Louisiana ally, Boysie Bollinger, is a major shipyard owner who operates extensively along the Gulf. In 2017, the Trump administration listed the canal project among its 50 most important infrastructure priorities. (Bollinger Shipyards did not respond to requests for comment.)

Since Trump’s return, the rules of the fight have shifted. The Supreme Court has tipped leverage away from regulators and toward industry in the most technical corners of environmental law. At the water’s edge, the Supreme Court’s 2023 guidance in Sackett v. EPA narrowed which wetlands the Clean Water Act still protects. Meanwhile, the Justice Department has stepped back from environmental justice enforcement.

Even the Corps’ civil works purse has become a battleground, with Democrats alleging that the Corps’ projects are being funded only in Republican districts, leaving coastal neighborhoods guessing who gets protected next.

In that opening, the canal’s backers see a clearer lane, and the people most exposed are again left to do what the government has not: Defend their health and their homes as they brace for the water to rise.

At Sankofa’s wetland park, rainwater seeps slowly into native grasses and cypress roots instead of rushing toward flooded streets, while families often stroll shaded trails where egrets rise from the reeds. Just down the road, neighbors gather at the Sankofa Market, trading recipes over baskets of locally grown and cost-friendly mustard greens, okra, and sweet potatoes.

Down the way, Freedom to Grow NOLA has turned a vacant lot into orderly rows of vegetables and herbs, where residents pull berries from bushes and learn how food connects to care for the land and each other. And along the edge of the city’s disappearing marsh, volunteers with Common Ground Relief, founded by a former Black Panther member days after Katrina hit, are planting mangrove seedlings, their roots anchoring the coast against the slow bite of the Gulf, before heading back to distribute bags of fresh produce and pantry staples to residents.

A blue building with a sign that reads, "Common Ground Relief Wetlands," surrounded by green trees and bushes.

Common Ground Relief in New OrleansTrenity Thomas

Together, these spaces are replacing scarcity with abundance and abandonment with stewardship, protecting both the landscape and the health of the community it sustains, residents have explained.

They understand that regardless of what decision the Corps makes, the canal’s waters will still divide New Orleans. The canal serves as a living line between what nature once claimed and what was claimed from it. It reminds Calhoun that here, the cost of development has mostly fallen on those Black families, and ultimately the question left hanging is existential: Whose safety, prosperity, and history does America choose to defend, not if, but when the water threatens to return again?

“New Orleans is surrounded by water, and it can either sustain us or kill us,” he said. “It seems like some people would rather continue to work against it, which only leaves one of those two options for us.”

Additional data analysis by Melissa Lewis.

Mother JonesSep 10, 2025, 10:00 AM

Utilities Are Usually Hostile to Solar and Battery Systems, but Not for These Rural Customers

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

Michael Gillogly, manager of the Pepperwood Preserve, understands the wildfire risk that power lines pose firsthand. The 3,200-acre nature reserve in Sonoma County, California, burned in 2017 when a privately owned electrical system sparked a fire. It burned again in 2019 during a conflagration started by power lines operated by utility Pacific Gas & Electric.

So when PG&E approached Gillogly about installing a solar- and battery-powered microgrid to replace the single power line serving a guest house on the property, he was relieved. “We do a lot of wildfire research here,” he noted. Getting rid of “the line up to the Bechtel House is part of PG&E’s work on eliminating the risk of fire.”

PG&E covered the costs of building the microgrid, and so far, the solar and batteries have kept the light and heat on at the guest house, even when a dozen or so researchers spent several cloudy days there, Gillogly said.

Over the past few years, PG&E has increasingly opted for these “remote grids” as the costs of maintaining long power lines in wildfire-prone terrain skyrocket and the price of solar panels, batteries, and backup generators continues to decline. The utility has installed about a dozen systems in the Sierra Nevada high country, with the Pepperwood Preserve microgrid the first to be powered 100 percent by solar and batteries. The utility plans to complete more than 30 remote grids by the end of next year.

Until recently, utilities have rarely promoted solar-and-battery alternatives to power lines, particularly if they don’t own the solar and batteries in question. After all, utilities earn guaranteed profits on the money they spend on their grids.

But PG&E’s remote-grid initiative, launched with regulator approval in 2023, allows it to earn a rate of return on these projects that’s similar to what it would earn on the grid upgrades required to provide those customers with reliable power. The catch is that the costs of installing and operating the solar panels and batteries and maintaining and fueling the generators must be lower than what the utility would have spent on power lines.

“It all depends on what the alternative is,” said Abigail Tinker, senior manager of grid innovation delivery at PG&E. For the communities the utility has targeted, power lines can be quite expensive, largely due to the cost of ensuring that they won’t cause wildfires.

PG&E was forced into bankruptcy in 2019 after its power lines sparked California’s deadliest-ever wildfire, and the company is under state mandate to prevent more such disasters. PG&E and California’s other major utilities are spending tens of billions of dollars on burying key power lines, clearing trees and underbrush, and protecting overhead lines with hardened coverings, hair-trigger shutoff switches, and other equipment.

But these wildfire-prevention investments are driving up utility expenditures and customer rates. Solar and batteries are an increasingly cost-effective alternative, Tinker said, with the benefits outweighing the price tag of having to harden as little as a mile of power lines.

PG&E saves money either by getting rid of grid connections altogether or by delaying the construction of new lines. Microgrids can also improve reliability for customers when utilities must intentionally de-energize the lines that serve them during windstorms and other times of high wildfire risk—an increasingly common contingency in fire-prone areas.

Angelo Campus, CEO of BoxPower, which built most of PG&E’s remote microgrids, sees the strategy penciling out for more and more utilities for these same reasons. “We’re working with about a dozen utilities across the country on similar but distinct flavors of this,” he said. “Wildfire mitigation is a huge issue across the West,” and climate change is increasing the frequency and severity of the threat.

Utilities are responsible for about 10 percent of wildfires. But they’re bearing outsized financial risks from those they do cause. Portland, Oregon-based PacifiCorp is facing billions of dollars in costs and $30 billion in claims for wildfires sparked by its grid in 2020, and potentially more for another fire in 2022. Hawaiian Electric paid a $2 billion settlement to cover damages from the deadly 2023 Maui fires caused by its grid.

Microgrids can’t replace the majority of a utility’s system, of course. But they are being considered for increasingly large communities, Campus said.

Nevada utility NV Energy has proposed a solar and battery microgrid to replace a diesel generator system now providing backup power to customers in the mountain town of Mt. Charleston. Combining solar and batteries with “ruggedized” overhead lines should save about $21 million compared to burying power lines underground, while limiting impacts of wildfire-prevention power outages, according to the utility.

Some larger projects have already been built. San Diego Gas & Electric has been running a microgrid for the rural California town of Borrego Springs since 2013, offering about 3,000 residents backup solar, battery, and generator power to bolster the single line that connects them to the larger grid, which is susceptible to being shut off due to wildfire risk. Duke Energy built a microgrid in Hot Springs, North Carolina, a town of about 535 residents served by a single 10-mile power line prone to outages, on the grounds that it was cheaper than building a second line to improve reliability.

In each of these cases, utilities must weigh the costs of the alternatives, Tinker said. “It’s complicated and nuanced in terms of dollars per mile, because you have to be able to do the evaluation of individual circuits, and what can be done to mitigate the risk for each circuit,” she said.

Whether microgrids are connected to the larger grid or not, utilities need to maintain communications links with them to ensure the systems are operating reliably and safely. PG&E is working with New Sun Road, a company that provides remote monitoring and control technology, to keep its far-flung grids in working order.

It’s important to distinguish remote microgrids built and operated by utilities from other types of microgrids. Solar, batteries, backup generators, and on-site power controls are also being used by electric-truck charging depots and industrial facilities that don’t want to wait for utilities to expand their grids to serve them. Microgrids are also providing college campuses, military bases, municipal buildings, and churches and community centers with backup power when the grid goes down and with self-supplied power to offset utility bills when the grid is up and running.

Utilities have been far less friendly to customer-owned microgrids in general, however, seeing them as a threat to their core business model. Since 2018, California law has required the state Public Utilities Commission to develop rules to allow customers to build their own microgrids. But progress has been painfully slow, and only a handful of grant-funded projects have been completed.

Microgrid developers and advocates complain that the commission has put too many restrictions on how customers who own microgrids can earn money for the energy they generate when the grid remains up and running. Utilities contend that they need to maintain control over the portions of their grid that connect to microgrids to avoid creating more hazards.

“It is a very difficult balance that PG&E is constantly trying to strike, with the oversight of [utility regulators] and other stakeholders, between safety and reliability and affordability,” Tinker said. “That’s something we’re trying to thread the needle on.”

But as the costs of expanding and maintaining utility grids continue to climb, and solar and batteries become more affordable, utilities and their customers are likely to see more opportunities to make microgrids work, Campus said.

“The cost of building poles and wires and maintaining distribution infrastructure has grown substantially over the past 20 years,” he said. “Look at the cost of distributed generation and battery—it’s an inverse cost curve.”

Mother JonesSep 10, 2025, 10:00 AM

Being Black in America Almost Killed Me Part 2

When Trymaine Lee began writing his first book, he didn’t realize that the gun violence he was reporting on was such a central part of his own story. But then he began digging into his family history, only to fully learn about a series of racially motivated murders involving his ancestors. Lee’s book, A Thousand Ways to Die: The True Cost of Violence on Black Life in America, soon became more personal than he’d planned. He realized he needed to “speak honestly about what I now know to be crushing down on me, which is the weight of this family history.”

On this week’s episode of More To The Story, Lee sits down with host Al Letson for part 2 of a conversation about generational trauma, the challenges of being a Black journalist in America, and how learning about his family’s history has changed how he writes and reports on Black Americans killed by violence. And if you haven’t listened to part 1, you can find that conversation here.

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: You have this book that you finished right before this massive heart attack and then you dive back in to make your edits and to polish it up, but your experience just changed the whole trajectory of the book. Talk to me about that

Trymaine Lee: Yeah, man. More than that, when I first turned that 90,000 word manuscript in it was really super rough. The book it is today is honestly about 25% of what it was into what it became. Initially, I was always going to hold the reader’s hand a little bit and speak to my own experiences. My grandfather’s murder in 1976 is this massive space in my life. It occupies a massive space in my family’s life. Two years before I was born, growing up seeing my family’s portraits of better days and people talking about his voice and his sense of humor and just how he moved through the world, I always knew that part. So part of the storytelling was even your friendly neighborhood journalists who you’ve come to know telling these stories has been touched by this thing, and here’s what it cost my family.

What I had less of an understanding of was that my grandfather’s was not the first murder in our family. Going back to the rural South, Jim Crow Georgia in the early 1920s to discover that my grandmother, who was a baby at the time, had a 12-year-old brother who was shot and killed in a sundown town where the men came together, and this is documented in the newspaper, came together in Fitzgerald, Georgia to outlaw Black labor and Black voting in this community in the late 1800s, ’cause that sparked my family’s journey into the migration to Philadelphia first and then South Jersey only to have a second of my grandmother’s brothers shot and killed by a state trooper, and to for the first time look at those headlines where it says, trooper’s gun kills youth, as if this gun just hopped up and shot a Black teenager under these weird circumstances.

Then 20+ years later, my grandfather’s murder. A prospective tenant. They owned an apartment in Camden, New Jersey and were going to rent it to a guy. He disappeared after leaving a deposit, wanted his money back, and my grandfather said, “No, I’ll see you in court.” He came back and murdered my grandfather. 20 years after that, my stepbrother’s shot and killed in Camden. A girl put a bullet in the back of his head. In the early 2000s, another cousin killed in Atlantic City.
So, the psychic residue of what’s been passed down and me grappling with telling these stories that Black families across the country experience in terms of the violence of police in the system and the violence of the community and the systemic violence, again, that binds us all, wraps us all up, this became so much more personal. As you know, for a long time I was trying to be somewhat arm’s length, even though I was very close to telling these stories. Now, was time to drop all of that and speak honestly about what I now know to be crushing down on me, which is the weight of this family history.

Yeah, as you were talking about it, it just made me think about my own family history and think our stories are so similar. My great-grandfather, the reason why my family ended up in New Jersey is because something happened to him in the South, and there are no records of it, but family lore is that he was lynched. I don’t have anything to prove that, but the family lore is that he was lynched and then that moved my family to New Jersey, and then all sorts of violent incidences happen there as well, and it just kind of seeps into you.

The funny thing for me is that I had no idea about any of that until I started reporting on a story and I thought, let me look into my genealogy and just think about … and when I saw it all, I was like, wow, I am reporting on the story of my family and didn’t even know it.

Time and again.

Time and again. Time and again you find yourself in these horrible stories, sad stories about people that look like you and then you find out they are you, and it’s a heavy weight to carry. At Reveal we worked on this series called Mississippi Goddam, and I get choked up when I talk about it. I remember … ooh, God, man, I’m so sorry, I’m getting choked up.

No, man.

I remember feeling like it was going to kill me. My blood pressure was ridiculous. I would check my blood pressure in the morning and I thought to myself … literally the blood pressure thing would tell me to go to the hospital, because it was that high, but I couldn’t stop, because I had to turn in this story. I had to turn in this story and I felt like I … and I did. I don’t think this was wrong, but I felt like I owed this family and I owed the young man that I was telling the story about like I had to finish it, but also when I look back, I owe my children to be around if I can. But I couldn’t see it then, I just was like-

Of course not.

… “You got to get through this thing.” Oof, man, I’m so sorry.

No, of course, man.

But every time I sat down at that computer or to write these episodes and listening to this tape and looking at autopsy reports and all of that type of stuff, and graphic photos of this young man’s death, I felt like I had to keep doing it. The more I did it, the higher my blood pressure went, the more I thought … I literally would think I’m going to stroke out, but I don’t have a choice, I have to finish this, I have to finish this.

I mean, just to be honest, Reveal, especially at that time, most of the people in that workplace were white, and I had worked so hard and championed the story for so long that I was finally getting a shot, and I knew I couldn’t drop it and just the amount of pressure and time it took. Then afterwards I realized like, bro, you acting crazy, so I went to a therapist that guided the therapy and I took three months off from Reveal. I just couldn’t do it, ’cause I thought it was going to kill me, and I think by the grace of God it didn’t, but carrying that, oh my God.

Brother, that same feeling. Again, I feel like I’m looking into a mirror and I’m hearing a echo bounce from me to you and back to me. Those early days especially, there’s nothing like arriving at a crime scene and seeing someone that looks just like you, dressed just like you, got some Air Force 1’s fresh just like you with their brain matter splattered across the pavement.

Yeah.

The family and that look in a mother’s eyes that could be your mother, there’s zero things in this universe like that pain, and that we are the burden bearers of that and we have to be and we have always had to be. Ida B. Wells did not like this season either.

Yeah.

Her blood pressure was probably through the roof-

Absolutely.

… but it’s a reminder that we cannot report our way out of the pain, we cannot educate our way out of the pain, we cannot drink our way out of the pain.

No.

When you’re a young man, you can’t run around and have sex. You can’t sex it away, we have to engage with it. Until we have those conversations about what it means to carry that weight when you have to carry the weight, because no one else will and no one will care when we die of a heart attack, because it happens every single day, right?

Yeah. No, absolutely.

What you got me doing here, bruh? What you got me doing here? You got me. That’s what we need though, that’s what we need. [inaudible 00:09:49]

Hey listen, I’m just mirroring you, bro, ’cause I’m sitting here talking to you with tears in my eyes trying to be like, “Brother, calm down. What are you doing, Mr. Letson?” So, to go back to trauma-

Yeah, let’s do more.

Yeah, let’s do more. One of the things in your book that I think about a lot, and again I’m giving so much personal information here. So my oldest son, I had no idea he was born. I didn’t find out about him until he was five years old and he lived all the way across the country. We had no communication or contact until I found out when he was five and I was 23. So I was 23, I was a kid when I flew out to get him, I was taking him home back to Florida and I didn’t know what to expect. I’d seen his picture, this was long before the days when we had video calls, so I talked to him on the phone a little bit.

Back then my thing was with him when I found out about him, I started writing postcards and sending him … ’cause he was a kid and getting mail’s a big thing, right? I was a flight attendant, so I’d be in different places and sending him stuff. Anyway, I go to get my kid, first time meeting him in-person, and the thing that tripped me out is that he was so much like me at that age. I mean, things that he would say were things that I … really specific things. I’m a little bit older than you, but when I was young, we had this saying, I think it went something like up your nose with a rubber hose or something like that, right?

I remember the first time I’m meeting my kid, he’s like, “Up your nose with a …” I was like, “What?” Then I brought him home to my mother and my mother who likes him more than me was like, “This is you as a kid.” He was so much like me. I tell that story to just say that I believe that DNA is way more powerful than we talk about.

Yes, yes.

That I believe that our family’s history is encoded in our DNA and we carry both the good, but also the trauma. You can’t get away from it, it is in you. It is in your blood, it is in your bones, it is who you are. I think especially for Black folks in this country whose ancestors have experienced a crazy amount of trauma, you carry it with you every day. So when you talk about going into your grandparents’ home and being at the spot where you know your grandfather died, can you talk to me about that?

Yeah, man, there’s the ways that these moments reshape the way we raise our children and the way we move through the world, how we teach them to survive in America and teach them to carry a bit of this trauma, that’s one thing in a practical way, right? This moment changes everything, there’s the emotional pain that we experience. When you think about those epigenetics and that post-traumatic slave disorder, that we’ve arrived at that moment after a long series of these cuts and slices. There’s one part of the book that I had to shrink down for the sake of the story, but it’s the guns for slave cycle and a psychic connection to the violence and the pain.

Not just a genetic one too, but there’s this other one, this ethereal psychic trauma that we carry from being bartered for guns, and that Europeans plied these regional African powers with guns and some would only trade in guns for enslaved people to create war instability. So this idea that we were forced out of Mother Africa with a muzzle of a gun at our back, and then we arrive at the hell of the Western world and experienced all this other violence and trauma that we then pass down for five, six, seven, eight generations to arrive on the South Side of Chicago, to arrive in Camden, New Jersey, to arrive in West Berlin, New Jersey where my grandfather was killed and stand in that spot, and then read in the newspaper about how the blood was smeared on my grandmother’s nightgown and what it means. How do we disrupt that? Is there any disrupting that?
I think acknowledging it, that it exists and it’s not some sort of fantasy of our Hoodoo, Voodoo imaginations that we’re carrying that, but I think it’s something that we have to acknowledge it, because it’s there, and we know it’s there. We know it’s there, and I just don’t know how we reconcile that.

Yeah, I mean, I think you’re right is that the key is talking about it, ’cause America will convince you it is not there. We’re I wouldn’t say the beginning, but maybe America has always been in the process of the great forgetting. America loves this idea of collective amnesia that it continually pushes on people, and so if you’re pushing the collective amnesia, we’re not engaging with all the things you just talked about.

That’s right.

If you don’t engage with it, it just gets bigger and it begins to guide your steps in the future, because you don’t know it’s there, so you have to talk about it.

That’s right. One of my guiding, and this is a guiding principle for my journalism, but also for this book in particular, because this is not a very prescriptive book, this is not a policy book, this is about how we’ve been shaped and our experience with the violence, but it’s that ain’t nothing wrong with us. Ain’t nothing wrong with us. If you want to understand what’s wrong with us, let’s look at this machinery around us.

Right.

Right? Let’s look at what we’ve carried in us, what was sparked by this white supremacist violence and a society bent on our breaking, that’s what’s wrong with us. So even though the gun is certainly the vehicle and that kind of violence is the vehicle, for me it’s like this is how we arrived at this moment, this is how we got here. But ultimately there is nothing wrong with us except for how we’ve experienced this country.

So, this country is moving. I’ve heard people say that this is unprecedented what we’re seeing right now. I would say that we saw all this at the end of reconstruction, and this is a rerun of reconstruction. Just the writers of America season five are pretty bad. This season-

They really jumping the shark, man. This is crazy.

This is like, what are you doing? We need new characters. But as we are living in this time period, and given all that you have reported on and gone through personally, where’s your work going to take you now that we’re here?

You know what? I’ve been having these conversations a lot lately with Black men in particular, but Black people in general. Not unlike those post-reconstruction days when the nadir or the nadir … I’m from New Jersey, I say nadir.

Yeah, right, right, right.

I might be wrong. Nadir just sounds right to me, so nadir. But beating back our efforts at nation building and institution building, and finding for the first time some fullness, some fullness of what it means to be an American and solidify this conditional citizenship that we’ve had. I think now is the time that we build and collaborate and double down on telling our stories and telling the truth. So for me, I think this book is an important bridge for me.

For more than 20 years, I’ve been a journalist in the newsroom, in print, in digital, in broadcast, in podcasting, now I have my first film coming out on the anniversary of Katrina on Peacock, I have the book coming out, I want to [inaudible 00:19:12] ways in which we speak to the Black American experience. This is not new or novel, but I think now is the time to continue to build in that catalog, because what’s going to happen is as they continue to try to erase us and erase our story, in 100 years when they’re on the fourth nadir, when they’re on the fourth burning down of any kind of reconstructive efforts, they have to understand that this is not unprecedented, that this is precedented, that this is the default position and this is how you survive it.

Yeah.

This is how you survive it is to look it square in it’s face and tell the truth as they’re renaming military bases after these fake Robert E. Lee. They’re so bent on making sure they honor-

It’s so ridiculous.

… the heroes of [inaudible 00:19:55]

Can we just talk about the ridiculousness of white-

That’s Robert Jenkins Lee.

Right, exactly.

Thing about this. We’ve been around long enough, we are just now comfortable enough to say white supremacist system, white supremacy.

Oh my God, absolutely.

We couldn’t say that-

No.

… we’re just there.

It’s just that America’s understanding of what it means to be Black and how we see the world and experience the world, we haven’t caught up and journalism absolutely hasn’t caught up.

Even among our friends and friends of the truth, there is an acceptable level of anti-Blackness in this country that is okay-

It’s okay.

… even among people who wish it would be different.

Yep, it’s okay.

But we’ve accepted it, it’s part of what this is, right? So that’s why you have to have an argument about whether the founders of this country, these transnational human traffickers are white supremacists or not.

But the idea that my ancestors’ lives didn’t matter. One of the things that our friend Nikole Hannah-Jones talks about a lot is that you can’t have this history and it matter, and suddenly this history doesn’t matter.

That’s right.

It doesn’t make sense.

That’s right.

It doesn’t make sense. You got to own the whole thing America, you just got to own it.

That’s right, that’s right, that’s right. Our friend Ta-Nehisi Coates, you can’t have the credits without the debits, right?

Exactly.

It has to be both, but also the idea that our existence and experience is kind of inconsequential when we are foundational in all of the ways. We were the economy-

Absolutely, exactly.

… we were our flesh.

Exactly.

But the fact that we’re still fighting to tell these stories.

Exactly.

You’d imagine a great nation would say, look how far we’ve come, and when we couldn’t do the right thing we did. Certainly this founding was A, B, C, or D, but we are such a great nation where look at the strides. The strides were made through bloodshed and sacrifice.

Absolutely, absolutely.

Come on. The truth, as we know, is so dangerous though, because the idea that … especially with Black people, this idea of liberation, but that America itself will be freed, finally freed, that’s a very dangerous proposition for those who don’t believe in our equality or humanity.

Yeah. Yes, absolutely, absolutely. Trymaine, is there anything that you wanted to hit on the book before I let you go?

I don’t think so, just that this truly is my life’s work. I have joked that this book almost killed me, which it did, but it truly is my life’s work and it finally became what it was supposed to be. I hope people not only find an understanding about how guns have shaped us and the industry that profits while there’s so much pain here, but that there is a healing and power and strength in facing down the hardest parts of what we harbor within, right? Confronting the violence, the silent, quiet violence from within.

As men in particular, but in general, finding the strength and courage to face that down and live freely and live happily and find peace. That’s why this matters, because it hurts so bad what we’ve experienced, what we’ve carried in our genes, the psychic residue of the violence that we’ve experienced, the systemic violence and the actual violence. What it means to finally find peace within that, that to me I hope is the great strength and power of this book, and I hope it finds the audience that it deserves.

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

Mother JonesSep 9, 2025, 3:45 PM

Democratic Voters Want Their Leaders to Stop Running From Zohran Mamdani

Zohran Mamdani hadn’t been Regina Weiss’ first choice for mayor of New York City. She’d ranked city comptroller Brad Lander number-one on her primary ballot in June, and told me she wished that the 33-year-old Democratic Socialist state assemblymember brought a bit more experience to the job. But Weiss, who volunteers with Indivisible, was happily supporting the Democratic nominee now, and expected to begin canvassing for him soon. What she couldn’t understand, she told me, as she waited for the candidate to take the stage with Sen. Bernie Sanders at the “Fighting Oligarchy” town hall in Brooklyn on Saturday, was why some of the biggest names in her party weren’t doing the same.

“I’ve never seen this before—I’ve never seen the Democratic leadership not endorse the Democratic candidate,” she said. “It’s so ugly, it’s so cowardly, it’s so stupid. The Democrats are basically in the crapper when it comes to enthusiasm. You’ve got this guy—the Democratic candidate for the biggest city in the country—and they’re not endorsing him.”

Weiss put her hands to her face in frustration. She’d been reading happily before I came along.

“Sorry, I’m very angry about this,” she said. “What is it? Is it like they’re afraid? I mean, I guess they’re afraid, but my God!”

“One might think—one might think!—that if a candidate starting at 2 percent in the polls, gets 50,000 volunteers, creates enormous excitement, gets young people involved in the political process, gets non-traditional voters to vote, Democratic leaders will be jumping up and down! ‘This is our guy!’”

Two months out from one of the biggest elections since Trump won the presidency, most Democratic voters in New York City are on board with their party’s nominee. After defeating disgraced former governor Andrew Cuomo by double digits in the primary, Mamdani leads him comfortably again in four-way general-election polls. Scandal-plagued mayor Eric Adams and Republican Curtis Sliwa are barely visible in the distance. Mamdani has raised the maximum amount allowable under the city’s matching-funds system, maintained a relentless schedule of campaign appearances and media hits, and even talked privately with Barack Obama. His support among elected officials is real. Four members of the city’s congressional delegation have publicly endorsed him—including Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, with whom he’d appeared a few hours before the town hall. Along the side wall of the packed auditorium at Brooklyn College, city council members and state legislators milled about, mingling with Mamdani’s top advisors and the omnipresent former Rep. Jamaal Bowman (who has cut an ad for the candidate, brought Mamdani to a Wu-Tang show, and co-hosted a community event for him in the South Bronx).

But it was hard to ignore who hadn’t gotten on board. Even as Trump threatened to unleash hell on New York City, and the president dangled an ambassadorship to lure Adams out of the race, some of the most powerful Democrats in the city and the state have been deafeningly quiet. Gov. Kathy Hochul, who helped force Cuomo’s resignation as governor, is publicly agnostic on whether Mamdani or Cuomo should run America’s largest city. Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer, after previously avoiding questions about the race by insisting that he does not endorse in primaries, has still not made an endorsement more than two months after the primary. House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries has thus far avoided backing Mamdani while egging on criticisms of his housing policy. Reps. Dan Goldman and Ritchie Torres, junior Democrats with outsized national profiles, have withheld thei support, while suggesting that the nominee has not done enough to condemn anti-semitism.

That Rep. Tom Suozzi, whose Long Island district includes parts of Queens, told a TV interviewer Mamdani should leave the party is not so surprising. That Rep. Greg Meeks—the chair of the Queens Democratic Party—is still holding out is a bit more glaring.

For the party’s left-wing, often accused by more moderate factions of hampering Democrats’ big-tent efforts, Mamdani’s nomination poses an obvious question: What kind of “big tent” party doesn’t have room for the party’s own candidate and the majority of its voters?

As Ocasio-Cortez recently put it, “Are we a party that rallies behind our nominee, or not?”

For the most part, the rally at Brooklyn College, a brisk walk away from Sanders’ childhood home in Midwood, was an upbeat affair. Sanders has been holding these “Fighting Oligarchy” rallies since February, and in always-unsaid ways they’ve sometimes felt like a passing of the torch. Mamdani told the crowd about gathering signatures for his first assembly campaign outside a Sanders rally in 2019, and of building out a volunteer base by inviting people to the senator’s debate watch parties. He spoke in some detail about Sanders’ tenure as mayor of Burlington, Vermont—evidence that a socialist can run a city pretty well, but also, that a socialist running a city still feels pretty banal much of the time. (He “took on a broken property tax system,” Mamdani said, and worked “to transform the Lake Champlain waterfront.”) A few protestors tried to spoil the fun, but never to much effect. At one point, a man with a Cuban flag on his shirt stood up to call the candidate a communist.

“Brother, I’m here with another Democratic Socialist,” said a smiling Mamdani, referring to Sanders.

But the lack of support from high-ranking Democrats was an unavoidable topic. During the Q&A portion of the event, a guy from Canarsie stood up to express his fear that history was repeating.

“I just look at this campaign and it reminds me a little bit of what happened a few years ago in Buffalo,” he said.

The man was referring to that city’s 2021 mayoral election, when India Walton, a 29-year-old nurse, defeated the incumbent mayor in the primary—only to lose to the same candidate in the general election. Billionaire donors’ support for Cuomo, and the party’s tepid response, was giving him “deja vu.” “How do we make sure that something like like this doesn’t happen again?” he asked.

Mamdani’s response was fairly diplomatic. “We have to beat Andrew Cuomo one more time,” he said, because, “This is a man who does not understand that no means no.” He urged the crowd to continue volunteering and organizing.

But Sanders sounded like he had been waiting for something like this. And like Weiss, the woman I spoke with before the town hall, he was fired up.

“I want to, if I might—I want to add a point to that very good question,” he said, standing up from his chair and walking toward the front of the stage. “It may be a little bit out of place here, but I want to do it. I find it a little bit strange that when we have a candidate who competed very hard, as did a number of other people in the Democratic primary—”

He turned to Mamdani.

“My understanding is you won that primary. Is that correct?” Sanders asked.

Mamdani nodded.

“My understanding is you are the Democratic Party candidate for mayor of the city of New York. Is that correct?”

Mamdani nodded again.

“Now, apropos that question: I find it hard to understand how the major Democratic leaders in New York State are not supporting the Democratic candidate,” Sanders continued. “One might think—one might think!—that if a candidate starting at 2 percent in the polls gets 50,000 volunteers, creates enormous excitement, gets young people involved in the political process, gets non-traditional voters to vote, Democratic leaders would be jumping up and down! ‘This is our guy!’”

The senator seemed to be saying what everyone else was thinking. The response from the crowd was surpassed, perhaps, only by Sanders’ earlier condemnation of American weapons sales in Israel. And the two sentiments are not really unrelated—in the case of both Israel and Mamdani, high-profile Democrats are substantially out of step with Democratic voters, and well-funded attempts to weaponize Mamdani’s criticism of Israel in the primary only served to underscore the qualities that made him appealing to voters.

That moment, and the two Democratic Socialists’ presence on stage together, was a reminder of both how much and how little had changed since I’d last checked in on the Fighting Oligarchy Tour last spring. At the time, it felt like a post-election low. While elected Democrats had, individually and in small groups, sought to demonstrate their opposition to Trump and Elon Musk’s rampage through Washington, the party had little to show from those first few months. Senate Democrats had just caved to approve a Republican funding measure and avert a government shutdown. Purportedly ambitious figures seemed to prefer litigating wokeness to putting out the fire in their house. And Democratic voters were watching this and going, what the hell? Covering Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez for two stops in Arizona, I had been struck by just how un-Bernie-like the crowds were; the normie Democrats were showing support for the Democratic Socialists, because the Democratic Socialists were showing up for them when so many powerful people and institutions were not.

Fast forward to today, and the party’s leaders in Washington seem ready to cave on another shutdown fight this month. A lot of people still sound more comfortable complaining about trans rights than fascism. It’s not too simplistic to say that the leadership that can’t unite behind Mamdani now is the leadership that made Mamdani possible—a cynical and bloodless and compromised liberalism that’s hovering tentatively by the focus groups while real popular movements takes shape on their own.

Sanders started holding these events, he explained earlier this year, because to his surprise, no one else was. For Trump’s opponents, this shift toward autocracy represents both a challenge and an opportunity—one that Sanders has laid the foundation for, and Mamdani and his movement have now seized. When no one else is coming to save you, you have to save yourselves.

Mother JonesSep 9, 2025, 10:00 AM

Nobody Wants This Dirty Gas Plant. Trump is Forcing It To Stay Open.

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

The Trump administration, citing an ongoing “energy emergency,” has once again saddled a community already overburdened by pollution with a dirty, obsolete power plant it doesn’t want or need. The decision has confounded residents and environmental justice advocates, who called the move an abuse of federal law and a lost opportunity to improve the area’s air quality.

The Department of Energy (DOE) issued what’s called an emergency “stay open” order for Constellation Energy’s gas-fired power plant in Eddystone, Pennsylvania, on August 27. It is the second time since May the agency has taken this step, and amounts to “an extraordinary and unprecedented” use of the Federal Power Act, said Robert Routh of the Natural Resources Defense Council.

The NRDC, along with the Sierra Club, PennFuture, and several other environmental groups, is challenging the decision. Emergency stay open orders have previously been reserved for wartime conditions or natural disasters, said Routh, who is the Pennsylvania policy director for the organization. “This is an abuse of an extraordinary authority reserved for emergency situations,” he said, noting that the short-term need for increased electricity the administration cited in defending the move would not justify keeping the facility open. “They are concocting the emergency situation in order to justify keeping a dirty fossil plant online past its retirement date.”

Eddystone lies just outside Philadelphia, at the head of a 12-mile industrial corridor that stretches to the town of Marcus Hook and is generally considered one of the most toxic areas in the state. Today, it’s home to myriad hazardous industries, including the nation’s largest trash incinerator, chemical plants, and refineries. Childhood asthma rates in the region are four times the national average, and the rates of some forms of cancer are more than 1,000 times higher.

“We have not yet seen that demand that everyone is talking about from the data centers.”

Constellation Energy’s gas plant in Eddystone began operation in the early 1960s and currently provides about 782 megawatts to the surrounding region. It has run only sporadically in recent years, in large part because it simply was not economical to operate consistently. According to the Environmental Protection Agency, it emitted 23,102 metric tons of carbon dioxide in 2022, 16 tons of methane, and 31 tons of nitrous oxide.

Grid operator PJM approved Constellation’s shutdown request for the plant in December of 2023 after finding that the closure would not adversely impact the grid, and the facility was scheduled to close May 31. But, one day before the closure, the DOE, ordered the plant to continue operating. The agency reissued that order when it expired last week.

Although environmental advocates argue the emergency order is a manufactured crisis, the DOE cited summer heat waves as the rationale for keeping the plant open, noting that the “Eddystone units were called on by PJM to generate electricity during heat waves that hit the region in June and July.”

The grid operator did not respond when asked if closing the plant would have caused blackouts—something that would not have been considered in its decision to approve the facility’s closure, because PJM cannot deny a closure solely on those grounds. But PJM said it supported extending the emergency order. Constellation Energy pointed to the rapid expansion of the data centers powering artificial intelligence, saying that it is “continuing to work with the Department of Energy and PJM in taking emergency measures to meet the need for power at this critical time when America must win the AI race.”

In July, Trump and Pennsylvania Senator Dave McCormick announced the private sector had promised $90 billion in funding to turn Pennsylvania into a hub for data centers. This has drawn concern from environmental advocates, who worry that the promise of corporate investment will provide a handy excuse to prolong the life of oil and liquid natural gas in order to generate electricity for hypothetical data centers.

“We have not yet seen that demand that everyone is talking about from the data centers,” said Jessica O’Neill, managing attorney at PennFuture, an environmental advocacy nonprofit. “In Pennsylvania, we just seem to fall over ourselves, again and again, to attract new industry.” Her concern, she explained, was that the state would build speculative gas plants or extend the life of aging plants in the service of an industry that might never materialize.

When Constellation’s shutdown request was approved almost two years ago, the grid operator noted that the plant’s closure would not cause “any reliability violations,” or leave the region at risk of blackouts. Both Routh and O’Neill noted that PJM’s interconnection crisis has left many renewable energy projects in limbo as they wait to be brought onto the grid. Despite the administration’s dire warnings of an energy emergency, it has moved aggressively to shut down renewable energy projects that would provide more electricity.

“I personally think it’s interesting that they’re justifying the stay open order on the grounds that there’s an energy emergency, because that has not been shown to be the case,” said Lauren Minsky, a medical historian and professor of environmental health at Haverford College. “And what there clearly is, is a public health emergency.” As part of her work, Minsky has been tracking community cancer rates in the industrial stretch between Eddystone and Marcus Hook. Pediatric Hodgkin’s Lymphoma rates in Eddystone are 1,051 percent higher than the national average; youth uterine cancer rates are 1,813 percent higher.

The emergency stay open order will likely increase costs for ratepayers, Routh explained. Because the order came down just a day before the plant was to retire, Constellation Energy had to abruptly order an enormous amount of fuel and tackle deferred maintenance it never expected to deal with. “Those costs are going to be shifted to ratepayers,” said Routh. “Whereas this plant otherwise would not have been operating. This is an unprecedented use of this authority, and it’s done in a way that doesn’t make sense even on its own face.”

Mother JonesSep 8, 2025, 10:32 PM

Supreme Court Blesses Racial Profiling by ICE

In greater Los Angeles, the Trump administration’s goal of deporting millions of people is being operationalized through often violent raids that target people who appear Latino while waiting for the bus or working in low-wage jobs. A shorter way to say this is racial profiling of low-income people. Today, the Republican-appointed justices on the Supreme Court blessed this approach.

“We should not have to live in a country where the Government can seize anyone who looks Latino.”

The ruling, on the so-called shadow docket, is yet another in a long string of cases since the spring in which the GOP appointees have allowed the Trump administration’s power grabs. From firing federal workers and agency heads to deporting people to dangerous countries without due process, the court’s majority has waived aside precedent, clear statutory language, and even constitutional protections in order to give this president increasing power. This time, the pesky thing standing in the way was the Fourth Amendment.

“The Fourth Amendment protects every individual’s constitutional right to be ‘free from arbitrary interference by law officers,'” Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in her dissent, joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson. “After today, that may no longer be true for those who happen to look a certain way, speak a certain way, and appear to work a certain type of legitimate job that pays very little.”

Among the administration’s long list of recent wins, this case is particularly foreboding. It allows the government to target people because of their appearance and how they speak, as well as where they were found and what kind of work they do—factors that the district court found likely violate the Fourth Amendment. To move freely in this country, it may become increasingly important to look white. As Sotomayor, the court’s only Latino justice, wrote in dissent, the majority has created a “a second-class citizenship status” of people who may be subject to harassment.Today’s decision sets a course for the United States to become a country where masked officers pluck people from streets and businesses because of how they look.

But to the court’s majority, the Latino citizen or visa holder who must now carry immigration documents or a passport every time they leave the house, and who might endure repeated harassment from federal agents anyway, is not the real victim. Instead, granting emergency relief to the Trump administration indicates the justices think the greatest harm is that the government might be forced to turn away from indiscriminate raids and put more effort into finding undocumented immigrants while this case challenging its tactics moves through the courts. As former prosecutor Ken White, a frequent media commenter, summed up the court’s holding: “Supreme Court Rules 6-3 That Fundamental Interests Of United States Of America Would Be Irreparably Harmed If It[s] Race-Based Harassment And Detention By Masked Thugs Were Even Temporarily Halted.”

It has become typical that even in extraordinary opinions granting the administration new powers, the GOP appointees provide little to no explanation. On Monday, the court’s majority once again declined to explain its rationale in a written decision—possibly because it doesn’t even have a cohesive argument. But Justice Brett Kavanaugh nonethelessprovided a concurrence, a kind of opinion that usually accompanies another justice’s fuller explanation. Perhaps Kavanaugh’s attempt to explain his reasoning in this case provides a partial explanation for why the majority so often remains silent: to show its reasoning would be to betray just how weak that reasoning is.

Kavanaugh’s words are all we have to understand the court’s decision. And while the explanation he provides is poor, that in itself is illuminating. The only way Kavanaugh can justify the government’s actions is to put on blinders, ignore the fact-finding performed by the district court, presume the Trump administration is acting in good faith, and even ignore the actual policy that the Trump administration is applying. You don’t need to be a lawyer to see the flaws, or read the counterpoints in Sotomayor’s dissent, to see that some of what Kavanaugh writes simply doesn’tmake sense.

Millions of people in Los Angeles now fear leaving their homes.

Kavanaugh, for instance, claims that the plaintiffs in this case, which include citizens who have been detained by ICE during its raids as well four groups that represent immigrant and worker rights, don’t have standing to challenge the administration’s immigration enforcement in Los Angeles because individuals and association members are unlikely to be detained again. “What matters is the ‘reality of the threat of repeated injury,'” he writes, before ludicrously concluding that the plaintiffs “have no good basis to believe that law enforcement will unlawfully stop them in the future based on the prohibited factors—and certainly no good basis for believing that any stop of the plaintiffs is imminent.” That must be news to the millions of people in Los Angeles who now fear leaving their homes, not because they have done anything illegal but because simply being at work, waiting for the bus, or going to Home Depot is enough to get slammed against a wall or taken to a warehouse for questioning.

If you are a Latino citizen who takes the bus to work in Los Angeles or frequents Home Depot, and ICE detains you once, what would insulate you from the same thing from happening again? Of course, the answer is nothing. Kavanaugh’s reasoning here seems to completely ignore how ICE is choosing its targets, even though that is literally the subject of the lawsuit.

Kavanaugh’s rejection of the facts continues when he brushes aside the often violent reality of ICE raids, as documented by the plaintiffs, and instead dismisses an ICE stop as a minor inconvenience. “As for stops of those individuals who are legally in the country, the questioning in those circumstances is typically brief, and those individuals may promptly go free after making clear to the immigration officers that they are U. S. citizens or otherwise legally in the United States.” Sure, that’s possible.

But Kavanaugh’s chipper language is belied by recent images of hundreds of people being shackled at a Hyundai plant sitein Georgia, and bused 100 miles to a detention center, including reportedly people with valid work permits and citizens—even those with their immigration documents on them—where some were held for days. Evidence presented by the plaintiffs in this case demonstrated that citizens were pinned against walls and driven away for questioning. There is an indignity that goes along with always having to carry papers because of what you look like. But Kavanaugh doesn’t acknowledge any of that. To do that, he would have to acknowledge that the most-harmed party might not actually be Trump and his plans.

“We should not have to live in a country where the Government can seize anyone who looks Latino, speaks Spanish, and appears to work a low wage job,” Sotomayor wrote. In LA now, that is the reality, at least as long as this case continues. And there’s no reason in this opinion to assume it won’t soon be the reality for the rest of us, too.

Mother JonesSep 8, 2025, 8:05 PM

Trump’s Birthday Letter to Epstein Is Out

In July, the Wall Street Journal reported on the existence of a birthday note from President Donald Trump to his one-time friend Jeffrey Epstein. The paper had claimed that the missive included a lewd image depicting the outline of a woman’s body and Trump’s signature, which was described as mimicking the appearance of pubic hair. Trump vehemently denied the letter and promptly sued the paper and its owner, Rupert Murdoch.

Now, in response to a subpoena from the House Oversight Committee, Trump’s lawyers have handed over the infamous birthday book. Here is the image, as first reported again by the Journal, and confirmed by the committee’s Democratic members.

Donald Trump wrote a personalized note in Jeffrey Epstein’s birthday book. He’s spent all summer lying about its existence.

We got a copy. Ranking Member @RepRobertGarcia explains what we know and how we got here: pic.twitter.com/PVbHaVWppw

— Oversight Dems (@OversightDems) September 8, 2025

For more on the Epstein scandal and how this could end for the president, read my colleague Anna Merlan.

Mother JonesSep 8, 2025, 6:58 PM

The One Crime Trump Doesn’t Seem to Have a Problem With? Domestic Violence.

Speaking at the Museum of the Bible on Monday, President Donald Trump repeated one of his favorite falsehoods as of late: That his deployment of the National Guard in Washington, DC, has virtually eliminated crime in the nation’s capital.

That is, of course, not true. But if that outright falsehood was not egregious enough, consider that Trump also complained that reports of domestic violence are inflating crime statistics and implied they should not be considered “crimes” at all.

“Things that take place in the home, they call crime,” Trump said. “They’ll do anything they can to find something. If a man has a little fight with the wife, they say this was a crime, see? So now I can’t claim 100 percent.”

Trump minimizes domestic abuse during a talk at the Museum of the Bible: "Things that take place in the home, they call crime … If a man has a little fight with the wife, they say this was a crime, see?"

— Phil Lewis (@phillewis.bsky.social) 2025-09-08T15:44:26.977Z

Dawn Dalton, executive director of the DC Coalition Against Domestic Violence, told me on Monday: “We don’t agree with what the president is saying.” Nearly half of women in DC, and more than 40 percent of men, have experienced intimate partner violence or stalking in their lifetimes, according to statistics the coalition compiled last year. Nationwide, an average of two dozen people per minute are victims of rape, physical violence, or stalking by an intimate partner, according to the National Domestic Violence Hotline.

“There have been federal and local statutes in place for decades that do name domestic violence as a crime,” Dalton added, “and we know that domestic violence is often a precursor to other crimes, including domestic violence homicides as well as mass shootings.” Indeed,research has found that in nearly 70 percent of mass shootings, perpetrators had a history of domestic violence or had killed at least one partner or family member.

“The frequency and the harm [of domestic violence] is not paid enough attention to, and remarks such as the president’s certainly underscore that truth,” Dalton added.

Abigail Jackson, a spokesperson for the White House, said in a statement provided to Mother Jones: “Of course the President wasn’t talking about or downplaying domestic violence—and any Fake News hacks trying to use this as a political cudgel against the President are doing a great service to actual domestic abusers and criminals around the country.”

In fact, Trump has not only downplayed domestic violence through his speech, but also through his actions: His administration has cut millions of dollars in grants earmarked for victims of crime, including domestic violence, and has tried to force domestic violence service providers to agree to hand crime victims over to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in order to receive federal dollars.

A statement like the one Trump made is also not surprising when you consider the man that uttered it has himself been accused of rape by his ex-wife, Ivana Trump. She later claimed she did not mean it “in a literal or criminal sense,” adding that she “felt violated.” (Trump denied the allegation.)

Trump has also stacked his Cabinet and surrounded himself with men who have faced similar accusations. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s own mother called him “an abuser of women,” in a 2018 email, though she told the New York Times last year that she subsequently recanted and apologized for it. Hegseth has also been accused of rape and sexually inappropriate behavior, charges which he denies. (Hegseth paid the woman who made the rape accusation, the Washington Post reported, but he alleges the interaction was consensual.) Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was accused of groping a babysitter in the late 1990s. While running for president last year, he texted her to apologize and said he had no memory of the incident. Ex-Department of Government Efficiency head and Trump frenemy Elon Musk was accused of sexual misconduct by a SpaceX flight attendant in 2016, but he denied the claim—after Business Insider reported that the company paid her $250,000 in 2018 to keep her from filing a lawsuit. And Rob Porter, a top White House aide, abruptly resigned during Trump’s first term after two of his ex-wives came forward with domestic abuse allegations, which Trump himself cast doubt on.

While there is ample evidence that the police do not always protect domestic violence victims or respond adequately to domestic abuse, it seems very unlikely that this is what Trump was referring to. The man is, after all, about the furthest thing from an abolitionist: His so-called One Big Beautiful Bill allocated more than $100 billion to ICE—the same agency that has created a chilling effect for immigrant survivors of domestic violence seeking help, as I previously reported. And the president has repeatedly threatened to send the National Guard to take over other cities after doing so in DC and Los Angeles.

Instead, his latest comments are a throwback to the infamous Access Hollywood tape. Trump seems to believe that, if you’re a man, “you can do anything” to women—and that you deserve to get away with it.

Mother JonesSep 8, 2025, 4:12 PM

Impeach RFK Jr.

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._

Of all the unqualified extremists Donald Trump has appointed to his Cabinet, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., as of now, poses the most direct threat to the nation. The secretary of health and human services is devastating the United States’ public health system and promoting quack science that imperils the lives of Americans. In recent weeks, he has decapitated the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, canceled mRNA vaccination research that held the potential for amazing medical breakthroughs, and loaded an important vaccine advisory panel with vaccine critics.

Kennedy is a threat to the well-being of the American citizenry. That’s why House Democrats should move to impeach him.

His promotion of vaccination opposition—don’t call him a vaccine “skeptic”; he’s a vaccine foe—has fostered an environment in which Florida this week announced it was ending all vaccine mandates for schoolchildren, with the state’s surgeon general, Joseph Ladapo, bizarrely declaring every vaccine mandate “is wrong and drips with disdain and slavery.” It’s unlikely a state would have taken this risky and outrageous step if the federal government—led by the HHS secretary and the president—would have denounced the move. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has no such worries with Kennedy and Trump.

Kennedy is a threat to the well-being of the American citizenry. That’s why House Democrats should move to impeach him.

This week, in a column for the New York Times, nine former CDC directors—who collectively served under every president from Jimmy Carter to Trump—asserted that Kennedy has waged a war on public health. Here is their summation of the damage he has done:

Mr. Kennedy has fired thousands of federal health workers and severely weakened programs designed to protect Americans from cancer, heart attacks, strokes, lead poisoning, injury, violence and more. Amid the largest measles outbreak in the United States in a generation, he’s focused on unproven treatments while downplaying vaccines. He canceled investments in promising medical research that will leave us ill-prepared for future health emergencies. He replaced experts on federal health advisory committees with unqualified individuals who share his dangerous and unscientific views. He announced the end of U.S. support for global vaccination programs that protect millions of children and keep Americans safe, citing flawed research and making inaccurate statements. And he championed federal legislation that will cause millions of people with health insurance through Medicaid to lose their coverage. Firing [CDC director] Dr. [Susan] Monarez — which led to the resignations of top CDC officials—adds considerable fuel to this raging fire.

He testified that he doesn’t know how many people died of Covid and whether the vaccines prevented Covid deaths: “The problem is they didn’t have the data.” But that data does exist.

More than 1,000 current and former HHS employees signed an open letter calling for Kennedy to resign or be fired. They noted he has appointed “political ideologues who pose as scientific experts and manipulate data to fit predetermined conclusions”; selected “David Geier, supporter of debunked theories linking vaccines to autism, to lead an HHS investigation on vaccines and autism”; refused to be “briefed by well-regarded CDC experts on vaccine-preventable diseases”; rescinded “the Food and Drug Administration’s emergency use authorizations for COVID-19 vaccines without providing the data or methods used to reach such a decision”; and insulted the HHS workforce by declaring, “Trusting experts is not a feature of either science or democracy.”

On Thursday, Kennedy, appearing before the Senate Finance Committee, repeatedly lied during a contentious hearing. He insisted he had not broken the vow he previously made to senators to not do anything to limit vaccines, though that’s exactly what he has done. He falsely claimed the CDC was overrun by financial conflicts and inaccurately said that was why he fired all 17 members of a vaccine advisory panel. (His new appointees have their own financial conflicts.) He testified that he doesn’t know how many people died of Covid and whether the vaccines prevented Covid deaths: “The problem is they didn’t have the data.” But that data does exist.

Kennedy demonstrated his slipperiness by agreeing that Trump ought to receive a Nobel prize for Operation Warp Speed, which developed the Covid vaccines, though he has previously said the Covid vaccine killed many people and was a “crime against humanity.” He told the senators that “there are no cuts to Medicaid.” But the Congressional Budget Office says that Medicaid provisions in Trump’s tax-and-spending bill would increase the number of people without health insurance by 7.8 million in 2034. And RFK Jr. hurled other falsehoods.

None of this is new. Kennedy has long been shown to be a deranged liar and conspiracy theorist. He lied during his confirmation hearings to hide his not-secret agenda to annihilate the nation’s vaccine regimen. And now we can see what happens when a disingenuous crusader obsessed with crackpot notions is put in charge of the US public health system.

Medical and scientific organizations—including the American Public Health Association, the American Society for Virology, and the Pediatric Infectious Diseases Society—have called for his dismissal. And numerous Democratic senators have done the same. House Democrats ought to do them one better and introduce articles of impeachment.

Do Americans want to Make Measles Great Again? Do they desire a wrecked public health system and severe cuts in research for cancer, Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, and other diseases? Do they want to be unprepared for the next pandemic?

Cabinet members can be impeached. This has happened twice in US history. William Belknap, who served as secretary of war for President Ulysses Grant, was impeached in 1876 for his involvement in what was called the trader post scandal (in which he was accused of receiving kickbacks on federal contracts). He was acquitted by the Senate. In 2024, House Republicans impeached Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas for supposedly not complying with federal immigration law. The Democratic-controlled Senate dismissed the articles of impeachment, contending they did not “allege conduct that rises to the level of a high crime or misdemeanor.”

Yes, there’s not much chance that articles of impeachment filed against Kennedy in the House, which is ruled by Trump’s cult, will get too far. But as Trump continues his authoritarian rampage and his administration implements profoundly harmful policies, the Ds need to acknowledge they are not in a conventional political battle and, most important, show some fight. Do Americans want to Make Measles Great Again? Do they desire a wrecked public health system and severe cuts in research for cancer, Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, and other diseases? Do they want to be unprepared for the next pandemic?

These are extreme times. House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries a few days ago stated that he’d like to work with Trump on affordable housing legislation. (See Dumbass Comment of the Week below.) The desire for bipartisanship is a tough craving for some of these guys and gals to kick. But to earn the trust and votes of concerned Americans, Democrats must show that they understand the multiple crises at hand and that they are willing and able to engage in the trench warfare that the Trump threat demands. Targeting Trump’s worst henchmen (and henchwomen) is just one way they can do that.

This can be a piece of the party’s 2026 strategy. The Democrats are aiming to regain the House and have hopes—though not as high—for the Senate. The most likely positive outcome for them at this point is a win in only the lower chamber. (I’m assuming nothing exceptional occurs to prevent or hinder the midterm elections—which is not an unsubstantial assumption.) Were the Democrats to triumph only in the House, their ability to thwart Trump’s assault on American democracy would increase but still be limited. They could mount investigations and issue subpoenas, but they could not pass legislation. And it’s important to keep in mind that much of what Trump has done in the past seven months to grab and consolidate power has not involved legislation. But the Democrats would hold the power of impeachment. And laying down a marker now for a Kennedy impeachment would be a serious flex.

What’s his impeachable offense? Endangering citizens ought to count, and lying to Congress is indeed a felony. His lies are life-and-death matters.

Why not move to impeach Trump? you ask. His authoritarian, unconstitutional abuses of power and arguably illegal moves could justify that. But the country has been through this before (twice!), and impeachment of a president is a direct defiance of the electorate’s will. Another Trump impeachment would allow an unpopular Trump to rally his supporters to oppose what he will call a new Democratic “hoax.” And his brown-nosing GOP lickspittles in the Senate would have his back. Also, a Democratic attempt to impeach Trump might make it seem the Democrats are as bent on revenge as Trump.

Impeaching Kennedy would cast the spotlight on his policies—which are not supported by the public—and place pressure on the handful of Republicans in the House and Senate who still have some connection to reality and who realize that Kennedy is a menace. What’s his impeachable offense? Endangering citizens ought to count, and lying to Congress is indeed a felony. His lies are life-and-death matters.

A handful of Republicans have begun to challenge Kennedy—or, that is, express concern about his perfidy. Talking about Kennedy’s recent decisions on vaccines, Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.), a medical doctor who has long championed vaccination, said, “This is about children’s health. This is about how we protect the children of the United States of America. There’s allegations that that that health is being endangered. We need to try not presupposing anybody’s right or wrong. We got to get to the bottom of it.”

For a Republican in the Trump era, that weaselly statement counts as criticism. The bottom is already evident. Kennedy is undermining vaccinations for children and for adults. Cassidy had the chance to stop this during Kennedy’s confirmation process, when he was a key vote. After much pondering, he chickened out, backed Kennedy, and assumed a huge chunk of responsibility for the mess Kennedy is creating.

Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) also was grousing about Kennedy this week. She asserted that the firing of Monarez and the departure of other high-level disease experts at the CDC raise “considerable questions about what is happening within the agency. Americans must be able to fully trust that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention rigorously adheres to science-based and data-driven principles when issuing policy directives. The removal of the director after such a short tenure appears to be evidence that politics are taking precedence over policy. I fully support…Cassidy’s call for congressional oversight and look forward to participating in the committee’s work.”

She, too, voted to place Kennedy at HHS. No point in crying for the barn door to be closed now. The mad horseman of the apocalypse is on a breakneck gallop.

Kennedy presents a clear and present danger. He is Exhibit No. 1 that the Trump regime is a fever swamp of fringe views, grift, extremism, and conspiracism. As the House Democrats prepare for the coming electoral battle against the forces of Trumpism, they will have to do more than highlight their gazillion policy proposals and proclaim their ideas for health care, the economy, retirement security, and you-name-it are the best. They must display fierceness—over and over. Moving to impeach Kennedy is one way to do this. And it has the benefit of being fully warranted.

Mother JonesSep 8, 2025, 10:00 AM

We Can Remove Toxic Forever Chemicals From Drinking Water. Why Aren’t We?

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

A new study finds that technologies installed to remove “forever chemicals” from drinking water are also doing double-duty by removing harmful other materials—including some substances that have been linked to certain types of cancer.

The study, published Thursday in the journal ACS ES&T Water, comes as the Trump administration is overhauling a rule mandating that water systems take action to clean up forever chemicals in drinking water.

Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), colloquially referred to as forever chemicals, are a class of thousands of chemicals that do not degrade in the environment and have been linked to a slew of worrying health outcomes, including various cancers, hormonal disorders, and developmental delays. Because they do not degrade, they are uniquely pervasive: a 2023 study from the US Geological Survey estimated that 45 percent of tap water in the US could contain at least one PFAS chemical.

Last year, the Biden administration finalized a rule establishing the first-ever legal limits of PFAS in drinking water, setting strict limits for six kinds of PFAS chemicals and mandating that water utilities needed to clean up drinking water under these limits by 2029. But in May, the Environmental Protection Agency said it would be reconsidering regulations on four of the six chemicals in the original rule and extend the deadline by two years. The changes come after widespread outcry from water utilities, who say that the costs of installing PFAS filtration systems would be far beyond what the agency originally estimated.

“There’s this gray area in between what is safe and what is legal where there’s still some risk, which is why we’re so concerned about all of these contaminants.”

“Building on the historic actions to address PFAS during the first Trump Administration, EPA is tackling PFAS from all of our program offices, advancing research and testing, stopping PFAS from getting into drinking water systems, holding polluters accountable, and more,” Brigit Hirsch, EPA press secretary, told WIRED in a statement. “This is just a fraction of the work the agency is doing on PFAS during President Trump’s second term to ensure Americans have the cleanest air, land, and water.”

Hirsch also emphasized that as EPA reconsiders standards for the four chemicals in question, “it is possible that the result could be more stringent requirements.”

Experts say the costs of cleaning up PFAS could have other benefits beyond just getting forever chemicals out of Americans’ water supply. The authors of the new study—all employees of the Environmental Working Group (EWG), a nonprofit that does research on chemical safety—say that technology that gets rid of PFAS can also filter out a number of other harmful substances, including some that are created as byproducts of the water treatment process itself.

The study looks at three types of water filtration technologies that have been proven to remove PFAS. These technologies “are really widespread, they’ve been in use for a really long time, and they’re well-documented to remove a large number of contaminants,” says Sydney Evans, a senior analyst at EWG and coauthor of the report.

Most routine water disinfection processes in the US entail adding a chemical—usually chlorine—to the water. While this process removes harmful pathogens, it can’t leach out PFAS or other types of contaminants, including heavy metals and elements like arsenic.

This method of disinfection can also, paradoxically, create some harmful byproducts as chlorine reacts to organic compounds present in water or in infrastructure like pipes. Long-term exposure to some of these byproducts has been linked to specific types of cancer. While there are some federal guidelines for water utilities to follow, experts say that a growing body of research illustrates that there’s a gap between what is legal and what is safe. (It’s also not uncommon for utilities to find water samples that exceed legal limits: Officials in Springfield, Massachusetts, and Akron, Ohio, have notified residents this year that their water was polluted with disinfection byproducts.)

“There’s this gray area in between what is safe and what is legal where there’s still some risk, which is why we’re so concerned about all of these contaminants,” says Evans, some of whose past work has focused on the links between disinfection byproducts and cancer.

“It’s really an interesting first effort to try to diagnose ancillary benefits—and perhaps unintended benefits—from installing advanced water treatment systems intended to remove PFAS,” says P. Lee Ferguson, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Duke University. “This gets at a question many of us have asked, and that I’ve thought about quite a bit: [with] the very act of installing advanced treatment intended to remove really recalcitrant contaminants like PFAS, you really do have the potential to get a lot of other benefits.”

While putting together the study’s methodology, the researchers also demonstrated how large the gap in advanced technology is between smaller water systems and bigger ones. Just 7 percent of water systems serving fewer than 500 customers had some kind of advanced water filtration system, as opposed to nearly 30 percent of water systems serving more than 100,000 people. These smaller systems, the EWG researchers say, overwhelmingly serve rural and under-resourced populations. Cost explains a lot here: These types of technologies are much more expensive than treating water with chlorine. (In May, the EPA said it would launch an initiative called PFAS OUT, which will connect with water utilities that need to make upgrades and provide “tools, funding, and technical assistance.”)

The relatively small sample size of 19 water systems, and the lack of detail in the data, means there are some wide discrepancies in the results, says Bridger Ruyle, an assistant professor of environmental engineering at NYU who studies PFAS and water systems. Some of the systems in the study saw a nearly complete reduction in disinfection byproducts after they installed advanced filtration; at the other extreme, some water systems actually showed a gain in byproducts after they installed the filtration systems.

This, Ruyle says, doesn’t mean that the technology isn’t effective. Rather, it calls for more research into how variables like new exposure sources and seasonality might be affecting specific plants.

“In the lab, you can do all of these controlled studies, and you can say, ‘Oh yes, we eliminate all of the PFAS, and that also takes care of some other contaminant issues of concern,’” he says. “But when you’re talking about the real operation of a water facility, the environmental behavior of PFAS and these other chemicals are not the same. You could have different seasonal patterns, you could have different sources, you could have climate change impacting different components. And so, just because we’re treating a certain inflow of PFAS, a lot of other things could be happening to these other chemicals kind of independently.”

The question of cost comes back to who, exactly, needs to be on the hook to pay to clean up water. In communities across the country, water utilities are folding new PFAS testing and remediation measures into other needed upgrades, and some consumers are seeing their bills skyrocket. But understanding the full benefits of some of these fixes can help scientists and policymakers better grasp the path forward.

“This is an enormous financial challenge,” Ruyle says. “And at the same time, it’s a financial need. There’s a big focus now in the Trump administration from the MAHA movement [around] what are these causes of all of these health and well-being ills. If you’re not willing to put up the money to upgrade infrastructure, to actually address proven causes of environmental harm, then what are we going to do?”

Mother JonesSep 8, 2025, 10:00 AM

Trump Has Turned the National Guard Into Mall Cops. Cost? $1 Million a Day.

When I went out to fetch lunch last Wednesday, three Louisiana Guard members were lounging outside the Mother Jones building, enjoying the perfect weather and watching dialysis patients spilling out of Metro access vans. The soldiers wore handcuffs on their belts and handguns strapped to their thighs, unaware that they were protecting some enemies of the people inside.

Later that afternoon, even more soldiers flocked to our building after a fire truck and ambulance pulled up to deal with a medical emergency. The Guard members stomped around, barking into walkie-talkies, but they contributed little more to the operation than the reporter and other rubberneckers on the sidewalk. They were back on Friday, clustered near the parking garage like smokers sheltering from the wind.

President Donald Trump has deployed more than 2,200 of these National Guard members to DC to execute his “historic action to rescue our nation’s capital from crime, bloodshed, bedlam and squalor and worse,” as he described it during an August 11 news conference. “This is liberation day in DC, and we’re going to take our capital back.”

City officials protested that crime in DC had fallen to near-historic lows. DC Mayor Muriel Bowser called the presence of the military in the city “un-American.”

American soldiers and airmen policing American citizens on American soil is #UnAmerican.

— Muriel Bowser (@MurielBowser) August 17, 2025

Nonetheless, armored vehicles rolled in the next day and lined up in front of the Washington Monument. The initial optics of an occupied city were terrifying,the fever dream of a budding authoritarian. Several weeks later, however, the military “liberation” of DC looks a lot different from the war on crime that Trump had promised to bring to our city.

National Guard members here aren’t actually doing much. Groups of bored soldiers seem to wander aimlessly around the city like tourists, taking selfies at national monuments and enjoying our varied dining offerings. On Tuesday, when I was walking my dog, I ran into a few Guard members patrolling my local coffee shop. The regulars were chatting them up, while expressing polite outrage at the militarization of this quiet, historic, gayborhood.

The soldiers were from Louisiana, a state whose capital city boasts a crime rate twice as high as DC’s. In their civilian lives, one was a cop, another an “assistant chiropractor.” They seemed oblivious to the pressing local crime wave: cyclists in the nearby bike lane blowing through the stop light, a scourge endlessly decried by the café denizens.

Groups of bored soldiers seem to wander aimlessly around the city like tourists, taking selfies at national monuments and enjoying our local dining offering

The presence of all these soldiers in my orbit this week left me pondering something that had nagged me since they first arrived in DC last month: If I got mugged in broad daylight, what could those National Guard members really, legally, do?

I put the question to John Dehn, a West Point grad and professor in the national security and civil rights program at Loyola University Chicago School of Law. The answer, he explained, depends on the mission and “the specific operational plans that have been put in place.” These guidelines, he said, are spelled out in the “Rules for the Use of Force,” which Guard members are supposed to carry with them. Two weeks ago, a HuffPost reporter got one from a local Guard member and posted it online.

Had a chance to stop a member of the Guard and ask whether they carried any guidance on their person about Posse Comitatus Act (and/or a list of "exceptions" like the troops in LA were given per DOJ). He didn't seem sure what PCA is but did show me this doc he had in his pocket on rules of force.

— Brandi Buchman (@brandibuchman.bsky.social) 2025-08-23T15:51:43.825Z

The RUF and Rules of Conduct statethat “This is a civilian SUPPORT mission.” The document emphasizes that the National Guard can’t arrest people. Nor can soldiersinvestigate anything or conduct searches and seizures, hostage negotiations, or extract a suspect from a barricade. Trump made a big deal recently about allowing Guard members to carry weapons, but the RUF says they are strictly prohibited from using those weapons except for self-defense and defense of others. No pulling a gun on a fleeing suspect. (“Warning shots are NOT authorized.”)

A JTF-DC spokesperson later confirmed that the National Guard “will not be conducting law enforcement.” However, the Department of Justice recently deputized many Guard members as US Marshals. The DC Attorney General has argued in a lawsuit that deputizing them does, in fact, empower National Guard members to make searches, seizures, and arrests, and as such, violates the 1878 Posse Comitatus Act, which bans the military from participating in domestic law enforcement.

Given all the mixed messages, the Guard members I spoke with appeared somewhat confused about what the rules of engagement were. But they seemed to agree that if they witness a crime, they are mainly supposed to detain a suspect if possible, call for help, and wait for real cops to show up. “If there’s any concerns, we notify Metropolitan Police Department or the right personnel to make sure that the situation is taken care of,” US Air Force Maj. Jay Green, a chaplain with the 113th Wing, District of Columbia Air National Guard, explained in one recent Defense Department website posting.

That seems to be what they’re doing in DC. The Washington Post recently sent out a team of reporters to observe troops during rush hour in the Metro system. Fanning out across various stations, Post reporters witnessed National Guard members standing around watching Metro police arrest a woman with an outstanding warrant. They did not assist.

In another station, a Metro rider mistakenly assumed the soldiers could help and told them someone was selling drugs on a stalled train. What did they do with that information? “One of the Guard members passed the details about the alleged drug dealer to Metro police,” the Post reported.

The Defense Department has published several puff pieces on military websites touting the National Guard’s work in DC. But even those official accounts indicate that when Guard members witness a crime, their main job is to call for help and wait for the local cops to arrive. Last month, for instance, Joint Task Force-DC proudly announced in an online release that two Guard members had “alerted local law enforcement to a potentially life-threatening situation involving a man brandishing a knife and threatening another man at the Waterfront Metro Station.”

“We showed our presence and then made sure that citizens around that area were safe,” said US Army Capt. Giho Yang, with the District of Columbia Army National Guard. “To do that, we had to partner up and communicate with the law enforcement officers that were nearby, making sure that we had eyes and ears on the situation to keep everyone safe.”

They didn’t mention whether any ordinary citizens also communicated with the nearby law enforcement officers or called 911, as they are wont to do when they see someone brandishing a knife in a subway station.

It’s probably a good thing that the National Guard isn’t doing more to fight crime in DC. They’re not trained for domestic law enforcement. Besides, DC has seen plenty of enhanced federal policing since Trump declared his crime emergency. Most of the action is driven by the city’s multitude of federal law enforcement agencies, suchas the US Park Police, plus the stepped-up presence of ICE and Border Patrol. They’re the ones kidnapping and beating up DoorDash drivers, chasing drivers with fake tags and causing car crashes, and arresting people for drinking in public.

But using soldiers as props in Trump’s fake crime emergency seems insulting to people serving the country honorably. Indeed, deployed to a city whose crime rate was already plummeting, the National Guard has been filling the time by picking up trash and spreading mulch in federal parks. Social media wags have dubbed them “National Gardeners.” (“Fighting crime one weed at a time,” the local joke goes.)

National Guard doing landscaping right now in McPherson Square.
byu/sillychillly ineconomy

As humiliating as this might be for the troops, they are providing DC with a useful service. Some 200 US Park Service employees once helped maintain the city’s parks and gardens. But soon after taking office this year, Trump got rid of all but 20 of them, leaving the city’s lovely green spaces seriously neglected. Of course, at the cost of $1 million a day, the military troops make very expensive landscapers.

The pointlessness of sending the National Guard to pretend to fight crime in DC isn’t deterring Trump from planning to repeat the operation in other cities, even though a federal judge just ruled that it’s blatantly illegal. Trump appears intent on “creating a national police force with the President as its chief,” US District Judge Charles Breyer warned in a September 2 decision, finding that Trump’s use of the military in LA earlier this summer violated the Posse Comitatus Act.

Because the District of Columbia is not a state, Trump has had more leeway in deploying the National Guard here. Nonetheless, on Thursday, the city sued the administration, arguing that the National Guard deployment in DC is illegal and runs “roughshod over a fundamental tenet of American democracy—that the military should not be involved in domestic law enforcement.”

Trump has claimed that DC “is very safe right now” since he sent in the troops, and that crime has plummeted. Even if that’s true, and it’s not clear that it is, the ceasefire is likely to be short-lived.

“You can have a massive police presence that you put in the communities,” Elliott Currie, professor of criminology at the University of California, Irvine, told me recently. “They can really show some impressive optics when they do this… But history tells us you can never sustain this for very long.”

The DC National Guard recently announced that its deployment to the city will be extended through December. But eventually, the local criminal class seems likely to realize that the soldiers are no more of a threat to their activity than CVS security guards. And when that happens, Trump’s vaunted crime reduction may prove as ephemeral as his plan to end the war in Ukraine.

Mother JonesSep 7, 2025, 6:45 PM

Let’s Review Trump’s Week of Massive Legal Losses, Shall We?

It was a week of so much losing.

Over the past week, President Donald Trump and his authoritarian agenda have sustained one loss after another in the courts. Putting all of them together reveals a stunning legal rebuke, and unsurprisingly, Trump World has been erupting with anger and petulance. Let’s review:

Last Friday, a federal appeals court ruled that Trump’s reciprocal tariffs were basically illegal, as my colleague Inae Oh covered. (On Truth Social, Trump alleged the court was “Highly Partisan,” adding, “If these Tariffs ever went away, it would be a total disaster for the Country.”)
The same day, a federal judge ruled that the administration could not fast-track deportations of people detained far from the southern border. (White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller called the ruling a “judicial coup.”)
Last Sunday, a federal judge temporarily blocked the administration from deporting hundreds of unaccompanied Guatemalan children. (Miller alleged the “Biden judge” was “effectively kidnapping these migrant children.”)
On Tuesday, an appeals court upheld a lower court’s ruling requiring Trump to rehire fired Federal Trade Commissioner Rebecca Kelly Slaughter. That prompted the administration to ask the Supreme Court to allow the firing to proceed.
The same day, a federal judge ruled that Trump’s deployment of the National Guard to Los Angeles was illegal, alleging that the president and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth are “creating a national police force with the President as its chief.” (White House spokesperson Anna Kelly characterized the ruling as “a rogue judge…trying to usurp the authority of the commander in chief to protect American cities from violence and destruction.”)
On Wednesday, a federal judge ruled that the administration broke the law when it froze billions of dollars in research funds to Harvard. (White House spokesperson Liz Huston called the decision “egregious.”)
On Thursday, an appeals court ruled that Trump could not cancel billions of dollars in foreign aid without getting approval from Congress. (The administration already appealed the decision.)
And on Friday, a federal judge blocked Trump from revoking the temporary legal status of hundreds of thousands of Haitian and Venezuelan immigrants. (A Department of Homeland Security spokesperson said the ruling “delays justice,” adding, “unelected activist judges cannot stop the will of the American people for a safe and secure homeland.”)

On top of all this, as my colleague James West covered, a new NBC poll out today shows that the majority of Americans—57 percent—disapprove of the job Trump is doing.

We may not be able to rely on the Supreme Court to keep Trump in check, but based on the last week or so, it seems we can trust the lower courts to step in where the high court will not.

Mother JonesSep 7, 2025, 4:54 PM

Florida Surgeon General Admits He Banned Vaccine Mandates Based on Vibes

After his announcement this week that he would seek to eliminate “all vaccine mandates,” Florida’s surgeon general, Dr. Joseph Ladapo, made one thing clear: This decision was based on no science, just vibes.

In an interview on CNN’s State of the Union on Sunday morning, Ladapo told host Jake Tapper that officials did not undertake any analysis to determine how many new cases of hepatitis A, whooping cough, and chickenpox would arise after the ending of vaccine mandates. “There’s this conflation of the science and sort of, what is the right and wrong thing to do?” Ladapo said, before proceeding to claim that the whooping cough vaccine is ineffective at preventing transmission. (Research has shown the whooping cough vaccine is safe and effective; the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says the protection they provide “decreases over time.”)

He continued: “This is an issue very clearly of parents’ rights. So do I need to analyze whether it’s appropriate for parents to be able to decide what goes into their children’s bodies?”

"Absolutely not." @FLSurgeonGen admits he didn't study impact before calling to lift vaccine mandate pic.twitter.com/bJCo0aNvk0

— State of the Union (@CNNSOTU) September 7, 2025

In fact, as my colleague Kiera Butler explained when Ladapo announced his decision this week it is an issue of public health—not “parents’ rights”:

If successful, such a move could have broad implications for workers across state government sectors. Most significantly, it could allow many more unvaccinated children to attend school, putting others at risk of acquiring highly contagious and potentially deadly diseases such as measles and polio.

Under Ladapo’s leadership, Florida’s rates of routine childhood vaccination—shots that protect against catastrophic diseases like polio and tetanus—have already declined. Today, the immunization rate for kindergartners is 90 percent, the lowest it’s been in a decade, and below the threshold required to prevent the spread of some serious illnesses. The rate of families seeking religious exemptions to school vaccine requirements has increased over the past few years.

All this is part of why, as Tapper mentioned, experts ranging from Ladapo’s predecessor, Scott Rivkees, to major medical groups including the American Medical Association and the American Academy of Pediatrics have voiced their opposition to the plan.

A Washington Post-KFF poll conducted in July also found that more than 80 percent of Florida parents said public schools should require vaccines for measles and polio, with some health and religious exceptions. A new NBC News poll out today shows that nearly 80 percent of Americans strongly or somewhat support vaccines. Even President Donald Trump seems skeptical of Ladapo’s decision, telling reporters in the Oval Office this week: “I think we have to be very careful. We have some vaccines that are so amazing… I think you have to be very careful when you say that some people don’t have to be vaccinated.”

Even President Trump gets it right once in awhile.

Vaccines are safe and effective. They have saved millions of lives.

Sadly, Sec. Kennedy disagrees.

We need an HHS Secretary who believes in science, not conspiracy theories.pic.twitter.com/14D0Gnet11

— Sen. Bernie Sanders (@SenSanders) September 6, 2025

Later in the CNN interview, Ladapo seemed to slightly revise his argument, claiming that officials did not do any projections ahead of killing off vaccine mandates because they already recognized that outbreaks would, in fact, be inevitable: “We don’t need to do any projections. We handle outbreaks all the time. So there’s nothing special that we would need to do. And, secondly, again, there are countries that don’t have vaccine mandates, and the sky isn’t falling over there.”

So, buckle up, Florida. Your surgeon general just admitted that outbreaks of vaccine-preventable disease are coming.

Mother JonesSep 7, 2025, 3:39 PM

Americans Continue to Really Dislike Trump and the Things He Does

NBC is out with a new poll this morning showing Americans continue to dislike Trump and the things he’s doing—including the things he said he was really good at, like fixing the economy. Respondents to the NBC News Decision Desk Poll reported weak approval across a range of signature issues, including tariffs, and mass deportations, while expressing overwhelming support for vaccines—a sharp contrast to the turmoil inside the administration over vaccine policy.

The topline approval rating remains in negative territory, with 57 percent saying they disapprove of the president’s job and 43 percent saying they approve—a similar result to the previous poll in June, NBC says. The results largely follow other polling tracked by The Economist, which uses a weekly YouGov survey to put Trump’s approval ratings significantly lower than both Biden’s and Obama’s at similar points in their presidencies, revealing it only took two months for his ratings to fall below zero, where they have remained. He’s currently languishing with a net approval rating of -14, according to The Economist. The average of a set of polls tracked by Nate Silver also puts him in negative territory at -6.9 net approval.

As my colleague Julianne McShane previously reported, Trump registered the lowest 100-day approval rating of any president in the past 80 years.

The headline in NBC’s poll today is that Americans of all political stripes really like vaccines—78 percent of all respondents said they support their use. Large majorities of Democrats, Republicans, and Independents agree. That comes as turmoil has erupted under Robert F. Kennedy’s leadership of the country’s top health agencies, including the decapitation of leadership at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention—a conflict that came to a boil during a heated marathon hearing on Thursday before the Senate Finance Committee. As my colleague Kiera Butler documented, Kennedy appeared to promote flat-out lies. In recent weeks, he has canceled mRNA vaccination research and stocked an important vaccine advisory panel with vaccine critics. A letter released this week and signed by 1,000 former HHS employees called for his resignation.

Americans are giving Trump poor marks on other issues too, with just 43 percent approving of his mass deportation regime (though he scores slightly higher on the broader issue of border security, at 47 percent). On trade (41 percent) and inflation (39 percent), Americans continue to view Trump dimly.

Meanwhile, the survey took the nation’s emotional temperature as well, showing nearly 70 percent of Democrats are either “furious” or “angry” at Trump’s actions. A smaller proportion of Republicans—45 percent—say they are either “thrilled” or “happy.”

Read the full results of the poll here.

Mother JonesSep 7, 2025, 10:00 AM

This Rock Bassist Is Remixing Climate Activism

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

Imagine if every climate policy rollback was met with the same unshakable loyalty Swifties show when Taylor drops a breakup song. What if climate action had the same unstoppable energy as Beyoncé’s BeyHive, marching full speed ahead toward a green economy?

According to Adam Met, the climate movement could learn a thing or two from fan-building tactics deployed by today’s pop stars. After all, he is one.

Met, 35, is the bassist of the multi-platinum indie-rock band AJR, which he started with his two brothers in 2005. Thirteen years later, after the band began selling out stadiums and amphitheaters, Met founded a climate focused nonprofit organization called Planet Reimagined—a climate research, advocacy, and storytelling hub—with his colleague Mila Rosenthal.

From plastic-free concessions to farm-to-stage initiatives, many musicians have worked hard to shrink the environmental footprint of their national tours. But for Met, carbon-neutral concerts and low-impact festivals are just the opening act. He sees bigger potential for the music industry: serving as a climate movement incubator.

Met is now juggling his work as an activist, author, musician, and adjunct professor at Columbia University. In June, he released his first book, Amplify: How to Use the Power of Connection to Engage, Take Action, and Build a Better World, which shows how fan-building strategies can be applied to social movements.

Between his book tour and AJR’s music tour, “Somewhere in the Sky,” Met sat down with Inside Climate News for an interview to discuss the connections between climate, music, and fan building.

When and why did you become interested in climate activism?

When I was in high school, I took a class on human rights, and we went on a class trip to see Mary Robinson speak. For me, it just took that one moment of hearing her speak about the connections between climate change and human rights that set me on this path. Since then, she and I have become friendly.

Then, over time, I started to see the impact of climate change firsthand on my work as a musician and on the fans who came to our shows. We would pull into San Francisco, and we would literally have to wear gas masks from the tour bus into the venue because the smoke from wildfires was so bad. When we pulled into Athens, Greece, the entire city flooded in minutes, and we had to drive through the floods to make it to the venue.

But we would experience these climate impacts and then move onto the next city in our tour, while our fans had to stay and clean up the mess. Seeing climate change directly, and studying it so deeply in undergrad and for my PhD, made me realize that this is the thing I need to dedicate my life to.

You recently came out with your first book that explores the connections between fan building and movement building. Can you tell me more about what those connections are?

Over the past 20 years AJR has built a fanbase, a unique fanbase. What I realized was that the same strategies we used to build our fanbase—and the strategies that a lot of other artists use—are all really relevant for how to build communities that can do good in the world.

Almost every day when I am on tour, I get asked by fans: What can I do? How can I help? The book answers those questions. It gives people creative, out-of-the-box ideas to build collective action. At the same time, the book gives people who have spent years working in this space fresh and different ideas. Ideas that work really well in music and entertainment, and how they can be applied to the climate space.

What are some of those fan-building ideas that can be applied to the climate movement?

Traditionally, the model of building a fan base and a social movement can be seen through the metaphor of a ladder. When you’re on the first rung of the ladder, that may mean you have heard a song or heard of a social movement. You go up a rung, and maybe you follow the band on social media or an organization connected to a social movement. Then you go up another rung; maybe you attend the band’s show or attend an organizing meeting. And you keep going up and up the ladder.

“People are much more likely to take action…if they have the opportunity to do it in person.”

This model doesn’t work in 2025, because it implies that this work is done as an individual. The actual model that I believe works looks more like a hurricane. At the beginning, you need to bring fans and followers really close to you, towards the center of the movement. Give them all the tools and skills they need to go out in the world to bring other people into the movement. Then those new people come close to the center, where we can again give them the skills and knowledge they need. By bringing them close to the center, they become really dedicated. They become evangelizers of the movement.

You can bring them to the center through gamification, building a bigger tent, effective storytelling, or featuring—where, just like bands, social movements can collaborate with each other. There are a lot of really effective fan-building methods that use the model of the hurricane rather than the ladder.

How does this understanding shape AJR’s practices as both a band and an advocacy group?

On our tours we try to limit our emissions as much as possible. We green the backstage areas by eliminating single-use plastics, donating extra food when possible, making sure energy from the show is coming from renewables, and whatever else we can do.

And that’s great, but at the same time we built in an advocacy strategy to our tours itself. At every stop on our last tour there was an opportunity for fans to take political or civil action on site. There were booths set up to call their representatives, flyers about volunteering at local nonprofits, or tables to sign petitions. And every action was hyperlocalized. In each city the actions are customized to the things impacting or relating to their local communities.

On our last tour we had 35,000 people take some sort of climate action.

What is the current state of the climate movement within the music industry? Are other artists speaking out?

Well, right now the climate movement seems to be a mess. It is leaderless and rudderless. The climate movement has a communications problem and is too large and existential of an issue to discuss easily. So how are you supposed to write a song that includes climate?

The way we are seeing the climate movement manifest itself into the music industry is not through the art itself, but through online advocacy and tours. Touring is not only the biggest emitter within the industry but is the place where you bring people together in person. All our research at Planet Reimagined shows that people are much more likely to take action—and see the impact of their action—if they have the opportunity to do it in person.

The best climate advocacy shows their fans the impact of climate locally and gives them an opportunity to engage in action. And by action, I do not mean switching the type of straws they’re using or taking shorter showers. By action, I mean civil and political participation.

For example, Billie Eilish did a great job implementing climate advocacy into her United Kingdom tour, and Planet Reimagined helped install those advocacy tactics into her tour. Artists like Jack Johnson and Dave Mathews are doing a great job as well.

What advice would you give to other artists who may want to speak out about climate change but are hesitant to?

Planet Reimagined just did a big study with Ticketmaster to figure out from fans what they want to hear from their favorite artists. And we found that fans want artists to speak about the issues they care about. If it’s manufactured or inauthentic, then don’t talk about it. Climate change is not an issue artists should pretend to care about. But if the artist actually does care about climate change and is talking about it online, then have real-world opportunities for fans to participate at your shows.

Planet Reimagined, AJR and Inside Climate News all focus a lot on storytelling. What is the importance of storytelling within the climate movement?

Stories are the only way to drive meaningful change. A lot of articles about climate change that are filled with statistics are so dry that they turn people away—1.5°C means nothing to anyone other than scientists. Plus it is Celsius, so it really means nothing to Americans. Good stories are a way for people to feel something and connect issues to their real life.

When we are building a show or tour for the band, it’s all about how we can get people to be happy, sad, angry, frustrated, and hopeful, because feeling all these emotions will connect them to the band. It’s the same thing with climate storytelling. We need to get people to have an emotional connection to climate issues, because that drives them to be a part of the movement.

The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Mother JonesSep 6, 2025, 7:11 PM

Washington Turns Out to Protest Trump’s Occupation

Thousands of people took to the streets of Washington, DC, on Saturday to voice opposition to Donald Trump’s armed federal intervention in the city.

This is what democracy looks like! A people united will never be defeated. We want federal forces out of DC NOW! #WeAreAllDC #FreeDC

— Free DC (@freedcproject.bsky.social) 2025-09-06T17:16:02.898Z

The demonstration, organized by a coalition of local activist groups and unions, demands the “immediate withdrawal” of federal troops from Washington and an end to Trump’s federalization of the city’s own police department.

Thousands march to the White House united in our demand. We want federal forces out of DC Now!! Free DC! Free DC! #WeAreAllDC #FreeDC

— Free DC (@freedcproject.bsky.social) 2025-09-06T17:07:34.462Z

Ever since Trump claimed a “crime emergency” in Washington on August 8, he has flooded the city with federal assets. When it comes to the National Guard, according to my colleague Schuyler Mitchell, experts “estimate that the DC deployment is costing roughly $1 million a day.”

“So far,” she wrote on Tuesday, “their work has not gone exactly as planned. Last week, soldiers deployed to fight a ‘crime emergency‘ instead found themselves completing ‘beautification’ duties on Capitol Hill and patrolling Krispy Kremes. Users on the r/NationalGuard subreddit were quick to give their colleagues a new nickname: National Guardeners.”

One guard member complained to Mitchell that the administration “see us as little toy soldiers to put on the street,” and that domestic deployments were damaging recruiting efforts. “We are losing candidates left and right,” the soldier said. “Certainly, people are watching this and making decisions—not only to not join, but plenty of people within our ranks who are pushing toward retirement are deciding they’re done, and they are leaving before it gets too bad.”

FREE DC Right now, DC is rising. Thousands are in Malcolm X Park and marching through the streets against Trump’s occupation. National Guard patrols, ICE raids, FBI harassment — our communities refuse to live under fear. DC belongs to the people. #WeAreAllDC #FightOligarchy

— Our Revolution (@our-revolution.bsky.social) 2025-09-06T16:39:52.054Z

Mother JonesSep 6, 2025, 6:22 PM

Trump’s Mortgage Fraud Smears Backfire on His Administration

When New York Attorney General Letitia James accused Donald Trump of committing fraud by lying to banks and insurance companies about the value of his properties, he never really denied it. Everyone does things like this, his lawyers argued, and no bank ever lost money—so what’s the big deal?

All three Trump cabinet members denied any wrongdoing.

But now that he’s in back office, Trump seems to have decided that telling banks things that aren’t true while seeking loans is a very big deal after all. His administration has launched investigations into James herself and Lisa Cook, a Biden-appointee on the Federal Reserve’s board of governors, alleging both women improperly told banks that two different properties each owned were both their primary residences. He’s previously made similar accusations against one of his main Democratic antagonists in Congress, California Sen. Adam Schiff.

The investigations were launched with the help of Bill Pulte, the Trump appointee leading the Federal Housing Finance Agency. On Friday, Reuters reported that relatives of Pulte appear to have done the very thing Trump and Pulte are targeting James and Cook over. Reuters says that Pulte’s father and stepmother had simultaneously requested “homestead exemptions”—a discount on property taxes for a primary residence—on two different properties, one in Michigan and one in Florida. It’s not clear if it is illegal to do so, and in some cases, tax experts told Reuters, it is permissible—for example if a married couple live separately. But after being asked about the Pultes’ situation, local tax officials promptly revoked the exemption on the Michigan house, Reuters reported.

The news about Pulte’s relatives comes after a Thursday report from ProPublica revealed that three different members of Trump’s cabinet appear to have simultaneously claimed multiple properties as their primary residence. ProPublica found records showing Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, and Environmental Protection Agency administrator Lee Zeldin all claimed two different homes as primary residences. Chavez-DeRemer made the claims about her two homes (one in the Oregon Congressional district she previously represented, and one in Arizona, where she is known to vacation) within two months of each other. All three cabinet members denied any wrongdoing and accused ProPublica of liberal bias.

According to ProPublica, it is not necessarily illegal to claim multiple homes as your primary residence at the same time—and in some cases, it may be encouraged by bank employees—but it is generally frowned upon. Banks typically offer reduced mortgage rates for primary residences, and higher rates for second homes; the practice stems from a belief that people are more likely to diligently repay the mortgage on a property if they live in it full-time.

Mother JonesSep 6, 2025, 3:59 PM

Trump Invites World Leaders to Put Money in His Pocket

Donald Trump famously doesn’t pay much attention to critics who complain about his many conflicts of interests and attempts to use the presidency to enrich himself. But in 2019, his attempt to host the G-7 summit at his Doral golf course outside of Miami was a rare example of the critics winning out. Asking a half-dozen of the world’s most powerful leaders and their large entourages to pay to stay in his hotel rooms was a step too far. Trump relented and said the summit would be staged elsewhere; it was ultimately cancelled due to COVID.

When Trump suggested Doral for a 2019 summit, the idea went over like a lead balloon.

But Trump never really backs down, and he’s come back with an even bigger plan for Doral, announcing on Friday that it would host next year’s G-20 summit—which features an additional 13 global leaders and entourages in need of hotel rooms and room service.

In his Friday announcement of his plan to stage the major international event at his Doral property, Trump said that “everybody wants it there because it’s right next to the airport. It’s the best location. It’s beautiful.” Trump even told reporters that G-20 officials had asked that it be at the resort.

Trump insisted the decision to have the giant summit at his own property wasn’t about making money. “We’re doing a deal where it’s not going to be money. There’s no money in it,” he said. “I just want it to go well.”

Of course someone will have to pay for the cost of shutting down the giant resort and moving in the world’s leaders for the three-day conference—not to mention time needed before and after for logistical and security purposes.

Doral was built in the early 1960s and for decades hosted PGA tournaments, but in recent years had become known for being increasingly shabby. Trump borrowed $125 million from Deutsche Bank to buy the property out of bankruptcy in 2012 and has been working on it ever since. He has refinanced the loan with Axos Bank, a California bank owned by a supporter who has helped Trump shore up mortgages at his other resorts.

In 2019, revenue at the Doral property had dropped significantly, but in his most recent personal financial disclosures, it seems to have picked up. It is unclear if the property is profitable.

When Trump suggested Doral as a location for the G-7 conference in 2019, the idea went over like a lead balloon. European leaders made it clear they were not interested in paying to stay at his resort, and both Congressional Republicans and Democrats quickly threw cold water on the scheme.

At the time, Republican Sen. Mike Simpson of Idaho told reporters he couldn’t get behind the idea. “You have to go out and try to defend him. Well, I don’t know if I can do that!” Simpson said at the time. “I have no doubt that Doral is a really good place—I’ve been there, I know. But it is politically insensitive. They should have known what the kickback is going to be on this, that politically he’s doing it for his own benefit.”

On Friday, the Washington Post reported that Simpson has seen the light, with a spokesperson telling the paper said the senator now supports holding the summit at Trump’s resort.

Mother JonesSep 6, 2025, 1:45 PM

Trump Plans to Deport Millions. Here’s How ICE Is Making it Happen.

A young woman clings to a tree as masked men try to peel her off. The men wrench one of the woman’s arms behind her back, then stuff her into the back of an unmarked SUV as bystanders film and shout. She was selling food outside a Home Depot in West Los Angeles when federal agents chased her down and arrested her.

Videos of aggressive immigration raids like this have become commonplace as the Trump administration pursues its goal of deporting millions of people over the next four years.

US Immigration and Customs Enforcement is arresting people in front of their kids during school dropoffs, on the way to church, and at routine check-ins at immigration offices. Communities are pushing back, leading to clashes with police and protests. These raids are remaking the country.

“Being forced apart like this is tearing through the heart of our home and community,” says Cecelia Lizotte, the sister of a Nigerian man in ICE detention.

This week on Reveal, producers Katie Mingle and Steven Rascón and reporter Julia Lurie tell stories about the people swept up in President Donald Trump’s mass deportations and the families that are left behind.

Mother JonesSep 6, 2025, 10:00 AM

A Tornado Destroyed Their Home. Then the “Vultures” Showed Up.

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

When a mile-wide tornado hit St. Louis on May 16, DeAmon White hopped in his car and rushed home. As he navigated downed trees and power lines, turning his 10-minute commute into a three-hour slog, he worried whether his family, neighbors, and home made it through unscathed.

When he turned the corner onto his block, White’s heart sank. The entire back wall of his house had been blown off. Chunks of ceiling plaster littered the floor, windows were shattered, and much of his property was damaged beyond repair.

Next, White checked on his mother, Bobbie, who lives a five-minute walk away. The third floor of her home was gone. But miraculously, her front yard flower garden made it through the 150 mph winds unscathed.

The St. Louis storm, an EF-3, was just one of 60 tornadoes that tore through Missouri, Illinois, Kentucky, Wisconsin, Minnesota, and the Carolinas over 48 hours in May, killing at least 26 people and injuring 168. DeAmon and Bobbie considered themselves lucky: A neighbor of theirs had his leg impaled by a pole that flew through his window. Bobbie went to her sister’s house to get some sleep; DeAmon spent the night in his truck, trading shifts with neighbors to fend off looters.

The next morning, at 8 a.m., the phone calls started: Would he be interested in selling his home? “They were aggressively going at it,” he said. This continued for the next two weeks, with half a dozen calls every single day.

A roofless house.

Damage to DeAmon White’s home in St. Louis from an EF-3 tornado on May 16.Courtesy of DeAmon White

They’re “vultures,” Bobbie and DeAmon both called the speculators. Some walked down the street with flyers, some texted, and some called.

In White’s West End neighborhood, an estimated 63 percent of renters and 49 percent of homeowners are uninsured. For many North St. Louis residents, their homes are their only major asset, meaning they don’t have the cash on hand necessary to rebuild without insurance. And when federal aid is slow to arrive, quick offers to buy a home in cash can look like a lifeline.

“You end up with this system where people are exploiting the misfortunes of others.”

“Hi, this is Paul with H.B. LLC,” read one text sent to a homeowner just north of the tornado’s path on August 4. “Touching base with you … is this Steven?”

Grist tried contacting several of these numbers, but most were not set up to receive call- or text-backs. One, however, did pick up. A woman, sounding like she was in a call center, asked if there was a property to sell. “We’re a ‘we buy homes’ company,” she said, but repeatedly refused to give Grist the company name.

Eight months earlier and 600 miles away, Gina Miceli’s community in Fairview, North Carolina, was devastated by Hurricane Helene, which triggered hundreds of landslides. The rushing earth swallowed up homes and cars and killed 15 of her neighbors. In the months following, she received near-constant texts asking if she’d be open to selling her family’s two plots of land. “They text really chummy, so they sound like they already know you,” Miceli said. “‘Hey, Gina, it’s so-and-so!’ It’s very, very creepy.”

“Let me know your price,” said one text on July 9, signed simply, “Bella.”

“Hi there Gina, hope you’re having a great day,” said another exactly two weeks later. “My name is Christine, I am a land buyer. I’m reaching out to see if you have any plans to sell the lot.” The text was signed by “Twin Acres.” Twin Acres is not a registered real estate broker. Grist’s attempt to text the number back went unanswered.

Images repeating the text quotes above.

Screenshots of text messages from real estate investors looking to buy homes in the wake of natural disasters, as shared with Grist. Homeowners’ personal information has been removed to protect privacy.Grist

Sometimes, Miceli said, she answers the texts. “It depends on my mood. I think there’s been a time or two I’ve said, ‘Go to hell.’” She has no plans to leave. She’s raising her family in the home her husband’s grandparents bought, and she owns a local brewery.

Some theorists call this phenomenon “disaster gentrification,” when real estate investors flood a disaster zone to buy up damaged properties for cheap.

Samantha Montano, a professor of emergency management and author of the book Disasterology, spent years living and working in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina and saw it happen with her own eyes. In areas like the Lower Ninth Ward, some people displaced by the storm didn’t have the resources to return. Speculators rushed in. Some landowners became instant millionaires, selling their properties to out-of-state developers hoping to rebuild and flip their property.

“The issue of gentrification in New Orleans was there from the beginning,” Montano said. “There were many groups who were warning about that, advocating for housing policy and other recovery policies to account for gentrification. [They] tried to prevent it.” Twenty years later, the demographics of New Orleans have shifted: Lower-income and Black residents have been displaced, and whiter, wealthier new residents took their place. “Certainly that is all very much intertwined in the recovery and in who had access to the resources to return and rebuild—and who didn’t,” she said.

In the wake of the Eaton Fire in Altadena, California, earlier this year, half of home purchases were by limited liability corporations, according to Dwell, the home design news site. That’s nearly double what they typically represent compared to individuals buying homes. Just six companies—among them Ocean Development Inc. and Black Lion Properties LLC—dominated those transactions in Altadena, spending millions of dollars to purchase destroyed properties in historically Black neighborhoods. It’s difficult to find out who these companies are: Often, they contact potential sellers through fake phone numbers or under names that aren’t necessarily attached to real corporations.

A destroyed home office

Damage to DeAmon White’s home in St. Louis from an EF-3 tornado on May 16. Courtesy of DeAmon White

The value of disaster-struck land consistently bounces back fast, meaning that buyers can flip the land or homes—sometimes even without making repairs. As climate change fuels more frequent severe natural disasters across the United States, “disaster investors” seem set to make greater profits than ever—and communities like North St. Louis stand to bear the burden.

Justin Stoler, a University of Miami researcher working on urban health disparities, recently published a paper on hazard gentrification. This phenomenon, Stoler told Grist, diverges from our standard understanding of gentrification in its speed. “It’s typically happening in a very punctuated, short-term manner. It doesn’t necessarily take years and decades to roll out.”

“People’s lives are completely upended, and they’ve got to make difficult choices,” Stoler said. “And opportunistic entities, companies, investors try to step in and get a good deal. You end up with this system where people are exploiting the misfortunes of others.”

In DeAmon White’s neighborhood, he saw the signs of gentrification long before the tornado: A community barbershop replaced by a trendy new restaurant; a former school turned into an upscale apartment building inhabited by law students; and “just a lot of white folks moving into what they used to call ‘the hood,’ you know?” he said. And investors were already circling. Signs with “WE BUY UGLY HOUSES” could be found on utility poles and in mailboxes before the May storm. These are markers of real estate wholesalers and house-flippers looking for a quick sale. But they increased in frequency and aggressiveness after the neighborhood was turned to rubble, he said.

It’s a little too soon to say whether the St. Louis tornado will lead to big land buys. But signs—and Zillow search results—are pointing in that direction.

At least 10 severely damaged homes in the tornado’s path have gone up for sale on the real estate platform Zillow in recent weeks. Each one is labeled not as a home for locals to move into, but as an investment opportunity: 4641 Maffit Avenue “offers investment potential” for rehab or brick salvage, with a starting bid of $20,000; 4236 East Sacramento Avenue—“Investor Special!! Tornado damaged property”—in the historic Ville neighborhood is going for $30,000.

“They find people in vulnerable situations that maybe don’t have equal access to information.”

One hundred days after the storm, many St. Louis neighborhoods remain as damaged as they were the day of the tornado in May. Debris still litters streets and yards, blue tarps still stand in for caved-in roofs, and windows are still boarded up—even as the weather cools. Community activist organizations are providing aid where they can. One group, The People’s Response, which mobilized some 10,000 volunteers, estimates that over 2,000 St. Louis households still require housing and shelter assistance.

But even with a robust volunteer network, $30 million from an NFL settlement redirected toward tornado relief, and FEMA aid (slowly) arriving, homeowners have been left in the lurch for months, facing a difficult decision about how—or even whether—to rebuild.

Deserai Anderson Crow, who researches community resilience at the University of Colorado-Boulder, says what is happening in St. Louis follows a pattern similar to other extreme weather disasters: Those who rebuild are more often than not landlords looking for renters, rather than people who intend to live in the homes they’re rebuilding.

“It’s a predatory renting cycle,” Crow said. “These huge industrial-rental landlords are trying to snap up disaster-affected homes because they assume, correctly, that a lot of people want to get out from under those mortgages as quickly as possible, and that they just don’t have the emotional bandwidth or financial bandwidth to deal with rebuilding.”

Bobbie White’s damaged home was built in 1901, back when St. Louis was a thriving Mississippi River transit hub. One of the industries that built St. Louis was brickmaking, with the materials renowned worldwide for their strength and quality. Bobbie’s home, and others on her block, are made of those bricks. “A lot of these houses are 100-year-old structures,” DeAmon said. What is built in their stead likely won’t be as unique or sturdy, and yet will cost far more, he lamented—prices out of reach for many in the neighborhood today.

Stacey Sanders, president of the St. Louis Association of Realtors, says she’s been inundated with reports of speedy post-disaster sale offers. But they often come with red flags: For one thing, multigenerational homes may not have access to a title, or the title might be in the name of a deceased family member. Sometimes, resolving title issues can take years.

Many of the storm-impacted multigenerational homes are in that legal category. Those “heirs’ property” homeowners are stuck, Sanders said. Without a title, it can be harder to access FEMA benefits, filing an insurance claim is extremely difficult, and sales without a title are legally dubious at best.

Broken glass and debris on the front lawn

Damage to DeAmon White’s home in St. Louis from an EF-3 tornado on May 16. Courtesy of DeAmon White

When Sanders’ own home and car were hit by a tornado this March, “we had letters, door hangers, people knocking on the door, doing everything.” They were either selling her on repairs or selling her on a home purchase. She was, as a professional real estate agent, able to access resources and recover her damaged property. But she worries others may have a harder time.

“It might be the easiest and the quickest way,” Sanders said, “ but it’s not always the best way to go.”

“A lot of the people that are out making these offers on houses are not doing it because they’re like, ‘Oh, these poor people, let’s give them a fair shake,’” she said. Instead, they’re seeing “desperate people” and chasing an opportunity to buy property for far less than it is worth.

There are options to curb this mass sell-off. One tactic, Crow, of the University of Colorado, said, is providing a few months of bridge funding so residents can stay and navigate the rebuilding process. Another is to stymie buyers: This June, the Ohio Senate passed a bill requiring real estate wholesalers to tell homeowners when they may be selling their homes for less than market value. Pennsylvania passed a similar law in January. The market in Missouri, however, remains unregulated at both the local and state level, according to attorney Peter Hoffman of Legal Services of Eastern Missouri, a nonprofit that has been providing pro bono services to tornado victims.

“They find people in vulnerable situations that maybe don’t have equal access to information,” Hoffman said. Those issues—redlining, displacement, exploitation—existed before the tornado. But the storm, he said, brought them to the light.

Talking on the phone between orders of fish, fried okra, and potato salad while at his restaurant, Ozell’s Kitchen and Food Mart, DeAmon White reflected on the last few months. Rebuilding his home has been hard. Though he does have insurance, he expects his home won’t be livable until February or March, the better part of a year after the tornado. Because he’s disabled, with a partially amputated foot, he stays mostly on the first floor of his mother’s house. A neighbor of his is still living in a camper on her lot. Others, he said, took the offer to sell. Right now, there are only four families left on his block. On August 21, White said, his mother received an offer in the mail: A man named Chris wanted to buy her home for about two-thirds of what it was worth.

“I really would like the people who are in the line of gentrification to realize what it is they have, and if they can, don’t sell out,” White said. “I know money talks, and when you’re in a stressful situation you got to do what you got to do, but resist, you know?”

Mother JonesSep 5, 2025, 8:44 PM

Baltimore’s Mayor Slams Trump Troop Threat: “What We Want from the President Is Very Simple.”

President Trump is planning to ramp up his federal reach into local enforcement after first flooding the streets of DC with National Guard troops, and this week he promised to send troops to more cities—including Baltimore.

Despite a federal judge ruling that Trump broke the law when deploying the National Guard in Los Angeles earlier this summer, Trump insisted during a press conference on Tuesday that his administration had “a right to do it because I have an obligation to do it to protect this country… and that includes Baltimore.”

Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott has been speaking out in defense of his city, including in a sit-down interview this week with me. Scott pushed back against Trump’s claims, saying that this year, his city has witnessed “the fewest amount of homicides through this date on record. That’s a 50-year low, and that’s still not good enough for me.” The Washington Post recently reported that homicide rates in Baltimore have plummeted nearly 23 percent compared with the first half of 2024, while non-fatal shootings fell by nearly 20 percent.

Scott also decried federal cuts to the very programs he says have been instrumental in reducing crime in Baltimore.

“Community violence intervention, victim services, all of those kinds of services that have been cut,” he said. “What we want from the president is very simple — reinstating all the cuts that they’ve made to federal grants to programs that have been working to reduce violence.”

Watch the full video here:

Mother JonesSep 5, 2025, 8:12 PM

DeSantis Celebrates as Appeals Court Blocks Dismantling of Alligator Alcatraz

An appeals court has temporarily blocked a federal judge’s decision ordering Florida and federal officials to begin winding down operations at Alligator Alcatraz, the controversial immigration detention center in the Everglades that opened in July.

As I reported last month, in response to a lawsuit filed in June by environmental groups, US District Judge Kathleen Williams had ordered the dismantling of equipment at the detention camp, such as fencing, lighting, generators, and other infrastructure, as well as a pause on the transfer of detainees to the site. The groups had argued that the construction of the camp proceeded without an environmental review or opportunity for public comment, in violation of the National Environmental Policy Act. But the state of Florida argued that the facility was a state-run operation, and, therefore, federal environmental protection laws did not apply.

Hastily erected in late June on a remote airfield by Big Cypress National Preserve, Alligator Alcatraz has been fraught with reports of malfunctioning air conditioners, scarce food, and rampant mosquitoes. Detainees are held in large white tents, each containing multiple fenced areas with 32 beds and three toilets. State and federal officials running the center have previously stated that the camp would be for immigrants with criminal records, but as the Miami Herald reported in July, many detainees have no prior arrests. In July, nearly 1,000 detainees were being held at Alligator Alcatraz. This week, The New York Times reported that between 120 to 125 detainees are currently at the center.

In her ruling, Williams had sided with the environmentalists. “The project was requested by the federal government; built with a promise of full federal funding; constructed in compliance with ICE standards; staffed by deputized ICE Task Force Officers acting under color of federal authority and at the direction and supervision of ICE officials,” she wrote, “and exists for the sole purpose of detaining and deporting those subject to federal immigration enforcement.” Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier promptly filed a notice indicating the state would appeal to the US Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit.

In a 2-3 decision on Thursday, the three-judge panel in Atlanta granted the defendants’ request to pause Williams’ ruling pending a future decision on the appeal. The judges found that the detention center did not violate NEPA because it was funded by the state and not the federal government. “Obtaining funding from the federal government for a state project requires completing a formal and technical application process,” the ruling states, which has not yet occurred. Alligator Alcatraz is predicted to cost $450 million a year, and the DeSantis administration has previously stated it would seek FEMA funds to cover those expenses.

“Alligator Alcatraz is in fact, like we always said, open for business.”

Florida officials celebrated the ruling on social media. “Alligator Alcatraz is in fact, like we always said, open for business,” Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said in a video posted to his X account. “We are going to continue leading the way when it comes to immigration enforcement.”

Meanwhile, Friends of the Everglades, one of the plaintiffs in the case, issued a statement saying that “the case is far from over.”

“While disappointing, we never expected ultimate success to be easy,” Eve Samples, executive director of Friends of the Everglades, said in the statement. “We’re hopeful the preliminary injunction will be affirmed when it’s reviewed on its merits during the appeal.” Talbert Cypress, chairman of the Miccosukee Tribe of Indians, which later joined the lawsuit as a plaintiff due to the detention center’s close proximity to their communities in the Everglades, told the Miami Herald they were “disappointed in the majority’s decision to stay the injunction. We were prepared for this result and will continue to litigate this matter.”