ICE Is Sending People to a Prison in Africa’s Only Absolute Monarchy

Eswatini, the landlocked nation formerly known as Swaziland, is Africa’s last remaining absolute monarchy. It is the kind of place where King Mswati III—who took the throne as an 18-year-old four decades ago—can warn in a speech in 2023 that nobody should “complain if mercenaries kill” political activists. When one of the country’s leading human rights lawyers is murdered only hours later, the king’s representatives will suggest there is no connection. No one will be punished.

In other words, Eswatini is just the kind of country—small, untroubled by democracy, and presumably eager to avoid a superpower’s wrath—with which the Trump administration has been eager to do business.

In May, officials from the US and Eswatini signed a deal that allows the Trump administration to deport people from all over the world to the African nation. A copy of the arrangement I reviewed shows that the United States has agreed to pay Eswatini $5.1 million to take in up to 160 so-called “third country nationals”—immigrants who came to the US with no ties to the country to which they are being deported.

A practice that would have been unthinkable under past administrations is becoming normalized: Sending ICE detainees, without due process, to far-flung prisons.

In July, the first five of those men arrived in Eswatini, where they were sent to a maximum security prison and detained in the country without any clear legal basis. Last weekend, the Trump administration sent ten more people to the Eswatini prison. None of the fifteen men sent to the nation are from Eswatini. But they are now under the authority of its king.

The situation is a “legal black hole,” according to Tin Thanh Nguyen, a North Carolina-based attorney who is representing five men from Vietnam and Laos now imprisoned in the African country. As he explained in a statement on Monday, “I cannot call [my clients]. I cannot email them. I cannot communicate through local counsel because the Eswatini government blocks all attorney access.”

Activists hold candles and posters in tribute to the assassinated human right lawyer Thulani Maseko in Nakuru Town, Kenya. Maseko was brutally killed in front of his wife and two young children by unknown assailants at his home after agitating for the end of the monarchy in Eswatini.James Wakibia/SOPA Images/ZUMA

The arrangement with Eswatini, which has a population of 1.1 million, is similar to the deal that allowed the United States to send more than 200 Venezuelans to an infamous Salvadoran prison earlier this year. The Venezuelans sent to the Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT)—most of whom had no criminal history—were released in July as part of a prisoner swap following sustained international outrage. (As we reported, ICE targeted many Venezuelans because of tattoos that the agency falsely claimed were evidence of gang membership.)

The CECOT disappearances led to international outrage. But the Trump administration’s efforts to offload people to a prison in Eswatini, along with similar arrangements with South Sudan and other African nations, have attracted much less attention.

A practice that would have been unthinkable under past administrations is becoming normalized: Sending ICE detainees, without due process, to far-flung prisons in countries with notorious human rights records.

The Department of Homeland Security did not respond to a request for comment. DHS Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin warned in a statement last month: “If you come to our country illegally, you could end up in CECOT or a country you didn’t even know existed.” Eswatini’s US embassy also did not respond to a request for comment.

The legal pathway for third-country deportations became far easier this summer.

In May, the Trump administration tried to summarily remove a small group of third-country nationals to South Sudan, despite a preliminary injunction from a federal judge in Massachusetts that clearly blocked the move. At an emergency hearing in May, Judge Brian Murphy found that DHS’s conduct was “unquestionably violative” of his preliminary injunction. He ordered the men not to be handed over to South Sudan.

In late June, the Supreme Court removed the protections Murphy put in place—effectively rewarding the Trump administration for flagrantly disobeying court orders. Justice Sonia Sotomayor excoriated the move in a dissent joined by Justices Ketanji Brown Jackson and Elena Kagan.

“Apparently,” Sotomayor wrote, “the Court finds the idea that thousands will suffer violence in farflung locales more palatable than the remote possibility that a District Court exceeded its remedial powers.” (At another point, Sotomayor compared the administration’s legal nitpicking in the case to an “arsonist who calls 911 to report firefighters for violating a local noise ordinance.”)

DHS quickly took advantage of the power granted it by the Supreme Court’s conservative majority.

In July, the department followed through on the South Sudan removals andannounced the first five deportations to Eswatini. In a series of social media posts, DHS claimed the men were so “uniquely barbaric that their home countries refused to take them back.” The posts said that the men sent to Eswatini—who were from Cuba, Jamaica, Laos, Vietnam, and Yemen—had been convicted in the United States of serious criminal offenses, including murder and rape.

The severity of the crimes obscures the legal stakes of the case. All of the men DHS sent to Eswatini had served their sentences and been ordered deported. The question was (and is) not whether they can be deported—it is whether the Trump administration has the authority to send people anywhere it wants, without due process, and imprison them in countries where the detainees have never broken any law.

Trina Realmuto, one of the lead lawyers in the case before Murphy, stressed that all of the class members she is representing have rights regardless of their criminal histories.

“But make no mistake,” Realmuto, the executive director of the National Immigration Litigation Alliance, said, “this is going to happen to people without criminal convictions.”

DHS did not name the people it sent to Eswatini, but it did share their photos. Through those photos, family members and friends in the United States learned that their relatives had been sent to a small kingdom on the other side of the world. It would be about two weeks before they were able to speak with them.

Nguyen, the North Carolina immigration lawyer, and two other American lawyers who took the cases of the men in Eswatini quickly, began working with Sibusiso Nhlabatsi, who is well known in Eswatini for his work as a human rights lawyer.

Nhlabatsi was also a colleague and close friend of Thulani Maseko, the activist and lawyer killed in 2023 while watching television at home with his wife and two young children. No one has ever been held accountable for his friend’s murder, and Nhlabatsi said he fears for his own “safety every day” due to his work. “It’s a risk that you have to take,” he told me. “Unfortunately, sometimes you have to pay the highest price.”

“It’s a monarchy. Nobody wants to be the person who does the wrong thing or does the thing they’re not supposed to do. But nobody really knows what they’re supposed to be doing.”

So far, Nhlabatsi’s efforts to represent the people sent to Eswatini from the United States have been thwarted by the kingdom. For the first time in his career, Nhlabatsi said that prison officials have repeatedly denied him the chance to meet with his clients at the prison.

In response, Nhlabatsi filed suit to try to force the courts in Eswatini to allow him access to the men deported from the United States. But what has happened since has been Kafkaesque.

King Mswati III of Eswatini and one of his wives arrive ahead of the inauguration of South Africa’s Cyril Ramaphosa as President at the Union Buildings in Pretoria.Phill Magakoe/Pool/AFP/Getty

After taking the government to court, Nhlabatsi said a legal adviser for the country’s prison system told him that he would be able to meet his clients. But when he returned to the Matsapha Correctional Complex—which houses the maximum security prison where the men are being held—Nhlabatsi said he was “pushed from pillar to post” and made to wait hours. Finally, Nhlabatsi told me the head of the prison told him that he would not be able to meet with his clients after all. The reason was absurd: The prison director claimed the men were refusing to see him.

A close friend of Roberto Mosquera, the Cuban national sent to Eswatini in July, said Mosquera told her during a brief call that he never refused to meet with Nhlabatsi. She said that officials in Eswatini “just blatantly lie and say that Mr. Mosquera refuses counsel.”

Mia Unger, an immigration attorney at the Legal Aid Society in New York, represented a man sent to Eswatini named Orville Etoria. “He requested to speak with us numerous times, and he wasn’t allowed,” Unger said. “They didn’t allow him to call us.”

Etoria’s story is particularly galling because there appears to be no basis for DHS’s claim that Jamaica, his home country, refused to take him back. Unger said that Etoria, who was convicted of murder nearly three decades ago and released from prison in 2021, was asked by Immigration and Customs Enforcement to obtain a Jamaican passport at a check-in earlier this year. He got the passport, went to another ICE check-in in June, and was taken into custody. Unger said “there was never any question of whether he was able to go to Jamaica.” As a result, it should have been illegal to send him to Eswatini. (US law makes it clear that people can only be deported to third countries when it is “impracticable, inadvisable or impossible” to countries to which they have close ties.)

After Etoria arrived in Eswatini, Jamaica’s government immediately made clear that it had not refused to take him back. And in September, after being imprisoned for two months at Matsapha, Etoria returned to the Caribbean island. (A Mexican national sent to South Sudan was also repatriated after the Mexican government facilitated his return.)

Alma David, an immigration attorney with Novo Legal, is representing Mosquera and Kassim Saleh Wasil, a Yemeni national in Eswatini. She told me the head of the Matsapha prison said via WhatsApp that the only way to have an unmonitored conversation with her clients would be for her or another attorney to come in person. She noted that Nhlabatsi had tried, and that he had been repeatedly turned away. In response, David said the prison chief told her that Nhlabatsi needed to go to the US embassy to get permission to meet with his clients.

It is unclear what the actual policies are. “It’s a monarchy,” David explained. “Nobody wants to be the person who does the wrong thing or does the thing they’re not supposed to do. But nobody really knows what they’re supposed to be doing.”

“All of these people had served their sentences,” she stressed about the men sent to Eswatini. “They were living in the community, and were not considered a danger to anybody until one day they were picked up and sent to Eswatini.”

When we first spoke late last month, Nhlabatsi said that he would soon be in court to secure an order allowing him to meet with the men sent from the United States. Last Friday, he said that the court ordered him to have access. But it came with a major caveat: the government immediately appealed the judgment.

It means that Nhlabatsi is likely months away from being able to meet with his clients—if he is able to do so at all. The goal appears to be to try to stonewall until the men are removed from Eswatini, at which point their claims would become moot.

Nhlabatsi said that the case has become big news in his country. Many residents have not been happy to learn that their government is holding people convicted of serious crimes in the United States. In contrast to the propaganda video El Salvador released after Venezuelans arrived at CECOT, Eswatini’s government seems to have tried to draw as little attention as possible to what it’s doing on behalf of the United States. (Nhlabatsi said he does not believe that the men are being physically abused while in custody, but added that being in prison is bad enough.)

Textile workers walk on a street after the end of their shifts at a nearby factory in Matsapha, Eswatini.Michele Spatari/AFP/Getty

ICE is now doubling down on these deportations. Nguyen, the North Carolina lawyer, said ICE told a group of men in detention in the United States last Friday that they were about to be deported to Eswatini. Nguyen said that the new group of deportees includes people from Cambodia, Chad, Cuba, the Philippines, and Vietnam. Flight tracking records indicate that the plane carrying them arrived in the nation around midnight on Monday. (Unlike the first five people sent to Eswatini, this group was able to make short calls after arriving in the country, according to Nguyen.)

Court records show that Mosquera, the Cuban national sent to Eswatini in July, was arrested in 1988 and later convicted for attempted first-degree murder. (ICE has incorrectly claimed that he was convicted of homicide.) He was later ordered deported, but the federal government was apparently unable to remove him to Cuba, which has often refused to accept deportees. Following additional arrests in 2008 and 2015, Mosquera was convicted of offenses including grand theft auto, assaulting a law enforcement official, and misdemeanor assault.

Mosquera’s close friend, who requested anonymity due to fear of potential retaliation by ICE, said Mosquera had “paid his dues to society” and had turned his life around by the time he was detained by ICE at a routine check-in this June. She said Mosquera, who came to the United States as a boy more than 40 years ago, should never have been sent to a prison in a country in which he has never committed any crime.

“I used to believe in the Constitution,” Mosquera’s friend said. “I used to believe that I lived in the greatest country in the world.” She explained that she was born in the United States after her parents left Cuba in the early 1960s. “But this is not the America that I grew up in,” she continued. “This is a whole different America.”

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As Troops Invade Chicago, Trump Threatens to Jail the Mayor and Governor

On Wednesday morning, President Donald Trump did something he has done many times before: He called for his perceived political enemies to be jailed.

Taking to Truth Social, Trump declared thatthe mayor of Chicago, Democrat Brandon Johnson, “should be in jail for failing to protect Ice Officers!”

“Governor Pritzker also!” Trump added.

Trump’s post comes on the heels of recent clashes between Illinois protesters and ICE officers, who have been carrying out what they call “Operation Midway Blitz,” an enforcement effort in Chicago that DHS says has led to more than 1,000 arrests. On Monday, Johnson signed an executive order prohibiting ICE from using city property in its immigration enforcement efforts.

And as I wrote on Sunday, Pritzker said this weekend that the Trump administration planned to deploy 300 National Guard troops to Illinois “against our will.” He later said the troops would be coming from Texas and called on Gov. Greg Abbott (R-Texas) to block the deployment; Abbott, for his part, said he authorized the move. Illinois leaders and the ACLU of Illinois have opposed the move. A majority of Americans, including Republicans, don’t think the National Guard should be deployed to cities without “external threats,” according to a new Reuters/Ipsos poll released on Wednesday. On Monday, Illinois’ Attorney General, Kwame Raoul, filed a lawsuit alleging the deployment of troops is “unconstitutional and/or unlawful.” Some troops have reportedly already arrived in Illinois.

Both Pritzker and Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-Calif.) are threatening to withdraw from the National Governors Association if the bipartisan organization does not more forcefully condemn Trump’s National Guard deployments to American cities—including Los Angeles, Washington, DC, and Portland (though a federal judge blocked the Portland deployment over the weekend). “This is precisely the federal and interstate overreach we warned against—gubernatorial authority being trampled, state sovereignty being ignored, and the constitutional balance between states being attacked,” Pritzker said in his statement criticizing the group. (The NGA did not immediately respond to a request for comment.)

In response to Trump’s latest post calling for him and Johnson to be jailed, Pritzker wrote on X Wednesday morning, “I will not back down.”

“What else is left on the path to full-blown authoritarianism?” the Illinois governor added.

Meanwhile, Johnson said: “This is not the first time Trump has tried to have a Black man unjustly arrested. I’m not going anywhere.” Trump has, for example, previously suggested that the Department of Justice should target former President Barack Obama.

If you think Trump’s latest threats are just bluster, consider that former FBI Director James Comey was arraigned today after being indicted last month by the DOJ—a longtime dream of Trump’s. Comey pleaded not guilty.

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Did MAGA Conspiracy Theories Doom the Lab-Grown Burger?

Scientists once predicted meat-making machines on every kitchen counter, but so far cultured meat—grown from the cells of an animal in a lab or factory—has only been seen at a handful of high-end restaurants. There are entirely practical reasons the stuff has yet to make its debut at McDonald’s, but also bizarre, conspiratorial ones; some states have already banned it for reasons that include “global elites” and “bugs.”

First imagined in 19th-century science fiction, cultured meat became a reality in the early 2000s when NASA grew fish tissue in a liquid serum. The first peer-reviewed paper on the topic, in 2005_,_ predicted that cultured meat could address consumer concerns over “nutrition-­related diseases, foodborne illnesses, resource use and pollution,” and the ethical implications of raising animals for meat.

The years that followed brought a mini-boom of research boosted by powerful investors like Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos. But the technology was pricey and the environmental gains didn’t pan out. While early ­analyses­ predicted that emissions from meat production could be reduced by up to 96 percent, those estimates were downgraded over the years; one paper even argued the environmental impact of lab-grown beef could be greater than that of cattle.

In 2022, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene asserted that the government was “surveilling” Americans with meat grown in petri dishes

Farmers didn’t take lab-grown meat seriously until about 10 years ago, when farmed animal protein was on the outs because of its association with climate change and heart disease. “Meatless Mondays” were in their Oprah-boosted heyday, plant-based burgers like Impossible and Beyond were exploding in popularity, and the agricultural giant Tyson Foods had invested in lab-grown meat startups and launched its own plant-based products. By 2019, the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association (NCBA) was lobbying states to pass laws limiting the use of terms like “hot dogs” and “burgers” to the marketing of farmed animal products. You’d have to say veggie “tubes” or “pucks.” (Tofurky sued, and the restrictions were deemed unconstitutional, except when the meat-related words were being used deceptively.)

The next year, Singapore became the first country to approve cultured meat for consumption. The United States followed in 2023, and two companies (including one backed by Gates) brought to market lab-grown chicken products, which are as yet too expensive for most consumers.

In the interim, right-wing trendsetters were busy spreading conspiracy theories about lab-grown meat. In 2022, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene asserted that the government was “surveilling” Americans with meat grown in petri dishes, and that the deep state would “zap” those who ate a real burger. Though widely mocked, Greene was tapping into a growing political movement that had begun the year before, with influencers going viral for promoting “real”—often raw—meat. The most famous one, Liver King, touted a meat-heavy “ancestral lifestyle” on TikTok that included eating raw organs and questionable “natural” supplements. He later admitted he was also ingesting copious amounts of steroids, but the trend stuck. Proponents, including doctors-turned-influencers, highlighted supposed benefits of animal meat—including increased testosterone and sperm count—and derided people who preferred plant-based options as “soy boys.”

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who brags of his “caveman”-style carnivore diet, drummed up concern about lab-grown meat when he served as chair of the anti-vaccine nonprofit Children’s Health Defense, calling it a ­“catastrophe-in-the-making” and, weirdly, “the death knell to Thomas Jefferson’s vision of a democracy.” Soon white supremacists were posting that Gates and other supposed shadowy “globalists” were pushing the government to replace traditional meat with stuff made from bugs. Tucker Carlson seized upon this particular bit of lunacy, devoting an episode of his show to it and declaring, “Eating insects is repulsive and un-American.” One of his guests said the push for bugs was “because they want these farmers’ land.”

This was red meat for the MAGA base. In May 2024, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signed the first statewide lab-meat ban. “Florida is fighting back against the global elite’s plan to force the world to eat meat grown in a petri dish or bugs to achieve their authoritarian goals,” he proclaimed. Earlier this year, in the lead-up to ­Nebraska’s ban, a state senator warned that cultivated meat would “socially engineer” people away from farmed meat, while Gov. Jim ­Pillen declared it the result of “crazy far-left ideology.”

Despite such rants, the cattle ­industry seems less concerned now than it was a few years ago. The NCBA has reversed course and come out against the state bans, some of which have failed. Trump’s FDA recently approved a cultured salmon product from the Bezos-backed company Wildtype.

What’s behind the about-face? Politics might be part of it. Fourth-generation Nebraska rancher Dan Morgan recently told the Associated Press that banning meat alternatives seems antithetical to free-­market innovation. “It sounds like a bunch of right-wing Republicans echoing a bunch of left-wing Democrats,” he quipped.

What’s more, the whole idea of lab-grown meat appears to give folks the ick: In one 2022 survey, people deemed it “equally or more healthy, but more disgusting than conventional meat products.” As long as prices are high and consumers are weirded out, conventional producers have little to worry about. As the Cattlemen’s director of government affairs put it last year, “We’re not afraid of competing with these products in the marketplace.”

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Sunrise Movement’s New Focus: Fighting Authoritarianism

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

As the Trump administration cracks down on both environmental policies and progressive activism, the Sunrise Movement, the youth-led climate justice organization that popularized calls for a Green New Deal, is widening its mission to fight authoritarianism.

“Every day, Donald Trump is seizing power and shredding the Constitution,” Sunrise’s executive director, Aru Shiney-Ajay, wrote in an open letter to Sunrise members, funders and allies. “What ordinary people do in the coming months will determine whether he and his billionaire cronies can cement their grip on power and turn this country into a playground for the rich and powerful.”

Unlike the majority of Sunrise’s past work, its newer efforts will not necessarily center the climate crisis. But Stevie O’Hanlon, a co-founder and spokesperson for Sunrise, said the projects will aim to build a world where climate action is possible.

“In order to win the bold action that we’ll need to prevent climate catastrophe, we’re going to need a country where we have the right to dissent and protest,” she said. “How are we going to win on climate under authoritarianism?”

One key focus will be campus organizing to urge schools to resist Trump’s attempts to control their curricula and rules around political dissent, the letter from Shiney-Ajay says. Another will be garnering rapid responses to the administration’s deployment of troops and immigration policies to cities, and attempts to “infringe on our First Amendment rights.” And a third expansion area will be training young activists to “recognize authoritarianism” and resist it using nonviolent tactics.

The missive formalizes work already underway at Sunrise. Last month, the group helped organize student walkouts at four Washington, DC, universities to protest Trump’s deployment of the National Guard and their intimidation of activists and immigrants. Two weeks later, the organization staged a comedy show-cum-demonstration outside ABC’s New York headquarters in response to the network’s temporary suspension of “Jimmy Kimmel Live!”.

Chapters have been taking on localized fights for free speech and immigrant rights, as well. At Duke University’s Sunrise chapter, activists have focused on protecting a beloved campus bus driver whose temporary protected status was revoked by the Trump administration last month—and who subsequently lost his job of 20 years. They are also urging school officials to overturn anti-protest policies and developing pro-worker campaigns alongside labor justice groups.

“In order to win a Green New Deal, climate justice, labor justice, racial justice, etc…we’re gonna need to defeat authoritarianism,” said Artivista Karlin, a junior at Duke University who organizes with the campus Sunrise chapter, who said that under Trump, the US has seen an “unprecedented manifestation of fascism.”

We need to overhaul our democracy “so that we are not in a situation where someone like Donald Trump can consolidate power in this kind of way ever again.”

Future Sunrise Movement efforts could include nationwide efforts to stop Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids, campaigns to back city officials standing up to Trump, and actions to resist Republicans’ cuts to healthcare programs. The organization will also build toward a mass student mobilization on May 1, 2028, when United Auto Workers president Shawn Fain has called for a general strike.

The refocus comes seven years after Sunrise captured national headlines when its members stormed the office of then incoming House speaker Nancy Pelosi. Joined by then freshman New York representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the group demanded the rapid phase-out of fossil fuels, the creation of good jobs, and the strengthening of social programs across the US. The policy platform, which they called the Green New Deal, helped inspire some of Joe Biden’s green policies, most notably the Inflation Reduction Act.

O’Hanlon sees the new tactics as an outgrowth of the fight for a Green New Deal, which highlighted how climate is intertwined with all other major social issues.

“The Green New Deal is critical for laying out an alternative world from the one that Donald Trump is portraying,” she said. “We’re going to keep talking about that, keep fighting for that vision, but in the short term, we need to also be confronting, their assault on our communities and on our rights.”

The shift also comes as climate concerns slip slightly down the list of electoral concerns in favor of economic issues, though evidence shows most people still want to draw down emissions. “My guess is you’re not going to see a lot of politicians using the word ‘climate,’ because people see that as a nice-to-have [concern], not a must-have, and right now they’re in the must-have mode,” Biden’s energy secretary, Jennifer Granholm, told reporters in New York last month.

Democratic presidential hopeful Kamala Harris last year came under fire for messaging around the threat Trump poses to democracy, rather than economic concerns, with some blaming the shift for her loss of the 2024 election. But O’Hanlon says concerns about authoritarianism feel more potent to Americans amid current attacks from the administration, and that Sunrise’s new campaigns will be far more concrete than Harris’s.

“A lot of the messaging on the Harris campaign was focused on this abstract idea of democracy, of saving democracy, but I think most people in this country feel like democracy is pretty broken,” she said. “When you’re talking about saving democracy, then people understand that as saving a broken political system that very, very few people think is working, and Donald Trump was able to position himself as the person who is going to disrupt and change the broken system.”

Sunrise, by contrast, will focus on the need for major changes, including the removal of corporate interests such as the fossil fuel industry from politics.

“We’re being very clear that yes, we need to defend rights to free speech, [but] we also need to be serious about overhauling our democracy so that we are not in a situation where someone like Donald Trump can consolidate power in this kind of way ever again,” O’Hanlon said.

The expansion comes amid an all-out assault from the White House on both green protections and progressive organizing. Since January, the president has rolled back hundreds of environmental rules demolished Biden-era incentives for carbon-free technologies. In recent weeks he also designated the decentralized antifascist movement, antifa, a “terrorist organization,” and issued a memorandum aimed at reining in what he calls the radical leftwing domestic “terror network.”

Last week, Trump said George Soros, the billionaire philanthropist who funds the Open Society Foundations (OSF), is “a likely candidate” for prosecution for unspecified charges. Sunrise obtained $2.1 million from the foundations between 2019 and 2023, OSF’s website shows.

“We will raise our voices against this authoritarian abuse of power,” Shiney-Ajay said.

Trump this week also posted Trump 2028 hats on social media, indicating interest in a potential, unconstitutional third term. “We are just seeing outright disrespect for our constitutional rights, and we can’t accept that,” said O’Hanlon.

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The Race to Stop AI’s Threats to Democracy

OpenAI became the world’s most valuable private company last week after a stock deal pushed the value of the artificial intelligence developer to $500 billion. The company and its remarkable chatbot ChatGPT have single-handedly accelerated AI’s boom and threatened to upend much of how we work, create, learn, and communicate in the process.

But when OpenAI was founded a decade ago, the company’s approach to artificial intelligence wasn’t taken seriously in Silicon Valley. Tech journalist Karen Hao has been covering OpenAI’s astounding rise for years and recently wrote a book about the company, Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman’s OpenAI. She says that while many in Silicon Valley warn of AI’s sci fi–like threats, the real risks are already here.

“We are allowing the tech industry to consolidate this extraordinary degree of resources unlike anything ever before,” she tells More To The Story host Al Letson. “We thought that they were already powerful during the social media era. In the AI era, the amount of resources and the amount of influence and domination that they now have is of a fundamentally different degree.”

The Center for Investigative Reporting, which produces Mother Jones, Reveal, and More To The Story, is currently suing OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement.

On this week’s More To The Story, Hao sounds the alarm about the risks to the planet from AI’s growth, examines the Trump administration’s efforts to deregulate the industry, and explains why the version of AI being developed by Silicon Valley could destabilize democracy.

This following interview was edited for length and clarity. More To The Story transcripts are produced by a third-party transcription service and may contain errors.

Al Letson: I’m hoping that you can walk me back from the ledge, because I am so worried about my namesake, AI. So many times, someone will write AI, and I think they’re saying Al, and, “No, dummy. It’s AI.” But no, I tend to use AI often. I’m dyslexic. So I tend to use OpenAI or ChatGPT to proofread, especially if I’m sending out emails or whatever. I just want to make sure that all the dyslexia is taken out. And because I use it for those purposes, I see what it can do. And to be honest, it scares the hell out of me. So for me, when I work with ChatGPT, I am wondering, for lack of better terms, if we are close to the singularity, where everything changes and the world is no longer recognizable from what it used to be. And so, I think the question that I’m thinking about a lot is, are we nearing the singularity where everything is going to shift because of OpenAI?

Karen Hao: It’s such a good question, because there are so many different ways of answering it. One of the challenges of the AI discipline and the AI industry is that there’s sort of a lack of definitional clarity about what the milestones are for AI progress. And part of that is because the idea of artificial intelligence or recreating human intelligence in computers, we don’t have any scientific consensus around what human intelligence is, and then we don’t really have any scientific consensus around what it would mean if we actually did accomplish this goal of fundamentally simulating it in digital technologies.

And so, on one hand, if we were to define the singularity as that kind of moment, then there’s a raging debate within the AI research world about whether AI can actually even ever get there, and 75% of scientists who study this would actually say that current AI models and the existing techniques for advancing AI are probably not going to get us there, if AI can ever do that at all.

But if you were to define the singularity as just the technology having a kind of fundamental transformation on the way that we work and live and everything, I think that’s already happened. Everyone is already grappling with the impacts of AI in various different ways on the multifaceted landscape of their lives.

You said something earlier that really struck me. There’s no scientific consensus around human intelligence, which I would argue given the world we are in today, yeah. I don’t know if human intelligence is such a thing anymore, but if we can’t really judge human intelligence, if scientists, people who have more intelligence than me, cannot say specifically what human intelligence is, then I imagine it’s near impossible to say what computer intelligence or artificial intelligence is.

There’s a really dark history around attempts to quantify human intelligence. There’s basically never been any endeavor to quantify or rank human intelligence without some kind of insidious motivation behind it. So in general, yeah, this entire idea of recreating human intelligence is actually quite fraught. And also, one of the challenges that we’re facing now is, the AI industry has become so resource-rich that most of the AI researchers in the world now are bankrolled by the companies that are ultimately trying to just sell us their technologies.

And there has become this distortion in the fundamental science that is coming out of these researchers in terms of understanding the capabilities and limitations of AI today in the same way that you would imagine climate science would be deeply distorted if most climate scientists were bankrolled by the fossil fuel industry. You would just not get an accurate picture on the actual climate crisis.

And so, we are not actually getting an accurate picture on the capabilities of these systems and all of the different ways that they break down, because a lot of these companies now censor that kind of research or don’t even allow that research to be resourced. So there’s never any investigation along those lines.

You’ve been an AI insider for a while now. You’ve got a degree in mechanical engineering from MIT. When did you start reporting on AI, and are you surprised at how quickly the field has grown?

Yeah. I started reporting on AI in 2017, 2018. And in 2018, I took a job at MIT Technology Review to cover the fundamental AI research that was happening in academia and within corporate labs. And at that time, the AI industry really wasn’t… It didn’t really exist yet. I mean, there were certainly efforts to commercialize the technology, but it was primarily back-office tasks. It was things like Google improving its search engine or Facebook improving its recommendation algorithm, but not actually consumer AI products where you could talk with the AI model or type directly into this chat for it to generate images.

And I have been really surprised. I mean, it’s so interesting, because OpenAI, I was the first journalist to profile OpenAI back in… I embedded within their office for three days in 2019, and then my profile published in early 2020. And at that time, it’s hard to sort of explain to people today, OpenAI was sort of the laughingstock of the AI field and of the tech industry.

People did not take that company seriously, in part because the approach that they said that they were going to take to AI development, which is ultimately what has come to pass, was they were just going to take existing AI techniques and technologies and throw more data on it and use larger supercomputers to train it. And people didn’t think that that would lead to advancements that we see today.

They thought this is an intellectually lazy approach. That’s not real research. We’re not actually investing in real breakthroughs here. But in the end, it turns out that there is a lot of interesting things that happen when you do that. And because they took that approach, they were able to do it very, very quickly, far faster than anyone else could have imagined. So absolutely, I would have never predicted that we would be where we are.

I want to talk a little bit specifically about OpenAI. So it started off as an altruistic organization with a unique structure created by Sam Altman. Can you talk me through that a little bit? How did it start? What happened with the rise and fall and rise again of Sam Altman? That whole story.

Yeah. So OpenAI started as a nonprofit at the end of 2015, and it was co-founded by Elon Musk and Sam Altman. And the origin story for how the two of them came together is that Musk was deeply, deeply concerned about the fact that Google was starting to develop a monopoly on AI talent at the time. They had acquired some of the top AI researchers in the world through the buying out of three researchers that basically started the first AI revolution, AI industry revolution, and as well as the acquisition of DeepMind, the London-based AI lab.

And Musk thought if Google is going to have a controlling influence on this technology, and Google is a for-profit company, that could potentially lead to AI development going very sideways. And what Musk meant by it going very sideways is not that it would then be unsafe for consumers, that it might have bias and discrimination, that it might have huge environmental impacts. What he specifically meant was AI might develop consciousness and then turn against humans and destroy everyone, which is a very sci-fi premise that has taken hold in a lot of parts of the AI industry.

Altman, he was the president of Y Combinator at the time, and he is a very strategic person. He essentially starts cultivating this relationship with Musk, telling him that he agrees with all of these concerns. He also is worried about rogue AI. He’s also worried about Google having a control on this technology, and he essentially proposes to Musk after a bit of a courtship, “Well, why don’t we actually create an organization that is antithetical to everything Google stands for? It’ll be a nonprofit instead of a for-profit. It’ll be highly transparent instead of secretive. It’ll be very collaborative, work together with all of these different entities to ensure ultimately that this technology goes well for humanity.” And so, they create this organization. But key to this origin story, which I sort of didn’t quite articulate until years later, is there is a very egotistical element to that origin. Right? Musk and Altman were basically saying, “We’re the good guys. We want to be the ones that create AI in our image so that it goes well for everyone in humanity.”

And so, it sort of was a natural consequence that then one-and-a-half years into the organization, when they were thinking about, “How do we actually make sure that we dominate, not Google?” that they came to the conclusion that they needed to advance AI faster than Google, faster than anyone else, and the best way or the way to guarantee that was to take these existing techniques, throw extraordinary amounts of data and computational resources at it, and that meant that they just had to build larger supercomputers than had ever been built in history. And then suddenly, the bottleneck was cash. A nonprofit structure didn’t work anymore. They needed some kind of for-profit to raise that level of cash, and OpenAI started its transition away from nonprofit to what is now the most capitalistic organization today, nearing a $500 billion valuation. And basically, since then, Altman led the organization. Musk left.

And there have been these allegations that have continued to follow Altman through his time at OpenAI as well as through the rest of his career that he has this slipperiness about him where he tells people what they want to hear, the same way that he told Musk what he wanted to hear, to sort of extract what he needs out of them, but then he might shift course at any moment to just continue doing what he ultimately wants to do, and no one can quite ascertain what it is that is his actual endgame.

But that basically then led to this very dramatic moment of reckoning where a lot of people suddenly lost trust in his leadership as the head of OpenAI. The board decides to fire him. But then because Altman is just so good at fundraising and so good at amassing the kinds of resources that OpenAI foresaw themselves needing to continue perpetuating what they want to do, that then employees rallied around bringing him back again, because they were concerned that without him, they wouldn’t get access to those resources. And now, he’s, you could argue, stronger than ever.

Yeah. And him and Elon seemed to have beef with each other. I’ve seen both of them making snide remarks about the other. Is that because of the breakup with OpenAI?

It is. So at the time that Musk decided to part, it was amicable. But as OpenAI continued to succeed more and more and more, Musk became more and more frustrated that he was not part of that success, and he then started to feel that he had really been tricked by Altman, because it was originally Musk’s reputation and Musk’s money that allowed OpenAI to establish a strong foundation for its later success. And so, that is why they’re kind of at each other’s throats these days.

I want to talk to you about your reporting that focused on Africa and South America. So early on in the development of ChatGPT, the company hired people there to work on data annotation. Tell me about the work they were doing, and do you think they were exploited?

Absolutely they were exploited. So yeah, everything that an AI system can do, it’s not because the AI system learned how to do it completely on its own. It is because there were human beings that taught the system how to do that. And that means that in order for the entire AI industry enterprise to function, they need to hire huge teams of workers to teach ChatGPT how to chat. The fact that it can even chat was a design decision, and there were workers that had to show ChatGPT, “This is what dialogue looks like. This is how humans converse. One person says one thing. Another person responds with related information.”

And there’s also, they have to do content moderation to make sure that the chatbot won’t spew crazy, racist, hateful, or other abusive content out of it. Most of that labor initially came from the Global South, because the AI industry was looking for the cheapest possible labor in the world. And one of the things that I talk about in my book is that, initially, they thought, “Oh, we want to go to English-speaking countries.” So they went to places like Kenya. They went to places like the Philippines, that have a history of colonialism, and therefore speak English, and also an understanding of American culture.

And now, in the generative AI era, when we see the need now for content moderation on these chatbots, I mean, we are repeating all of the same types of exploitation of content moderators in the social media era. So I went and met workers in Kenya that OpenAI contracted there to build their content moderation filter, and those workers ended up with extreme PTSD. Their personalities completely changed. They went from being extroverted or loving individuals to highly socially anxious, highly isolated. And one man-

What was it that made them that way? What in the work shifted their personalities like that?

They were wading through reams and reams of text that represented the worst content on the internet, because these chatbots… OpenAI decided at some point that they were going to train these chatbots on the entirety of the English-language internet. So they’re scraping all of this stuff willy-nilly, and the datasets have grown so large that they don’t even know what’s in there.
It would take too long for them to manually audit what’s in there. So there’s just a bunch of incredibly awful material that’s in there that is never taken out, which means that when you train an AI model, that AI model is then at risk of regurgitating all of that awful stuff, which would then make their consumer product highly untenable.

And so, they took different examples, thousands and thousands of different examples, of just the awfulness of that, both examples that they were finding on the internet as well as AI-generated, examples where OpenAI was prompting its own models to say, “Imagine the most awful thing that you could imagine.” And then giving it to the workers so that they had to read and then put into a detailed taxonomy exactly what was the badness of that content.

Was this violent content? Was this sexual content? Was it sexual abuse content? Was it child sexual abuse content? And reading that kind of stuff for eight hours a day, every day of the week, just completely deteriorated their mental health, and not just their mental health, but these people belong to communities. And when they break down, the people who depend on them also break down.

So I just want to talk a little bit about the cost of AI, because I think it’s really easy to forget when you’re on your computer, you’ve got a screen up, and you’re asking ChatGPT, or any other AI model, some questions that maybe five years ago, we would have popped it into Google and not gotten a great answer or gotten in the area of what we were looking for. And now, you can pop it into ChatGPT and really kind of fine-tune what you’re looking for. That being said, that is a very easy thing to do. Then recently, I found out the cost of that. Can you kind of walk me through what the cost of that is, both financially, but really I’m thinking about the environmental footprint that’s left behind by AI?

Overall, because of the amount of energy that is used to first develop these systems originally and then to deploy them at scale, McKinsey recently had a report that projected that based on the current pace of data center and supercomputer development to support this, we would need to add two to six times the amount of energy consumed by California onto the global grid in five years, by 2030, and most of that will be fossil fuels, because these data centers have to run around the clock. They cannot just pause when they’re serving up these models or training these models, like xAI with Grok.

There have been a lot of phenomenal journalistic investigations on the supercomputer that they’ve been using in Memphis, Tennessee, that is just being run on 35 unlicensed methane gas turbines that’s pumping thousands of pounds of toxins into the working-class communities in Memphis, Tennessee, who have long had a history of environmental injustice where they are unable to access this fundamental right to clean air.

And then that’s just the energy and air pollution side. There’s also the freshwater side of things where most of these data centers are cooled by water. You can also cool them with just energy, basically running massive air-conditioning units, but it is way more energy. So companies usually opt to cool with water because it’s more energy-efficient, but the water has to be fresh water, because any other type of water leads to corrosion of the equipment or bacterial growth.

And so, Bloomberg recently had an investigation showing that two-thirds of these data centers are actually going into areas that already don’t have enough freshwater resources for the human population. So there are people around the world that are actively competing with computers for their life-sustaining resources. And one of the communities that I reported on in my book was facing this crisis in Montevideo, Uruguay, where residents were facing a historic level of drought to the point where the Montevideo city government was actively mixing salt water into the public drinking water supply just so people could have something come out of their taps.

And for people who were too poor to buy bottled water, that is what they were drinking, and women were having higher rates of miscarriages. People with chronic illnesses were having exacerbated symptoms, and it was in the middle of that that Google proposed to build a data center that would cool with their fresh water. And I point to the Global South and these communities there, but this is actually also happening in the U.S. as well. There are plenty of communities that are now struggling and trying to figure out how to essentially prevent their freshwater resources from being taken by Silicon infrastructure.

When you say that, it feels like the scale of the problem is so big, and yet we’re not really talking about it when we talk about AI. When we talk about AI, we tend to talk about the benefits and the questions of whether it’s going to turn into Skynet and we’ll have a Terminator monitoring our streets next week. But really, the insidious part of it is that it is sucking up natural resources that human beings need and giving it to a machine.

Right. Yeah. A lot of the discourse around AI risks and dangers is ultimately a distraction to the real risks and dangers. We do point to these sci-fi-like scenarios, and in part because Silicon Valley keeps trumpeting that as the scenario, and it is a very convenient one for them to trumpet, because then if people are worried about existential risk and Skynet appearing, they’re not going to worry about the climate.

But to me, the real existential risk is that we are literally leading to the overconsumption of our planet. We are leading to the enormous exploitation of labor in the production of these technologies as well as the application of these technologies and the economic fallout that it could have when it starts to automate away a lot of people’s jobs, and we are allowing the tech industry to consolidate this extraordinary degree of resources unlike anything ever before.
I mean, we thought that they were already powerful during the social media era. In the AI era, the amount of resources and the amount of influence and domination that they now have is of a fundamentally different degree. We are not actually getting innovation that is in the public interest, and we need to hold those companies and the people at the top accountable in order to actually get to a point where we do get technology in the public interest.

I guess looking at the world today, specifically looking at the United States today and where we are politically and also socially, do you think that’s possible? The idea that the government can come in and regulate and really hold these companies accountable.

I think it is possible, but it would not be from the government. So I used to say, when the government was more functional, that that was the endgame, that we really wanted to have the governments do top-down governance and implement legislation and regulation and so forth. Now, I very much believe that we need to shift to bottoms-up governance when there is a crisis of leadership at the top.

The beautiful thing about democracy is that you can still have leadership from the bottom. We have seen artists and writers suing these companies, saying, “You can’t just take our intellectual property and just decide not to credit or compensate us.” And they’re using now litigation as a form of trying to create new mechanisms of governance around data use, around copyright law. We’ve seen so many communities around the U.S. and around the world that are pushing back against unfettered data center development to support the development and deployment of AI.

And actually, just recently, there was a huge victory in Tucson where the residents there, they successfully blocked what was reportedly going to be a hyperscale data center project from Amazon, not because they said, “We just don’t want data centers at all, supercomputers at all.” But specifically, they said, “We cannot accept a project like this that is going to consume a lot of energy. It potentially will consume a lot of our freshwater resources, and have absolutely no transparency around who is using this infrastructure, who is building it, who is using it, what kind of energy and fresh water it might be using, how it might hike up our utility bills, how it might pollute our air quality if these facilities are going to be run on natural gas or other types of fossil fuels.”

And they were basically demanding, like, “Yeah. It can’t just be a top-down… We have no say. It has to be a democratic process of engaging with the community. What are the terms under which you would want this data center to be placed in?” We’re also seeing students and teachers starting to have discussions within classrooms, within universities about a more nuanced AI governance policy that’s in between everyone use it or no one use it at all. And all of these different types of discussions, protest, pushback, I see as different forms of democratic contestation along the sites of the AI supply chain that are really actively pushing the tech industry to start to respond to the fact that they can’t actually just do whatever they want without any resistance.

You’ve mentioned all these concerning aspects of AI. I’m curious how worried you are personally about the growth of this technology and where it’s going.

I really want to emphasize that the thing I’m most worried about is the unfettered expansion of Silicon Valley’s model of AI development, their approach to creating these large-scale, extremely consumptive AI models. But there are so many other AI technologies that actually do not have any of the problems that we talked about, do not have the need for content moderation, do not have the huge environmental and freshwater costs, and those are smaller, task-specific models that are meant to tackle a very specific challenge that actually lends itself to the computational strengths of AI.

So one example of a system like this is DeepMind’s AlphaFold, which was a system that was able to predict with high accuracy how an amino acid sequence would fold into a protein, which is a very, very important first step for then accelerating drug discovery and for understanding different diseases, and it ultimately won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry last year.

That system is far-flung from ChatGPT. It was not trained on the internet. It was trained on just amino acid sequence and protein folding data, and it did not need massive supercomputers. It just needed a few computer chips to create that type of AI technology. And so, I am extremely pessimistic about what would happen if we allowed Silicon Valley to keep building the technology the way that they want to.

I think that, ultimately, they would consolidate so many resources, so much power that it would be the greatest threat that we’ve seen to democracy to date. At the same time, I am extremely optimistic about the other types of AI technologies that are available to us, that if we are to invest more in those other AI technologies, we really can get to a place where AI is actually serving our needs, serving society rather than us being served up to the tech industry.

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Outcry as Trump Plots the Plunder of US Forests: “You Can Almost Hear the Chainsaws”

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

In 1999, Bill Clinton ascended one of the highest summits in Virginia to announce that “the last, best unprotected wild lands anywhere in our nation” would be shielded by a new rule that banned roads, drilling, and other disturbances within America’s most prized forests.

But today, this site in George Washington national forest, along with other near-pristine forests across the US that amount to 58 million acres, equivalent to the size of the UK, could soon see chainsaws whir and logging trucks rumble through them amid a push by Donald Trump to raze these ecosystems for timber.

The Trump administration has said it will rescind Clinton’s roadless rule, more than two decades after its introduction appeared to mark the end of the bitter battle between environmentalists and loggers over the future of America’s best remaining woodland.

The rule is “overly restrictive” and an “absurd obstacle” to development, according to Brooke Rollins, Trump’s secretary of agriculture, as she outlined its demise in June. The administration is in a hurry—an unusually short public comment period of 21 days for this rescission has just ended, following a Trump “emergency” order to swiftly fell trees across the US’s network of national forests, spanning 280 million acres.

“These are some of the best places to hunt and fish and recreate, but also the last refuge for a lot of endangered species and the headwaters for our drinking water.”

The president has slapped tariffs on lumber imports, and the recent Republican spending bill requires more wood to come from American forests—a 78 percent increase in the amount of timber sold from national forests in the next nine years, an escalation that could trigger a frenzy of new cutting.

“We are freeing up our forests so we are allowed to take down trees and make a lot of money,” Trump has said. “We have massive forests. We just aren’t allowed to use them because of the environmental lunatics who stopped us.”

Yet advocates of the roadless rule argue these areas should not be viewed as mere sources of timber, pointing to their crucial ecological role in protecting and filtering the streams and rivers that provide clean drinking water to millions of Americans. The gnarled old-growth trees that have stood untouched for centuries in these places also act as a home to hundreds of threatened species, and are a vast carbon store in an age of climate breakdown.

58 million acres of national forestland are subject to Trump’s Roadless Rule repeal.Guardian graphic. Source: US Forest Service

The rule protects select fragments of forest, most of it in the US west, that are some of the most treasured jewels of nature found outside America’s storied national parks.

“Public support for the roadless rule has only increased in the quarter century it has been in place.”

The largest roadless area, in the Tongass national forest in Alaska, is one of the most carbon-rich forests in the world and contains more brown bears than the entire lower 48 states, drawn to an abundance of salmon. Superior national forest in Minnesota, meanwhile, contains miles of crystal clear waters for canoeing, as well as moose, lynx, songbirds, and wolves.

Putting such places off limits to new roads and oil and gas drilling—although companies can still access them to push through power transmission or pipelines—came from a rethink in the 1980s and 1990s about the role of US national forests, which were being logged unsustainably.

Mike Dombeck, who was in charge of the US Forest Service when the roadless rule was drawn up, said there was a blossoming recognition of forest values other than extracting timber—such as recreation, unspoiled vistas, watershed protection, and tourism revenue.

“These are some of the best places to hunt and fish and recreate, but also the last refuge for a lot of endangered species and the headwaters for our drinking water,” he said. “There are these other values, too, such as solitude, that are harder to measure.”

“It is such a puzzling, chaotic approach this administration is taking,” Dombeck said. “We are losing this land rapidly. If we don’t conserve it, we will lose it.”

The Forest Service already oversees 370,000 miles of roads, enough to wrap around the world 14 times, and any new roads carved through forests will also have to be funded by an agency that has had its budget cut and has lost about 15% of its staff, some 5,000 people, from Trump’s purge of the federal workforce.

Sixty million Americans get their drinking water from sources that flow from protected roadless areas.

“It costs the public money to create these new roads and the Forest Service can barely maintain the roads it has,” said Dombeck. “Also, the easiest timber to get has already gone. We will be putting new, expensive roads into hard-to-reach areas, which will then erode and pollute the water supply. It just doesn’t make any sense.”

The roadless rule specifically targets roads because they act as a multiplier for forest destruction, often spawning further offshoot roads that slice up connected habitat, as the fishbone-pattern dismemberment of the Amazon rainforest has shown. These roads often bring in new invasive species that can choke out native plants and animals.

The Trump administration and the logging industry claim the prohibition of roads impedes fire suppression activities, although vehicles and other human activity on roads can cause new wildfires in forests which are becoming more prone to blazes due to the climate crisis. Since the 1990s, wildfires have been nearly four times as likely to start in forests that have roads compared to roadless areas, according to a recent analysis by the Wilderness Society.

But unfettered road building is now set to return to American forests, barring legal challenges. Ironically, the place that Clinton announced the roadless rule—called Reddish Knob, a graffiti-covered perch on Shenandoah mountain—could in coming years overlook a patchwork of land torn asunder by new logging, rather than the blanket of undisturbed trees that are the legacy of the rule.

Almost a quarter of the George Washington national forest, which is co-managed with the adjoining Jefferson national forest, is protected under the roadless rule, and local advocates fret over its future. Towering old-growth hemlock, oak, and maple is found in nearly 400,000 acres of roadless area that plunges up and down wooded peaks that can reach 4,000 feet, steep places once too difficult to access with horses and trucks but could now have trunks removed by helicopter.

Even during the recent, abbreviated, public comment period , 99 percent of respondents opposed the rollback of the Roadless Rule.

“A lot of wise management practices will be overlooked in this brazen rush for more timber,” said a long-term Forest Service manager at George Washington national forest who recently departed and did not want to be named for fear of retribution from the administration. “The roadless rule was this truce between competing user groups and it shouldn’t be struck down so quickly. They really want to open it up though. You can almost hear the chainsaws already.”

The roadless areas here contain critical headwaters that feed a large reservoir from which the local city of Harrisonburg draws its drinking supply. In all, more than 2 million people in Virginia—and 60 million people across the whole of the US—get their drinking water from sources that flow from protected roadless areas.

“We are getting more extreme storms and hurricanes, so having these roadless areas here with intact roots to absorb water as it comes in quickly is crucial,” said Ellen Stuart-Haentjens, executive director of the Virginia Wilderness Committee.

_“_Without the roadless rule we will have more intense flooding events, the water quality would go down, fish species like trout would suffer, and the tourism dollars for local towns will be affected too. Beyond that there’s the spiritual element, the enjoyment of going to hike and look out and not think, ‘Oh, that’s just been logged.’”

Although the Trump administration has demanded a ramp-up in logging, there are still hurdles in its way. The recent, abbreviated, public comment period for the rollback showed that 99 percent of respondents were against its removal, suggesting broad pushback to its plan. “Public support for the roadless rule has only increased in the quarter century it has been in place,” said Aaron Weiss, deputy director of the Center for Western Priorities.

Furthermore, the timber industry, which currently gets more than 90 pecent of its product from private, rather than federal, lands, may choose to not expand into all of the currently protected areas.

A spokesman for the American Forest Resource Council, which represents loggers, called the roadless rule removal “a long-overdue correction of a one-size-fits-all federal policy that has too often restricted necessary, science-based forest management.”

But he added that even if the Forest Service offers up fresh areas for logging in roadless zones, any new projects will not be immediate. _“_Even if the roadless rule is rescinded, we think it could take years for such a project to be planned and approved, if it happens at all,” he said.

Still, the revocation of the roadless rule reopens a chapter many thought was closed for good, much like worries over the ozone layer or whaling. A seemingly bygone age of industrial clear-cutting of forests, where muscular extraction was the primary, or only, thought has had an unlikely resurrection.

In seeking to turn the clock back, the Trump administration is waving away years of scientific understanding of the role of forests, as it has attempted to do with our knowledge of the dangers, or otherwise, of greenhouse gases, vaccines, and medicines. “If you show students today pictures of clear-cut areas of forest they will say, ‘Yeah, yeah, that’s in the past, we solved that,’” said Stuart-Haentjens. “To have this pop up again now is just shocking.”

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SCOTUS Wades Back Into the War on Trans Kids—And Considers Greenlighting Conversion Therapy

Since the early 2010s, amid a sea change of public acceptance of LGBTQ people, state after state banned the use of conversion therapy—the debunked, harmful practice of trying to change a person’s sexual orientation or gender identity—on children and teenagers. And for just as long, a tiny contingent of therapists on the fringes of their profession have been fighting to overturn those laws, arguing that they have a free-speech right to try to “treat” or “cure” LGBTQ youth.

Now, those therapists—and their powerful allies in the conservative Christian legal movement—are on the verge of success.

On Tuesday, the Supreme Court hearsarguments in Chiles v. Salazar, a case brought by a Christian therapist challenging a Colorado law that forbids licensed mental health professionals from attempting to change minors’ gender identity or sexual orientation. The case has the potential to overturn restrictions on conversion therapy in 23 states, greenlighting a practice shown through decades of research to put individuals at higher risk for suicidality and depression.

The science on conversion therapy is unambiguous: it’s both ineffective and dangerous.

The science on conversion therapy is unambiguous: it’s both ineffective and dangerous. All the way back in 2009, an American Psychological Association task force issued a landmark report documenting the lack of evidence behind sexual orientation “change efforts,” as scientists refer to them. Since then, APA has only strengthened its stance against both anti-gay and anti-trans conversion efforts. In October 2015, the federal Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration published a report concluding that sexual orientation and gender identity change efforts were “coercive, can be harmful, and should not be part of behavioral health treatment.”

More recently, 28 major medical and psychological associations signed a joint statement condemning conversion therapy and pledging to eliminate it. “Decades of research findings and clinical expertise have revealed that variations in sexual orientation and gender identity are a normal part of human development across race, ethnicity, and socioeconomic status,” they wrote.

Before 1973, when homosexuality was still considered a psychological disorder, conversion therapy was the standard treatment. Some psychologists would administer electric shocks to patients, or give them nausea-inducing drugs, while showing them gay pornography. But once same-sex attraction was no longer pathologized, almost all therapists stopped trying to “cure” it, instead looking for ways to support their clients without changing their sexual orientation.

Still, as Mother Jones documented in an investigation last year, conversion therapy never really went away. Today, the practice usually takes the form of religious counseling or talk therapy.

When the harms of conversion therapy came to light, prominent “ex-gay” leaders disavowed their work, dissolved their organizations, and apologized.

“It is psychologically manipulative,” Simon Kent Fung, a conversion therapy survivor and advocate, said in 2023—instilling and deepening feelings of shame, isolation, and worthlessness.

In a prior interview with Mother Jones, conversion therapy survivor Myles Markham described the aftermath of conversion therapy as “a place of constant, albeit quiet, torment.”

“A lot of thoughts [were] placed into my head about how disturbing and gross and creepy people like me were,” a transgender survivor of conversion therapy, Lillian Lennon, said in the same series of interviews. “I internalized a lot of these projections.”

When the harms of conversion therapy came to light a decade ago, and a campaign to ban its use on children swept the nation, prominent leaders in the “ex-gay” movement disavowed their work, dissolved their organizations, and apologized. Today, those leaders are siding with Colorado at the Supreme Court.

“They cannot take back the harm they caused, but they recognize their unique obligation and opportunity to prevent future damage,” their lawyer wrote in a filing in August.

The case now before the Court was filed by Colorado Christian counselor Kaley Chiles. Her lawyers are affiliated with the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), a far-right legal powerhouse deeply involved in efforts to overturn Roe v. Wade and in a constant stream of legal attacks on trans rights.

ADF argues that because Chiles’ form of therapy consists only of talking with clients, Colorado’s Minor Conversion Therapy Law violates her constitutional right to free speech. Colorado, on the other hand, asserts that Chiles’ words during her therapy sessions constitute “professional conduct” subject to regulation.

Many of the arguments in the case dive deep into science, gender, and medicine. ADF and Chiles claim that “no reliable science” finds conversion therapy harmful or ineffective, citing several scholars who study how sexual orientation can shift over the course of a person’s lifetime. Yet two of those scholars, and the family of a deceased researcher, told the Guardian this week that ADF had “profoundly” misinterpreted and “distorted” their research, conflating naturally occurring sexual fluidity with forced repression.

If the justices rule for Chiles, conversion therapy bans across the country are also likely to fall.

“It’s erasing the fact that conversion therapy is motivated by shame, fear of disconnection, fear of expulsion, fear of the loss of God’s love, fear of abandonment,” Lisa Diamond, distinguished professor of psychology and gender studies at the University of Utah, told the Guardian. “Those are triggers of suicidality. That’s where the damage comes in.”

Chiles says she wants to use talk-based therapy to help minor clients “choose to align their sense of [gender] identity with their sex” and “to reduce or eliminate unwanted sexual attractions”—when the minors request it. She also claims the law prevents her from supporting clients who are detransitioning or speaking freely with them about their gender and sexuality. “Exploration is off-limits if the goal is change,” her lawyers write, “unless that change is a gender transition.”

Lawyers for the state of Colorado argue that the law forbids therapists from trying to force children to adopt a different sexual orientation or gender identity—cisgender or transgender, gay or straight. “What the therapist cannot do is try to achieve a predetermined gender identity for the minor,” they argue, “regardless of whether that is or isn’t a transgender identity.”

“[The laws] were developed in close conjunction with mental health professionals to make sure that they’re crafted very narrowly,” says Shannon Minter, legal director at the National Center for LGBTQ Rights, who has worked for years on efforts to ban the use of conversion therapy on minors. The practices prohibited are when a therapist is “trying to seek a predetermined outcome” around youth’s gender or sexuality. The law does “not restrict in any way, shape or form, any form of legitimate therapy,” Minter argues.

Fung, the survivor and advocate, says the fight to protect Colorado kids from conversion therapy has brought together unlikely allies. Catholic school educators, conservative therapists, and LGBTQ advocates are working hand-in-hand in the effort—like Christian therapist Julia Sadusky, who uses non-conversion therapy to help devout youth and co-authored a brief in support of Colorado. The law “hasn’t at all hindered me from being effective in my work with teens and with their families,” Sandusky said in an interview.

Now out as a gay man, Fung is still religious and wants young people to know there is a path through the pain of being told their religion conflicts with their sense of self. He says the side supporting Chiles uses “spiritual blackmail” to spread misinformation and fear.

But legal observers like Slate’s Marc Joseph Stern say it’s extremely likely the Supreme Court will side with ADF. After all, the court’s conservative majority has done the same in two previous cases in which ADF represented clients claiming that a Colorado law intended to protect the LGBTQ community infringed on their First Amendment rights as Christians. If the justices rule for Chiles, the remaining conversion therapy bans across the country are also likely to fall.

One party rooting for Chiles to succeed: the Trump administration. Last month, the court granted a motion from the Solicitor General to participate in Tuesday’s oral arguments.

It’s no surprise the administration is siding with conversion therapy proponents. When President Donald Trump took office and promptly purged mentions of “gender” from government documents, the Department of Health and Human Services took down the SAMHSA report that determined conversion therapy was “coercive” and “harmful.” A few months later, HHS issued a new report calling for doctors to withhold gender-affirming treatments from transgender young people. Instead, it endorsed “exploratory psychotherapy”—a euphemism embraced by conversion therapists for the work they do with trans children.

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A 90-Second Crash Course in Trump’s Betrayal of American Soy Farmers

Tomorrow, Donald Trump is expected to announce a significant aid package for soy farmers hurt by his trade war with China, according to Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent.

China is the world’s largest soybean importer and typically buys about half of the US crop—last year, that came to $12.6 billion. This summer, China has purchased zero dollars worth of soybeans from the United States and has no future orders planned.

Farmers are struggling. And worse, last week, Bessent announced thatTrump was giving $20 billion in economic aid to bail out the far-right government of Argentina, a main US competitor in the soybean market. The influx of cash from Trump allowed Argentina to remove its own export taxes on soybeans, so China is getting an even better deal from them.

Trump’s aid package to farmers is expected to be in the billions of dollars. But to some farmers, that misses the point. “The American farmer, especially myself included—we don’t want any payments. We want to work,” said Indiana soybean and corn farmer Brian Warpup to the Associated Press. “The worst thing we could ever want is a handout.”

In this video, I give a quick overview of the ongoing tension between the US, China, and Argentina, and explain how Trump is effectively pricing American farmers out of their own market.

Watch:

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It’s Time for Soft Secession

In 2013, venture capitalist Tim Draper launched a “Six Californias” ballot initiative. The upshot was that with some 40 million people, more than the population of the 20 smallest states combined, California was too big, too diverse, to be “efficiently” governed. So why not, Draper argued, break it up into six new “startups,” a.k.a. states? Instead of two senators, we erstwhile “Californians” would get 12.

Draper’s scheme was part of a long tradition—since California was admitted to the Union as part of the Compromise of 1850, there have been more than 220 proposals for it to divide or secede—but derided as a Silicon Valley ploy to create a libertarian deregulation zone. (Tellingly, the Bay Area state was to be named “Silicon Valley.”) And aside from the feasibility of making it happen, state and federal constitution-wise, people worried that it would cleave four rich populous states from two poorer rural states (fair) and weaken Democrats’ voting share in the Senate (in retrospect, nah). Draper’s measure gleaned valid signatures from some 753,000 people—more, it must be said, than the populations of America’s three smallest states—but in California, that wasn’t enough to get on the ballot.

After the 2016 election, which put the anti-majoritarian provisions of the US Constitution very much front of mind, Draper came back with a simpler proposal—three Californias, or Cal 3. This initiative got enough signatures to head to voters, but the day before the 2018 ballots were to be printed, the state Supreme Court blocked the measure—what about things like existing water treaties, the justices worried—and Draper eventually gave up.

While his motives were murky, Draper tapped into something now excruciatingly felt. The assignment of two senators per state, no matter its population, was always a deeply flawed (and deeply racist) proposition. But the unfairness has only gotten more acute. As my colleague Ari Berman has noted: “In 1790, the country’s most populous state, Virginia, had 12 times as many people as its least populous, Delaware. Today, California has 67 times the population of Wyoming. Fifteen small states with 41 million people combined now routinely elect 30 GOP senators; California, with 39 million residents, is represented by only two Democrats.” The Golden State is the fourth-largest economy in the world but doesn’t have political clout proportional to its population, let alone to our status as a global cultural, technological, and agricultural juggernaut.

In case it’s not obvious why I’m taking a leisurely drive down a byroad of California electoral history, let’s review some of the abuses and usurpations that President Donald Trump has visited upon us.

California, and the country, cannot await the outcome of the midterms to repel Trump’s siege on democracy. More drastic action is required.

The most vicious of those abuses has been over immigration. On June 6, at the urging of his deputy chief of staff, Stephen Miller, ICE escalated raids in California, hitting farms, factories, construction sites, and schools, separating families and detaining undocumented people, legal residents, and even citizens. Federal agents arrested and hospitalized David Huerta, the head of one of the state’s most powerful unions. When protests erupted, Trump jumped at the chance to federalize the National Guard against Gov. Gavin Newsom’s wishes—something that hasn’t been done since LBJ acted to protect civil rights protesters from segregationists. Border czar Tom Homan threatened to arrest Newsom, which Trump agreed was a “great” idea. When a reporter asked for what crime, Trump responded that his “primary crime is running for governor” and called protesters “insurrectionists.” Speaker of the House Mike Johnson chimed in that Newsom should be “tarred and feathered.” Then Trump sent Marines into LA. When California Sen. Alex Padilla—who was voted for by more Americans than 18 GOP senators combined—tried to ask Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem questions at a press conference, federal officials knocked him down and cuffed him. One-quarter of California’s population are immigrants, and the continual attack on them—and anyone who is brown—is a moral injury that plays out in our streets and our feeds day after day after day.

A demonstrator faces US Marines and National Guard members in Los Angeles on July 4, 2025.Etienne Laurent/AFP/Getty

But the direct assaults on California are by no means limited to raids and those protesting raids. Trump has dragged his feet about providing federal aid to address the devastation of LA’s wildfires, saying he’d release it only if we pass a voter-ID law; taken our own National Guard off fire lines; and made bizarre claims about sending us water for the fires from the Pacific Northwest. He’s canceled our car efficiency and emissions rules, attacked our renewable energy plan, and zeroed out federal money for rooftop solar and high-speed rail. He’s revoked federal grants to UCLA over spurious charges of antisemitism, then gave the school a list of demands, including a $1 billion settlement and the end of ­gender-affirming care in its hospitals.

Amid all of that came Trump’s demand that Texas engage in midcycle redistricting to give the GOP five extra congressional seats that he says it’s “entitled to.” Newsom, both legitimately enraged and sensing an opportunity to help his presidential ambitions, has rallied California Democrats to mount a ballot initiative to temporarily set aside its nonpartisan redistricting commission and draw congressional maps to counterbalance Texas’ scheme.

We will vote on that initiative in November, and my bet is it will pass. But California, and the country, cannot await the outcome of the midterms to repel Trump’s siege on democracy. More drastic action is required.

Unfortunately, especially as Trump berates generals and admirals on “the enemy within” and suggests they use US cities as “training grounds,” it’s all too easy to imagine a world where the commanders of California’s military bases are compelled to choose sides. (If you think such scenarios are out of the realm of possibility, ask yourself why he and Pushup Pete Hegseth have been purging the brass.) Our boundaries of oceans and mountains and deserts, our copious natural resources, and our technological prowess make a return to an independent California Republic more feasible than it might be for other states. But in advance, and hopefully in lieu, of that, it’s time to start applying our economic muscle.

When Trump first said he was gutting federal funding to California’s public universities, a system that is the envy of the world, Newsom responded: “Californians pay the bills for the federal government. We pay over $80 BILLION more in taxes than we get back. Maybe it’s time to cut that off, @realDonaldTrump.”

Remember when Mitt Romney called 47 percent of Americans “takers,” layabouts who fed off the “makers” that he claimed to represent? (We do, since Mother Jones’ own David Corn broke that story, arguably changing the course of the 2012 election.) This persistent GOP talking point is especially odd when you consider the residents of 19 mostly blue states pay more to the US Treasury than they get in federal benefits; to Newsom’s point, none pays more than California. (This includes our undocumented residents, who pay billions in federal taxes and receive no federal benefits.) We’re mostly happy to do it because we believe in things like Social Security, public education, pandemic preparedness, and research institutions. But why should we sit by while you take our money, defund our priorities, and shit on our values?

California can’t claim no power in Congress, like DC—home to 700,000 people, more than either Vermont or Wyoming—can. But it’s time to think outside of the electoral box and start flexing our considerable leverage. We are the nation’s largest agricultural state—growing more than a third of the country’s vegetables and ­three-quarters of its fruits—and the fifth-largest food producer in the world. We produce the most milk and the most wine, copious amounts of rice and cattle, and, crucially, 90 percent of US avocados. Other states may be poster children for farms, but we’re No. 1. Hollywood is a $47.2 billion industry exerting, for better or worse, immeasurable global cultural power. The $623 billion tech sector is even mightier. Were California to secede, almost 15 percent of America’s GDP would go with it, and the US could slip behind China as the world’s biggest economy.

Short of actual secession, what could California do? It could learn from the Jimmy Kimmel showdown and lead a financial “countervalue” rebellion, using “the full weight of blue states’ market power, cultural influence and legal authority to raise the stakes of Republican red-state aggression,” Democratic strategists Arkadi Gerney and Sarah Knight wrote in the Washington Post, by imposing “regulatory and economic costs that bite hard enough to make the constituents of even the most insulated legislator feel the pain.” We could start by disinvesting our pension funds from red-state companies like AT&T, American Airlines, ExxonMobil, and Tesla. “The 15 blue trifectas (states where Democrats control the governor’s mansion and both houses of the state legislature), with their larger state budgets and more generous pensions, have state investments that total almost 75 percent more than the 23 red trifectas,” they note.

If that seems a reach, consider that Texas effectively got BlackRock to drop its “woke” investment and governance policies by blackballing it. Blue states could lure away techies, doctors, nurses, and electricians with relocation bonuses. We could institute tax and other incentives to pull new factories and data centers away from red states. We could selectively terminate professional licensing reciprocity. We could ease commerce between friendly states and make it difficult for unfriendly ones.

Economic retribution is just part of a broader constellation of tools that law professors Jessica Bulman-Pozen (Columbia) and Heather K. Gerken (Yale) call “uncooperative federalism” and others call “soft secession.” It’s not, writes Substacker Chris Armitage, “the violent rupture of 1861, but something else entirely. Blue states building parallel systems, withholding cooperation, and creating facts on the ground that render federal authority meaningless within their borders.” Some of this is already underway. Led by California’s Rob Bonta, the attorneys general of blue states have been having almost daily Zoom calls to plot strategy and file briefs and suits. Democratic governors have devoted tens of millions to hire lawyers for those fights and banded together to oppose Trump’s threats to send troops to their states. In early September, California, Oregon, and Washington created the West Coast Health Alliance to formulate their own vaccine standards and distribute shots, no matter what lunacy Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. unleashes. Hawaii signed on a day later. Other blue states are honing similar coalitions.

Unified action could further preserve what the federal government is destroying, law professors Aziz Z. Huq (University of Chicago) and Jon D. Michaels (UCLA) wrote in the Los Angeles Times. Blue states could create “large regional research consortia; re-create public-health and meteorology forecasting centers servicing member states; and finance pandemic planning.” (A proposal to do much of this is underway in Sacramento.) With the Justice Department doing little more than acting as Trump’s goon squad, states could also “mobilize interstate criminal task forces to track and prosecute corruption by politicians, ­lobbyists and government contractors (who invariably, when violating federal laws, run afoul of myriad state laws, too).” Ditto consumer and environmental investigations—the cost of which could be offset by fines, even as they lay the groundwork for federal prosecutions if America is ever restored to sanity.

But we need to be clear-eyed: Such a restoration may not come in time. So far, this year has been marked by a collective action problem. Media conglomerates, law firms, universities, banks, CEOs—too many powerful institutions and individuals have failed to meet the moment. This is why people all over the country, desperate for pushback against Trump’s autocracy, have embraced Newsom’s redistricting plan, whatever their broader opinions of him. With Trump provocatively sending troops into blue cities, and using recision and the shutdown to claw back congressionally appropriated funds from blue states, it’s time to turn the tables on him. Soft secession, powered by the presidential ambitions of multiple blue-state governors, could, should it come to that, be the proving ground of a new confederacy. Hopefully the threat of CalExit or a new Union will be enough. But that extreme measures might be necessary to ensure that American democracy shall not perish from the Earth is becoming more self-evident with every passing day.

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The “Dual State” Theory Was Invented to Describe Nazis. The Supreme Court Could Take Us There.

Perhaps the most brazenly illegal action of President Donald Trump’s second term so far took place on his first day in office: an order to deny birthright citizenship to thousands of newborns. Within months, the question had reached the Supreme Court. But rather than affirm the right to birthright citizenship, which is plainly enshrined in the Constitution, the high court used the case to strip lower courts of the ability to issue nationwide emergency relief in most cases—now only those who sue can get reprieve. Instead of halting the administration’s lawless action, the justices made it easier for Trump to get away with future illegal abuses.

The ‘dual state’ framework explains how a dictator can exercise power while life appears mostly ordinary.

In her dissent, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson accused the majority of facilitating a two-track system of justice: One for those with the resources to challenge illegal actions, and a second where those without recourse are subjected to the president’s illegal whims. “The law-free zone that results from this Court’s near elimination of universal injunctions is not an unfamiliar archetype,” Jackson wrote. It is, she added, “eerily echoing history’s horrors” that “the zone of lawlessness the majority has now authorized will disproportionately impact the poor, the uneducated, and the unpopular.”

To eliminate any doubt about which historic “horrors” she had in mind,Jackson included a footnote citing Ernst Fraenkel, a Jewish labor lawyer who observed the transformation of the German legal system under Adolf Hitler. When Fraenkel fled Berlin in 1938, he smuggled out a manuscript on the legal mechanisms of Nazi authoritarianism. He eventually came to the University of Chicago and in 1941 published The Dual State: A Contribution to the Theory of Dictatorship. Fraenkel’s work has seen a resurgence of interest in the United States in recent months because it provides a framework for a phenomenon we are increasinglyexperiencingunder the second Trump administration: How a dictator can exercise unfettered power while life appears ordinary for most people. Or, as Jackson observed, how a “zone of lawlessness” can swallow some, while the rest go about their lives under the protection of the law.

In the Third Reich, Hitler’s will replacedGerman law. Whatever he wanted, he did. If anyone was perceived to threaten the Nazi project of a fascist ethno-state, no legal protection could save them. Fraenkel called this realm the “prerogative state.” But the broaderlegal system didn’t immediatelycrumble under arbitrary rule. To the contrary, the Nazis purposefully left some of the existing legal system intact in the 1930s and courts were allowed to function, particularly in areas of contracts and other economic concerns. This parallel “normative state,” Fraenkel observed, enabled Germany’s capitalist system to continue against the backdrop of an uninhibited regime. Most Germans generally lived in the law-bound normative state, while Jews and other disfavored people were victims of the arbitrary and violent prerogative state. The dual state is thus two-faced twice over:it is characterized by a bifurcation in the law, but also by the facade of normalcy obscuring the fact of an authoritarian state.

Life in the early months of Trump’s second presidency hews to this framework in important respects. How else to explain that most people enjoy a sense of normalcy while, for example, foreign students like Rümeysa Öztürk and green card holders like Mahmoud Khalil can be detained for their speech. Americans and immigrants alike can be terrorized by ICE, the federal government’s unleashed immigration force, if they speak Spanish, look nonwhite, or happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. The administration is sinking Venezuelan vessels and executing the civilians on board without any legal authorization—killings that look like war crimes or murder. The government demanded that Disney fire comedian Jimmy Kimmel as if the First Amendment didn’t exist. But at the same time,the Trump administration’s law-breaking in its war on immigrants, its crusade against dissent, its takeover of the machinery of the federal government, its unrestraineduse of the military, have not cannibalized the broader legal system or society—at least not yet.

While these actions augur the onset of a dual state, the Trump administration hasn’t gotten us to this pointalone. The Supreme Court, with its Republican-appointed 6-3 majority, has been a crucial facilitator. When the court blesses the administration’s disregard for the law while maintaining the appearance that the law still rules, it is enabling a dual state. When Jackson made explicit reference to Fraenkel,she was sounding an alarm on the court’s role in the shift toward a dual state. As Evan Bernick, a constitutional law professor at Northern Illinois University College of Law, puts it: “The reality is that the court is adjusting the law to make place for arbitrary power.”

“The court is adjusting the law to make place for arbitrary power.”

With the Supreme Court beginning its next term this week, the question hanging in the air is whether the Republican-appointed majority will finally draw legal boundaries to fence in the president or, confronted with Trump’s demands for ever-increasing power, it will revise or abandon the law to accommodate him. The results could consolidate adual state or, in the extreme, extend Trump’s leash so far that all Americans begin to feel the effects of his unbridled powers—the onset of an authoritarian state without the dual state’s pretense of normalcy.

In three major cases, the Supreme Court will be addressing a key feature of a dual state: the ability of the government to switch a person or entity from the normative state and the protection of the law to the prerogative state, where the laws do not apply. Emergency powers, like the ones Trump has cited in these cases, are a quintessential switch.

In November, the justices will hear oral arguments over Trump’s sweeping tariffs. In his first three months in office, Trump announced tariffs on dozens of countries. Tariffs are Congress’ bailiwick, but Trump claimed power to impose them under the 1977 International Emergency Economic Powers Act. That law gives presidents power to respond to “any unusual and extraordinary threat” from abroad, but does not explicitly name tariffs as an available tool. Citing the Roberts Court’s own recent precedents, the lower courts found that the president cannot unilaterally impose such a major policy—indeed, a policy that could hamstring both the United States and global economies. The question, as UC Berkeley Law Dean Erwin Chemerinsky wrote last month, is “Will the conservative justices adhere to what they have said and held recently, or will they just rubber stamp whatever Trump does?”

The case will be an important signal of whether the United States is operating as a dual state. If the justices abandon their legal principles in order to give the president more power, but do so under the color of law, then they will be bowing to the prerogative state while maintaining the illusion of the normative state.

Though it is not currently on the court’s docket, the justices will likely have to confront the question of whether Trump can once again use the specter of an emergency—even a pretend one—to round up and deport people. Since March, Trump has claimed the power to invoke the Alien Enemies Act with the baseless assertion that Tren de Aragua is invading the United States. This case, if it reaches the Supreme Court, will similarly test the justices’ willingness to maintain the guardrails around presidential power or whether, when it comes to the president’s targets, the law suddenly does not apply.

The justices will also consider the president’s attempt to remove Lisa Cook from the Federal Reserve Board of Governors even though her position is protected from firing except for cause. Trump claims sufficient cause in allegations of mortgage fraud—allegations that are factually weak and unproven. If the court blesses this as sufficient for immediate removal, even as the dispute moves forward in the lower courts, it will have ultimately handed control of the Federal Reserve to the president, unlocking Trump’s ability to control interest rates and transform the Fed’s coffers into a personal slush fund. Worse, Trump could use the Fed to withhold access to the financial system to any entity or individual who crosses him. It’s hard to overstate the degree to which the entire economy could tumble into the prerogative state if Trump were to stack the Federal Reserve Board with loyalists.

Should the court hand Trump the unchecked power to declare emergencies, invasions, and causes for removal, it would give him a legal tool that can nullify the law he claims to be invoking. As Aziz Huq, a constitutional scholar at the University of Chicago explains, in a dual state, the high “court’s role is in creating affordances within the law that operate as off switches for the law… The classic example of that is the emergency powers article in the Weimar Constitution that was used to switch off the Weimar Constitution.” It’s lawlessness dressed up as law.

“There’s no explanation…that’s one of the frightening things about the shadow docket.”

The Supreme Court is also facilitating the creation of a dual state through its emergency or “shadow” docket, where the court issues decisions in cases it has taken up outside of its typical procedures. In the first nine months of Trump’s second term, the six Republican-appointed justices have issued weakly or unexplained orders viathisdocket that switched off legal constraints on the president.They’ve blessed Trump’s firings of federal officials—despite those firings being illegal—enabling Trump to take control of bodies that Congress created to be bipartisan and independent, and to hollow out other agencies beyond what the law allows. It used it toreinstate Trump’s ban on transgender service members in the military, greenlighting a policy unconstitutionally animated by disdain for a minority group. In the realm of immigration enforcement, a shadow docket decision allowed the administration to violate federal and international law to send immigrants to dangerous places like South Sudan, and sanctioned the administration’s policy of racially profiling people as part of its immigration enforcement toolkit, subjecting both citizens and immigrants alike to harassment and inhumane detainment. The court even used the shadow docket in the birthright citizenship case to stop the lower courts from issuing universal relief from these abuses. When Trump refused to spend $4 billion in foreign aid appropriated by Congress, the Supreme Court used the shadow docket tolet him ignore the law and withhold the money—even though Congress is supposed to have the power of the purse.

“A prerogative state situation is a situation where it seems like there’s this rule that should apply and require X—and then all of a sudden, it’s Y,” says Bernick. “The court says it’s Y and there’s no explanation that’s given. That is a dual state situation. And that’s one of the frightening things about the shadow docket.”

In The Dual State, Fraenkel recounts how the German courts allowed landlords to stop renting to Jews in the 1930s, even though tenancy laws protected Jewish and Aryan renters alike. “The courts therefore had to choose between doing their duty and applying the law for the protection of the defenseless victim or sacrificing justice to the demands of National-Socialism,” Fraenkel wrote. Initially, courts protected Jewish renters. But after the Nazi press criticized those decisions, the courts changed their tune—not by reinterpreting the law, but by forgoing with the business of law entirely; a decision Fraenkel cites from the Appellate Court of Berlin held thatthe “question before the court is not a problem of the law of landlord and tenant, but a question involving a fundamental outlook on life.” In complying with the Third Reich, the courts elevated Nazi policies, as Fraenkel put it, “above the laws.”

It’s hard not to see echoes of this in the court’s current use of the shadow docket. Often, the court’s orders, issued with little or no explanation, don’t even attempt to find justification in the law. The law appears ignored. Take the decision last month to permit ICE officers to racially profile people who don’t look white. After years of decrying any state use of race to differentiate between people, the court allowed ICE to use race without any explanation. Only Justice Brett Kavanaugh attempted a justification, though it was the legal equivalent of swiss cheese.

“ICE is the face of a prerogative state, emerging or actual: It swoops in, it ignores safeguards, you can’t escape it,” says Bernick. “A Supreme Court that gets out of the way in that context, where the state is at its most brutal, and tries to manage everything else as normal, is a dual state Supreme Court.”

The key to understanding the Supreme Court’s interest in creating a dual state—and how close the United States actually is to becoming one—is that the normative state is not truly a safe zone. While the dual state framework generally refers to the law-bound normative state and the lawless prerogative state, that doesn’t capture the dual state Fraenkel described.

Under the Nazis, the normative state proved to be a fiction. As much as the Nazis wanted to use the courts to preserve the country’s capitalist economy, they would never be constrained by them. “Where the Prerogative State does not require jurisdiction, the Normative State is allowed to function,” Fraenkel wrote. “The limits of the Prerogative State are not imposed from the outside; they are imposed by the Prerogative State itself.”

Republican appointed justices prefer a hidden authoritarianism to one that is out in the open.

In such a dual state, the normative state remains a useful illusion, but it is not truly bound by the rule of law. Huq, who is working on a book about Fraenkel’s theory and today’s United States, suggests that Fraenkel thought of the prerogative state as something like a black hole: “It’s this void, but it’s a void that exerts a gravitational pull on everything around it. So there’s this constant distortion of what he calls the normative state. And there are these moments where some piece of the normative state just gets collapsed and blown away.”

As long as there are actual limits, a real safe zone, the United States is not a Fraenkelian dual state. Öztürk and Khalil were eventually released from detention on judges’ orders, while Kilmar Abrego Garcia, whom the administration deported in violation of a court order and then claimed it did not have to retrieve him, did finally bring him back. While these are signals that a true dual state hasn’t yetarrived, their situations remain touch-and-go, with the administration still attempting to deport Khalil and Abrego Garcia to farflung nations. Similarly, insofar as the Supreme Court actuallyis a critical facilitator of Donald Trump’s increasingly unfettered power—which would also mean it retains its authority to limit the administration’s actions—then Trump has not succeeded in creating a true prerogative state.

However, the justices appear to have a keen understanding, possibly intuitive, of Fraenkel’s dual state theory. In recent months, the court’s Republican wing has let Trump opt out of following the law virtually every time Trump has asked the justices for a hall pass. Covetous of their authority, this improbable winning streak—some 21 shadow docket cases—may actually signal the conservative justices’ unwillingness to cross him. They may realize that should Trump defy the court, it would mean that the court’s authority was, just as in Fraenkel’s world, an illusion of normalcy projected by the prerogative state to lull the masses into complacency.

The Republican appointed justices, to the extent the United States has become a dual state, would rather stave off such a collapse, not least because their legitimacy and power relies on such a mirage. Thus, they prefer a hidden authoritarianism to one that is out in the open. And more than anyone else, the justices are in the position to paper over Trump’s lawlessness or expose it. But this is precisely why the dual state is so dangerous: It allows the would-be autocrat to consolidate power under the cloak of democracy and norms.

Clearly, the Republican appointees are not mere victims of Trump’s authoritarian aims. Their role in the creation of a dual state began before Trump’s second term. Kim Lane Scheppele, an expert on authoritarian regimes at Princeton, has documented the ascendance of “autocratic legalism,” a modern form of authoritarianism that uses existing laws and constitutions to ultimately subvert those guardrails and establish an autocratic state. To succeed, she notes, autocrats must inherit an already weakened democracy or first weaken it substantially; a robust democracy is much harder to conquer.

Any account of America’s sclerotal democracy must include the Supreme Court. As often happens in backsliding democracies, the US’ highest court has been captured by loyalists to the autocrat. Between 2017 and 2020, Trump appointed three Supreme Court justices when, under historical precedent, at least one if not two of those seats should have gone to the Democratic president who either preceded or succeeded him. In other words, the current court is the result of a partisan plot to seize power through court appointments, enabled by a president who took office without majority support. But even before those appointments,the Supreme Court under John Roberts—he has been its chief for 20 years—was already facilitating the US’s democratic decline. From voting rights to campaign finance, the Roberts Court has repeatedly interfered with the machinery of a healthy democracy.

The Roberts court has given “the presidency the option, essentially, to opt out of statutory laws.”

A dual state is a legal artifice of authoritarianism, and under Chief Justice John Roberts, the Supreme Court inflated the powers of the president in case after case, as critics warned that the justices were paving the way to autocracy. The capstone in this progression was Roberts’ July 2024 opinion granting former presidents immunity from criminal prosecution for most official acts. “It’s basically saying Congress cannot constrain the President with criminal statutes,” Scheppele previously explained to Mother Jones. “So then why should Congress be able to constrain the President with appropriation statutes or anything else?”

You can look at these Roberts court opinions building up to the immunity decision, says Huq, as giving “the presidency the option, essentially, to opt out of statutory laws.” The opinions created a dual state mechanism wherein the Constitution itself could be used to switch off the law when it comes to the president. In his book, Fraenkel defined the “principle of the inviolability of law” as meaning that “once the sovereign has promulgated a law, he may not violate it at his discretion” and explained that its abandonment is quintessential to the prerogative state: “The complete abolition of the inviolability of law is the chief characteristic of the Prerogative State.” It’s likely no accident that a year after Trump was given the unregulable power to launch sham prosecutions of political enemies, he is doing just that.

Why would a dictator prefer a dual state to an overtly authoritarian regime? In Fraenkel’s telling, the normative state served the Nazis’ aims by maintaining an illusion of normalcy, especially in economics. Similarly, an American president with authoritarian ambitions would be more likely to realize them if people thought their lives wouldn’t be affected. The Republican wing of the Supreme Court has a self-interest in a dual state as well; without the illusion of the normative state, the justices’ are revealed to be pawns, not power brokers. Their authority wouldevaporate because it is based on the perception of the rule of law. But maintaining a stabledual state means that the prerogative state must hold itself back, particularly in when it comes to the economy—the black hole cannot grow too large.

The upcoming term contains key tests of whether this administration and this court canmaintainthe sort of dual state that reassures voters and financialmarkets. In May, the Supreme Court used the shadow docket to allow Trump to fire commissioners on the National Labor Relations Board and Merit Systems Protection Board, even though the law prohibited their removals. But in its order, the GOP appointees attempted to protect the similarly-situated Federal Reserve Board from Trump’s firing authority. “The Federal Reserve is a uniquely structured, quasi-private entity that follows in the distinct historical tradition of the First and Second Banks of the United States,” the opinion stated. That exemption isn’t actually grounded in any set of laws or precedents—and neither is the Fed board quasi-private. But the distinction’s utility in a dual state context is clear: hand Trump control of every other agency but reassure the markets by protecting the Fed. As Bernick put it, “It’s like the court is offering, ‘We’re going to help you. We’ll do this for you. And if you want to have a dual state, we’ll give it to you.’”

Unappeased, the administration is back before the court in the Lisa Cook case, again pushing it to hand Trump control of the Fed by allowing him to remove members for obviously pretextual “causes.” The dual state response would be to fashion a compromise in which the court both lets the administration remove Cook while also calming the markets by making it seem like a complete Trump takeover of the nation’s monetary policy is not about to happen. That balancing act may be impossible. “The paradox is that if the markets don’t believe you, because they see through it, then you don’t have a dual state,” says Bernick. “If it’s too transparent that what’s going on here is just capitulation to authoritarians who want to do whatever they want, then you don’t have the normative state. And then markets get spooked because they like the normative state.”

“You can read Fraenkel as a story of inevitability… The dual state eventually collapses.”

The tariff case carries the same economic perils for the dual state—and the administration seems to know it. Its reassurances in its briefs in both cases that its positions will only help the economy are likely its own attempt to calm both the justices and the markets. Similarly, Trump’s decision in April to back off his most extreme tariffs when bond prices began to wobble signals that the administration is aware, at least on some level, that a takeover of the machinery of the economy is self-defeating. And yet, the desire to seize this power and quite likely wield it in aggressive and economically disastrous ways has been a feature of Trump’s second term. “You can read Fraenkel as a story of inevitability; going back to the black hole, at some point the prerogative state just sucks everything in,” says Huq. “That’s one version of the story, where the dual state eventually collapses into a single prerogative state.”

Justice Jackson’s warning in the birthright citizenship case tries to halt the shift to authoritarianism before it is too late. In her dissent citing Fraenkel, she tells the public that the Republican appointees are not applying the law so much as clearing it out of Trump’s way. “To hear the majority tell it, this suit raises a mind-numbingly technical query” about the historical analogues to universal injunctions, she wrote. “But that legalese is a smokescreen. It obscures a far more basic question of enormous legal and practical significance: May a federal court in the United States of America order the Executive to follow the law?”

The dual state is dual in two respects: First, it divides the law into the prerogative and normative zones; next it uses the normative zone to create an illusion of normalcy to cover up an authoritarian reality. This “smokescreen” sustains the economy and fosters acceptance by the people until it’s too late. Jackson accuses her colleagues of creating this dual state on both tracks: first, by sanctioning a zone of lawlessness, and second, by pretending that doing so is business as usual. But, she warns, “Were courts unable or unwilling to command the Government to follow the law—they would ‘sanctio[n] a tyranny.’”

Jackson, in the court’s minority, cannot stop her colleagues from hastening this tyranny. But in her dissents, she can blow their cover.

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If You Want to Stay Healthy and Care About Humanity, Here’s What to Eat

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

Adoption of a plant-rich “planetary health diet” could prevent 40,000 early deaths a day across the world, according to a landmark report.

The diet—which allows moderate meat consumption—and related measures would also slash the food-related emissions driving global heating by half by 2050. Today, a third of greenhouse gas emissions come from the global food system and taming the climate crisis is impossible without changing how the world eats, the researchers said. Food production is also the biggest cause of the destruction of wildlife and forests and the pollution of water.

The planetary health diet (PHD) sets out how the world can simultaneously improve the health of people and the planet, and provide enough food for an expected global population of 9.6 billion people by 2050.

“This is not a deprivation diet…” It “could be delicious, aspirational and healthy.”

The diet is flexible, allowing it to be adapted to local tastes, and can include some animal products or be vegetarian or vegan. However, all versions advise eating more vegetables, fruits, nuts, legumes and whole grains than most people in the world currently eat. In many places, today’s diets are unhealthy and unsustainable due to too much meat, milk and cheese, animal fats and sugar.

People in the US and Canada eat more than seven times the PHD’s recommended amount of red meat, while it is five times more in Europe and Latin America, and four times more in China. However, in some regions where people’s diets are heavily reliant on starchy foods, such as sub-Saharan Africa, a small increase in chicken, dairy and eggs would be beneficial to health, the report found.

North American adult diets in 2020 versus planetary health recommendation, daily per capita intake in grammesGuardian

Severe inequalities in the food system must also be ended to achieve healthy and sustainable diets, the researchers said. The wealthiest 30 percent of the world’s population generates more than 70 percent of food-related environmental damage, it found. Furthermore, 2.8 billion people cannot afford a healthy diet and 1 billion are undernourished, despite enough food being produced globally. The food system is also failing the 1 billion people living with obesity, the report said.

The report recommends shifting taxes to make unhealthy food more costly and healthy food cheaper, regulating the advertising of unhealthy food and using warning labels, and the shifting of today’s massive agricultural subsidies to healthier and more sustainable foods.

“What we put on our plates can save millions of lives, cut billions of tonnes of emissions, halt the loss of biodiversity, and create a fairer food system,” said Prof Johan Rockström, who co-chaired the EAT-Lancet Commission that produced the report. “The evidence is undeniable: transforming food systems is not only possible, it’s essential to securing a safe, just, and sustainable future for all.”

“This is not a deprivation diet,” said Prof Walter Willett of the Harvard TH Chan school of public health, and another commission co-chair. “This is something that could be delicious, aspirational and healthy. It also allows for cultural diversity and individual preferences, providing flexibility.”

“Our recommendations are grounded in scientific evidence and real-world experience.”

The report, published in the Lancet, was produced by 70 leading experts from 35 countries and six continents. It builds on the 2019 report that introduced the PHD, but includes new evidence of the health benefits of the diet.

“We have been able to look at this diet in relation to health outcomes such as total mortality, diabetes, respiratory diseases, heart disease, stroke, etc and we found very strong inverse relationships” said Willett. The diet was also linked to reduced cancer and neurodegenerative diseases.

Overall, the researchers estimated global adoption of the PHD could prevent 15m early deaths a year in adults. The estimate did not include the impact of the diet reducing obesity, meaning it is probably an underestimate.

The PHD recommends plant-rich, flexible diets, including:

• Fruits and vegetables—at least five portions a day
• Whole grains—three to four portions a day
• Nuts—one portion per day
• Legumes (beans, peas, lentils)—one portion per day
• Dairy—one serving of milk, yoghurt or cheese portions a day
• Eggs —three to four a week
• Chicken—two portions a week
• Fish—two portions a week
• Red meat—one portion a week

Marco Springmann from UCL in the UK and an author of the report said the differences between the PHD and current diets vary: “What needs to be reduced differs a lot. In low income countries, it’s the starchy foods and grains, whereas in high income countries it is animal-sourced foods, sugar, saturated fats, and dairy. It’s insane how much dairy is consumed in Europe and North America.”

The data underlying the report is available online and can be used to tailor different planetary health diets for the tastes of people in specific countries and of different ages. The website also shows how much the diets reduce deaths, improve nutrition, and cut environmental impacts. “Hopefully this will lead to more science-based policymaking,” said Springmann.

The PHD is better than current average diets for many nutrients, including fatty acids, fibre, folate, magnesium and zinc. Adequate iron and vitamin B12 could be provided by green leafy vegetables, fermented soy foods and algae, the researchers said.

Moving diets towards the PHD could be achieved by helping consumers make better everyday choices, said Line Gordon, director of the Stockholm Resilience Centre, for example by shifting taxes to make healthy foods cheaper, and putting warning labels on unhealthy foods. “But it is not just about getting prices lower, it’s also about bringing purchasing power up so that people can afford a healthier diet” she said.

“Our recommendations are grounded in scientific evidence and real-world experience,” Gordon said. “Changes are already under way, from school meal programmes to regenerative agriculture and food waste reduction initiatives.” England banned price promotions on unhealthy foods on Wednesday and will ban advertising such foods online.

The report estimates that food-related ill health and environmental damage costs society about $15 trillion a year. It said investments to transform the food system would cost $200 billion to $500 billion a year, but save $5 trillion.

Alongside a shift in diets, the report calls for other changes to the food system, including cutting the loss and waste of food, greener farming practices, and decent working conditions, as a third of food workers earn below living wages.

The launch of the PHD in 2019 led to attacks from meat industry interests. Rockström said: “The [new report] is a landmark achievement. It is a state-of-the-art scientific assessment that quantifies healthy diets for all human beings in the world and the environmental boundaries all food systems need to meet to stay safe. So we have a really rigorous foundation for our [results]. We are ready to meet that assault.”

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“Authoritarian”: Trump Sending Troops to Another American City

President Donald Trump is making good on his promise to invade more American cities.

On Saturday, Gov. JB Pritzker (D-Ill.) announced that the Trump administration planned to deploy 300 National Guard troops to Illinois “against our will.” Gov. Pritzker added that Department of Defense officials had told him that if he did not call up the troops himself, they would.

“For Donald Trump, this has never been about safety. This is about control.”

“They will pull hardworking Americans out of their regular jobs and away from their families all to participate in a manufactured performance—not a serious effort to protect public safety,” Pritzker added. “For Donald Trump, this has never been about safety. This is about control.”

Earlier this week, Pritzker said the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) was requesting National Guard troops be sent to Illinois to protect ICE agents, who have been carrying out what they call “Operation Midway Blitz,” an enforcement effort that DHS says has led to more than 1,000 arrests.

It is unclear where or when the National Guard troops were deployed, and spokespeople for the White House and Pritzker’s office did not immediately respond to requests for comment from Mother Jones on Sunday afternoon.

Trump has already sent the National Guard to Washington, DC, Portland, Los Angeles, and Memphis, even though troops in some of these cities don’t appear to have much to do.

Related

The National Guard Soldier Pissed About Trump’s DC Takeover

The Portland operation also hit a legal snag: On Saturday, a Trump-appointed federal judge temporarily blocked Trump’s deployment of the troops to the city, saying that the president’s allegations of unrest and his depiction of the city as “war-ravaged” were “untethered to facts.” The government, the judge said, “made a range of arguments that, if accepted, risk blurring the line between civil and military federal power—to the detriment of this nation.”

Trump has long been floating the idea of sending troops to Chicago, which he has called “a mess,” as I previously reported. Earlier this week, at Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s bizarre military meeting, Trump said he told Hegseth officials “should use some of these dangerous cities as training grounds” for the US military, adding, “we’re going into Chicago very soon. That’s a big city with an incompetent governor, stupid governor.”

On CNN’s State of the Union on Sunday, Pritzker told host Jake Tapper that residents are “booing” the presence of ICE, who are “just picking up people who are Brown and Black, and then checking their credentials.”

“We didn’t need them before they showed up,” he added.

Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker blasts the Trump administration over its immigration crackdown in Chicago: “They are the ones making it a war zone… They want mayhem on the ground. They want to create the war zone so that they can send in even more troops.” pic.twitter.com/UUTCV2PC69

— State of the Union (@CNNSOTU) October 5, 2025

Trump told reporters on Sunday that he believes Pritzker is “afraid for his life,” and baselessly claimed protesters in Chicago were “paid.”

Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D-Ill.) [said in a post on X][13] that Trump’s deployment of the troops was “authoritarian.” Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) [added][14], “History will recognize President Trump’s mobilization of our nation’s military in American cities for what it is—a vile abuse of power by a cruel President pushing us toward authoritarianism.”

Colleen K. Connell, executive director of the ACLU of Illinois, [called][15] the announcement “the latest escalation of attacks on people in the Chicago area,” adding, “The president clearly despises the reality that Chicago rejects his cruel policies, but we will not be intimidated.”

According to reports, tensions have been ramping up between people on the ground in Chicago and ICE agents. Pritzker and other officials referenced an overnight ICE raid at an apartment building in Chicago’s South Shore neighborhood this week, which reportedly [led][16] to the arrests of 37 people. Pritzker [said][17] the raid involved kids being zip-tied and separated from their parents. DHS officials [claimed][18] the area was frequented by gang members, but building residents told local media that they were swept up in the chaos regardless of whether or not they had any warrants out for their arrests.

On Saturday, DHS officials [said][19] Border Patrol agents shot an armed citizen after they were “attacked and rammed by vehicles and boxed in by 10 cars.” The woman, who DHS [says][20] has a history of doxxing federal agents, was released from the hospital and is in FBI custody.

Protests have also broken out at an ICE facility in Broadview, an area on the outskirts of Chicago. More than a dozen people were arrested there on Friday, when Noem made an in-person visit, CNN [reported][21].

On CNN on Sunday, Pritzker said the chaos is the point. “They want mayhem on the ground,” the governor said of the Trump administration. “They want to create the war zone so that they can send in even more troops.”

[13]: http://He’s terrorizing citizens in attempt to expand his power and punish opponents. That’s just not who we are. It’s authoritarian. [14]: https://x.com/SenatorDurbin/status/1974868683077173312 [15]: https://www.aclu.org/press-releases/aclu-and-aclu-of-illinois-slam-president-trumps-imminent-activation-of-300-troops-to-chicago [16]: https://www.cnn.com/2025/10/03/us/chicago-apartment-ice-raid [17]: https://gov-pritzker-newsroom.prezly.com/governor-pritzker-directs-state-agencies-to-evaluate-treatment-of-children-during-federal-raid-in-south-shore [18]: https://abc7chicago.com/post/ice-chicago-federal-agents-surround-south-shore-apartment-building-dhs-requests-military-deployment-illinois/17908911/ [19]: https://www.dhs.gov/news/2025/10/04/vehicles-again-used-weapon-attack-against-dhs-law-enforcement-officers-forced-fire [20]: https://www.dhs.gov/news/2025/10/04/update-dhs-deploys-special-operations-after-multiple-violent-attacks-federal-law [21]: https://www.cnn.com/2025/10/03/us/illinois-broadview-ice-protests

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ICE Will Be “All Over” the Super Bowl

In the latest reminder thatnowhere is safe, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is planning to “be all over” the Super Bowl, according to Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem.

“They suck and we’ll win and God will bless us,” said a government official to a podcaster.

Noem made the announcement on podcaster Benny Johnson’s show on Friday. Right-wingers, including Johnson, have been freaking out over Bad Bunny’s recently announced performance during the halftime show at the February game in Santa Clara, California. The Puerto Rican rapper, who has been critical of Trump, has said he avoided touring in the mainland US because he was concerned about ICE enforcement targeting his fans.

In response to Johnson’s questions, Noem told the host of the Super Bowl and its halftime show, “We’ll be all over that place.”

“I think people should not be coming to the Super Bowl unless they’re law-abiding Americans who love this country,” she added.

When Johnson asked if Noem had a message to the NFL—alleging that by picking Bad Bunny it “seemed like they were trying to send a message to the Trump administration”—she replied: “They suck and we’ll win and God will bless us.”

Just two days earlier, Corey Lewandowski, one of Noem’s top aides, made similar comments to Johnson, calling Bad Bunny a “cross-dressing, America-hating, ICE-hating, Puerto Rican dude” and complained that “he doesn’t sing in English.” Lewandowski told Johnson, “It’s so shameful that [the NFL] decided to pick somebody who just seems to hate America so much to represent them at the halftime game.”

Bad Bunny hosted Saturday Night Live’s season premiere last night. But he did not address the plans for ICE enforcement at the Super Bowl. The closest he came was introducing a short montage of Fox anchors edited to say they love him and want him to be the next president (instead of the actual criticism the hosts spewed).

Bad Bunny's monologue! pic.twitter.com/pjS0Ejckcg

— Saturday Night Live – SNL (@nbcsnl) October 5, 2025

Later in the monologue, he made some comments in Spanish, which reportedly translated to thanking “all of the Latinos and Latinas in the world here in the United States who have worked to open doors.” He added: “Our footprints and our contribution in this country, no one will ever be able to take that away or erase it.” Then, he added in English: “If you didn’t understand what I just said, you have four months to learn.”

Neither Bad Bunny nor the NFL have appeared to respond to the Trump administration’s threats.

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Indigenous Nations Plan Tariff-Free Trade Corridor Across US-Canada border

This story was originally published by Canada’s National Observer and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Just west of Fort Qu’Appelle in Saskatchewan, the Standing Buffalo Dakota Nation is working across the US border to revive centuries-old trade routes as part of a new Indigenous-governed trade corridor.

Trucks from the First Nation could soon be transporting food, furniture and even critical minerals south of the border along ancestral pathways once used to move buffalo hides and pemmican across the plains—without paying taxes or tariffs.

For generations, Indigenous peoples freely exchanged goods, knowledge and culture across the land that is now divided by the Canada–US border. Those networks were disrupted by colonial laws that divided families and communities but they are now being reimagined as a modern supply chain grounded in Indigenous law and sovereignty.

“We’re operationalizing our old corridors—taking ancient trade routes our elders told us about and articulating them in a modern context,” said Solomon Cyr, spokesperson for Standing Buffalo Dakota Nation.

The First Nation plans to formalize its partnership with the Fort Peck Sioux Tribes, in Montana, next week by signing a memorandum of understanding to advance the trade corridor and its infrastructure development.

The corridor intends to use traditional routes traversing Dakota territories in Saskatchewan, Alberta, Manitoba and into the United States, reviving the historic Oceti Sakowin trade network, a historic alliance of seven Dakota, Lakota and Nakota Indigenous groups united by kinship, language and spiritual beliefs. The shared trade routes historically facilitated economic and military ties across their territories. “We have a lot of history, and even to this day, ties linking us to our relatives,” said Rodger Redman, chief of the nation.

“There was a promise to our people that we would continue to trade and be allowed to trade in our traditional territories.”

Redman said this corridor is not symbolic, but rather an economic engine for the countries. Standing Buffalo is located in a region rich with critical minerals vital to global industries including renewable energy and technology. By owning the corridor, Indigenous nations can control the movement of these resources and expand economic opportunities for their communities.

The plan includes a $2-billion infrastructure proposal submitted to Canada’s Privy Council aimed at developing core projects such as a cross-border trade portal, renewable energy corridors and smart transportation networks.

“We’re not only talking about natural gas or oil pipelines,” Cyr said. “We’re talking about furniture, anything connected to the GDP that moves on trucks, trains or pipelines that can be tax exempt, so long as the products move from point A to point B.”

It is currently the only Indigenous nation actively pursuing a trade corridor of this kind, which could transform commerce between the United States and Canada. “It’s a very distinctive and powerful world-class application of an old Indigenous order of operations,” Cyr said.

Redman said the initiative is part of a centuries-old relationship with the British Crown and Indigenous allies, noting that the nation never ceded its land or jurisdiction.

“There was a promise to our people that we would continue to trade and be allowed to trade in our traditional territories. Today, we are operationalizing those promises made by the Crown that we would continue to trade in our personal territory,” he said.

The promise Redman is referring to is the Jay Treaty, a 1794 agreement between the United States and Great Britain that recognizes the right of Indigenous peoples to freely cross the US-Canada border for trade and travel.

Nadir André, a partner at JFK Law with extensive experience in Aboriginal Law, said the Jay Treaty is the only legal source that could facilitate such movement. But while the United States acknowledges and enforces the treaty’s provisions, Canada has never acknowledged the treaty. In fact, a Supreme Court decision from the early 2000s, known as the Mitchell case, found that the Jay Treaty is not enforceable in Canada.

The court also ruled that there is no clear Aboriginal right under Section 35 of the Canadian Constitution allowing Indigenous peoples to bring goods across the border for trade purposes. If a First Nation fuel company wanted to bring fuel from Canada to sell in the United States, under US law this is allowed without paying duty taxes or tariffs. However, the reverse—bringing goods from the US into Canada—is not legally recognized.

“We were called refugees and treated in a discriminatory fashion… Now, with constitutional protections, we’re asserting sovereignty.”

“If it’s not bilateral, then it defeats the purpose, because then it would only confer an advantage to Canadian First Nations doing trade in the ‘States and it would not be a counterpart for the American tribes to be able to trade in Canada,” he said.

John Desjarlais, executive director of the Indigenous Resource Network, believes this initiative could serve as another test of the Jay Treaty, which could set a precedent for other First Nations creating trade corridors and opportunities in resources such as timber, oil, and mining, as well as long-term manufacturing. However, many questions remain.

“We’re pushing jurisdictional boundaries and sovereignty within Canada. What does that mean in the broader turmoil of cross‑border trade between Canada and the US? What does protected, tax‑ and tariff‑free trade look like?”

André said there’s also concern that without clear verification processes, non-Indigenous companies could misuse the system by falsely claiming Indigenous status.

He said considerations for the corridor extend beyond customs lines, involving strict environmental, health and safety regulations, as well. Many products, such as lumber and drinking water, require adherence to such standards. “Would you allow drinkable water as a trade? Could you bring water by bulk from Canada to the States through this initiative? Or would it be limited to certain items that are already allowed for trading?”

Governance is another significant challenge. Canada’s trade regulations come under the jurisdiction of multiple layers of government—provinces, territories and federal departments—while the US adds its own complexity with 51 states, each having separate rules. Coordinating among all these authorities will be a daunting task.

André recalled that similar efforts have been made before, such as during the renegotiations of the North American Free Trade Agreement in 2016, but none succeeded.

For the nation, this initiative is a breakthrough.

Until 2024, the Standing Buffalo Dakota Nation was not officially recognized as an Indigenous nation in Canada. That year, the Canadian government apologized for this mistake and formally recognized Standing Buffalo and eight other Dakota and Lakota First Nations as Aboriginal peoples, granting them constitutional protections under Section 35. “We were called refugees and treated in a discriminatory fashion without rights or recognition. Now, with constitutional protections, we’re asserting sovereignty over our lands and trade,” Cyr said.

Redman has been actively advancing the trade corridor through international diplomacy, including high-level meetings in Mexico City with officials from CUSMA (Canada-United States-Mexico Agreement), which replaced the former NAFTA agreement. He said that while the nation continues to wait for Canada to formally recognize its sovereignty and legal framework, officials from Mexico and the US have shown greater openness to work together.

The nation has also established its own consultation frameworks and environmental oversight processes to ensure that its voices and rights remain central in developments on their lands. The funding for their initiative is expected to come from multiple sources including the First Nations Finance Authority, the federal Indigenous Loan Guarantee Program, nation’s capital, and other investment partnerships.

“We’re not begging for crumbs anymore. We’re demanding what’s rightly ours and share our responsibility to Mother Earth,” Redman said. “We’re asserting our sovereignty. We’re here to give them notice that we have our trade corridor and we’re implementing that.”

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Judge Says DOJ May Be Vindictively Prosecuting Kilmar Abrego Garcia

The case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia—the immigrant whose deportation to a Salvadoran prison in March caused national outrage—has taken a new turn. On Friday, a federal judge found that the Trump administration may be pursing charges against him out of vindictiveness. Now, the judge is allowing evidence gathering and a hearing to determine if the Justice Department’s criminal prosecution of Abrego Garcia should be dismissed as a “selective or vindictive prosecution.”

In March, the Trump administration sent Abrego Garcia, originally from El Salvador, to a notorious Salvadoran prison, despite a judge’s previous order preventing his return to his home country. The government acknowledged it removed him by mistake, but then refused for months to return him to the United States. The government finally returned Abrego Garcia to the United States once it had filed criminal charges against him in Tennessee in connection to a traffic stop there in 2022, in which he was pulled over for speeding and questioned about transporting other immigrants in the vehicle he was driving. He wasn’t charged then, but now, more than years later, the government alleges that he was part of a human smuggling operation, transporting undocumented people within the United States.

Abrego Garcia’s lawyers have argued that the case should be dismissed as a vindictive and selective prosecution. They noted that such dismissals are rarely granted, but argued that this should be one such rare case. Tennessee District Court Judge Waverly Crenshaw Jr., an Obama appointee, agreed that the matter should be explored.

In his opinion, Crenshaw pointed to public statements from several Trump administration officials celebrating Abrego Garcia’s indictment. Most telling, Crenshaw wrote, are the actions of Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche.

After Abrego Garcia’s removal to El Salvador, he had sued for his release in Maryland. In a TV interview, Blanche later revealed that the Justice Department only launched the criminal investigation into Abrego Garcia after the judge in the Maryland case ruled in the man’s favor. The implication, then, is that the government may have launched criminal charges against Abrego Garcia as retaliation for the civil case where he questioned his deportation—and where the judge “found that it ‘had no right to deport him,’ and ‘accus[ed] [the government] of doing something wrong.'”

“The Fifth Amendment forbids the government from punishing Defendants for exercising their constitutional and statutory rights,” Crenshaw continued. “Consequently, Defendants may challenge the government’s charging decisions for actual or presumptive vindictiveness.”

This order comes at a perilous time for Abrego Garcia. After his return to the United States, he was jailed in Tennessee. At one point, his lawyers asked that he be allowed to remain in jail, because they feared the administration would deport him if released. Since August, the administration has been threatening to remove him to Uganda—a country where he’s never lived.This ispart of the government’s effort to deport people to far-away countries, with often dangerous conditions, if they cannot be returned to their country of origin. (This is one of many Trump policies that the Supreme Court has green lit on its shadow docket—usually brief and unexplained opinions made without a hearing.)

Now, Abrego Garcia is fighting his deportation even as the criminal prosecution against him in Tennessee proceeds. This week, an immigration judge in Baltimore denied his asylum request, which he has 30 days to appeal.

Even as his claims of vindictive prosecution move forward, the administration continues to work to remove him:“One thing is certain: This Salvadoran man is not going to be able to remain in our country,” Department of Homeland Security spokeswoman Tricia McLaughlin said in a statement to the Washington Post. Abrego Garcia will “never be loose on American streets.”

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The Supreme Court Just Took Legal Status from 300,000 Venezuelans

The Supreme Court’s Republican appointees on Friday let the Trump administration end the legal status of 300,000 Venezuelan immigrants who were granted Temporary Protected Status(TPS), a type of humanitarian relief for people whose home countries are in crisis, even as this group’s case continues to wind through the courts. The order is extraordinary—not least because it puts 300,000 people at the mercy of President Donald Trump’s increasingly brutal and uninhibited deportation forces.

Just this week, the American people saw images of an ICE raid on a Chicago apartment building with a significant Venezuelan population. Citizens had their doors bashed in and were zip-tied for hours. Pulled from their apartments in the middle of the night, mothers were separated from children, and children were zip-tied to each other, some naked. This type of raid is precisely what the Supreme Court allowed just last month when it said that ICE could use race to detain suspected immigrants. Nowwith Friday’s decision, they’ve all but ensured that many of the 300,000 Venezuelans will have no legal protection should they get detained.

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem announced earlier this year that she was ending temporary protected status for Venezuelans, even though, by law, those protections run until October 2026. It was, as Mother Jones reported, “the largest delegalization campaign in modern US history.” Friday’s order pausedDistrict Court Judge Edward Chen’s ruling that the revocation of TPS violated federal law. The Trump administration asked the Supreme Court to allow its revocation of TPS for the Venezuelan immigrants anyway, and it did. Now, even as the district court’s decision is not final—the case’s appeal is working its way through the courts—300,000 people will suddenly lose legal immigration status. Many have been here for years and have had temporary protected status since 2021.

The Supreme Court opinion behind this was brief, unreasoned, and unsigned. It is another decision on the so-called emergency or shadow docket in which the GOP wing of the court disregards lower court rulings with little or no explanation. It also fits a pattern, now demonstrated in nearly two-dozen cases, in which the Republican appointees on the high court have decided thatwhen it comes to Trump policies whose legality is still being decided in the courts, they should proceed in the interim, with little regard for the harm to people whose lives may be upended as a result.This case is a dramatic example of that decision to privilege Trump’s interests above everyone else’s—even as ICE’s brutality plays out daily across the country.

The three Democratic appointees dissented, but only Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson chose to explain her objections. She criticized her colleagues misuse of their emergency powers. Jackson stressed the human toll that her colleagues decision will have, and then juxtaposed that harm with their unwillingness to even explain their decision.

“We once again use our equitable power (but not our opinion-writing capacity) to allow this Administration to disrupt as many lives as possible, as quickly as possible,” Jackson wrote. She points out that her colleagues, rather than prioritizing the harm to 300,000 people, instead privilege “the bald assertion of unconstrained executive power over countless families’ pleas for the stability our Government has promised them.”

“Because, respectfully, I cannot abide our repeated, gratuitous, and harmful interference with cases pending in the lower courts while lives hang in the balance,” she concluded, “I dissent.”

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Climate Scientists Raise a Middle Finger to Trump’s Censorship Efforts

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

Researchers across the United States and the world who raced to protect climate data, public reports and other information from the Trump administration’s budget cuts, firings, and scrubbing of federal websites are launching their own climate information portals.

A group of scientists and other experts who formerly worked for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration recently launched Climate.us, where they eventually hope to replicate much of the public-oriented climate content from Climate.gov.

In a parallel effort, two major scientific institutions, the American Geophysical Union and the American Meteorological Society, have started soliciting studies for a special “Climate Collection” to maintain momentum on the work that was already under way on a Congressionally mandated 6th National Climate Assessment, due in 2028, before all the scientists working on the report were fired and cabinet-level team that led the effort disbanded.

“It’s unbelievable…We were literally forced to word search our own website and take down articles because they didn’t want to read the word ‘equity’ “

The new efforts demonstrate how difficult it is to erase or obscure climate science from the public in an era when thousands of scientists and computers around the world are continuously calculating and measuring climate and greenhouse gas emissions. Other science rescue efforts have focused on preserving those data sets, but the public-facing portals are also important, experts said.

Current efforts by the US government to make it harder for people to get scientific information are a clear-cut case of censorship, said Haley Crim, currently a climate solutions researcher at MIT and one of the leaders of an effort to restore important climate information that officials in the Trump administration purged from federal websites.

Along with significant funding and personnel cuts to various federal climate programs and other scientific efforts, some scientists report facing increased harassment and threats online. Others worry that misleading, inaccurate and potentially dangerous misinformation is being posted on official government websites.

Gaining traction for new climate websites can be a challenge in a world filled with misleading and false scientific information, but the latest efforts have endorsements from leading scientists and scientific institutions. And the researchers working on the science preservation and restoration efforts say that, in the long run, the projects may result in new ways to store and share scientific information, and perhaps even better ways to make that information more relevant to the growing number of people experiencing deadly and disruptive climate impacts in the US and around the world.

During her last few months working on the Climate.gov website, Crim said she was ordered to remove articles mentioning diversity and other terms identified by political appointees. The altered version of the website remains online, but its future beyond the end of this year is uncertain.

A NOAA spokesperson said that changes to Climate.gov were made in compliance with an executive order, and that all research products from climate.gov will be relocated to Noaa.gov to “centralize and consolidate resources.”

“It’s unbelievable, and it is censorship, and I think people were afraid to say that for a long time,” Crim said. “We were literally forced to word search our own website and take down articles because they didn’t want to read the word ‘equity’, or other related terms.”

The administration could still use Climate.gov to publish misleading information, like a recent debunked climate report from Trump’s DOE.

On top of the censorship, Crim said she and others working on the new website fear that the Trump administration could lash out at them or their institutions, but she said she won’t be intimidated.

“There’s no other option for me,” she said. “I can’t sit back and watch this stuff be taken down because someone didn’t like it. It is state-of-the-art climate information and I’m not just going to let that go away.”

Any mentions of climate justice were also purged, said former Climate.gov editor Rebecca Lindsey, who is now working on the effort to restore the deleted information on the new website, Climate.us.

So far, a handful of people are coordinating the effort publicly, with dozens of others volunteering behind the scenes. The long-term goal is to ensure there is as complete a backup as possible, including censored material, if Climate.gov goes offline.

“They removed anything about trying to increase diversity in the sciences, and the fact that the impacts of human-caused climate change are going to be disproportionately felt by people who are already marginalized,” Lindsey said, adding that the team wants to revive that potentially life-saving information.

Through mid-September, crowdfunding efforts have enabled the volunteers to launch their new website and, in a big step, to post the Fifth National Climate Assessment.

The NCA5, published in 2023, is the most comprehensive federal report on human-caused warming and its impacts and serves as a critical resource for communities facing wildfires, rising sea levels and other climate-related challenges. It was relegated to an archival website in June when the administration shut down the interagency US Global Change Research Program, which had a congressional mandate to produce the report.

In a worst-case scenario, Lindsey added, the administration could use the popular Climate.gov portal to publish deliberately misleading information, like a recent debunked climate report from the US Department of Energy.

To establish the new website’s credibility, the team plans to partner with authoritative institutions, such as the World Meteorological Organization and the American Meteorological Society, and recruit an independent science advisory panel for expert review and oversight, she said.

Parallel to the efforts to re-create the Climate.gov information portal, the AGU and the AMS are working to ensure that climate information relevant to the United States’ interests is being properly cataloged in a format that could be used in a future national climate assessment.

Their project compensates for the potential discontinuation of work on a new congressionally mandated National Climate Assessment scheduled for 2028. The Trump administration defunded the interagency team and dismissed the scientists working on the assessment in April.

A federal task force coordinated the National Climate Assessment, but the new US climate collection will be more of a grassroots project, as the peer-reviewed contributions help define its shape.

Working “outside the federal fence” could open avenues for climate communications that weren’t previously an option.”

“One of the things that we in the broader science community can do in this moment is do what we do best, and that’s peer-reviewed, rigorous science,” said Costa Samaras, director of the Scott Institute for Energy Innovation and trustee professor of civil and environmental engineering at Carnegie Mellon University, who is helping to coordinate the collection.

“Information about how climate affects communities and resources is essential for both public understanding and for public and private decision making,” he said.

The collection can be a beacon for the scientific community to submit “high-quality, rigorous scientific research around climate that can be peer-reviewed and widely shared for free,” he said, “in a way that helps, our broader understanding of these issues, especially as climate impacts accelerate.”

He said some of the research likely will focus on questions like where extreme rains will lead to flooding in coming decades, and where sea level rise may take unexpectedly big bites out of coastal communities, as well as studies looking at overall ecosystem impacts and community impacts, with an eye toward how climate impacts “disproportionately affects marginalized communities, both here and around the world,” he said.

Co-organizer Bob Kopp, a climate researcher at Rutgers University who has also participated in several other major national and international climate assessments, said there has been significant research on systemic climate impacts that could be part of the collection, including effects on insurance and real estate markets, and how climate impacts strain municipal health infrastructure. Additionally, he said assessments of carbon dioxide removal and other negative-emissions technologies would be useful.

There are, for example, a lot of ways to think about climate impacts and climate solutions that “relate to the education sector, the IT sector, or the legal system. I personally would love to see things that haven’t been assessed as much,” he said. “New synthesis papers could really lay the groundwork for future assessments.”

Lindsey, the former NOAA contractor now working on the new public climate information portal, climate.us, said that working “outside the federal fence” could open avenues for climate communications that weren’t previously an option for the federal agency, including posting information about global warming and carbon dioxide mitigation, which was not part of the mission of the climate.gov website, she said.

“We see this as an opportunity to diversify our support, to get out from under potential political interference,” she said.

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Russ Vought Is Trump’s Shutdown Hero. His Neighbors Think His Work Is “Abhorrent.”

On Thursday night, President Donald Trump shared a music video on Truth Social. In it, an AI-generated Russ Vought—Trump’s director of the Office of Management and Budget and a Project 2025 mastermind—is the grim reaper, carrying a scythe along a hallway lined with portraits of Democratic leaders. Vought, the video’s soundtrack explains, “wields the pen, the funds, and the brain” to enforce the president’s plans to axe federal workers.

“Everyone still remembers when he said he wanted to cause maximum trauma to federal workers,” one neighbor said.

The budget chief has been in the spotlight lately as Trump’s shutdown enforcer. He is pressing on with threats to permanently cut federal workers en masse during this crisis. It is part of his long-held dream of shrinking the federal government and giving the president unrestrained powers. Vought’s combination of bureaucratic know-how and hardline ideology has made him a star in right-wing circles.

But on the quiet, residential street tucked in the Virginia suburb where Vought lives, the perception of him and his role in the shutdown is less than favorable. Several homes in the neighborhood have a yard sign in the front proudly declaring: “This house supports federal workers.” That includes the house right next door to his.

“So many people in this neighborhood are federal workers,” said Cathy Hunter, a 60-year-old archivist who has lived in the area since 1993. “They do really good work and they just feel so disrespected.”

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Residents said the signs started cropping up early on in the administration, after Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) dismantled the US foreign aid agency and haphazardly purged government employees who are now being rehired by the hundreds. (A recent New York Times article included photos of a sidewalk chalk protest in the vicinity of Vought’s house that read: “I was hungry and the USA fed me. Until Vought cut USAID.”) Other chalk protests have popped up, too.

A chalk message in Russ Vought’s neighborhood.Courtesy of a neighbor

A chalk message in Russ Vought’s neighborhood.Courtesy of a neighbor

These days, the pro-federal worker signs have been sending an even louder message to Vought.

“People have strong feelings about him,” one person who lives further down the street told me, describing the neighborhood as solidly blue. “Everyone knows someone who lost their jobs.”

“He takes food and health care from the neediest and tries to, in his words, traumatize people—then he calls himself a Christian,” another neighbor told me. “Pretty despicable.”

Residents I talked to said that many federal employees, contractors, and active and retired military live in the area. “It’s a very friendly neighborhood,” one person said. “People look out for each other.” Of Vought, she said: “I don’t think he’s interacted with the neighbors at all.”

“Everyone still remembers when he said he wanted to cause maximum trauma to federal workers,” the neighbor said. “And that’s hard to forget.”

Most of Vought’s neighbors I talked to for this article declined to speak on the record or asked to remain anonymous. Some said they didn’t want to create a rift in an otherwise cordial neighborhood, while others worried about retribution or negative repercussions from their employers.

“I just wish he would have gotten to know us,” Hunter said. “We consider ourselves good Americans, we have good values. And I don’t think he’s been interested in getting to know any of us, in hearing if we might have a difference of opinion.”

Last week, Vought director sent around a memo blaming Democrats’ “insane demands” for the imminent lapse in funding and instructing agency heads to start making plans to cut non-mandatory programs “not consistent with the President’s priorities” and “use this opportunity to consider Reduction in Force.” Appearing on Fox Business, Vought claimed an “authority to make permanent change to the bureaucracy here in government” during the shutdown.

He has since announced pauses to funding for infrastructure projects in New York—home state of House Minority Leader Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (D-New York), who called Vought a “malignant political hack”—and slowdowns in clean energy projects in several blue states.

Vought, Republican Sen. Mike Lee of Utah said on Fox News, “has been dreaming about and preparing for his moment since puberty.”

AsIwrote in a profile of Vought from 2024, the bespectacled official spent years as a Washington insider and government bureaucrat before becoming the architect of a supersized second Trump presidency.

An avowed Christian nationalist and dedicated America First warrior, he once described the job of OMB director as the “keeper of ‘commander’s intent” and criticized the federal bureaucracy for standing in the way of the president’s agenda. During Trump’s first term, Vought tried to implement an executive order that would have made it easier for political appointees to fire career civil servants and replace them with MAGA loyalists. Now, he’s getting to realize his vision while earning points with the president.

For some of his neighbors, it is personal. “You stare it in the face when he’s there,” one person said. “This is the guy, you know.”

Another neighbor I talked to, who also asked not to be named, said many in the neighborhood find Vought’s policies and actions “abhorrent.”

“He takes food and health care from the neediest and tries to, in his words, traumatize people—then he calls himself a Christian,” the neighbor said. “Pretty despicable. You asked what it is like living near such a man. Frankly, I’d rather not, but this is a wonderful neighborhood and, unlike Mr. Vought himself, we do not want our neighbors (even Mr. Vought) to be traumatized. So we just live with it.”

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The “War-Ravaged” Portland Only Exists in Trump’s Head

First it was Los Angeles. Then, Washington, DC. Then, Memphis. Now, Portland, Oregon, is in President Donald Trump’s sights—just the latest Democratic city facing increased militarization.

Last week, Donald Trump announced on Truth Social he was authorizing Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth “to provide all necessary Troops to protect War ravaged Portland” from what he called a “siege” by “Antifa.” At the center of this claim is Portland’s ICE facility, where protesters have been gathering acrosssummer.

I recently visited the ICE facility with my cameraand spoke with people there and across Portland—and the reality of what is happening on the streets is very different than what the administration wishes to portray.

“What you hear is music and you see bubbles,” Oregon state representative Willy Chotzen told me at demonstration featuring Governor Tina Kotek. “This is the true Portland and this is the Portland that shows up for each other.”

While there has been some damage to facilities and clashes between agents and demonstrators, it’s been largely peaceful. Video shows protesters gather to dance to the “Cha Cha Slide” and show up dressed in silly costumes—a familiar Portland scene. Even the local city police have stated in court that they see the feds “instigating” and causing a “ruckus.”

While the White House and its allies framed weeks-long demonstrations outside the Portland ICE facility as “violent riots,” and authorizing “full force if necessary,” Oregon and the City of Portland jointly sued the administration, arguing president cannot federalize Oregon’s Guard to protect federal property without meeting the narrow conditions—such as rebellion or foreign invasion.

“This is an illegal escalation of force against the city of Portland,” Portland city councilmember Mitch Green told me. “This is an attempt to normalize the rising fascism that’s going on.”

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For Furloughed Workers, Trump’s Partisan Shutdown Jabs Are Just the Latest Slight

In the past, for veteran federal employees, the weeks leading up to a potential shutdown situation have always involved a flurry of emails and meetings in preparation for a winding down of their agency. That, at least, has been the experience of an employee I spoke with at the National Institutes of Health (my former employer) who asked not to be named for fear of retribution. This time was very different, they told me: “I experienced absolutely none of that, because there’s nobody around me…I go to the office most days and it’s empty.”

One of the few communications this employee received was an email stating that “President Trump opposes a government shutdown” and that any lapse in funding was “forced by Congressional Democrats.” Emails of this nature have been sent to employees throughout the government, in addition to some agencies instructing their staffers to set up out-of-office emails containing similar language—some employees have even reported that their automated replies were altered without their consent.

Apart from violating an apolitical ethos that runs deep within the career federal workforce, this partisan framing is a likely violation of the Hatch Act, which prohibits federal employees from engaging in political activities. “Honestly, at this point, I don’t think me or my coworkers were shocked at the ethics violations,” says a State Department employee who also asked for anonymity.

The NIH employee wasn’t particularly surprised, either, they said, but given the workforce reductions and other administration actions that have impeded their work since January, “I liked the fact that I still had the capacity for disappointment.”

The Hatch Act isn’t some small stipulation buried away in an employee handbook. Impartiality is emphasized in the ethics training that federal workers take when they start their jobs and typically re-up every two years. And it’s something career civil servants take seriously.

“I, like every other federal employee, have gone through tons of hoops and given up tons of things,” the NIH employee said. For example, when invited to give lectures at other institutions, the employee had to fill out piles of paperwork and always declined any honorarium, as many federal workers are required to do. “And that didn’t bother me. That felt correct,” the employee said.

Of the Hatch Act and related ethics stipulations, they added, “Those aren’t laws for the sake of being laws. They actually were things that were worth believing in because they prevented real conflicts of interest.”

The Trump administration’s blatant disregard of the laws and traditions governing federalcommunications—rules that most employees follow dutifully throughout their careers—has left some workers with a bad taste in their mouth. “Not only is it insulting to the standards we’re all supposed to abide by,” the State Department employee said, “but it’s also insulting to our intelligence.”

It furthermore has added insult to injury. A shutdown is a pause to normal operations, but for those who have remained in the federal government through rounds of layoffs and reduction-in-force deals, normal operations ended a long time ago. “I can’t do the job I was hired to do now at all…because, you know, everyone I work with was fired,” the NIH employee said.

This is true for teams across the NIH and other agencies. For much of this year, the website of the NIH institute I used to work at had a banner alert saying it was not being updated because of “reduction in workforce efforts.” Now, a new banner blames the lack of updates on the shutdown, when the truth is that the entire team that managed that website is gone.

To claim the shutdown is the cause of government dysfunction—and to blame “the Radical Left in Congress,” as the Housing and Urban Development website does—is “factually untrue,” the NIH employee said.

This is something many Americans realize, even if they don’t share front row seats with dedicated federal workers. But the pain for those workers transcends the administration’s falsehoods: “There were reasons for the rules and the norms,” the NIH employee told me. “They created a sense of legitimacy…The institution doesn’t have the legitimacy it did six months ago.”

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Taking Stock of the Roberts Court at 20—and the Shadowy Forces That Built It

Chief Justice John Roberts has led the Supreme Court for 20 years now. In that time, his Republican-appointed majority has completely transformed America and its politics, with many of its most destructive opinions written by Roberts himself. Some effects are already visible in our everyday lives, others are only now coming into focus.

“This is now a MAGA court, and Roberts is at the helm.”

The court has rolled back voting rights and greenlit gerrymandering, at particular costs to nonwhite voters. It has allowed unlimited money to warp our politics and empowered the wealthiest elites at the expense of most Americans—a distortion that is reflected in growing inequality. The court ended affirmative action in higher education. It ended the right to an abortion. It made it harder for the government to issue the kinds of rules and regulations that safeguard our health and environment. It so aggressively expanded gun rights that virtually every American is now essentially entitled to a machine gun. It’s consistently weakened labor unions and consumer rights. The court has eviscerated the separation of church and state by inviting religious activities and opinions into public schools. And after significant wins for LGBTQ rights—over Roberts’ objection—the court has pivoted and begun to attack them, and transgender people in particular. It’s made public corruption great again. And then there is the court’s obsessive drive to increase presidential power, culminating in last year’s immunity decision, written by Roberts, in which the court granted the president sweeping new powers and general immunity from criminal prosecution, upsetting the separation of powers in our system of government. The decision was the most radical one in a series of holdings where, leading up to the 2024 election, the court repeatedly stepped in to help Trump escape accountability for alleged crimes and aid his return to power. Finally, in recent months, the court has unleashed Trump to act illegally by halting lower court injunctions—decisions which have resulted in illegal deportations to South Sudan, racial profiling by ICE, and the partial dismantling of multiple federal agencies, to name a few. In the face of district courts reining in Trump, the justices decided to strip lower court judges of their power to issue nationwide relief.

That’s quite a record.

Lisa Graves saw it coming. As chief nominations counsel to Sen. Patrick Leahy, when President George W. Bush first nominated Roberts to a seat on the federal bench, she believed Roberts had been selected by monied rightwing interests to rise the ranks and lead a conservative revolution on the Supreme Court. In her subsequent years as a researcher, she has sought to uncover the billionaire funding networks behind the hijacking of the court. This month, she published a book, Without Precedent, that lays out not just the damage wrought by the Roberts court, but also the behind-the-scenes machinations that created it. The details and context Graves provides—both as a witness and a player in nomination fights, and a researcher working with reporters—combine tocapture the movement to overtake the court with a wide aperture. Did you know, for example, that the parents of C. Boyden Gray, a Republican kingmaker and key Roberts backer, celebrated their upcoming wedding with a party in which some guests dressed as Nazis? I didn’t.

To Graves, the Roberts court is the right’s answer to the Warren court, which in the 1950s and 1960s issued a long list of opinions that expanded individual rights and promotedracial equality. Conservatives wanted to undo that progress, but their mission to take over the court sometimes hit roadblocks. In 1987, President Ronald Reagan tapped Robert Bork, but his reactionary views on civil rights sank his nomination. In 1990, President George W. Bush nominated David Souter, who would go on to vote with the liberal wing of the court. Rightwing interests, whose power was channeled largely through the Federalist Society’s Leonard Leo, redoubled their efforts. This meant firstly, no more Souters. Second, it meant ensuring none of their nominees could get “Borked.” Graves account of the Roberts court is as much a story of Roberts as it is the people, like Leo, who spent fortunesorchestrating this campaign.

“No Supreme Court majority in American history has ever been constructed the way the Roberts court has—with the help of big, dark secret money,” Graves writes. “The Roberts faction dominating the Supreme Court is quite the cast of characters. Each of them was carefully selected not because they were thought to be fair but because they were believed to be dependable votes for a revolution in the law—one Leo and his cohorts knew could be accomplished only by keeping Americans in the dark about their views.” They have succeeded, perhaps beyond their wildest dreams.

Lisa Graves leads the judicial watchdog group True North Research, is a frequent guest on MSNBC, and sits on several non-profit boards—including the Park Foundation, which has supported Mother Jones. I spoke with Graves about her book, her thoughts on Roberts’ legacy, and where the country goes from here.

You finished the book earlier this year, but events are moving at warp speed with this Supreme Court. Have your thoughts on the chief justice evolved in the last few months as the court hands Trump win after win? Or is the John Roberts that you document over decades the same John Roberts that you see all the way through?

The court’s aggressive action to overturn numerous temporary restraining orders by lower court judges—and to do so using the emergency docket this summer—just the amount of those interventions and disregard for the detailed findings of lower court judges, exceeded my worst fears. But we’re not done yet, and there’s more damage that this Court will do. I do think that that is in many ways very consistent with the through line of who Roberts is and was at the time of his confirmation.

One of the stories in the book is about how he was auditioning for the job on the Supreme Court, secretly interviewing with the Bush administration, as the Bush administration was litigating a case before him. The Bush administration was asserting that the president had the power to reinterpret the Geneva Conventions and subject [Salim Hamdan] to these military tribunals that Bush and [Vice President Dick] Cheney constructed. Roberts never told Hamdan’s lawyers that he was seeking a job from the administration while that case was pending. Had he recused himself, he might not have gotten the job. Had he ruled against them, he might not have gotten the job. The facts are that he interviewed with the Bush administration, with top officials, for more than 100 days while that case was pending. He joined the decision ruling in favor of [the Bush administration], and two days later, he was nominated for the Supreme Court. He interviewed with Bush basically as that decision had come down.

One of his first acts in getting power was to accept a very aggressive assertion of executive branch power, and he did so while he was trying to get a job from that president. So in that sense it’s not a surprise to me that we’re here now, where he is basically using the power of the court, along with his fellow Republican appointees, to expand the power of a Republican President.

Your research has focused a lot on the shadowy network of billionaires behind the conservative legal movement. When we think about the court’s entanglements with billionaires, we generally think of Clarence Thomas, or even Samuel Alito. Can you explain Roberts’ relationship with the moneyed interests that support the Federalist Society and a lot of the agenda that he’s implemented?

I observed that firsthand when I was the chief counsel for nominations for the Senate Judiciary Committee for Senator Leahy. Roberts was one of just over a dozen people who were nominated by George W. Bush on May 9, 2001, putting people in place for potential Supreme Court vacancies. [Roberts was nominated to the DC Circuit Court of Appeals.] We were not going to move him forward to a hearing or a vote. And the right wing groups were enraged. They started spending a lot of money to try to pressure Democrats to approve Roberts. He was almost always at the top of their talking points; he was their top horse in the race. That was Leonard Leo. It was C. Boyden Gray and some right wing groups actively pushing for Roberts’ confirmation.

“It’s so damaging, it’s so destructive—and he orchestrated it.”

Then, when he was nominated to the Supreme Court in 2005, those groups went into overdrive. There’s very little known about some of the donors to some of those groups. But we know, for example, that Charles Koch supported Roberts and Alito. He’s been a long-standing funder of the Federalist Society. And Leo was described in internal documents that were released as part of the [Brett] Kavanaugh Supreme Court nomination as leading the umbrella group that was marshaling and managing the confirmation process for Roberts to the DC Circuit and and then to help ensure that they got their guy on the Supreme Court.

To crystallize it, Roberts is really the beneficiary of the first billionaire-backed campaign to capture the US Supreme Court. And as the Chief Justice, he’s used the power of that court to advance an agenda that has been aligned with the regressive agenda of those billionaires that are funding the right’s legal movement that Leonard Leo has helped helm.

If you look at what big business interests want, that’s the result that Roberts votes for. And at this point, what the court votes for.

There’s statistics showing that he almost never rules against the Chamber [of Commerce].

Looking forward, the upcoming tariffs case and also the case over the firing of Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook feature clashes between the Leonard Leo side of the conservative legal movement and the MAGA side. Leo and Koch have both funded the group challenging Trump’s tariffs. A prominent Republican lawyer is on the brief opposing Lisa Cook’s removal. But Trump thinks he should be able to do whatever he wants, even if it’s taking over monetary policy, and using tariffs to destroy the economy. What do you think of Roberts’ predicament in these cases?

The immunity decision signaled that Roberts has moved more into MAGA land. He has really taken the driver’s wheel in terms of embracing a MAGA agenda, and that’s reflected in the January 6 trio of cases last year, and in particular the unprecedented immunity decision, and is reflected in the rulings this year, these emergency rulings. He is embracing the White House’s position on immigration in a way that is not consistent with most of the business community that does not support these sort of aggressive attacks on immigration and our employment systems.

Let me ask about the immunity decision, Trump v. United States, because I was surprised that they granted presidents immunity from criminal prosecution—and then how far it went beyond that. The more I learn about the opinion, the more extreme it is. How does Trump v. United States fit into Robert’s career? Does it stand out in a way that seems radical even for him?

At his confirmation hearings, he affirmed that no president is above the law, no one is above the law. And then when it mattered most for him to stand for that principle, he not only abandoned it, he aggressively wrote this very expansive opinion, ignoring the language of the Constitution that says in two places, the job of the president is to faithfully execute the law. And nothing could be less faithful than breaking the law.

When Richard Nixon asserted that ‘When the President does it, it’s by definition legal,’ no reasonable person accepted that assertion. It was the assertion of a crook. And here we are, almost 50 years since that outlandish claim by Nixon, with a court that has embraced it as a matter of law to say that if the President says that something is part of his so-called official acts, that he cannot be held accountable in a court of law. That ruling broke a key component of our democratic republic, which is that no president is above the law. It’s so damaging, it’s so destructive, and he orchestrated it. Now, why did he do this?

“Roberts has moved more into MAGA land.”

This is now a MAGA court, and Roberts is at the helm of it, and he is helping to drive this agenda that is aiding Trump and emboldening Trump at every turn. The cynical view of that would be this notion that there will be no accountability, because once Trump and the Republicans consolidate the levers of power, they will never let them go. That is the worry that I think a lot of people have. So they’re consequence-free in the sense of not having to face an impeachment or reforms in Congress. That’s sort of the cynical view. And I can’t say that it’s an irrational view.

We are in a whole new territory because of this Supreme Court basically paving the way for Trump’s return by blocking the trials of Trump, signaling to some subset of the American people that those charges were illegitimate when they were well-grounded in the law. And signaling to Trump and some of his followers that he could do no wrong, that he could not violate the law, or going forward, that he, as President, has vast powers.

You predict in the book that Roberts will go down as the worst chief justice in American history. That seems bold, maybe less bold by the day. But Roger Taney wrote Dred Scott and might have caused a Civil War. What is your pitch for why you think that you’ll be proven right?

I didn’t make that observation lightly, knowing how Roger Taney’s inflammatory, outlandish, outrageous ruling helped precipitate the Civil War. What John Roberts has been orchestrating, in particular with the immunity ruling, and then the actions this year, along with the Citizen United decision [on political spending], the Shelby County decision limiting the Voting Rights Act, the Rucho case on the [political] maps, the South Carolina case [on racial gerrymandering], Brnovich [on voting rights], I think that Roberts will go down in history as the most destructive chief justice when it comes to the rights of Americans in our democracy, to participate in our democracy, to have a fair and representative democracy. And the ruling he orchestrated for Trump in the immunity case will threaten whether our democracy will continue to exist.

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It May Be Hard to Stop Trump From Privatizing Our Public Lands

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

In June, a long-standing effort to sell off massive chunks of federal land grew closer to fruition than ever before when a provision mandating such sales was slipped into President Donald Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill.”

The bill passed, and selling public lands easily could have followed. But it didn’t, largely due to a fierce public outcry led not just by pro-public land progressives but by a surprisingly broad coalition that included horseback riders, ATVers, backpackers, birdwatchers, hunters, anglers and tribal nations—even podcaster Joe Rogan.

“The ones that want to see this sold only have to win once. And those of us that want to keep public lands public…have to win every time.”

Months later, pieces of that coalition continued to hold together. But not all of it, said Land Tawney, co-chair of American Hunters and Anglers, citing the administration’s recent attempts to overturn the Roadless Rule, which restricts road construction and logging on nearly 60 million acres of land managed by the US Forest Service.

“There’s a lot of people who aren’t speaking up about the Roadless Rule that did speak up about public lands,” he said. “So as far as (the coalition) pivoting to other things, I think it depends on the issue.”

David Willms, the National Wildlife Federation’s associate vice president for public lands, has even more to say. Willms spent over a decade working on land issues in the Wyoming attorney general’s office and served as former Gov. Matt Mead’s natural resources policy advisor. He recently spoke with High Country News about how the effort to sell public lands made it this far, why it faltered, and where we go from here.

This interview was edited for length and clarity.

Why didn’t the provision to sell public lands make it into the final version of the One Big Beautiful Bill?

It could be for a few reasons.

It was written in a way that called for the sale of a certain percentage of lands in Western states under the guise of affordable housing. But these lands weren’t really tied to places that needed affordable housing. And it was drafted in a way where you didn’t know who could purchase the land.

A second piece of it is how quickly it came about. There was really no opportunity for the public to engage in this. There wasn’t even a hearing.

And the third thing is: It became crystal clear that the public as a whole, from the far right to the far left and everything in between, does not support selling public lands, particularly for undefined development.

It’s hard to find anything right now that the majority of Americans can agree on. Do you think this coalition of people who opposed sale of public lands will hold to help manage public lands in the longer term?

Here’s my hope: I don’t believe that the existence of public lands is inherently political, and I think this whole process bears out that the public at large deeply cares for their public lands and wants to be able to have access to those lands.

When it comes to how public lands are managed, that becomes more political. So I hope that this same coalition is willing to come to the table and say, “We care about our public lands, and we want to see them exist in perpetuity for future generations to enjoy. That means having hard conversations about how we manage them.”

And maybe if we have that as our centerpiece, of keeping public lands in public hands, that it enables us to work together better on some of the harder issues.

What do you think it would take for that to happen? For all these parties to come together and continue to engage on all these other issues surrounding public lands?

That’s the million-dollar question that I don’t have a million-dollar answer to.

What should people who want public lands to remain public watch out for over the next few years or decades?

Watch for proposals that are more place-based rather than national in scope. Work with folks to make sure that the proposal is balancing all different needs.

On the executive branch side, I’d suggest watching the Federal Land Policy Management Act, because some of the lands that are on the “suitable for disposal” list may have been put on that list 30 years ago, when they were deemed difficult to manage because nobody knew how to access them. But with new technologies like onX (a popular GPS mapping application), many of those lands are accessible, and some of these parcels are really high-quality habitat for wildlife.

And then you have to watch for county commissions and state legislatures passing resolutions of support for transfers or sales of public lands. Those are elected officials representing their constituents. If enough do that, it’ll send the signal to Congress that there’s a lot of local support for sales or transfers.

There are also types of policies that could reduce the value of lands in a way to shift support away from ownership. So monitor those policies dictating how lands are managed and the resources that are allocated to agencies.

That’s a lot to keep track of. Do you think people will get exhausted and stop fighting?

I don’t think so. There’s a recognition that the ones that want to see this sold only have to win once. And those of us that want to keep public lands public for future generations have to win every time.

Once the lands are sold, they’re gone. You can’t just wait for the next election cycle to “fix it.” And that’s what keeps people motivated.

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Americans Aren’t Buying Trump’s Shutdown Blame Game

As Democrats and Republicans trade accusations over which party is responsible for the government shutdown, new polling suggests that President Donald Trump’s efforts to falsely claim—in social media posts, on television, on government agencies’ websites, and in internal directives to federal employees—that Democrats shut down the government because they want to provide “free health care for illegal aliens” are not working.

Nearly half of Americans blame the shutdown on Trump and Republicans in Congress, according to a new nationally representative poll of more than 1,000 Americans, conducted by the Washington Post on Wednesday. Meanwhile, 30 percent said they blame Democrats, and nearly a quarter of respondents said they are unsure of who to blame. Interestingly, eight percent of Republicans blame Trump and the GOP for the shutdown, higher than the two percent of Democrats who blame their own party.

The White House’s claims, of course, are not accurate. Undocumented immigrants are already mostly ineligible for federal health care, and Democrats are seeking to restore access to Medicaid and Affordable Care Act (ACA) subsidies for documented immigrants, including refugees and people granted asylum. The Republican spending bill passed this summer contains the Medicaid cuts, while the ACA subsidies are set to expire at the end of this year under the Inflation Reduction Act passed in 2022. Yet, Republicans ranging from Trump, to Vice President JD Vance, to House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.), to Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) have made the claim that Democrats shut down the government over efforts to provide health care to undocumented people.

I questioned Speaker Mike Johnson tonight on the claim being made by Republicans that Democrats want to give free health care to “illegal aliens” in the government shutdown fight. pic.twitter.com/sjvnQwxTKN

— Kaitlan Collins (@kaitlancollins) October 1, 2025

Polls recorded before the shutdown officially started found similar results. An NPR/PBS News/Marist poll of nearly 1,500 people, conducted last week, found that nearly 40 percent of respondents would blame Republicans for the shutdown, compared to only 27 percent who would blame Democrats. Just over thirty percent said they would blame both parties. And a New York Times/Siena poll of more than 1,300 registered voters, conducted last week, found a higher proportion of respondents said they would blame Trump and Republicans than Democrats for a shutdown—26 percent to 19 percent—though about a third said they would blame both parties equally. Just over a fifth of respondents said they had not heard enough to say.

But beyond the fact that Republicans control all three branches of government, it appears as though the substance of their legislative priorities are also unpopular. The same Washington Post poll found that a staggering _71 percent o_f respondents say that the federal subsidies that reduce the cost of ACA plans scheduled to expire at the end of the year—a sticking point for Democrats in the stalled negotiations that led to the shutdown—should be extended, and nearly half of respondents said Democrats should demand the extension “even if it continues a government shutdown.” When you crunch the numbers, this view makes sense: A KFF analysis found that last year, the subsidies saved enrollees an average of more than $700 last year. And a more recent analysis found that extending the subsidies would save enrollees an average of more than $1,000 in premium payments in 2026.

Democrats, for their part, have leaned on this context as they try to spin the shutdown in their favor. “Republicans shut down the government because they would rather make health care more expensive than keep the government running,” Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) said in a speech on the Senate floor. “That is literally where we are.”

Trump and Republicans shut down the government because they'd rather make healthcare more expensive than keep the government running.

Democrats are fighting to roll back the Republican cuts that will take away healthcare from millions.

Via @SenWarren pic.twitter.com/1yuLz7bjOV

— Senate Democrats (@SenateDems) October 1, 2025

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Jane Goodall’s Final, Urgent, Message

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

Jane Goodall, one of the most influential environmental figures in human history, has died at 91 while doing what she’s done for most of her later years—touring the country to deliver an urgent message about nature and human existence.

Goodall, who revolutionized what we know about chimpanzees and animal intelligence, was interviewed as recently as last week, during New York City Climate Week. And her message was clear, consistent, and timely.

“It seems these days everybody is so involved with technology that we forget that we’re not only part of the natural world, we’re an animal like all the others,” Goodall, founder of the Jane Goodall Institute, a conservation group, said last week during the Forbes Sustainability Leaders Summit in NYC. “We’re an animal like all the others. But we depend on it for clean air, water, food, clothing—everything.”

And yet, “we’re destroying the planet,” she said.

In a separate conversation with the Wall Street Journal last week, Goodall said the problem is the pernicious idea that economic development should come before the environment. In reality, we’re on a planet with finite resources, and if we exhaust them, it could spell our own end. “Humans are not exempt from extinction,” Goodall said in the WSJ podcast, The Journal.

One of the most compelling messages from her last interviews is that while we’re the most “intellectual animals” to ever walk the planet, “we’re not intelligent,” said Goodall, who’s an expert in animal behavior. “Because intelligent creatures don’t destroy their only home.”

Ultimately, she said, it’s that intellect that gives us the best shot at saving ourselves and the planet. That’s what’s ushered in solutions to living in greater harmony with the natural world, Goodall said, including renewable energy and plant-based foods. She emphasized that we know what’s killing the planet: industrial agriculture, including livestock, and burning fossil fuels.

“We have a window of time,” Goodall, who’s authored more than two dozen books, said in The Journal. “But it’s not a very big window. If we don’t change the way we do things, the way we develop economically, then it will be too late.”

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Energy Department Tries to Stifle Workers’ Use of Climate-Related Words

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

The US Department of Energy has told employees in the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE) to avoid using the words “climate change” in what seems to be the latest incident in a crackdown on discussing the climate crisis in the US government.

“Please ensure that every member of your team is aware that this is the latest list of words to avoid—and continue to be conscientious about avoiding any terminology that you know to be misaligned with the administration’s perspectives and priorities,” says an email from an agency acting director seen by the Guardian.

Employees of EERE, which is the government’s largest funder of carbon-slashing technologies, were told to avoid using the terms in internal dealings and public-facing work: “Whether you work directly on communications or not, this email applies to you,” says the email, which was first obtained by Politico.

“DOE leadership can choose to stick their heads in the sand, but that won’t make the climate crisis go away.”

It’s a continuation of the anti-environmental agenda Trump has pushed since entering the White House, said one anonymous agency staffer. It follows a move by Trump to gut EERE’s funding of green technologies. “My reaction was: same shit, different day,” the worker said.

In addition to “climate change,” the banned terms include “decarbonization,” “sustainable,” “emissions,” and “green.” Also on the list are “energy transition,” “‘clean’ or ‘dirty’ energy,” and “carbon/CO2 ‘footprint’.”

Another set of words to be avoided: “Tax breaks/tax credits/subsidies,” probably because of the terms’ association with Joe Biden’s efforts to subsidize green technologies, which the administration is clawing back.

“Banning the use of these words would silence key elements of DOE’s mission,” another anonymous current agency staffer told the Guardian. “But what is even more worrying is that Secretary Wright is also illegally freezing and cancelling programs that fund advanced research into solar, wind, and other clean energy technologies. DOE leadership can choose to stick their heads in the sand, but that won’t make the climate crisis go away or stop super storms and wildfires from destroying more homes.”

The Trump administration has this year asked agency leaders to avoidsome 200 terms—a list that also includes words like “activism” and “injustice.”

“Welcome to the Donald Trump post-truth world,” Dr Ali Khan, a retired US assistant surgeon general and a former director of the Office of Public Health Preparedness and Response at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, wrote on social media.

The Department of Energy’s press secretary denied the agency had instructed employees to avoid the use of specific terms.

“There is no directive at the energy department instructing employees to avoid using phrases such as ‘climate change’ or ‘emissions’,” Ben Dietderich, the agency’s press secretary, said in an emailed statement. “President Trump and Secretary Wright remain committed to transparency and fostering an open, honest dialogue about climate science. Reflecting that commitment, Secretary Wright regularly engages on these issues.”

Wright railed against climate policy at the United Nations general assembly last week. “The more people have gotten into so-called climate action, the more expensive their energy has become,” he said. “That lowers people’s quality of lives and reduces their life opportunities.”

He defended a July climate report produced by the energy department that experts say is riddled with misinformation, and announce the cancellation of $13 billion of funding for renewable energy projects.

The recommendations are the latest attempt by the Trump administration to minimize or silence discussions about the threats posed by the climate crisis. Upon retaking the White House in January, Trump stripped mentions of climate change and global heating from government websites and ended a slew of climate-focused government programs.

In a speech at the United Nations last week, the president called the crisis “the greatest con job ever perpetrated upon the world.”

“Countries are on the brink of destruction because of the green energy agenda,” he said.

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“If I Had Legs I’d Kick You” Invites You to Look Directly at a Woman’s Rage

What happens when a mother is pushed to the brink, when stresses both tedious and extraordinary break her beyond recognition? What happens is that she might look a lot like Rose Byrne.

That might seem impossible, given that Byrne is, after all, a beautiful A-list actor. The suggestion even borders on cruelty. But her knockout performance in If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, a new film from Mary Bronstein, is the stuff of terrifying relatability.Byrne plays Linda, a mother flailing in an increasing state of crisis after the ceiling of her apartment suddenly collapses, forcing her to take refuge in a gritty motel room with her young daughter, who suffers from a mysterious illness that requires feeding tubes. Meanwhile, Linda’s work as a therapist grinds on with multiple clients, including a missing mother in the throes of acute postpartum depression. Linda’s efforts to manage her own deteriorating mental health by seeking the help of a colleague, another therapist played chillingly by Conan O’Brien in his first dramatic acting role, are met with escalating antagonism. Meanwhile, her husband may be traveling for work, but his requests for updates on the ceiling are relentless. Wine is chugged, and drugs via the dark web are pursued.

If I Had Legs I’d Kick You is not an explicitly political film. With seven years in the making, it could not have predicted the landscape into which it premieres today. But the film arrives at an urgent moment,a shot-out-of-a-cannon rejoinder to the hostile suggestion that women in pain “tough it out.” Its ability to maintain darkly humorous, propulsive energy despite the anxiety-inducing twists speaks to Bronstein’s enormous skill as both a writer and director. Ahead of the film’s theatrical release, I talked to Bronstein about a woman’s rage, Courtney Love, and the radical beauty of an untouched middle-aged face.

Talk to me about some of the personal parallels that led to you writing Kick You.

I have a daughter, and she’s 15 now and doing great. But when she was 7 years old, she became very ill. We are New Yorkers, but to get her the treatment that she needed, we had to go to San Diego. When I spoke initially to the place in San Diego, I asked: “Well, how long does the treatment usually take? How long should I expect to be in San Diego?” And they responded, six, max eight weeks. We were there for eight months.

While we were there, my husband, Ronald Bronstein, needed to stay back in New York. He’s a filmmaker who is a close creative partner with Josh Safdie, and during this period, they were making Good Time. So he’s making this film with Rob Pattinson while I’m in San Diego in a really shitty, tiny hotel room as a roommate with my daughter. It was incredibly stressful for obvious reasons, but I’m also the type of person who thinks of things in existential terms all the time. Like, my husband would say to me: “You can’t have an existential crisis every day. You can’t dismantle your entire existence and life choices every day.” But that’s just how my brain works.

During this time, I had a strong sense of dread and anxiety all the time, and I couldn’t articulate it. And part of it was that I felt trapped. [My daughter] was young, so the lights would go out at 8 p.m., and I’d be in this tiny room. Now, I didn’t do the things that Linda does in this film. But what I did for my escape was I would go into the bathroom and turn on the light of this horrible, cheap hotel room and sit on the tiles of the bathroom floor, drink cheap wine, and scarf candy and junk food.

One night, I was suddenly able to pinpoint that I felt like I was completely disappearing into the caretaking of my daughter. The dread shifted from what the situation was to: Wait a minute, this situation is going to end. She’s going to get better, and we’re going to go back to New York, and then what? Then what? That’s the emotional and physical, literal place where the film started from. I actually started writing the script in that bathroom while going through the situation. No one knew I was writing it for myself at that point, and the rare beauty of a middle-aged woman.

“I literally went into a trance. Like, ‘tough it out?’ You’ve never been pregnant. You don’t know what it’s like. Also, don’t tell me what to do with my body.”

This is an unflinching portrayal of a woman in acute stress. Linda is seen literally begging for someone to just help her. But everyone around her seems to expect nothing but calm and order. What do you think makes us so blind to a woman in crisis, even when she is screaming for help?

That’s such a great question and a question I haven’t gotten before. I think that in American society, a woman’s rage is terrifying, and the idea is to quell it by any means. A lot of the advice that we get as little girls is: Be a good girl. The difference between you and a boy is that you are not disruptive in a classroom. That stays with us, right? You know that scene in Networkwhere [Howard Beale] goes, “I’m mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore!” It’s like that. We suddenly don’t have room. And if a woman does have that personality and does have that boldness to do that, she’s villainized, and we don’t like her. We hate her.

I’m thinking of cultural things, too. I’m thinking about people like Courtney Love. Why was she hated? It wasn’t her music. She was hated because she was a woman who was loud and would say exactly what was on her mind. [Love] is the type of woman thatI’ve always been attracted to. My favorite feminist thinker of all time is bell hooks, and her work in Ain’t I a Woman. That no woman can write enough because there has not been enough. I think that right now, in 2025, is one of the scariest moments to be a woman. I don’t want to get political, because my work is not political in a literal sense, but we must acknowledge that this is a time in history where our rights are being taken away, and we are being told constantly in the media, “Just shut up.”

“You’re about to spend just under two hours with this woman, and you are going to watch her. You are going to deal with it. This is a woman who’s going through it. She is crying. It is on a giant screen. And instead of averting our eyes like we do in normal life, I’m making you deal with it.”

Meanwhile, our president is telling mothers to “tough it out.”

I was on a plane coming here to Los Angeles when I glanced over at a person’s TV screen, sort of diagonal from where I was sitting on the plane. I couldn’t hear it, but I saw the message at the bottom, the president telling pregnant people to “tough it out.” I literally went into a trance. Like, tough it out? You’ve never been pregnant. You don’t know what it’s like. Also, don’t tell me what to do with my body.

I think with my film, it’s “Don’t tell me what to do with my emotions.” Linda is screaming into the ether. “Is anything that I’m saying being heard or important to anybody? Can you hear me?” There’s a scene where she literally screams into her therapist’s face, this person who is supposed to help her, where she screams one inch from his face, “Help me!” And it still cannot be heard. It’s a moment where she is rejected in the most awful way. The filmmaking choices that I make in this film speak to the woman who doesn’t want to shut up or tough it out and instead wants to say: “No, this isn’t fair. No, I actually feel this way, and I’m going to make you listen to me.”

I open the film with an extreme close-up that keeps getting closer and closer until we’re right in Linda’s eye as she’s crying. That’s me saying to the viewer: “You’re about to spend just under two hours with this woman, and you are going to watch her. You are going to deal with it. This is a woman who’s going through it. She is crying. It is on a giant screen. And instead of averting our eyes like we do in normal life, I’m making you deal with it.” You’re going to see her tears, and you’re going to deal with it, and however it makes you feel, that’s not my business. It’s the viewer’s business. And it’s not me indicting the viewer. It’s really me, in quite a radical way, just saying this is a reality. Women have emotions. They’re not always polite; they’re often messy.

I want to talk more about the close-ups. One thing I loved about Kick You is how the close-ups of Rose Byrne let you see her real face. Like, that might be Rose Byrne, and she is gorgeous…

Oh, totally gorgeous. One of the most gorgeous women that we have in show business today. And I’m sorry to interrupt your question, but I want to say that one of the reasons that I cast her is because she and I are the same age. We’re middle-aged women, and she has a real face. She has the real face of a middle-aged woman.

Exactly! The shots captured her exhaustion. They felt radical. Like, yes, of course, Rose is beautiful. But I know that woman. She is exhausted and over it. That woman is me!

[Holding a C Magazine cover featuring Byrne] This is one version of what we are shown, and this is real, too. She is gorgeous. But for me, it was very, very important that I had a middle-aged woman who had not had work done on her face. I don’t disparage women who do, and I don’t judge women who do. By the way, Linda happens to be a gorgeous woman. She is a beautiful, gorgeous woman, but she’s going through it. What I wanted to do with the close-ups is that by the end of the movie, you know every pore on this woman’s face. Every pockmark when she smiles. How her eye crinkles when she cries. That’s disappearing in our society. What happens if everybody gets their face done? What are young people, especially young girls, seeing? Are they going to know what a middle-aged face even looks like? That’s something that freaks me out, but it was important to me. And Rose was so on board and not scared.

“The filmmaking choices that I make in this film speak to the woman who doesn’t want to shut up or tough it out and instead wants to say: ‘No, this isn’t fair. No, I actually feel this way, and I’m going to make you listen to me.’”

The other thing the close-ups are doing is exposing. Linda cannot hide from the camera. She’s trying to hide and run away from everything else. But she cannot run away from my camera. That was important, too. You’re trying to escape. But we see you. Maybe none of the other characters in the movie sees you. But we see you. The tragedy is that she doesn’t know that, because she’s inside the film. But we see her, and we see her cry, and we see the messiness. When the movie opens, that’s as good as it gets for Linda in both physical appearance and mental state. The de-evolution that follows is purposeful and calculated in a mathematical way that I worked out with the makeup and costume departments. By the end of the film, what I wanted her to really look like was a disheveled teenager, because that’s what she becomes emotionally. Actually, something that I don’t know if I’ve said in another press, but that band T-shirt that Rose wears, with the album Cheap Thrills by Big Brother and the Holding Company and Janis Joplin, is a T-shirt I bought when I was 14. At the start of the film, we see Linda wearing it as pajamas. But then she starts wearing it to work. By the end of the film, in that final therapy session, she’s wearing the shirt with a hoodie and looks like shit. But that’s where she’s at.

I have to give all kudos to Rose. She never, ever, ever had an issue with how I wanted her to look or how close the camera was going to get. She knew what it meant as an actress, as an artist, and she agreed with it. It shouldn’t be brave, but it is brave.

Definitely brave. I thought exactly the same thing, like, I am really seeing her face, a real face, the blemishes and all. It just felt like something I had never seen in movies before.

Thank you so much for bringing that up. Because nobody really brings it up, and I think some of that might be because I mostly talk with male journalists. Yes, I’ve talked with some wonderful female journalists. But filmmaking is a male-dominated space, and so is journalism. Maybe the question feels like it’s not polite to ask for some people, but it’s a very important question and something to talk about.

Let’s turn to Conan, who, I must admit, I did not expect to be so effective as a serious therapist. What were some of your thoughts that went into casting him?

How good is he? I want people to understand when they see his name on the poster that they know that this is not a cameo. It’s not him playing himself. It’s not him being the comic relief. He is turning in a proper dramatic performance that is on tit-for-tat with Rose as a scene partner. And what an extraordinary thing, because it started with me approaching O’Brien and him saying: “I am not an actor. I want to do it. I love the script. But I don’t know if I can do it.”

I don’t want to give away, but there’s a monologue that he does. And while I was writing it, I literally thought to myself, I am writing something that is not performable. I’m writing something so didactic, there’s no way it’s performable. So I’m going to have to work it out with whoever the actor is. But O’Brien performs that thing, and he kills it. And that is a testament to his talent. He radically availed himself of this totally unknown form that he had neverdone before. He was such a dream to work with.

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The End of the FBI—in One Act

A version of 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._

SCENE: An office at the headquarters of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. One side of it is a glass window through which other offices can be seen. On the wall are a collection of citations for meritorious service. There is a plant in the corner. It needs watering. On the desk are framed photos of a smiling middle-aged woman hiking a mountain trail and of identical twin girls of high school age in front of a sailboat. In walks Special Agent HENRY DOBSON. He’s 50-ish, with a square and solid build. His salt-and-pepper hair is thinning. He’s grinning. He sits at the desk and straightens the framed photos. He picks up the phone and dials.

DOBSON [into the phone]: Shelly, Hank. They just closed the bank. It’s done. After five years. Five fuckin’ years. He’s pleading. The Brazilians have it wrapped up. Nine years, no wiggle. Pretty good, right? Now on to the next scumbag…What? C’mon, you can’t be serious. That’s not what I do…No, no, no…What do I know about street patrols?…This is nuts—.

A YOUNG AGENT pokes her head in the office and tosses DOBSON a sealed manila envelope.

YOUNG AGENT: Someone dropped this off for you.

DOBSON: Who?

YOUNG AGENT: Didn’t say. Woman. Lots of jewelry. Big sunglasses. Floppy hat. Skedaddled quickly.

DOBSON [into the phone]: Hold on, Shelly.

DOBSON opens the envelope, takes out a sheaf of papers, and starts to flip through them.

DOBSON [murmuring]: Oh shit…Oh, I said, “Oh shit.” Someone just dropped off a stash of docs. Bank account summaries. Spreadsheets. Prospectus…With a memo explaining it all…It’s crypto…Sham deal…Dubai and Antigua…Looks like a fake ICO, maybe a rug pull…$34 million…SEC filings, transfers, phone numbers…Damn, the whole shebang…Ever get a silver-platter case like this?…Yeah, it says who did it…A guy named Carl, uh…Hold on, just hold on, let me do something.

A list of Google results come up. DOBSON clicks on the first one. A large headline appears: “Crypto Entrepreneurs Gather at Mar-a-Lago.” DOBSON immediately turns off his computer.

DOBSON puts down the phone without hanging up. He boots up his computer. The wallpaper image appears. It’s Kevin Costner playing Eliot Ness in The Untouchables_. DOBSON enters his password and goes to the Google homepage. He types in a few words._

DOBSON [loudly into the phone]: Hang on. Be right there. Just checking…

A list of Google results come up. DOBSON clicks on the first one. A large headline appears: “Crypto Entrepreneurs Gather at Mar-a-Lago.” DOBSON immediately turns off his computer.

DOBSON [to himself]: Oh shit.

DOBSON nervously looks around to see if anyone is watching him. He starts stuffing all the documents back into the envelope. He picks up the phone and cradles it between his face and shoulder and continues shoving the papers into the envelope.

DOBSON [into the phone]: Yeah, yeah, I’m still here…Oh, you know what? I don’t think this is anything…Yeah, I think it’s a prank…Yeah, the guys in laundering. They’re always doing shit like that…Yeah, yeah, should’ve looked more closely at first…But, please, Shelly, do me a favor: Don’t mention this to anyone, okay? Not anyone. I wouldn’t want them to know they got me…Yeah, okay, you’re the best…And, yeah, where should I report tonight?…Okay, got it. I know that Potbelly’s. It’s always real quiet around there…See ya later.

DOBSON reaches for a burn bag.

***

I don’t know if anything of the sort has happened at Kash Patel’s FBI. But it doesn’t take much imagination to wonder whether such scenes are occurring. The FBI has become a cauldron of vengeance, with scores of agents who worked on cases despised by Trump and his crew being canned—most notably, the gumshoes who pursued the Trump-Russia investigation or the January 6 insurrectionist rioters. Even bureau employees whose only sins were to be pals with agents who worked those cases have been booted.

Then there’s the absurd and troubling indictment of former FBI Director James Comey. Even though Comey’s decision to revive the Hillary Clinton email probe eleven days before Election Day in 2016 helped Donald Trump win the White House, Trump has been angling for years to take Comey down for having kick-started the FBI’s Russia investigation that morphed into the inquiry run by special counsel Robert Mueller. A US attorney and several assistant US attorneys refused to move the Comey indictment forward, contending there was no there there. So Trump forced out this US attorney, put in a lackey with absolutely no experience in prosecuting criminal cases (she specializes in insurance law), and—presto—he had his bullshit indictment of Comey. (I’ve been reading indictments for decades, and this slim two-pager is the worst and most amateurish indictment I’ve ever seen.)

If you’re an investigator at a federal agency, you’d have to be crazy to contemplate an inquiry that might involve an associate, friend, or crony of Trump, his family, or anyone in his inner or outer circle.

Comey is likely to beat the rap—perhaps easily. But this bogus act of retribution, the dismissal of all those FBI agents, and other get-even actions (such as Trump’s henchmen targeting New York Attorney Geneal Letitia James and Sen. Adam Schiff) are creating a chilling effect of Arctic proportions for all federal law enforcement.

If you’re an investigator at the FBI, the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Federal Trade Commission, the US Fish and Wildlife Service, or any federal agency, you’d have to be crazy to contemplate an inquiry that might involve an associate, friend, or crony of Trump, his family, or anyone in his inner or outer circle. You have 10 years until retirement, kids you want to put through college, parents that need home care—will you risk your job by looking at the possible misdeeds of a donor to Trump’s campaign or anyone with a connection to his crew, let alone Trump himself? Not even a former FBI director is safe. And Trump is now braying about going after Chris Wray, Comey’s successor at the FBI whom Trump appointed to the job.

Should you get a tip about possible wrongdoing involving anyone with a link to Trump, you’d be a fool to even mention it to a colleague or supervisor. Don’t put anything about this into an email. Find a narcotrafficker to chase instead—if you haven’t been reassigned to help round up migrants.

The Trump administration has signaled it doesn’t want the bureau bothering with whole categories of crime, such as foreign bribery or failure to register as foreign agents. Attorney General Pam Bondi shut down the task force investigating foreign influence operations. In February, the leadership of the public integrity section of the Justice Department quit instead of dropping the corruption charges that had been filed against New York City Mayor Eric Adams. After that, this section was downsized. That’s good news for dirty pols.

Should an FBI agent open an investigation that irks Trump, he or she would have to fear losing their job and more—possibly being harassed on social media by Trump and doxed by his MAGA army.

What all this means is that a host of wrongdoers, including crooked politicians and Trump chums, have a get-out-of-jail-free card—that is, license to cheat, grift, and crime with little fear of investigation or prosecution. And it’s a card that’s easy to obtain. In trouble with the law? Buy a million dollars of Trump’s crypto. That ought to keep the G-men at bay.

Should an FBI agent open an investigation that irks Trump, he or she would have to fear losing their job and more—possibly being harassed on social media by Trump and doxed by his MAGA army. And if a gutsy agent did move ahead with such a case, would the Trump Justice Department prosecute it against Trump’s wishes? Forget about it, Jake. There’s no percentage in starting such an inquiry. It will only lead to a world of hurt.

That’s the loud-and-clear signal that Trump and Patel have been sending to the FBI, while they shift agents to street crime tasks and ICE assistance. The Comey indictment is merely the exclamation point on the don’t-fuck-with-us message conveyed to all federal law enforcement. Special Agent Dobson is no fool. He knows the saying used to be that justice is blind. In Trump’s second term, it’s now justice is blind to the crimes of Trump and his gang—and if you dare take a glance in their direction, we’ll rip your eyes out.

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Another Shutdown Casualty: Medicare Telehealth Coverage

In 2001, Congress implemented partial Medicare coverage for telehealth, allowing remote visits with doctors and other forms of long-distance care—a response to the increasing need, in particular, for people in rural areas to reach specialists, and an essential service especially after the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, when lawmakers expanded that coverage to a broad range of services now used by a quarter of the country’s 68 million Medicare users.

But Wednesday’s federal budget impasse has halted that funding—and unlike other, temporary service cuts brought on by the shutdown, telehealth won’t be restored for long just by bringing the government back online.

As a consequence of the temporary way it was funded, Congress has had to renew Medicare telehealth coverage roughly annually, or even twice a year, since 2021.

This latest termination is linked to the government shutdown that began Wednesday: Medicare telehealth funds were tied to the failed continuing resolution for the federal budget, which would have funded government operations for just seven more weeks. But the repeated expirations of a program with bipartisan support, which Congress has repeatedly agreed to continue, look increasingly ridiculous to health care advocates and federal government observers.

Multiple bills across multiple recent sessions of Congress would have extended that coverage either for a two-year period or more permanently. The president of the American Medical Association has also argued in support of making telehealth coverage permanent for people on Medicare.

“Commercial payers generally follow Medicare guidance, and…this could eliminate coverage for telemedicine across the board for all Americans.”

Gin Jones, an author who lives in Massachusetts, is one of the millions of people affected. Jones has a rare genetic disorder, X-linked hypophosphatemia, which requires specialized treatment from an endocrinologist who lives four hours away. Her next visit, on Tuesday, is now in-person rather than remote; Jones doesn’t know what she is going to do about it. The long trip would be exhausting and painful and an “extraordinary waste of my time.”

“The big question is whether I go ahead and endure the four-hour round trip,” Jones said, “or switch to a closer endocrinologist who isn’t really qualified to treat me.”

Some smaller clinics are rescheduling their Medicare patients in person and suspending their telehealth appointments for Medicare patients, said Lydia Homovich, a policy analyst with the Center for Telehealth and eHealth Law.

Other patients are insulated, said Homovich, as some larger institutions are “going to continue providing these telehealth services as normal, even if they don’t get back payment for that if the waivers are reauthorized.”

Dr. Kanwar Kelley, the CEO and co-founder of Side Health, which focuses on virtual chronic disease management, said that his practice will be greatly impacted: most of his patients are on government insurance. “Unfortunately, given the uncertainty around whether we will be reimbursed, we are planning a dramatic reduction in workforce with furloughs,” Kelley said.

Homovich notes that some members of Congress may view a longer-term expansion of telehealth as too expensive—but ultimately, she says, it may actually be a cost-saver.

“Telehealth allows for the earlier detection and treatment of conditions that otherwise would be escalated to much more costly levels of care, like being admitted to a hospital or an emergency room,” Homovich said.

Kelley also cautioned that the expiration of Medicare telehealth waivers could have a knock-on impact for people on private health insurance.

“While this may not immediately affect patients with commercial insurance, commercial payers generally follow Medicare guidance,” Kelley said,” and depending on when or if the waivers are reinstated, this could eliminate coverage for telemedicine across the board for all Americans.”

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The Government Shutdown Means No Jobs Data—Conveniently for Trump

One of the many casualties of the government shutdown is the critical jobs report administered by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS)—and much maligned by President Donald Trump—which economists say is especially neededin light of predictions that the US could soon enter a recession.

The BLS data, which features estimates of employment and earnings nationwide from the previous month, offers important information on the state of the economy for economists, policymakers, government officials, and employers. It was due to be released Friday, but the Department of Labor (DOL), which oversees BLS, said in its contingency plan that no data would be released during the shutdown. Trump politicized the report back in August, when he baselessly alleged that poor jobs numbers were evidence of “rigged” data and subsequently fired then-BLS Commissioner Erika McEntarfer.

Paul Schroeder, co-chair of the Friends of the BLS, a nonpartisan group of organizations and individuals that support the agency, saidon Wednesday that the employment data was“more critical now than in normal times.” That’s due to both the massive impacts of Trump’s tariffs and the large revisions to BLS data released last month, which showedthat almost a million fewer jobs had been created than previously thought in the 12-month period prior to March 2025. Those revisions, Schroeder added, mean “the economy is changing, and that’s what’s concerning.”

“Unfortunately, it looks like it’s going the wrong direction, not the right direction, and that’s why we need this data now,” said Schroeder, who is also executive director of the Council of Professional Associations on Federal Statistics. “People are on edge at the moment, economists are trying to figure out what’s going on and to lose this source of data at this critical time, it’s just a real problem.”

Erica Groshen, who served as BLS commissioner from 2013 to 2017, agreed with Schroeder, saying that “it’s a particularly fraught time because of the economic conditions right now.”

It’s unclear if the data will be released when the government re-opens, though economists hope it will. The DOL’s contingency plan says the data release would “likely be delayed if a lapse is prolonged.” Following a 16-day shutdown in 2013, BLS released the information when the government was back up and running, Groshen said.

The limited data we do have is not promising: A report released Wednesday by ADP showed that there was a loss of 32,000 private sector jobs last month, and that a prior estimate of 54,000 jobs added in August was adjusted to a loss of 3,000 jobs.

CNBC: "Very disappointing. It's a weak number. This is private sector jobs for September. The total comes in -32,000. And that was a surprise because economists were looking for an increase of 51,000. Also, the revision was not good. August now showing -3,000 compared to the initial read of 54,000"

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) 2025-10-01T14:10:25.192Z

The future of the BLS is also uncertain after the White House withdrew Trump’s nominee to be its new commissioner on Tuesday. Trump named E.J. Antoni—a conservative economist at the Heritage Foundation, an architect of Project 2025, and longtime BLS critic—as his pick to run the agency after firing McEntarfer. Antoni’s nomination was controversial from the jump, as I previously explained:

Economists have called him “completely unqualified,” “an extreme partisan,” and “disastrously terrible.” Stan Veuger, a senior fellow at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, told Axios that Antoni’s work at the Heritage Foundation “frequently included elementary errors or nonsensical choices that all bias his findings in the same partisan direction.”

A look at Antoni’s public statements, writings, and politics suggest that, if confirmed, he will likely help remake the BLS—a wonky, heretofore nonpartisan agency housed within the Department of Labor (DOL)—in Trump’s image.

Unsurprisingly, then, some greeted the news that Antoni would not be in the running to lead the BLS as welcome. The Friends of the BLS said in a statement released on Tuesday that the next nominee “should demonstrate a commitment to gold standard statistics, strong management skills, excellent economics training, and a record of public support for the integrity of BLS products and standards.”

Groshen, who is also co-chair of the Friends of BLS, added that “the next BLS commissioner is going to face a very daunting job,” pointing to problems including understaffing, attacks from the Trump administration, and longstanding challenges to data collection.

“The agency will be better served the more that a new commissioner has a really deep grounding in economics and federal statistics, a commitment to following the principles and practices that make the statistics trustworthy, and the ability to protect the agency right from meddling and from unwarranted attack,” Groshen said.

Kevin Roberts, the president of the Heritage Foundation, said in a statement on Tuesday that Antoni’s “immense capabilities and insightful economic analysis have not changed—and we are very proud to have him on our team.”

“It is undeniable that BLS needs reform and [Antoni] was the right man for the job,” Roberts wrote, adding that Antoni “will keep calling for that reform.”

Spokespeople for the White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Mother Jones on Wednesday. An automated reply said responses could be delayed due to the government shutdown, adding, “As you await a response, please remember this could have been avoided if the Democrats voted for the clean Continuing Resolution to keep the government open.”

Such messages have become commonplace across the federal government—even though they may violate the Hatch Act, which prohibits engaging in political activity while in office. As Wired reported, the websites of several agencies blame the shutdown on Democrats, and employees at the Small Business Administration (SBA) were also told to blame Democrats in their out-of-office email responses. Additionally, emails viewed by Mother Jones show that the Office of Management and Budget also directed DOL employees to set out-of-office messages blaming Democrats for the shutdown.

Groshen said she was “pretty shocked” to see reports of the out-of-office messages instructing federal employees to blame Democrats.

To Schroeder, both the shutdown and the politicization of the BLS and similar agencies are “really damaging to our nation’s data infrastructure.”

“This damages the reputation of the independence and trustworthiness of the federal statistics that BLS puts out,” he added.

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Not Just “Medbeds”: How TruthSocial’s Bogus Medical Claims Fool Elderly Trump Fans

“I know in my heart that med beds [sic] are real,” a woman named Pam wrote recently on TruthSocial, the social media site owned by Trump Media and Technology Group, and President Donald Trump’s favorite place to post. “I’ve been hoping and at the same time thinking it’s too good to be true,” Pam confided. “But Trump is giving me back my hope.”

“I’ve been dreaming about this healing tool for a long time.”

Over the weekend, Trump posted an AI-generated video on the platform that touted purported “medbeds,” a non-existent healing technology that people falsely believe will miraculously cure all maladies. In the video, a robotic-sounding Lara Trump is seen heading a Fox News segment about medbeds, as footage of a fake Donald Trump proclaims, in part, “Every American will soon receive their own medbed card. With it, you’ll have guaranteed access to our new hospitals led by the top doctors in the nation, equipped with the most advanced technology in the world.”

Trump deleted the video without comment a few hours later. But even after it was taken down, his TruthSocial followers—who are among his most devoted fans—took the post as a sign that medbeds are about to be unveiled. They speculated about why the video had been deleted (one theory was that it had too many comments) and assured each other that the technology was indeed on its way.

“I’ve been dreaming about this healing tool for a long time,” one woman wrote. “I hope a ticket for me and my husband. [sic] Healing frequency and advancing healing technology is possible.”

“All citizens will get a card,” another wrote, “And I’m sure the waitlist will take the most acute first.”

All of this, of course, is a lie. “The medbed fantasy isn’t new,” says Jonathan Jarry, a science communicator at McGill University’s Office for Science and Society. “The promise is always that this fantastical technology will be rolled out tomorrow, and tomorrow never comes.”

Medbeds are just one outright fake or dubious health technology being promoted by TruthSocial accounts. TruthSocial users skew older and generally have a great deal of faith in Trump—demographics that suggest a less sophisticated approach to evaluating online claims. The site has become fertile ground for false or contested health claims, with TruthSocial users often proclaiming the miraculous healing benefits of ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine, both of which have been heavily promoted as fake Covid cures. On a recent day, for instance, a user calling herself “Oksana Trump” with 143,000 followers—a massive number for the site—shared a post about Florida’s plans to investigate ivermectin and other generic drugs as cancer treatments. Her replies were full of TruthSocial users proclaiming they already had used the drug to treat cancer, instead of chemotherapy or other scientifically-backed options. TruthSocial users also frequently promote or even provide links to places to buy what is called “vitamin B17,” a longstanding fake cancer cure often derived from apricot seeds, as well as “Indian black salve,” a product that falsely claims to cure skin cancer. The FDA warns that using black salve can result in disfigurement and infection while delaying actual treatment.

Even before Trump re-shared the AI-generated video, the medbed discourse was extremely active on TruthSocial. Users who seem to be would-be conspiracy entrepreneurs provide posts with what they claim are “medbed hospital updates” or assurances that “medbed cards” are being rolled out, sometimes accompanied with what look like AI-generated illustrations.

Several accounts on the platform claim to provide access to medbed reservations or hospitals. “This is not a rumor,” one such account proclaimed. “Not speculation. Not a future promise. Reservations are NOW open.” The link the account provides goes not to a medbed facility, but to a Telegram channel; Jarry has written about how social media users who claim to have access to medbeds will solicit a “registration fee” of hundreds of dollars from potential customers seeking appointments to use the technology—appointments that will, of course, never come.

TruthSocial, of course, is not alone: most social media sites are now filled with bad health information and dubious cures, as the companies have rolled back rules against health misinformation that were put in place during Covid. Twitter/X stopped policing Covid misinformation in 2022, while Meta moved to a “community notes” system for health misinformation in January—one that public health experts warned would likely lead to a rise in health misinformation on Meta’s platforms. This week, YouTube announced that it would reinstate accounts previously banned for making false claims about both Covid and the 2020 election.

But TruthSocial’s aging and especially Trump-devoted crowd represents a particular user base, one looking for any sign that the Trump administration will bring them the prosperity, deliverance, and even healing they’ve been promised. Long after Trump deleted the post, users there were still excitedly speculating about when, exactly, they would receive their medbed cards, and assuring each other the technology absolutely exists, but is kept secret.

“I know medbeds are already here,” wrote one TruthSocial user named Cyndi who, based on her online activity, appears to be an older white woman living in the Midwest. “I’ve seen facilities in several states. I believe medbeds are our future, not Big Pharma.”

When I reached out to her by email to ask about her confidence in the non-existent technology Cyndi replied, “All I can tell you is that I’ve done Google search on med beds, which showed me where the facilities are.” She added that she believes there’s “at least one in about every state,” sometimes using the name “Tesla Med Beds.” (The product neither exists, nor has any link to Elon Musk.)

“I’ve seen videos of people using med beds going back 10 years,” Cyndi added. “First article I saw was a facility out of Ohio. That’s all I know and that the military has been using med beds for decades. That’s all I can tell you.”

When the president posts a fake video promising a miraculous piece of healing technology, it speaks directly to the deepest hopes of some of his base. But, Jarry warns, it also opens the door for more scams.

What’s “remarkable” about Trump supporters’ belief in medbeds, Jarry explains, “is that it is one of the few optimistic conspiracy theories I have seen. Whereas most conspiracy theories center on a sinister goal, this one is benevolent in nature.”

But that doesn’t mean it isn’t harmful to the president’s fans. “Given that Trump has given this mythical technology the biggest publicity it has ever received,” Jarry warns., “I won’t be surprised to see entrepreneurs jumping on it to sell gadgets and services that will enrich them and impoverish desperate people.”

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