Why Activists Went on Hunger Strike Over A Trash Incinerator

When Nazir Khan picked up the phone on Wednesday, he was a bit delirious. Hours earlier, he’d had his first bites of food after a twelve-day hunger strike.

Alongside two other Minneapolis community organizers, Khan refused food for nearly two weeks in order to draw attention to a persistent, overlooked problem: a trash incinerator that just won’t die.

Located in a predominantly-Black neighborhood, the Hennepin County Energy Recovery (HERC) incinerator is one of only about 73 municipal trash incinerators left in the United States, down from a peak of nearly 200 in the 1990s. Hennepin County officials have said they plan to close the HERC incinerator between 2028 and 2040—but advocates want a clearer timeline and a more concrete plan.

According to the Natural Resources Defense Council, living near a trash incinerator comes with a bevy of health consequences: increased risk of cancer, birth defects, and lung disease among them. People from the area surrounding HERC have higher rates of asthma-related emergency room visits than people elsewhere in the state, and in 2022, Sierra Club researchers estimated that particulate-matter emissions from HERC are responsible for 1-2 early deaths per year.

The HERC is still operational, and no firm closure date has been set. But, Khan said, people are paying more attention to the incinerator than ever before.

Mother Jones spoke with Khan about his hunger strike, the connection between the HERC fight and the broader Minneapolis activist landscape, and the long road to communities people can breathe in.

How did you end up trying to take down a trash incinerator?

I came to Minneapolis 11 years ago as a labor organizer. Then, I got sucked into the environmental justice movement with Standing Rock, and got more involved with the fight around the Enbridge pipeline in Minnesota, Line Three.

People had been trying to organize around the HERC for decades. In the early 2010s they were trying to increase the amount of trash that was burned there to its full capacity, which would have been 1200-something tons. At the time, it was burning a thousand tons per day. They succeeded in blocking that.

There are very few new incinerators in the United States, but across the Global South, they’re spreading. My father is from India — one of the places that’s very important to us is near a giant incinerator in Delhi, India.

At the Minnesota Environmental Justice Table, we were trying to bring a sort of labor mentality to the environmental justice movement, which can often be focused on emergency-response- type fights. We wanted to be more strategic and forward-thinking. And then a whistleblower got in touch with us, six years ago. He had a lot of really concerning information about the state of the facility. He showed us pictures of ash violations, of worker injuries, really severe worker injuries.

Coming from a labor background, I can see how that would get your attention.

We’ve tried reaching out to the workers there. We’ve made many overtures, but to no avail so far. But to be concise about it, the HERC is blocking the way to zero waste. Detroit shut its incinerator down in 2019–since then, the recycling rates have doubled.

It seems like the assumption is that trash generation is just going to continue to exponentially increase, and the only solution is to use incinerators to deal with that. But that doesn’t address the root cause of the problem, which is, no, trash generation should not be exponentially increasing.

So how does the HERC influence the community around it?

On the one side of the facility in North Minneapolis, there’s one of the most economically marginalized, majority Black and Brown zip codes in the state, and it has the highest asthma rate in the state. And then on the other side is this quickly-gentrifying, Williamsburg Brooklyn type community.

Before the gentrification started, like 10 years ago, the HERC didn’t have odor control technology. It would stink, and people who lived in North Minneapolis would talk about the smell. Even with the odor control tech, there are hundreds of garbage trucks going through there every day. The garbage trucks don’t seem to go through the nice part of town.

How long did the hunger strike last? How did you protect your health?

We did it for twelve days. We had a medical team looking after us, doing checks in the morning and evening. We’d have people sleeping over at the house just to make sure we’re okay. We got wheeled around in wheelchairs to conserve energy. We all live pretty close to [HERC], but one of us…lives within sight of it.

We were really in some pretty intense discussion the last few days about extending it. It felt like we were making a lot of progress on the one hand, but on the other hand, the commissioners who represent Minneapolis…it’s like they were giving us the silent treatment.

Finally, yesterday morning, we heard from a state legislator and got the promise of a meeting.

So, what did you gain from the hunger strike?

The demands were really two things: one, we want a date for them to shut down the facility. Two, we want a just transition process, in which the community is at the table for what comes next. And so this hunger strike, I think, has been very effective in terms of clarifying to the public that it’s not closing without an actual additional vote. People are paying attention. The overall political apparatus – they are now at the table with us in a different way.

Part of the reason we stopped is, we’re at the point when negotiations are about to begin. It’s hard to negotiate if you don’t have any food in you.

Lately, of course, Minneapolis has been in the news for ICE violence, and also for the city’s ability to come together and push back against ICE. From an organizing perspective, are these things connected?

Our response to ICE was this moral kind of line-setting – we put our foot down and put a line in the road and said, you’re not passing this. This is Minneapolis saying to the world that there are some things that are not going to be acceptable. You’re not going to assassinate someone in the street for protecting somebody else. We’re not going to let that happen.

And to tie it into the HERC, you’re not going to poison a majority-Black community and get away with it anymore. We’re done. We’re putting a line in the road. We’re not going to allow anyone else to be sacrificed and murdered by this facility. And the commissioners and everyone need to understand that our resolve is set, that we’re not going anywhere.

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Convicted MAGA Fraudster Should Get 30 Years in Prison, Prosecutors Say

On July 4, 2020, Guo Wengui stood next to Steve Bannon on a bobbing boat in New York Harbor, with the Statue of Liberty as a backdrop, to announce the launch of the “New Federal State of China.”

Guo—a supposed billionaire Chinese dissident who claimed to know secrets of corruption among China’s leaders—had amassed a large, ardent following among that country’s diaspora.

“This case destroyed everything I had—my family’s savings, our ability to support each other, and even our emotional connection.”

The new organization was wildly ambitious. Guo and Bannon called it a “government-in-waiting,” prepared to step in and run China following what they claimed was the imminent collapse of ruling Chinese Communist Party, or CCP. At the same time, Guo was also seeking investments in GTV, an online streaming site he claimed would compete with companies like Amazon and TikTok, make investors rich, and air reporting that would fulfill his oft-stated goal: “Take down CCP.”

On the boat, Guo joined Bannon in reading a declaration of principles, told the former Donald Trump aide he loved him, and kissed him. Then Guo bit his own index finger and signed the declaration with his blood.

That was, in retrospect, one of many signs of how weird 2020 got. But it was also a high point for the “whistleblower movement” Guo and Bannon touted. Nearly six years later, federal prosecutors are asking Judge Analisa Torres, at a hearing Monday, to sentence Guo to more than 30 years in prison for overseeing one of “this nation’s worst and most rampant frauds.”

In 2024, a jury convicted Guo of stealing hundreds of millions from his followers. The New Federal State of China, the harbor ceremony, the nonprofits, and the media companies were all part of an elaborate con Guo used to “lock in” those supporters before hitting them up for investments, prosecutors said a sentencing memo last week.

Guo, who has been jailed as a perceived flight risk since his March 2023 arrest, continues to deny guilt. His lawyers argue, in their own sentencing memo, that his conviction was the result of the Chinese government’s “relentless and overwhelmingly powerful targeting of him.” The memo also suggests, without evidence, that Guo’s support for Trump, in particular his role in the publication of explicit pictures of Hunter Biden prior to the 2020 election, contributed to his prosecution.

“My family and I were defrauded of around $500,000.”

Guo has created a fashion line, secretly funded a pro-Trump social media company, starred in his own music videos, and once bought a $67 million apartment with a reference from Tony Blair. Last year, he publicly vouched for his former cell-block mate, Sean “Diddy” Combs, as “a very kind, sensitive, genius person.” He bankrolled bogus claims that covid is a Chinese bioweapon and clandestinely wired money to Trump backers trying to overturn the 2020 election results. While promoting himself as the world’s leading anti-China dissident, Guo has faced allegations, which he denies, that he has actually worked as a Chinese spy. In 2019, he faced an FBI counterintelligence probe. (In a ruling in a lawsuit two years later, a judge wrote: “The evidence at trial does not permit the Court to decide whether Guo is, in fact, a dissident or a double agent.”)

But behind the flamboyance and international intrigue was a straightforward scam. In China, Guo became rich through real estate development. He fled the country in late 2014 to avoid arrest there in a corruption scandal, and Chinese authorities ultimately seized most of his assets. Prosecutors argue that when he began launching anti-CCP organizations from the United States in 2018, his intention was to rebuild his wealth by fleecing his fans.

In the government’s telling, Guo, with Bannon’s help, launched a nonprofit, the Rule of Law Foundation, shortly after that seizure to cultivate donors in the Chinese diaspora community. Guo claimed he was putting $100 million of his own funds into the group, but never did. He instead relied on money from his followers, who prosecutors said ultimately put up $36 million.

Those funds were raised in part through an international network of clubs, which Guo followers called “farms.” These well-organized groups also worked to amplify claims Guo made in lengthy daily video broadcasts, with followers translating his remarks into various languages. At times the farms also carried out his directives to attack Guo critics or other Chinese dissidents he quarreled with, somtimes via aggressive in-person protests at their homes.

In 2020, as I have reported, Guo took new steps to monetize his network of political supporters. GTV was the first in a series of “investment opportunities” that Guo offered his backers. After a Securities and Exchange Commission probe curtailed his sale of GTV stock, Guo launched a scheme in which his fans “loaned” money to organizations tied to him in exchange for the chance to buy more stock. He followed that with a “club” in which fans paid tens of thousands of dollars for the chance, again, to invest in Guo companies at a discount, and then with cryptocurrency offerings and other financial vehicles.

Guo promoted these schemes in videos in he which told supporters their funds would help defeat the CCP and guaranteed that investors would not lose money.

“My entire moral compass, built around truth, compassion, and community, was manipulated and shattered.”

In fact, prosecutors say, “thousands” of investors, nearly all of them ethic Chinese fans of Guo’s anti-CCP politics, lost their shirts. The companies that Guo touted barely existed. And Guo moved money put up by his fans into bank accounts her controlled, then used the funds on luxury homes, an $832,000 Lamborghini, a $3.5 million Ferrari, a $4.4 million Bugatti, a $2 million yacht, and upkeep on a separate $30 million yacht—the same one Bannon was living on when federal agents arrested him in 2020 for an unrelated fraud scheme. (Trump pardoned Bannon before he faced trial.)

Guo’s schemes appeared to have benefited from his claims to have close ties to Trump advisers. His organizations paid or employed various MAGA figures, including Rudy Giuliani, Michael Flynn, and current White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt. Peter Navarro, between stints as a trade adviser to Trump, served as the New Federal’s State’s “Ambassador-at-Large.”

Bannon, who court records indicate was paid millions of dollars by Guo for consulting services, regularly promoted Guo’s companies in broadcasts watched by Guo fans, and privately advised Guo on how to pitch investors on the ventures that prosecutors later said were scams. In a court filing prior to Guo’s trial, prosecutors called Bannon a co-conspirator in Guo’s fraud scheme. But Bannon has not been charged with a crime in connection with Guo’s ventures. And while the gist of what Guo was up to was hard to miss by 2021, prosecutors have not presented evidence that Bannon knew the details of Guo’s fraud.

Bannon has had relatively little to say about Guo over the last few years, but has at times defended his former patron, arguing prosecutors targeted Guo due to his anti-CCP statements.

Some of Guo’s victims, too, continue to support him, taking up his argument that the government, by freezing his assets, caused their losses.

But according to prosecutors, 225 victims have provided impact statements to the government. Prosecutors quote extensively from those statements in their sentencing memo, though the filiings are sealed and the victims unnamed. Several victims also testified during Guo’s 2024 trial.

“[M]y family and I were defrauded of around $500,000, most of which came from selling our home,” one victim wrote. “Now, this entire amount has been lost. This has pushed us from a stable middle-class life to living on borrowed money.”

“This case destroyed everything I had—my family’s savings, our ability to support each other, and even our emotional connection,” another victim said. “I involved my mother and brother, thinking I was helping them, only to see all of us dragged into financial ruin.”

“When the truth became undeniable, I was overwhelmed with shame, guilt, and despair.”

Another person wrote that the fraud “stripped away” much of the savings their mother had worked to pass on to her family and “exacerbated her health conditions, robbing her of peace in her final years.”

Many of the victims reported experiencing anxiety and depression as a result of the fraud. A half-dozen of the victims quoted by prosecutors said they thought about suicide.

“My entire moral compass, built around truth, compassion, and community, was manipulated and shattered,” one victim wrote. “I had trusted blindly. When the truth became undeniable, I was overwhelmed with shame, guilt, and despair. I struggled with recurring suicidal thoughts. I lost my will to live, to hope, to believe in anything again.”

These victims are Chinese immigrants, in the US and around the world, who Guo claimed to champion. They are people who Bannon likes to call the “laobaixing,” a Chinese term for “ordinary folks.”

Prosecutors call what Guo did “affinity fraud,” a scheme where a con artist uses apparent membership in a particular community to win trust and supposed investments, often to finance a Ponzi or pyramid scheme.

Federal prosecutors and some of Guo’s victims argued that this particular scam, by targeting Chinese immigrants who wanted to believe Guo’s claims that their savings would help “take down CCP,” hurt not only their finances but their political movement.

_“_While loudly proclaiming his goal to defeat the CCP, he actually served their interests by discrediting the very cause he claimed to support,” one victim wrote. “By betraying us—the true believers in ending the CCP’s tyranny—he has tarnished the fight against the CCP itself.”

If you or someone you care about may be at risk of suicide, contact the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline by calling or texting 988, or go to 988lifeline.org.

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GOP Lawmakers Are Pushing “Alarming” Bills to Shield Big Oil From Climate Liability

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

Republican lawmakers are attempting to shield big oil from having to pay for its contributions to the climate crisis, alarming environmental advocates.

New House and Senate bills led by Rep. Harriet Hageman (R-Wyo.) and Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) would give oil and gas companies broad legal immunity from policies and lawsuits aimed at holding the industry accountable for damages caused by its emissions.

Dubbed the Stop Climate Shakedowns Act of 2026, the proposal would protect the sector from liability. It is similar to a 2005 law that has largely blocked lawsuits against the firearms industry over gun violence.

“To try to legislate that science away is something that’s really alarming.”

The Republicans’ proposal is designed to stop a surge of climate accountability measures launched by states and municipalities—which Hageman’s office called “leftist legal crusades punishing lawful activity,” in a statement. In recent years, more than 70 state and local governments have sued oil companies for allegedly deceiving the public about the dangers of their products. Meanwhile, New York and Vermont have also passed climate “superfund” laws requiring major polluters to pay for damages from past emissions, with other states considering similar policies.

If passed, the new federal legislation would dismiss pending climate accountability lawsuits, void all climate superfund laws and block similar future efforts. The proposals attempt to undermine the very foundations of climate accountability measures, said Delta Merner, lead scientist at the science hub for climate litigation at the science advocacy group Union of Concerned Scientists.

Hageman, for instance, in a statement said her bill would “affirm” that the federal government had exclusive authority and jurisdiction over the regulation of greenhouse gases, but legal experts dispute that, Merner noted. The language attempts “to take away the ability for local harms to be decided at the local and state level,” Merner said.

Cruz’s bill, meanwhile, attempts to discredit climate attribution studies—scientific analyses quantifying how much the climate crisis altered the likelihood or intensity of specific extreme weather events—on which some climate legal claims are based. “To try to legislate that science away is something that’s really alarming,” said Merner.

This year, the top US oil lobby, the American Petroleum Institute (API), said blocking “abusive” climate lawsuits was a top priority. Months earlier, 16 Republican state attorneys general asked the justice department for a “liability shield” for oil companies. And last year, both the API and energy giant ConocoPhillips also pressed Congress on draft legislation to limit climate liability.

“The industry knows it’s vulnerable. They are not totally confident they can win cases on their merits.”

“Immunity is clearly something the industry has been after,” said Cassidy DiPaola of the pro-climate superfund group Make Polluters Pay. “We’re in a period where there’s a Republican trifecta that will basically bow down to the industry, and I think they view this moment as one of their biggest opportunities to get it.”

Industry groups have praised the federal proposal. In a joint statement, Mike Sommers, the API CEO, and Chet Thompson, the CEO of the influential fuel lobby group American Fuel and Petrochemical Manufacturers, thanked Hageman and Cruz for the legislation, saying: “Congress should act decisively to reaffirm federal authority over national energy policy and end this activist-driven state overreach.”

Asked about advocates’ concerns about the new policy proposal, API referred the Guardian to its previous statement.

The bills’ introduction came as red states are also proposing to block climate lawsuits and superfund acts. Last week, Tennessee passed a measure blocking big oil accountability efforts, and Utah greenlit a similar law earlier this month. Other states are considering similar policies, but none of them are as straightforward about their goals as the federal proposals, said DiPaola.

“It’s honestly shocking how direct the federal lawmakers are being with with their wording,” she said. “We kind of anticipated it being a little bit more discreet, but they’re not hiding the ball whatsoever. They’re saying it out front: ‘You can’t hold us accountable.’”

The industry and its allies have made a variety of other attempts to thwart climate accountability efforts, including challenging superfund laws in court and attempting to have litigation thrown out. “In some ways, this federal bill feels like a capstone [of the] multi-layered strategy that we’ve been watching unfold, where the fossil fuel industry is attacking climate accountability on several fronts at once,” said Merner.

The industry has seen mixed results. Some climate litigation, for instance, has been thrown out. But last week, a federal judge dismissed a lawsuit from the Trump administration that aimed to pre-emptively block Hawaii from suing big oil. “The industry knows it’s vulnerable,” said Merner. “They are not totally confident they can win cases on their merits.”

Jay Inslee, a former Washington governor, has recently been raising concerns about the fossil fuel industry’s desire for a liability waiver, particularly since Hageman indicated in February that a federal proposal was in the works. “Every elected official who cares about the interests of their constituents more than those of corporate polluters should oppose this disgraceful proposal,” Inslee said in a statement.

It’s not clear whether Republicans could muster the votes to pass the legislation as it is written. But the bills could help lay the groundwork for a similar measure to be slipped into a larger piece of must-pass legislation, or via the reconciliation process when measures can pass with a simple majority rather than the 60-vote filibuster threshold. “We don’t think that the strategy is to pass this bill as a freestanding bill,” said Richard Wiles, president of the Center for Climate Integrity, which backs the litigation against the oil industry. “But bad things can happen at any minute, and we’ve got to be ready for it.”

The introduction of the federal legislation, Wiles said, “demystifies” oil industry allies’ objectives.

“If there was any doubt that they would try to do something this outrageous and this damaging to the justice system and to people’s rights to go to court to seek redress for harms, there’s no doubt any more,” he said.

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What RFK Jr. Doesn’t Get About Paid Family Care

While testifying in support of the Department of Health and Human Services’ budget before Congress this week, HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. attacked home-and community-based services, a Medicaid-backed program that provides over seven million disabled people the support they need to remain out of institutions.

Specifically, Kennedy singled out the fact that some states allow some family caregivers to receive payment through Medicaid, a system Kennedy alleged is “rife with fraud.” Kennedy indicated that he’d like to dismantle those programs in favor of unpaid work, implicitly by women, in the home—already the predominant model for many households, and a far from sustainable one.

I spoke with Calli Ross, a parent and advocate who fought for paid caregiving for minor disabled children in her home state of Oregon, about what RFK Jr. doesn’t understand—or want to know—about these programs.

Most states allow parents of adult children with disabilities, family members of children with disabilities, and family members of the elderly to be paid for providing attendant care.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is now saying all of this should be considered “natural supports” and unpaid labor. And the underlying rhetoric is that this labor should be provided by women.

Tensy is my 11-year-old little boy who was born with a genetic condition that makes him more susceptible to illness. At age one, he developed chronic lung disease. At four, he had his first cardiac arrest, going 33 minutes without oxygen to his brain. He recovered fairly well but with limited mobility. He requires 24/7 ventilator support for his lungs, uses a feeding tube, and is a wheelchair user.

In 2024, he had a second cardiac arrest caused by a seizure. This led to the loss of his smile, facial movement, and any purposeful physical movement. He is still able to communicate using an eye gaze device and experiences a full life because he is supported in his home and community.

Calli Ross with her son, Tensy.Courtesy of Calli Ross

In Oregon, like other states, a state assessment determined that to live safely at home, Tensy requires 744 hours of nursing and attendant care each month. These supports go far beyond typical parenting. They include tracheostomy care, manually resuscitating him during seizures, and full support for all activities of daily living.

Because Oregon passed the Children’s Extraordinary Needs waiver in 2023, parents of the highest-needs children are allowed to work up to 20 hours per week providing these supports, care that is clearly above and beyond typical parenting. Similar policies exist for adults with disabilities and the elderly, run by states but supplemented by federal matches. The few states that allow parents of minors to be paid are funded under the same principle.

Our program is incredibly small. Only 155 children can participate [at a time], and the waitlist is thousands long. That bill is named for my son: Tensy’s Law.

These are hours someone else could be paid to work—if the workforce existed. And by someone else, I mean anyone off the street who is 18 or older without a felony. But even that low-qualification workforce doesn’t exist. There is a well-documented national caregiver crisis. Many families are being forced to leave the workforce, rely on state aid, or institutionalize their loved ones at a much higher cost to state and federal systems.

As the baby boomer generation ages, the number of family caregivers is rapidly increasing. Without the infrastructure to support this care economy, the system as a whole will fail. We cannot expect women to leave the workforce en masse and provide the care needed for our aging and ill family members. We cannot expect families with children with disabilities to survive on GoFundMe and prayers.

Tensy is one of the 155 in children in Oregon, with a waitlist in the thousands, allowed to choose his dad as his paid caregiver for 20 hours a week. That is the cap, currently, in our state. (Even then, due to administrative delays, my son wasn’t able to benefit from having his dad as his paid caregiver until January.)

It isn’t much, but because of this help, we are able to afford a wheelchair-accessible vehicle. My husband is able to take more time from his job to provide Tensy the care he needs to thrive. As his parents, we are the most knowledgeable and most able to care for our son. But without support, we cannot keep him home. And that’s the reality everywhere.

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The US Military Is 3D Printing Warheads

The US Army announced this week that it has successfully 3D-printed a drone-based warhead prototype, and successfully used that weapon to make something explode.

In a press release, the military called the weapon “a lightweight, powerful, and lethal warhead that could be deployed from a small, agile drone.” In a video posted April 21 and captioned only “Multi-Purpose,” a drone blows up a makeshift bunker on a military testing site.

3D-printed drones and drone-based weapons are fairly new, and they’re having a bit of a moment in the American military limelight. Army Secretary Dan Driscoll, who President Donald Trump calls “the drone guy,” told lawmakers last week he has learned a great deal from Ukraine’s use of cheap and easily replicable drones, and is eager to apply those lessons to the United States’ wars. (Per reporting from The Economist in 2023, Ukraine has also used ChatGPT to build bombs.)

The Ukrainian military has “fundamentally changed the approach to warfare,” Driscoll said during a congressional hearing Thursday. Iran, too, has reportedly used cheap Shahed drones—$20,000 each—to take out million-dollar American and Israeli missiles. Now, the US may adopt similar technology. “The United States Army is a beacon of transformation,” Driscoll said. “Imagine what we could do if we weren’t bound by the red tape!”

This latest 3D-printed warhead, called the BRAKER, is part of a larger push towards high-tech, cheap munitions. At SpaceX’s Stargate campus in mid-January, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth urged the military and weapons-tech contractors to “accelerate like hell.” And as the Pentagon budget is slated to crest $1 trillion for the first time ever this year, the military is pushing to triple drone-related spending to $74 billion.

As the United States continues to bombard Iran—killing thousands of people, and spending, at last count, nearly $60 billion doing so—the military is looking for cheaper ways to mass-produce war from a distance. That might be why US News and World Report thinks drone stocks are worth buying.

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Meet Paolo Zampolli, the Man at the Center of Trump’s Biggest Scandals

Paolo Zampolli epitomizes why so many people hate the Trump administration.

Zampolli serves as Donald Trump’s US special envoy for “Global Partnership” and is mired in controversies over this year’s World Cup, Jeffrey Epstein, and, according to the New York Times, ICE.

He’s a shining example of people alleged to be scammer and abusers have weaseled their way into using Trump’s global platform for their own nefarious purposes. Let’s take a look.

The World Cup

On Wednesday, Zampolli told the Financial Times he made a suggestion to Trump and FIFA President Gianni Infantino that Iran be replaced by Italy at this summer’s World Cup. The soccer tournament will be played in the US, Canada, and Mexico, and both the US and Iran have expressed concerns that it would not be possible for Iran, which is currently at war with Israel and the United States.

“I’m an Italian native and it would be a dream to see the Azzurri at a US-hosted tournament. With four titles, they have the pedigree to justify inclusion,” Zampolli said to the Financial Times (“Azzuri” is a nickname for the Italian national sports team, which has won the competition four times, but has failed to qualify for three successive tournaments). Zampolli is an Italian-American but has no apparent association with Italian soccer or the World Cup.

The Financial Times suggested that Zampolli’s idea was designed to improve US and Italy relations after Italy’s Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni condemned Trump’s bizarre remarks about Pope Leo XIV over the war in Iran.

You may be wondering: Why is an American envoy attempting to lobby on behalf of Italy instead of the US?

Zampolli reposted the Financial Times‘ Tuesday story on X and, late Wednesday night, posted two screenshots of the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera reporting his World Cup proposal.

“Firstly, it is not possible, secondly it is not appropriate,” Italy’s sports minister, Andrea Abodi, told LaPresse. “You qualify on the pitch.”

“The attempt to exclude Iran from the World Cup only reveals the moral bankruptcy of the United States, which is afraid even of the presence of eleven young Iranians on the field of play,” the Iranian embassy said. A spokesperson for Iran’s government said Wednesday that Iran is prepared to play at the World Cup, according to the Associated Press.

According to the BBC, FIFA is not planning to replace Iran with Italy.

In other words, everyone hates the Trump administration.

Jeffrey Epstein

Zampolli, a former head of a modeling agency in the ’90s, claims that he introduced Donald and Melania Trump and helped the first lady obtain a work visa in the mid-’90s. He even told the Daily Mail he was prepared to testify before Congress following Melania’s public denial earlier this month of close connections to Jeffrey Epstein, including that it was the convicted sex offender introduced her to Donald Trump. Melania Trump called for a congressional hearing to allow survivors of Epstein’s abuse to testify.

Zampollihas his own ties to Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell. Heand Epstein discussed and later failed in their bid to purchase the agency Elite Model Management in 2004, and according to the Daily Beast, became a partner of Maxwell’s environmental charity and nonprofit organization, the TerraMar Project, that described itself as focused on protecting oceans. Maxwell launched the project in 2012 but the organization was dissolved in December 2019, following Epstein’s arrest in July of that same year.

ICE

Last month, the New York Times reported that Zampolli sent a request to David Venturella, an ICE official, to put his ex-girlfriend Amanda Ungaro, who is Brazilian and was arrested on charges of workplace fraud, in ICE detention. Zampolli had been in a custody battle with Ungaro over their son.

The Times obtained communication records demonstrating that Venturella contacted ICE’s Miami office to make sure agents would take Ungaro from a Miami jail where she was being held, an order that Venturella said was important to an individual closely connected to the White House. Ungaro was placed in ICE custody and deported, but, according to the Times, it remains unclear whether Zampolli’s request led to Ungaro’s deportation.

Mr. Zampolli denied asking ICE to detain Ungaro, saying he only asked Venturella about the status of her case.

The Department of Homeland Security said in a statement to the Times that Ungaro was detained and deported due to an expired visa and her fraud charges. “Any suggestion that she was arrested and removed for political reasons or favors is FALSE.”

Neither the US State Department nor the Kennedy Center immediately responded to a request from Mother Jones for Zampolli’s comment on the Financial Times and New York Times stories. (The Office for Global Partnerships is an office within the US State Department and Zampolli is on the board of trustees of the Kennedy Center, as appointed by President Trump.

Sensing a pattern?If Zampolli does get a role in organizing the World Cup, fans, players, journalists, and other travelers may be subjected to the Trump administration’s brutal immigration policies.

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The Fight Against Warehouse Detention Has Come to Congress

Laura Spivak, an organizer with Washington County Indivisible, has spent the past few months trying everything to stop the construction of an ICE detention warehouse only five miles from her home.

“We’ve protested, we’ve written and called, we’ve fought legal battles,” she said at a press conference Thursday in support of the Ban Warehouse Detention Act, a bill Rep.Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) is introducing to prohibit the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) from using taxpayer funds to purchase, convert, or operate commercial warehouses as immigration detention centers. Senators Cory Booker (D-N.J.) and Andy Kim (D-N.J.) introduced a similar bill in the Senate two weeks ago.

Spivak has found some success fighting the warehouse detention center in her backyard. Last week, a judge agreed to temporarily block the construction of a Williamsport, Maryland facility, where ICE planned to jail up to 1,500 people. But without more help, Spivak fears that this will only be a temporary victory.

The Ban Warehouse Detention Act, Spivak said, “prevents local politicians from colluding with DHS to convert warehouses into detention camps, and prevents them from shutting out the voices of residents like us.”

As of February, the Department of Homeland Security planned to spend over $38 billion dollars purchasing 24 warehouses across the country, in order to detain up to 92,000 people. So far, they have purchased eleven.

Spivak thinks that money could be better-spent doing pretty much anything else. Williamsport’s local library needs renovation, its school buildings need modernization, and investing in tourism could bring prosperity to the town’s historic district. “A prison camp will not help Williamsport develop economically,” she said. “It will drive down property values and bring shame to a town that deserves a helping hand, not a federal slap in the face.”

In early April, the Department of Homeland Security said they would pause the purchase of any new warehouses while conducting an internal review of facilities purchased under recently-fired Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem. But a pause, Tlaib said Thursday, is not enough.

“We need to save lives right now,” Tlaib said. She has been in contact with immigrants held in warehouse detention in Michigan, she said: some of them have been held for months after signing letters stating their willingness to leave the country; others are becoming sick due to the conditions in the facilities.

“A young lady that was in the facility for over a year at 33 years old, and never had a seizure before, had a seizure because of malnutrition and sleep deprivation,” Tlaib said. “I mean, this is a form of torture.” Immigrants at one GEO-group-owned facility in North Lake, Michigan, have launched a hunger strike demanding access to adequate food, medical care, and legal representation.

The local-level pushback against ICE, meanwhile, continues: there are rapid-response networks in every major city, where residents alert each other to the presence of ICE officers and gather resources for immigrants in their communities. Online maps show current and future detention warehouse purchases planned in communities across the country. And wherever ICE plans to build a facility, protests tend to follow.

Under Tlaib’s draft bill, no agency may “Establish, operate, expand, convert, or renovate any warehouse, industrial facility, tent, soft-sided structure, modular unit, or similar building or structure for the purposes of housing, processing, or detaining individuals under civil immigration authority.”

“Human beings do not belong in warehouses,” said Rep. Jesús “Chuy” García (D-Il.). “From Arizona to New Hampshire, even Republican local elected officials oppose these warehouses. Not one penny of our tax dollars should be going towards these massive detention centers.”

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The Trump Family’s Crypto Venture Is Being Sued by Its Own Billionaire Backer

The Trump family’s cryptocurrency venture World Liberty Financial is being sued by one of its billionaire investors, who claimsthe company froze his token holdings.

In the lawsuit filed Tuesday, Justin Sun accused World Liberty Financial of “engaging in an illegal scheme to seize property.”

“They wrongfully froze all of my tokens, stripped me of my right to vote on governance proposals, and have threatened to permanently destroy my tokens,” Sun wrote in a statement on X on Tuesday night. While he said he remains an “ardent supporter” of Trump and his administration’s efforts to make crypto-friendly policies, Sun wrote that “certain individuals” associated with World Liberty were operating the venture “in a manner that goes against President Trump’s values.”

Sun backed the Trump family when they launched World Liberty Financial in 2024, investing $30 million. He spent another $45 million on 3 billion tokens just a few months later. According to Reuters, Sun owns about 4 billion tokens worth approximately $320 million.

World Liberty Financial’s co-founder, Zach Witkoff, wrote in a Wednesday post on X that Sun’s legal complaint “is a desperate attempt to deflect attention from Sun’s own misconduct.” Witkoff did not offer more details on what Sun did but said the investor’s actions required the company to “take action to protect itself and its users.”

As my colleagues Russ Choma, Dan Friedman, and Tim Murphy wrote in 2025:

Shortly after Trump took office, the Securities and Exchange Commission—which had accused Sun of fraud in a federal complaint—agreed to pause its lawsuit while the parties pursued a “potential resolution.” That was one of more than a dozen lawsuits and investigations targeting crypto firms that the SEC reportedly backed off from after Trump took office.

Sun eventually resolved the case with the SEC in a $10 million settlement last month.

The Trump family receives 75 percent of net proceeds from token sales. According to the Wall Street Journal, since the launch, they have received about $1 billion in proceeds as of December 2025.

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Florida’s Notorious “Alligator Alcatraz” Can Remain Open, Court Rules

The infamous Florida immigrant detention center known as “Alligator Alcatraz” can remain open, an appeals court ruled Tuesday, overturning a lower judge’s decision to close the facility because it violated federal environmental laws.

The ruling is the latest development in the months-long legal battle against the center, which was constructed in the Everglades last summer by Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’ administration when the Department of Homeland Security needed more detention space to house immigrants pending their deportations.

The center has come under fire for both its living conditions and its impact on the surrounding area. As I reported in March, thousands of people have been detained there despite ongoing reports of mosquito infestations, flooding, poor medical care, lackluster food, and limited water access. Last month, two US senators said they launched an investigation into reported abuses, including the use of “the box,” in which detainees were allegedly shackled and held in small cages in direct sunlight for hours at a time. (A spokesperson for the Florida Division of Emergency Management, which runs Alligator Alcatraz, told me recently that the allegations were “false.”) In recent weeks, the center landed in the spotlight once again after attorneys representing immigrants held there told a judge that guards had assaulted and pepper sprayed detainees who protested after the phones were shut off, less than a week after a federal judge ordered legal access should be expanded at the facility.

Environmentalists have spent almost a year trying to shutter Alligator Alcatraz in an effort to protect the Everglades. The center was built on a little-used airfield next to the environmentally protected wetlands of Big Cypress National Preserve. “People get out, there’s not much waiting for them other than alligators and pythons,” Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier quipped in a video posted on social media late last June.

As I reported that month, environmental groups sued federal and state officials to halt the project. They argued that the construction hadproceeded without an environmental review or opportunity for public comment, in violation of the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA). They filed declarations in the case documenting how the camp could potentially impact the neighboring ecosystems and wildlife. Traffic to and from the detention site increases the likelihood of panthers being struck by vehicles, according to court filings, and light pollution could destroy the nighttime foraging abilities of bats in the area.

“Alligator Alcatraz will go down in history as a boondoggle to taxpayers and a flagrant assault on the Everglades.”

Florida and Trump officials argued that NEPA only applies to federal agencies, and that the facility was operated and funded by the state, which has spent at least $390 million to run it. But in August, a federal judge in Miami concluded that Alligator Alcatraz “exists for the sole purpose of detaining and deporting those subject to federal immigration enforcement” and ordered it to wind down operations within 60 days. The state of Florida appealed and the US Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit blocked the judge’s decision, allowing Alligator Alcatraz to continue to operate.

Alligator Alcatraz has disrupted the vulnerable ecosystems that surround it, Eve Samples, executive director of Friends of the Everglades, one of the plaintiffs in the environmental lawsuit, told me last month. The high intensity lighting, for example, has impacted about 2,000 acres of habitat for the Florida panther, an endangered species with a population of about 200. “The evidence of that harm is clear,” she said in a phone interview.

The three-judge panel heard oral arguments in the case on April 7 and released a 38-page ruling late Tuesday afternoon. In the 2-1 decision, judges concluded that the environmentalists failed to prove Alligator Alcatraz was under federal control. Florida also hasn’t received any federal funding (though it is in the process of requesting reimbursement). “Federal authority is, at most, indirect: it is involved in the construction only insofar as it sets the terms for which the facility may be used for detention of aliens, but Florida officials dedicated its land to that use,” wrote Chief Judge William Pryor, who was appointed by President George W. Bush, in the majority opinion.

Judge Nancy Abudu, a Biden appointee, wrote in her dissent that immigration is ultimately a federal obligation and the majority’s ruling is “just plain wrong.” “So long as Florida remains a willing participant in the federal government’s immigration detention scheme, it subjects itself to the federal government’s substantial control over the parties’ joint efforts,” she wrote.

The case was sent back to the district court. “This fight is far from over,” Samples, the Friends of the Everglades director, said in a statement Tuesday night. “Alligator Alcatraz will go down in history as a boondoggle to taxpayers and a flagrant assault on the Everglades, and we look forward to returning to the District Court to advance our case to shut it down.”

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Truth Social CEO Out After $1.1 Billion in Losses

Devin Nunes was not an obvious choice to run a fledgling social media network, but after $1.1 billion in losses, the former dairy farmer and congressman is out as the head of Truth Social.

Donald Trump Jr., a board member at Trump Media + Technology, the parent company of Truth Social, said on Tuesday night that Nunes would be replaced by another executive who formerly worked at Hulu. Nunes confirmed the move in a Truth Social post of his own.

The company, which is majority owned by Donald Trump, has seen its stock plummet 84 percent under Nunes’ leadership, from its debut price of $58 back in 2024. The current share price of around $9.80 is arguably still optimistic for a company that has lost $1.1 billion since it went public, and recorded just over $10.6 million in revenue in the same time.

Even as the company struggled, Nunes prospered. In 2024 alone, his pay outstripped any revenue the company has made over its lifetime—he drew a salary of $1 million, a bonus of $600,000 and was awarded stock worth another $46 million.

To be fair to Nunes, he was asked to oversee a company that despite having one of thet world’s most recognizable faces as its power user, had a remarkably scattershot approach to everything.

When Trump Media was first announced as a concept, the Trump family said it would include: Truth Social, streaming television services to rival Netflix and Amazon and web-hosting that would rival Amazon’s AWS business. And all of it would be devoted to fighting the “woke” media and corporate culture that Trump said had blacklisted him following Jan. 6. Truth Social would be a redoubt for freedom of speech, the streaming services would have wholesome non-“woke” content that America craved and the web-hosting would provide a home for any company that dared to challenge Amazon’s alleged anti-free speech motivations.

Of those grand dreams, under Nunes, Trump Media managed to launch Truth Social and a tepid streaming service, that runs for free and mostly provides content that is also free on YouTube. Truth Social may have as few as several hundred thousand daily active users, while Elon Musk’s X is estimated to have around 224 million. Those kind of numbers place it firmly in 24th place among social media companies, a few spots behind YouTube Kids.

That’s not how things were supposed to go. At its launch, a slide presentation distributed to investors and filed with the SEC suggested that by 2026, the company expected to have about $3.3 billion in revenue, 40 million users on Truth Social and another 81 million spread across the company’s other services.

Under Nunes, the company has, instead, struck out in seemingly random directions. It has, among other things, launched:

• “Personal freedom” oriented ETFs.
• A crypto “token”—a non-tradeable blockchain-based digital asset which, despite having no value, is slated to be given to shareholders and would grant them discounts on the company’s products.
• A Bitcoin treasury: following in the footsteps of controversial Bitcoin evangelist Michael Saylor, Trump Media announced in 2025 that it would begin accumulating as many Bitcoins as possible, based on the theory that Bitcoin’s precipitous increase in value would also make the company more valuable.

The last initiative, which was announced in May of 2025, a few months before a massive decline in Bitcoin prices kicked in, is responsible for most of the $712 million in losses. The company had purchased roughly $2.5 billion in bitcoin, and the latest data suggests that after declines in the price of Bitcoin and sale of some of the company’s Bitcoins, the treasury is now worth just $753 million.

Trump Media’s boldest move under Nunes might have been the idea to pivot to nuclear power—specifically the largely experimental method of nuclear fusion. In nuclear fission, which is the method used for decades, atoms are split, but in fusion, pushing atoms together generates even greater energy—but the process has never been made commercially viable. In late 2025, Trump Media announced it would be merging with TAE Technologies, a longstanding player in the fusion field, which despite having previously secured funding, was still struggling to build an actual power plant.

The merger, which is supposed to be completed in June, would have made Nunes co-CEO of the social media, streaming, web-hosting, financial products, Bitcoin treasury and nuclear fusion company.

All that is a lot of responsibility for Nunes who began his career working on the family dairy farm in southern California in the early 1990s (he has a degree in agriculture). First elected to Congress in 2003 and served for 19 years, including several as the chairman of the House Intelligence committee, where he and one of his staffers—Kash Patel—became two of Trump’s loudest backers in accusing a “deep state” in the intelligence community of having targeted Trump.

Nunes had no specific experience running a technology company before taking over as CEO of Trump Media, but in 2019 he sued political strategist Liz Mair and two anonymous parody Twitter accounts, including @DevinCow, which purported to be one of the cows on his dairy farm, for defamation. Nunes asked for $250 million in damages, but the case was dismissed.

Nunes confirmed his departure from Trump Media but did not say what he would be doing next. He remains chairman of Trump’s Intelligence Advisory Board.

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Tulsi Gabbard’s Dangerous War

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._

On Saturday, Donald Trump convened a meeting on the Iran war in the White House situation room. At the table, according to news reports, were Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, White House chief of staff Susie Wiles, envoy Steve Witkoff, Joint Chiefs Chairman Dan Caine, and CIA Director John Ratcliffe. Missing from this list: Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard. This was another opportunity for administration officials to snicker that DNI stands for Do Not Invite.

You might wonder what’s the point of having a director of national intelligence who’s routinely not included in major deliberations about national security. Gabbard’s value for Trump is not in her oversight of the 18 agencies in the intelligence community, which is ostensibly her job. Nor in her intelligence experience, which is slight. It is in her willingness to serve Trump’s lust for vengeance against those he deems his political enemies. That includes her enthusiasm for politicizing and weaponizing intelligence to an extent never seen in US history.

Last summer, she did this by releasing highly classified intelligence documents that she claimed proved that President Barack Obama, his CIA chief John Brennan, and other Deep Staters had committed “treason”—a crime punishable by death. She accused them of falsifying intelligence to show that Russian leader Vladimir Putin had covertly intervened in the 2016 election in part to help Trump. The memos clearly did not show that. (Investigations by special counsel Robert Mueller, the Justice Department, and the bipartisan Senate intelligence committee have confirmed Putin attacked that election to boost Trump.)

Here was the top US intelligence official deploying unsubstantiated or phony Russian material—over the objections of CIA officials—to smear an American politician. It was disgraceful.

Gabbard’s stunt was a despicable act of immense gaslighting. And she and Trump each called for Obama, Brennan, and others to be prosecuted. Trump went so far as to post an AI-generated video of FBI agents violently handcuffing and arresting Obama and tossing him into a prison cell. In the video, Obama is on his knees before Trump. Never has intelligence been so abused by an administration for purely political purposes. Gabbard’s move led the Justice Department to mount a criminal investigation of Brennan and others that is ongoing.

At the time, Gabbard also declassified and made public a secret report that cited Russian intelligence material from 2016 that claimed Hillary Clinton suffered from “intensified psycho-emotional problems,” was on a daily regimen of “heavy tranquilizers,” and had schemed to set up the Trump-Russia scandal to distract from her email controversy. But US intelligence analysts and FBI agents had previously judged this Russian material to be unreliable and possibly disinformation. So here was the top US intelligence official deploying unsubstantiated or phony Russian material—over the objections of CIA officials who worried its disclosure could compromise sources and methods—to smear an American politician. It was disgraceful.

Trump loved it. Gabbard had been on the outs with the White House prior to this for several reasons, including her release of a video that implied she opposed military action against Iran. Now Trump proclaimed her a “star.”

Recently, Gabbard was again in the hot seat. In March, the day after her ally Joe Kent resigned as director of the National Counterterrorism Center over the Iran war, Gabbard testified before Congress on threats posed to the United States. Trump, according to Axios, was displeased that Gabbard at this hearing did not wholeheartedly endorse his war in Iran and personally scolded her. He was also apparently mad that she had protected Kent, who had publicly undercut his rationale for the war. (In his resignation letter, Kent said Iran posed no “imminent threat” to the United States.) Trump began asking his top advisers if he should give Gabbard the boot.

Gabbard showed that she had learned the lesson of how to survive in Trumpland: She released more intelligence documents to discredit a Trump foe.

MAGA activist Laura Loomer tweeted that “Tulsi was done” and that the White House was about to show her the door. But this didn’t happen. Roger Stone, the longtime Trump adviser who was found guilty of lying to Congress during the Trump-Russia scandal (and subsequently pardoned by Trump), took credit for interceding with Trump and rescuing Gabbard. Axios quoted “a source familiar with Trump’s thinking” saying, “Roger sealed the deal. He saved Tulsi.”

Whether Stone’s influence mattered or not, Gabbard last week showed that she had learned the lesson of how to survive in Trumpland: She released more intelligence documents to discredit a Trump foe and to reveal yet another purported Deep State conspiracy against the president.

This time, the target was the whistleblower who in 2019 filed a complaint with the intelligence community’s inspector general, Michael Atkinson, about the infamous phone call during which Trump pressured Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to launch investigations to dig up dirt on Joe Biden, who was then running for president, and to prove that Ukraine, not Russia, intervened in the 2016 election. The whistleblower maintained that Trump was “using the power of his office to solicit interference from a foreign country in the 2020 US election.”

Just as Gabbard is trying to airbrush away Putin’s intervention in the 2016 election, she’s now attempting to delegitimize and erase that first impeachment.

When the acting DNI, John Maguire, declined to share this classified complaint with Congress, Atkinson informed Congress of its existence, triggering a brouhaha that soon led to Trump’s first impeachment.

Trump was not convicted by the Republican-controlled Senate, but he has always been steamed by the impeachment. Just as Gabbard is trying to airbrush away Putin’s intervention in the 2016 election, she’s now attempting to delegitimize and erase that first impeachment.

Last week, she released a handful of documents that she asserted exposed “a coordinated effort by elements within the Intelligence Community (IC), including a former Inspector General (IG), to manufacture a conspiracy that was used as the basis to impeach President Trump in 2019.” She insisted these records show that Atkinson “did not follow standard IG procedures and relied upon politicized, manufactured narratives” and that he took “actions to weaponize the Whistleblower process and exceed his statutory jurisdiction.”

Once more, she insisted that Trump was the victim of a nefarious cabal: _“_Deepstate actors within the Intelligence Community concocted a false narrative that was used by Congress to usurp the will of the American people and impeach the duly-elected President of the United States.”

Yet again, Gabbard is pulling a big con. The materials she released do not back up the charge that Atkinson mishandled this case, and they certainly don’t prove a narrative was manufactured. In fact, the whistleblower’s complaint was largely confirmed when the Trump White House, under pressure, released a summary of his call with Zelenskyy. And that summary played a more critical role in the impeachment proceedings than the whistleblower’s complaint. During the Trump-Ukraine controversy, Maguire testified that the whistleblower “did the right thing.” Maguire also testified that Atkinson’s handling of the whistleblower complaint was done “by the book” and consistent with the law.

Gabbard went further then pumping out more disinformation. She sent the Justice Department criminal referrals for Atkinson, who Trump fired in April 2020, and the whistleblower, who has never been officially identified. (Conservative media, Donald Trump Jr., and Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul revealed his name during the impeachment.)

A pro-Trump conservative activist who believes Gabbard should be ousted told me that it’s obvious Gabbard is gathering intelligence records she can strategically release when necessary to protect her position.

This is another dangerous action from Gabbard, who once again is abusing intelligence to gin up a criminal case to feed Trump’s revenge fantasy. There is no case here. There was no Deep State plot. This is all about payback—and Gabbard keeping her job.

A few days ago, a pro-Trump conservative activist who believes Gabbard should be ousted told me that it’s obvious Gabbard is gathering intelligence records she can strategically release when necessary to protect her position. This MAGA influencer called this conduct reprehensible, noting that if Gabbard has evidence of Deep State conspiracies, she ought to put it all out.

But none of the material Gabbard has released so far proves the conspiracy theories she’s peddling. As an apparatchik for Dear Leader, she’s misrepresenting once-classified material to set up show trials and demonstrating she will lie and cheat for Trump—and to stay employed. Such a disingenuous DNI is a threat to national security. Nothing she says—in private to the president or in public—can be trusted.

Gabbard’s most recent efforts to deceive the public have not received the media attention they deserve. They ought to be front-page news, for Gabbard also is leading the administration’s effort to find evidence of fraud in the 2020 election. Remember when she was photographed at the Atlanta site when FBI agents seized voting records and machines?

If Gabbard will manufacture false narratives and bogus evidence to support baseless criminal prosecutions of supposed Deep State conspirators and Trump critics, what might she do to cook up proof of Trump’s Big Lie about the 2020 elections or to concoct phony evidence of fraud in the coming midterm elections?

Gabbard is a careerist chameleon. In 2018, as I revealed last year, she spoke at the Bernie Sanders Institute and slammed Trump as a supporter of “genocidal war.” In 2019, when she was running for president as a progressive Democrat, she blasted Trump for being “on the brink of launching us into a very stupid and costly war with Iran.” Now she’s a Trump loyalist. She clearly will flip positions and jettison supposed principles to attain power. And she has demonstrated she’s willing to go far beyond that.

Gabbard may not be in the room when the big decisions about war are being made. But she’s prosecuting her own war on the truth to score retaliation for Trump. To date, her war has targeted a handful of people whom Trump craves to see crushed. But with her focus also on elections, it’s a war that could affect the future of American democracy.

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Majority Backs Trump Impeachment—Even One in Five of His Own Voters

A majority of American adults say that the US House should vote to impeach President Trump—including one-in-five people who voted for him in 2024.

A new poll by Strength in Numbers, a data-based news website, and the market research platform Verasight found that 55 percent of respondents said they support the US House voting for impeachment. Out of the 1,514 Americans surveyed between April 10 and April 14, 37 percent said they opposed and eight percent reported they were unsure.

While this is just one poll in a collection of many, it is clear that Trump’s approval ratings are sinking. The New York Times’ daily average of dozens of polls has the president at a 38 percent approval rating. On January 27, 2025, the first average calculated following Inauguration Day, the Times recorded Trump’s approval rating at 52 percent.

The numbers are striking, but there are few avenues for popular sentiment to achieve tangible results in Washington. There have been numerous calls from lawmakers to impeach and convict Trump or invoke the 25th Amendment, especially following his threats of genocide against the people of Iran. But they appear unlikely to succeed given the Republican majorities in the US House and Senate, as well as large support from his cabinet.

However, as I wrote on Sunday about Trump’s approval rating falling to its lowest point of his second term, if Americans see the upcoming midterms as a referendum on the failures of the current administration, then it could swing elections across the country.

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New England Has Become a Mecca for Enormous Grid Storage Batteries

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

Enormous new batteries keep appearing on the grid, making it devilishly tricky to keep track of which is the biggest in a given region. That’s certainly the case in New England, where acute power needs and robust state climate goals are fueling a buildout of big batteries that keep breaking capacity records.

Canary Media recently covered the inauguration of the 175-megawatt Cross Town battery in Gorham, Maine, which was the largest in New England when it began operating in late November. But that trophy has already passed to a 250-megawatt facility in Medway, Massachusetts, southwest of Boston and about 10 miles from the Patriots’ Gillette Stadium.

The Medway battery came online fully on February 25, according to developer VC Renewables, a subsidiary of global energy trader Vitol. “To be fair, I don’t expect Medway to hold that title for very long, either,” said Tom Bitting, managing director at Advantage Capital, which supported the project with a $158 million tax equity deal. ​“There are other batteries being developed in New England that are bigger, but I think it is all just a sign that we need all of it, and there’s huge demand for it.”

“Store all that solar energy that we’re producing in the middle of the day and bring down the cost of operating the system for everyone.”

For instance, Jupiter Power, a heavyweight in Texas’ booming grid storage market, is developing the 700-megawatt/2.8-gigawatt-hour Trimount battery plant at a former oil-storage site in Everett, Massachusetts, just north of Boston. Jupiter aims to finish the project in 2028 or 2029. Trimount is slated to be among the largest stand-alone batteries in the whole country—Vistra’s battery in Moss Landing, California, set that record with 750 megawatts/​3 gigawatt-hours, before much of that capacity burned up in a disastrous fire.

The wave of battery megaprojects marks a new chapter for the region, which until recently was focused on building small-scale batteries. Massachusetts encouraged this by requiring energy storage alongside many distributed solar projects that received payments through the state’s main solar incentive; this rule led to a buildout of systems in the range of 1 to 5 megawatts.

Bigger batteries started taking off in the late 2010s out West: In California, Arizona, and Nevada, where developers can sign long-term contracts to deliver grid capacity; and in Texas, where they can bid into a uniquely competitive market.

The first three big batteries in New England—Plus Power’s Cranberry Point and Cross Town, as well as Medway, which was previously developed by Eolian—won seven-year contracts in 2021 to provide capacity for the New England grid, but the grid operator subsequently shortened that kind of contract to one year. After that change, developers have struggled with the lack of long-term capacity revenue; they can still charge up when prices are low and sell when they’re high, but that’s an unpredictable revenue stream that financiers might not want to underwrite.

Massachusetts has succeeded in building a robust fleet of small-scale solar—on recent sunny spring days, it has generated close to half the region’s demand. But leaders knew they needed batteries to keep cleaning up the grid in the hours when solar doesn’t produce. So they created a new policy driver for storage investment called the Clean Peak Standard, which officially took effect in 2020.

The rule orders utilities to serve a percentage of their peak-demand hours with clean electricity, and the target grows with each passing year. Companies that use batteries to save solar energy for the evening—when electricity consumption rises as people get home from work and school—earn credits that they can sell to utilities, providing some revenue certainty outside the wholesale market.

The administration of Gov. Maura Healey, a Democrat, views storage as a key lever to improve energy affordability, Undersecretary of Energy Michael Judge said, because it makes better use of existing grid infrastructure to meet peak demand.

Batteries can fit a lot of power into a relatively small footprint, without smokestacks or pollution.

“Store all that solar energy that we’re producing in the middle of the day and bring down the cost of operating the system for everyone,” he said. ​“You don’t have to run these peakers, and you get all the emissions benefits and integration of clean energy benefits, too.”

It took several years for the rule to actually spur batteries in the multihundred-megawatt range, but now that era has begun. Advantage Capital, for example, factored in revenues from the Clean Peak Standard when it analyzed and underwrote the investment in the Medway project, Bitting noted. A total of 725 megawatts of battery storage had qualified for the Clean Peak Standard as of early March, according to state data.

Stand-alone grid battery projects are also bolstered by a federal tax credit that can cut investment costs by 30 percent, an incentive that the Trump administration preserved in last summer’s budget law even as it slashed support for wind, solar, and electric vehicles.

Clean Peak cash alone doesn’t pay the bills; battery developers still need to make money in the marketplace. Though New England lacks long-term capacity contracts, storage companies in the region have at least two factors working in their favor: some of the nation’s highest electricity prices and growing demand for power.

“It’s very difficult to get additional generation online in an area with high population density, because regardless of what type of power generation you’re building, it requires a lot of space,” Bitting said. Batteries, though, can fit a lot of power into a relatively small footprint, without the smokestacks or pollution that make it hard to build new fossil-fueled plants in populous areas.

Batteries compete directly with gas power plants to serve the peak hours of demand, when prices are highest. That’s especially valuable in New England, where gas supplies are stretched thin between power generation and home heating on the coldest days of the year.

“When it’s cold, the households are going to continue to demand it,” Bitting said. ​“But if we can ease some of the peak on the utility side, that will provide a relief valve to supply.”

Jupiter Power’s colossal Trimount project will continue New England’s foray into large batteries, with the ability to discharge enough power for roughly 500,000 homes, per the developer. Trimount was the largest of four battery projects selected in December from Massachusetts’ statewide solicitation to bring on more Clean Peak power. Previously, battery owners could sell off their Clean Peak credits on a quarterly or annual basis. The new solicitation was designed to produce ​“cost-effective” long-term contracts for storage, giving developers more stable revenue to plan around. Furthermore, Healey doubled down on grid storage in a March 16 executive order that calls for another 5 gigawatts installed by 2035.

“That kind of policy signal, combined with the state’s grid reliability challenges and its decarbonization commitments, creates the conditions for investment at scale,” Hans Detweiler, senior director for development at Jupiter, said in an email.

Massachusetts officials also hope to speed development with new permitting rules, which run large battery applications through a state-level body instead of piecemeal local processes. Community members still get to weigh in, but the program has a clear 15-month timeline and allows just a single appeal to the state Supreme Court, to ensure a more timely resolution of conflicts in the permitting process.

The true test of all these policies will be whether the recent megabatteries kick off a trend, or remain bold outliers in the region’s energy system.

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Justin Bieber’s Coachella Livestream Was Fine But Have You Seen These Birds

The most parasocial relationship I have is with a family of eagles that lives in Big Bear Valley, California. I watch them for hours every day through a camera mounted above their nest that is streamed live onto YouTube. There is a mother and a father who’ve been named Jackie and Shadow by the Friends of Big Bear Valley, the nonprofit that runs the webcam. They have two little chicks that, for now, are nameless. Eventually, the two chicks will have their names selected by a group of third graders in Big Bear.

I turn on the livestream when I start my work day, usually watching on my second monitor, but occasionally parking myself on the couch and opting for a more full-screen experience on the TV. I spend my day typing Slack messages, and Jackie and Shadow spend theirs hunting and feeding their babies and maintaining their nest and watching for threats.

When my husband calls on his way home from work to check in I tell him about these developments.

“How was your day?” he asks.

“It was good, but a little stressful because Jackie and Shadow had to leave the chicks to chase off some ravens that were getting too close to the nest.”

“Oh,” he says, “that is stressful,” kindly refraining from pointing out that this information tells him nothing about my day.

My day, usually, is good too, if not also a little stressful. I run the fact-checking department for Mother Jones. I read the news, and like my colleagues, I live in it. I read their reporting carefully, looking for any leaps in logic or possible factual discrepancies or potential legal issues. I believe strongly in what I do, what we do here at the Center for Investigative Reporting, and I like doing it too. Sometimes though, I am overwhelmed by the responsibility of being a journalist in today’s world, or by the news or by just being a person existing.

But I look up from a court document or new draft of a story or an email from a writer when I hear Jackie start to crow. My dog hates the sound, and she’ll pace the living room, looking for the source. Usually, Jackie is shrieking in delight as Shadow delivers a fish from the lake, and she will immediately jump up to feed her chicks. They are just about two weeks old now, but they are growing so fast. They have to, because they’ll fledge the nest in just about eight weeks.

It reminds me of when my husband returns home from work, sometimes with a little treat he’s picked up on the way: a piece of chocolate or a small bag of chips. I crow with delight too, though I have spent the entire day only feet from my kitchen and its full pantry, while Jackie has spent hers 145 feet in the air in a Jeffrey pine tree.

Everything about watching these birds delights me, and simultaneously makes me feel totally insignificant. I get cold and I turn on our heat. Jackie braves snowstorms, creating a canopy with her wings to keep the snow off her chicks. I send more Slacks. Jackie shows her babies how to fly.

Sometimes Jackie stares directly into the camera, and I imagine she’s looking right at me. She can see through the camera and into my living room, me in my enormous stained sweatshirts, my dirty dishes around me, staring at my laptop screen. I wonder how it makes her feel about her nest way up there. I wonder, if from her vantage point, we look as small as I feel.

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The Earth Is Worth Saving. Here’s How We Do It.

As NASA’s Artemis II journeyed into space earlier this month, one of the astronauts took a photo of Earth lit by the moon. Known as “Hello, World,” it’s the first published photograph of our planet taken by a human since 1972. “You could see the entire globe from pole to pole,” Commander Reid Wiseman, who took the photo, said when describing what Earth looked like from space. “It was the most spectacular moment, and it paused all four of us in our tracks.”

“Hello, World” and the Artemis mission have reinvigorated mankind’s awe of our planet. But for Earth to remain a habitable place for humans to flourish, it requires us to take care of it. On this special Earth Day episode of More To The Story, we’re featuring interviews with three influential environmental leaders: former Vice President and founder and chairman of the Climate Reality Project Al Gore; longtime activist Catherine Coleman Flowers; and journalist, author, and activist Bill McKibben.

All three acknowledge the challenges of fighting climate change to protect our planet, especially at a time when the Trump administration is rolling back federal environmental protections. But they’re surprisingly hopeful about our capacity to protect the Earth for future generations.

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

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Virginia Dems Just Won a Major Battle in Trump’s Redistricting War

Last summer, when Donald Trump began pressuring GOP-controlled states to redraw their congressional maps mid-decade, Republicans had a lofty goal: pick up a dozen or more seats in an effort to fend off a coming blue wave and retain the House in the midterms.

Trump scored early wins in Texas, Missouri, and North Carolina. But the gerrymandering arms race he started hasn’t resulted in the lopsided victory the White House envisioned. The approval by voters in Virginia on Tuesday of a new congressional map that could net Democrats up to four new seats shows how Democrats have fought Trump to a surprising draw in the redistricting wars.

Right now, the parties are basically even in the states that have redrawn their maps since last summer. The new map in Virginia makes it even more likely that Republicans will lose the House in November, given Trump’s tanking approval numbers and the fact that Cook Political Report forecasts that Republicans have to win three-quarters of toss-up races to remain in control, calling Democrats “substantial favorites.”

This is not how Trump and his allies envisioned things going. After easily securing the new maps in Texas, Missouri, and North Carolina, Trump suffered a humiliating defeat when Indiana Republicans refused to redraw their districts. Other GOP-controlled legislatures, including Kansas and Nebraska, also balked. Ohio passed a compromise map that, while favoring Republicans, could have been much worse for Democrats. The courts in Utah struck down the state’s existing map, leading to a likely Democratic pickup. And Missouri voters could have a chance to block that state’s new gerrymander at the polls in November, all of which helps Democrats.

Democrats in California, meanwhile, pulled off an improbable ballot measure to offset the Texas gerrymander by redrawing the Golden State’s maps. Now, Virginia Democrats have followed suit, despite the fact that the process in Virginia was actually much trickier. Democrats had to retake control of the legislature and governorship last November in order to kickstart the redistricting process. Then they had to convince voters in a state that is much less blue than California to pass a constitutional amendment authorizing the very type of partisan gerrymandering that Virginia voters had sought to limit just six years earlier, when they passed a separate constitutional amendment giving a bipartisan commission the power to draw congressional maps. The takeaway is that voters dislike gerrymandering, but they now seem to hate Trump even more.

That said, the redistricting wars are far from over. Florida is planning to convene a special session next week to redraw its congressional map, which could net Republicans between two and five more seats. The Supreme Court could issue a decision any day now striking down the key remaining section of the Voting Rights Act, which could shift a handful of seats toward the GOP—though whether those maps would take effect before November’s elections depends partly on the timing of the decision. (It’s probably too late for most Southern states to draw new maps before the midterms.) And the Virginia Supreme Court could still strike down the new voter-approved map; the court allowed the referendum to proceed after Republicans challenged it but has yet to issue a final decision on the constitutionality of the redistricting effort.

Trump has threatened to “take over” the election system, and the mid-decade gerrymandering spree he started is part of a multi-faceted plan to interfere in the midterms. But while that has deeply destabilized American democracy, the president hasn’t succeeded in stopping Democrats from racking up a series of electoral victories over the past year. The passage of the redistricting referendum in Virginia is the latest sign of Democrats successfully fighting back.

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Federal Judge Calls RFK Jr. an “Unsafe” Leader in Order Protecting Trans Youth Health Care

In a scathing ruling describing Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as an “unserious” and “unsafe” leader, a federal judge in Oregon issued an order that will protect doctors and hospitals, and the transgender kids they treat, from the federal crackdown on gender-affirming care.

On Saturday, US District Judge Mustafa T. Kasubhai ruled that Kennedy was acting illegally when he attempted last December to unilaterially cut off federal funding for healthcare providers treating kids with gender dysphoria. “Unserious leaders are unsafe,” Kasubhai wrote in his ruling, adding that Kennedy’s actions “caused chaos and terror for all those people and institutions of our great nation.”

The case began last December, when Kennedy issued a declaration falsely claiming that gender-affirming medical treatments for trans youth “fail to meet professional recognized standards of health care.” In reality, such treatments—including puberty blockers for kids entering adolescence and cross-sex hormones for older teens—are considered necessary for some patients under mainstream medical guidelines, and they’re supported by virtually the entire medical establishment. (And it’s worth noting that the treatments are actually quite rare, despite the amount of political attention paid to them.) Kennedy dubbed the treatments “sex-rejecting procedures” and claimed the right to pull all federal funding from any hospital, clinic, or doctor, found to be providing them. Soon, his department had referred over a dozen children’s hospitals for potential defunding, and hospitals hoping to avoid the federal crackdown began preemptively cutting off treatments for kids with gender dysphoria.

“I will go forward and issue a declaration and see if we can get away with it’ is not a principle of governance that adheres to the overarching commitment to a democratic republic.”

A coalition of 21 mostly Democratic-led states and Washington, DC, immedialy sued, arguing Kennedy had skipped the legally required procedures for such a drastic policy change. Last month, Kasubhai agreed that Kennedy had overstepped his authority and issued an order temporarily blocking the declaration. “The notion that ‘I will go forward and issue a declaration and see if we can get away with it’ is not a principle of governance that adheres to the overarching commitment to a democratic republic that requires the rule of law to be regarded and respected and honored as sacred,” the judge said at the time.

But Kasubhai’s first order wasn’t stopping the Trump administration. While the court case played out, HHS began going through the formal rule-making process, proposing a sweeping regulation that would strip federal Medicaid and Medicare funding from any hospital that provides trans youth health care, which I wrote about in depth last week. Such a regulation, if implemented, would force hospitals nationwide to cut off trans kids’ care or else face financial devastation. A former Trump policy aide has referred to the proposed rule as a “nuclear weapon.” A second proposed policy would ban federal insurance programs for kids in low-income families from covering the treatments.

Now, Kasubhai has thrown a new wrench in the administration’s plans. His ruling on Saturday makes permanent his prior order blocking Kennedy’s declaration. But the judge also went further, prohibiting HHS from enacting any similar policy “which supercedes or purports to supercede the professionally recognized standards of care” in the states that sued. “Despite repeatedly emphasizing their commitment and obligation to protect children, Defendants have sweepingly wielded the Kennedy Declaration to threaten children’s hospitals that provide life-saving care to children,” Kasubhai wrote.

Such a broad order was necessary, Kasubhai wrote, because the Trump administration has a track record of “evading or flouting” prior court orders.

The judge also took particular exception to an argument made by HHS that Kennedy’s declaration couldn’t be blocked because it was simply an example of the secretary exercising his right to free speech. The department’s arguments are based on “the bald-faced lie that the Kennedy Declaration amounts to nothing more than one man’s musings on gender-affirming care,” Kasubhai thundered. “Defendants cannot bully or gaslight this Court into ignoring the many procedural and legal flaws of the Kennedy Declaration by invoking one of the most sacred principles of our constitutional democracy—the freedom of speech—when that principle comes nowhere close to being implicated.”

Kasubhai’s order is sweeping enough that it likely blocks not just Kennedy’s declaration but also the soon-to-be-finalized Medicaid and Medicare regulations, according to Jennifer Levi, senior director of transgender and queer rights at GLAD Law. “This administration has tried to come back multiple times and do the same thing and then try to characterize it as something new,” she explains. “The court wanted to prevent that from happening.”

The Trump administration could appeal Kasubhai’s ruling. But now, if ittries to finalize its regulations in their current form, the states defending trans youth health care can go back to Kasubhai and argue that HHS is violating the injunction, Levi says. As a result, it seems likely that the regulations will be promptly blocked—if the Trump administration does decide to finalize them.

And that matters because hospitals across the country are watching this legislation closely to figure out if it’s financially and legally safe enough for them to offer trans youth health care. Could those hospitals who ended treatments restart them on the strength of Kasubhai’s new ruling? “I think they certainly could, and I think they should,” Levi tells me.

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And Then There Was Mills

At the start of last week, there were four members of Congress at risk of expulsion due to allegations of severe misconduct. Two of those members, Reps. Tony Gonzales (R-Texas) and Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.), quickly resigned. On Tuesday afternoon, Rep. Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick (D-Fla.) became the third member of Congress to resign in eight days. Now only one of the scandal-plagued members is still standing: Rep. Cory Mills (R-Fla.).

The allegations against Swalwell and Gonzales involved accusations of misconduct against women—including rape in Swalwell’s case. (The former California congressman has said that “allegations of sexual assault are flat false.”) Cherfilus-McCormick was indicted by a federal grand jury in November based on allegations that she and her brother stole government funding then used some of it to make illegal contributions to her campaign. A subcommittee of the House Ethics committee more recently found a pattern of “progressive and compounding corruption.” (The Florida Democrat resigned moments before the Ethics committee met to determine what, if any, punishment she should face.)

The accusations against Mills, who remains under investigation by the Ethics Committee, are shockingly wide-ranging. As I reported in a February profile, the Florida congressman has been accused of:

• Severely exaggerating his military record by falsely claiming to have been an Army Ranger, an Army sniper, and a Special Forces qualified medic—none of which are supported by records released by the Army
• Earning a Bronze Star through stolen valor and false claims about saving the lives of multiple former Army comrades in Iraq
• Punching someone during a trip to Ireland while serving in Congress in 2023
• Threatening to share sexually explicit content of an ex-girlfriend and, according to court testimony, saying he would kill her future partners

In October, a Florida judge placed a restraining order on Mills after concluding that he subjected his ex-girlfriend to “dating violence” via cyberstalking. Mills has defended himself by noting that he has never been criminally charged for that, or other, alleged misbehavior. That is true but highly misleading. Mills spent more than three hours in court as part of the restraining order case. He took the stand to defend himself but failed to convince a Florida judge to rule in his favor. (As part of his decision, the judge determined that Mills was not “truthful” about explicit material recorded during the relationship.)

Earlier last year, Mills was also implicated in an alleged assault involving a different girlfriend, although she later retracted the claim. According to bodycam footage and documents recently obtained by the Washington Post, police were on the verge of arresting Mills in relation to those allegations. The Post explained:

Before changing her account, the woman had shown [officer] Mazloom bruises on her arms and marks on her face, the body-camera footage shows. Tearful, she told the officer that Mills had harmed her during an argument and forcibly removed her from his Southwest Washington penthouse apartment, according to the footage.

Subsequent bodycam footage reviewed by the Post showed the alleged victim talking on the phone. She then told Mazloom, the DC police officer, that “he wants me to say” that the marks “were from our vacation and that I bruise easily.” According to the Post, Mazloom told fellow officers that he understood the alleged victim had been speaking to Mills.

Mills, an Army veteran who became an international arms dealer before running for Congress, has made enemies on both sides of the aisle in Washington. On Monday, Rep. Nancy Mace (R-S.C.), who has been in a long-running feud with her Republican colleague, introduced a resolution to expel Mills from Congress. Mills is reportedly weighing introducing his own resolution to expel Mace. (His congressional office has not responded to multiple interview requests and requests for comment that I have sent between January and April.)

For now, Mills may remain safe from expulsion as the Ethics Committee investigation proceeds on an open-ended timeline. This fall, though, Mills is facing what is likely to be his first truly competitive reelection battle since he entered Congress in 2023. His likely Democratic opponent, Bale Dalton, is a former Navy helicopter pilot who served as the chief of staff for NASA.

In 2024, Mills won by 13 points in his Republican-leaning district. In a normal year with a normal Republican running for reelection, that would be an insurmountable challenge for Democrats. In 2026, as Democrats overperform in races across the country and Mills’ scandals become more widely known, none of the usual rules apply.

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The Working Families Party Is Riding The Anti-AI Wave

Voters are anxious about losing their jobs to artificial intelligence, and key players across the political spectrum have started to notice.

Now, the Working Families Party has rolled out a slate of policy proposals for the midterms, backed by more than two dozen Democratic candidates and representatives, that aims to address that anxiety. Their plan to counter AI-related job losses? Not a direct cash dividend, but a program seeking to place Americans in union jobs.

A recent Quinnipiac poll showed that over half of Americans believe AI does more harm than good in their day-to-day lives, and 70 percent think that broad AI adoption will decrease the overall number of available jobs.

With the midterms coming up, corporations and politicians are looking to address these fears. This month, OpenAI proposed creating a “public wealth fund” that would “provide every citizen with a stake in AI-driven economic growth.” Yesterday, New York Assemblyman Alex Bores proposed a taxation framework designed to redistribute wealth from major AI corporations to people whose jobs might be displaced by their products, calling it an “AI dividend.”

The Working Families Party, meanwhile, is proposing what looks like another Green New Deal-style jobs program to solve the same problem.

Julie Gonzales, who is running for U.S. Senate in Colorado, said the WFP’s union jobs would be in green infrastructure and healthcare, though the platform itself doesn’t specify how this jobs program would work. “Corporations and the do-nothing Dems they support have shipped jobs overseas, cut wages, and busted unions to boost their own profits,” Gonzales said.

A jobs guarantee hasn’t seen much success since the Works Progress Administration of the 1940s—despite broad popular support for such a policy. The new WFP platform, called the “Working Families Guarantee,” also includes guaranteed low-cost health and childcare. They plan to fund this program by (you guessed it) increasing taxes on the rich. “The working families guarantee is what working people deserve, and we are coming to collect,” said Maurice Mitchell, the group’s national political director. The politicians endorsing the Working Families Guarantee include Representative Pramila Jayapal (D-WA) and Rep. Delia C. Ramirez (D-IL). Several prominent candidates—among them Brad Lander in New York, Charles Booker in Kentucky, and Graham Platner in Maine—have also signed on.

The Working Families Guarantee platform is part of an ongoing struggle over the future of AI policy within the Democratic Party. The Searchlight Institute, a moderate think tank which pitches itself as the leader of a “realignment” within the party, has vocally opposed efforts to limit datacenter buildout. (Searchlight, however, is backed by Nvidia-linked donors.) Third Way, another centrist Democratic think tank, has taken similar positions.

The WFP, a relatively small left-wing party with big influence, wants to push moderate candidates further to the left. They’ve found a foothold among younger voters, who increasingly distrust both major parties. Ravi Mangla, National Press Secretary for the Working Families Party, told Mother Jones “people want leaders with backbone, yet groups like Third Way and the Searchlight Institute are telling Democrats to avoid taking positions on things like guaranteed health care and AI regulations.”

“That,” Mangla said, “is a losing position.”

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Why Kevin Warsh Won’t Grade Trump’s Economy

Donald Trump’s nominee for Federal Reserve chair promised to bring a new inflation framework and regime change to the central bank on Tuesday morning—all while maintaining that the president’s economy was doing just great.

One bizarre exchange between nominee Kevin Warsh and Sen. Raphael Warnock (D-Ga.) during the former’s confirmation hearing was telling:

“If Professor Warsh were to assign a letter grade to the American economy today for the average working family, what grade would you assign?” Warnock asked.

“In modern academic institutions they give everyone A’s,” Warsh joked to a handful of laughs in the crowd. “If I give a student anything but an A, I would have been summoned to the dean’s office.”

While Warnock’s question had a peculiar frame—Warsh became a lecturer at Stanford University after resigning from the Federal Reserve Board of Governors in 2011 over disagreements on how to improve the US economy—the Fed chair nominee avoided a factual response, lest it displease the president.

WARNOCK: What grade would you give the American economy?WARSH: Well, if i gave a student anything other than an A, the dean would summon me because I would've hurt his self-imageWARNOCK: Consumer confidence is at a record low. That's Americans' grade on the economy

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) 2026-04-21T15:46:53.513Z

Warsh made a similar move when Sen. Tina Smith (D-Minn.) asked him about Trump’s remarks that “the roaring economy is roaring like never before” in his State of the Union address in February.

“The broad contours of the economy are improving,” Warsh responded. “I think it can improve more, and in the years ahead, I think the economy’s potential is strengthening.”

Warsh’s comment comes amid a massive affordability crisis with prices skyrocketing even further during the US-Israeli ongoing war in Iran and Trump’s tariffs—even if Wall Street appears to be happy.

It wasn’t just larger economic issues that Warsh avoided answering. Democratic senators, and even Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.), questioned whether the nominee was as independent from political pressure as he asserts. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) criticized Warsh for flip-flopping on his position on interest rates, which notably aligned with Trump when he won the 2024 election. During the 2008 financial crisis, Warsh, who was a Federal Reserve board member at the time, argued against lowering interest rates to help American families and businesses borrow money. Instead, banks got bailouts during his term.

Warren said Trump passed on nominating Warsh for Fed chair over his stance on interest rates, “but as soon as Donald Trump became president a second time,” Warsh “began shouting from the rooftops about how the Fed should cut interest rates.”

Just a few hours before the Senate confirmation hearing on Tuesday, Trump appeared on CNBC’s Squawk Box and said he would be disappointed if Warsh did not cut interest rates immediately upon getting confirmed. Last week, when asked on Fox Business whether interest rates would still drop this year, Trump answered, “When Kevin gets in, I do.” And last December, Trump said that “anybody that disagrees with me will never be the Fed chairman.”

Warsh’s confirmation hearing comes as Trump strains to restore the economy and the public’s confidence before the midterm elections this November. The nomination is one desperate move in a desperate campaign by a desperate party.

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Catholics Welcome Everyone, But Can They Handle Some of These New Converts?

Vice President JD Vance, a recent Catholic convert, has had a lot to say in recent weeks about his newfound religion – and it’s rubbing some cradle Catholics the wrong way.

Last week at a Turning Point event, Vance addressed remarks Pope Leo XIV made about the war in Iran.

“I think it’s very, very important for the pope to be careful when he talks about matters of theology,” he said.

This was after his boss, President Donald Trump, posted an AI-generated image of himself depicted as Jesus and called the pope weak on crime.

The pope has been vocal about his opposition to Trump’s handling of the war in Iran. After the president posted on social media that Iran could lose their entire civilization if they didn’t bend to his will, the pope told reporters: “Today, as we all know, there was this threat against the entire people of Iran, and this is truly unacceptable.”

The feud between the pope and the president has led to admonishments from nearly every bishop in the church, according to National Catholic Reporter columnist Michael Sean Winters. But some recent converts, like Vance, are speaking quite loudly and confidently while still learning the tenets of their faith. “I love converts, but you move into somebody’s house, you don’t start rearranging the furniture,” Winters said.

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There Are Eric Swalwells Across State Governments

Two lawmakers—Eric Swalwell and Tony Gonzales—resigned from office last week amid unrelated House Ethics Committee investigations over alleged sexual misconduct. And yesterday, the Committee stated that since 2017, they have initiated no less than 20 misconduct investigations against members of Congress, most of whom have not ended up resigning.

Sexual misconduct is pervasive in America’s statehouses, too, according to a new report by the National Women’s Defense League, a group focused on preventing sexual harassment in the workplace. The group started reporting on accusations against state lawmakers in 2023, tracking accusations going back to 2013.

NWDL has found credible sexual harassment allegations against 162 sitting state officials, in 424 incidents between 2013 and 2026. Six of those lawmakers were accused in 2025 — Ryan Armagost (R-Colo.); Ron Weinberg (R-Colo.); Jeremy Dean (D-Mo.); Dan McKeon (R-Neb.); Jeremy Olson (R-N.D.); and Solicitor General Judd Stone (R-Texas). Of those 162 lawmakers, 17 are still in office.

“The public record is only the tip of the iceberg,” said Sarah Higginbotham, NWDL co-director. Higginbotham noted that the report only includes public-facing accounts from people able to withstand the fear of retaliation from their bosses. “These numbers understate the harm.”

The problem is bipartisan: at the statehouse level, accusations against Republicans and Democrats happen at near-equal rates. The vast majority of victims are women, and 93 percent of accused officials over the past decade are men.

For Aftyn Behn (D-Tenn.), this isn’t surprising news. “Old-school sexism is absolutely back,” Behn said at a virtual press conference Tuesday morning, before offering a recent example. “Yesterday, a Republican female colleague of mine walked to the lectern on the Tennessee General Assembly House floor to present her bill. A member whistled at her. We all heard it, but nobody said a word, and we just moved on like nothing had happened.”

The problem may also be growing worse. In the years following the #MeToo movement, NWDL co-director Emma Davidson Tribbs said, the number of people reporting workplace sexual misconduct has decreased. “The recent dip in public reporting is a warning sign. It signals distrust in accountability systems,” she said. After Swalwell and Gonzales’ resignations, advocates hope they can push this issue back into the spotlight.

“This moment can, hopefully, give us momentum,” Republican Pennsylvania state representative Abby Major said at Tuesday’s press conference. This past year, five states enacted laws addressing sexual harassment in state legislatures—but most states still have relatively few protections in place. In practice, those protections might look like a confidential sexual misconduct reporting system, transparency around misconduct investigations, and other reforms. “We have to ensure that no one has to choose between their safety and their livelihood,” Major said.

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The Real Reason Tucker Carlson is Turning on Trump

Tucker Carlson would very much like you to forgive him for backing Donald Trump all these years.

“It’s not enough to say ‘I changed my mind’ or ‘this is bad, I’m out,'” Carlson said on his news podcast The Tucker Carlson Show on Monday. “I want to say I’m sorry for misleading people.”

Carlson said he will “be tormented for a long time” for promoting Trump in his campaign for presidency. The podcast episode featured his brother Buckley, who, according to the show’s notes, wrote speeches for Trump in 2015 and “can fully understand how painful the current betrayal is.”

Carlson, it must be noted, claimed his support for Trump “was not intentional.”

Tucker Carlson: I’ll be tormented for a long time by the fact that I played a role in getting Donald Trump elected. We’re implicated in this. I misled people.

— Headquarters (@headquartersnews.bsky.social) 2026-04-21T13:12:44.447Z

But it certainly looks intentional. Carlson consistently misled over 3.5 million viewers on his Fox News show. During the lead-up to the 2020 election, Carlson boasted a nightly audience of over 5 million.

Carlson repeatedly spread Trump’s propaganda, including unsubstantiated claims of “meaningful voter fraud” in Georgia following the 2020 election. He also made racist and anti-immigrant remarks, including voicing support for the “great replacement” conspiracy theory, which promotes the fictional idea that nonwhite people are brought to the US to replace white voters and decimate the GOP fundraising base.

Carlson’s breaking point came when Trump invaded Iran and went on a genocidal online crash out by posting a series of religious posts on religious Truth Social posts earlier this month. Carlson said the whole ordeal made “a mockery of Christianity.”

Carlson has been sowing the seeds of redemption for weeks now. After Trump went on several verbal tirades against Pope Leo XIV, who himself criticized the US’ role in the Iran War, Carlson condemned Trump publicly saying on his April 15 show: “Could this be the antichrist? Well, who knows? At least that’s my conclusion.”

So here is my conclusion:Carlson is one of many conservative commentators who now want you to believe they were sold a fake bill of goods. From Marjorie Taylor Greene to Candace Owens, Alex Jones, and Megyn Kelly, right-wing commentators see Trump’s MAGA base defecting. Are these right-wing ideologues suddenly principled defenders of conservative values? Not a chance. They’re all just hucksters who sense a good business opportunity.

These fake outrage artists are even using Trump’s playbook to do it. Call it the latest iteration of the art of the deal.

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As Fuel Prices Soar, Climate Leaders Urge Democrats to Tie Clean Energy to Affordability

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

Democrats should get louder in championing clean energy’s affordability and resilience from global shocks, according to some of the party’s leading voices on the climate.

As the Iran war roils economies by raising the cost of oil and gas, countries are aiming to accelerate their shift to cleaner energy. But in the US, Donald Trump has sought to kill off any alternative to fossil fuels while opposing Democrats have been reluctant to tie the conflict to any action on the climate crisis.

The closure of the Strait of Hormuz, where one-fifth of the world’s oil and gas normally travels, in the wake of the US and Israel’s attack on Iran caused energy costs to spike around the world. In the US, gasoline has soared above $4.10 a gallon nationally, with Trump admitting the costs could even be “a little bit higher” by November.

During the first month of the Iran war, the world’s largest oil and gas companies made more than $30 billion every hour in unearned profit.

Democrats have pointed to this as further evidence of the US president’s broken promises to lower the cost of living for Americans. But there have been few calls for a pivotal switch away from the volatility of fossil fuels in favor of clean energy in response to the conflict, to the frustration of those who support action on the climate crisis.

“There’s a timely clash on climate and costs that Democrats can win, as long as we have the nerve to actually show up to the fight,” said Sheldon Whitehouse, a Democratic senator, who added “true energy independence will be achieved by powering our economy with renewable energy, the fuel sources for which are unlimited, free and independent of geopolitical events.”

“Democrats will continue to lose the righteous and winnable fight over the future of clean energy if we cede the battlefield to fossil fuel liars and our own party’s misguided climate-hushers,” Whitehouse said.

Climate “hushing,” in which politicians and businesses downplay or ignore the need to cut planet-heating emissions, has been prevalent in the US during Trump’s second term. A bruising 2024 election loss and ongoing inflation concerns—polls show gasoline costs are Americans’ top concern about the Iran war—have left Democrats wrestling with a critique of affordability rather than the imperiled livability of the planet, despite the clear link between the two.

The Iran war provides a “unique moment of opportunity” for Democrats to extol the advantages of lower-pollution options like electric cars but the focus should be on “reducing consumer costs, which should’ve been the message over climate protection all along,” according to Paul Bledsoe, a former climate adviser to Bill Clinton’s White House.

“I don’t think they’ve grasped the political opportunity yet,” Bledsoe said. “They have to stay really focused on how these next-generation technologies will provide a consumer benefit. When you pitch clean energy as cutting consumer costs first and improving the overall economy second, people are happy to cut emissions third.”

Translating this into a winning political message has been a struggle for Democrats who in Joe Biden’s administration passed sweeping climate legislation to spur new jobs in the clean energy sector, only for the bill to be gutted by Republicans now in control of Congress. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer has proposed a partial resurrection of incentives for clean energy should his party regain power.

But Democrats must do better to pitch solar, wind, and battery technologies as a way to reduce US exposure to international fossil fuel costs dictated by global events, according to Ro Khanna, a leading Democratic member of Congress. “I really believe we missed a moment to do that with the Ukraine war,” he said. “We should have been linking the clean energy agenda to Americans’ economic security and our national security, and we should do that again.”

Longer term, Khanna added, the US needs to “wean ourselves off the petrostates. We need a moonshot for clean technology.”

Such a shift from fossil fuels, which scientists say is imperative if the world is to avert catastrophic climate impacts, has been stymied by Trump, who has implemented a “drill, baby drill” approach to oil and gas extraction and has taken extraordinary measures, even amid the Iran crisis, to halt domestic clean energy generation that he has called a “scam” and a “con job.”

“Wars don’t disrupt the supply of sunlight for solar power, and wind power does not depend on vulnerable shipping straits.”

The soaring price of oil may even be beneficial, Trump has suggested, because “when oil prices go up, we make a lot of money.” This money is mostly flowing to large fossil fuel corporations, with the world’s largest 100 oil and gas companies making more than $30 billion every hour in unearned profit during the first month of the war.

Trump’s approach differs starkly from that of other countries that have sought to rapidly reduce their exposure to a faraway conflict. Electric car sales have boomed in South Korea and Malaysia, while in Pakistan electric rickshaws have been selling out. “This is a wake-up call,” Indonesian president Prabowo Subianto said recently. “We will convert all motorcycles into electric motorcycles. All cars, all trucks, all tractors must [also] be electric.”

The European Union, too, plans to accelerate clean energy deployment to help alleviate electricity bills. “Every delayed investment in the energy transition risks greater cost for society at a later stage,” a draft European Commission proposal states. The plan comes ahead of a conference in Colombia this month where representatives from 85 countries will gather to craft a roadmap on how to move beyond the fossil fuel era.

The Iran war is a case study for the need to make this transition, according to the United Nations. “Clean energy is the antidote to fossil fuel cost chaos, because it is cheaper, safer, and faster to market,” said Simon Stiell, the UN’s climate chief. “Wars don’t disrupt the supply of sunlight for solar power, and wind power does not depend on vulnerable shipping straits.”

The mounting toll of the climate crisis, though, is the primary reason to ditch coal, oil and gas, advocates argue. Such impacts are increasingly apparent in the US, as well as the rest of the world, with the country enduring its hottest and driest start to a year in recorded history, with record-breaking March heat and punishing bouts of drought, heat and wildfire strafing much of the US west.

Despite the Trump administration’s dismissal of climate science, two-thirds of Americans are worried about global heating, polling has shown, with most people in the US underestimating how concerned others are about the topic as it has receded from coverage in many media outlets.

There has been “a surprising silence” from Democrats and climate activists on how clean energy is cheaper, inexhaustible and more locally controlled compared with fossil fuels, according to Anthony Leiserowitz, an academic at Yale University who studies public perceptions of the climate crisis. “And, oh by the way, it reduces the carbon pollution causing global warming,” he added.

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What We Lost When We Lost Self Magazine

Last week, the publishing conglomerate Condé Nast shuttered Self, a women’s health publication that in recent years had turned to publishing service journalism on chronic health conditions that was both practical and normalized living with chronic illness. Amid a trend of unrealistic articles on longevity and ambiguously defined, MAHA-coded writing on “wellness,” Self was a breath of fresh air.

“SELF has played an important role in shaping conversations around health and wellness,” Condé Nast CEO Roger Lynch said in a memo published last week. “However, as audience behaviors shift, we have not seen a path for SELF to continue in its current form as a digital publication.” Lynch’s memo said that health and wellness content would “be integrated into our other brands, including Allure and Glamour.” Self had already gone digital-only and ceased print publication in 2017.

I spoke to chronically ill women who had been dedicated readers of Self about what the magazine, and its closure, meant to them. Self may not have been a revenue driver for Condé, but its work was transformative for readers, quietly shifting away from the typical fare of women’s magazines in the 2000s and 2010s—like problematic weight-loss content—to a more progressive vision of women’s health and wellness.

Self‘s conversational style of writing about health topics made the publication more accessible, said Jaime Seltzer, scientific director of the myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome nonprofit MEAction, who was interviewed by then–editor-in-chief Rachel Miller for a 2022 article that Seltzer said sparked more awareness around ME/CFS and Long Covid and had a major impact on people who were trying to figure out what is happening to their health.

“The more people who know they have a disease, the more they can get the clinical care that they need,” Seltzer said. “A really good article like this is a great way to show a friend or a relative what you’re going through.”

Beth Morton, a migraine care advocate said she appreciated Self‘s non-stigmatizing articles on the condition by people who lived with migraines themselves. Self “still had an impact,” Morton said, lamenting the decision to shutter the magazine.

Myisha Malone-King, a chronic illness advocate living with Crohn’s disease, said Self made her feel seen and supported when she struggled with getting medical care for an ovarian cyst. “I felt extremely lonely when I was diagnosed,” Malone-King said, calling the publication’s folding “a huge blow.”

Condé Nast hasn’t announced what will happen to Self‘s digital presence and archives, and representatives for the company did not respond to a query about whether the site would stay online—or whether it would follow other folded media outlets, like the feminist publication Bitch Media, which also engaged frequently with chronic illness and disability, into digital oblivion (though some articles from Bitch are being republished in The Flytrap).

Vivian Delchamps Wolf, a disabled and chronically ill professor of English at Dominican University of California, told me how much she valued Self’s ability to capture the social dimensions of chronic illness, as with a piece by its former staff writer Katie Camero on how to navigate friendships with people who don’t seem to get what life with a chronic illness is like.

Reporting in that vein, Delchamps Wolf said, “clearly comes from an authentic space and refuses to present chronic illness as pitiful.”

“It’s so important that journalists address issues like medical racism and other systemic barriers that worsen people’s experiences of chronic illness,” Delchamps Wolf said. “In addition to talking about medical concerns, we have to acknowledge chronic illness as a politically, culturally, and socially marginalized category to bring about substantive change.”

Now, there’s one fewer publication where that can happen.

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Trump’s Hormuz Blockade Is a Catch-22

“If it works, it’s not great for the US. And if it doesn’t work, it’s also not great for the US.”

That’s what Jeff Colgan, a political science professor and director of the Climate Solutions Lab at the Watson Institute for Public and International Affairs at Brown University, told me last week about the US naval blockade on Iranian ports.

The Trump administration’s stated intention was to stop Iran from profiting off the closure of the Strait of Hormuz. At the time, Iran’s government only allowed its own ships, and those of some of its allies, safe transit in the waterway. Iran was also reportedly charging tolls for at least some other ships to pass through the Strait of Hormuz, a key waterway in the Persian Gulf through which approximately 20 percent of global crude oil and natural gas flowed before the US and Israel launched strikes on Iran starting in February. Much of that oil went to Asian countries, with China, India, and Japan as the primary importers.

The US military implemented the blockade last Monday in response, saying last Tuesday that global sea trade with Iran had “completely halted.” But as Colgan says, “there’s this kind of Catch-22”: the more effective the US military blockade is, “the more it ripples out to global energy markets and affects everybody,” including voters “who are not going to be pleased with higher prices.”

Since I spoke with Colgan on Wednesday**,** oil prices have risen even further. Despite the ceasefire between the US and Iran established earlier this month, few ships have been able to cross the strait. As I recently reported, Iran reportedly shot at two Indian-flagged ships on Saturday and Trump said on Sunday that Marines stormed and seized an Iranian cargo ship trying to run its blockade “by blowing a hole in the engineroom.”

On Friday, Trump said that the naval blockade would “remain in full force” until Iran agreed to a deal, while Iran has vowed to not open the strait until the US withdraws its blockade, which it argues violates the ceasefire agreement.

In short, although the US and Iran now appear set to continue peace negotiations in Islamabad, don’t count on significant advances anytime soon.

Many reports on the fight for control of Hormuz hinge on national governments’ claims about poorly documented conflict at sea; tracking individual ships in the region is overwhelming, and verifying the bulk ofmilitary statements is nearly impossible.

That’s partly the usual “fog of war,” Colgan says, but it’s exacerbated by what he calls the Trump administration’s “casual relationship with truth.”

Oil markets, ship transits, and other bellwethers of the ceasefire are fluctuating wildly. As a way of tracking what’s going on, Colgan says those types of assessments are doubtful at best.

But one measurement that remains palpable for American consumers is the gas pump. According to Brown University’s Climate Solutions Lab, Americans have spent $23.4 billion more on gasoline and dieselsince the start of the war on February 28. That comes out to $178.43 per household in the US, as the national average price of gasoline has increased by more than a third to $4.04 per gallon and diesel prices have risen by just over 50 percent.

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Corporations Are Getting Tariff Refunds. Americans? Not So Much.

The Trump administration has officially begun the process of repaying up to $175 billion in illegally collected tariffs, following a February Supreme Court ruling. It’s the biggest such repayment program in history, and over 330,000 businesses stand to benefit. But American consumers—that is, the people who ended up shouldering higher prices thanks to these fees—likely won’t see the cash anytime soon.

Justin Wolfers, a professor of economics at the University of Michigan, told Mother Jones the tariffs—a vast set of taxes Trump imposed on imports—“haven’t achieved what they were meant to achieve.”

“They were meant to onshore manufacturing—it’s continued to shrink. They were meant to lead to new factories being built—that hasn’t happened. They were meant to lead to an increase in government revenue—but the government’s about to write a whole bunch of checks. They were meant to lead to the US having leverage and signing new trade deals. We have effectively done none of that. So at a minimum, it achieved nothing positive.”

The refunds, then, might seem like a step towards minimizing the economic damage of “Liberation Day.” But Wolfers said that’s not how he’d put it in his Economics 101 class. “Often in economics, what we’ll do is we’ll try to subsidize something that we want more of, or we’ll tax something that we want less of”—a basic incentive structure. These tariff refunds don’t incentivize much, because “they’re purely tied to what you did in the past, which means [companies] have no incentive to do anything.”

“This is more like when your grandma sends money for your birthday,” he said. Smaller companies that folded entirely after the onset of Trump’s tariffs—think women selling handmade earrings on Etsy from their living rooms—won’t be refunded. Consumers, too, will likely miss out.

In February, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told reporters at the Economic Club of Dallas, “I’ve got a feeling the American people won’t see” the money. “My sense is this could be dragged out for weeks, months, years, so … we’ll see what happens there,” Bessent added.

“So, nothing here has helped American consumers,” Wolfers said. “If Costco raised the price of olive oil, I paid that higher price, and now I’m poorer. Costco, now, gets a refund. So what we did is, we took money out of the government coffers and gave it to Costco. Costco is not going to write me a check, it has no reason to. And now there’s less money in the government coffers, so eventually they’re going to tax me some more.” Theoretically, shoppers could benefit from lower prices after the tariffs—but the Budget Lab at Yale suggests that’s not the case, and that corporations haven’t stopped passing costs on to consumers.

One group of Costco-shoppers is attempting to sue the supermarket chain for collecting tariff prices from consumers, “while simultaneously seeking refunds of the same tariff payments from the federal government.” So, they’d be repaid by the government for costs that have already been passed on to shoppers.

“Costco stands to recover the same tariff payments twice” if the court doesn’t intervene, the customers wrote in their complaint. As of April 9th, over 56,000 importers had already completed the necessary steps to get an electronic refund—but they aren’t required to pass any of that money onto consumers.

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The Onion Says It Has Again Struck a Deal to Take Over Infowars

Infowars could finally have a new owner: Global Tetrahedron, the Chicago-based company that owns the satirical news outlet The Onion. The news was first reported by journalist and podcaster Pablo Torre, and also announced by Onion CEO Ben Collins, who wrote on Bluesky, “With the help of the Sandy Hook families, The Onion has reached a long-awaited deal to take over InfoWars.” Collins also said on Bluesky that Infowars’ new creative director will be comedian Tim Heidecker.

This is the Onion’s second attempt to acquire Infowars.

Collins also posted a link to a statement purportedly put out by Global Tetrahedron’s fake owner, Bryce P. Tetraeder. “Today I can finally say the sweetest nine or 10 words in the English language: Global Tetrahedron has completed its plan to control InfoWars,” the statement read. “With this new InfoWars, we will democratize psychological torture, welcoming brutal and sadistic ideas from everyone, even the very stupidest among us. It will be like the Manhattan Project, only instead of a bomb, we will be building a website.”

According to the New York Times, the Onion has reached a deal with the bankruptcy receiver overseeing Infowars, Gregory S. Milligan, to license the website from Milligan. Despite the Onion‘s description of the deal, its bid must still be approved by Judge Maya Guerra Gamble in a Texas district court.

This is the Onion’s second attempt to acquire Infowars. While Global Tetrahedron won a 2024 bankruptcy auction to buy the company while promising to turn the site into a parody of itself, a bankruptcy judge voided the results, saying that he wasn’t convinced the company’s bid had more value than one offered by allies of Jones. The announcement is the latest installment in an endless series of legal skirmishes that began in 2018, when the families of people killed during the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School sued Jones for defamation. Jones repeatedly claimed on-air that the shootings were a hoax; he lost all the lawsuits filed against him in Texas and Connecticut by default after failing to meaningfully participate in discovery.

If the past is any guide, Jones’ public response will likely involve a good deal of shouting and a vow to remain on-air, no matter what. During a live broadcast on Monday, after a viewer called to ask about the news, Jones said a “new thing” would soon be in place. Since 2024, Jones has been directing his viewers to buy supplements and donate money at a new site, the Alex Jones Store, which is currently hawking a “last-stand super sale” of Infowars products, billed as a “fundraiser” to keep the company alive. Jones has also said that if Infowars is shut down, he’ll immediately begin broadcasting from the Alex Jones Network, a website which currently broadcasts a mirror of Infowars content.

“Rumors of my death have been greatly exaggerated,” Jones added. “The media is going to run around and call this a victory. They already are. It’s all going to blow up in their face.”

_The Onion’_s CEO Ben Collins did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

This is a breaking news story and will be updated.

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Palantir Wants To Bring Back the Draft

On Sunday afternoon, Palantir, the defense-tech company that sells software to clients like ICE, the US military, and the Israeli military,decided to give us all a piece of their mind. The company’s official X account published a list of excerpts from co-founder Alex Karp’s 2025 book The Technological Republic.

The book frames Silicon Valley’s move into military technology as the righteous repayment of a “moral debt” owed to the country that built the tech billionaire class. “The engineering elite of Silicon Valley has an affirmative obligation to participate in the defense of the nation.”

If you read past the post and dig into the book itself, you’ll find that this sentence continues: “the engineering elite must also, Karp said, participate in “the articulation of a national project—what is this country, what are our values, and for what do we stand.”

That is to say: Men like Karp should decide what this country is.

“If a US Marine asks for a better rifle, we should build it; and the same goes for software,” Palantir’s Bill-Ackman-esque digression continued. It asserts that the future of American military dominance will not depend on nuclear deterrence, but on AI weaponry — possibly like the Palantir AI product that is reportedly used to help generate ‘kill lists’ for the Israeli military in Gaza.

Then, after arguing for the primacy of its own products—called “spy tech” by Palantir’s critics—Karp suggests the remilitarization of the Axis Powers. “The postwar neutering of Germany and Japan must be undone,” Karp’s company account asserted. “The defanging of Germany was an overcorrection for which Europe is now paying a heavy price. A similar and highly theatrical commitment to Japanese pacifism will, if maintained, also threaten to shift the balance of power in Asia.”

That would make those countries massive defense markets, which means more money for Palantir. Right now, about half of their earnings come from their contracts with various governments. A further militarized Japan and Germany could see that share expand further.

The rest of the manifesto is also, essentially, a sales pitch for corporate capture: “hard power in this century will be built on software,” Palantir says, meaning that if America doesn’t buy that software, someone else will. The company has had a banner year profiting on Trump’s ICE crackdowns, and currently holds $970 million in US government contracts, but is eager for more.

As Palantir pitches an increasingly militarized United States, ideologically determined by Silicon-valley tastes—at one point in the post, they suggest bringing back the draft—they’re suggesting a country in which they get all the power.

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Trump’s “Petro-Imperialism” Is Pushing the US and Iran to the Brink

Petro-imperialism is back in a big way.

On Monday, Iran’s military vowed to execute “necessary action” against US forces after it fired at and seized an Iranian-flagged ship the day before—destroying any hope for renewed peace negotiations in the near future.

While a spokesperson for Iran’s military called the US’ capture of the Iranian cargo ship trying to pass through a US blockade“blatant aggression,” they said the country’s first priority was to ensure the safety of crew members and their families on board. These developments are a drastic escalation of the fight for control over the Strait of Hormuz.

The Strait of Hormuz is a key waterway in the Persian Gulf through which approximately 20 percent of global crude oil and natural gas flowed—at least before the US and Israel launched strikes on Iran starting in February. Iran announced the re-opening of the strait after a 10-day truce between Israel and Lebanon. (Israel continued its indiscriminate bombing campaign against Lebanon even after the ceasefire agreement between the two countries).

But according to Al Jazeera, Iran reversed its decision on Saturday, stating that the strait will remain closed until the US withdraws its blockade on all ships entering and leaving Iranian ports. Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, Iran’s parliamentary speaker, said in a television interview that the blockade, which began last Monday, was “a clumsy and ignorant decision” and violated their ceasefire agreement with the US.

Since then, Iran has reportedly fired at ships with Indian flags attempting to cross the strait and President Donald Trump has threatened to commit war crimes against Iran again by decimating civilian infrastructure—including power plants and bridges—if Iran didn’t agree to re-open the strait in a new deal to end the war. Iran is, of course, not cooperating as the US has persisted with their naval blockade on their shipping ports.

Thus, the two countries are at a stalemate. According to CNN, JD Vance is expected to travel to Pakistan on Tuesday to discuss next steps with Iran, but the vice president isn’t exactly a skilled negotiator.

As Jeff Colgan, a political science professor and Director of the Climate Solutions Lab the Watson Institute for Public and International Affairs at Brown University, told me last month, during which the US and Iran were largely in the same place regarding control of the strait, the Trump administration’s poor planning and foresight to the lasting impacts of their bombing campaign with Israel has brought us to this situation.

More than 3,000 people in Iran have been killed as of April 9 and Iran’s “backs are to the wall”—they have no other realistic option to defend themselves, especially as the US has intervened in Iran’s oil trade since the 1950s.

The Trump administration has returned to what Colgan calls “petro-imperalism,” interventionist policies that not only affect Iran but have also led to the recent attacks on Venezuela.

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