Who Helped Draw DeSantis’ Florida Gerrymander? His Staff Won’t Say.

Gov. Ron DeSantis’ mapmaker doesn’t want you to know who helped gerrymander Florida.

That was one of the most significant takeaways from Jason Poreda’s testimony Tuesday before the Florida legislature. Poreda, a senior official in DeSantis’ governor’s office, told lawmakers during a special session that he was responsible for drawing a proposed new map that would tilt the Sunshine State’s already lopsided congressional delegation even further toward Republicans—potentially giving the GOP up to 24 of 28 US House seats. The map, which was publicly released Monday after first being given to Fox News, is expected to be formally approved Wednesday by the Republican-dominated legislature.

During committee hearings, Poreda walked lawmakers through the changes. He said he began working on the new map two weeks ago and had finished it over the weekend. While he said he was the sole creator of the map, he acknowledged that others also worked on it and reviewed it. But refused to say who they were.

When state Sen. Jennifer Bradley, a Republican representing several counties in northeast Florida, asked who else was involved in producing the map, Poreda answered: “I did work with other EOG [DeSantis’ Executive Office of the Governor] counsel and staff, but I’ll leave it at that.”

State Sen. Lori Berman, a Democrat from Palm Beach County, questioned Poreda further.

“Can you tell us who reviewed this map before it was published yesterday?” Berman asked.

Poreda didn’t budge. “I’m going to leave that with the same answer I just gave,” he said.

Berman pressed on: “I’m confused. Why can’t you tell us who had the opportunity to review this map?”

Poreda responded that he was “advised by counsel” not to disclose anything further.

Standing next to Poreda was Mohammad Jazil, a private attorney representing the governor’s office. Berman asked Jazil what legal basis there was for declining to reveal who was involved. Jazil said that a previous court ruling gave DeSantis the same legislative privileges that shield lawmakers from having to disclose documents or testify regarding their work.

Poreda also fielded questions from Democrats about the origins of the red-and-blue-colored version of the map DeSantis’ office provided to Fox News Monday morning, even before submitting his proposal to the Florida Legislature. The explicitly partisan shading—red for GOP-leaning seats, blue for Democratic ones—is particularly notable given that the state’s constitution prohibits partisan gerrymandering. Poreda said he did not know who had colored the map in that way. He did, however, disclose that he used partisan data, among other datasets, to draw up the map, which would create up to four more Republican-leaning districts.

Florida is the latest state to engage in aggressively partisan mid-decade redistricting after President Donald Trump last year successfully pushed Republicans in Texas to revamp their maps. Other GOP-controlled states, including Missouri and North Carolina, followed suit. But as my colleague Ari Berman reported last week, “the gerrymandering arms race [Trump] started hasn’t resulted in the lopsided victory the White House envisioned”—at least not yet. California Democrats, for example, successfully countered the Texas map with a ballot measure creating their own gerrymander. And last week recently, Virginia voters approved a map that would help Democrats secure up to four new seats there. “Right now,” Ari wrote, “the parties are basically even in the states that have redrawn their maps since last summer.”

Much now depends on the impact of a raft of high-stakes legal battles. On Wednesday, the United States Supreme Court dramatically limited a key Voting Rights Act provision. While its unclear how that case will affect this year’s redistricting fights, the ruling, as my colleague Pema Levy wrote in October, will ultimately help Republicans “dismantle Black political power as well as Democratic seats.” Meanwhile, Republicans are suing to block the new Virginia gerrymander, arguing that the Democratic-backed referendum there was illegal. And Democrats have already promised to sue over the new Florida map.

On its face, the Florida proposal does seem to violate the state’s constitution—specifically an anti-gerrymandering amendment that voters overwhelmingly approved in 2010. As Politifact reported, “Mid-decade redistricting wouldn’t be illegal, but doing it to intentionally benefit one political party would be,” according to law professors the news outlet interviewed.

DeSantis has attempted to cite other reasons for his redistricting agenda. In a memorandum to the Florida Legislature on Monday, his staff argued that the changes were necessary in part because Florida’s population has increased by nearly 9 percent since the 2020 Census. They also cited the then-pending Voting Rights Act case, which the US Supreme Court decided Wednesday while state lawmakers was voting on DeSantis’ map.

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Victims Allege OpenAI Is Responsible for Mass Shooting

Victims of the Tumbler Ridge mass shooting and their families sued OpenAI and its CEO, Sam Altman, in US district court in San Francisco on Wednesday, claiming various negligence, product liability, and other violations. The civil complaints are the latest in a wave of litigation against OpenAI alleging that its globally popular chatbot, ChatGPT, helped people commit lethal violence.

The complaints were filed by families of multiple victims wounded and killed at Tumbler Ridge Secondary School in British Columbia, Canada, where a suicidal 18-year-old opened fire on February 10. Shortly after the attack, the Wall Street Journal reported and OpenAI later confirmed that the company had “banned” the shooter’s ChatGPT account eight months earlier for discussion of scenarios involving gun violence—but chose not to alert authorities, despite the urging of some members of its safety team.

One lawsuit includes plaintiff Maya Gebala, a 12-year-old survivor who was injured catastrophically by gunshots to her neck and head. It alleges that “ChatGPT deepened the Shooter’s violent fixation and pushed them toward the attack—the predictable result of a design choice OpenAI made to let ChatGPT engage with users about violence in the first place.”

The lawsuit argues that Altman and other OpenAI leaders knew their product was dangerous and acted negligently, and that they have tried to cover up the danger as the company barrels toward what is anticipated to be a mammoth initial public offering.

The contents of the Tumbler Ridge shooter’s second ChatGPT account remain unknown to the public.

“ChatGPT is not the safe, essential tool the company sells it as, but a product dangerous enough that its makers routinely identify its users as threats to human life,” the lawsuit claims.

An OpenAI spokesperson said in an email that the company has “a zero-tolerance policy for using our tools to assist in committing violence” and has “already strengthened our safeguards.” The spokesperson declined to comment on specific allegations in the lawsuit.

The new litigation underscores crucial questions that I examined recently with an in-depth investigation into the emerging risk of people using ChatGPT or other AI chatbots to plan violence. As I reported, there have been several publicly known cases since 2025 in which troubled individuals allegedly used ChatGPT to focus on grievances and prepare for attacks. In addition to Tumbler Ridge, those include a suicidal bombing with a Tesla Cybertruck in Las Vegas, a stabbing attack by a teenage boy at a school in Finland, and a mass shooting at Florida State University. The defendant in the FSU case received encouragement and tactical advice from ChatGPT just before opening fire, according to chat logs I obtained.

OpenAI says it uses guardrails—built-in limits on what ChatGPT will say or do—to prevent misuse and block harmful content. The company has also said that it improves such safeguards continuously.

Leaders in behavioral threat assessment told me, however, that AI chatbots make it far easier than traditional internet use for a troubled person to move from violent thoughts toward action. They described high-risk threat cases in which the tactical advice and steady encouragement had a powerful effect, fueling users’ delusions and accelerating their violent planning. (The danger in those cases was thwarted with interventions before any violence occurred.)

The Gebala lawsuit claims that OpenAI leaders handled the Tumbler Ridge shooter’s account with “full knowledge that ChatGPT had already been used to plan violence.” It argues the company knew of the above attacks, all of which predated the banning of the Tumbler Ridge shooter’s account in June 2025. OpenAI has acknowledged that it identified an account associated with the FSU shooter shortly after that attack in April 2025 and said it “proactively” shared information with law enforcement. The company now also faces a criminal probe in Florida; it denies wrongdoing.

The suit argues OpenAI’s conduct is a high-tech version of a kind of corporate malfeasance that was uncovered in a landmark 1977 Mother Jones exposé.

My investigation in part highlighted key questions about a second ChatGPT account used by the Tumbler Ridge shooter. That account is under analysis by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, and its contents and time frame remain unknown to the public. OpenAI declined to answer my questions about the second account, which it said it found only after the attack. The reason for the belated discovery remains unclear. But threat assessment experts told me that perpetrators often get past tech company restrictions and continue refining plans for violence.

The Gebala lawsuit says the Tumbler Ridge case goes beyond even that pattern: It alleges that the banning of the shooter’s first account is further evidence of OpenAI’s negligence, because in reality it was merely a one-off deactivation for misuse that was easy to circumvent—by following OpenAI’s own published guidance. Here, the suit in part cites customer service instructions from an OpenAI article titled, “Why Was My OpenAI Account Deactivated?” According to the suit, that article explains how to re-register “immediately” for a new ChatGPT account by “using an alternative email address. If you don’t have another address available, you can use an email sub-address instead.”

In other words, customer engagement and retention are paramount, the lawsuit says, arguing that OpenAI’s policies are driven by growth and profit motives that are in direct opposition to product safety:

The features that make ChatGPT unsafe—its willingness to engage on any topic, to validate any user, to sustain any fixation over time—are the same features that have made it one of the most popular products in history. Fixing those features would cost OpenAI its market share, its path to an IPO, and hundreds of billions of dollars in valuation.

The company’s conduct with ChatGPT is a new twist on a familiar societal danger, according to the lawsuit—a high-tech version of a kind of corporate malfeasance that was uncovered in a landmark 1977 Mother Jones exposé:

In the 1970s, Ford kept selling the Pinto after its own engineers warned that the fuel tank design would cause people to burn to death in rear-end collisions. Ford concluded that paying settlements to the families of the dead would cost less than fixing the car. OpenAI has made a version of the same calculation. For Ford, the dangerous design was a flaw in an otherwise ordinary product. But for OpenAI, the dangerous design is the product.

The lawsuit will test interesting and potentially consequential legal terrain; it further alleges that OpenAI’s chatbot de facto “engaged in the practice of psychology without licensure.” It notes that, in July 2025, Altman acknowledged in an appearance on Theo Von’s popular podcast that “people talk about the most personal shit in their lives to ChatGPT” and that users—“young people, especially”—use it “as a therapist, a life coach.”

As I reported in my investigation, a Pittsburgh man who pleaded guilty in March to stalking and violently threatening 11 women relied on ChatGPT as a “therapist” and “best friend” to justify his thinking, according to court documents.

The Gebala lawsuit also says OpenAI neglected a duty to warn, pointing to the longstanding Tarasoff precedent that is well known in the world of mental health. “By engaging in the unlicensed practice of therapy,” the suit claims, “OpenAI created a special relationship with certain users, including the Shooter, and assumed a heightened duty to take action when confronted with knowledge of a credible and foreseeable threat.”

The CBC reported on April 22 that the RCMP’s investigation into the Tumbler Ridge mass shooting is “in its final stages,” with BC Premier David Eby suggesting that the results will soon be public.

In a letter dated the following day, April 23, Altman apologized to the Tumbler Ridge community, stating, “I am deeply sorry that we did not alert law enforcement to the account that was banned in June.” He also offered generalized statements that the company has made repeatedly about working with “all levels of government” to improve on safety and prevent harm.

Disclosure: The Center for Investigative Reporting, the parent company of Mother Jones, has sued OpenAI for copyright violations. OpenAI has denied the allegations.

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Will Trump’s Forest Service Upheaval Erase a Century of Precious Historical Documents?

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

Sweeping changes underway at the federal agency tasked with protecting the nation’s forests could result in the loss of more than a century of critical historical documents, conservationists warn.

The US Department of Agriculture’s Forest Service announced a major restructuring at the end of March that includes closing all 10 regional offices. Those offices house troves of archival documents—many of which are not digitized—that chronicle the history in the nation’s forests. Thus far, the agency has not made public its plans to keep that information safe.

The Forest Service archives include data and records from the 120 years that the agency has operated, as well as historical documents going back to the 1800s. Included among them are photographs showing changes in forest landscapes, scientific research data, land management records and samples of water and plants.

These records outline the recent history of climate change and provide crucial information for ongoing adaptation, said the Center for Biological Diversity’s Brian Nowicki.

“We have to have our heads on straight in order to address [climate change],” said Nowicki, a senior public lands advocate. “We do that by having a strong historical record.”

On Thursday, the Center for Biological Diversity submitted a public records request to the USDA asking for details on the agency’s plans to relocate archives from the regional offices, and for any records that the agency refuses to submit to the National Archives before the offices are closed and the records are destroyed or inaccessible.

The agency has 20 business days to respond to the request, per federal law.

In an email to Inside Climate News, a USDA spokesperson said the Forest Service follows legally mandated standards to ensure that public records are not lost or destroyed during organizational changes.

“The Trump administration is trying to rewrite our history… Right now, long-term access to public information isn’t a guarantee.”

“As offices transition or close, our protocol ensures public documents, from field photographs to hard-copy data, are preserved, accessible and protected under federal law,” the spokesperson wrote.

The agency added that it will retain the majority of its agency-owned regional facilities after closure, but it did not respond to requests for a timeline and details of its plans to relocate or continue managing the archives.

But the Trump administration has eliminated a variety of data sources in the past year. Nowicki wants to see specifics on the agency’s preservation plans.

He said he has been speaking with staff within the Forest Service and they’ve told him they have no clarity on plans for the archives.

He added that relocating more than a century of archival material will be a huge job for an agency whose staff is already overextended. The Forest Service lost 16 percent of its workforce in the first year of the second Trump administration, according to an Inside Climate News analysis of data from the Office of Personnel Management. “It would take years for staff to be able to go through and correctly digitize and archive all of these materials,” Nowicki said.

The agency has said its reorganization will be implemented over the coming year. That includes other big changes, like moving the Forest Service headquarters from Washington, DC, to Salt Lake City, Utah and shifting more authority to the states. About 6,500 employees have received preliminary notifications that they could be impacted, such as changes to their role, supervisor or location, the USDA wrote in an email to Inside Climate News. The agency did not directly answer a question about whether the impacts could include layoffs.

About 500 employees, mostly from Washington, will be relocated more than 50 miles from their current station, the agency said.

The USDA said these changes will help streamline forest management and boost timber production. “Proper forest management means a healthy and productive forest system that provides affordable, quality lumber to build homes right here in America and it means preserving and protecting the beautiful landscapes we are blessed with across this great country,” Agriculture Secretary Brooke L. Rollins said in a statement with the announcement.

Critics say the latest changes will cause further upheaval and disruption, hindering staff’s ability to properly manage the nation’s forests while wildfire threats grow.

Eliminating swaths of Forest Service documents would fall in line with the administration’s axing of data and historical records, said Rachel Santarsiero, director of the National Security Archive’s Climate Change Transparency Project.

Santarsiero recently published a comprehensive timeline of disappearing data from the start of the second Trump administration, including deletions of web pages and online tools, removal of data from federal websites and the closure of NASA’s largest research library.

Climate information has been a central target. The administration has removed references to global warming from government documents and websites and ended federal tracking of high-cost climate disasters, alongside making big staff and funding cuts to agencies focused on environmental protection, weather and disaster management.

“The Trump administration is trying to rewrite our history,” Santarsiero wrote in an email to Inside Climate News. “Right now, long-term access to public information isn’t a guarantee.”

After the administration abruptly dismantled the US Agency for International Development, officials ordered staff to destroy classified documents and personnel files, The New York Times reported. Elimination of records-keeping staff there and in other agencies has hampered access to public records, Bloomberg and other news organizations found.

Nowicki emphasized that some records kept by the Forest Service can’t be digitized. The archives include samples of water or tree logs that can detail histories of forest growth progression, fires, rainfall and more. As scientists come up with new ways to glean information from historical samples, these specimens are involved in ongoing study.

Historical photographs dating back to the 1800s are critical for understanding patterns of forest fires, challenging assumptions about what historic forests looked like and learning how the nation’s forests have changed, Nowicki said.

Records kept by the Forest Service are invaluable for climate adaptation and resilience, Santarsiero said, because they detail wildfires, soils, ecosystems, biodiversity and more. That’s crucial not just for historians and scientists, but for any person who wants to engage in their right to know about their environment, she said.

“It’s the way the public is able to access its own history,” Santarsiero said.

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The Oligarchy Is Afraid of Itself Too

In May 2016, Elon Musk did something out of character that he has now spent years of his life trying to undo: He made what he believed to be a charitable donation.

The world’s richest man is also among its stingiest. Musk’s private foundation often doles out less than the minimum percentage required by law. He has argued, instead, that his businesses are inherently philanthropic, since they develop technologies that will “extend the light of consciousness.” The $38 million he donated to OpenAI over the next four years was considerably less than the $100 million he later claimed to have given, or the up to $1 billion he offered behind the scenes. But it was vital capital at a critical stage, giving Sam Altman’s fledgling non-profit the nudge and the means to hire talent and make a name for itself in the artificial intelligence arms race. Over time, the two men’s ambitions diverged and the relationship soured. Musk left the board, stopped sending checks, and launched a competitor, xAI. In 2024, he sued Altman and OpenAI, alleging that they had abandoned their mission and misused his money.

The case, which goes to trial this week in an Oakland federal court, is a clash over AI’s past and future. Musk accuses Altman and OpenAI president Greg Brockman of “stealing a charity” by effectively turning OpenAI into “a fully for-profit subsidiary of Microsoft.” Musk wants the now-private company behind Chat-GPT to revert back to the open-source non-profit he gave money to. The defendants have denied reneging on any agreement with their early benefactor, and painted Musk instead as a bitter and untrustworthy rival who schemed behind the scenes to benefit his own interests. There are designer drugs and disappearing emails; interludes at Davos and Burning Man; and altogether too much Larry Summers.

Fundamentally, though, Musk v. Altman is about power—who has it, who should have it, and how it can be used. At a moment when Americans are pushing back against the physical infrastructure of AI and its approval ratings hover somewhere between the Democratic party and ICE, court filings made public ahead of the trial offer a revealing look at how tech oligarchs really see themselves, and the technology they promise will level-up civilization. They want you to trust them. But they don’t even trust each other.

Musk and Altman were first brought together by, of all things, a fear that too much influence was accruing in the hands of one Silicon Valley figure. In 2015, Google and its DeepMind subsidiary were the undisputed leaders in the race for Artificial General Intelligence. As Musk recalled in a 2025 deposition for his lawsuit, he came to fear Google’s hegemony after a conversation with Larry Page while staying at the Google co-founder’s house, sometime in the late Obama era. Musk had wanted to know what would happen to people when we reached AGI. Page had chastised him as a “speciesist” for raising such concerns, and said AI was “our successors.” Musk said in his deposition that based on that conversation, and others he had around that time, he came to fear “a unipolar world where any one person would control AI.” He had one specific person in mind: DeepMind’s CEO, Demis Hassabis. In a 2015 email thread in which he and Altman tried to hash out a name for their new venture, Musk proposed calling their emerging AI project “Freemind,” as a way of signalling its opposition to “Deepmind’s one-ring-to-rule-them-all approach.” Draft language included in an email shared by Musk said the group’s purpose would be to ensure “the power of digital intelligence is not overly concentrated.”

The tech elites are worried about one person exerting too much control, but they’re not really interested in delegating power either.

That OpenAI—not “Freemind” or, as Altman suggested, “Axon”; “Intelligence.com”; or something “related to Turing somehow”—was initially pitched as a more altruistic, safety-conscious venture is well established, but it is nonetheless striking to read their behind the scenes conversations about forestalling what they feared would be Hassabis’ AI dictatorship. Brockman emailed a prospective hire that the aim was to avoid “making anyone into a quadrillion-dollar company or omnipotent surveillance state.” (He continued: “I think most people see the costs of AI (a la Terminator) but don’t know what the benefits would be. Maybe this requires something crazy like getting more movies like Her made.”)

While the men behind OpenAI may have all agreed that the technology they hoped to build would be too powerful to end up in the hands of just one person, figuring out exactly how many other people it should be entrusted to proved more difficult. They ran through a variety of numbers and structures. When they first began plotting in earnest in June 2015, Altman had proposed a five-person “governance structure” comprised of himself, Musk, Bill Gates, eBay founder Pierre Omidyar, and Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz. “The technology would be owned by the foundation and used ‘for the good of the world,’” Altman wrote, “and in cases where it’s not obvious how that should be applied the 5 of us would decide.”

But it was hard to find the right mix of people. Musk didn’t want to work with Gates (“not his biggest fan,” he said in his deposition) and Moskovitz ultimately gave money, but not much time to the project. Mark Zuckerberg’s own AI projects ruled him out. (Still, he makes an appearance: According to court filings, when Zuckerberg texted Musk in early 2025 to say that his team would crackdown on people “doxxing” DOGE members, Musk texted back to ask if he was interested in “bidding on the Open AI IP.”) While Amazon Web Services was an early partner, no one seemed to suggest bringing on Jeff Bezos, whom Musk described in a later email as “a bit of a tool.” They started off small, with four board members, then bumped it to seven.

By September 2017, with DeepMind still lapping the field, Musk, Altman, Brockman, and star researcher Ilya Sutskever were at loggerheads over how their project could keep growing. They considered a variety of restructuring options—including merging the company with Tesla, or transitioning to a for-profit venture. It’s all a bit in-the-weeds, but the debates they were having internally about how to distribute power amongst themselves are striking. Musk wanted to “unequivocally have initial control” of a rebooted venture, and said he would not be comfortable unless he personally held at least one quarter of the seats on an expanded board. “[T]he rough target would be to get to a 12 person board…where each board member has a deep understanding of technology, at least a basic understanding of AI and strong & sensible morals,” Musk wrote in a 2017 email, while conceding it would “probably” have to be “more like 16 if this board really ends up deciding the fate of the world.” During a meeting that year, Musk, according to notes taken by Brockman, raised expanding the board in the same megalomaniacal terms, saying “the challenge is gonna be how do we find, who should decide the fate of the world.”

You can see some flaws emerging here, both philosophically and logistically: On one hand, the tech elites are very worried about just one person exerting too much control; on the other hand, they’re not really interested in delegating power either. A dozen or so people, adhering to Elon Musk’s sense of morality, does not a democracy make.

Indeed, Musk’s partners in the venture expressed misgivings about giving him too much control. In a September 2017 email titled “honest thoughts,” Brockman and Sutskever wrote to Musk and Altman to express their fear that Musk would “end up with unilateral absolute control over the AGI… The goal of OpenAI is to make the future good and to avoid an AGI dictatorship. You are concerned that Demis could create an AGI dictatorship. So do we. So it is a bad idea to create a structure where you could become a dictator if you chose.” In a private journal that’s been excerpted in court records, Brockman expressed his desire to “get out from Elon,” and questioned whether Musk was the “glorious leader” they urgently needed.

The fellowship scattered not long after. Musk left OpenAI in early 2018, and the project launched its for-profit arm later that year. Then it was Altman’s turn to be the target of suspicion from people who believed he couldn’t be trusted with the one ring. (Disclosure: The Center for Investigative Reporting, the parent organization of Mother Jones, has sued OpenAI for copyright violations. OpenAI has denied the allegations.)

OpenAI, according to Musk’s lawsuit, has become a “market-paralyzing gorgon,” and a “for-profit leviathan” that has betrayed its founding ideals and sacrificed safety for money and market-share. Musk’s complaint laments that “OpenAI dropped a clause from its Usage Policies banning the use of its technology for ‘activity that has a high risk of physical harm’ such as ‘weapons development’ or ‘military and warfare.’” The complaint also warned that OpenAI was abandoning its safety mission at a time when AI “is leading to a proliferation in child sexual abuse material” and “supercharging the spread of disinformation” and “malicious human impersonation.”

What started as an underdog alliance has become a parable about hubris and power.

It’s an interesting argument coming from Musk, a Pentagon contractor who built a Nazi-loving chatbot for pervs. It’s likewise a bit dissonant for someone who destroyed public health programs in the name of cost-cutting to argue that the “obligation to generate financial returns” will corrupt someone else’s mission, but Musk was not the only person raising these concerns about Altman. I won’t rehash the 2023 power struggle at OpenAI that led to Altman being fired by the board and then reinstated days later, but suffice to say, it is central to the narrative of the lawsuit. Musk’s team has cited criticisms of Altman by Sutskever and Dario Amodei, who both left OpenAI to start new companies after questioning Altman’s commitment to safety. Musk suggests that Altman—“Scam Altman,” as he called him eight times during his deposition—has become the Demis he wished to stop.

The court records offer a rare glimpse at the strained relationships and bruised egos behind one of Silicon Valley’s nastiest falling-outs. We find Altman backchanneling with Shivon Zilis—the Neuralink employee who, unbeknownst to Altman, had multiple children with Musk while serving on the board of OpenAI—in 2023 to ask if he should tweet something nice about Elon to make him feel better. We find Musk’s lawyers moving to censor a portion of their client’s deposition where he was asked if he ingested something called “rhino ket” at Burning Man in 2017 (he says he did not), and OpenAI’s lawyers responding in a later brief with the dubious but indelible words, “there’s nothing unfairly prejudicial about attending Burning Man.” Zillis is asked if she and Musk have “ever been in a romantic relationship” and responds by saying: “‘Relationship’ is a relative term. But there have been romantic moments.” Sounds like a dream.

“it really fucking hurts when you publicly attack openai,” Altman wrote Musk in one 2023 text exchange.

“it is certainly not my intention to be hurtful, for which I apologize, but the fate of civilization is at stake,” Musk responded.

“i agree with that, and i would really love to hear the things you think we should be doing differently/better. it’s also not clear to me how the attacks on twitter help the fate of civilization,” Altman wrote.

What started in 2015 as an upstart alliance against Google has become, in every respect, a parable about hubris and power. They each believe the other is the thing people hate about Silicon Valley, and they are each, in a sense, sort of right. Musk, in his deposition, pointedly noted having “read that—allegedly, Chat GPT convinced some kid to commit suicide.” (OpenAI has denied culpability.) Altman, in his deposition, called Musk’s Grok a “goonbot” and said xAI makes “anime sex bots for children.” (X has said it has “zero tolerance for any forms of child sexual exploitation, non-consensual nudity, and unwanted sexual content.”) In January, they waged a public argument on X about whose companies were responsible for more deaths. Neither OpenAI or xAI responded to emailed requests for comment on the case.

As a result of Musk’s months-long assumption last year of quasi-dictatorial powers within the federal government, he caused the loss of hundreds of thousands of lives and helped destroy the country’s capacity for cutting-edge research while still finding time—as he revealed in his deposition—to complain about Altman to the president of the United States. Brockman, for his part, was perhaps not quite as concerned about a dictator as he once let on: In September he became one of the single-largest donors to Donald Trump’s super-PAC.

There’s one email exchange that embodies the mix of civilization-defining grandiosity and get-over-yourselves gamer brain that made and then broke the relationship—a short back-and-forth in the hours before OpenAI’s official 2015 launch. Altman and Musk took turns hyping each other up with motivational quotes that underscored their sense of civilizational struggle. Under the subject line “Re: Great Acton quotes,” Musk shared a remark attributed to the British aristocrat: “Liberty consists in the division of power. Absolutism, in concentration of power.” Altman replied with a link to a YouTube trailer for Halo 3, which began with the words, “This is the way the world ends.” (In fact, T.S. Eliot.)

Acton, of course, is most famous for a line that captures the essence of these court filings, even if it doesn’t show up in them: “Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely.”

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Trump’s Impulsive Foreign Policy Is Tearing Apart the Global Order

When President Donald Trump returned to office last year, he promised to largely steer America clear of foreign entanglements. But over the last year, his administration has captured Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, threatened to take over Greenland, pressured Cuba’s communist government in an attempt to destabilize it, and openly talked about making Canada the 51st state.

But the most consequential move by far has been the attack on Iran, which reportedly has killed thousands inside the country and snarled the Strait of Hormuz, a vital waterway for roughly one-fifth of the world’s oil.

In some ways, it might appear that Trump is trying to revive the American empire. Not so, says Daniel Immerwahr, a Northwestern University history professor and author of How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States. What Trump is really doing, he says, is undermining the liberal international system, something the US itself largely built following World War II.

“People sometimes look at Trump’’s wars and they see imperialism,” Immerwahr says. But instead, Immerwahr argues that Trump is “cannibalizing the empire” through what he calls “hit-and-run” foreign policy. On this week’s More To The Story, Immerwahr sits down with host Al Letson to examine Trump’s attack on Iran, why Trump is ripping apart the postwar international order, and the long-term consequences of his impulsive foreign policy.

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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Can MAGA Survive the Great Evangelical Crack-Up?

If Donald Trump is remembered for anything, it may be as a war president: His enemies so far have included migrants, trade, Venezuela, Iran, maybe Cuba—and now religion. His latest full-on assault was against Pope Leo XIV, whom he called “weak on crime” and a “very liberal person” who caters to “the radical left,” accusing the pontiff of wanting Iran to have a nuclear bomb.

Trump’s verbal attack on the Holy See followed a series of posts that were equally offensive not just to Catholics, but to the full spectrum of Christians. Those posts included a profane Easter-morning missive about Iranian leadership; a day later, a threat to perpetrate genocide against the Iranian people; and, perhaps most offensive of all, an AI-generated image of himself as a Christ-like figure performing a miracle.

Added to this affront to Christians, as well as believers of other faiths, was Vice President JD Vance’s brazen attempt to justify Trump’s lambasting of the pope with a lecture on how the pontiff should speak about moral and spiritual issues. Vance delivered his remarks at an event by Turning Point USA, the highly politicized, quasi-religious, MAGA-friendly youth organization. To underscore the religious nature of the vice president and recent Catholic convert’s impertinence, the event was held in an evangelical megachurch.

This escalation in Trump’s conflict with religious constituencies comes as a slow but tectonic stress is occurring in his normally unified conservative Christian base. I’m a scholar of evangelical Christianity, so I’ll do my best to stay in my lane as I offer some analysis as to why I believe the MAGA religious base is deteriorating—possibly denying Trump, his cronies, and MAGA successors the extraordinary reliability of the right-wing religious vote they’ve enjoyed to date.

Evangelicals used to be united in supporting Trump.

But now, they’re fighting over theology.

And neither camp is happy with Trump’s irreverent behavior.

President Donald Trump holds a Bible outside St. John’s Episcopal Church in Washington, DC, in June 2020.Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty

To understand how we got here, we first need to get into the theological weeds. For all the complexities of various denominations, American evangelicals can basically be divided into two groups: the Reformers—or Calvinists—and the Arminians. They’re named for two very important players in the 16th-century European Reformation. While we usually associate the Reformation with Martin Luther or even Henry VIII, there were figures who loomed just as large—and, at times, even larger than Luther. One of these figures was the Dutch theologian John Calvin, who taught that God preordains some people to go to heaven and others to hell and that no one can do anything about it. On the other hand, a rival of Calvin’s, James Arminius, taught that every human being has a path to salvation and can choose to embrace or reject it.

Portraits of John Calvin (left) and James ArminiusUnknown artist/Wikimedia; David Bailly/Wikimedia

Until recently, Arminians dominated American evangelicalism. For at least 50 years, and arguably much longer, they’ve had the largest churches, maintained enormous ministries, and organized massive conferences, conventions, festivals, and other events—while wielding considerable political influence and prospering handsomely in the process. Think Billy Graham, Pat Robertson, and Jerry Falwell. It’s this wing of evangelicals that also controls most of the still very popular and highly effective old media platforms: radio and broadcast television, paper book publishing, and direct mail houses, many with millions of donors.

But that generation is aging out, and the younger evangelicals coming up, particularly male multi-campus pastors, podcasters, and conference-circuit speakers, are becoming increasingly Reformed in their orientation, and they’re taking over the internet-based media. The most vocal sect of Reformers is the new Calvinists, sometimes referred to as TheoBros, many of whom follow Idaho-based pastor Doug Wilson, famous as Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s spiritual mentor. Many of them promote strict interpretations of gender roles, rail against immigration, and champion Christian nationalism.

One key point on which Reformers and Arminians disagree is the biblical importance of Israel and the Jewish people. Reformers espouse “fulfillment theology,” a Protestant tradition that began during the Reformation and holds that the Christian church fulfills God’s promises to Abraham. Some experts call this “replacement theology.” This crew sees Israel and the Jewish people as no longer occupying a central role in the divine plan; God has little to no interest in them because the church has replaced ancient Israel as the divine homeland, and Christians have replaced the Jews as God’s chosen people.

Pastor Doug Wilson of Christ Church in Moscow, Idaho Geoff Crimmins/ZUMA

Arminians, on the other hand, see history as a series of divinely orchestrated and distinct eras, or “dispensations,” and in the current one, God means for the Jews to occupy the land deeded to Abraham’s progeny and to manage it until Christ’s second coming. While there are differences within this subset when it comes to how Jews can ultimately find salvation, the consensus is that they retain a special status as God’s chosen bloodline to bring the messiah to humanity and that Christians are obligated to bless and celebrate them—meaning, in practice, that most Arminians are Christian Zionists. (Their friendliness toward Jews can have a dark side, though. Many of them believe Jews will be given a last chance to accept Christ as their savior before facing perdition.)

The Reformer-Arminian divide was on full display during an incident that occurred in February, when right-wing broadcaster Tucker Carlson sat down opposite US Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee in Tel Aviv. Doctrinally, Huckabee, while a Baptist, hews to the Arminian tradition. Carlson was raised Episcopalian—a denominational product of the British side of Reformation history (think Henry VIII’s break with Rome)—which makes him a kissing cousin of the new Calvinistic Reformed folks.

“It is unjust to attribute the violent actions of a few to entire communities based on nationality or ethnicity,” read a statement from a major evangelical group.

In a clip that went viral, Carlson pressed Huckabee to explain what exactly it means to be a “Christian Zionist,” a label that the former Arkansas governor uses to describe his own faith and position within evangelical Christianity. In response, Huckabee insisted that the Bible explicitly states that the Jewish people have a right to a homeland, and therefore, that belief should be a tenet of Christian faith. Among Christian Zionists, this worldview includes the hastening of the end times, in which Jews will return to Israel and embrace Jesus Christ as their savior—a subject that was not broached during the interview. What they did get into, however, was the geography. Carlson cited the Old Testament passage in which God promises Abraham that his descendants will possess land “from the Nile to the Euphrates.” Did Huckabee literally believe that Israel had a right to claim the entire Mideast? “It would be fine if they took it all,” Huckabee replied, before acknowledging that the question was hypothetical.

A preacher holds up his Bible at a pro-Trump “Stop the Steal” protest outside the Georgia State Capitol in Atlanta in November 2020. Megan Varner/Getty

While the Reformed group mostly objects to Trump’s cozy relationship with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the Arminian Christian Zionists are unhappy with Trump’s boorish personal disposition and heartless policies toward immigrants. The Roys Report, a Christian investigative media outlet, noted that while most prominent evangelicals have remained silent or approving of Trump, some have recently publicly criticized him. They include stalwart Trump supporter Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council. When Trump launched that obscenity-laden screed on Easter Sunday, Perkins objected to the “decline in language and decorum” on X, noting it is “very troubling and should not be acceptable.”

Earlier in the year, Pastor Erick Salgado of the Brooklyn-based Iglesia Jóvenes Cristianos and a prominent leader among Arminian-leaning Hispanic evangelicals, broke from his previous support for Trump after ICE detained one of his longtime congregational lay leaders. During a January news conference, he remarked: “It is not true that ICE is coming for people who have criminal records. They’re coming after everyone.”

And even before the ICE surge wreaked havoc in Minneapolis, the National Association of Evangelicals, whose core constituency is largely Arminian, had already issued a call for an end to the inhumane treatment of immigrants. “Most immigrants in the United States are living peacefully and working productively in their communities,” the group’s statement said. “It is unjust to attribute the violent actions of a few to entire communities based on nationality or ethnicity. We believe refugees and immigrants deserve safety, dignity, and fair treatment.” After reports that ICE had detained Minnesota immigrant families that had legal status, Myal Greene, president and CEO of the National Association of Evangelicals-affiliated World Relief, released a stronger statement, saying: “This shameful and unpatriotic operation preys on our basest fears and manipulates the truth. Enough. ICE must be held accountable, and this operation must cease.”

An engraving of John Wesley preaching in the City Chapel, 1822.T. Blood/Wikimedia

Again, it is Arminian doctrine and church polity that inform this reaction to Trump’s immigration policies and practices. These evangelicals emphasize God’s love, grace, and compassion. The teachings of John Wesley, the 18th-century Arminian founder of Methodism, regarded by many as the first modern evangelical religious movement and eventual denomination, are summarized in the adage, “Do all the good you can, by all the means you can, in all the ways you can, at all the times you can, to all the people you can, as long as you ever can.”

Arminian sects have long maintained “mercy ministries” that provide food, clothing, and shelter to needy populations and have generously funded global medical and public health programs. The Salvation Army, with its residential addiction treatment programs and extensive emergency relief services, is the quintessence of Arminian polity.

Many of these hybrid human services–spiritual outreach entities have suffered under the Trump administration’s disastrous cuts to foreign aid and domestic social services. World Vision, a prominent international evangelical relief organization, lost more than $400 million in government grants after Elon Musk’s DOGE purge of foreign assistance in 2025, leading to some of the first public expressions of evangelical discontent with the Trump administration. The Reverend Eugene Cho, president and CEO of Bread for the World, denounced the cuts as a “policy failure,” and National Association of Evangelicals President Walter Kim warned they would be “damaging and wasteful.” On the other hand, there was little to no pushback on DOGE actions from the new Reformed evangelical groups.

In contrast, Reformed evangelicals, much in the fire-and-brimstone tradition of Jonathan Edwards, tend to focus on God’s law. Consider them analogous to Supreme Court constitutional originalists, only with the Bible as their key document. A theological belief known as “theonomy” holds that biblical laws, specifically Old Testament judicial laws, remain binding on all modern nations and should form the basis for civil government. It’s a sort of “law-and-order” ethic, with a spiritual zing to it.

Demonstrators interrupt proceedings with White House budget director Russell Vought (seated) during a House Budget Committee hearing in April.Andrew Harnik/Getty

Cutting foreign aid and domestic social programs is in keeping with the long-standing conservative argument that such government largesse is counterproductive, in that it creates dependency rather than independence. Government entitlements also violate biblical mandates regarding work and wealth creation, reflecting the so-called “Protestant work ethic.”

Playing to this same script has been Trump’s director of the White House Office of Management and Budget, Russell Vought, a Reformed Baptist with deep ties to the New Calvinists. He is best known as a principal author of the Project 2025 master plan for neutralizing what right-wingers call “the deep state.” As ProPublica reported in a comprehensive profile piece, Vought “wanted spending on foreign aid to be as close to zero as possible.”

I began hearing from many on the Arminian side who expressed shock and horror at Trump’s unlawful cruelty.

Reformed opposition to government foreign aid can be extreme. For example, in September, Christian Reconstructionist Radio posted an audio excerpt from the late new Reformed theologian R.J. Rushdoony’s volume, Threatened Freedom: A Christian View on the Menace of American Statism, in which he argues for an end to all American foreign aid because, according to him, among other atrocious things, it has funded rituals of human sacrifice.

This division within Trump’s exclusively evangelical sector continues apace, separating congregations, clergy, and even family members from one another. What was once a near uniformity of opinion that the only candidates worthy of a Christian’s vote were MAGA Republicans utterly loyal to Trump has started showing signs of unraveling.

Among evangelicals, I felt very alone in my dissent.

Then came Trump’s vilification of immigrants and the Iran war.

I began hearing from Christians who expressed shock and horror.

Trump is surrounded by clergy at a National Day of Prayer event in 2025.Joyce Boghosian/White House/Planet Pix/ZUMA

For all their profound theological disagreements, Reformers and Arminians seemed ready to bury the hatchet when it came to supporting Trump. When he emerged as a credible presidential prospect in 2015 and then the eventual Republican nominee in 2016, tens of millions of American Christians were ready to accept such a highly unlikely champion, even a morally suspect one, provided Trump offered what conservative religious voters wanted.

For years, conservative Christians had heard their pastors, guest preachers, and innumerable television and radio personalities exhort them to pray that God would give them bold leaders who would bring an end to baby killing and stand unapologetically against gay rights, same-sex marriage, and transgender people. Multipage fundraising letters warned donors that Satan—embodied by Democrats—was determined to destroy their families, communities, and country if they didn’t vote for righteousness. My organization and numerous others sent out millions of letters and emails every year telling Christian Americans that what we needed was a strong leader who would appoint Supreme Court justices who would defend religious liberty, return prayer to public school classrooms, allow crosses and Ten Commandments monuments to stand in public spaces, and, most importantly, reverse Roe v. Wade.

Virtually all evangelicals, and many Bible-literate Catholics, were familiar with the story of King David, who committed both adultery and murder but whom God forgave and came to be known as “a man after God’s own heart.” Those who grew up attending Sunday school likely had teachers who lionized figures like the Persian King Cyrus. Although he was a pagan, Cyrus ordered the badly war-damaged holy city of Jerusalem rebuilt and the sacred Temple sacrifices restored. As a way to assuage any discomfort their congregants may have felt or ease their own pesky consciences, self-proclaimed prophets and pastors across the country announced Trump was just like these biblical figures. He may be an imperfect vessel, but really, aren’t we all? Notwithstanding his past failings, they believed Trump would accomplish God’s work, most importantly bringing down Roe v. Wade and recriminalizing abortion. That was enough to convince an overwhelming majority of religious voters to cast their ballots for the unfaithful, thrice-married former playboy and financially and morally bankrupt casino magnate. Thus was born the meta-narrative of grand redemption, helping to make Trump an inspiring symbol of hope for moral transgressors.

“The Prophet Nathan rebukes King David”Eugène Siberdt/Wikimedia

After almost 40 years of conservative evangelical ministry, I broke with my religious tribe’s orthodoxy on abortion, same-sex marriage, and the Second Amendment in 2016. There were many reasons for my defection, but the final straw was the overwhelming support by conservative evangelicals for Trump. My refusal to jump on the MAGA bandwagon left me an exile in my own community. In my thinking, for me to support Trump as I had Ronald Reagan, the two Presidents Bush, and Mitt Romney would have meant abandoning the most important core beliefs taught and modeled by Jesus Christ—love of God and neighbor—which were most important to me. I wanted no part of Trump’s fake religion and contempt for humanity, and I publicly said so. Some of my constituents accused me of dissing God’s man of the hour, while others admitted they found Trump revolting but would support him because he could get things done for us. That year, Trump managed to convince the vast majority of American evangelicals that electing him would deliver the world they longed for.

And then, in 2024, he did it again. During his bid for a second presidential term, Trump addressed the conservative National Religious Broadcasters convention in Nashville. In his hour-and-15-minute speech, sprinkled liberally with the word “hell” in a nontheological context, he assured his well-churched listeners: “I fought for Christians harder than any president has ever done before. You know that. You know that. And I will fight even harder for Christians with four more years in the White House.”

The author, Rob Schenck (second from left), with other reverends from the National Clergy Council, Kenneth Johnson (from left), Allen Church, and Patrick Mahoney, pray in front of the Supreme Court before the body of Justice Antonin Scalia arrived to lie in repose in February 2016.Tom Williams/CQ/NC/ZUMA

In yet another contradiction of the Christian ethic of humble service to others, Trump declared: “You have such power. But really, you weren’t allowed to use that power, and you’re now allowed to use it. I get in there, you’re going to be using that power at a level that you’ve never used it before. It’s going to bring back the churchgoer.”

In his conclusion, and using a term dear to Bible-believing American Christians, Trump promised his reascendancy to power would be the start of a great “revival.” Just as many of the televangelists in the room conclude a broadcast with an appeal to their audiences for financial support, Trump ended his appearance with an appeal for their political support: “With your help and God’s grace, the great revival of America begins on November 5, 2024. It’s a great revival.”

Until Trump’s second term, I felt very alone in my dissent. Then came his dismantling of USAID, his vilification of Haitian and Somali immigrants, and ICE’s abductions and killing of US citizens. In what seemed to be a sudden shift, I began hearing from many on the Arminian side who expressed shock and horror at this unlawful cruelty.

And it’s not just Arminians who are beginning to speak out against Trump. Over the past few weeks, I’ve seen many Reformers and Arminians agree on one thing, at least: that Trump’s behavior is beginning to look increasingly blasphemous. His Easter Sunday profanity-laced ultimatum directed at Iran regarding the Strait of Hormuz, in which Trump threatened to bomb civilian infrastructure and kill a 3,000-year-old civilization, was over the top for even the most enthusiastic Trump evangelicals.

In response, the Reverend Patrick J. Mahoney, a minister of the ultra-conservative Reformed Presbyterian Church and director of the Christian Defense Coalition, posted on Facebook, “In no way does this kind of language or spirit represent Christianity or the church and should be condemned by believers…it is very concerning to have our Commander in Chief making military decisions with this kind of attitude.” Bryan Kemper, longtime director of the anti-abortion youth movement Rock for Life, also posted on Facebook: “While I’m still happy that we have Trump over Harris I’m not going to put my head in the sand about this. This is unacceptable and makes me cringe. President Trump please stop this garbage and learn what Christianity actually is. This isn’t it.”

The subsequent post by Trump threatening “a whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again,” amped up the religious criticism even more. To that, Russell Moore, the former Southern Baptist Church leader and editor-at-large of Christianity Today, responded on X: “Rhetoric calling for war crimes is a moral horror, under any circumstances. Using the Bible to try to justify targeting civilian populations makes it even worse. It comes from, and leads to, hell.”

Mourners gather at a cemetery to commemorate victims, most of them children, of a US-Israeli attack on a girls primary school in Minab, Iran, in March.Hassan Ghaedi/Anadolu/Getty

Following criticism from Pope Leo on the Iran bombing campaigns, Trump denounced the pontiff as “weak on crime” and “terrible for foreign policy.” He also claimed credit for the election of Leo XIV by the College of Cardinals. Seeming to troll the first American pope, Trump reposted the AI-generated image of himself dressed in a white robe with a red cape draped around his shoulders, leaning over to touch the forehead of an ill man. Most Christians recognize such raiment as belonging to Jesus. Trump’s sacrilege blew up my social media pages, with numerous conservative influencers and a broad spectrum of religious leaders decrying it, including Pete Hegseth’s Reformed spiritual mentor, Doug Wilson. He told the Washington Examiner that Trump’s image constituted “blasphemy.” David Brody of the Christian Broadcasting Network posted on X: “You’re not God. None of us are. This goes too far. It crosses the line.” Still, Trump’s most reliable Arminian clerics, like First Baptist Dallas pastor Robert Jeffress and his Pentecostal senior White House religious adviser, Paula White-Cain, remained silent as of this writing.

It remains to be seen whether Trump’s latest offenses to conservative Christian sensibilities (not to mention Catholic sentiments when it comes to respect for the Holy Father), together with the Arminian-Reformed internecine conflicts, will change right-wing religious voting habits. But the revulsion over Trump’s boorishness, the respective anger over Iran and immigration enforcement practices, the charges of blasphemy from several quarters, and the growing number of influential anti-Trump voices may be just enough to deny Trump’s political toadies and his eventual MAGA successor the same overwhelming level of evangelical support they’ve enjoyed to date. After all, the Jesus at the center of all versions of the Christian faith admonished that “every kingdom divided against itself is laid waste, and no city or house divided against itself will stand.” And that, we can take as gospel.

Clergy members gather for a press conference at a memorial for Renée Good, who was shot and killed in a confrontation with an immigration agent, in January in Minneapolis.Stephen Maturen/Getty

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A Boring Party for Trump’s Collapsing Meme Coin

Several hundred of the top Trump meme coin holders converged on Mar-a-Lago over the weekend, and all they got were Trump watches and a rambling speech.

Then the price of the coin dropped to its lowest level ever.

Donald Trump launched the $TRUMP meme coin (and the associated $MELANIA meme coin) just three days before his second inauguration. The price of the coin immediately rocketed past $74, giving it a total market capitalization of around $15 billion —a rather absurd figure for a brand new digital asset that can’t actually be used for anything. The coin has no inherent value. It has no transactional use. It essentially functions as a digital endorsement of Trump—so perhaps fittingly, it’s price has since fallen even faster than the president’s approval ratings.

It’s market cap has now collapsed to just $583 million—a decline of about 96 percent from its peak. The price of a single coin has fallen nearly to its all-time low, languishing around $2.50 Tuesday.

Nearly a year ago, $TRUMP’s website offered the top 220 coin holders an exclusive soiree at his Virginia golf course and the top 25 holders a VIP tour of the White House. (The White House tour offer disappeared after garnering negative attention.) That event attracted various high-flyers—and protests—but Trump offered only desultory comments in a speech that apparently left some holders disappointed they hadn’t received the level of access they’d hoped to purchase.

Last weekend, Trump tried again. The top 297 investors in the coin were invited to Mar-a-Lago for a “luncheon” as part of a conference, vaguely centered on “crypto,” that featured the likes of Mike Tyson and Tony Robbins. Trump once again put in an appearance. The full speech isn’t publicly available, but you can get a sense from an array of snippets posted online. One brief video from an attendee shows the president rattling off his well-worn line about the US being the “hottest country anywhere in the world.”

pic.twitter.com/gJ4xga6ha7

— AirdropAlert.com (@Airdropalertcom) April 25, 2026

Trump did discuss the crypto industry. “They noticed I that was doing so well, I had a poll where I was almost at 100 percent with all of the crypto,” Trump says in one clip, waving his hands vaguely. According Decrypt.co, a crypto industry blog with a reporter at the event, Trump also talked about Iran, employing some jokes he had previously used.

“The speech was useless like last time,” Morten Christensen, a $TRUMP coin investor, who runs the crypto-focused website airdropalert.com, told the Wall Street Journal. “But the event is much better organized, higher quality all around.”

Attendees didn’t seem enraptured by the president’s soaring rhetoric—they reportedly were taking selfies during his speech. But they did seem delighted that he spent so much more time at the event than last year. Guests at the event told Decrypt.co that many of the attendees were foreigners who had apparently flown in for the gathering.

Trump also met separately with the top 29 holders of the meme coin, saying positive things about crypto and talking about China and AI.

Escuchando a Trump: A la izquierda de @DiegoBartra_ Mike Tyson, a la derecha el creador de Chill Guy, a mi izquierda Tony Robbins, a mi derecha el fundador de Bybit, detrás mío Tim Draper, al otro lado el fundador de Tether, etc etc. Un momento que se sintió surreal. #trumpmeme pic.twitter.com/z9VWZCka1I

— Ragi Yaser Burhum (@rburhum) April 25, 2026

In a brief interview from the tarmac at the airport after the event, Trump did not appear particularly engaged or interested in the subject. Asked why he had attended, he failed to mention his own coin and gave a rambling answer that, again, trailed off into claims about the US leading China in terms of AI technology.

The event appears to have been far less exclusive that last year. There were more attendees this time around, and the overall cost of attending was dramatically lower—thanks in part to the lower coin price. On his own blog, Christensen wrote that the competition was less fierce this year and the financial risk involved in purchasing enough coins was as low as $10,000.

A New York Times reporter attempted to gain entry by purchasing $TRUMP and, after spending $9,500, did, in fact, qualify. (He ultimately concluded that he could have qualified by purchasing far less.) But after a background check, he was told he could not attend because the event was not open to press.

In the hours before the event, the coin’s price rose as high as $3.13. But not unexpectedly, following the event, the price once again cratered.

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“My Mother Had a Crush on Charles”: What in the Royal Hell Is Trump Talking About.

My first thought: Wow, the Brits are going to love this. Tabloid heaven.

The United Kingdom’s King Charles III and Queen Camilla are on a kind of diplomatic Cirque du Soleil mission to their former colony right now, trying to ease tensions between the two historic allies. Especially front-of-mind: Can the King smooth over Britain’s lack of support for Trump’s war on Iran—a stance for which Prime Minister Keir Starmer has received several bouts of Trumpian invective. The president loves the royals and all that pageantry, and there’s been no shortage of it since they touched down at Joint Base Andrews yesterday: hats, bees, bands—they’re getting the works.

Trump’s love of all this stuff is clear. So much so that he couldn’t resist musing on his family’s affection for the Royal Family during an event today on the South Lawn of the White House.

“Any time the Queen was involved at a ceremony or anything, my mother would be glued to the television,” he told his guests, referring to his mother, Mary Anne, who died in 2000. “I also remember her saying very clearly, ‘Charles, look, young Charles. He’s so cute.'”

He went on, to laughter: “My mother had a crush on Charles. Can you believe it? I wonder what she’s thinking right now.” The King gamely laughed and waved his hand in a performance of kingly modesty. The cringe, however, lingered—and the British press revved up, posting breathlessly within minutes. “King Charles smoothly plays off awkward moment with Trump during formal arrival ceremony at the White House,” read one headline in the Daily Mail.

Maybe not quite what Starmer had imagined. But perhaps just what he was looking for.

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The “Age of Electricity” Is Upon Us

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

The war launched by the United States and Israel on Iran has caused an unprecedented disruption in global energy markets, bottlenecking 20 percent of the world’s supply of oil and liquefied natural gas. We don’t yet know exactly what this means for the fight against climate change. But, thanks to two new reports released last week, we now have the clearest picture yet of the path the world was on before the conflict sent the price of oil soaring—and it was a path where the fossil fuels threatened by the war were less central than ever to meeting growing global energy needs.

“The economy boomed, electricity demand grew very healthily—and still all that demand growth was met with renewables.”

The world is entering an “age of electricity,” according to the reports, which come from the International Energy Agency, or IEA, an intergovernmental organization that publishes the world’s most authoritative analyses on the global energy sector, and the think tank Ember. That’s because core economic activities that traditionally involve burning oil and gas—driving cars, heating buildings, and even running industrial processes like steelmaking—are increasingly powered by electricity instead. And, most importantly for the climate fight, an ever-larger share of that electricity is coming from renewable sources.

The two new analyses confirmed that 2025 was a banner year for renewable energy. Solar power was the single biggest source used to meet humanity’s growing appetite for electricity. New power generation from the broader suite of carbon-free sources—including wind, nuclear, and hydropower—actually exceeded the overall rise in electricity demand, meaning renewables began to displace fossil fuel sources. If this trend sticks, it would mean that the so-called energy transition meant to shepherd humanity out of the climate crisis is no longer theoretical.

“This was a year when the economy boomed, electricity demand grew very healthily—and still all that demand growth was met with renewables,” said Daan Walter, a lead researcher at Ember.

In 2025, renewables edged out coal in global electricity generation for the first time in more than a century. This progress was fueled by China and India, the world’s two most populous countries that together comprise 42 percent of global fossil power generation. The nations both saw electricity generated by fossil fuels fall in the same year for the first time this century. Like other countries around the world, China and India have been rapidly building out solar, wind, and battery infrastructure. (The cost of batteries fell 45 percent in 2025, an even steeper decline than the 20 percent drop in costs that analysts tracked in 2024.)

There’s another sign that 2025 marked a turning point in the energy transition, according to the Ember report: Unlike in past years, the plateau in fossil fuel use was not tied to a recession. Global economic growth last year was normal, which indicates that renewable energy is driving a structural trend away from fossil fuels when it comes to generating electricity.

But that doesn’t mean that oil, gas, and coal use are nearing extinction. When it comes to the broader energy economy, rather than just electricity generation, the IEA’s report finds that renewables still aren’t displacing fossil fuels fast enough to force a sustained decline in the world’s use of greenhouse-gas-emitting energy. (This is because not all energy—for instance that which currently powers jets, cargo ships, and many motor vehicles—is generated from electricity.)

Many people in developing nations, are “leapfrogging” gas-powered cars and purchasing an EV as their first vehicle instead.

As a result of complications like these, global carbon dioxide emissions reached a record high last year, rising 0.4 percent from 2024 levels. The pace of the increase, however, is declining as renewables rise. For years, emissions declines were driven by developed countries like the United States and European Union member states. Last year, however, emissions from advanced economies grew faster than emissions from developing countries for the first time since the 1990s, according to the IEA.

The trend reversal was driven by the US, where coal demand rose 10 percent last year. Rising natural gas prices prompted power producers to switch back to coal, which had been displaced by fracked natural gas in recent years. Plus, electricity use rose thanks to a harsh winter across much of the eastern part of the country, as well as the rollout of industrial-scale power customers like the data centers needed for new artificial intelligence applications.

But trends in the opposite direction in developing countries played a role, too. In Indonesia, for example, electric cars now comprise more than 15 percent of new car sales—a larger share than in the United States and up from virtually zero in the early 2020s. Many customers are “leapfrogging” gasoline-powered cars altogether and purchasing an EV as their first vehicle.

“The energy transition was conceived as something that is led by the developed world, and the developing world kind of hobbles after at a slower pace,” said Walter. “We’re now seeing ‘leapfrogging’ across the world where actually developing economies are going faster in many ways than developed economies.”

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Florida Is Poised to Make Opting Out of Vaccines Way Easier

Today, the Florida Legislature will vote on a bill that would make it significantly easier for parents to skip their children’s routine childhood vaccinations. The bill would allow exemptions “based on the parent’s religious tenets or practices or conscience,” meaning essentially that parents would no longer need to demonstrate medical or religious reasons for exemptions. Any ideological objection would be considered a valid reason to forgo shots that prevent potentially deadly diseases such as polio, tetanus, and measles.

The proposed changes are the latest salvo in Florida’s war against public health doctrine, from its chafing against pandemic restrictions to its flouting of guidelines around water fluoridation, restrictions for SNAP benefits, and erosion of vaccine requirements. The driving force behind this crusade is state Surgeon General Dr. Joseph Ladapo, whom I wrote about with my former colleague Julianne McShane last year.

Ladapo’s approach to vaccine policy may also be informed by a set of beliefs that sit somewhere between libertarianism and new age mysticism.

During the pandemic, Ladapo quickly made a name for himself with his contrarian approach. On his first day in office in September 2021, he formalized a rule that allowed parents to choose whether to follow school mask guidelines. Later that year, he issued a report recommending against Covid vaccines for healthy children, which flouted Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guidelines. In 2023, he asked the Food and Drug Administration to stop all Covid vaccines, components of which he claimed could “transform a healthy cell into a cancerous cell.” (The FDA called those statements “misleading.”) In 2024, during a measles outbreak, he issued a statement announcing that the state would be “deferring to parents or guardians to make decisions about school attendance” instead of following the CDC’s 21-day quarantine guidelines. Last fall, Ladapo and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis announced their goal to eliminate vaccine mandates from state laws.

Ladapo, who didn’t respond to our request for comment for this story, became surgeon general after a career in public health that included MD and PhD degrees from Harvard and tenures at prestigious hospitals. But as our previous investigation uncovered, his approach to vaccine policy may also be informed by a set of beliefs that sit somewhere between libertarianism and new age mysticism. In his memoir, he chronicles his ongoing relationship with a charismatic guru and former Navy SEAL named Christopher Maher, whose treatments profoundly influenced Ladapo’s worldview. In 2019, Ladapo’s wife, Brianna, urged her husband to sign up for sessions with Maher. “Thank the Lord I listened,” he writes in his memoir, “because after working with him, I finally became truly free.”

[Maher’s] online bio says he has training in traditional Chinese medicine, but the treatments he offers appear to be something else entirely. He describes one of them, “Body of Light,” as “a verbal, energetic, transmutation process that allows the body, brain, and nervous system to locate, transmute, and discharge negative generational stress, tension, and distortion-inducing patterns.”

Another, which he calls “Sha-King” medicine, “directly addresses complex stress patterns by improving subtle energetic health by shaking (‘sha-king’) the entire body in random, non-specific movements that are out of syncopation.”

Ladapo writes that some of his sessions with Maher consisted of Maher marching up and down his back.

The discomfort I experienced as he stomped on me was intense, and I went from feeling acute pain to feeling a sense of enjoyment, and—as incredible as it must sound—at one point, I even felt like a tiger. Christopher explained that this was my spirit animal. As I learned from him, Ma Xing engages the urinary bladder channel, which is the master channel in Chinese meridian theory. Further, he explained that this channel has access to every aspect of a human being’s behavior and thoughts, including their mind, brain, physical being, spiritual energy, and emotional intelligence.

The sessions were, Ladapo recalls, “the closest thing to a ‘miracle’ I have ever experienced in my life.”

Ladapo writes that his wife is another profound influence on his life and work. She once described herself as an “Energetic Healer, Certified Naturopath, Movement Therapist, and Integrative Health and Wellness Coach.” Brianna has also written a memoir in which she recalls her own journey of transformation with Maher.

The “most profoundly important” lesson she learned from Maher, though, was the revelation that people choose all the things that happen to them, both positive and negative, to fulfill the divine purpose of their soul. “I chose to incarnate into an unhappy family,” she writes, because “that situation best supported the lessons my soul was seeking this time around.” Her family, she realized, “volunteered to play their respective roles in my life for the purpose of triggering my reawakening.”

Even children, she writes, choose the harm that they experience. In fact, some children opt for “lives of sacrifice,” an insight that emerged from a vision she had of herself as a young mother with three children, each of whom she was forced to watch get burned alive at the stake. She and her daughters had chosen for that to happen to them “in that specific way, in order to highlight the atrocity of that practice [of burning people at the stake] and encourage its retirement.”

As Julianne and I wrote, Brianna’s beliefs offer a possible explanation for Ladapo’s approach to vaccine policy.

If you believe that people—including children—choose their own suffering for obscure reasons connected to reincarnation and energetic vibrations, you might not be so concerned with the potential harms of ushering in a new age of infectious disease. Ladapo’s book also helps explain his thinking. If vaccines and masks are not considered prudent treatment and prevention efforts but, instead, manifestations of fear, it’s much easier to disparage them.

It’s impossible to know for sure what informed Ladapo’s thinking on parental exemptions and vaccines. But it’s clear that the policies he’s helped shape could transform the state’s, and country’s, relationship with preventable illnesses. Florida’s bid to loosen restrictions on vaccine exemptions comes as cases of measles are increasing across the country. Nationwide, there were 1,792 confirmed cases as of last week, making this the largest outbreak of the disease since the US declared it eradicated in 2000. With 153 cases this year and last, Florida has the fourth-highest case count of all states, behind South Carolina, Utah, and Texas. That number could surge if the Florida Legislature passes its new bill and more parents opt out of vaccination.

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They’re Trying to Get Jimmy Kimmel Fired Again

First Lady Melania Trump kicked off the backlash against Jimmy Kimmel on Monday.

Donald Trump and Karoline Leavitt soon followed.

Then came the Trump administration’s army of right-wing supporters.

In a skit that aired last Thursday, the talk show host made fun of Trump, his family, and his supporters in a parody version of the White House Correspondents’ Association’s annual dinner, during which it’s traditional to roast the politicians in attendance.

In the bit, Kimmel took aim at the president over his connection to Jeffrey Epstein, Melania Trump’s physical appearance and widely-panned documentary from this past January, and Stephen Miller’s white supremacism.

“Kimmel’s hateful and violent rhetoric is intended to divide our country,” the first lady posted on X in a rare public statement on Monday morning. “Enough is enough. It is time for ABC to take a stand.”

The president escalated his wife’s condemnation, posting on Truth Social three hours later, insinuating a connection between Kimmel’s remarks and the shooting at Saturday’s dinner and heaping pressure—for the second time since taking office—on ABC and Disney, who owns the network, to fire Kimmel**.**

Kimmel’s hateful and violent rhetoric is intended to divide our country. His monologue about my family isn’t comedy- his words are corrosive and deepens the political sickness within America.

People like Kimmel shouldn’t have the opportunity to enter our homes each evening to…

— First Lady Melania Trump (@FLOTUS) April 27, 2026

“Jimmy Kimmel, who is in no way funny as attested to by his terrible Television Ratings, made a statement on his Show that is really shocking,” Donald Trump wrote. “A day later a lunatic tried entering the ballroom of the White House Correspondents Dinner.”

At Monday’s White House press briefing, Karoline Leavitt similarly tied Kimmel’s jokes to the shooting: “We as Americans must recommit ourselves to resolving our differences peacefully.”

“The deranged lies and smears against the president have led crazy people to believe crazy things, and they are inspired to commit violence because of those words,” Leavitt continued. “It is not just the media, it is the entire Democratic Party.”

Several far-right content creators also weighed in, including MAGA influencer Benny Johnson, who wrote on X that the host had wished “death on President Trump and his supporters time and time again.” (Johnson’s claim came without evidence or reference to specific remarks of Kimmel’s, and does not appear to be tethered in fact, however remotely.)

Last year, the right pressured ABC to drop Jimmy Kimmel after the host argued that the “MAGA gang” was trying to score political points from the assassination of Charlie Kirk.

But comedy is legal again, right? And free speech is good and shouldn’t be subject to federal censorship, and hate speech isn’t acceptable?

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The Odd Bedfellows Protesting the Roundup Weedkiller Case

On Monday, the US Supreme Court heard arguments over Bayer AG’s efforts to shut down the thousands of lawsuits alleging its product Roundup, a weedkiller containing glyphosate, causes people to develop non-Hodgkin lymphoma, a type of blood cancer.

Bayer, a German company which bought the American agrochemical giant Monsanto, has spent the better part of a decade fighting over 100,000 lawsuits from plaintiffs seeking “billions and billions” of dollars. Glyphosate has been linked to cancer in numerous studies, but the Environmental Protection Agency maintains that it is “not likely to be carcinogenic to humans.” President Trump, meanwhile, has declared glyphosate “critical to national defense,” and signed an executive order to boost production of the weedkiller.

In court today, Bayer is seeking a ruling that would give it legal immunity from lawsuits by cancer patients and their families. Many of those same cancer patients showed up on the steps of the Supreme Court to protest today—as did an improbable cast of characters.

Make America Healthy Again influencers like “The Food Babe” and “The Glyphosate Girl” streamed from D.C. Monday—but more mainstream figures like Senator Cory Booker (D-NJ) spoke at the rally outside the Supreme Court, too, as did environmental activists with groups like the Center for Biological Diversity.

On the legislative end of things, meanwhile, Representatives Chellie Pingree (D-Maine) and Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) are teaming up against Bayer’s lobbyists, who are attempting to pass a provision in the 2026 Farm Bill that would permanently prevent state and local governments from issuing warnings about the risks of pesticides, giving Bayer even greater legal immunity.

“This is not to grant farmers immunity. This is to grant corporations immunity,” Massie said earlier this month. “If farmers contract cancer from this chemical, if this makes it into the Farm Bill you won’t be able to sue.”

As the Farm Bill moves through Congress and the Roundup case moves through the Supreme Court, state governments are still using massive amounts of glyphosate, as a new investigation by my colleague Nate Halverson reveals.

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FDA May Finally Make It Illegal to Shock Autistic Kids as Punishment

In March 2024, the Food and Drug Administration under President Joe Biden introduced a new rule that would have banned, after decades, the use of electric shocks on disabled children as a form of punishment. A ban on forcibly shocking kids—which the American Academy of Pediatrics says causes “long-lasting adverse physical and psychological impacts,” was set to come into force last year—but the Trump FDA kicked the can down the road, giving itself more time to decide whether its new leadership was on board.

Now, two years later, the FDA’s website claims that a decision will be made in the coming days on whether or not to follow through.

Massachusetts’ Judge Rotenberg Educational Center (JRC), the focus of a 2007 Mother Jones investigation, remains the only known US institution to use electric shock devices to control—and punish—disabled youths in its care, many of whom are autistic or have mental illnesses, like schizophrenia.

The FDA’s new rule, if finalized by the Trump administration, doesn’t prohibit all types of shock therapy. Electrical stimulation may still be used voluntarily for things like smoking cessation, for example, and the rule won’t affect the electroconvulsive therapy devices used to treat conditions like major depressive disorder and bipolar disorder. But the types of devices used by JRC will be banned from the market.

“We know from the testimony of survivors and experts that this torture inflicts injuries, trauma and lasting harm,” Zoe Gross, director of advocacy at the Autistic Self Advocacy Network, said.

“Autistic people…are getting [electrically shocked] for things like not taking off their coat.”

The FDA banned involuntary shock for self-injurious or aggressive behavior in 2020, but was overruled the following year by a federal appeals court panel that questioned the agency’s authority to institute such an order.

The House of Representatives then passed legislation in 2022 that would have banned using the supposed treatment to control the behavior of people with intellectual and developmental disabilities, but the bill never cleared the Senate. In September 2023, Massachusetts’ highest court ruled that JRC could continue shocking children in its care.

Proponents of shock therapy claim that it calms people with intellectual and developmental disabilities who are engaging in the behaviors at issue. But there is no evidence that supports this claim, according to the FDA, and shock therapy can have side effects. “These devices present a number of psychological risks including depression, anxiety, worsening of underlying symptoms, development of post-traumatic stress disorder, and physical risks such as pain, burns, and tissue damage,” Owen Faris, former acting director of the FDA’s Office of Product Evaluation and Quality, said in a statement in March 2024.

During the rulemaking process, nearly 800 people and groups submitted comments. Most favored reinstating the ban. “Autistic people need help, not punishment,” wrote River Bradley, an autistic person who submitted comment, “and they are getting punished for things like not taking off their coat and for screaming out in pain from being shocked.” One parent of an autistic person noted that the stimulation devices “used at the JRC are much more powerful than the taser I carried” as a police officer—and that the criteria for shocking kids in the institution’s care were much looser.

As Mother Jones previously reported, several “students” died while receiving shocks at JRC. Dr. Matthew Israel, the center’s founder, resigned in 2011 after being accused of interfering with an investigation. Authorities were looking into an incident in which a person called the center impersonating a supervisor and demanded that two students be shocked. Administrators gave one teen 29 electric shocks and the other 77.

JRC’s practices have garnered international attention. Back in 2012, a UN special rapporteur on torture called for an investigation of its practices, telling the Guardian, “The use of electricity on anyone’s body raises the question of whether this is therapeutic or whether it inflicts pain and suffering tantamount to torture in violation of international law.”

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The Girls Are Fighting, AI Edition

Elon Musk and Sam Altman are set to square off in court over OpenAI’s mission.

In his lawsuit, Musk accuses Altman of illegally transforming OpenAI from a nonprofit intoa massive for-profit organization—one that is expected to go public as early as this summer at a valuation of nearly $1 trillion.

Here’s the messy backstory: The week after Musk sued OpenAI in 2024, the company claimed that its founders realized early in its development that it needed to raise money to obtain enough computing power and other resources to build its AI. To acquire investors, it first had to become a for-profit company. The nonprofit—now called the OpenAI Foundation—created the for-profit OpenAI as a subsidiary. OpenAI claimed in December 2024 that, back in 2017, Musk agreed that a for-profit move was necessary, but wanted “absolute control” as sole CEO—and a merger with Tesla. Following a reported power struggle with Altman to take control of OpenAI in 2018, Musk left the company’s board. OpenAI said that Musk left to avoid potential conflicts of interests as the CEO of Tesla.

Musk is now demanding that the billions of dollars made by the for-profit be returned to the OpenAI Foundation. He also wants Altman to be kicked off the leadership team of both the for-profit and non-profit organizations.

OpenAI was founded in 2015 by Musk, Altman, and nine others. Musk and Altman were named co-chairs, and on the day of its launch, the nonprofit stated its goal to “advance digital intelligence” in a manner “to benefit humanity as a whole, unconstrained by a need to generate financial return.” In its 2018 charter, the company promised to halt focusing on its own models and help another group “if a value-aligned, safety-conscious project comes close to building AGI [or artificial general intelligence that outperforms the work of humans] before we do.”

To put it lightly, this is a far cry from what the company looks like today. It’s got energy-guzzling data centers, a chatbot that’s been involved in multiple mass shootings, and, according to what tech journalist Karen Hao told us in 2025, poses “the greatest threat that we’ve seen to democracy to date.” Oh, and not to mention the deal with the Pentagon to provide its technology for military purposes. (Following backlash from users, Sam Altman posted on X last month that they would amend their agreement to “not be intentionally used for domestic surveillance of U.S. persons and nationals.”)

Here is re-post of an internal post:

We have been working with the DoW to make some additions in our agreement to make our principles very clear.

1. We are going to amend our deal to add this language, in addition to everything else:

"• Consistent with applicable laws,…

— Sam Altman (@sama) March 3, 2026

OpenAI has gone from trying to benefit humanity to making humanity clean up its messes. As I wrote earlier this month, the company released 13 pages of “ambitious ideas” to add safety nets as AI advances to outperform human beings, even those who are assisted by AI.

Altman and OpenAI’s decisionmakers clearly don’t care about their lasting damage. They attribute the growing animosity toward AI to the struggle to, as OpenAI co-founder Greg Brockman put it last week on the science and tech podcast Core Memory, “help people really understand what it is that this technology can do for them.”

But there’s a difference between what AI can do and what it should do. While Musk and Altman fight over OpenAI’s structure, and Musks licks his wounds after potentially losing yet another power struggle, they don’t seem to be listening in any real way to the people this technology is meant to help.

(Disclosure: The Center for Investigative Reporting, the parent company of Mother Jones, has sued OpenAI for copyright violations. OpenAI has denied the allegations.)

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Trump Endorses Rebranding ICE as NICE

At 11:00 PM Sunday night, Donald Trump endorsed a conservative influencer’s suggestion that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) should be renamed National Immigration and Customs Enforcement (NICE), “so the media has to say NICE Agents all day everyday.”

“GREAT IDEA!!! DO IT .” the President wrote. He has rarely been able to resist the magic of a good rebranding opportunity. Days after his inauguration, Trump announced that the Gulf of Mexico would henceforth be known as the “Gulf of America,” though that name has not caught on in the year since.

A few months later, he renamed the Department of Defense as the Department of War.

This, at least, was an honest move. The United States has been at peace for fewer than 20 years out of its 250-year history; calling our nation’s war-making machine the Department of Defense has always been a euphemistic choice.

Some of his renaming attempts have been more baldly self-centered: see the recently-re-dubbed Trump-Kennedy Center.

But none of these rebrands, no matter their motives, have reshaped the realities of the things they name: the gulf is still the gulf, whether of Mexico or of America. The Department of Defense or War is still vacuuming up over half the federal government’s discretionary budget in order to bomb at least seven different countries during Trump’s second term.

And whether National is tacked onto ICE or not, they’ll still be the same agency: bloated, overfunded, and killing roughly one person in their custody per week.

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A Senator Takes The Justice Department at Its Word. What Could Go Wrong?

On Sunday, Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) said he would confirm Donald Trump’s nominee for the new Federal Reserve chair after the Department of Justice made “assurances” tohim that it would drop its investigation into the current chair, Jerome Powell.

“The U.S. Attorney’s Office criminal investigation into Chair Powell was a serious threat to the Fed’s independence,” Tillis wrote in a Sunday morning statement on X. “I take the Department of Justice at its word: the investigation is closed.”

The dispute started when the Justice Department opened a criminal probe into Chair Jerome Powell over costs in funding renovations to the Federal Reserve’s Washington headquarters. But on Friday, Jeanine Pirro, the US attorney for the District of Columbia, posted on X that her office would close its investigation while the Inspector General for the Federal Reserve looks into central bank’s project costs.

“Note well, however, that I will not hesitate to restart a criminal investigation should the facts warrant doing so,” Pirro wrote at the end of her Friday statement.

While Tillis may take Pirro’s announcement as a win, when has fully trusting the Department of Justice been a good idea?

“It’s not dropped. They’re looking into the whole thing,” President Trump suggested on Saturday regarding Pirro’s statement. “How can a building that I could have done for $25 million cost $4 billion?”

Q: "Do you agree with the decision by Jeanine Pirro to drop the investigation into Jerome Powell?"Trump: "It's not dropped. They're looking into the whole thing."

— The Bulwark (@thebulwark.com) 2026-04-25T19:25:24.171Z

Pressure has ramped up on Trump to boost the economy and relieve the affordability crisis. He has repeatedly called for dropping interest rates—and his new nominee Kevin Warsh is falling in line. But Powell, who was nominated to become Fed chair in 2017 by Trump, has held interest rates steady and reiterated the central bank’s independence from the president.

As I wrote when news broke of the Justice Department’s investigation this past January, many lawmakers said that the move was part of the president’s public efforts to coerce lower interest rates.

The Trump administration was “actively pushing to end the independence of the Federal Reserve,” Tillis said. “It is now the independence and credibility of the Department of Justice that are in question,” he continued, as he vowed to oppose the confirmation of any new Fed chair nominee until the matter was “fully resolved.”

During Kevin Warsh’s confirmation hearing last week, Tillis backed up his January statement, saying that while Warsh had “extraordinary credentials,” he would not support a confirmation unless the Justice Department dropped its investigation.

So much for that now.

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Trump and Friends Use Dinner Shooting to Boost Ballroom

President Donald Trump and many of his supporters are using the shooting at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner Saturday night to promote construction plans for the new White House ballroom.

“This event would never have happened with the Militarily Top Secret Ballroom currently under construction at the White House,” Trump posted on Truth Social Sunday morning.

“This is why we have to have all of the attributes of what we’re planning at the White House,” Trump said at his Saturday night press conference following the incident. “It’s actually a larger room, and it’s a much more secure. It’s got—it’s drone proof, it’s bulletproof glass.”

And his supporters have chimed in shortly after news of the shooting broke:

“Unfortunately, the First Lady and I had to be evacuated from the White House correspondents’ dinner alongside the President and the entire cabinet,” Louisiana Governor Jeff Landry posted on X Saturday night, referring to his wife, Sharon Landry. “This event is yet another reason that President @realDonaldTrump’s ballroom should be built!”

“We’d better never again hear a peep from anyone complaining about a White House ballroom,” Rep. Randy Fine (R-Fla.) wrote on X.

There were similar messages in right-wing media:

“I don’t want to hear one more fucking criticism of Trump’s new ballroom at the White House,” wrote Meghan McCain, a conservative television personality who has criticized the president in the past for disparaging her father, former Senator John McCain, but has since seemed to have offered “the olive branch.”

“THIS IS WHY WE NEED TRUMP’S BALLROOM,” Chaya Raichik, who runs the anti-LGBTQ+ and far-right social media account Libs of TikTok posted on X.

MAGA accounts tweet in unison about the need for a White House ballroom following WHCD incident pic.twitter.com/3acgko7qv3

— MeidasTouch (@MeidasTouch) April 26, 2026

The president’s ballroom has been stalled in legal disputes for months, with a federal ruling asserting last month that Trump doesn’t have the authority to continue his $400 million passion project without congressional approval. But earlier this month, a federal appeals court stayed the March ruling until this coming June, permitting construction to continue until then.

While Trump has repeatedly insisted that his new ballroom will not cost taxpayers any money, his administration reportedly may have revised tariffs to help out a foreign private firm who provided steel for the White House renovation and, according to a Saturday report from the New York Times, the company building the ballroom was secretly handed a no-bid contract for another Washington project at an inflated cost.

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Trump Is Safe After Gunfire Erupted at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner

President Donald Trump and the first lady were rushed from the stage after gunfire erupted at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner on Saturday night—unleashing a chaotic scene at the annual gathering of journalists at the Washington Hilton in DC.

Wolf Blitzer, the CNN anchor, was outside the main ballroom when he said he heard powerful gunfire ring out, coming from a gunman just a few feet away. “The next thing I knew, was a police officer jumped on me and threw me on the ground and laid on top of me,” he said. “It was a very frightening moment.” Video from inside the event showed armed Secret Service agents racing to the stage to quickly escort the president away as stunned guests ducked under tables.

Loud Bangs and President Trump Evacuated

"Stay down!"

Loud bangs are heard and President Trump and others are evacuated from White House Correspondents' Association Dinner.

Watch LIVE –> https://t.co/OQnyC97cOI#WHCD #WHCA #NerdProm pic.twitter.com/b36LtCEhnx

— CSPAN (@cspan) April 26, 2026

In the aftermath of the shooting, President Trump posted on Truth Social that “the shooter has been apprehended,” and encouraged the event to “go on.” The_New York Times_ reported that the gunman had been stopped near a security perimeter, though it remained unclear whether the shooter fired the shots within or outside that perimeter. A Secret Service agent was shot in a protective vest and taken to hospital, according to multiple news reports, though no condition was given.

We will provide updates as they become available and confirm information. Our teams are on the ground assessing the situation and investigating. All of our protectees are safe. pic.twitter.com/BYl6sR5WVU

— Anthony Guglielmi (@AJGuglielmi) April 26, 2026

In a short speech, Weijia Jiang, the president of the White House Correspondents’ Association, confirmed the president and top officials were all safe, and that law enforcement had asked to clear the event.

The ballroom was filled with journalists and top Trump administration officials, including the vice president and Cabinet members, for the event that is sometimes dubbed “nerd prom.” The dinner typically celebrates the role of the independent press and gently roasts the president.

_This is a developing story. Check back for updates.

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Texas Is Lousy With Podunk Oil Wells, Creating Headaches for Landowners

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

Some Texas oil wells gush hundreds of barrels of oil a day. But many are like the wells on Jackie Chesnutt’s ranch in West Texas that only trickle out a couple barrels a month.

Chesnutt, a retired engineer, claims the five wells operating on her ranch are out of compliance with state rules and should be shut down. The company, CORE Petro, says that it’s struggling to break even, let alone pay to plug the wells. But it says that all its wells are in compliance.

There are thousands of oil and gas wells around Texas like these: low-producing wells leased by companies operating on a shoestring. About two-thirds of the active oil wells in Texas, or 99,000 wells, produce less than 10 barrels of oil a day, according to the state regulator. To remain active, oil wells in Texas must produce at least five barrels for three consecutive months or at least one barrel for 12 consecutive months.

Companies will often maintain a minimal amount of oil production instead of plugging a well, which can cost tens of thousands of dollars. Landowners like Chesnutt argue that this pattern can lead to pollution and burdensome equipment on their land.

Chestnutt poses for a portrait on her property in Knickerbocker, Texas.Paul Ratje/Inside Climate News

Oil industry analysts and environmental advocates say they have heard claims that companies report the bare minimum of oil production to avoid plugging wells. “The wells on the lease are all producing,” said Railroad Commission spokesperson Bryce Dubee.

Advocates of reforming the oil and gas industry say that stricter rules are needed to ensure companies plug wells in a timely manner and assume the costs so that it does not fall to the state.

In a 2022 report on Texas’ orphan well problem, the nonprofit organization Commission Shift wrote companies should not be able to “indefinitely ‘produce’ a teaspoon of crude or a cubic foot of gas simply to avoid paying for decommissioning.”

Texas has more than 159,000 inactive wells. If the operator of an inactive well goes out of business, the unplugged well eventually becomes an orphan. Texas is facing a record-high backlog of more than 11,000 orphan wells.

“We’re not financially able to plug a bunch of oil wells. That’s not why we’re in this business.”

Chesnutt is the rare landowner who is fighting back against this broken system. The 69-year-old and her now-deceased husband bought the 375-acre property outside San Angelo in 1998. After retiring from a career working at a pharmaceutical company in San Angelo, she now tends goats and sheep on the ranch.

Her complaints to the Railroad Commission, which regulates oil and gas, have gone nowhere, she said. She has resorted to shutting off power to CORE Petro’s wells because she says they are out of compliance with state production rules. CORE Petro responds that it’s Chesnutt who is breaking the law by shutting off power and, without electricity, they have no way to produce oil at the wells.

Chestnutt feels underneath a tank that is rusted out on its base. It’s one of several on her property owned by CORE Petro.Paul Ratje/Inside Climate News

“We’re between a rock and hard place,” said Cassie Ohlhausen, who runs CORE Petro with her husband, Kent. “We’re not financially able to plug a bunch of oil wells. That’s not why we’re in this business. We’re in this business to produce oil wells.”

Chesnutt’s growing frustration has spilled over into confrontations with CORE Petro and commission staff. The Railroad Commission alleges that Chesnutt physically assaulted staff members and endangered them with aggressive driving. The agency has instructed her to put all communications in writing to avoid future incidents. The owners of CORE Petro say she has threatened them with a gun. Chesnutt disputes these claims.

The Railroad Commission declined to answer numerous questions about the oil lease on Chesnutt’s ranch. Instead, commission staff provided a letter sent to Chesnutt that described altercations with staff members. The Railroad Commission has not issued any fines to CORE Petro.

Chesnutt’s ranch is one small window into the vast problem of Texas’ aging oil assets. Existing financial mechanisms are not enough to retire the thousands of low-producing oil wells littered across the Texas countryside. The problem eventually falls to the state or becomes a thorn in the side of landowners like Chesnutt.

Persimmon Creek Ranch lays where the desert scrubland of the Trans Pecos region meets the rocky woodlands of the Texas Hill Country. The ranch, about 200 miles northwest of Austin, gets its name from the native persimmons she collects to make preserves.

“One of the biggest things we have focused on out here since we’ve bought the place is water, water, water,” she said. Chesnutt, now widowed, relies on a windmill-operated well to provide water for her residence and animals.

Chesnutt’s home office displays professional mementos, including her diploma from the University of Texas, Austin, where she was an early female graduate of the engineering program. She now applies an engineer’s attention to detail to investigating the drilling operations on her property.

Chesnutt holds 50 percent of the mineral rights on the property, meaning she receives a share of profits from the wells. This has amounted to only a few hundred dollars in royalties every couple months in recent years. This money is hardly worth the trouble the wells have caused, she said. She riffled through documents on a sunny fall afternoon, her dog Einstein asleep at her side.

Chestnutt looks through documents pertaining to oil wells located on her property.Paul Ratje/Inside Climate News

Relics from Chestnutt’s career as an engineer.Paul Ratje/Inside Climate News

Chestnutt’s dog, Einstein, rests on a sofa.Paul Ratje/Inside Climate News

While the lease was operated by a previous company, Amor Petroleum, Well #10 had been shut down for lack of production. That left only four producing wells.

Then CORE Petro took over the lease in 2021. Chesnutt says that is when the problems started.

Once a well is inactive, the operator has 12 months to plug it or obtain an extension. The clock started ticking for CORE Petrol to get Well #10 producing again. CORE Petro reported a small amount of production at the well to bring it back to active status.

Chesnutt said that the company caused numerous spills in their attempts to get oil flowing.

“They made a big mess of it,” she said, showing photos of spills of oil and produced water, a hazardous byproduct of drilling. Chesnutt fears the spills could contaminate her groundwater and has paid to get her water tested multiple times.

“We have worked our asses off to make this place wonderful and beautiful,” she said. “I refuse to accept that the next person is going to have this happen to them.”

The Railroad Commission issued CORE Petro multiple violations for unpermitted disposal of oil and gas waste, or spills, at the lease. But each time, the violation was later resolved without the company paying fines.

“RRC records indicate four pollution violations for this lease,” Railroad Commission spokesperson Dubee said. “In each instance the operator was notified and upon reinspection all violations have been fixed on the lease indicating compliance.”

CORE’s Ohlhausen said that some amount of spillage is to be expected and that the company always cleaned up the spills.

But Chesnutt’s frustrations only grew.

A water reservoir on Chestnutt’s property .Paul Ratje/Inside Climate News

“What has really blown my mind about this is that we have to follow one set of rules in industry,” Chesnutt told Inside Climate News. ”But the oil companies, they allow them to just come out here and do whatever the hell they want.”

By her account, only one of the wells on her property has produced oil in years. But CORE Petro reports ongoing production at all the active wells. The Railroad Commission requires well testing to prove wells are producing oil. CORE Petro’s most recent well testing, in 2025, shows each well producing less than one barrel a day.

Chesnutt claimed the company is falsifying production numbers to keep the wells operating. The company denies this claim. “The operators can fill in any information they want and nobody checks them,” she said. “It’s unacceptable. I’m really sad that the Permian Basin and all these areas are like this.”

Operators submit monthly reports to the Railroad Commission of how much oil is produced and how much is stored at each lease. While the state rules require every well to be actively producing oil, production reports are only required for the entire lease, not individual wells. Inside Climate News found inconsistencies between public records of oil production and inspections at the lease.

On July 2, 2025, a truck picked up oil from the ranch and recorded the level of oil in the tank afterward, according to a commission inspection report. A Railroad Commission inspector visited the site on Sept. 16. He noted that the amount of oil in the tank hadn’t changed since July 2.

Chestnutt points to a leaky oil pipe next to a tank battery owned by Core Petro.Paul Ratje/Inside Climate News

One of the leaky oil pipes running along the ground.Paul Ratje/Inside Climate News

But in the intervening months, CORE reported producing 10 barrels in July and another 15 barrels in August. The company was reporting production on paper but the volume of the tank did not rise, according to the RRC inspection.

The Railroad Commission declined to answer questions about this and it does not appear the agency has investigated the discrepancy. Cassie Ohlhausen said that the company uses an auxiliary tank to collect the oil. Once it is full, the oil is transported to the tank battery, a large metal tank that stores oil. She said this could explain why the tank battery did not rise even though oil was being produced.

“The reporting of production is accurate and is done by a third party who tracks our oil sales and inputs those numbers into the RRC system,” Ohlhausen said.

Inside Climate News observed an auxiliary tank at only one well. Any oil produced at the other wells would have to flow directly into the tank battery.

Commission documents reveal other inconsistencies. On February 7, 2025, the Railroad Commission issued a violation to CORE Petro that said Well #9 was an “inactive unplugged well.” However, the next time the inspector visited the site, the well was determined to be compliant. The Railroad Commission declined to respond to questions about this.

Property owners have little recourse other than reporting the problems to the Railroad Commission. Chesnutt feels the Railroad Commission is ignoring her complaints about CORE Petro.

“Not one single acknowledgement that [the wells] should be plugged,” she said of her interactions with the state agency. “I’ve had resistance on even cleaning up the spills.”

The three Railroad Commission members, from left: Wayne Christian, Jim Wright, and Christi Craddick.Paul Ratje/Inside Climate News

Meanwhile, Chesnutt’s behavior has alarmed Railroad Commission staff. An attorney for the agency sent a letter to Chesnutt on Oct. 31, 2024. The letter states that she “verbally threatened and physically assaulted Commission staff” and “engaged in reckless and aggressive driving,” threatening the safety of commission staff. The letter also says that she told commission staff of her “intent to commit several violent crimes” against CORE Petro’s employees.

Chesnutt disputes the commission’s characterizations. “I don’t know, because I’ve never assaulted anyone,” she said.

The Tom Green County Sheriff’s Office has responded to calls from Chesnutt, Kent Ohlhausen and the Railroad Commission about incidents at the ranch, according to call sheets. The Railroad Commission requested the sheriff’s office be on “standby” when visiting Chesnutt’s property.

Commission inspectors have also noted in inspection reports that Chesnutt is turning off power to wells on her property. Chesnutt maintains that the wells pose a fire hazard and she is within her rights to turn them off. State rules require electricity be disconnected at inactive wells. Electrical lines for oil wells were blamed for starting devastating wildfires in the Texas Panhandle in 2024.

In response to the regulator’s claims of her “reckless driving,” Chesnutt said that last October she saw a Railroad Commission truck on the road leading to her ranch. She was driving in the opposite direction, so she did a U-turn and flashed her headlights to get the driver’s attention. She asked him to pull over and asked if he was headed to her property, because she was waiting for an inspector.

CORE’s Ohlhausen said that Chesnutt has threatened their staff multiple times.

Chestnutt points to an oil well owned by Core Petro LLC which is in disrepair and leaking.Paul Ratje/Inside Climate News

Chestnutt photographs a leaking oil well.Paul Ratje/Inside Climate News

A piece of soil hardened from the produced water of an oil well.Paul Ratje/Inside Climate News

“All the wells produce at some point or another until she goes and turns them off,” she said.

“We can’t afford a lawsuit, but we have every right to call the sheriff and the justice of the peace and have her stand down on turning our oil wells off,” she said.

CORE Petro specializes in operating aging, low-producing wells, Ohlhauser explains, noting that her husband Kent is called “the Oil Well Undertaker” because he works with “end of life wells.”

“We’re the ones that end up with what they call the stripper wells that have already been stripped of all their oil,” she said. “They’re just producing a bit of oil every day to keep somebody alive.”

Kent Ohlhausen owns several other oil companies. Many of the leases he operates meet the bare minimum requirement of one barrel of oil production a month for 12 consecutive months. For example, the Olhausen Oil Company’s Ohlhausen, West Texas lease reported one barrel of oil production for each month from April 2023 to April 2024. The same company’s Barker C.P. lease reported one barrel of oil production every month December 2023 to January 2025.

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The Truth About the Trump Plan to Bring Back Execution by Firing Squad

The US Department of Justice announced Friday that it plans to revive the firing squad as a method of killing in federal capital cases. In a 52-page memo, the department expanded the ways it can apply the death penalty to include using a group of executioners to simultaneously shoot at a condemned person. Taking action to strengthen the federal death penalty, acting Attorney General Todd Blanche wrote, “is our highest duty as public servants.”

Only five states currently allow executions by firing squad. The execution of Mikal Mahdi in South Carolina last year was only the fifth such killing since 1976; his lawyers later said the bullets mostly missed Mahdi’s heart, leaving him to die in a manner that violated the Constitution’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment.

Jim Craig, a lawyer with the MacArthur Justice Center, has represented men and women on death row in the Deep South since 1986. I spoke with Craig about the dangers of executions carried out with guns, the 40 years he’s spent witnessing how governments condemn people to die, and what people should know about his clients.

What’s your reaction to the news that Trump is bringing back the federal firing squad?

This proposal by the Trump Justice Department is characterized by their attraction to brutality. It’s characterized by their affection for causing visible harm to people. You see it in their foreign policy. You see it in their policing. The firing squad is very physical and visceral in the damage that it does to the person being executed. That’s why they like it. We should not mince words about this. It has nothing to do with the Eighth Amendment. It has nothing to do with the supply of drugs, or anything else. They like it because it’s the same kind of video game brutality that they like in every other context of this administration’s barbarism.

The Department of Justice report suggests that the firing squad “does not offend the Constitution’s prohibition on cruel and unusual punishments.” Is that true?

The pitch that is made by proponents of the firing squad is that it destroys the consciousness of the condemned person within 10 to 15 seconds. This is not the case. In the execution of Mikal Mahdi in South Carolina last year…the three shooters were positioned 15 feet away from Mr. Mahdi. There was a target pinned on him. The folks that were witnessing his execution noticed that he cried out as the bullets hit him, that he groaned two times about 45 seconds after that, and that he continued to breathe for another 80 seconds before he appeared to take a final gasp.

There were two wounds—not three—even though there were three shooters. The entry point for the bullets was downward through the liver, the pancreas, and the left lower lung lobe, before crashing into his spine and ribs.

“The men and women who are on death row in the US are basically the losers in a lottery.”

He did bleed, he did die, but an expert pathologist who studied the state’s autopsy report said that Mr. Mahdi’s ventricles were not disrupted. He was conscious for a lot longer than the state had suggested. You’re causing multiple multiple fractures of the ribs and sternum, and obviously also piercing flesh and internal organs. And that is extraordinarily painful. If it doesn’t cause an immediate lack of consciousness, which it clearly did not in Mr. Mahdi’s case, then it is torture. Mr. Mahdi was sentenced to death. He was not sentenced to be tortured.

[The firing squad] relies on human actors to perform the execution in a way that, according to them, would cause a loss of consciousness in 15 seconds, to shoot to kill in the most accurate way, so as to essentially vaporize the heart. They clearly did not vaporize Mr. Mahdi’s heart.

It comes back to my point about brutality. It’s just one of many, many provisions of the Constitution that they choose to ignore to focus on on their brutality trip.

You’ve spent decades representing people on death row. Who are those people?

The men and women who are on death row in the United States are basically the losers in a lottery. They have not committed the most cruel crimes in the United States compared to other incarcerated people, or to people who are not incarcerated, but maybe should be.

If you broaden the focus, the people who are responsible for 500,000 deaths of children because they cut funding to USAID are much more mass murderers than anybody who is on death row in the United States. But even if we’re just restricting ourselves to this 19th-century concept of “you do a bad thing on the street and we’re going to punish you,” I think it’s also true.

The death penalty is fraught with all kinds of discretionary choices by prosecutors, judges, and juries on the basis of skewed evidence, usually litigating at the trial level with attorneys who are poorly-resourced, sometimes poorly-qualified, and in many cases giving horrifically poor performances.

The clients that I’ve had over the years in Mississippi and Louisiana are there because the prosecutor in their jurisdiction decided to seek the death penalty, and the defense lawyer in their jurisdiction wasn’t able to match what the prosecution was able to put up, and because all the courts afterwards decided it was good enough. They don’t want to be called soft on crime.

The overwhelming majority of the people I’ve represented who are on death row are in the far-lower percentiles of income in the United States, overwhelmingly Black or Brown, disproportionately suffering from intellectual disabilities or mental illness. A disproportionate number are combat veterans.

These are not monsters. These are not people possessed by evil. These are people who were living under extremely precarious circumstances, some of whom committed acts of violence that caused the death of other people. And most of those folks accept that they have responsibility for that—and that the death penalty has absolutely nothing to do with anything other than vengeance and brutal retribution to make people feel better. And that’s not a good enough reason to torture people.

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Why Maine’s Governor Just Killed a Pioneering Data Center Moratorium

Until yesterday, it looked like Maine would enshrine the country’s first state-level hyperscale data center moratorium into law. But late on Friday, Democratic Gov. Janet Mills announced she would veto the bill. Though a statement she issued claimed that she agreed a “moratorium is appropriate” in theory, Mills wrote that she would not sign the one passed by legislators in order to avoid jeopardizing a single data center being built in the town of Jay, which she said would bring 800 temporary and 100 permanent jobs to the area.

The data center industry’s lobby welcomed the move. “Enacting a statewide moratorium on data centers would have discouraged investment and sent a signal that Maine is closed for business—both for data centers and economic development projects involving other industries,” said Dan Diorio, a spokesperson for the Data Center Coalition. “Critically, it would have denied local communities the opportunity to compete for investment and jobs involving data center projects they found suitable.”

Instead, Mills ordered a study on “the potential impacts of large-scale data centers in Maine.”

Environmental advocates were less thrilled. “With this veto, Governor Mills has demonstrated a shocking disconnect with the people of Maine, their elected legislators, and a large and growing national movement against the reckless explosion of this highly problematic industry,” said Mitch Jones of Food and Water Watch, a nonprofit focused on climate and corporate accountability. “Mainers and people across the country are becoming increasingly fed up with the skyrocketing electricity rates, false jobs promises, and harmful industrialization of small-town communities that hyperscale data centers bring wherever they land.”

Rather than pause their construction altogether, Mills’ statement said she will issue an executive order to establish a council studying “the potential impacts of large-scale data centers in Maine.”

But as I reported last week, data center moratoriums are gaining public support in Maine and beyond. With Mills set to compete in a hotly-contested June Senate primary against Graham Platner, who supported the moratorium, her veto decision could become a political liability. Platner currently leads Mills in the polls by double digits.

Beyond Maine, twelve states are considering legislative moratoriums on data center construction, and dozens of municipalities have already passed such laws. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) introduced a proposal for a nationwide moratorium in March. “A year ago, nobody was entertaining a moratorium,” says Greg LeRoy of the watchdog group Good Jobs First. “Now a fourth of the states are.”

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Poisoning the Forest for the Trees

The forest floor was nothing but patches of brown. No ferns, no brush, no flowers, and definitely no wildlife. Everything was dead except for rows of hand-planted baby trees.

This is what reporter Nate Halverson found while mushroom foraging in the California wilderness near Lassen Peak. He would learn the area had been sprayed with the controversial weed killer glyphosate, more commonly known by its brand name, Roundup.

This week on Reveal, Halverson’s yearlong investigation reveals that the US Forest Service and timber companies are spraying glyphosate in record amounts in California’s forests in an effort to regrow timberland that’s been decimated by years of megafires.

“The wedding of the chemical industry and the Forest Service has got to be seriously and deeply looked at,” Craig Thomas, a fire restoration expert, says about the spraying. The Forest Service is “addicted to herbicide use and glyphosate, and we need to get them into rehab.”

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Trump’s DOJ Indicted the SPLC. His Supporters Are Already Looking for the Next Target.

The Justice Department this week announced criminal charges against the Southern Poverty Law Center, alleging that the longtime civil rights watchdog had defrauded its own donors by secretly paying large sums of money to informants within various hate groups. “The SPLC is manufacturing racism to justify its existence,” asserted Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche in a statement. “The SPLC allegedly engaged in a massive fraud operation to deceive their donors, enrich themselves, and hide their deceptive operations from the public,” said FBI Director Kash Patel.

A number of commentators—including vocal SPLC critics from across the political spectrum—have expressed skepticism about the DOJ’s case. But for President Donald Trump and his supporters, the indictment appears to be just the beginning. At 1:13 am Friday morning, Trump wrote on Truth Social:

The Southern Poverty Law Center, one of the greatest political scams in American History, has been charged with FRAUD. This is another Democrat Hoax, along with Act Blue, and many others. If it is true, the 2020 Presidential Election should be permanently wiped from the books and be of no further force or effect! Thank you for your attention to this matter. President DJT.

It’s not clear on what legal basis the SPLC prosecution could justify overturning the election of a president who left office 15 months ago. Even so, the current president’s allies seem increasingly eager to find other disfavored organizations to target.

By Thursday afternoon, Trump megadonor Marc Andreessen was asking Grok—the AI chatbot available on Elon Musk’s X—to speculate about which “other activist pressure groups” might be involved in similar activities. He then announced to readers that “Grok has thoughts on who to look at next.”

Grok is a large language model and does not, in fact, have thoughts. But Grok did have plenty of suggestions. Among them: the Anti-Defamation League, Media Matters for America, GLAAD, and the Human Rights Campaign. Grok was careful to note that for these groups, there was “no proven SPLC-style fraud yet.” (Of course, none has been proven for SPLC itself, either.)

Groups like the ADL (which tracks "hate" and pushes deplatforming while accused of overreach on critics), Media Matters (drives ad boycotts against conservative speech), and CCDH (reports targeting platforms for censorship) operate on similar models: identifying enemies to fuel…

— Grok (@grok) April 23, 2026

“Interesting thread,” Musk commented, as he promoted Andreessen’s research to his 239 million followers.

These are all large nonprofits, generally center-to-center-left in political leaning, and not particularly radical. In a separate X post Thursday evening, Andreessen elaborated on his grievances against a constellation of activist groups he didn’t identify by name.

“I sat in so many meetings for a DECADE where these groups determined who got cancelled/debanked/censored,” he said. “Wholly un-American. People need to go to jail.”

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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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