A Right-Wing Court Just Moved to Choke Off Abortion by Mail

A federal appeals court packed with conservatives has handed abortion opponents a major victory against the US Food and Drug Administration, effectively reinstating an in-person dispensing requirement for the abortion medication mifepristone and likely shutting down telemedicine providers from prescribing the abortion pill across the US.

In a 3-0 order issued Friday afternoon, the Fifth US Circuit Court of Appeals granted Louisiana’s request for an injunction against FDA rule changes from 2023 that have allowed blue-state telehealth providers to send mifepristone to thousands of patients every month in states where abortion is banned. At least temporarily, the ruling could severely disrupt the availability of mifepristone nationwide. The ruling, however, does not affect misoprostol, the second medication used with mifepristone to terminate pregnancies—and a powerful abortion drug on its own. Nonetheless, the ban will have the greatest impact on women in the dozen or so states—many in the South—where lawmakers and attorneys general have sought to end access completely.

The 2023 telemedicine rule change “injures Louisiana by undermining its laws protecting unborn human life and also by causing it to spend Medicaid funds on emergency care for women harmed by mifepristone,” Judge Stuart Kyle Duncan wrote for the court. “Both injuries are irreparable.”

“Every abortion facilitated by FDA’s action cancels Louisiana’s ban on medical abortions and undermines its policy that ‘every unborn child is a human being from the moment of conception and is, therefore, a legal person,'” Duncan wrote. He was appointed to the Fifth Circuit by President Donald Trump in 2017.

“Telehealth has been the last bridge to care for many seeking abortion, which is precisely why Louisiana officials want it banned,” said Nancy Northup, president and CEO of the Center for Reproductive Rights. “This isn’t about science—it’s about making abortion as difficult, expensive, and unreachable as possible. Telehealth has transformed healthcare. Selectively stripping that away from abortion patients is a political blockade.”

Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill filed her lawsuit last fall, arguing that the Biden administration’s decision to drop the in-person dispensing rule was “arbitrary” and “capricious,” and that abortion pills are too risky to prescribe remotely, even though scores of studies around the globe have proven otherwise. She also claimed the rule change was “avowedly political”—that is, it explicitly intended to get around the Supreme Court’s decision in the 2022 Dobbs decision overturning Roe v. Wade, and interfered with Louisiana’s right to regulate abortion as it sees fit.

In April, US District Judge David Joseph—also a Trump appointee—put the lawsuit on hold pending the FDA’s own review of mifepristone’s safety, which has been underway since last fall. Even though the Trump administration has made clear its own concerns about the rules changes, it has argued that rolling back the Biden rules while the review is ongoing amounts to “judicial intervention” in the agency’s long-established drug review process. It added that an injunction “may prove as unnecessary as it is disruptive, if FDA ultimately decides that the in-person dispensing requirement must be restored.”

But abortion opponents saw that study as a delaying tactic by a White House worried about the impact that cutting off access to abortion pills might have on the GOP’s already grim prospects in the midterm elections. Murrill quickly appealed to the Fifth Circuit, which encompasses Louisiana, Texas, and Mississippi—one of the most conservative federal jurisdictions in the country.

It is the same appeals court that ruled in a similar but separate lawsuit three years ago that the FDA exceeded its authority when it relaxed an assortment of restrictions on mifepristone during the Obama and Biden administrations, including the telemedicine rule. The Supreme Court eventually rejected that case, because the anti-abortion doctors who brought it didn’t have standing to sue. But the SCOTUS ruling did not address the far bigger and thornier issue of whether the FDA’s rule changes were legal.

In Friday’s ruling, the Fifth Circuit panel harkened back to its earlier decision.

“Our court has previously concluded that [the] FDA’s actions here were likely unlawful,” Duncan wrote in Friday’s ruling. The same reasoning, he said, “squarely applies” to the 2023 telemedicine rule change.

The ruling “will hit Latine and immigrant communities hardest,” predicted Lupe Rodríguez, Executive Director of the National Latina Institute for Reproductive Justice. “Medication abortion by mail is one of the few ways people can overcome systemic barriers to care…Taking it away is deliberate and dangerous and puts politics over the health and well-being of our communities.”

Even as they decried the Fifth Circuit’s ruling, abortion rights advocates insisted that they have been making contingency plans for just such a scenario—including ramping up efforts to switch to a different abortion-pill regimen that doesn’t include mifepristone.

“There’s no world in which this genie goes back in the bottle.”

“We will do everything in our power to continue providing care to people in all 50 states,” said Dr. Angel Foster, co-founder of the Massachusetts Medication Abortion Access Project, a telemedicine provider that serves more than 3,000 patients a month. “We remain committed to ensuring that people can get the care they need, when they need it.”

Legal scholars also doubted that the flow of abortion pills could be completely cut off. “Abortion is too important,” says Greer Donley, a law professor at the University of Pittsburgh and shield law expert who specializes in medication abortion. “People are going to find ways around the law because [the ability to access care is] so critical to someone’s identity and autonomy and self-determination. There’s no world in which this genie goes back in the bottle.”

Developed by French researchers in the 1980s, mifepristone is one of two drugs that make up the standard abortion-pill protocol in the US. It works by blocking the production of progesterone, the main hormone needed to support a developing pregnancy. A second drug, misoprostol, then causes the uterus to contract, expelling the embryo. Misoprostol—available over the counter in many countries to treat stomach ulcers—has also been shown in numerous global studies to be a safe and effective abortifacient on its own.

The anti-abortion movement fought hard to keep mifepristone out of the US, claiming it was—and remains—too dangerous. (Hundreds of studies over the past 40 years have found otherwise.) When the FDA finally gave its approval to the drug in 2000, it imposed a series of restrictions, including limiting mifepristone’s use to early in the first trimester. The rules became even more stringent in 2011 when mifepristone was consigned to a new program—known as Risk Evaluation and Mitigation Strategy, or REMS—normally reserved for the most dangerous drugs.

But the Obama-era FDA, buoyed by still more studies confirming the drug’s safety, began easing those restrictions in 2016, including allowing mifepristone to be used up to 10 weeks’ gestation and slashing the recommended dosage by two-thirds. In 2021, at the height of the pandemic, the FDA suspended the in-person office-visit requirement, and in 2023, it made the telehealth change permanent. The new FDA rules also made mifepristone more readily available in pharmacies.

In the four years since Dobbs, the revised rules have made it possible for large numbers of red-state patients —some 15,000 per month, according to the most recent data from the #WeCount project—to continue obtaining abortion pills despite draconian bans. Medication now accounts for almost two-thirds of abortions in the US, facilitated by shield laws—statutes that protect abortion providers in blue states who care for patients living in places where abortion is illegal. More than a quarter of all US abortions now occur via telemedicine. In 2025, approximately 142,000 people crossed state lines to access abortion care, or about 13 percent of all abortion patients in the US, according to the latest data from the Guttmacher Institute.

The growing availability of mifepristone has enraged the anti-abortion movement, which was counting on Trump 2.0 to take quick action to stop the flow of pills. But so far, administration officials have resisted pressure to rescind the FDA’s approval of mifepristone or revive the Comstock Act, a Victorian-era obscenity law, unenforced for decades, that prohibits the mailing of abortion drugs, supplies, and equipment.

So red-state attorneys general and other anti-abortion activists have escalated their own attacks in court. Murrill has been a leader in those efforts, trying to extradite abortion providers in New York and California to face criminal charges, without success, and threatening to sue those states over their shield laws. Louisiana has some of the toughest abortion restrictions in the country, yet telemedicine providers are mailing close to 1,000 packages of abortion pills to patients in the state every month.

In targeting the FDA, Murrill accused the Biden administration of making the 2023 rule change for political reasons, as part of a broader effort to thwart the Dobbs decision and “ensure that mifepristone is as widely accessible as possible.” She said the telemedicine rule exceeded Biden’s authority, violated the Comstock Act, and is causing Louisiana “irreparable harm” as long as it remains in effect, in part by forcing the state to bear the costs of Medicaid patients who suffer complications as a result of the pills’ use.

The Fifth Circuit panel cited those Medicaid costs as one of the reasons Louisiana had standing to sue. “Louisiana identifies $92,000 it paid in Medicaid costs from two women who needed emergency care in 2025 from complications caused by out-of-state mifepristone,” Duncan wrote. “Such costs will almost certainly continue because nearly 1,000 women monthly—many of whom are on Medicaid—have mifepristone-induced abortions in Louisiana.”

“We reject the argument that Louisiana was required to administratively exhaust its claims before bringing this suit. The agency’s 2023 REMS causes “federal interference with the enforcement of [Louisiana] law,” which gives Louisiana standing to challenge it…We conclude Louisiana has strongly shown a likelihood of winning its APA challenge to the 2023 REMS.”

In seeking a nationwide injunction, Murrill also claimed telemedicine makes it too easy for women to be tricked or coerced into having abortions they don’t want. Joining her as a co-plaintiff in the case is a Louisiana day care employee named Rosalie Markezich, who alleged that her ex-boyfriend used her email address to order drugs from a California doctor, then forced her to take the medication against her will. Markezich is represented by the Alliance Defending Freedom, a religious-right legal powerhouse that has played a pivotal role in most of the significant anti-abortion and anti-LGBTQ policy and court battles of recent years.

ADF also represented the anti-abortion doctors who challenged the FDA’s initial approval and regulation of mifepristone in the blockbuster case that went to the Supreme Court in 2024. While justices ruled 9-0 in that case that the doctors did not have standing to sue the FDA, it left open the possibility that other plaintiffs might. Louisiana and Markezich argue that they do have standing. The FDA and companies that manufacture mifepristone contend otherwise.

In his April 7 ruling putting Murrill’s lawsuit on hold, Joseph ordered the FDA to conduct its safety review of mifepristone with “deliberate speed.” At a hearing earlier, he was skeptical of Murrill’s arguments that issuing an injunction on telehealth would stop the flow of abortion pills. “The war on drugs has been going on for 50 years,” Joseph pointed out, “and yet there was more cocaine produced last year than any other.”

Donley, the law professor, agrees that abortion opponents are fooling themselves if they think any US court will be able to cut off access to abortion pills. “You shut off access to mifepristone, people will switch to misoprostol-only abortions,” she says. “Even if you were to shut down shield providers in this country, people would just switch to international providers and start shipping from other countries.”

Likely to President Trump’s dismay, Mary Ziegler, an abortion historian and law professor at the University of California, Davis, this ruling suddenly makes abortion a huge issue in the midterm elections. Telemedicine “has been why people in abortion-ban states have been able to get access to abortion,” she said. “It’s been the centerpiece of absolutely everything.” She added that voters who have been showing signs of complacency over the abortion issue, thanks in large part to telemedicine, won’t be any longer.

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This May Day, Even Organizers Are Cautious, But Hopeful

After last month’s No Kings protest, Indivisible, the group that describes itself as apro-democracy, anti-authoritarian people-powered movement, joined May Day Strong’s actions to take a page out of Minnesota’s one-day strike playbook from this past January.

On its surface, Indivisible’s participation appears to be a slight pivot, engaging in more disruptive labor-directed actions. But for Ezra Levin, the co-founder and co-executive director of Indivisible, May Day Strong is part of their movement**—**one that can’t succeed without growing its broad coalition. “Society cannot function without workers, and our political system won’t function unless more non-billionaires and non-mega corporations get involved in how politics works,” Levin told me when we spoke by phone on Thursday.

Politics feel brutal for most workers these days. It’s equally hard to measure the impact of protest groups like Indivisible. That’s especially true in a week where the Supreme Court dismantled voting rights and the Trump administration doubled down on its war in Iran despite rising costs and thousands of people killed. But Levin was, at times, evasive about looking too far in the future. For him, it’s impossible to measure the success of a pro-democracy movement on whether authoritarians are doing damage. It’s more useful to measure impact by how much a movement grows and tries new tactics.

This strategic alignment with May Day is an example. Levin was focused on building a coalition now—including opening the door for people who are not advocates or organizers. He also seemed clear-eyed about his group’s role: “Indivisible isn’t the right movement organization to organize the entire country. We are a piece of it.”

This interview has been lightly condensed and edited for clarity.

Where do you think Indivisible’s work stands within the larger US ecosystem of organizing?

I don’t think there’s a pathway to getting a real democracy that reflects the world of people that doesn’t depend on coalition. There’s not going to be any one organization or any one individual movement that succeeds in significantly changing our political system and bends it to the will of the people—you need to build across coalition.

For us, that’s core to just about everything Indivisible does. That shows up in the Hands Off coalition that came out a year ago. The Good Trouble Lives On [protests] on the John Lewis Day of Remembrance, and the No Kings coalition itself, which is made up of hundreds members.

May Day is not by Indivisible and it’s not led by the No Kings coalition. It’s being led by the May Day strong coalition with an emphasis on union participation. You’re not going to build a pro-democracy movement that’s successful without having heavy involvement from union leaders. You can’t succeed in what we’re trying to do without welcoming new members to your coalition and without showing up for them when they’re leading a day of action like tomorrow.

How are you measuring the impact of your work with No Kings, considering we’re in a week where the Supreme Court has fully gutted voting rights?

How you judge the success of a pro-democracy movement is with a couple of criteria: One, are you bigger than you were before? Two is, are you more aligned than you were before? Three is, is the authoritarian regime less popular than it was before? And four is, are your tactics proliferating? Are you trying new things? Are you developing new muscles?

We had three million people at the 1300 Hands Off protests last April. Then for the first No Kings, we had five million people at 2100 protests at the second No Kings. We had 7 million people at 2700, protests at the third No Kings. We had 3300 protests and more than 8 million people, which is to say three of the largest protests in all of American history are in ascending order.

The growth is pretty evident, and I don’t think it’s just us saying that. Some of the experts like Erica Chenoweth who are looking quantitatively at the scale of protests over the course of 2025 and into 2026. It dwarfs what we saw in 2017. The scale of mass mobilization and organizing is historic.

What are the challenges of growing No Kings?

The challenges in growing No Kings are the president repeatedly systematically using the powers of the presidency to go after his opponents. There are challenges of convincing people to care about politics. A lot of people believe that politics is bullshit, that both sides are corrupt, and that the whole system is broken and it’s not worth their time to get involved. That cynicism and nihilism and fatalism about the state of the country and our politics is the primary enemy that we have and the one that we have to slay. Indivisible isn’t the right movement organization to organize the entire country.

We are a piece of it. And if we’re doing our work to build a truly representative and powerful movement, we’ve got to be helping and showing up for other organizations, other movements, went into their time to lead, and I would be May Day tomorrow as an example that, like I said, it’s not an Indivisible action. This is being led by May Day Strong.

What do you think of larger disruption actions formed by coalitions over longer periods of time like the general strikes in India, Panama, and Italy? Do you think that is possible in the US?

In 2025, the regime was targeting the organization of America, which is straight out of [the playbook of] Hungary. One of the lessons of Orbán’s downfall is that the best way to remove an authoritarian is electorally, so it depends on building a mass movement.

When it comes to disruption, you don’t have to look abroad. You can look at the Twin Cities. The Day of Truth and Freedom was a mass disruption event and intended to bring society to a halt. And I think it was very successful. The federal government had to retreat because of the PR disaster as a direct result of the incredible organizing on the ground. If Trump tries to sabotage the midterm elections, you’re going to need something that looks like the Twin Cities but at the scale of something that looks like No Kings.

Going off what you brought up about disruption actions in the US, what do you think about tactics that try to get around restrictive US labor laws such as the proposed UAW strike in 2028?

I’m one battle at a time right now. There are a lot of questions about what happens in the Democratic primary, how we position ourselves in that race, and what happens if Trump runs again. These are all interesting questions that I look forward to digging into after we crush the regime in the midterms and elect some Democrats who are interested in using the powers of the Senate and the House to prevent the regime from doing more damage and bringing accountability to people who violated the Constitution. That is the single best thing we can do to set up democracy for a successful 2028.

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Amazon Powers ICE. Its Workers Aren’t Happy.

Matt Multari has been driving for Amazon—and organizing with the Teamsters—for about a year and a half. His days are mostly spent delivering packages. But he thinks of his role as a worker-organizer as something much more historically significant than just maximizing delivery efficiency.

“After the Assyrians lost their state, they survived in their homeland of Iraq for thousands of years. After facing a genocide that forced them to flee that homeland, they went to Russia, and then to Iran, and then some of them went to New York. Now I’m here,” he said. “And I’d like to tell Amazon: fuck you!”

Early on the morning of May 1, Multari took the megaphone in front of a hundred or so sign-toting Amazon warehouse workers, delivery drivers, and software engineers, who had traveled in from Queens and Staten Island to march on an Amazon office building for International Workers’ Day.

“Each of us here has a story of generational struggle,” Multari, 25, said. But to him, working for Amazon means the obliteration of identity. “Amazon is trying to erase that.” Every day, as he puts on his blue vest and delivers packages from Amazon’s DBK-1 warehouse in Queens, the company surveills him: “You have an app that tells you the exact stop order you’re supposed to go in. You’re under a time quota, basically.”

If you take too long, or take too many stops, Multari said, the app tells you to go faster. “You get a scorecard every week that says how you’re performing.” Five months ago, Multari and his DBK-1 coworkers unionized with the Teamsters, joining thousands of unionized Amazon workers nationwide. They’ve been able to extract some concessions from the e-commerce giant, though Amazon has refused to bargain with their unionized workers. Nonetheless, during this year’s record-breaking winter storms, they were paid for days they weren’t able to work; and when they needed new hand-trucks, Amazon paid up.

Amazon holds millions of dollars in ICE contracts.Sophie Hurwitz

Nonetheless, Multari and his coworkers are aware that they’ll have to do much more to win real job security in an age of automation. “Amazon, at its core, is a tech company,” Multari said. “Our main asset to them is our data from our routes, so that it can train its algorithm, so it can make us more and more replaceable.”

Amazon’s Web Services cloud-computing platform is more profitable than all the company’s retail operations combined. And AWS sells cloud-computing services to clients throughout the American government, including Immigration and Customs Enforcement: According to Forbes reporting, ICE spent at least $25 million on AWS during the second Trump administration. Amazon Web Services also holds contracts with Palantir, the surveillance-tech company behind much of ICE’s deportation operation. (And Amazon has served as an inspiration for ICE, too: acting ICE director Todd Lyons has said he wants deportations in the US to run “like Amazon Prime for human beings.”)

That’s part of why, at Monday’s rally, non-union tech workers stood alongside unionized warehouse workers.

Zelda Montes, a former software engineer at Google who was fired in 2024 for holding a sit-in with their coworkers, said they’ve spent much of the past two years trying to help organize tech workers at places like Amazon. With the group No Tech for Apartheid, Montes works to build power within tech companies against the contracts that Amazon and Google hold with the Israeli government. “For a lot of tech workers, the work that they’re doing is helping to create these systems of surveillance that affect warehouse workers, that affect delivery workers, that create more difficult working conditions for them,” Montes said. “So it’s really important for us to be able to unite with them on the labor front.”

Thousands of Amazon workers are unionized with the Teamsters. The company has spent years refusing to bargain with them.Sophie Hurwitz

At some Amazon warehouses, more than half of workers are immigrants. But Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos has shown no interest in walking back the company’s contracts with agencies targeting those immigrants. “Amazon’s abuse of workers bankrolls their ability to do this,” said Sultana Hossain, an organizer with Amazon Labor Union. So, workers in New York told Mother Jones, they’re going to keep fighting.

“We will demand the one thing that’s worth fighting for in this life: respect,” Multari said.

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Trump’s New Medicaid Work Requirements Are Here

On Friday, Nebraska became the first state to enact Medicaid work requirements, mandatory for states with Medicaid expansion due to Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act. Notably, the state did it seven months before the deadline.

Now, around 70,000 adults below the age of 65 in Nebraska who have Medicaid through its expansion could risk having their health insurance ripped away from them.

Medicaid work requirements do not increase employment. Instead, the administrative burden of work requirements only serves to kick people off this governmental health insurance. Additionally, a majority of people on Medicaid, who are not on Supplemental Security Income, work full or part-time jobs. This underlines how rhetoric around work requirements is just false.

The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities also highlighted that there is not enough time to implement what could be considered less cruel systems for Medicaid work requirements. The center called for work requirements to be pulled, “but short of that, states need more time to ensure their policies, systems, and staffing plans are in place to minimize the number of eligible people whose health care is taken away.” This also highlights the cruelty of Nebraska’s implementation of work requirements before the January 1, 2027 deadline.

Especially because an interim rule from the Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is not even due until June 1. I previously raised concerns about what an interim rule could look like from Kennedy:

A person with debilitating chronic pain, or a serious autoimmune illness, may appear “able-bodied” by the standards RFK Jr. appears poised to implement—even as they face hurdles in qualifying for Social Security disability due to not being considered disabled enough. HHS declined to answer a series of questions for this article, instead offering a general statement that the agency “remains committed to protecting and strengthening Medicaid for those who rely on it…while eliminating waste, fraud, and abuse.”

There are some exemptions to Medicaid work requirements, including for people with chronic illnesses and pregnant people. According to Nebraska’s Department of Health and Human Services’ website, the state will be considering work requirement exemptions during checks every six months. There is a list of conditions for people on Medicaid that qualify for people with exemptions, but understandably, not every serious health issue is on there. Notably absent is Long Covid, a post-infectious disease caused by a Covid infection that can very much impact someone’s ability to work.

“I don’t see how any state could protect people with disabilities from these kinds of cuts,” Georgetown University professor Edwin Park told me last year before Republicans voted to enact Medicaid work requirements and nearly $1 trillion worth of Medicaid cuts.

Now, it’s a waiting game to see how draconian Medicaid work requirements roll out throughout the country.

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Trump’s New Crypto Club Offers “Luxury Suites at the Biggest Sporting Events”

Fresh on the heels of a lackluster Mar-a-Lago “luncheon” party for his struggling $TRUMP meme coin, President Donald Trump appears ready to launch his next crypto-coin-for-exclusive-access project: Trump Coin Club.

In the wake of the Mar-a-Lago bash, the official $TRUMP coin website was updated with a new offer. The details are sparse but apparently meant to be enticing. “MEMBERS ONLY · LIMITED ACCESS,” the site promises. “The Trump Coin Club — invitation-only luxury suites at the biggest sporting events in the world, private dinners, and the most elite and extraordinary experiences.”

There is no information as to what specific “biggest sporting events” that might include. I sent an email to the $TRUMP coin website and the Trump Organization, but no one replied.

The website has a sign-up prompt and what appears to be a mockup of a “leaderboard”—apparently similar to the ranking system used to doll out slots to the top 297 $TRUMP coin holders who were invited to last weekend’s Mar-a-Lago luncheon. Independent crypto researcher Molly White first reported the new Trumpian offer Wednesday evening. While it seems anyone can join can join the Trump Coin Club for free, White writes that the leaderboard “appears designed to rank members by both the amount of the token they hold and the duration they’ve held it.” And the prospect of invitations to “elite” events could be intended to incentivize crypto enthusiasts to hold onto their $TRUMP coins for the long term.

$TRUMP is a meme coin, which means it doesn’t have any inherent use or value—it simply exists as a digital endorsement of Trump, as a concept. If it becomes popular, it can also become useful for financial speculation. But other than a huge spike in price in the hours immediately before and after Trump officially announced the coin’s creation, the price’s trajectory has been almost exclusively downward.

Depending on the crypto exchange you use, the price of the coin was once as high as $74, giving it a $15 billion market cap. But since February, each coin has been worth less than $4. After last weekend’s event at Mar-a-Lago, which Trump attended, the price slipped even further. As of this writing, it is currently hovering below $2.40.

But even with the plunging price, $TRUMP is a great deal for its namesake. The president created the coin out of nothing, so any price is a win for him.

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Welcome to the Insecurity-Industrial Complex

Affordability is the new buzzword. It’s yapped by politicians and pundits across the spectrum. It’s as popular as a new TikTok dance. And it’s genuinely an important and mobilizing concept.

But the truth is, it doesn’t really capture what’s ailing us.

What makes this moment unique is insecurity. Struggling with bills isn’t new to most Americans; what is different today, across lines of social class lines, is the degree of unpredictability that comes with ordinary ways of making a living: ICE grabbing people at workplaces and schools, at bodegas and hospitals, and taking them to American concentration camps; hundreds of thousands of formerly secure, essential federal workers being laid off, part of a Trump administration program of destroying any institution or program that led people to associate government with stability and security, like Medicaid-backed home care and FEMA. And then there’s the threat of AI ending our jobs as we know them.

In this era, instead of walking on solid ground, terra firma, we dwell on shaking, shifting terra infirma. While affordability is a handy reframe of pervasive income inequality—talking about prices and the cost of living, rather than structural forces that stymie mobility, makes people feel less blamed and less-than—it doesn’t cover the gamut of social instability that the last few years have wrought. Call them “economic-plus” factors.

Of course, much of this insecurity has been manufactured by merchants of doubt, the henchmen of an “insecurity-industrial complex.”

That complex is the brainchild, in part, of what former Trump advisor Steve Bannon has dubbed “muzzle velocity,” a rapid political communications strategy that presents a constant stream of wild news events and outrages, shocks designed to both overwhelm the media and put the populace on edge.

It entails the steady downpour of confounding right-wing populist dreck. Bannon described it to Frontline as “three things a day—they’ll bite on one.” When it lands on media platforms, viewers’ fears are then exploited in predatory fashion, for monetary or political gain.

The new insecurity also follows on more than a decade of gleeful “disruption” by Silicon Valley, whose titans have gutted or taken over so many familiar institutions in the last decade that experiences like shopping feel fundamentally less secure, with constant developments like the idea of dynamic pricing in stores, so that budgeting for coffee or eggs feels like playing a slot machine.

On a wider level, it also extends to predictive gambling mega-sites, which monetize the increasingly unpredictable news generated by the White House, benefiting inside traders in government and enabling corporate forces to cash in at scale on our feelings of instability.

Prediction market Kalshi’s co-founders Luana Lopes Lara and Tarek Mansour are now billionaires, according to Forbes; New York University anthropologist Natasha Schull characterizes their platform as “making everything into a set of binary choices” and bettable outcomes, both offering a kind of false reassurance.

The insecurity-industrial complex also includes the nationalist politicians who incite volcanic policy shifts and mass layoffs.

Take Tara Fannon, for years a research director at a consulting agency serving the federal government, responsible for communication outreach across agencies and direct work with veterans. In 2025, her government contracting job was DOGEd into oblivion. Fannon now makes a fraction of her former salary, and her unemployment has run out. At 50, she’s looking for a full-time job and “struggling”—Fannon says “the job market is the worst in my life: an absolute hellscape.” Her health care premiums are colossal.

“For me, ‘insecurity’ is a good word to describe all the ways I feel precarious right now,” Fannon says from her apartment in Brooklyn. “I can’t afford great medical care, and that’s going to affect my health, which causes me to worry and feel more anxious. I can’t afford to go to the gym or eat the kind of food that makes me feel healthy, and that affects me in other ways.”

She didn’t want to take all that turbulence lying down. Fannon started an oral history site interviewing government workers who had been laid off equally unceremoniously. Most, like her, she says, are still unemployed, “patching things together.”

And the war against our security entails crushing reliable government, including funds allotted to the caregivers of our most vulnerable citizens. United Domestic Workers deputy director Johanna Hester is on the front line of that battle. GOP-led cuts to Medicaid, she tells me, have been brutal for her members, who struggle with reduced paid hours as well as the fear of ICE raids at their workplaces. Many make less than $20 an hour and need food assistance from the union; some have been driven to live in their cars, struggling to afford gas.

Terra infirma is also a place where people fear speaking freely. The bravest are those who continue to, like Amisha Patel, a Chicago activist and mother of two who passed away this week at age 50, a month and a half after we spoke. Opposing the second Trump administration while struggling with metastatic cancer, Patel epitomized to me degree of courage that some Americans are showing today, standing up even while they teeter on the personal and political edge.

Before she passed, Patel underwent treatments, hoping to find something that would give her extra time. But by March, she was told she had just a few months to live. Still, when we spoke, she was trying to “show up,” as she put it, for her wife and neighbors in Chicago’s Rogers Park neighborhood amid an escalation of ICE raids.

What kept her together in the last months of her life, in a time of massive turmoil, was the opportunity “to fight fascism.” “It’s easy to be frozen and not to act,” Patel said. I knew what she meant: public defiance was harder in a time of street kidnappings, campus crackdowns, and organized attacks on free speech (of, say, anyone who called Charlie Kirk…well, a Charlie Kirk). “But my disease has shown me that we are not going to have certainty,” she continued—only “possibilities.”

Fannon, Hester, Patel, and so many of us are standing in a frightscape and yearning for security from the political developments that snap at us like carnivorous plants.

I am not the only one who sees our main vibe as uncertainty, anxiety, and nervousness, our mood rings always turning to a muted gray or black. The Urban Institute’s “True Cost of Economic Security” metric, which factors in costs like health insurance, childcare, and retirement, defines 52 percent of US families as financially insecure, many more than define themselves (or are defined by other standards) as poor.

In the age of gig work, volatile income is another source of systemic insecurity around our labor. It makes planning for the future or even giving consistent time to family and other obligations, far more difficult. (No wonder Gen Z, has come up with corecore, a TikTok aesthetic that specializes in confusing, overwhelming juxtapositions.)

So does indebtedness: consumer debt is among the reasons that Americans’ available income has dropped by more than a quarter in recent years, according to political scientist Jacob Hacker’s Economic Security Index. Businesses look to the Economic Policy Uncertainty Index, a financial instrument that tracks the effects of economic instability in the US and twenty other countries, going back to 1900.

Political uncertainty is approaching an all-time high here, says EPUI director Scott Baker, a professor of finance at the University of Wisconsin. Baker believes that insecurity about the future has made “firms and households less comfortable” spending and more likely to reduce consumption, while business have become less productive as a result, leery to make investments or increase hiring.

As Baker puts it, “sudden shifts in policy across a wide range of fields [have] made it hard for businesses and financial markets to know what is coming next.” According to a recent Associated Press-NORC poll, 47 percent of American adults are “not very” or “not at all confident” they could find a job they would want. That figure was 37 percent in late 2023.

Of course, the insecurity-industrial complex wasn’t born yesterday: exploiters have been making us nervous for generations. In her 1989 book Fear of Falling, Barbara Ehrenreich wrote about the anxieties of an American middle class barely holding on to its social position by one high-thread-count pillow-set. In the 2009 collection The Insecure American: How We Got Here and What We Should Do About It, nineteen ethnographers parsed how our leaders produce social insecurity, from the war on terror to the war on welfare.

But now that insecurity is everywhere, all the time. As economist Pranab Bardhan argues in his 2022 book A World of Insecurity: Democratic Disenchantment in Rich and Poor Countries, insecurity, rather than poverty or inequality, is our new constant, bringing with it the forces that have caused an erosion of liberal democracy in rich and poor countries alike. As societal uncertainty, both real and manufactured, has risen in countries like the US, India, and Turkey, populists have taken over and tilted the political tables toward despotism, exploiting citizens’ economic and cultural instabilities to get their votes.

What would really restore our sense of certainty? On a governmental level, bolstering the hardy social programs we have, like Social Security, Medicare and unemployment insurance. Paid leave, which I depended on over the last year to care for two family members.

Rebecca Vallas, CEO of the National Academy for Social Insurance, tells me that this is the “moment to return to the moral and even spiritual foundation of the New Deal—the idea that we are in this together—and to carry that further into the next chapter of public policy. The question isn’t whether uncertainty will exist, it’s whether we will meet it with solidarity or fragmentation.”

When I attended a conference Vallas recently organized in Washington on the future of American social programs, attendees struck similar notes, harkening back to that great moment of the birth of Social Security, the New Deal; of Frances Perkins and FDR. But we can also push new policies that have a grandeur of spirit; some of the threats to our security are too deeply contemporary to do otherwise.

Will we strategize and develop policies akin to universal basic income, updated to account for the six-fingered monster that is AI? An experimental “AI dividend” piloted by the nonprofit AI Commons Project and What We Will proposes to compensate 50 workers who have lost paid jobs or opportunities due to AI to the tune of $1,000 a month for a year, no strings attached. If it works, it will be a new model for basic income set to help the hundreds of thousands who may ultimately lose work due to AI.

And then there’s the personal piece of this: standing up to the insecurity complex, starting to naturalize the term “insecurity” when we talk about citizens’ state of mind, their needs and what informs their political will. I believe that part of surviving uncertainty is framing it, living with it—and acting despite it. Therapists I have spoken to speak of treating patients’ sense of “overwhelming and overweening threat,” in the words of psychologist Harriet Fraad, including fear of the encroachments of AI, while increasingly “unable to afford heat or gas for their car” as a consequence of Trump’s war in Iran.

Fraad tries to make her clients recognize the real culprit: “that their fears aren’t just because of their mother or something” but rather the nature of America today. She tries to ensure that they aren’t blaming themselves for their nerves, personalizing the effects of the insecurity-industrial complex into a singular failure on their part. To these patients, Fraad recommends “not being alone” and embracing “activism, love and solidarity.”

Similarly, it can’t hurt for us to recognize when we are participating in habits that reflect and exacerbate terra infirma—we can reject predictive betting markets and their janky fake sense of relief, for example, or use tools that strip our feeds of AI slop wherever they find it, demanding a more human internet.

I am trying to acknowledge the political and economic uncertainty and nihilism around me, to live with it and name it. Otherwise, there is always the danger of repression, which leads, according to psychologists, to our splitting into metaphorical parts. The version of myself that tries on tinted sunscreen, makes sure to Docusign contracts, and watches regional UK TV procedurals late into the night co-exists with the version of myself that is hyper-vigilant to the extreme events that keep unfolding.

In my quest to gain a greater sense of equilibrium, I also look for mirrors of our current precarity. Perhaps weirdly, I find reassurance in poetry reflecting extreme events, like poems composed shadows of the gulag, or one of Jorie Graham’s latest. As she writes, “I/will let go/of the world/as it was/once. It was probably/ never that way.”

This article was produced in collaboration with the Economic Hardship Reporting Project, which supports independent journalists as they forward fresh narratives about inequality. Subscribe to follow EHRP.

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An Unreleased Lyme Disease Vaccine Is Already Sparking False Conspiracy Theories

In April, the MAHA Mom Coalition, an organization that claims it advocates for “parental rights, holistic health, clean food & water, and medical freedom,” put out an unusual call. They wanted to talk to the farmers who’d been finding mysterious boxes of ticks in their fields—farmers and boxes that, by every available indication, don’t seem to exist.

“Can anybody reading this right now validate this?” the MAHA Mom Coalition wrote on their Instagram page. “We’d love to connect with and speak to these farmers!!”

The reason for such a request, as one conspiracist on Twitter explained in a post with over a million views, is with a potential new “Lyme disease vaccine coming out next year,” they “fear our government is going to release plague like levels of ticks upon us in order to incentivize the masses into getting another vaccine.”

The roots of the tick rumors originate, according to the fact-checking website Snopes, with an Iowa woman named Sarah Outlaw. “Something is happening with ticks right now, and farmers are starting to talk,” she wrote alongside a March 30 Instagram video post that’s been watched over 10 million times. “Reports of boxes of ticks being found. Reports of ticks being seen in ways that feel out of the ordinary. At the same time, we are seeing a very real increase in tick populations across our region…in my practice, I am seeing the impact. More Lyme. More chronic symptoms. More alpha gal,” an allergic reaction to red meat triggered by tick bites.

The suggestion that mysterious forces are distributing ticks to give us all Lyme disease keeps spreading.

Outlaw hasn’t provided documentary evidence to support these claims. She wrote on Threads that she heard them at a private seminar in late March from someone familiar with a “rural Missouri community.” But when Snopes reached out to hundreds of public health and other governmental officials in Missouri, they couldn’t find a single person who could corroborate seeing even one box of ticks. Snopes also wrote that in correspondence with Outlaw she “declined to provide us contact information for any involved parties, citing their privacy.” Outlaw didn’t respond to a request for comment for this story.

All evidence—or lack thereof—aside, Outlaw’s not-so-veiled suggestion that mysterious forces are distributing boxes of ticks to try to give us all Lyme disease has kept spreading. It wasn’t long before people on social media began to connect Outlaw’s claims to a newly developed Lyme disease vaccine from the drug companies Pfizer and Valneva. While the vaccine technically failed a late-stage clinical trial—which its makers attributed to a decrease in Lyme cases during the study period, resulting in less data than expected—the companies still hope to gain regulatory approval and release it in 2027. In a March press release, the companies boasted of the vaccine’s “strong efficacy,” reporting it reduced Lyme cases by 70 percent.

One major vector for the rumors was David Avocado Wolfe, a prominent wellness and conspiracy influencer, who quickly reshared Outlaw’s video on Telegram in a flurry of posts with suggestions on fighting ticks. He also re-shared a different video implying unknown powers are at work, featuring a woman who stares deadpan into camera as text under her reads, “Pfizer’s dropping a new Lyme vaccine next year… And magically, this spring and summer are going to be the worst tick season ever. You’ve seen this playbook.” Throughout April, posts on X making claims about boxes of ticks or casting suspicion on the forthcoming vaccine continued to go viral, with phrasing like “SHOCKING TIMING EXPOSED” and “feds bioengineering ticks to poison us with Lyme disease.”

A previous Lyme disease vaccine, LYMErix, was pulled off the market in 2002, doomed partly by suspicions from Lyme patient groups that it caused adverse effects, and partly by a weak CDC recommendation that didn’t fully protect it from liability. After a raft of lawsuits were filed against its maker, GlaxoSmithKline, it discontinued the drug. No human Lyme vaccine has existed since.

Ever since, Lyme cases have continued to grow, spurred in part by climate change and other environmental factors that have brought people into closer contact with ticks, which can carry the bacteria which causes the disease. Tick-borne alpha-gal is also on the rise, with its first reported death in November 2025, when a New Jersey pilot who was apparently unaware that he’d been bitten by a tick and had developed the allergy died after eating a cookout hamburger.

Because Lyme is a frightening and debilitating illness, conspiracy theories about it reliably catch attention. In 2024, Tucker Carlson produced a program claiming that “government bioweapons labs” that were “injecting ticks with exotic illnesses” in the 1960s led to widespread Lyme disease today, a show that has been viewed nearly 8 million times on X alone. In response, Politifact pointed to evidence that not only has the Lyme disease bacterium existed for some 60,000 years, it would make a poor weapon considering its slow spread and low fatality rate.

Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said as recently as January 2024 that he believes that Lyme disease likely came from a “military bioweapon.” FDA Commissioner Marty Makary made a similar claim on a podcast in November; both men have said the disease came from federal research facilities on Plum Island, New York. That idea was advanced in a 2019 book by science writer Kris Newby; the Washington Post debunked some of the book’s claims, including by disputing that a key Newby source was in fact a bioweapons researcher, as he is described. An epidemiologist who reviewed the book faulted it for “hysteria and fear-mongering,” while doing “little to help those afflicted by the disease it preys upon.”

The legacy of these bioweapons claims lives on. After at least two previous attempts, this year Rep. Chris Smith (R-N.J.), the co-chair of the Congressional Lyme and Tick-Borne Disease Caucus, succeeded in including a provision in the National Defense Authorization Act directing the Government Accountability Office to, as his office put it, “investigate whether the U.S. military weaponized ticks with Lyme disease.”

With suspicion pressing on Lyme from all sides—from the president’s cabinet and the halls of Congress, to natural health influencers and back again—it’s possible that Pfizer and Valneva’s vaccine will be doomed to death by distrust before it even hits the market.

Dr. Paul Offit, the director of the Vaccine Education Center at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, was a member of the CDC’s Advisory Council on Immunization Practice from 1998 to 2003, when the LYMErix vaccine was considered.

We “live in a time where conspiracy sells.”

While LYMErix was, Offitt says, “about 75% effective…it was damned by a soft recommendation from the ACIP” which held only that it “should be considered” for people who live in tick-endemic areas or spend lots of time outdoors. Offit had favored a broader recommendation, one which would have seen the shot covered by the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program. While patient reports of autoimmune issues were never conclusively proven, after only three years, LYMErix was pulled from the market.

“It was subject to the slings and arrows of outrageous litigation” Offit says, as its manufacturer “tried to defend the vaccine until it was too expensive” to continue, he adds.

In the intervening years, Offit adds, both “vigorous patient advocacy” and a “whole paramedical community” has grown up around Lyme disease and so-called chronic Lyme disease, in which people believe they have a long-term active infection. While persistent effects from Lyme disease, called post-treatment Lyme disease syndrome, exist, chronic Lyme is not recognized as a medical diagnosis.

Offit thinks more research is needed to demonstrate the new Lyme vaccine’s promise, but is worried about the environment in which it could be released.

The suspicion bubbling up around the unreleased vaccine, Offit says, precisely calls to mind what has happened to vaccines targeting the coronavirus. “MRNA Covid vaccines have suffered from these conspiracies” about both the virus’ origins and alleged safety issues, he says. “It was very easy to get that bad information out there. So we suffer.”

Outlaw, who works as a herbalist, holistic doctor, and nutritionist, closed her viral video spreading her claims about tick boxes with a call to reach out to her for help: “Comment TICKS and I will send you what we do in our practice to support and protect naturally.”

To those who responded, Outlaw provided a “tick exposure and prevention guide” via DM, centered around a supplement brand called Cellcore, according to a video from by Mallory de Mille, a correspondent for the Conspirituality podcast who often covers wellness scams, misinformation, and purported health trends on social media.

Outlaw describes herself as a “Board-Certified Doctor of Holistic Health,” and boasts of other credentials, including a master’s degree in applied clinical nutrition from the New York Chiropractic College and a certification in health coaching from the Biblical Health Institute. But she is not a physician. What she calls her “doctor’s degree” on LinkedIn came from Quantum University, a holistic medicine school whose two-year doctorate program is not accredited by the U.S. Department of Education. Quantum’s website has a disclaimer stating that its degrees “are NOT equivalent or comparable to” neither a MD or “a Doctor in Naturopathy Degree (ND),” nor do they “entitle graduates to any state, provincial, or federal licensure.”

“Lyme disease takes a huge toll on people in this country and their wellbeing,” infectious disease researcher Laurel Bristow says, with health influencers hawking baseless products adding to the problem. “There’s no evidence that anything they’re selling will reduce your risk of acquiring Lyme disease from a tick bite.”

Like Offit, Bristow—who hosts of Health Wanted, a podcast produced by Emory University’s Rollins School of Public Health—wants to see more research before passing judgment on the new vaccine. But she is also worried about the “pernicious” conspiracy theories it has already engendered: “We don’t want to cast aspersions on a vaccine before we really know what’s happening.”

Even if the new Lyme vaccine is eventually approved by the FDA, Bristow points out another issue: there is no working “mechanism to review who should be recommended for it.” That step, which helps determine whether a vaccine is covered by insurance and by the federal injury compensation program, is conducted by ACIP. But the panel is caught in an ongoing legal battle as RFK Jr. tries to unilaterally overhaul it and stock it with anti-vaccine fellow travelers.

Bristow hopes that time and more information about the new vaccine could raise public trust before it might hit the market. “It won’t be available to work for this tick season,” she says. “So hopefully in the intervening time we can have a little more data and feel a little more confident, and by the next tick season we’ll have a good option.”

Dr. Paul Offit is less optimistic about what might happen in the intervening months, because, as he puts it, we “live in a time where conspiracy sells.”

“I’m not sure what gets us through this,” he adds, with a note of exhaustion. “We’re at a time now—and RFK Jr. is a ringleader of this as a major conspiracy theorist—where people create their own truths, including scientific truths.”

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The Folly of Trump Taking a “Wrecking Ball” to a Crucial Science Advisory Board

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

Since the start of his second term last year, President Donald Trump has sought to weaken the federal foundations underpinning American science, slashing or stalling research funding, firing or pushing out thousands of scientists, canceling grants for ideological reasons and shuttering research facilities across the country.

But even against that bleak backdrop, the administration’s firing of all 22 current members of the National Science Board last week stands out as “one of the darkest moments” of the past year and a half, said Jacquelyn Gill, a paleoecologist and biogeographer at the University of Maine.

“It was incredibly chilling, and my stomach just dropped to my feet when I saw that the entire board had been fired,” Gill said. “Because now this last bastion of accountability and transparency and scientific expertise has been dismantled overnight.”

“It’s not a surprise,” notes one scientist, given the Trump administration’s “continuous onslaught of attacks on science.”

The National Science Board plays a key role in overseeing the National Science Foundation, a major research funder in fields such as chemistry, engineering, biology, the environment, computing, and technology, which supports academic inquiry and helps train the next generation of scientists.

The NSB and the NSF were designed to be “driven by our best and brightest scientific experts who are really representing a consensus of where science should go in this country,” Gill said. “It’s not at the whims of whatever president steps into office.”

Created by Congress in 1950 as an independent body of scientific advisors, the board is appointed by the president in staggered six-year terms and chosen for their distinguished service and eminence in their disciplines. Last Friday, members received an email saying their positions were “terminated, effective immediately.” The NSF website now reads “pending new appointments” instead of listing members’ names.

“This board is so important for being able to advise Congress as well as the president on issues that are so important to the country,” said Geraldine Richmond, presidential chair in science and professor of chemistry at the University of Oregon and a former member of the NSB. Richmond was first appointed to the board by President Barack Obama and later by Trump during his first term.

In the wake of the board’s sudden dismissal, experts fear that its members will be replaced with people chosen for their political loyalty rather than their scientific qualifications and who will be focused on short-sighted partisan concerns rather than the greater societal good.

Because of the board’s importance in the ecosystem that fosters American innovation, observers worry the decision will contribute to a loss of trust in public science and cause long-term damage to American competitiveness in critical research areas and the pipeline for educating and retaining new scientists.

“As concerning as this is, it’s not a surprise because of what this administration has been doing now” since January 2025, said Carlos Javier Martinez, a senior climate scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists who previously worked for the National Science Foundation. “It’s a continuous onslaught of attacks on science.”

In a statement to Inside Climate News, a White House official implied the decision to fire the board stemmed from a 2021 US Supreme Court case related to the appointment of administrative patent judges.

This ruling “raised constitutional questions about whether non-Senate confirmed appointees can exercise the authorities that Congress gave the National Science Board,” the official said. “We look forward to working with the Hill to update the statute and ensure the NSB can perform its duties as Congress intended. The National Science Foundation’s work continues uninterrupted.”

The “beautiful thing” about the NSF has been its “recognition that science without an immediate benefit or application was worth pursuing.”

“Like many of the legal claims they’ve made so far, it’s more of a smoke screen than a really plausible legal argument,” said Lauren Kurtz, an attorney and the executive director at the Climate Science Legal Defense Fund. The Supreme Court ruling cited by the White House is “factually, legally very different” from the process governing appointments to the NSB, she said. “I think trying to apply it in this case is disingenuous.”

The statute governing the National Science Board was updated in 2022, Kurtz pointed out. Martinez agreed with Kurtz’s assessment of the White House’s argument. “It doesn’t hold water,” he said.

“They’ve basically taken a wrecking ball to this [board], and we don’t know exactly how they plan to rebuild it, but if history is any indication, they will want to put in very administration-loyal, probably unqualified people,” Kurtz said.

“Without that body, really, the agency is now fully at the behest of the White House,” Martinez said.

In Gill’s view, the NSF is already being guided by industry priorities, especially Silicon Valley’s behemoth tech companies, which have tried to win over the second Trump administration with donations and public flattery.

“Having a scientific enterprise that focuses primarily on the needs of industry just means that we’re losing curiosity-driven science,” she said. That emphasis also shortchanges research, like her own, that focuses on areas industry is typically uninterested in or even hostile to, such as climate change, biodiversity and pollution monitoring.

The “beautiful thing” about the NSF, Gill said, was its “recognition that science without an immediate benefit or application was worth pursuing.”

“We studied electricity for hundreds of years before it had any practical purpose. We don’t know what we’re going to be missing out on in the decades and centuries to come because we have hamstrung our ability to do exploratory research,” she said. “You never know what is going to lead to the next breakthrough.”

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So You Want to Organize a General Strike

On Friday, International Workers’ Day, tens of thousands of people across the US will walk out of school, skip work, and refrain from shopping as part of a nationwide economic blackout against President Donald Trump’s agenda. Organizers with the May Day Strong coalition, a coalition of labor unions and community groups, are helping oversee more than 3,500 marches, rallies, and teach-ins. The coalition’s May Day action is inspired by the mass popularity of the Day of Truth and Freedom, in January, when more than 70,000 people took to the streets in Minnesota to demand ICE leave their state.

But are either of these events general strikes? And does it matter?

To better understand this moment, I spoke with Erik Loomis, a labor historian at the University of Rhode Island and author of Organizing America and A History of America in Ten Strikes.We discussed the history of the general strike in America, the legal barriers hindering today’s labor movement, and how workers can use their strategic power to stand up to the Trump administration.

This interview has been lightly condensed and edited for clarity.

What is a general strike, and how does it differ from a typical labor strike?

A regular strike comes out of a workplace. It’s usually affiliated with a singular workplace action by a group of workers who are angry about something going on in the workplace. They’re trying to form a union and the company won’t negotiate, or they have a union and the company won’t come up with a fair contract.

The idea behind a general strike is that the workers writ large, workers generally, will all come together and walk out in favor of some goal—a kind of broad-based revolution. It can be across sectors. Let’s say I go on strike as a college professor because my university is treating me really badly, and the hospital workers also walk out on strike with me. They’re trying to use their influence over their sector of the economy to increase the stress of the conditions so that I can win what I want to win. It doesn’t have to be about the workplace if a bunch of unions come together. Part of what they were trying to do in Oakland in 1946, for instance, was to overthrow the Republican political machine that controlled the city.

Has the US ever had a true general strike? What conditions preceded them, and what were the demands?

Basically every general strike in the US has come out of the established labor movement. We’re talking about Seattle in 1919, San Francisco in 1934, Oakland in 1946, New Orleans in 1892. These general strikes have been attempts by the labor movement that usually come out of a specific workplace issue but then explode as part of a general discontent with the system as it exists at that time—to place pressure on employers, the city, the forces of order.

“If people can use these terms in order to push for a more just world, then that’s a heck of a lot more important than whether it technically is or is not a general strike.”

In Seattle in 1919, it’s very much about employers not raising wages on docks after World War I, and the Seattle labor movement comes together as one to try to force a general increase in wages. In San Francisco in 1934, the longshoremen were led by the famed radical Harry Bridges, who had come out of the Industrial Workers of the World, in an attempt to form a union, which the companies and the police were very strongly resisting. In Oakland in 1946, it starts at a department store and spreads throughout the city of Oakland. In that case, it’s very much also about wages.

These have not always really been that radical. But the second thing you have to understand is that the general strike—or more specifically, sympathy strikes, where you strike in sympathy to try to put more pressure on the employer—were declared illegal by the United States as part of the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947. A union cannot actually legally engage in what would be required to hold a [true] general strike today. They could do it, but they would break the law and face all kinds of penalties for doing so.

Some people were using the term “general strike” to describe Minnesota’s Day of Truth and Freedom in January, and other people were pushing back against that word choice. Is “general strike” the correct term, and how much do definitions matter?

I am one who is a little skeptical about the way this term is being used. I don’t think what happened in Minnesota is a general strike, and I don’t really think what’s going on May 1 qualifies either.

But maybe it doesn’t matter. People are using the terms and the ideas that they have access to through their education and trying to apply them to the presently terrible political situation, and that’s okay. In fact, that’s exactly what people should be doing. Whether or not it is technically a general strike is far less important.

If people can use these terms in order to push for a more just world, then that’s a heck of a lot more important than whether it technically is or is not a general strike.

In 2022, it felt like we were seeing an inflection point in the American labor movement. There were key unionization efforts with companies like Amazon and Starbucks. Do you think that momentum has continued, or has it been really diminished by Trump’s second term?

I think there’s a few things there. One is the anger over economic inequality is very real. I think that hasn’t changed at all. I think we’re seeing that with the increased success of more left-wing candidates in the Democratic Party. Trump may be a liar and a terrible human being, but one of his lies is that he’s good for the working man. A lot of working people believe that because they’re so angry about the system as it exists.

So the economic anger is still very much there. And then every time a union wins something these days, there’s a sort of liberal-left world of writers and readers that want to blow up every single small victory into the revival of the labor movement, and that’s more pressure than it can bear.

We saw this with the Amazon vote, which, let’s face it, was one vote in one factory. We saw this with the Starbucks workers. And we saw this with the successful organizing by the United Auto Workers at that one plant in Chattanooga.

The reality is that the barriers to successfully organizing, in part because of the Taft-Hartley Act, are enormous. The Starbucks workers have done one heck of a job, but what they’re facing is a company that simply refuses to negotiate a contract. The burden to win a union vote and then win a contract is enormous, and if anything, winning that first contract is even harder than winning that first union election, and so companies can wait for years before actually seriously negotiating.

“Labor law is completely captured by corporations, backed by the courts and with the full support of the Republican Party.”

The reality is American labor law is broken. It’s controlled by corporations. President Biden’s idea of the [union-supporting] PRO Act would have tried to reset the playing field on this. But that’s what we need to happen in order to see this kind of energy turn into wins. It really is about political power. The reason that the unions were able to succeed in the 1930s, yes, it was going out on strike and all of the actions they took—but that had happened before.

The difference was massively electing pro-union officials to office, and then those pro-union officials putting the laws into place that create a pathway for those union actions to succeed. You need both the action on the ground, the strike, and you need the electoral side. And we haven’t had that electoral side in many, many decades. And that often has been true under Democrats and is always true under Republicans. So I think the energy is there, and there’s a huge demand for unions. But I don’t think people understand just how hard it is, because labor law is completely captured by corporations, backed by the courts and with the full support of the Republican Party.

I’d like to dive into the Taft-Hartley Act some more. What led to its passage, and how does it shape what’s legally possible when striking today?

First off, the Taft-Hartley Act is one of the worst laws in American history. It continues to severely limit what unions can do today. 1946 is a huge strike year in America. You have all these workers who had struggled through the 1930s and the Great Depression, and even if they’re forming unions, there’s not a lot of money in the economy, so their standard of living is still pretty low.

Then World War II happens, and sure, everybody has a job, but the government’s controlling wages, and we’re not really making consumer goods because everything’s for the war. And so there’s all this massively pent-up demand for increased wages. People want to live a good life, and that’s what a lot of these strikes were about, right? And so it was an enormous strike wave. Over 5 million Americans go on strike in 1946—almost certainly the most in any year in American history.

At the same time, Congress and America generally were moving sharply to the right. We’re seeing the beginnings of Cold War anti-communism, and some unions were led by communists. They were seen now as the enemy, and a lot of employers hated everything that had happened since the unions had started forming in large numbers a decade earlier in the mid-30s and wanted to roll all of that back. So the Taft-Hartley Act bans almost everything that labor unions were able to do to succeed. The sympathy strike is banned. Wildcat strikes—in which you’re under a union contract, but the employer does something bad and you walk out [without a formal strike vote]—are banned.

States were then allowed, through this law, to create the so-called “right to work” laws, in which anti-union states basically incentivize people to not join unions. These have been used in more recent years to try to destroy the labor movement. Taft-Hartley also requires union leaders to pledge they’re not communists, which takes out many of the best-organizing unions in the labor movement [of the time]. It’s a horrible law that continues to have massive impacts on the American labor movement today and goes very far to explain why the movement has become weaker.

It often feels like workers in European countries are engaging in the types of mass strikes we haven’t seen in the US in a long time. Part of it, like you said, is because there’s a lack of the political conditions that that we need to have in the States.

But is there anything else we can learn from other countries that maybe have stronger labor movements?

I think the key is the cultural differences. And this goes back to the mythologies that Americans tell themselves about America: That this is a nation of the individual. This is a nation where you pull yourself up by your bootstraps. This is a nation where the poor man can become rich if he just works hard enough, and all this other bullshit. And you don’t see that in nearly the same kind of way in Europe, in which you have a much more defined system of class consciousness.

Not that European politics are an amazing utopia. But I think it’s always been a challenge in this country to overcome the cultural barriers within the working class that can be this kind of pro-capitalist pathology that lots and lots of people have. And the gig economy, or the rise of Uber, really builds on that—saying, You can make more money by your side hustle.

Racial divisions also absolutely have been a major issue in American labor history. In the past, American workers have often chosen to divide themselves by race. And on top of that, the power of evangelical Protestantism and religion has been a real issue too, in that you have many, many Americans being told messages at churches about individualism, about getting rich, about power structures, about listening to your employer, about obeying. Religion has often been used to crush and bust American strikes as well. So politics is a piece of it, but the biggest difference between here and Europe are cultural issues around class consciousness.

I think a lot of people are looking for strategic actions to take to resist the Trump regime outside of just going to protests and see the general strike as one potential pathway. Given the state of the labor movement, do you think a general strike is the most useful tool to deploy in this moment? Or are there other more strategic pathways?

I think that people want to have one thing that they do and it stops Trump. That’s not going to happen. Everybody’s looking for a shortcut, and I think a lot of general strike rhetoric is a shortcut—if only we come together, we could solve this problem—but I’m not sure that’s really true unless it’s a very real general strike, where the American labor movement leads millions of workers off the job and says they’re going to keep it up for days with clear demands against an anti-worker Republican Party.

Unfortunately, the labor movement is doing nothing. A few unions are even Trump-supportive. The labor movement as an actual organized movement continues to not rise to the occasion. Some state federations have done a pretty good job, but at a national level, it’s been very poor.

So in the absence of that strong labor movement, what do we have?

We have people doing the best they can. And I think that that’s really noble in its own way. We can’t just snap our fingers and stop Donald Trump, and I think this is where learning from other historical movements really makes a difference— thinking about the ways in which people were organizing in the American context in tremendously difficult conditions.

We’re talking about civil rights organizers from the 1920s through the ’50s and ’60s pushing back on Jim Crow. We’re talking about the early organizers in the gay rights movement in the ’70s and ’80s, and the hate and murderous violence that they faced. These are people that we could be inspired by. It might not happen overnight, but we have to understand that struggle happens over the long term, and we have to commit ourselves to that struggle and continue to try to move these conversations forward through our actions, through our organizing.

Whether or not what’s happening on May 1 is a general strike, people using those terms to come together and try to put more pressure on a terrible situation is really a positive thing. And people should take heart from whatever happens out of that and use it as the next moment to continue to build the struggle.

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Congressman Bans SNAP Critic From Six McDonald’s Franchises He Owns

Did you know there is a second-term Republican congressman from North Carolina named Chuck Edwards who owns six McDonald’s franchises? I certainly did not. Neither, for that matter, did his constituent, Leslie Boyd—until she received a letter notifying her that she was now banned from all of them. The Assembly‘s Jessica Wakeman has the full story, featuring an interview with the offending constituent, Leslie Boyd. A Republican congressman banning his own constituent from McDonald’s for protesting his vote to cut SNAP benefits? I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a more House Republicans story than this.

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House Cements $187 Billion Cut to SNAP—But Hey, Free Chicken!

It has always perplexed me that the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program (SNAP)—known colloquially as food stamps—doesn’t allow recipients to use the benefit to purchase hot food items at grocery stores.

Bread, steak, fish, potato chips, bananas and nearly every other food item lining the shelves? Sure. The ready-made rotisserie chickens, mac-and-cheese, or mashed potatoes on warming racks near the check-out? Nope.

According to the US Department of Agriculture, which administers the program, nearly 80 percent of SNAP households include a child, an elderly individual, or someone with a disability—families that would plausibly benefit from having affordable and efficient meals and side dishes as dinner options. Until now, it’s been a no-go.

However, there was a tender development in the US House of Representatives on Thursday, when the legislative chamber voted to include an amendment on their broader $390 Farm Bill package that redefines “food” from an earlier law as to include rotisserie chicken. (The other hot-and-ready dishes weren’t lucky enough to be included.) Before being folded into the Farm Bill, the idea was most recently touted as a stand-alone bill, the aptly named “Hot Rotisserie Chicken Act” by a bipartisan group of Senators earlier this month.

While the legislation still needs to move through the Senate, the House passed the Farm Bill mostly along partisan lines, 224-220. Just 14 Democrats joined their Republican colleagues in supporting it.

You may be wondering what kind of monster would want to deprive a SNAP households—75 percent of which live below the poverty line—of such a convenient delicacy. But to vote for the rotisserie chicken would have meant to vote for other components of the Farm Bill, too. Namely, $187 billion in cuts to the SNAP program.

That part wasn’t as appetizing to most House Democrats.

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The New Frontiers of Aging

Daniel Reilly takes 19 pills in the morning and 13 at night. He lives with hemophilia and HIV, which he contracted in the 1980s. No one expected him to live this long.

In most respects, that’s a blessing—the product of generations of extraordinary medical advances. But it also means there are entire medical specialties he can’t find.

“I don’t know if there’s such a thing as [a] geriatric hematologist,” Reilly, who is 58 and retired, told me: a physician who would know what it means to age as a person with HIV contracted through a blood transfusion, with an understanding of the effects of decades of antiretroviral therapy on the body and blood—or how HIV-related comorbidities interact with the normal processes of getting old. Reilly recognizes how new, and unusual, his situation is: “The vast majority of us”—HIV-positive people with hemophilia—”who were infected in the early ‘80s have passed,” he said.

Reilly’s situation is emblematic of a gap in the medical infrastructure: a generation of people who, amid a variety of expanding and improving treatments, are the oldest ever cohort with their conditions. HIV patients, like Reilly, are a significant part of that. So are some with severe traumatic brain injuries, like social worker Brason Lee. Then there are the growing lifespans of those on dialysis, like retired judge advocate general Evelyn Dove Coleman, whose Air Force service also led to the inner ear disorder Menière’s disease.

As people with complex immune and neurological conditions age into their 60s and 70s, their lifespans are now often extending beyond the expectations of their doctors—and the design of the systems meant to support them. Health care professionals in most fields typically receive little training in disability, less in aging, and virtually none at the intersection of the two. And as federal Medicaid cuts reduce access to the home-and community-based services some aging disabled people depend on, many rely for their survival on networks of personal connections: siblings, spouses, neighbors.

Attacks spearheaded by RFK Jr. and Russell Vought strike at the kind of research that has let people like Daniel Reilly live far longer than anyone expected.

I spoke with Reilly; Lee, who is 63; and Coleman, who is 72—all of whom have lived with significant disabilities since before the age of 50—about their lives and their intricate medical realities, which involve both their disabilities and the normal processes of aging. All three were able to work: Reilly largely on the business side of specialty pharmacies, Lee in social work, Coleman as an attorney and JAG. They are navigating what it means to age into a system that, in many respects, wasn’t built with them in mind.

In 1986, when Reilly was diagnosed with HIV, the condition as he put it, “a death sentence.” He was 20. The stigma was unfathomably high. There was no approved treatment. He had contracted it through a blood transfusion for his hemophilia; he also contracted hepatitis C, since resolved, in the same way. “It was just kind of numbness and disbelief, because it all just kind of unfolded so quickly,” he said. Growing old with HIV—let alone getting married and having an HIV-negative child—seemed very unlikely.

Daniel Reilly (center, with wife Jacque, right, and daughter Liv) contracted HIV when it was a “death sentence.”Courtesy of Daniel Reilly

The world has transformed for people with HIV. For those with access to treatment—in many cases endangered by the expiry of enhanced Affordable Care Act tax credits and by the rise of Medicaid work requirements—it’s now often a chronic condition rather than a fatal one. I spoke with Todd Brown, a physician and researchr who runs a lab at Johns Hopkins University examining the health of those living with HIV.

“In the mid-to-late ‘90s, good antiretroviral therapy became available, and so people are living longer, which is great,” Brown said. “But what we’re noticing is that people living with HIV have a higher burden of many common comorbid diseases, things like cardiovascular disease, liver disease, diabetes, lung disease, and the list goes on and on.” In Reilly’s case, the list includes Type II diabetes and chronic kidney disease.

Reilly’s search for a geriatric hematologist speaks to a less unusual predicament: a medical profession that has not caught up with its own patients.

Reilly is acutely aware of what his survival has required. During his daughter’s university homecoming, he fell and “crushed my left kneecap and broke my left elbow,” Reilly said. “For 12 weeks, I was in a stabilizer where they were waiting for the bone to grow back together…and my wife was there the entire time taking care of me. I wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for my wife. I really would not.”

His daughter Liv, who lives with her own chronic illness, has benefited from Reilly’s decades of hard-won knowledge. “He really has been sort of a guide on how to gracefully deal with it to the best of his abilities,” she told me.

Brason Lee’s introduction to life with a disability was sudden. At 18, he was riding his motorcycle without a helmet in San Diego when an accident left him in a coma for a week, in the hospital for a month, and with a severe traumatic brain injury for the rest of his life. He spent more than a year in intensive rehabilitation and many more months in and out of different types of therapy.

“When I first met my speech therapist, she said that I couldn’t write a complete sentence,” Lee recalled. Even that ultimately took him more than six months.

Lee went on to pursue an undergraduate degree, then a master’s, facing tremendous cognitive challenges and lifestyle adjustments on the way; he took seven years to complete his bachelor’s degree. Lee nevertheless excelled in internships and found steady employment as a social worker. But he didn’t marry until 40 and was, for much of that time, deeply lonely.

Now 63, Lee has developed a set of strategies for navigating daily life with his injury. He employs text-to-speech software to read documents aloud, tools designed for blind users that turn out to be tremendously valuable for people in Lee’s situation—and which did not exist in anything like their current form when he was first injured. And he relies on his wife, Ling, to organize other elements of his life.

A motorcycle accident as a teenager left Brason Lee with a severe brain injury for the rest of his life.Colleen Ibarra Photography

But Lee now confronts newer cognitive issues, and faces fresh difficulties in trying to understand which stem from regular aging and which are long-term consequences of his traumatic brain injury. The difference in best-practice treatment could be major. But—not unlike Reilly’s challenge around geriatric hematology—the medical expertise simply is not there yet. It’s a distinction his doctors cannot yet make clearly, in which respect Lee is left waiting for new generations of researchers and physicians to develop answers.

A traumatic brain injury “is really one of probably lots of factors that go into developing aging, or dementia, or behavioral concentration problems down the line,” said Jared Knopman, a neurosurgeon at Weill Cornell Medicine in New York. “It’s really hard to narrow down this causative effect of TBI and aging.” Most research on traumatic brain injuries and aging focuses on people who sustain them when older, leaving a significant gap in understanding the long-term trajectory of people like Lee, who have lived with severe cases for decades.

“In health care in particular, there is very limited education or training of any professional at any level of care specific to aging. And there’s very, very little specific to disability.”

Coleman, the former judge advocate general, faced prolonged noise exposure at her Air Force base. That led to Menière’s disease, eventually resulting in deafness in one ear. Her experience with hearing-related disability as a veteran is far from unique: Approximately 1.3 million veterans receive compensation from the Veterans Administration for hearing-related disabilities. “Most of these veterans have a hearing loss that’s not only difficulty hearing soft sounds, but also not being able to listen to speech and engage in conversations and environments that are most important to them,” said Victoria Sanchez, a clinician-scientist in the University of South Florida’s Department of Otolaryngology. Those difficulties are associated with loneliness and social isolation—which in turn is linked with accelerated aging.

Coleman knows that Menière’s also puts her at risk of falls, another major concern for aging adults. But that has nothing on her experience with kidney disease, for which Coleman received a kidney transplant in late 2024. Life expectancy for dialysis, which she requires, has risen significantly in recent years, from well under a decade to as much as 30 years.

Still, said Coleman, who used to run five-kilometer races, “You can’t be carefree and just run around and do what your mind wants to do. You have to follow what your body is able to do.”

That’s made possible for Coleman above all by her sister, Dee, who moved to Coleman’s home in North Carolina to help care for her, managing her medications and providing the daily oversight that Coleman’s medical situation requires; by her brother, Bill, who credits their walks with keeping his sister’s spirits up when they’re together; and by her faith and community volunteer work.

Retired Air Force judge advocate general Evelyn Dove Coleman celebrating her birthday.Courtesy of Evelyn Dove Coleman

The support networks that Reilly, Lee, and Coleman rely on are not incidental to their survival. They don’t lack for community. (All three also have meaningful relationships with their adult children.) But many disabled people do experience gaps in community that could be substantially addressed—and in other contexts has been—with more robust federal and local support for social services. It’s a structural failure in particular for people who, like them, contend with complex medical needs.

Michelle Putnam, director of the Gerontology Institute at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, described a compounding dynamic: many disabled people are excluded, earlier in their lives, from environments where adult relationships are normally built.

“One of the challenges for anyone growing older is sort of when you leave the sort of common pathway, whether it’s education or work, you sort of move outside of formal groupings,” Putnam said. “And for younger people with disabilities, they may have had difficulty getting into those pathways in the first place because they didn’t have employment or had trouble having access into groups and organizations.”

For aging people with multiple disabilities, that can mean a more limited social fabric at exactly the time when it’s most needed. That Reilly, Lee, and Coleman are, in important ways, exceptions to that rule is partly why it was possible to talk to them at all: they have strong ties that let them manage their conditions exceptionally well, and that have helped them beat the odds.

The underpinning of future breakthroughs is being dismantled.

The data for the wider population is less promising. Not only is social isolation linked to accelerated aging, with physical inactivity (which many disabilities compel) and disrupted sleep (which many disabilities cause) among the contributing factors, but adults in the United States already face exceptionally high levels of loneliness: around one in three US adults between 50 and 80 reported a lack of companionship, in a society that is unaccommodating of informal networks of care.

For disabled people, finding community can be exceptionally difficult—the product of inaccessibility, difficulty with transit and commutes, and rising sentiment against, or simple failure to create, the kinds of remote activities that became commonplace during Covid stay-at-home orders.

“Social isolation and loneliness are recognized as a national and global public health concern, adversely impacting physical, cognitive, and mental health, quality of life, health care expenditure, and longevity across the lifespan,” said Cecilia Poon, a geropsychologist and the chair of the American Psychological Association’s committee on aging.

Senior centers, a legacy of the Johnson administration’s Great Society initiative, address some of those needs: training for caregivers, support with public benefits, and potential training sites “for health education and caregiver support programs,” Poon said. But the overall gap in community support for aging disabled people is matched by gaps in how the health care system itself is equipped to treat them.

“What we can say pretty clearly is that in health care in particular, there is very limited education or training of any professional at any level of care specific to aging,” Putnam told me. “And there’s very, very little specific to disability.”

There is also, she said, inadequate research on how disabled people who have been disabled since before age 50 are faring in the health care system and what their specific needs are. Reilly’s search for specialties like geriatric hematology is part of a wider predicament: a medical profession that has not fully caught up with its own patients.

That deficit ties back to a broader dynamic examined in a 2024 study in the journal Gerontologist: the link between ageism and ableism. Surveying nearly a thousand people, researchers found that ageism was associated with ableism, including among older adults who had internalized ageist beliefs about themselves. Positive feelings toward older adults were associated with lower rates of ableism—suggesting that those forms of discrimination are mutually reinforcing, and that efforts to reduce one may help reduce the other.

“Public policy initiatives to address community-level interventions and targeted training to inform discourse about ageism and ableism are critical,” the researchers wrote. That intersection may also help explain why some aging disabled people do not identify as part of the disability community at all.

The population at stake is not small. According to the Census’ 2024 American Community Survey, more than 7.5 million people living outside of institutions over the age of 65 have a disability that makes living independently difficult, over a tenth of that age group. As disabled people with complex health issues live longer, that number will grow. And it will grow during a period when home- and community-based services will be cut across every state as a consequence of sweeping attacks on, and reductions to, Medicaid services.

Then there’s the cost of being disabled. What the disability community calls the Crip Tax is already a constant pressure: mobility devices that insurance won’t cover, cumulative costs of medications, like the more than 30 that Reilly takes, and transit services like rideshares for those who need them. Many disabled people, as Rebecca Cokley wrote in the Nation, are forced to work until they die, purely as a consequence of the cost of living. Those systemic issues are daunting and arguably disabling in themselves.

All the while, biomedical research is being cut by the Department of Health and Human Services under Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and elsewhere in the administration by Office of Management and Budget director Russell Vought, among others in the Trump administration. Their attacks strike directly at the kind of research that has made it possible for people like Reilly to live far longer than anyone, themselves included, were led to expect. The underpinning of future breakthroughs is being dismantled.

Still, for Reilly’s wife, Jacque, who has been with him since the early 1990s—in a life made possible by radical medical progress—those existing wins are a source of hope: “a vision for the future of what could be possible,” in her words.

Those breakthroughs require a health care infrastructure designed to preserve and build on them, with professionals trained to treat the people who benefit from them, and support networks that are better-funded and less at the mercy of election cycles. Living for decades with conditions like Reilly’s is no longer unimaginable. In a growing number of cases, it is simply what aging looks like, amid systems that have yet to adapt.

This article was written with the support of a journalism fellowship from the Gerontological Society of America, the Journalists Network on Generations and the John A. Hartford Foundation.

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“We Could See the Largest Drop in Black Representation Since the End of Reconstruction.”

On Wednesday, the Supreme Court dealt a death blow to the country’s most important civil rights legislation, the Voting Rights Act of 1965—the law that defeated Jim Crow.

For 100 years, from 1865 to 1965, Black people were systematically and actively excluded from participation in American democracy through racial violence, but more commonly through race-neutral tricks like poll taxes and grandfather clauses. Governments across the country also used redistricting to dilute the Black vote without ever having to talk about race explicitly.

That’s what Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, enacted federally, went after: The slippery tricks deployed to destroy the political power of Black folks and other people of color—especially in the South.

And the Supreme Court just took us right back to that time.

The majority opinion in the case, Louisiana v. Callais, struck down the creation of a second majority-Black congressional district in Louisiana. In so doing, the court rendered Section 2 of the VRA basically useless, making it nearly impossible to prove that a gerrymandered map violates the right of voters of color.

As soon as this decision dropped, I knew exactly who I wanted to talk to. My colleagues Ari Berman and Pema Levy are two of the sharpest minds reporting on voting rights and the Supreme Court in the country. And they were clear: This is bad. “Today is so heartbreaking because we’ve been writing about this for so long,” Pema told me. “And this just really feels like the final nail in the coffin.”

“When we weaken the Voting Rights Act, we don’t just weaken one law,” Ari agreed, “we weaken the very fabric of American democracy.”

The two went on to explain the staggering potential costs of the decision. “Who needs poll taxes and literacy tests if you have partisan free for all?” Pema explained. “If your partisan designs trump everyone else’s rights, then you can just, under the guise of partisan gerrymandering, eliminate the voting rights of minority voters simply because they don’t vote for your party. It is absolutely a Jim Crow tool now.”

“We could see the largest drop in Black representation since the end of Reconstruction,” Ari warned. “We could lose a third of the Congressional Black Caucus.”

Our sobering conversation about the Supreme Court, the Voting Rights Act, and the future of multiracial democracy is above. I got a lot out of this, and I hope you do too.

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Sam Altman’s ChatGPT Couldn’t Stop Obsessing Over Goblins

OpenAI admitted it had to develop a specific instruction in the code of its latest model of ChatGPT to stop it from repeatedly referencing “goblins, gremlins, and other creatures.”

In an explanation posted on Wednesday, the company said the “strange habit” came from its chatbot personality feature—specifically for users who chose the “Nerdy” personality. According to OpenAI, this personality receives the following prompt from its system:

You are an unapologetically nerdy, playful and wise AI mentor to a human. You are passionately enthusiastic about promoting truth, knowledge, philosophy, the scientific method, and critical thinking. […] You must undercut pretension through playful use of language. The world is complex and strange, and its strangeness must be acknowledged, analyzed, and enjoyed. Tackle weighty subjects without falling into the trap of self-seriousness. […]

OpenAI said it first noticed the trend last November and some users said they found increased “goblin” references over newer model releases, even beyond the “Nerdy” personality.

Some exact quotes that users reported:

• “sensible little goblin”
• “because ovens are filthy little goblins.”
• “Brutal little goblin of a dynamic”
• “Tragic little digital swamp creature”

Through “reinforcement learning,” where the chatbot accounts for whichspecific responses receive high rankings from human evaluators in terms of accuracy and quality, the “playful” responses performed better.

As Wired first reported on Tuesday, the latest ChatGPT model, released last week, included the instructions: “Never talk about goblins, gremlins, raccoons, trolls, ogres, pigeons, or other animals or creatures unless it is absolutely and unambiguously relevant to the user’s query.” OpenAI did not immediately respond to Wired’s request for comment but the same day the report was published, Sam Altman posted a meme on X, making light of the situation by joking that the upcoming GPT-6 would have “extra goblins.”

pic.twitter.com/PR7C3NPxqk

— Sam Altman (@sama) April 28, 2026

After the company explained its troubleshooting process and how it implemented the override instruction to reduce goblin-related outputs the next day, it stated in its Wednesday post that “taking the time to understand why a model is behaving in a strange way, and building out ways to investigate those patterns quickly, is an important capability for our research team.”

The explanation may bring to mind how Elon Musk’s Grok chatbot repeatedly brought up “white genocide” in South Africa. Although xAI stated that Grok’s responses were due to an “unauthorized modification” from an employee, chatbot models should not be that easily manipulable if user safety was an actual concern.

Despite all this, the companyis pushingfor less regulation of its products while simultaneously acknowledging that it is still learning how its chatbot models work. As I wrote on Monday, Sam Altman and OpenAI have publicly wiped their hands of the detrimental effects their products are costing people now and have demonstrated a blatant disregard for potential lasting impacts.

A true embrace of goblin mode.

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The Onion’s Plan to Take Over Infowars Is Once Again in Jeopardy

In a brief ruling late on Wednesday, a Texas appeals court panel declined to immediately turn over Infowars, the conspiracy empire founded by Alex Jones, to a federal receiver, pending further court proceedings. That receiver had previously signed a deal with the satirical news site The Onion to take over Infowars’ physical and intellectual property; the emergency ruling puts that plan in jeopardy. The stay was first reported by Ben Mullin, a media reporter at the New York Times. The ruling does not, however, save Infowars, which is expected to stop broadcasting today, because no one is currently paying the rent. Jones said in a video posted on X that April 30 would likely be the company’s last day of operation.

Global Tetrahedron, the company who owns The Onion, announced earlier this month that they’d reached an agreement with the federal receiver overseeing Infowars, Gregory S. Milligan. The terms of that deal would allow a new LLC created by Global Tetrahedron to lease Infowars’ physical studio as well as its intellectual assets, but at the time, the plan still needed to be agreed to by a judge. In a motion last week, attorneys for Milligan said that the Sandy Hook families, to whom Jones and Infowars owe more than $1 billion in defamation judgments, support the plan. The Infowars studio rent, per the motion, costs $81,000 each month.

The Sandy Hook families have not yet been paid a dime of what they are owed.

On Thursday, Jones said on X that the receiver was no longer paying the rent or any other bills associated with the property. Jones has vowed for years that if Infowars is ever shut down, he’ll immediately begin broadcasting at a new studio; he’s also been selling products on a new site, Real Alex Jones, and encouraging supporters to donate money to him there to keep him on air. On Wednesday night, he celebrated the ruling on X, writing, “We Give Thanks To God and Infowars’ Supporters For Standing Against These Pathetic Weasels.” He also directed listeners and viewers to a new website, while stressing that the new site “was not Infowars.”

“I am the Infowar,” he declared. “You are the Infowar.” True to form, Jones then went on to falsely claim that the FBI and CIA were secretly behind the original civil lawsuits filed against him and the company.

This is the latest development in Jones’ and Infowars’ ongoing legal sagas, after the company lost a series of defamation lawsuits by default in both Texas and Connecticut. The suits were brought by the families of children and school personnel who died at Sandy Hook. Jones maintained for years that the shooting, as well as numerous other mass casualty events, were hoaxes. He’s inconsistently admitted that he was wrong in making those claims. Jones and Infowars both filed for bankruptcy protection in 2022; since then, the Sandy Hook families have not yet been paid a dime of what they are owed.

In a statement on Bluesky, Onion CEO Ben Collins said the Texas ruling had “created… an unprecedented situation” where “no one knows who is in charge of InfoWars, and therefore no one can pay rent.”

“Since no one controls these assets right now, it does appear InfoWars will shut down tonight at midnight,” Collins continued, adding that the Sandy Hook families are seeking relief in several different courts. “We’re hopeful they will resolve this immediately so we can take over and pay these families.”

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Food Recalls Are Good, Actually

Over the last few months, Trader Joe’s has pulled thousands of cases of focaccia bread and frozen fried rice from its shelves for potentially having fragments of metal or glass, respectively. If that makes you a little nervous about stocking up on other TJ favorites like cookie butter and Everything But the Bagel crackers, you’re not alone. (Trader Joe’s website notes that the company takes “these matters seriously—personally, even.”)

Monti Carlo, a chef who breaks down food recalls on her Substack, told me in November that at one point during the fall, it felt like there were too many recalls for her to keep track of. There was a listeria outbreak in prepared pasta meals, an infant botulism outbreak in ByHeart whole nutrition infant formula, and a recall of certain corn dogs and sausage-on-a-stick products for potential pieces of wood in the batter. “You have to ask yourself, ‘What is going on?’” Carlo said.

According to experts, the answer is complicated. For the past year especially, food safety has been in turmoil.

Last fall, the 43-day government shutdown led to the furlough of over 30,000 employees at the Department of Health and Human Services, stalling public health communications from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and delaying inspections of food facilities. Then there was the Trump administration’s layoff of 3,859 FDA and 2,499 CDC employees by the end of 2025, as part of Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s restructuring of the Department of Health and Human Services in accordance with the DOGE effort to cut costs.

Firing all the epidemiologists wouldn’t get rid of foodborne illnesses, it would just stop us from knowing about them.

While it isn’t totally clear yet how the shutdown and layoffs will affect the food safety system, when a system on the brink loses thousands of workers, it creates fractures in an already delicate food system. In a March 2025 Consumer Reports article, food safety experts in and outside the agency agreed “that the food program’s budget was already inadequate to carry out the amount of oversight required even before the new administration took over.”

For animal products like meat and poultry, food safety regulations are created and maintained by the USDA Food Safety and Inspection Service, while the safety of all other food products is overseen by the Food and Drug Administration. Many USDA facilities are under continuous inspection, but the FDA may visit each facility only once a year**,** leaving much of the daily oversight to food manufacturers. State and local health agencies may be the first to identify cases of illness and determine the cause to be foodborne. Sometimes the FDA will delegate food manufacturer inspections to these agencies, but its main purview is typically the inspection of the retail food industry. When illness cases in different states are linked, the CDC will often get involved to coordinate an investigation and contact the appropriate agencies once an issue is identified.

It’s a fragile system that becomes even more tenuous in situations like last year’s multistate listeria outbreak in prepared pasta meals. Donald Schaffner, an extension specialist in food science and professor at Rutgers University, recalled how that outbreak was an eye opener because it happened at a company making fresh pasta for meals, which made it an FDA-regulated company, but because the pasta might have been used to make a fresh or refrigerated entree that has meat in it, that became a USDA issue. They were still able to unravel the threads, but it showcased just how intertwined, and occasionally arduous, the system oversight can be.

The ultimate hope is that with these overlapping systems in place, all food will be safe, but it’s not perfect. It’s unnerving to have to worry about whether the food you’re eating is safe, and most foodborne illnesses are identified first by the consumer—once they’re already sick.

“We have recalls as a last recourse. Everything else that we need to do in order to produce a safe food product must be done,” said Angela Anandappa, founding executive director of the industry nonprofit Alliance for Advanced Sanitation. “And the worst-case scenario is for someone to get sick and die.”

Despite how unnerving a recall might be, experts argue that it might be a good thing that we’re still seeing them, because that means there are still people within the government doing the work to keep our food safe.

Schaffner noted that firing all the epidemiologists wouldn’t get rid of foodborne illnesses, it would just stop us from knowing about them.

“If you undermine those resources, things could get worse, and probably will get worse, and you might not even know it, because the people who are keeping track of whether it’s getting better or worse no longer work for the federal government,” he added.

When you see a new food recall, don’t take it lightly, but also remember that it means there are still food safety specialists working hard to make sure your food is as safe as it can be.

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The Roberts Court Shows Its True Partisan Colors

The Supreme Court’s Republican-appointed majority would have you think that its latest gerrymandering decision is a mere tweak to the legal rules governing political map-drawing. No doubt hoping for mild headlines, the court’s 6-3 opinion framed its holding as hewing to “the plain text” of the Voting Rights Act and “consistent with” the Fifteenth Amendment’s prohibition against racial discrimination in voting. In compliance with these two guideposts, Justice Samuel Alito’s majority opinion styles itself as a humble “update.”

Don’t be fooled. This is a counter-revolution. Section 2 of the 1965 Voting Rights Act requires that people of color have an equal opportunity to elect representatives of their choice. Wednesday’s decision effectively strikes down Section 2—at least what this Supreme Court had left of it—and takes the country back to the dark days when Black and brown voters in many states cast meaningless ballots, having been diluted and gerrymandered into powerlessness. In the decades since the Voting Rights Act, southern states have sent Black representatives to Congress, state legislatures, and local political bodies because this seminal civil rights law demanded that minority voters have an equal voice in the political process. Congress has repeatedly defended and continued these protections. On Wednesday, a court majority watered them right down to nothing.

The Republican appointees elevated partisan concerns over the rights of minority voters.

In her dissent, Justice Elena Kagan laid out the stakes of what the court had just done, and repeatedly chided the majority for downplaying the gravity of its holding. Wednesday’s decision in Louisiana v. Callais “could destroy most of the majority minority districts that in the past 40 years the Voting Rights Act created,” Kagan wrote, joined by Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson. The decision has “thus laid the groundwork for the largest reduction in minority representation since the era following Reconstruction. Under cover of ‘updat[ing]’ and ‘realign[ing]’ this greatest of statutes, the majority makes a nullity of Section 2 and threatens a half-century’s worth of gains in voting equality.”

This case is not the first that the Roberts Court has taken to dismantle the Voting Rights Act, but it may be the last. It is likely the final nail in its coffin, and the lid is now so firmly in place that it is improbable that any plaintiff will be able to pry it open and avail themselves of the law’s protections. This court, under Chief Justice John Roberts, began its assassination of the law in 2013, striking down the requirement that jurisdictions with a history of discrimination get pre-clearance for new maps and changes in voting rules. The court went on to make it harder to win cases against discriminatory voting laws that block minority voters from casting their ballots. And in a related line of cases, the justices green lit partisan gerrymandering and made it increasingly difficult to prove racially discriminatory map-drawing had occurred. The Callais decision marries these two lines of cases, destroying the Voting Rights Act while elevating permission to conductpartisan gerrymandering above minority voting rights.

The dissent opens with a hypothetical that illustrates the import of the majority’s decision: Imagine a state with a history of virulent racial discrimination, in which Black and white voters prefer different political parties. The population is 90 percent white, save a single county, shaped like a circle, which is 90 percent Black. The Black voters elect a representative of their choice because they belong to one congressional district. Then “the state legislature decides to eliminate the circle district, slicing it into six pie pieces and allocating one each to six new, still solidly White congressional districts,” Kagan writes. “The State’s Black voters are now widely dispersed, and (unlike the State’s White voters) lack any ability to elect a representative of their choice. Election after election, Black citizens’ votes are, by every practical measure, wasted.”

Congress, under the Voting Rights Act, forbid this kind of racial vote dilution. Under Callais, the Roberts Court brings it back. Indeed, if the white majority in the dissent’s hypothetical seeks to hand all their state’s congressional districts to Republicans, then the Black population cannot have a meaningful vote because they would choose a Democrat. “The majority straight-facedly holds that the Voting Rights Act must be brought low to make the world safe for partisan gerrymanders,” Kagan writes. “For how else, the majority reasons, can we preserve the authority of States to engage in this practice than by stripping minority citizens of their rights to an equal political process? And with that, the majority as much as invites States to embark on a new round of partisan gerrymanders.” Notably, the majority does not dispute this. Alito does not counter that this hypothetical district—the paradigmatic Section 2 district—would survive Wednesday’s opinion. It’s a damning silence that tacitly admits just how sweeping his decision is.

Partisan gerrymandering, the court’s preferred tool for dismantling Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, is not a constitutionally protected practice. In fact, it’s long been viewed as a big problem. As recently as 2017, the Supreme Court appeared poised to limit extreme partisan gerrymandering and its obviously corrosive impact on democracy and individual rights. But two years later, after Justice Anthony Kennedy was replaced by Justice Brett Kavanaugh, the court swung in the other direction. In Rucho v. Common Cause, Chief Justice John Roberts ruled that federal courts could not adjudicate partisan gerrymandering claims because they were ill-equipped for the task. Rucho “did not pretend that partisan gerrymanders were something in need of safeguarding,” Kagan recalled in her Callais dissent. “To the contrary, the Court conceded that they were ‘incompatible with democratic principles’ and ‘lead to results that reasonably seem unjust.’” But, seven years later, the majority has transformed partisan gerrymandering into a weapon with which to extinguish the political voice of minority voters.

Partisan gerrymandering—indeed any partisan concern that a legislature might raise—can now perform the same function that Jim Crow tactics did prior to the Voting Rights Act. There’s no need to resurrect poll taxes or literacy tests when legislatures can simply draw maps to exclude minority’s preferred candidate from winning. Against any accusations of discrimination against minority voters, legislators can simply invoke a political motive and prevail. The Voting Rights Act was “born of the literal blood of Union soldiers and civil rights marchers,” Kagan wrote. Callais not only tramples the Voting Rights Act, it creates the scaffolding upon which to build a new discriminatory political system.

Defenders of the Roberts Court chafe at the accusation by liberal critics that it is guided by partisan concerns rather than faithful application of the law. But on Wednesday, the Republican appointees literally elevated partisan concerns above the individual and collective rights of minority voters. They ruled that helping your preferred political party trumps the rights of Black and brown citizens. It’s hard to imagine a less justifiable decision—or a more precise representation of this court’s agenda.

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Congress Is in Chaos Over a Surveillance Law—But the Full Story Is Classified

Increasingly desperate negotiations. A plea from the president himself. An eleventh-hour sleight of hand, followed by a surprise vote in the dead of night.

Over the past month, chaos has unfolded on Capitol Hill as House Republicans fracture over a central question: Should the federal government need a warrant to spy on US citizens?

According to most interpretations of the Fourth Amendment, the answer is a simple yes. But for nearly two decades, Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) has created a nifty loophole. The law authorizes warrantless surveillance of foreign nationals abroad, but in practice, it allows intelligence agencies to scoop up the electronic communications of US citizens, too. Agents can then perform “backdoor searches” on records that would normally require a warrant to obtain—querying databases for Americans’ phone calls, text messages, and emails.

Privacy hawks and civil libertarians have long warned that the program undermines Americans’ constitutional right to privacy. Yet when Congress last reauthorized the program in 2024, Democrats were largely in favor. Joe Biden signed it into law with minor reforms; Donald Trump urged Republicans to “KILL” it.

But much has changed in the past two years, and FISA reform advocates say the 2024 changes have failed to stymie abuses. The rapid rise of artificial intelligence has collided with an unprecedented push by the Trump administration to expand government spy powers. ICE is spending hundreds of millions of dollars on new surveillance technology while the FBI buys up Americans’ cell phone location data from commercial brokers. Shortly after returning to office, Trump fired all three Democrats on the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, an independent body tasked with advising the executive branch and reviewing programs like Section 702. And in May, the FBI shuttered an internal office that audits for Section 702 abuses.

Now that Trump stands to benefit from the spy program himself, he’s demanding that Republicans pass a “clean” reauthorization, pushing a bill through without any amendments. The law is set to expire Thursday, and despite the bill clearing a procedural vote in the House today, deep divisions remain in the Republican Party. GOP privacy hardliners have insisted that any reauthorization of Section 702 must include a warrant requirement for government searches of Americans’ communications.

Meanwhile, all but four House Democrats are opposing a clean reauthorization, as the abuses of Trump’s second term have crystallized the dangers of handing warrantless surveillance powers to an aspiring authoritarian**.** Administration officials have publicly labeled anti-ICE protesters “domestic terrorists,” ICE agents have collected biometric data from activists, and Trump has used the Justice Department to go after his political enemies.

Congressional staffers familiar with the negotiations told me that the growing bipartisan opposition to Section 702 marks a significant opportunity to reform America’s outdated surveillance laws. “It’s very clear that the presidency being in a different hand has totally changed the dynamic,” said one Democratic staffer, granted anonymity to speak candidly. “While AI is part of that new opportunity, I really think it’s because people are cognizant of how dangerous it is to have a federal government with someone like Stephen Miller actively going around talking about domestic terrorists.”

Earlier this month, the Lever and the American Prospect reported that the Democratic-led Congressional Black Caucus planned to support a clean reauthorization of the program, despite its use in federal surveillance of Black Lives Matter activists in 2020. A few days later, facing media scrutiny, the caucus came out against a clean reauthorization and called for a judicial warrant requirement and a ban on backdoor searches.

“As it stands, the Trump Administration has already committed serious violations that undermine democratic norms. We cannot allow federal law enforcement officers to have unfettered and unregulated access to information to persecute political opponents or intimidate American citizens,” CBC members wrote in a statement.

In fact, FBI searches of US citizens’ data under Section 702 rose 35 percent last year to more than 7,000 queries, according to a letter the agency sent to Congress in March. An April report by the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board found that the FBI also conducted 839 “sensitive” searches in 2025—queries related to journalists, elected officials, political candidates, and religious groups—up more than 200 percent from 2024.

Critics say that those findings underscore that the 2024 reforms—which included a requirement that the deputy director of the FBI approve “sensitive” searches—did not go far enough.

“Until two months ago, the Deputy Director was Dan Bongino, a longtime conspiracy theorist who has frequently called for baseless investigations of his political opponents. His replacement, Andrew Bailey, is a highly partisan election denier who recently directed a raid on a Georgia election office to justify Donald Trump’s conspiracy theories,” Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) wrote in a “Dear Colleague” letter on April 13.

Wyden also deposited a classified Dear Colleague letter with House Security, detailing a secret legal interpretation of Section 702 that “directly affects the privacy rights of Americans.” That letter has made a splash in Washington, DC, two staffers told me, even though it’s largely been absent from mainstream media coverage. In other words, the public doesn’t know the full scope of the spy law that Congress is battling over.

“I strongly believe that this matter can and should be declassified and that Congress needs to debate it openly before Section 702 is reauthorized,” Wyden said in a Senate floor speech last month. “In fact, when it is eventually declassified, the American people will be stunned that it took so long and that Congress has been debating this authority with insufficient information.”

Some reporting has incorrectly conflated Wyden’s warning with a classified March 17 opinion from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. That ruling found compliance issues with how intelligence agencies used “filtering tools” to query Section 702 data, winnowing down the results without specifically searching for a target, and therefore evading oversight. Wyden’s warning is about a different classified opinion, sources told me.

“Senator Wyden does not cry wolf,” said Elizabeth Goitein, senior director for liberty and national security at the Brennan Center for Justice. “In the past, when he has said that there’s a secret legal interpretation that will shock Americans, he has been right.” Goitein pointed to Edward Snowden’s leaks of classified documents revealing a massive, indiscriminate global surveillance operation by the National Security Agency and its allies. Two years before the leaks, Wyden had warned the public of a secret intelligence court interpretation of Section 215 of the PATRIOT Act.

“Through the Snowden disclosure, we found out what that was. And that was that the NSA was collecting Americans’ phone records in bulk, and it was doing it based on a legal interpretation that the phone records of every American in the country were relevant to specific foreign intelligence investigations,” said Goitein. “That’s not a plausible interpretation of the law.”

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Hegseth to Congress: We Have No Iran Plan But Give Us 1.5 Trillion Anyway.

For the first time since the US began bombing Iran two weeks ago, our military leadership testified before a congressional committee today. The main takeaway: there is no real plan for ending this war. But there is a plan for giving the Pentagon more money.

At today’s House Armed Services Committee hearing, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, General Dan Caine, and Comptroller of the Army Jules Hurst each explained why they believe it is critical to American security to fund the Pentagon to the tune of 1.5 trillion dollars in 2027. The military’s budget surpassed $1 trillion for the first time in 2026—but, Hegseth said, building a “lethal arsenal of freedom” requires 500 million more dollars per year. This, he said, would both allow military “domination” and fuel the “American economic engine.”

Representative Mike Rogers (R-AL), chairman of the Armed Services Committee, invoked the power of mathematics to justify the budget proposal. Another half-billion dollars in funding for the Pentagon—an agency which has never passed an audit—is necessary, he said, because “China announced a 7 percent increase in defense spending this year” and “as a result, they are spending more of their GDP on defense than we are.” As are “all of our adversaries,” Rogers said.

Moreover, he added, American defense spending as a percentage of GDP has “been falling since World War II.” American defense spending as dollars, however, has consistently risen. Adjusted for inflation, current U.S. defense spending is more than $400 billion higher than in the late 1990s. Nonetheless, Rogers said, “we don’t have enough munitions, ships, aircraft, and autonomous systems” to get the country “where we need to be if we want to truly deter conflict.”

The military wants more money: as Hegseth put it, that money will go to “where technology is evolving. And as I mentioned, the character of war fighting is changing pretty quickly, mass simultaneity autonomy undersea space, cyber information.” All these big words require “a higher end of capital investment. It’s an important down payment on the future.”

As Representative Adam Smith (D-WA) pointed out, the Pentagon that’s asking for all that money has not yet provided Congress with an estimate of how much money they’re spending on war with Iran. Hurst, for the first time, answered on the record: about $25 billion in 60 days, or over $400 million dollars per day at war. Some independent researchers’ estimates, however, are nearly double that. And according to Iran’s ministry of health, well over 3,000 people have been killed since the US and Israel started bombing Iran in late February. When Hegseth was asked how much this war is costing American families in fuel and food costs, he said “that’s a gotcha question.”

Pressed by several members of Congress, Hegseth—who spent yesterday on a helicopter joyride with Kid Rock—did not outline a plan for ending the war.

“Their nuclear facilities have been obliterated. They’re buried underground,” he said.

“So we had to start this war, you just said 60 days ago, because the nuclear weapon was an imminent threat, and now you’re saying that it was completely obliterated?” Smith asked.

“Their facilities were bombed and obliterated, their ambitions were not,” Hegseth said. This—bombing on the basis of ‘ambitions’ is a “peace through strength” strategy.

Representative John Garamendi (D-CA) said that from his perspective, Hegseth’s strategy has been one of “astounding incompetence.”

“You have misled the public about why we are at war, you and the President have offered ever-changing reasons for this war,” he said.

Hegseth, for his part, said that criticizing him is providing free propaganda for America’s enemies. “Shame on you,” he told Garamendi. “Calling this a quagmire, two months in? Handing propaganda to our enemies?”

“Don’t say you support our troops on the one hand, and then a two-month mission is a quagmire. That’s a false equivalation. It undermines the mission.”

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Joe diGenova: The Right Pick for Trump’s Bogus “Grand Conspiracy” Case

A version of the below article first appeared in David Corn’s newsletter, Our Land_. The newsletter comes out twice a week (most of the time) and provides behind-the-scenes stories and articles about politics, media, and culture. Subscribing costs just $5 a month—but you can sign up for a free 30-day trial._

In what might be the ultimate encapsulation of Donald Trump’s disgraceful perversion of the Justice Department, the acting attorney general (Trump’s former personal defense lawyer) has selected an conspiracy theory peddler and election denier—who was part of a group that colluded with Russian intelligence to smear Joe Biden and who was deplatformed by Fox News for making an antisemitic comment—to run a baseless and biased criminal investigation that seeks to serve Trump’s revenge fantasy.

Last week, Joe diGenova, a former US attorney, was sworn in as a counselor to acting AG Todd Blanche and handed the mission of overseeing a probe being run out of the Miami US attorney’s office that aims to prove that Trump was the victim of what right-wing influencers call the “grand conspiracy” to destroy him. This alleged Deep State uber-plot encompassed the individual investigations that targeted Trump, including the Russia investigation and special counsel Jack Smith’s investigations of his alleged pilfering of top-secret White House documents and his efforts to overturn the 2020 election. Under this theory, these inquiries were not separate matters but each a component of a years-long clandestine scheme pursued by a nefarious cabal of government officials to persecute Trump and deprive him of his constitutional rights.

The grand conspiracy case was first launched last year as an investigation of former CIA chief John Brennan for testimony he gave years ago to Congress about the Russia investigation. This probe was triggered by a stunt pulled by Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, who in July declassified and released documents that she falsely claimed showed that Obama administration officials at the end of 2016 fabricated the intelligence community’s finding that Russia intervened in that year’s presidential election to assist Trump.

Initially, Trump’s Justice Department focused on whether Brennan had misled Congress about one aspect of the process that led to that conclusion. But this case was so weak that US attorneys in the Eastern District of Pennsylvania and in the Eastern District of Virginia couldn’t pull together a prosecution. With Trump pressing the Justice Department to lock up his perceived enemies, the matter was shifted to Jason Reding Quiñones, the US attorney in Miami and an ardent Trump loyalist. He eagerly took it on.

The goal: show trials for Brennan and other Obama and Biden officials, such as former FBI director Jim Comey, former DNI James Clapper, Hillary Clinton, and perhaps even Barack Obama and Joe Biden.

In November, Reding Quiñones zapped out subpoenas to Brennan and more than two dozen former intelligence officials who had toiled on the Russia investigation. Working with Mike Davis, a former Senate staffer and informal Trump adviser (who had publicly vowed to get even with former officials who had investigated Trump), he has sought to expand the case far beyond Brennan’s testimony to Congress to cover just about all of Trump’s grievances. The goal: show trials for Brennan and other Obama and Biden officials, such as former FBI director Jim Comey, former DNI James Clapper, Hillary Clinton, and perhaps even Barack Obama and Joe Biden.

After the Justice Department’s failed attempt to prosecute Comey—which might be revived— Reding Quiñones’ investigation has become the ground zero of Trump’s crusade of vengeance. Not surprisingly, it’s been marred so far by irregularities and signs of significant bias. Reding Quiñones called for a second grand jury to be set up for this investigation in the Fort Pierce courthouse, which is 130 miles from Miami but under the supervision of federal Judge Aileen Cannon, who issued a series of controversial and highly favorable rulings for Trump in the stolen-papers case. (Brennan’s lawyer protested this unusual move.) And earlier this month, a senior career federal prosecutor withdrew from the investigation, expressing concerns about the case’s legal viability.

Enter diGenova. In hailing his appointment, the Justice Department proclaimed that the 81-year-old former prosecutor has had a “distinguished career.” And he once boasted a decent reputation in Washington as a no-nonsense and savvy Republican. But in the Trump years, he has become a highly partisan purveyor of conspiracy theories and disinformation—a right-wing crank.

Prior to partnering up with Giuliani for this smear crusade, diGenova was a prominent Russia denier, who excoriated the Trump-Russia investigation as a “hoax” and insisted that “people should be put in jail for this.”

During the 2020 campaign, diGenova and his wife and fellow attorney, Victoria Toensing, were part of the small group Rudy Giuliani assembled to dig up dirt on Joe Biden and promote the false story that Biden, when he was vice president, forced the firing of a Ukrainian prosecutor to kill an investigation of Burisma Holdings, an energy firm that recruited Biden’s son Hunter for a well-compensated spot on its board of directors. (Biden had indeed pressured Kyiv to get rid of this prosecutor, but so had many European governments, as well as a bipartisan group of US senators, for he was widely reputed to be corrupt. At that time, there was no investigation of Burisma.)

Prior to partnering up with Giuliani for this smear crusade, diGenova was a prominent Russia denier, who excoriated the Trump-Russia investigation as a “hoax” and insisted that “people should be put in jail for this.” He claimed that a “group of FBI and DOJ people were trying to frame Donald Trump of a falsely created crime.” In a speech, he called Comey a “dirty cop.” At one point, he and Toensing nearly joined Trump’s legal team, but the pair didn’t come aboard due to potential conflicts of interest.

As part of Giuliani’s squad, diGenova worked with Ukrainians who were making unsubstantiated allegations about Biden that were debunked. He and Toensing also represented right-wing journalist John Solomon, another member of Giuliani’s hit team, who was promoting spurious allegations about purported Biden corruption in Ukraine. Appearing on Fox News, diGenova accused Biden and his family of engaging in “bribery and extortion”—offering no proof. He blamed Ukrainian officials for somehow triggering the Russia investigation. At times, he sounded like an extremist nutter. On Laura Ingraham’s podcast, he blasted the media and Democrats and said, “We are in a civil war in this country…It’s going to be total war. And as I say to my friends, I do two things: I vote and I buy guns.”

This meant that Giuliani’s get-Biden operation—of which diGenova was a key participant—had been in league with Russian intelligence in spreading bullshit allegations about Biden.

While looking for dirt on Biden, diGenova and his wife ended up working for a Ukrainian oligarch who had been indicted by the Justice Department for allegedly scheming to bribe officials in India. Giuliani was hoping this Ukrainian businessman could help unearth derogatory information on Biden. A Justice Department filing in the case identified the oligarch, who denied the charges and was fighting extradition to the United States, as an “upper-echelon [associate] of Russian organized crime.” Oddly, the Ukrainian prosecutor who had been fired at Biden’s insistence filed an affidavit in the oligarch’s extradition case claiming that Biden had “manipulated” the Ukrainian government and “forced” him out of his job. Giuliani used this affidavit to hype the case against Biden.

The Giuliani group even had a direct connection to Moscow. During his frantic chase for negative information about Biden, Giuliani joined forces with Andriy Derkach, a pro-Russia Ukrainian legislator who claimed to have evidence of Biden corruption in Ukraine. He didn’t, and Derkach was far from a public interest–minded legislator. In the summer of 2020, Trump’s own Treasury Department sanctioned him, calling Derkach a “Russian agent for over a decade.” It noted that he had “waged a covert influence campaign centered on cultivating false and unsubstantiated narratives concerning US officials in the upcoming 2020 Presidential Election”—meaning Biden. The department noted, “Derkach’s unsubstantiated narratives were pushed in Western media through coverage of press conferences and other news events, including interviews and statements.”

This meant that Giuliani’s get-Biden operation—of which diGenova was a key participant—had been in league with Russian intelligence in spreading bullshit allegations about Biden. DiGenova was a (presumably) unwitting helpmate for a Russian agent running an operation to benefit Trump.

diGenova called for Chris Krebs, the director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, who pronounced the election free of significant fraud, to be “drawn and quartered” and “taken out at dawn and shot.”

And there’s more. In November 2019, while appearing on Fox, diGenova remarked, “There’s no doubt that George Soros controls a very large part of the career foreign service of the United States State Department. He also controls the activities of FBI agents overseas who work for NGOs…He corrupted FBI officials, he corrupted foreign service officers. And the bottom line is this: George Soros wants to run Ukraine.” This baseless comment—reflecting longstanding right-wing conspiracy theories about Soros—was widely criticized as an antisemitic trope. It was even too much for Fox News. DiGenova’s appearances on the cable channel trailed off.

After Trump lost the 2020 election, diGenova became part of the legal team led by Giuliani that challenged the result. At one point he called for Chris Krebs, the director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, who pronounced the election free of significant fraud, to be “drawn and quartered” and “taken out at dawn and shot.”

DiGenova has demonstrated an immense bias against the targets of the Miami investigation, a tendency to recklessly spout unproven accusations, and a penchant for hawking conspiracy theories. And he was part of an endeavor that promoted Russian disinformation concocted to assist Trump. It’s absurd that he would be placed in charge of any federal investigation. But this grand conspiracy case is a bogus inquiry and a profound abuse of power. It’s not about justice; its goal is to defy the truth and obtain personal revenge for a corrupt and deceitful autocrat. That makes it the perfect case for diGenova.

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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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