Locals Didn’t Think Roundup Was Being Sprayed Near Lake Tahoe. So I Went to Find Out.

This past Sunday, I found myself walking across the snowless ski runs of Sierra-at-Tahoe in California, which sits on public land in the El Dorado National Forest. I had come to chase down a rumor.

Numerous Tahoe-area residents had told me the Forest Service’s plan to spray the controversial herbicide glyphosate—part of the agency’s forest restoration plan for about 75,000 acres scorched by the devastating 2021 Caldor Fire—had been delayed until 2028. A local news site, along with a major local environmental group—Keep Tahoe Blue—were telling people some version of that.

But I had my suspicions. I dug up maps from the Forest Service’s website, and headed to a spot where one of them indicated spraying might already be happening. It was strange to be standing in the middle of a ski run, with neither snow nor skiers around. But I knew if spraying were happening, it would be obvious.

Public uproar has echoed across the Tahoe area since April, when our yearlong Mother Jones investigation revealed that, in California, the fastest-growing use of glyphosate—the main ingredient in Roundup—is to spray forested areas, including this massive new project around Lake Tahoe. Everyone from environmentalists to an Olympic snowboarder and a prominent voice in the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) movement have since condemned the Forest Service’s plan.

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A petition on Change.org gathered about 10,000 signatures in less than two weeks. And people have taken to social media to call for action, generating hundreds of thousands of views, with companies and organizations like Patagonia and Greenpeace sharing information about the spraying. “Pesticides have no place in our forests!” Greenpeace wrote on its Instagram.

Snowboarder Hannah Teter, who won gold in the half pipe at the 2006 Winter Olympics in Torino, Italy, and Silver at the 2010 games in Vancouver, has voiced her opposition on Instagram, where she has 275,000 followers, as well as on her Facebook page.

“It’s so stupid. Everyone in Tahoe is so bummed,” she told me. “How the heck did they get this approved?”

The Forest Service did allow for public comment back in 2023 on its initially smaller proposal for herbicide use in the Caldor Fire scar, which most people in the area seemingly never heard about. Then a 2025 executive order by President Trump to expand timber harvesting on national forestland allowed the Forest Service to more than double its proposed herbicide use within the Caldor Fire scar without soliciting public feedback.

As the outcry grew over the past few weeks, news begin circulating on social media that the Forest Service was backing off. “They cancelled the plan!” one person wrote. “People showed up to meetings, called our representatives and it’s finally cancelled. OUR VOICES MATTERED ON THIS ONE.”

The Forest Service began spraying glyphosate in the Tahoe area last year, including directly on the slopes of Sierra-at-Tahoe.

But that wasn’t true. At Sierra-at-Tahoe, I stood on a mountainside that clearly had been doused in glyphosate. The plants around me were nearly all dead—killed with the controversial herbicide, which the World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer has deemed a probable human carcinogen—andthat a 2020 report from the US Environmental Protection Agency said likely harms 93 percent of endangered species.

Roundup’s manufacturer, Bayer, is currently on the hook for more than $12 billion in legal payouts to more than 180,000 people who say glyphosate made them sick—the company is now seeking immunity from some of its liability in a case recently heard by the Supreme Court. (In a statement, the company said glyphosate products are safe when used as directed and that regulators around the world have approved its use.)

Standing on the slopes of Sierra-at-Tahoe, it was clear to me that the Forest Service is moving ahead. It began spraying glyphosate in the Tahoe area last year, including here at the ski resort, and has been spraying elsewhere this spring.

Down the ski slope from me, I could see hillsides teaming with life, painted in the lush greens and brightly colored petals of spring. But where I stood, next to a ski run called “Marmot,” the land was devoid of spring flowers; the bushes leafless, brittle, and dead by all appearances. Practically the only thing growing was what the Forest Service intended—pine trees: Its workers had hand-planted baby conifers all across the slope.

This scene of devastation is part of the Forest Service’s pivot towards embracing glyphosate in its efforts to reforest in the wake ofmassive wildfires. The agency’s herbicide use in the Tahoe area is mirrored by another fire-restoration plan in Northern California’s Lassen National Forest, where the Forest Servie plans to spray about 10,000 acres with Roundup or a similar product.

As our investigation revealed, the deployment of glyphosate in California’s forestlands has been growing for decades, driven in part by the worsening fires, as companies and government officials scramble to harvest burned wood and replant trees for future timber sales. Glyphosate is among the effective methods—and the Forest Service says the cheapest—to get pine trees to grow back faster, as it kills any other plant that might compete for sunlight, soil nutrients, and water.

These new projects are expanding the agency’s historic use of the herbicide. In 2023, it sprayed 14,900 pounds of pure glyphosate across California, according to an analysis of more than 5 million state records that my colleague Melissa Lewis and I compiled as part of our investigation.

The Forest Service has authorized the spraying of glyphosate over about 75,000 acres within the Caldor Fire scar at up to the legal limit of eight pounds per acre. This means the Tahoe project could deploy more than 584,000 pounds of glyphosate over the next few years. In a document outlining how to transform the fire-scarred land into an ideal timber producing forest, the agency noted that “multiple herbicide applications may be required,” which could further increase the total.

This approach treats portions of the National Forest similarly to farmland, where managers aim to maximize yields and minimize costs. After all, the Forest Service exists within the US Department of Agriculture (USDA).

“It has a well-established toxicity to the environment. And, for endangered species, Roundup is a significant risk.”

The agency has not said exactly how much of the designated area around Tahoe it actually plans to spray, although its documents note that spraying herbicides is“the most effective method available for achieving reforestation objectives in the majority of situations.” Officials did not respond to my questions about how much glyphosate the agency will use, nor whether it still considers the chemical safe for people and the environment—especially now that we know that key research papers vouching for glyphosate’s safety were secretly orchestrated by its manufacturer.

This month, the nonprofit Keep Tahoe Blue sent a message to a concerned local, who then posted it online, saying “no glyphosate has been applied as part of the Caldor Fire Restoration Project, and the USFS has stated the earliest any potential herbicide application could occur is now 2028.” But this was inaccurate.

The Forest Service, as part of the Caldor Fire Restoration Project, has indeed been spraying outside the Tahoe basin, where officials plans to reforest 73,000 acres, including the work already done at Sierra-at-Tahoe.

A big source of confusion is that the Caldor Fire Restoration Project actually consists of two separate plans. One involves the Lake Tahoe watershed(a.k.a. the Tahoe basin),meaning the forest creeks that drain into the lake. This smaller portion of the project includes reforestation and potential herbicide use on about 3,000 acres. It was in relation to this area that the local news site SouthTahoeNow.com reported the Forest Service had held off on spraying until 2028.

But a Forest Service spokesperson told me there has been no delay or change of plans: The agency had never intended to spray in that section—which includes areas near Meyers and Heavenly ski resort—this year or next. But its public documents are unclear on this, and they don’t reveal when or under what circumstances that spraying might commence.

On May 7, the Forest Service posted maps online showing it had sprayed glyphosate around and within Sierra-at-Tahoe in spring 2025. When I called and emailed the local officials to confirm, I got a reply saying they’d need to consult with colleagues on the “East Coast” before answering my question. That’s when I decided to drive out and see for myself.

The Forest Service later confirmed that the area I visited indeed had been sprayed, and that the maps I found online were posted this month—a year after the spraying at Sierra-at-Tahoe—“to facilitate awareness.”

It also released maps showing where the agency is spraying in 2026.Those areas were either already treated with glyphosate in April, a government spokesperson told me this week, or the spraying is “ongoing” and expected to wrap up “within the next couple of weeks, weather conditions permitting.”

“Spraying glyphosate in such an environmentally sensitive and pristine place,” says Kelly Ryerson, a.k.a. Glyphosate Girl, “is “ludicrous.”

All ofthe spraying, they said, has been accomplished by crews using backpack sprayers. These tend to be contract workers, often Spanish speaking immigrants who may not be aware of the potential safety risks. Mother Jones obtained a photo of one work crew that was cited by a county inspector for failure to wear the mandated protective gear—their exposed skin was purple, covered with the chemical.

The spokesperson said the agency posts signs at locations where it sprays herbicides—and typically removes them within 48 hours. Several research papers indicate that glyphosate can persist in the environment and even plant tissue for months, even years, raising risks to the ecology and human health.

One Forest Service map shows areas outside the Tahoe basin that the agency plans to reforest as part of its restoration project—and which it says will likely requireglyphosate and other herbicides. The USDA has defended the Forest Service’s use of glyphosate, noting that it relies on the EPA’s “use of gold-standard science to assess pesticide safety.”

Attorney George Kimbrell, co-executive director of the Center for Food Safety, scoffs at that assertion. “It has a well-established toxicity to the environment. And, for endangered species, Roundup is a significant risk,” he told me.

In 2020, the EPA concluded glyphosate was safe for humans when used according to the label, and any environmental concerns were outweighed by the benefits. But that decision was quickly challenged in court by Kimbrell, who represented a coalition of environmental and farm labor groups arguing that the agency did not adequately assess health and ecological risks.

The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals agreed, overturning the EPA’s decision, noting that most of the studies the EPA examined had “indicated that human exposure to glyphosate is associated with an at least somewhat increased risk of developing non-Hodgkin lymphoma” and that the agency had shirked its duty in properly assessing the ecological risks. The EPA is expected to announce an update on its glyphosate safety assessment this year.

People in Tahoe, worried about glyphosate’s potential health and environmental harms, have begun organizing to slow or stop the Forest Service’s plan. That effort includes Kelly Ryerson—Glyphosate Girl on Instagram—an influential voice who visited the White House earlier this year with other members of the MAHA coalition.

The group met with President Trump and his staff and discussed the risks of glyphosate, among other issues. Trump has angered his MAHA base this year by taking action to protect Bayer from lawsuits, both via theSupreme Court case and in an executive order issued in February that sought to boost domestic protection of the chemical and shield it from legal liability.

Ryerson told me she is now committed to reversing the Forest Service’s plan in Tahoe. “It’s ludicrous,” she said. “To be spraying glyphosate in such an environmentally sensitive and pristine place, where it can get into the water that so many people drink, or swim in, I mean, who thought this was a good idea?”

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Solar Electricity Is Poised to Overtake Coal in—of All Places—Texas

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

The Texas sun keeps rising, as Texas coal wanes.

For the first time ever, solar is set to generate more electricity than coal in the power market managed by the Electric Reliability Council of Texas. Nobody is building new coal power plants in the state, but developers are adding more solar there than anywhere else in the country. As a result of those diverging trajectories, the federal government expects ERCOT will receive 78 billion kilowatt-hours from solar in 2026, and just 60 from coal.

This trend does have seasonal variations. Last year, solar output beat coal on a monthly basis from March through August, and this year it is expected to do so from March through December, per the US Energy Information Administration at the Department of Energy.

Deep-red Texas offers lessons for the liberal states that have committed to lofty climate goals yet failed to build much solar or batteries.

Nationally, the combination of wind and solar surpassed coal generation in 2024, as noted in an analysis by Ember, a think tank that conducts research on clean energy. In other words, the solar industry is further along in Texas than it is nationwide.

The Texas solar surge undercuts the prevailing energy narratives coming out of the Trump administration, which has attempted to boost coal and gas as tools of ​“energy dominance,” while blocking or canceling American energy that comes from renewables. The Department of Energy, for instance, is keeping struggling coal plants on life support at great expense to taxpayers. Meanwhile, the Department of the Interior is blocking wind and solar developments that intersect with public lands.

Trump officials have argued that coal is more reliable than solar because it can generate power around the clock. But even with that advantage, coal plants in Texas can’t keep up with the total annual and monthly production from the rapidly growing solar fleet. This has not damaged grid reliability, because ERCOT meets evening demand with a diverse portfolio, including gas plants, nuclear, wind, and, increasingly, batteries, which store all that excess solar power for use when the sun stops shining.

Of course, Texas leaders did not set out to disprove the Trump administration’s energy claims. The maverick Lone Star State kept its electricity system out of the hands of federal regulators, and in the 1990s and early 2000s reformed it to promote free market competition instead of centralized planning by monopoly utilities. That market, coupled with lots of space and lax building regulations, has made an ideal environment for wind, solar, and batteries to flourish. Now, Texas is fortified with tens of gigawatts of new capacity with which to tackle heat waves and temper price spikes.

Deep-red Texas offers lessons for the liberal states that have committed to lofty climate goals yet failed to build much solar or batteries so far. They can’t immediately switch over to an ERCOT-style market, but they can take steps to speed up the time it takes to get permits and grid connection, dial back the level of deference to habitually conservative legacy utilities, and make sure that clean energy gets a fair shot in the race to serve surging energy needs. And it’s always a good time to reexamine old market rules that subtly privilege entrenched players at the expense of new entrants that would make cheaper and cleaner power.

After more of the rapid-fire solar buildout, EIA expects ERCOT will produce 99 billion kilowatt-hours of solar power in 2027, up 27% from 2026. At that point, the upstart industry will have left its well-established coal competition in the dust.

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Trump Has Finally Found a Small Enough Enemy

On Wednesday, the Justice Department unsealed an indictment charging 94-year-oldformer Cuban head of state Raúl Castro with murder and conspiracy to kill US citizens. It’sa move that may signal potential military action to abduct Castro from the country, as with Donald Trump’s January raid on the compound of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro.

The indictment targets Raúl Castro, the brother of the lateFidel, and five other members of the Cuban military, for the 1991 downing by Cuban forces of two aircraft operated by anticommunist Cuban exiles. While the indictment was filed last month, the unsealing coincides with Cuban Independence Day, celebrating 124 years since the US ended its military occupation of the country.

But Cuban Independence Day comes this year amid a debilitating oil blockade imposed by Trump, which has devastated Cuba’s already struggling health system and economic infrastructure and worsened living conditions across the board. This year alone, residents have dealt with nationwide blackouts, food shortages, hospitals without power to operate, and constant worry over their economic and political future. The Trump blockade and associated policies, which many humanitarian groups view as human rights violations, have deprived the country’s residents of basic necessities and exacerbated the impact of the decades-long US embargo on its neighbor.

“The paradox is, the US imposes crippling sanctions while also saying, ‘I’m going to liberate your people.’ ”

Cuba produces enough oil to meet about 40 percent of its needs domestically. It imports the remainder, mostly from Venezuela and Mexico. But following the US attack on Venezuela and additional tariffs imposed on countries that sell or provide oil to Cuba, both countries halted oil exports to the island. And while the Supreme Court struck down Trump’s tariffs, the president continued his naval blockade on Cuba, seizing manyvesselsthat have sought to ship goods to, or that have simplybeen linked to, the country.

According to a March report by the Atlantic, the US attorney’s office in South Florida is building further indictments against Cuba’s military and government leadership, including Castro family members. The US cited a 2020 indictment against Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro to justify his capture in January. In the week prior to the report, Trump said he believed that he would have “the honor of taking Cuba.”

And earlier, at the end of his first term, Trump added Cuba to the federal list of state sponsors of terrorism, a policy that “put the brakes on some private investment on the island,” Will Freeman, a Latin America fellow at the nonpartisan Council on Foreign Relations told me in an April email. “And [it] did no favors to tourism, which the Cuban regime had made the island’s economic engine.”

A motorcyclist fills up at a gas station in Havana, Cuba during a severe energy crisis throughout the island nation, the result of a fuel blockade imposed on January 29, 2026 by the United States.Paul Hennessy/SOPA/Zuma

The Biden administration largely carried on Trump’s Cuba policy, further hindering Cuba’s tourism in 2022 by barring foreign travelers from visa-free travel to the US if they visited Cuba after the Trump-initiated state sponsor of terrorism designation went into effect in January 2021.

Claims of state terrorism, as M. Victoria Murillo, a professor of political science and international and public affairs at Columbia University, said to me last month, were the linchpin of US justifications for military assaults on Venezuela, and for the campaign of attacks on civilian vessels by US naval forces in the Pacific Ocean and Caribbean Sea.

In January, Trump declared Cuba an “extraordinary threat” to national security on the basis of its alignment with countries like Russia, China, and Iran and his allegations, made without evidence, that Cuba “welcomes transnational terrorist groups” like Hamas and Hezbollah. The executive order imposed additional US tariffs on goods from countries who supply oil to Cuba, which effectively eliminated all support for Cuba from Venezuela and Mexico.

At the end of his first term, Trump added Cuba to the federal list of state sponsors of terrorism.

These latest restrictions have been implemented amid a US embargo that has stopped US businesses from trading with Cuba since the 1960s. While former President Barack Obama eased many economic constraints on Cuba and allowed some travel, he ended the policy that gave Cubans arriving in the United States a guaranteed pathway to legal status. That,according to Murillo—along with Trump and Biden’s reimplementation of economic restrictions—led to growing inequality between Cubans with access to foreign currency and those who rely wholly on state salaries, wages that in 2025 amounted to about $18 a month.

The first group, who constitute an upper class, may have connections to private businesses, tourism, or remittances from relatives who live abroad.

“Cuba is in a situation similar to when the Soviet Union fell,” Murillo says. The US embargo, starting in the 1960s, led Cuba to depend on the Soviet Union, which supplied the island with oil at subsidized prices. Early oil shipments were delivered to US-owned refineries, but they refused to refine in part due to pressure from the US government.

“That started the escalation of nationalization,” Murillo says. “They had no energy, they had to bike places because they had no gas, [and] they lacked food.”

This time, Murillo says, it’s even worse: “Cuba is now on its own.”

The Trump administration’s “maximum pressure” campaign against Cuba to supposedly encourage popular rebellion against the island’s government has not worked. “Social movement theory says that when people are really desperate, they cannot protest. That requires certain resources,” Murillo says. “If you are spending all your time trying to get food, you don’t even have the time to protest.” Anti-government protests in Cuba are rare.

The failure to rouse popular protest—even against unpopular leaders—is increasingly familiar to the Trump administration, which expected an Iranian public uprising to follow its war on that country. In the immediate wake of the Iranian government’s violent crackdown on a series of protests that began in December, I had the opportunity to talk to historian Behrooz Ghamari, who explained the situation succinctly:

“The paradox is the US imposes crippling sanctions while also saying, ‘I’m going to liberate your people.’ This rhetoric about helping people contributes to delegitimizing the Iranian people’s legitimate protests. It gives the Iranian government the excuse to claim conspiracy and say that protesters are acting on behalf of foreign interests and can react severely and violently. If the US actually wanted to help, the only offer is to not intervene and allow these movements to unfold on their own terms.”

In 2021, President Miguel Díaz-Canel called large-scale protests then taking place “a plan orchestrated by the exterior,” claiming that the US government was directing protesters.

Why does Cuba think the US is directing opposition to its government? Historically, it has—Cuba is a longstanding fixation of US foreign policy, dating to generations before Castro. In 1898, Murillo explained, after winning the Spanish-American War, the US began driving towards hegemony, taking Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines from Spain and establishing a protectorate in Cuba. Cuba had no choice but to sign off on the Platt Amendment, which guaranteed the US sweeping powers—including the right to intervene unilaterally in Cuba’s politics, as Trump seeks to do again now—in return for withdrawing its troops from the island at the end of the war.

People wait for a ride at a bus stop in the Fontanar neighborhood of Havana, Cuba during the severe energy crisis throughout the island nation. Paul Hennessy/SOPA/Zuma

US domination remained the status quo for more than half a century. At the time of the Cuban revolution, in the late 1950s, American companies owned or controlled 90 percent of Cuba’s electricity, as well as significant parts of its sugar, communications, and mining industries. In large part to take ownership of domestic industries, the Cuban revolution established a socialist political system—one that the US wanted rid of by any means possible.

The rush of exiles from that revolution, and the proximity between the two countries, helped facilitate the establishment of a powerful Cuban-American lobby, founded by Cuban elites who were exiled after the revolution—which got us our current Secretary of State.

Marco Rubio, the son of Cuban parents who fled to the US in the 1950s, announced in March that Cuba would “have to get new people in charge.” Rubio has becomeby far the most visible and influential face of theCuban-American exile movement, pushing the Trump administration to heap pressure on the country. (Rubio’s family, ironically, fled the country under the US-aligned government of Fulgencio Batista—the one Castro toppled. Rubio has repeatedly claimed otherwise.)

“The reason you are forced to survive 22 hours a day without electricity is not due to an oil ‘blockade’ by the US,” Rubio said in a Spanish-languagevideo message to the Cuban people Wednesday, but because Cuba’s ruling officials “have plundered billions of dollars” from the nation.

Although some Democratic US lawmakers have called for the end of the oil blockade, only one oil tanker has reached Cuba. “We have absolutely no fuel [oil] and absolutely no diesel,” Cuba’s energy minister, Vicente de la O Levy, said last week.

In February, United Nations human rights chief Volker Türk called for the lifting of US sanctions that impede oil deliveries to Cuba: “Policy goals cannot justify actions that in themselves violate human rights,” Marta Hurtado, Türk’s spokesperson, said at the time.

“It looks like I’ll be the one” to topple Cuba, Trump said. “I would be happy to.”

“Cubans should be able to exercise their rights freely, including their rights to political participation, and the Cuban government’s policies of repression and censorship should stop,” the Washington Office on Latin America, a US advocacy organization promoting human rights and social and economic justice in Latin America and the Caribbean, wrote in a statement last month. “At the same time, U.S. policy towards Cuba, focused on coercive measures such as the embargo and other sanctions, is outdated and has failed to produce U.S. policy goals, while causing severe harm.”

“It is the Cuban people, with the concerted support of the international community, who should determine their future and be a core part of any bilateral discussions,” the statement continued.

Since then, the Trump administration has increased sanctions on Cuba, and Wednesday’s news of Castro’s indictment is the strongest signal that the Trump administration is considering switching from mostly economic and diplomatic pressure to military assault. The US military has sent at least 25 intelligence-gathering flights since February and has begun to increase its number of ships in the area.

In response, Cuba President Miguel Díaz-Canel warned that US military strikes could lead to a “bloodbath” on Monday. A Sunday Axios report cited classified intelligence that Cuba had acquired more than 300 military drones and were discussing a possible attack on the US base at Guantánamo Bay.

In his public rhetoric,Trump appears to be framing Cuba and Venezuela similarly. On Wednesday, he called the indictment of Castro a “very big moment” for Cuban Americans but suggested that he didn’t expect there to be an increase in hostilities between the two countries; Trump surprised and upset much of the Venezuelan opposition by taking such a tack with Venezuela, leaving its ruling party in power after the initial assault that abducted Maduro. “Look, the place is falling apart,” Trump told reporters that same day. “[The Cuban government has] really lost control of Cuba.”

But Trump’s remarks on Thursday may be more revealing. “Other presidents have looked at [Cuba] for 50, 60 years, doing something,” Trump said. “And, it looks like I’ll be the one that does it. So, I would be happy to do it.”

If Trump—a teenager when Fidel Castro came to power—sees overthrowing Cuba’s leadership as part of the legacy he’s increasingly concerned with, then a US escalation may well be in the cards.

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There are 50,000 Words in the DNC Autopsy. “Gaza” Isn’t One.

Among the more than 50,000 words in the DNC’s 192-page autopsy of why it lost the 2024 presidential election, here are a few that do not appear even once: Gaza, Israel, Palestine, Jewish, Muslim, foreign policy, protest, genocide.

The report—which was released today, and simultaneously disavowed by DNC Chair Ken Martin—is already generating its fair share of controversy for its typo-ridden, unfinished nature.

“For full transparency,” Ken Martin said in a note released alongside the report, “I am releasing the report as we received it, in its entirety, unedited and unabridged. It does not meet my standards, and it won’t meet your standards, but I am doing this because people need to be able to trust the Democratic Party and trust our word.”

It is understandable that an unedited and unendorsed draft would include numerical and grammatical errors, as well as notes saying things like “No sourcing provided for this claim” and “Methodology appears internally inconsistent.” Paul Rivera, the Democratic strategy consultant hired to write the autopsy, arguably can’t be blamed for his spelling errors—that’s what first drafts are for. But there are also more substantial omissions to consider: the report appears to neglect any of the actual policy reasons some Democrats might have chosen not to vote for Harris.

During the 2024 election cycle, tens of thousands of Palestinians were killed by the Israeli military, often using US-supplied bombs. At every turn, when confronted by protesters asking her to do more to stop the slaughter, the party’s nominee, Kamala Harris, demurred. When Democrats outraged by the war asked that a single Palestinian speaker be allowed to speak onstage at the DNC—and endorse Harris in doing so—they were snubbed.

In February, Axios reported that some of the strategists conducting the autopsy report believed that Gaza cost Harris votes. That did not make it into the now-published version. As horrifying testimonies of violence emerged from Gaza, and sources from the United Nations to the Israeli human rights group B’tselem agreed this was a US-aided genocide, Harris did not promise to stop the flow of arms to Israel. In key swing states like Michigan—where thousands of voters cast “Uncommitted” ballots—that made a difference.

Hamid Bendaas, a spokesperson for the Institute for Middle East Understanding Policy Project, told Axios in February that his organization met with DNC officials. “The DNC shared with us that their own data also found that policy was, in their words, a ‘net-negative’ in the 2024 election,” Bendaas said at the time.

According to polling by the IMEU, 29 percent of former Biden voters who did not choose Harris—equivalent to roughly 122,380 votes across six swing states—were influenced by Gaza. There were of course other factors: broad economic dissatisfaction, as well as a late-game candidate switch, among them—but to omit mention of Gaza is avoidant at best and dishonest at worst.

The release of the autopsy raises as many questions as it answers. Why is there no discussion of Palestine or Israel? Was Rivera told not to include them, or did he leave them out of his own accord? Neither options is flattering to Democrats. In the former, they are still in denial—trying to paper this over won’t make it go away. In the latter, they still can’t pick the right person for the job at hand.

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Supreme Court Leaves Rulings on Executing the Intellectually Disabled in Place

On Thursday, the US Supreme Court ruled 5-4 to dismiss the Hamm v. Smith case, effectively upholding its rulings that people with intellectual disabilities should not be executed, and that IQ tests alone are not enough to determine whether someone has an intellectual disability. A one sentence, unsigned opinion held that the court’s earlier decision to hear the case was “improvidently granted.” Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, John Roberts, and Neil Gorsuch dissented.

“The Court is not equipped in this case to provide any meaningful guidance on how courts should assess multiple IQ scores,” Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in a concurrence, joined by Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson. “All the parties here agree that the Eighth Amendment does not prescribe a single formula for weighing multiple IQ scores.”

Intellectual disabilities, the Supreme Court has ruled, should be determined holistically, as I explained in an article previewing December’s oral arguments in Hamm v. Smith:

The Supreme Court has previously stated that IQ tests alone fail to holistically determine intellectual disability, in 2002’s Atkins v. Virginia—which also established that executing people with intellectual disabilities violated the Eighth Amendment—reaffirmed in 2014 in Hall v. Florida, and most recently in 2017’s Moore v. Texas.

The state of Alabama argued Smith could be executed because he had no intellectual disability. As I previously wrote, Smith had shown that he arguably does:

Long before he was convicted of murder in 1997, Joseph Clifton Smith was placed in schooling for an intellectual disability. Smith had five documented IQ test scores by the time he was tried, all around the bottom five percent of the population—four of which, his legal team has argued, fall in the range of mild intellectual disability.

“The Court’s review is further complicated by the fact that the issue of how to consider multiple IQ scores was neither meaningfully raised nor passed upon below,” Sotomayor wrote.

Even though the court has banned executing people with intellectual disabilities, some advocates have raised concerns it still happens. For instance, Alabama executed Willie Smith in 2021, who some argued had an intellectual disability—though, like the Smith at the center of the Hamm v. Smith case, this was debated.

This gray area—judging who is disabled enough to be spared, and who is fit to be killed—raises questions about the ethics of the death penalty generally, including how racial bias may shape these determinations. According to the Death Penalty Information Center, nearly three out of four people sentenced to death under federal prosecution are people of color.

“In a country that created a system of law based around racial hierarchy, it’s no wonder that people of color, particularly Black people, are more likely to be executed, especially if they are disabled,” says Dom Kelly, the CEO of the disability justice organization New Disabled South. “In 2026, capital punishment is the next generation of racial lynching and the state’s way of keeping the eugenics movement alive.”

In a dissenting opinion signed by no other justice, Thomas blatantly called for the Atkins ruling to be rolled back. “As this case shows,” Thomas wrote, “Atkins has bred only confusion and absurdity. Nothing in the text or history of the Constitution supports Atkins. It should be overruled.”

Smith, who was convicted of capital murder in 1998 for beating a man to death during a robbery, is expected to spend the rest of his life behind bars.

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HHS Refuses to Say What An Anti-Vaccine Activist Is Doing at the Agency

Longtime and controversial anti-vaccine activist David Geier is still working at the Department of Health and Human Services—and the agency is still refusing to specify exactly what he’s doing. In mid-April, HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. told the Senate Finance Committee that he would give them a copy of Geier’s contract. According to a member of the committee, he has still not.

“Three weeks after Secretary Kennedy committed to providing details regarding David Geier’s work at HHS (something he committed to doing within 3 days), our office has yet to hear from HHS on anything related,” says a spokesperson for Senator Ben Ray Luján (D-N.M.).

Autism advocates have called Geier “a quack.”

Geier and his late father Mark, a physician who eventually lost his license, spent years presenting themselves as experts on alleged vaccine injuries and pursuing discredited and dangerous “treatments” for autism in children, including Lupron, a drug that inhibits testosterone production and is used to chemically castrate sex offenders.

From Mark’s home in DC’s Maryland suburbs, the pair presented themselves as experts on autism, running organizations with serious-sounding names, including the Institute for Chronic Illness and the Genetic Centers of America. Their work has been widely panned: in 2003, the American Academy of Pediatrics said a study they published—which purported to show a link between thimerosal, a preservative previously used in some vaccines, and autism—not only “contains numerous conceptual and scientific flaws, omissions of fact, inaccuracies, and misstatements,” but made inappropriate use of data from HHS’s Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System. For another paper in the journal Autoimmunity Review, which was subsequently retracted, the Geiers’ apparent review board, journalist Brian Deer wrote, consisted of the Geiers themselves, Mark Geier’s wife, along with “two of Dr Geier’s business associates; and two mothers of autistic children, one of whom has publicly acknowledged that her son is a patient/subject of Dr Geier, and the other of whom is plaintiff in three pending vaccine injury claims.”

Both Geier and his father were banned in 2004 from accessing the Vaccine Safety Datalink, a federal database which records adverse vaccine reactions and contains medical information on millions of Americans. At the time, a National Immunization Program official wrote in a warning letter that the men had attempted “to merge data files” from the VSD in a way that could have created “complete medical records on subjects, and if so, could have increased the risk of a breach of confidentiality.” Mark Geier’s Maryland medical license was revoked in August 2012 for prescribing children the synthetic hormone Lupron as a supposed autism treatment. David Geier, who has a bachelor’s degree in biology but no other certifications, was himself fined $10,000 in 2011 by the Maryland medical board for practicing medicine without a license.

David Geier’s hiring, which was first reported by the Washington Post in March 2025, generated serious concern among autism organizations. The Autistic Self-Advocacy Network bluntly termed him “a quack,” adding that by “hiring David Geier, the Trump administration has abandoned its responsibility to safeguard public health and promote science.”

The situation has also raised concerns about Geier’s potential access to sensitive medical or personally identifying information. Senator Luján’s office sent a pointed letter to Kennedy on April 1, asking, among other things, “what specific research questions” Geier is investigating, and “what data use agreements are in place to ensure that privacy of the data is maintained.”

Geier’s employment is just one of many concerning changes that Kennedy has made at HHS. He’s also taken steps to weaken the federal vaccine court system, and “retired” every member of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, a key vaccine review board, attempting to replace many of them with allies from the anti-vaccine movement. (The board remains in limbo after a judge issued an injunction against Kennedy’s appointments.)

Under Kennedy, the FDA also deleted a warning page outlining debunked autism treatments. One, chelation therapy, which removes heavy metals from the body, was practiced by the Geiers. (Some anti-vaccine activists falsely claim that vaccines impart heavy metals into the body; a separate FDA page which has not yet been removed warns against chelation therapy for autism.)

This month the New York Times reported that Kennedy has quietly continued driving what the paper described as a “vast inquiry” into vaccines, again attempting to link them to autism and various autoimmune conditions—theories that have been repeatedly debunked. The Times also reported that Kennedy has publicly deemphasized his inquiry at the behest of the White House, due to fears his anti-vaccine initiative will hurt Republicans in the midterm elections.

Neither David Geier nor HHS responded to requests for comment about his employment. The office of Senate Finance Committee chair Senator Mike Crapo, (R-Idaho) also didn’t respond to a request for comment.

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Trump and Elon Musk Crushed USAID. Hunger and Violence Followed.

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

For decades, the US Agency for International Development (USAID), worked across many of the world’s most food-insecure and climate-besieged regions, funding thousands of humanitarian, healthcare, food, and disaster relief programs. That all changed last year when, days after President Donald Trump’s inauguration, his administration issued a stop-work order that suspended nearly all of USAID’s overseas programs. Then, last July, the administration informally dissolved the agency—leading to the largest withdrawal of American international development aid in more than 60 years.

A new study published May 14 in the journal Science suggests the sudden USAID shutdown could have been linked to an uptick in violent conflict across much of Africa, with some of the most politically fragile regions seeing the largest spikes. Outside experts, however, caution that the findings are preliminary and may not capture the bigger picture.

“Who in their right mind would retract healthcare and food so abruptly?”

Farming and agricultural markets are easily disrupted by conflict, and when conflict occurs, food security worsens because fighting can limit communities’ access to food. At the same time, deepening food insecurity in fragile political states contributes to social unrest. Climate impacts then layer onto this fragility. Extreme weather is second only to conflict in having the greatest effect on global hunger, food insecurity, and malnutrition, according to a UN report. That’s in part because it causes people to migrate as they flee places destroyed by rising seas and cataclysmic storms, which, in turn, can fuel conflict.

“It is undeniable that USAID programming around food aid, including emergency food kitchens, therapeutic foods, and health and water programming on which basic food and nutritional security is built, provided a critical lifeline to millions of women, children, and families in severe nutritional deficits,” said Zia Mehrabi, a food security and climate change researcher at the University of Colorado Boulder. “Who in their right mind would retract healthcare and food so abruptly, in so many places, when the direct result is people suffering and dying?”

In analyzing the impact of funding cuts on conflict across 870 subnational African regions that had been receiving different levels of USAID services, the Science paper’s authors found that in the roughly 10 months that followed the administration’s immediate withdrawal of aid, areas that had previously received more USAID support may have experienced more or different types of conflict.

Using two global datasets that track funding disbursements and violent conflict, the study suggests that, in areas with high historical USAID funding, there was a 12.3 percent increase in conflict overall and a 7.3 percent surge in armed battles; protests and riots in these areas rose by 6.8 percent and battle-related fatalities by 9.3 percent after the shutdown.

The end of USAID has buckled our ability to measure the very outcomes of the end of USAID.

According to Austin Wright, a University of Chicago researcher who studies the political economy of conflict, and a co-author of the paper, the effects have been swift and destabilizing. “There is nothing that we’re aware of in recorded human history of the magnitude of that shutdown, in terms of ending a country’s commitment at a global scale,” said Wright.

Established in 1961, USAID was created to encourage economic and social development in emerging nations while countering the Cold War influence of the Soviet Union. Building resilience in foreign political systems has, in recent decades, been “one of the main goals of the work of USAID,” said Chelsea Marcho, a senior director for research and policy at the Food Security Leadership Council and former USAID official under former President Joe Biden, who was not involved in the Science paper.

The study showing that violence may have been less severe in places where USAID had helped build stronger institutions, she said, only underscores the value of those aid investments. One example is the largely discontinued work to develop more resilient food systems across sub-Saharan African nations facing higher rates of poverty, hunger, and malnutrition.

But what many tend to forget, said Marcho, is that USAID also funded the bulk of pivotal data collection efforts across much of the world’s most food-insecure and climate-vulnerable regions. The dissolution of the agency has prompted widespread disruptions in everything from localized weather monitoring to one of the primary global famine early-warning systems. Although some of these systems have since been restored, the gaps in monitoring coupled with the decreased capacity across aid organizations means it is all the more difficult to understand what is happening on the ground.

Indeed, the end of USAID has buckled our ability to measure the very outcomes of the end of USAID. “The visibility that we have around food security is potentially in decline at the same time that the risks to the system are increasing,” said Marcho. “How do we actually get the data we need?”

More equitable benefit-sharing of resource extraction from critical mineral supply chains would “far outweigh any benefits from foreign aid.”

Mehrabi finds the new paper creates “more questions than answers.” He argues the mechanisms of measurement are unclear, the analysis period is too short, and the authors don’t adequately disentangle USAID’s specific effects from Trump’s simultaneous cuts to other US international funding sources, such as the State Department. “The results are clearly early and tentative,” he said. “I think it is a leap to say this is all attributable to USAID.”

Wright, for his part, acknowledged the study has limitations, including a short post-shock observation window of just 10 months, a disbursement baseline drawn from the first Trump administration rather than the period immediately before the cuts, and a geographic scope confined to Africa—leaving much open to future research. He says the team ran extensive robustness checks addressing these concerns, detailed in the paper’s appendix.

After running his own reanalysis of their data, Mehrabi, however, remains unconvinced. What’s more, he warns against the possible takeaway that the presence of American developmental intervention equates to stability. The US, he argues, could more effectively help deter widespread conflict and hunger in nations like the Democratic Republic of the Congo, for example, through more equitable benefit-sharing of natural resource extraction from critical mineral supply chains. This would “far outweigh any benefits from foreign aid,” proposed Mehrabi.

Nevertheless, with an annual budget of tens of billions and an institutional history spanning 64 years, USAID’s developmental footprint throughout the African continent was no small thing. “One cannot simply create USAID all over again, or give it a mandate and give it funding and assume that we have waved a wand and we can reverse the damage done,” said Wright.

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Trump Wasn’t on the Primary Ballot in Georgia. He Still Won.

On Tuesday, six states held primary elections to select which Republican and Democratic candidates will advance to the general election in November. The primaries were seen not only as contests within the states, but also as potential referendums on President Donald Trump’s staying power within the Republican party. By Wednesday morning, it was clear that Trump’s influence is as strong as ever.

In Kentucky, for example, a Trump-endorsed Republican challenger toppled incumbent Rep. Thomas Massie, a thorn in the president’s side who clashed with Trump over deficit spending and the administration’s handling of the Epstein files.

But the MAGA mandate was arguably even clearer in Georgia, in which a number of contests culminated in rebukes of Trump foes and support for his friends.

In the GOP primary for governor, the Trump-endorsed current lieutenant governor, Burt Jones, received roughly 40 percent of the votes—more than any of the other seven candidates. Because of Georgia’s unique primary rules, in which a candidate has to receive more than half of the vote to become their party’s nominee, Jones will have to compete in a June runoff against the Republican who placed second. He’ll face billionaire health care executive Rick Jackson, who supported Trump’s competitors in the 2024 election and donated money to Liz Cheney’s PAC after she voted to impeach Trump over the Jan. 6 insurrection. Jackson’s foes used these donations to label him a “never-Trumper.”

Meanwhile, Brad Raffensperger, the Republican secretary of state who famously refused to “find” 11,000 votes for Trump following the president’s 2020 loss, is out of the running for governor, having received just 15 percent of the vote despite national name recognition.

In the GOP primary for secretary of state, former top Raffensperger aide Gabriel Sterling fared about as poorly as his former boss. Despite having more experience runningelections than any of his competitors,he received less than 12 percent of the vote. Sterling spent his campaign trying to persuade Georgia voters that Georgia had some of the safest elections in the country. The candidates who advanced to the GOP runoff, state representative Tim Fleming and former state representative Vernon Jones, largely did the opposite. Jones is the more extreme of the two, having said there were “many irregularities” in 2020 and that he “stand[s] with those who believe there was election fraud.”

In the competition to see which Republican will face incumbent Senator Jon Ossoff in November, Rep. Mike Collins performed best. A Trumployalist, Collins once called for the Episcopal Bishop of the Washington diocese to be deported (despite being an American citizen)after she asked Trump to have sympathy for immigrants. The second-term congressman will face Derek Dooley—son of famous University of Georgia football coach Vince Dooley—in the June runoff.

While technically non-partisan, the three seats up for grabs on Georgia’s Supreme Court also went Trump’s way. Former Democratic state lawmaker Jen Jordan and personal injury attorney Miracle Rankin failed to topple conservative incumbents in each of their races. Conservative Justice Benjamin Land was also re-elected, having run unopposed.

The majority ideology of the court would not have changed if Jordan and Rankin beat the incumbents, but the race gained outsized attention after a Supreme Court decision last month that enables states to weaken voting power among people of color in ways that will disproportionately improve Republicans’ odds at picking up seats. (Trump called it “the kind of ruling I like.”)

Following the decision, Governor Brian Kemp called a special legislative session for June so legislators can redraw congressional maps ahead of the 2028 election cycle. The Georgia Supreme Court will be asked to review these maps, so Republicans will presumably benefit from conservatives ruling the court.

The state supreme court races aside, most high-profile Georgia primary races will have question marks beside them until the June 16 runoffs. But one thing was fairly clear across the Peach State: Trump won up and down the ballot.

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Trump Has Been Investing in Companies and Then Pumping Them in His Speeches

This story was originally published by Popular Information, a substack publication to which you can subscribe here.

On March 11, President Trump took a tour of a manufacturing facility in Reading, Ohio, owned by Thermo Fisher Scientific, a medical supply company. During the tour, Trump lavished praise on Thermo Fisher which uses the facility to manufacture prescription drugs on a contract basis. “It’s a great honor being here. It’s a great company,” Trump said, appearing alongside CEO Marc Casper. “You have done a fantastic job and I’d like to congratulate you.”

Later, Trump asked another Thermo Fisher executive to share “some great information about this incredible company.” The executive talked about how Thermo Fisher is producing drugs for Merck and others at the facility. Trump then explicitly encouraged other pharmaceutical companies to contract with Thermo Fisher to “on-shore” more jobs. He claimed that some pharmaceutical companies were building their own US manufacturing facilities but said “they can get here a lot faster by using this great company.”

“I just left the head of Micron. It’s one of the hottest companies,” Trump said on “The Five.” He’d bought stock in Micron the day before.

Trump did not mention that, the same day of the tour, March 11, he purchased between $15,000 and $50,000 of Thermo Fisher stock. (Federal disclosure rules only require filers to list their transactions in broad ranges.) Trump did not publicly disclose the purchase until May 14. It was listed on page 38 of a 113-page document cataloging Trump’s stock purchases in 2026.

Trump also purchased between $51,000 and $115,000 worth of Thermo Fisher stock about one month before his visit on February 12. He made another purchase of Thermo Fisher valued between $15,000 and $50,000 on March 2. So at the time of Trump’s effusive remarks about Thermo Fisher, he had purchased as much as $215,000 worth of the company’s stock over the previous month.

The fact that Trump visited a Thermo Fisher facility on the same day he purchased the company’s stock—and bought Thermo Fisher stock repeatedly in the weeks before his visit—has not previously been reported.

The disclosures reveal that Trump has been a highly active trader in 2026, executing thousands of transactions—many in individual stocks impacted by his administration’s policies. In response to criticism, a spokesperson for the Trump Organization claimed that the trades were completely separate from Trump’s official duties and managed by an independent outside financial advisor.

“President Trump’s investment holdings are maintained exclusively through fully discretionary accounts independently managed by third-party financial institutions with sole and exclusive authority over all investment decisions,” the spokesperson said. “Trades are executed and portfolios are balanced through automated investment processes and systems administered by those institutions.”

Trump bought more than $1 million in Dell stock. Nine days later, he told a Georgia crowd to “go out and buy a Dell computer.”

The fact that Trump purchased stock in Thermo Fisher the same day that he toured its facility undercuts this claim. Further, the March 11 purchase of Thermo Fisher stock was marked “UNSOLICITED” in the document.

An “unsolicited” trade is one that is initiated by the customer, not recommended by a broker. If Trump wanted to legally remove himself from investment decisions he could do so by creating a qualified blind trust. Instead, before returning to the White House, Trump transferred his assets in a trust that is managed by his son Donald Trump Jr.

There are no legal or practical barriers preventing Trump from being involved in the management of his assets. But it’s a whopper of an ethical conflict. “When we say Donald Trump is the most corrupt president in American history, it’s because of conduct like this,” says Meghan Faulkner, a spokesperson for Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), which has been involved in several lawsuits involving Trump and his administration. “It could not be clearer that he views the presidency as a get-rich-quick scheme, and that’s a slap in the face to countless Americans struggling financially thanks to Trump administration policies.”

Thermo Fisher was not the only company featured in Trump’s official remarks and his investment portfolio that day.

After touring the Thermo Fisher facility in Ohio, Trump traveled to Kentucky and delivered a speech that afternoon. During his remarks, Trump singled out Apple and CEO Tim Cook for praise. “Apple, a great company, $2.5 billion to manufacture 100 percent of the glass for iPhones and Apple Watches right here in Kentucky factories,” Trump declared. “Apple [is] spending $650 billion on new plants all over the United States. Think of that. Who the hell else could have done this, nobody else. Nobody else. I say it kiddingly, but I’m actually not kidding. Nobody else could…He’s done a good job, Tim Cook.”

The same day, March 11, Trump purchased between $250,000 and $500,000 of Apple stock. The entry on the disclosure form is also marked unsolicited.

Trump had purchased between $1,000,000 and $5,000,000 of Apple stock in an unsolicited purchase on March 2. In total, Trump purchased between $2 million and $7.2 million in Apple stock during the month of March 2026, including five unsolicited purchases. (He sold smaller amounts of Apple stock on March 6 and March 27.)

Trump’s “financial self-dealing is a profound betrayal of the citizens he is supposed to serve. “

During the speech, Trump also worked in another plug for Thermo Fisher. “I just came from Thermo Fisher Scientific in Reading, Ohio, right across the way, the great American company that’s investing $2 billion in domestic manufacturing,” Trump told the crowd.

On March 25, Trump purchased between $50,000 and $100,000 in Micron stock. The transaction was marked unsolicited.

The next day, Trump called in to Fox News’ popular talk show, “The Five.” In the interview, he said he had recently met with Micron’s top executive and talked up the company’s prospects. “I just left the head of Micron. It’s one of the hottest companies,” Trump said.

Overall, Trump purchased between $217,000 and $530,000 in Micron from March 2 to March 25, including four unsolicited transactions. The fact that Trump touted Micron after building up a large position in its stock has not been previously reported.

There was also overlap between Trump’s public remarks and his investment in Dell Technologies. On February 10, Trump purchased between $1 million and $5 million worth of Dell stock.

During an economic speech in Georgia nine days later, Trump told the audience to “go out and buy a Dell computer,” adding the company made “phenomenal products.” Trump also praised Dell CEO Michael Dell and his wife for financially supporting “Trump Accounts” for newborns. The proximity of Trump’s February 19 speech to his purchase of at least $1 million in Dell stock has not been previously reported.

Trump also purchased between $15,000 and $50,000 of Dell stock on March 2 and again on March 11. Both transactions were marked unsolicited. He made a final purchase of Dell stock, valued between $1,000 and $15,000 on March 23.

Trump also continued to encourage people to buy Dell computers. He pitched Dell products on February 27, March 9, April 16, and May 8. The May 8 remarks, delivered at a Mother’s Day event, helped propel Dell’s stock to an all-time high.

Trump’s buy-and-pump routine, Rep. Seth Magaziner (D-R.I.) said in a statement, underscores the importance of legislation such as the bipartisan bill he co-introduced with hard-right Texas Republican Rep. Chip Roy that would ban stock trading by members of Congress, and another bill he cosponsored that also addresses trading by the president and vice president.

Trump’s trades, Magaziner noted, “show that he continues to put his own self-enrichment ahead of the interests of the American people,” and outlawing such behavior “is a necessary step to cleaning up the corruption that has plagued Washington for too long.”

Trump’s “financial self-dealing is a profound betrayal of the citizens he is supposed to serve. This is about trust. Elected officials—especially the president—shouldn’t be trading stocks,” added Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.), who coauthored a Senate companion to the Magaziner-Roy bill.

Other Trump stock purchases appear well timed to take advantage of Trump administration policies. For example, NOTUS reported that Trump “purchased $500,000 to $1 million worth of Nvidia stock on January 6, a week before the Commerce Department officially approved the sale of some Nvidia chips to China.” Similarly, NOTUS found that Trump, on January 6, purchased between $50,000 and $100,000 worth of stock in AMD, another chipmaker that was approved to do business with China on January 13.

By law, Trump was required to report all of these trades within 45 days. He missed that deadline for many of his trades. As a result, he was fined $200.

This article has been revised to include reactions to the revelations in the original.

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Far From DC, an Iconic trail Is Militarized for Trump’s Border Wall

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

Before the Trump administration decided the country urgently needed to erect a hulking steel wall in southern New Mexico’s bootheel, only a three-strand barbed wire fence separated the United States from Mexico in this arid stretch of the Chihuahuan Desert.

“Maybe I’d see a Border Patrol truck, a rancher and a couple of cows,” said Teresa Martinez, co-founder and executive director of the Continental Divide Trail Coalition, a national nonprofit that helps steward the trail. Now, she said, it’s a “construction zone.”

Almost exactly a year ago, Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum transferred 110,000 acres of federal land from the Bureau of Land Management in New Mexico into the jurisdiction of the US Army. The emergency measure, he said, was spurred by a need “to secure the border and protect the nation’s resources.”

“In my mind, to apply for the permit would be to condone the creation of the NDA.”

Part of the transfer, which included land in three counties, involved the famed southern terminus of the Continental Divide Trail, a 3,100-mile long-distance trail that stretches from Canada to Mexico and snakes along mountains that create a natural boundary between river systems.

The land transfer helps fulfill the signature promise of Donald Trump’s first and second terms—constructing a border wall between the US and Mexico to stem the flow of undocumented immigrants. Praised by supporters and fiercely condemned by critics, this latest iteration of the project—which will add hundreds of new miles of fencing and surveillance—is being funded by the so-called One Big Beautiful Bill, a medley of tax cuts, revocations of green energy subsidies and infusions of funding for border enforcement.

Building a wall here, though, would completely transform the region, including the southernmost edge of the Continental Divide Trail, whose rugged solitude and quiet beauty have long drawn hikers to the area. That transformation began earlier this year when the remote and rocky road leading to the trailhead, historically navigable only by four-wheel drive, was smoothed out and widened to accommodate two semi-trucks hauling sections of the wall.

Stacks of that impermeable bollard fencing—the diamond-shaped stainless-steel slats that have become emblematic of the border in the last decade—recently greeted hikers near a famed obelisk called the “Crazy Cook” monument, where the trail either begins or ends, depending on which direction you’re headed. Within days, roaring equipment heaved them vertically into place.

Martinez has seen the changes to the landscape firsthand. A nearby hill that provided dirt for concrete to be mixed onsite is now completely eroded, she said. Dust from the constant traffic has created massive swirling clouds, and jackhammers now rumble through the once-silent landscape.

Last year, the Department of Homeland Security and US Customs and Border Protection awarded almost $4.5 billion to wall-building efforts, including $1.6 billion to construct 49 miles of it in New Mexico’s remote Bootheel region, where the trail is located. Burgum’s transfer also designated the land as a National Defense Area (NDA), a temporary zone under the jurisdiction of the Department of Defense—which the Trump administration wants to rename the Department of War—and managed locally by Fort Huachuca, a US Army base that’s 150 miles west of New Mexico in Arizona.

More than a mile of the trail is within the bounds of this controlled perimeter.

In the months after the creation of the NDA, all international hikers were prohibited from entering it. Then, the rules eased, allowing hikers to apply for authorization from Fort Huachuca and be escorted by qualified government personnel. American citizens also had to apply for authorization from the fort and undergo a background check. Without this permission, hikers could face federal trespassing charges.

Thru-hiking for all hikers was down by as much as 20 percent last year, Martinez said.

Last June, thru-hiker Leslie Boyd set out southbound on the Continental Divide Trail at a time when confusion about the new NDA was at its peak. It wasn’t until September—more than halfway into a 144-day trip—that the application process and what it entailed became clear.

“This Bootheel border wall project is the absolute definition of waste.”

“In my mind, to apply for the permit would be to condone the creation of the NDA, and I do not condone the establishment of the NDA,” Boyd said. Ultimately, Boyd and a small group of other hikers decided against applying and instead reached the border by way of a small sliver of New Mexico’s state trust land where the federal trespassing laws did not apply.

“The repercussions of this?” they wrote in an Instagram post days after the hike ended. “Simply that I would not touch the terminus monument at Crazy Cook and take the iconic ‘monument photo.’” Instead, the group ended their expedition in a less traditional way, simply standing together next to a barbed wire fence.

Today, uncertainty remains high as two parallel barriers are slated for construction at the trailhead and monument, both of which will have to move some 200 feet to accommodate them. And Customs and Border Protection could temporarily limitall access to the trail for “safety reasons,” an agency spokesperson wrote by email, though he did not specify what those reasons might be.

Meanwhile, hundreds of construction workers have arrived in the region, transforming small towns like Hachita—a sleepy community of fewer than 20 residents with a church, a post office and a single gas station—into rapidly growing man camps.

Borderlands are inherently political zones that come with life-threatening perils. In 2022, the United Nations estimated that nearly half of all deaths on the US-Mexico border were of immigrants attempting to enter the country through the Chihuahuan or nearby Sonoran deserts, dry, forbidding regions where temperatures frequently exceed 100 degrees Fahrenheit in the summer months.

From 2025 to 2026, the number of undocumented immigrants apprehended by the Border Patrol was nonetheless down by 80 percent for all of New Mexico and two counties in Texas, though Customs and Border Protection declined to provide exact statistics for detentions in the Bootheel region. During almost the same period, the US Army made 24 temporary detentions in New Mexico, according to an agency spokesperson.

But when Burgum announced the land transfer last year, he invoked an emergency withdrawal, defined in the Federal Register as “extraordinary measures” undertaken to “preserve values that would otherwise be lost.” The Trump administration invoked the same provision—one move typically reserved by the Interior Department to preserve valuable lands from settlement, sale or extraction—in 2019 to withdraw much smaller chunks of land and transfer them to the Army for the same purpose.

According to Burgum’s order, the Army would “prevent unauthorized human activity in ecologically sensitive areas along the southern border, which can be harmed by repeated foot traffic, unregulated vehicle use, and the creation of informal trails or camps.”

Constructing a border wall like this is arguably more destructive and critics say the cost of building it is far too expensive. “This Bootheel border wall project is the absolute definition of waste and will do nothing to make our country safer,” said Congressman Gabe Vasquez (D-N.M.) in January.

Indeed, the sense of wildness and wonder that land withdrawals have historically sought to protect is all but gone amid the current noise, dust, and pending steel wall. “What has been lost, we’ll never get back,” Martinez said. “In all the ways, physical, metaphysical, emotional, spiritual, cultural. We will never get it back. That is what I mourn.”

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Before You Invest in Crypto, Watch This Film

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._

Not too sure what to make of cryptocurrency? Don’t really understand it but kind of think it’s a scam? That was Ben McKenzie’s attitude when an old buddy during the Covid pandemic suggested he invest in Bitcoin. His pal had given him a bum investment tip years earlier, so McKenzie was wary. But since he was shut in, with time on his hands, he decided to use that stretch to dig deep into crypto—real deep—and came to the realization: It’s a con. Thus, he was launched on a second career as a crypto critic.

McKenzie’s first career was a pretty good one. He’s a Hollywood star. He played Ryan Atwood, the bad boy with a good heart, on The O.C., the popular teen drama of the 2000s. He was also police detective Jim Gordon in Gotham, the dark and moody Batman prequel. But now he took on a much different role. Armed only with his undergraduate economics degree from University of Virginia and a sense of skepticism, he fired up his laptop and mounted a one-man investigation of crypto that resulted in the 2023 book (co-written with journalist Jacob Silverman), Easy Money: Cryptocurrency, Casino Capitalism, and the Golden Age of Fraud. The title is a giveaway for where his inquiry landed.

McKenzie began his crypto journey with a simple principle: You should not invest in something you don’t understand.

Last month, the 47-year-old McKenzie released a documentary, Everyone Is Lying to You for Money, which, appropriately for a denizen of a superhero world, is an origin story. It chronicles how this former teen heartthrob became one of the leading antagonists of the crypto industry. It also serves up a 90-minute-long entertaining primer on crypto, explaining its rise, its scamminess, and the threat it poses to the financial sector—and you and me. It’s not quite the same as watching Margot Robbie in a bubble bath explain subprime loans, but McKenzie has deftly crafted an enjoyable but troubling ride through the murky world of digital currency.

McKenzie began his crypto journey with a simple principle: You should not invest in something you don’t understand. After the financial crash of 2007, people were right to be pissed off at Big Finance, a system rigged by Wall Street predators for the wealthy. The promise that cryptocurrency could decentralize and democratize finance was appealing. But the specific promise of Bitcoin sounded like a “free lunch” to him. Especially given how Matt Damon and other celebs, paid by the industry, were promoting crypto as an adventure for the bold and exploiting FOMO. “What does Matt Damon know about crypto?” McKenzie asks in the film. “Nothing.”

In London, McKenzie chatted with Dan Davies, an economist and author of Lying for Money, and asked him, “All of crypto can’t be a scam, right?” Davies replied, “I don’t like that word ‘can’t.’”

McKenzie trekked to crypto conventions and talked to crypto disciples (including one cryptocurrency founder who ended up in prison for fraud). He traveled to El Salvador, where the nation’s authoritarian leader embraced crypto and promised to build a “Bitcoin City” powered by geothermal energy from a volcano. (Spoiler alert: There’s no such city yet.) In July 2022, he interviewed Sam Bankman-Fried, who fast became a billionaire by creating the FTX cryptocurrency exchange, and who had a hard time explaining to McKenzie what crypto was good for besides speculation and criminal operations. “There needs to be more oversight,” SBF told him. (Four months later FTX would collapse and Bankman-Fried would be arrested for fraud and money-laundering.)

In London, McKenzie chatted with Dan Davies, an economist and author of Lying for Money, and asked him, “All of crypto can’t be a scam, right?” Davies replied, “I don’t like that word ‘can’t.’” McKenzie testified before Congress and called the crypto industry “the largest Ponzi scheme in history,” warning it could infect the entire financial system if not regulated properly. In perhaps the most disturbing scene, he talked to everyday folks who still believed in the power and dream of crypto—even after being fleeced in a crypto scheme that crashed.

The film has been playing in several theaters nationwide, often with McKenzie doing Q&As. He hopes it will be on a streaming service soon. We recently talked about the movie and the current state of crypto.

Let’s start with the end of the documentary. You’re talking with your wife, and you say that you didn’t think that your anti-crypto efforts up to that point had much impact—your congressional testimony, your advocacy, your book. Have you seen more impact from the film?

I have. I go to screenings as often as I can and do a Q&A afterwards. I can see the audience really responding to the film. They have a lot of questions, a lot of anger—directed at not just crypto, but also prediction markets and AI. I’ve had incredible conversations with strangers, and personally that makes me feel good. Like I’m not crazy. And maybe this is part of the start of a change in the way we view all these things. A lot of folks have concerns similar to those with crypto about AI data centers and their effect on local communities. And who’s in charge of it? I feel inspired by that. And more people are going to see a 90-minute comedy that they can watch at home than are ever going to read a 300-page book on economics. I get that. I made the movie to be entertaining. So hopefully it is.

You don’t address AI in the film. But my guess is that in many people’s mind crypto and AI merge together as part of the whole issue with Big Tech and the dislocation it is causing.

There’s a number of areas of overlap. There’s disruption to communities and the costs that come from having these data centers and crypto mining operations in these places. They use an enormous amount of electricity, which can cause people’s prices to go up. They are incredibly loud, some of them very disruptive. And are you familiar with the term “the grift shift”? That’s the idea that grifters shift from one grift to another. So there’s a grift shift between the last crypto crash and the current AI boom. Companies that were mining Bitcoin suddenly decided they were going to be data centers. That’s somewhat telling. The difference, of course, is that AI is a real technology, whereas blockchain used for crypto is quite old and isn’t used for much of anything outside of cryptocurrency.

I think the concern that I and many other people have is, who’s in control of the technology and what are their motives?

I think the concern that I and many other people have is, who’s in control of the technology and what are their motives? I read the profile of Sam Altman, the OpenAI head, in The New Yorker, and I saw this quote from an unnamed Microsoft executive who said, “I think there’s a small but real chance he’s eventually remembered as a Bernie Madoff- or Sam Bankman-Fried-level scammer.”

I’m not nearly qualified to make grandiose statements, but it does feel like we’re running into problems that the current version of capitalism we’re practicing doesn’t solve. In fact, it only reinforces some of the negative dynamics. We’re talking about the accrual of extraordinary wealth in the hands of few and the costs to the broader public—and the sense that the system is rigged. These things seem to be getting worse—obviously embodied by our con-man-in-chief president. How do we address it? Democracy is not working. There’s a bad crypto bill going through Congress, the Digital Asset Market Clarity Act [which would set up a regulatory regimen with less stringent rules for crypto]. We know why Republicans are voting for it, but the reason that some Democratic members may vote for it is that they’re afraid of the crypto lobby, which has a lot of money.

In the movie, you show that when you came became a public crypto critic, you got a lot of hate mail and harassment online from crypto fans who claimed you didn’t know what you’re talking about. Has that happened with this film as well?

Not that I’m aware of. I’m sure I have. But I’m not on X anymore. After Elon Musk took it over, my account got hacked, and I couldn’t recover it because there was no customer service at X anymore. I haven’t been able to access my X account for years. I’m blissfully unaware of what’s happening on that platform, and I’m sure I’m getting some hatred over there. In person, at the screenings, it’s been either completely lovely or some very, quite frankly, reasonable questions from a guy in the audience who’s pushing back politely and trying to have a reasonable conversation.

It’s harder to be an asshole in real life than it is online.

Absolutely. Online it’s almost like the algorithm is telling you to be an asshole so that you get the clicks and the engagement. The cliché is the internet is not real life, but crypto exists exclusively on the internet. There is no there there. And most of these crypto “communities” aren’t really communities. They are people trying to sell you this or that type of thing, people hiding behind a pseudonym. In the real world, 80-plus percent of the country has never bought cryptocurrency. And when I ask them what they think of it, they almost always say some version of this: It seems complicated, but also scammy, and maybe I’m just not smart enough to understand it.

If this thing is really based on no underlying asset, you’re basically putting money in because you hope that someone else will buy it from you.

I made the movie to say, “No, you are. You know it sounds too good to be true. It is.” I don’t think I can convince the 5 to 6 percent of the population that’s really into crypto. They’re sort of members of a cult. And then there’s maybe 10 percent that are playing around with it. It’s really wild that 5 to 6 percent of the population can dictate policy on Capitol Hill, isn’t it? Talk about a minority view and overrunning the democratic processes.

When you were making the movie, you noted that Bitcoin was worth about $44,000. Today it’s $80,960. Why is it still holding so much value?

In the fall of 2021, it was $60,000. So it’s a little bit above that. It’s recovered from 2022 when all these companies went bust, and several people went to jail. The market was really in the tank. Now it’s very simple: Donald Trump is most of the answer. The market was slowly recovering, but not in any spectacular way. Then in summer of 2024 Trump suddenly embraced Bitcoin. After calling Bitcoin a scam as recently as 2021, he suddenly saw an angle. Perhaps as a way to make money, perhaps as a way to appeal to a certain constituency of young men.

People rationally made a calculation. If this thing is really based on no underlying asset, you’re basically putting money in because you hope that someone else will buy it from you. For econ guys like me, that’s the greater fool theory. But if you think that other people are going to buy it because Trump has a 50-50 shot at being president and he can do a lot to push the price higher, then it’s rational to bet on it. So the price started going up then. Sure enough, he was elected. And the price kept going up. And by the time he got in office, it was $100,000 a coin.

He and his administration have done an incredible amount to take apart what safeguards and accountability there was—not just by pardoning Changpeng Zhao (a.k.a. “CZ”), the founder of Binance, but also ripping apart the Justice Department cryptocurrency task force, and passing this bad bill called the Genius Act, which allows corporations to issue their own form of crypto. It was absurd any Democrat voted for it, but 100 Democrats did. So Donald Trump and people associated with him, including Howard Lutnick, Marc Andreessen, and Elon Musk, have been incredibly effective in getting crypto into our system and taking apart the rules, regulations, and law enforcement apparatuses that were trying to keep it in check.

With Trump now in the crypto business—albeit in a major conflict of interest and in a corrupt manner—do you think that’s given crypto a political status?

Definitely. To have the most powerful person in the world go all in is an incredible advantage. It’s deeply ironic, though. Crypto was supposed to be this reaction to the excesses of tyrannical government. This was supposed to be money that exists outside the government. And now you have the president of the United States issuing his own versions of these “currencies.” And he’s now being accused of fraud by one of his top investors. This certainly lays bare the lie that crypto is the decentralized, democratized future of money—when you’re talking about regulatory capture and corruption, and all the things that Trump embodies.

When you interviewed Sam Bankman-Fried for the film—just a few months before he was arrested—did you have a sense that he was blowing smoke up your ass about crypto?

Yeah. He clearly had trouble answering some basic questions. The simple question was, what good does crypto do? Give me one example. And he mentioned remittances—the payments workers here send to relatives in their home countries. But I had just come from El Salvador, where I saw crypto was not being used for this, and I politely said bullshit. Here’s supposedly the head of the industry, and he can’t tell me one good thing that this trillion-dollar industry actually does.

I had this sinking feeling that if this is the guy in charge, something bad was going to happen. And sure enough, it did.

The most alarming moment in our interview is when I asked him about the donations he made to politicians, and he has a hard time answering. He can’t look me in the eye. He can’t tell me how much money he was giving to them, which I thought at the time was quite strange because he was so openly supportive of the Democrats. You could have looked this up. It was public. He gave $40 million or whatever to the Democrats. Why is he lying to me or having a hard time with this question. We learned later he was allegedly running a $100 million straw-donors game. He was giving to the Democrats publicly, but he was secretly giving to the Republicans via cutouts.

I felt good about the interview from a journalistic standpoint. But on a personal level, I had this sinking feeling that if this is the guy in charge, something bad was going to happen. And sure enough, it did.

One of the more poignant parts of the movie is when you’re talking to everyday, retail investors who lost money in a big crypto bust-up and they say they still believe in crypto.

That was pretty powerful. Even I was a little surprised by it. This is how I make sense of it. We’re talking about the dynamics of the cult. We are way outside of what would be a “rational investment” where if you lose money, you’d be like either “That sucks” and/or “I got scammed.” These guys are twisting themselves in knots to say, “Well, I got scammed here in this one crypto thing. But the bigger idea still works, even if I’ve still lost money in it.” That requires a lot of rationalizations. It’s almost the more you lose, the more you have to believe. To acknowledge that you were duped and this is all a scam would be very painful.

I also can’t help but reflect on the gender dynamic, which I think is really sort of fascinating. It’s quite sad to say—as a man and as a father of boys—that men are better marks. They have a harder time talking about their feelings, admitting that they’ve been duped. They have a lot of pride. And the crypto industry’s sort of genius is getting them to blame themselves for it.

There’s this whole culture in crypto of DYOR—do your own research—meaning, if you lose the money, it’s your fault. That benefits the fraudsters and the insiders who are making money, but also keeps the big population of outsiders, the regular guys, in the game. They think they have to keep going. HODL—hold on for dear life. You can’t sell your Bitcoin, no matter what.

There’s a chilling moment in the film when you ask Dan Davies, the economist and fraud expert, whether all of crypto is a scam, and he does not challenge that idea. It that your bottom-line belief? It’s just a con and eventually there will be a reckoning?

Crypto is only good for two things: gambling—is the price going to go up or down?—and crime. The amount of crime that crypto facilitates is staggering. There’s a crypto company, Chainanalysis, that estimated $154 billion of criminal activity was facilitated via crypto last year alone. There’s the bubble idea that the price could, over time, keep going up, as new people flock to crypto as the story continues to spread. And then crime gives it a use case, a reason to be valuable.

In my congressional testimony, I described as a Ponzi scheme. What is Trump’s thing, if not a Ponzi scheme, right? His meme coin is down 96 percent. It’s all a penny stock, a pump-and-dump, a Ponzi scheme—pick your metaphor. It’s not a legitimate investment. That’s 99 percent of it. Then there’s crime on top of it. And what’s most troubling is that if crypto gets further into our regulated system, as it’s threatening to do this with the Genius Act that passed and the proposed Clarity Act, then the repercussions could be huge. Because if it does crash again—and I will remind people that crypto has crashed many times in its brief but sordid history—it could contribute to the next version of a subprime crisis. That would be incredibly ironic, given the crypto was supposedly a reaction to that crisis.

Have you heard from Matt Damon, whom you roast in the film for being a pitchman for crypto?

I try to keep my head down in our weekly celebrity meetings when we all get together and chat about the industry. No, I don’t know Matt. I actually don’t know anyone personally who has sold crypto. I don’t think I’ll be getting a Matt Damon movie anytime soon.

Watch the Everyone Is Lying to You for Money trailer here.

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Trump Destroyed USAID. Now People Are Dying.

When Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, went looking for government agencies to axe last year, one of its first targets was the US Agency for International Development. Established during the Cold War to counter Soviet influence, USAID spent billions of dollars on food aid, public health, and emergency relief for some of the world’s most vulnerable populations. In return, the US hoped to gain allies and goodwill. Call it a decades-long exercise in soft power.

But since President Donald Trump returned to office, soft power is out. And so is USAID, which has been slashed and reorganized. The Trump administration is trying to close the agency altogether by September. This has led to some horrific consequences for the people who relied on USAID to get by.

“Everyone, especially in South Sudan, wanted to know if the US really had cut off aid. It was easier for them to believe that the aid organizations were lying to them than to think that the United States would do this,” says Anna Maria Barry-Jester, a journalist at ProPublica who traveled to South Sudan and Kenya alongside her colleague Brett Murphy to report on how foreign aid cuts were directly affecting the people who live there. Earlier this month, their reporting was recognized as a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.

On this week’s More To The Story, Barry-Jester and Murphy join host Al Letson to talk about their on-the-ground reporting from Africa and how the aid cuts are leading to deadly consequences for people who’ve long relied on USAID to survive.

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Trump Knocks Off Thomas Massie in Heated Primary

President Donald Trump has knocked off another GOP dissident in his effort to cleanse the Republican Party of anyone who has even modestly challenged his agenda.

Rep. Thomas Massie lost Tuesday’s Kentucky primary to challenger Ed Gallrein, following a bitter race full of dirty tricks and astonishing amounts of money. At upwards of $35 million, the contest had become the most expensive primary in US history.

Massie is a seven-term libertarian who came to Congress in 2012 during the tea party movement that swept in a new class of deficit hawks and “constitutional conservatives.” Virtually all of those original tea partiers eventually migrated to Trump’s MAGA movement, where their concerns about the budget deficit, endless wars, and adherence to the Constitution have been sublimated to their fealty to Trump, who has no interest in any of these values. Massie was the last man standing, and as such, had made Trump’s life difficult, ultimately embarrassing the president by forcing him to make good on his campaign promise to release the government’s files on Trump’s friend, the late sexual predator Jeffrey Epstein.

As I explained recently:

Trump was only two months into his second term when he first threatened to have Massie primaried. “I will lead the charge against him,” Trump pledged on Truth Social after the congressman had refused to vote for a short-term spending bill. Massie didn’t seem too worried. “He’s going after Canada and me today,” he told reporters. “The difference is Canada will eventually cave.” Massie went on to be one of only two House Republicans to vote against the president’s signature legislation, the One Big Beautiful Bill, calling it a “debt bomb.”

For Trump, the final straw came in June last year, when Massie worked with [California Democrat Ro] Khanna to try to block the president from attacking Iran without congressional approval. When Trump joined the Israeli assault on Iran’s nuclear facilities, Massie criticized Trump directly. “I feel a bit misled,” Massie told Fox News Digital. “I didn’t think he would let neocons determine his foreign policy and drag us into another war.”

Trump was furious. “MAGA should drop this pathetic LOSER, Tom Massie, like the plague!” Trump fumed. Shortly afterward, he deployed his best campaign operatives to try to unseat the Kentucky Republican. Chris LaCivita, Trump’s 2024 co-campaign manager, set up MAGA KY PAC to fund a primary challenge, underwritten almost solely by three pro-Israel billionaires: Miriam Adelson, widow of the casino magnate Sheldon Adelson, and hedge fund titans Paul Singer and John Paulson. Together or through their PACs, they contributed $2.975 million to unseat Massie.

LaCivita first proved his commitment to punishing Trump defectors when he helped unseat Rep. Bob Good (R-Va.) in 2024. Good was no bleeding heart. He was the Trump-supporting chair of the arch-right House Freedom Caucus. But his temerity in endorsing Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis in the GOP presidential primary was all it took. “Bob Good won’t be electable when we get done with him,” LaCivita vowed. Trump appeared in an ad targeting Good, and Good lost the primary by fewer than 400 votes.

This year, Trump helped oust five Republican Indiana state legislators who had rejected pressure from the president to redraw the state’s congressional maps to create two new Republican seats in mid-decade redistricting. And this month, Louisiana GOP Sen. Bill Cassidy lost his primary after Trump targeted him over Cassidy’s vote to convict him in his 2021 impeachment trial.

“Combined with Cassidy‘s loss over the weekend in the Louisiana Senate primary and the five Indiana state senators losing their primaries two weeks ago,” says Trey Grayson, a former secretary of state and 2010 Republican Senate candidate in Kentucky, “a lot of Republicans are going to say, ‘I think I’ll keep to myself and stay in line.’ That would be a natural reaction.”

Massie’s defeat may indeed cow the rest of the Republican conference, but it’s likely to only embolden the congressman, who will still have the rest of the year to continue to antagonize the lame-duck president. He’ll also likely focus on some of the same issues he’s been pursuing since he was first elected, such as making it easier for small farmers and ranchers to sell their beef across state lines.

Recently, Massie said he’d learned a lot from his successful effort to pass the Epstein Transparency Act using a discharge petition that can force a vote on a bill over the objection of the House speaker. That legislation “is a proof of concept that if you have enough people behind an issue, I now have the tools to get it passed,” he told me. “It’s one of the hardest ways to get a bill passed, but it’s the grassroots way. I would start with what I’ve learned and apply that going forward.”

Potential targets for such a strategy could include a bill he introduced recently to restrict law enforcement searches. Not only would it require the government to obtain a search warrant to access data held by brokers or internet companies, it would also bar law enforcement from using facial recognition, biometric tracking, and license plate readers tied to individuals without first getting a warrant.

And despite Trump’s proclamation that the shaky ceasefire in Iran means he doesn’t need congressional approval for the war, Massie says that current law requires Congress to hold a War Powers vote in the coming weeks on whether to allow Trump to continue the conflict. “It’s clearly a war,” Massie told me. “There’s gonna be a vote after my primary that requires a positive outcome.”

As an engineer, Massie understands how to interpret the odds better than most, and when I spoke with him earlier this year, he was realistic about his prospects in the primary—and sanguine about it. “I’d be perfectly happy going back to my farm,” he told me. “If I were to lose, my blood pressure would go down, and my quality of life would go up, so I’m okay with that fate. I think so many of my colleagues just so desperately want the job that they couldn’t imagine doing a single thing that would endanger having the job.”

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First, a $1.8 Billion Slush Fund. Now Trump Aims to Weasel Out of IRS Audits “Forever”

A new addendum to the so-called settlement agreement between Trump and Trump—that is, the Department of Justice and Donald Trump’s personal lawyers—will “forever” prohibit the United States from seeking any claim or initiating any IRS enforcement action or audit against Donald Trump, his sons Eric and Don Jr., and the Trump Organization, based on any previous filings.

The order appeared on Tuesday in a supplementary document signed by Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche and posted on the DOJ website.

This is madness.

On Friday, Donald Sherman, president of the legal watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), told me that Trump’s underlying $10 billion lawsuit against his own IRS was “a stunningly corrupt attempt for the president to take taxpayer money and put it in his pocket.”

“Having the IRS agree to no audits of the President, his family and their businesses is unheard of.”

On Monday, the DOJ then rolled out terms for a $1.8 billion restitution fund, essentially controlled by Trump, to compensate the supposed victims of the agency’s “weaponization”—namely, Trump’s allies who ran afoul of the law, including the hooligans who ransacked the Capitol and attacked police officers on his behalf on January 6, 2021.

The DOJ is presenting the fund as a settlement. But Judge Kathleen Williams’ order on Monday dismissing the case of Trump v. IRS emphasized that there was no legal settlement in the case. This is not a settlement. It is theft.

And this latest twist is, as Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) says in a statement, “another heinously corrupt act by the most corrupt administration in history,” and a clear “violation of the law that prohibits interference by executive branch officials in IRS audits.”

Blanche’s addendum, unless Congress steps in, will prevent the IRS from pursuing a man who, as I wrote in my earlier story, has been found guilty or liable in several civil and criminal fraud cases, and whose company, the Trump Organization, was found guilty of criminal tax fraud and falsifying business records.

Last week, after the New York Times reported that the administration was considering a ban on Trump audits, I reached out to John Koskinen, Obama’s IRS chief, for his thoughts. I quoted him in my story, but now that the administration has pulled the trigger on this, here is Koskinen’s full response:

As far as I can tell from my experience, the possible settlement of the President’s $10 billion suit against the IRS by having the IRS agree to no audits of the President, his family and their businesses is unheard of. I don’t recall the IRS ever promising a taxpayer that there would be no audits.

Audits get settled all the time, but promising no audits simply raises the question of what someone is worried about or trying to hide. This is especially troubling when, as the President acknowledges, the Department of Justice, representing the IRS in the case, works for the President.

Audits of complicated returns can be expensive for the taxpayer, but the IRS goes out of its way to make sure that, when a return is selected for audit by the algorithms the IRS technology uses, there is a reasonable concern that the appropriate taxes have not been paid. The IRS keeps track of “no change” audits in order to adjust those algorithms and do the best they can to insure that only questionable returns are subject to an audit.

Promising not to audit a taxpayer, or a group of taxpayers, would set an unfortunate precedent.

That unfortunate precedent has now been set.

“Trump’s dirty deal has crossed the line into illegality,” notes a statement from the co-presidents of the group Public Citizen, which, along with CREW, had filed an amicus brief in Trump v. IRS urging Judge Williams to stay the lawsuit until Trump left office and to forbid the parties from entering into an agreement.

Federal law, they explain, “bars presidential requests to terminate audits made either ‘directly or indirectly’ and requires IRS officers and officials who receive such requests to report them to the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration. Failure to do so may subject those officers to criminal prosecution.”

Of course, Trump could just pardon them all, as he did the January 6 defendants.

“Democrats are going to fight every element of this self-dealing settlement.”

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Ma.) wrote in a tweet that the Trump immunity agreement represents an “unprecedented level of corruption.”

“What is Trump hiding from the American people?” she added. “Congress must step up and stop this corruption.”

Even some Republicans, before the IRS news broke, sounded unhappy about the Trump-DOJ “settlement.” Senate Majority Leader John Thune told reporters he was “not a big fan” of the restitution fund. Sens. Susan Collins of Maine, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, Jerry Moran of Kansas, and even Lindsey Graham of South Carolina also questioned it.

“We are a nation of laws; you can’t just make up things,” recently defeated Sen. Bill Cassidy told reporters on Monday. I just came off the campaign trail. People are concerned about making their own ends meet, not about putting the slush fund together without a legal precedent.”

“Democrats are going to fight every element of this self-dealing settlement,” Wyden vowed. “But regardless of the outcome of those efforts, future administrations and IRS leadership should consider this illegal directive completely invalid.”

Dan Friedman contributed reporting.

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How Much Are You Spending On the Iran War? $300 and Counting.

The Pentagon estimates that it has spent upwards of $29 billion on weaponry to bomb Iran since February 28, in a war of choice that has killed at least 3,400 people in Iran and thousands more across the region.

Americans, far away from the bombs, are relatively insulated from the immediate, human costs of warmaking. But the war is hitting Americans in their pocketbooks—and a new tracker shows how much individual American consumers have spent on higher-priced fuel since the war began and gas prices soared to a national average of $4.50 per gallon.

The Climate Solutions Lab and Costs of War Project at Brown University released a research brief May 18 showing that Americans have spent an additional $42 billion on gasoline and diesel over the past ten weeks. “On average, each U.S. household has paid over $300 more for gasoline and diesel since February 28, 2026, than it would have without the war,” the researchers wrote.

“This is where Americans who aren’t service members or who don’t have service members in their families are feeling this war in Iran the most,” said Stephanie Savell, a researcher with the Costs of War Project. “It’s a reminder, every time you go to the gas pump, that this country is at war.”

A 2025 report on US consumers showed that most Americans could not afford a $1000 emergency, and federal reserve data that same year revealed that only 60 percentof American households could withstand even a $400 unexpected expense. A surprise $300 surcharge at the gas pump, then, could be disastrous.

“People are already having to make choices between gas and other basic living expenses, and that is just going to continue,” Savell said. “This is a war cost that affects people on the lower end of the income ladder more.”

The Pentagon still has not provided Congress with an itemized cost of this war—the best numbers we have come from Pete Hegseth’s congressional testimony earlier this month, and then from a Pentagon official who corrected him the next day, saying he had estimated a bit too low. Some researchers say that the costs are likely far higher—somewhere more in the region of $1 trillion. And many of those costs are being kicked down the road to future generations, Savell said: “When the US is engaged in a conflict, a lot of times the spending is credit card spending. So we’re basically deferring payment for the war to future generations.” War borrowing, Savell explained, is “basically taking money from the budget for any sort of social safety net,” and then passing that money along to creditors.

“This data shows that energy price shocks function as an economy-wide, unacknowledged tax on households, with costs comparable to large federal programs and policies,” the Costs of War Project and Climate Solutions Lab researchers wrote in their brief. As the Strait of Hormuz remains closed, that “unacknowledged tax” will keep showing up at the gas pump.

Donald Trump, meanwhile, told reporters today that high gas prices are not a concern of his. “This is peanuts,” he said. “I appreciate everybody putting up with it for a little while. But I don’t even think about it.”

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Who Is Eligible For Trump’s Slush Fund Money? Blanche Won’t Say.

Trump now has a slush fund to reward his devotees, but who gets a share of it is unclear.

Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.): “Will individuals who assaulted Capitol Hill police officers be eligible for this fund?”

Sen. Chris Coons (D-Del.) “Will you commit that none of this money will go to President Trump’s campaign donors?”

During Tuesday’s Senate hearing before an appropriations subcommittee, Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche could not commit. “I am not committing to anything beyond the settlement agreement,” Blanche said in response to Sen. Coons’ question. And to Sen. Van Hollen: “Anybody in this country is eligible to apply if they believe they are a victim of weaponization.”

That reply, of course, doesn’t answer the question.

Blanche also maintained that it’s not up to him to decide eligibility as the “Anti-Weaponization Fund” will be managed by five commission members. But, per the Justice Department’s Monday press release announcing the fund’s launch, the attorney general will appoint all five members—although one will be chosen “in consultation with congressional leadership.”

The Office of the Attorney General’s explainer document of the fund states that “once the funds are deposited into the Designated Account, the United States has no liability whatsoever for the protection or safeguard of those funds…or any other fraud or misuse of the funds.”

To put it more plainly: anyone could be eligible.

According to the Justice Department, the commission doesn’t have to disclose everyone who receives money. “Will you commit to making reports fully public so Americans know who is getting taxpayer dollars out of this settlement fund?” Sen. Coons asked Blanche. The settlement agreement between the IRS and President Trump, his two eldest sons, and the Trump Organization, specifically states that the commission members will give the attorney general “a confidential written report that includes the name and address of each claimant who has received any relief and if so, nature of such relief.”

COONS: Will you commit to making reports fully public so Americans know who is getting taxpayer dollars out of this settlement fund?BLANCHE: There are privacy laws that may prevent some of the information from being fully public

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) 2026-05-19T14:14:45.373Z

“There’s obviously laws that exist around privacy that may prevent some of the information that the commission takes in from being fully public.” Blanche responded—a statement that provides those who run the fund an easy outwhen asked who and why recipients will get the money.

The potential conflicts of interest are endless.

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A Kentucky Primary Has Become a MAGA Reality Show From Hell

Last summer, President Donald Trump orchestrated a primary challenge against Rep. Thomas Massie, who’d become the lone House Republican willing to occasionally stand up to the president—at least the only one who wasn’t retiring. But the race has turned into a proxy fight over, well, just about everything.

It’s a referendum on Trump. It’s a fight over Israeli influence in American politics. And the final frenzied days of the campaign, expected to be the most expensive primary in US history, have also set the stage for a MAGA vs MAGA showdown, providing a new opportunity for grifters, podcasters, and a cast of wannabe influencers to join in the fray—or leverage it for a comeback.

Ahead of today’s primary vote, Trump has used the full power of his office and his surrogates in right-wing media to pummel Massie in an unprecedented campaign against a member of his own party. On Monday, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth took a break from the Iran war and attacking civilian vessels in the Caribbean to fly to Kentucky to rally against Massie. Trump himself issued a video:

President Trump releases a new video titled "GET RID OF THOMAS MASSIE":

"I hope you're going to put him out of business. We're in fight against the worst Congressman in the history of our country. He is so bad… So, get rid of Thomas Massie." pic.twitter.com/70oLhpIflf

— The American Conservative (@amconmag) May 18, 2026

As the election has become closer, Trump’s media surrogates have ratcheted up the absurdity as they reach for any possible angle they hope might weaken the MIT-trained Kentucky farmer and inventor. Right-wing provocateur Laura Loomer posted a video interview with Cynthia West, a woman who claims she dated Massie shortly after his wife died.

Loomer spent much of Monday promoting her two-hour interview with West, in which they seem to have spent most of the time discussing Massie’s sex life. West’s story has grown increasingly salacious, as she claimed that Massie possesses a “boner phone” that he allegedly used to communicate with women secretly. And Loomer posted texts in which she claims he refers to his penis as “pinecone,” a virtual campaign whose impact on Kentucky voters was hard to measure.

EXCLUSIVE:

“Call Me On My Boner Phone”

Former Congressional staffer and @RepThomasMassie’s ex girlfriend @Cyntaxed007 Cynthia West tells me Massie was a very controlling boyfriend and that he ordered her to delete her X account so he could control her online presence when they… pic.twitter.com/bn9n9iaX14

— Laura Loomer (@LauraLoomer) May 18, 2026

Massie has denied any wrongdoing and called the whole episode politically motivated. A libertarian hero with a cult following among young conservative men, Massie has his own band of irregulars who’ve rallied to his aid. Corralled by Matt Kibbe, an early organizer from the same tea party movement that produced Massie, they flooded into Kentucky this weekend to hang out at his farm. Massie showed them how he could mow the lawn, make pizza in his wood-fired oven, and play the banjo, while they made podcasts about it all.

Spotted on the farm: Thomas Massie cutting his grass without having ever applied for PPP loan. Unlike Bailout Ed, who never paid his loan back to taxpayers. pic.twitter.com/V930eUCMf4

— Matt Kibbe (@MattKibbe) May 18, 2026

Massie did bring in a few big names as well. Former Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) made the pilgrimage, as did Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.). After Boebert’s appearance, Laura Loomer promptly boosted West’s claims that Boebert had had sex with the candidate. Trump subsequently called Boebert “weak-minded” for campaigning for Massie and suggested that “anybody who can be that dumb deserves a good Primary fight!”

Then there was Kyle Rittenhouse, who shot three people, killing two of them, during the 2020 George Floyd protests in Kenosha, Wisconsin. Rittenhouse had been previously scheduled to appear at a pro-gun campaign event for one of Massie’s acolytes, State Rep. TJ Roberts, on May 16. But while he was in town, Rittenhouse volunteered for Massie, whom he called “the greatest congressman, I believe, in a very long time…He supported me from the beginning.”

Rittenhouse’s endorsement prompted an outpouring of hate on social media, where other MAGA Trump supporters now decided that their one-time Second Amendment champion was a “douchebag.”

Wow! Kyle Rittenhouse turned out to be a complete douchebag, we should've left him to the liberal wolves in 2020! pic.twitter.com/nJegH8hkHj

— Vince Langman (@LangmanVince) May 15, 2026

Massie also drew support from Stewart Rhodes, the founder of the Oath Keepers militia group. Rhodes boldly appeared at a campaign event with Trump’s nemesis, despite the fact that he would still be serving an 18-year prison sentence for seditious conspiracy for his role in the January 6 riot at the US Capitol if Trump hadn’t commuted his sentence last year. He also probably stands to profit from Trump’s new $1.7 billion slush fund for victims of “government weaponization,” which he may not have considered when he wrote a full-throated endorsement for Massie on his Substack:

“In a Congress full of career politicians who bend the knee to establishment party leadership, special interests, and the Deep State, Rep. Massie stands on principle,” he wrote. “He actually reads the bills. He votes against unconstitutional spending, endless undeclared wars, surveillance overreach, and the erosion of our God-given rights. His loyalty is to the Constitution and to the American people, not to the swamp.

That is why I drove all the way from Texas to Kentucky to knock on doors for him.”

Trump’s self-proclaimed “Secretary of Retribution,” retired Green Beret Ivan Raiklin, joined the fray, coming in to support Massie against the president he’s found insufficiently committed to payback. “It is Thomas Massie vs the entire War Machine, Deep State, and Foreign Lobby,” Raiklin declared on social media. He spent part of Monday antagonizing CNN’s Jake Tapper, who was also on hand.

While you wouldn’t know it from all the competing factions, Massie is not running against Trump but against an actual candidate, former Navy SEAL Ed Gallrein. His campaign handlers have largely kept Gallrein away from any reporters who might ask an unscripted question about something other than his devotion to the president. Even Raiklin, a fellow veteran, couldn’t get him to engage.

BREAKING! Retired Green Beret 25 year veteran and Kentucky Colonel tried to calmly, coolly and professionally to ask "NAVY SEAL" Ed Gallrein a question, but his handlers and campaign staff wouldn't allow it as Ed ran aimlessly and uncomfortably around the lobby before the… pic.twitter.com/P3DQj3IkSa

— Ivan Raiklin (@IvanRaiklin) May 18, 2026

Gallrein also refused to debate Massie. “Some people have said that it may be the smartest decision he’s ever made,” Massie told me recently about a man that Trump backhanded as a “warm body” when he first endorsed him in his last-minute addition to the race in October.

Journalist Ken Klippenstein observed that Gallrein has explained his reticence by declaring his background “classified.”

“Gallrein’s campaign touts endorsements from unnamed military officers, their identities and other supposedly sensitive details redacted to burnish the security theater,’ he wrote. “The strategy seems to be to let Trump’s endorsement and the SEAL mystique do the work—and to avoid as much public scrutiny as possible. In the few appearances Gallrein has made, his message to voters is consistent: the most important things about him are classified, the president has seen the file, and that should be enough.”

Despite all the national interest, the money—the primary is expected to cost up to $35 million—and the political theater, the outcome of the Kentucky primary is likely to come down to the votes of the same tiny sliver of the Kentucky electorate that always picks the primary winner. In 2024, a presidential election year, only 17 percent of registered Republicans voted in Massie’s last primary. The highest turnout came from those 62 and older—that is, the Fox News crowd. Only six percent of the more youthful Republican podcast audience, those between 25 and 34, cast a ballot.

Trump has made sure that his sycophants on Fox stay on the anti-Massie message. Once a frequent guest on the network as one of the most conservative members of Congress, Massie hasn’t appeared on any of its shows since March 2025, just around the same time Trump first called for his ouster from Congress. Massie told me recently that the media blackout has been damaging. “Fox is the biggest source of information about this race,” Massie said, “given the viewing habits of people in my district.”

Recent polling indicates that this demographic is indeed all in for Gallrein, or at least, for Trump.

KY-04 GOP PRIMARY POLL

Ed Gallrein: 49%
Thomas Massie: 42%
Not sure: 9%
——
• Age 18-49: Massie +9
• Age 30-44: Massie +50
• Age 45-64: Gallrein +4
• Age 65+: Gallrein +29
—
• Non White: Massie +10
• White: Gallrein +9
—
• Female: Gallrein +11
• Male:… pic.twitter.com/YTRS0DFj3u

— InteractivePolls (@IAPolls2022) May 17, 2026

In a new poll released Monday, nearly 15 percent of likely voters had no opinion about Gallrein, compared with 6 percent with Massie. Nonetheless, he’s up by 7 points.

Top image: Mother Jones illustration; Gage Skidmore/ZUMA; Jaime Carrero/ZUMA; Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call/ZUMA; Andrew Leyden/ZUMA; Marco Bello/AFP/Getty; Kenny Holston/Pool/CNP/ZUMA

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Scientology’s Extremely Online Pivot to Video

If you go on TikTok looking for information about Scientology, you’ll likely encounter a young man named Gunnar Scharf, leading impassioned tours of church buildings and holding holy texts aloft. Scharf has blue eyes, spiky dirty blonde hair, a trim black vest, and an abiding passion for telling the youth just how cool, normal, and approachable his faith really is.

“Inside Scientology,” one video begins, with Scharf leaning against a set of swinging doors, “what do we have that benefits all religions? Come with me.” He hikes a thumb over his shoulder and leads viewers in.

Scharf is the online face of Scientology’s Twin Cities church, and since the beginning of 2025 he has starred in dozens of videos on its TikTok and Instagram pages, inviting curious outsiders to check out what the church has to offer. He shows off personality tests and e-meters—the tools that Scientology uses to “audit” the curious and faithful alike—and answers common questions, like “Do Scientologists pray?” (The answer is no, unless, in addition to Scientology, they also belong to a religion where prayer is practiced.)

The account has over 10,000 followers and generates a lot of discussion—much of it either focused on Scharf’s looks (“I could fix him,” one Redditor declared) or witheringly critical (“So do I cut ties with my friends and family before or after joining?” one commenter asked on a recent video).

Scharf is just one of the young people at dozens of Scientology centers around the world who have begun making videos online, often using popular songs and trending audio, presenting a more approachable, amiable, and youthful face for the church. Many of these Instagram and TikTok accounts became especially active starting in early 2025 and have kept up an intense pace since.

A TikTok account for Scientology’s San Francisco chapter shows a younger male staffer leading tours. A less-active account called “Life Improvement Centre” shares TikToks from a Scientology mission in London, where youthful staff members brandish copies of the core Scientology text Dianetics to camera or answer questions about the church while standing near informational displays. In Las Vegas, an account presents two beaming women with long hair doing synchronized dances as onscreen text lists the “top three books to read in Scientology.” And the Los Feliz mission has been especially busy; there, a group of young female Scientologists star in a series of pop psychology-flavored videos about how Dianetics can support readers through self-discovery, mental health challenges, and even breakups.

“Stop stressing, you silly little goose,” one Los Feliz post declares, over a video of three female Scientologists jumping up and down in a kitchen. “You have a good heart, you’re not your intrusive thoughts, and Scientology exists. The universe is on your side… You’re going to be just fine.”

Screenshots from Scientology-backed TikTok videos.Scientology Minnesota; Scientology LV

According to Tony Ortega, a veteran journalist and former Village Voice editor in chief who has covered Scientology for decades, the videos are part of an evolving social media strategy. “They’ve been attempting to project a different impression for the past few years,” he says. “Now we have this online presence on TikTok and Instagram.”

A public relations pivot was arguably necessary, and even overdue, Ortega says, as Scientology is in need of new members. “They’re desperate right now,” he says. “It’s gotten really difficult for them. It’s so hard to recruit for Scientology.”

The videos come after years of bad press. The commenter who joked about cutting ties, for instance, was referring to just one controversial Scientology practice that became public through journalists and ex-members. They range from that concept, “disconnection,” where people in the religion are said to be pressured to sever contact with those who leave, to the financial and physical abuse former Scientologists say they experienced. High-profile defectors like actor Leah Remini and investigative projects like the book and documentary Going Clear have presented narratives of control and physical abuse that people allege having suffered during their time with the church.

Scientology has denied all reports of abuse, and accuses critics of harboring anti-religious bias, or worse. The STAND League, a Scientology-backed organization that says it fights discrimination against Scientologists and other religions, has, for instance, called Going Clear a “bigoted propaganda video,” and maintains webpages devoted to denouncing its critics, including Ortega, who they label as “an anti-religious hate blogger.”

In December 2025, however, the new, more lighthearted social media strategy was on full display in a Christmas-season TikTok. Scientology staffers from several different cities and countries were edited together in a video depicting them throwing a copy of Dianetics to each other. The last to catch the book is Scotland’s Amir Essalhi, a young man shown beaming in a red sweatshirt.

Essalhi, who is no longer in the church, first got interested in Scientology when he was an 18 year old film student with a love of Tom Cruise and dreams of acting. He heard Scientology had a library. “I like learning about philosophy and theology and life in general,” he told me recently. “They had mental health books and books claiming to have the answer about life. They sell themselves an applied philosophy. It’s not like you’re joining a religion.”

Essalhi was soon tapped to work without pay managing money for the Edinburgh Scientology center. Essalhi, who lived at home with his parents, says he dropped out of school and took on gigs helping fellow Scientologists with their various businesses: “Ads, social media, party businesses, cleaning, admin,” he says. (The church has for years faced, and denied, allegations it exploits members for money and forced labor.) It was challenging, he adds. “You don’t sleep.” Essalhi ultimately became the Edinburgh center’s public contact secretary, another unpaid executive role tasked with “getting new people through the front door and creating as many new Scientologists as possible.”

“We’re all in a WhatsApp group—or I was—called Social Media Warriors,” says Essalhi, who is now 21 years old. “Its purpose is to get Scientology out there on as many social media platforms as possible.”

“You basically get given full creative control,” he says.

Late last year, Essalhi decided to use his perceived autonomy in an unusual way by agreeing to appear on a podcast with Alex Barnes-Ross, a UK-based ex-Scientologist and prominent critic of the church’s alleged abuses.

“Any young person nowadays who walks past Scientology and gets handed a leaflet, they’re going to Google .”

Essalhi first encountered Barnes-Ross as he protested outside a 2025 Scientology conference in East Grinstead, where the church keeps its UK headquarters. His curiosity was piqued, and after a few weeks of cautious communication, the two agreed to speak on Barnes-Ross’ show. Essalhi hoped not only to defend Scientology, but to demonstrate the church’s commitment to free speech.

During the January recording, Barnes-Ross predicted their conversation would have negative repercussions for Essalhi. Essalhi disagreed: “I thought I was free to speak to this guy.”

“It was a great conversation,” Essalhi now says, a little ruefully, “that opened up Pandora’s box. The next two weeks after that I was subjected to all sorts of punishment.”

According to Essalhi, he spent that time being interrogated by senior Scientology officials before being ordered to do what he describes as “hard manual labor” renovating a new Scientology building. “And for what reason?” he asks. “For talking to somebody? For talking to a critic of the organization? For encouraging open dialogue and free speech?”

After one day of construction, Essalhi decided he was done: “I grabbed a grocery store bag, I grabbed all my awards, everything I was commended for, all my belongings. I went out the emergency exit, and I never returned.” (A Scientology spokesperson acknowledged a request for comment for this story, but did not provide any on the record response, including to questions about Essalhi’s account.)

Barnes-Ross says he joined the church at 15, and by 2014 was director of public sales for its London branch, charged with hawking copies of Dianetics and paid courses based on the tenets of its author, L. Ron Hubbard, the science fiction writer who founded Scientology. Today, Barnes-Ross tells me that his podcast is part of his efforts to give former Scientologists “a platform to share their stories and campaign for legislative changes in the UK to hold Scientology accountable for their abusive practices.” He maintains a YouTube page, Apostate Alex, with over 10,000 followers.

Before leaving in 2016, Barnes-Ross had a similar role in London as Essalhi did in Edinburgh. He recalls pushing his supervisor in roughly 2011 to “start using social media, set up a page on Twitter and Facebook and show people what Scientology really is, because there’s all these people talking rubbish about it online.” Barnes-Ross says that while Scientology’s central offices then had bare Facebook and Twitter pages, they mostly just offered links to the main Scientology website and basic videos. Barnes-Ross recalls no city-specific social media accounts—and nothing on social media that he thought did justice to what he then saw as the benefits of Scientology texts like Dianetics.

According to Barnes-Ross, his supervisor said that if they asked for permission from Scientology’s American headquarters, they’d likely be told no; instead, they should just launch some London accounts and see if they worked.

“’Do it,’” Barnes-Ross remembers the supervisor telling him, “‘but make sure you get results. If you do it and you don’t sell books, we’ll be in a lot of trouble.’”

“Trouble,” Barnes-Ross says, could have meant being subjected to “interrogations on the e-meter in the form of what’s called a ‘sec check’, a security check” or potentially being “put on hard manual labor and forced to confess my ‘crimes.’ The stakes were very high.”

The London accounts began “pumping out content like I’ve never seen before. It was like a post every single hour,” Barnes-Ross said, leading a few potential recruits to come in for introductory stress tests. With the rise in that closely tracked metric, he says “we were able to justify” the posting as a so-called “successful action” which, according to church doctrine, cannot be stopped.

The posts were a forerunner of videos that were later produced by another Barnes-Ross supervisor, a fellow London Scientologist named Charlie Wakley. According to Barnes-Ross, Wakley’s video content showing “how cool” it was to be a young Scientologist in the city made him a global figurehead, and “ultimately led to the social media campaigns we’re seeing today.” Wakley’s social media pages have been inactive since 2021 and he did not respond to a request for comment.

Videos featuring Swedish and French Scientologists.Scientology Malmö; Scientology Paris

While Scientology has had an online presence since the earliest days of the internet, the web has always been a bit of an unfriendly neighborhood. Its most boisterous opponent has been Anonymous, the decentralized activist group, which in 2008 launched Project Chanology, which sought to raise awareness about Scientology’s practices, troll the organization, and banish it from online spaces.

“Your organization should be destroyed for the good of your followers, for the good of mankind, and for our own enjoyment,” declared a video Anonymous posted announcing the campaign. “We shall proceed to expel you from the Internet and systematically dismantle the Church of Scientology in its present form.”

“The internet is something L. Ron Hubbard didn’t predict.”

The church has also been an object of online mockery and pranks. Today, groups of young people on TikTok are filming themselves “speed-running” Scientology buildings—seeing how deep inside they can get before being thrown out. The creator of the first speedrun video, targeting a Los Angeles church, told the Hollywood Reporter that it racked up more than 90 million views. Several of the most viral such videos have since been deleted, although it’s not clear if they were taken down by TikTok or by their creators. The church, meanwhile, told the Los Angeles Times that this behavior is a “hate crime.”

On a more practical level, the web has been a challenge for Scientology as critics have used it to create transparency around matters the church would prefer to keep private, and the organization’s leaders and lawyers have struggled to keep negative information about it from spreading online. Those critics have often been past members. In 1997, for instance, the church sued a former Scientologist from Virginia for copyright infringement after he posted a few dozen pages of doctrinal materials online. A court ruled in the church’s favor. Scientology was also successful in a similar lawsuit against the Fight Against Coercive Tactics Network, an anti-cult group founded by a former Scientologist. In that case, the church was ultimately allowed to repossess some 2000 pages of documents it claimed had been illegally copied.

But over time, this strategy proved fruitless and probably served, Streisand-effect-like, to only raise on- and offline awareness of anti-Scientology materials. Fundamentally, Ross-Barnes explains, “the internet is something L. Ron Hubbard didn’t predict,” and one the organization’s lawyers and legal threats cannot overcome. “This is a huge platform and space for free speech. People can put whatever they want on the internet. That’s something Scientology isn’t equipped for. It thinks it can control the narrative, silence critics, and avoid accountability. Perhaps this was easier in the 60s and 70s.”

“We’re all in a WhatsApp group… Its purpose is to get Scientology out there.”

Social media has given ex-Scientologists another space and platform to criticize the church. The most prominent is Jenna Miscavige, the niece of David Miscavige, Scientology’s ecclesiastical leader, who has built a large following on TikTok and YouTube talking about the neglect, isolation, and manual labor she said she suffered growing up in the Sea Org, the church’s tightly-controlled workforce.

In April, Alex Barnes-Ross was given a copy of a digital flyer circulated by the church to a Scientologist-only online community seeking recruits for a “Master dissemination group” that works to “get new people into orgs through social media.” Underneath an image of a team of people seated on a couch looking at laptops, tablets, and phones, the flyer’s authors’ claimed credit for having “introduced” “tens of thousands” to L. Ron Hubbard, while recruiting “hundreds of new people onto the Bridge,” Scientology’s graduated path of spiritual progress.

The flyer reflects the Scientology PR apparatus’ growing interest in harnessing church members not only to recruit members on social media, but to engineer a positive image that will drown out more critical voices.

“Scientology’s strategy is to try to control the dissent online and flood Facebook and Instagram and TikTok with their propaganda so it overrules the survivor stories,” Barnes-Ross explains.

The TikTok and Instagram pages being run by individual Scientology missions are likely being carefully monitored, he adds, with how they are authorized to respond to critical comments closely coordinated with the Office of Special Affairs (OSA), which oversees church public relations.

“OSA will basically send down orders and say, ‘In the future, reply like this’ or “Don’t do this,’” he says. “There’ll be very strict guidelines on what to say or not say and how to say it.”

Essalhi confirms that OSA would instruct the social media teams on how to answer negative comments. “Anyone that has to deal with the public,” he explains, would “get practiced on it routinely.”

The church’s new Instagram and TikTok presences—and, Essalhi says, an emerging emphasis on YouTube—are efforts to present a gentler and more approachable face to these platforms’ relatively young, unformed, audience, which is naturally an attractive population for Scientology. While Scientology claims a membership of millions, the figure seems to include anyone who’s ever taken one of the Church’s courses. Independent surveys have put it at fewer than 100,000 in America. A 2001 City University of New York survey estimated only about 55,000 US adults identified as Scientologists. Today, Tony Ortega pegs active membership at 20,000 to perhaps 50,000 at highest.

Scientology, Ortega says, “has an aging population. The vast majority of members…are second or third generation. They’ve been raised in Scientology rather than joining. They’re in a crisis in terms of membership. If they can get you while you’re young, you’re going to be a longstanding donor for years.”

In 2020, Mike Rinder, a former senior church official turned critic, described Scientology as “steadily shrinking” in a blog post: “The vast majority of scientologists today are… 65 to 75 years old. They are going to die off. Despite their claims to the contrary, scientology cannot prevent illness and disease.” Rinder himself died in 2025. Today, Scientology says 44% of members are between the ages of 31 and 40, and that only 3% are over 61 years old.

Whatever the current numbers, Essalhi says the social media recruitment effort “is not working at all.” While the videos he once helped make may be “doing a good job popping up on people’s For You page” on TikTok, Essalhi says they’re falling short of their actual goal: “If you want to talk about actually getting people in, getting products sold, selling books—which is the ultimate reason why you’d do it—it’s not working. I know, because I was in this group chat.”

“Any young person nowadays who walks past Scientology and gets handed a leaflet, they’re going to Google or go on TikTok,” explains Barnes-Ross. “They’re going to find the truth and they’re not going to go into the building.”

Barnes-Ross also says the new, TikTok-heavy approach is, as he puts it, “doomed for failure,” because with the internet, “the truth is out there—and it’s easy for people to engage and spread.”

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Why a Federal Gas Tax Holiday Is a Terrible Idea

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

As gas prices stay stubbornly high across the country, President Donald Trump mused last week about suspending the fuel tax US consumers pay. The idea is also picking up steam in Congress, with Democratic and Republican lawmakers pushing for a gas tax holiday.

But experts tell WIRED that it’s unlikely that any rollback—even temporary—of the fee will save consumers much as the unofficial start to summer travel season nears. “It’s unlikely that oil prices, gasoline prices, diesel prices are going to fall back to where they were in February any time in the next couple months,” says Clark Williams-Derry, an analyst at the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis.

The Strait of Hormuz, one of the world’s most crucial shipping routes and a chokepoint for both oil and gas supply and production, has remained effectively closed since early March, when the US and Israel first launched strikes against Iran.

The average price of gasoline across the country was $4.53 per gallon as of Thursday, up from $4.12 a month ago, and $3.18 last year, according to AAA. That includes the federal gas tax, which is a little over 18 cents a gallon. Trump can’t suspend the gas tax on his own—it would take an act of Congress. (Taylor Rogers, a White House spokesperson, noted the 18-cent savings in WIRED‘s request for comment, and added that this move “would be a temporary measure.”)

The tax, which was created in 1932, has never been suspended. But politicians from both sides of the aisle have put forward a variety of bills this year that would temporarily lift the federal tax.

“It’s just not a good deal for consumers.”

Even if the tax is suspended for the summer, drivers wouldn’t necessarily see much in the way of savings. Prices at the pump are decided by a number of different factors, from refining costs to the costs to operate gas stations. The price of oil has also fluctuated wildly, with Brent crude—a key benchmark—rising to an all-time high of $144 per barrel on the night of April 7, when Trump and the Iranian government brokered a 2-week ceasefire. It currently sits around $105 a barrel, still much higher than the average of $69 in 2025.

And inflation driven by high fuel prices and a shortage in commodities that rely on oil as a key input, like fertilizer, around the world is also making life more expensive for Americans. In April, the consumer price index—used to measure inflation—was up 3.8 percent year over year. With the costs of everything from food and rent to airfare ticking up, an 18-cent savings doesn’t add up to much over the long run.

“When you take away the retail gas tax, it’s not going to have a dramatic effect [for consumers],” says Tyson Slocum, the director of the energy program at the progressive think tank Public Citizen. “But what would be dramatic is the loss in federal revenues.”

The federal gas tax funds the Highway Trust Fund, which was formed to support highway maintenance and mass transit projects. That fund was already facing severe insolvency issues even before proposals to lift the federal gas tax. Williams-Derry points out that many of the roads in the US are “literally crumbling:” Nearly 40 percent of the country’s highways and roadways are in need of repair, a 2025 survey found. The already low taxes are a big driver of poor infrastructure, he says.

Cutting off revenue, even temporarily, would only exacerbate the problem. There’s also a possibility that a temporary break could be extended indefinitely, given the political risks of reinstating it, particularly as midterms near. “The loss of federal revenues available to ensure that our transportation infrastructure remains sound, it’s just not a good deal for consumers,” Slocum says.

Closing the Strait of Hormuz has suddenly cut off a massive amount of global oil supply from the market, in what is widely agreed upon to be one of the worst energy crises in history. Even if the Strait of Hormuz immediately opens up tomorrow, the effects of the new supply could take a while to reach consumers—likely a month or more as tankers travel to customers and production facilities start back up again.

“An oil tanker moves as fast as a bicycle,” says Williams-Derry. “It’s a significant trip.”

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Minnesota Is Doing What the Federal Government Won’t: Holding ICE Accountable

An ICE officer who allegedly shot a Minneapolis man when the Trump administration sent thousands of officers to Minnesota and lied about the series of events that led to the shooting was charged on Monday.

Christian J. Castro, the officer, is charged with four counts of second-degree assault and one count of falsely reporting a crime in the shooting of Julio César Sosa-Celis, a Venezuelan immigrant, on January 14, just one week after the killing of Renée Good.

A federal agent shot Sosa-Celis in the thigh after he and another officer pursued Sosa-Celis’ roommate, Alfredo Alejandro Aljorna. Hennepin County attorney Mary Moriarty said both Sosa-Celis and Aljorna reside in the US legally. The two men’s attorneys said that neither had violent criminal records.

Federal authorities initially claimed that the two men assaulted a federal officer. The next day, former Homeland Security secretary Kristi Noem called the event—without evidence**—**an act of “attempted murder,” and said the men beat the officer “with snow shovels and the handles of brooms.” Then a widely-circulated video showed what really happened, contradicting the federal government’s statements, and the federal government changed their story.

The video shows Aljorna going to his home after crashing his car as Castro chases him. Sosa-Celis was outside and he, Aljorna, and Castro tussled but no weapons were used. The two men then run into their home when the officer shoots at them.

The FBI said a week after the shooting that it was a case of mistaken identity.

In an interview with the Minnesota Star Tribune before she announced the charges, Moriarty said that their investigation into the incident revealed “no demonstrable trauma to [Castro’s] body, except for an abrasion to his left hand.”

The Hennepin County Attorney’s Office, which covers all of Minneapolis, issued a nationwide arrest warrant for Castro. In April, the office charged another ICE agent for pointing his weapon at two people while driving illegally on the highway.

The state of Minnesota also sued the Trump administration in March, alleging that it withheld evidence in the killings of Renée Good and Alex Pretti and the shooting of Sosa-Celis in order to prevent possible charges against their agents.

As my colleague Isabela Dias wrote in January during Operation Metro Surge, the federal government’s violence was intentional:

Under pressure to meet the administration’s goal of 3,000 daily arrests, ICE has been on a hiring spree…The result of that expansion drive has been less than optimal, with recruits failing fitness tests and not undergoing proper vetting. Experts have also raised concerns about the lowering of standards and reduced training times for new hires.

And as I wrote in February following a congressional hearing, the heads of ICE, Customs and Border Protection, and Citizenship and Immigration Services, largely deflected questions aboutkillings by ICE officers. My colleagues have reported again and again that they clearly do not care.

So it is up to local and state governments to hold the federal government accountable.

“There is no such thing as absolute immunity for federal officers who commit crimes in this state or any other,” Moriarty stated during a press conference announcing the charges on Monday afternoon.

But as she told the Minnesota Star Tribune, “While I understand people really want accountability and they saw what they saw in the [Good and Pretti] videos, this is incredibly complex. The last thing we want to do is make a mistake.”

It’s symptomatic of a system of failed accountability, and the cruelty is still happening today.

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One Congresswoman’s Scary Yearlong Fight for Justice After Standing Up to ICE

It’s been just over a year since Rep. LaMonica McIver (D-NJ), a sitting member of Congress, showed up to Delaney Hall, a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention facility in Newark, New Jersey, to do her job.

Members of Congress have the statutory right to conduct unannounced oversight visits at ICE detention centers across the country, and McIver had done it before.

But this time was different.

Things turned chaotic. ICE flooded the facility with agents. The mayor of Newark, Ras Baraka, was arrested. And McIver, a first-term Congresswoman, left that day, about to face two federal felony counts and a misdemeanor, for “forcibly impeded and interfered with federal officers,” according to the charges.

For the past year, McIver, who has pleaded not guilty, has been fighting the case, running to keep her seat in Congress, and making the argument that this isn’t really about her. For McIver, it’s about whether Congress can do its job in the Trump era.

“Honestly, it’s been extremely difficult,” McIver told me in this wide-ranging interview. “I think some days I’m still looking back, like, is this really happening? Because it’s truly unbelievable. I never thought I would get to Congress and have to be dealing with something like this, or being targeted in this way or fashion.”

McIver just revealed in an interview with People magazine that she is facing these charges while she is pregnant with her second child.

“This is really America, and it saddens me that this is happening,” she told me. “It definitely feels like I’m on the island alone, for sure, and that’s why I continue to talk about this case and explain that it’s bigger than just LaMonica McIver.”

Just ahead of the one-year anniversary of the events of that day, I sat down with Rep. McIver to talk about what happened, what went wrong, and why the Trump administration just won’t let up.

Watch the interview in full here:

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Trump Tried to Build Australia’s Tallest Tower. It Didn’t Happen.

Donald Trump has had an amazing run of success as an international businessman since becoming president for a second time. He’s made billions in crypto, traded stocks successfully, and unveiled new locations for an array of Trump-branded real estate projects—from Riyadh to Australia.

Still, not all those Trump-branded projects are winners. Take that Australia deal. Back in February, Eric Trump proudly announced a plan to build the tallest building in Australia on the continent’s sunny Gold Coast. But the whole thing got off to an inauspicious start when the Trumps’ local partner, a developer named David Young, tried to build some buzz for the project. In a statement, he reassured Australians that the new Trump Tower wouldn’t be as bad as they might imagine.

“Firstly, the file footage that Australians see, of Trump hotels and resorts with gaudy gold-plated bathrooms fixtures, mirrors and heavy chandeliers, is old footage from the 1980s and 90s,” Young said at the time. “The modern Trump package is high-end design and fit outs, with a premium feel. It’s tasteful and expensive – when you walk into a modern Trump property, the impression is ‘quality’ and ’boutique.’”

And that was, more or less, the last anyone heard of that project.

Until now. It’s official demise was confirmed last Tuesday. Young told Australian media that it was Trump’s toxic brand, in particular his war against Iran—which had kicked off five days after the project was first announced—that did the plan in.

“Let’s just say that with the Iran war and everything else, the Trump brand was increasingly toxic in Australia,” Young said.

For their part, the Trumps said it was Young’s fault.

“While we were very excited about the opportunity to bring a world-class development to the Gold Coast, the project was dependent on our licensing partner meeting certain obligations. Unfortunately, those obligations were not fulfilled,” a Trump Organization spokeswoman told Australian outlets. Young denied he hadn’t met any obligations.

In between the project’s announcement and cancellation, Australian media reported that Young had several previous bankruptcies and, in the 1990s, had been charged with hacking. The hacking charges were ultimately dismissed.

The Trump Organization did not respond to a request for comment for more clarification on why the project fell apart or if another Australian deal is in the works.

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Trump Just Gave Himself a $1.8 Billion Slush Fund to Reward His Friends

President Donald Trump dropped his $10 billion lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Service on Monday in exchange for a settlement deal to launch a $1.8 billion fund to pay claims made by his friends for purported unfair prosecution.

“The machinery of government should never be weaponized against any American, and it is this Department’s intention to make right the wrongs that were previously done while ensuring this never happens again,” Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche said in his department’s Monday press release, announcing “The Anti-Weaponization Fund.” “As part of this settlement, we are setting up a lawful process for victims of lawfare and weaponization to be heard and seek redress.”

“The Fund will consist of a Commission of five members appointed by the Attorney General. One Member will be chosen in consultation with congressional leadership,” the Justice Department’s press release states. “The President can remove any member, but a replacement must be chosen the same way as the replaced member was selected.”

According to the Justice Department, “on a quarterly basis, the Fund shall send a report to the Attorney General outlining who has received relief and what form of relief was awarded.” If Blanche’s previous decisions to protect Trump and go after his alleged enemies are anything to go by, there will therefore be little to no oversight beyond Trump loyalists.

The president has long claimed that he and his allies have been targeted by the Biden administration—including, as Mother Jones’ Michael Mechanic pointed out on Saturday, defendants who were charged for involvement in the Jan. 6 insurrection.

Trump, his two eldest sons, and the Trump Organization filed the $10 billion lawsuit this past January after IRS contractor Charles Littlejohn leaked the president’s tax returns to ProPublica and the New York Times.

In a Monday amicus brief shared with MS NOW, House Democrats said Trump’s lawsuit “undermine[d] the Constitution” and the potential “Truth and Justice Commission” was a “slush fund.”

“Never in the history of the United States has a sitting President sought a monetary settlement from the government he leads—let alone sought many billions of dollars in taxpayer funds,” the Democrats wrote, arguing that Trump was “filing a collusive lawsuit only to immediately dismiss it in order to produce a collusive settlement.”

And this is a pattern. Just think about the ABC lawsuit, where the process of the Trump administration’s pressure and subsequent settlement resulted in a form of extortion. As for the IRS settlement, the president now has a $1.8 billion compensation fund to support future attacks against anyone who opposes him.

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Trump Cuts to Weather Data May Make Forecasts Less Reliable, Experts Warn

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

As the United States prepares for hurricane season and a summer of record-breaking heat, experts fear the Trump administration’s cuts to climate and weather data programming could make the federal government’s weather forecasts less reliable when they are needed most.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) late last year launched a suite of artificial intelligence-powered global weather forecast models which it said would improve “speed, efficiency, and accuracy.” In March, an agency official said those models are being trained with centuries of weather data.

Artificial intelligence is a valuable tool for weather prediction, but only when it is well-trained with ample data, said Monica Medina, who served as NOAA’s principal deputy undersecretary of commerce for oceans and atmosphere from 2009 to 2012.

Under Trump, climate and weather data collection has declined, said Medina. This year, the Trump administration proposed a modest budget increase for the National Weather Service, but a 40 percent cut to NOAA overall.

“We absolutely need AI to help us crunch the data faster and to make sense of more and more data that we can collect,” said Medina, who under Joe Biden also served as assistant secretary of state for oceans. “But right now, what we’re doing is cutting back the data collection…we’re going in the wrong direction.”

Crucially, when it comes to predicting extreme weather events, new models still “underperform.”

In an emailed comment, Erica Grow Cei, a National Weather Service spokesperson said: “Despite the misinformation circulating about missing weather and climate data, there is, in fact, a wealth of weather data collected each day, from satellites in space, to a network of weather balloons, to buoys in the ocean, and land-based sensors.”

But widespread reports show staffing cuts have forced NOAA’s National Weather Service to scale back satellites and balloon launches, key parts of the country’s data collection system. And shrunk climate programs threaten ocean buoy networks and other observation systems, experts say. Research into effects of the climate crisis on Earth’s systems is also being slashed, along with funding for researchers who analyze data and identify new sources.

“Weather times time equals climate,” said Craig McLean, NOAA’s former acting chief scientist and head of NOAA Research. “Cutting climate research impacts the skill of our weather forecast, and it arrests our advancement of weather forecasts.”

Those impediments are coming as the US is preparing for more extreme weather. A “super El Niño” is expected to spike temperatures, smash heat records nationwide and may boost hurricane activity in some regions.

Noaa will issue its outlook for the 2026 Atlantic hurricane season on Thursday. For decades, scientists used traditional physics-based models to predict future weather conditions, using complex mathematical equations to simulate the dynamics at work in the atmosphere. New AI-based models instead identify patterns in decades of historical data to forecast weather outcomes.

That new technology uses less computing power than traditional models—which must run thousands of mathematical equations to work—and has been found to outperform traditional models for some aspects of weather forecasting. But it also seems to have major shortcomings, experts have found.

Crucially, when it comes to predicting extreme weather events, new models still “underperform,” according to an April study published in Science Advances. Because their forecasts are based on past weather events, the authors found, they seem to have trouble simulating the record-breaking weather events that are becoming increasingly common amid the climate crisis, instead tending to predict weather more similar to historical events.

It’s kind of a snowball effect. You need accurate data for inputs for our forecast models, but we’re running on less data currently with this current administration.”

Traditional physics-based models don’t have this problem, because they assess and predict the weather outcomes that certain physical conditions yield.

“They don’t really care if there’s a different situation than we’ve seen before, because they can understand based on a rules-based [analysis] what will happen tomorrow,” said Sebastian Engelke, a professor at the University of Geneva who co-authored the study.

Chris Gloninger, a forensic meteorologist who in 2023 received death threats after speaking about the climate crisis on television, likened the problems with AI-powered models to the ways other kinds of infrastructure struggles to manage a world experiencing global warming.

“You have infrastructure systems in this country that are built on having a steady or static climate, and we know that that’s not the case as extremes are increasing,” he said.

Like stormwater systems that were not designed to keep up with climate-fueled heavy rainfall events or roads that were not designed to withstand climate-fueled extreme heat, “the AI weather models were trained on a climate that no longer exists,” Gloninger said.

This problem already has real world implications, said Gloninger, noting that conventional models outperformed AI-based ones when forecasting a historic February 2026 blizzard in the north-eastern United States.

If the government scales up its reliance on AI-powered models while reducing the amount of data that powers them, that problem could compromise federal forecasts, said Gloninger. “It’s kind of a snowball effect,” he said. “You need accurate data for inputs for our forecast models, but we’re running on less data currently with this current administration.”

Long before Trump re-entered office, the National Weather Service had faced decades of understaffing. Recent cuts have exacerbated the problem, Gloninger said.

NOAA has not wholesale switched to AI forecasting. Instead, it says it is employing more artificial intelligence in its ensemble models, which blend multiple techniques to produce a range of probable outcomes. Cei said NOAA’s new AI-powered model suite is “an addition to our stable of weather models, not a replacement,” adding that it was “built on data” from the agency’s flagship physics-based Global Forecast System model.

But Gloninger said he is still concerned that rolling any AI technology into federal models could raise problems, particularly amid cuts to weather data collection and climate research.

“There could still very much be issues when you have a component of artificial intelligence that isn’t really trained when it comes to extreme weather and climate,” he said.

Neil Jacobs, current Noaa administrator, is “probably one of the preeminent modeling scientists”, said John Sokich, a former director of congressional affairs for the National Weather Service. “I don’t believe he would rush implement something that has not been tested,” said Sokich.

But though Jacobs is “committed to advancing weather forecasting,” Jacobs is also “a Trump appointee who must back the Trump budget or leave his job,” said McLean. The administrator defended Trump’s NOAA cuts at a House environment subcommittee hearing in April, McLean noted.

“I don’t think Dr Jacobs would be in a rush to be replacing capacity with AI that’s not ready yet,” he said. “But at the same time, the man has demonstrated his willingness to be obedient to the president who appointed him [and who is] destroying the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.”

Weather forecasts serve “indispensible” practical functions, powering early disaster warnings, enabling safe aviation and shipping, and helping officials optimize sectors of the economy from energy production to agriculture, said Medina. Less accurate forecasting could pose dangers to Americans, she said.

“Weather forecasts are vital to our economy, to our health, and to public safety,” she said.

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Trump Begins Branding America’s 250th Anniversary as a Christian Celebration

Donald Trump’s MAGA-style celebration of the 250th anniversary of American independence ramped up Sunday with a federally funded prayer service that organizers said would “rededicate America as One Nation Under God.”

“Rededicate 250,” is one of a series of events that the Trump administration is holding to mark the country’s semiquincentennial on July 4. A UFC fight at the White House planned for Trump’s 80th birthday and an IndyCar race around the National Mall in August seem more the style of the 47th president, who was at his golf club in Virginia, not church, on Sunday. But the prayer event nods to his evangelical supporters by asserting that the United States is a Christian nation.

“We welcome Jesus into this place!” proclaimed one performer on a stage on the National Mall, in the shadow of the Washington Monument.

Speakers at the event**,** which I checked out on Sunday, included House Speaker Mike Johnson, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who controversially used a prayer service to ask God for “overwhelming violence against enemies” in the US war against Iran. Trump also addressed attendees via video.

The religious event drew substantial criticism.

“This outrageous event makes a mockery of a core constitutional tenet of American life, the separation of church and state, essentially promoting a particular flavor of white evangelical protestantism as state-sponsored religion,” Public Citizen Co-President Robert Weissman said in a statement. “This self-proclaimed day of thanksgiving torpedoes the best of American traditions—inclusivity and diversity—and has no place being connected to the U.S. government.”

Counterprotests were organized by Faithful America, a group opposed to Christian nationalism and the Freedom From Religion Foundation, which hired a truck with a screen calling to “Celebrate Democracy, Not Theocracy.”

Hundreds of attendees waiting to the enter the event were accosted by a heckler who used a megaphone to accuse them of “supporting a pedophile.” (That was an apparent reference to unsubstantiated accusations about Trump being connected to Jeffrey Epstein.)

Just one of 15 scheduled speakers Sunday, an Orthodox Jewish Rabbi, was not a Christian. (A shabbat service on the Mall the day before appeared aimed at appeasing any concerns among Trump’s Jewish supporters about Sunday’s heavily Protestant focus.)

The gathering was organized by Freedom250, a private group established by the Trump administration that is using a so-far undisclosed amount of federal funding—along with corporate money from sponsors including United Airlines, ExxonMobil, John Deere, Lockheed Martin, MasterCard, Oracle and Palantir—to stage events.

The Trump administration has directed funds to Freedom250 that Congress appropriated to a different group, American250, a statutorily bipartisan group required to detail its spending for lawmakers. The White House appears to have set up Freedom25o to sidestep those requirements.

Around the perimeter of the event religious groups handed out literature, some of it anti-Catholic. Two days after federal officials announced “Operation Summer Surge” would bring thousands of additional troops, ICE agents and other law enforcement to Washington, in part to police anniversary events, there was a heavy presence: National Guard troops, US Marshals agents, and agents from Homeland Security Investigations (part of ICE) milled about.

The administration has awarded lucrative contracts for 250th anniversary celebrations to Event Strategies, a company that organized the rally Trump held on Jan. 6, 2021 that was followed by the attack on the Capitol. (The New York Times has reported Event Strategies has at least $13 million in federal contracts.) Owners of that company, which I reported was paid $688,000 for its work organizing that rally, have denied responsibility for the ensuing riot.

The Interior Department is also seeking $10 billion for a general fund the administration says will pay for beautification of federal land around Washington in connection with the 250th anniversary. And Interior and other federal agencies have awarded no-bid contracts to firms reportedly favored by Trump to repair various landscaping features, like the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting pool, citing an “urgency” exemption from federal contracting rules due to Trump’s wish for the work to be done by July 4.

Outside Sunday’s event, I checked out a “freedom truck,” one of a fleet of mobile museums offering information the country’s founders, including displays in which founders offer at times like right-leaning takes on US history.) The trucks, which will travel the US for the rest of the year, were created in partnership with right PragerU, which disseminates far right education material. Staffers manning the truck said that they work for Event Strategies.

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GOP Push for $1 Billion to Fund Trump’s Ballroom Hits Roadblock

A GOP bill aiming to use $1 billion of taxpayer money to finance required security for President Donald Trump’s White House ballroom was denied in a Saturday night ruling on technical grounds.

Senate Republicans attempted to include the ballroom project in a budget reconciliation bill—which also includes roughly $38 billion for ICE and $26 billion for US Border Patrol, among other immigration and law enforcement spending—to bypass the 60-vote filibuster threshold and only require a simple majority for passage. But all funding in such bills must be directly related to federal spending and revenue, which prevents “extraneous” provisions under the Byrd Rule.

“A project as complex and large in scale as Trump’s proposed ballroom necessarily involves the coordination of many government agencies which span the jurisdiction of many Senate committees,” said Senate Democrats, after meeting with the chamber’s parliamentarian, Elizabeth MacDonough, whose ruling stopped the bill. “As drafted, the provision inappropriately funds activities outside the jurisdiction of the Judiciary Committee.”

The GOP appears poised to seek a workaround. Ryan Wrasse, the communications director for Senate Majority Leader John Thune posted on X that the decision is not “abnormal” and that the next step is to, “Redraft. Refine. Resubmit.”

The GOP push to fund the security infrastructure conflicts in its own right with Trump’s stated plans for the construction. Trump has repeatedly said that his ballroom would cost no government funds. “These are all private individuals that put up a lot of money to build the ballroom,” he said last November at the White House. “Not one penny is being used from the federal government.”

Some Republican lawmakers are concerned about apportioning $1 billion for the ballroom. “I think the timing and the optics are really bad,” Sen. Thom Tillis, R-N.C., said last week. “This time last year, roughly, maybe a little bit before, we were all impressed with the fact that this $400 million building was going to be paid for out of the generosity of donors, and now we’re hearing 2½ times that is necessary for some other aspect of the project.”

According to a memo shared with senators and obtained by PBS NewsHour, $220 million would be used to toughen the White House complex, $180 million would be used for visitor screenings, $175 million for training, and an additional $175 million to boost security for those under protection by the Secret Service.

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Sen. Bill Cassidy’s Losing Legacy: He Gave America RFK Jr.

Sen. Bill Cassidy may remember coming in third place, but the American people will be left with his legacy of playing a role in degrading the nation’s health care system.

On Saturday, Cassidy won only roughly 25 percent of the vote for Louisiana’s Republican Senate primary—in a group of candidates led by President Donald Trump’s pick, Julia Letlow—thereby failing to qualify for the runoff in June. Cassidy’s political demise apparently was the first time an elected senator placed third or worse in a primary since 1944.

Cassidy, who practiced as a physician and has said he understands the “absolute scientifically based understanding that vaccines are safe,” provided the deciding vote in favor of advancing Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s nomination for health secretary in February 2025. “We need a leader at HHS who will guide President Trump’s agenda to Make America Healthy Again,” the longtime GOP senator said during his floor speech explaining his support. “Based on Mr. Kennedy’s assurances on vaccines and his platform to positively influence Americans’ health, it is my consideration that he will get this done.”

RFK Jr. has since launched a war on vaccines, while Cassidy has offered little more than passive criticisms. Trump’s health secretary has alsodismantled huge swaths of his department and replaced them with Trump loyalists. So much for “Mr. Kennedy’s assurances.”

Cassidy has repeatedly refused to acknowledge that he made a mistake by confirming RFK Jr. As Julianne McShane wrote for Mother Jones last November, Cassidy admitted to CNN’s State of the Union host Jake Tapper that the CDC pushing unsubstantiated links between vaccines and autism on its website was problematic, but he downplayed the importance of the site and did not name RFK Jr. as a principal reason for the change in the health department’s direction.

Cassidy was one of seven Republican senators who voted to convict Trump in his impeachment trial over the Jan. 6 insurrection, but since then, he has appeared to mostly bend over backwards to get on the president’s good side. Trump nonetheless attacked him as “disloyal” ahead of Saturday’s vote. Notably, as Mother Jones’ Sophie Hurwitz pointed out, only four members of Congress—out of the 10 House Republicans who voted to impeach Trump in 2021 and the seven Senate Republicans who voted to convict him—won reelection. Cassidy is the latest example of why so many in his party continue to fear crossing Trump.

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Smuggled in Syringes: Inside Nairobi’s Black Market in Giant Harvester Ants

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

In the biblical text Book of Proverbs, King Solomon describes the harvester ant as a model of wisdom and industriousness: “Go to the ant, you sluggard; consider its ways and be wise!”

Almost 3,000 years later, the thriving international parallel market for a distinct species of the ant native to East Africa has been thrust into the global spotlight after a series of convictions in Kenya for ant smuggling.

In the most recent case, Zhang Kequn, a Chinese national, was sentenced to a year in prison and fined 1 million Kenyan shillings (about $7,600) on April 15 after his arrest in March at Jomo Kenyatta international airport, where authorities found more than 2,200 live ants in specialized tubes in his luggage destined for China.

The insects included 1,948 Messor cephalotes, a prized species commonly known as the giant African harvester ant.

The presiding principal magistrate, Irene Gichobi, said a “deterrent sentence” was needed because of rising cases of ant smuggling in Kenya and the ecological impact of the trade.

“They’re like the tigers of the ant world—just rare and beautiful and interesting.”

Kequn’s case was the third such in less than a year in Kenya, pointing to a growing market for ants as exotic pets in Asia and Europe. Ant collectors and hobbyists in these regions pay large sums for the insects, which they put in formicariums, or ant farms, to observe and study their colonies and behaviors.

A study released in 2023 on the biological invasion risk of online ant sales in China found that Messor cephalotes wasthe third most popular species among non-native ants traded in the country over the internet during a six-month period in 2021.

Kequn was charged alongside Charles Mwangi, a Kenyan who allegedly sold him the ants and is out on bail. Prosecutors said Kequn paid 100 Kenyan shillings for each ant.

Live queen garden ants exhibited during the smuggling trial of Zhang Kequn, a Chinese national, and Kenyan citizen Charles Mwangi. Nairobi, Kenya, March 17, 2026.Andrew Kasuku/AP

One giant African harvester queen can fetch more than $300 in exotic pet markets in Europe, Asia and North America, according to Pat Stanchev, the general manager of Best Ants UK, an online store. That is 40 times the Kenyan price.

Last year, a court in Nairobi sentenced two Belgian teenagers to one year in prison, with an option of paying a fine of 1 million shillings, after they were found with about 5,000 live giant African harvester queen ants packed in tubes.

In a related case, a Vietnamese and a Kenyan received the same sentence after being found in possession of about 400 giant African harvester ants packed in syringes and containers.

Reacting to Zhang’s conviction, the Kenya Wildlife Service said: “The case highlights the growing concern over the illegal trade in invertebrates, which, though often overlooked, is increasingly targeted by traffickers due to rising global demand.”

Last year’s cases prompted conservationists to call on parties to the Cites treaty on endangered plants and animals to recognise the international ant pet trade as a conservation and biosecurity issue of global concern.

Messor cephalotes is a species of harvester ant that is native to east Africa. The ant has vibrant red and black colours; is the largest known species of the harvester ant—workers can grow up to 19 mm and queens up to 25 mm (about an inch); and exhibit complex behavior in its foraging and nest building. All these features make it popular among collectors and hobbyists.

“They’re like the tigers of the ant world—just rare and beautiful and interesting,” said Dino Martins, an entomologist.

A queen mates with males then goes on to start a colony of up to hundreds of thousands of her offspring, female workers and soldiers, while continuing to produce eggs her entire life. Colonies can last decades. The ants build and live in large, circular nests and store seeds underground.

“We lose the ants, we lose our cattle and we lose our milk and our butter and our cheese and we lose our wildlife and our tourism.”

Stanchev said giant African harvester ants were a rare and dream species for collectors, who prize them for their “large size, complex colony-building, impressive foraging trails, and polymorphic workers.” He added: “The queen ants are splendid, literally.”

Best Ants UK did not support or engage in wild collection or illegal trade, and all its ants were captive-bred or sourced ethically within UK and EU regulations, said Stanchev.

Martins described giant African harvester ants as a keystone species—one considered essential in holding the ecosystem together—in grasslands and savannahs, playing roles such as collecting the seeds of grasses and dispersing them.

“They’re like the farmers of the grassland, making sure that there’s a lot of diversity of grasses, which is really important [for livestock and wildlife],” he said.

Martins said over-harvesting the ants could cause devastating effects. “We lose the ants, we lose our cattle and we lose our milk and our butter and our cheese and we lose our wildlife and our tourism,” he said.

The places where the ants are moved could be affected, too. The 2023 study said the introduction of ants outside their native ranges could make them invasive “with dire environmental and economic consequences”.

Zhengyang Wang, a conservation biologist and the lead author of the study, said as grain collectors, the giant African harvester ant could impact crop growth in large agricultural fields, such as those in southern Asia or northern US, if introduced because they were non-native.

“In ecological terms, moving species out of their native habitat is almost always a bad idea,” he said.

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Suing His Own IRS? Creating a $1.8 Billion Slush Fund? What the Hell Is Trump Trying to Pull?

Sen. Ron Wyden, longtime Oregon Democrat and ranking member of the Senate Finance Commitee, has never been a fan of President Donald Trump. But I’ve never seen him quite this worked up.

The administration, Wyden declared in a statement on Friday, “is dripping with corruption from top to bottom” and is now plotting “among the most corrupt acts in American political history.”

What we are witnessing, he said, is nothing less “than a shakedown of the American people by a crook president and his crook lawyers…no more valid than if he had sued the White House kitchen for serving him an undercooked steak. Between this and the ballroom and a thousand other acts of corruption, Trump is a parasite on the American republic.”

In case you haven’t been glued to the news, the saga that has Wyden so enraged kicked off in late January, a week into Trump’s second term, when the president, along with his company and sons Eric and Don Jr., filed a lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Service seeking “at least $10,000,000,000” in damages.

Ten billion dollars!

Basically, in 2019 and 2020, an IRS contractor named Charles Littlejohn leaked Trump’s and the Trump Organization’s confidential tax returns and related filings to the New York Times, ProPublica, “and other leftist media outlets,” as the lawsuit put it. Admittedly, this was illegal, even though Trump had repeatedly (and falsely) promised to make his tax returns public. In 2024, Littlejohn was sentenced to five years in prison for his leaks, which included a trove of documents that revealed how little US billionaires pay in tax.

The Trump lawsuit claims that the leaks caused the Trumps and their company “reputational and financial harm, public embarrassment, unfairly tarnished their business reputations, portrayed them in a false light, and negatively affected President Trump, and the other Plaintiffs’ public standing.”

This is corruption of “a different scale,” because Trump “is negotiating a settlement with the government that he runs to take taxpayer money from hardworking folks.”

The reputational claims are notable, coming from a man found guilty or liable in several civil and criminal fraud cases and liable for defamation and sexual abuse. Trump’s company, the Trump Organization, was found guilty of criminal tax fraud and falsifying business records. And of course there’s Trump’s incitement of the violent attempt by his followers on January 6, 2021, to thwart the peaceful transfer of government, for which Trump was impeached though not convicted.

Early in his second term, Trump then pardoned all of the J6ers, dozens of whom, according to the legal watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), had been rearrested, charged, or sentenced for unrelated crimes in the wake of January 6, including rape, domestic violence, weapons charges, and possession of child pornography.

Some even reoffended after Trump pardoned them, including a man who had been sentenced to five years in prison for his role in January 6, and this past February pleaded guilty to threatening the life of the US House Minority Leader: “Hakeem Jeffries makes a speech in a few days in NYC I cannot allow this terrorist to live,” he’d written, according to court filings. “Even if I am hated, he must be eliminated, I will kill him for the future.”

All that aside, the primary legal question in Trump v. IRS is whether a president’s government lawyers can mount a meaningful defense against a president’s personal lawyers—in this case pertaining to the transgressions of that president’s own administration during his first term. The correct answer is: no, of course not.

CREW, along with the nonprofit group Public Citizen, filed a friend of the court brief in the Trump lawsuit, which notes, “The President’s two hats in this litigation—his personal capacity as plaintiff and his role as chief Executive—make it impossible for attorneys in the Department of Justice (DOJ) to fulfill their ethical duties to zealously represent the interests of the defendant agencies against President Trump’s claims.”

The brief urges Kathleen Williams, the federal judge in Florida overseeing the case, to hit pause on the proceedings and “enjoin the parties from terminating the lawsuit through an unconstitutional monetary settlement while the President remains in office.”

Now, as the New York Times first reported last Tuesday, there is talk of just such a settlement. Judge Williams had set a May 20 deadline for the two sides to submit briefs explaining why they should even be considered two sides—a prerequisite for any lawsuit, since one cannot sue oneself. Williams also, the Times noted, appointed six reputable outside lawyers to weigh in on “whether Mr. Trump’s lawsuit is legitimate.”

With seemingly little chance of convincing the skeptical judge, the two sides—which are actually one side—have scrambled to concoct a settlement prior to her deadline. Among the terms initially discussed, the Times noted, was that the IRS might be precluded from auditing the Trumps and their companies in the future.

That would be “unheard of,” says John Koskinen, who served as IRS commissioner under President Barack Obama. “I don’t recall the IRS ever promising a taxpayer that there would be no audits,” he told me. “Audits get settled all the time, but promising no audits simply raises the question of what someone is worried about or trying to hide. This is especially troubling when, as the president acknowledges, the Department of Justice, representing the IRS in the case, works for the president.”

The proposed settlement provides “financial reward for those who attacked American democracy. “

When I spoke with CREW’s president, Donald Sherman, on Friday, he called the lawsuit “a stunningly corrupt attempt for the president to take taxpayer money and put it in his pocket.”

While Trump has done many corrupt things during his second term, Sherman told me, those have mostly involved outsiders buying access and influence—via foreign investments in Trump crypocurrency enterprises, for example, or billionaires shelling out for Trump’s monster ballroom. “He’s sought to get foreign countries to put money in his business. He sought to get American corporations to pay for his pet projects. He sought trademarks and things like that. Not the best—pretty corrupt,” Sherman said.

But this proposal, he added, “is of a different scale and a different order in terms of the corruption involved, because the president is suing the government that he runs, and negotiating a settlement with the government that he runs to take taxpayer money from hardworking folks.”

The story took another turn later on Friday, when ABC Newscame out with new details: Trump would consider dropping the IRS lawsuit and other audacious claims he’d made against the DOJ in 2023 and 2024, seeking $230 million in restitution for what he claimed was malicious prosecution related to Russia’s 2016 influence campaign and the FBI’s August 2022 raid of Mar-a-Lago to recover classified documents. “I was damaged very greatly and any money I would get, I would give to charity,” he told the New York Times. (In 2019, a court forced Trump to pay $2 millionand admit to misusing his family’s own charitable funds for political purposes.)

The settlement now under discussion, ABC reported, would entail the creation of a $1.7 billion fund to be overseen by a commission ultimately under Trump’s control. The money wouldn’t go directly to Trump, but rather would be used to compensate people purportedly victimized by the “weaponization” of the DOJ under President Joe Biden.

On Saturday, ABC’s Katherine Faulders wrote on X that she’d been told the commission would be “likely be called ‘The President Donald J. Trump Truth and Justice Commission,’ and the total amount available in the fund will be… $1.776 billion.”

Cute.

There are “major problems with the settlement idea,” says Don Moynihan, a professor of public policy at the University of Michigan. First, it provides “financial reward for those who attacked American democracy. The consequence of not punishing Trump for January 6th is that now he rewards his supporters.”

“It is also,” Moynihan told me, “part of a pattern where Trump is violating the basic separation of powers—[$1.8] billion is a lot of money. There is no way that Congress would approve it. And yet, Trump will simply take these taxpayer resources.”

Using public money to reward the perpetrators of right-wing violence seems potentially far worse, even, than using it to enrich the president.

Can this be stopped? “It’s really up to the court to stop because obviously the majority in Congress has abdicated any responsibility,” CREW’s Sherman said. But if the parties act before the judge rules, things could get tricky. “There’s probably some narrow mechanisms where the court could overturn a settlement,” he added. Barring that, enough Republican lawmakers would have to draw the line—which they have done only very rarely with this president.

And that’s a big problem. We already have seen a great deal of corrupt intent from Trump’s DOJ, both in its actual weaponization against officials Trump despises—like former FBI director James Comey and Fed Chair Jerome Powell, whose term ended on Friday—and in its monetary settlements with Trump’s allies.

In April, for example, Trump’s DOJ agreed to pay a $1.25 million to Trump loyalist Michael Flynn, who in 2017 pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI amid the investigation of Russian election interference. (He was pardoned by Trump in November 2020.) His subsequent lawsuit against the DOJ accused federal prosecutors of “improperly and politically targeting General Flynn because of his lawful association” with the Trump campaign. (Flynn may stand to collect even more restitution in a separate case, according to Lawfare.)

Trump’s proposed $1.8 billion fund would lead to more of the same, and could potentially be used to pay off insurrectionists who engaged in violence in support of Trump on January 6—some of whom sued for restitution after he granted them clemency. This “slush fund,” as Rep. Jamie Raskin, a constitutional lawyer, told The New Republic‘s Greg Sargent, would be “a shocking new betrayal of the Constitution” and “an outrageous desecration of congressional power of the purse.”

What’s more, he pointed out, the Fourteenth Amendment prohibits the government from assuming any “obligation incurred in aid of insurrection or rebellion against the United States.”

Even by the standards of the Trump administration, a federal agency funneling cash into the president’s pocket indeed seems stunningly corrupt. Yet using public money to reward the perpetrators of right-wing violence seems potentially far worse—a clear and present danger to the republic.

As Raskin put it to Sargent, ominously, Trump and his lawyers “are figuring out a way to refund the January 6 militia, presumably to get them ready for the next round of battle.”

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Jared Polis Did the Right Thing

On Friday afternoon, Colorado Gov. Jared Polis issued 35 pardons. He also commuted the sentences of nine prisoners, allowing them to be released years before they otherwise would be.

Some of these acts of clemency were deeply controversial. Polis, a Democrat, shortened the sentences of multiple convicted murderers. He is also setting free Brandin Kreuzer, who shot Douglas County Sheriff’s Deputy Todd Tucker in 2008and has served 15 years of a 50-year sentence. “I had numerous surgeries to basically put my arm back together,” Tucker told Denver’s 9News. “I still have lasting nerve damage to this day. My arm is not 100 percent, does not function as it should.” The current county sheriff said in a statement that he was “furious” about Kreuzer’s commutation: “The audacity of Governor Polis to grant clemency to a would-be cop killer on National Peace Officer Memorial Day shows a complete lack of respect for the brave men and women who wear the badge.”

But it’s a different commutation that has sparked furious bipartisan backlash across Colorado. In 2024, Tina Peters—the former Mesa County clerk—was convicted of various crimes for her role in a scheme to illegally breach that county’s election system and in an effort to prove the 2020 race had been stolen from Donald Trump. Peters was originally sentenced to nearly nine years behind bars. On Friday, Polis commuted her sentence to about four-and-a-half years and ordered her paroled next month.

Trump—who for months has been demanding Peters’ release and attempting to punish Colorado for this and other perceived transgressions—immediately celebrated Polis’ decision. But beyond the MAGA faithful, the move is drawing broad outrage. Matt Crane, a Republican who directs the Colorado County Clerks Association, blasted Polis in a press conference, as Colorado Public Radio reported: “When given the opportunity to stand firmly for the rule of law, for the integrity of Colorado elections and for the public servants who defend them, [Polis] chose a different path.” The watchdog group Common Cause Colorado added that “Governor Polis’ decision undermines election security, weakens accountability, and permanently stains his legacy.”

These are reasonable arguments, but personally, I don’t find them compelling. There’s no doubt that Peters is a raging conspiracy theorist who abused her public office and broke the law. But nine years is an awfully long time. She is 70 and has already been in prison for more than a year and a half. A defendant who pleaded guilty to similar charges in the doomed Trump RICO prosecution in Georgia received probation. “The crimes you were convicted of are very serious and you deserve to spend time in prison,” Polis wrote in his commutation letter to Peters. “However, this is an extremely unusual and lengthy sentence for a first time offender who committed nonviolent crimes.”

Why was Peters’ prison sentence so severe? Partly because it was based unconstitutional factors. At sentencing, Judge Matthew Barrett indicated that he was taking into account not just her actions, but her noxious conspiracy theories. Among other things, Barrett accused Peters of peddling “a snake oil that’s been proven to be junk time and time again.”

“So the damage that is caused and continue[s] to be caused is just as bad, if not worse, than the physical violence that this court sees on an all too regular basis,” Barrett declared. “And it’s particularly damaging when those words come from someone who holds a position of influence like you.”

The key word there is “words.”

Last month, three Colorado appellate judges—all of whom were appointed by Polis’ Democratic predecessor—unanimously threw out Peters’ prison sentence, declaring it a clear violation of her First Amendment free speech rights. They ordered Peters to be resentenced, but Polis intervened before that could happen.

“It is apparent that the [trial] court imposed the lengthy sentence it did because Peters continued to espouse the views that led her to commit these crimes,” the appeals court concluded. “The tenor of the [trial] court’s comments makes clear that it felt the sentence length was necessary, at least in part, to prevent her from continuing to espouse views the court deemed ‘damaging.’”

In other words, Peters should have been sentenced for what she actually did, not the bizarre conspiracy theories she espoused. She can be punished for the crimes she committed in her illegal quest to expose non-existent election fraud. But she can’t be punished for loudly voicing her beliefs.

Publicly, Peters herself now claims to recognize this distinction. In a statement she released after the commutation was announced, she acknowledged that her actions were wrong but said that once released, she planned to “support election integrity” through “legal means.”

Thank you Governor Polis.

I made mistakes, and for those I am sorry. Five years ago I misled the Secretary of State when allowing a person to gain access to county voting equipment. That was wrong. I have learned and grown during my time in prison and going forward I will make…

— Tina Peters Whistleblower of fallen Navy SEAL (@realtinapeters) May 15, 2026

I have no doubt that Peters will continue spreading damaging election conspiracy theories in the years to come. But prison is not the solution to that.

Polis addressed that point in an interview Friday with 9News’ Kyle Clark. “I vehemently disagree with much of what she has to say, certainly her conspiratorial beliefs,” the governor said. But, he added, the proper way to oppose such rhetoric is through public refutation—not to “lock somebody up because they believe something that is…conspiratorial and potentially dangerous.”

“That’s not the country we live in,” Polis said. “I believe in free speech.”

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