The Trump Administration’s Hard-On for AI, Explained

In recent weeks, a fresh crop of people connected to the artificial intelligence industry have emerged to warn that AI is possibly going to kill us all, spreading the word with various degrees of credibility or self-interest. Anthropic chief and co-founder Dario Amodei has also called to slow down the development of AI technology, a recommendation that Sam Altman of OpenAI and even notorious good judgment-haver Elon Musk quickly cosigned. Meanwhile, the Trump administration and the president himself have continued to insist that AI is essential for American technological advancement and military might. As a very strange public debate has ensued, it’s become clear that Trump, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, and other people connected with the administration view AI as an essentially masculine tool: “dominant,” a word they keep using over and over, powerful, and able to be kept in check only by a strong ruler.

The Trump administration has become a place where very odd politics around both gender and “wokeness” are constantly on display. Trump issued a garbled executive order immediately upon retaking office that attempted to redefine “male” and “female.” Hegseth is obsessed with testosterone, announcing in July that military members will be screened for low T regardless of their gender. The intense focus on gender and wokeness has also been true of their approach to AI: last year, the administration promised that it would require AI companies with federal contracts to make sure their large language models match the administration’s views on things like climate change; transgender identity; and diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives. (The administration characterized the mandate as a way to only purchase AI tools that “prioritize truthfulness and ideological neutrality.”)

Trump has turned “a debate about technology into a debate about who’s got the phallus.”

It’s now increasingly obvious that Trump and his administration view AI technology as something akin to a large, dangerous dog that only a masculine owner can control. Trump has repeatedly called warnings that AI could harm human beings “a hoax,” writing on TruthSocial that the “only control or ‘guardrails’ that AI needs is a STRONG AND SMART (High IQ!) PRESIDENT, and the U.S.A. has that, in spades!”

“The people that say AI is going to destroy the World, and that Data Centers are bad for your neighborhood, are the same people that said, just a short time ago, that the World would be extinguished by ‘Climate Change,’” the president also posted, with his trademark random capitalization. “That HOAX never worked out for them, and now they’re on to the next one. These people are Revolutionaries, but Revolutionaries for a Bad and Evil Cause. Soon you’ll find out they’re working for people that do not have the best interests of the United States in mind!”

More recently, Trump promised, also on TruthSocial, that he’d appoint an “AI czar,” writing, “Only High I.Q. individuals need apply! AI is the next Industrial Revolution, or Internet, but will be even larger and more impactful.” And on X, he tried very hard to rebrand AI entirely, putting to his followers a poll about which more flattering term should be used instead. “A far more elegant and accurate description of this new phenomena would be Superior Intelligence (SI),” the president wrote, “or Extreme Intelligence (EI) or, Supreme Intelligence (SI).”

The debate took a strange turn last week when The New York Post ran a story warning that some people calling for a slowdown of AI development, including Amodei, are connected with the “effective altruism” movement. Effective altruism is, simply put, a philosophy first put forward by the bioethicist Peter Singer, which purports to use calculation and hard evidence to maximize the impact of charitable donations, and figure out what charitable initiatives will do the most good mathematically. The idea is controversial for all kinds of reasons, and one of its most visible proponents has been imprisoned financial fraudster Sam-Bankman-Fried, which isn’t, itself, a great advertisement. Some people have even likened EA to a cult, and one actual and extremely violent high-control group, the Zizians, had some effective altruist DNA. There’s also an offshoot best described as “effective altruism accelerationism,” promoted by several high-profile Silicon Valley figures, which holds that accelerating technological progress, including by developing AI faster, will promote human survival and consciousness on a galactic level, an idea that has several obvious, universe-sized holes. (Among them: AI data centers already clearly have disastrous environmental and health impacts, which is the opposite of promoting human survival.)

Boiling all of that down to only what might interest or scare their readers, The Post positioned effective altruism as a frightening example of a wealthy “group of woke elitists” trying to engineer the world to their liking. “It’s a group of globalists who believe in open borders, genderless pronoun and promote ‘Effective Altruism’ that believe all the world’s problems can be solved with technology,” the paper elaborated, adding that EA’s “obsessed adherents believe in funneling their wealth toward the goals they view as most important to humanity, including climate change and strict AI regulation.”

Right-wing commentators were quick to make the connection: that “woke,” feminine, or nonbinary people can’t be trusted in their warnings on AI. “There is no committee or regulatory body with a ‘they/them’ that will make any good decisions,” far-right activist Chris Rufo declared. “Social scientists call this the Iron Law of Genderfluidity, and it’s been replicated in a hundred peer-reviewed journals, so you know it’s true.” (He was attempting to make a joke; there is no such “law.”)

The Post soon ran a second story about how another prominent AI critic, author and computer scientist Nate Soares, is romantic partners with Aella, a well-known pseudonymous sex writer who has an OnlyFans and goes to sex parties. Soares is the president of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute and the co-author of If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies. But the Post‘s story barely discussed his work; rather than cast doubt on any of Soares’ specific ideas about AI, it instead painted AI critics as sexually deviant—even if only by association—and thus untrustworthy. Other outlets like Fox News and the Bari Weiss-run The Free Press have followed suit with their own stories about the dangers of the effective altruism movement’s views on AI.

“America will be AI DOMINANT!

The Defense Department has also gotten involved. The X account for the so-called Office of the Under Secretary of War for Research and Engineering, previously seen posting QAnon memes, has issued a series of posts attacking effective altruism. Emil Michael, who was confirmed to that position in May 2025, is a former businessman who worked at Uber and, before that, Klout, a social media analytics company that assigned users a score assessing their online popularity and influence.

“Americanism, not effective altruism,” one recent tweet from the account declared. “The United States will continue to be AI DOMINANT!”

“No dooming,” another declared. “America will be AI DOMINANT! Whoever wins AI, WINS!”

Michael has also appeared on Fox News to declare effective altruism’s advocacy against AI to be a plot against American interests. “The amount of dollars being spent in DC now, directly and indirectly, by this effective altruist movement,” he said recently in a Fox appearance shared on another Pentagon account, “in the next few years, you’re going to see more dollars poured into this industry from a lobbying standpoint. The promoters of some of these extinction, death-cult-like philosophies are a part of that effort… There’s no doubt this is a coordinated campaign to scare people to make irrational decisions that benefit some of these incumbents.”

Dr. Fred Turner is a Stanford University professor of communication who studies media, technology, and American cultural history. In the early years of the internet, he wrote recently in The Baffler, developers were interested in networking—using tech to create connections between people and imagine a more collaborative and utopian world. Now, he wrote, they’re interested in extraction.

”The social world is no longer something to be interlinked,” Turner told me. Now, he says, “The value comes from monitoring, measuring, mapping, and reselling every bit of our social interaction, including the production of knowledge, stories, and language.”

AI promises to help companies do just that. Given how often Trump has used the presidency as a vehicle to make money, Turner says it would be natural to assume that Trump’s alliance with the industry has something to do with him seeing the potential for personal profit from its data centers. But it’s also about asserting dominance and control.

**“**The Trump presidency is a process of protecting Trump’s personal incentives—his own personal reputation—and constantly shifting debates that could be about policy into interpersonal name calling realms where he can assert a kind of machismo,” Turner says.

The administration, Turner adds, has made asserting a stereotypically menacing masculinity a core part of how the world is meant to see it: “That kind of projection of masculine dominance in a cruel way, as Trump does routinely, has the effect of scaring enemies, recruiting allies, and drawing the craven to your side. They are embracing a masculine style that gives them real material gains.”

With respect to the Trump administration’s sudden championing of AI broadly and data centers specifically, Turner asks “what would they imagine they gain from reframing a policy about land use, about water use, about electricity use, in terms of sexuality?

“If it were mine to do, I would teach the world a class on separating out policy debate and questions of sexual style and ethics,” Farmer says. “If you tangle them up, you can muddy the water and cause folks to become upset against their own interests. I’d be asking about the profitability for Trump and his crew both in a financial sense, and then other senses: of turning a debate about technology into a debate about who’s got the phallus.”

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Time to Revisit Trump-Russia Collusion

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._

The recent news from ProPublica that a Russian oligarch attended Donald Trump Jr.’s wedding celebration on a private island in the Bahamas and covered hundreds of thousands of dollars in costs for the lavish affair was not a surprise to anyone familiar with the main thrust of my new book, How Russia Won: Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, and the Fight for America. The book chronicles the decade-long covert operation Putin has waged against the United States to sow discord, influence elections (to benefit Trump), and court Trump and his crew. An important fact in the wedding story is that Umar Kremlev, this oh-so generous oligarch, is not just another Russian billionaire who has to make nice with Putin to keep his fortune; he has been a key member of Putin’s security apparatus—truly the inner circle—and became an oligarch (and head of a corrupt international boxing organization) because of that. In essence, a Putin operative infiltrated deep into the Trump clan.

This is not the first time Russia has attempted to squirm its way into Trump Jr.’s world. During the 2016 campaign, Junior received a message from an associate who worked with the son of another Russian oligarch. That contact informed Don Jr. that Moscow was plotting to secretly help Trump and wanted to send an emissary who had dirt on Hillary Clinton to meet with the Trump campaign. Trump Jr. replied, “If it’s what you say I love it.” The meeting soon happened, with Trump Jr., campaign chair Paul Manafort, and Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner present. When the meeting was revealed—eight months after the election—Trump Jr. first lied about it, saying it was not related to the campaign, and then later claimed the emissary (who was tied to Russian intelligence) provided no useful derogatory information on Clinton.

Trump and his minions have contended that there was no collusion and, thus, no scandal, meaning the whole Russia investigation was a “hoax” and a Deep State “witch hunt” orchestrated to destroy Trump.

What was most important about the meeting was that it signaled to Moscow that the Trump camp was a-okay with Putin meddling in the election and that it made the Trump gang aware that the Kremlin intended to covertly mess in American politics to assist Trump. Still, Trump, Trump Jr., Manafort, and other Trumpers would loudly assert throughout the campaign and in the years afterward that Putin had not interfered. That is, they knowingly lied.

Which brings us to collusion.

Collusion has been the buzzword at the center of the Trump-Russia scandal for 10 years. Trump and his minions have contended that there was no collusion and, thus, no scandal, meaning the whole Russia investigation was a “hoax” and a Deep State “witch hunt” orchestrated to destroy Trump.

Their definition of collusion basically rested on whether Trump or his lieutenants were in the same room with Russian hackers as they pilfered the documents from Democrats that would later be made public by WikiLeaks. No evidence of such collaboration emerged. So, they have vociferously argued ever since, there was no collusion. And, therefore, no scandal.

The issue of collusion, naturally, has come up, as I’ve been doing media interviews about the new book. It has long seemed to me that the meeting Trump Jr. set up and the subsequent denials from him and other Trump players—which echoed and affirmed Putin’s denials of interfering in the election—were a form of collusion. Team Trump was colluding with Putin’s attempted cover-up. Maybe Trump and his lieutenants weren’t involved in the hack-and-leak operation. But they deliberately lied and provided cover for Putin. Smells like collusion.

In the stretch following the 2016 election, Democrats and Trump critics were too fixated on collusion. But it was the complicity, stupid.

As I’ve been discussing all this in media interviews, I’ve made the point that perhaps the better term is complicity. For 10 years, not just in 2016, Putin has been attacking US elections—the book details all this—and throughout that time, Trump has incessantly maintained that Moscow was doing nothing and that all claims otherwise were part of the Deep State’s bogus “Russia, Russia, Russia” conspiracy against him. Consequently, Trump has been complicit in Putin’s ongoing information war against the United States. That’s an act of profound betrayal.

In the stretch following the 2016 election, Democrats and Trump critics were too fixated on collusion. But it was the complicity, stupid.

Now let’s go back to collusion.

My book does have a chapter titled “Collusion,” and it digs into a 966-page bipartisan report on the Russian attack on the 2016 election that was produced by the Senate Intelligence Committee and released in August 2020. This investigation offers the most comprehensive account of what transpired in 2016. One of the most intriguing portions of the report zeroes in on Manafort. (Another very interesting section looks at whether the Kremlin obtained any compromising material on Trump. Read the book for that.)

In the Manafort passages, the committee—led at the time by a Republican senator named Marco Rubio—revealed that while he was chairing the Trump campaign, Manafort was interacting with and passing sensitive internal campaign data to Konstantin Kilimnik, a close business associate who was also a Russian intelligence officer. And, the report noted, Kilimnik had connections to the Russian military intelligence unit that ran the hack-and-leak operation that targeted the Clinton campaign. Moreover, the report noted that committee investigators had uncovered “two pieces of information” that “raise the possibility of Manafort’s potential connection to the hack-and-leak operations.”

It appears there’s a chance that there was indeed collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russian operation via Manafort.

The report’s description of this information was redacted, as was much text about Kilimnik. In my reporting for the book, I learned that the redacted portions disclosed that Kilimnik was an agent for the GRU, the Russian intelligence outfit that ran the hack-and-leak attack—a fact buttressing the possibility that Kilimnik was involved in or aware of that operation when he was in communication with Manafort.

Because of all the redactions—the intelligence community did not want to reveal too much of what it knew about the Manafort-Kilimnik connection to protect sources and methods—the public has never learned the full story. It appears there’s a chance that there was indeed collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russian operation via Manafort.

In any event, the fact that Trump’s campaign chair was in direct contact with a Russian agent—they communicated through means that left no traces—ought to have triggered a major scandal. Yet this Republican-backed report—which affirmed that Moscow intervened in the 2016 election to help Trump and that Trump actively exploited the Russian attack and “publicly undermined the attribution of the hack-and-leak campaign to Russia”—had little impact on the public view of the Trump-Russia affair.

It was released during the Covid pandemic in the summertime, when the two political parties were holding their presidential conventions. By then, most of the political-and-media world had moved on from all that Russia business, particularly after the final report of special counsel Robert Mueller noted he had found no evidence of a criminal conspiracy between Trump and Russia. (He did point out he had amassed plenty of evidence that Trump committed multiple acts of obstruction of justice.)

So Trump and those within MAGA-land could continue to peddle the narrative that collusion was a bogus charge that had been concocted by the Deep State, the media, and nefarious Democrats.

Trump Jr.’s wedding should prompt a reappraisal of the collusion question, as it illuminates what I try to convey in the book: Putin has been running an extensive covert action against the United States for a decade, and Trump and his crew have both colluded and been complicit.

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The Bizarre Backstory of the Trump-Endorsed Sticker Mogul Who Could Be Headed to Congress

Anthony Constantino, the Republican nominee in upstate New York’s 21st congressional district, is not subtle in his fealty to Donald Trump. Since 2024, the 43-year-old businessman has given the president a larger-than-life statue of himself, erected a “Vote for Trump” sign massive enough to be seen in satellite images, and dropped an album called “Thank You President Trump” that includes a “Baby Shark”–like track in which he mostly just repeats the president’s name.

Constantino poses in front of a “Vote for Trump” sign on the roof of his printing company, Sticker Mule, in Amsterdam, NY.

Shameless? Yes. Effective? Apparently. This past spring, Trump endorsed the paying Mar-a-Lago member over Assemblyman Robert Smullen, a retired Marine colonel backed by the state party. Constantino—who made a fortune through his novelty company Sticker Mule—defeated Smullen by 19 points. He is now favored to replace the retiring incumbent, Rep. Elise Stefanik.

Such a handoff would be the story of the Trump-era GOP in miniature. Stefanik, who was two grades behind Constantino at Albany Academy, went to Harvard before rocketing up the ranks of the Paul Ryan–era Republican Party. In 2014, she became the youngest woman ever elected to Congress, hailed as a paragon of the party’s supposedly moderate future. After Trump took power, Stefanik tacked hard toward MAGA, only to be rewarded with public humiliation when Trump pulled her nomination to be UN ambassador last year.

Constantino, conversely, says he was “sort of a screwup” as a kid. While Ivy League–educated conservatives have tried to wrangle Trumpism into seminar-table coherence, Constantino—a small-time rapper and boxer—channels MAGA’s gleefully offensive id. During his campaign launch held in front of a wall of free turkeys, Constantino labeled Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez a “perra falsa”—Spanish for fake bitch. He told Gerard Kassar, the head of New York’s Conservative Party, to get “his ass” in a boxing ring, so he could punch him “in the fucking face legally.” In the video for his Zohran Mamdani diss track—e.g., “fuck you bitch,” rapping about the New York mayor’s “boy Osama”—he makes a throat-slitting gesture. In keeping with this thuggish persona, Constantino’s close associates have been accused or found guilty of kidnapping, stealing money from a youth baseball league, and lying to Congress.

Come January, Constantino could become Congress’ most convincing Trump imitator.

According to Skidmore College political science professor Bob Turner, “when you talk to longtime professional Republicans” in Constantino’s district, they say things “like, ‘I hate that guy. I’m embarrassed by that guy.’” But just as the national establishment did for Trump, the New York GOP is now backing Constantino after failing to stop him. Come January, Constantino could become the most convincing Trump imitator in a body already teeming with them.

Constantino was born in 1982 to a prominent family in Amsterdam, a small city about a half-hour northwest of Albany. His father was the founder of a successful local printing company, wrote poetry, and was known for advocating on behalf of Native Americans. He died of cancer when Constantino was 6.

Constantino was a devoted high-school wrestler. Although he lost his first 30 matches, he credits reaching a regional final by reverse-engineering the training of another local wrestler. Today, he is open about imitating Trump. “This is what smart people do,” he says about the president. “We learn from other smart people.”

After high school, he says he was “semi–kicked out” of Stonehill College and transferred to Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, where he left without graduating to work at the family business. In 2010, he co-founded Sticker Mule with a friend of his late father’s.

The new company brought hundreds of manufacturing jobs to a region where other blue-collar work had disappeared, offering a path to the kind of respect his father enjoyed. But Constantino was not the type to follow one of his dad’s key business precepts: “Don’t promote controversy.” That became clear as the Sticker Mule CEO emerged on Twitter as an outspoken supporter of Trump’s 2016 campaign.

Over the next few years, Constantino began spending most of his time in Mexico training as a boxer. His campaign biography boasts of the “chiseled physique” he developed after taking up the sport professionally, when, at the age of 39, he won a 2022 bout against an opponent who, according to boxing records, never fought professionally before or since. His final—and only third—professional match was a loss the following year to another fighter making his pro debut, a recovering drug addict and candy vendor who has said he was meant to be “carne de cañón” (cannon fodder).

As he pursued boxing, Constantino was also trying to launch what he marketed as a “happy” social media company where users were required to verify their identities before posting. On the site, called Stimulus, his persona was lighthearted, if juvenile; he made at least three posts about eating soups containing animal penis. That was tame compared to a 2024 attempt at stand-up in a Manhattan bar where Constantino described a scenario in which women supporting Kamala Harris vomited before and after he put his penis in their mouths. “I had the consent forms,” Constantino joked.

Within days of winning in 2024, Trump announced his plan to send Stefanik to the UN. Constantino promptly filed to run for her seat, self-funding his anticipated special election campaign with $2.6 million (he has now loaned his campaign $12 million in total). According to FEC filings, some of
the money went to Drake Ventures, a Florida LLC affiliated with Roger Stone, the former Trump adviser and convicted felon. Other chunks went to Paul
Antonelli, a Sticker Mule employee who was arrested for grand larceny in 2020 after being accused of stealing from an Amsterdam youth baseball league. (A police report states $47,000 went missing over a two-year period, much of it from a concession stand. Antonelli pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor.)

When Trump left Stefanik languishing in the House, Constantino retooled for 2026—and grew more aggressive. At a June 2025 campaign event, he insinuated that Kassar may have sent a hit man to murder Antonelli. He alleged that Kassar had told him in late 2025 that “we intend to kill you” and that the Conservative Party would “destroy” him. Constantino added that someone later cut Antonelli’s brake line, suggesting without any clear evidence that Kassar could have been responsible for what he portrayed as a failed murder-for-hire scheme. Kassar later launched an ongoing defamation lawsuit that challenges Constantino’s “wholly false and invented series of events.” Constantino and Antonelli did not respond to requests for comment.

If Constantino’s allegations sounded like something from GoodFellas, so too did the criminal charges outlined in a police report and court documents against two of his close associates, who were arrested within weeks of his primary victory in connection with the alleged kidnapping and assault of an accountant who also knows the sticker mogul. Matt Moller, the reported victim, says he was one of three friends who attended Constantino’s 2022 wedding. One of the other two, he adds, was Tommy Marcellino—a former MMA fighter who is now accused of abducting and strangling Moller. The second alleged assailant is Ricardo “Porsche Truck Ruk” Henderson, a rapper whom Constantino and affiliated companies have paid more than $500,000 in recent years, according to invoices and emails I reviewed. (Neither of the accused men responded to requests for comment.)

Constantino was not involved in the alleged kidnapping, but it is only the most recent example of people around him being implicated in serious criminal conduct. In late 2025, Constantino used Antonio Brown as a hype man for his Trump album shortly after the former NFL star was extradited from Dubai to face an attempted murder charge in Florida. Jorge Masvidal, another guest star on the record, is a former MMA fighter who pleaded no contest in 2023 to misdemeanor battery after being accused of attacking another UFC fighter outside a Miami restaurant. A third is Jason “Greatness” Jensen, a face-tattooed Sticker Mule brand ambassador who, according to public records, pleaded no contest to aggravated assault in 2008 before reinventing himself as a Christian rapper.

Anthony Constantino answers questions after defeating Assemblyman Robert Smullen in the Republican Party Primary for the 21st Congressional District on Tuesday June 23, 2026.Jim Franco/Albany Times Union/Getty

Constantino’s antics and associations have hurt his standing. In June, the editorial board of the Albany Times Union wrote that it “can’t recall ever meeting a more unsuitable candidate.” An August survey from a local NBC affiliate found that 42 percent of likely voters had a very unfavorable view of Constantino and showed him narrowly trailing Democrat Blake Gendebien, a mild-mannered dairy farmer who lives near the Canadian border. The Sticker Mule CEO again took a page from Trump, saying that it was a “fake poll” and that the FCC should reprimand the station to the “fullest extent possible.”

A more recent survey touted by Constantino suggested he remains on track to succeed Stefanik. If he does, Constantino has signaled grander ambitions. The word “president” appears only once in his song glazing Trump, at the very end. “Man, I got to say, I love Donald, Donald Trump,” Constantino intones. “Might be president one day, just like Donald, Donald Trump.”

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One Miami District Is Testing How Far Trump Has Fallen With Latino Voters

Since 2021, US Rep. María Elvira Salazar has represented the 27th congressional district in Miami-Dade County, where more than 70 percent of residents are Hispanic. As a Republican candidate, she ran with Trump’s seal of approval, nabbing his endorsement that year and insubsequent elections.

But last week, Salazar jeopardizedher good standing with Trump and shocked the GOP with her first official campaign ad. In it, she called out the president for his anti-immigrant agenda. “Some of your immigration enforcement efforts have gone too far,” Salazar said, noting that half of the people arrested by ICE in July had no criminal records. “The same Hispanics that helped you get to the White House in 2024 feel betrayed today,” she added. “I’m not talking about giving them amnesty. I’m talking about giving them a dignified life in this promised land. And only you can do that.”

A Message to President Trump on Immigration | María Elvira Salazar pic.twitter.com/memcf4jags

— María Elvira Salazar (@MaElviraSalazar) September 17, 2026

Within hours, the 30-second ad had circulated through political circles. ManyDemocrats, including her opponent, retired South Florida TV news anchor Eliott Rodriguez, saw the move as an election ploy. In a Facebook post, Rodriguez criticized her for her support of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which gave billions in funding to ICE, and for her defense of conditions at the now-shuttered Alligator Alcatraz, a state-run immigrant detention center in the Everglades. “María Elvira Salazar did this,” Rodriguez said. “Make no mistake about it. She owns all of these deportations.”

Meanwhile, the ad drew the ire of some Republicans and the Department of Homeland Security. “Whether Congresswoman Salazar likes it or not, the men and women of ICE are enforcing the laws passed by Congress,” the agency said in a statement. Last weekend, Trump told a reporter that he disagreed with her, but described Salazar as a “nice person.” He then noted, “I got her elected. Without me she wouldn’t have gotten elected.”

A Cuban American, Salazar was a veteran TV journalist before joining Congress. She handily won her district in 2024 with a 20-point lead. But political experts I spoke to say November’srace will likely be a tighter one. Last week, a Miami-based pollster working for the Rodriguez campaign found that the two former television journalists are tied, with both candidates getting 45 percent support of voters. A few earlier polls also downgraded the race from “solid Republican” to “likely Republican.”

“She may survive,” said Orlando J. Pérez, political science professor at the University of North Texas at Dallas and a Cuban American who grew up in this district. “If she wins, it’s not going to be by 20 points. It’s going to be narrow.”

The district is among those with the highest percentage of Latino voters in the US, and many experts view this race as a test ofhow far Trump’s popularity has cratered with theLatino community, which gave him significant support in 2024. In fact, Pérez told me, this district “is a microcosm of how far Latinos, and in this case Cuban Americans, which are a core bedrock group for the Republicans and Trump, have shifted.”

This district “is a microcosm of how far Latinos, and in this case Cuban Americans, which are a core bedrock group for the Republicans and Trump, have shifted.”

Even before this public break, he added,Salazar has been a voice inside the Republican Party asking for a more moderate immigration enforcement approach. She sponsored a bipartisan proposal called the Dignity Act, which provided a pathway to legal status for Dreamers and undocumented immigrants who came to the US before 2020. She’s also been outspoken against the end of TPS protections for Haitians and Venezuelans. But the fact that she has taken a bolder stance, especially against Trump himself, “is a real sign that that community is really angry,” Pérez said.

Salazar’s campaign has not responded to my request for an interview. On CBS Face The Nation on Sunday, Salazar said she spoke with the president after the ad aired and told him to maintain the “pot of gold that you brought to the GOP in 2024” through the Latino vote. “No other president was able to convince the Hispanics to vote 55 points for a GOP president. Please preserve that fortune that you have brought to the party,” she recalled telling him. “We need to continue winning elections because we have this very big threat called the socialists on the Democratic side.”

Eduardo Gamarra, political science professor and director of the Latino Public Opinion Forum at Florida International University, saidSalazar is “trapped between trying to defend her position as somebody who is very supportive of the president, and at the same time trying to demonstrate that she is a dedicated defender of immigrants in her district. Those two things have been diametrically opposed objectives.”

Also working against Salazar is that her opponent, Eliott Rodriguez, is, as Pérez told me, “familiar to people” in South Florida. The son of Cuban immigrants, he was born and raised in New York City. His family moved to Miami when he was 12. He worked for nearly 50 years as a journalist, spending the latter half of his career at CBS News Miami, where he spent many years as a news anchor before retiring last year.

Rodriguez can also run on the affordability crisis unencumbered by the political baggage of being in the governing party while gas and everyday costs for families have risen in the last year. “Eliott can run on affordability; he can run as the real defender of immigrants,” Gamarra said. “And he can also differentiate himself from Trump without any penalty.”

During an interview in May, Rodriguez told me running for political office was not part of his plan following retirement. But recently, one of his daughters left Miami for North Carolina because she and her husband, both professionals with six-figure salaries, couldn’t afford to live there. He sees other young families being priced out of their hometown, now one of the most expensive cities in the United States.

“People were gracious enough to allow me into their homes to bring the news, and I worked hard to earn their trust,” he said. “And now I’m trying to earn their votes, because I am horrified by what’s happening in this country, and I’m also horrified that our representative in Congress has done nothing about it, and she’s just a rubber stamp for Donald Trump and MAGA.”

Gamarra said his team is about to begin work on a Florida poll focused on Latino voters, with results expected in mid-October. He pointed to a recent Colorado pollin which 66 percent of Latino voters said the country was on the wrong track and 68 percent disapproved of Trump. “The Colorado poll provides very strong evidence that Republican gains among Latinos are vulnerable,” he said. “But we’re not seeing yet a national reversal or a guarantee that dissatisfaction will become a Democratic turnout.”

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Sickened Coal Miners Plead for Their Black Lung Benefits as Cases Surge

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

For 38 years, Josh Armes worked as a coal miner in West Virginia and Virginia.

After retirement, Armes, 74, of Grundy, Virginia, was diagnosed with black lung disease, medically known as coal workers’ pneumoconiosis (CWP), caused by breathing in coal dust over long periods, which irreversibly damages the lungs.

Armes has required an oxygen tank to breathe for the past four years or so, along with regular doctor visits and an albuterol inhaler to help when he has trouble breathing. Even with the supplemental oxygen, he’s severely limited in what he can physically do.

In 2014, Armes received notice that the federal black lung benefits he had been receiving for more than three years were being appealed against by a coal operator. For the last 12 years, he and his family have been in an appeals process limbo, trying to regain their benefits while Armes’s condition progresses.

The federal black lung program was created in 1969 to provide coal miners disabled by black lung with monetary compensation and medical benefits. But the Armes family is just one of many who have struggled with appeals and long delays in obtaining federal black lung benefits.

Those delays come as the Trump administration moves to boost the coal industry and as cases of black lung are surging—reaching a nearly 50-year high, according to data published in the American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine last month.

“They can appeal it, get a different judge, and it’s stripped away from you, which I find absolutely insane. They fight you at every single step of the way. “

According to a May report by the government accountability office (GAO), 7,709 miner beneficiaries were receiving black lung benefits in 2024. The report was requested in 2023 by Democratic senators Mark Warner, John Hickenlooper, Tim Kaine, and John Fetterman, who have also introduced legislation to improve the black-lung benefits system.

In the fiscal year 2025, about 22,500 beneficiaries, including dependents, survivors, and miners, were receiving black lung benefits.

Between 2013 to 2024, 40 percent of approved claims by the Department of Labor were disputed, generally by coal operators.

The May report said miners have expressed problems with obtaining black-lung benefits. It said miners have been forced to wait several years for their claims to be approved, and raised issues with coal operators filing appeals. “I can’t figure out one thing. They sent me a paper that said I got first- and second-stage black lung. That ought to be enough, or do you have to be dead?” Armes said.

His daughter, Crystal Armes, said obtaining the black lung benefits is an arduous process, involving paying out of pocket for medical tests and finding a lawyer to take on the case. She also argued that the law should change so that coal companies shouldn’t be able to appeal after benefits are awarded.

“The burden of proof lies on the coal miner to prove that he has black lung,” she said. “We have appealed it and appealed it and appealed it. Still appealing it. He [Josh] does have black lung. Hopefully, soon we will be awarded the black lung benefits again. But I’m not holding my breath on that one.”

The GAO report said: “Miners in all six groups expressed their belief that mine operators were either ‘waiting for them to die’ or ‘waiting for them to give up’ so they could avoid paying benefit.” It noted between January 2013 to mid-August 2024, 390 beneficiaries whose claims were initially approved had their claims denied after appeal, leaving them responsible for paying back the benefits.

According to the report, the median length of an appealed claim was three years or more.

“If the Trump administration actually cared about protecting coal miners from black lung, we’d have a strong silica rule in place right now.”

Among 53,000 closed claims between January 2013 and August 2024, 11 claims took longer than 10 years to close. The report did not state how many open cases have surpassed 10 years.

The Armes family are still waiting for their black lungs benefits appeals process to complete, while not receiving benefits.

“When you’re awarded it, they can appeal it, get a different judge, and it’s stripped away from you, which I find absolutely insane,” added Crystal Armes. “They fight you at every single step of the way. They’ll send you from one doctor to another doctor to go do another test and another test. You got to go to this doctor. You got to travel over here, and it’s very costly. And some people don’t have the means to be able to do that. I don’t feel like the process should be this difficult.”

According to data published in August in the American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine, researchers at the National Institute for Safety and Occupational Health found 32.5 percent of veteran underground coal miners in central Appalachia are suffering from black lung disease, a rate unseen since 1978.

Between 2020 and 2023, more than 1,700 coal miners in the US died from black lung disease. The rise in cases has been attributed to silica dust that is more common in the coal seams being mined today.

In April, E&E Greenwire reported that the Trump administration’s Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA) would “indefinitely delay” a federal silica dust rule, “pending judicial review”—but any judicial review is on pause due to the agency requesting an abeyance on court action.

Rebecca Shelton, director of policy for Appalachian Citizens’ Law Center, in a statement on the agency’s freeze on enforcing the rule, said: “If the Trump administration actually cared about protecting coal miners from black lung, we’d have a strong silica rule in place right now. Instead, they are hiding behind a ridiculous legal process to delay action while miners get sick and die.”

The United Mine Workers of America has pushed to unfreeze the federal silica dust rule, which would mandate engineering and ventilation controls to protect miners on the job. It was passed in April 2024, but funding for the rule was blocked by Republicans in Congress in June 2024, and the MSHA under the Trump administration indicated to the union it has no plans to enforce the rule.

“Every day [that] federal regulators drag their feet and sit on this rule, another working father, mother, husband, wife, sister or brother contracts an incurable, fatal disease,” Brian Sanson, president of UMWA International, in a statement. “Someone’s life is forever changed. A company’s profit margin cannot take precedence over a miner’s right to draw a breath.”

Meanwhile, miners already dealing with black lung disease are still facing difficulties in trying to obtain federal benefits.

“These people, like my dad, he gave his life to mining to support his family, and now you know we’ve been fighting this fight for over 10 plus years now. Everyone should be outraged by this,” added Crystal Armes. “We’re hardworking, everyday Americans who go to work every day, pay our taxes, try to do the right thing, and then, we can’t get what was promised us.”

The White House deferred comment to the Department of Labor. NIOSH did not respond to multiple requests for comment. A spokesperson for the MSHA at the Department of Labor said in an email: “Until pending litigation and limited rulemaking on respirable crystalline silica are resolved, MSHA continues to vigorously enforce the permissible exposure limit of 100 micrograms per cubic meter.”

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AI Exec: We May Have Pulled Off “The Largest Theft of Labor in Human History”

The world is freaking out about the dangers of artificial intelligence, and no wonder: Every day brings news of AI agents breaking out of containment, hacking their way through the internet, and conspiring to evade humans. And the AI companies are responding that a) their systems could kill us all within a few years, but b) they should be allowed to keep going, if maybe just a tad more slowly.

Can they be trusted? On that, we here at Mother Jones have some relevant experience. Two years ago, we sued OpenAI and Microsoft for training their model on copyrighted content from our newsroom and many others. And now, documents from that lawsuit have provided an extraordinary window into how executives at these companies think about the rules, the law, and the rights of others.

Our lawsuit (which is similar to others filed by The New York Times, The Intercept, and other publishers) argued that the companies built their immensely valuable product via “astonishing theft of unprecedented proportions” and perhaps “the largest theft of labor in human history.”

A Microsoft executive warned that AI has started a “doom loop” that will “threaten the economic foundations of its essential suppliers” and eventually make the internet infinitely worse.

Actually those were not our words. They came from Microsoft’s director of applied science, Brent Hecht, and we were able to uncover his statements and many other instances where tech executives talk in unfiltered terms, through the lawsuit. You can read the full document—a brief we and the other plaintiffs filed on September 4—here. But in case you don’t have the stomach for 84 pages of legalese, here are a few of the most amazing bits. (No one except the lawyers is allowed to see the original documents from which these quotes were taken—but we are also petitioning the judge to let us uncover those, so stay tuned!)

• “Millions of people around the world will soon consider large models ‘hoovering up’ all their work to be an astonishing theft of unprecedented proportions,” an internal Microsoft document warned before acknowledging that “almost no one intended for content they created to be used in this fashion, nor are they compensated for its use.”
• The companies know full well that by ingesting content and training the AIs to spit it back out again, they are destroying the audience for publishers and other creators. OpenAI policy director Jack Clark wrote that the company was “creating systems that substitute for the labor of the people that define the culture of society.” Microsoft’s own research found that when people used AI search versus traditional search engines, there were 90 percent fewer clicks to news articles. Microsoft’s lawyer said that chatbots are “designed to answer your question” rather than “giving you a series of links to things you can go look for yourself.” Another expert found that referral traffic to publishers from Google Search and Google Discover has dropped by at least 30 percent since Google introduced AI overviews.
• They also knew that, ultimately, destroying the economic foundation for humans making content while also making it easy to generate slop by the bucketful, would wreck the internet—and, thus, their own content supply chain. Hecht warned that AI had started a “doom loop” that would “threaten the economic foundations of its essential suppliers” and eventually make the internet infinitely worse (a process for which the media critic Cory Doctorow has created the term “enshittification,” and that you may recognize from searching for… pretty much anything on the internet).
• Greg Brockman, who started OpenAI with Sam Altman and serves as its president (he is also one of Silicon Valley’s most generous donors to Donald Trump and his PACs, giving $50 million in the last two years) excitedly told his colleagues about how good the company’s products were at spitting out publishers’ content. “[It] seems to be particularly good at predicting text of news articles like whenever i have it complete in the middle of a sentence in a NYT article, it seems to complete the sentence on point.” When a fellow executive told Brockman about “a hack to get around nytimes paywall” to help the company scrape the Times’s site, Brockman responded “ah nice.” (OpenAI also hosted custom tools its users had made using ChatGPT to get around the Times’ paywall.)
• The AI companies didn’t just randomly grab text from the internet. In one version of their training data, they specifically zeroed in on quality content—and news articles ended up being the most prevalent type of content in that dataset. OpenAI also said its goal was to “crush freshness…in the domain of real-world news.” They also downloaded existing datasets, such as one intended for linguistic research that contained countless articles from paywalled news sites, even though its terms of use expressly prohibited using it for commercial purposes.
• Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella testified that AI companies should not “access data in violation of a term of service.” Glen Weyl, who founded a key Microsoft research unit, noted that compensating creators is “in the best interests of my employer, of my country, and of many other groups I belong to.” And yet, when the companies created their datasets, they systematically stripped out data that would indicate who actually owned the content—copyright notices, author information, terms of use, and so on. As another Microsoft document noted, “most LLMs (including those from OpenAl) are built on millions of scraped webpages and other large text datasets, and almost none of this content has been obtained with its owners’ knowledge or consent.”
• Right after the lawsuits were filed, OpenAI built a special filter to stop its models from spitting out the content of the news organizations suing it. As the legal brief notes, “OpenAI did not suppress the output of content from any entity that had not sued it…The purpose […], in other words, was not to prevent OpenAI’s models from infringing copyrights, but to stop Plaintiffs from gathering evidence of OpenAI’s copying for use in litigation.” This probably explains why, when a Columbia Journalism Review writer ran an experiment last year to get all her news from ChatGPT, it refused to cite content from the Times, Mother Jones, The Intercept, or any other publication that had sued it. Hecht, the Microsoft executive, warned that this filter could result in an “accidental cover up” because it would result in “people who have a right over the content having less visibility into what was used for training.”
• This one was surprising to me, even after being involved in this lawsuit for two years: OpenAI took 20 million ChatGPT responses and had one of its experts search for chunks of text—specifically “25-grams,” aka chunks of 25 words in a row, that were identical between ChatGPT’s responses and a news article. They found more than 400,000 of these 25-word overlaps between ChatGPT and Mother Jones articles—just about the same number as for the New York Times. (Not every one of those overlaps might constitute a “regurgitation” of our content—if one of our articles quoted something, and the AI quoted the same thing, that would show up as an overlap.)

In the legal filings, we and the other news organizations argue that the AI companies created their product by disregarding the rights of humans to their creativity and content—and that the companies themselves are now trapped in their own cycle of accelerating enshittification. AI is creating vast amounts of garbage content on the internet, while at the same time making it hard for news organizations like Mother Jones to stay afloat. “Yet AI companies remain powerless to break out of this ‘doom loop’,” the brief argues, “because, while the industry as a whole would benefit if every company paid… each individual company is better off taking content for free while others pay.”

Seem familiar? This is the same prisoner’s dilemma we’re watching play out as the AI agents go rogue: It would be better for everyone, including the AI companies, if everyone slowed down and figured out the technology. But for each individual company, the incentives are to plow ahead while waiting for others to slow down.

Bottom line: We cannot leave these decisions to the AI executives. Not when it comes to stealing content, and not when it comes to the fate of humanity. Left to their own devices, they will make the wrong choices—even when they know those choices are bad for them, too.

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Trump’s Desperate for TV Cameras Until They Tell the Truth

President Donald Trump, who loves a media hit, may no longer get his moments of glory on television after major news networks ABC, CBS, Fox News, and NBC announced on Monday that they would pause TV coverage of presidential events.

The four networks’ decision comes after Donald Trump banned CNN and other outlets “from the White House” on Friday for “constant ‘reporting’ FAKE NEWS!”

“The public has a vital interest in receiving accurate, independent information about its government. No administration should restrict a news organization because it objects to its reporting,” ABC, CBS, CNN, Fox News and NBC said in a joint statement of solidarity. Those five networks belong to the White House television press pool and rotate daily to provide reporting, video, and audio of the president’s daily events to share with other outlets around the world.

"The public has a vital interest in receiving accurate, independent information about its government. No administration should restrict a news organization because it objects to its reporting.” — White House television pool members: ABC News, CBS News, CNN, Fox News Media, NBC…

— NBC News PR (@NBCNewsPR) September 21, 2026

Along with CNN, Trump banned reporters from Politico and MS NOW. Reporters from all three publications were denied access to the White House on Saturday. The three outlets filed a lawsuit against the Trump administration in federal court earlier on Monday morning, alleging violations of First Amendment free press rights and Fifth Amendment due process.

According to CNN and others, Fox News Washington Bureau Chief and acting TV pool chair Bryan Boughton wrote in a Monday email to TV pool subscribers that “there will be no replacement pool put in place” and “all other pool coverage will continue as normal, including Congress, VIPs, and selected events in Washington and around the country.”

CNN was scheduled to be the TV pool on Monday and would have gone with Trump to New York City for the annual United Nations General Assembly this week. According to CNN, the White House’s Sunday night press schedule listed Hearst, which owns local newspapers and TV stations across the country, as the “secondary” TV crew in DC and Real America’s Voice, a right-wing streaming channel, as the “secondary” crew for the New York trip. These “secondary” teams can typically ask questions to the president at pool events but don’t provide all the pool reporting to other media organizations.

Later on Monday, Trump held a ribbon-cutting ceremony for a new White House helipad—only most of the audio sounded like static and led at least one Newsmax reporter to blame the inability to hear the president on a lack of pool access.

Trump made his first remarks without the TV pool and it is impossible to hear him through the White House feed. He is doing an unveiling of the new helipad just before Xi’s visit.

Nothing but static for 9 minutes and Trump is wheels up. pic.twitter.com/xpMqvA7SSJ

— Sophia Cai (@SophiaCai99) September 21, 2026

The Associated Press sent an update on Monday, acknowledging the ban on CNN, MS NOW, and Politico, and saying “no network travel pool is expected” to accompany Trump. “The Associated Press will cover the president at the United Nations, with journalists on the ground providing coverage, including live video, images and reporting.”

With uncertain coverage of future events like the United Nations General Assembly and Chinese President Xi visiting the US later this week—the latter of which Trump seems to care about after reportedly spending up to $875,000 to accelerate construction of the same helipad unveiled Mondayon the White House lawn ahead of the visit—his decision looks to have backfired.

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The California Lawmaker Forcing Big Food to Clean Up Its Act

Editor’s Note: When Robert F. Kennedy Jr. jumped on Donald Trump’s bandwagon in 2024, he brought with him the wellness-obsessed, vaccine-rejecting, food label-reading Make America Healthy Again voters who’ve been credited with helping Trump take back the White House. But there are signs that the MAHA–MAGA alliance is wearing thin, from squabbles over inaction to a tense standoff over regulating the herbicide glyphosate. In our MAHA and the Midterms series, a partnership between Mother Jones and the Food & Environment Reporting Network, we consider how MAHA is shaping the political landscape and upcoming elections.

The first time Jesse Gabriel was asked to consider a food safety bill, in 2023, he was wary—to say the least. Banning food dyes? It sounded a little “California woo-woo.” Gabriel, a third-term Democratic member of the California Assembly, was trying to establish himself as a pragmatist. And anyway, food wasn’t his thing.

Still, Gabriel took home a memo from the nonprofit Environmental Working Group (EWG). What he read, he said, was “mind blowing”: Page after page laid out the potential dangers of chemicals found in everyday foods. There was Red No. 3, a colorant that had been prohibited by the Food and Drug Administration for more than 30 years in cosmetics because of links to cancer in rats, but was authorized for use in the food we eat. There was potassium bromate, a dough conditioner banned in food in the European Union, China, India, and Brazil, but found in store-bought pastries and breads in the United States. He also learned about the so-called GRAS loophole, which permits US food companies to legally declare their own ingredients “generally recognized as safe” and to add them to the food supply without regulatory review.

“I always assumed there was someone in Washington, DC, watching my back. When I learned that that wasn’t the case, it actually made me angry.”

“My eyes were opened to a situation that, frankly, I had no idea existed,” Gabriel said. “I always assumed there was someone in Washington, DC, watching my back. When I learned that that wasn’t the case, it actually made me angry.”

That same year, Gabriel introduced the California Food Safety Act, which proposed banning five chemical additives: Red No. 3, potassium bromate, brominated vegetable oil, propylparaben, and titanium dioxide, a whitener then found in Skittles. Industry pushed back hard on what was soon dubbed the “Skittles ban”—a moniker that garnered headlines worldwide. But to no avail. After the bill was signed in October 2023, Gabriel’s staff jokingly gave him a Skittles pillow, with felt candies visible through a plastic window, which still sits on his office sofa.

As a presidential candidate and later as secretary of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. put a new spotlight on potential dangers lurking in common foods, whipping up fear and outrage at the way federal regulators do—and, for the most part, don’t—police ingredients. Yet even as he and his Make America Healthy Again movement have touted food reform, the FDA under Kennedy has so far taken little meaningful regulatory action, opting to try to extract voluntary commitments from manufacturers instead.

Meanwhile, Gabriel has continued to introduce bills that have become laws banning certain dyes and additives from school lunches and establishing the nation’s first statutory definition of ultraprocessed foods. Yes, these are state laws, but, given California’s huge market, ones with outsize impact: It’s typically impractical for food manufacturers to reformulate their products state-by-state. And in any case, Gabriel’s laws have served as models: Similar food policy bills have since been introduced in 43 states, and 15 have passed legislation.

Gabriel has succeeded by educating colleagues on both sides of the aisle and forgoing political tribalism for bipartisan compromise. “Jesse Gabriel is determined to make progress, not just drop bills and issue press releases,” said Scott Faber, senior vice president for government affairs at EWG, which co-sponsored the California Food Safety Act. In a few short years, “he’s passed more food legislation than the most heralded food legislators have in their whole careers.”

With Kennedy either unable or unwilling to enact meaningful regulation, Gabriel has quietly become America’s de facto food safety chief. He and his counterparts in legislatures across the country are addressing concerns that cross party lines and succeeding where national political leaders have repeatedly failed. With the midterms looming and Democrats still searching for messages that resonate beyond their base, Gabriel is proving that smart food safety regulations are winning politics.

Gabriel, who is chairman of the California Assembly Budget Committee, looks over his notes as one of the budget trailer bills is discussed in the capitol in Sacramento in 2024. Rich Pedroncelli/AP

Gabriel, 45, has trim dark hair and a boyish face. In interviews, he is prepared, earnest, and polished—too polished, perhaps, in a moment when authenticity is signaled by unfiltered rants. When I asked him about the food he ate growing up, he said his parents were “mindful,” but he also ate lots of pizza and ultraprocessed food. He hesitated before continuing, “I don’t want my mom to be angry at me about what I said about her.”

Political engagement was a family tradition. Both of Gabriel’s parents were involved in protest movements while students at the University of California, Berkeley. Even as a child growing up in Southern California, Gabriel set his sights on becoming the third generation to attend the famously liberal university. Once there, he became deeply involved in campus politics, becoming president of the student government, a job that included overseeing 105 staffers and a $20 million budget. James Gallagher, a conservative Republican who served in the Assembly until he won a US House seat in a special election in June, went to Berkeley with Gabriel and remembers him as a tactician with a “knack for maneuvering things and being able to put himself in a position to pass things that he cared about.”

After college, Gabriel ticked the boxes of a progressive rising star: studying constitutional law at Harvard, working on the legal team that defended immigrant Dreamers at the Supreme Court. But he wasn’t focused on elected office until 2018, after the Assembly member in his suburban Los Angeles district resigned in a #MeToo scandal. Spurred by the chaos of President Donald Trump’s first term, Gabriel ran a campaign that promised to stand up to the administration, prevent gun violence, and defend progressive values. “Food,” Gabriel said, “wasn’t on my dance card.”

The $2.5 trillion food industry is used to getting its way. Attempts to regulate it are typically met with manufactured doubt about nutrition science, accusations of nanny-statism, and a reflexive defense of that all-American value: personal choice. Back in 2023, nearly two years before RFK Jr. built MAHA into a political force, Gabriel’s Republican colleagues—and many in his own party—were sympathetic to the industry’s concerns. As trade associations like the National Confectioners Association and American Beverage Association ramped up lobbying, some expressed concerns about regulatory overreach.

Gabriel responded by knocking on the doors of every Democrat and Republican on the committees that would decide whether to bring the California Food Safety Act to the floor. He explained the Kafkaesque system in which nearly 99 percent of new chemicals that enter the food supply use GRAS to bypass FDA review. He reframed the very idea of choice, arguing that parents really didn’t have one when the grocery store was filled with unknown, untested ingredients. He traded on his reputation as a “proud incrementalist” and moderate. “I don’t color outside the lines a lot,” he told me. “So I think people thought, if he’s worked up about this issue, there must be something going on.”

It worked. Shock at how little FDA oversight existed brought his colleagues around, just as it had for him. “I walked into a room with Republican colleagues who were like, ‘Happy to take time with you, but I’m not supporting this bill,’” Gabriel said. “And then I’d watch them go through the same process I did.”

The California Food Safety Act passed with a wide margin, including one-third of California’s admittedly small Republican caucus. But Gabriel made compromises to get there. The law ultimately banned four, not five, chemicals; titanium dioxide, once found in Skittles and more than 10,000 other food products, escaped the ban to ensure bipartisan support.

In 2024, Gabriel introduced the California School Food Safety Act, which proposed prohibiting public schools from serving meals containing six synthetic dyes, including ones found in breakfast cereals and flavored applesauce. The Consumer Brands Association, National Confectioners Association, and California Grocers Association joined forces to oppose it. Officially, their concern was that these additives were still permitted by the FDA. But it was really about money: The federal and state government spend more than $4.5 billion feeding children in California schools. If the bill were to pass, it would effectively mean reformulating products nationwide.

The California School Food Safety Act, which kicks in starting at the end of 2027, prohibits public schools from serving meals containing six synthetic dyes. Because California is so massive, the law will effectively force companies to reformulate their products nationwide.Rick Loomis/Los Angeles Times/Getty

Again, Gabriel barnstormed the Assembly, sharing a 2021 study of state data that suggested a link between synthetic food dyes and neurobehavioral problems, including ADHD, the diagnosis of which has increased nearly 70 percent in children over the last 20 years. He also cast the ban as a boon for the state’s agricultural districts, which would have more opportunity to put their food on students’ trays. “A lot of the issues here are regional, not partisan,” said Heath Flora, a Republican Assembly member whose family has farmed in the Central Valley for nearly a century. “Jesse is one of those guys that’s willing to look at things from an agricultural perspective.”

In the end, not a single state legislator voted against the California School Food Safety Act.

By the following year, awareness of the possible dangers of food additives had surged. MAHA voters had helped swing the election in Trump’s favor. RFK Jr. was trumpeting the dangers of America’s lax food regulations in speeches, on podcasts, and on 60 Minutes, where he called ultra­processed foods “poison.” Suddenly, it wasn’t so crazy for Republicans to take an interest in food regulation—they had political cover.

Gabriel, though, has been careful not to align himself with MAHA. Instead, he has consistently cast the new regulations as being common sense, science-based, and, notably, given that it’s California and Gabriel didn’t need Republican votes, bipartisan—all the things that conventional wisdom says are dead in the Trump era. “In an era of hyper-polarization,” he said, “the right policy solution and the right messaging are the same thing.”

By the time Gabriel’s 2025 bill hit the Assembly floor, both Flora and Gallagher had signed on as co-authors. The Real Food, Healthy Kids Act established the nation’s first legal definition of ultraprocessed foods—something Kennedy has yet to do at the national level. The act also sets up a process to ban some ultraprocessed foods that contain both one or more additives and a high level of sugar, salt, or fat from California schools—including vending machines. Squarely in its crosshairs are products like sugary breakfast cereals, flavored milks and yogurts, and some versions of chicken nuggets. Flora told me that industry lobbyists were “surprised we were working with Jesse on it. But we did it because he gave us a seat at the table.” The bill passed the state Senate unanimously and the state Assembly by a vote of 79–1.

Gabriel and Jennifer Siebel Newsom at a press conference in 2025 where California Governor Gavin Newsom signed the Real Food, Healthy Kids Act, which established the nation’s first legal definition of ultraprocessed foods and bans some ultraprocessed foods from school lunches.Jill Connelly/ZUMA

Gabriel’s success reflects a pent-up demand for action. Eighty-four percent of Americans say it is the government’s responsibility to keep food safe from harmful ingredients and pesticides, according to recent polling from progressive firm Navigator Research. Less than half believe it’s doing a good job. And no wonder. RFK Jr. began his term as HHS secretary with grandiose promises to reduce industry influence. But he appears to have fallen prey to the same corporate capture that he once criticized. Following a flurry of lobbying, HHS did the bare minimum when it finally unveiled its GRAS proposal in August: requiring only that companies—after unilaterally declaring new chemical additives in their products as safe—inform the FDA. (Previously, they weren’t required to report this.) Meanwhile, barely a day went by over the summer without more news of a cy­clospora outbreak hitting another region of the country.

“When you ask: ‘Is this FDA coming to the rescue?’ You quickly decide it’s the state legislatures who are going to protect us.”

But state legislatures have taken up the slack, introducing more than 150 food safety bills since 2023. The 15 states that have passed new laws are about equally divided between red and blue. “When you ask: ‘Is this FDA coming to the rescue?’” said EWG’s Faber, “you quickly decide it’s the state legislatures who are going to protect us.”

In February, Gabriel introduced his fourth food bill, which would create a voluntary label to help shoppers identify foods with minimally processed ingredients. The bill sailed through the legislature with little discussion and was on the governor’s desk at the time of this writing. Even the California Grocers Association is backing it.

Still, Gabriel and other state legislators worry that new federal laws might undo their progress. In 2025, Sen. Roger “Doc” Marshall, a Kansas Republican, included state law preemption in his so-called MAHA bill, which advanced several of Kennedy’s priorities. But after public outcry and a near-revolt by MAHA-aligned GOP members of Congress, he was forced to strip the provision.

In April, Rep. Kat Cammack, a Florida Republican, published draft text of a bill called the FRESH Act that proposed to override all state food chemical laws with a weaker federal standard, prompting protest from food safety advocates, including Gabriel. “This is a Trojan horse for the food chemical industry,” Gabriel said at a press conference. “This would move the federal government, which for many decades has been asleep at the switch, from inaction to obstruction—to actually getting in the way of public health, getting in the way of laws that are meant to protect our kids.” Cammack never formally introduced her bill. But Gabriel is still planning a trip to Washington in the fall to educate the California delegation, in case Republicans try to quietly add the measure to a must-pass bill.

Gabriel characteristically demurred when I asked him whether he considered himself the nation’s shadow food safety chief. “That would be a fairly bold claim,” he said. But he did suggest that Democrats across the country might follow his lead by championing food regulation; in his eyes, it’s one of the issues that actually unites people. “Eighty percent of Democrats and Republicans in Washington don’t agree on what day of the week it is,” he said. When it comes to food safety, “it’s fairly unprecedented, the depth of the support and the depth of the response. I can’t figure out why people wouldn’t want to talk about it.”

This story was produced with the Food & Environment Reporting Network.

Top image: Illustration by Mark Harris; Rich Pedroncelli/AP; Getty(4)

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Trump Wants to Make His Triumphal Arch a Killing Machine

President Donald Trump said that he plans to make his proposed 250-foot arch in Washington, DC, a “top grade military complex” that holds large stores of weaponry, citing national security reasons and a “strong request” from the US military.

Trump added in his Sunday post on Truth Social that the planned “Triumphal Arch” near the National Mall would “have the rapid ability to use large numbers of drones, plus Snipers, on both the roof and plaza areas.”

The president first proposed building the arch last October to commemorate America’s 250th anniversary. The much-criticized project, as currently planned, would tower over most other DC landmarks—the tallestbeing the Washington Monument, at approximately 555 feet—and block the view of Arlington National Cemetery from the Lincoln Memorial.

Three Vietnam War veterans sued the administration to prevent construction of the arch based on the view issue, and also because Trump has not secured the required approval from Congress. Earlier this month, a federaljudge orderedtheadministration to provide 48 hours’ notice before doing any work on the project, but has yet to rule on the merits of the case.

Rep. Don Beyer (D-Va.) called Trump’s new arch plan, “obviously idiotic” as he “clearly expects to lose a lawsuit and therefore wants to set up a pretext to argue that the arch is tied to national security.”

Putting a drone launching site directly in the landing path for DCA is a stupid, dangerous, and unworkable idea.

Trump clearly expects to lose a lawsuit and therefore wants to set up a pretext to argue that the arch is tied to national security. Which is obviously idiotic. https://t.co/YIMlIm65TR

— Rep. Don Beyer (@RepDonBeyer) September 20, 2026

Trump’s latestpost represents a significant departure from his former plan for the arch, which included a winged, gilded statue of Lady Liberty and an inscription reading, “One Nation Under God.” The drones and snipers could indeed be a matter of Trump trying to justify the arch as a national security requirement—he applied a similar argument to his unpermitted and unpopular White House ballroom, announcing in March that “the military is building a big complex under the ballroom.”

As my colleague Sophie Hurwitz has pointed out, Trump has a long history of using the idea of “national security” to do whatever he wants: threatening to annex Greenland, targeting ICE protesters as terrorists, expanding construction of hyperscale data centers, and removing trans people from public life. “If national security is everything, then national security is nothing at all,” Hurwitz noted. Well, except, in this case, an excuse for Trump to abuse his power when no one is willing to stop him.

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Which Side Is Ed Sheeran On?

Ed Sheeran opened hisPhiladelphia show Saturday night by admitting to “making mistakes”—maybe not quite the apology some people were hoping for. It was the star musician’s first performance since billionaire Robert Kraft pressured Sheeran and his team to remove Macklemore from hisstadium tour over the rapper’s pro-Palestinian comments onstage.

Sheeran, who seemed to be reading from a teleprompter, told the audience he has tried to avoid being an “activist musician” or “a political commentator of any kind” throughout his career because he wants his music to be “about unity, not division, about humanity, not politics.” He said he recognized that the October 7 Hamas attack and “what is happening in Gaza,” which he called “catastrophic and unjustifiable and disproportionate,” was a “humanitarian issue.”

“This concert is still a place where everyone is welcome and everyone here can stand beside people that have opposing views,” Sheeran continued.

“I am deeply worried about the idea that venues pre-approve content performers,” he said. “It should never happen in the free world.” He did not mention Kraft by name or comment on the billionaire’s reasoning for demanding Macklemore’s removal.

In a statement last week, Kraft wrote in part: “Based on Macklemore’s recent actions, material shared from the stage during Ed Sheeran’s shows in New Jersey, and a broader history of antisemitic rhetoric and imagery that we believe has been deeply offensive and hurtful to the Jewish community, we determined that his participation in the September 25th and 26th concerts at Gillette Stadium would cross that line.”

Kraft has a long history of donating to Friends of the Israel Defense Forces, an organization that raises funds for IDF soldiers, veterans, and families, and the United Democracy Project, a super PAC backed by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee to elect pro-Israel candidates.

During shows at MetLife Stadium earlier this month, Macklemore advocated for Palestinian freedom and called Israel’s actions “genocide”—a designation most scholars of the subjectwould agree with. Shortly after Macklemore was taken off Sheeran’s tour, all four of the remaining opening acts withdrew out of solidarity.

Just before starting his Saturday show, Sheeran said that the recent developments put him “in the middle of an important and passionate argument about freedom of speech and the most complex political issue on the planet.”

His comments, which echoed a social media statement he made last Tuesday, are unlikely to appease critics who accuse him of complicity with Kraft. The Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel, for one, took issue with his “attempts to ‘both-sides’ Israel’s ongoing genocide.” Sheeran claims to support peace, the group said,“yet fails to even mention its crucial condition—justice.”

All five opening acts took significant financial hits by dropping out of the tour—as of April, Sheeran was the sixth-most streamed artist on Spotify of all time.AndSheeran failed to back them up on asubject where one cannot credibly walk a line down the middle.

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At the end of Saturday’s performance, Sheeran told the crowd that he wanted to “apologize for the first bit of the show,” noting that families with children did not buy their tickets to hear him talking about something other than “unity” and “love” and “family.”

“The last week of my life has been one of the worst weeks of my life,” he said, thanking the crowd for their support. “I really didn’t know whether I’d be even getting onstage again, whether I even wanted to be an artist at all.”

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These Black Los Angeles Residents May Soon Receive Environmental Reparations

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

As a child in the 1950s and ’60s, Regina Martin became so used to the oil pumpjacks near her home that she assumed every child lived beside them. Everyone was made “sick to [their] tummy” by the sulfurous, rotten-egg smell that never seemed to leave, she thought.

Only until she was grown did she begin to see a possible connection between growing up on top of the nation’s largest urban oil drilling field and her own sickness and the asthma that affected her sister.

For over a century in Los Angeles and across the nation, Black people have been disproportionately likely to live near oil wells, the machinery that draws oil from deep underground. The pollution from these drilling sites are connected to birth complications, child development issues, respiratory illnesses, and cancer.

Now, a new California state law moves to turn that lived experience into a broader public-policy question: What does a state owe communities exposed to pollution for generations? And what happens when you can’t offer support to every family that has struggled through the harm?

“The company has essentially just been extracting from the community with no investments in the community.”

California lawmakers have passed AB 1661, which would steer $5 million collected from penalized oil wells in Inglewood into direct cash aid for 1,000 nearby households with qualifying respiratory or reproductive health impacts. Some of LA’s Blackest suburbs and city neighborhoods, including Inglewood, Ladera Heights, and Baldwin Hills, surround the oil field.

The legislation, introduced by Assemblymember Isaac G. Bryan, is expected to be signed into law by Gov. Gavin Newsom by October. It sets aside enough money for payments of up to $5,000 for 1,000 impacted households under its initial structure. The money would come from the state’s community repair and reinvestment fund for people living nearest the oil field.

For Black communities living nearest to refineries, highways, landfills, and oil wells, this fund may signal something larger than one oil field or payment. It asks whether money can begin to repair harms accumulated across generations: lives cut short by illness, household wealth drained by medical bills and depressed property values, and the anxiety of raising children amid pollution.

Bryan and other supporters are calling it environmental reparations and say it is a model that could be replicated to make industrial companies help repair the damage borne by people living closest to polluting sites.

To Tianna Shaw-Wakeman, the environmental justice program director with Black Women for Wellness in LA, the law could provide a national organizing model. “My hope has always come at the community level, at the grassroots level,” she said. “I see how grassroots organizing has created long-term change in our local communities, and I see that that can be and is being replicated all over the country.”

For Bryan, who represents the communities surrounding the Inglewood Oil Field, the cash-assistance program is part of a longer fight over the field’s legacy. Bryan, the first Black legislator to chair the California Assembly’s Natural Resources Committee, said his constituents have faced lower life expectancies and higher rates of asthma and heart conditions for decades.

“The company has essentially just been extracting from the community with no investments in the community, no care in the community and what feels like no regard at times for the broader community,” Bryan told Capital B. “The community [is] due this repair, and it’s been long overdue.”

The measure builds on Bryan’s earlier legislation, AB 2716, which Newsom signed in 2024. That law requires the Inglewood Oil Field to close by 2030 and establish a penalty structure for low-producing wells. Low-producing wells can leak methane and other harmful gases into the air and water. To push operators to curb that pollution and clean up their sites, regulators imposed a penalty on companies that keep such wells operating. Bryan said operators are charged $10,000 per well each month, with the revenue directed into a community repair fund restricted to investments within 2.5 miles of the field.

The fund could eventually support affordable housing, urban greening, park infrastructure, and other community priorities, Bryan said. He described the cash program as a pilot that could help determine whether direct payments are the form of repair residents most want. “We know people are struggling,” he said. “We know one of the biggest tools against an increasingly unaffordable society is to just put more money in people’s pockets.”

As communities nationwide press for stronger environmental protections, California’s experiment could test whether government and industry are willing to move beyond preventing future harm and toward compensating people who have already lived with its costs.

“Community members who have been deeply impacted, whose health have been deeply impacted, have never gotten restitution for that in any sort of way. We deserve more than we have been getting,” Shaw-Wakeman said. “And as we transition our city, as we transition our county, part of that story has to be addressing past harms.”

At the same time, California has passed a law that would shield reparation payments from taxation. “California is actively preparing for the implementation of reparations programs,” said state Assemblymember Tina McKinnor, who introduced the legislation. “We must ensure that recipients receive the full benefit of these efforts.”

“We can’t replace toxic oil extraction with gentrification…There is still a lot more to address beyond those 1,000 households.”

Three dozen community groups came together in support of the environmental reparations legislation. There were no groups in public opposition.

The legislation would not close the oil field or resolve the long-running fight over drilling in Los Angeles County.

Under the proposal, eligible households within 2.5 miles of the field could seek aid if a resident has experienced respiratory or reproductive health impacts. But the program’s practical reach will depend on how Los Angeles County designs the application process, what documentation it requires, and how it handles demand if more than 1,000 households apply. There are tens of thousands more households in proximity to the oil field.

Bryan said Los Angeles County was still working through how the assistance would be delivered. It could come as a lump-sum payment, monthly payments, or another structure, he said, and county officials were evaluating which approach would best serve families.

Shaw-Wakeman said Black Women for Wellness and its allies pushed for a process that does not force residents to clear burdensome or invasive hurdles to prove harm. The organization has urged officials to consider self-attestation rather than requiring applicants to produce medical records that may be difficult or costly to obtain.

That question of access may determine whether the fund actually proves relief or is another government program that excludes the people it was intended to help. Many families, particularly low-income ones, may be living with these illnesses without formal diagnoses.

The program also lands amid a larger debate over what should happen to urban oil sites once production ends. Environmental justice advocates have argued that closing wells is only the first step. They want operators held responsible for plugging wells, cleaning contaminated land, and ensuring that redevelopment does not displace the same neighbors who lived with the pollution.

As oil wells have closed in Los Angeles in recent years, rental prices and home values have risen, threatening to displace longtime Black residents.

“We can’t replace toxic oil extraction with gentrification,” Shaw-Wakeman said. “There is still a lot more to address beyond those 1,000 households. We’re trying to address the ways in which community members are still being harmed every day.”

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What to Know About Trump’s New “Infinite” Greenland Deal

President Donald Trump announced on Friday that the United States has reached an agreement with Denmark and Greenland to give the US “permanent control over security, and all other needs,” in Greenland, which is a semi-autonomous territory of Denmark home to 56,000 people.

“This is an “Infinite Life” Agreement, there is no end!” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “From now on, no U.S. adversary can EVER have a base in Greenland, have a military presence in Greenland, or make sensitive investments in Greenland, without our express written approval.”

The US military already enjoys sweeping access to Greenland under a treaty that dates to the 1950s.

The agreement has not yet been signed, and little is known about it beyond Trump’s social media posts. Denmark and Greenland said on Saturday that any ​agreement with the United States would not compromise Greenland’s sovereignty. And Trump’s words about expanding American military presence in Greenland may not mean much, considering that the US military already enjoys sweeping access to Greenland under a treaty that dates to the 1950s. Service members are, in fact, the single largest group of Americans currently present in the territory.

Greenland’s prime minister, Jens-Frederik Nielsen, wrote in a post on Facebook that he is pleased with the potential deal. “The agreement recognizes the sovereignty and territorial integrity of our kingdom and ​the right of the Greenlandic people to self-determination,” he said. That suggests the agreement, whatever its specifics, does not involve fully annexing Greenland as Trump has repeatedly threatened to do in the past.

President Trump started floating the idea to annex Greenland in 2019, and he’s been saying that “the ownership and control of Greenland is an absolute necessity” since at least 2024. His threats against Greenland ramped up in early 2026. He has claimed that Greenland is “surrounded” by Russian and Chinese ships, and has said he wouldn’t rule out military force or economic coercion as strategies to try and take over the territory.

Why is he so dead set on gaining more access to Greenland? Trump has sometimes said that the US must seize Greenland so Russia or China don’t. Other annexation threats have focused less on military dominion, and more on control over the area’s rare earth minerals and oil reserves. Several US companies already mine in Greenland, and 17 days ago, the US-based company Greenland Mines signed a deal purchasing the Sarfartoq Rare Earths Project in southwest Greenland for over $35 million. As my colleague Schuyler Mitchell wrote early this year, “from Venezuela to Cuba to Greenland, this administration is committed to bolstering the financial interests of US companies through imperial aggression. Political control over a foreign nation is less important than making sure Americans can profit there.”

President Trump, despite his ongoing interest in Greenland, sometimes confuses it with Iceland and once said he “hasn’t spoken to”any Greenlanders, thousands of whom protested against his threats in early 2026. Ninety percent of Greenland’s population is Indigenous, and a majority of Greenlanders support independence from Denmark—to say nothing of the United States.

“My immediate reaction [to the deal] is that it makes me nervous and skeptical,” Ellen Frederiksen, a retired teacher in Narsaq, a town in southern Greenland, told the New York Times.

“The way Trump presents it, it sounds as if he is being given a monopoly over Greenland,” she said. “I sincerely hope that isn’t the case.”

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In Rare Move, Democrats Try to Block a Sale of Bombs to Israel

The top Democrats on the House and Senate foreign affairs committees this week announced their intent to block a $2.8 billion sale of 60,000 one-ton bombs to Israel. It’s an unusual move—and one with limited power beyond the procedural sphere. But it shows that even pro-Israel Democrats are concerned that US-funded weapons are being used to commit war crimes.

Congressman Gregory Meeks (D-N.Y.)—a longtime supporter of Israel, and ranking member of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs—invoked what’s known as an informal committee hold on the bombs sale. This type of hold essentially puts a transaction on pause so that lawmakers have time to acquire more information.

Even pro-Israel Democrats are concerned that US-funded weapons are being used to commit war crimes.

“The Trump administration has not provided sufficient assurances that these weapons will be used by the Netanyahu government in accordance with US law and with appropriate protections for civilians,” he told The Guardian. “I therefore will not clear this sale at this time.”

On the Senate side, Sen. Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire has been withholding her consent for the arms sale since July. Shaheen, ranking member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, “has unresolved concerns about how the bombs would be used in Syria, Lebanon, and Gaza—as well as to intensify the war with Iran,” as Semafor reported.

This bicameral opposition does not fully kill the sale, because the President can still override the hold.

But it complicates the path for what would be the largest single taxpayer-funded arms transfer to Israel in years, and it showcases the Democratic Party’s increasingly total break from the government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who is wanted by the International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity in Gaza. At least 73,000 people have been killed in Gaza since October of 2023, according to the Gaza Ministry of Health. In April 2026, a Pew Research Center poll found that 80 percent of Democratic voters held an unfavorable view of Israel, up from 53 percent in 2022.

“Netanyahu needs to hear from America that we don’t like what he’s doing,” Shaheen told CNN. “We don’t like what’s happening in the West Bank where settler violence is killing Palestinians, sending them out of their homes, disrupting basic infrastructure. And the Netanyahu administration has basically done nothing to address that.”

Netanyahu himself, meanwhile, is preparing for a trip to the United States, where he’s scheduled to speak on September 23rd at the United Nations in New York City. The Israeli Prime Minister will face protests upon his arrival. New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who threatened to arrest Netanyahu during his campaign, no longer believes he has legal jurisdiction to do so. However, he has said Netanyahu is “not welcome in New York City.”

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Did My IUD Make My Depression Worse?

After Mother Jones senior reporter Julia Lurie had her IUD removed, she was surprised to find that she felt happier and calmer than she had in years.

Her experience made her wonder: What does the science say about how hormonal birth control affects mood? And in a moment when contraceptives are so politicized and misinformation is rampant, is it possible to talk about the side effects of birth control without giving ammunition to those who want to get rid of it altogether?

In talking with scientists, doctors, and public health experts, Lurie learns that for years, research has found that people on hormonal contraceptives are much more likely to experience depression, suicidality, anxiety, insomnia, and other effects rarely discussed by the doctors who prescribe them.

“For some women, it can be an almost overnight change,” says OB-GYN and contraceptive researcher Dr. Ojvind Lidegaard.

This week on Reveal, we explore the gaps in women’s reproductive health, from contraceptives to menopause.

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Your Questions About Trump, Putin, and Russia’s Election Interference Answered

On Friday morning, I hosted a Reddit AMA, in which participants could ask me anything. But the questions were practically all related to my new book: How Russia Won: Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, and the Fight for America. The queries were smart, and none were vituperative—which was surprising given that this topic has become so toxic because of Trump’s BS insistence that “Russia, Russia, Russia” is a Deep State “hoax” and “witch hunt” orchestrated to destroy him. Here’s an excerpt of the Reddit conversation. You can learn more about the book at HowRussiaWon.com.

With Russia’s equivalent of midterm elections happening today, tomorrow, and on Sunday, what do you think the level of US interference in Russia’s election is?

Also, historically—say, from the 1990s to now, if we take Russia’s interference in the US as 100 percent—where would you put US interference in Russia? Are the methods employed similar? Different?

DC: We know that historically, Russia has long accused the US and the West of intervening in its domestic affairs. And indeed, throughout the Cold War, the US ran covert actions around the world that intervened in elections and operations that helped overturn democratically elected governments (such as in Iran, Guatemala, and Chile).

But I’ve seen no evidence that the US is doing anything like that in recent years in Russia. Of course, there are intelligence operations that target Russia and Putin. But given that Russia is a closed society, without free media, in which dissidence is crushed and critics imprisoned and killed, there’s much less opportunity for the sort of information operations that Russia can target at an open society like the US and European nations.

Are there signs that the war with Ukraine has affected their ability to interfere with our election due to the allocation of resources?

DC: After Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, much of the Russian disinformation operations focused on the war.

Two main lines of false narrative were purported corruption (Zelenskyy is using millions of dollars to buy yachts!) and the bogus charge that the US was running bioweapons labs in Ukraine—an allegation that Tucker Carlson, Tulsi Gabbard, and other MAGA/right-wing influencers embraced and amplified (as I detail in my book).

But during the 2024 campaign, Russian intelligence pivoted to direct its disinfo ops toward the US election—to disparage Biden and then Harris and Walz. And in recent days, we have seen one of those disinfo networks—dubbed Matryoshka—which I wrote about in the book, start to target the midterms to disparage Democrats and encourage votes for the GOP.

Do you have specific examples of what these disinformation campaigns looked like, what each of their intents was, and the platforms they used to do so?

The book is full of examples. Here’s one: During the 2024 campaign, a Russian disinformation operator—an American fugitive cop living in Moscow named John Mark Dougan—appeared on a show on Rumble, a conservative video platform, hosted by a QAnoner and presented a man (in silhouette with his voice altered) who claimed he had been a Kazakhstan exchange student at the Minnesota high school where Gov. Tim Walz had once taught and coached football.

This anonymous person said Walz had inappropriately touched him. This baseless allegation—it turned out there were no exchange students from Kazakhstan at the time—was then spread across a network of phony websites set up by Dougan that had real-sounding names: The Boston Times, the New York News Daily, the Miami Chronicle, and was soon picked up by American social media users and went viral across assorted social media platforms.

“The best disinformation ops produce false narratives that become embraced and spread by authentic accounts—that is, real Americans.”

Eventually, Jack Posobiec, a MAGA influencer who gave us the bonkers Pizzagate conspiracy theory and was then working for the Trump campaign, and Candace Owens, another MAGA influencer, amplified this allegation. It’s a good bet that this baseless charge was seen by over 10 million Americans.

Now, how do you stop something like that? Well, social media platforms could do moderating. More importantly, political operatives and influencers could behave more responsibly. I know. Hah! Not in the world of Trump. But we also can try to encourage everyone to be more discerning in what they pass along. Again, hah! This is a problem. Disinfo ops work best when the phony narratives are embraced and transmitted by real people. How to stop that is a challenge.

When Russia interferes using influencers, are the influencers even aware? Or does Russia just pump money into influencers they believe have the talking points that disrupt or push their agenda?

DC: The best disinformation ops produce false narratives that become embraced and spread by authentic accounts—that is, real Americans.

And we have seen numerous cases in which Russian disinfo slipped into US social media is then widely amplified by MAGA influencers and even Republican officeholders. The book is full of examples of this. And there’s the Tenet Media case, in which RT, the Russian state-controlled propaganda outlet, funneled $10 million to MAGA influencers, including Benny Johnson and Tim Pool, who claim they did not know the exorbitant payments they were receiving—far above normal levels—came from Moscow.

But you have to ask: Why was Russia willing to provide millions to these pro-Trump influencers? What does it say about their role in the information ecosystem?
Trump lifted restrictions on using US-supplied weapons for long-distance strikes inside Russia proper, including providing targeting assistance. The blockade of Venezuela saw a further crackdown on the shadow fleet, further restricting Russia’s export capacity. The Russia-friendly Assad regime in Syria has collapsed, and the Russian forces stationed there have been forced to flee.

Why exactly do you think Putin is a fan of Trump despite all that?

DC: I think the answer is obvious. Putin’s key goal is to weaken and divide the Western alliance. Trump is single-handedly doing that, dumping on NATO, threatening Canada, and declaring his intention to grab Greenland. He has cut back on assistance to Ukraine and provided Putin plenty of leeway in that war. Remember when Trump said he would end that war in 24 hours? Well, he has barely tried.

“Russia’s interventions in the 2020 and 2024 elections were all aimed at harming the Democrats and helping Trump.”

And most recently, he has sided with Putin, with his son-in-law declaring Ukraine should give up land to end the war—Putin’s position. And Trump has definitely weakened the US. Look at the recent news about countries pulling out of their investments in the US. Our position throughout the world is weaker. Our economy is weaker. Trump denigrates American democracy, which is a key part of Putin’s message: You cannot rely on democracy; you need autocratic leadership to have a strong nation.

True, not everything Trump has done has been to Putin’s benefit. He attacked an ally of Putin: Iran. But that has created such upheaval and weakened the US military that it has had benefits for Putin, including raising the value of Russia’s oil reserves.

Does Russia want a specific party in power? Or just to sow division and chaos?

DC: It’s pretty clear that when Russia started to mess with US elections in 2015, its aim was to sow discord and impede the Clinton campaign. Putin hated Clinton—especially for criticizing the 2011 Russian parliamentary elections as fraudulent (which they probably were).

But as Trump became the nominee, the Russian operation included in its goals boosting his campaign. The evidence for this is pretty solid, as I explain in the book. That was the finding of the intel community in early 2017. And the Senate Intelligence Committee released a massive bipartisan 966-page report in August 2020—which got little attention—on the Russian attack on the 2016 election that concluded Putin’s aims had included helping Trump.

Who was chair of the committee at the time and signed off on this conclusion? A guy named Marco Rubio. And, as I detail in the book, Russia’s subsequent interventions in the 2020 and 2024 elections were all aimed at harming the Democrats and helping Trump. Though they do like to increase discord and conflict, as well.

Did you get to work with Nick Offerman for the video about your book?

DC: I did, and it was both a joy and a thrill to work with him as he recorded the narration, particularly because he asked for notes on his reading of the lines and generously considered suggestions from me and our producer.

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What Else Is the Pentagon Hiding From Us?

More US military personnel have reportedly died during the ongoing Iran war than the Pentagon has shared publicly, the latest and most serious evidence of the Trump administration’s ongoing cover-up around disastrous military failures in that conflict.

In a Washington Post report released Friday, six US officials with knowledge of internal Defense Department data on military casualties, attested that at least 22 service members have died. The Pentagon’s public database reports 14 military casualties as of Friday as a result of Operation Epic Fury, which began with the first US and Israeli strikes on Iran in February. Four more deaths are labeled in a separate category, “Overseas Operations,” despite the Defense Department previously reporting 18 deaths related to Iran.

In July, the New York Times reported that one reason the Trump administration removed four service members who were killed days earlier from the casualty list—three in Jordan and one in northern Iraq—was that they died after the president declared a ceasefire in April.

One official told the Post that the four additional deaths were not all directly tied to the Iran war, but included military personnel who were separately stationed in the Middle East.

When a US service member’s death is formally accounted for, the military initiates an investigation to determine whether they died while performing official duties. The evaluation directly affects the amount of benefits their families receive.

The listed cause of military deaths directly affects the amount of benefits that their families receive.

The Trump administration also appears to be hiding the extent of damage to US military bases. Earlier this week, CBS News shared photos leaked by active service members of a destroyed Boeing aircraft in an Air Force base in Saudi Arabia. Other photos show destroyed buildings and military barracks at the base. Camp Buehring, a US staging post in Kuwait, had damaged aircraft, as well as armored vehicles, that the administration had not previously acknowledged.

In addition, the Defense Department’s inspector general released a report earlier this week that the war in Iran “has resulted in strategic inventory shortfalls and revealed industrial base bottlenecks for munitions resupply.” In the first four months, the inspector general valued the cost of military operations at $33.4 billion, not accounting for costs of damaged facilities, while the Trump administration strugglesto accelerate weapons production—a move that the report says has “significant lead times.”

Trump’s attempts to conceal those failures—with even less believable claims that the US has “wiped every single force in Iran out very completely” or that the war is “pretty much” over—are prolonging a war that the White House seems determined to lose, and that haskilled thousands of people across the region.

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“Near a Breaking Point:” Trump Is Failing Firefighters in an Intense Burn Season

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

Firefighters battling enormous wildfires in the United States say the federal government is failing them at a time when supercharged blazes have made their jobs exponentially more dangerous.

While the US continues to grapple with a critical shortage of federal firefighters—with especially large gaps in essential management positions—the Trump administration has increased pressure on firefighting forces to rapidly and aggressively contain the flames.

Nine firefighters who spoke to The Guardian under the condition of anonymity because they are barred from disclosing the information, as well as several retired firefighters, described how spread-thin crews are being pushed to their limits amid an unrelenting and extreme year of fire.

“Accidents have been through the roof,” one firefighter said, adding that widespread fatigue has set in after being on near-nonstop fire assignments since April. Another firefighter, who works as part of a specializedhelicoptercrew, said he’s had to opt out of assignments this year because they were too high-risk or ill-advised.

The job has always carried inherent risks, especially as the climate crisis continues to turn up the dial, creating blazes that are harder to battle. But this year has been a particularly dangerous one.

“Firefighting capacity is kind of like wages, and the fire environment is like inflation—it has not kept up.”

Wildfires are overrunning firefighters at the highest rate in two decades, according to data from the Wildland Fire Lessons Learned Center, a federal agency. By mid-August there had already been 12 entrapments—exceptionally dangerous situations when flames roar into pre-established safety zones or block firefighter escape routes. That’s the highest number in 20 years, Reuters reported.

There have been 14 reported on-duty fatalities this year, including three firefighters who died battling Colorado’s Knowles fire. An additional member of their crew succumbed to his injuries weeks later and another was severely burned. The incident was the most deadly entrapment in 13 years.

Timothy Ingalsbee, a fire ecologist who began his career as a wildland firefighter with the US Forest Service (USFS), said he’s heard from safety officers that there has been a notable spike in burn injuries this year, a sign he attributes to “crews being pushed into aggressive direct attack in times when it is not effective.”

Ingalsbee is the executive director of Firefighters United for Safety, Ethics and Ecology, a nonprofit he cofounded in an effort to increase both safety and sustainability in firefighting, and he said he’s concerned that operations are heading in the wrong direction on both fronts.

“Climate change is half the explanation,” Ingalsbee said, for what he called “the perfect firestorm for a really bad season for firefighting.”

The Department of the Interior and the USFS did not respond to requests for comment from the Guardian or answer questions on the comprehensive number of injuries reported so far this year.

But in a letter issued last week to the heads of the US Department of the Interior and the US Department of Agriculture (USDA), which oversees the USFS, five senators said personnel have had to work extended assignments, requests for crews went unfilled in communities across the west, and that the agencies are facing the depletion of their combined $6 billion suppression budget with weeks left to go before the highest fire risks subside.

The letter claimed “that teams have worked more fires than is safe, using temporary supervisory structures because fully qualified personnel are not available.”

Signed jointly by Sens. Michael Bennet, Alex Padilla, Ron Wyden, Adam Schiff, and John Hickenlooper, they added: “This is exceptionally concerning given the high wildland firefighter fatality rate this season.”

“We’re going to kill people trying to put out those last couple percent and we’re going to spend a lot of money doing it.”

Taskforce leaders, division supervisors and heavy equipment bosses are essential to run large firefighting operations, and require decades of experience. Losses in these on-the-ground leadership roles have become extremely difficult to replace. Meanwhile, firefighters said the federal government has failed to scale up staffing levels overall to meet the rising needs, pushing resources to the brink season after season.

“Firefighting capacity is kind of like wages, and the fire environment is like inflation—it has not kept up,” said one fire captain who works out of the Pacific north-west.

“We have had shortages for 20 years—and it’s only gotten worse,” said Bobbie Scopa, a retired fire chief who now serves as a vice-president for the firefighter advocacy group Grassroots Wildland Firefighters. As the need for resources grew and limited numbers of leaders grew scarce, responsibilities were sometimes doubled up. “That sets everyone up for failure,” Scopa said. “It is not like we are trying to add bureaucracy—we are trying to keep people alive.”

The picture stands in stark contrast to the one painted by Tom Schultz, the USFS chief, who has repeatedly assured lawmakers and the public that the agency’s firefighting workforce is at full capacity.

“Our firefighting workforce is stronger than at any point in recent years,” Schultz said in testimony to a congressional subcommittee in July. “We are fully staffed and equipped to respond aggressively to every unplanned ignition.”

The Trump administration has pushed for more aggressive tactics, at times at the expense of firefighter safety, several firefighters said.

Brooke Rollins, the US agriculture secretary, and Interior Secretary Doug Burgum both issued directives this year that prioritize direct attack, a strategy that can be more risky.

Officials have also mandated a return to fast and full suppression, shifting away from recent policies that took a softer approach to containing flames that could be beneficial to a landscape.

“Their roster is depleted and there doesn’t seem to be any strategic prioritization.”

Agency leaders have argued a more aggressive approach is necessary to ensure firefighters and communities are protected as conditions set the stage for more catastrophic fires. But critics, which include many fire ecologists and firefighter advocates, have raised concerns the approach will only perpetuate a cycle that contributed to the current crisis—leaving more vegetation on parched landscapes to burn in the future—and will more quickly exhaust limited resources.

Scientists, forest managers and other fire experts have advocated for allowing some fires to burn, especially those far from communities or in places that are difficult or dangerous for firefighters to reach.

Firefighters already stop 98 percent of fires before they spread. The administration wants to tighten that gap. “We’re going to kill people trying to put out those last couple percent and we’re going to spend a lot of money doing it,” Scopa said.

Meanwhile, the busy and destructive season has left little room for rest. Crews have spent months going from fire to fire. By mid-September, roughly 54,400 blazes have burned through more than 8.4 million acres, 149 percent of the 10-year average.

The US was classified at “preparedness level 5” (PL5)—the highest level, and one that indicates resources are fully deployed—for 48 consecutive days, close to double the 10-year average for days at the level per year.

Long seasons of sleep deprivation, smoke inhalation, exhaustion and malnutrition have a cumulative effect, said Ingalsbee. “It impacts your ability to think clearly and act decisively to keep you and your crew members safe.”

The level dropped to PL4 on 4 September and then to PL3 a few days later. But thousands of firefighters are still committed across the US. There may still be months left to go before the highest risks fully subside. “There are some crews near the breaking point,” Ingalsbee said. “Their roster is depleted and there doesn’t seem to be any strategic prioritization where they are sent.”

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Cory Mills’ Career Imploded. Then His Grenade Factory Exploded.

Last month, Cory Mills’ career in Congress imploded when the Florida Republican lost his primary by 13 points. Now part of a weapons facility operated by a company that Mills co-owns has exploded.

The incident occurred on Wednesday evening at a Pacem Defense facility in northern Florida and caused no injuries, the Taylor County Sheriff’s Office said in a statement. Mills, who entered Congress in 2023, has said that he stepped away from running his arms companies years ago, but he still owns a majority stake in Pacem Defense, according to his most recent congressional financial disclosure.

The explosion at Pacem Defense, which specialized in making and selling high explosive grenades to foreign militaries, was apparently massive. The Taylor County Sheriff’s Office said in its statement that one building at the Pacem facility sustained “significant damage” in the explosion, adding on Facebook that “[m]any residents heard and felt” it. One person who lives about three miles away from the facility wrote on the site that her brick home started shaking.

The sheriff’s office said that neither of the workers who were at Pacem Defense at the time of the explosion was harmed. It added that the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, the Department of Defense, and the Florida state Fire Marshal’s office are now involved in the investigation.

The blowup is only the latest challenge for Mills. Since 2025, the scandal-plagued Florida man has been accused of stealing valor, placed under a restraining order by a judge after subjecting an ex-girlfriend to “dating violence” via cyberstalking, and was nearly arrested after being accused of domestic assault by a different girlfriend. (That partner later retracted the allegation, and no charges were filed.) As I reported in a February profile of Mills, the full list is much longer.

Nevertheless, Mills managed to secure Donald Trump’s “Complete and Total Endorsement” earlier this year. Despite that support, Mills was easily defeated in his August primary by Ryan Elijah, a former local TV news anchor.

In late 2025, Pacem indefinitely furloughed many of its employees after racking up tens of millions of dollars in debt, according to court records.It has remained largely shuttered since then, a former employee told me on Thursday. (In March, Craig Pittman called the Pacem facility a “ticking time bomb.”)

According to a Florida court filing, Pacem ended up owing a Canadian lender more than $66 million. In another case, Pacem is subject to an order under which it is obligated to pay $8 million to an arms company that bought grenades from Pacem but never received them. A status update submitted in federal court on Wednesday states that Pacem has still not “paid any portion of the judgment amount.”

Mills’ financial disclosure states that he also maintains a 100 percent interest in Pacem Estate Holdings, the real estate entity that owns the site where the explosion on Wednesday occurred. According to court records, Pacem Estate Holdings continued to receive $12,000 per month in rent from another Pacem entity while the company’s employees were out of work.

Last Thursday, after remaining mostly silent on social media in the wake of his primary defeat, Mills struck a defiant tone on X—posing in front of a wall of fire and water in a tight polo with a Swiss watch that can sell for tens of thousands of dollars.

A Phoenix rises from the ashes. Our fight is far from over! pic.twitter.com/wVa4rB5LhP

— Cory Mills (@CoryMillsFL) September 10, 2026

“A Phoenix rises from the ashes,” Mills declared. Six days later, the ashes appear to have become real.

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Killer AI Is Already Here. We’re Using It in Iran.

More than 60 percent of Americans believe it’s at least moderately likely that artificial intelligence will kill us all, according to a Politico survey released Wednesday.

It’s easy to see why. Arguments that AI companies are “gambling with our lives” have dominated the news this week. But despite our fear that AI might kill us en masse, another new poll shows that very few Americans know our government is already using AI to do just that abroad.

The US-Israel war on Iran is not only the least popular war the United States has ever waged, but also represents an unprecedented application of AI in warfare. New data from the Institute for Global Affairs and YouGov shows that the present weaponization of AI has flown under the radar, with most Americans largely unaware of our own military’s AI use.

“People would be pretty shocked that what they’re using for their homework or to summarize emails is also being used by intelligence officers.”

Only 8 percent of Americans have heard “a lot” about the military’s use of AI in the war with Iran. The majority, almost two thirds, have heard “only a little,” and four in ten have heard “nothing at all.”

“We wanted to get a gut check on, do Americans know this is happening?” survey co-author Jonathan Guyer said in an interview. Despite a long history of US military development eventually boomeranging back home, the answer to that question might be “no”—notwithstanding Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s relentless messaging about the “AI-first Department of War.”

“People would be pretty shocked that what they’re using for their homework or to summarize emails is also being used by intelligence officers,” Guyer said.

Cameron Stanley, the chief digital and artificial intelligence officer for the Department of Defense, wrote in June that xAI’s Grok “enabled U.S. forces to deploy over 2,000 munitions to 2,000 distinct targets within 96 hours during Operation Epic Fury.”

That admission, part of the administration’s case for the national security importance of Elon Musk’s data centers, is just the tip of the iceberg. The Pentagon’s Maven Smart System, built by Palantir, also uses Anthropic’s Claude AI—the same program that people use to create AI boyfriends for themselves or draft awkward texts to their roommates—to “semi-autonomously rank targets by strategic importance, drafting automated legal justifications for each strike along the way,” according to Katie Livingstone of Military Times.

Claude’s target selection is reportedly only about 60 percent accurate in good conditions, 30 percent accurate in bad weather. So Pentagon officials claim there’s always a human in the loop when selecting who to bomb.

“We follow the law and humans make decisions,” Hegseth told the Senate Armed Services Committee in May. “AI is not making lethal decisions.”

But it’s making lethal recommendations, which don’t appear to receive enough human oversight to prevent atrocities. In February, the US military fired Tomahawk missiles directly at a girls’ school in Minab, Iran and killed over 150 people—most of them young children. Seven months later, UN experts called the strike a crime against humanity.

As AI companies enter the battlefield, “the scale of atrocities committed…is rising correspondingly.”

In the immediate aftermath of the attack, much of the US news coverage focused on whether Claude was used to select the school as a target. But the fact that a human was at some pointinvolved does not lessen the harm done.

At a congressional human rights hearing September 16, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace’s Steven Feldstein explained how AI has facilitated a massive ramp-up in the speed of missile target selection.

“In the Iran war, during the first week of hostilities alone, the Pentagon reported it had struck more than 3,000 targets,” Feldstein said. By the time a ceasefire was announced 38 days later, that number of targets had risen to 13,000.

“In Israel, AI targeting systems have played a crucial role in supporting its military campaign against Gaza,” Feldstein added. One system, known as Lavender, identified 37,000 individuals as potential airstrike targets in the initial weeks of the war. As AI companies make their way onto the battlefield, Feldstein said, “the scale of atrocities committed by warring parties is rising correspondingly.”

In January of this year, Pete Hegseth released a memo directing the United States to embed AI in every part of the “kill chain.” As it moves to comply, the Department of Defense is placing relatively few checks on what technology companies can or cannot do when the United States is waging war. “We’re in a situation where the companies are essentially regulating themselves,” Guyer, of the Institute for Global Affairs, said.

Ethical principles for AI use that the Department of Defense adopted in 2020 require only that military AI be “governable” by humans. And the additional safeguards AI policy groups tend to propose revolve around stopping fully automated technology—not regulating the semi-autonomous technology that is already being used to kill at scale.

As American policymakers debate potential future AI threats, it seems as though the immediate threat of AI—the ongoing expansion of those “kill chains”—is not even making it into the AI safety discussion. Nor are the victims of AI-assisted warmaking.

That means tech companies are still the ones making the rules: “Their terms of service are defining how AI systems are being used for war to a greater extent than any laws that have been written, or to a greater extent than even executive branch guidelines,” Guyer said.

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Trump’s Friends Are Already Signing Deals to Take Venezuela’s Oil

“It’s a milestone deal in making the Western Hemisphere the center of the global energy system,” Energy Secretary Chris Wright said on Wednesday.

He was talkingabout a fellow Trump ally’s oil deal with Venezuela: oil tycoon Harold Hamm of Continental Resources, a US petroleum and natural gas production company, who announced a preliminary deal with PDVSA, Venezuela’s national oil company, that same day. The agreement, which allows Continental Resources to develop and operate 126,000 acres of oil fields—an estimated 30 billion barrels of oil—was presented by Hamm, with Wright beside him, at this week’s G20 energy summit in Houston.

Hamm is in Trump’s inner circle and has advised the president on energy issues to benefit his business ventures, including fracking, and personally contributed $4.3 million to Trump-aligned PACs for his 2024 election campaign.

The deal comes after Chevron became the first known major US oil company earlier this month to expand production in Venezuela since the Trump administration seized President Nicolás Maduro in January, investing $7 billion over five years to more than double its production to 600,000 barrels a day.

On Wednesday, The Wall Street Journal reported that ExxonMobil is close to signing its own deal with Venezuela, which could be completed as early as the end of this month and include more than 50 billion barrels in oil reserves (Venezuela says it has about 300 billion barrels in total reserves). The potential Exxon deal is notable as the company has repeatedly tried to win more money in restitution after former Venezuela President Hugo Chávez nationalized major foreign oil operations in 2007, forcing Exxon to abandon its Venezuela projects.

While some oil executives remain hesitant to invest in Venezuelan oil due to the uncertainty surrounding the Trump administration’s August deal with the country, the challenges of scaling up production, and the chaotic relationship between the US and Venezuela, it’s become more clear that it has opened the door for his friends and other wealthy companies to invest in the country’s massive oil reserves.

Since the Trump administration captured Maduro, acting President Delcy Rodríguez has overhauled regulations on oil to encourage outside investment, including lowering tax rates on production. Continental Resources cited these changes as a major reason to pursue its oil deal.

As Jeff Colgan, a political science professor at Brown University, told me earlier this month, the winners of Trump’s oil agreement won’t lower gas prices for American consumers or help everyday Venezuela residents—it will just “line the pockets of some American companies.”

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Microplastics in Soil Act Like a Tiny “Trojan Horse” for Delivering Toxins

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

Microplastics act like a “Trojan horse,” delivering pollutants, pesticides, and bacteria through the soil, a five-year multinational research project has found.

The EU-funded project, which has so far resulted in 22 peer-reviewed studies, found microplastics in the soil of all 227 agricultural fields it tested across 11 European countries. The researchers said this poses a global threat, with healthy soils essential for life on Earth.

“Once these plastics fragment into the ground, they’re practically impossible to remove.”

In many cases, this contamination reflected current farming practices as well as historical land use, demonstrating that plastic pollution can persist for many years.

The researchers also found that microplastics could interact with other agricultural stressors such as pesticides and veterinary drugs.

One study in Switzerland found that fields with the highest levels of tire-wear particles also had the highest levels of other toxic chemicals and metals.

Microplastics can create new microbial habitats on their surfaces. Known as the plastisphere, these surfaces form a hotspot for interactions between plastics, microbes, and agrochemicals, the researchers found.

An increase of antibiotic-resistant genes was found within plastispheres when compared with controls. Pesticides appeared to amplify this effect further.

Edoardo Puglisi, a partner of the project and professor of microbiology at the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart in Piacenza, Italy, said the smaller the microplastics were, the more they tended to adsorb pollutants, microbes and DNA, leading to a “Trojan horse effect that can potentially increase the diffusion of pathogens and antibiotic-resistance genes.”

This Trojan horse effect can have an impact on earthworms and soil organisms by disrupting critical processes such as nutrient cycles, one study found.

Biodegradable plastics were not automatically safer and could still degrade into microplastics.

Earthworms play a vital role in shaping the composition of the soil microbiome as well as the ecological functions of soils.

The EU-funded Minagris research project, in collaboration with the Countryside and Community Research Institute at the University of Gloucestershire, also found microplastics could affect plant growth and function. One study found that higher concentrations of microplastics reduced leaf area, chlorophyll content, photosynthetic efficiency, and plant biomass in lettuce.

When drought conditions were added, these effects became even more pronounced, with plants performing less well than under either stress alone.

Environmental assessments often consider pollutants individually, but the findings show pollutants can behave differently when they occur together. The researchers say policy needs to recognise that plastic contamination is part of a wider picture of soil degradation and pollution.

In an effort to reduce plastic pollution, there has been an increase in the use of biodegradable plastics. However, the project found biodegradable plastics were not automatically safer and could still degrade into microplastics, potentially causing ecological damage.

“Once these plastics fragment into the ground, they’re practically impossible to remove, acting as vectors for agrochemicals and altering critical soil ecosystems,” said Esperanza Huerta Lwanga, a research associate in soil physics at Wageningen University in the Netherlands.

“To protect long-term food production and soil health, policy must catch up. We urgently need standardised plastic monitoring, full manufacturer transparency, and risk assessments that evaluate through different species how microplastics interact with co-pollutants.”

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Mike Johnson Can’t Protect Pete Hegseth Forever

Speaker Mike Johnson announced Wednesday that he would send Congress home early for its seven-week campaigning recess ahead of November’s midterm elections. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth—who was scheduled for an impeachment vote brought by Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) on the basis of his conduct during the Iran war—has been marked safe, for now.

House Republicans had planned to remain in session until Thursday. Now, they’re taking their final votes of the session Wednesday night, after which they’ll head home to face voters.

Massie, who introduced Hegseth’s articles of impeachment, said the early dismissal reflected GOP leaders’ fear that Hegseth might actually be impeached.

Among the “high crimes and misdemeanors” listed in Massie’s 34-page resolution are assertions that Hegseth knowingly violated the War Powers Resolution, that he “knowingly executed and implemented unlawful orders to initiate war against a foreign nation notwithstanding the absence of congressional authorization,” and that he “acted in a manner contrary to his trust as Secretary of Defense and subversive of constitutional government.”

Massie, a libertarian, found himself supported by lawmakers across the aisle. Hegseth, Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) wrote on social media, “has presided over the slaughter of thousands of civilians in immoral wars, aided and abetted genocide, and led a campaign of extrajudicial assassinations.”

I support Rep. Massie’s articles of impeachment against Pete Hegseth.

He has presided over the slaughter of thousands of civilians in immoral wars, aided and abetted genocide, and led a campaign of extrajudicial assassinations.

He belongs in the Hague, not our government.

— Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib (@RepRashida) September 16, 2026

Mike Johnson, however, didn’t want to hear it. The articles of impeachment, he said, are “a publicity stunt by someone who wants attention. It will immediately be tabled, of course….We should not be playing games with national security.”

And there it is. Just as I predicted. They’re canceling Congress tomorrow to avoid the vote on IMPEACHING @SecWar. It will also make it harder for us to reach 218 signatures on the Epstein Discharge Petition before the election. We were at 190+ signatures last night. https://t.co/nltarUjayl

— Thomas Massie (@RepThomasMassie) September 16, 2026

Though Massie asserted on social media that the impeachment vote was the reason he’s being sent home early, Johnson didn’t say so directly. Instead, he told reporters, “It’s time for our members to go home to their districts and make the case to the American people.”

Hegseth, between announcing and rescinding military testosterone-supplementation guidelines, doesn’t seem to have found time to speak on the matter of his potential impeachment.

In a statement, Pentagon Press Secretary Kingsley Wilson said the “entire Department is unified behind the Secretary’s vision and will continue working to put our warfighters and America first.”

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The Macklemore-Ed Sheeran Dispute Is a Corporate Threat to Free Speech

Robert Kraft, the billionaire owner of, among a ton of other stuff, the New England Patriots and its stadium, allegedly pressured Ed Sheeran and his team to remove rapper Macklemore from his tour after Macklemore voiced support for Palestinians amid the ongoing genocide in Gaza. All four of the remaining opening acts withdrew from the tour in solidarity with Macklemore by Tuesday afternoon.

“Artists must not be silenced when they speak up for the oppressed,” Finneas, a music artist best known for co-writing and producing much of his sister Billie Eilish’s work, wrote on Instagram. “I have decided to withdraw from my upcoming tour dates with Ed Sheeran. I stand with Palestine and its people.”

On Monday, Macklemore alleged that Kraft told Sheeran that hewould not be permitted to perform at his New England Patriots NFL venue, Gillette Stadium, at a show scheduled for later this month. Kraft also rallied some other stadium owners to support Macklemore’s removal.

“Collectively they gave [Sheeran] an ultimatum: if Macklemore stays on the tour, you will not be allowed to play in our venues,” the rapper recounted.

Macklemore opened for two shows on Sheeran’s tour, playing at MetLife Stadium in New Jersey on September 4 and 5. During his set, the rapper performed “Hind’s Hall,” his 2024 song that voices support for protests at college campuses demanding a ceasefire in the Gaza war, divestment from Israel, and anend to the genocide. Activists renamed Hamilton Hall at Columbia University to “Hind’s Hall” to honor Hind Rajab, a five-year-old Palestinian girl killed by the IDF in 2024.

“Free Palestine,” Macklemore said to many cheers from the crowd before performing the song. “I want to say those words loud and clear so the people of Gaza all the way to the West Bank know that we have not forgotten them.”

According to the Guardian, the other owners who allegedly opposed future Macklemore performances oversee venues hosting Sheeran’s previously scheduled shows in Philadelphia (September 19), Atlanta, Charlotte, Indianapolis, Arlington, and Tampa. Notably, all of these stadiums are home to NFL teams—the Eagles, Falcons, Panthers, Colts, Cowboys, and Buccaneers, respectively.(Only two other shows are on Sheeran’s US leg of the tour, both at Hard Rock Live in Hollywood, Florida.)

These venues may be publicly owned, but they’re branded by corporations and controlled by billionaire team owners. This arrangement has become a mechanism for corporate censorship of political speech. Kanye West, who has a well-documented history of making antisemitic statements, performed in Tampa in June and is scheduled to play at the Cowboys’ stadium in November. So far, there’s been no pushback from owners. Pro-Palestinian speech, by contrast, gets an artist blacklisted.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) placed the focus on Kraft when asked about the removal of Macklemore on Tuesday.

“When you see what Robert Kraft did to line up all of the stadiums to censor speech in that one specific way, it’s become clear that this is not just about one music artist or two music artists, but this is about how just a handful of stadium owners and the elite can prevent an entire massive issue, in this case, the genocide in Gaza,” Ocasio-Cortez said in a clip shared by Fox News.

This isn’t the first instance of this kind of censorship over Gaza. Massive Attack, Bella Hadid, and Kehlani have all faced similar backlash. But the Macklemore-Ed Sheeran case may be the most prominent yet, given both its scale and what’s now known about how the decision was allegedly made. If Ed Sheeran, the sixth most-streamed artist of all time on Spotify as of April, isn’t safe, then no one is.

Macklemore said it best in his Monday announcement: “The victims are the Palestinian people. The men, women, and children who have been killed, starved, displaced, and forced to live through unimaginable violence. More than 20,000 children have been killed in Gaza alone. People are being killed today, and people will be killed tomorrow. I want to make sure that as I tell this story, we don’t lose sight of that.”

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The Trump Administration Is Imprisoning Somali Immigrants in Gitmo

“The worst place ever I’ve been in my life.”

That’s how Sakariye Abdi Mohamed described the detention center at Guantanamo Bay, where he and a handful of other Somali immigrants are being held by Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Late last month, ICE put 12 Somali men on a plane and told them they were being deported to Somalia, according to interviews with community leaders, friends, and family members who are in touch with the detainees. Instead, they arrived at the notorious US military base in Cuba, where seven or eight of them remain. Since then, the men have said, they have been subjected to frigid temperatures, and they are shackled at all times.

“Nobody tell us that we’re going to Guantanamo Bay,” Mohamed told me in a phone call last week. “Just like kidnapping.”

“Just like kidnapping.”

It’s a dramatic escalation in President Donald Trump’s long-running campaign to target immigrants from the east African nation. Last year, he asserted that Somalis “contribute nothing” to the United States and declared, “I don’t want them in our country.” The president then unleashed roughly 2,000 heavily armed ICE and Border Patrol agents in Minnesota, home to the country’s largest population of Somalis.

The US military and the CIA began using Guantanamo to detain alleged “enemy combatants” following the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. The base, in the words of the American Civil Liberties Union, became a “symbol of injustice, abuse, and disregard for the rule of law,” plagued by reports of torture and mistreatment of war on terrorism detainees. For years, ICE has operated its own, separate facility at Guantanamo called the Migrant Operations Center, which, according to a 2024 report by the International Refugee Assistance Project, was used to confine refugees apprehended at sea in “prison-like conditions.”

At the beginning of his second term, Trump ordered the Pentagon and the Department of Homeland Security, which includes ICE, to expand the Migrant Operations Center to “full capacity to provide additional detention space for high-priority criminal aliens.” The president promised to incarcerate as many as 30,000 of the “worst of the worst” immigrants at the Gitmo facility. That hasn’t happened, but over the past two years, ICE has used the base on and off to detain a smaller number of immigrants from countries including Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela. On August 28, Gillian Brockell—a journalist who closely tracks deportation flights—reported that migrants had been sent to the facility for the first time in months. Last week, Minnesota Public Radio first reported that at least some of those prisoners are members of that state’s Somali community.

The detainees have been allowed to make phone calls from Guantanamo, and many have spoken to Abdinasir Kahin—a Chicago-based Somali community leader who has worked to connect the prisoners with the outside world—and Elmi Ware, a journalist who immigrated to the US from Somalia. In reporting this story, I spoke to Mohamed, Kahin, and Ware, as well as to friends and family of several of the detainees.

In an email, a DHS spokesperson claimed that the Somalis flown to Guantanamo in late August “included some of the worst of the worst, with criminal histories including aggravated assaults, weapons offenses, robbery, multiple larcenies, police obstruction, possession of burglary tools, receiving stolen property, trespassing, unauthorized use of a vehicle, multiple drug charges, and DUIs.” He added that the detainees “have received due process, and all have final orders of removal issued by an immigration judge.”

DHS declined to specify which of the Guantanamo inmates had been accused of those crimes; in response to follow-up questions, the spokesperson appeared to indicate that he did not know. At least some of the detainees have told people they have spoken to that they are not criminals and have not been charged with crimes. MPR reported last week that one of the men, Adam Abdullah, had received two parking tickets but had no criminal record. Several of the men at Guantanamo were applying for asylum and had work authorization, and at least one detainee had filed a habeas corpus petition, seeking to be released from detention.

“I don’t have no criminal record,” Mohamed told me. “I don’t have no tickets.” I found no court records contradicting Mohamed’s assertion.

Mohamed had been living with his cousin Ibrahim in Ohio at the time of his arrest. He said he was driving a truck for a commercial trucking company when he was pulled over by an Alabama state trooper on I-65. He was held by ICE for nearly a year in Louisiana before being sent to Guantanamo.

“I told him at the time to stop working, because ICE was arresting everyone,” Ibrahim told me. But Mohamed refused. “He believed ICE was looking for criminals.”

Mohamed’s friend and colleague, also named Ibrahim, affectionately described him as the rookie truck driver, viewed by his co-workers as a “young kid.” Mohamed had done everything right, he said: applied for asylum, waited for his work authorization, gotten his commercial driver’s license, paid his taxes. He’d hoped to build a better, brighter future in America than what he had left behind in Somalia.

Now, he is detained in a facility originally meant for suspected terrorists.

Another Guantanamo detainee, Kamal Hassan Olow, was arrested in December in Ohio, part of ICE’s Operation Buckeye. Abdirahman—a friend of Olow’s who is in daily contact with him—told me that Olow was working two jobs at the time of his arrest: a full-time position with Amazon and a part time job with a rental car agency. According to Abdirahman, Olow had a valid work permit and paid his taxes. He has a wife and children in Somalia, whom he was supporting. I found no evidence that Olow had a criminal record.

The conditions at Guantanamo are harsh. There are cameras in the showers and the bathroom, according to Mohamed and those in communication with other detainees. The building is extremely cold—a condition that individuals previously detained by the CIA and the military at Guantanamo as part of the war on terrorism have also described.

The DHS spokesperson said that all of the detainees’ allegations of mistreatment are “false,” adding that they are “provided three meals a day, clean water, clothing, bedding, showers, soap, and toiletries. Illegal aliens also have access to phones to communicate with family members and lawyers. Detainees have privacy in bathroom and shower areas.”

According to Mohamed, guards at Guantanamo have said they are being held there because that’s what officials in Washington, DC, want. “There’s no other nation, only Somali people in Guantanamo Bay, in the prison,” he told me. “And when we ask them why we are here, they tell us…Washington…ordered to keep Somali people in the Guantanamo Bay.”

Detainees held a hunger strike for several days after arriving in Cuba. According to those in contact with the men, officials told them that if they ended the strike, they would get to leave the naval base. Now, they no longer trust anything the guards say.

When we spoke last week, Mohamed said he and the other detainees would once again be going on a hunger strike. This time, they would not be mollified by vague promises.

“We die, or we go back to our country, or we go back to the States,” he said.

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Why MAGA Went Gaga for Putin

My new book, How Russia Won: Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, and the Fight for America (HarperCollins), was published this week. It covers how Russia has mounted multiple influence and disinformation operations against US elections (often to help Trump) since 2016 and how Trump, the GOP, MAGA, and right-wing media have aided and abetted this attack by denying it’s occurring.

The book is an attempt to reclaim the Trump-Russia narrative in the face of Trump’s decadelong crusade to brand it a “hoax.” Putin has been waging a twilight war against the United States and the West, and Trump and his crew have unilaterally surrendered, and there are now signs Moscow intends to meddle in the midterms to assist Trump.

Below is an excerpt of the book from Chapter 14 (“Useful Idiots”) that first appeared in my Our Land newsletter and that shows how MAGA and many on the right came to be fans of Putin, a repressive and murderous tyrant and war criminal. This is a major development within the conservative movement that has not drawn sufficient attention.

But first, a video promoting the book, narrated by the inestimable Nick Offerman:

Tucker Carlson began his nightly Fox News show on February 22, 2022, talking about Vladimir Putin. A few days earlier, President Biden had revealed that the United States possessed intelligence indicating the Russian leader planned to invade Ukraine imminently, and Carlson was furious that Putin was being demonized. He railed:

Since the day that Donald Trump became president, Democrats in Washington have told you you have a patriotic duty to hate Vladimir Putin. It’s not a suggestion. It’s a mandate. Anything less than hatred for Putin is treason. Many Americans have obeyed this directive. They now dutifully hate Vladimir Putin. Maybe you’re one of them. Hating Putin has become the central purpose of American foreign policy. It’s the main thing that we talk about… Very soon that hatred of Vladimir Putin could bring the United States into a conflict in Eastern Europe…What is this really about?

Why do I hate Putin so much? Has Putin ever called me a racist? Has he threatened to get me fired for disagreeing with him? Has he shipped every middle-­class job in my town to Russia? Did he manufacture a worldwide pandemic that wrecked my business and kept me indoors for two years? Is he teaching my children to embrace racial discrimination? Is he making fentanyl? Is he trying to snuff out Christianity? Does he eat dogs? These are fair questions. And the answer to all of them is no…So why does permanent Washington hate him so much?

Carlson dismissed the ongoing Russia-­Ukraine conflict as a mere “border dispute.”

This soft-­on-­Putin stance was not surprising. During Trump’s first impeachment in 2019, Carlson had huffed, “Why do I care what’s going on in the conflict between Ukraine and Russia?! And I’m serious. Like, why do I care? And why shouldn’t I root for Russia? Which I am.”

Carlson deployed Russia denialism to justify his support for Putin.

A week after that declaration, Carlson doubled down and said he opposed the sanctions the United States had imposed on Russia for its annexation of Crimea. “I think we should probably take the side of Russia if we have to choose between Russia and Ukraine,” he remarked. And he tied his pro-­Putin fervor to the Trump-­Russia scandal. Referring to journalists who had challenged the Ukraine-did-­it conspiracy theory about the 2016 election, he exclaimed, “Putin, for all his faults, does not hate America as much as many of these people do.”

He went on: “Russia didn’t hack our democracy. The whole thing was a talking point, a ludicrous talking point, invented by the Hillary Clinton campaign on or about November 9, 2016, to explain their unexpected defeat in the last presidential election.” Carlson had deployed Russia denialism to justify his support for Putin.

Now, with Putin on the verge of launching an all-­out war against Ukraine to seize territory and prevent his neighbor from joining NATO, Carlson was on the side of the Russian dictator. His comments encapsulated the titanic shift that had occurred in recent years within the conservative movement. During the Cold War, a core principle of Republicans and conservatives was opposition to the Soviet Union. The GOP had long crusaded against the Red Peril. Ronald Reagan in 1983 decried the Soviet Union as “the Evil Empire.” For decades, the hawks dominated within the Republican Party. In 2012, GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney called Russia America’s “number one geopolitical foe.”

After Trump faced accusations of colluding with Russia’s attack on the 2016 election, ­his supporters came to see Putin, the enemy of their political enemies, as, if not a friend, then at least not an enemy.

But Trump—­and America’s culture wars—had changed all that. While campaigning in 2016, Trump repeatedly displayed his affection for Putin and praised the Russian for being “strong” and for speaking well of Trump. Many of Trump’s followers were swept along.

After Trump faced accusations of colluding with Russia’s attack on the 2016 election—accusations he and his propagandists characterized as the evil fantasies of the Democrats, the media, and the Deep State—­his supporters came to see Putin, the enemy of their political enemies, as, if not a friend, then at least not an enemy. After all, if Putin was the Democrats’ boogeyman, he couldn’t be all that bad.

Other factors contributed to the Right’s embrace of Putin. The conservative movement had long been a home for so-­called America First isolationists who now viewed (as did far-­left anti-interventionists) assaults on Putin as provocations that could lead to US involvement in an overseas conflict. Some within this camp considered the extension of NATO toward Russia and attacks on Putin to be the handiwork of imperialists and neoconservative hawks angling for war and the expansion of US hegemony. And Putin’s staunch opposition to gay and transgender rights, his purported advocacy of “traditional values,” and his support for the Orthodox Church, a mainstay of cultural conservatism, resonated with certain Americans. The measures that the religious right in the United States was pushing in state legislatures—­anti-­transgender bills and so-called Don’t Say Gay legislation—­echoed Russian laws.

During Obama’s presidency, right-­wingers hailed Putin’s toughness, largely as a dig at Obama. “People are looking at Putin as one who wrestles bears and drills for oil,” Sarah Palin, the former Republican vice presidential candidate, told Sean Hannity on Fox News. “They look at [Obama] as one who wears mom jeans and equivocates and bloviates.” The conservative cable channel promoted a side-­by-side image of Obama wearing a helmet while riding a bicycle and Putin bare- chested on a horse.

Far-­right commentator and former GOP presidential candidate Pat Buchanan, who feared the end of “White America” and the death of “Christian America,” looked to Putin for inspiration. “Is Vladimir Putin a paleoconservative?” he wrote in The American Conservative in 2013. “In the culture war for mankind’s future, is he one of us?” In 2014, Buchanan hailed Putin’s illegal annexation of Crimea as part of the Russian’s overarching goal to turn Moscow into “the Godly City of today and command post of the counterreformation against the new paganism.” He opined, “In the culture war for the future of mankind, Putin is planting Russia’s flag firmly on the side of traditional Christianity.” For Buchanan and other Christian nationalists, Putin was a global commander in the culture wars.

Mainstream Republicans—­a shrinking band—­still considered Putin a threat and Russia a strategic adversary. But a significant slice of the Right had jumped on Trump’s pro-­Putin bandwagon. During the 2016 campaign, conservative commentator Dinesh D’Souza tweeted that what Trump admires about Putin “is the way Putin—­unlike someone else we know—­LOVES his country & FIGHTS for its interests.”

According to Gallup, Putin’s favorable rating among Democrats dropped from 15 percent to 10 percent between 2015 and 2017, yet with Republicans, it increased dramatically from 12 percent to 32 percent.

The following year, right-­wing author Ann Coulter, picking up on the Buchanan vibe, declared, “In 20 years, Russia will be the only country that is recognizably European”—­apparently meaning white. Christopher Caldwell, a prominent right-wing commentator, gave a speech at Hillsdale College in which he said, “If we were to use traditional measures for understanding leaders, which involve the defense of borders and national flourishing, Putin would count as the preeminent statesman of our time.”

Putin had originally leaned into conservative values to bolster his domestic support from tradition-minded Russians unsettled by the rapid changes following the collapse of the Soviet Union. He then took this pitch international and positioned himself as a leader against the decadent and relativist modern values rooted in the West—­a stance that resonated within the American right.

Despite his military aggression and the brutal and thuggish repression he imposed on Russia—locking up rivals and critics, rigging elections, shutting down the opposition, suppressing the media, eliminating an independent judiciary, invading neighboring countries, murdering foes—­he won support and a degree of admiration within MAGA. According to the pollster Gallup, Putin’s favorable rating among Democrats dropped from 15 percent to 10 percent between 2015 and 2017, yet with Republicans, it increased dramatically from 12 percent to 32 percent. The Americans warmest to Putin were Christian nationalists.

By the time Putin ratcheted up his threats against Ukraine in early 2022, he had won over a chunk of American conservatives, with some MAGA figures declaring they cared not a whit about a military attack on Ukraine.

Rep. Matt Gaetz, a Florida Republican, tweeted, “I’m more concerned with the US-Mexico border than the Russia-­Ukraine border. Not sorry.” Michael Flynn, Trump’s former national security adviser who had become part of the QAnon movement, said of Putin, “The guy’s a very strong leader. He’s been in charge for a long time. And he’s not going to put up with the nonsense he’s seeing in Europe.” JD Vance, then a GOP candidate for Senate in Ohio, remarked, “It’s ridiculous we’re focused on this border in Ukraine…I don’t really care what happens to Ukraine one way or another.” And Charlie Kirk, leader of Turning Point USA, the pro-­Trump youth group, took Putin’s side and echoed the Russian talking point that many in Ukraine desired a Russian intervention: “It feels as if Putin is going into places that want him. They have voted overwhelmingly to be part of it. It is a family dispute that we shouldn’t get in the midst of, that’s for certain.”

Putin’s efforts to covertly assist Trump in 2016 were still paying off. As Moscow prepared for war, pro-­Trump voices in America were either on Putin’s side or contending the coming invasion meant little for the United States. They were ensuring that partisan politics would shape—­and possibly hamper—­the US response to a full-­scale Russian invasion.

What a propaganda triumph for Putin: the former American president referring to the invasion force Putin had assembled on the Russia-Ukraine border as peacekeepers.

In this fraught pre-­invasion period, Trump couldn’t resist praising the Russian leader. During a radio interview, he extolled Putin for the “smart” move of sending “the strongest peace force I’ve ever seen” to the Ukraine border to threaten Kyiv. “This is genius,” Trump said. “Putin declares a big portion of the Ukraine—­of Ukraine—­Putin declares it as independent. Oh, that’s wonderful…He used the word independent and ‘We’re gonna go out and we’re gonna go in and we’re gonna help keep peace.’ You gotta say that’s pretty savvy.”

What a propaganda triumph for Putin: the former American president referring to the invasion force Putin had assembled on the Russia-Ukraine border as peacekeepers. Rep. Liz Cheney, a Wyoming Republican, tweeted, “Former President Trump’s adulation of Putin today—­including calling him a ‘genius’—aids our enemies.”

With war almost at hand, MAGA strategist Steve Bannon and Erik Prince, the onetime head of the controversial Blackwater private security firm, had a jocular exchange on Bannon’s podcast about their fondness for the Russian leader. “Putin ain’t woke,” Bannon declared. “He’s anti-woke.” Prince replied, “The Russian people still know which bathroom to use.” Bannon countered, “How many genders are there in Russia?” Two, Prince answered. “They don’t have the pride flags,” Bannon said.

On the day of the invasion, Bannon echoed Putin’s propaganda, telling his listeners and viewers, “Ukraine’s not even a country. It’s kind of a concept.” He added, “It’s just a corrupt area where the Clintons have turned into a colony where you can steal money out of.” Carlson pushed the same Putin-­friendly talking point: “Ukraine is not a democracy. It has never been a democracy in its history, and it’s not now. It is a client state of the Biden administration.” No surprise, his remarks were promoted on Russian state television. (Several days earlier, Putin had called Ukraine a “puppet” of the United States.)

At the Conservative Political Action Conference underway at this time, Lauren Witzke, a conservative media personality, QAnoner, and recently failed GOP candidate for the US Senate in Delaware, summed it up: “Here’s the deal. Russia is a Christian nationalist nation. They’re actually Russian Orthodox…I identify more with Putin’s Christian values than I do with Joe Biden.”

On February 24, 2022, Putin launched extensive air strikes and a ground invasion against Ukraine from the north, south, and east. His goal was to decapitate the Ukrainian government and conquer the country within ten days, but Ukrainian forces mounted a stiff resistance. As Russia pummeled civilian targets, both sides hunkered down for what would become a long, bloody, and costly conflict.

Despite the death and destruction caused by Putin, prominent conservatives and Trumpers defended, justified, or supported the Russian assault.

At CPAC, Trump decried the Russian attack as “appalling” and “an outrage and an atrocity,” and he insisted it would not have happened if he had been in the White House. But he also called Putin “smart” and said the Russian leader was “playing Biden like a drum.” At a competing conference in Florida of white nationalists—­which was addressed by Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Georgia Republican—­Nick Fuentes, a white supremacist, Holocaust denier, and Hitler fan boy, solicited applause for Russia’s invasion and whipped up the crowd to chant, “Putin! Putin! Putin!”

Despite the death and destruction caused by Putin, prominent conservatives and Trumpers defended, justified, or supported the Russian assault. Religious right leader Pat Robertson emerged from retirement to declare that Putin “is being compelled by God” to invade Ukraine. Arizona state Sen. Wendy Rogers, a Republican and fanatical 2020 election denier, slammed Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy as “a globalist puppet for Soros and the Clintons.” (Globalist was a common code word used by antisemites to disparage Jews.) Rep. Madison Cawthorn, a North Carolina Republican, remarked, “Remember that Zelenskyy is a thug. Remember that the Ukrainian government is incredibly corrupt and is incredibly evil and has been pushing woke ideologies.”

Greene signal-­boosted one of Putin’s most noxious talking points: Ukraine was run by Nazis, and the war had been initiated to rescue the Ukrainian people from these fascists. (This was a bonkers assertion, especially since Zelenskyy was Jewish.) She tweeted, “NATO has been supplying the neo­Nazis in Ukraine with powerful weapons and extensive training on how to use them. What the hell is going on with these #NATONazis?” In an interview, she was a cheerleader for Putin: “There is no win for Ukraine here. Russia is being very successful in their invasion.”

Non-­MAGA remnants in the GOP were sticking with Ukraine. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell dismissed Cawthorn and Greene as “a few lonely voices off to the side,” and told CBS News, “The vast majority of the Republican Party writ large, both in the Congress and across the country, are totally behind the Ukrainians.” But much of MAGA was lost. Appearing on the podcast of a white supremacist and Holocaust denier, Witzke declared, “Everybody affiliated or standing with Ukraine is either transgender, a Satanist, or a straight-­up Nazi.”

I hope that whets your appetite for How Russia Won_. You can learn more about the book or order it_ here. And you can find it wherever you purchase books.

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With EPA’s Latest Move, Trump Topples the Last Pillar of Biden’s Climate Legacy

Coal is by far the dirtiest of the world’s major energy sources. It accounts for almost half of the cumulative global carbon emissions since the industrial era began—as much as oil and natural gas combined. And it generates much more carbon dioxide per unit of energy than either oil or gas. Most climate experts agree that phasing out coal power is the single biggest change the world could make to slow down global warming.

For almost 20 years, the United States has whipsawed on the question of whether the federal government should try to speed up that phaseout. After Barack Obama failed to push a carbon tax through Congress, his administration drafted the “Clean Power Plan,” which would have forced electric utilities to cut their emissions by shifting away from coal. President Donald Trump repealed that rule during his first term, and the Supreme Court later said that the president could not unilaterally force utilities to give up the fuel.

“The Obama and Biden administrations implemented a war on coal to destroy reliable and affordable energy,” said EPA chief Lee Zeldin.

Instead of forcing utilities to abandon coal, the Biden administration tried to work around the Supreme Court ruling in its 2024 rule by giving utilities a choice. They could either retire their coal plants sometime in the 2030s, or they could equip them with new machines that would capture almost all the carbon dioxide that would come out of their smokestacks. The result either way would be a significant drop in carbon emissions from the power sector.

The Trump administration is now repealing that rule. The Environmental Protection Agency announced on Monday that it plans to wipe away all federal regulations for carbon emissions from the electricity sector, essentially allowing utilities to warm the Earth as much as they want. The agency used the same justification as it did in its repeal of climate regulations on motor vehicles earlier this year, arguing that the science of climate change was uncertain and that the repeal would save consumers money on power bills.

“For over 15 years, the Obama and Biden administrations implemented a war on coal to destroy reliable and affordable energy,” said Trump’s EPA chief Lee Zeldin at an international energy summit in Texas. “We are working to go even further so that American energy can be fully unleashed. Realizing the full potential of American energy means more jobs, lower prices, and a more prosperous America.”

This repeal deals a significant blow to the federal government’s efforts to force the power sector away from coal. The whiplash between Democratic and Republican administrations has been so frequent and so severe that neither the Obama nor the Biden rules have done much to speed the decarbonization of the power sector, especially when compared to other federal efforts like the Inflation Reduction Act subsidies for solar and wind.

“The reason to have a target is that it sends a clear signal to decision-makers in companies,” said Kenneth Gillingham, a professor of environmental economics at Yale University and an economic adviser to the Obama administration, where he helped draft the Clean Power Plan. “If you’re on the fence between choosing two things, you might as well choose the one that’s in line with the target. That’s been undermined. There has to be some teeth behind it.”

Even though the Obama and Biden rules never took effect, coal power has still been plummeting in the United States over the past 20 years. That’s thanks to the shale fracking boom, which lowered the cost of natural gas and made it cheap for utilities to replace their coal plants with gas plants. When burned, natural gas does warm the Earth, but slower than coal, and the shift has caused overall power sector emissions to fall in the US by almost half.

The repeal of the Biden rule will likely delay that phaseout and will have significant effects for the nation’s public health. Coal plants also release harmful toxins like mercury and particulate matter, leading to thousands of premature deaths around the world. Inasmuch as the Biden rule would have sped up coal closures, it would also have prevented around $370 billion in health damages from climate change and air pollution. The Biden administration predicted that in 2035, the rule would have prevented hundreds of thousands of asthma flare-ups, hundreds of emergency room visits, and more than 1,200 premature deaths.

The rapid growth in power demand from data centers has led to a resurgence in demand for coal plants.

The artificial intelligence boom is also slowing the phaseout of coal. The Biden administration drafted its 2024 rule at a time when coal was expected to keep shrinking on its own; the rule projected a “continued decline in projected coal-fired steam generating unit capacity as well as a steady decline in annual operation of those [plants] that remain online,” driven largely by “eroding economic opportunities for coal-fired steam generating units to operate.”

Now the rapid growth in power demand from data centers has led to a resurgence in demand for coal plants, and has led many utilities to push out the retirement date for their legacy coal assets. For coal power plants that sell into wholesale markets like the Midwest and the mid-Atlantic, high prices have made it worthwhile to stay online. (The Trump administration has also ordered some coal plants to stay online past their planned retirements, a move that a federal court found to be unlawful earlier this month.)

A case in point is Southern Company, the massive utility that produces energy for states including Georgia and Mississippi. Under the Biden administration, the utility had planned to retire its major Mississippi coal plant by 2028, but Southern announced last year that data centers would necessitate keeping it online well into the 2030s. The company’s previous efforts to install carbon capture at its coal units, meanwhile, have ended in failure. Environmental groups have criticized these decisions and argued that AI demand is inflated, but the Trump administration is happy to give utilities leeway to keep coal online.

The next president who seeks to take action on climate change will face much the same coal challenge that Obama did: how to speed up the phaseout of a fuel that is declining, but not dying? Gillingham argues that the short-term boost provided by Trump and the data center boom may not help rescue the coal fleet. The nation’s coal plants are only getting older, and many utilities will choose to replace them with gas or other fuels rather than repair them. The next president may still need the regulatory “stick,” but by that time the sector may be on its last legs.

“We have more electricity demand than we did before, which is, on the margins, going to make it easier for a coal plant to stay on,” said Gillingham. “But the trend is pretty clear, and you can only fight markets so much.”

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Women Built MAHA. MAGA Bros Have Taken It Over.

Editor’s Note: When Robert F. Kennedy Jr. jumped on Donald Trump’s bandwagon in 2024, he brought with him the wellness-obsessed, vaccine-rejecting, food label-reading Make America Healthy Again voters who’ve been credited with helping Trump take back the White House. But there are signs that the MAHA–MAGA alliance is wearing thin, from squabbles over inaction to a tense standoff over regulating the herbicide glyphosate. In our MAHA and the Midterms series, a partnership between Mother Jones and the Food & Environment Reporting Network, we consider how MAHA is shaping the political landscape and upcoming elections.

This past February, as Super Bowl viewers chowed down on Buffalo wings and loaded nachos, they found themselves unexpectedly admonished. On their TV screens, in a black-and-white close-up, was former heavyweight champion and convicted rapist Mike Tyson, ripping his teeth through a carrot as though it were Evander Holyfield’s ear. “We’re the most powerful country in the world,” Tyson said. “And we have the most obese, fudgy people.” As he tore into an apple, white block script was superimposed over his face: “Processed Food Kills. Eat Real Food.”

The ad directed viewers to RealFood.gov, a website laying out the new food pyramid, a pet project of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. that literally flipped the previous model on its head: Now, whole grains are at the pointy bottom and protein, dairy, and fats get top billing. The ad was sponsored by the nonprofit MAHA Center, whose leader, publisher Tony Lyons, also co-founded MAHA pac. And it signaled a telling shift. This wasn’t your mother’s Make America Healthy Again (or Gwyneth Paltrow’s, for that matter). This was manly MAHA.

Much attention has been paid to the MAHA moms, and rightly so. Women have powered the movement, evangelizing for whole foods and raw milk on Instagram, urging President Donald Trump to appoint Kennedy to lead HHS, and protesting against food additives and agricultural chemicals, in particular glyphosate, found in the weed killer Roundup.

But it’s the movement’s men who have ascended to the highest levels of power. RFK Jr. is the most prominent, but the list also includes Dr. Mehmet Oz, administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services; Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, who is running the National Institutes of Health; and Dr. Marty Makary, who was commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration until he resigned earlier this year. And it’s not just in government. Health entrepreneur turned MAHA stalwart Calley Means is the man who suggested that Kennedy forge an alliance with Trump and remains an influential adviser to Kennedy at HHS. His sister, Casey, meanwhile, was a vaccine-skeptical doctor nominated for surgeon general—only to watch her prospects die in the Senate.

With the midterm elections approaching and MAHA voters increasingly dissatisfied with Trump, it’s worth asking: How exactly did a cause powered by women turn into one run by men? And will the women who built the MAHA movement ever revolt?

Calley Means spoke to a MAHA-friendly crowd at a news conference at the Health and Human Services Department last year.Andrew Harnik/Getty

MAHA is often characterized by its most scientifically questionable positions—opposition to vaccines and fluoride, a fondness for raw milk and beef tallow—but the truth is that it is a complex coalition. Surveys conducted by Politico suggest that the movement’s core priorities are what you might hear from any athleisure-clad shopper circling the outer perimeter of Whole Foods: fewer ultraprocessed foods, food dyes, forever chemicals, microplastics, and pesticides, and more physical movement.

“I believe if these women are ignored, we’re going to lose the midterms, and I believe we will lose 2028.”

Kennedy speaks all of these languages. His anti-vaccine activism gets the most press, but he has rallied against polluters and frequently inveighs against ultraprocessed Frankenfoods pushed on the public by corporations. In the lead-up to the 2024 election, food journalist Mark Bittman asked in The New York Times why Americans were hearing more about food from Trump than they were from Kamala Harris. The intersection of food, chemicals, chronic illness, and corporate power may not have been central for most voters. But it was a topic with significant social media reach, especially to the young, female, and politically disengaged—and that pulled many who might otherwise share a Democrat’s politics into Trump’s orbit.

Kelly Ryerson, a prominent MAHA leader who writes under the name “Glyphosate Girl,” came to the movement the way many women do: because of personal health problems that traditional medicine couldn’t solve. Attending a gluten sensitivity conference, she heard it suggested that the issue might not be the gluten itself, but rather the chemicals sprayed on American wheat. That started her down a glyphosate research rabbit hole and eventually, in 2018, to the San Francisco courtroom where Monsanto, the manufacturer of glyphosate, was being sued by a man claiming the herbicide caused his cancer. One of the lawyers on the case was RFK Jr.

“I’m politically independent,” Ryerson told me. “I feel that I really represent this massive group of women who have either their family member, their child, or they themselves have been struggling with some kind of chronic illness and are just fed up with the toxicity.” Ryerson, like other MAHA devotees, stuck with Kennedy even as he switched parties.

That came in the summer of 2024, as Kennedy’s own presidential campaign was lagging. When Trump was shot at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, Calley Means reportedly called Kennedy and “suggested that it might be a moment for unity—Mr. Trump had just narrowly escaped the same fate that had befallen Mr. Kennedy’s father and uncle,” according to The New York Times. By the end of August, Kennedy was out of the race and in Trump’s camp, and MAHA was an emergent force in American politics.

Ryerson, “Food Babe” Vani Hari, and other MAHA influencers supported the McDonald’s-eating Trump in large part because of his association with Kennedy. And, Ryerson says, while much of the MAHA movement’s true devotion was and is with Kennedy, its followers were smart enough to see that Trump’s idiosyncratic and unpredictable politics were a potential asset. “The thought behind Trump,” Ryerson said, “was that it was the only way forward with getting Kennedy into a role.” And she also believed that “the chemical industry has its grips so tightly on both parties that it’s like, well, we need someone that we might have a chance of him saying, ‘No, we’re done with that.’ And Trump is so volatile in many different ways, you don’t know which way he’s going to go.” Maybe, she thought, he would go hers.

Vani Hari, a blogger who goes by “Food Babe,” made a video during a rally outside the US Supreme Court, as justices heard oral arguments in Monsanto Company v. Durnell in April.Francis Chung/Politico/AP

Agriculture and public health advocate Kelly Ryerson, also known as Glyphosate Girl, pictured at an anti-glyphosate rally outside the Supreme Court in April, feels she represents “this massive group of women who have either their family member, their child, or they themselves have been struggling with some kind of chronic illness and are just fed up with the toxicity.”Francis Chung/Politico/AP

Spoiler alert: He hasn’t. Rather than forcing food and chemical companies to clean up their acts, the Trump administration’s senior health officials seem to be more preoccupied with the priorities of the manosphere. MAHA, says Monika McDermott, a professor of political science at Fordham University, “fits with the MAGA movement’s vision of the role that men play and the roles that women play. And so, yeah, women are figureheads and can do things about the family, but the experts are still the masculine figures.”

For expertise, they’ve turned to a smattering of “functional medicine” doctors (healthcare providers who focus on “root causes” of disease, like diet, exercise, and sleep), researchers, and activists, most of whom have podcasts or large social media followings, such as Dr. Mark Hyman and Calley Means. Before becoming an adviser to RFK Jr., Means co-founded a company called Truemed that helps consumers use tax-advantaged medical savings accounts, like HSAs and FSAs, to buy things like red-light therapy boxes, Meta glasses, and supplements. (Hyman is an investor in the company, which also sells his recommended supplements.)

The administration’s MAHA-adjacent decisions also have prioritized the interests of men. Take protein. Like anxieties about testosterone and “soy boys”—weak men supposedly feminized by eating too much tofu instead of red meat—the protein craze is as much about a robust male identity as it is nutrition.

The protein craze is as much about a robust male identity as it is nutrition.

“There’s been a steady drumroll of protein boosterism by characters in the manosphere who trade in ideas that masculinity is in decline and under attack,” says Samantha King, a professor in the School of Kinesiology and Health Studies at Queen’s University in Canada and co-author of Protein: The Making of a Nutritional Superstar. Joe Rogan, the megapopular podcaster whose endorsement of Trump was widely seen as boosting his support among young men, has complained that masculinity is unfairly vilified, while hawking protein supplements and talking about his own penchant for eating wild game. He went on a fully carnivore diet for a 30-day challenge, which resulted in “hellacious projectile doo-doo.” Popular manosphere figure Andrew Tate, who with his brother was fighting extradition to the United Kingdom for alleged rape and sex trafficking as of this writing, told Tucker Carlson in 2023 that “80 percent of my calories come from meat. I have 10 cups of coffee a day and three or four large cigars.” “Smoking is fantastic for your testosterone level,” he added. (The Tates have denied all charges filed against them.)

No one seems more dedicated to protein than RFK Jr. When he announced the inverted food pyramid earlier this year, he framed it as a triumphal end to the war on protein—a dog whistle, King said, for the war on men, and especially on the male manual worker. RFK Jr. claims to subsist almost exclusively on meat and fermented foods, a diet that has, according to The Wall Street Journal, been embraced by Vice President JD Vance, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, to no doubt pungent results. And let’s not forget the weird video that RFK Jr. made with Kid Rock, in which they both exercised shirtless in a sauna (Kennedy in jeans), before pounding milk in a hot tub.

Meanwhile, in the first year of Kennedy’s tenure, HHS announced the appointment of “five new agency leaders to advance MAHA goals.” Four of the five were men. The most prominent was Admiral Brian Christine, an “internationally recognized leader in men’s health” and the new assistant secretary for health at HHS.

As part of his mandate, Christine, a staunch anti-abortion Catholic, was responsible for overseeing the agency administering Title X, the federal family planning program that has traditionally funded contraception access for poor women across America. Earlier this year, HHS released radically revamped guidance for organizations applying for Title X grants. “Chronic disease” gets 14 mentions in the document; contraception gets one. Relatively little attention is given to helping women prevent unwanted pregnancy, the reason the Title X program was created in the first place. Much more is spent on male fertility concerns: testosterone levels, sperm counts and motility, avoiding pornography, and so on. In recent months, testosterone therapy has also become a new general HHS priority. In early September, The Washington Sun reported that the department had canceled more than half of the Office of Minority Health’s existing grants, focused on things like infant mortality and postpartum wellness, to instead prioritize programs devoted to exercise and the “root causes” of infertility, including erectile disfunction.

In recent months, testosterone therapy has become a new general HHS priority.

At the same time, the administration has been mostly unwilling to regulate Big Food and Big Ag—the MAHA moms’ main priority. After Trump appointed industry-friendly Lee Zeldin to run the Environmental Protection Agency, Zeldin immediately went on a deregulation spree, staffed the agency with former Big Ag and industry lobbyists, and appointed former industry representatives to oversee pesticide regulation. The EPA office once charged with research on toxic chemicals has been dismantled.

And then there is the administration’s actions related to glyphosate, long one of MAHA’s top targets. Earlier this year, Trump issued an executive order calling glyphosate critical for national security and urging production increases. In June, the Supreme Court sided with chemical giant Bayer, which acquired Monsanto in 2018, in a case related to its weed killer Roundup. Trump’s DOJ had advocated for the court to take on the case. On Forked, a food politics podcast, Ryerson called the administration’s role in the case “deeply, deeply devastating.”

Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. ate ice cream at the end of a news conference last year alongside former Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Martin Makary, who resigned in May. Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty

So where does all this leave the MAHA moms? Ryerson says that while MAHA men are largely the ones in the most powerful roles in government, women “are still dictating it from the grassroots,” and “if what we want isn’t happening, then they won’t win reelection.”

She, podcaster Alex Clark, and others have been warning Republicans that if they don’t show up for the women of MAHA, the women of MAHA may stop showing up for them. At the Turning Point USA Women’s Leadership Summit over the summer, Clark told a conservative interviewer, “I believe that we won 2024 because of these women; I believe if these women are ignored, we’re going to lose the midterms, and I believe we will lose 2028.”

Ryerson, for her part, said she’s still stunned that most Democrats in Congress haven’t jumped on these issues. One exception is Maine Rep. Chellie Pingree, who told The 19th: “I really don’t think that these are necessarily left or right. The questions around toxins in our food and food is medicine, and the opposition to Big Ag and big chemical companies is very universal.”

This dynamic—of women as foot soldiers while men take up command posts—is not unique to MAHA. The “wine moms” who powered Democratic victories in the suburbs for the last several election cycles, and the Black women who took on the lion’s share of the legwork of “souls to the polls” turnout machines, did most of the labor—and were often mocked instead of being credited. But they eventually translated that preparation into power: 43 percent of congressional Democrats are now female (for Republicans, it’s 15 percent); women account for nearly half of state Democratic legislators. Will MAHA’s largely female organizers and leaders take a similar path within the GOP—or will the Democratic Party convince them to defect?

Ryerson says that she continues to support Kennedy and that anecdotally, many MAHA women in her orbit believe he’s often hamstrung by the White House but still a force for good. And many Democrats are understandably hesitant to court followers of a movement they see as rife with dangerous quackery. But most of MAHA’s core issues—additives in food, microplastics, pesticides—used to be clearly Democratic issues. If Democrats were to back away from them now, Ryerson says, they’re leaving votes on the table.

MAHA voters, she says, are “up for grabs, and [politicians] should be battling it out to see who can propose the best exit out of this toxic world that we’re living in.”

This story was produced with the Food & Environment Reporting Network.

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Russia Targeted Past US Elections. Will It Meddle in the Midterms?

The 2016 election that put Donald Trump in the White House the first time was defined in many ways by the role of America’s longtime adversary Russia. Over the years, multiple investigations have concluded that Russia meddled in the election to boost Trump over Hillary Clinton and create political discord among voters. Trump, meanwhile, has repeatedly called the Russia investigations a “hoax.”

As the 2026 midterms approach, experts warn that Russia could interfere in US elections once again. Because as Mother Jones Washington bureau chief David Corn lays out in his new book, How Russia Won: Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, and the Fight for America, Russia has been waging a continuous campaign against the US.

“You have to wonder if Russia will be meddling yet again,” Corn tells host Al Letson, referring to the upcoming midterms. “And this time around, it’s different, because what Trump has done since he got back into the White House is to decimate all the government offices and agencies that would be looking for Russian interference and trying to counter it.”

On this week’s More To The Story, Corn talks about Russian President Vladimir Putin’s “twilight war” against the US and Western democracies, argues that the infamous Steele dossier ultimately helped Trump, and examines how the Trump White House has dismantled government agencies tasked with finding and fending off Russian disinformation campaigns.

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

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Kash Patel Again Denies Firing Iran Experts Before Iran War

In an oversight hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Tuesday, FBI Director Kash Patel did little to acknowledge the continuing fallout around the firing of agents for their role in investigating President Trump’s alleged mishandling of classified documents—even though they were experts in tracking Iranian threats.

Several outlets have reported that at least a dozen fired FBI counterintelligence staffers belonged to a unit that specializes in investigating potential danger from Iran. The firings took place just days before the Trump administration launched its military campaign against the country in February.

During the hearing, Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) referenced those reports in his questioning: “Do you think firing the president’s political opponents is more important than retaining the decades of experience and expertise monitoring intelligence threats from Iran?”

“The individuals you are referring to are not experts [on Iran],” the FBI director responded. “I think what’s most important is [to] not have a weaponized FBI, and I will endeavor every single day to make sure we have no one there that is doing that.”

Blumenthal pointed out that Patel’s firings in effect politicized and weaponized the FBI against its own employees—despite previous claims that he would not target agents for participating in investigations.

“How can you make those two statements consistent?” the senator asked.

“Simple. If you weaponize law enforcement, you don’t get to work at the FBI,” Patel said—a remark that doesn’t actually address the question.

BLUMENTHAL: They were fired bc they worked on the classified docs case involving Trump. Do you think firing president's political opponents is more important than retraining decades of experience & expertise monitoring threats from Iran?PATEL: What's most important is not having a weaponized FBI

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) 2026-09-15T15:08:54.147Z

In a May Senate hearing, Patel also denied, multiple times, the accuracy of reporting that Iran experts were dismissed just before the current war began. Replying to Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.), Patel added that the situation was the subject of ongoing litigation—three FBI agents who were fired filed a class-action suit in March alleging a retribution campaign for investigating Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election—and claimed that he could not discuss it further. He again rejected the validity of the reporting in a March House committee hearing.

Although not firing thatgroup Iran investigators wouldn’t mean the Trump administration would have avoided the current war—which has killed thousands of Iranian civilians, over a dozen US servicemembers, and included several deadly military operations in neighboring countries—or even maintained a ceasefire later on, it does, yet again, suggest that targeting the administration’s opponents remains a greater priority for the White House than ensuring the semblance of government function.

Whether there will be any actual accountability for the FBI’s conduct is another question—one that doesn’t seem to interest Patel.

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The EPA Would Rather Monitor Water for Abortion Pills than Pollution

With his characteristic deregulatory zeal, Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin announced before an audience of G20 energy ministers in oil-rich Houston, Texas, that his agency would eliminate climate pollution standards for fossil fuel-fired power plants. “For over 15 years, the Obama and Biden administrations implemented a war on coal to destroy reliable and affordable energy,” Zeldin said in an EPA press statement issued during the Houston meeting. “The Trump Administration has come in to protect American energy and to make sure you can afford to keep the lights on.”

This announcement was yet another example of the Trump administration’s eagerness to reinforce what Republicans have long considered a priority: freedom from government intrusion or regulation. But only a few days before Zeldin reassured energy executives that the government would no longer prioritize protecting public health, the EPA announced a new study that would test the country’s water supply for abortion medication, contraception, and hormones used in gender-affirming care, along with over 1,000 other medications and chemicals. “We have heard loud and clear that Americans are concerned about potential unknown pollutants lurking in their drinking water,” Zeldin wrote in the study press release.

“The Pro-Life Generation is finally being heard!”

The testing of abortion medication has been championed by anti-abortion groups for years, especially by Kristan Hawkins, the leader of Students for Life, who tweeted a video of herself receiving the news that the study was made public. In her post, she wrote:

“BREAKING: The EPA will now test water for abortion pill pollution!! The FDA has recklessly, negligently allowed chemical abortion pills on the market and deregulated them. They’ve killed millions of babies, harmed mothers, and polluted our water for 26 years. For the last year, we’ve been calling on President Trump’s EPA to find out what’s in our water. After more than three years of innovative water testing, a peer-reviewed research paper, and the introduction of legislation in states, the Pro-Life Generation is finally being heard!”

The EPA’s unrelated but tandem announcements reveal an agency that has fundamentally overhauled its policies toward environmental and human health in pursuit of the Trump administration’s “energy dominance” and “Make America Healthy Again” agendas. Rolling back power plant pollution standards will lead to higher emissions of the greenhouse gases driving Earth’s warming to deadlier levels, as well as increased levels of smog, mercury, and lead contamination, which can cause health problems.

Coal and natural gas-fueled power plants are the second-largest carbon polluter in the United States behind the transportation sector. Under the Biden administration, carbon pollution rules for power plant emissions standards would have reduced carbon emissions by 1.38 billion metric tons by 2047. The recently announced plan will repeal these Biden-era regulations and could prevent future administrations from curbing carbon emissions. First reported by Bloomberg News, the EPA’s latest move caps off a year and a half of the agency’s overhaul of federal climate policy. In February, the EPA rescinded similar climate vehicle standards and the 2009 endangerment finding, the landmark ruling that asserted greenhouse gases threaten human health.

Much to the dismay of anti-abortion activists, the number of abortions in the United States has actually increased since the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision, which overturned the constitutional right to an abortion. One reason for this has been access to abortion medication, the two-drug regimen of mifepristone and misoprostol that act to terminate pregnancies. This has activated the anti-abortion movement to find new approaches to ending the procedure, and one of them has been environmental: focusing on the alleged presence of these medications in the water supply.

After Republican lawmakers urged the EPA to take up the water study in June, Nathan Donley, the environmental health science director at the Center for Biological Diversity, told The 19th that, compared to other pharmaceuticals, mifepristone is taken as a one-time dose by a small portion of the population. “There are legitimate water quality threats that we need to attack and rectify in a regulatory manner,” Donley said. “And then there are things that are out in left field that just distract people.”

Meanwhile, monitoring the water supply—which Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. wrote will “give Americans the truth about what is in their water”—may actually co-opt environmental policy to pursue anti-abortion policy. “I am deeply concerned,” Betsy Southerland, a former career scientist in EPA’s Office of Water, told Politico. “If there is any detectable level of mifepristone or its metabolites, the anti-abortion groups will scream that we are unknowingly aborting fetuses by drinking public tap water.”

According to Politico, the EPA insists the study will only determine if a chemical is present in the water supply, not its concentration. But pro-choice activists caution that the study could still pave the way for abortion access restrictions. “If the test finds any trace of abortion pills, conservatives will use it to legitimize their new legal front in the war on reproductive rights,” wrote activist and writer Jessica Valenti on her Substack, Abortion, Every Day. “The cruelty really is the point here, not science or health.”

As for the EPA’s other effort? Environmental groups are already planning their legal challenges to the EPA’s latest climate policy rollback. “The Trump administration is handing the fossil fuel industry a license to keep polluting,” Holly Bender, chief program officer for the Sierra Club, told The Guardian. “This is full-throated climate denial while the climate crisis happens in real time and a shocking betrayal of the American public.”

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