The Gospel of High Yields: Inside Tim Tebow’s Favorite Wealth Seminar

This story was produced in partnership with the Pablo Torre Finds Out podcast.

In a cavernous arena in suburban Atlanta one warm day last May, I arrived at 9:00 a.m. with thousands of others to see former NFL quarterback Tim Tebow—not playing football, but as the keynote speaker at a daylong event about faith and business. By the time Tebow took the stage, a racially and generationally diverse group of thousands of Christians from metro Atlanta had been sitting in the chilly, dark arena for eight hours, swaying to worship music, laughing at Christian comedians’ wholesome jokes, and listening to tear-jerking testimonials of faith-transformed lives. It had been a long and packed day, but you wouldn’t have known it from the crowd’s rapt attention as Tebow urged us to follow “the plan that he has for you, the good works that he has in store for each and every one of you. And then when the king says go, would we just say yes?”

What exactly Tebow intended the crowd to say yes to wasn’t clear. But earlier in the day, many of them had said yes to something far less metaphysical: a three-day seminar of classes on stock market and real estate investing, for the low price of $97.

As athletes go, they don’t get much more wholesome than Tim Tebow. The 39-year-old retired NFL quarterback has had a legendary career: In 2007, he became the first sophomore to win the prestigious Heisman Trophy; he then went on to lead the Denver Broncos and defeat the Pittsburgh Steelers in the playoffs, but missed the opportunity to become AFC champs in 2011 against Tom Brady’s New England Patriots. Though the latter part of his career fizzled—after underperforming for the New York Jets he shifted sports and embarked on a lackluster stint in minor league baseball while also hosting on ESPN—he remained in the spotlight largely because of his devout Christian faith. So frequently did he drop to one knee on the field that the move became known as “Tebowing.” He made frequent appearances on Christian media outlets, and in 2010 he starred with his mother in an anti-abortion Super Bowl ad sponsored by the right wing faith advocacy group Focus on the Family.

Tebow’s piety is more than just praying for a touchdown—he has used his fame and wealth for good works all over the world. Through the Tim Tebow Foundation, founded in 2010, he has helped orphans overseas, put on events for special-needs children, and worked to combat human trafficking. God “sent his son in the greatest love story rescue mission of all time because that’s how much he values people,” he said an appearance on Fox & Friends last year. “We get to care for people and we get to value them wherever they’re at, and that changes everything.”

In the last few years, one expression of Tebow’s love for others has included regular speaking gigs at Life Surge, the company sponsoring the event I attended. For as little as $20, attendees get a full day of Christian celebrity speakers, uplifting preaching, worship music, and advice they are told will transform their finances. Throughout the day, members of the audience are offered opportunities to enroll in three days of “impact classes” for $97. Those who attend then have the chance to enroll in “SurgeU”—a series of courses promising to “surge your resources and influence through real estate and trade—for Kingdom impact.” SurgeU doesn’t come cheap: Packages range from about $10,000 to $40,000. Should you want to enroll but lack the cash, Life Surge connects you with a third-party lender.

Founded in 2020, Life Surge hosts about 30 one-day events a year in locations all over the country. In 2025, according to Life Surge, 117,000 people attended one-day events. The model is clearly successful, albeit not unique; many other companies offer motivational seminars leading to pricey financial classes. What makes Life Surge stand out is its Christian messaging. The company emphasizes the concept of “kingdom impact.” Basically, the more money you make, the more good works you can do, whether through tithing or Christian charity.

The company emphasizes the concept of “kingdom impact.” Basically, the more money you make, the more good works you can do, whether through tithing or Christian charity.

Key to this model are the one-day events—and the big draw for those events is the star-studded speaker program. Tebow isn’t the only athlete who has spoken at Life Surge; the company has an impressive roster, including all-time greats like the NBA’s Magic Johnson, and the NFL’s Joe Montana. On the day I attended, other speakers included former ESPN host Sage Steele, comedian Jeff Foxworthy, and Christian twin real estate influencers the Benham Brothers (whose HGTV show was canceled before it even aired after David Benham’s homophobic remarks surfaced). Life Surge spokesperson Richard Lorenzen declined to disclose how much Life Surge pays its speakers, but Athlete Speakers, a speakers’ bureau, estimates that for the biggest names—including Tebow—feescan be as high as $100,000 per appearance. In 2024 and 2025, Tebow spoke at 10 Life Surge events per year, and in 2026, he’s on track to have spoken at 20 events by year’s end—putting his estimated potential total earnings so far in the neighborhood of $2-$4 million from Life Surge alone.

Yet despite its celebrity lineup, customer feedback about Life Surge is decidedly mixed. On Google reviews, out of a possible 5 stars the company has 4.8, with satisfied customers gushing about the inspiring speakers and helpful financial advice. “One of the best events I have been to,” wrote one. “Worship sessions were amazing. Had a life changing experience. Learned so much and the opportunities offered for continued learning was great. 10/10 Highly Recommend.” Another enthused, “This was an Awesome event for my life! I highly recommend going if you get the chance. Knowledge, worship, inspiration and guidance you can use today!”

“This was an Awesome event for my life! I highly recommend going if you get the chance. Knowledge, worship, inspiration and guidance you can use today!”

But elsewhere—in Reddit threads, on a Life Surge Complaints FB group with 1,300 members, and in complaints to the Federal Trade Commission and the Better Business Bureau—hundreds of attendees swap stories of high-pressure sales tactics infused with Christian messaging. “We believed that it would be a Christian-based day of like minded business people,” wrote an attendee in a complaint to the FTC from earlier this year. “We did not expect a bait and switch and the pressure to purchase investing classes. We are very disappointed but also concerned by the amount of people bought into this.” Another complaint read, “I am so devastated that Christians like Tim Tebow made me trust in something that has taken so much money from me. This is evil, especially because I’m disabled on a limited income.”

In a lengthy response (PDF) to our questions, Life Surge’s Richard Lorenzen said the company “does not train its representatives to pressure customers into borrowing or taking on debt they cannot afford.” Indeed, throughout the event that I attended, disclaimers periodically appeared on the screens behind the speakers, warning the crowd that investing in Life Surge products carried risk. “Any income or earnings shared examples are not intended to represent typical or guaranteed results for the average customer,” one said. “Results vary widely, and you should assume that the average person may earn little to no money or could potentially lose money.” But these disclaimers were hard to read from where I was sitting, and they appeared so briefly that it took me several tries to snap photos of them with my phone.

Lorenzen also emphasized that the company “does not condone using a person’s religious faith, fear, or spiritual beliefs to pressure that individual into purchasing a product”—yet I spoke to about a dozen Life Surge customers and current and former employees who felt uneasy about the company’s invoking Christianity in their promotion of investment courses. “I see many of these strong Christian artists and strong Christian people that are up there speaking at the Life Serve conferences,” Karen Neal, a 61-year-old former Life Surge customer, told me. “And it’s like, do they know what’s happening to some of these people that are getting into this?”

A Life Surge employee I spoke with, who requested anonymity because of job security concerns, wondered the same thing: Why would Christian celebrities lend their brand to the company at all? “You’ve heard all about the people who are losing thousands and thousands of dollars and just are being asked to cash in their 401Ks and piggyback credit cards in order to pay for these classes,” the employee said. “It just doesn’t seem like something a good Christian motivational speaker or pastor would want to be a part of.”

Neither Tebow nor any other celebrity speaker we reached out to responded to our request for comment, and Lorenzen added that Life Surge “does not ask its headline speakers to promote or endorse Impact Classes or advanced training programs.” Yet in a recording from a 2023 Life Surge event shared with Mother Jones, Tebow urged the crowd to sign up for classes. “So I know that many of you today have probably signed up for classes, have probably signed up to take the next step,” he said. “I want to encourage you to finish that, to follow through on that commitment, to finish strong.”

Tim Tebow kneels and prays before the start of an NFL football game in 2011.Joe Mahoney/AP

Karen Neal is far from alone. In addition to the hundreds of negative reviews I read online and in the FTC complaints, I spoke to seven Life Surge customers who said they had bad experiences; their recollections mirrored the online reviews I had read. One of them was Cathy Luebke, who in 2024 attended a Life Surge event with her husband in Carmel, Indiana. There, she said, the couple was encouraged by a stock market investment demonstration. “They brought people up, and it was this simple method,” Luebke recalled. It looked “super easy, like anybody could do that. So, we kind of talked about it, and it was like, well, maybe it’d be a good idea.”

The couple decided to take the next step and signed up for the three-day event, held a few weeks later about an hour away. Luebke remembers the counselors urging attendees to buy into the courses that weekend, saying they were offering the best price. She and her husband noticed the sales pitch, but the Christian messages and the presence of trustworthy celebrities reassured them. “My husband and I are very strong Christians, so when you see a product like this, you’re like, ‘well, all right, it’s a hard sell, but, you know, they’re telling us all the good stuff,'” she told me. They decided to buy a $20,000 package of investment courses. Then, after consulting with one of the in-house financial counselors with whom they had been paired at the three-day class, they borrowed roughly $40,000 on interest-free credit cards so they would have enough money to invest—thus enabling them to put into practice the technique they would be learning. “Once you get into this stock trading,” Luebke remembers the counselors assuring her, “you can have this paid off in a year.”

“My husband and I are very strong Christians, so when you see a product like this, you’re like, ‘well, all right, it’s a hard sell, but, you know, they’re telling us all the good stuff.'”

After several weeks of hours-long courses, it was clear that the reality was far more time-consuming and complicated than the simple demonstration on stage had suggested. “I don’t think I ever expected an easy button,” she told me, “but I never knew the learning curve would have been that hard.” The Luebkes made no money in the stock market. Instead, they ended up taking out a home equity loan to pay off the remaining $20,000 on credit cards whose interest rates had soared to a variable rate of about 29 percent after the initial promotion had expired.

Neal’s recollections followed a similar arc. She recalled being encouraged to use the equity in her home to pay for a $13,000 SurgeU real estate course package. “We did take out a line of credit on our house, and we are having to use it right now to pay back the freaking credit card that we got with them,” she said. She and her husband never made any money in real estate—in part because they didn’t have the capital to buy properties. She complained to the company that she found the courses confusing and hadn’t made any money, and eventually, she said, Life Surge offered her a partial refund of about $5,000. Still, the whole endeavor, she told me, was “about a $15,000 mistake.” She takes most of the responsibility for not researching the program beforehand. But she also feels that the sales pressure deprived her and her husband of the “opportunity to go home, really pray about this, and seek God’s wisdom. And they don’t give you that.”

The lack of time to deliberate was a recurring theme. One former attendee, who didn’t want her name used, said she remembered a Life Surge counselor telling her that the devil was responsible for her doubts about buying the investment courses. When asked about this, Lorenzen wrote that “suggesting that someone’s decision not to purchase a Life Surge program is attributable to the devil would be absolutely unacceptable and contrary to the company’s policies, guidelines, and training.”

The five current and former employees I spoke with confirmed the pattern: Despite the company’s guidelines discouraging high-pressures sales and the use of faith, Life Surge staffers sometimes oversold the ease of the program and invoked Christianity to further persuade attendees to buy expensive packages. “It gets people thinking, if they can do it with no experience, I can do it,” the employee said. “I have this amount in my 401K at work, or I have this much in the bank. Why don’t I just sign up for these classes? And, you know, it’s for God’s kingdom.”

Former football quarterback Tim Tebow joins guests during a celebration of the 2025 NCAA men’s basketball Champion Florida Gators in the East Room of the White House in 2025.Chip Somodevilla/Getty

To understand Life Surge, it’s helpful to know about the history of its founder, Joe Johnson. He’s a serial entrepreneur who has been running variations on this business for decades—and sometimes encountering some difficulties along the way.

In the early 2000s, Johnson became involved in the leadership team of a motivational seminar company called Get Motivated which, like Life Surge, combined Christian messaging, pricy stock market and real estate investment courses, and celebrity speakers, including Rudy Giuliani, Colin Powell, and Laura Bush. In 2011, Johnson bought the company with the help of a $12 million loan from a student, Amy Wolfe, who had enrolled in the seminars—whom he never repaid, according to court documents (PDF).Meanwhile, in 2012, the Washington Speakers Bureau sued Get Motivated because it had failed to pay some of its speakers—to the tune of a combined $1.7 million. Get Motivated later struggled, Johnson defaulted on the loan, and the company folded. Lorenzen noted that Johnson and Wolfe have since reconciled, and that Life Surge “was developed years later by a much broader team, built around a distinctly Christian mission from the outset, and was not an evolution or rebrand of Get Motivated’s model.” Yet the formats of the two companies are almost identical: one-day motivational events, three-day investment courses, and training programs that can potentially cost tens of thousands of dollars.

Get Motivated was not the only one of Johnson’s projects that encountered legal problems. In 2013, he founded a company called Welfont Group, which last year became the target of a Department of Justice lawsuit over its “abusive” practices. According to the complaint, the company recruited property owners to sell real estate—a former assisted living facility and an industrial site, for example. Welfont would then sell these properties to charities (including one that Johnson founded) at bargain sale prices. After soliciting inflated property appraisals—which, the DOJ alleges, routinely quoted Johnson’s own marketing materials verbatim—he found charities to purchase the property at the low price, which would enable property sellers to take a charitable deduction based on the difference between the discounted sale price and the appraised value. The lawsuit accuses Johnson of making “as many as 190 abusive bargain sale transactions” resulting in tax losses of more than $46 million.”

Lorenzen noted that Johnson denied the government’s allegations, maintaining that “neither Welfont nor Welfont’s clients are responsible for providing the necessary support, since Welfont’s clients were not the beneficiaries of any tax deductions.” Ultimately the DOJ offered Johnson a settlement with no monetary damages or civil penalties and no admission of wrongdoing, though as part of the settlement Johnson agreed to an injunction that prohibited him from making these bargain sales in the future.

Another important influence on Life Surge appears to have been an investment education company called Online Trading Academy, where three top Life Surge executives—although not Johnson—previously worked. According to a 2020 complaint for permanent injunction filed against Online Trading Academy by the Federal Trade Commission, the company “routinely claimed that consumers who purchase OTA training programs can quickly attain proficiency in OTA’s strategy and deploy it to earn substantial income, regardless of their background and prior experience.” The FTC required the company’s founder and other executives to pay between $5 and $9.7 million, and to offer debt forgiveness to more than 31,000 consumers who purchased its training programs. The settlement also imposed a $362 million monetary judgment, though much of it was suspended because the defendants were unable to pay.

One of Life Surge’s most visible former Online Trading Academy employees is Steven Champa, who leads the presentations about SurgeU’s stock market classes. From 2009-2020, Champa served as the chief revenue officer and owner of the Atlanta franchise of Online Training Academy, an entity that wasn’t involved in the FTC complaint. Neither Champa nor Life Surge’s other Online Trading Academy alums were named in the FTC complaint. Champa describes himself on LinkedIn as “Disruptor. Follower of Jesus. Life Surge Main Stage Presenter. Keynote Speaker. National Radio Show Host. Stock Options Expert. Sales Trainer. Business Credit Guru. Culture Specialist.”

In Atlanta, Champa, a confident man in late middle age who wore a sports coat and spoke with a light Boston accent, strode back and forth across the stage, alternating between self-deprecating jokes and heartfelt testimony.

After thanking God for “this amazing day, incredible worship, awesome presenters,” Champa described how, when he was 40 years old and a penniless house framer, he found Jesus and learned investment tips from a guy he met at church. But it wasn’t until he started tithing 10 percent of his meager income that he struck it rich. “I go back to that date—that specific date when I threw that tithe check in the basket at church—and I can show you a timeline of financial miracles after financial miracles after financial miracles start happening in my life,” he said. “I promise, it was amazing to live through!” God, he said, was “giving us massive abundance and success, all because we honored him and we learned a skill that I never would have thought I could possibly learn. And I’m excited, because this morning…I’m able to equip you. I’m going to introduce you to how the markets work in a very simple way, so that you can start to utilize some of the additional resources for kingdom impact!”

“I want you to realize that learning to manage your own money is a skill set—that you can do it a few hours a month and not have to pay any of those fees to Wall Street. Keep all those fees in your own account and then utilize those resources for kingdom impact.”

Before imparting these tips, though, Champa warned the crowd about the dangers of 401Ks, which he said only lined the pockets of Wall Street fund managers. “The biggest lie that Wall Street has you convinced of is that you’re not smart enough to handle your own money,” he said. “I want you to realize that learning to manage your own money is a skill set—that you can do it a few hours a month and not have to pay any of those fees to Wall Street. Keep all those fees in your own account and then utilize those resources for kingdom impact.”

But how? Champa solicited volunteers from the audience to show just how easy Life Surge’s stock market method was. Gesturing to a line graph ticking up on the big screen behind the volunteers, he explained that the line represented the value of certain stocks. When the line entered the area labeled “demand zone,” they should buy; when it reached the “supply zone,” they should sell. The demonstration moved quickly, taking the volunteers through a few small losses and larger profits. When it was over, Champa announced that if it had been a real trading session, the volunteers would have made a net profit of $61,841 on a $100,000 investment. “What do you think of that?” he asked the audience. “Isn’t that awesome?” The crowd clapped and whooped. As a reward for their participation the volunteers would attend the three-day classes free of charge.

For everyone else, Life Surge was offering a special deal: $97 for the three-day session—which happened to be the same package and price the crowd had been saying yes to since that morning. “Life Surge put together a very special discounted tuition opportunity, but because it’s such limited venue size, if you want to take advantage of it, you need to do it now,” Champa said. “Ladies and gentlemen, it’s time to move!”

The crowd hummed. All around me, I could see people conferring with each other about whether to sign up. A big group from my section rushed to the sign-up tables en masse. Soon, there were lines to purchase the classes.

Lorenzen emphasized that the company doesn’t claim that attendees of the one-day or three-day events will get rich. “Investing, whether in real estate or the stock market, is a skill set built over time, and Life Surge doesn’t claim otherwise,” he wrote. The events and impact classes “are intentionally built as a starting point: attendees leave with a range of investing strategies, taught by experienced investors, and a foundation to build on.”

“Investing, whether in real estate or the stock market, is a skill set built over time, and Life Surge doesn’t claim otherwise.”

The attendees at the event I attended seemed eager to get started on that journey. Not only did most of my section rush to the tables that the staff had set up to sign up for the three-day courses, later in the day, after the presentation about the Life Surge real estate courses—in which students learn skills like how to find cheap properties to sell to investors—more of them went to the tables.

By the time Tebow spoke at the end of the day, almost everyone in my section had signed up for the classes. As Tebow wrapped up his speech, the worship music swelled as if we were attending a religious service and the preacher was reaching the crescendo of his sermon. His cadence quickened, and he began to shout. “You might have no idea what he is doing, but if you were just willing to humble yourself, get in God’s word, and to say yes when he prompts you—just say yes!” he said. “You have no idea what God will do.”

Read Life Surge’s full statement here.

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What World Is Melania Living In?

First Lady Melania Trump appeared on Fox and Friends on Wednesday to defend her husband’s second term despite his abysmal approval rating stemming, in part, from Americans’ anger at the state of the economy and Trump’s war with Iran.

“He works nonstop,” Melania told the hosts. “He has the most energy than anybody. He’s, from morning to evening, nonstop working.”

“That’s what we see. Definitely under-appreciated. Absolutely,” the Fox hosts agreed.

But most of the country seems to be seeing something else. In July, New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand pressed Defense Secretary Hegseth on why he was requesting more money for a war that Congress hasn’t approved of.

“So you’re essentially saying you’re asking for literally $1.5 trillion for a war that President Trump said he already won?”

A recent CNN poll shows that Trump is losing support from independents, with approval ratings hitting historic lows.

“Look at his net approval rating now with pure Independents. It’s -71 points. I mean, these are the deep depths of the ocean. You never see numbers like these.”

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As Trump Banned News Outlets, His Own Media Company’s Stock Shot Up

Something strange occurred recently: The stock price of Donald Trump’s beleaguered media company shot up.

What happened? While the cause isn’t entirely clear, the price spike does seem to correspond to the president’s announcement that he was banning three mainstream media outlets—CNN, MSNOW, and _Politico—_from the White House. It’s difficult to pinpoint exactly why a stock moves, and Trump Media and Technology Group’s price has been volatile since the company went public in March 2024. But Trump has long touted Truth Social—which is TMTG’s core product—as his major tool to reach the American people directly, without any filtering from legacy media giants. Not surprisingly, Trump first announced his ban of MSNOW, CNN, and Politico on Truth Social.

At the time of that announcement Friday afternoon, the TMTG’s stock price was hovering around $8.84, and that’s about where it was when markets closed for the weekend an hour later. Early Monday morning, before the market opened, Trump continued his Truth Social-based assault on White House reporters, insisting that he wasn’t attacking the free press and was instead going after the “FAKE NEWS, something that has grown like Cancer…and must be stopped, NOW!”

When the market bell rang shortly after, TMTG rose 21 cents, or about 2.3 percent. Around 10 a.m., the remaining television networks in the White House press pool announced that they would be refusing to provide live coverage of Trump’s events until he unbanned their colleagues. TMTG began rising again. By Tuesday evening, it reached a peak of $9.40, the highest it had been in weeks.

Trump is the largest TMTG shareholder, with an estimated 114 million shares. So the price jump early this week briefly represented a theoretical $64 million boost to the value of the president’s holding. While the stock price has started to settle back down again—it’s still slightly over $9—it seems likely the jolt was related to Trump’s attacks on independent outlets. After all, there has been no other obvious news in the past week that might explain the stock’s fluctuation. There rarely is, in fact, much good news for the company, which might explain why its stock has slid from a high of $79.38 back in March 2024 to its current price, a drop of more than 88 percent.

Much of the latest news for the company has been grim. Last month, for instance, an independent web traffic monitoring company estimated that Truth Social has experienced massive declines in traffic since 2025, arguably matching the declining popularity of the platform’s most notable user, Trump himself. That decline in traffic was partnered with news that in the second quarter of 2026, the company lost an estimated $238 million. That loss was largely due to the company’s heavy investment in bitcoin, an attempted pivot after it became clear that Truth Social’s ad revenue was unlikely to ever be much of an earner.

One potential bright spot for the company was the announcement that it would be selling API access—essentially nearly immediate access to its users’ Truth Social posts—for $100,000 a month. It’s a service primarily targeting high-speed traders, likely to help them make fast trades when Trump announces market-moving news from his account.

But even that isn’t a sure hit. The company says at least 10 customers have signed up—welcome revenue, but still a fraction of the billions earned by social media rivals like Meta and Elon Musk’s X. And on Monday, the city of San Francisco filed a lawsuit asking California state courts to block the API scheme, claiming it violates a number of statutes designed to prevent insider trading. That lawsuit joins another suit, filed in federal court last month, which claims the service violates the First and Fifth Amendments and amounts to selling access.

In response to the boycott by major television outlets, the White House announced on Monday that it was launching its own streaming service to provide access to Trump’s public appearances: TrumpTV. But notably, the service won’t be hosted on TMTG’s own video streaming service, Truth+, but will instead appear on YouTube.

Missed President Trump's speech at the UN? Missed the historic Greenland deal signing?

Tune in to TRUMP TV at 12:05 PM EST to watch in full.

https://t.co/imdxRD3HOx pic.twitter.com/spwhRyAivz

— The White House (@WhiteHouse) September 22, 2026

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ICE Wiped Thousands of People From Its Database. Families Are Paying the Price.

On September 17, immigration attorney Rachel Marandett went looking for a man held by ICE in the agency’s detainee locator.

Searching his name returned zero results—and Marandett, an attorney with the American Friends Service Committee, began to worry he’d been deported without anyone noticing.

“He was missing, and I panicked,” Marandett said. “I sent a frantic email.”

Through other channels, she was eventually able to learn that he had not been sent out of the country. In fact, he hadn’t been moved at all. His name was just missing.

That man is one of thousands of detained immigrants with “Final Orders of Removal” whose records have been hidden or deleted from ICE’s tracking system, leaving families and lawyers unable to locate them.

As the Associated Press reported on Monday, those records began to vanish September 15. Thousands of people in ICE custody are likely affected.

ICE disputes the claim. “ICE does not ‘disappear’ people. This is a ridiculous lie that the media is peddling to demonize ICE law enforcement,” an ICE representative told Mother Jones via email. “Additionally, Illegal [sic] aliens in detention have opportunities to communicate with their family members and lawyers.”

“This puts a wall between attorneys and their clients, and produces tremendous anxiety for families.”

But that communication can’t happen unless family members and lawyers know where the person is being held. And obstacles to communication can have life-altering consequences—particularly for those whose orders of removal have been issued in absentia, or because they missed a court date.

“Often they didn’t even know the court hearing happened,” Marandett said. If lawyers find out in time, they can file a motion to reopen a person’s case based on lack of notice.

ICE “is working rapidly overtime,” as the agency’s representative put it in their statement, to deport as many people as possible. And being unable to locate a client can hamstring a lawyer’s last-minute appeal.

One notable absence from ICE’s Detainee Locator is Wilber Garcés Pérez, the Venezuelan delivery worker shot by a federal agent in Texas on Sunday. Garcés was taken into custody, hastily discharged from the hospital with a bullet still lodged in the back of his neck, and moved to detention within hours of being shot. He was then, according to the Washington Post, left on the floor of the South Texas ICE Processing Center with the bullet still in his spine.

Meanwhile, Garcés’ lawyers and family were unable to track him down. Eventually, attorney Kate Lincoln-Goldfinch was able to get in contact with him, she said in a series of social media posts. His deportation order, Lincoln-Goldfinch said, was issued in error when Garcés, who reportedly has a work permit, missed an immigration court hearing and was ordered removed in absentia—after the court sent notice of the hearing to the wrong address.

A deportation order that was issued in absentia because the immigration court is so incompetent they sent a hearing notice to the wrong address.

I see this all the time in my practice and it’s a mistake we can easily correct. It does not justify shooting people in the street.… https://t.co/yDMZFQcdhd

— Kate Lincoln-Goldfinch (@AttorneyKateLG) September 21, 2026

“I see this all the time in my practice and it’s a mistake we can easily correct,” Lincoln-Goldfinch wrote. “It does not justify shooting people in the street.”

Other groups of people who technically have final orders of removal—but are not, in practice, about to be deported—may also have their names removed from the Detainee Locator. That includes immigrants who have open circuit court appeals, as well as those who were granted withholding of removal under the United Nations Convention Against Torture and can’t be deported to their home countries. It may also include some people in active habeas corpus litigation, in which a lawyer must provide proof of where their client is. Usually, the best proof of where Marandett’s clients are being held is a screenshot of the Detainee Locator. Without it, “you may literally not know what district to file a lawsuit in.”

“Now it’s like we’re dealing with these same obstacles, but with a blindfold on.”

There’s little apparent consistency in who disappears. Immigration attorney Stefi Bastiaensz says that one of her clients, who came to the US fleeing political persecution in Nicaragua and has been held in New Jersey’s notorious Delaney Hall detention center for nearly a year, is technically under a final order of removal while his case moves through the appeals process. His profile, however, still shows up on Detainee Locator.

“What makes my firm panic is whether ICE is looking underneath the final order,” Bastiaensz said. A pending habeas petition, or other relief, may not matter to the agency.

There are other ways lawyers can find their clients—immigration lawyer Pedro Chavez posted some examples in an Instagram video—but none are as efficient as the detainee locator. And families can be left with very few tactics beyond waiting for a phone call from their loved one or contacting their member of Congress. “Regardless of what’s going on, this puts a wall between attorneys and their clients, and produces tremendous anxiety for families,” Bastiaensz said.

Obstacles to client communication aren’t exactly new to immigration lawyers. But “now it’s like we’re dealing with these same obstacles, but with a blindfold on,” Marandett said.

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JD Vance Is Coming For Your Obamacare

The Trump administration is removing about 760,000 people from Affordable Care Act coverage, Vice President JD Vance and Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services administrator Mehmet Oz announced Tuesday, citing alleged fraud—and saying the people being kicked off their health care aren’t eligible, don’t know they have it, or simply don’t exist.

“We call them phantoms, because we believe most of them either don’t exist or had no idea they had coverage,” Oz said during a press conference first reported on by The Wall Street Journal.

“These are not real people. We’re not paying insurance for nonexistent ghosts,” Oz added. One of his justifications for that assertion is that the individuals being kicked off their health insurance have never filed a claim—that is, while they are insured, they’ve never actually gone to the doctor.

The idea of the “phantom patient” hoarding Affordable Care Act cash is a persistent one in GOP rhetoric. The Paragon Health Institute, a Republican think tank, has for years pushed the idea that all patients who don’t use their coverage—exactly the kind of patients insurers want!—must necessarily be fraudulent “phantom” enrollees. But as Cynthia Cox of the health policy research group KFF said in 2025, the real story is more complicated.

“We’re not trying to argue there is no fraud. It’s a real thing. But the question is, how big of a scale is this problem?” Cox said at the time. “Just suggesting that anyone who’s not using health care is a fraudulent enrollee—that’s not true. Plenty of people don’t use health care.” Younger and healthier people, in particular, are more likely than others to acquire health insurance—especially if they’re able to access cheap plans—and then not actually use it unless they need to, which they very well might not.

The universal health care advocacy group Protect Our Care called Vance and Oz’s health care fraud task force a “smokescreen” for a push to cull actual coverage from actual people.

“This so-called task force is nothing more than a bullshit distraction—a political stunt designed to throw even more people off their coverage while pretending to save taxpayers’ money,” said Protect Our Care president Brad Woodhouse. “At a time when millions of Americans are already losing coverage and facing skyrocketing costs, Vance and this administration are making the crisis exponentially worse.”

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Trump to Ballroom Architect: “I Am the Code”

“I am the code.”

So said President Trump to the first architect working on the new White House ballroom being built on the ruins of the building’s East Wing, scoffing at his concerns over possible fire, health**,** and safety violations. The architect, James McCrery II, left the construction project last October after Trump repeatedly ignored his warnings in favor of a preliminary design the president preferred, according to a Washington Post investigation released Wednesday.

Building codes, the president claimed, don’t apply to the White House. That’s wrong. Federal agencies are required to follow federal standards unless it would “adversely affect national security,” as the Post reports and as multiple items of congressional legislation establish. The president’s argument: The Executive Residence, the president’s home and workplace in the White House, is not bound by the same rules as the rest of the White House.

The first architect of the White House ballroom resigned after warning repeatedly that Trump was insisting on designs that violated fire and safety codes, the Washington Post reports.“I am the code,” Trump said www.washingtonpost.com/investigatio…

— Phil Lewis (@phillewis.bsky.social) 2026-09-23T12:24:53.546Z

As funny as it is to imagine Trump delivering the line like Sylvester Stallone declaring “I am the law!” in Judge Dredd, the president’s reported tunnel vision with respect to the ballroom is one more episode in a series of ego-fueled beautification endeavors costing taxpayers millions of dollars: the Reflecting Pool, the Triumphal Arch—the list goes on.

And as I wrote back in June, many of these construction projects seem to follow a similar playbook: They inevitably go awry, exhibit the building version of Mar-a-Lago face, or lead to unfulfilled promises by Trump (often all of the above). After some private dealing—including a $500-million no-bid contract—a federal appeals court ruling that the administration must stop construction due to a lack of congressional approval, and now a reportedly sweeping disregard for health and safety in a building supposedly required for “national security,” the ballroom may become the shining example.

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Trump-Appointed Judge Smacks Down EPA’s Termination of Clean Energy Grants

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

A federal judge has declared that the Trump administration unlawfully terminated $7 billion in grant funding for clean energy programs in disadvantaged communities.

The Solar for All (SFA) program, established during the Biden administration as part of the Inflation Reduction Act, provided dozens of grants for states, municipalities, tribes and nonprofits designed to reduce electric bills, create jobs, and address the greenhouse gas emissions warming the global climate.

“They don’t have any excuse for sitting on this money anymore..”

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) canceled the program after President Donald Trump’s inauguration in 2025. The Conservation Law Foundation, Southern Environmental Law Center, Lawyers for Good Government, and Lawyers’ Committee for Rhode Island sued in the US District Court for the District of Rhode Island on behalf of workers, businesses, nonprofits, and individuals harmed by the withdrawal of funding.

“Congress’s clear intent was that EPA continue to administer the already obligated SFA grants,” Judge Mary S. McElroy, a Trump appointee, wrote in her ruling, issued Friday. “Defendants acted contrary to this intent, and with no other statutory authority, when they terminated the SFA program.”

The ruling means the EPA will have to release the funding, said Nick Torrey, senior attorney at the Southern Environmental Law Center.

“We have seen this administration try to resist and appeal and fight,” Torrey said. “They don’t have any excuse for sitting on this money anymore. They have to get this money out.”

The One Big Beautiful Bill repealed “unobligated” funding aimed at greenhouse gas emissions—but this funding wasn’t unobligated.

The EPA argued the court lacked jurisdiction over the plaintiffs’ claims and that the claims were meritless. The federal agency told Inside Climate News it is “reviewing the decision and considering options for appeal.”

The EPA awarded the grants in 2024 and said at the time the program would save families $350 million a year on electricity bills and support 200,000 jobs and workforce training opportunities. Among the recipients was a coalition of nonprofits in Florida, which received $156.1 million to create new and expand existing solar programs for low-income communities in the state.

The program was canceled before much of the funding could reach communities, according to the groups involved in the litigation. In 2025 Congress approved the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which repealed unobligated funding aimed at greenhouse gas emissions. The groups argued the program’s termination was unlawful because the funding was already obligated.

The lawsuit was filed on behalf not of grant recipients but what the litigation described as “downstream beneficiaries.” Among them were solar companies that invested in personnel and equipment based on funding awarded to the states of Georgia and Pennsylvania, a labor union that helped develop an implementation plan in Rhode Island, and a nonprofit that received a sub-award from a grant to the state of Indiana.

Grant recipients filed two subsequent lawsuits against the EPA. State grant recipients also filed challenges in the Court of Federal Claims.

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Newsom Vetoes Bill That Would Ban Extraditions for Abortion and Gender-Affirming Care

When Louisiana authorities tried to extradite a California doctor last winter for sending abortion pills to women in their state, Gov. Gavin Newsom pushed back—hard. “We will not allow extremist politicians from other states to reach into California and try to punish doctors based on allegations that they provided reproductive health care services,” Newsom declared. “Not today. Not ever.”

Yet nine months after that ringing defense of abortion providers and reproductive freedom, Newsom has blocked Democratic efforts to enshrine the same anti-extradition policy into state law.

The soon-to-be-ex-governor has vetoed a bill that would have prohibited future governors from handing over abortion providers, helpers**,** and patients to red states for criminal prosecution. The bill also barred extraditions involving transgender care. Newsom’s decision was “incredibly disappointing” and “certainly not what we were expecting,” says Pavitra Abraham, director of state campaigns for Reproductive Freedom for All.

The veto of AB 2164—also known as the Care Without Fear Act—has alarmed reproductive rights advocates around the country because of California’s critical role in preserving abortion access since the Dobbs decision overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022. The state is home to telemedicine providers, mail-order pharmacies, research organizations, and other groups that have helped keep abortion pills flowing even to the most conservative parts of the US.

Much of that abortion infrastructure is built on so-called shield laws that protect reproductive care across state lines. California has some of the most robust shield laws in the US, protecting providers, helpers and patients from out-of-state legal action over abortion and gender-affirming care.

Newsom signed California’s first shield laws in 2022 and has consistently backed legislation to strengthen those safeguards. But he has resisted efforts to codify one key protection: a ban on extraditions in criminal cases, like the one Louisiana authorities sought earlier this year. Instead, Newsom argues that decisions on extradition should remain an “executive function”—a prerogative of the governor rather than the legislature, preferably addressed by executive order rather than written into state law.

That distinction doesn’t matter much as long as California has a chief executive who supports reproductive rights. But it could be disastrous if a Republican won the governorship.

“Legislatively enacted laws are just on firmer footing when there are political changes at the executive level,” says Amanda Barrow, senior staff attorney at the UCLA Law Center on Reproductive Health, Law, and Policy. An executive order of the type Newsom has used to fight extraditions “could be revoked by a governor who is anti-abortion or anti–gender-affirming care.”

So, with Newsom winding up his second term as governor and widely expected to run for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2028, California reproductive advocates made a ban on extradition one of their top legislative priorities for 2026. Eighteen other Democratic-run states have enacted laws prohibiting extradition of abortion providers and patients.

“California cannot call itself a safe haven for reproductive freedom while leaving abortion providers just one election away from extradition.”

AB 2164 would have gone even further than most of those statutes, extending California’s shield-law protections to providers and helpers based in other blue states where abortion and gender-affirming care are legal.

Supporters seemed confident that Newsom would sign the bill into law. After all, this is the same governor who, when faced with President Donald Trump’s extraordinary effort to gerrymander red-state congressional seats to rig the midterm elections, responded with his own redistricting plan, in the form of last year’s Proposition 50. Four years ago, he signed a law making California the first sanctuary state for trans minors seeking medical care.

But instead, Newsom vetoed the bill, announcing the move in a Sunday legislative update. In his statement explaining his decision, Newsom pointed to his strong record on reproductive health issues, including privacy. But he said he was “troubled by the precedent that would be set if an outgoing administration agreed with the Legislature to erode the executive authority of an incoming Governor based on their shared policy preferences, regardless of how righteous and well-intentioned those actions may be.”

That stance “is cold comfort to Californians living and working in the real world post-Dobbs,” Lizzy Hinkley, legal director of Abortion Coalition for Telemedicine, the bill’s lead sponsor, responded in a statement. “A high-brow, academic justification for refusing to codify legal protections only reveals an ignorance for the lived reality of patients and providers—and does nothing to help them.”

Newsom’s veto—which some social media commenters criticized as pandering to conservatives ahead of a presidential run—also seems to reflect the widespread assumption that Democrat Xavier Becerra is a shoo-in to defeat Republican Steve Hilton in November’s gubernatorial election. Becerra—a former California attorney general and President Biden’s secretary of Health and Human Services in the aftermath of the Dobbs decision—has been a staunch defender of reproductive and trans care, while Hilton has said he would have extradited California abortion doctor Rémy Coeytaux to Louisiana as requested in January. Hilton later walked back that position. Texas and Louisiana attorneys general have also targeted telehealth abortion providers in New York and Delaware.

But Becerra’s widening lead in the polls doesn’t mean a ban on extraditions isn’t needed, the bill’s supporters counter. “That mentality of people saying, ‘It’s going to be fine, a Democrat’s going to win, it’s California, blah blah blah’—it’s just really dangerous,” Abraham says.

“California cannot call itself a safe haven for reproductive freedom,” she adds, “while leaving abortion providers just one election away from extradition.”

Newsom still has not acted on several other important reproductive-related bills this session, including AB 2540, which would make medication abortion available to community college students in the state, and AB 1973, which would expand the ability of non-physicians to provide abortion care.

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Loyalists Only, Please. Why Trump Surrounds Himself With True Believers

President Donald Trump’s second term has often felt like an exercise in mass distraction. As soon as he’s directing people to pay attention to one issue like the Iran war or immigration, he’s already moved on to false claims about widespread voter fraud, taking over Greenland, or building a massive arch in the nation’s capital.

In the new book Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump, New York Times reporter and co-author Jonathan Swan has tried to make sense of Trump’s unprecedented tenure by bringing readers inside the room where major decisions happen. And Swan says the loyalists Trump has surrounded himself with in his second term have made Trump’s overwhelming and exhausting presidency possible.

“The word ‘loyalty’ almost isn’t strong enough to describe the bond that some of them have with him,” Swan says. “It’s a belief that this man is a figure of destiny, a figure of history, that God has put him here to save the country.”

On this week’s More To The Story, Swan talks about the immense challenges of covering the Trump administration, how the Jeffrey Epstein scandal sent the White House into crisis mode behind closed doors, and why he’s not eager to write another book about the president anytime soon.

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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Trump Threatens to “Annihilate” Iran and Its People in UN Address

President Trump’s rambling, combative speech Tuesday to the United Nations General Assembly saw him return to his most serious quagmire yet—the war in Iran—telling world leaders that he was considering completely destroying the country as a means to end the conflict he launched alongside Israel in February.

“Do I annihilate the Islamic Republic and do it quickly, never giving them a chance to kill and destroy people and countries again? Do I drive them into hell with no chance of survival and no hope of future greatness or generations?” Trump pondered aloud, claiming thatIran’s leadership had rejected multiple peace deals with the US.

He said little about the terms of those offers—and nothing about the US and Israel’s explosive role in the Middle East, from Iran and the Gulf to Gaza and beyond.

The Center for International Policy’s Matt Duss, a former Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) foreign policy adviser, said in a statement that Trump’s threats were “dangerously unhinged” and “must be unequivocally rejected.”

“Such rhetoric is not merely reckless, it is a criminal threat of genocide against an entire nation,” Duss wrote. “U.S. lawmakers and U.S. partners around the world should condemn Trump’s remarks.”

The president again framed his demand as centering on Iran’s nuclear program, despite offering up a shifting litany of goals and terms on which he’d end the war across the last seven months,and implied that scorched earth was the only alternative. But American operations in Iran have brought an uncompromising government to power, limited the Iranian president’s power to enforce any deal, and made nuclear containment on the level of the Obama administration’s Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action virtually impossible for the indefinite future.

But it’s the tens of thousands of people who have been killed since the first US-Israeli strikes in February, and the communities whose essentials like food, water, and energy continue to be destroyed, who have faced the worst consequences—and who didn’t earn a mention in Trump’s speech beyond the threat of complete destruction.

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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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