Mother Jones

President Donald Trump’s sweeping domestic agenda, which seeks to inject plutocratic ideology and disdain for the poor into nearly every corner of American life, is on the verge of passage. Its success comes despite overwhelming unpopularity and official estimates that it will add $3.3 trillion to the national debt while slashing $930 billion from Medicaid over a decade.

Yet even for all the descriptors that have been attached to Trump’s budget bill—big, mega, supercharged—the scope of one of its most crushing ambitions appears to have been lost on the American public: more than $100 billion in new funding for US Immigration and Customs Enforcement through 2029.

What does that even look like? The figure would fund the single largest increase in immigration enforcement in US history. It would ramp up mass deportations to an unprecedented scale; create hastily built, sordid detention centers across the country; and all but ensure that millions of people who haven’t been accused of crimes are disappeared.

Here are some ways to process the scale of $100 billion in ICE funding:

343times what Elon Musk spent to swing the 2024 elections

140times the cost to make New York City buses free

1,451 times private prison company CoreCivic’s net 2024 income

568 times the cost to pay all US students’ public school lunch debt

1,923 times the amount saved by the bill’s defunding of Planned Parenthood

62.5 times what the US paid in reparations to over 82,000 interned Japanese Americans

2,000 Jeff Bezos-Lauren Sánchez weddings

388 of the HIV vaccine program the Trump administration eliminated, effectively ending chances for a shot to prevent infections

8 times what the US spent to develop and purchase Covid vaccines in 2020

185 years of operating the Guantánamo Bay prison

2.1 times what it would cost to hire enough teachers and nurses to end both national shortages

7.6 Rupert Murdochs

385 Rick Scotts, the richest US senator

170 times the amount Trump’s bill cuts from the national parks

2.63 times what the US Agency for International Development spent in 2023

12 times the 2023 Federal Bureau of Prisons budget

2 times Harvard University’s endowment, the largest of any university in the world

7times the 2021 federal child care funding

4.4 times what the US has spent on Israel’s military since the October 7, 2023, Hamas attacks

Correction, July 3: An earlier version of this story misstated the estimated increase in the national debt. The Senate version of budget bill is estimated to add $3.3 trillion.

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In June, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis announced plans to build an immigrant detention center on an unused airstrip in the Everglades. “There’s not much waiting for them except alligators and pythons,” Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier said in a video on social media, suggesting that the detention center’s location in the middle of a swamp was a key selling point for the Trump administration. “Nowhere to go, nowhere to hide.” He dubbed the facility “Alligator Alcatraz,” and soon started selling alligator-themed merch on his reelection campaign site.

A week or so later, Florida residents turned out in droves to protest the facility as a threat to the environment and human rights. One held up a sign that asked, “Is this a Carl Hiaasen novel?” A photo of the sign made its way to the Instagram account of the famous Florida author, who responded, “Thanks for the shout-out, but even I’m not warped enough to dream up Alligator Alcatraz.”

The exchange said a lot about the Era of Trump. It also said a lot about how difficult Hiaasen’s job as Florida’s premiere political satirist has become. After all, even the most brilliant novelist would be challenged to imagine storylines more preposterous than those generated by President Donald Trump in his second administration. The Fox News host with a booze problem running the Pentagon; the former heroin addict Kennedy scion with a brain worm overseeing the CDC; an ex-professional wrestling promoter turned Education Secretary; or the 19-year-old DOGE staffer formerly known online as “Big Balls” charged with improving the Social Security Administration? The entire federal government, it seems, has become a Hiaasen novel—though much less funny.

For those not familiar with his oeuvre, Hiaasen is a former longtime Miami Herald columnist who has written more than a dozen novels set in his home state of Florida, plus a handful of young adult and nonfiction works. One novel—Strip Tease—became a 1996 movie featuring Demi Moore, and last year, Apple TV turned Bad Monkey into a TV show starring Vince Vaughn.

Hiaasen’s novels defy easy categorization—they’re often lumped in with “crime fiction.” Generally speaking, they take the weirdness of Florida and its corruption, mix in a heavy dose of environmental consciousness, and turn it all into something resembling a comic thriller.

Over his long career, Hiaasen has created several memorable characters, most notably, his legendary anti-hero “Skink,” who first appeared in Double Whammy in 1987. Seven books later, Skink is now so iconic in Florida that Hiaasen’s friend, the late Jimmy Buffett, even put him in a song.

Née Clinton Tyree, Skink is a former Florida governor who had waged a quixotic battle against overdevelopment and fought to protect the environment. At one point, he tried to impose heavy fines or jail time on any boater who killed a manatee, which the boater would be required to personally bury in a public event.

Fed up with the corruption, Skink eventually disappears to live as a hermit in the Everglades, surviving on roadkill and fresh fish. He periodically resurfaces in Hiaasen’s books to save endangered panthers or to assist his other protagonists in various monkey-wrenching activities. After Hiaasen responded to the “Alligator Alcatraz” Instagram post, one of his fans replied, “Where is Skink when you need him?”

Hiaasen’s latest book, Fever Beach, came out in May. As a huge fan, I bought it without even reading the reviews, so I was a little shocked when I realized who had inspired it. “Holy shit this is about Matt Gaetz!” I told my husband after reading a few pages.

If there were ever a political figure who might be both deserving of and difficult to parody, it’s the former Republican representative from Florida. Gaetz had leveraged his father’s money and political ties to launch himself out of the Panhandle into national prominence, becoming one of the youngest members ever elected to the House in 2016. In November, he resigned after Trump nominated him to be US Attorney General. But then a House ethics report found credible evidence that he’d paid a 17-year-old for sex and abused illegal drugs while in office, which even among the Trump-loving GOP lawmakers, was a bridge too far. Trump dumped him.

Gaetz has since been reduced to hawking ivermectin on OANN, but he was clearly the model for Fever Beach’s Clure Boyette. A nepo-baby Florida congressman with a drug habit, Boyette has a fondness for underage escorts, and teeth that “looked like dentures for a Clydesdale.” His solidly red constituents are growing weary of him, so he hatches an outlandish reelection scheme that involves an assist from the Strokerz for Liberty, a white supremacist group founded as a competitor to the Proud Boys.

“The Strokers, we ain’t like the Proud Boys. You can jerk off all you want at home,” Stroker founder Dale Figgo promises a new recruit, referencing a real-life Proud Boys membership rule restricting self-gratification. (Hiaasen had to put a note in the book indicating that he did not, in fact, make this up.)

This “truth is stranger than fiction” detail left me wondering whether MAGA world might have bested Hiaasen. After I finished Fever Beach, I was curious about how he managed still to find satire in the age of Trump, so I called him up. He gracefully fielded all my questions, including the first burning one: “Have you heard from Matt Gaetz?” He had not. “I don’t know that Matt’s much of a reader,” he suggested.

“At some point these headlines drop and your heart sinks, not just for the country, for the state of Florida, but for the craft of satire. How do you get ahead of it?”

He confirmed that current events had made his job much more challenging. He pointed to Moms for Liberty, the book-banning group founded in Florida. “How do you improve on the facts that the Moms for Liberty were involved in a big sex scandal in Sarasota—threesomes!— involving the head of the Republican Party in the state of Florida?” he said in amazement. “At some point these headlines drop and your heart sinks, not just for the country, for the state of Florida, but for the craft of satire. How do you get ahead of it?”

He gave it a shot. In Fever Beach, the moms become “Wives Against Filth.” Much of the inspiration for Fever Beach, however, came from the January 6th assault on the US Capitol. Hiaasen said he couldn’t shake the idea that several people who broke into the Capitol decided when they got inside to “just take a shit.”

“I mean, that’s the most creative thing they could come up with?” he marveled. “I’m going to make a political statement by taking a shit in the Capitol?”

The episode left him curious about who those people were, and what their lives were like. That’s how he got into the character of Dale Figgo, who had been at the Capitol but, Hiaasen says, “shit on the wrong statue.” His defilement of the statue of a Confederate war veteran and rabid secessionist gets Dale kicked out of the Proud Boys and prompts him to start his own group.

While most of Hiaasen’s work has centered on Florida, it was probably inevitable that he would have to tackle the Trump administration, if only because so many people in the administration now hail from Florida. “We have a bottomless pool of mediocre public figures that we can keep supplying the Trump administration with,” Hiaasen says. On book tour, he says, he has tried to apologize for former Florida attorney general and now US Attorney General Pam Bondi and Secretary of State Marco Rubio. “I wish they were just characters in a novel,” he says, “but they’re actually real.”

Rubio, the Cuban-American former Florida senator who once espoused a George W. Bush-inflected “compassionate conservatism,” really gets under the writer’s skin. “To see the transformation of Marco Rubio,” he marvels. “I mean, his testicles are in a jar on Donald Trump’s desk. To see him now leaning on Ukraine when the whole Cuban immigrant experience was precipitated by Fidel Castro’s alliance with Moscow. Just how much of a wimp do you have to be to work for Donald Trump?”

In 2018, Hiaasen’s brother was murdered in a mass shooting at the Capital Gazette newspaper in Annapolis, Maryland, along with four of his colleagues. A former Baltimore Sun reporter, Rob Hiaasen was working as an editor at the Gazette at the time of his death. Hiaasen was devastated. He told me that after the shooting, he took a few months off from his Herald column, which he’d never done before, as he wrestled with the grief.

“He was a much different kind of writer than I was,” Hiaasen said of his brother. “He was, gentle, funny. He didn’t have the sharp edges that I had. He was really so good at what he did.” Eventually, he went back to work, concluding that Rob “would have been really pissed off if I had stopped writing,” he told me. “He would have wanted me to not only keep writing but keep writing the kind of stuff I did.”

Squeeze Me, Hiaasen’s first book after the shooting, came out in 2020 during the pandemic. It marked the first time President Trump, his tanning bed, and the Mar-a-Lago crowd came in for the Hiaasen treatment. (Skink returns with a cameo.) While I might have been projecting, I thought it wasn’t quite as funny as his previous books and wondered if his brother’s death might have been responsible. But Hiaasen—who hopes I’m wrong about the quality of the humor—says it was not just grief, but the state of the country that has made his work harder.

He fully recognizes that the same politics he lampoons often harms real people. He has to ration his news diet “because it can weigh you down to the point where you can’t squeeze out a sentence that is even mildly funny.” Much of his writing, he says, is “obviously me trying to cope in my own way. I’ve been lucky that so many people seem to get it, and judging from their reactions, it gives them some relief in times like these.”

Hiaasen came out of journalism school in the middle of the Watergate scandals. “The Vietnam war was still dragging on. We thought democracy was over,” he told me. That experience gives him some perspective on the current state of affairs. “I think you always want to cling to some hope that there are some good people out there who are going to rise up and stop this.”

Democrats, he said, will probably not save democracy from Trump. He recently told a friend, “This country can’t afford to sit around and wait for the Democrats to get their shit together. It’s going to be sensible, moderate, brave Republicans who stand up, just as they did during Watergate, and say, enough is enough.” In the meantime, he’ll keep working, and it’s hard to imagine that Alligator Alcatraz won’t appear in a future Carl Hiaasen novel.

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From Mother Jones via this RSS feed

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

As she canvassed for Zohran Mamdani in New York City on Tuesday last week, Batul Hassan should have been elated. Her mayoral candidate—a 33-year-old state assemblymember—was surging in the polls and would within hours soundly defeat Andrew Cuomo on first preference votes in the Democratic primary election.

But Hassan’s spirits were hampered by record-breaking temperatures. In Crown Heights, where she was the Mamdani campaign’s field captain, the heat index soared into the triple digits. “I couldn’t think about anything but the heat,” she said. “It was so dangerous.”

Early that morning, Hassan had visited a public school polling site, where elderly workers sweltered without air conditioning. The city Board of Elections sent over paper fans, but they were no match for the heat.

If Mamdani is elected mayor, that school could be retrofitted with air conditioning and green space to bring down temperatures as part of his green schools plan, or could even be transformed into a resilience hub for communities to shelter amid extreme weather events

“We need to expand mass transit to fight the climate crisis,” and also “because we want to improve people’s lives right now.”

“Seeing total infrastructural failure on Election Day emphasized the stakes of what’s happening with the climate crisis and the importance of the election,” said Hassan, who took time off from her day job at the leftist thinktank Climate and Community Institute to canvass.

Mamdani’s green schools plan is just one of his schemes to slash carbon emissions and boost environmental justice. His plans for New York City would make residents “dramatically more safe” from extreme weather, said Hassan.

But the democratic socialist, who was endorsed by the national youth-led environmental justice group Sunrise Movement and student-led climate group TREEAge, did not place the climate crisis at the center of his campaign, instead choosing to focus relentlessly on cost-of-living issues. The model could help build popular support for climate policies, supporters say.

“Climate and quality of life are not two separate concerns,” Mamdani told The Nation in April. “They are, in fact, one and the same.”

Over the past two decades, Democrats increasingly focused on the climate. But often, their proposed schemes have been technocratic, Hassan said. Carbon taxes, for instance, can be impenetrably complex, making them difficult candidates for popular support. They can also be economically regressive, with “working class people experiencing them as an additional cost,” Hassan said.

More recently, Joe Biden coupled climate plans with green industrial policy and plans to boost employment. But even those projects can take years to effect tangible change, critics say. As president, for instance, Biden achieved historic climate investments in the Inflation Reduction Act. But its green incentives disproportionately benefited the wealthy, and its job creation remains invisible to most people around the country. One poll found only a quarter of Americans felt the IRA benefited them.

“Now with Trump, we see the pitfalls of the IRA, where there is real difficulty in consolidating enough political support to defend those climate policy achievements,” said Hassan.

Mamdani “learned from some of the mistakes” of the Biden administration, said Gustavo Gordillo, a co-chair of the New York City chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America, which supported Mamdani’s campaign. His housing plan, for instance, aims to lower planet-heating pollution by boosting density, but his signature promise is a rent freeze.

That pledge could ensure residents are not priced out of New York City and forced to move to more carbon-intensive suburbs, and prevent landlords from passing the costs of energy efficiency upgrades or air conditioning installation to renters, preventing displacement, said Hassan.

Similarly, Mamdani’s headline transit goal was to make buses faster and free, which could boost ridership and discourage the use of carbon-intensive cars. “Public transit is one of the greatest gifts we have to take on the climate crisis,” Mamdani said at a February mayoral forum.

Biden’s IRA placed little focus on boosting public transit, said Gordillo. This was a missed opportunity to cut emissions and also lower Americans’ fuel costs, he said.

“We need to expand mass transit to fight the climate crisis, which hasn’t been a priority for the Democratic establishment,” said Gordillo, who is an electrician by day. “But we also need to expand it because we want to improve people’s lives right now.”

As a New York assemblymember, Mamdani has backed explicitly green policies. He was a key advocate for a boosting publicly owned renewable energy production. The effort aimed to help New York “live up to the dream of our state as being a climate leader,” he said in 2022.

He also fought fossil-fuel buildout. He coupled that climate focus with efforts to keep energy bills low, consistently opposing local utilities’ attempts to impose rate hikes, said Kim Fraczek, director of the climate nonprofit Sane Energy Project.

“His growing political influence is a clear win for communities demanding a just transition: renewable power, democratic control and relief from crushing energy costs,” said Fraczek.

Progressive cities like New York are often climate leaders. But if they price out working people, only the wealthy get to see the benefits of their green policies, Mamdani’s backers say.

By crafting popular climate policies, the Democratic nominee is also building a base of New Yorkers who will work to defend those plans in the face of threats from the Trump administration, they say.

“New Yorkers want an affordable city, clean and green schools, fast and free buses, and a rent freeze,” said Daniel Goulden, a co-chair of the New York City Democratic Socialists of America ecosocialist working Group. “But most importantly, New Yorkers want a future—one where they can live and thrive in New York.”

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From Mother Jones via this RSS feed

When Wisconsin voters flipped the ideological balance of the state’s supreme court in 2023, abortion was very much on their minds. Specifically, abortion opponents were arguing that with the demise of Roe v Wade the year before, the state’s 1849 near-total abortion ban—invalidated by Roe but never overturned by lawmakers, so still technically on the books—should go into effect. The Wisconsin Supreme Court would be the ultimate decider—and thanks to the retirement of a conservative justice, the court was evenly split along partisan lines, 3 to 3.

The race for the open seat between Democratic-aligned circuit judge Janet Protasiewicz and conservative former Supreme Court justice Daniel Kelly was hard-fought and, with over $45 million spent, the most expensive judicial race in US history to that point. The final vote left no doubts about voters’ mindset on abortion: Protasiewicz won by more than 11 percentage points.

On Wednesday, the now liberal-leaning court did what voters had wanted and struck down the state’s 176-year-old “zombie” abortion law, which made it a felony for anyone other than the mother or a doctor in a medical emergency to destroy “an unborn child.” In a 4-to-3 decision, Justice Rebecca Dallettsaid the old law was no longer valid because the Wisconsin legislature had effectively repealed it by enacting a myriad of abortion restrictions since Roe was handed down in 1973.

We conclude that comprehensive legislation enacted over the last 50 years regulating in detail the “who, what, where, when, and how” of abortion so thoroughly covers the entire subject of abortion that it was meant as a substitute for the 19th century near-total ban on abortion. Accordingly, we hold that the legislature impliedly repealed [the 1849 law] as to abortion, and that [the zombie law] therefore does not ban abortion in the State of Wisconsin.

Rejecting the claim that the zombie law should be revived, Dallett wrote, “A statute may be repealed either expressly, by enacting a subsequent statute that repeals the earlier one, or by implication.” She cited a number of regulations that Wisconsin lawmakers had passed during the Roe era, including a law criminalizing only those abortions performed after viability; laws requiring ultrasounds, a 24-hour waiting period, and parental consent; bans on government funding, and a 2015 law restricting abortions after 20 weeks of pregnancy, signed by the-then governor, Republican Scott Walker.

The court’s decision on Wednesday effectively upholds the 20-week ban, and Walker posted on X, “Had I not signed that law, there would be no real legal protections for the unborn in Wisconsin after this decision by the Wisconsin Supreme Court.”

The lawsuit against the Wisconsin zombie law was brought by Attorney General Josh Kaul, a Democrat. Defending the 1849 law was Joel Urmanski, Sheboygan County’s district attorney, who argued that the Roe-era restrictions were consistent with the older ban. Without the change in the court, the ruling could easily have gone the other way; last year, the Arizona Supreme Court declared that state’s 1864 abortion law to be enforceable—a ruling later repealed by state lawmakers.

In a concurring opinion, Chief Justice Jill Karofsky cited stories of women who died from unsafe, illegal abortions, including her own great-grandmother in 1929. “Like so many others,” Karofsky wrote, “she died because society did not recognize her as someone with the ‘dignity and authority to make these choices.'”

The Wisconsin Supreme Court was the focus of another intense partisan battle this April, when Elon Musk spent more than $25 million trying to defeat progressive candidate Susan Crawford for a seat being vacated by liberal Justice Ann Walsh Bradley. Instead, Crawford beat Musk’s pick, Brad Schimel, to preserve the liberal majority on the high court through at least 2028.

As my colleague Ari Berman wrote, the stakes went way beyond abortion:

“It’s a seismic event both inside and outside Wisconsin. On a state level, the court could soon decide the fate of an 1849 abortion ban, a law restricting collective bargaining for public sector unions, and Wisconsin’s gerrymandered congressional maps—the latter of which could help determine which party controls the US House in 2027.

Crawford takes office in August. Bradley voted with the majority to strike down the zombie abortion law.

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Last week, the Supreme Court ended a term unlike any other. The Roberts Court, with its 6-3 majority of Republican appointees, continued to issue partisan opinions that pleased the wealthy interests that fund the conservative legal movement while abetting the new Trump administration on its lawless rampage against immigrants, federal agencies, Congress, the courts, and natural born citizens. With the decisions now laid out, a clear pattern emerges: The court is increasingly solicitous of the political coalition that created its rightwing majority—as well as the court’s own power over the rest of the government.

“No right is safe in the new legal regime the Court creates.”

Once President Donald Trump took office on January 20, the justices’ work split along two parallel tracks. The first, called the merits docket, encompasses the normal business of the court—which for this court is doing the work of the billionaires and industry titans whose largess helped the conservative majority win its seats. The second track, the emergency docket, is wherethe court acts as the final mediator of Donald Trump’s unlawful power grabs—power clashes that the Republican-appointed justices have repeatedly called in Trump’s favor. This docket is also derisively called the shadow docket, because the justices not onlymake these decisions quickly, butwith little or no explanation. Thus, this is the executive power track.

These parallel tracks reflect the two sides of the Republican Party’s coalition: The traditional constituents of big business and conservative Christians on one side, and Trump’s newer MAGA movement on the other. On the merits docket, the Roberts Court continues at breakneck speed to dismantle the administrative agencies and laws that regulate industry while abetting the project of Christian nationalism. On the shadow docket, the GOP appointees oblige Trump’s power grabs.

The two tracks are not entirely separate, but mutually reinforcing. Both share a disdain for Congress’ role in our system of government whileprioritizing the prerogatives of the president, wealthy interests, and rightwing Christian interest groups. And so these parallel tracks have, in recent months, converged.

They also mutually reinforce the awkward political marriage that created this Supreme Court, between the powerful business interests and the religious extremists who,in joining up with Trump’s MAGA movement, forged an alliance that rewarded and kept both camps happy, facilitating their continued cooperation. Again and again, on both tracks, it is democracy that loses out to opportunism as the court seeks to hand party favors to all but the people who need their protection.

Michael Podhorzer, the former political guru for the AFL-CIO, has described how the Roberts Court often supplants “democratic legal principles” with what he terms rule-by-fiat, an “outcome-driven jurisprudence that disingenuously changes the law to accomplish outcomes that favor specific interests.” As Podhorzer tells it, “once cases reach the Rule-by-Fiat system, outcomes follow power relations rather than legal principles.” The best way to understand the court’s actions this year is through this Rule-by-Fiat framework.

Consider the justices’ track record in the last weeks of its term. According to Stanford political scientist Adam Bonica, between May 1 and June 23, lower courts ruled against Trump 94 percent of the time. In that same window, the Supreme Court ruled for the administration 94 percent of the time.

The shadow docket allows the justices to orderchange simply because they say so.

Traditionally, the Supreme Court begins each term in the first week of October and wraps up by the end of June, when multiple justices wing off to Europe on plum teaching junkets, cruise on billionaires’ yachts, or fly private jets to Alaska fishing expeditions—the spoils of their all-powerful position in government. Cases on this merits docket, many of which are handed out in the Supreme Court’s final weeks of term,have marinated in the lower courts, where district courts have fleshed out the facts and appellate courts have rendered their analysis—though those lower courts are increasingly shaped by the same special interests that indulge the justices in their fancy vacations and other perks. The justices read rounds of briefs, receive input from interested parties, hear oral arguments, and then make a final decision. These cases are generally the biggest of the term, and the focus of press reports.

But this year, the court’s regular business was overshadowed by its shadow docket. Throughout the year, the justices consider emergency applications—requests for the highest court to intervene before a case has worked its way up through lower courts and is ready for a full merits decision by the justices. In the past 10 years, this emergency or shadow docket has grown in both size and importance. Increasingly, the Republican-appointed majority is using these emergency appeals to render important legal decisions and intervene on behalf of partisan allies. They do this in the proverbial shadows, skipping over the normal deliberative process and often sharing no justification for their actions. Rather than release considered opinions, the shadow docket allows the justices to orderchange simply because they say so.

Since President Donald Trump’s swearing in five months ago, the shadow docket has exploded with the most vital cases on the very basic questions of liberty and the rule of law: Can the president deport people without due process? Can he disregard Congress’ spending authority? Can he gut federal agencies by executive order? Can district court judges halt Trump’s policies on a nationwide basis? Repeatedly, the court has used this shadow docket to carve rights out of the Constitution with a few days deliberation, no oral argument, and, in some cases, not a word of explanation.

It is through the shadow docket that the justices have greenlit many of Trump’s power grabs. When the administration flew 238 Venezuelan immigrants to El Salvador’s notorious Terrorism Confinement Center just hours after invoking the Alien Enemies Act, a federal judge in Washington, D.C. ordered the administration to halt AEA deportations for 14 days. But the Supreme Court intervened on Trump’s behalf, ordering that potential deportees could only contest the government’s plans by lodging habeas corpus petitions in the court district where they were confined. No justice signed their name to the April opinion, but it was clear from Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s dissent, which was joined by the other two Democratic appointees and Justice Amy Coney Barrett, which five Republican-appointed justices were behind it. Sotomayor called out the majority for using the shadow docket to decide new and novel legal questions. “There is every reason to question the majority’s hurried conclusion that habeas relief supplies the exclusive means to challenge removal under the Alien Enemies Act,” she wrote. “At the very least, the question is a thorny one, and this emergency application was not the place to resolve it.”

In her own dissent, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson was more blunt: “With more and more of our most significant rulings taking place in the shadows of our emergency docket, today’s Court leaves less and less of a trace. But make no mistake: We are just as wrong now as we have been in the past, with similarly devastating consequences. It just seems we are now less willing to face it.”

Days later, the court tempered a district court judge’s order to return Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the man mistakenly sent to CECOT. The Trump administration would use the Republican majority’s milder language to refuse to bring him home for months. Then, in a June shadow docket ruling that applied not to one man but to many, the court allowed Trump to cancel humanitarian parole for hundreds of thousands of immigrants,ending their legal right to stay in the country and injecting chaos and danger into the lives of half a million people without a word of explanation.

In June, the Supreme Court issued its most worrying immigration decision from the shadow docket yet when the GOP appointees greenlit an administration policy of sending non-citizens to dangerous, war-torn countries without an opportunity to challenge their deportation—a likely violation of US and international law, not to mention constitutional guarantees of due process. In a dissent joined by her Democratic colleagues, Sotomayor warned that the majority’s unsigned, unexplained order “expos[es] thousands to the risk of torture or death.”

As the president tried to manifest a strongman-style government, the Supreme Court rushed to his aid.

The Republican-appointed majority has also had Trump’s back in other lawless pursuits. In May, they reinstated Trump’s ban on transgender service members in the military. In early June, they sided with DOGE when it authorized Elon Musk’s minions to access millions of Americans’ Social Security data, possibly in breach of the 1974 Privacy Act. “Once again, this Court dons its emergency-responder gear, rushes to the scene, and uses its equitable power to fan the flames rather than extinguish them,” Jackson wrote in a dissent joined by Sotomayor. The emergency, according to the GOP majority, was not whether DOGE staffers can legally access the personal data of millions of Americans or what might happen to it, but that the Trump administration might have to wait out the litigation to get its hands on it. The same day, the GOP appointees sided with the administration in a case over access to DOGE records, setting backthe public’s ability to learn what the Trump administration is so urgently doing.

In the opening months of Trump’s second term, as the president tried to manifest a strongman-style government, the Supreme Court rushed to his aid, enabling him under the guise of the unitary executive theory,an expansive doctrine of executive power. Perhaps the justices’ embrace of the theoryis heartfelt, perhaps it is utilitarian, likely it is both. But one decision particularly showcases how the conservative majority used the shadow docket to both empower the president at the expense of Congress and enact the agenda of their industry backers against workers. How convenient that it all came in one case.

Shortly after taking office, Trump fired Gwynne Wilcox of the National Labor Relations Board and Cathy Harris of the Merit Systems Protection Board, which protects civil servants. Under federal law backed up by Supreme Court precedent, neither could be removed without cause. But Trump dismissed them anyway, betting that the Republican justices would take his side. He was right. In a brief, unsigned, shadow docket opinion, the Republican appointees effectively toppled a 90-year precedent that allowed Congress to createcommissionswith independent leadership. The opinion expanded the president’s powers over agencies that were supposed to be immune from partisan gamesmanship. It was a gift not only to Trump, but to the businesses that wish to neuter federal regulators that oversee unionization and labor disputes, and that regulate financial markets and big business—the agencies that sprung from the New Deal to reign in the excesses that led to the Great Depression. For the justices, this case presented a chance to help Trump and their big business backers: win-win. For civil servants, American workers, American consumers, and Congress’ power to enact its agenda, it was a big loss.

“Our emergency docket, while fit for some things, should not be used to overrule or revise existing law,” Justice Elena Kagan chided in dissent. “The majority’s order granting the President’s request for a stay is nothing short of extraordinary.” But the extraordinary is now ordinary.

Finally, the biggest case of the term also came from the shadow docket. On January 20, Trump signed an executive order purporting to carve the children of undocumented people and visa holders out of the constitutional guarantee of birthright citizenship. It was so blatantly illegal that Trump has lost in every court to consider the issue, all of which issued injunctions to halt the policy nationwide. So the administration turned to the Supreme Court for reprieve, asking their allies in robes tostop allnationwide or universal injunctions on the grounds that they are an inappropriate use of judicial power. Last week, the six GOP appointees agreed.

After again and again bailing Trump out when district courts halted his policies, the majority issued a get-out-of-jail free card: It will now be difficult for courts to protect everyone from Trump’s lawless actions. Those lower courts, ruling almost uniformly against Trump’s lawless actions, are now hamstrung. If you don’t have a lawyer, the ability to join a class action, or live in a state challenging a Trump policy, your rights will give way to Trump’s whims. “No right is safe in the new legal regime the Court creates,” Sotomayor warned. “The Court’s decision is nothing less than an open invitation for the Government to bypass the Constitution.”

The justices delivered wins for the traditional Republican coalition of big business and extremist Christian groups.

“By striking down nationwide injunctions, the Court furthered its determination to free up this President to exercise virtually unlimited power,” writes civil rights lawyer Sherrilyn Ifill. “More than a unitary executive, this conservative Court imagines an unfettered executive.”

And so on the last day of the term, the shadow docket created a new legal realm. It’s possible that through class actions and state litigation courts can limit the decision’s harms. But we no longer live in a country where rights are universally protected.

With all the momentous law made—and broken—on the shadow docket, the court’s merits decisionsreceived less attention. But in its course of regular rulings, the justices could be counted on to deliver wins for the traditional Republican coalition of big business and extremist Christian groups. Since 2020, the court’s six-justice GOP-majority has taken every opportunity to advance an agenda that aligns with the Republican coalition, and it is not slowing down. This term, winners included the fossil fuel industry, corporations seeking to dodge regulation, religious parents, anti-abortion advocates, and patriarchy. The losers include the environment, civil rights, people on Medicaid, women, transgender minors, other LGBT children, public education, people with disabilities, and Planned Parenthood.

In one case, the court’s GOP appointees and Kagan allowed a vaping company to sue the Food and Drug Administration in the Fifth Circuit, known for its rightwing attacks on agency regulation, rather than the DC Circuit or the circuit where the plaintiff is based, as stipulated by Congress. The result is that the Supreme Court discarded Congress’ will and created a loophole in federal law whereby tobacco industry litigants can pick their favorite judges when challenging certain FDA actions. Check off a big win for the tobacco industry.

The fossil fuel industry scored big as well, when the justices granted them standing to sue over California’s car emission standards, reasoning that oil companies’ profits will be harmed by the downstream effects. It’s hard not to see the decision as a favor to the fossil fuel industry and its grandees, including the Koch brothers, who helped pay for the Federalist Society and related entities that have nurtured and elevated members of the Supreme Court. In June, days before the majority slammed the courthouse doors to individuals seeking to vindicate their rights in a case over Medicaid, they opened those same doors to the fossil fuel interests that helped fund the justices’ rise.

Justice Jackson didn’t let this unsavory favoritism go unmentioned. “This case gives fodder to the unfortunate perception that moneyed interests enjoy an easier road to relief in this Court than ordinary citizens,” Jackson wrote in a dissent. She didn’t go so far as to outrightclaim that her colleagues were intentionally privileging “plaintiffs whose claims are backed by the Chamber of Commerce” over “those who seek to vindicate their rights to fair housing, desegregated schools, or privacy”—but she came close, writing that the decision “will do little to dissuade” anyone of the notion.

The GOP-appointed justices made a hash of federal regulators’ enforcement powers by allowing parties to challenge certain regulations in district court while they are being enforced—despite a federal law, the Hobbes Act, to the contrary. The case was a technical dispute over enforcement of a telecommunications law, but the bottom line is to bring chaos to the enforcement of federal regulations, to encourage regulated entities to flout the rules, and to open agencies to endless litigation—ushering in uncertainty and volatility. Who wins? Industries, corporations, and individuals who don’t want to follow the rules. The case follows recent decisions that make it easier for industries to defeat regulations Americans depend upon for a safe and healthy life. Once again, Congress’ will and lawwere nuisances to be disposed of.

“The Court will do whatever it wants, whenever it wants.”

While the court’s corporate backers had an excellent term, the far-right Christians in the GOP firmament made out just as well in their effort to subject the entire country to their patriarchal religious views. In a devastating case for transgender children, the court upheld a Tennessee ban on gender-affirming care for minors, opening the door to dozens of other state health care bans that similarly threaten the lives of transgender children. The decision cuts transgender kids out of the equal treatment protections of the 14th Amendment and disregards the wishes of parents seeking medical care for their children.

A week later, the Republican majority handed down a decision that threatens to upend public school classrooms by allowing religious parents to opt their kids out of lessons that violate their religious views. The case arose out of a Maryland county that allowed parents to opt their kids out of reading books with LBGT subjects, but that reversed course when the op-out proved impossible to manage. Now, the 6-3 majority has imposed opt-outs on every public school in the country: if a parent says a lesson violates their religious beliefs, the school has to pull the kid out of the classroom.

This is, of course, unworkable. Instead of constantly yanking a segment of their students out of classrooms, schools will remove the LGBT topics from the bookshelves, along with anything else the most vocal religious parents object to. As religious objections get bolder, teachers will likely self-censor. LGBT children, or those from LGBT families, will see representations of their lives banished. The court has ushered in a world where parents can no longer make decisions about their trans child’s medical care, but religious parents can dictate what every kid in the school learns. It’s parental rights, for the right parents.

“The damage to America’s public education system will be profound,” Sotomayor wrote in dissent. “In effect, then, the majority’s new rule will hand a subset of parents a veto power over countless curricular and administrative decisions. Yet that authority has long been left to democratically elected state and local decisionmakers, not individual parents and courts.” When it comes to transgender kids, the court lets state legislatures target a vulnerable minority. But when it comes to school curricula, the democratic process isn’t good enough. Rather than use its power to protect a minority’s rights against a hostile majority, the court throws them to the wolves, then invokes its protective powers to impose religious views on everyone else. It certainly seems like some litigants get favorable treatment while others do not.

The court also targeted poor people on Medicaid, particularly women, by allowing states to halt Medicaid payments to Planned Parenthood and any other disfavored providers. This is not only a blow to women’s healthcare, most certainly with deadly consequences, but the GOP majority also used the case to weaken a Reconstruction Era law that allows people to sue to vindicate their rights. For the scorekeepers: fossil fuels can sue over indirect financial losses, but the courthouse door is shut to individuals like Medicaid recipients seeking to protect their rights.

“I think the most telling single opinion from the entire term is Justice Kavanaugh’s concurrence in the birthright citizenship ruling—which, in my view, can be fairly read to stand for the proposition that the Court will do whatever it wants, whenever it wants,” Georgetown Law professor Steve Vladeck wrote on Tuesday. “And I think that principle is fairly reflected in most of the Court’s big decisions from the term—including almost all of the headline-generating rulings respecting emergency applications.”

This Supreme Court term delivered momentous cases that will pervert our system of checks and balances while furthering the GOP projects of dismantling public education, workers’ rights, and medical care. It’s decisions will submit hundreds of thousands of immigrants to unspeakable harm. A president with fascistic ambitious is significantly more powerful than he was when he took office five months ago. The court didn’t have to do any of this. It wanted to.

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From Mother Jones via this RSS feed

In March, The Atlantic’s editor-in-chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, glanced at his phone and couldn’t believe what he was seeing. He’d been inadvertently included in a secret chat on Signal among the Trump administration’s national security team about imminent military strikes in Yemen. The Signal chat leaks—which inevitably became known as “Signalgate”—called into question President Donald Trump’s national security team and how it handled top secret information.

Many of those same officials oversaw recent military operations against Iran and its nuclear facilities. Few journalists have seen how the administration operates from the inside out better than Goldberg. He says those Signal chats revealed something about how he believes Trump’s officials view their jobs, especially Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth.

“I almost felt like, at a very basic level, he was showing off for the vice president, who was also in the chat,” Goldberg says. “The thought I had was, ‘Dude, you don’t have to cosplay being secretary of defense. You are secretary of defense.’” He adds that while it was happening, he didn’t “contemplate just how amazingly stupid the whole thing was.”

On this week’s More To The Story, Goldberg sits down with host Al Letson to reflect on the Signal chat leaks, fears of World War III, and what truly worries him about the future of US democracy.

&Subscribe to Mother Jones podcasts on Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast app.

This following interview was edited for length and clarity. More To The Storytranscripts are produced by a third-party transcription service and may contain errors.

Al Letson: So after the US bombed Iran, I’ve seen all over the place that people feel like this could be the beginning of World War III. What are your thoughts?

Jeffrey Goldberg: Yeah, I see that and I read it. I just, no one’s explained to me how this leads to World War III yet. That is not to say that things can’t spin out of control in the Middle East. The Middle East, the only constant in the Middle East is sudden and dramatic change, so something can go off the rails even as we’re speaking.

There’s a larger point, and sorry to give you this lengthy answer, but I actually think that we’re in World War III and we’ve been in World War III since the Russian invasion of Ukraine or the full-scale invasion of Ukraine three years ago. And by that I mean, when you have a situation in which Russia, aided by North Korean troops and Iranian drones and supported diplomatically by China, is invading a neighboring country that is supported by Western Europe and until today at least, the United States, that seems like a low-grade world war. Right? It’s controlled, it’s conventional, it’s mostly done through proxies, at least from the western side it’s done through proxies. But we’re having all of these eruptions all the time now, and the world is not at peace because the major powers are battling it out through proxies and in other ways.

I think what has been a little bit surprising for me with this new front or change in the Middle East when it comes to Iran and Israel, is seeing that some people on the right are really against American intervention with Iran. And I’m thinking specifically about Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene. I saw her saying that she thought that this was going to become a nuclear war. And then you’ve got Tucker Carlson who really grilled Ted Cruz and brought his thoughts to the forefront. I don’t know, I just did not expect to see that happen.

I’m going to go deep here for a second and I’m going to argue against the idea that Americans don’t like wars. I think Americans are fine with wars as long as they’re short wars that we win.

Agree.

So I think, look, one of the differences and I just wrote a piece about this. I covered Barack Obama and as foreign policy, national security policy in depth so I know something about that and I know something about Donald Trump. Barack Obama was interesting because he would study the second and third and fourth order consequences of actions America could take, and that would frequently paralyze him into not taking any action. Remember, the Syrian red line controversy is a good example. Donald Trump, I don’t think understands intellectually the idea that there’s consequences to actions, right? And so they’re wildly different. And so when you have somebody like that, like Donald Trump, who doesn’t really ask analytically, what could happen down the road if I do X or Y or Z? You’re really rolling the dice.

I think maybe more than any journalist, you have seen up close the incompetence of the Trump Administration. And obviously-

Oh, I wouldn’t go that far.

I don’t know. I mean, you were added to a top secret group chat about a bombing. I think I would stand by my statement just because of that.

Okay, maybe yes, in the sense that it was coming in on my phone. Yes, it was very close.

Yes, I would say that-

I was getting a firsthand glimpse. I’m not going to argue the point.

How much confidence do you have in this team? And I’m talking about Secretary of Defense Hegseth, I’m talking about Trump, I’m talking about all the people that are around these decisions. How confident are you in their ability to execute a plan and to protect American lives?

I have confidence in, let me put it this way, the General in charge of Central Command, General Kurilla, who oversaw this operation, highly competent. There’s a lot of competent people still in government. I have no confidence in Pete Hegseth’s management or analytic or moral capabilities. Marco Rubio is a mystery to me because I knew Marco Rubio a bit and I was an admirer of his brain and many of his policy ideas and now he’s completely done one of these invasion of the body snatchers things where he’s just whatever Trump says is the thing.

Trump himself tweets or Truth Socials or whatever the verb is for posting on Truth Social, a kind of goading text about Russia and its nuclear capabilities. And I worry about Trump’s understanding of the way the national security systems of autocracies work. And I worry that, I mean, it would be the greatest irony of them all, it would be sort of a, that’s a hell of a way to destroy the planet if the planet were eventually destroyed because Donald Trump put something on Truth Social that was misinterpreted by a nuclear armed enemy of the United States who felt as if they had to respond by escalating.

I don’t think Donald Trump wants a nuclear war. Donald Trump has actually been very interesting on the subject of nuclear war and warfare in general. And as you know, he’s not very much into generally speaking into foreign adventures, or at least he’s said as much. I worry that he doesn’t have the self-restraint, maturity, analytic ability, and today the advisors to keep us out of an escalatory cycle with a major power. Iran is a minor power, but I’m talking about China and Russia, North Korea to some extent because they already have nuclear weapons. So that’s what I worry about. You want somebody in that office who’s not impetuous and who is not reactionary. I don’t mean reactionary in the political sense, I mean reactionary in the characterological sense, is easily poked, somebody who’s chill. I mean, if you remember, he was goading the leader of North Korea, this was eight years ago. Little rocket man, and my button is bigger than your button. It’s like, you don’t have to spend years in grad school studying nuclear weapons doctrine to know that ridiculing and threatening people with nuclear weapons is not a great idea.

And so if the question is how worried I am that this is the man in charge of our nuclear weapons, and remember, even though we are a democracy, the President of the United States is an absolute nuclear monarch. The President of the United States can use a nuclear weapon when he wants to. So I don’t feel great about the match of the responsibility that the president has and this particular person in the role.

The foreign power that I think about, the conflict that could be coming, I worry a lot about China and Taiwan and how President Trump would respond to any aggression from China towards Taiwan. And I mean, because I don’t know if you can say that this administration has a definable foreign policy, because you can’t really tell what they’re going to do from one day to the next. I wonder, all bets are off the table if China moves in on Taiwan.

Yeah, that’s interesting. By the way, there’s an argument to be made that a president who is unpredictable is useful, in terms of managing adversaries.

Sure.

It’s known in foreign policy is the crazy Nixon approach. Kissinger would tell the Russian, “Look, I understand what you’re talking about, but my boss, he’s a little bit nuts. We don’t know what he is going to do.” The problem with that is for the crazy Nixon approach to work, the president can’t actually be crazy.

It seems to me that this administration, specifically this president, if you whisper sweet nothing’s in his ear and find a way to get money into his coffers, aggression seems to go away.

Yes, and, I mean, the Iranians didn’t try, to be fair. So, we don’t know. Right, I mean, the joke in the first term or at least the joke that I heard was that either the Trump presidency ends with Trump bombing Iran or building a casino in Tehran. You don’t know, right? You don’t know which way anything’s going to go.

On the Taiwan issue, I would ask you what you think because I have no idea of knowing whether when push comes to shove, Donald Trump would go and defend Taiwan or not. He’s a very transactional person. He wants to do business with China on the one hand, he sees China as an adversary, as another. Does he care who runs Taiwan? No. He cares who’s in control of the smooth flow of semiconductors out of Taiwan into American manufacturing facilities. Right? So I don’t know what he would do. On the one hand, he’s transactional quasi isolationist so he doesn’t seem to be the sort of person who’s going to commit US bodies, meaning soldiers, to a fight to defend Taiwan. On the other hand, he’s very reactive, like we were talking. And so maybe he would be like, “China doesn’t get to do that. Only I get to do that sort of thing, so I’m going to go defend Taiwan.” I don’t know. Do you have any insight into it?

I have zero insight into it. I think the thing that I think about a lot is that there’s two paths, right? There’s a path that he says, “I don’t really care, as long as we get the superconductors, who cares?” There’s the other path where maybe China has a little bluster in their step and says something like challenging the United States, then anything could happen at that point. So, who knows?

Yeah, that’s what I mean about someone who is emotions based in these situations.

Right.

No, I mean, if you’re Taiwan, if you’re Poland, if you’re the Baltic States, you have to be asking, especially with the Europeans because he obviously has a softer spot for Putin than he has for Xi. If you’re the Europeans, you have to say, “I don’t know if this guy’s going to actually come in and save us if we need saving.”

But on the particular issue of Hegseth and Signalgate, obviously what I saw coming over my phone was to some degree a group of people, mainly Hegseth, cosplaying at running the country and running the national security apparatus of the country. This is why they were sort of putting things on Signal like, “The bombers leave at whatever.” And you know what the thought I had when I was seeing it? The thought I had was, dude, you don’t have to cosplay being Secretary of Defense. You are Secretary of Defense.

You are. Right, exactly. You are.

We’re good, we’re good. We’re good. I got it, you’re cool. You got all the bombers, that’s great. You don’t have to show… I mean, I almost felt like at a very basic level, he was showing off for the Vice President, who was also in the chat, and I was like, oh, this is not… You just want people in government, the people who have life-and-death responsibilities to be calm, cool, a lot of cool is necessary, mature, analytic. They don’t take things personally, they’re not getting tattoos to show how cool they are. You want smooth professionals who aren’t looking for glory, they just want to do their job because they believe that they have a responsibility to their country.

Where were you and what did you think when you realized exactly what was happening?

Well, I didn’t realize what was happening until it was happening. What happened was I got a connection request from Mike Waltz who, despite what Mike Waltz later said, I do know, I have met, my phone number would be in his phone. That’s not an impossible thing. And so I sort, oh, wow, Mike Waltz wants to chat, I haven’t talked to that guy in a long time. Maybe he wants to open up a channel, that’s great. So I accepted it and then the next day or two days after that, I was added to the, I think PC Houthi Small Group, it was called. And I thought, oh, this is somebody’s punking me. This is obviously some kind of scam. And then it continued in that vein until the actual messages about the bombing started coming in and I thought, well, if this is real, then we’re about to see some bombing in Yemen. And sure enough, it was real.

And this is a couple of months ago already, and when I do think about it, it still seems absurd because I was in the middle of this. And it’s not that common, as you know, for a reporter to be part of the story in the way that I became part of that story for a week. So in the middle of that swirl, I didn’t really contemplate just how amazingly stupid the whole thing was. What are the chances of that happening, right? And that goes back to your original question, which is, are these guys good at their jobs? In this case, they weren’t very good at their jobs.

No. Why did you decide to take yourself out of the chat?

You are making an assumption that I was making decisions alone. All I can say is that I had a great number of very, very skilled lawyers assisting me through this process because none of them had ever seen anything like this before. And so the prudent course of action was to remove myself from the chat, and obviously we thought that that would trigger… When you leave a Signal chat, the rest of the people on the chat are told that you’ve left the Signal chat. So we were expecting all kinds of high jinks to ensue. They didn’t because it seemed like nobody noticed that I had left the chat.

What I would say is, apart from various legal exposures and all the rest, I didn’t want to be in that chat. I have to be honest with you. I want to know as much as I can about the decision-making process and the arguments and the strategy of the United States National Security Complex. I do not as a civilian want to know when the bombers are taking off, from what base they’re taking off, what ships are firing, what missiles at what targets. I don’t want to know. I am not qualified to have that information, I don’t think it’s the place of a journalist to have that. I’m happy to find out later, but I don’t want specific tactical information to be coming to me. And not just because of all the exposure that that would open up, open you up to all kinds of Espionage Act issues. I don’t need to know what kind of gun the soldiers are using.

Well, it’s also a heavy responsibility, right? I mean-

That’s what I mean. It’s not my… that’s not what I-

Yeah, I don’t want to know that.

I don’t want to know that, and I have no problem with this. I’ve gotten into this argument subsequently. It’s like, what is your role as a journalist in these kind of circumstances? And for some people, for a lot of people, by staying in the chat at all and writing about it, I was a traitor and I was violating something. I don’t know what I was violating. To them I say, “Look, my job is to figure out what powerful people are doing on our behalf.” And so if they wanted to invite me to the chat, I’m in the chat and I’m going to tell the readers of The Atlantic what’s going on. There are some people who’ve said, “You should stay in the chat forever and then report out immediately what they’re attacking.” And it’s like, look, I’m an American journalist, right? I’m a patriotic American, I’m not doing anything. I’m sorry, but I’m not going to do anything that endangers the lives of another American.

So, what went into your decision to publish the chat?

Well, there are two phases. One, I wasn’t going to. A lot of the stuff, as you know, seemed to me to be obviously classified, secret information. What kind of missiles, when they’re going to leave, when they’re going to land, who they’re targeting, etc, etc, etc. What I did with all that information is along with colleagues, we measured the question of publishing, what benefit would become from publishing that specific information and what harm could ensue? So I willingly held back information that I thought was operational because it’s not my interest to provide operational details to stated sworn adversaries of America. And remember, the Houthis slogan is, “Death to America, death to the Jews, or whatever.” I’m like all the categories, right? I mean, death to left-handed Yankees fans. I’d be like, oh my God, they really know me. And so, I have no interest in sharing that kind of information.

They come out and call me all kinds of names and say that I’m lying and that there was nothing in the chat that was secret. And so they actually kind of weirdly forced my hand. So we spent the day after the first story appeared, vetting again the information that I had that I had not published, and making sure that no American would be harmed by the publication of that information. And then we went to all the different agencies and said, “Look, this is what I’m going to put in The Atlantic tomorrow. If you can make a compelling case why I shouldn’t publish this, make it now.” The CIA came back and asked that we not publish one specific thing about a specific person and I said yes, because my interest is not harming that specific person. Other than that, they were like, “Nope, we’re not raising objections.” So then I published it.

They could have had this become a two-day story by simply saying, and look, this is what an ideal administration or even a normal administration might’ve done. They might have said, “Oh, wow, that was a doozy. We really shouldn’t have been communicating on Signal. From now on we’re not going to communicate on Signal anymore and we’re going to investigate how this happened and investigate how this journalist was brought in.” And for whatever reason, their impulse was to attack me and say that I’m lying and call me a scumbag and call me… I mean, Mike Waltz literally called me a loser. And the funniest part of that is that I didn’t ask you to send me all this stuff.

Right, you, you added me.

I was literally, I mean, was literally sitting in a supermarket when I got off. I was shopping and I’m getting all this stuff, and it’s like, well, you could call me a loser but at least I know how to text.

Right, right. I think in normal times though, it wouldn’t just be, we’re not going to use Signal again. It would be, we’re not going to use Signal again and someone’s going to be held accountable. We’re going to fire somebody. And really, that didn’t happen here. This administration just kind of doubled down and said, “Jeff is stupid,” and that’s where it ends, Jeff was stupid.

No, but here’s a serious thing and anyone who is active duty military or works in the intelligence community who’s listening to this or any veteran is going to understand what I’m saying immediately. You can get in serious trouble if you’re a soldier for revealing the fact that you’re in a truck moving from X base to Y base, right? You can get into trouble for… The government over classifies, let’s stipulate that, they classify everything. But let’s also stipulate that there’s some stuff that’s worth classifying, making secret. There are so many soldiers who’ve been punished, including jail time, for revealing things that are so much less serious than the stuff that was revealed in the Signal chat. And what I heard from non-political rank and file soldiers, veterans, etc, was, “I would’ve gone to jail for that. These guys don’t even lose a day’s pay, but I would’ve gone to jail.” And that hypocrisy, let’s talk about what leadership is, right? That on the part of Pete Hegseth, Mike Waltz, etc, that is not modeling good leadership for the people who report to you.

Yeah. Are you scared for this country, where we are right now?

In my mind, we’re either experiencing a midlife crisis, a nervous breakdown, or a terminal illness. I know we’re going through something. We’re going through something. Social media, reality TV before it and the coming AI, it created a situation in which one of these things could happen. I don’t even know if democracy can survive in an age of social media, that’s a large question for another day. But I literally don’t know if we’re going through a thing where it’s like, all we need to do is buy a sports car and we’re going to be fine, or we just need a little bit of rest and relaxation and maybe some drugs and we’ll be fine, or if the American experiment is under such pressure that maybe it doesn’t make it.

I would note, colleague of mine, Yoni Appelbaum has noted this in writing in the past, that there’s never been this sort of experiment before in human history. A large, very large, multi-ethnic democracy has never flourished before over the long term. And I do think that introducing social media and conspiracism and the fakery of AI and all the rest has really affected our ability to keep it together. But I just don’t know. Obviously, I’m hoping for the best. I do think that America’s a great country. I think that we’re an indispensable nation. I think we are a force for good more than we’re a force for bad in the world, especially when you look around the world and see what actually is out there. I’ve got kids, I want them to live in a flourishing country, but I don’t know where we’re at.

I do know this. I do know that passivity in the face of outrage is not going to get us anywhere. And I do know that there are some people who believe that as long as we shovel enough cheap calories at Americans and multifarious forms of entertainment, we’ll keep them quiet and quiescent. And I think that people need to really contemplate what we have and what our system is and think about ways to make it better and not just let it get destroyed by people who don’t care about our democratic experiment. Sorry, I didn’t mean to start giving you a big speech there, but I really feel this. I feel like there’s a lot of passivity right now about things.

I agree with you. I think passivity, and I think that in a lot of ways, so many things, social media, the media we consume, all of it brings us further away from our humanity. And I think that-

Look at the way people talk to each other in this country.

Exactly, the way we talk to each other. Also, the fact that we’ve just lost touch with having empathy for people who aren’t in our immediate circle, and-

Well, this goes to my exact point. It’s like, you know what? You know what I call MAGA supporters? Americans. I want them to call us Americans too. I want people to look at journalists as patriots and not as traitors. I want people to operate within the boundaries of decent behavior and self-restraint, because we’re going to be living here together no matter what, so it might as well work.

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

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From Mother Jones via this RSS feed

In early June, a gurdwara in Fremont, California, shared a potential bombshell document on X. Obtained through public records requests, the legal note implied that the Hindu American Foundation—an advocacy group for the Hindu diaspora in the United States—maintains a “fiduciary” relationship with the Indian embassy in Washington, DC.

It could have massive consequences: If HAF, one of the wealthiest and most controversial nonprofits to organize on behalf of American Hindus, is financed by the embassy, it could trigger a violation of the Foreign Agent Registration Act (FARA).

It is not illegal to operate as a “foreign agent” in the United States. But organizations must register. And with the filing comes a series of significant requirements. If HAF were to register as a foreign agent, it would be compelled to publicly disclose detailed information about any alleged dealings with the Indian government.

Ben Freeman, the director of the Democratizing Foreign Policy program at the Quincy Institute, described the registration act as somewhat “murky” when it comes to dictating what think tanks or nonprofits can and cannot do. Still, establishing a “fiduciary relationship is really key for FARA.”

On its surface, HAF looks like a typical advocacy group. Created in 2003, it purports to provide school boards, law enforcement, college campuses, and journalists with “a better understanding and inclusion of Hindu Americans.” On an ideological level, many have said HAF is to India what the Anti-Defamation League is to Israel.The foundation—increasingly influential as the South Asian population increases in the US—operates aggressively to help shape a particular consensus on the most divisive political issues in the diaspora. HAF has publicly condemned caste abolitionists in California, Sikhs rallying for self-determination, and reporters who frame India’s military and human rights abuses in Kashmir as an occupation.

Any organization is free to support the policy of a foreign government, but the Department of Justice lays out several criteria that the government would use to establish a relationship between the “agent” and “foreign principal.” As outlined in a 2020 memo from the DOJ, “the purpose of FARA is not to restrict speech, but rather to identify it as the speech of a foreign principal (when fairly attributed), and thus to enable American audiences to consider the source in evaluating the message.” Finances can play a key part. “Frankly, the DOJ hasn’t done a good job of making it clear when think tanks should and shouldn’t register under FARA,” Freeman explained, “but there are a couple red lines that have been drawn.”

One of these criteria is somewhat objective: If the agent is receiving compensation for their activities. The other criteria are more subjective. If HAF were to be investigated by the DOJ, it would have to be established that the Indian government or embassy yields “some level of power by the principal over the agent.” The government would then consider if the foundation had an “ongoing relationship” with the foreign principal, whether their activities are “coordinated with the foreign principal,” whether their relationship is “documented in a written agreement,” or whether their actions are “a one-off or part of a pattern.”

The recent allegation of FARA violation began amid a flurry of paperwork. An activist requested email correspondences between the Indian Embassy in Washington and HAF, under India’s Right to Information Act. The embassy refused to release this information. But it did so in an odd way. According to the documents provided to Mother Jones, the embassy replied to the information request with a denial, and wrote that the disclosure of such emails would “irreparably breach” the trust between HAF and the embassy’s mission. They added that “some of the information” sought by the requesters contained “fiduciary” information that the embassy is entitled to withhold under Indian law.

Prabhjot Singh, a spokesperson for the temple, said they felt compelled to look further because of HAF’s close coordination with Prime Minister Narendra Modi and American politicians. HAF has previously liaised directly with Modi, former governor of South Carolina Nikki Haley, and former Hawaiian Rep. (and one-time Democrat) Tulsi Gabbard when Modi visited the United States in 2014. HAF played a similar role during two more trips in 2019 and 2024. HAF also organized a briefing in 2019 between Capitol Hill staffers and the Indian Embassy to discuss Modi’s first term, for which they provided materials to participants that touch on religious violence in India, while making no mention of the significant role Hindu paramilitaries played in organized attacks on minorities. (Modi was previously banned from entering the US for his role in the 2002 anti-Muslim pogrom.)

The Department of Justice encourages citizens to report violations with the federal government if they suspect that a person or organization is acting as an authorized foreign agent. The gurdwara filed a complaint with the DOJ through their legal counsel Lex Politica, an Austin-based law firm that has previously represented Elon Musk. As reported by the Times, the founder of the firm, Chris Gober, hopes to develop Lex Politica as the outside counsel to major Republicans like House Speaker Mike Johnson.

In conjunction with the “fiduciary” connection, a term Singh is convinced implies a formal loyalty, the gurdwara’s legal counsel says HAF’s response shows an unambiguous violation of FARA. The complaint says that the foundation has “consistently and unequivocally advocated for the interests of [Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party] on both domestic and foreign policy matters,” drawing on social media posts, interviews, newsletters, and other communications that indicate a close relationship between HAF and Indian politicians that span the last decade.

“Given its ‘fiduciary’ relationship with the Indian Embassy, [HAF] appears to be acting in alignment and in coordination with a foreign government,” said Singh. “It strikes at the heart of American sovereignty, civil rights, national security, all of those things are influenced by this.”

The legal complaint is similarly forceful. “A review of publicly-available information reveals that HAF appears to be acting as an agent of the Indian Embassy in Washington, D.C. and the Bharatiya Janata Party (‘BJP’), the ruling government of India,” Lex Politica wrote in their letter addressed to Attorney General Pam Bondi. “This consistent and repeated activity directly on behalf of its foreign principals demands that HAF register and report according to FARA’s requirements.”

The embassy has yet to elaborate on the details of said fiduciary connection. Neither HAF nor the Indian Embassy responded to comment on the exact nature of their relationship, financial or otherwise, but the foundation did tell The Guardian that they deny the claims and are open to meeting with the DOJ, Gabbard, and FBI Director Kash Patel to discuss the “dangerous accusations” against them.

HAF also responded to the allegations in a public statement, calling the complaint just the “latest dual loyalty smear” and said the foundation “categorically rejects the ludicrous allegation that HAF coordinates its activities with the Government of India.” Making no clear connection to the Fremont gurdwara, the statement also mentions Khalistan. The Khalistan movement aims to establish a sovereign Sikh state; for a significant number of American Sikhs, the movement represents a nonviolent freedom struggle. HAF says the movement is fundamentally anti-Hindu.

The Fremont gurdwara has been active in local Khalistan organizing for years, and in response, HAF has publicly disparaged their political stance in the press. Their statement on the FARA allegations goes on to suggest that HAF is being targeted for “their strong advocacy” against the Khalistan movement.

HAF is already infamous in some circles. It has reportedly orchestrated smear campaigns against scholars and organizations who ideologically oppose the right-wing elements in Indian politics, namely Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party. Researchers have placed HAF within a larger network of other right-wing Hindu organizations, which have explicit connections to the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), a massive Hindu paramilitary organization in India. According to Jewish Currents, HAF has wielded the accusation of “hinduphobia” against anyone outwardly critical of hindutva, especially on college campuses.

And this is not the first time HAF has faced similar accusations of violating FARA. A 2024 report in Al Jazeera found that HAF appeared to be “treading a fine line” between acting as a nonprofit and a foreign agent, even if the organization denies that it operates on the direct behalf of the Indian government.

Whether a connection between the activities of HAF and the will of the BJP can be plausibly established, enforcement is an entirely separate issue. “I think it’s unlikely that Trump’s DOJ under Pam Bondi would do anything about it,” Freeman said.

Since 2023, the self-professed “largest democracy in the world” has made international headlines for its very undemocratic repression of its critics from afar. Canadian intelligence connected the Modi government to the murder of Khalistan activist and Canadian citizen Hardeep Singh Nijjar and the Justice Department announced its charges against an Indian intelligence employee who attempted to murder a Sikh lawyer and American citizen in 2023. These events prompted Sen. Adam B. Schiff (D-Calif.) to introduce the Transnational Repression Reporting Act, currently working its way through the House.

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

The federal Weatherization Assistance Program is the oldest and largest energy efficiency initiative in American history. Born from the 1973 oil crisis, it helps low- and moderate-income households make a litany of upgrades to their homes, such as installing insulation, sealing windows, and wrapping water pipes. The program, known as WAP, is often free and saves residents an average of $372 annually on their utility bills.

But a report released today by the nonprofit American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy (ACEEE) found that many homes need basic—but expensive—repairs before they can participate, something many residents can’t afford. Those households are placed on a deferral list until those improvements are made. Although some buildings are too damaged to fix up and some people manage to get off the list,the research showed that, in 2023, another 7,000 homes could have been repaired but weren’t due to lack of money. That’s a fifth of the 35,000 homes that the Department of Energy estimates WAP reaches each year.

“People are in really bad situations…There is a very big demand for this no-cost program.”

“We were the first to really figure out what the deferral rates are and why,” said Reuven Sussman, an expert in energy efficiency behavior change at ACEE and an author of the report. “I don’t think this problem is broadly known.”The Department of Energy, which administers the $326 million WAP budget, works with local companies to weatherize qualifying homes.ACEEE surveyed providers in 28 states about their deferrals. The top reason cited was the poor condition of the roof—an issue that undermines improvements such as attic insulation. Floor damage and outdated electric panels were the other leading justifications for deferring homes. The average cost of bringing a home up to WAP standards, the report found, was nearly $14,000.

“If you’re eligible for WAP you likely don’t have enough money to pay for it,” Will Bryan, director of research for the Southeast Energy Efficiency Alliance. “There are households that are falling through the cracks.”

People facing deferrals have a few options, but they are limited and inconsistent. Depending on where these residents live, some public, private, or philanthropic funds are available for critical home repairs. Some states—like Pennsylvania, Delaware, and Vermont—have more specific programs targeting WAP deferrals. Starting in 2022, the federal government also provided money for the Weatherization Readiness Fund (WRF),  though it only backed it with about $15 million.

“The government has experimented with some pre-weathization funding, but that hasn’t happened at the kind of scale that it needs to,” said Bryan. And, he added, President Donald Trump’s administration and Congress are trying to pull what little money has become available in recent years. The “big, beautiful” budget bill that the House passed zeros out the budget for both WAP and WRF, as well as related assistance or incentive programs. The details of the Senate version are not yet clear, but the impacts of the rollback could be drastic.

“Elderly people, disabled people, small children—their energy burden is so much higher than other folks because they are on fixed incomes,” said Bryan Burris, vice president of energy conservation programs at projectHOMES, a WAP provider in Richmond, Virginia. The recent influx of state and federal funding has helped his organization cut its deferral rate from around 50 percent to about 20, but that progress is in peril. “People are in really bad situations,” said Burris. “There is a very big demand for this no-cost program.”

ACEEE estimates that it would cost about $94 million per year to make the 7,000 preventable deferrals ready for weatherization. If all those homes were able to receive WAP services, it would save 49,236 megawatt-hours of energy annually and reduce carbon dioxide emissions by 153,000 metric tons over the lifetime of the measures. WAP projects also often pay for themselves many times over in lower utility bills.

Evaluating the effectiveness of weatherization readiness programs is more complex. Although they may save homeowners some money on a monthly basis, the greatest gains of major repairs are often indirect boosts in health and quality of life. For example, fixing a roof could help a senior citizen age in place, rather than go to an assisted living facility. Removing toxic substances, like asbestos, from homes could prevent illnesses in children.

“You can potentially save money in the long term by reducing the hazards that people are exposed to,” said Bryan, pointing to a substantial body of research supporting the idea. A 2021 study in the southeastern United States, for example, found that after weatherization, “respondents reported fewer bad days of physical and mental health. Households were better able to pay their energy bills and afford prescriptions.”

While that line of inquiry was beyond the scope of the latest ACEEE report, Sussman said the logic makes sense. Avoiding even a minor trip to the hospital or doctor could save programs like Medicaid or Medicare thousands of dollars.

“People live with holes in the roof and asbestos and can’t get assistance,”  said Bryan. “It leads to health issues.”

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Everything is bigger in Texas—except, apparently, memory of devastating mass shootings.

In late June, Republican Gov. Greg Abbott signed into law the Anti-Red Flag Act, which preemptively bans the creation or enforcement of extreme risk protective orders. Such orders are legal tools used to temporarily prohibit a person from having access to guns after a judge evaluates evidence of alarming behavior and deems that person to be a danger to themselves or others.

Abbot and Republican state lawmakers have extensive knowledge of the harm that red flag laws are designed to prevent. Several of the worst gun massacres in recent memory took place in Texas, including when a suicidal 18-year-old slaughtered 19 children and two teachers at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde in 2022. Three years earlier, a 21-year-old right-wing extremist killed 23 people and injured 22 others at a Walmart in El Paso. In 2018, a high schooler fatally shot 10 and wounded 13 at Santa Fe High School near Houston. In 2017, a 26-year-old military veteran with a history of domestic violence killed 26 people and wounded 22 others at a Sutherland Springs church.

That’s only a partial list of these calamities in Texas over the past decade. (See also: the attack at an outlet mall in Allen, a rampage in Midland-Odessa, and a deadly ambush of police officers in Dallas.) Most, if not all, of these cases were preceded by observable warning behaviors from the perpetrators—red flags indicating that access to weapons made them dangerous.

In his public remarks about gun violence and mass shootings, Abbott consistently has focused heavily on the role of mental illness, a tactic conservatives often use to deflect arguments for stricter regulation of firearms. And while mental illness is not fundamentally the cause of mass shootings, the governor obviously is well aware that there can be identifiable individuals who should not have access to guns.

“Anybody who shoots somebody else has a mental health challenge, period,” he said as the state and nation reeled from Uvalde. Following the massacres in El Paso and Midland-Odessa, Abbot pledged to work with the legislature on laws “to keep guns out of the hands of dangerous criminals.” After the mall shooting in Allen, he spoke of the need to address “anger and violence by going to its root cause, which is addressing the mental health problems behind it. People want a quick solution. The long-term solution here is to address the mental health issue.”

Abbott himself once urged the legislature to “consider the merits of adopting a red flag law,” after the Santa Fe High School shooting seven years ago.

Texas legislators also know the reality behind these attacks—they were the first to publish an official investigative report on Uvalde, two months after the massacre, in July 2022. The 77-page state House report focused foremost on the disastrous tactical response, including how law enforcement officers waited more than an hour to confront the perpetrator inside the building. But it also summarized the perpetrator’s troubled background and detailed some of his warning behaviors leading up to the attack: A former girlfriend told the FBI that he’d been lonely and depressed and had “told her repeatedly that he wouldn’t live past 18, either because he would commit suicide or simply because he ‘wouldn’t live long.’” The perpetrator also began wearing black clothes and combat boots, the report said, and his online activity “reflected themes of confrontation and revenge.” It continued:

The attacker began to demonstrate interest in gore and violent sex, watching and sometimes sharing gruesome videos and images of suicides, beheadings, accidents, and the like, as well as sending unexpected explicit messages to others online. Those with whom he played video games reported that he became enraged when he lost. He made over-the-top threats, especially towards female players, whom he would terrorize with graphic descriptions of violence and rape.

Yet despite those and other red flags, the perpetrator had been able to purchase an arsenal—legally—within days of turning 18. As the Texas House report also detailed:

An online retailer shipped 1,740 rounds of 5.56mm 75-grain boat tail hollow point to his doorstep, at a cost of $1,761.50. He ordered a Daniel Defense DDM4 V7 (an AR-15-style rifle) for shipment to a gun store in Uvalde, at a cost of $2,054.28. On May 17, 2022, he bought a Smith and Wesson M&P15 (also an AR-15-style rifle) at the same store in Uvalde, at a cost of $1,081.42. He returned the next day for 375 rounds of M193, a 5.56mm 55-grain round with a full metal jacket, which has a soft core surrounded by a harder metal. He returned again to pick up his other rifle when it arrived on May 20, 2022, and he had store staff install the holographic sight on it after the transfer was completed.

Four days later, 19 children and two teachers were dead.

Opponents often make a blanket argument that red flag laws are unconstitutional and deprive citizens of due process. In reality, evidence of threatening behavior must be presented to a civil court judge, who rules on whether to remove access to guns on a temporary basis; to varying degrees, there is also a petitioning or review process for potential restoration of access. And while the US Supreme Court has not addressed red flag laws directly, in 2023, it ruled on a Texas case about gun rights and domestic violence restraining orders: “When an individual has been found by a court to pose a credible threat to the physical safety of another, that individual may be temporarily disarmed consistent with the Second Amendment.”

The core function of red flag laws, in other words, is not deprivation of firearms, but rather the twin purposes of protecting the community and getting help for the troubled person.

Violence prevention experts at the Santa Barbara County Sheriff’s Office told me that the law has become “a key tool in a lot of, if not most of, the threat management cases that we’ve worked.”

With the growth of these laws over the past decade—22 states and Washington, DC, now have some version of the policy—research in California and beyond has shown that they are effective at reducing suicides and targeted shootings. Last year, as I completed a deep investigation into the 2014 mass attack in Isla Vista, California—which gave rise to the state’s pioneering red flag law—violence prevention experts at the Santa Barbara County Sheriff’s Office told me that the law has become “a key tool in a lot of, if not most of, the threat management cases that we’ve worked.”

The senior US senator in Texas, Republican John Cornyn, was the lead cosponsor of the landmark Bipartisan Safer Communities Act authorized by Congress in 2022. Signed into law by then-President Joe Biden but now jeopardized under President Donald Trump, that legislation included $750 million in grant funding for states to implement crisis intervention programs and policies, including red flag laws. Cornyn did not respond to a request for comment about his state’s Anti-Red Flag Act, which takes effect September 1.

When the next major mass shooting occurs in Texas, it’s likely to be followed once again by a Texas-size round of “thoughts and prayers,” as Ted Cruz, the state’s other Republican US senator and a vocal opponent of red flag laws, can well attest.

Likely even bigger, though, will be the missed opportunity to have prevented yet another round of carnage and devastation.

Correction, July 2: An earlier version of this story misstated the age of the El Paso shooter. He was 21 at the time of the massacre.

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The GOP’s “Big Beautiful Bill,” which cleared the Senate Tuesday afternoon and is returning to the House, is generally terrible for families. But women and babies who live in areas that voted overwhelmingly for Donald Trump are likely to suffer some of its most sweeping and damaging effects.

The historically brutal Medicaid cuts—a staggering $930 billion slashed from the program over the next decade—could force as many as 144 rural hospitals around the US to close their labor-and-delivery units or drastically scale back services, a new analysis by the National Partnership for Women & Families projects. That could have potentially catastrophic consequences for maternal and infant health.

“When somebody is in labor or having a pregnancy-related emergency, every second counts,” says Rolonda Donelson, lead author of the analysis. “And with these hospital closures, people are going to have to travel further and further to get the help that they need.”

Medicaid is one of the most important safety nets for low-income women during pregnancy and the postpartum period, paying for 41 percent of births in the US—about 1.5 million babies a year. The program plays a particularly vital role in rural areas, covering the costs of 47 percent of births in those communities in 2023. Even with Medicaid support, the maternal mortality rate among rural women is almost twice as high as in urban areas; unsurprisingly, infant mortality is significantly higher as well.

Medicaid is likewise a critical safety net for the country’s 1,800 rural hospitals, helping defray the cost of caring for some 16 million rural residents who would otherwise be uninsured. Without Medicaid payments, many rural hospitals—which tend to be smaller and less profitable than their urban counterparts—would be at serious risk of going under. As it is, almost 150 rural hospitals stopped inpatient services or shut down completely from 2005 to 2023, the federal government says. The GOP megabill puts another 338 rural hospitals at risk, University of North Carolina researchers warned in a letter in June.

As rural hospitals have struggled to stay open, labor-and-delivery departments have been among the services at greatest risk of being slashed. That’s because reimbursements by both private insurance and Medicaid are often too low to cover the costs of obstetric services, and rural hospitals don’t make enough money from other types of services to offset those losses. Since 2020, more than 100 rural hospitals have shuttered their maternity units or announced plans to close, according to the Center for Healthcare Quality & Payment Reform, a national think tank; only 42 percent of rural hospitals still offer labor-and-delivery services, while in 11 states, fewer than one-third do.

Thus, vast parts of rural America are already maternity care deserts, forcing pregnant patients to travel further for prenatal care, deterring them from seeking immediate medical treatment when they suffer complications that might be life-threatening, and making them less likely to receive follow-up care after giving birth.

“When somebody is in labor or having a pregnancy-related emergency, every second counts, and with these hospital closures, people are going to have to travel further and further to get the help that they need.”

The GOP cuts and changes to Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act will make that situation much worse, leading to 17 million people becoming uninsured, Donelson estimates. “This will disproportionately impact women because they are more likely to have Medicaid health insurance,” she adds.

More than 60 percent of the rural labor-and-delivery units at risk are in red and purple states that went for Trump in 2024. Trump won rural voters by 40 points last November, a Pew analysis found.

As my Mother Jones colleague, Michael Mechanic has reported, when ordinary Republicans are informed about how the budget megabill—a package of tax and spending cuts that would add an estimated $3.3 trillion to the deficit—would affect the after-tax incomes of American families, they hate it. “Apparently even Trump’s die-hard fans are appalled when they are shown how the bill’s provisions will affect the finances of the nation’s richest and poorest households,” Mechanic wrote, “not that they’d ever hear it on Fox News.”

While the proposed cuts to Medicaid will be devastating for all rural hospitals, those in states that expanded Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act will be hardest hit, Donelson says. The GOP bill “really just shifts a lot of these costs from the federal government onto states that already [are struggling] to afford this,” making it “that much more expensive to cover those in the Medicaid expansion population,” she says.

According to the National Partnership’s analysis, the states facing the greatest threats to rural maternity care are Kentucky and California, each with 13 rural obstetric departments at risk of closure; New Mexico, which has 11; and Louisiana, where ten obstetric units are at risk. Unlike some other conservative holdouts, Kentucky and Louisiana both expanded Medicaid. As Sharona Hoffman, co-director of Case Western Reserve University’s Law-Medicine Center, told my colleague Julia Métraux, Republicans’ new cuts seem intended to undercut Medicaid expansion. “The goal, I think, is to get states to say, ‘Well, we’re not getting the federal money support, and so we’re going to roll back or undo our expansion of Medicaid,’” Hoffman said.

In total, 41 states could lose labor-and-delivery units in their rural hospitals because of GOP Medicaid cuts, Donelson says. The only reasonsome other states—including Arkansas and Alabama—won’t see cuts is because these states “already have limited maternal health services,” she says.

The cutbacks and closures won’t just affect patients; they will also have a profoundly destructive impact on rural jobs and economies, where hospitals typically serve as one of the biggest employers in their communities. According to the National Partnership analysis, more than 80 percent of people working in hospitals in non-metro areas are women.

The Trump/GOP mega-bill also includes many other provisions that will disproportionately affect women and children, from defunding Planned Parenthood to gutting spending on food stamps.

Reproductive justice groups lost no time in excoriating the Senate after today’s vote. “For the past six months, people in all 50 states have been grappling with the chaos unleashed by the Trump administration’s cuts, freezes, and destruction of critical federal programs—and now Congressional Republicans are pouring gasoline on the fire,” Jennifer Driver, senior director of reproductive rights at State Innovation Exchange, said in a statement. “Instead of helping people make ends meet by lowering costs, Senate Republicans are choosing cruelty over solutions.”

“The Senate’s version of the bill is just as dangerous and devastating as the one passed by the House and attacks our communities’ health, dignity, and futures,” echoed Lupe M. Rodríguez, executive director of the National Latina Institute for Reproductive Justice. “Let it be very clear, instead of helping people stay healthy and safe, it puts our communities at risk only to serve the interests of the billionaires.”

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Let’s start with the proposition that you should not have to know who Andy Ogles is. It often seems like Andy Ogles doesn’t know who he really is, either. The second-term Republican congressman is a Middle Tennessee George Santos whose partial fabrication of his biography is mostly not compelling enough to summarize here, although I will say that itinvolves a doughnut shop, a non-existent local governing body, and a dubious proficiency in Russian. In Washington, Ogles does not seem to do much in the way of work. His animating purpose—in addition to staying out of prison—is to say things about PresidentDonald Trump or the Democratic party that might produce a headline that features his words but not his name. But sometimes the things Republican congressmen say are a set-up for other, more important people, to say them too.

Last Friday, a few days after Zohran Mamdani all-but-clinched the Democratic primary for mayor of New York City, Ogles posted on X that the Democratic-Socialist state assemblyman—who was born in Uganda and received his US citizenship in 2018—should be denaturalized and deported on the basis of an old lyric from Mamdani’s rapping days that the congressman argued constituted material support for terrorism. (Like Ogles, I am neither a lawyer nor a “former member of law enforcement,” but: No.) Ogles’s comment was bigoted and insulting and also not how things work, but in the current moment, those are less disqualifiers than they are prerequisites. Citing the Ogles Memorandum, Fox News’ Peter Doocy asked White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt on Monday if Trump believes the Department of Justice should begin the process of stripping Mamdani of his citizenship.

Leavitt gave what is by now the standard Leavitt answer: She couldn’t speak to the specifics, but if what Ogles was saying was true, it’s something the DOJ ought to be looking into.

It was the latest entry in a stunning wave of Islamophobic bigotry against Mamdani. Ogles called him “little Muhammad.” Rep. Brandon Gill (R-Texas) said that Mamdani should “go back to the third world” because he ate with his hands in one video. Fox News legal analyst Emily Compagno said she found it horrifying that Mamdani “won’t condemn the Holocaust”—something he has, in fact, condemned. A Republican on the New York City Council previously called for Mamdani to be removed from the country. The New York Young Republicans Club is selling t-shirts that say “Deport Zohran.” Charlie Kirk invoked the specter of 9/11 and said the US risked “cultural suicide.” Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-New York), the likely Republican nominee for governor of New York, has repeatedly called Mamdani a “jihadist.” New York City Mayor Eric Adams has said Mamdani is “uplifting Hamas.”

Even by the standards of the Trump era, this talk of terrorism and denaturalization is despicable stuff—rank religious bigotry mixed with naked authoritarianism. It’s getting close to throwing-people-out-of-helicopters territory (which, to be clear, a Republican member of the New York City council has already shared a meme about doing). A White House official suggesting a political opponent might be stripped of their citizenship is unfathomable in a functioning democracy. Shouting that this is “authoritarian” does not quite do it justice; they are literally proposing to do to Mamdani what Idi Amin did to his father.

In the aftermath of Mamdani’s surprising victory, some members of his own party have seen the 33-year-old candidate as an inconvenience or a threat. Democrats have couched their criticisms of the candidate in the language of defending antisemitism, often citing Mamdani’s refusal to condemn the phrase “globalize the intifada”—a term that Mamdani has not himself used. Like a game of telephone, the understanding of what Mamdani has actually said has sometimes lagged behind their sense that they should condemn it. Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.) said that he did not agree with Mamdani’s comments  “about the Jewish people,” although Mamdani has not made disparaging comments about Jewish people. Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-New York) said on WNYC that she was “alarmed by past positions, specifically references to global jihad.” (Mamdani has not called for global jihad, and a Gillibrand spokesperson later said the senator had misspoke.)

With notable exceptions—such as Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-New York), the dean of the city’s congressional delegation, who endorsed Mamdani the day after the election—prominent Democrats have responded to the right-wing attacks on a Muslim officeholder with something a bit less tepid than full-throated solidarity. Meanwhile, the criticism of Mamdani on the right, purportedly because of an unspecified antisemitism, has produced its own kind of antisemitism. On Monday, in the midst of a segment accusing Mamdani of making life unsafe for Jews, Fox News host Harris Faulkner questioned Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer’s commitment to Judaism and said he “works against the interest of his own people.” Schumer is from Brooklyn; “his people” are New Yorkers.

Are Republicans all talk? Well, the Trump administration is trying to put a member of Congress in prison for making contact with an ICE officer during the baseless arrest of a mayor. It sent the vice president in front of the cameras to mistake a wrongfully-handcuffed Mexican-American US senator for a famous War on Terror detainee. It took a Green Card holder off the streets of New York City and tried to have him deported for criticizing another country’s foreign policy. The Trump administration is, according to NPR, rolling out an ambitious new denaturalization campaign aimed at bypassing due-process protections. And it is attempting to overrule the clear meaning of the 14th Amendment to strip babies of their citizenship—while pushing for a travel ban on much of the African continent (including Uganda). These things should all be DOA. But the story of the second Trump term is that it’s not a bluff when there’s no one willing to call it.

Democrats should be manning the barricades against this stuff, because the menace on the other side of the line is a far greater threat than a few negative advertisements in 2026. Attacking people’s citizenship and identity as punishment for their politics is a fascist move. It will destroy the country’s civic life if unchallenged. (Resist the temptation to cheer on Trump’s suggestion that he might do the same to Elon Musk; it is a poison for the soul.)

Beyond the corruption and the bad cologne, Trumpism has always been a story about who counts as American. The attacks on Mamdani—and the threat to strip him of his citizenship as punishment for his short-lived post-college career as Mr. Cardamom—reflect the rot at the heart of the modern GOP and the exclusionary definition of national identity that made Trump’s rise possible. The attack on an African-born Muslim is the logical continuation of a political movement that began with the racist lie that President Barack Obama was, in fact, an African-born Muslim. He and his ilk never stopped doing birtherism; it festered and festered until it controlled a state and legal apparatus that could render their fantasies into reality. And then it festered some more.

“A lot of people are saying he’s here illegally,” Trump said of Mamdani on Tuesday, at a press conference to announce the opening of a FEMA camp for immigrants in the Florida Everglades.

The fact that he wants this fight is all the more reason to have it. There has been an alarming lack of having-each-other’s-back during the first five-plus months of the new administration. Every successive threat has produced pleas to wait for the next one. High-profile Democrats have called, at various times, to make peace with the destruction of the United States Agency for International Development; the disappearance of immigrants to El Salvador; and the prospect of war with Iran. Senators do press tours to talk about the need for “alpha energy” after voting to confirm Kristi Noem. It’s incumbent upon them to stand united against this neo-birtherism, not because they agree with Mamdani on everything, but because if they punt on something so elemental people will start to question whether they believe in anything. They risk becoming a caricature of a caricature, a feckless party whose approach to fascism feels a lot like that old adage about grizzlies—you don’t have to run faster than the bear, you just have to run faster than your friends.

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

Republicans are pushing to pass a major spending bill that includes provisions to prevent states from enacting regulations on artificial intelligence. Such untamed growth in AI will take a heavy toll upon the world’s dangerously overheating climate, experts have warned.

About 1 billion tons of planet-heating carbon dioxide are set to be emitted in the US just from AI over the next decade if no restraints are placed on the industry’s enormous electricity consumption, according to estimates by researchers at Harvard University and provided to the Guardian.

This 10-year timeframe, a period of time in which Republicans want a “pause” of state-level regulations upon AI, will see so much electricity use in data centers for AI purposes that the US will add more greenhouse gases to the atmosphere than Japan does annually, or three times the yearly total from the UK.

The exact amount of emissions will depend on power plant efficiency and how much clean energy will be used in the coming years, but the blocking of regulations will also be a factor, said Gianluca Guidi, visiting scholar at the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health.

*“*By limiting oversight, it could slow the transition away from fossil fuels and reduce incentives for more energy-efficient AI energy reliance,” Guidi said.

“To just proscribe any regulation of AI in any use case for the next decade is unbelievably reckless.”

*“*We talk a lot about what AI can do for us, but not nearly enough about what it’s doing to the planet. If we’re serious about using AI to improve human wellbeing, we can’t ignore the growing toll it’s taking on climate stability and public health.”

Donald Trump has vowed that the US will become “the world capital of artificial intelligence and crypto” and has set about sweeping aside guardrails around AI development and demolishing rules limiting greenhouse gas pollution.

The “big beautiful” reconciliation bill passed by Republicans in the House of Representatives would bar states from adding their own regulations upon AI and the GOP-controlled Senate is poised to pass its own version doing likewise.

Unrestricted AI use is set to deal a sizable blow to efforts to tackle the climate crisis, though, by causing surging electricity use from a US grid still heavily reliant upon fossil fuels such as gas and coal. AI is particularly energy-hungry—one ChatGPT query needs about 10 times as much electricity as a Google search query.

Carbon emissions from data centers in the US have tripled since 2018, with an upcoming Harvard research paper finding that the largest “hyperscale” centers now account for 2 percent of all US electricity use.

“AI is going to change our world,” Manu Asthana, chief executive of the PJM Interconnection, the largest US grid, has predicted. Asthana estimated that almost all future increase in electricity demand will come from data centers, adding the equivalent of 20 million new homes to the grid in the next five years.

The explosive growth of AI has, meanwhile, worsened the recent erosion in climate commitments made by big tech companies. Last year, Google admitted that its greenhouse gas emissions have grown by 48 percent since 2019 due to its own foray into AI, meaning that “reducing emissions may be challenging” as AI further takes hold.

Proponents of AI, and some researchers, have argued that advances in AI will aid the climate fight by increasing efficiencies in grid management and other improvements. Others are more skeptical. “That is just a greenwashing maneuver, quite transparently,” said Alex Hanna, director of research at the Distributed AI Research Institute. “There have been some absolutely nonsense things said about this. Big tech is mortgaging the present for a future that will never come.”

While no state has yet placed specific green rules upon AI, they may look to do so given cuts to federal environmental regulations, with state lawmakers urging Congress to rethink the ban. “If we were expecting any rule-making at the federal level around data centers it’s surely off the table now,” said Hanna. “It’s all been quite alarming to see.”

Republican lawmakers are undeterred, however. The proposed moratorium cleared a major hurdle over the weekend when the Senate parliamentarian decided that the proposed ban on state and local regulation of AI can remain in Trump’s tax and spending mega-bill. Texas Republican Sen. Ted Cruz, who chairs the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation, changed the language to comply with the Byrd Rule, which prohibits “extraneous matters” from being included in such spending bills.

The provision now refers to a “temporary pause” on regulation instead of a moratorium. It also includes a $500 million addition to a grant program to expand access to broadband internet across the country, preventing states from receiving those funds if they attempt to regulate AI.

The proposed AI regulation pause has provoked widespread concern from Democrats. The Massachusetts senator Ed Markey, a climate hawk, says he has prepared an amendment to strip the “dangerous” provision from the bill.

“The rapid development of artificial intelligence is already impacting our environment, raising energy prices for consumers, straining our grid’s ability to keep the lights on, draining local water supplies, spewing toxic pollution in communities, and increasing climate emissions,” Markey told the Guardian.

“However, instead of allowing states to protect the public and our planet, Republicans want to ban them from regulating AI for 10 years. It is shortsighted and irresponsible.”

The Massachusetts congressman Jake Auchincloss has also called the proposal “a terrible idea and an unpopular idea.”

“I think we have to realize that AI is going to suffuse in rapid order many dimensions of healthcare, media, entertainment, education, and to just proscribe any regulation of AI in any use case for the next decade is unbelievably reckless,” he said.

Some Republicans have also come out against the provision, including Sen. Marsha Blackburn (Tennessee) and Sen. Josh Hawley (Missouri). An amendment to remove the pause from the bill would require the support of at least four Republican senators to pass.

Hawley is said to be willing to introduce an amendment to remove the provision later this week if it is not eliminated beforehand.

Earlier this month, Georgia congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene admitted she had missed the provision in the House version of the bill, and that she would not have backed the legislation if she had seen it. The far-right House Freedom caucus, of which Greene is a member, has also come out against the AI regulation pause.

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From Mother Jones via this RSS feed

Will Donald Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill,” as critics contend, be a massive giveaway to the rich?

Absolutely, when you tally it up. Yet the bill’s provisions, while devastating to the nation’s poorest, represent only modest gains for the majority of affluent families. Consider the merely rich—the top-earning 10 percent of households. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that the House version of the bill will increase average after-tax resources of those families by about $12,000, or 2.3 percent—hardly life-changing for families that bring home an average of $522,000 a year after taxes. (It may well prove life-changing for families on Medicaid and food stamps, and not in a good way.)

And what of the “ultrawealthy”—which I’ll define as households with at least $100 million in assets, enough to break into the richest 0.01 percent? For them, the financial benefits are even less meaningful, amounting to maybe five days’ worth of growth in their asset portfolios—basically a rounding error.

Our tax code is based on a fiction—the idea that investment gains aren’t income until the underlying investments are sold.

All of which begs the question: Is America’s progressive income tax—enacted by Congress way back when in part to tame Gilded Age excess—even capable of curbing the wealth inequality now eating away at our social and political fabric?

The answer: a resounding no. Even if Congress were to create a 100 percent tax bracket for people with millions of dollars in earnings, their wealth would keep growing relative to everyone else’s.

That’s because the government’s definition of taxable income doesn’t track with true economic income, and this disconnect grows as one proceeds further up the wealth ladder. At the uppermost rungs, barely 10 percent of an ultrarich person’s economic income shows up on their 1040.

The root of the problem is that our tax code is based on a fiction—the idea that investment gains aren’t income until the underlying investments are sold. Yet that economic income is what keeps adding zeros to the asset balances of the ultrarich. The explosive growth of those untaxed assets over four decades has resulted in a US wealth distribution more extreme, for example, than countries such as Pakistan and Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Share of national wealth held by the richest 1 percent of the population.World Inequality Database Share of national wealth held by bottom 50 percent of the population.World Inequality Database

To visualize America’s extraordinary wealth concentration, consider the richest 0.01 percent of US households—the top 1 percent of the top 1 percent. It’s really within this miniscule group, not even the entire top 1 percent, that the wealth is concentrating. Since the early 1980s, the fortunes of the 0.01 percenters—who today represent just 18,400 households—have increased dramatically, both in size and in their collective share of America’s overall wealth.

Based on data compiled by economists Gabriel Zucman, Thomas Blanchet, and Emmanuel Saez at the University of California-Berkeley, the average household in this rarified group had, in today’s dollars, $71 million at the start of 1982. Today, a little over four decades later, they have $972 million. That amounts to a 6.2 percent annual wealth gain, after taxes and lifestyle expenses, and adjusted for inflation.

Even if the richest 0.01 percent had to relinquish allof what our tax code counts as income, the wealth gap between them and the rest would keep growing.

If all Americans experienced such prosperity, it would be cause for celebration. In fact, millions have either lost ground or have been treading water economically since the early 1980s.

To quantify how the Trump megabill affects the wealthiest households, we can extrapolate from a recent report from the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy. The report indicates that the average annual tax cut for the top .01 percenters amounts to about one-tenth of 1 percent of household wealth. If Congress were to do nothing and allow the sunsetting provisions of Trump’s 2017 tax cuts to expire, the net worth of those families would simply grow at the slightly lower rate of 6.1 percent.

Seen through this lens, the bill is a lose-lose proposition. The United States would either incur hundreds of billions more dollars in annual debt or have to slash health care for poor and middle-class Americans to prevent an almost meaningless reduction in the rate at which the bloated fortunes of the ultrarich are expanding. The other 99.99 percent of US households, per Zucman’s data, have seen their wealth grow at an average inflation-adjusted rate of about 2.7 percent, although families in the bottom 40 percent have practically no wealth, and those in the lowest quintile have negative wealth, Zucman confirms.

This growth-rate discrepancy ensures the continuing concentration of the nation’s wealth at the very top—a near quadrupling, over 43 years, of the share held by the richest 1/10,000 of the population. If things continue like this for another 43 years, a crowd not large enough to fill a Major League Baseball stadium will end up with half of the nation’s wealth.

The longer we fail to address this wildly inegalitarian trend, the worse off we’ll all be, because excessive wealth commands excessive political power. Elon Musk, after contributing more than a quarter-billion dollars to Trump’s campaign, just spent four months making unilateral—and reckless—decisions about the funding and staffing of federal agencies. Further wealth concentration will produce more Elon Musks.

But arresting the rate of hoarding by the ultrarich is impossible under our current tax system. Even if the richest 0.01 percent were forced to relinquish allof what our tax code counts as income, the wealth gap between them and the rest of us would continue to grow. A 70 percent tax on income in excess of $10 million—such high “marginal” rates, common before Ronald Reagan was elected, are now considered radical—would fall even shorter of the mark.

“A minimum tax expressed as a fraction of wealth is the most effective way to address this situation.”

In a recent study, Zucman and three colleagues used anonymized IRS data—never before available—to look at the adjusted gross incomes and income tax payments of the wealthiest 0.01 percent of households. According to the data—from 2019, a fairly typical year—even if those families were charged an income and payroll tax rate of 100 percent, the average inflation-adjusted value of their assets still would have increased by 3.5 percent.

The picture gets even worse with the ultra-ultrawealthy. The Wall Street Journal recently reported, based on  Zucman’s analysis, that the top 0.00001 percent, just 19 billionaire households, controls 1.8 percent of the nation’s treasure—starting in September 1982, those billionaires have enjoyed inflation-adjusted wealth gains of nearly 9 percent per year, on average.

Placing a 100 percent income tax on these families would merely reduce their average annual growth rate to 7.7 percent—still large enough to ensure, within 28 years, that they would be worth more than $1 trillion per household.

The fiction that paper profits aren’t income created this mess. It allowed Jeff Bezos, for example, to avoid—indefinitely—taxes on more than $200 billion in gains on his Amazon shares. A ProPublica team calculated that Bezos’ effective tax rate from 2014 to 2018 was less than 1 percent of his true income—and also that Bezos, then worth about $18 billion, had even claimed and received a $4,000 child tax credit in 2011 that was intended to help poor and middle-class families. His net worth has grown an average of 20 percent per year—from $30.5 billion in 2014 to about $230 billion today. At this rate, he’ll be a trillionaire by 2033.

Bezos and his ilk can easily micromanage their taxable income by deciding whether and when to sell assets. The income tax, to work as needed, would have to be a tax on economic income, not on some arbitrary figure that oligarchs can control but wage earners cannot. “The super-rich largely avoid the individual income tax, allowing them to have relatively low effective tax rates relative to their wealth,” Zucman told me via email. “A minimum tax expressed as a fraction of wealth is the most effective way to address this situation.”

So far, anyway, Congress has refused to pass a tax on excessive wealth, despite numerous recent proposals. Indeed, four decades into a feedback loop of wealth concentration and political meddling by our growing dynastic class has made the odds of ending the cycle appear ever more daunting.

The US public, certainly, is eager for redistributive tax policies that favor working Americans over the ultrawealthy. That much is evident in the popularity of once-fringe politicians like Sen. Bernie Sanders, the surprise victory of a democratic socialist in the New York City mayoral primary, and the fact that the One Big Beautiful Bill polls very poorly—and extremely poorly, even among Republicans, once people learn how it affects the finances of rich and poor household.

And the cycle has to end. If our lawmakers continue acting as they have, America’s “shared” economic prosperity may soon mirror what we see in the poorest, least developed countries: a tiny, powerful upper class; a small, struggling middle class; and a vast underclass that can barely afford food and shelter.

We’re not quite there yet. But the clock is ticking.

Bob Lord, a tax attorney and associate fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies, serves as senior vice president for tax policy at Patriotic Millionaires

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From Mother Jones via this RSS feed

The Senate version of President Donald Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill,” unveiled to the public at Midnight on Friday, went even further than the House version in its hostility toward the nation’s burgeoning renewable energy sector. The House version merely seeks to end the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) subsidies for wind and solar development enacted under President Joe Biden. Now, Republican senators want to levy punishing new taxes on wind and solar projects.

“I hate to say it, but it would kill [America’s] renewable energy market,” says Kenneth Gillingham, a dean and professor of environmental and energy economics at Yale University.

“It would kill it!” concurs Bob Keefe, executive director of E2, a national organization of business leaders advocating for smarter climate policies and the author of a recent book titled Clean Economy Now.

If solar and wind projects aren’t finished by 2027, per the Senate version, the developers will face a tax that would add an additional 10 to 20 percent to their costs, per Rhodium Group‘s analysis. The American Clean Power Association estimates that this will cost companies $4 billion to $7 billion by 2036 and raise consumer electricity costs by 8 percent to 1o percent.

Red-state voters “will be losing out on jobs that they would have been getting otherwise, but they might not know that.”

Ending the IRA subsidies would cause a big industry slowdown, Gillingham says, but the proposed taxes are nails in its coffin. The Senate bill, he says, shifts the economy away from wind and solar—the fastest-growing energy sources here and worldwide—and back toward fossil fuels. “It very clearly shows the policy priorities of the Republicans who are drafting this bill. They are entirely pro-fossil fuels,” says Gillingham.

Jesse D. Jenkins, an energy systems engineering professor at Princeton University, calls the bill a “truly bizarre, a self-defeating measure,” especially from a “party that claims to stand for American energy dominance.” Its provisions, in addition to hindering the development of clean power, Jenkins says, will lead to more pollution and higher energy bills for homes and businesses.

Indeed, according to an analysis by Michael Thomas, founder and CEO of the clean energy data platform Cleanview, the bill will increase electricity costs substantially for customers in every state—in some cases by more than 20 percent.

That’s particularly notable now that demand for electricity has begun to increase after a decade of flatlining. The rise in demand, Keefe told me, referring to Trump’s invention of a crisis to rationalize his “drill, baby drill” energy policies, could well turn into an actual “energy emergency.” And the only way to fix that, he says, “is through solar, wind, and batteries.”

The Republicans’ bill utilizes what journalist Jael Holzman calls the party’s’ “anti-China trap.” Namely, wind and solar companies won’t have to pay the excise tax if they extract their supply chains from China—as if that’s remotely possible. “It would take several years to get to a point where a supply chain would not face this tax, if possible at all,” Gillingham told me. “In the meantime, the manufacturing would be destroyed.”

Keefe calls is a “worthwhile goal” to move manufacturing to the United States from China, the global renewable energy leader by leaps and bounds, but he says this bill would do the opposite. Fueled by the IRA funding, the US renewables industry was just starting to gain a stronger footing. “All of those projects now are at risk because we’re killing the tax policies that made them possible,” Keefe says.

The economic losses would almost certainly hit red, rural districts the hardest, because 78 percent of the IRA tax credits for clean energy have gone to these areas. And all the new jobs being created in states like Georgia were just the start. “The greater loss is actually on the jobs that would have happened within the next year or two,” Gillinhgam says. “They will be losing out on jobs that they would have been getting otherwise, but they might not know that.”

Keefe emphasizes that the losses won’t stop with IRA-funded projects. “Business investments were prompted because of the market signal that the previous administration set when it said it was shifting to a cleaner economy,” he says. Even if the bill fails, $14 billion and 10,000 clean jobs already have been lost just thanks to uncertainty created by the administration’s energy and trade rhetoric.

A handful of Republican Senators are balking at the new renewables taxes—three are backing an amendment to ease the proposed levies in ways that could jeopardize the larger bill.

In any case, the crux of the matter goes well beyond economic and political considerations, Keefe says, citing the bill’s downstream effects: “We’re going to be going backwards on protecting the air that you and I breathe, in the water that we drink, and and the planet that we live on.”

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From Mother Jones via this RSS feed

Dear Joe Rogan,

I don’t know you. We’ve never met, and I am not a regular listener of your podcast. But I have the impression you are a man who does not like to be played. I regret to inform you that Kash Patel played you.

When the FBI director was on your show last month, he made multiple statements that were false or misleading. Given that you’re a proponent of truth-telling, I expect you will be troubled to learn this. Let me start with Patel’s remarks about what he derisively calls “Russiagate.” A good chunk of your two-hour-long conversation was devoted to this topic, a personal obsession of Patel. As he has done for years, Patel presented to you and your audience a highly skewed and false narrative. “All roads lead to Russiagate,” he declared. “That’s where it all started.” He meant that his entire critique of the so-called Deep State and the supposedly corrupt Joe Biden gang stems from the Trump-Russia scandal. So it can be rather instructive to look at his claims about this foundational matter.

During the podcast, Patel gave you the “90-seconds” version of this controversy:

Can you imagine a time in the United Staes of America in the 21st century, where a political party would go overseas and acquire fake foreign intelligence from a foreign intelligence officer funded by donations to that political party in the United States of America, then take that material, package it, walk it to the FBI, literally, and say, ‘Hey, we need you to surveil the opponent of our political party who happens to be running for the president of the United States”? Then convince the FBI to go to a secret federal FISA [Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act] court that I used to use to manhunt terrorists and say, ‘Hey I need you to wiretap essentially all the comms in and around Trump camp because of the material we gave you.’ And then have that FBI lie to the federal court and the judge in that warrant application, which is a felony, and intentionally remove information of innocence from that application just to get it above the threshold so the judge would sign it. That’s Russiagate.

Much in this description was inaccurate. The political party Patel was referring to—the Democrats—did not hand that opposition research to the FBI and request surveillance of Donald Trump, and the FBI did not seek to wiretap “essentially all the comms” of the Trump camp. It requested a wiretap on one former Trump campaign adviser.

But more to the point, Joe, what Patel was referring to was merely one slice of the much larger Trump-Russia affair. And this is Patel’s magic trick. It’s a diversion. He wants you and others to fixate on the issue of a search warrant and not pay attention to the bigger story: Russia attacked the 2016 election to help Trump, and Trump aided and abetted Moscow by denying this assault, thus providing cover to Vladimir Putin.

For years, Patel and other Trump allies have deflected from these basic facts by focusing solely on what’s become known as the Steele dossier and how it was used by the FBI to obtain that surveillance warrant for Carter Page, a little-known foreign policy adviser for Trump’s 2016 campaign.

As you know, the dossier was a collection of memos that Christopher Steele, a former British intelligence official and Russia counterintelligence specialist, wrote during the 2016 election on possible ties between the Trump campaign and Russia. Steele, who had previously worked with the FBI, was commissioned to do so by Fusion GPS, an opposition research firm that was being paid by a lawyer for the Clinton campaign to dig up material on Trump. Starting in June that year, Steele sent periodic reports to Fusion GPS that contained unconfirmed information, much of it gossip and speculation from unidentified sources about internal Russian politics and juicy but unsubstantiated tidbits on Trump and his campaign. Weeks later, Steele began sharing these documents with his FBI contact.

And this is Patel’s magic trick. It’s a diversion. He wants you and others to fixate on the issue of a search warrant and not pay attention to the bigger story: Russia attacked the 2016 election to help Trump, and Trump aided and abetted Moscow by denying this assault.

The first of these research memos alleged that Russia had been “cultivating, supporting, and assisting TRUMP for at least five years.” It noted that Trump and his inner circle had accepted “intelligence from the Kremlin” on his Democratic rivals. It claimed that Russian intelligence had compromising information on Trump that could be used to blackmail him (including what would come to be known as the “pee tape,” which supposedly showed Trump instructing prostitutes to perform a “golden showers” show in his hotel room). The report stated that the Kremlin’s cultivation of Trump included offering him real estate deals in Russia. Another of Steele’s memos cited a source saying there was a “well-developed conspiracy of co-operation” between the Trump campaign and Russia, and that Paul Manafort, the campaign chair (who had a history of working for a Russian oligarch and Moscow-friendly Ukrainian politicians) was overseeing this arrangement.

Steele’s memos remained a secret until I revealed their existence in a story I reported in Mother Jones on October 31. One of the owners of Fusion GPS, Glenn Simpson, had shown me a copy of the documents and set up an interview for me with Steele, with the provision that I could not cite Steele by name. My article disclosed that a former senior intelligence officer for a Western country who specialized in Russian counterintelligence had provided the FBI with memos contending the Russian government had for years attempted to co-opt and assist Trump and that the FBI was looking into these allegations. (I did not report the details of the unsubstantiated lurid claims about Trump’s personal behavior believing that would not be fair to him.)

My story on the Steele memos received some attention, but it did not have much impact on the overall coverage of the race in the final week. (By the way, because of my reporting on the Steele documents, I’ve been pulled into some right-wing conspiracy theories about all this. If you’re interested, you can read about that here.)

Let’s back up a bit: Unknown to the public during the 2016 campaign was that in late July the FBI had opened up an investigation—dubbed Crossfire Hurricane—to determine whether Russia was trying to covertly intervene in the election and whether there had been contacts between the Trump campaign and Russians related to this. (The bureau had already been investigating the hacking of Democratic Party computers—an operation attributed to Moscow.) As part of this investigation, the FBI applied to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act federal court for a warrant to spy on Page, the Trump campaign adviser, who had had curious interactions with Russian officials during a trip to Moscow.For those who don’t know, this was S.O.P. It’s generally tough to get a warrant for surveillance on an American citizen—as it should be. The bureau has to file an extensive application with this court to win such permission. In its application for the Page warrant, the FBI cited the Steele memos. This was an egregious mistake. The documents contained unconfirmed scuttlebutt about Page from a foreign source. And as Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz later noted in a 2019 report, the application was loaded with other errors. Nevertheless, in late October 2016, the FISA court approved the secret warrant—and would in subsequent months approve re-authorizations of this warrant.

This was FBI wrongdoing. Patel is correct about that. An FBI lawyer even pleaded guilty to doctoring an email that the bureau used to win FISA court approval to eavesdrop on Page after the 2016 campaign was over. Much of FBI misconduct regarding the application for the surveillance of Page was laid out in that 478-page report issued by Horowitz. (For those in your audience who want to do their own research, the report can be found here.) By the way, the Horowitz report noted that the Steele dossier was only used in the surveillance application regarding Page. There were no other FISA warrants sought by the FBI in this investigation.

Discussing his effort as a congressional investigator to uncover FBI malfeasance related to the Page surveillance, Patel told you, “What I had unearthed was the biggest political criminal scheme ever perpetuated by portions of the FBI leadership and other people in the intelligence community in coordination [with the media].”

Sounds like hype to me. But you be the judge.

Patel, Trump, and others have beat the drum about the FBI’s misuse of the Steele dossier to draw attention from Putin’s assault on the 2016 election and Trump’s complicity. They claim that there is nothing to the Russia “witch hunt” or “hoax”—and that the entire fuss was kicked off by the Steele dossier, which was a Democratic dirty trick. That is, the Dems orchestrated the entire “Russia, Russia, Russia” business with the Steele documents.

That’s not true. Who says so? Many sources. We can start with Horowitz. His report concluded, “We found that Crossfire Hurricane was opened for an authorized investigative purpose and with sufficient factual predication.” It also found no “documentary or testimonial evidence that political bias or improper motivation influenced…[the] decision to open Crossfire Hurricane.” In fact, his report noted that the Steele dossier had nothing to do with the FBI’s launch of the Russia investigation. That inquiry began after the FBI learned that another Trump campaign foreign policy adviser named George Papadopoulos had told an Australian diplomat that the Trump team had been informed that Moscow could assist it by anonymously releasing information damaging for Clinton.

So it wasn’t a political witch hunt engineered by the Dems. You know who else says this? Special counsel John Durham, who was appointed in 2019 by then-Attorney General Bill Barr to investigate the Russian investigation.

Durham found flaws in the probe, but he concluded that the FBI inquiry “could have been opened more appropriately as an assessment or preliminary investigation” and not a “full investigation,” as it had been. In other words, the bureau did not improperly launch this investigation but assigned it the wrong level of seriousness. Durham, too, did not report uncovering any “political bias” regarding the FBI’s investigation, though he did assail the bureau for “confirmation bias.”

Now let’s look not at the investigation but the thing itself: what happened in 2016. Several government investigations have concluded that Russia mounted a covert operation to hack and leak Democratic emails and other materials to hurt Hillary Clinton and help Trump.

Trump and Patel, though, deny this. In a recent documentary, Patel said that the the FBI and the rest of the US intelligence community that investigated Russian interference in the 2016 election “knew it didn’t exist.” For his participation in this documentary, Patel was paid $25,000 by a Ukrainian-American-Russian filmmaker who has worked on a Russian propaganda project financed by Putin’s presidential office. Joe, I wish you had asked Patel about that payment. Maybe you can next time he’s on. Here are the details.

It’s rather odd that Patel would deny Russia clandestinely intervened in the 2016 election. When he was investigating what he calls “Russiagate,” he was a Republican staffer on the GOP-run House intelligence committee, which in March 2018 released a report on the Russian attack that opened with this line: “In 2015, Russia began engaging in a covert influence campaign aimed at the U.S. presidential election. The Russian government, at the direction of President Vladimir Putin, sought to sow discord in American society and undermine our faith In the democratic process.” Yet Patel won’t acknowledge even the existence of this Russian operation. Joe, why is that? Why isn’t he—or you—pissed off that Russia messed with our election? Why is the FBI director covering for Putin?

I know you like to get to the bottom of things. In this case, that would mean spending time with the 966-page report released by the Senate intelligence committee in 2020. This is the most comprehensive account of what Russia did in 2016—and it’s bipartisan. In fact, Republican Marco Rubio, now Trump’s secretary of state, was chair of the committee when the report was released. He and other Republicans on the panel endorsed its findings. So it ain’t Democratic spin or a phony narrative cooked up by the liberal press and Deep State that hates Trump.

There’s a lot of mind-blowing stuff in this report. But here are the basics:

The Committee found that Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered the Russian effort to hack computer networks and accounts affiliated with the Democratic Party and leak information damaging to Hillary Clinton and her campaign for president. Moscow’s intent was to harm the Clinton Campaign, tarnish an expected Clinton presidential administration, help the Trump Campaign after Trump became the presumptive Republican nominee, and undermine the U.S. democratic process…

While [Russian military intelligence] and WikiLeaks were releasing hacked documents, the Trump Campaign sought to maximize the impact of those leaks to aid Trump’s electoral prospects. Staff on the Trump Campaign sought advance notice about WikiLeaks releases, created messaging strategies to promote and share the materials in anticipation of and following their release, and encouraged further leaks. The Trump Campaign publicly undermined the attribution of the hack-and-leak campaign to Russia and was indifferent to whether it and WikiLeaks were furthering a Russian election interference effort.

You and your listeners ought to give those passages a good read. The committee—including such Republicans as Rubio, Tom Cotton, and John Cornyn—was saying the Russian assault was real and that Trump assisted Putin by echoing Moscow’s denial. What’s more, these Republicans were confirming that Trump had been indifferent to an attack on the United States by a foreign adversary and had even sought to exploit it. Oh boy. I ask you, Joe: What’s worse—the FBI screwing up one FISA application or Trump helping Russia subvert an election for his own benefit? Is it a close call?

I’m guessing that about now you are thinking, “Well, what about all that talk of collusion?” Democrats and some in the media did spend a lot of time claiming that Trump colluded with Russia in this attack. Special counsel Robert Mueller, reported that he found no evidence of a criminal conspiracy between Trump’s campaign and Russia. But his report did detail extensive contacts between the campaign and Russian operatives who tried to influence the election. As Mueller testified to Congress, “We did not address ‘collusion,’ which is not a legal term.” Trump and his loyalists seized on the absence of criminal charges to claim full exoneration. That was spin.

On the issue of collusion, Joe, I would, once more, direct you to that lengthy GOP-backed bipartisan Senate intelligence committee report. Its many revelations include the disclosure that Manafort, when he was chair of Trump’s 2016 campaign, covertly met with a former business associate named Konstantin Kilimnik whom the committee characterized as a “Russian intelligence officer,” and he handed over inside campaign information.

Check out this line from the report: “Kilimnik likely served as a channel to Manafort for Russian intelligence services.” Trump’s top campaign aide hobnobbing with Russian intelligence. Isn’t that scandalous? Why does that not interest Patel?

The committee noted it had “obtained some information suggesting Kilimnik may have been connected to the [Russian intelligence’s] hack and leak operation targeting the 2016 U.S. election.” That’s big: Trump’s campaign chief was in close contact with a Russian intelligence officer who might have been tied to Putin’s covert attack on the 2016 campaign to help elect Trump. Moreover, the report reveals that the committee found “two pieces of information” that “raise the possibility” that Manafort himself was connected “to the hack-and-leak operations.” Might one call this collusion? This was not the only possible collusion. Several government investigations, include the Senate intelligence committee’s, confirmed that in June 2016, top officials of the Trump campaign—Manafort, Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner—met in Trump Tower with a Russian intermediary after being informed she was bringing them dirt on Clinton as part of a secret Russian government effort to help Trump. The information she handed over was apparently not useful. But by agreeing to this meeting, the Trump campaign signaled to Moscow it was just fine with Russia mucking about in the election. Collusion? I dunno. But it’s certainly getting cozy with an enemy. And consider this: After that Trump Tower meeting, when the news broke that Russians had hacked into Democratic Party computers and 20,000 pages of the pilfered material was leaked right before the party’s convention to hurt the Clinton campaign, Trump Jr. and Manafort publicly insisted that Russia had nothing to do with it. They had been informed Moscow was scheming to covertly boost Trump. Yet here they were backing up Putin’s assertion that Russia had nothing to do with the the hack-and-leak operation. They were lying to protect Russia. Collusion? If not, perhaps complicity?

Joe, if you’ve gotten this far, you’re probably tiring from all these details. I know this whole affair can seem convoluted. But for my money, it remains damn important. It’s the original sin of the Trump presidencies. And I wonder why the current FBI director, whose brief includes countering Russian covert actions targeting the United States, doesn’t seem to care that Putin screwed with an American election.

Patel calls Russiagate “the disinformation seed that started it all.” In a way, I agree. Trump’s betrayal in 2016 helped him reach the White House. Remember when WikiLeaks released John Podesta’s emails, which were hacked by Russian ops, to draw attention from Trump’s “grab ’em’ by the pussy” video? During the final weeks of the campaign, the dissemination of those swiped emails generated a ton of negative news stories for Clinton, which certainly contributed to her ultimate defeat. Over the past nine years Trump and loyalists like Patel have done their mightiest to cover up Trump’s foul deed—his aiding of the Russian attack—pushing a competing narrative that lets Putin and Russia off scot-free.

During the podcast with Patel, you appeared to accept his version of all this at face value and expressed outrage at the FBI’s misuse of the Steele dossier: “It’s so crazy,” you said, “that someone could do something like that and a whole enormous group of people could do something like that with no repercussions….You were part of something that was one of the biggest scandals in political history. But because it was targeted toward Trump people look the other way.”

And you blasted the left:

The disturbing thing to me is how people on the left are willing to look the other way….If the federal government is doing this, and they’re doing this to someone you consider an enemy, what’s to stop them from doing this against your candidate. This is unprecedented behavior that is tolerated and coordinated with the media. That’s dangerous for the country. But people are so ideologically captured. They’re so locked into their party. By any means necessary. We gotta get Trump out. And they push that narrative so hard that they’re willing to do a very un-American thing.

I wonder if you can take a critical look at your embrace of Patel’s self-serving narrative and at the Trump gang’s unrelenting effort to hide Trump’s involvement in Russia’s assault on the United States. I know that might be tough to do. But I would love to see you have Patel back on the show after you read through those reports I cited above. He sure can sound convincing—unless you know the facts. While I have you: Two other small things regarding your chat with Patel. At one point, he said, “We are on track to have the lowest…murder rate ever…We’re already down 20 percent from last year.” You asked him how he achieved this, and Patel explained that he was following the policy “let good cops be cops,” suggesting the Biden administration had not focused on stopping crime. I contacted the FBI and asked for statistics to back up Patel’s claim of a 20-percent decline. It responded, “The 2024 and 2025 statistics on the murder rate have not been publicly released yet.” The most recent numbers cover 2023, and those show a 11.6 drop in the murder rate. In fact, the murder rate peaked in 2020, during Covid, when Trump was president, and it has been decreasing since then. Any decline in murders is good news, but Patel made it seem as if the Trump administration had scored an unprecedented achievement, when this drop (assuming Patel’s stat is accurate) may well be part of a historical trend.

Also during the podcast, Patel brought up a claim he has many times made: that Trump “preemptively authorized” the deployment of 10,000 to 20,000 National Guard troops before January 6—and these troops were rejected by then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Washington, DC, Mayor Muriel Bowser. You seized on this to suggest these Democrats were somehow behind the riot: “So they wanted it to be chaos?” (Patel did not dispel that notion and replied, “I will leave it to you on that.”) But does it make sense that Pelosi or any other Democrat would want to cause a riot that might interfere with the certification of Biden’s electoral victory? What would be the point? In any event, the acting defense secretary at that time, Chris Miller—a Trump appointee—has testified there was no Trump order to ready military personal ahead of January 6: “I was never given any direction or order or knew of any plans of that nature,” Miller told Congress. There were other assertions that Patel made during his time with you that could be similarly challenged or debunked. But by now you get my drift. He didn’t deserve the free ride you provided him. I realize it’s popular to blast the Deep State and portray the Biden crowd as nothing but evil and corrupt—and to depict “the media” as craven accomplices in assorted schemes to undermine Trump. This is Patel’s hymnal. But if you critically scrutinize many of his claims, you will find they don’t hold up or are not the full story. Patel deserves factchecking as much as any government official. Perhaps more so, given he’s been running a con for years, insisting the Russia scandal was not real.

You’re an influencer with a massive audience. So I hope you’ll take the time to read up on the Trump-Russia affair. You know, do your own research. There’s a ton of material. Being informed these days can take a huge amount of effort, especially when Patel and others are out there pushing disinformation. But I assume you’ll agree that whatever our differences we all believe that an accurate flow of information is what’s best for our country and necessary to ensure a sound future for American democracy. If you want to discuss any of this, Joe, I’d be delighted. My DMs are open. All best,David

If you appreciate kick-ass journalism and analysis, sign up for a free trial subscription to Our Land, David Corn’s twice-a-week newsletter at davidcorn.com.

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From Mother Jones via this RSS feed

This story was produced by the independent, nonprofit newsroom Canary Media and co-published by Mother Jones*.*

Gary Yerman, 75, sat nervously in a noisy ballroom in Virginia Beach, Virginia, counting down the minutes until he could shed his ill-fitting double-breasted suit for a sun shirt and blue jeans. He introduced himself as a fisherman of 50 years to a stranger seated next to him at the banquet table.

“That sounds really hard,” the other man replied.

“Not as hard as it’s going to be to go accept this award and talk to a room full of people,” joked Yerman. Moments later, his name was called, and he walked onto a professionally lit stage to accept a small crystal trophy from the Oceantic Network, a leading trade group for the burgeoning multibillion-dollar US offshore wind industry.

It was an unlikely sight. America’s fishermen have long treated wind developers as their sworn enemies.

The conflict started in the early 2000s, when the first plans for New England’s offshore wind areas were sketched out. In packed town hall meetings that often devolved into shouting matches, fishermen claimed the projects would make it harder to earn a living: fewer fishing grounds, fewer fish, damaged ocean habitat.

Few of these predictions have come to pass in places like the UK, which has already built over 50 offshore wind farms in its waters. Wind areas there are thriving with sharks and serving as a surprising habitat for haddock. But even today, fisher-led groups in the US are spearheading lawsuits aiming to halt at least two offshore wind farms under construction on the East Coast. One former offshore wind executive told Canary Media that the amount of pushback from fishermen in America has made offshore wind investments riskier than in Europe.

“Everyone knows that fishermen hate offshore wind companies. Well, guess what? Offshore wind companies hate fishermen.”

Yerman was one of the first fishermen in the US to cross this bitter divide. He’s become the reluctant face of a group of over 100 fishermen and fisherwomen who go by the name Sea Services North America. They’ve decided to work for offshore wind farms—not against them. Doing so supplements their income from scalloping, a centuries-old bedrock of the New England fishing economy that has seen revenues dry up.

Pursuing work in wind power has come at a cost. After the awards event, back in blue jeans and with a celebratory beer in hand, Yerman recounted the exact word New England fishermen used when he and his crew first crossed the Rubicon.

“They called us traitors,” he said.

Those tensions have become supercharged with the election of President Donald Trump, who has called offshore wind “garbage” and “bullshit” and, in the weeks leading up to his inauguration, pledged that​ “no new windmills” would be built in the US during his presidency. He’s backed up those words with action since taking office, stopping new projects from proceeding and attempting to block some of the country’s eight fully permitted offshore wind projects, too.

Yerman and his crew are left wondering if the industry they’ve bet their livelihood on—and work they’ve risked their reputations for—will all come crashing down.

Many of the fishermen who work through Sea Services voted for Trump. And if the president fulfills his promise to halt the industry, it would be devastating not only for the Northeast’s climate goals and grid reliability—but for thousands of workers in the region, from electricians to welders to Sea Services’ fishermen.

One of Sea Services’ captains, Kevin Souza, put it simply: The impact would be “big time.”

Six years ago, Yerman was like the others—angry with offshore wind developers, particularly Danish giant Ørsted, which had set up shop in his hometown of New London, Connecticut.

Concerned that wind turbines might push his son out of the scalloping business, he pulled one of the only levers he could think to pull and contacted his state senator at the time, Paul Formica, a Republican who owned a local seafood restaurant.

Formica wanted to see the two sides get along. He arranged a meeting between Yerman and an Ørsted executive named Matthew Morrissey, who happened to be a native of New Bedford, Massachusetts, the most lucrative commercial fishing port in America.

Offshore wind turbine blades in the staging area of the recently modernized Marine Commerce Terminal in New Bedford, Massachusetts, this spring.Clare Fieseler/Canary Media

Yerman found in Morrissey a sympathetic ear, and in turn, he listened to what the executive had to say—that Ørsted was open to partnering with fishermen. Morrissey had seen, with his own eyes, fishers working for and coexisting with Ørsted in a tiny port in Kilkeel, Northern Ireland. The energy firm had a team of about two dozen marine affairs employees, Morrissey relayed, who could help make something like that happen in America if Yerman was on board. He pitched it as a win-win.

“Everyone knows that fishermen hate offshore wind companies. Well, guess what? Offshore wind companies hate fishermen, too,” Morrissey, who no longer works at Ørsted, told Canary Media earlier this year. “Our goal here is to spread the understanding that these two industries can and do and will work together.”

The idea intrigued Yerman. In the US, profits from scalloping have fluctuated from year to year, and, following a crash in the 1990s, scallop numbers remain unpredictable. In his view, if offshore wind companies were moving into their waters—like it or not—they might as well make some money from it.

Yerman got to work.

His first call was to Gordon Videll, a longtime friend and affable small-town lawyer, who knew things about contracts that Yerman didn’t. The two flew to Kilkeel—on their own dime—to see the model for themselves. Videll noticed that some of Kilkeel’s fishermen were driving cars nicer than his. He and Yerman were inspired.

When they returned to Connecticut, Yerman recruited about a half dozen of his commercial fishing buddies, and Videll started putting together the paperwork. They dubbed themselves Sea Services North America and in 2020 landed their first small contract, with Ørsted. It was a pilot, said Morrissey, to see if this arrangement would work here in America.

“Everyone was skeptical,” recalled Morrissey with a laugh. “Because their boats were in such poor safety condition. But you know what? They pulled it off.”

Since taking office in January, President Trump has launched an all-out assault on the offshore wind industry.

Today, Sea Services operates like a co-op and has brought 22 fishing boats up to certified safety standards. With Videll at the helm as part-time CEO, the group has completed over 11 contracts in eight different wind farm areas, from Massachusetts to New Jersey. Instead of hiring ferries or work boats, developers rely on Sea Services fishermen to provide safety and scout services for offshore wind vessels.

It’s important work: making sure, for example, no fishing gear, like crab traps, is in the way of cables, monopiles, or survey operations. If necessary, Sea Services fishermen move gear—with the owner’s approval. When not cleared, these obstacles have caused days and sometimes weeks of costly delays for developers, according to Morrissey.

Sea Services was an “indispensable partner” in helping to build South Fork Wind, which went online last year and became America’s first large-scale offshore wind project, wrote Ed LeBlanc, a current Ørsted executive, in an email to Canary Media. The firm has since contracted the group for other projects, in no small part because of their expertise about local waters, he added.

Cooperation between these two sides—offshore wind and commercial fishing—does exist elsewhere in America. For example, Avangrid and Vineyard Offshore, the codevelopers of the Vineyard Wind project off the coast of Massachusetts, have paid out $8 million directly to local fishermen unaffiliated with Sea Services for similar safety jobs over the past two years.

But Sea Services is unique. Today the group offers an expansive network of 22 partner vessels based in six states and is led by a commercial fisherman. Videll brought on new technology, allowing developers to track their work remotely. He said they adopted a co-op model to maximize the amount of money going into participants’ pockets.

Receiving the Oceantic Network award in late April was a big deal for the collective, said Videll. It’s an example of how successful the venture has been in a short period of time—and, more importantly, it should be good for business. Industry awards mean visibility. More visibility could mean more Sea Services contracts.

Cofounders of Sea Services North America wait among gala attendees on April 29, 2025, to receive a Ventus Award from the Oceantic Network. Clare Fieseler/Canary Media

But, right now, the Sea Services business faces headwinds that no award can help overcome.

Since taking office in January, President Trump has launched an all-out assault on the offshore wind industry. On his first day in office, he halted new lease and permitting activity and called for a review of the nine projects that already had their federal permits in hand. In March, his Environmental Protection Agency chief revoked a key permit for Atlantic Shores, a fully permitted project that has since been called off in part due to roadblocks created by the administration.

The most eyebrow-raising step came in April, when Trump’s Interior Department issued a stop-work order for Empire Wind 1, two weeks after the project had begun at-sea construction.

It was a wake-up call for Sea Services, which works for Norwegian energy giant Equinor on the project. Videll, Sea Services’ CEO, said at the time that the cessation of Empire Wind would be a crushing blow that could cost the co-op a total of $9 million to $12 million worth of work.

In May, the administration suddenly lifted the stop-work order. Sea Services’ contract was safe, at least for the time being. But it was the most bracing illustration yet that the business, in spite of all its success, now faces very choppy waters under the Trump administration.

On a cloudless late-February day at the New Bedford port, 57-year-old Souza hovered over a checklist and laptop in the captain’s quarters of the Pamela Ann. Souza is the captain of the boat, and he needed to make sure everything was in order before he and his crew left New Bedford that afternoon. They’d be at sea for 10 days, working in many of the spots Souza had fished in for decades.

Those 10 days at sea would not be spent dredging up scallops from the seafloor and tallying their catch, however, but conducting safety operations for the Revolution Wind offshore wind project, which is being built off the coast of Rhode Island and Massachusetts.

The hulking scalloping boat, with its ebony-painted hull and wood-paneled interior, was bustling ahead of the journey. In the galley, Souza’s 25-year-old son, one of the three mates onboard, sorted through the food they’d need. Jack Morris, a 73-year-old scalloper and Sea Services manager, paced around the Pamela Ann checking in on its recently updated safety assets, like a new tracking beacon and safety suits.

Trips like these have become a lifeline for Souza, his crew, and an increasing number of fishermen who depend on the struggling scalloping industry.

Today, there are roughly 350 vessels sitting in ports from Maine to North Carolina that have licenses to harvest sea scallops. For several decades, East Coast scallopers managed to eke out a comfortable middle-class lifestyle on scalloping alone. Morris said that “years ago” he’d pull in $200,000 to $300,000 of profit annually as a scallop boat captain.

“Yeah, those days are gone,” scoffed Morris.

While the price of scallops remains high, making it one of the most lucrative US fisheries, rules passed over the last 30 years have restricted when and where scallopers can harvest, resulting in fewer days at sea, fewer scallops caught—and less money for the entire industry.

Souza has mixed emotions about the regulations.

On the one hand, scallops are no longer being overfished. A 2024 third-party audit of the fishery said it “meets the requirements for a well-managed and sustainable fishery.” In fact, for over a decade, US sea scallops sold on grocery store shelves have carried a little blue-check label—the mark of a seafood certified by the Marine Stewardship Council.

But most scallop fishermen are now limited to an extremely short window of time during which they can harvest scallops—in 2025, it was just 24 days. Some of their favorite fishing grounds are regularly closed for scallop recovery. There are simply fewer scallops to go around. Souza estimates that captains who stick to scalloping alone are making half of what they did in years past: “They’re probably lucky to make a hundred [thousand].”

Offshore wind work has helped fishermen like Souza and Morris ease the sting of that lost income.

“You’ll have the lobster guys and they’ll say shit to you—like, ‘traitor.’ Or ‘Trump’s gonna shut that down, ha ha ha.'”

Across Revolution Wind’s two-year construction window, Souza expects to make over $200,000 as a part-time boat captain. For the younger generation, who Souza said as deckhands can expect to make only around $30,000 per year from scalloping, offshore wind work makes it possible to keep earning a middle-class wage.

In the past year, Souza has recruited to Sea Services both of his sons, his nephew, and a few other young folks from longtime fishing families who might have otherwise left the scallop industry if not for the supplemental income.

“This wind farm business is the number one way for scallop guys, captains, mates, deckhands, to make extra money,” said Morris.

It’s also helping to revitalize the port of New Bedford, a city of 100,000 that is not only the most valuable fishing port in America but also a place of tremendous historic importance to the industry. It was once the epicenter of the whaling world and serves as the backdrop for the opening scenes of Herman Melville’s “Moby Dick.”

In just 10 years, the offshore wind industry has ushered in a transformation the city hadn’t seen “since the whaling era,” according to Jon Mitchell, the city’s mayor since 2011.

The companies building Vineyard Wind now stage their offshore wind infrastructure in New Bedford. Their presence has brought a flood of public and private funding to the city, with over $1.2 billion already invested and pledged to help give the terminals, docks, and harbor a facelift, according to Mitchell.

For all the money offshore wind has brought to the city—and into the pockets of locals like Souza and Morris—offshore wind remains highly controversial among many commercial fishermen in New Bedford.

That’s in spite of Mitchell’s insistence that, when push comes to shove, New Bedford’s local government will always side with scalloping.

Still, Mitchell, one of New England’s fiercest offshore wind defenders, remains unpopular with many down at the boat docks. “I’ve put myself in the loneliest place in American politics, which is right in the middle. Between offshore wind and commercial fishing,” he said.

The fishermen who take part in Sea Services also float in that lonely place.

It’s not uncommon for them to face harassment from other fishermen over the radio when out on the water, Yerman said. One time, he said a Sea Services fisherman was turned away from a Rhode Island dock, in what Yerman characterized as an act of revenge.

The hardest part of Yerman’s job is overcoming this cultural aversion and getting fishermen to the table, convincing them that working for the offshore wind developers is a way to sustain a livelihood whose viability has begun to fade.

“You’ll have the lobster guys and they’ll say shit to you—like, ‘traitor.’ Or ‘Trump’s gonna shut that down, ha ha ha,’” Souza said, imitating the taunts he receives over the marine radio bolted to the wall near the helm of the Pamela Ann.

The lobstermen have a point regarding Trump. As frustrating as their remarks may be, the biggest threat to offshore wind is not snipes from colleagues, but the actions of a president who many Sea Services members—including Souza—voted for.

Captain Kevin Souza prepared the Pamela Ann, a scallop-fishing vessel docked in New Bedford, for an Captain Kevin Souza prepared the Pamela Ann, a scallop-fishing vessel docked in New Bedford, for a February excursion.Clare Fieseler/Canary Media

As Souza prepared to leave the New Bedford port in February to go help Ørsted build giant wind turbines in the ocean, something Trump swore would not happen during his term, he explained his support for the president.

“Trust me, I want Trump to ‘drill, drill, drill.’ I’m all for it,” said Souza of the president’s plans to expand oil and gas production.

But he still thinks offshore wind is necessary to get more power onto New England’s grid and lower energy costs. Experts say that the federal permitting process for offshore wind in America takes too long—about four years. But, in the Northeast region, according to energy analyst Christian Roselund, finishing the deployment of the offshore wind projects already in the permitting pipeline will be much faster than starting up new nuclear or fossil-gas power plants.

“Once we ‘drill, drill, drill,’ you’re still gonna need more electricity,” Souza said. “Where are you gonna get it? My electric bill at my house is stupid high!”

“When you put that first wind turbine up there,” Avila recalls other fisherman saying to him, “we’re going to hang you from it!”

Most of the fishermen in New Bedford are Trump supporters, he insisted. Morris, who also voted for Trump, agreed. Overall, Trump won 46% of the city’s votes in last November’s election—a much higher proportion than his Massachusetts statewide total of 36.5%. The “TRUMP 2024” flags flown from the dozens of scallop boats docked across New Bedford’s port underscored the point. A few of those Trump flag-flying boats even work for the offshore wind companies, Morris claims. ThePamela Ann*,* for its part,does not have a Trump flag.

“I support Trump even though I know he’s against wind. … I believe this will still be around,” said Souza, gesturing toward the ocean, where somewhere over the horizon an array of wind towers was being erected. “He’s gonna see the light.”

Trump, of course, has not seen the light—though he did revoke his stop-work order against Empire Wind.

After being grounded for a month, Sea Services fishermen began operations on Empire Wind again in early June, when the project resumed at-sea work. The co-op’s members are helping Equinor’s construction vessels lay boulders on the seafloor to stabilize all 54 wind towers that will be raised over the next two years and eventually supply much-needed carbon-free power to New York City.

But nothing is certain. When the Trump administration unpaused the project, it left open the door to stopping it again—or killing it altogether. A May letter from the Interior Department to Equinor noted that it is still conducting an “ongoing review” to determine if the project’s permits were “rushed” and therefore illegitimate in the eyes of the Trump administration.

Meanwhile, a coalition of a dozen fishing companies and several anti-offshore wind groups typically allied with Trump sued the administration on June 3, just days before Empire Wind restarted at-sea construction, in an attempt to reinstate the stop-work order. The move came weeks after wind opponents asked Trump to also pause Revolution Wind, one of the more lucrative contracts Sea Services holds.

In his opposition to offshore wind, Trump has positioned himself as a defender of the commercial fishing industry, claiming falsely at a May 2024 campaign rally in Wildwood, New Jersey, for example, that the turbines “cause tremendous problems with the fish and the whales.”

But for the increasing number of fishermen working with offshore wind companies, halting the industry would not help—it would crush a financial lifeline.

Not long ago, in 2017, Sea Services captain Rodney Avila remembers being one of the only fishers in New Bedford willing to seize this lifeline. He recalled with a laugh what a long-time fisherman friend said to him then: “When you put that first wind turbine up there…we’re going to hang you from it!”

Times have changed. In New Bedford alone, almost 50 local fishing vessels have performed some kind of safety or scouting work for offshore wind projects. At least one captain lowers his MAGA-supporting flag before setting out to work on the projects the president has sworn to stop, according to Avila. He said politics has always been tangled up in fishing. And work is work.

“They don’t care whether it’s red, or blue, or whatever color…They don’t care,” Avila shrugged, while sipping coffee inside a Dunkin’. Five scalloping boats bobbed on calm water just beyond the parking lot.

“It’s money that they need to support their families, wherever it comes from.”

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From Mother Jones via this RSS feed

When Karen Thompson became the legal director at Pregnancy Justice a year and a half ago, she was still learning about the reproductive justice issues at the heart of the organization’s mission. But after 20 years focused on the criminal justice system, first at the Innocence Project, then at the ACLU of New Jersey, she did know a lot about racial profiling, government surveillance, law enforcement overreach, and wrongful convictions. And to her, the parallels between her earlier work and the increasing criminalization of pregnancy and abortion in post-Roe v. Wade America could not have been clearer. “We are seeing all the same kinds of issues in the repro space that people in the criminal defense space have been talking about for years,” Thompson says.

That criminal-defense perspective frames how Thompson has been thinking about another major development of the post-Roe era: efforts to enshrine abortion rights into state constitutions. Since 2022, voters in 12 states have passed ballot measures aimed at protecting abortion rights, including seven states last November. But half of those measures restrict or ban abortions after viability—the point when a fetus is capable of living outside the womb, usually at around 22 to 24 weeks’ gestation. In Missouri, Ohio, and other states, repro rights advocates have rationalized viability limits as a necessary evil to win over voters who might be squeamish about abortions later in pregnancy. The same debate has been playing out in Virginia, where advocates are trying to get a constitutional amendment on the 2026 ballot.

“I get it,” Thompson says. “But my eyes and this organization’s eyes are on who is being criminalized.” And, she adds, by creating a constitutional line between acceptable and unacceptable abortions, law enforcement is given a powerful weapon they can use against women for any actions that might be seen as harming a viable fetus—drug use in pregnancy, for instance—as well as a rationale to investigate and punish people for miscarriages and stillbirths. “It’s already happening,” Thompson says, “and viability lines just make it easier.”

A new report by Pregnancy Justice and the advocacy group Patient Forward underscores the fact that one of the most insidious things about viability lines is their close relationship to fetal personhood, the once-fringe idea—now increasingly embraced by the Republican mainstream—that embryos and fetuses are entitled to the same constitutional rights as anyone else. Personhood arguments are foundational to the anti-abortion movement, part of its long-term strategy to outlaw all abortions. Repro rights groups should be doing everything they can to fight the spread of personhood laws, the report’s authors argue. Instead, Thompson says, by accepting viability limits, abortion advocates are unwittingly legitimizing the idea of fetal rights.

I recently met Thompson at a convening of legal scholars and maternal health advocates at the UCLA School of Law and followed up by Zoom. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Gestational limits have been a central issue in the abortion debate since 1973 when Roe v. Wade held that women had a constitutional right to abortion until viability. When did you first become aware of the dangers that gestational limits pose to abortion rights?

After I graduated from law school in 2003, I got a job at a big private law firm, Morrison & Foerster, that does a lot of pro bono work on reproductive issues. My first pro bono case was against a guy named William Graham who was holding himself out as an abortion provider in New Orleans. He had a business name, Causeway Center for Women, that was very similar to a real abortion provider, Causeway Medical Clinic. People would go through the Yellow Pages, stumble on his name first, and call. And he would stall them until it was too late in their pregnancy to get an abortion, or it was now so expensive, they couldn’t afford it.

This sounds like a crisis pregnancy center. Buthe was one dude doing all this through his phone. So we filed a class-action suit arguing that this was fraud and trademark infringement, which was a very non-repro approach to take. And we shut him down. He’s not allowed to hold himself out in public as an abortion provider. That was my first introduction to the overreach of anti-abortion activists and the real, practical realities around what a viability line does. It also showed me how easily the gestational age and viability line could be manipulated in a way that could cause very severe damage to people’s lives.

Twenty years later, Roe has been overturned, and gestational and viability limits have become a significant point of conflict among people who support the right to abortion. A lot of mainstream repro groups rationalize viability limits as nonthreatening—just “restoring Roe.”

I want to be clear, I fully understand why people want viability limits—they believe this is what gets ballot measures passed. They can say, “Look, we’re going to protect access here in Missouri, here in Virginia, but we’re going to put a limit on this.” For legislators who are on the fence, that may seem like a reasonable compromise.

“Some of the things that some repro groups believe preserve the right to abortion are actually harming and paving the road to hell for people who are experiencing pregnancy criminalization.”

But some of the things that some repro groups believe preserve the right to abortion are actually harming and paving the road to hell for people who are experiencing pregnancy criminalization.

“Paving the road to hell for people who are experiencing pregnancy criminalization”—that’s some pretty strong language. How do viability limits do this?

What viability limits are saying is that there are good abortions and bad abortions, which is problematic all by itself. But you’re also creating soft fetal personhood, because you’re saying: There is a moment when an abortion becomes bad; there is a moment when the government gets to involve itself in someone’s womb; there is a moment where the pregnant person disappears in favor of a governmental interest in the child or the fetus.

It’s that simple: If a fetus is considered a separate person under the law, and if you’re saying, “Here’s the line where that fetus becomes a separate person,” there are no limits to what a state can do after that moment under the guise of protecting that fetus. And that is never going to end well for the pregnant person.

Just this month, there was a West Virginia prosecutor who said, “Hey, if you’re having a miscarriage, call the police and report it!” What got less attention was the rest of what he said. The kind of criminal jeopardy a woman who miscarries would face would depend on “her intent,” which he went on to define as “What did you do? How late were you in your pregnancy? Were you trying to hide something?” He said, “If you were relieved, and you had been telling people, ‘I’d rather get ran over by a bus than have this baby,’ that may play into law enforcement’s thinking.” So that artificial viability line was enough to justify criminal charges in his head.

We are in dangerous territory. That is our reality now.

The idea that viability should determine when fetuses develop certain rights— that started long before Roe, right?

Historically, a fetus didn’t acquire full legal rights as a person until birth, which I think is the best and most legitimate standard. When a child is born; when there is a baby who is independent of its parent, who is able to breathe and live and be given medical treatment that is going to sustain that life without being dependent on the body of another person—that’s when life begins. That’s what the law said for a very, very long time. Many religions also believe that that’s when life begins.

Then, in the 1940s, courts started ruling that a child could sue for fetal injuries that were incurred in the womb after the point of viability.So the idea of a viability line comes from a place of trying to do better and acknowledge harms that can occur to a fetus before it’s born. Legislators started passing [fetal homicide and wrongful death] laws to punish people’s bad behavior. For example, when somebody was pregnant and they were hit by a car because of someone else’s negligence and they lost their pregnancy.

But these kinds of laws only work if they are limited to specific situations, and they never are. They become a foundation for a much bigger legal and political drift, including the spread of the idea that fetal personhood begins not at viability, and not at 12 weeks, or eight weeks, or six weeks, but at fertilization.

Have viability lines become more problematic since Dobbs**?**

They are hugely dangerous now in a way that they weren’t necessarily before. Because at the very least, Roe put some guardrails down. At the end of the day, it said there was a constitutional right to abortion that was protected by federal law. With Roe gone, that federal protection is no longer with us. These issues are now being decided by the state, at the whim of whoever is running things, whoever wants to pass legislation or bring litigation based on their religious or personal beliefs.

“You’re also creating soft fetal personhood, because you’re saying: There is a moment when an abortion becomes bad; there is a moment when the government gets to involve itself in someone’s womb.”

A recent Pregnancy Justice report shows a surge in pregnancy-related prosecutions in the first year after Dobbs, mostly involving drug use, but also for miscarriage and stillbirth. Is that a sign of things to come in states that enshrine viability into their constitutions?

Cases are going up. Part of that is because our research is getting tighter, so we’re able to find the cases. But what is also happening is that these are easy cases for prosecutors to bring—low-hanging fruit. If you are a prosecutor, and you have certain numbers of convictions that you are getting pressure to hit every year lest you be perceived as being soft on crime, it’s really easy to criminalize someone because of their miscarriage or because they were using substances while they were pregnant. All you have to say is, “Drug exposure to a fetus is a crime, and that crime is felony child abuse.” Boom! That’s a 10- to 20-year sentence, whether or not there is any harm to the fetus or an actual born child—which, by the way, you don’t have to prove—or whether someone has quit using after they found out they were pregnant, and so on. The guardrails are gone and standards to convict someone of a crime based on their pregnancy are so low.

Keep in mind: Something like 70 percent of these pregnancy criminalizations are being done through laws that were not written for this purpose. Women who might have smoked a joint while they’re pregnant are being charged with child neglect, or domestic violence against themselves, or under laws that were written to protect children from fumes in a meth cook house. There’s already mission creep in these cases. So, yeah, I’m worried about how viability lines could become a new law enforcement tool. They will make the criminalization process easier and faster.

And with the sweeping cuts that the Trump administration is making to safety-net programs like Medicaid, and the attacks on Planned Parenthood, and the legal fights over emergency medical care…

We’re only going to see things get worse. People are going to have more miscarriages and more stillbirths, and that will lead to more criminalization.

The rise in surveillance technology would seem to make that possibility even more concerning.

Criminal justice reform people have been raising the alarm about automatic license-plate readers for years. They’ve been talking about cell phone tower pings and all of this tracking tech that has been used to throw people in prison. Now we’re seeing this tech being used in the reproductive context. In Texas, you have a county sheriff who, under the guise of protecting a woman who they claimed might be bleeding out from a self-managed abortion, proceeds to use the information from 83,000 different license-plate-reader reports to track this person down…If she wasn’t pregnant or she hadn’t had an abortion, would anyone be okay with that? Someone who hadn’t committed a crime being tracked down through license-plate readers? I don’t think so. But what is happening is that pregnancy is justifying the imposition of law enforcement on people’s movements.

How does the repro rights side fight this potential deluge of criminal cases?

Part of what we are doing as an organization is incorporating lessons from the wrongful conviction space. So you can’t convict someone on bad science. If you see in the placenta or umbilical cord that there was clearly an infection that led to pregnancy loss, you can’t blame substance use, because that’s not how it works. You can’t have snitches—people working in hospitals or homeless shelters—calling child protection services and telling them, with no grounds, that a woman has a mental health issue. And then have CPS separate that child from their parent. You can’t randomly drug-test people when they go in for labor and delivery for no reason other than that they’re pregnant.

We’re seeing the same kind of issues in these pregnancy-related cases as in other criminal justice cases but with none of the legal checks. Partly because these cases are very, very unseen. They move really fast. If someone’s pregnant, they don’t want to be in jail. There is deep judgment in our society about what good mothers are supposed to be, and anyone who is using drugs is immediately a bad mother. And keep in mind who is getting targeted. We’re not talking about someone in her very fancy apartment on Fifth Avenue in New York City taking Percocet and drinking wine. No one’s sending CPS after the father-to-be who is clearly high. The people being affected are mostly poor women. It’s disproportionately white women in drug cases, Black and brown women in cases involving pregnancy loss like stillbirths and miscarriage.

We know what the history is in this country. We know how criminalization works. And, the only thing that is different now is that there is one group of women who the state wants to have more babies because they are in an irrational panic around the demographic shift. And there’s another group of women over which the state wants to continue its rampant overcriminalization and overpolicing of bodies.

Even with everything you’ve talked about, the idea of viability feels very entrenched in how we think about pregnancy and motherhood in our culture. So how do you convince people that viability limits don’t protect abortion rights—that they are, in fact, a contraction?

My colleagues at Patient Forward have a lot more data on this, but from what I understand of polling on this issue, viability limits are not popular with voters. What seems to be happening is that voters are approving what is put in front of them. So we believe, based on research data, that they would have supported ballot measures without viability limits, too. The polling shows overwhelming rejection of government interference throughout pregnancy.

“We should not be putting ourselves out there supporting this idea of bad and good abortions. Either we want people to have access or we don’t. If you want them to have access, let them have access. “

I think people understand why patients have later abortions: because they can’t get time off work, they can’t find folks to watch their other kids, their car is busted, or they don’t have money to get enough gas to get care. Maybe they have an abusive partner, or they didn’t know they were pregnant until they were already at five months, or because they don’t want to have a kid, or because they simply cannot afford another kid. People understand these realities. And as a movement about reproductive justice, we should not be putting ourselves out there supporting this idea of bad and good abortions. Either we want people to have access or we don’t. If you want them to have access, let them have access.

People shouldn’t have to travel from New York City to Colorado to get the care they need. I don’t know how to make it any clearer, any more simple, than that. I think that some repro advocates have so internalized these talking points about the political risks of viability lines that they’re not able to get past them. And that doesn’t mean that you don’t say, “Listen, this is complicated.” I know people have complicated feelings. And that if that’s what you have for yourself, OK. But your complicated feelings are not what should be driving legislation.

We’ve lost. Roe is gone. And we have people right now in the federal government who are implementing Project 2025, which wants to provide fetuses with 14th Amendment protections.If that happens, all abortion access will be gone. So the repro movement can have its feelings. But we are losing. We can keep woe-is-me-ing our way through what is happening. Or we can step up and fight. Passivity is not going to work. We cannot appease the other side. They’re not appeased—they’re taking, taking, taking.

Everything is burning down. This is the moment for the repro movement to rebuild in a way that serves everybody.

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From Mother Jones via this RSS feed

Donald Trump’s realty firm is representing one of the country’s largest pharmaceutical companies in its effort to offload a $12 million New York condo—an arrangement that represents yet another apparent conflict of interest for the 47th president of the United States.

The condo on the 39th floor of the Trump International Hotel and Tower at Columbus Circle has been on and off the market for several years but hasn’t been successfully sold. According to real estate websites, it was listed by a different realty firm, Sotheby’s, until late last month. Around that time, it was listed for sale on Trump International Realty’s website. If it sells at its current listing price, it would likely earn hundreds of thousands of dollars in commissions for Trump’s firm.

According to New York real estate records, the Swiss pharmaceutical giant Roche bought the swanky 3,000-square-foot condo back in 2006. The two-bedroom unit features “sweeping views of Central Park,” along with “lacquered custom tray ceilings with custom lighting, custom pocket doors, Steinway black lacquered doors, Corian counters, subzero refrigerator, Wolf convection oven, wine cooler and marble bath.” It’s unclear why Roche—which has offices across the United States—originally purchased the property or why it recently turned to Trump’s real estate firm for help. Roche and its American biotech subsidiary, Genentech, did not respond to requests for comment. Nor did the Trump Organization or Karina Lynch, an attorney with the powerhouse firm DLA Piper, who was recently announced as the Trump Organization’s “outside ethics adviser.”

Trump International Realty is far from the president’s most profitable venture, but it’s still plenty lucrative. Boasting a “luxury portfolio” full of “exclusive listings,” the firm pulled in $2.4 million in revenue last year, according to Trump’s most recent financial disclosure filing. Trump owns 55 percent of the firm, and his children own the rest. It currently lists 10 properties for sale in New York, with a combined listed price of $42.6 million. Most are inTrump-branded luxury buildings.

The Roche condo is, by far, the priciest unit. But the second-most expensive—a $6.6 million condo in a nearby building known as Trump Parc—also raises some questions. According to real estate records, that unit has been owned since 2001 by a British Virgin Islands-based company. The identity of the individual or individuals behind that company are unclear. An accountant whose name appears on the deed did not respond to a request for comment.

The amount of commission a realty firm earns on a property sale can vary, but real estate websites say the typical seller’s commission in New York is around 2.7 percent. At that rate, selling Roche’s condo for the asking price of $11,950,000 could earn the Trumps’ realty business about $323,000 in commissions. And selling the mysterious Trump Parc condo could bring in another $178,000. It’s not clear what portion of those commissions would go directly to the individual real estate agents employed by Trump International Realty and what portion would be retained by the Trumps.

Roche has massive and complex interests in Washington, DC, and the Trump administration has considerable authority over the price of pharmaceuticals and the approval of new products. The drugmaker is one of heaviest spenders on K Street, with the company and its subsidiaries shelling out more than $10.7 million on lobbying expenses last year. In the first three months of 2025, the company reported nearly $3.6 million in federal lobbying. Most of that spending went to Genentech’s in-house lobbying team. In March, Genentech also hired MAGA-linked K Street firm Miller Strategies to lobby the Executive Office of the President and other parts of the administration. Roche’s overall spending this year on lobbyists ranks 6th in the pharmaceutical industry and just outside the top 25 of any special interest.

The possibility that one of Trump’s businesses could collect a substantial commission from a major corporation during his presidency is deeply problematic, says Robert Maguire, research director for Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, a watchdog group.

“The optics are terrible, but there’s also all of the unanswerable questions which are raised by it, like did someone tell them that by enriching the president, they’d have a better chance of having their interests heard by the administration?” Maguire says. “Or is there just a general perception that if you do business with the president, if you enrich the president, you will get better treatment by the administration?”

Even if the decision by Roche to list its condo for sale with the sitting president’s realty firm was unrelated to politics, it could undermine public confidence in the integrity of the regulatory system, Maguire says.

Roche has had its fair share of high-stakes dealing with the Trump administration over the last few months. As a Swiss-based drug company, it potentially has a lot to lose from Trump’s tariffs—the standard tariff of 10 percent is supposed to rise to 31 percent on many of its products. In April, Roche made a splash by announcing it would be investing up to $50 billion in the United States and creating as many as 12,000 jobs—a move that would theoretically help it avoid tariffs by moving some manufacturing to the US. The company’s CEO told investors that the firm was in ongoing discussions with the White House about the tariffs, and a few days later, Roche’s announcement earned praise from the administration.

In May, Trump signed an executive order that attempted to force pharmaceutical companies to tie their US drug prices to the prices they charge in other developed countries. Roche was one of the first—and loudest—companies to complain about the move.

By early June, though, the company’s US investment plans were once again being touted by the administration. “Since President Donald J. Trump took office,” the White House crowed, “his unwavering commitment to revitalizing American industry has spurred trillions of dollars of investments in US manufacturing, production, and innovation—and the list only continues to grow.”

Ethics experts have long urged Trump to divest from his businesses, but he has steadfastly refused to do so. As Maguire notes, conflict-of-interest rules would prohibit any federal official other than the president and vice president from hanging onto a business like Trump International Realty.

“He’s the president, so he’s exempted from any of these rules that would apply to other people—hundreds of thousands of other government employees would be restrained or prohibited from this kind of thing,” Maguire says. “It’s just another instance of how at every turn, the Trump family and their businesses are demonstrating why these rules exist in the first place.”

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From Mother Jones via this RSS feed

As the dust settles in Venice, where some of the world’s richest gathered to bless the union of Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sánchez, I’m wondering what to make of the multi-day affair. Plenty has already been written about the blinding tackiness of each event; in terms of ostentatiousness, it met my expectations.

But even as someone who enjoys celebrity news, I was struck by how activated my ever-eager algorithm was by the events in Venice, and the relentlessness with which it churned out constant glimpses of these nuptials. It was a gluttonous buffet of the in-your-face aesthetics that define this political and cultural moment, and it has since left me with the feeling of a trashy hangover.

There were the Kardashian-Jenners, whose outfits seemed designed to send algorithms into overdrive. Sydney Sweeney and Oprah Winfrey. A newly single Orlando Bloom nearly chomping at the bit at the prospect of fresh skin. The over-the-top Vogue spread. The flood of reactions to the Vogue spread. Jerry Seinfeld, Gayle King, Usher. Many of these guests were seen waving to onlookers as they departed on little boats to the island of San Giorgio Maggiore, as though they had been unaware that the city hated their guts.

Leonardo DiCaprio is a MOOD in Venice for Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sanchez's wedding https://t.co/8wfYNmTwG1

— hunter harris (@hunteryharris) June 27, 2025

One guest who did not wave was Leonardo DiCaprio, who instead arrived with a black baseball cap pulled down to cover his face. Some speculated that DiCaprio, a self-fashioned environmentalist, did not want to be seen attending the environmentally noxious affair. (Nearly 100 private planes reportedly landed in Venice for the weekend.) But that’s a generous guess, one that presumes a capability for shame. The truth is that no one in attendance cares about what you and I will ever think.

I’m feeling icky, but they’re flying high on their jets back home. Meanwhile, thanks to the father of another guest, Ivanka Trump, they stand in spitting distance from even higher levels of wealth.

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From Mother Jones via this RSS feed

After a brief interlude, Elon Musk on Saturday resumed his public wrestling match with President Donald Trump, ripping into the president’s domestic policy bill as “utterly insane and destructive” just as the Senate met to vote on a key procedural step to pass the “big beautiful bill.”

“The latest Senate draft bill will destroy millions of jobs in America and cause immense strategic harm to our country!” the billionaire wrote on X. In a later post, Musk warned that the bill would be “political suicide” for the Republican Party.

Musk’s apparent attempt to influence the vote ultimately failed; after several hours, the Senate ultimately cleared the procedural hurdle. But in this crucial moment for the president’s massive spending agenda, Musk’s latest attacks are certain to infuriate his former boss as their rift widens once more. Are we moments away from the return of ugly insults? Will Musk expand on his Jeffrey Epstein accusations? Will a new level of lawlessness be unlocked? As of this writing, Trump has yet to respond. But as I predicted only weeks ago, it was only a matter of time before their feud returned to the public sphere.

But what is certain, as Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” now heads to the House for final approval, is that the country is on the verge of passing one of the most dangerous bills in US history. It will decimate spending on Medicaid and food stamps while adding an estimated $2.8 trillion to the deficit; send energy bills skyrocketing across American households; unleash billions for Trump’s border wall; and far more.

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From Mother Jones via this RSS feed

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

Jeff King has served on the volunteer fire department in Corydon, Kentucky, for over 30 years. He is well aware of the dangers of the job—including one that may be hiding in the supplies he and his crew use to keep others safe.

Many of the foams firefighters spray to extinguish blazes contain per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS. Known as “forever chemicals,” PFAS are a class of human-made chemicals that repel water and oil; it’s this quality that makes them effective at battling tough-to-put-out fires, like those started with diesel fuel. The chemicals are also tied to a host of human health problems, from reproductive issues to high cholesterol to certain types of cancer. King admits that some of the foams he’s used over his career “may or may not be good for us.”

That’s why he visited Dalton, Georgia, last year to meet with representatives from Cross Plains Solutions, a company that developed a PFAS-free firefighting foam made from soybeans. After seeing the foam in action, he was impressed. “The product performs just fantastic,” said King. And because it has been certified as PFAS-free, he figured, “there’s nothing in it that could potentially make me or any other firefighter in this country that uses it sick. I just thought, ‘Wait a minute, this is almost a no-brainer.’”

There’s another upside for King in all of this: In his day job, he’s a soybean farmer himself. A new application for the humble soybean would be good for business.

The search to find a PFAS-free firefighting foam is relatively new, as a growing body of research illuminates the harmful impact that these chemicals have on humans and the environment. Soybean farmers have presented their crop as a surprising solution to this problem. Although more research and development are needed to ensure soy-based firefighting foam holds up under the toughest circumstances, the product is catching the attention of local fire departments.

“There is a good bit of interest,” said Alan Snipes, CEO of Cross Plains Solutions. He estimated that his company’s product, aptly named SoyFoam, is now being used in 50 fire departments around the country, mostly in the Midwest. That’s not a coincidence: Snipes pointed out that many rural fire departments in the middle of the country depend on volunteer firefighters. “A lot of the volunteers are farmers, and a lot of the farmers grow soybeans,” he said.

Cross Plains began to look into creating a PFAS-free, soy-based firefighting foam after being approached by the United Soybean Board. Snipes was first in touch with the board more than 30 years ago, when he worked in the carpet industry and started using soy-based compounds to manufacture backing for commercial carpets. He started Cross Plains Solutions about 13 years ago to produce a bio-based cooling gel for mattresses. Then, three years ago, the United Soybean Board offered the company funding to develop and test a biodegradable firefighting foam.

“The majority of the headache” with PFAS foams “is the military application,  because of all of the military bases and the training activities.”

The board, whose members are appointed by the US Department of Agriculture, exists to collect one-half of one percent of the market price of every bushel of soybeans sold by US farmers. This congressionally mandated process, called the soybean checkoff program, is used to fund research into new markets for soybeans.

The United Soybean Board partners with both public and private actors, like universities and corporations, to fund research into and commercialization of new soybean uses. Often, this looks like investing in more sustainable alternatives to fossil fuels—like using soybean oil as a petroleum replacement in tires, straws, and shoes. In a partnership like the one with Cross Plains, the checkoff program is hoping to create a business opportunity that might help farmers sell more bushels down the line. The result is a “win-win,” said Philip Good, chair of the United Soybean Board.

After King returned home to Kentucky, his fire department voted to exclusively use SoyFoam going forward; according to King, it was the first in the country to do so.

SoyFoam is not unique. There are other alternatives to PFAS-based firefighting foams on the market with different formulations and applications, said Danielle Nachman, a senior staff scientist at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory. “They can span all kinds of chemistry,” said Nachman. Some are bio-based, like a gel made with canola oil, while others try to replicate the chemical properties of PFAS without relying on fluorinated compounds.

The big hurdle for SoyFoam and other PFAS-free firefighting foams is meeting requirements set by the Department of Defense for military firefighting and training activity. PFAS-containing firefighting foams were first patented by the United States Navy in the 1960s, following a series of devastating fires on aircraft carriers and other ships. In the 1970s, virtually every US military base began using these foams for emergencies and training exercises—leading to dangerous contamination in the surrounding areas.

“The majority of the headache when it comes to PFAS [in firefighting foams] is the military application,” said Mohamed Ateia Ibrahim, an adjunct assistant professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering at Rice University, “because of all of the military bases and the training activities.”

The Department of Defense has been working to transition away from firefighting foams that contain PFAS—but SoyFoam has a ways to go before it could be fully embraced by the military. The Pentagon has not tested Cross Plains Solutions’ product, but Snipes said the agency has encouraged the company to seek further funding to continue its R&D.

The Department of Defense didn’t respond to Grist’s request for comment.

Ibrahim said he supports the development of bio-based, PFAS-free foams, but that companies need to be more transparent about what exactly goes into their products. “We need more clarification about the other components and whether they are, as a whole, really better or not” than PFAS-based firefighting foams, said Ibrahim.

According to Snipes, SoyFoam is made up of things you could find in your pantry—although when asked to specify what those components are, he demurred, calling the information proprietary.

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From Mother Jones via this RSS feed

Earlier this year, Hungary’s parliament passed legislation banning Pride events and allowing the use of facial recognition technology to identify attendees. The ban is supported by Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, a conservative nationalist and Trump ally whose regime has been widely described as anti-democratic. Orbán has for years decried “gender insanity” and “woke globalists,” the New York Times reports, “distracting attention from Hungary’s faltering economy and revving up his right-wing rural base.”

“None of us are free until everyone is free.”

But in spite of the ban, tens of thousands of people marched through Budapest on Saturday during the city’s 30th annual Pride march, according to several news outlets. At least 70 European Parliament members also attended, CNN reported. The event had the support of Budapest’s liberal mayor, Gergely Karácsony. “They have trapped themselves by trying to ban something that cannot be banned,” Karácsony said, according to the Times.

On Friday, Orbán suggested that law enforcement would not actively intervene in the demonstration, calling Hungary a “civilized country,” but held the door open to later legal action.

“We are adults, and I recommend that everyone should decide what they want, keep to the rules… and if they don’t, then they should face the clear legal consequences,” Orbán told state radio, according to Reuters.

Thousands of marchers pack Budapest’s Elisabeth Bridge on Saturday.Genaro Molina/Los Angeles Times/Getty

Despite the ban and Orbán’s remarks on Friday, the event attracted large crowds, who began their march from the steps of Budapest’s city hall. Livestreams of the event showed participants of all ages flooding the streets with rainbow flags and supportive signs. “Solidarity is our pride,” one placard read. “None of us are free until everyone is free,” another sign said.

“The right to assembly is a basic human right, and I don’t think it should be banned. Just because someone does not like the reason why you go to the street, or they do not agree with it, you still have the right to do so,” one attendee, Krisztina Aranyi, told the Guardian.

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From Mother Jones via this RSS feed

Deep in the Everglades, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’s administration has swiftly begun construction of an ICE detention center on an airfield surrounded by wetlands that will house up to 1,000 detainees and could open as soon as next week. In a Friday interview with Fox News, DeSantis called the new center “Alligator Alcatraz” and said deportation flights could also take off from the airfield, which was previously used for military and law enforcement training. “This is going to be a force multiplier and we’re really happy to be working with the federal government to satisfy President Trump’s mandate,” he said.

DeSantis has pushed anti-immigrant laws and encouraged police to collaborate with ICE.

Florida is expected to pay $450 million a year to run the facility, with the possibility of being reimbursed by the federal government, the Miami Herald reported. Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier said the detention center will be mostly comprised of “light infrastructure,” the Herald reported, such as tents and trailers.He suggested in a video posted to X that the facility’s location would deter escapes: “People get out, there’s not much waiting for them other than alligators and pythons,” Uthmeier said

The project has faced considerable backlash in recent days from immigrant advocacy groups, environmentalists, and Miami-Dade county mayor Daniella Levine Cava. The Miccosukee Tribe has also publicly opposed the construction of the center on its ancestral lands. “The state would save substantial taxpayer dollars by pursuing its goals at a different location with more existing infrastructure and less environmental and cultural impacts,” Talbert Cypress, chair of the tribe, wrote in a statement posted to Facebook.

On Friday, two environmentalist groups filed a lawsuit in federal court against federal and state officials to halt the project, the Tampa Bay Times reported, arguing that the project proceeded without an environmental review and opportunity for public comment. Instead, the complaint reads, construction has already commenced at a “breakneck pace,” as crews transported kitchen facilities, restrooms, industrial lighting, and dump trucks onto the airfield.

The site is located within the Big Cypress National Preserve, “a nationally and State protected, and ecologically sensitive, area that serves as habitat for endangered and threatened species like the Florida panther, Florida bonneted bat, Everglade Snail kite, wood stork, and numerous other species,” according to the environmental groups’ complaint.

Plans for the center are largely a response to a nationwide surge in immigration detention. As my colleague Isabela Dias recently reported, the number of people held by ICE now surpasses 56,000—an unprecedented level. “The record high detention numbers also raise concerns about overcrowding, especially since the Department of Homeland Security is imposing new rules restricting access by members of Congress to ICE facilities,” she wrote.

That Florida is undertaking such a massive detention center project is not a surprise. As I reported in April, under DeSantis the state has passed a slew of anti-immigrant laws and has encouraged local police and jails to collaborate with ICE on immigration arrests.

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From Mother Jones via this RSS feed

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

The Kenyan marine ecologist David Obura is chair of a panel of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), the world’s leading natural scientists. For many decades, his speciality has been corals, but he has warned that the next generation may not see their glory because so many reefs are now “flickering out across the world.”

**Why are corals important?**Multiple reasons. They are home to a huge amount of biodiversity, which provides food and environmental services. They also serve as coastal buffers, protecting coastlines from storms and swells. In many ways, coral are like underwater forests. The algae living inside corals are photosynthetic and grow very much like trees. Together, they are the ecosystem architects, and if you lose those, you lose the entire ecosystem.

What is happening to coral reefs**?**There are sudden collapses and also long linear declines. It depends on the circumstances. Climate change and pollution are really changing the background environmental conditions that coral reefs need to survive in. And then through fishing and other exploitation, a lot of their biomass is being extracted. There are so many of these different pressures happening at the same time that it’s a death by a thousand cuts. In the end, you lose the interactions and the complexity that characterises a coral reef. Half of the total area of live coral has been lost already. Many reefs no longer support the diversity and abundance that they used to.

**When scientists talk about a tipping point for coral reefs, what do they mean?**Tipping points occur when the characteristics of a given system cease to exist. In the case of coral reefs, that happens due to a loss of the diversity and abundance of different species. At a certain point, this leads to the breakdown of the functions and the ecosystem processes of the entire system and if you don’t have any of those, then you don’t have a coral reef any more.

**For people who are not experts, what are the signs of a collapsing reef system?**Firstly, less color, because there’s less coral and other brightly colored invertebrates. Instead, drab algae tend to dominate, and other invertebrates, such as sponges.

Then in the water, you see less abundance and diversity of fish. What you hear is also very different: On a vibrant coral reef, there are so many sounds, it is just like walking through a forest and listening to all the insects and birds. But a degraded, simpler reef has fewer animals making sounds, and they sound deathly quiet.

Finally, the three-dimensional structure breaks down. This may only take 10 years or so and then all the complexity is gone.

**Where is this most pronounced?**It is easier to say where it is not pronounced. The last major holdout is perhaps the “Coral Triangle” in the Indonesian-Philippine archipelagos. It shows some resilience, though even there some places are strongly impacted because of local threats or climate change. In almost every other region, you’re seeing declines in coral cover and diversity and a loss of abundance and diversity of fish and invertebrates. That weakens the general health of the reef systems, and makes them more vulnerable to diseases and microbial activity, which are very harmful to coral species.

The most pronounced losses are probably in the Caribbean because it’s a smaller sea; a regional basin surrounded by land-based impacts. That’s also true of the Persian-Arabian Gulf, where there are many places that may no longer be called coral reefs. Whole regions are now vulnerable to ecosystem collapse and specific corals within them are increasingly endangered.

**How close are coral reefs to a tipping point or has this already happened?**There’s a huge amount of discussion about that. Should we consider a tipping point at a small local scale, or at the level of an island or a coastline, or a region or the whole world?

Certainly it is already evident at a local scale; many reefs across the world have passed a point of no return. At the regional scale, I think the Caribbean may have tipped as an integrated coral reef system, even though there are locations that are still very vibrant, like the Mesoamerican barrier reef and some of the islands. All the coral reef regions that have so far been assessed on the red list of ecosystems have been classed as threatened, which means there is a high risk they may collapse within a 50-year period—unless the right actions are taken.

**How much****global heating do scientists estimate coral reefs can withstand?**We have recently revised the temperature threshold. Up to 2022, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said the tipping point for coral reefs would occur when warming is between 1.5 C and 2 C above preindustrial levels. But in 2023, we revised that to between 1 C and 1.5 C. The world is already close to that upper limit and it will certainly come within the next 10 or 20 years as a result of committed climate change—which comes from cumulative emissions that have already gone into the atmosphere. So have we already gone past the tipping point for coral reefs in global terms? Perhaps.

**What are the consequences?**The most obvious is the loss of the physical presence of coral reefs, their diversity of species and their functions. That has an effect on people because reefs protect coastlines and are habitats for fish that we eat. They are natural capital—assets that support our lives. When we lose coral reefs, we lose a lot of the foundations of societies and economies that depend on them.

**Which fish depend on coral reefs?**Most affected are fish that eat or live in corals. They are mostly small, ornamental species, such as butterfly fish, damsel fish and things like that. But more importantly, corals provide the structure that sustains a much wider diversity of fish that eat algae, plankton, invertebrates and many other sources. All are impacted when the structure of the reef simplifies.

**Are there any redeeming impacts?**Not at all. When coral cover goes down, it gets replaced by algae. Sometimes this can lead to an increase in herbivorous fish, because there’s more food for them. That may be good for fishing in the short-term, but any benefits disappear quickly as the three-dimensional structure of the reef declines.

**Will this also affect****people who don’t live near coral reefs?**They’ll feel it in many different ways. First, psychologically—instead of going on holiday to see beautiful coral reefs or getting messages from friends about their amazing colors and biodiversity, they will hear news of loss and decline. Second, there will be an economic impact. People won’t get fish on their plate from coral reefs, and tourism and coastal economies that depend on reefs will decline.

More broadly, the loss of corals will herald wider, systemic threats because corals are a canary in the coal mine for climate and other compounding threats. It means there will be a lot of other hidden tipping points, of other beautiful landscapes or the ecosystems that rural communities and even cities depend on. We’ve basically been using nature for free. If we had incorporated the cost of really caring for nature in our economies, we wouldn’t be in this situation right now.

**Is there any way to restore corals?**Not yet at scale. Many techniques are being trialled, and many show promise—but they cannot replace what we are losing. There are now fewer and fewer healthy coral systems, more and more isolated from one another. The water is just getting too hot and too polluted, and there is too much extraction, all of which is punching big holes in the mosaic of reefs along our coastlines. Restoring coral reefs in this context is an uphill battle, and existing technologies are too difficult, and too expensive to apply at scale. What restoration does do is engage people in visible and tangible efforts to care for reefs, and this may deliver the greatest benefit, to finally build commitment to conserve coral reefs much more broadly.

**What about experiments to artificially grow coral? Is there any hope of a technological solution?**There are a lot of trials, and many innovations. I’m a scientist, so I think we always need research into new techniques, otherwise we’ll never discover them. But the thing that I am adamant about, particularly coming from Africa, is that money that would go into community development and local resilience and building up low-income communities should not be going into the pockets of researchers and consultants doing artificial coral restoration. Research funding could and should be available, but we have to be very conscious of the rights and the equity issues around hi-tech fixes—who benefits and who doesn’t.

**Putting aside scientific knowledge acquisition, how do you feel about the state of the world’s corals?**Angry, more than anything else. I want to point my fingers at the people who are responsible so they change what they’re doing. It’s not the billions of poor people around the planet; they face local challenges and environmental degradation, but they don’t have a global footprint. The global footprint that is causing a decline of corals and so much else is from the much smaller number of high-income consumers and economies.

Until that is understood and they transform what they’re doing, we won’t be able to resolve the challenges at the bottom end of the income pyramid. You, in the global north, have to change what you’re doing in order for there to be an option for better futures, rather than just giving up and letting the worst futures come about. This is my mission now—to make waves for change.

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

Democratic lawmakers led by the Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren are pressing two energy companies about their efforts to “win a $1.1 billion tax loophole” in Donald Trump’s so-called One Big Beautiful Bill.

The proposed exemption, which Senate Republicans inserted into their version of the reconciliation megabill this month, would exempt fossil fuel companies from paying a tax codified by Biden in 2022. “It’s an insult to working people to give oil companies a massive tax handout while slashing healthcare and raising energy prices for millions of families,” Warren, who was a major advocate for the tax, told the Guardian.

“Americans deserve to know if Big Oil paid for these Republicans in Congress to carve out tax breaks just for them.”

Enshrined within the Inflation Reduction Act, the corporate alternative minimum tax (CAMT) requires corporations with adjusted earnings over $1 billion to pay at least 15 percent of the profits they report to their shareholders, which are known as “book profits,” in taxes. The Senate Finance Committee’s proposal would shield domestic drillers from that tax by allowing companies to deduct certain drilling costs when calculating their income—a change that would allow some companies to pay zero dollars in federal taxes.

Winning the tax tweak has been a major priority for fossil-fuel interests this year. The oil major ConocoPhillips and Denver-based petroleum company Ovintiv directly lobbied for the change, federal disclosures show.

On Thursday morning, Warren, along with Senate Democratic colleagues Sheldon Whitehouse (Rhode Island), Ron Wyden (Oregon), and Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, sent letters to ConocoPhillips and Ovintiv pressing for answers on their role in shaping the CAMT change. “Your company’s lobbying disclosures explicitly prioritize this handout,” read the letters, which were shared exclusively with the Guardian.

Both companies could “benefit tremendously from this provision,” read the letters, which are addressed to the ConocoPhillips CEO, Ryan Lance, and the Ovintiv CEO, Brendan McCracken, respectively.

The Guardian has contacted ConocoPhillips and Ovintiv for comment.

In their missives, the senators asked how much each company has spent on lobbying for the provision and will spend this year, how much each has donated to elected officials advocating for fossil fuel tax cuts, and how much of a reduction in taxes each company would see if the provision is finalized, requesting answers by July 9.

“The rationale for CAMT was simple: for far too long, massive corporations had taken advantage of loopholes in the tax code to avoid paying their fair share, sometimes paying zero federal taxes despite earning billions in profits,” the signatories wrote.

The proposed change, the letters note, closely resembles a bill introduced by the Oklahoma senator James Lankford this year, which would allow companies to subtract “intangible drilling and development costs” from their CAMT income calculations.

Lankford accepted nearly $500,000 in donations from the fossil fuel sector between 2019 and 2024, making it his top source of industry funding. The Guardian has contacted the senator for comment.

Deductions for intangible drilling costs—referring to costs incurred before drilling, such as for labor and equipment—have been on the books since 1913, making them the oldest, largest US fossil fuel subsidy, according to one report on the Lankford proposal.

“Big Oil now wants this deduction to apply not only for purposes of their taxable income, but for book income purposes as well,” the letters say. “Put another way, if enacted, this provision would reduce or even eliminate tax liabilities for oil and gas companies under CAMT, allowing some to pay no federal income taxes whatsoever.”

Other energy-related provisions in the draft reconciliation bill would phase out incentives for clean energy manufacturing and energy efficiency, causing utility bills to rise and jobs to be lost. This makes the tax break proposal “especially insulting,” says the letter, which was sent as temperatures spiked across much of the US.

“Americans deserve to know if Big Oil paid for these Republicans in Congress to carve out tax breaks just for them,” said Warren.

As drafted, the reconciliation bill would also jeopardize energy security by curbing the growth of renewable energy, Schumer told the Guardian.

“The Republicans’ plan is a complete capitulation to Big Oil at the expense of clean energy and American families’ wallets,” Schumer said. “Republicans would rather kill over 800,000 good-paying jobs and send energy costs skyrocketing than stand up to their Big Oil billionaire buddies.”

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